Most recent 10 articles: Technology Review - Climate Change
|
Regenerative agriculture is raising a lot of climate hopes - and a lot of concerns | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Jun 03, 2020) |
|
Jun 03, 2020 · Even though lots of politicians, environmentalists, and companies are eager to try. Corporations, politicians, and environmentalists have all embraced carbon farming as the feel-good climate solution of the moment. Several leading Democratic presidential contenders highlighted the potential to alter farming practices to suck up more carbon dioxide in their climate plans. And the presumptive nominee, Joe Biden, declared last summer: "Soil is the next frontier for storing carbon." Read more ... |
|
|
The pandemic made life harder for deaf people. The solutions could benefit everyone. | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (May 28, 2020) |
|
May 28, 2020 · Captioning and clear masks are a start. About a month after shelter-in-place orders began in her area, Shaylee Mansfield—an 11-year-old deaf actress in Austin, Texas—posted a video on Twitter. "I don't understand my favorite people on Instagram," she signs as she watches various Instagram videos. "Why? No captioning!" Shaylee's video got thousands of likes and retweets, though no official response—yet—from Instagram at the time of publishing. "It's not fair that Shaylee, a deaf sister, and Ivy, a hearing sister, cannot watch together equally," says their mother, Sheena McFeely (who is also deaf, as is their father, Manny Johnson). McFeely says the new reliance on ... Read more ... |
|
|
"The first day was really hard": Life as a contact tracer | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (May 10, 2020) |
|
May 10, 2020 · America is hiring an army of people to track down coronavirus cases. What's the job like? How do people respond? And how stressful is it? As American states weigh the possibility of reopening services in the face of the covid-19 pandemic, the demand for contact tracing—helping track down and isolate potential carriers of the virus—will get even larger. We spoke to people working as contact tracers across America to understand what it's like, what they're seeing, and what might be coming next. When San Francisco's Department of Public Health asked if anyone in the library system would want to join the city's contact tracing program, I said yes right away. From the ... Read more ... |
|
|
These pop songs were written by OpenAI's deep-learning algorithm | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (May 01, 2020) |
|
May 01, 2020 · The news: In a fresh spin on manufactured pop, OpenAI has released a neural network called Jukebox that can generate catchy songs in a variety of different styles, from teenybop and country to hip-hop and heavy metal. It even sings—sort of. How it works: Give it a genre, an artist, and lyrics, and Jukebox will produce a passable pastiche in the style of well-known performers, such as Katy Perry, Elvis Presley or Nas. You can also give it the first few seconds of a song and it will autocomplete the rest. Old songs, new tricks: Computer-generated music has been a thing for 50 years or more, and AIs already have impressive examples of orchestral classical and ambient ... Read more ... |
|
|
MIT - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 29, 2020) |
|
MIT - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 29, 2020) |
|
Apr 29, 2020 · It has also open-sourced the AI system to spur further research. For all the progress that chatbots and virtual assistants have made, they're still terrible conversationalists. Most are highly task-oriented: you make a demand and they comply. Some are highly frustrating: they never seem to get what you're looking for. Others are awfully boring: they lack the charm of a human companion. It's fine when you're only looking to set a timer. But as these bots become increasingly popular as interfaces for everything from retail to health care to financial services, the inadequacies only grow more apparent. Blender's ability comes from the immense scale of its training data. It ... Read more ... |
|
|
Remdesivir seems to shorten covid hospital stays and may save lives | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 29, 2020) |
|
Apr 29, 2020 · A government trial showed patients got better 30% faster. The good news started trickling out early this morning, first in a vague company press release and then, by midday, from the White House. A drug called remdesivir appears to actually work against the coronavirus that causes covid-19. More on coronavirus The news was delivered to President Donald Trump by Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), who said covid-19 patients who received the antiviral drug recovered 31% faster, in 11 days instead of 15, in a placebo-controlled trial carried out by his agency. "Even though it doesn't seem like a ... Read more ... |
|
|
|
- Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 27, 2020) |
|
- Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 27, 2020) |
|
Apr 27, 2020 · The covid-19 pandemic is stretching hospital resources to the breaking point in many countries in the world. It is no surprise that many people hope AI could speed up patient screening and ease the strain on clinical staff. But a study from Google Health—the first to look at the impact of a deep-learning tool in real clinical settings—reveals that even the most accurate AIs can actually make things worse if not tailored to the clinical environments in which they will work. Existing rules for deploying AI in clinical settings, such as the standards for FDA clearance in the US or a CE mark in Europe, focus primarily on accuracy. There are no explicit requirements that an AI ... Read more ... |
|
|
MIT - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 27, 2020) |
|
MIT - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 27, 2020) |
|
Apr 27, 2020 · If AI is really going to make a difference to patients we need to know how it works when real humans get their hands on it, in real situations. The covid-19 pandemic is stretching hospital resources to the breaking point in many countries in the world. It is no surprise that many people hope AI could speed up patient screening and ease the strain on clinical staff. But a study from Google Health—the first to look at the impact of a deep-learning tool in real clinical settings—reveals that even the most accurate AIs can actually make things worse if not tailored to the clinical environments in which they will work. Existing rules for deploying AI in clinical settings, ... Read more ... |
|
|
Covid-19 has blown apart the myth of Silicon Valley innovation | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 25, 2020) |
|
Apr 25, 2020 · The pandemic shows that the US is no longer much good at coming up with technologies relevant to our most basic needs. The frustration in Marc Andreessen's post on our failure to prepare and respond competently to the coronavirus pandemic is palpable, and his diagnosis is adamant: "a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to 'build.'" Why don't we have vaccines and medicines, or even masks and ventilators? He writes: "We could have these things but we chose not to—specifically we chose not to have the mechanisms, the factories, the systems to make these things. We chose not to 'build.'" More on coronavirus Forgetting for a moment that this is ... Read more ... |
|
|