Software Can Read Pain By Analyzing Human Expressions
Video
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/news/sof ... lsignoutmd
TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT
The Case for Fetal-Cell Research
Boston — WE first acquired the stem cells from the red receptacles of a local hospital’s labor and delivery ward, delivered to our lab at the University of Southern California. I would reach into the large medical waste containers and pull out the tree-like branches of the placenta, discarded after a baby had been born. Squeezing the umbilical cord that had so recently been attached to new life, the blood, laden with stem cells, would come dripping out.
But sometimes a different package would arrive at our lab. Despite my distaste for wringing placentas, I felt more squeamish about what lay inside the unassuming white box. Packed in the ice was a crescent-shaped sliver of dark red tissue: a human liver. Just like the placentas that were discarded after birth, this tissue was originally destined for medical waste following an abortion.
Although their fates were similar, their origins couldn’t be more different. One source was the byproduct of celebration, the other a procedure often marked with stigma and shame. While under the bright focus of the microscope the cells we isolated were indistinguishable, in our minds there was a significant difference.
Stem cell science is a big deal in California, thanks to the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, a state agency that has allocated almost $2 billion in research grants since 2004 (federal funding is still highly restricted). To meet the demand for cells, researchers turned to a procedure protected by federal law: abortions. The discarded tissue from terminated pregnancies, performed up to 26 weeks in California, is a rich source of stem cells.
But only certain fetal cells are useful. While embryonic stem cells, derived from fertilized eggs, can give rise to any cell that makes up the body, as fetal cells develop from the embryo they become committed to specific cell lineages. The liver and thymus, for instance, are packed with the precursor cells to the immune system, while the brain contains neural cells that form the nervous system.
To meet the need for these precursor cells, biotech companies form an essential middleman between tissue donated from abortion clinics and the research labs that need it. They ensure that informed consent is obtained, harvest the organs, in some cases isolate and purify the cells and then ship them out to laboratories. There are profits to be made by such middlemen in what critics call the abortion industry. A fetus runs upward of $850, not including testing, cleaning or shipping charges, while a vial packed with pure stem cells can fetch more than $20,000.
The use of fetal tissue in research is not new. Fetal cells extracted from the lungs of two aborted fetuses from Europe in the 1960s are still being propagated in cell culture. They’re so successful that today we still use them to produce vaccines for hepatitis A, rubella, chickenpox and shingles. From two terminated pregnancies, countless lives have been spared.
It isn’t just vaccines. Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have injected neural stem cells into two patients to treat their spinal cord injuries. And progress is being made in the use of stem-cell therapies against cancer, blindness, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, H.I.V. and diabetes.
As impressive as this is, for critics the lives saved cannot make up for those that have been lost. And as important as I believe my research was, I sympathize with that sense of loss, even after leaving the lab for Boston.
Every week when the plain white FedEx box was delivered, uneasiness permeated the lab. We all knew that the tissues contained within were precious. We planned our experiments meticulously, trying not to waste a single drop. We rationalized using the cells by telling one another that the abortions would happen regardless of whether we used the tissue for research. And we knew that if we didn’t use the tissue it was bound for the trash.
Still, even with our preparations, justifications and the sheer excitement that accompanied our research, the fetal cells brought sadness. We wished we didn’t have them, despite the breakthroughs.
Perhaps this is why it was difficult to hear Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services, discuss the organs of aborted fetuses so casually in surreptitiously recorded conversations with anti-abortion activists posing as fetal-tissue buyers. It’s understandable that politicians, angered by her callous tone, are investigating how fetal tissue is handled and how research is conducted, despite the strict institutional review that governs the use of anatomical tissue donated for research.
Politicians aren’t the only ones looking for answers. Scientists are searching for alternatives to fetal cells. One solution may lie in reprogramming adult cells, creating what researchers call induced pluripotent stem cells. These cells share the ancestral adaptability of embryonic stem cells, yet can also be manipulated to look and act like fetal stem cells.
And yet, every time I worked with a fetal liver, I imagined that somewhere in California a woman had made the agonizing, heartbreaking decision to end her pregnancy. Yet she had also donated her aborted fetus to medical research. I thought of this as I isolated the golden-tinged cells inside the vent hood. A promise had been made; these cells were not simply trash.
The choice I made is repeated every day, in labs all over the world. Researchers have no say in whether a fetus is aborted or develops into a human baby; those decisions are made by women and shaped by politicians. Yet their science, performed on discarded tissue, has the ability to save lives. It already has.
Nathalia Holt, a microbiologist, is the author of “Cured: The People Who Defeated HIV” and the forthcoming book “Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us From Missiles to the Moon to Mars.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/30/opini ... d=45305309
******
Save Fetal Tissue Research, and Save Lives
Fetal cells were used to develop the original polio vaccine and are still used to make vaccines for rubella, shingles, chickenpox and an experimental Ebola vaccine. The tissue is critical for studying conditions that affect the health of fetuses and newborn infants, brain injuries in the womb that lead to cerebral palsy, and eye conditions that lead to macular degeneration.
Researchers also use it to develop treatments for H.I.V., end-stage breast cancer, diabetes and Parkinson’s, among other conditions. Last year the National Institutes of Health, a federal agency that spends money only on the research that experts consider most promising, awarded $76 million in grants for fetal tissue research.
Fetal tissue is a precious medical resource. It should be exploited for the many health benefits it can provide, not banned as part of a vicious, continuing assault on Planned Parenthood and the health services it provides to millions of women a year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/opini ... ef=opinion
Boston — WE first acquired the stem cells from the red receptacles of a local hospital’s labor and delivery ward, delivered to our lab at the University of Southern California. I would reach into the large medical waste containers and pull out the tree-like branches of the placenta, discarded after a baby had been born. Squeezing the umbilical cord that had so recently been attached to new life, the blood, laden with stem cells, would come dripping out.
But sometimes a different package would arrive at our lab. Despite my distaste for wringing placentas, I felt more squeamish about what lay inside the unassuming white box. Packed in the ice was a crescent-shaped sliver of dark red tissue: a human liver. Just like the placentas that were discarded after birth, this tissue was originally destined for medical waste following an abortion.
Although their fates were similar, their origins couldn’t be more different. One source was the byproduct of celebration, the other a procedure often marked with stigma and shame. While under the bright focus of the microscope the cells we isolated were indistinguishable, in our minds there was a significant difference.
Stem cell science is a big deal in California, thanks to the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, a state agency that has allocated almost $2 billion in research grants since 2004 (federal funding is still highly restricted). To meet the demand for cells, researchers turned to a procedure protected by federal law: abortions. The discarded tissue from terminated pregnancies, performed up to 26 weeks in California, is a rich source of stem cells.
But only certain fetal cells are useful. While embryonic stem cells, derived from fertilized eggs, can give rise to any cell that makes up the body, as fetal cells develop from the embryo they become committed to specific cell lineages. The liver and thymus, for instance, are packed with the precursor cells to the immune system, while the brain contains neural cells that form the nervous system.
To meet the need for these precursor cells, biotech companies form an essential middleman between tissue donated from abortion clinics and the research labs that need it. They ensure that informed consent is obtained, harvest the organs, in some cases isolate and purify the cells and then ship them out to laboratories. There are profits to be made by such middlemen in what critics call the abortion industry. A fetus runs upward of $850, not including testing, cleaning or shipping charges, while a vial packed with pure stem cells can fetch more than $20,000.
The use of fetal tissue in research is not new. Fetal cells extracted from the lungs of two aborted fetuses from Europe in the 1960s are still being propagated in cell culture. They’re so successful that today we still use them to produce vaccines for hepatitis A, rubella, chickenpox and shingles. From two terminated pregnancies, countless lives have been spared.
It isn’t just vaccines. Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have injected neural stem cells into two patients to treat their spinal cord injuries. And progress is being made in the use of stem-cell therapies against cancer, blindness, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, H.I.V. and diabetes.
As impressive as this is, for critics the lives saved cannot make up for those that have been lost. And as important as I believe my research was, I sympathize with that sense of loss, even after leaving the lab for Boston.
Every week when the plain white FedEx box was delivered, uneasiness permeated the lab. We all knew that the tissues contained within were precious. We planned our experiments meticulously, trying not to waste a single drop. We rationalized using the cells by telling one another that the abortions would happen regardless of whether we used the tissue for research. And we knew that if we didn’t use the tissue it was bound for the trash.
Still, even with our preparations, justifications and the sheer excitement that accompanied our research, the fetal cells brought sadness. We wished we didn’t have them, despite the breakthroughs.
Perhaps this is why it was difficult to hear Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services, discuss the organs of aborted fetuses so casually in surreptitiously recorded conversations with anti-abortion activists posing as fetal-tissue buyers. It’s understandable that politicians, angered by her callous tone, are investigating how fetal tissue is handled and how research is conducted, despite the strict institutional review that governs the use of anatomical tissue donated for research.
Politicians aren’t the only ones looking for answers. Scientists are searching for alternatives to fetal cells. One solution may lie in reprogramming adult cells, creating what researchers call induced pluripotent stem cells. These cells share the ancestral adaptability of embryonic stem cells, yet can also be manipulated to look and act like fetal stem cells.
And yet, every time I worked with a fetal liver, I imagined that somewhere in California a woman had made the agonizing, heartbreaking decision to end her pregnancy. Yet she had also donated her aborted fetus to medical research. I thought of this as I isolated the golden-tinged cells inside the vent hood. A promise had been made; these cells were not simply trash.
The choice I made is repeated every day, in labs all over the world. Researchers have no say in whether a fetus is aborted or develops into a human baby; those decisions are made by women and shaped by politicians. Yet their science, performed on discarded tissue, has the ability to save lives. It already has.
Nathalia Holt, a microbiologist, is the author of “Cured: The People Who Defeated HIV” and the forthcoming book “Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us From Missiles to the Moon to Mars.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/30/opini ... d=45305309
******
Save Fetal Tissue Research, and Save Lives
Fetal cells were used to develop the original polio vaccine and are still used to make vaccines for rubella, shingles, chickenpox and an experimental Ebola vaccine. The tissue is critical for studying conditions that affect the health of fetuses and newborn infants, brain injuries in the womb that lead to cerebral palsy, and eye conditions that lead to macular degeneration.
Researchers also use it to develop treatments for H.I.V., end-stage breast cancer, diabetes and Parkinson’s, among other conditions. Last year the National Institutes of Health, a federal agency that spends money only on the research that experts consider most promising, awarded $76 million in grants for fetal tissue research.
Fetal tissue is a precious medical resource. It should be exploited for the many health benefits it can provide, not banned as part of a vicious, continuing assault on Planned Parenthood and the health services it provides to millions of women a year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/opini ... ef=opinion
Last edited by kmaherali on Sat Sep 12, 2015 12:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Why ‘Smart’ Objects May Be a Dumb Idea
A FRIDGE that puts milk on your shopping list when you run low. A safe that tallies the cash that is placed in it. A sniper rifle equipped with advanced computer technology for improved accuracy. A car that lets you stream music from the Internet.
All of these innovations sound great, until you learn the risks that this type of connectivity carries. Recently, two security researchers, sitting on a couch and armed only with laptops, remotely took over a Chrysler Jeep Cherokee speeding along the highway, shutting down its engine as an 18-wheeler truck rushed toward it. They did this all while a Wired reporter was driving the car. Their expertise would allow them to hack any Jeep as long as they knew the car’s I.P. address, its network address on the Internet. They turned the Jeep’s entertainment dashboard into a gateway to the car’s steering, brakes and transmission.
A hacked car is a high-profile example of what can go wrong with the coming Internet of Things — objects equipped with software and connected to digital networks. The selling point for these well-connected objects is added convenience and better safety. In reality, it is a fast-motion train wreck in privacy and security.
The early Internet was intended to connect people who already trusted one another, like academic researchers or military networks. It never had the robust security that today’s global network needs. As the Internet went from a few thousand users to more than three billion, attempts to strengthen security were stymied because of cost, shortsightedness and competing interests. Connecting everyday objects to this shaky, insecure base will create the Internet of Hacked Things. This is irresponsible and potentially catastrophic.
That smart safe? Hackers can empty it with a single USB stick while erasing all logs of its activity — the evidence of deposits and withdrawals — and of their crime. That high-tech rifle? Researchers managed to remotely manipulate its target selection without the shooter’s knowing.
Home builders and car manufacturers have shifted to a new business: the risky world of information technology. Most seem utterly out of their depth.
Although Chrysler quickly recalled 1.4 million Jeeps to patch this particular vulnerability, it took the company more than a year after the issue was first noted, and the recall occurred only after that spectacular publicity stunt on the highway and after it was requested by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In announcing the software fix, the company said that no defect had been found. If two guys sitting on their couch turning off a speeding car’s engine from miles away doesn’t qualify, I’m not sure what counts as a defect in Chrysler’s world. And Chrysler is far from the only company compromised: from BMW to Tesla to General Motors, many automotive brands have been hacked, with surely more to come.
Dramatic hacks attract the most attention, but the software errors that allow them to occur are ubiquitous. While complex breaches can take real effort — the Jeep hacker duo spent two years researching — simple errors in the code can also cause significant failure. Adding software with millions of lines of code to objects greatly increases their potential for harm.
The Internet of Things is also a privacy nightmare. Databases that already have too much information about us will now be bursting with data on the places we’ve driven, the food we’ve purchased and more. Last week, at Def Con, the annual information security conference, researchers set up an Internet of Things village to show how they could hack everyday objects like baby monitors, thermostats and security cameras.
Connecting everyday objects introduces new risks if done at mass scale. Take that smart refrigerator. If a single fridge malfunctions, it’s a hassle. However, if the fridge’s computer is connected to its motor, a software bug or hack could “brick” millions of them all at once — turning them into plastic pantries with heavy doors.
Cars — two-ton metal objects designed to hurtle down highways — are already bracingly dangerous. The modern automobile is run by dozens of computers that most manufacturers connect using a system that is old and known to be insecure. Yet automakers often use that flimsy system to connect all of the car’s parts. That means once a hacker is in, she’s in everywhere — engine, steering, transmission and brakes, not just the entertainment system.
For years, security researchers have been warning about the dangers of coupling so many systems in cars. Alarmed researchers have published academic papers, hacked cars as demonstrations, and begged the industry to step up. So far, the industry response has been to nod politely and fix exposed flaws without fundamentally changing the way they operate.
In 1965, Ralph Nader published “Unsafe at Any Speed,” documenting car manufacturers’ resistance to spending money on safety features like seatbelts. After public debate and finally some legislation, manufacturers were forced to incorporate safety technologies.
No company wants to be the first to bear the costs of updating the insecure computer systems that run most cars. We need federal safety regulations to push automakers to move, as a whole industry. Last month, a bill with privacy and cybersecurity standards for cars was introduced in the Senate. That’s good, but it’s only a start. We need a new understanding of car safety, and of the safety of any object running software or connecting to the Internet.
It may be hard to fix security on the digital Internet, but the Internet of Things should not be built on this faulty foundation. Responding to digital threats by patching only exposed vulnerabilities is giving just aspirin to a very ill patient.
