162: Wet Blanket

Tommy and Adam take off the rose-colored glasses and look at science and technology through a more pessimistic lens for a change...for the most part. :)

Tommy and Adam take off the rose-colored glasses and look at science and technology through a more pessimistic lens for a change...for the most part. :)

Links for this episode:

Road rage drivers will bully self-driving cars, suggests study
TechRadar: "When our roads are entirely populated by self-driving cars it's expected that they'll be safer and more pleasant to drive on, but while we transition towards this, aggressive drivers are likely to make things difficult."
Dan Ariely Takes on 'Irrational' Economic Impulses
Dan Ariely: "My good friends Uri Gneezy (a professor at the University of California at San Diego) and Aldo Rustichini (a professor at the University of Minnesota) provided a very clever test of the long-term effects of a switch from social to market norms. A few years ago, they studied a day care center in Israel to determine whether imposing a fine on parents who arrived late to pick up their children was a useful deterrent. Uri and Aldo concluded that the fine didn't work well, and in fact it had long-term negative effects. Why? Before the fine was introduced, the teachers and parents had a social contract, with social norms about being late. Thus, if parents were late — as they occasionally were — they felt guilty about it — and their guilt compelled them to be more prompt in picking up their kids in the future. (In Israel, guilt seems to be an effective way to get compliance.) But once the fine was imposed, the day care center had inadvertently replaced the social norms with market norms. Now that the parents were paying for their tardiness, they interpreted the situation in terms of market norms. In other words, since they were being fined, they could decide for themselves whether to be late or not, and they frequently chose to be late."
Why you need a dash cam in china and Russia.
"Crazy insurance scammers!"
MetroMile
MetroMile: "Car insurance based on how much you drive. Pay a low base rate plus pennies per mile."
The Beguiling Promise Of John Goodenough's New Battery Technology
Forbes: "Google's Eric Schmidt tweeted this week about a new fast-charging battery technology from John Goodenough, the inventor of the lithium-ion battery, Dr. Maria Braga and his research team in the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas in Austin."
This fully transparent solar cell could make every window and screen a power source
ExtremeTech: "Back in August 2014, researchers at Michigan State University created a fully transparent solar concentrator, which could turn any window or sheet of glass (like your smartphone’s screen) into a photovoltaic solar cell."
AI Creates 3D Models From Faces | Two Minute Papers #149
"Photorealistic Facial Texture Inference Using Deep Neural Networks"
Lyrebird
"Record 1 minute from someone's voice and Lyrebird can compress her/his voice's DNA into a unique key. Use this key to generate anything with its corresponding voice."
Roundtable: The DLC "Problem"
GameIndustry: "Our staff discusses the issues surrounding DLC and whether gamers are being exploited."
I miss the days when I only had to pay once for a video game
Business Insider: "These days, game companies and developers are monetizing their games to their full potential. It’s not enough to sell a game just once: If you don’t sell extra content, you could be leaving millions of dollars on the table."
Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle
In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”
High School Student Suing Amazon After They Deleted Homework From His Kindle
Gizmodo: "Forget blaming it on the dog, thanks to Amazon students have a 21st century excuse for lost homework. When Amazon foolishly yanked 1984 from thousands of Kindles, Justin Gawronski's electronic notes for a summer assignment became useless."
Old TVs Create Toxic Problem for Recycling Programs Across America
NBC News: "Low commodities prices around the world are making life difficult for electronics recyclers, especially those struggling to get rid of toxic materials from obsolete television sets."
Don’t Throw Out Your Dog’s Poop: It’s Now A Valuable Natural Resource
FastCompany: "Your dog might seem like an unlikely source of renewable energy. But a new appliance is designed to take a plentiful resource your pet produces–dog poop–and convert it into electricity that can charge household gadgets."
Recurring Billing Models - Difference Between Tiered vs Volume Pricing
FuseBill: "This is the first in a mini-series of articles on "tiered, volume, and usage-based" pricing as part of metered price plans. At Fusebill we've found that many companies believe they have a “complex” pricing model - not because of anything inherent in the model itself, but because they find it difficult to track manually. We hope that these articles will provide better understanding of the different types of pricing within a metered price plan."
The Earth Is Flat, Explained
Gawker Black Bag: "Earlier today, rapper B.o.B. declared to his millions of Twitter followers that, despite everything they’ve been led to believe their entire lives, the earth is flat. And the weirdest part isn’t just that he believes the earth is flat, but that he’s not even remotely alone."
10 Easy Ways You Can Tell For Yourself That The Earth Is Not Flat
PopSci: "The evidence is right in front of you."
Math is Subjunctively Objective
Less Wrong: "I am quite confident that the statement 2 + 3 = 5 is true; I am far less confident of what it means for a mathematical statement to be true."

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