A Flat Screen Television Across the Pacific
In today's edition: a heartwarming story about drones, what eyes are, human-assisted search, Amazon freight, colorization, and vines.
When the Real Future TV crew went out to the Drone Racing National Championships, we expected a whizbang segment about quadcopters. We found something else entirely in Zoe "Hexinair" Katherine's story about how this technology brought her back from depression. Check out the segment. I promise: it's really good. (Also, I hosted it.)
"'If you ask people what animal eyes are used for, they’ll say: same thing as human eyes. But that’s not true. It’s not true at all.' In his lab at Lund University in Sweden, Dan-Eric Nilsson is contemplating the eyes of a box jellyfish. Nilsson’s eyes, of which he has two, are ice blue and forward facing. In contrast, the box jelly boasts 24 eyes, which are dark brown and grouped into four clusters called rhopalia. Nilsson shows me a model of one in his office: It looks like a golf ball that has sprouted tumors. A flexible stalk anchors it to the jellyfish. 'When I first saw them, I didn’t believe my own eyes,' says Nilsson."
2. Neural nets to help design neural nets.
"The other issue is that constructing this kind of mega-neural net is tremendously difficult. Landing on a particular set of algorithms—determining how each layer should operate and how it should talk to the next layer—is an almost epic task. But Microsoft has a trick here, too. It has designed a computing system that can help build these networks. As Jian Sun explains it, researchers can identify a promising arrangement for massive neural networks, and then the system can cycle through a range of similar possibilities until it settles on this best one. 'In most cases, after a number of tries, the researchers learn [something], reflect, and make a new decision on the next try,' he says. 'You can view this as ‘human-assisted search.'"
3. Amazon may get into the ocean freight business, which is really a marvel of the modern world.
"Ocean freight is cheap right now. As of January 2016, Flexport’s ocean freight customers were paying less than $1300 to ship a 40-foot container from Shenzhen to Los Angeles. More than 10,000 parcels can fit in a single container, so the price for the ocean freight leg could be as low as $0.14 per parcel. Here’s another way to think about that figure: Right now it costs under $10 to ship a flat screen television across the Pacific. With ocean freight itself so low, a considerable portion of logistics costs come through labor costs—particularly compliance and coordination of cargo handoffs between different players in the chain. It’s here that automation, something no traditional freight forwarding company can do even one percent as well as Amazon can, becomes the key competitive advantage over legacy freight forwarders."
4. Should we expect a mass colorization of historical photos?
"Have you seen Reddit's /r/colorization sub? People use photoshop to add color to old black and white photos. This is a good problem to automate because perfect training data is easy to get: any color image can be desaturated and used as an example. This project is an attempt to use modern deep learning techniques to automatically colorize black and white photos."
5. Vines are taking over tropical forests and no one is quite sure why.
"Although the boom in liana abundance has been well-established since 2002, when the first study to show this pattern was published, it’s still a bit of a mystery why the density of lianas has been increasing. Their success could be a result of climate change, with higher levels of carbon dioxide juicing their growth. Lianas also do well when gaps appear in the forest, and since climate change could be increasing tree mortality, that could be giving lianas more opportunities to sneak in. Or it could be that lianas benefit from people’s presences in forests, since the sort of disturbances and fragmentation we tend to create benefits them, too. But as lianas take over a particular neighborhood, they affect infrastructure, too."
1. ngm.nationalgeographic.com | @blprnt 2. wired.com 3. flexport.com 4. tinyclouds.org | @defabulous 5. atlasobscura.com
A Flat Screen Television Across the Pacific