Anne crawled out of bed in her North Las Vegas house around 10 p.m. and started to get ready for her shift. She pulled her chestnut hair into a bun and slipped on her olive green flight suit.

For medical researchers and biochemists, simulation software will vastly speed the early stages of screening for new compounds. And for molecular biologists, models that are of sufficient accuracy will yield new understanding of basic cellular principles.

This kind of modeling is already in use to study individual cellular processes like metabolism. But Dr. Covert said: “Where I think our work is different is that we explicitly include all of the genes and every known gene function. There’s no one else out there who has been able to include more than a handful of functions or more than, say, one-third of the genes.”

The simulation of the complete life cycle of the pathogen, Mycoplasma genitalium, was presented on Friday in the journal Cell. The scientists called it a “first draft” but added that the effort was the first time an entire organism had been modeled in such detail — in this case, all of its 525 genes.

The History of Art is filled with forgeries, but are there fakes in digital art fields made from creative cut-and-pastes, collaborative works and infinite works? We approached four people who, pondering the notion of fake, point to characteristics specific to digital art.

Officially, the Swiss Academy of Sciences meeting in Bern on 20 January was an overview of large-scale computer modelling in neuroscience. Unofficially, it was neuroscientists' first real chance to get answers about Markram's controversial proposal for the Human Brain Project (HBP) — an effort to build a supercomputer simulation that integrates everything known about the human brain, from the structures of ion channels in neural cell membranes up to mechanisms behind conscious decision-making.

Any time we interact with a representative art work – be it a painting, a sculpture, a song, a novel, a comic, a play, a film, or a game – it involves the exercise of our imagination, and as such we can see this deployment of our imagination as a game (in the manner of a child’s game of make-believe). Looking at a painting, we imagine we are perceiving what is depicted; listening to a song we imagine the story or sentiments mentioned in the lyrics and invoked by the music; reading a novel or comic or watching a film we imagine the events of the story unfolding; playing a game we imagine the reality of the events that occur.   Fictional Worlds In prop theory, representations of all kinds are seen as props that prescribe specific imaginings. What is imagined is fictional, that is, true in the fictional world of the game that is played with the prop (Walton says “What is true is to be believed, what is fictional is to be imagined”). 

There is a seductive image of contemporary culture circulating today. Our world, Jean Baudrillard tells us, has been launched into hyperspace in a kind of postmodern apocalypse. The airless atmosphere has asphyxiated the referent, leaving us satellites in aimless orbit around an empty center. We breathe an ether of floating images that no longer bear a relation to any reality whatsoever.1 That, according to Baudrillard, is simulation: the substitution of signs of the real for the real.2 In hyperreality, signs no longer represent or refer to an external model. They stand for nothing but themselves, and refer only to other signs. They are to some extent distinguishable, in the way the phonemes of language are, by a combinatory of minute binary distinctions.3 But postmodernism stutters. In the absence of any gravitational pull to ground them, images accelerate and tend to run together. They become interchangeable. Any term can be substituted for any other: utter indetermination.

Shanzai is the name used for a huge black market industry that (currently) specialises in making fake mobile phones in small factories. Basements. We’re not talking about a few phones either. The volume is terrifying. According to CCID Consulting in 2007 an estimated 150 million phones - 20% of the 750 million devices produced in China - were counterfeit or off brand.

Initially carbon copies of the genuine article, more recent shanzai phones sometimes add eccentric new features to meet the demands of the market and can produce them far quicker than the genuine manufacturers can adapt (apparently 28-30 days to market). It’s probably because they have access to the components, tools, skilled factory workers and they’re not held back by corporate bureaucracy, legal issues, manufacturing schedules and overheads - or safety. For example shanzai Nokia phones had dual SIM slots before the genuine ones did -

It could be one of the most ambitious computer projects ever conceived.

An international group of scientists is aiming to create a simulator that can replicate everything happening on Earth - from global weather patterns and the spread of diseases to international financial transactions or congestion on Milton Keynes' roads.

Nicknamed the Living Earth Simulator (LES), the project aims to advance the scientific understanding of what is taking place on the planet, encapsulating the human actions that shape societies and the environmental forces that define the physical world.

"Many problems we have today - including social and economic instabilities, wars, disease spreading - are related to human behaviour, but there is apparently a serious lack of understanding regarding how society and the economy work," says Dr Helbing, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, who chairs the FuturICT project which aims to create the simulator.

Just a quick fyi: If you head over to the Harvard University Press web site, you can grab a free copy of Marcus Boon’s new book, In Praise of Copying, which makes the case that “copying is an essential part of being human, that the ability to copy is worthy of celebration, and that, without recognizing how integral copying is to being human, we cannot understand ourselves or the world we live in.” Boon is a writer, journalist and Associate Professor in the English Literature department at York University, Toronto. You can download a free copy of his book in PDF format straight from this link. (Note that the text is formally released under a Creative Commons license.) Or you can always purchase a printed copy online.

Extract from 'Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes', page 46

A documentary about the current state of copyright and culture

by Daniel Rourke

Japan. That's where I am. With the rice-triangles and the tatami-mats and row upon row of vending machines. In a country where serving others is paramount, and where holidays are something that other people do, I find myself being served - on holiday... I am the ultimate gaijin 1 and every ticket I buy and photo I take seems to confirm this. I came to see Japan. But now I realise that the culture of seeing has been commodified into an experience in itself, and perhaps not an experience any of us are capable of moving beyond alone.

