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I'm not sure if this is it, but assuming the correctness of the test is independent of the sample quality, a sample could be split and tested multiple times to obtain a result with a much better FPR.

I think this might be a bit premature. For the bulk of these tools (pandas/numpy/tensorflow/torch), most of their users have probably been using them for 3-5 years max.

A universal API standard is a nice idea, but I don't know that the ecosystem has been around long enough to justify this effort.

Given the asynchronous nature of consortiums though, maybe this exactly the right time to start talking about this.

Will be watching closely either way.

Without some form of compression, I don't think it is.

In particular, consider your example (5 horcruxes with 3 needed to reconstruct). View the original file as the interval (0, N) and view it as a set covering problem. If each horcrux covers an interval of size N/3, then if any pair overlaps, there is no third horcrux that can complete the covering. This is a contradiction because 5 horcruxes of size N/3 must overlap somewhere.

> possession of 12 grams of LSD

Reader's note: that's between 50k and 100k doses.

Not that I disagree with your point.

Surely you mean the number of publications, or some other superficial metric (e.g. being the third "supervising" author on a paper with a dozen authors).

If I read a paper and have a great appreciation for the ideas, and have a sense that an author contributed significantly to the aspects I appreciate (either from explicit descriptions of the authors' contributions in the publication, or by speaking to them), why would that not be impressive to me?

> * Public access to research results, methods, and data, with some exceptions (such as PII)

You mentioned PII, so I'm assuming some familiarity with the health field. I'm curious about your thoughts on the position that one should not be required to immediately publicize their data, because there needs to be an expectation that a researcher can translate the capital (both time and money) they expend to acquire quality data into academic and institutional capital (in the form of research output, i.e. papers). The fear being, there might be insufficient motivation to conduct large data collection-oriented studies due to another researcher beating the data collector to the punch in terms of publishing certain findings.

Agree, I don't think salary caps have much to do with the poor alignment of incentives under discussion here.

That's an interesting idea that could stop very specific types of fraud, certainly in the life sciences. But it's not feasible for all kinds of research, and in fact could hinder lots of research.

> All papers would be required to be made public.

This is more universally feasible. Publicizing the data and analysis tools (scripts, software) falls into the same category, and would go a long way to help without the need for such strong separation.

Very neat. It sounds like they're curating a dataset ripe for machine learning.

Sorry, I didn't mean to detract from that point. I completely agree.

I'm not saying the policy is worthwhile or even justifiable, but the comment I replied to later used the word "treason" (sorry, I didn't quote it) which implies that these actions aren't endorsed, and certainly not encouraged, by the US government.

> Don't you think that C-levels of all of them were previously dying to get into China, and were ready to do anything?

> ...

> treason

In the case of China, doesn't the US government in some ways encourage this? I forget the colloquial name for the "policy" (if you can call it that, because I don't think it's codified into law), but isn't the idea that if the US shares some of the fruits of capitalism and liberal democracy with China, the people of their country may follow suit?

Not to be over-speculative, but I think OP is probably referring to the rebound effects of corticosteroids which have been documented recently as related to skin conditions [1].

[1] https://www.jaad.org/article/S0190-9622(17)32533-1/pdf

Influenza viruses are not coronaviruses.

So cool. In my opinion, so many of the open problems in biology can be approached from the direction of specificity - from specificity in measurement to specificity in targeting interventions. For example, tools like this for elucidating cognition; alternatively, cancer (identifying and targeting problematic cells).

Gain-of-function literally only means the protein has, in some sense, gotten better at its "job" (or has taken on an additional "job"). In this case, the "job" of the protein is to infect organisms more effectively.

Some background: viruses primarily contain the genetic material and a protein coat. The Spike (S) protein is one of the proteins in the coat, and plays a role in whether an infection will take root.

From the paper:

> we identified a peculiar furin-like cleavage site in the Spike protein of the 2019-nCoV, lacking in the other SARS-like CoVs

Furin is a protease that is present in healthy humans. Some proteins aren't "active" until they're cut (cleaved) at specific sites along their sequence, so furin's "job" is to cleave these proteins - activating them. Notably, furin is highly expressed in the lungs.

