When CRISPR Meets the Coronavirus

We’ve been bombarding you with information about different technologies for the past couple of months on almost a weekly basis as we’ve been working on our project. (And you’re getting one final dose today.) One of these technologies was CRISPR. 

Have you ever thought about what would happen if CRISPR was used in tackling the Coronavirus crisis? 

Many are familiar with CRISPR as a gene-editing technique, but CRISPR could actually make it easier to test for the Coronavirus.

As Piyush K. Jain writes: “The coronavirus RNA activates CRISPR/Cas, transforming a pair of controlled molecular scissors into an unstoppable chainsaw. When the CRISPR/Cas enzyme activates, we know that the genetic sequence of the coronavirus is present in the saliva sample. To make the signal of the coronavirus stronger in the testing kit, we add millions of synthetic “reporter molecules,” which are also chopped up by the CRISPR/Cas mechanism. This means that within minutes we can detect the presence of coronavirus.”

Several labs and companies are rushing to develop CRISPR-based Coronavirus detection kits for saliva testing, and this could open an avenue for a faster and more accessible at-home Coronavirus test. 

Check out this article for more! https://www.fastcompany.com/90507421/why-crispr-could-be-the-key-to-faster-at-home-coronavirus-tests. 

Time for the last #coffeemonday

Time passes by and we are already at the end of this academic year…and what a year, indeed. Within a little more than half a year, two events occurred that better than anything else showed our vulnerability and our dependence towards technologies yet at the same time enabled us to continue working in one of the biggest crises in all of our lives.

The cyber-attack of December unveiled the interconnectivity of UM’s systems, take for example the library, where books were once again handed out after noting name and student ID on paper. In the first weeks, the theme could have come from a casino - rien ne vas plus. After becoming used to the comfort that interconnected systems provide, going “offline” again was, as many of us realised, extremely difficult.

The Covid-19 crisis on the other hand took us to the other extreme. In less than a week, courses underwent the forced change to an online environment and we all worked from home. As this is a topic that everybody has at least some expertise on, I will not write further on this to keep this #coffeemonday brief but rather combine both events to develop a little scenario.

#whatif the cyber-attack and the Covid-19 measures happened in the same week? Quite simply, rien ne vas plus, this time however in a unprecedented totality. Thinking about the difficulties of going back to offline-style working during the month of January, I wonder about the future. Technologies will be more and more present in our lives and simple “AIs” such as Alexa and Google Home are more and more common. Just like a frog in slowly warming water, we don’t realise the problems that come along our ever-increasing dependence on technology. What if I don’t own a pen anymore in 20 years? How would I write down my thoughts, if there is something with similar consequences like the cyber-attack? This might sound ridiculous but who would have thought 20 years ago that you cannot lend a book from the library because someone encrypted files on the university network?

It is incredibly difficult to develop risk-assessment scenarios of issues that we are not fully aware of. I never expected it but I think our report on the interplay of future technologies and society got the biggest viral marketing boost possible.

 Meanwhile…

…Jeroen is reading articles for his last tutorial as a student.

…Jack is considering whether a career in bread baking isn’t more suitable for him.

…Sabine is excited to start her waitress career again.

…Dora is being very whiny and can’t wait for her final course to end.

We are ready for a final review from our supervisor! Looking forward to present our findings and report to Arcadis and of course also to the closing event on Thursday. 

The Premium project has been an amazing experience! From the team-work to  the contact with our client, from the workshops and masterclasses to the meetings with our personal coaches, it truly was a great project in which we’ve been able to develop ourselves on a professional as well as on a personal level. 

A big thanks to the Premium Management Team, and we will see you on Thursday! 

Funfact Friday

Did you know that the first wireless (what we now call mobile) phonecall was made by Martin Cooper of Motorola. He called his competitors over at Bell Labs to explain to them they were squarely beaten in the race to have the first wireless calls. In a cheeky off note he told them: “I'm ringing you just to see if my call sounds good at your end.”

Our personal favourite story from the data we’ve collected.

