Category Archives: Transhuman News

Episode 1

The Campus Technology Insider podcast explores current trends and issues impacting technology leaders in higher education. Listen in as Executive Editor Rhea Kelly chats with ed tech experts and practitioners about their work, ideas and experiences.

In this first episode, Executive Editor Rhea Kelly speaks with futurist Bryan Alexander about higher education's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and how the fall semester might play out as colleges and universities reopen.

Higher education is going through unprecedented times, and institutions' response to the COVID-19 pandemic has, by necessity, been a constantly evolving process. I think it's safe to say that at this point, most institutions are grappling with their plans for the fall semester. What will a return to campus look like? Will teaching and learning need to remain online? What's the best way to keep the campus community safe?

Bryan Alexander

To help answer these questions, I wanted to talk with a futurist someone who pays close attention to present-day trends in order to forecast possible scenarios for the future. My guest, Bryan Alexander, is a futurist, researcher, writer, consultant and educator who works in the field of how technology transforms education. Bryan has been covering COVID-19 and its impact on academia both on his blog and through his Future Trends Forum, a weekly series of open, interactive video conversations about the future of higher education. He's a prolific speaker you may have seen him at the Educause Annual Conference for many years. And he's also a senior scholar at Georgetown University and teaches graduate seminars in its Learning, Design and Technology program.

If you're wondering about Bryans forecasting methods, he wrote a wonderful article for Campus Technology a couple years ago called "How to Be an Ed Tech Futurist." In it he details how he identifies and analyzes trends, creates future scenarios, and even the importance of science fiction in envisioning and shaping the future.

Campus Technology Insider is available on Stitcher. Subscribe today or listen below, and stay tuned for more episodes!

About the Author

About the author: Rhea Kelly is executive editor for Campus Technology. She can be reached at [emailprotected].

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Introducing the Campus Technology Insider Podcast - Campus Technology

Cosmic Sunset

Geronimo Villanueva, a planetary scientist from NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland has created stunning simulations of what sunsets would look like on a variety of planets.

The animation shows what you would see through a super wide fisheye lens pointed at the sky from a planets surface so make sure to go full-screen for the full effect.

A second animation, below, shows what the same sunsets would look like from a more conventional perspective.

For instance, a sunset on Uranus would appear mostly blue, fading into a greenish turquoise due to the hydrogen, helium, and methane in its atmosphere absorbing the red portion of the visible light spectrum. For similar reasons, Earths sky appears blue on clear days.

On Mars, on the other hand, sunsets transition from brown to blue hues, due to dust particles scattering the blue portion of the visible spectrum.

To create the simulations, Villaneuva used on an online tool called the Planetary Spectrum Generator, which is capable of producing the appearance of evening skies on a variety of planets.

READ MORE: NASA simulation shows kaleidoscope of sunsets on other worlds [NASA]

More on sunsets: What Makes Mars Sunsets Different from Earths?

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This is What Sunsets on Other Planets Would Look Like - Futurism

If a star is gigantic enough, it can collapse in on itself to form a black hole. Stars that are still huge, but not big enough to become black holes, tend to explode in supernovae, eventually transforming intowhat is known as a neutron star.

What has long puzzled scientists is that the smallest black holes tend to be at least five times the mass of the Sun, while neutron stars are at most 2.5 times the mass of the Sun. Inside those boundaries lies what has become known as the mass gap a mysterious range between the mass of black holes and neutron stars.

Now, though, a new discovery by a team of European astronomers seems to fit into that gap, suggesting a new class of objects that were thought to be impossible.

Using the National Science Foundations Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Louisiana and the Virgo detector in Italy, a team of experts discovered an unusual celestial object thatsabout 2.6 times the mass of the Sun.

The reason these findings are so exciting is because weve never detected an object with a mass that is firmly inside the theoretical mass gap between neutron stars and black holes before, Laura Nuttall, a gravitational wave expert from the University of Portsmouths Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, and co-author of the paper published in The Astrophysical Journal today, said in a statement. Is it the lightest black hole or the heaviest neutron star weve ever seen?

The object dubbed a black neutron star by the BBC was first detected in August, when it merged with a massive black hole of 23 solar masses, transforming into a final black hole of 25 solar masses some 800 million light-years from Earth.

The two objects were extremely different in mass, making it an highly unusual merger.

