News Room

For many, the rise of commercial space tourism is a vulgar display of wealth and power. Amid several global crises, including climate change and a pandemic, billionaires are spending their cash on launching themselves into space for fun. When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos told reporters after his first space tourism trip on Tuesday that Amazon customers and employees had “paid” for his flight, that only intensified that criticism.

The first wave of COVID-19 claimed the lives of several of Rikard Steiber’s colleagues and friends. One of them was a well-known DJ who had a big digital and public presence. When the partner of the deceased asked Steiber how to gain access to her loved one’s Google Photos, the Silicon Valley executive came face-to-face with the difficulty of navigating a post-mortem digital existence.

What started out as a rush on cleaning supplies, canned goods and toilet paper in preparation for the unknowns of the COVID-19 pandemic has endured as a long-standing problem with the global supply chain.

The genealogy process is typically the most time-consuming part of – and a limiting factor in the success of – investigative genetic genealogy. In his presentation at ISHI, Lawrence Wein will present a systematic approach to efficiently perform the genealogy portion of investigative genetic genealogy. He and his colleagues have formulated a two-stage mathematical model of the genealogy process: an ascending stage that attempts to find the most recent common ancestors (MRCAs) between the unknown individual and each investigated match, and a descending stage that searches for a marriage among the descendants of the MRCAs.

The first editorial, by Ike Brannon, Senior Fellow at the Jack Kemp Foundation, and Michael F. Gorman, Niehaus Chair in Operations and Analytics at the University of Dayton and Editor-in-Chief of the INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Journal on Applied Analytics, takes the pro-PSR stance. The response, by House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), paints PSR as “a business strategy promoted by Wall Street to boost short-term profits.”