The GAO investigation [summary - text] titled Direct-To-Consumer Genetic Tests: Misleading Test Results Are Further Complicated by Deceptive Marketing and Other Questionable Practices sent DNA samples to four companies, and followed up with undercover calls for medical advice.

The results ranged from misleading, to what the GAO found as “horrifying”. Two of the companies claimed to “repair damaged DNA”. The GAO castigates the companies for implying that their advice that is diagnostic.

“One donor was told that he was at below-average, average, and above-average risk for prostate cancer and hypertension,” the report notes. Another donor with a pacemaker was told he had a below-average chance of contracting the condition. Another donor was told they were “in the high risk of pretty much getting” breast cancer.

How odd that skeptics devote so much time to the fraudulent claims of homeopathy, but have given DNA testing a free pass. But maybe it isn’t so strange at all.

“It’s the digital manifestation of you,” Mrs Sergey Brin told Time magazine in 2008, as it awarded DNA kits Time’s ‘Invention of the Year’ Award. The desire to reduce complexity to a simple piece of code, one that can be crunched by computers, is compelling. In a digital age, why wouldn’t it be?

Journalists who may be relied upon to mock “water with memory” suspended their critical faculties. If we’re computers, and DNA is digital, then isn’t medical research now just one big Google search? The stardust sprinkled upon the field by the Google association certainly helped.

We’re obviously not computers – things are a bit more complicated than that. The decoding of the human genome has been one of the greatest disappointments of recent science.

But as with the Medicine Shows that flourished in the US until the passing of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act – people wouldn’t have come if they didn’t want to believe.

With the puncturing of the gene bubble, perhaps medical research can return to the traditional, laborious and exhausting business of hypothesis, observation, and testing.

It’s very, very timely – and even if you don’t follow Nokia, mobile or telecomms it’s a fascinating exercise in business analysis and organisational studies. Enjoy.

Read more at The Register…

SABIP was founded in 2008 in the wake of the Gowers Report, as a quasi think-tank focusing on copyright policy. New technology has allowed many more people to record and distribute material – “everyone’s a creator” – we’re told, and this hasn’t gone unnoticed. From publishers such as News International to giant web data aggregators such as Facebook, the pressure to weaken the individual’s rights remains enormous. All are eager to exploit amateur material, and drive down the cost of professional material.

At once, SABIP began to discuss the removal of copyright as an “automatic” right from creators, something that thanks to international conventions is recognized worldwide. It’s something that benefits individuals and amateurs more than multinationals, and it means that individuals can receive the full protection and moral rights of international copyright law for everything they do – without having to sign-up, click-through or take any action at all.

(For a recent example of commercial land-grabs, see the Daily Mail’s TwitPic theft.)

SABIP obviously didn’t think so, and proposed to redefine copyright so certain “non-commercial” works were excluded. In its 2008 launch paper, it wrote:

While subject to international variation, the definition of works which attract copyright is very wide and includes much material which is not of commercial value, and arguably may not require copyright protection.

Might there then be advantage in reworking the coverage of copyright to separate the moral rights of creators of all types of material from the economic/commercial rights and to limit the latter only to those outputs that do have an economic value?

SABIP noted several obstacles to this radical redefinition of individual rights. Copyright is automatic by international convention – this would mean the UK ripping up the Berne Convention. Since the UK is one of very few net exporters of “stuff”, this would have had deep repercussions with possibly years of tit-for-tat trade restrictions.

No matter, by this year, the language had morphed again, but this time it duly made its way into Europe as the official position of the UK government. And so earlier this year, the UK proposed to Europe that:

The UK will push at European level for a general non-commercial and pre-commercial use exception to copyright.

And added, for good measure, that it would quite like to outlaw private contracts at will:

The creator contract/bargaining problem may be addressed in the first instance through a working group (perhaps with OFT involvement), looking at acceptable forms of contracting.

When asked what “pre-commercial” meant, civil servants replied that they didn’t know.

Traditionally what decides whether a work is commercial is pretty straightforward – the market. A picture of your toddler eating Alphabet Spaghetti Soup is typically worth nothing – unless somebody decides to stick it on a calendar. The SABIP proposal would have left the photographer with the moral right, but no automatic compensation right. It would also mean – quite strange, this – a bureaucratic apparatus pre-emptively picking what categories of work may benefit from a market, and excluding the rest. You may wonder how this would work – folk music non-commercial, dubstep commercial, perhaps?

