2008-10 Paul Graham
… investors tend to be less willing to invest in bad times. They shouldn’t be. Everyone knows you’re supposed to buy when times are bad and sell when times are good.
Month: March 2020
Machine Learning Takes On Antibiotic Resistance
2020-03-09 Katherine Harmon Courage
In the February 20 issue of Cell, one team of scientists announced that they — and a powerful deep learning algorithm — had found a totally new antibiotic, one with an unconventional mechanism of action that allows it to fight infections that are resistant to multiple drugs. The compound was hiding in plain sight (as a possible diabetes treatment) because humans didn’t know what to look for. …
Collins, Barzilay and their team trained their network to look for any compound that would inhibit the growth of the bacterium Escherichia coli. They did so by presenting the system with a database of more than 2,300 chemical compounds that had known molecular structures and were classified as “hits” or “non-hits” on tests of their ability to inhibit the growth of E. coli. From that data, the neural net learned what atom arrangements and bond structures were common to the molecules that counted as hits. …
The researchers … also trained the algorithm to predict the toxicity of compounds and to weed out candidate molecules on that basis. …
They then turned the trained network loose on the Drug Repurposing Hub, a library of more than 6,000 compounds that are already being vetted for use in humans for a wide variety of conditions.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/machine-learning-takes-on-antibiotic-resistance-20200309/
Physicists determine the optimal soap recipe for blowing gigantic bubbles
2020-02-04 Jennifer Ouellette
Study reveals that polymers of varying strand lengths are the key ingredient.
The article includes the recipe for blowing gigantic bubbles.
How Expedia Solved a $100 Million Customer Service Nightmare
2020-03-03 Dan Heath
When you spend years responding to problems, you can sometimes overlook the fact that you could be preventing them.
https://marker.medium.com/how-expedia-solved-a-100-million-customer-service-nightmare-d7aabc8d4025
15 extra minutes
2020-02-10 Miguel Ferreira
The only way you can get people to do anything is by giving them what they want.
How David Bowie charmed journalists.
https://creativesamba.substack.com/p/15-extra-minutes-20-02-10
Sonic’s very fast redesign
When the redesign [of the Sonic the Hedgehog movie] was commissioned, Artist Tyson Hesse, who had worked on previous Sonic the Hedgehog media, was brought on to lead the redesign. “But a lot of the work that the team had already done as far as the look of Sonic’s fur, should he have eyelashes and what they look like…how we should handle the eyes…all that kind of stuff was actually directly translatable over to the new design,” comments Wright. “I think the redesign took only seven or eight weeks, which is a record at MPC for the design of a 3D character.”
The process was helped by Hesse having a strong relationship with Sega previously. The team flew to London, “where we all sat with the guy that was concept sculpting and literally just did it in real-time.” Wright felt that because there was a clear remit for Hesse to take the redesign lead, it allowed everything to fall into place very simply. “Actually, funnily enough, the redesign was pretty painless. In some respects, a more exaggerated character is a simpler thing for the team to execute,” he comments.
https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/sonics-very-fast-redesign/