fiberopticgal's JOB SEEKER FORUM

International Day of Light 2026

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Sat, 16 May 2026 02:10:39 +0000

2026 International Day of Light

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Fri, 15 May 2026 22:16:54 +0000

Happy Mother's Day: Girls & Robots

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Sun, 10 May 2026 22:35:33 +0000

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY! - GIRLS & ROBOTS

REPUBLISHED FROM ORIGINAL POST ON MAY 10TH, 2026

- links updated

- original post here, on Geek Feminism, May 5th, 2012, Girls and Robots.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at 2:30PM

GIRLS and ROBOTS

Happy Mother's Day to all the women engineers and scientists out there. In honor of Mother's Day, the following is a cross-post of "Girls & Robots" from Geek Feminism.org. It was written by Andrea Phillips, an award-winning game designer, author, and transmedia writer. The original post can be found on her blog, Deus Ex Machinatio.

My daughter Maya is five and a half years old. She's in kindergarten, and is as clever and adventurous a child as you've ever seen. She loves dancing and princesses and rainbows and anything that is pink.

Maya has also always, always loved cars and robots, right along with those butterflies and flowers and hearts. But recently she’s been saying that she doesn’t like these things anymore.
"I don’t like cars," she told me, "because I want people to like me."
This breaks my heart. And I imagine it breaks your heart, too. Five years old, and she's already figured out just exactly how this thing works.
It turns out that "it got out" in school that she liked cars, so she says. And then the other girls in her class made fun of her for liking boy things.
All her life I've been talking about being true to yourself, about liking the things you find in your heart whether it's a girl thing or a boy thing, and still, still, this is how fast it can unravel. Five years old, and she's already trying to change who she is because she doesn't think it's who she should be.
Internet, talk to Maya, and talk to me. Tell us about girls who make robots and cars and bridges. Girls who build rockets, girls who can make and build and invent -- girls who have grand adventures, but who can still go dancing, and still braid their hair, and still wear pink. Tell us about you. I know you're out there.

Update on Wednesday, May 9, 2012 at 10:41AM by Andrea Phillips

I've posted a little bit of an update, if you're into that kind of thing.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I would like to thank Andrea for allowing me to post this. You can follow her on bluesky. In the spirit of her post I have posted to this blog links to just some of the many women in science career sites, job boards, and resources out there, including those from:

The Society of Women Engineers - founded in 1950
"For more than six decades, SWE has given women engineers a unique place and voice within the engineering industry. Our organization is centered around a passion for our members' success and continues to evolve with the challenges and opportunities reflected in today's exciting engineering and technology specialties." Their careers page.

Women In Aerospace - founded in 1985
"Women in Aerospace (WIA) is dedicated to expanding women's opportunities for leadership and increasing their visibility in the aerospace community. Our membership women and men shares an interest in a broad spectrum of aerospace issues, including human space flight, aviation, remote sensing, satellite communications, robotic space exploration, and the policy issues surrounding these fields." WIA Career Empowerment and mentors.

The Association for Women in Science - founded in 1971
"For nearly 40 years, the Association for Women in Science has fought for equity and career advancement for women – from the bench to the board room." AWIS Career Center and Advocacy Resources, including anti-harassment and antiracism.

Careers in Science:

The National STEM Society - Foundation for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education.
The GATES FOUNDATION section on WOMEN AND GIRLS EMPOWERMENT.
Women in Science, Technology, and Mathematics!
(NSF-funded public radio program. NOTE: ARCHIVED VERSIONS, May, 2026)

For Women in Optics:

SPIE's "Women in Optics" newsletter and twitter feed.... main SPIE.org account also on bluesky.
Optica's "A Women's Place is in the Lab".

The National Science Foundation's published statistics on women, minorities, and persons with disabilities in science and engineering can be found here. **** UPDATE MAY, 2026: NO LONGER AVAILABLE, ARCHIVED VERSION HERE ****

International Day of Women and Girls in Science

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:33:00 +0000

Let's Celebrate International Day of Women & Girls in Science!👏🫶👏

Last year's conference:

https://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k17/k17k82l47j

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM FIBEROPTICGAL & CAREER PRO CONSULTANTS

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 07:21:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 19:17:00 +0000

The Conversation: Astronomers listened to the ‘music’ of flickering stars – and discovered an unexpected feature

Pavel Gabzdyl / Shutterstock

Claudia Reyes, Australian National University

The “music” of starquakes – enormous vibrations caused by bursting bubbles of gas that ripple throughout the bodies of many stars – can reveal far more information about the stars’ histories and inner workings than scientists thought.

In new research published in Nature, we analysed the frequency signatures of starquakes across a broad range of giant stars in the M67 star cluster, almost 3,000 light years from Earth.

Using observations from the Kepler space telescope’s K2 mission, we had a rare opportunity to track the evolution of stars during most of their journey through the giant phase of the stellar life cycle.

In doing so, we discovered that these stars get stuck “playing the same part of their tune” once their turbulent outer layer reaches a sensitive region deep inside.

This discovery reveals a new way to understand the history of stars – and of the entire galaxy.

The sound of starquakes

Starquakes happen in most stars (like our Sun) that have a bubbling outer layer, like a pot of boiling water. Bubbles of hot gas rise and burst at the surface, sending ripples through the entire star that cause it to vibrate in particular ways.

We can detect these vibrations, which occur at specific “resonant frequencies”, by looking for subtle variations in the brightness of the star. By studying the frequencies of each star in a group called a cluster, we can tune into the cluster’s unique “song”.

Our study challenges previous assumptions about resonant frequencies in giant stars, revealing they offer deeper insights into stellar interiors than previously thought. Moreover, our study has opened new ways to decipher the history of our Galaxy.

The melody of a stellar cluster

Astronomers have long sought to understand how stars like our Sun evolve over time.

One of the best ways to do this is by studying clusters – groups of stars that formed together and share the same age and composition. A cluster called M67 has attracted a lot of attention because it contains many stars with a similar chemical makeup to the Sun.

Just as earthquakes help us study Earth’s interior, starquakes reveal what lies beneath a star’s surface. Each star “sings” a melody, with frequencies determined by its internal structure and physical properties.

Larger stars produce deeper, slower vibrations, while smaller stars vibrate at higher pitches. And no star plays just one note – each one resonates with a full spectrum of sound from its interior.

A surprising signature

Among the key frequency signatures is the so-called small spacing – a group of resonant frequencies quite close together. In younger stars, such as the Sun, this signature can provide clues about how much hydrogen the star still has left to burn in its core.

In red giants the situation is different. These older stars have used up all the hydrogen in their cores, which are now inert.

However, hydrogen fusion continues in a shell surrounding the core. It was long assumed that the small spacings in such stars offered little new information.

A stalled note

When we measured the small spacings of stars in M67, we were surprised to see they revealed changes in the star’s internal fusion regions.

As the hydrogen-burning shell thickened, the spacings increased. When the shell moved inward, they shrank.

Then we found something else unexpected: at a certain stage, the small spacings stalled. It was like a record skipping on a note.

We discovered that this stalling appears during a specific stage in the life of a giant star — when its outer envelope, the “boiling” layer that transports heat, grows so deep that it makes up about 80% of the star’s mass. At this point the inner boundary of the envelope reaches into a highly sensitive region of the star.

This boundary is extremely turbulent, and the speed of sound shifts steeply across it — and that steep change affects how sound waves travel through the star. We also found that the stalling frequency is distinctively determined by the star’s mass and chemical composition.

This gives us a new way to identify stars in this phase and estimate their ages with improved precision.

The history of the galaxy

Stars are like fossil records. They carry the imprint of the environments in which they formed, and studying them lets us piece together the story of our galaxy.

The Milky Way has grown by merging with smaller galaxies, forming stars at different times in different regions. Better age estimates across the galaxy help us reconstruct this history in greater detail.

Clusters like M67 also provide a glimpse into the future of our own Sun, offering insight into the changes it will experience over billions of years.

This discovery gives us a new tool – and a new reason to revisit data we already have. With years of seismic observations from across the Milky Way, we can now return to those stars and “listen” again, this time knowing what to listen for.

Claudia Reyes, Postdoctoral Fellow, Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

NOTES:

*Originally viewed on ScienceAlert as:

Stars Get Earworms Too, And The 'Songs' Could Tell Us Their History

*Direct Link to the original findings published via Nature.com:

Acoustic modes in M67 cluster stars trace deepening convective envelopes

*The phenomenon of earworms are described (in part, from NIH's PubMed) here:

Stuck song syndrome: musical obsessions — when to look for OCD

*or here (from The Kennedy Center):

https://web.archive.org/web/20131126222220/http://www.kennedy-center.org/index.cfm

Your Brain on Music: Earworms
When songs get stuck... get stuck... get stuck... in our brains

*other links from our playlist:

Data Sonification: Vela Pulsar (Optical Only)

Data Sonification: Vela Pulsar (X-ray Only)

Data Sonification: Vela Pulsar (Composite)

This Is What the Sun's Wind Sounds Like! (Very Creepy) - Six Real Sound Recordings (4K)

Oscillations - Silver Apples (Song)

Joy Division - Transmission (Song)

https://youtu.be/gDVVW21qT6k

************

The Conversation: Language AIs in 2024: Size, guardrails and steps toward AI agents

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 22:13:00 +0000

Language AIs in 2024: Size, guardrails and steps toward AI agents

2024 saw smaller models and new guardrails for language AIs. pagadesign/E+ via Getty Images

John Licato, University of South Florida

I research the intersection of artificial intelligence, natural language processing and human reasoning as the director of the Advancing Human and Machine Reasoning lab at the University of South Florida. I am also commercializing this research in an AI startup that provides a vulnerability scanner for language models.

