linkstream2 microblog

What Happens When We All Live to 100?
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/what-happens-when-we-all-live-to-100/379338 Will the 3month/yr increase in life expectancy plateau? Will it affect society?

QT:{{”
The university, a significant aspect of the contemporary economy, centuries ago was a place where the fresh-faced would be prepared for a short life; today the university is a place where adults watch children and grandchildren walk to Pomp and Circumstance. The university of the future may be one that serves all ages. Colleges will reposition themselves economically as offering just as much to the aging as to the adolescent: courses priced individually for later-life knowledge seekers; lots of campus events of interest to students, parents, and the community as a whole; a pleasant
college-town atmosphere to retire near. In decades to come, college professors may address students ranging from age 18 to 80.
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Steve Jobs on working with Rand:

“I asked him if he would come up with a few options, and he said, ‘No, I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. You don’t have to use the solution. If you want options go talk to other people.’” “}}

http://www.logodesignlove.com/next-logo-paul-rand

#Neuroscience, Ethics & National Security http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001289
Interrogations w/ oxytocin truth serum, No-lie fMRI & p300 waves. Scary!

QT:{{"
National security agencies are also mining neuroscience for ways to advance interrogation methods and the detection of deception. The increasing sophistication of brain-reading neurotechnologies has led many to investigate their potential applications for lie detection. Deception has long been associated with empirically measurable correlates, arguably originating nearly a century ago with research into blood pressure [24]. Yet blood pressure, among other modern bases for polygraphy like heart and breathing rates, indicates the presence of a proxy for deception: stress. Although the polygraph performs better than chance, it does not reliably and accurately indicate the presence of deception, and it is susceptible to counter measures. ….

“Brain fingerprinting” utilizes EEG to detect the P300 wave, an event-related potential (ERP) associated with the perception of a recognized, meaningful stimulus, and it is thought to hold potential for confirming the presence of “concealed information” [25]. The technology is marketed for a number of uses: “national security, medical diagnostics, advertising, insurance fraud and in the criminal justice system” [26]. Similarly, fMRI-based lie detection services are currently offered by several companies, including No Lie MRI [27] and Cephos [28]. DARPA funded the pioneering research that showed how deception involves a more complex array of neurological processes than truth-telling, and that fMRI arguably can detect the difference between the two [29]. No Lie MRI also has ties to national security: they market their services to the DoD, Department of Homeland Security, and the intelligence community, among other potential customers [30].

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In addition to questions of scientific validity, these technologies raise legal and ethical issues. Legally required brain scans arguably violate “the guarantee against self-incrimination” because they differ from acceptable forms of bodily evidence, such as fingerprints or blood samples, in an important way: they are not simply physical, hard evidence, but evidence that is intimately linked to the defendant’s mind [32]. Under US law, brain-scanning technologies might also raise implications for the Fourth Amendment, calling into question whether they constitute an unreasonable search and seizure [33].”

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https://www.quantamagazine.org/20141218-machine-intelligence-cracks-genetic-controls/

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The splicing code is just one part of the noncoding genome, the area that does not produce proteins. But it’s a very important one. Approximately 90 percent of genes undergo alternative splicing, and scientists estimate that variations in the splicing code make up anywhere between 10 and 50 percent of all disease-linked mutations. “When you have mutations in the regulatory code, things can go very wrong,” Frey said.

“People have historically focused on mutations in the protein-coding regions, to some degree because they have a much better handle on what these mutations do,” said Mark Gerstein, a bioinformatician at Yale University, who was not involved in the study. “As we gain a better understanding of [the DNA sequences] outside of the protein-coding regions, we’ll get a better sense of how important they are in terms of disease.”

Scientists have made some headway into understanding how the cell chooses a particular protein configuration, but much of the code that governs this process has remained an enigma. Frey’s team was able to decipher some of these regulatory regions in a paper published in 2010, identifying a rough code within the mouse genome that regulates splicing. Over the past four years, the quality of genetics data — particularly human data — has improved dramatically, and
machine-learning techniques have become much more sophisticated, enabling Frey and his collaborators to predict how splicing is affected by specific mutations at many sites across the human genome. “Genome-wide data sets are finally able to enable predictions like this,” said Manolis Kellis, a computational biologist at MIT who was not involved in the study.

