Posts Tagged ‘quote’

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What the shape of our cities says about the way that we live

November 22, 2014

What the shape of our cities says about the way we live
http://www.salon.com/2014/11/16/what_the_shape_of_our_cities_says_about_the_way_that_we_live Longer commutes from more distended layout (via night lights)

Nighttime light shows more distended layout gives longer commutes & a lower standard of living… but this only applies to walking-only cities

QT:{{”

What she found is that “compactness” — in her paper, the nearer, basically, that a city’s shape is to a circle — is a kind of urban amenity, like a subway line or a movie theater, that people will pay for. All else being equal, India’s compact cities have lower wages, higher rents and shorter commutes. “One standard deviation
deterioration in city shape, corresponding to a 720 meter increase in the average within-city round-trip,” Harari writes, “entails a welfare loss equivalent to a 5 percent decrease in income.”

An instructive comparison is between Kolkota (Calcutta) and Bengaluru (Bangalore). Among the country’s largest cities, these are on opposite ends of Harari’s measurement system: giraffe-like Kolkota has the “worst” geometry, squat Bengaluru the “best.” According to Harari, “if Kolkota had the same compact shape that Bengaluru has, the average trip to the center would be shorter by 4.5 kilometers and the average trip within the city would be shorter by 6.2 km.”

Just a couple of miles difference, right? But the average commute speed in India is 12 km per hour, and is forecast to fall to 9 km per hour within the decade. For the average person, on an average potential trip, compactness could save an hour a day.

“}}

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Do Data From Wearables Belong In The Medical Record?

November 16, 2014

Do Data From #Wearables Belong In The Medical Record? by @dshaywitz
http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidshaywitz/2014/09/07/do-data-from-wearables-belong-in-the-medical-record/ The dichotomy: High-quality morsels v messy gobs

QT:{{”
I suspect that the routine use of wearable data by the medical establishment will closely parallel that of genomic data: everyone will agree that it’s interesting, and represents an area that should be followed closely, but relatively few pioneers will actually jump in, and really start collecting data and figuring out how all this works; the return on investment will be hard to define, the
uncertainty viewed as too high.

It wouldn’t surprise me if many of the same innovators that are early adopters of genomics (e.g. pursue whole genome sequencing on an ambitious scale) will be also be the earliest adopters of data from wearables, with the idea that the combination of rich genotype plus rich phenotype is likely to be an important source of insight (again, keep in mind that I work at a genomic data company). Within pharma, I’d suspect many of the largest companies (playing not to lose) will pursue lightly-resourced exploratory projects in this area, while companies I’ve called mid-size disruptors are more likely to take a real run at this, as part of a more confident and aggressive strategy of playing to win.

I’m obviously a passionate and long-time believer in the value of collecting and colliding large volumes of data, but I also recognize that this remains largely an unproven proposition, and I can understand why anxious administrators, prudent physicians, cautious corporations, and sensible investigators might prefer to place their bets elsewhere at the moment, deciding it’s still too early to jump in.
“}}

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Charles Babbage Quotes – 36 Science Quotes – Dictionary of Science Quotations and Scientist Quotes

November 1, 2014

Babbage … gave the name to the [Cambridge] Analytical Society, which he stated was formed to advocate ‘the principles of pure d-ism as opposed to the dot-age of the university.’

— W.W.R. Ball
History of Mathematics (3rd Ed., 1901), 451.

Create qt on calculus notations

http://todayinsci.com/B/Babbage_Charles/BabbageCharles-Quotations.htm

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Geneticists tap human knockouts

November 1, 2014

Sequenced genomes reveal mutations that disable single genes and can point to new drugs.

Ewen Callaway

28 October 2014 Corrected:
29 October 2014

http://www.nature.com/news/geneticists-tap-human-knockouts-1.16239

You should also read the Corrections to this article
http://www.nature.com/news/geneticists-tap-human-knockouts-1.16239#/correction1

QT:{{”

The poster child for human-knockout efforts is a new class of drugs that block a gene known as PCSK9 (see Nature 496, 152–155; 2013). The gene was discovered in French families with extremely high cholesterol levels in the early 2000s. But researchers soon found that people with rare mutations that inactivate one copy ofPCSK9 have low cholesterol and rarely develop heart disease. The first PCSK9-blocking drugs should hit pharmacies next year, with manufacturers jostling for a share of a market that could reach US$25 billion in five years.

“I think there are hundreds more stories like PCSK9 out there, maybe even thousands,” in which a drug can mimic an advantageous
loss-of-function mutation, says Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, California. Mark Gerstein, a bio­informatician at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, predicts that human knockouts will be especially useful for identifying drugs that treat diseases of ageing. “You could imagine there’s a gene that is beneficial to you as a 25-year-old, but the thing is not doing a good job for you when you’re 75.”