From my vantage point, I observed significant developments in the field of AI language models in 2024, both in research and the industry.

Perhaps the most exciting of these are the capabilities of smaller language models, support for addressing AI hallucination, and frameworks for developing AI agents.

Small AIs make a splash

At the heart of commercially available generative AI products like ChatGPT are large language models, or LLMs, which are trained on vast amounts of text and produce convincing humanlike language. Their size is generally measured in parameters, which are the numerical values a model derives from its training data. The larger models like those from the major AI companies have hundreds of billions of parameters.

There is an iterative interaction between large language models and smaller language models, which seems to have accelerated in 2024.

First, organizations with the most computational resources experiment with and train increasingly larger and more powerful language models. Those yield new large language model capabilities, benchmarks, training sets and training or prompting tricks. In turn, those are used to make smaller language models – in the range of 3 billion parameters or less – which can be run on more affordable computer setups, require less energy and memory to train, and can be fine-tuned with less data.

No surprise, then, that developers have released a host of powerful smaller language models – although the definition of small keeps changing: Phi-3 and Phi-4 from Microsoft, Llama-3.2 1B and 3B, and Qwen2-VL-2B are just a few examples.

These smaller language models can be specialized for more specific tasks, such as rapidly summarizing a set of comments or fact-checking text against a specific reference. They can work with their larger cousins to produce increasingly powerful hybrid systems.

What are small language model AIs – and why would you want one?

Wider access

Increased access to highly capable language models large and small can be a mixed blessing. As there were many consequential elections around the world in 2024, the temptation for the misuse of language models was high.

Language models can give malicious users the ability to generate social media posts and deceptively influence public opinion. There was a great deal of concern about this threat in 2024, given that it was an election year in many countries.

And indeed, a robocall faking President Joe Biden’s voice asked New Hampshire Democratic primary voters to stay home. OpenAI had to intervene to disrupt over 20 operations and deceptive networks that tried to use its models for deceptive campaigns. Fake videos and memes were created and shared with the help of AI tools.

Despite the anxiety surrounding AI disinformation, it is not yet clear what effect these efforts actually had on public opinion and the U.S. election. Nevertheless, U.S. states passed a large amount of legislation in 2024 governing the use of AI in elections and campaigns.

Misbehaving bots

Google started including AI overviews in its search results, yielding some results that were hilariously and obviously wrong – unless you enjoy glue in your pizza. However, other results may have been dangerously wrong, such as when it suggested mixing bleach and vinegar to clean your clothes.

Large language models, as they are most commonly implemented, are prone to hallucinations. This means that they can state things that are false or misleading, often with confident language. Even though I and others continually beat the drum about this, 2024 still saw many organizations learning about the dangers of AI hallucination the hard way.

Despite significant testing, a chatbot playing the role of a Catholic priest advocated for baptism via Gatorade. A chatbot advising on New York City laws and regulations incorrectly said it was “legal for an employer to fire a worker who complains about sexual harassment, doesn’t disclose a pregnancy or refuses to cut their dreadlocks.” And OpenAI’s speech-capable model forgot whose turn it was to speak and responded to a human in her own voice.

Fortunately, 2024 also saw new ways to mitigate and live with AI hallucinations. Companies and researchers are developing tools for making sure AI systems follow given rules pre-deployment, as well as environments to evaluate them. So-called guardrail frameworks inspect large language model inputs and outputs in real time, albeit often by using another layer of large language models.

And the conversation on AI regulation accelerated, causing the big players in the large language model space to update their policies on responsibly scaling and harnessing AI.

But although researchers are continually finding ways to reduce hallucinations, in 2024, research convincingly showed that AI hallucinations are always going to exist in some form. It may be a fundamental feature of what happens when an entity has finite computational and information resources. After all, even human beings are known to confidently misremember and state falsehoods from time to time.

The rise of agents

Large language models, particularly those powered by variants of the transformer architecture, are still driving the most significant advances in AI. For example, developers are using large language models to not only create chatbots, but to serve as the basis of AI agents. The term “agentic AI” shot to prominence in 2024, with some pundits even calling it the third wave of AI.

To understand what an AI agent is, think of a chatbot expanded in two ways: First, give it access to tools that provide the ability to take actions. This might be the ability to query an external search engine, book a flight or use a calculator. Second, give it increased autonomy, or the ability to make more decisions on its own.

For example, a travel AI chatbot might be able to perform a search of flights based on what information you give it, but a tool-equipped travel agent might plan out an entire trip itinerary, including finding events, booking reservations and adding them to your calendar.

AI agents can perform multiple steps of a task on their own.

In 2024, new frameworks for developing AI agents emerged. Just to name a few, LangGraph, CrewAI, PhiData and AutoGen/Magentic-One were released or improved in 2024.

Companies are just beginning to adopt AI agents. Frameworks for developing AI agents are new and rapidly evolving. Furthermore, security, privacy and hallucination risks are still a concern.

But global market analysts forecast this to change: 82% of organizations surveyed plan to use agents within 1-3 years, and 25% of all companies currently using generative AI are likely to adopt AI agents in 2025.

John Licato, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Director of AMHR Lab, University of South Florida

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Conversation: Can science be both open and secure? Nations grapple with tightening research security as China’s dominance grows

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 22:02:00 +0000

Can science be both open and secure? Nations grapple with tightening research security as China’s dominance grows

China has been the top scientific collaborator with the U.S. since 2013. kritsapong jieantaratip/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Caroline Wagner, The Ohio State University

Amid heightened tensions between the United States and China, the two countries signed a bilateral science and technology agreement on Dec. 13, 2024. The event was billed as a “renewal” of a 45-year-old pact to encourage cooperation, but that may be misleading.

The revised agreement drastically narrows the scope of the original agreement, limits the topics allowed to be jointly studied, closes opportunities for collaboration and inserts a new dispute resolution mechanism.

This shift is in line with growing global concern about research security. Governments are worried about international rivals gaining military or trade advantages or security secrets via cross-border scientific collaborations.

The European Union, Canada, Japan and the United States unveiled sweeping new measures within months of each other to protect sensitive research from foreign interference. But there’s a catch: Too much security could strangle the international collaboration that drives scientific progress.

As a policy analyst and public affairs professor, I research international collaboration in science and technology and its implications for public and foreign policy. I have tracked the increasingly close relationship in science and technology between the U.S. and China. The relationship evolved from one of knowledge transfer to genuine collaboration and competition.

Now, as security provisions change this formerly open relationship, a crucial question emerges: Can nations tighten research security without undermining the very openness that makes science work?

Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping and American President Jimmy Carter sign the original agreement on cooperation in science and technology in 1979. Dirck Halstead/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

China’s ascent changes the global landscape

China’s rise in scientific publishing marks a dramatic shift in global research. In 1980, Chinese authors produced less than 2% of research articles included in the Web of Science, a curated database of scholarly output. By my count, they claimed 25% of Web of Science articles by 2023, overtaking the United States and ending its 75-year reign at the top, which had begun in 1948 when it surpassed the United Kingdom.

In 1980, China had no patented inventions. By 2022, Chinese companies led in U.S. patents issued to foreign companies, receiving 40,000 patents compared with fewer than 2,000 for U.K. companies. In the many advanced fields of science and technology, China is at the world frontier, if not in the lead.

Since 2013, China has been the top collaborator in science with the United States. Thousands of Chinese students and scholars have conducted joint research with U.S. counterparts.

Most American policymakers who championed the signing of the 1979 bilateral agreement thought science would liberalize China. Instead, China has used technology to shore up autocratic controls and to build a strong military with an eye toward regional power and global influence.

Leadership in science and technology wins wars and builds successful economies. China’s growing strength, backed by a state-controlled government, is shifting global power. Unlike open societies where research is public and shared, China often keeps its researchers’ work secret while also taking Western technology through hacking, forced technology transfers and industrial espionage. These practices are why many governments are now implementing strict security measures.

Nations respond

The FBI claims China has stolen sensitive technologies and research data to build up its defense capabilities. The China Initiative under the Trump administration sought to root out thieves and spies. The Biden administration did not let up the pressure. The 2022 Chips and Science Act requires the National Science Foundation to establish SECURE – a center to aid universities and small businesses in helping the research community make security-informed decisions. I am working with SECURE to evaluate the effectiveness of its mission.

Other advanced nations are on alert, too. The European Union is advising member states to boost security measures. Japan joined the United States in unveiling sweeping new measures to protect sensitive research from foreign interference and exploitation. European nations increasingly talk about technological sovereignty as a way to protect against exploitation by China. Similarly, Asian nations are wary of China’s intentions when it seeks to cooperate.

Australia has been especially vocal about the threat posed by China’s rise, but others, too, have issued warnings. The Netherlands issued a policy for secure international collaboration. Sweden raised the alarm after a study showed how spies had exploited its universities.

Canada has created the Research Security Centre for public safety and, like the U.S., has established regionally dispersed advisers to provide direct support to universities and researchers. Canada now requires mandatory risk assessment for research partnerships involving sensitive technologies. Similar approaches are underway in Australia and the U.K.

