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phantom-le6 · 4 years ago

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Episode Reviews - Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 5 (4 of 6)

Time for another round of episode reviews from season 5 of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Episode 16: Ethics

Plot (as given by me):

During an inspection in the cargo bay, Lt. Worf is hit from above by a falling cargo container, and he awakens later in sick bay to learn he has been paralysed by the accident. With no cure for the condition immediately to hand, Worf asks Commander Riker to assist him in a ritual suicide known as the Hegh’bat something all Klingons do when faced with such injuries. Riker is appalled by the idea, and Dr Crusher likewise refuses to give up on the idea of Worf recovering, bringing aboard neurologist Dr Toby Russell to consult on the matter.

Riker seeks advice from Captain Picard, who asks him to consider the matter from Worf’s perspective; as a Klingon, Worf is part of a warrior culture that, by its very nature, would disdain physical infirmity and cannot abide life with a disability as humans can. Eventually, Riker finds a way out of assisting Worf by noting that the ritual should be performed by a family member, namely Alexander, and when Worf tries to use Alexander’s age and part-human heritage as excuses, Riker calls him on it, accusing him of being afraid to fight for his life as many of their fallen comrades have done.

Meanwhile, Dr Russell notes that Klingon anatomy is heavily over-designed, possessing a redundancy for every vital physical function to ensure that if a primary organ is damaged, a secondary one can always compensate. She suggests using a genetics-based replication therapy that could create a new spinal column for Worf, but it is still experimental and Russell has only a 37% success rate in holographic simulations. Dr Crusher suggests they’ll stick to conventional methods, but when these prove insufficient for Worf, Russell offers him her experimental treatment. Later, the Enterprise assists survivors from the transport ship USS Denver, which has been damaged by a Cardassian mine. When Crusher learns Russell tried an experimental treatment on a patient who subsequently died without considering the use of conventional medicine, she has Russell relieved of duty.

Worf ultimately opts to undergo Russell’s procedure against Dr Crusher’s advice, and Picard has to convince Crusher that while normally her normal medical philosophy would be the more valid option, in Worf’s case a high-risk operation is better than either a life being disabled or ritual suicide. The operation initially appears successful, but Worf goes into cardiac arrest moments after his vital functions are taken off life support, and he apparently dies. A heart-broken Dr Crusher has to break the news to Alexander and to Counsellor Troi, who Worf named as Alexander’s guardian if he should die during the operation. Alexander insists on seeing his father, but when he does, Worf shows signs of life. It turns out Worf’s brain has a back-up for his synaptic functions in the same way that his body has multiple back-up organs.

While Dr Crusher is thrilled that Worf will recover, she condemns Dr Russell for putting her research efforts ahead of the lives her patients, pointing out that proper medical research takes time and intensive study, and that Russell is ‘taking short-cuts, right through living tissue’. Meanwhile, Worf begins his recovery and allows Alexander to help him, having previously tried to keep the boy away during his paralysis.

Review:

This episode is one with a very apt title, as there’s actually not one but two issues of ethics being tackled. The first is around the idea of euthanasia of the permanently disabled or terminally ill. For me, this is the least well-handled of the two because it’s being tackled via a character from a warrior society, and those tend to be the most barbaric around the differently abled. Consider the film 300, and what that showed us of how the ancient Spartans would kill at birth any child who was not physically ‘perfect’. For all that it makes sense from a strictly tactical and militaristic perspective, assuming you’re only looking for physical prowess on the battlefield, the idea of trying to get anyone to kill themselves over a bum leg or deformed arm or anything like that is discrimination and murder, pure and simple. To put someone out of their misery when facing a painful degenerative illness with no chance of a cure before the end whatsoever, that is one thing, but to euthanise the disabled just for being disabled? That is simply barbaric and inhuman, and frankly an attitude no one on the Enterprise should have been trying to endorse. Frankly, I lost some respect for Picard and gained a lot for Riker looking at how they acted; Picard is all but giving an all-clear to his tactical officer topping himself, and Riker is the only one trying to make Worf fight for his life like a real warrior.

The other ethical debate revolves around the question of medical ethics, and whether the end justifies the means when it comes to short-cuts and other unsound research methods. In this, it’s clear Crusher is the one in the right, because the validity of Russell’s argument is founded on the idea that Worf is from a culture where the high-risk experimental operation beats the immediate alternatives. If, like me, you see Worf’s attitude as typical of the regularly abled acting like spoiled, whining babies because they’ve been made part of the differently abled community, then Russell’s arguments cease to carry weight. Research should take time where it needs to, especially in case you’re proceeding from a false supposition that the research actually disproves. The biased results of improper research into vaccines and autism resulting in autistics being vilified as a result of vaccine science when they’re actually nothing of the sort is by itself reason enough that improper research should not only be banned, but treated as a criminal offence.

Perhaps the biggest undermining element of this episode, however, is that it centres on something happening to a main character of the show and not a guest character. Anytime issue exploration on an issue like this involves a main character, especially on a show like Next Generation which doesn’t really do overall story arcs even by this stage, you know the character will somehow recover and all will return to status quo. Had the show done this with a guest character, they could have gone a different way and perhaps avoided potential advocacy of some very, very morally questionable stances on these issues. It’s great drama and good issue exploration, but I think the show should have been more opposed the idea of killing off the disabled just for being disabled than it appeared to me. For me, the episode only gets 6 out of 10, and it’s lucky I don’t mark it down more than that.

Episode 17: The Outcast

Plot (as adapted from Wikipedia):

The Enterprise is contacted by a humanoid race called the J'naii, who as a species have no gender. They ask the crew for help in finding a shuttle which has gone missing. It is theorized that the shuttle disappeared into a pocket of null space, a type of space which drains energy rapidly. In short order, a rescue mission is planned, for which Riker volunteers to pilot a shuttle to retrieve the shuttle crew. A member of the J'naii named Soren insists on accompanying Riker, acting as a co-pilot. Soren proves to be a good pilot. Riker and Soren share a meal and become more comfortable with each other. They are interrupted by another J'naii, and Soren leaves quickly.

While the pair is charting the null space, the shuttle is damaged, and Soren is injured. While being treated by Dr Crusher, Soren asks her several questions about female gender identification. While Soren and Riker work on the shuttle, Soren confesses that she is attracted to Riker and states that she has a female gender identity. Soren explains that the J'naii are an androgynous species that view the expression of any sort of male or female gender, and especially sexual liaisons, as a psychological perversion. According to their official doctrine, the J'naii had “evolved” beyond gender and thus view the idea of male/female sexuality as primitive. Those among the J'naii who view themselves as possessing gender are ridiculed, outcast, and forced to undergo "psychotectic therapy". This is a form of conversion therapy meant to remove any desire for gender-specificity and allow acceptance back into J'naii society.

The affair between Riker and Soren grows and eventually is discovered. Soren is put on trial, but before she answers to the charges, Riker bursts in and attempts to take the blame for the situation. Soren foils his attempt and proceeds to passionately defend herself and express her outrage at what their society does to those who express male or female identities. J'naii diplomats force Soren to undergo psychotectic therapy, citing reformed citizens' newfound happiness and desire to be normal. Riker's emotions and love for Soren grow and he decides that he cannot leave Soren to this fate. He tries to explain the situation to Picard, who is sympathetic to Riker but says that he cannot sanction a rescue mission as it violates the Prime Directive, not to mention Riker throwing away his career. Worf visits Riker in his quarters and offers to go with him on an "unannounced visit" to rescue Soren, since he is unwilling to let Riker face the task alone. When Riker and Worf beam down to the planet to rescue Soren, he realizes that the therapy has already been performed. Soren refuses to go with him, claiming that she is now happy and was “sick” during her affair with Riker. Soren apologizes to Riker, who returns dejectedly to the Enterprise with Worf.

Review:

‘The Outcast’ is one of those episodes where Trek aims to represent one thing, misses by miles and hits something else issue-wise instead. The idea of the episode was to finally remedy the fact that homophobia and same-sex relations had never been dealt with by the franchise. Apparently, this is something Roddenberry had very much been in favour of, as he was a big believer that 24th century humanity wouldn’t have the same kind of prejudices we have now around non-heterosexual relationships. As such, the intended premise of this episode was to tackle the issue through the metaphor of an alien race.

However, the race in question is one that abstains gender, and for whom picking a gender such as male or female is seen as a kind of deviancy by the wider society. As a result of this, and the alien Riker falls in love with choosing a female identity, the homosexuality metaphor is very much weakened. Instead, the episode becomes of an allegory about transsexuality and transphobia, which is even less well-tackled by the entertainment industry than concepts of homosexuality. As such, Trek inadvertently went a bit ahead of its time.

It’s great seeing Riker honestly try to get his head around the language issues that can be brought up dealing with someone who doesn’t apparently identify with a binary model of gender, but at the same time apparently lacks easily understandable substitutes. In many ways, that’s probably one of the key reasons why it’s so hard for film and television to effectively deal with gender identity concepts. How do you right about the many genders that apparently exist beyond male and female when they’re often not fully defined and perpetually being redefined? Physical sex and the societal construct that is gender get over-simplified and baked into the mainstream of our society at a very young age, and we’re leaving the wider scope of both out of the picture until too late in the lives of many people. If we are to make society more inclusive to people from the LGTBQ+ community, I think that over-simplification needs to be reversed and the simplification process adapted so that all gender constructs can easily be taught at an early age and then built upon. Unlike some, I don’t believe that gender itself is a problem, but how we let it be defined and taught is.

This episode apparently got a lot of LGBT criticism back when it initially aired, mostly around the belief that the show was somehow condoning the conversion “therapy” Soren was being subjected to. Looking at it from the objective perspective of an LGBTQ+ ally who knows his TNG, that’s not what the show was doing at all; otherwise, Riker would never have tried to rescue Soren from that fate. The fact is that in any exploration of how the LGBT community was treated back then, and still is now in many parts of the world, you can’t always paint a rosy picture of how things should be and be done. Sometimes you also have to show the reality, and the reality is that conversion therapy was still something that was forced on people back in the 1990’s. The fact that this practice is now going to be banned in the UK makes this episode now a cautionary tale of what we could revert to if we’re not careful. For me, this episode is a good episode, worth about 8 out of 10. It would have got higher had it actually tackled the issue it aimed for, or dealt more directly with transgenderism.

Episode 18: Cause and Effect

Plot (as adapted from Wikipedia):

The viewer is shown through the episode that Enterprise is caught in a time loop (referred to in-universe as a "temporal causality loop"). The loop begins with the senior members of the crew playing poker and continues for about a day when they discover a spatial anomaly. While studying the anomaly, a ship suddenly emerges from it. Commander Riker suggests decompressing the main shuttlebay to move the Enterprise out of danger, while Lt. Commander Data advocates using a tractor beam to push the other ship out of the way. Captain Picard chooses Data's option, although the tactic does not succeed and the other ship strikes one of the Enterprise warp nacelles, causing a critical warp core containment failure and the destruction of the Enterprise moments later, at which point the loop restarts.

Initially, crew members are unaware of the loop. However, Dr Crusher begins to hear noises before she goes to bed following the poker game. Having a sense of déjà vu during the poker game and able to predict the cards Data will deal during a subsequent loop, Crusher takes a tricorder with her to her room, records the voices, and later Data analyses them to discover they are the panicked commands and broadcasts of the crew. The senior staff work out that they are stuck in the loop; the voices they are hearing are those of themselves from the previous loop just prior to the destruction of the ship. They evaluate the voices to determine that the loop is restarted due to the collision of the two ships but do not know how to avoid that collision in the first place. Data suggests that his positronic brain can be used to send a short message to himself in the next loop which may help them to avoid the collision. When they arrive at the anomaly, and after the collision, Data sends the message.

On the following loop, Crusher again has a feeling of déjà vu during the poker game, but when Data deals the next hand, all the cards are threes, followed by a hand where all players have three of a kind. The number 3 begins appearing throughout other parts of the ship's operations while, again, they determine they are stuck in a time loop. When they reach the anomaly and the ship appears from it, Data suddenly realizes that the 3 stands for the number of command pips on Riker's uniform, and realizes that Riker's original tactic (decompressing the main shuttlebay) will work. This allows Enterprise to safely clear the oncoming ship. The anomaly disappears and the time loop ends, and the crew realizes they have been trapped in the loop for over 17 days, while the other ship, the USS Bozeman, has been missing for over 90 years. Picard welcomes the Bozeman's crew to the 24th century.

Review:

While the concept of the loop in time would be made famous more generally through the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, this episode of TNG was written, produced and aired well before that, and if the TNG staff are right in believing such an approach to time travel hadn’t been done before, then this episode is quite ground-breaking. It’s certainly not one that would have been easy to make, as Riker actor Jonathan Frakes directed the episode and was under orders to direct each pass through the time loop differently. In essence, the episode uses a combination of alternate camera angles and changes in the events of each loop to try and avoid any appearance that you’re watching the same act multiple times. Now I say try because apparently when the episode first aired in the US, a lot of viewers phoned in to report a possible broadcast problem.

Watching with the benefit of advance knowledge of what the episode is about, it’s much easier to appreciate that you’re not just watching the opening act multiple times, and it gets more interesting on the later loops due to the crew’s growing awareness of what is happening. However, I think we could have done with just three loops, as by the fourth one, we’ve worked out what’s happened and I think an extra loop at that stage is almost redundant. It’s also a shame that Ensign Ro has so little to do in her recurring guest role this time round, as does Kelsey Grammer right at the end. It would have been a much better idea if they could have saved a guest appearance by Grammer for something with more substance and less of a techno-babble problem episode. Still, all in all it’s a good episode; I give it 8 out of 10.

Episode 19: The First Duty

Plot (as given by me):

As the Enterprise returns to Earth for Captain Picard to give the year’s commencement address at Star Fleet Academy, the Academy Superintendent Admiral Brand informs Picard that an accident involving Wesley Crusher has occurred. Picard subsequently relates the news to Wesley’s mother Dr Beverley Crusher; apparently, Wesley has by now become a member of Nova Squadron, a much-revered part of the Academy flight team on campus lead by cadet Nicholas Locarno. The squad had been practicing a flight demonstration for the commencement event at the Saturn flight range when a collision occurred, resulting in the death of squad member Joshua Albert.

Picard puts the Enterprise at Admiral Brand’s disposal if it should help the subsequent investigation, and while visiting the Academy Picard also looks up the groundskeeper Boothby, who once gave Picard some hard advice as a cadet that helped him out of a problem of his own. Picard tries to thank Boothby, but he notes that Picard having turned his life around well enough to become captain of the Enterprise is thanks enough. At the investigation hearings, Locarno claims the crash resulted from Joshua panicking due to his being a nervous flyer, but satellite footage of Nova Squadron’s flyers reveals a discrepancy between the squad’s account and what actually occurred. Picard later talks further with Boothby about the squad, who reveals what a high image they’ve established for themselves and the influence their leader Locarno has over them.

An analysis carried out by Lt. Commanders Data and La Forge suggests the squadron were trying to ignite their plasma trails; combined with the squad formation depicted by the surveillance satellite, Picard deduces that Nova Squadron was attempting a different manoeuvre to the one they claimed; specifically, a Kolvoord Starburst, which involves the ships passing within metres of each other at a central point before igniting their plasma trails. The manoeuvre has not been performed at the Academy in over a century because the last time it was, an accident occurred that killed the entire squad trying to perform it. Picard confronts Wesley with his deductions, and when Wesley refuses to answer, the captain tells him that a lie of omission is still a lie, and the ‘first duty’ of every Star Fleet officer is to the truth.

Faced with an ultimatum by Picard to either admit the truth himself or be turned in by the captain, Wesley goes to Locarno, who refuses to even consider joining Wesley in abandoning their cover-up. To him, the team comes above everything, and tells Wesley he should resign from the Academy if he can’t live with getting away with the accident via cover-up. As Admiral Brand brings the investigation to a close, noting that she cannot prove any dishonesty on Nova Squadron’s part and preparing to give them a minor punishment, Wesley speaks up and admits the truth. Initially, Locarno says nothing, but it is later revealed to Wesley by Picard that Locarno makes a plea to take full responsibility, noting that he abused his position as squad leader to not only make the squad attempt the prohibited stunt, but also to cover it up. As a result, Locarno is expelled while the rest of the squad will have all of their academy credits for the past year suspended, preventing them from advancing with the rest of their class.

Picard warns Wesley he will have a hard time ahead now the whole Academy knows the truth, and Wesley thanks Picard for his advice as the pair bid each other farewell.

Review:

While Data episodes tend to be my favourites among TNG episodes, I honestly believe this is probably one of the show’s most iconic episodes, if not the most iconic Trek episode ever. It’s Wesley’s second guest appearance since actor Wil Wheaton left TNG, and to date it’s his best appearance, but it’s also the episode where we get to meet Boothby, who is a remarkably influential and iconic character for the series despite his relative lack of appearances. Through in future Voyager cast member Robert Duncan McNeil playing Nick Locarno, and it’s well on its way to be being a very good episode before you factor in Patrick Stewart delivering some truly iconic acting as Captain Picard, especially the Ready Room scene with Wesley that makes the episode so iconic.

