Everybody ready to go? Okay. I will gavel this session to order. Welcome everyone to the science circles continuing program of panel discussions. I just want to take a moment to point out that the science circle is a grant funded nonprofit organization. So we appreciate your sort of abiding by our code of conduct and apparel and so forth.  So we have with us today, Phil Youngblood, Vic and Mike Shaw, who is Charza, and Alex Hastings, who is eroticious. Can you correct that pronouncing for me? It's Akkaranta Sukas. Akkaranta Sukas. Okay, thank you. It's a fossil crocodile that I named. Fantastic. I think we're all familiar with Phil and Mike.  So I want to especially acknowledge Alex being with us today. Alex is a published paleontologist. He's currently the Fitzpatrick chair of paleontology at the Science Museum of Minnesota and has held a number of other sort of curatorial and postdoctoral positions in paleontology. He has interests in the evolutionary relation to temperature and body sizing in ectotherms and factors influence turnover and extinction fossil predators. So it's a real honor and a pleasure to have Alex here. And there is a reason he's here. For today, we're going to talk about extinction. Modern extinctions. Many may be aware that there's an emerging consensus that we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction, sometimes also called the Holocene extinction. So today, I hope we can kind of unpack that idea in some detail because the story has more wrinkles than you might think. So I originally kind of thought of this idea because I kept hearing news stories about various types of animals becoming populations declining, insects, birds, corals. You just kind of hear these stories from time to time all the time now and it is a little bit alarming. And I had originally thought that, well, maybe we could look at some specific instances of population declines in specific species. But the more I looked into the topic, once again, I kind of changed my focus. And I really just kind of think it would be worthwhile to just kind of explore what extinction means and why we think that we may be in the midst of a new great extinction. And just, it turns out to be have, like I say, just seems that the whole story seems to have a little more wrinkles than you might expect. So I'm hoping we can kind of dig into it. And with that introduction, let me introduce Alex and let him make some an initial presentation regarding his thoughts on the subject. So Alex, take it away. Great. Thanks. So this is just a kind of brief little overview of kind of extinctions in the past, kind of leading into the extinctions that we're seeing now. So we've got Sean is in charge of slides here. So if you can advance the slide, kind of dodo to set the tone here a bit. Perfect. Thanks. So the big thing kind of looking into the past course, there have been many, many, many, many extinctions going back throughout the hundreds of millions of years or billions of years really of life. But we generally consider there to have been fit five big mass extinctions in the past. So when we're looking at the chart here there's these five call outs the end or division and Devonian and Permian and Triassic and then usually when we think of a big extinction in the past we're usually thinking about the end Cretaceous, which was the end of the age of the dinosaurs at about 66 million years ago. But there have been certainly other large extinction events in the past. In fact, the largest of which was the end Permian extinction that really, really tall spike in the middle. And that was the extinction that was right before the end of the age of the dinosaurs what kind of began the next age. And when we're kind of breaking up these big chunks of time. We often use these mass extinction events as markers for how we divide chunks of time. And by the age of dinosaurs is bracketed by two major extinction events and then kind of some of the subdivisions is also one of them is bracketed by the and Triassic extinction. These are times we have massive changeovers in the kinds of life that we see across earth on one end of the extinction versus other. And this is one of many reasons why we're currently looking at defining a new era, the Anthropocene or the human era, because we're going through kind of by a lot of measures a mass extinction event right now. There's also other things that we're doing that are affecting our worlds. This is kind of the idea behind defining a new era. Now when you talk to paleontologists often, we kind of view extinction in a little bit of a different light because it is a natural process. So the fact that their extinctions happening right now is not surprising you would actually expect that it really comes down to the rate of extinction and it also comes down to the cause of that rate increase, which will be getting into a little bit more here and then I'm assuming as we But these big extinction events are often kind of defining time or at least how we define it. Can we go to the next slide or loading a bit or at least on my end we're still. So we'll give that a second. What is it? I'll read some questions here. Oh what so question was what is the threshold that defines extinction. Really an extinction is just kind of the the absence of species now when you get into modern extinctions it kind of gets a little bit hazier because we're In the past it's just literally not finding any more of the things so like you have a species of a trilobite in one place, and then it just disappears. So we're talking about modern extinctions it's often the last individual dying out so there's no living representatives.  So as we'll kind of be discussing here today there's not everything is clearly well defined with nice bracketed ends on either side. The diet is totally not. Oh, there we go. Okay. Finally loaded for me. Hopefully others can see it basically it's just a concept picture, which reinforces the idea that when we're looking into the past we're really only seeing a piece of the overall picture of extinction. So when you think about the way that things fossilize. We're looking at kind of a whole ecosystem and typically things that have hard parts or what are actually fossilizing. So things that have bones, especially large things that have bones like dinosaurs or crocodiles and turtles have a much better chance of fossilizing. So if you think about all the tiny little things all the insects all the slugs the amoebas really have very very little chance of even becoming a fossil and then being able to actually recognize what those things were and the diversity of them and how they went extinct. And when we're looking into the past we're really just getting a biased glimpse of the past now relatively speaking we can say well a lot of the things that we are finding are going extinct at this time so regardless we are looking at a massive change over things but it could actually be far worse than what we're seeing. And especially when we start to consider something like the number of species that are alive today, which is also really hard to get a handle on we're at over a million of just named species of things. But when you start trying to factor in the kinds of things that we don't know that are even alive today, it's potentially even getting into over 8 million species alive today. That's one geologic moment in time if we go back in time, we're looking at quite likely billions and billions of species going into the fossil record far far far more than we've actually been able to recognize. And so it's this problem where extinction is, we're losing things that we don't even know we have. And that's true, not only for the past but even for our modern ecosystem. So can we go to the next slide. And I'll catch up on some. Oh, that one loaded real quick. So there have been some attempts to try and put some numbers on extinction rates right now. So this neat study in 2015 basically used the IUCN. I should have looked up it stands it's a conservation network that basically keeps track of the endangered and threatened species across the world today. Now this has very strict guidelines behind what actually counts as extinction. So when you look at this graph you're actually looking at a highly conservative estimate of the rates of extinction here. And we're looking at based on the bottom is more or less historical records so since we're able to start keeping track of that. And if you look at the bottom there there's a dotted line that says background, that is the rate at which we would naturally expect things to go extinct. Because things come and go that's a normal thing. What we're looking at is basically no matter how you break down the records and these are pretty biased towards vertebrates. The rates are increasing rapidly as we go towards the more modern era. This is under kind of the most conservative ways that we can possibly put this together. We're still looking at rates of extinction that are much, much higher than we would expect as background rates of extinction. And those rates are rapidly increasing it towards the modern era. So that means that even by the most conservative versions that we can find those extinction rates are far exceeding what we would naturally expect. That's a good indicator that you're going into a mass extinction event and not just normal kind of ups and downs you would normally get. Also is a pretty good correlation towards kind of the effects that humans are having on their environments and giving you kind of better support for us defining a new geologic era based on the kinds of things that were to our environments and to these things. So it's putting into real terms and putting some numbers on something that we're also seeing quite. So it's often typical to kind of think of the big elephants and stuff like that and okay we still have elephants we still have cheetahs even though they're rare. But there's a lot of other things that we're you know maybe less familiar with that are dying out. This is kind of feel. Can we go to the next slide? So Lonesome George. Lonesome George is a good example of modern extinctions now. George was a Galapagos tortoise. He lived specifically on the island of Pinta and he was the last known representative of a subspecies of the Galapagos tortoise. And the reason why we can say that pretty darn confidently as they made a massive effort is really just one island that was known from and they basically combed the whole thing and a massive survey got people climbing over every square inch of that island and did not find any other tortoises. They did find a few bones of one and that was. So they relocated Lonesome George to a wildlife preserve on another island in the Galapagos where he lived out the rest of his days and they made strong very very strong efforts to try and get him to successfully breed with any female Galapagos tortoise. Realizing that you know any children would be hybrids but trying to conserve some of his genetic information. Ultimately those efforts failed. They did collect genetic information from George so he could be cloned. He did live over 100 years old so that's pretty darn good and he lived out the end of his life quite comfortably and he was taxidermied so you can still go and see him on display in on the big reserve on Santa Cruz and the Galapagos. So perhaps his genetic information will still live on in the future. But this is a case where we're able to really document the very very end of a species and by most definitions that subspecies is now quite extinct. Then potentially could bring it back and then through cloning and then that becomes a little bit more hazy again whether constitutes extinction. But there are a few cases in modern systems in which we can really document exactly very very end. There's a similar scenario for the Tasmanian tiger and the passenger