shoguning

> The DARPA grand challenges have bootstrapped:

I have a contrarian opinion about the impact of DARPA and related programs (ARPA-e especially). To some extent, there is a confusion of cause and effect. DARPA is good at identifying possible nascent technologies and funding them. They then have a flag planted, and can claim "we helped invent X", which is hard to disprove. But was it because of DARPA involvement, or was DARPA merely there at the right time? They have definitely funded plenty of projects that go nowhere.

ARPA-e makes this strategy explicit. They'll give money to an up-and-coming startup between rounds and then claim all later investment as "follow-on funding". They then report "follow-on funding" as a success metric to congress, which seems easy to game. ARPA-e has been around for over 10 years and I don't think they can point to anything coming out of the program as a legitimate game changer.

I do think the applied research programs do some good and has some impact, mostly as a way to convene the broader technology community. But for the most part I would rather have the government focus on funding basic research instead of applied research.

I wrestle with this too, there's a lot of context to determine what skillset is better.

I suspect, if there are lots of relatively simple ML problems, then a generalist with integration chops will be more effective in getting them out quickly and "good enough". The specialist may take too long on models that are too heavy and impractical.

If there's one big ML problem (Google search, Netflix recommender, Amazon search, etc), where 1% additional makes a difference, then yes, specialist DS/modeler is probably preferred.

Larger, older org/heavier existing infra/more specialized culture will also tilt the scale towards specialists.

This judgment sounds big but it can be appealed and Caltech may never collect a penny. A $200 million judgment against Apple was thrown out less than 2 years ago [1].

Most tech transfer programs at universities don't break even, they usually lose money [2]. This is even more insane than it sounds because the research is already paid for. Tech transfer deals don't even cover the university lawyers.

If the patents were so valuable why wouldn't the universities be starting unicorns left and right with actual investors or actual revenue? Instead they try to get the money through litigation.

It's sad (and a waste of money) that universities have become fixated on being get-rich-quick patent trolls instead of doing transformational research.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/&apple-wins-reversal-in-univ... [2] https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/10/09/the-changing-face-of-u...

Exome could plausibly change due to alternative splicing, but my guess is that what is meant here is transcriptome, which is which genes are actually transcribed and their quantities.

Unfortunately RNA is chemically unstable. Not sure if cDNA synthesis could be done with a consumer kit.

Gut biome population sequencing/gene panels probably easier to get.

The big ones I don't see are:

Plenty - Indoor agriculture (raised over $200m)

[https://www.plenty.ag]

Pivot Bio - Nitrogen fixation with engineered microbes

[https://www.pivotbio.com/]

As far as I can tell, students are not counted as in the labor force. Therefore, as more people pursue advanced degrees and other training later in life, labor force participation drops. Is this a bad thing? Hard to say.

Possible... but I don't think so. I believe the hatred is pretty visceral. For one Taleb is/was pro-Trump, Silver definitely not. Taleb, despite being a professor/author/elite in his own way is pretty anti-elitist in rhetoric, again very different from Silver. Personality-wise, Taleb is pretty abrasive and has very few 'friends' in the public sphere that I know of, despite the high profile of his work--this is regardless if you think he is right or wrong.

Exactly. Plumbing improves my quality of life way more than the internet.

I've heard the assertion that utopianism is bad, but what about it is bad? Certainly, we should be able to strive for improvement, in ourselves and society?

The problem with utopianism is the desire to create a new society out of whole cloth, with no regard for the lessons of the past, or the structure of existing society. Drastic changes, like those of the communist revolutions, rarely bring about positive change (not never), and frequently bring about huge disaster. Instead, changes on the margins tend to more reliably improve things. There are exceptions of course.

> Yeah, and if you ever had to leave the city, it was a multi-day dangerous journey by horse-back to get anywhere.

Not so much. There used to be inter-city rail that people used regularly.

This old railroad map (https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4121p.ct001917/?r=0.329,0.288,...) shows how dense and sprawling the railroad network was, even in 1900. Towns like Rhinelander, WI (and ones even smaller) that aren't even served by inter-city bus routes today had regular train service.

Frankly, I think the piece is poorly written, and thus hard to critique.

But I _think_ what the author is saying is that we need good urban design everywhere, not just in downtowns. That would benefit everyone. Ie, if you make necessities available in walking or transit distance, people can save money. It doesn't really matter where the cool kids choose to live, if everyone has the benefit of more people-oriented urban planning.

The same thing is happening in data science, just at an earlier stage. There are software/service providers like H2O and RapidMiner that automate the whole model selection/optimization/productionization process.

It will take some time, but I think these providers will basically displace advanced ML knowledge workers, especially at large fortune 500 companies. IMO to stay ahead of the curve, data scientists need to pick up more business knowledge and move into a business/financial analyst role.

There is so much good that price transparency would do. Most treatments are not emergency and you can absolutely shop around even if it's not cosmetic. Ever hear of medical tourism? It's not a perfectly 'free market', but it could benefit so much from better information.

Where to begin?

1) Universities, and I mean through official channels, are not great at creating startups. I'd rather they focus on basic research. No, Google was not started 'by' Stanford, etc. The biggest company I know of to come out of a university (founded by a professor) is Broadcom in 1991. Anyone know of a bigger one?

2) Be skeptical of the "$416,442,265" in funding claim. How many of those companies would have gotten funding anyways? This is a tactic incubator programs use: claim affiliation with a successful startup that's about to get a lot more funding. Then the startup gets to employ a "co-founder" for peanuts.