In order to write our report, we have collected 32 very unique stories. Some quite positive, some rather concerning on how we have to deal with emerging technologies in the future. Some see technology helping parents make better informed decisions for their children, others see technology help children having all information at hand, which disconnects them from their parents. Some see a future in which technology will help us get rich, others see technology dividing most of us from the rich. One of our personal favourite’s on CRISPR-CAS9 shows exactly that, and it is indeed quite concerning:

Jack shuffled through the street, exhausted, and famished. He had been walking for hours, unable to find rest. After having been forced to leave his home he had nowhere to go. Thirsty and unable to go further he stumbled into a bar hoping that the bartender would bare some sympathy for him. It took a moment for his eyes to correct after walking into the dark, cool bar. It was empty except for a lonely middle-aged man with a slender physic. Although he was slender, he was well toned appearing to be very strong, his face looked as though it had been chiselled from stone by Michelangelo himself. The man looked at Jack with despair as he knew he would not be able to help him. Instead, with a perfectly posed finger to point to a sign above the door. Jack squinted to read the small writing, pulling his broken glasses from his pocket. It read ‘Gene-Corrected People Only’. Without further consideration, Jack left the bar and returned to the hot pavement outside. He knew that any attempt of dissidence would only make things worse. A couple of days back he had seen a woman trying to enter a bus for ‘Gene-corrected People’, only to be taken away in handcuffs by the police after she refused to get off. Jack knew that the fact of the matter was that, elites feared them. Instead of mingling with us we were separated and driven to the outskirts of the city. It was us and them. The elite viewed themselves as Darwin’s next evolutionary step, a better human free from disease or hunger. With better health and able to outrun, outthink and generally outperform any normal human. To them, we were Neanderthals, best left to our own demise. As Darwin famously wrote ‘nature is the survival of the fittest’ and we were riddled with imperfections.

Does Jack really have a large collection of themed teaspoons?

Teamwork makes the dreamwork.

A quote that is one of those cliché, yet true lines that everyone knows. Important for our team was to create a bond beyond working together, as teamwork really succeeds when you know what is really going on in one’s life. So, at our first meeting we played the ‘two truths one lie’ game to get to know each other a bit better in person. Now, we share some of our truths and lies with you. 

Dora:  1. I spent 2 days and 1 night in an old Russian train. 2. I like pumpkins. 3. I love Croatia. Jeroen: 1. I have flown upside down in an airplane. 2. I have had our king as the pilot of my flight. 3. I have jumped out of an airplane.  Jack 1. I have a large collection of themed teaspoons. 2. I have a personal vendetta against anything Spanish. 3. My favourite musician is Taylor Swift. Sabine 1. I had a mental breakdown while cross country skiing in Finnish Lapland 2. My identity card states not one, but three places of birth. 3. I celebrated a birthday at night on the top deck of an eight-story ship Any idea which ones are the lies?

Note: picture taken before COVID-19. 

Thumbs up for the nominees!!

Coffee Monday #7

Welcome to one of our final coffee Monday’s. As we continue to work from home, we need to be a bit creative in finding the balance to enjoy the weather and still be productive. So this is my desk today. Working on PREMIUM, my thesis and one final course.

Today we have an interesting message for the LAW and FHML students who might find themselves competing with some Artificial Intelligence program once searching for a job in a couple months:

“In the United States, young lawyers find it difficult to be employed. This is because IBM’s Watson computer can provide legal advice in a few seconds, for more or less complicated cases, all with 90% accuracy, compared to 70% for humans. So, if you are studying Law, forget it right away. In the future, there will be 90% fewer lawyers, only those who are specialised will survive.

The Watson computer is already helping to diagnose cancer with 4 times more accuracy than humans” (Salgues, 2018).

We would love to hear your thoughts about this in the comments. Do you expect finding a job will become more difficult due to these technological developments, or do you see a more positive future in which you perhaps work together with this type of system?

Meanwhile...

...Sabine is enjoying the sun while transcribing interviews for her thesis.

...Sunny is thinking about life.

...Dora has been watching way too much cartoons from the 1920s.

...Jack has come out as an official bird enthusiast.

Are drones a type of bird?

What if I told you that there is a community out there of 300.000 that supports the idea (99% satirical) that birds are not real. The story goes that during the Reagan presidency all birds were replaced with look-a-like drones that are used to surveil us for the CIA. Don’t believe me? Have a look: https://www.reddit.com/r/BirdsArentReal/

While I support creative content, an interesting thought experience is if our conceptions of drones will ever be close to that of birds. Because we already have a rich body of usable language in relation to animals, we tend to use those words when talking about drones, especially related to machines of war. Look at the names used:  General Atomics MQ-1C Grey Eagle ; Northrop Grumman Global Hawk & Black Hornet Nano. 

