I worked at Last.fm from 2007 to 2012. The MIR team (think: research) developed a wonderful system called "RadioQL", which allowed you to stitch together custom ratio stations from any of a huge host of factors, joined together by AND, OR, and NOT. You could select artist radios, song radios, tags, and so on, but also combine this with things like the BPM or even some sentiment analysis. It was used a little bit inside some public-facing radio stations, but nobody outside of the staff ever got full access, and that's a tragedy as it was glorious.
The whole thrust of the article is complaining about timed tests and some kids getting more time. That's doubtless unfair if some are overclaiming, but the real solution is to not do timed tests at all - they are only serving to produce an arbitrary bell curve so that some can have higher grades and get better career opportunities. Better to not have a timer at all, and let people's actual ability shine.
Sure. I doubt that if some test at the moment takes an hour then you're getting much extra benefit at the five hour mark. The whole point of the time compression is to spread the grades out - along an axis different to "competence".
>whole point of the time compression is to spread the grades out
I suspect that is true for standardized tests like the SAT, ACT, or GRE.
I suspect in classroom environments that there isn't any intent at all on test timing other than most kids will be able to attempt most problems in the test time window. As far as I can tell, nobody cares much about spreading grades out at any level these days.
How strong is the argument that a student completing a test in 1 hour with the same score as a student who took 10 hours that the first student performed "better" or had a greater understanding of the material?
Sure, but that answer doesn't address the questions of the value of time limits on assessment.
What if instead we are talking about a paper or project? Why isn't time-to-complete part of the grading rubric?
Do we penalize a student who takes 10 hours on a project vs the student who took 1 hour if the rubric gives a better grade to the student who took 10 hours?
Or assume teacher time isn't a factor - put two kids in a room with no devices to take an SAT test on paper. Both kids make perfect scores. You have no information on which student took longer. How are the two test takers different?
Not arguing with any of that, just stating plainly that there are practical reasons for time limits and one of the many reasons is that tests are done supervised and thus must have _some_ sort of time limit. Everything else is you projecting an argument onto me that I didn't make.
Nebula and Dante will do this for like $300, and you can get 30x coverage at every base or even 100x coverage if you pay a little more. The $1000 genome was here more than a decade ago.
I wanted to try this, but I looked into Nebula a bit more.
Nebula is facing a class action for apparently disclosing detailed genomic data to Meta, Microsoft & Google. The subreddit is also full of reports of people who never received their results years after sending their kits back. There are also concerns about the quality of sequencing and false positives in all DTC genomics testing. Given what happened with 23andme as well and all of this stuff, I'm wary of sending my genetic data to any private company.
I was interested to read this because some time ago I had my genome sequenced by Nebula. If you look at the lawsuit you can see that what Nebula did was use off-the-shelf third-party analytics products on their website, including recording analytics pings when users buy a kit, and pings when users use the Nebula website to browse Nebula's high-level analysis of their traits (leaking that the user has those traits to the analytics provider.)
This behavior represents a contemptible lack of respect for users' privacy, but it's important to distinguish it from Nebula selling access to users' genomes.
That's a good clarification. I read through some of that link, and it does look relatively benign - Meta & Google pixels might see when you buy a kit but nothing more, but on page 21 they directly leaked genetic information to Microsoft via their Clarity tracker. Not intentionally maybe, questionable if it can be linked to a person specifically instead of just an advertising ID but they did leak that. I think the lawsuit says that even disclosing whether a person has undergone genetic testing is in violation of GIPA, so the information they sent to all 3 is enough to violate that.
I don't have any evidence they're selling anything but that lawsuit shows pretty sloppy behaviour for a company that should be thinking very deeply about privacy. I guess that's about what you said though :)
Another point is that Wojicki's big idea that all this genetic data would be useful to sell to business, didn't work out so well. For an advertiser, it's a lot more useful to know if you're a smoker, than to know that you have a 40% higher chance of being a smoker.
The point isn't what they are doing with your data now, but that they retain your data and what might happen in the future. Someone with malicious designs on your DNA might buy Nebula tomorrow and there's nothing you can do about it.
Actually, the main reason I used Nebula was that they advertised a credible-to-me promise that you could download and permanently delete your data upon request. That was some years ago, so I don't know if I would trust them today. But that was their claim, and I have no reason to believe they didn't delete my data.
That's a legal requirement in the EU and many US states. Some of the genetic genealogy companies actually play fast and loose with it though - not the deletion, which I trust, but the data portability and reasons to store PI parts.
> There are also concerns about the quality of sequencing and false positives in all DTC genomics testing.
Even when the raw results are accurate there is a cottage industry of consultants and snake-oil sellers pushing bad science based on genetic testing results.
Outside of a few rare mutations, most people find their genetic testing results underwhelming or hard to interpret. Many of the SNPs come with mild correlations like “1.3X more likely to get this rare condition” which is extremely alarming to people who don’t understand that 1.3 times a very small number is still a very small number.
