Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for November 11, 2019

CEO of intuit thinks AI's risk as a job-killer is overhyped; 9 abandoned islands returned to nature; Studying vampire bats to learn about pandemics; Wave characteristics have been observed for a natural biomolecule; A 200 STEM contest to answer the question: what do you feel will be the next biggest scientific or technological breakthrough in the next 10 years?; and a STEEM essay on quantum computing as a technological revolution...

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

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.

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1. Intuit's CEO explains why he thinks it's a myth that AI will be a job killer - Intuit CEO, Sasan Goodarzi, says it is true that many of today's jobs will be automated, but he counters that this will create as many or more new jobs for human judgment and value. Goodzari concedes that people will need new skills, but says it's a myth that artifiical intelligence (AI) will eliminate the need for human workers. The article quotes unnamed experts who counter that there is no guarantee that the people who lose their jobs will be good fits for the new jobs, and that large numbers of people will experience "challenges" as a result of AI changing the labor market. To this, Goodzari responds that Intuit's AI development is methodical and strategic, focusing in three areas: (i) Being "very intentional about what AI is good for"; (ii) Avoiding bias in the creation of AI; and (iii) Seeking the correct people to build the technologies. In their case, he says, AI is making things better for workers by expanding the size of their network and doing a better job at connecting customers with experts.


2. 9 Abandoned Islands Reclaimed by Nature - (i) Rumor has it that the only family to ever live on the Brazilian island of Ilha da Queimada Grande was killed by bites from the island's unique and deadly snake species. Travel to the Brazlilian island is now severely restricted; (ii) Japan's Hashima Island or Battleship Island was once a bustling mining town, but people vacated when the mines closed down; (iii) New York's Pollepel Island, also known as Bannerman Island, in the Hudson River, was vacated after a ferry sinking and two fires, and it is now only accessible by groups of tourists; (iv) Groups of Inupiat lived in wood huts in the side of mountains on Alaska's King Island until the Bureau of Indian Affairs closed the local school in 1959. By 1970, the island had been abandoned. Click through for more details about those and five more islands in locations including Japan, Italy, Scotland, India, and the Pacific Ocean.


3. What vaccinating vampire bats can teach us about pandemics - This TED talk was published in November, 2018, and it came across the site's RSS feed on October 31. In the talk, Daniel Streicker discusses his work to study and predict disease outbreaks by tracking vampire bats in Peru. Specifically, by focusing on rabies, he is able to study the factors that lead a disease to jump between species. Because 100% of rabies infections are caused by animal bites, it is an ideal virus for studying diseases that are transmissible between species. By studying mutations in the rabies genome, he has been able to map the spread of rabies over time, and determined that it spreads between 10-20 miles per year. His team also managed to observe a "historical first invasion" when the virus spread through a valley to the other side of the Andes mountains, and they also devised a way to stop the virus from spreading by covering bats with an edible rabies vaccine that will naturally spread to other bats through their grooming behaviors.


4. A natural biomolecule has been measured acting like a quantum wave for the first time - In a recent paper, Armin Shayeghi and colleagues demonstrated quantum interference in gramicidin molecules. Gramicidin is a natural antibiotic that is comprised of 15 amino acids. The team observed this behavior by ultracold gramicidin molecules and measuring the interference pattern to verify that the beam interferes with itself in wave-like fashion. Although the design is fairly simple, it was technically challenging because the particles are very fragile. The challenge was accomplished by coating a spinning wheel with gramicidin particles and then firing a laser at it in pulses that were strong enough to knock the particles loose, but short enough to keep from damaging them. Once knocked loose, the particles were carried in a beam of argon, moving at a speed of 600 meters per second. Measuring the interference was also a technical challenge, which the team met through the use of Talbot-Lau interferometry. As covered in Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for October 10, 2019, other teams have measured quantum interference in large particles, but those methods would have destroyed biomolecules.


5. STEEM 200 STEM Token Contest - This contest, by @themarkymark, offers 200 STEM tokens for people who create a post through stemgeeks.net with tags: #technology or #science & #stemgeekscontest. [Note: the contest is for STEM (one "E")-- not STEEM (two "E"s).] The post must be at least 500 words long, and address the subject: what do you feel will be the next biggest scientific or technological breakthrough in the next 10 years. The contest runs for seven days, ending at 6AM US/Eastern on November 18th, and contestants can submit one unique post per day. Click through for the full rules. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @themarkymark.)


6. STEEM Solving Problems With Few Operations; Quantum Computing - Here is a submission for @themarkymark's contest. In point of fact, this post is how I learned about the contest. In this essay, @balticbadger suggests that quantum computing will be the most impactful technology break through for the next decade. According to the post, large companies like IBM, Google, and Apple are already working on quantum computing, but it remains error-prone. @balticbadger suggests that once the technology is perfected, quantum computing, taking advantage of quantum entanglement, will usher in a technological revolution, disrupting artificial intelligence, medicine, blockchain, data storage, and more. Quantum computing has been previously covered in Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for October 24, 2019, Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for September 24, 2019, Science and technology micro-summaries for June 29, 2019, and Science and technology micro-summaries for June 23, 2019 (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @balticbadger.)

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