February, 2008
Mechanical Turk
A few months ago, on a different blog I posted a method for reading books for free on Amazon. Hopefully they didn’t take offense to this but rather saw it for what I did which was a way to get people interested in a book enough to want to purchase it. But just in case Amazon has any hard feelings, I will make amends here by plugging one of their little-known but extremely powerful services called Mechanical Turk.…
What is a Gene?
Not having had any serious biological training I have to go to Wikipedia and Google to learn the basics. And I’m often surprised to find that concepts everyone uses don’t have good consensus amongst scientists. When reading the Wikipedia entry for “gene”, it occurs to me that if the concept didn’t predate the discovery of DNA, it would not exist.…
Parrondo's Paradox and Poker
Parrondo’s paradox is the well-known counterintuitive situation where individually losing strategies or deleterious effects can combine to win…. Over the past ten years, a number of authors have pointed to the generality of Parrondian behavior, and many examples ranging from physics to population genetics have been reported. In its most general form, Parrondo’s paradox can occur where there is a nonlinear interaction of random behavior with an asymmetry, and can be mathematically understood in terms of a convex linear combination.
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Complex Links: Cancer
- Why We’re Losing the War on Cancer
- Untangling the Roots of Cancer
- Cancer as an evolutionary and ecological process
- Scientific, Social and Organizational Requirements for the Specific Cure of Cancer
- Stochastic cancer progression driven by non-clonal chromosome aberrations
- Aneuploidy theory explains tumor formation, the absence of immune surveillance, and the failure of chemotherapy
- Contagious Cancer