linkstream2 microblog

The Disruption Myth
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/the-disruption-myth/379348 Term’s evolution from #Kuhn to Foster to Christensen. Does it still apply in the business world?

BUSINESS OCTOBER 2014
The Disruption Myth

The idea that businesses are more vulnerable to upstarts than ever is out-of-date—and that’s a big problem.

QT:{{”

After several years of research, and a close reading of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (which introduced the concept of the paradigm shift), Foster came up with an explanation. What threatened these well-run market leaders were what he called “technological discontinuities”—moments when the dominant technology in a market abruptly shifted, and the expertise and scale that the companies had built up suddenly didn’t count for much. One example: when electronic cash registers went from 10 percent of the market in 1972 to 90 percent just four years later, NCR, long the leading maker of cash registers, was caught unprepared, resulting in big losses and mass layoffs.

Foster’s 1986 book, Innovation: The Attacker’s Advantage, described this phenomenon, offered tips for surviving it (just being aware of the possibility of a technological shift was the first step), and predicted that there was much more to come as giant waves of innovation in electronics, software, and biotechnology buffeted the economy. “The Age of Discontinuity,” Foster called it, borrowing the line from the management guru Peter Drucker.

The book did well, but the expression didn’t stick. “I will forever rue the day I didn’t call it ‘disruption,’ ” Foster now says. That was left instead to Clayton Christensen, a consultant and an entrepreneur who headed to Harvard Business School for a mid-career doctorate in 1989 and started teaching there three years later. For his
dissertation….

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Candy Crush’s Puzzling #Mathematics http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.16278,y.2014,no.6,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx Game reducible to a NP-hard logic circuit; maybe useful in solving other problems

QT:{{"
To show that Candy Crush is a mathematically hard problem, we could
reduce to it from any problem in NP. To make life simple, my
colleagues and I started from the granddaddy of all problems in NP,
finding a solution to a logical formula. This is called the
satisfiability problem. You will have solved such a problem if you
ever tackled a logic puzzle. You have to decide which propositions to
make true, and which to make false, to satisfy some set of logical
formulae: The Englishman lives in the red house. The Spaniard owns the
dog. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house. Should the
proposition that the Spaniard owns the zebra be made true or false?

To reduce a logic puzzle to a Candy Crush problem, we exploit the
close connection between logic and electrical circuits. Any logical
formula can simply be represented with an electrical circuit.
Computers are, after all, just a large collection of logic gates—ANDs,
ORs, and NOTs—with wires connecting them together. So all we need to
do is show that you could build an electrical circuit in a Candy Crush
game.

…

The idea of problem reduction offers an intriguing possibility for
Candy Crush addicts. Perhaps we can profit from the millions of hours
humans spend solving Candy Crush problems? By exploiting the idea of a
problem reduction, we could conceal some practical computational
problems within these puzzles. Other computational problems benefit
from such interactions: Every time you prove to a website that you’re
a person and not a bot by solving a CAPTCHA (one of those ubiquitous
distorted images of a word or number that you have to type in) the
answer helps Google digitize old books and newspapers. Perhaps we
should put Candy Crush puzzles to similar good uses.

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Pictures from an Institution http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/pictures-institution Interesting fact on #Bard College: Leon Botstein became president decades ago at 23

Leon Botstein made Bard College what it is, but can he insure that it
outlasts him?Profiles SEPTEMBER 29, 2014 ISSUE
BY ALICE GREGORY

QT:{{"
Botstein graduated from high school at sixteen and went to the
University of Chicago, where he majored in history and founded the
school’s chamber orchestra. He began Ph.D. studies at Harvard,
focussing on the social history of modernist music in Vienna. In
Cambridge, he met his first wife, with whom he had two daughters. (He
has two more children from his second marriage.) In 1970, having left
Harvard to be a special assistant to the president of the New York
City Board of Education, Botstein took a job as president of Franconia
College, a small, now defunct institution in New Hampshire, run out of
a former resort hotel. At twenty-three, he was the youngest college
president that America had ever had. A 1971 profile that ran in
Playboy described him as “a bespectacled, long-haired youth” and
included a photo of him, in a rumpled shirt and a paisley tie, next to
an office door marked “President” in a curiously Tolkienesque font.

