GCR News Summary July 2013

Post Date July 28, 2013
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Artificially-colored MERS virus image courtesy of CSIRO.

ConceptNet, an artificial intelligence program developed by a team led by Catherine Havasi at the MIT Media Lab, performed as well as an average four-year-old on the information, vocabulary, and word reasoning portions of standard intelligence test. The program uses a crowdsourced semantic network—a database of statements of basic facts—to answer questions. Miles Brundage explained in Slate that the program did well on “precisely the parts of the test that one would expect computers to excel …

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Itsuki Handoh Gives Online Lecture On Phosphorus and Chemical Pollution

Post Date July 03, 2013
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Category environmental change, online lectures

On Tuesday-Wednesday 25-26 June, GCRI hosted an online lecture by Itsuki Handoh titled ‘Phosphorus and Chemical Pollution as Global Catastrophic Risks’. (See the pre-lecture announcement.) Handoh is an Associate Professor at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN), Kyoto.

A starting point for the talk is recent research on planetary boundaries, describing nine global-scale environmental thresholds that, if crossed, could have very harmful effects.[1] The planetary boundaries paradigm has grown influential, especially in international environmental governance. For example, it was featured prominently in the report …

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GCR News Summary June 2013

Post Date July 01, 2013
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U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius speaking to the World Health Assembly image courtesy of US Mission Geneva/Eric Bridiers.

“Every pandemic emergence seems to be a law unto itself.” David Morens, Jeffrey Taubenberger, and Anthony Fauci wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine that there’s no evidence viruses that develop one mutation that could lead them to becoming pandemic will necessarily develop any others. In fact, an important open question is whether any bird flu virus that infects humans could viably develop the …

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Itsuki Handoh To Deliver Online Lecture On Phosphorus And Chemical Pollution As GCRs 25-26 June

Post Date June 05, 2013
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Category environmental change, online lectures

This is the pre-event announcement for an online lecture by Itsuki Handoh, Associate Professor at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto.

Here is the full talk info:

Phosphorus and Chemical Pollution as Global Catastrophic Risks
Tuesday-Wednesday 25-26 June, midnight GMT (Wednesday 9:00AM JST/Tokyo; Tuesday 20:00 New York; Tuesday 17:00 Los Angeles)
To be held online via Skype or equivalent. RSVP required by email to Seth Baum (seth [at] gcrinstitute.org). Space is limited.

Abstract:

The so-called global environmental problems are a manifestation of adverse effects of the interactions between humanity …

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