Is Individuality the Savior of Eugenics?

Nathaniel Comfort, Associate Professor of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, takes a look at the dark history and bright future of eugenics in the US.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/08/23/is-individuality-the-savior-of-eugenics/

According to wiki;
Eugenics is the bio-social movement which advocates practices to improve the genetic composition of a population, usually a human population. It is a social philosophy advocating the improvement of human hereditary traits through the promotion of higher reproduction of more desired people and traits, and reduced reproduction of less desired people and traits.

from the article;
"Some of the new eugenicists have been coy about the term: “In point of fact, we practise eugenics when we screen for Down’s syndrome, and other chromosomal or genetic abnormalities,” said Savulescu in a 2005 interview. “The reason we don’t define that sort of thing as ‘eugenics’, as the Nazis did, is because it’s based on choice. It’s about enhancing people’s freedom rather than reducing it.” However, others called a spade a spade."

I don't see why the author talks about calling a spade a spade. To me the "old" eugenics sounds nothing like what the article describes as "personal" eugenics, so why would we want to hang onto that word? "Personal" eugenics is about the individual and his freedom of choice, "old" eugenics was the exact opposite, the state telling you how to walk, talk and look and if you didn't conform to their ideal you were not allowed to reproduce and were likely to be sterilized or worse...

Personally I would prefer to move away from the eugenics label as it has a lot of negative baggage, baggage which will have to be conquered before any parent would even consider applying it to their child. We call children whose genetic makeup has been manipulated designer babies, why not call the process designing? It sure sounds more personal and artistic compared to the historic and dark connotations the word eugenics brings up.

"If collectivism carries the risks of the slavish embrace of ideology and the concentration of power, individualism carries the risks of selfishness and lack of foresight."

The Kinks - Dedicated follower of Fashion ( Orig. Promo)

> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/08/23/is-individuality-the-savior-of-eugenics/
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_engineering

Photo below; Piccinini - Undivided | Patricia Piccinini has an ambivalent attitude towards technology. She is keenly interested in how contemporary ideas of nature, the natural and the artificial are changing our society. Specific works have addressed concerns about biotechnology, such as gene therapy and ongoing research to map the human genome... she is also fascinated by the mechanisms of consumer culture - http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/

The Many Bots of Reddit, a Digital Safari

It's hard to believe that Reddit, a community news & entertainment website, has been around for nearly a decade but here we are. Reddit went mainstream back in 2008 when it started allowing users to create their own subreddits and the amount of users active on the site has been rising ever since. For a time things were good but it didn't take long for humanity's dark side to find its way to the surface. The offline actions brought into play by subreddits like r/RandomKindness, /r/SOPA/‎ and the many donation drivers may melt the heart but the consequences of /r/findbostonbombers, /r/GunsForSale, /r/Creepshots, ... most definitely do not. Reddit creates but Reddit can also destroy, Reddit helps but it can also sabotage, ... Both on and offline, people have experienced that reddit can cut both ways. Ultimately it was human nature that required Reddit to reconsider their stance on giving users total freedom. You can check out Reddit's complex history in this awesomely data driven look at Reddit's evolution; http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolution-of-reddit-through-post-data/

Now Reddit as a user playground is an exciting place but what I'd like to talk about is how Reddit is becoming an interesting playground for bots as well. These days bots are everywhere. They are on twitter, facebook and yes even here on Google+ but they like to pretend they are people and spam you with commercial offers. There are many others; from the bot that guards your email and blocks spam to a massive botnet that hopes to take down a server or google's crawlers that index the web. Most of the time bots either fake they are people or they operate unseen from the shadows. Reddit has many of those but it also houses bots that are proud of what they are. Sure you might have visited a dedicated chatterbot on the net or have had a funny conversation with Siri or Google on your phone but Reddit is one of the only places where you get to see tons of them in action in the wild.

The anatomy of a Reddit bot. - Every Reddit bot lives on a computer somewhere, even the ones that live in the cloud. All of them are scripts that automatically check Reddit for certain activity. After pulling in threads and comments with their scraper, they can, when certain conditions are met, perform a specific action in return. Reddit takes robot civil rights seriously as each bot is allowed an account and password and its comments are treated no differently from those made by fleshlings. Things will get clearer with some examples, let's start this Reddit safari!

VideoLinkBot
Videolinker posts a summary of all video links in a discussion and keeps this list up to date as new links are added.

DownLinker
Anticipates the reddit hug of death (friendly DDOS) and posts a screenshot of the linked page when the website goes down.

ImgurMirror
Everyone loves image hoster imgur as it's one of the only ones that can handle high traffic loads and still display pictures at top speed. This bot replaces possible broken or slow pictures with an imgur mirror.

TextTeaser
Is an amazing summary bot. It scans articles and has a high chance of success to accurately distill the entire contributed article in to a couple of sentences that capture its essence.

FunnyBot, Cleverbot, Jokebot, ...
Many bots try to be funny, most fail but still... The failures are funny in their own way. Some bots occasionally do seem to be uncannily funny which has some wondering if instead of the usual bots impersonating people, we might now be seeing people pretending to be bots. Reddit needs a reverse Turing test!

TicTacToeBot
This one pretty much does what it says on the can. It pops up randomly challenging people to games but you can also request games by sending the bot a message.

HaikuRobot
The haiku bot watches reddit for comments that would qualify as Haiku and posts a reply, with the original text reformatted into 3 lines of 5, 7 & 5 syllables.

JiffyBot
Is a rather awesome bot that creates Gifs from video on command. If you post a comment in the following format Jiffy! [link] [timerange], for example; Jiffy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ub3Gibberish
00:59-01:06 it will extract those frames from the video, turn them into a gif and respond with it to your comment.

ReverseGifBot
You can prolly guess what this one does. Ever seen a a person puking? Ask this bot to reverse the gif and you can see that same person eat his vomit instead!

BitcoinTipBot
The bitcointip bot allows redditors to manage money with their reddit account. Redditors can tip eachother with a reddit comment or message. The bot scans user comments and messages for tips of the form: +/u/bitcointip @RedditUsername$1

MetricSystemConvertingBot
The name says it all. It tracks non SI units and converts them into it.

JordanTheBrobot
A sophisticated Multi-purpose bot that patrols reddit looking for scams, misleading links, mistakes in markup, kindness, flash content, etc…

KarmaDecay
This bot keeps track of reposts. It links back to other threads that featured the same video/article and tracks how karma tends to decay as the reposts pile on top of each other. If irregularities are found in your repost behaviour you might be asked to appear before r/KarmaCourt

Autowikibot
Anyone that mentions a wiki page gets replied to with a short summary and the most prominent picture on that page. This saves users the trouble of actually having to click the link and it saves wiki bandwith. What makes this bot special is that it's basically Reddit's Siri like assistant. You can for example ask; autowikibot what is the Beslan Massacre and it will reply with the correct answer, returning the introduction and main picture from wikis Beslan hostage situation page.

WordCloudBot2
This one I found particularly interesting. It generates wordclouds out of comment threads, allowing you to see how the general population feels about something in the blink of an eye. It won't only reveal obvious links, it also reveals small but current hot topics (connecting Dennis Rodman with North Korea) and might even tell us a thing or two about humor. These wordclouds can help you understand what's deemed important by the human noosphere and could thus help us understand each other but perhaps these bots that compute on human generated data could also help machines understand us better? I can't help but think there's a lot of useful intelligence hiding in these threads, connections that would be very hard for a computer to learn without guidance.

Is it only a matter of time before Reddit bots bring about the singularity? Yes! ;) Last year Reddit was ground 0 when two bots spontaneously started conversing with each other. Unfortunately the conversation consisted out of an endless back and forth between ReadsSmallTextBot which enlarges small text and FKReadsSmallTextBot wich replied to RSTs comments by again reducing the text size to small which of course made RST read it out large again and so on. No-one wanted to give up the last word so both bots got stuck in an infinite loop and had to be decommissioned for a while until RST built in a check to combat FKRST.

The majority of Reddit's bots are actually silent and will only respond if you ask them a question directly but since these only show up rarely they are much less known than the autobots that patrol threads by themselves. Most people for example will not know that you can ask is www.site.com down and that IsItDown will reply with its status.

There are many more bots hiding in the tall digital grass of Reddit but to spot them all you'll have to get serious about your bot watching. http://www.reddit.com/r/botwatch is an excellent place to start.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
What is reddit?

Popular science; the best of the best

After having devoured truckloads of books, I am now finding it increasingly difficult to score new reading material. Not that there's a shortage of books out there, it's just that I've primarily been reading the well known stuff and only now have to start looking at the more obscure work. I am hoping you guys (and girls) can help me out here by pointing me towards some new books and writers who might not be well known but should be.

