#way to go @ Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences

[lunasilvis]

Finally meeting my deadbeat thesis coach at 1 PM after calling, mailing and physically trying to meet him before... Super to see how well my university attempts to improve their image of being horrible at personal student care/contact

#:^) I mean... really? Ghosting your students amidst their graduation phase #way to go @ Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences #personal

[probablyasocialecologist]

One simple way to look at it is to take the rate of emissions reductions achieved in countries that have successfully decoupled, and see how long it would take for them to fully decarbonize. That’s essentially what Jefim Vogel and Jason Hickel — researchers at the University of Leeds and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, respectively — did in the Lancet Planetary Health study. They found that, if 11 high-income countries continued their achieved rates of emissions reduction, it would take them more than 220 years to cut emissions by 95 percent — far longer than the net-zero-by-2050 timeline called for by climate experts. “The decoupling rates achieved in high-income countries are inadequate for meeting the climate and equity commitments of the Paris Agreement and cannot legitimately be considered green,” the authors wrote. In an interview with Grist, Vogel likened optimism around gradual decoupling to saying, “Don’t worry, we’re slowing down,” while the Titanic races toward an iceberg.

[...]

“Absolute decoupling is not sufficient to avoid consuming the remaining CO2 emission budget under the global warming limit of 1.5 degrees C or 2 degrees C and to avoid climate breakdown,” concluded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its most recent assessment. Instead of making growth greener, some economists call for a whole new economic paradigm to address converging social and ecological crises. They call it “post-growth,” referring to a reorientation away from GDP growth and toward other metrics, like human well-being and ecological sustainability. Essentially, they want to prioritize people and the planet and not care so much what the stock market is doing. This would more or less free countries from the decoupling dilemma, since it eliminates the growth imperative altogether. Raworth, the professor at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, calls her version of the post-growth agenda “doughnut economics.” In this visual model, the inner ring of the doughnut represents the minimum amount of economic activity needed to satisfy  basic needs like access to food, water, and shelter. The outer ring signifies the upper limits of natural resource use that the Earth can sustain. The goal, she argues, is for economies to exist between the inner and outer rings of the doughnut, maintaining adequate living standards without surpassing planetary limits.  “Our economies need to bring us into the doughnut,” Raworth told Grist. “Whether GDP grows needs to be a secondary concern.”  Vogel and Hickel go a little further. They call for a planned, deliberate reduction of carbon- or energy-intensive production and consumption in high-income countries, a concept known as “degrowth.” The rationale is that much of the energy and resources used in high-income countries goes toward carbon-intensive products that don’t contribute to human welfare, like industrial meat and dairy, fast fashion, weapons, and private jets. Tamping down this “less necessary” consumption could slash greenhouse gas emissions, while lower energy demand could make it more feasible to build and maintain enough energy infrastructure. Some research suggests that reducing energy demand could limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C without relying on unproven technologies to draw carbon out of the atmosphere.

#degrowth #decoupling #economic growth #green growth #climate change

[s-c-i-guy]

Troubled Times for Alternatives to Einstein’s Theory of Gravity

New observations of extreme astrophysical systems have “brutally and pitilessly murdered” attempts to replace Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Miguel Zumalacárregui knows what it feels like when theories die. In September 2017, he was at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Saclay, near Paris, to speak at a meeting about dark energy and modified gravity. The official news had not yet broken about an epochal astronomical measurement — the detection, by gravitational wave detectors as well as many other telescopes, of a collision between two neutron stars — but a controversial tweet had lit a firestorm of rumor in the astronomical community, and excited researchers were discussing the discovery in hushed tones.

Zumalacárregui, a theoretical physicist at the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, had been studying how the discovery of a neutron-star collision would affect so-called “alternative” theories of gravity. These theories attempt to overcome what many researchers consider to be two enormous problems with our understanding of the universe. Observations going back decades have shown that the universe appears to be filled with unseen particles — dark matter — as well as an anti-gravitational force called dark energy. Alternative theories of gravity attempt to eliminate the need for these phantasms by modifying the force of gravity in such a way that it properly describes all known observations — no dark stuff required.

At the meeting, Zumalacárregui joked to his audience about the perils of combining science and Twitter, and then explained what the consequences would be if the rumors were true. Many researchers knew that the merger would be a big deal, but a lot of them simply “hadn’t understood their theories were on the brink of demise,” he later wrote in an email. In Saclay, he read them the last rites. “That conference was like a funeral where we were breaking the news to some attendees.”

The neutron-star collision was just the beginning. New data in the months since that discovery have made life increasingly difficult for the proponents of many of the modified-gravity theories that remain. Astronomers have analyzed extreme astronomical systems that contain spinning neutron stars, or pulsars, to look for discrepancies between their motion and the predictions of general relativity — discrepancies that some theories of alternative gravity anticipate. These pulsar systems let astronomers probe gravity on a new scale and with new precision. And with each new observation, these alternative theories of gravity are having an increasingly hard time solving the problems they were invented for. Researchers “have to sweat some more trying to get new physics,” said Anne Archibald, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam.

Searching for Vulcan

Confounding observations have a way of leading astronomers to desperate explanations. On the afternoon of March 26, 1859, Edmond Lescarbault, a young doctor and amateur astronomer in Orgères-en-Beauce, a small village south of Paris, had a break between patients. He rushed to a tiny homemade observatory on the roof of his stone barn. With the help of his telescope, he spotted an unknown round object moving across the face of the sun.

He quickly sent news of this discovery to Urbain Le Verrier, the world’s leading astronomer at the time. Le Verrier had been trying to account for an oddity in the movement of the planet Mercury. All other planets orbit the sun in perfect accord with Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation, but Mercury appeared to advance a tiny amount with each orbit, a phenomenon known as perihelion precession. Le Verrier was certain that there had to be an invisible “dark” planet tugging on Mercury. Lescarbault’s observation of a dark spot transiting the sun appeared to show that the planet, which Le Verrier named Vulcan, was real.

It was not. Lescarbault’s sightings were never confirmed, and the perihelion precession of Mercury remained a puzzle for nearly six more decades. Then Einstein developed his theory of general relativity, which straightforwardly predicted that Mercury should behave the way it does.

In Le Verrier’s impulse to explain puzzling observations by introducing a heretofore hidden object, some modern-day researchers see parallels to the story of dark matter and dark energy. For decades, astronomers have noticed that the behavior of galaxies and galaxy clusters doesn’t seem to fit the predictions of general relativity. Dark matter is one way to explain that behavior. Likewise, the accelerating expansion of the universe can be thought of as being powered by a dark energy.

All attempts to directly detect dark matter and dark energy have failed, however. That fact “kind of leaves a bad taste in some people’s mouths, almost like the fictional planet Vulcan,” said Leo Stein, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. “Maybe we’re going about it all wrong?”

For any alternative theory of gravity to work, it has to not only do away with dark matter and dark energy, but also reproduce the predictions of general relativity in all the standard contexts. “The business of alternative gravity theories is a messy one,” Archibald said. Some would-be replacements for general relativity, like string theory and loop quantum gravity, don’t offer testable predictions. Others “make predictions that are spectacularly wrong, so the theorists have to devise some kind of a screening mechanism to hide the wrong prediction on scales we can actually test,” she said.

The best-known alternative gravity theories are known as modified Newtonian dynamics, commonly abbreviated to MOND. MOND-type theories attempt to do away with dark matter by tweaking our definition of gravity. Astronomers have long observed that the gravitational force due to ordinary matter doesn’t appear to be sufficient to keep rapidly moving stars inside their galaxies. The gravitational pull of dark matter is assumed to make up the difference. But according to MOND, there are simply two kinds of gravity. In regions where the force of gravity is strong, bodies obey Newton’s law of gravity, which states that the gravitational force between two objects decreases in proportion to the square of the distance that separates them. But in environments of extremely weak gravity — like the outer parts of a galaxy — MOND suggests that another type of gravity is in play. This gravity decreases more slowly with distance, which means that it doesn’t weaken as much. “The idea is to make gravity stronger when it should be weaker, like at the outskirts of a galaxy,” Zumalacárregui said.

Then there is TeVeS (tensor-vector-scalar), MOND’s relativistic cousin. While MOND is a modification of Newtonian gravity, TeVeS is an attempt to take the general idea of MOND and make it into a full mathematical theory that can be applied to the universe as a whole — not just to relatively small objects like solar systems and galaxies. It also explains the rotation curves of galaxies by making gravity stronger on their outskirts. But TeVeS does so by augmenting gravity with “scalar” and “vector” fields that “essentially amplify gravity,” said Fabian Schmidt, a cosmologist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany. A scalar field is like the temperature throughout the atmosphere: At every point it has a numerical value but no direction. A vector field, by contrast, is like the wind: It has both a value (the wind speed) and a direction.

There are also so-called Galileon theories — part of a class of theories called Horndeski and beyond-Horndeski — which attempt to get rid of dark energy. These modifications of general relativity also introduce a scalar field. There are many of these theories (Brans-Dicke theory, dilaton theories, chameleon theories and quintessence are just some of them), and their predictions vary wildly among models. But they all change the expansion of the universe and tweak the force of gravity. Horndeski theory was first put forward by Gregory Horndeski in 1974, but the wider physics community took note of it only around 2010. By then, Zumalacárregui said, “Gregory Horndeski [had] quit science and [become] a painter in New Mexico.”

There are also stand-alone theories, like that of physicist Erik Verlinde. According to his theory, the laws of gravity arise naturally from the laws of thermodynamics just like “the way waves emerge from the molecules of water in the ocean,” Zumalacárregui said. Verlinde wrote in an email that his ideas are not an “alternative theory” of gravity, but “the next theory of gravity that contains and transcends Einstein’s general relativity.” But he is still developing his ideas. “My impression is that the theory is still not sufficiently worked out to permit the kind of precision tests we carry out,” Archibald said. It’s built on “fancy words,” Zumalacárregui said, “but no mathematical framework to compute predictions and do solid tests.”

The predictions made by other theories differ in some way from those of general relativity. Yet these differences can be subtle, which makes them incredibly difficult to find.

Consider the neutron-star merger. At the same time that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) spotted the gravitational waves emanating from the event, the space-based Fermi satellite spotted a gamma ray burst from the same location. The two signals had traveled across the universe for 130 million years before arriving at Earth just 1.7 seconds apart.

