Unfortunately, that link between vagotomy and reduced risk of PD hasn't been supported by subsequent studies. In fact, it wasn't really even supported by the initial study[1]: although the point estimates of the hazard ratios were below 1.0, the confidence intervals did not exclude 1.0 -- or stated differently, at p<0.05, the null hypothesis cannot be rejected.
Cool, interesting! Though I wouldn’t be surprised if there are such links, even if this one is not supported by further research. We know that gingivitis can lead to heart disease, so I wouldn’t be surprised to find that gut microbial imbalance could have other implications.
On those days, I like to switch from work on the computer to work with my hands, like wrenching on a project in the garage. It won't get me any progress on my computer-based work, but it will give me a sense of progress on my garage-based projects, and it will leave me recharged for the next day.
Still quite common to encounter elemental cadmium in other contexts, too. I'm around it all the time while working on my race cars where (at least in amateur circuit racing in North America), the use of cadmium-plated "AN" and "MS" fasteners is extremely common. Ditto for aviation.
SEEKING WORK | Remote (based in Denver, Colorado, USA)
EMBEDDED FIRMWARE and HARDWARE
Got an embedded programming challenge you need solved? I'll solve it!
14 years of experience, and I've seen it all; for the past decade I've been exclusively consulting independently. Past clients have included companies large and small, with everything from green-field ideas for new products to tricky situations with existing products they needed fixed. Comfortable working under regulatory constraints; many of the projects I've worked on have been medical devices.
C is my bread and butter on the embedded side, and Python is my go-to for developing PC utilities and scripts, but I'm comfortable working in a lot of languages from assembly all the way up to Javascript when needed. I can even patch embedded binaries by hand when needed.
Architectures? Well, these days it's mostly ARM Cortex, but I've done everything from 8051 and 6502 to STM8 to PIC16/24 to all of the modern stuff, plus a handful of really obscure things. Specific chip families that I've dealt with a lot lately include STM32, nRF5x, and PIC16, but again, I've successfully worked with MCUs from NXP, SiLabs, Renasas, Atmel, Nordic, Microchip, and various other vendors.
Super comfy with Linux, though most of my practice is bare-metal or with true RTOSes.
Bespoke drivers need development? No problem. USB, I2C, SPI, CAN? Yup, all of those and more. BLE, LoRa? Expert. Power optimization for battery operation? I squeeze out every last nanoamp -- and can quantify the improvement.
BS in EE. I have a fully equipped lab bench, including for RF out to 8 GHz. Bringing up boards, debugging hardware, and consulting on hardware improvements are all no problem. I do embedded hardware design, too, if that's what you need.
US citizen, masters from Stanford.
Feel free to reach out and let's see if there's a good fit. Thanks!
While well-intentioned, I wonder if this will lead to something like the "sesame" debacle[1], in which is becomes far cheaper and easier for companies to deliberately design digital devices so as to be absolutely unrepairable -- even by the manufacturers themselves -- rather than provide parts and instructions for 3rd parties to effect repairs.
Apple already did this. They've been doing it for over a decade. They don't do component-level repair, they do assembly swaps, because it's cheaper to make the customer pay $500 to replace a board with 100 soldered-on components than to pay $50k/yr more for a skilled technician to replace just one. Then they handcuff their vendors to make sure as many chips as possible on the board can only be bought by them.
The reason why Louis Rossmann is - or, at least, was able to fix your MacBook is because Apple's vendors were breaching their supplier agreements. Apple worked around that by putting Apple logos on all their components and getting Customs to seize any parts shipments coming out of China.
Why are you singling out Apple here? I can't think of any consumer product where the manufacturer does board-level repair. My washing machine dies? They replace the whole board. TV dies? replace the TCON board. My aircon stops? They replace the whole board. ECU in my car starts throwing errors? They replace the whole unit. What company sends out a repairman with a soldering iron?
Samsung still charges $300 for a new board for their washing machines, half the cost of a new machine.
It's actually an even BETTER candidate for board-level repair as they have easier to hand-solder, off-the-shelf through-hole components, and yet they still don't do it.
