Four short links: 16 May 2016
Learning to Synthesise, Ingestible Origami Robot, Office Sleeps, and 50 Shades of Open
- Learning from Lab Notebooks (Nature) — The reaction conditions suggested by the algorithm generated a crystalline product in 89% of around 500 cases. By comparision, using intuition and rules of thumb developed from more than 10 accumulated years of experience with the materials, the researchers’ own best guesses were successful only 78% of the time.
- Ingestible Origami Robot — a tiny origami robot that can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule and, steered by external magnetic fields, crawl across the stomach wall to remove a swallowed button battery or patch a wound.
- Chinese Tech Workers Sleep in Office — Some employees at RenRen Credit Management Co. sleep on provided camp beds in their offices. I’m shocked, shocked I say, to hear that there might be exploitative working conditions in the tech industry in ANY country. At least in America, the company can’t host dorm rooms, so you can retain your dignity as you live in a van in the company parking lot.
- 50 Shades of Open — there are at least 50 different terms in which the word “open” is used, encompassing nearly as many different criteria for openness. In this essay we will attempt to make sense of this open season on the word “open.” In the words of Orwell: The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides.
