Daily Archives: May 22, 2021

Promotion of Covid-19 pseudoscience by Indian government criticised as pandemic rages – Chemistry World

Posted: May 22, 2021 at 10:11 am

A raging Covid-19 outbreak in India has not hampered the promotion of some questionable science by the government, drawing the ire of some of the countrys scientists.

One example is the Indian science ministrys funding of an Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) trial on whether reciting an ancient Hindu prayer, Gayatri Mantra, along with a set of deep breathing exercises in yoga could improve treatment of Covid-19 patients.

The chanting of the prayer is being evaluated along with pranayama breathing exercises from yoga as a pilot study to assess inflammatory markers in hospitalised Covid-19 patients at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Rishikesh, under the ICMR.

Patients will be given instructions on chanting and breathing exercises through video-conferencing for an hour in the morning and evening in the hospital room or at home after discharge, for up to 14 days. The criticism is mostly aimed at the design of the trial, small sample size and pre-conceived bias.

Breathing exercises are expected to benefit Covid-19 patients, says Partha Majumdar, founding director of National Institute of Biomedical Genomics, Kolkata. But when they are mixed with chanting of the prayer, it will be impossible to separate the effects of the two on Covid-19 patients, he says. Even if the prayer has no effect, which is the most plausible expectation, the beneficial effect of pranayama will show up as the confounded effect of both, he says.

Scientists have also criticised the small sample size just 20 volunteers. It is too small a number for arriving at any inference, especially because we are still unclear about the rather large variability of Covid-19 symptoms during the disease and during recovery, says Subhash Lakhotia, a cytogeneticist at the Banaras Hindu University. The details available at the clinical trials registry also do not make it clear if the analysis would follow a blind protocol. I am surprised that such an irrationally planned research project, even if claiming to be a pilot study, is approved for funding.

A greater worry [with] such directed research is the pre-existing bias, says Lakhotia. Previous studies undertaken to validate the claimed benefits of chanting Gayatri Mantra too suffered from a similar absence of rational planning. Such improperly planned studies are indeed typical of pseudoscience, he says.

On 7 May, Indias Ayush ministry that deals with alternate systems of medicines, ayurveda, yoga, unani, siddha and homeopathy, announced a nationwide campaign to promote polyherbal drugs for Covid-19 patients undergoing treatment at home. It states that the efficacy of these drugs has been proved through robust multi-centre clinical trials, but does not link to any peer-reviewed evidence for this claim.

In February 2021, Indias science and health minister Harsh Vardhan, himself a doctor and surgeon, was present at the launch of a Coronil kit, containing three herbal medicines, which is claimed to boost immunity. It was formulated by self-styled godman Baba Ramdevs company Patanjali. Ramdev initially claimed Coronil was certified by Indias drug regulator and the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO quickly clarified on Twitter that it has not reviewed or certified any traditional medicine for the treatment [of] #Covid-19.

The Indian Medical Association described the claims that Coronil could be used in prevention, treatment and post-Covid care as a false and fabricated projection of an unscientific medicine.

In recent times we are witnessing a trend where governmental agencies offer funding to scientifically validate personal beliefs, says Soumitro Banerjee, a professor of physics at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata, and general secretary of Breakthrough Science Society (BSS) that promotes scientific rationalism. The BSS condemns financial support for ill-conceived research projects when mainstream science is suffering due to the lack of funding, he adds.

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What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack? – Education Week

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Is critical race theory a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy, or a divisive discourse that pits people of color against white people? Liberals and conservatives are in sharp disagreement.

The topic has exploded in the public arena this springespecially in K-12, where numerous state legislatures are debating bills seeking to ban its use in the classroom.

In truth, the divides are not nearly as neat as they may seem. The events of the last decade have increased public awareness about things like housing segregation, the impacts of criminal justice policy in the 1990s, and the legacy of enslavement on Black Americans. But there is much less consensus on what the governments role should be in righting these past wrongs. Add children and schooling into the mix and the debate becomes especially volatile.

School boards, superintendents, even principals and teachers are already facing questions about critical race theory, and there are significant disagreements even among experts about its precise definition as well as how its tenets should inform K-12 policy and practice. This explainer is meant only as a starting point to help educators grasp core aspects of the current debate.

Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberl Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.

A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.

Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.

CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.

This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by criticsoften, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into oppressed and oppressor groups; and urges intolerance.

Thus, there is a good deal of confusion over what CRT means, as well as its relationship to other terms, like anti-racism and social justice, with which it is often conflated.

To an extent, the term critical race theory is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much its actually informed those programs.

One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT, including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, Californias recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary disciplinesuch as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based, the organization claimed.

(A good parallel here is how popular ideas of the common core learning standards grew to encompass far more than what those standards said on paper.)