Design For Manufacturing + Design For Obsolescence
!=
Design For Durability + Design For Repair + Design For Low TCO
Recall how the GDR's unbreakable beer mugs failed to sell in the West and became lost to time because restaurant vendors insisted on selling "cheap", inferior, fragile products breaking regularly to ensure profits.
> because restaurant vendors insisted on selling "cheap", inferior, fragile products breaking regularly to ensure profits
I prefer thinner, lighter glassware. Even if it breaks more often. The fact that these products didn’t do well in households should be Exhibit A for why restaurants’ profit concerns weren’t to blame.
Design For Obsolescence isn't often the goal ... just a side benefit. Not that it doesn't happen.
The goal is usually something like: ensure we meet durability requirements X, while minimizing costs.
Now in practice that might very much amount to the same practical impact, such as the product will break after the designed lifetime, but maybe not if it happens to be cheaper to use a simpler, cheaper component that actually is more durable. But probably there is some component that is the weak link that only meets the minimum design specs. And this yet one more reason why Repair is important, because many of the components are perfectly fine!
People already steal beer mugs...buying very expensive ones that don't break would just be a target for thieves requiring you to replace them even more frequently than glass ones.
This has been the status quo. Soldered SSDs, ram, keyboards that die from a speck of dust. It's the lack of oversight that's allowed companies to do as they please.
The market largely self-regulates this. If you want systems with replaceable components built to high quality standards, they exist, but there are costs. They might costs more, not be cutting edge, not have the nice integrated form factors. But plenty of third-party-reviewers, brand reputation from customers, and fierce competition reigns in much of the worst practices of industry. But things move fast enough that it requires either relying on a reputation for quality or detailed review to get what you want. And the mainstream buyers don't care about soldered components (at point of purchase). They might care about resale value, but really doesn't hinder the current market too much, given how fast things deprecate relative to repairability. All of this is basically self-regulated by a highly competitive global market.
There are two reasons this often results in a market failure.
One is when the market is too concentrated. So e.g. when substantially all of the SoCs in smartphones are made by just three companies, none of them have to provide adequate drivers or documentation unless the others do, and then their devices become e-waste as soon as they themselves stop updating the binary blob drivers for newer kernel versions, because the kernels the old blobs are compatible with have published security vulnerabilities. A better solution to this would be to break them up / stop letting them buy each other, but state-level governments have little ability to break up multi-national corporations and national governments have failed to do it, so here we are.
The other is when the rule is to protect customers other than the original purchaser. In many of these markets one customer buys the product new, with a warranty, and then sells it to someone else when the warranty expires. The original customer doesn't care about repairability because all their repairs will be under warranty, and may not even care much about resale value because they're affluent, so the OEM can sell them a device that isn't repairable. But that screws the customers in the second-hand market who need to make out-of-warranty repairs, and it's those who the law is trying to protect.
I think you mean to say the market is "supposed to" self-regulate this.
People don't notice early enough that it will cause problems, and they don't have equivalent options available that are more repairable but only marginally different in price and capability.
Brand reputation reigns in "the worst", but pretty bad things still happen, and being unrepairable and non-upgradable isn't "the worst" so it keeps happening.
> being unrepairable and non-upgradable isn't "the worst" so it keeps happening.
Because it isn't collectively valued relative to other things, like have the most performant device. The bundle of things people value includes repairability ... but not that much. As I said, you can buy repairable and upgradable system, they just tend to be last-generation tech and cost more. Buyers just don't value it more. But clearly they value it some, which reaches that equilibrium of reigning in the "worst" as you say.
The price premium for those niche options is orders of magnitude higher than it would be in a highly competitive market. People avoiding those options makes sense. The market is not competitive enough to consistently offer moderately important things like repairability in an accessible way, especially because it's hard to tell at a glance. The market is failing here.
If it was there at a fair price, lots of buyers would pick it.
But because the actual cost is quite low, we can have a good outcome by forcing it on companies, to also fight their perverse incentive to make disposable hardware.
> If it was there at a fair price, lots of buyers would pick it.