These nearly simultaneous observations “brutally and pitilessly murdered” TeVeS theories, said Paulo Freire, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany. “Gravity and gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light, with extremely high precision — which is not at all what was predicted by those [alternative] theories.”

The same fate overtook some Galileon theories that add an extra scalar field to explain the universe’s accelerated expansion. These also predict that gravitational waves propagate more slowly than light. The neutron-star merger killed those off too, Schmidt said.

Further limits come from new pulsar systems. In 2013, Archibald and her colleagues found an unusual triple system: a pulsar and a white dwarf that orbit one another, with a second white dwarf orbiting the pair. These three objects exist in a space smaller than Earth’s orbit around the sun. The tight setting, Archibald said, offers ideal conditions for testing a crucial aspect of general relativity called the strong equivalence principle, which states that very dense strong-gravity objects such as neutron stars or black holes “fall” in the same way when placed in a gravitational field. (On Earth, the more familiar weak equivalence principle states that, if we ignore air resistance, a feather and a brick will fall at the same rate.)

The triple system makes it possible to check whether the pulsar and the inner white dwarf fall exactly the same way in the gravity of the outer white dwarf. Alternative-gravity theories assume that the scalar field generated in the pulsar should bend space-time in a much more extreme way than the white dwarf does. The two wouldn’t fall in a similar manner, leading to a violation of the strong equivalence principle and, with it, general relativity.

Over the past five years, Archibald and her team have recorded 27,000 measurements of the pulsar’s position as it orbits the other two stars. While the project is still a work in progress, it looks as though the results will be in total agreement with Einstein, Archibald said. “We can say that the degree to which the pulsar behaves abnormally is at most a few parts in a million. For an object with such strong gravity to still follow Einstein’s predictions so well, if there is one of these scalar fields, it has to have a really tiny effect.”

The test, which should be published soon, will put the best constraints yet on a whole group of alternative gravity theories, she added. If a theory only works with some additional scalar field, then the field should change the behavior of the pulsar. “We have such sensitive tests of general relativity that they need to somehow hide the theory’s new behavior in the solar system and in pulsar systems like ours,” Archibald said.

The data from another pulsar system dubbed the double pulsar, meanwhile, was originally supposed to eliminate the TeVeS theories. Detected in 2003, the double pulsar was until recently the only binary neutron-star system where both neutron stars were pulsars. Freire and his colleagues have already confirmed that the double pulsar’s behavior is perfectly in line with general relativity. Right before LIGO’s October announcement of a neutron-star merger, the researchers were going to publish a paper that would kill off TeVeS. But LIGO did the job for them, Freire said. “We need not go through that anymore.”

Slippery Survivors

A few theories have survived the LIGO blow — and will probably survive the upcoming pulsar data, Zumalacárregui said. There are some Horndeski and beyond-Horndeski theories that do not change the speed of gravitational waves. Then there are so-called massive gravity theories. Ordinarily, physicists assume that the particle associated with the force of gravity — the graviton — has no mass. In these theories, the graviton has a very small but nonzero mass. The neutron-star merger puts tough limits on these theories, Zumalacárregui said, since a massive graviton would travel more slowly than light. But in some theories the mass is assumed to be extremely small, at least 20 orders of magnitude lower than the neutrino’s, which means that the graviton would still move at nearly the speed of light.

There are a few other less well-known survivors, some of which are important to keep exploring, Archibald said, as long as dark matter and dark energy remain elusive. “Dark energy might be our only observational clue pointing to a new and better theory of gravity — or it might be a mysterious fluid with strange properties, and nothing to do with gravity at all,” she said.

Still, killing off theories is simply how science is supposed to work, argue researchers who have been exploring alternative gravity theories. “This is what we do all the time, put forward a working hypothesis and test it,” said Enrico Barausse of the Astrophysics Institute of Paris, who has worked on MOND-like theories. “99.9 percent of the time you rule out the hypothesis; the remaining 0.1 percent of the time you win the Nobel Prize.”

Zumalacárregui, who has also worked on these theories, was “sad at first” when he realized that the neutron star merger detection had proven Galileon theories wrong, but ultimately “very relieved it happened sooner rather than later,” he said. LIGO had been just about to close down for 18 months to upgrade the detector. “If the event had been a bit later, I would still be working on a wrong theory.”

So what’s next for general relativity and modified-gravity theories? “That question keeps me up at night more than I’d like,” Zumalacárregui said. “The good news is that we have narrowed our scope by a lot, and we can try to understand the few survivors much better.”

Schmidt thinks it’s necessary to measure the laws of gravity on large scales as directly as possible, using ongoing and future large galaxy surveys. “For example, we can compare the effect of gravity on light bending as well as galaxy velocities, typically predicted to be different in modified-gravity theories,” he said. Researchers also hope that future telescopes such as the Square Kilometer Array will discover more pulsar systems and provide better accuracy in pulsar timing to further improve gravity tests. And a space-based replacement for LIGO called LISA will study gravitational waves with exquisite accuracy — if indeed it launches as planned in the mid-2030s. “If that does not see any deviations from general relativity, I don’t know what will,” said Barausse.

But many physicists agree that it will take a long time to get rid of most alternative gravity models. Theorists have dozens of alternative gravity theories that could potentially explain dark matter and dark energy, Freire said. Some of these theories can’t make testable predictions, Archibald said, and many “have a parameter, a ‘knob’ you can turn to make them pass any test you like,” she said. But at some point, said Nicolas Yunes, a physicist at Montana State University, “this gets silly and Occam’s razor wins.”

Still, “fundamentally we know that general relativity is wrong,” Stein said. “At the very core there must be some breakdown” at the quantum level. “Maybe we won’t see it from astronomical observations … but we owe it to ourselves, as empirical scientists, to check whether or not our mathematical models are working at these scales.”

#science #general relativity #physics

[lalaligayalove]

Light it up: A true story of a lady from darkness

“You’re never too young to dream big”

A 19-year old lady who always wish for a happy and successful life. She is a student taking up a Bachelor of Arts in Behavioral Science in the University of the Cordilleras. As she lives her daily life, she never forgets to pray and say thank you for the blessings and additional life she always received. Many say that youngest siblings are the one who have less responsibility but for her, being the youngest among the three, she considers herself to have many responsibilities as well.

In life, we cannot avoid experiencing situations that feel us sad and pain. As part of her life, she encountered many problems and difficulties that made her life miserable. A problem or challenge in one area of our life can also affect other factors. Some problems can drain a lot of our energy and coping resources. It can make us so tired that we might not deal effectively with other stressful things that could be happening like conflicts with friends, exams, or assessment tasks. Sometimes, when we are struggling to cope with our pain, we might also become a bit more irritable with our family and less able to handle frustrations. Financial and family problem are one of those situations that she had experienced as she grows. Conflicts are part of family life and it has big impact in one’s life including her plans and goals which tend her to feel stress. All of us had experienced financial problem. Even if the richest person in the world had experience it and upon knowing on what she had experienced regarding this matter, I really felt sad as well.

 Most people want to change at least one thing in their life. But it can be challenging to find the motivation just to make a start. Instead of making things that will add to her problems, she made these situations as her motivation in which she became strong and brave to face all the problems she will still have especially in achieving her goals. Motivation is important because it provides us with goals to work towards, helps us solve problems, change our old habits and for us to cope with challenges and opportunities. She does different process to be motivated such as reviewing her goals and progress regularly and seeing a progress as a great motivator to herself. She also improves her self-esteem and self-confidence.

She has her own goals and achievements and she continues setting new goals thinking about what she wants to achieve in a day, next week, next month and next year. She was able to surround herself with positive people like her families and friends who are always there to help him as she experiences difficulties. Positive friends and family enhance our positive self-talk, which also helps to manage the symptoms of stress and anxiety.

She is a behavioral science student so she applies what she learned in which she exercises daily activities to improve her mental health like self-reflection and other basic routines like plenty of sleep and eating healthy and nutritious foods. Being a behavioral science student, her goals is to finish her studies, help her family and pursue a Master’s Degree in Psychology.

When she already has her own job, she wants to experience being an independent woman with own house and own car. She also wants to save money and have a travel in the different places with her family and friends. She wants to enjoy her life as she was still young. She wishes to travel in Paris and Amsterdam.

Aside from academics, she also loves sports in which she is a member of the famous group named Team Lakay. Team Lakay is a martial arts group based in Baguio also known as Lakay Wushu or Lakay MMA. She excels in athletic wherein she is a varsity of wushu and mixed martial arts. She is also a archery player.

She is really a talented woman because she has potential when it comes to arts and music wherein, she loves painting and drawing. She also knows how to play a flute. She is also a dancer. Being a multi-talented person is really a good thing because she can use her talents in her future life. It is not possible for her to be a super star.

Dreams and goals are necessary. Without these, there will be no ambition to chase and there will be no goals to reach. Not having dreams in life is like filling a basket with water. You cannot fill a basket with water because it has holes so, it is useless. Similar to our life, it is a must for us to have dreams, plans and goals in life because it is our purpose, it is our mission. We must know what we want to do and follow that ambition. We cannot achieve anything in life without goals.

To dream is to know the essential of our life. It is free to dream and no one can stop us from this unless we want to. All goals in life is important. Big ones or small ones. Even the most successful people had dreams and that is what has made them what they are today. Dreaming with planning is essential for a human being because without these, we will lose interest in life and finally hate to live life. We will be bored and tired of the same monotonous routines of our daily life and will not even find interest in the most exciting things. Only with dreams, we will find a purpose to live our life in which we will start working hard towards the dream and will never lose interest in life. we will never get tired and always be motivated. This is the best way to become successful.

Dreaming and wanting to achieve our goals are nothing if we do not put action and discipline with it. As the saying tells that actions speak louder than words. It is nothing if you will just say “I want to be successful.”, “I want to travel the world.” or “I want to buy luxurious things.”, you cannot achieve these if you don’t act upon it. On the other hand, our actions have consequences and we should be responsible with it. So, if we don’t want to have troubles with our actions, practice self- discipline and respect others.

