sent2null space

The year is 2560, A colonization star ship is on its way to a planet in the Trapezium open cluster in the Orion Nebula...discovered over a hundred years earlier. It was characterized to detail a few years later via autonomous systems. The planet was found to be not quite human 1.0 habitable...but we weren't going to be sending human 1.0's there. See in 2560, gene editing has been a routine and common practice in human populations going back 540 years. Humans have been thus able to radically conform themselves and their flora and fauna to the environs often far more inhospitable to human 1.0 life than Mars. Evaluation of a trip to Orion Trapezium planet beta3 had been a 10 year affair once it was stamped as worthy of exploration. 10 years ago in 2350, most people hadn't heard of the system ...by this point in time there are several billion recorded and characterized exo planets and humans have only gotten to a few dozen of them with our advanced but sub

When I first started blogging at sent2null space one of the main reasons for doing so was to record sketchy thoughts into a public medium where there would be a record of the act of having presented the idea. This would serve as a proof of record of sorts to the origination of a given concept. The idea being that in the future when the question comes up of "who wrote about x or y first?" the answer can be found definitively by searching several sources with such proofs of record. A few hours ago I posted an idea for a new company name to a thread. After joking about the fact that some one may be stealing the idea to attempt implementing something similar I realized that some aspects of that post would be ideally protected via Facebook itself. If any service will likely be with us for decades if not centuries to come I'd pin it on Facebook, the main reasons I've posted about before. 1) network connection effects. Facility to build social conn

With recent news that yet another new method for performing in vivo gene editing has been discovered the landscape of possibilities looms beyond just the superficial. "Asian flush" is the term used to describe a condition that effects a large population of people of Asian descent which is a genetic mutation that prevents proper processing of one of the caustic by products of alcohol ingestion. This leads to an inflammatory response in the system which leads to dilated blood vessels and the "flushed" appearance. Aside from this superficial result it also means that generally Asians with this mutation need to be very careful with the amount of alcohol they are ingesting as they don't process it as efficiently as those without the mutation. Enter gene editing: The gene mutation is well known so this would be an ideal 'low hanging fruit' target for an edit. A targeted Asian Flush cure could be effected with a germ line edit or a temporary one co

A  new paper   published this week describes another bacteria associated system for gene editing, the CrispR-Cpf1 system. As I've been covering this space for over a decade now and predicted in 2009 that gene editing would soon be a major innovation of the next 10 years you should be familiar with the progenitor systems discovered since that time. Zinc fingers, TALENS, AAV and CrispR-Cas9 via various articles of mine over the years. Cpf1 appears to have complementary functionality to Cas9 but performs some things that Cas9 does not, allowing it possibly to be more "specific" in its ability to accurately target edits. Some of these advantages are indicated in the paper but this article is more about the fact that find new systems should be an expectation. From an evolutionary perspective the fact that living processes under go cycles of change and growth requires that at some point they have detailed and accurate abilities to edit genetic information in various ways..

Researchers in Britain make moves to perform gene editing in humans: The early rush to ban such use is going to fall by the wayside very quickly as governments realize that banning the technology for human use domestically will only put their people at a huge disadvantage going forward. As I have been explaining at my blog for years and explained in my chapter of The Future of Business :CrispR Cas9 will make all sorts new industries possible that are focused on genetic modification of superficial (phenotype) traits that are "low hanging fruit" modifications. It heralds the "cosmecutical" industry as I like to call it. I've written on this subject for quite some time having prognosticated its emergence going back a decade. Research teams all over the world are probably already at work (bolstered by entrepreneurs and business people who have come across these ideas) will require a few months to years of focused research identifying the importa

Steven Pinker provides some details regarding his view that banning gene editing technology outright is naive in this interview . I some times agree with what Pinker states on various issues and on this one a particular area of my research focus he does get the general reality correct in my view (that bans are naive at this point) however he's a philosopher and not a Scientist and thus has made a few errors that I will point out here. First, the idea that crispr is prone to significant errors is false. The early versions of the technology produced by Doudna's team in late 2012 were but even then they were significantly less likely to induce errors than prior methods (zinc fingers and TALENS). Since then far more advanced methods have emerged that are virtually perfect in make single gene modifications consistently, keep in mind that a large part of the accuracy is involved in ensuring the a sufficiently unique guide RNA is utilized to zero in on a given gene an

Thus apparently altruism is a purely socially emergent phenomena and one that is not gene driven . Why is this *not* surprising? In some of my musings on altruism, morality (which I posit emerges from it) and later the ability for religions to form....the definition of altruism stems from one underlying reality of social organisms: The competition for limited resources necessitates in closely living organisms of the same type a response heuristic to the resources various states of supply under demand.  Here from 2012 I put a line under it: "If a particular resource or resources is required for our survival and we are the only agent in the environment that can gain value from the resource we have no inherent desire to be altruistic, this may seem trivial but it is not...our altruism is not an absolute characteristic of our make up but rather an emergent quality of moral expression that ONLY becomes extant when others that also value that resource are present and subje

Yet another darling of the so called share economy has called it quits, home services startup homejoy has announced they will be shutting down operations. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2015/07/23/what-really-killed-homejoy-it-couldnt-hold-onto-its-customers/ This gets to a truth about the marketplace disinter-mediation that is all the rage these days a concept that is core to the very reason I started working on the AgilEntity framework back in 2001. I realized then that technology enabling the removal of various types of middle men coupled with the elimination of mobility requirements for getting work done would lead to a much more flexible workforce. After I'd built the framework I teased these ideas in an email from 2006 which I later transcribed into a blog post on the coming "telepresent workforce". http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2008/03/increasingly-telepresent-workforce.html In this post I predicted a future of offices as flexible work location

My rendition of a logo to symbolize generalized systems for market place disinter -mediating the execution of actions between agents engaged as buyer and seller in that marketplace. On the left ingress and egress action requests and commitment signals by agents requesting they be performed. Those who need. (Say the person hailing a ride via Uber) On the right ingress and egress action requests and commitment signals by those that can satisfy the request of the agents. Those who are the providers. (Say the drivers cruising around looking for fairs). The center symbolically indicates the logic that is leveraged to enable matching of agents on either side (blue half circle meets red half circle) in order to enable a transaction. The AgilEntity framework is a system that does this for any type of marketplace exchange that is modeled into the system leveraging the Action Oriented Workflow paradigm 's statistical learning algorithms to perform efficient real time ro