Cappuccino is back in business with my sincere apologies for the long hiatus. As you can see, I’ve been busy posting elsewhere in cyberland, and sometimes even tabbed browser windows aren’t enough to help me keep track of multiple online personae. One day, according to Aili McConnon at BusinessWeek, my online lives will link into one another and I can manage them all at once. That day could not come soon enough.  

That said, other parts of Web 2.0 progress have moved so fast while this blog’s been off duty that I hardly know where to begin. Perhaps with a news update:  

1. Oxford University took a real killing in the press for using Facebook to go after student parties. I took a dig at them myself in BusinessWeek.
2. Facebook has been hauled in for a potential killing in court. Some other Harvard alums say Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea from a network they were thinking of launching. The case looks pretty shoddy, but that’s mostly because there aren’t very strict copywright laws for this web stuff anyway.
3. The U.S. Republican Presidential candidates took some dips in the polls because they’ve said they don’t want to do a debate on YouTube! like the Democrats did earlier this summer. Apparently being web savvy and appealing to young voters can actually move the needle in politics today.
4. The piece de resistence: one of the candidates, Rudy Giuliani, faced the heavy embarrassment of having the world discover that his own daughter actually backs a candidate from the other party. How did word get out? Some fellow student saw it on her Facebook page and leaked it to the press.

Together, all this seems to suggest that these websites are getting to be more “established” and more concerned with rules, an idea we’ve discussed here before.   

On the other hand, the politicians and authority figures have to participate and have to worry about what’s on Facebook, or it might cost them votes or just make an arse of them. Which confirms my longstanding suspicion that the mainstream and the exceptional are less distinct categories today.  

But more importantly, it suggests to me that our whole generation is pretty engaged with the wheels of society—we’re driving the politicians to take up our formats, they’re coming to our online playgrounds to deal with us and the rules and structures that govern culture (the law, for example) are having to figure out how to accommodate those playgrounds into their reasoning.   

So how come everyone keeps saying we’re so apathetic? This week, the New York Times collected essays for a contest they are running for college students in the U.S. They had people write a response to this article by Rick Perlstein about how disconnected and disengaged young people are from the big ideas of society and politics. It’s all about America, but the article describes a bunch of students in ways that any young person anywhere in the world can react to. Read the piece here, and then please tell me what you think. Does this sound like the students you know? Are we this materialistic and politically useless?  

Or does all the legal and political rumbling around Facebook and YouTube! suggest we’re driving change in ways Rick Perlstein is missing?

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1) Sinister left-handed gene found. Scientists working in Oxford’s Wellcome Trust Centre for Genetics believe carrying the gene may slightly raise the risk of developing psychotic mental illness such as schizophrenia…but may improve sporting ability. A fair exchange?  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6923577.stm  

2) Deep brain stimulation brings man back from coma. Previously doomed to a vegetative existence for the rest of his life, DBS has allowed this patient to feed himself, talk, express emotion, and recognise visitors. DBS is a relatively new technique which have already yielded some miraculous results in treating CNS disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article2182621.ece  

3) A Virgin Birth in Korea – shamed Korean scientist made groundbreaking discovery – without realising it. Analysis of data has revealed he may have created stem cells from unfertilised human eggs – a human ‘virgin birth’ – which will have profound implications for stem cell research worldwide. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6929203.stm 
4) Mission to Mars: NASA launches a 9 month mission to Mars to search for life beneath the surface. Read a blog by one of the team members here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6914836.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6926880.stm  
5) Groove on down to the sounds of the Big Bang. Jodrell bank is celebrating its 50^th birthday and is planning to turn the sounds of the Big Bang into a backing track for the physics party of the century. Get your glad rags and white coats on.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2195682.ece
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Hardworking Mertonians across the country will be feeling smug today thanks to news that their college has topped the 2007 Norrington table for the second year running.

Magdalen College is runner-up in the league of undergraduate degree results, with a score of 74.81 – just under two points behind Merton's 76.63%. Harris Manchester comes bottom for the third year running, kept company by Oriel, another college all too familiar with the bottom five.

The table has been a regular feature of college rivalry since the 60s, when it was invented by Sir Arthur Norrington as a way of comparing the finals results of Oxford's colleges. A score is compiled by awarding five points for every 1st class degree obtained, three for a 2:1, two for a 2:2 and one point for a 3rd. The total is then expressed as a percentage of the highest possible score that the college could have achieved that year.

Until recently the table was compiled unofficially from publicly posted pass lists, but the fact that students can ask for their names to be withheld from these lists led to complaints that the system was unfair. In 2005 the University decided to publish its own, official version of the league.

Some critics remain, including those who feel the table gives an unfair advantage to colleges with higher numbers of science students, as subjects such as Mathematics and Chemistry usually produce a higher number of first class degrees compared to the arts.