SABIP also attempted to make itself busy in other areas outside copyright, gradually turning into a Spartist think-tank. In January for example (minutes), it raised the role of “the regulation of genetic modification (GM) and the appropriation of ‘nature’” and low-carbon technologies. You’ll struggle to find any mention of these in the Gowers Report, and neither has much crossover with copyright.

Photographers welcomed the demise of the quango. Stop43 noted yesterday

“Its reports were vacuous, based on questionable methodology, notably light on meaningful statistics, and in the main simply pleaded for further research to be carried out. A true QUANGO, then, primarily engaged in perpetuating itself and its ‘work’. Stop43 does not mourn its passing.”

Yet pre-commercial use is an IPO-inspired invention, and SABIP merely the ventriloquist’s dummy. The ideas live on.

The ambitious, Nokia-sponsored interactive extravaganza began this weekend, and it’s an interesting experiment. In Kring’s own words, this series of events, called Conspiracy For Good, is “not quite a drama, not quite a flashmob, not quite an ARG [alternate reality game]“.

What is it, then, and how did it come about?

Kring says that the underlying message of Heroes was one of “hope and interactivity and global consciousness and saving the world”, and when Nokia approached him to do some content for Ovi, he pitched the idea of anti-capitalism activists shaming a wicked corporation by using Swampy-style hacktivist tactics. You can be Swampy, if you wish to be. I have no idea if you get to keep the phone, but Nokia is donating towards a real library in Zambia and giving away 50 scholarships if the bad guys lose. So there’s very little prospect of the bad guys not losing.

It was the love-child of Nokia’s VP Tero Ojanperä. So for four weeks you can find clues hidden online and in the real world. You’ll encounter reality actors or “reactors” – some in character as Swampies, some as evil corporate suits – to guide you. And you’ll be using a Nokia phone.

Kring calls it “social benefit storytelling”. But you can see another reason why it appealed to a technology company – because Kring endorses the modern idea of “engagement”.

“Shows like Lost and Heroes did force you to go on line and look for clues – they were sort of a bridge to this. Each tentacle carries one little piece of the story and you have to put the pieces together,” he told us. “It’s not the same as letting it wash over you – you’re forced to participate, and guess, and predict.”

Which audiences have always had to do before – with Miss Marple, or Twin Peaks. But because the interactivity is now electronic, tech companies are very interested. In this version of ‘engagement’, the concept of the Mind places it as a kind of communally-shared external cyber-appendage, a bit like the Ood’s Hive Mind in Dr Who.

So how would it work, I wondered. People will shame the fictional corporation into… what, exactly?

Kring explains:

“We have this contract that proves they illegally obtained this land, and they’re a very tricky corporation. and in a very guerrilla kind of way we expose them. Busted exactly. But there’s a lot of stuff to find out before we bring them down.”

There’s no doubt who’s Good and Bad here. Isn’t what makes great drama the moral ambiguity – forcing the audience to decide who to root for? When people are forced down one path some rebel, while for others it becomes an exercise in reinforcement.

Kring politely disagrees.

“I may not completely share your view, I believe in archetypal and mythical storytelling and what’s missing from the world. We used to know what’s right or wrong, by the myths we heard around the campfire. Those are now missing in our culture and have been replaced by consumerism.

“We really wanted the secret society to be really cool. We force the audience to choose which is the right path; by giving them a moral fork in the road.

“People are starved for archetypal stories, where there is good and evil and people are given a choice.”

It just didn’t seem like much of a choice – particularly if you were being guilt-tripped. 50 people in the real world would lose out on scholarships if the Bad Guys won. Kring didn’t think so. On Heroes, he explained, some people started supporting the bad guys.

“If some people want to become part of [evil corporation] Blackwell Briggs, that’s fabulous! On Heroes people started a Syler’s army where they identified with [evil megalomaniac] Syler.

“Ultimately if you align yourself with Blackwell Briggs you have been on the wrong side of the narrative…”

Surely you’ll burn in hell for supporting Blackwell Briggs?

“Hah, yes.”

I thought these questions probably arose because a decision was made to put this into a political context. There’s no problem with killing a zombie or a cannibal, or even an alienate determined to wipe out the human race. Did he need to give such an explicit and simple political view?

“We try not to be political”, says Kring. “We tried to create someone who’s the face of persecution, corporate greed, and injustice.”