Now apparently, executive producer Michael Piller had to do some pushing back against the original intentions of this episode’s writers to get us the episode in its final format. Apparently, the original idea was that the incident was far more serious, and by not owning up the whole squad would have been kicked out of the Academy, with Wesley remaining silent to honour his word to his friends. However, Piller didn’t like the idea of Wesley doing something that severe, and as a parent he wanted to push for Wesley to be responsible and eventually admit the truth, to correct his mistake in the end by owning up even if it meant making things worse for himself and his friends.

In both versions, the character conflict remains the same; to stand by one’s friends or by one’s duty to be truthful. Now granted, there will be other occasions where the circumstances require discretion and loyalty to one’s friends simply because most people would misunderstand the truth. However, in most cases I think admitting the truth is the best thing to do, even if it does mean you and others close to you may get in a bit of trouble, and this is for two reasons. First, true friendship means being willing to call your friends out if their behaviour is morally wrong, and making sure they do the right thing.

Second, we’re all human and we all make mistakes; that is a simple, irrefutable fact of life, and most of the time if we do make mistakes, we can stop ourselves from repeating them by learning from them. However, in some cases people can’t learn from their mistakes if they avoid taking responsibility for them, and some people may not take that responsibility alone. Sometimes they need help, whether through being called on it like Picard did for Wesley, or owning up on behalf of those involved like Wesley did for his squad-mates. Moreover, a ‘friends before authority’ attitude backfires in other areas; it’s how bullying gets to be so prevalent in schools and work places, and it is why concepts of ‘playground’/’locker room’ honour codes should be systematically obliterated from our society.

Friendship, true friendship, is not based on secret codes of silence that enable bullying, encourage lying and that are dishonourable and despicable to say the least. It is based on honesty and trust, including the trust that your friends will hold you to account if you betray yourself and that you will do the same for them if they need it. True friendship means sometimes being a bit harsh, a bit tough, and any friendship that can’t stand such tempering probably isn’t really friendship to start with. Overall, I give this episode 10 out of 10.

Episode 20: Cost of Living

Plot (as adapted from Wikipedia):

Lwaxana Troi arrives on the Enterprise, announcing that she will be holding her wedding there with a man that shares many interests with her, as judged by a computerized matchmaking system. Captain Picard, initially wary of Lwaxana's plans, is relieved that all she wants from him is to give her away as the bride. Privately, Counsellor Deanna Troi talks to Lwaxana about the marriage, and while she is happy that her mother is marrying again, she is surprised and concerned that she will not follow the Betazoid custom of being a naked bride at the wedding. Lwaxana informs her that such customs offend the groom and his people. Deanna notes her decision to abandon her own custom is strange given the pride she normally takes in her Betazoid heritage and the high rank that she holds in their society.

Meanwhile, Lt. Worf is having difficulties in getting his son Alexander to complete his obligations such as homework and chores. Deanna offers the idea of creating a contract that would allow Alexander to have time to play after completing his tasks. While this initially seems to be acceptable to Alexander, Lwaxana arrives and downplays the idea. Lwaxana makes friends with Alexander, taking him to a holodeck simulation of the Parallax colony despite Worf's orders. Lwaxana encourages Alexander to be a free spirit, but Deanna believes that Lwaxana's message is confusing Alexander.

Eventually, Campio, Lwaxana's husband-to-be, arrives at the Enterprise, and Lwaxana finds that he is not as perfect a fit for her as the computer match suggested, being stricter and more demanding than she was led to believe. She evades Campio by taking Alexander to the holodeck. There, Alexander reiterates some of the advice she had previously given him. Taking it to heart, Lwaxana arrives at the wedding naked as per Betazoid custom, and Campio, offended, leaves her at the altar. Lwaxana winks at Alexander, who smiles in turn.

During these events, the Enterprise becomes infected with an undetectable parasite that feeds off nitrium, a component used in most of the starship's materials. Though initial system failures are attributed to normal wear, they become concerned when warp and life support systems begin to fail. The crew is able to identify the parasite, and as life systems fail and cause the crew to pass out due to lack of air, Lt. Commander Data, who is able to function without oxygen, navigates the starship to a nearby asteroid field rich in nitrium and coerces the parasite to move there. Ship systems are quickly restored to normal before the wedding.

The episode ends on an amusing note with Lwaxana relaxing in the Holodeck simulated Parallax colony mud-baths with Deanna, Alexander, and Worf. Lwaxana admits she made a mistake with Campio and thanks Alexander for helping her out. Meanwhile, a confused and irritated Worf asks, "You're just supposed to sit here?"

Review:

As ever, throwing Lwaxana Troi into an episode proves to give us a rather poor showing, because the character is so over-the-top in her supposedly comedic antics that you end up feeling as annoyed by her as most of the Enterprise crew. It’s only when she’s forced to drop that façade that you get anything of worth out of the episode’s main plot. Basically, Lwaxana is trying to re-marry out of a desire to avoid loneliness, and ends up trying to live vicariously through Alexander because her intended husband is the total opposite to her. It’s not the best approach to the situation, nor does the B-plot about parasites endangering the ship fit in well with that, or with Worf trying to teach Alexander about responsibility. A better use of these elements would have been to have the intended couple each having trouble accepting the other’s perspective on life, and so they’d each take sides in the Worf-Alexander dispute to try and indirectly keep the argument going. Worf might then be convinced to give his duties a rest for a bit to see things more from Alexander’s point of view, only for said dereliction of duty to endanger the Enterprise. Getting through the danger, father and son would see the value of compromise and balance, and in so doing demonstrate the idea to Lwaxana and Campo, who would follow suit. As it is, the episode is just another cringe-worthy instalment more worthy of the show’s earlier seasons, and I can only give it 4 out of 10.

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firebirdsdaughter · 5 years ago

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Hmmm…

… I wonder if Yua was supposed to just have AIMS scrap Horobi and didn’t, for some reason… Interestingly, Over-Time translated Isamu’s line as ‘you were poking at him’ while Genm Corp translated it as ‘we [AIMS itself, presumably, rather than him] were fiddling around w/ it’… Presumably he’s referring to repairs, and it’s not a huge difference whether it was Yua or just generally AIMS that did so, but… Curious. I guess they were maybe trying to find out what made him go homicidal and hoped repairs would give them access or something, but maybe that failed.

All in all, I don’t think Yua was ‘supposed’ to just leave him w/ AIMS, in particular Isamu. I don’t think that Gai necessarily cared to specifically order her to see Horobi destroyed, but he may have intended for her to do that. Though I do hope him deliberately pausing to step on Horobi’s chest indicates a past w/ them, I think he considers Horobi to have served his purpose and no longer cares what happens (which could come back to bite him, and I hope it will). This, I guess could be Yua’s way of trying to give Isamu some closure after everything that happened—which makes her being smacked w/ Gai’s reveal that he was the root cause of Daybreak all the more rough, bc she knows very well how that effected Isamu, and I think was hoping he’d find some sort of peace from it now…

Meanwhile, Isamu’s starting to question his outlook. Obviously, he’s not going to just flip a one eighty, but… He’s actually looking at the state Horobi is in and taking the time to think. I think he was building up MetsubouJinrai and esp Horobi as some sort of… I dunno, big, dramatic… Thing, in his mind, and now… For all, in a way, I think he recognises them more than even Aruto does, Ismau’s not quite the level of thinking of HumaGear as ‘people,’ which is why I think he was saying a ‘pile of scrap metal,’ but… He finally comes face to face w/ what he believes to have been the architect of his trauma, finally apparently overcomes it, and… It’s just not right. I feel like Isamu’s getting the sense that there’s something wrong here. Bc this ‘big enemy’ that he’s built up, this threat is… Now just a broken, shutdown robot. It’s not quite pity, but… But he’s shifting. I think he’s starting to wonder just how this happened.

I still think Isamu’s a better person to interact w/ Horobi bc, well, we all know how Horobi and Aruto piss each other off, but also… I dunno. I have a strong suspicion that, if anyone can understand Horobi’s mindset, it’s Isamu, the one who has also spent all those years consumed by hate and anger. And I also still think Isamu will be better able to accept/understand a certain aspect of singularity that I think Aruto doesn’t quite get, which is that it’s merely about AI evolving beyond human understanding, in the same way that the details of the human mind are. I think, as I’ve said before, that Isamu is better able to accept the concept of self-aware HumaGears still having the capacity to change and grow, that they have an equal capacity for good and bad, and that what their predominant mindset is upon awakening is about what drove them to wake up, but that it’s not the be all and end all. All Aruto did when learning about how Jin was only fighting bc it was all he knew, was how he was raised, was lament ‘why couldn’t you have been different’ and then destroyed him. Isamu, going by the ep 17 preview, is actually going to be confronting and debating and arguing w/ Horobi, which I think is a key difference. It’s not that Isamu likes HumaGear, he doesn’t, but… I think esp w/ Horobi, there’s a weird respect/recognition there. Isamu holds Horobi accountable for his actions, shouts and tries to argue w/ him, like he has w/ every other HumaGear, w/ only Raiden fighting back. I still think Aruto’s sympathies and definition of ‘good’ in HumaGear are still very rooted on whether they benefit humans, and he still doesn’t quite understand the potential he talks about. I think he could have talked Jin down if he’d questioned further, if he’d shown respect and recognition for the fact that Jin had become self aware, and still had the potential to change. Jin was already incredibly advanced at processing and acting and responding. Like I said in a previous salt post, imagine if Aruto had kept pressing, if he’d eventually discovered the cause of Jin’s grief, offered to help fix Horobi and find a way to work together. But he didn’t. He couldn’t seem to grasp that HumaGear don’t stop evolving and learning. If anything, he taught Jin that even if a human espouses wanting peace w/ HumaGear, they’ll still just destroy one that goes against their perceptions for any reason, that they still don’t see HumaGear as thinking equals. Aruto probably could have reasoned w/ Jin—maybe it would have taken a while, but he could have. But… It’s like, he talks about seeing them as people, but in the end didn’t treat Jin like one. Isamu, on the other hand, hates and fears HumaGear, but… He tries to fight w/ them, he tries to engage. When he has Horobi, who, as far as he knows, caused all his trauma, right in front of him, his first thought isn’t ‘if only you’d been different’ it’s ‘this is who you are right now and this is who I’m going to engage w/.’ He doesn’t think ‘we should reset/remake you and ‘correct your learning’ (ugh, that wording pisses me off),’ he thinks ‘I am going to fight and debate with you as who you are.’ He wants to argue, to hold Horobi accountable. I don’t think he’s thinking ‘I can change your views,’ but he’s giving more validity to Horobi’s mind and ability to think than Aruto gave to Jin’s. More respect.

It’s part of why I think it’d be stronger to have Isamu be the human who get through to Horobi. They’re foils. Isamu treats Horobi more like an equal, imo, than Aruto treated Jin. Like an equal he hates and wants revenge on, but more of an equal. He doesn’t expect HumaGear to be naturally kind and benevolent, and never has. He’s more ready to accept them having darker sides and thoughts and feelings etc. I can’t deny that I also get a smug little feeling about the possibility of such a feat kind of throwing in Aruto’s face that he didn’t need to destroy Jin, by proving that HumaGear aren’t bound to what they learn upon their first singularity. Maybe even something where Horobi can look at him and ask why Isamu, who was traumatised by HumaGear during Daybreak, who hated Horobi above all, can look at him [Horobi] and consider things, can actually recognise him and confront him and spare him long enough to actually talk to him—but Aruto, w/ all his speeches and love for HumaGear, concluded so quickly to just kill Jin, who he had just learned was a child raised into this conflict, all while going on about wanting HumaGear and humans to ‘smile’ together. Why did Aruto, the supposed sympathiser, conclude that Jin, a child just following someone else’s wishes, deserved to die while Isamu, who hates HumaGear, could conclude that Horobi, who was giving the orders and possibly the most willing villain, should have at least a chance to live?

It’s weird, and hard to explain, and this turned into salt w/out meaning to. I may post the top part again w/out all this stuff, so people who don’t want to deal w/ all this rambling don’t have to. It’s just… I feel like it’s an interesting comparison. Aruto loves and sympathises w/ and supports HumaGear, but can’t seem to accept that they might develop thoughts other than exclusive benevolence to humanity. Doesn’t… Quite understand that ‘self-awareness’ isn’t just some ‘final true nature’ if that makes sense, but something that means they’ve evolved beyond human understanding in the same way that the actual subtleties of the human nature are beyond understanding. Like… Like he can’t accept HumaGear who vary from his ‘ideal’ of what they are to the point that he can’t understand that, just like humans, self-aware HumaGear are still changing. Isamu, meanwhile, hates and fears HumaGear and is trigger happy up the wazoo, but… He… He ‘sees’ them better, if that makes sense? He doesn’t expect them to be unquestioningly benevolent towards humans all the time, bc he never thought they were. He treats them the same way he treats other humans he doesn’t like. I wouldn’t say he quite considers them people or anything (he is shifting in his views and it was partially Aruto who prompted that), but he gives more respect to their capacity as people for both good and bad than Aruto seems to. Aruto’s sympathy is rooted in how they benefit humans. Isamu never thought they were a benefit, but while he’s not sympathetic… He almost recognises them as people more than Aruto does.

None of this makes sense, I know. I’m sorry.

#Firebird Salt #I'm sorry it's hard to explain #I know the cultural implications #like how it's about being part of the society #but what's bugging me is that I think they COULD have reached Jin and brought him back into society #Jin was so special as a HumaGear made by another HumaGear #not made to serve humans #yes he was made to destroy humans #but he wasn't programmed like that he was RAISED #imagine if he had been human #I bet Aruto would've pressed more there'd've been trying to talk him down #a self-aware HumaGear should be clarified as being the same as a human #still constantly learning and changing #I'm really kinda hoping Horobi gets to confront Aruto and be like 'you talk about wanting us to live in harmony but you destroyed my son'#'who was not responsible for this and just doing what I and the ark told him'#'how is that sympathising w/ us and respecting our singularities?'

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vintage-miseries · 6 years ago

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The CCB

There’s little magic left to be found in England, and that which remains is squirreled away into small, secret places and is guarded most jealously. Humans, despite their voracious love for fairy tales, parlour tricks, and boy wizards do not react the best when they come nose to nose with real magic. Real magic, here, is not David Blaine or Copperfield, or even that warm, honey-in-your-gut sensation you get when you see particularly mesmerizing fireworks. Real magic in this case comes in multiple forms, but none of them particularly awe-inspiring. Rather, most of them are beyond terrifying and cause immediate trouser-soiling.

The last magic in the world (and what a peculiarly sad notion that was!), did not come in the form of waving wands, unicorns, or flying carpets, but rather in the daily press and shuffle of the local population. As a certain (and terribly human writer herself) author might say, the _Muggle _population was entirely unaware of what went on just under their noses. This second, secret world was not invisible, but integrated. So used to hiding in plain sight is magic that it has made the daily grind into a costume, into a habit, and most sadly, into a lifestyle.

Would it intrigue you to know just how many creatures, of this world but unknown, shuffle themselves into human form just to pass their days? This magic, magic being a broad, broader, and broadest of terms, is not so much a thing as it is many things. It is, logically speaking, an umbrella term for anything that falls into a human’s definition of something that is non-sensical, defying explanation, or just downright bizarre.

This ideology, however, has caused much debate amongst the Magical community, with many arguing that not everything “non-sensical” is actually magical, and that “bizarre” is not specific enough to fit into the terminology, so really a lot of things considered to be magic are just, well, not.

For instance, many of the older magics insist that Aliens, while definitely bizarre, are not in fact magic, but more of Science. Of course, as with any ethnic argument, this debate hit rather heavily with both the Fresno Nightcrawler community, as well as with the Flatwoods Monster.

“We exist, we’re here,” The Flatwoods Monster, who goes by day by the name of Carol, said in one interview. “To deny us our place in the Umbrella term is to say that we don’t belong. Well, I’ve been here just as long as most of them, if not longer. How can you say I don’t belong? Just because I’m not from this planet, that means I’m not Magic? You have no idea what I was on my planet. None!”

The Fresno Nightcrawlers could not be reached for comment.**

It is tepidly agreed upon by many, that any with access to the CCB (The Creature Control Board), can call themselves magic. The CCB, otherwise known simply as ‘The Board’, has its main building of operation in California. Several smaller, though no less important branches find themselves in Toronto, Ireland, Brussels, Russia, Australia, Peru, and Cairo. There are also outlier stations across the globe, though their google reviews have never risen above 3.5 stars.

The history of the CCB has varied from decade to decade, but it’s purpose has always remained the same. Opened in 1855, it was meant to be a communal hub for the world’s magic. Hot meals were served, advice was given, human visages were constructed, and jobs were allocated. It attracted several thousand in its first month, and subsequently shut a month later due to over-demand. A year later it reopened, armed and ready, and over the years grew into what it is today.

The CCB is now a focal point for the magical community. A community centre, healthcare professional, and Job centre all in one, it is the foundation for all magical life on earth. Magicals come from across the globe seeking guidance or aid, and the CCB delivers. Last year, a total of over 600,000 appointments were made, it is expected that this number will double within the next decade.

