Author: Nathan Taylor

1. Subscription news will inevitably skew partisan. The journalistic code of objective news is a legacy from last century. With only three national TV stations and at most a handful of newspapers per city, news gatekeepers had monopoly power. And that power led to a journalistic code of balance, showing two sides to every story.… Continue reading Saturday Links 10-Feb-2018 Subscription news is innately partisan, Voice UI, Europa and Enceladus, Hobbits back to the trees

1. Amazon Healthcare. My current favorite example of tech and healthcare is the Mycin system. A 1978 AI expert computer system that was better than pathologists, yet never adopted due to incentives. So better technology is important, but if you can’t shift incentives, it’s completely useless. Health is hard. And using the word “AI” doesn’t… Continue reading Saturday Links 02-Feb-2018 Amazon health, faithland, driverless trucks, rules for life

1. Cloning of Macaque Monkeys by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer.  Here’s the paper in Cell. The scientists are from Mu-Ming Poo’s Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai. They used the same technique as Dolly the sheep, which previously hadn’t worked in primates. How? “We found that injection of H3K9me3 demethylase Kdm4d mRNA and treatment with histone… Continue reading Saturday Links 27-Jan-2018 Cloned monkeys, Amazon Go, AI medicine outperforming humans since the 1970s, Eye for an Eye

1. More people should read and follow Spotted Toad to learn about the Opioid Crisis. Yes it’s true. Someone is writing about the Opioid Crisis under the pseudonymous handle Spotted Toad. As he(?) noted on twitter this week: Lol, US Senators are holding public hearings based on blog posts they read from “Spotted Toad”. And: If this had… Continue reading Saturday Links 20-Jan-2018: Spotted Toad on Opiods, Amazon HQ2 as tech monopoly marketing, Blue Planet II

1. Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and Apple.  Here’s a good piece on the continuing rise of voice interface at CES. My favorite CES read was by Ben Bajarin (link), who begins with the unfortunately necessary caveat “For the record, Apple is not doomed.” Then gets to his primary point: Gone are the days of Apple’s… Continue reading Saturday Links 13-Jan-2018: CES and Apple, Facebook newsfeed, IQ genomics, Star Wars

I plan to write a links-with-commentary blog post every Saturday in 2018. Today being the first one. I’ll keep these newsletter style casual, with minimal edits. Hopefully that will increase the chance I’ll post every Saturday this year. Mostly I’ll pull from what I’ve recently shared on twitter.