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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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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GCR News Summary May 2013

Post Date May 31, 2013
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Sunset from Mauna Loa Observatory image courtesy of NOAA/Eric Johnson.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration reported that for the first time the daily mean atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatory was higher than 400 parts per million. The concentration of CO2 has grown at an increasing rate since the observatory began taking measurements in 1958. The concentration of CO2 is generally believed to be 40% higher than it was before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It …

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GCR News Summary April 2013

Post Date April 29, 2013
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You can help us compile future news posts by putting any GCR news you see in the comment thread of this blog post, or send it via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).

So far 115 people have been diagnosed with a strain of bird flu known as H7N9 that was previously unknown in humans. Twenty-three of the people known to have contracted the disease have already died. The discovery of a 4-year-old boy who has the virus but who has no apparent …

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GCR News Summary March 2013

Post Date March 26, 2013
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This post marks the first of what we hope will be an ongoing series of global catastrophic risk news summaries. You can help by posting any GCR news you see in the comment thread of this blog post, or send them via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).

In Science, British Astronomer Royal Martin Rees argued that we need to take existential risk more seriously. Foreign Policy did a profile of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, which Rees helped …

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Wei Luo Talks To GCRI About Geo-Social Visual Analytics And Pandemics

Post Date October 25, 2012
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Category infectious disease, nuclear war, online lectures, risk management

Wei Luo is a PhD candidate in Geography at Pennsylvania State University and researcher in Penn State’s GeoVISTA Center. He’s also a good friend of mine from my own time at Penn State Geography. Yesterday, Wei presented his research on geo-social visual analytics to GCRI, exploring how this research applies to global catastrophic risk.

Visual analytics can be defined as “the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces”. As an illustration of visual analytics, Wei recommends the video Precision Information Environments Envisioning the future …

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