Noor Siddiqui's Personal Site
Summary Sister and brother duo Claude and Shannon get into antics together and discover how “entropy” works in the process. This playful book weaves the fundamental concepts of information theory into a story relatable to kids today. Claude and Shannon are curious, cunning kids that are sure to spark your young learner’s interest in entropy....
This is a summary of the key results from five seminal papers on the neuroscience of free will, namely: Libet (1983), Fried (1991), Brass (2007), Lau (2007), Soon (2008). Motivation Society revolves around the belief in the presence of a conscious free will. It is at the heart of our conception of moral and legal...
What are side channel attacks? The idea behind “side channel” attacks is to use the physical effects caused by the execution of an algorithm to uncover information about a system. A side channel attack is different than a traditional security vulnerability in that traditional vulnerabilities expose bugs in the software itself. The broad classes of...
What is ChIP-seq? ChIP-seq is an experiment that answers the question: is a protein bound to a piece of DNA or not? Scientists use “ChIP-seq” to find out if a “protein of interest” is bound to a piece of DNA or not. Usually the protein of interest is a “transcription factor”. What is a transcription...
An “availability cascade” is the concept that as a topic gains traction in the media, people perceive it to be more plausible, creating a self-reinforcing loop where the topic continues to rise in the public discourse through further momentum in the media. A “reputational cascade” is the concept that a person who wants to earn...
Here are some questions I’ve found fun to ask people I’ve just met to get to know them. I’ve found that good conversations start from questions that get your (future) friend to: recall an emotionally charged memory (positive or negative) recall a rarely accessed memory (nostalgia) generate a novel response (think about something they hadn’t...
What is gene therapy? The core idea behind gene therapy is to replace a defective gene with a functional gene. So, “gene therapy” is when DNA is used as the therapeutic. This is in contrast to most drugs, which use a small molecule, or a recombinant protein. The DNA (gene) used usually encodes a protein...
What is Pharmacogenomics? Pharmacogenetics was coined in 1959, and focused on how a single gene affects how a patient responds to medication. Pharmacogenomics (PGx) began being used after the Human Genome Project emerged in 2000, and focuses on how many genes interacting affect how you respond to medication. Pharmacogenomics / pharmacogenetics are largely interchangeable terms....
23 pairs of chromosomes Each of us has 23 pairs of chromosomes. 22 are “autosomes” (non-sex chromosomes) and 1 is an “allosome” (sex-chromosome). Females are “XX”, and males are “XY”. The X chromosome has ~800 genes and just shy of 154 million bases, and the Y chromosome is significantly smaller, containing only ~50 genes and...
I had a lot of fun making this video for the final project for a film class I took. It sums up the mindset I shift into when starting a new project I’m intimidated to begin. Shifting Perspective We live on tiny patches of a planet called earth, but we don’t see how our home...
A video interview I did for a class on Ethics in Computer Science in the Gates Library. Guests Veritasium creator Derek Muller 3blue1brown creator Grant Sanderson WebTorrent creator Feross Aboukhadijeh Thanks Keith Winstein and Allison Berke provided feedback on this project.
Where is this going What justifications are given by Islamic scholars to exclude women from leading prayers and giving a khutbah (sermon) to the congregation, as well as segregating women to the back of the prayer hall during jummah prayer? Are the justifications religiously motivated or culturally motivated? I argue that the justifications provided to...