created

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

AI, TECHNOLOGY

Can AI Could Help Solve The Privacy Problems It Has Created?

The stunning successes of artificial intelligence would not have happened without the availability of massive amounts of data, whether its smart speakers in the home or personalized book recommendations. Artificial systems use reams of data to get a better profiles of individuals. And the spread of AI into new areas of the economy, such as AI-driven marketing and self driving vehicles, has been driving the collection of ever more data. These large databases are amassing a wide variety of information, some of it sensitive and personally identifiable. All that data in one place makes such databases tempting targets, ratcheting up the risk of privacy breaches. The general public is largely wary of AI’s data-hungry ways. According to a survey by Brookings, 49% of people think AI will reduce p...

It’s A Developed World We’ve Created – But Is It Giving Us Cancer?

14Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

LIFESTYLE

It’s A Developed World We’ve Created – But Is It Giving Us Cancer?

I had assumed that the small lump in my breast was a blocked milk duct from nursing my seven-month-old son. The news that I had stage 2 breast cancer stunned. “But it’s not in my family,” I told the radiologist. “And I have a healthy lifestyle! Why did I get breast cancer?” In one way or another, friends and relatives here in the U.S. asked the same question. Why had this happened to me? Their explanations coalesced around a single point: bad genes. But when I told my friends and host family in Haiti, where I’ve been studying social and political life for the past decade, their reactions were different. They asked: Who had done this to me? Was a colleague angry? Was a family member getting revenge? Or was someone simply jealous, especially after the good year I’d had landing a new job, ...

The Perfect Conditions That Created The Homicide Spike In 2020 – More Guns, Pandemic Stress And A Police Legitimacy Crisis

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS

The Perfect Conditions That Created The Homicide Spike In 2020 – More Guns, Pandemic Stress And A Police Legitimacy Crisis

Justin Nix, University of Nebraska Omaha Homicides in the U.S. spiked by almost 30% in 2020. That was the main takeaway from figures released on Sept. 27, 2021, by the FBI that showed almost uniform increases across America in the murder rate. The fact that big cities, small cities, suburbs and rural areas – in both blue and red states – experienced similar increases in homicides suggests that nationwide events or trends were behind the rise. The COVID-19 pandemic would be one obvious explanation given its pervasiveness in 2020. But as a criminologist, I know that homicide rates are affected by a number of factors. And what happened in 2020 was a confluence of events that created the perfect conditions for a spike in murders. Stress and a lack of support COVID-19 likely did have an imp...

A Place For Trans Youth To Find One Another And Explore Coming Out Was Created By The Early Internet

25May

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

CULTURE, LGBTQ

A Place For Trans Youth To Find One Another And Explore Coming Out Was Created By The Early Internet

Follow coverage of trans issues, and you’ll hear some people say that teens who change their gender identity are participating in a fad, and that social media is the culprit. As one proponent of legislation that would restrict access to care for trans teens claimed, social media platforms are where trans youths are falsely “convinced” that their feelings of identifying as a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth – known as gender dysphoria – are valid. These fears of Instagram, Tumblr and TikTok as breeding grounds for instilling gender dysphoria in young people recall other moral panics over new media, from the Victorian-era paranoia that serialized stories called “penny dreadfuls” were going to incite a youth crime wave to 20th-century anxiety over children’s exposure to v...

6 Questions Answered – Why Facebook Created Its Own ‘Supreme Court’ For Judging Content

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIAL MEDIA

6 Questions Answered – Why Facebook Created Its Own ‘Supreme Court’ For Judging Content

Facebook’s quasi-independent Oversight Board on May 5, 2021, upheld the company’s suspension of former President Donald Trump from the platform and Instagram. The decision came four months after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg banned Trump “indefinitely” for his role in inciting the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. The board chastised Facebook for failing to either set an end date for the suspension or permanently ban Trump and gave the social media company six months to resolve the matter. What is this Oversight Board that made one of the most politically perilous decisions Facebook has ever faced? Why did the company create it, and is it a good idea? We asked Siri Terjesen, an expert on corporate governance, to answer these and several other questions. 1. What is the Facebook Oversight Boa...

