Monthly Archives: January 2014

Why You Should Upload Yourself to a Supercomputer

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We're still decades if not centuries away from being able to transfer a mind to a supercomputer. It's a fantastic future prospect that makes some people incredibly squeamish. But there are considerable benefits to living a digital life. Here's why you should seriously consider uploading.

As I've pointed out before, uploading is not a given; there are many conceptual, technological, ethical, and security issues to overcome. But for the purposes of this Explainer, we're going to assume that uploads, or digital mind transfers, will eventually be possible whether it be from the scanning and mapping of a brain, serial brain sectioning, brain imaging, or some unknown process.

Indeed, it's a prospect that's worth talking about. Many credible scientists, philosophers, and futurists believe there's nothing inherently intractable about the process. The human brain an apparent substrate independent Turing Machine adheres to the laws of physics in a material universe. Eventually, we'll be able to create a model of it using non-biological stuff and even convert, or transfer, existing analog brains to digital ones.

So, assuming you'll live long enough to see it and muster up the courage to make the paradigmatic leap from meatspace to cyberspace here's what you have to look forward to:

Once you're living as a stream of 1's and 0's you'll never have to worry about body odor, going to the bathroom, or having to brush your teeth. You won't need to sleep or have sex unless, of course, you program yourself such that you'll both want and need to do these things (call it a purist aesthetic choice).

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At the same time, you won't have to worry about rising cholesterol levels, age-related disorders, and broken bones. But you will have to worry about viruses (though they'll be of a radically different sort), hackers, and unhindered access to processing power.

The end of an organic, biological human life will offer the potential for an indefinitely long one. For many, virtual immortality will be the primary appeal of uploading. So long as the supercomputer in which you reside is secure and safe (e.g. planning an exodus from the solar system when the Sun enters into its death throes), you should be able to live until the universe collapses in the Big Rip something that shouldn't happen for another 22 billion years.

I spoke to futurist John Smart about this one. He's someone who's actually encouraging the development of technologies required for brain preservation and uplift. To that end, he's the Vice President of the Brain Preservation Foundation, a not-for-profit research group working to evaluate and award a number of scanning a preservation strategies.

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Why You Should Upload Yourself to a Supercomputer

The INQUIRER Android Experiment: Episode Three

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I CAME UP with a joke today.

Q: What will we eat if Android wins the mobile operating system war?

A: Blackberry and Apple Crumble.

I never said it was a good joke. But after the day I've had, even a lame pun is better than nothing.

Monday, 6 January

At this point, I am going to let you into a little secret. I nearly caved today. I was sitting in a room with four Windows machines, all switched off. I'd spent five hours - yes, five - trying to post an article.

During that time, I fought against devices rebooting, apps that crashed for no apparent reason but always at the crucial moment, and a cut and paste mechanism that seems to have been written by the cast of Sesame Street on ritalin.

It is safe to say that, for a journalist on a successful tech website, using Android exclusively is, while not impossible, certainly not convenient. It's a little like a holiday in North Korea. It can be done, but it probably isn't very relaxing and you might not get out of it in one piece.

I'm an advocate for Android due to its open ecosystem. But that can also be its undoing. There is often inconsistency between apps that means that they behave differently than Android design guidelines, thus reducing their capacity for intuitive use.

In addition, because many apps come from back bedroom developers, they are prone to instability. There isn't a huge community of bug testers to check every possible eventuality, and you can be sure that the one they haven't tested will be the one you end up running into and finding out about the hard way.

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The INQUIRER Android Experiment: Episode Three

Column: Twitter co-founder unveils Jelly, but to whom?

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1/8/14 business By MIKE SCHUSTER/MINYANVILLE Column: Twitter co-founder unveils Jelly, but to whom?

Photo credit: MINYANVILLE

Last April, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone hinted at a new project he and his team were working on. Keeping things clandestine at first, he asked the question on his company blog, "What is Jelly?" In the months that followed, the answer was partially revealed in tiny fragments. It was to be a question-and-answer platform with a mobile approach.

This week, Jelly was revealed to be little more than that vague description.

Specifically, Jelly allows iOS and Android users to snap and upload photos to their social networks, utilizing a crowdsourced "group mind" to answer questions about the picture. For example, someone could take a photo of an unusual animal they see on a hike, upload the picture to Jelly, and ask their followers, "What in the world is this?" The app collects these photo queries and answers posted by their friends in a timeline, letting users mark their favorite responses and share them with others within and outside their particular social network.

Full story at Minyanville.

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Column: Twitter co-founder unveils Jelly, but to whom?

IDrive’s solution to slow cloud backups: a drive shipping service

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21 hours ago Jan. 9, 2014 - 10:58 AM PST

Uploading hundreds of gigabytes of data can be a slow and tedious process. Thats why cloud backup provider IDrive launched a new service Thursday that replaces that upload with the postman. IDrives new IDrive Safe offering offers small to medium businesses a way to back up their data on one of the companys hard drives, then have it shipped to a managed storage location, and get it sent back if there ever is a need to restore the entire backup.