Its a challenge for current theoretical models to form merging pairs of compact objects with such a large mass ratio in which the low-mass partner resides in the mass gap, Vicky Kalogera, professor at Northwestern University in the United States, and co-author, said in the statement.

The mass ratio was so off, Kalogera likened it to Pac-Man eating a little dot and in one bite.

This discovery implies these events occur much more often than we predicted, making this a really intriguing low-mass object, she added.

But we still cant say for certain that we know what it actually is.

The mystery object may be a neutron star merging with a black hole, an exciting possibility expected theoretically but not yet confirmed observationally, Kalogera said. However, at 2.6 times the mass of our sun, it exceeds modern predictions for the maximum mass of neutron stars, and may instead be the lightest black hole ever detected.

READ MORE: Black neutron star discovery baffles astronomers [BBC]

More on neutron stars: Astronomers Watch Neutron Star Charge Up Before Huge X-Ray Blast

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Astronomers May Have Discovered First-Ever Black Neutron Star - Futurism

Nature Walk

NASA just revealed new details about Artemis, its upcoming crewed mission to the Moon.

Once they reach the lunar surface, the astronauts are going to be seriously hoofing it: Space.com reports that NASA expects astronauts to hike ten miles in a single excursion. NASA is putting a lot of faith into its upgraded spacesuits, but the risky excursions could be invaluable for the space agencys goal of hunting for signs of water on the Moon.

For context, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrongs single extravehicular activity (EVA) thats what NASA calls any excursion outside of the lunar lander was only about 3,300 feet.

The Artemis astronauts 10-mile hikes will bring them 16 times farther away from the comparative safety of their vehicle while they trek around the Moons south pole, Space.com reports.

In order to protect the Artemis crewmembers, NASA is dedicating more resources to new spacesuits that will be able to withstand the extreme cold for long enough to complete the EVAs. The suit, dubbed the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) is a hybrid of the EMU suits worn on the International Space Station and the Moon-specific capabilities of the Apollo suits.

This is where were going to test out technologies, utilize lessons learned from EMU and obviously Apollo, in order to get to 2024, NASA EVA systems engineer Natalie Mary said during a recent committee meeting. We do have some things that we are holding off [on] for sustained lunar [exploration].

READ MORE: Dont expect NASAs 1st Artemis astronauts to drive on the moon in a fancy lunar car [Space.com]

More on Artemis: Heres NASAs Plan for a Lunar Base Camp

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NASA: Next Moon Astronauts Will Hike 10 Miles on Lunar Surface - Futurism

In 2018, futurist and academic Karinna Nobbs worked with a major cosmetics brand on an augmented reality try-on tool. During user testing, Nobbs noticed that some of the technology worked more effectively on white and Asian faces. For darker skin tones and older users, it was not able to track and place the content on the face, and lipstick would wobble on lips.

The brand solved the problem by training the algorithm to recognise more types of people, which also enabled the tool to better calibrate colour cosmetics. This experience demonstrated the importance of inclusivity to build an effective product, Nobbs says. It also shows that artificial intelligence and algorithms can be flawed.

Just like the humans that design it, AI can have bias. In fashion and beauty, this might manifest as online searches showing only certain types of models, or an image-matching engine mistaking legs for dark jeans. It might mean missing out on an entire customer segment or reinforcing harmful stereotypes. So as brands undergo a reckoning to be more inclusive and diverse, their data and algorithms are due for a closer look as well.

Brands have come under fire for using creative that is offensive and discriminatory. If your AI has seen that in the data set and thinks it's acceptable, it will most likely reproduce some of that offensive design, says Ashwini Asokan, CEO of retail automation platform Vue.ai, which works with Thredup and Zilingo. This is why there is no one size fits all in AI. AI must adapt to your business, your goals, your aspirations as a company.

AI and machine learning let machines perform human-like tasks reading text, seeing images, making decisions. It does this through algorithms, or sets of rules, that are applied to data. For example, if you supply multiple images of people wearing red dresses, it could eventually learn to identify red dresses.

The AI is only as good as the data it learns from, Asokan says. This can be a problem if a brand uses limited data, whether its a specific skin colour or body type. If every image of the red dress was on a tall, white model, for example, the algorithm might only work within those limitations meaning that a petite or Black person may never be recommended clothes that are relevant to them.

Brands have come under fire for using creative that is offensive and discriminatory. If your AI has seen that in the data set and thinks it's acceptable, it will most likely reproduce some of that offensive design.

