Earthworms are the unsung heroes of the planet’s ecosystems: Unnoticed below our feet, they grind up soil and dead matter, recycling essential nutrients and moving air and water deeper into the ground. Without them, soil health would suffer and plant productivity would falter. Now, for the first time, researchers have mapped where these humble invertebrates live, identifying wormy hot spots around the globe. The project, which pooled earthworm data from more than 140 scientists and 6900 sites, has cataloged hundreds of species and revealed trends about where each plies the soils—and under what conditions they thrive.
Can the methods of science help inform the practice of law? And can a tradition-bound profession be transformed into a field that uses evidence to determine which legal interventions are safe and effective, both for individuals caught up in the justice system and society as a whole?
For Harvard Law School Professor Jim Greiner at the Access to Justice Lab, the answer is yes. Judges and lawyers, he argues, must begin to rely more on evidence garnered from randomized clinical trials, rather than anecdote and personal experience, to ensure that the decisions they make have the results they intend. In doing so, he says, the legal profession should follow the path charted by medicine, which fitfully transformed itself from an art into a science over the course of the 20th century.
Harvard Law Today recently spoke with Greiner about the Access to Justice Lab’s work, and about an ongoing clinical trial it is overseeing in Dane County, Wisconsin to examine the value of risk assessment tools designed to inform judicial decisions about whether or not to release defendants awaiting trial.
Data from the patch will be transmitted to an app on each employee’s phone so they can see it. The app will also send the data to the company’s occupational-health department, where they can view it on a dashboard. “Even if you have 1,000 employees dotted around the world, you can see their health status, and whether they are clear to return to work in a certain sense,” says Kim Ramessa, product marketing manager at LifeSignals. “It’s to mitigate the risks as much as they can for the people who are showing symptoms, and catch them as early as possible as well.”
This kind of corporate health tracking is part of a wider trend of companies exploring new ways of monitoring their employees, typically with the goal of optimising performance. Reports have already suggested that silent snooping has been exacerbated by the pandemic, with some employers turning to surveillance technology to check staff are actually working while at home. (For instance, earlier this year reports flagged up a facial recognition tool developed by consultancy PwC that logs when employees are away from their computer screens. PwC said the technology was a prototype aimed at helping the investment banking sector meet compliance obligations while staff were working from home.)
Now, as companies adopt health tracking technologies as a means of controlling Covid-19, might the corporate world also use them to collect data on a more permanent basis in the future?
Weighing in against Google, former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang is urging a federal judge to allow a group of Chrome users to proceed with a privacy lawsuit claiming that Google wrongly collects their data.
“The California Constitution establishes (and courts have recognized) that Californians have a property interest in their own data,” Yang argues in a proposed friend-of-the-court brief filed Tuesday with U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California.
Yang is seeking to file a friend-of-the-court brief in a battle dating to July, when Patrick Calhoun and several others alleged in a class-action complaint that Google wrongly collects personal information from logged-out Chrome users — including IP addresses, identifiers stored on cookies, and data about web-browsing activity.
Less than 5 years ago, physicists rocked the scientific world when they first spotted gravitational waves—fleeting ripples in space and time—set off when two gargantuan black holes billions of light-years away swirled into each other. Since then, scientists have detected a scad of similar events, mostly reported event by event. Today, however, researchers with a global network of gravitational wave detectors announced the first major statistical analyses of their data so far, 50 events in all. Posted online in four papers, the analyses show that black holes—ghostly ultraintense gravitational fields left behind when massive stars collapse—are both more common and stranger than expected. They also shed light on mysteries such as how such black holes pair up before merging.
The new studies, posted on the physics preprint server arXiv, “are superimportant,” says Carl Rodriguez, an astrophysicist at Carnegie Mellon University who was not involved in the work. “With an individual event, there’s only so much you can do in comparing to astrophysics models. But with a catalog you can not only begin to constrain the theory, you can start to understand the landscape.” Selma de Mink, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, says she and her colleagues have been waiting to do their own analyses of the data trove. “There will definitely be a flurry of papers that are rushing to take the first stabs at the data.”
The library has partnered with Darktrace, a company founded by Cambridge University mathematicians, which claims to be the first to develop an AI system for cybersecurity. Miceli said: “You cannot throw people at this problem – you need to augment human beings with technology that understands the shades of grey within very complex systems and fights back at machine speed.”
AI “never sleeps, doesn’t take breaks and can spot and investigate more threats than any human team could. It makes decisions in seconds about what is strange but benign and strange but threatening.” But, he added, there was no 100% guarantee against attack. “The only way to make an organisation completely secure is to cut it off from the internet. Our mission is to bring the Vatican Library into the 21st century – so we won’t be doing that any time soon.”
Dave Palmer, director of technology at Darktrace, said cyber-attackers were constantly looking for ways “to make a quick buck or to cause embarrassment on the global stage”.
Recently, the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC) released a white paper called Pandemic Informatics: Preparation, Robustness, and Resilience, by Elizabeth Bradley (University of Colorado Boulder), Madhav Marathe (University of Virginia), Melanie Moses (The University of New Mexico), William D Gropp (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Daniel Lopresti (Lehigh University). It is part of the series of white papers called Quadrennial Papers that explore areas and issues around computing research with potential to address national priorities.
