Competitiveness

Our civilization is young, our technology even younger, and we have so much unrealized potential. If we are to become a smarter, healthier and more peaceful society, we need the freedom to experiment and try every possible way to evolve into our potential. To limit freedom is to think much too highly of the status quo.

One unfortunate trait we've yet to evolve beyond is competitiveness. People say that money is the root of all evil, but I think that evil is rooted in competitiveness, and money is just the yardstick.

Competition at its best drives people to outdo each other, and everyone benefits. At its worst, competition drives people to lose sight of what really matters purely for the sake of winning.

You can tell a person cares more about winning than doing good when he asks you to trade your freedom for the security of his solutions. What rational person could be convinced that he has arrived at a solution so perfect that all others should stop working on the problem?

A competitive person is eager to convert potentially innovative individuals into soldiers in their match towards victory. You can tell such a person by how he treats people who disappoint him. The telltale sign is when, rather than trying to educate people and help them do better, he tells them to give up and just follow orders.

Free markets and capitalism often take the blame for the damage done by competitive people, but it would be a tragedy to let freedom take the fall. Free markets and capitalism are not the same thing. A free market is simply a place where people voluntarily exchange goods and services for mutual benefit. Capitalism, on the other hand, is when competitive types descend on the market and turn it into a barbaric game to see who can amass the most money.

Capitalists give the free market a bad name, but without free markets, cultural evolution would slow down to whatever pace is convenient for those in power. To take their side would be to reject the ingenuity of billions of people and postpone the day when civilization can truly be called civil.

A 10 year old boy received a new trachea grown from his own stem cells attached to a colagen scaffold.

Doctors at the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) along with colleagues at the University College London, the Royal Free Hospital, and Careggi University Hospital in Florence have successfully transplanted a trachea into a 10 year old boy using his own stem cells. A donor trachea was taken, stripped of its cells into a collagen-like scaffold, and then infused with the boy’s stem cells. The trachea was surgically placed into the boy and allowed to develop in place. Because his own cells were used, there was little to no risk of rejection. This was the first time a child had received such a stem cell augmented transplant and the first time that a complete trachea had been used. This also marks only the second time that an organ has been transplanted into a person while stem cells were still forming the new body part. Previous attempts required the donor organ to be infused with stem cells and incubated for weeks before transplantation. This surgery is an amazing step forward for regenerative medicine and organ transplants, and could be a sign of a new direction in these kinds of surgeries.

We reported earlier about the first person to ever receive a stem cell grown windpipe. Claudio Castillo was around 30 when her stem cells were used to grow a new bronchea on a donated trachea scaffold in 2008. That windpipe was incubated in a lab for weeks before she was operated upon. In 2009, Dr. Macchiarini (leader of the team responsible for the earlier procedure) operated on a 53 year old Italian woman, replacing a portion of her trachea with a scaffold covered in her stem cells. As with the recent 10 year old boy, this operation did not require weeks of incubation. In fact, the stem cells were applied just hours before the scaffold was placed inside the patient. In just two years time, then, Dr. Macchiarini (and his colleagues in the EU and UK) has gone from producing the first stem cell organ transplant, to streamlining that procedure so that the organ is mostly reformed while still in the body. That’s simply incredible. Following this trend forward several iterations, and it may be possible to completely renew an organ, or replace it, simply through the correct application of stem cells.

Compared to the newest non-stem cell surgical options, this procedure was considerably faster and less expensive. The unnamed 10 year old boy had Long Segment Tracheal Stenosis, a condition which narrows the trachea and makes the patient feel as if they are breathing through a straw. It is a potentially fatal condition. Typical treatments (which are still relatively new) involve a conventional transplant. The boy had received such a treatment but a metal stent used in that procedure damaged his aorta several years later. Rather than face the uncertainties of another transplant, with the risk of rejection, GOSH doctors requested Dr. Macchiarini’s help in transplanting a stem cell covered scaffold. Letting the trachea develop in the patient may eventually make this process cost just tens of thousands of pounds rather than hundreds of thousands.

The procedure can be seen in a simulation developed by Dr. Macchiarini. The video can be found on the UCL News site by clicking the photo below. There is no sound.

To further the development of the stem cells on the trachea scaffold, Dr. Macchiarini used various cytokine drugs (shown as injections in the video). These drugs help signal to the stem cells where and how to develop. While not directly stated in the press releases or news segments about this procedure, I suspect that such drug augmentation may become a more integral part of stem cell therapies in the future. As multipotent cells are directed to replace a wide variety of different organs and tissues, proteins and other chemicals may be necessary to speed stem cell specialization and keep it focused on the type of cell that is desired.