The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so peoplewhite or nonwhitewho dont intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel racism.

Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white people in order to achieve equity. They mainly aim those accusations at theorists who advocate for policies that explicitly take race into account. (The writer Ibram X. Kendi, whose recent popular book How to Be An Antiracist suggests that discrimination that creates equity can be considered anti-racist, is often cited in this context.)

Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT thus puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.

Heres a helpful illustration to keep in mind in understanding this complex idea. In a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court school-assignment case on whether race could be a factor in maintaining diversity in K-12 schools, Chief Justice John Roberts opinion famously concluded: The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. But during oral arguments, then-justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg said: Its very hard for me to see how you can have a racial objective but a nonracial means to get there.

All these different ideas grow out of longstanding, tenacious intellectual debates. Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalismtenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.

Scholars who study critical race theory in education look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them. Among the topics theyve studied: racially segregated schools, the underfunding of majority-Black and Latino school districts, disproportionate disciplining of Black students, barriers to gifted programs and selective-admission high schools, and curricula that reinforce racist ideas.

Critical race theory is not a synonym for culturally relevant teaching, which emerged in the 1990s. This teaching approach seeks to affirm students ethnic and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous. But its related in that one of its aims is to help students identify and critique the causes of social inequality in their own lives.

Many educators support, to one degree or another, culturally relevant teaching and other strategies to make schools feel safe and supportive for Black students and other underserved populations. (Students of color make up the majority of school-aged children.) But they dont necessarily identify these activities as CRT-related.

As one teacher-educator put it: The way we usually see any of this in a classroom is: Have I thought about how my Black kids feel? And made a space for them, so that they can be successful? That is the level I think it stays at, for most teachers. Like others interviewed for this explainer, the teacher-educator did not want to be named out of fear of online harassment.

An emerging subtext among some critics is that curricular excellence cant coexist alongside culturally responsive teaching or anti-racist work. Their argument goes that efforts to change grading practices or make the curriculum less Eurocentric will ultimately harm Black students, or hold them to a less high standard.

As with CRT in general, its popular representation in schools has been far less nuanced. A recent poll by the advocacy group Parents Defending Education claimed some schools were teaching that white people are inherently privileged, while Black and other people of color are inherently oppressed and victimized; that achieving racial justice and equality between racial groups requires discriminating against people based on their whiteness; and that the United States was founded on racism.

Thus much of the current debate appears to spring not from the academic texts, but from fear among critics that studentsespecially white studentswill be exposed to supposedly damaging or self-demoralizing ideas.

While some district officials have issued mission statements, resolutions, or spoken about changes in their policies using some of the discourse of CRT, its not clear to what degree educators are explicitly teaching the concepts, or even using curriculum materials or other methods that implicitly draw on them. For one thing, scholars say, much scholarship on CRT is written in academic language or published in journals not easily accessible to K-12 teachers.

As of mid-May, legislation purporting to outlaw CRT in schools has passed in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee and have been proposed in various other statehouses.

The bills are so vaguely written that its unclear what they will affirmatively cover.

Could a teacher who wants to talk about a factual instance of state-sponsored racismlike the establishment of Jim Crow, the series of laws that prevented Black Americans from voting or holding office and separated them from white people in public spacesbe considered in violation of these laws?

Its also unclear whether these new bills are constitutional, or whether they impermissibly restrict free speech.

It would be extremely difficult, in any case, to police what goes on inside hundreds of thousands of classrooms. But social studies educators fear that such laws could have a chilling effect on teachers who might self-censor their own lessons out of concern for parent or administrator complaints.

As English teacher Mike Stein told Chalkbeat Tennessee about the new law: History teachers can not adequately teach about the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement. English teachers will have to avoid teaching almost any text by an African American author because many of them mention racism to various extents.

The laws could also become a tool to attack other pieces of the curriculum, including ethnic studies and action civicsan approach to civics education that asks students to research local civic problems and propose solutions.

The charge that schools are indoctrinating students in a harmful theory or political mindset is a longstanding one, historians note. CRT appears to be the latest salvo in this ongoing debate.

In the early and mid-20th century, the concern was about socialism or Marxism. The conservative American Legion, beginning in the 1930s, sought to rid schools of progressive-minded textbooks that encouraged students to consider economic inequality; two decades later the John Birch Society raised similar criticisms about school materials. As with CRT criticisms, the fear was that students would be somehow harmed by exposure to these ideas.

As the school-aged population became more diverse, these debates have been inflected through the lens of race and ethnic representation, including disagreements over multiculturalism and ethnic studies, the ongoing canon wars over which texts should make up the English curriculum, and the so-called ebonics debates over the status of Black vernacular English in schools.

