Interesting Links: April 13, 2019

in #links5 years ago

Business, News, Science, Technology, or whatever gets my attention.

Straight from my RSS feed:


Ten posts and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.


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pixabay license: source.

  1. Declassified photos from U2 planes are helping archaeologists unlock the past - Declassified "spy plane" photos of the middle east during the 1950s and 1960s are giving archaeologists a view of landscapes that disappeared decades ago. This helps them answer questions about how past humans lived and interacted with their environment, and also into the ways that those aspects of human society have changed.
  2. Artificial Intelligence: The Risks Could Outweigh the Rewards - In this Intelligence2 debate from 2016 Jaron Lanier and Andrew Keen argue for the motion, Don't trust the promise of artificial intelligence. James Hughes and Martine Rothblatt argue against it. Lanier is well known in the AI field, so it's a little ironic to see him on that side of the debate.
  3. Oil-eating microbes found in the deepest part of the ocean could help clean up man-made oil spills - From the Gulf of Mexico to the Marianas Trench, bacteria that digest hydrocarbons are found throughout the ocean, and they even helped to clean up after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, with the highest proportion on Earth being in the Marianas Trench. Scientists are studying these bacteria to learn how they could be harnessed for cleaning all oil spills.
  4. “Hyperscans” Show How Brains Sync as People Interact - Interactive social neuroscience is an emerging field that seeks to describe the neural properties of the mind when it's engaged in social behavior. This is made possible by recent advances in technology that make it feasible to generate high quality, synchronized data from multiple people engaging in social activity. The technique that's used to do this is called, "hyperscanning". This capability and area of research is important because emerging evidence suggests that the human brain operates differently when we're engaged in social behavior than it does when we're acting in isolation, and it may have practical benefits in fields like psychiatry, where it might be used for tasks like matching the best psychiatrist available for a particular patient.
  5. Zapping the brain with electricity seems to improve memory in older people - A paper in Nature Neuroscience reports that older study participants performed as well as younger ones on memory tests after the older ones were exposed to 25 minutes of electrical stimulation that synchronized brain waves in their temporal and prefrontal cortex. A DIY community already exists for improving focus via electronic brain stimulation, but there has been limited research into its safety, so self-application of this technique is not recommended.
  6. Home-plate umpires make the wrong call on a shocking 20% of pitches - Boston university graduate students analyzed umpire calls and stadium data from the stadiums' triangulated tracking cameras for 4 million pitches and 11 seasons. They found that the average error rate was 20%, and it increased to 29% when the batter had two strikes. Perhaps surprisingly, the umpires with the best scores averaged 33 years of age with less than 3 years of experience, whereas the average umpire age is 46, with 13 years of experience. Should umpires get technology assistance from the stadium cameras in real time in order to improve their game?
  7. STEEM Alpas - Manage your team's work, projects & tasks online for free - This @steemhunt post by @opalemoku contains screenshots and a brief description of alpas.io, a project management tool.
  8. Advocates sue Pa. officials, say they failed to catch major problems at Glen Mills Schools - Glen Mills Schools, which once housed 1,000 boys, was the oldest reform school in the country. Located in Pennsylvania's Delaware County, the school lost its license last week after an investigation by the Philadelphia Media Network found abuse, repeated instances of violence, and a "culture of intimidation". Now the Education Law Center is suing Pennsyvlania state officials, alleging that they failed at their oversight role.
  9. Short-circuiting the suicide cascade - In the face of a rising suicide rate, researchers have come to view suicide as a two process phenomenon, ideation - or thinking about suicide, and action - where it is actually carried out. In order to interrupt this process, modern protocols include individualized plans teaching patients to recognize and deescalate the symptoms of ideation before the action phase begins. A recent study in JAMA Psychiatry found that these treatment plans can cut suicidal behaviors in half. The article closes on an optimistic note, reporting that a long-term study of people who had attempted suicide found that only 7% eventually died by their own hands.
  10. Authors have papers in Nature and Science retracted on the same day - The papers were by Steve Jackson from the University of Cambridge (corresponding author), and Abderrahmane Kaidi from the University of Bristol (lead author). The papers were retracted after Kaidi admitted to fabricating unrelated research data and resigned. The paper in Science has been cited 240 times, and the one in Nature 119.

Note: Sharing a link does not imply endorsement or agreement, and I receive no incentives for sharing from any of the content producers.

Thanks to SteemRSS from @philipkoon, @doriitamar, and @torrey.blog for the Steem RSS feeds!

Please feel welcome to discuss any of those links in the comments.

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