"The procedure Kurimoto performed is unlikely to restore his patient's vision. However, researchers around the world will be watching closely to see whether the cells are able to check the further destruction of the retina while avoiding potential side-effects, such as bringing about an immune reaction or inducing cancerous growth."
Seems that at this point they're still evaluating safety rather than actual therapeutic benefits. Still exciting progress :)
First, I would guess that part of the reason Calico is a separate company instead of just a team within Google is that they don't fit within Google's central mission. Second,I don't know if there really needs to be an altruistic motive; is Larry's concern for his own health and the health of those he cares about not enough?
T-Mobile is claiming that they are not sponsorships and that Spotify, Rhapsody, Pandora, and the other launch partners are not paying for data-exempt status[1]. That said, this still raises serious net-neutrality red flags.
Speaking from experience, I see everyone from the team leader to the interns tackling bugs on my team at Google. Furthermore, the engineer with the highest level on my team has done a tremendous amount of refactoring and maintenance work over the course of the past year. Clearly this is just anecdotal, but from what I've seen an engineer who took the initiative to improve performance/stability or significantly refactor old code would have just as good a chance of promotion as an engineer churning out new features.
I imagine it's a whole lot easier to pass campaign finance regulation than it is to transform a population of hundreds of millions of people into an intelligent, knowledgeable, rational group.
But that doesn't mean that we have to appoint from within industry. There are probably many academics who would be just as qualified or more than former industry lobbyists. Moreover, these people would probably be more than happy to return to academia and research after serving their tenure.
I had the privilege of seeing Dean Kamen speak last year about the DEKA arm. One of the things he lamented was that the FDA had to decided not to classify the arm as Class I, and as such it was getting caught up in drawn out regulation when there were people he felt it could help right now.
Actively working to restrict the rights of a marginalized population goes beyond simply holding a personal belief. He is free to donate to whatever anti-gay cause he wishes, but we are also free to hold him accountable for it.
Great work. It looks really slick, and from the comments so far it appears many people are excited to have a native app. That said, I'd be interested to here why exactly people want a native app. The web app already has notifications and has suited me just fine, so I'd be interested to hear what others find useful about a native app.
Woo! Moving to Mountain View in June, so I'm excited to see this.
On another note, I wonder if this will have any impact on the Comcast/Time Warner merger. Comcast has specifically called out Google Fiber as a source of legitimate competition in defending the merger[1]. With the announcement that Google could increase the number of Fiber cities 10-fold, that claim might have a little more weight.
While that may well be true in some cases, in my own experience I've never felt like I couldn't get help with my problems, minor as they might have been. Long story short, a serious of unfortunate circumstances led to me having a period of anxiety/insomnia that was affecting my studies. I talked to my freshman counselor who referred me to my college dean, who in turn extended deadlines for several of my assignments to decrease my stress. He also referred me to Yale Health, where I had a few counseling sessions and was prescribed a sleeping aid.
The counseling itself was nothing to write home about, but at no point in the experience did I feel I had to filter my problems to avoid repercussions. Granted, the issues I was dealing with were quite mild compared to the author of this article, and her experiences may well be representative of students facing serious mental health problems. I merely wanted to post to say that, in my opinion, most Yale students are able to talk and get help with their problems without fear of repercussions.
That's not really relevant. The point was that Gruber stated that Google is presenting Glass as a finished product, which is something they have never done.