linkstream2 microblog

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And the take-home message from their efforts to control the release of harmful particulates in the air is simple: ban wood burning. “”}}

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23831801-400-why-the-uks-plan-to-tackle-air-pollution-is-mostly-hot-air/

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With the right precautions, there’s a lot you can do to prevent Lyme disease. Here’s what you need to know.

Know the Four Places Ticks Like to Hide

Dr. DeShaw stresses that a thorough daily check is key. Ticks, he said, particularly love to hide in these places: (1) behind the knees; (2) in the groin; (3) in the scalp; and (4) in the armpits. A tick should always be removed with tweezers. Grasp it as close to the skin as possible and pull out firmly and smoothly.

Use Repellents

DEET (on skin) and permethrin (on clothing) are the recommended repellents. Essential oils may have some repellent effect, but don’t rely on them, Dr. DeShaw said.

Assess Your Surroundings

If you live in an area where Lyme disease is prevalent, like Connecticut, you may want to treat your lawn or have it treated by a professional. Benjamin Asher, an ear, nose and throat specialist in Manhattan, emphasizes that spraying should be limited to natural options. “We should be respectful to the environment,” he said.

…
Katy Noble, a pediatrician in Stamford, Conn., recommends making “a daily shower or bath at night your nightly ritual, and use that time as a means to check your family for ticks. You may wash off any before they’ve really had a chance to really dig in.”
…
According to Dr. DeShaw, July and August are the peak months for Lyme disease. Don’t slouch on fall, though. He recommends staying vigilant through September and October.”
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Ticked Off
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/style/ticks-lyme-disease-summer.html

H2Oh! Water is actually two liquids disguised as one
https://www.NewScientist.com/article/mg23831800-100-h2oh-water-is-actually-two-liquids-disguised-as-one/ Nice description of the complexity of the phase diagram of #water

Perspective | OPEN | Published: 23 July 2018

Responsible sharing of biomedical data and biospecimens via the “Automatable Discovery and Access Matrix” (ADA-M)

J. Patrick Woolley,
Emily Kirby,
Josh Leslie,
Francis Jeanson,
Moran N. Cabili,
Gregory Rushton,
James G. Hazard,
Vagelis Ladas,
Colin D. Veal,
Spencer J. Gibson,
Anne-Marie Tassé,
Stephanie O. M. Dyke,
Clara Gaff,
Adrian Thorogood,
Bartha Maria Knoppers,
John Wilbanks &
Anthony J. Brookes

npj Genomic Medicinevolume 3, Article number: 17 (2018) | Download Citation

new paper in Nature Genomic Medicine:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41525-018-0057-4

Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet
https://www.Amazon.com/Spam-Shadow-History-Internet-Infrastructures/dp/026252757X Fascinating discussion of #LitSpam: how the #spam arms race led to the development of Bayesian filters & then, in response, a bizarre mash-up of free literary texts meant to evade them

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“Let us return to Turing, briefly, and introduce the fascinating Imitation Game, before we leave litspam and the world of
robot-read/writable text. The idea of a quantifiable, machine-mediated method of describing quali- ties of human affect recurs in the literature of a variety of fields, including criminology, psychology, artificial intelligence, and computer science. Its applications often provide insight into the criteria by which different human states are determined—as described, for example, in Ken Alder’s fascinating work on polygraphs, or in the still understudied history of the “fruit machine,” ….is the so-called Turing Test. The goal of Turing’s 1950 thought experiment (which bears repeating, as it’s widely
misunderstood today) was to “replace the question [of ‘Can machines think?’] by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.” Turing considered the question of machines “thinking” or not to be “too meaningless to deserve discussion,” and, quite brilliantly, turned the question around to whether people think—or rather how we can be convinced that other people think. This project took the form of a parlor game: A and B, a man and a woman, communicate with an “interrogator,” C, by some intermediary such as a messenger or a teleprinter. C knows the two only as “X” and “Y”; after communicating with them, C is to render a verdict as to which is male and which female. A is tasked with convincing C that he, A, is female and B is male; B’s task is the same. “We now ask the question,” Turing continues, “‘What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?’ …

What litspam has produced, remarkably, is a kind of parodic imitation game in which one set of algorithms is constantly trying to convince the other of their acceptable degree of salience—of being of interest and value to the humans. As Charles Stross puts it, “We have one faction that is attempting to write software that can generate messages that can pass a Turing test, and another faction that is attempting to write software that can administer an ad hoc Turing test.” …

Surrealist automatic writing has its particular associative rhythm, and the Burroughsian Cut-Up depends strongly on the taste for jarring juxtapositions favored by its authors (an article from Life, a sequence from The Waste Land, one of Burroughs’s “routines” in which mandrills from Venus kill Eisenhower). Litspam text, along with early comment spam and the strange spam blogs described in the next section, is the expression of an entirely different intentionality without the connotative structure produced by a human writer. The results returned by a probabilistically manipulated search engine, or the poisoned Bayesian spew of bot-generated spam, …
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https://www.amazon.com/Spam-Shadow-History-Internet-Infrastructures/dp/026252757X

Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet [excerpt, Part 2]
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spam-shadow-history-of-internet-excerpt-part-two/

the flap display ….

https://www.vestaboard.com/

the price is pretty steep even after the hefty discount

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/us/dr-arnold-relman-outspoken-medical-editor-dies-at-91.html

TWAS of 229k women identifies new candidate susceptibility genes for breast cancer https://www.Nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0132-x Metascan approach. Derive model for imputing transcriptome from #GTEx & validate against TCGA. Application to BCAC.

Genome-wide prediction & functional characterization of the genetic basis of autism spectrum disorder, by @OlgaTroyanskaya lab
https://www.Nature.com/articles/nn.4353 Intersected candidate #ASD genes w/ #BrainSpan gene expression to find a pre-natal signal for the disease

https://9to5mac.com/2018/07/24/2018-ipad-pro-specs-price-release-date-more/