Germany’s 2023 provisions establish compliance units and ethics committees to oversee security-relevant research. They are tasked with advising researchers, mediating disputes and evaluating the ethical and security implications of research projects. The committees emphasize implementing safeguards, controlling access to sensitive data and assessing potential misuse.

Japan’s 2021 policy requires researchers to disclose and regularly update information regarding their affiliations, funding sources – both domestic and international – and potential conflicts of interest. A cross-ministerial R&D management system is unrolling seminars and briefings to educate researchers and institutions on emerging risks and best practices for maintaining research security.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development keeps a running database with more than 206 research security policy statements issued since 2022.

Emmanuelle Charpentier, left, from France, and Jennifer Doudna, from the U.S., shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2020 for their joint research. Miguel RiopaI/AFP via Getty Images

Openness waning

Emphasis on security can strangle the international collaboration that drives scientific progress. As much as 25% of all U.S. scientific articles result from international collaboration. Evidence shows that international engagement and openness produce higher-impact research. The most elite scientists work across national borders.

Even more critically, science depends on the free flow of ideas and talent across borders. After the Cold War, scientific advancement accelerated as borders opened. While national research output remained flat in recent years, international collaborations showed significant growth, revealing science’s increasingly global nature.

The challenge for research institutions will be implementing these new requirements without creating a climate of suspicion or isolation. Retrenchment to national borders could slow progress. Some degree of risk is inherent in scientific openness, but we may be coming to the end of a global, collaborative era in science.

Caroline Wagner, Professor of Public Affairs, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Conversation: Will AI revolutionize drug development? Researchers explain why it depends on how it’s used

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 21:52:00 +0000

Will AI revolutionize drug development? Researchers explain why it depends on how it’s used

A high drug failure rate is more than just a pattern recognition problem. Thom Leach/Science Photo Library via Getty Images

Duxin Sun, University of Michigan and Christian Macedonia, University of Michigan

The potential of using artificial intelligence in drug discovery and development has sparked both excitement and skepticism among scientists, investors and the general public.

“Artificial intelligence is taking over drug development,” claim some companies and researchers. Over the past few years, interest in using AI to design drugs and optimize clinical trials has driven a surge in research and investment. AI-driven platforms like AlphaFold, which won the 2024 Nobel Prize for its ability to predict the structure of proteins and design new ones, showcase AI’s potential to accelerate drug development.

AI in drug discovery is “nonsense,” warn some industry veterans. They urge that “AI’s potential to accelerate drug discovery needs a reality check,” as AI-generated drugs have yet to demonstrate an ability to address the 90% failure rate of new drugs in clinical trials. Unlike the success of AI in image analysis, its effect on drug development remains unclear.

Behind every drug in your pharmacy are many, many more that failed. nortonrsx/iStock via Getty Images Plus

We have been following the use of AI in drug development in our work as a pharmaceutical scientist in both academia and the pharmaceutical industry and as a former program manager in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. We argue that AI in drug development is not yet a game-changer, nor is it complete nonsense. AI is not a black box that can turn any idea into gold. Rather, we see it as a tool that, when used wisely and competently, could help address the root causes of drug failure and streamline the process.

Most work using AI in drug development intends to reduce the time and money it takes to bring one drug to market – currently 10 to 15 years and US$1 billion to $2 billion. But can AI truly revolutionize drug development and improve success rates?

AI in drug development

Researchers have applied AI and machine learning to every stage of the drug development process. This includes identifying targets in the body, screening potential candidates, designing drug molecules, predicting toxicity and selecting patients who might respond best to the drugs in clinical trials, among others.

Between 2010 and 2022, 20 AI-focused startups discovered 158 drug candidates, 15 of which advanced to clinical trials. Some of these drug candidates were able to complete preclinical testing in the lab and enter human trials in just 30 months, compared with the typical 3 to 6 years. This accomplishment demonstrates AI’s potential to accelerate drug development.

Drug development is a long and costly process.

On the other hand, while AI platforms may rapidly identify compounds that work on cells in a Petri dish or in animal models, the success of these candidates in clinical trials – where the majority of drug failures occur – remains highly uncertain.

Unlike other fields that have large, high-quality datasets available to train AI models, such as image analysis and language processing, the AI in drug development is constrained by small, low-quality datasets. It is difficult to generate drug-related datasets on cells, animals or humans for millions to billions of compounds. While AlphaFold is a breakthrough in predicting protein structures, how precise it can be for drug design remains uncertain. Minor changes to a drug’s structure can greatly affect its activity in the body and thus how effective it is in treating disease.

Survivorship bias

Like AI, past innovations in drug development like computer-aided drug design, the Human Genome Project and high-throughput screening have improved individual steps of the process in the past 40 years, yet drug failure rates haven’t improved.

Most AI researchers can tackle specific tasks in the drug development process when provided with high-quality data and particular questions to answer. But they are often unfamiliar with the full scope of drug development, reducing challenges into pattern recognition problems and refinement of individual steps of the process. Meanwhile, many scientists with expertise in drug development lack training in AI and machine learning. These communication barriers can hinder scientists from moving beyond the mechanics of current development processes and identifying the root causes of drug failures.

Current approaches to drug development, including those using AI, may have fallen into a survivorship bias trap, overly focusing on less critical aspects of the process while overlooking major problems that contribute most to failure. This is analogous to repairing damage to the wings of aircraft returning from the battle fields in World War II while neglecting the fatal vulnerabilities in engines or cockpits of the planes that never made it back. Researchers often overly focus on how to improve a drug’s individual properties rather than the root causes of failure.

While returning planes might survive hits to the wings, those with damage to the engines or cockpits are less likely to make it back. Martin Grandjean, McGeddon, US Air Force/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

The current drug development process operates like an assembly line, relying on a checkbox approach with extensive testing at each step of the process. While AI may be able to reduce the time and cost of the lab-based preclinical stages of this assembly line, it is unlikely to boost success rates in the more costly clinical stages that involve testing in people. The persistent 90% failure rate of drugs in clinical trials, despite 40 years of process improvements, underscores this limitation.

Addressing root causes

Drug failures in clinical trials are not solely due to how these studies are designed; selecting the wrong drug candidates to test in clinical trials is also a major factor. New AI-guided strategies could help address both of these challenges.

Currently, three interdependent factors drive most drug failures: dosage, safety and efficacy. Some drugs fail because they’re too toxic, or unsafe. Other drugs fail because they’re deemed ineffective, often because the dose can’t be increased any further without causing harm.

We and our colleagues propose a machine learning system to help select drug candidates by predicting dosage, safety and efficacy based on five previously overlooked features of drugs. Specifically, researchers could use AI models to determine how specifically and potently the drug binds to known and unknown targets, the level of these targets in the body, how concentrated the drug becomes in healthy and diseased tissues, and the drug’s structural properties.

These features of AI-generated drugs could be tested in what we call phase 0+ trials, using ultra-low doses in patients with severe and mild disease. This could help researchers identify optimal drugs while reducing the costs of the current “test-and-see” approach to clinical trials.

While AI alone might not revolutionize drug development, it can help address the root causes of why drugs fail and streamline the lengthy process to approval.

Duxin Sun, Associate Dean for Research, Charles Walgreen Jr. Professor of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Michigan and Christian Macedonia, Adjunct Professor in Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

May Your Days Be Merry & Bright: Happy Holidays from Fiberopticgal & Career Pro Consultants (Shining Star)

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 22:25:00 +0000

FTTH Council Europe - Women in Fibre

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 05:11:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 21:51:00 +0000

A Diverse Workforce - the potential for innovation by leveraging different backgrounds, experiences, & POV. Innovation & creativity... along w/ technical skills relying on expertise in STEM, contribute to a robust enterprise.

https://t.co/B8P2lp2eJZ pic.twitter.com/QHk8xSWyxP

*STEM = science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

— fiberopticgal (@fiberopticgal) July 12, 2023

Laser source for biosensors: First time organic lasers integrated into a silicon photonic chip

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 17:05:00 +0000

OPTICS: Laser source for biosensors: First time organic lasers integrated into a silicon photonic chip: In the area of nano photonics, scientists for the first time succeeded in integrating a laser with an organic gain medium on a silicon photonic chip. This approach is of enormous potential for low-cost biosensors that might be used for near-patient diagnosis once and without any sterilization expenditure similar to today's strips for measuring blood sugar.

OPTICS: How Do You Build a Mirror for One of the World's Biggest Telescopes?

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Fri, 12 Feb 2016 19:54:00 +0000

20 tons of Ohara E6 borosilicate glass being loaded onto the mold of one of the GMT’s mirrors. Ray Bertram, Steward Observatory, CC BY-ND

How do you build a mirror for one of the world's biggest telescopes?

Buddy Martin, University of Arizona and Dae Wook Kim, University of Arizona
When astronomers point their telescopes up at the sky to see distant supernovae or quasars, they’re collecting light that’s traveled millions or even billions of light-years through space. Even huge and powerful energy sources in the cosmos are unimaginably tiny and faint when we view them from such a distance. In order to learn about galaxies as they were forming soon after the Big Bang, and about nearby but much smaller and fainter objects, astronomers need more powerful telescopes.
Perhaps the poster child for programs that require extraordinary sensitivity and the sharpest possible images is the search for planets around other stars, where the body we’re trying to detect is extremely close to its star and roughly a billion times fainter. Finding earth-like planets is one of the most exciting prospects for the next generation of telescopes, and could eventually lead to discovering extraterrestrial signatures of life.