It isn’t hopeless. We can make programs more reliable and databases more secure. Critical functions on Internet-connected objects should be isolated and external audits mandated to catch problems early. But this will require an initial investment to forestall future problems — the exact opposite of the current corporate impulse. It also may be that not everything needs to be networked, and that the trade-off in vulnerability isn’t worth it. Maybe cars are unsafe at any I.P.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/opini ... d=45305309
A FRIDGE that puts milk on your shopping list when you run low. A safe that tallies the cash that is placed in it. A sniper rifle equipped with advanced computer technology for improved accuracy. A car that lets you stream music from the Internet.
All of these innovations sound great, until you learn the risks that this type of connectivity carries. Recently, two security researchers, sitting on a couch and armed only with laptops, remotely took over a Chrysler Jeep Cherokee speeding along the highway, shutting down its engine as an 18-wheeler truck rushed toward it. They did this all while a Wired reporter was driving the car. Their expertise would allow them to hack any Jeep as long as they knew the car’s I.P. address, its network address on the Internet. They turned the Jeep’s entertainment dashboard into a gateway to the car’s steering, brakes and transmission.
A hacked car is a high-profile example of what can go wrong with the coming Internet of Things — objects equipped with software and connected to digital networks. The selling point for these well-connected objects is added convenience and better safety. In reality, it is a fast-motion train wreck in privacy and security.
The early Internet was intended to connect people who already trusted one another, like academic researchers or military networks. It never had the robust security that today’s global network needs. As the Internet went from a few thousand users to more than three billion, attempts to strengthen security were stymied because of cost, shortsightedness and competing interests. Connecting everyday objects to this shaky, insecure base will create the Internet of Hacked Things. This is irresponsible and potentially catastrophic.
That smart safe? Hackers can empty it with a single USB stick while erasing all logs of its activity — the evidence of deposits and withdrawals — and of their crime. That high-tech rifle? Researchers managed to remotely manipulate its target selection without the shooter’s knowing.
Home builders and car manufacturers have shifted to a new business: the risky world of information technology. Most seem utterly out of their depth.
Although Chrysler quickly recalled 1.4 million Jeeps to patch this particular vulnerability, it took the company more than a year after the issue was first noted, and the recall occurred only after that spectacular publicity stunt on the highway and after it was requested by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In announcing the software fix, the company said that no defect had been found. If two guys sitting on their couch turning off a speeding car’s engine from miles away doesn’t qualify, I’m not sure what counts as a defect in Chrysler’s world. And Chrysler is far from the only company compromised: from BMW to Tesla to General Motors, many automotive brands have been hacked, with surely more to come.
Dramatic hacks attract the most attention, but the software errors that allow them to occur are ubiquitous. While complex breaches can take real effort — the Jeep hacker duo spent two years researching — simple errors in the code can also cause significant failure. Adding software with millions of lines of code to objects greatly increases their potential for harm.
The Internet of Things is also a privacy nightmare. Databases that already have too much information about us will now be bursting with data on the places we’ve driven, the food we’ve purchased and more. Last week, at Def Con, the annual information security conference, researchers set up an Internet of Things village to show how they could hack everyday objects like baby monitors, thermostats and security cameras.
Connecting everyday objects introduces new risks if done at mass scale. Take that smart refrigerator. If a single fridge malfunctions, it’s a hassle. However, if the fridge’s computer is connected to its motor, a software bug or hack could “brick” millions of them all at once — turning them into plastic pantries with heavy doors.
Cars — two-ton metal objects designed to hurtle down highways — are already bracingly dangerous. The modern automobile is run by dozens of computers that most manufacturers connect using a system that is old and known to be insecure. Yet automakers often use that flimsy system to connect all of the car’s parts. That means once a hacker is in, she’s in everywhere — engine, steering, transmission and brakes, not just the entertainment system.
For years, security researchers have been warning about the dangers of coupling so many systems in cars. Alarmed researchers have published academic papers, hacked cars as demonstrations, and begged the industry to step up. So far, the industry response has been to nod politely and fix exposed flaws without fundamentally changing the way they operate.
In 1965, Ralph Nader published “Unsafe at Any Speed,” documenting car manufacturers’ resistance to spending money on safety features like seatbelts. After public debate and finally some legislation, manufacturers were forced to incorporate safety technologies.
No company wants to be the first to bear the costs of updating the insecure computer systems that run most cars. We need federal safety regulations to push automakers to move, as a whole industry. Last month, a bill with privacy and cybersecurity standards for cars was introduced in the Senate. That’s good, but it’s only a start. We need a new understanding of car safety, and of the safety of any object running software or connecting to the Internet.
It may be hard to fix security on the digital Internet, but the Internet of Things should not be built on this faulty foundation. Responding to digital threats by patching only exposed vulnerabilities is giving just aspirin to a very ill patient.
It isn’t hopeless. We can make programs more reliable and databases more secure. Critical functions on Internet-connected objects should be isolated and external audits mandated to catch problems early. But this will require an initial investment to forestall future problems — the exact opposite of the current corporate impulse. It also may be that not everything needs to be networked, and that the trade-off in vulnerability isn’t worth it. Maybe cars are unsafe at any I.P.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/opini ... d=45305309
Robot Weapons: What’s the Harm?
LAST month over a thousand scientists and tech-world luminaries, including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Steve Wozniak, released an open letter calling for a global ban on offensive “autonomous” weapons like drones, which can identify and attack targets without having to rely on a human to make a decision.
The letter, which warned that such weapons could set off a destabilizing global arms race, taps into a growing fear among experts and the public that artificial intelligence could easily slip out of humanity’s control — much of the subsequent coverage online was illustrated with screen shots from the “Terminator” films.
The specter of autonomous weapons may evoke images of killer robots, but most applications are likely to be decidedly more pedestrian. Indeed, while there are certainly risks involved, the potential benefits of artificial intelligence on the battlefield — to soldiers, civilians and global stability — are also significant.
The authors of the letter liken A.I.-based weapons to chemical and biological munitions, space-based nuclear missiles and blinding lasers. But this comparison doesn’t stand up under scrutiny. However high-tech those systems are in design, in their application they are “dumb” — and, particularly in the case of chemical and biological weapons, impossible to control once deployed.
A.I.-based weapons, in contrast, offer the possibility of selectively sparing the lives of noncombatants, limiting their use to precise geographical boundaries or times, or ceasing operation upon command (or the lack of a command to continue).
Consider the lowly land mine. Those horrific and indiscriminate weapons detonate when stepped on, causing injury, death or damage to anyone or anything that happens upon them. They make a simple-minded “decision” whether to detonate by sensing their environment — and often continue to do so, long after the fighting has stopped.
Now imagine such a weapon enhanced by an A.I. technology less sophisticated than what is found in most smartphones. An inexpensive camera, in conjunction with other sensors, could discriminate among adults, children and animals; observe whether a person in its vicinity is wearing a uniform or carrying a weapon; or target only military vehicles, instead of civilian cars.
This would be a substantial improvement over the current state of the art, yet such a device would qualify as an offensive autonomous weapon of the sort the open letter proposes to ban.
Then there’s the question of whether a machine — say, an A.I.-enabled helicopter drone — might be more effective than a human at making targeting decisions. In the heat of battle, a soldier may be tempted to return fire indiscriminately, in part to save his or her own life. By contrast, a machine won’t grow impatient or scared, be swayed by prejudice or hate, willfully ignore orders or be motivated by an instinct for self-preservation.
Indeed, many A.I. researchers argue for speedy deployment of self-driving cars on similar grounds: Vigilant electronics may save lives currently lost because of poor split-second decisions made by humans. How many soldiers in the field might die waiting for the person exercising “meaningful human control” to approve an action that a computer could initiate instantly?
Neither human nor machine is perfect, but as the philosopher B. J. Strawser has recently argued, leaders who send soldiers into war “have a duty to protect an agent engaged in a justified act from harm to the greatest extent possible, so long as that protection does not interfere with the agent’s ability to act justly.” In other words, if an A.I. weapons system can get a dangerous job done in the place of a human, we have a moral obligation to use it.
Of course, there are all sorts of caveats. The technology has to be as effective as a human soldier. It has to be fully controllable. All this needs to be demonstrated, of course, but presupposing the answer is not the best path forward. In any case, a ban wouldn’t be effective. As the authors of the letter recognize, A.I. weapons aren’t rocket science; they don’t require advanced knowledge or enormous resource expenditures, so they may be widely available to adversaries that adhere to different ethical standards.
The world should approach A.I. weapons as an engineering problem — to establish internationally sanctioned weapons standards, mandate proper testing and formulate reasonable post-deployment controls — rather than by forgoing the prospect of potentially safer and more effective weapons.
Instead of turning the planet into a “Terminator”-like battlefield, machines may be able to pierce the fog of war better than humans can, offering at least the possibility of a more humane and secure world. We deserve a chance to find out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/opini ... d=45305309
LAST month over a thousand scientists and tech-world luminaries, including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Steve Wozniak, released an open letter calling for a global ban on offensive “autonomous” weapons like drones, which can identify and attack targets without having to rely on a human to make a decision.
The letter, which warned that such weapons could set off a destabilizing global arms race, taps into a growing fear among experts and the public that artificial intelligence could easily slip out of humanity’s control — much of the subsequent coverage online was illustrated with screen shots from the “Terminator” films.
The specter of autonomous weapons may evoke images of killer robots, but most applications are likely to be decidedly more pedestrian. Indeed, while there are certainly risks involved, the potential benefits of artificial intelligence on the battlefield — to soldiers, civilians and global stability — are also significant.
The authors of the letter liken A.I.-based weapons to chemical and biological munitions, space-based nuclear missiles and blinding lasers. But this comparison doesn’t stand up under scrutiny. However high-tech those systems are in design, in their application they are “dumb” — and, particularly in the case of chemical and biological weapons, impossible to control once deployed.
A.I.-based weapons, in contrast, offer the possibility of selectively sparing the lives of noncombatants, limiting their use to precise geographical boundaries or times, or ceasing operation upon command (or the lack of a command to continue).
Consider the lowly land mine. Those horrific and indiscriminate weapons detonate when stepped on, causing injury, death or damage to anyone or anything that happens upon them. They make a simple-minded “decision” whether to detonate by sensing their environment — and often continue to do so, long after the fighting has stopped.
Now imagine such a weapon enhanced by an A.I. technology less sophisticated than what is found in most smartphones. An inexpensive camera, in conjunction with other sensors, could discriminate among adults, children and animals; observe whether a person in its vicinity is wearing a uniform or carrying a weapon; or target only military vehicles, instead of civilian cars.
This would be a substantial improvement over the current state of the art, yet such a device would qualify as an offensive autonomous weapon of the sort the open letter proposes to ban.
Then there’s the question of whether a machine — say, an A.I.-enabled helicopter drone — might be more effective than a human at making targeting decisions. In the heat of battle, a soldier may be tempted to return fire indiscriminately, in part to save his or her own life. By contrast, a machine won’t grow impatient or scared, be swayed by prejudice or hate, willfully ignore orders or be motivated by an instinct for self-preservation.
Indeed, many A.I. researchers argue for speedy deployment of self-driving cars on similar grounds: Vigilant electronics may save lives currently lost because of poor split-second decisions made by humans. How many soldiers in the field might die waiting for the person exercising “meaningful human control” to approve an action that a computer could initiate instantly?
Neither human nor machine is perfect, but as the philosopher B. J. Strawser has recently argued, leaders who send soldiers into war “have a duty to protect an agent engaged in a justified act from harm to the greatest extent possible, so long as that protection does not interfere with the agent’s ability to act justly.” In other words, if an A.I. weapons system can get a dangerous job done in the place of a human, we have a moral obligation to use it.
Of course, there are all sorts of caveats. The technology has to be as effective as a human soldier. It has to be fully controllable. All this needs to be demonstrated, of course, but presupposing the answer is not the best path forward. In any case, a ban wouldn’t be effective. As the authors of the letter recognize, A.I. weapons aren’t rocket science; they don’t require advanced knowledge or enormous resource expenditures, so they may be widely available to adversaries that adhere to different ethical standards.
The world should approach A.I. weapons as an engineering problem — to establish internationally sanctioned weapons standards, mandate proper testing and formulate reasonable post-deployment controls — rather than by forgoing the prospect of potentially safer and more effective weapons.
Instead of turning the planet into a “Terminator”-like battlefield, machines may be able to pierce the fog of war better than humans can, offering at least the possibility of a more humane and secure world. We deserve a chance to find out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/opini ... d=45305309
The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t
In the digital economy, it was supposed to be impossible to make money by making art. Instead, creative careers are thriving — but in complicated and unexpected ways.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/magaz ... 05309&_r=0
In the digital economy, it was supposed to be impossible to make money by making art. Instead, creative careers are thriving — but in complicated and unexpected ways.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/magaz ... 05309&_r=0
The Controversial Way More Parents Are Choosing Their Baby's Gender
More and more couples are using pricey fertility treatments not because they're having trouble conceiving, but because they want to choose their baby's gender, Wall Street Journal reports.
The process, called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, is usually used ​to test for genetic diseases, but can also be used to determine a baby's sex, and the price tag of up to $15,000 to $20,000 per cycle (and the fact it's not available in many countries outside the U.S. and Mexico yet) doesn't seem to be stopping anyone from getting them.
According to Southern California fertility clinic network HRC Fertility, approximately 1 in 5 couples who come in to their facilities for fertility treatments are getting them specifically so they can choose the sex of their baby.
Daniel Potter, medical director of HRC Fertility, says that much of network's current growth is coming from people who fit this exact description, outweighing same-sex couples and couples with genetic diseases.
Despite the growing interest in the service, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists ethics committee says they "don't want people to use technology that's really intended to help couples with medical needs for nonmedical reasons," even if there are minimal health risks involved.
Arthur Caplan, director of the division of medical ethics at New York University School of Medicine, agrees, saying that allowing families fertility treatments so they can only produce the sex of their choice could easily turn into a situation where everyone only wants babies of a particular sex.
Some clinics the Wall Street Journal spoke with said they got more requests for girls than boys while other clinics said the requests were pretty evenly split.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/health/pregnan ... lsignoutmd
More and more couples are using pricey fertility treatments not because they're having trouble conceiving, but because they want to choose their baby's gender, Wall Street Journal reports.
The process, called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, is usually used ​to test for genetic diseases, but can also be used to determine a baby's sex, and the price tag of up to $15,000 to $20,000 per cycle (and the fact it's not available in many countries outside the U.S. and Mexico yet) doesn't seem to be stopping anyone from getting them.
According to Southern California fertility clinic network HRC Fertility, approximately 1 in 5 couples who come in to their facilities for fertility treatments are getting them specifically so they can choose the sex of their baby.
Daniel Potter, medical director of HRC Fertility, says that much of network's current growth is coming from people who fit this exact description, outweighing same-sex couples and couples with genetic diseases.
Despite the growing interest in the service, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists ethics committee says they "don't want people to use technology that's really intended to help couples with medical needs for nonmedical reasons," even if there are minimal health risks involved.
Arthur Caplan, director of the division of medical ethics at New York University School of Medicine, agrees, saying that allowing families fertility treatments so they can only produce the sex of their choice could easily turn into a situation where everyone only wants babies of a particular sex.
Some clinics the Wall Street Journal spoke with said they got more requests for girls than boys while other clinics said the requests were pretty evenly split.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/health/pregnan ... lsignoutmd
VW Scandal Shows a Need for More Tech, Not Less
You could be forgiven for reacting to the Volkswagen scandal by yearning for the halcyon era of dumb cars. Remember when our rides weren’t controlled by secret, corrupt software — when your father’s Oldsmobile was solidly mechanical and so simple in its operation that even a government regulator could understand it?
