Science | Chris Aldrich

👓 ‘I Want What My Male Colleague Has, and That Will Cost a Few Million Dollars’ | New York Times

Read ‘I Want What My Male Colleague Has, and That Will Cost a Few Million Dollars (nytimes.com)

Women at the Salk Institute say they faced a culture of marginalization and hostility. The numbers from other elite scientific institutions suggest they’re not alone.

From a statistical mechanics perspective, there isn’t much of a chance that women are all grouped at the bottom of the pack without their being systematically being drug down to that position.

The thing that goes unsung in a lot of these gender inequality articles is the assured dramatic loss to science as a result. If women were given equal footing, funding, and support what great discoveries would they have otherwise have found by this point? Assuredly the world would be far better off from those unknown discoveries.

It was quoted in the title of the article, but the full quote is even more damning.

“I know a lot of men who sincerely promote gender-equality opportunities for women, but all their efforts are devoted toward younger women,” Emerson says — because it’s less costly. “But I want what my male colleague has, and that will cost a few million dollars.”

🎧 The Daily: A Path to Curing H.I.V. | New York Times

Listened to The Daily: A Path to Curing H.I.V. from New York Times

A second person appears to have been cured of infection with the virus that causes AIDS. We spoke to an activist about what this means.

👓 Highly Profitable Medical Journal Says Open Access Publishing Has Failed. Right. | Forbes

Read Highly Profitable Medical Journal Says Open Access Publishing Has Failed. Right. by Steven Salzberg (Forbes)

The New England Journal of Medicine just published an editorial saying open access publishing isn't necessary, because they already make most of their content free. What are they so worried about? Yours truly breaks down a few of their bogus arguments.

You’d think that a highly respected medical journal would be great and providing some back up evidence right?!

Read Blue Brain solves a century-old neuroscience problem (ScienceDaily)

New research explains how the shapes of neurons can be classified using mathematical methods from the field of algebraic topology. Neuroscientists can now start building a formal catalogue for all the types of cells in the brain. Onto this catalogue of cells, they can systematically map the function and role in disease of each type of neuron in the brain.

👓 Scientists rise up against statistical significance | Nature

Read Scientists rise up against statistical significance by Valentin Amrhein, Sander Greenland & Blake McShane (Nature )

Valentin Amrhein, Sander Greenland, Blake McShane and more than 800 signatories call for an end to hyped claims and the dismissal of possibly crucial effects.

🎧 Episode 120 The Social Impact of Intelligent Systems | Human Current

Listened to Episode 120 The Social Impact of Intelligent Systems by

Haley Campbell-Gross from HumanCurrent

In this episode, Haley talks with Dr. Mihaela Ulieru, a scholar of distributed intelligent systems, Founder and President of the IMPACT Institute for the Digital Economy, and a Fourth Industrial Revolution champion at the World Economic Forum, where she advocated to include Blockchain among the "Top 10" in 2016. Ulieru talks about the interplay between society and technology and its effects on our humanity. She shares many paradoxical examples for how technology, like artificial intelligence and blockchain, can help us transcend our limitations while also preying on them. Ulieru also urges leaders to educate themselves on the ways blockchain can streamline their business, stating it’s now “a matter of survival”.

Sometimes I get the impression that our hosts in this series can be a bit too credulous when they don’t have the technical background to push back on their interviewees. This episode is a prime example.

While Dr. Ulieru may have some of the technical background to talk about blockchain, I think it’s a bit irresponsible for her to be evangelizing it the way she is without more concrete and successful examples. This interview falls into the trap of many conversations about blockchain and evangelizing it without enough push back on its long term potential.

About 30 minutes in she mentions the Sapien Network as a replacement for social media using blockchain. I’m curious to dig into it a bit to see what it is and how it actually works. Is it or could it be IndieWeb friendly? I don’t have high hopes, but I’ll try to take a peek shortly. Again here she simply evangelizes that it’s the solution to our problems without any discussion about why except to say “but blockchain!”. At present their site says they have 5,800 users.

At about 34 minutes in she also mentions a YouTube replacement on blockchain called Snacked (perhaps I misheard her?), but I was unable to track down such a site with the functionality she mentioned. Here again she states a reasonable problem, and simply states the solution as “blockchain!” without any direct specifics about why blockchain is a good solution and how it works to make a marked improvement.