…
December, 2013, after a three-month review, Moody’s Investors Service
downgraded Bard’s bond rating three notches and revised its outlook to
“negative.” The Moody’s report cited Bard’s “exceedingly thin
liquidity with full draw on operating lines of credit,” “weak
documentation and transparency,” “willingness to fund operations and
projects prior to payment on pledges,” and “growing dependence on cash
gifts.” (The report found that in 2012 and 2013 more than forty per
cent of annual operating revenues came from gifts. Among other small
private colleges, about seven per cent is typical.) Six months
earlier, Bard had had monthly liquidity of $7.1 million—equal to just
two weeks’ worth of operating costs. Bard is highly leveraged,
carrying a hundred and sixty million dollars of debt, which is close
to its operating budget of a hundred and eighty-five million. The
undergraduate endowment (eighty million dollars) is a tenth that of
Vassar, a school that is comparable to Bard in both size and age and
is one Amtrak stop to the south.

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The Solace of Oblivion http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/solace-oblivion In Europe, the right to be forgotten trumps #Google. In the US copyright is effective for this

QT:{{
In the effort to escape unwanted attention on the Internet,
individuals and companies have had success with one weapon: copyright
law. It is unlawful to post photographs or other copyrighted material
without the permission of the copyright holder. “I needed to get
ownership of the photos,” Bremer, the Catsouras family’s lawyer, told
me. So he began a lengthy negotiation with the California Highway
Patrol to persuade it to surrender copyright on the photographs. In
the end, though, the C.H.P. would not make the deal.

Other victims of viral Internet trauma have fared better with the
copyright approach. In August, racy private photographs of Jennifer
Lawrence, Kate Upton, and other celebrities were leaked to several Web
sites. (The source of the leaks has not been identified.) Google has
long had a system in place to block copyrighted material from turning
up in its searches. Motion-picture companies, among others, regularly
complain about copyright infringement on YouTube, which Google owns,
and Google has a process for identifying and removing these links.
Several of the leaked photographs were selfies, so the women
themselves owned the copyrights; friends had taken the other pictures.
Lawyers for one of the women established copyrights for all the
photographs they could, and then went to sites that had posted the
pictures, and to Google, and insisted that the material be removed.
Google complied, as did many of the sites, and now the photographs are
difficult to find on the Internet, though they have not disappeared.
“For the most part, the world goes through search engines,” one lawyer
involved in the effort to limit the distribution of the photographs
told me. “Now it’s like a tree falling in the forest. There may be
links out there, but if you can’t find them through a search engine
they might as well not exist.”
…
The job had two parts. The first was technical—that is, creating a
software infrastructure so that links could be removed. This was not
especially difficult, since Google could apply the system already in
place for copyrighted and trademarked works. Similarly, Google had
already blocked links that might have led to certain dangerous or
unlawful activity, like malware or child pornography.

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What Kids Around the World Eat http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/08/magazine/eaters-all-over.html Neophobia: "evo-sensibly" they initially reject unfamiliar food. Sugar is an exception

QT:{{

Children, and young omnivorous animals generally, tend to reject
unfamiliar foods on the first few tries. Evolutionarily, it makes
sense for an inexperienced creature to be cautious about new foods,
which might, after all, be poisonous. It is only through repeated
exposure and mimicry that toddlers adjust to new tastes — breakfast
instead of, say, dinner. That we don’t put pickle relish on waffles or
eat Honey Bunches of Oats for supper are rules of culture, not of
nature. As children grow, their palates continue to be shaped by the
food environment they were born into (as well as by the savvy
marketers of sugar cereals who advertise directly to the 10-and-under
set and their tired parents). This early enculturation means a child
in the Philippines might happily consume garlic fried rice topped with
dried and salted fish calledtuyo at 6 in the morning, while many
American kids would balk at such a meal (even at dinnertime). We learn
to be disgusted, just as we learn to want a second helping.

Sugar is the notable exception to “food neophobia,” as researchers
call that early innate fear. In utero, a 13-week-old fetus will gulp
amniotic fluid more quickly when it contains sugar. Our native sweet
tooth helps explain the global popularity of sugary cereals and
chocolate spreads like Nutella: Getting children to eat sugar is easy.
Teaching them to eat slimy fermented soybeans, by contrast, requires a
more robust and conservative culinary culture, one that resists the
candy-coated breakfast buffet.

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http://www.courant.com/health/hc-jackson-laboratory-20141002-story.html

QT:{{”

The facility is funded in part by $291 million from the state through a legislative act passed three years ago, largely along party lines. In general, Democrats backed the plan by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s administration, and Republicans said it was too much money in exchange for 300 jobs over the course of a decade.

…
About 150 people work at the Farmington location, most of them hired in the past 16 to 18 months,said Charles Lee, director of the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine.

…

Last week, as Lee arrived by plane in Seoul, Korea, to check on a collaborative research project there, he was greeted at the airport by media reporting on a recent announcement that Lee is a 2014 Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate, meaning that he is a strong contender this year for a Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Nobel winners will be announced Oct. 6.

