Fortunately by last year the this Café (GE) double oven induction range was available here in the US: https://www.cafeappliances.com/appliance/Cafe-30-Smart-Slide... I have a few quibbles (mainly, that only one of the burners is properly sized for a 12" skillet) but overall I like it.
I don't mind the touch buttons for operating the oven and timers--in fact, they're nice and easy to clean (with a handy "lock screen" feature so you can spray and wipe down the front panel without everything going nuts) but I'm pretty sure trying to fine tune the burner settings using a touch slider while keeping an eye on multiple pans would have driven me nuts. I also have haven't had problems with the knobs getting dirty or being hard to wipe down if they do, to address a point raised in another reply.
Price splits the difference between the entry level ranges and the snobby brands (Miele, Thermador, etc).
From a quick skim: what's interesting about this study from an HN perspective is that they used Alphafold (or more specifically Alphafold-Multimer: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.04.463034v2....) to screen more than 1400 different proteins that were likely to be present on zebrafish sperm to see which ones might bind to other known sperm fertility factors.
Lo, and behold, they found a protein (i.e, the product of a particular zebrafish gene) that Alphafold-Multimer predicted would bind to two of the known sperm factors. And it turned out to be a kind of missing link: the three sperm proteins together were predicted form a stable structure. And, that structure ("complex") sticks to the only egg protein known to be required for fertilization! (Where all of this was first predicted using Alphafold-Multimer, then experimentally confirmed to some degree.)
Not only that, it turns out human versions ("orthologs") of these three sperm proteins exist, and their experimental evidence at least suggests that they stick together, forming a complex as well. Which presumably sticks to some human egg protein. Pretty neat.
Why this matters: Consider. 20 years ago, I briefly worked for a lab that used genetics to study fertilization in C. elegans (fast breeding, millimeter-long worms with a lot of infrastructure in place for scientific study). Sure, we were studying worms, but the PI had a personal interest in (in)fertility, and it was his long bet that fundamental research would help medicine solve infertility.
Now it looks like the bet is showing promise of paying off: back then, there didn't seem to be any vertebrate equivalents of the worm genes we found. Maybe worm fertilization was just too far removed. But the top "related article" is from my old lab (https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)...) and the abstract points out that several worm genes they and related labs found are, in fact, equivalents of the vertebrate genes discussed in TFA! So progress accelerates.
What are other important “protein complexes” that we know of in biology? Seems like they may have relevance as an important precursor in the pathway of the evolution of life
As an engineer who has worked on systems that handle sensitive data, it seems straightforwardly to me to be a statement about:
1. ACLs
2. The systems that provision those ACLs
3. The policies that determine the rules those systems follow.
In other words, the model training batch job might run as a system user that has access to data annotated as 'interactions' (at timestamp T1 user U1 joined channel C1, at timestamp T2 user U2 ran a query that got 137 results), but no access to data annotated as 'content', like (certainly) message text or (probably) the text of users' queries. An RPC from the training job attempting to retrieve such content would be denied, just the same as if somebody tried to access someone else's DMs without being logged in as them.
As a general rule in a big company, you the engineer or product manager don't get to decide what the ACLs will look like no matter how much you might feel like it. You request access for your batch job from some kind of system that provisions it. In turn the humans who decide how that system work obey the policies set out by the company.
It's not unlike a bank teller who handles your account number. You generally trust them not to transfer your money to their personal account on the sly while they're tapping away at the terminal--not necessarily because they're law abiding citizens who want to keep their job, but because the bank doesn't make it possible and/or would find out. (A mom and pop bank might not be able to make the same guarantee, but Bank of America does.) [*]
In the same vein, this is a statement that their system doesn't make it possible for some Slack PM to jack their team's OKRs by secretly training on customer data that other teams don't use, just because that particular PM felt like ignoring the policy.