In history, the debates have focused on the balance among patriotism and American exceptionalism, on one hand, and the countrys history of exclusion and violence towards Indigenous people and the enslavement of African Americans on the otherbetween its ideals and its practices. Those tensions led to the implosion of a 1994 attempt to set national history standards.

A current example that has fueled much of the recent round of CRT criticism is the New York Times 1619 Project, which sought to put the history and effects of enslavementas well as Black Americans contributions to democratic reformsat the center of American history.

The culture wars are always, at some level, battled out within schools, historians say.

Its because theyre nervous about broad social things, but theyre talking in the language of school and school curriculum, said one historian of education. Thats the vocabulary, but the actual grammar is anxiety about shifting social power relations.

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Google to open first physical store in New York this summer – Reuters

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The logo of Google is seen at the high profile startups and high tech leaders gathering, Viva Tech,in Paris, France May 16, 2019. REUTERS/Charles Platiau/File Photo/File Photo

Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google said on Thursday it would open its first physical store in New York City this summer, mirroring a retail approach that has helped Apple Inc (AAPL.O) rake in billions of dollars in the last two decades.

The Google store will be located in the city's Chelsea neighborhood near the its New York City campus, which houses over 11,000 employees.

Google, which has set up pop-up stores in the past to promote its products, said it would sell Pixel smartphones, Pixelbooks and Fitbit fitness trackers along with Nest smart home devices at the retail outlet.

Visitors will also be able to avail customer service for their devices and pick up their online orders at the store. (https://bit.ly/3wrqXjX)

The announcement signals the internet giant has taken a leaf out of Apple's play-book of operating physical stores and providing in-person services to boost sales.

Apple, which opened its first two retail stores in Virginia in 2001, has 270 stores in the United States and many more around the world that drive its sales and also provide shoppers hands-on customer service.

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DeepMind reportedly lost a yearslong bid to win more independence from Google – The Verge

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Tensions between Google and its AI brain trust DeepMind have always been fascinating. To put the relationship in crude terms: DeepMind, founded in 2010, is home to some the best AI researchers in the world who output a steady stream of insightful academic papers and Nature front covers. Google, meanwhile, bought DeepMind in 2014 and bankrolls its large losses, and it really, really wants to squeeze some money out of all those juicy brains.

Thats why a recent story on the two companies from The Wall Street Journal is so interesting. In it, Parmy Olson reports that Google has ended yearslong negotiations between the two firms, ultimately rejecting a plea from DeepMind for more independence.

According to Olson, DeepMind told staff the talks were over late last month. One suggestion from DeepMinds founders was apparently for the company to have the same legal structure as a nonprofit, reasoning that the powerful artificial intelligence they were researching shouldnt be controlled by a single corporate entity, according to people familiar with those plans. But Google wasnt on board with this, telling DeepMind it didnt make sense considering how much money the company has poured into DeepMind.

This conflict isnt surprising. Google execs have said repeatedly the companys future lies in AI, and numerous news stories suggest the mothership has been pressuring DeepMind into commercializing its work. This has led to projects from DeepMind using its research to improve battery life on Android and reduce energy costs in its data centers, but the financial benefits of these efforts are unclear. Meanwhile, the UK firms losses keep rising hitting a high of 477 million (around $660 million) in its most recent public filings for 2019. If Google wants its moneys worth, it cant give DeepMind anything like nonprofit status.

Alongside financial pressures, another bone of contention between the two companies seems to be ethical oversight. A much-trumpeted element in Googles acquisition of DeepMind was a promise that Google would set up an ethics board to ensure its technology was always deployed fairly. The exact nature and scope of this board, though, including who sits on it, has always been unclear. A 2019 report from The Economist said the board even held ownership over any artificial general intelligence created by DeepMind a term that refers to AI that meets or exceeds human capacity across a broad range of tasks.

The status of this board is not mentioned in the WSJs report, but Olson notes that DeepMinds future work will now be overseen by a separate ethics board staffed mostly by senior Google executives. Olson noted in a tweet that this is the Advanced Technology Review Council, or ATRC. This is reportedly Googles highest review board.

Update, May 21st, 11:04AM ET: Story has been updated to note that the ethics board mentioned in the WSJs report is the ATRC.

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Can Google and Samsung’s Wear OS take on the Apple Watch? It’s complicated – CNET

Posted: at 10:10 am

James Martin/CNET

Google had big ambitions with its wearable software, Wear OS. But for the past few years, it's stagnated and Apple has taken an even bigger lead in the global smartwatch market. A new partnership with Samsung announced on Tuesday at Google I/O could give Wear OS the attention it needs to stay relevant. But it won't catch up to Apple unless it seriously addresses some of the biggest issues that have plagued its smartwatches over the past few years.

Here are the things Google's new Wear OS needs to do to be a viable competitor to the Apple Watch.