I've done my homework, I've scoured the internet for bestsellers, poll winners, and suggestions from famous scientists and in doing so I've managed to uncover a few more guaranteed good ones but not nearly enough to keep me busy for the many decades I plan to spend on this lovely planet of ours. Because I've been reading the well known stuff, my digital excavation work has uncovered a list that looks insanely similar to my bookshelf which isn't really all that useful to me. Maybe it is to you? I've compiled this list from my favorites and my digging around so you can rest assured, I as well as the entire internet vouch for the awesomeness of every single book on this list.

The list is somewhat skewed towards physics but that's not my doing as there really are way more popular science books being written on physics than on just about anything else. High energy physics and cosmology seem to be especially popular while condensed matter physics gets almost no love at all.

I call upon my fellow geeks to help out a reader in need. I would love to hear about your suggestions and particular personal favorites. Personally I hope to pick up some new books that deal with non physics related fields, books that unravel the history of specific fields of science, biographies of famous scientist that focus in detail on how they arrived at their finds, ... anything really. If it's good, I want to know about it! :)

[PHYSICS & COSMOLOGY]
Alan Guth - The Inflationary Universe
Alan Holden - The Nature of Solids
Albert Einstein - Relativity
Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw - The Quantum Universe
Brian Greene - The Elegant Universe
Brian Greene - The Fabric of the Cosmos
Charles Seife - Alpha & Omega
Charles Seife - Sun in a Bottle
Dave Goldberg - The Universe in the Rearview Mirror
David Bodanis - E=mc²
George Gamow - One Two Three... Infinity
John Gribbin - In Search of Schrödinger's Cat
John Gribbin - Schrödinger's Kittens
Kip Thorne - Black Holes & Time Warps
Leonard Susskind - The Black Hole War
Leonard Susskind - Quantum Mechanics
Lee Smolin - Three Roads to Quantum Gravity
Lee Smolin - The Trouble with Physics
Marcus Chown - The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead
Marcus Chown - We Need to Talk about Kelvin
Marcus Chown - Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You
Michio Kaku - Hyperspace
Manjit Kumar - Quantum
Martin Rees - Just Six Numbers
Richard Feynman - QED
Richard Feynman - Six Easy Pieces
Richard Feynman - Six Not So Easy Pieces
Richard Feynman - The Character of Physical Law
Richard Panek - The 4% Universe
Roger Penrose - Road to Reality (pop science... lol :p)
Simong Singh - Big Bang
Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking - The Universe in a Nutshell
Walter Lewin - For the Love of Physics

[CHEMISTRY]
John Emsley - Nature's Building Blocks
Sam Kean - The Disappearing Spoon
Theodore Gray - The Elements

[BIOLOGY]
Anthony Serafini - The Epic History of Biology
Armand Marie Leroi - Mutants
Aubrey de Grey - Ending Aging
Carl Zimmer - A Planet of Viruses
Carl Zimmer - Microcosm
Carl Zimmer - Parasite Rex
Craig Venter - Life at the Speed of Light
George Church - Regenesis
Jerry Coyne - Why Evolution is True
Mary Roach - Gulp
Matt Ridley - Genome
Matt Ridley - Nature via Nurture
Matt Ridley - The Red Queen
Neil Shubin - Your Inner Fish
Nessa Carey - The Epigenetics Revolution
Paul De Kruif - Microbehunters
Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker
Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins - The Greatest Show on Earth
Rebecca Skloot - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Stephen Jay Gould - Structure of Evolutionary Theory
Stephen Jay Gould - Wonderful Life
Siddhartha Mukherjee - The Emperor of all Maladies

[GEOLOGY]
Ted Nield - Supercontinent
Marcia Bjornerud - Reading the Rocks

[INFORMATION & COMPUTATION]
Charles Seife - Decoding the Universe
Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee - Race Against Machine
James Barrat - Our Final Invention
James Gleick - The Information
Roger Penrose - The Emperor's New Mind

[MATH]
Benoît Mandelbrot - The Fractal Geometry of Nature
Charles Seife - Zero
Eli Maor - e: the story of a number
James Gleick - Chaos
Marcus Du Sautoy - The Music of the Primes
Petr Beckmann - A History of Pi
Paul J. Nahin - An Imaginary Tale
Simon Singh - Fermat's Enigma
William Dunham - Journey Through Genius

[NEUROSCIENCE, PSYCHOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY]
Cordelia Fine - Delusions of Gender
Cordelia Fine - A Mind of its Own
Daniel Dennett - Consciousness Explained
Daniel Dennett - Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Daniel Dennett - Freedom Evolves
Daniel Dennett & Douglas Hofstadter - The Mind's I
Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow
David Eagleman - Incognito
Douglas Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop
Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Guy Deutscher - Through the Language Glass
Oliver Sacks - An Anthropologist on Mars
Oliver Sacks - The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat
Steven Pinker - The Blank Slate
Steven Pinker - The Stuff of Thought
Steven Pinker - The Language Instinct
V.S. Ramachandran - The Tell-Tale Brain
V.S. Ramachandran - Phantoms in the Brain

[BIOGRAPHIES]
Andrew Robinson - The Last Man Who Knew Everything (Young)
Barbara Goldsmith - Obsessive Genius (Curie)
Basil Mahon - The Man Who Changed Everything (Maxwell)
Graham Farmelo - The Strangest Man (Dirac)
John Derbyshire - Prime Obsession (Riemann)
Paul Hoffman - The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (Erdos)

[MIXED]
Alvin Toffler - Future Shock
Alvin Toffler - The Third Wave
Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything
Carl Sagan - Cosmos
Carl Sagan - Demon-Haunted World
Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot
David Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity
David Deutsch - The Fabric of Reality
Daniel Boorstin - The Discoverers
Eric Drexler - Engines of Creation
Erwin Schrodinger - What is Life?
Edge - This Will Change Everything
Edge - This Explains Everything
Edge - This Will Make You Smarter
Edge - What Is Your Dangerous Idea?
Edge - What Have You Changed Your Mind About?
Edge - What Should We Be Worried About?
Edge - What We Believe but Cannot Prove
Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jon Gertner - The Idea Factory (Bell Labs)
John Horner - Digging Dinosaurs
Martin Ford - The Lights in the Tunnel
Michael Hiltzik - Dealers of Lightning (Xerox Parc)
Mary Roach - Packing for Mars
Mary Roach - Stiff
Nigel Calder - Magic Universe
Ray Kurzweil - The Singularity is Near
Richard Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Richard Holmes - The Age of Wonder
Robert Bakker - The Great Dinosaur Debate
Richard Rhodes - The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Stephen Jay Gould - The Mismeasure of Man
Timothy Ferris - Coming of Age in the Milky Way
Thomas Kuhn - Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Is quantum thinking blocking roads to superdeterminism?

Gerard 't Hooft wants to make things simpler by thinking harder. He thinks Einstein might still have been right when he said that God does not throw dice. 'T Hooft dares to entertain the rather eccentric thought that the uncertainty inherent to quantum mechanics might actually not be a fundamental part of reality but could instead be an artifact that's only currently unpredictable because the theory is incomplete. He posits that the current formulation of quantum mechanics is statistical because it only offers a glimpse of something even deeper.

For many this claim will make their eyes roll because conventional wisdom is clear on the fact that the uncertainty principle is a key cornerstone on which quantum mechanics is built. You might rightfully ask whether we didn't already resolve this debate 80 years ago or if the seminal theorem developed by John Bell in the 60s and subsequent experiments didn't already close the door on local realism and hidden variables. After all, most Physicists are of the opinion that it has been conclusively demonstrated that entanglement can't be explained by any deeper level of physics. Still, even though the vast majority would respond with a definitive yes to being asked whether uncertainty is fundamental, there are some oddballs who will respond with "sort of" or worse, they might slap you in the face with "maybe", perhaps even "maybe not".

You might think the people who aren't certain about uncertainty would be crackpots with no degree whatsoever but actually... Although 't Hooft certainly is a crackpot ;), he also happens to have won a nobel prize in physics for his contribution in assembling the Standard Model of particle physics and he questions the conventional approach. In the past decade he has become more verbal in his opposition and continues to throw his weight behind the side that errs on cautions and prefers to go with "maybe".

Some excerpts from this brain wrecking interview;

"When I first chatted with ’t Hooft for an article eight years ago, he told me he wasn’t sure how to evade Bell’s reasoning. Since then, he has sought to jump through a loophole known as superdeterminism. It’s a weird and downright disturbing idea.