Or as Will Partin puts;

“THE DRONE IS, OBVIOUSLY, NOT ONE OF US, BUT IT IS IN POSSESSION OF ALL IT REQUIRES TO BE INDEPENDENT. HISTORICALLY AND PHILOSOPHICALLY SPEAKING, WE HAVE A WORD, A CATEGORY, A CONCEPT FOR THAT: THE ANIMAL.”

More readings: https://theoutline.com/post/7562/is-a-drone-a-type-of-animal?zd=1&zi=j4gpdmsd

Coffee Monday #6

And quarantine week #. . .  7, 5, 9? I have honestly lost the count.

It feels as though time has ceased to exist during quarantine. I substituted day with night; I started waking up later and later; I am becoming a night owl; and I no longer even pay attention to what time it is during the day. Despite all these changes in my rhythm, I still enjoy a nice cup of black coffee the moment I wake up.

I realized that the quarantine has been having a positive effect on many people’s creativity in my environment, myself including. My best friend has started to write poetry on a daily basis. I stared dedicating time to writing much more regularly than I did before. And, in general, the creative output of many writers that I have been in contact with during the past few weeks has rapidly increased. To some extent, this is also reflected in our PREMIUM project.

As we have already mentioned in one of our previous posts, our project is using science fiction prototyping (SFP) as its method for collecting data. This means that our participants basically had to write short stories about how they envisioned humans will interact with different technologies in the future. Since we are currently analyzing our data, I must say I am genuinely impressed with our participants’ creativity! Some of the stories that we collected briefly transport you into a dystopian future where human enhancement has become the basis for various forms of discrimination, while others have a more positive outlook and envision the future filled with chocolate-flavored tomatoes.

Bottom line: even though we are going through these unsettling times, there is always some room for personal growth and development, as well as to make the most out of the time that we are spending in our four-wall student rooms.

Meanwhile. . .

Sunny wades through the swamps of his quantitative-data nightmare. . .

Jack feels like he is the Don Quixote in his thesis writing story. . .

Sabine is drowning in coffee and literature studies. . .

And Jeroen is getting a new coffee machine to keep him awake as he finalizes his thesis.  

*Inspirational quote loading*

As I was walking down the street today, I noticed this sticker. For all those non-Dutch speaking among us, it states: May the Spring flowers remined you that the rain was necessary.

Besides the fact that this sticker put a smile on my face, it also reminded my on the workshop I recently followed on happiness and positivity, provided by PREMIUM.

Barbara Kuiters taught us during this workshop that due to evolutionary reasons, our brain is more focused on the negative. Training your brain with various exercises will help you to rewire your brain in a more positive way. 

In the difficult times we are facing, I feel it is even more important to search for the positive things in everyday, acknowledging the beauty that can be found around you.

This sticker made my day a brighter one, I hope it will do the same for you.

What is AI?

I don’t know if this counts as AI, but there is a calculator that tells you how long your toilet paper will last. Would be interesting to see who overstocked slightly.

https://howmuchtoiletpaper.com/

Thoughtful evening...

Coffee Monday #5

Another week, another coffee Monday. And with this weeks main ingredient; existential thought on algorithms. An algorithm to most is a piece of written software that performs an action without intervention. Sounds as basic as the clock ticking on your wall, however, algorithms are very much influencing our digital relationships. Who decides what content appears on your timeline? 

An algorithm decides that for you based on your online behaviour. While helping us overcome information overload, it does select who we will interact with socially. Instagram even has a shame function now where you can see the list of followers that you have the least interacted with and vice-versa. I always wonder what makes the best social media profile to be pushed to the front of your followers time line. Like twitter’s best tweets rather than latest tweet function. Are there certain innate characteristics besides likes & shares that the algorithm looks for? Can I model my own content to fit the algorithm’s preference? 

Two questions that could make anyone filthy rich if they have found the answer. Imagine if you knew the secret code that would viralise any content you make. A well placed emoji here, proper use of tags there, and voila, the picture with some paid product placement is visible to the whole network. It is only a matter of time, or have ‘smart’ ad companies already found a way? Perhaps a little bit of a tin foil hat thinking, but there are many interesting books being published recently (last 1-2 years) on the effect of algorithms on our lives. One such book is the quirks of digital culture. You can read a nice review on the blog of LSE: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2020/03/16/book-review-the-quirks-of-digital-culture-by-david-beer/

Some food for thought, and until next week!