Now playing: Watch this: Samsung and Fitbit are making Google watches. Here's...

8:09

The first major complaint about Wear OS from most users is battery life. While it depends on the specific watch, its processor and usage patterns, some of the Wear OS watches I've worn have struggled to get me from breakfast to dinner. Add a resource-intensive task like a GPS workout and it's not unusual to see your battery life drop even further. You shouldn't have to turn off features or nix notifications just to get through the day.

While Google hasn't provided any specific numbers for its next-generation watches beyond a general "better battery life" spec, at least it's on the radar. The Apple Watch Series 6 can last almost two days with raise-to-wake enabled instead of the always-on display, so the benchmark isn't particularly high.

Wear OS watches, on the whole, have been pretty slow. Even basic smartwatch tasks like scrolling through menus or raise-to-wake can take ages. There are exceptions: The Ticwatch Pro 3 addresses some of these performance issues as it's running Qualcomm's latest chip, the 4100 Plus. But if you've used a Wear OS watch in the past, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Samsung's current watches use its own Exynos processors. While we don't yet know what chipset the new Wear OS watches will use, it makes sense to leverage the power of what Exynos can already do when it comes to cellular connectivity and performance.

Then there's the question of Google apps. One of Google's biggest strengths on the Android side is the power of its Assistant. But when it comes to Wear OS, it misses the mark. It took months for the "OK Google" wake phrase to get fixed when users reported it stopped working, and even basic tasks, like using the Assistant to send a text message, can be hit and miss. Thankfully, it looks like we'll finally be gettingoffline YouTube Music support and be able to use Google Maps without a phone, but a lot of this feels like catch-up for features we should have had years ago.

Most Wear OS watches don't really focus on health features. Wear OS can do the standard stuff like track basic workouts and calories burned with Google Fit. But third-party apps have had to fill in a lot of the gaps for people looking for more of a fitness focus, like specific training programs.

Apple's health and fitness tracking is incredibly strong, not only because of its intuitive system of rings and workout programs like Fitness Plus, but also because of potentially life-saving features like fall detection on the Apple Watch.

Fitbit, now a part of Google, has really strong sleep and fitness tracking, as well as a great social component for its users. The Fitbit app is also one of the best out there to help interpret your fitness metrics and give an overall picture of your health goals. The new Wear OS will have a Fitbit app that will bring in activity snapshots and exercise modes, but won't have heart-rate tracking or sleep tracking yet. And for the time being, Google Fit and Fitbit's health platforms aren't merging.

Wear OS has also lagged behind on medical-grade sensors like an electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG). While Samsung and Fitbit both added an ECG app on their flagship watches in 2020, it came two years after Apple rolled it out on the Apple Watch Series 4. And in the case of Samsung's Galaxy Watch 3 and Watch Active 2, the ECG only works if you have a Samsung Galaxy phone. (It's worth noting the Oppo Watch that runs Wear OS does have an ECG, but that version was only offered in China.)

The Oppo Watch.

Apple on Wednesday announced Assistive Touch, a feature that lets people who have the use of only one arm control the Apple Watch. You can use gestures like pinching or clenching to control watch functions. It will roll out in the next version of WatchOS, likely to debut in the fall.

Wear OS does have some accessibility features like TalkBack, which lets you hear audio feedback so you don't need to see the screen, but there's room for much more.

This is the greatest strength of the new Wear OS partnership, but also the biggest potential risk. How do you unify three completely different platforms and take the best parts of all of them to create the ultimate smartwatch experience, or as CNET's Scott Stein put it, the Justice League of wearables?

Take the responsiveness of Samsung's Tizen, the fitness tracking and battery-life management of Fitbit, plus the third-party app support of Wear OS and Google could be on to a winner. But it's a huge challenge. Let's hope that the new Wear OS lives up to expectations.

Discover the latest news and best reviews in smartphones and carriers from CNET's mobile experts.

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Here’s what Google announced today at its first developer conference since 2019 – CNBC

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at the company's 20201 Google I/O conference.

Google

Google announced a slew of updates to its developer products Tuesday at its first Google I/O event since 2019.

Though Google makes most of its money from advertising, the annual event is a way to excite its developer ecosystem with updates ranging from software and artificial intelligence moonshots to shopping features. The company cancelled the annual developer conference last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This year's event was mostly virtual, with a few in-person attendees at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

Here's a roundup of some of the more interesting announcements from the day's event:

This year's event was pretty light on hardware announcements no big unveiling or refresh to its Pixel phones or home speakers. It did, however, announce some updates to existing products.

Most notably, Google said it now has a whopping 3 billion active Android devices, globally, well ahead of Apple's claim of 1 billion iPhones. However, Android devices are widely divergent in terms of the version of the platform they run, with some relying only on the core open-source code and others relying on custom apps and skins issued by hardware makers and carriers.

