by Lynne Peeples

Waste from people, pets, pigs and even seagulls may be playing a significant role in the rise of antibiotic-resistant infections, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a number of new studies warn.

Widespread fear of diminishing returns for modern medicine is becoming amplified, scientists say, by the discovery of soils and http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120322100027.htm]" target="_hplink">waterways polluted with both traces of antibiotics and bacteria encoded with antibiotic-resistant genes, the information that tells a microbe how to evade drugs designed to kill it. And even if that fortified microbe isn't capable of causing illness in humans itself, scientists add, its DNA could find its way into the more malignant microbes in the environment.

"Antibiotic resistance is likely the biggest public health challenge that we'll be facing this century," said Amy Pruden, an expert on antibiotic resistance at Virginia Tech. "We're in a state of complacency right now. We count on antibiotics working for us, but they are slowly starting to lose their effectiveness."

While progress has been made in the clinical realm -- limiting unnecessary uses of antibiotics, for example, and encouraging patients to take the full course of their prescribed drugs -- Pruden noted "mounting evidence that the environment is another important piece of the puzzle."

Drug residues and bacteria with drug-resistant genes can pass together through a human's or animal's gut and into the environment, even if the living contaminants take a detour through a wastewater treatment plant.

In a study published on Tuesday, Scottish researchers found that relatively low concentrations of antibiotics in certain environments -- such as river sediments, swine feces lagoons and farmed soil -- may be enough to speed along the proliferation of the drug-resistant genes. It's another survival-of-the-fittest story: Bacteria that can withstand the drugs will survive and reproduce, while their antibiotic-susceptible counterparts die out.

The winning genes then have the potential to infiltrate drinking water or produce, which increases human exposure and raises the likelihood that the genes will spread.

"Antibiotic resistance is such a big global health concern," said Alfredo Tello of the University of Stirling, lead researcher on the study. "We need to consider the effect that antibiotics released into the environment can have on development of this resistance."

Adding to the danger is the fact that bacteria can easily swap genes with each other. A bacterium that passes through the intestines into the local waterway, for example, may not itself be a pathogen that normally threatens human health, but that benign bug can share its drug-tolerating secrets.

"It's not necessarily important what species is holding on to the DNA as long as the DNA is held on to and propagated," explained David Cummings, a biologist at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. "Then it can later be released to cause disease in an animal, plant or human."

Cummings' own research has identified dangerous DNA in the river sediments around San Diego and across the Mexican border into Tijuana.

"These coastal wetland habitats are becoming sinks and ultimately sources for drug-resistant bacteria -- more importantly, sinks for the DNA that provide resistance," said Cummings, who points his finger at pet waste, bird feces, leaky sewer pipes and hospital waste effluent as the likely culprits in the San Diego area, which is home to few livestock operations. "We've tinkered with a lot of resistance genes, and anything we look for, we find."

A separate study published last month also emphasized the importance of oft-overlooked aquatic sources of antibiotic resistance. Canadian researchers analyzed four different bodies of water affected by varying levels of human activity. They found resistance genes at all four sites, although the intensity varied: A harbor hosting sewer overflows suffered from higher levels than a nature preserve.

"Antibiotic resistance is widespread in aquatic environments ranging from heavily impacted urban sites to remote areas," Lesley Warren of McMaster University in Canada, and the lead researcher on the study, said in a statement. "The presence of environmental bacterial communities in aquatic environments represents a significant, largely unknown source of antibiotic resistance."

What's more, antibiotic residue and resistance genes may be spread farther and more widely by wildlife, particularly seabirds. Researchers at the University of Miami recently found a large number of seagulls and pelicans were host to bacteria associated with broad-spectrum resistance to infectious bugs, such as the E. coli that causes urinary tract infections in women.

It is becoming increasingly evident that the world's dire antibiotic-resistance problem involves a lot of players, all acting through a variety of complicated means. So what should be done?

"The solutions need to come from upstream, figuratively and literally," said Cummings. "That can be public education, improving our wastewater management and treatment -- even something as simple, albeit expensive, as separating stormwater from the sewage system." The latter would limit the untreated sewage flowing into waterways.

