Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for September 3, 2019

remlaps-lite (76)in #rsslog • 5 years ago

Adidas is harvesting ocean pollution as material for new sneakers; Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen calls for light-handed regulatory approach to help cryptocurrency flourish; Using AI to cultivate empathy in crisis counsellors; A critique of a recent nutrition study claiming benefits from plant-based diets; Interesting links in a #steemstem curation post


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.

pixabay license: source.

Adidas is turning plastic ocean waste into sneakers and sportswear - Adidas has been working with partner, Parley, since 2015 to collect and sort plastics from beaches and coastal areas. After sorting, anything with polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is reclaimed for use in the comany's shoes. The company says it has cleaned 2,810 tons of plastics from the world's oceans and expects to make 11 million pairs of shoes with the recycled plastic in 2019. The company also hopes to produce its first 100% recyclable shoe by 2021 and to replace all "virgin polyester" with recycled polyester in its manufacturing process by 2024.

Andreessen Horowitz Co-Founder: Crypto a Solution to Web's Challenges - No matter how much time goes by, I guess I'll always think of Marc Andreessen as the creator of the NCSA Mosaic web browser, but now he's also a major venture capitalist. In a recent speech, he suggested that cryptocurrency may have the ability to solve some of the Internet's problems, like privacy, but argued that for that to happen the government needs to take a light-handed approach to regulation while the technology matures.

AI analysis gives guidance to crisis counselors - In the paper, Finding Your Voice: the Linguistic Development of Mental Health Counselors, researchers publish the results from analyzing transcripts of calls on suicde and mental health crisis lines. The analysis revealed linguistic patterns that develop in experienced crisis counselors as a result of training and empathy in hopes that this knowledge can be used to improve training for future volunteers. The analysis made use of natural language processing (NLP) and observed that experienced counsellors tend to drift away from formal language that they had picked up in training towards a more personal and informal language. Experienced counsellors were also more likely to mention specific concepts like "therapist", "app", or "meditation" instead of generalized concepts like "brainstorming" and "activities". In addition to the practical advance of knowledge from this research, it also serves to demonstrate how AI can be used to assist people who work in conversation-heavy professions. h/t Communications of the ACM

New Research On Plant-Based Diets and Mortality - This youtube video covers a new study that reanalyzed data from a previous study to compare the health of people who ate plant-based diets with those who didn't. The new study found a slightly improved relative risk for those who ate the plant-based diets, but due to statistical limitations, it couldn't rule out the possibility that the improvement in health is because people who eat plant-based diets are likelier to be wealthier and make other healthier lifestyle choices than those who don't. In short, maybe plant-based diets are a little bit healthier, but this study didn't show it. The speaker also argues that we have reached the end of usefulness for observational nutrition studies, saying that they have shown everything that they can, and it is time to go to the next level through the use of randomized and controlled trials that will produce more reliable claims. h/t RealClear Science

STEEM SteemSTEM Distilled #107 - Well, as I write this on Monday afternoon, most of the day is gone and the on-going Steem outage is making it very hard to find things, so I'm just going to recommend that you read this SteemSTEM Distilled article from a few days ago, and I'll get back on my normal track tomorrow (assuming the blockchain is fully accessible by then). The @steemstem curation post covers topics including communicating about climate change, and the role that socialization and environment play in our understanding of gender. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @steemstem)

In order to help make Steem the go to place for timely information on diverse topics, I invite you to discuss any of these links in the comments and/or your own response post.

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About this series

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#business #steemstem #cryptocurrency #artificial-intelligence #stem #palnet

5 years ago in #rsslog by remlaps-lite (76)

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lemouth (72) 5 years ago

That is a cool series. I liked the Adidas one a lot, as well as the advertisement for our distilled. Note that because of the HF mess, we may skip this week's distilled. I will however try to find the time, as always ^^

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8 votes

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remlaps-lite (76) 5 years ago (edited)

Thanks! I think (hope) this style of posting is a good way to bring a lot of fresh content onto the blockchain in a repeatable and consistent way, without spamming or demanding too much cognitive effort from the reader.

I liked the Adidas one, too. It's a creative way to turn a problem into an opportunity.

I understand about the distilled post. I think that outage threw some kinks into a lot of people's plans. Growing pains.

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2 votes

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lemouth (72) 5 years ago

I wish you will continue this series! I am always happy to learn 2-3 things outside my field (which I am sure I will here).

By the way, a new distilled has been posted earlier today (but not too much on it because of the hard fork issues) :)

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7 votes

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remlaps-lite (76) 5 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! Sometimes I wonder how many people are reading, so I really appreciate it.

Is it appropriate to use the #steemstem category for these? I only included it on this post because I incorporated steemstem content, but otherwise I've been avoiding the tag because I thought it was reserved for primary material. I'll certainly add it to future science & technology posts if this series fits there.

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lemouth (72) 5 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! Sometimes I wonder how many people are reading, so I really appreciate it.

I am pretty sure that answering "not many" would be quite correct... Unfortunately, I think that most STEM authors are in this situation. However, how to better attract content producers otherwise than by providing good content to read?

This being said, I have read your post. So at least the number of reader is greater than 0 ;)

Is it appropriate to use the #steemstem category for these? I only included it on this post because I incorporated steemstem content, but otherwise I've been avoiding the tag because I thought it was reserved for primary material. I'll certainly add it to future science & technology posts if this series fits there.

The content discusses STEM. So yes: feel free to use the #steemstem tag (I would even encourage you to do so).

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8 votes

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remlaps-lite (76) 5 years ago

Sorry for the delay. I missed this reply earlier. As-of tomorrow, I'll start using #steemstem as a tag on these posts then. I also added the @steemstem account as a beneficiary in my template a couple days ago in order to support STEM curation. Thanks for the feedback!

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steemstem (73) 5 years ago

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