The company announced its latest operating system update called Android 12, which works on a reduced server CPU time by 22%, essentially meaning "basically, everything is faster," said Google's Vice President of Android and Google Play Sameer Samat said.

Google executives said it's combining Wear, Google's wearable tech software platform, with Samsung's Tizen software. It will aim to streamline the smartwatch OS for the Android platform along with faster load times and battery life improvement.

The company also said it will be bringing YouTube Music app for Wear OS later this year.

Fitbit CEO James Park said that Google Wear will include Fitbit popular features such as tracking healthy progress with plans for more. Google parent company Alphabet finally closed its $2.1 billion acquisition of the fitness-tracking company in January after regulators took more than a year to sign off on the proposed deal.

"In the future, we'll be building premium smart watches based on Wear that combines the best of Fitbit's healthcare expertise with Google's ambient computing capabilities," Park said, referring to Google's aim to place computing in all spaces.

The company announced a few updates in its push for e-commerce as it aims to compete with Amazon.

The company announced a deepened partnership with Shopify, by letting the company's more than 1 million merchants make their products more discoverable in Google Search and elsewhere. It will allow Shopify businesses to appear across Google Search, Maps, Lens, Images and YouTube "with just a few clicks." Shopify's stock popped as much as 4% on the news.

Separately, the company announced other enhancements to its e-commerce functionality: For instance, Google's Chrome browser will persistently display shopping carts when people open new tabs, so they can return to shopping after doing other tasks.

Google also announced some updates to make collaboration easier within its Workplace products. The industry, which also includes Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Slack, saw a surge in usage during the pandemic.

A new feature in Workspace called smart canvas will let people tag other users in a documents and the call through its video platform, Google Meet, directly from a document, spreadsheet or slide.

The company also showed off an early research project called Project Starline which builds a 3D image of a person that can be used for conversations in a meeting. It appears as a type of a hologram chat.

CEO Sundar Pichai stressed that Project Starline is still in the early stages but that some employees have been testing it amid efforts to collaborate between separate locations during the pandemic. It's planning trial deployments with enterprise partners later this year.

Google is best known for its artificial intelligence technology, which powers its products from Search to self-driving cars. Executives said Tuesday that it's getting even smarter.

Pichai unveiled LaMDA, a breakthrough in natural language processing, which aims to make conversations and searches more natural while having the ability to answer more open-ended questions. Pichai gave the example of a person heaving a conversation with the planet Pluto, which gave answers to questions the user had about it.

Execs also announced a "Multitask Unified Model" it calls MUM, which they said is 1,000 times more powerful than the BERT model powering Google Search. Pulling data from texts, images and videos, MUM can supposedly answer complex questions about what a user might need for, say, a specific hike on Mt. Fuji.

Google also announced its first campus dedicated to quantum computing. The Quantum AI campus in Santa Barbara, Calif., includes a data center, research laboratories, and its own quantum processor chip fabrication facilities. "These new computing capabilities will help to accelerate the discovery of better batteries, energy-efficient fertilizers, and targeted medicines, as well as improved optimization, new AI architectures, and more," the company says.

Speaking at her first Google I/O, Google's chief health officer Karen DeSalvo,the former Obama administration official who joined the company in 2019, said that the company is helping create a device that uses AI to detect skin conditions. After users upload three different photos from skin, hair or nail issues and answer some questions, it'll offer a diagnosis of possible dermatological conditions along with some information about them.

DeSalvo said the product will be accessible from internet browsers and cover 288 conditions, including 90% of the most commonly searched derm-related questions on Google. It will first be available to consumers in the European Union by the end of the year, she said.

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Google rediscovers RSS: tests new feature to follow sites in Chrome on Android – The Verge

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Google is testing a new feature for its Chrome browser on Android that lets users follow sites to create an updating list of new content they publish. The feature is based on RSS, an open web standard thats been the backbone of many popular web aggregation tools in the past. That includes Googles own, much beloved (and now defunct) Google Reader.

The test is small-scale: following sites will only be an option for some US users of Chrome Canary (the bleeding-edge version of Chrome that lets enthusiasts access beta features). Users will be able to follow sites from the browser menu, and updates will be aggregated in a card-based feed thats shown when users open a new tab. Its not clear whether this feed is wholly dependent on sites providing RSS support, or if Google will fill in the gaps itself.

Although this is just an early test, its nonetheless exciting for a certain sort of web user who misses the glory-days of RSS (and, by extension, a mode of internet discovery and distribution that faded years ago). At its core, RSS allows users to maintain a personalized feed of new content from favorite sites, blogs, and podcasts. And although tools that utilized these feeds were briefly very popular, they were eclipsed for numerous reasons.