But emotionally attractive as it might be, the analog automobile isn’t a realistic option (which is perhaps why even Luddites aren’t asking for it). The real lesson in VW’s scandal — in which the automaker installed “defeat devices” that showed the cars emitting lower emissions in lab tests than they actually did — is not that our cars are stuffed with too much technology. Instead, the lesson is that there isn’t enough tech in vehicles.
In fact, the faster we upgrade our roads and autos with better capabilities to detect and analyze what’s going on in the transportation system, the better we’ll be able to find hackers, cheaters and others looking to create havoc on the highways.
Photo
Right now we are at an awkward in-between phase in the transformation of the automobile — somewhere in the uncanny valley between the mechanical horse of Henry Ford’s era and the intelligent, autonomous, emissions-free, crash-free, networked fleet that will begin chugging along our roads later this century. This transition period will mean short-term turmoil. Cars today are lousy with code that can’t be inspected, opening the way for scary hackings and cheats and also the unforeseen complications of interactions between robots and humans.
Some of these problems call for obvious fixes. As many have pointed out since the VW admission, the code in our cars (and other life-threatening machines) shouldn’t be secret, but should allow for better inspection by authorities and independent experts. Another obvious fix is to replace the sort of lab-testing that VW was able to game with the kind of real-world analysis that uncovered its chicanery.
But to do that, we’ll need more technology, not less. We need more sensors in cars and on roads and a network of computers watching the data to figure out when vehicles are behaving in aberrant ways. In other words, the best way to prevent cheating isn’t to make our cars dumber, but to make the entire transportation grid smarter.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/techn ... d=71987722
You could be forgiven for reacting to the Volkswagen scandal by yearning for the halcyon era of dumb cars. Remember when our rides weren’t controlled by secret, corrupt software — when your father’s Oldsmobile was solidly mechanical and so simple in its operation that even a government regulator could understand it?
But emotionally attractive as it might be, the analog automobile isn’t a realistic option (which is perhaps why even Luddites aren’t asking for it). The real lesson in VW’s scandal — in which the automaker installed “defeat devices” that showed the cars emitting lower emissions in lab tests than they actually did — is not that our cars are stuffed with too much technology. Instead, the lesson is that there isn’t enough tech in vehicles.
In fact, the faster we upgrade our roads and autos with better capabilities to detect and analyze what’s going on in the transportation system, the better we’ll be able to find hackers, cheaters and others looking to create havoc on the highways.
Photo
Right now we are at an awkward in-between phase in the transformation of the automobile — somewhere in the uncanny valley between the mechanical horse of Henry Ford’s era and the intelligent, autonomous, emissions-free, crash-free, networked fleet that will begin chugging along our roads later this century. This transition period will mean short-term turmoil. Cars today are lousy with code that can’t be inspected, opening the way for scary hackings and cheats and also the unforeseen complications of interactions between robots and humans.
Some of these problems call for obvious fixes. As many have pointed out since the VW admission, the code in our cars (and other life-threatening machines) shouldn’t be secret, but should allow for better inspection by authorities and independent experts. Another obvious fix is to replace the sort of lab-testing that VW was able to game with the kind of real-world analysis that uncovered its chicanery.
But to do that, we’ll need more technology, not less. We need more sensors in cars and on roads and a network of computers watching the data to figure out when vehicles are behaving in aberrant ways. In other words, the best way to prevent cheating isn’t to make our cars dumber, but to make the entire transportation grid smarter.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/techn ... d=71987722
Manipulating Faces From Afar in Realtime
Video at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/scien ... d=71987722
Moviegoers and electronic game players have grown accustomed to digital manipulation of all sorts of still and moving images.
But even the most jaded among them might be surprised by a process that computer scientists in California and Germany have developed to instantaneously transfer facial expressions.
With the new technique, one person’s smile appears seamlessly on live video of another person’s face, even though the second person is not smiling at all.
A computer processes the transfer in 30 milliseconds, no time at all for a human observer, although less expensive cameras can result in a bit of a lag.
The researchers demonstrate their technique with simultaneous live video from two people, and the result is at least mildly disturbing. Presentations that show unadulterated videos of two people along with the manipulated ones prompt the viewer to keep looking from real to unreal, feeling that something is just not right.
Matthias Niessner, a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University who works on the rendering of three-dimensional surfaces in computer graphics, refers to the process as “live facial re-enactment.”
Dr. Niessner, along with Justus Thies, a graduate student at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, where Dr. Niessner studied, and other colleagues at Stanford and in Germany used the kind of camera that captures gestures in three dimensions, as in the Microsoft Kinect.
Software that they developed maps every pixel on both faces, and then transfers the expression. The speed of the process comes partly because the software runs on a number of computer processors at once.
Dr. Niessner said he envisioned the technique’s being used to improve dubbing in movies, to make video in virtual reality more realistic, and to provide instantaneous translation.
Skype has already released a preview of nearly real-time voice translation during video calls. Dr. Niessner said that with further work, real-time transfer of facial expressions could be combined with real-time translation. Then, for example, if an English speaker were talking to a Mandarin speaker, each would appear to be speaking the other’s language.
Dr. Niessner said that when programs like Photoshop first appeared, there was some concern about the dangers of altering visual reality. But now, he said, “The whole advertisement industry is kind of living on Photoshop.” The public has adjusted, and there are techniques to detect any surreptitious alteration of an image. The same would be true with facial re-enactment, he said.
The researchers are scheduled to present their work at Siggraph Asia 2015 in Kobe, Japan, next week. Their paper will then be published in the proceedings of the conference, a special issue of ACM Transactions on Graphics.
Once the technique becomes popular, it’s reasonable to expect that talking animal videos will become more popular than ever.
Video at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/scien ... d=71987722
Moviegoers and electronic game players have grown accustomed to digital manipulation of all sorts of still and moving images.
But even the most jaded among them might be surprised by a process that computer scientists in California and Germany have developed to instantaneously transfer facial expressions.
With the new technique, one person’s smile appears seamlessly on live video of another person’s face, even though the second person is not smiling at all.
A computer processes the transfer in 30 milliseconds, no time at all for a human observer, although less expensive cameras can result in a bit of a lag.
The researchers demonstrate their technique with simultaneous live video from two people, and the result is at least mildly disturbing. Presentations that show unadulterated videos of two people along with the manipulated ones prompt the viewer to keep looking from real to unreal, feeling that something is just not right.
Matthias Niessner, a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University who works on the rendering of three-dimensional surfaces in computer graphics, refers to the process as “live facial re-enactment.”
Dr. Niessner, along with Justus Thies, a graduate student at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, where Dr. Niessner studied, and other colleagues at Stanford and in Germany used the kind of camera that captures gestures in three dimensions, as in the Microsoft Kinect.
Software that they developed maps every pixel on both faces, and then transfers the expression. The speed of the process comes partly because the software runs on a number of computer processors at once.
Dr. Niessner said he envisioned the technique’s being used to improve dubbing in movies, to make video in virtual reality more realistic, and to provide instantaneous translation.
Skype has already released a preview of nearly real-time voice translation during video calls. Dr. Niessner said that with further work, real-time transfer of facial expressions could be combined with real-time translation. Then, for example, if an English speaker were talking to a Mandarin speaker, each would appear to be speaking the other’s language.
Dr. Niessner said that when programs like Photoshop first appeared, there was some concern about the dangers of altering visual reality. But now, he said, “The whole advertisement industry is kind of living on Photoshop.” The public has adjusted, and there are techniques to detect any surreptitious alteration of an image. The same would be true with facial re-enactment, he said.
The researchers are scheduled to present their work at Siggraph Asia 2015 in Kobe, Japan, next week. Their paper will then be published in the proceedings of the conference, a special issue of ACM Transactions on Graphics.
Once the technique becomes popular, it’s reasonable to expect that talking animal videos will become more popular than ever.
Harvard Law Library Readies Trove of Decisions for Digital Age
Shelves of law books are an august symbol of legal practice, and no place, save the Library of Congress, can match the collection at Harvard’s Law School Library. Its trove includes nearly every state, federal, territorial and tribal judicial decision since colonial times — a priceless potential resource for everyone from legal scholars to defense lawyers trying to challenge a criminal conviction.
Now, in a digital-age sacrifice intended to serve grand intentions, the Harvard librarians are slicing off the spines of all but the rarest volumes and feeding some 40 million pages through a high-speed scanner. They are taking this once unthinkable step to create a complete, searchable database of American case law that will be offered free on the Internet, allowing instant retrieval of vital records that usually must be paid for.
“Improving access to justice is a priority,” said Martha Minow, dean of Harvard Law School, explaining why Harvard has embarked on the project. “We feel an obligation and an opportunity here to open up our resources to the public.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/us/ha ... 87722&_r=0
Shelves of law books are an august symbol of legal practice, and no place, save the Library of Congress, can match the collection at Harvard’s Law School Library. Its trove includes nearly every state, federal, territorial and tribal judicial decision since colonial times — a priceless potential resource for everyone from legal scholars to defense lawyers trying to challenge a criminal conviction.
Now, in a digital-age sacrifice intended to serve grand intentions, the Harvard librarians are slicing off the spines of all but the rarest volumes and feeding some 40 million pages through a high-speed scanner. They are taking this once unthinkable step to create a complete, searchable database of American case law that will be offered free on the Internet, allowing instant retrieval of vital records that usually must be paid for.
“Improving access to justice is a priority,” said Martha Minow, dean of Harvard Law School, explaining why Harvard has embarked on the project. “We feel an obligation and an opportunity here to open up our resources to the public.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/us/ha ... 87722&_r=0
Student launches solar backpack for Kenyan school children
Former Aga Khan Academy, Mombasa, student Salima Visram has become a social entrepreneur even as she studies as an undergraduate in Canada, with the launch of a crowd-funded Kenyan business producing school students’ backpacks that create solar lighting for pupils to do their homework.
The business, last month, delivered its first 500 back packs in Kikambala Primary School, in Mombasa County.
“Studying at the Aga Khan Academy Mombasa greatly improved my leadership skills and helped me grow my community development skills. I received an educational experience beyond the classroom that helped me learn about the real-world implications of what i was studying,” said Salima.
Some 92 per cent of rural households in Kenya use kerosene to fuel lighting. When night falls, this sees millions of Kenyan school children forced to rely on the toxic and expensive light source to do their homework. For those who cannot keep up with the expense of buying the fuel, learning stops when the sun goes down, according to a report compiled by lighting company Sunny Money in Kenya.
Salima grew up in Kikambala witnessing the effects that poverty and the lack of electricity had on school going children and came up with the solar back pack, which she calls the Soular Backpack. The backpack allows children in rural areas to leverage the power of the sun during their long walks to and from school to provide light for reading at night.
The back packs consist of a solar panel, a battery pack and an LED lamp. The solar panel stores solar power during the day and allows the LED lamp to be connected to it during the night as a light source. For four hours of charging, the back pack is able to give out seven to eight hours of light a night.
In January, Visram raised $38,000 (Sh3,990,000) through crowd-funding platform Indiegogo, which she used to place the first order of 2,000 backpacks to distribute to the Kikambala village as a pilot project.
“If successful, I want to expand the project to a hundred schools in the county within the next year and a half. This is in direct alignment with Kenya’s Vision 2030 “Masomo Bora”, which is the nation’s effort to ensure that all children are educated, and realize their full potential,” said Visram.
Salima Visram is now in her final year of studying International Development Studies at McGill University, in Montreal, having been at Aga Khan Academy, Mombasa, for her secondary school education. She believes social business is the greatest catalyst in creating sustainable change, and hopes to form partnerships with UNICEF, the UNHCR and the Government of Kenya to expand the project to other parts of Kenya and Africa. Her goal is that through education, people will be given the tools to empower and alleviate themselves from poverty.
“Salima’s vision and implementation demonstrate the power and importance of empowering our students to create solutions to the problems that are hampering Kenya’s development, and we see her emerging rapidly as a role model for all that the Academy stands for, and its mission in positioning talented young students as future leaders driving change and poverty alleviation for all,” said Mr Bill O’Hearn, Head of Aga Khan Academy, Mombasa.
Staff Writer
http://www.itnewsafrica.com/2015/10/stu ... rettyPhoto
Former Aga Khan Academy, Mombasa, student Salima Visram has become a social entrepreneur even as she studies as an undergraduate in Canada, with the launch of a crowd-funded Kenyan business producing school students’ backpacks that create solar lighting for pupils to do their homework.
The business, last month, delivered its first 500 back packs in Kikambala Primary School, in Mombasa County.
“Studying at the Aga Khan Academy Mombasa greatly improved my leadership skills and helped me grow my community development skills. I received an educational experience beyond the classroom that helped me learn about the real-world implications of what i was studying,” said Salima.
Some 92 per cent of rural households in Kenya use kerosene to fuel lighting. When night falls, this sees millions of Kenyan school children forced to rely on the toxic and expensive light source to do their homework. For those who cannot keep up with the expense of buying the fuel, learning stops when the sun goes down, according to a report compiled by lighting company Sunny Money in Kenya.
Salima grew up in Kikambala witnessing the effects that poverty and the lack of electricity had on school going children and came up with the solar back pack, which she calls the Soular Backpack. The backpack allows children in rural areas to leverage the power of the sun during their long walks to and from school to provide light for reading at night.
The back packs consist of a solar panel, a battery pack and an LED lamp. The solar panel stores solar power during the day and allows the LED lamp to be connected to it during the night as a light source. For four hours of charging, the back pack is able to give out seven to eight hours of light a night.
In January, Visram raised $38,000 (Sh3,990,000) through crowd-funding platform Indiegogo, which she used to place the first order of 2,000 backpacks to distribute to the Kikambala village as a pilot project.
“If successful, I want to expand the project to a hundred schools in the county within the next year and a half. This is in direct alignment with Kenya’s Vision 2030 “Masomo Bora”, which is the nation’s effort to ensure that all children are educated, and realize their full potential,” said Visram.
Salima Visram is now in her final year of studying International Development Studies at McGill University, in Montreal, having been at Aga Khan Academy, Mombasa, for her secondary school education. She believes social business is the greatest catalyst in creating sustainable change, and hopes to form partnerships with UNICEF, the UNHCR and the Government of Kenya to expand the project to other parts of Kenya and Africa. Her goal is that through education, people will be given the tools to empower and alleviate themselves from poverty.
“Salima’s vision and implementation demonstrate the power and importance of empowering our students to create solutions to the problems that are hampering Kenya’s development, and we see her emerging rapidly as a role model for all that the Academy stands for, and its mission in positioning talented young students as future leaders driving change and poverty alleviation for all,” said Mr Bill O’Hearn, Head of Aga Khan Academy, Mombasa.
Staff Writer
http://www.itnewsafrica.com/2015/10/stu ... rettyPhoto
In 5 Minutes, He Lets the Blind See
HETAUDA, Nepal — WATCHING the doctor perform is like observing miracles.
He has restored eyesight to more than 100,000 people, perhaps more than any doctor in history, and still his patients come. They stagger and grope their way to him along mountain trails from remote villages, hoping to go under his scalpel and see loved ones again.
