[Popular STEM] Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for October 12, 2020
Congress releases report alleging anti-competitive behaviors by big-tech firms; 20 major companies that are now friendly to remote work arrangements; A new technique enables extreme aerial acrobatics by an autonomous quadrotor; How to keep workers engaged during the pandemic scare; and Survey finds that Open Source adoption rises during economic hardship
Administrivia
Experimental: Please leave a relevant and substantive reply to this post in order to be considered for a gratuity from @penny4thoughts after the post pays out.
Straight from my RSS feed | Whatever gets my attention |
Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.
First posted on the Steem blockchain: SteemIt.
- Congress releases blockbuster tech antitrust report - In a 449 page report, the House Judiciary Committee criticizes big-tech for, "an alarming pattern of business practices that degrade competition and stifle innovation". Alleged harmful behaviors include buying competitors, wielding disproportionate power over small businesses that use their products, and giving preferential treatment to their own products. Val Demmings (D-FL) is quoted as saying, "We will take steps necessary to hold rulebreakers accountable." Although there was bipartisan on the scale of the problem, political fractures prevented the committee from presenting a clear and unanimous solution. Some proposals include non-discrimination rules, prohibitions that prevent dominant companies from using their dominance to power competition in adjacent spaces, and a new standard for anti-trust violations. As a result of the political divide, Ken Buck (R-CO) has also distributed an alternative report. In a join statement, committee chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and subcommittee head David Cicilline (D-RI) said, "As they exist today, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook each possess significant market power over large swaths of our economy. In recent years, each company has expanded and exploited their power of the marketplace in anticompetitive ways."
- 20 major companies that have announced employees can work remotely long-term - Microsoft, Indeed, Google, American Express, AirBnB, REI, Uber, Zillow, and about a dozen others have all announced long term plans to allow varying degrees of remote work for their employees. Click through for the complete list and the details about each company's specific plans.
- AI-Powered Drone Learns Extreme Acrobatics - In collaboration with Intel, researchers from the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich have developed a neural network training system that enables an autonomous quadrotor to rely exclusively on onboard sensing and computation to train itself in the execution of extreme acrobatic maneuvers. Two notable aspects of the technique are that (i) training is completed entirely in simulation - without the need for a so-called "sim-to-real" transition from simulated world to real world; and (ii) the drone doesn't need to make use of any external camera or motion tracking system. The researchers made use of the Gazebo simulation environment. Maneuvers that the drone can execute include the Power Loop, the Barrel Roll, the Matty Flip, along with a combination of all three.
Here's a video.
- Keep Your Weary Workers Engaged and Motivated - Harvard's Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams discuss their research into motivation. They say that humans have four desires that motivate us. These include: "acquire, bond, comprehend, and defend". They go on to say that these ABCDs of motivation should be kept in balance in order to keep employees engaged during difficult times like the ongoing COVID scare. In particular, acquire and bond are in tension because acquiring is competitive whereas bonding is cooperative. Similarly, comprehend are nearly opposite because comprehending requires an open frame of mind whereas defending requires a desire for consistency. The article contains a helpful diagram of the "four drive ecosystem", and offers these tips, along with descriptions and elaborations on each of them:
Acquire- Pay at least as well as competitors
- Sharply differentiate good performance from poor performance
- Tie rewards clearly to performance
- Foster mutual reliance
- Value collaboration
- Encourage sharing of best practices
- Hold office-hours on video-conferencing to replace physical office-hours
- Provide opportunities for continuing education
- Create a psychologically safe environment
- Overcommunicate
- Treat people fairly
Click through to read their ideas in more detail.Discussion question: How can STEEM do more to harness the ABCDs of motivation?
- Open-source use goes up while the economy goes down - In its third annual Managed Open Source Survey, commercial support and maintenance company, Tidelift reports that cash strapped firms are increasingly turning to Open Source software. CEO, Donald Fisher, is quoted as saying, "This finding continues a trend that began after the recession of the early 2000s and continued after the financial crisis of 2008. Organizations turn to open source in tough economic times because it helps them reduce costs and improves their ability to innovate." In the details, the survey finds that 42% of businesses have seen application budgets cut and 2/3 report that their top reason for using Open Source software is to realize savings in time and money. Another common reason for using Open Source is to avoid vendor lock-in. The survey also found that 83% of companies surveyed make contributions to Open Source projects, but only 49% have policies governing these contributions. The top-3 languages cited were Javascript, Python, and Java.
In order to help bring Steem's content to a new audience, if you think this post was informative, please consider sharing it through your other social media accounts.
And to help make Steem the go-to place for timely information on diverse topics, I invite you to discuss any of these links in the comments and/or your own response post.
Beneficiaries
- Experimental - penny4thoughts - 36%
- Public Steem API - justyy - 5%
- Public Steem API - steemit - 5%
- SteemWorld.Org Tools for Steemizens - steemchiller - 5%
About this series
Sharing a link does not imply endorsement or agreement, and I receive no incentives for sharing from any of the content creators.
Follow on steem: remlaps-lite, remlaps