Dead? He gets that a lot
Monthly Archives: March 2014
Lego Calendar
Cute idea, mainly for designers me thinks…
http://vitaminsdesign.com/projects/lego-calendar/
PDF: lego-calendar
Cheap Cardboard Standing Desk!!
http://www.fastcoexist.com/3027364/this-cheap-strong-cardboard-standing-desk-will-let-you-ditch-your-deadly-office-sitting#1
This Cheap, Strong Cardboard Standing Desk Will Let You Ditch Your Deadly Office Sitting
Have you always wanted to try out a standing desk but didn’t want to commit? This recyclable model is assembled without any glue or fasteners and costs only $65.
Looking for a cheap and sturdy standing desk? There are DIY options. But if you’ve always wanted to have some cardboard furniture in your home or office (and who hasn’t?), try one of the standing desks from Chairigami.
Entrepreneur and recent Yale graduate Zach Rotholz has attracted plenty of attention for his line of corrugated cardboard furniture. Called Chairigami, the furniture is recyclable, lightweight, flat-packed, and cheaper than conventional designs. It’s popular at big events, which often require large amounts of furniture to be taken in and out quickly (Rothholz recently supplied Chairigami furniture to the Feast, a conference in New York City). But Rotholz has to make all of the furniture by hand, restricting Chairigami’s potential for growth.
Now, with the launch of a Kickstarter campaign for a $65 Chairigami standing desk, Rotholz is partnering with a manufacturer in Massachusetts to scale up production. But in order to make the desk suitable for mass production, Rotholz had to come up a new design. All of his past pieces have been made out of triple-wall cardboard, which is difficult to die cut. The standing desks, in contrast, are made out of single-wall cardboard that has been doubled up in certain places.
“There are a lot more folds and origami skills used in designing it,” he explains. “You can create stronger pieces just by folding. You can double up layers and fold them together in places that need strength, like the top and the legs.”
The 42-inch tall desk weighs 15 pounds, can handle up to 300 pounds of stuff on top of it, and lasts up to four years with heavy use. Made without fasteners or glue–all the pieces can be folded and slotted together–it’s as simple a piece of furniture as you’ll find.
Rotholz believes the desk will be especially attractive to people who want to experiment with standing desks without a huge monetary commitment up front. For everyone else, there’s an element of fun that’s hard to match with traditional desks. “We want people to hack it, customize it, cut a hole for the power cord, color on it, print on it. We want it to be a blank slate for people,” he says.
The Chairigami standing desk is available to pre-order on Kickstarter here.
Mindful habits for a lighter life…
Terrific tips…
http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/10-mindful-habits-for-a-lighter-life-201180
10 Mindful Habits for a Lighter Life
APARTMENT THERAPY’S HOME REMEDIES
A disorganized and cluttered home can quickly become a huge source of stress that can rob us of the ability to live life to the fullest. Of course we all want a lighter life, but what is the key to truly achieving it? Streamlining your home and developing the rituals needed to keep it that way can allow you to come home to a peaceful and relaxing environment instead of feeling overwhelmed the instant you turn the key in the door. Here are ten mindful habits that you can follow to help you achieve the life you deserve.
1. Have a vision for your space.
The first step toward a lighter life and less cluttered home is to have a vision for your life and your space. Picture it in your mind and use that image as motivation to make the tough decisions.
2. Have a plan.
Go on the offense and plan ahead, for example, have a blueprint for your wardrobe – choosing simple basics that coordinate with one another will ensure that you have an open, airy, unstuffed closet no matter its size.
3. Before buying, ask yourself, “Is it useful? Is it beautiful?”
If the answer is no, don’t allow the item to enter your home, even if it may be free or was a gift.
4. Don’t let it get past the front door – shred, trash, donate, or recycle it.
Immediately shred personal papers, recycle junk mail, and trash garbage – don’t let it pile up on your landing strip or counter. Keep a donation box in the back of your vehicle and drive it to your favorite charity as soon as it becomes full.
5. Follow the “one in, one out” rule.
If you buy a new dress, donate one to charity. When your child gets a new stuffed animal, have them choose one to give away. Make sure it’s done immediately and don’t be afraid to make substitutions. It’s okay to get rid of a blazer when you purchase a pair of pants – as long as it’s making space in your closet.
