Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Sometimes, people laugh imagining themselves as elderly people. Would they laugh imagining themselves as diseased?

If you watched a TV show, or read a comic book, where the difficulties and suffering of an oncological patient were portrayed in a disrespectful, humorous way, you would likely be outraged; at the very least, you would think that the show or comic book was in seriously bad taste. You’d probably think the same about similar material involving a disabled person or anyone who, because of an incurable disease, had only a short time to live spent in increasing misery—for example, a child affected by progeria, a disease that may best be described as a sort of accelerated aging syndrome that kills off its victims in their mid-twenties at the very latest.

Yet, it is not uncommon to see the diseases of old age, and even elderly people in general, being laughed at in just such a way without causing much outrage at all. Why is there a difference?

We’ve all seen this

You can probably recall plenty of examples of this phenomenon from your own experience. Who has never seen a sketch where the main characters are exasperated by a shriveled, elderly man who, holding up an old-fashioned ear trumpet, keeps getting wrong what they are saying despite all their efforts? How many times have cheap laughs been gotten because of an elderly person losing his or her dentures or a rambling old man exaggeratedly ranting about pretty much everything?

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An engineer in California has an invention that she hopes will someday help people with damaged lungs breathe easier.

Stanford University’s Annelise Baron has developed a synthetic version of something called lung surfactant. Lung surfactant coats the tiny air sacs in the lung. Without it, every breath would be a struggle, like blowing up millions of little balloons. With surfactant, breathing is as easy as blowing soap bubbles.

Scientists inferred the existence of lung surfactant in the 1950s, and then Dr. Mary Ellen Avery showed that premature infants were unable to make surfactant, explaining the often fatal respiratory distress syndrome they suffered from.

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1. Predictive analytics

Imagine being able to project a customer’s worth as soon as he buys your service. Sounds impossible, right? Well, in the course of our AI-as-triage work, we helped a leading online registry predict the lifetime value of its patrons within a few days of sign-up with 90 percent accuracy. Now, the registry can make more informed decisions about its customer service, delivering as much value as possible to its most loyal users.

Of course, creating a predictive solution requires a complete record of your customer interactions. Building this database takes time, but many of the necessary components are available off the shelf. Even if predictive analytics are a way off for your business, start collecting customer data now so you’ll have it when you decide to tap into AI.

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European public spaces are becoming more original, but also more homogeneous. The author of an architecture thesis, written at EPFL, explains this paradox and calls on critics and public authorities to do something about it.

For almost two decades, designers of public spaces throughout Europe have been striving to give passers-by unique experiences. Using a multitude of materials, shapes, interactive street furniture and sensory effects, these squares, streets and walkways are becoming genuine tourist attractions for their cities. The problem is that, rather than integrating with the existing urban environment, the public spaces of the 21st century are tending to diverge from it intentionally and, most importantly, to look alike.

This is one of the findings in Sonia Curnier’s thesis, which she researched at EPFL’s Theory and History of Architecture Laboratory (LTH2), supervised by Bruno Marchand. Until now, academic research has mainly focused on the use of public spaces, for example observing whether or not passers-by really connect with them, but spent very little time looking at their design. This is the novel approach taken by Curnier’s thesis, which offers the first comprehensive overview of the subject. The public defense of his Ph.D. will take place on 2 May at EPFL.

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