670 karma · joined February 4, 2017
“When overweight individuals with >14 h eating duration ate for only 10–11 h daily...they reduced body weight, reported being energetic, and improved sleep.”
The 10 hour period was self selected. So could have been morning or evening I guess.
This doesn’t seem very surprising to me. Maybe there are other details that I missed.
Dropbox put Condoleezza Rice on their board, who supports warrentless wiretaps [1].
I deleted my account when they did that. Not so much because it would have any direct effect, but because it’s clear that we have differing views on how user data should be treated.
I surprised that people are shocked by them treating user data like this, it’s absolutely in character.
Last time I checked, the license fees Google receives did not fully cover the development of Android.
I don’t think either situation is ideal however, but the iOS motivation seems better aligned with my interests.
The average software developer salary in China seems to be about 15,000USD a year (Glassdoor). I don’t think this is a years work.
But I’m curious as to how the work is funded. These ROMs get shared pretty liberally. So I’d guess once the work is done you have a limited amount of time to exploit it exclusively.
I also find it infuriating that when we watch a kids film, your immediately shown a preview for another film during the credits.
I get it, but I wish there was an option to turn them off.
Could you link to the research because this makes very little sense to me. DNA doesn’t conduct electricity in any meaningful way (base resistance >= Teraohms).
Maybe charge distribution or something?
I recently saw someone objecting to climate change being characterized as a “belief” [1] as it’s a scientific fact. Unfortunately, even with this being the case a large number of people believe in climate change because of their own inherent biases. It’s absolutely possible to hold a belief that is true for the wrong reasons. And in the long term, unless the root causes are addressed equally harmful.
[1] the context was 60% or Americans believing in climate change.
In a theoretical paper, it’s possible to make statements that stand on their own merits. In empirical science, a single paper is never really enough to support an entire field. Empirical sciences generally rely on the development of scientific consensus.
I’m not saying they don’t, but legally Japanese workers have more paid time off than Americans [1]. Japan also has a larger number of public holidays, which while not legally enforced, are generally taken.
I’d be curious to see data about when people actually arrive at and leave work, and how many holidays are taken.
[1] 10+ days versus 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave...
Illumina appear to be targeting 100USD right now. I think their markup on reagents is probably at least x10...
But even that’s super expensive compared to reading data from a HD... so you have to wonder where DNA as storage is viable. Unless a vastly cheaper read method becomes available.
However the basic density isn’t really the factor of interest. What’s more interesting about DNA is that you don’t need to store it on a surface. So while with semiconductors, you can only really cover a 2d surface (and maybe stack a few dies for density). With DNA you can pack a lot more information into a 3 dimensional area.
I however am not particularly bullish in DNA storage. We don’t really have the read systems we’d need to make this viable (still costs ~1000USD to read the ~ 1Gigabyte human genome and > 1 day). Unless these guys have really developed something very novel, we don’t have the write systems either.
Both the read and write systems are also highly errored compared to digital storage (like error rates of 1 in 100). So their are many issues...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/28/facebook-...
I can’t find the exact story, but wasn’t there some recent news that they were mostly abandoning Free Basics/Internet.org? From what I can tell Free Basics seems to have been mostly a failure.
Are there any similar apps which store the data locally?
The problem isn’t that they get to try an unproven treatment to see if it works. The problem is that they get to charge desperate people huge amounts of money for it.
Do it for free, as a way to validate a drug and advance research and this wouldn’t be a problem (or at least it’d be a completely different problem).
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/theranos/investors/i...
Investors, particularly tech investors often do neglect basic (tech DD) questions.
Sometimes it’s because they’re investing in the “team” and neglect DD. Sometimes it’s because the area is hot and they need to make a play... or just because they happen to know or like the people involved.
Whatever the reason, it’s dangerous to assume that the investors must have done their DD (see Theranos for example). Not saying that this is the case here, and often things work out anyway...
I’d still just be tempted to set something up in another country and operate via that until things started to pan out.
As far as future advice goes, I think you likely invested too much money up front. It sounds like you may be short on cash. I would have likely started the company somewhere cheaper than Japan (or just not as a KK which is an expensive option). For example, Estonia is pretty cheap (about 200USD, then 60USD a month for banking/accounting). I’d have found another way to keep your Japanese VISA going. Either some kind of student visa (Japanese study) or another option... Japan is much less strict than other countries and I know people who have stayed (traveling outside the country every 6 to 9 months to reset the visa) on short term visas for years.
As far as what to do now, it’s hard to offer good advice. You seem to have 3 options for the KK: keep it going, shut it down, or ignore it. If money is an issue, I’d be tempted to do whatever is cheapest.
I would then probably keep at the English teaching until your situation has stabilized if you can stand it.
After a while I’d slowly (and cheaply) try to bootstrap something, if that’s what interests you.
I think for this discussion semiconductor companies with fabrication facilities are more interesting.
How much fab is still done in the US?
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2016/10/30/how-tos/lo...
If anyone has more information, I’d be interesting it reading it as it’s pretty unclear to me.
With young kids, you often what your own cooking/food preparation facilities. Sleep arrangements are often easier in a house too.
Ironically, it seems like hotels with food preparation areas are more common in Japan (weekly mansion/business type hotels).
But I don’t believe it was quite clear that the consumer testing was a fraud until just before the last round of “investment”.
I put “investment” in quotes because the last 100MUSD was kind of a loan, based by their parent portfolio... so they’ve effectively sold what assets they have.
So yea, consumer testing appears to have been fraudulent, and after that became clear publicly there wasn’t much further investment.
It’s not like suing the company gives them a desirable outcome. In fact it probably makes them look slightly more risky to companies looking for investment. Usually they just write off the investment and move on. Just like Rupert Murdoch did (sold it back to Theranos for 1USD).
Either that or they look for someone else to pump more money in or cash them out. I feel like that was the subtext of a lot of the conversations with board members/investors in the book. There was nothing they could do, except make the play look as good as possible and hope more money gets poured in and it either works eventually, or they get to cash out... so.. why acknowledge any of the issues?
But if it wasn’t consumer testing, then I don’t think it would have been news, and the fallout wouldn’t have been as big.
So, we possibly agree. The fact that they started doing consumer testing with a device that didn’t work made this news.
However, similar kinds of lies/misinformation gets told to investors in biotech startups all the time. That they actually did consumer testing is what made this news.
It’s partly “fake it until you make it”, “double think” and a certain lack of understanding of the basic technology.
And investors reward that behavior mostly investing in a persons connections and projected confidence. Theranos raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and they’re by no means the only company like this. In fact, many of them do manage to fake it until they make it and become successful.
“AFTER ALL THE DELAYS, the partnership seemed to finally be getting off the ground in the early months of 2012: as a beta run before a full launch, the companies had agreed that Theranos would take over the blood testing at an employee health clinic Safeway had opened on its corporate campus in Pleasanton. The clinic was part of Burd’s strategy to curb the supermarket operator’s health-care costs by encouraging its workers to take better care of themselves.”
Carreyrou's first article was October 2015. I think the Walgreens stuff had kicked off by then too. The FDA probably took a while to deal with it. But by putting a non-working instrument in a consumer facing context they were clearly going to get involved at some point.
If they hadn’t done that, I don’t think it would have been a news story, or that legal action would have been taken.
This stuff happens relatively often, investors just right-off the investment (or otherwise try and dump it).