A day after he operates to remove cataracts, he pulls off the bandages — and, lo! They can see clearly. At first tentatively, then jubilantly, they gaze about. A few hours later, they walk home, radiating an ineffable bliss. Dr. Sanduk Ruit, a Nepali ophthalmologist, may be the world champion in the war on blindness. Some 39 million people worldwide are blind — about half because of cataracts — and another 246 million have impaired vision, according to the World Health Organization.
If you’re a blind person in a poor country, then traditionally you have no hope. But Dr. Ruit has pioneered a simple cataract microsurgery technique that costs only $25 per patient and is virtually always successful. Indeed, his “Nepal method” is now taught in United States medical schools.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/opini ... ef=opinion
HETAUDA, Nepal — WATCHING the doctor perform is like observing miracles.
He has restored eyesight to more than 100,000 people, perhaps more than any doctor in history, and still his patients come. They stagger and grope their way to him along mountain trails from remote villages, hoping to go under his scalpel and see loved ones again.
A day after he operates to remove cataracts, he pulls off the bandages — and, lo! They can see clearly. At first tentatively, then jubilantly, they gaze about. A few hours later, they walk home, radiating an ineffable bliss. Dr. Sanduk Ruit, a Nepali ophthalmologist, may be the world champion in the war on blindness. Some 39 million people worldwide are blind — about half because of cataracts — and another 246 million have impaired vision, according to the World Health Organization.
If you’re a blind person in a poor country, then traditionally you have no hope. But Dr. Ruit has pioneered a simple cataract microsurgery technique that costs only $25 per patient and is virtually always successful. Indeed, his “Nepal method” is now taught in United States medical schools.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/opini ... ef=opinion
Uterus Transplants May Soon Help Some Infertile Women in the U.S. Become Pregnant
CLEVELAND — Six doctors swarmed around the body of the deceased organ donor and quickly started to operate.
The kidneys came out first. Then the team began another delicate dissection, to remove an organ that is rarely, if ever, taken from a donor. Ninety minutes later they had it, resting in the palm of a surgeon’s hand: the uterus.
The operation was a practice run. Within the next few months, surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic expect to become the first in the United States to transplant a uterus into a woman who lacks one, so that she can become pregnant and give birth. The recipients will be women who were born without a uterus, had it removed or have uterine damage. The transplants will be temporary: The uterus would be removed after the recipient has had one or two babies, so she can stop taking transplant anti-rejection drugs.
Uterine transplantation is a new frontier, one that pairs specialists from two fields known for innovation and for pushing limits, medically and ethically — reproductive medicine and transplant surgery. If the procedure works, many women could benefit: An estimated 50,000 women in the United States might be candidates. But there are potential dangers.
The recipients, healthy women, will face the risks of surgery and anti-rejection drugs for a transplant that they, unlike someone with heart or liver failure, do not need to save their lives. Their pregnancies will be considered high-risk, with fetuses exposed to anti-rejection drugs and developing inside a womb taken from a dead woman.
Eight women from around the country have begun the screening process at the Cleveland Clinic, hoping to be selected for transplants. One, a 26-year-old with two adopted children, said she still wanted a chance to become pregnant and give birth.
“I crave that experience,” she said. “I want the morning sickness, the backaches, the feet swelling. I want to feel the baby move. That is something I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember.”
She traveled more than 1,000 miles to the clinic, paying her own way. She asked that her name and hometown be withheld to protect her family’s privacy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/13/healt ... 87722&_r=0
CLEVELAND — Six doctors swarmed around the body of the deceased organ donor and quickly started to operate.
The kidneys came out first. Then the team began another delicate dissection, to remove an organ that is rarely, if ever, taken from a donor. Ninety minutes later they had it, resting in the palm of a surgeon’s hand: the uterus.
The operation was a practice run. Within the next few months, surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic expect to become the first in the United States to transplant a uterus into a woman who lacks one, so that she can become pregnant and give birth. The recipients will be women who were born without a uterus, had it removed or have uterine damage. The transplants will be temporary: The uterus would be removed after the recipient has had one or two babies, so she can stop taking transplant anti-rejection drugs.
Uterine transplantation is a new frontier, one that pairs specialists from two fields known for innovation and for pushing limits, medically and ethically — reproductive medicine and transplant surgery. If the procedure works, many women could benefit: An estimated 50,000 women in the United States might be candidates. But there are potential dangers.
The recipients, healthy women, will face the risks of surgery and anti-rejection drugs for a transplant that they, unlike someone with heart or liver failure, do not need to save their lives. Their pregnancies will be considered high-risk, with fetuses exposed to anti-rejection drugs and developing inside a womb taken from a dead woman.
Eight women from around the country have begun the screening process at the Cleveland Clinic, hoping to be selected for transplants. One, a 26-year-old with two adopted children, said she still wanted a chance to become pregnant and give birth.
“I crave that experience,” she said. “I want the morning sickness, the backaches, the feet swelling. I want to feel the baby move. That is something I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember.”
She traveled more than 1,000 miles to the clinic, paying her own way. She asked that her name and hometown be withheld to protect her family’s privacy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/13/healt ... 87722&_r=0
Engineering Mosquitoes’ Genes to Resist Malaria
In a basement on the Irvine campus of the University of California, behind a series of five protective doors, two teams of biologists have created a novel breed of mosquito that they hope will help eradicate malaria from the world.
The mosquito has been engineered to carry two ingenious genetic modifications. One is a set of genes that spew out antibodies to the malarial parasite harbored by the mosquito. Mosquitoes with these genes are rendered resistant to the parasite and so cannot spread malaria.
The other modification is a set of genetic elements known as a gene drive that should propel the malaria-resistance genes throughout a natural mosquito population. When a malaria-resistant male mosquito mates with a wild female, the gene drive copies both itself and the resistance genes over from the male chromosome to its female counterpart.
Because almost all the progeny carry the new genes, instead of just 50 percent as would be expected by Mendel’s laws of genetics, the inserted genes are expected to spread rapidly and take over a wild population in as few as 10 generations, or a single season. A large region, at least in principle, could be freed from malaria, which kills almost 600,000 people a year.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/scien ... 87722&_r=0
In a basement on the Irvine campus of the University of California, behind a series of five protective doors, two teams of biologists have created a novel breed of mosquito that they hope will help eradicate malaria from the world.
The mosquito has been engineered to carry two ingenious genetic modifications. One is a set of genes that spew out antibodies to the malarial parasite harbored by the mosquito. Mosquitoes with these genes are rendered resistant to the parasite and so cannot spread malaria.
The other modification is a set of genetic elements known as a gene drive that should propel the malaria-resistance genes throughout a natural mosquito population. When a malaria-resistant male mosquito mates with a wild female, the gene drive copies both itself and the resistance genes over from the male chromosome to its female counterpart.
Because almost all the progeny carry the new genes, instead of just 50 percent as would be expected by Mendel’s laws of genetics, the inserted genes are expected to spread rapidly and take over a wild population in as few as 10 generations, or a single season. A large region, at least in principle, could be freed from malaria, which kills almost 600,000 people a year.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/scien ... 87722&_r=0
The New Atomic Age We Need
THIS past summer, the Group of 7 nations promised “urgent and concrete action” to limit climate change. What actions exactly? Activists hope for answers from the coming United Nations climate conference in Paris, which begins Monday. They should look instead to Washington today.
The single most important action we can take is thawing a nuclear energy policy that keeps our technology frozen in time. If we are serious about replacing fossil fuels, we are going to need nuclear power, so the choice is stark: We can keep on merely talking about a carbon-free world, or we can go ahead and create one.
We already know that today’s energy sources cannot sustain a future we want to live in. This is most obvious in poor countries, where billions dream of living like Americans. The easiest way to satisfy this demand for a better life has been to burn more coal: In the past decade alone, China added more coal-burning capacity than America has ever had. But even though average Indians and Chinese use less than 30 percent as much electricity as Americans, the air they breathe is far worse. They deserve a third option besides dire poverty or dirty skies.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/opini ... 87722&_r=0
THIS past summer, the Group of 7 nations promised “urgent and concrete action” to limit climate change. What actions exactly? Activists hope for answers from the coming United Nations climate conference in Paris, which begins Monday. They should look instead to Washington today.
The single most important action we can take is thawing a nuclear energy policy that keeps our technology frozen in time. If we are serious about replacing fossil fuels, we are going to need nuclear power, so the choice is stark: We can keep on merely talking about a carbon-free world, or we can go ahead and create one.
We already know that today’s energy sources cannot sustain a future we want to live in. This is most obvious in poor countries, where billions dream of living like Americans. The easiest way to satisfy this demand for a better life has been to burn more coal: In the past decade alone, China added more coal-burning capacity than America has ever had. But even though average Indians and Chinese use less than 30 percent as much electricity as Americans, the air they breathe is far worse. They deserve a third option besides dire poverty or dirty skies.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/opini ... 87722&_r=0
Scientists Seek Moratorium on Edits to Human Genome That Could Be Inherited
An international group of scientists meeting in Washington called on Thursday for what would, in effect, be a moratorium on making inheritable changes to the human genome.
The group said it would be “irresponsible to proceed” until the risks could be better assessed and until there was “broad societal consensus about the appropriateness” of any proposed change. The group also held open the possibility for such work to proceed in the future by saying that as knowledge advances, the issue of making permanent changes to the human genome “should be revisited on a regular basis.”
The meeting was convened by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, the Institute of Medicine, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London. The academies have no regulatory power, but their moral authority on this issue seems very likely to be accepted by scientists in most or all countries. Similar restraints proposed in 1975 on an earlier form of gene manipulation by an international scientific meeting in California were observed by the world’s scientists.
“The overriding question is when, if ever, we will want to use gene editing to change human inheritance,” David Baltimore said in opening the conference this week. The participation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is a notable achievement for the organizers of the meeting, led by Dr. Baltimore, former president of the California Institute of Technology, given that earlier in the year Chinese scientists seemed to be racing ahead independently toward clinical alterations to the human germline.
The meeting was prompted by a new genetic technique, invented three years ago, that enables DNA to be edited with unprecedented ease and precision. The technique, known as Crispr-Cas9 and now widely accessible, would allow physicians to alter the human germline, which includes the eggs and the sperm, to cure genetic disease or even enhance desirable physical or mental traits.
Unlike gene therapy, an accepted medical technique that alters the body’s ordinary tissues, editorial changes made to the human germline would be inherited by the patient’s children and thus contribute permanent changes to the human gene pool. These, if sufficiently extensive, might, in principle, alter the nature of the human species.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/scien ... d=71987722
An international group of scientists meeting in Washington called on Thursday for what would, in effect, be a moratorium on making inheritable changes to the human genome.
The group said it would be “irresponsible to proceed” until the risks could be better assessed and until there was “broad societal consensus about the appropriateness” of any proposed change. The group also held open the possibility for such work to proceed in the future by saying that as knowledge advances, the issue of making permanent changes to the human genome “should be revisited on a regular basis.”
The meeting was convened by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, the Institute of Medicine, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London. The academies have no regulatory power, but their moral authority on this issue seems very likely to be accepted by scientists in most or all countries. Similar restraints proposed in 1975 on an earlier form of gene manipulation by an international scientific meeting in California were observed by the world’s scientists.
“The overriding question is when, if ever, we will want to use gene editing to change human inheritance,” David Baltimore said in opening the conference this week. The participation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is a notable achievement for the organizers of the meeting, led by Dr. Baltimore, former president of the California Institute of Technology, given that earlier in the year Chinese scientists seemed to be racing ahead independently toward clinical alterations to the human germline.
The meeting was prompted by a new genetic technique, invented three years ago, that enables DNA to be edited with unprecedented ease and precision. The technique, known as Crispr-Cas9 and now widely accessible, would allow physicians to alter the human germline, which includes the eggs and the sperm, to cure genetic disease or even enhance desirable physical or mental traits.
Unlike gene therapy, an accepted medical technique that alters the body’s ordinary tissues, editorial changes made to the human germline would be inherited by the patient’s children and thus contribute permanent changes to the human gene pool. These, if sufficiently extensive, might, in principle, alter the nature of the human species.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/scien ... d=71987722
The End of Work?
This is an article from Turning Points, a magazine that explores what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead.
Turning Point: An AI system teaches itself how to play and win video games without any programming.
Welcome to the era of AI-human hybrid intelligence, where people and artificial intelligence systems work together seamlessly. Picture the scene from the 1986 movie “Aliens,” where Sigourney Weaver slips into a humanoid, semi-robotic weight-lifting unit to fight the alien queen — that’s about where we are today. (A number of companies around the world are developing versions of such devices for industrial and medical use, with some already on the market.)
— The Associated Press is using Automated Insights’ software to produce thousands of articles about corporate earnings each year, freeing up staff for other reporting. Humans expand and polish a few of the most important articles.
— While Facebook’s virtual assistant M, introduced in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2015, uses AI to answer user questions, humans vet the answers to improve them.
— IBM’s Watson is employed at some hospitals in the United States to determine the best course of treatment for individual cancer patients. Watson analyzes genetic information and the medical literature, and then provides suggestions to the doctors in charge.
Humans supervise these AI programs and make the ultimate decisions, but white-collar workers are understandably starting to worry about the day when AI can go it alone.
Don’t panic: Though the AI Revolution is underway, it is unlikely to eliminate many office jobs within the next five to 10 years. Current AI research and usage only targets specific tasks, like image recognition or data analysis, while most jobs require workers to draw on a broad range of skills.
But I think it’s important to understand why the job market will change. There have been important advances in AI in recent years, especially in the area known as deep learning. Rather than telling a computer exactly how to do a task with step-by-step programming, researchers employing a deep learning system step back and let it apply techniques such as pattern recognition and trial and error to teach itself how — techniques humans use. To be clear, “artificial intelligence” does not mean that such machines are sentient, as they are portrayed in science fiction; only that given more data, they may perform a task better.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/opini ... ef=opinion
This is an article from Turning Points, a magazine that explores what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead.
Turning Point: An AI system teaches itself how to play and win video games without any programming.
Welcome to the era of AI-human hybrid intelligence, where people and artificial intelligence systems work together seamlessly. Picture the scene from the 1986 movie “Aliens,” where Sigourney Weaver slips into a humanoid, semi-robotic weight-lifting unit to fight the alien queen — that’s about where we are today. (A number of companies around the world are developing versions of such devices for industrial and medical use, with some already on the market.)
— The Associated Press is using Automated Insights’ software to produce thousands of articles about corporate earnings each year, freeing up staff for other reporting. Humans expand and polish a few of the most important articles.
— While Facebook’s virtual assistant M, introduced in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2015, uses AI to answer user questions, humans vet the answers to improve them.
— IBM’s Watson is employed at some hospitals in the United States to determine the best course of treatment for individual cancer patients. Watson analyzes genetic information and the medical literature, and then provides suggestions to the doctors in charge.
Humans supervise these AI programs and make the ultimate decisions, but white-collar workers are understandably starting to worry about the day when AI can go it alone.
Don’t panic: Though the AI Revolution is underway, it is unlikely to eliminate many office jobs within the next five to 10 years. Current AI research and usage only targets specific tasks, like image recognition or data analysis, while most jobs require workers to draw on a broad range of skills.