Of course, while the vast majority of Magicals are happy to seek out the CCB for aid, there are plenty who are happy to keep themselves separate. Many claim it to be a generational issue, with older Magicals refusing aid or even acknowledging the resource entirely. A poll conducted in 1985 revealed that while 80% of the world’s Magic did indeed use the service, a whopping 20% chose not to. Many of those polled refused to give comment, though a later census revealed that a good number of that fifth were in fact Cairn Creatures.

Cairn Creatures, an unofficial title, are any Magicals born before the approximate date of 1200 CE. They are often assumed to be an offshoot of the Fae world, many having been human in some variation before undergoing magical transmutation. Though they are near extinct in number, these Cairn Creatures walk the line between the mortal world, and that of the Seelie/Unseelie.

It is purported that fewer than one hundred remain in the world, with many of those still residing in either Europe, England, or in Africa.

“It’s a load of p***. This whole classification system is shit. Why would I bother? Are you asking me to join a union? I’m just fine by myself, cheers. Never needed some poxy doctor in a suit to help me mind my own business, ta. Know how to do that myself.” Cat Sidhe, known as Illiver Kash, 1998 CE

One major issue for the CCB has always been management. Prior to its creation in 1855, there was little in the way of policing Magicals. An uncertain set of laws, somewhat akin to Christianity’s Ten Commandments existed amongst the community, though these were treated more as guidelines than as strict policy. So it was in 1859 when the CCB faced its second major hurdle, this time in the instituting of the RRMC. The RRMC, or the _Rules & Regulations for Magical Continuity _was a strict, 6 rule code that each Magical was expected to adhere to. These rules evolved with time, though their core structures have remained the same since their original incarnation. They are as follows:

I. Kill only as necessary; Your survival is based on more than hunger

II. Order first; Adhere to law both Magical and human, for it keeps your secret

III. Purpose in Power; your strength makes you exemplary, but do not forget that you are other

IV. Understand restraint; retribution always comes with a price, if not to you then to your kin

V. Understand Balance; spend your days under guise, the night time is for you

VI. Bond of kin; do no harm to your fellows, for it is the blackest of crimes

As of 2017 CE, the RRMC has evolved into a 260 page manual. This manual has seven key chapters, the first being an introduction, and the latter seven each pertaining to one of the key tenets. Though the original rules remain in place, each now hosts several sub classes and all fall under regulation and moderation policies.

For instance, tenet I, kill only as necessary has been heavily edited, with kill licenses granted to only a select few. These licenses are known most commonly as K-factors, and allow anywhere from one to six human kills a year depending on necessity. At present, less than 25 members of the CCB hold a K6 license.

It is not a stretch to say that these rules were deeply unpopular in their initial years, though as with most policy changes, the community did eventually settle into compliance. There are a few, however, that did not. When the RRMC was put into place, it came with much discussion on the method of dealing with those who did not comply, especially as their sixth tenet explicitly banned the killing of Magicals. In the end it was decided that permissions would be redacted, and sharply, for any who broke the code. In modern times, these permissions would extend to travel permissions, state arrest, and narrowed territories, as well as lessened monetary allowance.

Those that persist despite these allowances are usually allowed ultimatums in the form of banishment. One such case can be traced back to 1976, during the brief trial of Azelgore, known more commonly by humans and other Magicals as the Loch Ness Monster. Though he was initially granted a K6 license, his quota overpassed his allowance by a harrowing degree, and the CCB had no choice but to remove him from his territory. He accepted banishment to the Fae plane, and has since returned only a handful of times on specialised (supervised) allowance.

For most historians working amongst the CCB, its short history is still a colourful one, and one that has markedly improved the lives of most creatures who make use of its services.

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shuga-hill · 7 years ago

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Life’s Code: Blockchain and the Future of Genomics

In an era of hotly contested debates surrounding data ownership, privacy and monetization, one particular piece of data could be said to be the most personal of all: the human genome.

While we are 99.9 percent identical in our genetic makeup across the species, the remaining 0.1 percent contains unique variations in code that are thought to influence our predisposition toward certain diseases and even our temperamental biases — a blueprint for how susceptible we are to everything from heart disease and Alzheimer’s to jealousy, recklessness and anxiety.

2018 offered ample examples of how bad actors can wreak havoc with nefarious use of even relatively trivial data. For those concerned to protect this most critical form of identity, blockchain has piqued considerable interest as a powerful alternative to the closed architectures and proprietary exploits of the existing genomics data market — promising in their stead a secure and open protocol for life’s code.

Encrypted chains

Sequencing the human genome down to the molecular level of the four ‘letters’ that bind into the double-stranded helices of our DNA was first completed in 2003. The project cost $3.7 billion and 13 years of computing power. Today, it costs $1,000 per unique genome and takes a matter of days. Estimates are that it will soon cost as little as $100.

As genomic data-driven drug design and targeted therapies evolve, pharmaceutical and biotech companies’ interest is expected to catapult the genomics data market in the coming years, with a forecast to hit $27.6 billion by 2025.

If the dataset of your Facebook likes and news feed stupefactions has already been recognized as a major, monetizable asset, the value locked up in your genetic code is increasing exponentially as the revolution in precision medicine and gene editing gathers pace.

Within the past year, unprecedented approvals have been given to new gene therapies in the U.S. One edits cells from a patient's immune system to cure non-Hodgkin lymphoma; another treats a rare, inherited retinal disease that can lead to blindness.

Yet, here’s the rub.

Genomics’ unparalleled potential to trigger a paradigm shift in modern medicine relies on leveraging vast datasets to establish correlations between genetic variants and traits.

Generating the explosion of big genomic data that is still needed to decode the 4-bits of the living organism faces hurdles that are not only scientific, but ethical, social and technological.

For many at the edge of this frontier, this is exactly where Nakamoto’s fabled 2008 white paper — and the technology that would come to be known as blockchain — comes in.

Cointelegraph spoke with three figures from the blockchain genomics space to find out why.

Who owns your genome? Resurrecting the wooly mammoth… and blockchain

For Professor George Church, the world-famous maverick geneticist at Harvard, the boundaries between technologies in and out of the lab are porous. Having co-pioneered direct genome sequencing back in 1984, a short digest of his recent ambitions include attempts to resurrect the long-extinct mammoth, create virus-proof cells and even to reverse aging.

He has now placed another bleeding-edge technology at the center of the genomics revolution: blockchain.

Last year, Church — alongside Harvard colleagues Dennis Grishin and Kamal Obbad — co-founded the blockchain startup Nebula Genomics. Church had been trying for years to accelerate and drive genomic data generation at scale. He had appealed to volunteers to contribute to his nonprofit Personal Genome Project (PGP) — a ‘Wikipedia’ of open-access human genomic data that has aggregated around 10,000 samples so far.

PGP relied on people forfeiting both privacy and ownership in pursuit of advancing science. As Church said in a recent interview, mostly they were either the “particularly altruistic,” or people concerned with accelerating research for a particular disease because of family experiences.

In other cases, as cybersecurity expert DNABits’ Dror Sam Brama told Cointelegraph, it is the patients themselves who generate the data and are “sick enough to throw away any ownership and privacy concerns”:

“The very sick come to the health care system and say, ‘We'll give you anything you want, take it, we’ll sign any paper, consent. Just heal us, find a cure.’”

The challenge is getting everybody else. While no one knows exactly how many people have had their genomes sequenced to date, some estimates suggest it is around one million.

Startups like Nebula and DNABits propose that a tokenized, blockchain-enabled ecosystem could be the technological tipping point for onboarding the masses.

By allowing people to monetize their genomes and sell access directly to data buyers, Nebula thinks its platform could help drive sequencing costs down “to zero or even offer [people] a net profit.”

While Nebula won’t subsidize whole genome sequencing directly, a blockchain model would allow interested buyers — say, two pharmaceutical companies — to pitch in the cash for someone’s sequence in return for access to their data.

Tokenization opens up the flexibility and granular consent for enabling different scenarios. As Brama suggested, a data owner could be entitled to shares in whichever drug might be developed based on the research that they have enabled or be reimbursed for their medical prescription in crypto tokens. Contracts would be published and hashed, and reference to the individual’s consent recorded on the blockchain.

Genomic dystopias

Driving and accelerating data generation is just one part of the equation.

Nebula ran a survey that found that, rather than simply affordability, privacy and ethical concerns eclipsed all other factors when people were asked whether or not they would consider having their genome sequenced. In another study of 13,000 people, 86 percent said they worried about misuse of their genetic data: over half echoed fears about privacy.

These concerns are not simply founded in the dystopian 90s sci-fi of Hollywood — think Gattaca’s biopunk imaginary of a future society in the grips of a neo-eugenics fever.

As Ofer Lidsky — co-founder, CEO and CTO of blockchain genomics startup DNAtix — put it:

“Once your DNA has been compromised, you cannot change it. It’s not like a credit card that you can cancel and receive a new one. Your genetic code is with you for all your life […] Once it’s been compromised, there’s no way back.”

Data is increasingly intercepted, marketized and even weaponized. Sequencing — let alone sharing — your genome is perhaps a step further than many are willing to take, given its singularity, irrevocability and longevity.

DNABits’ Brama gave his cybersecurity take, saying that:

“The consequences are very difficult to imagine, but in a world [in which] people are building carriers like viruses that will spread to cells in the body and edit them — it’s frightening, but in fact, all the building blocks are already there: genome sequencing, breaches of data, gene editing. People are now working to fix major health conditions using gene editing in vivo. But we should assume that every tool out there will eventually also get into the wrong hands.”

He added, “We're not talking about taking advantage of someone just for one night with GHB or some other drug” — this would impact the rest of an individual’s life.

This April, on the heels of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, news broke that police detectives had mined a hobbyists’ genealogy database for fragments of individuals’ DNA they hoped would help solve a murder case that had gone cold for over thirty years.

Law enforcement faced no resistance in accessing a centralized store of genetic material that had been uploaded by an unwitting public. And while many hailed the arrest of the Golden State Killer through a tangle of DNA, others voiced considerable unease.

This obscurity of access has implications beyond forensics. While Brama’s dystopia may be some way off, today there are concerns about genetic discrimination by employers and insurance firms — the latter of which is currently only legally proscribed in a partial way. Grishin echoed this, noting that in the U.S., “you can be denied life insurance because of your DNA.”

This May, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission opened a probe into popular consumer genetic testing firms — including 23andMe and Ancestry.com — over their policies for handling personal and genetic information, and how they share that data with third parties.

23andMe and Ancestry.com represent a recent phenomenon of so-called direct-to-consumer genetic testing, the popularity of which is estimated to have more than doubled last year.

These firms use a narrower technique called genotyping, which identifies 600,000 positions spaced at approximately regular intervals across the 6.4 billion letters of an entire genome. While limited, it still reveals inherently personal genetic information.

The highly popular 23andMe home genotyping kit — sunnily packaged as “Welcome to You” — promises to tell people everything from their ancestral makeup to how likely they are to spend their nights in the fretful clutches of insomnia. The kit comes with a price tag as low as $99.

This July, the world’s sixth largest pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), invested $300 million in a four-year deal to gain access to 23andMe’s database, and the testing firm is estimated to have earned $130 million from selling access to around a million human genotypes, working out at an average price of around $130. By comparison, Facebook reportedly generates around $82 in gross revenue from the data of a single active user.

Battle-proof, anonymized blockchain systems for the genomics revolution

In this increasingly opaque genomics data landscape, private firms monetize the genotypic data spawned by their consumers, and sequence data is fragmented across proprietary, centralized silos — whether in the unwieldy legacy systems of health care and research institutions or in the privately-owned troves of biotech firms.

Bringing genomics onto the blockchain would allow for the circulation that is needed to accelerate research, while protecting this uniquely personal information by keeping anonymized identities separate from cryptographic identifiers. Users remain in control of their data and decide exactly who it gets shared with and for which purposes. That access, in turn, would be tracked on an auditable and immutable ledger.

Grishin outlined Nebula’s version, which would place asymmetric requirements on different members of the ecosystem. Users would have the option to remain anonymous, but a permissioned blockchain system with verified, validator nodes would require data buyers who use the network to be fully transparent about their identity:

“If someone reaches out to you, it shouldn't be just a cryptographic network ID, but it should say this is John Smith from Johnson & Johnson, who works, say, in oncology.”

Grishin added that Nebula has experimented with both Blockstack and the Ethereum(ETH) blockchain but has since decided to move to an in-house prototype, considering the 15 transactions-per-second capacity of Ethereum to be insufficient for its ecosystem.

DNABits’ Brama, also committed to using a permissioned system, proposed using “the simplest and most robust form of blockchain — i.e., a Bitcoin-type network.”

“The more powerful and the more capable engine that you use, the larger the surface attack.”

Lie-proofing the blockchain

23andMe is said to store around five million genotype customer profiles, and rival firm Ancestry.com around 10 million. For each profile, they collect around 300 phenotypic data points — creating surveys that aim to find out how many cigarettes you (think) you’ve smoked during your lifetime or whether yoga or Prozac was more effective in managing your depression.

A phenotype is the set of observable characteristics of an individual that results from the interaction of his or her genotype with their environment. Generating and sharing access to this data is crucial for decoding the genome through a correlation of variants and traits. But as Grishin notes, being largely self-reported, the quality of much of the existing data is uncertain, and a tokenized genomics faces one hurdle in this respect:

“If people will be able to monetize their personal genomic data, then you can imagine that some people might think, ‘If I claim to have a rare condition, many pharma companies will be interested in buying access to my genome’ — which is just not necessarily true. The value of a genome is kind of difficult to predict and it's not correct to say that if you have something rare, then your genome will be more valuable. In fact many studies need a lot of control samples that are kind of just normal.”

Education can help make people aware that they won’t be making any more money by lying and that a middle-of-the-road genome might be just as interesting for a buyer as an unusual one. But Grishin also noted that a blockchain system can offer unique mechanisms that deter deception, even where education fails:

“Blockchain can help to create phenotype surveys that detect incorrect responses or identify where an individual participant has tried to lie. And this can be combined with blockchain-enabled escrow systems, where, for example, before you participate in a survey, you have to deposit a small amount of cryptocurrency in an escrow wallet.”

If conflicting responses indicate that someone has tried to lie about their medical condition, then their deposit could be withheld in a way that is much easier to implement within a blockchain system than compared to one using fiat currencies.

2018: Viruses and chromosomes hit the blockchain

Even with just a fraction of the population on board, given the data-intensivity of the body’s code, a tsunami of sequence is already flooding the existing centralized stores.

The complex, raw dataset of a single genome runs to 200 gigabytes: In June 2017, the U.S. National Institute of Health’s GenBank reportedly contained over two trillion bases of sequence. One of the world’s largest biotech firms, China’s BGI Genomics, announced that same month that it planned to produce five petabases of new DNA in 2017, increasing each year to hit 100 petabases by 2020.

In his interview with Cointelegraph, Lidsky proposed that the raw 200 gigabyte dataset is unnecessary for analysts, emphasizing that initial genome sequencing is read multiple times “say 30 or 100 times,” to mitigate inaccuracies. Once it’s combined, he explained, “the size of the sequence is reduced to 1.5 gigabytes.” This still requires significant compression to bring it to the blockchain. As a reference, the average size of a transaction on the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain was 423 kilobytes, as of mid-June 2018.

Average transaction size on the Bitcoin blockchain, 2014-18. Source: TradeBlock.com

In June, DNAtix announced the first transfer of a complete chromosome using blockchain technology — specifically IBM’s Hyperledger fabric. Lidsky told Cointelegraph the firm had succeeded in achieving a 99 percent compression rate for DNA this August.

Nebula, for its part, envisions that even on a blockchain, data transfer is unnecessary and ill-advised, given the unique sensitivity of genomics. It proposes sharing data access instead. The solution would combine blockchain with advanced encryption techniques and distributed computing methods. As Grishin outlined:

“Your data can be analyzed locally on your computer by you just running an app on your data yourself […] with additional security measures in place — for example, by using homomorphic encryption to share data in an encrypted form.”

Grishin explained that homomorphic techniques encrypt data but ensure that it is not “nonsensical” — creating “transformations that morph the data without disturbing it”:

“The data buyer doesn't get the underlying data itself but computes on its encrypted form to derive results from it. Code is therefore being moved to the data rather than data being moved to researchers.”

Encrypted data can be made available to developers of so-called genomic apps — something that Nebula, DNAtix and many other emerging startups in the field all propose as one means of providing users with an interpretation of their data. They could also provide a further source of monetization for researchers and other third-party developers.

But is ‘outsourcing’ genomic interpretation to an app that simple? The decades-old health care model referred patients to genetic counselors to go over risks and talk through expectations, helping to translate what can be bewildering and often scary results.

Consumer genetic testing firms have already been accused of leaving their clients “with lots of data and few answers.” Beyond satisfying genealogical curiosity and interpreting a range of ‘wellness’ genes, 23andMe can reveal whether you carry a genetic variant that could impact your child’s future health and has — as of 2017 — even been authorized to disclose genetic health risks, including for breast cancer and Parkinson’s.

Blockchain may not fare much better when it comes to leaving individuals in the dark, faced with the blue glow of their computer screens. Nebula and DNAtix are both considering how to integrate genetic counselors into their ecosystems, and Grishin also proposed that users would be able to “opt in” to whether they really want to “know everything,” or only want “actionable” insights — i.e., things that modern medicine can address.