Of course, excrement from livestock is subject to even looser waste management practices than human waste.

The use of antibiotics in livestock is the subject of ongoing debate. According to the latest estimates from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 80 percent of the country's antibiotics are given to food animals, predominantly for the purpose of promoting growth or preventing disease, rather than for treating illness.

Also published this Tuesday was a study implicating the widespread use of antibiotics in swine feed. Not only do antibiotic-resistant genes end up in the soil and wastewater around the feedlots, but researchers suggest the genes are often spread further by the application of the waste on crop lands.

In response to the growing concerns, the FDA released contentious guidelines last month that ask pork, beef and poultry producers to choose to stop using antibiotics for fattening up their livestock. As The Huffington Post reported in March, the agency has also been ordered by a federal court to follow through on a rule proposed in 1977 that would withdraw approvals for most non-therapeutic uses of penicillin and tetracyclines in livestock, drugs particularly crucial in human medicine.

"Every time you use antibiotics, you can select for resistance," said Gail Hansen, senior officer with the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming. "When giving them to healthy animals for no reason other than to get them to grow faster or compensate for unhygienic conditions, you're adding to that."

"The new research," added Hansen, "really points out that antibiotics aren't just affecting the bacteria while they're inside the pig."

Permalink | bit.ly/IYetr2

by Jeff Miller

A major difference between launching a brand new startup and working on one that’s a year or two old is quality of shot selection. Every day begins with 1,000 doors in front of you: which door do you go through to make the most progress? Shot selection is choosing what to focus on at the expense of other forgone opportunities. It’s one of the most critical skills in running a startup.

As a company matures, I think it’s normal (ideally) for judgment to improve and shot selection to get a lot better, resulting in less wasted time and more forward momentum. This can be driven by many things. Maybe it’s having enough live users to give you feedback on market fit. Or you found some role models to help with targeted advice. Or you figured out how to optimize against your true traction metrics.

Looking back on the first six months of my own startup, I’m embarrassed by how terrible my shot selection was. I routinely spent time on features that ended up having zero impact on the business. I was especially prone to working on short-term (1 to 2 week) projects that seemed fun and harmless, but wasted a lot of time when you add them all up. I simply wasn’t focused enough. Thinking back on it now makes me cringe.

Here are some things I wish I had never spent time on:

1. Invite-only access. Invites are traditionally a strategy for stoking interest in your product while also managing the scalability of your roll-out. In my case, all I accomplished was making some users angry when I left them on the invite list too long. It seems strange in retrospect that I would keep new users out of my app on purpose, but at the time I thought it would help with virality. Also, implementing the numerous moving parts of an invite-only access system consumed much engineering time.

2. Real-time traffic measurement. I went through a phase where I used GoSquared (and before that, Chartbeat) to observe users of my webapp in real-time. I was able to see how many visitors were on my site, where in the world they were coming from, which pages they were viewing, etc. Vanity metrics at its finest. And, of course, I had to waste time checking the traffic dashboard 10 times a day. Nowadays I ignore real-time stats and just use Google Analytics to look at historical trends.

3. User admin dashboard. Another engineering boondoggle, I built this amazingly detailed admin panel where I could view all my registered users along with matching social and biographical information pulled from the Qwerly API (since acquired by Fliptop). For example, if a new user Fred Bloggs signed in to my app with Facebook, I could also see Fred’s LinkedIn profile, his handle on Twitter and his picture. The original purpose of this dashboard was to identify influential users to further engage with, but I never found the time. And after my app gained more than a few thousand users, the dashboard became unscalable.

4. Experimenting with ads too early. I was so eager to attempt monetizing my site with ads that I placed grocery-coupon text links on the front page when I only had a few thousand uniques/day. Don’t know why I was surprised when only about ten people clicked on the ad. It was a cold-shower lesson in low CTR’s. You need real traction and attention on your site to attract quality advertisers, too.