We are still young and free so, let us do the things that make us happy not only for our sake but also for the sake of others. Life is short. There are very few people in this world who won’t wish for more time when they are lying on their deathbeds. The biggest regrets people have revolved around experiences, relationships, and happiness. Make yourself a priority because if you don’t take care of yourself, nobody else will. All things in our life stem from our happiness. Be someone who makes you happy. Be confident in who you are because every person is unique and special in their own way. Be proud of who you are and don’t be afraid to let the world know it. Focus on the present and worrying to a certain degree about your future is normal, but don’t overlook the power of being in the present moment. You can’t change the past, but you can control what you do right now. Be a positive person because our success in life will come from our thoughts and our thoughts can be either negative or positive. Let go of negative influences and avoid bad situations, unhealthy relationships, and people who make our life worse. Letting go of a good friend who is going to drag you down is a difficult yet intelligent decision. Lastly, learn from your past but don’t dwell on it. Being caught up in your past can lead to stagnation and the inability to progress with your life. Understand that life is just a series of events and move on. You can change the future but you cannot alter your past decisions.

For her, her life has purpose. Her fight has achievements and her goals has success.

#goalsdreamsachievementsfuturesuccessselflife

[tastydregs]

Computers Are Learning to See in Higher Dimensions

Computers can now drive cars, beat world champions at board games like chess and Go, and even write prose. The revolution in artificial intelligence stems in large part from the power of one particular kind of artificial neural network, whose design is inspired by the connected layers of neurons in the mammalian visual cortex. These “convolutional neural networks” (CNNs) have proved surprisingly adept at learning patterns in two-dimensional data—especially in computer vision tasks like recognizing handwritten words and objects in digital images.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research develop­ments and trends in mathe­matics and the physical and life sciences.

But when applied to data sets without a built-in planar geometry—say, models of irregular shapes used in 3D computer animation, or the point clouds generated by self-driving cars to map their surroundings—this powerful machine learning architecture doesn’t work well. Around 2016, a new discipline called geometric deep learning emerged with the goal of lifting CNNs out of flatland.

Now, researchers have delivered, with a new theoretical framework for building neural networks that can learn patterns on any kind of geometric surface. These “gauge-equivariant convolutional neural networks,” or gauge CNNs, developed at the University of Amsterdam and Qualcomm AI Research by Taco Cohen, Maurice Weiler, Berkay Kicanaoglu and Max Welling, can detect patterns not only in 2D arrays of pixels, but also on spheres and asymmetrically curved objects. “This framework is a fairly definitive answer to this problem of deep learning on curved surfaces,” Welling said.

Already, gauge CNNs have greatly outperformed their predecessors in learning patterns in simulated global climate data, which is naturally mapped onto a sphere. The algorithms may also prove useful for improving the vision of drones and autonomous vehicles that see objects in 3D, and for detecting patterns in data gathered from the irregularly curved surfaces of hearts, brains or other organs.

Taco Cohen, a machine learning researcher at Qualcomm and the University of Amsterdam, is one of the lead architects of gauge-equivariant convolutional neural networks.Photograph: Ork de Rooij

The researchers’ solution to getting deep learning to work beyond flatland also has deep connections to physics. Physical theories that describe the world, like Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity and the Standard Model of particle physics, exhibit a property called “gauge equivariance.” This means that quantities in the world and their relationships don’t depend on arbitrary frames of reference (or “gauges”); they remain consistent whether an observer is moving or standing still, and no matter how far apart the numbers are on a ruler. Measurements made in those different gauges must be convertible into each other in a way that preserves the underlying relationships between things.

For example, imagine measuring the length of a football field in yards, then measuring it again in meters. The numbers will change, but in a predictable way. Similarly, two photographers taking a picture of an object from two different vantage points will produce different images, but those images can be related to each other. Gauge equivariance ensures that physicists’ models of reality stay consistent, regardless of their perspective or units of measurement. And gauge CNNs make the same assumption about data.

“The same idea [from physics] that there’s no special orientation—they wanted to get that into neural networks,” said Kyle Cranmer, a physicist at New York University who applies machine learning to particle physics data. “And they figured out how to do it.”

Escaping Flatland

Michael Bronstein, a computer scientist at Imperial College London, coined the term “geometric deep learning” in 2015 to describe nascent efforts to get off flatland and design neural networks that could learn patterns in nonplanar data. The term—and the research effort—soon caught on.

Bronstein and his collaborators knew that going beyond the Euclidean plane would require them to reimagine one of the basic computational procedures that made neural networks so effective at 2D image recognition in the first place. This procedure, called “convolution,” lets a layer of the neural network perform a mathematical operation on small patches of the input data and then pass the results to the next layer in the network.

“You can think of convolution, roughly speaking, as a sliding window,” Bronstein explained. A convolutional neural network slides many of these “windows” over the data like filters, with each one designed to detect a certain kind of pattern in the data. In the case of a cat photo, a trained CNN may use filters that detect low-level features in the raw input pixels, such as edges. These features are passed up to other layers in the network, which perform additional convolutions and extract higher-level features, like eyes, tails or triangular ears. A CNN trained to recognize cats will ultimately use the results of these layered convolutions to assign a label—say, “cat” or “not cat”—to the whole image.

[samqwanmiawj-blog]

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[dangkynhanhieusanphamcom]

Documentary follows Pastafarians as they strain for recognition

Some time next year, the European court of human rights will decide on the case of a Dutch woman who feels unfairly treated because her country’s highest court has told her she cannot wear a plastic colander on her head for her ID photo.

It may combine Mienke de Wilde’s plea with that of an Austrian former MP, Niko Alm, who proudly wears the offending kitchen utensil on his official documents but now insists his country recognise Pastafarianism – the faith both follow – as a religion.

Watching the pair closely is Mike Arthur, an independent American film-maker whose smart, funny but above all thought-provoking documentary, I, Pastafari, about the world’s fastest-growing faith premieres in the US in October.

All in all, it is shaping up to be quite a big few months for the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whose believers wear strainers on their heads in homage to their deity, strive to be nice to pretty much everyone, and conclude their prayers with “r’amen” rather than “amen”.

It sounds, of course, like a joke. On one level, it is. But for Arthur, who has spent three years working on his film, and for many Pastafarians who believe their faith embodies some profound – and profoundly important – principles, it is a lot more.

Mienke de Wilde’s ID card photos. Photograph: www.ipastafaridoc.com

“We live,” says Arthur, sitting in an Amsterdam cafe, “in the age of unreason. We no longer value the best idea, but the loudest idea. From Brexit to Trump, we applaud blind faith and are sceptical about overwhelming observable evidence.

“The problem is that rationality is just no match for irrationality. That ship sailed in 2016. People now don’t change their minds, they double down on their irrationality, and using facts, science and reason to contest the unreasonable is simply driving us all further apart. Maybe it’s time to try a different approach.”

A different approach is, undeniably, what Flying Spaghetti Monsterism offers. The church was founded in 2005 by Bobby Henderson, at the time a 25-year-old US physics graduate, as a response to Christian fundamentalists demanding the teaching of creationism in Kansas school science classes. Its name is a portmanteau of pasta and Rastafarianism.

In an open letter, Henderson argued that if intelligent design was to be taught alongside evolution, so should the belief that, with the aid of His Noodly Appendages, an invisible and undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe, probably after drinking heavily (thus explaining its many flaws).

Like other religions, the church has a gospel and, rather than commandments, eight “I’d really rather you didn’ts” (two having been lost). These suggest ways to live your life happily without infringing on others’ rights to do the same – a morality based on harmonious co-existence, nonjudgmental conduct “and generally not being a dick”.

Henderson’s basic point, expertly if satirically made, was that since intelligent design was every bit as much of an evidence-based theory as the unshakable belief that the world was created by an omniscient flying monster made of spaghetti, nothing should be taught in science classes bar science.

Mathé Coolen, an archbishop of Pastafarianism, wearing his colander in court in a still from the documentary. Photograph: www.ipastafaridoc.com

But as it has grown – there are now Pastafarians from Poland to New Zealand and Italy to Taiwan, and the church is officially recognised in at least four countries – it has begun posing bigger questions: what actually is a religion? Who gets to decide that? And why should faith – or lack of it – have anything to do with rights?

For Derk Venema, an eloquent Dutch legal expert who has worked with De Wilde, his former student, to develop her arguments for wearing a colander on her driving licence photo, Pastafarianism raises genuine human rights issues – even if (or perhaps because) it is also satirical.

“I started out thinking this was just a big joke,” Venema says. “But the more you look at it, the more you see it is about fundamental principles. The Dutch courts have denied it has any serious message, but it manifestly does: non-violence, tolerance, loving each other – the same principles as many established religions.”

The European court has previously determined that to be recognised as such, a religion must be cogent, coherent, important to its followers, and “serious”. On the latter point, Venema argues that the humour and good fun of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism is simply a more modern, accessible way of getting its message across.

As De Wilde – who after three long years is starting to struggle with wearing a colander every day, but whose determination to take her case to the European court remains undimmed – puts it: “The fact that the church is fun doesn’t mean it isn’t serious in what it stands for.

“I can imagine it all looks very odd if you’re not a believer. But that’s the case with many faiths – people who walk on water or split themselves in three, for example. Personally, I find other religions unbelievable.”

De Wilde reads the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Photograph: www.ipastafaridoc.com

Moreover, argues Venema, even theologians have “never really been able to agree on what constitutes a religion. So should the state really get to decide? For me, if it looks like a religion, with certain customs and traditions; if its followers call it a religion; and if they call themselves believers, that should be it.”

Most importantly, in many societies belief in an established religion comes with certain privileges: from the right to sport religious headwear on your ID photo in the Netherlands, to faith schools in the UK and full-scale tax exemption for US megachurches. “We say, as long as there are special rights for believers, they should apply to all religions,” says Venema.

Alm, a journalist, writer, publisher and former MP, has fought his five-year court battle to get Pastafarianism recognised as a religion in Austria as part of a broader struggle for a true separation of church and state and genuine religious freedom – which, he argues, should include freedom from religion.

“All we ask is a level playing field,” he says. “Total neutrality of the state towards whatever belief I hold. We don’t want anything forbidden, but the law must apply equally to all of us, whatever we believe in and whether we believe nothing at all. Complete freedom of religion. It’s political.”

He readily concedes, however, that Flying Spaghetti Monsterism is a diverse church. “For some, it’s not a political thing at all. In some countries, Pastafarians mainly just want to have fun and eat pasta.”

