Category Archives: Web Article Review

robot-assisted surgery

Robot-assisted surgery is here, and this BBC video has some real footage of it. Warning, it’s a little graphic. It looks like the surgeon operating the robot is in the same room, and I assume he could jump in with an old-fashioned scalpel if he needed to. But in the future, I suppose there is no reason why surgery couldn’t be done by a surgeon far away, or even without direct human assistance at all.

video camera coverage

The police are making increasing use of video cameras – and not just public ones, but cameras on private property pointed in a public direction. When they want private footage, they just ask and most people are happy to turn it over. Some stats on Philadelphia from Philly.com:

This year, police have released more than 500 videos in crimes ranging from Halloween-decoration theft to shootings, throughout all six detective divisions – Northeast, Northwest, East, Central, South and Southwest.

As a result of those videos, police have made more than 100 arrests and have solved more than 200 crimes, Stanford said.

Police have access to about 4,000 video cameras across the city – in addition to city-owned cameras, SEPTA and Amtrak cameras and those at Philadelphia International and Northeast airports, Stanford said.

That adds up to more than 30 cameras per square mile in the city, from which police can readily obtain video – so it’s pretty tough to commit a crime anywhere and flee without being caught on video at some point…

Video is recovered in about 50 to 60 percent of homicide cases, he said. Based on a five-year average of 297 homicides a year in the city, detectives are obtaining video in roughly 150 to 180 homicide cases per year.

As a city dweller, it’s kind of hard to have a problem with this. City streets, and even underground walkways, aren’t nearly as dangerous as suburbanites think they are from sitting home watching CSI. But still, the more people feel that violent crime is being deterred, the more they will want to be out, and the safer we will all be. You wouldn’t want the police using video footage to get overzealous about minor infractions like jaywalking or open containers, or against political expression, but at least in Philadelphia there are no signs of that happening.

F.E. Smith

BBC has an interesting article on predictions made by F.E. Smith, a British aristocrat. These were predictions made in 1930 for the year 2030. BBC calls them “strange”. A couple really are strange, but several of them either have come true or still could by 2030. If technological progress is truly exponential, then 2015 is too soon to rule out any outcome for 2030 – remember the old saw about the lily pond and day 29.

  • average lifespan of 150, and a cure for cancer – there have been huge gains in lifespan, but obviously nowhere near this; but it could still happen; I’m reading The End of Illness by David Agus right now. One of his points is that the discovery of highly effective treatments for infectious diseases (antibiotics, etc.) has led to a focus on disease as an invader to be fought, rather than a focus on the patient’s body as a complete system, which is what is needed for better cancer treatment. He is not optimistic about a cure, but thinks that with better prevention and early detection most people could live healthy lives to 100 or more. I am also reminded of Long For this World, a book about Aubrey de Grey, who has proposed a radical (and seemingly drastic, not to mention painful) cure for cancer that he believes could allow people to live for hundreds or even a thousand years.
  • a 16-24 hour average work week – certainly this is not the average work week for people who work today. But is it so weird? This guy probably knew John Maynard Keynes, who was making exactly these sorts of projections based on long-term increases in productivity (Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren). These productivity increases, and related increases on overall monetary wealth, actually have come to pass. But two things have happened. First, the wealth is distributed unevenly, so that some people don’t have to work at all, while others have to work a lot. Of the richer countries, a few in Northern Europe have taken steps in the direction of sharing both wealth and work hours, while the Anglo-American countries and emerging Asia generally have not. Second, as we have become wealthier, we have come to see some things as necessities that would have been seen as luxuries in the past. Air conditioning comes to mind. Robert and Edward Skidelski talk a lot about these issues in How Much is Enough.
  • a color TV in every home 🙂 which would lead to a return to direct democracy 🙁
  • synthetic meat – has already happened in the lab, almost certainly will be commercialized by 2030 I would think
  • new “physiologically pleasant substances…as pleasant and harmless…” 🙂 “…as tobacco” 🙁

Books I mention above (which I am not selling):

taxi medallions and creative destruction

The Washington Post has a pair of interesting articles on taxi medallions. The first article claims that taxi medallions have been the “best investment in America for years”:

In New York, taxi medallions have topped $1 million. In Boston, $700,000. In Philadelphia, $400,000. In Miami, $300,000. Where medallions exist, they have outperformed even the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. In Chicago, their value has doubled since 2009.

A medallion is an asset that an entrepreneur or corporation can buy. They then rent out the right to use the medallion, receiving an income while hoping the asset will appreciate, which in the past it always has. Not surprisingly, since they have been such a good investment, there is a whole financial industry that has grown up around them, which is the focus of the second article. There are companies who specialize in lending to taxi medallion investors.

The 23-page market report warns of “financial ruin” for Medallion Financial Corp., a 70-year-old company that has long lent money to drivers and investors in New York, Chicago and Boston looking to buy expensive taxi medallions. The coveted assets give owners the right to operate taxicabs, and for decades they have been the best investment in America, providing a steady business for a company that goes by the ticker symbol TAXI.

But the market report, released to the media on Thursday at a time when transportation companies Uber and Lyft are threatening established taxi markets across the globe, predicts a much darker future. “Medallion Financial,” it reads, “has left itself and its shareholders exposed to an economic reckoning rarely observed in free-market economies – the collapse of an asset class propped up by decades of government-sponsored, monopolistic entry barriers with the sudden, unconstrained introduction of new supply.”

So it’s very clear why the owners of these assets are fighting for government regulation to outlaw use of the new technologies that might provide better service and better value. They might hold back the tide for awhile, but technology and consumer expectations will continue to evolve, and ultimately history is not likely to be on their side.

