Thursday, August 3, 2017

Friday Thinking 4 August 2017

Hello all – Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.)  that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.

Many thanks to those who enjoy this.
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - work is just beginning.

“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9


Content
Quotes:

Articles:




… a growing effort by researchers around the world to understand how the microbiome—the mass of microbes that live in the gastrointestinal tract—affects our overall health. The gut contains up to a thousand different bacteria species, which together weigh between one and three pounds. This mass contains trillions of cells, more than the number of cells that make up our own bodies. Over the past several years, scientists have compiled a growing collection of evidence that many of these bugs may have a major effect on our well-being, with some triggering chronic, non-infectious ailments such as rheumatoid arthritis, and others protecting against such diseases.

“It’s become more and more clear that these microbes can affect the immune system, even in diseases that are not in the gut,” says Veena Taneja, an immunologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who has found clear differences in the bacterial populations of mice bred to be genetically prone to rheumatoid arthritis. In those more susceptible to the disease, a species of bacteria from the Clostridium family dominates. In mice without arthritis, other strains flourish, and the Clostridium strains are scarce.

“This is frontier stuff,” says Scher, the director of the NYU’s Microbiome Center for Rheumatology and Autoimmunity. “This is a shift in paradigm. By including the microbiome, we’ve added a new player to the game.”

In recent decades, the incidence of many autoimmune diseases has been increasing; many microbiome researchers argue that at least some of this rise is due to changes in our bacterial ecosystem. Altered diet, the explosion of antibiotic use, and decreasing contact with the microbe-packed natural world of animals and plants have all combined to transform the bacteria that call humans home. “Our microbiome has changed significantly over the past century, and especially over the past 50 years,” says NYU microbiologist Martin Blaser, who puts much of the blame on widespread use of antibiotics. “We’re losing microbes with each generation; they are going extinct. These changes have consequences.”

Joint Pain, From the Gut




Dear Members of the Board
I am writing to you with a proposal that may seem radical, but is in fact conservative. That is because my primary concern as Chief Executive Officer is to conserve this company as a healthy enterprise. You are now paying me so much that I can no longer manage this company as I should. I hereby request that you cut my salary in half and eliminate my bonuses.

We have talked a great deal about teamwork in our enterprise, that our people are all in this together. So why am I singled out by virtue of my compensation? Bonuses are the worst part of it. Like everyone else in this company, I am being paid to do my job. Why should I be paid extra to do a good job? If I believe in this company, I buy the stock. If I don’t, I quit. The misguided assumption behind these bonuses is that I, as CEO, do it all.

Now I am getting hate mail from our employees about my pay. This is certainly disconcerting, but more troublesome is that I have no reasonable reply, short of claiming that I must be several hundred times more important than they are. Is this leadership? Is it any way to run a company?

We have had a good deal of discussion at our board meetings about the long-term health of this company. Why then am I being rewarded for short-term gains in the stock price? You all know perfectly well that I can use all kinds of tricks to drive up that price, and so reach my bonuses, while destroying real value—and helping to do a number on our economy too.

Henry Mintzburg - A CEO letter to the Board...long overdue




This is a great 53 min video with Ray Kurzweil - outlining the exponential nature of the current change in conditions of change. One of the first conditions he lays out is the dispelling the notion that productivity has been stagnant - by challenging the capacity of current economic approaches to actually measure gains of productivity from price performance improvement. For example, a young African buying a $50 smartphone (measures as only $50 dollars of economic activity) purchases a $Trillion gain in computation over what was available in 1969 and a $Billion gain over what was available in 1980 - Where one could spend $3k (measure as $3k of economic activity) for an encyclopedia Britannica, whereas today the greatest encyclopedia the world has ever known is available for free (hence measuring via standard GDP as Zero economic activity) on the young African’s mobile device.
Hence the way we measure productivity - leaves invisible the price-performance gains of all information domains. The key to remember is every domain of life is being transformed by exponential progress in information technology.

Interview With Ray Kurzweil | Ray Kurzweil, Bob Pisani | Exponential Finance

A chat with the fascinating Ray Kurzweil, one of the world's leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, and CNBC's world renowned Bob Pisani.


