… The names and faces driving the analytics movement in the sport are overwhelmingly white and male. When [David] Sparks stepped back and looked, he saw the same picture.
“I think that, going back in time five years, the list would have been smaller and similarly diverse,” he said.
The past 20 years, nothing has reshaped sports at large more than the shift toward quantitative analysis. The standard box score statistics that everyone knows and understands are still there. But the foundation that Bill James laid with sabermetrics in the 1970s became the inspiration for the minds who created the Association for Professional Basketball Research message board at the turn of the century to provide concrete answers for questions that typically came in the form of hot takes.
Treating different diseases might demand different kinds of gene-editing. The simplest approach is to just mess up a gene so it doesn’t work. When Cas9 snips a DNA strand, the cell’s DNA-repair machinery doesn’t just stitch it together again; typically it shaves a bit off the strands, as if cleaning up the ragged ends. The rejoined gene is then generally useless – and sometimes that’s all you need. Some editing jobs call for a more precise molecular scalpel, however.
“For most genetic diseases, precise gene correction, rather than disruption, is needed to benefit patients,” says David Liu of the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. Over the past few years, he has developed a way of using Cas9 to make precise changes to just a single one of the molecular units – called bases – that encode genetic information. Sometimes, as in sickle-cell disease, that’s all it takes to make a mutation dangerous. Liu’s so-called base editors use a modified version of Cas9 that can target DNA in a programmed way but doesn’t cut it, in conjunction with other molecules that then swap a single base at the target site.
Pulse oximeters, devices used for estimating blood oxygen levels, may be less accurate in people with darker skin pigmentation, the FDA warns. The tools are often used by patients at-home to monitor conditions, however the FDA cautioned that the technology have limitations and a risk of inaccuracy under certain conditions.
Today many pulse oximeters are digitally connected, which has made the device popular for remote monitoring.
While the agency doesn’t explicitly mention race, it cites a recent report published in The New England Journal of Medicine, which found, in two large cohorts of patients, “Black patients had nearly three times the frequency of occult hypoxemia that was not detected by pulse oximetry as white patients.”
SAGE Journals, Public Health Reports, Madina Agénor et al.
from
Objectives
Although US state laws shape population health and health equity, few studies have examined how state laws affect the health of marginalized racial/ethnic groups (eg, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx populations) and racial/ethnic health inequities. A team of public health researchers and legal scholars with expertise in racial equity used systematic policy surveillance methods to develop a comprehensive database of state laws that are explicitly or implicitly related to structural racism, with the goal of evaluating their effect on health outcomes among marginalized racial/ethnic groups. Methods
Legal scholars used primary and secondary sources to identify state laws related to structural racism pertaining to 10 legal domains and developed a coding scheme that assigned a numeric code representing a mutually exclusive category for each salient feature of each law using a subset of randomly selected states. Legal scholars systematically applied this coding scheme to laws in all 50 US states and the District of Columbia from 2010 through 2013. Results
We identified 843 state laws linked to structural racism. Most states had in place laws that disproportionately discriminate against marginalized racial/ethnic groups and had not enacted laws that prevent the unjust treatment of individuals from marginalized racial/ethnic populations from 2010 to 2013. Conclusions
By providing comprehensive, detailed data on structural racism–related state laws in all 50 states and the District of Columbia over time, our database will provide public health researchers, social scientists, policy makers, and advocates with rigorous evidence to assess states’ racial equity climates and evaluate and address their effect on racial/ethnic health inequities in the United States. [full text]
Oftentimes, an air crew flies over a blaze, capture images, lands and works the data – soaking up crucial time as firefighters on the ground battle for a while without vital information.
But now a small plane equipped with a state-of-the-art camera and a satellite sits at the ready at the Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos, poised to deliver real-time infrared video and photos to decision-makers on the ground – in seconds.
Nvidia has shared its Q4 2021 earnings, and despite the company’s GPUs being in extremely low supply, it didn’t seem to hurt how much money the company made. In fact, it reported a record $5 billion in revenue, which is up 61 percent year-over-year. What’s more impressive is that Nvidia expects to make another $5 billion in revenue during Q1 2022.
This positive outlook is surprising given that Q1 is generally slower than other quarters, even for the biggest tech companies, as it follows the rush of people buying lots of products during the holiday period. It’s generally a slower period in general for product releases across tech and gaming. Also, let’s not forget the GPU shortage is still happening. Nvidia reiterated that sparse supply will continue through the next quarter, but that’s likely factored into its rosy revenue prediction.
“Sparse GPU supply will continue through the next quarter”
Nvidia says it expects most of that $5 billion revenue estimate in Q1 2022 to come from the gaming market.
An international research team has developed an approach using publicly available big data. The tool—the Urban Environment and Social Inclusion Index (UESI)—can assess environmental conditions at the scale of individual neighborhoods.
Applying UESI to 164 cities spread across all continents (excluding Antarctica), the researchers found that most cities leave lower-income communities with higher shares of environmental burdens and lower shares of environmental benefits. Interestingly, stark inequalities are also seen in many cities with high overall environmental performance—wealthy cities that regularly receive plaudits for their green credentials.
