When Google rolled out Buzz in mid-February, people were angered by the type of privacy breaches which have plagued another social medium. The three main issues for Buzz were:

• auto generation of follower lists from individuals’ private email and chat behavior
• auto completion of some email addresses in a feature similar to Twitter’s @reply
• auto connection to Google Reader and Picasa Web Albums.

Google responded to privacy concerns within days. However, for some who had very real privacy concerns, this simply wasn’t good enough.

I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.

There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts.

You know who my third most frequent contact is?

My abusive ex-husband.

Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did.

There’s still a lot to learn about how we integrate privacy into new products, but we know the golden rule - personal information should never be published without personal consent.

I spend a lot of time studying how people communicate, and one of the most interesting things I notice is how much the effectiveness of communication depends on the recipient.

Some people like you to get straight to the point, and you’d better shut up quick when you get there or they’ll lose interest. Others need a more roundabout approach, with fifteen or twenty minutes spent inquiring about relatives, health, and extracurricular activities before you even think about broaching the topic in question.

Of course, it’s up to the communicator to adapt to the other person’s style. As they say in sales, if your customer doesn’t understand you, it’s your fault.

I was musing about this today to a colleague, and she responded that it’s often a cultural thing. “You tend to get straight to the point, so people label you as a ‘brash American.’”

Of course, we all know that different cultures have different customs. Nonetheless, there are certainly Americans who are brash (not me, though!) and Americans who ramble, laid-back Islanders and Islanders who cut to the chase. So what drives the difference? Is it in the DNA?

It’s clear that people who share similar communications styles fare better with each other. Someone who is in a rush can get mightily frustrated with someone who goes off on tangents. Is it always better to be the same, though, or is there merit to the ‘opposites attract’ idea?

On Fox News the other day there was a blurb about a dating service that matches people based on immune system DNA. They claim that ‘Nature’ wants us to mate with people who have different immune system DNA to ours, in the hopes that our immunity will broaden with the increased exposure. It may sound like a dubious proposition, but there’s a certain amount of logic.

So being the same can work, and it can not work. Ditto being different. What’s a girl to do?

What works is being aware. Paying attention to the people you’re speaking to and reading their reactions. Knowing yourself well enough to understand what characteristics your mate has to have. Realizing that the myriad manifestations of humanity are neither good nor bad, positive nor negative; they simply exist, and are all capable of being accommodated.

I would love to hear your cross-cultural communications stories.

As you might imagine, I was an avid reader as a kid?still am, of course. One of my favorite books was about an eleven-year-old boy, Will, who learns that he’s one of the Old Ones and has to fight the Dark to save the Earth. I’ve thought about this book many times over the years, but its title and author had completely escaped my memory until recently, when I mentioned the story to my friend Steve.

“Oh, that’s The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper,” he said immediately. Delight! Rapture!

Then he went me one better. A few weeks later, we met for lunch, and he brought me a copy of the entire Dark Is Rising series! Oh, frabjous day!

So I’ve been journeying back to my childhood via Will Stanton and the eternal battle between Light and Dark. If that weren’t bliss enough, it turns out that there are five books in the series?and I had only read the first two. A trip down Memory Lane and a new adventure! Life doesn’t get much better than this. Incidentally, Will’s story was turned into a perhaps not-so-good movie just last year.

The Dark is Rising is classic good vs. evil, in which Will must fulfill his destiny as the last of the Old Ones. His destiny is a good one, but not all destinies are. Consider this quote from Dr. Robert Green, professor of neurology, genetics and epidemiology at Boston University School of Medicine (hat tip: Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei):

Genetic information has a special power. It has a feel of fate about it, a sense of inevitability, that sense that, ?Oh, you are marked.?

Of course you could be marked for something good or for something bad, but what we seek in genetic information is usually the bad: Do I have a propensity for obesity? Cancer? Heart disease? The lack of these markers isn’t cause for celebration, but their presence is cause for despair.

I don’t know whether destiny exists. I have two astrologer friends who tend to be pretty accurate with their insights and predictions, so maybe it does. Nonetheless, I urge you:

Strive to excel regardless of whether or not you believe it is your destiny.

