Soon two American biotechnology firms hope to offer couples undertaking in vitro fertilisation the chance to screen embryos before they are implanted. Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis is already widely used to test for chromosomal abnormalities or specific genetic disorders. But MyOme and Genomic Prediction plan to reconstruct the whole sequence of an embryo’s genome using just a few cells from a biopsy and genetic sequences of both parents. They can then, in theory, calculate the risk the embryo will develop a wide range of different diseases in later life—including ailments that are extraordinarily complicated, involving thousands of genetic variants. By selecting between different embryos, those undergoing IVF can optimise the health of their progeny in a way that those who conceive naturally cannot. That raises ethical concerns. Although both firms will screen embryos for disease risk only, there is no reason why traits such as height or intelligence might not be selected in the same way.
Reads
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
👓 Defence in depth | Wikipedia
Defence in depth (also known as deep or elastic defence) is a military strategy that seeks to delay rather than prevent the advance of an attacker, buying time and causing additional casualties by yielding space. Rather than defeating an attacker with a single, strong defensive line, defence in depth relies on the tendency of an attack to lose momentum over time or as it covers a larger area. A defender can thus yield lightly defended territory in an effort to stress an attacker's logistics or spread out a numerically superior attacking force. Once an attacker has lost momentum or is forced to spread out to pacify a large area, defensive counter-attacks can be mounted on the attacker's weak points, with the goal being to cause attrition or drive the attacker back to its original starting position.
👓 Converting png files to jpg files while using a screen reader | Amanda Rush
The Problem
By default, WordPress supports png files to its media library. However, some hosts, (including mine), will block some filetypes for security reasons. In my case, one of the off-limits filetypes is png (image) files. You can change this by either employing the appropriate filter through c...
👓 Chris Aldrich’s Year In Pocket
See how much I read in Pocket this year!
According to Pocket’s account I read 766,000 words or the equivalent of about 10 books. My most saved topics were current events, science, technology, health, and education.
The most popular things I apparently saved this year:
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The 100 best nonfiction books of all time: the full list by Robert McCrum • theguardian.com
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Is Your Child Lying to You? That’s Good by Alex Stone • nytimes.com
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How Actual Smart People Talk About Themselves by JAMES FALLOWS • theatlantic.com
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The Fall of Travis Kalanick Was a Lot Weirder and Darker Than You Thought by Eric Newcomer, Brad Stone • bloomberg.com
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The female price of male pleasure by Lili Loofbourow • theweek.com
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I’ll have to work at getting better to create my own end-of-year statistics since my own website has a better accounting of what I’ve actually read (it isn’t all public) and bookmarked. I do like that their service does some aggregate comparison of my data versus all the other user data (anonymized from my perspective).
Pocket also does a relatively good job of doing discovery of good things to read based on aggregate user data in terms of categories like “Best of” and “Popular”. They also give me weekly email updates of things I’ve bookmarked there as reminders to go back and read them, which I find a useful functionality which they haven’t over-gamified. Presently my own closest functionality to this is to be subscribed to the RSS feed of my own public bookmarks in a feed reader (which I find generally useful) as well as regularly checking on my private bookmarks on my websites’s back end (something as easy as clicking on a browser bookmark) and even looking at my “on this day” functionality to review over things from years past.
I’ll note that I currently rely more on Nuzzle for real-time discovery on a daily basis however.
Greg McVerry might appreciate that they’re gamifying reading by presenting me with a badge.
As an aside while I’m thinking of it, it might be a cool thing if the IndieWeb wiki received webmentions, so that self-documentation I do on my own website automatically appeared on the appropriate linked pages either in a webmention section or perhaps the “See Also” section. If wikis did this generally, it would be a cool means of potentially building communities and fuelling discovery on the broader web. Imagine if adding to a wiki via Webmention were as easy as syndicating content to a site like IndieNews or IndieWeb.XYZ? It could also function as a useful method of archiving web content from original pages to places like the Internet Archive in a simple way, much like how I currently auto-archive my individual pages automatically on the day they’re published.
👓 ‘Heathers’ TV show cancelled again following Pittsburgh synagogue shooting | The Independent
Paramount Network's remake of the cult 1988 black comedy has been rendered tasteless by a string of mass shootings over the past eight months
👓 The Impossibility of ‘Heathers’ | National Review
Kevin D. Williamson (National Review)Which movies from your youth would be impossible to make today due to political correctness?
Interesting that he asks for reader responses here, but the website provides no way to actively respond.
👓 Instagram’s Christmas Crackdown | The Atlantic
No meme account is safe—not even @God.
There are so many reasons here for these folks to join the IndieWeb. A solid, popular feed reader would solve many of these problems.
