Disruptive Diagnostics and the Business of Science

Former UT professor Tom Kodadek returned to address the postdoctoral student association of the School of Biological Sciences on April 25. He met a full house of about 250. The title of his talk was “The Ups and Downs of Moving ‘Disruptive’ Diagnostic and Therapeutic Technology from the Lab to the Real World.”  Dr. Kodadek is now with the Scripps Research Institute, in Jupiter, Florida.  Originally funded by the NIH, his work is now marketed by OPKO Health, Inc., which found the angel funding he needed to bring his theories to realization.

He first identified the standard approach to any drug therapy:

1. Perform basic research on the disease mechanism,.

2. Identify molecules in the blood that are unique to that disease, or whose levels change drastically.

3. Develop a specific method to measure the level of that molecule in the blood.

4. Commercialize.

This fits our standard model for diagnosis.  The patient feels bad and goes to a doctor for treatment.  Tests are run.  A cause is hypothesized and treatments begin while the patient’s course is monitored.  The shortcomings with the standard approach begin with the fact that we have to wait until we feel bad to get a diagnosis.  Also, tests are heterogeneous: any symptom suggests many tests.

Dr. Thomas Kodadek (left) at the Reception.

 Kodadek then offered a better approach.  His theory is that antigens must exist before symptoms reach perceptible levels: you are sick before you have a fever. With pre-symptomatic screening we could monitor for any active disease in its early stage, before the symptoms appear.  His recommended course is to routinely monitor the levels of dozens of disease-specific antibodies as part of any periodic medical check-up.  

To achieve that, we need to develop a large, broad, and deep array of synthetic artificial molecules that act as antigen surrogates. This is possible through combinatorial chemistry.

He then rapidly outlined the some of the details of his methodology for the audience of post-doctoral biologists at the School of Biological Sciences before re-aligning his presentation to the business community. 

Having left the University of Texas, he thought that he was about to go to San Francisco to present his ideas to venture capitalists.  However, he first was invited to speak to a group at  the Scripps Research Institute.  Feeling somewhat challenged to be sharing the stage with six Nobel laureates, he thought that he handled it well.  After the talks, the president of Scripps, Dr. Richard Lerner, came up to him and graphically explained that he was about to get screwed. Dr. Lerner introduced him to Phil Frost of OPKO Health, Inc.

Opko had just suffered a failed third-stage test of a major product initiative.  Phil Frost had a company in need of new work.  Opko also acquired Cytochroma, Inc., a company with “a suite of products for treatment of secondary hyperparathyroidism and hyperphosphatemia in chronic kidney disease patients.”  Another Cytochroma product screens for vitamin D deficiency.  In fact, said Kodadek, we may find that we are in the midst of an epidemic and not know it because we only now are coming to understand the many functions of that essential nutrient.  

Opko is also pursuing a screen for neuromyelitis optica (NMO). NMO is marked by the presence of AQP4 (aquaporin 4) and anti-AQP4 antibodies. With Bindu L. Raveendra, Hao Wu, and others, Kodadek published “Discovery of Peptoid Ligands for Anti-Aquaporin 4 Antibodies,”in Chemistry and Biology, (vol 20:3; 21 March 2013, pp 351-359).  In the same issue, working with Yu Gao, Kodadek published “Synthesis and Screening of Stereochemically Diverse Combinatorial Libraries of Peptide Tertiary Amides,” (Pages 360-369). 

Tom Kodadek with his friends at the Reception

Dr. Thomas Kodadek closed by  summarizing his experiences. “Work on important projects, not widgets. Incubate for as long as possible in the university before taking your work to the market.  Angel investors are better than venture capitalists.  Focus early on the people you bring in to start the organization.”

Following the talk the School of Biological Sciences hosted a reception.  About 50 people attended.  I met old friends Maggie Bishop of the Austin Chamber of Commerce, Benjamin Grosse-Siestrup of Antimicrobial Test Laboratories and Ken Russell of Metabolic Therapy, as well as new acquaintances Dr. Gregory Daniel Frank of XBiotech, and Dr. Priya Sridharan of the UT department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, and neurobiologist Dr. Sangeetha Iyer. (Dr. Iyer and I actually crossed paths in 2012 during South by Southwest. I was flattered that she remembered me.)

