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Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

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Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#331

Post by Lost_BiomedE »

tassl wrote: post #286

I have always been interested on life-extension with a focus on healthy life. My background is mainly engineering (computer science, mechanical engineering) with focus on machine learning and statistics. I was thinking on taking some graduate program that would help the transition in this kind of companies; does anybody knows a university/program that would help? I have checked some graduate bioinformatics, but I am…

In the current environment, if you already have an engineering undergrad, an MBA would do you best. I am not a fan of the programs, but the degree will open doors that are mostly shut for pure engineers.

In many areas and locals, not necessarily Silicon Valley, a pure engineering man is seen as a lackey. An engineer with business cred is considered valuable, just my experience.

Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#332

Post by dekhn »

brudgers wrote: post #323
dekhn wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Err... catalyzing a paradigm change makes perfect sense to me. I think Thomas Kuhn might have used that in his book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". A lit class isn't going to make any comment on a phrase like that, or management speak in general. Management speak is just a jargon.

Kuhn popularized the phrase "paradigm shift." In his view, it occurred over generations as adherents to older scientific models died of old age - e.g. the Copernican model replaced the Ptolomeic model because Ptolomeic astronomers went extinct.

yes, but it's much faster now (look at how quickly the RNA World Hypothesis took over after Noller, Woese, and Cech demonstrated their results. One might say we're catalyzing paradigm shifts through network effects. Then engineers would complain I was using management talk, but I can assure you, that's a succinct and accurate way to explain it.

Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#333

Post by dekhn »

nl wrote: post #294
PeterisP wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting point from one of Calico's announcements is a statement that curing all cancer would only add ~3 years to the expected lifespan. This is thought provoking - if even a perfect solution to such a problem won't give us what we want, then we do need to "make people think differently" and try to focus on a different, bigger problem than the current approach of trying to strike out separate illnesses. By the…

The biggest predictor of a society's average predicted lifespan is infant mortality. Most of the gains in average lifespan over the last 100 years is from increasing the number of children who live past 2. 3 years increase from a non-infant mortality related improvement is actually pretty huge. I'd have to look it up, but I think the impact of non-infant vaccinations would be roughly a similar sized increase.

Very good point! I didn't think the statement about curing cancer and getting back 3 years was a very thoughtful one.

Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#334

Post by repsilat »

nostrademons wrote: post #180
LoganCale wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's horrible. Life is all there is. When you die, from your perspective, that is the end of all things. That's pretty horrible. Just because it's natural doesn't make it good.

I remember discussing this in both of my philosophy courses, Intro and MetaEthics. In the intro course, the question was "Why should you fear death? When you're dead, by definition, you're not around to fear it, so why should you care?" In meta-ethics, the question was "What does it mean for something to be horrible in the first place? How do you decide something is good or bad in the first place? If you fear your ow…

There was a book on that a little while ago by Shelly Kagan (decent excerpt at [1]). I think the evolutionary perspective is clearly "correct," but it doesn't quite answer the big questions for me. It establishes that "death is bad" is an axiom of our ethical system (and not a theorem of it,) but it has nothing to say when we ask whether we should attempt to adjust our morality.

1: http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Death-Bad-for-You-/131818/

Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#335

Post by coldtea »

dekhn wrote: post #327
coldtea wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Err... catalyzing a paradigm change makes perfect sense to me. I think Thomas Kuhn might have used that in his book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". And I think he wouldn't have touched that phrase with a barge pole. > Management speak is just a jargon. No. Jargon comes out of necessity and field-specific needs. Management speak comes out of the desire to unecessarily dress-up bullshit.

To catalyze something means to speed it up. So catalyzing a paradigm change means to make it happen faster. I don't see the problem with this. Could you be more specific?

>To catalyze something means to speed it up. (...) I don't see the problem with this. Could you be more specific?

The problem with this is that "make it happen faster" is already clear and sufficient.

People understand it -- including people who don't have an idea what "catalyst" means (for me it's a totally transparent word, as its origin and etymology come from my language. YMMV).

If you want to dress it up to make it sound more impressive, then you're not communicating effectively.

And if you include 3-4 other unecessary buzzwords in the same sentense you're just name-dropping words.

"I saw a very puissant pismire lifting 100 times its weight in a sweven yesterday". Do you see anything wrong with this sentense?

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/pismire http://www.thefreedictionary.com/puissant http://www.thefreedictionary.com/sweven

(Except if you're a chemist, and you use the word "catalyst" as it applies to your terminology)

Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#336

Post by bsullivan01 »

throwawaay wrote: post #328
bsullivan01 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, you hit a nerve, so I'll keep beating a dead horse: says who? Who made a side by side study of all the efforts in self driving cars? http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-autos-mercede...

