New Techniques To Measure Social Bias in Software

Today, banks are increasingly using software to decide who will get a loan, courts to judge who should be denied bail, and hospitals to choose treatments for patients. These uses of software make it critical that the software does not discriminate against groups or individuals, say computer science researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Professor Alexandra Meliou in the College of Information and Computer Sciences says, "The increased role of software and the potential impact it has on people's lives makes software fairness a critical property. Data-driven software has the ability to shape human behavior: it affects the products we view and purchase, the news articles we read, the social interactions we engage in, and, ultimately, the opinions we form."

Meliou with professor Yuriy Brun and Ph.D. student Sainyam Galhotra, have developed a new technique they call "Themis," to automatically test software for discrimination. They hope Themis will empower stakeholders to better understand software behavior, judge when unwanted bias is present, and, ultimately improve the software.

Brun says, "Unchecked, biases in data and software run the risk of perpetuating biases in society. For example, prior work has demonstrated that racial bias exists in online advertising delivery systems, where online searches for traditionally-minority names were more likely to yield ads related to arrest records. Such software behavior can contribute to racial stereotypes and other grave societal consequences."

The researchers' paper describing this research, published in pre-conference materials for the European Software Engineering Conference (ESEC/FSE 2017) before its September meeting in Paderborn, Germany, has won an Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (ACM SIGSOFT) Distinguished Paper Award. The work is supported by the National Science Foundation.

Brun explains that while earlier research has considered discrimination in software, Themis focuses on measuring causality in discrimination. Software testing allows Themis to perform hypothesis testing, to ask such questions as whether changing a person's race affects whether the software recommends giving that person a loan, he says.

"Our approach measures discrimination more accurately than prior work that focused on identifying differences in software output distributions, correlations or mutual information between inputs and outputs. Themis can identify bias in software whether that bias is intentional or unintentional, and can be applied to software that relies on machine learning, which can inject biases from data without the developers' knowledge," he adds.

When evaluated on public software systems from GitHub, Themis found that discrimination can sneak in even when the software is explicitly designed to be fair. State-of-the-art techniques for removing discrimination from algorithms fail in many situations, in part because prior definitions of discrimination failed to capture causality, the researchers point out.

For example, Themis found that a decision-tree-based machine learning approach specifically designed not to discriminate against gender was actually discriminating more than 11 percent of the time. That is, more than 11 percent of the individuals saw the software output affected just by altering their gender.

Themis also found that designing the software to avoid discrimination against one attribute may increase discrimination against others. For example, the same decision-tree-based software trained not to discriminate on gender discriminated against race 38 percent of the time. "These systems learn discrimination from biased data, but without careful control for potential bias, software can magnify that bias even further," Galhotra says.

Source: sciencedaily.com

Insufficient Sleep May Be Adding To Your Waistline

Adults in the UK who have poor sleep patterns are more likely to be overweight and obese and have poorer metabolic health, according to a new study.

The findings showed that people who were sleeping on average around six hours a night had a waist measurement that was 3cm greater than individuals who were getting nine hours of sleep a night. And shorter sleepers were heavier too.

The results strengthen the evidence that insufficient sleep could contribute to the development of metabolic diseases such as diabetes -- major health challenges facing the NHS.

The study -- led by Dr Laura Hardie, Reader in Molecular Epidemiology at the University of Leeds -- not only looked at the links between sleep duration, diet and weight, but also other indicators of overall metabolic health such as blood pressure, blood cholesterol, blood sugar, and thyroid function.

The study involved 1,615 adults who reported how long they slept and kept records of food intake. Participants had blood samples taken and their weight, waist circumference, and blood pressure recorded.

The researchers looked at the associations between how long people were sleeping and these key biological parameters.

The research team, from the Leeds Institute of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine and the School of Food Science and Nutrition, reported their findings in the journal PLOS One.

Obesity has doubled

Greg Potter, one of the Leeds researchers, said "The number of people with obesity worldwide has more than doubled since 1980.

"Obesity contributes to the development of many diseases, most notably type 2 diabetes. Understanding why people gain weight has crucial implications for public health."

Shorter sleep was also linked to reduced levels of HDL cholesterol in the participants' blood-another factor that can cause health problems. HDL cholesterol is 'good' cholesterol that helps remove 'bad' fat from the circulation. In doing so, high HDL cholesterol levels protect against conditions such as heart disease.

Interestingly, the study did not find any relationship between shortened sleep and a less healthy diet -- a fact that surprised the researchers. Other studies have suggested that shortened sleep can lead to poor dietary choices.

The research was a snapshot of the associations between sleep duration and measurements of metabolic health. It was not designed to assess the impact of chronic poor sleep over time, and whether that leads to disease.

