Middle East: The growth of a desert jewel

Qatar's research machine is a work in progress, but its funding opportunities are already luring international scientists to its increasing number of institutions | Nature (subscription required)

Khaled Machaca enjoys the high-risk, high-reward aspects of a start-up project. His latest is particularly demanding. Machaca has been tasked with establishing a research programme at a newly founded medical college in Qatar: a small Middle Eastern country whose science enterprise, initiated only in the past decade, is itself a start-up of sorts.

The challenges are manifold. Machaca has had to convince funders, the larger medical community and the public of the importance of his work. He has also had to source lab equipment in a place with few suppliers. To foster international collaborations, crucial to Qatari researchers' success, he has had to help craft and customize a code of research ethics, created by Qatar's Supreme Council of Health, that complies with both US and Qatari laws. And he has had to convince young scientists that they can advance their careers and conduct cutting-edge science in a country known less for research than for hosting the news network Al-Jazeera and, as was announced this month, the 2022 soccer World Cup.

“We had serious challenges,” says Machaca, who is associate research dean at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar (WCMC–Q), based in Doha. But he relishes the notion of building a programme from scratch. And the country has a big advantage: money. Scientists working in Qatar will find good funding and ample opportunities for big projects, but, like Machaca, they might have to deal with rigid bureaucracy, evolving research-ethics regulations and rules — on stem-cell research, for example — that could limit collaborative ventures. These trade-offs will help to determine Qatar's success as it attempts to build a sustainable science enterprise. >>>

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The great Web splintering

Facebook and smartphone “apps” may change the nature of the web as we know it | OnIslam.net

The rise of Google signaled the maturing of the Web as the medium that accommodated almost all other media, from text to audio and video content. Most users embraced that medium standardization. Suddenly Google, along with other search engines, became our indispensable guides into that world.

The success of Facebook, in contrast, marked the maturing of our Web habits, and thus the growing amount at every one's disposal of what author Clay Shirky calls “cognitive surplus” (the title of his latest book, though he has been using the term for several years).

That began with the routinization of our Web use. We knew when to peek into email and more or less what to expect. We dispatched Word Documents back and forth, with changes tracked and comments stacked in the margins. We skimmed and organized the daily harvest from our “feed aggregators.” We occasionally or obsessively went back to the familiar blogs. And, of course, all along we googled, initially cheered and surprised by its speed and accuracy at coughing back results, but only initially. And appropriately so — there is only so much admiration one (ordinary human being) can harbor for an algorithm.

The investigative journalism skeptic's manifesto

I’m an “investigative journalism” skeptic. And I’m right until the promoters of investigative journalism prove me wrong | The blog of the World Federation of Science Journalists

Let’s start with the latter. Associating “investigative” with “journalism” is almost equivalent to slapping “artistic” on “films.” It’s tautological. Good films are necessarily artistic as much as good journalistic pieces are naturally investigative. Therefore, those who insist on making the distinction have to justify it as we, the skeptics, invest our doubt-infested minds in less “investigative” endeavors.

Because of this (false) implication of distinction, I’m skeptical of so-called investigative journalism. If “investigative journalism” required a distinct set of skills or approaches, one would have an easier time accepting a distinct term for it. But it does not.

In Saudi Arabia, a pyramid of a different type

A drive in Saudi Arabia to open up local universities to cutting edge research at reputed science centers worldwide has King Saud University "twinned" with a Max Plack physics laboratory. How successful can such efforts be? | Nature (Middle East) (free registration required)

For Abdallah Azzeer, his long-term goal of turning Saudi Arabia into a regional hub for advanced laser physics starts with studying matter at short, or rather unimaginably short, time scales – racing against the hasty flashes of time lasting mere billionths of a billionth of a second.

To that end, the Saudi physicist is leading a collaborative research program involving King Saud University (KSU), where he works, and the famed Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Germany. "If you want the best outcome from a partnership, you must go to the best," Azzeer says.

Leading the MPQ side is Ferenc Krausz. The Hungarian physicist's Laboratory for Attosecond Physics is credited with expanding our knowledge about the behavior of electrons, through observing and measuring at the most fleeting of time durations, phenomena once deemed the preserve of theoretical physicists.

Full article on the Nature Middle East website ...

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Google and the intruders in the China shop

Web security is too important to be left to Web firms -- or so thinks Google | IslamOnline.net

Back in the day when computers were just computers, rogue code was regarded as a form of vandalism -- denounced, but largely tolerated. Yet as computers became the networks that underlie the operations of everything, from banks and power grids to obsessive real-time social-networking, vandalism is no longer an apt description of acts that disturb networks. That is now called cybercrime. And it’s far from the exclusive domain of law enforcement authorities. Increasingly it’s the business of diplomats and heads of states.

In a recent speech by the United States’ chief diplomat, Hillary Clinton said: “States, terrorists and those who would act as their proxies must know that the United States will protect our networks.” The country’s force, in other words, could be deployed to protect the network if need be.

With Buzz, Google as a search network

Google thinks that now is the time to incorporate the social-network into the search engine | IslamOnline.net

Perhaps surprising to some, Google too makes mistakes. This fact was on display with the February launch of Buzz, Google’s social networking service apparently aimed at competing with Facebook and Twitter.

The problem was not Buzz itself, but the hasty manner with which Google pushed it onto its Gmail users. Like Twitter and Facebook, Buzz enables users to post “status” updates, links, photos, and the whole repertoire of Web-borne distractions.

However, eager to make its presence immediately felt in the new realm, Google decided not to start from scratch. Instead, it tied the new social-networking service to Gmail, its mail service with about 175 million users. And before users knew it, they were, without permission, signed up on Buzz, and assigned lists of “followers” based on the frequency of email exchanges with people in their address books.

Of iPad and the elusive "third category"

Apple's chief says iPad will sit comfortably in the space between smart-phones and laptops -- except that such space probably doesn't exist | IslamOnline.net

Whenever Steve Jobs takes the stage, he’s guaranteed to amaze and disappoint, regardless of what he has up his sleeve.  The Wednesday uncovering of Apple’s long-anticipated, feverishly-rumored tablet-like iPad was no exception.  Almost immediately after Apple’s chief took the wraps off the new gadget, the blogosphere was humming with mutterings: too expensive; no slot for memory expansion; no removable battery; no physical keyboard; and no camera either.

As for the other camp, the immediately-amazed — judging by the volume and tone of comments on popular technology websites such as Engadget and Gizmodo — they’ve plenty to appreciate in the iPad.  That includes the expansive 10-inch brilliant screen, the familiar interface (resembling, but not copying, that of iPhone and iPod Touch), the compatibility of the whole repertoire of iPhone apps, and the new iBooks app that draws books from five major book publishers in an iTunes-like interface.