pigeon and the quagga which are all animals that died out within human time. And the last known representative died within activities so we know exactly what happened. There's of course many other examples in which these wild some definitions where if they die out in the wild they're already considered extinct. But then if you bring them back into the wild does that make it non extinct. It's a lot of gray air. And we go to the next slide and I'll read some read up here. It is incredibly sad. There was a reason why George was called lonesome George in the end or Solitario Jorge. So this is a vulnerability map that was done just a couple of years ago showing basically kind of when you're trying to conserve not just a single species but you're trying to conserve ecosystems. This is a far better way to try and conserve species on the whole. So if you imagine trying to just save the elephant which is great we should save elephants. But a much better way to save the elephant is to save the habitat that it lives in and then by proxy you're saving a lot of the other animals in its environment some of which you may not even know exists there. So that also gives the elephant a much better chance of moving on and propagating and being successful by giving it all the cohabitants that it needs in order to survive. So this is kind of the kind of perhaps more effective way of conserving species in the futures by going to these areas of high vulnerability and these are areas that are typically quite species rich. The darkest colors in terrestrial ecosystems are the Amazon and Central Africa and Southeast Asia to the places where we have the most species just in general, as well as the darkest blues in the tropical areas of the Caribbean and Southeast Asia again. So these are areas that are at highest risk, as well as maybe a bit more surprisingly into kind of more temperate landscapes across Central Asia and into Europe. Now a lot of this is from habitat degradation as well as climate change. So this is where we're anticipating the greatest need for conservation based on changes happening to. Of course those are not exclusive areas, huge areas of North America and in other parts of South America, Africa basically the world over has areas that are quite at risk as well and we shouldn't necessarily ignore those. That's probably where there are the greatest vulnerability and that's probably where it just can serve as much species and as many as much ecosystems that's where it could be most common. I think I had one more slide. Can we advance that? Nope, that was it. So that's kind of a little bit of a depressing overview. Extinction is not the most uplifting topic. Hopefully we'll hit some hopeful notes in there that make it a little less depressing, but so I'll turn this over to, I think, was it Mike had a few slides as well. Yeah, before we move on to, I think, I think actually was Phil or slash Vic was going to go next. And but Alex, I wanted to follow up on one of your slides that suggested or indicated that mass extinctions are associated with geological eras. What I'm thinking about I saw when I was sort of preparing for today I saw a chart showing sort of the shrinkage in the in the ranges of like certain animals for example one that stuck at stuck out of me was the shrinkage of the range of lions in Africa, which at one time roamed huge swaths of the continent. But but now their ranges have have shrunk down basically what looked like basically sort of national parks in various African countries. And so that seems to be due to habitat loss and deforestation and so forth, the sort of turning over a lot of the land into farmland for example and things like that. And then of course there is also climate change. So my question is, is so assuming we are in the midst of a new mass extinction. Is it such that we would predict it would be reflected in the in the geological record is there sort of what kind of what what do you what. How would it be reflected in the geological area to kind of conform with the idea that mass extinctions are correlated with geological eras. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah, no. And it's one of those that's kind of one of the whole issues with defining the Anthropocene is that these are usually defined on geologic boundaries which geology is a slow process. So the idea is that you would find as fossils, a large change over in the kinds of animals from one side of the boundary to the other. So that you would go from potentially a very species rich fossil record with bones and other remains of creatures across the board. And then a lot of those lineages dying out, more or less simultaneously when I say simultaneous I mean on a geologic scale. So something even over the course of 1000 or 10,000 years is still more or less considered the same time. Yeah, and that's certainly within kind of, you know, a lot of the historical extinctions are well within that timeframe. So the idea is that you would have less things going into the pipeline to become fossils. So you would see a lot of things dying out and I think a lot of the expectation is that that would be well documented but it's something that wouldn't really be able to be compared to past extinctions until that geologic process can take its time, which, you know, could take 1000 years and by which time all of us talking right now would be dead. So it's hard to really define while you're going through it when you're talking about geologic systems. But the idea is that that should carry through in a very, very similar way in the form of those fossils not showing up as we go into the Anthropocene because those lines have gone. Yeah, you know, one also preparing today what an example that kind of stuck out at me about how these things can be reflected in the rock layers is as the Earth's as the atmospheric CO2 has fluctuated throughout the Earth's history. There have been periods where, you know, a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere which acidifies the oceans, which makes it hard for shelled creatures to make shells, so they go extinct. And those periods are reflected by dark layers because, you know, there aren't any shelled animals.  So that's just kind of another kind of an example of how of how the this history is recorded in the rock layers. Great. And ocean acidification, which is something we are facing currently as we're basically it's all carbon driven is was one of the the major factors thought to be the major factor in the largest extinction of all time the one that ended the era before the age of the dynamic. Yeah, so it can absolutely be a mass extinction driver. Fascinating. Okay, well, thank you very much. That was a really, really good presentation. And, Vic, why don't you take over and give us your thoughts. Sure. Okay, first thing is I'm not an expert. I'm a concerned scientist. Okay. I like to study lots of different things. So it's nice to hear from people that actually do it for a living. There's some thoughts on the slides up there. There's some thoughts that kind of cover some of the areas that we've talked about a little bit is one is kind of definition. So here again, since I'm not an expert, I like I love to hear the audience talk about things so that they can correct anything I say or agree or disagree or whatever that sort of thing. Yeah, citizen scientists right world, world citizen scientists so under definition I was thinking. Technically extinction means like there's no more. Okay, species is gone but when you say what about in the wild. In other words, we have several species. Now that basically there are more in zoos in captivity or than there are in the wild. So you could say extinction in the wild, which in zoos and such like that they you're not going to have a very diverse gene pool either. So the idea is that once you get to a point where the gene pool is so low, you also risk in other words you also risk extinction and you also risk higher vulnerability. There are humans if you actually study it a bit. There's a lot of studies that say that humans got down to only 200,000 individuals in Africa during a big change in climate. Some time ago and that's basically everybody on earth is related to those 200,000 humans that's why we can trace the mutations and such through the world for people that did those things. So why distinctions occur? Well, as I'm not going to read the slides up there, but I'm just going to talk a little bit about it, but why does extinction, why does extinction occur? Well, basically failure to adapt for, yeah, colocanth. Okay, that's actually one of the things I was going to mention is sometimes we think things are extinct, but they may just be on islands or in the case of the colocanth they were found off of eastern Madagascar someplace, but there again they're probably fairly vulnerable as far as the species. So failure to adapt. Now in some cases failure to adapt, remember that there were like 5 billion passenger pigeons. If I've got the right ones, passenger pigeons about 100 years ago and they were all killed by hunters and other people in the United States even though they were quite numerous, killed within a fairly short period of time. So failure to adapt, certainly an asteroid is not something you can adapt to quickly or hunting or habitat loss is difficult. So the big thing is, as the slide showed earlier, is at what rate would we expect changes, speciation stuff to occur. And in this case there are a lot of plants, animals of all kinds, which are not adapting well to the changes, whether the changes are climate changes, lots of habitat changes, acidic ocean conditions, all of that. So it'd be very interesting to see that. So that's kind of why we're saying that there is a recent extinction because there are a lot of animals which populations. Interestingly enough, I was at a real, not real, sorry, this is as real as it gets, but I was at a first life class just in between the events this morning talking about bird population. And one of the things they mentioned was that in the case of grassland birds, for example, the population is 50% lower than it was in 1970s. It was or in the cases of other birds anywhere from 30% to 50%. So bird populations have gone down tremendously. I'll show you a couple slides here in a minute. Let me continue with some of the ideas on this one. First of all, remember that extinction is a natural process. I mean, that's partly what evolution is all about is to try to adapt to different niches and changes and such. And that everything is going to go extinct, including humans one day, a little faster than we want to if we don't watch it. Running out of chicken, not sure. But see, that was part of the problem with the Dodo, of course, is that they didn't have chicken on Mauritius. And so the Dodo's were big flightless birds that were easily preyed on. And same thing with a lot of the flightless birds on islands in the world. I don't know, probably tasted like chicken. Okay. So in any case, species typically may last about 10 million years, although we know for a fact that there are species that are hundreds of millions, if not a billion years old that haven't changed very much at all, including the arid, the crocodiles, okay, and other species that haven't changed a lot. So there, yeah, island biogeography is very interesting about how the animals adapt to islands by becoming smaller and such like that. So in any case, in order in order to because there's not a lot of food and other sources. One of the things by recent extinctions is that we can, whether you like it or not, we can trace a lot of them to human cause with 7.7 billion people in the world with technology. We can wreak havoc on habitats so we can build freeways, we can take out trees, we can change the climate and that sort of thing. So we really are changing what would normally