This type of bias is evident even in a Google image search for dresses, says Yael Vizel, co-founder of Zeekit, a computer vision startup that works with Asos and Bloomingdales to digitally dress diverse models. She points out that most of the Google results show models that look similar, even if the brand offers items in a range of sizes.

If you ask Google what the average customer looks like, one out of 25 is plus-size or has dark skin, which is not reality, Vizel says. When a machine scans a catalogue, the system is biased from the beginning because of the way brands present their products. These are the visuals that represent the data set of the internet. Its our responsibility, as leaders of companies, to pay attention to the fact that we are biased.

Zeekit has a library of models that it can dress using a single product image. This is how Asos is able to show many different diverse models wearing the same garment. Because brands still end up making a biased selection, Zeekit has a Diversity Matrix that charts representations of body type and skin tone.

Bias in search is a challenge because user behaviour often reinforces biases, says Jill Blackmore Evans, community and editorial manager of stock photography library Pexels, which has intentionally created algorithms that generate diverse results. To combat this, Evans recommends that brands use human curators to review and adjust any automated content.

Otherwise, for example, computer vision may not accurately recognise gender in an image, and if searches for love only resulted in straight people, this would reinforce the notion that only heterosexual couples are normal, Evans says. Companies can be part of the push for change by diversifying the creators they work with and increasing the diversity of people depicted in the imagery they use.

Avoiding the explicit use of sensitive attributes, such as gender or skin tone in a content image, is known as fairness through unawareness, says Nadia Fawaz, the technical lead for fairness in AI at Pinterest, adding that this approach may not be sufficient because it ignores implicit correlations. The platform is investigating several approaches to improving the relevance and diversity of its pins, in addition to letting users customise their beauty searches by skin tone range. If the data we input is not diverse, the AI models may learn implicit biases, serve biased results, leading to the collection of more biased training data, and the creation of a biased feedback loop, Fawaz says.

It also means being smarter with the data. Data science firm Dstillery says brands often miss whole sets of customers because they look at the dominant signal, one which typically reinforces stereotypes. Dstillery chief data scientist Melinda Han Williams cites a soccer-based apparel client who knew that it had customers from Spanish-speaking countries but missed that these fell into two generations who were very culturally different. By looking more closely at the data, they saw that one customer group was a bit older and had moved to the US recently; another segment was younger and had grown up in the US.

Pexels updated its algorithm so that photos representing all races, genders and identities populate tags such as couple or holding hands.

Pexels

Racism plays out in how marketing departments target customers within certain demographics, says Jessica Graves, founder and chief data officer of Sefleuria, who advises fashion and luxury companies like Outlier and Fortune 500 brands on using algorithms. One brand, for example, might ask to target Black Gen Z customers because of assumptions they make about that demographic, like that they prefer a certain style of clothing, even if race is not a relevant data point. Or a brand might use location to distribute discount codes, giving different amounts to certain neighbourhoods, which happen to be communities of colour, even though that might not correlate with purchasing behaviour.

Instead, she advises that brands focus on customer behaviour, using algorithms that adapt to how people shop on a brands website, what they click on, what they never buy and which search terms they use. Its way more effective. You make so much more money if you do this, she says. Marketing based on demographics should just stop unless you can justify that customers want this incorporated.

Ultimately, technology cannot solve biased teams or products that do not serve certain demographics. Zena Digital Group founder and CEO Zena Hanna, who has worked with those including Versace, Creed, Farfetch and the Fashion Institute of Technology, advises brands to go against their own biases and test strategies even if they think they wont work. Often, she says, a team might design and plan media only for people who look like them, and perpetuate that assumption in photo shoots, influencer selection or marketing copy. A lot of people don't realise that they have segments not just in their minds, but also in the way they push [content] out, so ads are not going to be inclusive of who the actual audience is.

It comes down to who is behind these systems and who is building these systems. If the diversity around the table who is testing and training them is all homogeneous? Good luck. You are almost guaranteeing that you will end up with a biased system, says Falon Fatemi, founder of AI service platform Node, which helps companies like venture capital firm Clearbanc generate predictions from data.

Of course, racist missteps from brands like Prada, Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana likely wouldn't have been prevented by AI, so the first step is diversifying teams, Hanna says. She also suggests social listening algorithms to alert brands of any racist, transphobic, homophobic or sexist rhetoric being said about them online.

She adds that diverse representation builds loyalty. In this day and age, that is super important and diminishing quickly, so whatever brands can do on the tech side and on the human side ... is really important.