Blockchain and big pharma

Prescription drug sales globally are forecast to hit $1.2 trillion by 2024. But closing the feedback loop between pharmaceuticals and the millions of people who take their pills each and every day still faces significant hurdles.

Drug development relies on correlating and tracking the life-cycle of medical trials, genetic testing, prescription side effects and longer-term effects relating to lifestyle; tokenization can incentivize individuals and enterprises to share data that is generated across multiple streams. As Brama outlined:

“Lifestyle data comes from wearables, smartphones, smart homes, smart cities, purchasing, commercial interactions, social media, etc. Another is carried by everyone, and that's our genome. The third is clinical and health-condition data generated in the health care system.”

Brama used the analogy of a deck of cards to explain how blockchain could be the key to starting to bring this data into connection, all the while protecting data owners’ anonymity.

An individual can hold an unlimited number of unique addresses in their digital wallet. Going into a pharmacy to purchase a particular drug — say, vitamin C, stamped with a QR code — would generate a transaction for one of these addresses. A visit to a family doctor might generate a further hash for a diagnosis on your electronic medical record (EMR) — say, a runny nose. This transaction goes between the caregiver and another wallet address.

A user might choose to put the correlation between transactions for their different wallets on the blockchain and make it public for people to bid on the underlying data. Or, they might keep the correlation off-chain and send proof only when, say, an insurance firm or research institute advertises to users who have a particular set of transactions:

“You hold the deck. You look at the cards, you decide if you say, if you don't say. And you can put them on the table and let everyone see, or you can indicate privately that you actually have these. It really leaves the choice and the implementation up to you.”

Biotechnological frontiers

Professor Church has made an analogy that likely rings bells for anyone plugged into the crypto and blockchain space, saying that “right now, genome sequencing is like the internet back in the late 1980s. It was there, but no one was using it.”

Blockchain and the vanguard of genomic research have perhaps come closer to each other than ever before. Now that the DNA in our cells is understood as a life-long store of information, a new and disruptive technology is needed to securely and flexibly manage the interlocking networks of the body’s code.

The advent of genomics raises questions that cannot be settled by science alone. For all of our interviewees, blockchain could be just the key to creating the equitable and transparent means of ownership and circulation that would ensure these helices of raw biomaterial don’t spiral out of control.

#health #blockchain #dna

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awakeningstar-posts · 5 years ago

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Food for thought: Connecting some dots on COVID-19

I am putting together this blog in response to friends and family who are looking for information outside of the mainstream news fear porn that we are subjected to everyday. I started doing my own research in February out of curiosity because my intuition told me something wasn't right.

Disclaimers: I used to work in public health and am by no means anti-vaccine, although I have newfound understanding of the concerns raised. I have voted democrat since 2012 and come from a liberal family. With that said, the narrative we are seeing playing out is not one that I can put my trust behind for reasons I will outline below. The more I learn the more I become skeptical of the global establishment narrative #wwg1wga

When the crisis jumped from China to the rest of the world in February/March, I was impressed with the global coordination to contain the virus. Closed borders, airport shut downs, quarantines, loan assistance for small businesses and unemployment relief for workers. Standard formula, applied globally. What a fantastic response by governments, including those who have turned a blind eye to the millions who die annually from diseases that could be prevented with existing life saving medicine, improved regulations on food and water supplies, and alternative medicines. But here we are in 2020 and all of a sudden, your health and mine are so important that they were willing to shut down economies. Had world leaders suddenly grown a heart or was there more to this story ?

In this post, I will not go into theories about the agenda. The truth is that I don't know. There are theories ranging from 5G, New world order, ID 2020, and more. I will refrain from making any theories but rather present facts that I have come across that had made me think there was more to the story than was being presented to us. My aim isn't to further any conspiracy theories. With that said I do not subscribe to the thought that an individual who thinks for him or herself is a conspiracy theorist, but rather someone seeking truth. As with all information, I urge you to do your own research and come up with your own conclusions.

1st question I researched: Was COVID-19 a natural virus that mutated from bats?

Information I came across: Francis Boyle interview stating that this was a bio-weapon. For information, Francis Boyle is a Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law. He drafted the U.S. domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989.

The interview was removed by youtube and recovered here by a youtube user: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9KZjydtAWU

March 9: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Former President of Iran sends letter to UN Secretary General to investigate the potential of COVID-19 as a bio-weapon https://twitter.com/Ahmadinejad1956/status/1237072414841937920?s=20

More information pointing to a man-made virus:

Indian researchers publish study showing that it was unlikely to have a natural original because of its unusual similarities with HIV and Ebola. I read the study before it was taken down from this site: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v2

Article on the censoring of this study: https://www.ccn.com/hiv-ebola-like-mutations-suggest-coronavirus-leaked-from-a-lab/

PR Luc Montagnier, French Virologist and Nobel Prize winner in Medicine states the virus came out of a lab and backs up censored Indian study. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usyQgPU-VrI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=durcHyxpFT4

Question 2: If this virus really was engineered, who made it ?

There is evidence pointing to the fact that there was a study conducted in 2015 on the coronavirus with US scientists and Chinese scientists from various American institutions and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Overview: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/05/updated-dr-fauci-likely-broke-us-law-funded-wuhan-lab-continue-coronavirus-projects-banned-us-2014/

US National Institute of health funded Coronavirus Study in 2015 (Notable partners : Harvard Medical School, University of North Carolina, Wuhan Institute of Virology see authors information): https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985#Sec1

Excerpt:

« On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo. Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations. »

Response to the controversy of the 2015 US and China study:

https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debate-over-risky-research-1.18787

Excerpt:

« The argument is essentially a rerun of the debate over whether to allow lab research that increases the virulence, ease of spread or host range of dangerous pathogens — what is known as ‘gain-of-function’ research. In October 2014, the US government imposed a moratorium on federal funding of such research on the viruses that cause SARS, influenza and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome, a deadly disease caused by a virus that sporadically jumps from camels to people).

The latest study was already under way before the US moratorium began (2015 study), and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) allowed it to proceed while it was under review by the agency, says Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a co-author of the study. The NIH eventually concluded that the work was not so risky as to fall under the moratorium, he says.

But Wain-Hobson disapproves of the study because, he says, it provides little benefit, and reveals little about the risk that the wild SHC014 virus in bats poses to humans.

Other experiments in the study show that the virus in wild bats would need to evolve to pose any threat to humans — a change that may never happen, although it cannot be ruled out. Baric and his team reconstructed the wild virus from its genome sequence and found that it grew poorly in human cell cultures and caused no significant disease in mice.

“The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,” agrees Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Both Ebright and Wain-Hobson are long-standing critics of gain-of-function research. »

Question 3: Is it a coincidence that the virus came out of Wuhan and not somewhere else in China?

A simple google search told me that Wuhan was home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is a BSL 4-lab. The highest clearance level for research on dangerous pathogens. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52318539

US, UK, and Australia investigating the origins: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1270676/China-UK-US-Wuhan-virus-lab-coronavirus-origin-mystery-COVID-19-latest

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/australia-joins-us-china-coronavirus-pandemic

Thought: Assuming this was man-made and it as released by accident, does that matter right now, when we are dealing with a lethal virus and a pandemic?

Question 4: Is the coronavirus death toll including numbers of people who would have died of other diseases? *Disclaimer: I am in no way suggesting that this disease isn't real or that it hasn't been the cause of death for some. I do think we owe it to ourselves to get to the bottom of it so we can treat those who are sick, protect those who are vulnerable, and actually have proper plans for how we move forward.

May 9: Dr. Birx (former head of CDC's Global HIVAIDS dept) states: irx and others were frustrated with the CDC’s antiquated system for tracking virus data, which they worried was inflating some statistics — such as mortality rate and case count — by as much as 25 percent, according to four people present for the discussion or later briefed on it. Two senior administration officials said the discussion was not heated.

“There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust,” Birx said, according to two of the people. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-deaths-mount-trump-tries-to-convince-americans-its-safe-to-inch-back-to-normal/2020/05/09/bf024fe6-9149-11ea-a9c0-73b93422d691_story.html

BBC article on how to interpret Coronavirus death numbers, focused on UK data.

"Nearly 10% of people aged over 80 will die in the next year, Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter at the University of Cambridge points out, and the risk of them dying if infected with coronavirus is almost exactly the same. That does not mean there will be no extra deaths - but, Sir David says, there will be "a substantial overlap".

"Many people who die of Covid [the disease caused by coronavirus] would have died anyway within a short period," he says.

Knowing exactly how many is impossible to tell at this stage."

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51979654

In Italy:

Prof Ricciardi (scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health) added that Italy’s death rate may also appear high because of how doctors record fatalities.

“The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.

On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity - many had two or three,” he says.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/have-many-coronavirus-patients-died-italy/

In the US:

Dr. Scott Jensen, a Minnesota family physician who is also a Republican state senator, told "The Ingraham Angle" Wednesday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) guidelines for doctors to certify whether a patient has died of coronavirus are "ridiculous" and could be misleading the public

https://www.foxnews.com/media/physician-blasts-cdc-coronavirus-death-count-guidelines

CNN confirms CDC change in guidelines and 'probable cases' that will make the numbers spike on April 16, one month after the guidelines were changed and numbers already inflated since early March https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/15/health/us-coronavirus-deaths-trends-wednesday/index.html

Thought: Wait if this is a pandemic and this virus is lethal to the point where the entire world has come to a standstill, why do they need to inflate the numbers when reporting it?

Question 5: Shouldn't we focus now on finding the treatment instead of being distracted by the origins?

Thought: What if the same people behind the origins are controlling the public narrative and have an agenda (profits for pharmaceutical companies, vaccine, insert the list of theories)?

In October 2019, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, World Economic Forum, and Johns Hopkins organized Event 201. A simulation of a coronavirus with exactly the same symptoms as the one we are seeing. Yes, I understand that the last couple pandemics were coronaviruses with the same symptoms. What made me scratch my head wasn't the fact that that the simulation happened or that their was a preparation for a potential outbreak. What shocked me is that the global leadership listened? Since when do people listen to public health officials and prioritize health over our economies? Health over money, wow that's new!

And here we are following the simulation play by play. I hope when we come out of this nightmare we will take a similar care for the millions who die of malaria, malnutrition, and more annually. Mobilize all resources until there are no more preventable deaths, because it's the number of deaths we want to reduce right? I digress...

Videos of the simulation can be found here: https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/videos.html

I watched them so that I could know what was planned ahead. We did not end up seeing the internet blackout but censorship of any opposing views to the mainstream narrative is in full swing (videos taken down on youtube, scientists silenced, doctors silenced, citizen journalists silenced...)

On potential Vaccine:

See also link to potential vaccine agenda: https://awakeningstar-posts.tumblr.com/post/618825201145249792/mass-vaccination-agenda

See here for information on vaccines pushed by the Gates Foundation and video on the link between CDC, the pharmaceutical industry and Gates.

Why is Robert F Kennedy Jr, son of former US Attorney General and nephew to President Kennedy against Gates? Kennedy is an attorney and advocate for safe vaccines for children.

https://theduran.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-exposes-gates-plan-to-control-global-health-policy-video/

Why did Microsoft patent a cryptocurrency system using body activity data in mid-March 2020. Would that require a vaccination and a chip? https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2020060606

Some information on Fauci's past: https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/hivaids-research-pioneer-dr-judy-mikovits-blows-whistle-on-dr-fauci/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

Researcher nearing some “very significant findings” in his work on the coronavirus was found killed at his Pittsburgh-area home: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/may/4/bing-liu-university-pittsburgh-coronavirus-researc/

Plandemic (video has been pulled down multiple times, please search the subject in youtube to find a new link): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsi9csLNb-Y&feature=youtu.be

Random insert but why aren't we talking about the head of Harvard University's Chemistry Department, Charles Liebert's who was arrested with two of his graduate students on their way to China in January? Why does he also have a link with an institution in Wuhan? Why did one of his grad students get arrested trying to smuggle 21 biological vials into China? https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/harvard-university-professor-and-two-chinese-nationals-charged-three-separate-china

Why is it that in the middle of this pandemic, the mainstream media is bent on attacking President Trump rather than coming together and finding solutions? We can play blame games later. If this really is a pandemic with the numbers being reported in the mainstream media, I would think they would be able to put their pettiness aside in the middle of a crisis.

Nobody took COVID-19 seriously at first. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1249858152578920449?s=20

I know some of us liberals have varying degrees of Trump derangement syndrome where everything the President does and said is viewed negatively. I know because I used to be like that and cognitive dissonance wouldn't allow me to disassociate with the image CNN gave me of him. Did it ever cross your mind that he isn't the enemy?

Question 6: Is Hydroxychloroquine a potential treatment or not?

Update June 2: “Surgisphere, whose employees appear to include a sci-fi writer and adult content model, provided database behind Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine hydroxychloroquine studies. It was also behind a decision by the WHO and research institutes around the world to halt trials of the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine.“ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere-who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine Remember when they said the Indian Scientists who discovered the HIV strains in coronavirus had not followed proper protocol, or that Dr. Rault’s study was ‘anecdotal’? And then they went and got data from a team of 6 including a sci-fi writer and adult content model. Let that sink in.

Update May 3: Meanwhile heroic medical professionals are coming out to state that hydroxychloriquiine is effective. Don't believe me, do your research. https://twitter.com/DocEvenhouse/status/1256765070245269505?s=20

On March 17 a study in France published findings of using an existing drug, Hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment.

See study below :

Notable collaborators (Department of Virology, Biological and Pathological Center, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Nice, Infectiologie, Hôpital de l’Archet, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Nice, Thai Binh University of Medicine and Pharmacy)

In press March 17 https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Hydroxychloroquine_final_DOI_IJAA.pdf

March 24 Dr. Fauci of the National Institutes of Health was asked March 24 whether the drug was considered a treatment for the novel coronavirus.

"The answer is no," he said, "and the evidence that you're talking about ... is anecdotal evidence."

Thought: Interesting statement, in response to a study not anecdotal evidence. Why not call for further studies to be done? We are looking to stop the spread of this lethal disease, no?

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/03/827177623/fact-check-premature-trump-continues-to-claim-drug-can-treat-coronavirus?t=1587336343410

Did Fauci already know about chloroquine as a potential treatment to coronavirus in 2005? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16115318/

March 30th : FDA approves emergency use of Hydroxychloroquine https://www.fda.gov/media/136537/download

April 6th : Mixed messages sent to the US public about hydroxychloroquine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceUDBPaQ77E

Mainstream media denies hydroxychloroquine as possible treatment.

Thought: We don’t know if it is THE treatment but given that an initial study has been conducted, does it not warrant that we explore a drug that could save lives ?

April 9 : Gates reiterates it could take another 18 months until we return to normalcy due to vaccine development. https://www.cnbc.com/video/2020/04/09/bill-gates-an-effective-covid-19-vaccine-is-at-least-18-months-away.html

April 9 : Studies begin testing if hydroxychloroquine is effective

April 10 : https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/28/health/coronavirus-hydroxychloroquine-trial/index.html

April 15: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/15/health/new-french-study-hydroxychloroquine/index.html

Thought: I don't know if hydroxychloroquine is the most effective treatment, nobody will know until the studies are concluded but if there has been some success shouldn't we look at it? Why is CNN deciding before the results of the study that the drug is ineffective?

As of April 17 55 countries had placed orders for Hydroxychloroquine

Include : Afghanistan, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Maldives, Mauritius, Seychelles, Sri Lanka, Dominican Republic, Madagascar, Myanmar, Zambia, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Ecuador, Jamaica, Marshall Islands, Syria, Ukraine, Eswatini, Chad, Republic of Congo, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, France, Jordan, Kenya, Netherlands, Nigeria, Oman, Peru, Philippines, Russia, Slovenia, South Africa, Tanzania, UAE, Uzbekistan, Uruguay, Colombia, Algeria, Bahamas, Bolivia, Guyana, UK, US.

India is in the process of supplying anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to 55 coronavirus-hit countries as grants as well as on commercial basis

https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/india-sending-hydroxychloroquine-to-55-countries-will-not-procure-ppes-from-china-1667822-2020-04-17

May 10: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexledsom/2020/05/10/hydroxychloroquinenumber-of-prescriptions-explode-in-france/#56428ce2180f

Numerous studies under way to further study the effects of hydroxychloroquine. Jury is out, but why the backlash on this potential drug?

And that's a wrap. Long but I wanted to show the full picture as I understand it. Think for yourselves, there is a lot of misinformation being spread by the mainstream media and alternative media. There is also a lot of censoring happening, doctors who previously were given platforms on mainstream media being called pseudo doctors for having differing views than the mainstream narrative, namely Dr. Oz and Dr. Drew. Funny how they weren't pseudo doctors when the same media channels were giving them platforms for the last decade. Ask yourself why information is being kept from us and as always, follow the money trails. Links between WHO, Gates, NIH, Fauci.