Wouldn’t you always want to do your best, even if your life was predetermined? Let’s say you’re genetically programmed to never win a gold medal at the Olympics. Wouldn’t you still benefit from training to your peak? Let’s say it’s your destiny to get heart disease. Shouldn’t you still eat well and exercise?

Looking to destiny is one thing; relying on it, in the absence of your own positive action, is another thing altogether.

My brilliant friend Shana once described how she met a fella she’d been dating: “I put a clarion call out to the universe that I was ready to be with a really great guy, and then I took the action steps to make it happen.”

I loved that. There are lots of people who understand the first half of that equation, but it’s the totality of the statement that makes the difference. That’s why I love the epigenetics story: that your environment, including your beliefs, determine whether your genes get switched on or off. In Dr. Green’s parlance, your environment and beliefs drive the inevitable outcome of your life.

Don’t worry about whether or not something is your destiny. Just take the action steps. Even if you don’t achieve your original goal, I promise you that you will be more satisfied than if you had done nothing.

What are your thoughts on destiny?

Nova Spivack, of Twine fame, has come out with an interesting blog post questioning whether our ‘junk’ DNA (the 97% of our DNA that doesn’t code for amino acids) could be a more effective storage mechanism for communal knowledge than Wikipedia:

There is of course one other place to store knowledge which may be even better than the Wikipedia — and that is DNA. By storing knowledge in human DNA of living humans, or of common bacteria for that matter, it could then potentially be passed down and spread through generations into the far future. However the mutability of DNA over time might gradually introduce errors that would degrade the information within particular lines of DNA over long periods of time.

Perhaps this could however be mitigated by comparing DNA samples from a large cross-section of individuals within the population of descendants of original holders of DNA-knowledge-archives in the future — this would effectively enable statistical error cancellation. The farther in the future from the date at which the knowledge is “written” to the DNA of some number of humans, the more people’s DNA would be needed to eliminate the errors statistically. This would however in principle counteract mutations and enable the reliable recovery of messages in DNA even very far in the future.

Interestingly, the problem that he posits here and his proposed solution mirror the wiki process itself: by gathering data from everyone, errors are likely to occur, but by normalizing across a large sample, those errors should be minimized if not eliminated.

Spivack goes on to cite an article by Karl Kruszelnicki about a language that possibly already exists in our DNA:

According to the linguists, all human languages obey Zipf’s Law. It’s a really weird law, but it’s not that hard to understand. Start off by getting a big fat book. Then, count the number of times each word appears in that book. You might find that the number one most popular word is “the” (which appears 2,000 times), followed by the second most popular word “a” (which appears 1,800 times), and so on. Right down at the bottom of the list, you have the least popular word, which might be “elephant”, and which appears just once.

Set up two columns of numbers. One column is the order of popularity of the words, running from “1″ for “the”, and “2″ for “a”, right down “1,000″ for “elephant”. The other column counts how many times each word appeared, starting off with 2,000 appearances of “the”, then 1,800 appearances of “a”, down to one appearance of “elephant”.

If you then plot on the right kind of graph paper, the order of popularity of the words, against the number of times each word appears you get a straight line! Even more amazingly, this straight line appears for every human language - whether it’s English or Egyptian, Eskimo or Chinese! Now the DNA is just one continuous ladder of squillions of rungs, and is not neatly broken up into individual words (like a book).

So the scientists looked at a very long bit of DNA, and made artificial words by breaking up the DNA into “words” each 3 rungs long. And then they tried it again for “words” 4 rungs long, 5 rungs long, and so on up to 8 rungs long. They then analysed all these words, and to their surprise, they got the same sort of Zipf Law/straight-line-graph for the human DNA (which is mostly introns), as they did for the human languages!

There seems to be some sort of language buried in the so-called junk DNA! Certainly, the next few years will be a very good time to make a career change into the field of genetics.

Incidentally, this type of analysis is what generates most great discoveries: somebody looking at two things that have never before been connected to each other and saying, “Hey, there’s a pattern here!”

Spivack goes on to suggest that all we need is a way of writing to the DNA and we’re sweet (assuming we also have a way to read it).

Wouldn’t it be great? Imagine you’re the first person encoded?you’d be unstoppable at pub quizzes. You’d make millions on Jeopardy! and 1 vs. 100. You’d be totally insufferable (nobody likes a literal know-it-all), but at least you’d be rich.

