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Magnitude and Direction, Issue #48 | 13 Dec 2019

Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication

I'm eagerly waiting for someone to make an MTA version of this circuit board-based MBTA system status map. This Pelican case-based Raspberry Pi computer is ready for whatever the situation can throw at it. (I'd just like to say that I'm a big fan of hardware projects that aim to build something inside of a very specific form factor.) It's the most wonderful time of the year! The Prepared's 2019 tool guide is out and once again it's a who's-who of excellent hardware.

Software and Programming

On Black Friday, you might be competing against dozens of other consumers who want the same flat screen TV as you do, but on Cyber Monday, you're competing against hundreds, if not thousands, of bots designed to swipe the best deals out from under you. 🧠 Co-founder of Union Square Ventures and personal newsletter inspiration, Fred Wilson, recently got the machine learning treatment to his daily AVC newsletter posts. While the intellectual depth was a bit lacking in the AI-generated posts, I was pretty impressed with how well the "beats" of Fred's actual posts were captured. Check out the AI-generated and actual posts to see what I mean.

Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine

🧲🧠⚡ Usually magnetic resonance is used to image the entire brain at once. This new, miniature, implantable NMR device, however, is designed to measure data at the neuron-level. Dawn on Mars looks an awful lot like dawn on Earth (at least in some places). ➡ "Fish will mate with a species outside their own if the male's colouring is attractive enough or if the female can't see him properly, according to new research. Such 'mistakes' in mate choice can lead to the evolution of new species..." Ummm, excuse me?!

Mapping, History, and Data Science

🥓🥧 The Food Timeline may not be the prettiest of websites, but it's certainly a thorough breakdown of what the human race was eating when. 🧥 The Smithsonian may not have every jacket on file, but they've got all the ones that matter. Different regions of the United States have reputations for having certain "personalities". It turns out there might be more to the concept than just regional stereotypes, though. ‍‍‍ Where on Earth do people live? The German Aerospace Center provides the most accurate (and detailed) map to-date. I'm sure many of you have done the Spotify Wrapped year-in-review for your personal listening habits. Here's the Spotify Wrapped for the world. (Since it's from the BBC, some of the categories are UK-specific. Sorry to all of my readers - everyone, I think - who are from the US.)

Events and Opportunities

I don't know about you, but December 18th is making me which I could make copies of myself...

Sunday & Monday, 12/15-16 The graduate students from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and their new Interactive Media Arts (IMA) program come together to showcase the creative design projects they've been working on for the semester at the annual Winter Show.

Monday, 12/16 New York's hardware innovators, enthusiasts, and entrepreneurs gather together at General Assembly once more for the last hardware meetup of 2019.

Monday, 12/16 Join the Secret Science Club at the Bell House for a deep dive into the world of Marine Biology with explorer David Gruber.

Wednesday, 12/18 The Mid Atlantic Bio Angles host their annual end-of-the-year 1st Pitch event, featuring the year's 1st Pitch winners from New York and Pennsylvania going head to head pitching biotech angel investors and getting the business critiques that would normally happen after they leave the room. The 1st Pitch events are always a great gathering of the NYC biotech community, but the year-end Best of the Best events are especially so.

Wednesday, 12/18 JLABS hosts their December Innovators and Entrepreneurs mixer giving attendees a chance to meet the current JLABS residents, the NYC team and not to mention, expand your network with fellow NYC Innovators and entrepreneurs.

Wednesday, 12/18 Bristol-Myers Squibb and BioLabs team up to host a Pitch Event, Partnering Panel Discussion, and Golden Ticket Award reception. Six Golden Ticket finalists will present their work developing new approaches to tackling tough science and improving the lives of patients. There'll also be an assortment of panels and presentations from BMS and a networking reception.

Thursday, 12/19 Join the most friendly and fun group of scientists and engineers in the city for the inaugural Nanotech NYC Holiday Party! Meet up for great conversation and laughter at the CUNY Graduate Center from 6:30-9:30PM. There'll be food, drinks, and music - and all are welcome to attend!

Thursday, 12/19 If hardware startups are more your speed, the entire NYC hardware community is getting together at Craftsman Ave for a holiday party filled with snacks, drinks, a holiday jazz band, and the inevitable, impromptu demos of IoT devices.

Some other upcoming events to keep on your radar...

Monday, 1/13 The LifeSci NYC program hosts a panel on January 13 at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City about what it takes to work in a startup in New York City, and how startups fit into the City's health care ecosystem. The panelists will also share their own career journeys and offer advice to those looking to follow in their footsteps.

DUE Friday, 1/17 Apply to NYDesigns Hardware Accelerator, a program designed to provide early-stage hardware entrepreneurs with access to prototyping facilities; light industrial manufacturing space to build, assemble and distribute products, and an expert team of investors, mentors and manufacturers.

Map of the Month

The Urban Archive takes tons of historical photos of New York City and aggregates them all onto one map for you to peruse for hours on end.

Odds & Ends

🪕 The best-selling single from every decade of human civilization.

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josephborrello · 6 years ago

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Moment of Inertia, Issue #16 | Rat Race to the Bottom

When a lot of people want something, they'll all race to get it. This "first in line" feedback loop, however, can end up causing a detrimental race to the bottom - all in the service of making it to the top.

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Rat Race to the Bottom

For 5 of the last 10 years, I've woken up on Thanksgiving morning and traveled down to the Upper West Side to watch the Thanksgiving parade in person. Being the most famous parade in the nation's largest city, I was never alone in this endeavor - and I'm not even talking about the out-of-towners. In total,a little under half the normal population of New York City comes out to watch the parade in person. When there's that many people lining a parade route that's only 2.5 miles long (that might sound long, but trust me, it's not when you pack 3.5 million people along that distance) good viewing space comes at a premium. With the parade starting at 9am, the official parade information advises spectators to get to the parade route by 7am to get a good spot. Since I was often staking out space for more than just myself, I would try to get down there a little earlier than that - usually between 5:30am or 6:30am. As ungodly as that hour may seem on Thanksgiving Day, even when I showed up to Central Park West at 5:30am, I was never the only one already lining the route, not by a long shot. With the officially disseminated "suggested arrival time" being 7am, many people aim to get out ahead of the crowds and shoot for 2 or more hours before the suggested time they show up. Each year I went in person, there would be more and more people already set up by 5 or 6. I can't help but wonder when enough people will catch on to this trend to drive the early arrival time to 3 or 4 in the morning. When you're grouped together with 3.5 million other people, you're never the only one doing or being anything. If there's enough people out there who want to ensure they get a good spot for the parade (no matter the cost), then come 4am in some not-too-distant future, the parade route will look the way it does at 6:30am now. This race to get "ahead of the crowd" doesn't just apply to parades, amusement parks, or vacation travel, though - at least, not anymore. Most every aspect of our lives has been "gamified", optimized, and turned into a race against the masses. This is perhaps most pervasive in the world of career development, specifically early career development... and specifically college admissions and other career preparation. Whether someone is trying to get into Harvard or play major league baseball, there's never been a more complex and elaborate set of steps they have to go through in order to hone themselves into what they think is the best possible candidate. It's never started earlier, either. Was I aware in high school that playing sports and being in the band would make me a more "well-rounded" and potentially appealing applicant to colleges? Of course - I think we all have a certain self-awareness when we do "good" or "meaningful" or "cool" things. A sense of "oh yeah this'll look great on my CV/linkedin/college essay/instagram". I did those things because I wanted to, though, and, for what it's worth, I can't see how spinning a cross country track experience into a college essay about overcoming adversity can hold a candle to someone's experiences overcoming actual adversity, but perhaps at the cost of being able to run cross country track after school. Nevertheless, "making it" in life is increasingly becoming a series of checklist items, rather than meaningful accomplishments that bring actual diversity and richness to our lives and to society. If you want to make it in the majors, then you have to start that journey by middle school at least; playing in the right travel leagues and going to the right tournaments. Likewise for anyone who wants to become a business executive - you'd best be starting by kindergarten. Why have all of these things become so competitive and transactional? For the same reason I'm not the first one to the Thanksgiving parade route when I show up there at 5:30am - a full 3.5 hours before the parade even starts! If you really want something - and want to make sure you get it - you'll do whatever is necessary, be that sitting on Central Park West in the cold for 4 hours, or traveling up and down the Northeast Corridor every weekend with a travel baseball league. As you might imagine, all of the participants in this race are not equally capable of winning it. When success is measured in checklist items, the wealthier participants always have it easier. Take a look at the competition for elite private kindergarten programs in New York City, for instance, or families that have consumed themselves in debt in order to send a child to the college they've always dreamed of attending.

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josephborrello · 6 years ago

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Moment of Inertia, Issue #15 | A Poor State of Repair

The story of industrialization is very much the story of humankind's mastery over science and technology. In the post-industrial future we're moving towards, however, much of those gains seem to be slipping away.

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A Poor State of Repair

I'm not usually one to feature the same source of inspiration two Moment of Inertias in a row, but I was once again very taken by what Drew Austin had to say in yesterday's edition of Kneeling Bus. (Again, folks, you should subscribe to this newsletter - Drew does some of the best writing on the internet, period.)

"Max Read wrote a delightful piece this week arguing that the internet hasn’t precipitated a gleaming, hyperrational cyberpunk future as expected, but instead is making us act like medieval peasants who are 'entranced by an ever-present realm of spirits and captive to distant autocratic landlords.'"

A more concrete example of the sentiment is given a little later on...

"In the 20th century, one manifestation of agency was knowing how to fix and maintain the important objects in your life, like your car. Now the iPhone embodies our default relationship to tools—that of the user: For the unprecedented amount of power Apple compresses into a single device, its smooth metallic surfaces offer no portal for apprehending or tweaking its inner workings, and we’re largely happy to abdicate that responsibility..."