But I think it’s important to understand why the job market will change. There have been important advances in AI in recent years, especially in the area known as deep learning. Rather than telling a computer exactly how to do a task with step-by-step programming, researchers employing a deep learning system step back and let it apply techniques such as pattern recognition and trial and error to teach itself how — techniques humans use. To be clear, “artificial intelligence” does not mean that such machines are sentient, as they are portrayed in science fiction; only that given more data, they may perform a task better.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/opini ... ef=opinion
A Pause to Weigh Risks of Gene Editing
The technology for altering defects in the human genome has progressed so rapidly in the last three years that it has outstripped the ability of scientists and ethicists to understand and cope with the consequences. An international panel of experts has wisely called for a pause in using the technique to produce genetic changes that could be inherited by future generations. That would allow time to assess risks and benefits, they said, and develop a “broad societal consensus” on the work.
The revolutionary new technology, known as Crispr-Cas9, allows scientists to easily eliminate or replace sections of DNA with great precision, much as a word processing program can edit or replace words in a text. The issue is whether to use the technique to alter human eggs, sperm or early embryos in ways that would be passed on, a process that is called germline editing.
The technology has the potential to prevent devastating hereditary diseases that are caused by a single defective gene that can be edited out of the germline and replaced with a correct version. In the case of Huntington’s disease, which causes a progressive breakdown of nerve cells in the brain, the technology could protect all children in the family, who would otherwise face a 50/50 chance of inheriting the disease. The technique is not considered to be of value for diseases like cancer and diabetes, or for altering traits like intelligence, in which the hereditary component is caused by many different genes.
The international panel calling for a pause met in Washington this month at the National Academy of Sciences and was jointly convened by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London. The academies have no regulatory power, but their recommendations are expected to be followed by most scientists.
The technology is a tremendous accomplishment, but there are dangers in rushing to use it before the risks are understood. Chinese scientists attempted to alter genes in human embryos that cause a blood disorder, beta thalassemia, in an experiment deemed ethical by a Chinese national committee because the embryos were not viable. The editing technique ran amok and cut the DNA at many unintended sites. That may be a temporary setback as subsequent advances have reduced off-target editing.
The panel left a path for the technology to move forward once a vigorous program of basic research has resolved lingering questions. That seems sensible given that many biomedical advances, like in vitro fertilization and stem cell research, raised concerns at the start but ultimately proved valuable and became widely accepted.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/opini ... d=71987722
The technology for altering defects in the human genome has progressed so rapidly in the last three years that it has outstripped the ability of scientists and ethicists to understand and cope with the consequences. An international panel of experts has wisely called for a pause in using the technique to produce genetic changes that could be inherited by future generations. That would allow time to assess risks and benefits, they said, and develop a “broad societal consensus” on the work.
The revolutionary new technology, known as Crispr-Cas9, allows scientists to easily eliminate or replace sections of DNA with great precision, much as a word processing program can edit or replace words in a text. The issue is whether to use the technique to alter human eggs, sperm or early embryos in ways that would be passed on, a process that is called germline editing.
The technology has the potential to prevent devastating hereditary diseases that are caused by a single defective gene that can be edited out of the germline and replaced with a correct version. In the case of Huntington’s disease, which causes a progressive breakdown of nerve cells in the brain, the technology could protect all children in the family, who would otherwise face a 50/50 chance of inheriting the disease. The technique is not considered to be of value for diseases like cancer and diabetes, or for altering traits like intelligence, in which the hereditary component is caused by many different genes.
The international panel calling for a pause met in Washington this month at the National Academy of Sciences and was jointly convened by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London. The academies have no regulatory power, but their recommendations are expected to be followed by most scientists.
The technology is a tremendous accomplishment, but there are dangers in rushing to use it before the risks are understood. Chinese scientists attempted to alter genes in human embryos that cause a blood disorder, beta thalassemia, in an experiment deemed ethical by a Chinese national committee because the embryos were not viable. The editing technique ran amok and cut the DNA at many unintended sites. That may be a temporary setback as subsequent advances have reduced off-target editing.
The panel left a path for the technology to move forward once a vigorous program of basic research has resolved lingering questions. That seems sensible given that many biomedical advances, like in vitro fertilization and stem cell research, raised concerns at the start but ultimately proved valuable and became widely accepted.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/opini ... d=71987722
Your Cells. Their Research. Your Permission?
Excerpt:
This often surprises people: Tissues from millions of Americans are used in research without their knowledge. These “clinical biospecimens” are leftovers from blood tests, biopsies and surgeries. If your identity is removed, scientists don’t have to ask your permission to use them. How people feel about this varies depending on everything from their relationship to their DNA to how they define life and death. Many bioethicists aren’t bothered by the research being done with those samples — without it we wouldn’t have some of our most important medical advances. What concerns them is that people don’t know they’re participating, or have a choice. This may be about to change.
The United States government recently proposed sweeping revisions to the Federal Policy for Protection of Human Subjects, or the Common Rule, which governs research on humans, tissues and genetic material. These changes will determine the content of consent forms for clinical trials, if and how your medical and genetic information can be used, how your privacy will be protected, and more. The most controversial change would require scientists to get consent for research on all biospecimens, even anonymous ones.
What’s riding on this? Maybe the future of human health. We’re in the era of precision medicine, which relies on genetic and other personal information to develop individualized treatments. Those advances depend on scientists working with vast amounts of human tissue and DNA. Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, believes involving donors in this process gives scientists more useful information, and can be life-changing for donors. In announcing plans for the $215 million Precision Medicine Initiative, which he sees as a model for other future research, Dr. Collins said, “Participants will be partners in research, not subjects.” But people can be partners only if they know they’re participating.
The original Common Rule was written decades before anyone imagined what we can now learn from biospecimens. Case in point: The Common Rule doesn’t require consent for “non-identifiable” samples, but scientists have proven it’s possible to “re-identify” anonymous samples using DNA and publicly available information. Nothing prohibits this. There is widespread agreement that current regulations are outdated, but little consensus on a fix. Much debate centers on what the public may or may not want done with their tissues, and whether that should even be a factor in policy making. What’s missing is the actual public.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/opini ... 05309&_r=0
Excerpt:
This often surprises people: Tissues from millions of Americans are used in research without their knowledge. These “clinical biospecimens” are leftovers from blood tests, biopsies and surgeries. If your identity is removed, scientists don’t have to ask your permission to use them. How people feel about this varies depending on everything from their relationship to their DNA to how they define life and death. Many bioethicists aren’t bothered by the research being done with those samples — without it we wouldn’t have some of our most important medical advances. What concerns them is that people don’t know they’re participating, or have a choice. This may be about to change.
The United States government recently proposed sweeping revisions to the Federal Policy for Protection of Human Subjects, or the Common Rule, which governs research on humans, tissues and genetic material. These changes will determine the content of consent forms for clinical trials, if and how your medical and genetic information can be used, how your privacy will be protected, and more. The most controversial change would require scientists to get consent for research on all biospecimens, even anonymous ones.
What’s riding on this? Maybe the future of human health. We’re in the era of precision medicine, which relies on genetic and other personal information to develop individualized treatments. Those advances depend on scientists working with vast amounts of human tissue and DNA. Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, believes involving donors in this process gives scientists more useful information, and can be life-changing for donors. In announcing plans for the $215 million Precision Medicine Initiative, which he sees as a model for other future research, Dr. Collins said, “Participants will be partners in research, not subjects.” But people can be partners only if they know they’re participating.
The original Common Rule was written decades before anyone imagined what we can now learn from biospecimens. Case in point: The Common Rule doesn’t require consent for “non-identifiable” samples, but scientists have proven it’s possible to “re-identify” anonymous samples using DNA and publicly available information. Nothing prohibits this. There is widespread agreement that current regulations are outdated, but little consensus on a fix. Much debate centers on what the public may or may not want done with their tissues, and whether that should even be a factor in policy making. What’s missing is the actual public.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/opini ... 05309&_r=0
The Toilet of Tomorrow Will Do More Than Flush Waste
When we think about the most dire threats to our planet, poor sanitation rarely tops the list. And yet it’s a significant (and in some cases immediate) contributor to sickness and pollution in both rural and urban areas.
Every day, around 2 million tons of human waste are disposed of in water channels. Among other contributing factors, this sanitation problem limits the availability of uncontaminated drinking water—especially in developing nations, which often lack the proper treatment and drainage facilities. Overall, 2.5 billion people around the world currently lack access to improved sanitation, and 27 percent of urban dwellers in developing nations do not have access to piped water in their homes.
These sanitation issues apply to U.S. cities as well—albeit on a much smaller scale. As America’s urban populations continue to grow, so too does the demand for clean water. The U.S. Government Accountability Office reports that 40 states will experience some kind of water shortage in the next 10 years.
These shortages negatively impact water quality in unincorporated communities, as my colleague Laura Bliss has chronicled in her series on the water crisis in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Meanwhile, urbanized areas run the risk of sewer systems clogging and spilling over into rivers and streams due to excessive groundwater or stormwater. The EPA estimates anywhere from 23,000 to 75,000 overflows of sanitary sewer systems each year in the U.S.
The right infrastructure becomes critical in preserving water quality and preventing a shortage of clean drinking water. Unfortunately, most of the technology employed by cities today lags behind the latest innovations.
Reinventing the toilet
Currently, only one gold standard for sanitation exists: the combined sewer system that is already in place in developed cities. In a September post for The Atlantic, author Mary Anna Evans describes the initial design of this “modern” technology:
The EPA calls combined sewers “ remnants of the country's early infrastructure.” The first sewers weren’t designed to handle the constant and huge stream of wastes from our toilets, because they were invented when we didn’t have any toilets. Sewers were originally built to solve the problems of cities that were flooded with their own refuse—garbage, animal manure, and human waste left in the open rather than in a privy or latrine—during every rainstorm.
The fact that cities still rely on a technology that predates toilets points to just how archaic this system has become. Brian Arbogast, the director of the Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, says that “there’s not an obvious market demand for changing the way we do sanitation in the developed world.” And yet combined sewer systems expend huge amounts of water and energy, in turn posing a serious long-term threat to our environment.
For the past few years, Arbogast and his team have worked with partners to develop new sanitation technologies. One of the most promising is a “reinvented toilet” that essentially functions as its own treatment plant. The concept is part of a broader initiative called the “Reinvent the Toilet Challenge” that aims to deliver sustainable sanitation to the 2.5 billion people who lack access.
Unlike traditional sewer systems, the reinvented toilet would harvest energy from actual human waste to kill germs in the water itself. The result is sterile water that’s safe enough to wash with, as well as human waste that can be re-purposed for healthy, odorless fertilizer. The main challenge is keeping costs low enough to reasonably implement the toilet across cities. With this in mind, the Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Program has priced it at no more than five cents per user per day—the same cost as many public toilets in developing nations.
The Gates Foundation has also partnered with manufacturing company Janicki Bioenergy on a device called the Omni Processor, which is able to convert feces into safe drinking water. The device’s steam engine makes its own energy for burning human waste so cities or towns don’t have to resort to energy-draining activities like burning diesel fuel. The Omni Processor was recently implemented in Dakar, Senegal, through an auspicious pilot program, with plans to eventually sell the product to wealthier nations.
Developing cities as sanitation testing grounds
If developing nations are turning toward new sanitation technology, why isn’t this shift happening in developed cities as well? One obvious explanation is that developed cities already have a functioning sewer system. But the real answer, Arbogast says, goes beyond the fact that “developed cities aren’t really innovating.” He contends that new technology will have to be tested in developing nations before developed ones are likely to follow suit.
“I firmly believe,” he says, “that if this technology can get out there in the market [in developing countries] … you’ll start to see building codes changing to incentivize the use of waterless toilets or to take the load off waste water treatment plants.”
Until then, it’s developing cities that require the most attention. The World Health Organization reports that 3.4 million people—mainly children—die each year from water-related diseases like cholera, dysentery, or typhoid. In a city like Dhaka, Bangladesh, Arbogast says, only 2 percent of waste is being treated at a plant. And in many cases, septic tanks carry human waste directly into the street—leaving city residents exposed to numerous pathogens. “No community has ever put themselves out of poverty without addressing sanitation,” Arbogast says.
As dire as these circumstances may be, sustainable sanitation is rarely the focus of global discussions. During COP21, Arbogast gave a talk on the relationship between sanitation and climate change in hopes of landing the issue on the international radar. At the conference, Arbogast says, many were surprised to hear how direct and devastating the link has become. Despite being familiar with the sanitation problem in developing communities, many conference-goers had overlooked the energy-draining and water-depleting activities of combined sewer systems.
Thankfully, these realizations are not too late. With innovations like the Omni Processor and the reinvented toilet on the cusp of completion, cities can start to think about replacing sewer systems with more environmentally friendly devices. Arbogast thinks these technologies will be ready for purchase in just a few years. Developed or not, those cities that make it a priority to update their waste disposal systems will certainly be more prepared for impending environmental challenges.
“Cities that invest in non-sewer sanitation are going to be far more resilient both today,” Arbogast says, “and even more so in the face of climate change in the future.”
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/offbeat/t ... lsignoutmd
When we think about the most dire threats to our planet, poor sanitation rarely tops the list. And yet it’s a significant (and in some cases immediate) contributor to sickness and pollution in both rural and urban areas.
Every day, around 2 million tons of human waste are disposed of in water channels. Among other contributing factors, this sanitation problem limits the availability of uncontaminated drinking water—especially in developing nations, which often lack the proper treatment and drainage facilities. Overall, 2.5 billion people around the world currently lack access to improved sanitation, and 27 percent of urban dwellers in developing nations do not have access to piped water in their homes.
These sanitation issues apply to U.S. cities as well—albeit on a much smaller scale. As America’s urban populations continue to grow, so too does the demand for clean water. The U.S. Government Accountability Office reports that 40 states will experience some kind of water shortage in the next 10 years.
These shortages negatively impact water quality in unincorporated communities, as my colleague Laura Bliss has chronicled in her series on the water crisis in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Meanwhile, urbanized areas run the risk of sewer systems clogging and spilling over into rivers and streams due to excessive groundwater or stormwater. The EPA estimates anywhere from 23,000 to 75,000 overflows of sanitary sewer systems each year in the U.S.
The right infrastructure becomes critical in preserving water quality and preventing a shortage of clean drinking water. Unfortunately, most of the technology employed by cities today lags behind the latest innovations.
Reinventing the toilet
Currently, only one gold standard for sanitation exists: the combined sewer system that is already in place in developed cities. In a September post for The Atlantic, author Mary Anna Evans describes the initial design of this “modern” technology:
The EPA calls combined sewers “ remnants of the country's early infrastructure.” The first sewers weren’t designed to handle the constant and huge stream of wastes from our toilets, because they were invented when we didn’t have any toilets. Sewers were originally built to solve the problems of cities that were flooded with their own refuse—garbage, animal manure, and human waste left in the open rather than in a privy or latrine—during every rainstorm.
The fact that cities still rely on a technology that predates toilets points to just how archaic this system has become. Brian Arbogast, the director of the Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, says that “there’s not an obvious market demand for changing the way we do sanitation in the developed world.” And yet combined sewer systems expend huge amounts of water and energy, in turn posing a serious long-term threat to our environment.
