I saw a wonderful recording of a talk the authors gave a few years ago (which I regrettably can't find now), and it was amongst the most eye-opening talks I've ever seen.
I'm grateful that my 2019 Norco Section uses a round seatpost, threaded Shimano BB, and standard cockpit; I deplore the "self-adjusting" D-shaped Giant seatpost on my girlfriend's bike (which is subtly off-centre and takes all kinds of witchery to approximate the ease with which I can adjust a standard seatpost), as well as the mess of BBs and integrated cockpits that are becoming common even on mid-range road & gravel bikes. When I buy my next bike, I will go out of my way to select something using standardized parts. I very much hope something akin to the Framework laptop comes to market in cycling, where the entire machine is built to be user-serviceable with off-the-shelf, readily available parts. I put something like 20,000 km commuting to school on my early 1970s Raleigh Record, which I rebuilt almost completely with my brother, and it was a gloriously simple machine that I miss dearly today.
You have 46 chromosomes. Each chromosome is one massive contiguous molecule of DNA, which can be represented as a string of (up to) 150 million letters ("nucleotides") drawn from {A, C, G, T}. Together, the whole human genome is roughly 3 billion nucleotides. Since you have two copies in each cell, you have 6 billion nucleotides in total.
Each chromosome is either an autosome or sex chromosome. The autosomes are chr1 to chr22. All people (excepting those with chromosomal disorders, like trisomy 21) have two copies of each autosome, with one copy coming from each parent. Then, for the sex chromosomes:
* If you're male, you get an X chromosome from your mom and a Y chromosome from your dad.
* If you're female, you get an X chromosome from your mom and another X chromosome from your dad.
So, yes, "two copies of each chromosome" and "two copies of the genome" are the same concept, since the genome consists of chromosomes.
I moved to Toronto from Calgary four years ago to do my PhD at the UofT. I love Toronto.
* Toronto has a legacy as one of the best places to do ML, and while it felt like it was losing momentum, the Vector Institute's opening has infused the academic community with incredible energy. Vector's been recruiting top researchers from around the world, but particularly from the US -- there are a number of new Vector members who've come from the Boston/Cambridge area. The academic community in Toronto will only become stronger over the next few years, given how hostile the US has become to students from abroad.
* The strength of the academic community is fuelling a burgeoning startup scene. While it's still early days, there are a number of accelerators associated with the UofT and other entities, so given the talent coming out of the academic system here, I think the community will grow rapidly.
* Quality of life is fantastic. The food and music scenes are world-class, stemming largely from how diverse Toronto is. Downtown Toronto feels like a mixture of Manhattan and Brooklyn, just on a smaller scale. I don't own a car, and only use the subway perhaps once a week -- everything is in easy walking distance.
As to downsides:
* We have a reasonably cold winter from November to March. It's far less harsh than Calgary, though.
* Rent is expensive and rising. I've lived in the downtown core for all four years on a grad student's salary, so it's possible to make it work. But finding accommodations seems only to be getting harder.
* The political interests of the city are often overwhelmed by the sprawling suburbs surrounding it that make up the Greater Toronto Area. The new provincial government seems to be intent on attacking Toronto at every opportunity.
I've had the privilege to travel around the U.S. and Europe quite a bit during my PhD, and it's made me realize how well Toronto compares to the rest of the world. I plan to settle here after graduating -- the tech scene here seems like it's going to explode over the next decade, and it will be a lot of fun to be part of it.
Hype has almost universally negative connotations to me. Based on the name, I expected your extension would hide "hyped" stories (where hype is perhaps defined by a high comment-to-upvote ratio for a story), since hype is usually bad. You may wish to consider a new name.
I remember reading about OpenWorm a few years ago and thinking it was ridiculously cool. I'm glad to see the project has persisted. They do a bad job, however, of selling themselves.
1. What have they accomplished to date? I see little more than an animated worm. Tell me about how you're trying to model the worm, and how these approaches may accurately capture its behavior.
