While I completely agree that these questions need to be asked, the public doesn't appear to have issues giving out social data everywhere. E.g., what if we took your questions and replaced "genetic" with "social"?
I admire and applaud your endeavor and hope that we see more disease-specific communities sprout in the near future.
I attended the Consumer Genetics Conference last year (http://www.consumergeneticsshow.com/CGC2010.html) and heard Rolf Benirschke speak. His short speech was inspiring and further encouraged me to pursue my startup.
Ping me offline archuleta(at)seqcentral and I'd be happy to further discuss how I can help and who I might be able to get you in touch with.
(FWIW: I recently became an advisor for a cystic fibrosis non-profit with a similar e-community to the one you are pursuing.)
It is near 0% likely that the Colorado earthquake and Virginia earthquake are related as VA and CO are on different faults. It's not 0% because, quite frankly, it's hard to model the earth.
This wikipedia article on plate tectonics explains how the Earth crust is composed of different sections all sliding past/under each other. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics Since the earthquakes occur at the friction points between the plates, this should help explain why Japan and California has a lot, and Virginia and Colorado not so much.
One of the major problems humans have with earthquakes is the assumption that we should/can predict them. As such, whenever there are earthquakes close in time to one another, the first assumption is that the first earthquake caused the second. Aftershocks are such an example where this assumption holds because the primary earthquake causes secondary earthquakes. However, in the general case, this assumption does not hold.
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The appeals court ruled against Myriad in another part of the case, however. The court said that Myriad’s patent claims on the process of analyzing whether a patient’s genes had mutations that raised the risk of cancer was not patentable because it involved only “patent-ineligible abstract mental steps.”
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The result that the gene is patentable but that the test is not patentable is intriguing.
From the standpoint of genetic research, I may not care whether I have the gene itself, but I do care whether I can test for the gene and its mutations. For example, if my methodology needs to isolate the gene in order to test for it (e.g. exome sequencing), then the "isolation patent" prevents me from using this methodology but allows me to find another methodology that does not require isolation (e.g. whole-genome sequencing).
Can you take a moment tomorrow and add an edit to your post giving a summary of whether you felt the comments answered your questions?
I ask simply because my first read of your post focused on "How do I get there?" and not "what was your path?" As such, I was surprised to be reading life stories of fellow HN'ers. Since we all absorb info differently, I'm curious to know if the stories helped and what you gleaned from them.
All the best in your endeavor. -- A fellow large-scale enthusiast.
For some reason, I don't have an edit link for this post anymore, but I can answer this right now. All of these responses are exactly what I was looking for, and then some. As far as the phrasing, I'm equally interested in direct advice like "read this paper", and personal stories. I've always been able to intuit how to go about learning any given topic in computing, whether languages, game programming, HTTP, Win32, or what have you. I don't know exactly why this subject in particular seems more esoteric to me - probably a product of my background - but it does. I wanted to know how others learned. Before this thread, my best answer would have been "Get a job at Amazon or Google as a front-end dev, and try to work my way into the back end." Now I have papers to read, algorithms to learn, topics to explore, and ideas about setting up a toy environment for learning. So yes, all of the answers are definitely helping, and I hope a few more people will add their stories. A big thank you to everyone.
Expanding on your advice: when diversifying it helps to not throw darts. It may be best to not have investments only in tech, auto, health, etc., but it's quite another to randomly choose a company or two in different sectors.
Unsolicited advice ;-):
* Tech: ARMH over MSFT over FB (phones/tablets need to be low, low power and P/E of FB seems egregious)
* Auto: VLKAY over F over GM (100MPG TDI trumps "made in USA" trumps bankruptcy)
"The api design functions on the simple idea of having a "GET" request act as a discovery mechanism while "POST" requests perform operations and searches -- much like how most websites function."
should make its way into your blog post or final documentation. I was thoroughly confused because there's no mention that GET and POST are actually different in the blog post. Best of luck with the API creation.
