The U.S. economy appears to be coming apart at the seams. Unemployment remains at nearly ten percent, the highest level in almost 30 years; foreclosures have forced millions of Americans out of their homes; and real incomes have fallen faster and further than at any time since the Great Depression. Many of those laid off fear that the jobs they have lost — the secure, often unionized, industrial jobs that provided wealth, security, and opportunity — will never return. They are probably right. And yet a curious thing has happened in the midst of all this misery. The wealthiest Americans, among them presumably the very titans of global finance whose misadventures brought about the financial meltdown, got richer. And not just a little bit richer; a lot richer.
The point here is that science [which is impossible], and this form of science that I and presumably you do, biomedical research (which I suppose is impossible squared), is unbelievably frustrating. And, as a consequence, stressful. … My mandate here is to identify the sources of stress in our scientific lives and to suggest ways to deal with them. … Each one is impossible (by which I mean “very, very difficult”), but even the attempt seems to help, and I’ve divided these into six impossible things. I am not sure that it is really six things, but the number was chosen because the White Queen asserted that with practice she regularly believes six impossible things before breakfast. Me, I’m still practicing.
Good fodder for New Year’s resolutions: read more.
“ INT – ACORN-FUNDED HACK-CAVE – NIGHT Rows of TEENAGE HACKERS in THICK GLASSES and shirts emblazoned with ACORN LOGOS and HAMMERS AND SICKLES sit behind massive COMPUTERS, typing furiously as MATRIX-STYLE LINES OF CODE stream down the monitors. On one rocky wall of the hack-cave hangs an ENORMOUS OIL PORTRAIT OF JULIAN ASSANGE STYLED AS JESUS CHRIST. On another wall hangs a PAINTING OF BARACK OBAMA SEIZING THE LAND OF A MIDDLE CLASS FAMILY. On one of the teen communist hacker’s screens, the words “OVERRIDE PASSWORD? Y/N” appear. He stands and waves. ”
You’re more likely to have your car stolen or experience a B&E in Vancouver than 13 of 17 large cities. Property crime rates more than 2x higher than NY or Toronto. You wouldn’t guess, though! Less likely to be mugged for sure.
“So then what is special about Christmas music? Let’s take the nativist view– that there is something in the composition, construction, timbre or production in every popular Christmas song that makes it fit into the genre. Some predefined, baked in, Chomsky grammar style language of melodies and instruments. So play a Christmas song to someone who’s never experienced a Christmas before. What do they feel? Do they rush out and buy spray-on snow? I never got around to doing the study. What I could do is try to distill holiday music down to its barest essentials. My hypothesis was that if we could figure out the dominant components of Christmas music, and train a system looking only at the audio to make more of it from those components, and if that new music passes the Turing test of the general public considering it Christmas music, then yes, we’ve cracked the code — we can have Holiday Forever, a Singular Christmas.”
“ Simply put, all open data is publicly available. But not all publicly available data is open. Open data does not mean that a government or other entity releases all of its data to the public. It would be unconscionable for the government to give out all of your private, personal data to anyone who asks for it. Rather, open data means that whatever data is released is done so in a specific way to allow the public to access it without having to pay fees or be unfairly restricted in its use. ”