occur by way of natural extinction or evolution. So why should we care? I mean, okay, we can easily live in Antarctica or we can live in the tropics. In other words, humans, it's going to take a while for us to die out unless we kind of do things to ourselves. But why should we care? Well, partly because can somebody tell me what that game is? I've been trying to think about that all morning. The one where you stack stuff up and then you have to take the blocks out or you have to take little pieces out. Anybody remember what that game is? Yeah, that one. Okay, my grandkids love it. And we were playing it, well, Tetris also. But on the Jenga game, essentially you pull out little blocks. And the objective is to keep pulling out blocks until the whole thing collapses. And that's part of the problem. It's like, okay, maybe there's some frog in a pond in Death Valley or something. But it's not just the frog in the pond in the Death Valley, it's the whole ecosystem. Something eats that frog or the frog eats something and you're going to change the conditions of the ecosystem. And then you're going to have a domino effect to where it's going to change things to where it's noticeable. The other thing I wonder about is the do we care more about the species that we like? In other words, if the tiger dies, we're going to be very distressed. But what about the little frog in the pond in the whatever? In other words, which one has the greater impact on the world? Let me show you a couple of the slides that I have here. Yeah, mosquitoes, for example. In other words, a lot of people go, yay, let's get rid of mosquitoes, but mosquitoes have an ecological niche. Now here's another slide of the extinction of dense and I looked it up as to what kinds of things happen. And you'll notice that there's quite a few things happening in the early part of the Earth because the Earth was changing a lot. I mean, at one time we didn't have any oxygen. So there were extinction events long ago until the anaerobic organisms came into being. And then there was snowball and then there were lots of other... In other words, the world's life was a bit fragile back in the old days. And so you can see a little bit of some of those mass extinctions. Now notice that the blue is everywhere. In other words, there are extinctions that happen all the time. It's just not quite as many, quite as much percent. And then again, for example, with the dinosaurs, you've got things that were smaller than 5 kilograms on Earth actually survived. So you had birds survived. You had mammals survived. It was just the really large creatures who could not last that nuclear winter, so to speak, when the asteroid hit. And also, on a lot of these extinctions, it's not one event. I once had, when I was in the military, one of my jobs was as investigating accidents. And invariably, it's not one event. In fact, somebody mentioned it earlier that one of the issues of some of these extinctions, like I think the Dodo, somebody mentioned, is that there were also things happening on that island at the time. So in other words, you have very fragile ecosystems where lots happening. It may be, in the case of, if you look at the extinctions up there, it may be vast lava fields. Changes due to tectonic forces, like the Deccan Plateau thing, I believe, in India. And also in the Siberian areas where you have huge lava fields changing the composition in the air. Sometimes you have asteroids, they do come. And then, of course, we're bombarded by particles every day, tons of particles in the upper atmosphere. We don't usually have the really large ones hit except for every once in a while. And somebody mentioned perturbations in their orbit due to the Oort cloud and other things. And then, of course, global cooling and warming and things. Sometimes people, yeah, exactly the volcanism and stuff. So basically, a lot of people, sometimes people who don't want to face the idea of extinctions or the idea that humans are involved. Yes, we are. Okay. We'll say, well, you know, there were times of the Earth's history where there was more carbon dioxide or more of this. Well, I got to tell you, I don't want to go back to Snowball Earth. I don't want to have all the species we recognize disappear. And I don't want to live in the swamps of the dinosaur ages. The other thing is, as we, no one showed the population. Did somebody show population? No, I think that was the other class that was actually the first life class. Whatever they're showing population of humans is we are in a very tenuous speaking of tenuous situations as we continue to grow in population in the Earth. We're becoming in a more tenuous situation ourselves. Part of it is because a lot of people live right within a meter of sea level. Part of it is because with climate change, we're getting changes in the availability of water. We're getting changes in climate and that is more difficult to support. More difficult to support the types of crops. In fact, there was kind of a study that said that the middle of the United States, it won't be long within the next century that the conditions will be not right for a lot of the bread and basket of the United States. And that it will basically go up to Canada. And so basically Canada will become, or can, will have the same sorts of conditions that we have now in the middle of the United States. And maybe they'll become more of a bread and basket. Okay, so that's something to think about there. The next one that I'm going to show you here was actually a slide that I had in a presentation this morning. And it has to do with the natural cycles of plants and animals. And this has to do a bit with the ecological side of this. So let's take a look. I learned a new word. It's a phenology. Phenology is basically the study of life cycles that are influenced by seasonal and annual variations in climate. And what, let's take a look at how this might happen. So for example, I hope not tagline, frankly, I hope they become extinct. But that's my own opinion is. So here's how it can happen is birds have evolved over time period to take their migratory. They don't just go, okay, let's go south for the winter and because we want to go down to Rio and then come back up here, that kind of stuff. They have evolved over years to go along migratory routes and to stay in places where there's an abundance of food. And then they come back when there is a, it basically coincides with the peak availability of food sources. Okay. And so what's happening is that as things get warmer in the northern latitudes is plants grow up earlier and then they get their nice young leaves early and insects don't have as hard a time. And so they come out earlier. They eat the young leaves.  And so the birds go arrive late, kind of like, you know, flying in general where you arrive late. But in case birds come back to where they hope that there's a lot of food and then they find, oh, my, we're a little late. You know, plants are already out, plants have been eaten. The insects are, yeah, birds may have lost their luggage or just, they're all flying in mass. And so, you know, you get delayed on the tarmac and that kind of stuff. Okay. So in any case, so in any case, the birds come back. There isn't as much food sources as they were expecting. And so the poor little baby birds don't have as much food as they need to. Some of them starve. And so the populations of the bird populations go down. Well, by how much? Well, let's take a look at this. We may not like insects as much as we like tigers or little baby birds. But this is a slide of the insect decline. And so once you start having the base part of, in other words, like in the oceans, when you start having sick conditions, now you have animals that have calcium shells. You know, it's not just the reef. It's the diatoms and others that you're going to have less of. Well, they're the chain. Everybody eats them. So at least at the bottom of the food chain. So now you have the same problem that the birds have where there's not the food to support the population. And then you have those go down. And so it just ripples all the way up to the top of the food chain, which is us. You see the thing with the caddis flies, butterflies, beetles, bees, et cetera, going down. A lot of those are food sources for higher parts of the population. So why should we care about insects? Well, I added a few things to this slide here is one, their major food source. Okay. The other thing is they do things for us that we may not always recognize such as pollinate plants. They prey on pests. They break down dead plants and animals and done. They aerate and fertilize the soil. So without insects, there probably wouldn't be the plants that we eat. Or if they're in the plants, we eat and there aren't humans. Okay. So that's one of the issues. Now you go up a little further on the food chain and you got the birds. We've already mentioned something about birds decreasing. This is part of the issue right here is that part of it has to do with loss of habitat, which by the way, hey, how did that happen? Well, part of it's us, part of it's climate change, that sort of thing. And it's increasing. As I mentioned, anything from 30 to 50% of bird population since 1970 have decreased. Back a long time ago, I used to hear a lot more birds. And there were a lot more insects hitting my windshield than there are today. And it's not just because I'm getting old and I can't hear the birds. It's real. Okay. And so why should we care about birds? Well, almost the same reason is we care about the insects. Birds eat the insects that are harmful to us. Birds help pollinate plants. Birds disperse seeds. Well, remember, extinction is kind of like statistics. Extinction is the larger picture.  So birds disperse seeds. And there are a lot of trees and other plants that count on birds to basically poop out the seeds and make sure that they continue to grow with a little bit of fertilizer. Okay. And birds eat animal pests.  They are aesthetically pleasing to us. Yeah. All of that with all of the changes and the types of things we do that you might not even expect. And let me see if I have one other slide. Oh, that's the, that's the one that I did this morning and that you can see again later. So I'll take that copy out quick. Okay. All right. Fantastic. That was very helpful. Before we move along to Mike, I wanted to inject an additional thought just to kind of push back on this idea a little bit before we get too worked up. And I was particularly struck by your Jenga analogy because there is a school of thought that thinks that this notion that we are in the midst of a new great extinction is hysterical and that we, that it's not that bad. And the, the, I think it's kind of a two pronged argument. One is that it fails to recognize the true scale of previous mass extinctions and how cataclysmic they really were.  And I think especially the, well, I forget the terms and so forth. So they are really absolutely catastrophic. And the idea is that they are the result. These great mass extinctions are the result of essentially a network failure. And so, so to understand this, you have to understand sort of the theory behind networks. And the idea is that once a network collapses, there is nothing you can do about it. And the analogy is that once the Jenga tower begins to fall, right, there's nothing you can do. You can't go back and start inserting bricks into the tower to reconstitute it. It simply collapses automatically. And there's no intervention possible. So the idea is that if we are, in fact, in the midst of another great mass extinction, it's too late to do anything. The network has collapsed. So, and I think there is some controversy about really where are we? Are we, is the network collapsed? And there's nothing we can do.  