5. Amazon affiliate links. Another monetization experiment I shouldn’t have tried in the first place, but was driven by an unfounded belief that users would want to purchase cookbooks while browsing my site. Building this system also consumed several days’ worth of engineering time—it required learning about the Amazon Affiliate API, writing code to match cookbooks to recipes, and so on. The final profit was less than $1/day. I have yet to meet anyone who is making serious money on the side with Amazon links.

6. TechCrunch. TechCrunch can be a good way to gain visibility among investors and the tech community in general, but in my experience, it didn’t have value beyond that. (Perhaps some SEO value.) I regret I expended so much mental energy figuring out how to get my startup covered on TC. When I finally did make it onto TechCrunch, both the article itself and the resulting traffic were very underwhelming. I should have concentrated on other outlets that are less tech-centric and more suited to my site’s audience—for example, LifeHacker and kottke.org, which ended up yielding 100x as many signups as TC.

7. One-off partnership projects. I once spent about two weeks building a custom prototype with my API as part of a potential partership with another company. The partnership was never fulfilled and the final result ended up basically zilch. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this situation; sometimes you have to gamble a little bit of upfront time for a larger gain down the road. But two weeks worth of time is way too valuable in the early days of a startup. I should have just said no thanks to the partnership and instead devoted that time to making my product more awesome.

8. Coffee meetings / “let’s jump on a call”. This is rookie stuff, but initially I was caught off guard by how insidious a “quick” meeting or phone call can be. They always go longer than expected, can eat up half a day of work, then destroy the productivity of the other half because of lost focus and having to play catch-up (especially if you’re writing code). It’s important to concentrate on meetings that add value or build relationships, and avoid the people who just want to pick your brain for their own purposes.

9. Excessive side projects. Side projects are like comfort food for coders. I’m a believer in doing a side project here and there to keep burnout at bay. Unfortunately, there was a period where I overdosed on them and was working on enough side projects to rival my real startup. I think it’s particularly easy to fall into this trap when your company is new but not brand new, i.e. traversing the Trough of Sorrow. Better to just suck it up and stay focused on product.

10. Working from home. I spent the first year of my startup working from a home office. After that, I moved to a spartan desk in a shared space in downtown Palo Alto. My productivity from the office space is easily 2-3x that of the home office. I can’t explain it well but there’s a mysterious psychological barrier that prevents me from truly cranking when I’m working from home. If I had started on day one working from an outside office, I’d be way further along on my company now. At the outset, I had no idea that would be true, though. Hindsight.

It’s easy to criticize with the benefit of hindsight, but I believe most of these mistakes were avoidable at the time. They all distracted me from the one strategy that always works no matter what—iterating on your product vision, listening to feedback, and working towards making your product awesome.

Permalink | bit.ly/ISgdSJ

By Chris Bidmead

Your phone, your tablet - their chip tech

Unsung Heroes of Tech Back in the late 1970s you wouldn't have guessed that this shy young Cambridge maths student named Wilson would be the seed for what has now become the hottest-selling microprocessor in the world.

Ninety-five per cent of today's smartphones are built around an ARM processor. The ARM began with Wilson.

Sophie Wilson today
Source: Broadcom

Today, she's Sophie Wilson, one of the most highly respected names in microprocessor electronics. In 1978, Roger Wilson was a quietly-spoken, long-haired Maths and Computing undergraduate whose only commercial experience to date had been to build an electronic device for feeding cows.

Made for a firm in Harrogate, the cow-feeder had been based on the MOS 6502, a game-changing low-cost US CPU elegantly designed by Chuck Peddle and Bill Mensch, a pair soon to become legendary as the creators of the Vic-20.

At a third of the price of equivalent processors, the 6502 was spawning a new generation of cheap personal computers in the States, and Wilson was already working on designing one too. However, the initial approach made to Wilson by Hermann Hauser, a 28-year-old Cambridge-educated Austrian physics graduate, had nothing to do with computers.

Wilson and minister Kenneth Baker at the BBC Micro launch in 1981

Hauser’s new company, CPU, had landed itself a consultancy to a manufacturer of fruit machines that were replacing elaborate relays with electronics. There was a serious problem: some rogue genius had discovered that the spark emitted by the new cheap, disposable piezo-electric cigarette lighters was, at 1KV, powerful enough to persuade the elecronic one-armed bandits to dish out their winnings.

