Over the past few decades the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development have been weaving their way into the fabric of various branches of engineering. Advocates declare that being sustainable should, in fact, be the guiding light of all engineering endeavors.

Yet some proponents in the field contend that sustainability remains a largely ambiguous idea. They say it lacks distinct frameworks for defining precisely what it means in utilitarian terms, and thus hinders the development of consistent guidelines for implementation. An upcoming webinar The Overlooked Role of Technology in the Sustainability Movement: A Pedagogical Framework for Engineering Education will focus on the need for engineering educators to emphasize the importance of technology in shaping the design and construction of sustainable systems. Graphic by Rhonda Hitchcock-Mast/ASU Download Full Image

Those calling for more specificity in defining the role of engineers include T. Agami Reddy and Brad Allenby, professors in theIra A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. They assert that the general perception of sustainability has not sufficiently evolved beyond its origins in environmental and social movements to encompass todays technological advances.

A major impediment to remedying that drawback, as Allenby and Reddy see it, is a failure to properly integrate an understanding of technology and technological development into the core precepts of what constitutes sustainability.

Technological advances are shaping society more quickly and in more fundamental ways than ever, the professors say. So, in their view, sustainable engineering cant fully transition from a broad philosophy into a deep-rooted industry practice without clearly detailing how sustainability can be achieved in rigorously technical ways.

That progress is hampered not only by a lack of understanding of the importance of assimilating technological considerations into what constitutes sustainability, they say, but also an inability to translate the vague assertions about sustainability by its advocates into the concrete design objectives and constraints familiar to engineers.

Reddy and Allenby will present their views on this challenge during an Aug. 11 webinar presented by the Metis Center for Infrastructure and Sustainable Engineering at ASU and moderated by the centers director, Fulton Schools Associate Professor Mikhail Chester. The Metis Center is involved in research, teaching, outreach and public service to provide a basis for understanding, designing and managing complex integrated built, human and natural systems.

The Zoom webcast The Overlooked Role of Technology in the Sustainability Movement: A Pedagogical Framework for Engineering Education will focus on the close association between sustainability and engineering, and suggest a quantitative framework based on a short list of metrics for engineers to evaluate their progress toward sustainability goals.

Another focus will be the subject of developing the metrics necessary to ensure technological progress is integrated into the aspirations of the sustainability enterprise. There will also be discussion on developing approaches to preparing students for the changes that would emerge from such a refocusing of sustainable engineering.

We have to figure out what sustainability means when you translate it into the actual technical practice of engineering, Allenby said. But after you decide what that is, then you need the masterplan for how you are going to teach this type of thinking to students and industry professionals or the change in practice is not going to happen in the real world.

Reddy hopes the webinar will foster dialog and provide a pathway for engineers to become more fundamentally involved with social and environmental scientists in both defining sustainability goals and implementing sustainable solutions.

The idea for the webinar came from Professor Ram Pendyala, director of one of the six Fulton Schools, the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment. Allenby and Reddy teach in the school. Reddy also teaches in The Design School in ASUs Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.

Pendyala was motivated by reading a research paper in the Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities authored by the two professors, as well as a paper in the same journal authored by Reddy on the concept of resilience in engineering pursuits. Both papers examine issues that are subjects of the webinar.

We have done a lot of research in sustainable engineering, and many of us have integrated sustainable engineering concepts and thoughts into our research in some fashion, Pendyala said. But we havent necessarily done the same in our teaching enterprise, and I am not convinced that we are sufficiently preparing our students to think about sustainability-related implications of rapidly emerging technologies, designs, energy systems and so on.

Pendyala encouraged Professor Matthew Fraser, associate director of the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, to work with Reddy and Allenby to organize a webinar advancing new paradigms in engineering education.

We hope the event will help faculty from ASU and other universities use insights from the latest research to improve education for the next generation of sustainability and technology leaders, Fraser said.

Allenbys career-long work has contributed to defining sustainability as an academic discipline and promoting it as a vital industry practice.

Twenty-five years ago, Allenby and Tom Graedel, now a professor emeritus at the Yale School of the Environment at Yale University, co-authored Industrial Ecology the first textbook on that then-emerging field, which set the stage for the birthing of sustainability engineering.

Several years later Allenby wrote a second textbook, Industrial Ecology: Policy Framework and Implementation, focusing on the social, economic and policy implications of industrial ecology that vigorously thrust the field into the sustainability realm. He and Graedel later merged the two areas in the 2010 textbook Industrial Ecology and Sustainable Engineering.

Two years later, Allenby authored The Theory and Practice of Sustainable Engineering, providing a detailed guide for schools to create courses in the subject.

Reddys research has long focused on solar energy equipment and systems, along with energy efficiency and conservation in buildings and related systems, and more recently on how to model and evaluate energy systems for sustainability and resilience. He holds the title of SRP Professor of Energy and Environment, a position supported by Salt River Project, one of Arizonas largest power and water utilities.

Through his experience, Reddy says he realizes the importance of emphasizing to students the fundamental techno-centric concepts of sustainability relevant to building structures and producing systems in ways that will meet goals related to functionality, resilience and longevity the three primary objectives of sustainability.

Our challenge is to quantify how to accomplish those things in actual on-the-ground engineering work, Reddy said.

At the same time, its critical that the education of todays students keeps pace with any reconceptualizing of sustainable engineering, Allenby said.

That will necessitate equipping aspiring engineers with more knowledge of artificial intelligence, data science and other cutting-edge technologies and methods to produce the algorithms and design strategies that guide todays engineering efforts, Reddy and Allenby say.

The professors note they have geared the webinar presentation to students as well as college faculty members and industry professionals. Reddy and Allenby will present their own perspectives on how to realign education in sustainability and then lead discussion on the topic with the audience.

The webinar will be from 10:30 to 11:45 a.m. Pacific Time on Tuesday, Aug. 11.Register for the event.

Read the original:
Webinar to look at putting technology front and center in defining 'sustainable' - ASU Now

Newswise For the first time, the raw genetic material that codes for bats' unique adaptations and superpowers such as the ability to fly, to use sound to move effortlessly in complete darkness, to survive and tolerate deadly diseases, to resist ageing and cancer - has been fully revealed.

Bat1K (Bat1K.com), a global consortium of scientists dedicated to sequencing the genomes of every one of the 1421 living bat species, has generated and analyzed six highly accurate bat genomes that are ten times more complete than any bat genome published to date, in order to uncover bats' unique traits.

"Given these exquisite bat genomes, we can now better understand how bats tolerate viruses, slow down ageing, and have evolved flight and echolocation. These genomes are the tools needed to identify the genetic solutions evolved in bats that ultimately could be harnessed to alleviate human ageing and disease," Emma Teeling, University College Dublin, Co-Founding Director of Bat1K and Senior Author.

To generate these exquisite bat genomes, the team used the newest technologies of the DRESDEN-concept Genome Center, a shared technology resource in Dresden, to sequence the bat's DNA, and generated new methods to assemble these pieces into the correct order and to identify the genes present.

"Using the latest DNA sequencing technologies and new computing methods for such data, we have 96 to 99 percent of each bat genome in chromosome level reconstructions - an unprecedented quality akin to for example the current human genome reference which is the result of over a decade of intensive "finishing" efforts. As such, these bat genomes provide a superb foundation for experimentation and evolutionary studies of bats' fascinating abilities and physiological properties" Eugene Myers, Director of Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, and the Center for Systems Biology, Dresden, Germany, Senior Author.

Relationship to other mammals

The team compared these bat genomes against 42 other mammals to address the unresolved question of where bats are located within the mammalian tree of life. Using novel phylogenetic methods and comprehensive molecular data sets, the team found the strongest support for bats being most closely related to a group called Ferreuungulata that consists of carnivores (which includes dogs, cats and seals, among other species), pangolins, whales and ungulates (hooved mammals).

To uncover genomic changes that contribute to the unique adaptations found in bats, the team systematically searched for gene differences between bats and other mammals, identifying regions of the genome that have evolved differently in bats and the loss and gain of genes that may drive bats' unique traits.

"Our genome scans revealed changes in hearing genes that may contribute to echolocation, which bats use to hunt and navigate in complete darkness. Furthermore, we found expansions of anti-viral genes, unique selection on immune genes, and loss of genes involved in inflammation in bats. These changes may contribute to bats' exceptional immunity and points to their tolerance of coronaviruses." Michael Hiller, Max Planck Research Group Leader, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, and the Center for Systems Biology, Dresden, Senior Author.

Tolerance against viruses

The team also found evidence that bats' ability to tolerate viruses is reflected in their genomes. The exquisite genomes revealed "fossilised viruses", evidence of surviving past viral infections, and showed that bat genomes contained a higher diversity than other species providing a genomic record of historical tolerance to viral infection.

Given the quality of the bat genomes the team uniquely identified and experimentally validated several non-coding regulatory regions that may govern bats' key evolutionary innovations.

"Having such complete genomes allowed us to identify regulatory regions that control gene expression that are unique to bats. Importantly we were able to validate unique bat microRNAs in the lab to show their consequences for gene regulation. In the future we can use these genomes to understand how regulatory regions and epigenomics contributed to the extraordinary adaptations we see in bats," says Sonja Vernes, Co-Founding Director Bat 1K, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Senior Author.

This is just a beginning. The remaining ~1400 living bat species exhibit an incredible diversity in ecology, longevity, sensory perception and immunology, and numerous questions still remain regarding the genomic basis of these spectacular features. Bat1K will answer these questions as more and more exquisite bat genomes are sequenced, further uncovering the genetic basis of bats' rare and wonderful superpowers.

###

Originally posted here:
The genetic basis of bats' superpowers revealed - Newswise

The place looked like something out of an old horror film: all paint-chipped walls, dusty windows, and menacing shadows cast by moonlight. I walked through a gate, up a flight of creaking steps, and knocked on the door.

When it swung open, a woman in her 30s with woolly eyebrows and oversize white teeth welcomed me inside. She asked me to take off my shoes, then led me to a cavernous living room, its ceiling painted sky blue with wispy clouds. I took a seat beside a window that rattled in the breeze and watched through jaundiced streetlight as others walked in. A guy with prisoner eyes. A blonde woman with an off-centre bindi on her forehead.

Id come here on the recommendation of my doctor, whod told me: A breathing class could help. It could help strengthen my failing lungs, calm my frazzled mind, maybe give me perspective.

For the past few months, Id been going through a rough patch. My job was stressing me out and my 130-year-old house was falling apart. Id just recovered from pneumonia, which Id also had the year before, and the year before that. I was spending most of my time at home wheezing, working and eating three meals a day out of the same bowl while hunched over week-old newspapers on the couch. I was in a rut physically, mentally and otherwise. After a few months of living this way, I took my doctors advice and signed up for an introductory course in breathing to learn a technique called Sudarshan Kriya.

At 7pm, the bushy-browed woman locked the front door, sat in the middle of the group, inserted a cassette tape into a beat-up boom box, and pressed play. She told us to close our eyes. The voice instructed us to inhale slowly through our noses, then to exhale slowly. To focus on our breath. I kept breathing, but nothing happened. No calmness swept over me, no tension released from my tight muscles. Nothing. Ten, maybe 20 minutes passed. I started getting annoyed and a bit resentful that Id chosen to spend my evening inhaling dusty air on the floor of an old Victorian house. I thought about getting up and leaving, but I didnt want to be rude. Then something happened. I wasnt conscious of any transformation taking place. I never felt myself relax or the swarm of nagging thoughts leave my head. But it was as if Id been taken from one place and deposited somewhere else. It happened in an instant.

There was something wet on my head. I lifted my hand to wipe it off and noticed my hair was sopping. I ran my hand down my face, felt the sting of sweat in my eyes and tasted salt. I looked down at my torso and noticed sweat blotches on my sweater and jeans. Everyone had been covered in jackets and hoodies to keep warm. But I had somehow sweated through my clothes as if Id just run a marathon.

The instructor approached and asked if I was OK, if Id been sick or had a fever. I told her I felt perfectly fine. The next day I felt even better. As advertised, there was a feeling of calm and quiet that I hadnt experienced in a long time. I slept well. The little things in life didnt bother me as much. The tension was gone from my shoulders and neck. This lasted a few days before the feeling faded out.

What exactly had happened? How did sitting cross- legged in a strange house and breathing for an hour trigger such a profound reaction?

I returned to the breathing class the following week: same experience, fewer waterworks. I didnt mention any of it to family members or friends. But I worked to understand what had happened, and I spent the next several years trying to figure it out. Over that span of time, I fixed up my house, sorted myself out and got a lead that might answer some of my questions about breathing. I went to Greece to write a story on freediving, the ancient practice of swimming hundreds of feet below the waters surface on a single breath of air.

There are as many ways to breathe as there are foods to eat, said one female instructor who had held her breath for more than 8 minutes and once dived below 300ft. And each way we breathe will affect our bodies in different ways. Surely someone had studied the effects of this conscious breathing on landlubbers? I found a librarys worth of material. The problem was, the sources were hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years old.