Or are we, is it still early enough to have some useful interventions? And then finally, I just also want to make the point that there are some people who believe that this new mass extinction has been going on for a long time, like maybe as early as the Middle Ages for like 500 years. Because these things happen over geological time periods. And it's possible that human activities are accelerating the phenomenon during the Anthropocene age. But I should say, I guess, the result of industrialization and conversion of forest to farmland and all of that sort of stuff may be accelerating it, but did not start it. That it started earlier on also. And I guess I'm not quite sure what the factors are, because I'm not sure how much human influence was, how much the, how much pre-industrial human activity could account for that. So it may have started really without much human, without much being attributed to human activities. But then humans just poured gasoline on the fire, so to speak. So I just wanted to make those points before we move on and hopefully we can kind of hash that out a little bit about what, you know, has the network collapsed or is it only about to collapse. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Mike and let him throw in his two cents on all this. Wow, the network collapse. Okay, this is a fun note to end on. And I think I'm going to pick it up and go with it. And talking about network collapse. So everything we know about the extinctions comes from the geological record. And we can read the geological record in many ways. We can look at the fossil record and the orders of the fossils in the rocks. And presumably rocks found deeper down are older than rocks that are found on top. Of course, if there's mountain building and the like, there may be some flipping of orders. But generally there's an agreed on order in which different species show up in the fossil record. And that gives us very good relative dates, you know, basically from different places on the planet. If you see the same sorts of fossils, you can generally think that the rocks are the same ages. We can also do better than relative ages. We can do various dating-type analyses. And dating rocks is actually very interesting. Radioactive dating is wonderful. It's not carbon-14 dating. Some of you may be familiar with C14 dating. C14 doesn't live long enough for us to really go back into the geological record. It's really good to about 70,000 years or something. Things like potassium argon dating, where radioactive potassium turns into argon. I think it's potassium 40. Looking at how various types of uranium, uranium 238 has half-life of a couple of billion years. Now it turns into lead. Basically looking at these traces of elements in rock samples can give us a good idea of their absolute ages. So what the comment I'm trying to boil the stem to is that we know a lot of things about biodiversity from the fossil record. We may not be able to see every single life form that has ever existed in the fossil record. It's pretty much a crapshoot as to how things are going to fossilize. But we can see these events where all the different types of life suddenly cease. And we've seen graphs. We've seen either five or some people count previous extinction of events. And each of these events carries with it a signature or several signatures in the rocks. So things that can cause extinctions include climate change. Include volcanism and volcanoes, spew carbon dioxide and sulfur things into the atmosphere. Combinations of events can lead to weakness in the biodiversity which may be tipped into a mass extinction by some precipitating event too. A couple of examples of these types of events. Things that we can be careful of, things that might have been seen in the past. There's, for example, a hypothesis about hydrogen sulfide being emitted from the oceans, H2S. May not smell like rotten eggs and in small doses it's merely unpleasant. You guys are very sensitive to this chemical. It smells terrible. But it doesn't take much of it, doesn't take many parts per million of it for it to quickly build up into toxic levels. If we have anoxic ocean floors perhaps because of global climate changes that changed the way in which ocean currents run then there's a risk of H2S, another hypothesis, is the melting of clathrates. Clathrate is a term of like one compound crystallizing with another and the one I'm thinking of is methane clathrate. It's basically methane hydrate. So methane and water under high pressure form a solid. And it's thought that there's all sorts of this solid on the margins of the continents where it's cold enough and high pressure enough. Almost like a snow line on a mountain in reverse. The deeper you go the more of this stuff would be. For oceans warm up that stuff destabilizes and pumps methane into the atmosphere. There's a greenhouse gas and that accelerates the climate change. So moving forward we are going to leave traces in the fossil record. I believe we're already doing so. There's going to be a micro plastics layer in rocks and sediments around the world that will define at least our advent on the stage much like the iridium traces at the KT boundary define or point to an asteroid impact 66 million years ago. This layer is going to also probably show things like unusual isotope abundances. We can expect different isotope levels than we would expect from a baseline simply because we've had clear accidents and we've had above ground atomic testing. So going into the future there are all sorts of weaknesses in the biosphere that we need to be careful of. We need to have an environment that supports agriculture. Fertilizers are necessary for to feed everybody on the planet. The nitrogen infertilizer is primarily coming from the Haber-Bosch process and basically you have to take nitrogen and hydrogen which is made from hydrocarbons giving you CO2 and you have to pressurize them over iron powder at like 500 degrees Celsius. Again heated up with fossil fuels. This is a way of turning fossil fuels into ammonia which is used as fertilizers to feed people. Not really sustainable thing. Especially when you consider there's other elements in fertilizers we have to be careful of. Phosphate comes from rocks it's mined and when we look at how many more phosphate bearing like rich deposits there are that's going to put an upper limit on the type of agriculture but maybe it's a couple of hundred years more or less. So essentially I didn't want to give a huge presentation but I did want to give confidence in how we know what we know about the geologic record and these extinction events and emphasize that the extinction event we're going through we are not immune to it from our activities. And with that I'll pass it back on to Mike. Thanks Mike. I appreciate that perspective. I do kind of want to take this opportunity even though we're a little bit low on time. I do want to kind of expand on this notion of the network collapse. I think what I'd like I linked to an article up there just to kind of it's a little bit of a contrarian view I suppose but I think it is worth talking about. Let me see if I can find the section here. So this is a guy Doug Irwin who I don't really know who he is but apparently he is a member of the Geological Society of America I guess he's a Smithsonian paleontologist so in this Atlantic article he has a couple of he has some interesting thoughts if we're really in a mass extinction then go get a case of scotch people who claim we're in the sixth math extinction don't understand enough about mass extinctions to a certain extent they're claiming it as a way of frightening people. He says it's a network collapse problem just like power grids network dynamics research has been getting ton of money from DARPA. They're all physicists studying about it. The secret to power grids is that nobody knows how they work and it's the same problem in ecosystems. Irwin's other point that the magnitude of the big five mass extinctions and there's past dwarfs humanity's destruction thus far as he talks about passenger pigeons and how there were enough of them to blacken the sky at one time but now they're all gone and he questions but would there be any fossil record of them? This massive population might not leave any fossil record and he says when mass extinctions hit they don't just take out the big charismatic mega fauna like elephants or niche ecosystems like cloud forests they take out hardy and ubiquitous organisms as well like clams and plants and insects.  So that's a pretty compelling statement and again sort of begs the question about sort of where are we in this process? The idea he mentions insects specifically and the idea that insects populations are declining is alarming because insects I think would be a significant trip hammer into a mass extinction network collapse. Right so I mean I think the point is you know we should still be acting whether or not we consider this to be a current mass extinction or not and I mean because you're defining things geologically and humans don't live on geologic time it becomes very difficult to compare those things really to each other but I think there's at least some benefit to having that discussion hopefully in order to help enact action and changes in policy and in the way that we handle conservation there is some value to considering this as a large extinction event that is largely human driven. Yeah and I think you know one thing that makes this current six mass extinction different is that humans are alive to observe it. You know in the past you know this was the you know the life was just a victim of the circumstances leading to extinction but now humans exist and we are seeing it happen and we're documenting it and maybe that is maybe that's a new wrinkle in this phenomenon where you know whereas perhaps in the past maybe it would have been too late the network would already be collapsing and there's nothing we could do there's nothing that could stop it but now humans exist and maybe there is an opportunity to intervene there you know in other words the the we can we can change the algorithm of the network collapse and there still may be time to do that. So if no one has any other I guess concluding remarks or thoughts do we have any comments in our nearby chat here? Let's see let me scroll up a little bit here see what people are talking about. So I'll just say like I don't think we're at the point where we can't do anything I certainly think there's lots of efforts that we can and should be doing so I think in that sense you know we're not at a point where everything's going to just collapse and we might as well just drink ourselves to death so I think there's opportunities there to to really make impactful changes and even if we can't fully stem the tide of change we can at least kind of lessen the blow a little and I think that's definitely worth our time and energy. Yeah Alex I also just saw your comment in nearby chat that there is a fossil record of passenger pigeons. So that's it yeah so that's very interesting okay so okay well I think that's pretty good I think that's a pretty good stopping point I think there's some looking through the comments here and I think what you all have been saying I have come down to that also I did want to put in that contrarian view I just feel like it wouldn't be fair to exclude it from this discussion but it does seem to me that evidence suggests that it is certainly worth making whatever efforts we can to you know to save what we can and so with that I so hopefully on that optimistic note why don't we go ahead and and bring today's discussion to a close I want to thank my panelists for all their work preparing their slide presentations and gathering their thoughts for this topic and also thanks to all the students here attending today and we'll look forward to another one next month.