See Wikileaks drop on influence of Big Pharma on WHO (whose 2nd largest funder is Gates): https://www.collective-evolution.com/2020/04/19/wikileaks-highlights-the-influence-of-big-pharma-on-policy-making-within-the-world-health-organization/

See for Truth about vaccines and CDC and Big Pharma's role in past vaccine push and the censoring of scientific data raising concerns on vaccine safety: https://youtu.be/cHWeJ0f_o3A

After all this research, all I can say is do not blindly follow the official narrative, educate yourself and make informed decisions.

How many coincidences before mathematically impossible? What are the odds of that? Coincidence? #Q

As I mentioned before, I come from a liberal background, I currently do not follow any establishment party ever since Jimmy Dore showed me the light on the Corporate Democrats. I am just a truth seeker who wants everyone on this planet to live their best lives and that means freeing ourselves from a system that does not serve us.

Disclaimer: I am not suicidal and do not have suicidal thoughts. If something happens to me, it is not an accident. Stay safe. #WWG1WGA

More resources:

Follow Dr. Rashid Buttar on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzXs1OHvItA

Robert F. Kennedy Jr on twitter: @RobertKennedyJr or look up his name to see articles people have tagged re Gates and vaccine agenda

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krinsbez · 6 years ago

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GI Joe: Remixed, Cobra-La

Let's talk Cobra-La.

First off, it's not actually called that; "Cobra-La" was simply a codephrase that a Siegie stationed in Tibet was waiting for, upon receipt of which he was him to open the sealed orders that instructed him to make contact with Golobulus. However, as human vocal apparatus has difficulty pronouncing the Cobra-Lan language in general, and the name for their civilization (naturally, they have more than just one city up there) in particular, it stuck. Somewhat similarly, "Golobulus" is a mispronunciation, although upon assuming leadership, he took it as his new name for symbolic reasons that will make more sense in a bit. "Nemesis Enforcer" and "Pythona" are rough translations; note that the former is actually a title.

OK, with that out of the way, the Cobra-Lans are a species of sapient reptilian humanoids. They did not in fact evolve from snakes, and honestly have no more taxonomic relationship to them then they do to any other reptile; however, they are big into snakes culturally and have been since their earliest history. They are older than anatomically modern humans, and prefer the use of biological to mechanical technology, and have over millennia honed their mastery of bioengineering to a degree human science can barely even dream of. They have long lifespans, do not reproduce as often as humans, and in general are more content to stay in one place and do things the same way than humans are. Their civilization grew to it's greatest heights during the last Ice Age. Unfortunately, they mostly lived in low-lying coastal areas, which of course proceeded to drown when the Ice Age ended and the glaciers melted, for which reason the survivors decamped to the Himalayas and refused to come back down.

Their first contact with humans was in the mid-'70s, via Joe Colton and the Adventure Team, who found them to be peaceful, well-meaning people, who just wanted to be left alone. A subsequent discussion over whether to initiate contact with the wider human world predictably ended with a decision to retain the status quo. Joe and Co. respected that wish and kept their existence secret. But not everyone was happy with this. Observing the effects of human industrial civilization on the planetary ecosystem, some Cobra-Lans noted the threat of climate change, and theorized that it could well force humans to do what their own ancestors did and flee to higher ground, potentially threatening their security. Some further argued that Something Should Be Done to prevent this threat from becoming reality. The leader of this movement was a young Golobulus, who's advocacy eventually passed over the line into militancy, and so alarmed the authorities that they attempted to detain him. He escaped arrest, and took the unprecedented move of fleeing to the outside world, disguised as a human.

On the off-chance that he would be pursued, Golobulus set ought to put as much distance between himself and his homeland as possible, and so traveled to North American, where, by chance he encountered a young Cobra Commander. At this time, Cobra was still at the MLM/Cult stage, but CC had already begun formulating more ambitious plans. Golobulus was impressed by the charismatic masked demagogue and chose to reveal his true nature. CC shrewdly took the young exile under his wing, encouraging him to try something radical. Together, they devised a plan to take control of Golobulus' people, and then traveled to the Himalayas to do so. Golobulus fleeing in the first place was a scandal that made the leadership look bad and made him a cause celebre', and so when he came back they treated him with kid gloves, as he built a powerbase, gathering a small army of followers. Some of whom had supported him prior to his fleeing, others he'd won over since his return with the speeches CC wrote for him. What happened next succeeded in large part due to being an Out-of-Context-Problem, because the idea of political violence was completely alien to Cobra-Lan society previously and the opposition didn't even realize what was happening, much less how to respond to it, until it was too late:

Using old Soviet hardware obtained by CC, Golobulus devastated the entire capital in an engineered disaster he would go on to claim was brought on by human negligence. After which, his faction moved in to provide relief and "restore order". Golobulus declared himself Primarch (see below), as it was his forces that restored order in the capital, but it was not a popular move with some of the city-states, who saw this as a naked power grab (though they remained unaware that he was responsible, again, it being unthinkable that a Cobra-Lan would or even could do something like this on purpose). This led to a civil war, between Golobulus' supporters, and the dissident city states. Eventually, after a relatively short conflict, Golobulus won, and established full control over Cobra-La. Following which CC returned to America, keeping in his back pocket that a secret civilization of super-advanced snake-people owed him a favor.

When CC's conflict with Serpentor broke out into a Cobra Civil War, and the war then turned against him, CC called in that favor, and in response Golobulus reinforced his old partner's flagging forces with Cobra-Lan troops and technologies, under the command of Pythona and Nemesis Enforcer. But Golobulus had formed his own plans in the intervening years, and predictably eventually turned on CC and made his won play for global domination. Fortunately, with assistance from Joe Colton, the Joes had found the secret cities and made contact with some of his old friends, setting of an uprising against Golobulus' tyrannical rule...

Random notes:

-Cobra-La's government was organized as follows:

High Council: The leaders of their entire civilization, a council of (insert number here, preferably odd number to serve as a tie-breaker), whom serve for life, or retirement. Each Councilor is in charge of a specific sphere; Civil Infrastructure, Biosciences, Education, Military, etc. One of their number is elected as Primarch, a first-among-equals post that has a ten-year long rotation before going up for election again. Councilors are chosen from the assembly.

High Assembly: Elected representatives of the various Cobra-La city-states. Each representative serves for a twenty year term, and each city has about twelve representatives. The leader of the Assembly is the Archon, who also serves on the High Council

Each individual city-state follows the Council-Assembly model, just at the local level, except the head of a city council is called governor.

-Mind you, this was before Golobulus and his militant faction took over, with Cobra Commander tagging along. After the violent overthrow of the High Council and the Assembly, Golobulus revived the old title of 'Serpent King,' and instituted a new order. Cities are now ruled by Viceroys, who maintain their control through the military, each city now their own personal fiefdom. Essentially, Cobra-La was turned into a psuedo-feudal society.

-All Cobra-Lan soldiers are bioengineered for superior combat performance, and are further equipped with gear vastly superior to that of any conventional human military. Whether they clear the bar for "super-soldiers" is a matter of debate. However, the Enforcers (of whom Nemesis Enforcer is in command) definitely do.

-Cobra-La's forces include Yetis.

-Cobra-Lan sexual behavior is one of many ways in which they differ from humans; females only experience sexual arousal when in estrus, and males only when in the vicinity of a female in estrus. Or at least, that's how it goes in nature. Given their proclivity for bioengineering, it should be no surprise that the Cobra-Lans have hacked this, allowing them to induce sexual arousal at will, and thus making recreational sex possible. That said, in general, they remain considerably less libidinous than humans.

-Cobra-Lans do not give birth and do not nurse young; Pythona's breasts and curves are the result of cosmetic bioengineering, partially to make liasing with Cobra easier, partially as a personal aesthetic choice.

-Golobulus' snake-tail is the result of grafting, and required removal of his existing lower body, which means that he's technically a eunuch. This used to actually be a standard thing for leaders of Cobra-La, demonstrating their commitment to the people by removing their ability to have children, etc. Of course, Cobra-Lan science eventually advanced to a point where genitalia were unnecessary to produce offspring, and this became a purely symbolic gesture, and by the modern day it had fallen into disuse. But many Cobra-Lans are big on tradition, and given how Golobulus' position as leader comes entirely from throwing many traditions out the window, he needed to appease the traditionalists somehow, so he revived it.

#Headcanon #Headcanons #Fanfic #Collaboration #GI Joe #GI Joe Headcanon #GI Joe Headcanons #GI Joe Fanfic #GI Joe Collaboration #GI Joe: Remixed #GI Joe: Remixed Cobra-La #Cobra-La #Golobulus #Pythona #Nemesis Enforcer #Cobra Civil War

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toomanysinks · 6 years ago

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Consumer-focused healthcare can save lives by focusing on changing behavior

Vijay Pande Contributor

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Vijay Pande, PhD, is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, as well as an Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University, where he continues to advise the Pande Lab -- focused on tackling challenging problems in chemical biology, biophysics, and biomedicine.

Everything we do in the $3 trillion healthcare market today only affects 10% of outcomes to premature death.

You read that right. All of that, for just 10% of outcomes:

That 10% exists for a reason. Genetic predisposition is hard to change. So, unfortunately, are social circumstances and environmental behavior. But that 40% of behavioral patterns — why can’t we tackle that? This is what real prevention would look like: nothing comes even close to mattering as much towards whether you will die prematurely as your behavior does.

We can do better than simply focusing on that small 10% slice of the pie; in fact, we’re looking in the wrong place. Doctors, entrepreneurs and founders need to be thinking (and treating with) lifestyle as medicine. Because behavioral change is the best and most powerful way to impact that whopping 40% slice.

Too often we think of this as the “just eat right and exercise” problem. As we know very well, that platitude will not solve our healthcare problem. The true problem is the difficulty of modifying behavior. We know this, because the platitude doesn’t work. We like to eat what we want, to exercise or not exercise if we choose. In short, humans like our patterns. They’re hard to change.

Tech, on the other hand, modifies behavior very well. Just look at the phone you’re probably reading this on, which has foundationally changed the way we communicate — along with huge other swaths of human behavior, in both positive and negative ways — from the ability to call a ride service in practically any city at any time to tracking your health to screen addiction. We know technology modifies behavior; we live this every day. So the question is, how can we target this superpower ability of tech to have 4x the ability to impact that the $3 trillion healthcare budget does?

How does it work?

Let’s think about why technology actually does work for modifying behavior. For one, it’s always there, thanks to the leap in mobile tech, whether that be phones or fitness trackers. Second, technology’s ability to do constant A/B testing essentially enables RCTs, or Randomized Clinical Trials, every moment that technology is present and being used. These RCTs are invaluable laboratories for learning about what is effective therapeutic behavior modification, or improving efficacy — and it’s not toxic. Most medical products are released and then rarely get updated (think about how old the stethoscope is!). Rolling out new versions of products has been difficult and expensive. But that no longer has to be true. The same kind of A/B testing that Amazon does, for example, to optimize ecommerce — everything from the look of the website to the flow of the experience to the nature of the shipping that you get — can be now applied to behavior modification for health. Comparing the immediate efficacy of two algorithms for lifestyle behavior modification on two different populations can happen not just over years or months — as a RCT would have to be — but over weeks and even days, improving our responses and lifestyles that much faster.

Second, applying Machine Learning to vast amounts of new data is identifying all kinds of nuances of human behavior that we aren’t nearly as good, as humans, at noticing. For example, correlating patterns with data like where you shop, when you eat lunch, what activities do you do, what shows you watch, what your exercise routine has been, how much you sleep, even perhaps whether you remember to charge your phone. Identifying the clues in our behavior that eventually add up to significant lifestyle risk is the first step towards changing and improving that behavior. Like it or not, we live our lifestyles now through our phones — ML allows us to learn from it.

And last, technology allows us to scale existing therapies in new orders of magnitude. Programs which have proven extremely effective at behavior modification through personal interaction — such as Diabetes Prevention Program for Type 2 Diabetes — have been by definition hard to scale; computation can extend their reach into the billions. Or take for another example depression, a complex disease where the molecules involved are poorly understood: drug therapies have been challenging, but therapy, specifically CBT, has a very strong track record, and computational CBT — ie, CBT scaled with technology — the strongest.

Even conditions as mysterious and difficult as cognitive decline can be treated much more effectively with technology. This is another fascinating example where the biology is so complex at the molecular level that breakthroughs have been far and few between. On the other hand, cognitive is painfully clear at the behavior level. And it is also very clear that behavioral treatment in the form of cognitive stimulation helps significantly. In this study, for example, the auditory memory and attention capability of patients who received cognitive stimulation training 1 hour per day, 5 days per week, for 8 weeks improvement was significantly greater than those who did not.

These are big challenges to meet. Behavior is the result of thousands of small decisions at every moment of every day: do I sit or do I stand? Do I drink this beer? Even, do I take regular deep breaths? One of the biggest challenges to face is how we ‘read’ this behavior and turn it into reliable data. There’s also the issue of small sample sizes: in order to narrow down to a meaningful experiment, you need, at the moment, to have very clear definitions of behavior, which often means small sample sizes of people who always do X in Y conditions. The science of behavior and decision making itself is complex, debatable, and often evolving. And there’s the company building practicalities: to build a company in this space, you need to find people who understand clinical science, data science, experimentation approaches, behavioral science *and* product and UI.

But that’s exactly the opportunity. These things are coming; we understanding more about behavior every day, as devices enter our daily lives and health data becomes more and more fine-grained. New conceptions of roles that blend behavioral science and product design are clearly emerging. All of these means are not exclusive and can be combined into powerful ways of modifying behavior for health. Those that can connect all these dots have the ability to build companies that can take a giant bite out of that 40% — and have tremendous impact on mortality for huge swaths of the population.

There’s an old joke that plumbers have saved more lives than doctors, because improving sewers and sanitation (and eradicating the disease that went along with that) was so impactful on longevity for humans. By cleaning up the modern day ‘sewers’ of our lifestyles — not through magical drugs, complex procedures, or platitudes about prevention — but through a real infrastructure of technology that is being built right now — technology will bring an analogous impact.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/12/consumer-focused-healthcare-can-save-lives-by-focusing-on-changing-behavior/

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fmservers · 6 years ago

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Consumer-focused healthcare can save lives by focusing on changing behavior

Vijay Pande Contributor

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Everything we do in the $3 trillion healthcare market today only affects 10% of outcomes to premature death.

You read that right. All of that, for just 10% of outcomes:

How does it work?

Via Jonathan Shieber https://techcrunch.com

#TechCrunch

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fitnesshealthyoga-blog · 6 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://fitnesshealthyoga.com/plague-bacteria-lurks-in-5000-year-old-remains/

Plague bacteria lurks in 5,000-year-old remains

In an ancient grave in Sweden, scientists have unearthed the oldest known strain of a deadly bacteria that has killed millions of people over thousands of years.

They call it Yersinia pestis. You may know it as the plague.

The new discovery suggests that the microscopic bacteria has been wiping out great swaths of the human population for more than 5,000 years – destroying empires, spurring political uprisings and leaving a permanent mark on regional gene pools.

“What we found in the Swedish grave site is not only the oldest sample of the Y. pestis genome but also the oldest version of the genome,” said Simon Rasmussen, a metagenomics researcher at the Technical University of Denmark, who led the work. “Think of it as the root of the tree.”

The oldest recorded plague pandemic, known as Justinian’s Plague, dates to 541 AD. Over the course of 200 years, it killed more than 25 million people across the Byzantine Empire, hitting the capital city of Constantinople especially hard.

The next major plague pandemic, known as the Black Death or the Great Plague, started in China in 1334 and spread along trade routes to Constantinople before reaching Europe in the 1340s. It also claimed the lives of an estimated 25 million people, including about half the population of Europe, according to researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The third major outbreak, known as the Modern Plague, took root in China in the 1860s. It popped up again in Hong Kong in 1894 and spread to port cities around the world over the next 20 years, carried by stowaway rats on steamships. It was during this pandemic that scientists discovered the bacterial source of the disease, and that it is spread by fleas that pick it up from rats and pass it on to humans.

Rat-associated plague can still be found in populations of ground squirrels and other small mammals in the Americas, Africa and Asia. It is now under control in most urban areas across the globe, and if it’s caught early enough, it can be treated. From 2010 to 2015, there were 3,248 human cases of plague reported worldwide and 584 deaths from the disease, according to the World Health Organization.

The new study, published Thursday in the journal Cell, reveals that the relationship between humans and plague goes back even further than scientists had realized. The bacteria identified may represent a previously unknown outbreak of plague that struck Europe as much as 5,700 years ago.

The researchers already knew that the population plummeted 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, known as the Neolithic decline, and its cause is still up for debate.

Rasmussen and his colleagues wondered whether a plague pandemic could have been responsible.

“We were thinking, ‘Where have we seen this drop before?’ and that got us thinking about the Black Plague,” he said.

The disease was known to have existed across Eurasia at the dawn of the Bronze Age, which started around 4,500 years ago, but there was no evidence of its existence earlier than that.

To see if the plague was in Europe at the end of the Neolithic period, the group turned to databases of DNA extracted from ancient human remains – specifically, ancient teeth.

Because blood circulates through the center of our teeth, Rasmussen said, it is possible to detect the DNA of pathogens that were present in a person’s bloodstream at their time of death by examining a tooth sample.

“If you die from it and it’s in your blood,” he said, “then we can find it.”

