The public health danger posed by potentially pandemic-causing viruses escaping from laboratories has become the subject of considerable discussion, spurred by “gain of function” experiments. The ostensible goal of these experiments—in which researchers manipulate already-dangerous pathogens to create or increase communicability among humans—is to develop tools to monitor the natural emergence of pandemic strains. Opponents, however, warn in a variety of recent research papers that the risk of laboratory escape of these high-consequence pathogens far outweighs any potential advance.
http://www.slate.com/
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Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, a widely used herbicide made by Syngenta. The company’s notes reveal that it struggled to make sense of him, and plotted ways to discredit him. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/10/140210fa_fact_aviv
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In Mike McQueary, some see a hero who brought down a monster. Others see a liar who railroaded a legend. At the upcoming trial that will close the book on the Jerry Sandusky scandal, Joe Paterno's former protégé will have the final word. http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/10542793/the-whistleblower-last-stand
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A few weeks ago David Carr profiled Kevin Kelly on page 1 of the New York Times Business section. He wrote that Kelly's pronouncements were "often both grandiose and correct." That’s a pretty good summary of Kevin Kelly's style and his prescience. http://www.edge.org/conversation/the-technium
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Meetings are such a fixture in our work lives that we constantly hear the same advice: have an agenda, keep it short, don’t invite too many people. However, despite the commonality of this well-meaning advice, research from Harvard suggests that half of all meetings are unproductive. http://99u.com/
Tags: #longread
71
Nate Weiner is neither a journalist nor a publisher. He’s a developer bent on changing publishing, and he’s built the platform to do it. With 10 million users, Pocket is the largest save-for-later service on the market. But more than market share, what sets Pocket apart is its ability to…
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One day in July 2001, Larry Page decided to fire Google’s project managers. All of them.
It was just five years since Page, then a 22-year-old graduate student at Stanford, was struck in the middle of the night with a vision. In it, he somehow managed to download the entire Web and by examining the links between the pages he saw the world’s information in an entirely new way.
What Page wrote down that night became the basis for an algorithm. He called it PageRank and used it to power a new Web search engine called BackRub. The name didn’t stick.
By July 2001, BackRub had been renamed Google and was doing really well. It had millions of users, an impressive list of investors, and 400 employees, including about a half-dozen project managers.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/
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Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, a widely used herbicide made by Syngenta. The company’s notes reveal that it struggled to make sense of him, and plotted ways to discredit him. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/10/140210fa_fact_aviv
Tags: company, #longread, years
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Google Glass shares much of its electronics and software with the smartphone, but it’s a very different machine. You hold a smartphone in your hand. And we do—at restaurants, at the movies, walking across the street, and even in bed. We use smartphones to check our mail, update Facebook, get…
Tags: google, #longread, search
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Jan Koum picked a meaningful spot to sign the $19 billion deal to sell his company WhatsApp to Facebook earlier today. Koum, cofounder Brian Acton and venture capitalist Jim Goetz of Sequoia drove a few blocks from WhatsApp’s discreet headquarters in Mountain View to a disused white building across the…
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Onstage at TED2014, Charlie Rose interviews Google CEO Larry Page about his far-off vision for the company. It includes aerial bikeways and internet balloons … and then it gets even more interesting, as Page talks through the company’s recent acquisition of Deep Mind, an AI that is learning some surprising…
Tags: company, vision, larry, google
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Why is America’s largest cable TV company buying its biggest rival for $44 billion? Well, not to oversimplify things, but that’s easy to explain: http://qz.com/176837/one-sentence-and-six-charts-explain-why-comcast-is-buying-time-warner-cable/
Tags: company, well
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