  

Previously on Necessary Facts

BioBash: Chamber Replicates Success

Austin Winter 2012 BioBash
BioPunks: DIY Scientists Hack the Code of Life
Bob Swanson and Genentech
Epigenetics
Mayim Bialik

OBJECTIFIED

Objectified is a film by Gary Hustwit about design, designers, and the objects that they create.  Dieter Rams of Braun and Apple’s Jonathan Ive appear, of course. (See, The Genius of Design below.)  So do thirty other designers, and a couple of supportive critics, such as Paola Antonelli of the Museum of Modern Art.  IKEA and Target both get cameo roles as they deliver to us the magic of inexpensive mass produced items that ennoble us, their owners, with the spiritual benefits of good design.  You and I also appear in anonymous walk-ons because in the words of Andrew Blauvelt, “anything that is touched by man, is transformed by man, is by its very nature designed.” The human-built environment is design.

Dirt Devil by Karim Rashid

Karim Rashid works for the “techno-organic world.” As a teenager, he owned a Claritone stereo radio and a Braun alarm clock and through his teenage angst, looking at them alone in his room brought a sense of comfort.  He calls our time the “third technological revolution.” To him, our living room furniture is like a kitsch stage prop. “When I get up from my laptop and my iPod, do I get into a horse and carriage? No.”

Claritone stereo similar to Karim Rashid's.

According to Andrew Blauvelt, the design concept has three layers. First form begets form, the formal logic of form.  Then come symbols and symbolism, the cultural symbols.  From that comes the contextual symbolism of making coffee, for instance, the bigger scenario of the human-object relationship.  The little rituals define the fork and knife.  The vacuum cleaners from Dirt Devil and Dyson extended the horizons for a single-use product into designer goods for display. Ultimately, the Roomba programmable robot vacuum allowed an undreamed of level of hacking as user interaction.

Alice Rawsthorn of the International Herald Tribune points out that if you were a Martian and you came to Earth, you could pick up a spoon or a chair and pretty much get a feel for their purpose.  Now, the digital age removes that.  Objects can take any shape.  This leads to tensions and conflicts in design. 

But objects do not take just any shape.  Some seem intractably wedded to their pasts.

Three principals from IDEO of Palo Alto shared a common theme in their different experiences of design.  "I inherited my father’s leather briefcase and it got better with time and I look to passing it on.  I look to designing things for wearing in versus wearing out.  ... I designed the case for the GRiD “Compass” computer in 1987, the first laptop.  When I got it home I realized that the beautiful case and clever latches were irrelevant to the user experience, so I came to study software interfaces.  ...  "

"... because in that moment it moves you,
you have an emotion"
-- Hella Jongerius

Naoto Fukusawa designs hardware interaction. Subconscious actions develop the mind and soul: design dissolving in behavior. “A very important turning point for me was the term "obsessive sketch" by Takahama Kyoshi, the haiku master. When the poet’s sentences are overly visible the audience may become uncomfortable. Japanese ritual is the opposite.” 

Rob Walker of the New York Times Magazine asks rhetoically, when the hurricane is coming and you have twenty minutes to pack, what do you grab? Not the object that got a great review in some design magazine, but the object that means the most to you.

Paola Antonelli insists that “democritization of design is an empty slogan.” According to Paola Antonelli, “design takes revolutions and progress and makes it into objects that we can use.”

Speaking of his work on the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, Jonathan Ive says that the curse of being a designer is always looking at everything and wondering “why does it have to be that way and not some other way?”

Ad hoc design: wine cork as doorstop

Ad hoc design: section of plastic cup as bicycle fender

I want things that do not exist, that you cannot go out and buy, what is going to happen, not what has happened. – Marc Newson.

Within Karim Rashid's apartment

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Knowledge Maps

Documentation is Specification

The Genius of Design

Art & Copy

Start the Presses

The Genius of Design

“For industrial designers, the world is never enough. They give shape and texture to the world to make it livable—indeed, beautiful—for the rest of us. This fascinating five-part documentary examines the art and science of design and the stuff it shapes, from computer chips to cityscapes and everything in between. See the evolution from artisans’ workshops to industrial mass production, and the profound changes it has wrought in our economy, society, and environment.” – from the promotional.

