A Riverside 10 year old with metastatic brain cancer got his wish last Friday according to the Orange County Register. Ezra Chatterton visited Blizzard Entertainment here in Irvine; they are the creators of the popular massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft, which I posted about previously. The game designers tricked out his character with weapons, armor, and bumped him up seven more levels to the maximum 70. They wrote two Non Player Characters for him, one featuring his voice with a specialized quest. He even received a customized crossbow with his exact damage specifications. Lastly, he was able to make a customized flying character with the game’s lead designer and then explore all the highest level content of the game. Anyone who has even played W.o.W. for more than a few minutes has had this exact fantasy. This was made possible by the Make-a-Wish Foundation, and apparently the in game response has been overwhelmingly positive. Amazing story for gamers and non-gamers alike!

[tags]warcraft, make-a-wish, WoW,blizzard[/tags]

Orange County AIDS Walk is this weekend and I’m tantalizingly close to my goal. Thanks to all who’ve supported me thus far! If you’d still like to help me hit my $400 goal for raising funds for AIDS / HIV research, prevention, and therapy then check out my donation page to find out how you can contribute. Its easy!

[tags]AIDS, fundraising, Orange County, Walk[/tags]

These days I’ve been prepping for “the hunt.”

No, I’m not donning camouflage and fluorescent orange caps like the mid-Michigander in me might. I’m referring to the job hunt I’ll be on in the next half of a year. I’ve been going to resumé workshops so I can look good on paper, and doing some popular literature searches so I can look good in pin stripes.

Also, this week I attended HIV / AIDS on the Frontline, a conference focused primarily on HIV+ patient issues for caregivers. I would not have consider myself part of that cohort just a few weeks ago, but my work with ACTION has certainly changed that lately. An added bonus for me was the number of pharma corps. there talking about their latest drugs. Even though I consider my thesis to be more cancer focused, I sometimes forget that our retroviral work extensively overlaps with HIV research. I was able to talk to a number of scientists about potential job opportunities working in the HIV focused areas of these companies.

I learned there a number of exciting, new anti-HIV drugs coming out in the next few months. These are getting a lot of press lately because they appear to work well and they target parts of the viral life-cycle that available anti-retroviral drugs do not. Who knows, maybe I will end up working with these medicines in just a few months?

[tags]AIDS, biotechnology, HIV, hunt, job, pharmaceutical, biotechnology [/tags]

There’s been a lot of new stuff going on lately, some of which I can tell you about here.

I’ve volunteering with an AIDS outreach group called ACTION (an acronym which stands for AIDS CareTeams In Our Neighborhoods.) The Careteam method of volunteering is a simple and conducive way to allow busy people to participate in helping those who could use a hand - just a little bit at a time. Essentially, a “careteam” is comprised of 5-10 individuals who are focused on one “partner” which has specific needs that some member of the team could address at any given time. In ACTION’s case, all the partners are HIV positive (though not necessarily with advanced disease) and may have developed conditions where they might need a lift to the clinic or just some tasty treats dropped off because they aren’t able to run superfluous errands. Or, maybe they would just appreciate some folks to hang out with. The idea is that if each member can pay a the partner a visit every once in a while (and that one of us would be able to handle an emergency situation if it came up) the care partner will have a much stronger support structure than existed previously. Now, clearly dedicating 10 people to one needy partner does not scale well - but doing something is so much better than doing nothing in these cases.

The experience has been a serious dose of “heavy stuff” as I get more involved, but there’s been a lot of surprises along the way. The first of which is how easy it is to make a little bit of time for someone who really appreciates your presence. The second is that the other individuals with ACTION are so cool, interesting, and aware that it hardly feels like a sacrifice to give time to a volunteer organization. Lastly, though ACTION is a secular organization, it does attract a number of religious or stongly spiritual people. What all of these people seem to have in common is how open-minded they are - it goes beyond tolerance to actually embracing others who are different. That is a rare thing.

I realize all of us are busy - but I feel like volunteering is something that each of us could do just a little bit of, no matter how full our calendar’s seem. You would be suprised how self-serving this is just from the satisfaction you take in the experience! I’m hoping to find an organization like this when I land in the next place a few months from now.

[tags]action, careteam[/tags]

Kansas repeals guidelines questioning evolution.

That really needed to happen.  It was already far beyond rediculous.