[*] Not a perfect analogy, because a bank teller is like a Slack customer service agent who might, presumably after asking for your consent, be able to access messages on your behalf. But in practice I doubt there's a way for an employee to use their personal, probably very time-limited access to funnel that data to a model training job. And at a certain level of maturity a company (hopefully) also no longer makes it possible for a human employee to train a model in a random notebook using whatever personal data access they have been granted and then deploy that same model to prod. Startups might work that way, though.
There was a Soofa sign near my house across the river in Somerville that (now that I think about it) I haven't seen for a while now. The branding wasn't quite as prominent as the Brookline Bank sponsored one in the photo. As I recall it displayed a vaguely useful calendar of local and city events, plus a question you could reply to on Twitter so they could show "engagement".
I'm not surprised nor especially troubled that the sign gathers pseudonymized MAC addresses in hourly buckets. In the last several years there's a mini-trend of startups attempting to provide more or less anonymized smartphone traffic data to cities and towns for urban planning purposes.
In theory this is good! Ideally it helps city hall be more data driven and see things that might not filter up to city hall, in a "pave the cowpaths" way (E.g,. do we need a new circulator shuttle stop? What's happening that one weekend in May that drives so much foot traffic and that we're not aware of at city hall, and should send a police detail to control that intersection? Oh, that brewpub has an annual event we didn't know about that blew up on Instagram.)
In practice I think the problem is the wins tend to be minimal compared to the effort involved.
All that said, I don't love the conspiratorial, low-trust assumptions you're encouraged to make by the bare statement "They’re collecting data from your cell phone."
But without privacy regulations I suppose that's where things will inevitably go -- people will assume a priori that "data collection" is itself threatening. (I certainly foresee a lot of rich retirees agitating to cancel the contract at the next Brookline town meeting.) So I wonder if the main benefit of better privacy regulation in the US would be preventing further deterioration of the basic trust that allows the "collective intelligence" vision of the 00's to come to fruition.
American here - it is foolish to trust so much; history has shown again and again that a few determined actors, often wearing a uniform, can and do "fleece the sheep" for fines, tracking or whatever else.. With that said, there are plenty of benign or even constructive uses for traffic data. This is not traffic data alone. The worst offenders of privacy violation and aggressive monetization with or without consent, can do a lot of damage.
Fun! This is the kind of thing I got back into programming for around 2010. Just to toot my own (and my former employer's) horn, I worked on a bunch of the underlying models behind the Concord Consortium activities here: https://learn.concord.org/
They're aimed more at middle and high school, are "curriculum aligned" and developed into classroom-ready form by professional educators, and then Concord researches how well they work in actual classrooms.
We had been using a Java app (and applet) called Molecular Workbench for some of these, but in 2012 we got a Google.org grant to reimplement the same concept but natively running in browsers.
It traces the story of a Renaissance humanist who tracked down and translated the Epicurean philosopher/poet Lucretius' De Rerem Natura, which Greenblatt describes as portraying a strikingly modern way of seeing the world.
In particular Lucretius and the Epicureans denied the existence of supernatural causes, were opposed to religious fear, and posited the ideas of atomism and biological evolution. Of course they're better known for their approach to living life, which Greenblatt shows is more sophisticated than sometimes caricatured, and which he portrays as a breath of fresh air compared to the oppressive moralism and hypocrisy of the Church at the time. (Jefferson and many of the American Founders described themselves as Epicureans.)
He goes on to imply that Epicureanism was influential and widespread in the ancient world but suppressed by the early Church, so that we now know little of it.
Anyone, one of the tantalizing parts of the book is where he describes the carbonized and unreadable Herculaneum scrolls, since they were the private library of a wealthy patron of the Epicureans. I think he thinks being able to read the scrolls will really change our understanding of the ancient world.
And remember: if they hadn't been carbonized, they would have crumbled to dust. That's why we only have the texts that managed to get copied. (Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land is a novel about the survival and 21st century rediscovery of an imaginary Greek play, and ... I'll let you read it yourself - https://www.anthonydoerr.com/books/cloud-cuckoo-land)
(Apologies for any errors above, as basically all I know about this subject is what I read in the book!)
