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HI FOLKS!
I don't know how you feel but I am fed up with products that don't last more than a month before disintegrating! The initial idea was to keep the economy rolling at full steam providing jobs for the unemployed. Apparently keeping people employed and consuming is what keeps company executives and governments economically comfortable while the industrial pollution they create does not seem to bother our wonders of social leadership as long as the profit margin is above the red line. The fact most products produced today are basically crap and destructive to the environment and the fact millions of people are basically surviving below the poverty line while working full time to pay for the products they are producing, also does not bother our comfortable bosses in the corporate board rooms and in the halls of both our large and small governments.
Today, we have just as many unemployed as yesterday and quality products are rare and far between and often too expensive for the average middle class individual. The larger companies are using Robots to produce thousands of items that are of marginal use to humans. We human so called "consumers" are not employed by those companies and yet we are expected to buy their cheap products! Where is the logic? Those of us who do work are basically in the service sectors pushing brooms and cleaning toilets and often surviving in a stress filled state of debt! It is economic slavery and my conclusion is that we have to expose and remove from our economy the companies and governments that deliberately create products and social policies that fall apart! We have to remember that we are not economic slaves. That freedom is extremely valuable and when we sacrifice our individual freedom to work for a company producing a product, or a government attempting to run a society, we should feel pride in what we produce. We should create products and policies that will last and will help to create individual and sustainable freedom from economic slavery for everybody and not simply for a comfortable few! We can then use our free time to create vegetable and flower gardens and Green forests filled with Birds and small animals and people! As for the hard labor necessary for maintaining a decent standard of living, Robots are here and now and they should be programmed to help the helpless and to create more basic freedom for all of us, not for creating crap for a few selfish individuals.
They should be doing the heavy lifting.
Signed: Joseph Raglione.
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Before I started working on real-world robots, I wrote about their fictional and historical ancestors. This isn’t so far removed from what I do now. In factories, labs, and of course science fiction, imaginary robots keep fueling our imagination about artificial humans and autonomous machines.
Real-world robots remain surprisingly dysfunctional, although they are steadily infiltrating urban areas across the globe. This fourth industrial revolution driven by robots is shaping urban spaces and urban life in response to opportunities and challenges in economic, social, political, and healthcare domains. Our cities are becoming too big for humans to manage.
Good city governance enables and maintains smooth flow of things, data, and people. These include public services, traffic, and delivery services. Long queues in hospitals and banks imply poor management. Traffic congestion demonstrates that roads and traffic systemsare inadequate. Goods that we increasingly order online don’t arrive fast enough. And the WiFi often fails our 24/7 digital needs. In sum, urban life, characterized by environmental pollution, speedy life, traffic congestion, connectivity and increased consumption, needs robotic solutions—or so we are led to believe.
In the past five years, national governments have started to see automation as the key to (better) urban futures. Many cities are becoming test beds for national and local governments for experimenting with robots in social spaces, where robots have both practical purpose (to facilitate everyday life) and a very symbolic role (to demonstrate good city governance). Whether through autonomous cars, automated pharmacists, service robots in local stores, or autonomous drones delivering Amazon parcels, cities are being automated at a steady pace.
Many large cities (Seoul, Tokyo, Shenzhen, Singapore, Dubai, London, San Francisco) serve as test beds for autonomous vehicle trials in a competitive race to develop “self-driving” cars. Automated ports andwarehouses are also increasingly automated and robotized. Testing of delivery robots and drones is gathering pace beyond the warehouse gates. Automated control systems are monitoring, regulating and optimizing traffic flows. Automated vertical farmsare innovating production of food in “non-agricultural” urban areas around the world. New mobile health technologies carry promise of healthcare “beyond the hospital.” Social robots in many guises—from police officers to restaurant waiters—are appearing in urban public and commercial spaces.
As these examples show, urban automation is taking place in fits and starts, ignoring some areas and racing ahead in others. But as yet, no one seems to be taking account of all of these various and interconnected developments. So, how are we to forecast our cities of the future? Only a broad view allows us to do this. To give a sense, here are three examples: Tokyo, Dubai, and Singapore.
Tokyo
Currently preparing to host the Olympics 2020, Japan’s government also plans to use the event to showcase many new robotic technologies. Tokyo is therefore becoming an urban living lab. The institution in charge is the Robot Revolution Realization Council, established in 2014 by the government of Japan.