Size comparison of optical telescopes' primary mirrors. Cmglee, CC BY-SA

Detectors in research telescopes are already so sensitive that they capture almost every incoming photon, so there’s only one way to detect fainter objects and resolve structure on finer scales: build a bigger telescope. A large telescope doesn’t just capture more photons, it can also produce sharper images. That’s because the wave nature of light sets a limit to the telescope’s resolution, known as the diffraction limit; the sharpness of the image depends on the wavelength of the light and the telescope’s diameter.
As optical scientists, our contribution to the next generation of telescopes is figuring out how to craft the gargantuan mirrors they rely on to collect light from far away. Here’s how we’re perfecting the technology that will enable tomorrow’s astrophysical discoveries.

Multiple mirrors

The question is how to build something substantially bigger than the current generation of telescopes, which have effective diameters of 8 to 12 meters (26 to 40 feet). One of the biggest challenges is making a bigger mirror to collect the light.

Optical diagram of the Giant Magellan Telescope. Giant Magellan Telescope - GMTO Corporation, CC BY-ND

First, it helps to know the basic optical layout of a telescope, illustrated here by the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) that is being built in Chile. A large primary mirror collects incoming light and reflects it to a focus. The light is reflected a second time by the smaller secondary mirror, to form an image on an instrument located at a safe, accessible place below the primary mirror, where the image is recorded.
A mirror much larger than eight meters, made of a single piece of glass, would be too expensive and too hard to handle. Everyone involved in building giant telescopes agrees that the solution is to make the primary mirror out of multiple smaller mirrors. Multiple pieces of glass are shaped and aligned to form one gigantic mirror, called a segmented mirror. Gaps between the segments are acceptable as long as the segments' surfaces lie on a continuous nearly parabolic surface, called the parent surface.
The three extremely large telescope (ELT) projects now in development have made very different decisions about the design of this segmented primary mirror. Two of the ELTs, the European ELT and the Thirty Meter Telescope, have adopted the approach pioneered by the 10-meter Keck Observatory telescopes in Hawaii – they’ll make a giant mirror out of hundreds of 1.5-meter segments.
The third project, the Giant Magellan Telescope, takes a different tack. Its 25-meter primary mirror will have only seven segments. They’re the largest single mirrors that can be made, the 8.4-meter (28-foot) honeycomb mirrors we produce here at the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab at the University of Arizona. The GMT’s 3-meter secondary mirror also has seven segments, each paired with one of the primary mirror segments.

Artist’s representation of the seven giant mirrors installed in the Giant Magellan Telescope. Giant Magellan Telescope – GMTO Corporation

Large, stiff and light

Big mirror segments guarantee a smooth surface over their entire large areas. The more segments there are in the primary mirror, the more its accuracy depends on their precise alignment to keep them on the parent surface. Because of the pairing of primary and secondary mirror segments in the GMT, the fine control needed to form sharp images can be done by moving the small, agile segments of the secondary mirror rather than the 8.4-meter primary segments. A second advantage of the 8.4-meter honeycomb mirrors is their strong legacy, including use in what is currently the world’s largest telescope, the Large Binocular Telescope here in Arizona.
One of the challenges of using a large mirror is that it tends to bend under its own weight and the force of wind. The mirror is exposed to wind like a sail on a yacht, but it can only bend by about 100 nanometers before its images become too blurry. The best way to overcome this problem is to make the mirror as stiff as is practical, while also limiting its weight.
We accomplish this feat by casting the mirror into a lightweight honeycomb structure. Each mirror has a continuous glass facesheet on top and an almost continuous backsheet, each about one inch thick. Holding the two sheets together is a honeycomb structure consisting of half-inch-thick ribs in a hexagonal pattern. Our honeycomb mirrors are 70 centimeters thick, making them stiff enough to withstand the forces of gravity and wind. But they’re 80 percent hollow and weigh about 16 tons each, light enough that they don’t bend significantly under their own weight.

Mold for casting an 8.4-meter honeycomb mirror for the GMT. The glass will melt around the hexagonal boxes to form the honeycomb. Ray Bertram, Steward Observatory

Crafting the mirror

We start by melting glass into a complex mold that’s the negative of the honeycomb mirror we want to end up with. While the glass is molten, the furnace spins at five revolutions per minute; the centrifugal force pushes the glass' surface into the concave parabolic shape that can focus light from a distant star. Watch the video below to see the construction of the honeycomb mold and the spin-casting process.

Spin-casting the honeycomb mirror.

The spin-cast mirror surface doesn’t yet have the optical quality needed to make sharp images. But spinning gives it the right overall curvature and saves our having to grind out 14 tons of glass from a flat surface – almost as much glass as is left in the finished mirror.

Polishing the surface

Next we need to polish the surface to an accuracy of a small fraction of the light’s wavelength, so it will form the sharpest images possible. The mirror surface has to match the ideal, nearly parabolic surface to about 25 nanometers – about 3 ten-thousandths of the width of a human hair. That’s really, really smooth; if the mirror were scaled up to the size of North America, the tallest mountain would be one inch high and the deepest canyon would be one inch low.
To guide our polishing, the first step is to create a superfine contour map of the mirror’s surface, with steps of less than 10 nanometers. As our “ruler,” we use red laser light; its divisions are the light’s wavelength – about 630 nanometers – and it can be read to about one hundredth of a division.
The measuring instrument illuminates the mirror surface, collects the reflected light, and compares the path lengths of the rays reflected by different locations on the mirror. A ray that reflects off a high spot will have a shorter path than a ray that hits a low spot. The instrument uses this information to construct the contour map of the mirror’s surface.
The basic principle of polishing is to rub the surface with a disk-shaped tool, removing glass selectively from the spots that are too high. A fine abrasive such as rouge (iron oxide) slowly removes glass, atom by atom, through mechanical and chemical processes.
Figuring is removing glass explicitly from high spots identified in the contour map, for example by having the tool rub there longer. This is effective on scales larger than about 10 centimeters. Smoothing is what happens when you rub a stiff tool over a rough surface: the tool naturally sits on the high spots and removes more material there, even without any guidance from a contour map. This is effective on scales smaller than 10 centimeters. Both methods are more difficult when the mirror surface is aspheric, meaning its curvature changes from point to point, which is very much the case for the GMT segments.

An 8.4-meter mirror for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope being polished at the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab. Steward Observatory, CC BY-ND

We’ve developed several new polishing tools to address the challenges of polishing large mirrors for telescopes. One essential feature of any polishing tool is that it match the shape of the mirror surface to an accuracy of around 1 micron. The larger tool in the background is a complex electro-mechanical system that changes the shape of a stiff aluminum disk as it moves over the surface, so it always matches the local curvature of the mirror.
The smaller tool in the foreground is much simpler. Similar to Galileo’s reinvention of a carnival toy as an astronomical telescope, our new idea came from Silly Putty – a non-Newtonian fluid that flows like a liquid over a long period of time but acts like a solid on short timescales. We harness those intrinsic properties to achieve both figuring and smoothing.
Our tool, containing Silly Putty enclosed by a thin rubber diaphragm, slowly moves over the surface of the mirror while simultaneously rapidly orbiting around itself. The Silly Putty is stiff over the quick period of the orbit, which smooths out small-scale irregularities in the mirror surface. Over the longer time it takes to move across the mirror, the Silly Putty flows easily, so the tool always matches the surface’s shape. As a result, it removes glass at a predictable rate and in a predictable pattern that doesn’t vary as it moves across the mirror.

The Giant Magellan Telescope as it will look after construction on Cerro Las Campanas in Chile. Giant Magellan Telescope – GMTO Corporation, CC BY

Countdown to installation

Here at the Mirror Lab, we finished making the first Giant Magellan Telescope segment in 2012. After a pause for work on two other mirrors, the lab is in the process of grinding Segments 2 and 3. Segment 4 has just finished cooling to room temperature after spin-casting in September 2015. We are well on the way to manufacturing the full 25-meter primary mirror.
Getting these near-perfect mirrors from our lab in Arizona to a mountaintop in Chile presents another set of challenges. They travel by tractor-trailer on land, and by freight ship from California to Chile. The keys to safe transport are distributing the weight of the mirror over hundreds of support points and having several layers of suspension between the mirror and the road or ship deck.
The GMT project schedule calls for a preliminary first light, with four segments installed in the telescope, in 2022. We expect all seven segments to be scanning the cosmos starting in 2024.
Many of us who work on the GMT see it as the way to open new windows into the universe, as the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has done over the last 25 years. That orbiting telescope was a generous gift to the next generation from the people who worked on the project for decades before it launched. HST’s deep space images amazed, motivated and inspired many of us on Earth. The GMT project team dreams of passing on a similar gift for future generations.

Buddy Martin, Project Scientist at the Steward Observatory and Associate Research Professor of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona and Dae Wook Kim, Assistant Professor of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Women in Science: Why Today's Long STEM Postdoc Positions Are Effectively Anti-Mother

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 03:08:00 +0000

Why today's long STEM postdoc positions are effectively anti-mother

Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy, Northwestern University
The fallen leaves remind, once again, that the Hunger Games of securing coveted tenure-track academic jobs have begun. This is my second year serving on the Northwestern University Department of Neurobiology Search Committee, and we’ve received nearly 300 applications for a single faculty position this time around. Less than a third are from women.
We often hear about the leaky STEM pipeline, and the data bear this out, both at the national levels and within our local search. From what I see as a recent female postdoc with children and now an assistant professor making hiring decisions and advising postdocs seeking academic positions, there are some serious problems uniquely faced by women in academic STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields.