From little Acorns…

Young Wilson designed a fix that used a wide-band radio receiver to detect the EMP and halt any payout. And then Wilson and Hauser began talking personal computers. Hauser challenged Wilson to design and deliver a working model by the end of the Summer holiday. Wilson won the challenge.

In March 1979, Hauser relaunched his company as Acorn Computers, offering as its first product the Wilson-designed Acorn System One. It was built, like the cow-feeder, around the 6502, had 512 bytes of Ram, and was yours by mail order for 70 quid.

Acorn's System One
Source: Chris's Acorns

Wilson had graduated by now and was taken on by Hauser as lead designer. The pay was peanuts, but Hauser played the "what an opportunity" card, and Wilson snapped up the chance to make affordable computers a reality.

Not Apple, affordable

The Apple II had appeared in the States in 1977 together with others, but none of these were "affordable" by any UK definition. Typically, Clive Sinclair had jumped in, in 1978, with his MK14 - not to be confused with the famous rifle of that name, or indeed the Milton Keynes postcode.

At a very affordable £39.95, the MK14 set a radical new price point — but only at the nerdiest end of the market. The design was a rush job: with no particular enthusiasm for computers at that point, Sinclair had simply hired a graduate called Steve Furber to put together a machine using the processor manufacturer's own proof-of-concept schematic.

Reference board: Sinclair's 1978 MK14

Furber was studying for a PhD in aerodynamics at the time, but was handy with a soldering iron and had developed a keen interest in microprocessors.

Not invented here

The Acorn System One was a different proposition. Everything was designed from the ground up. As Wilson said later: "I'm used to working at a level where absolutely everything has to be done; there are no building blocks that we get from other people."

Logic circuits, assemblers, disassemblers, editors, and on top of all that the Basic interpreters for the operating system - all of these were built in house, from scratch.

The MK14 and its technically superior and more expensive rival, the Acorn System One, were surprisingly successful. Successful enough to make Sinclair change his mind and concentrate on producing a new microcomputer: 1980's ZX80, which was to lead the following year to the ZX81. Hauser was also encouraged, and set his team to work developing the successor to the Acorn System One, the Acorn Atom.

The Race for the BBC Micro

By mid-1981, Sinclair's ZX81 and the Acorn Atom were going head-to-head in the marketplace. At a fraction under £50 - £150 in today's money - the ZX81 was the popular choice, available in WHSmiths newsagents throughout the nation.

The more sophisticated Atom, costing £120 in kit form, had to be ordered directly from Acorn, but was the choice of the discerning user.

For the discerning micro enthusiast: the Acorn Atom
Source: Archivus

The company was also working on a successor to the Atom, to be called the Proton, when the BBC's TV series, The Computer Programme arrived to add more fuel to a market already fired by government subsidies for microcomputers in schools. Acorn and Sinclair weren't the sole competitors: there were by now between 20 and 30 different makes of microcomputers - all incompatible.

Wilson and Furber get to work

This incompatibility was a huge problem for The Computer Programme. The BBC decided it needed its own standard machine, to be called the BBC Micro.

The Acorn Proton... er... the BBC Micro

The BBC put the contract out to tender. Acorn co-founder Chris Curry jumped in ahead of Sinclair, promising the BBC that Acorn would be able to demonstrate a machine closely following the required specifications. How soon? Oh, said Curry... by the following week.

It was the wildest of wild boasts. The Proton wasn't much more than a circuit diagram at this stage. And the BBC specs called for the 8-bit processor du jour, the Zilog Z80 - the Atom, like its predecessor, was built around the 6502.

Working flat-out, Wilson and the Atom team, now joined by Furber, “sort of got the system working" attached to a circuit emulator. In theory, this would enable it to demonstrate actual programs. In practice... nothing. With time running out, Hauser instructed the team to disconnect the machine from the emulator and try running it by itself.

Inside the Beeb

"He was entirely correct," said Wilson later. "It didn't seem possible at the time, but the machine burst into life."

