Monthly Archives: May 2020

Fourth Industrial Revolution and its impact on charity organizations

Leave a reply

Andy Levy-Ajzenkopf’s February 21, 2020 article (Technology and innovation: How the Fourth Industrial Revolution is impacting the charitable sector) for Charity Village has an ebullient approach to adoption of new and emerging technologies in the charitable sector (Note: A link has been removed),

…

Almost daily, new technologies are being developed to help innovate the way people give or the way organizations offer opportunities to advance their causes. There is no going back.

The charitable sector – along with society at large – is now fully in the midst of what is being called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a term first brought to prominence among CEOs, thought leaders and policy makers at the 2016 World Economic Forum. And if you haven’t heard the phrase yet, get ready to hear it tons more as economies around the world embrace it.

To be clear, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the newest disruption in the way our world works. When you hear someone talk about it, what they’re describing is the massive technological shift in our business and personal ecosystems that now rely heavily on things like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, 3D printing and the general “Internet of things.”

…

Still, now more than ever, charitable business is getting done and being advanced by sector pioneers who aren’t afraid to make use of new technologies on offer to help civil society.

…

It seems like everywhere one turns, the topic of artificial intelligence (A.I.) is increasingly becoming subject of choice.

This is no different in the charitable sector, and particularly so for a new company called Fundraise Wisely (aka Wisely). Its co-founder and CEO, Artiom Komarov, explains a bit about what exactly his tech is doing for the sector.

“We help accelerate fundraising, with A.I. At a product level, we connect to your CRM (content relationship management system) and predict the next gift and next gift date for every donor. We then use that information to help you populate and prioritize donor portfolios,” Komarov states.

He notes that his company is seeing increased demand for innovative technologies from charities over the last while.

“What we’re hearing is that… A.I. tech is compelling because at the end of the day it’s meant to move the bottom line, helping nonprofits grow their revenue. We’ve also found that internally [at a charitable organization] there’s always a champion that sees the potential impact of technology; and that’s a great place to start with change,” Komarov says. “If it’s done right, tech can be an enabler of better work for organizations. From both research and experience, we know that tech adoption usually fails because of culture rather than the underlying technology. We’re here to work with the client closely to help that transition.”

…

I would like to have seen some numbers. For example, Komarov says that AI is having a positive impact on a charity’s bottom line. So, how much money did one of these charities raise? Was it more money than they would have made without AI? Assuming they did manage to raise greater funds, could another technology been more cost effective?

For another perspective (equally positive) on technology and charity, there’s a November 29, 2012 posting (Why technology and innovation are key to increasing charity donations) on the Guardian blogs by Henna Butt and Renita Shah (Note: Links have been removed),

At the beginning of this year the [UK] Cabinet Office and Nesta [formerly National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts {NESTA}] announced a £10m fund to invest in innovation in giving. The first tranche of this money has already been invested in promising initiatives such as Timto which allows you to create a gift list that includes a charity donation and Pennies, whose electronic money box allows customers to donate when paying for something in a shop using a credit card. Small and sizeable organisations alike are now using web and mobile technologies to make giving more convenient, more social and more compelling.

…

Butt’s and Shah’s focus was on mobile technologies and social networks. Like Levy-Ajzenkopf’s article, there’s no discussion of any possible downside to these technologies, e.g., privacy issues. As well, the inevitability of this move toward more technology for charity is explicitly stated by Levy-Ajzenkopf “There is no going back” and noted less starkly by Butt and Shah “… innovation is becoming increasingly important for the success of charities.” To rephrase my concern, are we utilizing technology in our work or are we serving the needs of our technology?

Finally, for anyone who’s curious about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, I have a December 3, 2015 posting about it.

McGill University team gets better understanding of nonribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs) also described as nanomachines

Leave a reply

This research from McGill University (Montréal, Canada) focuses on enzymes and their possible utility as nanomachines for producing drugs. (For the uninitiated, nano means billionth, which, in turn, means these enzymes are measured at the nanoscale.)

An April 30, 2020 McGill University news release (also on EurekAlert) describes the work,

Many of the drugs and medicines that we rely on today are natural products taken from microbes like bacteria and fungi. Within these microbes, the drugs are made by tiny natural machines – mega-enzymes known as nonribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs). A research team led by McGill University has gained a better understanding of the structures of NRPSs and the processes by which they work. This improved understanding of NRPSs could potentially allow bacteria and fungi to be leveraged for the production of desired new compounds and lead to the creation of new potent antibiotics, immunosuppressants and other modern drugs.

“NRPSs are really fantastic enzymes that take small molecules like amino acids or other similar sized building blocks and assemble them into natural, biologically active, potent compounds, many of which are drugs,” said Martin Schmeing, Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at McGill University, and corresponding author on the article that was recently published in Nature Chemical Biology. “An NRPS works like a factory assembly line that consists of a series of robotic workstations. Each station has multi-step workflows and moving parts that allow it to add one building block substrate to the growing drug, elongating and modifying it, and then passing it off to the next little workstation, all on the same huge enzyme.”

Ultra-intensive light beam allows scientists to see proteins

n their paper featured on the cover of the May 2020 issue of Nature Chemical Biology, the team reports visualizing an NRPS mechanical system by using the CMCF beamline at the Canadian Light Source (CLS). The CLS is a Canadian national lab [these types of labs are sometimes called synchrotrons] that produces the ultra-intense beams of X-rays required to image proteins, as even mega-enzymes are too small to see with any light microscope.