 Acorn Media 2009

In five episodes running 242 minutes, we meet some of the leading designers who gave us our material world.  They are not engineers. They are not scientists.  The Apple computer was the creation of Wozniak and Jobs, of course, but they did not give it the form we know.  Their Macintosh, their iPod, Sony’s Walkman, all of the furniture in an IKEA warehouse, and even the weapons of war achieved materiality because designers thought long and hard about how real people would use these common objects.

“Meet historians, critics, and legendary contemporary designers, including Dieter Rams (Braun electronics), J Mays (Ford), and Jonathan Ive (Apple), who reveal the thinking behind iconic products such as the VW Beetle, the Eames chair, and the computer desktop. Along the way, discover how design has influenced even the outcome of war.”

At a time when – surprising to us, today - German goods were called cheap AEG launched what may have been the first modern rebranding.  They hired Peter Behrens who created a new AEG typeface for both their advertising and their product labeling. From William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement to Dieter Rams of Braun, from Henry Ford to Ford Motor’s J Mays, we meet the people and their works and their critics (mostly favorable).  Produced for Athena Learning by Tim Kirby’s team for Wall to Wall Media, the video is supported by the Athena website (here) which delivers biographies of Raymond Loewy, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzk, Henry Charles Eames, Alberto Alessi, and Philippe Starck.  The videos also show us Joe Columbo, Robin Day, Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, Earl Silas Tupper, Verner Panton, Marc Newson, and Michael Graves, among many others.  You may not know the names, but if you ever read a highway sign or sat in a plastic chair, you know their work.  It is not always easy. The graphical user interface was first introduced in 1963.  

Supporting the presentation, the website also delivers a study guide for classrooms, and a booklet with more ideas centered on design failures. 

•  Episode 1:  Ghosts in the Machine: What distinguishes good design from bad design in a consumer product?
• Episode 2: Designs for Living: To what extent is the kitchen in your home “a machine for living”
• Episode 3: Blueprints for War: The British Sten gun was designed as a cheap, easy to manufacture, and ultimately disposable weapon. The German “Tiger” tank was the finest quality motorized cannon possible – and because of that, it could not be produced in sufficient numbers.
• Episode 4: Better Living Through Chemistry: Plastic, for better and worse. Steve Jobs famously said, “You know a design is good when you want to lick it.”
• Episode 5: Objects of Desire: How do you think the challenges of sustainability and limited disposal will affect product design in the decades ahead? Glen Olver Low calls it “Crade to Cradle.”  Instead of being down-cycled, his concept of recycling returns material to the highest level of manufacturing processes.

Michael Graves found his inspiration - in part - at a flea market, where he saw a hand-made stopper, carved as a rooster which sang when the water boiled. The conical shape was dictated by the need to boil water as rapidly as possible.

Previously on Necessary Facts

Objectified: A Film by Gary Hustwit

Art & Copy: How Advertising Changed Our Self-Perceptions

Start the Presses: Typography 

Cities: The Urban Visions of Jane Jacobs
Documentation is Specification

Drones are Everywhere

"The influential head of Google, Eric Schmidt, has called for civilian drone technology to be regulated, warning about privacy and security concerns. Cheap miniature versions of the unmanned aircraft used by militaries could fall into the wrong hands, he told the UK's Guardian newspaper.  Quarrelling neighbours, he suggested, might end up buzzing each other with private surveillance drones.  He also warned of the risk of terrorists using the new technology.  Mr Schmidt is believed to have close relations with US President Barack Obama, whom he advises on matters of science and technology.” -- BBC Technology News here Touted on Slashdot here

Radio controlled model Air Force One Giant Scale RC Airplanes here

Radio Controlled Coast Guard Ship Model

Radio Controlled Crane from ToysRUs

Among the huge, wide, broad and deep array of RC “cars” are replica tanks.  Radio controlled toys mimic just about any mechanism you can imagine. And the technology is 50 years old, back to the first transistors. 

Of course,  good things come in small packages, such as this remote controlled dragonfly.

