linkstream2 microblog

The pain when children fly the nest by @AdamGopnik
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22207482 Eloquent description of an asymmetrical relationship

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“The new and more scientific explanation for the asymmetry is that it is all in our inheritance. Our genes are just using us to make more of them. (That Dawkinsian idea of selfish genes always gives me an image of the galley slaves on a Roman ship, peering and panting out of their little window and then, with a silent nod to each other, deciding where to steer the ship while the captain frets helplessly above.)” “}}

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Dr. Weitzman … joined the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, of which the Institute of Chronobiology is part, last year.
Chronobiology is the study of the biological rhythms of life processes.
Previously, he had directed the Sleep-Wake Disorders Center, a diagnosis and treatment facility, at the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and was professor of neurology and neurosciences at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, also in the Bronx. Studied Night Workers
In 1961, he joined Einstein, becoming chairman of the department of neurology in 1971. He was named chief of the department of neurology at Montefiore in 1969. At Montefiore, Dr. Weitzman also directed the Laboratory for Human Chronophysiology, a research unit.
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http://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/16/obituaries/dr-elliot-d-weitzman-expert-on-sleep-dies.html

Also, forgot he moved into a new home….

http://dalido.narod.ru/NW/NW-quote5.html

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Wiener as a prototype of an “absent-minded professor”.
These anecdotes (collected by Howard Eves, a math historian) are told about him:

He went to a conference and parked his car in the big lot. When the conference was over, he went to the lot but forgot where he parked his car. He even forgot was his car looked like. So he waited until all the other cars were driven away, then took the car that was left. When he and his family moved to a new house a few blocks away, his wife gave him written directions on how to reach it, since she knew he was absent-minded. But when he was leaving his office at the end of the day, he couldn’t remember where he put her note, and he couldn’t remember where the new house was. So he drove to his old neighborhood instead. He saw a young child and asked her, “Little girl, can you tell me where the Wieners moved?” “Yes, Daddy,” came the reply, “Mommy said you’d probably be here, so she sent me to show you the way home”.

One day he was sitting in the campus lounge, intensely studying a paper on the table. Several times he’d get up, pace a bit, then return to the paper. Everyone was impressed by the enormous mental effort reflected on his face. Once again he rose from his paper, took some rapid steps around the room, and collided with a student. The student said, “Good afternoon, Professor Wiener.” Wiener stopped, stared, clapped a hand to his forehead, said “Wiener – that’s the word,” and ran back to the table to fill the word “wiener” in the crossword puzzle he was working on.

He drove 150 miles to a math conference at Yale University. When the conference was over, he forgot he came by car, so he returned home by bus. The next morning, he went out to his garage to get his car, discovered it was missing, and complained the police that while he was away, someone stole his car.
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“We have around 24,000 genes that make us uniquely human and, until now, it was thought that if any were missing it could cause serious problems.

But new research has found that around 200 of these genes may in fact be completely redundant, without posing any such risk.

By studying the genomes of 2,500 people, researchers have said they were surprised to see around one per cent of these genes were missing entirely in some participants.

More importantly, these particular people had no significant health defects that would be explained by the missing genes.
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3256030/More-200-genes-USELESS-Genome-project-finds-not-need-DNA-survive.html

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“Because this is an extremely complicated process, moving hundreds of families stranded in a decrepit complex where mold, leaks and crumbling staircases threaten their health.”
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http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/ccs_follow2/

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the cardiac pacemaker [Mathematical aspects of heart physiology, … New York University, New York, 1975, pp. … Our work was inspired by Peskin’s model for self-synchronization …… and electrical coupling as mechanisms for synchronous.
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https://www2.bc.edu/~mirollo/Publications/Pulse.pdf

Preserving Validity in Adaptive Data Analysis http://ibmresearchnews.blogspot.com/2015/08/preserving-validity-in-adaptive-data_6.html Using differential #privacy for correct #stats even w/ test-set reuse

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“A common next step would be to use the least-squares linear regression to check whether a simple linear combination of the three strongly correlated foods can predict the grade. It turns out that a little combination goes a long way: we discover that a linear combination of the three selected foods can explain a significant fraction of variance in the grade (plotted below). The regression analysis also reports that the p-value of this result is 0.00009 meaning that the probability of this happening purely by chance is less than 1 in 10,000.

Recall that no relationship exists in the true data distribution, so this discovery is clearly false. This spurious effect is known to experts as Freedman’s paradox. It arises since the variables (foods) used in the regression were chosen using the data itself.