This is a wonderful 2.5 min video that articulates so clearly and precisely why HR should be at the front end of strategic visioning in all organizations developing or adapting to technological change. This is also the key to alleviating so many concerns related to emerging algorithmic intelligence.

Human Technology Teamwork: The Role of Machines and Humans in Good UX Design (Don Norman)

Don Norman explains Human Technology Teamwork and why forcing people to act like machines fails. Instead, allow people do what they are good at.


This is an very interesting signal of changes in science research - especially for social science.

It will be much harder to call new findings ‘significant’ if this team gets its way

A megateam of reproducibility-minded scientists is renewing a controversial proposal to raise the standard for statistical significance in research studies. They want researchers to dump the long-standing use of a probability value (p-value) of less than 0.05 as the gold standard for significant results, and replace it with the much stiffer p-value threshold of 0.005.

Backers of the change, which has been floated before, say it could dramatically reduce the reporting of false-positive results—studies that claim to find an effect when there is none—and so make more studies reproducible. And they note that researchers in some fields, including genome analysis, have already made a similar switch with beneficial results.

“If we’re going to be in a world where the research community expects some strict cutoff … it’s better that that threshold be .005 than .05. That’s an improvement over the status quo,” says behavioral economist Daniel Benjamin of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, first author on the new paper, which was posted 22 July as a preprint article on PsyArXiv and is slated for an upcoming issue of Nature Human Behavior. “It seemed like this was something that was doable and easy, and had worked in other fields.”

But other scientists reject the idea of any absolute threshold for significance. And some biomedical researchers worry the approach could needlessly drive up the costs of drug trials. “I can’t be very enthusiastic about it,” says biostatistician Stephen Senn of the Luxembourg Institute of Health in Strassen. “I don’t think they’ve really worked out the practical implications of what they’re talking about.”

The authors are careful not to endorse the use of p-values as the ultimate measure of significance; many scientists have argued that they should be abolished altogether. But in the many fields where a p-value below .05 has become a gold standard, the authors propose a rule of thumb for new findings: “Significant” results should require a p-value below .005; results with p-values below .05 but above .005 should be called merely “suggestive.”


Another interesting signal - with many levels of implication - this is well worth the read - when science researches the Placebo (and it’s polar opposite the Nocebo) it becomes the science of understanding Faith.
“The placebo effect is the most interesting phenomenon in all of science,” Mogil says. “It’s at the precise interface of biology and psychology,” and is subject to everything from the drug ads we see to our interactions with health care providers to the length of a clinical trial.

The weird power of the placebo effect, explained

Yes, the placebo effect is all in your mind. And it’s real.
Over the last several years, doctors noticed a mystifying trend: Fewer and fewer new pain drugs were getting through double-blind placebo control trials, the gold standard for testing a drug’s effectiveness.

In these trials, neither doctors nor patients know who is on the active drug and who is taking an inert pill. At the end of the trial, the two groups are compared. If those who actually took the drug report significantly greater improvement than those on placebo, then it’s worth prescribing.

When researchers started looking closely at pain-drug clinical trials, they found that an average of 27 percent of patients in 1996 reported pain reduction from a new drug compared to placebo. In 2013, it was 9 percent.

What this showed was not that the drugs were getting worse, but that “the placebo response is growing bigger over time,” but only in the US, explains Jeffrey Mogil, the McGill University pain researcher who co-discovered the trend. And it’s not just growing stronger in pain medicine. Placebos are growing in strength in antidepressants and anti-psychotic studies as well.

Scientists have been studying this incredibly complex interface in great detail over the past 15 years, and they’re finding that sugar pills are stranger and more useful than we’ve previously imagined. The new science of placebo is bringing new understanding to why alternative treatments — like acupuncture and reiki — help some people. And it could also potentially allow us to one day prescribe smaller doses of pain drugs to help address the opioid crisis currently ravaging America.

Most instructively, the science finds that since we can’t separate a medicine from the placebo effect, shouldn’t we use it to our advantage?


This is an important signal about the need to transform our concepts of security in the 1st Century - one more aligned with a concept of immune system - and one that inevitably must include citizens - security can’t be something done ‘to’ citizens - it must be done ‘with’ citizens. That said we can’t simply overlay a ‘crowdsourcing capacity on top of existing institutions - we need to re-imagine participatory processes. The same concept is relevant for new approaches to military and police reserves.

