Considering using meal kits? I spent weeks cooking with boxed ingredients shipped to my door. Here are the best.
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Sunday, April 5, 2020
Mark Cuban Likes the Idea of NBA Season Starting on Christmas
The coronavirus pandemic has upended our world so much that nothing is set in stone anymore. Previously, Dallas Maverick owner Mark Cuban was hoping for a possible May return of the currently suspended NBA season, but he likes the idea of the season returning just in time for Christmas, according to CBS Sports.
A typical NBA season usually starts in the fall, sometime in October or November, and continues until late spring or early summer, stretching from April in the league’s earlier days into as late as June now. This week, during an appearance on ESPN’s Get Up, the Shark Tank host stated he would prefer that the NBA season starts around Christmas and that now may be the perfect opportunity to alter the schedule to do so.
“Honestly, it’s been something that I’ve been asking for more than 10 years. I’ve always thought that we should start on Christmas and go into the summer, but the response has always been that our television partners don’t want that because there are fewer households using television during the summer months. But everything is different right now. Particularly if we continue to be quarantined, then people are at home willing to watch the games. Nothing else is on other than SharkTank and SportsCenter and you guys, of course. But I think it really could be a great experiment for us, and if it works out well, then we could do it,” says Cuban.
Since the season is on lockdown, Cuban also said he doesn’t know when the season would pick back up.
“I have no idea. The only thing I know is that we’re putting safety first and that we’re not gonna take any chances, we’re not gonna do anything that risks the health or safety of our players, our fans, our staff, our whole organizations, so right now, I really don’t have anything new to say.”
“All the experts have got to say, ‘it’ll be absolutely safe.’ We cannot put anything ahead of the health and safety of our players and staff, that’s it, and it’s such a moving target, and nobody really has specifics. I haven’t had any conversations where anybody’s even discussed an actual date at this point.”
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Saturday, April 4, 2020
Accelerating data-driven discoveries
As technologies like single-cell genomic sequencing, enhanced biomedical imaging, and medical “internet of things” devices proliferate, key discoveries about human health are increasingly found within vast troves of complex life science and health data.
But drawing meaningful conclusions from that data is a difficult problem that can involve piecing together different data types and manipulating huge data sets in response to varying scientific inquiries. The problem is as much about computer science as it is about other areas of science. That’s where Paradigm4 comes in.
The company, founded by Marilyn Matz SM ’80 and Turing Award winner and MIT Professor Michael Stonebraker, helps pharmaceutical companies, research institutes, and biotech companies turn data into insights.
It accomplishes this with a computational database management system that’s built from the ground up to host the diverse, multifaceted data at the frontiers of life science research. That includes data from sources like national biobanks, clinical trials, the medical internet of things, human cell atlases, medical images, environmental factors, and multi-omics, a field that includes the study of genomes, microbiomes, metabolomes, and more.
On top of the system’s unique architecture, the company has also built data preparation, metadata management, and analytics tools to help users find the important patterns and correlations lurking within all those numbers.
In many instances, customers are exploring data sets the founders say are too large and complex to be represented effectively by traditional database management systems.
“We’re keen to enable scientists and data scientists to do things they couldn’t do before by making it easier for them to deal with large-scale computation and machine-learning on diverse data,” Matz says. “We’re helping scientists and bioinformaticists with collaborative, reproducible research to ask and answer hard questions faster.”
A new paradigm
Stonebraker has been a pioneer in the field of database management systems for decades. He has started nine companies, and his innovations have set standards for the way modern systems allow people to organize and access large data sets.
Much of Stonebraker’s career has focused on relational databases, which organize data into columns and rows. But in the mid 2000s, Stonebraker realized that a lot of data being generated would be better stored not in rows or columns but in multidimensional arrays.
For example, satellites break the Earth’s surface into large squares, and GPS systems track a person’s movement through those squares over time. That operation involves vertical, horizontal, and time measurements that aren’t easily grouped or otherwise manipulated for analysis in relational database systems.
