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the cardiac pacemaker [Mathematical aspects of heart physiology, … New York University, New York, 1975, pp. … Our work was inspired by Peskin’s model for self-synchronization …… and electrical coupling as mechanisms for synchronous.
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Posts Tagged ‘quote’
https://www2.bc.edu/~mirollo/Publications/Pulse.pdf
October 3, 2015IBM Research: Preserving Validity in Adaptive Data Analysis
September 23, 2015Preserving Validity in Adaptive Data Analysis http://ibmresearchnews.blogspot.com/2015/08/preserving-validity-in-adaptive-data_6.html Using differential #privacy for correct #stats even w/ test-set reuse
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“A common next step would be to use the least-squares linear regression to check whether a simple linear combination of the three strongly correlated foods can predict the grade. It turns out that a little combination goes a long way: we discover that a linear combination of the three selected foods can explain a significant fraction of variance in the grade (plotted below). The regression analysis also reports that the p-value of this result is 0.00009 meaning that the probability of this happening purely by chance is less than 1 in 10,000.
Recall that no relationship exists in the true data distribution, so this discovery is clearly false. This spurious effect is known to experts as Freedman’s paradox. It arises since the variables (foods) used in the regression were chosen using the data itself.
…
We found that challenges of adaptivity can be addressed using techniques developed for privacy-preserving data analysis. These techniques rely on the notion of differential privacy that guarantees that the data analysis is not too sensitive to the data of any single individual. We rigorously demonstrated that ensuring differential privacy of an analysis also guarantees that the findings will be statistically valid. We then also developed additional approaches to the problem based on a new way to measure how much information an analysis reveals about a dataset.
The Thresholdout Algorithm
Using our new approach we designed an algorithm, called Thresholdout, that allows an analyst to reuse the holdout set of data for validating a large number of results, even when those results are produced by an adaptive analysis.
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Before I Go: A Stanford neurosurgeon’s parting wisdom about life and time – The Washington Post
September 22, 2015Before I Go: A Stanford neurosurgeon’s parting wisdom https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/03/12/before-i-go-a-stanford-neurosurgeons-parting-wisdom-about-life-and-time/ Eloquent writing on the passing of time, in one’s final hours
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there are two strategies to cutting the time short, like the tortoise and the hare. The hare moves as fast as possible, hands a blur, instruments clattering, falling to the floor; the skin slips open like a curtain, the skull flap is on the tray before the bone dust settles. But the opening might need to be expanded a centimeter here or there because it’s not optimally placed. The tortoise proceeds deliberately, with no wasted movements, measuring twice, cutting once. No step of the operation needs revisiting; everything proceeds in orderly fashion. If the hare makes too many minor missteps and has to keep adjusting, the tortoise wins. If the tortoise spends too much time planning each step, the hare wins.
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The funny thing about time in the OR, whether you frenetically race or steadily proceed, is that you have no sense of it passing. If boredom is, as Heidegger argued, the awareness of time passing, this is the opposite: The intense focus makes the arms of the clock seem arbitrarily placed. Two hours can feel like a minute.
…
But the years did, as promised, fly by. Six years passed in a flash, but then, heading into chief residency, I developed a classic constellation of symptoms — weight loss, fevers, night sweats, unremitting back pain, cough — indicating a diagnosis quickly confirmed: metastatic lung cancer. The gears of time ground down.
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What Is a Tree Worth? – The New Yorker
September 15, 2015What Is a #Tree Worth?
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-is-a-tree-worth Study on Toronto shows 10 more trees/block =+1% in wellness =$10k/person =being 7yrs younger
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“That is the riddle that underlies a new study in the journal Scientific Reports by a team of researchers in the United States, Canada, and Australia, led by the University of Chicago psychology professor Marc Berman. The study compares two large data sets from the city of Toronto, both gathered on a block-by-block level; the first measures the distribution of green space, as determined from satellite imagery and a comprehensive list of all five hundred and thirty thousand trees planted on public land, and the second measures health, as assessed by a detailed survey of ninety-four thousand respondents. After controlling for income, education, and age, Berman and his colleagues showed that an additional ten trees on a given block corresponded to a one-per-cent increase in how healthy nearby residents felt. “To get an equivalent increase with money, you’d have to give each household in that neighborhood ten thousand dollars—or make people seven years younger,” Berman told me.
…
You can produce an attenuated version of the same effect simply by looking out a window, or (for experimental convenience) at a picture of a nature scene. Over the past few years, Berman and his colleagues have zeroed in on the “low-level” visual characteristics that distinguish natural from built environments. To do this, they broke down images into their visual components: the proportion of straight to curved edges, the hue and saturation of the colors, the entropy (a statistical measure of randomness in pixel intensity), and so on. The view of an arboretum, for instance, tends to have higher color saturation than that of a street corner, indicating that “the colors in nature are more of the ‘purer’ version of those colors,” Berman said. Even when images are scrambled so that there are no recognizable features, like trees or skyscrapers, to betray what they represent, their low-level visual characteristics still predict how much people will like them.”
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Multi-tasking: how to survive in the 21st century – FT.com
September 15, 2015Multi-tasking: how to survive in 21C http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bbf1f84a-51c2-11e5-8642-453585f2cfcd.html Explains @gtdguy’s plan of closing "open loops" in terms of the Zeigarnik effect
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“The principle behind Getting Things Done is simple: close the open loops. The details can become rather involved but the method is straightforward. For every single commitment you’ve made to yourself or to someone else, write down the very next thing you plan to do. Review your lists of next actions frequently enough to give you confidence that you won’t miss anything.