Meanwhile ...

... Sunny is spending his entire day writing a 100 word abstract ... Jeroen is practising online assessment tests ... Dora is working on a tedious assignment for a course. ... Sabine is having muscle aches from a 20 km inline skating tour on Sunday

Guess Who!

Last week we had a wonderful team dynamics meeting during which we talked about our team’s ups and downs, went through some of our concerns, and realized how important it is never to forget to have some fun along the way. 

Our team dynamics meeting also resulted in a discovery; we found out that our team actually consists of a captain of a boat, a care bear, a dog that guides the blind, a sun, and a navigator of a starship. 

Here is a recent picture of our team floating somewhere in a remote galaxy. The sun is illuminating our way as we float among territories unknown and intact; our care bear is energetically chatting with the dog that guides the blind and the captain of a boat; and our navigator is mapping nearby planets (sort of). 

Can you guess which of our team members corresponds to which of the five characters? 

Is Sabine more of a dog that guides the blind or a captain of a boat? Is Jeroen an energetic care bear or a navigator of a starship? Or would Jack make a better navigator than Jeroen, Dora, or Sabine? What about Alexander? 

Let us know in the comments!

Science Fiction Prototyping, how does that work?

As most of you, we are finalising our data collection. However, quite contrary to most of you, we use Science Fiction Prototyping (SFP) to collect data. Why? Well, because we’re studying the future, which requests for some creative data collection techniques, as you can image. So, today we try to explain how that works and we show you one of the stories we have collected using this technique. 

What were we doing again?

We want to find out how students from different faculties think about the future and emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, 3D-printing, Augmented Reality, and CRISPR-CAS9.

What is Science Fiction Prototyping?

Using this method, we ask our participants to write a small memo, or story, about one of the above future technologies and how they envision this technology will be used in their daily life. 

Why do we do this?

The purpose of collecting data like this is to get a vivid understanding of how our generation, the future participants of Society 5.0, envision their daily life in a technology-driven world.

How do people respond?

“In my story, people are going to interact with an AI software that makes live-like decisions for them. Specific focus will be on childhood developments and raising up children. Currently, in the early stage, all parents have to make crucial decisions for their children. Which hobbies will my children like? Which school is best for them, etc. In 2040, I could image that most of such questions are answered by an AI. Based on millions of datapoints from different parents, these decisions are much more precise and tailored than human decisions. Parents themselves only have to “feed” the AI with enough data about their current situation and future preferences for their children. Based on this data, the AI will be able to predict the best choices for their children’s life. 

Obviously, one might believe that this will lead to homogeneity among children, but parents still might have different preferences for the future of their kids. When it comes to the emotional level of this AI, parents might be afraid of giving such a decision out of their hands. Additionally, many parents want to raise their children as freely and “unique” as possible. Therefore, they might have difficulties to get used to such a software. But does an AI really make less unique decisions, or would it become much better at making tailored paths for each individual?”

Coffee Monday #4

Good morning everyone! Time for our fourth coffee Monday. Today I started my day a bit different. I woke up at 4:45, drove to a watchtower in the nature and watched the sunrise. You can imagine that my coffee was black and very strong. Even though it was early and cold, it was an amazing way to start my day. As a big nature enthusiast it was fantastic to see the nature wake up as soon as the rays of sunshine touched upon the ground. 

So how about our project? The data collection is still in a work in progress, which we hope to finish this week. After that, data analysis can start! Furthermore, we as a team are going to focus more on the fun aspect that PREMIUM brings along as well. Due to COVID-19 this aspect of PREMIUM faded to the background. Thanks to the team dynamics meeting the fun, and with that a new portion of enthusiasm, was brought back into the group. 

That’s all for today, Happy Kingsday!

Meanwhile ... 

.... Sunny is running somewhere around Maastricht. .... Dora started learning Korean out of boredom. .... Jeroen is finalizing his data collection for his thesis. .... Jack is daydreaming about sailing in open waters

Say hi to the weekend! 

We finished this workweek with an amazing team dynamics meeting. It was so nice to see each other again, even if it is in this digital way. Imagine how digital meeting are going to look like in twenty years from now.. Holograms perhaps? Who knows...