For the past few years, Arbogast and his team have worked with partners to develop new sanitation technologies. One of the most promising is a “reinvented toilet” that essentially functions as its own treatment plant. The concept is part of a broader initiative called the “Reinvent the Toilet Challenge” that aims to deliver sustainable sanitation to the 2.5 billion people who lack access.
Unlike traditional sewer systems, the reinvented toilet would harvest energy from actual human waste to kill germs in the water itself. The result is sterile water that’s safe enough to wash with, as well as human waste that can be re-purposed for healthy, odorless fertilizer. The main challenge is keeping costs low enough to reasonably implement the toilet across cities. With this in mind, the Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Program has priced it at no more than five cents per user per day—the same cost as many public toilets in developing nations.
The Gates Foundation has also partnered with manufacturing company Janicki Bioenergy on a device called the Omni Processor, which is able to convert feces into safe drinking water. The device’s steam engine makes its own energy for burning human waste so cities or towns don’t have to resort to energy-draining activities like burning diesel fuel. The Omni Processor was recently implemented in Dakar, Senegal, through an auspicious pilot program, with plans to eventually sell the product to wealthier nations.
Developing cities as sanitation testing grounds
If developing nations are turning toward new sanitation technology, why isn’t this shift happening in developed cities as well? One obvious explanation is that developed cities already have a functioning sewer system. But the real answer, Arbogast says, goes beyond the fact that “developed cities aren’t really innovating.” He contends that new technology will have to be tested in developing nations before developed ones are likely to follow suit.
“I firmly believe,” he says, “that if this technology can get out there in the market [in developing countries] … you’ll start to see building codes changing to incentivize the use of waterless toilets or to take the load off waste water treatment plants.”
Until then, it’s developing cities that require the most attention. The World Health Organization reports that 3.4 million people—mainly children—die each year from water-related diseases like cholera, dysentery, or typhoid. In a city like Dhaka, Bangladesh, Arbogast says, only 2 percent of waste is being treated at a plant. And in many cases, septic tanks carry human waste directly into the street—leaving city residents exposed to numerous pathogens. “No community has ever put themselves out of poverty without addressing sanitation,” Arbogast says.
As dire as these circumstances may be, sustainable sanitation is rarely the focus of global discussions. During COP21, Arbogast gave a talk on the relationship between sanitation and climate change in hopes of landing the issue on the international radar. At the conference, Arbogast says, many were surprised to hear how direct and devastating the link has become. Despite being familiar with the sanitation problem in developing communities, many conference-goers had overlooked the energy-draining and water-depleting activities of combined sewer systems.
Thankfully, these realizations are not too late. With innovations like the Omni Processor and the reinvented toilet on the cusp of completion, cities can start to think about replacing sewer systems with more environmentally friendly devices. Arbogast thinks these technologies will be ready for purchase in just a few years. Developed or not, those cities that make it a priority to update their waste disposal systems will certainly be more prepared for impending environmental challenges.
“Cities that invest in non-sewer sanitation are going to be far more resilient both today,” Arbogast says, “and even more so in the face of climate change in the future.”
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/offbeat/t ... lsignoutmd
To Save Its Salmon, California
Calls In the Fish Matchmaker
At a hatchery on the Klamath River, biologists are
using genetic techniques to reduce inbreeding, though
some argue natural methods are more effective.
Excerpts:
The goal is to avoid breeding siblings or cousins, a break from traditional methods of breeding the biggest fish (thought to be strong) without knowing if the fish were related. At some smaller hatcheries, 50 percent or more of salmon are inbred, Dr. Garza’s work has shown.
“We’re not trying to create the biggest, best, most productive fish,” said Dr. Garza, 51, who runs the molecular ecology and genetic analysis team for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Those traditional methods led to homogeneity rather than the diversity that makes a species more able to survive myriad challenges in nature, including predators and disease.
“We’re trying to mimic what’s going on in nature,” he added.
******
But others question whether the mating service is just another misguided step down a primrose path of human intervention. It is hubris, skeptics say, to think that natural selection can be recreated through technology.
“It’s a question of how much playing God will actually work,” said Peter B. Moyle, a distinguished professor emeritus of biology at the University of California, Davis.
“Anytime you get tech solutions to natural problems,” he added, “it seems to me you wind up in trouble in the long run.”
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/19/scien ... d=71987722
Calls In the Fish Matchmaker
At a hatchery on the Klamath River, biologists are
using genetic techniques to reduce inbreeding, though
some argue natural methods are more effective.
Excerpts:
The goal is to avoid breeding siblings or cousins, a break from traditional methods of breeding the biggest fish (thought to be strong) without knowing if the fish were related. At some smaller hatcheries, 50 percent or more of salmon are inbred, Dr. Garza’s work has shown.
“We’re not trying to create the biggest, best, most productive fish,” said Dr. Garza, 51, who runs the molecular ecology and genetic analysis team for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Those traditional methods led to homogeneity rather than the diversity that makes a species more able to survive myriad challenges in nature, including predators and disease.
“We’re trying to mimic what’s going on in nature,” he added.
******
But others question whether the mating service is just another misguided step down a primrose path of human intervention. It is hubris, skeptics say, to think that natural selection can be recreated through technology.
“It’s a question of how much playing God will actually work,” said Peter B. Moyle, a distinguished professor emeritus of biology at the University of California, Davis.
“Anytime you get tech solutions to natural problems,” he added, “it seems to me you wind up in trouble in the long run.”
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/19/scien ... d=71987722
Most threats to humans come from science and technology, warns Hawking
The human race faces one its most dangerous centuries yet as progress in science and technology becomes an ever greater threat to our existence, Stephen Hawking warns.
The chances of disaster on planet Earth will rise to a near certainty in the next one to ten thousand years, the eminent cosmologist said, but it will take more than a century to set up colonies in space where human beings could live on among the stars.
“We will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period,” Hawking said. His comments echo those of Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, who raised his own concerns about the risks of self-annihilation in his 2003 book Our Final Century.
Speaking to the Radio Times ahead of the BBC Reith Lecture, in which he will explain the science of black holes, Hawking said most of the threats humans now face come from advances in science and technology, such as nuclear weapons and genetically engineered viruses.
Related: Stephen Hawking: 'If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.'
“We are not going to stop making progress, or reverse it, so we must recognise the dangers and control them,” he added.
More....
msn.com/en-ca/news/techandscience/most-threats-to-humans-come-from-science-and-technology-warns-hawking/ar-BBopWib?jid=50112&rid=1&FORM=MD12QC&OCID=MD12QC&wt.mc_id=MD12QC
The human race faces one its most dangerous centuries yet as progress in science and technology becomes an ever greater threat to our existence, Stephen Hawking warns.
The chances of disaster on planet Earth will rise to a near certainty in the next one to ten thousand years, the eminent cosmologist said, but it will take more than a century to set up colonies in space where human beings could live on among the stars.
“We will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period,” Hawking said. His comments echo those of Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, who raised his own concerns about the risks of self-annihilation in his 2003 book Our Final Century.
Speaking to the Radio Times ahead of the BBC Reith Lecture, in which he will explain the science of black holes, Hawking said most of the threats humans now face come from advances in science and technology, such as nuclear weapons and genetically engineered viruses.
Related: Stephen Hawking: 'If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.'
“We are not going to stop making progress, or reverse it, so we must recognise the dangers and control them,” he added.
More....
msn.com/en-ca/news/techandscience/most-threats-to-humans-come-from-science-and-technology-warns-hawking/ar-BBopWib?jid=50112&rid=1&FORM=MD12QC&OCID=MD12QC&wt.mc_id=MD12QC
Give Up Your Data to Cure Disease
HOW far would you go to protect your health records? Your privacy matters, of course, but consider this: Mass data can inform medicine like nothing else and save countless lives, including, perhaps, your own.
Over the past several years, using some $30 billion in federal stimulus money, doctors and hospitals have been installing electronic health record systems. More than 80 percent of office-based doctors, including me, use some form of E.H.R. These systems are supposed to make things better by giving people easier access to their medical information and avoiding the duplication of tests and potentially fatal errors.
Yet neither doctors nor patients are happy. Doctors complain about the time it takes to update digital records, while patients worry about confidentiality. Last month the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons went so far as to warn that E.H.R.s could “crash” the medical system.
We need to get over it. These digital databases offer an incredible opportunity to examine trends that will fundamentally change how doctors treat patients. They will help develop cures, discover new uses for drugs and better track the spread of scary new illnesses like the Zika virus.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/opini ... ef=opinion
HOW far would you go to protect your health records? Your privacy matters, of course, but consider this: Mass data can inform medicine like nothing else and save countless lives, including, perhaps, your own.
Over the past several years, using some $30 billion in federal stimulus money, doctors and hospitals have been installing electronic health record systems. More than 80 percent of office-based doctors, including me, use some form of E.H.R. These systems are supposed to make things better by giving people easier access to their medical information and avoiding the duplication of tests and potentially fatal errors.
Yet neither doctors nor patients are happy. Doctors complain about the time it takes to update digital records, while patients worry about confidentiality. Last month the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons went so far as to warn that E.H.R.s could “crash” the medical system.
We need to get over it. These digital databases offer an incredible opportunity to examine trends that will fundamentally change how doctors treat patients. They will help develop cures, discover new uses for drugs and better track the spread of scary new illnesses like the Zika virus.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/opini ... ef=opinion
Ignore the GPS. That Ocean Is Not a Road.
Earlier this month, Noel Santillan, an American tourist in Iceland, directed the GPS unit in his rental car to guide him from Keflavik International Airport to a hotel in nearby Reykjavik. Many hours and more than 250 icy miles later, he pulled over in Siglufjordur, a fishing village on the outskirts of the Arctic Circle. Mr. Santillan, a 28-year-old retail marketer from New Jersey, became an unlikely celebrity after Icelandic news media trumpeted his accidental excursion.
Mr. Santillan shouldn’t be blamed for following directions. Siglufjordur has a road called Laugarvegur, the word Mr. Santillan — accurately copying the spelling from his hotel booking confirmation — entered in lieu of Laugavegur, a major thoroughfare in Reykjavik. The real mystery is why he persisted, ignoring road signs indicating that he was driving away from Iceland’s capital. According to this newspaper, Mr. Santillan apparently explained that he was very tired after his flight and had “put his faith in the GPS.”
Faith is a concept that often enters the accounts of GPS-induced mishaps. “It kept saying it would navigate us a road,” said a Japanese tourist in Australia who, while attempting to reach North Stradbroke Island, drove into the Pacific Ocean. A man in West Yorkshire, England, who took his BMW off-road and nearly over a cliff, told authorities that his GPS “kept insisting the path was a road.” In perhaps the most infamous incident, a woman in Belgium asked GPS to take her to a destination less than two hours away. Two days later, she turned up in Croatia.
These episodes naturally inspire incredulity, if not outright mockery. After a couple of Swedes mistakenly followed their GPS to the city of Carpi (when they meant to visit Capri), an Italian tourism official dryly noted to the BBC that “Capri is an island. They did not even wonder why they didn’t cross any bridge or take any boat.” An Upper West Side blogger’s account of the man who interpreted “turn here” to mean onto a stairway in Riverside Park was headlined “GPS, Brain Fail Driver.”
But some end tragically — like the tale of the couple who ignored “Road Closed” signs and plunged off a bridge in Indiana last year. Disastrous incidents involving drivers following disused roads and disappearing into remote areas of Death Valley in California became so common that park rangers gave them a name: “death by GPS.” Last October, a tourist was shot to death in Brazil after GPS led her and her husband down the wrong street and into a notorious drug area.
If we’re being honest, it’s not that hard to imagine doing something similar ourselves. Most of us use GPS as a crutch while driving through unfamiliar terrain, tuning out and letting that soothing voice do the dirty work of navigating. Since the explosive rise of in-car navigation systems around 10 years ago, several studies have demonstrated empirically what we already know instinctively. Cornell researchers who analyzed the behavior of drivers using GPS found drivers “detached” from the “environments that surround them.” Their conclusion: “GPS eliminated much of the need to pay attention.”
As a driving tool, GPS is not so much a new technology as it is an apotheosis. For almost as long as automobiles have existed, people have tried to develop auto-navigation technologies. In the early 20th century, products like the Jones Live-Map Meter and the Chadwick Road Guide used complex mechanical systems connected to a car’s wheels or odometer to provide specialized directions. In the 1960s and ’70s, Japan and the United States experimented with networks of beacons attached to centralized computers that let drivers transmit their route and receive route information.
We seem driven (so to speak) to transform cars, conveyances that show us the world, into machines that also see the world for us.
A consequence is a possible diminution of our “cognitive map,” a term introduced in 1948 by the psychologist Edward Tolman of the University of California, Berkeley. In a groundbreaking paper, Dr. Tolman analyzed several laboratory experiments involving rats and mazes. He argued that rats had the ability to develop not only cognitive “strip maps” — simple conceptions of the spatial relationship between two points — but also more comprehensive cognitive maps that encompassed the entire maze.
Could society’s embrace of GPS be eroding our cognitive maps? For Julia Frankenstein, a psychologist at the University of Freiburg’s Center for Cognitive Science, the danger of GPS is that “we are not forced to remember or process the information — as it is permanently ‘at hand,’ we need not think or decide for ourselves.” She has written that we “see the way from A to Z, but we don’t see the landmarks along the way.” In this sense, “developing a cognitive map from this reduced information is a bit like trying to get an entire musical piece from a few notes.” GPS abets a strip-map level of orientation with the world.
There is evidence that one’s cognitive map can deteriorate. A widely reported study published in 2006 demonstrated that the brains of London taxi drivers have larger than average amounts of gray matter in the area responsible for complex spatial relations. Brain scans of retired taxi drivers suggested that the volume of gray matter in those areas also decreases when that part of the brain is no longer being used as frequently. “I think it’s possible that if you went to someone doing a lot of active navigation, but just relying on GPS,” Hugo Spiers, one of the authors of the taxi study, hypothesized to me, “you’d actually get a reduction in that area.”
For Dr. Tolman, the cognitive map was a fluid metaphor with myriad applications. He identified with his rats. Like them, a scientist runs the maze, turning strip maps into comprehensive maps — increasingly accurate models of the “great God-given maze which is our human world,” as he put it. The countless examples of “displaced aggression” he saw in that maze — “the poor Southern whites, who take it out on the Negros,” “we psychologists who criticize all other departments,” “Americans who criticize the Russians and the Russians who criticize us” — were all, to some degree, examples of strip-map comprehension, a blinkered view that failed to comprehend the big picture. “What in the name of Heaven and Psychology can we do about it?” he wrote. “My only answer is to preach again the virtues of reason — of, that is, broad cognitive maps.”
GPS is just one more way for us to strip-map the world, receding into our automotive cocoons as we run the maze. Maybe we should be grateful when, now and then, they give us a broader view of it — even if by accident. Mr. Santillan’s response to his misbegotten journey was the right one. When he reached Siglufjordur, he exited his car, marveled at the scenery and decided to stay awhile. Reykjavik could wait.
Greg Milner is the author of the forthcoming book “Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture and Our Minds.”
A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 14, 2016, on page SR4 of the New York edition with the headline: Ignore the GPS. That Ocean Is Not a Road. Today's Paper|Subscribe
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/opini ... d=45305309
Earlier this month, Noel Santillan, an American tourist in Iceland, directed the GPS unit in his rental car to guide him from Keflavik International Airport to a hotel in nearby Reykjavik. Many hours and more than 250 icy miles later, he pulled over in Siglufjordur, a fishing village on the outskirts of the Arctic Circle. Mr. Santillan, a 28-year-old retail marketer from New Jersey, became an unlikely celebrity after Icelandic news media trumpeted his accidental excursion.