Importance of getting enough sleep

Dr Hardie said: "Because we found that adults who reported sleeping less than their peers were more likely to be overweight or obese, our findings highlight the importance of getting enough sleep.

"How much sleep we need differs between people, but the current consensus is that seven to nine hours is best for most adults."

Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Online Assessment Could Improve Math Marks of Deaf Learners

Online mathematics assessment (OMA) could help improve the mathematics performance of deaf and hard-of-hearing learners in South Africa.

This is one of the key findings of a new study at Stellenbosch University (SU).

"OMAs can help deaf and hard-of-hearing learners to understand difficult mathematical concepts and provide them with equal opportunities to do well in formal mathematics assessments," says Dr Nolan Damon who is a mathematics teacher and ?blended-learning designer and trainer from Worcester. He recently obtained his doctorate in Curriculum Studies at Stellenbosch University.

Damon investigated the use of OMAs as an alternative form of assessment to current pencil and paper-based mathematics assessments which do not provide deaf and hard-of-hearing learners with a fair chance to showcase what they have learnt.

"Deaf and hard-of-hearing learners perform poorly in mathematics pencil and paper assessments because they struggle to read and understand written texts and to interpret mathematics questions posed in Afrikaans or English since neither Afrikaans nor English is their home language," says Damon.

He adds that since these learners communicate through Sign Language, they struggle partly because of the difference between the structure and grammar of Afrikaans/English and Sign Language, the absence of a mathematics vocabulary in Sign Language, and their limited language skills.

Learners' understanding of mathematical functions

As part of his research, Damon designed OMAs for Grade 8 learners at a school for the deaf and hard of hearing in the Western Cape. Apart from Damon and the learners, an interpreter was also involved in this study.

Damon used a quiz module in Moodle, which is a free and widely used open-source software package, as well as two mathematic software plugins (components that adds a specific feature to an existing computer programme) to test the learners' understanding of mathematical functions which are crucial in our everyday lives. Moodle quizzes can be used for, among others, exams preparation, continuous assessments, and to measure learners' understanding of content knowledge. Damon says his experience as a teacher of mathematics to deaf and hard-of-hearing learners has shown that they struggle to understand mathematics concepts, in this case the function concept.

"Testing their understanding of mathematical functions is important because deaf students, for example, don't hear or understand that fruit, meat or vegetables are sold per kilogram. They know the sign for it, but they find it difficult to grasp that if I pay R4, 00 for 2kg apples, the functional relationship can be applied to more bags of apples, etc."

The Moodle quiz tested, among others, the ability of learners to determine rules for patterns and functional relationships using flow diagrams, tables, formulae and equations in line with the current National Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement for Grade 7-9.

Damon observed the learners while they were completing the quizzes as part of the OMA to record their interactions with it. Apart from documenting their experience with the OMA, the learners were also interviewed by an interpreter about the possible advantages and disadvantages of the OMA. Damon then used this information to make adjustments to the OMA based on the learners' feedback.

"Not only did the learners find it easier to do online quizzes as opposed to pencil and paper-based assessment, but the inclusion of a Glossary within these quizzes made it possible to have immediate access to difficult words and phrases."

Damon points out that although the learners initially experienced difficulties with the OMA, their scores improved after a few adjustments were made to it.

"All the learners passed the test with marks above 60% and three learners obtained a score of 100%. Since an improvement in test scores are directly linked to an increase in the learners' understanding, it can be argued that due to modifications to the OMA, their knowledge based on the function concept improved."

Multimedia can enhance the learning process

Damon says each question within the OMA included an icon which the learners could click on for a video example to experience the mathematics concept that needed to be conveyed and to be guided through questioning. He adds that these 'help' features were extremely useful especially with the limited Sign Language concept vocabulary at hand.

"The study highlighted the value of incorporating multimedia such as videos, images, simulations, interactive content and other graphics within the OMA because deaf and hard-of-hearing learners are dependent on visual imagery for learning. These multimedia can reduce the cognitive load of interpreting texts and also enhance the learning process for these learners."

"This is important because signs for concepts in mathematics are non-existent which makes it tough to translate these ideas via Sign Language without losing the essence of the math concepts."

Damon says the OMA allows learners to use smart phones, tablets and laptops to take the assessment.

"Sign Language can be incorporated within the OMA with ease which means these learners will be provided with assessments in their Home Language."

"This OMA can assist these learners in their understanding of difficult concepts and can make their studies so much better if they have access to subject content in their own language, i.e. Sign Language."

"It also allows the teacher to create online assessments, and the computer captures the learners' answers, scores it and provides immediate feedback to students."

Damon adds that the OMA might also provide mathematics teachers with insights into the cognitive processes of deaf and hard-of-hearing learners while doing mathematics.

For the OMA to have the desired outcome teachers and deaf learners have to receive training in how to use Moodle, and software plugins such as GeoGebra, WIRIS, says Damon.

He adds that the OMA principles can also be used for Languages, Science and any other subject and universities can also benefit from his research.

Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Paracetamol during pregnancy can inhibit masculinity

Paracetamol during pregnancy can inhibit the development of 'male behavior' in mice; new research from the University of Copenhagen shows that it can reduce sex drive and aggressive behavior.

Paracetamol is popular for relieving pain. But if you are pregnant, you should think twice before popping these pills according to the researchers in a new study. In an animal model, Paracetamol, which is the pain-relieving substance found in the pills, actually damages the development of male behaviours.

Previous studies have shown the paracetamol can inhibit the development of the male sex hormone testosterone in male foetuses, thus increasing the risk of malformation of the testicles in infants. But a reduced level of testosterone at the foetal stage is also significant for the behaviours of adult males, says Ph.D. David Møbjerg Kristensen, a researcher employed during the studies at the Department of Biomedical Sciences and the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences.

"We have demonstrated that a reduced level of testosterone means that male characteristics do not develop as they should. This also affects sex drive. In a trial, mice exposed to paracetamol at the foetal stage were simply unable to copulate in the same way as our control animals. Male programming had not been properly established during their foetal development and this could be seen long afterwards in their adult life. It is very worrying," says David Møbjerg Kristensen.

The dosage administered to the mice was very close to the recommended dosage for pregnant women. Because the trials are restricted to mice, the results cannot be transferred directly to humans. However, the researchers' certainty about the harmful effects of paracetamol means it would be improper to undertake the same trials on humans, explains David Møbjerg Kristensen.

Markedly reduced male behaviour

Testosterone is the primary male sex hormone that helps develop the male body and male programming of the brain. The masculine behaviours in mice observed by the researchers involved aggressiveness to other male mice, ability to copulate and the need for territorial marking. The mice reacted significantly more passively than normal for all three parameters. They did not attack other males, they were unable to copulate and behaved more like female mice when it come to urinary territorial marking.

After observing the changed behavioural patterns, Prof. Anders Hay-Schmidt, who was employed at the then Department of Neuroscience and Pharmacology during his studies at the University of Copenhagen, investigated the specific effects of a lack of testosterone on the brain. The results showed up clearly here, too.

"The area of the brain that controls sex drive - the sexual dimorphic nucleus - had half as many neurons in the mice that had received paracetamol as the control mice. The inhibition of testosterone also led to a halving of the activity in an area of the brain that is significant for male characteristics," he explains.

Also affects female fertility

This study focused on the effect of paracetamol on masculine characteristics but paracetamol during pregnancy also has the potential to influence the subsequent lives of female mice. In 2016, the researchers published a study showing that female mice had fewer eggs in their ovaries if their mothers had had paracetamol during pregnancy. This led to the mice becoming infertile more quickly. But even if paracetamol is harmful, that does not mean it should never be taken, even when pregnant.

"I personally think that people should think carefully before taking medicine. These days it has become so common to take paracetamol that we forget it is a medicine And all medicine has side effects. If you are ill, you should naturally take the medicine you need. After all, having a sick mother is more harmful for the foetus," says David Møbjerg Kristensen.

He emphasizes that pregnant women should continue to follow the guidelines given by their country's health authorities and recommends people to contact their GP if in doubt about the use of paracetamol.

The study, "Prenatal exposures to paracetamol/acetaminophen and precursor aniline impair masculinisation of male brain and behaviour," has just been published in the scientific journal Reproduction.

Source: www.eurekalert.org

UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN THE FACULTY OF HEALTH AND MEDICAL SCIENCES

Device pulls water from dry air, powered only by the sun

While it's easy to condense water from humid air, machines that harvest water from drier air require energy. Researchers have created the first water harvester that uses only ambient sunlight. The key component is an extremely porous material called a metal-organic framework that absorbs 20 percent of its weight in water from low-humidity air. Sunlight heats the MOF, releasing the water vapor, which condenses to produce liters of water per day.

Imagine a future in which every home has an appliance that pulls all the water the household needs out of the air, even in dry or desert climates, using only the power of the sun. That future may be around the corner, with the demonstration this week of a water harvester that uses only ambient sunlight to pull liters of water out of the air each day in conditions as low as 20 percent humidity, a level common in arid areas.