Drew's overall musings in the article were focused on our behavioral return to a more "medieval" style of thinking, subject to the often-ethereal wills of the algorithms that govern us. I was more taken, however, with the physical issue at hand: by and large, we can't get inside our own devices anymore. Since the creation of the transistor, most of the problems we have with our devices can be traced back to an electrical issue of some kind - a fried resistor, a broken trace, insufficient (or too much) solder, etc. For a long time, those issues were dealt with by getting a screwdriver, opening up said device, and poking around until it was fixed. Even if you didn't do it yourself, there were plenty of shops with skilled electricians and/or tinkerers that could help. This Right to Repair has been rapidly eroded, however. I'm not even 30 yet, but I can remember when cell phones (read: flip phones) became consumer commodities, when they transitioned from flip phones to flat panes of glass and plastic, and when I suddenly lost the ability to take the battery out of my phone. Remember when that happened? I bet many of you still have one of those "old" smart phones sitting around somewhere, one where you can still pop out the battery and swap it when it starts to get old, instead of trading in the entire phone. The battery example is just the most prominent example of the closing off of hardware designs. Between hardware design choices and software customization, it's never been harder to get inside the inner workings of our devices. Some of this is due to the ongoing miniaturization of electronics - it was easier to fix an electronics board in the 1960s or 1970s than it is today, if only because the components have gotten so much smaller. Even considering the miniaturization of electronics (and the specialization of hardware required to work on them), however, there's still been a rapid (and deliberate) closing of device designs. For all the increased quality control this closing gives manufacturers over their products, it also ends up reducing the lifetime of those products and/or increases the cost of maintaining them. If my phone battery is dying, or my screen is cracked, and I can only go to a subset of all the places that could take care of my issue, I either won't go and just upgrade or change my device sooner than I otherwise would have, or I'll supplement the product's flagging capacity with some auxiliary device. This consumption cycle is good for manufacturers, but not good for the planet. In a time when we should be moving towards a circular economy, the closing off of hardware makes us more linear than ever. Furthermore, turning hardware into a black box makes it harder for enterprising and innovative individuals to come up with improvements to that hardware. To go back to Drew's musings, we got out of the medieval Dark Ages when we started thinking critically and probe the function of the "crystals" we had sought for guidance. 600 years ago, it was societal, environmental, and geopolitical factors that enabled western Europe to break free of that Dark Ages thinking. Being complacent with surrendering our ability to remove the batteries from our smartphones shouldn't be the reason we can't break free again.

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josephborrello · 6 years ago

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Moment of Inertia, Issue #14 | Magnitude and Direction

Technology and innovation, for all the benefits they bring to society, are also frequently implicated in discussions around our society's "degeneration". An axiom of computer science, though, says the computer is never at fault when there's an error, its operator just programmed it wrong. Shouldn't the same thinking apply to technological advancement, writ large?

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Magnitude and Direction

It occurred to me last night that I never actually sent out the Moment of Inertia following last week's Magnitude and Direction, and in the ensuing week I came across some very interesting pieces on the internet that have inspired me to hold off on sending out my original piece. In particular, I was taken by Drew Austin's article in this week's edition of Kneeling Bus (which is a great newsletter and some of the most beautifully written content on the internet,you should definitely subscribe- it's in large part the inspiration for Moment of Inertia). Much like myself, Drew frequently muses on topics of technological progress and its implications for society - typically with a more civic bent than my own thoughts. This week, he was exploring the notion of a "gold rush" and the way progress inevitably leaves some behind. Whether it's the actual Gold Rush of the mid-1800s or the tech gold rush that currently has innovators and "innovators" flocking to roughly that same part of the world, there are winners and losers (both by accident and by design). As Drew also notes, every gold rush also has its detractors. I'm sure you're familiar with the ones around our modern tech gold rush - the people who are saying we don't actually talk anymore, and that our values and priorities have eroded. I've said here before, though, that this isn't anything new:people thought the telephone was a horrible innovation because people would stop writing letters to one another- that conversation would become cheapened and informalized into barbarism. Now, people say the same thing about texting relative to talking on the phone as was said around 100 years ago about writing letter and talking on the phone (there's a bit of irony here, for sure). The concept of"nothing new under the sun" turns up here probably every other edition (I even dedicated an edition of MoI to it), but it was the way the idea was framed in Kneeling Bus that really captivated me:

"...Most of the good and bad in the world is incredibly resilient—technology isn’t creating or destroying it but reshuffling it. Community, collective joy, and creative play as well as propaganda, envy, and harassment have existed forever in various forms. Whenever someone complains about fake news or kids zoning out on their phones, the lazy rebuttal is that “this is nothing new.” And while that’s correct, technological change—particularly unbundling and rebundling—determine where that good and bad exists, who experiences it, and how it’s packaged. The texture and distribution of the good and bad change constantly, and technology certainly drives that. So, the position that the aggregate human experience remains fairly stable and that there is almost nothing new under the sun is broadly correct (or “directionally correct”), which could be a license to stop trying to do anything because lol nothing matters."

His idea of reshuffling was particularly fascinating to me and, indeed, it rings true: our complaints about the detriments and evils of technological innovation aren't always the same. Sometimes we really do change things, bringing modes of societal engagement in and out of existence. It's also important to note that Drew's thoughts don't stop at the above excerpt. He goes on to say:

"Maybe we’re not all advancing together toward an objectively brighter future, but just eternally trying to hold it together?"

In my opinion, that sentiment is, in its own way reassuring, a kind of universe-wide acknowledgement that things aren't always going to be perfect and no innovation comes without its side effects, but we're all doing our best to make it through. The thing that jumped out at me most, though, was Drew's use of directional and navigatory language. A lot of it turns up when we talk about the forward march of progress, but we don't always consider that the forward progress we see an experience isn't just a single vector moving in the direction of the future, but rather a composite of many vectors going in many directions (and maybe now you can see where the resolution of this article is going, but please bear with me here). The forward vectors of our gold rushes create corresponding backwards vectors of the people, things, and ideas we leave behind when we get swept up in progress. We only move forward when the benefits of something outweigh its detriments - progress has both a Magnitude and a Direction. --- P.S., This is not how I came up with the name for my newsletter, per se, but my sentiments around this concept are a happy coincidence.

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josephborrello · 6 years ago

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Magnitude and Direction, Issue #47 | 29 Nov 2019

Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication

Pwnagotchi is without a doubt the cutest wifi-cracker I've ever seen. 🧱⛓ It turns out that some of the structural geometries that make carbon nanotube materials so strong also work when you scale them up and produce them using 3D printing. The result? Bulletproof plastic. 🧻 Is this article about a giant roll of Charmin toilet paper sponsored Buzzfeed content? Yes. It is crazy that Charmin has actually manufactured this item (plus the equipment you'd need to install it - although that was probably white-labelled)? Also yes. ➰ What if the fiber optics networks that provided information to cities could also gather information from them?

Software and Programming

Finally, an app that can tell if something is art or not. Tired of the rudeness and vitriol of twitter? "Whenever you see a rude or abusive tweet, simply reply to it with '@GoodnessBot' and [the bot] will magically turn it into a positive tweet." A good idea, but I'm not of the opinion that bots on the internet will solve our core societal problems (if anything, they'll probably exacerbate them). Sound control lets you use a variety of motion inputs to control new digital instruments - definitely something I'll be playing around with this holiday weekend. ‍ AI and machine learning doesn't have to solely be the domain of expert computer scientists (at least for some cases), thanks to Google's Teachable Machine. ⚖ This one goes out to the handful of IP attorneys that I know read M&D: Can AIs own the copyrights on the content they create? From recent M&D subscriber Ana: Google's AIs come through again this week with a tool that turns your shoddy scribbles into impressive icons.

Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine

🪐 There's a good chance you've seen other "size of space" websites out there (or on here - I don't remember what I may have shared on this topic, tbh) but this one is particularly impressive. Dog vision gives you the power to see what your goodest boi sees (although after you use it you might not consider this a power - and you'll be glad they've got great senses of smell). ➡ While we're on the topic of dogs, scientists have come up with a more accurate method to convert dog years to human years, rather than just multiplying by 7.

Mapping, History, and Data Science

The 1920s was when, for the first time, more people in the US lived in cities than in the countryside. More recently, however, cities have become even more of a nexus of power, with the age of winner-take-all cities resulting in hyper-concentrations of resources, talent..., and inequality. 🥁 It takes a certain kind of dedication to build a drum machine out of an excel spreadsheet. Here's a reasonably exhaustive list of video game console logos. You're either going to love or hate this map of the most popular jingles in each US state. Also from Ana: Information is Beautiful is going beyond the headlines with an informative data visualization covering one news story per day.

Events and Opportunities

Get ready for some of the last events of 2019 (it's still a pretty long list)...

Tuesday, 12/3 Join NYDesigns for their December Women in Tech Happy Hour, happening at Bierocracy in LIC. As always, Men and individuals who identify as female are welcome to attend, too.

Tuesday, 12/3 The Transit Techies are back with the December edition of their meetup. As always, you can expect great talks and awesome maps and data visualizations, plus lots of cool people to talk to.

Tuesday, 12/3 Join Cornell's BioVenture ELab for the 2019 Accelerating BioVenture Innovation Final Pitch, the culmination of their annual Fall course and training program in biomedical entrepreneurship known as Accelerating BioVenture Innovation. Some of Cornell's most exciting life science innovations will be on display.

Monday, 12/9 New Lab and JLABS are back with the 6th edition of their existential medicine series, this time covering the promise of personalized medicine and how innovations in computing and biology may actually get us to a world where medicine is tailored to each individual. Register with code NewLab2019.

Wednesday, 12/11 Join the SciArt group for their December Synapse mixer, a a casual evening of cross-disciplinary networking over drinks at favorite laid-back city bar, Peculier Pub. Come to discuss your latest projects and make new connections with artists, scientists, technologists, and cross-disciplinary practitioners.

Thursday, 12/12 Head over to A/D/O in Greenpoint for Women in 3D Printing's next event. They've put together a jam-packed itinerary prepared with activations from local companies and kickass women in the NYC 3D printing industry speaking on the topic of community.

Thursday, 12/12 The new NYC Health Professionals networking group is holding their first meetup over at Clinton Hall in west Midtown. Based on the existing RSVPs, there promises to be a great mix of innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, and practitioners.

Some other upcoming events to keep on your radar...

Map of the Month

The Urban Archive takes tons of historical photos of New York City and aggregates them all onto one map for you to peruse for hours on end.

Odds & Ends

🥁 Deep learning for jazz.

