Very interesting and highly creative. A few thoughts.
1) If a graphical plot turns data into something visual, an audio "plot" turns data into something audible. Your output is an audio file rather than an image or video file. The typical applications of this are to turn a boolean flag into a chime (e.g. text message received). Your important insight is that this can be extended to longer-form audio outputs.
2) When is audio more advantageous than image or video?
- When you cannot look at a screen (driving, working out)
- When there are too many screens (control room)
- In a very dark environment where visibility is impeded
- If you are blind or vision-impaired
This could find real application in cockpits/control rooms, to ensure that a pilot is perceiving data even if they aren't looking at a particular dial. It could also be useful for various fitness and health apps that don't need you to look at the screen all the time.
Perhaps the most interesting application would be in a car, which is where people spend a great deal of time and have their ears and brains (but not their eyes) free. Some ideas:
a) Could you generate different sounds based on the importance of a text message (doing something like Gmail's importance filtering) signaling that you don't really need to respond to this particular message right now while driving?
b) Could you have audio feedback for important things along the road? For example, the problem with the Trapster app (trapster.com) is that I need to look at the phone to see where the speedtraps are. You can imagine an integrated audio feed that could give information like this and also tell you your constantly updated ETA (via Google Maps API call). Or you could listen to the pulse of your company on the road to do something semi-useful, and drill down into notable events via voice.
c) The really interesting thing is if you could pair this with a set of defined voice control commands. As motivation: an audible plot can't be backtracked like a visual plot. With a visual plot your eyes can just scan back to the left. To scan back and re-heard the sound you just heard requires rewinding and replaying. But it could be interesting to set up a small set of voice commands that allow not just rewinding, but rewinding and zooming. So you hear an important "BEEP" and you want to say something like "STOP. ZOOM" and set up the heuristics such that this identifies the right BEEP and then gives an audio drill-down of exactly what that BEEP represented.
d) Done right, you might be able to turn a subset of webservices into a sort of voice-controlled data radio for the road. People spend thousands of hours in their cars so it's a real opportunity.
Cool ideas here. I imagine both Google and the military would be interested in building auditory feedback systems into their vehicles/control centers, if they aren't already doing it.
What I think would be a useful addition would be transforming 'levels' (as opposed to events) to ambient, continuously-playing audio. This is pretty much the "dynamic audio" of computer games.
For example, you could have strings playing according to CPU activity: softly and slowly (think double basses) when activity is low, but more loudly and urgently (cellos) when activity is high. That would create a sense of how busy the server is (if you enable the CPU activity 'channel').
edit: I see cortesi has already mentioned they're working on transforming continuous data now - good job.
We definitely see Choir fitting in where you can't look at or interact with a screen. Cars and wearable computing are areas we're excited about. First, though, we want to experiment on the desktop, find out what makes a good audio interface, and solve our own burning needs regarding more mundane monitoring situations.
Interesting project (not sure if I would really like it as a service, though -- I think I would personally prefer a library).
Either way, looks like your signup-form has some peculiar ideas about what constitutes an email address, it keeps asking me to input an email address when I type in:
I believe the rule of thumb is that there are 15 that reach $100M revenue. We could square the figure of 200 at $100M valuation with this rule of thumb if we assume valuation is say 10X revenue, so 200 reach ~$10M revenue. Thus maybe 1/15 or so of the companies that reach $10M in revenue hit the next level of scale and get to $100M revenue.
This is amazing work. Could you explain why you decided to go with many individual stills rather than filling in the gaps in a video codec? It's a really counterintuitive approach.
Datastax, Datastax. Must have appeared 20 times in the piece. I'm sure they are a great company but Oracle's real problem is Postgres (and, to a lesser extent, SQLite and the various MySQL forks). Oracle might want to consider paying $1B to the Postgres devs to sidetrack development for a few years like they did with MySQL.
> Oracle might want to consider paying $1B to the Postgres devs
There's no single Postgres dev, it's been community-driven from the start and the various postgres companies mostly provide support. So there's nobody to pay $1bn to really.