Global network of 'hunters' aim to take down terrorists on the internet

Group of volunteers obsessively tracks and reports Isis’s most prominent recruiters and propagandists, and tries to block the spread of their propaganda
Colonel Kurtz used to spend hours playing social games like Farmville. Now he hunts terrorists on the internet.

The pseudonymous 41-year-old, who runs his own construction company, is one of dozens of volunteer “hunters” to dedicate hours each day trying to identify and infiltrate terror groups online and block the spread of their propaganda.
“We’re trying to save lives and get this crap off the net to keep the next vulnerable kid from seeing propaganda and thinking it’s cool,” said Kurtz.

These hunters plug a gap in social media companies’ ability to keep terrorists off their networks by obsessively tracking and reporting Isis’s most prominent recruiters and propagandists across private messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp and public networks like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Some of them also provide valuable tip-offs of credible threats to law enforcement.

This type of hunting originated in 2014, when hacktivist collective Anonymous declared “war” on Islamic State with the #OpIsis campaign. The loosely affiliated army of digital activists set out to expose and report Isis supporters on social media, and hack or take down their websites….


Transparency is a vital social function that can help establish trust in a society’s institutions as well as supporting a culture that values egalitarian approaches and opportunities.
The purpose of all this transparency is to increase people’s trust in the tax and social-security system. Norwegians pay really high income tax—an average of 40% versus 30% elsewhere in the EU. Perhaps the country’s narrow gender pay gap—it’s third on the World Economic Forum’s ranking of 144 countries for wage equality—meant the government wasn’t too concerned about people knowing each other’s salaries.

Norwegians can snoop and find out what anyone else in the country earns

Imagine if you could find out how much your boss, colleagues, and friends were making at the click of a mouse. If you lived in Norway you could. Its citizens have been able to go online and check out how much every single person in the country is earning since 2001.

Spying on what others were making was all the rage when the government put everyone’s salary and tax details online in 2001, according to Tom Staavi, a former economics editor at the national daily, VG.

“At one stage you would automatically be told what your Facebook friends had earned, simply by logging on to Facebook. It was getting ridiculous.” Staavi told the BBC. The BBC itself was in a spot of controversy this week after the government asked it to reveal what its top-earners were making. Of all the BBC talent who earn over £150,000 ($195,000), about two-thirds are men.


Here is a different but also very important signal about a looming transformation of public space - think of Malls - they seem public but they are not. If we want an open society it is vital to protect real public space and be more transparent about who can control the right of citizens in pseudo-public space. This article is worth the read - outlining the issue but also demonstrating potential approaches to involving citizens and public officials to develop clearer more accountable regulations and guidelines.
unless landowners choose to volunteer the information themselves, members of the public have no way of knowing what regulations they are bound by at some of London’s biggest open spaces and whether activities they enjoy a legal right to in other public areas – be they taking photos, holding a political protest or even simply sitting down and having a nap – are permitted, or whether they will result in removal by security guards.

Revealed: the insidious creep of pseudo-public space in London

Pseudo-public space – squares and parks that seem public but are actually owned by corporations – has quietly spread across cities worldwide. As the Guardian maps its full extent in London for the first time, Jack Shenker reports on a new culture of secrecy and control, where private security guards can remove you for protesting, taking photos ... or just looking scruffy
A Guardian Cities investigation has for the first time mapped the startling spread of pseudo-public spaces across the UK capital, revealing an almost complete lack of transparency over who owns the sites and how they are policed.

Pseudo-public spaces – large squares, parks and thoroughfares that appear to be public but are actually owned and controlled by developers and their private backers – are on the rise in London and many other British cities, as local authorities argue they cannot afford to create or maintain such spaces themselves.

Although they are seemingly accessible to members of the public and have the look and feel of public land, these sites – also known as privately owned public spaces or “Pops” – are not subject to ordinary local authority bylaws but rather governed by restrictions drawn up the landowner and usually enforced by private security companies.


This is another signal related to the ongoing dramatic decreases in renewable energy - and the phase transition in global energy geopolitics.

