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hubie (1068)
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Been around from the beginning, but only recently volunteered as an editor.
from the black-box-future-dept.
Recent years have seen the emergence of AI tools marketed as an answer to lack of diversity in the workforce, from use of chatbots and CV scrapers to line up prospective candidates, through to analysis software for video interviews.
Those behind the technology claim it cancels out human biases against gender and ethnicity during recruitment, instead using algorithms that read vocabulary, speech patterns and even facial micro-expressions to assess huge pools of job applicants for the right personality type and 'culture fit'.
However, in a new report published in Philosophy and Technology, researchers from Cambridge's Centre for Gender Studies argue these claims make some uses of AI in hiring little better than an 'automated pseudoscience' reminiscent of physiognomy or phrenology: the discredited beliefs that personality can be deduced from facial features or skull shape.
[...] "We are concerned that some vendors are wrapping 'snake oil' products in a shiny package and selling them to unsuspecting customers," said co-author Dr Eleanor Drage.
"By claiming that racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination can be stripped away from the hiring process using artificial intelligence, these companies reduce race and gender down to insignificant data points, rather than systems of power that shape how we move through the world."
The researchers point out that these AI recruitment tools are often proprietary – or 'black box' – so how they work is a mystery.
"While companies may not be acting in bad faith, there is little accountability for how these products are built or tested," said Drage. "As such, this technology, and the way it is marketed, could end up as dangerous sources of misinformation about how recruitment can be 'de-biased' and made fairer."
[...] "All too often, the hiring process is oblique and confusing," said Euan Ong, one of the student developers. "We want to give people a visceral demonstration of the sorts of judgements that are now being made about them automatically".
Journal Reference:
Drage, E., Mackereth, K. Does AI Debias Recruitment? Race, Gender, and AI's "Eradication of Difference". Philos. Technol. 35, 89 (2022). DOI: 10.1007/s13347-022-00543-1
Some astronomical eye candy from the Dark Energy Camera:
From high atop a mountain in the Chilean Andes, the Dark Energy Camera has snapped more than one million exposures of the southern sky. The images have captured around 2.5 billion astronomical objects, including galaxies and galaxy clusters, stars, comets, asteroids, dwarf planets and supernovae.
Now 10 years since the Dark Energy Camera first saw stars, the impressive 570-megapixel camera was originally built at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory for the Dark Energy Survey. The international DES collaboration uses the deep-space data to investigate dark energy, a phenomenon that is accelerating the expansion of space.
The Dark Energy Survey, whose scientists are now analyzing the data collected from 2013-2019, isn’t the only experiment to benefit from the powerful piece of equipment. Other research groups have also used the camera to conduct additional astronomical observations and surveys. Here are some of the many stellar photos created using the Dark Energy Camera.
My favorite is the second one, the deep field, when you realize that almost every dot of light in that image is a whole galaxy.
Break out your machine learning model training skills for fame and glory.
The 2022 EXPLORE Lunar Data Challenge is focused on the Archytas Dome region, close to the Apollo 17 landing site where the last humans set foot on the Moon 50 years ago this December.
The Machine Learning Lunar Data Challenge is open to students, researchers and professionals in areas related to planetary sciences, but also to anyone with expertise in data processing. There is also a Public Lunar Data Challenge to plot the safe traverse of a lunar rover across the surface of the Moon, open to anyone who wants to ‘have a go’, as well as a Classroom Lunar Data Challenge for schools, with hands-on activities about lunar exploration and machine learning.
In a press conference at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2022 to announce the EXPLORE Machine Learning Lunar Data Challenge, Giacomo Nodjoumi said: “The Challenge uses data from the Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission of the Archytas Dome. This area of the Moon is packed craters of different ages, boulders, mounds, and a long, sinuous depression, or rille. The wide variety of features in this zone makes it a very interesting area for exploration and the perfect scenario for this data challenge.”