But the world really isn’t so simple. The idea that business is all bad and philanthropy good is one that quite a few recipients of charity might see as a bit patronising. Grinding third-world poverty isn’t much fun no matter how many books you’ve got – and yet economic development gives us incubators and… Nokia phones.

“I’m not sure I follow.”

For Kring this problem was solved by making the bad guy so bad any such ambiguity might be banished.

“Well, Blackwell Briggs is trying to trade on human capital to exploit resources. They’re involved in child labour and … we’re trying to exaggerate it and make it so broad no one can have any doubt. Cutting the heads of babies, that sort of thing.”

Was the choice of name for the bad guy a coincidence, then?

“The name was meant to conjure up Black Hats, good guys wear White. Any resemblance is just a coincidence.”

So Xe (formerly Blackwater) haven’t sued you?

“Not yet,” he says.

A study correlating economic and political changes in China’s Middle Kingdom has found that warmer climate benefited society. By contrast, a fall of temperature of 2C was correlated with conflict and famine.

“The collapses of the agricultural dynasties of the Han (25-220), Tang (618-907), Northern Song (960-1125), Southern Song (1127-1279) and Ming (1368-1644) are closely associated with low temperature or the rapid decline in temperature,” say the academics led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

Historical studies are problematic in two ways, and you have to be careful not to fall into one of two obvious elephant traps. One is that politics very much determines whether a society gets out of a pickle or goes into a decline. So deterministic views such as Jared Diamond’s in Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse tend to underestimate this capacity for change.

The other (not entirely unrelated) trap is that we’re no longer at the mercy of nature, and thanks to technology have tamed it to a significant degree. We don’t have a “peak wood” or a “peak whaleblubber” crisis today. Even the IPCC grudgingly admits as much. “The marginal increase in the number of people at risk from hunger due to climate change must be viewed within the overall large reductions due to socio-economic development.”

Well, obviously. Although slight increases in temperature (and CO2) result in higher productivity, wealth remains a much bigger factor. It’s poverty that makes people miserable, not the climate. And lifting a couple of billion people from messing about in the mud, and into a modern, largely urban, technological society effectively removes them from the risks our great-great-grandparents used to worry about.

The idea that tiny changes in climate (either way) cause catastrophic effects, against which we’re powerless, is really the last in a line of medieval superstitions.

As Roddy Campbell writes here, if you’d asked people in 1900 what would happen if temperatures rose by one degree, you’d have got the same prognosis you hear from the “bedwetters” today: “hunger, war, migration, desertification and water shortages in 2010… Pretty grim, wouldn’t you think?” Yet here we are, and life expectancy is higher than ever. The fear of science and technological innovation runs so deep with some people, that self-flagellation is always preferred.

Even significant long-term falls in temperature – such as the ones we can expect quite soon – can be made tolerable by adaptation and technological innovation. Nigel Calder this week revisited the study of Milankovitch cycles he published while editor of Nature in 1974.

The extrapolation suggests that the next ice age began five thousand years ago and it’ll get quite chilly in the next 120,000 years.

“This ice age looks like a relatively slow starter,” Nature reported. “The theory, though, is of widespread snow that fails to melt in the vicinity of 50°N in summer, so that large areas of North America, northern Europe and the USSR will have to be encrusted with ice sheets during the next few thousand years.”

On the other hand, the Sahara would return to being warm and wet, as it was during the last ice age, and would be fertile again.

Even life above the 50° line (which includes the whole of the UK) need not be grim. I suggest a row of nuclear power stations at Hadrian’s Wall, discharging warm water around the coastline and inland via a heating/irrigation network. That should keep things toasty.

It seems absurd, at first – Nokia is still turning a profit in the billions, while Apple’s annual loss was in the billions of dollars. But one thing should focus minds of executives and shareholders for one reason that’s never mentioned – the Sudden Extinction Event.

A recent theory suggests that life on Earth is extinguished and starts over every 27 million years. Coincidentally, 27 million years is how long it takes the Dave TV channel to show every repeat of Top Gear without showing the same repeat twice [*].

Businesses suffer Sudden Extinction events too, and we saw one in the past 12 months right in Nokia’s backyard: the rebirth and crash of Palm. Some businesses are much more vulnerable to Sudden Extinctions than others, and I’ll explain why by using Apple’s pre-Jobs quandary to illustrate it.

