Interesting Links: May 11, 2019
Business, News, Science, Technology, or whatever gets my attention.
Straight from my RSS feed:
Ten links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.
- The last reactor at Three Mile Island is shutting down - Exelon, the plant's operator, said they need to close it for financial reasons after Pennsylvania legislators declined to reclassify nuclear power as renewable. The closing is expected to complete before September 30, 2019, and will impact about 700 employees. As @cmp2020 wrote in 20 Questions for an NRC Nuclear Engineer who Responded to the Three Mile Island Crisis, my father in law was with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's emergency team that went to the site after the accident in 1979.
- Sleep is your superpower - UCB's sleep diplomat, Matt Walker, gives a TED talk discussing the benefits that people receive from sleep and the problems that we experience from missed sleep. Areas of focus include the immune system and aging. He suggests that sleep quality is intertwined with age related memory loss and dementia, and describes a wearable device that amplifies the brainwaves during sleep and has been shown to improve the quality of sleep and enhance its benefits in young adults. His "moon shot goal" is to make use of the same technology to reduce the impact of aging in older adults. To improve your sleep, he suggests avoiding caffeine and naps, disciplined maintenance of a regular daily sleep schedule, and maintaining a bedroom temperature around 65 (F)/18 (C).
- Cats rival dogs on many tests of social smarts. But is anyone brave enough to study them? - Wild animals, including our closest evolutionary relatives, are unable to recognize that when humans point at something it signals a guide for their attention. This is something that even human toddlers are able to accomplish easily. About 20 years ago it was demonstrated that dogs have that ability. Since then, social cognition researchers have studied dogs extensively, but few have studied cats because of their frequently aloof and disinterested personalities. Researchers are now creating innovative new methods for studying cats, and demonstrating that domesticated cats have evolved that capability and many other similar capabilities to domesticated dogs. The link includes an article and an embedded youtube videos. h/t RealClear Science
- Dogs Sacrificed by Shang Dynasty Were Just Pups. Some Were Even Buried Alive. - Roderick Campbell from NYU and Zhipeng Li from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences reanalyzed data from older studies and published in Archaeological Research in Asia. They determined that most of the dogs that were used in the Shang Dynasty's sacrificial rituals were less than a year old. This suggests that the dogs were not pets. The article suggests that they may have been bred for the purpose, but it's more likely that they were strays, and also that the dogs may have acted as stand-ins for human sacrifice, saying that "Canines have always played a different role in human history than livestock". The Shang dynasty was China's second, controlling the Yellow River Valley from about 1600 BC to 1046 BC. h/t archaeology.org
- Ex-Intelligence Analyst Charged With Leaking Information to a Reporter - Officials claim that Daniel Everette Hale, 31, of Nashville, was leaking information to the press, starting in 2013. It is claimed that his phone contained contacts for journalists in 2014, and he possessed a thumb drive with the tails operating system and TOR software. h/t Bruce Schneier
- How to tell whether machine-learning systems are robust enough for the real world - MIT researchers have devised a method to estimate how reliable convolutional neural networks (CNNs) will be for visual processing in real world conditions. The technique involves making changes to pixels in images and measuring the CNNs susceptibility to adversarial images, i.e. images that are designed specifically to fool the visual processing system. h/t Communications of the ACM
- Tim Draper Envisages Bitcoin at $250,000 Taking 5% of Global Market Share by 2023 - From the article: "It’s a better currency, it’s decentralized, open — it’s transparent; everybody knows what happens on the blockchain...I eventually want to have a fund where I take in bitcoin and I fund everybody in bitcoin and they pay their employees and suppliers in bitcoin and then I pay my investors in bitcoin, ...Because I would then require no accounting, no legal, no bookkeeping, no custody — it would all be done.”
- Uber’s first employee is poised to make over $1 billion after the company’s massive public offering, and he’s already committed to donating at least $14 million to charity - At least 1% of Ryan Graves' shares are pledged to charity: water, a global non-profit who wants to provide clean water to communities that don't have it. The charity says they will use the funds to "to support operating costs like rent for its offices and employee salaries" and leftover funds will pay bonuses for their workforce.
- STEEM Neural Network Generated Song - @disillusional shares a song, "Ballad of a Hipster in Williamsburg", that was generated by Google's AI. I'm no musician, but I guess it's a bit of a ballad with a jazz injection. (@disillusional will receive 5% of this post's payout.)
- STEEM EOS Rex: How it can help you earn money - @skycorridors interviews Ashe Oro, cofounder of freedomproxy.org, who describes the EOS Resource Exchange (REX) that lets you rent out your EOS tokens for CPU or network. (5% of the rewards from this post will go to @skycorridors.)
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