It's interesting reading for a layperson, but as with any other pop-history book, one should read this with a heaping plate of salt at hand. (I'm... not sure what that metaphor actually means or if this is an appropriate way to extend it.)
Things are always more nuanced than can be laid out in a sweeping narrative format and the compression required can lose some critical information, even with the best of intentions. There's also just getting things wrong, which most non-historians do and many historians will do on topics that aren't their expertise.
I'd read this criticism from AskHistorians (not infallible, I know)
The "grain of salt" reference relates to some antidote, which contained a grain of salt. The reduction to "handle with care" is modern.
So the extended metaphor makes no literal sense according to the Pliny text, but it makes sense according to our interpretation of it, which is what matters.
You might also be interested in the Charvaka school of ancient India [1], which is a close counterpart to Epicureanism. The Charvaka school was likewise influential and widespread, and it likewise become obscure over time, for reasons I don't know.
I realize citing Wikipedia risks some serious error, but my impression is that by late antiquity (after AD 200), the main philosophical systems in the Roman world were Christianity and Neoplatonism (itself heavily influenced by Christianity) and to a lesser extent Stoicism. Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Middle Platonism were more characteristic of Classical Antiquity (200 BC-200 AD). The Wikipedia page on Epicureanism[0] supports this impression: "By the late third century CE, however, there was little trace of its existence.[7] With growing dominance of Neoplatonism and Peripateticism, and later, Christianity, Epicureanism declined."
I can think of many reasons it's difficult, though:
* The fact that accident investigations are designed to figure out which driver was at fault, for insurance purposes
* The fact that road designers are shielded from liability (good, right?), but only if they can show they followed the standard design handbooks, which not only fail to prioritize safety over traffic flow but also don't require or even contemplate performing a thorough case-by-case investigation into how to prevent a certain type of accident from happening again. (Crash Analysis Studio tries to demonstrate how to do this.)
* The sheer scale of the changes to roads that would be needed. In the States, access of hundreds of thousands of businesses and probably millions of homes depend on roads that are supposed to get people from A to B fast but also have lots of access points for businesses on them, which is like just like mixing taxiing and holding with takeoff and landing, but without the air traffic controllers. And don't get me started about unprotected lefts across multiple lanes of traffic.
* The lack of buy-in from the citizenry for enforcing professional-like standards on drivers. Despite the blameless culture that helps identify flaws in the system, air traffic controllers, pilots, maintenance crews, train engineers, etc also know that their job depends on making a sincere effort to follow the rules that are written, and in most cases their professional identity is tied up with following the rules. (I've heard that to be a pilot you really have to be comfortable with doing what you're told, all day long.) There's really no obvious way to get the masses of drivers to think and feel that way about their driving, and of course we can't just sanction our way to compliance because people need their licenses to go about their lives. And of course usually there is no reasonably alternative to driving yourself where you need to go.
> I've heard that to be a pilot you really have to be comfortable with doing what you're told, all day long.
Quite the opposite. The Pilot in Command is ultimately the person who is legally responsible for the safe operation of the aircraft. While you are following ATC instructions the majority of the time you are in contact with them, you are also culpable if you blindly allow them to put you in danger. If ATC tells you to do something unsafe, the proper response is to say "unable" and then say why. As described in the article, there are safeguards to protect pilots acting in good faith, and this is also one reason why airline pilots are unionized.
Ah, I worded that badly. Ultimately the pilot is the decider as you say. I was getting at the idea that (so I am told) the day to day experience of piloting is very much about working within a regimented system.
Strongly reglemented: yes; however, the rules are cut out in a way that requires _a lot_ of due diligence and experience to make sound decisions. For instance, EASA rules so no problem whatsoever dispatching an aircraft with minimum fuel (fuel planning regs) and no alternate planned (alternate planning regs) towards a destination that has thunderstorms in their weather forecast (weather regs)... it is up to the flight crew to mentally "fusion" different regulations together and make sound and safe decisions.
Well the Bell Labs Holmdel complex is often used as an example of the death and creative reuse of the suburban office park, and I guess this is the flip side.
