“Proteins are the workhorses of the cell”. According to Google, some 42,800 articles and web pages have used this sentence verbatim to preface their work. What’s more, they did so without citing whomever first thought it clever to compare proteins to workhorses. Does this constitute plagiarism?

And what about those who claim that proteins are instead the machinery of the cell? Examples such as these illustrate that, except in rare cases of blatant copying, plagiarism has many shades of grey. On the issue of plagiarism, Fang and Casadevall argue that good scientists are those who “strike out on their own paths, using their own words”.

Indeed, shamelessly copy-pasting without proper citation is one of the most common definitions of plagiarism. However, with such a definition, would it then be acceptable to re-publish Fang and Casadevall’s article in a different journal, replacing each word with a synonym? The National Academy of Science (NAS)—and the author of this article—would not think so.

In their handbook that treats responsible conduct in research, the NAS goes further. It insists that plagiarism goes beyond using the same turns of phrase; it is about stealing ideas and is an infraction committed “intentionally, or knowingly, or recklessly”. In that same handbook, the NAS suggests a case study where a certain Professor Lee is writing a research grant. In the background section, he includes short sentences copied from a review paper he did not write.

These sentences are not novel ideas, but summarize what is known in the field. He ends the section with a one-sentence summary of that review paper and cites it. Whether this is plagiarism is debatable. The case study suggests that the ‘borrowed’ sentences are common knowledge, much like the introductory sentence of this essay. If so, I would argue this isn’t plagiarism on purely practical grounds: Whom would he cite if a dozen other papers also used a similar sentence?

That said, one would do better to choose different words in any case, if only to avoid clichés. Otherwise, if Professor Lee uses sentences that constitute novel ideas synthesized by someone else, he may want to heed the NAS’ warning that, in a stroke of misfortune, the author of the review paper may be sitting on the committee that evaluates his grant.

In 1998, you obtained your M.D. and by 2013, you had held editing positions at The Scientist, Scientific American and Reuters Health. What made you turn to journalism after medical school?

I had been active in journalism since college – high school, really – and medical school, so when I found myself running home every night after being on call to report and write columns and other assignments, I decided leaving medicine after my internship year would be a good way to see if journalism would work for me in the long term. That was 1999. Fourteen years later, so far, so good.

In 2010, you started Embargo Watch to comment on embargoes in scientific journals. What led you to start Embargo Watch?

I had been thinking about embargoes for several years, ever since writing about a silly sanction the World Health Organization had imposed on the New York Times. I read Vincent Kiernan’s excellent Embargoed Science, and realized that embargoes were helping journals and other scientific institutions control the flow of information. So after following these issues for a few years, I was inspired by my ScienceOnline counterparts to start a blog on the subject. I realized that blogs were perfect vehicles for obsessions such as the one I have about embargoes.

Later that year, you co-founded Retraction Watch, a blog to discuss retracted papers in science. What was your goal with Retraction Watch?

Adam Marcus – he and I co-founded Retraction Watch – would like to see more transparency in science, and particularly when science goes wrong somehow. Retractions are a great window into that. We also found retractions to be a great source of stories. The response to the blog, however – we are on target to beat five million pageviews in 2013, and are mentioned in major media almost every week – has surpassed anything we could have imagined. The conversations people are having about scientific integrity suggest we’ve really hit a nerve.

Have you noticed any trends in the number of papers retracted? Has it gone up in number?

The number of retractions per year grew ten-fold from 2001 to 2010, as has been reported by Nature, while the number of papers published per year has only grown 44%. So clearly, retractions are on the rise.

Is this because there are more flawed papers being published or is it because journals are more proactive about retractions?

This remains the $64,000 question. In a recent paper, Daniele Fanelli argues that it’s mostly because journals have developed policies for retractions, and are looking for fraud. But others – notably Ferric Fang and colleagues – have shown that more retractions are due to misconduct. So it may be both.

You recently joined MedPage Today as Global Editorial Director. What is your role at MedPage and how is the focus different from other publications?