Back in 1980, the National Association for Rocketry held its annual convention (NARAM 22) in East Lansing. My little sister and I built rockets and went to several launches.  As a result, I heard about the government contracting accomplished model rocket hobbyists to fly cameras over Three Mile Island.  All in all, this is very old technology now.  Altitudes of 2000 meters are typical for record-holders.  The amateur construction record for a rocket is 1648 pounds straight up to 4400 feet, a 1/10 scale Saturn V.

But this should be no surprise.  Wernher von Braun was a member of a club of weekend rocketeers.  When war came, only their social connections gave them access to the decision makers.  They were not sought out by the military or the ruling party.  Even after the effort was funded for militarization, as Willy Ley told it in Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel, they were thwarted by the need for massive fuel pumps. They began planning a whole enterprise to design and build them.  Then, one of their industrial collaborators told them about fire engines.  The point is that like rockets, military drone aircraft are just an adopted technology. The private sector came first by decades before the military caught on and recognized the new state of the art. 

 Eric Schmidt’s father was Wilson Schmidt, a German American professor of international economics at Johns Hopkins University who worked at the U.S. Treasury Department during the Nixon Administration. … in 2011... Schmidt dated Lisa Shields, a communications executive for the Council on Foreign Relations. ... According to PCWorld, Schmidt also expressed the following sentiment: "if you don’t have anything to hide, you have nothing to fear". ... Schmidt is also a member of the Bilderberg Group. - Wikipedia 

Schmidt is a smart fellow, a Unix wizard who earned his masters wiring up the Berkeley electrical engineering and computer science departments; but, he wants to control your toys. People like him are drawn to centers of political power. That carries a consequence for Google's corporate strategies. Be that as it may, self-propelled, programmed, cybernetic, and autonomic machines have been with us since flyball governors were added to steam engines.

The Science of Liberty

The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature by Timothy Ferris is excellent assembly of cogent essays is an extended argument for freedom and science. The scientific revolution and liberal democracy are inseparable.  To limit one is to defeat the other.  According to Ferris, the scientific method is the root of political freedom.  In that, he continues the case made long ago by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies.  

Like Popper, Ferris misses the center of the target.  It is not “liberal democracy” but capitalism that enabled and was empowered by the Enlightenment philosophy of rational-empiricism that we know today as Objectivism. To be fair, though, Ferris does devote an entire chapter to “The Science of Wealth” where he praises both free market capitalism and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

Anyone who values freedom and science will find this book is well worth the time invested.  The essays are crisp, insightful, and backed by citation.  While Ferris does good work building up the material benefits of the scientific method and the human values in liberal democracy, the core of the book is a total demolition of claims that centralism and totalitarianism can lead to good science.  In one chapter, plus other material throughout, Ferris shows that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were scientifically bankrupt, and technologically inferior to the liberal democracies they opposed. 

In just under 300 pages, Ferris delivers a close and informative history of the scientific method, centered on Sir Francis Bacon's creation - and betrayal - of it.  Ancient Greeks such as Aristarchos and Demokritos, guessed correctly, reasoning well, that the Earth orbits the sun, and that matter is comprised of atoms.  But that was not science.  Science is a method of observation, questioning, investigation, tests, and reporting.  (To see why Aristotle's description of the chick embryo does qualify as science, see my review of Great Scientific Experiments, here.)  Science did not exist before the Renaissance; the creation of science led to the political Enlightenment. Like the chicken and the egg, of course, which came first is a moot point: you cannot have one without the other.  More to the point, Ferris argues well, the essence of liberal democracy, what it is that makes freedom work, is precisely the scientific method applied to social problems.

That said, Ferris is well aware of the essential weakness in liberal politics: experimental programs become permanent.  According to the scientific method as applied to civics, we, the people, vote on certain remedies, try them out, and if they fail, we pragmatically try something else.  Actually, that last never happens.  We go on to new attempts, but the old failures continue to be funded and staffed and enforced.  He has no solution for that.

Ferris does deliver a good history, especially of the American revolution as the triumph of citizen scientists.

In another chapter on “Academic Antiscience” Ferris reveals how Karl Popper’s theory of falsification and Thomas Kuhn’s theory of “paradigm” were misapplied at first innocently, and then wantonly, by “post modernists.”  Claiming that theirs was an agenda of liberation, Paul Feyerabend and those who followed him quickly moved on to demanding an end to science and an end to material prosperity.

