According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 34.6 percent of 16-to-19-year-olds employed on average from June to August 2018. This was less than compared to 51.7 percent in the summer of 2000, and much less compared to 57.7 in the summer of 1979. Nevertheless, summer jobs are still a practical choice for some teens. Aside from earning money, they also learn new skills.

“In high school, there’s a difference between having to work and having the option to work,” says photographer Eva O’Leary, who spent much of June and July 2019 taking pictures of young people employed in her Pennsylvania hometown. But these days, finding kids on payroll isn’t easy. “It was pretty challenging to find high schoolers who were working. I went all over town, every day,” says O’Leary, who also grew up working a number of odd jobs.

Ultimately, O’Leary was able to locate teens working to save up money for college, or just get through small-town summer boredom. Sometimes, the work itself may be a little dull, but finding confidence in learning how to use a register, resolve conflicts with customers, or just earning a wage that’s all your own is enough to make it worthwhile.  

Check out the many photos and stories of these teens over at Topic Magazine.

(Image Credit: Eva O’Leary/ Topic)

Our high school textbooks about biology were wrong about cells. It isn’t a neat translucent sphere. Its internal parts are also not sitting and conveniently far apart like pineapple chunks suspended in gelatin. So what does it really look like?

In reality, a cell looks more like a pound of half-melted jelly beans stuffed into a too-small sandwich bag. And its contents are all constantly moving, following a choreography more precise and complex than that of a computer chip.

In short, understanding what cells look like on the inside — much less the myriad interactions among their parts — is hard even in the 21st century. “Think of a cell as a sophisticated machine like a car — except every 24 hours, you’ll have two cars in your driveway, and then four cars in your driveway,” said Greg Johnson, a computer vision and machine learning researcher at the Allen Institute for Cell Science. “If you found the smartest engineers in the world and said, ‘Make me a machine that does that,’ they would be totally stumped. That’s what I think of when I think of how little we know about how cells work.”

To view the inner workings of living cells, biologists currently use a combination of genetic engineering and advanced optical microscopy. (Electron microscopes can image cell interiors in great detail, but not with live samples.) Typically, a cell is genetically modified to produce a fluorescent protein that attaches itself to specific subcellular structures, like mitochondria or microtubules. The fluorescent protein glows when the cell is illuminated by a certain wavelength of light, which visually labels the associated structure. However, this technique is expensive and time-consuming, and it allows only a few structural features of the cell to be observed at a time.

But with his background in software engineering, Johnson wondered: What if researchers could teach artificial intelligence to recognize the interior features of cells and label them automatically? In 2018, he and his collaborators at the Allen Institute did just that. Using fluorescence imaging samples, they trained a deep learning system to recognize over a dozen kinds of subcellular structures, until it could spot them in cells that the software hadn’t seen before. Even better, once trained, Johnson’s system also worked with “brightfield images” of cells — images easily obtained with ordinary light microscopes through a process “like shining a flashlight through the cells,” he said.

Know more about Greg Johnson’s work over at Quanta Magazine.

(Image Credit: Chona Kasinger/ Quanta Magazine)

Personality tests promise to tell us who we are. The tests would instruct a person to rate the statements according to how well it describes him or her. The choices would then range from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The results then would group the person into other like-minded people. Some are grouped with introverts, and others with extroverts.

These tests have spread into career centre, high schools, and universities across North America, and according to some estimates, it has become an industry worth as much as $4 million. It has also spread into the Internet, a place where a person can find hundreds of free versions of personality tests.

...But there’s another side to this tool, one that’s about corporate efficiency rather than self-understanding.

Personality tests have today become a popular screening tool. In 2016, a global HR study found that 48 percent of businesses surveyed in the US and 57 percent of businesses surveyed in the UK were using personality questionnaires. Two years earlier, the Wall Street Journal had found that between 60 and 70 percent of job seekers in the US took personality tests, which screened out nearly one-third of prospective employees. Recent Canadian stats are harder to find, but we know that in 2013 almost 30 percent of small and medium Canadian businesses reported using them. By relying on these tests, employers can ask questions that would be inappropriate—or at best bizarre—in a traditional interview. At Michaels, a North America–wide arts-and-crafts supply store, for example, Canadians who applied for a job online in March 2017 were directed to a questionnaire that asked them to assess themselves in reference to around 200 items.

