linkstream2 microblog

The #Fatigue Conundrum
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/2015/3/the-fatigue-conundrum/99999 Safety v cost cutting: ~”Delta saved $250k/yr by
shaving an oz from each steak it served”

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Such narrow profit margins, coupled with volatile fuel prices (which today account for up to 40 percent of operating expenses as compared with only 15 percent a few decades ago), mean that airlines are continuously looking for ways to cut costs. According to a report in the New York Times, Delta Airlines saved $250,000 in one year by shaving an ounce from each of the steaks it served on board, whereas American Airlines is said to have saved $40,000 a year by removing a single olive from every salad it served to passengers.
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[Protein] Glypican-1 [uniquely] identifies [circulating] cancer #exosomes & detects…cancer
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v523/n7559/full/nature14581.html Maybe also for @exRNA

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Exosomes are lipid-bilayer-enclosed extracellular vesicles that contain proteins and nucleic acids. They are secreted by all cells and circulate in the blood. Specific detection and isolation of
…we identify a cell surface
proteoglycan, glypican-1 (GPC1), specifically enriched on
cancer-cell-derived exosomes. GPC1+ circulating exosomes (crExos) were monitored …”}}

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v523/n7559/full/nature14581.html

No assembler required
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21660077-how-teach-computer-science-nursery-school-no-assembler-required KIBO, Dash, Vortex & Hackaball provide a playful way to learn #programming

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Dr Umaschi Bers is not alone in that quest. KIBO, made by KinderLab Robotics (of which she is chief science officer when she is not doing her day job), is unusual only in that its instruction set is so tied to physical objects. Other toys being developed to teach young children the rudiments of programming use not wooden blocks but blocks of code, presented as icons of various sorts on the screens of tablets, smartphones and even old-fashioned PCs. Instead of being scanned, these instructions are uploaded wirelessly to the robots they are intended to control—robots that come in all sorts of shapes and sizes.

Some, like Vortex (a wheeled device that resembles a flattened motorcycle helmet) and Dash (a tetrahedron of spheres which, besides moving around at its programmer’s command, can also play tunes on a glockenspiel), are, like KIBO, designed mainly to scuttle across the living-room floor. Others, though, are heading in a different direction.
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Dream teams http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/dream-teams The “Gamification of Fandom,” making the fans into the players & the players into statistical pawns

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The fan of the not too distant future, Goldstein said, will want better telecom service within the stadiums so that he can follow his fantasy teams at the same time as he is watching the game. “You’ll have an iPad mounted into the seat, and on that iPad you’ll have the RedZone channel,” he said. “Can you imagine? I pay, I can lean back, I can sit, and I can be in my living room—but in the stadium. That’s what we’re doing in the theatres.”

What explains the temptation to make games of the watching of games? Last month, I joined Fantasy Iditarod, and the two or three hours that I spent compiling my team of Alaskan dog mushers were a nirvana of pure concentration. I had twenty-seven thousand “dollars” to spend on seven sled drivers, whose “salaries” were calibrated such that you couldn’t just stock up on favorites and former champions. The process reminded me of something Dan Okrent said, when describing what he called the “one, overriding positive contribution” that Rotisserie baseball had made to the actual sport, which was that, after you started playing,
…
The gamification of fandom is alluring because it provides an application for the things you’ve learned—or think you’ve learned—in the course of wasting so much time that could have been spent reading Proust, or playing with your kids, or donating blood. It’s a hedge against existential despair, a measurable opportunity to “succeed” at what might otherwise be called futility. I went to Alaska on assignment a couple of years ago, to see the Iditarod in person, and was sufficiently transfixed by the new sporting subculture that I’ve continued to follow its developments from afar.

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Big myth about medicine: We know how #drugs work
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/23/one-big-myth-about-medicine-we-know-how-drugs-work “If you only half-know something, you can appreciate serendipity”
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If you think you’re too smart and you only do what is scientifically indicated, there’s always going to be something, ‘Oh my God, we never thought of that!’” Haber said. “If you half-know what you’re doing, then you’re better prepared to understand or appreciate discoveries that are serendipitous in some way.”

