Greg Bedwell

i think the correct way to think about the lonely boy question is not "how do we reach out to incels?" but "how do we make sure that a teenage boy looking for romantic advice isn't flooded with right-wing propaganda?"

Promising too much and failing to deliver could also have negative consequences related to public perception of the effort, etc. I absolutely agree about Aim 2B, but given the current anti-science/anti-knowledge climate in the US, a more measured/balanced spin seems responsible.

Very cool paper! The portal of P22 also appears to act as a pressure-sensitive switch/signal transmitter during packaging, though in a seemingly different way to P74-26. P74-26 is a very cool model system -- taking extremes (dsDNA packaging) to another level (at high temps)! Incredible machines.

I helped build a government AI system. DOGE fired me, rolled the AI out to the whole agency, and implied the AI can do my job and the jobs of the others they've fired.

It can't. But, what DOGE accidentally revealed about themselves in the process is fascinating. 🧵

A great, interesting thread.

We need to organize--let’s help each other.

NIH is cancelling grants, but it's not clear exactly what they're cancelling and why. Without this information, we can't respond.

I've started a Google Sheet to track grant cancellations.

Please add any canceled grants you know of and spread the word!

New:

DOGE's spending has been secret.

No longer.

My colleagues have uncovered it.

www.propublica.org/article/doge...

a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on ALT: a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on

A Primer on Indirect Cost Rates

GitHub - bcgsc/ntCard: Estimating k-mer coverage histogram of genomics data Estimating k-mer coverage histogram of genomics data - bcgsc/ntCard

ntCard (github.com/bcgsc/ntCard) is also supposed to be fast and accurate (moreso than khmer, I believe). Both, however, utilize cardinality estimations. You may want exact numbers.

I've done similar calculations with github.com/dib-lab/khmer (see: unique-kmers.py). khmer itself might also be far more complicated than what you were after, however.

Only lentiviruses are known to infect non-dividing cells, suggesting that only they are likely to have evolved mechanisms of nuclear import.

it has always been a long reaction to the New Deal. from then to now, capital had seen the New Deal as the sin that must be purged so that the rest of us understand our place as grist for their mills

As Gregorio Weber famously stated, “Indeed the protein molecule model resulting from the X-ray crystallographic observations is a ‘platonic’ protein, well removed in its perfection from the
kicking and screaming ‘stochastic’ molecule that we infer must exist in solution.”

A thread on NIH Reorganization and the Scientific Management Review Board (SMRB)

Disclosure: I was involved with the SMRB since its inception and have very strong feelings about how it was used, misused, and abandoned. My passion on these issues will undoubtably show through.

1/n

1/ X's algorithm was changed in mid-July 2024 to systematically boost Republican-leaning accounts and Elon Musk's own account following his endorsement of Donald Trump, according to a newly released computational study of engagement from the Queensland University of Technology.⬇️

wait why does the dept of government efficiency have two co-chairs

All - Bluesky Directory A curated collection of all things relating to the Blue Sky social media platform.

Starter packs are genius, but I was surprised there wasn't a list of them for people to find.

So I built it:
blueskydirectory.com/starter-pack...

The website monitors the packs being shared and adds the ones it finds to the database.

Missed your stater pack? Message me and I'll get it added.

Bio Art

NIAID releases alternative to BioRender, all illustrations freely available in public domain
bioart.niaid.nih.gov

Tips and Tricks for Bluesky Search - Bluesky Let’s dive into all the tips and tricks for advanced Bluesky search!

Speaking of the utterly broken Twitter search (RIP), here are instructions for searching on Bluesky. It requires a little more from you, but once you know the prefixes, I've found the search works just fine. bsky.social/about/blog/0...

To a lot of Americans, everyone who isn’t a white straight cis guy is an “elitist.”

Our culture *unquestionably accepts* it when millionaire MAGA dudes who own car dealerships claim THEY’RE not elite, but librarians who make $30K and listen to NPR
ARE “elite.”

We should stop accepting it.

A thread.

Today, millions of people woke up to see the problem of a broken information ecosystem that asymmetrically favors anti-democratic & authoritarian emotions, narratives, actors and movements.

Some suggest to fight fire with fire, build a left-leaning influence machine against the rightwing one...

🧵

Every Milton press conference referencing the misinformation and conspiracy theories—and one just now, advising people not to believe what they see on social media... the time when social media was an emergency comms system in a disaster has passed. Musk sped it along, but the momentum is beyond him

Incredible that the Harris-Walz campaign is just basically this now, and it's working.

Alphafold and various materials modeling techniques are some of the best algorithmic probability generators out there, today, and I really wish we hadn't let these hypemerchants collapse and conflate GPTs, LLMs, ML, NLP, and Algorithms into an undifferentiated smear they labeled "AI"

Haunting the Human Genome Project: A Question of Consent One person’s DNA has long been the centerpiece of a genetic sequence used by biologists the world over. Did he agree to that?

I knew most of the human genome reference came from one donor. I didn't know he only consented to be 10% of it. The identity of another contributor is revealed in this story as well. 🧪🧬💻

undark.org/2024/07/09/i...

italian newspaper Il Manifesto's front page, titled "Veni Vidi Vichy", referecing french government who collaborated with the Nazis during WWII, next to Macron's silhouette

Italy going for our jugular

Reminder that Aaron Swartz was facing 35 years in prison and financial devastation for trying to programmatically download and open the contents of JSTOR, which led to him taking his own life.

But OpenAI is going to scrape all of academia and make billions by plagiarizing it.

I have known many CTOs that did not need to replaced by AI because they could have been replaced much more easily with a very short shell script.