Twenty-four-year-old Ashleigh was a university student when she took the Michaels test. She says she found it “very invasive.” At the time, she was suffering from depression and anxiety, so her mood fluctuated throughout the day, and she had taken time off work to take care of her mental health. She fears the test was a subtle method for weeding out people like her. “They’re not allowed to ask, ‘Are you schizophrenic? Do you have Asperger’s?’” she says. “But they can ask something similar.”...

Ashleigh never heard back from Michaels, and doesn’t know if the test had any effect on her application. But, for corporations who have bought into the idea that an ideal personality exists for each specific role, such exams have become serious business. 

Know more about this topic over at The Walrus.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: ElisaRiva/ Pixabay)

In 1842, English mathematician Ada Lovelace was tasked in translating from French to English an article for the “Grandfather of the Computer”, Charles Babbage. The piece was about Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a revolutionary new automatic calculating machine. Lovelace was only tasked to translate the article. However, she went the extra mile and did something that would mean a lot to the world two centuries later (the modern world of today.)

...Lovelace also scribbled extensive ideas about the machine into the margins, adding her unique insight, seeing that the Analytical Engine could be used to decode symbols and to make music, art, and graphics. Her notes, which included a method for calculating the Bernoulli numbers sequence and for what would become known as the “Lovelace objection,” were the first computer programs on record, even though the machine could not actually be built at the time.

Her contributions were astonishing. Though never formally trained as a mathematician, Lovelace was able to see beyond the limitations of Babbage’s invention and imagine the power and potential of programmable computers; also, she was a woman, and women in the first half of the 19th century were typically not seen as suited for this type of career. Lovelace had to sign her work with just her initials because women weren’t thought of as proper authors at the time. Still, she persevered, and her work, which would eventually be considered the world’s first computer algorithm, later earned her the title of the first computer programmer.

[...]

Ada Lovelace took us “from calculation to computation,” and nearly two centuries later, her visionary insights have proved true. She received little recognition for her contributions at the time and didn’t receive an official New York Times obituary until 2018, when the Times decided to go back and eulogize the many women and people of color the newspaper had overlooked since 1851. She was able to see the vast potential of the computer in the mid-19th century, and her creative and unconventional approach to mathematical exploration has much to teach us about the power of diversity, inclusion, and multidisciplinary, cross-pollinating intelligence.

Ada Lovelace was only one of the many people that have contributed to the advancement of technology. Like her, there are also many women who have lots of contributions in A.I development.

What do her actions imply about our future? What does her story tell us?

More details of this topic at Nautilus.

(Image Credit: Sambeetarts/ Pixabay)

Hypersanity is an uncommon and an unaccepted term. However, this is a term nonetheless. But what exactly is hypersanity? In his book, The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (1967), R D Laing, a Scottish psychiatrist, presents “madness” as “a voyage of discovery that could open out onto a free state of higher consciousness, or hypersanity.”

For Laing, the descent into madness could lead to a reckoning, to an awakening, to ‘break-through’ rather than ‘breakdown’.

The Laingian concept of hypersanity, though modern, has ancient roots. Once, upon being asked to name the most beautiful of all things, Diogenes the Cynic (412-323 BCE) replied parrhesia, which in Ancient Greek means something like ‘uninhibited thought’, ‘free speech’, or ‘full expression’. Diogenes used to stroll around Athens in broad daylight brandishing a lit lamp. Whenever curious people stopped to ask what he was doing, he would reply: ‘I am just looking for a human being’ – thereby insinuating that the people of Athens were not living up to, or even much aware of, their full human potential.

If hypersanity is a real thing, what does it imply? And if it is real, are they hypersane people out there? If there are, then who are those people? Find out the answers on Aeon.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: TeroVesalainen/ Pixabay)

The KwaZulu-Natal is a coastline that runs along South Africa’s east coast. Well-known to the residents of this coastline is the sardine run. The sardines migrate close to the shoreline every year in winter. This phenomenon is well documented in the local press.

The sardine run is of great economic importance because it provides prime fishing opportunities and attracts large numbers of tourists who come for dolphin and shark sightings. Similar migration patterns are seen in Sweden, Chile, and the Pacific Ocean.

The sardine run is what scientists term a “phenological event”—a biological event that occurs at the same time every year. Phenological events are standard for plants and include the appearance of leaf and flower buds, blossoming, fruit development, fruit harvest and leaf colouration and fall.