MedPage Today’s core audience is health care providers. We welcome all readers, but we’re geared toward doctors, nurses, physician assistants, and the like. My role is to oversee the editorial staff and strategy. Building on our strengths as the world’s leading provider of clinical news, we’re going to broaden our focus to include more health care provider voices and drive even more engagement with our readers.

In a TEDMED talk you gave in 2012, you spoke about the US being over-medicalized. Could you summarize your thoughts about this issue?

Thanks in no small part to our fee-for-service health care system, the vast majority of incentives drive providers to order more and more tests and procedures, and write more prescriptions. It’s not enough to just treat the real diseases that affect people. Normal variations become diseases that require treatment, which only leads to other conditions that result from those treatments. We’re all part of the problem, though. Americans are not very good at “Don’t just do something, stand there.” The amount of money sloshing around medicine, as others have put it, means that drug companies and hospitals feel the need to constantly create new markets to please investors.

From your profile and your involvement in many projects, it seems you’re highly entrepreneurial. Is that the case? If so, how does an entrepreneurial spirit fit into science and journalism?

I do think it’s important for science journalists to take advantage of what technology now offers in terms of reporting and reaching audiences. What Adam and I are doing with Retraction Watch, what MedPage Today is beginning to do – none of that would have been possible a decade ago, perhaps not even more recently. It’s a really exciting – if unsettling – time in journalism, and I’m enthusiastic about all the new models that are bursting with entrepreneurial spirit.

I’ve always been interested in humor and physics. I’d planned on an academic career right from the start, so I never considered comedy as anything but fun, but over time I found myself doing more and more.

Sticking up satirical safety posters around the lab, writing comedy academic papers, spending far too long on article-length e-mails to friends in other parts of the world.

Humor makes everything better, especially when you’re working.

I first went to college to do computer science, but changed to physics, figuring that I could always buy a computer for my home, but a high-energy laser system was less likely to be in my personal budget. Physics became my entire life plan. I never doubted that I’d be an academic, a professor poking reality and then telling people about. Over time that morphed into a focus on lecturing as I learned how much I enjoyed interacting with people and telling stories. That evolved its final form when I became a humor writer instead.

Existing! Physics is everything. It’s the fundamental truth of existence, and our most powerful tool for making the most of doing so. It’s the satisfaction of solving an abstract puzzle coupled with the achievement of doing things that don’t just change but actually are the world. And since it obeys rules and equations, it’s really quite simple compared to things like people and emotions. But we’re all expected to work with those every day.

That’s using some work I did back in university. The lab has an interesting tweak on laser processing. Longer pulses can ablate material but cause thermal effects in the material left behind, melting and burning the surrounding area, while ultrafast pulses can vaporise the target material so neatly the surrounding material doesn’t even notice it’s gone. By using thousands of ultrafast pulses so that they’re spread over that longer timescale, you can neatly remove the target material while causing controlled thermal treatment of the borders left behind. The idea is that would be useful for annealing materials (I was working on fused silica), or cauterization in surgery. I haven’t been involved in that for a while though.

I got my first article into Cracked six years ago. Being contacted by Cracked changed my life. Until then the idea of being paid for writing simply hadn’t occurred to me. They’re brilliant about giving people a chance to get paid for words – anyone interested should check out http://www.cracked.com/write-for-cracked/. I’ve been writing for CBS Man Cave for a year and a half.

Of course! You have to write every day, and if you can invent some way to write more often than that, do that too. And tell me how. As a freelancer the real challenge is remembering to do something useful other than writing every day as well.

Yes, as many as will have me. Right now my other clients include GameGavel.com, Outfunny.com, and a bunch of others, including copywriting firms. You, person reading, do you want to hire a writer? Contact me at [email protected].

Always. I also rely on it when I’m mixing drinks or walking down the street. Scientific training improves your brain. It isn’t a set of equations, it’s a system for interacting with the world. It helps you solve problems, develop thoughts and avoid mistaking desire or laziness for facts and reasons.

As much as possible in the time available.