IDrives staff also makes these drives available online on request, but the data isnt accessible 24/7. IDrives Business Development CoordinatorShane Bingham told me during an interview at CES in Las Vegas this week that the offering was more about offsite backups than about cloud storage, and he suggested that this would be a good solution for businesses that still have a lot of local data, but want some peace of mind with an extra offsite copy.

IDrive Safe is $100 per year for a one-time copy of up to 1TB of data. Businesses that need their data backed up more frequently can elect to get a new drive shipped every month for $1000 per year, and a yearly backup costs $200 per year.Bingham told me that the company employs two people just for managing drive storage, and that it can scale up to manage thousands of drives within days.

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Alpha-1 project commissions UMass Medical School to develop Alpha-1 protein antibody

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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

9-Jan-2014

Contact: Jim Fessenden james.fessenden@umassmed.edu 508-856-2000 University of Massachusetts Medical School

MIAMI, FL and WORCESTER, MA, (January 8, 2014) Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) have been commissioned by the Alpha-1 Project (TAP) to develop a PiZ antibody. The antibody will be used to track the presence of mutant alpha-1 PiZ protein in human blood serum, an essential tool in testing potential therapies for Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency (Alpha-1).

Alpha-1 is a genetic condition characterized by low or absent levels of alpha-1 protein in the blood. Normal alpha-1 protein protects the lungs against damage caused by neutrophil elastase. In Alpha-1, the mutant PiZ protein is misfolded and cannot be transported into the blood. This can lead to emphysema due to the loss of the alpha-1 protein's protective effects in the lung, and liver disease caused by the abnormal buildup of alpha-1 protein in the liver cells.

UMass Medical School scientists plan to optimize the antibody to track the PiZ protein in human macrophages (white blood cells) and liver tissue. The antibody could be used, along with a currently available antibody that tracks normal (PiM) protein, to test a dual-function viral strategy to both reduce the body's production of abnormal PiZ protein and increase production of the normal PiM protein. The contract also calls for the PiZ antibody to be made available to other researchers and industry who request it.

"The production and dissemination of the PiZ antibody is another example of our commitment to provide tools to researchers and industry in finding a cure for Alpha-1," said Jean-Marc Quach, executive director of TAP.

"Tremendous progress has been made over the last several years in the search for a breakthrough treatment for Alpha-1," said Terence R. Flotte, MD, the Celia and Isaac Haidak Professor of Medical Education, executive deputy chancellor, provost, dean of the School of Medicine and professor of pediatrics and microbiology & physiological systems at UMMS. "While tools have been available to assess total amounts of alpha-1 and PiM protein, there has not been a specific assay to pick up only the mutant PiZ protein in human serum and liver tissue samples. As more therapeutic options aimed at down regulating or degrading PiZ become available, it is essential we have a way to easily and efficiently track its release and evaluate new potential treatments."

"This is an exciting step forward in seeking new therapies for Alpha-1," said John Walsh, president and CEO of the Alpha-1 Foundation and member of TAP's board of directors. "UMMS researchers are doing cutting-edge research on both reducing the amount of defective PiZ protein and increasing the amount of healthy PiM protein in the body. The PiZ antibody will speed their progress."

Christian Mueller, PhD, assistant professor of pediatrics and the Gene Therapy Center at UMMS said, "Recently we characterized an antibody clone that was able to differentiate between human PiZ and PiM protein in mice sera. By further characterizing this antibody specifically for human serum we can more readily detect the presence of the disease-causing PiZ protein circulating in the blood using standard diagnostic tools."

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Alpha-1 project commissions UMass Medical School to develop Alpha-1 protein antibody

Medical students take mini-med school to SCSDB students

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Students from Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine (VCOM) present a "mini med school" training workshop Wednesday at the South Carolina School for the Deaf and the Blind in Spartanburg, Aryeona Freeman, center, practices CPR on a manikin with medical students Rosmery Victoria, left, and Lauren Hildebran, right, during the workshop.

A "mini-medical school" in Spartanburg Wednesday was a learning experience for students of both S.C. School for the Deaf and the Blind and Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine (VCOM).

Thirteen second-year medical students from VCOM visited the SCSDB campus, teaching hands-on presentations about the heart and other organs, bones, muscles and CPR.

About 60 middle and high school students attended the extracurricular program. The mini-med school was coordinated by VCOM student Matt Fenlason.

"You're going to get to touch a real lung, a real heart and brain," Fenlason told a group of students before the hands-on activities began, using sign language as he talked.

"Eeeewww," several students responded, but curiosity won out. The students donned rubber gloves and handled the organs (covered in a preservative plastic). They also took a pulse, listened to heartbeats with a stethoscope, pumped the chest of a CPR simulator and performed jumping jacks to learn how the heart rate increases during physical activity. Students crowded around the presentation tables and spoke or signed enthusiastically as they participated.

The presentations stressed the importance of a healthy lifestyle and even impressed some of the staff members when they saw the difference between a healthy lung and the lung of a smoker.