Supplementing that demonstration is a chapter on Progress.  Post-modernists decry and deny it.  They claim that material progress leaves us spiritually impoverished.  Politically, they claim that progress is illusory, being only the looting of the poor by the rich. Ferris takes the second claim and shreds it with facts.  Even if the claim were true that the rich are evermore far richer than the poorest, the sheer numbers of the poor, multiplied by their material advantages today, bury any claims to injustice from progress.  The poorest are far better off than they were 50 or 100 years ago. 

The book closes with a chapter on global warming and the consequent ice age that will come “unless we do something.”  What is that “we” must “do” is less clear.  Once again, Ferris is mindful of the precarious state of the world’s poor.  Reducing greenhouse gases, however accomplished, must not come by taking their lives. Who can afford to make which sacrifices today in order to secure the future is a tough question for which Ferris has no answer.

“The point is that lightswitch ethics—pounding the table and insisting, “We must save the lives of our grandchildren” or alternately, “We must leave free enterprise alone”—are inadequate. … Responsible stewardship requires dealing in quantities and probabilties, with little recourse to comforting certitudes.” 

Ferris closes by comparing the universal, invariant nature of science with the universal and invariant nature of liberalism.  Both depend on and advocate truths that apply to all people in all times and places.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Seeing in the Dark: Your Front Row Seat to the Universe
Science versus Common Sense
Slow Down and Think
Criminalistics: Science or Folkway

Goofing to a Meltdown?

After the Code.Org video touting "fun at work"  (see the post before this one), this article appeared on March 28 on CNN.com about the positive side of "goofing off at work."

The theory is that encouraging "play" at work not only boosts morale but also fosters increased creativity and teamwork, leading to better productivity and quality of work. ...
"The emphasis on fun spawns creative energy," explains Lauren Austin. She's creative director at marketing agency MKG in New York, where play is a priority. "Inspiration comes from interacting with one another and the world around us."

I agree 100% that stepping back from a problem and setting it aside allows the opportunity for creativity and insight.  We all have such experiences and we all know many stories.  Friedrich Kekule solved the problem of benzine's structure while dozing off and staring into a fire.  Kari Mullis had a similar insight about PCR (polymerace chain reactions; how we now replicate DNA), while speeding in his sports car up and through the Sangre de Cristo mountains outside Sante Fe.  But when Pasteur said that chance favors the prepared mind, his emphasis was on the mind, not the chance.

Large social events seldom have a single cause, but certainly do have identifiable contributing factors.  Not everything going on at one moment causes the events of the next.  But human action is causative.  I believe that the Dot.Com Meltdown was caused in part by the "business casual" attitude expressed in acceptable office attire and the casual atmosphere in business of the times.  The prosperity of the 80s and 90s, the Reagan-Clinton years, seemed assured because we never got to the real reason, the root, or radical fact.  Liberty and freedom are requisites to prosperity, but they are not causes of it. 

Cut taxes. Remove regulations.  Wealth will follow.  ... but only if the prepared minds can see for themselves the benefits of their creativity.  The creative mind does not work primarily for money (or primarily for love), but absent those rewards, much less gets done.  Primitive hunters were great artists. They decorated caves and cliffs, their weapons, and themselves.  Naked in the sun, they wore decorative shells for the pleasure of it. ... but the alphabet was waiting... and waiting...

What you can measure you can improve.  The invention of large numbers (beyond 3) led to the creation of writing. And here we are 8,000 years later, living by means that would be inexplicable to our Ice Age ancestors.  The difference is that we learned to work when we did not need to.  We gave up the luxury of hunting in an abundant environment for the opportunity to work long hours every day.  We could measure, count, tally, and store the excess wealth.

Will the new theory of goofing off on the job improve the statements of earnings, or are we on the verge of another Dot.Com Meltdown?

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Entrepreneurship
Steve Jobs: One of a Kind
Venture Capital
Capitalist Culture

Engines of Creation

I told him how much I wanted to be paid if I was successful.  He locked me in his business on Friday night. …   When he came back on Sunday, I had the solution wrapped and ribboned.