Bruder Spaghettus, a leading German Pastafarian, by a ‘noodle mass’ sign in Templin outside Berlin Photograph: www.ipastafaridoc.com

Arthur, whose film follows Venema and Alm through their court battles and also features Bruder Spaghettus, the luxuriantly bearded leader of the Kirche des Fliegenden Spaghettimonster in Germany, says Pastafarianism is like other religions, with a supernatural deity, a prophet, and lessons of morality in holy scriptures.

“Unlike other religions, it’s left out hate, bigotry, violence and dogma – its only dogma is that there is no dogma. But by challenging innocuous privileges like the right to wear religious headgear on an ID photo, it makes us think about others, like the right not to vaccinate your children, say, or to use tax-free income to buy private jets so you can fly round preaching science is a conspiracy.”

So Pastafarians, says Arthur, whose film premieres at the Nashville film festival in the first weekend of October, “are actually saying, ‘Look, if no one’s going to talk to each other like adults any more, let’s try something else.’

“By putting their own beliefs on display, in a fun way, they make us think more deeply about ours. And in a time of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, fake news and alternative facts, they may just be the saviour we’ve been waiting for. R’Amen.”

The post Documentary follows Pastafarians as they strain for recognition appeared first on NEWS - EVENTS - LEGAL.

source https://dangkynhanhieusanpham.com/documentary-follows-pastafarians-as-they-strain-for-recognition/

#dangkynhanhieusanpham

[dailytechnologynews]

Intel tried to bribe VU University Amsterdam into suppressing news of the latest security flaw

Credit: The following is a copy of a post from /r/AMD_Stock, edited in a very minor way to remove some opinions of the original poster that are probably less relevant to this sub. I'd have crossposted but this sub doesn't allow that.

Title was kept the same as the original.

The following is a Google translation of a Dutch report about VU University Amsterdam's announcement of this latest (among many) of Intel security leaks. It's long, but I've bolded the following two excerpts from the full text:

According to the VU, Intel tried to downplay the severity of the leak by officially paying $40,000 in reward and "$80,000" in addition. That offer was politely refused.

"If it were up to Intel, they would have wanted to wait another six months"

Source here: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2019/05/14/hackers-mikken-op-het-intel-hart-a3960208

VU discovers megaleak in Intel chips

Thanks to a mistake, the VU uncovered a mega breach in Intel chips. Intel pays the price for a fast but risky design.

The news in brief:

Researchers from the VU University Amsterdam have found an extensive data breach that is present in all Intel processors. These chips are in more than 80 percent of all computers and servers.

On Tuesday evening, Intel and VU announced the details of RIDL (Rogue In-Flight Data Load), a vulnerability that allows malicious parties to "steal almost all data" from computers. Unauthorized persons can view the data that the processor is currently processing.

The vulnerability is in all Intel processors of the last ten years - including the very latest. Hackers can exploit the vulnerability by hiding code in a web advertisement.

Two rack cabinets from the Ikea full of computer walls, a jumble of cables and a stack of second-hand processors. It is not immediately the test lab that you expect from which VU University researchers uncovered the sophisticated, super-complex leak in recent months.

Here, in room P455, on the fourth floor of the W&N building in Amsterdam, it was demonstrated that all Intel processors of the past ten years are susceptible to a major leak. This means that more than 80 percent of all computers in the world are susceptible to an attack that gives access to data at the heart of the computer.

RIDL, as the new vulnerability was baptized, came to light by chance. On Tuesday 11 September, Stephan van Schaijk, Computer Science student at VU University Amsterdam, worked on his study assignment: investigating a leak in the Intel processor.

Van Schaijk: „I was busy for an hour but did not advance. I adjusted something in my code and then I saw something strange appear on the screen. Values ​​I did not expect. "

Van Schaijk had made a mistake, a bug in a bug, with which he could suddenly watch what happened in another program. It was a bigger and more serious leak than he was actually looking for.

His colleagues and teachers were just as surprised. Together, they wrote more than 20 "exploits" attack scenarios in a short time that would allow hackers to take control of the computer.

One of those tricks: by logging in with an incorrect password, the attacker forces the computer to compare the wrong password with the correct password. This data runs through the 'pipelines' of the chip and can be intercepted, after which the hacker can retrieve the correct password after some tinkering. "You find fragments. As if you are going to get a paper document through the shredder and then reassemble the shreds, ”says Herbert Bos, professor of system and network security at the VU.

Stephan van Schaijk was sent out to buy as many different processors as possible, to see if they were all vulnerable.

And that was true. Even the oldest one, from 2008, that was picked up via Marktplaats, turned out to be vulnerable to RIDL, or Rogue In-Flight Data Load. And so, Intel was immediately warned.

A beer please

It is not the first time that Intel gets into trouble with a leak in its processors. The chip is extra fast because it is ahead of things: each time the processor speculates which data is probably needed next. This presents risks because computer processes do not remain well separated from each other.

Assistant professor Kaveh Razavi compares it to a café: the processor works like a waitress who assumes that you want to drink the same as the one before you. The glass is poured automatically without the waitress checking whether you can have that beer.

The solution: the tray must be emptied after every order. That makes the processor slower. Depending on the programs you use, the speed difference can be considerable, the researchers expect. That explains why Intel has been struggling so long to fix this leak.

RIDL cuts right through all existing security layers. This applies to the data centers where virtual systems often run on the same server. The encrypted environment that Intel devised for business customers is also vulnerable.

Premium with aftertaste

Although parts of the leak were found by several researchers from different universities and companies, the VU has discovered the majority. Amsterdam University is also the only party to receive a reward: $ 100,000 (89,000 euros), Intel's maximum reward for discoverers of critical leaks.

According to the VU, Intel tried to downplay the severity of the leak by officially paying $40,000 in reward and "$80,000" in addition. That offer was politely refused.

Anyone who accepts a reward must also adhere to the rules. In this case, that meant: no consultation between researchers and uncertainty about which software manufacturers were warned in advance. According to the researchers, tech companies do not reason in the interests of the user, but of the shareholder.

Intel initially failed to notify Google and Mozilla, two major browser manufacturers.

The VU tried to force the manufacturer to come out faster. Eventually the VU forced Intel to come out in May - otherwise the university would publish the details itself. "If it were up to Intel, they would have wanted to wait another six months," says Bos.

Intel had promised that the next generation of chips would not be vulnerable to RIDL, but that is not the case.

Hackers usually anticipate software vulnerabilities. Undiscovered holes (zero days) in important programs are sold for a lot of money in the black circuit. But after Specter and Meltdown, two fundamental holes that were previously found in Intel chips, both the ethical computer experts and the criminal figures are pointing their hardware. "Processors have become so complex that chip makers no longer have security under control," said Bos.

And what should you do as a computer user? Update, update and update again. It is expected that all major software manufacturers will close the gap or have already closed the latest releases. It's not for nothing that RIDL comes out on Patch Tuesday, the monthly update day from Microsoft.

#hardware #Computer #Technology #Tech #News

[sebastiankurz]

See some amazing and inspiring European design projects

Design projects can come from any part of the world, however, there’s something about those who come from Europe that makes them special, not only due to their heritage but also due to the uniqueness of each country. Let’s have a look at a couple of examples that definitely show the best of this continent in terms of design and creativity.

France

Alberto Pinto Interior Design

Alberto Pinto Interior Design, under Linda Pinto’s leadership, is a talented team of design professionals which follows the beliefs of the founder. Eclecticism, luxury, details and refinement remain the keywords when it comes to creating entire universes for prestigious clients worldwide: private residences, office buildings, airports, hotels, yachts and jets.

The extensive range of Pinto’s style, marked by several cultural influences lets traditional and modern meet in harmony and is perfect to both intimate rooms and larger spaces, private and public design projects. Alberto Pinto Interior Design pleases the eclectic tastes of its international clients by adjusting the décors to suit each one, while adding an elegance which creates a luxurious balance.

Among Pinto’s clients, we can find the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia as well as Qatar, along with many other important private clients around the world for whom residences have been designed and decorated in the United States, Brazil, the Middle-East, Morocco, Tunisia, France and Europe.

Other design projects, as several luxury hotels, including The Lanesborough, the Dorchester in London, the Grand Park Hotel in Gstaad, the villa Rose-Pierre of the Grand Hôtel in Cap Ferrat, the Hostellerie de Plaisance in Saint-Emilion, la Residencia and the Palm Beach in the Canary Islands were also relevant.

Patrick Jouin

Patrick Jouin is a designer whose creativity finds expression in industrial design for the decorative arts. With the top manufacturers, Cassina, Kartell, Alessi, Puiforcat, JC Decaux or Fermob, and for exceptional design projects, Patrick found a special place in the landscape of international design for his talents. Patrick Jouin’s career and his design agency, Patrick Jouin ID, were consecrated by a monographic exhibition at Centre Pompidou in 2009. They were also honoured with the Compasso d’Oro in 2011 for PastaPot.

Many of his creations are showcased in the permanent collections of museums worldwide, including the “Solid” collection at MoMA, which is 2004 was the first series of real-size furniture made by 3D printing technology. Patrick Jouin is also involved in interior design projects with his partner Sanjit Manku, within the agency Jouin Manku founded in 2006.

In 2009, concerned about the preservation of his heritage, the talented designer Christian Liaigre nurtured a creative and executive transition in his studio Liaigre. In 2014, he promoted a new creative direction within his existing team. Under the leadership of Christophe Caillaud, CEO of the company since 2009, Liaigre entered a new era.

One of the characteristics of Liaigre is it’s “style without being stylish”, which seduces customers that want to live in contemporary interiors while maintaining the excellence of the French furniture tradition. Liaigre cultivates a fine style which reveals itself in time and space. It has design projects all around the globe, in places from far-away islands to great metropolis, from chalets at the top of a mountain to penthouses.

You can also check out: The Best Design Spots you can’t miss while in London

Straight from the foundation, the creative designs from the studio are born from natural materials thanks to the finest craftsmanship, supporting arts and crafts in the spirit and tradition of French furniture. When he opened his first showroom at rue de Varenne in the mid 1980s, Christian Liaigre surprised everyone with his calm and clean aesthetic which impresses with its individuality and modernity until today.

Italy

Antonio Citterio and Patricia Viel share a desire to bring to life new and diverse ways of experiencing space, beyond the simple structure. An art of living, with unique micro and macro perspectives. Architecture that evokes emotion, inspires the intellect, reflects qualities of life. Design which is in dialogue with the background and engages people.

