Add one more to the list of effects from COVID-19: Surfacing sensory power as a new governance model Professors at the University of London note that while data politics is reflected in concepts like surveillance capitalism, data colonialism, and digital citizenry, little exists to plot these phenomena against historical modes of power. This paper suggests the pandemic gave birth to a new form of governance based on cluster visibility, continuous analysis, and real-time intervention. (via Big Data and Society).
DIY technologies are democratizing science. Modifying existing microscopes to do imaging costs roughly US $5,000–10,000. But doctors are bringing DIY sensibilities to produce exponentially cheaper solutions. In Brazil, Dr. Gustavo Batista Menezeshe pooled funds with colleagues to buy a cheap, bare-bones confocal microscope, a $1 plexiglass stage, and a $2 infrared lamp from a local hardware store. "Twelve minutes after the microscope was installed in my lab," he says, it produced its first in vivo images. It would generate images that were good enough to make the cover of the journal Hepatology twice. (via Nature).
An AI now helps to summarize the latest in AI. A new AI model for scientific literature helps research teams wade through and identify the latest cutting-edge papers. The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) rolled out the model onto its flagship product, Semantic Scholar, an AI-powered scientific paper search engine. It provides a one-sentence tl;dr (too long; didn't read) summary under every computer science paper (for now) when users use the search function or go to an author's page. The work was also accepted to the Empirical Methods for Natural Language Processing conference this week. (via MIT Tech Review).
Coursera is experiencing a surge of interest in online learning. CEO Jeff Maggioncalda says the company will have 30 million people signing up just in 2020 alone. "In some ways, COVID was like a huge required experiment with online learning." The increase in users comes from people stuck at home, and those laid off or furloughed. "There's been a long trend toward job automation that's been happening for years and years. In response, people need to reskill for the slew of digital jobs that are emerging." (via Fortune).
Quick Links: Accounts now sell fake people. Nikola soars as clueless investors again trade the wrong stock. How scientists study COVID-19 with location data. The long view: the way Jeff Bezos makes high stakes decisions.