The solar-powered harvester, reported in the journal Science, was constructed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology using a special material -- a metal-organic framework, or MOF -- produced at the University of California, Berkeley."This is a major breakthrough in the long-standing challenge of harvesting water from the air at low humidity," said Omar Yaghi, one of two senior authors of the paper, who holds the James and Neeltje Tretter chair in chemistry at UC Berkeley and is a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "There is no other way to do that right now, except by using extra energy. Your electric dehumidifier at home 'produces' very expensive water."The prototype, under conditions of 20-30 percent humidity, was able to pull 2.8 liters (3 quarts) of water from the air over a 12-hour period, using one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of MOF. Rooftop tests at MIT confirmed that the device works in real-world conditions."One vision for the future is to have water off-grid, where you have a device at home running on ambient solar for delivering water that satisfies the needs of a household," said Yaghi, who is the founding director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute, a co-director of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute and the California Research Alliance by BASF. "To me, that will be made possible because of this experiment. I call it personalized water."Yaghi invented metal-organic frameworks more than 20 years ago, combining metals like magnesium or aluminum with organic molecules in a tinker-toy arrangement to create rigid, porous structures ideal for storing gases and liquids. Since then, more than 20,000 different MOFs have been created by researchers worldwide. Some hold chemicals such as hydrogen or methane: the chemical company BASF is testing one of Yaghi's MOFs in natural gas-fueled trucks, since MOF-filled tanks hold three times the methane that can be pumped under pressure into an empty tank.Other MOFs are able to capture carbon dioxide from flue gases, catalyze the reaction of adsorbed chemicals or separate petrochemicals in processing plants.In 2014, Yaghi and his UC Berkeley team synthesized a MOF -- a combination of zirconium metal and adipic acid -- that binds water vapor, and he suggested to Evelyn Wang, a mechanical engineer at MIT, that they join forces to turn the MOF into a water-collecting system.The system Wang and her students designed consisted of more than two pounds of dust-sized MOF crystals compressed between a solar absorber and a condenser plate, placed inside a chamber open to the air. As ambient air diffuses through the porous MOF, water molecules preferentially attach to the interior surfaces. X-ray diffraction studies have shown that the water vapor molecules often gather in groups of eight to form cubes.Sunlight entering through a window heats up the MOF and drives the bound water toward the condenser, which is at the temperature of the outside air. The vapor condenses as liquid water and drips into a collector."This work offers a new way to harvest water from air that does not require high relative humidity conditions and is much more energy efficient than other existing technologies," Wang said.This proof of concept harvester leaves much room for improvement, Yaghi said. The current MOF can absorb only 20 percent of its weight in water, but other MOF materials could possibly absorb 40 percent or more. The material can also be tweaked to be more effective at higher or lower humidity levels."It's not just that we made a passive device that sits there collecting water; we have now laid both the experimental and theoretical foundations so that we can screen other MOFs, thousands of which could be made, to find even better materials," he said. "There is a lot of potential for scaling up the amount of water that is being harvested. It is just a matter of further engineering now."Yaghi and his team are at work improving their MOFs, while Wang continues to improve the harvesting system to produce more water."To have water running all the time, you could design a system that absorbs the humidity during the night and evolves it during the day," he said. "Or design the solar collector to allow for this at a much faster rate, where more air is pushed in. We wanted to demonstrate that if you are cut off somewhere in the desert, you could survive because of this device. A person needs about a Coke can of water per day. That is something one could collect in less than an hour with this system."Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170413141104.htm

Seedstars Summit

The Seedstars Summit is next week! 

Check out the Seedstars Summit Bizzabo App where you can access the event community and network with other attendees as well as see the agenda. 

You can look up for clients or partners by industry, role, or country and even book one on one meetings!

Source: https://www.seedstarsworld.com/summit/

Smartphones are revolutionizing medicine

Smartphones are revolutionizing the diagnosis and treatment of illnesses, thanks to add-ons and apps that make their ubiquitous small screens into medical devices, researchers say.

"If you look at the camera, the flash, the microphone... they all are getting better and better," said Shwetak Patel, engineering professor at the University of Washington.

"In fact the capabilities on those phones are as great as some of the specialized devices," he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting this week.

Smartphones can already act as pedometers, count calories and measure heartbeats.

But mobile devices and tablets can also become tools for diagnosing illness.

"You can use the microphone to diagnose asthma, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder)," Patel said.

"With these enabling technologies you can manage chronic diseases outside of the clinic and with a non-invasive clinical tool."

It is also possible to use the camera and flash on a mobile phone to diagnose blood disorders, including iron and hemoglobin deficiency.

"You put your finger over the camera flash and it gives you a result that shows the level of hemoglobin in the blood," Patel said.

An app called HemaApp was shown to perform comparably well as a non-smartphone device for measuring hemoglobin without a needle. Researchers are seeking approval from the US Food and Drug Administration for its wider use.

Smartphones can also be used to diagnose osteoporosis, a bone disorder common in the elderly.

Just hold a smartphone, turn on the right app in hand and tap on your elbow.

"Your phone's motion picture sensor picks up the resonances that are generated," Patel said.

"If there is a reduction in density of the bone, the frequency changes, which is the same as you will have in an osteoporosis bone."

