Tag: images

Europe

One of my favorite topics and in the end the reason why I left Europe.

One doesn’t have to have a US-centric view of privacy, competition policy, or free speech to notice the dissonance between European mores and the digital economy. One assumes Europeans want to enjoy the benefits of the Internet, but they also seem consumed with ensuring that nothing of the old order is changed—let alone destroyed—in the process. They are the continental incarnation of what Virginia Postrel calls stasis—they are unwilling to accept the tradeoffs that come with progress and instead hopelessly try to plan around all discomfort.

2013-04-10: Remember Quaero, the search engine just like real search engines, but with more european commission? Apparently someone forgot to shut the project down and they are proudly working on a human adventure
2013-04-11: Economies in Europe don’t have the flexibility to deal with the double challenge of globalization and automation, so they’ll shrink a lot.
2015-06-19: Why Europe can’t have nice things.

Americans tend to act in a more rational and less emotional way about the goods and services they consume, because it’s not tied up with their national and regional identities. In Europe, stability is prized. Europeans are conservative with a small c. They pretty much like things the way they are

2018-03-26: European protectionism

Using a new survey, we show that the dispersion of marginal products across firms in the European Union is 2x as large as that in the United States. Reducing it to the US level would increase EU GDP by more than 30%. Alternatively, removing barriers between industries and countries would raise EU GDP by at least 25%.

2018-07-20: European Commission really hates innovation.

The European Commission continues to be a bit too cavalier about denying companies — well, Google, mostly — the right to monetize the products they spend billions of dollars at significant risk to develop; this was my chief objection to last year’s Google Shopping case. I am concerned that the Commissions’ publicly released reasoning doesn’t seem to grasp exactly how Android has developed, the choices Google made, and why.

2021-03-04: Anemic GDP growth, or even shrinking

The average European is ~33% or more worse off than the average American, and it’s getting worse.


2021-03-05: More regulatory nonsense

What people making these calls — and these laws — need to be more honest about, though, is that they killing competition. If you want to ensure that Twitter wins in audio, or that Facebook wins everywhere else, then elevating privacy over everything else, ignoring both tradeoffs (like killing competition in social networks) and facts on the ground (like the reality that your contacts have long since ceased to be private), is an excellent way to accomplish exactly that. Look no further than ecommerce.
Shopify, 1 of the most exciting companies in tech and the seeming leader of The Anti-Amazon Alliance, effectively moving into Facebook’s garden, because the web is increasingly a barren wasteland for small businesses. The cause is Apple: its approach to cookies makes platform-based web storefronts increasingly difficult to monetize effectively (Shop Pay performed magic in this regard), and its attack on “tracking” — which goes far beyond the IDFA — makes it increasingly impossible to acquire users in 1 place and convert them in another. The solution is to do user acquisition and user conversion all in 1 app — i.e. on Facebook — which is why Shopify is helping merchants move off the web and onto Facebook.

2022-12-14: A good summary why there’s no innovation in Europe

  • Talented people have a choice of careers. In Europe we steadfastly underpay technologists. Many people that really really want to get into engineering and programming continue to do so anyhow. A larger class however gets swayed by better paying jobs in financial engineering and other non-productive shenanigans. The response here to far higher US salaries for technical people is always that money is not the only factor. This is true. However, the OTHER factor of work is being appreciated and valued, and we also do not offer that! In Europe we outsource technology, as we don’t really consider it a core activity.
  • Not only do we not appreciate technologists, we also penalize founders. Banks, tax agencies and even family members distrust startups and will make life difficult for you.
  • For better or worse, here in Europe we are fond of business plans that somehow make sense. Blue sky “let’s launch this and I’m sure we’ll eventually find sufficient rent seeking or surveillance possibilities to one day make money” things don’t fly too well here.
    • Specifically, I’ve found that in the US it is quite acceptable to discuss plans that revolve around eventually screwing over your customers when they aren’t in a position to leave
    • In addition, European investors and entrepreneurs don’t tend to see their ventures as ’lottery tickets’ that might pay off. We like to see things costed with at least a theoretical path to profits
  • Related, it really is the case that (on average) US entrepreneurs are more ruthless and competitive than European ones. The flip side of this is that any nastiness hinders trust which makes it harder to build partnerships.

2023-07-17: Europeans are getting poorer.