If you look at the contributors page[0], out of 6 "core devs" there are 5 different companies, with EnterpriseDB being "overrepresented" at 2 core from the company, plus a pair of "major contributors" out of a truckload.
And these people are probably Postgres devs first and foremost. Not Tom Lane or Josh Berkus, but even if Oracle bought out EnterpriseDB they might just cash in and work on Postgres from an other company.
It looks like this possibility was known and broadcasted to merchants during the maintenance window two days ago. It's kind of like the Rails mass assignment or security bug: merchants are just going to have to stay on top of Bitcoin issues.
[Submitted March 12]
It's DanielTaylor again and I wanted to create a simple yet
intuitive post to explain the folks out there what happened
a couple of hours ago. This might also be useful for
bloggers or journalists who might be going to write about
it in the following hours.
TL;DR
The programs that read the blockchain, the bitcoin ledger,
disagree.
Due to a bug in 0.7, it says that HIS is the correct
version of this ledger and 0.8 says that HIS is the correct
version.
Miners (the people who add pages to the blockchain) are
told to switch to the 0.7 program so that this version
gains more support and the other one is discarded.
(orphaned).
Regular users are not affected. Their transactions are
included in both ledgers and don't need to change any
programs.
During that time, though, there is a slight chance of a
double-spend ocurring. That is why people recommended
merchants and exchanges to wait until there is one single
blockchain again before processing purchases and
merchandise.
...
What's a double-spend?
This is the reason why some merchants and exchanges stopped
processing incoming bitcoins for a couple of hours.
The bitcoin network prevents people from spending the same
coins by mantaining this unique ledger, the blockchain. But
now that there were two of them, it was theoretically
possible to broadcast two different transactions with the
same coins and still get some confirmations.
With some luck, someone could sneakily sneakily* buy a
television to a merchant who was reading the 0.8 ledger and
have the transaction confirmed. At the same time he could
have sent the same coins back to himself and, with some
luck, have the transaction confirmed on the 0.7 ledger.
What happens is that, in the end when 0.7 wins, the thief
will have the television and his bitcoins. Remember that
there were two different versions of the same coins!
This is not something easy to do and requires a lot of luck
because the blocks mined (the pages added to the ledger)
must be mined precisely in the correct order. But still, in
this situation it was easier to pull off and so it was
recommended for merchants and exchanges to temporarily stop
processing incoming transactions.
Now the situation has resolved and the blockchain keeps
growing happily, page by page, block y block.
Calling what happened the other day a "maintenance window" is about as truthful as describing a fire that burns your house as down as a "redecorating party".
Strongly agree. If he names names, something good might come of this now that it has HN's attention for the day. And if he was going to journalists, he had a willingness to name names at some point in the past. I understand that these guys are organized crime, but without names no action can be taken. With the right push, Anonymous can/will dox the hell out of these guys given enough details. OP has to judge for himself whether (a) these are really bad guys and (b) he has the courage to call down the Internet upon them.
(To preempt: yes, Anonymous is not always good. No, I don't believe that Internet justice is always bad, or that it would be bad in this case, especially as all formal avenues appear to have been exhausted and the perpetrator is scot free.)
The issue is not really whether these treatments work or not. Every new treatment is by necessity unproven and more risky than an established one. Some people are early adopters or terminal patients with high risk-tolerances; others would rather suffer for a while than chance a drug that might make things worse.
Both of those are fine as preferences. The trouble arises because every US citizen is forced to have the global minimum of risk-tolerances across the population. It would be as if you could not try a development version till it became user-friendly enough for your grandparents. Specifically, in the US, you can't be an early adopter: the FDA does not allow citizens to opt-out unless they leave the borders of the USA. Indeed, in Cowan vs. US (1998) it successfully sued in federal court to prevent a dying AIDS patient from trying an experimental drug:
Plaintiff requests that Dr. Davis be authorized to inject
Plaintiff with the with the experimental goat neutralizing
antibody drug [1] and that the FDA be enjoined from
interfering with Dr. Davis' treatment of Plaintiff. ...