With art pieces in every noteworthy museum’s contemporary design collections, Antonio Citterio is a renowned innovator in the fields of design and architecture. His humble character and environmental sensitivity place form at the service of function, elevating both.

Patricia Viel is the driving force of the practice. Her exceptional vision, leadership and sensibility bring her to the vanguard of the creative architectural environment. Working closely with the team, Patricia Viel evokes emotion and perspective with each project and translates it into an extraordinary narrative and reliable design solutions.

Spain

Santiago Calatrava Valls was born in 28 July 1951. He is a Spanish architect, designer and engineer, a sculptor and a painter, mainly known for his bridges supported by single leaning pylons, and his railway stations, stadiums, and museums, whose sculptural forms often resemble living organisms.

You can also check this out: Have a glance at some of the best Luxury Brands In The UK

His most celebrated artworks include the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Turning Torso tower in Malmö, Sweden, the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in Dallas, Texas, and one of his largest design projects, the City of Arts and Sciences and Opera House, in his birthplace, Valencia. His architectural studio has offices in New York City, Doha, and Zürich.

Netherlands

Studio Piet Boon is an internationally renowned design studio, recognized for its multi-disciplinary design services and its outstanding talent in balancing functionality, aesthetics and originality into one of a kind design experience. The studio’s goal is to break boundaries and set new standards.

The studio’s heritage comes from Amsterdam and the nearby Zaanstreek, a region known for its innovative spirit and hardworking mentality, once the historic motor that drove the success of the epic Dutch Golden Age. In the Zaanstreek, painters, woodworkers, carpenters, and other master craftsmen became entrepreneurs and tastemakers as early as the 15th century. Building on this heritage, a practical attitude combined with the spirit of creative expertise, Studio Piet Boon was established by Dutch designer and Zaanstreek resident Piet Boon in 1983.

They consider every design as tailor-made and unique. The designers and makers try to understand their clients, their wishes, requirements and lifestyle so they can create the perfect masterpiece for them. Considering the customers’ tastes allows them to harmonize the studio’s characteristic signature with the personality of their client.

Their design approach is divided in the phases: Preliminary and Definitive Sketch Design, Fixed Furniture, Aesthetic Lighting Plan, Non-fixed Furniture and Upholstery to on-site Styling. Their range includes exterior, interior, layout, fitted and non-fitted furniture, finishes, lighting schemes and on-site styling.

Since 1983, the studio stands for its firmly rooted design values, creating new challenges and always evolving. These values shape every design vision and decision. Their creative process is built with them in mind, ensuring consistency in every single project and design they have.

Britain

Working with clients that have a worldwide reputation for excellence, Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) is developing transformational design projects across the six continents. Based in London for 40 years, ZHA redefined architecture for the 21st century with a collection of design projects that have challenged imagination across the globe.

Receiving the highest honors from civic, professional and academic institutions worldwide, ZHA has been one of the world’s most inventive architectural studios for four decades. These 40 years of research are marked within every design. ZHA’s architecture is defined by its democratic attitude, offering stunning public spaces inside and out. The ideology within each design is applied with a light touch, charming the city.

ZHA’s visually interesting interiors are studies of spatial composition. They invite perception, space becomes personal, owned by all visitors as they interact with each other and the surrounding architecture. Mathematicians acknowledge the purity of ZHA’s formal geometries and fluid lines, but this architecture also engages the senses and captures the eye, creating unrivalled spatial experiences.

Employing advancements in design, material and construction technologies, ZHA is a global leader in the application of Building Information Modelling (BIM) in the design, construction and operations of buildings to increase efficiencies as well as significantly reduce energy consumption and emissions.

Marrying innovative digital design with ecological materials and sustainable construction practices, ZHA works to understand them as a whole, finding practical solutions to the major challenges of our era. Each project by ZHA is a unique adaptation to the context, local culture, requirements and intelligent engineering allowing the architecture and surrounding urban setting to be fused together. ZHA works closely with each client to establish new and better ways in which people can use every building.

After over 50 award-winning design projects around the world, ZHA’s architecture becomes more refined spatially, more efficient structurally, more polished materially, more advanced technologically with each new design.

Collaborating with visionary clients, communities and industry experts on over 60 on-going design projects in 28 countries, ZHA’s hugely talented and dedicated teams of experienced professionals work with passion and commitment to honour Zaha Hadid’s legacy and deliver outstanding design projects across the globe.

★

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★

from Sebastian Kurz Blog https://www.designbuildideas.eu/amazing-inspiring-european-design-projects/

[luceroherrera]

Van Goghing My Own Way

June 9

This morning’s presentations were from Amsterdam University of Applied Science and one of their partners, Alliander on Smart Cities. The idea, to my understanding, is to create a city that allows its citizens to interact with their data. For example, using smart meters that a homeowner could use to monitor their energy or water usage. There are currently lots of projects in place to help facilitate involvement and change. For example, we heard of a park that was created by a neighborhood of people who voted for it, and signed a contract to help upkeep it. Overall, I was super impressed with the level of innovation and creativity in the energy/water companies in Amsterdam, and it made me excited for a more sustainable future! 

Following the meetings and bagged lunch, we were on our own for the day. The line for the Anne Frank House was notoriously long, and as such, no one wanted to go with me. It felt really important that I should go, and so I went by myself. Two hours of standing around honestly didn’t feel like so long because Amsterdam is pretty and I had music to pass time while I people watched. 

If you’ve kept up with the last post, you’ll know I’ve been feeling poorly on this trip and today was no different. It meant I was very emotional (I say, as if I haven’t cried over a dog video before) and I cried a lot when touring the Anne Frank House. Her story is one I’ve always felt very connected to, and the weight of it all never leaves, no matter how many documentaries or movies or plays I watch. Each time is still as difficult as the last. And I think it’s important to not become desensitized to the atrocities that have afflicted people, especially as the events start to fade from our cultural memory. Anyway, doing the audio tour around the house and seeing photos of her family I’d never seen before was my favorite part of the trip, and I honestly just feel better overall for having been. 

The area that the house was in was very nice, as is all of Amsterdam so I walked around a bit and poked my nose in different shops (I got new patches for my jacket!!) I walked into a tulip museum’s gift shop and looked at all of their flowery things. Did you know tulip chocolate is a thing? If it weren’t 10 euros, I might have tried some.

I kept seeing teenagers walk around with giant Primark bags, and I got curious. Primark is, I think, an English brand and I recognize it for it’s inexpensive prices. Forever 21 and H&M are sinfully expensive in Europe, for the product they deliver. And so I went out and found the Primark and spent some time in there. The prices were really great, and I got a few things for myself and a few souvenirs! I’d worked up an appetite and so I went to McDonald’s and got a Happy Meal for the first time in a long time and called it a day. 

-

June 10

We left Amsterdam today and it made me sad. After having breakfast and packing up my things, I ventured out in search of the Van Gogh museum. A few of my friends and my professor had done it the day before, and I’d heard nothing but good things about it. On my way there, I spotted three x’s on the ground. The three x’s are St. Andrew’s crosses, and the symbol of Amsterdam so they’re everywhere! They’re not associated with the red light district, as some might assume.

Just as I’d been told, the museum was fascinating! They had Van Gogh’s work laid out in chronological order and I was able to follow the story of his life through his work and small placards. I also did this alone, and it was nice to go at my own pace and listen to music as I went along. I think my favorite part was actually a separate exhibition on Parisian prints, oops!

I took my time getting back to the hotel, because I definitely didn’t want to leave. I don’t know what it was about the city, but I really enjoyed it all. The rest of the day was uneventful, which is always good when travelling! Taking the tram, a train, and a metro to get back to my Paris in homestay took all afternoon and evening and I was properly worn out from it. 

Au revoir, Lucero

#amsterdam #netherlands #anne frank #anne frank house #van gogh #van gogh museum #water #sustainability #uh #photography #maymester

[fumpkins]

European ban on stem-cell patents has a silver lining

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Researchers can work without fear of action over patent infringement.

Embryonic stem cells: contrary to ethics and public policy?D. Scharf/Science Faction/Corbis

To hear European stem-cell researchers talk last week, you might have thought that their world was ending. After the European Court of Justice ruled on 18 October that procedures involving human embryonic stem (ES) cells cannot be patented, many responded with shock and dismay.

“This is the worst possible outcome and it’s a disaster for Europe,” Oliver Brüstle at the University of Bonn, Germany, told Nature shortly after learning that the court had felled his 1999 patent for a method of transforming human ES cells into neurons. Others said that without patent protection, few investors would pay to develop stem-cell therapies for conditions from neurodegenerative diseases to diabetes.

But in the days following the ruling, lawyers, funders and researchers have taken a more moderate view. There are other ways for companies and scientists who commercialize ES cells to protect their inventions in Europe, they say. And some believe that a lack of patents could speed up, rather than suffocate, innovation. “If anything the ruling is an opportunity,” says physician scientist Chris Mason of University College London. “It’s not the end of stem cells in Europe.”

The decision by the European Court of Justice, which applies throughout the European Union and cannot be appealed, stems from a 2004 lawsuit brought by Greenpeace. The Amsterdam-based environmental group challenged Brüstle’s patent on the grounds that it offended public sentiment and violated European law banning the industrial use of human embryos. A German court agreed, and by 2009 Brüstle’s appeal had reached Europe’s highest court (see Nature 462, 265; 2009). The language in these legal rulings — that commercial use of human embryos “would be contrary to ethics and public policy”, for example — alarmed scientists, who spoke out against the court (A. Smith et al. Nature 472, 418; 2011).

The 13 judges of the court’s Grand Chamber have now concluded that procedures involving human ES cells cannot be patented if they derive from the destruction of embryos. The ban applies retrospectively, and contrasts sharply with the position in the United States, where scientists face few restrictions on patents relating to ES-cell applications.

“Time will tell how serious it’s going to be,” says Nick Bassil, an intellectual-property lawyer at Kilburn & Strode in London, who represents companies developing stem-cell therapies. He adds that it may take years for the European Patent Office, national patent offices and courts to interpret the ruling.

