Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Cure disease – why bother?
Much of biological science and technologies are trying to cure disease. However, there are a large group of people who do not want to be cured. There are several instances and examples where they have objected vehemently about not doing things that would cure their ailment. What ailment ? Deafness. Deafness has been cured to…
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Pay Scientists more!
Drug Discovery is obviously expensive but the scientists that actually make the discoveries, make very little money. Yes, they might get a bonus or two but it is nowhere close to what the Vice President of the President of the division will make, who get a decent compensation package with stock options and other bonuses.…
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Cancer cures through data sharing
Cancer is a difficult disease to manage but still difficult to treat. However, many people have many thoughts on what it takes to cure disease and cure it. Maybe, some of them are practical and others are no so practical, however, it will take a revolutionary approach to come up drug discovery paradigms that help…
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Drug Discovery through financial engineering: new model proposed by MIT professor
Drug Discovery is expensive. Even drugs for an important disease like cancer have not been as easy to discover. There are many reasons and that could be a topic for a separate article but an MIT professor, Andrew Lo has proposed a new model. In the present model, all drug discoveries are funded…
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Scientist/Engineer to Entrepreneur
It takes many steps to make a businessman. The path from a scientist to businessman takes many more steps. There are some fascinating stories out there and the three entrepreneur mentioned in the link below have fascinating stories by themselves.
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Innovation – circle back to old materials
Dr Teng Li and Liangbing Hu of University of Maryland have been working on lithium or sodium based batteries and have used a unique material in the batteries that has not been thought before – wood. In batteries typically, the positive ion shuttles between the electrodes as it goes through its electrical cycle. Lithium is…
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Strange correlations in data can spook people
When anyone measures a lot of data and then correlates it with phenomenon seemingly unrelated to the data, seemingly some relationships become evident. Is there a cause and effect? – Not necessarily but it still is surprising on how it can be related. Consider the example correlation between the movie showed on TV and the…
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Weave for data visualization
Data visualization requires special tools. The one that has been very useful is “Weave”, as a ridiculously powerful visualization tool. Instead of describing in detail, look at this video below showing the elections of UK and the link that gives all the features very well. {youtube}WHQeP4yQa9U{/youtube}
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Open access publishing by University of California
The University of California system adopted a policy on August 2nd that the default publishing of any scholarly article will be licensed openly to the University of California and also openly available to all the scientists. This has received a great amount of press for the valuable value it brings to open access journals as…
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Three rules of visualizing large data sets
There are several ways to visualize data. The most commonly used could be Excel charts. However, when the data sets are complicated and large, the ability to display and chart the data is required to be given to the individual user or consumer, new techniques are required to plot the data. One such technique involves…
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