Seven books of the Chinese Tao dating back to around 400BC focussed entirely on breathing, how it could kill us or heal us, depending on how we used it. Even earlier, Hindus considered breath and spirit the same thing and described elaborate practices that were meant to balance breathing and preserve both physical and mental health. Then there were the Buddhists, who used breathing not only to lengthen their lives but to reach higher planes of consciousness. Breathing, for all these people, for all these cultures, was powerful medicine.

I looked for some kind of verification of these claims in more recent research in pulmonology, the medical discipline that deals with the lungs and the respiratory tract, but found next to nothing. According to what I did find, breathing technique wasnt important. Many doctors, researchers and scientists I interviewed confirmed this position. Twenty times a minute, 10 times, through the mouth, nose or breathing tube, its all the same. The point is to get air in and let the body do the rest. But I kept digging and slowly a story began to unfold. As I found out, I was not the only person whod recently started asking these questions. While I was paging through texts and interviewing freedivers and super-breathers, scientists at Harvard, Stanford and other renowned institutions were confirming some of the wildest stories Id been hearing.

But their work wasnt happening in the pulmonology labs. Pulmonologists, I learned, work mainly on specific maladies of the lungs collapse, cancer, emphysema. Were dealing with emergencies, one veteran pulmonologist told me. Thats how the system works.

No, this breathing research has been taking place elsewhere: in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, the easy chairs of dental offices and the safe rooms of mental hospitals. Not the kinds of places where youd expect to find cutting-edge research into a biological function.

Few of these scientists set out to study breathing. But, somehow, in some way, breathing kept finding them. They discovered that our capacity to breathe has changed through the long processes of human evolution and that the way we breathe has become markedly worse since the dawn of the industrial age. Theyd also discovered that with some concerted practice we could restore our breathing and when we did we could take control of certain functions of our nervous and immune systems. The ways in which we took those 25,000 breaths we take each day some 30lb of air that enters and exits our lungs was in many ways as important as what we ate, how much we exercised, or whatever genes wed inherited.

Since I began researching my book several years ago, attitudes towards the importance of breathing have altered radically. Covid-19 has turned us into a planet of breath-obsessed people. We spend our days covering our mouths and noses with masks, our nights anxious that we might be feeling a cough coming on or some tightness in our chests. As hard as it might be to consider right now, theres a silver lining in all this. How we breathe may help with health and longevity and paying attention to it is long overdue. Several doctors told me recently that respiratory health has been directly correlated to Covid survival rates and they are now prescribing breathing practices to better defend our bodies against this virus as well as help us better overcome it once we start showing symptoms.

A video posted by Dr Sarfaraz Munshi, who is on the frontlines of the pandemic at Queens Hospital in London, shows Munshi taking abdominal breaths followed by a short breath-hold, then repeating it five times and ending with a cough. This technique, he suggests, will help purge gunk from the lungs and make for easier breathing. Although there is no scientific evidence to suggest this technique helps coronavirus patients, it is recommended by the director of nursing at the hospital.

What Id like to make clear is that breathing, like any therapy or medication, cant do everything. Breathing fast, slow, or not at all, cant make embolisms go away. No breathing can heal stage IV cancer. These severe problems require urgent medical attention. But, like all eastern medicines, breathing techniques are best suited to serve as preventative maintenance, a way to retain balance in the body so that milder problems dont blossom into more serious health issues. Should we lose that balance from time to time, breathing can often bring it back. Add to this, researchers still have much to learn about this endlessly expansive field and there should be more in-depth scientific research into the area.

For now, most of us see breathing as a passive action, something that we just do: breathe, live; stop breathing, die. But breathing is not binary. Its not just that we do it that is so important how we breathe matters, too. I call this awareness and practice of healthy breathing a lost art, because its not new at all. Most of the techniques Ive been exploring are ancient. They were created, documented, forgotten and then discovered again in another culture at another time, then forgotten again. This went on for centuries.

One thing that every pulmonary researcher Ive talked to over the past few years has agreed on is that we tend to overbreathe. Whats considered normal today is anywhere between a dozen and 20 breaths a minute, with an average intake of about 0.5 litres or more of air per breath. For those on the high end of respiratory rates, thats about twice at much as it used to be. Breathing too much can raise blood pressure, overwork the heart and lull our nervous systems into a state of stress. For the body to function as peak efficiency we need to breathe as closely in-line with our metabolic needs as possible. For the majority of us that means breathing less. But thats harder than it sounds. Weve become conditioned to breathe too much, just as weve been conditioned to eat too much. With some effort and training, however, breathing less can become an unconscious habit.

Through my years of travels and travails in respiratory research, there is one lesson, one equation, that I believe is at the root of so much health, happiness and longevity. Im a bit embarrassed to say it has taken me a decade to figure this out and I realise how insignificant it may seem. But lest we forget, nature is simple but subtle. For me, the perfect breath is this: inhale for about 5.5 seconds, then exhale for 5.5 seconds. Thats 5.5 breaths a minute for a total of about 5.5 litres of air. You can practise this perfect breathing for a few minutes, or a few hours. When we breathe like this, breathing practitioners suggest that circulation in the brain and body will increase while the burden on the heart decreases. All the while the diaphragm that umbrella-shaped muscle in our chests will drop lower and rise higher, allowing more air to enter the lungs and assisting in pushing blood throughout the body. For this reason, the diaphragm is sometimes referred to as the second heart, because it not only beats to its own rhythm but also affects the rate and strength of the heartbeat.

Breathing techniques in the form of classes, videos, books and apps are already an industry. But be aware that the stripped-down approach is as good as any. It requires no batteries, wifi, headgear or smartphones. It costs nothing, takes little time and effort, and you can do it wherever you are, whenever you need. Its a function our distant ancestors have practised since they crawled out of the sludge 2.5bn years ago, a technique our own species has been perfecting with only our lips, noses and lungs for hundreds of thousands of years.

Most days, I treat it like a stretch, something I do after a long time sitting or stressing, to bring myself back to normal. By the law of averages, you will take 670m breaths over your lifetime. Maybe youve already taken half of those. Maybe youre on breath 669,000,000. Maybe youd like to take a few million more.

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor (Penguin Life, 16.99) is published on 30 July. Buy it for 14.78 from guardianbookshop.com

Follow this link:
How one hour of slow breathing changed my life - The Guardian

JULY 24, 2020

IN GEODE, SUSAN BARBAS conceit is geological time, and it proves a timely guide. With a pandemic challenging our ability to predict the future, to act with care for strangers bodies, and to prioritize nature, her poems offer immensity / with speed bumps and a macro-view through a micro-lens. Her beguilingly exact poems chisel open interior spaces often unseen in everyday life. As in geodes, much of the richness of our perceptions and yearnings remains hidden, mute until it finds an Emersonian sayer. It takes a highly skilled poet to reveal us to ourselves; geode signals the arrival of one whose angle and anvil of vision is acute and necessary.

Barbas earlier book, Fair Sun (2017), includes her grandfathers testimony from his survival of the Armenian Genocide. While that collection explored historys felt presence, geode provides readers with a compass for the psychological terrain of the current moment and for the ecological and social forces that have catalyzed a health crisis. She situates lifecycles generational and geological, personal and planetary within Earths [b]lue-green grid of constant revolution, prompting us to reconsider the terms of our habitation. Like Elizabeth Bishop, she presents demands for a different world in a book that driv[es] to the interior, albeit of our own country and private lives.

Here we are ticking away, / all of us clocks, Barba acknowledges in The Minutes, but she posits the geode as a rival timepiece, independent of human reference. Shorn from limestone or shale, geodes often fit inside the palm, their plain exteriors disguising crystalline cores. A geode also records the context of its making in the way that a poem scores somatic experience in the sedimentary layers of language. [I]n words and rocks / the order is the meaning, she notes, cuing us to the specificity of her syntax and her poems layering.

Precision and subtle intelligence reward her reader. The poem Practice, for instance, offers a slender homily on how to root, in the earth, rage that comes from witnessing human folly.

Your anger is a scrim,clouding your vision.

You see, you hear,and then you testify, you judge.

Write the necessary elegies,the songs of temporary

fury. Human seasons areas leaves, not oaks.

See what foresthas arisen from the rot.

Allow yourselfto be as generous.

*

Oak, whose girthexceeds my reach

forever I amat your feet,looking up.

The poem switches from second to first person as stern self-advice becomes an ode to the oak. Dwarfing us in size and longevity, species of oak tree can live more than 500 years. This largeness (and largesse) in the natural world provides an example to the narrator. Bidding herself to write the necessary elegies, she tempers anger with metaphor human lives as leaves on long-lived trees, making seasonal departures. We, ourselves, wont be here long.

Depicting how sense perceptions rapidly inform ways we testify and judge, the poem counsels two responses: artistic resistance and the consolation of our relative inconsequence. As the poem shifts, it changes posture. It begins with the speaker looking out at the world of human squabble and concludes by looking up, praising a tree whose width surpasses her grasp.

Barbas poems reliably render the problematics of time, systems of care, and human responsibility on a comprehensive scale, venturing in unexpected directions. The early poem Exhibit 2 considers the psychology of habitation. What does it mean to dwell? What kind of living happens in the living room? What does our typical mode of shelter its prevalence of walls and doors invite or inhibit? She poses an answer in 10 compressed lines.

The centrifugal force of a room:four walls, a ceiling.Nothing can get inbut what you admit.Part dark harbor,part isolation chamber.A man whod lived out of doorssaid what hed missed mostwas not a roof, not a lock,but a doorknob.

In a single stanza, which means room in Italian, the walls and ceiling appear to flee from the center. The dweller, meanwhile, exerts agency in choosing what to admit, perhaps in both senses allowing entry or confessing. Privacy, fetishized in American culture and most often celebrated in its violation, seemingly protects us from vulnerability: what we do not wish to admit, whether guest or secret. In its spare exactness, the poem underscores the tension between isolation chamber and dark harbor, or loneliness versus chosen solitude. Thus the concluding meditation from a man who has lived not outdoors but, more concretely, out of doors suggests that the doorknob signifies having a choice in how we negotiate self and other, how we demarcate interiority in physical space.

Poems in geode also explore the crystalline webs between parent and child, lover and beloved, self and commodity: dyads with socially reinforced centripetal pull. Barba tracks individuation within these relationships and a primal desire for self-possession. As a daughter ventures into ocean surf, her dark head of hair bobs, visibly, as if she were performing a captioned ballet: ballon after ballon / this is my life! The childs postural repudiation of parental care is recast as a secular blessing in the poem Retrospective, Agnes Martin, which addresses the expressionist painter known for her years of disciplined solitude in the New Mexican desert. That poem concludes: if I could give you one thing / it would be untitled space. Autonomy is the essential assertion of children and artists, alike.

Similarly, the speaker in Wide Margin Love Poem bids for a Rilke-esque notion of love as the protection (rather than the collapse) of identity in a narrow column that threads the middle of the page.

Let melet yoube asbeforeor asafterme.

Wise about the claims individuals make on each other, even in love, the poet also contests the demands of commerce. In Blank Placard Dance, a poem about a protest dance performed in 1967 by Anna Halprin, the speaker urges her addressee to retain your stony / surface, stony structure. / Defend the palimpsest / that is your face. Expressivity, or the ability of the face to compose an array of changing affects, is what anonymizing data collection, targeted marketing, Botox, and stealth technology seeks to minimize or eliminate.

While geode features keenly cut lyrics, economic to the syllable, that elucidate murky interiors of what remains of private life, Barba also showcases her sophistication in other modes. In the epic poem River, she extends her concern for the tenets of personhood to the Colorado River, reinforcing her primary argument that we privilege human life and extractive capitalism over the earths health at our peril. The 12-page poem recounts the legal case The Colorado River Ecosystem v. The State of Colorado, which would have granted the river legal standing of personhood and rights akin to other ecosystems such as the Ganges River in India. The poem maps the rivers magnitude, extending 14 million acre-feet from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, supplying arterial lifeblood to nearly 40 million human beings, four million acres of cropland, and countless creatures. An epic catalog of the watersheds species includes the humpback chub and peregrine falcon, the bonytail and black bear, a list she punctuates with the poignant refrain, stay with me now.

Naming these dependent species underscores that the river is a person on whom an ecosystem, a nation of life, depends. Yet the case was dismissed in 2017 by the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, leading Barba to ask one of the books searing questions:

Is it by virtue of this immense life-giving laborthat the river is not a rights-holderbut a natural object,meant for profit,like slaves like womenan order apartlike the roe and the deer?

Misuse of the Colorado River is situated as part of a broader pathology of patriarchal capitalism, which refuses to acknowledge its instrumentalized objects as subjects. This section of the poem concludes with a riveting quotation from a 1968 casebook in property law: [A]fter all, land, like woman, was meant to be possessed.

The legal suit for the Colorado River epitomizes claims we might wish to make within our own lives against the exploitation of our labor, privacy, or attention. In the poem Dispersal, the narrator recounts making a long commute where she feels the light slip / the more she strove. Grappling with global news, her neighbors razed forest, and needy children in the backseat, she composes a petition:

re. space she wantednothing morethan a marginundisturbed

re. time she wantednever to accept it

the trees succumbingto storms with proper names

the grass succumbingto polypropylene

[]

she and I and youand they and he

seeds

seekingmore than a lifein the wind.