The main objectives of Japan’s robotization are economic reinvigoration, cultural branding, and international demonstration. In line with this, the Olympics will be used to introduce and influence global technology trajectories. In the government’s vision for the Olympics, robot taxis transport tourists across the city, smart wheelchairs greet Paralympians at the airport, ubiquitous service robots greet customers in 20-plus languages, and interactively augmented foreigners speak with the local population in Japanese.
Tokyo shows us what the process of state-controlled creation of a robotic city looks like.
Singapore
Singapore, on the other hand, is a “smart city.” Its government is experimenting with robots with a different objective: as physical extensions of existing systems to improve management and control of the city.
In Singapore, the techno-futuristic national narrative sees robots and automated systems as a “natural” extension of the existing smart urban ecosystem. This vision is unfolding through autonomous delivery robots (the Singapore Post’s delivery drone trials in partnership with AirBus helicopters) and driverless bus shuttles from Easymile, EZ10.
Meanwhile, Singapore hotels are employing state-subsidized service robots to clean rooms and deliver linen and supplies, and robots for early childhood education have been piloted to understand how robots can be used in pre-schools in the future. Health and social care is one of the fastest growing industries for robots and automation in Singapore and globally.
Dubai
Dubai is another emerging prototype of a state-controlled smart city. But rather than seeing robotization simply as a way to improve the running of systems, Dubai is intensively robotizing public services with the aim of creating the “happiest city on Earth.” Urban robot experimentation in Dubai reveals that authoritarian state regimes are finding innovative ways to use robots in public services, transportation, policing, and surveillance.
National governments are in competition to position themselves on the global politico-economic landscape through robotics, and they are also striving to position themselves as regional leaders. This was the thinking behind the city’s September 2017 test flight of a flying taxi developed by the German drone firm Volocopter—staged to “lead the Arab world in innovation.” Dubai’s objective is to automate 25% of its transport system by 2030.
It is currently also experimenting with Barcelona-based PAL Robotics’ humanoid police officer and Singapore-based vehicle OUTSAW. If the experiments are successful, the government has announced it will robotize 25% of the police force by 2030.
While imaginary robots are fueling our imagination more than ever—from Ghost in the Shell to Blade Runner 2049—real-world robots make us rethink our urban lives.
These three urban robotic living labs—Tokyo, Singapore, Dubai—help us gauge what kind of future is being created, and by whom. From hyper-robotized Tokyo to smartest Singapore and happy, crime-free Dubai, these three comparisons show that, no matter what the context, robots are perceived as a means to achieve global futures based on a specific national imagination. Just like the films, they demonstrate the role of the state in envisioning and creating that future.
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Welcome to the Barking Up The Wrong Tree weekly update for April 15th, 2018.
This Is How To Sleep Better: 5 Secrets From Neuroscience
***
Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my first book become a Wall Street Journal bestseller! To check it out, click here.
Two-thirds of adults throughout all developed nations fail to obtain the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep.
And that's bad. Really bad... Yes, this is the part where I lecture you on how horrific missing sleep is. I promise to make it as quick and terrifying as possible, okay?
Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer. Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease. Inadequate sleep—even moderate reductions for just one week—disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic. Short sleeping increases the likelihood of your coronary arteries becoming blocked and brittle, setting you on a path toward cardiovascular disease, stroke, and congestive heart failure. Fitting Charlotte BrontĂ«’s prophetic wisdom that “a ruffled mind makes a restless pillow,” sleep disruption further contributes to all major psychiatric conditions, including depression, anxiety, and suicidality.
So if you're fond of saying, "I'll sleep when I'm dead", well, that may be happening a lotfaster than you anticipated.
But I know: you're fine. You don't feel tired. Or you've "taught" yourself to get by on less sleep. Or you have mutant powers. Nope. Truth is you're too tired to realize how tired you are. You're like a drunk shouting, "GIMME THE KEYS! I CAN DRIVE! I'M FINE!"
When participants were asked about their subjective sense of how impaired they were, they consistently underestimated their degree of performance disability.
Which is probably why “…vehicular accidents caused by drowsy driving exceed those caused by alcohol and drugs combined.”
You need eight hours. The National Sleep Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention both recommend 7 to 9 hours -- but after 10 days of 7 hours your brain is mush whether you realize it or not. So get 8.
After being awake for nineteen hours, people who were sleep-deprived were as cognitively impaired as those who were legally drunk… After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail. Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours.
Let's not forget: sleep deprivation is routinely used as a torture method. And we do this to ourselves. Voluntarily. (I've moved on to waterboarding myself. I like a challenge.)
