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Category: education – Page 149

Seemingly “intelligent” devices like self-driving trucks aren’t actually all that intelligent. In order to avoid plowing into other cars or making illegal lane changes, they need a lot of help.

In China, that help is increasingly coming from rooms full of college students.

Li Zhenwei is a data labeler. His job, which didn’t even exist a few years ago, involves sitting at a computer, clicking frame-by-frame through endless hours of dashcam footage, and drawing lines over each photo to help the computer recognize lane markers.

“Every good-looking field has people working behind the scenes,” says Li. “I’d prefer to be an anonymous hero.”

Continue reading “China’s Big AI Advantage: Humans” | >

A team of two indigenous Nahua students from Guerrero came in first place at a national robotics contest held in Quintana Roo, winning them a berth to represent Mexico in an international competition in Japan next year.

The contest was organized by Conalep, a system of public high schools that offer technical education.

Victor Manuel Bautista Nieves and Próspero Romero Gerardo, both 18-year-old students at the Conalep school in Chilapa, Guerrero, won the contest by designing a robot able to locate and extinguish three randomly-placed candles on a determined field within three minutes.

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Cold Spring Harbor, NY — Cancer cells use a bizarre strategy to reproduce in a tumor’s low-energy environment; they mutilate their own mitochondria! Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) also know how this occurs, offering a promising new target for pancreatic cancer therapies.

Why would a cancer cell want to destroy its own functioning mitochondria? “It may seem pretty counterintuitive,” admits M.D.-Ph. D. student Brinda Alagesan, a member of Dr. David Tuveson’s lab at CSHL.

According to Alagesan, the easiest way to think about why cancer cells may do this is to think of the mitochondria as a powerplant. “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell,” she recites, recalling the common grade school lesson. And just like a traditional powerplant, the mitochondria create their own pollution.

Read more | >

Cancer cells use a bizarre strategy to reproduce in a tumor’s low-energy environment; they mutilate their own mitochondria! Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) also know how this occurs, offering a promising new target for pancreatic cancer therapies.

Why would a cell want to destroy its own functioning mitochondria? “It may seem pretty counterintuitive,” admits M.D.-Ph. D. student Brinda Alagesan, a member of Dr. David Tuveson’s lab at CSHL.

According to Alagesan, the easiest way to think about why may do this is to think of the mitochondria as a powerplant. “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell,” she recites, recalling the common grade school lesson. And just like a traditional powerplant, the mitochondria create their own pollution.

Read more | >

I’m super excited to share this new Quartz article of mine, part of an ongoing personal debate about #transhumanism, #kids, and #education in my family:

But the age of downloading experience and expertise directly into our brain mainframe is coming. So is downloading professional training, including everything from becoming a police officer to practicing medicine or investigative journalism.

For many in the audience, I think that was the first time considering this could become a reality in our lifetime.

But in plenty of instances, brainwave tech is already here. People fly drones using mind-reading headsets. Parkinson’s disease patients can use brain chips to calm shaking attacks. Machine interfaces let people silently communicate mind-to-mind with one another, or with devices.

Continue reading “In 15 years we’ll be able to upload education to our brains. So can I stop saving for my kids’ college?” | >

China isn’t the only country with a draconian “social credit score” system — there’s one quite a bit like it operating in the U.S. Except that it’s being run by American businesses, not the government.

There’s plenty of evidence that retailers have been using a technique called “surveillance scoring” for decades in which consumers are given a secret score by an algorithm to give them a different price — but for the same goods and services.

But the practice might be illegal after all: a California nonprofit called Consumer Education Foundation (CEF) filed a petition yesterday asking for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to look into the shady practice.

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Dr. Alan Green’s patients travel from around the country to his tiny practice in Queens, N.Y., lured by the prospect of longer lives.

Over the past two years, more than 200 patients have flocked to see Green after learning that two drugs he prescribes could possibly stave off aging. One 95-year-old was so intent on keeping her appointment that she asked her son to drive her from Maryland after a snowstorm had closed the schools.

Green is among a small but growing number of doctors who prescribe drugs “off-label” for their possible anti-aging effects. Metformin is typically prescribed for diabetes, and rapamycin prevents organ rejection after a transplant, but doctors can prescribe drugs off-label for other purposes — in this case, for “aging.”

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Are you prepared for the Age of Machine Intelligence? That’s a time when machines anticipate consumers’ choices before they are made. That age is nearer than many people realize, according to author/futurist Mike Walsh, who said business leaders need to understand how the new reality impacts the decisions they make.

The National Automatic Merchandising Association show, held last week in Las Vegas, made an appropriate setting for Walsh’s message, given the number of exhibits and education sessions featuring artificial intelligence. While these new technologies impact many industries, the convenience services industry has experienced a significant boost in recent years thanks to AI, micro markets, cashless readers, digital signage, telemetry-based remote machine monitoring, smart sensor shelving, facial detection and voice technology.

Walsh, author of “The Dictionary of Dangerous Ideas” and CEO of Tomorrow, a consumer innovation research lab, challenged his listeners during his keynote presentation to think more creatively.

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