#future event and meetups and maybe even expanding into other parts of country!!

[somnolent-scout]

Help support our group and get cool merch in the process!!

[josephborrello]

Magnitude and Direction, Issue #43 | 4 Oct 2019

Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication

⚙ Last week's issue of The Prepared featured Boltcutter, a list of hardware VC fund Bolt's favorite shop tools. It's a who's-who of tools that I think everyone should have in their workshop and I'm proud to say I personally have many of the tools listed. ⚙ This plotter artwork is great for people like me: who can't draw, but have lots of tools and machines. What do you do when you have to machine a part, but it's made out of highly radioactive fuel rods? Hero dogs like Lassie are all well and good on the TV, but if a random dog (or even a dog you knew) was barking at you with no apparent danger or trouble in sight, would you "listen" to them and follow? Maybe not, and that's where a new vest designed to give dogs the power to "speak" comes in.

Software and Programming

🔈🔉🔊 It's easy to make a user-friendly volume adjust, but a user-unfriendly one? Well, that's much harder (and more fun... at least until you lose it and throw your computer against the wall.) A problem unique to the 21st century: What do you do when a computer thinks your last name is "offensive"? A modern version of the Linux operating system, running on a very not-modern version of a Toshiba laptop.

Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine

Stellarium: a free, open-source planetarium for your computer. For a while, we've thought heart disease was a relatively new issue. Recent scans of mummies, however, are telling a different story. 🪐 The hottest new Soundcloud artist? NASA's InSight Mars lander.

Mapping, History, and Data Science

From The Prepared: How Civil War-era legislation is driving multibillion dollar IT investments today. You've heard of VHS v. Betamax, HDDVD v. Blu-Ray... Now you can add Wi-Fi v. HomeRF to the list of behind-the-scenes tech standards wars that ended up shaping the very fabric of our society. ⚙ I wasn't totally sure where to put this, since it very much involves software, hardware, and engineering, so I decided on putting it here, since it's an important piece of history: Here is a visualization of how the Enigma Machine worked, the famous encryption device used by the Nazis in WWII and cracked, in part, by father of computing Alan Turing. The way the animation moves the "bits" of data around really captures the nature of this computing device, which was totally electromechanical.

Events and Opportunities

I don't know about you guys, but I've got a busy few weeks ahead of me...

TONIGHT, 10/4 This year's Futureworks Incubator closes out with a party and showcase down at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, featuring over 50 of the hardware and manufacturing startups that went through this year's program.

Monday, 10/7 Join GRO-Biotech and Insight Data Sciences for a talk and Q&A about different careers in data, the most suitable backgrounds for each of them, and how Insight Data Sciences can help you make the transition.

Monday, 10/7 If you don't mind being suspended over the East River for a bit, head over to Cornell Tech for the inaugural seminar in their HealthTech.NYC series, uniting engineers, clinicians, and leaders intent on disrupting and improving healthcare through technology. The first event will examine how precision medicine can be applied in the context of cancer care with speakers joining from sema4, Englander Institute for Precision Medicine, Flatiron health, and the NYU Perlmutter Cancer Center. (And yes, you can take the subway to get there as well, if you're afraid of heights)

Wednesday, 10/9 In honor of National Nanotech Day (10/9 >> 10^9, for the uninitiated, myself included) the Nanotech NYC meetup group will be gathering together for their next Nanonite social, with a collection of researchers, enthusiasts, and entrepreneurs, as always.

Saturday, 10/12 The next edition of Hot Glass Cold Beer returns to the Brooklyn Glass studios in Gowanus, featuring live glass blowing, open studios, and effectively endless amounts of beer. As always, getting a ticker in advance (versus at the door) means you'll be guaranteed to get one of their hand-made glasses (which you can subsequently drink out of for the rest of the night).

October 11-16 Innovation Week at Mount Sinai. What started as just the SINAInnovations conference is now a week's worth of activities dedicated to bringing New York's biomedical innovation communities together. Here's the full lineup:

Friday-Sunday, 10/11-13 Mount Sinai Health Hackathon. The 4th annual Mount Sinai Health Hackathon will be an exciting 48-hour transdisciplinary competition focused on creating novel technology solutions for problems in healthcare. This year’s theme is Artificial Intelligence – Expanding the Limits of Human Performance.