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josephborrello · 6 years ago

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Magnitude and Direction, Issue #46 | 15 Nov 2019

Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication

You may have heard of the Lightphone, which has for a while now reigned supreme as the most minimalist implementation of a smartphone (indeed, it's barely even "smart"). It's reign may soon be at an end, though, with the introduction of the paper phone, a design concept so minimalist, I strongly question its utility, as well as the field of design writ large (although it certainly brings new meaning to the term "burner phone"). Makercase is one of my favorite (and most used) hardware resources online, but sometimes you don't need to go to the trouble of machining or laser cutting panels for your project needs. For those cases (no pun intended), there's Templatemaker. The Open Book Project is a community effort to create a fully open-source e-reader that anyone with a soldering iron can build for themselves. I've seen this article make the rounds in a few places this past week, so I figured I'd give it a shout-out here too: The tape cassette adapter truly helped bridge the digital divide.

Software and Programming

The US Constitution has been given the GitHub treatment. (Now if only the US government itself could do this...) NVIDIA's latest GAN-powered demo? Face swap for animals. ↔🥁 Spleeter is open-source code that enables you to separate the vocal and backing tracks from *any* song. Definitely worth checking out if you're in the remixing space. Plus, here's an example of the code in action: original, vocals, backing. Here it is, folks, the complete collection of things that don't exist (and are only the product of AI generative adversarial networks). Will it stop me from sharing more GAN-content in the future? Probably not, but now you don't have to click on any of the future links (although I hope you do).

Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine

🦠 There's already a pretty comprehensive network of bacteria spanning the globe, so why not tap them in to the Internet of Things as well? 🧊 Why is ice so slippery? One of the many truths of life we never really got around to figuring out. It turns out quantum behavior is naturally occurring not only at the tiniest of length scales, but also at more biologically-relevant ones as well.

Mapping, History, and Data Science

From longtime M&D reader Lisa: The Power Thesaurus knows the word (or phrase) that's on the tip of your tongue. (It's definitely a different kettle of fish, or change, from your typical thesaurus.) There are a lot of ways to map the world. (Some of them more ridiculous than others.) Connie's compilation of every Sephora review that references crying is the dataset you didn't know you needed. The Bed Bug Registry is one of those datasets you hope you never have to access, but I'm sure you'll agree that it's a good thing it exists.

Events and Opportunities

That whole "events seem to be tapering off" thing I mentioned last edition? Maybe I was wrong about that...

TODAY, 11/15 Join mermbers of the Homodeus startup team and GRO-Biotech at a special happy hour event covering some of the new job opportunities at this fast-paced and exciting biotech startup as well as the broader 4Catalyzer ecosystem, which counts several device and AI startups among its members as well - all of them working at the interface of innovative biomedicine and groundbreaking technology.

Monday, 11/18 Join the Sinai Consulting Interest Group for the last event in their series geared toward helping young academics familiarize themselves with the economics of healthcare and scientific discovery. There will also be a special information and networking mixer with Prescient Healthcare Group following the course. Separate registration for the mixer can be found HERE.

Wednesday, 11/20 Coming off their diamond anniversary meetup (aka meetup #60) the Hardware Startup meetup will be gathering for #61 at Collab fabrication lab and innovation studio.

Thursday, 11/21 Join the BioIdea team, healthcare investors, entrepreneurs, and life sciences professionals for their November Biotech Reception. This is a unique opportunity for investors, pharma & biotech leaders to connect in person to discuss the emerging biotech ecosystem in NYC.

Thursday, 11/21 Join some of the city's newest startups at Ignitia in Brooklyn for an evening of pitching, pizza, and potential investments. Startups, observers, and other entrepreneurship enthusiasts are all welcome to attend.

Friday, 11/22 One of the year's most interesting conferences, SciViz NYC is back and once again bringing NYC-area visual science communicators, researchers, clinicians, journalists, artists, and enthusiasts together for an event focused on visualizing science for analysis, education, inspiration, and provocation. It's a day dedicated to exploring the parts of science we might forget about, but deserve just as much consideration.

Monday, 11/25 The November edition of Derek Brand's ECHO bio-entrepreneurship meetup is here and you can be sure a great cross-section of the community will turn out for drinks and dialogue.

Some other upcoming events to keep on your radar...

Tuesday, 12/3 Join NYDesigns for their December Women in Tech Happy Hour, happening at Bierocracy in LIC. As always, Men and individuals who identify as female are welcome to attend, too.

Map of the Month

This 3D visualization of the Tokyo metro is one of the most beautiful transit maps I've ever seen. (Maybe in 2053, when we finally have modern - which will by then be antiquated again - signals in the entire NYC subways system someone will be able to do the same here.)

Odds & Ends

Most of the books published in the US before 1964 never had their copyrights renewed. This bot tells you which titles they are, and links you to them.

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josephborrello · 6 years ago

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Magnitude and Direction, Issue #45 | 1 Nov 2019

Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication

Leonardo da Vinci's reputation for designing technologies that were way ahead of his time is pretty well known, and the feasibility of yet another design - and innovative bridge structure - has been proven to work. In a recent issue of The Prepared, Spencer shared an article from the New York Times in 2011 covering how flooding in Thailand that year significantly disrupted the world's hard drive supply (a lot of hard drives were manufactured in Thailand back then, it turns out). An interesting side effect of the flooding was the spurring of our transition away from disk drives and towards solid state drives - a reminder that technological change and progress isn't always "man-made".

The McMaster-Carr API documentation: An M&D link so category-bending, that I've literally put it in its own dedicated space between the Hardware and Software sections.

Software and Programming

If you were worried about not having access to technology after the apocalypse happens, don't worry Collapse OS has got you covered. ⚖ For most of us, artificial intelligence and machine learning are probably most visible in the recommendations we get when we shop online or the videos we're promoted on social media. In the criminal justice system, however, these algorithms can determine who goes to jail and who doesn't. In a situation where the stakes couldn't be higher, the correlations these algorithms draw frequently lays bare the biases that are still baked into so much of our society. Just in time for election season: How to spot deepfakes. The last season of Silicon Valley started this past Sunday. In honor of that, here's the Startup Generator.

Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine

It's time to move beyond the p-value, and the plots that live or die by it. ⚗🧪 Don't forget, folks, everything is a chemical. I was recently introduced to the work of Robert MacCurdy who is doing all kind of crazy things with multi-material 3D printing, including printing fully-formed hydraulics and soft robots.

Mapping, History, and Data Science

🥤♻ Everyone knows we throw away a lot of plastic, but it can be hard to really comprehend what those quantities mean. To help put it into perspective, Reuters put together an incredible data visualization that will leave you absolutely speechless. (It's remarkable how quickly New York would be absolutely suffocated under a mountain of the stuff. From Topos (the folks who brought you the pizza analytics post from the last edition of M&D): Redrawing the boundaries of the 5 boroughs for the 21st century. The Pudding is back with a new tool for data-driven UK pub crawls built around arcane themes of your choosing! The Internet often seems like an invisible force connecting all of our devices to one another and to the breadth and depth of human knowledge. As these two maps show, however, it takes a lot of tangible hardware (mostly cables) to bring the world wide web to each of us.

Events and Opportunities

Looks like the horizon past these next two weeks is finally starting to slow down...

Friday-Sunday, 11/1-3 Join NIST and CCNY for a weekend-long hackathon focused on developing technologies to improve community safety and help the first responders who help keep us safe. All skill levels are welcome and $35,000 in cash prizes will be awarded at the end of the weekend.

Monday, 11/4 Brooklyn Law School hosts two of Mount Sinai's leading AI researchers (who also happen to be colleagues of mine) for a discussion on the role of law and policy in advancing medical AI research. It's not ever edition of M&D you get an event that sits at the intersection of law, government, and technology, so you should definitely try to make it out to this.

Tuesday, 11/5 NYDesigns hosts their next Women in Tech happy hour at Bierocracy in LIC. As always, men and individuals who identify as female are welcome to attend, too.

Wednesday, 11/6 GRO-Biotech and the Einstein Biotech-Pharma Club are back with the best-named event in all of NYC biotech: Early ACCESS. Featuring panels and roundtable discussions with professionals from all around the life sciences, ACCESS is a great opportunity to learn about all the career paths available to students working in the life sciences.

Wednesday, 11/6 Join BioLabs and Launch Bio for the next installment of their monthly Larger than Life Science series. November's topic: how to build your company's boards, be they advisory or executive. Even if you're not working on your own startup, these events are always a great place to meet other people working in the community.

Thursday, 11/7 The LifeSci NYC meetup hosts their next event at BMCC with a focus on careers in the public health sector featuring a panel of NYC leaders in the field discussing what it means to work in public health, what it takes to get into the field and succeed, and what the public health ecosystem looks like in NYC.

Friday, 11/8 Nanotech NYC's next Nanonites happy hour get-together is happening at Clinton Hall in east midtown. The topics of discussion might be small, but the fun never is!

Friday, 11/8 The Intrepid museum's Innovators series returns for another evening of showcasing startups powered by NASA technologies, plus networking and mingling between scientists, entrepreneurs, and technologists.

Friday-Sunday, 11/8-10 For 36 hours on November 8-10, HackPrinceton will bring together 600 developers and designers from across the country to create incredible software and hardware projects. They'll have swag, workshops, mentors, prizes, games, free food, and more.

Tuesday, 11/12 The Secret Science Club hosts neuroscientist Nim Tottenham for their next event at the Bell House. Nim's talk, which will be doubling as the Dana Foundation's annual Brain Lecture, will explore human brain development and its relationship to emotional behavior, stress, and well-being.

Some other upcoming events to keep on your radar...

Map of the Month

Odds & Ends

How does someone even make Etch-a-Sketch art like this??!!

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josephborrello · 6 years ago

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Magnitude and Direction, Issue #44 | 18 Oct 2019

Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication

I'm eagerly awaiting IKEA's mass-production of this flat-pack toaster. There are few websites that belong in this section more than This to That, a resource to help guide you in your journey to stick various materials to one another. Relatedly, there's also Can You Microwave? a running message board of people asking that very question about a variety of different substances and foodstuffs. Some of the scenarios that frame these questions are a bit tmi, imo. Maybe I was the only one hoping to come across this some day, but here's a great guide on how to fabricate your own, in-home air hockey table. (You know I'm making one of these.)