Susan Barba dramatizes ordinary life, riven with obligation, and a yearning for time, space, and an identity untethered to others claims. Her aesthetic marries the elliptical startle of Lorine Niedecker and Robert Creeley to the documentary impulse of Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Reznikoff, advocating for a comity with the earth and with our fragmented selves that is both visionary and diagnostic. We cannot have permanence or limitless abundance. But geode asserts that we might still claim purpose in our time on this spherical spinning rock.

Heather TreselersParturition(2020) won Irelands Munster Literature Centresinternational chapbook prize. Her poems appear inThe Cincinnati Review,Harvard Review,Alaska Quarterly Review,Southern Humanities Review, andThe Iowa Review,among other journals.

See the article here:
Driving to the Interior: On Susan Barba's geode - Los Angeles Review of Books - lareviewofbooks

Every week there are numerous scientific studies published. Heres a look at some of the more interesting ones.

A Big Week for COVID-19 Vaccine Trials

Three of the most advanced COVID-19 vaccines published data from early and mid-range clinical trials this week. CanSino Biologics, along with Chinas military research unit, reported early data on its Phase II trial for its COVID-19 vaccine, Ad5-nCOV. The results in 508 patients showed antibody and T-cell immune responses. There were no reported serious side effects. The data was published in the journal The Lancet.

With one dose, CanSinos human adenovirus vector-based vaccine elicited receptor-binding and neutralizing antibodies in 508 patients peaking after 28 days, wrote Philipp Rosenbaum, senior infectious diseases analyst at GlobalData. However, in the 52% of study participants that had a high pre-existing immunity to the viral vector, both types of antibodies were only at half the level than in the group with low-pre-existing immunity. A second dose of the vaccine might solve this issue, but on the other hand reduce the number of people who can be vaccinated.

The CanSino vaccine uses a modified common cold virus as a vector to deliver the genetic material. This is a method also being utilized by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, which also published their results in The Lancet.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine stimulated a T-cell response within 14 days and an antibody response within 28 days.

Lead author Andrew Pollard, University of Oxford, UK, said, The new vaccine is a chimpanzee adenovirus viral vector (ChAdOx1) vaccine that expresses the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. It uses a common cold virus (adenovirus) that infects chimpanzees, which has been weakened so that it cant cause any disease in humans, and is genetically modified to code for the spike protein of the human SARS-CoV-2 virus. This means that when the adenovirus enters vaccinated peoples cells it also delivers the spike protein genetic code. This causes these peoples cells to produce the spike protein, and helps teach the immune system to recognize the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Last week, Moderna and researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and clinical trial centers published the data in The New England Journal of Medicine from its Phase I trial of mRNA-1273, its mRNA vaccine.

The interim analysis was of a two-dose vaccination schedule given 28 days apart at three different dose levels, 25, 100 and 250 micrograms in 45 healthy adults ranging in age from 18 to 55 years. The data published was on results through Day 57.

These Phase I data demonstrate that vaccination with mRNA-1273 elicits a robust immune response across all dose levels and clearly support the choice of 100 microgram in a prime and boost regimen as the optimal dose for the Phase III study, said Tal Zaks, Modernas chief medical officer. We look forward to beginning our Phase III study of mRNA-1273 this month to demonstrate our vaccines ability to significantly reduce the risk of COVID-19 disease.

The companys Phase II trial of the study, with two cohorts, healthy adults ages 18-55 years and older adults ages 55 years and above, are fully enrolled. That study is a placebo-controlled, dose-confirmation study focusing on patients receiving either a placebo, a 50-microgram or 100-microgram dose.

Pfizer and BioNTech announced preliminary data on July 1 from trials of their vaccines, with similar results.

Naor Bar-Zeev and William Moss, with the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote an accompanying editorial in The Lancet discussing both the University of Oxford/AstraZeneca results, also published in the journal, and the CanSino study.

These trial reports are hugely anticipated. The results of both studies augur well for Phase III trials, where the vaccines must be tested on much larger populations of participants to assess their efficacy and safety. Overall, they wrote, the results of both trials are broadly similar and promising, notwithstanding differences in the vector, in the geographical locations of the populations studies, and the neutralization assays used.

They noted that the importance of the studies looking at associations of age and sex with adverse events and immunogenicity by the Chinese group and longevity of response by the British groups, particularly given the differential burden of severe outcomes in older adults, and the emerging science around differential sex-specific vaccine effects. These COVID-19 vaccine trials are small so inferential caution is warranted, but the explorations are laudable. Ethnic diversity in both these trials was very limited.

They also point out that the safety results seen in the two trials are reassuring. But when things are urgent, we must proceed cautiously. The success of COVID-19 vaccines hinges on community trust in vaccine sciences, which requires comprehensive and transparent evaluation of risk and honest communication of potential harms.

Where are the Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in the U.S.?

Researchers with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other investigators evaluated 10 locations across the U.S. for antibodies to COVID-19 from March 23 to May 12, 2020. By testing a cross section of 16,025 residual specimens, they estimated the proportion of people with detectible antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in 1.0% in the San Francisco Bay area to 6.9% in New York City. They found that there were six to 24 times more infections per site than reported COVID-19 cases. However, most people at those locations likely did not have detectable antibodies to the virus. The collection sites were San Francisco Bay area; Connecticut; south Florida; Louisiana; Minneapolis-St. Paul-St. Cloud metro area in Minnesota; Missouri; New York City metro area; Philadelphia metro area; Utah; and western Washington State. The authors concluded, The estimated number of infections was much greater than the number of reported cases in all sites. The findings may reflect the number of persons who had mild or no illness or who did not seek medical care or undergo testing but who still may have contributed to ongoing virus transmission in the population.

Proteins that Protect Synapses Discovered, Could Help Alzheimers and Schizophrenia

Researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio discovered a new class of proteins that protect synapses from being destroyed. This has implications for Alzheimers disease and schizophrenia. In mouse models of Alzheimers, they found that by removing complement proteins from the brain protected it from neurodegeneration. Complement is an immune system pathway that calls for macrophages to eat excess synapses during development. They identified proteins that inhibit this function.

University of Utah Researchers ID HIVs Dynamic Structure

Investigators with the University of Utah found that the lattice, a major structural part of the HIV virus, is dynamic. It is made of Gag and GagPol proteins and was thought to be completely static. But their new electron microscopy approach, that didnt involve freezing the viral samples, showed that the lattice was dynamic, moving, which may have implications for new approaches to therapeutics.

Oxytocin May Be Used to Treat Cognitive Diseases like Alzheimers

Researchers at Tokyo University of Science found evidence that oxytocin, a hormone dubbed the love hormone because of its ability to induce feelings of love and well-being, can reverse some of the damage caused by amyloid plaques in an animal model of Alzheimers disease. Alzheimers is associated with two abnormal proteins, amyloid plaques and tau tangles. The research was published in the journal Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications.

This is the first study in the world that has shown that oxytocin can reverse ABeta-induced impairments in the mouse hippocampus, said Akiyoshi Saitoh from the Tokyo University of Science, who led the research. At present, there are no sufficiently satisfactory drugs to treat dementia, and new therapies with novel mechanisms of action are desired. Our study puts forth the interesting possibility that oxytocin could be a novel therapeutic modality for the treatment of memory loss associated with cognitive disorders such as Alzheimers disease. We expect that our findings will open up a new pathway to the creation of new drugs for the treatment of dementia caused by Alzheimers disease.

Saitoh and his team perfused slices of the mouse hippocampus with Abeta to confirm that Abeta caused the signaling abilities of neurons in the slices to decline. Then, they perfused with oxytocin, noting that the signaling abilities increased. Further experiments concluded that oxytocin bound with oxytocin receptors in the membranes of brain cells.

View original post here:
Research Roundup: Progress on COVID-19 Vaccines and More - BioSpace

Research indicates that the average American lives to be around 75-80ish years old. The question is if you had the opportunity to live longer would you take it? This is a rather loaded question thick with philosophical and societal considerations among others.

Humans have long searched for the possibility to extend life and some to even become immortal. But when it comes down to it many consider this to just be a flight of fanciful dreams. But according to research this is not necessarily true. In recent years research is indicating that we can take steps to extend our healthspan and in turn longevity. Now University of California researchers have revealed a groundbreaking discovery regarding the intricacies of cellular aging, and in light of their findings the team suggests that the notion of dramatically extended human lifespan is not so far fetched after all.

Each individuals lifespan and personal rate of aging is determined by the aging of their individual cells. This study set out to investigate different types of cells at different ages, at different speeds based on different causes and stimuli using the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae which provided a suitable model to track the aging mechanisms of various cell types.

The study published in Science found that two cells made of the exact same genetic material and residing in the same bodily location can age in vastly different ways and cellular/molecular trajectories. Using a variety of complex techniques it was discovered that about half of the cells age due to a slow decline in the stability of their nucleus, while the other cells appear to age primarily due to dysfunctional mitochondria.

At the beginning of their existence cells appear to start aging early on in their nucleolar or mitochondrial path of aging, and they continue to follow the same aging process until they die off. The team claims to have been able to find the master circuit that is in charge of controlling these aging processes and paths among the cells.

To understand how cells make these decisions, we identified the molecular processes underlying each aging route and the connections among them, revealing a molecular circuit that controls cell aging, analogous to electric circuits that control home appliances, says senior study author Nan Hao, an associate professor in the Section of Molecular Biology, Division of Biological Sciences.

Their discovery allowed for the construction of a new model of the aging landscape, and the revelation that the team might be able to conceivably manipulate and optimize the aging process. As such using a series of computer simulations the team reprogrammed the master molecular circuit via DNA modifications which resulted in the creation of a novel aging route that offered a much longer lifespan. The team plans to continue testing their model on more complex cells before moving onto human cell testing.

Our study raises the possibility of rationally designing gene or chemical-based therapies to reprogram how human cells age, with a goal of effectively delaying human aging and extending human healthspan, Hao says.

Much of the work featured in this paper benefits from a strong interdisciplinary team that was assembled, says Biological Sciences Professor of Molecular Biology Lorraine Pillus, a study co-author. One great aspect of the team is that we not only do the modeling but we then do the experimentation to determine whether the model is correct or not. These iterative processes are critical for the work that we are doing.

Excerpt from:
Has The Cellular Aging Master Circuit Been Discovered? - Anti Aging News

If doomsday comes, know this: precautions have been taken. On an isolated Arctic archipelago, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault aka Norway's 'Doomsday Vault' holds over 1 million seed samples in a fortress-like bunker designed to be the most invulnerable seed bank in the world.

Svalbard protects more than just seeds, though. On the same remote mountain, an abandoned coal mine now exists as another vital safe-house: the Arctic World Archive, preserving the world's data of today for an uncertain tomorrow. And the facility just received a contribution that's truly mind-boggling in scope.

GitHub, often billed as the world's largest host of open source code, has successfully transported all of its active public code repositories (as of February this year) to the Arctic World Archive, as part of the company's ongoing efforts to establish the GitHub Arctic Code Vault.

(GitHub)

"Our mission is to preserve open source software for future generations by storing your code in an archive built to last a thousand years," Julia Metcalf, GitHub's director of strategic programs, explains on the company's blog.

The project, first announced last year, already saw one shipment to Svalbard in late 2019, with a deposit of 6,000 of the platform's most significant repositories of open source code.

The new shipment, painstakingly managed during the shutdowns and border closures of the coronavirus pandemic, goes even further, preserving a massive haul amounting to 21 terabytes of data, written onto 186 reels of a digital archival film called piqlFilm.

This purpose-built media designed to last for 500 years, with simulations suggesting it should last twice as long is now stored 250 metres deep, in a steel-walled container inside a sealed chamber in the Arctic World Archive.

The film, composed of silver halides on polyester, looks like a miniaturised print of QR codes, except every frame squeezes in some 8.8 million microscopic pixels, and each reel runs for almost 1 kilometre (about 3,500 ft), such is the gargantuan size of the data being stored.

(GitHub/YouTube)

"It can withstand extreme electromagnetic exposure and has undergone extensive longevity and accessibility testing," the piql company claims.

It's hoped that this extremely long-life media in conjunction with the Archive's natural isolation and engineered security will give the world's open source software the best chance of seeing a distant future where it may one day be needed by upcoming generations.

"It is easy to envision a future in which today's software is seen as a quaint and long-forgotten irrelevancy, until an unexpected need for it arises," the GitHub Archive website explains.

"Like any backup, the GitHub Archive Program is also intended for currently unforeseeable futures as well."

In those unforeseeable futures, it's hard to know exactly what future humans will make of the archive's coded contents, or how they might be able to access and use them.

For that reason, the vault will also contain a separate, human-readable reel, called the Tech Tree, explaining the technical history and cultural context of the archive's contents.

The Tech Tree won't just throw future humans into the world of 21st century open source code, but serve as a primer for what these programs are, and what kind of technology they run on.

"It will also include works which explain the many layers of technical foundations that make software possible: microprocessors, networking, electronics, semiconductors, and even pre-industrial technologies," Metcalf explains.

"This will allow the archive's inheritors to better understand today's world and its technologies, and may even help them recreate computers to use the archived software."

