New economy – old problems
NY Times article By Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld exposed workplace issues Inside Amazon, and many great pieces written on the aftermath – among them one particularly good was by John Cassidy at The New Yorker.
Published right before NY Times’, one can only wonder what a great input would have been if Inside Amazon debate was to be taken into directly into consideration at “Networks and the Nature of the Firm” by Tim O’Reilly. This takes on a broader view on the new economy.
From Tim O’Reilly’s bigger picture to a inside dive into amazon jungle these articles compose an interesting triptych.
Empathy, Authority, and Virtual Reality
Suggestion has been used for a long time by pseudo-psychics, hypnotism, and other form of magicians. Regardless of some straight-out frauds, this is telling of the way our mind interprets perceptions does not conform to a deterministic way people sometimes try to see their ‘reasoning’.
An important factor on most of the explored means of tapping into suggestion was interaction with other person (the hypnotist). Authority plays a major role in this. As human communication is more and more mediated by technology, would our perception of authority be migrating as well? One may see a big data miracle if amazon guess someone is pregnant by her shopping history, but take for granted if a local pharmacist do so?
Would empathy, hand-in-hand with suggestion and authority, be migrating to be mediated by virtual reality?
Not surprisingly, as businesses get the taste of the market potential of this shift, here is a new batch of articles on the matter. Too many in this trendy topic to pick one, sorry.
“Inside the Empathy Machine: VR, Neuroscience, Race and Journalism” by Joel Beeson at Media Shift.
“NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell steps into virtual reality at Stanford lab” by Bjorn Carey
“The Limits of Virtual Reality: Debugging the Empathy Machine” by Ainsley Sutherland from MIT
“The Future of Empathy-Generating Virtual Reality Is Here” by Bill Desowitz
“How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine” – TED Talk with Chris Milk
“CAN VIRTUAL REALITY MAKE YOU A BETTER PERSON?” by Stern Strategy Group
“Is It Really So Bad If We Prefer Virtual Reality to Reality?” by Sveta McShane
“Science Isn’t Broken” by CHRISTIE ASCHWANDEN
Article from fivethirtyeight.com:
“If you follow the headlines, your confidence in science may have taken a hit lately.
(..) International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology recently accepted for publication a paper titled “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List,” whose text was nothing more than those seven words, repeated over and over for 10 pages. Two other journals allowed an engineer posing as Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabappel to publish a paper, “Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations.”
Revolutionary findings? Possibly fabricated. In May, a couple of University of California, Berkeley, grad students discovered irregularities in Michael LaCour’s influential paper suggesting that an in-person conversation with a gay person could change how people felt about same-sex marriage. The journal Science retracted the paper shortly after, when LaCour’s co-author could find no record of the data.
Taken together, headlines like these might suggest that science is a shady enterprise that spits out a bunch of dressed-up nonsense. But I’ve spent months investigating the problems hounding science, and I’ve learned that the headline-grabbing cases of misconduct and fraud are mere distractions. The state of our science is strong, but it’s plagued by a universal problem: Science is hard — really fucking hard.Continue reading
“You Have a Notification: Welcome to the 24/7 Work Culture” by VIVEK WADHWA
Article featured in Singularity Hub‘s series ‘Future of Work’
“Netflix recently announced an unlimited paid-leave policy that allows employees to take off as much time as they want during the first year after a child’s birth or adoption. It is trying to one-up tech companies that offer unlimited vacation as a benefit. These are all public-relations ploys and recruiting gimmicks. (…)
Urgent or not, the emails continue for 24 hours a day—even on weekends. (…)
The reality is that there is no 9 to 5 any more. We are always connected, always on, always working— (…) as we became chained to the Internet. (…) There is no longer an excuse for not working.” read full article
Interspecies organ transplant
It is now long awaited that some day humans will be able to raise human spare parts in other species. Pigs are among the favored donors – perhaps due to the similar diet habits.
As this story by Antonio Regalado reports, researchers are presenting impressive progress in swapping hearts and kidneys among pigs and baboons (that would be us). Get me a new liver and a double dry martini to celebrate, please.
And then we know as well that (other) scientific experiments made mice smarter by inserting human brain cells in them.
Now we just have to be careful how to mix (shake, don’t stir) these practices. Make the pig too smart and I bet it won’t give away a heart so easily.