a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
rene's comments
activity:
rene  ·  148 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: And the prompt was: Hubski Poetry

Figure a better setting then where I am now

life wears on you worse than the skin of a cow

the struggles the hurt of where you are now

distinguished feelings to respect if only you knew how

to respect me a life god-fearing deserving of praise

thanksgiving dinner is not enough give me a raise

trials and tribulations foment feelings malaise

eternal life is not enough to earn peace in my days

remember life is fluid atomic rearrange the pie

pecan piquante the crunch sells the question why

why why why cries the pig in the abbattoir

my oh my says the pig in the butcher on the loire

what recourse have we to return our received life

what number to call and complain

shall I end it now? What will be the nature of your death.

We all must die, the luckiest thrice and in good health.

What's left for us, the rest? A rest, a bath in distress

instead turn your head, not right but left.

A turning gaze instills fear in the best

left left left cried the cat, the emperor left his vest

if you could wear the clothes of dreams, seen or unseen, how would you seem, empress?

rene  ·  1984 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: mk's senolytic smoothie

Found some curious articles. Seems like cooking at moderate temperatures releases compounds from cell material without degrading them.

Key takeaways are:

1) don't heat fats/oils to smoking point (150+C/302+°F) while cooking vegetables

2) if you're making soup, add acid (vinegar, tomato/tomato paste, lemon, yogurt, creme fraiche, etc.) to preserve phenolic compounds (particularly fisetin).

Temperature-dependent studies on the total phenolics, flavonoids, antioxidant activities, and sugar content in six onion varieties

    In general, heating had a positive effect on all four flavonoids. For instance, the total flavonoid content in the red onion variety (Q + QMG + QDG + IMG) increased from 9.34 μmol/g DW to 9.70 μmol/g DW on heating at 120°C for 30 minutes and then decreased to 5.40 μmol/g DW at 150°C. In all the studied onion varieties, the total flavonoid content increased up to 120°C, and then decreased at 150°C...

    Table 2

    The total phenolic content was significantly increased after heating at 80°C, 100°C, and 120°C for 30 minutes each...

    Heating at 150°C for 30 minutes decreased the total phenolic content for all of these onion varieties. Different processing steps such as boiling, sauteing, frying, and roasting can be used to liberate phenolic compounds from various plants...

    However, simple heating reportedly cannot cleave covalently bound phenolic compounds; however, far-infrared treatment can cleave the bond;

Degradation kinetics of fisetin and quercetin in solutions affected by medium pH, temperature and co-existing proteins

    Some results were obtained based on the changes in the k values under different pH values and temperatures. The first is that fisetin was more stable than quercetin, giving smaller k values in all cases. The second is that the degradations of fisetin and quercetin were sensitive to medium pH, especially at alkaline pH values.

    Flavonoids in aqueous solutions show instability, resulting in concentration loss (i.e., degradation)....These mentioned studies shared similar conclusion to the present data, supporting that fisetin and quercetin were more stable (but instable) under acidic (and alkaline) conditions.

rene  ·  2258 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Everything Easy Is Hard Again

    simply npm your webpack via grunt with vue babel or bower to react asdfjkl;lkdhgxdlciuhw

This is about the level of detail a lot of online guides/tutorials have for most of these packages/workflows/tools/watchamacallitnow. The next step is to read through the documentation, which is often verbose, not pedagogically structured, and sometimes non-existent. The method of last resort is to attack the source code: akin to reading someone's notebook written in a foreign language. You have to get used to their style and shorthand.

"Remember, we're just manipulating text" is what I repeat to keep me sane when troubleshooting tooling issues. It's a big time investment to understand the full-stack; a bigger one to keep on top of it. This issue will only grow exponentially as more code is written and more individuals become developers.

If anybody is interested in learning web development, Full Stack Python is a great resource that places lots of different web technologies in proper context, it helped me a lot in the past. I can also recommend Mozilla's Documentation Pages for HTML/CSS/Javascript as it relates to webpages, although the quality can be inconsistent.

(If you want an example of atrocious documentation, check out the Galago Search Engine/Lemur Project. It's so opaque a research paper dedicated a section to how hard it is for phd's to understand the source code)

rene  ·  2559 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Machine learning algorithms exhibit racial and gender biases, research reveals

Link to Paper (ScienceMag Paywall): http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6334/133

Author's Homepage: Anthony G. Greenwald, PhD

Algorithm used for analysis: GloVe - Global Vectors for Word Representation

    GloVe is an unsupervised learning algorithm for obtaining vector representations for words. Training is performed on aggregated global word-word co-occurrence statistics from a corpus, and the resulting representations showcase interesting linear substructures of the word vector space.