 

best of best of 2014

This time of year, you pretty much have to do a “best of” post. I’ll get to a review of some of my own posts eventually, but in the meantime here are a handful of “best of” posts. I actually don’t know if they are the best of the best of, but they are just a few that caught my eye.

  1. from Wired, The Best and Worst in a Tumultuous Year for Science: Despite the annoyingly un-reader-friendly slide show format, there are some serious eye openers here, such as synthesis of completely new, man-made DNA base pairs; custom-designed monkeys with a “gene-editing system”; a potentially huge breakthrough on diabetes; and a study concluding that the number – not the number of species, but the actual number of wild animals – has decreased by half in the last 40 years.
  2. Longreads Best of 2014: Business Writing: This links to some great articles on education reform, the status and future of Microsoft, and Airbnb. But be warned, these are some seriously long reads!
  3. Economist Money talks podcast, End of year edition. I would always rather read the transcript, but still this goes through some major trends from the year like oil prices, financial regulation, Uber and Lyft, and is worth a listen.
  4. from Wired again, The Best Science Visualizations of the Year. Some interesting ones depict “genetic activity of ocean bacteria”, loss of Arctic summertime sea ice, and the origin and early spread of AIDS.
  5. From Urbanful, Film’s 6 coolest (fictional) hydrid cities. Yes, the Los Angeles version of Blade Runner makes it. So do Gotham City and Metropolis, which are described as “New York by night” and “New York by day”. Finally, “Big Hero 6, the first collaboration between Disney and Marvel, takes place in the futuristic city of San Fransokyo, a fusion of San Francisco, California and Tokyo, Japan.”
  6. One more from Wired: The Craziest Sci-Fi Fantasies That Got Closer to Reality This Year. There’s plenty of Star Wars vs. Star Trek here, but my favorites are that you can now get your dog cloned in South Korea, and a “cheetah robot”.

Happy new year!

health care cost-effectiveness

Here is an interesting blog post on the “forbidden topic” of health care cost-effectiveness. It’s hard because at the personal, human level life and health are of course priceless. But at the scale of a country or civilization with limited resources, there are choices to make, and better information should allow better choices.

Research in this area can be difficult to perform. One of the reasons is that it’s not always easy to measure health outcomes. Some things, like death, can be relatively easy to define, but how do you quantify having diabetes,asthma or a seizure disorder?

A robust methodology exists for doing so, based upon the expected utility theory of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. Asking people to consider what risks they will take to avoid certain health states, a technique known as the “standard gamble,” can yield what we call a utility value. Another method, which asks people to think about the trade-off between a shorter life in perfect health and a longer life in an unhealthy state (this is a “time-trade-off”) can also be used to determine a utility value.

When you take a utility value and multiply it by a number of years, you can calculate “quality-adjusted life years,” or QALYs. So if interventions improve quality or add years of life (or both), the number of QALYs goes up. Taking the cost of a therapy and dividing it by the number of QALYs gained results in a measurement of cost effectiveness.

programming boot camp

Here’s an article about computer programming boot camps. Marketable job skills are an important thing. Being an educated person who can understand systems, solve problems, and make ethical choices is also a good thing. These two types of education are complementary, but one does not guarantee the other. Corporations are interested in skills because they are trying to exploit some microscopic niche in the economy to make a profit. And that is where most skills apply – in those microscopic niches. When you are exploiting a microscopic niche, you are not thinking about consequences outside your niche. So if that is the only thing we do, it will eventually be possible for highly skilled, highly intelligent, well intentioned people to collectively manage to run our civilization into the ground.

sea vs. land warming

According to a guy named Ka-Kit Tung, we have seen less land surface warming than expected in the last 15 years because the heat has gone into the oceans instead. He thinks the trend of land surface warming will eventually resume. Is he worried about some sudden reversal where the heat trapped in the ocean would suddenly be released? No.

Nobody knows how long the current pause will last. Nonetheless, at some point, the natural cycles will shift; the oceans will cease to absorb the bulk of the planet’s warming; and surface temperatures will begin to climb again. When they do, we can expect the increase to resume the rapid pace observed during the late twentieth century, when surface temperature rose by about 0.17 degrees Celsius every ten years.

In the meantime, whether the overall risk to our environment has been reduced by the pause remains an open question. Some argue that what went down will eventually come back up. The sloshing back and forth of warm and cold waters – El Niño and La Niña – in the shallow layer of the equatorial Pacific Ocean will continue to produce fluctuations in surface temperatures every year. Over longer periods, however, the risk that the heat currently stored in the deep ocean will resurface is remote.

Who is this guy? He is “a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, is Professor of Applied Mathematics and an adjunct professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington.”

If we are saying some end of year thank yous, I would just like to say, thank you, ocean, for keeping our planet habitable for another year.

Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and financial stability

Elizabeth Warren continues to warn that another financial crisis may be in the making as big financial companies are able to influence laws shifting large risks onto the taxpayer:

Bernie Sanders also is worried that the big banks have too much influence over policy:

“Over the last several days, it has become abundantly clear that Congress does not regulate Wall Street but Wall Street regulates Congress,” Sanders said. “If Wall Street lobbyists can literally write a provision into law that will allow too-big-to-fail banks to make the same risky bets that nearly destroyed our economy just a few years ago, it should be obvious to all that their incredible economic and political power is a huge danger to our economy and our way of life.”

Sanders said, “Enough is enough…. If Congress cannot regulate Wall Street, there is just one alternative.  It is time to break these too-big-to-fail banks up so that they can never again destroy the jobs, homes, and life savings of the American people.”