The Machine Learning Data Challenge is in three steps: firstly, participants should train and test a model capable of recognising craters and boulders on the lunar surface. Secondly, they should use their model to label craters and boulders in a set of images of the Archytas zone. Finally, they should use the outputs of their models to create a map of an optimal traverse across the lunar surface to visit defined sites of scientific interest and avoid hazards, such as heavily cratered zones.
The public and schools are also invited to use lunar images to identify features and plot a journey for a rover. Prizes for the challenges include vouchers totalling 1500 Euros, as well as pieces of real Moon rock from lunar meteorites.
The deadline for entries closes on 21 November 2022 and winners will be announced in mid-December, on the anniversaries of the Apollo 17 mission milestones.
The 2022 EXPLORE Data Challenges can be found at: https://exploredatachallenges.space
from the hurricane comes to town dept.
Researchers suggest ocean cooling is an effectively impossible solution to mitigate disasters:
A new study found that even if we did have the infinite power to artificially cool enough of the oceans to weaken a hurricane, the benefits would be minimal. The study led by scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science showed that the energy alone that is needed to use intervention technology to weaken a hurricane before landfall makes it a highly inefficient solution to mitigate disasters.
"The main result from our study is that massive amounts of artificially cooled water would be needed for only a modest weakening in hurricane intensity before landfall," said the study's lead author James Hlywiak, a graduate of the UM Rosenstiel School. "Plus, weakening the intensity by marginal amounts doesn't necessarily mean that the likelihood for inland damages and safety risks would decrease as well. While any amount of weakening before landfall is a good thing, for these reasons it makes more sense to direct focus towards adaptation strategies such as reinforcing infrastructure, improving the efficiency of evacuation procedures, and advancing the science around detection and prediction of impending storms."
[...] "You might think that the main finding of our article, that it's pointless to try to weaken hurricanes, should be obvious," said David Nolan, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the UM Rosenstiel School and senior author of the study. "And yet, various ideas for hurricane modification appear often in popular media and are even submitted for patents every few years. We're happy to be able to put something into the peer-reviewed literature that actually addresses this."
Journal Reference:
Hlywiak, J., Nolan, D.S. Targeted artificial ocean cooling to weaken tropical cyclones would be futile [open]. Commun Earth Environ 3, 185 (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s43247-022-00519-1
Seeing as how Bitwarden has recently finished their latest round of fundraising by pulling in $100M, does anyone have any particular concerns about that? Impaired by both paralysis of choice and old fashioned inertia, I have yet to set up a password manager and currently rely on on overly-complicated method to deal with all my passwords. I've seen various concerns expressed that when this much money is raised by an entity, this is usually a sign that big changes are ahead as they seek to monetize what they have to make good for the investors by closing source. They are at least saying all the right things:
On top of its basic free service, which gives individuals access to unlimited password storage across platforms, Bitwarden ships a bunch of paid-for premium tools and services, including advanced enterprise features like single sign-on (SSO) integrations and identity management. [...]
“Our investment in Bitwarden reflects our conviction that the password management market is poised for considerable growth as online account use grows and security concerns mount in the hybrid working environment,” PSG managing director Tom Reardon noted in a press release.
Additionally, growing competition and VC investments in the password management realm means that Bitwarden can’t rest on its laurels — it needs to expand, and that is what its funds will be used for. The company confirmed plans to extend its offering into several aligned security and privacy verticals, including secrets management — something that 1Password expanded into last year via its SecretHub acquisition.
“The timing of the investment is ideal, as we expand into opportunities in developer secrets, passwordless technologies, and authentication,” Bitwarden CEO Michael Crandell said. “Most importantly, we aim to continue to serve all Bitwarden users for the long haul.”
Anyone use Bitwarden, and are you happy, and does this news have you considering other software? I know there are good examples of companies that manage free and paid products, and bad examples. Since I have yet no horse in this race, I'm trying to weigh all the options.
from the Marcia Marcia Marcia dept.
