Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for September 30, 2019

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Authored by @remlaps

NASA preparing Transformer-like shapeshifting robots for possible mission to Titan; Machine-human collaboration may not always outperform machines alone, or humans alone; An interactive map to explore Scottland's witch hunts; A new form of dimentia - LATE; and the Pythagorean impact on music

Question for readers: I'm considering a title change for this series. In your opinion, would something like, "The Daily Internet Digests", be a more accurate and eye-catching title than "Curating the Internet"?

Fresh and Informative Content Daily: Welcome to my little corner of the blockchain

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Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

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pixabay license: source.

  1. NASA is testing a shape-shifting robot that could explore Saturn’s moon Titan - NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab is currently testing a Transformer-like 3D printed robot, Shapeshifter, that is designed like a drone inside of an elongated hamster wheel. The structure has the ability to split in half and use small propellors to float through the air. The fully realized version of the design would be a sphere that serves as a landing craft and is comprised of a dozen "cobots" that can split apart and use their fans to power flight and explore the surface of extraterrestrial bodies. The cobots could fly as a flock, separate in different directions, or even link together "like a barrel of monkeys" to explore underground tunnels and fissures. Once complete, the device might be deployed to Titan, one of Saturn's 53-150 moons. The article says that it will be "a long time before the robot is cleared for a mission. With the next Titan launch, Dragonfly, scheduled for launch in 2026, it's not clear if these robots will fly that mission or not.

    Here is a video:

  2. The Effects of Mixing Machine Learning and Human Judgment - In this article, Michelle Vaccaro and Jim Waldo discuss their work studying the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) algorithm, which is used by courts to predict criminal recidivism for things like parole and sentencing decisions. Citing efforts by Gary Kasparov, they observe that chess teams of humans and computers have been found to outperform teams comprised just of humans or computers, and wonder if that finding is generalizable. The pair conducted two experiments, using Amazon's Mechanical Turk, and found that (i) "when algorithms and humans make sufficiently similar decisions their collaboration does not achieve improved outcomes."; and (ii) "when algorithms fail, humans may not be able to compensate for their errors. Even if algorithms do not officially make decisions, they anchor human decisions in serious ways.". In the first experiment, they observed that when provided with COMPAS scores, human accuracy was worse than algorithm accuracy by a small, but not statistically significant margin. It wa also comparable to human accuracy without access to COMPAS scores. In the second experiment they observed that humans were influenced by apparent "anchoring bias", when provided with COMPAS scores, so that their risk assessments tended to cluster more closely to the score that was provided.

  3. Explore Scotland’s Witch Hunts With This Interactive Map - This interactive map contains data from 3,141 accused witches in Scotland between the 16th and 18th centuries. (Be patient, it takes a little while to load.) The data comes from the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft with some additional records added when new data became available. Witch hunts were fueled in 1563 and following decades when the Scottish parliament made witchcraft a capital offense, and King James encouraged witch-hunting as a matter of policy. The level of knowledge about the cases varies from just names and locations to extensive documentation. Most victims were women, but some men were also caught up in the sweeps. Here is a test to see if you'd be a 17th century witch.

  4. We Totally Missed a Different Kind of Dementia for Decades - Dementia can have multiple causes, and understanding the causes is believed to be important for identifying treatments. After decades of study, scientists have identified a new cause of dementia. Known as LATE, the condition is triggered by tangles of TDP-43 proteins building up in the brain. In stage (i) of the disorder, TDP-43 accumulates in the amygdala, in stage (ii) it spreads to the hippocampus, and in stage (iii) it can be found in the middle frontal gyrus. The disease has been linked to some genetic variants; It closely mimics Alzheimer's disease; and it develops at a later age - typically in the patient's 80s. As-of now, there is no non-invasive way to distinguish between LATE and Alzheimer's, which leads researchers to believe that many LATE patients have been misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's. If so, this may have confounded many Alzheimer's drug studies. h/t RealClear Science

  5. STEEM The History of Music: Pythagoras' Theory of Music - In this post, @mobbs continues an ongoing series on the history of music with a discussion of the contributions from Pythagoras. In particular, the author notes that Pythagoras made the observation that pitch is determined by the frequency with which a string vibrates, and that is determined by the string length. Further, the distance between notes is proportionate to the ratio between vibration frequencies. For example, a string that is twice as long as another sounds an octave lower. After describing this, @mobbs embeds a youtube video to demonstrate the concept with a guitar string experiment. Next, the post moves on by describing the results of the experiment. Using thes insights, Pythagoras devised a musical tuning system that was based on the fifth-interval, which corresponds to a 3:2 string ratio, and he considered to be the most pure. In conclusion, the post shows how Pythagoras' system for tuning is only slightly different from the modern system. (A beneficiary setting of 10% has been applied to this post for @mobbs.)

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