Stonebraker recalls his scientific colleagues complaining that available database management systems were too slow to work with complex scientific datasets in fields like genomics, where researchers study the relationships between population-scale multi-omics data, phenotypic data, and medical records.
“[Relational database systems] scan either horizontally or vertically, but not both,” Stonebraker explains. “So you need a system that does both, and that requires a storage manager down at the bottom of the system which is capable of moving both horizontally and vertically through a very big array. That’s what Paradigm4 does.”
In 2008, Stonebraker began developing a database management system at MIT that stored data in multidimensional arrays. He confirmed the approach offered major efficiency advantages, allowing analytical tools based on linear algebra, including many forms of machine learning and statistical data processing, to be applied to huge datasets in new ways.
Stonebraker decided to spin the project into a company in 2010, when he partnered with Matz, a successful entrepreneur who co-founded Cognex Corporation, a large industrial machine-vision company that went public in 1989. The founders and their team went to work building out key features of the system, including its distributed architecture that allows the system to run on low-cost servers, and its ability to automatically clean and organize data in useful ways for users.
The founders describe their database management system as a computational engine for scientific data, and they’ve named it SciDB. On top of SciDB, they developed an analytics platform, called the REVEAL discovery engine, based on users’ daily research activities and aspirations.
“If you’re a scientist or data scientist, Paradigm’s REVEAL and SciDB products take care of all the data wrangling and computational ‘plumbing and wiring,’ so you don’t have to worry about accessing data, moving data, or setting up parallel distributed computing,” Matz says. “Your data is science-ready. Just ask your scientific question and the platform orchestrates all of the data management and computation for you.”
SciDB is designed to be used by both scientists and developers, so users can interact with the system through graphical user interfaces or by leveraging statistical and programming languages like R and Python.
“It’s been very important to sell solutions, not building blocks,” Matz says. “A big part of our success in the life sciences with top pharmas and biotechs and research institutes is bringing them our REVEAL suite of application-specific solutions to problems. We’re not handing them an analytical platform that’s a set of LEGO blocks; we’re giving them solutions that handle the data they deal with daily, and solutions that use their vocabulary and answer the questions they want to work on.”
Accelerating discovery
Today Paradigm4’s customers include some of the biggest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the world as well as research labs at the National Institutes of Health, Stanford University, and elsewhere.
Customers can integrate genomic sequencing data, biometric measurements, data on environmental factors, and more into their inquiries to enable new discoveries across a range of life science fields.
Matz says SciDB did 1 billion linear regressions in less than an hour in a recent benchmark, and that it can scale well beyond that, which could speed up discoveries and lower costs for researchers who have traditionally had to extract their data from files and then rely on less efficient cloud-computing-based methods to apply algorithms at scale.
“If researchers can run complex analytics in minutes and that used to take days, that dramatically changes the number of hard questions you can ask and answer,” Matz says. “That is a force-multiplier that will transform research daily.”
Beyond life sciences, Paradigm4’s system holds promise for any industry dealing with multifaceted data, including earth sciences, where Matz says a NASA climatologist is already using the system, and industrial IoT, where data scientists consider large amounts of diverse data to understand complex manufacturing systems. Matz says the company will focus more on those industries next year.
In the life sciences, however, the founders believe they already have a revolutionary product that’s enabling a new world of discoveries. Down the line, they see SciDB and REVEAL contributing to national and worldwide health research that will allow doctors to provide the most informed, personalized care imaginable.
“The query that every doctor wants to run is, when you come into his or her office and display a set of symptoms, the doctor asks, ‘Who in this national database has genetics that look like mine, symptoms that look like mine, lifestyle exposures that look like mine? And what was their diagnosis? What was their treatment? And what was their morbidity?” Stonebraker explains. “This is cross correlating you with everybody else to do very personalized medicine, and I think this is within our grasp.”
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Cardi B Donates to NYC Healthcare Workers Following a Personal Healthscare
Belcalis “Cardi B Almánzar showed her appreciation to New York medical professionals on the frontlines in the fight against COVID-19 by making a massive meal donation. According to the New York Post’s Page Six, the Grammy Award-winning rapper supplied 20,000 bottles of Owyn, a plant-based vegan meal supplement drink, to hospitals around the city.