Exactly why RSS fell from prominence is complicated. (Heres a story from Vice and one from TechCrunch that help explain.) But whatever the ultimate cause, many see its demise as a turning point for the web: the moment when decentralized, chronological feeds were replaced by the engagement-driven algorithms of social media giants.

Because the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and the like have had so many obviously bad effects (misinformation! Hoaxes! Nazis!), many look back wistfully on RSS as a sort of Golden Age for the web that failed from a surfeit of nobility and deficit of cunning. If only RSS had thrived! they say. All this nastiness could have been avoided. Perhaps. Whats clear is that Google is responding to a demand for new (read: old) ways of engaging with the web.

Weve heard it loud and clear: Discovery & distribution is lacking on the open web, and RSS hasnt been mainstream consumer friendly, tweeted Googles head of web creator relations, Paul Bakaus. Today, were announcing an experimental new way, powered by RSS, to follow creators with one click.

What happens next is anyones guess. Will Google follow through and push RSS-powered features to all Chrome users? Or will it get bored of a product thats not integral to its bottom line? (As it did with Google Reader.) Bakaus, at least, suggests theres more to come. This is only the beginning of a bigger exploration, and to get this right, we need your feedback, he tweeted. Hit us up via @WebCreators to let us know what we need to build for you. Im very excited about it!

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Google is reinventing Docs to fight a two-front war – The Verge

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Lets talk about some big changes announced to the platform where many of us get a lot of work done: Google Workspace, home to the suite of cloud-based tools that includes Docs.

The relative stagnation of Docs in a rapidly evolving world of productivity tools has been an ongoing fascination for me. When Im writing for myself, I use slick, modern tools like Notion, Bear, and (more recently) Substack. But when I write for others, its most often in Docs, which launched 15 years ago and looks more or less the same as it has since the late 2000s.

Create a new document in any other digital writing tool and you see an infinite canvas; in Docs you see a picture of an 8.5 x 11-inch sheet of paper, since Google assumes that any document you create is going to be printed eventually. On paper. To me, the skeuomorphism of Docs has long been a sign that Google has fallen behind the times.

And so I was happy to learn, at long last, thats changing. Heres Dieter:

Ultimately, Google is working to make every single part of its Workspace suite of apps interconnected. Youll be able to start a Meet video chat directly within Docs or share your Doc directly into a Meet call with a button in the doc. All of that integration will be useful, but it also has the benefit (for Google) of perhaps enticing users away from using competing products like Zoom or Slack and instead using Googles cohesive suite.

There is a smattering of other small updates: emoji reactions in Google Docs in addition to traditional comments, a new timeline view in Google Sheets for improved project management, and best of all: a new pageless view in Google Docs that does away with the assumption that your document is meant for an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper. It dynamically resizes the doc to the size of your web browser the way a web app ought to.

The changes are part of a suite of updates to Workspace that, I would argue, represent the biggest set of changes to Docs in more than ten years. While the shift away from printed pages is perhaps the most symbolic move here, the larger idea is to create more dynamic, interactive documents that are integrated with other Google products.

As Dieter notes, this will offer a lot of practical convenience for average users: starting quick video chats from inside a document; creating polls to help colleagues make quick decisions; and quickly assigning tasks to colleagues via the @-mentions that are already standard across most enterprise software. Together, they create what Google is calling a smart canvas in Workspace, built on individual objects called smart chips.

Notably, smart chips can include file formats other than Googles own youll be able to embed document previews from Microsoft Office docs, for example. Modern enterprise software is built on these kinds of useful integrations Slack raced out to an early lead mostly because it let you monitor events across an entire suite of third-party products, including Googles but they have been next to nowhere inside Docs.

For casual users of Docs, the entire conversation can end here: Google is making a series of minor helpful changes to Docs, making the overall experience 10 or 15 percent better for you. Great! I wish every product I used got 10 to 15 percent better every year.

At the same time, Googles incremental approach to improving Docs also reveals a dilemma that the company often faces when trying to improve its most-used products. Introducing lots of changes is appealing to designers, developers, and the tech enthusiasts like me that they serve, but often causes average users to revolt. And Google is so big that even well-funded startups with great ideas can fail to gain traction. The result is that the safest path at Google and other big companies is almost always to change things very little. The more users the product has and Workspace has hundreds of millions of users the more true this generally is.

Just look at Gmail, which has changed relatively little over the past decade. The companys noble attempt to build a new email experience from scratch, a standalone product called Inbox, won praise from reviewers for its more innovative features. But it failed to get much traction and was eventually ended. Gmail is still thriving in large part due to indifference from the startup world, which sees a daunting challenge in trying to build a new email service from scratch. But its telling that when Basecamp tried last year with its email service Hey, it was overflowing with novel ideas.