    GloVe is essentially a log-bilinear model with a weighted least-squares objective. The main intuition underlying the model is the simple observation that ratios of word-word co-occurrence probabilities have the potential for encoding some form of meaning . . . The training objective of GloVe is to learn word vectors such that their dot product equals the logarithm of the words' probability of co-occurrence. Owing to the fact that the logarithm of a ratio equals the difference of logarithms, this objective associates (the logarithm of) ratios of co-occurrence probabilities with vector differences in the word vector space. Because these ratios can encode some form of meaning, this information gets encoded as vector differences as well. For this reason, the resulting word vectors perform very well on word analogy tasks, such as those examined in the word2vec package.

Perhaps more interestingly, Extended Reading:

Implicit Bias: How Should Psychological Science Inform the Law?

Statistically Small Effects of the Implicit Association Test Can Have Societally Large Effects

    OMBJT characterized their average correlation finding for IAT measures (which they estimated as r .148, in the domain of

    intergroup behavior) as indicating that the IAT was a “poor” predictor (pp. 171, 182, 183). This section’s analysis reaches a very different

    conclusion by applying well-established statistical reasoning to understand the societal consequences of small-to-moderate correlational

    effect sizes. The first step of this analysis shows that OMBJT’s and GPUB’s meta-analytic findings had very similar implications for the

    average percentage of criterion-measure variance explained by IAT measures. The second step explains how statistically small effects can

    have societally important effects under two conditions—if they apply to many people or if they apply repeatedly to the same person. In

    combination, the two steps of this analysis indicate how conventionally small (and even subsmall) effect sizes can have substantial

    societal significance . . .

    Small effect sizes comprise significant discrimination. For most of the time since the passage of the United States’ civil rights

    laws in the 1960s, U.S. courts have used a statistical criterion of discrimination that translates to correlational effect sizes that are

    often smaller than r .10. This criterion is the “four-fifths rule,” which tests whether a protected class (identified by race, color,

    religion, national origin, gender, or disability status) has been treated in discriminatory fashion. A protected class’s members

    receiving some favorable outcome less than 80% as often as a comparison class can be treated by courts as indicating an “adverse

    impact” that merits consideration as illegal discrimination (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 1978, §1607.4.D).

rene  ·  3229 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Bizarre ruling with far-reaching consequences in AIG government bailout case

This is actually a good ruling as it limits the Fed's abilities to bailout large banks. The main crux of the argument is that the Fed treated AIG (insurance) in a tougher manner than Morgan Stanley (finance), etc. and that, with other things, is illegal (basically, the Fed unjustly favored the banks with the bailout. It demonstrates how the Fed is more beholden to Wall Street). This ruling makes it much riskier to depend on receiving a bailout from the Fed in order to publicly subsidize risky activities. Here's some brief analysis.

It's also pushing back on Wall Street's encroachment into monetary policy.

rene  ·  3230 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Who will own the Robots? Improving on sharing the wealth technology produces

Not that I like bitcoin, but there are some interesting applications of the blockchain technology that can allow for autonomous systems to exist financially independent from human institutions. Here is a developer discussing what an autonomous taxi service - among others - with no middle-men would look like at the Turing Festival in 2013

rene  ·  3241 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Haiku Alone

Long winters spill green

Do all springs lead to summer?

Young bud blooms northward

rene  ·  3487 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: October 1, 2014

Thank you for the response. Do you mind me asking what you did for those two years and why you decided to take the break in the first place?

My tentative plan if I drop out is to save up for a few months and then try to get my old job touring with Cirque du Soleil around the country. I feel like future me would appreciate the experience, even if that makes me delay my "career" a few years.

rene  ·  3498 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Eighty-Ninth Weekly "Share Some Music You've Been Into Lately" Thread

Isaiah Rashad - Heavenly Father. Great rhythm and hook on this song, a bit melancholic.

Rustie ft. Danny Brown - Attak. Hyphy song showcasing why Danny is perfect for electronic music, he's the only reason I'll listen to edm.

Tyler, The Creator x BADBADNOTGOOD - Fish. A jam session between the two, a relaxing jazzy rhythm. Really great for chilling to.

Flying Lotus ft. Kendrick Lamar - Never Catch Me. First single from Flying Lotus's upcoming album. My god I can't wait for it.

This is mostly old stuff, I haven't been paying attention to recent hip hop that much.

rene  ·  3755 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet

I've always found that most sites on the internet unconsciously have a white and male bias. It's not a tremendous surprise that institutionalized racism and sexism are present on the internet as it's embedded in some parts of our culture, but anonymity on the internet really throws a few logs onto the fire.

rene  ·  3757 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What is a favorite word of yours?

I've got to get this off my chest. My least favorite word in the english language is "debacle." Don't get me wrong--I WANT to use this word, its definition and connotation are great, but the pronunciation makes me sound like a damn chicken whenever I say de-BAWK-le. So I've decided to never use the word.

Answering the original question, my favorite word is "salaam", it's very calming.