Month: February 2016

The art of the deal

hilarious and insightful.

But Trump of the book is more a-intellectual, in the same way some people are amoral or asexual. The world is taken as a given. It contains deals. Some people make the deals well, and they are winners. Other people make the deals poorly, and they are losers. Trump does not need more than this. There will be no civilization of philosopher-Trumps asking where the first deal came from, or whether a deal is a deal only by virtue of its participation in some primordial deal beyond material existence.

long lost, recently rediscovered at a yard sale: the art of the deal, the movie

Robot Friends

any given conversation and image will not be completely unique. There are 7B people in the world, but 1 piece of text will not generate 7B different responses. When 2 people are chatting, it is possible a similar conversation has already taken place—we just have to find it.

The Cause of RBF

The cues are understated, yet the machine detects and interprets them the same way our human brains do. “Something in the neutral expression of the face is relaying contempt, both to the software and to us.”

i’ve been diagnosed with RBF, and the root cause is contempt. sounds about right.

Gene Expression Modeling

ML uncovers unknown features of multi-drug-resistant pathogen

Even though the model built with ADAGE was relatively simple, it had no trouble learning which sets of P. aeruginosa genes tend to work together or in opposition. To the researchers’ surprise, the ADAGE system also detected differences between the main laboratory strain of P. aeruginosa and strains isolated from infected patients. “That turned out to be one of the strongest features of the data”.

“We expect that this approach will be particularly useful to microbiologists researching bacterial species that lack a decades-long history of study in the lab. Microbiologists can use these models to identify where the data agree with their own knowledge and where the data seem to be pointing in a different direction … and to find completely new things in biology that we didn’t even know to look for.”