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Member since 2017-07-15T03:50:57Z. Last seen 2025-01-02T20:05:01Z.
2729 blog posts. 128 comments.
市場觀望美國明日公布的通脹數據，以尋找聯儲局下次加息的時機，投資轉趨審慎，美股經過昨日創收市新高後，今日回吐，結束兩連升，目前窄幅上落。
截至本港時間晚上約11時06分，道指報22127點，升8點或0.04%；標普500指數報2496點，升不足1點；納指報6452點，跌1點或0.03%。
本周初至今，全球都出現了風險資產受到追捧的局面，因為市場發現颶風伊爾瑪造成的損失低於原本預期，加上北韓周末並未發射導彈，令緊張局勢有所緩解。不過，分析指出，即使挑釁行為有所減少、敵對立場弱化，但目前市場上仍然存在很多潛在的地緣政治風險，這些情況將使股市上漲趨勢受到限制；再者，北韓仍蔑視聯合國就最近核試驗對該國施加的最新制裁，揚言要加倍努力反擊其所稱的美國侵略威脅。
另外，投資者亦將焦點轉移到明日發布的通脹數據上，因為預期數據會影響美國聯邦儲備理事會(FED)下次加息的時機，亦關注聯儲局縮表的時間。
個股方面，昨日公布新款手機的蘋果繼續受到關注，這家科技行業巨頭昨日推出了新的旗艦產品iPhone X及其他一些新產品，但由於iPhone X在11月後才會交付，蘋果股價現跌逾1%。Western Digital(WD)股價跌逾5%，此前該公司宣布已喪失與東芝集團(Toshiba Corp)的協議。
值得留意的是，今年下半年，美股會遇到很多不利因素，其中投資者將賭注押在美國總統特朗普的稅改上，而稅改充其量可能是發生在2018年的事情。如果稅改失敗，則無法獲得財政推力，投資者或擔憂2019年會出現經濟衰退。
油價上揚，紐約原油期貨現時每桶報48.69美元，升0.46美元或0.95%；倫敦布蘭特期油報54.55美元，升0.28美元或0.52%。
歐洲股市個別發展，英國富時100指數報7392點，跌7點或0.11%；德國DAX指數報12546點，升21點或0.17%；法國CAC 40指數報5219點，升10點或0.20%；意大利富時MIB指數報22267點，升34點或0.16%。
全球「果粉」翹首以待的蘋果新手機發布會於美國時間周二舉行，今年是iPhone面世10周年，據悉將推出3款手機，其中兩款為iPhone 7和iPhone 7 Plus的升級版，以及萬眾矚目的「紀念版」高端款式iPhone X。
股價隨後曾急升20%
執筆之時，筆者尚未知曉iPhone新機的情況，但普遍分析員預期今次將會是繼2014年iPhone 6推出後最大的突破，並將會爆發換機的「超級周期」。摩根大通的數據顯示，截至今年9月，iPhone用戶平均手機持有時間基本上將達「6.4季」，創4年以來的新高。
由於過去3年iPhone的規格都沒有較大的改變，故是次發布會如果沒有出現反高潮令「果粉」失望的話，相信新機將會掀起如iPhone 6的搶購熱潮。回顧當年，新機發布會公布後兩個月，蘋果股價就有逾一成的升幅【圖】，若以當年發布會為基準，
蘋果股價於隨後兩個月大幅跑贏納指9.5%。佔蘋果銷售收入逾半的iPhone
今次會能否令其股價複製上次的強勢，投資者可以拭目以待。
信報投資研究部
25 kposehn 9 hrs 3
Legendary children’s book author Sandra Boynton takes tea with some of her whimsical characters. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Boynton's first book, “Hippos Go Berserk!” (Jesse Dittmar/for The Washington Post) Sandra Boynton lives on a farm in rural Connecticut. She works out of a converted barn, surrounded by pigs in overalls, frogs wearing cowboy hats, a clutch of bemused chickens and a few skeptical sock puppets.
Standing there, you get the feeling that at any moment they might all come alive and break into a high-stepping song-and-dance. Which they probably will. Because this is Boynton’s world, and in Boynton’s world, animals do whatever she wants. And what she wants them to do, mostly, is make her smile.