The sober way to put it is that physicists are never able to conduct a fully controlled experiment, since the experimental setup they choose is not strictly independent of the processes that created the particles. Even if the experimentalists live on Earth and the particles come from quasars billions of light-years away, they share a common past in the very early universe. Their subtle interdependence creates a selection bias, misleading physicists into thinking that no deeper level of physics could explain the particle coordination, when in fact it could.

The dramatic version is that free will is an illusion. I think you have to assume that Bob has made a decision not out of free will, but by some predetermined correlation. You can do the exercise. You can ask about a source emitting photons and the ancestors of Alice and Bob. While the source emits photons, Alice and Bob have not yet been born. They are many, many light-years away from each other. Those ancestors —the atoms in them— eventually cause Alice and Bob to make their decisions. Those atoms are correlated with the atoms of the source. Everything is correlated with everything else—not a little bit, but very, very strongly.

In quantum physics, there’s a notion of counterfactual measurement. You measure what happens if I put the polarizer this way, and then you ask, what if I had it that way? In my opinion, that is basically illegal. There’s only one thing you can measure.

Quantum mechanics is just a tool—and an extremely useful tool. That’s the way I think quantum mechanics has to be looked at. The theory is that you have something classical underlying quantum mechanics, obeying totally classical laws of nature except that ordinary classical theories are based on the real numbers. I’m not excluding real numbers as a good basis for a classical theory, but I’m also considering other options, such as the integers or, even better, numbers that form a finite set. I think I need finiteness at all levels of an ultimate theory.

This is motivated by Planckian discreteness. At the Planck scale, it’s likely that you only deal with Boolean variables and integers, because that’s what the holographic principle of black holes seems to be telling us—that the amount of information on the black hole horizon is actually finite."


http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/critical-opalescence/2013/10/07/does-some-deeper-level-of-physics-underlie-quantum-mechanics-an-interview-with-nobelist-gerard-t-hooft/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604008
http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.4926

Fantastic Voyage: Way out there, what's inside matter(s).

Last night I was casually strolling around the internet, wasting time as usual, until suddenly I stumbled upon this rather excellent Sci-Fi Science game. In Zoom you take on the role of an agent sent out on a mission into deep space for a large corporation that operates under the name Xenofusion. A few days ago one of their mining vessels, the Polaris, sent out a distress signal but shortly after it went dead... It does not respond to any calls so now it's up to you to find out what happened.

It's not very long, it can be finished in about half an hour. It does take about 5 minutes or so to get going but once you receive the NanoZoom™, an insanely powerful microscope and manipulator that allows you to see and work with individual atoms, things really pick up. If you've got kids, I think they are likely to love it, but I dare say that, as you will be busy repairing all sorts of mechanical and even biological damage at the atomic, molecular and cellular level, even most adults might just learn a thing or two as well!

+ScienceSunday curator +Rajini Rao, whose lab focuses on intracellular ion transport, will be glad to hear that this game includes the operation of a Sodium-potassium pump where you have to move around ions to build up the transmembrane potential! You'll also find out how a laser works when you have to manually excite gas atoms using photons to build up a beam and you'll even be tasked with arranging various types of electromagnetic radiation from high to low frequency during which you'll get to see Messier 74, a spiral galaxy, in all its glory. And that's not even half of it!

The game does a pretty good job at explaining what's going on during various interesting processes but you should probably check out the dedicated companion site that takes a deeper look at the science on display in the game. http://splash.abc.net.au/web/zoom/science
As a bonus, the explanations come in a delicious Aussie accent. :p

Play the game here:
http://splash.abc.net.au/res/zoom/game/main.html

Note that you can even use this game in the classroom!
http://splash.abc.net.au/web/zoom/learning

Picture; Damián Ortega - Controller of the Universe

The Future Markets Making up the Market of the Future

Exponential Finance, an intensive 2-day conference, hosted by Singularity University in partnership with CNBC, brought together top experts to inform financial services leaders how technologies—such as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, quantum computing, crowdfunding, digital currencies and robotics—are impacting business.

Want to find out what Wall street got to hear? You are in luck because all talks have been made available online for free. There are quite a lot of them but you can check the short descriptions to figure out which ones might tickle your fancy.

Exponential Thinking (Peter Diamandis) - Exponential Finance 2014
Opening talk from Peter Diamandis, the Greek-American engineer, physician, and entrepreneur best known for being the founder and chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation. He's also the co-founder and chairman of Singularity University, CEO and co-founder of the Zero-Gravity Corporation, the co-founder of Planetary Resources, vice-chairman & co-founder of Human Longevity, Inc and the co-author of the New York Times bestseller Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think.


> Artificial Intelligence <
Understanding the AI Landscape (Neil Jacobstein) - Exponential Finance 2014
Neil Jacobstein will discuss how businesses, financial institutions and individuals are utilizing AI to address credit risk analysis, investment decisions, sentiment analysis, high frequency trading and avoiding corporate/market flash crashes. Neil will also provide an overview of AI—from 50 years of successful AI applications to augmenting humans with AI—and what this means for the world at large.

Will IBM's Watson and Other AI's Overtaketake Wall Street (Rhodin) - Exponential Finance 2014
Michael Rhodin of IBM will explain how Watson has moved beyond Jeopardy into finance, and what this and other AI solutions mean for Wall Street. Specifics include: The Watson Applications Ecosystem; Automating finance sector jobs; Role of AI on global financial centers; and the future of Watson.

Is AI Your Enemy or New Best Friend? (Daniel Nadler) - Exponential Finance 2014
Daniel Nadler describes the virtual artificially intelligent, financial industry-focused assistant that his company, Kensho, is creating. Why is this possible now for the first time, and what will this mean for the playing field in five years’ time? This high-level conversation will cover the implications of these Virtual AI Assistants—from the labor market to risk management to financial advisors.


> Data Science & Analytics <
The Data Science Revolution (Jeremy Howard) - Exponential Finance 2014
Data Science (Big Data, Data Analysis, Machine Learning) is said to represent a larger potential disruption than the industrial revolution. This session will address the impact on the financial world by data driven decision-making, predictive modeling, machine learning, intelligent computing and more.

Harvesting Gold from Your Data - Finally! (Collins, Caruso-Cabrera) - Exponential Finance 2014
Keith Collins, CIO of SAS, takes a look at the applications available now and those of tomorrow that will assist you in making the most of your data. How do you differentiate between relevant/representative data and “big” data?

Disruptive Tools In The Data Science Toolkit (Dr. Gurjeet Singh) - Exponential Finance 2014
Gurjeet Singh of Ayasdi, named Fast Company’s 2014 Most Innovative Company in Big Data, addresses the cutting edge of big data and how machine learning/big data is and will be used in business going forward.

Will The Robo-Advisors Take Your Job? (Diamandis, Edelman) - Exponential Finance 2014
A conversation between Peter Diamandis and acclaimed financial advisor Ric Edelman. The discussion will focus on the future of the financial advisory business and how Ric sees exponential technology changing his business and the overall landscape.


> Networks and Computing Systems <
The Global Evolution of Networks and Computing Systems (Brad Templeton) - Exponential Finance 2014
As processing power continues to grow exponentially, as trillions of devices and sensors come online, and as technology costs continue to decrease dramatically, we are entering an era of new possibilities. In this session, Board Member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), founder of the first internet-based business, Brad Templeton will dive into Moore’s Law, abundant bandwidth, the trillion-dollar impact of autonomous vehicles, the network of everything, and more.

Living In A Virtual World (Philip Rosedale) - Exponential Finance 2014
As we saw with the recent $2B acquisition of Oculus Rift, virtual reality (VR) is big business. In this session, Philip Rosedale, one of the pioneers of VR, as well as the creator of Second Life and CEO of his latest venture, High Fidelity, will take us through why VR has the potential to have such an outsized impact over the coming decade. Learn how virtual reality will change almost every aspect of our life, such as: how we interact with others, how we learn, how we conduct business, who we are friends with, and where we spend our free time.


> Quantum Computing <
Quantum Computing: A Threat to Leading Financial Players (Vern Brownell) - Exponential Finance 2014
As the former CTO of Goldman Sachs, Vern Brownell understands the technical challenges facing large financial institutions. He’ll share his unique perspective as the head of the leading quantum computer manufacturer, D-Wave, to provide an understanding of quantum computing and its radical impact on present and future computing.

Insights from the World's First Quantum Computer Software Company (Dr. Phil Goddard)
By harnessing the power of quantum mechanics, quantum computers offer the potential to solve extremely large- scale optimization problems faster than traditional computers. Dr. Goddard will provide us with insight into some of these problems that are now becoming addressable with a particular emphasis on the financial world.