It's all coming after me. No, I can't deal with it. Well, that's really what a compound schedule is like See, that's the term compound schedule really compound schedules a global term, right? So there's lots of different types of compound schedules but basically all you're doing is Establishing a schedule using all the other schedules of reinforcement or extinction or all the ones out there You know, you got the F-R, the V-I-Z, the F-I-Z, F-I-Z, all the whatever's right And we got those four basic ones, then you have extinction schedules and you get the DR schedules You know, you can combine those things together and when you do it becomes a compound schedule as you might imagine It can be discriminated, you're on this schedule, you're on that schedule, you're on those schedules Whatever it is or it cannot be that which is rather evil like a casino But life is confusing and complex and in the lab we tend to break these things down into really small pieces But we can put them back together to represent the real world using compound schedules


Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you including Miranda Janell, Justin Zellers and Pepper Geesey. Coming up on DTNS SoundCloud bets on algorithms to help you find better music, vehicle data could make us all safer, and do we focus too much on bias in AI? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday. May the fourth be with you. 2022 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We are going to talk about a hot button issue. It's not Twitter. Actually, we will talk about Twitter. But we're going to talk about bias in AI. But first, a few tech things you should know. Samsung's memory manufacturing is arguably more successful than its phones. The company just announced Universal Flash Storage 4.0, which can achieve 23.2 gigabits per second per lane. 30 would be better, but 23 is still pretty good, which is double what UFS 3.1 could do. This helps memory keep up with increasing throughput that comes from faster internet service like 5G. It's also 46% more power efficient than 3.1, so you get faster storage and also better battery life. And the 1 terabyte UFS 4.0 module is a hair smaller than the 512 gigabyte UFS 3.1 module. So you might say, sounds great. When do I get it? Samsung will begin mass production in Q3 of this year, meaning it could start showing up in phones by the end of the year and certainly in early 2023. The company also introduced pro-endurance microSD cards aimed at dashcams that can record continuously for 16 years. The previous max was five years without stopping, so quite a jump. No kidding. Here's my 16 years of dashcam footage. Please review it. Let's clear out all the Elon Musk buying Twitter stories right now. This shouldn't take long, so you don't even have to skip ahead too far if you're trying to avoid it. The chair of the UK Parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, Julian Knight, has invited Musk to testify about his plans for Twitter. I guess he won't go, but he got invited. Musk has been talking to private investors who might go in on the deal with him, including existing shareholders that might be able to maintain their stake. He also says that he might take Twitter public again three years after he takes it private, which he plans to do on the close of the deal. A lot of companies have done that. Dell has done that, and he suggested he might charge for government and commercial use. There you go. That's it. That's the tweet. AMD plans to release a new gaming laptop CPU line code named Dragonrange designed for high power machines with a 55 watt TDP and up. There are 20 millimeter thick laptops that probably need to be plugged in most of the time. It's also AMD's shot at capturing the top of the laptop gaming market, arguably already dominating the midrange and below. AMD also announced a lower power Phoenix line of chips for thinner machines at 35 to 45 watts of power. Both will be part of the Ryzen 7000 series based on the Zen 4 architecture and will arrive in 2023. AMD will give more details on them before then, so the company sets. In fact, AMD said that next quarter it will start reporting gaming as its own financial segment. So expect more details on all of this at the June Analyst Day. All right. We have continually covered the U.S. dispute between mobile carriers and the Federal Aviation Administration and airlines over the deployment of C-Band 5G wireless. We have a whole episode of Know a Little More about it if you want to dig in. The second version is that while C-Band wireless does not operate in the same bandwidth as airplane altimeters, which are very important for landing safely, especially in fog, some older altimeters don't properly filter out all the C-Band transmission. And the fight has been over whose responsibility that is. Should they replace their old altimeters or should the carriers modify how they broadcast around airports? Right now, carriers are biting by restrictions near airports, but that goes away July 2022. Reuters reports that the FAA is meeting Wednesday with telecom and airline officials to push to retrofit and eventually replace altimeters that might face interference from C-Band 5G. The U.S. nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research studied usage of CHIVO, that's El Salvador's national Bitcoin wallet. Since it launched last September, around half of Salvadorans have downloaded the wallet, which came with a $30 incentive, you know, just to get you started. Of those who downloaded it though, 61% have stopped using it. Remaining users tend to be unbanked people who use it to hold and transfer dollars. Yeah, so maybe not the glowing success some people would have liked. But there you go. That's the update. All right. We got some car news, Scott. Well, I had an experience last week where I got to get an up close and personal experience with a Rivian truck in the famous gear tunnel. And one of the things I learned about it that I didn't know is how much data this thing collects. It's always taking pictures, always taking video, always recording data. So these, we know this is already happening. They're out on the road. They're collecting data maybe more than ever before. And now we have a brand new effort. What is it? Yeah, GM. GM is partnering with a company called InRix to collect data from vehicles for U.S. transportation officials to analyze the data would be formatted for the transportation department's Safe Streets and Roads for All program, and would include pedestrian and construction worker data. So it's trying to prevent pedestrian and construction worker deaths. It could also be used by local governments for road safety projects, and also for Vision Zero, an effort to reduce fatalities and serious injuries on the road. I don't, it doesn't feel like it's the first time I've heard of this though. It's not like the first effort of its kind.  Honda Research Institute, USA announced a pilot program in December that would use data from cameras and GPS in its cars to help monitor road conditions and identify repairs for local transportation departments. That pilot program is taking place in Ohio. In December 2020, Europe's Data for Road Safety Initiative announced a long term deployment of a safety related traffic information system that would integrate data from cars and traffic systems. To create warnings for drivers of dangerous conditions. And the International Transport Forum runs the International Road Traffic and Accident Database, ERTOD, IRTAD, that contains a validated crash and exposure data from 32 countries, including the United States, going back to 1970. And it makes that data available for safety agencies to use as well. I feel like a lot of people will go, well, okay, we all want construction workers and anybody who might be crossing the road when cars are going by to be as safe as possible. But if you're collecting the data of how I was exceeding the speed limit for the last three days, is it going to come back to me in some way? I think that's where some of this, like, hmm, what are we really doing when this data comes in? Yeah, to me, I don't know. I just probably not a fair comparison, but it feels like browser data going back some years where the big concern was, well, with this new advent of cookies back when that was a new thing. And these ideas that you can kind of be tracked across the site you're on, as well as when you left, where did you go? And this sort of thing made a lot of people go, well, I don't want to be followed around. I don't want people to know everywhere that I'm going, whether or not you're up to something skeety or weird or whatever it doesn't matter. I just don't want people following me, especially, you know, government or big companies or whatever. And I feel like this is a little like that.  Because some people maybe don't want someone else to know that they, I don't know, they take a certain road on their commute or whatever the reasons may be. I can't help but feel the parallels from that, from that conversation for some reason. Yeah, and that's why it's important to, this is a great example of data collection does not immediately mean privacy violation. And in fact, data collection doesn't immediately mean ad targeting, which we all kind of jumped to the conclusion. Sometimes it's not about surveillance, it's about safety. Safety. This is important data to have to literally save people's lives, especially construction workers. People just kind of forget how much risk those construction workers are at when they're out doing highway work. So it's important, you guys are absolutely right, it's important that this data be privacy first. Most of these efforts have good privacy policies in place. And all of them at least say, and I haven't looked to see if they're audited, but they say that they are only aggregating data incidents. They're not tying it to like a license plate number or even a VIN or anything like that. They're just saying like this, you know, these amount of cars passed this place at this speed, that sort of stuff there. Yeah, there'll always be some percentage of people who just say, well, I don't believe them when they tell me that. And that's fine, whatever. There's always going to be that. But personally, I think data is important in almost every aspect of life these days. And I think this kind of data would go a long way to not just help us ease into the, you know, more energy efficient electric car era that we're slowly entering into or automation. I mean, these things are going to benefit from that data, of course, but just good old fashioned. How's that stretch of the highway performing data is really interesting and not only interesting, but saves lives, saves money, saves a lot of headache. So I want my car to tell a database that will use that knowledge that this road needs work.  