In the long run I guess splendid isolation turned out to be no match for being in a walkable city with a research university, research hospitals, major pharma headquarters (J&J) right in town, and a train station across the street that goes right to New York, EWR, and Princeton.
Still, I'm suffering a bit of vertigo that Bell Labs (or what's left of it) is moving to where the old Rutgers Bookstore and Albany St parking garage used to be (!) and that suddenly the gritty, grungy New Brunswick I used to bum around 20 years ago looks more like Kendall Square, where I work now. (And which also didn't used to look like it does now, I suppose.)
(Disclaimer: this is a super local story for me; my dad worked at Bell Labs in Holmdel, and I'm a third generation Rutgers grad whose mom grew up walking into downtown New Brunswick, and I probably spent way too much of my early 20s at the Starbucks on George Street and the Melody Bar, both RIP.)
I worked in N Jersey in the late 70s and I had coworkers who'd worked for Bell. They said that most tech people in Jersey had been thru Bell at one time or another. Does this match your experience of the area ?
It really blew my mind how much Bell Labs influenced the area. I had my internship at Ericsson in Piscataway (formerly Telcordia, formerly part of Bell). I later worked for a defense contractor that came out of the Bell/Lucent/Alcatel-Lucent line. It feels like everyone I crossed paths with knew everyone else, and that they all had roots in some part of the Bell System.
Well, statistics matter here and one thing insurance companies know about is statistics. If you brake hard once or twice, no biggie.
But, for sure, my prior is that someone who frequently brakes hard on the road is someone who gets themselves into jams they shouldn't have been in in the first place. Maybe it's a matter of failing to anticipate what's coming up ahead. Maybe it's a matter of where, when, and how often they drive.
Both indicate risk that, arguably, should be priced appropriately. Same for health behaviors.
Dropping you is a thing that happens when the expected value of your insurance payouts exceed the expected value of the premiums collected. With granular data from telematics, an insurer [*] could notify you to change your game long before they end up concluding, "Well, none of the data we have on this person differentiates them from the last 3 guys to cost us a million plus in settlements and claims, so sayonara"
[*] thinking of TFA here I mean a suitably regulated insurer, not one that is somehow sneakily accessing telematics data without any transparency
Insurance companies know stats. But I don’t think regulators effectively regulate use of these new statistics, which is essential to an business like car insurance.
The headline put me in mind of a different memory I had of the campus BBS from undergraduate days, and then I clicked through and realized that the author was actually the admin of that BBS!
Anyway, in addition to the BBS there was also an IBM mainframe (?) running VM/SP that you could connect to, and somehow that was how you got to IRC.
One night several of us spent hours chatting on IRC, and the next day we got called into the campus computing service where it was patiently explained that some professor's overnight batch job running stats had failed because it was constantly being interrupted by interactive-priority jobs ... i.e., our chat sessions. Which we should now stop.
I remember writing a passionate open letter using my vague knowledge that had trickled out about "hacker culture" in places like Berkeley where students were surely right now exploring these new things called "Usenet" and "the Internet", arguing that even though we weren't doing anything fancy like running stats for an economics paper, and even though we didn't know what any of it would actually amount to, the important thing for our education was that we had the chance to experiment with it for ourselves...
Fortunately by last year the this Café (GE) double oven induction range was available here in the US: https://www.cafeappliances.com/appliance/Cafe-30-Smart-Slide... I have a few quibbles (mainly, that only one of the burners is properly sized for a 12" skillet) but overall I like it.
I don't mind the touch buttons for operating the oven and timers--in fact, they're nice and easy to clean (with a handy "lock screen" feature so you can spray and wipe down the front panel without everything going nuts) but I'm pretty sure trying to fine tune the burner settings using a touch slider while keeping an eye on multiple pans would have driven me nuts. I also have haven't had problems with the knobs getting dirty or being hard to wipe down if they do, to address a point raised in another reply.
Price splits the difference between the entry level ranges and the snobby brands (Miele, Thermador, etc).
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