linkstream2 microblog

Jim Simons, the Numbers King
https://www.NewYorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/jim-simons-the-numbers-king Highlights the new @FlatironInst & one of its new hires, Nick Carriero, who co-wrote the original Yale pseudogene pipeline, PseudoPipe (Pseudogene.org/pseudopipe) HT @Anne_Churchland

QT:{{”
“Our discussion turned to the Flatiron Institute. Renaissance’s computer infrastructure, he said, had been a central part of its success. At universities, Simons said, coding tends to be an erratic process. He said of the graduate students and postdocs who handled such work, “Some of them are pretty good code writers, and some of them are not so good. But then they leave, and there’s no one to maintain that code.” For the institute, he has hired two esteemed coders from academia: Carriero, who had led my tour, had been recruited from Yale, where he had developed the university’s high-performance computing capabilities for the life sciences; Ian Fisk had worked at cern, the particle-physics laboratory outside Geneva. Simons offered them greater authority and high salaries. “They’re the best of the breed,” he said. Carriero and Fisk sometimes consult with their counterparts at Renaissance about technical matters.
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The Magnetohydrodynamic Drive Is Real – & You Can Build One
https://www.Wired.com/story/the-magnetohydrodynamic-drive-is-realand-you-can-build-one/ Great illustration of the cross product & the weird way #magnetism makes things curl around

QT:{{”
“In the diagram, I have a magnet with the north side pointing down. This produces a magnetic field that also mostly points down (as indicated by the red arrow). Now for the awesome physics part. If you have an electric charge moving in a magnetic field, there is a force on that charge—the magnitude of this force depends on the strength of the magnetic field, the value of the electric charge, and the velocity of the charge. This magnetic force can be expressed as the following equation:

If don’t have a degree in physics, there are three things that are crazy about this equation. First, there is this weird arrow symbol over some of the variables. Nothing to be alarmed about—this just means these are vector quantities so that the direction also matters. Next there is this vector B. This represents the value of the magnetic field. Honestly, I’m not sure why we (physicists) always use B for the magnetic field—but we do. Lastly, there is that big “X”. That is not the sign for multiplication, that is the sign for the cross product. I guess I should also point out that “q” is the symbol for the electric charge.”

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18 exponential changes we can expect in the year ahead
https://www.TechnologyReview.com/s/609868/18-exponential-changes-we-can-expect-in-the-year-ahead/ Might be the year of the #Buddha. Quote: “Buddha’s relevance will be driven by a greater awareness of mindfulness & contemplation in our dopamine economy.”

Even Amazon, a Colossus, Has Its Limits, by @mims
https://www.WSJ.com/articles/the-limits-of-amazon-1514808002 Quote: “Imagine the data-collecting power of $FB wedded to the supply-chain empire of $WMT — that’s $AMZN.” But I thought Wal-mart was pretty good at data collection & analytics!

QT:{{”
All of these moves fit into Amazon’s core mission as a data-driven instant- gratification company. Its fanaticism for customer experience is enabled by every technology the company can get its hands on, from data centers to drones. Imagine the data-collecting power of Facebook wedded to the supply-chain empire of Wal-Mart—that’s Amazon. “}}

#Estonia, the Digital Republic
https://www.NewYorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-digital-republic Great description of an advanced nation built on a public rather than private computing infrastructure (X-road). Systems built on a national ID card. Laws & tech explicitly protect personal info even from a casual glance.

QT:{{”
““Let me show you how,” Beljuskina said, and led me into a room filled with medical equipment and a computer in the corner. She logged on with her own I.D. If she were to glance at any patient’s data, she explained, the access would be tagged to her name, and she would get a call inquiring why it was necessary.
…
“Instead of setting up prisoner transport to trial—fraught with security risks—Estonian courts can teleconference defendants into the courtroom from prison.”