Software and Programming

It used to be that when an artist erased a painting it stayed erased. Thanks to neural networks, though, we can "paint" and restore these lost works, as shown with a famous Picasso painting from his Blue Period. I happen to know that at least a few readers of M&D are pretty bad at hangman, so I imagine they're going to get very frustrated when they try to play Cheatman, which is hangman against a computer that cheats. ➰ I'm sure you've heard that blobs are in when it comes to web design, so here's a nice little tool to make all kinds of them for your hip, modern, graphic design needs.

Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine

This might be the best article title I've ever read: How much are you polluting your office air just by existing? From one of the other newsletters I help run, The Lattice, here's Parts 1 & 2 of my series there on 3D printing and scanning in the clinic, based largely on my experiences in the Sinai BioDesign prototyping center.

Mapping, History, and Data Science

Forebears.io is a website working to aggregate all the disparate data around our last names to build a more comprehensive picture of who we are as individuals, families, and societies. (Relatedly, I wonder what that one person with the last name Borrello is doing over in Egypt ) When I was a kid, seeing a non-yellow "school bus" felt like finding some kind of mythical creature. Why is the "yellow school bus" such a fixture in our society, though? Smithsonian magazine gives the history. Most satellite imagery of the planet is from a top-down view, but a lot of our geography (both natural and man-made) is better appreciated from a more oblique angle. From longtime M&D reader Christina: What the big data of pizza in New York City can tell us about our society. (It turns out, if you're near a pizza joint, you're probably also near the subway.)

Events and Opportunities

Well, my busy weeks are behind me (mostly), but I'm not sure the community calendar is getting any lighter...

Saturday, 10/19 New Lab's annual open house birthday celebration is back, with a theme this year of Light+Motion. As always, you can expect pretty much everyone affiliated with technology, design, science, and/or entrepreneurship to turn up for what's one of the bigger bashes of the year.

Saturday & Sunday 10/19-20 The biggest bi-annual graduate career symposium in the country is back at NYU Med showcasing all the career trajectories you can pursue post-PhD. This is one of the best opportunities for graduate students and postdocs to learn about the breadth of career paths for doctorates and an amazing place to network with the next generation of scientists. More info on the two-day conference can be found here, and the registration link is here.

Sunday, 10/20 It's no secret that the Secret Science Club always puts on a great barroom lecture and this Sunday's talk promises to be no exception to the rule. They'll be featuring atmospheric scientist and climatologist Sonali McDermid down at the Bell House in Gowanus.

Monday 10/21 It's not always science and startup events here. One of my favorite organizations, the Society for the Advancement of Social Studies (aka SASS) is back with more barroom history, this time with a focus on the spooky, scary, and ghoulish.

Wednesday, 10/23 VR investors and practitioners in the healthcare space will gather at RLab in the Brooklyn Navy Yard for a showcase of the latest and greatest VR technologies and applications in the healthcare space.

Wednesday, 10/23 Scientists, artists and everything in between meet up once again at Peculier Pub for the October edition of SciArt's Synapse social mixer.

Wednesday, 10/23 Women Owning It, a "celebration of women in media and tech killin’ it in their fields and owning their space in the industry" is focusing their Fall 2019 panel event on the art of negotiating. Hear from women who are pros at closing deals and negotiating contracts, from female founders, to filmmakers, to a negotiation coach. Whether you’re in media or in tech, you're welcome to come and learn negotiation tips from both industries.

Thursday, 10/24 The NYC biotech/life science/entrepreneurial communities get together at JLABS once again for the October edition of their Innovators & Entrepreneurs mixer.

Saturday, 10/26 The Future of Care conference is back at Rockefeller University featuring some of the latest breakthroughs in clinical care and the innovators helping shepherd them from bench to bedside.

Tuesday, 10/29 Join Columbia Nano Labs for their annual Industry Day conference. Learn how you can use and leverage the Nano Labs facilities, hear from a panel of entrepreneurs who have done just that, and listen to faculty and technical experts discuss the way these sophisticated tools contribute to cutting-edge research. (Yes, this was rescheduled from the originally planed date of 9/5.)

Tuesday, 10/29 Taste of Science NYC invites you to a seasonally appropriate evening of phantasmagoric talks about perceiving things that may or may not be there! Learn about the neuroscience behind popular illusions and stage magic, and why paranormal investigators maintain a healthy sense of doubt in their work.

Tuesday, 10/29 Mark your calendars for Derek Brand's next ECHO bio-entrepreneurship mixer, a mainstay of the NYC biotech and startup ecosystems and something I recommend all M&D readers try to get to at least once.

Wednesday, 10/30 The Transit Techies are back to talk planes (maybe), trains (likely), and automobiles (possibly) at their next meetup held, as always at the Sidewalk Labs/Intersection offices in Hudson Yards.

Thursday, 10/31 Pitching your startup in front of investors doesn't have to be spooky. The Mid Atlantic Bio Angels 1st Pitch events offer NYC's biotech entrepreneurs the chance to pitch their innovations in front of a panel of real investors and receive critical feedback on their pitches and business plans. The 1st Pitch events are also a great place to learn about the latest innovations in the NYC biotech ecosystem and connect with some of its major players.

Some other upcoming events to keep on your radar...

Map of the Month

⚡ Here's a live map of carbon emissions being generated by electricity generation around the world.

Odds & Ends

Which medieval lion illustration are you today?

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josephborrello · 6 years ago

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Moment of Inertia, Issue #13 | Full Bloom

In the last Moment of Inertia, I discussed the detriments of STEM education as we know it today. In this edition, I'll put forward some of my own ideas on how we can ensure students (of all ages) are equipped with the technical tools they'll need to be empowered in the world of tomorrow.

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Full Bloom

When last we left this two-part series, I was making a case for the notion that the biggest detriment to advancing the goals of STEM education is STEM education itself. The bundling of STEM skills, technologies, and training, rather than being more accessible to all students, has to date resulted in a kind of winner-take-all educational situation where, instead of treating each letter in that acronym as different subjects that people can independently choose to learn, you have to subscribe to the whole bundle, like it or not Well, I've got news for you, folks. You don't need to know much more than elementary school math to be a great technologist and coder. I would argue that you don't even need to know the "S" in STEM at all to be competent at the "T". That being said, I do think everybody should have working knowledge of each of the disciplines represented in the STEM acronym, I just don't think STEM should be its own, standalone curriculum. The centuries-long removal of the STEM disciplines from the liberal arts has left entire generations and populations behind, not because they weren't interested in learning STEM topics, but because they weren't interested in subscribing to the whole package. What I'm really proposing, then, isn't the end of STEM education as much as it is the reintegration of STEM education. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics represent a set of tools that everyone should be utilizing in their lives regularly, if not daily. Political science stands to gain as much from big data and APIs as computer science, and sociology benefits as much from differential equations as aerospace engineering does. Whenever possible, we should be exchanging teaching expertise between disciplines, creating opportunities to show both students and peers new opportunities and capabilities created through the utilization of tools from the STEM toolbelt. One of my favorite examples of such an opportunity is the Sunlight Foundation "a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that uses civic technologies, open data, policy analysis and journalism to make ... government and politics more accountable and transparent to all." They provide a collection of APIs that make it easy to comb through the myriad amount of government data that gets generated every day in sessions of Congress, publications in the Federal Register, and meetings between politicians and donors, among others. For anyone who knows how to navigate a simple python code, these tools provide an amazing level of access to information and, perhaps more importantly, the power to very quickly aggregate a lot of data for the purposes of gleaning trends, outliers, or any other collection of information you might be interested in. The problem here is that the intersection of people who have the time, interest, and skills to do anything with these technological tools is very small. (At best I've got 2 of those 3 things.) Wouldn't it be amazing if everyone in the United States had the ability to go through this data? The amount of political action and government accountability that would result would be unprecedented in the history not only of the United States but of representative democracy writ large. And it's just sitting there, out in public, waiting for those few people who both possess the technical skills needed to access the data and the care to do so. I don't know about you, but I don't only want to empower a small subset of the US's software developers to hold their government accountable, I want everyone to be able to do it. The problem is that we've created a system where, in order to leverage this tool, you're expected to also be taught, broadly, how to code. As someone who codes very frequently, I can attest to how backwards this concept is as an educational strategy. Nobody really "codes". 99% of the time software developers google the problem they're having, or the function they want to perform and then copy-paste some lines of someone else's code into their own. (So yes, I suppose someone had to "actually" code at some point, but the bigger picture here is that the vast majority of the "T" workforce doesn't even regularly put their STEM education to use, they just pull from existing examples and snippets, kind of like a mosaic.) If our STEM workforce isn't even writing their tools from scratch, why do we want to create a STEM training paradigm where we expect students to do it? You want more people to use technology in the social sciences? Give them the code they need to get data from one of Sunlight's APIs. Just give it to them. Don't tell them to figure it out themselves, or even understand exactly how it's working. That's not STEM education, that's a bachelors degree in computer science. People are naturally inquisitive when they get a new tool. Show someone how to get the legislative data from the most recent session of Congress and in short order they'll understand the patterns and structure of the code enough to understand what one section they'll have to change to get data from previous sessions of Congress. When the only difference between one set of data dates.json?phrase=united+states&start_date=2009-01-01&end_date=2009-06-01 and another dates.json?phrase=united+states&start_date=2009-06-01&end_date=2009-12-01 is the dates you write into one line of the code, then you don't really need to understand the fundamentals of computer programming to be able to leverage the technology in a meaningful way. You just need to be shown how to set it up and make it run on your computer. I think somewhere along the line, we got a little carried away with STEM education. It went from adding new and important tools to everyone's repertoire to trying to make everyone into a software developer or aerospace engineer. That's not what this world is going to need. You don't need to understand how a website server works to know how to get data off of it, and you don't need to understand how to synthesize a polymer to know how to use a 3D printer. STEM education shouldn't be about training everyone to reach the ultimate level of technological competency and achievement. It should be about making people aware of the tools and opportunities that exist and then showing them just enough to understand how to make use of those tools and opportunities. If you teach a man to fish, he'll be fed for a lifetime, it's true, but nobody ever said anything about teaching that same man how to make his own fishing line. --- If many of my comments and prescriptions here over the past few weeks have felt generic, it's because I've tried to keep this core argument intentionally broad. Ultimately, the tools we add to our belt with vary from person to person, and from field to field, but we should all be well-versed enough to hold our own at a surface level - not everyone needs to know how to operate a router, but we should all probably know how to use a drill. I do have some more specific thoughts on these subjects as they relate to graduate education, and graduate education in the life sciences in particular, and I do plan on sharing those thoughts here as part of a tangential series, "GRO Your Own" (if that series title doesn't make sense to you yet, I promise it will). The GRO Your Own series won't be coming in the next edition of Moment of Inertia, though. I've got some other, unrelated, musings that've been knocking around in my head for a while that I'd like to share first...

