Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• The Good Kind of Brainwashing

  Scientists are exploring why the glymphatic system, which helps clear waste from the brain, declines with age -- and whether slowing that decline can improve aging.

  Unfortunately, getting a good night's sleep becomes harder and harder as we age. Not only do elderly people wake up more often during the night than do young people, but they also do not sleep as deeply. Most important, they don't settle into the deepest level of sleep, known as NREM3, when glymphatic circulation crests. Young people, by contrast, spend most of the early part of the night in this sleep phase. Evidence suggests that sleep disruptions reduce brain cleansing. For example, one study found that the levels of beta-amyloid in the brain soared after one night of bad sleep. In addition, patients with age-related diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's have abnormal sleep patterns. "Poor aging is linked to poor sleep," says Nedergaard.

• Why Do We Dream? A New Theory on How It Protects Our Brains

  Recent decades have yielded several revelations about livewiring, but perhaps the biggest surprise is its rapidity. Brain circuits reorganize not only in the newly blind, but also in the sighted who have temporary blindness. ... When blindfolded participants are continuously measured, touch-related activity shows up in the visual cortex in about an hour.
  ...
  We suggest that the brain preserves the territory of the visual cortex by keeping it active at night. In our "defensive activation theory," dream sleep exists to keep neurons in the visual cortex active, thereby combating a takeover by the neighboring senses. In this view, dreams are primarily visual precisely because this is the only sense that is disadvantaged by darkness.

• Cancer can be precisely diagnosed using a urine test with artificial intelligence

  The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) announced that the collaborative research team led by Dr. Kwan Hyi Lee from the Biomaterials Research Center and Professor In Gab Jeong from Asan Medical Center developed a technique for diagnosing prostate cancer from urine within only 20 minutes with almost 100% accuracy.

• The Great Software Stagnation

  I think what happened was the internet boom. Suddenly, for the first time ever, programmers could get rich quick. The smart ambitious people flooded into Silicon Valley. But you can't do research at a startup (I have the scars from trying). New technology takes a long time and is very risky. The sound business plan is to lever up with VC money, throw it at elite programmers who can wrangle the crappy current tech, then cash out. There is no room for technology invention in startups.
  ...
  Don't look to Computer Science for help. First of all, most of our software technology was built in companies (or corporate labs) outside of academic Computer Science. Secondly, Computer Science strongly disincentivizes risky long-range research. That's not how you get tenure.

• Boston Dynamics Robots Do Fortnite Victory Dances

  Must see amazing video of robots dancing to Do You Love Me?

• The Bitcoin Dream Is Dead

  And yet the reality is that Bitcoin has never really functioned as a currency. Almost from the beginning, only a small percentage of Bitcoin transactions have been for actual goods and services -- and of those, many have been for illicit goods and services, like drugs and online gambling. Most Bitcoin transactions have been trades: people simply buying and selling it. The blockchain analysis company Chainalysis, for instance, found that in the first four months of 2019, just 1.3% of total transactions involved merchants.
  ...
  Some of the failure of Bitcoin to live up to its promise as a currency has to do with practical problems with the way it works, most obviously the fact that Bitcoin's design makes it very slow at processing transactions. For instance, Visa processes approximately 6,000 transactions a second and has the capacity to do many times that. Bitcoin can do seven.

• When Big Brands Stopped Spending On Digital Ads, Nothing Happened. Why?

  Much of the problem with digital advertising today stems from marketers' obsession with big numbers. But big numbers of ads and clicks do not translate into more business activity and sales. They are just large numbers in dashboards and spreadsheets. Marketers could be spending far fewer dollars and getting the same levels of business outcomes; or spending the dollars more smartly in digital and getting even more business outcomes than they are now.

• FDTV: Data Valuation Tool for Facebook Users

  Would you like to know the money you are generating for Facebook™?

• Playing Go with Darwin

  New research elevates evolution from a tactical process to one of strategic possibility.

  Evolution not only proceeds by direct competitive advantages (Sente) but, through neutral processes like harmless genetic mutations (Gote), establishes robust phenotypes (Thickness) that develop out of an organisms' genes interacting with the environment. From new neutral variation entirely new latent variation (Aji) can be accessed. And many traits once established cannot be changed (Seki) as a result of evolved co-dependencies.