6. Utilize an outbox.
If you’re finding it difficult to get rid of something due to an emotional or financial connection, or you’re just afraid that you might need it “someday”, an outbox is a no-pressure way to get started on decluttering.
7. Have a place for everything.
If you know where something belongs it’s much more likely that you will actually put it away. Items that don’t have a home are the ones that pile up in the corners, cabinets, closets and on the horizontal surfaces of your home. Eventually, if left unchecked, those piles can become overwhelming sources of stress.
8. Follow routines and complete the cycle.
Those with clean, organized homes have a very simple secret – they follow small routines throughout the day. After dinner the dishes are washed and put away. When they get the mail it is opened and action is taken. The coat is hung up immediately upon entering the house. Completing the cycle is all part of this – putting clothing in the washer but failing to switch it to the dryer will leave you with moldy, musty-smelling clothing that needs to be rewashed and the dirty laundry piles up. Failing to unload the dishwasher in the morning leads to a pile of dirty dishes in the sink.
9. Be a problem solver.
Too many bulky CD’s and DVD’s? Toss the plastic cases and use paper instead. Overwhelming piles of old family photos? Digitize them. Keep losing your keys? Create a landing strip. When something threatens to overwhelm you or becomes a source of stress, set aside time to research or think about a solution for the problem and take action.
10. Be content with what you have.
There’s the old saying “less is more”. Being content with what you have is truly the key to a lighter life.
What habits do you follow in order to maintain a lighter life and an uncluttered home? We’d love to hear about them!
Machines put half of US work at risk
Great tip from Michael Griffith on the back of last night’s dinner terrific conversation at the Nicholas Gruen organised feast at Hellenic Republic…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-12/your-job-taught-to-machines-puts-half-u-s-work-at-risk.html
Paper (PDF): The_Future_of_Employment
Your Job Taught to Machines Puts Half U.S. Work at Risk
By Aki Ito Mar 12, 2014 3:01 PM ET
Who needs an army of lawyers when you have a computer?
When Minneapolis attorney William Greene faced the task of combing through 1.3 million electronic documents in a recent case, he turned to a so-called smart computer program. Three associates selected relevant documents from a smaller sample, “teaching” their reasoning to the computer. The software’s algorithms then sorted the remaining material by importance.
“We were able to get the information we needed after reviewing only 2.3 percent of the documents,” said Greene, a Minneapolis-based partner at law firm Stinson Leonard Street LLP.
Full Coverage: Technology and the Economy
Artificial intelligence has arrived in the American workplace, spawning tools that replicate human judgments that were too complicated and subtle to distill into instructions for a computer. Algorithms that “learn” from past examples relieve engineers of the need to write out every command.
The advances, coupled with mobile robots wired with this intelligence, make it likely that occupations employing almost half of today’s U.S. workers, ranging from loan officers to cab drivers and real estate agents, become possible to automate in the next decade or two, according to a study done at the University of Oxford in the U.K.
Aethon Inc.’s self-navigating TUG robot transports soiled linens, drugs and meals in…Read More
“These transitions have happened before,” said Carl Benedikt Frey, co-author of the study and a research fellow at the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology. “What’s different this time is that technological change is happening even faster, and it may affect a greater variety of jobs.”
Profound Imprint
It’s a transition on the heels of an information-technology revolution that’s already left a profound imprint on employment across the globe. For both physical andmental labor, computers and robots replaced tasks that could be specified in step-by-step instructions — jobs that involved routine responsibilities that were fully understood.
That eliminated work for typists, travel agents and a whole array of middle-class earners over a single generation.
Yet even increasingly powerful computers faced a mammoth obstacle: they could execute only what they’re explicitly told. It was a nightmare for engineers trying to anticipate every command necessary to get software to operate vehicles or accurately recognize speech. That kept many jobs in the exclusive province of human labor — until recently.
Oxford’s Frey is convinced of the broader reach of technology now because of advances in machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence that has software “learn” how to make decisions by detecting patterns in those humans have made.
