from the NIH Challenge Grant website:

Funded projects would develop and implement virtual collaborative environments to facilitate biomedical and translational research, e.g. addressing issues of privacy, technology transfers and sharing resources.

There’s also talk of Facebook and Second Life style applications helping to “eliminate barriers to scientific collaboration.”

According to the NIH, there’s $200 Million available for as many as 200 grants. Not a lot if you want to actually build something, but if you’re looking to research the effects of teledildonics on sex-addicts who enjoy watching avatars girate to techno music then you’re in luck!

Oh, and here’s the very interesting list of areas that are most likely to get a “challenge” grant…

High Priority Topics Within Broad Challenge Areas:

(01)  Behavior, Behavioral Change, and Prevention
(02)  Bioethics
(03)  Biomarker Discovery and Validation
(04)  Clinical Research
(05)  Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER)
(06)  Enabling Technologies
(07)  Enhancing Clinical Trials
(08)  Genomics
(09)  Health Disparities
(10)  Information Technology for Processing Health Care Data
(11)  Regenerative Medicine
(12)  Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education (STEM)
(13)  Smart Biomaterials – Theranostics
(14)  Stem Cells
(15)  Translational Science

Thanks to David Horowitz for finding the buried treasure and letting me know about it. He’s a technologist and entrepeneur with experience navigating the complex maze of paperwork and red tape associated with applying for and securing funding opportunities from the private sector and local, state and federal sources. So if you have any ideas that might warrant a grant from NIH, he’d make a good partner.

Oh, and by the way. The deadline for proposals is NEXT WEEK!

Being a curmudgeon, I don’t always like it when people write on my Facebook wall, and I don’t feel the need for every person I’ve ever met to see my childhood photos. I also like to use Facebook for social networking with disparate groups of friends, family, business associates, and random folks I’ve met. With this in mind, I’ve spent some time figuring out how to adjust Facebook’s privacy settings to better suit my tastes.

These settings are all hidden to others, so by revealing my method I am partially defeating the purpose of my own system. But in the name of knowledge-sharing (and against my tin-foil hat-wearing nature) I will do so anyway.

For those Facebook friends who may wonder what settings I’ve applied to them, I’ll say 2 things:

1. Hardly anyone can write on my wall, so you probably can’t either.
2. I’m basically experimenting, so these settings change every now and then, and are not very meaningful. At the moment, the people with the most access to my feed are family members.

Identity Management on Facebook

This is a simple how-to on using the groups feature to manage who can and can’t see the different parts of your feed. Not everything can be controlled but this is the best way I know, considering the limited tools. It’s very subjective, and everyone will find their own way to do this. This is how I do it…

First some general advice:

• Try and start as soon as possible, since it’s much easier to add a new friend to an existing group, than to add all your existing friends to new groups.
• By default, everyone can see everything, so at the time you add new friends you’ll want to decide if they belong in a group.
• These tools are not very robust, so there’s no easy way to know if everyone is in the right group.

Follow these steps:

On the Friends page:

1. make 3 new lists: Level 1, Level 2, Level 3. You can change the names later if you want to have something more descriptive based on the actual settings.
   
2. Use ‘Select multiple friends’ to add friends to the groups, based on which features the groups will NOT be able to see. ie. no wall, no status updates, no personal info, etc. (You may prefer to do this this step AFTER you edit the privacy settings page described below.)

On the Profile Privacy Settings page

1. on any category, click ‘Edit Custom Settings.’ Here you will see a screen that allows you to type in the name of any groups that shouldn’t see this feature. Adjust the settings to your liking.
2. You can test the settings by typing a friend’s name in the field at the top of the page to see how your profile will look to them. (If they have been added to a group.)
3. The photos section has an extra link: ‘Edit Photo Albums Privacy Settings’ where you can hide different albums from different groups.

On the News Feed and Wall settings page

This page is pretty clear, so I won’t bother explaining it.

So that’s pretty much it, until Facebook adds more, or I discover something else. You can experiment to see how you want to use it, and please add comments with suggestions for better ways to approach this. I’ll be updating this page and looking into how to best deal with Identity Management on other social networks as well.

Who am I? Who are you? Who’s that guy?

Questions we are answering at all times throughout our lives. Whether we intend to or not.

I believe we are in a sort of “honeymoon phase” with social networking. Novelty has inspired generations to present themselves publicly to hundreds of observers at a time. Facebook and Facebook Connect present an interesting set of potential futures, some of which are explored in this slide show.

If a celebrity who has lost control of her identity becomes one thing in the public eye, yet that same person maintains a completely separate identity among her close-knit friends and family… then which identity is “real?”

All my connections, from professional to family are now able to view my Facebook news feed. By default, anyone can tag a photo of me, and even tag photos that aren’t me. If I stop actively managing my identity on Facebook, my account may end up with a life of its own through photo tagging alone. These settings can be turned off, and managed differently for different groups of friends, but by default everyone can see everything. The more friends I have on my list, the more I will be drawn to managing my identity.

In virtual worlds, I think the issue of identity is slightly more clear due to the obvious separation between the virtual identity as represented by an avatar, and the “real” identity of the person behind it. For most virtual world users, there is a clear delineation between the virtual and real persona. On a social networking site, the dividing line is less clear. The representation of self that comes through the Facebook news feed isn’t any more or less “real” than a person’s avatar in a virtual world, yet the use of photos and real-world connections makes it seem more real. This presents both opportunities and challenges.

In the second part of this article, I will describe how I actually go about managing my identity on Facebook through the various tools they provide (or in most cases fail to provide.)