The folks at Code.Org created a video with Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and others, encouraging kids to learn to program computers.  That much is laudable.  Disgracing the video, with an odd anti-capitalist mentality, is a segment by Drew Houston of Dropbox about how much fun it is to be a programmer.  (View from the 3:00 minute to the 4:00 minute mark of this 5:44 announcement.)  Was it the fun of 48 hours in three days to solve a tough problem?  No, it is the fun of skateboarding in the office, playing ping pong, and chatting with your fields.  The segment also touts free food including gourmet cooking three times a day.  But where do these come from, if no one works?  Blank out.  (Firms are not launched with perquisites, benefits, and privileges--but more on that in another post.)

From the 3:17 mark: “… to get the very best people we try to make the office as awesome as possible."  Fantastic chef, free food, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, free laundry, snacks, even places to play, and scooters. “All these interesting things around the office: places where people can play or relax, or goto think or play music or be creative.”

Back in the 80s when the concept of a “Dot.Com Meltdown” was inconceivable on several levels,  working as a technical writer for a software start-up I was paid a salary of $400 per week for a 40-hour week. I would come in on my own time on Saturdays and find most, if not all, of the four programmers there, also.  This was neither the first nor the last time that my co-workers and I at that company or for some previous or subsequent job worked “for free.” 

It was not unusual. Computer programming was the quintessential brain work that people did because they loved it.  As well as we were paid, getting paid was a bonus., a secondary consequence.  Thus, hackers created Open Source software and formalized it with the Open Source Foundation.  Unix became Linux and GNU: Gnu is Not Unix.  Freeware and shareware abounded.  Companies made money selling it.  Individuals made money creating it and marketing it.  But we did it because the "fun" - the ecstasy of creation - was in the work.

“But first, I want you to think and tell me what made me give years to this work. Money? Fame? Charity? Altruism?... You see, I’m never concerned with my clients, only with their architectural requirements. I consider these as part of my building’s theme and problem, as my building’s material—just as I consider bricks and steel. Bricks and steel are not my motive. Neither are the clients. Both are only the means of my work. Peter, before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people. Your own action …”  (Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Plume edition, 1994; page 604)

Continues below click "Read More"... 

(A jump lead walks into a bar.  
The bartender says, "I'll serve you, but don't try to start anything.")

Start the presses!

The fundamental principles of composition are constant.  Styles are invented, transformed, evolved.  Good styles depend upon the adaptation of principles and then validate those principles.  The composition may be poetry or prose, music or dance, sculpture or painting, but the same principles govern: order, structure, and motion; rhythm, melody, and harmony; contrast, conflict and resolution.  These make a symphony or a skyscraper or this page. 

Typeface is a film by Justin Nagan about the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Company and the Wood Type Museum of Two Rivers, Wisconsin.  For about a hundred years, wooden type was the preferred mode for very large printing, from political protest placards to circus posters to billboards, and everything else that required type more than 72 points (1 inch) in size. These letters were larger than your hand, some a foot high. 

The film also ties in the re-birth of the old letter presses, history not just as it was but the adaptation and assumption of traditional tools and media to new expressions, bringing a “crazy growth in letter press printing.”  Students in university graphic arts classes make the pilgrimage to Two Rivers and then apply their insights on Chandler and Price, Steracle, and Vandercook presses.  At the museum, they acquire a three dimensional understanding of letters that is not available from  computerized typesetting.

The bonus features in this disk deliver the nuance and context.  Among them are an extended history of wood type and “The Most Ambitious Type in the World: Louis John Pouchée.” 

When I win the fight with Blogspot, these blogs begin with an opening paragraph in blue Helvetica Bold 12 point.  The body is in Georgia.

Helvetica: A Documentary Film by Gary Hustwit

 “Since millions of people see and use Helvetica every day, I guess I just wondered, "Why?" How did a typeface drawn by a little-known Swiss designer in 1957 become one of the most popular ways for us to communicate our words fifty years later? And what are the repercussions of that popularity, has it resulted in the globalization of our visual culture? Does a storefront today look the same in Minneapolis, Melbourne and Munich? How do we interact with type on a daily basis? And what about the effects of technology on type and graphic design, and the ways we consume it? Most of us use computers and digital fonts every day, so are we all graphic designers now, in a sense?” 