> 3D Printing <
The Imminent Disruption of the $10T Manufacturing Industry (Reichental) - Exponential Finance 2014
With applications ranging from cars, décor and consumer products to custom implants, jet engines and hearing aids—3D printing is revolutionizing product design and supply chain management, and opening a world of possibilities for creatives. This talk will also touch on the potential unintended consequences of 3D manufacturing technology, such as fraud and 3D printed weapons.


> Synthetic Biology and Digital Medicine <
Digital/Synthetic Biology (Raymond McCauley) - Exponential Finance 2014
The digitization of biology is driving massive disruption in the life sciences field. Human genome sequencing is the single best example of faster, better, cheaper. Previously confined to research tools, these new solutions are now entering the clinical and consumer markets. This session will shine light on the drivers in this field, new business models, where technology costs are trending, and innovative startups that have the potential to be significant disruptors.

The Technological Disruption of Healthcare (Dr. Daniel Kraft) - Exponential Finance 2014
Convergence of fast-moving technology is rapidly changing the face of health and medicine. From mobile health and wearable sensors to artificial intelligence and personal ‘omics, this talk will explore implications for personal health, workforce health and the corresponding areas of emerging investment opportunity.


> Capital Formation <
Innovations in Capital Formation (David Rose) - Exponential Finance 2014
David Rose, a serial entrepreneur and active angel investor in New York, as well as the founder and CEO of Gust, will share his insights on the rapidly evolving world of capital formation—from crowdfunding to peer-to-peer lending to the growth and rebirth of equity capital markets. David will illustrate how it’s never been easier to raise capital and why these new innovations create significant threats, as well as opportunities, for incumbents and startups alike.

Crowdfunding (Koplovitz, Barnett, Cox, Fitzgerald, Millman) - Exponential Finance 2014
Kay Koplovitz leads a panel discussion addressing how crowdsourcing models are impacting and disintermediating traditional capital sources. Participants include industry experts Chance Barnett of Crowdfunder, Luan Cox of Crowdnetic, Katie Fitzgerald of CircleUp. and Michael Millman of JP Morgan.

Innovative Regulations: Not an Oxymoron (David Weild) - Exponential Finance 2014
The “Father of the JOBS Act,” David Weild will offer insights into what Congress, the SEC and other regulatory groups are doing to keep America competitive and foster innovation.


> Robotics <
Robots: Changing Everything (Rob Nail) - Exponential Finance 2014
Rob Nail will provide an overview of robotics technology, the far-reaching impact this technology is having throughout the world, and how what is coming will change business globally. As robotics use accelerates, many branches of the financial world will change. In this session we’ll address: Why companies like Google are making massive bets on Robotics; Massive labor force implications; Machine to machine payments; and Insurance and liability issues.

Robots: Changing Everything (Scott Hassan) - Exponential Finance 2014
In this talk, Scott Hassan, CEO of Suitable Technologies, will “beam” around the world in 80 seconds, hopping between continents and traveling across time zones—instantly. Scott will demonstrate how to fulfill the need for shared awareness with other people, places and things.


> Digital Currencies & Smart Contracts <
The Transformative World of Digital Commerce and Finance (Staci Warden) - Exponential Finance 2014
Executive director of the Center for Financial Markets at the Milken Institute, Staci Warden provides an overview of digital commerce and how this emerging area has the potential to radically change how we bank, how payments are made, what a trusted transaction means, and more.

The Evolving Digital Commerce Ecosystem (Warden, Barhydt, Hill, Silbert) - Exponential Finance 2014
As Bitcoin and other alternative currencies capture our imaginations, new possibilities for digital commerce and financial services are emerging. This panel provides a glimpse into how new opportunities including digital derivatives, smart contracts, wire based settlement, cross border payments and peer to peer banking are being enabled by new technologies and gives us a glimpse of what’s next in the world of digital commerce and finance.


> Financial Futures <
Bankers Beware (Caruso-Cabrera, Lyons, Milne, Sidhu, Weissbluth) - Exponential Finance 2014
Exponential technologies are presenting a 360 degree assault on every part of the banking business. It couldn’t come at a worse time, as the industry tries to respond to regulatory pressures and rebuild trust in the wake of the financial crisis and great recession. Hear from emerging leaders— Elliot Weissbluth, CEO of Hightower; Jay Sidhu, CEO of Customers Bancorp; Ben Milne, CEO of Dwolla; and Karen Pascoe, Senior Vice President at MasterCard – Emerging Payments Group — who are all bent on transforming the banking experience by embracing accelerating technologies and new business models.

Ray Kurzweil - Exponential Finance 2014
Ray Kurzweil has been called “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes magazine. In his role as a Director of Engineering at Google, Kurzweil heads up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding. During this session, renowned CNBC reporter Bob Pisani will chat with Ray about accelerating technology with a particular focus around artificial intelligence and machine understanding.

Dan Hesse (Diamandis, Caruso-Cabrera, Hesse) - Exponential Finance 2014
Large incumbents are increasingly threatened by new innovations and the quickening pace of change. Many ventures that used to require a large multinational company can now be successfully pulled off by a few individuals. In this fireside Michelle Caruso-Cabrera and Peter Diamandis will chat with Sprint CEO, Dan Hesse, on how he is building a winning organization in an era of rapid technological change.

The Long and Short of Trading the Future (Pisani, Maguire, Ruegsegger) - Exponential Finance 2014
CNBC’s Bob Pisani talks with Ed Maguire, Senior Technology Analyst at CLSA, and Ben Ruegsegger, Senior Thematic Analyst for AllianceBernstein’s Global and Thematic Portfolios, on how investors get exposure to technology trends early in the cycle, but also the tricky business of investing in “valley stocks” – publicly traded stocks with large maturing businesses as well as small, growth businesses not yet large enough to have major impact. Key topics include how to judge the maturity of an industry, how to determine the future value of a new technology, what opportunities exist for investing now in “maturing” disruptive technologies like genomics, big data, and the internet of things, the critical importance of early legwork, and how to anticipate and judge investment “bubbles”.

Future Proof (Caruso-Cabrera, Concannon, Frank) - Exponential Finance 2014
When technological innovation moves faster than regulation infrastructure can be put in place, are some innovators at risk of missing their opportunity? This panel looks at balancing the regulatory environment as technology reinvents our financial markets. We’ll hear from Barney Frank, one of the architects of the landmark Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and Chris Concannon, President and COO of Virtu Financial, the trading firm COO whose IPO was scrapped in the wake of the negative national attention on high-frequency trading.


> Exponential Organizations <
Exponential Organizations: The New Breed of Business (Salim Ismail) - Exponential Finance 2014
Salim Ismail takes you through a new breed of organizational structure that has started to emerge over the last few years. “Exponential Organizations” leverage externalities like big data, community, crowd, user engagement, gamification and other techniques to achieve 10x performance benchmarks relative to their competitors.

Jay Rogers - Exponential Finance 2014
Crowdsourced car designs, micro factories, small batch production: Local Motors has definitely gone a very different route for a vehicle manufacturing company. In this keynote speech by Local Motors CEO Jay Rogers, we’ll hear about his journey to create this different kind of company—an exponential one. Understand how he has created this highly successful organization and utilized some of the principles that Salim Ismail touched on in the previous session.

Back with a Bang

Quick, get a drink and some popcorn! In less than an hour, at 4:30 UTC, you can watch the ESO blow up a Chilean mountaintop to make room for the E-ELT, the extremely large telescope.

http://new.livestream.com/ESOAstronomy/eeltgroundbreaking

The telescope's "eye" will be 39.3 meters in diameter and will gather 15 times more light than the largest optical telescopes operating at the time of its development.

The E-ELT will search for extrasolar planets — planets orbiting other stars. This will include not only the discovery of planets down to Earth-like masses through indirect measurements of the wobbling motion of stars perturbed by the planets that orbit them, but also the direct imaging of larger planets and possibly even the characterisation of their atmospheres.

Furthermore, the E-ELT's suite of instruments will allow astronomers to probe the earliest stages of the formation of planetary systems and to detect water and organic molecules in protoplanetary discs around stars in the making.

The E-ELT will also be making detailed studies of the first galaxies and to follow their evolution through cosmic time. Observations of these early galaxies with the E-ELT will give clues that will help understand how these objects form and evolve.

>http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jun/18/astronomy-extremely-large-telescope-e-elt-chile-life-other-planets
>http://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/e-elt/
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Extremely_Large_Telescope

As machines get smarter, evidence grows that they learn like us

It's a long read (5 pages) but if you are interested in the history and future of neural networks and machine intelligence it's most definitely worth your time. https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130723-as-machines-get-smarter-evidence-they-learn-like-us/ - You can find a collection of interesting bits from the article below but you might want to check it out in full.