The eurozone economy grew 6% over the past 15 years, compared with 82% for the US. That has left the average EU country poorer per head than every US state except Idaho and Mississippi. If the current trend continues, by 2035 the gap between economic output per capita in the US and EU will be as large as that between Japan and Ecuador today.
Spending on high-end groceries has collapsed. Germans consumed 52 kg of meat per person in 2022, 8% less than the previous year and the lowest level since calculations began in 1989.

Shut up the seatbelt alarm

china is definitely somewhere else on the convenience – safety continuum.

Chinese drivers hate to wear their safety belts. Instead, they wear specially designed clothing to pretend they are buckled up. But that won’t stop the seat-belt reminder lights and beeps, which are all extremely annoying. It is possible to click the belt in the buckle behind your back but that is uncomfortable. It is also possible to fiddle with the electronics but that is difficult. Creative and innovative Chinese companies finally found an easy solution.

Water desalination

Lockheed Martin has found a way to slash the amount of energy needed to remove salt from seawater, potentially making it vastly cheaper to produce clean water at a time when scarcity has become a global security issue. Because the sheets of graphene are so thin – just 1 atom in thickness – it takes much less energy to push the seawater through the filter with the force required to separate the salt from the water.

The material is called Perforene and is mostly vaporware as of 2018:

The potential of graphene to serve as a key material for advanced membranes comes from 1 major possible advantages of this atomically thin 2D material: permeability and selectivity. Graphene-based membranes are also hypothetically attractive based on concentration polarization and fouling, and graphene’s chemical and physical stability. Further research is needed to fully achieve these theoretical benefits, however. In addition, improvement in the design and manufacturing processes, so to produce performance and cost-effective graphene-based desalination devices, is still an open question. Finally, membranes are only one part of desalination systems, and current processes are not optimized to take full advantage of the higher selectivity and permeability of graphene. New desalination processes are, therefore, needed to unlock the full benefits of graphene.

2014-03-04: Graphene membranes

The researchers have now found a strategy to avoid the swelling of the membrane when exposed to water by building smaller sieves. When the common salts are dissolved in water, they form a “shell” of water molecules around the salt molecules. This allows the tiny capillaries of the graphene-oxide membranes to block the salt from flowing along with the water. Water molecules are able to pass through the membrane barrier and flow faster, which is ideal for application of these membranes for desalination. “Realization of scalable membranes with uniform pore size down to atomic scale is a significant step forward and will open new possibilities for improving the efficiency of desalination technology”

These graphene sheet water filters are a huge deal for desalination and safe drinking water.

Researchers have devised a way of making tiny holes of controllable size in sheets of graphene, a development that could lead to ultrathin filters for improved desalination or water purification. A big limitation in existing nanofiltration and reverse-osmosis desalination plants, which use filters to separate salt from seawater, is their low permeability: Water flows very slowly through them. The graphene filters, being much thinner, yet very strong, can sustain a much higher flow.


2016-08-01: Israel desalination

Amazingly, Israel has more water than it needs. The turnaround started in 2007, when low-flow toilets and showerheads were installed nationwide and the national water authority built innovative water treatment systems that recapture 86% of the water that goes down the drain and use it for irrigation — vastly more than the second-most-efficient country in the world, Spain, which recycles 19%.

But even with those measures, Israel still needed ~1.9b cubic meters of freshwater per year and was getting just 1.4B cubic meters from natural sources. That shortfall was why the Sea of Galilee was draining like an unplugged tub and why the country was about to lose its farms.

The country faces a previously unfathomable question: What to do with its extra water? Enter desalination. Desalination plants can provide some 600m cubic meters of water a year, and more are on the way.

2022-02-28: Salt fouling

“There have been a lot of demonstrations of really high-performing, salt-rejecting, solar-based evaporation designs of various devices. The challenge has been the salt fouling issue, that people haven’t really addressed. So, we see these very attractive performance numbers, but they’re often limited because of longevity. Over time, things will foul.”

Many attempts at solar desalination systems rely on some kind of wick to draw the saline water through the device, but these wicks are vulnerable to salt accumulation and relatively difficult to clean. The team focused on developing a wick-free system instead. The result is a layered system, with dark material at the top to absorb the sun’s heat, then a thin layer of water above a perforated layer of material, sitting atop a deep reservoir of the salty water such as a tank or a pond. A system with just 1m2 of collecting area should be sufficient to provide a family’s daily needs for drinking water, and would cost $4.

World visualized

This is pretty awesome as far as infographics go. presumably the usual warnings about infographics accuracy apply.