Such advances can empower patients to better manage their own care, Patel said.

"You can imagine the broader impact of this in developing countries where screening tools like this in the primary care offices are non-existent," he told reporters.

"So it really changes the way we diagnose, treat and manage chronic diseases."

Lower costs

Mobile smartphone devices are already helping patients manage cancer and diabetes, says Elizabeth Mynatt, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

"Someone who is newly diagnosed with diabetes really needs to become their own detectives," she said.

"They need to learn the changes they need to make in their daily lifestyle."

For women newly diagnosed with breast cancer, researchers provided a tablet that allows them real-time access to information on the diagnosis, management of their treatment and side effects.

The technique also helps patients who may not be able to travel to a medical office for regular care, reducing their costs.

"Our tool becomes a personal support system," Mynatt said. "They can interact to get day-to-day advice."  Research has shown this approach "changes dramatically their behavior," she added.

"The pervasiveness of the adoption of mobile platform is quite encouraging for grappling with pervasive socio-economic determinants in terms of healthcare disparities."

A growing number of doctors and researchers are turning to smartphones for use in their daily work, seeing them as a useful tool for managing electronic health data and figuring out the most effective clinical trials, said Gregory Hager, professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University.

Clinical trials currently cost around $12 million to run from start to finish, he said.

"The new idea is micro-randomized trials, which should be far more effective, with more natural data," he said.

Although the costs could be dramatically lower, too, the field is still new and more work needs to be done to figure out how to fully assess the quality and the effectiveness of such trials.

Source: https://phys.org/news

Electrical engineers create tiny but powerful medical devices

Battery-operated medical devices implanted in human bodies have saved countless lives. A common implant, the cardioverter defibrillator, sends a jolt of electricity to the heart when needed, preventing a heart attack or heart failure. While patients' lives are improved by this technology, if the device causes an infection or the battery needs to be replaced, more invasive procedures are necessary.

Mehdi Kiani is seeking a better solution. The assistant professor of electrical engineering in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Penn State is making the implantable devices smaller, which decreases the chances of infection, and more powerful, eliminating the need to replace the battery.

"We're developing novel wireless power transfer techniques and integrated power managements," said Kiani. "We're working to power these implantable devices wirelessly while keeping their size fairly small—about a millimeter and below, which is quite challenging."

Kiani's work, "An adaptive reconfigurable voltage/current-mode power management with self-regulation for extended-range inductive power transmission," was presented at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco.

The conference, which has only a 30 percent acceptance rate from both industry and academia, is the foremost global forum for the presentation of advances in solid-state circuits and systems-on-a-chip. ISSCC offers a unique opportunity for engineers working at the cutting edge of IC (integrated circuit) design and application to maintain technical currency, and to network with leading experts.

Hesam Sedeghi Gougheri, a doctoral student advised by Kiani, said the work they are doing is an important piece of a bigger technology and can affect various aspects of our lives beyond their medical uses, such as in cell phones and portable computers.

According to Kiani, they are creating an adaptive voltage/current-mode integrated power management that, unlike conventional voltage-based power managements, can reconfigure its structure based on its input voltage to efficiently provide a stable power supply for implantable devices from sub-volts incoming signals. This will allow Kiani and Sadeghi Gougheri to power the device wirelessly and meet their millimeter size goal.

This device, Kiani said, will be able to send signals from different organs so we can learn more about their underlying functional mechanism. For example, implanting such a device in the brain can enhance our understanding about the brain functions and pave the way toward solutions for brain disorders.

Source: https://phys.org/news

5 Lies the World Tells Entrepreneurs

Hard work and persistence are not enough -- true success hinges on another factor (and it's not luck).

It's common knowledge that 90 percent of startups die. So what do the 10 percent have that the 90 percent don’t?

We are taught that succeeding as an entrepreneur is all about working ridiculously harder than anyone else and persisting beyond the challenges. Then, and only then, will you “make it.” That is a big bunch of hooey.

I believe there is one factor above the others that allows for great success: brutal honesty. Unfortunately, we are fed lies in the form of inspirational quotes and fairytale stories about entrepreneurship, which tempt us not to engage in brutal honesty.

What is brutal honesty? Brutal honesty is about being excruciatingly self-aware so that you can hear the real feedback the market is telling you, and correct course before it is too late. This is the true test of entrepreneurship, since tearing down the walls you built with your blood, sweat, tears (and limited funds) is not for the faint of heart.

