My first reaction was also to think, "That doesn't seem like a very useful mutation/bit of evolution" but of course most of the age-related stuff won't be important until you're beyond the age of reproduction
It's been common to think of aging as a process of "accumulation of insults" that eventually leads to loss of function. After all, we have a number of extremely long lived cell types (e.g. CNS neurons, pancreatic beta cells, etc.). However, recently it's been clearer and clearer that aging is a deliberate, regulated cellular program. Emphasis because, individual cells (and single celled organisms) also age. Probably the evolutionary explanation lies more with the sacrifices needed for multicellularity, and/or population dynamics of cells, rather than of whole, multicellular organisms.
if the FOXO4 is doing something else more useful for us when we're young
It prevents cancer. FOXO4 is a transcription factor that activates transcription of P27, a CDK inhibitor that prevents cells from progressing through the cell cycle. FOXO4 itself is a target of PI3K and Akt, kinases which attach phosphate groups to FOXO4 and prevent its translocation to the nucleus, and thus transcription of FOXO4 regulated genes. Since FOXO4 favors cell cycle progression, this tends to permit cells to advance through the cell cycle and proliferate.
PI3K and Akt are important components of pathways for nutrient sensing, regulation of growth and proliferation, and protein production and degradation. They frequently have activating mutations in cancer, contributing to runaway division. In many ways, cancer and aging/neurodegeneration are actually flip sides of the same coin. Cancer cells tend to have hyperactive homeostasis mechanisms that boost protein stability and buffer the destabilizing effects of the mutations they accumulate, as well as allowing the runaway growth, etc. In contrast, old cells (especially degenerating neurons) have compromised homeostasis mechanisms, leading to increased protein misfolding and reduced degradative capacity, which in turn cause loss of function and inability to replicate and grow as these misfolds build up in the cell.
Here's a partial map of some of these pathways, centered on the mTOR regulatory hub (you can pick out Akt, PI3K and FOXO1, though FOXO4 is missing). Clearly, these are extremely complex regulatory networks, which we are only just beginning to understand, that exist to strike a delicate balance between growth and stability within a multicellular alliance that itself exists in a context of worldly struggle. As we develop technology to manipulate these regulatory networks, we will also have to learn how these networks are altered in aging and disease in order to understand when - and if - medical interventions can safely restore that balance.
Source/disclaimer: I am a PhD student in Biophysics.
The main reason behind the dramatic decline in children per woman, even in developed countries, is probably the similarly dramatic improvement in infant and childhood mortality seen over the last several decades (and not scarcity as suggested above).
Even in developing countries, people prefer quality to quantity when it comes to children. If they're confident their children will survive to early adulthood, they have fewer children.
Is there something different or more legal about this project than past SNES scanning projects?
"My friend" has an archive of ROMs that's complete. It has every game, and even has every regional or versioned release as well (several ROMs per game). Same for NES, Genesis, and N64
The notion that "publish or perish" hurts science is apparently widespread, but its misguided. Now, as a researcher, it's tempting to agree in the interest of making my life easier, but the truth is that the need to publish creates an environment in which there is both competition for excellence and a strong incentive to document and share results. The problem isn't "publish or perish" as such, but rather simple inadequacy of funding. Our competitive grant system was intended to fund around 30% of proposals, not the ~5% that receive funding today. We spend a total of just 2.7% of GDP on R&D (public and private), and the highest spender is South Korea at 4.3%. I think these amounts are shockingly low considering the benefits to society.
The result is that instead of competition for excellence, we now have competition because there isn't enough to go around. That leads to an environment where excellence and reproducibility can fall by the wayside in the context of a desperate need for funding. If you think about it, it's clear that publications should be a requirement for continued funding. But every such statement about how science should be funded, and conducted, are predicated on a reasonable proportion of worthy projects receiving funding.
Here's a more deeply thought-out perspective from a respected biologist (and one of my professors). He discusses a similar reproducibility study done at Amgen. It turns out that the several significant variables were altered in the "reproductions," and some of the experiments weren't successful for unrelated reasons (bad knockdowns). TFA covers a reproducibility study looking at just five papers in one narrow field - then uses this sample to draw broad conclusions about "science" in general. It's about as valid as similar articles making similar statements based on failed reproductions in psychology or sociology.
