Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for May 1, 2020

remlaps (74)adminFounder - PS🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥in Popular STEM • 4 years ago

A Steem essay discusses the impacts of automation and telework on society; 3 ¹/2 million citizen scientists crowdsource COVID-19 symptoms; A Harvard professor argues that innovation happens from the bottom towards the top and effective leaders need advanced skills for dealing with problems that defy control; US Army funded research funds project to reduce energy use in fiber communications by as much as 25% or more; and a beta-edition robot aims to help children with emotional, social, and cognitive development

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First posted on my Steem blog: SteemIt, SteemSTEM.

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Steem @mauromar: Almost half a million robots will conquer factories this year - In this post, mauromar comments on a recent estimate by International Federation of Robotics (IFR) that as many as 465,000 ots may be installed in factories and notes that the number may be even higher because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, the author expresses concerns that automation of jobs may displace an increasing number of workers. Another, related, effect that the author notes is that companies are now making more use of teleworking, which may lead to location displacements as the place of work is decoupled from the location of the employer. On an optimistic note, the author concludes with the observation that technologies like Steem are coming online in a way that might close the gap. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @mauromar)

Millions of people have used this app to log their COVID-19 symptoms — and data suggests the most common symptom isn't what governments initially thought - One of the biggest citizen science initiatives ever is being run by the King's College London. Researchers have created an app that has been used by more than 3 million users in the UK and about 200,000 in the US. According to data entered by app users, cough and fever are never experienced by somewhere around half of COVID-19 patients. The single biggest warning sign may be loss of taste. According to the article,
The loss of taste and smell appears to be the clearest indicator that someone may develop more severe COVID-19 symptoms later on, researchers working on the app told The Wall Street Journal.

The Key to Powerful Social Change: Small Villages - Subtitle: When institutions let us down, look for leadership outside of hierarchies, says Rosabeth Moss Kanter. These leaders "don’t wait to be asked; they just get moving." - The Harvard Working Knowledge web site interviews Rosabeth Moss Kanter about her book, Think Outside the Building and her stated view that, "solutions are most likely to generate from outside traditional institutions". Her book covered the topic of pandemics in general term, and in the interview she describes some of the specific bits of knowledge that are illustrated by current events. These include the fact that all of our systems are interdependent, and it's not possible to isolate oneself inside a specific economic cycle. A second theme, however, is that major problems unleash astonishing amounts of creative energy, that can be coupled with local action to solve problems within a community and then duplicated by others. She compares the process to a kaleidoscope, where entrepreneurs are inspired to find new possibilities by combining fragmented pockets of creativity in new ways. She illustrates this further, with an example from her concerns about climate change. She says:
I do get into metaphor overload in the book, but I had gone to a lot of dinner parties for a number of years that were accompanied by fine whines, W-H-I-N-E-S. The complaining, not the Chardonnay. I'm a fairly positive and optimistic person, and I wanted people to do something about it, not just complain. And they would say, “There aren't enough leaders. Where are the leaders? Do they have a plan?” And I'm thinking: It's us.
Moving on, she also discusses the concept of Advanced Leadership, saying that Advanced Leadership skills are increasingly needed by top-level executives who find themselves facing problems that defy control in a chaotic and messy environment. The tools she suggests bringing to bear for these problems include, the three Cs: "capabilities, connections, and cash or know how to find the cash"; and also three forms of capital: intellectual capital, your social capital, and financial capital, and all of that brings her back to the kaleidoscope. She defines "kaleidoscope thinking" as a way of making use of those tools. The interview closes with an example of how she has seen these tools in the context of protecting the oceans from climate change.

New design could make fiber communications more energy efficient - The U.S. Army CCDC Army Research Laboratory announces a new discovery for optoelectronic devices that could improve the energy efficiency for communications across fiber networks. The work was carried out by "The University of Pennsylvania, Peking University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology", and published in Nature. Under current fiber designs, light tends to flow in a single direction, but some light leaks out and interferes with efficiency by flowing in the opposite direction. Previous studies have suggested that this leakage accounts for a minimum of 25% of energy across a connection. To improve the efficiency, the team designed a structure with a series of slanted bars that can - theoretically - reduce the leakage to zero by breaking the left-right and up-down symmetries in the connection and thereby creating one-way light motion inside of fiber connections. Because of the massive use of fiber connectivity in data centers and around the globe, the potential for energy savings from this design is massive. -h/t Communications of the ACM: Artificial Intelligence

Meet Moxie, a Social Robot That Helps Kids With Social-Emotional Learning - Saturday's post, Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for April 25, 2020, included a video of Menoy, a robot that is intended to help kids with autism to learn social skills. Today, we learn about a conceptually similar robot, Moxie that's intended for all kids in the age range near 6 to 9 years. According to the subtitle, Moxie is A new social robot designed for children wants to help promote social, emotional, and cognitive development. Moxie comes from Embodied, and is available now to qualified "pioneers". The device will begin shipping in the fall, at a cost of $1,499.

Here is a promotional video:

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