… James Jones, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Delaware, Newark, who has studied the psychology underlying prejudice and racism for over 50 years, thinks it’s a real possibility.
Jones is the author of “Prejudice and Racism” and “The Psychology of Diversity: Beyond prejudice and racism.” He was awarded the 2011 Lifetime Contribution to Psychology award from the American Psychological Association.
“In one sense, I’m hopeful this is finally an inflection point, a watershed like the 1960s were, that fundamentally changes how we approach things,” Jones told Science. “We’ve done a lot of research about how to reduce people’s adherence to stereotypes and help different groups recognize their commonalities.”
I have ideas. You have ideas. We all have ideas. 2/n
But we need to recognize that even our best ideas about how to solve the problems in policing are untested hypotheses. We need to start testing! (And we need to be ready to be proven wrong. Really good ideas often don’t work in practice.) 3/n
Hours before facing court proceedings from openDemocracy over its massive NHS COVID-19 data deal with private tech firms, the UK government has caved to pressure and released all the contracts governing its deals with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and controversial AI firms Faculty and Palantir.
The contracts, released to openDemocracy and tech justice firm Foxglove today, reveal details of what has been described as an ‘unprecedented’ transfer of personal health information of millions of NHS users to these private tech firms.
Significantly, the contracts reveal that the Dominic Cummings-linked firm Faculty is being paid more than £1m to provide AI services for the NHS. The documents also show that terms of that deal were changed after initial demands for transparency were made by Foxglove under the Freedom of Information Act.
As scientists attempt to speed up COVID-19 research, attention by the public and media has changed the way preprint servers and journals handle those papers
Call it science by press release — a tactic that pharmaceutical companies are increasingly relying upon to set their experimental coronavirus drugs and vaccines apart in a crowded field, shape public opinion and court regulators. Public health experts say the approach could increase political pressure on federal health officials to green-light drugs and vaccines before it is clear they are safe or effective, with potentially dangerous consequences.
“There’s a long history of pharmaceutical manufacturers putting out self-serving press releases related to clinical trial data that they’re developing that present an overly rosy picture of the data, usually with a boilerplate disclaimer at the end, which is fairly useless,” said Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who studies drug regulation and pricing.
Purdue University will soon be the home of Anvil, a powerful new supercomputer that will provide advanced computing capabilities to support a wide range of computational and data-intensive research spanning from traditional high-performance computing to modern artificial intelligence applications.
Anvil, which is funded by a $10 million award from the National Science Foundation, will significantly increase the capacity available to the NSF’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which serves tens of thousands of researchers across the U.S., and in which Purdue has been a partner for the past nine years. Anvil will enter production in 2021 and will serve researchers for five years. Additional funding from the NSF will support Anvil’s operations and user support.
Kavita Bala, professor and chair of computer science, has been named dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science (CIS), Provost Michael Kotlikoff announced June 5.
Bala, a leading expert in computer graphics and computer vision, has served as chair of the Department of Computer Science since 2018. She will assume her new post Aug. 15.
The Arkansas Economic Development Commission announces a five-year $20 million National Science Foundation grant to spur data analytics research by state colleges. The state will add $4 million.
From the release:
The project, “Data Analytics that are Robust and Trusted” (DART) will work to systematically investigate key aspects of three barriers to big data (management, security/privacy, and model interpretability) and develop novel, integrated solutions to address them. Big data involves data sets that are too large or complex for traditional data-processing application software to process. NSF has identified data analytics and data science education as one of 10 priority areas for research funding.
From biosensor chips to wastewater epidemiology, the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the development of next-generation disease diagnostics.
Why it matters: If we’re going to stop a disease, we first have to know who has it and where. New technologies promise to provide doctors with more reliable intelligence about who in a community has a disease — and who is likely to get seriously ill.
Last week, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics published its monthly Employment Situation Summary. A few major issues came to light with this month’s report that I thought worth discussing. First, the attacks on a nonpartisan federal government agency. Second, and more relevant to data visualization, several misleading graphics using the new numbers. Third, variation in all employment numbers.
Attacks on the BLS
Having spent nearly a decade at the Congressional Budget Office, I am sensitive to attacks on the federal civil service. This month’s employment report comes at a difficult time for agencies like BLS where data collection is extremely difficult and traditional economic models may not be sufficient to capture the abrupt change in economic activity.
