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Mark Zuckerberg And Priscilla Chan Are Funding Dozens Of Scientists

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan.

Jeff Chiu / AP

Six months ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife launched a $3 billion effort to “cure, prevent, or manage all diseases” by the end of the century, starting with a new research center in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The leaders of that center, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, announced on Wednesday one of the first major components of that ambitious goal: It will fund nearly 50 scientists in fields such as engineering, biology, chemistry, computer science, math, and physics.

The Biohub Investigators, as they’re being called, hail from UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and UC San Francisco, and will each receive up to $1.5 million for five years of research. The nonprofit was launched with a 10-year, $600 million commitment from Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, a UCSF-trained pediatrician, and their philanthropy-oriented limited liability company, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is also investing in education and technology projects.

Zuckerberg and Chan’s goal is for the scientists to use the biohub, located near UCSF, to collaborate on interdisciplinary projects and build research tools together, on top of keeping their positions and labs at their home institutions. Joseph DeRisi, the Biohub’s co-president, told BuzzFeed News that the couple regularly communicates with him, although they didn’t help select the 47 Biohub Investigators. That task was left to an international panel of 60 scientists and engineers, who vetted more than 700 applicaticants from the three universities.

“Both Mark and Priscilla are avid consumers of science,” said DeRisi, a UCSF professor of biochemistry and biophysics. “They enjoy learning new things and knowing what the cutting edge of research is all about.”

President of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Cori Bargmann and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Co-Founder Priscilla Chan.

Bryan Bedder / Getty Images for The New York Times

The scientists are a mix of early- and late-career faculty members. (A complete list can be found here.)

DeRisi highlighted Aaron Streets, a UC Berkeley researcher developing tools to precisely analyze single cells; Jill Banfield, also of UC Berkeley, who studies environmental microorganisms; and Alex Marson, a UCSF scientist who uses genome-editing technologies to understand the body’s immune system. Others include Stanford’s Manu Prakash, who has invented a folding paper telescope that costs $1 and is used by scientists and students around the world.

Meanwhile, a handful of Biohub staffers, who came on-board before the new Investigators, are already getting started on two of the hub’s big projects: figuring out how to detect, respond to, treat, and prevent infectious diseases; and creating a comprehensive atlas of all the cells in the human body.

In an effort to more quickly share results with other researchers and the public, scientists will be required to publish in an open-source database the drafts of papers being submitted to peer-reviewed journals, according to Stephen Quake, Biohub co-president and Stanford professor of bioengineering and applied physics.

And faculty won’t be bound to finish a certain project or publish a certain number of papers before their five years are up.

“We asked for, ‘What have you done that’s great in the past, and what is your bold vision of the future?’” DeRisi said. “We are leaving the door open to maximize creativity and dynamically go where the research takes them.”

LINK: Document Shows How Mark Zuckerberg’s New Science Charity Will Handle IP

Quelle: <a href="Mark Zuckerberg And Priscilla Chan Are Funding Dozens Of Scientists“>BuzzFeed

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Here's Why Venmo Users Should Care If Sean Spicer Is Being Trolled

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

Alex Wong / Getty Images

It’s safe to say White House press secretary Sean Spicer is having a bad week. To put the mayo on his turd sandwich, last night, people discovered his account on Venmo and started sending him bogus payment requests with trolling messages.

The wave of trolling was kicked off when the celebrity gossip podcast Who? Weekly tweeted that Spicer could be found on Venmo after a listener tipped them off. This isn’t the first time the podcast has looked for C-list celebs on the payment app – they found Bella Thorne and Tiffany Trump [full disclosure: I am a friend of the hosts and made one of its theme songs]. A few hours after Spicer’s Venmo was trolled, people found Kellyanne Conway’s account and did the same. This is all meant to be relatively harmless fun; only a real killjoy wouldn’t see the appeal of the weirdness of finding celebrities on a highly plebeian money app. It’s funny to find celebrities on Venmo precisely because you wouldn’t expect them to be there, and it’s the kind of app that we use for unglamorous and petty things like splitting cab fare or drinks.

A bunch of extraneous Venmo requests are probably the least of Spicer&#039;s concerns at the moment (BuzzFeed News confirmed the account was his by matching his phone number). However, The ability to use Venmo to harass someone with bogus payment requests should strike you as somewhat alarming.

Here’s why.

1) Venmo is convenient precisely because it’s so easy to find your friends on it, just by phone number, email, or by name. The privacy settings allow you to make the details of your payments private, but there’s no option to keep your account completely hidden from search. If you’re on there, people can find you by just your name.

