Omicron-targeted vaccines do no better than original jabs in early tests
Keeping Secrets: Anonymous Data Isn’t Always Anonymous – I School Online
April 17, 2022https://ischoolonline.berkeley.edu/blog/anonymous-data/
QT:{{”
The classic example of this problem occurred in 1997, when Latanya Sweeney, who was then a graduate student at MIT, found the medical records of Massachusetts Governor William Weld, who had collapsed during a public ceremony. She used Weld’s readily available zip code and birth date to scan the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission (GIC) database for his records and confirmed the identity using voter-registration records from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some have cited this as an unusual example, given that it involved a
high-profile public figure, which may not be generally repeatable. However, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago earlier this month, Sweeney, who is now a computer science professor at Harvard, submitted the results of another sting operation: This time, she purchased a $50 database from the state of Washington that included all hospitalization records for one year. The data included patient demographic information, diagnoses, the identity of the attending physicians, the hospital, and the method used to pay the bill. It had no patient names or addresses, but it included the zip code. Sweeney then conducted a search of all news stories in the state that contained the word ‘hospitalized’ during the same period. With a little sleuthing, they found they could exactly match the information from an article to the database in 43 percent of the cases (they hired a reporter to confirm the identifications), essentially allowing them to place a name on an anomymized health record. “}}
King Richard
April 17, 2022AOL search log release – Wikipedia
April 17, 2022Mutation bias reflects natural selection in Arabidopsis thaliana | Nature
April 14, 2022https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04269-6
https://twitter.com/MarkGerstein/status/1510065060806283269
Interesting paper, relating de novo mutation rate to epigenetic features. Wonder exactly how this connects to the fact that the background mutation rate in cancer genomes depends strongly on epigenetics.
Important genomic regions mutate less often than do other regions https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00017-6
Commit to transparent COVID data until the WHO declares the pandemic is over
April 14, 2022Liked the line: “A simple text file would do.” People should be more aware of how useful the most basic of formats is!
Behind the Entenmann’s Cellophane, a Slice of Long Island Life – The New York Times
April 14, 2022Agree that this was a great piece of nostalgia. Celebrated many life events with a slice of Entenmann’s cake.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/15/dining/entenmanns-bakery-long-island.html
Life’s Preference for Symmetry Is Like ‘A New Law of Nature’ – The New York Times
April 14, 2022Interesting paper. Nevertheless, natural designs are still less symmetric than engineered ones. (I think!) Any thoughts on why?
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2113883119
Symmetry and simplicity spontaneously emerge from the algorithmic nature of evolution
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/24/science/symmetry-biology-evolution.html
