We’ll tell you how to limit the amount of data that’s being collected. But first you have to understand what kind of data you’re giving up when you have a modern TV.
Boulder’s Scientific Aviation has a key role in a first-of-its-kind effort organized by the Environmental Defense Fund to provide timely and transparent data to spotlight methane reduction opportunities for oil and gas operations.
Specifically, the effort launched this fall is using advanced emissions monitoring technologies to find out how much methane is escaping from the massive Permian Basin, one of the biggest oil and gas producing regions in the country.
A coordinated, yearlong research effort is aimed at generating scientifically robust emissions data that can be employed in mapping and measuring the scale of the problem to facilitate faster and better solutions.
Beijing is not just trying to master artificial intelligence—it is succeeding. AI will have as transformative an impact on commerce and national security over the next two decades as semiconductors, computers and the web have had over the past quarter century.
To illustrate the granularity of data offered by brokers of voter files, the US-based firm HaystaqDNA offers a ‘must-have’ list of political issues that they claim their data can resolve for individual voters. These include the latest hot-button issues such as presidential approval and immigration policy, support for activist groups and movements such as Black Lives Matter or Momentum, as well as consumer habits such as being a rideshare user. The scope of voter preferences offered by HaystaqDNA not only shows how voter files now seek to gauge the finer points of voter sentiment, but also exemplifies the shift in the composition of voter files: they are no longer solely developed by political parties, but also by data brokers and digital consultants, many of whom specialise in political data. For example, the data broker NationBuilder offers free voter files for 190 million US voters including their phone numbers, addresses, voter history and sometimes email addresses, acquired from government elections offices for substantial fees, before being standardised and enhanced by the company. This fine-tuning, they claim, allows them to offer a comprehensive voting history that tracks voter participation in ‘any type of election… from football club to parliament’.
Bloomberg Law, Chantalle R. Forgues and Daniel Lee
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Attorneys can, and should, use big data analytics tools to predict the likelihood their clients will be sued. Chantalle R. Forgues and Daniel Lee, professors at Plymouth State University, explain how, for example, words and phrases in employee reviews can be analyzed to predict lawsuits.
Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, Brad Plumer and Coral Davenport
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In just three years, the Trump administration has diminished the role of science in federal policymaking while halting or disrupting research projects nationwide, marking a transformation of the federal government whose effects, experts said, could reverberate for years.
Political appointees have shut down government studies, reduced the influence of scientists over regulatory decisions and in some cases pressured researchers not to speak publicly. The administration has particularly challenged scientific findings related to the environment and public health opposed by industries such as oil drilling and coal mining. It has also impeded research around human-caused climate change, which President Donald Trump has dismissed despite a global scientific consensus.
The Pentagon is advising members of the military not to use consumer DNA kits, saying the information collected by private companies could pose a security risk, according to a memo co-signed by the Defense Department’s top intelligence official.
A growing number of companies like 23andMe and Ancestry sell testing kits that allow buyers to get a DNA profile by sending in a cheek swab or saliva sample. The DNA results provide consumers information on their ancestry, insights into possible medical risks and can even identify previously unknown family members.
The boom in popularity of such kits has raised ethical and legal issues, since some companies have shared this data with law enforcement or sold it to third parties. The Defense Department is now expressing its own concerns about these kits.
This was the stark message embedded in the National Audubon Society’s climate report, Survival by Degrees: 389 Bird Species on the Brink, which reveals that nearly two-thirds of bird species are imperiled by current climate change projections. Audubon asked Stamen to use our data visualization expertise to illuminate this grim — but sometimes hopeful — story, creating visualizations of Audubon’s latest projections of the impact of global warming on species across the U.S., Canada and Mexico..
Even the Food and Drug Administration ― which has approved more than 40 AI products in the past five years ― says “the potential of digital health is nothing short of revolutionary.”
Yet many health industry experts fear AI-based products won’t be able to match the hype. Many doctors and consumer advocates fear that the tech industry, which lives by the mantra “fail fast and fix it later,” is putting patients at risk ― and that regulators aren’t doing enough to keep consumers safe.
Early experiments in AI provide a reason for caution, said Mildred Cho, a professor of pediatrics at Stanford’s Center for Biomedical Ethics.
A first-of-its-kind law might give employment candidates more insight into the algorithms that analyze their interviews, but they shouldn’t expect much to change.
California is projected to lose a congressional seat for the first time next year, while states President Trump won such as Texas and Florida will likely gain seats, according to an analysis of new Census data by the Brookings Institution’s William Frey.
Why it matters: It only takes a handful of seats to shift a party’s power in Congress for a decade. The new data underscores the need for an accurate 2020 Census count, especially with changing demographics in states with booming populations such as Florida, Texas and Arizona.
The global push to make the scholarly literature open access continued in 2019. Some publishers and libraries forged new licensing deals, while in other cases contract negotiations came to halt, and a radical open access plan made some adjustments. Here are some of the most notable developments in the publishing world in 2019:
“Mayo Clinic is committed to leading the digital transformation of health care by creating world-class platforms that align with our patients-first culture and values,” Mayo Clinc CEO Dr. Gianrico Farrugia said in a news release. “We must continually innovate and reimagine the delivery of health care, and we are delighted that Ms. Khan, with her diverse experience in consumer-focused digital innovation, will lead this effort.”
Khan’s appointment caps several steps Mayo Clinic has taken to build out its digital health expertise. Earlier this month, the health system hired health IT expert Dr. John Halamka to head up its Mayo Clinic Platform, which includes managing a portfolio of digital health businesses. In September, Mayo selected Google as its cloud provider, striking a 10-year partnership to use its data analytics and machine learning resources.
With Khan, Mayo Clinic will bring in a leader with a deep background in consumer products and e-commerce.
Because of how tenure works, such faculty typically have an appointment in the center and a departmental home in a traditional academic unit (Biology, Political Science, etc.). The faculty peers who evaluate them are often trained in single disciplines, especially in new centers. [thread]
The Centre for Satellite Data in Environmental Science (SENSE) will bring together expertise in satellite remote sensing, climate change, and advanced data science to nurture the next generation of Earth observation researchers.
Through a £2.2m investment from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), support from the UK Space Agency, and a further £3.4m of matched funding, SENSE will create 50 new PhD studentships over the next 3-years.
In [University of Washington, Human-Centered Design & Engineering] “usability studies course, students engage in product and user research, formulate an appropriate usability study, design and execute that study, and analyze and report on their findings. Industry and academic partners are encouraged to submit their projects that could benefit from a usability study.” Deadline to submit projects is January 8.
As far back as 1956, the U.S. Copyright Office refused registration for a musical composition created by a computer on the basis that copyright laws only applied to human authors.
Recognizing the need to adapt, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) recently issued notices seeking public comments on intellectual property protection related to artificial intelligence.
How far has AI come in a year? In 2018 I generated cocktails using textgenrnn and char-rnn, two neural networks that learn to imitate text. I trained them on 1000 cocktails that Beth Skwarecki collected for her neural net cocktails bot, and watched the neural nets struggle to make sense of what they were seeing. They came up with nonexistent ingredients and had such limited memory that they didn’t know how many times they’d already used a particular ingredient. One cocktail, the Black Banana, was a behemoth containing a staggering amount of creme de cacao.
The goal of this blog series — which will have a {bookdown} book companion along with some screencasts — is to help you get up to speed using R and RStudio to write R packages that wrap code from many different languages to help you “get stuff done” with as little friction as possible.