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More on this topic:

Stores get smart about AI

Facebook experiments with AI-powered styling program

A top Silicon Valley futurist on how AI, AR and VR will shape fashions future

Continued here:
As fashion resets, its algorithms should too - Vogue Business

Chinese police are gathering blood samples from the countrys roughly 700 million men and boys with the express purpose of building a national genetic database of their DNA.

The Chinese government has reportedly been collecting these genetic codes since 2017, according to new research. Police have been showing up to peoples homes and even schools to draw blood and compile genetic information.

Once theyre done, the state will be able to track down any man or boys male relatives based on their genes, according to The New York Times, vastly enhancing Chinas already ubiquitous surveillance powersinto a Gattaca-esque genetic panopticon.

Even more alarming is that at least one American company, Thermo Fisher, is helping China do it the pharma company sold China the tailor-made DNA testing kits that police are using to collect samples after actively pursuing the contract, the NYT reports. After the U.S. government criticized Thermo Fishers decision, the company continued onward.

Law enforcement officials in China cite law and order to justify their growing genetic database, arguing that the surveillance effort will help with criminal investigations. But human rights advocates and even some officials in China are concerned about the privacy implications of forcing everyone to surrender their genetic code.

The ability of the authorities to discover who is most intimately related to whom, given the context of the punishment of entire families as a result of one persons activism, is going to have a chilling effect on society as a whole, Human Rights Watch researcher Maya Wang told the NYT.

Continued here:
China Is Building a Genetic Database of Every Man in the Country - Futurism

What will it take to encourage much more widespread reliance on working at home for at least part of each week? asked Frank Schiff, the chief economist of the US Committee for Economic Development, in The Washington Post in 1979.

Four decades on, we have the answer.

But COVID-19 doesnt spell the end of the centralised office predicted by futurists since at least the 1970s.

The organisational benefits of the propinquity effect the tendency to develop deeper relationships with those we see most regularly are well-established.

The open-plan office will have to evolve, though, finding its true purpose as a collaborative work space augmented by remote work.

If were smart about it, necessity might turn out to be the mother of reinvention, giving us the best of both centralised and decentralised, collaborative and private working worlds.

Cultural Resistance

Organisational culture, not technology, has long been the key force keeping us in central offices.

That was the case in 1974 and is still the case today, observed the father of telecommuting Jack Nilles in 2015, three decades after he and his University of Southern California colleagues published their landmark report Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff: Options for Tomorrow. The adoption of telework is still well behind its potential.

Until now.

But it has taken a pandemic to change the status quo evidence enough of culture resistance.

In his 1979 article, Schiff outlined three key objections to working from home:

how to tell how well workers are doing, or if they are working at all

employees need for contact with coworkers and others

too many distractions.

To the first objection, Schiff responded that experts agreed performance is best judged by output and the organisations objectives. To the third, he noted: In many cases, the opposite is likely to be true.

The COVID-19 experiment so far supports him. Most workers and managers are happy with remote working, believe they are performing just as well, and want to continue with it.

Personal Contact

But the second argument the need for personal contact to foster close teamwork is harder to dismiss.

There is evidence remote workers crave more feedback.

As researchers Ethan Bernstein and Ben Waber note in their Harvard Business Review article The Truth About Open Offices, published in November 2019, one of the most robust findings in sociology proposed long before we had the technology to prove it through data is that propinquity, or proximity, predicts social interaction.

Wabers research at the MIT Media Lab demonstrated the probability that any two workers will interact either in person or electronically is directly proportional to the distance between their desks. In his 2013 book People Analytics he includes the following results from a bank and information technology company.

Experiments in Collaboration

Interest in fostering collaboration has sometimes led to disastrous workplace experiments. One was the building Frank Gehry designed for the Chiat/Day advertising agency in the late 1980s.

Agency boss Jay Chiat envisioned his headquarters as a futuristic step into flexible work but workers hated the lack of personal spaces.

Less dystopian was the Pixar Animation Studios headquarters opened in 2000. Steve Jobs, majority shareholder and chief executive, oversaw the project. He took a keen interest in things like the placement of bathrooms, accessed through the buildings central atrium. We wanted to find a way to force people to come together, he said, to create a lot of arbitrary collisions of people.

Yet Bernstein and Wabers research shows propinquity is also strong in campus buildings designed to promote serendipitous interaction. For increased interactions, they say, workers should be ideally on the same floor.

