Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 5, 2020

Partnership between Boston Dynamics and Otto Motors makes warehouse automation safer; A paper claiming a link between the Sun and global warming was retracted. The authors dispute the action.; Computers suggest that between 1700 and 1910, Beethoven was the most influential piano composer and Rachmaninoff was the most innovative; A new AI chip makes image recognition much faster; and a Steem author reviews the Brave Browser

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

Straight from my RSS feed

Whatever gets my attention

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

First posted on my Steem blog: SteemIt, SteemPeak^*, StemGeeks.

1. Boston Dynamics' Handle Teams Up With Mobile Robots on Warehouse Logistics - In today's awesome robot video, IEEE Spectrum covers a partnership between Boston Dynamics and Otto Motors. Boston Dynamics' Handle robot is good at moving and lifting heavy objects in a warehouse environment, but it's flexibility for that task makes the kinds of sensors that could protect nearby people impractical, so it may be unsafe for people to work around the robot. To solve this dilemma, Otto Motors' autonomous mobile pallets come in and bridge the gap. These robots can safely move objects from an environment where humans are working to an environment where Handle is operating (and back).
   
   Here is a video:
   


2. Heavily criticized paper blaming the sun for global warming is retracted - In 2019, Nature published the paper, Oscillations of the baseline of solar magnetic field and solar irradiance on a millennial timescale. Lead author Valentina Zharkova reported that the work was funded in part by the US Air Force and the Russian Science Foundation. The paper claimed that the Sun's magnetic field could be driving global warming, but it was immediately met with criticism. For example, Ken Rice argued that it made an elementary mistake by claiming that the distance between the Sun and the Earth changes as a result of the Sun's movement "around the barycentre of the solar system". On the other hand, the paper was well received by people who are skeptical of the notion that global warming is being caused by human activities. The journal has now retracted the article, saying that, "Current ephemeris calculations show that the Earth-Sun distance varies over a timescale of a few centuries by substantially less than the amount reported in this article." The authors responded to Retraction Watch with a link to the corrected article and saying that the article should not have been retracted for such a minor correction. They also argued that the criticisms and the journal's retraction notice are incorrect because the original paper said that, "the Sun-Earth distance would change UP to 0.02 au not that it would change BY 0.02 au."


3. Computers Confirm Beethoven's Influence - Scientific American's 60 Second Science podcast discusses a recent article was published in EPJ Data Science, Novelty and influence of creative works, and quantifying patterns of advances based on probabilistic references networks. In this work, Doheum Park, Juhan Nam, and Juyong Park described their work comparing 900 pieces of piano music from the baroque, classical, and romantic eras. When they examined chord transitions for novelty, they found that Rachmaninoff was the one with the most creative transitions and Beethoven was the one whose work was most borrowed from. The analysis was conducted by breaking each of the 900 works down into smaller segments, or chunks, and then comparing the chunks.


4. A new AI chip can perform image recognition tasks in nanoseconds - A new type of artificial eye works by combining light sensing electronics with artificial intelligence (AI) on a tiny chip. As a result of its size and tight integration, the device can operate without passing around data, which means that it can perform image recognition tasks far faster than existing technologies. This may be useful for technologies that range from autonomous vehicles to factory robotics and remote sensing. The chip is built with diodes on a sheet of tungsten diselenide that's just a few atoms thick. And the diodes are wired together into a neural network. The material of the chip gives it special properties, so that the diodes' photosensitivity can be adjusted externally, which enables training of the neural network. As-of now, the chip only has 27 detectors, which means that it's limited to recognizing blocky, 3x3 images, but the researchers claim that scaling it up would be straightforward.


5. Steeem @shaden: How good is Brave Browser? An Honest Product Review - This post by @shaden starts by describing the problem that Brave was created to address. Namely, advertising, tracking, and other malicious web-site ad-ons invade our privacy, slow down our devices, and increase our bandwidth costs. Brave was launched to make it easy for users to avoid these negative consequences of life on the Internet while creating alternative revenue streams for advertisers and publishers. According to the author, the browser also enhances privacy through the use of the duckduckgo as a default search engine as well as forcing the use of the https protocol. Beyond that, it lets users opt in or out of receiving ads, and distributes Brave Attention Tokens (BAT) to users who elect to receive them. The author goes on to report their own observations, which include the fact that the browser has a familiar "look and feel" because it's built on the Chromium engine, and also that web pages load faster and look cleaner. Drawbacks, however, note that Brave Shields must be disabled for some sites to work and that it's not able to block entire pages that are meant to be advertisements. Perhaps the stronger endorsement is that that the author has switched to using Brave as their primary browser. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @shaden.)

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