[...]

Scientists have become very interested in phenology over the past few decades, because it’s one of the most sensitive biological indicators of climate change. As temperatures increase, the plants or animals experience their triggers for spring earlier and their triggers for winter later. As a result, many of these phenological events are occurring at different times of the year.

In a recently published paper in the South African Journal of Science, we examined newspaper articles written between 1946 and 2012 that reported on the South African sardine run. From these articles we established an annual date of the peak of the sardine run.

We then explored how the dates of the sardine run have changed over the 65-year period, and statistically examined oceanographic and climatological factors to determine the cause of this change. We did this because there are very few phenological records for South Africa and consequently, the rate of phenological shifts and the associated climate signal is largely unknown.

What does the change mean for the fishermen and the supply chains? 

Find out the answer on Quartz.

(Image Credit: pixaoppa/ Pixabay)

Most of our science textbooks up to this day teach that our galaxy the Milky Way resembles a flat spiral. However, this new detailed 3-D map of our galaxy says otherwise. It turns out that our galaxy is warped.

Getting an actual look at our own galaxy is basically impossible. So far, our most distant space probes have barely left our own solar system and will likely never leave the galaxy to capture an image from a distance. So astronomers have to rely on modeling to figure things out using the telescopes and instruments we have. That’s difficult because Earth is parked in a small spiral arm about 26,000 from the galactic center, making it hard to take in the big picture.

Elizabeth Gibney at Nature reports that prior to this study, the best maps of the Milky Way, which is about 120,000 light years in diameter, used indirect measurements, like counting stars and extrapolating information from other nearby spiral galaxies that we can see. But for this study, researchers from the University of Warsaw used the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile to analyze the Cepheids, a group of stars that brighten and dim on a predictable cycle, directly measuring their distances.

Over the course of six years, the team catalogued 2,341 Cepheids stretching across the galaxy, taking 206,726 images of the stars. Observing stars from Earth, it’s sometimes hard to know how bright they really are. A super-bright star that is very far away may appear dim. But researchers know that the slower a Cepheid star pulses, the brighter it really is, which allows them to calculate its true, or intrinsic, brightness. By comparing the brightness level of the star with its apparent brightness from Earth, the researchers were able to determine the distance and three-dimensional position of each Cepheid with more than 95 percent accuracy. Using these data points, they plotted the positon of the Cepheids throughout the galaxy, creating a structural map. The study appears in the journal Science.

More of this topic over at Smithsonian.com.

It looks like a Pringle to me. What do you think?

(Image Credit: J. Skowron/ OGLE/ Astronomical Observatory, University of Warsaw)

Millions of people walk by the magnificent cobbled streets of Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. Unknown to many, they tread upon old gravestones looted from Jewish cemeteries that have long been forgotten.

They look like normal paving stones and indistinguishable from the rest, because the smooth, polished side of the granite block—the one that carries the inscription—is always laid face down.

Like the rest of Europe, the holocaust ravaged the Jewish population in the Czech Republic. Before World War Two, Czechoslovakia's Jewish population stood at 350,000. Systematic extermination and migration left only about 50,000 Jews when war ended. In the following decades of Communist rule, anti-Semitism was so high that the majority of the remaining voluntarily emigrated elsewhere leaving barely 8,000 individuals of the community behind.

As Jewish villages became abandoned hundreds of Jewish cemeteries lay untended and forgotten. The Communist authorities, and surprisingly, many officials within the Jewish community too, saw these cemeteries valuable repositories for building material that would otherwise go to waste. All across the Czech Republic, people dismantled Jewish graves and used the stones to pave their backyards and walkways.

The local Jewish population seems to be aware of this, and they have expressed outrage from time to time regarding this matter. However, the subject never became a wider public debate.

Leo Pavlat, the director of the Prague Jewish Museum, believes it would be impossible to dismantle Prague’s streets and recover the blocks because of the cost associated. Besides, the blocks have been cut into such small pieces that it would be impossible to put them back together anyway. However, Pavlot said that he would like the city to put up a small plaque reminding people of the origin of the blocks and the barbarism of the Communist regime.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: BBC)

The body of a human being has the ability to repair itself. It can patch up its wounds, heal broken bones, and combat infections. However, the human body can only do this at a certain point. For example, when a person loses a limb, he or she should not expect the limb to grow back because his or her body is not capable of doing that. Other creatures, however, have mastered this ability. One example of these creatures is the hydra.

Scientists at the University of California Davis (UC Davis) and Harvard have sequenced the RNA transcripts for the immortal hydra in order to understand how it manages to do that.

The hydra is a tiny freshwater invertebrate, which is related to jellyfish and corals. Measuring a few millimeters long, these little critters kind of resemble a soft stick with tentacles on one end. While they're not particularly exciting at a glance, the hydra has a hidden talent – it's basically immortal. These things don't seem to age at all, with their lifespan basically indefinite until killed by predators or environmental factors.

Even more amazing, they can perfectly regenerate their entire bodies. Cut a hydra in half and pretty soon you have two hydra, as the critters can regrow all tissue types and even a new central nervous system. Humans, on the other hand, struggle to repair any tissue without some kind of scarring, and the nervous system is particularly resistant to patch-jobs.

The researchers on the new study set out to investigate how the hydra does it, in the hopes of maybe learning something about ourselves. Hydra use three different lines of stem cells to renew their cells, and the researchers sequenced the messenger RNA transcripts of 25,000 individual hydra cells to figure out what all those cells are doing.

Head over at New Atlas to know more about the study.

(Image Credit: Stefan Siebert/ UC Davis)

It’s alright if you think that the AI will soon replace replace human physicians. After all, there are various headlines out there that tell us so, such as “Your Future Doctor May Not Be Human”. With the rapid advancement of technology, this scenario might really be possible in the future. However, experts say otherwise: they state that “the reality is more of a collaboration than an ousting”. Patients could soon find their lives in the hands of both the AI and the human physician.

There is no shortage of optimism about AI in the medical community. But many also caution the hype surrounding AI has yet to be realized in real clinical settings. There are also different visions for how AI services could make the biggest impact. And it’s still unclear whether AI will improve the lives of patients or just the bottom line for Silicon Valley companies, health care organizations, and insurers.

“I think that all our patients should actually want AI technologies to be brought to bear on weaknesses in the health care system, but we need to do it in a non-Silicon Valley hype way,” says Isaac Kohane, a biomedical informatics researcher at Harvard Medical School.

If AI works as promised, it could democratize health care by boosting access for underserved communities and lowering costs — a boon in the United States, which ranks poorly on many health measures despite an average annual health care cost of $10,739 per person. AI systems could free overworked doctors and reduce the risk of medical errors that may kill tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of U.S. patients each year. And in many countries with national physician shortages, such as China where overcrowded urban hospitals’ outpatient departments may see up to 10,000 people per day, such technologies don’t need perfect accuracy to prove helpful.

Critics, however, say that all that promise could vanish if the rush to implement AI will trample on patient privacy rights, if it would overlook biases and limitations, or worse, if it fails to deploy services in a way that improves people's health.

“In the same way that technologies can close disparities, they can exacerbate disparities,” says Jayanth Komarneni, founder and chair of the Human Diagnosis Project (Human Dx), a public benefit corporation focused on crowdsourcing medical expertise. “And nothing has that ability to exacerbate disparities like AI.”

More details of this topic over at Undark.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

If you think that catfishing only appeared on the advent of the Internet, think again because it’s not. (Well, technically, the term catfishing is new, but the activity is not). As historian Angus McLaren said, “fraudulent matchmaking efforts are nothing new.” A scheme which ripped off bachelors for over a decade was said to have happened on 19th-century Britain.

According to McLaren, from 1884 to 1895, the Matrimonial Herald and Fashionable Marriage Gazette promised to provide “HIGH CLASS MATCHES” to U.K. men and women looking for wives and husbands. Prospective spouses could place ads in the paper or work directly with staff of the associated Word’s Great Marriage Association to privately make a connection.

The Association’s clients were mostly, though not all, men. The Herald lured them with advertisements in local papers supposedly placed by wealthy women.

While seeking a wealthy wife might raise eyebrows today, McLaren notes that, for most of the nineteenth century, men of all classes unabashedly tried to use marriage for social advancement. He quotes one young Canadian man who, in a letter to his sister, ended a description of his fiancée with “… and best of all [she] is possessed of property, and has no hangers on.”