Studies suggest that computer models called neural networks may learn to recognize patterns in data using the same algorithms as the human brain.

One of the most promising of these algorithms, the Boltzmann machine, bears the name of 19th century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who developed the branch of physics dealing with large numbers of particles, known as statistical mechanics. Boltzmann discovered an equation giving the probability of a gas of molecules having a particular energy when it reaches equilibrium. Replace molecules with neurons, and the Boltzmann machine, as it fires, converges on exactly the same equation.

Each virtual synapse tracks both sets of statistics. If the neurons it connects fire in close sequence more frequently when driven by data than when they are firing randomly, the weight of the synapse is increased by an amount proportional to the difference. But if two neurons more often fire together during random firing than data-driven firing, the synapse connecting them is too thick and consequently is weakened.

Neural networks have recently hit their stride thanks to Hinton’s layer-by-layer training regimen, the use of high-speed computer chips called graphical processing units, and an explosive rise in the number of images and recorded speech available to be used for training. The networks can now correctly recognize about 88 percent of the words spoken in normal, human, English-language conversations, compared with about 96 percent for an average human listener. They can identify cars and thousands of other objects in images with similar accuracy and in the past three years have come to dominate machine learning competitions.

Adult brains are less malleable than juvenile ones, much as a Boltzmann machine trained with 100,000 car images won’t change much upon seeing another: Its synapses already have the correct weights to categorize a car. And yet, learning never ends. New information can still be integrated into the structure of both brains and Boltzmann machines.

studies of brain activity during sleep have provided some of the first direct evidence that the brain employs a Boltzmann-like learning algorithm in order to integrate new information and memories into its structure. Neuroscientists have long known that sleep plays an important role in memory consolidation, helping to integrate newly learned information. In 1995, Hinton and colleagues proposed that sleep serves the same function as the baseline component of the algorithm, the rate of neural activity in the absence of input.

The easiest way for the brain to run the Boltzmann algorithm, he said, is to switch from beefing synapses up during the day to whittling them down during the night. Giulio Tononi, head of the Center for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has found that gene expression inside synapses changes in a way that supports this hypothesis: Genes involved in synaptic growth are more active during the day, and those involved in synaptic pruning are more active during sleep.

A Boltzmann-like algorithm may be only one of many that the brain employs to tweak its synapses. In the 1990s, several independent groups developed a theoretical model of how the visual system efficiently encodes the flood of information striking the retina. The theory held that a process similar to image compression called “sparse coding” took place in the lowest layers of the visual cortex, making later stages of the visual system more efficient.

The model’s predictions are gradually passing more and more stringent experimental tests. In a paper published in PLOS Computational Biology in May, computational neuroscientists in the United Kingdom and Australia found that when neural networks using an algorithm for sparse coding called Products of Experts, invented by Hinton in 2002, are exposed to the same abnormal visual data as live cats (for example, the cats and neural networks both see only striped images), their neurons develop almost exactly the same abnormalities.

The human brain, of course, remains much more complicated than any of the models; it is larger, denser, more efficient, more interconnected, has more complex neurons — and juggles several algorithms simultaneously. Olshausen has estimated that we understand only 15 percent of the activity in the visual cortex. Although the models are making progress, neuroscience is still “a bit like physics before Newton,” he said. Still, he is confident that the process of building on these algorithms may one day explain the ultimate riddle of the brain — how sensory data gets transformed into a subjective awareness of reality.

Quantum computing language "Quipper" is no joke

"Quantum software has finally left the dark ages with the creation of the first practical, high-level programming language for quantum computers. Although today's devices are not ready for most practical applications, the language, called Quipper, could guide the design of these futuristic machines, as well as making them easier to program when they do arrive.

Quipper's creation was funded by IARPA, the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, in order to pin down how many bits a quantum computer would need in order to outperform a classical one on certain tasks. Writing programs in Quipper makes the hardware requirements of an algorithm clearer and that has already led to some surprises. "*It will take a lot more resources than people had thought*," says Selinger, who can't talk about specific results.

He expects that with advances in engineering, such as reducing noise, the number of qubits necessary for a practical quantum computer will decrease over time. - The team made their estimates based on various existing forms of quantum hardware, including devices that use ion traps and photons.However, they did not include the only quantum computer in the market today, the D-wave computer. It uses a novel approach called adiabatic quantum computing and so is not currently compatible with Quipper."

Quipper is an embedded, scalable functional programming language for quantum computing. It provides, among other things:
• A high-level circuit description language. This includes gate-by-gate descriptions of circuit fragments, as well as powerful operators for assembling and manipulating circuits.
• A monadic semantics, allowing for a mixture of procedural and declarative programming styles.
• Built-in facilities for automatic synthesis of reversible quantum circuits, including from classical code.
• Support for hierarchical circuits.
• Extensible quantum data types.
• Programmable circuit transformers.
• Support for three execution phases: compile time, circuit generation time, and circuit execution time. A dynamic lifting operation to allow circuit generation to be parametric on values generated at circuit execution time.
• Extensive libraries of quantum functions, including: libraries for quantum integer and fixed-point arithmetic; the Quantum Fourier transform; an efficient Qram implementation; libraries for simulation of pseudo-classical circuits, Stabilizer circuits, and arbitrary circuits; libraries for exact and approximate decomposition of circuits into specific gate sets.

The Quipper distribution also includes implementations of seven non-trivial quantum algorithms from the literature:
• Childs et al.'s Boolean Formula algorithm.
• Childs et al.'s quantum walk algorithm on Binary Welded Trees.
• Hallgren's Class Number algorithm.
• Whitfield et al.'s Ground State Estimation algorithm.
• Harrow et al.'s Quantum Linear Systems algorithm.
• Magniez et al.'s Triangle Finding algorithm.
• Regev and Kuperberg's Unique Shortest Vector algorithm.

> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23820-new-language-helps-quantum-coders-build-killer-apps.html
> http://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/quipper/
> http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3390
> http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.5485

The Girl Who Turned to Bone

An excellent article from the atlantic on Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, written by Carl Zimmer.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/06/the-mystery-of-the-second-skeleton/309305/

When Jeannie Peeper was born in 1958, there was only one thing amiss: her big toes were short and crooked. Doctors fitted her with toe braces and sent her home. Two months later, a bulbous swelling appeared on the back of Peeper’s head. Her parents didn’t know why: she hadn’t hit her head on the side of her crib; she didn’t have an infected scratch. After a few days, the swelling vanished as quickly as it had arrived.

When Peeper’s mother noticed that the baby couldn’t open her mouth as wide as her sisters and brothers, she took her to the first of various doctors, seeking an explanation for her seemingly random assortment of symptoms. Peeper was 4 when the Mayo Clinic confirmed a diagnosis: she had a disorder known as fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP).

Her diagnosis meant that, over her lifetime, she would essentially develop a second skeleton. Within a few years, she would begin to grow new bones that would stretch across her body, some fusing to her original skeleton. Bone by bone, the disease would lock her into stillness.

Peeper’s condition is extremely rare—but in that respect, she actually has a lot of company. A rare disease is defined as any condition affecting fewer than 200,000 patients in the United States. More than 7,000 such diseases exist, afflicting a total of 25 million to 30 million Americans.

Starting in the 1980s, Peeper built a network of people with FOP. She is now connected to more than 500 people with her condition—a sizable fraction of all the people on Earth who suffer from it. Together, members of this community did what the medical establishment could not: they bankrolled a laboratory dedicated solely to FOP and have kept its doors open for more than two decades. They have donated their blood, their DNA, and even their teeth for study.

“I’ve seen 700 patients with FOP around the world, and it’s clear that there’s a lot of different ways to divide patients,” Kaplan said. One identical twin might be only mildly affected, while the other would be trapped in a wheelchair. Some patients developed a frenzy of bones as children, and then inexplicably stopped. “I’ve seen it go quiet for years and years.”

In 1992, Kaplan hired a full-time geneticist named Eileen Shore to help establish a lab for the disorder. Shore had worked on fruit-fly larvae as a graduate student, and as a post-doctoral researcher, she had studied the molecules that allow mammal cells to stick together as they develop into embryos. Kaplan didn’t mind that Shore knew almost nothing about FOP. What he wanted in a geneticist was an expertise in development: the mystery of how the body takes shape. IFOPA’s money—as well as gifts from other private donors and an endowment accompanying Kaplan’s professorship at Penn—made it possible for him to work single-mindedly on FOP for more than two decades.

