The Value of Privacy – IEEE – The Institute

The Value of Privacy – IEEE – The Institute.

An interesting article on privacy in the Internet of Things. Echoes many of the concerns/predictions I had raised in one of my earlier blog posts.

The Monitored Man – NYTimes.com

The Monitored Man – NYTimes.com.

Waiting for the Black Box – NYTimes.com

Waiting for the Black Box – NYTimes.com.

My heartfelt sympathies go to the loved ones of the people on the lost plane.

Modern planes are fully instrumented. If even a fraction of the gathered data could be transmitted to the ground in real time, then that would be an immense aid for search and rescue and accident forensic teams. It could really save lives in the critical few hours after a crash.

By the way these same comments apply to other forms of transport – connected cars being the prime example.

Measuring a lot of data is one thing, but getting the data to human/machine agents who can take meaningful timely actions is another. Hence the “real time” aspect is absolutely critical to the whole internet of things space, which differentiates it from the previous “big data” revolution.

IoT is more than data analytics. It is also about agile control of real time real world systems. I am not sure the technology community quite gets it yet … most of the tools of big data and semantic web are singularly unsuited to real time actions and  control. For example contrast RDF N-tripe store +  SPARQL technology to Neo4j + Cypher technology. The latter seems much more suited to real time action by its very design.

Currently I am taking  a close look at the Neo4J and am amazed how versatile it is and how closely graph traversal can be aligned to natural language processing. It is a mathematicians delight when he suddenly sees that two disparate concepts are one and the same thing, said in different manners (“equivalence” they call it).  I am not a mathematician by training but I do partake of this joy when ever it occurs. Life is great if you can deduce a new equivalence every once in a while!

 

A Powerful New Way to Edit DNA – NYTimes.com

A Powerful New Way to Edit DNA – NYTimes.com.

Interesting, and potentially revolutionary, advance in manipulating DNA. Rather than simply silencing genetic expression by disrupting messengers, now we can potentially edit (rewrite) offending parts of DNA fragments.

Even more interesting seems to be the evidence that every time a bacterium encounters a new virus, and survives the infection, it retains a  snap shot (“mug shot”) of some of its DNA, and so we can distinguish between two samples of bacteria of the same species based on their infection history. Does this work at the level of higher animals, even humans? And can’t this become a vehicle for a new type of genetic inheritance? We will be passing down to our kids not old our “fit” DNA, but also DNA picked up from other organisms during our life.

Genomes undergo mutations all the time and this is the reason behind evolution. But the above process is not simply random mutation, but rather the random splicing-in of whole chunks of viral DNA. I wonder how this affects the mechanism of genetic evolution.