It’s nice that along the way the charming creatures have sold tens of millions of children’s books and hundreds of millions of greeting cards, recorded six albums, nabbed a Grammy nomination and co-starred in a music video with B.B. King. They’re not slackers, these furry and feathered friends. They always do their job — they make Boynton smile. And then they go out into the world and do the same for untold multitudes of kids.
Sandra Boynton hangs back at the farm. There’s always another critter to conjure into life. Almost every waking moment she is working, bringing more lightness, more laughter into her world. And, thank goodness, into ours.
Boynton’s office is in a converted barn on her property. (Photo by Jesse Dittmar for The Washington Post)
Boynton started drawing her animals on greeting cards to help pay for college. (Photo by Jesse Dittmar for The Washington Post) Perhaps you’re so intimately familiar with Boynton that you can recite her books by heart. Bow to the horse. Bow to the cow. Twirl with the pig if you know how. Or perhaps you’ve never heard of her.
She is both ubiquitous and anonymous. She’s one of the best-selling children’s authors and card designers of all time, yet rarely recognized even in her own small town. This year marks the 40th anniversary of her first kids’ book, and this month she’ll release her latest record, “Hog Wild! A Frenzy of Dance Music,” which includes the Laura Linney/“Weird Al” Yankovich duet the world has been waiting for. But chances are, if you’re not currently driving a minivan with car seats in the back, you might miss it.
Boynton is 64. She wears Converse sneakers, jeans and her feathery blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. Red reading glasses hang around her neck. On a sunny day in July, she pops them on to inspect an image on her computer screen of a dinosaur walking out of his house. Then she adds a vase of red flowers. Because: Why shouldn’t a T. rex have something lovely and civilized?
This is the irreverent whimsy at the heart of Boynton’s world. A world she’s been creating and re-creating for 60 years. As a 4-year-old in Philadelphia, she was hospitalized with encephalitis. She doesn’t remember much except that it was scary, and that Bruce, a slightly older boy in the same ward, always looked out for her, but she knew, somehow, that he wasn’t going to make it.
Somewhere around the same time, she illustrated a short paper book. Here’s the text: “Once there was a funny animal. He had a birthday party. All the animals came. They did not like it, so they left. The end.” Thematically, it’s not that different from the 50-odd books she’s published since.
Her intention then? And now? “I think,” she says, “trying to create safety.”
Boynton grew up Quaker. Her mother was a pointedly funny homemaker, she says, and her father a brilliant English teacher and headmaster of the school she and her three sisters attended. She enrolled at Yale with dreams of becoming a theater director. To help pay for college, she painted the cartoon-style animals she’d been sketching since childhood onto blank gift cards and sold them to specialty shops. Over the next two years she water-colored 60,000 cards by hand.
Just before heading to graduate school in drama in 1976, Boynton swung an invite to a greeting card trade show. Company buyers were interested, but they wanted her to give the characters names and distinct personalities. “They were basically trying to turn me into ‘Peanuts,’ ” she recalls. “I said, ‘That’s not what I’m doing.’ ”
Then she was introduced to the founders of a Chicago upstart called Recycled Paper Greetings. Mike Keiser and Phil Friedmann liked her animals and offered to pay her $50 a design. “I want a royalty,” she remembers saying. “They said, ‘It’s just never done.’ ” But in the end, they agreed.
Keiser recalls that when Boynton signed on, the company was doing about $1 million a year in sales. Within five years their annual revenue topped $100 million, almost all because of Sandra Boynton.
“What a genius,” says Keiser. He remembers walking into a Marshall Fields store and watching customers react to Boynton’s cards. “They’d say, ‘Oh, aren’t these cute. And they’re witty!’ Women would buy clutches of them.”
Her best seller was a twist on the birthday song: “Hippo Birdie Two Ewes.” To Keiser, “it’s probably the best greeting card ever conceived by man.” Er, woman. At any rate, Boynton’s designs made them all multimillionaires.
When Boynton was still at Yale, her mother had nudged her to take note of a classmate who’d won a bronze medal for slalom canoe in the 1972 Olympics. “I said, ‘Mom there are 1,200 people in my class,’ ” Boynton remembers. “And she said, ‘I’m sure he’s more interesting than all of them.’ ”
Boynton’s senior year, she wound up in an acting class with the handsome paddler, and by the end of the first semester, she and Jamie McEwan were in love.