After scanning for genetic sequences resembling modern-day Y. pestis, the group eventually found a match. It was in DNA extracted from the tooth of a 20-year-old woman who died in western Sweden between 5,040 and 4,867 years ago.

“This really surprised us,” Rasmussen said. “It was the oldest plague sample ever found.”

Next, the authors compared the newly discovered Y. pestis genome to 150 other plague samples that spanned thousand of years, going back all the way to the Bronze Age. This analysis revealed that the strain from the Swedish woman was closer to the origin of Y. pestis than any other, and therefore could inform scientists about the first plague ancestor from which all subsequent strains evolved, Rasmussen said.

How could this be? The Swedish woman lived in a small farming community, far from the center of the Neolithic world. Plague thrives in environments where large groups of people live in close quarters, share space with animals and stored food, and contend with poor sanitary conditions.

None of that explains how this woman contracted the disease.

So the researchers looked beyond genetics and considered the archaeological histories of human populations from the time period.

Although the young Swedish woman did not live in prime plague territory, there were other places in Europe where the disease could have flourished in the Neolithic era, Rasmussen said. These were the mega-settlements of the Trypillia Culture, built between 6,100 and 5,400 years ago and located in present-day Ukraine, Romania and Moldova. The largest of these settlements was home to as many as 20,000 people.

Archaeologists have shown that these settlements were abandoned and burned about once every 150 years. Usually, subsequent generations rebuilt right on the ashes of the previously destroyed buildings. Why the original structures were burned has never been explained.

Using the new findings as a guide, the researchers propose that the plague first evolved in these mega-settlements, morphing from a relatively benign stomach bug to a deadly microscopic killer around 5,700 years ago, around the time when the Swedish strain diverged from all others then in existence. This could explain the periodic burning of the buildings – perhaps they were set aflame to eradicate the disease.

The authors also suggest that the plague made its way from these settlements to the small Swedish farming village thanks to a vast trade network that was made possible by the recent expansion of animal-pulled wagons. As the disease spread along trade routes throughout the continent, it could have caused the Neolithic decline.

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genocidershodan · 7 years ago

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Age of Legends (A.L)

An excerpt from Leonold Shattersley’s famous textbook, A Concise History Of The Universe. Chapter 3: The Dawn of Life as We Know It

In chapter one we discussed the various layers of reality, and the voidal conductor, the stream of energy that binds together all the universe in an enormous complex web. Indeed, the word web is too generous as that would imply some kind of organisation to its design. The voidal conductor is chaotic in its expansiveness as it weaves blindly it’s way across all of space.

The start of the Age of Legends is marked long before our planet came to be. When the universe was younger, our history starts with an entanglement in the voidal conductor. A strange junction that could be likened to an electric coil. Generating large amounts of ethereal energy, it wasn’t too long before the higher beings of these strange eons came, attracted by this power.

The Ancient Gods arrived first. They marvelled in the energies formed by the junction and began to extensively experiment with them. As more of the Ancient Gods arrived, they formed into a hierarchy. It’s not clear whether they experienced some kind of struggle, or if they just naturally fell into place by some kind immediate understanding. But the Ancient God that came to be known as the Red Prince became Their leader. Often also called the King of the Gods, and legends imply that They were the most powerful of all the Ancient Gods. It’s also believed that in this formative period, many of these beings came and went, but at some point this figure became permanent and they all had a specific relationship to one another.

The nature of most of Their experiments is sadly not known and possibly not to ever be understood. But one of the earlier experiments with the energies of the junction was to create a bubble between the layers of the universe. Something akin to the theorised pocket universe. This experiment was successful and the Ancient Gods formed a home for themselves, called the Aetherium. To reside in as they continued with unknowable machinations.

Another later experiment would result in the creation of our sun and, eventually, our world. Though there is much debate in the historical and scientific communities about how much involvement the Ancient Gods actually had in the creation of this world and the life on it. Regardless of the various theories, the commonly understood truth is that in a span of millions, if not billions, of years. Our sun was created, followed by our planet, and slowly but steadily life began to evolve in ever more complex forms. A further study of evolution and it’s properties can be found in Melvin Huntley’s renowned book The Definitive Theory of Life.

The Ancient Gods observed the formation of this little world with great interest from their thrones in the Aetherium. After the turbulence of creation settled and life began to thrive, two great migrations came, both several thousand to a million years apart.

First came the eldar, tall but frail beings with great magical power. They too journeyed the Voidal Conductor and were ultimately drawn by the energies of the junction and settled on the world. The extent of the eldar’s magic is still a complete mystery, but it dwarfed in comparison to the might of the Ancient Gods. Using their abilities they built two great cities on the highest peaks on the land mass that would later be formed into Halidore. Mithak in the north and Arthnite in the south, and resided almost solely in these two cities, rarely venturing away. The eldar were immortal and did not age, although they did not reproduce either. Scientists still ponder where the eldar came from and how they came to be.

Until the dragons arrived, very little is known about what the eldar did in this period. It’s commonly believed that they also performed many kinds of experiments using their own powers in conjunction with the magical energies that flowed through the world from the junction in the Voidal Conductor. They drew little attention from the Ancient Gods, but were looked upon with unfavourable eyes by the Red Prince.

Some time after that, the first of the dragons followed through the voidal conductor. Unlike the eldar, they did not come in a single group, but trickled over a few hundred years. The Red Prince noted with disgust how more of these creatures began to infect Their creation and some kind of threat was made. It’s not clear on the nature of this event. But nothing further arrived through the voidal conductor after this. It is entirely possible that other beings or species also tried to settle here but were stopped by the Ancient Gods.

Keep in mind, our current understanding of the history of the world is limited as much was lost during the War of the Dragon. It is possible that there are other locations around the world where eldar and dragons settled, and their societies evolved differently. Or perhaps even other creatures have travelled here and we have no knowledge even of their existence.

The nature of the dragons discovery of the world and their subsequent activities are much better understood as their history is deeply intertwined with ours. Forming new settlements and eventually raising great stone towers of learning, some of which may possibly still stand today. It is they who discovered what would come to be known as dragon magic, although today we commonly know it as spellbinding. Learning to innately access the magical energies of the world without any inborn magics, which is something that the dragons, although large and formidable, didn’t possess, unlike the eldar and the Ancient Gods.

Many of these early eons were passed, with indigenous life continuing to evolve naturally on the surface, and the “Old Three” continuing to conduct mysterious activities. But they by no means existed peacefully. The Red Prince continued to lose patience with this infestation while being discouraged by the other Ancient Gods from taking any direct action. The eldar did not approve of the magic-less dragons meddling and believed they were somehow dirtying the magical energy. A claim which science has since proved false. However the eldar believed this so deeply that they actively tried to oppose them.

Three great conflicts were known to have occurred, each of them catastrophic, causing mass extinctions across the continent, and each of them progressively becoming more devastating. Although the eldar were the instigators in all three counts, they were also the ones to call for truce. They indeed wielded deep and powerful magic but were physically weak and frail. And the dragons, armed with their own newly discovered magic, had the distinct advantage of being incredibly powerful beasts. But they also had another significant advantage, they could reproduce.

The first two conflicts exacted a terrible toll on the eldar. With almost half their number now gone. There was very little thought of trying to force the dragons to stop their experimentation, despite their deeply held beliefs that the dragons actions were an affront. That changed when a new weapon was discovered. One of the few known experiments that the eldar performed was on the nature of the soul. Of course, such research has been undertaken by every advanced species in history. However the eldar had by then managed to achieve something that has not since been recreated, the creation of an artificial soul.

This is how, as much as history tells us, the demons were created. Twenty of them are known to exist, whether that’s how many were ever forged or if some had been destroyed in the coming conflict, either way they turned out to be the greatest mistake the eldar ever made.

They were imbued with many of the strongest powers the eldar had at their disposal, able to wreck incredible devastation, were exceptionally resilient, tough, and difficult to kill, and they could also transform at will into any form. Full of malice and devoid of empathy. This time the tides were greatly turned against the dragons who began losing ground immediately when the demons were unleashed. Though they refused to back down even if it meant the potential extinction of their species. They would not willingly lose these new powers that the world had given them.

But the eldar pressed their advantage too hard and soon their monstrous creations, who were treated more like livestock than actual living beings, grew weary of being used as pawns in this war that they personally had no care in. They rebelled against their masters. Fighting against both the other species. The eldar were ill equipped to deal with the dreadful weapons they manufactured and in their hubris hadn’t even contemplated the possibility of such an outcome.

Swiftly then, the fighting ceased with the writing of the The Golden Concord. A complete agreement for eldar, dragons, and demons to never attempt to interfere or interact with one another. The eldar, with their population significantly dwindled, were no longer in any position to make any kind of demands, the dragons were permitted to continue their practises, and as a peace offering, the two species combined their powers to create a home for the demons called The Pantheon. A minute dimension not dissimilar to the Aetherium, but on an infinitesimally smaller scale. Though, this was no means the end of their part in our history.

After the dust settled and the three continued on their separate paths, the world healed and primates came to take dominance over the land. As stated above, there is much debate among scientists and scholars about how much the Ancient Gods or the magical energies that flowed through the world from the junction in the voidal conductor were involved in our evolution. The theories greatly vary but history has yet to provide a definite answer. What is known is that humans first moved north wards from the Aphidian peninsula and it’s highly believed that in this younger world the continents of Halidore and Katachan were connected by a natural bridge and humans emigrated from there.

It didn’t take too long, by the reckoning of the vast times of this age, for these primitive humans to begin settling across all of Halidore, and the other beings began to take an interest in these curious creatures. Who seemed capable of intelligence never before seen in indigenous life. Having already mastered fire and slowly beginning to tame the land. The eldar preferred to observe from afar but the dragons instead chose to directly approach and uplift the humans.

Over the coming centuries they slowly and carefully taught the humans about the world they lived in. From the dragons humans learnt about the Ancient Gods, and the basic sciences, and construction, how to properly work their land and founded the early languages, they even divulged the secrets of dragon magic allowing us to teach the art amongst ourselves.

The uplifting of the humans seemed to be the final act that caused the Red Prince to go against all the other Ancient Gods, determined now to purge all life from the world. In overwhelming opposition, the others all turned against the Red Prince. With the combined efforts of the dragons and the few remaining eldar, The King of the Gods was instead imprisoned in an inescapable dimension, powered by a great seal planted by the eldar. With the Great Atoner put away, many of the Ancient Gods chose to retreat from the observations of the world and it’s happenings, though from time to time they have still been known to take an interest in the actions of this world, specifically if it pertains to their own strange unknowable machinations.

Within two centuries from here though, the eldar had become extinct. It’s not known how the last few perished, perhaps residing in the great cities of Arthnite and Mithak was no longer feasible for such a low population and they ventured into the wild. Maybe there are some still out there to this day. But nevertheless the two glorious cities maintained through deep and unknowable enchantments stood abandoned. They had however made one final attempt at preservation by interbreeding with humans. Likely through the means of their own magics. However this experiment too was doomed, as the resulting offspring appeared to be an entirely new species all together. Thus the child like sprites were born, with mixed attributes of both eldar and humans. Eventually escaping, and making their own way in the forests of Halidore.

The dusk of this age is heralded by the Binding Twelve, Warriors of great skill and charisma who denounced the dragons and the way of life their teachings provided. Many rumours and myths surrounded them and it’s still difficult to discern historical fact from fiction. For example, it was strongly believed that the twelve were immortal. And many historians claim that they indeed may have been the first to discover the secret to immortality. But many others believe in Reindholme’s theory that instead they would each raise a single offspring of the same gender to replace them.

The Binding Twelve soon grew a cult like army of followers called the Wikkerana, who believed in their divine purpose. They created an ideology that called for the deaths of all dragons. Spellbinders were sought and forced to swear loyalty to the twelve or be executed. Writing, mathematics, construction, irrigation, it was all heresy. The only true life that should be followed, which the Wikkerana brutally enforced, was the nomadic life of their ancestors, before dragons came polluted the minds of humans. The dragons chose to withdraw from the humans they had cared for, choosing not to kill them and instead watched as the knowledge they gave them humans was burnt, except for anything that the Wikkerana could use as a weapon.

And with the growth of this dark power on the continent of Halidore, the Age of Shadows dawns.

Back to history

Back to Black Horizon

#black horizon #world building #history #age of legends

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sherristockman · 7 years ago