Artificial intelligence has arrived in the American workplace, spawning tools that… Read More
702 Occupations
The approach has powered leapfrog improvements in making self-driving cars and voice search a reality in the past few years. To estimate the impact that will have on 702 U.S. occupations, Frey and colleague Michael Osborne applied some of their own machine learning.
They first looked at detailed descriptions for 70 of those jobs and classified them as either possible or impossible to computerize. Frey and Osborne then fed that data to an algorithm that analyzed what kind of jobs make themselves to automation and predicted probabilities for the remaining 632 professions.
The higher that percentage, the sooner computers and robots will be capable of stepping in for human workers. Occupations that employed about 47 percent of Americans in 2010 scored high enough to rank in the risky category, meaning they could be possible to automate “perhaps over the next decade or two,” their analysis, released in September, showed.
Safe Havens
“My initial reaction was, wow, can this really be accurate?” said Frey, who’s a Ph.D. economist. “Some of these occupations that used to be safe havens for human labor are disappearing one by one.”
Loan officers are among the most susceptible professions, at a 98 percent probability, according to Frey’s estimates. Inroads are already being made by Daric Inc., an online peer-to-peer lender partially funded by former Wells Fargo & Co. Chairman Richard Kovacevich. Begun in November, it doesn’t employ a single loan officer. It probably never will.
The startup’s weapon: an algorithm that not only learned what kind of person made for a safe borrower in the past, but is also constantly updating its understanding of who is creditworthy as more customers repay or default on their debt.
It’s this computerized “experience,” not a loan officer or a committee, that calls the shots, dictating which small businesses and individuals get financing and at what interest rate. It doesn’t need teams of analysts devising hypotheses and running calculations because the software does that on massive streams of data on its own.
Lower Rates
The result: An interest rate that’s typically 8.8 percentage points lower than from a credit card, according to Daric. “The algorithm is the loan officer,” said Greg Ryan, the 29-year-old chief executive officer of the Redwood City, California, company that consists of him and five programmers. “We don’t have overhead, and that means we can pass the savings on to our customers.”
Similar technology is transforming what is often the most expensive part of litigation, during which attorneys pore over e-mails, spreadsheets, social media posts and other records to build their arguments.
Each lawsuit was too nuanced for a standard set of sorting rules, and the string of keywords lawyers suggested before every case still missed too many smoking guns. The reading got so costly that many law firms farmed out the initial sorting to lower-paid contractors.
Training Software
The key to automate some of this was the old adage to show not tell — to have trained attorneys illustrate to the software the kind of documents that make for gold. Programs developed by companies such as San Francisco-based Recommind Inc. then run massive statistics to predict which files expensive lawyers shouldn’t waste their time reading. It took Greene’s team of lawyers 600 hours to get through the 1.3 million documents with the help of Recommind’s software. That task, assuming a speed of 100 documents per hour, could take 13,000 hours if humans had to read all of them.
“It doesn’t mean you need zero people, but it’s fewer people than you used to need,” said Daniel Martin Katz, a professor at Michigan State University’s College of Law in East Lansing who teaches legal analytics. “It’s definitely a transformation for getting people that first job while they’re trying to gain additional skills as lawyers.”
Robot Transporters
Smart software is transforming the world of manual labor as well, propelling improvements in autonomous cars that make it likely machines can replace taxi drivers and heavy truck drivers in the next two decades, according to Frey’s study.
One application already here: Aethon Inc.’s self-navigating TUG robots that transport soiled linens, drugs and meals in now more than 140 hospitals predominantly in the U.S. When Pittsburgh-based Aethon first installs its robots in new facilities, humans walk the machines around. It would have been impossible to have engineers pre-program all the necessary steps, according to Chief Executive Officer Aldo Zini.
“Every building we encounter is different,” said Zini. “It’s an infinite number” of potential contingencies and “you could never ahead of time try to program everything in. That would be a massive effort. We had to be able to adapt and learn as we go.”
Human-level Cognition
To be sure, employers won’t necessarily replace their staff with computers just because it becomes technically feasible to do so, Frey said. It could remain cheaper for some time to employ low-wage workers than invest in expensive robots. Consumers may prefer interacting with people than with self-service kiosks, while government regulators could choose to require human supervision of high-stakes decisions.