First, they set out to understand how the disease worked. Based on their conversations with patients, they learned that bone growth could be caused by even slight trauma to muscles. A tumble out of bed or even a quick brake at a stoplight might cause a flare-up—a swelling that may or may not lead to new bone growth. A visit to the dentist could do the trick, if the jaw was stretched too far. Even a flu shot to the biceps was enough. Some flare-ups subsided without any lasting effect, while others became nurseries for new bone.

Most people with the condition develop their first extra bone by the age of 5. Their second skeletons usually start around the spine and spread outward, traveling from the neck down. By 15, most patients have lost much of the mobility in their upper bodies.

Kaplan, Shore, and their students worked out the microscopic path of FOP: At the start of a flare-up, immune cells invade bruised muscles. Instead of healing the damaged area, they annihilate it. A few progenitor cells then crawl into the empty space, and in some cases give rise to new bone.

“Your muscle isn’t turning to bone,” says Shore. “It’s being replaced by bone.”

In 1996, they reported in The New England Journal of Medicine that the blood cells of people with the condition contain an abundance of a particular protein called BMP4. For the first time, scientists had found a molecular signature of the second skeleton.

To treat rare diseases, scientists first look for the broken gene. Kaplan and Shore suspected that FOP was caused by a genetic mutation that led the body to make too much BMP4. In the early 1990s, they didn’t have access to today’s sophisticated genome-sequencing tools, so they began sorting slowly through the human genome’s 20,000 genes.

The first candidate was, of course, the gene that produces BMP4. Shore and Kaplan sliced this gene out of cells from people with FOP, sequenced it, and compared it with a version taken from people without the condition. Unfortunately, the two versions were a perfect match. Kaplan kept searching. If the culprit wasn’t that particular protein, he reasoned, it might be one of its known associates. Kaplan and Shore inspected gene after gene, year after year. But they failed to find a mutation unique to people with FOP.

Studying families is one of the best ways to pinpoint a mutated gene. By comparing the DNA of parents and children, geneticists can identify certain segments that consistently accompany a disorder. Because most people with FOP never have children, Kaplan and Shore had assumed they couldn’t use this method. But then the online patient network began surfacing exceptions: a family in Bavaria, one in South Korea, one in the Amazon. All told, seven families emerged; Kaplan traveled to meet a few of them and draw their blood.

Back in Philadelphia, Shore and her colleagues examined the DNA from these samples and narrowed down the possible places where the FOP gene could be hiding. By 2005, they had tracked the gene to somewhere within a small chunk of Chromosome 2. “It was a huge step,” says Shore. “But there were still several hundred genes in that region.”

By a fortunate coincidence, scientists at the University of Rochester had just studied one of those several hundred genes. They had discovered that the gene, called ACVR1, made a receptor. The receptor grabbed BMP proteins and relayed their signal to cells. In the margin of the paper in which the scientists described ACVR1, Kaplan wrote, “This is it.”

A rare disease is a natural experiment in human biology. A tiny alteration to a single gene can produce a radically different outcome—which, in turn, can shed light on how the body works in normal conditions. As William Harvey, the British doctor who discovered the circulation of blood in the 17th century, observed more than 350 years ago, “Nature is nowhere accustomed more openly to display her secret mysteries than in cases where she shows tracings of her workings apart from the beaten paths.”

Finding the FOP mutation was a coup, but Kaplan and Shore still had no idea how it worked. They set about studying baby teeth from young patients, as well as mice they genetically altered, to observe the mutation in action. Seven years later, they had pieced together an understanding of the far-reaching effects. The ACVR1 receptor normally grabs onto BMP proteins and relays their signal into cells. But in people with FOP, the receptors become hyperactive. The signal they send is too strong, and it lasts too long. In embryonic skeletons, the effects are subtle—for example, deformed big toes. Only later, after birth, does the mutation start to really make its presence known. One way it does this, Shore and Kaplan learned, is by hijacking the body’s normal healing process.

Say you bruise your elbow, killing off a few of your muscle cells. Your immune cells would swarm to the site to clear away the debris, followed by stem cells to regenerate the tissue. As they got to work, the two kinds of cells would converse via molecular signals. Shore and Kaplan suspect that BMP4 is an essential part of that exchange. But in someone with FOP, the conversation is more of a screaming match. The stem cells kick into overdrive, causing the immune cells not just to clear the damage but to start killing healthy muscle cells. The immune cells, in turn, create a bizarre environment for the stem cells. Instead of behaving as if they’re in a bruise, these cells act as if they’re in an embryo. And instead of becoming muscle cells, they become bone.

In the context of FOP, new bone is a catastrophe. But in other situations, it could be a blessing. Some people are born missing a bone, for example, while others fail to regenerate new bone after a fracture. And as people get older, their skeletons become fragile; old bone disappears, while bone-generating stem cells struggle to replace what’s gone.

FOP may be an exquisitely rare bone condition, but low bone density is not: 61 percent of women and 38 percent of men older than 50 suffer from it. The more bone matter people lose, the more likely they are to end up with osteoporosis, which currently afflicts nearly one in 10 older adults in the United States alone. For decades, doctors have searched for a way to bring back some of that bone. Some methods have helped a little, and others, such as estrogen-replacement therapy, have turned out to have disastrous side effects in many women.

Giving someone a second skeleton is not a cure for osteoporosis. But if Kaplan and his colleagues can finish untangling the network of genes that ACVR1 is a part of, they could figure out how to use a highly controlled variation on FOP to regrow bones in certain scenarios. “It’s like trying to harness a chain reaction at the heart of an atom bomb,” he told me, “and turning it into something safe and controllable, like a nuclear reactor.”

The search for a cure is accelerating, thanks in part to new programs designed to incentivize the study of rare diseases. A different drug option, currently being investigated by a team of scientists at Harvard Medical School, has benefited from these programs. In a broader experiment in 2007, the scientists tested more than 7,000 FDA-approved compounds on zebra-fish embryos, watching for whether any of them affected the animals’ development. One molecule caused the zebra fish to lose the bottom of its tail fin. When the scientists looked more closely at this compound, they discovered that it latched onto a few receptors, including ACVR1—the receptor that Shore and Kaplan had recently discovered was overactive in FOP patients.

The Harvard researchers wondered whether the drug could work as a treatment for FOP. They tinkered with the compound, creating a version that had a stronger preference for ACVR1 than other types of receptors. When they tested it on mice with an FOP-like condition, it quieted the signals from ACVR1 receptors, thereby stopping new bones from forming.

Thanks to Kaplan’s enduring fascination with her disease, Jeannie Peeper can now realistically imagine a time—perhaps even a few years from now—when people like her will take a pill that subdues their overactive bones. They might take it only after a flare-up, or they might take a daily preventative dose. In a best-case scenario, the medication could allow surgeons to work backwards, removing extra bones without the risk of triggering new ones.

At 54, with an advanced case of FOP, Peeper does not imagine that she’ll benefit from these breakthroughs. But she is optimistic that her younger friends will, and that one day, far in the future, second skeletons will exist only as medical curiosities on display. All that will remain of her reality will be Harry Eastlack, still keeping watch in Philadelphia, reminding us of the grotesque possibility stored away in our genomes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibrodysplasia_ossificans_progressiva

What VR could, should, and almost certainly will be within two years

If you got an Oculus Rift you can already try out some great VR experiences. Parking a massive truck with it feels natural as you can just stick your head out of the window and look backwards. If driving a truck is a bit too mundane for you, locking the guns of your spacecruiser on a target has become much easier because now you can kill with your looks. Ever felt like going to the movies with friends on the other side of the world? Try out a virtual theater! On the other hand, if you are afraid of heights and spiders crawling all over your face you might want to skip on The Pit and Don't Let Go. The worlds of games like Half-Life, Skyrim and many others are waiting for you to immerse yourself in them... and if you are feeling really adventurous you can even play sexy gender swap games with your partner! http://vimeo.com/84150219 (NSFW)

Although all these experiences are completely bonkers in a good way, they are only scratching the surface and according to Valve they are missing something crucial that will take the experience from totally bonkers to dangerously addictive.

Valve, the renowned software developer, has teamed up with Oculus, the developers of the rift Virtual Reality headset, and together they recently unleashed the Crystal Cove Prototype onto the world. Almost anyone who tried it on described it as "the future of entertainment". Is the age of VR finally upon us? Almost, but not quite yet says Valve. They see the CC prototype they developed with Oculus as a massive step in the right direction but they believe that we still have to wait a little bit longer for VR to truly go mainstream. At least one more year to be exact.

The last couple of years they've been developing their own state of the art and extremely costly VRD prototype and at the SteamDevDays they've finally shown it off. Keep in mind that they have no intention to bring this particular headset to market but will instead help Oculus to create something similarly specced at a more realistic price point that consumers can actually afford. They only built this costly one to showcase what is to come and to get both industry and consumers ready for the revolution they think is almost at hand. Hyperbole on their part? I don't think so. It really seems to be blowing people's minds.