The Court is sympathetic to Plaintiff's situation.
However, the law is very clear, and under the current
statutes and regulations, Plaintiff's physician may not
administer the goat neutralizing antibody drug absent
prior approval of the FDA. In Court, Plaintiff argued that
he should have the right to take whatever treatment he
wishes due to his terminal condition regardless of whether
the FDA approves the treatment as effective or safe, and
that to prohibit him from taking the treatment he wishes
violates his rights under the US Constitution. ...
This Court is in no way criticizing the intentions of
Plaintiff and his physician or the potential effectiveness
of the proposed treatment. Plaintiff's physician should
pursue approval of his Investigational New Drug
application as quickly as possible. Plaintiff's doctor
must obtain appropriate approval through the proper
regulatory authorities. As much as this Court may
empathize with Plaintiff, the authority to provide some
type of exemptions for individuals such as Plaintiff rests
with Congress and not with this Court.
Plaintiff was denied. Plaintiff died. Who knows whether the drug would have saved him, but he wasn't given the chance to try. Occasionally, if you have tremendous political connections, you can get a waiver, like Fred Baron:
“We did a safety review, consulted with experts on PML,
and worked closely with FDA to come up with a risk
management program that allowed us to bring it back on the
market in a way that limited its use,” a Biogen
spokeswoman told the Law Blog. The plan prohibits giving
Tysabri for unapproved uses.
Biogen Idec is running an early-stage trial of the drug in
multiple myeloma, but Baron doesn’t meet the criteria to
participate.
Baron’s a prominent donor to the Democratic party, and
many of his powerful friends, including Lance Armstrong
and Bill Clinton, made appeals on his behalf. And the
family agreed not to sue if anything goes wrong.
Ultimately, his doctors at the Mayo Clinic worked directly
with the FDA to find a “legal basis” for giving Baron
Tysabri. The deal was announced on Baron’s son’s blog late
yesterday.
So, if you are wealthy you can travel outside the US to opt-out (though US-based companies will usually not administer treatment for fear of getting on the FDA's bad side). And if you are politically connected you can sometimes get an experimental treatment, like Baron.
But this is not really optimal. If you are an academic, you accept the concept of QC/quality checking, but you aren't stuck with just one journal to submit to. You can revise and resubmit somewhere else. And if you are an end-user, you don't have to take a reviewer's opinion into account when choosing between movies, books, bikes, or virtually any other physical good with star ratings on Amazon.com. Except for drugs. Then you, as the end-user, cannot opt-out and take the FDA's opinions with a grain of salt. In part this is because the FDA will sue you directly. In part it is because companies that even think of trying this route will get slapped by the FDA for trying to game the system, and subsequently find their approvals slowed or (nowadays) outright denied.
We need to carve out a jurisdiction where patients and entrepreneurs alike are free to take informed risks, recognizing up front that sick people do die in medicine, and also recognizing that society already allows people to take incredible risks in other contexts (joining the military, bungee jumping, walking tightropes). Whether that new jurisdiction is Singapore, or Estonia, or a seastead, or a medical cruise ship, or something else is to be determined. But that has to be the goal.
Counterfactuals are hard, but I wonder if anyone has studied whether or not the FDA is actually a net saver of lives. It seems to me that every time the FDA approves a new drug that will save X lives a year, it has necessarily cost X lives every year that the drug was delayed in the mandatory approval pipeline.
If FDA approval was optional (perhaps requiring a big "NOT FDA APPROVED" label), would the number of people who die from taking unapproved drugs (and who otherwise would have lived) be more than the number who die from being denied a drug (and who otherwise would have lived)?
As I write this, it reminds me a bit of the IP issue, and whether the patent system really is a net benefit or not.
I'm not arguing from principle as much as I'm pointing out that the utility value is itself subjective with respect to each individual; I'm criticizing the socio-political doctrine of utilitarianism which pursues the "greatest good for the greatest number" in accordance with a single, generalized definition of "good" applied to all, irrespective of the divergent preferences of each.
