Remember Napster? How about Kazaa? Do you remember how popular they were and how blatantly illegal they were? The illegality was blatant but revolutionary. It was emblematic of a myopic but resolute spirit still actively pervasive among new companies, especially those providing new mechanisms for old grey markets.

The ongoing fracas about Uber and Lyft always brings that spirit to mind. Some folks in my city are excited about its possibilities. I'm conflicted about it, honestly. Just as Napster, Kazaa, and all the other early file-sharing methods rendered music sharing painless, these new companies are simplifying ride sharing. People could and did share music before the internet made it easy and they certainly still do so. They also continue to share cars, even on an unofficial paid basis.

Here's why I'm conflicted, though:

1. Taxis are terrible but I'm glad they're regulated. I'm generally in favor of regulating services: there's always some liability issue should something go wrong during a business transaction. Uber and Lyft really need some very specific safety regulations before I'm convinced they should supplant the existing taxi system.
2. I'm increasingly worried about the distancing effect of turning human interactions into apps. Is that old-fashioned?*
3. Uber and Lyft frame their business concepts as creative destruction. I don't see anything terribly creative about it. They're organizing existing systems in a patently illegal way and discarding every logical reason why the laws exist. If that's the only way this system can be improved, then I suppose I'll get used to it. In the meantime, I'll continue to be suspicious. 

*I do really like knowing how much a taxi ride will cost up-front, though. That's a clear advantage of these new services and it's obscene that the old taxi companies couldn't provide it.

This clickbait-headlined Bloomberg article makes the claim that "The Villages", a proliferant retirement community in Florida, is the most rapidly-growing metropolitan area in the US. Something seems vaguely cyberpunk about the place, possibly because it is obscenely large and chock-full of people at the tail ends of their rich lives. That's the traditional "overbearing dystopian future society" part, at least. 

So how is The Villages different from a university of equivalent size? Ohio State (er, The Ohio State University) has about 57,000 students on one campus, making it one of the most populous universities in the nation. It's not quite the 110,000 headcount claimed for The Villages, but I'm assuming that number includes resident employees as well. If we include OSU's non-student employees, their total "resident" population is closer to 87,000, not counting commuter students. 

This is my point: the population size isn't what intrigues me about The Villages. It's not the monolithic overlord problem, either. It's having that many affluent, elderly people in one place. It's a recipe for highly-concentrated success.

Unlabeled, but not forgotten.

Today I learned about Positive-Unlabeled learning, a type of semisupervised machine learning approach. This is the general problem: if you want a machine learning method to do binary classification, you need to start with examples of items which fit into one classification or the other. This is much easier and more efficient when you can safely say that everything in Column A is not in Column B and vice-versa. That isn't the case with some data. Rather, it's either labeled (Column A) or unlabeled (maybe Column B, or maybe Column A but just unlabeled).

PU learning can be used to define negative examples for protein function prediction.  Citation below:
Youngs N, Penfold-Brown D, Bonneau R, Shasha D (2014) Negative Example Selection for Protein Function Prediction: The NoGO Database. PLoS Comput Biol 10(6): e1003644. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003644.

I had a brief look at Google's Material Design guide today after seeing it linked by Andy Baio. It's essentially a series of guidelines about how to make an interface or product look Google-y. Much of it is good design advice for other projects. The color palettes are one such example.

When future historians want to know what 2014 looked like, this will be a fairly accurate record. I hope we (or just Google, at least) can improve on a few things; their cascading menus have always looked messy and non-intuitive to me. They just pop up all over the screen.

If I had to choose the most insulting sentence currently available in the English language, it would likely be the following:

Those people are mistaken, for reasons I explained in a series of tweets.

The source is here. For more immediate context, it's in reference to people who are in favor of the Oxford comma. The referenced Twitter arguments are of the usual Twitter caliber: glib, poorly organized, and myopic. The source organization, Poynter, is intimately concerned with journalism so I can forgive their editor's concern over generally trivial grammatical squabbles. I have more difficulty with the general concept of "you're wrong because of arguments I've previously made in the worst possible format."