Natural selection tends to build things up by selecting only the most fit organisms.
We can reverse that very nicely by selecting the least fit. And whether or not my idea works, that’s probably how we’re going to beat cancer and other diseases that rely on natural selection to evade treatment.
I’m probably making some false assumptions here, but bear with me for a moment…
Malignant cells invade adjacent tissue.
Tissue may be normal or cancerous. Hopefully cancer cells can’t tell the difference.
Treatment is a natural selection process. Cells that survive the treatment proliferate and form treatment-resistant recurrences.
My idea is this: Examine a tumor for an area that is sensitive to chemotherapy or another treatment. Remove these cells (along with the rest of the tumor in a patient, but don’t use the rest), optionally genetically engineering them to curtail their ability to evolve, making them secrete some sort of treatment molecule (a telomerase antagonist would be a very good choice, IMO), or doing other things that may help treat the cancer. Grow these cells.
Now inject them back into the patient at the original tumor site.
Wait a little while and then blast the whole thing with whatever treatment those cells were vulnerable to.
The optimal hypothetical scenario is that the vulnerable tumor cells displace the original tumor, invading those cells just as they would invade normal tissue. The treatment then eradicates them, leaving the patient with virtually none of the vulnerable cells and substantially fewer resistant cells than they would otherwise have. Not a complete cure, but it should boost survival time significantly and may even boost cure rates due to elimination of micrometastases.
I’ll keep thinking. I’m still officially researching on the diagnostic side rather than the treatment side, but perhaps I have an audience (or at least someone to tell me why it won’t work) for these sorts of ideas now that I work with oncologists.
Adding to the list, no fewer than three people who seem extremely intelligent criticized the situation that the ivies forced me into today. Coupled with almost all of my professors, including two on the grad. level that didn’t even know I had applied to those schools in the past, the list is becoming quite extensive.
Really, mathematical talent is not something you just brush off and refuse to train. Especially not after evidence of it starts to manifest.
I don’t think that most people, or even most gifted people, think the same way that I do. I’m not sure whether that’s an asset or hindrance. On the one hand, there’s “you can direct your thoughts so precisely?” On the other, there’s “you mean thinking tires you out?” and “you can only think of one thing at a time?”
I was going to post here about how there should exist a line of coffee shops with the name “Espressivo”, but apparently Marriott has already implemented that idea in some of their hotels. “Con Brio” still seems open… “coffee with spirit!” could be the motto.
You know there’s something wrong with the system when the people in charge say things like this:
“Jorge Cham’s talk was humorous and helpful. His cartoon strip has been a giant plus in helping graduate students acknowledge and cope with the stress they experience.”
– Isaac Colbert, Dean of Graduate Students, M.I.T.
Rather than trying to reduce the stress the students feel in the first place!
I’ve had this theory kicking around in my mind since before this blog started, but since it wasn’t around then, I never posted it.
There are two types of “social” sites: those where one person naturally invites others (exosocial) and those where others are required for one to join (endosocial). Quite simply, an exosocial site attracts people as population grows, while an endosocial site attracts users only once a critical population is reached.
Why is this important? Well, an endosocial site (such as HireGeeks) requires heavy marketing as a catalyst, since no one will come until people are already there. Exosocial sites do not create such dependencies between a user and the rest of the population (though they might build one between two individual users), and are free to grow almost unchecked.
That’s why HireGeeks was a stupid shoestring business. Technically, that is some of the nicest Perl code I’ve ever written, but it means nothing if I can’t attract two separate groups of people to the site at the same time.
Using text mining techniques, I am going to attempt to build a naive Bayesian classifier capable of determining a person’s Myers-Briggs type from a sample of text that they write. This should be a fairly quick project once I finish with everything else. Whether it works or not is another story. Most likely it will, but no one will use it, so I’ll never accumulate a sufficient training set. No one uses anything I create these days, despite the constantly improving quality of my creations.
Anyway, if it does work, it’s publication-worthy, as this sort of thing hasn’t been done before, as far as I can tell. It could open up a whole new approach to automated psychological testing.
Update: It’s been done by uClassify. Pretty neat stuff.
You know that uneasy feeling you get when moving to a much higher resolution on a monitor?
I now call this the “paradox of too much space”. That phrase drew no hits from Google. I’m happy; I finally discovered an original phrase 🙂
To the world: either let me manage my own time or show me that you can manage mine as effectively as I can. I should not be forced to remain idle for long periods of time – it’s a waste of both my time and yours. My time is one of my most valuable resources: I can spend it doing anything from staring at the walls to curing cancer (something my group is actually trying to do).
As a subset of this, if you’re going to coop me up in a lab/office, please give me work to do or let me seek my own out. If I’m bringing Gödel, Escher, Bach with me to the office (and I’m not working as a professional philosopher) or I’m furiously scribbling down mathematical research (and I’m not working as a professional mathematician), that is a sign that you are not using my time effectively enough to keep me busy. Even if the work is fascinating, it must more or less fill the time that I’m forced to be there or there really is no reason for me to be there at all.