Also on Necessary Facts 

Documentation is Specification
Art & Copy 
Objectified, a film about design by Gary Hustwit
The Genius of Design

Hacking Computer Security: BSides Austin 2013

The 3-1/2 day event  (March 20-23) kicked off with a screening at the Paramount Theater of Code 2600, Jeremy Zerechak’s documentary about the origins and present reality of computer hacking and privacy issues.  The festival officially began the next morning at the Wingate by Wyndham in Round Rock.  Registration was $10 per day for the official 2-day event.  The movie was extra.  Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and beer (courtesy of New Republic Brewing of College Station) came with the price of admission. Conference schwag included t-shirts and complicated ballpoint pens. Other giveaways and door prizes were plentiful. Officially closing Friday at 5:00 PM,. an after-party and Saturday field trip to Texas A&M’s Disaster City training center capped the hacking holiday of hard work.

Star Trek theme with
Command for the volunteers,
Blue for attendees
and some Redshirts.

Special two-day games included a lockpicking contest, a social engineering challenge, and “capture the flag.” 

Lockpicking is a traditional cultural aspect of hacking.  The practical side for computer security professionals is that business managers typically hang five dollar locks on server racks with millions of dollars of data: you need to know your exposed risks.

“Social engineering” is the engagement of hapless intermediaries as tools to reveal and expose software and hardware. The two-day challenge was limited to the hotel and the adjacent shopping center: the residential neighborhood with its homes, day care, school, and senior center, was off limits. 

“Capture the flag” involves a server loaded with typical applications. The defense team must keep the system up and running while offense teams attempt to break in.

Sponsors included RackSpace, Digital Defense Inc., Visible Risk, RSA, Rapid 7, Palo Alto Networks, Mandiant, ISSA of Texas, Pwnie Express, Security Innovation, Tenable, The Denim Group, Milton (providers of shwagg), Last Pass, Haking, the International Association of Forensic Investigators, Longhorn Lockpicking, and New Republic Brewery of College Station. Also mentioned were "Protect Your Nuts" and "Kommand && Kontrol: Revenge of the Carders."

Money was collected for two charities, "Hackers in Uganda" and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, via the sale of conference buttons.  EFF is famous for protecting and extending rights in cyberspace.  "Hackers in Uganda" is to be a film by Jeremy Zerechak.

Friday lunch: about half of the 175+
attendees sat in the big room.

BSides San Antonio will be held in May, DFW in November. (BSides Texas here). 

Summaries and reviews of talks delivered follow below.

(Much of this presentation began as posts to the Group64 and the Austin Tech Geeks local groups on LinkedIn.)

Seeing in the Dark: Your Front Row Seat to the Universe.

Seeing in the Dark by Timothy Ferris is a narrative rhapsody honoring amateur astronomy.  You do not need even a telescope to be blessed by the wonder of the skies.  City lights are not a barrier.  Certainly, a large telescope deep in the countryside, above the surrounding landscape is best. Building your own observatory is the epitome of the hobby. But for anyone, anywhere, passion and patience deliver the rewards.  Seeing in the Dark is about the people whose love and work open the universe for themselves and others. 

John Dobson built large, rugged, cheap telescopes that he set up on the streets of San Francisco for onlookers.  He did not invent the Dobsonian Reflector, but he popularized it; and now hundreds of stargazers enjoy instruments that would have been the envy of professionals a hundred years ago. Here is the deeper lesson: you do not need the Wilson Observatory at Mount Palomar to discover the skies for yourself – and even to publish work of academic quality – because the pioneers of astronomy from Galileo forward did not have such tools. 

THE PBS DVD

Galileo, Kepler, Caroline Herschel and hundreds of others all relied on telescopes that were severely under-powered – arguably mere toys – compared to today’s instruments.  Many of them were amateurs because astronomy was not an academic profession until late in the 19^th century.  Today, astronomy is one of the few endeavors of scientific exploration and discovery where amateurs contribute significantly to the work of professionals.  (Numismatics is another: more on that later.) 

Ferris warns that some tension does exist, as amateurs occasionally do not care about or understand the astrophysics of the objects they see, track, photograph, and measure.  Largely, though, the working relationship is one of mutual admiration and appreciation.  Amateurs are free to devote themselves to work that professionals cannot afford to do. 