“}}

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The genomic landscape of Neanderthal ancestry in present-day humans : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

November 1, 2014

The genomic landscape of #Neanderthal ancestry in…humans
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v507/n7492/full/nature12961.html Regions enriched & depleted in ancient alleles, from 1000G

1004 indiv. => 1000G phase 1

QT:{{”
Here, we have systematically inferred Neandertal haplotypes in the genomes of 1,004 present-day humans. Regions that harbor a high frequency of Neandertal alleles in modern humans are enriched for genes affecting keratin filaments suggesting that Neandertal alleles may have helped modern humans adapt to non-African environments. Neandertal alleles also continue to shape human biology, as we identify multiple Neandertal-derived alleles that confer risk for disease. We also identify regions of millions of base pairs that are nearly devoid of Neandertal ancestry and enriched in genes, implying selection to remove genetic material derived from Neandertals. “}}

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The Disruption Myth – Justin Fox – The Atlantic

October 27, 2014

The Disruption Myth
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/the-disruption-myth/379348 Term’s evolution from #Kuhn to Foster to Christensen. Does it still apply in the business world?

BUSINESS OCTOBER 2014
The Disruption Myth

The idea that businesses are more vulnerable to upstarts than ever is out-of-date—and that’s a big problem.

QT:{{”

After several years of research, and a close reading of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (which introduced the concept of the paradigm shift), Foster came up with an explanation. What threatened these well-run market leaders were what he called “technological discontinuities”—moments when the dominant technology in a market abruptly shifted, and the expertise and scale that the companies had built up suddenly didn’t count for much. One example: when electronic cash registers went from 10 percent of the market in 1972 to 90 percent just four years later, NCR, long the leading maker of cash registers, was caught unprepared, resulting in big losses and mass layoffs.

Foster’s 1986 book, Innovation: The Attacker’s Advantage, described this phenomenon, offered tips for surviving it (just being aware of the possibility of a technological shift was the first step), and predicted that there was much more to come as giant waves of innovation in electronics, software, and biotechnology buffeted the economy. “The Age of Discontinuity,” Foster called it, borrowing the line from the management guru Peter Drucker.

The book did well, but the expression didn’t stick. “I will forever rue the day I didn’t call it ‘disruption,’ ” Foster now says. That was left instead to Clayton Christensen, a consultant and an entrepreneur who headed to Harvard Business School for a mid-career doctorate in 1989 and started teaching there three years later. For his
dissertation….

“}}

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Candy Crush’s Puzzling Mathematics » American Scientist

October 26, 2014

Candy Crush’s Puzzling #Mathematics http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.16278,y.2014,no.6,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx Game reducible to a NP-hard logic circuit; maybe useful in solving other problems

QT:{{"
To show that Candy Crush is a mathematically hard problem, we could
reduce to it from any problem in NP. To make life simple, my
colleagues and I started from the granddaddy of all problems in NP,
finding a solution to a logical formula. This is called the
satisfiability problem. You will have solved such a problem if you
ever tackled a logic puzzle. You have to decide which propositions to
make true, and which to make false, to satisfy some set of logical
formulae: The Englishman lives in the red house. The Spaniard owns the
dog. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house. Should the
proposition that the Spaniard owns the zebra be made true or false?

To reduce a logic puzzle to a Candy Crush problem, we exploit the
close connection between logic and electrical circuits. Any logical
formula can simply be represented with an electrical circuit.
Computers are, after all, just a large collection of logic gates—ANDs,
ORs, and NOTs—with wires connecting them together. So all we need to
do is show that you could build an electrical circuit in a Candy Crush
game.

…

The idea of problem reduction offers an intriguing possibility for
Candy Crush addicts. Perhaps we can profit from the millions of hours
humans spend solving Candy Crush problems? By exploiting the idea of a
problem reduction, we could conceal some practical computational
problems within these puzzles. Other computational problems benefit
from such interactions: Every time you prove to a website that you’re
a person and not a bot by solving a CAPTCHA (one of those ubiquitous
distorted images of a word or number that you have to type in) the
answer helps Google digitize old books and newspapers. Perhaps we
should put Candy Crush puzzles to similar good uses.

"}}

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Leon Botstein and the Future of Bard College

October 24, 2014

Pictures from an Institution http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/pictures-institution Interesting fact on #Bard College: Leon Botstein became president decades ago at 23

Leon Botstein made Bard College what it is, but can he insure that it
outlasts him?Profiles SEPTEMBER 29, 2014 ISSUE
BY ALICE GREGORY

QT:{{"
Botstein graduated from high school at sixteen and went to the
University of Chicago, where he majored in history and founded the
school’s chamber orchestra. He began Ph.D. studies at Harvard,
focussing on the social history of modernist music in Vienna. In
Cambridge, he met his first wife, with whom he had two daughters. (He
has two more children from his second marriage.) In 1970, having left
Harvard to be a special assistant to the president of the New York
City Board of Education, Botstein took a job as president of Franconia
College, a small, now defunct institution in New Hampshire, run out of
a former resort hotel. At twenty-three, he was the youngest college
president that America had ever had. A 1971 profile that ran in
Playboy described him as “a bespectacled, long-haired youth” and
included a photo of him, in a rumpled shirt and a paisley tie, next to
an office door marked “President” in a curiously Tolkienesque font.