This level of privacy setting is akin to what other social networks like Facebook or Twitter offer – you can make the details of your account private, but not the fact that you HAVE an account. But on those platforms, you can prevent randos from sending you messages or even trying to add you.

Part of what makes Venmo fun is the fact that it layers elements of a social network on top of a regular payments app: You can look at the feed of your friends’ payments and see who they’re interacting with. If you really want to be weird, you can even comment on their payments. Tilt your head and squint, and Venmo is a social network that happens to do payments. And where there’s a social network, there’s trolls.

2) Venmo sends you a text message and push notification for payments and requests. It’s possible to turn these off deep in the Settings, but it’s likely many people leave these on – I have them left on. This means Sean Spicer’s phone was probably blowing up late into the night while people sent him pennies.

The text message that Venmo sends you for a payment or request contains the message from the transaction. Here’s what this means: Let’s say you want to say “go jump in a lake” to Sean Spicer. You could tweet at him, but let’s be real: At best he’ll probably just quickly glance it while scrolling through his mentions. And in the context of Twitter, it’s nothing. You, the average citizen, don’t have much ability to directly get the attention of one of the people at the tight inner circle to the President. But if you merely search his name on Venmo, you can send a payment request, and blammo&#033; you sent a message via a text directly to his personal cell phone. And while you can block people, you have to do it one by one (according to some reports, Spicer was receiving hundreds of these messages).

3) While you can reject requests for payments, you cannot reject someone sending you money. Which… in the case of a government official like Sean Spicer, is kind of weird. Spicer has no way of stopping me from sending him $100,000 and writing it “Trump payola, per our conversation” in the message. Sure, there’s nothing to stop me from dropping off a bag of cash at his doorstep either, but that might not be public or easy. For non-celebs, it’s not too hard to imagine scenarios in which sending someone money could be a form of harassment – a weapon to be used in a financial grudge between exes, friends, or business people.

4) It works as an ad hoc reverse cellphone lookup. You can’t see a person’s phone number from their profile, but you can match up a phone number to a profile. Let’s say you have an anonymous cell phone number, and you want to find out who it belongs to. You can’t search by the phone number in Venmo, but if you complete a payment or request, it reveals the name attached to the number. Same with matching a name to an email address.

Facebook and Twitter allow you to search for people by email or phone, but that option can be turned off. In Venmo, there’s no option to turn this search off, or make it so that your number can’t be used to find you. Reporters need to match cell phones to names all the time, so this is a great tool for us — or perhaps just for anyone who sees their partner texting a stranger’s number and wants to find out who it is.

5) You can’t make your “friends” list private, which you can do on Facebook. This matters in cases like Spicer’s: For example, one of BuzzFeed’s politics reporters was able to help verify that the account actually belonged to the press secretary by glancing through his friends list and seeing names of Washington insiders.

Here’s where Venmo significantly differs from social networks: being “friends” on Venmo with Spicer doesn’t mean he’s friendly with someone, it means they may have a financial connection. That matters for Sean Spicer; it matters for the rest of us, too.

A spokesperson for Venmo said that privacy for users is one of their highest priorities, and pointed me to a list of customizable privacy settings that control how your transactions will show up to other people. While the tools to make your payments private are there, this doesn’t significantly address what’s happening to Sean Spicer (his payments are all private).

“This doesn’t happen a lot. This is a new thing for Venmo to think about,” a company spokesperson told me. They were indeed very aware of what was happening with Mr. Spicer today from the news, but declined to tell me if any direct actions had been taken, citing user privacy.

Quelle: <a href="Here&039;s Why Venmo Users Should Care If Sean Spicer Is Being Trolled“>BuzzFeed

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Here's Why Venmo Users Should Care If Sean Spicer Is Being Trolled

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

Alex Wong / Getty Images

It’s safe to say White House press secretary Sean Spicer is having a bad week. To put the mayo on his turd sandwich, last night, people discovered his account on Venmo and started sending him bogus payment requests with trolling messages.

The wave of trolling was kicked off when the celebrity gossip podcast Who? Weekly tweeted that Spicer could be found on Venmo after a listener tipped them off. This isn’t the first time the podcast has looked for C-list celebs on the payment app – they found Bella Thorne and Tiffany Trump [full disclosure: I am a friend of the hosts and made one of its theme songs]. A few hours after Spicer’s Venmo was trolled, people found Kellyanne Conway’s account and did the same. This is all meant to be relatively harmless fun; only a real killjoy wouldn’t see the appeal of the weirdness of finding celebrities on a highly plebeian money app. It’s funny to find celebrities on Venmo precisely because you wouldn’t expect them to be there, and it’s the kind of app that we use for unglamorous and petty things like splitting cab fare or drinks.

