Posts Tagged ‘quote’

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National Geographic Magazine – NGM.com

July 12, 2015

QT:{{”
EP is six-foot-two (1.9 meters), with perfectly parted white hair and unusually long ears. He’s personable, friendly, gracious. He laughs a lot. He seems at first like your average genial grandfather. But 15 years ago, the herpes simplex virus chewed its way through his brain, coring it like an apple. By the time the virus had run its course, two walnut-size chunks of brain matter in the medial temporal lobes had disappeared, and with them most of EP’s memory.
“}}

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2007/11/memory/foer-text

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No one has a photographic memory.

July 11, 2015

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2006/04/kaavya_syndrome.html

QT:{{”
In 1970, a Harvard vision scientist named Charles Stromeyer III published a landmark paper in Nature about a Harvard student named Elizabeth, who could perform an astonishing feat. Stromeyer showed Elizabeth’s right eye a pattern of 10,000 random dots, and a day later, he showed her left eye another dot pattern. She mentally fused the two images to form a random-dot stereogram and then saw a three-dimensional image floating above the surface. Elizabeth seemed to offer the first conclusive proof that photographic memory is possible. But then in a soap-opera twist, Stromeyer married her, and she was never tested again.
“}}

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The New Statistics

July 11, 2015

QT:{{”
“Exploration has a second meaning: Running pilot tests to explore ideas, refine procedures and tasks, and guide where precious research effort is best directed is often one of the most rewarding stages of research. No matter how intriguing, however, the results of such pilot work rarely deserve even a brief mention in a report. The aim of such work is to discover how to prespecify in detail a study that is likely to find answers to our research questions, and that must be reported. Any researcher needs to choose the moment to switch from
not-for-reporting pilot testing to prespecified, must-be-reported research.”
“}}

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/11/07/0956797613504966.long

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Why do we keep expecting robots to kill us?

July 10, 2015

Why do we…expect…robots to kill us?
http://mashable.com/2015/07/02/robot-killers/ Freak accident & coincidental reporting leads to skynet/#Terminator posts

QT:{{”
“The news flashed around the world, every headline a variation on the classic “man bites dog” — Robot Kills Man. To make matters more ominous, one of the reporters tweeting about the story was the Financial Times’ Sarah O’Connor — who was apparently unaware of the Terminator franchise featuring her namesake, Sarah Connor, and didn’t understand why so many of her replies talked about something called Skynet becoming self-aware.

Never mind that the robot in question was a relatively prosaic piece of machinery, a giant arm designed to operate within a cage, far away from humans. Never mind that, according to the preliminary assessment, the worker was at fault. Never mind that since the first robot-related death was reported in 1979, we’ve seen fewer than one such incident per year. Toilets, zippers and pants all cause more deaths than robots.

But we see what we want to see, and apparently what we want to see is the robopocalypse.”
“}}

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Dr. Strangelove – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

June 30, 2015

QT:{{”
The character is an amalgamation of RAND Corporation strategist Herman Kahn, mathematician and Manhattan Project principal John von Neumann, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun (a central figure in Nazi Germany’s rocket development program recruited to the US after the war), and Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb.”[15] There is a common misconception that the character was based on Henry Kissinger, but Kubrick and Sellers denied this;[16] Sellers said, “Strangelove was never modeled after Kissinger—that’s a popular misconception. It was always Wernher Von Braun.”[17]
“}}

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove

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Did natural selection make the Dutch the tallest people on the planet?

June 16, 2015

Did natural #selection make the Dutch the tallest people on the
planet? http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/04/did-natural-selection-make-dutch-tallest-people-planet Height spurt in last century not all nurture

QT:{{”
“This study drives home the message that the human population is still subject to natural selection,” says Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University who wasn’t involved in the study. “It strikes at the core of our understanding of human nature, and how malleable it is.” It also confirms what Stearns knows from personal experience about the population in the northern Netherlands, where the study took place: “Boy, they are tall.”
…
“For many years, the U.S. population was the tallest in the world. In the 18th century, American men were 5 to 8 centimeters taller than those in the Netherlands. Today, Americans are the fattest, but they lost the race for height to northern Europeans—including Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, and Estonians—sometime in the 20th century.

Just how these peoples became so tall isn’t clear, however. Genetics has an important effect on body height: Scientists have found at least 180 genes that influence how tall you become. Each one has only a small effect, but together, they may explain up to 80% of the variation in height within a population. Yet environmental factors play a huge role as well. The children of Japanese immigrants to Hawaii, for instance, grew much taller than their parents. Scientists assume that a diet rich in milk and meat played a major role.