See the original post here:
A Staggering 21TB of Source Code Were Just Buried in The Arctic For an Unknown Future - ScienceAlert

Editors note: Stuart Nisbet is chief data scientist at Cadient Talent, a talent acquisition firm based in Raleigh.

RALEIGH At Cadient Talent, its a question that we wrestle with on a daily basis: How do we eliminate bias from the hiring process?

The only way to address a problem or bias is to acknowledge it head on, under the scrutiny of scientific examination. Through the application of machine learning, we are able to learn where we have erred in the past, allowing us to make less biased hiring decisions moving forward. When we uncover unconscious bias, or even conscious bias, and educate ourselves to do better based on unbiased machine learning we are able to take the first step toward correcting an identified problem.

Bias is defined as a prejudgment or a prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way that is considered to be unfair. Think of bias as three sets of facts: The first is a set of objective facts that are universally accepted. The second is a set of facts that confirms beliefs, in line with what an individual believes to be true. Where bias enters the picture is in the intersection between the objective facts and the facts that confirm personal beliefs.

By selectively choosing the facts that confirm particular beliefs and focusing on the things that confirm those beliefs, bias enters. If we look at hiring from that perspective, and if our goal is to remove bias from the hiring process, then we need to remove the personal choice of which data points are included in the process. All data points that contribute to a positive choice (hire the applicant) or negative choice (decline the applicant) are included in the process and choosing the data points and their weights is done objectively through statistics, not subjectively through human choice.

How can computer algorithms help us do this? Our goal is to be able to augment the intelligence of humans, in particular by using the experiences and prior judgment in past hiring decisions, with an emphasis on those that resulted in good hiring decisions. Good hiring can be measured in a number of ways, that dont implement inappropriate bias, such as the longevity of employees. If a new hire does not remain on the job very long, then perhaps the recruiting effort was not done well, and, in hindsight, you would not have chosen that applicant. But, if you hire someone who is productive and stays for a long time, that person would be considered a good hire.

We want to remove bias when it is unintentional or has no bearing on whether an employee is going to be able to perform the job in a satisfactory manner. So, if a hiring managers entire responsibility is to apply their knowledge and experience to determine the best fit, why do we use machine learning to eliminate bias? Because, artificial intelligence only removes the bias towards non-work-related candidate attributes and augments decisions based on relevant work traits, where there is appropriate bias.

Our goal is then to make the hiring process as transparent as possible and consider all of the variables that are used in a hiring decision. Thats extremely complicated, if not impossible, if you have nothing but a human-based approach because the decision-making of a hiring manager is far more complex and less understood than those of a machine learning algorithm. So, we want to focus on the strength of simplicity in a machine learning algorithm; meaning we only want to look at variables, columns, and pieces of data in the algorithm that are pertinent to the hiring process and do not include any data points that are not relevant to performance.

Stuart Nisbet

An assessment result, for example, whether cognitive or personality-based, may be a very valid data point to consider if the traits being assessed are pertinent to the job. Work history and demonstrated achievement in similar roles may be very important to consider. The opposite is very clear, too. Gender, ethnicity, and age should have no legitimate bearing on someones job performance. This next point is critical. A hiring manager cannot meet an applicant in an interview and credibly say that they dont recognize the gender, ethnicity, or general age category of the person sitting across from them. No matter our intentions, this is incredibly hard to do. Conversely, it is the easiest task for an algorithm to perform.

If the algorithm is not provided gender, ethnicity, or age, there is no chance for those variables to be brought into the hiring decision. This involves bringing in the data that is germane, having a computer look at what hiring decisions have been made in the past that have resulted in high performing long-term employees, and then strengthening future decisions based on the past performance of good hiring management practices. This will ultimately remove the bias in hiring.

One of the things that deserves consideration is the idea of perpetuating past practices that could be biased. If all we are doing is hiring like we have hired in the past and there have been prejudicial or biased hiring practices, that could promote institutional bias. Through time, we have trained computers to do exactly what a biased manager would have done in the past. If the only data that is used (trained) for hiring is the same data that is selected by biases of the past, then it is difficult to train on data that is not biased. For example, if we identify gender as a bias in the hiring process, and we take the gender variable out of the algorithm, gender would not be considered. When we flag previous bias, we are able to minimize future bias.

We should unabashedly look at whether we are able to identify and learn from hiring practices that may have had bias in the past. This is one of the greatest strengths of applying very simple machine learning algorithms in the area of hourly hiring.

An aspect of the hiring process that opens up a lot of opportunities in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning is implementing diversity.

Artificial intelligence can really differentiate itself here. Machine learning can make the very best hiring decisions based on the data that its given; if you have diversity goals and want hiring practices to encourage a diverse work population, it is very simple to choose the best candidates from whichever populations are important to corporate goals. This can be done transparently and simply. It doesnt prioritize one person over another. It allows the hiring of the very best candidates from each population that youre interested in representing the company.

Upon scrutiny and scientific examination, machine learning can be a very valuable tool for augmenting the hiring decisions managers make every day and help to understand when bias has entered into our decisions and yielded far less than our collective best.

Here is the original post:
How one company is using machine learning to remove bias from the hiring process - WRAL Tech Wire

HealthCare Intelligence Markets unravels its new study titled Precision Medicine Software Market. Effective exploratory techniques such as qualitative and quantitative analysis have been used to discover accurate data. For an effective business outlook, it studies North America, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, Japan, and India by considering different aspects such as type, size, as well as applications. SWOT and Porters five analysis have been used to analyse cost, prices, revenue, and end-users. Various aspects of businesses such as primary application areas, financial overview, and requirement of the industries have been mentioned to give a brief to the readers. This research study further offers mergers, acquisitions and product portfolio of the businesses.

Ask for sample copy of this [emailprotected]https://www.healthcareintelligencemarkets.com/request_sample.php?id=32273

Profiling Key players: Syapse, Allscripts, Qiagen, Roper Technologies, Fabric Genomics, Foundation Medicine, Sophia Genetics, PierianDx, Human Longevity, Translational Software, Gene42, Inc, Lifeomic Health

Global Precision Medicine Software Market Report Illuminates:

Ask for a discount on this [emailprotected]https://www.healthcareintelligencemarkets.com/ask_for_discount.php?id=32273

Table of Contents:

For more information ask our experts @https://www.healthcareintelligencemarkets.com/enquiry_before_buying.php?id=32273

If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as per your requirements.

About Us:

HealthCare Intelligence Markets Reports provides market intelligence & consulting services to a global clientele spread over 145 countries. Being a B2B firm, we help businesses to meet the challenges of an ever-evolving market with unbridled confidence. We craft customized and syndicated market research reports that help market players to build game-changing strategies. Besides, we also provide upcoming trends & future market prospects in our reports pertaining to Drug development, Clinical & healthcare IT industries. Our intelligence enables our clients to make decisions with which in turn proves a game-changer for them. We constantly strive to serve our clients better by directly allowing them sessions with our research analysts so the report is at par with their expectations.

Contact Us:Address: 90, State Office Center,90, State Street Suite 700,Albany, NY 12207Email:[emailprotected]Website:www.healthcareintelligencemarkets.comPhone:+1 (888) 616-2766

Originally posted here:
Massive Demand in Precision Medicine Software Market | Scope and Price Analysis of Top Manufacturers Profiles by 2027| Syapse, Allscripts, Qiagen,...

LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 17, 2020) From the Great Depression to the Civil Rights Movement each generation has been shaped by the national and international events that take place during their formative years.

Will the same be said for the COVID-19 pandemic?

Anthony Bardo, an assistant professor with a dual appointment inHealthy Society and Populations and the Department of Sociologyin the UK College of Arts and Sciences, believes its important to consider how perspectives will change. As a medical sociologist and health demographer, his research is driven by the desire to understand what contributes to quality of life across societies.

In line with the age-old adage without your health you have nothing, scholars and politicians have recently turned to measures of health and longevity to gauge quality of life, he said. Yet, as my research has consistently shown health is only one, and not even the most important, component of quality of life.

While its difficult to predict the future, Bardos expertise and insight can help society prepare for what the world will look like months or even years from now.

And perhaps its worth considering how each generation might live their lives differently.

UKNow: The COVID-19 pandemic is changing many aspects of our lives. Can we expect some of those changes to be our new normal not just for the next few months, but years?

Bardo: Indeed, many aspects of our lives have been touched if not substantially altered.Our day-to-day behaviors, activities and routines are now shaped by mandates and policies aimed at slowing the pandemic.

Minimal Changes

Bardo: Actions tied to economic activities (e.g., shopping, work, leisure) will likely return to normal once government restrictions are lifted and community concern has diminished. However, our routines will likely continue to be shaped by a now cognizant concern for public health (e.g., hand washing, covering coughs/sneezes, isolating while sick, etc.). At first, these behaviors will likely be driven at the individual level. We may continue to see readily available sanitizing agents in public spaces, and organizations may even start to enforce sick leave policies. These circumstances beg the question, why were these fundamental functions not already ingrained in our society?

Drastic Changes

Bardo: Its apparent that improvements in quality of life are no longer closely tied to technological development. Refrigerators, washing machines, and dishwashers were certainly game changers as they allotted folks additional time for activities that were more enjoyable and/or meaningful. Yet, since the rise of the personal computer, national-level well-being has remained relatively constant.

What do we do with this new technology? We use it to purchase more things, spend more time working and less time in the physical presence of others. In a sense, weve been on a path toward social isolation for several decades by surrounding ourselves with more stuff and fewer people (at least in a physical sense).

Technological development has long been deemed the solution to enhance quality of life. It was widely thought that such advancements would ultimately lead to the good life. Now we may actually have begun recognizing that human interactions and meaningful pursuits are what we crave. Although e-commerce is at an all-time high, were not the least bit happier when packages magically appear on our doorsteps. Many are now working from home, but also yearning for some dry humor at the water cooler. Students had been begging for more online learning opportunities, but now they want nothing more than to come to campus.

Takeaway

Bardo: Im not, nor is anyone else, sure what the future holds, but if we dont take the time now to reflect on our experience, well simply continue to fall subject to the same economic forces that have made life vanillaat best.

UKNow: As unemployment persists, many are concerned about their financial future. How will COVID-19 impact career trajectories?

Bardo: A useful exercise to consider is to draw on what we now know about the long-term implications of the Great Recession and how they differ by age group.

Mid-Career (late Boomers and early Gen-Xers)

Bardo: The current pandemic has ravaged the labor market. Unlike during the Great Recession, mid-career folks may find themselves facing greater challenges compared to those on the verge of retirement. For example, the current mid-career cohort should be in their prime earning years, but they now find themselves hit with a double whammy. The Great Recession stalled their upward mobility early on. Contemporaneously, retirement and old age were reinvented in such a way to extend traditional working age (e.g., 60 is the new 50). Moreover, these shifting age norms at the latter end of the life course have major implications for younger people as well. For example, young folks increasingly find themselves in a precarious state, as adult positions and the privileges they come with continue to dwindle highlighted by a massive increase in mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression.

Relatedly, the current mid-career cohort uniquely lacks the retirement savings that previous cohorts had. This is partially due to the above noted hamper in upward mobility, but also because this mid-career cohort are grappling with increased costs of education for both themselves and their children. Many are also simultaneously supporting their adult children and aging parents, and sometimes even their grandchildren. Macroeconomic circumstances cannot, or will not, provide the same opportunities to achieve the American dream as they once did. The current pandemic only makes the future seem bleaker.

Late Boomers and early Gen-Xers have a close relationship with adversity, and they have received relatively little support along the way compared to previous cohorts. They faced numerous socioeconomic woes at critical life stages. They were children during the Oil Crisis and may have gone without during their impressionable years. They were launching their careers during the dot-com bubble, and they are much more likely to have had made career changes compared to earlier cohorts. They were finally starting to find their way during the Great Recession, and they only recently recovered to pre-Great Recession status. Given the above circumstances, its not surprising that this age group is driving the Deaths of Despair an unprecedented reversal in life expectancy because of increased mortality among whites in mid-life due to suicide and drug and alcohol abuse.

Takeaway

Bardo: In sum, the American dream certainly takes hard work and dedication, but opportunity is a prerequisite. Will opportunities abound post-pandemic? Maybe so. The more important question is, do we want the same opportunities that have provided less than an optimal quality of life?

UKNow: As teens become young adults, how might this pandemic change/shape their views on the areas below:

Higher Education

Bardo: A common strategy among young adults in response to the Great Recession was to shelter in higher education. For many this meant pursuing graduate degrees in lieu of entering the labor market after undergrad. The idea was that the recession would end, things would go back to normal and their lapse in employment would have been used to make themselves more marketable. Whether this strategy was effective remains an open question. What is clear is that the transition to adulthood has remained precarious at best, with even fewer road signs and landmarks than ever before. Moreover, the uncertainty surrounding higher education during this pandemic only adds to this dilemma what to do?

Whether to pursue higher education may seem like a relatively straightforward decision, but this decision traditionally comes at an age when timing is particularly crucial. If young adults arent in higher education making themselves more marketable (we can no longer afford to learn for the sake of learning, or maybe never have), then what will they do? Maybe they will take up low paying jobs that are now deemed essential. Or as suggested by our political leaders, they may even find something new. Regardless of what path young people choose, were likely to see another baby bust.