There’s a great tip by Teller (of Penn &), he says “Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth.” He’s talking about magic, but it applies to everything. Don’t measure out your effort in terms of how much you’re getting paid, or how long the piece should be. Make as much effort as you possibly can. This piece is a piece of you, sent out into the world to stand alone, and it won’t be able to say “This one was rushed” or “They weren’t paying much”. Or if it does say those things to a reader, that’s even worse.

There are a lot of pieces where you can tell that someone reached the desired word count and thought “done”. In my favorite columns, my first draft was triple or quadruple the final word count, which is brilliant, because I can brutally compress and combine and cut and cut and cut until what’s left is the best. Then, of course, you cut some more.

Michaelangelo talked about cutting away the bits of marble that weren’t statue. Writers have to do that too, but they have to squeeze out the two ton chunk of marble in the first place. As you’d imagine, that can be painful. So painful many people think that’s the work. But that’s just the start.

If your article contains everything you know about a subject, it’s immediately obvious. And not in a good way.

They’re not separable in that way. People like to think of brains as little Dungeons & Dragons characters, with different skills and abilities they can level up independently, but it’s a single super-connected network. Everything you put in gets processed and blended and affects everything that it comes out. How good you are at anything subtly influences how good you are at everything else. That’s why scientific training is so powerful: it permanently upgrades the your brain, and everything you do with it from then on.

On November 13, Dr. Incandela will give a talk at the Simons Foundation in New York, where he will discuss the discovery of the Higgs Boson, as well as what is to come. Register now; seats are limited!

Prior to his talk, we asked him a few questions to help us better understand the basics about this elusive particle.

What is special about the Higgs boson is that it is a fundamental particle with no spin (spin 0) and it is the first such particle ever discovered. Fundamental spin 0 particles are peculiar in many ways, as they can provide a force field that has no direction in space. Such a force field may be at the root of the inflationary eras of our universe. A field based on spin 0 particles could have a constant value everywhere in the universe without affecting the isotropy of space-time.

Simulated signature of a Higgs Boson as a result of a collision between two protons. © 1997 CERN

I do not use this term, nor do any of the physicists I know at the LHC so I can only speculate as to why some people have called it this. It may be for the following reasons. Higgs particles are the basis of a special force field that permeates the universe. This force field has a constant strength everywhere and it interacts with most of the fundamental particles and engenders them with mass.

In the Standard Model of particle physics, all massive fundamental particles get their mass this way. (This is not the only source of mass. A proton or neutron gets most of its mass from the strong binding energy of the quarks.) Without the Higgs mechanism the electron would be massless, and so atoms could not be formed. There would be no stars, planets, and no people.

What they did was purely theoretical. In fact it was not yet quite connecting to a specific description of nature. At that time it was already known that the two nuclear forces (known simply as the weak and strong forces) appeared to be short-distance forces, unlike electromagnetism and gravity. Short-distance forces could not easily be explained in quantum field theory.

Many people tried to solve this problem. Brout, Englert and Higgs were among the first to come up with a solution. Namely, that of a spin 0 field with a constant value in space that actually can limit the distance over which a force can act (which is equivalent to making the force carrying particles have mass). Steven Weinberg and others used this idea a few years later to successfully describe the weak nuclear force.

Dr. Joe Incandela © 2012 CERN

When we say we see ‘an excess of 5 sigma’ we mean that we see an excess of candidate Higgs events produced in high energy collisions of protons that is well above what we would expect for background processes.

We carefully estimate the number of events expected from backgrounds and the uncertainty on that number. This uncertainty in the background equals 1 sigma (equivalently 1 standard deviation). We require the excess we see for any mass value to be at least 5 times this number above the best estimate of the background. In statistics this would mean that the excess has less than about a 3 in 10 million chance of being a statistical fluctuation of the background. This is a very high standard, but it is in reality very difficult to do these experiments and it is possible to make mistakes and be fooled in a number of ways.