Tuesday, 10/15 Careers & Connections 2019. GRO-Biotech's next big event, the Careers & Connections mini-conference and networking event, is being held concurrently with emerging healthcare technologies conference, SINAInnovations. We have hit capacity for event RSVPs, but a wait list has been started so you should still register!

Tuesday & Wednesday, 10/15-16 SINAInnovations Conference. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is hosting its eighth annual SINAInnovations conference around the theme of Artificial Intelligence. A range of talks and panels will focus on the explosive growth of AI in our society and in particular in medicine, featuring international thought leaders across the range of relevant domains.

Tuesday, 10/15 The Careers & Connections reception ends around 7pm, which would leave you just enough time to get down to Tir Na Nog for the second half of the New York BioPharma Networking Group's October after-work gathering.

Wednesday, 10/16 Right after Careers & Connections, GRO-Biotech is hosting a fireside chat at BioLabs with Adam Wollowick from Stryker and Jack Wu from Adlai Nortye on what a career in business development looks like and how you can start a career in bizdev.

Some other upcoming events to keep on your radar...

Saturday, 10/19 New Lab's annual open house birthday celebration is back, with a theme this year of Light+Motion. As always, you can expect pretty much everyone affiliated with technology, design, science, and/or entrepreneurship to turn up for what's one of the bigger bashes of the year.

Saturday & Sunday 10/19-20 The biggest bi-annual graduate career symposium in the country is back at NYU Med showcasing all the career trajectories you can pursue post-PhD. This is one of the best opportunities for graduate students and postdocs to learn about the breadth of career paths for doctorates and an amazing place to network with the next generation of scientists. More info on the two-day conference can be found here, and the registration link is here.

Monday 10/21 It's not always science and startup events here. One of my favorite organizations, the Society for the Advancement of Social Studies (aka SASS) is back with more barroom history, this time with a focus on the spooky, scary, and ghoulish.

Wednesday, 10/23 VR investors and practitioners in the healthcare space will gather at RLab in the Brooklyn Navy Yard for a showcase of the latest and greatest VR technologies and applications in the healthcare space.

Wednesday, 10/23 Scientists, artists and everything in between meet up once again at Peculier Pub for the October edition of SciArt's Synapse social mixer.

Thursday, 10/24 The NYC biotech/life science/entrepreneurial communities get together at JLABS once again for the October edition of their Innovators & Entrepreneurs mixer.

Saturday, 10/26 The Future of Care conference is back at Rockefeller University featuring some of the latest breakthroughs in clinical care and the innovators helping shepherd them from bench to bedside. Applications close today!

Tuesday, 10/29 Join Columbia Nano Labs for their annual Industry Day conference. Learn how you can use and leverage the Nano Labs facilities, hear from a panel of entrepreneurs who have done just that, and listen to faculty and technical experts discuss the way these sophisticated tools contribute to cutting-edge research. (Yes, this was rescheduled from the originally planed date of 9/5.)

Thursday, 10/31 Pitching your startup in front of investors doesn't have to be spooky. The Mid Atlantic Bio Angels 1st Pitch events offer NYC's biotech entrepreneurs the chance to pitch their innovations in front of a panel of real investors and receive critical feedback on their pitches and business plans. The 1st Pitch events are also a great place to learn about the latest innovations in the NYC biotech ecosystem and connect with some of its major players.

Friday, 11/8 The Intrepid museum's Innovators series returns for another evening of showcasing startups powered by NASA technologies, plus networking and mingling between scientists, entrepreneurs, and technologists.

Friday-Sunday, 11/8-10 For 36 hours on November 8-10, HackPrinceton will bring together 600 developers and designers from across the country to create incredible software and hardware projects. They'll have swag, workshops, mentors, prizes, games, free food, and more.

Map of the Month

⚡ Here's a live map of carbon emissions being generated by electricity generation around the world.

Odds & Ends

The Son of Sam is sorry for what he did. (Naturally, the only place I could've possily found this website is the incomparably scattershot Web Curios.)

[type2diabetestreatments-blog]

The Next Stage of Evolution in Diabetes Advocacy?

New Post has been published on http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/the-next-stage-of-evolution-in-diabetes-advocacy/

The Next Stage of Evolution in Diabetes Advocacy?

OK, we're dubbing 2014 the Year of Diabetes Foot Soldier Advocacy.