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josephborrello · 6 years ago

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Moment of Inertia, Issue #12 | Root and STEM

There's no doubt technical innovations are transforming (and have been transforming) every corner of our world, but is the current approach of STEM education the best way to equip ourselves with the tools we'll need in the future?

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Root and STEM

We are living in what is perhaps the golden age of acronyms, many of which carry great cultural, social, and economic weight. When it comes to significance, though, I would like to submit for your consideration the acronym STEM, aka "Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics". For as long as I've been aware of educational policy, this acronym and the four "pillars of society" it encompasses have been upheld as the superior fields of pursuit for students across the United States and around the world. The logic goes that the innovations currently transforming our world have by and large been derived from advancements in these four disciplines, so our future generations must learn to master these levers by which to move the world, or risk being moved by them and those that do possess those technical skills, instead. Despite being a STEM student myself (arguably, pursuing a PhD in biomedicine is about as deep into STEM as one can get), I have been opposed to this notion of "STEM" for several years, and there are two major reasons why I don't believe it's the best way to approach the very real and very pressing need for us all to be more literate in the advancements shaping our world. First, the dichotomy of STEM/not-STEM is leaving far too many people out of crucial educational opportunities; and second, despite the integration of the 4 STEM disciplines that is often spoken about, we're largely failing when it comes to ensuring literacy in all 4 areas. I'll start with the second point first. There's no denying that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are all derived from the same "job description". Dating back to antiquity, there were individuals who were expert practitioners of all 4 fields (although one might wonder what the difference between the T and E would have been in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia). More contemporaneously, the concept of STEM can trace its routes back to the WWII-era military-industrial complex, where disciplines like theoretical physics and mechanical engineering worked side-by-side on the Manhattan Project and mathematics, mechatronics, and computing were used to both create and subsequently break the Enigma Machine. In the 80 years since the official start of WWII hostilities in Europe, however, each of these fields has advanced, expanded, and specialized far too much for experts in one field to truly be experts in another as well. This isn't to say we couldn't accomplish a Manhattan Project-scale endeavor today, there'd just be a lot more job titles. Heck, you couldn't even do materials science in 1942, not that the activities that comprise materials science weren't being done back then, we just didn't have a separate name for them. Despite what some people say, words and names do carry with them great importance, and in the world of STEM, giving a STEM sub-field a new name gives it the power to have its own professional societies, conferences, and sub-specialties. This branching and expanding is one of the primary reasons why we have been able to advance so much in the past century, but it is also why a talented developer likely knows very litter about cell biology and why an expert in gene therapy probably doesn't know much data science. What we write as STEM is these days probably better represented as S|T|E|M. Those boundaries aren't hard and fast, but they're certainly there. Going back to the first - and in my opinion more important - point, by focusing on STEM as a package of disciplines and majors to be taught in school, we end up creating two groups of people: STEM and non-STEM. Nothing could be further from the stated goals around STEM as preparing everyone for the future. This isn't to say everyone needs to be taught an in-depth STEM education - not everyone needs to vector calculus (I'm not even sure I needed to learn vector calculus). What everyone does need to be, though, in conversant in the language of technical innovation, and it wouldn't hurt if more people could also add some key STEM skills (e.g., data analysis, coding for task automation, basic chemistry) to their toolbelts. I use the term toolbelt very deliberately here, because there is a whole lot of STEM that is not a college major so much as it is a tool to be leveraged in our day-to-day lives, like email or word processing. An example I always like to give is that 3D printing is frequently housed within the domain of engineering (sometimes technology) but nothing I learned in the course of my engineering education made me particularly well-equipped to work with 3D printing technologies, virtually all of my exposure to that manufacturing method happened extracurricularly, largely in entrepreneurial, startup-type environments. Furthermore, a lot of 3D printing feels a lot like repairing a car or some other kind of "blue collar" industrial machine. The attempts to rectify this in-group/out-group discrepancy have largely consisted of adding letters to the acronym. I'm sure many of you are familiar with the modified acronym STEAM, giving the creative arts writ large a seat at the table in the form of the word "Art". I made up my own, recently, ESTEAM, which adds "Entrepreneurship" to the start, since that often seems to be a field that gets mixed up in all of this too (and rightly so, in my opinion). Even more recently, I came across this one: STEM2D, standing for "Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, Manufacturing & Design" (personally I think ESTEAM rolls off the tongue a little bit better). There's no denying people working in fields as disparate as mechanical engineering and the fine arts are all leveraging the technical innovations we have brought into the world over the course of the past century, but at what point do we, in the name of making sure STEM education reaches everyone, just add a letter for every discipline that already existed?I would argue no one can be a STEM2D expert (or an ESTEAM2D expert, for that matter). We can all specialize in our sub-fields, but trying to teach every student in america ESTEAM2D the way we try to teach STEM right now would be bombarding them with so much content that they'd have no chance of truly learning any of it. And it's true learning and retention, coupled with practical applications that truly empowers us to leverage our learning in our day-to-day lives? If we ought to throw out STEM education as we know it today, though, how should we best prepare future generations for the world they will inherit? Even more so, how can we do even better than past generations and truly empower everyone to take advantage of the innovations we've brought into the world, instead of a select few? There are many proposed solutions.I'll offer some of my own in two weeks with the continuation of this series. Until then,I'd love to hear your thoughts and insights- and I'll also mention that I'm looking for some guest editorials around these topics as well.

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josephborrello · 6 years ago

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Moment of Inertia, Issue #11 | Man vs. Machine

We've never relied more on the data sent to our devices, but it's important to note that while the data and its distribution itself is digitized and automated, the collection of it rarely is.

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Man vs. Machine

When was the last time you drove somewhere without GPS navigation? Even when we make trips between places we go to all the time (e.g., work or a friend's house), we'll take out our phone and ask for directions so as to get the most optimal route possible, reducing time, or tolls, or mileage .As the article about "Haberman", Queens in this weekend's M&D shows, though, there can be strange disconnects between the "ground truth"of a digital map and the "truth on the ground" about a place described by that map. For all the faith we place in the reliability of our digital systems, though, they're certainly not infallible and even the smallest of human errors can lead us dramatically astray(when we otherwise might have been fine, sans computer assistance). Human error interfacing with these systems is only part of the issue, though. The computer can only execute programs to the best of our ability to enter the necessary prerequisites. The Haberman situation brings to light a much more important issue when considering the interface of Man and Machine. With the exception of the last quarter-century or so, all of human knowledge that we can now access on a computer or smartphone didn't start out on computers and smartphones, it was physically recorded somewhere - be it in a book, on parchment, or etched into a stone tablet. Furthermore, this information then had to be digitized, a process that (more often than we might think) requires A LOT of human input. If we can't type the right address into our GPS, why would we be any better at interpreting subtle differences between hand-set typography? It's also worth noting there's a lot of human knowledge out there that we haven't gotten around to digitizing and/or making accessible. A few years ago I did some Fermi estimation on Wolfram | Alpha regarding the state of human knowledge and found the following relations:

About 10% of all the information on the internet (let's take this to represent all digitized data, since we're doing Fermi estimation anyway) is indexed and searchable (i.e., you can find it through a Google search).

Where's the other 90% of internet information? That's what is otherwise known as the Deep Web (of which the infamous Dark Web is a part, which is not dark in color scheme). It's just a bunch of websites that you can't get to through a google search or conventional URLs. (It's also worth noting that the source I cited in that hyperlink actually says my Wolfram | Alpha Fermi estimate was an order of magnitude or two too high.)

The more astounding thing, though, was the estimate that only 10% of all human knowledge is even digitized and available online in any form. That means a Google search is, at best, uncovering 10% of 10% of all human knowledge (aka, 1%).

All of this assumes that data is being gathered and cataloged in a more or less random and consistent fashion, which is very often not the case. As the saying goes, "history is written by the victors" and the majority of peoples and civilizations across time have not been the victors. The result of this systematic imbalance of information is a data-logging system that only makes it harder as time goes by to rectify these knowledge gaps that have formed. This isn't to say we shouldn't trust the driving directions our phone gives us, but rather that, when we look at information - especially as we look further and further back in time - we have to recognize that there were no digital sensors to record peoples' movements, thoughts, and actions. Our contemporary base of information is incredibly thorough, but it is built upon a foundation that becomes ever more tenuous as we go back in time - and sometimes we're forced to look back and glean what knowledge we can to inform our decisions in the present and future. Just understand that that information (and indeed, all information to an extent) interacted with a human or human-supervised process at some point, and we're not always the best at recording every detail, be it out of intentional omission or just a failure to read someone's handwriting.

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josephborrello · 6 years ago

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Moment of Inertia, Issue #10 | A Tough Sell

Even when we've learned everything there is to know, many of us are convinced there's more we're not seeing. It's perhaps the most dangerous quality of modern society.

