Find out about Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Patient Engagement at FutureLink Munich | pharmaceutical - Packaging Europe

TraceLink Inc., the Track and Trace Network for connecting the life sciences supply chain and providing real-time information sharing for better patient outcomes, has announced the latest keynote speakers for its upcoming FutureLink Munich conference to be held June 5-7, 2018. 

Confirmed speakers include industry and academic thought-leaders: Professor Elgar Fleisch, Ph.D., of ETH Zurich; Justus Wolff of the Syte Institute; and, Andrew Rut, M.D., CEO, MyMeds&Me.

FutureLink Munich Addresses Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Patient Engagement The unique FutureLink value track will address the operational and commercial challenges in the pharmaceutical and healthcare arenas, delivering industry insights on how to capitalize on serialization and big data with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and predictive analytics, to improve patient outcomes. The conference will include discussions and workshops for commercial executives interested developing transformative strategies for brand protection, patient safety, instant and accurate product recalls and directly engaging healthcare providers at the point-of-dispense, and with patients at the point of consumption. 

Featured value speakers at FutureLink Munich include: 
•    Professor Elgar Fleisch, Ph.D. from ETH Zurich and the University of St. Gallen, will cover the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in the pharmaceutical and healthcare fields in his presentation, “The Digital Pill: How Digital Technologies Change Health Care.”...

FutureLink Munich is being held at the Sheraton Munich Arabellapark Hotel. 
For further information and to register for the conference, visit https://www.tracelink.com/futurelink-munich/about
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Source: Packaging Europe

7 things to do to prepare for distance learning | Study International News

"After umming and ahhing about what was the best course to study, how much you could afford to spend, how far you could travel, whether you wanted a local or international degree (we vote foreign!), you have finally come to a decision. You’re going to get your qualification online" inform Study International Staff.
 

Studying in bed is pretty great... but ya' might wanna leave the house at some point
Photo: Shutterstock

Perhaps you have family to care for, a job you wish to keep at home, or you cannot afford to move to the other side of the world to get the degree you so crave.
 
There are many reasons you might choose to study online but mostly it rewards you with an opportunity to get a degree from one of the best universities in the world from the comfort of your own home, as well as giving you almost total flexibility.
 
So, you’ve been accepted into a distance learning programme. You’re excited, ready for the challenge and raring to go. Here is what you need to do to prepare…
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Source: Study International News

UTAR unveils newly merged programme | The Borneo Post

Over the years, the awareness of global environmental problems has risen significantly, with issues ranging from climate change and pollution to depletion of natural resources known to have been adversely affecting human health and bringing about dire consequences if left unchecked.
 

Photo: The Borneo Post

These have given rise to the emergence of environmental protection legislation related to the control of hazardous substances, green technologies, green materials and waste treatment technologies.

Likewise, today’s work environment has changed drastically following the heightened awareness that people have towards the multitude of concerns relating to employees’ safety at work.

Such concerns include the risks as well as possibilities of being exposed to hazardous substances, heavy machinery and occupational diseases.

Since the passing of the Occupational Safety and Health Act 1994, Malaysia has been increasingly attentive to safety at work.

This has also resulted in a majority of employers looking into safety procedures and measures meant to protect employees from potential workplace hazards.

As a university committed to providing strong undergraduate programmes, which encourage the intellectual and personal development of students, as well as respond to professional and community needs, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) through its Faculty of Engineering and Green Technology (FEGT) is unveiling a new multidisciplinary programme integrating both ‘environmental health’ and ‘occupational safety and health’.

“We believe that safety measures can be taken to prevent risks and untoward disasters at the workplace,” said FEGT head of department of environmental engineering, Assoc Prof Dr Mohammed JK Bashir...

The university currently provides more than 110 programmes from Foundation Studies to Bachelor’s, Master degrees and PhDs in the fields of Accounting, Business and Economics, Actuarial Science, Mathematics and Process Management, Agriculture and Food Science, Arts, Social Sciences and Education, Chinese Studies, Creative Industries and Design, Engineering and Built Environment, Information and Communications Technology, Life and Physical Sciences, and Medicine and Health Sciences.

