The burgeoning Robot Middle Class [Article]

Contrast the MIT Tech Review article wondering how a mass influx of robots affects human employment, to  the International Labour Organisation’s report which warns of social unrest and growing unequality as number of unemployed people worldwide continues to grow.

Imagining the possible future scenarios for middle-class unemployment is a first step to considering ways in which we can preserve our quality of life given the robotic future that will meet us. Without doubt, robots can greatly improve many lives, offering everything from smart prosthetics to home care for the aging. But for humans, the robot future is a mixed bag. [MIT article] 

“In advanced economies, unemployment spells have lengthened and more workers are becoming discouraged and dropping out of the labour market altogether. This not only has adverse consequences on individuals and their families, but also can weaken previously stable societies, as opportunities to advance in a good job and improve one’s standard of living become the exception rather than the rule” [ILO report]

Truly take a vacation: Ideas for making a “email free holiday” a success [Article]

Microsoft Researcher Danah Boyd has a bunch of tried & tested techniques to make sure you are not tethered to that email inbox while you’re trying to have a vacation.

The idea is simple: turn off your email. Set up a filter and Send all messages to /dev/null (a.k.a. the Trash). Send a bounce message telling people their message wasn’t received and that they should resend it after X date or send you the contents via snail mail. Of course, if you just turn off your email with no warning, you’re bound to piss off your friends, family, colleagues, and clients. So here are some tips to successfully taking an email sabbatical. 

Read on

Disruptions: The Echo Chamber of Silicon Valley [Article]

The NY Times Nick Bilton walks into the echo chamber called Silicon Valley, & discovers that lots of startups are solving fake problems that don’t actually create any value (or in other words, a solution is search of a problem).  Read more from Evgeny Morozov here

Using yellow liquid to flush toilets [Improbable Research]

Improbable Research, as the site says, is research that makes people laugh and then think. “Our goal is to make people laugh, then make them think. We also hope to spur people’s curiosity, and to raise the question: How do you decide what’s important and what’s not, and what’s real and what’s not — in science and everywhere else?”

Consider this one for instance, German research that explores using urine as the main fluid to make flush toilets flush

 the utilization of yellow water as toilet flush liquid seems to be advantageous. To be accepted for this purpose, urine has to be decolorized (and also deodorized).

Conserve water, & save your water bills – watch out for those new products hitting the shelves at a store near you shortly!

How do you measure a tornado? [Article]

Kurt Vonnegut’s brother, Bernie, posthumously won the 1997 Ig Nobel Prize for meteorology for establishing that the then state-of-the-art method, involving a chicken carcass and a cannon was imperfect. The New Yorker had a recent piece on how tornadoes, or rather their impacts, are measured, using a scale that came into use in 2007, called the E.F scale:

Mobile water companies and irrelevance [Article]

Ben Evans is an internet analyst, & writes that mobile operators innovations are irrelevant.

..the key point is that something can look like it’s an adjacent area when actually all of your skills and leverage points are irrelevant. Mobile operators have almost none of the skills and leverage points needed to be relevant for anything other than connectivity.

He echoes others that have argued essentially the same. He publishes an excellent free weekly newsletter that covers the tech/ telco industry, if you are interested in this industry.

Interview with a dead man [Article]

Helen Thomas writes about Graham who lives with one of the world’s most mysterious neurological conditions: he has a condition known as Cotard delusion. People with this extremely rare condition believe that they, or parts of their body don’t exist. A fascinating, & for those with it – insufferable, insight.

Nine years ago, Graham woke up and discovered he was dead. “It’s really hard to explain,” he says. “I just felt like my brain didn’t exist any more. I kept on telling the doctors that the tablets weren’t going to do me any good because I didn’t have a brain. I’d fried it in the bath.”