Unfortunately, there’s an issue. Not with the idea that societal knowledge can be carried within us?that already exists. How else do salmon know where to go? No, it’s more the idea of our ability to mechanically control this process that pulls me up short.

Mainly, the problem is that there’s no single-source option for DNA. If somebody updates Wikipedia, we all see the updated version, but with DNA, you’d have to have an intimidatingly active sex life to make sure new information is properly distributed.

And how do you handle the question of version control? It would be worse than figuring out whether you qualify as a Native American. “Well, my great-great-grandmother was first infected with knowledge in 2014, so my batch is more recent than yours…” What a mess.

Sorry, Nova, I think we’ve got a ways to go before your idea can be made a reality. I will say this, though, if you can make the semantic web happen, I’ll back you for wikiDNA as well.

(hat tip: Brian Hayes)

Wired ran a piece this week about post-traumatic stress disorder that reinforced the epigenetic connection between experience and genes.

The study they reported on found that people who had been abused as children were likely to experience variations in a stress-related gene, and that people with those variations were more likely to experience PTSD if they were exposed to traumatic events as adults.

This is profound in two directions: first, because it identifies the genetic influence on PTSD (one of only two studies to do so). Second, because it shows the experiential influence on genes.

The results suggest that there are critical periods in childhood when the brain is vulnerable “to outside influences that can shape the developing stress-response system,” said Emory University researcher and study co-author Dr. Kerry Ressler.

Of course, given that several authors of the study have financial ties to psychiatric drug manufacturers, the obvious reaction is for them to identify a drug-distribution opportunity:

Ressler noted that there are probably many other gene variants that contribute to risks for PTSD, and others may be more strongly linked to the disorder than the ones the researchers focused on.

Still, he and outside experts said the study is important and that similar advances could lead to tests that will help identify who’s most at risk. Treatments including psychotherapy and psychiatric drugs could be targeted to those people, Ressler said.

I would hope that scientists in this area also use this profound information to explore more non-drug remedies. If the cause of the initial gene change is experiential, couldn’t the cure be experiential?

The statement about “critical periods in childhood” pre-defines the argument by suggesting that there’s this tiny window in which genes can be changed without drugs, and then after that it’s pills, baby, pills!

Let’s not limit ourselves. This study has dramatic implications across all aspects of human life. Our experience directly impacts our physical reality, which directly impacts our subsequent experience, and on and on.

What do you think about this research? Does it push any buttons for you?

A couple of days ago, much-respected DNA commentator Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei picked up on some of the negative chatter surrounding personal genetics testing. She quoted an article by GP Dr. Ann Robinson:

If you find out you?ve an increased risk of diabetes and heart diseases, the advice you?d be given is exactly the same as if you didn?t have an increased risk: eat well, exercise, don?t smoke, don?t get too fat, have a test if you get symptoms.

This is the thing about good advice: it’s pretty much universal. Want to lose weight? There’s no secret: diet and exercise. Want to write a popular blog? Write genuine, original content and be a positive, active participant in the blogosphere.

“Sometimes things really are that simple.”

My friend Ricky said that to me last year, and it stuck. As a species, we like to make things complicated, but they don’t have to be. About halfway through Outswim the Sharks, which the author Reut Schwartz-Hebron generously sent me, I found a reference to The Ladder of Inference, and I was struck by how well it tied into what I was saying about stories not too long ago. Essentially, all of the in-between steps are the stories we tell ourselves.

So what’s the point here? It’s really that simple, and it comes down to personal responsibility. The DNA test won’t save us if we won’t be responsible for ourselves. The ThighMaster isn’t the answer; the diet pill isn’t the answer; the new boyfriend or job or city doesn’t solve the problems we carry within ourselves. But often it’s easier to focus on these external things than it is to accept our own incredible power.

That’s what I take away from Dr. Robinson: don’t wait for a DNA test to tell you what you already know. Take care of yourself. Treat yourself well. You deserve to be happy, to be healthy, and to be loved, and if you don’t take responsibility for yourself, no DNA test can help you.

Do you agree? Disagree? How do you treat yourself?