Her rep said she wanted to provide sustenance for healthcare workers and ambulance crews who are too busy to have a proper meal in light of the coronavirus pandemic, TMZ reported.
The donation was reported days after the Bronx-born artist admitted herself to an emergency room. Although some fans feared that she may have contracted the coronavirus, the 27-year-old wife and mother revealed that she was suffering from severe stomach pains and vomiting that were unrelated to the novel virus.
“I was weighing at least 130 [pounds] and now I’m back to weighing 124. Like literally I weigh 124 because I was throwing up my f—ing life away, man,” she lamented while wearing a wrapped towel on her head, sunglasses, and a face mask on Instagram, reports Billboard. She added that she ate four bags of cotton candy and yogurt with peanut butter in an attempt to gain the weight she lost.
The “I Like It” rapper went on to say that she doesn’t have the coronavirus after spending time in the hospital for her stomach issues. “Yesterday, I was on Twitter, right, and one of my fans asked me, ‘Oh, why you haven’t gone on live?’ And I told her like, ‘Yo, I went to the hospital bi—. I was sick,'” she recalled. “And then today my publicist hit me up like, ‘Oh, I just wanted to tell you like ain’t nothing coronavirus-related or something.’ Thank God.”
Last year, Almanzar starred in Pepsi’s Super Bowl spot. She also launched a second signature clothing line with Fashion Nova in May, which reportedly sold out within 24 hours and generated $1 million in sales.
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More Than 200 Million Daily Video Participants Used Zoom in March
Zoom Video Communications, a remote conferencing services company founded in 2011, has seen a drastic surge in users in lieu of the global novel coronavirus outbreak, which has upended entire industries and brought the world to a standstill.
Earlier this month, BLACK ENTERPRISE reported that the founder of the video-conferencing platform, Eric Yuan, added more than $2 billion to his net worth. After starting the year unranked on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Yuan is now ranked 274 on the list with a $5.6 billion fortune. Meanwhile, Zoom stock, which debuted last year at $36, closed down at $137 on Wednesday, reported Reuters. Furthermore, daily use of the video app peaked at 200 million daily participants in March from a previous maximum total of 10 million set in 2019.
“Usage of Zoom has ballooned overnight,” wrote Yuan in a memo Wednesday. “To put this growth in context, as of the end of December last year, the maximum number of daily meeting participants, both free and paid, conducted on Zoom was approximately 10 million. In March this year, we reached more than 200 million daily meeting participants.”
A number of institutions have turned to Zoom in light of the national social distancing guidelines and state-issued stay-at-home orders. Companies utilize the platform to connect with employees, while local government agencies use Zoom to connect with their communities. Zoom is also being used in over 90,000 schools across 20 countries to teach students remotely. Non-emergency doctors are conducting appointments online; friends are hosting watch parties. However, along with the company’s drastic growth, Yuan admitted that Zoom is experiencing challenges in protecting its users’ privacy. One of its main issues is the rise of “Zoom bombing,” when unwanted people disrupt public Zoom meetings sometimes by sharing inappropriate images. On Monday, the FBI’s Boston office issued a warning about Zoom, telling users not to make meetings on the site public or share links widely after it received two reports of unidentified individuals invading school sessions, Reuters reported.
“For the past several weeks, supporting this influx of users has been a tremendous undertaking and our sole focus,” the 50-year-old CEO wrote in the memo. “We have strived to provide you with uninterrupted service and the same user-friendly experience that has made Zoom the video-conferencing platform of choice for enterprises around the world, while also ensuring platform safety, privacy, and security. However, we recognize that we have fallen short of the community’s–and our own–privacy and security expectations. For that, I am deeply sorry.”
Yuan, who was born in China, continued: “Over the next 90 days, we are committed to dedicating the resources needed to better identify, address, and fix issues proactively.”
Yuan’s U.S. visa application was denied eight times before he was allowed to migrate to the States. He launched Zoom to help him maintain a long distance relationship with his then-girlfriend.
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