The worst are the consultants and websites that take your files and claim to interpret everything about your life or illness based on a couple SNPs. Usually it’s the famous MTHFR variants, most of which have no actual impact on your life because they’re so common. Yet there are numerous Facebook groups and subreddits telling you to spend $100 on some automated website or consultant who will tell you that your MTHFR and COMT SNPs explain everything about you and your ills, along with which supplements you need to take (through their personal branded supplement web shop or affiliate links, of course).
The DNA itself is not "anonymous", but I would do it without giving my real name, address, etc. They could know who the DNA is related to, but not gain more information than that.
Even better would be to swap identity with someone else who wants to get sequenced...
They know who X and Y are, and also know the identity of their son (you), so that gains them your unique DNA sequence, identified as yours specifically.
How do you plan to do it anonymously, considering what you now know?:
1. There are already multiple database containing both your parents, you, and a linkage between you and them indicating parentage. So, prior knowledge: Alice and Bob are parents of Charlie.
2. If Charlie's parents have taken a DNA test, there already exists a database linking their DNA to their name. So, prior knowledge: Alice's DNA belongs to Alice, Bob's DNA belongs to Bob.
3. If Charlie takes a DNA test totally anonymously and perfectly untraceably, it will still show up as, child of Alice and Bob's DNA. So, knowledge now includes: Charlie's (anonymous) DNA is the son of Alice and Bob's DNA
4. From these pieces of information, it is trivial to de-anonymize Charlie's DNA, linking it to Charlie's identity: the only person it could belong to is the son of Alice and Bob, and the son of Alice and Bob is already known from point 1.
I think in my case I'm just not that concerned by the hypothetical because my parents haven't done sequencing/genetic screening and also aren't likely to. I guess the main question is how far out in my family tree I have to think about that. (Also has implications for my descendants, I suppose...)
Yeah but then basically somebody else gets ownership of your genetic data and gets the right to do anything with it in the context of their "legitimate interests". Not to mention to probability of that company getting hacked or sold, as it has already happened with some.
Note the $2,000 bill includes the DNA extraction machinery and the sequencer itself. The sequencers that Nebula et al use are probably over 1 million $.
If you want to go even cheaper and depending of what you want, you can go for an exome instead of a WGS. And a lot of people are sequencing when they really want genotyping.
But I would not be surprised if someone is already getting $100 WGS.
I distinctly remember in one of his talks he said words to the effect of “I wrote corporate C++ and Java for years and eventually realised I had to do something else, or else quit the industry”. So he took a year long sabbatical and created Clojure.
Rick wrote jfli, a Java foreign language interface for Common Lisp, before working on Clojure. He was a seasoned lisper, and he wanted to do something both modern and practical.
It's very interesting to go through the bookshelf he read during his sabatical. He was inspired by many languages aside from CL, including Mozart/Oz, AspectJ, and Prolog.
He didn't mean he'd quit out of boredom, he meant he'd quit out of frustration with proglangs that bite you in the ass when writing e.g. concurrent programs
I don't think the particular niche matters, eventually everything becomes being a mundane job.
I know few people that made it in shiny businesses (Serie A and Champions League players like Fabio Liverani and Simone Pepe, or Massimiliano Rosolino swimming gold metal at Olympics) and they all absolutely either hated or found 99.9% of their career an endless marathon of mundane boring activities.
I'm not saying there aren't plenty of exceptions of people that like their job, and jobs that may make it easier, but it looks to me that most of people find their job mundane and boring most of the time.
Agree. Although, as opposed to physical performance activities, be it sports or music, where one of the key activities is to repeat the same thing thousand times, in software, we strive towards not repeating the same thing.
He wasn't writing corporate CRUD apps, he was working on systems like radio broadcasting, voting machines, and Datomic, which involve significant concurrency challenges.
It's useful to have as a resource that you can dip into; for instance to check a specific thing like "how fast do I metabolise caffeine (bad example as youc can get that from a SNV checking service like 23&Me. However, never ever EVER dump your whole genome into a program that will output every match for some potential condition. Now that's not for the reason you might immediately think ("Oh no look at all the bad stuff"), but rather because the databases that tools like this use are pretty chock full of junk where some researcher threw in a reference - along with a few thousand others - to say that their particular piece of research implicates this gene at this poistion with this variant. I've seen it with my own eyes, and a lot of it is very low quality. You therefore need highly curated databases where the genotype-phenotype associations are well-defined and thoroughly researched. You'll spend the rest of your life either trying to prove/disprove every potential false positive, or just worrying yourself needlessly. So, yeah, it's not a bad resource to have if you can be responsible with it.
Taildrop is neat, but Wormhole is much more flexible and much easier to use (if you're OK with a command line tool). We use Tailscale everywhere here and I still wormhole things all the time.
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