3) I don't think universities do a great job of protecting the rights contingent labor. See: grad school. I can see this program as being very abusive to participants.

Further, this is _exactly_ the type of thing that H-1B critics would point to as an abuse of the system. Honestly it's odd seeing this done out in the open and celebrated.

You can remove correlated predictors or do stepwise regression to get a minimal model with more intelligible coefficients.

The problem is it's still difficult to determine direction of causality. That's why controlled experiments are so important.

Whether it's supposed to or not, that's how it's viewed. Also viewed as an economic ladder by lots of people including low-income and minority.

IMO there is a difference between K-12 and higher ed.

K-12 is actually more about enforcing cultural norms of dilligence, punctuality and ideally some civic norms.

Higher ed (paraphrasing Peter Thiel) is a mix between insurance and a tournament. It is _supposed_ to ensure a basic living standard. But it's also a competitive tournament where the high prestige colleges grant access to higher pay/prestige careers.

Agreed, further:

>every significant clinical study of drugs and dietary supplements for the treatment or prevention of cardiovascular disease between 1974 and 2012

There is room for a lot of bias when selecting which studies are 'significant' and on topic. Not to mention deciding which metric to report from the study.

It is not unreasonable--but that is the average case. Many students live with family and keep costs low. Costs can be much higher than that for individual students depending on circumstances.

The overall economics of small mid-tier universities is getting drastically worse--a few exceptions notwithstanding.

I expect a lot more closures and consolidations as tuition competition increases and students become more hesitant to take on debt.

Hobbies can be just for enjoyment. If you're not growing in some area of your life though (relationships, family, career, hobby, knowledge) you're stagnating.

I would include more cities on this list. For starters, LA/NY/Boston/Seattle. The software scene in Los Angeles is great right now. I don't have first-hand knowledge of the other cities but they definitely have the reputation of being great for developers.

Interesting, but isn't it also a potential bottleneck at the other side of the network? I.e.: NBCSport has fatter pipes/less congestion than YouTube?

The design and density of cities will change even in the Midwest. Inter-city transport can and will change.

From Wikipedia: "There was a dense system of inter-city railways in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but after the decline of passenger railroad in North America in the 1960s, the inter-city lines decreased greatly and today the system is far less dense."

Wisconsin used to have inter-city rail servicing most/all of its population centers and even many of the smaller towns: https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3701p.rr006200/?r=0.514,0.298,...

Yes, today cars are the default, but that took a long time. Things will continue to change and it's hard to predict exactly how.

Bike commuting growth has stopped/reversed in most places in the US in the last couple of years: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/09/14/bike-commuting-growth...

My worry is that there actually aren't enough people to use the bike infra to justify continued/increasing costs--or at least makes it easy to argue against. For example, there is a bike path next to a new light rail line in West LA (expo line for the curious). I used it to commute for ~1 year and the traffic I observed on it was very minimal considering the cost it must have taken to put in and maintain (lights at night too).

Yeah there are a couple bike hotspots like Portland and Minneapolis (maybe DC?) but outside that, the demand is minimal unfortunately.

Nice article, but I fear North Americans just don't care by and large.

I've had some passing involvement with bike advocacy and have been a bike commuter in Los Angeles for the past six years. My impression is that in the early 2000s, there was a flowering of bike advocacy and infrastructure.

But now we've reached the point of resistance where other transport modes are pushing back against any more consideration for bikes. In short, cycling is now big enough to matter but not big enough to win.

I've often wondered if there was an approach other than the incrementalist, go-along-get-along approach that most bike advocacy has taken. The electric scooter startups have changed the transport landscape more quickly than anything else I've seen.

Yes. It depends on delivery, but it can come across very snobby when class differences may be involved. I've noticed when talking to 'upper class' people they often lead with asking about occupation, as if they're trying to guess how much money I make, or trying to figure out if I'm 'worth knowing' in their estimation. Reading too much into it? Maybe, but I'm sure some other people feel the same way if I do.

I make a point to never ask, unless it's a work scenario (conference/meetup). Besides, there's usually something more interesting to talk about.

Yeah, I disagree with FORD totally.

FORD is heavy and personal. The point of small talk is that it's small and light. You have to make sure you trust a person before you start talking about personal stuff.

Small talk is about progressive disclosure. You make the conversation a little bit more personal and see if the other person reciprocates--but you have to start small, that's the whole point. If someone started out asking me about FORD I'd think they were odd/awkward or maybe snobby.

Yes, this is extremely misleading. You can download the data set and do the analysis for yourself. I have--the average income for science majors (biology & chemistry) with BS only is more like $55k as I recall.

Interesting you would call Taiwan developing world, it is one of the most developed countries in the world--21st out of 188 according to the UN.

Source: http://focustaiwan.tw/news/asoc/201409180039.aspx

As others have said you are actually describing class and cultural differences which don't depend on country. I moved from the Midwest to LA and am still in shock and awe at the displays of wealth here. I grew up with a much more frugal mindset and in a place with much more modest homes. Keep in mind even in the US, the fraction of people living in Bel-Aire mansions, or anything even close to that wealth, is very, very small.

Also, I suspect that there are plenty of very wealthy people and luxurious residences in Taiwan that would be equally jarring to you. My point is it's not the country, it's class and culture.