Proton awakes

At 7am on the morning the BBC was due to arrive, the raw hardware was fully functioning. But without an operating system, there was nothing to show. Working against the clock, with only two hours in hand, Wilson ported the operating system across and installed what was to become BBC Basic. Acorn nailed the contract.

Wilson's hand was on everything inside the BBC Micro, including what was for the punter its most obvious manifestation, BBC Basic, which Wilson would maintain, develop and rewrite over the course of the next decade and a half.

Steve Furber today
Source: The Institution of Engineering and Technology

And unlike the average head-down techie, Wilson took ownership of the whole BBC Micro project. “I was one of the people who wrote all the documentation, communicating with other people, negotiating specifications."

Wilson had learnt that the art of communication was a fundamental part of the technical skill mix... 

Permalink | bit.ly/IyiNgk

BY Dinfin Mulupi

East Africa’s growing opportunities in the technology sector have proved too good to ignore for some entrepreneurs from western countries. While many people in Africa have for a long time viewed the US and Europe as the lands of opportunity, young entrepreneurs from western countries are abandoning Silicon Valley to participate in east Africa’s technology sector.

BY Lyneka Little

Want to raise $1 million overnight? Post a new videogame project on Kickstarter.

The news was recently filled with stories about social-gaming giant Zynga's $180 million purchase of OMGPOP, the maker of the Pictionary-like game "Draw Something." But for young entrepreneurial game developers, the real story may just lie in crowdfunding, a type of investment regime that asks for typically small amounts of capital from strangers.

Though posting a project on sites like Kickstarter, PeerBackers and Indiegogo won't soon deliver returns of $180 million to developers, the sites have helped companies land top-dollar pay outs. In recent weeks, games like Double Fine Adventure and Wasteland 2 have raised a combined total of more than $6 million from the masses.

What's more, a crowdfunding website focused solely on the videogame industry called Gambitious is set to launch in June at the E3 - Innovation Unveiled conference in Los Angeles. The gaming crowdfunding site will offer would-be investors equity in the projects. Investment amounts will start at roughly $26. Gambitious is expected to launch in Europe before launching in the U.S. in 2013.

Related: 8 Crowdfunding Websites That Will Help You Raise Funds

"The Gambitious crowdfunding model is the first of its kind, providing a new way for small and large investors to directly invest in a wide selection of promising game projects, taking home a share in any eventual profits from the venture, as opposed to merely acting as a donator," founder Paul Hanraets told YoungEntrepreneur.com.

Still, that may be a tough sell for many companies, says Jim Babb, co-founder of Awkward Hug, a game designer in Brooklyn, N.Y. "Gambitious is a really cool concept, but I'm not sure how it will perform," adds Babb who is also a consultant at Undercurrent, a New York digital strategy firm. "I think there are people in the indie community interested in equity stake but people that buy on Kickstarter are more interested in the project than the company. Those donors are people interested in supporting an artist or game."

Related: On Crowd-Funding Sites, Age Doesn’t Matter

That mentality is what inspired Double Fine Productions' 44-year-old founder Tim Schafer to launch a campaign on Kickstarter in Feb. Using the crowdfunding model, he says, helped him "democratize the process by allowing consumers to support the games they want to see developed and give developers the freedom to experiment, take risks and design without anyone else compromising their vision."

The money likely helped too. Within 24 hours of launching a Kickstarter campaign to raise $400,000, the San Francisco-based game studio topped $1 million. And, it didn’t stop there. Double Fine raised more than $3.3 million from 87,142 backers by offering everything from the finished game to lunch with the developers.

Such high-dollar payouts may be heartening for aspiring game designers, but Babb adds that they're a rarity that young treps shouldn't bank on. "There are some really big [campaigns] that have just dominated," he says. "Those are flukes and they are due to celebrity and awesome ideas but I think most people can't expect to succeed at that."

But there's still hope, of course. Last Friday, the videogame project Shadowrun Returns, launched by Harebrained Schemes, a small game design shop in Bellevue, Wash., collected more than $1.6 million in donations 48 hours before the close of donations. Their stated funding goal was $400,000.

Permalink | bit.ly/KiU24D