Stoicon 2019 Athens, Greece

On the 5 of September took place, in Athens, the 2019 Stoicon!
The word conference of Stoicism.

I have been so lucky that I was able to assist it for the second time after last year in London. This was actually the 5th Stoicon ever done. There were: London 2014 and 2015; New York 2016, Toronto 2017 and London 2018.

The next location for 2020, is still to be decided, although, I hope that after Athens, Rome will follow.

Athens is, of course, the perfect city for hosting a conference on an ancient Greek philosophy.

By walking its street and ruins you can have the sense that this was one of the most important birthplace of philosophy, democracy and in general the western civilisation. it has been a constant trill for me.

Besides, the city offers good food and its autumn weather was better of this year summer here in the UK!

The conference

This year conference was hosted in the Cotsen Hall of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

The entrance of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Photo by M. CInelli

Review on: “On Living and Dying Well” by Cicero

If it’s possible to attain wisdom,
then we should put it to use and not just possess it.
The only limit on seeking the truth is finding it;
and to give up looking is shameful,
because what we’re looking for
is the most beautiful thing there is.
Cicero, On Ends, 1.1-12

If you, like me, had the to translate Cicero in school, you probably hate the guy! The first thing you would, in every Latin test, was to glance a the author name and hope that was not Cicero. Anything but Cicero!!! Such his texts are hard to translate!

Despite, be the name of the book I want to suggest you is titled “On Living and Dying Well“. I’m still more frightened by the name of the author.

Alpha parameter doesn’t work on geom_rect!!! Sort of…

The parameter alpha in the R package ggplot2 is used to express the transparency of the fill colour of the function geom_

However for the function geom_rect it might not work as aspected.

In my latest work, I tried to combine different geom function but I was stuck when all was covered when I used geom_rect.
Let’s see an example:

If we plot the data using geom_jitter and geom_boxplot we obtain the plot:

More Than Happiness: Buddhist and Stoic Wisdom for a Sceptical Age

In the book “More Than Happiness: Buddhist and Stoic Wisdom for a Sceptical Age” the author Antonia Macaro offers a detailed comparison between two ancient philosophic and life inspiring practice: Stoicism and Buddhism.

Review

In my experience, when the first is mentioned or discussed the second is usually brought up. After reading this book It is clear to me, how the two philosophy offer similar solutions for how to tackle day-to-day. Although, those solution come from traditions and sensibilities way different.

Hidden Markov Model applied to biological sequence. Part 2

This is part 2, for part 1 follow this link.

Application on Biological sequences

As seen thus far, MC and HMM are powerful methods that can be used for a large variety of purposes. However, we use a special case of HMM named Profile HMM for the study of biological sequences. In the following section, my description of this system should explain the reasoning behind the use of Profile HMM.

Analysis of a MSA

Let us consider a set of functionally related DNA sequences. Our objective is to characterise them as a “family”, and consequently identify other sequences that might belong to the same family [1].

We start by creating a multiple sequence alignment to highlight conserved positions:

A	C	A	–	–	–	A	T	G
T	C	A	A	C	T	A	T	C
A	C	A	C	–	–	A	G	C
A	G	A	–	–	–	A	T	C
A	C	C	G	–	–	A	T	C

It is possible to express this set of sequences as a regular expression. The family pattern for this set of sequences is:

[AT][CG][AC][ACGT]^{*}A[TG][GC]

Hidden Markov Model applied to biological sequence. Part 1

Introduction on Markov Chains Models

The Markov Chains (MC) [1][2] and the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) [3] are powerful statistical models that can be applied in a variety of different fields, such as: protein homologies detection [4]; speech recognition [5]; language processing [6]; telecommunications [7]; and tracking animal behaviour [8][9].

HMM has been widely used in bioinformatics since its inception. It is most commonly applied to the analysis of sequences, specifically to DNA sequences [10], for their classification [11], or the detection of specific regions of the sequence, most notably the work made on CpG islands [12].

Overview

The Markov Chain models can be applied to all situations in which the history of a previous event is known, whether directly observable or not (hidden). In this way, the probability of transition from one event to another can be measured, and the probability of future events computed.

The Markov Chain models are discrete dynamical systems of finite states in which transitions from one state to another are based on a probabilistic model, rather than a deterministic one. It follows that the information for a generic state $X$ of a chain at the time $t$ is expressed by the probabilities of transition from the time: $t-1$ .