Our personality as adults is not determined by whether we grow up with sisters or brothers:
Siblings play a central role in childhood, and so it seems reasonable to assume that they influence each other's personalities in the long term. In fact, psychological research has been dealing with the question of what difference it makes whether people grow up with sisters or brothers for more than half a century.
[...] "Our findings refute the idea that growing up with brothers or sisters causes us to develop certain personality traits in the long term that are considered 'typically female' or 'typically male' in a society," explains Dr Julia Rohrer, one of the authors of the paper. "Overall, current research suggests that siblings have a surprisingly small impact on personality in adulthood. For example, previous studies by our research group here in Leipzig show that sibling position – that is, whether a person is a firstborn or a sandwich child, for example – also does not play a major role in personality."
However, the results of the new study do not mean that sibling gender does not play a role at all in long-term life paths. Economic studies have shown that in the US and Denmark, women with brothers earn less when employed. "So there do seem to be some interesting dynamics here that are related to gender," says Rohrer. "But personality is probably not part of the explanation for such effects."
Journal Reference:
Thomas Dudek, Anne Ardila Brenøe, Jan Feld, et al., No Evidence That Siblings' Gender Affects Personality Across Nine Countries, Psych Sci, 2022. DOI: 10.1177/09567976221094630
from the science you can sink your teeth into dept.
Incorporating banana peel flour into sugar cookie batter makes the treats more healthful:
Banana peels aren’t always destined for the trash or compost anymore. They’re making their way onto people’s plates, replacing pork in “pulled peel” sandwiches and getting fried up into “bacon.” And now, researchers reporting in ACS Food Science & Technology show that incorporating banana peel flour into sugar cookie batter makes the treats more healthful. In taste tests, cookies enriched with some banana peel flour were more satisfying than those baked with wheat flour alone.
Interest in plant-based diets and reducing food waste is increasing, and people want creative ways to use every part of their vegetables and fruits. Banana peels are one such waste that chefs and home cooks have been experimenting with, but these skins are extremely fibrous, making them unpleasant to eat raw. Recently, scientists found that they can grind the peels into a flour that’s rich in fiber, magnesium, potassium and antioxidant compounds. And when small amounts of wheat flour in breads and cakes were replaced with the new flour, the baked goods were more nutritious and had acceptable flavors. However, similar experiments haven’t been widely done with cookies. So, Faizan Ahmad and colleagues wanted to substitute some of the wheat flour in sugar cookies with banana peel flour, assessing the cookies’ nutritional quality, shelf-stability and consumer acceptance.
To make banana peel flour, the researchers peeled ripe, undamaged bananas and then blanched, dried and ground the skins into a fine powder. They mixed together different amounts of the powder with butter, skimmed milk powder, powdered sugar, vegetable oil and wheat flour, creating five batches of sugar cookies, and baked them.
Increasing the amount of the banana peel flour from 0 to 15% in the batches produced browner and harder products, which could be a result of the increased fiber content from the peels. In addition, cookies with banana peel flour were more healthful, having less fat and protein, higher amounts of phenols and better antioxidant activities than the conventional ones. A trained panel determined that cookies with the smallest substitution of banana peel flour (7.5%) had the best texture and highest overall acceptability compared to the other batches. This batch also kept well for three months at room temperature — it tasted the same as the wheat-only versions after the lengthy storage period. Because cookies can be enriched with some banana peel flour without impacting their consumer acceptance, the researchers say this addition could make these baked goods more nutritious.
So, anyone have a good recipe for banana flour?
Journal Reference:
Asima Shafi, Faizan Ahmad, and Zahra H. Mohammad, Effect of the Addition of Banana Peel Flour on the Shelf Life and Antioxidant Properties of Cookies, CS Food Sci. Technol. 2022, 2, 8, 1355–1363. DOI: 10.1021/acsfoodscitech.2c00159
from the entropy wins again dept.
In trying to understand the nature of the cosmos, some theorists propose that the universe expands and contracts in endless cycles.
Because this behavior is hypothesized to be perpetual, the universe should have no beginning and no end — only eternal cycles of growing and shrinking that extend forever into the future, and forever into the past.
