[Popular STEM] Curating the Internet: STEM digest for December 3, 2020

remlaps (74)in #steemexclusive • 4 years ago (edited)

Researchers discover a 68 million year old dinosaur species resembling a giant parrot; Russian and Indian satellites narrowly avoid collision in Earth orbit; TLDR artificial intelligence software summarizes scientific articles in a single sentence; MIT researchers argue that artificial intelligence will not create a shortage of work; and Flat tax countries get richer faster than progressive tax countries.

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Steem @jorgebgt:Giant parrots. (EN - CAST) Loros gigantes. - In Mongolia's Gobi Desert, a team of researchers has discovered a new species of dinosaur fossils from an animal that lived 68 million years ago. The species has been named, Oksoko Avarsan, and it is from an animal which resembles the modern parrot, but stands about two meters in length. In addition to their large size, the animals were omnivores with large beaks. Surprisingly, they only had two fingers, which is one less than we find on related modern animals. (The author will receive 10% of this post's liquid rewards.)

Steem @sarahjay1:Two satellites flew 224 meters from each other and almost collided - In a near-collision on November 27, two satellites with a combined weight of more than a ton flew about 224 meters from each other. The incident was recorded by the the Russian Space Agency (Roskomos), which observed the Russian Canopus-V and the Indian Cartosat-2F in close proximity to each other at 20:49 US/Eastern time. It also observed the two objects approach each other several more times, but at greater distances. With several thousand satellites and far more space-debris in orbit, collisions sometimes occur. An example is given of a 2009 collision between the Russian satellite Kosmos-2251 and the American Iridium 33. (The author will receive 10% of this post's liquid rewards.)

tl;dr: this AI sums up research papers in a sentence - In an initiative that hopes to make life easier for skim-readers, AI creators released the TLDR program this week to write a single sentence that summarizes scientific articles in the Semantic Scholar. The software was developed by researchers from the Semantic Scholar's provider, the non-profit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in Seattle, Washington. According to AI2's Dan Weld, the software will eventually be turned loose on scientific sources outside of the Semantic Scholar. The paper has been accepted for publication by Findings of ACL: EMNLP 2020, a conference on natural language processing. The Open Source code has been published on GitHub and a demo web site is here. -h/t Communications of the ACM

Why we shouldn’t fear the future of work - Although some people worry that automation and digitization have replaced millions of jobs and wages have stagnated, researchers who participated in a conference at MIT and issued a report argue for an optimistic future. The researchers acknowledged that technologies do replace some jobs, but they also create others. The researchers suggest that new jobs created by artificial intelligence and automation can be supplemented by education, labor, and safety-net policies. Because of this, a report concludes that, "there is no technology-driven jobs wipeout on the horizon", but that new policies are needed in order to keep up with the rapid pace of innovation. In recent decades, the researchers argue that technology has benefited white collar workers more than blue collar workers, and that what remains is a distribution problem, to make sure that everyone shares in the benefits of innovation. In addition to the usual tips on training and policy improvements, CNN's Fareed Zakaria suggested that, "The real fundamental shift is, we have to think of service jobs the way 100 years ago we thought about manufacturing jobs." -h/t Communications of the ACM

The Macroeconomic Effects of Flat-Taxation: Evidence from a Panel of Transition Economies - Although the "flat tax" has been the submect of political debates for decades, its macroeconomic effects have been largely ignored by researchers. In a Harvard Working paper, PhD candidate Brian Wheaton reviews the effect of a flat tax in transitioning economies. Wheaton studied 20 post-communist countries which implemented a flat tax after the break-up of the USSR. After 2011, five of those countries reverted to progressive income tax measures. Wheaton's analysis finds that flat tax countries grew their GDPs at a rate that was 1.36% higher than progressive tax countries. -h/t Daniel Lemire

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