Boynton dropped out of graduate school and devoted herself exclusively to the animals. Publishers passed on a children’s book she’d written, so in 1977, Recycled Paper Greetings published “Hippos Go Berserk!” It sold 50,000 copies and got the publishing world’s attention.
Boynton and McEwan married in 1978 and bought an early 18th-century farmhouse in the Berkshires, where McEwan could continue his training on the Housatonic River. They reconstructed an old barn, giving it his-and-hers offices upstairs and, eventually, a replica 1940s diner — complete with booths, stools and a mint-green refrigerator — where the whole family could hang out.
Here, for the last 35 years, Boynton has shifted attention between her great loves: Jamie, their four children, and those spirited little animals that keep scampering out of her pysche.
Boynton on the grounds of her farm. She has written more than 50 books for children and adults and designed thousands of greeting cards. (Photo by Jesse Dittmar for The Washington Post) A cow says Moo. A sheep says Baa. Three singing pigs say “LA LA LA!”
Read through a bunch of lists of “best books for toddlers,” and Sandra Boynton is, well, often not there. She has no Caldecott Medal. She's not frequently mentioned in the same breath as Dr. Seuss or Maurice Sendak, who was one of her professors at Yale.
In Boynton’s books, there’s no overt moral messaging. No arresting avant-garde visuals. (Drawing, she says, “does not come naturally to me.”) There is only joy. Which is perhaps not enough for the critics doling out awards for literary distinction.
But for parents of tiny humans — perpetually on the verge of collapsing into inexplicable tears — joy is everything.
Darcy Boynton, Sandra’s youngest child, reads all the private messages to her mother’s Facebook account. “We hear a lot from parents whose kids have been really sick or who had really tough times as babies and young children and talk about how my mom’s books helped them get through that time,” she says.
In person, Sandra Boynton is warm and funny, with a throaty voice and a soft, easy smile. She’s not an introvert, but those who know her best say she’s somehow been able to hold on to childhood sensibilities that most of us surrender.
So the books, the drawings, the songs — “They’re for me,” she says. “They’re for me as a child. Things I would respond to.”
Wendy Lukehart chooses the children’s books for the D.C. public library system. When she considers the authors whose books she has to replenish again and again, Boynton is at the top of the list. And to Lukehart, Boynton deserves a rank beside Seuss and Sendak.
“I just think she’s brilliant,” she says. “The wonderful thing about her books is that you can use them to develop children’s sense of humor. You’re helping them learn about the unexpected and ambiguity and surprise.”
Boynton's characters have no race, no gender, no age. The animals are Everychild, with black dot eyes and curved mouths that convey every shade of human emotion. Including the difficult ones. “There’s also a wistfulness in it,” Boynton says of her work. “I guess I think things aren’t truly joyful if they don’t have a grounding component.”
In 2015 the New Yorker published a critical review of Boynton’s collective works. The author, Ian Bogost, deemed “But Not the Hippopotamus,” a “board-book masterpiece,” and wrote that Boynton’s book are “rich works that all of us can and should enjoy far longer than the tiny sands that slip between crawling and preschool can measure.” Boynton thought, when she read the piece, that Bogost was kidding. He insists, via email, that he was not.
Boynton aims to create a world “that is simpler and more benevolent” than reality, she says. (Photo by Jesse Dittmar for The Washington Post) Boynton isn’t much of an advice giver. But there’s one bit of wisdom she does like to dole out: “You need to know what to say no to.”
She’s said no to an awful lot: licensing agreements, television series, Boynton-themed tchotchkes at grocery-store checkout counters. The few products she has sold have been kept completely under her control.
“It’s all her,” says Suzanne Rafer, her longtime editor at Workman Press. “She’s very serious about her work and pays extreme attention to every detail.”
One idea she said yes to was making music. But after composing her first few songs, she cut out the producer who recruited her and began putting together her own records with Mike Ford, her longtime collaborator. The list of boldface names to appear on her albums is jaw-dropping: Meryl Streep, Alison Krauss, Ryan Adams and Kate Winslet, among others. Some she has connections to — Streep’s kids went to the same high school school as hers — but most she has simply cold-called.