A bunch of extraneous Venmo requests are probably the least of Spicer&#039;s concerns at the moment (BuzzFeed News confirmed the account was his by matching his phone number). However, The ability to use Venmo to harass someone with bogus payment requests should strike you as somewhat alarming.

Here’s why.

1) Venmo is convenient precisely because it’s so easy to find your friends on it, just by phone number, email, or by name. The privacy settings allow you to make the details of your payments private, but there’s no option to keep your account completely hidden from search. If you’re on there, people can find you by just your name.

This level of privacy setting is akin to what other social networks like Facebook or Twitter offer – you can make the details of your account private, but not the fact that you HAVE an account. But on those platforms, you can prevent randos from sending you messages or even trying to add you.

Part of what makes Venmo fun is the fact that it layers elements of a social network on top of a regular payments app: You can look at the feed of your friends’ payments and see who they’re interacting with. If you really want to be weird, you can even comment on their payments. Tilt your head and squint, and Venmo is a social network that happens to do payments. And where there’s a social network, there’s trolls.

2) Venmo sends you a text message and push notification for payments and requests. It’s possible to turn these off deep in the Settings, but it’s likely many people leave these on – I have them left on. This means Sean Spicer’s phone was probably blowing up late into the night while people sent him pennies.

The text message that Venmo sends you for a payment or request contains the message from the transaction. Here’s what this means: Let’s say you want to say “go jump in a lake” to Sean Spicer. You could tweet at him, but let’s be real: At best he’ll probably just quickly glance it while scrolling through his mentions. And in the context of Twitter, it’s nothing. You, the average citizen, don’t have much ability to directly get the attention of one of the people at the tight inner circle to the President. But if you merely search his name on Venmo, you can send a payment request, and blammo&#033; you sent a message via a text directly to his personal cell phone. And while you can block people, you have to do it one by one (according to some reports, Spicer was receiving hundreds of these messages).

3) While you can reject requests for payments, you cannot reject someone sending you money. Which… in the case of a government official like Sean Spicer, is kind of weird. Spicer has no way of stopping me from sending him $100,000 and writing it “Trump payola, per our conversation” in the message. Sure, there’s nothing to stop me from dropping off a bag of cash at his doorstep either, but that might not be public or easy. For non-celebs, it’s not too hard to imagine scenarios in which sending someone money could be a form of harassment – a weapon to be used in a financial grudge between exes, friends, or business people.

4) It works as an ad hoc reverse cellphone lookup. You can’t see a person’s phone number from their profile, but you can match up a phone number to a profile. Let’s say you have an anonymous cell phone number, and you want to find out who it belongs to. You can’t search by the phone number in Venmo, but if you complete a payment or request, it reveals the name attached to the number. Same with matching a name to an email address.

Facebook and Twitter allow you to search for people by email or phone, but that option can be turned off. In Venmo, there’s no option to turn this search off, or make it so that your number can’t be used to find you. Reporters need to match cell phones to names all the time, so this is a great tool for us — or perhaps just for anyone who sees their partner texting a stranger’s number and wants to find out who it is.

5) You can’t make your “friends” list private, which you can do on Facebook. This matters in cases like Spicer’s: For example, one of BuzzFeed’s politics reporters was able to help verify that the account actually belonged to the press secretary by glancing through his friends list and seeing names of Washington insiders.

Here’s where Venmo significantly differs from social networks: being “friends” on Venmo with Spicer doesn’t mean he’s friendly with someone, it means they may have a financial connection. That matters for Sean Spicer; it matters for the rest of us, too.

A spokesperson for Venmo said that privacy for users is one of their highest priorities, and pointed me to a list of customizable privacy settings that control how your transactions will show up to other people. While the tools to make your payments private are there, this doesn’t significantly address what’s happening to Sean Spicer (his payments are all private).

“This doesn’t happen a lot. This is a new thing for Venmo to think about,” a company spokesperson told me. They were indeed very aware of what was happening with Mr. Spicer today from the news, but declined to tell me if any direct actions had been taken, citing user privacy.

Quelle: <a href="Here&039;s Why Venmo Users Should Care If Sean Spicer Is Being Trolled“>BuzzFeed