Nokia’s huge asset today is cash. It turns over a lot of cash, and it still makes a tidy profit. The most recent financial year saw a profit of around €9bn gross, with a net profit of €3.3bn for its devices and services division. Maintaining profitability is a decent achievement. Nokia also has around €8.8bn cash in the bank.

Back then Apple was smaller, of course, and it was hit harder. It saw revenues fall from $11bn in 1994 to under $6bn in 1998. Unable to respond to falling demand quickly, Apple lost $1.8bn over two successive financial years. (It took a decade, and the iPod, for Apple to rescale the peak of its 1990s income.)

But Apple had two great advantages.

The replacement cycle for Apple products was much longer than it is for Nokia’s products today. It varies in each market and each age group (and on who you ask) but it’s around 18 months. Apple’s kit back then was replaced every few years – and it didn’t help that they were built like tanks.

Much more importantly, Apple had a “network effect”. It had lost the IT productivity market to Windows, but in education and particularly in professional content creation, it was the dominant system.

Repro houses took Apple files. The publishing systems were Apple. They were usually tied together using AFP and AppleTalk networks. The workforce of contractors knew Apple products. (I recall how difficult it was to find Photoshop or Quark contractors who knew the shortcuts for the Windows versions in the mid-1990s – the Apple shortcuts were so deeply ingrained.)

And in this market, Apple’s computer continued to work. The PowerPC chip was still pretty fresh, and looked to have plenty of life in it. So making the move to Windows would have been costly.

Even for individuals, moving away from the Mac was much more problematic than it is today – valuable data was trapped inside extended attributes (or in Apple parlance, resource forks), that Windows had problem reading. Better to sit tight than move.

Despite its terrific brand, particularly in Asia, Nokia has no such network effect. Customers can choose to switch from a Nokia phone quite painlessly. They copy the address book to a SIM, and off they go. Given a bad experience, customers can stay away a long time.

A recent poll by YouGov showed that only a third of smartphone owners would even consider a Nokia as their next purchase, a drop of 12 per cent in just six months; only 15 per cent would recommend a Nokia, another number falling.

Today, Nokia cites amongst its great advantages its scale and logistics, and in particular its manufacturing assets. But there’s no point in having manufacturing if the demand isn’t there – the factories become a costly overhead. Without high-margin products of its own, Nokia may as well become a contract manufacturer.

Cash is still King

Opinion is pretty unanimous why Nokia is getting beaten up by analysts and pundits on a daily basis. A little may be American triumphalism, but most of it is sound. Nokia isn’t making high margin products, and its lower margin products aren’t significantly better than the competition, which gets better every year.

Ten years ago, a low-end Nokia was still much better than a low-end rival – it was easier to use, had better battery life and reception, and often had better build quality. Today, Samsung makes very good ‘cheap Nokias’, and Apple and RIM have stolen the ‘aspirational’ bit of the market. With two billion new members of the middle class looking to make a statement, this is quite ominous.

In recent years Nokia has become so used to splashing the cash about that it’s rare to find a marketing consultant who doesn’t or hasn’t worked for the Finnish giant. It single-handedly keeps parts of the economy going – particularly the Strategy Boutique sector – people who dream up segmentation strategies or demographic shorthand. It funds entire branches of academia. But Nokia’s cash cushion isn’t so great that it can afford that anymore.

For example, this means it can’t afford too many splurges like the Navteq acquisition, which will never recoup the mind-boggling €8.1bn investment but has yet to be turned into a differentiator. In under three years, Maps has been Ovi-fied into near-oblivion, and Nokia needs to turn it into an asset that retains existing customers and attracts new ones. Nor can it afford to fail as it did with games, another expensive adventure it embarked upon with N-Gage in 2002 and finally abandoned last year.

With a network effect, Apple could afford to annoy partners and customers as it fought its way back to profitability. It did so again with the move to Mac OS X, before it was ready. Each time Apple gambled that customers could endure a bit of temporary pain. That’s not the Finnish way – it still talks in terms of ‘eco-systems’ and about generating opportunities for partners, who increasingly realise they can seize them without Nokia’s help.

Without a network effect, it’s not a luxury Nokia can afford. Its responsibility is to shareholders, and it has to be pretty brutal.

Footnote

You can view Steve Jobs case-study keynote at MacWorld in 1997 explaining Apple’s recovery strategy here. The segment identifying the market starts at around 18m:30s.