The Dutch have become so much taller in such a short period that scientists chalk most of it up to their changing environment. As the Netherlands developed, it became one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of cheese and milk. An increasingly egalitarian distribution of wealth and universal access to health care may also have helped.”
“}}

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America’s Epidemic of Unnecessary Care

June 1, 2015

America’s Epidemic of Unnecessary Care
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/overkill-atul-gawande QT: Facing a doctor, what are you going to fear: doing too little or too much?

Annals of Health Care MAY 11, 2015 ISSUE
Overkill
An avalanche of unnecessary medical care is harming patients physically and financially. What can we do about it?
BY ATUL GAWANDE

QT:{{”
Still, when it’s your turn to sit across from a doctor, in the white glare of a clinic, with your back aching, or your head throbbing, or a scan showing some small possible abnormality, what are you going to fear more—the prospect of doing too little or of doing too much?” …
“Right now, we’re so wildly over the boundary line in the other direction that it’s hard to see how we could accept leaving health care the way it is. Waste is not just consuming a third of health-care spending; it’s costing people’s lives. As long as a more thoughtful, more measured style of medicine keeps improving outcomes, change should be easy to cheer for. Still, when it’s your turn to sit across from a doctor, in the white glare of a clinic, with your back aching, or your head throbbing, or a scan showing some small possible abnormality, what are you going to fear more—the prospect of doing too little or of doing too much?”
“}}

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How Do We Build a Safer Car? – The New Yorker

June 1, 2015

How [to] Build a Safer Car?
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/the-engineers-lament QT: Pessimist sees glass as 1/2 empty; optimist, 1/2 full; engineer, 2X what it should be

Dept. of Transportation MAY 4, 2015 ISSUE
The Engineer’s Lament
Two ways of thinking about automotive safety.
BY MALCOLM GLADWELL

QT:{{”
There is an old joke about an engineer, a priest, and a doctor enjoying a round of golf. Ahead of them is a group playing so slowly and inexpertly that in frustration the three ask the greenkeeper for an explanation. “That’s a group of blind firefighters,” they are told. “They lost their sight saving our clubhouse last year, so we let them play for free.”

The priest says, “I will say a prayer for them tonight.”

The doctor says, “Let me ask my ophthalmologist colleagues if anything can be done for them.”

And the engineer says, “Why can’t they play at night?”

The greenkeeper explains the behavior of the firefighters. The priest empathizes; the doctor offers care. All three address the social context of the situation: the fact that the firefighters’ disability has inadvertently created conflict on the golf course. Only the engineer tries to solve the problem.
…
Almost all engineering jokes—and there are many—are versions of this belief: that the habits of mind formed by the profession enable engineers to see things differently from the rest of us. “A pessimist sees the glass as half empty. An optimist sees the glass as half full. The engineer sees the glass as twice the size it needs to be.” “}}

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Noninvasive Analysis of the Sputum Transcriptome Discriminates Clinical Phenotypes of Asthma (ATS Journals)

May 30, 2015

Analysis of the Sputum Transcriptome Discriminates Clinical Phenotypes of Asthma http://www.atsjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1164/rccm.201408-1440OC Consistent blood expression patterns

Noninvasive Analysis of the Sputum Transcriptome Discriminates
Clinical Phenotypes of Asthma (ATS Journals)

Yan, X., Chu, J.-H., Gomez, J., Koenigs, M., Holm, C., He, X., Perez,
M. F., Zhao, H., Mane, S., Martinez, F. D., Ober, C., Nicolae, D. L.,
Barnes, K. C., London, S. J., Gilliland, F., Weiss, S. T., Raby, B.
A., Cohn, L., and Chupp, G. L. “Non-Invasive Analysis of the Sputum
Transcriptome Discriminates Clinical Phenotypes of Asthma” American
Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine (2015):
doi:10.1164/rccm.201408-1440OC,

QT:{{"
Conclusions: There are common patterns of gene expression in the
sputum and blood of children and adults that are associated with near
fatal, severe and milder asthma.
"}}

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The Mind of Marc Andreessen – The New Yorker

May 23, 2015

QT:{{”
Andreessen laughed and continued, “They were doomed from the start, because Apple in Cupertino”—in Silicon Valley—“had spent three years building that. I’ve been totally determined to be on the other side of that dynamic by being here, because success in software follows a power-law distribution. It’s not Coke and Pepsi and a bunch of others; it’s winner take all. Second prize is a set of steak knives, and third prize is you’re fired.”
“}}

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-advance-man

TOMORROW’S ADVANCE MAN

by Joe Pugliese

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