Category Archives: news

Adaptive data analysis

In “The reusable holdout: Preserving validity in adaptive data analysis” published in Science researchers Cynthia Dwork, Vitaly Feldman, Moritz Hardt, Toniann Pitassi, Omer Reingold, Aaron Roth addresses the issue of data analysis adaptivity.

Applying thumb rules such as the same 5% significance test many learn when introduced to scientific method at school sometimes corroborate misleading ‘discoveries’.  Data analysis often enough is made through a re-interpretation of statistics.  So that conclusions carry much of our models and how we interpret raw data in the first place.

Author Moritz Hardt posted an interesting introduction to the paper in Google Research Blog.

ATCG not enough for good DNA?

In “Structural Basis for a Six Nucleotide Genetic Alphabet” published at the Journal of the American Chemical Society researches propose adding a couple of letters.

“Z” and “P” would contribute to the classic double helix structure with similar flexibility and rigitdy.  Paper states that this would integrate well with current ‘conventional’ pairs.  An ATCGZP DNA could evolve and take a life of its own.  Literally.  Including evolution and all its unforeseen consequences.

In theory, having an enriched set of building blocks would increase the possibility of creating new proteins and thus potentially useful for medial and scientific purposes.  Perhaps one advantage is that such proteins (and other biochemical structures) is the fact that they would be easily marked and spotted as distinguished elements.

see the press release

the Moon?? – get in line – you’re decades late

From Los Angeles Times, back in February 10, 1985:

“Pan Am Has 90,002 Reservations : Public Interest Grows in Flights to the Moon
February 10, 1985|ROBERT E. DALLOS | Times Staff Writer

NEW YORK — Now that the airlines have been deregulated, they may fly just about anywhere they wish. And Pan American World Airways (…) has a list of 90,002 persons who hold reservations for the flights–to the moon.

Pan Am insists its moon-flight reservations program, established in 1968, is not a publicity stunt. (…)

The cards, says Pan Am, are not transferable and card holders must produce them before they can buy tickets to the moon. Although no deposits were required for the reservations, one would-be passenger was so anxious to secure his place in line that he sent along a check for $1 million. The check wasn’t cashed, Arey says. (…)

sb thumbs latimes pan am

 

If your ticket is still valid and you happen to be travveling for business reasons so that you have to fill a expense claim: Buzz Aldrin’s voucher could be a good template.

sb thumbs buzz aldrin moon voucher 1

“How Tiny Lab-Grown Human Brains Are Giving Big Insights Into Autism” BY SHELLY FAN

Article featured in SingularityHub

“cerebral organoids” are the brainchild of Dr. Madeline Lancaster, a neuroscientist at Cambridge who is interested in how our brains develop as embryos.

In a study published last week in Cell, a team from Yale School of Medicine used the technique to glean insight into why autism occurs in some people without a clear genetic cause.

Within a month, it was apparent that organoids created from people with autism overproduced one type of neuron that acts to dampen the chatter of normal neural activity. This small change upset the delicate excitatory and inhibitory balance in the developing brain, and may in part cause the faulty wiring behind autism’s behavioral symptoms. Further sleuthing led the scientists to a single gene responsible for the glitch.

… read more

“NASA CHIP REFLECTS WI-FI TO SAVE YOUR SMARTPHONE BATTERY” by Dave Gershgorn

posted in popsci.com

“(…) A researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, Adrian Tang, working with UCLA professor M.C. Frank Chang, has developed a Wi-Fi chip for use in mobile electronics that uses 100 times less power than traditional receivers. (…)  Tang’s Wi-Fi chip reflects a constant signal sent by a specialized router, instead of generating its own original signal. Data is imprinted on the signal when it’s reflected, so all the heavy lifting is essentially done on the router’s side.

(…) Low energy doesn’t mean slow, either. (…)

Tang says that the biggest difficulty was isolating the specific signal that was reflected back, because the initial signal is also being reflected by every surface in the room.

(…) NASA and UCLA have joint ownership of the idea and are in talks with a commercial partner to bring the technology to market, but they also see this technology being used to conserve energy in space.”  read full post

time for blockchain to step in?

“The ticking time-bomb at the heart of our big banks’ computer systems” by  Mark Latham

“(…)

Experts have for years been warning that the legacy systems of high street banks – some dating back to the 1960s – are an IT disaster waiting to happen. (…)

 

Rewind 15 years to RBS’s acquisition of NatWest in 2000. Although the integration of the two banks was lauded by City analysts for huge cost savings, Ian Fraser’s acclaimed account of the demise of RBS Shredded recounts how a decision was taken at an early stage to ditch NatWest’s more advanced computer systems and migrate all of the enlarged group’s IT onto RBS’s smaller IBM-based platform.

(…)

Although RBS has the worst record IT failures, there have also been well-publicised outages at Lloyds, the Cooperative Bank, TSB and the Bank of Scotland.

