Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for October 13, 2019

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(Edited)
Authored by @remlaps

Using DNA to help farmers fight crop disease; IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos; A claim that Tinder dating is less equal than some of the world's most unequal economies; Dog owners live longer; and a Steem essay on the planning phase when building a rail to enhance macro photography

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  1. How we're using DNA tech to help farmers fight crop diseases - In this TED talk, computational biologist Laura Boykin tells about her efforts to help East African farmers by saving the Cassava plant. Millions of people depend on the Cassava plant for food and income, but the plant is currently under attack by pesticide resistant white flies and viruses. She says that we have all the technology we need for the farmers to know which varieties of plants are resistant to the pests, but it has been inaccessible to the farmers because of cost and geography. Before her work, it would take 6 months for a farmer to provide a sample and get back an analysis, which meant that by the time the answer was known, it was already too late. Her team piggy-backed on a hand-held device that was in use to fight Ebola in West Africa, and produced a mobile device to do DNA extraction on site. Now farmers can use the device in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda, to diagnose sick plants in 3 hours (as opposed to 6 months) and then replace them with pathogen-resistant varieties. One of the first people that her team, Tree Lab, helped was able to go from 0 hectares to 40 hectares after deploying this tool.

  2. Video Friday: This Humanoid Robot Will Serve You Ice Cream - This week, IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos has: a highly dynamic quadruped, known as "mini-cheetah"; A robotic ice cream man on a bike; A promo video for the latest Roomba that demonstrates "keep out zones"; A fully autonomous robotic hex-coptor that can spray paint buildings; Robotic arms that can grab and sort; Drones that drop and recover GPS stations on a glacier; and more...

    I couldn't pick one favorite, so here are two:


  3. Tinder Experiments II: Guys, unless you are really hot you are probably better off not wasting your time on Tinder — a quantitative socio-economic study - In an article that will surprise absolutely no one, a study of Tinder "likes" revealed that "the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men." The blogger also calculated measures of inequality and compared Tinder (as a "like" based economy) to other economies. In terms of Lorenz and Gini scores, Tinder is less equal than the US economy, and in terms of Gini coefficient, it falls somewhere between Venezuela and Botswana. The article has a tongue in cheek feel to it (and probably wasn't peer reviewed), the research had a small sample size, relied on self-reporting, and made the assumption that all women find the same men attractive - so take it with a huge grain of salt. ; -) h/t Daniel Lemire

  4. Dog Ownership and Survival - From the Abstract: "Dog ownership is associated with lower risk of death over the long term, which is possibly driven by a reduction in cardiovascular mortality." In other words, dog owners live longer, maybe because they are less likely to die from heart disease. The article also says that the effect is more pronounced in people who have already experienced some sort of prior coronary events. h/t Daniel Lemire.

    Not sure why, but it reminds me of this (skip forward about 7 minutes):


  • STEEM Building a photography macro rail for focus stacking (Part 1 - Planning) - According to @markangeltrueman, a problem with macro photography is the difficulty of getting an entire picture in focus due to changes in distance from the lens. For example, if you try to photograph a fly, the eye might be in focus, but the back of the head might blur (I see this in photography for @rgkmb-unofficial, too, where the percussion section might be in focus, but instrumentalists further back on the field come out blurred). To resolve this, the post says that there is a technique known as focus-stacking, where the same photo is taken at multiple depths, and then combined with software like photoshop. This post begins a series of posts on building a "macro rail", which is a hardware device that automates the process of taking the identical photos at multiple depths. Click through to learn about the planning process, and follow @markangeltrueman for the subsequent posts in the series (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @markangeltrueman.)

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    I note the handheld diagnostic tool for Cassava disease is an excellent example of decentralization, limited AI, and of how the more advanced tech is the faster it disseminates, and to the people that need it most, generally less financially able folks.

    This gives me great hope.

    Thanks!

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    Agreed. And this one in particular has a huge compounding effect. By getting food to so many people and shoring up the finances for the farmers who do it, the project (hopefully) enables huge amounts of future productivity from large numbers of people who would have otherwise been struggling just to survive.

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