This week’s Interesting Things // August, Week 2
Move over watercolor painting, the digital art movement is upon us. The art collective Team Lab has created 32,000 square feet of interactive art installations called “DMM.Planets” — and the work could be the future of art. The exhibition will run through August 31st and features an infinite room full of crystals, A cozy black hole where every surface is a pillow, and a dark universe that rains flowers.
Here’s a fun fact: Facebook hates your ad blocker. HATES it. And with over 26% of all computers using ad blockers, Facebook will now disguise all their desktop ads as organic content in an attempt to bypass the services.
Artist and photographer Fede Ruiz Santesteban found a way to develop images on leaves without using chemicals or additional inks. The results are kind of amazing:
Uber has a management problem. If they exert too much control over drivers, they’re treating them like employees as opposed to independent contractors (entitling drivers to hundreds of millions of dollars in expense reimbursements). And if they exert too little control, the customer experience declines because there’s no guarantee you’ll get a ride. The solution? Algorithmic management. A new study out of NYU details how Uber uses apps and notifications to nudge workers towards specific behaviors. The findings make it clear that the ride-sharing giant has legitimate control over its drivers’ work hours and decision making… all without actually “employing” them.
A team of researchers has found that a “sizable portion” of the 100 million Volkswagen Group cars sold since 1995 can be unlocked remotely by hackers. And apparently the only hardware an attacker requires is a homemade radio costing about $40.
When IBM’s Watson won Jeopardy in 2011, it was considered a major advancement for the artificial intelligence industry. Fast forward 5.5 years and Watson is now saving lives, literally. Doctor’s at the University of Tokyo has a female patient that was not responding well to her leukemia treatment, so they turned to Watson for help. In just 10 minutes, Watson compared the patient’s genetic changes with a database of 20 million cancer research papers and determined she was suffering from a rare form of leukemia that had eluded the doctors. The AI’s positive identification allowed doctors to develop a treatment for the woman in question, ultimately saving her life.
