At Texas Tech, where 60% of classes have met in person this fall, it’s full speed ahead, with [Lawrence] Schovanec saying he hopes to expand to 75%, including hybrid classes.
“People have different levels of anxiety regarding COVID-19,” he said. “We were very flexible.”
Joyce Zachman, executive director of the nonprofit Texas Tech Parents Assn., said she hears more concern from parents about students being forced to take classes online than about them catching COVID-19.
“It’s not the college experience that parents had hoped for their kids,” said Zachman, who’s asthmatic but still attended Saturday’s game, where fans sang the school fight song with its chorus of “Wreck ’Em!” and pointed their trigger fingers in the Texas Tech “guns up” victory sign.
After cautiously approaching the pandemic for months, with a go-slow attitude toward reopening, San Francisco has become the first urban center in California to enter the least restrictive tier for reopening. Risk of infection, according to the state’s color-coded tiers, is considered minimal, even though San Francisco is the second-densest city in the country after New York.
“We have, at least so far, done everything right,” said Dr. Robert Wachter, professor and chair of the Department of Medicine at UC San Francisco.
Researchers at both automakers found strong evidence in the 1960s and ’70s that human activity was warming the Earth. A primary culprit was the burning of fossil fuels, which released large quantities of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide that could trigger melting of polar ice sheets and other dire consequences.
A GM scientist presented her findings to at least three high-level executives at the company, including a former chairman and CEO. It’s unclear whether similar warnings reached the top brass at Ford.
But in the following decades, both manufacturers largely failed to act on the knowledge that their products were heating the planet. Instead of shifting their business models away from fossil fuels, the companies invested heavily in gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs. At the same time, the two carmakers privately donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups that cast doubt on the scientific consensus on global warming.
Stanford Social Innovation Review, Allison Fine & Beth Kanter
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As nonprofits emerge from the shock of the pandemic and financial crisis, there is an opportunity to rethink fundraising and improve donor retention rates by embracing emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.
Migration is often the go-to solution to economic, environmental, and social problems. Wealthy Americans contemplate moving overseas, or to one of nine US states with no income tax, for financial reasons. Americans continue to flee urban areas for suburbs with better—or whiter—schools. Retirees go abroad in search of cheaper housing and health care. And many Americans are now thinking about where they could move to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change—even as far away as New Zealand, at the opposite end of the globe.
As climate impacts worsen, experts foresee the mass migration of millions of Americans, mostly in the form of internal displacement within the United States. But running from climate change, like so many of our responses to this crisis, is at best a Band-Aid solution that delays meaningful action. Focusing on flight leaves fewer resources for “fight.” And it assumes a freedom that affluent (and sometimes not-so-affluent) Americans take for granted: migration privilege.
University of California-Santa Barbara, The Current
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Although the link may not be obvious, healthcare and climate change — two issues that pose major challenges around the world — are in fact more connected than society may realize. So say researchers, who are increasingly proving this to be true.
Case in point: A new study by UC Santa Barbara’s Andy MacDonald found that improving healthcare in rural Indonesia reduced incentives for illegal logging in a nearby national park, averting millions of dollars’ worth of atmospheric carbon emissions.
Students in the Masters of Public Health program can now participate in the School of Public Health’s new Climate Change and Health Concentration.
The concentration — a product of collaboration between the School of Public Health and the Yale Center for Climate Change and Health — is aimed at educating future healthcare professionals about the need to consider climate change as a growing public health concern. Students who are interested in participating need to apply and — in order to fulfill the requirements of the concentration — they must complete certain courses on the intersection of public health and climate change. This concentration will join others offered by the School of Public Health, such as the Global Health and Public Health Modeling concentrations.
The global hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine for kids is only just beginning — a lagging start that has some U.S. pediatricians worried they may not know if any shots work for young children in time for the next school year.
Older adults may be most vulnerable to the coronavirus, but ending the pandemic will require vaccinating children, too. Last week, Pfizer Inc. received permission to test its vaccine in U.S. kids as young as 12, one of only a handful of attempts around the world to start exploring if any experimental shots being pushed for adults also can protect children.
“I just figured the more people they have to do tests on, the quicker they can put out a vaccine and people can be safe and healthy,” said 16-year-old Katelyn Evans, who became the first teen to get an injection in the Pfizer study at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.
Stanford University, Stanford Medicine, Scope blog
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When the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic became clear, some researchers began investigating the number of lives lost. Others probed the ensuing economic downturn.