When Claudio Castillo received her stem cell scaffold windpipe the procedure was basically just a lab test. It had never been tried before and was likely years from being developed to a point of clinical use. Now, with two more patients having undergone a new (and improved) version of the transplant, we can cautiously pronounce this a developing trend in treatment. Oh, we’re still years from seeing transplants of this kind from becoming commonplace, but every successful case is a step in the right direction. Also, with every new patient there are more doctors that gain experience in the procedure. I think that we are very likely to see more of these transplants (at the rare, lab-based level) in the near future. Hopefully we’re all a little closer to being able to use stem cells and scaffolds to grow new organs when we need them. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: medicine is cool.

The doctors and surgeons responsible for this miraculous trasnplant. From left to right: Dr. Martin Birchall (UCL), Dr. Mark Lowdell (RFH), Dr. Paolo Macchiarini (Careggi), Dr. Martin Elliott (GOSH).

[screen capture credit: Paolo Macchiarini]
[image credit: UCL News]
[source: UCL News, GOSH, BBC News]

Justin.tv's Live Video Broadcasting Architecture

The future is live. The future is real-time. The future is now. That's the hype anyway. And as it has a habit of doing, the hype is slowly becoming reality. We are seeing live searches, live tweets, live location, live reality augmentation, live crab (fresh and local), and live event publishing. One of the most challenging of all live technologies is that of live video broadcasting. Imagine a world in which everyone becomes a broadcaster and a consumer of video streams, all in real-time (< 250 msec latency), all so you can talk and interact directly without feeling like you are in the middle of a time shift war. The resources and the engineering needed to make this happened must be substantial. How do you do that?

To find out I talked to Kyle Vogt, Justin.tv Founder and VP of Engineering. Justin.tv certainly has the numbers. Their 30 million unique monthly visitors even outshine YouTube in the video upload game, reportedly uploading nearly 30 hours per minute of video compared to YouTube's 23. I asked for an interview after listening to an interview with Justin Kan, another Founder of the eponymously named Justin.tv. Justin talked about how live video was fundamentally different than YouTube's batch video approach, where all the video is stored on disk and replayed later on demand. Live video can't be made by pushing video faster, it takes a completely differently architecture. Since the YouTube Architecture article is the most popular article ever on this site, I thought people might also enjoy learning about live side of the video world. Kyle was unbelievably generous with his time and insight into how Justin.tv makes all this live video magic happen, going way beyond the call, providing a tremendous number of juicy details. Anyone building a system can learn something from how they run their business. I can't thank Kyle enough for putting up with my never ending prodding.

Think like a statistician – without the math

I call myself a statistician, because, well, I'm a statistics graduate student. However, ask me specific questions about hypothesis tests or required sampling size, and my answer probably won't be very good.

The other day I was trying to think of the last time I did an actual hypothesis test or formal analysis. I couldn't remember. I actually had to dig up old course listings to figure out when it was. It was four years ago during my first year of graduate school. I did well in those courses, and I'm confident I could do that stuff with a quick refresher, but it's a no go off the cuff. It's just not something I do regularly.

Instead, the most important things I've learned are less formal, but have proven extremely useful when working/playing with data. Here they are in no particular order.

Attention to Detail

Oftentimes it's the little things that end up being the most important. There was this one time in class when my professor put up a graph on the projector. It was a bunch of data points with a smooth fitted line. He asked what we saw. Well, there was an increase in the beginning, a leveling off in the middle, and then another increase. However, what I missed was the little blip in the curve in the first increase. That was what we were after.

The point is that trends and patterns are important, but so are outliers, missing data points, and inconsistencies.

See the Big Picture

With that said, it's important not to get too caught up with individual data points or a tiny section in a really big dataset. We saw this in the recent recovery graph. Like some pointed out, if we took a step back and looked at a larger time frame, the Obama/Bush contrast doesn't look so shocking.

No Agendas

This should go without saying, but approach data as objectively as possible. I'm not saying you shouldn't have a hunch about what you're looking for, but don't let your preconceived ideas influence the results. Because if you go to length looking for some specific pattern, you're probably going to find it. It'll just be at the sacrifice of accurate results.

Look Outside the Data

Context, context, context. Sometimes this will come in the form of metadata. Other times it'll come from more data.

The more you know about how the data was collected, where it came from, when it happened, and what was going on at the time, the more informative your results and the more confident you can be about your findings.

Ask Why

Finally, and this is the most important thing I've learned, always ask why. When you see a blip in a graph, you should wonder why it's there. If you find some correlation, you should think about whether or not it makes any sense. If it does make sense, then cool, but if not, dig deeper. Numbers are great, but you have to remember that when humans are involved, errors are always a possibility.

*Photo by misterbisson