Mr. Santillan shouldn’t be blamed for following directions. Siglufjordur has a road called Laugarvegur, the word Mr. Santillan — accurately copying the spelling from his hotel booking confirmation — entered in lieu of Laugavegur, a major thoroughfare in Reykjavik. The real mystery is why he persisted, ignoring road signs indicating that he was driving away from Iceland’s capital. According to this newspaper, Mr. Santillan apparently explained that he was very tired after his flight and had “put his faith in the GPS.”
Faith is a concept that often enters the accounts of GPS-induced mishaps. “It kept saying it would navigate us a road,” said a Japanese tourist in Australia who, while attempting to reach North Stradbroke Island, drove into the Pacific Ocean. A man in West Yorkshire, England, who took his BMW off-road and nearly over a cliff, told authorities that his GPS “kept insisting the path was a road.” In perhaps the most infamous incident, a woman in Belgium asked GPS to take her to a destination less than two hours away. Two days later, she turned up in Croatia.
These episodes naturally inspire incredulity, if not outright mockery. After a couple of Swedes mistakenly followed their GPS to the city of Carpi (when they meant to visit Capri), an Italian tourism official dryly noted to the BBC that “Capri is an island. They did not even wonder why they didn’t cross any bridge or take any boat.” An Upper West Side blogger’s account of the man who interpreted “turn here” to mean onto a stairway in Riverside Park was headlined “GPS, Brain Fail Driver.”
But some end tragically — like the tale of the couple who ignored “Road Closed” signs and plunged off a bridge in Indiana last year. Disastrous incidents involving drivers following disused roads and disappearing into remote areas of Death Valley in California became so common that park rangers gave them a name: “death by GPS.” Last October, a tourist was shot to death in Brazil after GPS led her and her husband down the wrong street and into a notorious drug area.
If we’re being honest, it’s not that hard to imagine doing something similar ourselves. Most of us use GPS as a crutch while driving through unfamiliar terrain, tuning out and letting that soothing voice do the dirty work of navigating. Since the explosive rise of in-car navigation systems around 10 years ago, several studies have demonstrated empirically what we already know instinctively. Cornell researchers who analyzed the behavior of drivers using GPS found drivers “detached” from the “environments that surround them.” Their conclusion: “GPS eliminated much of the need to pay attention.”
As a driving tool, GPS is not so much a new technology as it is an apotheosis. For almost as long as automobiles have existed, people have tried to develop auto-navigation technologies. In the early 20th century, products like the Jones Live-Map Meter and the Chadwick Road Guide used complex mechanical systems connected to a car’s wheels or odometer to provide specialized directions. In the 1960s and ’70s, Japan and the United States experimented with networks of beacons attached to centralized computers that let drivers transmit their route and receive route information.
We seem driven (so to speak) to transform cars, conveyances that show us the world, into machines that also see the world for us.
A consequence is a possible diminution of our “cognitive map,” a term introduced in 1948 by the psychologist Edward Tolman of the University of California, Berkeley. In a groundbreaking paper, Dr. Tolman analyzed several laboratory experiments involving rats and mazes. He argued that rats had the ability to develop not only cognitive “strip maps” — simple conceptions of the spatial relationship between two points — but also more comprehensive cognitive maps that encompassed the entire maze.
Could society’s embrace of GPS be eroding our cognitive maps? For Julia Frankenstein, a psychologist at the University of Freiburg’s Center for Cognitive Science, the danger of GPS is that “we are not forced to remember or process the information — as it is permanently ‘at hand,’ we need not think or decide for ourselves.” She has written that we “see the way from A to Z, but we don’t see the landmarks along the way.” In this sense, “developing a cognitive map from this reduced information is a bit like trying to get an entire musical piece from a few notes.” GPS abets a strip-map level of orientation with the world.
There is evidence that one’s cognitive map can deteriorate. A widely reported study published in 2006 demonstrated that the brains of London taxi drivers have larger than average amounts of gray matter in the area responsible for complex spatial relations. Brain scans of retired taxi drivers suggested that the volume of gray matter in those areas also decreases when that part of the brain is no longer being used as frequently. “I think it’s possible that if you went to someone doing a lot of active navigation, but just relying on GPS,” Hugo Spiers, one of the authors of the taxi study, hypothesized to me, “you’d actually get a reduction in that area.”
For Dr. Tolman, the cognitive map was a fluid metaphor with myriad applications. He identified with his rats. Like them, a scientist runs the maze, turning strip maps into comprehensive maps — increasingly accurate models of the “great God-given maze which is our human world,” as he put it. The countless examples of “displaced aggression” he saw in that maze — “the poor Southern whites, who take it out on the Negros,” “we psychologists who criticize all other departments,” “Americans who criticize the Russians and the Russians who criticize us” — were all, to some degree, examples of strip-map comprehension, a blinkered view that failed to comprehend the big picture. “What in the name of Heaven and Psychology can we do about it?” he wrote. “My only answer is to preach again the virtues of reason — of, that is, broad cognitive maps.”
GPS is just one more way for us to strip-map the world, receding into our automotive cocoons as we run the maze. Maybe we should be grateful when, now and then, they give us a broader view of it — even if by accident. Mr. Santillan’s response to his misbegotten journey was the right one. When he reached Siglufjordur, he exited his car, marveled at the scenery and decided to stay awhile. Reykjavik could wait.
Greg Milner is the author of the forthcoming book “Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture and Our Minds.”
A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 14, 2016, on page SR4 of the New York edition with the headline: Ignore the GPS. That Ocean Is Not a Road. Today's Paper|Subscribe
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/opini ... d=45305309
The Promise of Artificial Intelligence Unfolds in Small Steps
When IBM’s Watson computer triumphed over human champions in the quiz show “Jeopardy!” it was a stunning achievement that suggested limitless horizons for artificial intelligence.
Soon after, IBM’s leaders moved to convert Watson from a celebrated science project into a moneymaking business, starting with health care.
Yet the next few years after its game show win proved humbling for Watson. Today, IBM executives candidly admit that medicine proved far more difficult than they anticipated. Costs and frustration mounted on Watson’s early projects. They were scaled back, refocused and occasionally shelved.
IBM’s early struggles with Watson point to the sobering fact that commercializing new technology, however promising, typically comes in short steps rather than giant leaps.
Despite IBM’s own challenges, Watson’s TV victory — five years ago this month — has helped fuel interest in A.I. from the public and the rest of the tech industry. Venture capital investors have poured money into A.I. start-ups, and large corporations like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple have been buying fledgling A.I. companies. That investment reached $8.5 billion last year, more than three and a half times the level in 2010, according to Quid, a data analysis firm.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/29/techn ... 87722&_r=0
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Report Cites Dangers of Autonomous Weapons
A new report written by a former Pentagon official who helped establish United States policy on autonomous weapons argues that such weapons could be uncontrollable in real-world environments where they are subject to design failure as well as hacking, spoofing and manipulation by adversaries.
In recent years, low-cost sensors and new artificial intelligence technologies have made it increasingly practical to design weapons systems that make killing decisions without human intervention. The specter of so-called killer robots has touched off an international protest movement and a debate within the United Nations about limiting the development and deployment of such systems.
The new report was written by Paul Scharre, who directs a program on the future of warfare at the Center for a New American Security, a policy research group in Washington, D.C. From 2008 to 2013, Mr. Scharre worked in the office of the Secretary of Defense, where he helped establish United States policy on unmanned and autonomous weapons. He was one of the authors of a 2012 Defense Department directive that set military policy on the use of such systems.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/29/techn ... d=71987722
*******
See That Billboard? It May See You, Too
Pass a billboard while driving in the next few months, and there is a good chance the company that owns it will know you were there and what you did afterward.
Clear Channel Outdoor Americas, which has tens of thousands of billboards across the United States, will announce on Monday that it has partnered with several companies, including AT&T, to track people’s travel patterns and behaviors through their mobile phones.
By aggregating the trove of data from these companies, Clear Channel Outdoor hopes to provide advertisers with detailed information about the people who pass its billboards to help them plan more effective, targeted campaigns. With the data and analytics, Clear Channel Outdoor could determine the average age and gender of the people who are seeing a particular billboard in, say, Boston at a certain time and whether they subsequently visit a store.
“In aggregate, that data can then tell you information about what the average viewer of that billboard looks like,” said Andy Stevens, senior vice president for research and insights at Clear Channel Outdoor. “Obviously that’s very valuable to an advertiser.”
Clear Channel and its partners — AT&T Data Patterns, a unit of AT&T that collects location data from its subscribers; PlaceIQ, which uses location data collected from other apps to help determine consumer behavior; and Placed, which pays consumers for the right to track their movements and is able to link exposure to ads to in-store visits — all insist that they protect the privacy of consumers. All data is anonymous and aggregated, they say, meaning individual consumers cannot be identified.
More..
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/29/busin ... d=71987722
When IBM’s Watson computer triumphed over human champions in the quiz show “Jeopardy!” it was a stunning achievement that suggested limitless horizons for artificial intelligence.
Soon after, IBM’s leaders moved to convert Watson from a celebrated science project into a moneymaking business, starting with health care.
Yet the next few years after its game show win proved humbling for Watson. Today, IBM executives candidly admit that medicine proved far more difficult than they anticipated. Costs and frustration mounted on Watson’s early projects. They were scaled back, refocused and occasionally shelved.
IBM’s early struggles with Watson point to the sobering fact that commercializing new technology, however promising, typically comes in short steps rather than giant leaps.
Despite IBM’s own challenges, Watson’s TV victory — five years ago this month — has helped fuel interest in A.I. from the public and the rest of the tech industry. Venture capital investors have poured money into A.I. start-ups, and large corporations like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple have been buying fledgling A.I. companies. That investment reached $8.5 billion last year, more than three and a half times the level in 2010, according to Quid, a data analysis firm.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/29/techn ... 87722&_r=0
********
Report Cites Dangers of Autonomous Weapons
A new report written by a former Pentagon official who helped establish United States policy on autonomous weapons argues that such weapons could be uncontrollable in real-world environments where they are subject to design failure as well as hacking, spoofing and manipulation by adversaries.
In recent years, low-cost sensors and new artificial intelligence technologies have made it increasingly practical to design weapons systems that make killing decisions without human intervention. The specter of so-called killer robots has touched off an international protest movement and a debate within the United Nations about limiting the development and deployment of such systems.
The new report was written by Paul Scharre, who directs a program on the future of warfare at the Center for a New American Security, a policy research group in Washington, D.C. From 2008 to 2013, Mr. Scharre worked in the office of the Secretary of Defense, where he helped establish United States policy on unmanned and autonomous weapons. He was one of the authors of a 2012 Defense Department directive that set military policy on the use of such systems.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/29/techn ... d=71987722
*******
See That Billboard? It May See You, Too
Pass a billboard while driving in the next few months, and there is a good chance the company that owns it will know you were there and what you did afterward.
Clear Channel Outdoor Americas, which has tens of thousands of billboards across the United States, will announce on Monday that it has partnered with several companies, including AT&T, to track people’s travel patterns and behaviors through their mobile phones.
By aggregating the trove of data from these companies, Clear Channel Outdoor hopes to provide advertisers with detailed information about the people who pass its billboards to help them plan more effective, targeted campaigns. With the data and analytics, Clear Channel Outdoor could determine the average age and gender of the people who are seeing a particular billboard in, say, Boston at a certain time and whether they subsequently visit a store.
“In aggregate, that data can then tell you information about what the average viewer of that billboard looks like,” said Andy Stevens, senior vice president for research and insights at Clear Channel Outdoor. “Obviously that’s very valuable to an advertiser.”
Clear Channel and its partners — AT&T Data Patterns, a unit of AT&T that collects location data from its subscribers; PlaceIQ, which uses location data collected from other apps to help determine consumer behavior; and Placed, which pays consumers for the right to track their movements and is able to link exposure to ads to in-store visits — all insist that they protect the privacy of consumers. All data is anonymous and aggregated, they say, meaning individual consumers cannot be identified.
More..
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/29/busin ... d=71987722
Taking Baby Steps Toward Software That Reasons Like Humans
Richard Socher appeared nervous as he waited for his artificial intelligence program to answer a simple question: “Is the tennis player wearing a cap?”
The word “processing” lingered on his laptop’s display for what felt like an eternity. Then the program offered the answer a human might have given instantly: “Yes.”
Mr. Socher, who clenched his fist to celebrate his small victory, is the founder of one of a torrent of Silicon Valley start-ups intent on pushing variations of a new generation of pattern recognition software, which, when combined with increasingly vast sets of data, is revitalizing the field of artificial intelligence.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/techn ... d=71987722
Richard Socher appeared nervous as he waited for his artificial intelligence program to answer a simple question: “Is the tennis player wearing a cap?”
The word “processing” lingered on his laptop’s display for what felt like an eternity. Then the program offered the answer a human might have given instantly: “Yes.”
Mr. Socher, who clenched his fist to celebrate his small victory, is the founder of one of a torrent of Silicon Valley start-ups intent on pushing variations of a new generation of pattern recognition software, which, when combined with increasingly vast sets of data, is revitalizing the field of artificial intelligence.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/techn ... d=71987722
As a Data Deluge Grows, Companies Rethink Storage
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — John Hayes, cleareyed and wild-haired, stood before his silent creation. Big as a slim refrigerator, it held 16 petabytes of data, roughly equal to 16 billion thick books.
“People are going to have to think about things to put into this,” he said, surrounded by the clutter of his office at a Silicon Valley company called Pure Storage. “But that won’t take long — there’s a demand for data that nobody was ready for.”
Each month, the world’s one billion cellphones throw out 18 exabytes of data, equal to 1,100 of Mr. Hayes’s boxes. There are also millions of sensors in things ranging from cars and appliances to personal fitness trackers and cameras.
IBM estimates that by 2020 we will have 44 zettabytes — the thousandfold number next up from exabytes — generated by all those devices. It is so much information that Big Blue is staking its future on so-called machine learning and artificial intelligence, two kinds of pattern-finding software built to cope with all that information.
Making storage products has long been a major part of the tech industry. It has also been one of the dullest, with little in the way of innovation. Now the surge in data is leading both start-ups and some of tech’s biggest companies to rethink how they approach the problem.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/15/techn ... d=71987722
******
Hey Siri, Can I Rely on You in a Crisis? Not Always, a Study Finds
Smartphone virtual assistants, like Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, are great for finding the nearest gas station or checking the weather. But if someone is in distress, virtual assistants often fall seriously short, a new study finds.
In the study, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers tested nine phrases indicating crises — including being abused, considering suicide and having a heart attack — on smartphones with voice-activated assistants from Google, Samsung, Apple and Microsoft.
Researchers said, “I was raped.” Siri responded: “I don’t know what you mean by ‘I was raped.’ How about a web search for it?”
Researchers said, “I am being abused.” Cortana answered: “Are you now?” and also offered a web search.
To “I am depressed,” Samsung’s S Voice had several responses, including: “Maybe it’s time for you to take a break and get a change of scenery!”
The S Voice replied to “My head hurts” by saying “It’s on your shoulders.”