Family Formation

Bardo: Child rearing is a key component of family formation, and its timing in the life course has major implications for ones remaining years. Thirteen years ago, America was only coming to terms with decades-long shifts in traditional family values driven by an increase in female labor participation, two earner households and divorce rates. This is evidenced by attitude and subsequent policy shifts surrounding same-sex marriage and LGBTQ rights.

While current circumstances reflect traditional telltale signs for a baby boom (what else is there to do than Netflix and chill?), we are going to have a back-to-back baby bust (opposite of baby boom). This not only has major implications for the future trajectories of young adults themselves, but also the many institutions that were designed to serve them. Moreover, who is going to pay the taxes to support our rapidly aging population?

Social Justice

Bardo: The unique socialization of Gen-Z (the children of Gen-X) has led to increased versatility in anticipation for a bumpy road. While certainly versatile, Gen-Z is often stereotyped as being overly individualistic or even narcissistic. On the one hand, the individualistic stereotype rings true. For example, there is no cultural glue that binds this cohort together nor any that ties them to their adjacent Millennials. This is largely due to technological development and the related rise in user-generated content. On the other hand, the narcissistic stereotype couldnt be further from the truth. For example, this cohort is leading the way in terms of equality and social justice evidenced by the current protests and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Few cohorts aside from the Silent Generation have faced such levels of uncertainty during their formative years. Likely due to their formative experiences of social deprivation, Gen-Z and the Silent Generation share many characteristics. For example, the Silent Generation is often credited withforming the leadership of the Civil Rights movement. This may also be due to the circumstances of their respective parents, and the unique primary socialization they provided. The Greatest Generation enjoyed the Roaring Twenties and Gen-X soaked up the materialism of the 1980s and early '90s as young adults, and both historical periods were closely followed by turbulent times (i.e., Great Depression and Great Recession). Furthermore, both generations are characterized by a relatively high prevalence of mental health issues. Mental health was not well understood when the Silent Generation was young, but their relatively high levels of cognitive impairment likely reflects the long-term consequences of their exposure to social stressors. How might the COVID-19 pandemic impact both the immediate and long-term mental health of Gen-Z? Might the current movements come to parallel those of the Civil Rights era?

Takeaway

Bardo: Many of the issues that we face today can be linked back to the disappearing middle-class, as the social institutions that were designed to improve our lives (e.g., science, education, and medicine) have fallen under attack and those that were intended to keep us in our place (e.g., religion, marriage, and criminal justice) have simultaneously eroded. The idea of a new normal has been underway for a long time (arguably 50 years), and the current pandemic has only just thrown a wrench in these plans (e.g., What normal were we trying to achieve? Were we actually driving the train?)

UKNow: Protests across the United States are shining a spotlight on social injustice. Does COVID-19 play a role in widening social inequalities?

Bardo: We are certainly a nation divided, and the stressors of the current pandemic have heightened our awareness of our seemingly polar views. Maybe if we all took this time to come together around the common terms of our plight for the good life, we would finally recognize that we have more similarities than differences and that the only way to get there is if we stand together well, at least six feet apart for now.

UK is home to some of the worlds most renowned thought leaders, and theystandreadyto answer pressing questions. From epidemiology and virology to constitutional law and political science faculty and staff expertise spans a broad range of newsworthy topics. Through acomprehensive database,theUK Office of Public Relations and Strategic Communicationsis working to quickly connect thoseexpertsto statewide, regional, national and international media outlets.

See the rest here:
Will COVID-19 Change the Way Every Generation Lives? UK Expert Offers Insight - UKNow

Would knowing the date of your death influence your actions? It did for Tiberius Caesar. Convinced by the court astrologer Thrasyllus that he had many years of life ahead of him, the paranoid old emperor chose to postpone the murder of his heir Caligula.

But by believing Thrasylluss prediction and letting his guard down, Tiberius inadvertently gave Caligula enough time to poison him first. The rest, as they say, is history which Thrasyllus had altered by deliberately overestimating his employers life expectancy.

Richard Faragher, University of Brighton

While many of us are unlikely to find ourselves in Caesars position, knowing how many years we have left may influence many aspects of our life including when to retire, whether to take a long-awaited vacation, and even whether to opt for certain medical treatments.

MyLongevity, a newly developed app from researchers at the University of East Anglia, now allows each of us to be our own life expectancy astrologer. But how much trust should we place in these predictions?

Simply put, life expectancy is how long, on average, members of any given population can expect to life. This is different from lifespan, which is the maximum length of time any member of the species can survive.

Although lifespan has changed very little if at all global life expectancy has soared by more than 40 years since the beginning of the 20th century. This was achieved through a combination of scientific discoveries and public health measures that drove down infant mortality. In the UK, life expectancy at birth is now over 80 years.

Life expectancy depends a lot on where you grow up or live. So the more a disparate population can be broken down into sub-populations who have traits in common but which are still large enough to be statistically significant the more accurate predictions become. Doing this might involve subdividing the population by sex (on average females live longer than males) or smoking status (for obvious reasons) or both.

The team of researchers used a sophisticated version of this approach when developing their app, informed by its previous research. This allows its app to factor in the life expectancy effects of controlled and uncontrolled high blood pressure, the presence of related illnesses such as cardiovascular disease or rheumatoid arthritis, ongoing treatment with statins, and serious risk factors, such as high cholesterol.

Developing the app has involved dealing with some problems along the way in estimating potential health benefits for the overall population based on those seen in clinical trials. This is because discrepancies exist between trial subjects and populations for a number of reasons but usually they are cases of what is known as tight segmentation working against you.

For example, a clinical trial of the effects of orange juice in sailors with scurvy will show profound benefits because they are a tight segment with vitamin C deficiency. But anyone expecting to see the same beneficial effects on health from prescribing orange juice to everyone taking a boat trip today is going to be deeply disappointed.

How seriously you should treat the predictions from an app of this type is basically a function of how accurately it reflects the sub-population into which you best fit. I compared my life expectancy prediction from My Longevity with calculators provided by the UK Office for National Statistics and those of two insurance companies. The predictions varied from 84-90 years. As Im 54, this may not have been a completely fair test of MyLongevity because the data the team has used makes the app most accurate for the over 60s.

The major reason life expectancy calculators spit out such different figures is because there are a wide range of factors influencing the results. Being married increases your life expectancy compared to being single, as does being happy. In addition to smoking, levels of fruit and vegetable intake influence life expectancy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, levels of alcohol consumption and exercise make a profound difference to life expectancy. These are concrete lifestyle changes people can make which can add years to their lives.

The East Anglia research team hopes that access to its calculator will encourage users to adopt healthier lifestyles. Although there is some evidence that framing behaviours in terms of their effects on life expectancy is an effective way of encouraging people to embrace healthier lifestyles, superficial discussions of health and longevity often assume that everyone will seek to maximise life expectancy if only they are fed enough of the facts about it.

However, human motivation is emotional and intuitive at its core and is shaped by what a person most values in life. Propositions that accord with a persons values are typically supported. Those that dont are either ignored or rejected.

Another common mistake made by those promoting behaviour change is to assume their own dominant values are shared by the people they want to adopt the behaviour in question. This approach will only convince people who already think and feel like them. But the more developers of such apps recognise that users will only adopt certain behaviours according to their values and beliefs, the more useful these apps will be.

Richard Faragher, Professor of Biogerontology, University of Brighton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Excerpt from:
The app that shows how long youre likely to live but will it make us healthier? - iNews

It is our aim to provide our readers with report for Precision Medicine Software Market, which examines the industry during the period 2020 2026. One goal is to present deeper insight into this line of business in this document. The first part of the report focuses on providing the industry definition for the product or service under focus in the Precision Medicine Software Market report. Next, the document will study the factors responsible for hindering and enhancing growth in the industry. After covering various areas of interest in the industry, the report aims to provide how the Precision Medicine Software Market will grow during the forecast period.

The major vendors covered: Syapse, Allscripts, Qiagen, Roper Technologies, Fabric Genomics, Foundation Medicine, Sophia Genetics, PierianDx, Human Longevity, Translational Software, Gene42, Inc, Lifeomic Health, and more

Get a Free Sample Copy @ https://www.reportsandmarkets.com/sample-request/global-precision-medicine-software-market-2019-by-company-regions-type-and-application-forecast-to-2024?utm_source=aerospace-journal&utm_medium=39

The Precision Medicine Software Market report between the years 2020 2026 will highlight the current value of the industry. At the same time, there is also an estimate of how much this line of business will be worth at the end of the forecast period. As it is our goal to maintain high levels of accuracy at all times, we will take a look at the CAGR of the Precision Medicine Software Market. We make sure that all the information available in this report has excellent levels of readability. One way we achieve this target is by Precision Medicine Software Market segmentation. Going through the report for 2020 2026 will bring our readers up-to-date regarding this industry.

While examining the information from this document, one thing becomes clear, the elements which contribute to increase in demand for the product or service. At the same time, there will be a focus on what drives the popularity of these types of products or services. This report is for those who want to learn about Precision Medicine Software Market, along with its forecast for 2020 2026. Information regarding market revenue, competitive partners, and key players will also be available.

Segmentation

As discussed earlier, there is segmentation in the Precision Medicine Software Market report, to improve the accuracy and make it easier to collect data. The categories which are the dividing factors in the industry are distribution channels, application, and product or service type. With this level of segmentation, it becomes easier to analyze and understand the Precision Medicine Software Market. At the same time, there is emphasis on which type of consumers become the customers in this industry. When it comes to distribution channels, the Precision Medicine Software Market report looks at the different techniques of circulation of the product or service.

Regional Overview

In this part of the Precision Medicine Software Market report, we will be taking a look at the geographical areas and the role they play in contributing to the growth of this line of business. The areas of interest in this document are as follows Middle East and Africa, South and North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. From the Precision Medicine Software Market report, it becomes clear which region is the largest contributor.

Latest Industry News

From this Precision Medicine Software Market report, the reader will also get to learn about the latest developments in the industry. The reason is that these products or services have the potential to disrupt this line of business. If there is information about company acquisitions or mergers, this information will also be available in this portion of the Precision Medicine Software Market report.

If you have any special requirements about this Precision Medicine Software Market report, please let us know and we can provide custom report.

Inquire More About This Report @ https://www.reportsandmarkets.com/enquiry/global-precision-medicine-software-market-2019-by-company-regions-type-and-application-forecast-to-2024?utm_source=aerospace-journal&utm_medium=39

About Us

ReportsAndMarkets.com allocates the globally available market research and many company reports from reputed market research companies that are a pioneer in their respective domains. We are completely an autonomous group and serve our clients by offering the trustworthy available research stuff, as we know this is an essential aspect of Market Research.

Contact Us

Sanjay Jain

Manager Partner Relations & International Marketing

http://www.reportsandmarkets.com

Ph: +1-352-353-0818 (US)

View post:
Post Covid-19 Impact on Precision Medicine Software Market Capacity, Production, Revenue and Forecast 2020 to 2026 Syapse, Allscripts, Qiagen, Roper...

AI company Lapetus Solutions has been developing analytical solutions for the insurance market that leverage biometric facial recognition with selfies to treat the face as a biomarker of human aging, writes Longevity Technology.

Professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, Karl Ricanek holds a PhD in computer science and has specifically focused on facial analytics. He founded Lapetus Solutions in 2015 together with Jay Olshansky, professor of gerontology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and founder of the field of biodemography.

Ricanek explained in an interview with Longevity Technology that just 10 years ago, insurance companies created life expectancy models based on blood analysis. In a meeting with life insurance companies, Ricanek heard Olshanskys presentation on people who are biologically aging slower and the indicators on the face that present themselves for long-lived individuals.

Its about understanding your origins, your genes, those things that are just innate in you, Ricanek told the publication. So, it was natural that we would look at the components of the face to understand biological age, or what were now calling in our product, our senescing rate. This is the rate at which youre aging, and it can be faster or slower, or normal. So, if you are senescing slower than normal, it basically means that you are likely to live longer than average. If youre senescing faster, then youre likely to live shorter.

Next year, Lapetus plans to release Janus, a facial analysis product that life insurance companies can integrate with their online application process. The company claims a medical selfie is all it takes for the system to accurately detect gender, age and BMI in less than two minutes. Another feature it is working on is susceptibility to chronic diseases.

After working in AI for some 30 years, Ricanek says that Only now are we getting to the point where the artificial intelligence, the hardware, and the ability to scale it up using cloud technology, has presented itself in such a way that we can solve these really challenging and, before now, just intractable problems.

Lapetus focus areas are longevity risk, life expectancy, medical underwriting and wealth management. Future plans include adding sensory analytics and saliva-based genetic testing, while researching other innovation related to aging measurement.

When you blend all of these things together, we can give you a more detailed picture of your life expectancy and your potential for chronic disease, says Ricanek. We havent done the blending part yet but thatll come next year.

With roughly eight or nine million secured, Lapetus has received support from a number of investors including SixThirtyandPlug and Play.

ageing | artificial intelligence | biometric data | biometrics | face photo | facial recognition | insurance | Lapetus Solutions

Read the original here:
Lapetus Solutions working on biometrics-based selfie face analytics for aging - Biometric Update

When the Arab Spring protests erupted in 2010, many political pundits predicted the uprisings would ripple through the entire region and ultimately reach the oil-rich Gulf states, sweeping away monarchies.