And the UK’s banks are not alone. (…)  The big players throughout the developed world (…) use computer systems that have been built up and adapted over several decades.” read full article

 

reading list: Bill Gates

Below some of top recommendations.  for a more complete view of the books, including reviews and comments, see his bookshelf by Bill Gates himself

“Tap Dancing to Work” by Carol Loomis

“Making the Modern World” by Vaclav Smil

“The Sixth Extinction” by Elizabeth Kolbert

“Stress Test” by Timothy Geithner

“The Better Angels of Our Nature” by Steven Pinker

“The Man Who Fed the World” by Leon Hesser

“Business Adventures” by John Brooks

“The Bully Pulpit” by Doris Kearns Goodwin

“The Rosie Project” by Graeme Simsion

“On Immunity” by Eula Biss

“How Asia Works” by Joe Studwell

“How to Lie With Statistics” by Darrell Huff

are there life jackets under our cities?

James Hansen, an early global warming whistleblower is publishing again.  More bad news, folks: “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming is highly dangerous”

Hansen and team of scientists studies indicates that:

“There is evidence of ice melt, sea level rise to +5–9 m, and extreme storms in the prior interglacial period that was less than 1 °C warmer than today.

Human-made climate forcing is stronger and more rapid than paleo forcings (…)  ice sheets in contact with the ocean are vulnerable to non-linear disintegration (…)

ice sheet mass loss can be approximated by a doubling time up to sea level rise of at least several meters. (…) Paleoclimate data reveal that subsurface ocean warming causes ice shelf melt and ice sheet discharge. (…)

slow Antarctic bottom water formation and increase ocean temperature near ice shelf grounding lines, while cooling the surface ocean and increasing sea ice cover and water column stability. Ocean surface cooling, in the North Atlantic as well as the Southern Ocean, increases tropospheric horizontal temperature gradients, eddy kinetic energy and baroclinicity, which drive more powerful storms.(…)

Recent ice sheet melt rates have a doubling time near the lower end of the 10–40 year range. We conclude that 2 °C global warming above the preindustrial level, which would spur more ice shelf melt, is highly dangerous. (…) ”

read full publication

 

“Forces of nature: Biomimicry in robotics” by Stuart Nathan

featured at theengineer.co.uk

“(…) robotics, possibly the most important field where engineers try to copy the abilities of living beings, is providing fruitful ground for bioinspired technologies. Investigating nature’s solutions is the preserve of biologists, but their insights into the often surprising and even seemingly perverse ways that organisms achieve what might seem impossible — such as climbing a sheer, smooth surface — can often  give engineers ideas for how to solve completely different problems. (…) .

(…)

Systems based on nature are attractive to engineers for several reasons, Whitesides said. “They tend to work well with humans because their functional parts are frequently soft, so they aren’t as hazardous as heavy industrial machinery with fast-moving metal components. Also, they tend to be simpler, because a lot of the time we replace complex electronic or mechanical control systems by simply making use of the properties of the materials of construction and how we actuate them. That often means they’re relatively cheap, so they can be built for a single use. …” read full article

Autonomous Weapons Open Letter from the Future of Life institute

Future of Life Institute published this “Autonomous Weapons: an Open Letter from AI & Robotics Researchers”:

“Autonomous Weapons: an Open Letter from AI & Robotics Researchers
Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people.

Just as most chemists and biologists have no interest in building chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no interest in building AI weapons — and do not want others to tarnish their field by doing so, potentially creating a major public backlash against AI that curtails its future societal benefits. Indeed, chemists and biologists have broadly supported international agreements that have successfully prohibited chemical and biological weapons, just as most physicists supported the treaties banning space-based nuclear weapons and blinding laser weapons.

In summary, we believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so. Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.”

“Self-Charging Phones Are on the Way, Finally” by Rachel Metz

from MIT Tech Review:

“The case that Will Zell slides onto his iPhone doesn’t look that unusual, but it’s doing something pretty out of the ordinary: capturing some of the radio waves that the phone transmits when connecting to cell-phone towers and Wi-Fi routers, converting them to electricity, and feeding that power back to the phone’s battery.

Zell is the CEO of Nikola Labs, a startup based in Columbus, Ohio, whose energy-harvesting technology was invented by Chi-Chih Chen, a research associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State University. (…)

They won’t make plugging your phone into a charger obsolete, but Zell says that Nikola’s phone case should be able to give users about 25 to 30 percent more battery life between charges. (…). Eventually, he hopes to fit the technology into the phone itself; early talks with phone makers have begun.

A French solar technology company called Sunpartner Technologies is already working on this with a thin, see-through overlay called WYSIPS Crystal (…) when the phone is exposed to artificial or natural light, it captures the light and converts it to an electric current. (…)

Much clunkier but perhaps more suited to that job is a wearable charger from Ampy, a startup based in Evanston, Illinois. The device contains a battery you fill up by moving around.” read full article

 

Commercial version of IBM’s Watson upgraded with Deep Learning

Watson commercial version now comes with translation, speech-to-text and text-to-speech modules.

Such modules apply deep-learning algorithms to the set of tools available to developers using Watson.

If not necessarily avant-garde, this makes clear that recent developments in machine learning techniques are bound to a more wide-spread use sooner.  Built-in APIs let developers a handy use of deep learning ‘skiping’ the full journey of statistical and computing learning curve.

 

btw, you can also try Watson’s Personality Insights serivce on your won (or other’s) texts.