10,000x more birds are killed by cats than by solar (?!?) and wind? Can you provide a citation for that? I'd like to use it in shutting-up idiots in the future (if true).
Oh, it's quite true. See this recent study for the numbers on wind turbines, and this one for cats*. This report ranks various energy sources; perhaps unsurprisingly coal actually kills the most birds.
It turns out cats kill a lot of animals, making them "the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals." According to that second study, though, most of the deaths are attributable to un-owned cats. The actual numbers from the studies are exactly those quoted by Anaerin above.
Car is assembled by robots in the factory. Car drives itself off the factory floor and into the nearest city. Car starts hailing rideshare passengers. No question marks, just profit.
I'm sure there's more, but it's too depressing to keep searching for them. Honestly, as an academic/scientific programmer I feel like I could never try to write a commercial application. Any idea you have is already present in an overbroad patent owned by someone with deeper pockets than you.
Ever use a search engine (in particular image searching)?
A string like "https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/JmVq0i-tBJiPxGt5XOrDYDO6lyA=/0x16:1300x883/1280x854/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/48728355/playboy_march_16_cover_wide.0.0.jpg" is just a *fact* and should not be copyrightable. It simply *is not* the information that has been copyrighted.
It's true - In 2008 I changed a person's stance on the Israel/Palestine conflict after a reasoned discussion, in-person.
Most political "discussions," including Facebook posts, don't change minds because they are rhetorically weak. Indeed, it isn't hard to conclude that most of them have no persuasive rhetorical content. Authors of such posts are venting their opinions, or preaching to the choir, in total absence of actual dialogue.
Now, if one was able to restrict the study to conversations containing even attempted persuasive rhetoric, I doubt the majority of them would be effective. But it would be more than reported in TFA.
First, yes, they do in fact know that much about you and yes the tools work incredibly well.
I'm curious how this is supposed to work on vaguely careful people - who use NoScript, adblock, clear cookies regularly, aliases (recognizable to friends) on social media. No like buttons, etc.
I just went back to Panopticlick and I have to whitelist several scripts before my browser is identifiable. On most sites, those sources wont ever be allowed to run because only one or two first-party sources are needed for the page to function.
Of course, some companies are going to have data, say Google (because Gmail and Play) and Amazon (because payments and product ids), but why would they share that information with competitors like this startup?
How dare these peons communicate about their earnings and working conditions?! Don't they know a desperate reserve labor force is critical to our economy?
You make all good points...but it seems that the real problem here is that Autopilot-supported drivers have been in any accidents at all. Even if the proportion of accidents is dramatically lower, consumers, media and perhaps regulators are going to keep freaking out over every single incident.
Car accidents are extremely common. Autopilot-supported drivers, and in the future, fully automatic cars, are always going to be involved in some number of accidents each year.
Not to mention all the time I couldn't be working in my job or working on improving my business or service...
Exactly, it's a transparently anti-competitive operation. The CEO's forum post tacitly admits as such. I don't get what's with all these people here saying that if you haven't sought to have the government enforce monopolies on your behalf, you're actually the bad guy.
And what a hypocrite, too...Trent Reznor has admitted to using private torrent sites to download music, because no legal service worked as well or as conveniently.
This matters? WTH? With everything going on in the tech world should we be worried about a lawsuit about Trumps hair?
I'm guessing from your comment that you're ignorant of the context here. Peter Thiel personally dislikes Gawker, and is now bankrolling third-party lawsuits against them. It's "news" because the very wealthy are openly perverting the United State's permissive litigation rules in order to quell disfavored speech. It's "for nerds" because those wealthy individuals happen to be high profile tech VCs targeting new media websites using, among other things, intellectual property law.
When the very wealthy bankroll third-party lawsuits against media outlets they personally dislike, it's "news." When those wealthy individuals are high profile tech VCs, it's "for nerds."
Slashdot Mirror
You'd have to be crazy to put people in your vehicle's first flight.
Getting free formula or milk as a baby is a shameless handout and clearly a sign of privilege.
You're absolutely right. Babies should have to work for their formula!
