Grass

Image: Grass, this photo is available to licence on EyeEm.

#271

Friday, July 9, 2021

In This Edition:
Limerick DEM, fitness trackers & COVID-19 recovery, faces in things, data structures visualised, the roots of corporate work culture in Soviet USSR, & centuries of sound!

Limerick is soon to have a directly elected mayor (DEM) due to a new bill being created by the Irish Government. Stephen Kinsella from UL tweeted two great threads about how the expectations set in the DEM 2019 report are not being met by the Bill, and how there is still time to write to Minister Peter Burke to have this changed.

Everyone in Limerick should engage with this, as should everyone in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway, and Waterford, who wants a DEM in the future to have sufficient decentralised power and money control, in order to do positive things for their city.

Fitness Trackers & COVID-19 Recovery

Image: Unsplash, FitNish Media

A study of freely volunteered data from fitness trackers of 243 people with COVID was compared with the tracker data of 641 sick people without COVID. The study showed that it takes the body two to three months to recover from COVID-19. Resting heart rate takes the longest to return to baseline after two to three months, with step count returning to normal levels at around day 24.

Source:

Faces In Things

Image: Taubert et al, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2021

Researchers at the University of Sydney found that when the brain sees faces in objects, known as face pareidolia, the same areas of the brain's face detection network are used as when seeing people's faces. They also found a bias link between the emotion the brain perceives in a face and evaluation of emotion in subsequent faces.

Source:

Data Structures Visualised

Image: David Galles

David Galles atthe University of San Francisco created a fantastic website with animations that visual data structures and algorithms as they are executed.

The Roots Of Corporate Work Culture In Soviet USSR

Image: Bogdan Costea

In 1935 a Soviet miner named Alexei Stakhanov set a record by extracting 102 tonnes of coal in a single shift, compared to the shift average of 7 tonnes. Stakhanov was hailed as the new standard for super workers in Soviet Russia and used to create a new movement called Stakhanovism to promote workers giving their all in the service of their work. Eighty-five years later, this cult of work is alive and well in the corporate workplace where employees are expected to hand over their lives to their jobs and play the corporate power & optics games that are rife in that environment. In The Conversation this week, Bogdan Costea and Peter Watt published a great piece on the history of Stakhanovism and how that led the way for the corporate culture of the 21st century.

Centuries Of Sound

Image: Centuries Of Sound

Centuries of Sound is a project that releases an audio mix for every year of recorded sound, starting in 1859!

About Found This Week

Found This Week is a curated blog of interesting posts, articles, links and stories in the world of technology, science and life in general.
Each edition is curated by Daryl Feehely every Friday and highlights cool stuff found each week.
The first 104 editions were published on Medium before this site was created, check out the archive here.

Daryl Feehely

I’m a web consultant, contract web developer, technical project manager & photographer originally from Cork, now based in London. I offer my clients strategy, planning & technical delivery services, remotely & in person. I also offer freelance CTO services to companies in need of technical bootstrapping or reinvention. If you think I can help you in your business, check out my details on http://darylfeehely.com

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