Even more, recent advances still don’t mean computers are nearing human-level cognition that would enable them to replicate most jobs. That’s at least “many decades” away, according to Andrew Ng, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory near Palo Alto, California.
Machine-learning programs are best at specific routines with lots of data to train on and whose answers can be gleaned from the past. Try getting a computer to do something that’s unlike anything it’s seen before, and it just can’t improvise. Neither can machines come up with novel and creative solutions or learn from a couple examples the way people can, said Ng.
Employment Impact
“This stuff works best on fairly structured problems,” said Frank Levy, a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who has extensively researched technology’s impact on employment. “Where there’s more flexibility needed and you don’t have all the information in advance, it’s a problem.”
That means the positions of Greene and other senior attorneys, whose responsibilities range from synthesizing persuasive narratives to earning the trust of their clients, won’t disappear for some time. Less certain are prospects for those specializing in lower-paid legal work like document reading, or in jobs that involve other relatively repetitive tasks.
As more of the world gets digitized and the cost to store and process that information continues to decline, artificial intelligence will become even more pervasive in everyday life, says Stanford’s Ng.
“There will always be work for people who can synthesize information, think critically, and be flexible in how they act in different situations,” said Ng, also co-founder of online education provider Coursera Inc. Still, he said, “the jobs of yesterday won’t the same as the jobs of tomorrow.”
Workers will likely need to find vocations involving more cognitively complex tasks that machines can’t touch. Those positions also typically require more schooling, said Frey. “It’s a race between technology and education.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Aki Ito in San Francisco at aito16@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Chris Wellisz at cwellisz@bloomberg.net Gail DeGeorge, Mark Rohner
Reflections on trackers…
It’s about healthy living, not quantifying oneself…
http://www.medgadget.com/2014/03/an-interview-with-the-monitored-man-albert-sun.html
An Interview with “The Monitored Man”: Albert Sun
Posted: 13 Mar 2014 12:04 PM PDT
Albert Sun, a young journalist at the New York Times, recently authored an article entitled “The Monitored Man” chronicling his experience using a multitude of health fitness trackers over the last few months. I wanted to ask him about his fitness tracking adventure and gain further insight into this booming sector from a “super user” who at times was simultaneously wearing up to four fitness tracking devices.
Tom Fowler, Medgadget: Albert, tell me about why you decided to put fitness tracking devices to the test.
Albert Sun: I think it started with a really simple graphic that my colleague Alastair put together last year listing a few interesting wearable health monitors and what things they measured. For that he put together this google spreadsheet and we sort of tried to keep it up to date with all the different gadgets as we heard about them. I was constantly adding things to it and at a point felt that if I was having this much trouble keeping track of all of them that probably other people were as well. My original idea was actually to put them all to the test in accuracy and be able to chart which ones were the most accurate. I had plans to reverse engineer their drivers and access the raw data they were recording. But once I actually started wearing them I realized that, yes there was a lot of data, but it was actually this idea of motivation and behavior change and how you understand the data that was much more interesting.
Medgadget: You mentioned that many trackers were lacking in detecting exertion and activities like biking and fidgeting. Are the device makers missing the point, or are these merely due to current technical limitations?
Albert Sun: It’s definitely due to current technical limitations. If companies could make devices that could track everything perfectly, I think they absolutely would. And I think a lot of people see that kind of tracking as a kind of holy grail and are trying very hard to make it to that goal. I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. No tracker is going to be able to fully track everything about you and we’ve all already got a perfectly good “tracker” that’s wired in to every part of our body: our brain. My colleague Gretchen Reynolds writes about that in her article on why she decides to remain a “tech nudie.”
Yes an objective measure of your activity level is useful, but it’s just one view, and it has to be integrated into the broader subjective view of how you feel.
Medgadget: If every fitness tracking device producing company CEO was reading this interview, what tips would you like to give them?
Albert Sun: I think many of these CEO’s are already thinking about the things and experiences I wrote about. From talking to their users they know what experiences people are having and they’re definitely improving rapidly. Just in the time I’ve been using them they’ve improved a lot.