Demographic data for this year’s applicants to a tenure-track position at Northwestern. Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy, CC BY-ND

Here’s who I see applying

Our applicants are impressively accomplished, and their age matches their scientific contributions. On average, this group – both men and women – defended their PhDs a little before 2008.
That means that now at the close of 2015, the bulk of our applicants have lingered in postdoctoral limbo for more than half a decade. A postdoc position used to be an optional step toward independence in my field of neuroscience. Eventually, a year or two of research experience after receiving a doctoral degree and before winding up in a faculty job became expected. But now, seeing strong candidates with less than five years of high profile post-PhD work is rare.
The lengthening of this training period is reflected in the aging pool of recipients of R01 grants, the key funding mechanism for biomedical science laboratories, administered by the National Institutes of Health. The average age of first-time recipients has crept up to 42, while the proportion of R01 holders younger than 36 has dropped from 16% in 1980 to 3% by 2010.

Stretching the STEM career path affects women disproportionately

The National Science Foundation reports that women have comprised half of STEM undergraduate degrees since the 1990s. Yet, a gender gap emerges during the long years of academic training, and it grows substantial in time for faculty appointments. As seen in our representative pool of applicants, the average applicant age for tenure-track assistant professor positions is now past the peak age of female fertility (think a PhD at 28-29 years of age, plus a 5-7 year long postdoc).
Here’s where things get sticky for those who think the advances of feminism mean women should be able to cobble together some version of “having it all.” Building a family while pursuing a STEM career has pitfalls. Delaying childbirth until reaching a tenure-track job could mean long years trying to conceive and expensive assisted reproductive technologies – average price of an IVF cycle is over US$10,000 – with no guarantee of success. So, a female scientist who wants a family must seriously consider childbirth during her postdoc.
However, postdoctoral salaries are low, and the days are long. The recommended starting salary for a new research fellow is below $43,000, per National Institutes of Health. A year of high-quality childcare for two kids at daycare centers near prominent research institutions costs more than a postdoc salary – even before taxes are taken out.
While high daycare costs in US cities (even surpassing $2,000 per child per month in some places) seems like a problem for male and female postdocs, it disproportionately affects aspiring female academics. As described in the Dual-Career Research Report from the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, academic females are more likely to be partnered with academic males. The same is not true for the more numerous males. Many successful academics acknowledge the importance of stay-at-home partners, or partners with flexible jobs, in their rise to academic fame. As described in the same Stanford report, 20% of male academics, but only 5% of females, have a stay-at-home partner. These gender differences, together with the fact that even in our egalitarian society, accomplished women in leadership positions still tend to be responsible for the majority of childcare, mean that the careers of women in STEM are hindered by the choice to have a family.

Here come the professors… but were they on a level playing field? Jack Duval, CC BY

Institutional support needs to change

Universities today are doing more for the families of their faculty and, increasingly, many are expanding benefits programs to cover all of their staff. But postdoctoral fellows, often classified as trainees, can fall through the cracks, receiving different, lesser benefits than faculty and staff. Sometimes, they receive no benefits at all. Recently, the National Postdoctoral Association released a large Institutional Policy Survey that highlighted considerable variability in benefits and programs available to postdocs in responding institutions. Postdoctoral training features benefits that are remnants of an earlier time when postdocs were rare and transient positions.
How do we upgrade to Postdoc 2.0, a version of life for young academics that plugs the leak of talented women in STEM? Prestigious female-targeted postdoc awards, like the glamorous L'Oreal Fellowship that supports only five STEM female postdocs every year, are woefully few. Yet, research universities themselves have the power and the funding structure to implement a variety of strategies that would support women in STEM. Here are concrete examples I think would be valuable to consider:

Award several thousand dollars to female postdocs with children when they go on the academic job market. This can cover high-quality childcare, travel with children or living costs for family caretakers.
Create competitive internal scholarships to fund a research technician for a year, when a female postdoctoral fellow is pregnant, or with infant. The technician would carry on the fellow’s experiments during the time she must be away from the bench.
Ensure that postdocs' benefits don’t vary based on salary funding sources (that is, grants, fellowships, etc), and that their benefits are comparable to faculty and staff.
Train and perhaps financially support the laboratory directors of female academics with families. University faculty are taught to recognize and avoid misconduct, but not how to help pregnant female trainees design flexible work schedules that advance their career while protecting family time.

The cost of some of these programs would be pennies in the budget of our great research institutions, but the impact on gender distribution in STEM could be transformative. Moreover, such programs are likely to have immediate measurable impact on the success of women postdocs transitioning to independence in academia. The institutions that take the lead will attract the top STEM postdocs.
For sure, designing programs to advance women in STEM will take careful consideration, when even a Supreme Court justice takes a stand against affirmative action, suggesting that minority students might fare better at less-advanced, slower-track schools.
But let us not silence half our voices. Diverse companies and institutions are more efficient and more creative. Both pragmatic and social justice considerations support striving toward a STEM workforce that mirrors US demographics. We should ensure that the odds in academia, however low overall, aren’t stacked against female aspiring scientists who hope to have families.

Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy, Assistant Professor of Neurobiology, Northwestern University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

FIBER OPTICS: In Our Wi-Fi World, The Internet Still Depends on Undersea Cables

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 00:43:00 +0000

Courtesy of: The Conversation

In our Wi-Fi world, the internet still depends on undersea cables

Nicole Starosielski, New York University
Recently a New York Times article on Russian submarine activity near undersea communications cables dredged up Cold War politics and generated widespread recognition of the submerged systems we all depend upon.
Not many people realize that undersea cables transport nearly 100% of transoceanic data traffic. These lines are laid on the very bottom of the ocean floor. They’re about as thick as a garden hose and carry the world’s internet, phone calls and even TV transmissions between continents at the speed of light. A single cable can carry tens of terabits of information per second.
While researching my book The Undersea Network, I realized that the cables we all rely on to send everything from email to banking information across the seas remain largely unregulated and undefended. Although they are laid by only a few companies (including the American company SubCom and the French company Alcatel-Lucent) and often funneled along narrow paths, the ocean’s vastness has often provided them protection.

2015 map of 278 in-service and 21 planned undersea cables. Telegeography

Far from wireless

The fact that we route internet traffic through the ocean – amidst deep sea creatures and hydrothermal vents – runs counter to most people’s imaginings of the internet. Didn’t we develop satellites and Wi-Fi to transmit signals through the air? Haven’t we moved to the cloud? Undersea cable systems sound like a thing of the past.
The reality is that the cloud is actually under the ocean. Even though they might seem behind the times, fiber-optic cables are actually state-of-the-art global communications technologies. Since they use light to encode information and remain unfettered by weather, cables carry data faster and cheaper than satellites. They crisscross the continents too – a message from New York to California also travels by fiber-optic cable. These systems are not going to be replaced by aerial communications anytime soon.

A tangled cable caught by fishermen in New Zealand.

A vulnerable system?

The biggest problem with cable systems is not technological – it’s human. Because they run underground, underwater and between telephone poles, cable systems populate the same spaces we do. As a result, we accidentally break them all the time. Local construction projects dig up terrestrial lines. Boaters drop anchors on cables. And submarines can pinpoint systems under the sea.
Most of the recent media coverage has been dominated by the question of vulnerability. Are global communications networks really at risk of disruption? What would happen if these cables were cut? Do we need to worry about the threat of sabotage from Russian subs or terrorist agents?
The answer to this is not black and white. Any individual cable is always at risk, but likely far more so from boaters and fishermen than any saboteur. Over history, the single largest cause of disruption has been people unintentionally dropping anchors and nets. The International Cable Protection Committee has been working for years to prevent such breaks.

An undersea cable lands in Fiji. Nicole Starosielski, CC BY-ND

As a result, cables today are covered in steel armor and buried beneath the seafloor at their shore-ends, where the human threat is most concentrated. This provides some level of protection. In the deep sea, the ocean’s inaccessibility largely safeguards cables – they need only to be covered with a thin polyethelene sheath. It’s not that it’s much more difficult to sever cables in the deep ocean, it’s just that the primary forms of interference are less likely to happen. The sea is so big and the cables are so narrow, the probability isn’t that high that you’d run across one.
Sabotage has actually been rare in the history of undersea cables. There are certainly occurrences (though none recently), but these are disproportionately publicized. The World War I German raid of the Fanning Island cable station in the Pacific Ocean gets a lot of attention. And there was speculation about sabotage in the cable disruptions outside Alexandria, Egypt in 2008, which cut 70% of the country’s internet, affecting millions. Yet we hear little about the regular faults that occur, on average, about 200 times each year.

Redundancy provides some protection

The fact is it’s incredibly difficult to monitor these lines. Cable companies have been trying to do so for more than a century, since the first telegraph lines were laid in the 1800s. But the ocean is too vast and the lines simply too long. It would be impossible to stop every vessel that came anywhere near critical communications cables. We’d need to create extremely long, “no-go” zones across the ocean, which itself would profoundly disrupt the economy.
Fewer than 300 cable systems transport almost all transoceanic traffic around the world. And these often run through narrow pressure points where small disruptions can have massive impacts. Since each cable can carry an extraordinary amount of information, it’s not uncommon for an entire country to rely on only a handful of systems. In many places, it would take only a few cable cuts to take out large swathes of the internet. If the right cables were disrupted at the right time, it could disrupt global internet traffic for weeks or even months.
The thing that protects global information traffic is the fact that there’s some redundancy built into the system. Since there is more cable capacity than there is traffic, when there is a break, information is automatically rerouted along other cables. Because there are many systems linking to the United States, and a lot of internet infrastructure is located here, a single cable outage is unlikely to cause any noticeable effect for Americans.