In recent years, Boynton began making videos to accompany the songs. “Jamie used to say that my books support my recording habit,” she admits. And that’s fine with her, because making music and videos is where she feels most at home. She’s directing, just as she set out to do.
Jamie was always her sounding board, “just my best editor and check,” she says. He was also “the greatest person in the world.”
Today the lights in Jamie’s office are dark. He died of cancer in 2014.
Sitting in a booth in the diner, Boynton looks out the window and far away as she talks about Jamie’s illness. “I don’t even go there very much in my head,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
She doesn’t believe in the idea of passing grief. “To me, for a healthy person it never ends,” she says. Her solace comes from their grown kids — all of whom sing on her new album — and her work. For her, the act of creating feels like “a place of not existing — of being in a kind of zone.” She has never not been able to access that zone, she says, and — like a child who just wants to play — always relishes being there.
“I’m obviously creating a world that in certain ways is simpler and more benevolent than it can be,” she says. “Except I think that’s a kind of truth about the world, too. The world is so many things. So to say this is a skewed reality — well, it’s all a skewed reality. Why not skew it in this direction? Why not posit a kind of benevolence? And humor.”
27 allenleein 6 hrs 19
Wes “Wuz Good” Armstrong has almost 700,000 followers on Instagram, enough to get paid six figures a year to promote Lexus cars and Axe body spray there. It’s easy, he says, to put products in his comedy and stunt videos for an audience that will still like and comment on the posts as long as they’re entertained.
Snapchat makes things a lot tougher. Armstrong has followers there, too, but he doesn’t know exactly how many. And because of the way the service works, it’s hard for him to track how many people watch the sponsored messages he sprinkles into his posts. To capture the audience for a recent video for Toyota Motor Corp., he had to set an alarm on his iPhone for 23 hours and 59 minutes after the post to remind him to take a screen shot of the number of viewers. He was cutting it close: Like most Snapchat posts, the video disappeared at the 24-hour mark, taking his proof with it. He makes a lot less money on Snapchat—maybe $10,000 a year, he says, if he’s lucky.
This is by design. Snapchat’s parent company, newly public Snap Inc., says the app is mostly meant to be used for communication among close friends. The implication: It’s not designed for the so-called influencers who use carefully edited Instagram photos to get internet-famous enough to hawk Axe. Influencer types use Snapchat anyway, and people follow them anyway, but Snap makes little effort to cater to them. And they’re getting annoyed. The number of influencers posting Snapchat stories in the second quarter fell 20 percent from the first quarter, while Instagram saw an 11 percent jump, according to data-analysis company Captiv8.
He credits Axe body spray with getting him out of the “friend zone.” The company doesn’t send executives to VidCon, the influencer conference in Anaheim, Calif., where Instagram and its corporate parent, Facebook Inc., have a heavy presence. There’s no special Snapchat team catering to the pitchmen and no easy way for the influencers to tell how many views they’re getting, making it less obvious why the Lexuses of the world should pay them. And since Instagram copied Snapchat’s “stories” feature, letting users string together videos that disappear after a certain amount of time, “Instagram has taken a lot of Snapchat’s swag, for sure,” Armstrong says. Snap declined to comment for this story.
Instagram’s clone (also called “stories”) has made it easier for advertisers to cut Snapchat out of their plans. At last year’s New York Fashion Week, marketing agency United Entertainment Group used other services to pay teen girls and college-age women to pitch a large hair-care brand to their peers. “It would have fit right into the Snapchat demographic, but right now there is just so much available on Instagram and on YouTube and on Facebook,” says Josh Kaplan, senior director at UEG’s influencer-focused division. “It makes it very difficult for us to justify pushing content to Snapchat.”
Instagram has catered to this kind of advertising only in the past year or so. Since 2016, the company has made it easier for brands to track the popularity of posts by the influencers they pay and let the brands pay to promote those posts as they would regular ads. (It’s also started to indicate more clearly which posts are paid ads.) Captiv8 says the volume of lifestyle-focused daily Instagram stories is growing at 16 times the rate of Snapchat’s. Facebook and Twitter Inc., like YouTube, allow some influencers to get a cut of ad revenue from videos they produce.
