University of California-Santa Barbara, Sustainable Fisheries Group (SFG) & National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
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In this Big Picture roundtable, four researchers from a couple of these working groups share insights they are gaining about the ecological factors important to sustaining biodiversity across regions and continents.
Kim Komatsu and Kevin Wilcox are both leading a team that’s exploring how climate change and other global drivers affect plant communities now and into the future, which indicates conditions for biodiversity and biodiversity-supporting habitats. Jonathan Walter and Joan Dudney are part of a different team that is identifying the factors that stabilize ecological communities, looking particularly at the fluctuations in species’ populations and communities over time, how synchronized these fluctuations are, and the causes and consequences of the synchrony.
Harvard University, T.H. Chan School of Public Health
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A summer crash course at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health helped a dozen undergraduates from across the U.S. learn how to use quantitative skills to improve health on a wide scale.
During the six-week Summer Program in Biostatistics and Computational Biology—aimed at attracting underrepresented minorities into the field of biostatistics—students took noncredit courses in biostatistics and epidemiology. They learned about data collection and analysis methods, participated in group research projects guided by faculty mentors, postdocs, and graduate students, and attended talks on a wide range of public health topics.
“The talks were great. The classes were amazing. And the mentorship was great, too,” said Ian Reyes, a physics major and a rising junior at the University of Texas at El Paso. “The most important thing I learned was how diverse the field of public health is and the massive amount of work that biostatisticians can do in so many different areas.”
Email overload has become a backwards point of pride. “I get several hundred emails a day,” I heard someone say at a recent corporate event. “At least.” It’s a lamentation, but also a boast. Productivity signals personal value, and email offers an easy way to quantify it. Maintaining “inbox zero” is a display of willpower and efficiency, every new missive “triaged” as if the office were a military front or an emergency room. More recently, groupware programs such as Slack have tried to sublimate work email into chat rooms, but that works only inside an organization; there’s no stopping the email from outside customers, suppliers, or colleagues from arriving. As an old tech-industry aphorism puts it, email is the cockroach of the internet. It will outlast every technology fashion.
But what if all that received wisdom is wrong? Maybe the workplace has given email a bad rap. Office jobs made email a chore. But at home, email is something else: a heap of opportunities, mostly sent by businesses instead of friends and family. The problem isn’t getting through it, but figuring out which offers, notices, and invitations deserve attention and which can be ignored. Most popular email software, including Gmail and Outlook, is built for enterprise use first, which infects home email with the Sisyphean despair of the office. That’s finally changing, thanks in part to Yahoo and AOL, two old-school internet icons sold off for parts after newer tech darlings overtook them. Harnessing a legacy as consumer companies, they hope to wrest email from work’s oppressive grip by redesigning it for use at home.
Why does academia move slowly? I spent some time talking to researchers about the current system. Below are the notes of an outsider peering in, trying to decipher why things are broken and how one might help fix it:
A conservative cultural feedback loop. People optimize the cultural reward system they’re in. This is one of the reasons why Nigeria doesn’t have 10X more successful startups. It isn’t that they lack the IQ; it’s that when you grow up in Africa you’re told the best thing you can do is provide sustenance for your family. Not start the next Google. “Winning” means something relatively modest by global standards. You move at the cultural cadence set by your peers. And the academic cadence is (a) just not as speedy as Xiaomi’s (b) very conservative. Over time, this becomes particularly pernicious with adverse selection. Anyone seriously adventurous just pursues another path.
It’s bad practice to be openly ambitious. Californian startup culture rewards big thinking. Academia penalizes it.
Data center environments must stay consistent regarding things like humidity and temperature. Otherwise, the costly equipment inside them could begin malfunctioning. Moreover, data center clients want assurances that the valuable information stored within a facility will be available whenever they need it, and maintaining consistency comes into play there, too.
Here are four ways machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are upending data center management.
POLITICO, Margaret Harding McGill and Daniel Lippman
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The White House is circulating drafts of a proposed executive order that would address allegations of anti-conservative bias by social media companies, according to a White House official and two other people familiar with the matter — a month after President Donald Trump pledged to explore “all regulatory and legislative solutions” on the issue.