Well theoretically there can be many different kinds of bosons left to be found. Indications were pretty good that this was a Higgs boson (e.g. because of the rates at which we saw it decay to pairs of photons or pairs of Z bosons) but we were not sure if it was the simple type of boson predicted in the Standard Model or one of several that might exist in more complete theories of nature. It could also have been a more exotic spin 2 boson for instance or a boson that is a composite of other particles.

It would be difficult to rule out these other possibilities with absolute certainty, but we have done many studies since the 4th of July announcement, with much more data, and more sophisticated analysis methods and so far everything is consistent with a spin 0 Higgs boson, like the one in the Standard Model. More work is needed however.

As I noted above, this is the first fundamental spin 0 particle ever discovered and as such, gives physicists confidence to develop theories based on spin 0 force fields that would explain the inflationary periods in which the universe expanded rapidly.

In addition, within the Standard Model of Particle physics, the newly measured mass of this particle, together with information we have on the top quark mass, allow us to assess the stability of the universe and potentially understand how long it will last before undergoing a major transition to something very different. There are in fact hundreds of ideas coming out. The discovery papers we submitted at the end of July 2012 already have more than 1800 citations giving some idea of how much interest this has generated in the field.

In my talk on November 13 at the Simons Foundation I will review the basics of particle physics and the reason for the Higgs boson to have been predicted and then I will cover all the hard work it took to make the discovery. I will then present the newer results, talk about what we will do in the near future and even further down the road to understand this new particle better.

Finally I will briefly talk about the big open questions (beyond the Higgs boson) that we hope to start to answer in coming years. This includes for instance trying to understand what is dark matter, which is more abundant than ordinary matter by about a factor of 5.

A video from PhD Comics to explain the Higgs Boson

If you weren’t able to attend, check out the #RDS2013 Twitter feed for an overview, and keep an eye on the conference’s main website, where organizers should be posting videos soon.

Also, check out our Twitter analysis of #RDS2013 throughout the conference:

The short answer is that the Internet is really a network of billions of computers around the planet that are connected together. When you connect to the Internet, you’re simply joining this network of computers.

Every computer in this network is assigned a unique address so they can talk to each other. This address is called an IP address (IP stands for internet protocol). For example, Google.com’s IP address is “173.194.35.18”. You can type those numbers and dots in your browser and you will land on Google’s website (try it!).

From URLs to IP addresses

Memorizing telephone numbers is difficult enough that we shouldn’t have to memorize the IP addresses of websites. To solve this problem, there are computers on the Internet called DNS Servers (DNS stands for Domain Name System) whose job it is to translate website URLs to IP addresses: When you type ‘google.com’ in your browser, your computer connects to DNS servers, which then redirect you to the computer identified by the IP address ‘173.194.35.18’.

Think of it as getting in a taxi and requesting to go to the train station when you don’t know the exact address; before driving you there, the taxi driver’s must translate your vague request into an address.

But what’s the formula for translating ‘google.com’ to ‘173.194.35.18’? In reality, there are none, it’s much simpler than that. The numbers are completely unrelated to the website itself; in fact, the DNS servers simply maintain tables that map domain names to IP addresses. If you enter an invalid website domain, the DNS server will not have the listing for that website and will contact other DNS servers to see if they can map the domain name you provided. After a while (this would only take milliseconds), the DNS server gives up and returns an error message.

What about my IP address?

I mentioned earlier that all computers on the web are assigned an IP address. By that definition, it means that your computer is also assigned such an address when you connect to the Internet. To find out yours, go to Google.com and search for “my IP address”.

A common misunderstanding is that your IP address should not be shared with others; otherwise, the hackers will get you. The truth is that your IP address is public information, much like the house number on your mailbox. Displaying your house address does not make the lock on your front door any less secure. Similarly, your computer is set by default to not accept such connections from the outside—your doors are locked.

Is it ‘Internet’ or ‘World Wide Web’?

You may have noticed that I’ve used the terms ‘internet’ and ‘web’ interchangeably. The sad truth is that those two terms mean very different things. The term ‘Internet’ refers to the network itself, whereas the ‘web’ is an application that runs over the Internet. The languages and conventions used to communicate over the Internet are called protocols. For example, the web uses the HTTP protocol while you need the SMTP protocol to send e-mails.