Surfacing.in is an interactive platform developed by Erik Loyer and the author that lets users navigate the transpacific cable network. CC BY-ND

Any single cable line has been and will continue to be susceptible to disruption. And the only way around this is to build a more diverse system. But as things are, even though individual companies each look out for their own network, there is no economic incentive or supervisory body to ensure the global system as a whole is resilient. If there’s a vulnerability to worry about, this is it.
Nicole Starosielski, Assistant Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
http://www.submarinecablemap.com/

SHARED ARTICLE: Content Barons, Smart Dust, & SkyNet

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Mon, 13 Apr 2015 13:16:00 +0000

SHARED ARTICLE:

Content Barons, Smart Dust

Content Barons, Smart Dust & SkyNet: 6 Telecommunications Disruptions for 2020

Future Tech By Christopher Surdak, Chief Field Technologist and HPE Big Data Platform Business

In this article...

By 2016, data traffic will be 200 times greater than voice traffic, presenting a serious problem for telco vendors
Mobile data is massive today, but it is a fraction of the volume we should expect in 2020 as the Internet of Things takes off
Consumers continue to recognize the importance of cyber security and are likely to pay carriers a premium to protect their sensitive data

https://www.hpematter.com/issue-no-4-spring-2015/content-barons-smart-dust-skynet-6-telecommunications-disruptions-2020

INFOGRAPHIC: Anatomy of a Job Interview

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Sun, 27 Apr 2014 20:41:00 +0000

INFOGRAPHIC: ANATOMY OF A JOB INTERVIEW

OPTICS & CULTURE: The Optics of Paranormal Activity

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 20:58:00 +0000

Just in time for Halloween:

"Among other things, I discovered that ghost hunting is simply all about optics."

Gary Boas in his post "The Optics of Paranormal Activity" . Gary was kind enough to allow me to repost this article (below). Thank you also to photonics.com and Laurin Publishing. The original blog, "Different Wavelengths", can be found here.

The Optics of Paranormal Activity

The site of the now-shuttered Camp Evans, in Wall Township, N.J., has played host to the Ku Klux Klan, former Nazi scientists and Senator Joseph McCarthy, and is said to be among the most haunted in the state. A group called Behind the Wall Paranormal regularly conducts investigations of the site, using a variety of optics-based instruments. I joined them a few weeks ago to see what I could learn.

I stood in a darkened room on the second floor of the abandoned dormitory, fumbling with the settings on my camera. Every few seconds the flash from another camera – from somewhere in the hallway behind me – lit up the room, casting a larger-than-life shadow of my form on the opposite wall.

Events earlier in the evening had left me on edge, and this fearsome, flickering silhouette, like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon featuring dogs and drug-addled teens, was almost more than I could bear. A young woman was standing several feet away – in ghost hunting you never enter a room alone – and I said to her, without turning, “I am literally afraid of my own shadow right now.”

A second’s pause; another flash. “Well, you cut an imposing figure.”

I appreciated the attempt to boost my confidence but I had already forfeited any claim to tough guy status – maybe an hour before in the attic, where a pulsing, diffusely glowing light in the corner had all but swept away my skepticism and journalistic objectivity and forced a paroxysm of wide-eyed credulity (“What was that? Did you see it? DID YOU SEE IT?”), my voice an octave or so higher than its usual dulcet tone.

Popularized by the TV show “Ghost Hunters,” laser grids help to detect shadows and other visual disturbances during an investigation. Images courtesy of Tony Abello.

My night at Camp Evans was eye-opening, to say the least. Among other things, I discovered that ghost hunting is simply all about optics. It’s about the technology, of course – the infrared detectors, the full-spectrum cameras, the laser grids – but it’s also about the intangibles of the optics realm, about shadows and reflections and afterimages. Almost everything I touched that night, almost everything I experienced, somehow involved a phenomenon of light.

Not least: the instruments we used during the investigation. Sure, ghost hunters have relied on compasses since the 18th century – spirit activity is said to cause disturbances in the electromagnetic field, making the compass needles spin – and EMF meters are still an integral part of the ghost hunting kit. But it would be hard to imagine a modern-day investigation without cameras – specifically without infrared night vision cameras, in which the blocking filters are removed from the light path, making the devices sensitive to infrared light.

You can find these throughout the ghost hunting community. Some folks hand-modify cameras into the infrared or the full spectrum, by changing out the filters, etc. Behind the Wall uses only commercially available IR cameras – so as not to void the warranties of conventional digital cameras by opening them up and altering them. Tony Abello, co-founder of the group and leader of the expedition that I joined, told me that Behind the Wall primarily uses Sony cameras with the NightShot or NightShot Plus facility and equipped with one or more external infrared lights.

Behind the Wall Paranormal uses a range of infrared night vision cameras in its paranormal investigations at Camp Evans in Wall Township, N.J.

Such cameras serve a dual purpose in paranormal investigations. First, the night vision capabilities help to capture events in darkened rooms and even to guide investigators in unlit hallways, attics, etc. (with the investigators keeping an eye on the viewfinder of an IR-equipped camcorder, for example). Just as important, though, the cameras can catch anomalies that might not appear in the visible range of the spectrum.

“We have caught several things with the cameras with IR extenders,” Tony said. “And yes, we could only see the matter upon review, not with our naked eyes or a regular, non-IR camera.”

Encouraged by early findings with infrared cameras, ghost hunters started thinking about other regions of the spectrum. During the Camp Evans investigation I met a young man named Adam, co-founder of another paranormal investigation group (in the small hours of the morning, in the far corner of the dormitory basement, he and Tony would argue over which group would get to recruit me as a full-time member). Adam demonstrated for me the full-spectrum camera he’d recently purchased. The camera can image from the infrared up to the ultraviolet, he said, potentially revealing a host of additional anomalies.

Toy trains and talking to spirits

Several days after my Camp Evans experience I spoke with Marti Haines about the technologies used in ghost hunting. Haines, store manager at The GhostHunter Store in Mt. Holly, N.J., and member of the paranormal investigation group South Jersey Ghost Research, told me that she and colleagues had caught a number of anomalies with full spectrum cameras, either in the UV or the IR – “anything from light rods to full-body apparitions,” she said.

She also described devices called REM pods and trigger objects – trigger objects will be things like lanterns or toy trains that might attract spirits. These work on a static-field basis, and can be used for detection or even for communication with spirits. “It seems easier for the spirits to manipulate these,” Haines said. “They can give you a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer by breaking the field.”

REM pods work by creating their own magnetic field and detecting any disturbances in that field, but the concept – at least in terms of communicating with spirits – is similar to the older, lower-tech “flashlight work” approach. Here, you simply unscrew the top of a flashlight to turn it off and ask the spirit to give a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response by turning it back on.

I had my own experience with flashlight work in the Camp Evans dormitory. It was well after midnight in a room on the second floor where several people had earlier seen an indistinct mass with glowing red eyes. Tony was sitting at the end of a table attempting to establish contact with whatever spirit was in the room. “Spirit,” he said, “if you are here with us please give us a sign.”

I was sitting at the opposite end of the table fiddling with my flashlight, and at the very moment he said this I accidentally switched the flashlight on.

“Holy crap!!!” It was the voice of one of the investigators.

“Sorry!” I cried. “That was me!”

In the darkness I could feel five paranormal investigators glaring at me, and then I heard them laugh. I may never be a seasoned ghost hunter –wielding laser grids and full-spectrum cameras while chasing down shadows and apparitions – but I was having a good time. And that has to count for something.

Note: Infrared cameras have also been linked to another, less reputable pursuit: trying to see through people’s clothes (find a history of X-ray vision and assorted other attempts to see folks naked here. In 1998, Sony shipped some 700,000 camcorders with infrared night vision technology that, unbeknownst to the company, enabled people to do just this. Sony recalled those cameras but people have since worked out how to modify the technology themselves to achieve that particular goal.

ABOUT GARY BOAS:

"After working in the research community as a writer and editor, Gary Boas joined Laurin Publishing in 2001. Today, he is a news editor for BioPhotonics magazine and a contributing editor to Photonics Spectra. He currently resides in New York. His views are his own and do not reflect the opinions of photonics.com, Photonics Media or Laurin Publishing Co. Photonics.com is not responsible for the accuracy of any information supplied by this blog." - photonics.com

Optics Art Update: More Art Inspired By Light

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 04:52:00 +0000

(NOTE: This is a follow-up to my earlier post from June 4th, 2012 - Fiber Optics: Fashion Made of Light)

Wired.com has published a few articles recently on new optics-inspired art installations, here are the links:

Everything Will Be Illuminated: Artist to Cover Bay Bridge in Programmable LEDs

"With apologies to Journey, the lights may not go down in the City by the Bay for quite a while. Not if Leo Villareal, an artist known for his illuminated installations in major museums and at Burning Man, has anything to do about it."

How to Destroy a Building With Light

"On July 4, onlookers in Atlantic City watched with awe as Boardwalk Hall cracked, shuddered, then crumbled to the ground. Then, somehow, the hall erupted in rainbow-colored bricks that appeared to move. It was all an illusion! The historic building remained intact."

