As terrible as the COVID-19 pandemic has been, it has also forced various industries to adapt on the fly or shift their attention to public health. It has also challenged them to apply their knowledge much quicker than during normal conditions. The artificial intelligence sector has been one such industry. An article in The Gradient explores the areas where AI has had the most impact. “Five general categories are used to distinguish the different contributions. Note that the boundaries are not always that well defined and assigned categories may not fit every contribution equally well. The categories are: Clinical applications, Epidemiological applications, Applications for biochemistry, Providing information, Safety assessment.” https://bit.ly/3bX64oX
Thanks to carelessness and indifference, human beings have made the oceans a dangerous place for its inhabitants. From plastics to pollution, we’ve dumped everything possible into the Earth’s waters.An article in the Associated Press highlights yet another assault on the ocean ecosystem, ghost nets. According to the article, “‘Ghost nets’ from unknown origins drift among the Pacific’s currents, threatening sea creatures and littering shorelines with the entangled remains of what they kill. Lost or discarded at sea, sometimes decades ago, this fishing gear continues to wreak havoc on marine life and coral reefs in Hawaii. Now, researchers are doing detective work to trace this harmful debris back to fisheries and manufacturers — and that takes extensive, in-depth analysis on tons of ghost nets.” How does humanity plan on colonizing and terraforming Mars when we can’t even take care of the planet we live on? https://bit.ly/3fpDq1z
Facemask mandates are being lifted in regions where vaccination rates and going up and infection rates are declining. Still, there’s the lingering feeling that governments may have rushed into it a tad too quickly. An article in Nature examines how the dynamic has played out across the world. https://go.nature.com/2TokM1N
Social media has proven a ripe area for research in all sorts of fields from psychology to anthropology. Each platform offers a distinctly different cyber-society. A recent study in Social Media +Society examined the data being collected from Reddit and how it should be analyzed, given the nature of the site’s platform. “Our analysis reveals the increasing growth in use of Reddit as a data source, the range of disciplines this research is occurring in, how researchers are getting access to Reddit data, the characteristics of the datasets researchers are using, the subreddits and topics being studied, the kinds of analysis and methods researchers are engaging in, and the emerging ethical questions of research in this space. We discuss how researchers need to consider the impact of Reddit’s algorithms, affordances, and generalizability of the scientific knowledge produced using Reddit data, as well as the potential ethical dimensions of research that draws data from subreddits with potentially sensitive populations.” https://bit.ly/3fKNJMO
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