Happy birthday to the World most important Entrepreneur (Olorogun Elon Musk). We at the Ogba Educational Clinic and Artificial intelligence Hub celebrate and wish to immortalize you by Setting up a club after you (The Elon Musk Club). This is in line with our vision to create small Elon’s that would eventually outdo you from Africa.
Posted in education, robotics/AI | Leave a Comment on Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Live Webinar: MIT Professional Education’s Machine Learning: From Data to Decisions. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar
Join us for an online webinar on Tuesday, June 30th at 9:30 a.m. ET with MIT faculty member and expert in machine learning, Professor Devavrat Shah.
This webinar is a way to understand the topics covered in the ‘Machine Learning: From Data to Decisions’ online course, ask questions, and get a preview of the content.
This is a 60-minute webinar with Prof. Devavrat Shah to learn more about the upcoming Machine Learning: From Data to Decisions (Online) Program, followed by a Q&A session.
Time.
Now that the world is in the thick of the coronavirus pandemic, governments are quickly deploying their own cocktails of tracking methods. These include device-based contact tracing, wearables, thermal scanning, drones, and facial recognition technology. It’s important to understand how those tools and technologies work and how governments are using them to track not just the spread of the coronavirus, but the movements of their citizens.
Contact tracing is one of the fastest-growing means of viral tracking. Although the term entered the common lexicon with the novel coronavirus, it’s not a new practice. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says contact tracing is “a core disease control measure employed by local and state health department personnel for decades.”
Traditionally, contact tracing involves a trained public health professional interviewing an ill patient about everyone they’ve been in contact with and then contacting those people to provide education and support, all without revealing the identity of the original patient. But in a global pandemic, that careful manual method cannot keep pace, so a more automated system is needed.
A team of scientists, led by Natural History Museum postdoctoral researcher Dr. Anne-Claire Fabre, have conducted the first study on how metamorphosis has influenced the evolution of salamanders.
Using micro-CT scanning to study the skulls of this group of animals, the team were able to build a huge dataset of 148 species of salamanders and used cutting-edge methods to describe the shape of the skull with nearly 1000 reference points, known as landmarks.
Dr. Fabre said, “Most studies of this kind are limited to just a few dozen landmarks. Our study is the first large-scale investigation of this incredibly diverse group. We have captured the shape of the skull in such great detail that it has allowed us to learn more than ever before about how these creatures evolved.”
Not even the lawyers will be spared.
In the summer of 2015, Stanford-bound high school grad Josh Browder spent his nights coding and developing an automated program that would help people contest parking tickets. The native Londoner had recently gotten his driver’s license, and had himself assembled a respectable collection of fines, some of which he felt were unjustly rewarded.
About three weeks later, Browder already had a product called DoNotPay which he shared with his friends. A blogger from Reddit picked up on it, and almost overnight, DoNotPay went from 10 people using it to 50,000 users.
Today, the company announced it closed a $12 million Series A at an $80 million valuation. Coatue led the round, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund and Felicis Ventures. All had previously invested in the company’s $4.6 million seed round.
A pair of researchers at University College London has found that people with low socioeconomic status experience more declines in age-related functions as they grow older than do people who have a higher socioeconomic status. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Andrew Steptoe and Paola Zaninotto describe their study of data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, and what they learned.
Prior research has shown that poor people tend to suffer more adverse health effects than those who are better off. They also tend to die younger. But one area of aging that has not been well-studied is the impact of poverty on age-related functional decline, associated with such symptoms as loss of hearing or muscle strength. To learn more about the relationship between socioeconomic status and age-related functional decline, the researchers analyzed data in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing—an ongoing long-term study of the aging process. Launched in 2002, the study involved collecting data on volunteers aged 50 and over as they grew older. The data includes both medical and physical information, along with test results designed to measure cognitive and emotional levels. The data sample for this new effort included information on 5,018 people 52 years of age or older as they aged over periods of six to eight years.
The researchers found that people living at the lower end of the economic spectrum performed worse on every measure of age-related functionality. Those less well-off lost grip strength, lung function, gait speed, processing speed and executive function. They also tended to report enjoying life less than those who were more affluent. The researchers noted their findings were independent of race, gender, education or age. They also found that those of lesser means experienced more vision problems and were more likely to be depressed.
Good talk, not just about NAD. Q&A just before 35 minutes. A lot of epigenetics here.
David A. Sinclair, Ph.D., A.O. is a Professor in the Department of Genetics and co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Harvard Medical School. He is best known for his work on understanding why we age and how to slow its effects. He obtained his Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney in 1995. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at M.I.T. with Dr. Leonard Guarente where he co discovered a cause of aging for yeast as well as the role of Sir2 in epigenetic changes driven by genome instability. In 1999 he was recruited to Harvard Medical School where he has been teaching aging biology and translational medicine for aging for the past 16 years. His research has been primarily focused on the sirtuins, protein-modifying enzymes that respond to changing NAD+ levels and to caloric restriction (CR) with associated interests in chromatin, energy metabolism, mitochondria, learning and memory, neurodegeneration, and cancer. The Sinclair lab was the first one to identify a role for NAD+ biosynthesis in regulation of lifespan and first showed that sirtuins are involved in CR in mammals. They first identified small molecules that activate SIRT1 such as resveratrol and studied how they improve metabolic function using a combination of genetic, enzymological, biophysical and pharmacological approaches. They recently showed that natural and synthetic activators require SIRT1 to mediate the in vivo effects in muscle and identified a structured activation domain. They demonstrated that miscommunication between the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes is a cause of age-related physiological decline and that relocalization of chromatin factors in response to DNA breaks may be a cause of aging.
The job market of tomorrow will require people to develop their technical capacity in tandem with human-only skills.
The coronavirus pandemic has been a real learning curve, not least for educators. But with many schools now reopening, questions are being asked about what the future of education might look like. CNBC Make It’s Karen Gilchrist spoke to entrepreneurs in India, Hong Kong and the U.S. to learn more about the multibillion-dollar business opportunity.
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3. Evolution shifts to off-world human colonies.
4. Transhumanism will drive evolution.
Is natural selection still a major force in human evolution? As far back as high school biology, we’ve been taught to think the answer must be yes. But is it really true?
Charles Darwin published his groundbreaking On the Origin of Species back in 1859, around the same time that Charles Dickens was making a name for himself writing about social conditions in England. Dickens’ stories emerge from a period in which only 50 percent of British children survived to adulthood — a number not so different from animals in the jungle. In that vein, Darwin was right when he said natural selection was operating on humans full force.
Yet the forces that came into play in the 1850s are far different from those we experience today, prompting some high profile biologists to suggest that our advanced medical capabilities have, in effect, blunted natural selection. In a 2013 Radio Times interview, science communicator David Attenborough described it this way:
