Sawyer on the elasticity of the liberal arts education

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📖 On page 143 of 425 of A Riddle in Ruby by Kent Davis

📖 On page 143of 425 of A Riddle in Ruby by Kent Davis

The story is starting to move along now. We’ve discovered where the father has been taken, but we’re still completely in the dark about why things are happening. The color and description of the world is coming more firmly into place.

🔖 "Opposite-of"-information improves similarity calculations in phenotype ontologies

Bookmarked "Opposite-of"-information improves similarity calculations in phenotype ontologies (bioRxiv)
One of the most important use cases of ontologies is the calculation of similarity scores between a query and items annotated with classes of an ontology. The hierarchical structure of an ontology does not necessarily reflect all relevant aspects of the domain it is modelling, and this can reduce the performance of ontology-based search algorithms. For instance, the classes of phenotype ontologies may be arranged according to anatomical criteria, but individual phenotypic features may affect anatomic entities in opposite ways. Thus, "opposite" classes may be located in close proximity in an ontology; for example enlarged liver and small liver are grouped under abnormal liver size. Using standard similarity measures, these would be scored as being similar, despite in fact being opposites. In this paper, we use information about opposite ontology classes to extend two large phenotype ontologies, the human and the mammalian phenotype ontology. We also show that this information can be used to improve rankings based on similarity measures that incorporate this information. In particular, cosine similarity based measures show large improvements. We hypothesize this is due to the natural embedding of opposite phenotypes in vector space. We support the idea that the expressivity of semantic web technologies should be explored more extensively in biomedical ontologies and that similarity measures should be extended to incorporate more than the pure graph structure defined by the subclass or part-of relationships of the underlying ontologies.

@lpachter Your cup of tea over at UCLA next week? Regulatory & Epigenetic Stochasticity in Development & Disease http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/workshops/regulatory-and-epigenetic-stochasticity-in-development-and-disease

@lpachter Your cup of tea over at UCLA next week? Regulatory & Epigenetic Stochasticity in Development & Disease http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/workshops/regulatory-and-epigenetic-stochasticity-in-development-and-disease


👓 A Conversation with @LPachter (BS ’94) | Caltech

Read A Conversation with Lior Pachter (BS '94) (The California Institute of Technology)
Pachter, a computational biologist, returns to CalTech to study the role and function of RNA.

Why the Obamacare repeal effort is suddenly a huge mess | Axios

Read Why the Obamacare repeal effort is suddenly a huge mess by Caitlin Owens (Axios)
The future of Medicaid expansion is a big disagreement — and the divide over replacement is getting bigger.

👓 Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds | The New Yorker

Read Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (The New Yorker)
New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.

The vaunted human capacity for reason may have more to do with winning arguments than with thinking straight.
The vaunted human capacity for reason may have more to do with winning arguments than with thinking straight. Credit Illustration by Gérard DuBois
Continue reading 👓 Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds | The New Yorker

Chief digital officer steps down from White House job over background check | Politico

Read Chief digital officer steps down from White House job over background check by Tara Palmeri and Daniel Lippman (POLITICO)
The background check must be completed by White House staffers for positions that cover national security.