Roche is pulling out of the IBM project for a super DNA sequencer. Here’s a quick review on In The Pipeline:
Tech companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Google actually have dismal records of moving into medicine. Biology is simply not like semiconductors or software engineering, even when it involves semiconductors or software engineering
I love Derek’s perspective on this:
One of the big mistakes that people make is in thinking that “technology” is a single category of transferrable expertise.
Seth Brown:
If you’re reading this Samuel L. Jackson, I’m available for Snakes On A Plane 2. If you should need me, I already have an idea for the plot.
That’s a provocative quote. The post is an interesting look at how a data-guy does estimation.
From The Guardian UK:
Colquhoun’s guide is a Devil’s Dictionary of all things holistic: “Herbal medicine: giving patients an unknown dose of an ill-defined drug, of unknown effectiveness and unknown safety… Reflexology: plain old foot massage, overlaid with utter nonsense about non-existent connections between your feet and your thyroid gland… Spiritual healing: tea and sympathy, accompanied by arm-waving… Kinesiology, iridology, vega test, etc: various forms of fraud, designed to sell you cures that don’t work, for problems you haven’t got.
A nice little book review at the Guardian:
Tears are less important when you are alone because there is no one to witness them
There’s some more thoughtful analysis in the article, but that quote will certainly get you to read it. It’s the most controversial conclusion I think anyone could draw from the research.
From the scientist behind the current outrage of imbeciles:
Investment in the NSF is just over $20 per year per person, while it takes upward of $2,000 per year per person to fund the military. Basic research has to be funded by the government rather than private investors because there are no immediate profits to be derived from it.
And later:
The commentary and headlines in some of the recent articles reflect outrage that the study was about duck genitals, as if there is something inherently wrong or perverse with this line of research.
From Science Based Medicine blog:
In conclusion, atherosclerosis was common in four preindustrial populations, including a preagricultural hunter-gatherer population, and across a wide span of human history. It remains prevalent in contemporary human beings. The presence of atherosclerosis in premodern human beings suggests that the disease is an inherent component of human ageing and not characteristic of any specific diet or lifestyle.
And later…
Some advocates of “paleo” will claim that they are not at all advocating that humans should eat what their paleolithic ancestors ate but that we should use what they ate as a template to figure out what to eat today.
A really great layman’s introduction to accuracy and precision.
Accuracy and precision are not the same things. In the field of science and data, “accuracy” is typically considered to be a measure of how close a number is to that quantity’s true value. “Precision” is a term with two relevant meanings. The first describes the degree to which repeated efforts to do, or measure, something will produce the same results.
That Federico is a genuinely great guy.
Read that again. I wouldn’t be here without science, and without the work of people who believe in science.
I think we should all be thankful for this news. The world wins a little bit this week, whether they know it or not.
I love NCBI ROFL and this link about cartoons and tragedy in The New Yorker is a good example of why.
This is a really great overview of entropy and logical fallacies about a topic I know little about. Ethan Siegel never fails to entertain and educate me.
Because unlikely things happen all the time: that’s part of what comes along with living in a chaotic Universe where many seemingly random outcomes occur. And people — many of whom are often reasonable scientists otherwise — use these unlikely outcomes from random events to try and sow doubt about the quality of the underlying scientific theories.