UTAR was awarded self-accreditation status by the Malaysian Qualifications Agency of the Ministry of Higher Education last year and ranked 501-600 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2018.

It was also ranked 99 in 2018 Times Higher Education Asia University Rankings.

For more information, go to www.utar.edu.my or call 05-468 8888 (Kampar Campus) / 03-9086 0288 (Sungai Long Campus).
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Source: The Borneo Post 

HSBC Singapore launches fast online-only life insurance platform | International Investment

"HSBC Insurance (Singapore) has announced the launch of HSBC Insurance Online – offering one of the fastest online insurance application processes in Singapore" continues International Investment.

Photo: International Investment

HSBC Insurance Online is a digital platform that offers simple and value for money term-based life insurance products online. Customers can complete the process within minutes by answering three simplified underwriting questions and an additional question if critical illness coverage is desired. Furthermore, to reward customers who lead a healthy and balanced lifestyle, HSBC Insurance Online offers certain premium discounts if they answer four additional lifestyle questions.

Carlos Vazquez, CEO of HSBC Insurance (Singapore), said: “HSBC Insurance Online will appeal to time-sensitive, digital-savvy customers who are receptive to investing or buying insurance products online...

HSBC says its Insurance Online is designed to help Singaporeans bridge this gap by helping customers identify the shortfall in their protection needs and the corresponding solutions available to them.
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Source: International Investment

Local teacher is infusing music with mathematics | Bakersfield Now

"A local teacher found the hook to battle classroom boredom and connect with students" according to Lexi Wilson, Eyewitness News.

Watch the Video

Rachel Harless is helping music meet math at Stockdale High School. She teaches statics and finite math.

Her students code using their calculators to create music through a hub, a small machine that produces sound. Each command represents a musical note.

Harless says bringing music into the classroom will help close a mathematical gap.

"Whenever we can incorporate music, I think it helps in the learning process," said Harless. "We memorize music so fast you listen to two songs on the radio, singing along, and you didn't make flash cards for that."

It's boosting students confidence to tackle problem solving.

"I'm not the greatest at math but when it came to this it's something that makes me really interested," said senior at Stockdale High School, Dylan Sullivan.

Sullivan coded 130 lines to play the Star Wars theme song.
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Source: Bakersfield Now

The Mysteries of the Golden Ratio Explained by Math and Sunflowers | Popular Mechanics

Photo: Jay Bennett

Jay Bennett, associate editor of PopularMechanics.com argues, "This number, approximately 1.62, has fascinated mathematicians and artists for centuries—but perhaps not for the reasons you think."

Photo: YouTubeNumberphile

The golden ratio is an almost mythical number that you may have heard of in various areas of architecture or design. For example, many claim the ancient Greek Parthenon has numerous examples of the golden ratio in its design. Others have said that the most beautiful people are those with features aligned according to the golden ratio.

These claims are rough approximations of the golden ratio at best and pseudoscience at worst. The truth is much more awesome.

The wonderful YouTube channel Numberphile recently spoke to Ben Sparks, a mathematician working at the University of Bath, to reveal the true nature of the golden ratio: 1 plus the square root of 5 over 2, or approximately 1.62, represented in mathematics by the Greek letter phi. In geometry, this number produces some fascinating patterns, such as a golden rectangle. (If you take the shorter length of a golden rectangle and make a square with that length, and then remove the area of that square from the golden rectangle, you are left with another, smaller golden rectangle.)

As the video below explains, the golden ratio can also be considered the "most irrational" of all irrational numbers. An irrational number is one that cannot be expressed by a fraction of integers, or whole numbers. Pi, for example, is an irrational number. It is almost 22/7, but not quite. 

The Golden Ratio (why it is so irrational) - Numberphile

A mathematical method for exploring irrational numbers is to play a kind of game. The idea is that you have a flower, and you are trying to place seeds on the face of the flower in such a way that you can fit as many as possible. If you place a seed, and then rotate the flower face a certain amount, and place another seed, and then repeat this process, what would be the ideal amount to rotate the flower face? 