Snap would be wise to catch up, says Erin Dorr, vice president for digital and social strategy at MSL Group, a PR conglomerate. “Agencies everywhere are just waiting for Snapchat to come out with more functionality and capabilities and transparency for influencer campaigns,” says Dorr, whose company represents Procter & Gamble Co. and General Motors Co., two of the biggest advertisers in the world.
But Snap isn’t interested, say people familiar with its executives’ thinking. As a compromise, the company has started providing viewership data to a handful of popular users who produce posts Snap considers broad or interesting enough to be tagged as “official” stories. Michelle Obama made the cut; most latte-foam artists didn’t.
This break with self-promotional social media types is one of the many ways Snap has deliberately eschewed the examples of Facebook and Instagram, despite outside pressure for it to start making more money. Without mentioning the company by name, Snap executives aren’t shy about criticizing Facebook’s obsession with growth during investor presentations and earnings calls, arguing that the service’s value has been diluted by meaningless connections and notifications about acquaintances users haven’t seen in years. Snap maintains it’s focused on holding the interest of a much smaller group of higher-value eyeballs.
However big or small the audience, brands want to know exactly who they’re reaching, says UEG’s Kaplan, whose clients include Microsoft, Samsung, and Unilever. “It’s very important to us to have an apples-to-apples comparison with how we’re spending our dollars.” If clients choose Snap, he says, “we get a lot of screen shots.”
349 mwheeler 13 hrs 225
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/09/06/mozilla-washington-post-reinventing-online-comments/
Digital journalism has revolutionized how we engage with the news, from the lightning speed at which it’s delivered to different formats on offer.
But the comments section beneath that journalism? It’s… broken. Trolls, harassment, enmity and abuse undermine meaningful discussion and push many people away. Many major newsrooms are removing their comments. Many new sites are launching without them.
Instead, newsrooms are directing interaction and engagement to social media. As a result, tools are limited, giant corporations control the data, and news organizations cannot build a direct relationship with their audience.
At Mozilla, we’re not giving up on online comments. We believe that engaging readers and building community around the news strengthens not just journalism, but also open society. We believe comments are a fundamental part of the decentralized web.
Mozilla has been researching, testing, and building software in this area since 2015. Today, our work is taking a huge step forward as the Washington Post integrates Talk — Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform — across washingtonpost.com.
Talk is currently deployed across the Washington Post’s Politics, Business, and The Switch (technology) sections, and will roll out to more sections in the coming weeks.
Talk is open-source commenting software developed by Mozilla.
What is Talk?
Talk is developed by The Coral Project, a Mozilla creation that builds open-source tools to make digital journalism more inclusive and more engaging, both for audience members and journalists. Starting this summer, Talk will also be integrated across Fairfax Media’s websites in Australia, including the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. One of The Coral Project’s other tools, Ask, is currently being used by 13 newsrooms, including the Miami Herald, Univision, and PBS Frontline.
“Trust in journalism relies on building effective relationships with your audience,” says Andrew Losowsky, project lead of The Coral Project. “Talk rethinks how moderation, comment display and conversation can function on news websites. It encourages more meaningful interactions between journalists and the people they serve.”
“Talk is informed by a huge amount of research into online communities,” Losowsky adds. “We’ve commissioned academic studies and held workshops around the world to find out what works, and also published guides to help newsrooms change their strategies. We’ve interviewed more than 300 people from 150 newsrooms in 30 countries, talking to frequent commenters, people who never comment, and even trolls. We’ve learned how to turn comments — which have so much potential — into a productive space for everyone.”
“Commenters and comment viewers are among the most loyal readers The Washington Post has,” said Greg Barber, The Post’s director of newsroom product. “Through our work with Mozilla, The New York Times, and the Knight Foundation in The Coral Project, we’ve invested in a set of tools that will help us better serve them, powering fruitful discussion and debate for years to come.”
The Coral Project was created thanks to a generous grant from the Knight Foundation and is currently funded by the Democracy Fund, the Rita Allen Foundation, and Mozilla. It also offers hosting and consulting services for newsrooms who need support in running their software.
Here’s what makes Talk different
It’s filled with features that improve interactions, including functions that show the best comments first, ignore specific users, find great commenters, give badges to staff members, filter out unreliable flaggers, and offer a range of audience reactions.
