Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for September 3, 2019

Adidas is harvesting ocean pollution as material for new sneakers; Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen calls for light-handed regulatory approach to help cryptocurrency flourish; Using AI to cultivate empathy in crisis counsellors; A critique of a recent nutrition study claiming benefits from plant-based diets; Interesting links in a #steemstem curation post


Straight from <A HREF=https://theoldreader.com>my RSS feed	Whatever gets my attention

Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

pixabay license: source.

Adidas is turning plastic ocean waste into sneakers and sportswear - Adidas has been working with partner, Parley, since 2015 to collect and sort plastics from beaches and coastal areas. After sorting, anything with polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is reclaimed for use in the comany's shoes. The company says it has cleaned 2,810 tons of plastics from the world's oceans and expects to make 11 million pairs of shoes with the recycled plastic in 2019. The company also hopes to produce its first 100% recyclable shoe by 2021 and to replace all "virgin polyester" with recycled polyester in its manufacturing process by 2024.

Andreessen Horowitz Co-Founder: Crypto a Solution to Web's Challenges - No matter how much time goes by, I guess I'll always think of Marc Andreessen as the creator of the NCSA Mosaic web browser, but now he's also a major venture capitalist. In a recent speech, he suggested that cryptocurrency may have the ability to solve some of the Internet's problems, like privacy, but argued that for that to happen the government needs to take a light-handed approach to regulation while the technology matures.

AI analysis gives guidance to crisis counselors - In the paper, Finding Your Voice: the Linguistic Development of Mental Health Counselors, researchers publish the results from analyzing transcripts of calls on suicde and mental health crisis lines. The analysis revealed linguistic patterns that develop in experienced crisis counselors as a result of training and empathy in hopes that this knowledge can be used to improve training for future volunteers. The analysis made use of natural language processing (NLP) and observed that experienced counsellors tend to drift away from formal language that they had picked up in training towards a more personal and informal language. Experienced counsellors were also more likely to mention specific concepts like "therapist", "app", or "meditation" instead of generalized concepts like "brainstorming" and "activities". In addition to the practical advance of knowledge from this research, it also serves to demonstrate how AI can be used to assist people who work in conversation-heavy professions. h/t Communications of the ACM

New Research On Plant-Based Diets and Mortality - This youtube video covers a new study that reanalyzed data from a previous study to compare the health of people who ate plant-based diets with those who didn't. The new study found a slightly improved relative risk for those who ate the plant-based diets, but due to statistical limitations, it couldn't rule out the possibility that the improvement in health is because people who eat plant-based diets are likelier to be wealthier and make other healthier lifestyle choices than those who don't. In short, maybe plant-based diets are a little bit healthier, but this study didn't show it. The speaker also argues that we have reached the end of usefulness for observational nutrition studies, saying that they have shown everything that they can, and it is time to go to the next level through the use of randomized and controlled trials that will produce more reliable claims. h/t RealClear Science

STEEM SteemSTEM Distilled #107 - Well, as I write this on Monday afternoon, most of the day is gone and the on-going Steem outage is making it very hard to find things, so I'm just going to recommend that you read this SteemSTEM Distilled article from a few days ago, and I'll get back on my normal track tomorrow (assuming the blockchain is fully accessible by then). The @steemstem curation post covers topics including communicating about climate change, and the role that socialization and environment play in our understanding of gender. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @steemstem)

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About this series

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