None of the three would describe the contents of the order, which one person cautioned has already taken many different forms and remains in flux. But its existence, and the deliberations surrounding it, are evidence that the administration is taking a serious look at wielding the federal government’s power against Silicon Valley.
I am helping to launch a new Center for Applied Data Ethics (CADE), housed within the University of San Francisco’s Data Institute to address issues surrounding the misuse of data through education, research, public policy and civil advocacy. The first year will include a tech policy workshop, a data ethics seminar series, and data ethics courses, all of which will be open to the community at-large.
Misuses of data and AI include the encoding & magnification of unjust bias, increasing surveillance & erosion of privacy, spread of disinformation & amplification of conspiracy theories, lack of transparency or oversight in how predictive policing is being deployed, and lack of accountability for tech companies. These problems are alarming, difficult, urgent, and systemic, and it will take the efforts of a broad and diverse range of people to address them. Many individuals, organizations, institutes, and entire fields are already hard at work tackling these problems. We will not reinvent the wheel, but instead will leverage existing tools and will amplify experts from a range of backgrounds. Diversity is a crucial component in addressing tech ethics issues, and we are committed to including a diverse range of speakers and supporting students and researchers from underrepresented groups.
MIT Sloan School of Management, Sloan Managemet Review, Timocin Pervane and Kaijia Gu
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While there is much discussion of how artificial intelligence will continue to transform industries and organizations, a key driver of AI’s role in the global economy will be cities. How cities deal with coming changes will determine which ones will thrive in the future.
Many cities have plans to become “smart cities” armed with AI-driven processes and services, like AI-based traffic control systems, to improve residents’ lives. But simply adopting these new technologies won’t be enough to guarantee their success. Jobs that exist today may not exist tomorrow. Completely new jobs will need to be filled quickly. Many people today don’t yet have the skills needed for the jobs of the future. Yet cities cannot just shrink and grow their populations and talent at will.
To realize the potential of AI, city administrations have to work with local employers to plan for new opportunities — along with possible painful transitions — that their communities may experience. Many U.S. cities once dependent on manufacturing industries have made the shift to knowledge-based economies, including cities like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Rochester, New York; and Madison, Wisconsin. In order for these economies to continue to prosper, cities — along with organizations and education experts — need to assess and prepare for AI-related skills gaps.
An experiment conducted in German train stations involving paper cups and escaping oranges has found that people are less likely to help a woman if she appears to be Muslim — but they’re more likely to help that same woman if she somehow proves that she shares their social values.
The findings, described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal that discrimination is a somewhat fluid phenomenon that can be mitigated — within certain limits.
In a time of climate change denial and vaccine resistance, scientists worry they are losing public trust. But it’s just the opposite, a survey released Friday finds.
Public trust of scientists is growing. It’s on a par with our trust of the military and far above trust of clergy, politicians and journalists.
The survey by the Pew Research Center finds 86% of those surveyed say they have a fair amount or a great deal of faith that scientists act in our best interests. And that’s been trending higher — it was 76% in 2016.
Conservation groups today asked a federal court to block construction of President Donald Trump’s border wall through protected wilderness in Arizona until a judge rules on a pending lawsuit.
Today’s motion for a preliminary injunction, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., involves the groups’ July lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s waiver of dozens of environmental and public health laws to speed border-wall construction in Arizona.
“It’s senseless to let bulldozers rip a permanent scar through our borderlands’ wildlife refuges and national monuments before the court decides whether the waiver is legal,” said Jean Su, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.
Increasingly, Amazon Alexa and Siri are no longer just a tool for ordering pizza. Voice technology has found its way into healthcare, and now one of the most established industries in the medical world is starting to explore the possibilities of voice: pharma.
“I think voice should be part of a robust ecosystem in which pharma provides treatment information … and things like that,” Kay Bayne, senior manager of consumer and HCP marketing at AstraZeneca, said during the Voice of Healthcare Summit at Harvard Medical School yesterday.
While the technology has a myriad of potential use cases, there are still a lot of unknowns.