But, seriously, if two-thirds of people have this problem then we need some real answers from a real expert...
Matthew Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley, the director of its Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab, and a former professor of psychiatry at Harvard University. He's been a sleep consultant for the NBA, the NFL, Pixar and a bunch of other places your mom would be really impressed by.
We're gonna explode some myths, review the science and get some great tips on how to sleep better -- along with the best way to implement them.
Let's get to it...
So Why Do We Need Sleep Anyway?
On the surface, from an evolutionary perspective, sleep makes absolutely zero sense. You can't gather food, find a mate, socialize or do anything useful while you're out cold. And you're vulnerable to predators.
Yet every animal that has a lifespan of more than a few days sleeps or performs a sleep-like activity. So obviously something pretty darn important is going on. Actually, a lot of important stuff...
Sleep is essential for memory and skill development. Cheat yourself on zzz's and learning drops as much as 40%. Yeah, thats the difference between an A+ and an F.
When we compared the effectiveness of learning between the two groups, the result was clear: there was a 40 percent deficit in the ability of the sleep-deprived group to cram new facts into the brain (i.e., to make new memories), relative to the group that obtained a full night of sleep.
Sleep is also a built-in therapist, emotionally working out the issues you're dealing with while you're out cold.
REM-sleep dreaming offers a form of overnight therapy. That is, REM-sleep dreaming takes the painful sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional episodes you have experienced during the day, offering emotional resolution when you awake the next morning...
That's not too shocking -- we've all been moody after a night of little rest. But what you probably don't know is that sleep also helps you deal with the emotions of others. Less slumber means less emotional intelligence.
By removing REM sleep, we had, quite literally, removed participants’ levelheaded ability to read the social world around them.
Nobody has ever told you to "stay awake on a problem." And there's a good reason that "sleep on it" is a phrase that exists not only in English, but in numerous languages. Next time your Swahili-speaking friend needs to come up with a creative solution to a tricky challenge, tell them to "kulala juu ya tatizo."
Things were very different for those participants who had obtained a full night of sleep—one dressed with late-morning, REM-rich slumber. Almost 60 percent returned and had the “ah-ha!” moment of spotting the hidden cheat—which is a threefold difference in creative solution insight afforded by sleep!
And from a health perspective, sleep is the after hours cleaning crew. You make quite a mess in your grey matter with all that thinkin' you do all day. Without the janitor to sweep up those amyloid dust bunnies you have a much higher chance of developing Alzheimer’s.
Without sufficient sleep, amyloid plaques build up in the brain, especially in deep-sleep-generating regions, attacking and degrading them... getting too little sleep across the adult life span will significantly raise your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
And downtime makes you sexy. Yeah,research shows "beauty sleep" is real.
(To learn more about the science of a successful life, check out my bestselling bookhere.)
Alrighty: sleep-deprived bad. Lots-of-sleepgood. So if you're only going to do one thing to improve your nightly slumber, what should it be?
Have A Consistent Sleep Schedule
Go to bed at the same time every night. Wake up at the same time every day. It's crucial.
...if you can only adhere to one of these each and every day, make it: going to bed and waking up at the same time of day no matter what.
Don't just set an alarm to wake up -- set an alarm for bedtime. Build yourself a good pre-sleep routine where you wind down at the same time every night. And if you can get someone to read you a bedtime story, all the better.
(To learn the seven-step morning ritual that will make you happy all day, click here.)
You're consistent and ritualized. Great. So let's talk about that thing you hear mentioned constantly: blue light. How your smartphone and iPad screens are teaming up to turn you into an insomniac. Thing is, that's only half the story...
Even a hint of dim light—8 to 10 lux—has been shown to delay the release of nighttime melatonin in humans. The feeblest of bedside lamps pumps out twice as much: anywhere from 20 to 80 lux. A subtly lit living room, where most people reside in the hours before bed, will hum at around 200 lux. Despite being just 1 to 2 percent of the strength of daylight, this ambient level of incandescent home lighting can have 50 percent of the melatonin-suppressing influence within the brain.
That sleep hormone melatonin doesn't just immediately flood your system when you flip the light switch off. It takes time. So dim the lights long before you're ready to hit the sack.
And make sure your bedroom is darker than an H.P. Lovecraft story when it's finally time to sleep.
(To learn the science of how to take naps that will make you smarter and happier, clickhere.)
Now everybody knows dark is important when it comes to sleep. But there's a second melatonin trigger that most people don't pay enough attention to...