The clever electronic inks rewriting our energy future

Australia’s position as a global leader in printed solar has surged, following the unveiling of its first printed solar demonstration site at the University of Newcastle (UON) today.
“There are just three demonstration sites at this scale that we know of anywhere in the world, so Australia has joined quite an elite group of global leaders poised to make this technology a commercial reality,” said Professor Dastoor.

Professor Dastoor said the material could be rapidly manufactured, enabling accelerated deployment into the marketplace.

“No other renewable energy solution can be manufactured as quickly. On our lab-scale printer we can easily produce hundreds of metres of material per day, on a commercial-scale printer this would increase to kilometres. If you had just ten of these printers operating around the clock we could print enough material to deliver power to 1000 homes per day,” said Professor Dastoor.

“The low-cost and speed at which this technology can be deployed is exciting, particularly in the current Australian energy context where we need to find solutions, and quickly, to reduce demand on base-load power.” The technology delivers unprecedented affordability at a production cost of less than $10 a square metre.

“Our printed solar solution continues to function consistently in low light and under cloud cover, which means that users don’t experience dips in productivity.”
So sensitive, the material can even produce small quantities of energy from moonlight.


This is an excellent and very short article about biases in Algorithmic Intelligence. This is a must read for anyone interested in AI and concerned with all the hyperbole around the subject.

Three very different sources of bias in AI, and how to fix them

Since our Science paper came out it's been evident that people are surprised that machines can be biased.  They assume machines are necessarily neutral and objective, which is in some sense true -- in the sense that there is no machine perspective or ethics.  But to the extent an artefact is an element of our culture, it will always reflect bias.

I think the problem is that people mistake computation for math.  Math really is pure, has certain truth, it's eternal, it would be the same without any particular sentient species looking at it. That's because math is an abstraction that doesn't exist in the real world.  Computation is a physical process. It takes time, energy, and space.  Therefore it is resource constrained.  This is true whether you are talking about natural or artificial intelligence. From a computational perspective there's little difference between these.

the first source of AI bias:  unintentionally uploading the implicit human biases that pervade our culture.  That's what we demonstrated with our Science paper.  There's no real way to fix this without fixing our culture first, so we need to compensate for it when we design our systems.

the second source of AI bias is poorly-selected training data for machine learning, or poorly reasoned rules.  So for example training face recognition only on Caucasian faces.

the third source of AI bias is evil programmers.  Or corporations, or governments.  Someone sits down and says "I'm a white nationalist and I want other races to get less money."  The way to deal with this is to insist on the right to explanation, on due process.  All algorithms that affect people's lives should be subject to audit.  


This is a MUST SEE 30 min video that outlines the change in conditions of change driving the phase transition in energy geopolitics - including transportation. This is the clearest presentation of all the forces working to this dramatic transformation of our society. Remember ‘Peak Oil’? Well we’ve past peak coal demand and projections indicate that peak oil demand may arise as soon as 2025.

Energy | Ramez Naam | Exponential Finance

How the cost of new energy technologies is dropping, existing companies face disruption, and investors have tremendous opportunities to profit.


There are a lot of signals around the emergence of the electric vehicle and the autonomous vehicle. This is a serious signal about the inevitable shift in our transportation paradigm.

Electric cars will take over, threatening European car industry

Electric cars are on a breakthrough, and even faster than we thought. The major reservations people still have – charging infrastructure, range anxiety and pricing – will be overcome within the next seven years, according to the Breakthrough of electric vehicle threatens European car industry report by ING’s senior economists Max Erich and Jurjen Witteveen.

Only electric passenger cars will be sold from 2035 onwards, according to the research estimation. This has a drastic impact on the European car market. Currently, European car manufacturers are at the forefront of internal combustion engines (25% market share), but their share in lithium-ion production used in electric cars is only 3%. Therefore, it is likely that both Asia and North-America will get a bigger foothold in the European car market due to their great supply of resources.


Here’s a great innovation based on the zip tie that are ubiquitous in our packaging and is now a common form of restraint security forces use. The images and 2 min video illustrate the concept very well.

