#125 - Giant Solar Farms, Biocomputers, and Humility!
#125 - Giant Solar Farms, Biocomputers, and Humility!
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In the News
☀️ The world’s largest solar farm just came online in Xinjiang, China.
🌑 The Chang’e 6 lunar mission successfully landed on the dark side of the moon last week and transmitted some spectacular photos.
💉 mRNA vaccines for cancer are a thing, and the first trials for melanoma seem extremely promising.
🌱 A Swiss startup is connecting small chips to the brain to create biocomputers, and they work!
Opportunities
GovAI is looking for a 1-year visiting research scholar. “GovAI was founded to help humanity navigate the transition to a world with advanced AI. Our first research agenda, published in 2018, helped define and shape the nascent field of AI governance. Our team and affiliate community possess expertise in a wide variety of domains, including AI regulation, responsible development practices, compute governance, AI company corporate governance, US-China relations, and AI progress forecasting.”
Fortify Health is looking for a quality systems manager. “The Quality Systems Manager will blend technical, managerial, and strategic work around Fortify Health’s Quality systems. The QS Manager will need to have a deep understanding of quality assurance and control in the food manufacturing sector, the ability to think both at the systems as well as the granular level, and excellent people management skills. The QS Manager will streamline technical processes followed by the Monitoring & Evaluation (M & E) team to ensure the quality of fortification in our partner mills. They will also help set up coordination and communication systems to ensure smooth coordination between the Program and the M&E teams.”
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is seeking a research assistant for their new project on LLMs in Southeast Asia. “The project examines the recent rise of Southeast Asia-focused LLMs as a nascent expression of agency in an international landscape otherwise dominated by the languages, worldview, knowledge perspectives, and resources of others. Through a socio-technical lens on technology, the project seeks to understand the extent to which the historically-charged and politically sensitive role of language in culturally diverse Southeast Asia has (or has not) been a consideration in the development of regionally-based LLMs. The project will also offer practical recommendations on the way forward in this space.”
What We’re Watching
Our World In Data recently published a report about the efficacy of vaccines. Did you know that thanks to developments over the last 50 years, a child is saved every 10 seconds thanks to public health vaccination campaigns?
Here’s a super interesting story on Koo, India’s Twitter alternative, and how it rose to prominence and then essentially folded within 4 years.
We have a bio fascination at Impact Labs, and this article suggests a major framework update based on the research of Michael Levin at Tufts.
An astronaut’s father writes to his son.
Quotes We Love
“Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”
-Rick Warren
That’s all for now! We’ll be taking a break during the summer, so expect the next edition of the Impact Labs newsletter in your inbox in mid July!