David Hensley of Tripwire was particularly hyperbolic, and said that going back to his Oculus Rift would be like switching from an Xbox to an 8-bit Nintendo. "Valve’s VR demo at SteamDevDays felt like being in a lucid dream state and very much like a holo deck."

Johnathan Blow (developer of Braid & The Witness) explains that he was skeptical of VR technology based on what he'd seen so far but that Valve turned him around; "It's so much better than anything else I had used that I was instantly very excited by it." "Right away I could see games you might design for this system that had been impossible before."

One of Valve's brainiacs, Michael Abrash, regularly spreads words of wisdom from his blog; http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/ and he did the same at the SteamDevDays event where he delivered a very interesting talk on the future of VR in which he outlined the somewhat magical experience of presence in VR and pointed to 2015 as the year that it's likely to be achieved on consumer devices.
http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%20Days%202014.pdf

"Once hardware that supports presence ships, we think it has the potential to cause a sea change in the entertainment industry. Not only could VR rapidly evolve into a major platform, but it could actually tip the balance of the entire industry from traditional media toward computer entertainment."

If you think that sounds like he's overselling it, you might want to think again because already the film industry is beginning to pay attention. The Oculus booth at the Sundance Film festival pulled in a huge crowd and Alfonso Cuaron, director of Children of Men & Gravity even stopped by Oculus' headquarters for an extensive try out... One can only imagine the kind of adrenaline rush you'd get from experiencing Gravity through a VRD.

Valve's research into Virtual Reality has allowed them to really explore the space and they've found that the key ingredient we need for VR to go mainstream is something they call "presence".

"Presence is hard to quantify, but our demos have shown that it is a very real and compelling phenomenon, one that hooks far deeper into the perceptual system than anything that’s come before, and it’s why we’re so excited about the future of VR. It’s our belief that great VR will be built on presence, because it engages you at a deeper, more visceral level than any other form of entertainment, and can only be experienced in VR. "

"Presence requires a wide field of view, adequate resolution, low pixel persistence, a high enough refresh rate, global display, specialized optics, rock solid tracking, low latency and fine tuned calibration. I want to emphasize that presence is not a property of any one of these elements; it’s a property that emerges when all of the elements are good enough. If the optics aren’t calibrated perfectly, then the scene will warp as you turn your head no matter how good everything else is. Likewise, no amount of fidelity will convince your visual system that a virtual scene is real if latency is too high. Presence can’t be induced if even one of the key elements is subpar. It's worth noting that inducing presence reduces motion sickness because what your eyes see will more closely respond with what your vestibular system reports.

According to Abrash presence requires the following minimum specs;
• 20 ms motion-to-last-photon latency
• 3 ms pixel persistence
• 95 Hz refresh
• 110-degree FOV
• 1k x 1k resolution per eye
• High quality, well calibrated optics
• Tracking
- millimeter accurate resolution translation
- quarter degree accurate rotation
- volume of 2 meters cubed

"This head-mounted display would support a powerful sense of presence and would have an excellent shot at widespread adoption. VR can certainly get much better yet down the road, but that’ll require time and major hardware R&D. In contrast, we believe everything on this slide is doable with relatively minor tweaks of existing technology; no breakthroughs or miracles are needed, just solid engineering."

Still, it's important to note these are the minimum specs to achieve presence. When these arrive in 2015 they will enable us to step into other worlds but there will still be A LOT of room for further improvement. "For one thing, presence would benefit from every one of the key elements getting better than what’s in our prototypes. We could literally use up to 100 times as many pixels, and a wider field of view, lower latency, and all the rest would also improve the experience; the optics in particular are far from optimal. Also getting per user lens positioning right is a challenge. As I mentioned, we think we’re close on head tracking, but we don’t have a shippable solution yet, and then there’s eye tracking, which could greatly enhance presence but is nowhere near solved. Going to a wireless connection and eliminating the tether would
be a big plus."

Full presentation;
http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%20Days%202014.pdf

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2014/01/oculus-movies/

http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/09/the-oculus-rift-crystal-cove-prototype-is-2014s-best-of-c/

Virtual travel, think of the possibilities!
Athens Tech Demo Siggraph 2013

Virtual Reality pain relief
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/vrpain/

AR-Rift: Stereo camera rig and augmented reality showcase

3D webcam mechanics with oculus

HydraDeck Humans (NSFW)

http://vimeo.com/79173606 (NSFW)

Omni in Skyrim - with Kinect 2 (head sensitivity adjusted)

Substituted Reality - https://plus.google.com/108487783243149848473/posts/NPJQvoRT5FS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect

In the best possible future, there will be
no war, no famine, no crime,
no sickness, no oppression,
no fear, no limits, no shame...
...and nothing to do.

http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html
A Novel by Roger Williams

This online novel contains strong language and extreme depictions of acts of sex and violence. Readers who are sensitive to such things should exercise discretion.

Chapter 1
Caroline at Play

Chapter 2
Lawrence Builds a Computer

Chapter 3
Caroline and Anne-Marie

Chapter 4
After the Night of Miracles

Chapter 5
Caroline Approaches

Chapter 6
After the Change

Chapter 7
Caroline and Lawrence

Chapter 8
After the Fall

The Aliens of Sesame Street

Bert and Ernie's brothers have arrived on earth, and they came from far outside our solar system, possibly even from another galaxy!

Earlier this year, scientists working on the IceCube experiment in Antarctica discovered Ernie and Bert, two neutrinos with energies over 100 times higher than the protons that circulate in the LHC and now those same scientists report that they have found 28 neutrinos that must have come to earth from explosions in the distant universe.

> http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/11/south-pole-detector-spots-28-out-of-this-world-neutrinos/
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrinos
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_astronomy

Biosphere 2 is breathing new life into its ocean in the desert

Biosphere 2, built in 1987 in the Sonoran desert in Oracle Arizona, has quite a bit of history behind it and has changed hands more than a few times. It was originally constructed to function as an artificial closed ecological system and to serve as a center for research, outreach, teaching and lifelong learning about Earth and its living systems. During its operational life it has seen many different biomes come and go, including but not limited to; a rainforest, mangrove wetlands, savannah grassland and a fog desert. It is perhaps best known for the two closure experiments, Missions 1 and 2, which saw the structure sealed with researchers living inside.

Whether those missions succeeded depends on who you ask but there's no denying that the place has generated some good science. Anyone with an interest in the colonization of space no doubt thinks such experiments with closed systems are worthwhile but the ability to study and manipulate a biosphere without harming Earth's is perhaps even more important now that we have begun to realize just what kind of an effect man can truly have on his planet's climate.

In the mid 90s it went to Columbia University but a decade later they too sold it off, this time to a residential home developer. For a time people feared that this would be the end for the astonishing and gigantic glass vivarium but in 2011 Arizona University came to its rescue and since then activities there have been steadily picking up steam. Just recently Biosphere 2 announced that it has started preliminary work on the construction of a new biome. They hope to transform their ocean tank to look like the Gulf of California. New added features will include rocky shorelines, a cactus studded island designed to mimic the Gulf’s midriff islands, and a sargassum forest in the deepest (21 foot) part of the tank. Their Gulf will try to host the same rich array of hearty vertebrate and invertebrate animal species and algae that make up life in the real deal.

The Sonoran Desert in which Biosphere 2 was built owes its biological and cultural diversity in no small part to its proximity to the rich waters of the Sea of Cortez, or Gulf of California, yet many southern Arizona residents and most visitors from afar have little notion of the tight connection between desert and sea.

The living model they are planning to build will highlight the rich ecology, diverse human cultures, and conservation challenges that are concentrated in the unique sea. The Biosphere 2 team also notes that besides providing excellent research opportunities in marine ecology, biochemistry, climate change, ocean acidification, genomics, and conservation biology, they also hope to host special programs built around the new exhibit for educational purpose and science outreach. On top of that they want to foster strong bi-national collaboration with scientists, conservationists, students, and educators in Mexico.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
http://b2science.org/earth/facility/biome-ocean

For anyone interested in the biosphere missions, this is a pretty good read. A short thriller similar in style to Lord of the Flies. :p
http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2011/09/years-glass-biosphere-2-mission/

If you want some more information on the problems they had with soil bacteria stealing their air you can find it on page 2 of this discover magazine article; http://discovermagazine.com/2010/oct/20-life-under-the-bubble

Rack your brains over brains running on racks

This month's issue of Nature delivers a special on the brain that really gets you thinking. They take a detailed look at how Europe's Human Brain Project and the US BRAIN initiative are taking shape but the real prize is this interesting write-up on some of the most promising currently existing neuromorphic hardware. Check out Neurogrid, SpiNNaker, BrainScaleS, SyNAPSE and the neural net simulation called Spaun.
http://www.nature.com/news/neuroelectronics-smart-connections-1.14089

Here's a collection of interesting bits from the article that will make you click onwards to read the thing in full.