My first reaction was also to think, "That doesn't seem like a very useful mutation/bit of evolution" but of course most of the age-related stuff won't be important until you're beyond the age of reproduction
It's been common to think of aging as a process of "accumulation of insults" that eventually leads to loss of function. After all, we have a number of extremely long lived cell types (e.g. CNS neurons, pancreatic beta cells, etc.). However, recently it's been clearer and clearer that aging is a deliberate, regulated cellular program. Emphasis because, individual cells (and single celled organisms) also age. Probably the evolutionary explanation lies more with the sacrifices needed for multicellularity, and/or population dynamics of cells, rather than of whole, multicellular organisms.
if the FOXO4 is doing something else more useful for us when we're young
It prevents cancer. FOXO4 is a transcription factor that activates transcription of P27, a CDK inhibitor that prevents cells from progressing through the cell cycle. FOXO4 itself is a target of PI3K and Akt, kinases which attach phosphate groups to FOXO4 and prevent its translocation to the nucleus, and thus transcription of FOXO4 regulated genes. Since FOXO4 favors cell cycle progression, this tends to permit cells to advance through the cell cycle and proliferate.
PI3K and Akt are important components of pathways for nutrient sensing, regulation of growth and proliferation, and protein production and degradation. They frequently have activating mutations in cancer, contributing to runaway division. In many ways, cancer and aging/neurodegeneration are actually flip sides of the same coin. Cancer cells tend to have hyperactive homeostasis mechanisms that boost protein stability and buffer the destabilizing effects of the mutations they accumulate, as well as allowing the runaway growth, etc. In contrast, old cells (especially degenerating neurons) have compromised homeostasis mechanisms, leading to increased protein misfolding and reduced degradative capacity, which in turn cause loss of function and inability to replicate and grow as these misfolds build up in the cell.
Here's a partial map of some of these pathways, centered on the mTOR regulatory hub (you can pick out Akt, PI3K and FOXO1, though FOXO4 is missing). Clearly, these are extremely complex regulatory networks, which we are only just beginning to understand, that exist to strike a delicate balance between growth and stability within a multicellular alliance that itself exists in a context of worldly struggle. As we develop technology to manipulate these regulatory networks, we will also have to learn how these networks are altered in aging and disease in order to understand when - and if - medical interventions can safely restore that balance.
Source/disclaimer: I am a PhD student in Biophysics.
I'm not sure the argument flies with actual humans.
Just look at the data.
The main reason behind the dramatic decline in children per woman, even in developed countries, is probably the similarly dramatic improvement in infant and childhood mortality seen over the last several decades (and not scarcity as suggested above).
Even in developing countries, people prefer quality to quantity when it comes to children. If they're confident their children will survive to early adulthood, they have fewer children.
I'm having much more sex than I was 20 years ago.
Is there something different or more legal about this project than past SNES scanning projects?
"My friend" has an archive of ROMs that's complete. It has every game, and even has every regional or versioned release as well (several ROMs per game). Same for NES, Genesis, and N64
The notion that "publish or perish" hurts science is apparently widespread, but its misguided. Now, as a researcher, it's tempting to agree in the interest of making my life easier, but the truth is that the need to publish creates an environment in which there is both competition for excellence and a strong incentive to document and share results. The problem isn't "publish or perish" as such, but rather simple inadequacy of funding. Our competitive grant system was intended to fund around 30% of proposals, not the ~5% that receive funding today. We spend a total of just 2.7% of GDP on R&D (public and private), and the highest spender is South Korea at 4.3%. I think these amounts are shockingly low considering the benefits to society.
The result is that instead of competition for excellence, we now have competition because there isn't enough to go around. That leads to an environment where excellence and reproducibility can fall by the wayside in the context of a desperate need for funding. If you think about it, it's clear that publications should be a requirement for continued funding. But every such statement about how science should be funded, and conducted, are predicated on a reasonable proportion of worthy projects receiving funding.
Here's a more deeply thought-out perspective from a respected biologist (and one of my professors). He discusses a similar reproducibility study done at Amgen. It turns out that the several significant variables were altered in the "reproductions," and some of the experiments weren't successful for unrelated reasons (bad knockdowns). TFA covers a reproducibility study looking at just five papers in one narrow field - then uses this sample to draw broad conclusions about "science" in general. It's about as valid as similar articles making similar statements based on failed reproductions in psychology or sociology.
10,000x more birds are killed by cats than by solar (?!?) and wind? Can you provide a citation for that? I'd like to use it in shutting-up idiots in the future (if true).
Oh, it's quite true. See this recent study for the numbers on wind turbines, and this one for cats*. This report ranks various energy sources; perhaps unsurprisingly coal actually kills the most birds.