Yup, you heard right: foot soldiers.

No, that's not some veiled reference to the fictional ninjutsu clan from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (well, maybe it is)... But it's the best way we know how to describe where our Diabetes Online Community seems to be going with our advocacy efforts -- beyond the virtual walls of the online universe to the actual, in-real-life world of local activities where more and more people with diabetes are able to hear our messages.

We've come a long way... it's been fascinating to watch our beloved DOC evolve through the years. From the primitive listservs and online forums back in the late 90s to the emergence of a whole universe of diabetes blogs and interactive online networks in recent years. And just in the past few years, the DOC has stepped into a stronger position, reaching industry decision-makers and regulators who are now paying more attention to our Patient Voices than ever before.

Now our community is also looking internally, to offer more teaching and mentorship opportunities, including scholarships that enable more PWDs to step into that sometimes-scary advocacy role, by paying their way to expensive diabetes conferences so they can represent the wider D-audience and help us all learn how to best raise our voices for the most impact.

Just this week, the non-profit Diabetes Hands Foundation announced it's awarding 16 scholarships to patient advocates in the D-Community, in order for them to attend one of three of the upcoming D-conferences this summer -- one of which will feature a new "Masterlab" aimed at creating a formula for successful diabetes advocacy in the future.

It's a way to get more of us to these conferences to learn about advocating, and it's sign of the times, we think!

The MasterLab: D-Advocacy 101

As we head into the busy summer season sprinkled with diabetes conferences, the CWD Friends For Life Conference happening this July in Orlando, FL, will be home to the first-ever day-long "Masterlab" hosted by DHF on the event's opening day. Attendees will learn about multiple issues and get tips to become better advocates in their own communities, online or offline.

Speakers include well-known names in the advocacy game: Paul Madden, Mike Swearingen, Rebecca Killion, Kelly Close, Kerri Sparling, Moira McCarthy, and many other diabetes experts and a variety of government affairs folk from device and pharmaceutical companies. The topics will range from policy and regulatory issues, to what advocacy looks like now and how we can improve, and an overview of how patients can be effective in the policy landscape. DHF co-founder and president Manny Hernandez says the plan is to offer hands-on practice and role-playing, to borrow a page from the HIV/AIDS advocacy playbook in creating an advocacy model, and ultimately to develop a Diabetes Advocacy Roadmap.

"The Masterlab is about building a sense of what is possible. It's a chance to learn from veteran advocates for other health issues. It's about creating a formula for successful diabetes advocacy in the future," he says. "We will be recording the whole event and will be sharing it with the broader community following the event (we wanted to stream it, but it was too expensive). Part of the hope is to broaden the level of participation in advocacy within the community as a whole."

In prepping for FFL and the Masterlab, Manny says his team has just finished the first phase of developing an actual Diabetes Advocacy Roadmap. That's led to many realizations on how the DOC can work together even better internally and with other advocacy groups leading the way outside of the diabetes universe. The plan for the next two months is to distill that information and recommendations into an improved Roadmap and establish a timeline, before sharing the plan with the broader community in July.

Six of the scholarships announced Tuesday are for the Masterlab, so you'll likely be able to follow those D-Advocates online (among others) to get the scoop on the Masterlab as it's happening at FFL.

(If you're interested in attending just the Masterlab on July 2, you can register and get more details here.)

Successful Advocacy in Action

The Masterlab is all about is advocacy in action, and making it possible for more PWDs to learn what needs to be done and carry that into their own physical worlds. In the past, it's always been the big groups like JDRF or ADA asking us to "advocate" by taking some specific action with a particular message in mind. Now, thanks in large part to the DOC, it's a lot more patient-driven than it used to be.

Look at some of the campaigns like StripSafely and Spare A Rose, Save a Child where community members have come together to beat the drum issues important to them, and spread awareness.

The Big Blue Test movement (that huge "test-in" that teaches us about the impact of exercise while raising money for people with diabetes in Third World countries) has gained steam through the years, rippling into local community meetups and awareness initiatives beyond just lighting landmarks up in blue on World Diabetes Day each Nov. 14.

The community has been hammering a point recently about expanding coverage of diabetes devices like insulin pumps and CGMs, especially when it comes to Medicare competitive-bidding and specific state budgets. We saw the birth of a letter-writing and social media campaign that led clearly to a victory in convincing Arizona's government leaders to include insulin pumps in its state budget. Effective advocacy, at its best!

