Farewell to Starbucks’s green straws
https://www.economist.com/the-world-in/2019/12/30/farewell-to-starbuckss-green-straws [www.economist.com]
2019-12-31 15:14
tags:
essay
food
life
In the long history of pipe-assisted drinking—beginning with the gold beer-sipping tubes of the Sumerians—Starbucks’s plastic straws knew they were a cut above the rest. Their tight white wrapping carried not only English words but a stylish French inscription, Pas recommandé pour utiliser dans les boissons chaudes. Released from that confinement, springing up ready, they stood straight, stiff and tall as a stalk of wheat, with no disfiguring articulations; for they never quailed or bent. And their colour was beautiful. It was darker than the leaves of spring, lighter than the Washington forests and the logo of the company, yet fresh, viridian, straight from the palette of a Monet or a Van Gogh. But despite all that they were doomed to disappear by 2020, for not being green enough.
The Exxon Valdez of cyberspace
https://www.economist.com/business/2019/08/08/the-exxon-valdez-of-cyberspace [www.economist.com]
2019-08-12 15:04
tags:
business
malware
security
In 1989 the thin-hulled Exxon Valdez supertanker ran aground in Prince William Sound, Alaska, pouring a quarter of a million barrels of oil into the surrounding waters. At the time, it was America’s worst offshore spill, and a huge blow to the reputation of the ship’s owner, Exxon. The firm paid $3bn to clean up the area and settle legal claims, and to improve safety the American government ordered the phasing out of single-hull ships such as Exxon Valdez. All vessels used worldwide by Exxon’s corporate descendant, ExxonMobil, are now double-hulled. But that is not all. The disaster gave rise to a cultlike culture of discipline within ExxonMobil that helped turn it into the profitmaking beast it is today.
If we haven’t yet seen a sufficiently nasty data breach to motivate cleanups, I don’t think we want to.
How to wring power from the night air
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/08/01/how-to-wring-power-from-the-night-air [www.economist.com]
2019-08-03 02:13
tags:
energy
physics
tech
vapor
Solar power is all very well, but it is available only during daylight hours. If something similarly environmentally friendly could be drawn on during the hours of darkness, that would be a great convenience. Colin Price, an atmospheric scientist at Tel Aviv University, in Israel, wonders if he might have stumbled across such a thing. As he told a meeting of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, held in Montreal in July, it may be possible to extract electricity directly from damp air—specifically, from air of the sort of dampness (above 60% relative humidity) found after sundown, as the atmosphere cools and its ability to hold water vapour diminishes.
source: HN
If you’re looking for gold, look in trees
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/05/25/if-youre-looking-for-gold-look-in-trees [www.economist.com]
2019-05-24 17:47
tags:
biology
business
chemistry
Prospecting for gold by looking for it in leaves has finally proved itself commercially in Australia
The quantities are minuscule. In areas where there is no gold, leaves may have a background level of 0.15 parts per billion (ppb) of gold; on gold-rich sites that can rise to 4ppb.
source: HN
Why have humans never found aliens?
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/10/11/why-have-humans-never-found-aliens [www.economist.com]
2019-01-10 00:07
tags:
life
space
Dr Tarter reckoned that decades of searching had amounted to the equivalent of dipping a drinking glass into Earth’s oceans at random to see if it contained a fish. Dr Wright and his colleagues built on Dr Tarter’s work to come up with a model that tries to estimate the amount of searching that alien-hunters have managed so far. They considered nine variables, including how distant any putative aliens are likely to be, the sensitivity of telescopes, how big a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum they are able to scan and the time spent doing so. Once the numbers had been crunched, the researchers reckoned humanity has done slightly better than Dr Tarter suggested. Rather than dipping a drinking glass into the ocean, they say, astronomers have dunked a bathtub.
source: DF
Apple should shrink its finance arm before it goes bananas
https://www.economist.com/news/business/21730631-worlds-biggest-firm-has-financial-arm-half-size-goldman-sachs-apple-should-shrink [www.economist.com]
2017-11-14 02:57
tags:
article
business
finance
valley
IT IS fashionable to say that tech firms will conquer the financial services industry. Yet in the case of Apple, it seems that the opposite is happening and finance is taking over tech by stealth. Since the death of Steve Jobs, its co-founder, in 2011, the world’s biggest firm by market value has sold hundreds of millions of phones with bionic chips and know-it-all digital assistants. But it has also grown a financial operation that is already, on some measures, roughly half the size of Goldman Sachs.
source: ML
The latest AI can work things out without being taught
https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21730391-learning-play-go-only-start-latest-ai-can-work-things-out-without [www.economist.com]
2017-10-18 21:16
tags:
ai
gaming
It is much better at the game, learns to play much more quickly and requires far less computing hardware to do well. Most important, though, unlike the original version, AlphaGo Zero has managed to teach itself the game without recourse to human experts at all.
Original: https://deepmind.com/blog/alphago-zero-learning-scratch/
How to devise the perfect recommendation algorithm
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21716464-recommendations-must-be-neither-too-familiar-nor-too-novel-how-devise-perfect [www.economist.com]
2017-03-09 07:35
tags:
ai
business
life
Unfortunately the answer is not contained within, but one interesting tidbit.
Spotify, a music-streaming service, offers a different model with its Discover Weekly playlist, which it produces for more than 100m customers.
By limiting the list to a couple of hours-worth of listening, and by setting an expiration date each week, Spotify creates a sense of scarcity to keep listeners engaged.
Finding a voice
http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2017-05-01/language [www.economist.com]
2017-01-05 19:04
tags:
ai
article
ideas
language
life
tech
Computers have got much better at translation, voice recognition and speech synthesis, says Lane Greene. But they still don’t understand the meaning of language
It’s been 50 years since a National Academy of Sciences report that language-technology research had overpromised and underdelivered. But now it’s all about the deep learning and neural nets.
Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, an Israeli MT pioneer, realised that “the pen is in the box” and “the box is in the pen” would require different translations for “pen”: any pen big enough to hold a box would have to be an animal enclosure, not a writing instrument.
“Who plays Thor in ‘Thor’?” ... Siri came up with an unexpected reply: “I don’t see any movies matching ‘Thor’ playing in Thor, IA, US, today.”
A bit more on the lifestyle and privacy changes brought about by voice control: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21713836-casting-magic-spell-it-lets-people-control-world-through-words-alone-how-voice
How to empty the ketchup bottle every time
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21711015-and-improve-power-plants-too-how-empty-ketchup-bottle-every-time [www.economist.com]
2016-12-07 00:41
tags:
chemistry
physics
Not actually, but in theory.
For more than a decade Kripa Varanasi and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have been creating and studying slippery surfaces for use in industrial equipment such as steam turbines and desalination plants.
Every fluid requires its own surface structure and lubricating agent to prevent stickiness. Fill the tiny gaps in the surface with the liquid, and the otherwise gooey substance won’t be able to stick.
Transport employees in America were secretly paid by the government to search travellers’ bags
http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2016/12/snoop-case [www.economist.com]
2016-12-07 00:29
tags:
flying
policy
The DEA paid TSA employees (among others) to search bags and provide tips (for which the informant received compensation for hits), in violation of policy prohibiting government employees to serve as informants.
DOJ report: https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2016/a1633.pdf
Storing electricity underwater
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21709527-pumped-storage-gets-makeover-depths-imagination [www.economist.com]
2016-11-04 10:28
tags:
energy
physics
tech
urban
New variants of pumped storage, storing water (or air) in water.