[tags] evolution, education[/tags]

My friend Matt put together this neat site, Rebutter.com. It’s a cool way to checkout political speeches and then share commentary and criticism (of specific paragraphs or the entire text) with other users. Its a great offering in light of the upcoming election.

[tags]politics, rebutter, speeches[/tags]

Thanks, Bo.

Go Blue!!!

[tags]bo, michigan, schembechler, UofM[/tags]

I attended an information session by the Central Intelligence Agency on campus today. Protesters showed up with signs and began shouting (somewhat humorous) slogans during the Q & A. Here’s one I chuckled at “Should I study water boarding here, or will you offer training on this tactic?” Cute. I’m just thankful they waited till the end to begin their disruption as I found the presentation interesting and would consider employment opportunities in their organization for scientists and analysts. Especially since graduate experience in those areas was a benefit to applicants. Unfortunately I didn’t have the chance to ask what life is like for domestic C.I.A. employees after work (i.e. easy to socialize and discuss your employer, negative reactions and self-consciousness from friends and family, etc.)

Well, clearly all this spy stuff is on my mind, because a recent on-line discussion at John Battelle’s Search Blog had me really theorizing. A commentor discussed how Google searches for certain keywords could yield men in suits knocking on your door. I was skeptical but offered another idea of Google and intelligence agency collaboration:

Ha! Men in suits showing up after Google searches for certain keywords relating to jihad? Hardly. Too obvious. That’s such an easy bait for the EFF or other journalists to drop. How simple to measure overt government surveillance and ruin a billion dollar corporation’s credibility. Oh you don’t believe so? Then do it yourself, search for those terms repeatedly and see what happens. Nothing.

A more realist collusion between an intelligence service and a patriotic American search engine is a high ranking SERP. The CIA could (nay should!) have its own clandestine websites featuring content that contains enemy propaganda. Google would graciously provide that site as a number one result under searches for certain keywords that would interest an enemy combatant. (Nothing too obvious like `jihad` or `Amerikkka` or other such nonsense, but certain other phrases which are unique to enemy propaganda in other languages.) The CIA would monitor and tabulate access to their covertly operated sites (accesses referred from Google are interesting but ones non referred are doubly so) and then cross-reference what is known about the originating IPs at foreign telecoms. A tactic like that is…just…duh!

In fact, if the CIA was really sophisticated, they would have dozens of unlinked(!) “content honeypots” on a variety of `borderline` topics (insurgent ideology, transportation defense, mass media psychology) and review user access at these sites against each other. Why?

Build your own web of content. Make the database of intentions work for you. Tempt others with know-how and deduce their motivations. You can monitor them and no one will ever be the wiser. As Google webmaster guidelines say “Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles [of quality] will…enjoy better ranking” Hell, you may not even need to collude with Google to achieve that. You can have “persons of interest” sniffing your site if you just offer them something they finding “interesting.”

What do you think?

[tags]cia, domestic intelligence, content honeypot[/tags]

Not too long ago, I described how my graduate education is indirectly funded by my professor’s NIH R01 grants. Well, there’s recently been a discussion in the “science-o-sphere” prompted by this letter in Science Magazine about how politics and the economy influences the percentage of grant applications funded. The Scientific Activist and other science bloggers have some thought provoking commentary, as well as my alma mater’s student newspaper. This topic is of great importance to me, as I find myself once again T.A.’ing (as a seventh year graduate student no less) to help the lab conserve costs.

[tags]funding, grant, politics, R01[/tags]

Oh look, according to this photo supplied by Cuban media outlet Juventud Rebelde, Fidel Castro is doing fantastic - relaxing and reading the daily paper in his sweatsuit. Hmmmm, look at the text on that paper…that’s not a faked picture at all!

Or how about this manipulated (and original shot) from an Reuters photographer depicting the destruction in Beirut suburbs after an Israeli airstrike?

Those are two photoshopped images from media outlets of poor quality. With a little more effort a reader would not be able to tell they are being deceived. In fact, I wonder how many of the images we see in our papers have been modified to push someone’s agenda? In light of the Reuters case, this phenomena is not just relegated to state sponsored propoganda either. Its only a matter of time before video footage is manipulated and broadcast on the cable outlets as “the news.” Remember, those outfits compete for your eyeballs more aggressively than the papers. And besides, if its kind of like the truth, well that’s close enough right?
[tags]beirut, castro, media, photoshop[/tags]