Bag-of-words and k-mers

Bag Of Words

The bag of words (BOW) is a strategy usually adopted when we need to convert a document of strings, e.g., words in a book, into a vector of pure numbers that can be used for any sort of mathematical evaluation.

At first, this method was used in text and image classification, but it has recently been introduced into bioinformatics, and can be successfully applied to DNA/AA sequences’ repertoires.

With the BOW approach, we can redefine a highly complex document, such as a picture or a book, into a smaller set of low-level features, called codewords (also a codebook, dictionary or vocabulary).

The quality and origin of features is arbitrary, i.e. if we want to analyse a book or a series of books, we can choose as features all the words present inside the books, or the letters, or the combination of letters. As for the origin, the features can be all words present in the same books or all the words in the English dictionary, etc. As a result, the length of a codebook is defined by the number of features chosen.

Tom likes to go to the cinema on Sunday.
Martin likes to go to the cinema on Tuesday.
George prefers to visit science museums.
Carl prefers to visit art museums.

Introduction to Stoicism – pamphlet

Not to merely know, but to live philosophically

PDF version of this intro can be find here:

Pamphlet by Cambridge Stoic Download

“It isn’t the events themselves that disturb people, only their judgements about them”
Epictetus

“If it is not right don’t do it, if it is not true don’t say it”
Marcus Aurelius

“Through my efforts, I gain the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”
Secular serenity preyer

What is Stoicism?

In today’s English, we refer to stoicism as: the ability or the predisposition of a person to endure pain or hardship without the displaying of feelings.

However, that is not Stoicism!

Stoicism is a philosophy, a school of thought founded in Athens about 2300 years ago by a man named Zeno of Citium. Zeno started his school by standing on a porch in the market and talking to anyone who happened by. The word for porch in Greek is stoa, and the followers of Zeno were known as Stoics.

Stoicism became the preeminent philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome; it penetrated all sectors and classes of the society such that two of the most important Stoic authors are the slave Epictetus and the emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Stoicism flourished for nearly 500 years, until the fall of the empire. It re-emerged occasionally in many philosophers and thinkers during the Renaissance when people returned to reason to find answers about how to live.

However, only recently has it been rediscovered as a philosophy to live by!

Stoicism and the Art of Happiness

The stoics lived a long time ago, but they had some startling insights into the human condition – insights which endure to this day.

In this meetup we’ll have an overlook on Stoicism as a whole. From its foundation by Zeno in 301 BC in Greece, its development in the following 500 years and its modern return.

Stoicisms is a body of thought with a simple extraordinary goal: to provide a rational, healthy way of living in harmony with the nature of the universe and in respect of our relationships with each other and to possess a sense of direction in life!

Bayes’ theorem

Overview

Bayes’ theorem is today considered one of the main theorems in statistics, and one of the most applied formulae in science.

its importance grew steadily until the middle of the last century. And it is now considered essential in all statistics courses, and applied in almost every field of research and not least in Bioinformatics, where it has been applied extensively to the biological system analysis.

At first glance, Bayes’ theorem can seem confusing, counterintuitive, and hard to grasp. We know that, for many, statistics is not intuitive, as with other aspects of mathematics.

However, if we analyse the thought processes leading Bayes to his theorem, we see that these are natural and logical ways of thinking.

A	C	A	–	–	–	A	T	G
T	C	A	A	C	T	A	T	C
A	C	A	C	–	–	A	G	C
A	G	A	–	–	–	A	T	C
A	C	C	G	–	–	A	T	C

A	C	A	–	–	–	A	T	G
T	C	A	A	C	T	A	T	C
A	C	A	C	–	–	A	G	C
A	G	A	–	–	–	A	T	C
A	C	C	G	–	–	A	T	C

The conference

Review

Application on Biological sequences

Analysis of a MSA

Introduction on Markov Chains Models

Overview

Bag Of Words

Not to merely know, but to live philosophically

­What is Stoicism?

Stoicism and the Art of Happiness

Overview

What is Stoicism?

A	C	A	–	–	–	A	T	G
T	C	A	A	C	T	A	T	C
A	C	A	C	–	–	A	G	C
A	G	A	–	–	–	A	T	C
A	C	C	G	–	–	A	T	C