Googles dilemma with Workplace is even more acute, since the company is fighting a two-front war. On one side you have Microsoft, the original target that the products once called G Suite were designed to antagonize. (That project was a tremendous success, and ultimately dropkicked Microsoft into cloud-based subscriptions for Office five years later.) A huge part of Googles attention remains occupied by the picayune needs of current and former Office users and can enforce a kind of slow, linear progression in the product roadmap.

On the other hand, though, you have the upstarts: beautiful, feature-rich, fast-iterating products like Notion, Coda, and Airtable. What these products lack in the lowest-common-denominator simplicity of Google Workspace is more than made up for in power and flexibility. The learning curve is real I think I tinkered with Notion for six months before I figured out how it really fit in my life, which isnt much of an endorsement but before the Google I/O announcements, using Docs has come to feel like going back in time.

But unlike new email apps, productivity tools are getting real traction. Coda raised money at a valuation of $600 million last year. Notion raised $50 million at the start of the pandemic, and by April 2020 was valued at $2 billion. As of March, the spreadsheet-based Airtable was valued at $5.77 billion.

Its clear that these startups ability to move fast is drawing in new users at a rapid clip. And because they arent serving legacy user bases in the millions, they can afford to have a learning curve. Coda CEO Shishir Mehrotra himself a former Googler, having run product at YouTube told me Docs could only afford to evolve so much.

I think theyre gonna get stuck at what I call the Dropbox Paper point, Mehrotra said, referring to the file-storage companys tepid attempt to improve digital documents. Which is like, theres like a set of things you can do without fundamentally changing the paradigm. And itll be good I think a lot of people will love @-mentions and so on. Theyre clearly trying to cherry-pick attractive features they highlighted voting and reactions, which are two of our most popular features. Theyre clearly trying to pull individual things in. But if you dont want to fundamentally change the product, theres only so far you can go.

Toward the end of the day, I hopped on a Meet with Javier Soltero, who has run Google Workspace since October 2019. Soltero has seen both sides of the tech giant / startup divide he founded the great mobile email app Acompli, sold it to Microsoft, and then successfully transformed it into the mobile Outlook app during a productive stint in the Office organization.

Soltero took exception to my suggestion that the Workplace team hasnt been shipping lately he pointed to the roll-out of AI-assisted smart compose features over the past couple years, for example. But he acknowledged that the company had a lot of infrastructure work to do free customers and paid customers have been using different versions of the apps, for example, and Google is spending a lot of time migrating them to a more similar set of features.

Ultimately, though, Soltero told me what I wanted to hear: that the changes would herald the arrival of a world where Docs would start to iterate faster.

Im excited because today actually represents a big step toward continued acceleration, he told me. Its not to say that were going to get everything right, or that everythings going to be an earth-shattering, Marvin the Martian-style kaboom, but we are guided, I think, by the right set of things as a team. And Im seeing the organization get really excited.

Of course, Coda and its peers are also accelerating. And despite the welcome moves, Google still has a lot of catching up to do.

This column was co-published with Platformer, a daily newsletter about Big Tech and democracy.

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California Governor Newsom gushes over Google as he signs real-estate bill on site of future mega-campus – CNBC

Posted: at 10:10 am

California Governor Gavin Newsom speaks at the opening of the country's first federal and state operated community vaccination site during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Los Angeles, California, February 16, 2021.

Mike Blake | Reuters

California Governor Gavin Newsom pointed to a recent flood of tech IPOs and Google's forthcoming development project in San Jose as examples of a California comeback, as a recall campaign and complaints from departing residents draw attention to the state's troubles.

Google chief legal officer and global affairs SVP Kent Walker joined local and state officials, including Newsom, as he signed California bill SB7 at an event in San Jose. The law changes zoning to allow denser housing and speeds up the state's environmental review process for construction projects, which would include Google's proposed mega campus in San Jose.

Newsom and officials thanked Walker several times during the event. "Kent, thank you for highlighting this this bill is about the investment in the state of California," Newsom said in a press conference in San Jose Thursday. "This bill is about our comeback. This bill is about our renewal."

"To be here with Google and the incredible private sector investment and the faith and devotion to the future of this city and this region and this state is exactly where we want to be and it's why we are here," Newsom said, adding that he opted to "celebrate" in-person instead of with a Zoom call originally scheduled for Friday.

The law comes as critics say the state is losing its grip on tech thanks to high housing costs and poor governance, which were exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic. The state has also seen an increasingly hostile climate with wildfires and drought. A recall effort against Newsom recently collected enough valid signatures to qualify for the voter ballot.

When the press asked him about Californians migrating out of state, Newsom pointed to the tech industry, IPOs, Google and the high density of engineers, researchers and scientists.