It's an appealing concept in part because it removes the need for a state called a singularity that corresponds to the "beginning of time" in other models.
But a new study by University at Buffalo physicists Will Kinney and Nina Stein highlights one way that cyclic or "bouncing" cosmologies fall flat.
[...] "Unfortunately, it's been known for almost 100 years that these cyclic models don't work because disorder, or entropy, builds up in the universe over time, so each cycle is different from the last one. It's not truly cyclic," Kinney says. "A recent cyclic model gets around this entropy build-up problem by proposing that the universe expands a whole bunch with each cycle, diluting the entropy. You stretch everything out to get rid of cosmic structures such as black holes, which returns the universe to its original homogenous state before another bounce begins."
"But," he adds, "long story short, we showed that in solving the entropy problem, you create a situation where the universe had to have a beginning. Our proof shows in general that any cyclic model which removes entropy by expansion must have a beginning."
[...] And, of course, there are further research questions, Kinney says: "Our proof does not apply to a cyclic model proposed by Roger Penrose, in which the universe expands infinitely in each cycle. We're working on that one."
Journal Reference:
William H. Kinney and Nina K. Stein, Cyclic cosmology and geodesic completeness, JCAP, 6, 2022. DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2022/06/011
Listening to music helps to relieve pain, but apparently the effect is greater for you if you get to put together the play list.
from the let's use my mixtape dept.
Pain Relief from Listening to Music Enhanced by 'Choice' over Playlist:
The analgesic effect of music is increasingly recognised as an adjuvant therapy alongside more traditional forms of pain relief, particularly for chronic pain (i.e., pain lasting more than 12 weeks).
However, what drives the effect remains "an open question", and the underlying mechanisms are unclear, especially for acute pain lasting less than 12 weeks, according to the authors of a new study from Queen Mary University of London and University College Dublin.
Moreover, most previous studies have been laboratory-based, for example with experimental pain stimulation from a cold-pressor task, and although individual preferences for music attributes have been shown to play a significant role in music-induced analgesia, the extent to which observed effects apply in people's everyday lives remains unclear.
[...] "Overall, findings demonstrated that increased perceived control over music is associated with analgesic benefits, and that perceived choice is more important than music complexity," the authors concluded. They said that their findings have implications for both research and practice and emphasised "the importance of facilitating freedom of choice, and sustained engagement with music throughout music-listening interventions".
They added: "Now we know that the act of choosing music is an important part of the wellbeing benefits that we see from music listening. It's likely that people listen more closely, or more carefully, when they choose the music themselves."
Many years ago I used to spend a significant amount of time really listening to music; listening to full albums with headphones on. With all the streaming services available these days, is that still a thing for anybody, or do you just listen to whatever the streaming algorithm sends you?
Journal Reference:
Claire Howlin, Alison Stapleton, and Brendan Rooney, Tune out pain: Agency and active engagement predict decreases in pain intensity after music listening [open], Plos One, 2022. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0271329
A user submitted this via upstart (thank you), but there isn't much more to it than a link to a video so it wouldn't make for a good front page story; however, I think the video is too good to pass on, so I've put it here in the journal.
It is a very interesting eleven minute video from the American Chemical Society's Reactions YouTube channel on the science and history of quinine and how it may have had a hand in causing World War I.
In case you aren't going to watch the video, the basic argument is:
The European powers essentially couldn't colonize Africa due to malaria (the White Man's Grave), but once quinine was chemically isolated, there was a major Scramble for Africa where the Europeans carved up the continent and jostled for all of the natural resources. This led to a lot of inter-country tensions that put all of Europe on edge ready for something to set off the powder keg.
Video: How quinine caused World War I:
If we look at how the bark of the cinchona tree is used to treat malaria, we can see the cutting-edge chemistry of quinine binding an enzyme essential for the malaria parasite's survival.
But if we look from another angle, we can see how that coincidental affinity may have been a major contributing factor to World War I:
