Computed·Blg

Via PCWorld

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Via PCWorld

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Via NBC News

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Two Silicon Valley giants now offer women a game-changing perk: Apple and Facebook will pay for employees to freeze their eggs.

Facebook recently began covering egg freezing, and Apple will start in January, spokespeople for the companies told NBC News. The firms appear to be the first major employers to offer this coverage for non-medical reasons.

“Having a high-powered career and children is still a very hard thing to do,” said Brigitte Adams, an egg-freezing advocate and founder of the patient forum Eggsurance.com. By offering this benefit, companies are investing in women, she said, and supporting them in carving out the lives they want.

When successful, egg freezing allows women to put their fertility on ice, so to speak, until they’re ready to become parents. But the procedure comes at a steep price: Costs typically add up to at least $10,000 for every round, plus $500 or more annually for storage.

With notoriously male-dominated Silicon Valley firms competing to attract top female talent, the coverage may give Apple and Facebook a leg up among the many women who devote key childbearing years to building careers. Covering egg freezing can be viewed as a type of “payback” for women’s commitment, said Philip Chenette, a fertility specialist in San Francisco.

The companies offer egg-freezing coverage under slightly different terms: Apple covers costs under its fertility benefit, and Facebook under its surrogacy benefit, both up to $20,000. Women at Facebook began taking advantage of the coverage this year.

Why freeze?

While techniques and success rates are improving, there's no guarantee the procedure will lead to a baby down the road. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine doesn’t keep comprehensive stats on babies born from frozen eggs – in fact, the group cautions against relying on egg freezing to extend fertility – though experts say the earlier a woman freezes her eggs, the greater her chances of success. Doctors often recommend women freeze at least 20 eggs, which can require two costly rounds.

But in the two years since the ASRM lifted the “experimental” label from egg freezing, experts say they’ve seen a surge in women seeking out the procedure. Fertility doctors in New York and San Francisco report that egg-freezing cases have nearly doubled over the past year.

For many women, taking the step to boost their chances of having kids in the future is worth the uncertainty. A majority of patients who froze their eggs reported feeling “empowered” in a 2013 survey published in the journal Fertility and Sterility. Women who know they want kids someday “can go on with their lives and know that they've done everything that they can,” said Chenette.

Egg freezing has even been described as a key to “leveling the playing field” between men and women: Without the crushing pressure of a ticking biological clock, women have more freedom in making life choices, say advocates. A Bloomberg Businessweek magazine cover story earlier this year asked: Will freezing your eggs free your career? “Not since the birth control pill has a medical technology had such potential to change family and career planning,” wrote author Emma Rosenblum.

News of the firms’ egg-freezing coverage comes in the midst of what’s been described as a Silicon Valley “perks arms race.” It’s only the latest in a generous list of family and wellness-oriented health benefits from Apple and Facebook (whose COO, of course, is feminist change agent and “Lean In” author Sheryl Sandberg). Both companies offer benefits for fertility treatment and adoption. Facebook famously gives new parents $4,000 in so-called “baby cash” to use however they’d like.

New ground

Silicon Valley firms are hardly alone in offering generous benefits to attract and keep talent, but they appear to be leading the way with egg freezing. Advocates say they’ve heard murmurs of large law, consulting, and finance firms helping to cover the costs, but no companies are broadcasting this support. “It’s very forward-looking,” said Eggsurance’s Adams.

Companies may be concerned about the public relations implications of the benefit – in the most cynical light, egg-freezing coverage could be viewed as a ploy to entice women to sell their souls to their employer, sacrificing childbearing years for the promise of promotion.

“Would potential female associates welcome this option knowing that they can work hard early on and still reproduce, if they so desire, later on?” asked Glenn Cohen, co-director of Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, in a blog post last year. “Or would they take this as a signal that the firm thinks that working there as an associate and pregnancy are incompatible?”

But the more likely explanation for lack of coverage is simply that egg freezing is still new, and conversation around the procedure has only recently gone mainstream. “I think we've reached a tipping point,” said Adams. “When I used to say ‘egg freezing,’ people would stare at me with their mouths open.” Now? Most people know someone who’s done or considered it.

Many large companies adopt new benefits in response to employee demand – firms have recently started to offer benefits for transgender employees, for example. As women’s awareness of egg freezing grows, more employers may jump on the band wagon.

“The attitude toward egg freezing is very different,” and more positive, than just a few years ago, said Christy Jones, founder of Extend Fertility, a company that offers and promotes egg freezing across the country. Women are making the proactive decision to freeze their eggs at a younger age, and the choice is "more one of empowerment than 'this is my last chance.'"

EggBanxx, the first service to help women finance egg freezing, has recently begun to capitalize on this shift by hosting “egg-freezing parties,” where experts educate guests. “Maybe you haven’t found Mr. Right just yet or perhaps you would like more time to focus on your education or career,” the company website says. “Whatever the reasons, freezing your eggs now will allow you to tackle conception later.”

‘Back to work the next day’

Women generally need about two weeks of flexibility for one cycle of egg freezing. After about ten days of fertility drug injections, patients undergo a relatively short outpatient procedure – and they’re “back to work the next day,” said Lynn Westphal, Associate Professor Obstetrics and Gynecology at Stanford University Medical Center. From there, eggs are frozen and stored until a woman is ready to use them, at which point she’ll begin the process of in vitro fertilization.

Once a woman freezes her eggs, she may never return to use them, fertility doctors report. Some women get pregnant the old-fashioned way, others make different life plans. Westphal compares egg freezing to car insurance: You hope you don’t have to use what you’ve put away, but if you find yourself in a situation where you need to, you’re glad to have the protection.

Will the perk pay off for companies? The benefit will likely encourage women to stay with their employer longer, cutting down on recruiting and hiring costs. And practically speaking, when women freeze their eggs early, firms may save on pregnancy costs in the long run, said Westphal. A woman could avoid paying to use a donor egg down the road, for example, or undergoing more intensive fertility treatments when she’s ready to have a baby.

But the emotional and cultural payoff may be more valuable, said Jones: Offering this benefit “can help women be more productive human beings.”

Via NASA

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Robert Alexander spends parts of his day listening to a soft white noise, similar to water falling on the outside of a house during a rainstorm. Every once in a while, he hears an anomalous sound and marks the corresponding time in the audio file. Alexander is listening to the sun’s magnetic field and marking potential areas of interest. After only ten minutes, he has listened to one month’s worth of data.

Alexander is a PhD candidate in design science at the University of Michigan.  He is a sonification specialist who trains heliophysicists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to pick out subtle differences by listening to satellite data instead of looking at it.

Sonification is the process of displaying any type of data or measurement as sound, such as the beep from a heart rate monitor measuring a person’s pulse, a door bell ringing every time a person enters a room, or, in this case, explosions indicating large events occurring on the sun. In certain cases, scientists can use their ears instead of their eyes to process data more rapidly -- and to detect more details – than through visual analysis. A paper on the effectiveness of sonification in analyzing data from NASA satellites was published in the July issue of Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.

“NASA produces a vast amount of data from its satellites. Exploring such large quantities of data can be difficult,” said Alexander. "Sonification offers a promising supplement to standard visual analysis techniques.”

LISTENING TO SPACE

Alexander's focus is on improving and quantifying the success of these techniques. The team created audio clips from the data and shared them with researchers. While the original data from the Wind satellite was not in audio file format, the satellite records electromagnetic fluctuations that can be converted directly to audio samples. Alexander and his team used custom written computer algorithms to convert those electromagnetic frequencies into sound. Listen to the following multimedia clips to hear the sounds of space.

This clip has three distinct sections: a warble noise leading up to a short knock at slightly higher frequency followed by a quieter segment containing broadband noise that is both rising and hissing. This clip gathered from NASA's Wind satellite on Nov. 20, 2007, contains a reverse shock. This type of event occurs when a fast stream of plasma – that is, the super hot, charged gas that fills space— is followed by a slower one, resulting in a shock wave that travels towards the sun.

This audio clip is the previous clip played backwards. Here, trained listeners will notice the reverse shock event played backwards sounds similar to forward shock event.

This clip contains audified data from the joint European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA Ulysses satellite gathered on October 26, 1995. The participant in Alexander's study was able to detect artificial noise produced from the instrument, which he did not notice in previous visual analysis. Here, the artificial noise can be heard as a drifting tone.

PROCESSING AN OVERWHELMING AMOUNT OF DATA

Alexander's focus is on using clips like these to quantify and improve sonification techniques in order to speed up access to the incredible amounts of data provided by space satellites. For example, he works with space scientist Robert Wicks at NASA Goddard to analyze the high-resolution observations of the sun. Wicks studies the constant stream of particles from our closest star, known as the solar wind – a wind that can cause space weather effects that interfere with human technology near Earth. The team uses data from NASA's Wind satellite. Launched in 1994, Wind orbits a point in between Earth and the sun, constantly observing the temperature, density, speed and the magnetic field of the solar wind as it rushes past.

Wicks analyzes changes in Wind's magnetic field data. Such data not only carries information about the solar wind, but understanding such changes better might help give a forewarning of problematic space weather that can affect satellites near Earth. The Wind satellite also provides an abundance of magnetometer data points, as the satellite measures the magnetic field 11 times per second. Such incredible amounts of information are beneficial -- but only if all the data can be analyzed.