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Unconventional Medicine — The Revolution to Reinvent Health Care and Reverse Chronic Disease Dr. Mercola By Dr. Mercola Chris Kresser, L.Ac., an acupuncturist, licensed integrative medicine clinician and codirector of the California Center for Functional Medicine, is widely recognized for his contributions to the ancestral nutrition movement. As many leaders in and promoters of functional medicine, Kresser is a wounded healer, whose interest in alternative disciplines developed because conventional medicine failed him. “In my early 20s, I took off on an around-the-world trip. I was surfing in Indonesia [when] I got an acute tropical illness — fever, chills, diarrhea, delirium. I don’t really remember much of what happened during those few days. But there was an Australian staying in the little village that I was in who happened to have some antibiotics that brought me back from the brink,” Kresser says. “That evolved into a decadelong journey back to health … I came home and … proceeded to see probably no fewer than 20 or 25 doctors over the course of the next several years, in three different countries, hoping they would be able to help me. Most of the doctors I saw meant well. They tried their best to help, but I quickly found out that conventional medicine, while it’s fantastic at dealing with trauma and emergencies, it was really miserable at dealing with the kind of complex chronic illness that I had developed. Despite everyone’s best efforts, nobody was able to help. I eventually decided there was no one that was more deeply invested in my own healing than myself. I started my own exploration, which eventually led to returning to school to study Chinese medicine and acupuncture. I chose that because of all the modalities I tried along my journey, that was what has been most helpful to me. But then, even before I graduated from school, I realized I wasn’t going to end up practicing Chinese medicine. I discovered functional medicine and kind of moved in that direction.” Unconventional Medicine Kresser has written a number of books, the latest one of which is “Unconventional Medicine: Join the Revolution to Reinvent Healthcare, Reverse Chronic Disease, and Create a Practice You Love.” In the beginning of the book, he discusses the impact of conventional medicine on chronic disease, and why it so rarely works. When modern medicine as we know it was developed, the primary challenges were acute problems, and this is one of the reasons why conventional medicine lacks the tools and know-how to address the many chronic ailments facing us today. The landscape of health and disease has changed rather dramatically, and acute care medicine doesn’t work well for chronic problems. In 1900, the top three causes of death were all acute infectious diseases: typhoid, tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other common reasons for medical visits included broken limbs, gallbladder attacks, appendicitis and similar problems. “The treatment for those problems was relatively straightforward. You put the arm in a cast or remove the gallbladder,” Kresser says. “It was one doctor, one problem, one treatment and that was the end of the story.” Today, 7 of the 10 top causes of death are chronic diseases rather than acute diseases and, unlike acute problems, chronic diseases tend to be complex, difficult to manage, and often last a lifetime. In short, the model of care that was developed for treating acute problems doesn’t work for chronic disease. As noted by Kresser, “That explains why 1 in 2 Americans now has a chronic disease, and 1 in 4 has multiple chronic diseases, including almost 30 percent of kids. We’ve just been using the wrong tool for the job.” Chronic Disease Has Become an Existential Threat This is also why the health care debate, which is really focused on the availability of insurance, is completely missing the point. “If we don’t get a handle on chronic disease, there’s no method of paying for health care that will be sufficient,” he says. “A simple thought experiment will show this. It costs $14,000 a year to treat the average patient with Type 2 diabetes. The most recent statistics by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that 100 million Americans now either have prediabetes or full-fledged Type 2 diabetes. You don’t have to be a math genius to multiply 100 million times $14,000. You get a number so big that it’s absolutely impossible to generate the money we would need to cover that.” The situation is actually far worse than that, because insulin resistance likely affects upward of 250 million Americans, and insulin resistance is a foundational core of prediabetes and diabetes. Work by the late Dr. Joseph Kraft, author of “Diabetes Epidemic and You: Should Everyone Be Tested?” suggests that 80 percent — 8 out of 10 — of Americans are insulin resistant.1,2 Statistics also reveal opioid overdoses are now a leading cause of death among Americans under the age of 50, and two separate studies have confirmed that conventional medical care is the third leading cause of death in the U.S. As noted by Kresser: “It’s not an exaggeration to say that chronic disease is an existential threat to society and humanity at the same level as nuclear weapons, warfare and other things that we typically worry about and concern ourselves with. I don’t think that chronic disease gets the attention that it should get as a threat to our health, well-being and longevity as a species.” Doctors Are Victims of the System Too Doctors are also hogtied by a medical system that doesn’t allow them to really invest sufficient time. Most physicians genuinely want to help people. But how much can you really accomplish in mere minutes? The average primary care visit is eight to 12 minutes. Most primary care doctors have 2,500 patients on their roster and see an average of 25 patients a day. The incentives for physicians are based on how many patients they’re seeing each day, and with an average debt of $200,000 for medical school, doctors have to play this numbers game to pay off their debt and still make a living. Add to those pressures the interests and incentives of the drug and insurance industries, which rarely align with the best interest of patients or even doctors. “You end up reimbursement-based medicine, where the treatment chosen is based on what will be reimbursed by the insurance company, not on what the evidence suggests is the best option. You’ve got all these misaligned incentives, which almost guarantee that the type of care that’s offered to patients is not in their best interest,” Kresser says. “To clarify, there are three issues here. 1) There’s a mismatch between what our bodies are hardwired for and the way that we’re living now. 2) The medical paradigm is totally mismatched with what we need for chronic disease, and 3) The way care is delivered is mismatched [to our true needs] … If we recognize that diet and lifestyle is a primary driver of chronic disease ... then we need to acknowledge that changing our behavior, our diet and our lifestyle, is one of the most important steps we can take to prevent and reverse chronic disease. And yet our medical system just pays the briefest lip service to that. It’s not at all set up to actually deliver that kind of care.” The ADAPT Framework Kresser has developed a program called the ADAPT Framework, referring to the need for adaptation to our environment (which has dramatically changed from what it was for most of our evolutionary history), adaptation of our medical paradigm to one suited for the prevention and treatment of chronic disease, and adaptation of our health care delivery methods. “Those are really the three separate elements of the framework: realigning our diet, behavior and lifestyle with what our bodies are hardwired for; changing the medical paradigm to one that prevents and reverses chronic disease instead of just trying to manage it for the whole patient’s life; and updating the way we deliver care, so it supports the most important interventions which, again, are diet, lifestyle and behavior changes,” Kresser says. Case Sample: Prediabetes As a hypothetical example, take an individual who is diagnosed with prediabetes, meaning he has a fasting glucose level above 100 milligrams per deciliter but not high enough to qualify as diabetes. The current medical paradigm has nothing to offer at this point, because his glucose level is not high enough to start prescribing medication. In essence, the patient is simply told to wait until full-blown Type 2 diabetes develops, at which point treatment can commence. “What could happen in that situation would look something like this: ‘The good news is we’ve discovered that your blood sugar is high. It’s not full-fledged Type 2 diabetes yet, and the earlier we intervene, the better prognosis you’re going to have, the more chances that we have of preventing or reversing it,’” Kresser says. “To do that, we need to address your diet and your lifestyle, because we know that’s the primary driver of this condition. So, we’re going to set you up with a health coach, who is going to come to your house and do a pantry cleanout. They’re going to take you shopping. They’re going to give you recipes and meal plans. They’re going to work intensively with you to adopt this diet, because we know that information is not enough to change behavior. If it was, we wouldn’t be in the situation that we’re in now. I can’t just tell you to eat well. I have to actually give you some support in order to do that. Then we’re going to set you up with a personal trainer at the gym. They’re going to get you on an exercise and physical activity program that’s going to also support these efforts. The good news is your insurance company is going to cover all of that, because they recognize they could save potentially half a million dollars over the course of your lifetime just by preventing you from getting this one single disease. They’re going to spend a few thousand dollars now to save a half-million dollars over the course of your lifetime. That’s just one small example of how this model could work, because it’s actually focusing on preventing the disease before it happens or reversing it once it started to progress. Nothing that I just said is not possible, given our current technology, resources, and even the system as it currently exists. This could happen tomorrow if it was the way we decided to offer care.” A Collaborative Practice Model To facilitate this kind of switchover, Kresser has developed a powerful collaborative practice model that embraces streamlined operation and reduced overhead bureaucracy, and that really cuts to the core of what needs to be done to address chronic illness. One of the key changes is allowing for more time with each patient. You simply cannot cover diet, exercise, sleep and stress management in a 10-minute appointment. For that, we really need a team-based approach. Patients need support to implement diet and lifestyle changes. They need medical experts to help them understand the significance of their test results. Kresser’s collaborative practice model integrates physicians and other licensed providers such as nurse practitioners, physician assistants, health or wellness coaches and nutritionists trained in functional medicine, who can provide specific guidance related to diet and lifestyle changes. “Ultimately, I would say the proper ratio of health coaches to doctors would be probably five or six [per] doctor in each practice, depending on the patient load,” Kresser says. This model also requires the elimination of red tape bureaucracy and bloated, inefficient electronic medical record systems that simply get in the way. Technology should be used to automate things that create more time for what should never be automated — the face-to-face direct patient care. Community can also be built around online and in-person classes, video meetings and group care, where people with similar condition get together and actually connect with and support each other. “There are some electric medical records that are actually designed for this type of medicine that we’re talking about. They strip out all of the stuff that you don’t really need. They focus on only what you do need. The one that we use has features that make it really easy to quickly enter what you need to enter so that I can focus on the patient. But I also have a nurse practitioner with me, and she does all the note taking. I can just work and maintain eye contact with the patient and do what I need to do. That’s part of this team-based approach to care as well,” Kresser says. “We’re moving toward [this] program at our clinic. When the patient comes in, they work intensively with the health coach and nutritionist for several months before they even see the doctor. Now, of course, you can’t make hard and fast rules. Some people need to see the doctor right away if they have a more serious issue that needs to be dealt with. But in general, if someone has what we could call a lifestyle disease, which is most chronic diseases, and they haven’t yet taken the steps to address their diet and lifestyle, what’s the point of them even working with the doctor until they get that stuff under control? In many cases, if once they get that stuff under control, they may never even need to see the doctor.” New Payment Models Are Also Needed Naturally, someone’s going to have to pay for this care model. Health coaches typically bill by the hour, and few insurance companies presently offer reimbursement for this kind of care. There are signs of change, however. Iora Health,3 for example, a Denver-based primary care facility, is currently addressing Type 2 diabetes using health coaches. “They use something called capitated payments, where they go to the insurance companies and say, ‘Give us your patients with Type 2 diabetes. We will reverse Type 2 diabetes … or at least get your diabetics back to prediabetes. We’re going to do this mostly with health coaches. If we are successful, you pay us this much. If we’re not successful, you pay us less. If we are more successful than we said we would be, pay us more.’ That’s an attempt to realign incentives. It’s actually performance-based compensation instead of the way it usually works in medicine, where the compensation happens no matter what. That system has been pretty successful. I think it’s a good proof of concept that that could actually work, even within our current system. But this is just one company in one area. That will need to roll out on a wider scale for it to be successful. Whether or not that happens goes back to that other question: Is it going to happen voluntarily, or is it going to happen because it has to happen?” The National Board of Medical Examiners also recently teamed up with the International Consortium for Health and Wellness Coaching (ICHWC) to create standards for health coaches. This too is a step in the right direction in terms of legitimizing health coaching in the eyes of medical professionals, with the goal of incorporating them into the health care system and provide reimbursement for their services. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is not known as a particularly progressive organization, has also publicly recognized the need for health coaching. “Even without the full collapse of our health care system, I think we will see more integration of health coaching in the next decade,” Kresser says. “Whether we can get all the way to where we need to get to is another question.” The Importance of the Basics It’s hard to overstate the importance of basic lifestyle strategies when it comes to protecting and optimizing your health. Take sleep for example. One-third of Americans get less than six hours of sleep per night. Fifty-five years ago, that number was only 2 percent. This upshot of sleep deprivation is undoubtedly having an impact on public health these days, as lack of sleep has been linked to weight gain, diabetes, cognitive impairment and reduced immune function, just to name a few. For example, most obesity researchers now agree that sleep is the second most important factor beyond diet for maintaining healthy body weight. Even a single night of sleep deprivation has been shown to cause insulin resistance in healthy people with no pre-existing insulin resistance. “Sleep is where we rejuvenate and regenerate our mind, our body and our spirit. If we don’t get enough sleep, that doesn’t happen. We basically start to fall apart in every area of our life,” Kresser says. Electromagnetic field (EMF) exposures, especially electrical fields generated by electrical wiring, is a related issue, as these fields have been shown to impair biological function and disrupt sleep. For most people, it would therefore be wise to shut down the electrical circuit in your bedroom at night, to allow your body to recuperate and regenerate optimally. More Information At present, the ADAPT Program has trained over 400 clinicians, and in June the ADAPT Health Coach Training Program will be launched. The training has been submitted for approval by the ICHWC. If approved, anyone who graduates from the Health Coach Training Program and completes the requirements will be eligible to sit for the ICHWC accreditation, which will be internationally recognized. “We’re really excited about that. I view that as the next step in this collaborative practice model, because we’re training the practitioners and we’re training them on why they need health coaches and nutritionists, and then we’re training the nutritionists and the health coaches on how to work effectively with licensed clinicians,” Kresser explains. “We really want to create that synergy, all under this ADAPT Framework umbrella … Part of what differentiates our program from most others is its emphasis on practical application. You can’t learn to be a good coach by reading books or watching PowerPoint presentations. The ADAPT program focuses heavily on skills development, mentor coaching and supervision, and practice coaching sessions with real clients to ensure that our students are well-prepared when they graduate.” To learn more, and to sign up for the ADAPT training for clinicians and health coaches, please visit KresserInstitute.com. There you can also find a list of providers who have finished the training program. Also be sure to pick up a copy of Kresser’s book, “Unconventional Medicine: Join the Revolution to Reinvent Healthcare, Reverse Chronic Disease, and Create a Practice You Love.”

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thedeadshotnetwork · 7 years ago