This Non-Invasive Skin Closure Solution Could Spell the End for Stitches

An alternative to traditional stitches has been developed that promises faster wound healing and less scarring. Looking more like something from a hardware store, Zip Skin Closure System uses sticky strips and plastic ‘zip ties’ to close surgical wounds. The sticky strips are placed on either side of the wound and then the plastic ties are tightened across the cut holding the skin together. The design allows for flexibility and movements of the area while still ensuring adequate tension on the wound to allow the body to begin to heal.

The technology provides an alternative to staples, sutures and glue, commonly used in post surgical skin closure. It provides the additional benefit of putting a cage or scaffold over the wound to minimize rubbing from clothes or bed sheets. Zip comes on a roll in different lengths and is cut to size to fit the wound. This also means the product can be applied by nurses or first aid attendants and reduces the risk of infection caused by stitches. It could also have applications in emergency first aid.


This is a great signal of the ongoing progress of personalizing medicine - However, I’m not sure where Canada is in relation to this development. This is also an important signal of a change in medical treatment paradigm.

FAST, PRECISE CANCER CARE IS COMING TO A HOSPITAL NEAR YOU

...the Food and Drug Administration approved the first next-generation-sequencing-based test, from Thermo Fisher Scientific, that can tell you how different drugs will work for you, based on the genetic makeup of your tumor. And it only takes four days to get back results. In many ways, it represents the leading edge of precision medicine’s maturation from a buzzword in grant applications and investor pitch decks to a real, workable product that can actually improve patient outcomes.

Getting the FDA’s approval took nearly two years and 220,000 pages of data. (That’s like reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s 6-book autobiographical memoir front to back 61 times in a row. Talk about My Struggle.) But the process has helped clarify the agency’s thinking about how to regulate personalized treatments going forward, opening up doors for tech that's still in the pipeline.

The panel, called Oncomine Dx Target Test, takes a tiny amount of tumor tissue and reports on alterations to 23 different genes. All that information is useful for physicians, but three in particular—ROS1, EGFR, and BRAF—are the the most crucial. That’s because those mutations have drugs to match: Precision medicine chemotherapies from Pfizer, Novartis, and AstraZeneca. The test can be performed at any CLIA-certified lab, and it’s already being offered by two of the largest oncology-focused ones.

Getting the FDA to approve that amalgam of tests wasn’t easy. “Putting multiple genes and multiple drugs on the same test; all of these are firsts,” says Joydeep Goswami, Thermo Fisher’s president of clinical next generation sequencing. “That put the technology under extraordinary scrutiny.” The FDA usually approves one diagnostic for one product or drug—that’s it. But the whole point of precision medicine is to tailor treatments for patients based on their genes, and a bunch of one-off genetic tests aren’t going to deliver on that promise. So a multi-gene, multi-drug panel is kind of a big deal.

For one, it allows Thermo Fisher to add new genetic markers and new drugs almost as quickly as they become available—turning it into a one-stop shop for cancer treatment recommendations. But it also opens the door for things like liquid cancer biopsies, which sequence tumor DNA floating in a patient’s blood to make earlier diagnoses, and personalized immunotherapy treatments, which boost the body’s natural defenses to fight cancer cells. These promising fronts in the war on cancer will only make it to the oncology ward if the US adopts a regulatory framework flexible enough to put the individual—genes, environment, history and all—at the center of the conversation.


One more signal in the accelerating progress of domesticating DNA. There is a great 3.5 min video explaining why this is important. If protein folding is complex - the structure they have visualized is another order of magnitude.

Scientists solve long standing biological mystery of DNA organization

Stretched out, the DNA from all the cells in our body would reach Pluto. So how does each tiny cell pack a two-meter length of DNA into its nucleus, which is just one-thousandth of a millimeter across?

The answer to this daunting biological riddle is central to understanding how the three-dimensional organization of DNA in the nucleus influences our biology, from how our genome orchestrates our cellular activity to how genes are passed from parents to children.

Now, scientists at the Salk Institute and the University of California, San Diego, have for the first time provided an unprecedented view of the 3D structure of human chromatin—the combination of DNA and proteins—in the nucleus of living human cells.

In the tour de force study, described in Science on July 27, 2017, the Salk researchers identified a novel DNA dye that, when paired with advanced microscopy in a combined technology called ChromEMT, allows highly detailed visualization of chromatin structure in cells in the resting and mitotic (dividing) stages. By revealing nuclear chromatin structure in living cells, the work may help rewrite the textbook model of DNA organization and even change how we approach treatments for disease.