In Ultraclean Labs ‘Humanized Pigs’ Are Being Created To Study Human Illnesses And Treatments

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SCIENCE

In Ultraclean Labs ‘Humanized Pigs’ Are Being Created To Study Human Illnesses And Treatments

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires all new medicines to be tested in animals before use in people. Pigs make better medical research subjects than mice, because they are closer to humans in size, physiology and genetic makeup. Pigs with human immune systems. Ahlea Forster, CC BY-SA In recent years, our team at Iowa State University has found a way to make pigs an even closer stand-in for humans. We have successfully transferred components of the human immune system into pigs that lack a functional immune system. This breakthrough has the potential to accelerate medical research in many areas, including virus and vaccine research, as well as cancer and stem cell therapeutics. Existing biomedical models Severe Combined Immunodeficiency, or SCID, is a genetic condition that cause...

‘Food Apartheid’ In US Cities Created By Urban Planning And Housing Policies

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS

‘Food Apartheid’ In US Cities Created By Urban Planning And Housing Policies

Hunger is not evenly spread across the U.S., nor within its cities. Even in the the richest parts of urban America there are pockets of deep food insecurity, and more often than not it is Black and Latino communities that are hit hardest. As an urban planning academic who teaches a course on food justice, I’m aware that this disparity is in large part through design. For over a century, urban planning has been used as a toolkit for maintaining white supremacy that has divided U.S. cities along racial lines. And this has contributed to the development of so-called “food deserts” – areas of limited access to reasonably priced, healthy, culturally relevant foods – and “food swamps” – places with a preponderance of stores selling “fast” and “junk” food. Both terms are controversial and have...

Filling Research Gaps Created By The Pandemic – Citizen Scientists

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SCIENCE, VIDEO REELS

Filling Research Gaps Created By The Pandemic – Citizen Scientists

The rapid spread of COVID-19 in 2020 disrupted field research and environmental monitoring efforts worldwide. Travel restrictions and social distancing forced scientists to cancel studies or pause their work for months. These limits measurably reduced the accuracy of weather forecasts and created data gaps on issues ranging from bird migration to civil rights in U.S. public schools. A volunteer looks for waterbirds at Point Reyes National Seashore in California during the National Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count. Kerry W/Flickr, CC BY Our work relies on this kind of information to track seasonal events in nature and understand how climate change is affecting them. We also recruit and train citizens for community science – projects that involve amateur or volunteer scientists...

GI Bill Opened Doors To College Vets, But Politicians Created A Separate GI Bill For Blacks

14Nov

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

EDUCATION, POLITICS

GI Bill Opened Doors To College Vets, But Politicians Created A Separate GI Bill For Blacks

When President Franklin Roosevelt signed the GI Bill into law on June 22, 1944, it laid the foundation for benefits that would help generations of veterans achieve social mobility. Formally known as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, the bill made unprecedented commitments to the nation’s veterans. For instance, it provided federal assistance to veterans in the form of housing and unemployment benefits. But of all the benefits offered through the GI Bill, funding for higher education and job training emerged as the most popular. More than 2 million veterans flocked to college campuses throughout the country. But even as former service members entered college, not all of them accessed the bill’s benefits in the same way. That’s because white southern politicians designed the distr...

Synthetic odors created by activating brain cells help neuroscientists understand how smell works

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SCIENCE, VIDEO REELS

Synthetic odors created by activating brain cells help neuroscientists understand how smell works

When you experience something with your senses, it evokes complex patterns of activity in your brain. One important goal in neuroscience is to decipher how these neural patterns drive the sensory experience. For example, can the smell of chocolate be represented by a single brain cell, groups of cells firing all at the same time or cells firing in some precise symphony? The answers to these questions will lead to a broader understanding of how our brains represent the external world. They also have implications for treating disorders where the brain fails in representing the external world: for example, in the loss of sight of smell. To understand how the brain drives sensory experience, my colleagues and I focus on the sense of smell in mice. We directly control a mouse’s neural activit...