Four short links: 14 May 2010

Personalised Healthcare, Academic Link Shorteners, Journalism Futures, Security

  1. Genome Scan Gives Man Insight Into Future Health Risks the first completely mapped genome of a healthy person aimed at predicting future health risks. The scan was conducted by a team of Stanford researchers and cost about $50,000. The researchers say they can now predict [his] risk for dozens of diseases and how he might respond to a number of widely used medicines. Personalized medicine takes a step closer, and all powered by massive computational power.
  2. Long Handle on Shorted Digital Object — digital object identifiers, and their relationship to shortener services like bit.ly (in which O’Reilly is an investor). The Handle System is relatively inexpensive, but the costs are now higher than the large scale URL shorteners. According to public tax returns, the DOI Foundation pays CNRI about $500,000 per year to run the DOI resolution system. That works out to about 0.7 cents per thousand resolutions. Compare this to Bit.ly, which has attracted $3.5 million of investment and has resolved about 20 billion shortened links- for a cost of about 0.2 cents per thousand. It remains to be seen whether bit.ly will find a sustainable business model; competing directly with DOI is not an impossibility.
  3. We Are In The Information BusinessA well-architected news website leads to content that will keep on providing value, rather than leaving stories to wither away when their immediate news value has faded. Structured content is the stuff that makes a website malleable, rather than cementing you into certain ways of doing things. Structured content is like a big undo button that allows you to reverse decisions and change how your website looks and behaves. Since none of us can predict the future, the freedom to change course as often as we please and not having to worry about escalating legacy costs, well, that’s pretty close to heaven.
  4. Sacramento Credit Union FAQThe answers to your Security Questions are case sensitive and cannot contain special characters like an apostrophe, or the words “insert,” “delete,” “drop,” “update,” “null,” or “select.” (via Simon Willison)
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