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Source: Popular Mechanics and Numberphile Channel (YouTube)

The new math must focus on basics | Toronto Sun

"Make new math old school" notes Sue-Ann Levy, journalist on Toronto Sun. 
 

Photo: Toronto Sun files

PC Ontario leader Doug Ford says he’s talked to an “endless number of teachers” who are frustrated at being dictated to by Queen’s Park about how they must teach math.

He recently told me he intends to seek input from teachers on the best way to scrap discovery math and get “back to the basics” — which means teaching students how to properly add, subtract, multiply and divide (without a calculator) by the time they leave Grade 6.

“Our Grade 6 students are still failing (in standardized math tests) … Across Ontario, 50% still aren’t at the provincial standards,” he said. “We’re going to make sure we go back to the basics.”

He said many Ontario students (in the elementary grades) still can’t do simple multiplication or long division — and if they don’t have a calculator, they’re lost.

Retired Hamilton elementary school teacher Teresa Murray agreed that the way math is currently taught is a serious problem.

Murray, who taught for 32 years in the Catholic school system and has been tutoring students for the past six years, said “severe damage” has been done to kids for 20 years with the current discovery math curriculum.

“There are real people who have cried on my shoulder because they see what is happening to their children day after day,” she added. “Their education has been damaged with massive amounts of money being spent.”

She said a lot more time needs to be provided to learn the basics of math in school — and rigorously learn them — without having to seek outside tutors.

But Murray figures it will take “many many years” to bring the curriculum back to where it once was.
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Source: Toronto Sun

The Order of Time review: Where physics and philosophy meet | Culture - Irish Times

Exquisite translation captures Carlo Rovelli’s beautiful and intricate messages.

Carlo Rovelli points out that our entire conception of reality is blurred, necessarily – we can only discern the big events, not the infinitesimally small.
Photo: Stefania D’Alessandro/Getty Images

We live in the past. When we look deep into the night sky the radiance of the stars we see is anything from minutes to millions of years old: we are stargazing into the past. Even here on earth the “present moment” is an illusion. The light that for me is the image of your face takes an interval of time, however brief, to reach the retina of my eye, so that for me the you I see is you as you were an instant ago. It is a dizzying thought. Carlo Rovelli has many such facts and phenomena to confront us with, that require us to bethink ourselves. As he remarks, “We know little of the actual relation between what we see of the world and the world itself.”

Rovelli is a physicist working in the field of quantum gravity – “There is not yet a theory of quantum gravity that has been generally accepted by the scientific community, or obtained experimental support” – and is based in Marseilles, where he directs a research group at the Centre de physique théorique. He is also a masterly interpreter to the layman of highly complex and counter-intuitive current theories of the actual nature of reality, that reality to which most of us outside the laboratory are purblind. As the title of Rovelli’s previous book has it, Reality Is Not What It Seems. But have no fear: he is a wonderfully humane, gentle and witty guide through the theoretical thickets, for he is as much philosopher and poet as he is a scientist.

Perhaps the easiest means of access to this captivating, fascinating, profoundly beautiful but undeniably intricate book is to consider, as Rovelli does in Chapter 4, the contrast between Aristotle’s and Isaac Newton’s notions of what time is. For Aristotle, philosopher of the actual, time is nothing more or less than the measurement of change: “If nothing changes, there is no time.” Newton, on the other hand, founded his physics on the premise that there is such a thing as absolute time – and absolute space, too, but that is another matter – which passes in a seemingly Platonic somewhere, “independently of things and of their changes”. 

Another structure

We live in a Newtonian universe, as we must. Newton, it might be said, made a home for us, accommodating, dependable, built to our scale, and there we reside, and always shall. There is, however, not next door but on the very same site as our House of the World, another structure, wherein other laws hold sway, and another reality is in place. Here the medium in which things exist is Einstein’s spacetime. “This is the synthesis that Einstein found between Aristotle’s conception of time and Newton’s,” Rovelli tells us. “With a tremendous beat of his wing, Einstein understands that Aristotle and Newton are both right.” However, Newton is mistaken in holding that time is absolute and independent of things, “that it passes regularly, imperturbably, separately, from everything else”.
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Additional resources  

The Order of Time

Source: Irish Times

Beyond the Classroom | Learning Delivery - Chief Learning Officer

Amy W. Loomis, director of digital learning at IBM Think Academy and Robert M. Burnside, former chief learning officer at Ketchum summarizes, "The digital revolution presents challenges and opportunities to the traditional classroom delivery model."

