Data Science newsletter – November 18, 2019

GROUP CURATION: N/A

Lawmakers are closely following an agreement between Google and Ascension that grants the tech giant access to tens of millions of patient records. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), for instance, is corralling his colleagues for a hearing examining tech companies’ HIPAA compliance; he also introduced a bill Thursday that would stop businesses from selling and sharing data gathered by fitness trackers, along with Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.).

The ratio of carbon isotopes in three common species of tuna has changed substantially since 2000, suggesting major shifts are taking place in phytoplankton populations that form the base of the ocean’s food web, a new international study finds.

“The change we observed in tuna, which are near the top of the marine food web, reflects profound changes in physiology or species composition occurring at the bottom of the food web,” said Nicolas Cassar, professor of biogeochemistry at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

Specifically, the phytoplankton changes reflect more fossil fuel carbon capture by the oceans and possible stratification of ocean layers, which is driven by warming.

By analyzing nearly 4,500 samples of muscle tissue from three common species of tuna caught in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans between 2000 and 2015, Cassar and his colleagues discovered that the fishes’ carbon stable isotope composition values (the ratio of Carbon 13 to Carbon 12, called delta C-13) declined by between 0.08% and 0.25% during the study period.

There’s only so much you can learn about a wildfire by studying it from a distance. That’s why an intrepid team of scientific fire chasers, equipped with a new high-powered, fire-probing radar system, head straight toward fires to collect valuable data up close as everyone but firefighters evacuate.

This team of fire chasers recently had front row seats for this season’s destructive California wildfires.

“What we saw was pretty exciting because, as you pull into a fire incident, you try to make sure that everybody’s safe — my whole team — that we set up in a safe-zone before we set up our instruments,” said Craig Clements, a professor of meteorology and the director of the Fire Weather Research Laboratory at San Jose State University in California. [audio, 8:37]

Want to see the sun in a whole new way?

Now you can do just that by looking through a host of science data newly made available to the public. That information was gathered by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe during its first two close passes of the sun. The flybys brought the spacecraft closer to the sun than any previous vehicle had gone, offering scientists an incredible opportunity to learn more about our star.

In the prevailing there’s-an-app-for-that culture, perhaps it should not be surprising that researchers are exploring machine learning that could bring artificial intelligence to the practice of psychiatric diagnosis.

Peter Foltz, a research professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, is co-author on a new paper in Schizophrenia Bulletin that lays out the potential payoffs and possible pitfalls of AI in psychiatry.

And, with co-author Brita Elvevåg, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Tromsø, Norway, Foltz is striving to apply machine learning — a subset of AI — to psychiatry through a speech-based mobile app that can categorize a person’s mental health status just as well, or even better, than a human clinician can.

We introduce a behavioral intervention (accuracy salience) & show in surveys+field exp w >5k Twitter users that it increases quality of news sharing

Although it’s not clear how many of the planned megaconstellations will actually be built, several researchers have begun to analyse how the satellite networks could affect astronomy. The situation doesn’t seem as bad as initially feared, but might still dramatically shift how some astronomers do their jobs.

California’s major wildfires have been contained, but the threat of bigger and more destructive blazes is still on the horizon.

Climate change is exacerbating the chance of bigger wildfires in California, drying out vegetation that serves as fuel for devastating firestorms.

So-called “convergence” research brings many disciplines together to solve problems—and the right lab design can make that much quicker and easier

While many larger finance companies have in-house innovation labs and accelerators, few let employees live the life of a full-fledged entrepreneur.

GS Accelerate is the brainchild of Stephanie Cohen, who launched the initiative shortly after stepping into the role of chief strategy officer in 2017. Her goal was to create something that made it easier to launch cross-divisional products, provided opportunities for innovation and tapped into the company’s internal talent pool.

She chose Tanya Baker, a managing director who spent more than a decade in digital strategy and innovation leadership roles at the company, to help lead the initiative.

What is it about social media that makes discussions about controversial topics so caustic and unpleasant? A variety of reasons have been put forward — such as the tendency for outrage to self-perpetuate, as we reported earlier this week. But now a new study, published in PLoS One, implicates a concept so far explored in philosophy rather than psychology. This is “moral grandstanding” — publicly opining on morality and politics to impress others, and so to seek social status.

To engage in moral grandstanding, it’s the motivation behind the comments or statements that really matters: the individual is seeking to gain status, rather than simply to express their sincerely-held beliefs. Moral grandstanding can take many forms, the researchers write: “in a quest to impress peers, someone may trump up moral charges, pile on in cases of public shaming, announce that anyone who disagrees with them is obviously wrong, or exaggerate emotional displays in taking ideological positions.” They may also ramp up the situation, seeking to out-do others in their outrage. This concern with increasing one’s influence, rank or social status is, of course, a common characteristic of discourse on social media.