Amateurs and professionals carry out the same work with the same tools: telescopes, cameras, spectroscopes, and more, including even radio telescopes that bring information about the universe from far beyond the sadly narrow visible band.

The book version of Seeing in the Dark by Timothy Ferris (Simon & Schuster, 2002), was followed by a PBS presentation in 2007.  The movie is better. 

The Book

The book is padded with basic astronomical information about the planets and stars that appears in every astronomy book.  The print version of Seeing in the Dark is a long narrative, devoid of pictures.  So, while Ferris told me everything I already knew about The Great Red Spot of Jupiter (and many facts that I did not), I had to goto Wikipedia to learn what a Richey-Chrétien telescope is and to bolster my limited understanding of the Cassegrain reflector. 

The PBS website for Seeing in the Dark (here) is replete with supporting articles, how-to guides, and biographies of accomplished amateurs (few of whom appear in the book, which introduces others). Of course, the PBS website also gives helpful links to Local Societies, Books, Videos, Magazines, Websites to Explore, resources on “Astronomy & the Arts” a Glossary and much more.  Perhaps chief among them are the links on astrophotography.

Looking through a telescope is at once startling, edifying, and disappointing.  We are treated to images from the Hubble space telescope.  You are not going to look through a $500 five-inch (130 mm) reflector and see an 8x10 color glossy print of the Andromeda Galaxy.  But you will see pretty much what it really looks like – or looked like 2.5 million years ago even before our ancestors stopped dragging their knuckles -  because when you look into space, you always look back into time.  And more to the point, amateurs who are accomplished and gifted viewers do measure up even against the great Hubble.  

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Perfect Machine

The Scientific Method

Cosmos: A Spacetime Travesty

Measuring Your Universe

Images from SXSW 2013

Another day and night of fun and splendor as 6th and Congress remains the focal point of energy in downtown Austin. On Saturday, March 15, Oliver and Wilder Lee moved across the street. Balafon player Abou Sylla returned from last year. The Yellow Roses returned from yesterday. The Magician and Sonia did not. 

A rapper with his own videographer and a portable generator to power the sound took up the northeast corner. The valets at Ruth'sChris could not park in their garage because a pianist and his lively and talented skittle band blocked the entrance. Also making a video of some sort, a fake priest declaimed to his cast of actors and actresses about "The Church" (whatever he might have meant about that.) As the night ground along, the crowd flowed back and forth more quickly and also slid down the socio-economic scale. I finally had to warn a mild vagrant and his really nice dog that they were not going to sleep in the doorway of Brooks Brothers. 

Oliver on bass and Wilder Lee with banjo and percussion

The flash is connected to the camera ...

Thursday, March 14, was "Camera Day." Cameras are common enough at SXSW, of course, but the shutterbugs swarmed the streets with equipment closer to field artillery than to anything you carry in your pocket.  This was a professional shoot. They took about 50 clicks with her sitting and then standing on the corner in "Vogue" poses.

The camera is connected to the flash over the model

YELLOW ROSE OF TEXAS,

a gentlemen's club

Right space; wrong time. He missed the Yellow Roses.

Sonia was more interesting with eight knives stuck in the box.
She assisted her father with his magic tricks.

Even blindfolded Sonia can see what is behind her.
She actually missed this one: Dad's fault of course.

These were some of the people who worked the intersection of 6th and Congress on Thursday.  Blues and bluegrass, rock or skittle, tuba, xylophone, acoustic and electric, break dancing, no corner goes unoccupied for long.  These shots were possible only in the moments when the on-lookers were sparse.  To get me to work, we just waited for traffic to stall and did a "fire drill." Later, on my way to a bus stop after work, I found the poet Bill Keys up a block, once again surrounded by girls. (Oh, why I did choose technical writing?)  

Friday the 15th Abou Sylla plays the balafon

Saturday the 16th
Signing the "Charity Life" tour bus (www.MyCharityLife.com)
This is basically a clearing house for small and local charities.
You can pledge as little as $5. Your favorite charities save
the burden of administrative staff.

Saturday the 16th "Chico Chico" plays "Puttin' on the Ritz"

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

South by Southwest 2013

South by Southwest 2012

Formulas for Success

Austin at Night

Around Austin