The tracking of hundreds of Michigan Capitol protesters’ cellphones from two rallies this spring has raised questions about protecting privacy rights, while testing limits of what location data can predict about the spread of the novel coronavirus from packed public events.
A liberal advocacy group most recently pursued the anonymized cellphone location data from more than 400 devices from individuals who attended the American Patriots Rally on April 30 in Lansing against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-home orders and used it to gauge their locations the next day in a bid to determine the potential spread of the virus from the demonstration.
A recent sample of 50 worldwide COVID-19 apps published in Nature Medicine highlights found only 16 that promisted to anonymize, encrypt and secure the data they collect.
MIT Technology Review; Patrick Howell O'Neill archive pageTate Ryan-Mosley archive pageBobbie Johnson
from
When we began comparing apps around the world, we realized there was no central repository of information; just incomplete, constantly changing data spread across a wide range of sources. Nor was there a single, standard approach being taken by developers and policymakers: citizens of different countries were seeing radically different levels of surveillance and transparency.
So to help monitor this fast-evolving situation, we’re gathering the information into a single place for the first time with our Covid Tracing Tracker—a database to capture details of every significant automated contact tracing effort around the world.
All in all, choosing a pathway that builds resilience through nature seems like an investment we cannot afford not to make. And yet, it is far from clear that we are ready to choose this pathway, perhaps because we have been so conditioned to view the protection of nature as something in conflict with advancing economic and social interests, rather than as foundational to them. This pernicious mindset is an artifact of having operated for so long in a system that has been engineered for exploitation rather than resilience — where our choices about living with nature are constrained toward delivering a narrow set of benefits that flow toward a similarly restricted set of beneficiaries. The short-sighted choices favor near-term expediency over long-term sustainability, extraction over regeneration, and accumulation over equity. If we are able to expand our vision and see the system and its interdependencies for what they are, we will be able to operate in a world not of rigidity and scarcity, but of resilience and abundance.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today joined the ACLU of northern and southern California in filing a lawsuit against Los Angeles for collecting detailed trip data and real-time locations and routes of the electric scooters thousands of residents use each day.
EFF, ACLU-Northern California, ACLU-Southern California, and Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman & Machtinger LLP are representing scooter riders Eric Alejo and Justin Sanchez in a case seeking a court order halting a requirement by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) that operators of dockless vehicles like JUMP, Lyft, and Lime, collect and turn over to the city information about every single scooter trip taken within city limits. The data collected includes real-time and historical, minute-by-minute information about where and what time every ride was started, and where and what time each ride ended.
Salt Lake City, UT October 2020, workshop at IEEE VIS. “The VisGuides 2020 Workshop focuses on the analysis, design, reflection, and discussion of applicable frameworks to mastering guidelines in visualization by the broader visualization community, embedded in a larger research agenda of visualization theory and practices.” Deadline for submissions is July 6.
Shimmer Research, a global leader in wearable technology for research applications, today announced that the Open Wearables Initiative (OWEAR) has uploaded its open source software and datasets database for wearable sensors and other connected health technologies to its website at http://www.owear.org.
“We are proud to announce the release of the OWEAR database, which includes the organization’s initial index of open source software and datasets, together with validation papers,” said Geoffrey Gill, president of Shimmer Americas and an OWEAR co-founder.
” We address the problem of any-code completion – generating a missing piece of source code in a given program without any restriction on the vocabulary or structure. We introduce a new approach to any-code completion that leverages the strict syntax of programming languages to model a code snippet as a tree – structural language modeling (SLM). SLM estimates the probability of the program’s abstract syntax tree (AST) by decomposing it into a product of conditional probabilities over its nodes. We present a neural model that computes these conditional probabilities by considering all AST paths leading to a target node. Unlike previous techniques that have severely restricted the kinds of expressions that can be generated in this task, our approach can generate arbitrary code in any programming language. Our model significantly outperforms both seq2seq and a variety of structured approaches in generating Java and C# code. We make our code, datasets, and models publicly available.”
Over the past week, protests against police officers’ use of force against black men and women have rocked American cities. American institutions are facing a reckoning, and higher education is not excluded.
That’s because colleges have their own problems with racial inequity, says Sirry Alang, an associate professor of sociology and health, medicine, and society at Lehigh University.
She spoke with The Chronicle on Monday about how academe can meet the most pressing problems of the moment: the disproportionate toll that Covid-19 is taking on black and Latina/o Americans, as well as harsh policing in black and brown communities.