Quote of the week
Find something in your life that’s so worthwhile doing, that the fact that you are going to suffer is justifyable
~Jordan Peterson ( https://youtu.be/7QRQjrsFnR4, @10:00)
Things I learned this week
Quality over quantity
First of all, I’m back from my vacation. In the first week I still published a weekly learning post, but I was not satiesfied with the quality of it. So I decided I won’t post a second one for the other weeks and follow up with better quality this week. I hope you appreciate it!
Cryptocurrencies can improve society
I have some ideas about crypto and how it works (I talked about this in a past blog post aready). However, I always struggled when people were talking about how cryptocurrencies would actually help society.
With the help of Vitalik Buterin’s paper on charity I now get the idea: You can implement automated systems that provide “stickers” to users, which can then be used to get a discount on certain products. I imagine it would be similar to a returnable bottle system that works pretty well in Austria and Germany.
Imagine following scenario: A store offers a sandwich for -25% for buyers that have a certain kind of sticker.
So, what eg. a city could do is, to offer this kind of stickers to people who clean up the local park, collect garbage,… or – on a bigger scale – to those, who provide some kind of service to the public. With automated systems it could become effortless to give discounts to those who benefit society.
More:
CO2 levels influence your cognitive capacities
I think we all know this situation of sitting in a meeting room and you start getting tired and more tired and more tired. Suddenly you notice, how warm the room has gotten and how bad the air quality is.
Guess what: It seems like high levels of CO2 in office buildings influence productivity sometimes as much as 30%. So, the situation above does not only descibe a feeling – it‘s an actual thing! Further, also CO2 level during our sleeping hours might influence our health and productivity.
It seems like there is not a lot of research going on in this space, but the findings so far sound really intuitive.
More:
Machine learning as a catalyst for health care cost
Some of you people know that I‘m interested in Machine Learning and – more specifically – Deep Learning. I think the advances in this field are just amazing and I believe that AI systems will – one day – make our everyday life a lot easier and eg. health care a lot more affordable.
A deep learning algorithm has now learned to detect urgent eye diseases as well as experts in the field (error rate of 5.5%). And – more importantly – didn‘t miss any of the urgent cases.
I don‘t think that this will take jobs of medical professionals but I think it will make healthcare a lot more affordable, as those diagnoses get a lot quicker and doctors can focus on treatment (both psychologically and physiologically).
More:
Cool thing of the week
If you are a curios mind and interested in all different scientific resources, this one is for you:
At SSRN scientist and professionals publish whitepapers and research. Usually even before submitting it somewhere else. It‘s an amazing, endless resource of knowledge and definitely worth a look!
Hint: look at the top papers section at the bottom, it already gives a good overview of the most intersting topics and papers!