Photo: Chief Learning Officer

In the university model that emerged in Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries, the professor faced the class and expounded wisdom. The class debated it. The professor summarized it. Done. Knowledge formed and agreed to by the community.

In the 21st century, nothing and everything has changed about the classroom learning experience.

Look around at the explosion of digital, mobile, cloud and AI technologies and it’s easy to think we have entered a completely new era of learning. And yet much of the behavioral mechanics remain the same. Is virtual learning different from face-to-face learning? Can digital learning at scale accomplish the same depth of learning that a classroom can provide?

Digital learning did not turn out to be the panacea promised but neither has it gone away as detractors predicted. It has evolved alongside other technologies. Cloud computing allows for sharing and creating multimedia content at scale. Data analytics enable user experience tracking and personalization. The best MOOCs are socially interactive, track learning behaviors and offer incentives for completing courses. Artificial intelligence helps us understand learning behavior patterns and predict challenges.

In the traditional university classroom, the Socratic paradigm of eager learners receiving wisdom from seasoned professors has not changed much in the past eight centuries. Early digital and distance learning merely transferred the traditional lecture to a visual medium. The introduction of social media, mobile devices and new conventions for digital learning created in the era of cloud, data, analytics and AI – along with the cultural expectations of consumer culture they’ve built – have blown it apart.

The Digital Disruption
Digital learning challenges fundamental assumptions of intellectual authority in the classroom. Instant digital access offers students the opportunity to validate, expand, challenge or substitute for traditional classroom knowledge.

At the same time, the small group experience of the classroom competes with broadly defined communities such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. But the echo chamber present in those communities threatens to replace the debate and discussion of contrary perspectives that happens in the classroom. False facts and fake online news makes the job of teachers all the more critical as arbiters of the tools to critically analyze what counts as truth...

Where is the awkward silence, the opportunity for learning while in transit, the ancillary messy elements that come with often uncomfortable but rewarding experiences that happen in the hybrid live-digital world in which we live?

The good news is we can use the technology of digital learning to create a new university model informed by and intertwined with the tools and tropes of online engagement. Here are three examples:

Digital learning frees us from the constraints of physical space and time. The place of digital learning is free from the physical limitations of the classroom. People gather from wherever they are, meaning cross-pollination of ideas happens across the planet. It also gives us the ability to stop time and re-listen to a key point in a presentation or jump ahead.

Digital learning offers an opportunity to gain knowledge through conversation within a broader community. Instead of operating in isolation, our knowledge and opinions can be part of a wider discussion. The traditional role of the professor as class moderator over orator takes on new urgency and importance. Classrooms have always been about creating a context for shared conversation and learning. Digital learning offers an opening of that aperture and a means of documenting and codifying the collective knowledge the classroom is building together.

Digital learning has the potential to alter the power dynamics between the traditional knowledge giver (professor) and knowledge seeker (student). Digital learning platforms offer a more level playing field for conversation, shared understanding and the creation of shared experience. We can make use of the conversational conventions of online learning as an experience that is in itself a collective voice of authority.
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Source: Chief Learning Officer

How to Overcome 10 Digital Learning Challenges | The Tech Edvocate (press release) (blog)

"Digital learning is becoming almost commonplace in classrooms across America; however, you will still come across opposition. While studies suggest digital learning is changing education for the better, it does not mean that digital learning is without problems" reports Matthew Lynch, Author at The Edvocate.

Photo: The Tech Edvocate

Ask any teacher who has ever attempted to use technology or digital resources in his or her classroom, and you will be told about a time when technology let them down.

And, yet, even with the digital learning challenges teachers face, most are willing to deal with them to make their classroom a digital learning environment. Today, let’s take some time to look at some of the more common digital learning challenges and discuss ways to overcome them.
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Source: The Tech Edvocate (press release) (blog)