David W. Wills, a professor of religious history at Amherst, on MOOCs.
Wills started out being open to MOOCs, he said. But the more he heard the more his concerns grew, and none of edX’s representatives seemed able to address them.
[…]
The language he heard from edX, he said, was the rhetoric of tech innovation—seemingly to the exclusion of anything else—and he worried about academia falling under hierarchical thrall to a few star professors.
From Laptop U - Has the future of college moved online? [New Yorker]
…for now, it takes selections about genres and key ingredients and feeds them into a complex system that combines a repository of recipes with databases of “psycho- and chemo-informatics”—computer models of how the human palate might respond to different combinations of flavors. There are literally trillions of possibilities. The program’s mission is to sort them based on its predictions of how pleasant and surprising those combinations might be.”
Cooking with I.B.M.: The Synthetic Gastronomist [Elements: New Yorker]
Humans need not worry for there are many things that this computer cannot do that a human can, yet this is pretty neat.
Genomics may accomplish a lot, but could it redefine humanity’s view of itself?
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Given the number of famous scientists around, it’s easy to forget the full title of the Nobel Week Dialogue includes the phrase “impact on society.” But Helga Nowotny, the president of the European Research Council, was on hand to provide a remedy. Nowotny is a social scientist who spends a lot of time thinking about how science and society influence each other. She was next in line for a Nobel Week Dialogue talk.
Nowotny started out by noting genomics is often mentioned as a promising thing (like the “promise of genetic medicine” and so forth). But the term “promise,” she noted, implies a contract, and she did her best to make the details of that contract explicit. The payoff of getting this contract right in the case of genetics, she suggested, might be a second Renaissance.
Although attempts to understand the natural world have existed in almost every culture, institutionalized science of the sort we practice today only dates back a few hundred years. As it has grown, it has become increasingly reliant on society for support. In return, Nowotny said, science makes a number of promises. One is the promise of information that is above the vagaries of political and religious figures.
”
Was there a computer age while Victoria was on the throne?
John Graham-Cumming has an ambitious plan: he wants to recreate the”analytical engine”, one of the first computer that was ever dreamed of by Charles Babbage in 1837 (sadly, it was never actually built):
To understand why it’s worth building an almost 200-year-old mechanical computer, it’s necessary to first understand what a computer is. Although Babbage’s analytical engine is entirely mechanical, it has the same essence as a modern computer. That computer essence is one of the important consequences of another British computing pioneer’s work, a century after Babbage. Exactly 99 years after Babbage invented the computer, Alan Turing wrote his now famous paper describing the universal Turing machine. An important mathematical idea arising from Turing’s paper and another by American mathematician Alonzo Church is that all computers have the same capabilities, no matter how they are constructed. Because of the Church-Turing thesis, as it is called, we know that Babbage’s analytical engine (with its levers and cogs), Turing’s theoretical machine and the latest tablet all have the same fundamental limits. Of course, Babbage’s machine would by modern standards have been painfully slow.And please note: it is the size of a locomotive (!) – a larger-than-life computer. Best of luck to him.
Photograph: Science Museum Archive / Science & Society Picture Library
Babbage’s compute may have never been built but Ada Lovelace (which this piece barely mentions in passing) is considered one of the first computer programmers and the method she devised to describe how the Analytical Engine would calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers (alongside the rest of the notes for the engine) is recognized as the world’s first computer program. So the engine may not have been built but at least “computer programming” was underway.
Brainstorm Episode 107 - Returning to Nature WITH Genetic Engineering
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Interesting.
704TB in DNA: A New Method of Information Storage?
One of the first things you learn in biology is that the nucleic acids, particularly DNA, store the biological blueprint inside an organism’s cells. Scientists have been experimenting with making little circuits and and factories out of DNA, but it’s evident now that we’ve been missing out.
Professor George Church and his team at Harvard University have encoded and copied the professor’s new book entirely into DNA. They stuffed 96 bits into each DNA strand by treating each of the bases (A, T, C, and G) as though they were binary values. The genetic sequence was then synthesised by a microfluidic chip that matched up that sequence with its position in a relevant data set, even when all the DNA strands were out of order.
“My flash drive works just fine,” you say? Well, apparently DNA works better. Microscopic DNA can store a gigantic amount of information: 704TB of data fits into a cubic millimeter, or more than you’d get out of a few hundred hard drives. Of course, there are caveats; the processing time is currently too slow for time-sensitive content, and cells with living DNA would destroy the strands too quickly to make them viable for anything more than transfers. All the same, with DNA’s density and lifespan of eons, Professor Church has certainly opened a few interesting doors in biotechnology and broadened technology’s view of information storage.
The article was originally published in the journal Science. Harvard University’s website has an article that makes for lighter reading. The video is the property of Harvard University.
The highlighted portion above is my emphasis, I just want to point out that we’re still missing out. Below is a picture of the “size” of natural modules,
In all we have 19 of the elements above. TOTAL. Of those 6 are orthogonal regulators, 11 enzymes and I forget the other two. To complicate matters, this is only 1 of approximately 200 known modules for E. coli.
What George Church did is crazy and really cool (if you think static storage is cool and I do) but it’s evident that we’re still missing out.
But yeah, that’s a lot of storage.
Inky cat footprints!
From p. 170 of Clavis Bibliorum: The Key of the Bible, Unlocking the Richest Treasury of the Holy Scriptures by Francis Roberts (1675). Original from Princeton University. Digitized August 12, 2008.
Obviously the cat was trying to paw our attention to something in the text. We should inform Nicolas Cage and Dan Brown about this, it might involve popular works of biblical art and strange religious organizations with strong political ties to the state.
I want to believe.
Mark Zuckerberg: Worth a lot less than he was before
“Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth is now at its lowest since his company’s May 17 initial public offering, as the company’s shares hit a new low on Thursday. Facebook shares sagged 6.3 percent as it put millions more up for sale; the day’s drop personally cost Zuckerberg $600 million. His net worth is now down to $10.2 billion, according to Bloomberg, while other Facebook founders have also lost big. Chris Hughes, the new owner of The New Republic, lost $400 million since the IPO, Dustin Moskovitz $2.4 billion, and Eduardo Saverin, $960 million.”
OUCH. Those co-founders have each lost nearly half of their net worth.
Poor Mark, his net worth is now down to $10.2 billion.
Meanwhile my net worth is [redacted].