Here are the top five lies they feed you as an entrepreneur and how to combat them with the right mindset:

1. Listen to the data.

Whether it is Eric Reis’ Lean Startup or the countless other modern entrepreneurial books on agile/lean approaches to building businesses, the emphasis on data can be dangerous. Many entrepreneurs interpret this as logging into your Google Analytics or Mixpanel dashboards, often ignoring underlying assumptions and often simply reinforcing your existing beliefs (i.e. confirmation bias, or reading into data to prove out what you already believe). While data is essential, the data that is most important is the one spit out by your brain, not by the computer. The data on the screen is full of shoddy underlying assumptions. The only way to be brutally honest is to take this digital data and force yourself to create real-world, self-critical human conclusions about what the data means. Without that, you will agile or lean yourself out of existence.

2. Follow your dreams

Am I really going to argue with this? Yes, I am. I completely agree that one must follow their dreams, no matter how crazy and unrealistic they may be, but it is absolutely critical to your success to make an important distinction about which aspect of the dream you will follow. This is the part that takes brutal honesty. In my experience, success tends to follow entrepreneurs who have a wild idea that they want to make happen, but they remain totally open to the specific paths they will take to get to that destination. The difference is “I want to change this industry” vs. “I want to change this industry but it must start with this thing.” Being too specific about the path too early on could be your downfall.

3. Market it and they will come

Many early-stage entrepreneurs try to bulldoze their market with jazzy marketing. This cannot work without brutal honesty. Honesty is about perpetually asking your audience about why they need you and not simply investing money in marketing and believing that your market “will come around.” I’ve seen too many companies run out of capital pouring money into marketing tactics without first listening to their audience. This doesn’t mean that you aren’t being patient with marketing tactics. It just means that you are listening intently to “micro-reactions” from your audience so you can adjustments and optimize for the limited capital you have.

4. Do tons of market research by talking to your potential customers

This is another myth that you are constantly fed by the entrepreneurial expert community. The brutally honest truth is that conducting traditional market research with surveys, focus groups and open-ended conversations, while being helpful in some ways, could actually mislead you to build a business on top of a weak foundation. The reality is that market research requires the power of context. To succeed, you need the brutal truth from your market and the only way to get the real feedback is by trying to pitch a product while asking your audience to pay for it. Only when the product feels real to your audience, will you get the critical feedback you need to succeed. Even if you’re not sure what the product is going to be, you’ve got to “make it real” as early as you can and ask people to pay for it.

5. Luck is a myth.

Also known as “I make my own luck” or “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” All of these statements are false. The concept of luck does exist, but the real word for it is timing. Timing determines if the right door opens exactly when you need it, or the key person walks into your life or if your product resonates with your customer given all the other factors in the world at that time. And despite our best attempts, most often, timing is outside of our direct control. The only thing we can do is to stay alive long enough, with the broad delirious vision of where we want to go, and open tactical plan, and attempt to increase our timing-based probabilities. It is true that “the harder you work, the luckier you get,” but that is because with hard work, you are increasing the probability that your efforts will intersect with opportunity at exactly the right time. It takes brutal honesty to separate mystical notions like “luck” and call it out for what it really is -- the spontaneous intersection of your efforts with the right moments in time.

These are some common myths I’ve come across in popular entrepreneurial and motivational ideology. The core solve for these myths is perpetual commitment to brutal honesty. It is the hardest thing you have to do as an entrepreneur. For example, maybe you’ve spent millions to build a product and now your honest ears are telling you the real market feedback, that you need to rip down all your efforts, and rebuild it (again). Now, will you do this hardest of all hard things -- or will you keep putting money and time into your current product simply hoping that hard work and persistence will change the tide?

That decision means everything.

Source: Ron Shah, founder and CEO of Bizly, an enterprise software company focused on corporate meetings and events.

Device Turns Air Pollution Into Printing Ink

An MIT spinoff company in India is proposing a novel solution to air pollution problems in Asia — turning vehicle exhaust into ink.

It involves attaching a device, called a Kaalink, to the business end of a standard automobile exhaust pipe. The Kaalink filters and captures unburned carbon emitted by incomplete engine combustion. The technical details of the process are secret, but officials at Gravinky Labs, a spinoff company from MIT Media Lab, said the process is largely mechanical and relatively straightforward.

"Our device is designed as a clever fusion of electronic sensors, mechanical actuators and a collection system," company co-founder Anirudh Sharma told Seeker in an email exchange from India. "It is retrofitted to the exhaust pipe of vehicles and mounts through a triangulated screw/clamp-set."

According to tests at Graviky Labs, the Kaalink device can capture up to 93 percent of the emitted pollution from standard internal combustion engines. It takes about 45 minutes of exhaust filtering to produce an ounce of ink.

But how does the captured carbon get turned into ink? Well, that's under wraps too, but Sharma said the captured carbon comes out the other end of the process as a high-quality printing ink that can be sold in both the consumer and industrial markets. The company has a new crowdfunding campaign to refine its development.