…
Lift99, which houses thirty-two companies and five freelancers, had industrial windows, with a two-floor open-plan workspace. Both levels also included smaller rooms named for techies who had done business with Estonia. There was a Zennström Room, after Niklas Zennström, the Swedish entrepreneur who co-founded Skype, in Tallinn. There was a Horowitz Room, for the venture capitalist Ben Horowitz,”
…
“In what may have been the seminal insight of twenty-first-century Estonia, Martens realized that whoever offered the most ubiquitous and secure platform would run the country’s digital future—and that it should be an elected leadership, not profit-seeking Big Tech. …
“Kaevats told me it irked him that so many Westerners saw his country as a tech haven. He thought they were missing the point. “This enthusiasm and optimism around technology is like a value of its own,” he complained. “This gadgetry that I’ve been ranting about? This is not important.” He threw up his hands, scattering ash. “It’s about the mind-set. It’s about the culture. It’s about the human relations—what it enables us to do.””
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QT:{{”

After being harassed by spam calls, a telephone geek took matters into his own hands and devised a way to keep the person on the other end of the line engaged endlessly…..

“The idea is to keep the telemarketer on the call for as long as possible. The longer the conversation goes on, the more eccentric the robot becomes. In one sequence, the robot tells the telemarketer that a bee landed on his arm, and asks the telemarketer to keep talking as he focuses on the bee.

After seeing that the service worked, Mr. Anderson made it freely available to anyone; it works with landlines (with conference call or three-way calling service) and cellphones. To send telemarketing calls to the robot, add the phone number 214-666-4321 to your address book. Then, the next time you get a call from a telemarketer, patch the number in, merge the calls and put your phone on mute while the robot does the talking.”
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A Robot That Has Fun at #Telemarketers’ Expense
https://www.NYTimes.com/2016/02/25/fashion/a-robot-that-has-fun-at-telemarketers-expense.html Quote: “The idea is to keep them on…as long as possible….The next time you get a call from a telemarketer, patch…in” 214-666-4321 & merge calls

Robots Will Transform Fast Food
https://www.theAtlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/iron-chefs/546581/ Some iron chefs work, some don’t: @Starbucks app v @Eatsa salad maker

QT:{{”
“Based just down the road from Yale in New Haven, Conn., and backed by $18 million in funding from the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and others, the start-up is another sign that quantum computing — for decades a distant dream of the world’s computer scientists — is edging closer to reality.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/technology/quantum-computing-research.html

$GOOG Is Giving Away AI That Can Build Your Genome Seq. https://Research.GoogleBlog.com/2017/12/deepvariant-highly-accurate-genomes.html + https://www.Wired.com/story/google-is-giving-away-ai-that-can-build-your-genome-sequence GATK creators now doing a tensor-flow version. Release sounded a bit like IBM unveiling Deep Blue decades ago: “Today, we announce…DeepVariant, a #DeepLearning tech…"

Steven Salzberg’s response to deep variant:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2017/12/11/no-googles-new-ai-cant-build-your-genome-sequence/#5953db7b5774

QT:{{"On Monday, Google released a tool called DeepVariant that uses deep learning—the machine learning technique that now dominates AI—to identify all the mutations that an individual inherits from their parents.1 Modeled loosely on the networks of neurons in the human brain, these massive mathematical models have learned how to do things like identify faces posted to your Facebook news feed, transcribe your inane requests to Siri, and even fight internet trolls. And now, engineers at Google Brain and Verily (Alphabet’s life sciences spin-off) have taught one to take raw sequencing data and line up the billions of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs that make you you.”
"}}

Google Is Giving Away AI That Can Build Your Genome Sequence
https://www.wired.com/story/google-is-giving-away-ai-that-can-build-your-genome-sequence/

#Blockchains: How They Work & Why They’ll Change the World
https://spectrum.IEEE.org/computing/networks/blockchains-how-they-work-and-why-theyll-change-the-world + https://spectrum.IEEE.org/computing/networks/do-you-need-a-blockchain Overview of the technology, with a focus piece on whether it applies to a particular domain. Not sure we need this in genomics…

Do You Need a Blockchain? – IEEE Spectrum
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/do-you-need-a-blockchain