You own your data. Unlike the most popular systems, every organization using Talk runs its own version of the software, and keeps its own data. Talk doesn’t contain any tracking, or digital surveillance. This is great for journalistic integrity, good for privacy, and important for the internet.
It’s fast. Talk is small — about 300kb — and lightweight. Only a small number of comments initially load, to keep the page load low. New comments and reactions update instantaneously.
It’s flexible. Talk uses a plugin architecture, so each newsroom can make their comments act in a different way. Plugins can be written by third parties — the Washington Post has already written and open sourced several — and applied within the embed code, in order to change the functionality for particularly difficult topics.
It’s easy to moderate. Based on feedback from moderators at 12 different companies, we’ve created a simple moderation system with keyboard shortcuts and a feature-rich configuration.
It’s great for technologists. Talk is fully extensible with a RESTful and Graph API, and a plugin architecture that includes webhooks. The CSS is also fully customizable.
It’s 100% free. The code is public and available for you to download and run. And if you want us to help you host or integrate Talk into your site, we offer paid services that support the project.
Learn more about The Coral Project.
从制造业、服务业到零售业，“无人”概念已然成为热点话题之一。近日，北京商报记者走访发现，作为最早一批在北京落地的无人便利仓，位于优家国际青年社区的第一家小麦铺在运营了一个多月后正在停业装修，EATBOX被消费者吐槽不够接地气，“随便一瓶矿泉水都要五六块钱”。
而此前被曝出最迟7月底会在望京落地的缤果盒子至今迟迟未见踪影。看起来无人便利仓似乎还并不具备大范围复制的技术和市场基础，而无人值守货架正引发新一轮的资本追捧。无人零售凭借其轻型体量，可以碎片化渗透到当前零售格局之外的最后一公里，但不可否认还处于“摸着石头过河”的阶段，大量样本尝试势必会被淘汰，无人零售最终会以什么形式存在，仍有待观望。
踌躇的无人便利仓
作为京城第一家无人便利仓，EATBOX于7月26日在北京世纪金源购物中心一层居然之家家具家饰馆正式营业。EATBOX定位为进口美食魔方，按照EATBOX怡食家超市CEO安利英此前的介绍，EATBOX整体大小为20-40平方米，店内共有600多个SKU，其中海外进口商品有400多个SKU。未来EATBOX将落户于中高端小区、高校、CBD中心及科技园等区域。
但在实际的消费体验当中，更多的消费者是出于好奇体验，且体验结果也不尽是正面，尤其是部分商品价格较一般渠道偏高遭遇不少吐槽。有消费者表示，进去体验一下觉得很酷，也挺顺畅的，但是价格较高，而且都是些进口商品，“就想买个普通的农夫山泉矿泉水都买不到”。北京商报记者在EATBOX里看到，一听330ml的百事可乐标价为8.9元，而一般便利店仅需3元；味全果汁售价7.2元一瓶，一般便利店卖6.5元。
北京已经开业的另一家无人便利仓是校园物流服务品牌小麦公社在今年7月推出的小麦铺。但北京商报记者9月2日走访时发现，位于优家国际青年社区的小麦铺第一家店已经停业，货架全空，有工作人员在进行内外搭建工作。小麦铺市场部负责人表示，这家小麦铺停业是因在进行4.0版本升级。据介绍，目前小麦铺已经有12家，分布在封闭社区里。值得注意的是，小麦铺目前并不是完全的“无人便利店”，上述负责人表示，目前，每家小麦铺都配备有一名店员，在一定时段进行商品维护、陈列工作，以及当顾客遇到使用操作上的问题时提供帮助。
无人货架新风口
如果说，无人便利仓减少了店租、人力成本，但还需要承担高昂的科技成本，那么无人值守货架则干脆把大部分科技成本也给抹去了。进驻企业、开放货架、无人值守、自助购物、在线支付等特点集中体现在无人值守货架上。基于对写字楼人群的信任，无人货架以进驻企业为主，货架上提供零食、饮料等产品，方便上班族选购，消费者不用再下楼、出办公室，解决“最后100米”的问题。
资料显示，2016年8月，小e微店在全国就已经布下了1500多个网点，哈米魔方目前也已入驻ofo、百度外卖、爱奇艺、瓜子二手车等多家企业，并且预计到2017年底可实现单日移动支付交易20万笔。
一位在百度外卖工作的周先生告诉北京商报记者，在办公楼二层的茶水间里就有哈米魔方的无人值守货架。产品主要是饮料和零食，第一次购买要先关注哈米魔方的公众号，绑定货架，扫描商品上的二维码付款，但商品品类太少，且以小零食为主，价格也没有优势。就他了解，男性基本不去哈米魔方买东西，女性偶尔会买。
无人货架在近期也站上风口，成为新一轮资本热捧对象，放眼全国市场上还有领蛙、猩便利、易得等30多家企业，每日优鲜、易果集团等生鲜电商业于最近先后宣布将进入办公室无人零售市场。
诸多痛点待解
以无人业态“无人”的特点来看，事实上存在已久的自动贩售机也是形式之一。也就是说，目前在北京市场上，主要存在三种无人零售业态：以24爱购、友宝等为代表的自动贩卖机；以EATBOX、小麦铺为代表的可进入式无人便利仓；以小e微店、哈米魔方等为代表的进驻企业的无人值守货架。就目前的发展状态来看，自动贩卖机出现已久，无人便利仓风头正盛却很难说十分理想，无人值守货架目前则更多局限于企业等封闭场景。
