Most recent 20 articles: Technology Review - Climate Change
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Regenerative agriculture is raising a lot of climate hopes - and a lot of concerns | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change (Jun 03, 2020) |
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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 ...
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The pandemic made life harder for deaf people. The solutions could benefit everyone. | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change (May 28, 2020) |
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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 ...
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"The first day was really hard": Life as a contact tracer | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change (May 10, 2020) |
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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 ...
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These pop songs were written by OpenAI's deep-learning algorithm | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change (May 01, 2020) |
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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 ...
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MIT - Technology Review - Climate Change (Apr 29, 2020) |
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MIT - Technology Review - Climate Change (Apr 29, 2020) |
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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 ...
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Remdesivir seems to shorten covid hospital stays and may save lives | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change (Apr 29, 2020) |
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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 ...
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- Technology Review - Climate Change (Apr 27, 2020) |
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- Technology Review - Climate Change (Apr 27, 2020) |
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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 ...
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MIT - Technology Review - Climate Change (Apr 27, 2020) |
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MIT - Technology Review - Climate Change (Apr 27, 2020) |
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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 ...
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Covid-19 has blown apart the myth of Silicon Valley innovation | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change (Apr 25, 2020) |
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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 ...
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Antigen testing could be a faster, cheaper way to diagnose covid-19 | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change (Apr 24, 2020) |
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Apr 24, 2020 · Current coronavirus testing is plagued by a lack of resources. An antigen test could be a useful alternative that bypasses supply-chain bottlenecks.
Coronavirus testing in the US is nowhere near where it should be. A recent road map suggested we need to test upwards of 20 million people every day in order to safely reopen the economy (we're currently running around 150,000 a day). To scale up, we need to move beyond conventional methods—and that might require an entirely different type of test.
The gold standard for covid-19 testing is the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test. In a PCR test, genetic material collected in a nasal swab is copied millions or billions of ... Read more ...
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Israel is using AI to flag high-risk covid-19 patients | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change (Apr 24, 2020) |
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Apr 24, 2020 · But the approach, which works best with access to lots of patient data, probably won't be as effective in the US.
One of Israel's largest health maintenance organizations is using artificial intelligence to help identify which of the 2.4 million people it covers are most at risk of severe covid-19 complications. Maccabi Healthcare Services says the system—which it developed with AI company Medial EarlySign—has already flagged 2% of its members, amounting to around 40,000 people. Once identified, individuals are put on a fast track for testing.
More on coronavirus
The AI was adapted from an existing system trained to identify people most at risk from the flu, using ... Read more ...
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Bluetooth contact tracing needs bigger, better data | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change (Apr 22, 2020) |
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Apr 22, 2020 · Using Bluetooth signals to tell you if you've been put at risk of covid-19 is the cornerstone of contact tracing apps. But doing it well is a complex and challenging task—even for the experts.
You might know Bluetooth best for helping you pair your headphones and smartphone, but the 21-year-old wireless technology is getting a new wave of attention now that it's at the heart of contact-tracing apps designed to show whether you might have been exposed to the novel coronavirus.
Google and Apple, for example, are building a system to track contact between people who might spread the disease. The idea is simple: since Bluetooth is constantly scanning for other devices, your ... Read more ...
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California is racing to boost coronavirus testing and contact tracing efforts | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change (Apr 22, 2020) |
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Apr 22, 2020 · And it's striving to build a 10,000-person "army" of contact tracers.
California plans to significantly ramp up its coronavirus testing and tracing efforts, as the state strives to reach a point where it could relax stay-at-home rules implemented to contain the outbreak.
During a press conference on Wednesday, Governor Gavin Newsom said the state intends to increase testing capacity from about 16,000 per day to 25,000 by April 30, and reach between 60,000 and 80,000 in the weeks after. As part of that effort, California will open 86 new testing sites around the state through partnerships with Verily and OptumServe, with a focus on filling in "testing deserts" in rural areas. Read more ...
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Many covid-19 survivors will be left traumatized by their ICU experience | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change (Apr 22, 2020) |
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Apr 22, 2020 · People who survive intensive care and the process of being put on a ventilator often suffer depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
There's a phrase to describe what we're experiencing: collective trauma. We are all grieving—whether it's for the deaths of loved ones, the loss of our way of life, or the knowledge that things will never quite be the same again. Most of us are experiencing some level of anxiety. The loss of control over major aspects of our lives and lack of a clear end point to the crisis are both partly to blame. For some, stress will spiral into a diagnosable mental health problem.
But we're not all going through the same thing. ... Read more ...
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Radio Corona, Apr 23: would you volunteer to get the coronavirus? | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change (Apr 22, 2020) |
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Apr 22, 2020 · In this episode of Radio Corona, Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, will discuss volunteer initiatives that might accelerate the development of a coronavirus vaccine.
Joining him will be Josh Morrison, executive director at Waitlist Zero and part of the team at 1 Day Sooner. Both organizations recruit volunteers to take part in the covid-19 vaccine trials, some of which—"challenge trials"—will involve deliberately being exposed to the virus to test if the vaccine has worked. Also joining is Ian Haydon, a volunteer currently taking part in Moderna's vaccine trial (though not a challenge trial). He explained his decision for us a couple of weeks ago. ... Read more ...
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Facebook has released a map of coronavirus symptoms crowdsourced from its users | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change (Apr 21, 2020) |
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Apr 21, 2020 · How it could be used: Knowing who is experiencing symptoms and where could help health officials and governments to prepare for surges of hospital cases and decide where to allocate resources like ventilators, face masks, and personal protective equipment. Given the shortage of tests, and long delays for results, this map could be useful in helping to predict where covid-19 hot spots are forming across the US.
Limitations: Obviously, the map is only as good as the data that's used to create it, and as you can see for yourself, vast swaths of the map don't have enough participants to yield reliable data. The map is part of Facebook's work with CMU and the CDC to predict the ... Read more ...
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