Bright Idea: Artist Turns Simple Materials Into Massive Lighting Installations

"It took English lighting designer Bruce Munro a while to come around to the art world, but when he did, he did it in a big way. Munro’s first solo show, Light: Installations by Bruce Munro, covers 23 acres of Longwood Gardens, just outside of Philadelphia. The show, which opened this month and runs through September, comprises 12 installations and a set of sculptures that use a whopping 235 miles of fiber-optic cable."

*** Light at Longwood Gardens runs through September 29, 2012 ***

FIBER OPTICS: Fashion Made of Light

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 11:17:00 +0000

Fiber Optic "Robe", 2006 by artist Taegon Kim.

Fiber Optics for Consumers - It's Not Just Trees Anymore...

I was greatly inspired by Gary Boas' recent article "Rock-n-Roll Optics" published in April on photonics.com. In it, he lists his five favorite optics moments of rock, featuring Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame nominees. Of course, I quickly recognized the ubiquitous Pink Floyd prism album cover from "The Dark Side of the Moon" (sidenote: favorite track, "Time", and, according to a friend from years ago, best listened to at 78 rpm). However, the U2 lighted leather jackets from an '09-'11 concert tour was completely new to me.

Now, I never thought of fiber optic fiber as anything beyond its utility in communications & other applications, save for, of course, those silly lamps (lava lamp lovers need not worry) from years ago and those ill-gotten fiber optic lit trees around the holidays. (sorry if I offended any fiber optic tree fans out there).

Not long after I read Gary's post, I came across LaserFocusWorld's article on wearable photonics - PHOTONICS APPLIED: WEARABLE PHOTONICS: Smart photonic textiles begin to weave their magic. (by Kunigunde Cherenack, Koen Van Os, and Liesbeth Van Pieterson, April 01, 2012), which touches on and touts the virtues of OLED technology in textile design. (Also see Gayle Overton's blogpost discussing the article).

Searching the web, I found a plethora of artists and industry alike pushing the boundaries with optics in textile, design, art installations, and interactive displays - from companies such as Lumigram Fabric in France and Moon Berlin in Germany as well as individual artists and designers like Francesca Castagnacci and Taegon Kim.

Fiber Cloud by MIT Mobile Media Lab

Of Interest:

Lumigram Fabric
http://www.lumigram.com/

Francesca Castagnacci
http://www.francescacastagnacci.it/works1.html

Bruce Munro Art & Lighting Design
http://www.brucemunro.co.uk/

Exhibit, The Holburne Museum, Bath, England
http://www.holburne.org/field-of-light-2/

Cipriano Landscape Design
Mahwah, NJ
http://www.plantnj.com/

Nobel Peace Center
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Peace_Center
http://www.nobelpeacecenter.org/

Cityscapes - Fiber Optic Cityscapes and Lampshades For Sale
http://www.citiscapes-art.com/fiber_optic_lampshades.htm

Artist Taegon Kim
http://www.taegonkim.com/

World's Largest Fiber Optic Tree, Hong Kong, 2010 - World Record Academy
http://www.worldrecordsacademy.org/biggest/largest_fiber_optic_Christmas_tree_Hong_Kong_mall_set_world_record_101988.html

The Fiber Optic Store
http://thefiberopticstore.com/FOS-mainpage.htm

JOB SEARCH: The Resume - Then & Now

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Mon, 28 May 2012 10:38:00 +0000

NOTE: This is a repost from recruitingblogs.com, a network for recruiting and staffing professionals. Posted by FiberopticGal on May 15, 2012 at 7:51pm View Blog

Visual "heatmap" from TheLadders eye tracking study of recruiters reviewing resumes. The study was published in March and concluded that a job seeker has 6 seconds to make an impression.

The following is an excerpt from the job-hunting guide, “The Seven Keys to Job Hunting Success” published in the early nineties by Al Bratland & Jeff Beardsley. As I looked over this guide, I was amazed at how the key points they were trying to get across to anyone in the workforce, not just candidates, are often dismissed or overlooked in today’s environment. I will be updating their guide for today’s market. Even with the sheer volume of resume writing and job hunting tips, tricks, and manuals out there, one can’t help but notice the timelessness of their insights into the job search process - especially in today’s climate of constant technological evolution - visual resumes, personal branding, social media, and the like - the “soft skills” in landing a position are often overlooked.

Here are their insights (THEN), with some notes added on my part (NOW):

THEN:

The #1 Reason for potential interviews being missed and potential job offers being lost is the resume! Your resume is one of the most important documents you own. Birth and marriage certificates are important. Certainly your educational degrees are significant. However, all of these are documents, created once to be unchanged through time, exist only to prove certain events took place.

Your resume, on the other hand, is an ongoing chronology of your working life. It is a road map pointing out where you have been, stops you have made, the objective of your journey and the route you choose to follow.

Your resume is a living document – an evolving and growing record of each success and failure you have encountered. It is your statement of what you can do and the yardstick by which your new employer will measure you in your new job.

Considering the importance of your resume, do not let it get stale. If you don’t already have it up-to-date, update it NOW. Do not wait until your job is lost or that new opportunity shows up. Then it may be too late. Review it frequently with an eye on tomorrow.

NOW:

No one would argue today the importance of the resume (though I have heard its death knell on recruiting forums several times). What seems to be evolving is how that document will take shape:

VISUAL RESUME FOUND VIA GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH

THEN:

Remember, your resume is one of hundreds, if not thousands, that someone has to sort through every day. The garbage can or delete key* is only two seconds away from that first glance.

NOW:

Networking, both online via social media and in person, is touted as the most valuable asset in today’s job search climate, but by no means does that mean a resume is less important. If anything, once that connection / contact / lead is made, the resume needs to shine to get through the hiring process.

*A word about the delete key: We all know the importance of keywords in a resume, if just to make it through the automated applicant tracking system and get plucked out of obscurity, a technology still in its infancy when this guide was written (god, how I remember that old OCR software from years ago). However, it seems, if following and listening to the gist of what they are saying, the keywords will naturally be a byproduct of a well-written document. (and read on for this…)

THEN (& NOW): So, how do you escape this fate and stand out from the rest? Not by being fancy, crafty, or slick, but with a straightforward format that is easy to read and shows quickly and clearly how you can help your potential new employer.

(and here is where their insight really shines)

Remember, the reason a hiring manager is looking at resumes is because she or he has a NEED. It could be the need to:

INCREASE – profit, satisfaction, confidence, convenience, productivity, pleasure
IMPROVE – customer relations, employee relations, image, status, earnings
PROTECT – investment, self, employees, property, money
MAKE – money, satisfied customers, good impression, space
REDUCE – risk, investment, expenses, competition, worry, trouble
SAVE – time, money, energy

HOW DO YOU MEET THOSE NEEDS?

If your resume addresses those needs both figuratively and quantitatively as related to Wyour industry, IT WILL BE READ.
If your resume reveals the results of applying your skills to satisfy a need, YOU WILL GET THE INTERVIEW.
If you can show success, YOU WILL GET HIRED.

______________________

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

Visual Resumes:

Inc.com article on infographics & visual resumes
Mashable post on how to create a visual resume, with links to sites such as visualize.me (you can even order your new graphic resume on a t-shirt!) & re.vu
Pinterest board with some interesting visual resume and infographic examples found on the web (to be updated frequently - if you have an interesting resume / CV / infographic you would like me to pin, send me the link - fiberopticgal@gmail.com)
RSS Feed of Visual Resume & Infographic Images.

Applicant Tracking Systems / Keyword Optimization:

12 Ways to Optimize Your Resume for Applicant Tracking Systems from Mashable.
Video describing TheLadders eye-tracking study on Youtube.

TheLadders Eye-Tracking Resume Study

WOMEN IN SCIENCE: Girls and Robots

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Mon, 14 May 2012 04:22:00 +0000

Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at 2:30PM

GIRLS and ROBOTS

Happy Mother's Day to all the women engineers and scientists out there. In honor of Mother's Day, the following is a cross-post of "Girls & Robots" from Geek Feminism.org. It was written by Andrea Phillips, an award-winning game designer, author, and transmedia writer. The original post can be found on her blog, Deus Ex Machinatio.

My daughter Maya is five and a half years old. She's in kindergarten, and is as clever and adventurous a child as you've ever seen. She loves dancing and princesses and rainbows and anything that is pink.

Update on Wednesday, May 9, 2012 at 10:41AM by Andrea Phillips

I've posted a little bit of an update, if you're into that kind of thing.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I would like to thank Andrea for allowing me to post this. You can follow her on twitter. In the spirit of her post I have posted to this blog links to just some of the many women in science career sites, job boards, and resources out there, including those from:

The Society of Women Engineers - founded in 1950
"For more than six decades, SWE has given women engineers a unique place and voice within the engineering industry. Our organization is centered around a passion for our members' success and continues to evolve with the challenges and opportunities reflected in today's exciting engineering and technology specialties."

Women In Aerospace - founded in 1985
"Women in Aerospace (WIA) is dedicated to expanding women's opportunities for leadership and increasing their visibility in the aerospace community. Our membership women and men shares an interest in a broad spectrum of aerospace issues, including human space flight, aviation, remote sensing, satellite communications, robotic space exploration, and the policy issues surrounding these fields."

The Association for Women in Science - founded in 1971
"For nearly 40 years, the Association for Women in Science has fought for equity and career advancement for women – from the bench to the board room."