"... Mercedes-Benz announced Monday that it had successfully driven an autonomous S-Class sedan 62 miles on German city streets." Well, shit, that quote right there plus your hostile attitude sure have me impressed. 62 whole miles! They're clearly on the doorstep of releasing a production autonomous car, as you were trying to imply over at " rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6408590> . Meanwhile, th…

Well, shit, that quote right there plus your hostile attitude sure have me impressed. 62 whole miles! They're clearly on the doorstep of releasing a production autonomous car

I'm here to impress you sir, that's my mission in life.

Now who said that they drove a total of 62 miles vs a 62 mile trip? Did the car crash at mile 62 or they reached the destination? All these are little details that need to be taken in consideration before an idiot exclaims "Google is #1 in autonomous cars..."

By the way, see anything funny http://i.bnet.com/blogs/google-self-driving-car.jpg sticking out of the Mercedes car http://www.trbimg.com/img-522e6325/turbine/la-fi-hy-autos-20... ? Don't tell me they have shrunk it to make it fits inside a normal car already. How much does the Google system cost now, is it $100K+ just for the autonomous driving system? Details, details, details

Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#337

Post by outside1234 »

jbooth wrote: post #127
VikingCoder wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't intend my first statement to be absolutist, and I do not believe I need to resort to some extreme form of free market society, in order to have my vision of reality work. gdulli was criticizing a corporation for providing goods and services that a relative minority of the wealthy can provide. I assert that that criticism is only valid, if you have fundamental problems with capitalism itself. The way I stated…

Well, if we're being honest, this isn't particularly capitalist of Google. It's an idealist, good-intentions-and-ego-driven play. Yes, they want to capture some of the value that they eventually might create but they are not doing it primarily for money.

yeah right!

Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#338

Post by tedks »

coldtea wrote: post #335
dekhn wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To catalyze something means to speed it up. So catalyzing a paradigm change means to make it happen faster. I don't see the problem with this. Could you be more specific?

> To catalyze something means to speed it up. (...) I don't see the problem with this. Could you be more specific? The problem with this is that "make it happen faster" is already clear and sufficient. People understand it -- including people who don't have an idea what "catalyst" means (for me it's a totally transparent word, as its origin and etymology come from my language. YMMV). If you want to dress it up to mak…

>The problem with this is that "make it happen faster" is already clear and sufficient.

Do you only read Simple English wikipedia? It's very clear and sufficient.

Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#339

Post by dchichkov »

jhardcastle wrote: post #5

Interesting is that Art Levinson will remain Chairman at Apple. Apparently the two giants are working together here. > Tim Cook, Chief Executive Officer of Apple, said: “For too many of our friends and family, life has been cut short or the quality of their life is too often lacking. Art is one of the crazy ones who thinks it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no one better suited to lead this mission and I am exc…

... one of the sensible ones ...

Re: Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

#340

Post by throwawaay »

bsullivan01 wrote: post #336
throwawaay wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... Mercedes-Benz announced Monday that it had successfully driven an autonomous S-Class sedan 62 miles on German city streets." Well, shit, that quote right there plus your hostile attitude sure have me impressed. 62 whole miles! They're clearly on the doorstep of releasing a production autonomous car, as you were trying to imply over at " rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6408590> . Meanwhile, th…

Well, shit, that quote right there plus your hostile attitude sure have me impressed. 62 whole miles! They're clearly on the doorstep of releasing a production autonomous car I'm here to impress you sir, that's my mission in life. Now who said that they drove a total of 62 miles vs a 62 mile trip? Did the car crash at mile 62 or they reached the destination? All these are little details that need to be taken in consi…

Well, sorry to say that you're failing pretty hard at your mission then. But do keep ramping up the snarky rhetoric. It looks like I hit a nerve.

I didn't say anything about total miles; I was comparing Mercedes' single 62 mile trip against the other car's single 380+ mile trip. But if you want to bring up total miles logged, That Company In Mountain View hit 300k miles last year [1] and there are absolutely no public numbers from Mercedes. If the figure were impressive, they'd probably have released it.

But now you want to make a fuss over the LIDAR on top of That Company's car while the S Class gets by on just radar. Your earlier post quoted a Mercedes engineer saying "we have had test cars doing that, but what happens if a child steps out into the street and the radar misses it?" -- well, gosh, maybe that funny spinning thing is doing something useful. Wouldn't you want an autonomous car to use any and every available method to detect obstacles? Details indeed.

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-self-driving-car-...

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