Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Makes Its First Acquisition, Meta
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That said, I like the idea of CZI acting as a hub for tool development that will enable all researchers broadly. There are a bunch of tools that are incredibly useful to making logistics of a lab simpler.
1. Lab management and logistics: quartzy and others
2. Online paper writing: overleaf and a few others
3. DNA Bashing: benchling et al
4. Bioinformatics: They could do a bunch here
I worry that a lot of things in this space right now will disappear pretty quickly once the VC gravy train runs dry. More importantly, I think this is something that CZI might have expertise to do well and sustainably.
What would be much more useful that making logistics of labs simpler is cheaper and more flexible lab automation to make all tasks in a lab programmable and automated.
Pt2. A lot of people talk about automation, but biology has changed so fast in the last decade that any serious automation efforts in this space have become quickly outdated. It's useful when you are doing the same thing a million times, but such things are often already automated.
As for automation, I think that flexible automation solution shouldn't become outdated so fast. I think automating a lab to a large extent would be the same as automating a kitchen. You need to take thing in and out of storage, in a lab this would usually be different types of freezers, refrigerators, incubators etc., then you do stuff like mixing, slicing, dicing, heating, cooling, shaking, transferring liquids and solids between different types of equipment.
Smaller labs often don't have much automation. There's plenty of labs that don't even have lab robots, even though they do plenty of pipetting. Automated storage solutions are also rare as far as I know. Just deploying existing solutions and making them cheaper would help.
The only way to make thing really programmable though, is to automate everything. One challenge is that most machines and equipment only have interfaces for humans. If you were to place all your equipment in a kind of rack you could have a mix of conveyor belt for moving materials and robot arms on tracks in the roof to do manipulation tasks. Still it would be challenging to operate much of the equipment unless it is rebuilt to have standardized interfaces, but perhaps improvement in computer vision etc could eventually mitigate this. Another challenge is to make lab equipment communicate and compare data in completely different formats etc. There's lots of challenges but building a lab robotics system that can completely replace humans in doing the lab work should be possible even without hard AI and the hardware wouldn't necessarily have to be extremely expensive either.
TLDR: From a glance, this entire organization's existence is centered around the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. There's no indication of anything useful they've done for real. I'm sure I could find that information if I bothered to look more, but for an organization that describes themselves as "mission-driven", and one that is "working on problems that matter," I fail to see any of those problems, or how this organization has contributed to the solution. I mean, not even a link to "Solutions" or "Mission" or "About". Nada. I'm very curious to how this page looked [yesterday].
Organizations that actually do stuff don't hesitate to put it front and center of their website, for example:
This is literally a sentence by sentence breakdown of everything on Meta.com at the time of this posting.
> "Most scientific breakthroughs have been preceded by the invention of new tools that help us see and experiment in new ways."
Great! Oh, this is just a quote from Mark Zuckerberg, linking to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. OK. Moving along.
> Meta is joining the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
OK, got it. There's a bunch of corporate speak that you'll see if you click it. I won't click it because I want to know what Meta does outside of the whole CZI thing.
> Reserve a free account
> Meta is a tool that helps researchers understand what is happening globally in science and shows them where science is headed. Pending shareholder and court approval, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is acquiring Meta to help bring its technologies to the entire scientific community.
Sign up now to reserve your free account.
Neat! If you go to https://meta.science/reserve, where you actually can reserve you'll see more CZI stuff. Again, there's no indication of what these people do, in practice.
> Join a mission-driven organization working on problems that matter
Awesome! Oh, wait, this is just a link to their hiring page.
What exactly do these people do, specifically? Sure they "help researchers understand what is happening globally", but that's so vague. Google and Wikipedia technically do that too in a way.
[1] http://meta.com/
> "Meta’s tools can dramatically accelerate scientific progress and move us closer to our goal: to support science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the century. Meta will help scientists learn from others’ discoveries in real time, find key papers that may have gone unnoticed, or even predict where their field is headed.
The potential for this kind of platform is virtually limitless: a researcher could use Meta to help identify emerging techniques for understanding coronary artery disease; a graduate student could see that two different diseases activate the same immune defense pathway; and clinicians could find scientists working on the most promising Zika treatments sooner. In the long run, it could be extended to other areas of knowledge: for example, it could help educators stay up to date on developmental science to better understand how children learn."
a platform with virtually limitless potential. WOW WOW WOW WOW! limitless. potential.
why didn't you just say that in the first place? all my potentials have been limited so far. finally something with limitless potential.