“For any business that can use blockchain (to improve their processes) and is not using it now, I think it’s a race against time right now, so educate yourself because it’s a matter of survival for your business. Especially educate your leaders.” — Dr. Mihaela Ulieru
Statements like this can be deadly for businesses when they’re done in this sort of evangelizing fashion without any supporting reasoning below it. There is too much blockchain FUD out there, particularly when the technology is over a decade old, and there are very few, if any, real success stories and lots and lots of vaporware.

👓 How long do floods throughout the millennium remain in the collective memory? | Nature

Read How long do floods throughout the millennium remain in the collective memory? by Václav Fanta, Miroslav Šálek & Petr Sklenicka (Nature Communications, volume 10, Article number: 1105 (2019) )

Is there some kind of historical memory and folk wisdom that ensures that a community remembers about very extreme phenomena, such as catastrophic floods, and learns to establish new settlements in safer locations? We tested a unique set of empirical data on 1293 settlements founded in the course of nine centuries, during which time seven extreme floods occurred. For a period of one generation after each flood, new settlements appeared in safer places. However, respect for floods waned in the second generation and new settlements were established closer to the river. We conclude that flood memory depends on living witnesses, and fades away already within two generations. Historical memory is not sufficient to protect human settlements from the consequences of rare catastrophic floods.

This is intriguing particularly when thinking back to our earliest world literatures which all involve flood stories.

I wonder what the equivalent sorts of things would be for C. elegans, drosophila, etc. for testing things on smaller timescales?

Bookmarked From bit to it: How a complex metabolic network transforms information into living matter by Andreas Wagner (BMC Systems Biology)

Background

Organisms live and die by the amount of information they acquire about their environment. The systems analysis of complex metabolic networks allows us to ask how such information translates into fitness. A metabolic network transforms nutrients into biomass. The better it uses information on available nutrient availability, the faster it will allow a cell to divide.

Results

I here use metabolic flux balance analysis to show that the accuracy I (in bits) with which a yeast cell can sense a limiting nutrient's availability relates logarithmically to fitness as indicated by biomass yield and cell division rate. For microbes like yeast, natural selection can resolve fitness differences of genetic variants smaller than 10-6, meaning that cells would need to estimate nutrient concentrations to very high accuracy (greater than 22 bits) to ensure optimal growth. I argue that such accuracies are not achievable in practice. Natural selection may thus face fundamental limitations in maximizing the information processing capacity of cells.

Conclusion

The analysis of metabolic networks opens a door to understanding cellular biology from a quantitative, information-theoretic perspective.

https://doi.org/10.1186/1752-0509-1-33

Received: 01 March 2007 Accepted: 30 July 2007 Published: 30 July 2007

Hat tip to Paul Davies in The Demon in the Machine

Bookmarked Statistical Physics of Self-Replication by Jeremy L. England (J. Chem. Phys. 139, 121923 (2013); )

Self-replication is a capacity common to every species of living thing, and simple physical intuition dictates that such a process must invariably be fueled by the production of entropy. Here, we undertake to make this intuition rigorous and quantitative by deriving a lower bound for the amount of heat that is produced during a process of self-replication in a system coupled to a thermal bath. We find that the minimum value for the physically allowed rate of heat production is determined by the growth rate, internal entropy, and durability of the replicator, and we discuss the implications of this finding for bacterial cell division, as well as for the pre-biotic emergence of self-replicating nucleic acids.
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4818538

Syndicated copy also available on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.1179

Hat tip to Paul Davies in The Demon in the Machine

👓 Defining the DNA of collaboration | The Open Co-op

Read Defining the DNA of collaboration (The Open Co-op)

As a species, human beings are barely more intelligent than kindergarten kids. We revel at our place at the top of the food chain, and praise our technological ingenuity but, let’s face it, we’ve barely begun to work life out. We’ve created one directional extractive systems that undermine our own life support systems, like kindergarten …

There’s some interesting philosophy here. It dances around the idea of fitness landscapes, but doesn’t mention them directly, though this is essentially what the article is exploring from the perspective of businesses.