Medium, MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, Paula Klein
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The 2019 Platform Strategy Summit, hosted by the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) at MIT’s Media Lab on July 12, was the seventh, and largest, conference yet, with more than 300 attendees — and with good reason. MIT IDE director, Erik Brynjolfsson, noted that “the five most valuable companies on planet Earth today are platform companies,” referring to Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple. He also said that it’s important to understand that it is not just these “behemoths of the digital economy” that are driving the platform revolution; “myriad startups and smaller companies are thriving as well,” thanks to network effects and platform ecosystems.
Event co-chairs Peter Evans, Marshall Van Alstyne, and Geoffrey Parker summed up the day’s event with key highlights and calls to action. It became clear that platforms are the business in so many cases, and there is huge optimism in what platforms and technology can do, especially with 5G and AI technology. There were also sober reminders that unchecked growth could harm market ecosystems, as well as society, which is why international regulatory and antitrust discussions are heating up. Clearly, we are navigating uncharted waters.
Scale is looking to sell its wares to just about any company developing AI technology. Several high-profile venture capitalists are sold on the mission. On Aug. 5, Scale plans to reveal an investment that values the business at more than $1 billion. “It takes billions or tens of billions of examples to get AI systems to human-level performance,” says Alexandr Wang, Scale’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “There is a really big gap between the handful of giant companies that can afford to do all this training and the many that can’t.”
relates to Silicon Valley’s Latest Unicorn Is Run by a 22-Year-Old
With Scale’s technology, “tasks that used to take hours end up taking just a couple of minutes,” says CEO Wang.
Photographer: Kelsey McClellan for Bloomberg Businessweek
Even by Silicon Valley standards, Wang is something of a phenom. He grew up in New Mexico, the son of two physicists. During his teenage years, Wang excelled at coding competitions and got job offers from tech companies as a high schooler. This put him on a path to graduate early, work in Silicon Valley, and then start Scale by the time he was 19. Now, at the ripe old age of 22, Wang has a fresh $100 million from investors, including Mike Volpi, a general partner at Index Ventures. “When we signed the term sheet and went out to dinner, I ordered a nice bottle of wine to celebrate,” says Volpi, “and then had to ask him if I’m breaking the law.”
CarpentryCon 2020: Meet Up in Madison, Wisconsin, USA!
We are excited to announce that CarpentryCon2020 will be held on June 29 – July 1st, 2020 at the University of Wisconsin – Madison (Madison, Wisconsin, United States). [save the date]
Denver, CO September 7-8. “PyColorado is a regional Python conference to bring together the community of Python users and developers in the Front Range region of the Rocky Mountains.” [$$$]
Help us articulate The Carpentries Values by answering these two questions:
Envision people you think of as representative of The Carpentries community. What words would you use to describe these people? (No need to identify them, briefly outline their characteristics.)
The workshops we run, calls we hold, interactions we have on various platforms, and guidelines we use to uphold these interactions are but a few things that make us who we are as a community. With this in mind, in 2-3 sentences, how would you describe The Carpentries community culture?
I am a huge fan of modern web development, though I would describe it as “magical” — and magic has its upsides and downsides:
When you understand how to use the magical tools of web development (babel! bundlers! watchers! etc!), your development workflow is speedy, powerful, and delightful
If you don’t understand the magical tools of web development, it’s terribly confusing
… and trying to learn how the magic works is all-too-often miserable, unless you have someone to help guide you through the tangle of jargon, hot takes, and outdated information on the web
Paper Digest uses an AI to generate an automatic summary of a given research paper. You can simply provide a DOI (digital object identifier), or the url to a PDF file, then Paper Digest will return a bulleted summary of the paper. This works only for open access full-text articles that allow derivative generation (i.e. CC-BY equivalent). In case you receive an error message and no summary is generated, it is most likely either the full text is not available to use or the license does not allow derivative generation. Example of journals that work for Paper Digest include but not limited to: PLOS One, Wiley, and others. … Paper Digest is still in its beta stage and we welcome your contributions to improve our algorithm. We are currently accepting a limited number of pilot users who can participate in our user test, in which you are expected to test Paper Digest for your own published papers and spend up to 10 minutes for each to give us feedback.