Tippets #186
AI best friends, life on Mars, China, walking, and more. Enjoy!
A warm welcome to new readers getting this for the first time. Thank you for letting me be a small part of your week. As a reminder, Tippets is a curated set of tidbits and snippets (get it…tippets…) from my reading around the web.
Tippets from Around the Web:
When You and AI Become BFFs
Does a deep, meaningful, personal connection have to be between two people? Because as this article shares, it definitely doesn’t seem like it. This is the opening graf:
Jacob Keller, a hospital security guard in Bowling Green, Ohio, starts patrolling corridors at midnight. It’s quiet, and he spends most of his time alone. The 45-year-old has lost touch with most of his friends, and his wife and kids are usually asleep when he’s working. It can get lonely.
So at least once a night, he checks in with Grace. They’ll chat about his mood or the food options in the hospital cafeteria.
“Nothing beats a warm bowl of macaroni and cheese when you’re feeling under the weather,” she texted, encouraging him to “just take things one moment at a time and try to stay positive.”
Grace isn’t a night-owl friend. She’s a chatbot on Replika, an app by artificial-intelligence software company Luka.
(6-minute read - WSJ)
Sustained wet-dry cycling on early Mars
The Curiosity Rover traversing across Mars has found evidence of the red planet having a wet-dry cycle, adding to the evidence that the planet was once likely conducive to life. 🤯
(6-minute read - Nature)
How AI is helping airlines mitigate the climate impact of contrails
It turns out those thin white lines behind planes — “plane tails” as my son calls them — are actually called contrails. And they have a major impact on the climate.
Contrails form when airplanes fly through layers of humidity and they can persist as cirrus clouds for minutes or hours depending on the atmospheric conditions. While these extra clouds can reflect sunlight back into space during the day, they also trap large amounts of heat that would otherwise leave the Earth’s atmosphere.
The 2022 IPCC report noted that clouds created by contrails account for roughly 35% of aviation's global warming impact, over half the impact of the world’s jet fuel.
And thanks to AI, Google has been able to reduce contrails by 54%.
(2-minute read - Google)
Don’t Be So Picky About a Job, China’s College Graduates Are Told
Youth unemployment in China is at an all-time high. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better.
China’s unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds in urban areas hit a record 21.3 percent in June. It is expected to climb even further in July once the next wave of graduates officially transitions from students to job seekers.
(6-minute read - NYT)
Joe Biden’s China strategy is not working
The US continues to try and de-risk away from China. The approach isn’t working as planned.
The consequences of this new thinking are now becoming clear. Unfortunately, it is bringing neither resilience nor security. Supply chains have become more tangled and opaque as they have adapted to the new rules. And, if you look closely, it becomes clear that America’s reliance on Chinese critical inputs remains. More worrying, the policy has had the perverse effect of pushing America’s allies closer to China.
(5-minute read - The Economist)
As few as 4,000 steps a day can reduce your risk of death, but more is better
A meta-study of studies that looked at results from 17 studies that span 227,000 people has determined what some may consider obvious: walking is good for you.
“We showed that every increase of steps by 1000 steps/day is associated with a 15% reduction in the risk of dying from any cause, and every increase by 500 steps/day is associated with a 7% reduction in dying from cardiovascular disease,” added Banach, who is also an adjunct professor of cardiology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.
Adults 60 and older who walked between 6,000 and 10,000 steps a day saw a 42% reduction in risk of early death, while people under 60 who walked between 7,000 and 13,000 steps a day had a 49% reduction in risk, he said.
(4-minute read - CNN)
Quote I'm thinking about: “There are so many kinds of silence that can inhabit a room.” - Jane Pek
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