Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for December 20, 2019

A self-driving truck made a cross-country trip across 12 states in 3 days; A TED talks says that fake news propagates faster than real news, possibly due to perceived novelty - or surprise. It gives five proposals for reducing the threat; Researchers argue that automation is not eliminating jobs, just changing them; Boeing's Starliner may be on its last mission before carrying a crew; and a Steem essay describing how to use R with a MYSQL database

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1. A self-driving truck delivered butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days - An autonomous truck from Plus.ai made a run across 12 states and 2,800 miles, traveling from Tulare, California to Quakertown, Pennsylvania with a load of 40,000 pounds of Land O'Lakes butter. The truck was occupied by a safety driver who was prepared to take over if needed and also a safety engineer, but the truck was able to complete the journey without human intervention (aside from scheduled breaks). During the trip, the truck successfully navigated past road construction, underground tunnels, wet and snowy roads, and first responders that effected traffic flow. This was the first "Level 4 U.S. cross-country commercial pilot hauling a fully-loaded refrigerated trailer". The completed trip was completed around the Thanksgiving holiday, and announced on December 10. The truck uses lidar, radar, and cameras to observe road conditions. Shawn Kerrigan, the company's co-founder and chief operating officer, thinks that it will be a few years until trucks are regularly completing cross-country freight trips. Makes me wonder if the freight railroads are under threat.
   
   Here is a video:
   

h/t Communications of the ACM

How we can protect truth in the age of misinformation - This TED talk was posted in November, 2018, and it came across the ted.com RSS feed on December 17. In the talk, Sinan Aral discusses work by his team and others studying the online spread of fake news. In the "largest ever longitudinal study", his team looked at true and fake news stories on Twitter. They found that "false news diffused further, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in every category of information that we studied, sometimes by an order of magnitude" and that false political news was the most viral. In response to this observation, the team created the novelty hypothesis - the idea that people like to share information that seems novel. In testing that hypothesis, they found that there is a difference in the replies to false news vs. true news. Replies to false news generally contained more indications of surprise or disgust. The level of surprise, they said, is consistent with the novelty hypothesis. Another thing they checked was the influence of bots, but surprisingly, they found that bots amplify the spread of true news and false news at the same rates, so they are not a factor. Finally, he predicts that the problem of fake news is about to get a lot worse because of the phenomena of synthetic and deep-fake videos. To address this, he suggests five paths: (i) labeling; (ii) incentives; (iii) regulation; (iv) transparency; and (v) algorithms and machine learning. Click through for more detail about each.

Testing the Automation Revolution Hypothesis - In a December 10 working paper, Keller Scholl and Robin Hanson examine the effect of automation on the labor market. The pair examines how strongly "basic theory, two vulnerability metrics, and 251 O*NET job features" predict 1505 reports on automation levels for 832 US job types between 1999 and 2019. Their examination found no relationship between automation levels and salary levels or unemployment, so the researchers conclude that the data is more consistent with the idea that automation changes the nature of work than with the idea that automation eliminates work. Here's the conclusion of the Abstract:

And since, over this period, automation increases have predicted neither changes in pay nor employment, this suggests that workers have little to fear if such a revolution does come.

h/t Daniel Lemire

Boeing is about to launch its Starliner crew spacecraft for the first time - An Atlas V rocket launch was scheduled for Friday, December 20 at 6:36 am. As-of Thursday afternoon, the rocket is expected to carry an uncrewed Boeing CST-100 Starliner into orbit. From there, the Starliner will attach to the Inernational Space Station (ISS) on Saturday, celebrate the holiday there, and undock a week later for its return to Earth in pre-dawn hours on December 28. After the retirement of the Space Shuttles, NASA has been relying on the Russian Soyuz for access to the ISS. This Starliner test marks an important milestone for NASA's plan to make use of commercial carriers instead. NASA has contracts with Boeing and SpaceX to provide crewed missions to the ISS, both were expected to deliver by 2017, but both are still under development. Tomorrow's mission is Boeing's last "check-mark" before carrying humans into space, and NASA's Pat Forrester said they're treating it like a dress rehearsal. If the mission goes through with no significant problems, astronauts are expected to be onboard for another mission during the middle of 2020. Boeing has plans to expand this program beyond NASA and to begin offering training and tourism program.

Update: According to news reports on TV this morning (Friday), the satellite failed to reach its intended orbit after launching due to computer problems, so it will not dock with the ISS. Instead, the Starliner is in a stable orbit, and is expected to return to Earth - landing again in about 48 hours.

STEEM Using R To Connect To A MySQL Database - In this post, @dkmathstats describes the process for connecting from R to a MySQL database. It starts with instructions for adding the RMySQL package and library, then moves on to instructions to open the connection, execute a query, convert the result into an R Dataframe, write it as a CSV file, and finally close the connection. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @dkmathstats.)

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