Careers in Science:

The National STEM Foundation - Foundation for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation section on STEM education.
Women in Science, Technology, and Mathematics ON THE AIR!
(NSF-funded public radio program)

For Women in Optics:

SPIE's "Women in Optics" newsletter and twitter feed.
The Optical Society's MWOSA - Minorities and Women in OSA.

The National Science Foundation's published statistics on women, minorities, and persons with disabilities in science and engineering can be found here.

FIBER OPTICS: Does Glass Flow?

noreply@blogger.com (Fiber Optic Gal) — Sun, 06 May 2012 04:45:00 +0000

Does Glass FLOW?

Video from Discovery Channel's "How It's Made" Fiber Optics Episode

I came across this old Discovery channel video on Youtube recently and it brought back a flood of memories of how I stumbled into the optics field, purely by chance. First, a disclaimer, I am no expert in the field. But, rather, more of a hanger-on, an optics "groupie", if you will.... a lover of science & technology since the age of five when my father caught me "programming" his Altair computer in the living room. (All I remember is a series of LED lights). Anyway, far from holding me captive, it simply remained one of many interests... turning me into a proverbial jack-of-all-trades, master of none.

Fast-forward 20 years, and I fell into the recruiting business, again, by chance (or luck, if you believe in luck). The gentlemen I worked with, Al Bratland, himself had "fallen" into optics & fiber optics while consulting to Ensign-Bickford. If I remember the story correctly (& perhaps someone can correct me if I am wrong), the company was looking for a way to safely detonate blasting caps in a volatile environment. The solution - fiber optic fiber. A consulting & recruiting business in fiber optics was born.

My first lesson began when he pulled out a round hunk of glass from his desk and said to me: "This is how a fiber optic fiber is made." That glass, which I have somewhere, was a piece of preform. From there, I learned all about the preform process, draw towers, and all the engineering and processes before, during, and after the manufacture of a strand of fiber optic fiber. I learned about single-mode and multi-mode fiber, attenuators, amplifiers, connectors, connectorization, inside plant & outside plant applications, how fiber was used in defense, in medicine, in media, and on & on...

It didn't take long before I was hooked, like the techie-groupie I tend to be, and found myself perusing the Edmund Optics catalog for the shear fun of it, trying to scheme a laser-light show in my backyard. We had a great many conversations of serious import in between the headhunting - science, technology, politics, religion. One of my favorites (must have been a particularly slow day) was a three or four hour (at least) discourse on ketchup. The manufacture of ketchup (how many parts per billion of, ahemm, nefarious protein matter was allowed in ketchup) and the containment of ketchup, and the failure of glass bottles to aid in the flow of ketchup, and how the public was slow to adopt other, easier means of dispensing ketchup.... but I digress... I bring up the ketchup discussion because that, too, involved the knowledge of viscosity (Wikipedia's article on viscosity) and, well, FLOW.

It was during these discussions that the myth I had grown up with was debunked - that glass, over time, was viscous. I grew up with this myth firmly entrenched by my father... yes, the Altair-owner, brilliant guy that he was (a defense contractor, great with calculus and physics), told me time and again how old glass pane windows were warped and deformed because the glass flowed over time. I remember reading the "Diary of An Early American Boy" by Eric Sloane and visiting the Eric Sloane Museum in Kent, CT as a kid. Eric Sloane was an artist, author, and avid collector of early, colonial American tools. The "Diary" was based on a leatherbound journal he found and then republished. He built a replica of the homestead described in this journal from1805, including glass bottle windows (glass window panes were taxed back then). My father pointed to the glass-bottle windows, and again repeated the tale: "See how the glass is thicker / heavier at the bottom? That is because..."

So, years later, the myth was finally put to rest for me as I received a crash course on the nature of glass and optics. Until, of course, I first saw the Discovery Channel's "How Things Work" episode on Fiber Optics... and all the lessons, lectures, whitepapers, and articles I had read came to life again. My favorite part of the video is watching the preform glass drop down through the draw tower and become a bendable, flexible carrier of light. I guess, for some reason, I love to watch the glass, well, flow. So, while the good scientists at MIT, Corning, and elsewhere have proven definitively that glass does not flow per se... from my perspective, the non-scientist's scientific groupie, for me, sometimes, I guess, it does.

For more on the viscosity of glass, please read:

Corning Museum of Glass Work's article: "Does Glass Flow?"

"Does Glass Flow?" / "Window Panes" - a glass artist's perspective

Also, take a look at:

Edmund Optic's Optic Super Heroes Page and the more general, uber-geeky Edmund Scientific catalog.

And, if ever in CT at one of the many optics & photonics companies located there, a visit to the Sloane-Stanley Museum in Litchfield County is an experience. Here are a few of CT's optics-related companies:

Hubbell Incorporated
Ensign-Bickford
Nufern
OFS: Specialty Photonics Division
JDS Uniphase
"Photonics In Connecticut" White Paper And, if interested in ketchup, here is an article from Packaging News on the Heinz Ketchup Bottle, as well as Malcolm Gladwell's excellent and profound New Yorker piece on ketchup - "The Ketchup Conundrum".

NOW ON TWITTER!

noreply@blogger.com (Bratland and Associates, Inc.) — Sun, 11 May 2008 08:08:00 +0000

I have now joined twitter for up-to-the-minute, on-the-go posts!!! Link to the right to follow me... my alter-ego is "fiberopticgal". See you there.

fiberopticgal's JOB SEEKER FORUM

International Day of Light 2026

2026 International Day of Light

Happy Mother's Day: Girls & Robots

My daughter Maya is five and a half years old. She's in kindergarten, and is as clever and adventurous a child as you've ever seen. She loves dancing and princesses and rainbows and anything that is pink.

International Day of Women and Girls in Science

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM FIBEROPTICGAL & CAREER PRO CONSULTANTS

The Conversation: Astronomers listened to the ‘music’ of flickering stars – and discovered an unexpected feature

The sound of starquakes

The melody of a stellar cluster

A surprising signature

A stalled note

The history of the galaxy

Stars Get Earworms Too, And The 'Songs' Could Tell Us Their History

Acoustic modes in M67 cluster stars trace deepening convective envelopes

Stuck song syndrome: musical obsessions — when to look for OCD

Your Brain on Music: EarwormsWhen songs get stuck... get stuck... get stuck... in our brains

The Conversation: Language AIs in 2024: Size, guardrails and steps toward AI agents

Language AIs in 2024: Size, guardrails and steps toward AI agents

Small AIs make a splash

Wider access

Misbehaving bots

The rise of agents

The Conversation: Can science be both open and secure? Nations grapple with tightening research security as China’s dominance grows

Can science be both open and secure? Nations grapple with tightening research security as China’s dominance grows

China’s ascent changes the global landscape

Nations respond

Openness waning

The Conversation: Will AI revolutionize drug development? Researchers explain why it depends on how it’s used

Will AI revolutionize drug development? Researchers explain why it depends on how it’s used

AI in drug development

Survivorship bias

Addressing root causes

May Your Days Be Merry & Bright: Happy Holidays from Fiberopticgal & Career Pro Consultants (Shining Star)

FTTH Council Europe - Women in Fibre

Laser source for biosensors: First time organic lasers integrated into a silicon photonic chip

OPTICS: How Do You Build a Mirror for One of the World's Biggest Telescopes?

How do you build a mirror for one of the world's biggest telescopes?

Multiple mirrors

Large, stiff and light

Crafting the mirror

Polishing the surface

Countdown to installation

Women in Science: Why Today's Long STEM Postdoc Positions Are Effectively Anti-Mother

Why today's long STEM postdoc positions are effectively anti-mother

Here’s who I see applying

Stretching the STEM career path affects women disproportionately

Institutional support needs to change

FIBER OPTICS: In Our Wi-Fi World, The Internet Still Depends on Undersea Cables

In our Wi-Fi world, the internet still depends on undersea cables

Far from wireless

A vulnerable system?

Redundancy provides some protection

SHARED ARTICLE: Content Barons, Smart Dust, & SkyNet

Content Barons, Smart Dust & SkyNet: 6 Telecommunications Disruptions for 2020

In this article...

INFOGRAPHIC: Anatomy of a Job Interview

INFOGRAPHIC: ANATOMY OF A JOB INTERVIEW

OPTICS & CULTURE: The Optics of Paranormal Activity

"Among other things, I discovered that ghost hunting is simply all about optics."

Gary Boas in his post "The Optics of Paranormal Activity" . Gary was kind enough to allow me to repost this article (below). Thank you also to photonics.com and Laurin Publishing. The original blog, "Different Wavelengths", can be found here.

The Optics of Paranormal Activity

Toy trains and talking to spirits

Optics Art Update: More Art Inspired By Light

Wired.com has published a few articles recently on new optics-inspired art installations, here are the links:

FIBER OPTICS: Fashion Made of Light

JOB SEARCH: The Resume - Then & Now

TheLadders Eye-Tracking Resume Study

WOMEN IN SCIENCE: Girls and Robots

My daughter Maya is five and a half years old. She's in kindergarten, and is as clever and adventurous a child as you've ever seen. She loves dancing and princesses and rainbows and anything that is pink.

FIBER OPTICS: Does Glass Flow?

Does Glass FLOW?

Video from Discovery Channel's "How It's Made" Fiber Optics Episode

NOW ON TWITTER!

Your Brain on Music: Earworms
When songs get stuck... get stuck... get stuck... in our brains