Right now, Kaalink devices have to be individually and manually installed by drivers. When the collection apparatus is full, the device can be traded in at Graviky Labs facility in India. Sharma said each unit typically collects carbon for about two weeks of city driving before it needs to be swapped out.

To really be effective, the system needs to scaled up significantly, and supported by more processing facilities in more areas. The company's new Kickstarter campaign, launched today, is structured to provide funds for a gradual roll-out and expansion of the technology.

"At present, we are harvesting and collecting pollution on a small scale in Bengaluru, India," Sharma said. "Currently our collection mechanism involves emptying the units at our own garage."

The Air-Ink system has been in development for more than three years already. In fact, Graviky Labs recently partnered with the popular Asian brand Tiger Beer to launch a proof-of-concept awareness campaign in Hong Kong. Fine art painters and street artists were provided with Air-Ink pens, markers and spray paint, then cut loose to literally make art out of air pollution. The demo video is pretty slick, you can check it out below.

Sharma said that, down the line, the company hopes to radically expand the system, and not just for vehicles, either. Variations on the Kaalink device could potentially be attached to chimneys, smoke stacks and other industrial exhaust systems.

"At this stage, the Kaalink device is still undergoing several rounds of testing and eventual certifications," Sharma said. "We intend to deploy it on cars, trucks and chimneys of various sizes and scales, and help individuals, organizations, and governments capture their own pollution and recycle it."

Source: livescience.com

Robots Could Aid Insects with Pollination Duties

Mini drones sporting horsehair coated in a sticky gel could one day take the pressure off beleaguered bee populations by transporting pollen from plant to plant, researchers said.

Roughly three-quarters of the world’s flowering plants and about 35 percent of the world's food crops depend on animals to pollinate them, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Some of nature's most prolific pollinators are bees, but bee populations are declining around the world, and last month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed a native species as endangered for the first time.

Now, researchers from Japan said they've taken the first steps toward creating robots that could help pick up the slack from insect pollinators. The scientists created a sticky gel that lets a $100 matchbox-size drone pick up pollen from one flower and deposit it onto another to help the plants reproduce.

"This is a proof of concept — there's nothing compared to this. It's a totally first-time demonstration," said study leader Eijiro Miyako, a chemist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science in Tsukuba, Japan. "Some robots are expected to be used for experiments in pollination, but no one has tried yet."

A happy accident

The key innovation of the new study, published today (Feb. 9) in the journal Chem, is the so-called ionic liquid gel, but according to Miyako it was more down to luck than design. The gel was actually the result of a failed attempt to create electrically conducting liquids and had sat forgotten in a desk drawer for nearly a decade.

But after eight years, it still hadn't dried out, which most other gels would have done, and was still very sticky, Miyako said. Fortunately, this discovery coincided with Miyako watching a documentary that detailed concerns about insect pollinators.

 "I actually dropped the gel on the floor and I noticed it absorbed a lot of dust, and everything linked together in my mind," he told Live Science.

The gel has just the right stickiness, meaning it can pick up pollen but is not so adhesive that it won't let the grains go.

The scientists next tested how effectively the gel could be used to transport pollen among flowers. To do so, the researchers put droplets of the material on the back of ants and left the insects overnight in a box full of tulips. The next day, the scientists found that the ants with the gel had picked up far more pollen grains than those insects that lacked the sticky substance.

In a side experiment, the researchers found that it was possible to integrate photochromic compounds, which change color when exposed to UV or white light, into the gel. Scientists stuck this material onto living flies, giving the bugs color-changing capabilities. This, Miyako said, could ultimately act as some kind of adaptive camouflage to protect pollinators from predators.

Real solutions?

But while improving the ability of other insects to pollinate flowers is a potential solution to falling bee numbers, Miyako said he was not convinced, and so began to look elsewhere. "It's very difficult using living organisms for real practical realizations, so I decided to change my approach and use robots," he said.

The hairs that make insects like bees fuzzy are important for their role as pollinators, because the hairs increase the surface area of the bees' bodies, giving pollen more material to stick to. In order to give the smooth, plastic drone similar capabilities, the scientists added a patch of horsehair to the robot's underside, which was then coated with the gel.

The researchers then flew the drones to collect pollen from the flowers of Japanese lilies and transport this pollen to other flowers. In each experiment, the researchers made 100 attempts at pollinating the flower, achieving an overall success rate of 37 percent. Drones without the patch of hair, or with uncoated hair, failed to pollinate the plants.

Miyako said there are currently limitations to the technology, because it is difficult to manually pilot the drone. However, he added that he thinks GPS and artificial intelligence could one day be used to automatically guide robotic pollinators.

Before these robo-bees become a reality, though, the cost of the drone will have to come down drastically and it's 3-minute battery life will need to improve significantly, Miyako said. But he added that he is confident this will happen eventually.