Be Cool
Ever try to sleep when it's too hot? It's not just icky uncomfortable, but it's also telling your brain that it's not bedtime.
Your nocturnal melatonin levels are therefore controlled not only by the loss of daylight at dusk, but also the drop in temperature that coincides with the setting sun... A bedroom temperature of around 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18.3°C) is ideal for the sleep of most people, assuming standard bedding and clothing.
Your body wants its core temperature low when you sleep. So it's gotta dump all that heat you're producing. And this is why you often see people's feet or arms sticking out from under the covers: unconscious heat regulation.
The need to dump heat from our extremities is also the reason that you may occasionally stick your hands and feet out from underneath the bedcovers at night due to your core becoming too hot, usually without your knowing.
For super sleep, take a hot bath before bed. It doesn't just relax you; it dilates blood vessels, allowing your body to ditch all that extra core warmth. This can boost NREM sleep by up to 15%.
When you get out of the bath, those dilated blood vessels on the surface quickly help radiate out inner heat, and your core body temperature plummets. Consequently, you fall asleep more quickly because your core is colder. Hot baths prior to bed can also induce 10 to 15 percent more deep NREM sleep in healthy adults.
Exercise definitely improves sleep but you don't want to do it within 3 hours of bedtime because -- guess what? It raises your core temperature.
(To learn 5 secrets from neuroscience that will increase your attention span, click here.)
I'm guessing you know that drinking a latte and a Red Bull before bed is not a great idea. And you probably heard booze isn't a genius move here either. But there's more to it than that...
No Coffee, No Booze... And No Sleeping Pills
If you want the best sleep possible, you should only use caffeine in the morning or early afternoon.
Caffeine has an average half-life of five to seven hours. Let’s say that you have a cup of coffee after your evening dinner, around 7:30 p.m. This means that by 1:30 a.m., 50 percent of that caffeine may still be active and circulating throughout your brain tissue.
And decaf isn't really decaf. It actually contains 15-30% of the caffeine of a regular cup of coffee. So if you drink three or four cups of decaf after dinner, well, don't be surprised if you're staring at the ceiling at 2AM. (To learn more about the science of coffee, click here.)
And, no, alcohol doesn't help you sleep. What it does is actually more akin to anesthesia, which is not "real" sleep. And because it's not the real deal, your brain can't do its memory consolidation work properly.
...those who had their sleep laced with alcohol on the first night after learning suffered what can conservatively be described as partial amnesia seven days later, forgetting more than 50 percent of all that original knowledge.
And sleeping pills affect the same receptors in your brain as alcohol. So you get the same results -- except their effects on memory are even worse.
A recent team of leading medical doctors and researchers examined all published studies to date on newer forms of sedative sleeping pills that most people take. They considered sixty-five separate drug-placebo studies, encompassing almost 4,500 individuals. Overall, participants subjectively felt they fell asleep faster and slept more soundly with fewer awakenings, relative to the placebo. But that’s not what the actual sleep recordings showed. There was no difference in how soundly the individuals slept. Both the placebo and the sleeping pills reduced the time it took people to fall asleep (between ten and thirty minutes), but the change was not statistically different between the two. In other words, there was no objective benefit of these sleeping pills beyond that which a placebo offered.
I'm sure this is going to get me hate mail from Ambien lovers. Emails they won't remember sending, that is.
(To learn how to best use caffeine -- from a neuroscientist -- click here.)
So what if all of the above isn't cutting it? What if you have stone cold chronic insomnia? What's the cutting edge front-line treatment for the most serious of sleep issues?
To Sleep More... Sleep Less
If you're only able to sleep 6 hours a night, then restrict yourself to 5. You'll feel like poop the next day and crash hard...
But then only let yourself sleep 5 hours and 15 minutes. Now you feel like double poop and will be out before your head hits the pillow. So go to 5 hours and 30 minutes... And as long as you meet your designated quota, incrementally increase the amount of sleep you allow yourself. No naps.
You'll be a zombie for a while but this is actually a core part of what is now quickly becoming the first-line treatment for chronic insomnia: CBT-I. The application of cognitive behavioral therapy to sleep issues.
One of the more paradoxical CBT-I methods used to help insomniacs sleep is to restrict their time spent in bed, perhaps even to just six hours of sleep or less to begin with. By keeping patients awake for longer, we build up a strong sleep pressure—a greater abundance of adenosine. Under this heavier weight of sleep pressure, patients fall asleep faster, and achieve a more stable, solid form of sleep across the night. In this way, a patient can regain their psychological confidence in being able to self-generate and sustain healthy, rapid, and sound sleep, night after night: something that has eluded them for months if not years. Upon reestablishing a patient’s confidence in this regard, time in bed is gradually increased.