无人零售吸引了资本的关注，也提供了一种新奇的消费体验，但最终会以什么形式留下，还有待观望。业内人士指出，无人便利仓与传统便利店相比，节省了人力、租金成本，但是技术还不够稳定。此前上海的第一家缤果盒子就曾因不敌高温天气而暂停营运，EATBOX也出现过结算故障。目前，无人便利仓还有不少技术性问题，稳定性难以保证，短期内难以大范围复制推广。无人值守货架与无人便利仓相比，虽然将技术成本进一步降低、模式进一步减轻，但也存在SKU数量有限、难保证用户黏性等痛点。
北京商业经济学会常务副会长赖阳认为，无人零售是传统商业的一种补充，但发展不能忘记真正以无人技术降低运营成本为出发点，那样才能扎实地带来收益。事实上，不少新入局的技术型企业对于商业本身是门外汉，未必能真正服务消费者。并且由于目前某些无人技术并不成熟稳定，实际运营成本也并不低。
AI通常被定义是能够复制人类学习和问题解决能力的智能技术，AI对VR的作用在于其能够预测观众希望查看的位置，然后对视频流进行相应的准备。
除了固定的玩家行动反应，游戏已经开始集成AI。当玩家做出“不正常”的行为时，AI引擎就能“凭空捏造”新的反应。这为虚拟世界添加了一层全新的维度，
人工智能没有理由不能用于预测简单的反应，比如理解用户最有可能查看的位置，这样当用户头部快速移动时，系统就能为其准备合适的显示分辨率。
最近IABM的终端用户调查报告显示，10%的终端用户已经启用了某种VR服务。45%的受访者表示，他们“有可能”或“非常有可能”在未来2-3年内启用VR视频服务;而另有45%表示，他们“不太可能”或“根本不可能”这样做。
虽然行业对这种全新的技术十分兴奋，但在普及推广上存在一定的挑战。
面向内容创作的vr技术已经存在，但与其他格式相比价格十分高昂。另外，消费者对这一新技术的认识不高，而且头显设备价格相对昂贵。
最重要的是，如果需要终端用户持续地进行投资，vr技术需要清晰的商业模型作为支撑。在IABM的调查中，部分终端用户已经启用了VR服务，68%的终端用户“不知道”如何实现营收或没有计划实现营收。“广告”是最为热门的营收选择，但相应的受访者占比也只有12%。
商业模型的缺乏表明了VR在广播和媒体领域的低营收前景。
对于AI，IABM询问终端用户在未来2-3年内是否有可能把某种AI技术应用在机构组织上。其中，5%的受访者表示他们已经进行了相关的部署;35%指出他们有可能在未来几年内进行相应的部署;57%则认为他们“不太可能”或“根本不可能”采用AI。
在所有的终端机构中，只有电视广播，系统集成商，制作公司或后期制作公司已经实施了AI技术。另外，越大的公司越有可能采用这项技术。目前AI在电视广播和媒体行业的应用十分罕见，只有少数供应商在2016年-2017年期间启用了包含部分AI元素的服务。
AI的其他应用包括语音识别和元数据自动标记等等。相应地，其能够为商业广播提供广告营销建议;为付费电视运营商提升网络管理销量;以及为在线订阅服务提供驱动个性化UI体验的推荐引擎。比如，Netflix声称AI技术在一年间帮助他们节省了10亿美元。
AI的普及与近年来推动着广播和媒体技术发展的运营效率密切相关。由于运营效率如此重要，所以当超过一半的IABM调查对象表示对AI兴趣不大时，我们感到十分惊讶。也许相关受访者认为这项技术过于超前。
IABM自上世纪50年代以来便在密切观察AI，但大多数人只是注意到IBM沃森所能实现的酷炫应用，比如为电影《摩根》创建预告片。在其他稍显平凡的应用上，你电子邮件服务正在使用AI，通过识别和理解你的个人需求来更新建议过滤器。
随着人工智能的日益普及，媒体公司在日常工作上的自动化程度将不断提高，这样将能消除内部效率低下，从而更好地从收视中实现营收。
在商业方面，VR与AI之间的主要区别在于：AI具有提高盈利能力的良好记录，而VR正在努力寻求（游戏之外）的盈利方式。
http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2017/09/10/better-postgres-migrations/
As your database grows and scales there are some operations that you need to take more care of than you did when you were just starting. When working with your application in your dev environment you may not be fully aware of the cost of some operations until you run them against production. And at some point most of us have been guilty of it, running some migration that starts at 5 minutes, then 15 minutes in it’s still running, and suddenly production traffic is impacted.
There are two operations that tend to happen quite frequently, each with some straightforward approaches to mitigate having any noticable amount of downtime. Let’s look at each of the operations, how they work and then how you can approach them in a safer way.
Adding new columns
Adding a new column is actually quite cheap in Postgres. When you do this it updates it’s underlying tracking of the columns that exist–which is almost instant. The part that becomes expensive is when you have some constraint against the column. A constraint could be a primary or foreign key, or some uniqueness constraint. Here Postgres has to scan through all the records in the table to ensure that it’s not being violated. Adding some constraint such as not null does happen some, but is not the most common cause.