Given its relationship with status-seeking, Joshua Grubbs at Bowling Green State University and colleagues figured that moral grandstanding should also be amenable to examination as a psychological phenomenon. They hypothesised that it would be characterised by strivings for dominance or prestige, and may be associated with personality traits related to status-seeking, such as narcissism.

Why do you choose the browser you use? Maybe you think it loads pages more quickly. Maybe it’s made by the same firm as your device and you think it’s more compatible in some way. You prefer the graphics, perhaps, or it just happened to be pre-installed on your machine. Maybe you’re not even aware that there’s a choice.

In reality, two-thirds of us have been funnelled into using Google’s Chrome, but browser choice also hides a contest about the openness of the web and how data is collected about users. One organisation that has always put such issues to the forefront is Mozilla.

The not-for-profit foundation, which has as its aim the promotion of “openness, innovation and participation on the internet”, is best known for the Firefox browser, which it started developing in 2003. But the foundation was set up to shepherd the Mozilla organisation, which was formed in 1998 to oversee the development of a suite of web tools developed from another browser – Netscape Communicator.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will impact every job, in every industry and every country. There are significant fears that AI will eliminate jobs altogether. Many reports have exposed the harsh realities of workforce automation, especially for certain types of jobs and demographics. For instance, the Brookings Institution found that automation threatens 25% of all US jobs, with an emphasis on low-wage earners in positions where tasks are routine-based. A separate study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that women comprise 58% of jobs at highest risk of automation.

Yet despite these realities, we are beginning to accept our new AI world and adopt these technologies as we see the potential new opportunities. Other studies emphasize how AI will create more jobs or just remove tasks within jobs. A new global study by Oracle and Future Workplace of 8,370 employees, managers and HR leaders across 10 countries, found that almost two-thirds of workers are optimistic, excited and grateful about AI and robot co-workers. Nearly one-quarter went as far as saying they have a loving and gratifying relationship with AI at work, showing an appreciation for how it simplifies and streamlines their lives.

For many years, telling someone in everyday settings that you worked on user interface design or human-computer interaction would produce puzzled looks and require a good deal more explanation. With the rise of design and interaction associated with the proliferation of interactive devices, these terms became much more familiar to people outside the discipline. Lately, though, there has been a second shift. Lately, if you tell someone that you work on interactive systems, or that you find new ways to make interaction effective and enjoyable, it is likely to evoke a skeptical or mistrustful response. In light of a series of scandals—over user data management, over online profiling, over online tracking, over targeted manipulation, over digital addiction, and more—user experience professionals and researchers have found themselves facing new questions about our work and its consequences.

Can old dogs teach us new tricks? Scientists are looking for 10,000 pets for the largest-ever study of aging in canines. They hope to shed light on human longevity too.

The project will collect a pile of pooch data: vet records, DNA samples, gut microbes and information on food and walks. Five hundred dogs will test a pill that could slow the aging process.

“What we learn will potentially be good for dogs and has great potential to translate to human health,” said project co-director Daniel Promislow of the University of Washington School of Medicine.

If scientists find a genetic marker for a type of cancer in dogs, for instance, that could be explored in humans.

Austin, TX January 25, 2020. “Originally launched in January 2011 as one of the first NoSQL / Big Data conferences, Data Day Texas each year highlights the latest tools, techniques, and projects in the data space, bringing speakers and attendees from around the world to enjoy the hospitality that is uniquely Austin.” [$$$]

1.) @Code_Copilot (by @_MMathur, @TomHardwicke, & @BalazsAczel) is a no-frills, beta platform to help you, a researcher in any discipline, to find another researcher (your “copilot”) to carefully read and re-run your data prep and analysis code to help check for errors.

We have built a system that simulates what a member’s homepage would have been given an experimental change and compares it against the page the member actually saw in the service. This provides an indication of the overall quality of the change. While we primarily use this for evaluating modifications to our machine learning algorithms, such as what happens when we have a new row selection or ranking algorithm, we can also use it to evaluate any changes in the code used to construct the page, from filtering rules to new row types. A key feature of this system is the ability to reconstruct a view of the systemic and user-level data state at a certain point in the past. As such, the system uses time-travel mechanisms for more precise reconstruction of an experience and coordinates time-travel across multiple systems. Thus, the simulator allows us to rapidly evaluate new ideas without needing to expose members to the changes.

In this blog post, we will go into more detail about this page simulation system and discuss some of the lessons we learned along the way.

Embedded CPUs took off almost everywhere because they offer flexibility along with pretty good performance and low power and usually much lower cost. When compared with a solution requiring a separate microprocessor or microcontroller coupled to your custom hardware, switching to designs based on embedded CPUs was a no-brainer. But CPUs of any kind have limits. Even though we can move our algorithms into software, the potential complexity of algorithms is unbounded. We can write the programs and they will run, but not necessarily in an acceptable time or within a reasonable power budget.