Four short links: 20 June 2017
Dynamic Processes, Hardware Upgrades, Social Cooling, and RNC Data
- Close-Up View of DNA Replication Yields Surprises — Conventional wisdom is that the polymerases on the leading and lagging strands are somehow coordinated so that one does not get ahead of the other. If that did happen, it would create stretches of single-stranded DNA that are highly susceptible to damaging mutations. Instead, what looks like coordination is actually the outcome of a random process of starting, stopping, and variable speeds. Over time, any one DNA polymerase will move at an average speed; look at a number of DNA polymerases synthesizing DNA strands over time, and they will have the same average speed.
- Hardware Is the New Software — Microsoft researcher hypothesizes that Intel is releasing new features in chips at a faster rate because the end of Moore’s Law means the end of reasons to keep upgrading CPUs. The graphs are great. (via Adrian Colyer)
- Social Cooling — People are changing their behavior to get better scores. […] Social Cooling describes the long-term negative side effects of living in a reputation economy.
- Inside the RNC Data Leak (Upguard) — anyone with an internet connection could have accessed the Republican data operation used to power Donald Trump’s presidential victory, simply by navigating to a six-character Amazon subdomain: “dra-dw”. Interesting not just for this, but also for the glimpse at the CSV files.