When men responded to the Herald’s ads, they received an invitation to join the Association. The new members then received more descriptions of marriageable women and the opportunity to correspond with them. The Association also informed them that, upon marriage, they would owe it 2.5 percent of their bride’s wealth. To avoid this charge, they could pay a £12 fee up front…

The Association did eventually connect them with actual women: Domestic servants or other members of the working class who had themselves paid membership fees in the hopes of marrying wealthy men.

The Association was eventually put to trial due to several years of complaints.

Find out what happened next on JSTOR Daily.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

Have you ever played SimCity or Cities: Skylines? On those games, traffic becomes an incredible frustration and you end up tearing down the roads in an attempt to fix the traffic. You think to yourself, “What if there was a game where I can control the drivers or the traffic lights?” Traffix is one such game.

Each level of Traffix puts you in control of an intersection or group of intersections and asks you to manually control the traffic signals until a specified number of white cars leaves the area. How you control the lights couldn’t be more simple. By default, all of the lights are set to red, stopping all cars and trucks. Tapping or clicking a traffic light once lets a single vehicle through, while tapping twice lets all vehicles through until you hit it again to change the light back to red.

Aside from making sure that the right number of vehicles leaves the stage, you also need to avoid causing crashes and making a vehicle wait too long at a traffic light. Racking up 10 of those in a single level causes you to fail and start over. At first, this seems simple enough to avoid. But as the game progresses, it introduces new intersections with more complicated layouts, as well as traffic that you have no control over, including trains and sometimes planes. You have to manage your time between looking at traffic, an ever-growing lineup of cars that are stopped at your lights, or deciding what lights need to be signaled and when.

(Video Credit: Infinity Games/ YouTube)

This test is based on the Stroop Effect, an event that happens when conflicting streams of information interfere with your brain’s reaction time. The test measures how quickly you can recognize 5 matching colors and 10 mismatching ones.

After testing 2000 adults, 79 percent were able to get all five matching colors correct, while only 21 percent of respondents scored a perfect 10 out of 10 for the mismatching colors. They believe that different factors may affect your score such as age, emotional state, and how much you exercise.

Take the test over at Mental Floss and comment down your score.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: cmart29/ Pixabay)

Lynn Scott’s husband (whose name was not mentioned in the story) was adopted at birth. After he passed away, Lynn wanted to help their son find his paternal biological grandparents. She and her son then sent test tubes, on which they spat into, to FamilyTreeDNA. They then found a match with a second cousin which eventually led them to her son’s paternal grandfather and a half-aunt. However, unknown to Lynn, what seemed to be an innocent search would turn out to be something else.

… several other matches popped up that weren’t from her husband’s side, but Scott didn’t recognize them from her family either. “I thought, ‘I know all my second cousins, and I don’t know who these people are,’” she says. “I started putting together bits and pieces and realized there was something I was missing.”

Scott’s brother had tested his DNA separately through AncestryDNA, so the family compared their results to figure out what was going on. They discovered that Scott and her brother were actually half-siblings.

It turns out that the man who raised Scott — who passed away in 2003 — was not her biological father. Finding out she wasn’t genetically related to her father was heartbreaking, she says. “It felt like I lost him all over again.”

More DNA sleuthing led Scott to the man she believes to be her biological father — a former co-worker of her mother’s — although her mother denies it. That man passed away in 1999, so Scott never got the chance to meet him, but she has connected with his grandchildren and she hopes to meet a half-brother soon.

Scott has begun to accept her new family tree, but at the outset she really struggled with the results. “I felt so alone when I first found out,” she says. “Who do you talk to about this? Is there anybody out there who’s going through the same thing?”

Fortunately, Lynn found out there was when she came across an online support group run by Brianne Kirkpatrick, a genetic counselor who specializes in unexpected family discoveries from at-home DNA tests. There Lynn found comfort and she no longer felt alone.

More details of the story on Medium.com.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

The world isn’t all that bad. It is common knowledge that there are a lot of bad people out there, such as creepy guys who can’t take “no” for an answer. However, there are a few heroes that can save us from these bad guys, and these heroes can be found in the most unlikely of places.

Uber driver Brandon Gale shares his story on Facebook of how a female passenger asked him to pretend to be her boyfriend.

Via Bored Panda

(Image Credit: freestocks-photos/ Pixabay)

(Image Credit: Bored Panda)