A 2011 study reviewed a decade worth of drug approvals found that of 75 drugs that worked in a completely new way, 28 came from the more old-fashioned method of screening drugs against cells or animals, and 17 were built from detailed understanding of how the disease worked. David Swinney of the Institute for Rare and Neglected Diseases Drug Discovery said that despite the fact that far more resources are devoted to developing drugs by focusing on targets, the older method of screening has been more productive by his analysis.”
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The Cobweb http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb 20% of URLs in journal articles suffer from reference rot. Why we need a “Digital Vellum” & Web #archive

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Twitter is a rare case: it has arranged to archive all of its tweets at the Library of Congress. In 2010, after the announcement, Andy Borowitz tweeted, “Library of Congress to acquire entire Twitter archive—will rename itself Museum of Crap.”
…
Last month, a team of digital library researchers based at Los Alamos National Laboratory reported the results of an exacting study of three and a half million scholarly articles published in science,
technology, and medical journals between 1997 and 2012: one in five links provided in the notes suffers from reference rot. It’s like trying to stand on quicksand.
…
Copyright is the elephant in the archive. One reason the Library of Congress has a very small Web-page collection, compared with the Internet Archive, is that the Library of Congress generally does not collect a Web page without asking, or, at least, giving notice. “The Internet Archive hoovers,” Abbie Grotke, who runs the Library of Congress’s Web-archive team, says. “We can’t hoover, because we have to notify site owners and get permissions.” (There are some
exceptions.)
…
Also, it’s riddled with errors. One kind is created when the dead Web grabs content from the live Web, sometimes because Web archives often crawl different parts of the same page at different times: text in one year, photographs in another. In October, 2012, if you asked the Wayback Machine to show you what cnn.com looked like on September 3, 2008, it would have shown you a page featuring stories about the 2008 McCain-Obama Presidential race, but the advertisement alongside it would have been for the 2012 Romney-Obama debate.
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The indulgent world of…Fitzgerald
http://nypost.com/2015/07/18/cocktails-castles-and-canoodling-the-decadent-world-of-f-scott-fitzgerald/ What the #GreatGatsby’s E & W Egg look like now: F. Scott’s modest home at ~$3M

The real locations of West & East Egg + The Great Gatsby’s author’s real home, currently valued at $3M

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It was in this atmosphere of money — old and new, elegant and garish — that the idea for Fitzgerald’s most celebrated novel, “The Great Gatsby,” took shape.

The Fitzgerald house is up for sale for $2.999 million. It’s been expanded over the years, but it still looks like it did in 1922.

The Gold Coast itself does not. What was once a pastoral escape for the superrich has become a sprawling suburb, with condominiums occupying tracts of land that were once polo fields.

But the geography is the same, and here and there you can catch glimpses of places that may have inspired “The Great Gatsby.”

Fitzgerald famously named the two peninsulas that jet out into the Long Island Sound “East Egg” and “West Egg.”

He liked the word egg, calling friends “colossal eggs” and enemies “unspeakable eggs,” writes biographer Jeffrey Meyers.
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While enriched with ENCODE biochemical annotations, much of the short-lived constrained sequences we identify are not detected by models optimized for wider pan-mammalian conservation. Constrained DNase 1 hypersensitivity sites, promoters and untranslated regions have been more evolutionarily stable than long noncoding RNA loci which have turned over especially rapidly. By contrast, protein coding sequence has been highly stable, with an estimated half-life of over a billion years (d1/2 = 2.1–5.0). From extrapolations we estimate that 8.2% (7.1–9.2%) of the human genome is presently subject to negative selection and thus is likely to be functional, while only 2.2% has maintained constraint in both human and mouse since these species diverged.
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http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004525

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The author goes further in discussing the evolutionary processes. He considers the view of the modern synthesis, which focuses on variation and selection, too simplistic. Hence he proposes to adopt a multifactorial view, and to recognize three modalities of evolution, so-called Darwinian (random mutation and selection), Lamarckian (directed mutation) and Wrightian (random mutation and random fixation), the latter from Sewall Wright, one of the founders of population genetics. As an example of Lamarckian modality, Koonin mentions the CRISPR system in bacteria, where ‘acquired’ modifications are transmitted in the genome (Koonin & Wolf, 2009).

Now here, if I’m not mistaken, we enter territories devoid of consensus among evolutionary biologists. (I’m not an evolutionary biologist, and I admit that the subtleties of the debate often escape me.) For instance Patrick Forterre, from the Institut Pasteur, is very critical of what he calls “the false come back of Lamarck” (Forterre, 2012). He considers the CRISPR example as misleading, and that in essence this is a Darwinian phenomenon.
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http://ofbacteriaandmen.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-logic-of-chance-by-eugene-koonin_22.html

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Begin thinking of your investments in terms of three buckets: one for liquidity, one for longevity and one for legacy

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http://www.worth.com/index.php/component/content/article/3-grow/7469-live-long-and-prosper