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A Tough Sell

The notionofFake News has gotten a lotofattention the past few years, as well it should. There are good sourcesofinformation and there are bad and biased sourcesofinformation, and we should always try to check our confirmation biases and normalize the data we're given (these concepts are kindofa recurring thing here, in case you haven't noticed). However, there's a phenomenon that has been a sourceofmisinformation and confusion for even longer than the deliberate creationoffalse information. In fact, it's my hypothesis that this phenomenon is in large part responsible for the waveoffake news that is currently running rampant around the world. I call this phenomenon the "what are you trying to sell me?"effect (if you come up with a better name, or if there's already a name for this, please let me know). In this phenomenon, someone is told factual information, believes it, but is also suspiciousofthe person telling them - and that person's motives - because they are suspiciousofadditional factual information being withheld. I've found this phenomenon to be more insidious than outright acceptanceoffake news because it's foundations are rooted in factual information - the recipientsofthat factual information, though, are just convinced that there's more information they're not being told. For better or worse, my timing here is a bit fortuitous becausethe idea that there's more to the news than what we're hearing is back at the forefrontofdaily discussion. It's a much more persistent problem, though, in the sciences where, for some reason, people are convinced that a groupofpeople who constantly share information (to a fault at times) are not telling society at large certain key piecesofinformation. Whether it's a clinical trial that proves vaccines don't cause autism or a reviewofa key ingredient in a moisturizer, people are convinced there's something they're not being told. (Granted, not everyone feels this way, but I'd wager it's a larger portionofthe population than the portion that believes fake news.) All this really is, though, is an exercise in anti-intellectual posturing conducted by a groupofpeople who don't want to make the effort to consult multiple sourcesofinformation. If you think a scientific report (or any other report) is delivering incomplete information, then do what all the scientists and domain experts do and check other sources that cover the same topic. (And yes, I'm also saying that any "domain expert" that doesn't do this is undeservingofthe title.) By all means, question your sources and the information you're told, but don't do it from your armchair (unlessofcourse you're diligently browsing the internet on a laptop). An informed dialog is only possible when we're all informed, though, so go out, talk to people, read peer-reviewed papers (whenever possible), and use your own best judgement (I trust you all... mostly). Patterns will emerge and, more often than not, those patterns outline the truth. Sometimes the truth isn't particularly exciting. It doesn't mean there's anything more to the story, and that's okay. Isn't there enough excitement in the world already?

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josephborrello · 6 years ago

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Magnitude and Direction, Issue #43 | 4 Oct 2019

Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication

⚙ Last week's issue of The Prepared featured Boltcutter, a list of hardware VC fund Bolt's favorite shop tools. It's a who's-who of tools that I think everyone should have in their workshop and I'm proud to say I personally have many of the tools listed. ⚙ This plotter artwork is great for people like me: who can't draw, but have lots of tools and machines. What do you do when you have to machine a part, but it's made out of highly radioactive fuel rods? Hero dogs like Lassie are all well and good on the TV, but if a random dog (or even a dog you knew) was barking at you with no apparent danger or trouble in sight, would you "listen" to them and follow? Maybe not, and that's where a new vest designed to give dogs the power to "speak" comes in.

Software and Programming

🔈🔉🔊 It's easy to make a user-friendly volume adjust, but a user-unfriendly one? Well, that's much harder (and more fun... at least until you lose it and throw your computer against the wall.) A problem unique to the 21st century: What do you do when a computer thinks your last name is "offensive"? A modern version of the Linux operating system, running on a very not-modern version of a Toshiba laptop.

Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine

Stellarium: a free, open-source planetarium for your computer. For a while, we've thought heart disease was a relatively new issue. Recent scans of mummies, however, are telling a different story. 🪐 The hottest new Soundcloud artist? NASA's InSight Mars lander.

Mapping, History, and Data Science

From The Prepared: How Civil War-era legislation is driving multibillion dollar IT investments today. You've heard of VHS v. Betamax, HDDVD v. Blu-Ray... Now you can add Wi-Fi v. HomeRF to the list of behind-the-scenes tech standards wars that ended up shaping the very fabric of our society. ⚙ I wasn't totally sure where to put this, since it very much involves software, hardware, and engineering, so I decided on putting it here, since it's an important piece of history: Here is a visualization of how the Enigma Machine worked, the famous encryption device used by the Nazis in WWII and cracked, in part, by father of computing Alan Turing. The way the animation moves the "bits" of data around really captures the nature of this computing device, which was totally electromechanical.

Events and Opportunities

I don't know about you guys, but I've got a busy few weeks ahead of me...

TONIGHT, 10/4 This year's Futureworks Incubator closes out with a party and showcase down at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, featuring over 50 of the hardware and manufacturing startups that went through this year's program.

Monday, 10/7 Join GRO-Biotech and Insight Data Sciences for a talk and Q&A about different careers in data, the most suitable backgrounds for each of them, and how Insight Data Sciences can help you make the transition.

Monday, 10/7 If you don't mind being suspended over the East River for a bit, head over to Cornell Tech for the inaugural seminar in their HealthTech.NYC series, uniting engineers, clinicians, and leaders intent on disrupting and improving healthcare through technology. The first event will examine how precision medicine can be applied in the context of cancer care with speakers joining from sema4, Englander Institute for Precision Medicine, Flatiron health, and the NYU Perlmutter Cancer Center. (And yes, you can take the subway to get there as well, if you're afraid of heights)

Wednesday, 10/9 In honor of National Nanotech Day (10/9 >> 10^9, for the uninitiated, myself included) the Nanotech NYC meetup group will be gathering together for their next Nanonite social, with a collection of researchers, enthusiasts, and entrepreneurs, as always.

Saturday, 10/12 The next edition of Hot Glass Cold Beer returns to the Brooklyn Glass studios in Gowanus, featuring live glass blowing, open studios, and effectively endless amounts of beer. As always, getting a ticker in advance (versus at the door) means you'll be guaranteed to get one of their hand-made glasses (which you can subsequently drink out of for the rest of the night).

October 11-16 Innovation Week at Mount Sinai. What started as just the SINAInnovations conference is now a week's worth of activities dedicated to bringing New York's biomedical innovation communities together. Here's the full lineup:

Friday-Sunday, 10/11-13 Mount Sinai Health Hackathon. The 4th annual Mount Sinai Health Hackathon will be an exciting 48-hour transdisciplinary competition focused on creating novel technology solutions for problems in healthcare. This year’s theme is Artificial Intelligence – Expanding the Limits of Human Performance.

Tuesday, 10/15 Careers & Connections 2019. GRO-Biotech's next big event, the Careers & Connections mini-conference and networking event, is being held concurrently with emerging healthcare technologies conference, SINAInnovations. We have hit capacity for event RSVPs, but a wait list has been started so you should still register!

Tuesday & Wednesday, 10/15-16 SINAInnovations Conference. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is hosting its eighth annual SINAInnovations conference around the theme of Artificial Intelligence. A range of talks and panels will focus on the explosive growth of AI in our society and in particular in medicine, featuring international thought leaders across the range of relevant domains.

Tuesday, 10/15 The Careers & Connections reception ends around 7pm, which would leave you just enough time to get down to Tir Na Nog for the second half of the New York BioPharma Networking Group's October after-work gathering.

Wednesday, 10/16 Right after Careers & Connections, GRO-Biotech is hosting a fireside chat at BioLabs with Adam Wollowick from Stryker and Jack Wu from Adlai Nortye on what a career in business development looks like and how you can start a career in bizdev.

Some other upcoming events to keep on your radar...

Wednesday, 10/23 Scientists, artists and everything in between meet up once again at Peculier Pub for the October edition of SciArt's Synapse social mixer.

Thursday, 10/24 The NYC biotech/life science/entrepreneurial communities get together at JLABS once again for the October edition of their Innovators & Entrepreneurs mixer.

Map of the Month

⚡ Here's a live map of carbon emissions being generated by electricity generation around the world.

Odds & Ends

The Son of Sam is sorry for what he did. (Naturally, the only place I could've possily found this website is the incomparably scattershot Web Curios.)

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josephborrello · 6 years ago

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Magnitude and Direction, Issue #42 | 20 Sep 2019

Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication

‍♂️ These robots learn how to dig holes by watching humans do it. (So does one dig, while 4 others watch?) ✝ Robot priests are giving new meaning to the term deus ex machina. (I hope you thought that was as witty as I did.) It's amazing how much stuff (and people) you can fit into a fire truck (or ambulance, or rescue helicopter...)

Software and Programming

➕ generated.space is a great collection of very aesthetic, generative artwork. ➡ This AI tries to make emojis more lifelike and is neither particularly good, nor necessary. It is, however, very scary. Clippy is back. Ironically, he's back on Mac, not Windows. (He's also available for websites, like here for example.) The Recomendo newsletter did a better job describing this than I did, so I'll just re-print what they've written:

"I’ve waited all my life for a tool that would create art for me. It’s here. Artbreeder is a website that breeds new visual images from existing images. Using deep learning (AI) algorithms it generates multiple photo-realistic “children” mutations of one image. You — the gardener — select one mutant you like and then breed further generations from its descendants. You can also crossbreed two different images. Very quickly, you can create infinite numbers of highly detailed album covers, logos, game characters, exotic landscapes. I find it fiendishly addictive. Wanna see the zoo of unearthly creatures I found/made? (Note: If Artbreeder is not out of beta use Ganbreeder, it’s predecessor.) — [Kevin Kelly]"

Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine

You've heard of "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!" but have you heard of "I Can't Believe It's Mostly Water!"? Also on the topic of water, pulling moisture out of thin air in arid, desert climates won't only be the stuff of sci-fi for much longer. The website Relativity, showing how recent observations of a star orbiting near the galactic core helps support Einstein's theory of general relativity, is a great example of the kind of science communication we need to be doing more of.

Mapping, History, and Data Science

There's a (near-infinite) world of colors out there for you to name! (I named one 'Jimmy') ⛓ Do you understand how the blockchain works? If not, maybe this data sonification/visualization will help (it probably won't but it sounds and looks really cool). The orientation of airport runways may not sound very interesting, but I was absorbed by this map almost immediately. (For example, what's with the pretty drastic East/West divide among US runways?) What were the most popular videos on Youtube a decade ago?

Events and Opportunities

We're within spitting distance of Fall and there's lots of exciting autumnal activities coming up:

Sunday, 9/22 The World Health Organization is hosting the first-ever edition of the Walk the Talk: The Health for All Challenge in the United States, being held over 4 miles in New York's beautiful Central Park. This fun run/walk will bring together people from all over the world for a celebration of health, on the eve of the United Nations General Assembly

Monday, 9/23 Derek Brand's monthly ECHO biotech gathering is back and, as always, bringing together some of the NYC area's most exciting life science startups and entrepreneurs.

