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"With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay

"We demonstrated the high-speed, non-deformation catching of a marshmallow. The marshmallow is a very soft object which is difficult to grasp without deforming its surface. For the catching, we developed a 1ms sensor fusion system with the high-speed active vision sensor and the high-speed, high-precision proximity sensor. Generally, a tactile feedback is used to grasp various kinds of soft objects without deforming. However, the robot hand tends to deform the object surface with only tactile feedback. By slowing the grasping speed, the deformation becomes smaller. However, grasping time becomes longer. The 1ms sensor fusion system enabled seamless, high-sensitive sensing from non-contact to contact state. The robot hand could control fingertip position dynamically and precisely based on the visual and the proximity feedback. By the proximity feedback, contact to the object was detected before deforming its surface, and grasping motion is stopped. The robot hand could catch the marshmallow even if the position and posture of it were different. http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/fusion/... SHOW MORE "

"Drones' greatest attraction for the national security world is that they create options where there were none - or none at a cost policymakers feel comfortable with. With a public tired of large scale military interventions, drones and other approaches that gave the U.S. options to study or intervene against security challenges in a low profile, low risk way fit perfectly into the Obama administration's comfort zone. These platforms came to symbolize and enable much of the Obama national security team's approach. But the enthusiastic embrace of drone technology, particularly in counterterrorism, left some former Obama officials questioning whether they'd been clutching a Pandora's box they should have opened more deliberately. Overall, such "light footprint" strategies generate enduring disagreements about their efficacy, risk, and oversight. Unlike any other recent military platform, drones in particular engender strong emotion - hope, revulsion, overconfidence, demonization - and magical thinking, even among those who know them best. And the attributes that make them so compelling - that they are precise, remote, sensing, and unmanned - may sometimes be too reassuring."

"If corporations returned to the practices of the pre-neoliberal era (1952-1983, to be precise), stuffing not half but less than a fifth of their cash flow in their shareholders' pockets, that could take net investment back to its old average. But under today's model of capitalism, it's more important to keep the shareholders happy."

In the midst of a pandemic, as Gates points out, there's never been a more important time to be precise about what it is that we're trying to accomplish, and how we get there.

" Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o

The common challenge of covid-19 has produced very different outcomes around the world, leading to many questions about the determinants of national performance and shortcomings in global performance. Problems of reporting and standards do not make precise comparisons easy, but few would disagree that the roughly 1400 deaths reported by South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam together represent far better results than the roughly 700 000 deaths reported by Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the United States.1 Adjusting these figures for population-the first group has about a third of the citizens of the second group-does not explain why covid-19 mortality differs by a factor of nearly 500. Neither typical proxy measures such as gross national income per capita nor national rankings on the 2019 Global Health Security Index have any meaningful association with performance on covid-19.2

As scientists await the highly anticipated initial results of the Muon g-2 experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, collaborating scientists from DOE's Argonne National Laboratory continue to employ and maintain the unique system that maps the magnetic field in the experiment with unprecedented precision.

Younger generations are blamed for the pandemic's spread, but also face the brunt of the transmission risk that comes with keeping the economy going. 6 MINUTE READ BY REBECCA RENNER PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 17, 2020 WHEN PARAMEDICS RUSHED the pregnant Honduran woman into the emergency room, 28-year-old Chuan-Jay Jeffrey Chen stood ready to receive her. It was April, and the pandemic had already taken over his final year as an emergency medicine resident. Of all the coronavirus patients surging into Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, this 32-year-old patient remains Chen's most memorable. The woman was so short of breath she could barely speak, so Chen would need to intubate her-a tricky procedure that requires precision as well as speed. Every moment without oxygen causes a patient's chances of survival to decline; pregnancy further complicates the scenario by making airways swollen, causing blood pressure to drop more quickly. As Chen set to work and talked her through the steps in Spanish, he also tried to calm his own nerves. "I knew I had very little margin for error," says Chen. The woman's husband had been barred from entering the building because of coronavirus restrictionsgen-z

People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do; they are subject to an illusion-an illusion of explanatory depth. The illusion is far stronger for explanatory knowledge than many other kinds of knowledge, such as that for facts, procedures or narratives. The illusion for explanatory knowledge is most robust where the environment supports real-time explanations with visible mechanisms. We demonstrate the illusion of depth with explanatory knowledge in Studies 1-6. Then we show differences in overconfidence about knowledge across different knowledge domains in Studies 7-10. Finally, we explore the mechanisms behind the initial confidence and behind overconfidence in Studies 11 and 12. Implications for the roles of intuitive theories in models of concepts and cognition are discussed.

this is how living in the COVID era can feel. We know that an unprecedented economic cataclysm has rippled across the globe. But the precise consequences of this catastrophe - for the global economy, geopolitics, climate change, and our own little lives - remain opaque.