The California wildfires now burning across the state are a “new normal” that will require insurers to reconsider their risk assessment of the peril, according to AM Best.
A statewide emergency was declared more than a week ago as millions of people were forced from their homes.
While the blazes are not as severe as last year, AM Best believes the catastrophe once again highlights the urgency for improved modelling.
Some of 2020’s big bets are obvious. Joe Biden is betting the support of African Americans and labor will compensate for the diverse vulnerabilities of his campaign. Donald Trump is betting the economy stays robust for another year and that he emerges from a likely House impeachment, paradoxically, with his supporters energized and his reelection prospects brightened.
But many of the most important wagers shaping 2020 strategies are not as visible to the naked eye. At the end of last week, we assembled a small group of POLITICO campaign reporters to illuminate the issue. One theme runs through their answers: There is a dividing line between candidates betting that old rules of presidential politics will reassert themselves at last and those who believe the United States is in a transformational moment in its politics manifested in ways that go far beyond Trump.
Sandia National Laboratories, PNNL, and the Georgia Institute of Technology are launching a research center that combines hardware design and software development to improve artificial intelligence technologies that will ultimately benefit the public. The Department of Energy Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research will provide $5.5 million over three years for the research effort, called Artificial Intelligence-focused Architectures and Algorithms.
The Kincade Fire has been the most destructive of California infernos so far this year. But other damaging blazes have erupted too, including six in the Los Angeles area alone.
You can watch the evolution of these blazes in the animation above. I created it using imagery acquired by a trio of spacecraft: NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites, and the Suomi-NPP satellite.
Accumulating evidence suggests that the microbiota living in and on animals has important functions in the social architecture of those animals. Sherwin et al. review how the microbiota might facilitate neurodevelopment, help program social behaviors, and facilitate communication in various animal species, including humans. Understanding the complex relationship between microbiota and animal sociability may also identify avenues for treating social disorders in humans.
A coordinated effort involving trailblazing science—and icebreaking ships—from many nations is needed to fill gaps in our understanding of the Arctic Ocean and how it’s changing.
World Economic Forum, Formative Content, Charlotte Edmond
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What do Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner and Beyoncé all have in common?
Well, aside from fame, wealth, and a glittering lifestyle, they have among the biggest Instagram followings on the planet.
Together, they appear in many millions of social media feeds a day. But the impact following a limited range of people can have on young people’s health and wellbeing is a growing cause of concern.
On Monday, the New York Times and Siena College released a poll of how Donald Trump is faring against three leading Democratic Presidential opponents—Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren—in six critical swing states, all of which Trump won in 2016. The results contain bad news for Warren, despite her strong showing with Democratic-primary voters in Iowa; against President Trump, she performs worse than Biden or Sanders, with Trump leading or tied in five of six swing states. Biden leads or is tied with Trump in five of the six states, while the Times/Siena poll shows Trump and Sanders running essentially even. The Times’ Nate Cohn, who oversaw the poll, wrote of Warren, “not only does she underperform her rivals, but the poll also suggests that the race could be close enough for the difference to be decisive.” Cohn also noted that the poll suggests that Trump may have a greater advantage in the Electoral College in 2020 than he did in 2016, suggesting that the President could again win the election while losing the popular vote.
For further insight into the results, I recently spoke by phone with Cohn. (Cohn and I worked together at The New Republic and remain friends.)
Multilevel societies have, until now, only been known to exist among large-brained mammals including humans, other primates, elephants, giraffes, and dolphins. Now, scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz and the University of Konstanz report the existence of a multilevel society in a small-brained bird, the vulturine guineafowl (Acryllium vulturinum). The study, published in the current issue of Current Biology, suggests that the birds can keep track of social associations with hundreds of other individuals – challenging the notion that large brains are a requirement for complex societies and providing a clue as to how these societies evolved.
Alan Kay, Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway, and I have an article in this month’s Communications of the ACM called “Computational Thinking Should Just Be Good Thinking.” (See link here.) Our argument is that “computational thinking” is already here — students use computing every day, and that computing is undoubtedly influencing their thinking. What we really care about is effective, critical, “expanded” thinking where computing helps us think. To do that, we need better computing.
Ken Kahn engaged with our article in the comments section (thank you, Ken!), and he made a provocative comment:
There are have been many successful attempts to add programming to games: Rocky’s Boots (1982), Robot Odyssey (1984), RoboSport (1991), Minecraft (multiple extensions), and probably many more. But these efforts excite a small fraction relative to those who are excited about using general-purpose programming systems such as Logo, Scratch, Squeak, ToonTalk, or Snap! for their own projects.
Gaggle monitors the work and communications of almost 5 million students in the US, and schools are paying big money for its services. Hundreds of company documents unveil a sprawling surveillance industrial complex that targets kids who can’t opt out.
Adobe just announced a new version of Photoshop for your smartphone, but it’s nothing like the one you use on your PC. Instead, the new Photoshop Camera is meant to take your Instagram game to the next level: it’s basically a photo filter app on steroids, using AI to implement a variety of customizable filter styles.
Of course, there is no shortage of filter apps, so Adobe is trying to differentiate itself with the quality and range of styles in these filters. Rather than simply providing a retro film look or a few popular art styles, Photoshop Camera is able to use Adobe’s Sensei AI to recognize an image’s subject and provide style recommendations.
University of California-San Diego, UC San Diego UC San Diego News Center
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What is the optimal investment strategy if people live beyond 100, yet retire at 65-70? How will diversity and inclusion affect a company’s performance? Should investments in global warming and renewable energy funds be ramped up for pension funds?
For the first time at the University of California San Diego, academia will collaborate with the asset management industry to find answers to these and other financial questions. The Kroner Family Foundation, directed by UC San Diego alumnus Ken Kroner and his wife, Jennifer, has launched the Pacific Center for Asset Management (PCAM) with a $1 million lead gift to provide unbiased, in-depth research to assist in financial decision making. The gift contributes to the Campaign for UC San Diego.
New York University, Development Research Institute
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New York, NY November 7, starting at 9 a.m., NYU. “The emphasis on experimental and quasi-experimental methods was driven by an attempt to generate internally valid results, i.e., accurate estimates of the impact of the policy of interest in the time and place the experiment was implemented. But the now global scale of experiments points to the central question of external validity: to what extent and how can we generalize the knowledge generated by experiments beyond the setting of the experiment to other contexts?” [rsvp required]
Toronto, ON, Canada November 21-22. “Expect 1 day of workshops and 2-days of quality networking, food, drinks, workshops, breakouts, keynotes and Exhibitors.” [$$$]
Austin, TX November 21, starting at 5 p.m., Google-Austin. “Machine Learning is transforming products and the way we think about the problems around us. Come hear from experts working on the cutting edge of Machine Learning at Google about the newest technologies, research, and how they are using AI.” [registration required]
University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center
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Berkeley, CA November 6, starting at 6 p.m., UC-Berkeley. Speaker: Katharine Hayhoe is currently a professor and directs the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. [free]
“Innovators with pilot, demonstration, scale-up, and first-of-kind deployment projects in the upstream, midstream, and downstream natural gas industry are invited to apply for ERA’s Natural Gas Challenge.” Deadline for submissions is December 19.
If your company operates out of a co-working space, you may have more to worry about than just formaldehyde-infused phone booths. Shared WiFi available in co-working spaces makes life easier for companies working there, but weak security practices can leave your critical business data, product infrastructure and intellectual property vulnerable to Peeping Toms not only in your physical environment but in the network too.
In 2013, the National Security Agency (NSA) founded the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences (LAS) at North Carolina State University (NCSU) to help the Intelligence Community (IC) address the growing complexity of big data challenges. The goal of LAS is to partner experts and practitioners from academia, government, and industry to create tools and techniques that help intelligence analysts provide better information to the decision makers who need it. This interview of Alyson Wilson, the principal investigator of LAS from NCSU, and Matthew Schmidt, the LAS technical director from NCSU, is conducted by Lara Schmidt, the principal director for Strategic and Global Awareness at the Aerospace Corporation, and Brent Winter from University Relations at NCSU. It provides an overview of the LAS collaboration model and describes projects conducted at LAS.
Chaitra Nagaraja is Associate Professor of Statistics at the Gabelli School of Business at Fordham University. Prior to joining Fordham, she was a researcher at the U.S. Census Bureau. She combined her various research interests with her love of history in a new book, Measuring Society, which explores the history and measurement of official statistics. [audio, 25:39]
“Ellie Murray and Lucy D’Agostino McGowan try to keep in casual in this quick teaser to introduce you to the types of things the Casual Inference podcast will include.” [audio, 8:20]
