Curated Commons // Edition 22
Thank you for subscribing and welcome to the Twenty Second edition of Curated Commons. Let’s dive right in.
Those who understand Internet culture understand the future
There’s no other way to describe what happed with the financial markets the past week than to say we all need to start understanding Internet culture more deeply. That it doesn’t take a lot to mobilize people very rapidly around a common cause enough to make a multi-billion dollar dent should make you wonder about other systems that are vulnerable to crowd manipulation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/style/gamestop-wallstreetbets-reddit.html
Get young as you get old
A startup that offers “Whole-body mitochondrial transfusion” got pre-seed funding. Our future is lit!
https://www.longevity.technology/whole-body-mitochondrial-transfusion-start-up-lands-funding/
Mitrix wants to create biobanks of our “young mitochondria” that we can use to help our cells regenerate as we age.
Mitochondria, the power generators within our cells, are one of the key factors in the aging process, and their dysfunction is linked to a wide range of diseases, from Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s to heart attacks and strokes. The idea behind Mitrix is to extract and grow “young” mitochondria in external bioreactors, and then transfuse them into your body in later life, enabling the regeneration of cells to a more youthful state.
Remote learning + outsourcing = potent mix!
Chegg is an edtech company that offers a monthly subscription plan to have a tutor-on-demand. It apparently has 70,000 freelance experts in India who provide step-by-step answers. Now students are using it to cheat.
Can you tell time by colour?
This is a fascinating new way to look at how you can use colours to tell time. Inspired by neuroscience experiments at Harvard. (also, read the comments!)
https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/ressences-clever-way-to-tell-time-by-color
Vegetarian pet owners, rejoice!
Lab-produced meat as a guilt-free way of feeding pets is on its way!
Code/hardware that transformed science
As we head into a world of computational science, this is a good list in Nature on ten codes that transformed science in the past. Including such classics as the Fortran compiler, arxiv.org, Fast Fourier Transform among others.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00075-2
Our AI Weaponry age is coming close
A US panel, led by Eric Schmidt, has said that the US has a “moral imperative” to explore AI weapons. Wars are notorious for assigning accountability. AI algorithms equally. Will be a strange world when these two mix!
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-military-ai-idUSKBN29V2M0
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Dead man teaching
The pandemic brought to forth many strange news. None stranger this in context of remote learning. There’s a professor in an university in Canada who died two years ago who is still taking online classes. And the assigned junior instructor had no clue till a student googled the Professor and found an obituary!
https://www.chronicle.com/article/dead-man-teaching
Algorithms reflect the racist, sexist, ignorant world we live in
AI systems are learning from the Internet. And the Internet is winning in making them terrible!
“An AI saw a cropped photo of AOC. It autocompleted her wearing a bikini.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/29/1017065/ai-image-generation-is-racist-sexist/
On the topic of biased algorithms, can’t miss this story! Stanford Hospital developed a propriety algorithm to distribute the initial vaccine doses it received. The algorithm qualified only 7 out of 1,300 patient-facing doctors!
https://onezero.medium.com/black-box-algorithms-shouldnt-decide-who-gets-a-vaccine-492be4bbae3c
Meet the guy who bought a ghost town!
One of those stories! Guy buys a deserted town for a Million dollars+ given its rich history. The pandemic strikes. And what he expected to be a few weeks trip to ride out the pandemic turned out to be a multi-month stint. Fascinating read!
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7k9ddg/this-guy-bought-a-ghost-town-cerro-gordo
Never-smokers and lung cancer
This is an eye-opening read!
https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/26/growing-share-of-lung-cancer-turning-up-in-never-smokers/
Worldwide, 15% of male lung cancer patients are never-smokers. But fully half of female lung cancer patients never smoked. And women never-smokers are twice as likely to develop lung cancer as men who never put a cigarette to their lips.
Pandemic and impact on offices. And people.
For good, or for bad, offices of the future will likely look, and mean, very different to offices that we are used to. The NewYorker has a good long read on this.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/has-the-pandemic-transformed-the-office-forever
Closely tied to the shift to remote work, and an under-appreciated aspect of moving online - “When companies move all employee communications online, they face the same problems as the rest of the internet.” It’s easier for an individual to separate their trollish self when they are in a physical setting, not so when they start using tools designed to replicate social networks that reward witty/trollish responses. Good thoughtful piece on how to keep Internet trolls out of online offices.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/24/business/remote-work-culture-online.html
Who do you want to be on your next video call?
Deepfakes for your Zoom call are here! https://xpressioncamera.com/
In all things Japan
The Japanese focus on tidying up did not start with Marie Kondo. Good read - https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-long-history-of-japans-tidying-up
From Japan, with (AI) love - “Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s government plans to allocate ¥2 billion ($19 million) in the next fiscal year to back local authorities that run programs to help their residents find love, he said.” - https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/12/07/national/japan-ai-funding-matchmaking/
Happens only in Japan!
Flash goes down. Trains in China stop
Never underestimate the power of entrenched software!
https://hk.appledaily.com/news/20210117/FLXATT4LKVBGVEBRLAECJPTCHM/
The railroad system in Dalian, northern China, collapsed citywide on Tuesday for up to 20 hours after the Adobe Flash programing software stopped running.
The Robot (economic) takeover is here
It is a century to the coining of the word ‘Robot’. The takeover that we are on the threshold of - one where ‘professional service robots’ overtake sales of industrial robots.
“The main difference between automation today and what we had 50 or 60 years ago is that we added software”
More good reads:
Blackrock is pushing companies to disclose how their business model will be compatible with a net-zero economy - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/26/blackrock-calls-for-climate-change-disclosure-expects-sustainable-investing-to-continue.html
Excellent read on how we are living in the golden age of ignorance!
The number of reported bee species has dropped 25% from the 1990s - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-22/bee-extinction-worries-grow-as-species-numbers-drop
GM plans to end sales of gasoline powered cars by 2035 - https://www.axios.com/gm-sales-gasoline-cars-electric-vehicle-2035-1344b85c-bcb3-48ef-9b68-9e2d637aa6ce.html
Jokes in 2021 make themselves - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-28/mnuchin-s-wife-linton-plays-murderous-fund-manager-in-new-movie
Really good presentation on state of tech across industries by Ben Evans - https://www.ben-evans.com/presentations
The quarterly AI Ethics report from the Montreal AI Ethics Institute is out - https://montrealethics.ai/jan2021/
Stay safe, and happy reading! And if you liked the newsletter, please do share on your social networks. My DMs on Twitter are always open for any feedback.