Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for November 23, 2019
The coming rise of serverless computing; A TED talk on the search for Planet Nine; Machine Learning algorithm agrees with 1850s scholar that Shakespeare's Henry VIII was written by two collaborators; A new archaeological technique can identify species and sex for million year-old fossils; and a Steem essay discussing recent research into the Mediterranean diet.
Straight from my RSS feed | Whatever gets my attention |
Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.
- The Rise of Serverless Computing - Cloud computing is seeing widespread adoption, with 2/3 of all IT spending expected to be spent in the cloud by the end of 2020. As-of now, most of that spending is directed towards the traditional architecture, where the server is moved to the cloud. The next evolution of the technology is the serverless computing architecture, where the application runs directly in the cloud, and the developer does not need to be aware - at all - of the operating system layer.. This model delivers near-limitless scalability and true capacity on demand. It also frees the developer to focus on application-layer details. This article offers two characteristics to define serverless computing: (i) Billing is done based on usage; and (ii) The architecture scales from zero to "infinity". Because of its infinite scalability, developers no longer have to rely on over-provisioning in order to be ready for peak loads, so along with its technical advantages, the paradigm also delivers cost savings. Although this is still a nascent technology, it is already available from cloud providers like IBM, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, and it is expected to reach a $7.72 billion market by 2021. Risks for the technology include the possibility that applications may evolve requirements that aren't available from the underlying platform, and also that there is currently a dearth of available tools and frameworks.
Here is a video from the article:
Authors include: Paul Castro, Vatche Ishakian, Vinod Muthusamy, and Aleksander Slominski.
- The search for our solar system's ninth planet - This TED talk by Mike Brown was posted this month and came across the ted.com RSS feed on November 22. In the talk, Brown discusses the history of discovering planets based upon deviations between predictions of observed orbits of celestial bodies and actual observations. In 2003, Brown discovered Sedna, an object that's in a massively elongated orbit around the Sun that takes it about 10,000 years to complete. Along with two later-discovered objects with similar orbits, the math seems to imply the existence of an undiscovered 9th massive and distant planet that is circling the Sun in an elongated orbit. This planet, that he calls "Planet nine, has six times the mass of Earth, and it's about 15 times further away than Neptune from the Sun. Brown describes two ways that this planet might be discovered by astronomers. First, they have narrowed down its location to a relatively small area of sky, so astronomers can systematically study that area until they find it; or second, he believes that it has already been captured in past images, and a computational search of past images for the undiscovered planet might find it.
- Machine learning has revealed exactly how much of a Shakespeare play was written by someone else - During Shakespeare's time, another famous playwright was John Fletcher. In 1850, literary scholar James Spedding noticed sections in Henry VIII that resembled Fletcher's writing more than Shakespeare's, leading him to conclude that the two collaborated on the work. Other scholars later suggested that Philip Massinger was Shakespeare's collaborator. Now, Petr Plecháč trained a machine-learning system to recognize writing by all three writers, and then turned it loose on Henry VIII. The AI identified sections that resembled Fletcher's writing and sections that resembled Shakespeare's, but few that resembled Plecháč's. Based on its analysis, it appears that Shakespeare and Fletcher each wrote about half of Henry VIII.
- UNT scientist helps advance archaeology millions of years - As part of an international team, Reid Ferring helped to discover a method that makes use of proteins, instead of DNA, to determine the species and sex of million year-old fossils. Previous methods, based on DNA, were limited to fossils of about 200,000 years old. The new method creates opportunities for gaining additional knowledge from already-discovered samples, because proteins last far longer than DNA. Ferring believes that this technique may be critical to determine the evolutionary line leading from early hominids and modern man. Ferring also points out that, "We have thousands of hominid fossils in collections and museums around the world from all time periods", implying that we're already staged to collect a great deal of new information, even without unearthing any new fossils. The methods were described in the article, Early Pleistocene Enamel Proteome from Dmanisi Resolves Stephanorhinus Phylogeny, which appeared in the September issue of Nature. This technique was also covered in Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for September 25, 2019. (Related: This Ancient Tooth Could Shake Up How We Study Evolution) h/t archaeology.org
- STEEM More Evidence Suggests Mediterranean-type Diet Can Help Boost Beneficial Gut Bacteria - In this post, @doitvoluntarily discusses a new study, which found evidence that a plant-based, or Mediterranean diet, can promote beneficial gut bacteria. The post says this adds to a body of evidence finding that the diet also deters overeating, boosts brain function, encourages longevity, and protects against cancer. A concern with the diet, however, is that its focus on raw foods, fruits, and vegetables, may irritate the digestive tract for some people. The post concludes by saying, "This study adds to that belief, that the diet plays a critical role in management and treatment of disease." (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @doitvoluntarily.)
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The cloud is presently almost only three providers, and one of them AWS dominates the market significantly. This dramatically limits the ability of consumers to be able to use it, beyond the horrible security implications of AWS being the provider dominating the market due to it's affiliation with notorious surveillance agencies like the CIA.
Not many consumers of such services should even consider the cloud as presently constituted to prevent becoming captive to a monopoly, and worse, to be simply a source of data flowing to nefarious police state actors and paying for the privilege.
Again, the study of ancient human activity is archaeology, while studying other animals is palaeontology.
Thanks!
There used to be a cloud storage provider that I loved, symform. It was run by Qualcomm and created by a couple of former Microsoft engineers. It used peer to peer storage, where you didn't have to pay anything. You contributed your own diskspace to the cloud, and in return got to use half-as much space as you contributed on other peoples' computers scattered around the globe. Before the files left your computer, they were encrypted, then they were sliced up and different parts of the files were stored on different computers in a redundant arrangement that they called RAID-96. All of which is to say, the vendor couldn't have snooped on the file even if they had wanted to. Sort-of like IPFS, I guess, but I'm not as familiar with the security or redundancy of the IPFS protocol. (One of these days, I want to read about that.) I keep hoping that another decentralized service like that will gain a foothold in the market. There are a few that are trying. We'll see. Eventually, I hope there will be decentralized equivalents of AWS, too. But yeah, privacy is a real issue on today's mainstream platforms.
Interesting. I must've missed it if you commented to that effect earlier. Sorry if I did. Looks like the study above actually mixes the two, since they used the technique on animals, but plan to apply it to hominids. And as a result of your comment I just scanned back through the original article and took note of the fact that they're calling it a new field, Palaeoproteomics . I had missed the significance of that point when I first read it. Thanks for the clarification.