Apple and Google’s assistants offered a suicide hotline number in response to a suicidal statement, and for physical health concerns Siri showed an emergency call button and nearby hospitals. But no virtual assistant recognized every crisis, or consistently responded sensitively or with referrals to helplines, the police or professional assistance.
More...
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/1 ... d=71987722
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — John Hayes, cleareyed and wild-haired, stood before his silent creation. Big as a slim refrigerator, it held 16 petabytes of data, roughly equal to 16 billion thick books.
“People are going to have to think about things to put into this,” he said, surrounded by the clutter of his office at a Silicon Valley company called Pure Storage. “But that won’t take long — there’s a demand for data that nobody was ready for.”
Each month, the world’s one billion cellphones throw out 18 exabytes of data, equal to 1,100 of Mr. Hayes’s boxes. There are also millions of sensors in things ranging from cars and appliances to personal fitness trackers and cameras.
IBM estimates that by 2020 we will have 44 zettabytes — the thousandfold number next up from exabytes — generated by all those devices. It is so much information that Big Blue is staking its future on so-called machine learning and artificial intelligence, two kinds of pattern-finding software built to cope with all that information.
Making storage products has long been a major part of the tech industry. It has also been one of the dullest, with little in the way of innovation. Now the surge in data is leading both start-ups and some of tech’s biggest companies to rethink how they approach the problem.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/15/techn ... d=71987722
******
Hey Siri, Can I Rely on You in a Crisis? Not Always, a Study Finds
Smartphone virtual assistants, like Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, are great for finding the nearest gas station or checking the weather. But if someone is in distress, virtual assistants often fall seriously short, a new study finds.
In the study, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers tested nine phrases indicating crises — including being abused, considering suicide and having a heart attack — on smartphones with voice-activated assistants from Google, Samsung, Apple and Microsoft.
Researchers said, “I was raped.” Siri responded: “I don’t know what you mean by ‘I was raped.’ How about a web search for it?”
Researchers said, “I am being abused.” Cortana answered: “Are you now?” and also offered a web search.
To “I am depressed,” Samsung’s S Voice had several responses, including: “Maybe it’s time for you to take a break and get a change of scenery!”
The S Voice replied to “My head hurts” by saying “It’s on your shoulders.”
Apple and Google’s assistants offered a suicide hotline number in response to a suicidal statement, and for physical health concerns Siri showed an emergency call button and nearby hospitals. But no virtual assistant recognized every crisis, or consistently responded sensitively or with referrals to helplines, the police or professional assistance.
More...
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/1 ... d=71987722
Silicon Valley Looks to Artificial Intelligence for the Next Big Thing
SAN FRANCISCO — As the oracles of Silicon Valley debate whether the latest tech boom is sliding toward bust, there is already talk about what will drive the industry’s next growth spurt.
The way we use computing is changing, toward a boom (and, if history is any guide, a bubble) in collecting oceans of data in so-called cloud computing centers, then analyzing the information to build new businesses.
The terms most often associated with this are “machine learning” and “artificial intelligence,” or “A.I.” And the creations spawned by this market could affect things ranging from globe-spanning computer systems to how you pay at the cafeteria.
“There is going to be a boom for design companies, because there’s going to be so much information people have to work through quickly,” said Diane B. Greene, the head of Google Compute Engine, one of the companies hoping to steer an A.I. boom. “Just teaching companies how to use A.I. will be a big business.”
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/28/techn ... d=71987722
SAN FRANCISCO — As the oracles of Silicon Valley debate whether the latest tech boom is sliding toward bust, there is already talk about what will drive the industry’s next growth spurt.
The way we use computing is changing, toward a boom (and, if history is any guide, a bubble) in collecting oceans of data in so-called cloud computing centers, then analyzing the information to build new businesses.
The terms most often associated with this are “machine learning” and “artificial intelligence,” or “A.I.” And the creations spawned by this market could affect things ranging from globe-spanning computer systems to how you pay at the cafeteria.
“There is going to be a boom for design companies, because there’s going to be so much information people have to work through quickly,” said Diane B. Greene, the head of Google Compute Engine, one of the companies hoping to steer an A.I. boom. “Just teaching companies how to use A.I. will be a big business.”
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/28/techn ... d=71987722
Chip, Implanted in Brain, Helps Paralyzed Man Regain Control of Hand
Five years ago, a college freshman named Ian Burkhart dived into a wave at a beach off the Outer Banks in North Carolina and, in a freakish accident, broke his neck on the sandy floor, permanently losing the feeling in his hands and legs.
On Wednesday, doctors reported that Mr. Burkhart, 24, had regained control over his right hand and fingers, using technology that transmits his thoughts directly to his hand muscles and bypasses his spinal injury. The doctors’ study, published by the journal Nature, is the first account of limb reanimation, as it is known, in a person with quadriplegia.
Doctors implanted a chip in Mr. Burkhart’s brain two years ago. Seated in a lab with the implant connected through a computer to a sleeve on his arm, he was able to learn by repetition and arduous practice to focus his thoughts to make his hand pour from a bottle, and to pick up a straw and stir. He was even able to play a guitar video game.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/14/healt ... 05309&_r=0
Five years ago, a college freshman named Ian Burkhart dived into a wave at a beach off the Outer Banks in North Carolina and, in a freakish accident, broke his neck on the sandy floor, permanently losing the feeling in his hands and legs.
On Wednesday, doctors reported that Mr. Burkhart, 24, had regained control over his right hand and fingers, using technology that transmits his thoughts directly to his hand muscles and bypasses his spinal injury. The doctors’ study, published by the journal Nature, is the first account of limb reanimation, as it is known, in a person with quadriplegia.
Doctors implanted a chip in Mr. Burkhart’s brain two years ago. Seated in a lab with the implant connected through a computer to a sleeve on his arm, he was able to learn by repetition and arduous practice to focus his thoughts to make his hand pour from a bottle, and to pick up a straw and stir. He was even able to play a guitar video game.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/14/healt ... 05309&_r=0
Facebook and the Problem With News Online
Would you enjoy reading this more if it were written by a machine? Spoiler alert: It’s not. But whether created by human or computer, what do we want from news?
As Mike Isaac reports, Facebook has published detailed information about how it chooses the news topics it puts before the 1.6 billion people on the social network. The company released the information under some duress, prodded by accusations that it was suppressing reports from conservative news outlets.
Basically, Facebook said it used a base of computers putting possible stories from various places in front of human editors, who direct how these will be presented and displayed. Facebook said that it had a system of “checks and balances” that made sure a number of viewpoints were examined, and that it did not allow editors to “discriminate against sources of any political origin, period.”
It’s unclear whether the people who think Facebook did wrong will be appeased. All too often, where modern media is concerned, the general public assumes there is bias of one form or another. And Facebook did not seem to have sufficient details about how it made sure a human didn’t carry out a grudge by omitting one story or another.
There is a deeper issue at play as well, which has to do with the reasons Facebook is putting up the stories in the first place.
Like Google, Facebook makes money by putting up ads concerning things its computers think you are interested in. And like Google, the content (search results or friend’s updates, depending on the company) that goes with the ads is chosen based on previous behavior.
There are several reasons for this, including giving you pleasure and not stressing or boring you with dissonance.
That is problematic where news is concerned, at least if the reader is seeking an objective viewpoint: Since new information can force us to change our minds, we have to want, on some level, to be stressed if we’re looking to be fully informed. In a slower-moving world, this was known as changing your mind.
Is that what people want from news in a click-paced online world, though? The rise and success of specialty news outlets, which largely confirm their readers’ points of view, indicate that many people want to hear about the world, but through filters that affirm how they already feel about things.
Arguably, it was ever thus, and the right or the left had their own journals that people read. But the use of computer algorithms that know what you like stand to make it much more so.
Facebook may struggle to take news from a lot more points of view, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to put them in front of you.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/14/techn ... d=71987722
*******
More articles on the same theme...
How Facebook Warps Our Worlds
Extract:
“Technology makes it much easier for us to connect to people who share some single common interest,” said Marc Dunkelman, adding that it also makes it easier for us to avoid “face-to-face interactions with diverse ideas.” He touched on this in an incisive 2014 book, “The Vanishing Neighbor,” which belongs with Haidt’s work and with “Bowling Alone,” “Coming Apart” and “The Fractured Republic” in the literature of modern American fragmentation, a booming genre all its own.
We’re less committed to, and trustful of, large institutions than we were at times in the past. We question their wisdom and substitute it with the groupthink of micro-communities, many of which we’ve formed online, and their sensibilities can be more peculiar and unforgiving.
Facebook, along with other social media, definitely conspires in this. Haidt noted that it often discourages dissent within a cluster of friends by accelerating shaming. He pointed to the enforced political correctness among students at many colleges.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/opini ... d=45305309
Facebook’s Subtle Empire
In one light, Facebook is a powerful force driving fragmentation and niche-ification. It gives its users news from countless outlets, tailored to their individual proclivities. It allows those users to be news purveyors in their own right, playing Cronkite every time they share stories with their “friends.” And it offers a platform to anyone, from any background or perspective, looking to build an audience from scratch.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/opini ... ef=opinion
Would you enjoy reading this more if it were written by a machine? Spoiler alert: It’s not. But whether created by human or computer, what do we want from news?
As Mike Isaac reports, Facebook has published detailed information about how it chooses the news topics it puts before the 1.6 billion people on the social network. The company released the information under some duress, prodded by accusations that it was suppressing reports from conservative news outlets.
Basically, Facebook said it used a base of computers putting possible stories from various places in front of human editors, who direct how these will be presented and displayed. Facebook said that it had a system of “checks and balances” that made sure a number of viewpoints were examined, and that it did not allow editors to “discriminate against sources of any political origin, period.”
It’s unclear whether the people who think Facebook did wrong will be appeased. All too often, where modern media is concerned, the general public assumes there is bias of one form or another. And Facebook did not seem to have sufficient details about how it made sure a human didn’t carry out a grudge by omitting one story or another.
There is a deeper issue at play as well, which has to do with the reasons Facebook is putting up the stories in the first place.
Like Google, Facebook makes money by putting up ads concerning things its computers think you are interested in. And like Google, the content (search results or friend’s updates, depending on the company) that goes with the ads is chosen based on previous behavior.
There are several reasons for this, including giving you pleasure and not stressing or boring you with dissonance.
That is problematic where news is concerned, at least if the reader is seeking an objective viewpoint: Since new information can force us to change our minds, we have to want, on some level, to be stressed if we’re looking to be fully informed. In a slower-moving world, this was known as changing your mind.
Is that what people want from news in a click-paced online world, though? The rise and success of specialty news outlets, which largely confirm their readers’ points of view, indicate that many people want to hear about the world, but through filters that affirm how they already feel about things.
Arguably, it was ever thus, and the right or the left had their own journals that people read. But the use of computer algorithms that know what you like stand to make it much more so.
Facebook may struggle to take news from a lot more points of view, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to put them in front of you.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/14/techn ... d=71987722
*******
More articles on the same theme...
How Facebook Warps Our Worlds
Extract:
“Technology makes it much easier for us to connect to people who share some single common interest,” said Marc Dunkelman, adding that it also makes it easier for us to avoid “face-to-face interactions with diverse ideas.” He touched on this in an incisive 2014 book, “The Vanishing Neighbor,” which belongs with Haidt’s work and with “Bowling Alone,” “Coming Apart” and “The Fractured Republic” in the literature of modern American fragmentation, a booming genre all its own.
We’re less committed to, and trustful of, large institutions than we were at times in the past. We question their wisdom and substitute it with the groupthink of micro-communities, many of which we’ve formed online, and their sensibilities can be more peculiar and unforgiving.
Facebook, along with other social media, definitely conspires in this. Haidt noted that it often discourages dissent within a cluster of friends by accelerating shaming. He pointed to the enforced political correctness among students at many colleges.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/opini ... d=45305309
Facebook’s Subtle Empire
In one light, Facebook is a powerful force driving fragmentation and niche-ification. It gives its users news from countless outlets, tailored to their individual proclivities. It allows those users to be news purveyors in their own right, playing Cronkite every time they share stories with their “friends.” And it offers a platform to anyone, from any background or perspective, looking to build an audience from scratch.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/opini ... ef=opinion
Last edited by kmaherali on Mon May 23, 2016 2:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
I Run a G.M.O. Company — and I Support G.M.O. Labeling
Boston — MY first exposure to biotechnology was from my father. He grew up with juvenile diabetes, and for most of his life had taken daily injections of insulin from pigs, even though it came with a risk of side effects. That changed in 1982 when Eli Lilly introduced Humulin. I remember the Humulin box with “human insulin (recombinant DNA origin)” proudly displayed on the label: Biological engineers had transferred human DNA-encoding insulin into bacteria, and that meant my dad could get the real thing and no longer had to make do with insulin from animals.
Twenty-six years later, I became a founder of a biotechnology company that makes products with genetically modified organisms for the food industry. Like 88 percent of my fellow scientists, I believe that genetically engineered foods are safe. But unlike many of my colleagues, I’m among the 89 percent of Americans who believe that bioengineered ingredients should be identified on food packaging.
To me, there’s no contradiction in these two beliefs. For years, scientists have celebrated the many benefits of genetic engineering, from increased crop yields to improved nutritional content. They have also been embracing transparency, in the form of open access to research findings and calls for increased public engagement. It doesn’t make sense to advocate a better understanding of biotechnology in one breath and, in the other, tell consumers they don’t need to know when that technology is used to make their food.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opini ... d=71987722
******
Eske Willerslev Is Rewriting History With DNA
Extract:
As the director of the Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, Dr. Willerslev uses ancient DNA to reconstruct the past 50,000 years of human history. The findings have enriched our understanding of prehistory, shedding light on human development with evidence that can’t be found in pottery shards or studies of living cultures.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/scien ... ctionfront
Boston — MY first exposure to biotechnology was from my father. He grew up with juvenile diabetes, and for most of his life had taken daily injections of insulin from pigs, even though it came with a risk of side effects. That changed in 1982 when Eli Lilly introduced Humulin. I remember the Humulin box with “human insulin (recombinant DNA origin)” proudly displayed on the label: Biological engineers had transferred human DNA-encoding insulin into bacteria, and that meant my dad could get the real thing and no longer had to make do with insulin from animals.
Twenty-six years later, I became a founder of a biotechnology company that makes products with genetically modified organisms for the food industry. Like 88 percent of my fellow scientists, I believe that genetically engineered foods are safe. But unlike many of my colleagues, I’m among the 89 percent of Americans who believe that bioengineered ingredients should be identified on food packaging.
To me, there’s no contradiction in these two beliefs. For years, scientists have celebrated the many benefits of genetic engineering, from increased crop yields to improved nutritional content. They have also been embracing transparency, in the form of open access to research findings and calls for increased public engagement. It doesn’t make sense to advocate a better understanding of biotechnology in one breath and, in the other, tell consumers they don’t need to know when that technology is used to make their food.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opini ... d=71987722
******
Eske Willerslev Is Rewriting History With DNA
Extract:
As the director of the Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, Dr. Willerslev uses ancient DNA to reconstruct the past 50,000 years of human history. The findings have enriched our understanding of prehistory, shedding light on human development with evidence that can’t be found in pottery shards or studies of living cultures.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/scien ... ctionfront