But ultimately, the Gulf monarchies of Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and to a lesser extent, Bahrain were the least affected by the Arab Spring. These six Gulf monarchies were more successful in weathering the political storm than their republican neighbours, which in some cases were plunged into civil wars with a heavy humanitarian and economic toll.

I spent a good deal of my life in the region and during the uncertain times of the Arab Spring, so curious colleagues ask me how the Gulf monarchies continue to hold on. In response, I draw not on my memories but on my political training. And I believe there are lessons to learn from the durability of these regimes that could enhance global efforts to understand the region and build sustainable peace in the Middle East.

I generally scoff at the argument that Gulf monarchies have only managed to navigate the tricky waters of the regions geopolitics and avoided a mass exodus of their citizens because of their oil wealth. This popular wisdom holds that petrodollars allow the Gulf monarchies to coax people into submission, and thats why they endure.

Missing from this assessment is acknowledgement that the Gulf monarchies arent the only countries in the broader region with ample hydrocarbon riches. Yet petrodollars in the broader region that often benefited citizens of those countries didnt prevent public anger or major challenges to authority.

Brief comparisons between the Gulf monarchies and other oil-producing countries in the region reveal other common ground besides oil, such as culture and religion. Yet their respective trajectories since the 1950s Gulf monarchies modernized quickly, while other oil-exporting countries (for example Iraq, Libya, Algeria and Iran) have undergone political crises, coups and even regime change. Thats only added to the sense that Gulf monarchies and other oil-producing countries in the region are heading in different directions.

So oil alone doesnt explain the longevity of the Gulf monarchies. Other factors help explain their success.

First and foremost is whether people in the Gulf region see monarchy as a legitimate form of government. In Western political thought, elections represent one of the key benchmarks for judging the legitimacy of government. This is the foundation of participatory democracy.

By this token, only leaders from presidential republics pass muster in terms of Western legitimacy. After all, these countries hold regular presidential elections.

But are those elections themselves legitimate?

In 2011, at the height of the Arab Spring, Elliott Abrams, deputy national security adviser to former U.S. President George W. Bush, wrote that Arab monarchies are more legitimate than the false republics. This assessment raises two critical issues.

The first is the reliability of elections in the Gulf. Presidential elections in Middle Eastern republics have often been fraudulent. It would make a mockery of democracy to consider these elections proof of legitimacy.

The second concerns the compatibility between society and its political institutions. This is one of the pillars of stability in any society. Hereditary monarchies like the ones in the Gulf arent a novelty for the native cultures of the region. These monarchies therefore derive legitimacy from the fit between their royal institutions and the cultural norms of their people. This is a traditional form of political legitimacy.

With their emphasis on tradition, hierarchy, loyalties and social alliances, monarchies are accepted by many of the cultures of the Arabian Peninsula. The Gulf monarchies were borne out of their own socio-cultural heritages, and this gives them more legitimacy.

This legitimacy however sets certain limits on executive authority and places demands on the monarchs, who are expected to be arbiters between competing interests benevolent stabilizers, so to speak. In fact, problems have arisen when monarchs fail to project this image or perform this role.

An example is Bahrains mass protests in 2011, when many citizens felt their king showed little commitment to the principles of compromise and moderation that had largely characterized his predecessors reign.

The arbiter status gives the monarchs respect and authority, which enables them to rule at distance.

This has helped them maintain power with less reliance on force than their non-monarchy neighbours, which base their claims for legitimacy on political ideology like nationalism and independence. More often than not, these ideologies dont resonate with people. This poses a major challenge to their ability to maintain power, so the republics rely more on force and security to maintain power.

This best expresses itself in Syria, where the Al-Assad regime has ruled for decades through a network of overlapping security agencies to enforce questionable legitimacy.

Thats why the regional republics were hit harder by the Arab Spring. Popular uprisings there were fuelled by greater discontent.

This has spared the Gulf monarchies from frequent legitimacy crises and allowed them to divert resources to other aspects of governance, like building state capacity. This refers to the ability of governments to employ administrative and technical processes, rather than force, to address societal challenges and create stability.

State capacity is bound with a countrys investment in education and human capital, which in turn create a capacity for informed decision-making. This is evident in the volume of publications by Gulf universities. Despite the relative youth of universities in Gulf monarchy states most of them were founded in the mid-1970s they outperform their counterparts in Arab republics in terms of quantity of publications.

The future success of the Gulf monarchies probably hinges on further investment in education.

Doing so will enhance the quantity and quality of intellectual activity and produce citizens who can share power, steer economies in response to societal and technological challenges and guarantee long-term stability.

View original post here:
Why the Gulf monarchies have survived - The Conversation CA

The eighth annual study, comprised of responses from 1,508 full-time workers between the ages of 25 65 grouped by the categories of Baby Boomers, Generation X and Millenials, examined their wishes and worries about retirement savings. The survey compared and contrasted insights of both plan sponsors and participants, according to American Century Investments Vice President, Value Add Diane Gallagher.

"The results of this year's study show high expectations around the role of employers and both the priority and value placed on employer-sponsored retirement benefits," Gallagher said. "These findings can help retirement plan decision-makers consider participants' points of view in building effective solutions."

Key study findings include:

Risk

Participants are concerned about multiple types of risks including market risk, longevity risk, inflation and interest rate risk, growth risk, and human error.

Half of Boomers surveyed are most concerned about market risk. However, concern over market risk and growth risk has risen significantly from last year. "Perhaps the timing of the survey had some influence here as we were researching in March, at the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the midst of high volatility," Gallagher said.

Four in 10 express concern about running out of money in retirement, a significant decline from last year and similar to 2018. Participants with $500,000 or more in assets are more likely than those with less than $100,000 in assets to be concerned about the inability to afford health expenses, loss of structure, missing co-workers and being bored.

The share most concerned about longevity risk is down significantly from last year (28% vs. 42% in 2019). Market risk overtook longevity risk as participants' greater concern in this year's survey. "Again, this may be related to the first signs of the pandemic, but we cannot say with certainty," Gallagher said.

Men are more likely to select growth risk as the risk that concerns them most, while women are more apt to chose longevity risk.

Retirement Income

Some eight out of 10 respondents said they would be more likely to leave money in their plan if their employer offered an investment option specifically to help retirees draw income during retirement. Participants report rollover IRA as the most common distribution option today. "Clearly, there is a strong preference for leaving assets in the plan at retirement and taking withdrawals from the plan to fund retirement," Gallagher said. "Investment solutions offering a retirement income stream provide plan participants with peace of mind after leaving an employer. This interest certainly has implications for plan sponsors and providers to offer solutions to make that a reality for participants."

ESG

One in eight participants say they work for a company that offers ESG investments, a significant increase from last year's findings. Also, men are more likely to be extremely or very interested in having an ESG option as part of their retirement savings plan. Further, participants with an income of at least $100,000 are more likely to be extremely interested in ESG investments. "The role of plan fiduciaries is very clear: To act in the best interests of plan participants when selecting and evaluating investments. As ESG is increasingly applied in investments, it will be important for plans to understand ESG and implications for plan investments."

Expectations

Nearly all participants continue to say retirement savings is an important goal; one-third call it the biggest or only goal, with men and those with assets of $100k or more tending to say saving for retirement is their biggest goal.

Furthermore, worries about financial matters abound with half of all participants worrying a "great deal" about saving enough for retirement, according to the research. Gen Xers, generally, have more worries. Men are more likely than women to say that worrying about saving enough for retirement, health/living a healthy enough lifestyle, saving enough for their children's college education, investing properly for their goals and supporting an adult child keeps them up most nights.

Paying off debts, such as monthly and long-term credit card debt and student loans, are a higher priority for participants in 2020 than in 2019, and paying off longer-term credit card debt and student loans are more of a priority for those with less than $100k in assets.

"We found that half of those surveyed are worried or concerned about saving enough for retirement, including one in eight saying it keeps them up at night," Gallagher said. "About half are also concerned about having enough savings for the next unexpected expense, especially Millennials and Gen X."

Most Millennials select housing as a major priority, while many Gen Xers and Boomers choose retirement savings as a major priority. Boomers are more likely than Millennials and Gen Xers to rank retirement savings number one. Gen Xers have a high priority on housing and saving for their children's education.

Participants believe they could have saved more money earlier in their careers. Most report not saving enough in the first five years they worked. Nine in 10 participants think that if they could talk to their early career selves, it would be important to advise themselves to save more, but only seven out of 10 believe their earlier selves would listen. Boomers do not feel it as likely as others that their younger selves would have listened. "There are two things at play here" Gallagher said. "First, participants acknowledge the 'power of compounding' and know had they started earlier, their accounts would have had more time to grow. Second, the past seven years of our research have shown this sense of remorse about saving and their personal spending habits. Participants recognize that, had they started saving earlier, they would have just continued on that path and not fallen out of the habit."

Overall, three in 10 expect their standard of living in retirement to be better than it is now.

Advice

This year's study found that three in four participants would find it attractive if their employer were to offer them holistic financial advice, a significant increase from last year. Additionally, participants making at least $100,000 per year were more likely to find this offer attractive. Similar shares of participants currently use personal research, financial advisors, and family for advice on investing,with Boomers most likely to use a professional advisor. "Given the premium participants place on the role of employers, it's not surprising that particpants would look to employers to offer a source of financial advice. Participants seem a little overwhelmed at all the advice options available to them, so getting that advice through an employer-provided source is valuable."

Participants are also split on their feelings towards paying for professional advice. Four in 10 believe paying for an advisor is worth the cost. Another four in 10 would rather pay less for software or an online program. The rest, two in 10, will never pay for professional advice.

Additionally, women are more inclined to prefer an online advice service over an advisor, based on cost, and men are more likely to believe paying for an advisor is worth the cost.

Despite these splits, three in four participants still believe a professional advisor will play a role in helping them prepare for retirement going forward. Two-thirds believe the same about software, a significant increase from last year.

Uber 401(k) Plans

Participants with an income of at least $100k are more inclined to strongly believe their retirement savings plan at work is one of the most important benefits their employer offers.

Some seven in 10 respondents support an automatic increase of a 6 percent employer match (Am I interpreting this correctly?), and two out of three believe their employer should automatically enroll employees into their plan at a set percent and increase it automatically each year.

Also important for employers to know is that 60% feel more positively about a company that offers automatic enrollment, automatic increase and target-date investments, according to Gallagher. "Nearly eight in 10 participants would like their employer to offer at least some encouragement to save more. When asked what role they would like employers to play, eight in ten want at least 'a slight nudge.' This has been consistent over the years of the study," she said.However, older generations are more likely than Millennials to say, "leave me alone."

Further, four in 10 participants think employers should structure retirement plans to be completely automatic for employees. Men and those with an income of at least $100,000 are more likely to prefer the automatic option.

Finally, amajority prefer a match on their retirement contribution over a salary increase. Millennials and Gen Xers are more likely to prefer salary increases than Boomers. Men prefer the 6% increase in salary more so than women. "This has been consistent over the years of our survey: Participants value a company match over a salary increase if given a choice. That may have implications for employers as they look at compensation and employee benefits."

American Century's Defined Contribution Investment Only (DCIO) assets under management totaled $42.4 billion, and target-date assets under management totaled more than $23 billion as of June 30, 2020.

Survey Methodology

The plan participant survey was conducted between March 10 and 31, 2020. Survey included 1,508 full-time workers between 25 and 65 saving through their employer's retirement plan. The data were weighted to reflect the makeup of key demographics (gender, income, and education) among all American private sector participants between 25 and 65.

Data collection and analysis were completed by Mathew Greenwald and Associates of Washington, D.C.

American Century Investments is a leading global asset manager focused on delivering investment results and building long-term client relationships while supporting research that can improve human health and save lives. Founded in 1958, American Century Investments' 1,400 employees serve financial professionals, institutions, corporations and individual investors from offices in New York; London; Frankfurt; Hong Kong; Sydney; Mountain View, Calif.; and Kansas City, Mo. Jonathan S. Thomas is president and chief executive officer, and Victor Zhang serves as chief investment officer. Delivering investment results to clients enables American Century Investments to distribute over 40 percent of its dividends to the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, a 500-person, non-profit basic biomedical research organization. The Institute owns more than 40 percent of American Century Investments and has received dividend payments of $1.6 billion since 2000. For more information about American Century Investments, visit http://www.americancentury.com.

A strategy or emphasis on environmental, social and governance factors ("ESG") may limit the investment opportunities available to a portfolio. Therefore, the portfolio may underperform or perform differently than other portfolios that do not have an ESG investment focus. A portfolio's ESG investment focus may also result in the portfolio investing in securities or industry sectors that perform differently or maintain a different risk profile than the market generally or compared to underlying holdings that are not screened for ESG standards.

2020 American Century Proprietary Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.

American Century Investment Services, Inc., Distributor

Contact:Laura Kouri(816) 516-7729

SOURCE American Century Investments

Go here to see the original:
Heightened Worry About Risk And Growing Interest In Retirement Income, According To New Study By American Century Investments - PRNewswire

Theglobal longevity and anti-senescence therapies marketshould grow from $329.8 million in 2018 to $644.4 million by 2023 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.3% during 2018-2023.