Some history never hurts

The first use of the word ‘Internet’ was in 1974. In the early days, when the creators of the Internet thought about how to best implement this network, they opted for a design that favored flexibility. In his monumental 1988 paper “The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols“, David D. Clark explains the decision to opt for the ‘end-to-end principle’ , which argues that the network be kept as simple as possible by implementing functionality at the ends of the networks rather than making such functionality a defining part of the network, thereby imposing restrictions on the future growth of the Internet.

It was only in 1990 that Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau invented the World Wide Web (yes, it’s only been that long). Initially, it was meant as a medium for physicists to share papers and data, and allowed browsing the information using ‘hypertext links’.

In those letters, the authors express their concerns about the state of computational biology: “Engineers and biologists should collaborate more”, they urge. And collaborate they must: the current state of affairs is such that a lot of experiments in biology generate so much data that we aren’t able to process any of it with ease. Supposedly, there are oodles of science that we could learn from that data if only we had enough engineers and time, or computer cycles, to analyze it all.

One example that comes to mind is sequencing DNA. Currently, sequencing your complete genome would cost you around $10,000 and several hundreds of gigabytes of disk space. That said, companies like 23andMe.com will gladly sequence a small chunk of your genome. For roughly $200, they will mail you a kit that you spit in and then mail back. They extract the DNA from the sample, analyze it and send you the results. That said, they only look at certain regions of your genome known as Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs, pronounced snips). These SNPs are locations in your genome where you find a mutated letter in the DNA sequence; such variations can be thought of as typos in your DNA.

While the price of sequencing a genome keeps decreasing (see our Q&A with NHGRI director Dr. Eric D. Green), the problems encountered with storage and data processing remain a big issue. Beyond that, the other issues that creep up include whether sequencing every human on the planet is feasible from the point of view of technology, whether it is useful in terms of the medical information we can reasonably extract from looking at sequence data, and whether it is even desirable in the first place, from the point of view of privacy.

But let’s go back to our multidisciplinary collaborators. On the face of it, it seems like such a simple problem: Gather biologists and computer scientists in one building, supply unreasonable amounts of caffeine and have them collaborate to solve all our problems.

However, a quick thought experiment would reveal that scenario to be ineffective. The much thrown-around idea that all we need to do is to build research facilities with floors that have both engineering and biology labs to increase interactions is wishful thinking. If the problem originates from differences in research culture, increasing the number of chance encounters in the building will get us nowhere.

Collaboration ≠ Working together

Working together does not mean having biologists conduct experiments and asking computer engineers to analyze the data later. It has been tried for years and has been the cause of much frustration and wasted time.

Biologists who want to plan an experiment correctly ought to have discussions with computer engineers before the experiment to have an idea of which experimental parameters will ensure significant results.

Conversely, computer engineers cannot develop data analysis tools without understanding the biology behind the experiment. Otherwise, how could they possibly know about the caveats of an experiment and how those show up in the data?

This fantasy world where biologists and computer scientists need only be near each other to foster an atmosphere of collaboration is becoming increasingly absurd

The slogan of the festival was “Startups and LOL”, which seemed appropriate: At the event, we witnessed the ultimate Elevator Pitch, an actual elevator with investors and VCs inside, waiting to hear startups pitch their ideas during the short ride. When asked to choose their most enjoyable elevator rides, they went with Visualize.me in 1st place, Uknowa in 2nd and Cheek’d in 3rd.

Before the conference, twelve startups were selected from all over the world to come pitch their ideas on stage, to a crowd of hundreds of entrepreneurs. An ingenuous award—the Grandmother’s Pick—was put in place where six grandmothers judged those startups by asking the tough questions. The winners:Onavo won 1st place and Hoot.me came in 2nd. The “grandmother crew” also walked around, talking to various startups presenting their ideas at the demo tables. Some of the attendees told us they were asked questions that made them rethink their startup vision. The winners at the demo tables were Nexalogy in 1st place, Epic.io in 2nd and Wind-Do in 3rd.