This method has a cult following, and practical experience suggests that many people find it enormously helpful — including me (see below). Only recently, however, did the psychologists E J Masicampo and Roy Baumeister find some academic evidence to explain why people find relief by using David Allen’s system. Masicampo and Baumeister found that you don’t need to complete a task to banish the Zeigarnik effect. Making a specific plan will do just as well. Write down your next action and you quiet that nagging voice at the back of your head. You are outsourcing your anxiety to a piece of paper.”
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A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future
September 15, 2015A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics & a Future http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/us/cancer-immortality-cryogenics.html Glioma sufferer opts for $80K Alcor crowdfunded, brain preservation
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“If the $80,000 fee for neuropreservation seemed steep, they learned that about a third of it pays for medical personnel to be on call for death, while another third is placed in a trust for future revival. The investment income from the trust also pays for storage in liquid nitrogen, which is so cold that it can prevent decay in biological tissue for millenniums.
Some of what they found out gave them pause. Alcor’s antifreeze, once pumped through the blood vessels, transitions into a glassy substance before ice can form and do damage. The process, called vitrification, is similar to that used to store sperm, eggs and embryos for fertility treatments. But that glassy substance has been known to crack, likely causing damage of a different kind.
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Rock-paper-scissors may explain evolutionary ‘games’ in nature
September 8, 2015Rock-paper-scissors may explain evolutionary ‘games’
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/05/rock-paper-scissors-may-explain-evolutionary-games-nature How aggressive, cooperative & deceptive behaviors can coexist
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“The hand game “rock-paper-scissors” is a classic way to settle playground disputes, with rock smashing scissors, scissors cutting paper, and paper covering rock. But it turns out that nature plays its own versions of the game, and mathematicians and biologists have used it to study everything from human societies to bacteria in a petri dish. Now, researchers have found that when players change their strategies on the fly, a stable pattern arises in which each of the three weapons gains and loses popularity in turn. The discovery could shed light on how living creatures maintain competing strategies in the struggle for existence.
When applied to biology, rock-paper-scissors blossoms from a two-person children’s game into a complex dance among multiple players. Certain lizards, for example, use three competing
strategies—aggression, cooperation, and deception—to win mates, with each tactic beating one and losing to another—just like rock, paper, and scissors. For the lizards, winning the game equates to making babies.
…
Inspired by computer simulations of a related game, two
mathematicians—Steven Strogatz and Danielle Toupo of Cornell University—decided to get to the root of what happens when players switch strategies midgame. “I thought it was fascinating, and I wanted to find a mathematical model that would describe this in its simplest form,” Strogatz says. They went back to basics, studying the pure equations instead of complicated computer simulations.”
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A New Initiative on Precision Medicine — NEJM
September 8, 2015A New Initiative on Precision Medicine
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1500523 Notable: focus on #cancergenomics & mention of endophenotypes & #QS data
Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., and Harold Varmus, M.D.
N Engl J Med 2015; 372:793-795February 26, 2015DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1500523
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“These features make efforts to improve the ways we anticipate, prevent, diagnose, and treat cancers both urgent and promising. Realizing that promise, however, will require the many different efforts reflected in the President’s initiative. To achieve a deeper understanding of cancers and discover additional tools for molecular diagnosis, we will need to analyze many more cancer genomes. ….
The cancer-focused component of this initiative will be designed to address some of the obstacles that have already been encountered in “precision oncology”: unexplained drug resistance, genomic
heterogeneity of tumors, insufficient means for monitoring responses and tumor recurrence, and limited knowledge about the use of drug combinations.
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The initiative’s second component entails pursuing research advances that will enable better assessment of disease risk, understanding of disease mechanisms, and prediction of optimal therapy for many more diseases, with the goal of expanding the benefits of precision medicine into myriad aspects of health and health care.
The initiative will encourage and support the next generation of scientists to develop creative new approaches for detecting, measuring, and analyzing a wide range of biomedical information — including molecular, genomic, cellular, clinical, behavioral, physiological, and environmental parameters. Many possibilities for future applications spring to mind: today’s blood counts might be replaced by a census of hundreds of distinct types of immune cells; data from mobile devices might provide real-time monitoring of glucose, blood pressure, and cardiac rhythm; genotyping might reveal particular genetic variants that confer protection against specific diseases…
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Machine ethics: The robot’s dilemma
September 8, 2015Machine ethics: The robot’s dilemma
http://www.nature.com/news/machine-ethics-the-robot-s-dilemma-1.17881 Asimov’s science fictional 3 Laws of #Robotics become a reality for programmers
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In his 1942 short story ‘Runaround’, science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov introduced the Three Laws of Robotics — engineering safeguards and built-in ethical principles that he would go on to use in dozens of stories and novels. They were: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; and 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
Fittingly, ‘Runaround’ is set in 2015. Real-life roboticists are citing Asimov’s laws a lot these days: their creations are becoming autonomous enough to need that kind of guidance. In May, a panel talk on driverless cars at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington DC, turned into a discussion about how autonomous vehicles would behave in a crisis. What if a vehicle’s efforts to save its own passengers by, say, slamming on the brakes risked a pile-up with the vehicles behind it? Or what if an autonomous car swerved to avoid a child, but risked hitting someone else nearby?”
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Species-Specific | The Scientist Magazine(R)
September 6, 2015Scientists uncover striking differences between mouse and human gene expression across a variety of tissues.
By Jyoti Madhusoodanan | November 17, 2014
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/41453/title/Species-Specific/
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The results “go a little against the grain,” said bioinformatician Mark Gerstein of Yale University who was not involved in the study. “We might think that humans and mice are very similar [genetically], but when we compare their transcriptomes, they’re more different than we thought.”
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