Those are just a few examples...

"First and foremost, advocacy is about connecting peers. The better we connect, the more people with diabetes are empowered and hopefully the each PWD's life is better. Policy advocacy is a side effect of peer connection, a good side effect," says D-Dad and type 2 advocate Bennet Dunlap, who blogs at YDMV and is a co-creator of the StripSafely movement that began last year and has led to regulatory discussions with the FDA about test strip and meter accuracy.

Really, we don't have to look much beyond StripSafely to see the impact our community's already making.

This initiative has sparked continued, direct dialogue with the FDA, including a live online chat earlier in the year, and that's all helped raise awareness in the D-Community and draw more comments on the FDA's draft guidelines for better accuracy.

(Important Note: The deadline to submit comments is actually today, so make sure to let the regulators know what you think before the day ends!)

Bennet says that in creating StripSafely in mid-2013, he took guidance from the initial Spare A Rose, Save a Child campaign that came together earlier last year as a way to raise money for the International Diabetes Federation's Life For a Child program. Those kinds of efforts -- along with others in the DOC like the video-support initiative known as the You Can Do This Project; Diabetes Advocates collaboration on raising patient voices on issues like media awareness and mental health; and our own Innovation Summits here at the 'Mine -- are what Bennet sees as part of a broader trend.

"I hope is that is all a part of a cycle," he tells us. "Look at the community response to the open FDA meter dockets. That is all of us. As a direct result of the DiabetesMine Innovation Summit, the DOC connected with FDA and that lead to a live webinar. More than 400 people registered for that, and FDA was thrilled. What's important is that collaboration has resulted something like 350 comments to the docket. That is very exciting, and a sign that we can reach tipping points on policy issues, as well. We need to keep supporting each other, sharing resources rather than recreating them. In the policy area, that means we can make gains by supporting issues led by ADA, JDRF and others. Where there are issues that lack leadership, we can find exclusive ways to help each other."

What's the most important part of all this? Most definitely, it's the mantra that everyone has a voice, and you don't have to be a part of huge movements or have shiny collateral to effectively advocate.

We at the 'Mine are more than delighted to see our community's collective voice being heard! And we love the notion of spreading the word beyond the WWW via "foot soldiers" who can carry the message on to more and more patients who may not yet be "plugged in." Cowabunga!

Or, you might say that like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: as D-Advocates, we're going to raise some shell!

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community. The content is not medically reviewed and doesn't adhere to Healthline's editorial guidelines. For more information about Healthline's partnership with Diabetes Mine, please click here.

Type 2 Diabetes Treatment Type 2 Diabetes Diet Diabetes Destroyer Reviews Original Article

[josephborrello]

Magnitude and Direction, Issue #31 | 19 Apr 2019

Notes

Yes, I know the header is another sans serif font, but it's a cool open-source one, as you'll see down in the Software section. --- Also, I've just launched a new portion of this newsletter, which takes ones of the topics covered in the previous day's issue of M&D and expands on it, with a little bit more of my own voice and opinions. Think of it as an Op-Ed column for M&D.  And, of course, another physics pun is involved, this one to reflect that point in time when you're still sitting in bed, grab your phone, open the article, and end up stuck in bed reading it. It's a moment when an object at rest (you) stays at rest... one could call it a Moment of Inertia. (So I did.)

Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication

 The sleek, geometric design of this industrial-modern table by Tyler Bell belies the intense craftwork that went into it. I just wish I had that much workshop space...  Is it possible to take out the Internet? (And are you wondering why I put this in the hardware section rather than the software section?)  The next time you think you're experiencing a home invasion, make sure it isn't just your robotic vacuum.  Boston Dynamics' first consumer robot is ready for the Iditarod.  My dad found this one: Etch-a-snap takes pictures and renders the image using a classic Etch-a-Sketch. As you might guess, these aren't 4K images, but they are definitely unique.

Software and Programming

CSSBattle is code golf for CSS code. Change the CSS code to match the design you're given, but try to do it in as few modifications as possible (hence the "golf" part).  Public Sans is "a strong, neutral typeface for interfaces, text, and headings" developed by the United States Web Design System (did you know we had one of those?). It's also this edition's header font.  "[i]f the Web should be 'a per­ma­nen­t, long-lived store of humanity’s in­tel­lec­tu­al her­itage… it needs to be in­dexed, just like a li­brary. Google ap­par­ent­ly doesn’t share that view.'"

Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine

🧠 Anatomists and evolutionary biologists answer the age-old question "what is the least useful body part?" 🥃 According to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, "whiskey" is any spirit that touches wood. As you might expect, this can enable you to get away with quite a bit.  To understand how people will react to driverless cars, those cars have to be, well, driverless. This poses some difficulties, however, since you can't currently let an autonomous vehicle roam around completely unsupervised. A compromise? Have your safety drivers disguise themselves as car seats.  If an organism has chlorophyll, it does photosynthesis, right? Apparently not always... ‍ What's it like spending almost a year in space? Depending on who you ask, apparently, it's either great news or a sobering outcome. But how can that be when the experiment in question was the same? Tomorrow's edition of Moment of Inertia will explore this phenomenon (and maybe also the outcomes of long-term space habitation), and what we can do to address it.

Mapping, History, and Data Science

⚰ I wasn't really sure initially where to put the Google Cemetery, since it's sweeping amalgamation of the tech giant's now-dead hardware and software initiatives. Ultimately, this stuff is a part of Internet history, I suppose, so I decided to split the difference and put it in this section. As a bonus, I challenge to you see how many of these products you'd even heard of before. I had used or heard of somewhere between 20% and 25% (RIP Google Inbox). 🦅🦆 Digitization has had an impact on numerous fields, from manufacturing, to marketing, and even birding - yes bird-watching has its own online, open data set. One of the things you can do with this data set is visualize bird migration patterns as they correspond to regional climates. Seen together, you almost wonder if the birds are responding to the weather, or vice-versa... A description of the data set can be found here.  These breakdowns of how the big tech companies make their money is extremely illuminating with respect to each one's business priorities. One big takeaway: Facebook either needs to do everything in its power to diversify its business model, or they're never actually going to change the way they do anything (despite what Zuck might write in his Op-Eds).

Events and Opportunities

There's only one event that really matters in the coming two weeks...

Sunday-Friday, 4/21-26 The New York Taste of Science Festival is back all next week with boozy lectures, interactive science fairs, and much more at a variety of locations around the city.

Tuesday, 4/23 The 4th Annual GRO Your Career life sciences conference will be at Columbia University (and yes, I am helping organize this event). A wide array of professionals from industries directly and indirectly related to the life sciences will be giving talks and participating in panel discussions, with lots of opportunities for networking.

Wednesday, 4/24 Scientists, artists, and everything in between gather together for the April SciArt Synapse mixer at the Peculier Pub.

Tuesday, 4/30 Derek Brand's next ECHO Bio-entrepreneurship meetup gathers together a cross-section of the NYC biotech community for the first get-together of the spring.

Thursday, 5/2 Falling Walls is a global lightning pitch competition hosted by the German Embassy in celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and featuring enterprising scientists and startups seeking to answer the question of "what will be the next walls to fall"? Their next New York event takes place at NYU's Leslie eLab.

Friday, 5/3 CUNY Startups hosts a bracket-style pitch competition where startups go head-to-head in a series of elimination rounds to see who wins the final prize of free access to CPGO Network, which provides a three-month capital listing on Castle Placement’s website, 100 targeted investors with contact information, and access to CPGO (Castle Placement’s proprietary capital raising app).

Some other upcoming events to keep on your radar...

May 3-5 MIT is holding their 2019 Grand Hack, one of the biggest medical hackathons in the world that has spawned several successful companies over its history. Applications to participate are due by April 17th!

Wednesday, 5/8 The Transit Techies meet up once again at Sidewalk Labs in the Hudson Yards for their eighth event.

Thursday, 5/16 The RobotLab meetup holds their next event at the heart of Silicon Alley with a discussion about the future of human-robot interactions.

Thursday & Friday, 6/20-21 The Biodesign Challenge Summit 2019 on June 20th and 21st at Parsons School of Design and the Museum of Modern Art brings together 36 teams from 9 countries to present their visions for the future of biotechnology. Use code SUMMITVIP115 for a free pass.

Map of the Month

 Follow the growth of NYC's street grid with Here Grows New York City.

Odds & Ends

 More stuff to play with in your browser. This time it's the Chrome Music Lab.