You know, this road is crumbling like, yeah, let me opt in, I guess, but do that and integrate it more. Let's use organizations like ERTOD to compile this and make it available to everybody who can use it. Transportation agencies, car companies, road repair, etc. Music streaming services are a convenient way to listen to music you want to listen to. I think we all agree on that. But sometimes it's really difficult to find good new stuff. That's always the trick. How good is the recommendation? Sounds like SoundCloud's got an idea, Sarah. Indeed, yeah. So I'm one of those people who I tend to kind of listen to the same stuff over and over because discovery can be overwhelming to me. And I don't always get what I want if I'm just kind of trying new music unless it was specifically recommended by a friend, etc. SoundCloud has acquired a company called Museo. That's M-U-S-I-I-O. It's an audio-AI company that can listen to new music and identify what makes a hit a hit. SoundCloud says it wants to use Museo to sort through its library of largely amateur music. Not everything on SoundCloud is amateur music, but there's a lot of it. And also help people discover things that they might love but might not find on their own. Because Museo's tools can sift through hours of music, countless hours in fact, and then pick up the songs that have certain patterns and characteristics that correlate with being popular. This is a bit of a math project, really. Yeah, and they're not the only ones doing it, right? Who else is out there doing this? Yeah, so Music Distribution Platform Tunecore announced back in February that it's partnering with LAB's music startup Fuego. That's F-W-A-Y-G-E-O. Get it? It also uses AI to match listeners with creators. So it's a little bit different, but the idea is to get a creator to be able to have a deeper connection with somebody who really likes the music that would not have found them otherwise. Tunecore is a division of global digital music company called Believe. It's based in Paris, France. Fuego is a mobile music discovery platform which helps independent artists increase their exposure, also their earnings potentially, and they launched in beta last year. Along the same lines, DIY music distributor DistroKid, it's been around for some time now, has an AI bot already in place that bot is named Dave. And it reviews tracks and ranks qualities like danceability, speechiness. Now you might say, well, okay, what does all that mean? Results, at least, as far as I checked it out, a little varied. So for example, Dave's review of the song, if you want to build a legacy, you're going to have to break some legs. That is by an artist called Madison Minor. I included 3% speechiness, meaning the song probably doesn't have talking. I listened to the song. It's like a heavy metal song. So there was a lot of yelling, screaming. You might say, oh, okay, that's not rapping. You know, maybe there's some nuances there. But yeah, DistroKid invites people who have submitted music on its platform already to submit to Dave and see where people fall in the percentages of what is this music, how good is it to me based on what I want to listen to right now? One takeaway I have from just the recent years of streaming music, wherever the source is, that they all do okay with their algorithms and that approach. Spotify, Apple Music and others seem to do okay in that regard. But I'm a little surprised this announcement or this, let's say these movements are happening in the smaller, what we would consider the smaller areas of music recommendation on the internet. It isn't Spotify announcing a big AI initiative to improve their searchability or findability. It's not Apple announcing it either. It's coming from smaller places. I wonder if we'll see the big boys adopt a similar plan, something with AI. They just don't make as big of a deal about it, right? SoundCloud had to acquire a company. Spotify and Apple have both bought AI companies in the past. I think we're just less surprised and we don't talk about those as much because we expect those companies to buy AI. And we already know Spotify uses algorithms to recommend stuff. I think what's distinctive about this is SoundCloud is saying not just discovery. Jerdstar in our chat said, I don't think math solves music discovery well. It's a subjective issue. We don't just want more of the same. But that's not what SoundCloud's doing. They are looking through and saying, there's a lot of bad music here. Sorry guys, but there is. We can narrow it down for you and say, these are most like the kinds of music that succeed. And then still leave it up to you to subjectively decide which ones you like. And that's a little different than Spotify, which is trying to say, oh, well, we know you like this. Let me give you more like that. Yeah. Also, this is, you know, just to be clear for all of us here. Yes, this can be helpful for discovery, but this is also really helpful for artists who already have a presence who are trying to figure out, oh, who's the next person to collab with or a manager. There's a lot of business, you know, senses of this that make a lot of sense because SoundCloud is a place where I mean, you know, many artists have kind of made a name for themselves. There are a lot of artists who obviously are trying to make a name for themselves who can't. And it's not because they're not talented. It's because there's just a lot of junk in there. Yeah, you're back to the discoverability problem. And it happens if every medium podcastings this way, certainly music. It's getting, I think to the point where streaming services have enough original content that they're struggling with discoverability of their newer shows if they're not, you know, marketing them right or whatever. So, you know, can we get the next weekend or the next post Malone or the next whoever to spring out of SoundCloud the way they have in the past, probably, but they were also among a fewer base then they had some advantages in that regard. And now those those places are full of really talented people. How do they get noticed? I think this is the track. This is the way you get it. It's like a diagnostic assistant, right? The doctor still determines whether you have the disease or not. But the AI can help narrow it down where to look, right? And give an advice of like, yep, might be that. And the doctor signs off SoundCloud is right now having to just kind of look into finding things. I'm sure people at SoundCloud go through tons of bad songs. They're like, Nope, Nope, Nope. Before they finally hit one like, Oh, that was pretty good. We can recommend that on the homepage. So this is going to make that job easier. Narrow it down so they're only listening to the likely candidates, which would theoretically make their homepage recommendations and their other recommendations better because they can now choose a wider variety because they have more to choose from. Whereas before they wasted a lot of time listening to things they were never going to highlight. It would be cool if they broke some real ground here so we could see that some of these ideas bleed into other mediums. I think podcasting in particular is really hard to get noticed if you're new. But even old timers like us, we do a new show. A lot of times we're counting on our current base to know about it and to spread the word. Very hard to get noticed for new people. So these kinds of initiatives I think are going to be really important for user-created stuff moving forward. Well, we have a little more to talk about on the ethics of using these kind of algorithms in a second. But first, I want your ideas. If you have ideas about hosts and guests from other podcasts and shows that we should have on this show, let us know. Check out our guest survey and put in your recommendations at dailytechnewshow.com. Well, in 2021 there were more than 400,000 research papers published on subjects relating to artificial intelligence. And that number continues to rise. As the work expands, so do the concerns around it. Ethics and bias in the field have led to multiple controversies. At Google, for example, and certainly elsewhere. We're among the outlets who have emphasized the importance of accounting for human bias in training data. It happens. How do we identify it? And how do we make it better? Protocol has an interview out today called Stop Worrying About AI Bias All The Time. What is going on with that? Yeah, no, it's not great. It's like, we're, like you said, we're always saying like, gotta be careful of bias. Here's a person saying, don't worry about it. It's not exactly what she's saying, though. It's an interview with Bina Aminath, Executive Director of the Global Deloitte AI Institute, and head of Trustworthy AI and Ethical Tech. You should read it. It's an excellent read over a protocol doing great work. Aminath knows what she's talking about. She's a database and SQL developer. She's worked in data science and AI for more than 10 years at Bank of America, GE, Hewlett Packard, and then joined Deloitte in 2019 and just wrote a book called Trustworthy AI. In that book, she writes the following. What passes for public scrutiny is too often just seductive clickbait headlines that fret over AI bias and point to a discreet use case. There's a lot of noise on AI ethics and trust, and it does not move us closer to clarity or consensus on how we keep trust in AI, commensurate with its power. Alright, so if you're someone who says, well, shouldn't we be concerned about AI bias? What direction is she going in? She's pointing out that it's not that there isn't bias or that we shouldn't be concerned about it. It's that we only think of bias in the cases where it matters. And there are lots of cases out there where other ethical concerns are important and those are getting overlooked. For example, she points out predicting jet engine failure or wind turbine power generation. Reliability, security, and safety are more important in those cases. She even uses a medical example practicing, you could say like, oh, well, the medicine, it should always be about bias. Well, whether an MRI machine might fail or not, bias might play a part, but it's probably not the most important part. If human data isn't involved in a decision, bias probably doesn't play an important part. AI ethics also need to account for situations where other concerns might outweigh bias concerns even when bias is a big concern. And she uses the example of identifying potential human trafficking victims as a place where there might be bias in your data set, but that bias might be tolerable if that algorithm is better at identifying victims of human trafficking over not using it. It's a question anyway. And I think what she's trying to say is not, don't take account of bias, but don't assume that's the only problem. So she's not saying that bias is a problem, just that bias needs to be, you need to identify it. And in certain situations it's helpful and in others it is not. Yeah. She wants the public conversation to not identify bias as the only problem. We need to add to the conversation. So she recommends that ethical practices should be part of every employee's training. If you're using AI in your business, the intern should know about it just as much as the data scientist, because every employee is going to use the tools that the data scientists create. The interns in HR is going to use that weed out algorithm that the data scientists created for HR, so they need to know what questions to ask and everything like that. So it strikes me that the concern here might be, this is my average brain speaking here, so I'm happy to be corrected on this, but it seems like the bias in AI is something that, let's say, lay folks, people who don't understand this stuff or haven't really paid a huge attention to it, they're going to be the ones with the least amount of information about what this even means, like what does it even mean to say an AI has bias? I feel like there's a big opportunity for education kind of across the board, and that's what she's doing. This is good, right? This is a step in that direction, certainly. But so that people understand the more and more our world gets wrapped up in automated systems and AI driven systems that we have as clear understanding as possible about what that actually means so that we can back off of the nerves about it a little bit. That seems like that's always kind of part of this problem. This is such advanced stuff. Whether we're talking about vehicle automation or a million other tech advancements, having a voice assistant in every room, this sort of thing, these scare people