However, even a restrictive interpretation should allow companies to patent the technologies needed to turn human ES cells into treatments, rather than patenting procedures involving the cells themselves. “If the sum total of this market were some cell lines, I would be deeply, deeply worried,” says Julian Hitchcock, a life-sciences lawyer at Field Fisher Waterhouse in London. Growth media, equipment and chemicals that help scientists to work with stem cells could all be patented in Europe without running afoul of the high court’s ruling, he says. For instance, Peter Coffey at the Institute of Ophthalmology in London and his team are working with the drug giant Pfizer to develop a human-ES-cell-based treatment for macular degeneration, a progressive disease of the retina that causes blindness. Their patents cover the placement of their retinal cells in the eye, not the cells themselves.

Rob Buckle, a board programme manager at Britain’s Medical Research Council (MRC) in London, agrees that investors will find other ways to protect their intellectual property, and adds that the ruling will not affect the MRC’s spending on ES-cell research.

The sheer complexity of therapies involving human ES cells should also help to ward off copycats who might otherwise exploit the lack of patent protection to rush their own versions of a treatment to market. By keeping many of their manufacturing processes secret until they seek regulatory approval, companies can ensure that knock-offs are unlikely, says Mason. “If I give you my cell line, your chance of knowing what to do with it and copying what I do is zero,” he says.

Many of the 20-year patents issued for ES-cell treatments will probably have expired by the time the treatments reach the clinic anyway, Mason adds. Indeed, the European Medicines Agency offers additional protection for inventions. The drug regulator keeps private for eight years any data that companies submit with their application for marketing approval, and blocks others from using this information for another two.

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The ruling may even turn out to be a boon for European stem-cell science, says Mason, creating an anything-goes atmosphere that could attract scientists from abroad. Non-commercial research is generally exempted from patent infringement claims, but many patents cover the cells’ use as research tools, creating uncertainty about which methods researchers are allowed to use, says Hitchcock.

A January statement from the Hinxton Group, an influential consortium of scientists and ethicists, had expressed concern that stem-cell biology was becoming so thick with broad patents that key areas of the field were being walled off from scientists and entrepreneurs. “With patents gone, it’s much easier to do anything,” says Mason. 

Additional reporting by Alison Abbott.

New post published on: http://www.livescience.tech/2018/03/07/european-ban-on-stem-cell-patents-has-a-silver-lining/

[wendytenkate-blog]

The benefits entailed in a membership at a student association

In 2016, student associations were repeatedly mentioned negatively in the news. In particular, the reputation of G.S.C. Vindicat, full the Groninger Studenten Corps Vindicat atque Polit, was harmed. At the beginning of the current academic year a news item was published about the so-called ‘banga list’. Due to these kinds of messages student associations have been given a bad image. But what exactly are the benefits of membership? Through this blog I would like to tell you something about the student life and all the benefits that it entails.

Student associations in a bad light A news-site in Groningen, called Sikkom, received an anonymous message containing a strange file with concerning content about 22 female members of G.S.C. Vindicat. The file, intended to spread among the male members of the association, consisted of photographs, phone numbers and student houses of the female members. All the girls were given a ranking from one to four stars. The list, which resembled a notorious ‘banga list’ was spread by strangers on the Internet.

The University of Groningen (RUG), Hanze University Groningen and student association Vindicat wrote in a message on their website that they distance themselves from the recent events at the student union. Internal measures were taken and the creators of the list were suspended.

However, it did not stop there. There was a lot of commotion in media and the student associations had their compatriots angered. Heated discussions on the Internet, on television and within the student life itself followed. In less than a month a second incident took place at Vindicat which was not very fortunate for them. An apprentice member of G.S.C. Vindicat had been addressed so roughly during the hazing that he was hospitalized with head injuries. There are similar reports about hazing in Amsterdam, by the Amsterdamsch Studenten Corps (ASC).

Source: https://www.powned.tv/media/1180/teranbulan_gr.jpg?anchor=center&mode=crop&quality=80&width=1024&height=576&rnd=131068450440000000 Much incomprehension The Dutch population turned against student life and many people did not understand why one would want to be a member of a student association. Many people got a negative image of the associations. Hazing was not / is not humane. Why would you want to throw your life away with a membership? In popular view, there are only disadvantages.

I understand their thoughts. Negative news spreads quickly and a negative image or negative reputation is the result. I don’t agree at all with what happened during the hazing, but there certainly is another side to the story. The image the media creates of the student life is negative and the positive side of this life is not named in the articles.

Source: http://www.hpdetijd.nl/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ANP-22966787.jpg

My experience with student life I am going to take you on a journey through my experiences as a student. Through this blog, I would like to point out all the benefits that are entailed in a membership. The student life consists of more than drinking beer in the clubhouse in the hours that you don’t study. Not everything is about the hazing and tasks for freshman students. You learn a lot within the four walls of a clubhouse. You make new social contacts with whom you will enjoy the rest of your life and norms and values are important. The benefits of student life and student associations should be mentioned more.

When I was 17 years old, I made the first contact with student life. While I was doing intermediate vocational education, my friends from high school started their studies at colleges or universities. Because of this I was regularly found in the infamous student cities of the Netherlands. I went to parties, took my first steps in student houses and became acquainted with all the odd manners of student culture. I thought it was all really weird, but I think this was mainly because I was not part of it at that time. I liked to have a beer with them or to go to a party in the clubhouse, but to be a member of an association? No, that was not for me. No way.

Source: https://images.nrc.nl/OIxhq1Tr3W36msU6-DaujMpBtjc=/1280x/s3/static.nrc.nl/spoetnik/files/2014/07/minerva.jpg Exploring the student life during the orientation week Eventually, a few years later, I went to study in Leiden. I was really looking forward to start at the University of Applied Science and was actually truly curious about student life. I assumed that it was not for me. But when the summer approached I became more curious. Leiden, a real student city. Should I be a member of a student association? What are the activities for students in Leiden anyway? And are the associations also approachable for students from the University of Applied Science? There was only one way to find out. I had to experience the orientation week for new students in Leiden, the EL CID. A week in which you get to know the city and the college or university but where you also become acquainted with student life and all the associations that Leiden has to offer. As I travelled to Leiden, my only thoughts were that students were strange. And how did they all manage to study and be a member of a student association? I was dying to find out.

I've had a great week and I fell in love with the city and student life. How could people not love this life? Such nice people, amazing parties and activities for all kinds of people with different personalities. Students associations, sports clubs and even a club where they play board games.

I didn’t become a member of a student association that week. At that moment I thought I couldn’t combine a busy membership with my study. However, I have signed up to be a member of a student orchestra called S.M.G. Sempre Crescendo, the oldest subdivision of L.S.V. Minerva, full the Leidse Studenten Vereniging 'Minerva'. An orchestra where the members rehearse with a beer next to their music stand and the weekly get-togethers last until the early morning hours. There are unwritten rules, the so-called ‘mores’. You quickly manage to remember those during your membership. At the beginning, I thought all the rules were quite crazy, but as we speak I am completely entangled in the strange subculture.

I still enjoy the rehearsals every week with great pleasure, also the subsequent get-together. I’m even often found at the clubhouse on other days during the week as well and I’ve joined several committees. I have also lived in a student house, with roommates who are members at the other major student associations of Leiden, which makes me visit the other student associations regularly. There are a lot of things outsiders don’t know about the student life and that’s why I also think that the positive side of a membership needs to be highlighted.

The wrong impression Not only the previously mentioned news reports have drawn a false picture of what happens in the lives of students. Also in the television series ‘Feuten’ is greatly exaggerated. Many students were not pleased with the production of the series produced by the youth broadcasting BNN. The scene from the film ‘Soldaat van Oranje’ is also cited during a discussion.

All very entertaining, but the 'regular Dutchman' now thinks we're a bunch of disordered people without decency and respect for each other during hazing and other activities with freshman students. We students are more than that. The positive side of student life should be highlighted more and this blog will hopefully give more information about what is really going on in the life of an active member of a student association and what benefits the membership entails.

Source: http://www.flameshots.nl/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Feuten-2_Martijn-Lakemeijer.jpg

The benefits of a membership at a student association Being a member of a student association involves more than living in a student house, drinking lots and lots of beers and wearing a nice suit or dress during daily activities. There are many benefits to mention.

First of all, it’s much fun to join an association. You should be able to relax when you’re not studying and the associations provide that opportunity. Convivial evenings at the club, many activities and trips in which you can participate and there are almost always events to go to. Your social life unfolds in full speed!

You get to know new people very quickly and your network will be expanded significantly in a short time. Increasing your network can be very beneficial for the rest of your life - and it also brings you lifelong friendships. Especially if you are new to a city, it is not only nice to make friends quickly or even find a room with the help of your connections but also after finishing your study a large network is convenient. For example in finding a job.

During a job interview, your membership can also work to your advantage. More and more companies are looking at how much experience you have gained during your studies with extracurricular activities instead of only looking at your study program. The fact that you can combine your study with a membership and extracurricular activities says a lot about your personality and motivation. According to research by TNS NIPO on behalf of the Volkskrant, over two thirds of the most influential people in the Netherlands have been members of a student association.

Secondly, you can develop tremendously. You can join committees within the association and, for example, organize parties, manage the bar, write for the almanac or even provide some more politically oriented activities. If you are really ambitious, then perhaps a place within the board could be something for you. You can develop skills that you would not normally think of, you expand knowledge and gain new experiences which helps you to unfold and enriches your career.

Several studies show that members of student associations or students who have lived in student houses often achieve better academic results than non-members. The people around them will always stimulate them to study properly. The students study together, they encourage each others and good results will be rewarded at the student associations, for example by offering you to join committees.

It is also remarkable that many associations engage in a collaboration with the municipality. For instance, A.L.S.V. Quintus from Leiden organizes an annual event called ‘The Museum Night’ and is engaged in developing a plan to solve the bicycle and litter problem which the city is facing at the moment. There is regular consultation between associations and municipalities in all major student cities and this brings advantages to both parties.

What is also important to point out, is that not all members are preppy and typical frats. There are lots of student associations in the Netherlands, in all kinds of forms, which you can join. In Leiden alone there are more than 20 different associations. Take a look at the associations which you are interested in and don’t be afraid of hazing or tough first year. Remember that you are not alone. Lots of new students are all sitting in the same boat. Hold on a bit longer. It's all worth it. The benefits are for the rest of your life. All benefits I’ve just mentioned. Keep that in mind.

Basically, when you join a student association, your student life will be an experience you will never forget, accompanied with a lot of benefits in the future. 