There are two things that I think they could do that would improve people’s experiences though. First is they could be a little more upfront in their marketing of these devices about what they can and can’t do instead of presenting them as magic.
The other thing that I think would be really helpful would be for them to put some error bars on the data they show and indicate that they are estimates and the true values lie somewhere in a range. I think that would go a long way towards helping people interpret their data in the proper context.
I might be sounding overly pessimistic about activity tracking, but I actually really like these devices and think they’re very cool and useful. But to be very cool and useful I think people have to approach them the right way and that means having realistic expectations of how they work. Otherwise people will be disappointed.
Medgadget: Would you say your conclusion “I don’t need a monitor anymore. I’m tracking me.” is a reflection of a large part of the market, in that many will initially use but then no longer have a need for trackers?
Albert Sun: Yes, absolutely. It’s maybe not a permanent thing, but it could be a now and again thing. I mean, are we really expecting people to start now and wear something that tracks their movement continually until they’re in the grave?
The goal here is to be healthier and happier — to live well — not to be perfectly quantified. Once an activity tracker has helped you do that it should ideally fade to the background to the point where you can almost forget about it. I obviously haven’t been able to do that while I’ve been working on this story, I’ve been juggling a lot of different gadgets and apps and chargers trying to keep everything straight. It’s quite taxing and it takes a toll on all the other things that life is about.
A good run…
Anne Wojcicki lays out 23andMe’s vision…
http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/09/future-of-preventative-medicine/
23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki envisions the future of preventative medicine
BY TERRENCE O’BRIEN @TERRENCEOBRIEN MARCH 9TH, 2014 AT 3:05PM ET 17
Anne Wojcicki and her genetic sequencing company 23andMe are locked in abattle with the FDA. Even though it can’t report results to customers right now, Wojcicki isn’t letting herself get bogged down in the present. At SXSW 2014 she laid out her vision of the future of preventative medicine — one where affordable genome sequencing comes together with “big data.” In addition to simply harvesting your genetic code, the company is doing research into how particular genes effect your susceptibility to disease or your reaction to treatments. And 23andMe isn’t keeping this information locked down. It has been building APIs that allow it to share the results of its research as well as the results your genetic tests, should you wish to.
It’s when that data is combined with other information, say that harvested from a fitness tracker, and put in the hands of engineers and doctors. In the future she hopes that you’ll see companies putting the same effort into identifying and addressing health risks as they do for tracking your shopping habits. Targetfamously was able to decode that a woman was pregnant before she told her father, based purely on her purchase history. One day that same sort of predictive power could be harnessed to prevent diabetes or lessen a risk for a heart attack. Whether or not that future is five, 10 or 15 years off is unclear. But if Wojcicki has her way, you’ll be able to pull up health and lifestyle decisions recommended for you with the same ease that you pull up suggested titles on Netflix.
On bureaucracies
The American economist William A. Niskanen considered the organisation of bureaucracies and proposed a budget maximising model now influential in public choice theory. It stated that rational bureaucrats will “always and everywhere seek to increase their budgets in order to increase their own power.”
An unfettered bureaucracy was predicted to grow to twice the size of a comparable firm that faces market discipline, incurring twice the cost.
http://theconversation.com/reform-australian-universities-by-cutting-their-bureaucracies-12781
Reform Australian universities by cutting their bureaucracies
Universities drive a knowledge economy, generate new ideas and teach people how to think critically. Anything other than strong investment in them will likely harm Australia.
But as Australian politicians are preparing to reform the university sector, there is an opportunity to take a closer look at the large and powerful university bureaucracy.
Adam Smith argued it would be preferable for students to directly pay academics for their tuition, rather than involve university bureaucrats. In earlier times, Oxford dons received all tuition revenue from their students and it’s been suggested that they paid between 15% and 20% for their rooms and administration. Subsequent central collection of tuition fees removed incentives for teachers to teach and led to the rise of the university bureaucracy.
Today, the bureaucracy is very large in Australian universities and only one third of university spending is allocated to academic salaries.
Click to enlarge
Across all the universities in Australia, the average proportion of full-time non-academic staff is 55%. This figure is relatively consistent over time and by university grouping (see graph below).