Treating individuals' health as something to be optimized with respect to a putative macro-level abstraction of society as opposed to treating individuals' health as something to be optimized with respect to each individual's particular happiness is the problem here.
The post I replied to was also an implicit argument from principle, in treating the net-lives-saved measurement, with respect to the aggregate population, as the overriding decision criterion. It's just that this is a bad principle in that it gives "saving" the life of someone living in misery due to an uncurable but not terminal disease the same moral weight as curing someone of a terminal disease, and gives the potential death of someone consciously willing to risk death in an attempt to alleviate suffering the same moral weight as the potential death of someone denied access to a treatment they were willing to try and which might have saved their lives.
You might be interested in these studies. The second link is to a discussion of Andy Grove's editorial in Science calling for the FDA to only certify safety (rather than safety + efficacy + comparative effectiveness). But it's the third that gets at your question:
The delay and large reduction in the total number of new
drugs has had terrible consequences. It is difficult to
estimate how many lives the post-1962 FDA controls have
cost, but the number is likely to be substantial;
Gieringer (1985) estimates the loss of life from delay
alone to be in the hundreds of thousands (not to mention
millions of patients who endured unnecessary morbidity). ...
If the U.S. system resulted in appreciably safer drugs, we
would expect to see far fewer postmarket safety
withdrawals in the United States than in other countries.
Bakke et al. (1995) compared safety withdrawals in the
United States with those in Great Britain and Spain, each
of which approved more drugs than the United States during
the same time period. Yet, approximately 3 percent of all
drug approvals were withdrawn for safety reasons in the
United States, approximately 3 percent in Spain, and
approximately 4 percent in Great Britain. There is no
evidence that the U.S. drug lag brings greater safety.
Ultimately this boils down to a classification problem. There will be type I and type II errors associated with any kind of centralized approval process. And when studied in its totality, there is quite a bit of evidence that the type II errors are predominating: good drugs being slowed or denied.
The only way to prove this definitively is a side-by-side experiment with a new jurisdiction in which patients and entrepreneurs alike are free to choose and the FDA has no power.
Even with careful studies, there have been some awful messes. One famous example is Thalidomide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide (If you are not impressionable you can use Google images.)
Some drugs investigations are discontinued because they cause complications or deaths in the small test groups. Another important number is how many additional dead could have been if everyone could take unapproved treatments.
And most people would sign whatever the doctor tells them to sign, for example a "NOT FDA APPROVED"-waiver. People thrust whoever has a white coat and promises a cure. There has been problems with peopled enrolled in official experimental drug test, that didn't understand the details, but had signed just another "usual" form handled by the doctors.
Sorry, I couldn't remember something more relevant, like a pill for the heart that reduces the blood pressure but after some years it produces more strokes. But if no one test the new proposed drugs for effectiveness and side effects, then there would be more death and complications.
It's impossible to compute the number of treatments that weren't even invented because the inventor saw the FDA barrier as too much trouble for him to manage.
The real question is the unpopular one: by what right does the FDA insert itself between doctor and patient, between drug manufacturer and doctor?
It is very hard to say that any patient should be allowed to opt-out of the FDA's regulation because almost without exception every patient that buys into snake-oil thinks it is a good idea that is worth a shot.
How do you distinguish between "this patient is making an informed decision to opt out and use this unapproved drug" and "this patient is an idiot who thinks that throwing money at a "doctor" to mainline bleach will cure his disease"?
First, many (most?) medical advances seem crazy and kooky because they haven't been tried before. So it's not usually as obvious as "this is a proven scam" vs. "this really works". It's much more frequently "this is unproven". And like Barry Marshall's famous self-experiment with H. pylori, someone has to be first for it to ever get proven.