I don't think this is true. Lot's of folks on a forum like this would pick it. But the social norms around repair have degraded significantly (in large part no doubt, to it not being a cost-effective option). But my main point is that it will take more than just availability. And thus there is no market pressure, so it doesn't appear to me that this is indeed a market failure, instead it looks like the market responding to the demand.
Let me illustrate further, if a top provider of electronics and appliances, but not fully market dominate in many niches, say LG, pledged and followed through on their pledge to ensure the repairability of their products, and remained price-competitive, would they gain significant market share over their competitors? In phones? In appliances sold at a big box store? Or would people choosing an Apple device, or GE Fridge still choose those options because of features and market clout and ignore the repairability? I predict they'd gain some marginal sales, but really wouldn't incentivize change amongst their competition.
Now there are markets where the dynamic is different. Farming equipment, where there are some strong challengers to Deere and one of the things they sometimes use to different is repairability. There the market failure I'd be concerned with is the vertical alignment of dealers with service.
The interactive visualization is pretty great. Try zooming in on the slices and then scrolling up or down through the layers. Also try zooming in on the 3D model. Notice how hovering over any part of a neuron highlights all parts of that neuron:
If someone did this experiment with a crow brain I imagine it would look “twice as complex” (whatever that might mean). 250 million years of evolution separates mammals from birds.
I dunno anyone who screams “Caw! CAW!”, raids garbage and poops in the street all day would probably be put in a mental institution. (Or just move to San Francisco.)
I expect we'll find that it's all a matter of tradeoffs in terms of count vs size/complexity... kind of like how the "spoken data rate" of various human languages seems to be the same even though some have complicated big words versus more smaller ones etc.
Birds are under a different set of constraints than non-bat mammals, of course... They're very different. Songbirds have ~4x finer time Perception of audio than humans do, for example, which is exemplified by taking complex sparrow songs and showing them down until you can actually hear the fine structure.
The human 'spoken data rate' is likely due to average processing rates in our common hardware. Birds have a different architecture.
You misunderstand, I'm not making any kind of direct connection between human speech and bird song.
I'm saying we will probably discover that the "overall performance" of different vertebrate neural setups are clustered pretty closely, even when the neurons are arranged rather differently.
Human speech is just an example of another kind of performance-clustering, which occurs for similar metaphysical reasons between competing, evolving, related alternatives.
Humans are an n=1 example, is my point. And there's no direct competition between bird brain architecture and mammalian brain architecture, so there's no reason for one architecture to 'win' over the other - they may both be interesting local maxima, which we have no ability to directly compare.
Human brains might not be all that efficient; for example, if the competitive edge for primate brains is distinct enough, they'll get big before they get efficient. And humans are a pretty 'young' species. (Look at how machine learning models are built for comparison... you have absolute monsters which become significantly more efficient as they are actually adopted.)
By contrast, birds are under extreme size constraints, and have had millions of years to specialize (ie, speciate) and refine their architectures accordingly. So they may be exceedingly efficient, but have no way to scale up due to the 'need to fly' constraint.
Are humans able to destroy all this habitat because they've got a better brain architecture, because they are able to achieve higher brain mass (because they don't need to fly to survive), or because they have opposable thumbs?
There's too many confounding factors to say that the human brain architecture is actually 'better' based on the outcomes of natural selection. And if we kill all the birds, we will lose the chance to find out as we develop techniques to better compare the trade-offs of the different architectures.
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.
This might be a dumb question, because I doubt the distances between neurons makes a meaningful distance… But could a small brain, dense with neurons like a crow, possibly lead to a difference in things like response to stimuli or “compute” speed so to speak?
The electrical signals in brain are chemical reactions, not conductivity like a metal wire. They are slow! Synaptic junctions are a huge number of indirect chemical cascades, not a direct electrical connection, they are even slower! So brain morphology and connectome has a massive impact on what can be computed. Human twitch responses are done by cerebellum, not cerebrum. It's faster, but you can't do philosophy with the cerebellum, only learn to ride a bike etc. This is the brain doing the best it for the circumstances.