Throughout the day, there were plenty of talks to satisfy everyone’s hunger for information, whether about starting a company or about maintaining a startup once it’s off the ground.

We spoke to the conference’s organizer, Philippe Telio, who found the event to be a great success: “We have a great attendance and wonderful speakers. The kick-off party was a blast and everyone had fun networking. The second day was a marathon of 20-minute presentations from 9 am through 9 pm, with only 2 hours of break.” Overall, he said, “it’s fantastic!”

Christian Beauclair, Senior Developer Evangelist at Microsoft Canada, was also at the conference and he discussed his thoughts on the future of technology: “Mobile seems to be one of the top technologies in terms of interaction. It’s now all about apps rather than websites. And the focus won’t be on apps that try to do everything, but on those that do specific things and do them well.”

While wandering around, we bumped into three startups who wanted to share their ideas with the rest of the world:

Arkalumen

“We do sustainable LED lighting for largescale areas such as hospitals and warehouses. The lifetime of these LEDs is about 10 years so you have less replacement issues. The payback is really that you only pay the first time you have to replace the fluorescent tubes with our product.

We also offer better light quality: with the fluorescent technology, there is a sharp discontinuity in the spectral distribution and the intensity has to be changed to ignore those discontinuities. What we do is create a more even distribution so the light is more natural and comparable to sunlight. There is also no mercury in any of our LED systems because mercury is toxic and can have disastrous environmental impacts.”

S2 Eye Tracker from TandemLaunch Technologies

“We present an eye-tracker device. The technology itself was developed at the University of British Columbia and we turned it into a product and created software to run the device. The way it works is: There is an infrared light that shines into your eyes and a camera that captures the light and analyses that information. When you shine light on your eyes, a little glint appears so the camera captures the position of that glint and compares it to where your eye is.

When you watch something, the glint moves and we can calculate the movement using mathematical equations. There are also points that show up on a screen to show where you are looking; these points concentrate around the region that is most viewed. The bigger the dot, the more that region is seen. This is valuable information for those interested in how effective product placement is. It is also useful for advertising, marketing and psychology research (e.g. to see how the brain analyzes images).

Big Sweet Deal.com

Our main focus is to create a sustainable model for restaurants in the deal sector. We are the Hotwire for restaurants. We use unpublished rates so you don’t know the exact location and name of restaurants; you only know the cuisine, user ratings, general area of the restaurants and the percentages off they offer.

We don’t cannibalize for sales and only take a small commission—lower than other websites—which makes this model sustainable. Restaurant managers can specify the rebate rates and quantity directly in the website. Our services are very fl exible and are not contractual. Restaurants sign up for the service and we don’t charge them anything unless we sell something.

As you gaze at the sky, your mind may wander and you could hypothesize: why wouldn’t there be (for the sake of symmetry) atoms with negatively-charged nuclei? And Paul Dirac would have agreed with you.

In 1928, Dirac proposed his own version of Schrödinger’s wave equation, which he adapted to include Einstein’s theory of special relativity. The two solutions that solved the equation, however, initially troubled him: one solution had positive energy whereas the other had negative energy. Dirac interpreted the negative energy solution to correspond to antiparticles: particles with positive energy but whose nuclei are negatively-charged. He thus suggested the existence of the positron—the antiparticle of the electron—four years before it was ever confirmed in the lab.

Antiparticles—or antimatter, for that matter—are hard to come across; we have yet to observe antimatter in the visible universe. But maybe not for long. The shuttle Endeavour started its last space voyage yesterday (May 16 2011), equipped with the “Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer” (AMS), which the astronauts will attach to the International Space Station. The AMS will collect data on antimatter and dark matter among other things. That instrument took nearly 15 years and 2 billion dollars to complete.

Meanwhile, scientists on Earth will use particle accelerators to smash particles together at very high speeds, in the hope of generating antiparticles, which they can fuse together to form antimatter. Take for example, hydrogen: One atom of hydrogen is made of 1 electron and 1 proton. The antihydrogen, then, is made of 1 antielectron (or positron) and 1 antiproton. But it’s not so easy to do because when matter meets antimatter, annihilation occurs. By that I mean that their masses are converted to energy in the form of gamma rays.

