Good morning! Today: online matchmaking shows how dating culture is changing during lockdown, China's farmers have turned to livestreaming to survive the pandemic, and could AI do a better job than us at creating fair tax policies? Get your friends to sign up here to get The Download every day.
|
Zoom Bachelorette, online matchmaking, and our strange new lockdown love lives
A new way to date: Katia Ameri and Ronald “Ro” Trivedi got “engaged” on Zoom on Saturday, after three hours of flirting and playing games The pair were taking part in Zoom Bachelorette, a streamed quarantine phenomenon inspired by the cult American reality television show. In this version, 12 suitors vie for a singleton’s affection over the course of three hours.
Bigger picture: The way the pair met is an example of how dating culture is changing during the coronavirus crisis. While the pandemic has made traditional dating virtually impossible, March’s shelter-in-place orders have given us a sneak peek at what might be to come: more video chats, less location filtering, and even a matchmaker behind the scenes. Read the full story.
—Tanya Basu
|
|
Live-streaming helped China’s farmers survive the pandemic. It’s here to stay.
A few years after Li Jinxing graduated from college, he returned to his rural hometown to become a flower farmer. The days were long but the routine familiar: rise early and tend to the blossoms in the morning; trim and package those in bloom during the afternoon; deliver the parcels, delicately stacked in trucks, to customers by late evening.
Where the flowers ended up, Li was never quite sure. From his fields in Yunnan province, China, he sold them to national distributors who sold them to flower shops who sold them to end consumers. He imagined the beautiful fruits of his labor brightening up homes around the country. This had been the life work of his family for generations. It all threatened to come to an end with covid-19.
As lockdown protocols swept through the country, panic began to set in. The logistics company that Li relied on had shut down for the holidays, and now the drivers were stuck at home. His business was in jeopardy. Then, on February 11, he received a message from an old friend, Ao Fenzhen, the COO of a flower distribution company. JD.com, one of China’s largest online retailers, was offering to help farmers use live-streaming to reach consumers, she said. It would involve broadcasting a few hours of content each day on its app, JD Live, to show off different products and answer questions from potential buyers. The company, hoping to attract new users, would provide access to its delivery networks—one of the few that had survived the lockdown. Did Li want to join in? Read the full story.
—Karen Hao
In the latest episode of MIT Technology Review's Deep Tech podcast, biomedicine editor Antonio Regalado explains the reasons why the US is still behind on testing, and outlines promising schemes to fix the problem at scale.
|
|
An AI can simulate an economy millions of times to create fairer tax policy
A knotty problem: Taxation is one of the most effective ways to reduce income inequality, but how do you ensure you get the balance right between taxing people too much or too little? It remains an open problem after decades of research, because people’s economic behavior is complex, and gathering data about it is hard.
Unleash the AI: Scientists at the US business technology company Salesforce think AI can help. They’ve developed a system called the AI Economist that uses reinforcement learning—the same sort of technique behind DeepMind’s AlphaGo and AlpahZero—to identify optimal tax policies for a simulated economy. It’s still relatively simple, but it’s a promising first step toward evaluating policies in an entirely new way. In one early result, the AI found a policy that—in terms of maximizing both productivity and income equality—was 16% fairer than a state-of-the-art progressive tax framework studied by academic economists. Read the full story.
—Will Douglas Heaven
|
|
We can still have nice things
|
|
The top ten must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Coronavirus may have arrived in Europe way earlier than we thought
A sample taken from a pneumonia patient in France on December 27 has tested positive. ( BBC)
+ The UK has surpassed Italy to report the most coronavirus deaths in Europe. ( Axios)
2 New covid-19 hotspots are emerging in the US
For every area that’s improving, a new outbreak is emerging elsewhere. ( NYT $)
+ Will America tolerate coronavirus deaths like it does gun deaths? ( NYT $)
+ Trump says the US must reopen, no matter the cost. ( Bloomberg $)
+ The White House is going to wind down the coronavirus task force. ( CNN)
3 This pandemic is the first truly global event
It’s happening now, and it’s happening to everyone. ( Slate)
4 Twitter is testing alerting people before they tweet something “harmful”
It’s the latest effort to deal with rampant harassment on the platform. ( TechCrunch)
5 A picture guide to the race for a coronavirus vaccine 💉
There are over 90 in development, and they use a variety of approaches to confer immunity. ( Nature)
+ Coronavirus’s sugary coating offers clues as to how it can be vaccinated against. ( Quanta)
6 Americans are having to go to parking lots to get internet access
This feels like an indictment. ( NBC)
7 An Amazon warehouse worker in New Yorker has died of covid-19
Workers at the facility have been calling for better safety measures since March. ( The Verge)
8 Why countries with women leaders are doing better
Machismo is a liability right now. ( The Atlantic)
+ New Zealand recorded no new coronavirus cases for a second day. ( Reuters)
9 Welcome back to work. You are being watched. 👀
And these sorts of emergency measures have a habit of becoming permanent. ( WSJ $)
+ Surveillance is even coming for home workers. ( NYT $)
10 The Trump administration is working to make it easier to mine the moon 🌑
The “Artemis Accords” would let businesses own any resources they might extract. ( Reuters)
+ Tom Cruise is working with NASA to shoot a film in space. ( Quartz)
|
|
“I don't think there's a chance that this virus is just going to disappear. It's going to be around, and if given the opportunity, it will resurge.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment