Within an increasingly specialized environment, architecture is becoming a collective endeavour at every stage of the design process, and social sciences have acquired an important role. As architecture has become more aware of its social outcome, decisions formerly resulted from the speculative thinking of the architect are now backed up by professional expertise. The following discusses the increasing role of humanist professions such as anthropology, psychology, or futurology within architecture.
A cross-sector group of individuals and organizations from education, business, philanthropy and technology today announced a new coalition to prioritize data science in K-12 education. Known as Data Science for Everyone, the coalition is incubated at the University of Chicago’s Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change and funded by Citadel Founder and CEO and philanthropist Ken Griffin and Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
Over the next year, Data Science for Everyone will focus on engaging states and districts in meaningful curriculum and policy reform. To that end, the coalition has launched a Commitments Campaign through which companies, districts, higher education institutions and policymakers have pledged to take specific and measurable steps to advance access to data science education for all children.
A year ago I wrote, with much help from our Diversity Equity and Inclusion Council, a blog on addressing inequality. It was inspired, like so many statements, by the events of the time that were by no means new or less unjust, just more visible as they were played relentlessly across media outlets. Our statements were broadly acknowledged because they were not just words of outrage, but also explicit actions that we would undertake as a School to champion equality and justice. I am here to fact check ourselves one year on.
Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google said on Wednesday it was building an undersea cable that would connect the United States, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, to bolster internet connection capacity between these regions.
The cable, called Firmina, will be the longest cable in the world, Google said in a blog post, adding that it will run from the East Coast of the United States to Las Toninas, Argentina, with additional landings in Praia Grande, Brazil, and Punta del Este, Uruguay.
To meet the goal of carbon neutrality, Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture and conglomerate Toyota announced the plan to build a hydrogen-powered smart city on June 4. A dozen of companies including Asahi Group, Aeon, and Isuzu Motors is to participate in the project as of the announcement date.
The project plans to build an implementation model for a city with a population of 300,000 people, and create an implementation model for hydrogen-based deliveries at supermarkets and convenience stores, which play a role both as essential urban infrastructure and as evacuation areas in times of disaster.
Albert Einstein has been credited with saying “creativity is intelligence having fun.” Einstein would likely be impressed with the artificial intelligence now being used to help create modern works of art, whether it’s painting and sculpture, music, or even the written word. Brook Silva-Braga met some of the humans briging AI creations to life.
If you think getting into college is tough, try landing a campus tour.
High schoolers and their parents are discovering it has become a challenge to book visits to colleges they’re interested in.
Many schools have curbed the number of tours or family groups that can attend, creating a scrum for available spots. Penn State University is fully booked at its University Park campus through the first week of August. Middlebury College in Vermont is offering five to seven tours a day, limited to only one family per tour guide. Tours at Stony Brook University in New York are limited to no more than two people per household.
Rhodes College announced it will charge a fee for non-vaccinated students returning to campus.
Upon returning to campus, students who have not received a COVID-19 vaccine will be charged a $1,500 per semester Health & Safety fee to cover the costs of mandatory testing, according to a release from the college.
On Tuesday, NBC News reported that the Gateses had acquired more than 269,000 acres of farm in the United States in the past 10 years. Those purchases, made with the help of the Washington-based firm Cascade Investment and a number of shell companies, include farmland in nearly 20 states that cultivate vegetables such as carrots, soybeans, and potatoes (some of which end up in McDonald’s French fries). These details come after the agriculture outlet the Land Report reported in January that the tech billionaire and his wife were the country’s top private farmland owners in the country. An NBC News analysis also identified Gates as the largest farmland owner in the US.
A new study from Switchup has analyzed the hiring rates of coding bootcamp graduates among the Big Five tech companies — Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Amazon.
Sung Rhee, CEO of Switchup’s parent company Optimal, said his team analyzed data from LinkedIn to see which coding bootcamps had the highest number of alumni employed at the Big Five and how they compared to those with four-year degrees.
Of all the bootcamps, Code Fellows topped the list, with 11.15% of its graduates working for one of the Big Five. Hackbright Academy, Hack Reactor and Product School were the next three bootcamps on the list, each hovering around 4% of 5% of graduates securing positions at the Big Five.
The Media School and IU Libraries at Indiana University Bloomington have announced the appointments of Walter Gantz and Diane Dallis-Comentale, respectively, as their interim deans, effective July 1.
Currently, Gantz is the associate dean of The Media School, and Dallis-Comentale is the associate dean for planning and administration at IU Libraries.
A new analysis by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) offers a novel perspective on the disproportionate impact that COVID-19 has had on people of color, low-income populations, and other structurally disadvantaged groups. Their findings, published in a research letter to the Journal of General Internal Medicine, emphasize the urgency of addressing inequities that have been exposed by the coronavirus pandemic.
“At Mass General, we are deeply interested in uncovering disparities and then fixing them,” says cardiologist Jason H. Wasfy, MD, MPhil, lead author of the research letter, director of Outcomes Research at the MGH Heart Center and a medical director of the Massachusetts General Physicians Organization (MGPO). In pursuit of that mission, Wasfy and several MGH colleagues decided to analyze the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of patients tested for COVID-19 at 14 sites within the Mass General Brigham system from the earliest days of the pandemic until mid-December 2020. Those sites include not only hospitals also but community health centers and urgent care clinics.
Your health and fitness apps may have privacy issues that put your personal information at risk, researchers warn.
“This analysis found serious problems with privacy and inconsistent privacy practices in mHealth [mobile health] apps. Clinicians should be aware of these and articulate them to patients when determining the benefits and risks,” lead study author Muhammad Ikram and his co-authors concluded. He’s a computing lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.
The researchers looked at more than 15,000 free health apps in the Google Play store and compared their privacy practices with a random sample of more than 8,000 non-health apps.
Only 4% of these patents are from all-female teams suggesting there are 1,000s of missing female-focused inventions.
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The eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good program is now accepting applications for student fellows and project leads for the 2021 summer session. Fellows will work with academic researchers, data scientists and public stakeholder groups on data-intensive research projects that will leverage data science approaches to address societal challenges in areas such as public policy, environmental impacts and more. Student applications due 2/15 – learn more and apply here. DSSG is also soliciting project proposals from academic researchers, public agencies, nonprofit entities and industry who are looking for an opportunity to work closely with data science professionals and students on focused, collaborative projects to make better use of their data. Proposal submissions are due 2/22.
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. v6.0.0 is out now and makes clustering more robust. It also lays the foundation for more important features.
QuantHub is solving the data literacy problem with their platform. They assess an individual’s current level of data literacy, then provide bite sized chunks of learning with a daily data topic and quiz question through Slack (or your preferred method of communication), to promote individualized, continuous learning. I thought this sounded innovative and cool. It’s currently being used at companies such as Verizon, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Southern Company, and more, I was intrigued and interested in seeing a demo.
Coming from the Python world, most visualizations you’ll make on a day-to-day basis will be very different from these: static plots, because that’s what’s convenient to make in matplotlib. How can you go from the Python world of static plots to the wizardry of Javascript?
A big wall you’ll run into is that modern web development is big. Getting to proficiency is hard: it’s very easy to get discouraged and fall off the wagon before you get to build something interesting. What I’ve assembled here is a kind of roadmap so that you can start building interesting dynamic visualizations with the lowest barrier to entry as possible, while building a self-reinforcing skillset.
Training the machine learning models that power Foresight ETAs is not an easy task. In order to support thousands of destinations around the world, we need to train about 3500 different models. To make matters worse, these models must be retrained once per month, from scratch, to ensure that they’re able to adapt to any changes in real world conditions.
