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Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for January 30, 2020

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Steve Palmer
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LocalBitcoins reportedly suspended accounts without warning in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia; Researchers report an immune discovery that may treat many or all forms of cancer; The difficulty of documenting non-reproducible systems; A TED talk argues that humans and AI systems should work together on solving problems; and a Steem post reporting that the coronavirus has been cultured in a lab

Fresh and Informative Content Daily: Welcome to my little corner of the blockchain

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Whatever gets my attention
Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

First posted on my Steem blog: SteemIt, SteemPeak*, StemGeeks.

pixabay license: source.

  1. LocalBitcoins Quietly Suspends Accounts in Multiple Regions Without Notice - According to a report in Forbes, the LocalBitcoins exchange has quietly and without warning shut down accounts in "countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia". The action has left some users unable to withdraw their bitcoin holdings. Finland-based LocalBitcoins has not made any comment, but users in "Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Syria, and Pakistan" have reported that their accounts were suspended without warning and are currently unable to make withdrawals. Users on reddit are suggesting that the suspensions have something to do with Europe's new Anti-Money Laundering (AML) law and that users will have to wait at least 14 days before being permitted to delete their accounts and withdraw their bitcoin. Between June of 2019 and January of 2020, trading volumes on LocalBitcoins have dropped by more than 50% due to the company's proprietary Know Your Customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) policies as well as external regulations.

  2. Immune discovery 'may treat all cancer' - According to a new study in Nature, a team of researchers from Cardiff University has found a way to kill "prostate, breast, lung and other cancers" in the lab. The team has harnessed the body's immune system by identifying a T-cell that is capable of attacking a wide range of cancers. One of the researchers, Andrew Sewell , says that "It raises the prospect of a 'one-size-fits-all' cancer treatment, a single type of T-cell that could be capable of destroying many different types of cancers across the population." Another researcher, Garry Dolton, says that ""We are the first to describe a T-cell that finds MR1 in cancer cells - that hasn't been done before, this is the first of its kind". By interacting with the pervasive MR1 molecule, these T-cells are able to use their receptors to detect and attack "lung, skin, blood, colon, breast, bone, prostate, ovarian, kidney and cervical cancer cells" while leaving normal cells in the surrounding tissue unharmed. T-cell therapies for cancer already exist, but until now they have targeted specific types of cancers. This would be the first to address a wide variety of different cancer types. As with bacteriophages that were covered in Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for January 28, 2020 and Science and technology micro-summaries for June 19, 2019, the technique uses a virus to deliver the T-cells to the cancerous location. As of now, the technique has only been tested in animals and cell samples in the lab. More safety reviews are needed before it can be trialed in humans. -h/t Daniel Lemire

  3. Missing documentation and the reproduction problem - Missing and inaccurate documentation is a phenomenon that Steem's many developers will be acquainted with. In this article, Open Source luminary, Eric S. Raymond, suggests a reason why some products suffer from sparse documentation. Drawing on his own reposurgeon and also the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), Raymond argues that some products are not well-suited for introductory level documentation because it is prohibitively difficult to craft examples that a reader can reproduce. In contrast, he draws attention to the documentation for the GNU image editor, GIMP, which he says has very good documentation. From this background, he arrives at the thesis: "High-quality introductory software documentation depends on worked examples that are understandable and reproducible. If your software’s problem domain features serious technical barriers to mounting and stuffing a gallery of reproducible examples, you have a problem that even great willingness and excellent writing skills can’t fix." After recognizing the challenge, Raymond adds that he has little advice for improvement, and asks his blog readers for their thoughts.

  4. How humans and AI can work together to create better businesses - This TED talk by Sylvain Duranton was published in September, 2019, and it came across the site's RSS feed on January 29. In the talk, he describes his work with a team of artificial intelligence (AI) specialists who are seeking to learn the best ways for humans and AIs to work together. He notes the results from a recent survey which found that the companies who are pioneering AI solutions are, by and large, not seeking to replace humans with AI, but instead to grow and improve the quality of decisions. He claims that 10% of AI efforts are directed towards creating AI algorithms, 20% are focused on building technology around the algorithms, and the remaining 70% is focused on the best ways to weave human and AI efforts into the business work flow. After this introduction of the general environment, Duranton goes on to describe the deployment of an AI algorithm with expert guidance from doctors in a hospital environment to diagnose risk of a heart attack and finally concludes with the notion that, "'Human plus AI' is our only option to bring the benefits of AI to the real world. And in the end, winning organizations will invest in human knowledge, not just AI and data. Recruiting, training, rewarding human experts. Data is said to be the new oil, but believe me, human knowledge will make the difference, because it is the only derrick available to pump the oil hidden in the data. "

  5. STEEM Seeking a cure: Scientists recreate coronavirus in Australian lab - This post from @rt-international advises us that Australian scientists have grown a culture of the coronavirus from a patient's blood sample, and will now be distributing it to medical researchers around the world. Deeper analysis will involve use as an antibody test for asymptomatic patients and additional validation of testing methods. Finally, it will aid epidemiologists in determining the "true mortality rate" of the disease.

    The post includes this embedded video, presumably showing the growth of the virus in a petri dish:

    (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @rt-international.)


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