Dispatches

Artificial intelligence is the future, is it?

Many believe that, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize the future. During the Cold War, then-Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson believed that “whoever wins the space race would gain control over the Earth”. Today, AI development is the new space race. Recently, Russian President Putin said, “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world”. Despite the hyperbole in this statement, the importance of technology’s power should never be overlooked and artificial intelligence is truly today’s hot topic.

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Alumni consulting company acquired by Ideo

Ideo is a San Francisco Bay Area consulting firm that helps companies design new products and services. It has 52 employees in Chicago and will add 16 more, including 15 data scientists, with the acquisition of Datascope Analytics. Datascope, founded by two Northwestern University and Amaral Lab alumni, has partnered ...

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Holiday Fashion

An introductory guide to personalized livery.

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New paper linking fractal dynamics of worms to aging and stress

Luiz G. A. Alves, Peter B. Winter, Leonardo N. Ferreira, Renée M. Brielmann, Richard I. Morimoto, and Luís A. N. Amaral: Long-range correlations and fractal dynamics in C. elegans: Changes with aging and stress Physical Review E 96, 022417 (2017)

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Function wrapper and python decorator

When researchers translate their thoughts into codes, they usually have the needs to modify their existing functions to accommodate their new ideas, such as adding new arguments or a little more computations to the functions.

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Shootings in U.S. schools are linked to increased unemployment

By Megan Fellman EVANSTON – A rigorous Northwestern University study of a quarter-century of data has found that economic insecurity is related to the rate of gun violence at K-12 and postsecondary schools in the United States. When it becomes more difficult for people coming out of school to find ...

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New paper out in Open biology

How do bacteria tune translation efficiency?

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Do it live!

Code at rest is a dreary thing. Worse, it’s often ignored. Distributing your lifeless code is nice and all, but running it for others can be even better.

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Effectively communicating scientific information

How do scientists make effective connections with the public?

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Thought about imperial units

As a European, I’ve never been interested in working with the imperial units. But today I want to talk about a good point I discovered in it.

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New paper out in G3:Genes|Genomes|Genetics!

The recent work of Chuyue Yang, a talent undergraduate (now recently graduated!), and graduate student Adam Hockenberry is now online. This work is a part of a multi-year collaboration with Professor Michael Jewett investigating the mechanisms by which the sequence of messenger-RNA can influence its translation. In this particular work, ...

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post hoc != propter hoc

Lest I scare you away immediately, let me clarify that the topic of this blog is only marginally about the ethics of animal research. Rather, it’s about making a cogent argument. And more specifically, about the sense of nausea I feel when reading terrible arguments from people who should know ...

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Interesting facts about China

It surprises me that there exists so many misconceptions about China, my homeland. Some of them are really hilarious, while others are both funny and annoying. Let’s begin with some famous American Chinese food. Only after I found myself chewing a piece of paper did I realize what the fortune ...

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How much was the Japanese Imperial Palace worth?

With the Japanese Emperor attempting to abdicate the throne this week, it is a good time to reflect on the significance of the event. While not odd historically (the Emperors in Heian Era resigned fairly often), this is the first resignation in the modern era. Whether he will actually be ...

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How I estimate time

How good are you at making short-term predictions about your own future?

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Traveling alone

Don’t be afraid to explore the world by yourself

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Unintended effects of data privacy in healthcare

I would like to draw attention to an instance where I believe the pendulum has swung too far: the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

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R v Python: Dawn of Analytics

A fresh yet slightly biased perspective on the recent data science language war.

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The State of Soccer

Can soccer be the new Budweiser?

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The ultimate book about folktales

I’d like to use my first blog post to advertise the ultimate story book – which also happens to be one of the most successful works of information-based science: the Aarne-Thompson index. Briefly, this index tries nothing less than to identify and categorize every folklore tale. Although the first version of the index is more than a hundred years old, it has stayed as a useful tool for folklore research ever since. Parts of the success of the Aarne-Thompson index seem to stem from time-less design decisions for organizing data.

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