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Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for September 7, 2019

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Steve Palmer
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An MIT task force delivered a report on making technology work for society; Facebook, Microsoft, and others are using paid actors to produce deepfake videos in order to develop countermeasures; A new archaeological probe of the deepest and oldest parts of Pennsylvania's Meadowcorft Rockshelter; The universities' role in creating and solving the so-called civic crisis; What primordial black holes could teach us about nature

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Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

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  1. MIT Report Examines How to Make Technology Work for Society - An MIT report finds that, although the likelihood of technology wiping out huge swaths of jobs in economic sectors is often exaggerated, it is still important to be cognizant of the impact that new technology has on the labor force, so it calls for "new policies, renewed support for labor, and reformed institutions". The report draws from data, expert knowledge, and analysis in order to identify concerns over worker anxiety over job stability, wage stagnation, and an increasing ratio of low quality jobs as compared to high quality jobs. It also coins the term "so-so technology" to describe technology that displaces worker without a substantial augmentation in productivity. A key observation may be that, "Not all innovations that raise productivity displace workers, and not all innovations that displace workers do much for productivity." The report also anticipates that expertise, judgement, and creativity will continue to be necessary for the foreseeable future. Policy recommendations include expanded post-secondary investment in education, greater recognition of workers - as stakeholders, and rebuilding support for research and development.

  2. Facebook is making deepfake videos using paid actors so that it can help researchers better detect fake footage - Facebook is collaborating with Microsoft and a handful of universities to produce "deepfake" videos so that researchers can develop techniques for detecting them. Facebook will be contributing $10 million in funding to the effort, and it will not use Facebook's user data. The effort is intended to produce a realistic and freely available dataset using paid actors, who agree to the appropriate level of consent.

  3. Archaeologists probe oldest, deepest part of Meadowcroft Rockshelter - Meadowcroft came up in the comments on a previous post, so of course this headline caught my attention. The article contains photos of researchers at the Meadowcroft Rockshelter, and describes their current work to try to extract information from DNA in the oldest and deepest areas of the site. The site is located in Jefferson Township, Washington County, Pennsylvania, near the southwest corner of the state - where it borders on West Virginia. Research at the site began in 1973, when it was first uncovered by James Adovasio, who is now the director of archaeology. The plan is to collect possible DNA samples this week, and then analyze it to obtain an incremental improvement in our knowledge of the past. As of now, the site is known to have been home to early hunter & gatherers as early as 19,000 years ago. Since the interior of the continent was under ice at the time, it is believed that these people did not arrive through there. Over the years since 1973, the site has yielded information about a time period that spans 16,000 years. (Related content: Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for September 1, 2019 and Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for August 21, 2019.) h/t archaeology.org

  4. How Universities Have Been Part of the Problem (And Can Be Part of the Solution) for America’s Civic Crises - This essay argues that despite massive increases in education, intelligence, and access to information, America's civic literacy is largely unchanged since the 1930s, and its government and society are growing increasingly dysfunctional. To remediate this, the article proposes an education program that teaches students to engage constructively across lines of difference by including information about cognitive biases, motivated reasoning, and identity-based reasoning. This idea is intended to help groups of people improve their thinking in similar fashion to cognative behavioral therapy (CBT), which helps individuals to improve their thinking. The article goes on to argue that universities spend a great deal of time and effort teaching students to think critically, with a focus on problem identification, but spends very little effort on constructive problem solving and consensus building. To solve this, the essay suggests that civic education should be central to the curriculum in higher education. The essay is excerpted from this 90 minute talk at the conference: Polarization and Disagreement: Combatting America’s Civic Crisis.

  5. STEEM Primordial killers - excluding common dark matter with black holes - Two candidates for embodiments of dark matter include Weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPs) and primordial black holes - a special class of black holes that were formed just after the Big Bang. In this article, @lemouth reviews a recent paper that explores the possibility of primordial black holes and WIMP particles coexisting, and reaches the surprising understanding that if primordial black holes exist, it could rule out many common extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics. In many extensions of the Standard Model, dark matter is used to balance the equations of particle physics, but it has so-far escaped detection, and if both forms of dark matter exist, then WIMP annihilation must also take place when WIMPs stray too close to the primordial black holes. All of this leads to a model where scientists can exclude candidate models for overall WIMP mass based on the number of primordial black holes that they eventually observe, and observing just a handful of primordial black holes "could potentially entirely rule out the WIMP hypothesis" (emphasis added, bold in original)

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