briefs, health ‘ science

(MCT) WASHINGTON – An international group of experts began work this week in Washington to… (MCT) WASHINGTON – An international group of experts began work this week in Washington to tackle a huge problem facing ordinary families, the entertainment industry, scientists, businesses and governments, among others.

The problem is that most of the words, sounds or pictures that are created these days come in digital form. They consist of endless streams of electronic zeroes and ones stored on magnetic tapes or computer disks, not printed on paper or film or carved in stone. Digital data can be accessed only by machines whose technology keeps changing and soon is outdated.

“It’s the grand challenge of the Information Age,” said Francine Berman, the director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. “We produce digital data in truly staggering amounts.”

Berman is the co-chair of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Library of Congress and other organizations.

The task force consists of computer scientists, information experts, lawyers and economists who’ll spend the next two years trying to devise a system to store data in a way that they can be read, heard or viewed for the foreseeable future.

Most details remain to be worked out, but the digital information probably will be stored in a network of computer “repositories” scattered across the globe. To avoid obsolescence, the information will have to “migrate” repeatedly from existing systems to the next generation of storage platforms. Decisions have to be made about which data will be kept, who’ll have access to them, what it will cost and how to protect confidential or private information.

Examples of lost data abound. Early images of the Earth and the moon from space were stored on 1970s-era UNIVAC computers and can’t be recovered. Almost half the websites created in 1998 vanished within a year. Data stored on once-ubiquitous floppy disks probably are gone forever. – Robert S. Boyd, McClatchy Newspapers

(MCT) SAN FRANCISCO – eBay Inc. unveiled several changes to its core online-auction service Tuesday, including a sharp reduction in listing fees, as part of an effort to better compete against a growing base of rivals.

The company’s shares weakened by Tuesday afternoon, dropping 2.5 percent to $26.18, with reports that the changes could actually increase charges placed on many sellers.

The online auctioneer had previewed the changes during its fourth-quarter earnings call last week. Details of the changes were announced during its annual eCommerce Forum in Washington on Tuesday.

“We’re serious about making eBay easier and safer to shop,” John Donahoe, who was named to succeed Meg Whitman as chief executive last week, said at the gathering.

The changes are part of eBay’s broad effort to battle rivals like Amazon.com Inc., which also offers online auctions. eBay has seen the growth of its core business slow in recent periods, forcing the company to rely on lower-margin business such as its PayPal and Skype for earnings growth.

Among the most notable changes are lower fees that sellers pay to list items for sale on eBay’s site. The company is slashing these listing or insertion fees by 25 percent to 50 percent, depending on the market.

To make up for the revenue shortfall, eBay plans to take a larger cut from final sale prices, known as final value fees. The move is designed to lower the risk for sellers if their items do not sell.

The company also said that it’s eliminating fees for sellers using the Gallery option, aimed at expanding the number of photos of items for sale. – Dan Gallagher, MarketWatch

(MCT) ST. LOUIS – They say you can’t be too rich or too thin, but what about too happy?

People who say they are perfectly happy don’t do as well in the workplace, in school and in the public arena as their peers who aren’t quite as blissful, according to a new study.

The study looked at data from the World Values Survey, taken from more than 100,000 people in 96 countries over 20 years. The survey asked people to rank their life satisfaction on a 10-point scale and then asked questions about income, level of education, relationship status, volunteer work and political activities.

It showed that generally the happier you are, the more successful you will be in work and relationships. But there seems to be a cap on the influence of happiness in some areas.

People who rated themselves as an eight or nine scored highest in terms of income, education level and political activity. The 10s did finish first in the social categories, such as volunteer work and stable relationships.

Trying to achieve perfect happiness can backfire, the study suggests, because it could lead you to risky behaviors or illegal drugs to get it.

The happiest people might be less likely to think they need to improve in any way, the study suggests.

To see whether their theories on happiness and success held up, the researchers also looked at the behaviors and attitudes of some 200 University of Illinois students.

As expected, students who said they felt happiest had more active social lives but earned lower grades and missed more classes than the less ecstatic students.

Ed Diener, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who co-authored the study published last month in Psychological Science, said happiness is a worthwhile goal as long as it’s realistic.

“It’s people who are at an eight or a nine and take Prozac to get to a 10 that we’re sort of worried about,” he said. – Blythe Bernhard, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

(MCT) CHICAGO – Like cooks whipping up a recipe from scratch, a team of genetics researchers has artificially assembled all of the genes needed to make a simple bacterium, in hopes of creating a synthetic organism by the end of the year.

The team led by maverick scientist J. Craig Venter chose the smallest target possible by building the genome of Mycoplasma genitalium, one of the tiniest known species of bacteria. But their ambitions are much larger, such as understanding the most basic requirements for life and designing new bacterial life forms capable of producing biofuels.

“If the experiments are successful we could enter into a new design phase of biology,” Venter said Thursday during a press teleconference from Davos, Switzerland.

Despite such lofty goals, the new study published online in the journal Science does not demonstrate God-like control over life.

The team has tried but failed to insert the genes into a bacterial cell and “reboot” the cell into a new, living organism.

Although the prospect of man-made organisms evokes images of scientists drunk with absolute power, the short-term uses of the new research are not much different from the methods of genetic manipulation that scientists have used for decades. Other scientists already have synthesized working viruses such as polio, though viruses are considered less complex forms of life than bacteria. – Jeremy Manier, Chicago Tribune

(MCT) SAN FRANCISCO – A significant number of customers appear to be buying Apple Inc.’s popular iPhone with the intention of “unlocking” the device to use on a range of wireless networks.

Several Wall Street analysts raised questions Monday about the number of devices that have been modified to work with other wireless networks and what impact those modifications could have on Apple’s business in the future. Unlocking an iPhone allows the device to work on networks other than the one operated by AT’T, Apple’s exclusive carrier partner in the United States.

The questions stem from the companies’ earnings reports last week. Apple claimed it had sold 3.7 million by the end of 2007, while AT’T said it had signed up nearly 2 million iPhone subscribers by year-end.

Those numbers leave approximately 1.7 million devices missing in action. Some of these were sold in Europe, though analysts believe that number falls somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000. And some of the devices may have been sold but not yet activated for telecommunications.

But analysts believe more than 1 million devices may have been sold and unlocked, accounting for as much as one-quarter of the company’s total iPhone sales to date – a number one analyst called “astounding.”

For every 1 million iPhone units unlocked, Apple forgoes $300 million to $400 million in future revenue and profit, Toni Sacconaghi, of Bernstein Research, wrote in his report. – Rex Crum, MarketWatch