Dave Goulson, a professor at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, said he sees the intellectual interest in trying to create robot bees, but he's skeptical  about how practical they are and worries about distracting from more vital pollinator conservation work.Goulson specializes in the conservation of bumblebees but was not involved with the new research.

In a blog post, he wrote that there are roughly 3.2 trillion bees on the planet. Even if the robo-bees cost 1 cent per unit and lasted a year, which he said is a highly optimistic estimate, it would cost $32 billion a year to maintain the population and would litter the countryside with tiny robots.

"Real bees avoid all of these issues; they are self-replicating, self-powering and essentially carbon-neutral," Goulson wrote in the post. "We have wonderfully efficient pollinators already. Let's look after them, not plan for their demise."  

Source: livescience.com

Ancient Toy Inspires Low-Cost Medical Diagnostic Tool

Modern medicine often feels like magic: A technician pricks your skin, draws a drop of blood and whisks it away into another room. Oftentimes, this gives the doctor enough information to make a diagnosis and prescribe a treatment. But for people in developing countries, these kinds of diagnostics can be more science fiction than reality.

Modern medicine relies heavily on technology, like centrifuges, that are costly, bulky and require electricity. In many places around the world, this kind of equipment can be hard to come by. 

The centrifuge is the workhorse of modern medical laboratories. The device spins samples at high speeds to separate particles or cells based on size and density, effectively concentrating specific components. Most diagnostics "are like looking for a needle in a haystack," said Manu Prakash, lead researcher on the new study and an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. A centrifuge, Prakash said, puts all the needles in one place, making them easier to find.

Unfortunately, even the simplest modern centrifuges are burdensome for doctors in the field. Prakash, who won a 2016 MacArthur "genius" award, is a leader in the so-called frugal science movement, which aims to devise low-cost solutions for complex technologies. Prakash is best known for developing the Foldscope, an origami-like paper microscope that costs about $1.50.

In the past, researchers explored common household items, such as egg beaters and salad spinners, as alternatives to the centrifuge, but these devices gave poorer results than modern diagnostic tests. A simple blood test using these tools required more than 10 minutes to separate cells, compared with 2 minutes for commercial centrifuges. So instead of using these items, Prakash and his colleagues focused on spinning toys.

"We tested many toys, like the top and yo-yo," study lead author M. Saad Bhamla, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, told Live Science. "We wanted to find the most effective way of converting physical energy into rotational energy."

The researchers found that a toy known most commonly as the whirligig had the greatest potential as a centrifuge. By tweaking the basic design, they were able to achieve speeds of up to 125,000 revolutions per minute (RPM), the fastest speeds reported for a hand-powered device, the researchers said. 

Also known as a button spinner, buzzer or spinning disk, the whirligig is one of the most ancient toys and can be found all over the world. It is a simplistic child's toy, with a button or disk threaded through two strings that are affixed to handles. A child begins by winding the strings and then pulling on the handles to make the threads unwind and the button spin. Pulling and relaxing the strings repeatedly makes the button spin faster. 

Using a paper disk and fishing wire, the researchers modified the whirligig, turning it into a hand-powered centrifuge that costs about 20 cents to make. They called their device a "paperfuge" and tested it against modern centrifuges to measure red blood cell counts. To do so, Prakash and his team loaded a finger prick of blood into a capillary tube and placed that into a sealed plastic straw that was mounted onto the paper disk.

"With a conventional centrifuge, the [blood test] will take about 2 minutes and that [centrifuge] will cost about $1,000," Bhamla said. "And in a minute and a half, we can achieve the exact same result — at a cost of $0.20 without electricity." The researchers' results were similar in tests for malaria parasites.

To better understand how the paperfuge works and how to optimize it for different types of diagnostics, Prakash and his colleagues generated a mathematical model for the movement of the disk.

"It is quite an unconventional centrifuge," Prakash said. "It's an oscillatory centrifuge, so it flips direction." Most centrifuges spin in only one direction but the paperfuge reverses during its spin, which may limit the volume of liquid that it can separate, he added.

Prakash and Bhamla also found that the toy is essentially self-winding. The spinning disk has inertia that causes the strings to twist. When a person adds force by pulling on the handles, the strings become supercoiled, with twists looping back on themselves, Prakash said. "These supertwists give torque and result in twisting of the disk," he said. "It is amazing how little force it takes."

Prakash and his team are now taking the paperfuge out into the field. "Our current work has put about 100 paperfuges into the hands of clinical partners and health care workers in Madagascar," Prakash said, "in the front line of developing countries where almost nothing is available."

At the same time, the researchers are testing other versions of the paperfuge, using 3D-printed plastics and different designs in hopes of applying the technology to other diagnostic tests, Prakash said.

Source: http://www.livescience.com/57449-ancient-toy-inspires-paper-centrifuge.html