…
December, 2013, after a three-month review, Moody’s Investors Service
downgraded Bard’s bond rating three notches and revised its outlook to
“negative.” The Moody’s report cited Bard’s “exceedingly thin
liquidity with full draw on operating lines of credit,” “weak
documentation and transparency,” “willingness to fund operations and
projects prior to payment on pledges,” and “growing dependence on cash
gifts.” (The report found that in 2012 and 2013 more than forty per
cent of annual operating revenues came from gifts. Among other small
private colleges, about seven per cent is typical.) Six months
earlier, Bard had had monthly liquidity of $7.1 million—equal to just
two weeks’ worth of operating costs. Bard is highly leveraged,
carrying a hundred and sixty million dollars of debt, which is close
to its operating budget of a hundred and eighty-five million. The
undergraduate endowment (eighty million dollars) is a tenth that of
Vassar, a school that is comparable to Bard in both size and age and
is one Amtrak stop to the south.

"}}

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Google and the Right to Be Forgotten

October 24, 2014

The Solace of Oblivion http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/solace-oblivion In Europe, the right to be forgotten trumps #Google. In the US copyright is effective for this

QT:{{
In the effort to escape unwanted attention on the Internet,
individuals and companies have had success with one weapon: copyright
law. It is unlawful to post photographs or other copyrighted material
without the permission of the copyright holder. “I needed to get
ownership of the photos,” Bremer, the Catsouras family’s lawyer, told
me. So he began a lengthy negotiation with the California Highway
Patrol to persuade it to surrender copyright on the photographs. In
the end, though, the C.H.P. would not make the deal.

Other victims of viral Internet trauma have fared better with the
copyright approach. In August, racy private photographs of Jennifer
Lawrence, Kate Upton, and other celebrities were leaked to several Web
sites. (The source of the leaks has not been identified.) Google has
long had a system in place to block copyrighted material from turning
up in its searches. Motion-picture companies, among others, regularly
complain about copyright infringement on YouTube, which Google owns,
and Google has a process for identifying and removing these links.
Several of the leaked photographs were selfies, so the women
themselves owned the copyrights; friends had taken the other pictures.
Lawyers for one of the women established copyrights for all the
photographs they could, and then went to sites that had posted the
pictures, and to Google, and insisted that the material be removed.
Google complied, as did many of the sites, and now the photographs are
difficult to find on the Internet, though they have not disappeared.
“For the most part, the world goes through search engines,” one lawyer
involved in the effort to limit the distribution of the photographs
told me. “Now it’s like a tree falling in the forest. There may be
links out there, but if you can’t find them through a search engine
they might as well not exist.”
…
The job had two parts. The first was technical—that is, creating a
software infrastructure so that links could be removed. This was not
especially difficult, since Google could apply the system already in
place for copyrighted and trademarked works. Similarly, Google had
already blocked links that might have led to certain dangerous or
unlawful activity, like malware or child pornography.

}}

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What Kids Around the World Eat for Breakfast – NYTimes.com

October 24, 2014

What Kids Around the World Eat http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/08/magazine/eaters-all-over.html Neophobia: "evo-sensibly" they initially reject unfamiliar food. Sugar is an exception

QT:{{

Children, and young omnivorous animals generally, tend to reject
unfamiliar foods on the first few tries. Evolutionarily, it makes
sense for an inexperienced creature to be cautious about new foods,
which might, after all, be poisonous. It is only through repeated
exposure and mimicry that toddlers adjust to new tastes — breakfast
instead of, say, dinner. That we don’t put pickle relish on waffles or
eat Honey Bunches of Oats for supper are rules of culture, not of
nature. As children grow, their palates continue to be shaped by the
food environment they were born into (as well as by the savvy
marketers of sugar cereals who advertise directly to the 10-and-under
set and their tired parents). This early enculturation means a child
in the Philippines might happily consume garlic fried rice topped with
dried and salted fish calledtuyo at 6 in the morning, while many
American kids would balk at such a meal (even at dinnertime). We learn
to be disgusted, just as we learn to want a second helping.

Sugar is the notable exception to “food neophobia,” as researchers
call that early innate fear. In utero, a 13-week-old fetus will gulp
amniotic fluid more quickly when it contains sugar. Our native sweet
tooth helps explain the global popularity of sugary cereals and
chocolate spreads like Nutella: Getting children to eat sugar is easy.
Teaching them to eat slimy fermented soybeans, by contrast, requires a
more robust and conservative culinary culture, one that resists the
candy-coated breakfast buffet.

}}

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