Second, when the government gets it wrong, it gets it catastrophically wrong. The USDA Food Pyramid recommending "6-11 servings of grain" is still being slavishly followed, and in the fullness of time we might well find it partially responsible for the epidemic of obesity and type II diabetes. The FDA is still doing Phase I/II/III clinical trials despite all the evidence in favor of adaptive trials. And tens of millions of people were irradiated by TSA x-ray scanners fast-tracked through the FDA approval process, scanners criticized by UCSF scientists, scanners which have now (finally) been withdrawn. These errors are magnified in impact because no one can opt-out, because a .gov has a bully pulpit, and because strong political incentives exist to silence criticisms.
Third, if people have the right to euthanasia, or the right to walk near bridges, I do believe they have the right to try what treatments they want. Frankly I don't consider someone else's medical affairs my business, anymore than I'd ask why they had an abortion. You can argue that vaccinations present a public health issue, and I might agree with you there. But otherwise this strikes me as a right to privacy and right to bodily integrity issue.
People can inject just about anything they want into themselves (the Controlled Substances Act being the exception). The issue is when 'doctors' get involved and use their position of trust to scam, harm, and kill. These regulations control what doctors and companies can do, not what individuals can do.
In Court, Plaintiff argued that he should have the right to
take whatever treatment he wishes due to his terminal
condition regardless of whether the FDA approves the
treatment as effective or safe, and that to prohibit him
from taking the treatment he wishes violates his rights
under the United States Constitution.4 The United States
Supreme Court previously addressed and rejected this
argument in Rutherford. In Rutherford, cancer patients
requested the right to use Laetrile, arguing, as does
Plaintiff, that for terminally ill patients the
effectiveness or safety of the proposed treatment is
irrelevant since such treatment is a last chance effort.
However, as identified by the Supreme Court in Rutherford,
to permit terminally ill patients to seek any type of
treatment regardless of the effectiveness of such treatment
would create a cottage industry existing solely to provide
potential panaceas to highly vulnerable patients. The
language of the Supreme Court in rejecting the Laetrile
argument is equally applicable here.
"If history is any guide, this new market would not be long
overlooked. Since the turn of the century, resourceful
entrepreneurs have advertised a wide variety of purportedly
simple and painless cures for cancer, including liniments
of turpentine, mustard, oil, eggs, and ammonia; peat moss;
arrangements of colored floodlamps; pastes made from
glycerin and limburger cheese; mineral tablets; and
`Fountain of Youth' mixtures of spices, oil, and suet. In
citing these examples, we do not, of course, intend to
deprecate the sincerity of Laetrile's current proponents,
or to imply any opinion on whether that drug may ultimately
prove safe and effective for cancer treatment. But this
historical experience does suggest why Congress could
reasonably have determined to protect the terminally ill,
no less than other patients, from the vast range of self-
styled panaceas that inventive minds can devise."
I don't know about you, but this argument strikes me as bizarre. Terminal patients are to be protected from their own good from a "drug [that] may ultimately prove safe and effective for cancer treatment" because they might be scammed by "inventive minds"?
The absolute worst case scenario is that they lose some money and die a little sooner. The best case scenario is that they live!
To say that someone else can or should have the power to constrain another human in this way, to keep them from a chance at living, in the name of "protecting" them from doctors or companies...well, we are likely at a fundamental philosophical impasse. Which is why I return to my original point. Feel free to stay in the United States with the FDA. Those with a different cast of mind need a jurisdiction where we can take conscious risks, where we aren't "protected" from medical innovation.
The fact that you can currently buy MMS and inject it to your hearts desire says otherwise. You can legally, right now, buy all sorts of medical bullshit that the FDA has not vetted. The court decision you bring up seems clearly aimed at preventing an industry of victimization that could occur if legitimacy were lent without review.
> The absolute worst case scenario is that they lose some money and die a little sooner. The best case scenario is that they live!
No, the worse case scenario is that charlatans, given a license to operate with perceived legitimacy by an "opt-out" system, convince sick people to neglect real treatment for woo. In the vast majority of cases, your best case scenario never happens.
We have a system designed to separate the woo from the real. Despite what one might think from the narrative you paint, human trials are involved in this system and sick people receive experimental treatments every day in a controlled fashion. Perhaps this process could be streamlined, but it must stay in place.