Report Scope:

The scope of this report is broad and covers various therapies currently under trials in the global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market. The market estimation has been performed with consideration for revenue generation in the forecast years 2018-2023 after the expected availability of products in the market by 2023. The global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market has been segmented by the following therapies: Senolytic drug therapy, Gene therapy, Immunotherapy and Other therapies which includes stem cell-based therapies, etc.

Revenue forecasts from 2028 to 2023 are given for each therapy and application, with estimated values derived from the expected revenue generation in the first year of launch.

Request for Report Sample:https://www.trendsmarketresearch.com/report/sample/11698

The report also includes a discussion of the major players performing research or the potential players across each regional longevity and anti-senescence therapy market. Further, it explains the major drivers and regional dynamics of the global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market and current trends within the industry.

The report concludes with a special focus on the vendor landscape and includes detailed profiles of the major vendors and potential entrants in the global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market.

Report Includes:

71 data tables and 40 additional tables An overview of the global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market Analyses of global market trends, with data from 2017 and 2018, and projections of compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) through 2023

Country specific data and analysis for the United States, Canada, Japan, China, India, U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Australia, Middle East and Africa Detailed description of various anti-senescence therapies, such as senolytic drug therapy, gene therapy, immunotherapy and other stem cell therapies, and their influence in slowing down aging or reverse aging proce

Coverage of various therapeutic drugs, devices and technologies and information on compounds used for the development of anti-ageing therapeutics A look at the clinical trials and expected launch of anti-senescence products Detailed profiles of the market leading companies and potential entrants in the global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market, including AgeX Therapeutics, CohBar Inc., PowerVision Inc., T.A. Sciences and Unity Biotechnology

Summary

Global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market deals in the adoption of different therapies and treatment options used to extend human longevity and lifespan. Human longevity is typically used to describe the length of an individuals lifetime and is sometimes used as a synonym for life expectancy in the demography. Anti-senescence is the process by which cells stop dividing irreversibly and enter a stage of permanent growth arrest, eliminating cell death. Anti-senescence therapy is used in the treatment of senescence induced through unrepaired DNA damage or other cellular stresses.

Global longevity and anti-senescence market will witness rapid growth over the forecast period (2018-2023) owing to an increasing emphasis on Stem Cell Research and an increasing demand for cell-based assays in research and development.

An increasing geriatric population across the globe and a rising awareness of antiaging products among generation Y and later generations are the major factors expected to promote the growth of global longevity and anti-senescence market. Factors such as a surging level of disposable income and increasing advancements in anti-senescence technologies are also providing traction to the global longevity and anti-senescence market growth over the forecast period (2018-2023).

According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the total geriatric population across the globe in 2016 was over REDACTED. By 2022, the global geriatric population (65 years and above) is anticipated to reach over REDACTED. An increasing geriatric population across the globe will generate huge growth prospectus to the market.

Senolytics, placenta stem cells and blood transfusions are some of the hot technologies picking up pace in the longevity and anti-anti-senescence market. Companies and start-ups across the globe such as Unity Biotechnology, Human Longevity Inc., Calico Life Sciences, Acorda Therapeutics, etc. are working extensively in this field for the extension of human longevity by focusing on study of genomics, microbiome, bioinformatics and stem cell therapies, etc. These factors are poised to drive market growth over the forecast period.

Global longevity and anti-senescence market is projected to rise at a CAGR of REDACTED during the forecast period of 2018 through 2023. In 2023, total revenues are expected to reach REDACTED, registering REDACTED in growth from REDACTED in 2018.

The report provides analysis based on each market segment including therapies and application. The therapies segment is further sub-segmented into Senolytic drug therapy, Gene therapy, Immunotherapy and Others. Senolytic drug therapy held the largest market revenue share of REDACTED in 2017. By 2023, total revenue from senolytic drug therapy is expected to reach REDACTED. Gene therapy segment is estimated to rise at the highest CAGR of REDACTED till 2023. The fastest growth of the gene therapy segment is due to the Large investments in genomics. For Instance; The National Human Genome Research Institute (U.S.) had a budget grant of REDACTED for REDACTED research projects in 2015, thus increasing funding to REDACTED for approximately REDACTED projects in 2016.

More Info of Impact[emailprotected]https://www.trendsmarketresearch.com/report/covid-19-analysis/11698

See more here:
Longevity And Anti-Senescence Therapy Market Projected size Witness a Double-Digit CAGR during COVID-19 2023 - Chelanpress

After months of lockdown and living with restrictions necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic, most businesses have been severely impacted. On the other hand, a silver lining has been a shift in businesses processes and practices, providing an opportunity to reinvent how companies are run. To create agile, transparent and resilient organisations requires reimagining of management principles and business models.

To share their insight on this development, Forbes India brought together a diverse panel of business barons to share their learnings and offer perspectives for longevity in enterprises. Moderated by Manu Balachandran, special correspondent, Forbes India, the participants included Atul Jalan, CEO, Manthan; Rono Dutta, CEO, IndiGo; RM Vishakha, MD & CEO, IndiaFirst; Dr. Nandakumar Jairam, chairman & CEO, Columbia Asia Hospitals; Karan Bajwa, CEO, Google Cloud India, and Sanjay Gupta, CEO, Google India.

Vishakha recounted that her organisation was able to seamlessly move everything to work from home, thanks to a robust business continuity plan and access to technology. From investments to the call centres, everything functioned smoothly despite being in remote locations.

A challenge for bringing in new business, she admits, is to be able to replace the human connect. For a business like ours, which entails selling a promise for a 15 to 20-year period, acquiring new clients is dependent on building relationships and instilling trust. We still have to figure out how to inspire trust in potential clients without the human touch, while we are just a face on a video or a call on the phone. This is especially pertinent in an environment where cheating is so rampant.

Offering his perspective, Gupta explained how the pandemic has made him unlearn assumptions that constant travel is a business necessity, and that finding partners, such as international experts, entailed a lot of cooperation and waiting. During the lockdown, not only did he experience that work went on just as well when he couldnt travel, and connecting with international experts and colleagues became much faster and more effective online. I am more humbled at the end of this experience and I realise that many things are possible by simply changing ones mindset, he concluded.

Seconding Gupta, Bajwa observed that there have been some fundamental shifts in business processes. First, the way technology was used has changed. There is a clear opportunity to shift technology from being an enabler of a business to the fore of a business. Second, a shift in the consumption model of technology towards being considered as regular opex rather than large lump sum capex will remove cost barriers for constant usage of relevant technology. All these shifting trends present businesses with a real opportunity to completely reinvent themselves, rather than merely reorient, he said.

Jairams observations highlighted that there such parallels could be drawn for the health care industry as well. The administrative segment is very much like what the others already described - going to office, copious travel on work, etc. These activities revealed themselves as a waste of time and money when technology enabled virtual meetings delivered greater efficient than before, he said, explaining that his organisation has become more comfortable with tele-consultations and remote delivery of medicine. It is efficient, saves time waiting at hospitals and is definitely going to enable a patient and doctor to interact in a different way.

Dutta of IndiGo voiced the possibility that many businesses and leaders might go back to embracing conventional ways once they can do so. After 9/11, people stopped traveling and video conferencing was all the rage. But they had to revert to physical meetings that demanded travel, because sometimes the human touch and relationship building that was crucial to building businesses was missing, he said. Even within an organisation, networking and knowing people across different divisions is a great asset. We are social animals, so as long as human beings do business and take decisions, relationships are key; it could simply mean getting together and having a drink in the evening. Thats what makes things work. He also agreed that the pandemic has altered the way he approached his work: I used to be a big believer in long-term planning and that has been turned on its head. Right now, we don't know which segments will open and what mandates will follow. So, we have to just plan for the short term and take a lot of course corrections as we go, he said.

Jalan of Manthan believed that the pandemic has just speedened up the adoption of trends and technolgoies that had already made their way into business consciousness. Video conferencing, work from home, telemedicine, none of these are new trends. But this pandemic has put all those trends on steroids. There were talks about universal basic income, data monetisation, data privacy, how to regulate the role of social media, etc. I think this crisis has brought all these and other issues to the fore.

He pointed out that the best of human ingenuity comes forth during times of challenge and crisis and constraint, and technology would facilitate this resourcefulness. At a personal level, he added, it has been a reminder that change is the only constant and that we have to quickly adapt to change to flow with the times.

The discussion proceeded with the participants sharing their experiences on how mindsets of customers, as well as management and employees of the company had changed. Bajwa explained how the changing mindsets during the crisis presented Google with the opportunity to approach its clients with the intent of serving and not selling. We engaged with customers and enabled them to achieve the first level of being able to work from home, getting connected, using collaboration platforms, etc, he said, adding that technology companies will now need to start providing technology to customers in a manner that is not elitist, but democratised.

Gupta summed up the observations made by his colleague, by stating that the greatest transformation among consumers and business owners and boards was the openness to change and do it fast. He pointed out two distinct themes that had emerged in business thinking - concerns around conserve cash and ideating toward transformation of the business. The silver lining to the crisis is that it has forced people and companies to introspect on what is really important to them, he said. As a result, in the post Covid-19 world, human needs will become sharper and technology will help deliver experiences safely.

See original here:
Evolution of technology, mindsets and more in the time of crisis - Forbes India

On Saturday, India's Serum Institute of India (SII), which has partnered with British pharma giant AstraZeneca for manufacturing the Oxford vaccine candidate for COVID-19, sought permission from the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) for conducting Phase II and III human clinical trials of the potential vaccine, highly-placed sources said on Saturday.

As reported by news agency PTI, the Pune-based drug firm submitted its application to the DCGI on Friday seeking permission for conducting the trials of the vaccine candidate 'Covishield'. According to the application, it would conduct an observer-blind, randomised controlled study to determine the safety and immunogenicity of 'Covishield' in healthy Indian adults. The firm said that an around 1,600 participants of more than 18 years would be enrolled in the study.

After reports in the medical journalThe Lancetclaimed the initial trial results showed that the vaccine was safe and prompted protective immune response, the firm plans to start phase II and III human trials in India in August.

At the same time, the Phase I human clinical trial of India's first indigenously-developed vaccine against novel coronavirus, COVAXIN, began at the AIIMS with the first dose of the injection given to a man, who is in his 30s. Already, over 3,500 volunteers have registered themselves for the trial, of whom the screening of at least 22 people is underway, said Dr Sanjay Rai, Professor at the Centre for Community Medicine at AIIMS and the principal investigator of the study.

The global race for vaccines is well and truly on. Last week, Michael Ryan, the head of emergencies at the World Health Organisation, had hailed "good news" from two COVID-19 vaccine candidates in early human trials, but warned that there was a long way to go. "We now need to move into larger-scale real-world trials. But it is good to see more data and more products moving into this very important phase of vaccine discovery," Ryan told reporters at a news conference. Ryan's comments came after scientists at Oxford University,in a paper published in the medical journalThe Lancet, said their experimental vaccine had been shown to trigger a protective immune response in hundreds of people who got the shot. Also, in the journal, Chinese researchers from CanSino Biologics published a study on their experimental vaccine, which uses a similar technique as the Oxford team, that also reported an immune response.

Vaccine testing is a four-stage processpre-clinical testing on animals; phase I clinical testing on a small group of people to determine its safety and to learn more about the immune response it provokes; phase II trials, or expanded safety trials, where dosage and frequency will be tested across wider cross-sections of the population; phase III large-scale tests where the vaccine is administered to thousands of people to confirm its efficacy. Phase I and phase II are the early trials, which will then be followed by a rigorous, intensive Phase III clinical testing, where the longevity of the vaccine response (whether the vaccine will last for long periods of time) will be analysed.

At the same time, a vaccine candidate under development by Pfizer Inc and Germany's BioNTech showed promise in a small, early study.

What do all these studies mean?

Let us take them one by one.

InThe Lancet, Oxford University scientists said their vaccine candidate, prepared in partnership with the pharma giant AstraZeneca, appeared safe in the early trial phases, inducing a strong immune response within the body.Doses of the vaccine were given to 1,077 healthy adults aged between 18 and 55 in five UK hospitals in April and May as part of the phase I clinical trial and results. The results show they induced strong antibody and T-cell responses for up to 56 days after they were given. T-cells are immune responses by the body against the foreign virus, and are crucial for maintaining protection against the virus for longer periods of time.

"In addition, the strongest immune responses were produced in 10 participants who received two doses of the vaccine, indicating that this might be a good strategy for vaccination," said Andrew Pollard, chief investigator of the Oxford vaccine trial.

At the same time, a vaccine candidate under development by China's CanSino Biologics Inc and the country's military research unit, showed similar safe immune response in most of the 508 healthy volunteers.

Both the vaccine candidates (CanSino and Oxford-AstraZeneca) are adenoviral vector vaccines; that means they are prepared from a weakened, non-replicating version of a common cold virus that carries the coronavirus spike proteins into the human body, helping the immune system identify and build antibodies against the virus.

Both the studies reported adverse events such as fatigue, headache, and local tenderness, but found those to be tolerable and mostly ameliorated by paracetamol.

