George Church wants to automate evolution, in the same way that we’ve now automated genome sequencing. Any trait that can be easily and automatically screened for should be susceptible to the technique. You give the machine a rough draft, and let it mutate the genome in fast forward, and iterate with screening/selection. They’ve already used the technique to engineer a couple of pigments (indigo and lycopene) much more effectively than straightforward genetic designers. Mmm. Custom evolved babies. And virus-proof replacement livers. Sweet, in a creepy kind of way.
Tag: technology
Discounted cashflow analysis of scientific programming
Software Carpentry does a little math describing the value of teaching scientists how to build good software. Even with very pessimistic assumptions, it’s clearly worthwhile. With realistic assumptions, it’s a frigging research bonanza. WTF? Why don’t advisers and administrators make sure everyone is on board?
CycleTracks for iPhone and Android
The San Francisco Transportation Authority created a mobile app to collect bicycle route/usage data called CycleTracks. It’s open source, and we’re thinking it might be fun to adapt for use here in Boulder (and elsewhere) to better understand how people really get around by bike.
High-Tech Flirting Turns Explicit
High-Tech Flirting Turns Explicit. Virtually all the damage resulting from “sexting” is done by the law, not the digital nudity. Eighth graders get naked. With each other. Theyve been doing this for a long time actually. And unlike getting pregnant at 14, having some nude pictures floating around is only serious if we choose to make it serious. It wasn’t so long ago that that was the age when people started getting married, after all. Instead of destroying their lives by registering them as sex offenders and trying to scare the other teens, why not accept it and change our norms surrounding nudity?
Big Brother Loves Your Phone
A great visualization of one person’s location, as tracked for 6 months by their cell phone carrier. The person is Malte Spitz, a Green Party politician in Germany. He fought a legal battle with Deutsche Telekom to obtain their records of his movements. This kind of data is collected on essentially everyone with a cell phone, and last year in the US carrier Sprint provided it more than 8,000,000 times to US law enforcement via a convenient online API. Many of them also sell the data in aggregate for marketing purposes.
Leveraging digital design in synthetic biology
Automatic Design of Digital Synthetic Gene Circuits from PLoS Computational Biology. They seem to be saying look, real biology isn’t generally digital, and all that continuum behavior means we need a bunch of new and complex tools to do anything with it.  However, there are plenty of instances of pseudo-digital biological control systems, and we’ve already got a gigantic toolbox from EE/VLSI world for building very complex digital circuits, so why not limit ourselves to using an artificially digitized subset of biology so we can leverage the existing design tools, and see how far we get? Weird to think of this particular kind of very intimate digitization of life. Talk about historical effects. What would our post-dark-age descendants think, rediscovering a strange class of metabolic networks, in which everything is binary?
The Missing Wikipedians
An interesting analysis of the cultural biases of the Wikipedia. As participation by the developing world increases, we need to come up with a better way of assessing “notability”. Especially with English, shared language is not shared culture or context. We in the west may see Kenyan pop cultural references as unworthy of note… but that’s not how they see it! Personally I’d rather see it become a truly global repository of knowledge. The less insular we are, the better.
Education will not be fixed, it will evolve
It seems like there have been calls to “fix” our education system in the US for decades. The Apollo program’s Saturn V engines were largely built by young engineers and scientists. Their educations were influenced by the Sputnik-inspired National Defense Education Act of 1958, which despite its codified McCarthyism was probably a good thing. Those kids of my parents’ generation were probably also directly inspired by Sputnik, and the Amazing Stories of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. Even my Seventh Day Adventist dad wanted to study physics in college, until he encountered the associated math.
If it takes a Sputnik moment to “fix” education, we may be out of luck this time around.
This burst of attention to (and funding for) science and mathematics education was, like the entire Apollo program, the product of a nationalist fear that we were “falling behind” the Soviets. Despite Thomas Friedman’s ongoing attempts to frame China’s production and adoption of clean energy technologies and as a modern Sputnik Moment, I doubt it’s in the cards. Not without some pretty dramatic focusing moment, and not without exiling the fossil fuel industries from US politics. It’s also just not the same kind of story as your newly atomic ideological arch nemesis lobbing rocks over your territorial boundaries, well out of reach. We will not be terrified by China’s solar panels, nor even, it seems, by their monopoly on the production of rare earths.
Continue reading Education will not be fixed, it will evolve
Anki: intelligent digital flashcards
Aaron recently pointed me at Anki, an open-source flashcard system. I’m using it to refresh my Spanish language skills, but it’s a very generalized system that one can use to remember just about anything. You create linked “facts” (n-sided flash cards) and study them on your desktop, the web, or even a phone. It reduces the overhead in studying a lot, and there are thousands of “shared” decks of flashcards you can use or build on.
Hackable Cars
A study of the security (or lack thereof) inherent in today’s highly computerized vehicles. Not much better than voting machines overall. We’re connecting dangerous things to our networks much faster than we’re learning how to keep them from blowing up. Just ask Iran! Thankfully my bicycle is still unhackable.