>help scientists learn from others’ discoveries in real time, find key papers that may have gone unnoticed, or even predict where their field is headed.
What that amounts to for a researcher is a paper discovery service. You can search for papers/labs, and click on topics like "CRISPR/Cas9" and get the top 20 most impactful papers in the last decade using that technique. You can subscribe to new papers on that topic across a large set of journals. You can also observe trends in science, like certain research concepts that are increasing in popularity.
In practice, as a researcher, I don't find it more useful than journal RSS feeds and a Google Scholar alert or two, but it's a step in the right direction.
This may be good idea but if data was open.
Post CZI acquisition I bet they're doing a full revamp of what they're bringing to market, so I guess they're just pulling all the content down first before they figure out how to rebrand.
All you need is one client. Solve a problem for that client and make it cheaper for them to acquire you than keep paying you.
With that slight snark I applaud this philanthropic move. :/
Tried out Meta once but couldn't get it to surface similar material to a set that I fed it. I don't need Meta to recommend by citations, I need it to recommend by topical similarity.
Still though, props to team Zuck and I can see Meta complementing G Scholar or possibly supplanting it.
I'd much rather see Zuckerberg buy out an entire niche of science journals and Open Access them and keep them that way while keeping the high standards and impact factor in tact. Bioinformatics would have been a decent fit. I think freeing domains one by one with wads of tech-donor-$$$ might be the easiest stept towards open science.
I wonder if this extends to Meta?
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2016/09/21/chan-zuckerberg-initiati...
It seems greed knows no bounds. Throwing money at things is not charity.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/23/mark-zuck...
Were I indigenous, I think I'd actually find this kind of Western academic white-knighting slightly offensive. You'd be essentially questioning the agency, sovereignty, and decision-making capacity of my people's ability manage resources.
The partial land-owners with lineage to the original 14 parcels of land on the North Island are being compensated for something then never knew they had, and are not being evicted from the land. Those that sold their land also initially knew what they were doing. So it's unfair to hold Zuckerberg solely accountable for the market forces that dispossess the indigenous of their land.
The following write up explains the issue in more detail and there are countless more articles and blog posts explaining the situation http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mark-zuckerberg-kauai-la...
Mark is greedy because it's just a holiday house that he doesn't really need to own. He is just causing a bunch of people grief so he can have his own way and his own playground. Ironically he wants privacy (haha). He is bullying people with lawyers and money.
If he wants to be Gordon Gecko type figure, be Gordon Gecko. But this generous philanthropist angle is a hoax when he is behaving like this.
> These indigenous families opted to sell their land and were compensated at some point. So please elaborate on what you mean by Zuckerberg's boundless "greed"?
Yet the linked article states "complicated history of land ownership in Hawaii and can result in owners being forced to sell their land at auction. In some cases, defendants are even required to pay the legal fees of the plaintiff – in this case, the world’s fifth richest man." Now, the article may not be the most unbiased source, but I certainly trust it more than some armchair colonial apologist on HN.
> Were I indigenous, I think I'd actually find this kind of Western academic white-knighting slightly offensive. You'd be essentially questioning the agency, sovereignty, and decision-making capacity of my people's ability manage resources.
An interesting (if emotionally baited) spin on it, possibly an appeal to incredulity. Zuckerberg can easily afford the best Hawaiian property lawyers on the planet. It doesn't seem like a fair fight to me.
> The partial land-owners with lineage to the original 14 parcels of land on the North Island are being compensated for something then never knew they had, and are not being evicted from the land. Those that sold their land also initially knew what they were doing. So it's unfair to hold Zuckerberg solely accountable for the market forces that dispossess the indigenous of their land.
Poor old Zuckerberg is just an innocent free-market agent? He's just drifting with the tide of capitalism? Bullshit. A guy like this only sees the world in terms of opportunity. He has no morals (show me evidence of the existence of these morals). He just weighed up the cost of dealing with the indigenous population vs bullying the locals with better lawyers.