Science and technology micro-summaries for July 2, 2019

The first study of the links between air travel and academic productivity; A general purpose language that simplifies AI programming from novice through expert; IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos; Gen Z's favorite device is the iPhone, and it's creating cliquish behavior; A web site that offers free, peer reviewed, college level text books

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Straight from my RSS feed:

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

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1. Academic air travel has a limited influence on professional success (Paywall) - I couldn't get through the paywall, so this is just from the Abstract. A study in the Journal of Cleaner Production reports the results of the first study of the link between academic success and airline travel. The researchers found that early career individuals are responsible for less air travel emissions than late career individuals, they found no link between air travel and academic productivity, but they did find a relationship between air travel and salary. Higher salary individuals fly more. Finally, the researchers found no significant difference in air travel among researchers who they coded as either "Green" or "Not-Green" in their filed of study. h/t Daniel Lemire


2. New AI programming language goes beyond deep learning - Speaking of air travel by academics, researchers presented the Gen programming language at the 40th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation. The language aims to combine flexibility, automation, and efficiency in order to enable even novice researchers to, "write models and algorithms from multiple fields where AI techniques are applied — such as computer vision, robotics, and statistics — without having to deal with equations or manually write high-performance code", and it also offers the capability for "sophisticated models and inference algorithms". The source is publicly available, along with documentation and a partially instantiated tutorial library. h/t Communications of the ACM


3. Video Friday: NASA Is Sending This Flying Robot to Saturn's Moon Titan - IEEE Spectrum's "weekly selection of awesome robot videos" includes an animation of the Dragonfly mission to Titan from 2026-2034; A robot that uses engineered bacteria to "taste" for a specific chemical; Another dish-washing robot - this one understands the shape of dishes and dishwasher shelves and loads dishes from the sink to the dishwasher; A tactile pair of robot hands that transmits the sensations of touch to a glove-wearing operator anywhere in the world; Robotic snakes that demonstrate snake-like movement and also skills that snakes cannot perform; Robots learning to "dance"; and more..
   
   Here are the dancing robots:
   

Gen Z says everyone has an iPhone these days — and if they don’t, they get left out of group chats - People aged 13-21 are part of the post-millennial generation that's known as Generation Z. Business Insider surveyed 1,884 of them and found that 46% use iOS, 36% use Android, and 11% use Windows. The survey also found that because of the closed nature of Apple's technology, iPhone owners in the generation sometimes exhibit a tendency to ostracize the others by excluding them from group chats.

STEEM OpenStax - Free Textbooks Openly Licensed - This post from @holovision through @steemhunt contains a link to the OpenStax web site. According to the post, OpenStax offers free, peer reviewed, college level textbooks that are published under the Creative Commons licensing. The post goes on to say that this platform may be useful for self-learners or college professors. (5% of the rewardss from this post will go to @holovision.)

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In order to help make Steem the go to place for timely information on diverse topics, I invite you to discuss any of these links in the comments and/or your own response post.

For example, feel free to comment on any or all of these discussion topics:

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• Compared to other possible activities, do you think that air travel is a useful way for academics to spend their time and money? Why or why not?
  
  
• Can you identifies ways that the "Gen" programming language could be useful with Steem blockchain?
  
  
• Which one is your favorite from the IEEE Spectrum's list of robot videos?
  
  
• Do you think it's concerning that Gen Z iPhone others may exclude others from their chats because iOS makes it difficult to include people who use other platforms?
  
  
• The article on Gen Z also makes note that "multi-tasking" may be impossible for the human brain. Do you agree? Why or why not?
  
  
• If you can find the time, which of the OpenStax text book topics would you be likely to read?
  
  

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About this series

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