Please don't misunderstand me. I love Japan. I lived here from 2004 until 2006, teaching English on the outskirts of a medium sized city on the island of Kyushu. The experience enriched me, precisely because it tore me from my anchors. Because it helped me understand where I had come from. On the surface Japan behaves like the perfect machine, with all its components functioning within designated parameters. And what's more, that machine just seems to work, with hardly anyone screaming to get off. The Japanese are a nation in a very different sense to us Brits. And for a small-town, West Yorkshire boy like myself, being part of that nation, that huge entity, all be it for only 24 months of my life, is still one of my most humbling experiences. But even as I gush about Japan being here can often feel like toiling through an endless urban labyrinth. With little of cultural merit to distinguish the pachinko parlours from the snack bars and multi-storey car parks Japan can seem grey, shallow and everything but refined. But when it surprises you, whether you're picking blueberries in the mountains or being served delicate morsels of fish in the private room of your ryokan, Japan redefines the word privileged. I feel privileged to have lived here, I feel privileged to be travelling through it. Yet, keeping hold of that feeling is not always easy. The problem is not completely a Japanese one. Worldwide tourism has moulded, cast and set into faux-stone souvenirs the types of experiences we can access. Even those attempting to wind their own path through the deserts of Mongolia or the jungles of Brazil will occasionally find themselves face to face with a toll-booth and turnstile scrawled in badly translated English instructions. The forces of the free-market mean that being somewhere has come to mean "being near this particular cultural commodity". Any 21st century traveller who believes that they can get to the authentic heart of an experience will have to pay for a ticket somewhere along the track. Had the restless 17th century poet Matsuo Bashō known that his musings on the River Ōi would be turned into a set of commemorative face flannels he might very well have never set out on the road to Fuji:

In a wayIt was funNot to see Mount FujiIn foggy rain 2 Like Bashō I aim to plant myself in a place, more deeply than at the toll-booth and souvenir shop. But with every photograph I've taken of a monument, of a neon high-street or sunset, I've moved further away from this essential desire. Lest we forget the verb 'to be' whenever we are trying to be somewhere, somewhen, somehow. The Japanese seem particularly keen on the token of the experience. Whether it is the photo of themselves issuing the 'V' sign in front of Mount Fuji, or the gift-set of sweet rice-cakes they take home as omiyage 3 for their grandmother. At first I thought this was nothing more than tourism top-trumps. A way to out-do your neighbour with 20 'sugoii!' 4 points over her holiday snaps. But unlike the Westerner's conception of the experience gained, the Japanese live to share their commodities with each other. Suddenly holiday photos are more than a way to put cousin Seth to sleep, they are a ticket for every member of your family, of your friendship group, your work mates and arch-enemies, to take a little bit of your experience for themselves. The machine of Japanese society is oiled by holiday snaps and boxes of seaweed crackers stamped with the silhouette of Hello Kitty. Before I lived here I read that the Japanese spend the same equivalent of their GDP on omiyage as America spends on law-suits and litigation. In this sense, the commodity of 'being somewhere' has far greater value for Japanese society than the mere personal. If we in the West were offered the chance to swap all our law-suits and lawyers for seaweed crackers, I hope we'd at least consider it. Perhaps the value I grasp for in my lived experience would be better shared than savoured for myself. Is it possible then to have an experience without commodifying it? I'm not sure if it is. Whether through my photo collection or the stuttering inadequacies of my language, I find it increasingly difficult to pinpoint what it was about an experience that lingers within me. As the smorgasbord of human experiences is extended, enhanced, mixed and matched between cultures and languages, what there is to take away with us seems increasingly shallow. Turn on The Discovery Channel and be instantly smacked around the face with the token beauty of the world. Travel there yourself, whether by tourist boat or chartered jet, and wallow in the sense that where you are right now is not where you normally find yourself. Without meaning to paint the entire Japanese nation with one brush, I do feel that they have got something right with their tourism tokens. They have brought in from the outside the gamut of experiences the world has to offer. They have reduced them to a pocket souvenir, or a sliver of flavour that lingers on the tongue, and shared them around for everyone to make sense of. The idea that we should all escape our lives for a while, should buy a reduced price ticket and lose ourselves on a pristine, simulacrum of a beach somewhere, bothers me. The only time I have ever felt distant from myself was when I was at the mercy of a culture who take pride in the commodities of their experiences. Who exist to share them. To really believe for one moment that I can find something, out here, that is true, that is mine and only mine is a little naive. When I finally get back on my flight, disembarking at Terminal 2 of Heathrow, only then will I once again be living the absolutely individual experience that is my own. For it is only through my removal and return to London that my deepest experiences are founded. If I am going to be anywhere, I may as well be where and what I am, and not what my plane ticket promises me I can be:

Coming home at lastAt the end of the year,I wept to findMy old umbilical cord 5

Notes 1. 'Gaijin' is the Japanese word for a foreigner, or, outsider.2. Poem taken from, The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton, one of Matsuo Bashō's journeys as recounted in The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches.3. A souvenir or gift that represents something about a trip you have taken. Omiyage usually takes the form of a foodstuff that is 'unique' to the place visited.4. 'Sugoii!' roughly translates as Great! or Brilliant!.5. Poem taken from, The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel, one of Matsuo Bashō's journeys as recounted in The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches.

by Daniel Rourke

As the Pentagon ousts plans to turn insects into cyber war machines you'd be forgiven for asking the question: Where does the real digital end and the faked life begin? Are we simulating life synthetically? or just speeding up an entirely natural process? Technologically engineered life is here to stay. Its not far fetched to speculate that simulacra may become all there is.