You can view the official Norrington table here.

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On Friday night, I went to a baseball game where my hometown Yankees were ingloriously destroyed by the Tampa Bay Devils. My long hiatus from this blog can be explained by the consequent mourning period, combined with my Harry Potter reading.
 
I was at the game with two friends and each of us knew people in New York. So after the game, we wanted to get in touch with all our different contacts and figure out where to meet for drinks and food. As we stood in the stadium, each of us on our cellphones for 15, 20 minutes but not speaking to each other, I laughed to myself. How strangely antisocial the technology was making us.
 
Then we decided to call a fourth friend whose number no one had in their phones. His number, we knew, was posted on his Facebook page, but of course, none of us was by a computer. But my mother happens to be very high tech and she is not only on Facebook, but friends with my friends. [Mothers on Facebook is a topic for its own article].
 
I proceeded to call her and ask her to sign online and text message the number to me. It gets better, because my mother's phone was losing service, so she dictated the number to me quickly over the phone. I read it aloud to one of the friends at the game with me, who typed it into his phone and texted it back to me. At this point, it was taking three cell phones and a computer to connect me and the one friend I wanted to meet up with.
 
Our solitary phone calling at first made me think that technology cuts people off from each other, which you sometimes here the cynics say. We'll all sit at home and shop over Amazon and Second Life and never go out. TIn my house, my mother, sister and I sometimes sit in the same room on our respective laptops without speaking to each other.
 
The ridiculous hoops we were jumping through seem to support the other cynical view that technology makes human interaction more complicated. But the knowledge that we might never have met up with the fourth friend without three phones and a laptop makes me wonder if technology facilitates real world connections.
 
Does technology make the world bigger and lonelier as we surf an ever expanding web and listen to our iPods but stop noticing people in the streets? Or does technology make the world smaller and more social, linking us to people we might never meet otherwise? Silly as my Friday night adventures may seem, this is the million dollar/pound question of the moment. Anybody want to venture an answer?
 
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1)       One small move of a counter – one giant leap for computer-kind. Scientists in Canada claim to have written a program which can win or draw any possible game of draughts – ever. 500 billion billion possible combinations of movements have been analysed over 2 decades to give the winning (or drawing) formula. What happened to losing gracefully?  
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6907018.stm
2)       What's green and sticky? No, it's not an unfortunate joke. A powerful glue inspired by geckos and mussels may be gluing together space shuttles – or your suture wounds – in the near future: it joins a long list of biological glues, including ones derived from frogs, based on polymers and the strength-in-numbers-power of van der Waals’ forces.    
 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6904175.stm
3)       This does sound like a bad joke – vibrating rings designed to guide women around foreign cities safely. A ring on either hand guides you in the right direction. Words fail me.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6905286.stm
4)       Size Doesn't Matter – the case of a man with almost a 75% reduction in brain volume has been published in the Lancet. Married with two children and a stable career – living proof of the brain's astonishing plasticity. He came into the surgery with a slight weakness in one leg and left with a picture of a hole in his brain. Astonishing pictures. 
 http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-brain-shocks-doctors.html
5)       Another moon has been discovered in orbit around Saturn, bringing the total number up to 60.  Saturn's moons have also been described as the location with the ‘best chance of finding life’ in our solar system. Some planets get all the attention. Spare a thought for poor Pluto with only one moon, and now not even a planet any more. Life as an orbiting body just ain't fair.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6908190.stm
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Torrential downpours hit Oxfordshire yesterday causing severe flooding and transport delays.
Many train routes in and around Oxford have been cancelled or rerouted, leaving passengers stranded at stations, with National Rail advising people to avoid travelling where possible. Last night, many passengers stranded in Oxford and Banbury were forced to spend the night in a local school after some routes were deemed impassable. The disruption is forecast to continue until Sunday, with no alternative transport available.
On the roads, drivers found many routes blocked due to poor weather conditions. Some of the major roads around Oxford continue to be affected today, including the A329, the A420, the B4450 and the B4495.
The impact of the heavy rain has caused many events in Oxfordshire to be cancelled or rescheduled, including the annual Truck Festival in Steventon, and forecasters are predicting there is more rain yet to come.

Way back in 2005, I wrote a few columns about generation gaps and aging. You see, in a Web 2.0 world, where things can happen quickly, ideas and people get old faster. My grandmother sometimes refers to her four grandchildren (aged 21, 15, 10 and 3) as "the young generation." A generation, she says, is about 20 years and we're all in the same group.

I beg to differ.