…
We found that challenges of adaptivity can be addressed using techniques developed for privacy-preserving data analysis. These techniques rely on the notion of differential privacy that guarantees that the data analysis is not too sensitive to the data of any single individual. We rigorously demonstrated that ensuring differential privacy of an analysis also guarantees that the findings will be statistically valid. We then also developed additional approaches to the problem based on a new way to measure how much information an analysis reveals about a dataset.

The Thresholdout Algorithm

Using our new approach we designed an algorithm, called Thresholdout, that allows an analyst to reuse the holdout set of data for validating a large number of results, even when those results are produced by an adaptive analysis.

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Before I Go: A Stanford neurosurgeon’s parting wisdom https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/03/12/before-i-go-a-stanford-neurosurgeons-parting-wisdom-about-life-and-time/ Eloquent writing on the passing of time, in one’s final hours

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there are two strategies to cutting the time short, like the tortoise and the hare. The hare moves as fast as possible, hands a blur, instruments clattering, falling to the floor; the skin slips open like a curtain, the skull flap is on the tray before the bone dust settles. But the opening might need to be expanded a centimeter here or there because it’s not optimally placed. The tortoise proceeds deliberately, with no wasted movements, measuring twice, cutting once. No step of the operation needs revisiting; everything proceeds in orderly fashion. If the hare makes too many minor missteps and has to keep adjusting, the tortoise wins. If the tortoise spends too much time planning each step, the hare wins.
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The funny thing about time in the OR, whether you frenetically race or steadily proceed, is that you have no sense of it passing. If boredom is, as Heidegger argued, the awareness of time passing, this is the opposite: The intense focus makes the arms of the clock seem arbitrarily placed. Two hours can feel like a minute.
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But the years did, as promised, fly by. Six years passed in a flash, but then, heading into chief residency, I developed a classic constellation of symptoms — weight loss, fevers, night sweats, unremitting back pain, cough — indicating a diagnosis quickly confirmed: metastatic lung cancer. The gears of time ground down.

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What Is a #Tree Worth?
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-is-a-tree-worth Study on Toronto shows 10 more trees/block =+1% in wellness =$10k/person =being 7yrs younger

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“That is the riddle that underlies a new study in the journal Scientific Reports by a team of researchers in the United States, Canada, and Australia, led by the University of Chicago psychology professor Marc Berman. The study compares two large data sets from the city of Toronto, both gathered on a block-by-block level; the first measures the distribution of green space, as determined from satellite imagery and a comprehensive list of all five hundred and thirty thousand trees planted on public land, and the second measures health, as assessed by a detailed survey of ninety-four thousand respondents. After controlling for income, education, and age, Berman and his colleagues showed that an additional ten trees on a given block corresponded to a one-per-cent increase in how healthy nearby residents felt. “To get an equivalent increase with money, you’d have to give each household in that neighborhood ten thousand dollars—or make people seven years younger,” Berman told me.
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You can produce an attenuated version of the same effect simply by looking out a window, or (for experimental convenience) at a picture of a nature scene. Over the past few years, Berman and his colleagues have zeroed in on the “low-level” visual characteristics that distinguish natural from built environments. To do this, they broke down images into their visual components: the proportion of straight to curved edges, the hue and saturation of the colors, the entropy (a statistical measure of randomness in pixel intensity), and so on. The view of an arboretum, for instance, tends to have higher color saturation than that of a street corner, indicating that “the colors in nature are more of the ‘purer’ version of those colors,” Berman said. Even when images are scrambled so that there are no recognizable features, like trees or skyscrapers, to betray what they represent, their low-level visual characteristics still predict how much people will like them.”
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Multi-tasking: how to survive in 21C http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bbf1f84a-51c2-11e5-8642-453585f2cfcd.html Explains @gtdguy’s plan of closing "open loops" in terms of the Zeigarnik effect

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“The principle behind Getting Things Done is simple: close the open loops. The details can become rather involved but the method is straightforward. For every single commitment you’ve made to yourself or to someone else, write down the very next thing you plan to do. Review your lists of next actions frequently enough to give you confidence that you won’t miss anything.

This method has a cult following, and practical experience suggests that many people find it enormously helpful — including me (see below). Only recently, however, did the psychologists E J Masicampo and Roy Baumeister find some academic evidence to explain why people find relief by using David Allen’s system. Masicampo and Baumeister found that you don’t need to complete a task to banish the Zeigarnik effect. Making a specific plan will do just as well. Write down your next action and you quiet that nagging voice at the back of your head. You are outsourcing your anxiety to a piece of paper.”
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