DPL Reading List – January 18, 2019
Here are some of the new and interesting articles we found this week.
12 books that CEOs think you should read in 2019 – “If you’re a founder or aspiring entrepreneur, perhaps you’re looking to round out your reading list for 2019 with a few inspiring business reads. We asked entrepreneurs to offer their book recommendations for the new year, including both recent releases and older favorites. A number of CEOs lauded the first book on this list–one you might have already picked up over the holidays–but keep reading for other titles you may have overlooked.”
Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway. – “When it comes to the internet, trust is something easily lost and difficult to regain. In a sense, every time a giant of the internet surveillance economy is revealed to have sold out its customers in some innovatively horrifying way, the ensuing chaos almost serves as free advertising for DuckDuckGo.”
Why Is It So Hard to Make a Computer Talk Like a Human? – ““Intonation is a combination of four qualities: tone (the most important), speech rate, intensity, and loudness. I can do multiple combinations of those when I talk. Siri can’t,” Rodero says, who says she has worked with voice engineers and provided them with a list of intonations connected to emotions, including joy, sadness, and everything in between. But there’s the inherent limitation of being a machine — they can spit out only what we put in—and each of us is unique in myriad ways.”
What happened when I followed Ben Franklin’s schedule for a month – “Franklin was a productivity master. It’s likely what allowed him to juggle a variety of roles and tasks, including writer, printer, politician, entrepreneur, scientist, inventor, diplomat and postmaster. In his autobiography, he shared his daily routine, and its simplicity struck me. So did its rigor.”
The Coming Commodification of Life at Home – “These thousands of devices, or even just hundreds or tens, would capture an unprecedented amount of data about domestic life. They present a possible future in which the experience of doing stuff at home converges with the experience of being online, in which a company can catalog people’s daily habits and present them with more of what it thinks they’ll like—the transformation of the home into just another tech platform.”
Cheaper AI for Everyone Is the Promise With Intel and Facebook’s New Chip – “The new “inference” AI chip could help Facebook and others deploy machine learning more efficiently and cheaply. The social network uses AI to do a wide range of things, including tagging people in images, translating posts from one language to another, and catching prohibited content. These tasks are more costly, in terms of time and energy, if run on more generic hardware.”
8 robots racing to win the delivery wars of 2019 – “These small bots could, in theory, solve many of these “last mile” problems by offering an efficient, quick, and inexpensive way to get your stuff whenever you needed it. This is easier said than done; there are plenty of unanswered questions about how these bots should operate in society. They must be good citizens, respect humans, and do their job as invisibly as possible. All without getting attacked or bursting into flames first.”