Monday, 9/23 Coming off a great mid-summer meetup with the Health-Tech Connect group, the Mount Sinai Innovators Group is teaming up with them again for another event featuring some great pre-SINAInnovations topics: Artificial Intelligence and Assistive Devices. Both presenters have extensive experience in the healthcare startup space and this promises to be a can't-miss event!

Tuesday, 9/24 Join NYDesigns for a tour of their 5,000 square foot fabrication facility and learn about how you can make use of all the impressive equipment there at their upcoming open house.

Tuesday, 9/24 Join GeoNYC and Doctors Without Borders for a special map-a-thon to fill in missing geospatial data for underserved regions in order to provide international and local NGOs and individuals with the data they need to better respond to crises.

Wednesday, 9/25 The NYC JLABS crew is back for their next Innovators and Entrepreneurs mixer, which promises, as always, to be a great event to meet local life science startups and biotech enthusiasts.

Wednesday, 9/25 The RobotLab meetup's September event focuses on the good, the bad, and the ugly of Industry 4.0 and autonomous manufacturing.

Thursday, 9/26 Join GRO-Biotech, MSIG, and the Petri biotech accelerator at Mount Sinai for an info session on opportunities to get involved in their new startup program focused on helping formation-stage innovators realize the next frontier of biology and engineering

Thursday, 9/26 It's been touched on in previous Existential Medicine events, but the next science seminar collab between New Lab and JLABS dives deep into the revolutionary, and sometimes controversial technology of CRISPR. Use code "NewLab2019" to unlock the event registration.

Saturday, 9/28 Admission is just the swipe of a metro card for the Parade of Trains at the Brighton Beach station. Vintage train cars from all periods of the subway's history will be on display, as well as taking passengers on short trips around south Brooklyn.

Monday, 9/30 The NY Hardware Startup meetup is back with their regularly scheduled programming, which, in this case, means presentations from the likes of Lime, Light Phone, and more, down at General Assembly in the Flatiron.

Tuesday, 10/1 The next stop on Ogilvy's healthcare innovation pop-up series takes them to Hudson Yards, where they're teaming up with the HITLAB and SAP.iO Foundry for an event that will focus primarily on the female and underserved health innovators who are disrupting healthcare today.

Tuesday, 10/1 NYDesigns' next Women in Tech happy hour is back at Bierocracy in Long Island City. As always, individuals who identify as female and men are welcome to attend, too!

Wednesday, 10/2 The next edition of Larger Than Life Science at New York BioLabs is back and focusing on a crucial aspect of bringing healthcare innovations to market: preparing for and conducting clinical trials.

Some other upcoming events to keep on your radar...

Tuesday, 10/15 Careers & Connections 2019. October may feel far away, but I promise you it's not and you'll want to be sure to mark your calendars for GRO-Biotech's next big event, the Careers & Connections mini-conference and networking event, held concurrently with emerging healthcare technologies conference, SINAInnovations.

Map of the Month

When we hear about the 2-3 Celsius increase in temperature that's going to set us on path to irreversible environmental changes, it often sounds like it's still a ways off. As this map from the Washington Post shows, that future is already becoming a reality in some parts of the US.

Odds & Ends

Bovine Obstruction. I can't explain this.

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josephborrello · 6 years ago

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Magnitude and Direction, Issue #41 | 6 Sep 2019

Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication

The Mobius Flex is both an elegantly simple work of electronics art, as well as an ingenious use of a flexible PCB. 🛸 The Curiosity rover's wheel's have taken quite a beating in the time it's been driving around the Martian surface. Take your files LITERALLY everywhere you go, with this implantable mesh network device. I appreciate how open-sourced this is, but I think I'll pass on implanting this in my forearm.

Software and Programming

From the MIT Tech Review: You can now practice firing someone in virtual reality. Well, isn't that lovely? How do you turn your macbook (or any laptop, for that matter) into a touchscreen for about $1? I'll give you a hint, computer vision is involved. This video of Bill Hader turning into the people he's impersonating is one of the most jarring things I've ever seen, and also the scariest deepfake-produced video I've ever encountered. Perhaps you've heard me say this here before (you have), but AI-driven fake news articles are getting uncannily good at writing to any prompt and we're going to start to have a really hard time identifying fake news, videos, etc. unless we're really paying close attention. Still don't believe me? Try making a fake article yourself.

Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine

🥃 What do you do with an artificial tongue? Taste whiskey to make sure it's not counterfeit, of course. 🔴🔴 According to popular lore, you can predict the weather based on sky color. The saying typically goes, “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.” The saying has been around in various forms for a long time, and the reason it’s lasted so long is that it actually works (at least in certain parts of the world), as XKCD artist Randall Munroe explains with words (and cartoons) in the New York Times. ➕➕🧑➕🤴 It turns out that having a few extra husbands can be a good way to weather tough times. Apparently we've had the idea of a harem backwards this whole time.

Mapping, History, and Data Science

The Version Museum may be the easiest museum in the world to visit, seeing as you can get there right from the device you're reading this on right now. What does this Version Museum exhibit? The old versions of some of the world's most influential websites. (It really does feel like a "only 90s babies will remember..." article - crazy how much has changed in the just under a quarter century.) ‍ Here's a design guide for the flags of all the US states, which explains but doesn't quite justify why some of these designs were chosen. ⚰ Since it is my birthday today, I'll also continue a long-running social media tradition here and share my deathclock. Do you live in The Midwest?

Events and Opportunities

Maybe my channels to find out about upcoming events and opportunities have just increased, because we've got another jam-packed section in this edition of M&D:

Friday 9/6 I'd like to say Nanotech NYC scheduled their next nanonite happy hour in honor of my birthday, but I don't think Jacob or the other organizers know when my birthday is! (Although they do now.) At any rate, NYC's nanotech community (practitioners and enthusiasts alike) will be getting together at Clinton Hall in east Midtown.

Monday, 9/9 Small science gets a big showcase at Nano Day at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center. Learn about some of the most exciting nanotechnology research and innovations coming from the NYC area and meet other technologists working in the field.

Monday, 9/9 Innovation Forum New York is co-hosting a workshop with NYU Biolabs on fundraising for biotech startups, a topic of utmost importance to entrepreneurs in the life sciences. The workshop will provide valuable insights for all interested in starting their own company or considering work at a startup.

Tuesday, 9/10 The NYC Emerging Healthcare Technology meetup is holding their next event for anyone interested in creating websites for Healthcare

Tuesday, 9/10 The Accelerating BioVenture Innovation 12-week entrepreneurship training program kicks off at Cornell Med. The program is focused on building teams and business plans around patented technologies from Weill Cornell Medicine, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Rockefeller University.

Wednesday, 9/11 Ingredient Intelligence startup (and M&D darling) See Thru is holding the first panel discussion in their Straight Talk series, aimed at unpacking emerging trends at the intersection of beauty, science, and technology. The first topic: what does it mean to be "transparent" in the digital age, where consumers are more educated on products than ever?

Wednesday, 9/11 Scientists, researchers, cartographers, artists, and everyone in between will be gathering together at Peculier Pub for the next SciArt mixer.

Friday, 9/13 The Nanotech NYC meetup hosts Kendra Krueger, the founder of 4LoveandScience, a research and education platform that inspires new modes of working and learning in a complex world. An electrical engineer with nanotech experience in academia and the photonics industry, Kendra is also a trained facilitator in mindfulness, sustainable design and social justice.

Some other upcoming events to keep on your radar...

Wednesday, 9/18 LiveIntent is hosting their first tech happy hour at their office in lower Manhattan. The event promises to be a great opportunity for New York tech professionals to network, share ideas, meet our team, and learn all about LiveIntent and how their re-imagining email. There will be food, beer and wine provided, along with video games and board games available!

Friday, 9/20 The Aspen Institute Science & Society Program and the Institute for Systems Genetics at NYU Langone Health are co-hosting InspireScience, a symposium inspiring scientists to create a more outward-looking culture through communication, engagement, and innovation. Scientists of all levels are welcome to this special event focused on community building through communication and outreach.

Tuesday, 9/24 Join NYDesigns for a tour of their 5,000 square foot fabrication facility and learn about how you can make use of all the impressive equipment there at their upcoming open house.

Wednesday, 9/25 Coming off their 1st birthday party, the NYC JLABS crew is taking a short break for the summer but will be back in September for their next Innovators and Entrepreneurs mixer.

Wednesday, 9/25 The RobotLab meetup's September event focuses on the good, the bad, and the ugly of Industry 4.0 and autonomous manufacturing.

Map of the Month

Odds & Ends

"Jay Street and needless to say... ...Metrotech"

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josephborrello · 6 years ago

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Magnitude and Direction, Issue #40 | 23 Aug 2019

Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication

Via The Prepared: The VertiWalk is essentially a human-powered elevator (it's not as hard to operate as it sounds) that can improve mobility for people struggling to get up and down stairs. Blaser Hub has scientifically tested which nerf darts are best, so you know what to stock up on before the next office war. 🧲 This 252-segment ferrofluid display is part digital clock, part lava lamp.

Software and Programming

🤬 Try to play this horrible-UI game without losing your mind. 🔊 There's been speculation of secret codes and messages hidden in songs for generations. Now, though, it's finally come to pass. Not only does this article provide an informative and interactive breakdown on what a JPEG really is and how it works, it also provided this somewhat disturbing factoid: "...in the same way you confuse your brain when you rub your eyes too hard andstart to see blotches of dimness and color! These blotches you see—known as phosphenes—don’t come from any light stimulus, nor are they hallucinations made up in your mind. They arise because your brain assumes that any electrical signal arriving through the nerves in your eye is conveying light information. The brain needs to make this assumption because there’s no way to know whether a given signal is sound, sight, or something else. All the nerves in your body carry exactly the same type of electrical pulse. When you apply pressure by rubbing your eyes, you’re sending non-visual signals that trigger the receptors in your eye, which your brain interprets—incorrectly, in this case—as vision. You can literally see the pressure!" This new knowledge makes me wonder all kinds of things about brain-computer interfaces I wasn't thinking about before!

Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine

As climate change causes the loss of glaciers around the world, more than environmental issues are being precipitated. In the case of Italy, it means they have to keep redrawing their borders. 🥑 Rest easy, folks, we've sequenced the avocado genome. It may seem like just a white orb, but the eye is one of the most complex organs in the body and notoriously hard to replicate in vitro, which makes this tear-shedding artificial eye all the more impressive.

Mapping, History, and Data Science

I came across an interesting article by Jeff Sisson on the BetaNYCSlack Group the other day investigating how a section of Queens most people would probably indentify as Maspeth ended up getting labeled "Haberman" on Google Maps. The conclusion he arrived at, while not 100% confirmed, does seem likely and serves as a reminder that our data is only as good as we are, the topic of this week's Moment of Inertia. "There will probably never be a year in which no one dies in an aviation accident, but there will definitely never be a year in which 10 percent of the global population dies in a single plane crash. Yet that could happen with a supervolcano, an asteroid strike or a nuclear war." The New York Times on why our perceptions of probability make us woefully under-prepared for existential threats (ourselves included). Much to my chagrin, you can't technically ride the entire NYC subway system in alphanumeric order (i.e., 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-A-B-C-D-E-...-Z) with a single metro card swipe (the lack of transfer between the G and J trains is what does you in, in case you were wondering). You can however, travel 154.6 miles in the system without ever doubling back on yourself with a single swipe, as this WNYC article explains. (Also, in case you were curious 154.6 miles is roughly the distance from New York to Baltimore.)

Events and Opportunities

Remember two weeks ago when I said this section was the longest it had ever been? Well, the community may have one-upped itself yet again this week.

TONIGHT, 8/23 Join the New York Academy of Sciences for a brainy comedy night where local scientists will attempt to confirm the hypothesis that science does indeed have a sense of humor.

Tuesday, 8/27 The New York 3D Group hosts their first meetup at The World Bar, where participants can learn about 3D scanning technologies and even how to get a scan of themselves.

Wednesday, 8/28 The NY/NJ chapter of the Society for Conservation GIS are gathering for an informal chat over snacks and drinks. Come network with the organizing committee and other members of the chapter. If your map-minded data enthusiast like myself, they're always looking for volunteers, presenters, and suggestions for activities.

Wednesday, 8/28 The Hardware Startup meetup may not be having formal events over the summer, but that's not going to stop the community from getting together for their second happy hour of the season.

Tuesday & Wednesday, 9/3-4 If you've got some time to take a trip up to Cambridge, join the Harvard Biotech Club for their 20th anniversary Bridging the Gap symposium, annual Career Fair, or both. Students from all academic institutions are welcome and dozens of companies will be on hand for networking and recruiting.

Wednesday, 9/4 The Transit Techies meetup is back with all of your favorite transit-and-data-related projects. If you like trains, data science, and/or the view from Hudson Yards, I highly recommend you check out what is one of my favorite meetups.

Wednesday, 9/4 NYDesigns is hosting is next Women in Tech Happy Hour at Bierocracy in Long Island City. As always, individuals who identify as female and men are also welcome to attend.

Thursday, 9/5 Join Columbia Nano Labs for their annual Industry Day conference. Learn how you can use and leverage the Nano Labs facilities, hear from a panel of entrepreneurs who have done just that, and listen to faculty and technical experts discuss the way these sophisticated tools contribute to cutting-edge research.

Thursday, 9/5 The HAX hardware startup accelerator is journeying east from their usual haunts of San Francisco and Shenzen for a visit to New York to connect with the local hardware community with a special after-work hardware meetup and a night of socializing, drinks, and bites.

Some other upcoming events to keep on your radar...

Wednesday, 9/11 Scientists, researchers, cartographers, artists, andeveryone in between will be gathering together at Peculier Pub for the next SciArt mixer.

Thursday, 9/19 LiveIntent is hosting their first tech happy hour at their office in lower Manhattan. The event promises to be a great opportunity for New York tech professionals to network, share ideas, meet our team, and learn all about LiveIntent and how their re-imagining email. There will be food, beer and wine provided, along with video games andboard games available!

Wednesday, 9/25 Coming off their 1st birthday party, the NYC JLABS crew is taking a short break for the summer but will be back in September for their next Innovators and Entrepreneurs mixer.

Wednesday, 9/25 The RobotLab meetup's September event focuses on the good, the bad, and the ugly of Industry 4.0 and autonomous manufacturing.

Tuesday & Wednesday, 10/15-16 SINAInnovations Conference. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is hosting its eighth annual SINAInnovations conference around the theme of Artificial Intelligence. A range of talks andpanels will focus on the explosive growth of AI in our society and in particular in medicine, featuring international thought leaders across the range of relevant domains.

Map of the Month

What will the climate in your city feel like in 60 years?

Odds & Ends

Meteor showers are amazing from earth, but they're even more breathtaking from space.

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josephborrello · 6 years ago

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Magnitude and Direction, Issue #39 | 9 Aug 2019

Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication

It's the dog days of summer, which means it's time to ask the age-old question: is it better to wear a white shirt, or a black shirt? These all-paper mechanisms put your typical pop-up book to shame. It turns out we don't really understand how tape works. ‍♂️ I don't really wear hair clips, but I think I need to get this one(which doubles as a multi-tool).

Software and Programming

One of the most persistent and insidious computer worms in history infected 10 million computers, but it was never used to initiate an attack. (Also, did you know I don't have a worm emoji?) The NSA open-sourcing its code might seem counterintuitive but a lot of the technology they develop for... security? surveilance? spying? can also have a lot of useful applications in the general software development space - with the proper pre-release modifications. The best way to gird yourself against fake news is to play a game where you're tasked with creating fake news. From Gizmodo via the NYC Media Lab: "It's grim, but true: 'once you die, your image is kind of a part of the public domain,' attorney Joseph Rothberg tells Gizmodo. For some dead celebrities, rights are controlled by heirs. So, for example, Whitney Houston's sister-in-law and former manager Pat Houston calls the shots for Whitney's upcoming hologram tour. For-profit moves like these are the estate's decision, but making holograms for personal purposes? Legally, anyone can double your likeness whether you're alive of dead." Why did I use the computer/laptop emoji with each of these articles? Well, I hadn't initially realized I had already used it once when I added the second one so I decided to just keep going with it for every article in this section.

Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine

A volcanic eruption from the ground? Scary. A volcanic eruption from space? Beautiful. Do you go on dates for the free food (aka a "foodie call")? You might score high on the "dark triad" of personality traits, too. Everything you need to know about Uranium.

Mapping, History, and Data Science

What are the densest square kilometers in your city? The way New York jumps around from neighborhood-to-neighborhood is absolutely fascinating to me. From Ingrid Burrington, a civic-minded techie and dataviz artist I recently discovered: How much does it cost us when the MTA raises fairs? Could taxis be the solution to urban data collection? These initial results are certainly promising.

Events and Opportunities

Hold on to your hats, kids. We've got a lot of stuff coming up...

TONIGHT, 8/9 Uptown nanotech enthusiasts, this is your moment! Nanotech NYC's next Nanonite Social is being held at Harlem Tavern.

TOMORROW (& 8/17) If you've ever wanted to know what it's like to walk through the streets of New York City without getting hit by a car, you can find out tomorrow (and next Saturday) at Summer Streets, the annual multi-mile street fair held the first three Saturdays in August.

Tuesday, 8/13 Join the New York Biopharma networking group for their August meetup, back at Tir Na Nog in midtown.

Tuesday, 8/13 Celebrate the Summer season at this a special event where IFP members, the Media Center community, and DUMBO neighbors collide. Whether you’re a longtime supporter of either of those communities or just want to learn what IFP stands for and what the Media Center does, this event is for you! Meet and mingle while enjoying complimentary beer, wine, and snacks.

Thursday, 8/15 The Health-Tech Connect meetup group is gathering once again, this time for some drinks, snacks, and informal discussions over at Earl's Beer & Cheese for a special happy hour.

Thursday, 8/15 Join the Hackaday Make It NYC meetup at Kickstarter where Supplyframe's Giovanni Salinas, Sophi Kravitz, and Majenta Strongheart whill host an interactive workshop covering all things product development.

Thursday, 8/22 The Nanotech NYC meetup group heads to New Lab in Brooklyn for their next Nanochats seminar, featuring group leader Jacob Trevino. He'll be discussing the all-important topic of nanotechnology's role in society.

Some other upcoming events to keep on your radar...

Friday, 8/23 Join the New York Academy of Sciences for a brainy comedy night where local scientists will attempt to confirm the hypothesis that science does indeed have a sense of humor.

Friday, 8/23 NYDesigns holds its third community lunch, a great place to meet other inventors, tinkerers, and awesome startups working in and around NYC.

Wednesday, 9/4 NYDesigns is hosting is next Women in Tech Happy Hour at Bierocracy in Long Island City. As always, individuals who identify as female and men are also welcome to attend.

Wednesday, 9/11 Scientists, researchers, cartographers, artists, andeveryone in between will be gathering together at Peculier Pub for the next SciArt mixer.

Wednesday, 9/25 Coming off their 1st birthday party, the NYC JLABS crew is taking a short break for the summer but will be back in September for their next Innovators and Entrepreneurs mixer.

Wednesday, 9/25 The RobotLab meetup's September event focuses on the good, the bad, and the ugly of Industry 4.0 and autonomous manufacturing.

Tuesday, 10/15 Careers & Connections 2019. October may feel far away, but I promise you it's not and you'll want to be sure to mark your calendars for our next big event, the Careers & Connections mini-conference and networking event, held concurrently with emerging healthcare technologies conference SINAInnovations.

Tuesday & Wednesday, 10/15-16 SINAInnovations Conference. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is hosting its eighth annual SINAInnovations conference around the theme of Artificial Intelligence. A range of talks andpanels will focus on the explosive growth of AI in our society and in particular in medicine, featuring international thought leaders across the range of relevant domains.

Map of the Month

What will the climate in your city feel like in 60 years?

Odds & Ends

All you need to make this furniture is plywood or MDF, and a large enough router.

0 notes