linkstream2 microblog

Your an adult. Your brain, not so much by @CarlZimmer
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/science/youre-an-adult-your-brain-not-so-much.html Non-obvious ethical implications of developmental neuroscience

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“The human brain reaches its adult volume by age 10, but the neurons that make it up continue to change for years after that. The connections between neighboring neurons get pruned back, as new links emerge between more widely separated areas of the brain.

Eventually this reshaping slows, a sign that the brain is maturing. But it happens at different rates in different parts of the brain.

The pruning in the occipital lobe, at the back of the brain, tapers off by age 20. In the frontal lobe, in the front of the brain, new links are still forming at age 30, if not beyond.

“It challenges the notion of what ‘done’ really means,” Dr. Somerville said.

As the anatomy of the brain changes, its activity changes as well. In a child’s brain, neighboring regions tend to work together. By adulthood, distant regions start acting in concert. Neuroscientists have speculated that this long-distance harmony lets the adult brain work more efficiently and process more information.”
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Quotes from the book I particularly liked:

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In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aimlessly. You don’t get anywhere by not wasting time on something, unfortunately, that the parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget. He was in Pavia.

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The sun bends space around itself, and Earth does not turn around it because of a mysterious force but because it is racing directly in a space that inclines, like a marble that rolls in a funnel. There are no mysterious forces generated at the center of the funnel; it is the curved nature of the walls that causes the marble to roll. Planets circle around the sun, and things fall, because space curves.

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The difference between past and future exists only when there is heat. …

Boltzmann’s idea is subtle and brings into play the idea of
probability. Heat does not move from hot things to cold things due to an absolute law: it does so only with a large degree of probability. The reason for this is that it is statistically more probable that a quickly moving atom of the hot substance collides with a cold one and leaves it a little of its energy, rather than vice versa. Energy is conserved in the collisions but tends to get distributed in more or less equal parts when there are many collisions. In this way the temperature of objects in contact with each other tends to equalize. It is not impossible for a hot body to become hotter through contact with a colder one: it is just extremely improbable.

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http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelsimmons/2013/07/22/power-of-relational-thinking/#b556e894ab33

quote from the meeting

Dark side of the..genome
http://www.Nature.com/nature/journal/v538/n7624/full/538275a.html QT: NextGen..has been..the tech engine of #ENCODE..but..hi-res livecell imaging [is coming]

Has figure from Khurana et al. Nat. Rev. Genet. (’16)

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“Next-generation sequencing has been — and still is — the
technological engine of ENCODE. But looking ahead, researchers might be able to roll out high-resolution live-cell imaging on a large scale to watch the state of the genome change in real time using specific markers. This technology could be disruptive. “If we had a better microscope, we wouldn’t be sequencing anymore,” says
Stamatoyannopoulos”
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark

QT:{{"
For some time, Gell-Mann was undecided on an actual spelling for the term he intended to coin, until he found the word quark in James Joyce’s book Finnegans Wake:

–Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark
And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

— James Joyce, Finnegans Wake[49]
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaximander

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Anaximander was the first to conceive a mechanical model of the world. In his model, the Earth floats very still in the centre of the infinite, not supported by anything. It remains "in the same place because of its indifference", a point of view that Aristotle considered ingenious, but false, in On the Heavens.[30] Its curious shape is that of a cylinder[31] with a height one-third of its diameter. The flat top forms the inhabited world, which is surrounded by a circular oceanic mass.

Anaximander’s realization that the Earth floats free without falling and does not need to be resting on something has been indicated by many as the first cosmological revolution and the starting point of scientific thinking.[32][33] Karl Popper calls this idea "one of the boldest, most revolutionary, and most portentous ideas in the whole history of human thinking."[34] Such a model allowed the concept that celestial bodies could pass under the Earth, opening the way to Greek astronomy.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needleman%E2%80%93Wunsch_algorithm

relates to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner%E2%80%93Fischer_algorithm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_J._Fischer

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Historical notes and algorithm development[edit]

The original purpose of the algorithm described by Needleman and Wunsch was to find similarities in the amino acid sequences of two proteins.[1]

Needleman and Wunsch describe their algorithm explicitly for the case when the alignment is penalized solely by the matches and mismatches, and gaps have no penalty (d=0). The original publication from 1970 suggests the recursion …

A better dynamic programming algorithm with quadratic running time for the same problem (no gap penalty) was first introduced[3] by David Sankoff in 1972. Similar quadratic-time algorithms were discovered independently by T. K. Vintsyuk[4] in 1968 for speech processing ("time warping"), and by Robert A. Wagner and Michael J. Fischer[5] in 1974 for string matching.

