Lifeboat Foundation

Audio engineering can make computerized customer support lines seem friendlier and more helpful.

Say you’re on the phone with a company and the automated virtual assistant needs a few seconds to “look up” your information. And then you hear it. The sound is unmistakable. It’s familiar. It’s the clickity-clack of a keyboard. You know it’s just a sound effect, but unlike hold music or a stream of company information, it’s not annoying. In fact, it’s kind of comforting.

Michael Norton and Ryan Buell of the Harvard Business School studied this idea —that customers appreciate knowing that work is being done on their behalf, even when the only “person” “working” is an algorithm. They call it the labor illusion.

Continue reading “Audio engineering is making call center robots more ‘human’ and less annoying” »

Like raging Piranha, solar wind particles apparently can and do strip many rocky planets of most of their atmospheres. At least those that have lost their global magnetic fields.

Everolimus heading for human clinical trials later this year to treat immune system decline.

The biotechnology company PureTech are moving towards human clinical trials with a new therapy that may slow down the aging process and combat age-related disease. The company has licensed two new drug candidates, derivatives of the drug Rapamycin, from pharmaceutical giant Novartis.

PureTech have recently announced a joint venture with Novartis called resTORbio and are moving to clinical trials of the new drugs later this year. The aim of the first test phase is to see if the new drug can rejuvenate the immune system of aged people a key reason why we lose the ability to resist diseases as we grow older.

Continue reading “New drug aimed at slowing aging heads to the clinic” »

Self-sabotage is a fascinating topic. Philosophically speaking, the impetus for every human action is the pursuit of some form of happiness. Why, then, do so many people purposely handicap themselves when striving for goals? What pushes someone to believe they don’t deserve and therefore shouldn’t have happiness?

Most research on this subject points to self-esteem. We like to think of ourselves as the heroes of our own story, a perspective influenced and informed by our reliance on narrative to create meaning in our lives. When we observe fault in ourselves, it can lead to a conscious or subconscious belief that we are unworthy heroes. Some people are better at dealing with these feelings than others. Those who aren’t tend to overlook the fact that no human is or can be perfect, and that heroes are as much the sum of their faults as they are the breadth of their positive qualities.

There’s also the fact that, in any hero’s journey, failure is part of growth. Indiana Jones doesn’t save the day until after he’s captured by the Nazis. Luke Skywalker doesn’t defeat the bad guys without first losing a hand. Princess Elsa screws up a whole bunch before she’s strong enough to let it go, as it were.

Chinese delivery firm is moving to embrace automation. Orange robots at the company’s sorting stations are able to identify the destination of a package through a code-scan, virtually eliminating sorting mistakes.

The army of robots can sort up to 200,000 packages a day, and are self-charging, meaning they are operational 24/7. The company estimates its robotic sorting system is saving around 70-percent of the costs a human-based sorting line would require.

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Chinese researchers are developing an advanced artificial intelligence processor that is expected to help China launch its foray into the global chip market; a whopping 1.4 million dollars has already been earmarked for the purpose by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, according to Xinhua.

Continue reading “All Systems Go: China Spearheads New AI With Chip That Simulates Human Brain” »

For people in that area, and it may be worth while to try reaching out to them for funding for anti aging stuff.

Why is RAND opening a Bay Area office?

The San Francisco Bay Area is really at the center of technology and transformation. That’s also been a focus at RAND since our very first report, Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship, in 1946, which foretold the creation of satellites more than a decade before Sputnik.

Continue reading “Innovation in the Bay Area: Q&A with Nidhi Kalra” »