But they rarely looked at both.
Stanford Medicine health economist Maria Polyakova, PhD, and her colleagues set out to fill the gap.
“We were intrigued that a lot of the initial research and media reports either focused on mortality impacts or the economic damage of the pandemic — but were not combining the two, even though the possible tradeoff was clearly on everyone’s minds,” said Polyakova, who is a core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy and a faculty fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
Sean Cusack has been a backyard beekeeper for 10 years and a tinkerer for longer. That’s how he and an entomologist friend got talking about building an early warning system to alert hive owners to potentially catastrophic threats.
They envisioned installing a motion-sensor-activated camera at a beehive entrance and using machine learning to remotely identify when invaders like mites or wasps or potentially even the Asian giant hornet were getting in.
“A threat like that could kill your hive in a couple of hours, and it’d be game over,” Cusack said. “But had you known within 10 minutes of it happening and could get out there and get involved, you could potentially rescue whole colonies.”
It wasn’t until Cusack heard about Lobe, an app that aims to make machine learning easier for people to use and helps them train models without writing code, that he saw a manageable way to bring the project to reality.
Veteran technology executive Joe Marks has joined Weta Digital as the company’s Chief Technology Officer, according to an announcement by CEO Prem Akkaraju. Marks has an extensive background in graphics, computer science and research and development; he will oversee the company’s technology initiatives that span visual effects as well as the newly announced Weta Animated division. Marks will report to Weta Digital CEO Prem Akkaraju.
Many crowdsourced biotech problems rely on our innate pattern recognition ability. Humans are much better than computers at picking out certain patterns in genome data, at least when the data is represented in a way that seems natural to us. Human geneticists are interested in cataloging genome rearrangements, called structural variants or SVs — portions of the DNA sequence that are copied, flipped, or deleted, and which in some cases cause genetic diseases. Because it takes several kinds of data to reliably label an SV, human expert curators have performed better than the best machine learning algorithms. But there are many potential SVs and not enough expert curators to sort through them all.
A team led out of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology is trying to solve the SV problem by crowdsourcing it. They developed a web platform, called SVCurator, which visualizes the data in a way that’s easy for humans to parse. SVCurator shows a volunteer an example and then asks some specific multiple-choice questions about whether the example looks like an SV. The research team tested their platform with 136 volunteers, and they obtained reliable answers for almost one thousand SVs.
Research is increasingly being driven by digital technology. Whether it’s using text analysis to understand parliamentary debates, GPS tracking to measure biodiversity or simulations to predict the efficacy of health interventions, data science is changing how research is being done.
To strengthen the use of this innovative technology, the UvA will launch its own Data Science Centre at the beginning of 2021. Its mission will be to enhance the university’s research across all faculties by developing, sharing and applying data science methods and technologies.
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Morgridge Institute for Research
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Recognizing the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s leadership role in research computing, the National Science Foundation announced this month that the Madison campus will be home to a five-year, $22.5 million initiative to advance high-throughput computing.
The Partnership to Advance Throughput Computing (PATh) is driven by the growing need for throughput computing across the entire spectrum of research institutions and disciplines. The partnership will advance computing technologies and extend adoption of these technologies by researchers and educators.
The University of Texas at Arlington will offer a new Bachelor of Science in Business Analytics, available at only a few universities in the area, beginning in January 2021.
The new degree plan, approved by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board in July, will reside in UTA’s College of Business.
University of Chicago, Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation
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“On Oct. 29-30, the Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI) at the University of Chicago will host an interdisciplinary workshop to address the COVID-19 pandemic. The event, “Dealing with COVID-19 in Theory and Practice,” will bring together key stakeholders with diverse backgrounds and expertise from across academia, industry and government—including biomedical experts, epidemiologists, public health officials, economists, business professionals and bioethicists.”
I had the opportunity to do a 3-month research internship on GANs. I read a lot of scientific papers as well as blogs. In this post, I try to convey the basics of what I learned and feel worth sharing.
Something is wrong with today’s management. As companies grow they add layers of middle management to grapple with the complexities of organizing lots of people. Too often this leads to endless alignment meetings and byzantine decision making, costing the US $3T a year.1 Instead of recommending yet another reorg, our hypothesis is that companies suffer from a communication problem. We’re building a tool that lets employees see what’s going on across the business and self-organize to decide on direction.