Epigenetics and Chronic Pain

Preliminary research may hold clues to epigenetic factors having a role in chronic pain.

"In the study, published today in Cell Reports, they found that nerve damage changes epigenetic marks on some of the genes in these immune cells. Epigenetics is the process that determines which gene is expressed and where. Some epigenetic signals have direct functional consequences, while others are just primers: flags that indicate a potential to act or be modified.

The cells examined in this King's study still behaved as normal, but the existence of these novel epigenetic marks may mean that they carry a 'memory' of the initial injury."

As a sufferer of chronic pain, this is quite interesting. Sadly, I suspect it may take several years before it may help lead to treatment plans.

Neighbours of Lottery Winners Significantly More Likely to go Bankrupt

So, this study was pretty interesting. People who live next to recent lottery winners are more likely to go bankrupt, new research suggests.

According to a recent report from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve, an arm of America's central bank, for every $1,000 your close neighbour wins in the lottery, you are 2.4 per cent more likely to go bankrupt in the next two years.

Full story on the CBC website.

Conspicuous consumption leading others to spend more is not surprising at all, but the fact that the effect is powerful enough to drive a significant number of families into full on bankruptcy and ruin is rather shocking. 

Degradation of the Web

So, I've started to notice the Web seems to be getting more and more unpalatable. Pages are covered with links to stories about "jaw dropping dresses on the red carpet", "10 foods to avoid for less belly fat", "shocking this" and "Unbelievable that". They change every few months, but appear all over the place.

In addition to this, the quality of news articles continues to degrade. The level of click-bait nonsense and space filling waffle just grows and grows. Not to mention the prevalence of news stories with such atrocious spelling, grammar, and sentence construction one can barely make sense of them.

I don't want to live in a world of web sites that only serve to confirm my bias on various topics, but I do feel I may need to create some type of curated sub-web that only contains high quality sites, and generally avoid the rest of the web when trying to stay up to date with the world.

It does all make me feel rather sad about humanity I must say.

Robots and AI: Unemployment, the Singularity and More. Part 1

OK, so I plan to post on this topic a few times, so this is just the first.

Saw another headline about Robots putting us all out of work in the future. These stories seem to be getting more and more common.

AI and robots threaten to unleash mass unemployment, scientists warn 

February 14, 2016 12:55 pm

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/063c1176-d29a-11e5-969e-9d801cf5e15b.html#axzz40M4v4gzP


It seems there are four possible near to mid-term futures.

The first is that, as in the past, new jobs arise to replace the old ones, productivity increases, people continue to work the same amount. When the horse and cart replaced human labour, people found new jobs, some of which included shoeing horses and building carts and roads. When the steam engine, and then the internal combustion engine replaced the horse and cart, a similar thing happened. Perhaps this will also occur with AI and robots.

The second is that AI and robots will be able to do so many jobs, that we simply won't find a significant number of new jobs to do that can't also be automated, and we will have to deal with exceptionally high unemployment in one way or another.

The third is that when the singularity occurs, humans are all, or mostly, wiped out by the Machine, and unemployment rates will be of little concern.

The fourth is that we decide to stop the march or technical progress, and keep flipping burgers, driving trucks, scrubbing floors, digging ditches, and so on, and freeze the world pretty much as it is now.

Option four will only happen if the world becomes convinced that options two or three almost certain and imminent, which we are a long way from right now, so I'll ignore it for now. Option three seems to be an either or thing. If the singularity occurs and "The Machine" is "evil", we are probably screwed.

So options one and two are left to talk about and plan for, and really option two is the scenario that requires new and different planning. It also, to me, seems to have a pretty high chance of happening in the next couple of decades, and how well we organise our societies can have a huge impact on quality of life. Will resources be shared well, or will the few rich and powerful hoard the worlds wealth? How long and deep would the misery be before there was a general revolt?

I guess my main though is this - the sooner we can determine which option is the most likely to occur, the sooner we can begin to adjust society accordingly and prevent as much misery as possible, or more optimistically, accelerate human society and potential as far as possible.

Sorry if this post is a bit rough, struggling mentally at the moment, but it's been a while since I last posted. Better rough than nothing.