“We are our own BuzzFeed,” said Declan Mortimer, a 16-year-old who ran the @ComedySlam account, with more than 11 million followers. Kaamil Lakhani and Jonathan Foley, who work together on @SocietyFeelings, said they were even in the process of building a dedicated website, as accounts such as @Daquan have already done.
Despite the Christmas setback, most meme account holders mentioned in this article said that they weren’t planning to abandon the platform anytime soon. But the incident served as an acute reminder of how quickly they can lose it all and be forced to start from scratch. “We’re playing on rented property,” said Goswami, “and that’s just so apparent now more than ever before.”
👓 How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success | New Yorker
With “The Apprentice,” the TV producer mythologized Trump—then a floundering D-lister—as the ultimate titan, paving his way to the Presidency.
How did this not get written before the election?
👓 The Case for Moving Your Social Network to Micro.blog | Brad Enslen
Brad (Brad Enslen)This is a continuation of a series. You may want to start with the first post: Populism and Today’s Social Tech vs. Blogging What is Micro.blog? Micro.blog (MB) has two elements the 1. hosted blog and 2. the social network. They exist sort of separately but they are also intertwined. You have...
👓 Journalism as a technology service | Nieman Lab
"Over the years, journalists have innovated narrowly, focusing on how stories look rather than what journalism can do."
👓 India’s Tighter E-Commerce Rules Frustrate Amazon and Walmart Plans | WSJ
Foreign companies will no longer be allowed to sell products from their own affiliated companies in India
NEW DELHI—India is tightening restrictions on foreign e-commerce companies operating in the country, a new challenge to Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc. as they bet billions on the nascent market.
Current rules forbid non-Indian online sellers from holding their own inventory and shipping it out to consumers, as is typically done in other countries. Instead, they have found a work-around by operating as online marketplaces and selling what are effectively their own products held by their affiliated local companies.
They will no longer be allowed to sell such goods, a division of India’s Commerce and Industry Ministry said in a statement Wednesday, an apparent attempt to close that loophole.
The new rules, which take effect Feb. 1, also bar foreign companies from entering into exclusive agreements with sellers. Amazon, for example, has in the past been the exclusive third-party online retailer to sell smartphones from the popular Chinese smartphone brand OnePlus.
Abneesh Roy, an analyst at Edelweiss Securities, noted that ahead of elections set for early next year, the government could be moving to appease owners of smaller shops that have been hit as customers buy more goods online.
“Shopkeepers have been unhappy,” he said. “In an election year, the government will definitely listen more to voters.” ❧
It’s nice to see foreign countries looking at what has happened to coutries like America with the rise of things like e-commerce, actually thinking about them and the longer term implications, and making rules to effect the potential outcomes.
Now the bigger follow up question is: is this a good thing? Perhaps there won’t be the community interruption we’ve seen in the US, but what do the overall effects look like decades hence? From a community perspective, from a competitive perspective?
December 27, 2018 at 12:26PM
👓 Usernames on Micro.blog | Manton Reece
Manton Reece (manton.org)Micro.blog now has 3 distinct styles of usernames to make the platform more compatible with other services: Micro.blog usernames, e.g. @you. These are simple usernames for @-mentioning someone else in the Micro.blog community. Mastodon usernames, e.g. @you@yourdomain.com. When you search Micro.blog ...
👓 A Reading Plan for 2019 | Rhoneisms
Last year, I publicized my reading plan for the year. Overall, I’m very happy with the number of books I managed to read (20) and the quality of what I read. There are some aspects of the plan I wish I’d been better at but that’s a small regret. I enjoyed almost everything I picked up with few...
I like the idea of a reading plan (or personal syllabus, if you will). I’m not sure I could be as rigid about letting new titles onto my list though.
I did a miserable job of reading the non-fiction on my list this year, but did a good bit of juvenile fiction that I enjoyed. I did however read a humongous amount of online content (articles, etc.) and managed to log nearly every bit of it.
👓 Book Notes: ‘Sapiens,’ by Yuval Noah Harari | Newley.com
Newley Purnell (newley.com)A deeply thought-provoking book about how homo sapiens came to dominate the world – and how our advancements have come at a significant cost.
I love big, sprawling books that tackle huge subjects and challenge you to change the way you conceive of the world.
This global bestseller, which has been all the rage among Silicon Valley technologists in recent years, in particular, is one of the best of that sort of title I’ve read.
If Newley likes this and Guns, Germs, and Steel, he’ll likely love David Christian’s Maps of Time.
Unlike typical book blogs, it looks like Newley is posting these types of reviews, quotes, and ideas in a way similar to how I set out my own online commonplace book.
👓 The 10 Best Books I Read in 2018 | Newley.com
Newley Purnell (newley.com)Here’s the best of what I read in 2018. As in previous round-ups, some of these titles came out this year, while others were published in years past.