The Pandemic Informatics paper outlines an effective strategy to reduce the national and global burden of pandemics. It includes (i) detect timing and location of occurrence, taking into account the many interdependent driving factors; (ii) anticipate public reaction to an outbreak, including panic behaviors that obstruct responders and spread contagion; and (iii) develop actionable policies that enable targeted and effective responses.
One of the authors from this paper, Madhav Marathe in collaboration with Simon Levin, Anil Vullikanti, and Li Xiong, recently launched a relevant National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project called Pandemic Research for Preparedness & Resilience (PREPARE): a virtual organization to foster increased discussion and collaboration among CISE pandemic researchers which is part of an NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) initiative to coalesce a community around the topic of pandemic preparedness.
A federal appeals court on Thursday agreed with a lower court ruling that Harvard University does not intentionally discriminate against prospective Asian American students.
Two judges from the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the district court was correct in ruling that Harvard’s limited use of race in its admissions process in order to achieve diversity “is consistent with the requirements of Supreme Court precedent.”
“Today’s decision once again finds that Harvard’s admissions policies are consistent with Supreme Court precedent, and lawfully and appropriately pursue Harvard’s efforts to create a diverse campus that promotes learning and encourages mutual respect and understanding in our community,” Harvard spokesperson Rachael Dane said. “As we have said time and time again, now is not the time to turn back the clock on diversity and opportunity.”
Liberalism and conservatism are associated with qualitatively different psychological concerns, notably those linked to morality, shows a new study that explores how political ideology and moral values are connected to motivated social cognition. The findings, which appear in the journal PLOS ONE, offer deeper psychological insights into the nature of political division in the United States.
“Psychological research on the different motives underlying support for liberal versus conservative leaders and agendas, such as those separating Biden and Trump supporters, can help to explain why, for instance, one group is much more focused on promoting equality and social justice than the other,” explains John Jost, a professor of psychology, politics, and data science at New York University and the study’s senior author.
Within the last decade, techniques for collecting and analyzing single-cell data have come to constitute a major, fast-moving field in biomedicine. The ability to tease out individual, molecular differences in large populations of cells is providing essential information on cellular function in health and disease, allowing researchers to glean insights on protein expression and many other variables across different cell states and modalities.
Collecting complex data on single cells is one matter. Being able to integrate and interpret that data is another — which is where the work of genomicist and computational biologist Rahul Satija comes in.
In 2015, Satija — then at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts — and colleagues (including his postdoctoral supervisor, Aviv Regev) launched the first version of Seurat, a software toolkit for biomedical researchers. Named for the famed pointillist artist Georges Seurat, who painstakingly combined discrete dots of paint into a unified image, the open source software harmonizes and integrates multiple single-cell datasets. It can, for example, help researchers combine data collected using disparate experimental methods from varying cell populations.
How is Citizen Science—the active contribution of the general public in scientific research activities—developing, and what should research library involvement look like? This final session of the OCLC/LIBER Open Science Discussion series brought together research librarians with a range of viewpoints and practical experiences of this exciting area. Together the group formed a vision of Citizen Science in an ideal future state, and identified challenges that stand in the way of achieving that.
Much progress has been made since 2018, when libraries first identified a potential role in Citizen Science. Since then, several research libraries in Europe have incorporated Citizen Science into their activities—despite the adverse impact of COVID-19—and are working with researchers. We can also see knowledge brokering taking place in this area, one valuable example being LIBER’s Citizen Science Working Group, two members of whom were present at this session. So we’re seeing some momentum for libraries within Citizen Science, though not evenly spread, across Europe.
The U.S. Census Bureau denied any attempts to systemically falsify information during the 2020 head count used to determine the allocation of congressional seats and federal spending, even as more census takers told The Associated Press they were pressured to do so.
The Census Bureau statement was issued Monday night in response to AP reports of census workers who said they were told by supervisors to enter fake answers on the head-count forms in order to close cases in the waning days of the census.
A University of Minnesota-led research team has developed new methods to assess how biodiversity loss impacts forest ecosystems by determining how sunlight reflects off the surface of the forest canopy using spectral images taken from an airplane. The research, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, lays the foundation for measuring the consequences of changes in biodiversity on ecosystem function remotely at a significant scale.
“We need to be able to determine how biodiversity is changing and impacting ecosystem functions in real time on large scales, from individual ecosystems to the biosphere,” said study author Jeannine Cavender-Bares, a professor in the College of Biological Sciences and director of the newly established Biology Integration Institute (BII). “Right now, two in five plants are considered endangered. This study is an important step in learning how to detect where biodiversity is being lost, where efforts to slow its loss are succeeding, and how these changes in diversity are affecting our life support systems. Filling these knowledge gaps is important for making informed policy decisions that will impact future generations globally.”
“The Biometrics Section of the American Statistical Association invites submissions for early career paper awards. We will consider papers from two categories: Biometric Methodology and Biometric Practice.” Deadline for submissions is December 15.
ORCAS is a click-based dataset associated with the TREC Deep Learning Track. It covers 1.4 million of the TREC DL documents, providing 18 million connections to 10 million distinct queries.
Spotify R&D Engineering blog, David Riordan and Lynn Root
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TL;DR We just open sourced Klio — our framework for building smarter data pipelines for audio and other media processing. Based on Python and Apache Beam, Klio helps our teams process Spotify’s massive catalog of music and podcasts, faster and more efficiently. We think Klio’s ease of use — and its ability to let anyone leverage modern cloud infrastructure and tooling — has the potential to unlock new possibilities in media and ML research everywhere, from big tech companies to universities and libraries.