who haven't really been filled in. And so some of that is on them because they're just not bothering to fill themselves in. But this one feels like a complicated one, and I hope there's more of this, more talking about it, and less saying, well, it's AI, no one can understand. This is really high end stuff. And then everyone feels like, well, wait a minute, you can't do that. I need to know. I mean, it's built by humans. Right. It's not that hard to understand. I agree. There's a nuance to what she's saying, which I think gets lost in our simplified, 280 character conversations out there, which is, there's bias in AI. Well, then we should stop using it, right? If that's the extent of the conversation, you're going to come to the wrong conclusion because as she said, we can use these algorithms to predict jet engine failure. We can use them to stop human traffic. We use them for a lot of very good things. We just need to be responsible about how we use them. And that doesn't mean, oh, just ignore the bias. It means fix the bias and also make sure that you're paying attention to all of the ethical concerns and the other things you do as well. I think that's worth paying attention to. Yeah. It's not the same as saying we can't have uranium based decorations at this restaurant. No, we're going to go back and figure out how we can do it. This isn't that. This is an alterable, tweakable, look at it from a different perspective, find something to go, oh, that is kind of weird. And we don't want that bias in there and go and tweak it again. Like I got to have that attitude, I think. You have a lot of places with uranium based decorations. No, I don't know why I thought of that. In what world? An example we can all identify with. I mean, if you're really a fan of uranium and you're like, yeah, you're not had a uranium party lately. They're really fun. I just run in the wrong circles. Apparently. Hey, wait, you're in my circles. Never mind. Oh, yeah. Google plus for out a little liquor. Okay. So US based movie studios and streaming services. This is not funny. Have largely shut down in Russia and are no longer supplying their content to the country. And that's in protest over the war in Ukraine. We all know this. However, many folks in Russia were still able to go see the Batman. And it wasn't because Warner Brothers or DC changed a policy or because theaters there broke the law. So what's going on here? Dan Campos has an explainer. Hello, DTNS crew. Movie theaters in Russia continue to release films like the Batman. Don't look up or turn in red. Thanks to the use of Torrents. While the locates by Hollywood studios or streaming services organizations such as the Association of Cinema Owners in Russia issue the statement to indicate that the block threatened to crush their industry. At the end of March, Russia approved an act known as the priority action plan to ensure the development of the Russian economy in conditions of pressure from external sanctions, where it eliminates fines for violating copyright laws in digital assets such as movies, music, software or video games. For more information about this, listen every day to Noticias de Tecnología Express, the Duolingo of Tech Podcasts. I love the Duolingo of Tech Podcasts. Go sign up for NTX and brush up on your Spanish. Or if you already speak Spanish, it's going to be perfect for you. I had heard about this law, but I'm glad Dan brought this back to our attention to be like, yeah, they are in fact using it. It's not just a law they put on the books. They are showing the Batman in theaters. And yeah, it's crazy to think that they went to the extent to change copyright law because copyright law feels like that immutable thing that even the theater owners might be like, well, don't change it because if you open that door, then piracy is going to get worse. That's a weird and crazy thing to think about. Yeah. And some people, you just need the Batman. I get it, man. You've got to have the Batman. So I'm not saying this is good. I'm not saying anybody has anything. I'm just saying the Batman. Sometimes you need him. Yeah.  I don't know. Yeah. It's an illegal bat signal. But it's not the movie they deserve. There you go. That's great. God. But he's the movie they pirate it. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Okay. So, I'm going to go back to the code and this was in response to our conversation Monday. Where, where Rich declared his love for Yen's like men. Mattia says, Yen's like men will never go stale. Great deep dive into the music scene and why artists are increasingly releasing older products. Of course the labels have been doing this for years with greatest hits compilations. But the cynic in me wants to point out remixes. Put out a new product and increase your revenue. Ultimately, the only correct response to this conversation is Hans shot first. Very nice. The real quick note on that. It's not that different than, you know, what we used to call reruns back in the 80s. And I'm watching the fall guy for some reason. Well, no, it's different from reruns. It's like if they went and reshot the entire show. That's a better way. Yeah. And I wouldn't mind that. I'm not saying that the fall guys totally out of date, but it's pretty out of date. So. Up your game. Isn't that what we get though? Everything gets reimagined. Yeah. And you know that thing.  In fact. Yeah. Who knows how many shelved scripts there are for the fall guy movie. I know they exist. They there. I don't know the last time. Anyone watched back to the future, but that's one of my favorite scenes where the kids like, what's a rerun? And he's like, Oh, never mind. Yeah. Back to that because it's not a rerun to watch for a lot of kids to watch friends or the office. It's the first time through. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Well, thanks to you, Scott Johnson for being the best person ever. Let folks know where they keep up with everything else that you do. Yeah. Take that every other day's guests.  Just kidding. You guys are all great. Yeah. There's a lot going on. If you listen to the show, there's a good chance you like daily content. I have to figure. And so as a result, I thought today I would just mention that I have a daily morning show that I do with my good friend, Brian Ibbitt. In fact, Tom's on Wednesday as we does a tech segment before we all come together here today for this. And that happens every week. So if you are looking for some good old fashion, fun morning entertainment that doesn't sound like every morning show you've ever heard. Come check it out. We're over at frogpants.com slash TMS. It's the morning stream. If you're searching for it for your, for your podcast apps or whatever. So again, that is frogpants.com slash TMS. And for everything else, you can find me on Twitter at Scott Johnson. Excellent. We also want to thank our brand new bosses, Christopher and George just started backing us on Patreon. Give a warm welcome to Christopher and George. Very warm. That's warm. I don't know. No, I didn't hit the wrong button. This is an actual audience that we have here. And they blew the air horn. So yeah. There's a longer version of the show called good day internet. We'll probably laugh about this and lots of other things available at patreon.com slash D T N S for all the live viewers and those after roles right after D T N S. But just a reminder, we're live Monday through Friday at four PM Eastern 20 hundred UTC on D T N S. And you can find out more at daily tech news show.com slash live. We are back doing it all again tomorrow because that's what we do on weekdays. Just remember young movie joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com.


How's everybody doing welcome back to my channel this week. I'm gonna be tattooing Donnie He is an amazing producer and also a musician that has worked with a lot of great artists We're gonna be doing a cover up on him He has this guitar on his right for and I gotta go ASAP so with that being said Let's get this day started. Let's go Listo Listo, let's go Ya se armuela asunto Esto preparado banodo dejame volar Y como te gusta que te llaman? Donnie. Donnie? Donnie. How long ago did you say you got this piece? Ya como 4 años. 4 años. The good thing is that it's not scarred Yeah Just a little bit on the lines, but that's normal. I was showing the guys and they thought it was a skyscraper They were like oh is that a skyscraper? No, it's a guitar When you got it done, did you feel like ah it's not how I imagined it would look like. Yes. Yes I think I think that was the whole problem with it, que nunca me lo terminé pues That's the one. This one. Perfect Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. Yeah, this is the one All right, so this is the piece that we're gonna be covering up today. It is about four to five years old There is a lot of hard lines right in the middle So we definitely gotta watch out with the texture gotta make sure that we add the right amount of texture to not make It look extremely dark across the whole entire thing Then the reason why the first time so I placed it a little too far out onto the wrist I didn't want that just because there's a really hard line here So having that line across this area It was gonna make it very difficult for me to cover it up Just because that is a super hard line and it was gonna show right through the highlights and the texture So I would rather have the actual shading across the whole entire mouth for me To be able to play around with the contrast and the background play with it as well They make it even darker than that that way it gives me leverage to bring it back to life As far as the red areas we gotta make sure that we add a little bit heavier medium Grace because red can be a very heavy color and it's gonna show through any light colors So we gotta watch out for that too. It is a very challenging cover up just because it is a whole bunch of lines down and having Shapes like that definitely can make it complicated, but with the right concept It's it's everything, you know the right concept is gonna help you out to get through it And my first approach is gonna be testing out that how dark it really is by making the background Extremely dark with some grace. I want to play around with this corner You don't want to make the whole entire solid black. So I'm gonna start with solid black here Faded out to grace here, and I want to see how how powerful this black is first. You're excited. You nervous How do you feel? Some what? Some what? I just want a gun The people who see it in shit It's dark Extremely dark Yeah, I mean the lines here like super dark, but yeah, it's a combination of everything Hey So I just added this all the black in the background And I also did the line of the mouth just to come kind of give me an idea of how dark the The tattoo that already that he already has is It is definitely a dark piece But now putting my black right next to it's letting me know that It is not as strong as I thought it was because now my my black is overpowering The black that he has so after you already like met with all this like artists and stuff like who would you want to produce or make a Or collaborate with in the future We look at you like I would like M&M like my image But You get the motive to start a production and all that and My father The show was a talk at all yet, but you have a group My other brother too, and it was crazy because me as a kid I knew that I was really good at the music The key instrument of Stokas part of the guitar He played guitar, bass and accordion The accordion I think that already comes more from the tone of the music Just because you know rhythm Yeah, it's crazy So now that we got started with the whole face now I Already