What do we want?
No more Nazis.
When do we want it?
Honestly like 70 years ago I mean it was a whole thing.
Aug
12
Aug
12
Reminds me of Tolkien’s burn about the Bagginses: you could know what their opinion would be on any subject, without…
Reminds me of Tolkien’s burn about the Bagginses: you could know what their opinion would be on any subject, without going to the trouble of asking them.
Originally shared by Kimberly Chapman
This thread is a pure proof for Lewis’ Law.
https://storify.com/Pharniel/you-are-boring-no-one-s-bothered-to-tell-you
Aug
12
This sounds like pseudoscience, but apparently it’s real. In mice, at least.
This sounds like pseudoscience, but apparently it’s real. In mice, at least.
Aug
12
When you turn 50 in New Zealand (assuming you’re a citizen or resident), the government gives you a gift of a free…
When you turn 50 in New Zealand (assuming you’re a citizen or resident), the government gives you a gift of a free screening for bowel cancer.
It’s all done by post.
The sample required is surprisingly small, and sealed in a tube which is sealed in a bag which is sealed in an envelope.
I still wouldn’t want to be the person who has to process them.
Aug
11
An interesting angle on diversity: we don’t have a truly “blind” hiring process until employees of all demographics…
An interesting angle on diversity: we don’t have a truly “blind” hiring process until employees of all demographics are equally mediocre.
Via Yonatan Zunger.
Originally shared by ****
if the Google Manifesto was correct, then you would expect to see that Google was full of mediocre female employees, who had been hired by a process biased in their favour despite being inadequate to the task. Whatever the author of the manifesto thinks, Google does not believe this to be the case and as far as I can tell from industry blogs, it isn’t – female employees in tech are generally very good. This would, of course, be consistent with the hypothesis that the current selection process is biased against them.
[…]
If, on the other hand, one had a situation where the writers of windy conservative manifestoes about not getting fair treatment were in fact mediocre whiners who inflated their CVs, then that would be evidence that there wasn’t a bias in the recruitment and retention system, and that in fact there was probably an inefficiency caused by the extent to which mediocrities were able to bump along because their face fitted in a homogeneous techbro culture. The concentration on star engineers, senior executives and Sheryl Sandberg C-Suite geniuses is entirely wrong; the progress of gender equality in the workplace ought to be measured by the extent to which women can get into the ranks of time-serving dead-wood middle management roles.
True equality will be reached when mediocrities of all kinds exist at every level. The fact that minority hires are consistently excellent is an indicator that we aren’t there yet.
Aug
11
if the Google Manifesto was correct, then you would expect to see that Google was full of mediocre female employees,…
if the Google Manifesto was correct, then you would expect to see that Google was full of mediocre female employees, who had been hired by a process biased in their favour despite being inadequate to the task. Whatever the author of the manifesto thinks, Google does not believe this to be the case and as far as I can tell from industry blogs, it isn’t – female employees in tech are generally very good. This would, of course, be consistent with the hypothesis that the current selection process is biased against them.
[…]
If, on the other hand, one had a situation where the writers of windy conservative manifestoes about not getting fair treatment were in fact mediocre whiners who inflated their CVs, then that would be evidence that there wasn’t a bias in the recruitment and retention system, and that in fact there was probably an inefficiency caused by the extent to which mediocrities were able to bump along because their face fitted in a homogeneous techbro culture. The concentration on star engineers, senior executives and Sheryl Sandberg C-Suite geniuses is entirely wrong; the progress of gender equality in the workplace ought to be measured by the extent to which women can get into the ranks of time-serving dead-wood middle management roles.
True equality will be reached when mediocrities of all kinds exist at every level. The fact that minority hires are consistently excellent is an indicator that we aren’t there yet.
http://crookedtimber.org/2017/08/11/from-a-logical-point-of-view/
Aug
11
I love the idea of vertical forests (and vertical farms).
I love the idea of vertical forests (and vertical farms). My short story “Vegetation” is the only place I’ve explored it so far, but I plan to return to the idea.
Originally shared by Greg Batmarx
Air pollution is the single biggest environmental health risk the world faces today, with outdoor pollution linked to 3 million deaths every year.
It’s no wonder designers and engineers are racing to come up with all kinds of air-purifying solutions, from smog-sucking towers and bikes to moss-covered walls. But one of the most impressive ideas so far can be found in Milan, Italy, the design capital of the world and one of the most polluted cities in Europe.
The brainchild of Italian architect *Stefano Boeri, Bosco Verticale (meaning “Vertical Forest”) is the concept of residential high-rises packed with greenery, which can help cities build for density while improving air quality.
The first “vertical forests” were realized in 2014 in the Porta Nuova Isola area of Milan, where two towers, with over 100 apartments between them, together host nearly 500 medium and large trees, 300 small trees, 5,000 shrubs, and 11,000 plants.
The science is simple: trees are the cheapest and most efficient way to absorb carbon dioxide. The 20,000 trees and plants across this pair of towers can transform approximately 44,000 pounds of carbon dioxide into oxygen each year.
Trees, a perennial gift from nature, can also keep temperatures cool indoors and filter out fine dust particles and noise pollution from traffic below.
The logistics of making it all happen, however, were a lot more complex. The process began with bringing together experts in structural engineering and botany to answer all the essential questions.
For example: how can a tree resist extremely windy conditions at 400 feet in the air? Engineers then had to devise a way to secure the roots of the plants in their containers while making sure they could be properly watered and fertilized.
Laura Gatti an architectural botanist on the project, also conducted a three-year study about local plants to determine which species would survive the conditions of the towers. And, of course, even after they’ve been planted, the trees need regular maintenance.