Your college years are the best time of your life. It is therefore important that you fully enjoy it. Be aware of all the parodies that have been made about the student life and just laugh at it. When you’re a member of a student association, you know better. It is quite okay to laugh, which I would certainly recommend. Therefore, I will conclude this blog with two humorous videos about the student life, played by the men of Jiskefet, a humoristic and foolish television series from The Netherlands.

I hope the image of student associations is more positive thanks to this short blog and that the benefits which a membership entails now are clear. I’m a proud member and I have the most amazing time living in my student house. I wouldn't miss this for all the gold in the world!

#students #studentassociations #studentlife #vindicat #jiskefet #delullos #semprecrescendo #minerva #asc #membership #thebenefitsofastudentassociation

[scienceblogtumbler]

Algorithm finds hidden connections between paintings at the Met

Art is often heralded as the greatest journey into the past, solidifying a moment in time and space; the beautiful vehicle that lets us momentarily escape the present.

With the boundless treasure trove of paintings that exist, the connections between these works of art from different periods of time and space can often go overlooked. It’s impossible for even the most knowledgeable of art critics to take in millions of paintings across thousands of years and be able to find unexpected parallels in themes, motifs, and visual styles.

To streamline this process, a group of researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Microsoft created an algorithm to discover hidden connections between paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) and Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum.

Inspired by a special exhibit “Rembrandt and Velazquez” in the Rijksmuseum, the new “MosAIc” system finds paired or “analogous” works from different cultures, artists, and media by using deep networks to understand how “close” two images are. In that exhibit, the researchers were inspired by an unlikely, yet similar pairing: Francisco de Zurbarán’s “The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion” and Jan Asselijn’s “The Threatened Swan,” two works that portray scenes of profound altruism with an eerie visual resemblance.

“These two artists did not have a correspondence or meet each other during their lives, yet their paintings hinted at a rich, latent structure that underlies both of their works,” says CSAIL PhD student Mark Hamilton, the lead author on a paper about “MosAIc.”

To find two similar paintings, the team used a new algorithm for image search to unearth the closest match by a particular artist or culture. For example, in response to a query about “which musical instrument is closest to this painting of a blue-and-white dress,” the algorithm retrieves an image of a blue-and-white porcelain violin. These works are not only similar in pattern and form, but also draw their roots from a broader cultural exchange of porcelain between the Dutch and Chinese.

“Image retrieval systems let users find images that are semantically similar to a query image, serving as the backbone of reverse image search engines and many product recommendation engines,” says Hamilton. “Restricting an image retrieval system to particular subsets of images can yield new insights into relationships in the visual world. We aim to encourage a new level of engagement with creative artifacts.”

How it works 

For many, art and science are irreconcilable: one grounded in logic, reasoning, and proven truths, and the other motivated by emotion, aesthetics, and beauty. But recently, AI and art took on a new flirtation that, over the past 10 years, developed into something more serious.

A large branch of this work, for example, has previously focused on generating new art using AI. There was the GauGAN project developed by researchers at MIT, NVIDIA, and the University of California at Berkeley; Hamilton and others’ previous GenStudio project; and even an AI-generated artwork that sold at Sotheby’s for $51,000.

MosAIc, however, doesn’t aim to create new art so much as help explore existing art. One similar tool, Google’s “X Degrees of Separation,” finds paths of art that connect two works of art, but MosAIc differs in that it only requires a single image. Instead of finding paths, it uncovers connections in whatever culture or media the user is interested in, such as finding the shared artistic form of “Anthropoides paradisea” and “Seth Slaying a Serpent, Temple of Amun at Hibis.” 

Hamilton notes that building out their algorithm was a tricky endeavor, because they wanted to find images that were similar not just in color or style, but in meaning and theme. In other words, they’d want dogs to be close to other dogs, people to be close to other people, and so forth. To achieve this, they probe a deep network’s inner “activations” for each image in the combined open access collections of the Met and the Rijksmuseum. Distance between the “activations” of this deep network, which are commonly called “features,” was how they judged image similarity.

To find analogous images between different cultures, the team used a new image-search data structure called a “conditional KNN tree” that groups similar images together in a tree-like structure. To find a close match, they start at the tree’s “trunk” and follow the most promising “branch” until they are sure they’ve found the closest image. The data structure improves on its predecessors by allowing the tree to quickly “prune” itself to a particular culture, artist, or collection, quickly yielding answers to new types of queries.

What Hamilton and his colleagues found surprising was that this approach could also be applied to helping find problems with existing deep networks, related to the surge of “deepfakes” that have recently cropped up. They applied this data structure to find areas where probabilistic models, such as the generative adversarial networks (GANs) that are often used to create deepfakes, break down. They coined these problematic areas “blind spots,” and note that they give us insight into how GANs can be biased. Such blind spots further show that GANs struggle to represent particular areas of a dataset, even if most of their fakes can fool a human.

Testing MosAIc 

The team evaluated MosAIc’s speed, and how closely it aligned with our human intuition about visual analogies.

For the speed tests, they wanted to make sure that their data structure provided value over simply searching through the collection with quick, brute-force search.

To understand how well the system aligned with human intuitions, they made and released two new datasets for evaluating conditional image retrieval systems. One dataset challenged algorithms to find images with the same content even after they had been “stylized” with a neural style transfer method. The second dataset challenged algorithms to recover English letters across different fonts. A bit less than two-thirds of the time, MosAIc was able to recover the correct image in a single guess from a “haystack” of 5,000 images.

“Going forward, we hope this work inspires others to think about how tools from information retrieval can help other fields like the arts, humanities, social science, and medicine,” says Hamilton. “These fields are rich with information that has never been processed with these techniques and can be a source for great inspiration for both computer scientists and domain experts. This work can be expanded in terms of new datasets, new types of queries, and new ways to understand the connections between works.”

Hamilton wrote the paper on MosAIc alongside Professor Bill Freeman and MIT undergraduates Stefanie Fu and Mindren Lu. The MosAIc website was built by MIT, Fu, Lu, Zhenbang Chen, Felix Tran, Darius Bopp, Margaret Wang, Marina Rogers, and Johnny Bui, at the Microsoft Garage winter externship program.

Press Contact

Rachel Gordon Email: [email protected] Phone: [phone] MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

source https://scienceblog.com/517660/algorithm-finds-hidden-connections-between-paintings-at-the-met/

[dorcasrempel]

Algorithm finds hidden connections between paintings at the Met

Art is often heralded as the greatest journey into the past, solidifying a moment in time and space; the beautiful vehicle that lets us momentarily escape the present. 

With the boundless treasure trove of paintings that exist, the connections between these works of art from different periods of time and space can often go overlooked. It’s impossible for even the most knowledgeable of art critics to take in millions of paintings across thousands of years and be able to find unexpected parallels in themes, motifs, and visual styles. 

To streamline this process, a group of researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Microsoft created an algorithm to discover hidden connections between paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) and Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. 

Inspired by a special exhibit “Rembrandt and Velazquez” in the Rijksmuseum, the new “MosAIc” system finds paired or “analogous” works from different cultures, artists, and media by using deep networks to understand how “close” two images are. In that exhibit, the researchers were inspired by an unlikely, yet similar pairing: Francisco de Zurbarán’s “The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion” and Jan Asselijn’s “The Threatened Swan,” two works that portray scenes of profound altruism with an eerie visual resemblance.

“These two artists did not have a correspondence or meet each other during their lives, yet their paintings hinted at a rich, latent structure that underlies both of their works,” says CSAIL PhD student Mark Hamilton, the lead author on a paper about “MosAIc.” 

To find two similar paintings, the team used a new algorithm for image search to unearth the closest match by a particular artist or culture. For example, in response to a query about “which musical instrument is closest to this painting of a blue-and-white dress,” the algorithm retrieves an image of a blue-and-white porcelain violin. These works are not only similar in pattern and form, but also draw their roots from a broader cultural exchange of porcelain between the Dutch and Chinese. 

“Image retrieval systems let users find images that are semantically similar to a query image, serving as the backbone of reverse image search engines and many product recommendation engines,” says Hamilton. “Restricting an image retrieval system to particular subsets of images can yield new insights into relationships in the visual world. We aim to encourage a new level of engagement with creative artifacts.” 

How it works 

For many, art and science are irreconcilable: one grounded in logic, reasoning, and proven truths, and the other motivated by emotion, aesthetics, and beauty. But recently, AI and art took on a new flirtation that, over the past 10 years, developed into something more serious. 

A large branch of this work, for example, has previously focused on generating new art using AI. There was the GauGAN project developed by researchers at MIT, NVIDIA, and the University of California at Berkeley; Hamilton and others’ previous GenStudio project; and even an AI-generated artwork that sold at Sotheby’s for $51,000. 

MosAIc, however, doesn’t aim to create new art so much as help explore existing art. One similar tool, Google’s “X Degrees of Separation,” finds paths of art that connect two works of art, but MosAIc differs in that it only requires a single image. Instead of finding paths, it uncovers connections in whatever culture or media the user is interested in, such as finding the shared artistic form of “Anthropoides paradisea” and “Seth Slaying a Serpent, Temple of Amun at Hibis.” 

Hamilton notes that building out their algorithm was a tricky endeavor, because they wanted to find images that were similar not just in color or style, but in meaning and theme. In other words, they’d want dogs to be close to other dogs, people to be close to other people, and so forth. To achieve this, they probe a deep network’s inner “activations” for each image in the combined open access collections of the Met and the Rijksmuseum. Distance between the “activations” of this deep network, which are commonly called “features,” was how they judged image similarity.

To find analogous images between different cultures, the team used a new image-search data structure called a “conditional KNN tree” that groups similar images together in a tree-like structure. To find a close match, they start at the tree’s “trunk” and follow the most promising “branch” until they are sure they’ve found the closest image. The data structure improves on its predecessors by allowing the tree to quickly “prune” itself to a particular culture, artist, or collection, quickly yielding answers to new types of queries.

What Hamilton and his colleagues found surprising was that this approach could also be applied to helping find problems with existing deep networks, related to the surge of “deepfakes” that have recently cropped up. They applied this data structure to find areas where probabilistic models, such as the generative adversarial networks (GANs) that are often used to create deepfakes, break down. They coined these problematic areas “blind spots,” and note that they give us insight into how GANs can be biased. Such blind spots further show that GANs struggle to represent particular areas of a dataset, even if most of their fakes can fool a human. 