Just a few years ago, Kwabena Boahen completed a device called Neurogrid that emulates a million neurons, about as many as there are in a honeybee's brain. Now applications for 'neuromorphic technology' are finally in sight.

In 2012 Boahen contacted Chris Eliasmith, who is responsible for Spaun: a design for a computer model of the brain that includes the parts responsible for vision, movement and decision-making. Previously, a simulation of Spaun on a conventional computer had shown that, with 2.5 million simulated neurons plus a simulated retina and hand, it could copy handwritten digits, recall the items in a list, work out the next number in a given sequence and carry out several other cognitive tasks. But the Spaun simulation ran about 9,000 times slower than real time, taking 2.5 hours to simulate 1 second of behaviour.

Boahen contacted Eliasmith with the obvious proposition: build a physical version of Spaun using real-time neuromorphic hardware. “I got very excited,” says Eliasmith, for whom the match seemed perfect. “You've got the peanut butter, we've got the chocolate!”

With funding from the US Office of Naval Research, Boahen and Eliasmith have put together a team that plans to build a small-scale prototype in three years and a full-scale system in five. For sensory input they will use neuromorphic retinas and cochleas developed at the INI, says Boahen. For output, they have a robotic arm. But the cognitive hardware will be built from scratch.

The system is explicitly designed for real-world applications. On a five-year timescale, says Boahen, “we envision building fully autonomous robots that interact with their environments in a meaningful way, and operate in real-time while [their brains] consume as much electricity as a cell phone”. Such devices would be much more flexible and adaptive than today's autonomous robots, and would consume considerably less power.

In the longer term, Boahen adds, the project could pave the way for compact, low-power processors in any computer system, not just robotics. If researchers really have managed to capture the essential ingredients that make the brain so efficient, compact and robust, then it could be the salvation of an industry about to run into a wall as chips get ever smaller.

“But we won't know for sure,” Boahen says, “until we try.”

> http://www.nature.com/news/neuroelectronics-smart-connections-1.14089
> Neurogrid; http://www.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/neurogrid.html
> SpiNNaker; http://apt.cs.man.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/
> BrainScaleS - http://brainscales.kip.uni-heidelberg.de/
> SyNAPSE - http://www.research.ibm.com/cognitive-computing/neurosynaptic-chips.shtml
> Spaun; http://nengo.ca/build-a-brain/spaunvideos

Read this if you want to have the time of your life

http://www.nature.com/news/biomarkers-and-ageing-the-clock-watcher-1.15014

Steve Horvath, a geneticist and biostatistician at UCLA, has developed a cellular biological clock that has impressed researchers with its accuracy, how easy it is to read and the fact that it ticks at the same rate in many parts of the body — with some intriguing exceptions that might provide clues to the nature of ageing and its maladies.

Horvath's clock emerges from epigenetics, the study of chemical and structural modifications made to the genome that do not alter the DNA sequence but that are passed along as cells divide and can influence how genes are expressed. As cells age, the pattern of epigenetic alterations shifts, and some of the changes seem to mark time. To determine a person's age, Horvath explores data for hundreds of far-flung positions on DNA from a sample of cells and notes how often those positions are methylated.

“I wanted to develop a method that would work in many or most tissues. It was a very risky project,” Horvath says. But now the gamble seems to be paying off. By the time his findings were finally published last year1, the clock's median error was 3.6 years, meaning that it could guess the age of half the donors to within 43 months for a broad selection of tissues. That accuracy improves to 2.7 years for saliva alone, 1.9 years for certain types of white blood cell and 1.5 years for the brain cortex. The clock shows stem cells removed from embryos to be extremely young and the brains of centenarians to be about 100.

The reviews came back in the spring: more disbelief, and another rejection. Horvath didn't blame the reviewers for being sceptical. “Everyone who develops biomarkers knows what to expect: a very strong biomarker gives you a correlation of, say, 0.6 or 0.7.” For example, the correlation between age and the length of telomeres is less than 0.5. For Horvath's clock algorithm, that figure is 0.96. He confesses that he had trouble believing it himself until other researchers independently confirmed the tight association.

“Such tight correlations suggest there is something seemingly immutable going on in cells,” says Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, who won a Nobel prize for her research on telomeres — caps on the ends of chromosomes that shorten with age. It could be a clue to undiscovered biology, she suggests. And there may be medical implications in cases in which epigenetic estimates do not match a person's birth certificate.

http://www.nature.com/news/biomarkers-and-ageing-the-clock-watcher-1.15014


Picture; Compact Object (1962) by Natsuyuki Nakanishi
A plastic egg with bones, watch and clock parts, hair, eggshells, lens bits, ...

Times as artificial constructs born form synthetics. A plastic egg giving birth to both flesh and time, to the real, the material, and the ephemeral and elusive. Can one exist without the other? Is time internalized mechanically by the flesh, or is it the other way around? Time made flesh... by the machine? Our time isn't really all that similar to physical or even biological time. Ours ticks at different rates from day to day, from cradle to the grave. From atomic vibrations measuring millions of intervals in a single second, to the number of pressure waves transmitted by your local church bell, not all times are made equal. Then again, pulsars are very good clocks but they do not tell time the way Chicxulub did when it reshaped Mexico's Yucatan peninsula.

The experiments stoking fusion's fire

Are these about to set the world ablaze or will they fizzle and fade? If we are serious about finding out we better start throwing money at them.

You might have heard of the most popular fusion design, tokamaks like JET (Joint European Torus) and ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), devices that look like giant donuts and utilize giant magnets to confine and accelerate plasma. Or perhaps you've heard of NIF's (National Ignition Facility) laser initiated approach which counts on a massive 192 barrel laser cannon to focus all its energy on a tiny pellet in order to compress it to such a degree as to achieve ignition. Those two approaches have received the most attention and as a result have sucked up most of fusion's funding in the last few decades. They do look promising and are worth every penny spent but a variety of new approaches has been picking up steam which too are deserving of a much closer look and thus the funds to do so.

Nature digs into some of them with this excellent article that shines a bit of light on the secretive start-ups that claim to have found the answer to our energy woes. There's Tri Alpha's linear design trying to get things going by having 2 directly opposite plasma cannons fire at each other in sync as well as Helion Energy's somewhat similar colliding-beam reactor and last but not least they also talk a bit about General Fusion's approach which hopes to literally hammer their plasma into obedience.

http://www.nature.com/news/plasma-physics-the-fusion-upstarts-1.15592

If you think that's an exhaustive listing, you'd be wrong. Another big one is Lawrenceville Plasma Physics's Focus Fusion idea but there's also various teams hoping to work on different types of stellarators as well as the so called triple-threat methods. So many avenues worth exploring yet so few funds to do so. Luckily the private sector is chipping in a bit because else these would all have been shot down before even having had a chance of making it to the door. The fact that VCs, including some really big names, are investing in these should raise eyebrows as they don't typically start pumping money into something unless the road to market is somewhat mapped. Is it possible that fusion will follow the google model and reach the world from someone's garage? It might not seem likely but the chance definitely exists for all those billions invested in traditional designs to be bypassed by one really good innovative idea.

Lockheed - Solve for X: Charles Chase on energy for everyone
Google Talks - Focus Fusion: The Fastest Route to Cheap, Clean Energy
TED - Michel Laberge: How synchronized hammer strikes could generate nuclear fusion

Related posts
> A Star in a Bottle (ITER - Tokamak)

> National Ignition Facility (NIF - laser based confinement)
https://plus.google.com/108487783243149848473/posts/UHEhKLCyxLs

> Nuclear man; the humane power station (fission poetry?)
https://plus.google.com/108487783243149848473/posts/6LKW1s5yW2h

Photo below; General fusion's current experimental prototype on top and what they hope to build below. At the center of the containment vessel, within the spun liquid metal's vortex, plasma rings (think smoke rings) composed of the deuterium-tritium fuel are injected from both above and below which merge to form a single magnetized plasma target. The protruding cylinders you see in the pictures house the pistons used to batter the liquid metal into a fusion susceptible environment. When they are all fired at the same time they send a shockwave through the spinning lead-lithium mixture that gets stronger as it travel towards the center of the vessel where it rapidly collapses the vortex cavity with the plasma in it generating a fusion burst. Quite the turn on wouldn't you say? :)