The paintings on the walls of the Ohio Supreme Court’s law library tell the story of the evolution of law through the ages. On Monday, state leaders marked another point in history.
Representatives from the Supreme Court, Ohio Criminal Sentencing Commission, and the University of Cincinnati (UC) signed a partnership agreement for criminal justice reform. The idea is to standardize felony sentencing in the state by creating a digital Ohio Sentencing Data Platform.
In a brilliant inquiry @newyorker
, journalist Nick Romeo asks if @coreeconteam
‘s free economics textbook is the curriculum for a post-neoliberal age. Read it here: https://newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/is-it-time-for-a-new-economics-curriculum 2/6
“On October 26, the Center for Universal Education (CUE) will host a virtual event to launch the report “Building skills for life: How to expand and improve computer science education around the world” to address these questions and more. After opening remarks from CEO of Code.org Hadi Partovi about how computer science education changed his life and now the lives of millions of other students, CUE Co-Director Emiliana Vegas will give a brief presentation on the report’s key findings and policy recommendations.” [registration required]
The National Academy of Education recently called for high school courses that engage students in civic reasoning—focusing on exactly the mathematical content and practices set out in currently available data science courses. One example is the Mobilize Introduction to Data Science course that was jointly developed by UCLA and the Los Angeles Unified School District and Stanford’s Youcubed: Explorations in Data Science.
In this associated publication we lay out a set of standards that build from the American Statistical Association’s PreK-12 Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education. One important quality of the standards is that, at every grade, they are enfolded within a data investigation cycle. Data science should not be taught as a set of disconnected methods but instead as an approach to problem-solving with data, highlighting mathematical content and practices. As students advance, they will actively engage in this problem-solving investigation cycle with increasing levels of sophistication. Although each grade level lists important knowledge, the knowledge is linked and developed as part of a coherent whole.
“One of the great benefits in living in the age that we live in is that we have access to all of this information, just really quickly and really easily,” [Tamlin] Pavelsky said.
He says he often looks up a detail from an online article, drops a line in a research paper or grant proposal, and moves on.
As UNC-Chapel Hill slashes its libraries’ collections budget over the next two years, that ease of access will end.
UNC-Chapel Hill hasn’t had a balanced budget in a decade. Add on pandemic revenue losses, and the university is now making operating cuts of 7.5% across-the-board. The university announced in January it would begin a plan to rein in its operating and personnel expenses.
China has won the artificial intelligence battle with the United States and is heading towards global dominance because of its technological advances, the Pentagon’s former software chief told the Financial Times.
China, the world’s second largest economy, is likely to dominate many of the key emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and genetics within a decade or so, according to Western intelligence assessments.
Nicolas Chaillan, the Pentagon’s first chief software officer who resigned in protest against the slow pace of technological transformation in the U.S. military, said the failure to respond was putting the United States at risk.
NPR’s Michel Martin speaks with former Facebook data scientist Roddy Lindsay, who recently wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times about ways to regulate the media giant’s algorithms.
A new gift to the USC Viterbi School of Engineering totaling $14 million will significantly grow recruitment of expert faculty members in industrial and systems engineering (ISE), with a focus on interdisciplinary areas such as computational systems, machine learning and artificial intelligence. The gift will also catalyze the modernization of the facilities that house the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.
The gift is part of $25 million in cumulative support that USC Trustee Daniel J. Epstein has contributed to USC to build capacity and expand the university’s impact in ISE research, teaching and learning. The latest contribution comes nearly 20 years after Epstein made history with a naming gift to establish the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering — the first-named department at USC and the largest naming gift for any ISE department in the United States at the time.
Urban nature—such as greenness and parks—can alleviate distress and provide space for safe recreation during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, nature is often less available in low-income populations and communities of colour—the same communities hardest hit by COVID-19. In analyses of two datasets, we quantified inequity in greenness and park proximity across all urbanized areas in the United States and linked greenness and park access to COVID-19 case rates for ZIP codes in 17 states. Areas with majority persons of colour had both higher case rates and less greenness. Furthermore, when controlling for sociodemographic variables, an increase of 0.1 in the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index was associated with a 4.1% decrease in COVID-19 incidence rates (95% confidence interval: 0.9–6.8%). Across the United States, block groups with lower income and majority persons of colour are less green and have fewer parks. Our results demonstrate that the communities most impacted by COVID-19 also have the least nature nearby. Given that urban nature is associated with both human health and biodiversity, these results have far-reaching implications both during and beyond the pandemic.
The U.S. Census Bureau is extending a final round of door knocking into early 2022 for a key survey that is expected to help determine the accuracy of last year’s national head count, NPR has learned.
The change is the latest in a series of delays to the little-known but critical follow-up survey. The disruptions have raised concerns about whether the bureau can produce important indicators about who was missed and which groups were over- or undercounted in a census that was upended by both the coronavirus pandemic and interference by former President Donald Trump’s administration.
The results of the Post-Enumeration Survey are factored into population statistics that guide how an estimated $1.5 trillion a year in federal funds are distributed to local communities, as well as how to better carry out future once-a-decade counts that are used to reallocate each state’s share of congressional seats and Electoral College votes.
A team led by Lehigh University has developed a novel machine learning approach that can create similarity projections via machine learning, enabling researchers to search an unstructured image database for the first time and identify trends. Agar and his collaborators developed and trained a neural network model to include symmetry-aware features and then applied their method to a set of 25,133 piezoresponse force microscopy images collected on diverse materials systems over five years at the University of California, Berkeley. The results: they were able to group similar classes of material together and observe trends, forming a basis by which to start to understand structure-property relationships.
“One of the novelties of our work is that we built a special neural network to understand symmetry and we use that as a feature extractor to make it much better at understanding images,” says [Joshua] Agar.
A multi-institutional and multiagency team led by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis is outlining a framework for objective task-based evaluation of AI-based methods and outlining the key role that physicians play in these evaluations. They also are providing techniques to conduct such evaluations, particularly in positron emission tomography (PET).
Abhinav Jha, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering, and Barry Siegel, MD, professor of radiology and of medicine at the School of Medicine, led a team that laid out such a framework in a paper published in a special October issue on AI in PET in the journal PET Clinics.
Joining the team are Kyle Myers, senior adviser at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; Nancy Obuchowski, vice chair of quantitative health sciences and professor of medicine at the Cleveland Clinic; Babak Saboury, MD, lead radiologist (PET/MRI) and chief clinical data science officer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and Arman Rahmim, associate professor of radiology and of physics at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and senior scientist and provincial medical imaging physicist at BC Cancer.