"Eat your heart out, all those other states," Newsom continued. "The state has enjoyed 99 IPOs year to date. We've had record-breaking venture capital last year in the state of California. We're the No. 1 innovation state in America," he said. "Those that write our obituary they've done so every seven to ten years are proven wrong over and over again, and once again, they'll be proven wrong about their current assessment."

Google's chief legal officer and global affairs SVP Kent Walker spoke at a SB7 bill signing in San Jose, California, alongside Governor Gavin Newsom.

Screenshot

California startups raised $84.2 billion in venture funding last year, according to the National Venture Capital Association. Google vowed to spend $7 billion on U.S. data centers and office space in 2021, especially in California where it has several campus sites.

Thursday's event also comes one week ahead of the city council's decision next week on whether to approve Google's massive South Bay campus in partnership with the city of the San Jose called "Downtown West." The 80-acre campus in downtown San Jose will have more than 20,000 employees and a portion of it will be allocated for residential and public space, including what it hopes will be one of the country's largest transit sites. The company has recently added $200 million in community benefits to help the deal along.

"As we start to bring our employees back to our offices throughout the state, throughout the country, we're looking forward to investing more in California," Google's Walker said Thursday. "We want to invest throughout the United States but we have a special love and affection for California and a belief that California can enable the next generation of innovation. We're well on our way to economic recovery and we look forward to working with all of you in the years to come."

Newsom pointed to Google's proposed housing development, which will include a proposed 4,000 housing units, 25% of which will be designated for "affordable" housing. He also said the sustainability features of the campus are examples of a solution to "Mother Nature's challenges" in the state.

Watch Now: The California tech exodus: How big is it and what can be done to reverse it?

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Google updates Firebase with new personalization features, security tools and more – TechCrunch

Posted: at 10:10 am

At its I/O developer conference, Google today announced a slew of updates to its Firebase developer platform, which, as the company also announced, now powers over 3 million apps.

Theres a number of major updates here, most of which center around improving existing tools like Firebase Remote Config and Firebases monitoring capabilities, but there are also a number of completely new features here as well, including the ability to create Android App Bundles and a new security tool called App Check.

Helping developers be successful is what makes Firebase successful, Firebase product manager Kristen Richards told me ahead of todays announcements. So we put helpfulness and helping developers at the center of everything that we do. She noted that during the pandemic, Google saw a lot of people who started to focus on app development both as learners and as professional developers. But the team also saw a lot of enterprises move to its platform as those companies looked to quickly bring new apps online.

Maybe the marquee Firebase announcement at I/O is the updated Remote Config. Thats always been a very powerful feature that allows developers to make changes to live production apps on the go without having to release a new version of their app. Developers can use this for anything from A/B testing to providing tailored in-app experience to specific user groups.

With this update, Google is introducing updates to the Remote Config console, to make it easier for developers to see how they are using this tool, as well as an updated publish flow and redesigned test results pages for A/B tests.

Image Credits: Google

Whats most important, though, is that Google is taking Remote Config a step further now by launching a new Personalization feature that helps developers automatically optimize the user experience for individual users. Its a new feature of [Remote Config] that uses Googles machine learning to create unique individual app experiences, Richards explained. Its super simple to set up and it automatically creates these personalized experiences thats tailored to each individual user. Maybe you have something that you would like, which would be something different for me. In that way, were able to get a tailored experience, which is really what customers expect nowadays. I think were all expecting things to be more personalized than they have in the past.

Image Credits: Google

Google is also improving a number of Firebases analytics and monitoring capabilities, including its Crashlytics service for figuring out app crashes. For game developers, that means improved support for games written with the help of the Unity platform, for example, but for all developers, the fact that Firebases Performance Monitoring service now processes data in real time is a major update to having performance data (especially on launch day) arrive with a delay of almost half a day.

Firebase is also now finally adding support for Android App Bundles, Googles relatively new format for packaging up all of an apps code and resources, with Google Play optimizing the actual APK with the right resources for the kind of device the app gets installed on. This typically leads to smaller downloads and faster installs.

On the security side, the Firebase team is launching App Check, now available in beta. App Check helps developers guard their apps against outside threats and is meant to automatically block any traffic to online resources like Cloud Storage, Realtime Database and Cloud Functions for Firebase (with others coming soon) that doesnt provide valid credentials.

Image Credits: Google

The other update worth mentioning here is to Firebase Extensions, which launched a while ago, but which is getting support for a few more extensions today. These are new extensions from Algolia, Mailchimp and MessageBird, that helps bring new features like Algolias search capabilities or MessageBirds communications features directly to the platform. Google itself is also launching a new extension that helps developers detect comments that could be considered rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable in a way that will make people leave a conversation.

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Google updates Firebase with new personalization features, security tools and more - TechCrunch

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