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The father of virtual reality sounds off on the changing culture of Silicon Valley, the impending #MeToo backlash, and why he left Google for Microsoft BI Getty Images Widely recognized as the father of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier has been hugely influential in shaping the technology of today. Lanier's work is considered foundational to the field of VR; he's spurred developments in immersive avatars, VR headsets and accessories, and was involved in early advancements in medical imaging and surgical simulator techniques. He's also credited with coining the phrase "virtual reality." In addition to his work as a programmer and inventor, Lanier is a prolific author and celebrated tech critic. His most recent book, 'Dawn of the New Everything,' explores his upbringing in New Mexico, his years pioneering virtual reality in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, and his experiences working with pre-eminent scholars, critics, scientists, and developers. Lanier sat down with Business Insider's Zoë Bernard and Steven Tweedie to chat about his latest book, the current debate over the impacts of social media, his decision to join Microsoft after working at Google, and whether or not artificial intelligence will eventually wreak havoc on humanity. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Steven Tweedie : In the last year, we've seen an adjustment to expectations when it comes to the consumer market for virtual reality and the hype around VR in general. What would you say to those skeptical of whether or not it will take off? Wikimedia/Evan Amos Jaron Lanier : Let’s break this down just a little bit. First of all, there’s one side of VR which is the industrial side, not the consumer side, that’s been a total success. I’ll give you a very personal story from my life that’s an example of it. In the book, you’ll read about the surgical simulator, which dates back to the ‘80s. I did that with a few people, Dr. Joe Rosen, for example, who is a Stanford Med guy. In the last couple of years, my wife has been battling cancer and she had a bunch of operations. She’s post-cancer now, but one of her surgeons for the most difficult operation was a student of a student of Joe Rosen’s, and he used a procedure that was designed in the surgical simulator that evolved from the original one and trained in one. Since I’ve worked more on that side of things than the consumer end, I don’t have any doubts about whether or not VR is going to happen. For me, it’s been great. I think this is an established technology. I’m really proud of what we’ve done. But I’ve also played around with the consumer side a lot, starting with the Power Glove which a lot of people still have a bit of fondness for, which charms me. Business Insider By the way, I was supposed to be interviewed by Leonard Lopate on WNYC in the morning, and I just got this email that he’s been fired for sexual misconduct, 'so we’re finding another host to interview you.' The same thing happened to my interview with Charlie Rose last week. It’s hard to promote a book right now because all of the people who are supposed to interview me keep getting outed for sexual misconduct. Tweedie : Yep, it's been non-stop — our Entertainment team has been quite busy for the past month or two. So on the consumer side of the VR market, Sony's PlayStation VR headset is leading the pack when it comes to sales, and there seems to be genuine interest in the gaming side of VR and augmented reality (AR) — what are your thoughts on how those markets will evolve? Lanier : Sony has found some success with headsets, there has been some pretty good adoption of the phone and holder for things like news clips — The New York Times has been a pioneer in that. And Pokémon Go needs to be mentioned. Pokémon Go was super crude, barely over the line of usability, and yet there it was and it engaged a lot of people and that gave us a taste of mixed reality in a wide area. People like it, it makes sense. I feel like we’re doing fine, actually. For me, this is what a new market looks like. I don’t know what people are expecting. Do you know what it is? Everybody is still in this weird post-Steve Jobs period where they want that big thrill of the iPhone intro, and those things just don’t happen a lot. Tweedie: You've been involved with Microsoft's HoloLens headset, so I have to ask you about one of its competitors, Magic Leap, which one investor compared to the first time he experienced multi-touch technology, a key selling point of the iPhone. What's your opinion on Magic Leap? Lanier : I want nothing more than for Magic Leap to ship and thrive. I think it would be really good for everybody, and I really hope they do, I think it’d be great. I don’t know if they will, but I hope they do. You can’t just have a single vendor in something. You can have a most innovative vendor, you can have a vendor who's ahead, but you can’t just have a single vendor. That’s not a market. Getty Tweedie : You've been at Microsoft for around a decade, is that right? How'd that come about? Lanier : Well, it depends on how you count it. Never in a million years would have expected that I would have worked at Microsoft Labs, but it’s been a brilliant, amazing thing which I wouldn’t really have expected. I was a critic of Microsoft in the ‘90s, and I’ve always a bit of a radical purist, and Microsoft was the punching bag for people like me for a long time. Business Insider How I ended up at Microsoft is really simple. Sergey [Brin] told me, “We don’t want people writing all of these controversial essays,” because I’ve been writing tech criticism for a long time. I’ve been worried about tech turning us into evil zombies for a long time, and Sergey said, “Well, Google people can’t be doing that.” And I was like, really? And then I was talking to Bill Gates and he said, “You can’t possibly say anything else bad about us that you haven’t said. We don’t care. Why don’t you come look at our labs? They’re really cool.” And I thought, well that sounds great. So I went and looked, and I was like, yeah, this is actually really great. Zoe Bernard : I wanted to ask you about Silicon Valley. You’re living very close to there, in Berkeley. What is your perception of how the culture has changed? Lanier : Well, the tech world has such incredible stories of quick money, quick power, and quick status, that I think it’s made people a little drunk and crazy, and also a little shallow, and that makes me a little sad . The amazing thing about the old days was that you could have some people in a room from early Silicon Valley, and one of them might be a billionaire, one of them might be living out of a car, and what it was all about was how much you could do. We respected technical ability over money, and I think that was a really healthy and interesting culture . And now it’s gone. Sure, broadly speaking, in the whole world, hacker culture still exists, but Silicon Valley and San Francisco have both become so intense. For one thing, you can’t afford to live there unless you’re doing really well, so a lot of people have been priced out. And I’m not down on anybody, I mean, I live there. But if you’re asking me how it’s changed, that’s how. There’s this thing that happened which is that the re’s more diversity of ethnicity and background perhaps, but less diversity of cognitive style. If you have a certain kind of nerdy, quantitative problem-solving oriented cognitive style, that will get you more friends, and that will get you along better than if you have a more contemplative, aesthetic center. Bernard : You mentioned the lack of cognitive diversity in Silicon Valley. Do you think that this lack of cognitive diversity plays an influence in the technologies being created there? Lanier : Sometimes I do. A lot of the tools we have tend to be more usable by people who are similar to the engineers who made the tools. It’s not always true, but in general it’s a principle that seems to take hold. E ngineers are designing things that work better for people who are similar to the engineers, and that turns into a social effect that favors and disfavors certain classes of people. Tweedie : It seems like that would just lead to more isolated communities and some people thinking they're smarter than others. Business Insider Lanier : This is an ongoing conversation and argument that goes back for years. If I’m in an environment with a bunch of technical men, and I say, you know, we’re doing this thing that excludes people, they’ll say, “What are you complaining about? At least you’re on the good side of it.” And my response is, “Actually, from a purely selfish point of view, it does hurt me because I’m in this weird echo chamber where I’m being told ‘you're a hacker, you’re a technical man, you’re a white man’” and it becomes this ongoing reinforcement where you’re that thing — but the thing is this total artificial bullshit classification that just happens to rise from the resonance of this stupid tool. So while I’m on the beneficial side of it, in some ways, it forces me into this box. I think this kind of thinking hurts everyone, even the people who appear to be the beneficiaries of it. They’re forced into a place where they can’t reach their full potential. Bernard : In your first book, 'You Are Not a Gadget,' you wrote about how technology is doing us a disservice, and that computers are not yet worthy to represent people. You wrote that almost ten years ago — have your views changed at all? Lanier : I like to think that my views are always changing. I’m always interested in re-examining my stuff and seeing if I can find some way to make it better. But that general principle — that we’re not treating people well enough with digital systems — still bothers me. I do still think that is very true. Bernard : What do you think about programmers using consciously addicting techniques to keep people hooked to their products? Lanier : This was an open secret for a long time. Maureen Dowd published an interview with me in The New York Times that talked a little bit about it, and then the next day, Sean Parker, who I used to know, admitted to it and said, “Yeah, we did that.” There’s a long and interesting history that goes back to the 19th century, with the science of Behaviorism that arose to study living things as though they were machines . Behaviorists had this feeling that I think might be a little like this godlike feeling that overcomes some hackers these days, where they feel totally godlike as though they have the keys to everything and can control people. So if you zoom ahead to the 1950s or so, Norbert Wiener, one of the founders of computer science after Alan Turing and Jon van Neumann, wrote a book called 'The Human Use of Human Beings,' and in that book he points out that a computer (which at that time was a very new and exotic device that only existed in a few laboratories) could take the role of the human researcher in one of these experiments. So, if you had a computer that was reading information about what a person did and then providing stimulus, you could condition that person and change their behavior in a predictable way. He was saying that computers could turn out to have incredible social consequences. There’s an astonishing passage at the end of 'The Human Use of Human Beings' in which he says, “The thing about this book is that this hypothetical might seem scary, but in order for it to happen, there’d have to be some sort of global computing capacity with wireless links to every single person on earth who keeps some kind of device on their person all the time and obviously this is impossible.” Getty Images The behaviorists got pretty far in understanding the kinds of algorithms that can change people. They found that noisy feedback works better than consistent feedback. That means that if you’re pressing the button to get your treat, and once in a while it doesn’t work, it actually engages your mind even more — it makes you more obsessive, whether you’re a rat, or a dog, or a person. And the reason why is that the brain wants to understand the world and if there’s this thing that isn't quite working, your brain just keeps on trying to get it and wants to figure out how to build a better model. So you can really grab the brain that way. The results from the behaviorists’ research transformed the gambling industry and made it what it is today — an algorithmic, person-manipulation industry. People are driven by emotions and some emotions are cheaper, more efficient ways to engage us. Negative emotions get you first. Fear, anger, resentment, jealousy, insecurity, grab you, and it’s easier to renew them and keep you grabbed than positive things like nurturing, adoration, appreciation of beauty. Those emotions are softer. They’re easier to kill and harder to nurture in an audience. There’s an unfortunate imbalance. So, according to Sean Parker, these types of programming were put in intentionally [in Facebook’s design]. I wasn’t in the middle of Facebook, but my memory of those days — how people were talking and what was going on — is a little different. I don’t think that it’s so much that people were evil geniuses saying, “Let’s take the worst of behaviorism and manipulate the entire world.” I think what they were doing was: let’s maximize the efficiencies of our algorithms for a purpose. Tweedie: That purpose being engagement? Lanier : Well, this is maybe the greatest tragedy in the history of computing, and it goes like this: there was a well-intentioned, sweet movement in the ‘80s to try to make everything online free. And it started with free software and then it was free music, free news, and other free services. But, at the same time, it's not like people were clamoring for the government to do it or some sort of socialist solution. If you say, well, we want to have entrepreneurship and capitalism, but we also want it to be free, those two things are somewhat in conflict, and there’s only one way to bridge that gap, and it’s through the advertising model. And advertising became the model of online information, which is kind of crazy. But here’s the problem: if you start out with advertising, if you start out by saying what I’m going to do is place an ad for a car or whatever, gradually, not because of any evil plan — just because they’re trying to make their algorithms work as well as possible and maximize their shareholders value and because computers are getting faster and faster and more effective algorithms — what starts out as advertising morphs into behavior modification. It morphs into the very thing Weiner was warning about. Getty Images A second issue is that people who participate in a system of this time, since everything is free since it’s all being monetized, what reward can you get? Ultimately, this system creates assholes, because if being an asshole gets you attention, that’s exactly what you’re going to do. Because there’s a bias for negative emotions to work better in engagement, because the attention economy brings out the asshole in a lot of other people, the people who want to disrupt and destroy get a lot more efficiency for their spend than the people who might be trying to build up and preserve and improve. T here used to be this sense of an arc in history in which, if there was something that seemed like an injustice in society and people worked to improve it, there might be some backlash, but gradually it would improve. Now, what happens is that the backlash is greater than the original thing, and in some ways worse. For instance, the Arab Spring, driven by social media, turned into networks of terrorists. A few women trying to improve their place in the gaming world turned into Gamergate, which, in turn, became a prototype for the alt-right. Black Lives Matter is followed by a rise of white supremacy and neo-fascism which would have been inconceivable until recently. Now, I’m just waiting to see what happens with the #MeToo movement, because the same thing always happens with these moments that are social media-centric. That good energy becomes fuel for a system that is routed to annoy another group of people who are introduced to each other, and then get riled up and that becomes even more powerful, because the system inherently supports the negative people more than the positive people. My prediction, which I hate and which I’m sorry for, is that the #MeToo backlash will be far more powerful than the #MeToo movement. And that’s because the backlash from all these other movements was more powerful than the original. And I’d say that social media driven by the so-called advertising media is fundamentally incapable of doing anything positive for society as it stands. Bernard : What do you think that #MeToo backlash would look like? Lanier : It’s unpredictable. It will be algorithmic. As long as it’s really annoyed and mean-spirited, that’s the thing that will count, because that would be the most engaging thing. We can’t predict what it will be, but it will be mean, and it might take on a surprising character, but it will happen. People don’t understand that #MeToo will inevitably lead to a negative outcome because of the way that things are figured structurally right now. I find that it takes about a year for it to cycle through the system, for the good stuff to turn into the bad stuff. Business Insider I try to draw a certain line, and it’s a difficult line to draw. I don’t want to become a judgmental, middle-aged person. If we can identify a particular process that’s doing damage and draw a circle around it and say, “This is it,” then I think we have to talk about it. I don’t think it’s possible for us to do better unless we change the incentive structure. Right now, of the big five tech companies, three of them don’t rely on that [advertising] model. Whatever you think of Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, they’re selling goods and services primarily. In terms of big companies, it’s really Google and Facebook. It’s not even the whole tech industry, it’s really kind of narrow. I’ m totally convinced if companies like Google and Facebook can shift to a more monetized economy, then things will get better, simply because people participating will have some incentive to add to the attention economy, where they at least have something else to do, rather than just be assholes. Bernard : So the model you’re presenting is that you would like to see users get paid for the data they contribute rather than have Facebook and Google give that money to advertisers? Lanier . Yeah. The way I imagine it is that you’d pay a small fee to use Facebook. We pay for all kinds of things we like, so don’t freak out. Netflix proves that this can work. Look at what happens when people pay their Netflix bills, we suddenly have peak TV. People say “I’ll pay for this,” and suddenly better stuff is there. I really reject this zero-sum idea where we should volunteer because there’s no way we can be better anyway. So Facebook would charge a fee. I’m sympathetic to a lot of people who say that young people or people in poverty couldn't afford it. And sure, make some accommodation for that. But i n general, people will pay a small fee, but then they’d also have a chance to earn money. I f someone is a super-contributor to a social network, if they’re really adding a lot of content, they should get paid for it. Like, what Google is doing now is communist central control. They’re saying that certain YouTube personalities should be paid because they like them, but not others. That’s ridiculous. It should be a market. It should be a gradual curve, it shouldn’t be some arbitrary rule where everything is free except for this designated group. It should be universal . I think it will make things better because it will give people a different game to play in addition to seeking attention. Sometimes people come to me and say, “You don’t make any sense,” because on the one hand I’m a tech critic and I say that tech is turning us into zombies and destroying the world. But, on the other hand, I love virtual reality and I'm promoting it. But there’s no contradiction — it’s all true at once. There’s zero contradiction. We can afford to be honest. If we’re going to look at the good side of tech, it's good enough that it’s not going to kill us to also look at the bad side and be fearful of it. I don’t think there is any inconsistency in looking at the whole spectrum. Business Insider Bernard : You have an eleven-year-old daughter. Do you monitor her interactions with technology? Lanier : I’ve had extraordinary good fortune in that I was the one that made my daughter get a smartphone. I’m in this wonderful position where the problem took care of itself. I don’t have a problem with her being too into technology. Sometimes you get lucky. There does seem to be a correlation, though. The more a parent is involved in the technology industry, the more cautious they seem to be about their kids’ interactions with it. A lot of parents in Silicon Valley purposefully seek out anti-tech environments for their kids, like Waldorf Schools. I hope we won’t have to go there. Bernard : I’m interested in what you think the future of technology looks like. From reading your new book, I got the sense that you’re slightly anxious, but that you also have a sense of optimism about the future. What do you think is in store? Lanier : I’m optimistic for many reasons, one reason is that it’s dysfunctional not to be. If you look at history, people have been through horrible things in the past, including very confusing things. The world has seen horrifying mass phenomenon. Somehow, we seem to be able to find our way through, and I do believe in an arc of history. I believe that as technology improves, it gives us more opportunities to learn to be decent. I think in the big picture, I am optimistic. Bernard : Do you think that there’s a problem with people becoming progressively addicted to technology or growing too reliant on it? Lanier : It’s all in the details. Using a technology a lot is not necessarily a bad thing, people use books a lot too. The mere use of it is not bad. When we talk about addiction, we should make it specific, and in the case of behavioral addiction, it’s really a noisy feedback loop. I do believe that these noisy feedback loops are dysfunctional, and they should not exist. Bernard: There’s also been so many differing perspectives regarding artificial intelligence (AI). Some people, like Elon Musk, think that we should be more skeptical because it could end up controlling us, while others, like Mark Zuckerberg, seem to think it’s less insidious. Where do you fall in the spectrum of that debate? Lanier : I have a position that is both unusual and yet entirely correct. From my perspective, there isn’t any AI. AI is just computer engineering that we do. If you take any number of different algorithms and say, “Oh, this isn’t just some program that I’m engineering to do something, this is a person, it’s a separate entity,” it’s a story you’re telling. That fantasy really attracts a lot of people. And then you call it AI. As soon as you do that, it changes the story, it’s like you’re creating life. It’s like you’re God or something. I think it makes you a worse engineer, because if you’re saying that you’re creating this being, you have to defer to that being. You have to respect it, instead of treating it as a tool that you want to make as good as possible on your terms. The actual work of AI, the math and the actuators and sensors in robots, that stuff fascinates me, and I’ve contributed to it. I’m really interested in that stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the mythology that’s creepy. Tweedie : In your book, you describe AI as a wrapping paper that we apply to the things we build. Lanier : Yeah, you could say that. AI is a fantasy that you apply to things. The issue with AI is that we’re giving these artifacts we build so much respect that we’re not taking responsibility for them and designing them as well as possible. Business Insider The origin of this idea is with Alan Turing, and understanding Turing’s life is important to understanding that idea about AI because he came up with this notion of AI and the Turing test in the final weeks of his life, just before he killed himself while he was undergoing torture for his sexual identity. I don’t want to presume to know what was going on in Turing’s head, but it seems to me that if there’s this person who is being forced by the state to take these hormones that are essentially a form of torture, he’s probably already contemplating suicide or knows that he’ll commit suicide. And then he publishes this thing about how maybe computers and people are the same and puts it in the form of this Victorian parlor game. You look at it, and it's a psycho-sexual drama, it's a statement, a plea for help, a form of escape or a dream of a world where sexuality doesn’t matter so much, where you can just be . There are many ways to interpret it, but it’s clearly not just a straightforward, technical statement. For Turing, my sense is that his theory was a form of anguish. For other people, maybe it’s more like religion. If you change the words, you have the Catholic church again. The singularity is the rapture, you’re supposed to be a true believer, and if you’re not, you’re going to miss the boat and so on. I think our responsibility as engineers is to engineer as well as possible, and to engineer as well as possible, you have to treat the thing you’re engineering as a product. You can’t respect it in a deified way. It goes in the reverse. We’ve been talking about the behaviorist approach to people, and manipulating people with addictive loops as we currently do with online systems. In this case, you’re treating people as objects. It’s the flipside of treating machines as people, as AI does. They go together. Both of them are mistakes. Jaron Lanier's latest book, "Dawn of the New Everything," is on sale now. NOW WATCH: France's $21 billion nuclear fusion reactor is now halfway complete December 16, 2017 at 02:18PM

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pimpskweek · 8 years ago

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First Human Embryos ‘Edited’ in U.S.—Get the Facts The work, which removed a gene mutation linked to a heart condition, is fueling debate over the controversial tool known as CRISPR. Two days after being injected with a gene-editing enzyme, these developing human embryos were free of a disease-causing mutation. What if you could remove a potentially fatal gene mutation from your child’s DNA before the baby is even born? In an advance that’s as likely to raise eyebrows as it is to save lives, scientists just took a big step toward making that possible.

For the first time, researchers in the United States have used gene editing in human embryos. As they describe today in the journal Nature, the team used “genetic scissors” called CRISPR-Cas9 to target and remove a mutation associated with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a common inherited heart disease, in 42 embryos.

If CRISPR sounds familiar, there’s a reason: Ever since its introduction, it’s been at the center of a heated debate about the ethics of gene editing. (Read more about how the DNA revolution is changing us in National Geographic magazine.)

DNA HACKING TOOL ENABLES SHORTCUT TO EVOLUTION A technology called CRISPR makes it possible to target and replace DNA segments in plants, animals, and other living things. Potential applications range from food security to disease prevention. CRISPR’s ethical implications remain a matter of debate.

Scientists who want to explore the technique hail it as a biomedical advance that could one day give people the option not to pass down heritable diseases. The tool could also reduce the number of embryos that are discarded during fertility treatments because of worrisome genetic mutations.

But critics counter that it takes more than safety or even efficacy to make a procedure ethical.

“The scientists are out of control,” says George Annas, director of the Center for Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights at the Boston University School of Public Health, who thinks that scientists should not edit the genomes of human embryos for any reason. “They want to control nature, but they can’t control themselves.”

HEALING HEARTS According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy occurs in about one in 500 people. The condition causes the heart muscle to thicken and can lead to sudden cardiac arrest.

It takes only one gene mutation to cause the condition, and you can get the disease even if only one of your parents has the mutated gene. If you inherit it, there’s a 50 percent chance you will pass it on to your children.

For their work, Shoukhrat Mitalipov, principal investigator at the Oregon Health and Science University’s Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy, and his colleagues targeted the genetic mutations that cause the majority of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy cases.

First, they created 58 human embryos from the sperm of a male donor with the mutation and the egg of a female without the mutation. Then, they used CRISPR to cut the mutation out of the gene. The gene editing tool guides an enzyme called Cas-9 to a targeted position on DNA and snips the molecule at just the right spot. When things go right, the DNA repairs itself and the mutation disappears.

The technique isn’t always successful. In previous studies, some CRISPR-edited embryos developed mosaicism, a condition in which some cells have the unwanted mutations and others don’t.

So the team developed a new method: injecting sperm and CRISPR into the egg simultaneously instead of waiting until after fertilization to edit the genes. This time, they say, mosaicism did not occur.

All in all, the team was able to repair the gene mutation in about 70 percent of the embryos, and the study showed no unwanted changes at other sites in the edited DNA.

The team allowed the fertilized cells to develop into blastocysts—the stage at which embryos are usually implanted into the mother during fertility treatments. They showed normal development, the team reports. Then, the embryos were destroyed.

The edited embryos were allowed to develop into blastocysts, seen here. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OHSU SCIENCE IN MOTION “Of course further research and ethical discussions are necessary before proceeding to clinical trials,” study coauthor Paula Amato, adjunct associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at OHSU, said during a press briefing on August 1.

Earlier this year, the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine asked an international committee of scientists and ethicists to weigh in on the benefits and risks of genome editing in humans. (Find out why scientists think gene editing is both terrifying and terrific.)

The panel recommended that in the case of the human germline—genes passed down from generation to generation—scientists refrain from editing genes for any purpose other than treating or preventing a disease or disability. The report also insisted on a more robust public debate before such experiments begin.

In the United States, there’s currently a ban on using taxpayer funds for any research that destroys human embryos.

In this case, the researchers forged ahead with their work and used institutional and private funds. If the team can’t move ahead as quickly as desired in the U.S., they’ll consider pursuing their research in other countries.

While editing out genetic diseases may still seem far off, people should pay close attention to this kind of research, says Sakthivel Sadayappan, director of the heart branch of the University of Cincinnati’s Heart, Lung and Vascular Institute.

“This is exciting,” says Sadayappan, who was not involved in the new CRISPR study. “This is the future.”

The experiment’s small sample size certainly leaves something to be desired. But Sadayappan says it’s worth conducting and supporting the research. “Of course feasibility studies have issues,” he says. “But it’s the only way science can evolve.”

For Sadayappan, who researches hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the stakes are high. Patients who have inherited the mutation from both parents, he says, “have no option other than this technology if they want to have offspring.”

DEBATING THE FUTURE It’s already possible to screen for genetic defects within embryos during in vitro fertilization using a process called preimplantation genetic diagnosis. The team thinks their CRISPR technique could eventually be applied to gene mutations associated with other diseases, like cystic fibrosis.

In their paper, the team writes that their method may one day “rescue mutant embryos, increase the number of embryos available for transfer and ultimately improve pregnancy rates.”

“That’s just absurd,” says Annas. “They admit right up front that if you want to avoid having a baby with [the mutation], you can just not implant the embryos that are affected.”

Mitalipov disagrees: “Discarding half the embryos is morally wrong,” he tells National Geographic. “We need to be more proactive.”

Either way, Annas says, it’s time to revisit the conversation about how to regulate CRISPR in the United States. “My guess is that the regulators will be horrified.”

But for Mitalipov, the debate is a chance to inform the world about the technique’s potential. And for a scientist who has also cloned monkey embryos and even cloned human embryos to make stem cells, he knows plenty about how to ignite public debate.

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