2019-nCoV apparently has a "furin-like site" in its Spike protein - a sequence that furin can bind to and cleave. Notably, furin is the protease that cleaves one of the proteins in the protein coat of HIV, which then allows for viral replication [1]. The authors therefore hypothesize that this mutation which creates the furin-like cleavage site accounts for some of the pathogenicity of 2019-nCoV. They further hypothesize that furin inhibitors may be effective agents in combating the virus (which have shown some promise in combating other viruses, tumours, etc.).

Disclaimer: not a virologist, just a computational biologist with a bit of interest in structural biology. Also, the authors emphasize that further experimentation needs to be done to validate this claim.

[1] doi:10.1038/360358a0

Good for execs, bad for Europe (is perhaps what the grandparent comment meant)?

That's exactly the point.

> higher crime rates

Source? Everything I've read suggests that crime rates are pretty much the same across race and ethnicity when controlling for economic status. The primary variable is contact with the justice system, i.e. getting caught.

ah, yes, why squint at a PDF when you can squint at LaTeX compile errors instead

Okay, as a layman, can you clarify a scenario where (even huge-scale) money laundering would pose a similar threat to the stability of the Icelandic banking system as the misbehaviour of banks on an international level leading up to 2008?

Speaking generally, money laundering is probably good for small, cash-poor countries. Probably not much motivation to stop it besides, well, things like the topic of this article.

If genes are the data, then methylation is more like an additional piece of metadata directing the cell (potentially different across cells) how to use the data. One possible use for this metadata is potentially error correction, but it does much more than that.

A few questions that might help people answer better:

1. Where do you currently live?

2. What country/countries do you have citizenship for?

3. Do you have the equivalent of (what we would call in the US/Canada) a high school diploma?

4. Do you have any sort of degree or academic certificate already? If so, in what?

5. What is your interest in business specifically? Are you interested in startups, or getting into management at a large corporation?

What you're talking about is counterfactual inference, which is a non-trivial problem even in well-controlled settings. The effect of large-scale protests would probably be very difficult to quantify with the rigour you're alluding to. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.

Well of course it's within the government's purview, but we have to draw a line between law enforcement and military-run surveillance somewhere, and it seems to me drug enforcement (violent or not) falls staunchly within the former's purview. The blurring of that line or its movement altogether strikes me as dangerous (cf. the mosaic theory of the 4th amendment [1]).

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2032821

Is anyone else extremely bothered by the false equivalence of narcotics trafficking and the need for homeland security?

This blurring of the lines between a multi-billion dollar _business_ (probably around 1% of the world's GDP) that in fact relies on the success of the state, and purported threats to the state itself strikes me as extremely dangerous.

I'm contrasting this to American intelligence involvement in central America in the 1980s. During that time, the same organizations involved in cocaine trafficking and production were also extremely political, and crucial to the CIA carrying out their (in my opinion neoimperialist) "responsibilities" in the region.

My point is: I am aware of absolutely no evidence that modern drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) operating within the borders of the US are political whatsoever, so can we really view them as a threat to homeland security? Is there evidence that there is some risk of groups which pose a threat to our security have infiltrated these DTOs, or are piggybacking off their operations somehow?

It's not immediately clear to me that the energy involved in creating a "more controlled environment" would make the investment a net positive.

Is this a joke? I mean, I understand the sentiment, and agree with it, but (probably unfortunately) the current value of education is more highly correlated with the ability to _prove_ that one is educated than education itself - the "piece of paper" if you will. Coursera is moving toward a model where affordable certification is possible for topics normally restricted to an advanced traditional post-secondary education in the US, but the reality that the value/cost ratio of post-secondary education for the average American has decreased significantly over the past 50 years.

Note: I'm doing this calculation under the assumption that the value of an undergraduate degree has remained constant, while the average price of tuition has increased significantly. Some might even argue that the value of a degree has even decreased due to looser lending practices enabling more people to obtain degrees, further increasing this disparity.

Lots of people in this thread talking about the quality of the customer support here, and I think they're missing the point. The support staff seems to be doing their best to provide reasonable explanations for the changes. But there's a deeper question here about what responsibilities developers of free applications have regarding notifying users about major feature changes. This is just a particularly important question on platforms that don't offer fine-grained user control over application version installation (i.e. mobile).