This is a self-initiated project based on the scenario – If the world were a village of 100 people. There are a few different versions of this text in circulation about the world’s statistics. I found the data very striking and neatly summarizes the world that we live in. So I used information graphics to retell the story in another creative way. I designed a set of 20 posters, which contain most of the information. I used simple vector graphics that related to a statistic in order to present the information in the simplest and most accessible way.

Outdoor baby storage

this is genius. it ensures babies get the fresh air and exercise they need.

This article of manufacture comprises a housing or cage, wherein the baby or young child together with proper toys may be placed. The baby is enabled to receive fresh air through the screen or wire fabric, and it will be noted that the baby has sufficient room or space for playing with toys. Furthermore suitable bed clothing may be arranged in the cage or housing, when suspended adjacent the window or the house or apartment, so that when it is time for the baby to take a nap, the bed clothing may be made up in one corner wherein the baby may sleep.

Interspecies communication

Bonobo understanding several 1000s words in English. Some of the candidate species with enough consciousness do not have the right vocal cords, so touch-based UIs might be the way forward for 2-way communication.

2014-01-25: Various species

A recent workshop on Analyzing Animal Vocal Sequences provided some illuminating views of what we know and what we don’t know about animal communication. In particular one notes the increased use of Machine Learning algorithms that are currently used to make sense of human interactions on the web. Talks at the workshop included:Unraveling dolphin communication complexity, Singing isn’t just for the birds, Automated identification of bird individuals using machine learning, A receiver’s perspective on analyzing animal vocal sequences, Animal communication sequence analysis using information theory, Machine learning for the classification of animal vocalizations and Information theoretic principles of human language and animal behavior

2015-05-23: Birds and Squirrels

squirrels understand ‘bird-ese,’ and birds understand ‘squirrel-ese.’ When red squirrels hear a call announcing a dangerous raptor in the air, or they see such a raptor, they will give calls that are acoustically “almost identical” to the birds

2019-11-07: Dog talk

Stella, an 18-month-old dog, can use a sound board to communicate using the 29 words she knows in short phrases and has been learning to ‘talk’ by pressing on buttons since she was 8 weeks old.

People.com interviewed Christina about Stella and how she can put words together to make simple sentences.

Using nose-activated vests and touchscreens, our canine pals are being trained to summon help for their handlers—and much more.

2023-01-31: Great apes (and humans?) share sign language. The research is plausible but the reported results hover around 57.3 ± 11.9%, so not very conclusive

All the great apes – chimps and bonobos – have an overlap of about 95% of the gestures they use to communicate. “So we already had a suspicion that this was a shared gesturing ability that might have been present in our last shared ancestor. But we’re quite confident now that our ancestors would have started off gesturing, and that this was co-opted into language.” The great apes use a whole “lexicon” of 80 gestures, each conveying a message to another member of their group. Messages like “groom me” are communicated with a long scratching motion; a mouth stroke means “give me that food” and tearing strips from a leaf with teeth is a chimpanzee gesture of flirtation.
Volunteers watched videos of the chimps and bonobos gesturing, then selected from a multiple choice list of translations. The participants performed significantly better than expected by chance, correctly interpreting the meaning of chimpanzee and bonobo gestures over 50% of the time.


2023-04-21: Sperm whales

We detail a scientific roadmap for advancing the understanding of communication of whales that can be built further upon as a template to decipher other forms of animal and non-human communication. Sperm whales, with their highly-developed neuroanatomical features, cognitive abilities, social structures, and discrete click-based encoding make for an excellent model for advanced tools that can be applied to other animals in the future. We outline the key elements required for the collection and processing of massive datasets, detecting basic communication units and language-like higher-level structures, and validating models through interactive playback experiments. The technological capabilities developed by such an undertaking hold potential for cross-applications in broader communities investigating non-human communication and behavioral research.


2023-04-22: Parrot video calls

A group of domesticated birds were taught to call one another on tablets and smartphones. The birds engaged in most calls for the maximum allowed time. They formed strong preferences—in the preliminary pilot study. Ellie, a Goffin’s cockatoo, became fast friends with a California-based African grey named Cookie. “It’s been over a year and they still talk”. The types of vocalizations the birds used suggested they were mirroring the call and response nature they engage in in the wild—“hello, I’m here!” in parrot-speak. The most popular parrots were also the ones who initiated the most calls, suggesting a reciprocal dynamic similar to human socialization. And while, in large part, the birds seemed to enjoy the activity itself, the human participants played a big part in that. Some parrots relished the extra attention they were getting from their humans, while others formed attachments for the humans on the other side of the screen.