It turns out cats kill a lot of animals, making them "the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals." According to that second study, though, most of the deaths are attributable to un-owned cats. The actual numbers from the studies are exactly those quoted by Anaerin above.
* Nature isn't open access but...
Car is assembled by robots in the factory. Car drives itself off the factory floor and into the nearest city. Car starts hailing rideshare passengers. No question marks, just profit.
Breathe
Konfabulator
Patenting an app's features, using pictures of the app itself.
Examples of features taken from apps (not necessarily kicking them out)
Blog post of dev whose animated weather app was refused shortly before Apple implemented the same thing
I'm sure there's more, but it's too depressing to keep searching for them. Honestly, as an academic/scientific programmer I feel like I could never try to write a commercial application. Any idea you have is already present in an overbroad patent owned by someone with deeper pockets than you.
What's so bad about that?
Ever use a search engine (in particular image searching)?
A string like "https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/JmVq0i-tBJiPxGt5XOrDYDO6lyA=/0x16:1300x883/1280x854/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/48728355/playboy_march_16_cover_wide.0.0.jpg" is just a *fact* and should not be copyrightable. It simply *is not* the information that has been copyrighted.
It's true - In 2008 I changed a person's stance on the Israel/Palestine conflict after a reasoned discussion, in-person.
Most political "discussions," including Facebook posts, don't change minds because they are rhetorically weak. Indeed, it isn't hard to conclude that most of them have no persuasive rhetorical content. Authors of such posts are venting their opinions, or preaching to the choir, in total absence of actual dialogue.
Now, if one was able to restrict the study to conversations containing even attempted persuasive rhetoric, I doubt the majority of them would be effective. But it would be more than reported in TFA.
Thank you, I was trying all kinds of NoScript whitelisting until I realized what was going on.
First, yes, they do in fact know that much about you and yes the tools work incredibly well.
I'm curious how this is supposed to work on vaguely careful people - who use NoScript, adblock, clear cookies regularly, aliases (recognizable to friends) on social media. No like buttons, etc.
I just went back to Panopticlick and I have to whitelist several scripts before my browser is identifiable. On most sites, those sources wont ever be allowed to run because only one or two first-party sources are needed for the page to function.
Of course, some companies are going to have data, say Google (because Gmail and Play) and Amazon (because payments and product ids), but why would they share that information with competitors like this startup?
Dramatic improvements in periodontal health are claimed for careful flossing. Careless flossing turns out not to matter.
How dare these peons communicate about their earnings and working conditions?! Don't they know a desperate reserve labor force is critical to our economy?
You make all good points...but it seems that the real problem here is that Autopilot-supported drivers have been in any accidents at all. Even if the proportion of accidents is dramatically lower, consumers, media and perhaps regulators are going to keep freaking out over every single incident.
Car accidents are extremely common. Autopilot-supported drivers, and in the future, fully automatic cars, are always going to be involved in some number of accidents each year.
For something like 6 years, too.
Not to mention all the time I couldn't be working in my job or working on improving my business or service...
Exactly, it's a transparently anti-competitive operation. The CEO's forum post tacitly admits as such. I don't get what's with all these people here saying that if you haven't sought to have the government enforce monopolies on your behalf, you're actually the bad guy.
Yeah, exactly, if you don't seek government-enforced monopolies you're actually the bad guy.
at best it is a measure of how well the country's culture conditions people to taking standardized tests.
At this level it's probably not even that - but just a proxy for income.
That low income correlates with piracy should surprise no one.
it's all about "his" stolen music.
And what a hypocrite, too...Trent Reznor has admitted to using private torrent sites to download music, because no legal service worked as well or as conveniently.
This matters? WTH? With everything going on in the tech world should we be worried about a lawsuit about Trumps hair?
I'm guessing from your comment that you're ignorant of the context here. Peter Thiel personally dislikes Gawker, and is now bankrolling third-party lawsuits against them. It's "news" because the very wealthy are openly perverting the United State's permissive litigation rules in order to quell disfavored speech. It's "for nerds" because those wealthy individuals happen to be high profile tech VCs targeting new media websites using, among other things, intellectual property law.
When the very wealthy bankroll third-party lawsuits against media outlets they personally dislike, it's "news." When those wealthy individuals are high profile tech VCs, it's "for nerds."