2. Why should I care about having an animated worm in my browser? Why is this an appropriate medium to deliver the simulation? If I want to do any kind of science, how will this help me? What I've seen to date looks scarcely more useful than Bonzi Buddy. The most interesting part seems the Academy, but I must donate at least $250 to gain access. This seems counter to the "open" part of "OpenWorm."
3. What academic affiliations does the project have? If the project is useful and has experienced success to date, surely they can recruit students/postdocs/whatever to work on it full-time, with well-established labs making major contributions. Are they computational people? Biology people?
4. What are the bona fides of the people involved? If they can't typeset or capitalize the species' name properly ("C. Elegans") in their video, that doesn't lend much faith to their expertise. The gentleman in the video marvels over the mere "1000 cells" in the worm, but does nothing to put this number in context (with, say, the 10 trillion cells of humans).
I'd love to see this project succeed, and I admire its attempt to recruit funding through a novel means, but the pricing seems too steep, and the overall quality of the pitch is regrettably poor.
I don't understand the crux of this fellow's argument. If we can engineer and then print a fully functional cell, one which perhaps performs a function radically different than found in any natural organism, then what we're doing is no longer synthetic biology -- it's nanotechnology. In this case, we're building nanomachines, not cells.
Synthetic biology's appeal is that it leverages nature to do all the heavy lifting -- we don't have to engineer functions from the ground up, but only find similar designs in nature and then tweak them for our purposes. Furthermore, in synbio, we don't actually have to build anything, but only design it. We let nature -- which can assemble cells extremely efficiently, through a process it has been refining for the last four billion years or so -- build our systems for us, once we've translated them into the language of genes. If we have the ability to build our own nanomachines from the ground up (understanding, of course, that the cell is simply a specialized nanomachine built by nature), there's no need to constrain ourselves to the limitations inherent to nature's design. At that point, there's no reason not to divorce ourselves from the "biology" part of "synthetic biology."
The issue of how to deal with people who seek out child porn troubles me. The tone accompanying an article such as this inevitably vilifies those who consume such material, as though this is a clear moral issue. This implies all of us have pedophilic urges, with only those who lack the moral fortitude to resist going on to seek out child porn. But this is not accurate -- I don't have the least desire to view such images, but instead feel a visceral disgust. Most others, I imagine, have the same reaction.
People who want to view sexually explicit images of children are sick, not immoral. They suffer from a deviant urge from which the rest of us are free. The issue, then, should not be how to punish them, but how to cure them of this urge. (Whether such a cure is possible is another matter altogether -- our sexual desires exert regrettable power over our behaviours.) In conjunction, we must do everything we can to halt the dissemination of such material, just as Microsoft is doing here. By shifting our reaction from wanting to punish consumers of child porn to wanting to rehabilitate them, we will encourage more to come forward for treatment, ultimately reducing the amount of such material that is consumed, and thus the number of children harmed in its creation.
Just what is that "larger point"? Is it that by revealing his identity and publicizing his movements, Snowden has shifted attention to his personal story, away from the issue of U.S. government surveillance? If so, I disagree with the point -- Snowden's story has, if anything, given the issue a more compelling narrative arc, and kept it in front of the public far longer than if he remained an anonymous whistleblower.
Brad Templeton delivered a superb talk on robotic cars at the Singularity Summit 2009 (http://www.vimeo.com/7337628). It expounds on the technology's implications, supporting Maroon's assertion that even a small slice of the market will easily eclipse Google's stake in search. Of particular interest:
* Transportation is more dangerous than we think, and this is largely due to human factors. (Driver inattention is a factor in 80% of crashes; alcohol in 40%.)
* The purchase of private vehicles forces us into a "one size fits all" model. If someone goes skiing only once a year, he will purchase an SUV; if someone spends 90% of his mileage traveling alone to work, he'll still purchase a five-person sedan so he can haul around friends occasionally. By moving to a grid-like service that provides cars to us on demand, we will be able to choose the vehicle best suited to the type of trip we're making.
