Posts Tagged ‘quote’

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Reading by the Numbers: When Big Data Meets Literature

November 11, 2017

Reading by the Numbers: When #BigData Meets Literature
https://www.NYTimes.com/2017/10/30/arts/franco-moretti-stanford-literary-lab-big-data.html Distant reading as a complement to close reading for literary texts. Perhaps a useful dichotomy for biosequences too!

QT:{{”
“Literary criticism typically tends to emphasize the singularity of exceptional works that have stood the test of time. But the canon, Mr. Moretti argues, is a distorted sample. Instead, he says, scholars need to consider the tens of thousands of books that have been forgotten, a task that computer algorithms and enormous digitized databases have now made possible.

“We know how to read texts,” he wrote in a much-quoted essay included in his book “Distant Reading,” which won the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. “Now let’s learn how to not read them.””

“}}

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Cancer’s Invasion Equation

October 30, 2017

Cancer’s Invasion Eqn, by @DrSidMukherjee
https://www.NewYorker.com/magazine/2017/09/11/cancers-invasion-equation terms: Soil-v-seed, metastasis matching + overcoming “denominator” problem

QT:{{”

“This is medicine’s “denominator problem.” The numerator is you—the person who gets ill. The denominator is everyone at risk, including all the other passengers who were exposed. Numerators are easy to study. Denominators are hard. Numerators come to the doctor’s office, congested and miserable. They get blood tests and prescriptions. Denominators go home from the subway station, heat up dinner, and watch “The Strain.” The numerator persists. The denominator vanishes.” “}}

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Is Genetic Privacy a Myth?

October 28, 2017

QT:{{”
But it’s the very specificity of genomic data that threatens privacy. Although most genomic databases strip away any information linking a name to a genome, such information is very hard to keep anonymous. “I’m not convinced you can truly de-identify the data,” says Mark Gerstein, a Yale professor who studies large genetic databases and is a fierce privacy advocate. He is concerned about whether even the most cutting-edge protections can safeguard personal data. “I am not a believer that large-scale technical solutions or ‘super-encryption’ will solely work,” he says. “There also needs to be a process for credentialing the individuals who access this data.”
…
Threats to privacy could multiply once there is an active market for genetic data. Wood speculates that it could be valuable to life insurance companies, which could use it to raise your premiums; or it could become a tool for those who want to prove or disprove paternity. White nationalist groups, who have become preoccupied with genetic testing, might find a way to weaponize the ancestry data the tests can show. It would not be the first time genetic information was used against a race or races. “Genetics has a very troubled history, from Darwin on,” says Yale’s Mark Gerstein.
…
Yet Columbia’s Yaniv Erlich and others, including Church, fear differential privacy could compromise biomedical research, with smudged data making it harder to get clear results. Mark Gerstein at Yale believes that scientists would be better off testing hypotheses on small amounts of publicly available but pure data, even if it’s not representative of the overall population, rather than using larger quantities of imperfect data.
“}}

Is Genetic Privacy a Myth?
http://protomag.com/articles/genetic-privacy-myth
Genetic tests and genome sequencing are generating terabytes of sensitive private data. How can they be kept safe?

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Big biology projects warm up to preprints

October 28, 2017

QT:{{”
“The 4D Nucleome, a major research consortium funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), is now requiring that all manuscripts related to its US$120-million, five-year programme are posted to an online preprint server ahead of peer review. And a privately funded, US$600-million biomedical research initiative in California is considering whether to demand its investigators do the same.”
“}}

http://www.nature.com/news/big-biology-projects-warm-up-to-preprints-1.21074

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Google’s New Super-Secure Email Is Designed For High-Profile Targets. Would It Have Protected Hillary’s Campaign?

October 28, 2017

QT:{{"

“The Advanced Protection Program incorporates a physical security key (a small USB or wireless device that costs around $25) to protect against phishing. The key, which participants need to buy themselves, uses public-key cryptography and digital signatures. Without the key, even someone with your password would be unable to access your account. Advanced Protection limits your Google data access to only Google apps and adds additional safeguards in the account recovery process to prevent someone from social engineering their way into your account. It also performs additional scans on files and attachments to ensure no malware is piggybacking on the download.”
"}}

#Google’s New Super-Secure Email Is Designed For High-Profile Targets http://www.Slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2017/10/17/google_introduces_super_secure_email_to_prevent_high_profile_hacks_could.html Appears to be open to all. Anyone tried this?