…

The lab is headquartered in Bar Harbor, Maine, and it has another location in Sacramento, Calif. All told, the laboratory has an annual budget of $262.4 million for fiscal year 2014 and employs more than 1,500 people, mostly in Maine.

Much of its revenue — $165.3 million — comes from the JAX Mice & Clinical Research Services through its sale of mice to other researchers. Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor ships more than 3 million mice annually to researchers around the globe, Lee said.

The lab also received $69.6 million in public support, including grants and contracts in fiscal year 2014. The rest of its budget is funded by contributions and other sources.

In 10 years or so, the Farmington facility could become a $70 million-to-$75 million operation, said Mike Hyde, a spokesman for The Jackson Laboratory.

…

Jackson is partnering with various Connecticut hospitals and universities, too. Lee has reached out to researchers at Quinnipiac, Wesleyan and Yale.

“I already have a collaboration that’s funded by the NIH with Mark Gerstein, a full professor at Yale University,” Lee said. “I’m developing ties with Rick Lifton, who is the head of genetics at Yale.”

Perhaps the closest academic relationship, in proximity and in collaboration, is between Jackson and both the UConn Health Center and UConn School of Medicine.

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Signaling #hypergraphs
http://www.cell.com/trends/biotechnology/abstract/S0167-7799(14)00071-7 Edges from interactions of 2 sets of nodes. Better representation of assemblies & #complexes.

QT:{{”
each edge is defined not by interaction of 2 nodes (as in graphs), but 2 sets of nodes (known as hypernodes in hypergraphs)……The use of hypernodes also represents three concepts better than directed or non-directed graphs: protein complexes, protein assemblies and regulation (especially involving complexes/assemblies).
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Signaling hypergraphs. Ritz et al. (2014) TIB

This opinion paper advocates the use of hypergraphs to complement graph-based signaling network and pathway analyses, where each edge is defined not by interaction of 2 nodes (as in graphs), but 2 sets of nodes (known as hypernodes in hypergraphs). They argue that
hypergraphs is a set-based method that acts like a more general version of a graph. The use of hypernodes also represents three concepts better than directed or non-directed graphs: protein complexes, protein assemblies and regulation (especially involving complexes/assemblies). They propose that hypergraphs can be very useful in situations where the effects of individual proteins might be neglected in graphs but will have a noticeable effect when these proteins are included in protein complexes as hypernodes. They use 3 applications as examples: pathway enrichment, pathway reconstruction, and pathway crosstalk.

Here, Ansel! Sit, Avedon!
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/garden/here-ansel-sit-avedon.html (Also, cowcam.ch) #Gopro #Lifelogging for cats. Next: fitbit & calorie-counting for dogs?

QT:{{”

Last week, GoPro, a camera company made famous by surfers and other athletes who clip on its waterproof miniature Heros to record their adventures, introduced its own version: Fetch, a harness and camera mount designed for dogs. For years, pet owners had been rigging Heros to attach to their pets; perhaps you’ve seen the YouTube video of that surfing pig? …. As programmable digital cameras get smaller and cheaper, the universe of pet, uh, journalism — or is it fine art? — has exploded. Scientists on both sides of the Atlantic have been using these technologies to learn more about the habits of all manner of animals, including house cats. The work of Leo, a cat from
Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, has been made into a poster…. A collaborative (what else to call them?) of Swiss cows posts their oeuvre at cowcam.ch.

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The Debate on Salty Foods, Continued
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/opinion/sunday/the-debate-on-salty-foods-continued.html Americans consume 3400 mg Na/day; should it go to 2300 (~1 teaspoon of #salt)

QT:{{”
The current average sodium consumption in the United States is about 3,400 milligrams per day. This is mostly ingested in processed foods and is equivalent to the amount of sodium in about 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt. Dietary guidelines endorsed by the federal government and leading medical groups recommend reducing the average to 2,300 milligrams for the general population and 1,500 for groups deemed at greater risk, like adults older than 50, African-Americans, people with high blood pressure and diabetics, among others.
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President @Yale’s highlights from last year
https://messages.yale.edu/messages/University/univmsgs/detail/109439 “Honored to join several colleagues at Yale’s 1st 6th-grade
graduation.”

QT:{{”
Even as we are gearing up for a new academic year, I had the opportunity to look back on my first year as president of this extraordinary and inspiring institution. I am grateful for what we have achieved and enthusiastic about the future….

…

Nursing was not the only school to take up residence on the West Campus this year. When Peck Place School, an elementary school in Orange, Connecticut, was forced to close in late December due to water damage from burst pipes and the subsequent discovery of asbestos, Yale provided alternative space for the entire school. The students will return to their school building nextyear, but in June, I was honored to join several of my colleagues at Yale’s first sixth-grade graduation.
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