got the rhythm going I already know the sequence that I'm gonna be executing the rest of the face So the sequence that I'm doing right now is basically doing my black first Then doing texture with my medium gray and Then doing my lightest gray at the end and Contrasting it with a little bit of white highlights around in the gaps that I got left to make it pop because it is a super dark tattoo So I got to make sure I include those white highlights I am not and I don't want to remind everybody that I do not use white to cover up black What I use the white for is to enhance those gaps that I have Around the open skin to make it stand out because if I was to pull white on black The black is going to overpower it So that's why you need that gray to cover up the black in order for the white to Come out and make it look brighter So right now I'm gonna start doing the nose area the bridge of the nose the cheek area here and Probably start contrasting that the eyes because I want to start getting the shape of the whole entire face And but yeah, it is it is definitely getting covered up nice and easy It was definitely challenging at the beginning getting the getting into the rhythm, but now that I got it smooth This was a really interesting piece because I feel like I definitely pushed myself even though it wasn't a huge cover up It was a very challenging one just because of all the lines Going vertical and that makes it very difficult for anyone. That's that's one thing Maybe you have a client that wanted something similar. I would highly recommend for you guys to really Have self-awareness for this kind of piece just because If you're not that experiencing cover ups You are definitely not gonna be able to make it through Because those lines are gonna show through if you don't have the right concept the right texture the right tones It has to be precise every single time you hit the skin. It has to be precise and if you are More experiencing in the cover up field I would say to really study the piece Really study it because it's gonna help you a lot to make those Spontaneous decisions as you're tattooing because it requires a lot of that So yeah, definitely have self-awareness on this one. It was have me sweating the whole day have me sweating for reals but I think Throughout the day I noticed that he had a lot of open gaps and I didn't I didn't just want to add fur You know across his whole entire forum So I told him you know what I might have you come back and I want to customize something that's gonna fit those gaps To make the whole sleeve come together But because he has a whole bunch of tattoos all over the place and those gaps are making everything look very empty And I just you know, it was just not I wasn't gonna feel right just me adding black in those gaps You know, so I'm gonna have him come back, but I hope you guys enjoy this video Thank you guys for coming back and if you're a tattoo artist I hope you learn something from this video and if you're a tattoo enthusiast, I hope you were entertained Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you guys next week. Peace


I have a complex relationship with nightmares. I don't understand why your brain would willingly want to throw back at you all the scary stuff you've experienced throughout your existence when you're trying to de-stress and prepare for a day of societal functioning. I'd say I have an above average concentration of nightmares compared to most people. Some of the earliest memories I have of my life consist of nightmares I've had. They've happened to me all my life, but as I got older and more perceptive of things, they gradually became not only more developed, i.e. they have plots that don't just amount to I get eaten, but also significantly more traumatizing than most of the actually scary things that inspire them. I did eventually manage to find a workaround, I found that material for dreams, and nightmares by extension, is harvested from the near front of my mind, which basically means anything that I've thought about recently, but isn't currently an active thought. So, I keep a mental compendium of everything that I don't want to dream about, and think about all of them at once before disregarding them, so that they're at the front of my mind, and thus ineligible to be dreamt about. This method works for not dreaming about specific things, but that just leaves nightmares to be created from exciting new concepts that I would never have thought about otherwise. The following is a documented summation of a nightmare I had relatively recently that left a substantial impact on me. The framework was that I was watching an episode of Garfield and Friends on YouTube. I'm not super familiar with the show in real life, but I've seen bits and pieces. From what I remember, the episode revolved around Garfield confronting a monster that lives in his closet at night. For some reason, my dream self was scheming throughout the episode intermittently, though a lot of details are missing. The monster itself was kept in shadow the whole time, and never left the closet. Appearance-wise, it appeared to be a hunched over bipedal creature with a long proboscis and no visible hair, about the same height and proportions as Garfield. It kind of reminded me of that purple thing from Heart of Darkness, but not as tall. From what I could tell, the monster was in line with the art style of the show.  The only actual joke that survived my crossover into a reality was as follows. The closet opens, the monster is standing there, holding up a sign that says in all caps, Weenie, and Garfield says, Weenie, I don't know any one named Weenie. After that, I entered the second portion of the episode, which is where it gets rather odd, to say the least. The plot had completely vanished by this point, and it was replaced by several repeated shots of the closet door opening, and the camera zooming into complete darkness. But instead of the established monster, there was a series of horrifying faces and other such images. They looked like something you'd see on Lomando, or some other surrealist horror indie project. Some of them were my brain's own creation, while others looked blatantly lifting from Markiplier's scary game thumbnails. In particular, I'd like to single out one image that stood out to me. It was a grainy black and white photograph of three people in business suits, clutching their hands to the sides of their heads, which were largely obscured by their ginormous eyes and toothy smiles, which had been crudely cut out and resized, and were frantically waddling around rapidly. The third portion was the last part before the dream ended, and the culmination of all the horror that had been building up thus far. Any semblance of this being a Garfield episode was completely done, and the video had devolved into the aforementioned scary images from before, flashing between each other, while horror ambience droned in the background, and a voice resembling Vincent Price recited a poem about the concept of fear. I really wish I could remember the contents of the poem, because it sounded really well written for being in a dream. After I woke up, I couldn't stop thinking about it all day. I decided that posting it here would be a good way to purge it from my consciousness. However, one question does remain. Are these nightmares purely my only imagination, or is there something else at play here?


кож ते खे परिक겁 स्रMANDARIN क्रषंे क्याउयला, luent keeps photos in the Turkey in there and also the view of the deport hometown.  एत ना करी रहा ग़े खी्र क्यारे बाय।  करना,  मेंना क्यागर खे � erf.  अप से मेंने प्रताइpe , yo that's all !  बर�ell �akin prapaal...  बरन सोत्वड्याए का्еты मों कारि चिकने ...ären ḍᵈᴇ Ḁ�onna ᶁᵉᵗᵗᵗᴰᶫᵒḜᵟᶂᴍᵃ concealer ᴁᵈᵉᵗᵛᵒ ᵎᵉ ᵎᵗᴏ᷄ᵐᶻᵔᶼᵉ ᴠᵄᵐᵚᵨᵬᵎ ᶁᵗᵬᵒᵎ ᴀᵉᵖ ᶜᵀ � auditharrum ᴀᵏᵘᵏ ᵃᵀ ᵏᵷᵖ ᶦᵜᵜᵐᵜht estou ස්බ෎යින්ටම ඨුාශූ මෙහදයි liṅ Tu වන්යය, වන්� only හර්ර Push conferences හක්වෙන්ම වන්ල අපා හපන්යයිූය agora, වලා ලෙකර්බර එක්඼ල අබා්සිීාහ පුවාස �asha programmers is suffocated as they don't say it's shortages.ාවසි�oaවිේීව එවුවඅිිල, юැකකාlzුන තහංත් Province පික්cu සට මොන්ම Tok detectionීදයයි ම්ෟශැ ඔඩ ඇරාවඪ මේ්මතුත් ුබහ සන් මේ්මද ආඅි මෙේ 1.35mm lens, that is, storytelling lens, is known as the focal length of a person's eye. 2.50mm lens, is known as the nifty 50mm lens. This is a lens that is loved by photographers for a long time. When there is less light, it is better to take photos. 3.85mm lens, is known as the classic portrait lens. Because of its focal length, the slimming look of the face is similar to any other composition. When shooting wide open, it is known as the invisible eye. 4.75mm lens, is known as the nifty 50mm lens. 5.25mm lens, is known as the nifty 50mm lens. 5.25mm lens, is known as the nifty 50mm lens. 6.25mm lens, is known as the nifty 50mm lens. 5.25mm lens, is known as the nifty 50mm lens. 6.25mm lens, is known as the nifty 50mm lens. 6. Laptop 7. Images process 8. Studio flash kits 9. Modifiers 10. Diffusers 10. Beauty Dish 11. Snoot 12. Softbox 10. Backdrop 11. Tripod 12. Extension Box 11. Diffusers 12. Diffusers 13. Diffusers


We did familiarization with medical treatment, how you would perform treatment in situations, basic medical treatment in situations where you have an extreme situation where a patient is in a life-and-death situation. You need a trained medical personnel to perform this treatment. In a case where you can take care of the patient, simply give them comfort measures until that treatment is able to be provided.


My name is Lena Schulze. I just finished my PhD in machine learning and neural computation at OISD. I developed machine learning algorithms for the analysis of neural scientific data, particularly for the inference of neural networks from neural activity. And hopefully in time this kind of research will help us to understand how computation is done in the brain. After finishing my undergraduate degree I had some experience working as a software engineer in a startup. So I was pretty much thinking about like big name universities in the US and that's mostly where I applied. Somehow just as an afterthought really recommended by a friend who was a postdoc in OISD I ended up applying here and OISD invites you for a one-week workshop. And this experience of really being here seeing this place and talking to people I just felt at home. It was really easy to talk to everyone and this kind of feeling that your culture really fit into a place I think is very important and that was basically what made me decide in the end to give this place a chance. What I like about OISD is it's a very inspiring environment and I think to do creative work you need an inspiring environment and it's built in such a way that you will always meet people. You can't just go alone somewhere in your little corner and do your research. You actually have to talk to people and that's a good thing. The campus definitely inspires you to get out there and talk to people. I had a lot of struggles that I had to overcome at one point in time. There was really a lot of stuff going on and for me to actually stick to my PhD and not just drop out that was my biggest triumph and I must thank the OISD community because so many people supported me and I honestly think possibly at some other university I would have just given up. Our journey has started from taking a risk to overcoming many obstacles to succeeding in this part of our journey. We venture out from this point taking on positions of leadership in the world and I believe our experience at OISD on this island of Okinawa has formed us not only to become competent scientists but also compassionate, tolerant, supportive, future colleagues, mentors and leaders. This I believe is the greatest accomplishment of OISD to date.