“Scientists have long been excited about the potential of bioengineering NRPSs by identifying the order of building blocks and reorganizing the workstations in the enzyme to create new drugs, but the effort has rarely been successful,” said Schmeing. “This is the first time anyone has seen how these enzymes transform keto acids into a building block that can be put into a peptide drug. This helps us understand how the NRPSs can use so very many building blocks to make the many different compounds and therapeutics.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Structural basis of keto acid utilization in nonribosomal depsipeptide synthesis by Diego A. Alonzo, Clarisse Chiche-Lapierre, Michael J. Tarry, Jimin Wang & T. Martin Schmeing. Nature Chemical Biology volume 16, pages493–496(2020) Published: 17 February 2020

This paper is behind a paywall.

First major literary work (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) developed as an app

Leave a reply

I wanted something completely different today and found it in a May 2, 2020 article, by Lucie Laumonier for University Affairs, about a multimedia app featuring the Canterbury Tales narrated in middle English,

Four historians from Canada and England have launched the General Prologue app, the first app featuring an audio performance of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in its original 14th-century English.

“Here bygynneth the Book of the tales of Caunterbury,” says the expressive voice of the narrator. The strange Middle English words comprise the opening verse of the medieval masterpiece composed by Chaucer more than 600 years ago. The app, which launched on February 3, is available for iOS and Android users, and through a dedicated website.

A February 2, 2020 University of Saskatchewan news release (also on EurekAlert), announced news of the app’s launch and the international collaboration, which included an academic at University College London (UCL), and the late Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame),

A University of Saskatchewan-led international team has produced the first web and mobile phone app of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales–the first major literary work augmented by new scholarship, in any language, presented in an app.

“We want the public, not just academics, to see the manuscript as Chaucer would have likely thought of it–as a performance that mixed drama and humor,” said University of Saskatchewan (USask) English professor Peter Robinson, leader of the project.

“We have become convinced, over many years, that the best way to read the Tales is to hear it performed–just as we imagine that Chaucer himself might have performed it at the court of Richard II.”

The free app is the first edition in a planned series. The app features a 45-minute audio performance of the General Prologue of the Tales–the masterpiece work by the most important English writer before Shakespeare–along with the digitized original manuscript. While listening to the reading, users have access to supporting content such as a translation in modern English, commentary, notes and vocabulary explaining Middle English words used by Chaucer.

The app, an offshoot of Robinson’s 25-year work to digitize the Canterbury Tales, contains key new research work. This includes a new edited text of the Prologue created by USask sessional lecturer Barbara Bordalejo, a new reading of the Tales by former USask student Colin Gibbings, and new findings about the Tales by UCL (University College London) medievalist professor Richard North. The National Library of Wales offered its digitized version of the Prologue‘s original manuscript for the app.

The late Monty Python star Terry Jones, who was a medievalist with two influential books on Chaucer, was also instrumental in developing the content of the app. His translation of The General Prologue and his books feature in the introduction and notes. This work on the app is thought to have been the last major academic project that Jones worked on before his passing on January 21.

The app was released on Android and Apple IoS just after Jones’ birthday on February 1st, in celebration of Jones’ academic work.

“We were so pleased that Terry was able to see and hear this app in the last weeks of his life. His work and his passion for Chaucer was an inspiration to us,” said Robinson, whose work on the Tales has been supported by USask and by the federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). “We talked a lot about Chaucer and it was his idea that the Tales would be turned into a performance.”

Because Chaucer left the Tales unfinished at his death, there is no single text of the Tales, and scholars have to re-construct the text from over 80 distinct manuscripts, mostly written by hand before 1500.

“While the app has material which should be of interest to every Chaucer scholar, it is particularly designed to be useful to people reading Chaucer for the first time. These include not only bachelor of arts university students and school children but also members of the public who have their own interest in Chaucer and his works,” said UCL’s North.

Robinson’s Canterbury Tales project, based at USask since 2010, includes several students who are transcribing all 30,000 pages of the manuscripts into the computer to discover how they are related to each other and to Chaucer’s lost original.

“The app is important for people who do not know the history behind the production of the Canterbury Tales, and to understand how the modern concept of author didn’t exist back then,” said Robinson. “We have many manuscripts copied by hand over time, and the Canterbury Tales Project hopes to establish where they come from, how they were created and who produced them as part of that history.”

Robinson said that the team has ready materials to develop at least two more apps, in particular Miller’s Tale, the second story in the Canterbury Tales.

The General Prologue app was built around the Hengwrt manuscript of the Tales, commonly regarded as the best source for Chaucer’s text and held at The National Library of Wales. The specialist preservation and digitization work undertaken at The National Library of Wales enabled the images of the original manuscript to be presented with supporting content for readers via the app.

North’s academic research on the project includes several new discoveries. For instance, he has found evidence suggesting that Chaucer’s Knight, one of the main characters of the Tales, is at the siege of Algeciras near Gilbraltar, in the south of Spain, in 1369 instead of the commonly assumed date 1342-44.

North believes that putting the Knight at this siege puts his age nearer to 50 years old when the reader encounters him with the other pilgrims in the Tabard in the General Prologue–about the age of Chaucer himself.

Brigit Katz covered the story in a February 5, 2020 article for Smithsonian Magazine. Medievallists.net also posted a story (no date) which included two trailers for the app (you’ll find a 1:39 trailer below),

Here’s where you’ll find the app and more,

Enjoy! And for those who caught it, “something completely different” was a reference to Monty Python’s “And Now for Something Completely Different.”