Australia is not alone as data for the United Kingdom shows a similar staffing profile with 48% classed as academics. A recent analysis of US universities’ spending argues:
Boards of trustees and presidents need to put their collective foot down on the growth of support and administrative costs. Those costs have grown faster than the cost of instruction across most campuses. In no other industry would overhead costs be allowed to grow at this rate – executives would lose their jobs.
We know universities employ more non-academics than academics. But, of course, “non-academic” is a heterogeneous grouping. Many of those classified as “non-academic” directly produce academic outputs, but this rubs both ways with academics often required to produce bureaucratic outputs.
An explanation for this strange spending allocation is that academics desire a large bureaucracy to support their research efforts and for coping with external regulatory requirements such as the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative, theAustralian Qualifications Framework (AQF) and the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA).
Another explanation is that university bureaucracies enjoy being big and engage in many non-academic transactions to perpetuate their large budget and influence.
The theory to support the latter view came from Cyril Northcote Parkinson, a naval historian who studied the workings of the British civil service. While not an economist, he had great insight into bureaucracy and suggested:
There need be little or no relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which it may be assigned.
Parkinson’s Law rests on two ideas: an official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals; and, officials make work for each other. Inefficient bureaucracy is likely not restricted to universities but pervades government and non-government organisations who escape traditional market forces.
Using Admiralty Statistics for the period between 1934 and 1955, Parkinson calculated a mean annual growth rate of spending on bureaucrats to be 5.9%. The top ten Australian research universities between 2003 and 2010 report mean annual growth in spending on non-academic salary costs of 8.8%. After adjusting for inflation the annual growth rate is 5.9%.
The American economist William A. Niskanen considered the organisation of bureaucracies and proposed a budget maximising model now influential in public choice theory. It stated that rational bureaucrats will “always and everywhere seek to increase their budgets in order to increase their own power.”
An unfettered bureaucracy was predicted to grow to twice the size of a comparable firm that faces market discipline, incurring twice the cost. Some insight and anecdotal evidence to support this comes from a recent analysis of the paperwork required for doctoral students to progress from admission to graduation at an Australian university.
In that analysis, the two authors of this article (Clarke and Graves) found that 270 unique data items were requested on average 2.27 times for 13 different forms. This implies the bureaucracy was operating at more than twice the size it needs to. The university we studied has since slimmed down the process.
Further costs from a large bureaucracy arise because academics are expected to participate in activities initiated by the bureaucracy. These tend to generate low or zero academic output. Some academics also adopt the behaviour of bureaucrats and stop or dramatically scale back their academic work.
The irony is that those in leadership positions, such as heads of departments, are most vulnerable, yet they must have been academically successful to achieve their position.
Evidence of this can be seen from the publication statistics of the professors who are heads of schools among nine of the top ten Australian research universities. Between 2006 and 2011, these senior academics published an average of 1.22 papers per year per person as first author.
This level of output would not be acceptable for an active health researcher at a professor, associate professor or even lecturer level.
The nine heads of school are likely tied up with administrative tasks, and hence their potential academic outputs are lost to signing forms, attending meetings and pushing bits of paper round their university.
If spending on the costs of employing non-academics could be reduced by 50% in line with a Niskanen level of over-supply, universities could employ additional academic staff. A further boost to productivity could be expected as old and new staff benefit from a decrease in the amount of time they must dedicate to bureaucratic transactions.
If all Australian universities adopted the staffing profile of the “Group of 8” institutions, which have the highest percentage of academics (at 51.6%), there would have been up to nearly 6,500 extra academics in 2010.
While no economist would question the need for some administration, there needs to be a focus on incentives to ensure efficient operation. It’s possible to run a tight ship in academic research as shown by Alan Trounson, president of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM).
In 2009, Trounson pledged to spend less than 6% of revenues on administration costs, a figure that is better than most firms competing in markets. So far, this commitment has been met.
It’s clear then that finding solutions to problems in modern Australian universities calls for a better understanding of economics and a reduction in bureaucracy.
Comparative International Pricing Data
Terrific information from the International Federation of Health Plans. Suspect the AU figures are distorted by unusually high AUD at the time… still, no excuses!
2012 iFHP Price Report FINAL April 3