>The electrical signals in brain are chemical reactions, not conductivity like a metal wire.
Nerve signals are both chemical reactions and electrical impulses like metal wire. Electrical impulses are sent along the fat layer by ions Potassium , Calcium, Sodium etc.
Twitch responses are actually done in spinal cord. The signals are short circuited all along the spine and return back to muscle without touching the brain ever.
Regarding compute speed - it checks out. Humans "think" via neo cortex, thin ouside layer of the brain. Poor locality, signals needs to travel a lot. Easy to expand though. Crow brain have everything tightly concentrated in the center - fast communication between neurons, hard to have more "thinking" thing later (therefore hard to evolve above what crows currently have)
Not a dumb question at all; one of the hard constraints of cou design is signal propagation time. Even going at 1/3 the speed of light, when you only have on the order of a billionth of a second (clock frequencies in the GHz), a signal can’t get very far.
I haven’t heard of a clocking mechanism in brains, but signals propagate much slower and a walnut / crow brain is much larger than a cpu die.
> I haven’t heard of a clocking mechanism in brains
Brain waves (partially). They aren't exactly like a cpu clock, but they do coordinate activity of cells in space and time.
There are different frequencies that are involved in different types of activity. Lower frequencies synchronize across larger areas (can be entire brain) and higher frequencies across smaller local areas.
There is coupling between different types of waves (i.e. slow wave phase coupled to fast waves amplitude) and some researchers (Miller) thinks the slow wave is managing memory access and the fast wave is managing cognition/computation (utilizing the retrieved memory).
I wonder if we manage to annotate this much level of detail about our brain, and then let (some variant of the current) models train on it, will those intrinsically end up generalizing a model for intelligence?
Almost every other cell in the worm can be simulated with known biophysics. But we don't have a clue how any individual nematode neuron actually works. I don't have the link but there are a few teams in China working on visualizing brain activity in living C. elegans, but it's difficult to get good measurements without affecting the behavior of the worm (e.g. reacting to the dye).
They partially figured out how two neurons (AVA, AVB) control forward and backward movement, previous theories assumed one neuron controlled forward and one controlled backward, but that didn't correctly model actual movement.
They found that AVA+AVB combine in a complex mechanism with two different signaling/control methods acting at different timescales to produce a graded shifting between forward+backward when switching directions, as opposed to an on/off type switch (that previous models used but didn't match actual movements).
Interesting learnings from this paper (at least for me):
1-Most neurons in worm are non-spiking (I had no idea, I've read about this stuff a lot and wasn't aware)
2-Non-spiking neurons can have multiple resting states at different voltages
3-Neurons AVA and AVB are different, they each have different resting state characteristics and respond differently to inputs
I've worked on the hardware and firmware design and implementation for many medical devices, almost all of which were approved via the 510(k) process. I always found it a mixture of amusing and bemusing that we'd have to tell the FDA, effectively, "Look at how similar this thing is to existing stuff!" while at the same time telling the Patent Office, "Look at how new and novel this thing is!"
Yup, self-employed embedded firmware and hardware engineer. I mostly consult on things like wearable sensors (especially class 2 and class 3 medical devices) and industrial control systems. I also have a bit of an odd niche in phosphorescence-measurement instruments for research and practical applications. The closer to the metal, the better! The tighter the power requirements, the better! The more connected, the better!
Been doing it independently for almost 14 years now. Was based in Minnesota, but now I'm in Colorado. Wouldn't have it any other way.
In terms of total compensation, I probably pay myself about what I would make at one of the big tech companies. (Side note: before changing to consulting, I did spend several years working as an engineer in a "real" job at a large medical device company.) The real appeal to me is twofold: first, I have strong control over my time; and second, I get to see and work on a very wide range of interesting projects and challenges. You can certainly get all of this in a traditional job as well, but my personal opinion is that it's easier to find it as a consultant.
Exactly this: my 96-year-old grandma still uses Wordpad to write letters that she then prints out and mails to the family -- just like she has been doing for almost 25 years. There's definitely a niche for Wordpad.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ana.24448