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While the documentation shipped with the original Lisa only ever referred to it as The Lisa, officially, Apple stated the name was an acronym for Local IntegratedSystem Architecture or “LISA”.[6] Since Steve Jobs’ first daughter (born in 1978) was named Lisa Nicole Brennan, it was normally inferred that the name also had a personal association, and perhaps that the acronym was invented later to fit the name. Andy Hertzfeld[7] states the acronym was reverse engineered from the name “Lisa” in autumn 1982 by the Apple marketing team, after they had hired a marketing consultancy firm to come up with names to replace “Lisa” and “Macintosh” (at the time considered by Jef Raskin to be merely internal project codenames) and then rejected all of the suggestions. Privately, Hertzfeld and the other software developers used “Lisa: Invented Stupid Acronym”, a recursive backronym, while computer industry pundits coined the term “Let’s Invent Some Acronym” to fit the Lisa’s name. Decades later, Jobs would tell his biographer Walter Isaacson: “Obviously it was named for my daughter.”[8] “}}

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa

Major Discovery About #Prime Numbers
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/mathematicians-make-major-discovery-prime-numbers Extension of trick to find spans of composites, eg start w/ 101! add 2,3,4…101

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The two new proofs of Erdős’ conjecture are both based on a simple way to construct large prime gaps. A large prime gap is the same thing as a long list of non-prime, or “composite,” numbers between two prime numbers. Here’s one easy way to construct a list of, say, 100 composite numbers in a row: Start with the numbers 2, 3, 4, … , 101, and add to each of these the number 101 factorial (the product of the first 101 numbers, written 101!). The list then becomes 101! + 2, 101! + 3, 101! + 4, … , 101! + 101. Since 101! is divisible by all the numbers from 2 to 101, each of the numbers in the new list is composite: 101! + 2 is divisible by 2, 101! + 3 is divisible by 3, and so on. “All the proofs about large prime gaps use only slight variations on this high school construction,” said James Maynard of Oxford, who wrote the second of the two papers.
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Programmer’s Price
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/programmers-price@10xmgmt: Talent agency for the developer stack, UI guru to datascientist, even a bioinformatician

American Chronicles NYer NOVEMBER 24, 2014 ISSUE
Want to hire a coding superstar? Call the agent.
BY LIZZIE WIDDICOMBE

QT:{{”
Solomon leaned back in his chair and flipped through a mental Rolodex of his clients. “I definitely have some ideas,” he said, after a minute. “The first person who comes to mind, he’s also a
bioinformatician.” He rattled off a dazzling list of accomplishments: the developer does work for the Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, where he is attempting to attack complicated biological problems using crowdsourcing, and had created Twitter tools capable of influencing elections. Solomon thought that he might be interested in AuthorBee’s use of Twitter. “He knows the Twitter A.P.I. in his sleep.”
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And, like actual rock stars, rock-star developers come in a range of personality types. Guvench had briefed me at the coffee shop: front-end guys—designers and user-interface engineers—make products that interact with what he referred to as “normal” people. As a result, “they’re sort of hip,” he said. “Especially designers—they dress nicely.” The further you get down the “stack,” Guvench explained, “the more . . .” He paused. “ ‘Neckbeard’ is the word that comes to mind.” Back-end engineers, like data scientists and system administrators, “are the most brilliant people,” he said. “They may not be the most fun to talk to at a party, but they’re really fucking good at talking to computers.” Of course, he added, the stereotype doesn’t apply to his clients.
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#Lego car becomes an avatar for a worm http://www.engadget.com/2014/11/27/lego-car-becomes-an-avatar-for-a-worm Powered by adapting nematode neural #connectome for sound, instead of food

QT:{{"
Remember the OpenWorm project, in which researchers reproduced the
genome of a nematode worm digitally and made it wiggle around on a
screen? If you take the "brain" of that worm and use it to power a
robotic car, you end up with researcher Timothy Busbice’sWormBot. He
mapped the software into a Lego Mindstorms EV3 bot, then trained it to
follow sound the way a nematode follows food. When he whistles to
"call" the bot, it heads toward him and even stops and reverses if it
detects an obstacle (using the EV3’s sonar) — even though it was
programmed to do none of those things.

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Leafy Luxury: Mansions with a Tree Premium http://online.wsj.com/articles/leafy-luxury-mansions-with-a-tree-premium-1417015300 “Street #tree” in frontyard adds >$7K to home price, helps neighbors too

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A 2010 study by the U.S. Forest Service conducted in Portland, Ore., found that the presence of a single “street tree” in front of the home added over $7,000 to its sale price. The street-tree effect spilled over to neighboring houses, increasing property values as well as helping the homes sell faster.
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Harvard secretly photographed [2000] students to study… attendance [in 10 classes], raising #privacy concerns
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/11/05/harvard-secretly-photographed-students-study-class-attendance-raising-privacy-concerns/hC8TBdGdZmQehg0lAhnnJN/story.html
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Harvard University has revealed that it secretly photographed some 2,000 students in 10 lecture halls last spring as part of a study of classroom attendance, an admission that prompted criticism from faculty and students who said the research was an invasion of privacy. The clandestine experiment, disclosed publicly for the first time at a faculty meeting Tuesday night, came to light about a year-and-a-half after revelations that administrators had secretly searched thousands of Harvard e-mail accounts. That led the university to implement new privacy policies on electronic communication this spring, but another round of controversy followed the latest disclosure.
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