That’s done by a team of aerial arborists, who, like the familiar skyscraper window washers, make their way up and down the buildings, inspecting and grooming the vegetation.
As cities continue to grapple with air pollution, housing shortages, and climate change, these vertical forests could very well be the residential typology we need for the future. And you can certainly expect to see more of them.
I really hope many other architects, many other urban planners, many politicians will be in condition to replicate and improve what we have done Boeri tells us.
His firm itself is currently working on new vertical forests across Europe and in China, including an ambitious “Forest City” in the city of Nanjing.
Meanwhile, similar projects are being proposed and developed all the time, from a spiraling high-rise in Taiwan that is expected to contain 23,000 trees when complete to new tree-tower variations in Toronto and Bogota, to name a few.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/9/16112758/milan-vertical-forest-stefano-boeri-video
Aug
11
Manufacturing productivity, measured as value added per worker, has increased immensely in recent years thanks to a…
Manufacturing productivity, measured as value added per worker, has increased immensely in recent years thanks to a number of key technologies all improving at once. This article explains how.
Not in the article: This is good news primarily for the people who own the means of production, since they have positioned themselves to keep the benefits of the increased productivity largely to themselves. Ironically, they defend this by claiming to be “job creators”.
It does mean that manufactured goods are rapidly dropping in price, though. Which is a mixed blessing; lots more stuff isn’t necessarily a good thing, but some of it is genuinely useful.
It reminds me of The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures by Charles Babbage (the Difference Engine guy), which is a book I recommend reading if you’re interested in industrialism. Writing in the 1830s, he demonstrated with tables of figures how rapidly the price of manufactured goods had dropped recently, and provided an insightful analysis into why that was. It’s on Project Gutenburg.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
Exponential technologies have helped manufacturing productivity double over construction productivity.
Aug
10
Via Deborah Teramis Christian.
Via Deborah Teramis Christian.
Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh
Nice work. “When 16-year-old Kavya Kopparapu wasn’t attending conferences, giving speeches, presiding over her school’s bioinformatics society, organizing a research symposium, playing piano, and running a non-profit, she worried about what to do with all her free time.
[…]
Of 415 million diabetics worldwide, one-third will develop retinopathy. Fifty percent will be undiagnosed. Of patients with severe forms, half will go blind in five years. Most will be poor.
“The lack of diagnosis is the biggest challenge,” Kopparapu says. “In India, there are programs that send doctors into villages and slums, but there are a lot of patients and only so many ophthalmologists.” What if there were a cheap, easy way for local clinicians to find new cases and refer them to a hospital?
That was the genesis of Eyeagnosis, a smartphone app plus 3D-printed lens that seeks to change the diagnostic procedure from a 2-hour exam requiring a multi-thousand-dollar retinal imager to a quick photo snap with a phone.
Kopparapu and her team—including her 15-year-old brother, Neeyanth, and her high school classmate Justin Zhang—trained an artificial intelligence system to recognize signs of diabetic retinopathy in photos of eyes and offer a preliminary diagnosis. She presented the system at the O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence conference, in New York City, last month.
“The device is ideal for making screening much more efficient and available to a broader population,” says J. Fielding Hejtmancik, an expert in visual diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Other research groups, including Google and Peek Vision, have recently announced similar systems, but Hejtmancik is impressed with the students’ ingenuity. “These kids have put things together in a very nice way that’s a bit cheaper and simpler than most [systems designed by researchers]—who, by the way, all have advanced degrees!”
[…]
Hejtmancik, the NIH expert, notes that there’s a long road to clinical adoption. “What she’s going to need is a lot of clinical data showing that [Eyeagnosis] is reliable under a variety of situations: in eye hospitals, in the countryside, in clinics out in the boonies of India,” he says.
Still, Hejtmancik thinks the system has real commercial potential. The only problem, he says, is that it’s so cheap that big companies might not see the potential for a profit margin. But that affordability “is exactly what you want in medical care, in my opinion,” he says.”
Harish Pillay Jyoti Q Dahiya
Aug
06
Via Yonatan Zunger.
Via Yonatan Zunger.
Originally shared by Robert Hansen
An example of a successful informal incubator:
As an appellate court judge, Dad had X clerk slots to fill. And, of course, every student at every Tier-1 law school applied. Federal appellate clerkships are prestigious and can result in large bonuses to initial salary once a clerk matriculates. Dad often said that if all he wanted were Harvard Law grads with 4.0s, LSATs of 172 or above, and a Polish last name, he could do it just from the applications in his inbox.
He didn’t, of course. Instead at the beginning of each law school year he’d call up professors at Tier-2 law schools, at historically black colleges, and he’d ask them: “Do you have any third-years who are once-in-a-career students who haven’t had the one break they need and are running out of time to get it?” Sometimes — usually — they’d say no. No harm, no foul: talk to you next year.
But sometimes — rarely — they’d say yes. At which point Dad would write this student a personal note telling them their professor recommended them highly, and encouraging them to spend this next year doing something that really knocked it out of the park, something to tell him about in their application for a federal clerkship.
And the thing is, if you specifically ask for “students who just haven’t had the one break they need,” that is a wholly race, sexuality, gender, and creed-blind criteria which will nevertheless disproportionately benefit minority candidates. It’s a meritocratic program that at no point involves the word ‘diversity’ — and yet, it resulted in a remarkably diverse workplace filled with whipsmart lawyers from a broad variety of experiences, all of whom were fanatically loyal to Dad for being the guy who took a chance on them.
Pretty good program, I think.