The Heroes of CRISPR

Source: The Heroes of CRISPR: Cell

January 2016

Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining about its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life was short if we lived 10 times as long?Since there didn’t seem any way to answer this question, I stopped wondering about it. Then I had kids. That gave me a way to answer the question, and the answer is that life actually is short.Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it’s impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.Ok, so life actually is short. Does it make any difference to know that?

Source: Life is Short

This is the most serious bug you’ll hear about this week: the issues identified and fixed in OpenSSH are dubbed CVE-2016-0777 and CVE-2016-0778.

Source: OpenSSH: client bugs CVE-2016-0777 and CVE-2016-0778

Something has changed in the last few years which has made an increasing number of people want to join startups. It seemed to start around the time the Social Network movie came out – perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but part of me imagines a group of MBAs sitting around watching Justin Timberlake play Sean Parker, thinking thatactually a billion dollars would be pretty cool.

When choosing a startup to work at, people often overlook one of the most important factors, which is the size and stage of the company. I’d argue this is sometimes even more important than the industry or the idea itself.

Source: Tom Blomfield: When to join a startup

Open Source and the Free Software movement have always played a very important role in Qt’s history. From the very beginning, Qt has been available under both Open Source and commercial licensing terms. This dual licensing approach has played a major role in turning Qt into the technology it is today. While the commercial business

Source: New agreement with the KDE Free Qt Foundation and changes for the open source version – Qt Blog

You know what ? We could encrypt the name of the authors using GPG and only reveal the real names later on, after the paper gets approved and published or even later if someone requested us show our credentials like in a job interview. That would be a good idea, just thinking… :\

In today’s lookit-me culture of selfies, Twitter, Facebook and (ahem) endless blogging, the notion of anonymity is about as welcome as a case of hemorrhoids. But Paul Hanel thinks it may be key to correcting some fundamental problems in science.

Hanel, a psychologist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, posted a manuscript recently calling for anonymity in science articles. More than that, Hanel suggests stripping identifiers from virtually all academic output: doing away with name-based citations, CVs on researchers’ web sites, author names on book chapters, titles on academic journals, and more.

Source: Should scientific papers be anonymous? – STAT

A few years ago, I helped save a company by showing them a single picture that took almost no work to produce.

Although formally speaking, the picture was titled Issue Open vs. Close Rate Over a Four Month Period — I tend to refer to it as The Sad Graph of Death when discussing it in educational conversations. Here it is, in all its glory:
This figure tells a story that is no way surprising to anyone who has worked on software projects before: demand for fixes and features is rapidly outpacing the supply of development time invested, and so the issue tracker is no longer serving as any sort of meaningful project planning tool.

In all but the most well-funded, high functioning, and sustainable businesses — you can expect some degree of tension along these lines. The business side of the house may blame developers for not moving fast enough, while the developers blame the business for piling work on too quickly and not leaving time for cleanup, testing, and long-term investments. Typically, both sides have valid concerns, but they don’t do an especially good job of communicating with one another.

Source: The sad graph of software death

Abstract

Sleep is a universal phenomenon necessary for maintaining homeostasis and function across a range of organs. Lack of sleep has severe health-related consequences affecting whole-body functioning, yet no other organ is as severely affected as the brain. The neurophysiological mechanisms underlying these deficits are poorly understood. Here, we characterize the dynamic changes in brain connectivity profiles inflicted by sleep deprivation and how they deviate from regular daily variability. To this end, we obtained functional magnetic resonance imaging data from 60 young, adult male participants, scanned in the morning and evening of the same day and again the following morning. 41 participants underwent total sleep deprivation before the third scan, whereas the remainder had another night of regular sleep. Sleep deprivation strongly altered the connectivity of several resting-state networks, including dorsal attention, default mode, and hippocampal networks. Multivariate classification based on connectivity profiles predicted deprivation state with high accuracy, corroborating the robustness of the findings on an individual level. Finally, correlation analysis suggested that morning-to-evening connectivity changes were reverted by sleep (control group)-a pattern which did not occur after deprivation. We conclude that both, a day of waking and a night of sleep deprivation dynamically alter the brain functional connectome.

Source: The brain functional connectome is robustly altered by lack of sleep. – PubMed – NCBI

Since the 1970s, economic inequality in the US has increased dramatically. And in particular, the rich have gotten a lot richer. Some worry this is a sign the country is broken.

I’m interested in the topic because I am a manufacturer of economic inequality. I was one of the founders of a company called Y Combinator that helps people start startups. Almost by definition, if a startup succeeds its founders become rich. And while getting rich is not the only goal of most startup founders, few would do it if one couldn’t.

I’ve become an expert on how to increase economic inequality, and I’ve spent the past decade working hard to do it. Not just by helping the 2400 founders YC has funded. I’ve also written essays encouraging people to increase economic inequality and giving them detailed instructions showing how.

Source: Economic Inequality