Testing MosAIc 

The team evaluated MosAIc’s speed, and how closely it aligned with our human intuition about visual analogies.

For the speed tests, they wanted to make sure that their data structure provided value over simply searching through the collection with quick, brute-force search. 

To understand how well the system aligned with human intuitions, they made and released two new datasets for evaluating conditional image retrieval systems. One dataset challenged algorithms to find images with the same content even after they had been “stylized” with a neural style transfer method. The second dataset challenged algorithms to recover English letters across different fonts. A bit less than two-thirds of the time, MosAIc was able to recover the correct image in a single guess from a “haystack” of 5,000 images.

“Going forward, we hope this work inspires others to think about how tools from information retrieval can help other fields like the arts, humanities, social science, and medicine,” says Hamilton. “These fields are rich with information that has never been processed with these techniques and can be a source for great inspiration for both computer scientists and domain experts. This work can be expanded in terms of new datasets, new types of queries, and new ways to understand the connections between works.” 

Hamilton wrote the paper on MosAIc alongside Professor Bill Freeman and MIT undergraduates Stefanie Fu and Mindren Lu. The MosAIc website was built by MIT, Fu, Lu, Zhenbang Chen, Felix Tran, Darius Bopp, Margaret Wang, Marina Rogers, and Johnny Bui, at the Microsoft Garage winter externship program.

Algorithm finds hidden connections between paintings at the Met syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

[khalilhumam]

This women’s college in Ghana leads the way on e-learning during the pandemic

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New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/this-womens-college-in-ghana-leads-the-way-on-e-learning-during-the-pandemic/

This women’s college in Ghana leads the way on e-learning during the pandemic

St. Teresa’s College uses Telegram and WhatsApp to engage students

Veronica Kissiedu Emefa, a student teacher at St. Teresa's College in Hohoe, Ghana, Volta Region, seen in class before the pandemic. Now, most courses have gone online. Screenshot via a trailer for documentaries produced by Elio Stamm for Transforming Teacher Education and Learning, Ghana, January 2017.

< p class="p1">Amid the coronavirus pandemic, many universities are currently deliberating what to do for the forthcoming semester. St. Teresa’s College of Education, one of five female-only colleges in Ghana, is leading the way with e-learning by consolidating the use of messaging applications like Telegram and WhatsApp.

Established as the Women’s Training College in 1961 and later becoming the St. Teresa’s College of Education, Hohoe, Volta region, in 1964, the college is one of 46 colleges of education in Ghana.

In March, the college sent its students home as part of measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus and most classes shifted online. While some students have been asked to return to school to prepare for their final exams, many students continue to learn online from home.

The college does not have an in-built e-learning platform like Sakai, Canvas or Blackboard, and there are no officially recognized learning platforms in Ghana. At other colleges, tutors often use whichever platform they feel works best and as a result, many students download multiple applications like Google Classroom, Zoom, Telegram, and WhatsApp, some of which consume a lot of data. In many cases, students are not formally enrolled on these platforms by their institutions to take lessons.

At St. Teresa’s, however, online learning is mostly conducted on WhatsApp and Telegram. After consulting with tutors and students, the apps were designated as the official learning platforms for the college. Tutors switch to WhatsApp if they run into network problems while conducting classes on Telegram. Students observe that these platforms are low-cost, and this helps them save money on internet data.

Read more: How COVID-19 affects education for people with disabilities in Ghana

Speaking to Global Voices by phone, Benedictus Mawusi Donkor, a tutor at the college, explained why the college decided to enroll all students on WhatsApp and Telegram for e-learning:

When we were using the Google Classroom and YouTube, downloading videos becomes a problem when the network is not that strong. But when it comes to Telegram, I think with a little bit of network you easily get access to text mostly and audio. And some too, just a handful even with the Telegram they have a problem, so we try to engage them on WhatsApp. They have a WhatsApp platform as well as the Telegram.

By consolidating and centralizing platforms for e-learning, tutors have found creative methods to keep students engaged in classes conducted on these messaging apps. Some of these methods include close monitoring of student engagement and attendance, customizing available digital platforms for learning, listening to and addressing students’ and tutors’ concerns and providing monthly digital training for tutors in need.

Doreen Mensah, a first-year student, said that tutors and the college’s authorities found ways to motivate students to participate in online lessons.

The tutors have been motivating us. They know it’s not easy, so they tell us to try. When they are online, and you are not available he will pick his phone to call and find out what is going on. And then they will give you words of encouragement to convince us to go online.

However, there are still structural issues that mitigate learning at St. Teresa’s. According to Jennifer Nyavor, a first-year student, students are struggling financially since their allowances have not been paid since March when they were sent home:

When we were in school, we depended on the allowance but now that we are home, they stopped paying allowances and some of us use it to pay school fees so it’s making life difficult. Since we came back home in March when the president said no school till further notice, that was when they stopped paying the allowances. The allowance is 200 Ghana cedis [$34.54] per month. Unless my parents give me something small to buy data. So when I come online, I can’t ask questions because then the class is over.

High student engagement

According to a Transforming Teacher Education and Learning (T-TEL) report, while some colleges reported attendance rates as low as 31 percent in June, St. Teresa’s reported a 97 percent attendance rate. Tutors were highly engaged and in touch with students’ pedagogical needs. Tutors checked in regularly with students who were missing classes to work with them so that they could maintain regular class attendance.

In phone conversations with Global Voices, students and tutors observed that the college’s principal, vice-principal and quality assurance officer were added to each course platform to observe classes and work to address challenges as they emerged.

According to Jennifer Agyekum, a second-year student at the college, the efforts of tutors to keep students engaged have been effective:

Those who do well in assignments, tokens are being given to students in the form of [internet data] bundles. They are really motivating us to participate in the virtual learning and they are doing their best.

However, tutors and students still had to deal with other structural issues that specifically affected student engagement while they studied remotely.

Sophia Adjoa Micah, the principal, said:

As students are at home, some parents may not understand the whole business of learning online. Seeing their wards online they may not take kindly to it. And being females, some of the students have to do chores at home. It is a challenge to learn online and concentrate without any distractions.

Other tutors took the initiative to call parents and talk to them about creating conditions at home to enable their daughters to learn online with as few distractions as possible.

At the end of each month, tutors are required to write reports detailing the progress of their online classes and identify the challenges of mitigating teaching and learning. These reports are then submitted to school management who review them and work with tutors and students to develop strategies to address these issues.

The college also adopted an open communication style where conditions were created for students to share their concerns and challenges. The students who spoke to Global Voices found that this communication style was helpful for supporting their learning.

A model for higher education e-learning

While some lecturers in other higher education institutions in Ghana have struggled to navigate teaching online, St. Teresa’s College has worked in close collaboration with tutors to ensure that they are properly equipped to use digital tools to teach their classes.

Some tutors said that the Information Technology (IT) department of the college organizes monthly programs and workshops to help tutors who are struggling to navigate digital platforms in their classes.

In an email conversation with Global Voices, Principal Micah explained how some of the college's support funds from T-TEL were used to enroll tutors in an online certificate course organized by Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.

The college is doing well with limited resources, but Micah believes that the establishment of a state-of-the-art ICT center will help them improve the quality of e-learning. Micah has also appealed to telecommunications companies in Ghana to provide support for students via free data packages to improve access to education, especially for marginalized students.

Editor's note: Wunpini Mohammed is a consultant with T-TEL.

Written by Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed · comments (0) Donate · Share this: twitter facebook reddit

[expertdigi]

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It is designed for working professionals who're looking for leadership roles in Analytics field. Curriculum is designed such that college students get an exposure to completely different areas and managerial/business functions of data science.

Welcome to a life-changing and transformative experiential studying at IIMA. The programme is appropriate for professionals of all ranges and disciplines, as job roles are gradually becoming extra advanced.

Popular universities embody SRH University Heidelberg, FOM University of Applied Sciences, University of Ulm, University of Dusseldorf, Heilbronn University among others. Candidates on the lookout for a program taught in English language solely can contemplate SRH University Heidelberg. According to Skills Ireland, there will be a demand for Big Data/Analytics in the range of forty nine,000-62,000 in Ireland by 2020 and the numbers will maintain rising. Top schools in Ireland include University College Dublin (UCD), National University of Ireland Galway, University College Cork,University of Limerick and Letterkenny Institute of Technology to call a few. Switzerland is among the prime 5 international locations in Europe for enterprise analysts and knowledge scientists.

BMU’s unique MBA programme in Business Analytics provides the best instruments and coaching for a rewarding profession in any of those fields and the all-spherical improvement of assorted skills to make a difference. PGDBA is a two 12 months full time residential diploma programme geared toward creating business analytics professionals employable by main Indian and overseas corporations. This programme is designed for individuals who have an analytical mindset, are interested in tackling challenging business issues, and possess an inclination towards arithmetic. This program brings together the analytics expertise of Jigsaw Academy and the global academic perspective of Bocconi.

This Professional Science Master’s (PSM) diploma is built on trade-specific expertise—over half of the programs are targeted on data science and analytics; the remainder tackle the challenges of at present’s enterprise world. The curriculum for the Business Intelligence & Analytics Track is fastened (no electives), and programs are mixture of stats, quantitative analysis, information systems and management.

For a knowledge analyst, studying SQL and Python might result in a possible $50,000 median base wage. Best of all, learning the way to code requires weeks and not years.If changing into a knowledge scientist sounds intriguing, Flatiron School provides several ways to begin your career in big data. Our Immersive Data Science Bootcamp in New York will turn you into a data scientist in only 15 weeks. For those that want to sharpen their expertise or may not be quite ready to vary careers, our part-time Intro to Courses in Business Analytics on our New York and London campuses may be the proper option for you. If you’re on the fence about information science, or not sure if you can commit to a full bootcamp, our on-line Data Science Bootcamp Prep covers the basics with over seventy five hours of curriculum.

Professionals in this area earn greater than CHF100,000, among the only a few nations that pay greater median salaries than the US market. Business analytics or knowledge science are among the many most- highest paying and amongst high 5 jobs today according to in style surveys similar to Forbes, LinkedIn, and Glassdoor among other reviews. ‘Quant Crunch’, a study carried out by IBM, Burning Glass Technologies and Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF), predicts that more than 39% of knowledge scientist and analyst jobs would require a masters or Ph.D. The U.S. alone is expected to face a scarcity of around 1.5 million enterprise analysts by 2020.