Your source of news about the people, places, things, and events across Second Life.
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Saturday September 25
10 AM to 11 AM
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Science%20Circle/161/99/24
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Saturday September 25
9PM SL time
Whether it’s in areas like data forecasting or classifying images, computer algorithms are vulnerable to bias. In areas like the medical field or cybersecurity, where the employment of artificial intelligence is being explored, bias can be severely detrimental. How can bias be measured, how can it be prevented? What are the consequences and threats to society it may introduce?
Panel Host – Karthik Prathaban
Auditorium
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Science%20Circle/67/129/32
Saturday April 24,
10AM to 11 AM
From toys to surveillance to autonomous flight on another planet, robots and drones are becoming a part of life in the 21st century. We are on the threshold of advances in AI and universal surveillance that will bring benefits and risks to society. It is time to discuss the implications of these new elements in our world.
A 16-minute YouTube to get you started: Why do Boston Dynamics Robots dance? And could Elon Musk be right that superhuman AI is only around five years away?
Mathew Burr
For more information, Click Here.
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Science%20Circle/67/129/32
"Panel: Ministry for the Future"
Saturday March 27
10 AM to 11 AM SL time
The recent state-wide cold snap that left many Texans without electricity and water seems like a good time to consider Kim Stanley Robinson’s book The Ministry for the Future.
This book is disaster novel wrapped loosely around a series of essays, stories, metaphors, reports and commentaries about economics, politics and social inequality. The story line follows two characters: Frank, the sole survivor of a lethal heat wave, and Mary, the director of the Ministry for the Future, an agency established by the U.N. Their relationship is complicated by an incident that results in Frank’s arrest. The book is not an easy read, dealing as it does with a serious effort to alter human behavior enough to ward off the dire consequences of ignoring our own contributions to climate change. Robinson recognizes both the difficulty of making such changes and the necessity to do so and argues convincingly for some possible solutions.
By Mathew Burr
For more information, Click Here.
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Science%20Circle/67/129/32
Saturday February 27
10AM to 11AM SL time
To aid everyone in the audience in getting the most from our presentations, The Science Circle is introducing a series of presentations that seek to explain popular and important topics in different fields of science. Each presentation will start with a basic understanding that most pre-college students may have and gradually work up to the types of things that experts know, and still do not know, about each topic, all within an hour.
For this month’s Panel discussion, the topic is Gravity. Gravity is something so present in our lives that we may take it for granted, but it is also what makes possible some of the most fantastical concepts that explain, and objects that make up, our known universe.
Panel Host Matthew Burr will start by reviewing that we understood about Gravity until the beginning of the 1900’s, based on Newtonian mechanics.
Dr. Phil Youngblood will then review the new ideas that Einstein discovered at the turn of the century regarding the relativity of space-time.
Dr. William Wall will conclude by talking about Einstein’s field equations and the more exotic aspects of gravity associated with massive objects.
On March 20, Phil Youngblood will continue the series with an explanation of “Elementary Particles” at different levels of understanding.
For more information, Click Here.
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Science%20Circle/67/129/32
"The Cambrian Explosion and the History of Life” 