So to make antihydrogen, scientists cool their antiparticles and carefully push antiprotons into a cloud of antielectrons, which are contained within a magnetic trap, a way to contain antiparticles using magnetic fields. Even when scientists succeed in doing so, however, antimatter proves very difficult to contain. Last year, scientists at CERN had managed to contain antihydrogen particles for 172 milliseconds but two weeks ago, they succeeded in containing them for nearly 17 minutes!

But if we go back billions of years ago to the Big Bang, how could matter and antimatter have been present without being wiped out altogether? We don’t know yet, but some scientists suggest that a slight imbalance in the amounts of both may have favored matter. The experiments currently being conducted will hopefully enlighten us on this “matter”.

Finally, it has been suggested by several media that the next step for those scientists is to trap antihydrogen, “throw it in the air and watch which way it falls”! If this sounds slightly absurd, a quick search on CERN’s website reveals why: “The gravitational force depends [on] the energy of an object, and since matter and antimatter have both positive energy, gravitation acts on them in the same way.”

Today, mainframes, although not entirely extinct, mostly form a niche market. And cloud computing is, in a nutshell, the web equivalent of mainframes and terminals: Your computer becomes a browser connected to the internet. All your files, and all your software are stored on another server—the “cloud”.

The advantages are clear: Since everything is stored on the cloud, you don’t need to wander around with a hard drive. You don’t have to worry about someone physically stealing data from your laptop. And with all your desktop applications becoming web applications, expect no more installations and virtually no software updates; since most computation and processing is done on the cloud, all you need is access to the internet.

Cloud computing can be a great way of fulfilling the heavy computational needs of scientists, engineers and web developers. However, when adapting this “innovative technology” to the needs of the general public, we will find that the sun does not shine behind the cloud, especially for those concerned with the feasibility, privacy and security issues of this endeavour.

Is this feasible / desirable?
For cloud computing to become a reality, all your favourite applications will have to be converted into web applications. Given the limitations of the tools we have for making websites, this won’t be the most pleasant of experiences, both for users and developers. We all use different browsers that adhere to different standards; displaying a website correctly for different computer configurations often requires writing code with inelegant workarounds.

But regardless of your browser, web applications will have to be as responsive and as usable as desktop applications are.  Yet many web versions of popular software feel clunky and cumbersome because they are in a browser. Since you are restricted in what you can do locally, using a computer connected to the cloud almost feels like using a computer meant for demonstration purposes. Given the choice, who wouldn’t prefer the desktop version of Google Earth, Microsoft Office and Photoshop?

On the other hand, some argue that these limits will disappear as we get better at making software for the web. That is true, but we also face other problems that can’t be fixed by getting better programmers. Since your files are not at hand, whenever you need a file—a lab report, a movie or an mp3 file—you need to download (or stream) it from the cloud. If this is to be feasible, we need faster internet connection speeds and ISPs willing to invest in infrastructure that supports greater bandwidth demands.

Privacy and Security

Until a cloud server fails, or your access to internet is cut, it may be difficult to see why storing your files on someone else’s computers—the essence of cloud computing—has its problems.

In particular, what responsibilities does the cloud provider have towards their clients? Once your data is on their servers, it is unlikely they would hold themselves responsible for any loss of data or privacy.  Also, if the cloud owner files for bankruptcy or decides to no longer host your files, where will your data end up?

Conclusion

Discussions on the merits of cloud computing are currently shrouded by hype and jargon. If cloud computing is to be useful to anyone, we must push the hype aside, be clear on what we
mean by cloud computing, unambiguously let the public know about what the implications of it are, and how these concerns will be addressed, if at all.

It is in our own interest—and especially in that of the general public—to speak truthfully about cloud computing. We cannot present it as an innovation while pushing aside legitimate concerns, or, as it were, put our heads in the cloud