“There is a very long, accurate time series of data, which gives a fantastic view of solar wind changes and what’s going on at small scales,” said Wicks. “There's a rich diversity of physical processes going on, but it is more data than I can easily look through.”

The traditional method of processing the data involves making an educated assertion about where a certain event in the solar wind -- such as subtle wave movements made by hot plasma -- might show up and then visually searching, which can be very time consuming. Instead, Alexander listens to sped up versions of the Wind data and compiles a list of noteworthy regions that scientists like Wicks can return to and further analyze, expediting the process.

In one example, Alexander’s team analyzed data points from the Wind satellite from November 2007, condensing three hours of real-time recording to a three second audio clip. To an untrained ear, the data sounds like a microphone recording on a windy day. When Alexander presented these sounds to a researcher, however, the researcher could identify a distinct chirping at the beginning of the audio clip followed by a percussive event, culminating in a loud boom.

By listening only to the auditory representation of the data, the study’s participant was able to correctly predict what this would look like on a more traditional graph. He correctly deduced that that the chirp would show up as a particular kind of peak on a kind of graph called a spectrogram, a graph that shows different levels of frequencies present in the waves that Wind recorded. The researcher also correctly predicted that the corresponding spectrogram representation of the percussive event would display a steep slope.

CONVERTING DATA INTO SOUND

Alexander translates the data into audio files through a process known as audification, a specific type of sonification that involves directly listening to raw, unedited satellite data. Translating this data into audio can be likened to part of the process of collecting sound from a person singing into a microphone at a recording studio with reel-to-reel tape. When a person sings into a microphone, it detects changes in pressure and converts the pressure signals to changes in magnetic intensity in the form of an electrical signal. The electrical signals are stored on the reel tape. Magnetometers on the Wind satellite measure changes in magnetic field directly creating a similar kind of electrical signal. Alexander writes a computer program to translate this data to an audio file.

“The tones come out of the data naturally. If there is a frequency embedded in the data, then that frequency becomes audible as a sound,” said Alexander.

Listening to data is not new. In a study in 1982, researchers used audification to identify micrometeroids, or small ring particles, hitting the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it traversed Saturn's rings. The impacts were visually obscured in the data but could be easily heard – sounding like intense impulses, almost like a hailstorm.

However, the method is not often used in the science community because it requires a certain level of familiarity with the sounds. For instance, the listener needs to have an understanding of what typical solar wind turbulence sounds like in order to identify atypical events. “It’s about using your ear to pick out subtle differences,” Alexander said.

Alexander initially spent several months with Wicks teaching him how to listen to magnetometer data and highlighting certain elements. But the hard work is paying off as analysis gets faster and easier, leading to new assessments of the data.

“I’ve never listened to the data before,” said Wicks. “It has definitely opened up a different perspective.”

Via ComputerWorld

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Gartner sees things like robots and drones replacing a third of all workers by 2025, and whether you want to believe it or not, is entirely your business.

This is Gartner being provocative, as it typically is, at the start of its major U.S. conference, the Symposium/ITxpo.

Take drones, for instance.

"One day, a drone may be your eyes and ears," said Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's research director. In five years, drones will be a standard part of operations in many industries, used in agriculture, geographical surveys and oil and gas pipeline inspections.

"Drones are just one of many kinds of emerging technologies that extend well beyond the traditional information technology world -- these are smart machines," said Sondergaard.

Smart machines are an emerging "super class" of technologies that perform a wide variety of work, both the physical and the intellectual kind, said Sondergaard. Machines, for instance, have been grading multiple choice for years, but now they are grading essays and unstructured text.

This cognitive capability in software will extend to other areas, including financial analysis, medical diagnostics and data analytic jobs of all sorts, says Gartner.

"Knowledge work will be automated," said Sondergaard, as will physical jobs with the arrival of smart robots.

"Gartner predicts one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025," said Sondergaard. "New digital businesses require less labor; machines will be make sense of data faster than humans can."

Among those listening in this audience was Lawrence Strohmaier, the CIO of Nuverra Environmental Solutions, who said Gartner's prediction is similar to what happened in other eras of technological advance.

"The shift is from doing to implementing, so the doers go away but someone still has to implement," said Strohmaier. IT is a shift, although a slow one, to new types of jobs, no different than what happened in the machine age, he said.

The forecast of the impact of technology on jobs was also a warning to the CIOs and IT managers at this conference to consider how they will adapt.

"The door is open for the CIO and the IT organization to be a major player in digital leadership," said David Aron, a Gartner analyst.

CIOs have been steadily gaining authority, and 41% of CIOs now report to the CEO, a record level, said Aron. That's based on data from 2,810 CIOs globally.

To be effective leaders, Gartner argues that CIOs have shifted from being focused on measuring things like cost to being able to lead with vision and describe what their business or government agency must do to take advantage of smarter technologies.

Via MIT Technology Review

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