Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 10, 2020

Automatic pricing algorithms could reduce competition and raise consumer prices; Robot swarm achieves goals without central orchestration; Lettuce grows on the International Space Station (ISS); Google releases open source TensorFlow Quantum to streamline quantum machine learning; and a @steemhunt post that draws attention to a children's exotrainer for repairing muscular atrophy

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Fresh and Informative Content Daily: Welcome to my little corner of the blockchain

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

First posted on my Steem blog: SteemIt, SteemPeak^*, StemGeeks.

1. Warring Algorithms Could Be Driving Up Consumer Prices - This article discusses a recent paper by Alexander MacKay and Zach Brown. According to the paper, the widespread use of online pricing algorithms is reshaping the competitive business landscape and it may be raising prices for consumers - all of which is catching the eye of consumer advocates, government regulators, and anti-trust authorities. In the past, the article says, price changes were major strategic decisions for most companies, so they were only adjusted once or twice a year. Now, with the advent of online data analysis tools, however, businesses can change prices multiple times per day. This is done out of a desire to stay in tune with current supply and demand conditions, but it can change the nature of competition - especially when businesses know that a competitor is monitoring and reacting to pricing changes. The research suggests that the existence of price-tuning algorithms may restrict competition and raise prices because the algorithms are expensive, so once a leader has established their pricing leadership, incentives are reduced for competitors to either (i) dynamically adjust prices; or (ii) adopt price-tuning algorithms of their own. Based on their findings, here is some of MacKay's advice for managers:

   If you have a chance to get an edge on your rival in terms of pricing technology, that can be quite beneficial. But if your rivals already have highly sophisticated and fast pricing technology, then maybe there’s not much of a benefit, and maybe you should look at investing in other ways to build your competitive advantage.

   This research was previously covered in Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for February 4, 2020.


2. Swarm of Robots Forms Complex Shapes Without Centralized Control - Subtitle: By talking only to each other, these mobile robots cooperate to make patterns and shapes. Research into swarming robots is important because the devices are small and inexpensive. But, it is made difficult by the fact that it's hard to orchestrate the swarm's behavior without the use of some sort of central controller. Researchers at Northwestern University have been working to accomplish just that.
   
   Here is a video where the robots cooperate to form the letters "N" and "U":
   


3. Astronauts grow lettuce in space - Until recently, astronauts have had to eat prepackaged food that has been sterilized by heating, irradiation, or freeze-drying. That sort of food is nutritious, but maybe not too exciting. This may be changing, however, because researchers have successfully grown red romaine lettuce that is safe to eat and nutritious in the International Space Station. The effort is described on March 6 in the journal, Frontiers in Plant Science. The main challenge to growing vegetables in space is the zero-gravity environment, because plants' roots need to be exposed to both oxygen and water. To overcome this challenge, the project used a specially designed watering system. The vegetables were lit by LED lights, and protected from radiation through the use of specially designed growth chambers that also enabled logging of things like carbon dioxide levels, humidity, and temperatures. Once grown and proved to be safe to eat, the astronauts were allowed to eat half of the lettuce, while the other half was packaged and returned to Earth for further analysis.
   
   Here is a video (from 2015)
   
   
   -h/t RealClear Science


4. Google is making it easier to develop quantum machine-learning apps - Google is adding TensorFlow Quantum to its popular TensorFlow Toolkit to bring quantum machine learning into the open source community. TensorFlow makes machine learning more accessible by providing open source reusable code and simplifying creation of deep neural networks. TensorFlow Quantum now looks set to do the same for quantum machine learning. In order to facilitate debugging, the new software comes with a configuration switch to let the programmer chose between running on actual quantum computer hardware or running on a classical simulation of a quantum platform. In addition to describing the release, the article also asserts that although quantum computing is still a niche use case for scientific researchers, it is getting closer to having real-world, mainstream applications.


5. Steem @charlie-says: EXOTrainer - Exoskeleton for Children with Spinal Muscular Atrophy - Yesterday's post, Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 9, 2020, contained an exosuit for adults to use in an industrial or warehouse setting. Today's post has an exotratiner for Children with Spinal Muscular Atrophy. This @steemhunt post contains photos and a link for a product that helps children with muscular atrophy to retrain their muscles.
   
   Here is a video of the exotrainer:
   

   
   
   And in case you missed it yesterday, here is a video of the exosuit:
   

   
   

   (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @charlie-says.)

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