* Robotic cars could eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. Energy usage would be dramatically lower due to people using a vehicle only as large as they need for a given trip. Vehicles powered by alternative energy have a chicken-and-egg problem -- no one wants to build the infrastructure to deliver energy until people buy the vehicles, but no one wants to buy the vehicles until a ubiquitous energy infrastructure is in place. Robotic cars, however, would have no qualms with traveling halfway across a city to refuel, nor with waiting two hours in a lineup before refuelling.
* The transportation infrastructure will also become substantially more efficient, as cars will be able to travel much closer together without compromising safety. As a consequence, energy usage can be reduced another 30% by having cars draft one another.
* Before robotic cars would be accepted by the public, they'd have to meet much more stringent safety standards than we apply to human drivers. No one would accept a robotic car that killed a human, even if robotic cars on the whole were twice as safe as human drivers. Templeton figures we'll need cars on the order of 100 times safer than human drivers before they will be widely accepted. To convince people of the cars' safety, Templeton proposes the "school of fish" test -- imagine walking out onto a track swarming with cars travelling at 40 miles per hour, and having every car swerve around you no matter how hard you try to make them hit you.
* Robotic vehicles will record video everywhere they go, for this will prove invaluable in determining the cause of accidents. Any modifications to the driving software will then have the ability to be tested on the "trillion mile road test" -- they will have a corpus of testing data composed of the recorded footage of every trip ever made. New software will be tested against every vehicle accident that has ever occurred.
* The privacy implications of this universal recording are disconcerting. Templeton raises the spectre of a situation like that in Minority Report, where police can remotely override your control of a vehicle, locking you inside and transporting you to a destination of their choosing.
I found A Field Guide to Genetic Programming to be a good introduction to genetic programming, which is a subset of genetic algorithms. The book can be had freely at http://www.gp-field-guide.org.uk/
'"If he doesn’t make a dramatic move soon to clean up the service, the brand will be permanently tarnished," says another interested investor.'
Is Chatroulette not already synonymous with anonymous penises? I'd say the brand's already tarnished in that regard. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing -- anonymous penises may be exactly what some users are looking for.
Ubuntu is the best choice for a user who is not terribly computer literate. The Ubuntu devs have made an extensive effort to provide a cohesive and well-integrated system that should not require the user to drop down to the command line for most uses. No other distro has made as exhaustive an effort to insulate the user from Linux's rough edges; Ubuntu's popularity ensures that numerous online tutorials are available to assist in just about any task.
As with any operating system, installation is the biggest hurdle, particularly if the user needs to preserve existing data. Once past that point, however, if he can handle Windows or OS X, he should have no trouble using and maintaining Ubuntu.
In Canada, CTV offered access to both live video and recorded clips for these Olympics. On Windows, the service seemed to work seamlessly -- it did not prompt for cable providers, e-mail addresses, or any such thing. On Linux, the experience was less smooth. As the video relied on Silverlight, I had to install Moonlight. Through the first day or two of the Games, only the stable v2.0 was clearly offered on the Moonlight Web site, which did not support video from CTV or NBC (and which had the unfortunate habit of ballooning a freshly-launched Firefox to more than a gigabyte of memory usage). Later on, the v3.0 preview, which does support video, was prominently offered on the Moonlight site. Sadly, it performed poorly -- video ran at only about 5 FPS on my system, while consuming an entire CPU core.
In contrast, CBC handled Canadian coverage of the Beijing Games in 2008. All their video was offered via Flash, which worked splendidly in Linux. Almost every event was viewable, often without commercials and commentators. I am saddened by this backward step.
iTunes proved that people are willing to pay rather than pirate if you make purchasing more convenient than pirating. The movie studios seem almost to be begging their customers to steal content.
Or a recap from The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/can-neur...
I saw a wonderful recording of a talk the authors gave a few years ago (which I regrettably can't find now), and it was amongst the most eye-opening talks I've ever seen.