Being Apart

How to balance the organisational forces pulling us together with the health forces pushing social distancing?

We know COVID-19 spreads most easily between people in enclosed spaces for extended periods. In Britain, research by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine shows workplaces are the most common transmission path for adults aged 20 to 50.

We may have to get used to wearing masks along with plenty of hand sanitising and disinfecting of high-traffic areas and shared facilities, from keyboards to kitchens. Every door knob and lift button is an issue.

But space is the final frontier.

Its going to take more than vacating every second desk or imposing barriers like cubicle walls, which largely defeat the point of open-plan offices.

An alternative vision comes from real-estate services company Cushman & Wakefield. Its 6 feet office concept includes more space between desks and lots of visual cues to remind coworkers to maintain physical distances.

Of course, to do anything like this in most offices will require a proportion of staff working at home on any given day. It will also mean then end of the individual desk for most.

This part may the hardest to handle. We like our personal spaces.

Well need to balance the sacrifice of sharing spaces against the advantages of working away from the office while still getting to see colleagues in person. Well need new arrangements for storing personal items beyond the old locker, and handover protocols for equipment and furniture.

Offices will also need to need more private spaces for greater use of video conferencing and the like. These sorts of collaborative tools dont work well if you cant insulate yourself from distractions.

But theres a huge potential upside with the new open office. A well-managed rotation of office days and seating arrangements could help us get to know more of those colleagues who, because they used to sit a few too many desks away, we rarely talked to.

It might just mean the open-plan office finally finds its mojo.

Andrew Wallace isprogram director of Interior Architecture at theUniversity of South Australia.

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

Excerpt from:
The Death of the Open-Plan Office? Not Quite, but a Revolution is in the Air - Nextgov

Freestyle Digital Media hasacquiredU.S. rightstoDivos!, a high school comedy directed by Ryan Patrick Bartley. It will bow day and date on digital and DVD on July 14. Matt Steele penned the script and stars as Ricky Redmond, a self-proclaimed Broadway Legend who is forced to share the spotlight with the schools star athlete (Brundidge) in the high school musical. Marissa Jaret Winokur, Nicole Sullivan, Jayson Bernard, Jason Stuart and Jake Busey also star in the ensemble. Theres always that one kid who takes the school play way too seriously, said Steele. Divos! is for those kids whose year is made or broken the day the cast list is posted. Steele also produces with Bernard, Roberto Rosario Jr., Bartley, Javier Montoya, Maria Capp and Kristi Kilday.

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The Prison Within, the justice system reform documentary directed by Katherin Hervey that won an award at this years Santa Barbara Film Festival, has been acquired by Gravitas Ventures. It will be released August 25 on VOD and home video. Narrated by Hill Harper, the film from Hervey, a former Los Angeles Public Defender and volunteer prison college instructor who was granted unprecedented access inside San Quentin Prison, tells some of the stories of men incarcerated for murder, and shows off their redemption and healing. It reveals the systemic injustices that perpetuate cycles of violence and trauma, and attempts to lays a path to reconcile the mass incarceration crisis.

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Superhuman: The Invisible Made Visible, a documentary that seeks to offer proof of individuals with extra-sensory powers, has been acquired by 1091. It will bow worldwide on demand and VOD on July 14. Futurist and the documentarys producer-host Caroline Cory is joined by the likes of Corey Feldman, Naomi Grossman, Robert Picardo, Michael Dorn, Karina Smirnoff and Rachele Brooke Smith along with scientists Tom Campbell, Dean Radin, Rudolph Schild, Glen Rein and Jim Gimzewski, as the film provides never-before-seen demonstrations of psi phenomena for the first time in a documentary format.

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Random Media has acquired worldwide rights to Ali Zamanis Opus of an Angel, a drama starring William McNamara, Cindy Pickett, Jamison Newlander and newcomer Kaylynn Kubeldis. A July 28 on-demand and digital release is planned. Written by Shahram Zargari and Zamani, the film centers on Stephen (McNamara), who is taking a sentimental tour of Los Angeles a year after tragic events cost him everything. His plan is to commit suicide until a chance encounter with Maria (Kubeldis), a blind girl who is lost and wandering the city. He begins to question whether their encounter was mere coincidence or divine intervention.

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Freestyle Acquires Divos!; Docs The Prison Within & Superhuman Find Homes; Random Media Takes Opus Of An Angel Film Deal Briefs - Deadline