Posts Tagged ‘x57s’
Dietary supplements: Nobel or ignoble – The Boston Globe
April 3, 2017Scientists are cracking the code of when genetic variants matter
April 2, 2017Cracking the code of when #genetic variants matter, by @CarlZimmer https://www.StatNews.com/2016/08/17/genetic-variants-ex-ac-sequence/ Underscores need for realistic guidelines on risk
Here, there and everywhere | The Economist
April 2, 2017Here, there & everywhere
http://www.Economist.com/technology-quarterly/2017-03-09/quantum-devices Overview of #quantum computing mentions using it to #encrypt transmission of genomic data
QT:{{”
Thanks to the development of ever more secure links, quantum cryptography has recently been deployed more widely. ID Quantique has installed quantum links between data centres of KPN, a Dutch telecoms firm; of Battelle, an American non-profit research firm; and of Hyposwiss and Notenstein, two Swiss private banks. It offers links between financial institutions in Geneva and a disaster-recovery centre 50km away. In 2015 researchers at Toshiba in Japan began sending quantum-encrypted genomic data from a research facility in Sendai to Tohoku University, 7km away.
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Costly drugs | February 27, 2017 Issue – Vol. 95 Issue 9 | Chemical & Engineering News
March 25, 2017Pushback on costly #drugs
http://CEN.acs.org/articles/95/i9/Pushback.html Table of signpost meds: $80k Sovaldi hep. C treatment, $14k/yr for PCSK9 inhibitor Repatha
Does Trump Really Have the Best Words?
March 12, 2017Does Trump…Have the Best Words?
http://www.LitCharts.com/analitics/inaugural #Lexical analysis of 58 inaugurals; words/sent., we-v-I & will-v-shall usage, &c
QT:{{”
“V. Inaugural Language Has Kept Up With the Times
Modern inaugurals are less complex than early inaugurals, but not at the cost of lexical richness. Presidents aren’t exactly dumbing things down for us–they don’t assume we have limited vocabularies–but they are trying to speak our language. So they tend to use words that fit the current vernacular.
Take, for example, the choice to use “will” or “shall”:
To Americans, “shall” began to sound outmoded (or perhaps British) somewhere around World War II, and presidents pretty much stopped using it. “Will” has the same imperative force, but doesn’t clang as much to modern ears.
Mr. Trump, who has an ear for vernacular, didn’t use “shall” at all in his speech. Instead, he used “will” a record-breaking 43 times, and its prevalence was plain as he declared his intention to upend Washington politics, reinforce borders, and turn us into winners in what he sees as a zero-sum world:
….
In addition to “we,” Mr. Trump also hit the word “America” pretty hard. If you compare the use of “America,” “American,” and
“Americans,” to “citizenship,” “citizen,” and “citizens,” you’ll see that this tendency is also part of a trend:”
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The Second Avenue Subway Is Here! – The New Yorker
March 11, 2017The 2nd Avenue #Subway Is Here
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/13/the-second-avenue-subway-is-here/amp A century in the making (+ costing $4.5B for phase I) for a mass transit Q-tip
extends the tip of the Q !
By sparring with AlphaGo, researchers are learning how an algorithm thinks
February 26, 2017With #AlphaGo researchers are learning how an algorithm thinks
https://qz.com/897498/by-sparring-with-alphago-researchers-are-learning-how-an-algorithm-thinks What images #NNs conjure up for a classification term
QT:[{”
-“Tyka was part of the Google team that first published work on DeepDream, a computer-vision experiment that went viral in 2015. The team trained a deep neural network to classify images, i.e. show the network a picture, it tells you what the image depicts. Except instead of asking it to look at pictures, they programmed the network to look at a word and produce what it thought would be an image that represents the word. The deep neural network would then supply its visual “idea” of different words.
And it worked. The team gave the network the word “banana,” for example, and it produced a dizzying fractal of banana-shaped objects. But the experiment also provided insight into how the machine thought about objects. When asked to produce dumbbells, the network generated gray dumbbell shapes with beige protrusions—arms. The neural net correlated arms and dumbbells so highly that they were seen as almost one object.”