"This benefits any teenager," said SCSDB President Maggie Park, who stopped by to check out the presentation. "While other students may be able to hear this on the radio or watch TV, our students may not. Having an interpreter here helping them access the information makes a big difference."

Fenlason, of Colorado, grew up with sign language because his mother is a professional interpreter, and he is now a sign language interpreter at First Baptist Church in Spartanburg. He chose VCOM partly because it was near the location of the SCSDB, where he volunteers as a wrestling coach.

The VCOM students have conducted mini-med schools at Dorman and Spartanburg high schools, but this was the first time they visited SCSDB. Most of the medical students had to learn some sign language in order to be able to conduct the presentation. The VCOM students arrived at the campus two hours early to practice signing, said Cora Richardson, after-school program coordinator and resident life services director for SCSDB.

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Medical students take mini-med school to SCSDB students

Another Voice: Medical schools must also instruct on health care policy

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By Rahul Rekhi

Since its inception more than a century ago, modern medical education has undergone a series of quiet revolutions. Yet this comprehensive expansion in one critical area masks a relative neglect of another: Medical curricula today largely omit training on health policy.

The result? Even as todays medical students graduate with a deep scientific fluency, they leave all but illiterate when it comes to the health care system.

I can bear witness to this firsthand. The curriculum of Stanford Medical School, where I am a deferred first-year student, does not incorporate a single required course on health policy or the health care system across four years and 249 credits of training.

And this oversight comes with consequences. To illustrate, recent research in JAMA Internal Medicine found that fewer than half of medical students nationwide understand even the basic components of the Affordable Care Act.

On a systemic level, this illiteracy directly impedes our ability to institute meaningful health policy reforms that tackle such thorny issues as quality-based physician payments, comparative effectiveness guidelines or end-of-life care. Without willing and capable physician leaders to guide, implement and sustain such major shifts for the decades to come, reform efforts almost certainly will founder.

Consequently, efforts to rein in health care costs and improve patient outcomes must begin by modernizing medical curricula to incorporate health policy training.

For example, a national mandate that fundamental knowledge of health systems be a prerequisite for medical licensing would encourage medical schools to incorporate course work on basic principles of health policy and economics. This teaching, moreover, should be nonpartisan and nonideological, focusing instead on the nuts and bolts of health systems akin to what law or business school students learn about policymaking and institutional governance.

Furthermore, the advent of so-called massive open online courses, or MOOCs, means that financial concerns the costs of expanding medical curricula to encompass health care policy may be unwarranted. Online health policy courses, such as the one taught by physician/policymaker Ezekiel Emanuel at the University of Pennsylvania, could serve as a functional stand-in when a university lacks a department or set of instructors dedicated to health policy.

Whatever the medium, it is imperative that we install health policy as an integral part of the national medical curricula, lest we continue to churn out a generation of students who are ill-equipped to make sense of the challenges and changes to come.

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Another Voice: Medical schools must also instruct on health care policy

U of M med school warns of doc shortage

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Shortage on the way (UMN) Listen Medical school warns of residency crunch

Jan 10, 2014

A national training bottleneck threatens Minnesotas ability to fill increased demand for doctors in coming years, University of Minnesota medical school officials warn.

Stagnant federal and state funding has limited the number of residency positions where they can train. Unless the number of residencies increases Minnesota will be short a projected 2,000 physicians a decade from now, they say.

If you want to be able to control your workforce and have workforce available in the future, youve got to build your own, said Troy Taubenheim, director of the Metro Minnesota Council on Graduate Medical Education.

Tens of thousands of new patients are expected to flood hospitals in the state over the next decade many of them aging Baby Boomers and those newly insured under the Affordable Care Act, according to numbers provided by Taubenheim.

Meanwhile, close to half of the states physicians will be old enough to retire within a decade. If they do, Taubenheims figures indicate, under current conditions the state will be able to replace fewer than half of them.

Simply expanding medical school enrollment wont produce enough doctors to fill such gaps because of a training bottleneck, health officials say.

After students graduate from medical school, they cant practice until they receive several years of training in hospitals and clinics training known as a residency.

The problem is that the number of residencies is effectively capped by government funding.

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Rafael Campo’s student physicians embrace poetry to hone art of healing

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, Jeffrey Brown continues his series with U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey called "Where Poetry Lives," taking us to places where poetry and literature connect to everyday life.

In past stories, they visited a program for Alzheimer's patients in New York, and one in Detroit that encourages young students to write about themselves and their city.

Tonight, a different kind of connection, through the practice of medicine and healing.

JEFFREY BROWN: Outside Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital on a recent frigid morning, Natasha Trethewey met up with a former poetry student of hers from Emory University.

Do you remember her as a teacher?

SAMYUKTA MULLANGI, student at Harvard Medical School: Of course I do.

RELATED INFORMATION

Doctor/Poet Rafael Campo finds rhythm through a stethoscope

(LAUGHTER)

JEFFREY BROWN: And Natasha remembers Sam, Samyukta Mullangi, fondly as well.

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Rafael Campo's student physicians embrace poetry to hone art of healing