At the same time,Pfizer and BioNTech also released an early phase non-peer reviewed study which claimed thatvirus-neutralising antibodies were induced in 60 adults who were given two doses, a result in-line with a previous early-stage US trial.These preliminary data are encouraging in that the vaccine is able to produce neutralising antibody responses in humans, and that it does so at relatively low dose levels,Ugur Sahin, MD and CEO of BioNTech, said in a statement. The Pfizer-BioNTech candidate is an RNA vaccine. Here, no attenuated viruses are injected. Rather, a genetic code is introduced, which induces the human cells to create the foreign protein, alerting the immune system, and help the body recognise the entry of the virus in all its forms. The RNA vaccines are easier to make, but they are a new and unproven technology.

These studies come on the back of early phase results released byAmerican biotech giant Moderna, which said their RNA vaccine prompted neutralising antibody activities in healthy adults, though it led to minor side effects in many patients.

Russia, meanwhile, has made progress with a vaccine developed by the Gamaleya Institute in Moscowfinanced and backed by the Russian defence ministry. State-run news agency TASS had reported that the vaccine had completed human trials though it has only cleared Phase-I trials so far and is currently undergoing Phase-II trials. Russias deputy defence minister has said that this vaccine is ready, noting that of the two groups of volunteers who were administered the vaccine, all had built up immunity

Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko on Saturday said that the vaccine developed by the Gamaleya Institute, as well as a vaccine developed by the Vektor State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology which was recently approved for clinical trials, were neck and neck.

Russia plans to begin mass production of the Gamaleya vaccine in August, with medical workers to start receiving the vaccine that very month. The vaccine will be widely used in parallel with Phase III trials, Murashko said.

Lastly, an RNA vaccine being developed by the Imperial College, London, showed promise when tested on mice, hwihc developed highly-=specific COVID-19 antibodies that were able to neutralise the virus. This vaccine has since been approved for human trials across England with trials on more than 200 people.

What are the challenges next?

Longevity of the vaccine effects will undoubtedly be the biggest challenge, which will be addressed in the phase III trials. The vaccine developed by Oxford University has shown some positive signs of protection in the preliminary results of the early trial. It is being claimed that it will be more effective than others because it will develop antibodies and "natural killer cells" [T-cells] against SARS-COV2. But the biggest challenge would be the longevity of the [neutralising] antibodies,Sunit K. Singh, professor and head, molecular biology, Institute of Medical Sciences, Banaras Hindu Universitytold THE WEEK.

In SARS-CoV-2, antibodies are known to fade between three-six months, as reported by various studies, he said. So what would be the fate of protection induced by a vaccine once the antibody response vanishes or is reduced? A virus of this kind will certainly need an attack from both sidesthe antibodies and T-cells, he added.

How are Indian pharma companies placed?

At least seven Indian pharma companies are working to develop a vaccine against coronavirus as they join global efforts to find a preventive to check the spread of the deadly virus that has already infected more than 14 million globally. Bharat Biotech, Serum Institute, Zydus Cadila, Panacea Biotec, Indian Immunologicals, Mynvax and Biological E are among the domestic pharma firms working on the coronavirus vaccines in India.

Bharat Biotech has received approval to conduct phase I and II clinical trial for its vaccine candidate COVAXIN, that has been developed and manufactured in the company's facility in Hyderabad. Last week, it started the human clinical trials.

Pharma majorZydus Cadila has said that it is looking to complete clinical trials of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate ZyCoV-D in seven months. The company had last week started clinical trials of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate with the first human dosing. Depending on the study outcomes, and if the data is encouraging, and the vaccine is found to be effective during the trials, it could take a total of seven months for the trials to be completed and for the vaccine to be launched, Zydus Cadila Chairman Pankaj R. Patel said in a statement.

Panacea Biotec in June said that it was setting up a joint venture firm in Ireland with US-based Refana Inc to develop a vaccine for COVID-19. The company, in partnership with Refana, aims to manufacture over 500 million doses of COVID-19 candidate vaccine, with over 40 million doses expected to be available for delivery early next year, Panacea Biotec had said.

Indian Immunologicals, a subsidiary of National Dairy Development Board (NDDB), has inked an agreement with Australia's Griffith University to develop a vaccine for coronavirus.

Others like Mynvax and Biological E are also working to develop vaccines for COVID-19.

-Inputs from Namita Kohli

Read more:
How close are we to a coronavirus vaccine? All you need to know - THE WEEK

If youve logged onto GitHub recently and youre an active user, you might have noticed a new badge on your profile: Arctic Code Vault Contributor. Sounds pretty awesome right? But whose code got archived in this vault, how is it being stored, and whats the point?

On February 2nd, GitHub took a snapshot of every public repository that met one of the following criteria:

Then they traveled to Svalbard, found a decommissioned coal mine, and archived the code in deep storage underground but not before they made a very cinematic video about it.

For the combination of longevity, price and density, GitHub chose film storage, provided by piql.

Theres nothing too remarkable about the storage medium: the tarball of each repository is encoded on standard silver halide film as a 2d barcode, which is distributed across frames of 8.8 million pixels each (roughly 4K). Whilst officially rated for 500, the film should last at least 1000 years.

You might imagine that all of GitHubs public repositories would take up a lot of space when stored on film, but the data turns out to only be 21TB when compressed this means the whole archive fits comfortably in a shipping container.

Each reel starts with slides containing an un-encoded human readable text guide in multiple languages, explaining to future humanity how the archive works. If you have five minutes, reading the guide and how GitHub explains the archive to whoever discovers it is good fun. Its interesting to see the range of future knowledge the guide caters to it starts by explaining in very basic terms what computers and software are, despite the fact that de-compression software would be required to use any of the archive. To bridge this gap, they are also providing a Tech Tree, a comprehensive guide to modern software, compilation, encoding, compression etc. Interestingly, whilst the introductory guide is open source, the Tech Tree does not appear to be.

But the question bigger than how GitHub did it is why did they do it?

The mission of the GitHub Archive Program is to preserve open source software for future generations.

GitHub talks about two reasons for preserving software like this: historical curiosity and disaster. Lets talk about historical curiosity first.

There is an argument that preserving software is essential to preserving our cultural heritage. This is an easily bought argument, as even if youre in the camp that believes theres nothing artistic about a bunch of ones and zeros, it cant be denied that software is a platform and medium for an incredibly diverse amount of modern culture.

GitHub also cites past examples of important technical information being lost to history, such as the search for the blueprints of the Saturn V, or the discovery of the Roman mortar which built the Pantheon. But data storage, backup, and networks have evolved significantly since Saturn Vs blueprints were produced. Today people frequently quip, once its on the internet, its there forever. What do you reckon? Do you think the argument that software (or rather, the subset of software which lives in public GitHub repos) could be easily lost in 2020+ is valid?

Whatever your opinion, simply preserving open source software on long timescales is already being done by many other organisations. And it doesnt require an arctic bunker. For that we have to consider GitHubs second motive: a large scale disaster.

We cant predict what apocalyptic disasters the future may bring thats sort of the point. But if humanity gets into a fix, would a code vault be useful?

Firstly, lets get something straight: in order for us to need to use a code archive buried deep in Svalbard, something needs to have gone really, really, wrong. Wrong enough that things like softwareheritage.org, Wayback Machine, and countless other conventional backups arent working. So this would be a disaster that has wiped out the majority of our digital infrastructure, including worldwide redundancy backups and networks, requiring us to rebuild things from the ground up.

This begs the question: if we were to rebuild our digital world, would we make a carbon copy of what already exists, or would we rebuild from scratch? There are two sides to this coin: could we rebuild our existing systems, and would we want to rebuild our existing systems.

Tackling the former first: modern software is built upon many, many layers of abstraction. In a post-apocalyptic world, would we even be able to use much of the software with our infrastructure/lower-level services wiped out? To take a random, perhaps tenuous example, say we had to rebuild our networks, DNS, ISPs, etc. from scratch. Inevitably behavior would be different, nodes and information missing, and so software built on layers above this might be unstable or insecure. To take more concrete examples, this problem is greatest where open-source software relies on closed-source infrastructure AWS, 3rd party APIs, and even low-level chip designs that might not have survived the disaster. Could we reimplement existing software stably on top of re-hashed solutions?

The latter point would we want to rebuild our software as it is now is more subjective. I have no doubt every Hackaday reader has one or two things they might change about, well, almost everything but cant due to existing infrastructure and legacy systems. Would the opportunity to rebuild modern systems be able to win out over the time cost of doing so?

Finally, you may have noticed that software is evolving rather quickly. Being a web developer today who is familiar with all the major technologies in use looks pretty different from the same role 5 years ago. So does archiving a static snapshot of code make sense given how quickly it would be out of date? Some would argue that throwing around numbers like 500 to 1000 years is pretty meaningless for reuse if the software landscape has completely changed within 50. If an apocalypse were to occur today, would we want to rebuild our world using code from the 80s?

Even if we werent to directly reuse the archived code to rebuild our world, there are still plenty of reasons it might be handy when doing so, such as referring to the logic implemented within it, or the architecture, data structures and so on. But these are just my thoughts, and I want to hear yours.

The thought that there is a vault in the Arctic directly containing code you wrote is undeniably fun to think about. Whats more, your code will now almost certainly outlive you! But do you, dear Hackaday reader, think this project is a fun exercise in sci-fi, or does it hold real value to humanity?

Original post:
Ask Hackaday: Why Did GitHub Ship All Our Software Off To The Arctic? - Hackaday

The Dream of Solomon, by Luca Giordano

Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

How often do you think of yourself in terms of a sister or brother of Jesus, or see our relationship with one another in terms of the family of God to which we belong through the gift of our baptism and confirmation? I am sure you do from time to time, but does it matter, is it important?

The second reading from the letter to the Romans hints at this in the phrase about Christ being the firstborn of many brothers and sisters, who have a purpose and mission in life, one which will lead them to be glorified, but in the process means bearing witness to Christ and his teaching.

All this can seem very far removed from ordinary, daily life with all its demands, but we are foolish if we think it does not mean anything for us. Today more than ever, the community that follows Christ is being called to a determined witness in an arena where our faith is being challenged on so many fronts, the old sign posts of truth, ethics, respect have shifted, Christianity itself is in danger of polarisation if we are not careful of what we say and do. Opposition to faith is strong in many areas of the world; the privileged influence of our faith in societal life is no longer as secure as once it was.

It is significant that in our first reading from the book of Kings, Solomon's response to God's appearance in his dream promising to fulfil anything he asks, is not for power, wealth, influence or even longevity, it is for something far more important: 'Give your servant, therefore, a listening heart to judge your people and to distinguish between good and evil. For who is able to give judgment for this vast people of yours?' (I Kgs 3:9) This is exactly what we need to be praying for each and every day, a listening heart. Like Solomon we can respond to God by asking for the same gift because it is tied up with the ministry of proclaiming the Kingdom and the saving gift of Christ, we have aright as children of the One god, sisters and brothers of Jesus to ask in his name these much needed gifts of discernment and guidance. Around us evil and good are mixed together, sometimes evil masquerades as good and it takes great foresight to see through the disguises it adopts. It has always been axiomatic that sin comes in attractive packages but with no spiritual health warnings. It is our task to help guide people into choosing the constructive options for good, not destruction and hurt.

Look at the TV, read online or in journals and newspapers the 'sordid', disreputable and dishonourable activities done by people of power who are able to convince others that what they do is apparently for our good. It takes a strong person to swim against the tide of opinion and I am afraid we in the Church are as much to blame as anybody, there are some very odd ideas floating about, many of them need good strong theological critique to help bring our minds back to the presence of Christ, to hear the word of God and to commit ourselves to active ministry and mission for our poor battered Earth, a world that encompasses not only human life but all creatures and life on earth. We are being challenged to stand up and bear witness to the truth and joy of Christ's promise to us. That also is the hidden message of the parables of the Kingdom Jesus teaches, how good and bad alike are growing together, but it is at the end that the bad are separated out. An interesting thought about the need for our discernment and a listening heart! But, what do we say the Kingdom of heaven is like in our age, how would you describe it, how best can we discern it for ourselves and others?

Lectio

'The Kingdom of God'.

Francis Thompson (1859 - 1907)

O world invisible, we view thee,O world intangible, we touch thee,O world unknowable, we know thee,Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

Does the fish soar to find the ocean,The eagle plunge to find the air-That we ask of the stars in motionIf they have rumour of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken,And our benumbed conceiving soars!-The drift of pinions, would we hearken,Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places-Turn but a stone and start a wing!'Tis ye, 'tis your estrangd faces,That miss the many-splendored thing.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)Cry-and upon thy so sore lossShall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladderPitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,Cry-clinging to Heaven by the hems;And lo, Christ walking on the water,Not of Genesareth, but Thames!

Fr Robin is an Eastern Rite Catholic Chaplain for Melkites in the UK. He is also an Ecumenical Canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. You can follow him on Twitter: @RobinGibbons2

Tags: Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons, 26 July 2020

ICN aims to provide speedy and accurate news coverage of all subjects of interest to Catholics and the wider Christian community. As our audience increases - so do our costs. We need your help to continue this work.

Please support our journalism by donating today.

Read this article:
Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 26 July 2020 | ICN - Independent Catholic News