“Copenhagen, Paris, and London, even if they’re doing really well overall on environmental indicators—so their air pollution levels are low, they have green space—they’re not providing amenities and environment benefits equally amongst all their citizens,” said Angel Hsu of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who led the research.
Analytics from streaming services and the major label groups are increasingly able to deliver numbers-backed answers to questions that once required gut calls. Here’s how artists and their reps are harnessing this information
Literacy increasingly means and includes interacting with and critically evaluating AI.
This means our children should no longer be taught just formulaic writing. Instead, writing education should encompass skills that go beyond the capacities of artificial intelligence.
Dr Amy McGovern leads the NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography (AI2ES), and is based at the University of Oklahoma. We spoke about her research, setting up the Institute, and some of the exciting projects and collaborations on the horizon.
Firstly, could you give us a general overview of the research you are involved in at the moment?
In terms of the Institute, we got funded to be one of the inaugural Institutes in September 2020 and our focus is on creating trustworthy AI with a focus on weather applications, climate applications and coastal oceanography. However, we are aiming for a broad set of applications so we named ourselves AI2ES to reflect environmental science (ES) generally.
We’re developing AI hand-in-hand with meteorologists, oceanographers, climate scientists, and risk communication specialists who are social scientists. The risk communication specialists are working on understanding the reasons behind whether the AI we’re developing gets used or not, gets trusted or not, why trustworthiness matters, and what we can do to make the AI better.
Georgia, Maine, Pennsylvania and others took mapping into their own hands, building their own granular data to pinpoint gaps in internet coverage and apply for federal funding.
Microsoft Azure is proud to have recently launched the Azure HPC & AI Collaboration Centers program, which funds collaborations with well-known institutions to develop and share these best practices with the HPC & AI communities. The Collaboration Centers program is delivered in partnership with our friends at AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA.
The first five Azure Collaboration Centers are already underway with Duke University, Purdue University, Red Oak Consulting, Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG), and RedLine Performance. We plan to announce further exciting collaboration centers over the coming months.
Despite their best intentions, there’s often a gap in businesses between the desire to act ethically and following through on those good intentions.
We call this the intention-action gap. Closing this gap is key to ensuring technology is developed in a more responsible, inclusive manner.
To help close the intention-action gap, the World Economic Forum recently embarked on a project to unearth tools, processes, and lessons from organizations that have made progress in operationalizing ethics in technology. This project, studying Microsoft’s journey to operationalize its responsible innovation practices among its more than 145,000 employees, considered the evolution of the company’s culture, the tools and processes it created, and the efficacy these of efforts.
UCSF’s interactive data platform allows users to drill down into 150 social determinants of health variables. This data, layered with EHR data, can give researchers and clinicians invaluable insights into the nexus of social factors and health.
A few years ago, the economists Alicia Sasser Modestino and Justin Wolfers sat at the back of a professional conference and watched Rebecca Diamond, a rising star in their field, present her latest research on inequality. Or at least she was meant to present it — moments after she began her talk, the audience began peppering her with questions.
“She must have gotten 15 questions in the first five minutes, including, ‘Are you going to show us the data?’” Dr. Modestino recalled. It was an odd, even demeaning question — the session was in the data-heavy field of applied microeconomics. Of course she was going to show her data.
Later that morning, Dr. Modestino and Dr. Wolfers watched as another prominent economist, Arindrajit Dube, presented a paper on the minimum wage. But while that was one of the most hotly debated topics in the field, the audience allowed Dr. Dube to lay out his findings for several minutes with few interruptions.
Over a drink later, Dr. Modestino and Dr. Wolfers wondered: Had the audiences treated the two presenters differently because of their genders?
Online April 22, starting at 9:15 a.m. Eastern. [free, registration required]
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The eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good program is now accepting applications for student fellows and project leads for the 2021 summer session. Fellows will work with academic researchers, data scientists and public stakeholder groups on data-intensive research projects that will leverage data science approaches to address societal challenges in areas such as public policy, environmental impacts and more. Student applications due 2/15 – learn more and apply here. DSSG is also soliciting project proposals from academic researchers, public agencies, nonprofit entities and industry who are looking for an opportunity to work closely with data science professionals and students on focused, collaborative projects to make better use of their data. Proposal submissions are due 2/22.
For sports are getting old. And they’re about to get even older.
Modern truth, of course, tells us that Brady is indeed an extreme rarity, able to conjure Super Bowl-winning productivity at an age when most quarterbacks have long since put the playbook into cold storage.
Yet he might not always be. As time ticks forward and medical science and sporting perception shift with it, it is entirely possible that the way future generations think about Brady’s recent masterpiece in Tampa Bay will be with a slightly lessened sense of wonder.
“Quarterbacks will definitely continue to get older and … the average age is really going to start rising,” Josh McHugh, Editor-in-Chief of the Future Of Sports told me. “People are going to be able to turn back the clock on their body tissues. There is this new biotechnology of telomere maintenance …”
The best analytics apps are seamlessly embedded where your users already do their daily work and push the right insights at the right time. This model offers access to relevant data in context, enabling users to take action without leaving their workflow.
Apps have dynamic layers that provide information in smaller, focused bites with options for users to drill in where they need details, and zoom out for the big picture when required.
Apps are also device-appropriate, making them portable and available to users anywhere — desktop, laptop, smartphone.