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When a country melts
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/24/greenland-is-melting Calving of Greenland’s icesheets portends >3′ rise in sea level. Has this been set into motion?

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“I first visited the Greenland ice sheet in the summer of 2001. At that time, vivid illustrations of climate change were hard to come by. Now they’re everywhere—in the flooded streets of Florida and South Carolina, in the beetle-infested forests of Colorado and Montana, in the too warm waters of the Mid-Atlantic and the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, in the mounds of dead mussels that washed up this summer on the coast of Long Island and the piles of dead fish that coated the banks of the Yellowstone River.

But the problem with global warming—and the reason it continues to resist illustration, even as the streets flood and the forests die and the mussels rot on the shores—is that experience is an inadequate guide to what’s going on. The climate operates on a time delay. When carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere, it takes decades—in a technical sense, millennia—for the earth to equilibrate. This summer’s fish kill was a product of warming that had become inevitable twenty or thirty years ago, and the warming that’s being locked in today won’t be fully felt until today’s toddlers reach middle age. In effect, we are living in the climate of the past, but already we’ve determined the climate’s future.

Global warming’s back-loaded temporality makes all the warnings—from scientists, government agencies, and, especially, journalists—seem hysterical, Cassandra-like—Ototototoi!—even when they are understated. Once feedbacks take over, the climate can change quickly, and it can change radically. At the end of the last ice age, during an event known as meltwater pulse 1A, sea levels rose at the rate of more than a foot a decade. It’s likely that the “floodgates” are already open, and that large sections of Greenland and Antarctica are fated to melt. It’s just the ice in front of us that’s still frozen.”
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Protecting Your Digital #Privacy
http://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/protecting-your-digital-privacy-is-not-as-hard-as-you-might-think 66 hints, from evaluating password entropy to determining
https://HaveIBeenPWNed.com

http://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/66-ways-to-protect-your-privacy-right-now/

things l liked from the site:

QT:{{”
Your Long-approved list of paperwork to shred includes any documents containing the following:

• Social Security number (even just the last four digits)
• Birth date
• Credit card numbers
• Account numbers from financial institutions
• Medical insurance numbers
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http://dmachoice.org

https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Password-entropy (bigger is better) = log2 ([alphabet-size]^[password-length])

Faking your address for some sites:
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For an address, may we suggest Bart Simpson’s—742 Evergreen Terrace? “}}

Grading Candidates, w. medians is robust but affected by the no-show paradox – extra votes for top-ranked can hurt
http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/grading-candidates

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Although the median is generally less manipulable than the mean, which would seem to favor majority judgment over range voting, majority judgment suffers from a bizarre problem that range voting and approval voting do not—its vulnerability to the “no-show paradox,” as illustrated by the following example, in which five voters give candidates A and B the following grades:

Notice that all three voting systems, including approval voting, render A the winner, and that A receives a higher grade than B from every voter except the second one.

Now suppose that two new voters show up, and each gives a grade of Excellentto candidate A and a grade of Very Good to candidate B. These additions would not change the outcome under range and approval voting; in fact, they would give a bigger victory to A. By contrast, under majority judgment, the new median would be Very Good for B but would remain Good for A, so B would win, even though it was A who received more support from the new voters.

Although the new voters have given higher grades to A than to B, their votes have backfired, electing B instead, so they would have been better off not showing up. This paradox is clearly antithetical to democratic choice—more support should help, not hurt. The authors acknowledge that majority judgment is vulnerable to the no-show paradox, but they dismiss this as “of little real importance” in practice.

Majority judgment is not the only system in which additional support can sometimes hurt a candidate. In some systems—such as the Hare system of single transferable vote (also known as the alternative vote or instant-runoff voting), which is used in Australia, among other places—voters rank all of the candidates. Those who receive the fewest first-choice votes are sequentially eliminated, and the votes cast for them are transferred to the next-lower choice who remains until one candidate receives a majority. Under this system, a voter who raises a candidate in his or her ranking can actually cause that candidate to lose. Voting systems that allow this to occur are said to be nonmonotonic.

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Grading Candidates
BOOK REVIEW

Steven J. Brams

MAJORITY JUDGMENT: Measuring, Ranking, and Electing. Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki. xvi + 414 pp. The MIT Press, 2010. $40.