"One of the most intractable challenges in biology is to discover the higher-order structure of DNA in the nucleus and how is this linked to its functions in the genome," says Salk Associate Professor Clodagh O'Shea, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholar and senior author of the paper. "It is of eminent importance, for this is the biologically relevant structure of DNA that determines both gene function and activity."


Exploring the larger context - interstellar space - and extending our sensorium.

Smallest satellite ever paves way for planned interstellar fleet

Breakthrough Starshot has taken the first step towards their grand plans to one day send spacecraft to Alpha Centauri. On June 23, the $100 million initiative to send light-propelled spacecraft to our nearest star sent the tiniest-ever satellites into orbit.

An Indian rocket carried six of these miniature satellites, called Sprites, into space. Two of them are attached to the sides of other, larger satellites: the Latvian Venta satellite and the Italian Max Valier satellite. Once communications are established, the Max Valier satellite will release the other four Sprites to orbit on their own.

Each Sprite is a four-gram square of circuit board measuring 3.5 centimetres to a side. Despite their small size, the Sprites carry a lot of instruments. Each one has a computer processor, solar panels, a magnetometer, a gyroscope, and a radio for communicating with researchers on Earth.


Here’s a strong signal of disruption in the arms business.

The World’s First Functional Laser Weapon is Ready to Protect You

The United States Navy has announced that the LaWS laser defense system is up and running. The weapon is designed to take out drones and ships and has future potential in missile defense.

The weapon was designed to strategically take out flying unmanned vessels. It also has the ability to surgically destroy engines of manned watercraft without endangering the lives of any onboard personnel. The Geneva Convention restricts the use of laser weapons against humans, but the high precision of the laser could allow it to target a ship’s engine without the use of missiles.

This technology could be the beginning of replacing missiles for the purpose of destroying enemy targets. On top of sparing lives, the cost comparison of a single shot from LaWS and a missile is astounding: while missiles can cost up to millions of dollars, a single LaWS “round” only costs about one dollar.


This is Awesome - a Must View
There is a fantastic 5.5 min video that explains how to visualize an invisible 4th dimension - and a link to the game for anyone who buys stuff at the iStore.

The games that build playgrounds out of impossible physics

The primary colours, the simple shapes, the knock of wood on wood as the blocks tumble out – there’s nothing unfamiliar about a box of babies’ toys tipped across the floor. Then you start playing.

Toss a ball into a stack of blocks and those shapes shrink and morph, popping in and out of subjective reality. This is not everyday physics.

4D Toys is pretty much summed up by its name. Made by Marc ten Bosch, the game gives you a toybox and a highly accurate simulation of four-dimensional physics, then just lets you play. You will be knocking down duocylinders with hyperspheres, bouncing omnitruncated tesseracts and throwing 600-sided dice in no time.


Here is an opportunity to be a citizen scientist.
“No matter where you are in North America, whether it’s cloudy, clear or rainy, NASA wants as many people as possible to help with this citizen science project,” said Kristen Weaver, deputy coordinator for the project. “We want to inspire a million eclipse viewers to become eclipse scientists.”

NASA Invites You to Become a Citizen Scientist During US Total Solar Eclipse

Learn how you can participate in a NASA experiment
NASA invites eclipse viewers around the country to participate in a nationwide science experiment by collecting cloud and air temperature data and reporting it via their phones.

The Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment, or GLOBE, Program is a NASA-supported research and education program that encourages students and citizen scientists to collect and analyze environmental observations. GLOBE Observer is a free, easy-to-use app that guides citizen scientists through data collection.

On Aug. 21, a total solar eclipse will occur across the entire continental United States. Crossing the country from Oregon to South Carolina over the course of an hour and a half, 14 states will experience night-like darkness for approximately two minutes in the middle of the day. The eclipse enters the U.S. at 10:15 a.m. PDT off the coast of Oregon and leaves U.S. shores at approximately 2:50 p.m. EDT in South Carolina.
All of North America will experience at least a partial eclipse.

To join in the fun, download the GLOBE Observer app https://observer.globe.gov/about/get-the-app. After you log in, the app explains how to make eclipse observations.