Viral-based genetic manipulation

Having just returned from vacation I’m a bit behind in posting things. So while catching up on some of my science reading I came across a story about gene-based research into anti-aging bladee-blah (has something to do with shutting off the srr-2 gene or something like that).

Which reminds me of an incident that occurred many decades ago (I kid you not) when I was a younger lad in college. One night a couple of friends of mine who were in pre-med were frustrated with a chemistry or biology project they had to turn in. They were pulling an all-nighter, of course, because they had not solved the problem they were presented with.

I don’t recall exactly what they were trying to do but it had something to do with altering the behavior of a single cell. They showed me a picture of the cell, and it had all these long ridge-like shapes in it that were supposedly “identical” to the non-ridge-like regions of the cell. They wanted to do something to the ridge-like shapes without doing anything to the non-ridge-like regions.

In a moment of feigned superiority one of the guys said to me, “So how would would you tackle this problem, Michael?”

I scratched my head and said something like, “I dunno nothin’ about birthin’ no babies, but if’n it were me, I’d introduce some sort of selective molecule into the structure designed to tackle just the region I wanted to affect.”

And at that point the other fellow yelled out: “A virus! We’ll design a virus to infect the cell and alter its biology!”

I think one of those guys went on to become a doctor and one went on to become a veterinarian. I have no idea of whether either got involved with gene therapy but it seems to me that maybe we’re just now beginning to figure out what I intuitively deduced decades ago.

So, in this humble moment of ego-centrically inflammated recollection, I shall lay stake to whatever credit I may for advancing the cause of cellular-manipulation science.

Canadian government testing Second Life experience

The headline of the article (“Navis wanted: feds go in search of avatars interested in civil service”) is more science fictiony than the subject matter itself, but The Winnipeg Free Press has an interesting article about a 12-week pilot project where the Canadian government is testing out interacting with citizens through virtual communities.

There are a few precedents for something like this in science fiction. Whether the idea’s time has come remains to be seen. One of the problems with the use of avatars is that you lose the “human” face — the emotional interaction we engage in when we are actually in the presence of another person.

The movie “Avatar” wasn’t using a virtual reality motif but rather an extended reality motif. That is, the avatars were hosting the consciousness of their operators and were physical bodies that could act, react, and emote just like the operators’ bodies. The lack of emotional connection that Internet-based communication struggles with will ultimately force us more toward using Skype-like videophone technologies and less into avatarish virtual communities.

The need to know that the other person in the conversation cares about what you are saying and sees what you are feeling demands something more effective than a cartoon-like avatar.

SF-Fandom and the Web spam community

I have been preoccupied with Web spammers lately. They have invaded the SF-Fandom forums in greater numbers than I have seen in a long, long time. So this past week I finally implemented the strictest email filters I have ever used. The filters have almost stopped all spam submissions.

Of course, we’re blocking thousands of IP addresses and all the major free email domains (AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo!). It hardly seems fair to the users of those services to require that they contact us directly to request that their accounts be created for them manually but we do take on an extra burden ourselves.

The registration spam problem has grown so bad that other VBulletin users are now complaining that their CAPTCHAs are being circumvented. It is well known in the SEO industry that many of these spammers hire low-cost labor in overseas markets like India, Pakistan, Vietnam, and the Philippines to manually create email and forum accounts. So we’re not just fighting robots here.

In the age of Twitter and Facebook people might wonder if 1990s-style Web forums are about done but I would like to believe that there is a still a place for the Web forums. We have a lot of great users at SF-Fandom who like to discuss books, movies, and entertainment news. And there are many other people who enjoy browsing our forums.

The registration spammers don’t all seem to pursue the same goals. Time was when they all wanted to drop links in the forums, but they learned quickly that many forum moderators delete the posts. So then they turned to just creating profile pages with links. I block search engines from crawling our user profile pages so even when spammers get past our guard they get no benefit from that.

But over the past year or so I have noticed an increasing number of spam registrations that don’t associate themselves with Websites. What is the purpose of these accounts? I’m a little worried.

Among the measures we take to prevent the spammers from gaining a foothold in the forums is that we require all new users to respond to a confirmation email. Most of the spam accounts don’t seem to do this, or they delay doing it. We have been inundated with bounce messages from unconfirmed registrations.

Lists of Web forums and blogs are circulated among the Web spammers. They use software like XRumer to created hundreds, possibly thousands of forum accounts across the Web every day. These people have absolutely no morals or ethics. They are just trying to make a buck off of other people’s hard labor.

If you run a science fiction forum and you’ve seen a lot of registrations but relatively little activity in the way of new posts, you’re probably being hammered by registration spammers. You should take a closer look at what is going on and see if you can batten down the hatches.

Over the past few weeks we have deleted around 2500 registration spam accounts at SF-Fandom. They weren’t all created at once. We let our guard down for a while. That won’t happen again.