(To learn 3 secrets from neuroscience that will help you quit bad habits without willpower, click here.)
Okay, hopefully that wasn't too exhausting. (Or maybe it's good that it was?) Let's round everything up and learn the most important question to ask your doctor...
Sum Up
Here's how to sleep better:
Have a consistent sleep schedule: Yes, that includes weekends. Yes, I understand that you hate me now.
"Blue" light isn't the only problem: Dim the lights in the evening. Set the mood. (Barry White music optional.)
Be Cool: People stick their feet out from under the covers because it's good science.
No coffee, no booze... and no sleeping pills: And while I'm ruining everything and being a total buzzkill let me add: there is no Santa Claus.
To sleep more... sleep less: Don't think of it as CBT; look at it as getting revenge on your brain for not letting you sleep.
What's the question you definitely want to ask your doctor before your next procedure?
"How much sleep did you get last night?"
The amount of zzz's you get certainly affects your life. But don't forget that how much sleepother people get can affect your life too. Or end it. After a 30 hour shift, residents make 460 percent more errors.
Additionally, after a thirty-hour shift without sleep, residents make a whopping 460 percent more diagnostic mistakes in the intensive care unit than when well rested after enough sleep. Throughout the course of their residency, one in five medical residents will make a sleepless-related medical error that causes significant, liable harm to a patient. One in twenty residents will kill a patient due to a lack of sleep.
But hopefully you won't be seeing a doctor anytime soon because you'll be in tip-top shape due to all that glorious shut-eye you're getting.
And this is the one post where if you fell asleep while reading it, well, I'm not offended.
Please save this on Pocket. Thank you!
Email Extras
Findings from around the internet...
+ Want to learn how to pick a career that fits you? Click here. (An insightful deep dive from the inimitable Tim Urban. His brilliant TED talk on procrastination is here.)
+ And want to know the questions to ask yourself at any point in your career? Clickhere.
+ Want to know the right way to guilt trip your kids? Click here.
+ Want to know the 4 questions to ask yourself before you quit something? Clickhere.
+ You made it to the end of the email. You tired? I sure am. Thanks for keeping me company. Alrighty, Crackerjack Time: If you read my book, you might remember Matt Polly -- my friend who dropped out of Princeton to move to the Shaolin Temple and master Kung Fu. (He subsequently became a Rhodes Scholar and a bestselling author.) Matt's been hard at work on a biography of none other than Bruce Lee. At over 600 pages with more than 100 original interviews it looks to be the the defintive book about the martial arts icon. And I'm thrilled to say it's now available for pre-order. Check it out here.
Thanks for reading! Eric
PS: If a friend forwarded this to you, you can sign up to get the weekly email yourself here.
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Canada's shameful slaughter of defenseless seal pups has been going on for three days now, and already thousands of terrified baby seals have been violently killed. But momentum is on our side, and we're closer than ever to ending this massacre. Your generous gift today will help keep up that momentum by immediately strengthening our work for seals and other animals used for their skins.
Beginning this week, thousands of seals—most between the ages of 3 weeks and 3 months—will be barbarically killed and may even be skinned alive, each one a victim of Canada's East Coast commercial seal slaughter.
Even after young harp seals lose their white baby fur at just a few weeks of age, they're still babies. Left to thrive in the wild, they can live for more than 30 years as part of a large, social colony.
But that idyllic life has been replaced with a nightmare, as sealers head out onto the ice with guns and hakapiks—thick wooden clubs that have a sharp metal hook on one end. Many seals won't die after the first blow, and they'll thrash around and scream in pain in front of other terrified seals who will soon meet the same violent end.
The slaughter that began this week is an ugly stain on Canada's global reputation, and it should have ended long ago. The country's attempts to create a market for the fur, meat, and oil from slaughtered seals are failing, and seal-fur "products" remain banned across the EU, Russia, and the United States. Recently, India hammered another nail into the sealing industry's coffin with news that it, too, would prohibit the import of all seal "products"—a victory that comes after more than a decade of pressure from PETA India and other compassionate people.
With virtually no one interested in buying the vile "products," the only thing keeping this bloody industry alive today is the millions in Canadian taxpayer money poured into government subsidies for sealers.