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Wikipedia shapes language in scientific papers

October 27, 2017

QT:{{"
"Wikipedia is one of the world’s most popular websites, but scientists rarely cite it in their papers. Despite this, the online encyclopedia seems to be shaping the language that researchers use in papers, according to an experiment showing that words and phrases in recently published Wikipedia articles subsequently appeared more frequently in scientific papers"
…
“Thompson and co-author Douglas Hanley, an economist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, commissioned PhD students to write 43 chemistry articles on topics that weren’t yet on Wikipedia. In January 2015, they published a randomized set of half of the articles to the site. The other half, which served as control articles, weren’t uploaded.
…
Using text-mining techniques to measure the frequency of words, they found that the language in the scientific papers drifted over the study period as new terms were introduced into the field. This natural drift equated to roughly one new term for every 250 words, Thompson told Nature. On top of those natural changes in language over time, the authors found that, on average, another 1 in every 300 words in a scientific paper was influenced by language in the Wikipedia article.”

"}}

#Wikipedia shapes lang. in science https://www.Nature.com/news/wikipedia-shapes-language-in-science-papers-1.22656 Seeding it with new pages & watching them evolve (v ctrls) as a type of soc. expt

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How do I disable two finger gestures (Back/Forward) on Chrome for 10.7? – Google Product Forums

October 8, 2017

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/PaMriZC-Kuo

QT:{{"
OK — This isn’t a real fix, but I turned off "swipe between pages" in System Preferences -> Trackpad -> More Gestures.

Apparently "between pages" of a PDF or whatever is seen as back-forward in the browser. I wish you could keep the page turning and kill the browsing hiccup.

"}}

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Multistep nucleation of nanocrystals in aqueous solution : Nature Chemistry : Nature Research

October 1, 2017

Multistep nucleation of nanocrystals in…solution
http://www.Nature.com/nchem/journal/v9/n1/full/nchem.2618.html Creation of Au-Au pair, expelling water, drives cluster formation

QT:{{”
To explain how the gold-rich aqueous phase forms and breaks down in Figures 1A and 2A, we
performed ab-initio calculations of a hydrated gold atom pair (Figure 4). This hydrated atom pair
becomes ionized when brought closer together: the left gold atom plus two nearby water molecules
form a linear cationic coordination complex, [Au(H2O)2]+1, while the right gold atom becomes an
anion surrounded by a simple hydration shell. Other (square planar and linear) complexes involving
chloride and hydroxide ligands may also participate, depending on pH (26, 33) (Section SI2). For
nanoclusters to form inside the gold-rich aqueous phase, pairs of gold atoms within it must be partially
dehydrated. In our calculations (Figure 4), this dehydration is delayed by a 7.6 kcal/mol (12.9 kBT)
energy barrier required to breakdown the linear cationic complex (close to the gold anion).
“}}

also:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.04632

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The Risk of Nuclear War with North Korea

September 30, 2017

On the brink https://www.NewYorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-risk-of-nuclear-war-with-north-korea/amp Pro-basketball player Rodman may be the best communication conduit betw. the US & N Korean dictator Kim

QT:{{”
a measure of how impoverished America’s contact with North Korea has become that one of the best-known conduits is Dennis Rodman, a.k.a. the Worm, the bad boy of the nineties-era Chicago Bulls. Rodman’s agent, Chris Volo, a hulking former mixed-martial-arts fighter, told me recently, “I’ve been there four times in four years. I’m in the Korean Sea, and I’m saying to myself, ‘No one would believe that I’m alone right now, riding Sea-Doos with Kim Jong Un.’ ” Rodman’s strange bond with Kim began in 2013, when Vice Media, aware of Kim’s love of the Bulls, offered to fly American basketball players to North Korea. Vice tried to contact Michael Jordan but got nowhere. Rodman, who was working the night-club autograph circuit, was happy to go. He joined three members of the Harlem Globetrotters for a game in Pyongyang. Kim made a surprise appearance, invited Rodman to dinner, and asked him to return to North Korea for a week at his private beach resort in Wonsan, which Rodman later described as “Hawaii or Ibiza, but he’s the only one that lives there.”
“}}

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Sweet taste, not just calories, dictates metabolic response | YaleNews

September 30, 2017

Sweet taste, not just calories, dictates metabolic response
https://News.Yale.edu/2017/08/10/sweet-taste-not-just-calories-dictates-metabolic-response May explain link betw. diabetes & artificial #sweeteners

QT:{{”
“When sweet taste and calories do not align, the body’s metabolism is fooled, a finding that may help explain the link between artificial sweetener use and diabetes, a new Yale University study has found.” “}}

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