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How DNA Editing Could Change Life on Earth
February 22, 2017QT:{{”
“One of Esvelt’s goals at M.I.T. is to facilitate that shift. Part of his job, as he sees it, is to challenge what he describes as “the ridiculous notion that natural and good are the same thing.” Instead, he told me, we ought to think about intelligent design as an instrument of genetics. He smiled because the phrase “intelligent design” usually refers to the anti-Darwinian theory that the universe, with all its intricacies and variations, is too complex to have arisen by chance—that there had to be a guiding hand. The truth is more prosaic, and also more remarkable: for four billion years, evolution, driven by natural selection and random mutation, has insured that the most efficient genes would survive and the weakest would disappear. But, propelled by CRISPR and other tools of synthetic biology, intelligent design has taken on an entirely new meaning, one that threatens to transcend Darwin—because evolution may soon be guided by us.”
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How DNA Editing Could Change Life on Earth
http://www.NewYorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/rewriting-the-code-of-life Intelligent design from CRISPR & gene drive rather than natural selection
The complete list of Siri commands – CNET
February 20, 2017Some ones l liked.
QT:{{”
Schedule or cancel a meeting. Ex.: “Schedule a meeting with [name] tomorrow at 11:30 a.m.” or “Cancel my 5 p.m. appointment.”
Set location-aware reminders. Ex.: “Remind me to remember my keys when I leave,” or “Remind me to feed the dog when I get home.”
Set alarms. Ex.: “Set an alarm for 1 a.m.” or “Set an alarm for six hours from now.”
Delete/turn off all alarms. Ex. “Delete all alarms” or “Turn off all alarms.”
Check the number of days between dates. Ex.: “How many days until October 6?” or “How many days between April 3 and June 16?”
Send an email. Ex.: “Send email to [name] about [subject] and say [message].”
Set a timer. Ex.: “Set the timer for 10 minutes.”
Check the weather. Ex.: “What’s the weather like today?” or “Do I need an umbrella?”
Random tips and tricks:
Find out what airplanes are currently flying above you. Ex.: “What airplanes are above me?”
Roll a die or roll two dice.
Tell me a joke.
What does the fox say?
Knock knock.
Who’s on first?
Why did the chicken cross the road?
What is zero divided by zero?
Learn how to say my name.
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https://www.cnet.com/how-to/the-complete-list-of-siri-commands/
The Heroism of Incremental Care
February 18, 2017The Heroism of Incremental Care, by @Atul_Gawande
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/23/the-heroism-of-incremental-care Positively compares GPs-v-surgeons to bridge inspectors v rescuers
QT:{{”
“For a long time, this would have seemed as foolish as giving your money to a palmist. What will happen to a bridge—or to your body—fifty years from now? We had no more than a vague idea. But the
investigation of the 1967 Silver Bridge collapse marked an advance in our ability to shift from reacting to bridge catastrophes to anticipating and averting them.
Around the same time, something similar was happening in medicine. Scientists were discovering the long-term health significance of high blood pressure, diabetes, and other conditions. We’d begun collecting the data, developing the computational capacity to decode the patterns, and discovering the treatments that could change them. Seemingly random events were becoming open to prediction and alteration. Our frame of medical consideration could widen to encompass our entire life spans.
…
Our ability to use information to understand and reshape the future is accelerating in multiple ways. We have at least four kinds of information that matter to your health and well-being over time: information about the state of your internal systems (from your imaging and lab-test results, your genome sequencing); the state of your living conditions (your housing, community, economic, and environmental circumstances); the state of the care you receive (what your practitioners have done and how well they did it, what
medications and other treatments they have provided); and the state of your behaviors (your patterns of sleep, exercise, stress, eating, sexual activity, adherence to treatments). The potential of this information is so enormous it is almost scary.
Instead of once-a-year checkups, in which people are like bridges undergoing annual inspection, we will increasingly be able to use smartphones and wearables to continuously monitor our heart rhythm, breathing, sleep, and activity, registering signs of illness as well as the effectiveness and the side effects of treatments. Engineers have proposed bathtub scanners that could track your internal organs for minute changes over time. We can decode our entire genome for less than the cost of an iPad and, increasingly, tune our care to the exact makeup we were born with.
Our health-care system is not designed for this future—or, indeed, for this present. We built it at a time when such capabilities were virtually nonexistent. When illness was experienced as a random catastrophe, and medical discoveries focussed on rescue, insurance for unanticipated, episodic needs was what we needed. Hospitals and heroic interventions got the large investments; incrementalists were scanted. After all, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, they had little to offer that made a major difference in people’s lives. But the more capacity we develop to monitor the body and the brain for signs of future breakdown and to correct course along the way—to deliver “precision medicine,” as the lingo goes—the greater the difference health care can make in people’s lives, as well as in reducing future costs.”
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