My sister, who's only 5 years younger than I, is already a different generation. Lumping me with my younger cousins is completely out of the question. Think about it—my sister cannot remember large 5 inch computer disks, MS DOS-based games or life before the Internet. She and her friends had cell phones when they were 9 years old; I remember when cell phones were new technology. She aspires to own a Blackberry; I can still remember thePalm Pilot. In so many ways, she has grown up on technology that I can have grown up with. Even though I'm tuned in to the technologies, they aren't part of my mental makeup the way they are for her.
What that means, is that her world still moves at a faster, higher-tech clip than mine. My favorite "contemporary" bands are those I got to know in the late 1990's; in her world, contemporary is the last few months. With generations now about 5 years long, few trends can hang on longer than a season. We used to be able to identify trends by decade—the hair metal '80s, the punk rock '90s. We're only ¾ through this decade and I can already think of at least 5 musical movements that have come, dominated, and gone. And even when trends dominate, they dominate among smaller groups—groups of the new, shortened, generations; groups of the specific niche who happen to be at the right social network at the right time. Smart people are making a lot of money off these niches, creating boutique social sites, and niche brands. You can do a lot better getting a few people to be intensely loyal to you than you can getting everybody to be lukewarm about you. As I've highlighted in my columns, it's virtually impossible to be mainstream today. 

Every individual is trying to be their own niche, their own brand, their own kind of alternative. If nothing else, Facebook and MySpace pages are a chance for teens, tweens and twentysomethings to brand themselves and rebrand themselves with each profile update. Indeed, I rebrand myself about once a day when I post on a wall or upload a new picture.
My professional life is likely to take about as much rebranding. My father points out how worried he is about our generation's careers—we're all going to have 5 or 6 jobs in the time he's spent in one company. We'll switch between fields, go back for more degrees and be forced to pack up and move cities. Web 2.0 and the real world that goes with it, is all about change and fragmentation.
Can anybody—from a company to a pop star—have staying power in a world like this? Sure, the people who can best cope with reinvention. The older world had some of those too. Think of Madonna: her many identities, her long and never boring career. In the 1980s and '90s her shape shifting was a cause for derision and surprise. Today, hers is the kind of identity stunt we'll all have to pull just to stay on par.
Strike a pose, Gen Y.
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Your Physicists Need You! An Oxford team of astrophysicists is enlisting the public's help in classifying newly discovered galaxies at http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ The name is whimsically inspired by the huge (and stunningly beautiful) variety of galaxies – one million never before seen by human eyes – milling against the darkness of the universe, a zoo of the new and unknown. 

Newly discovered galaxies need to be sorted into types – elliptical and spiral – and since the launch of the website a week ago, 40,000 have already signed up. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is taking these images in an attempt to help scientists understand better how galaxies are born, evolve, and die. Volunteers have been recruited from around the world – Japan, New Zealand, and Russia are just a few – and Dr Lintott, a member of the Oxford team, claims the interest has appeal even further afield: "I'm convinced that somewhere out there there is an alien at a computer spending two seconds looking at an image of the Milky Way, saying that's just another spiral."

But why people (or aliens, for that matter)? Why not use a computer? Because you, yes you, are better than any super-computer can ever be at recognising patterns, shapes and resemblances (try sticking that on your CV for your next interview). The website explains:

"Any computer program we write to sort our galaxies into categories would do a reasonable job, but it would also inevitably throw out the unusual, the weird and the wonderful. To rescue these interesting systems which have a story to tell, we need you."

While some unfortunates may argue that facebook too is a collection of the unusual, the weird and the wonderful, if you're looking for something a little different, the GalaxyZoo awaits. Try your hand at identifying galaxies at http://www.galaxyzoo.org/Tutorial.aspx. Deep space is just a click away.
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Oxford's Proctors have resorted to Facebook in their latest campaign against post-exam celebrations.  
Senior members of Univeristy staff are using the social networking tool to track down photographs of students participating in trashing, using them as evidence upon which to base disciplinary action.
OUSU President Martin McCluskey has leapt to students' defence, sending out emails advising them to alter privacy settings on Facebook "to prohibit members of staff and faculty from viewing your profile and photographs.”
The student union stressed that while it does not condone antisocial behaviour it is determined to stand for the privacy of its members and that "disciplinary procedures at all levels within the University should be fair and transparent."
It has drawn up a document offering advice to students who have been summoned by the Proctors, explaining disciplinary procedures and possible outcomes.  

Oxford student Will Jaggs has pleaded guilty to killing a 25 year-old woman in a frenzied sexually-motivated attack.

Police were called to the crime scene after being alerted by neighbours and they arrived to find Jaggs naked and screaming before he began stabbing himself in the chest. Miss Braham lay naked in front of him in a pool of blood.
Last week the Oxford student pleaded not guilty to murder but yesterday  admitted manslaughter on the grounds of dimished responsibility.

He has been sent to Broadmoor Hosptial, a high-security psychiatric unit in Berkshire, where he will remain indefinitely.