The most common reason for slowness of adding a new column is that most frameworks make it very simple for you to set a default value for the new column. It’s one thing to do this for all new records, but when you do this when an existing table it means the database has to read all the records and re-write them with the new default value attached. This isn’t so bad for a table with a few hundred records, but for a few hundred million run it then go get yourself coffee, or lunch, or a 5 course meal because you’ll be waiting for a while.
In short, not null and setting a default value (on creation) of your new column will cause you pain. The solution is to not do those things. But, what if you want to have a default value and don’t want to allow nulls. There’s a few simple steps you can take, by essentially splitting your migration up from 1 step to 4 migrations:
Add your new column that allows nulls Start writing your default value on all new records and updates Gradually backfill the default value Apply your constraint Yes, this is a little more work, but it doesn’t impact production in nearly the same magnitude.
Indexes
Index creation like most DDL operations holds a lock while it’s occurring, this means any new data has to wait for the index to be created and then the new writes flow through. Again when firsting creating the table or on a small table this time is not very noticable. On a large database though, you can again wait minutes to possibly even hours. It’s a bit ironic when you think about it that adding an index to speed things up can slow things down while it’s happening.
Postgres of course has the answer for this with CONCURRENT index creation. What this does is gradually build up the index in the background. You can create your index concurrently with: CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY. As soon as the index is created and available as long as you did what you were hoping to Postgres will swap over to using it on queries.
A tool to help
It’s a good practice to understand what is happening when you run a migration and its performance impact. That said you don’t have to manage this all on your own. At least for Rails there’s a tool to help enforce more of these as you’re developing to catch it earlier. Strong migrations aims to catch many of these expensive operations for you to have your back, if you’re on Rails consider giving it a look.
Have other tools or tips that can help with database migrations in Postgres? Drop me a note and I’ll work to add them to the list.
https://tomdale.net/2017/09/compilers-are-the-new-frameworks/
My current “investment thesis” is that what we call web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers. When it comes to eking performance out of hand-authored JavaScript and accompanying runtime libraries, we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns.
Increasingly, the bytes that get shipped to browsers will bear less and less resemblance to the source code that web developers write.
In the same way that a compiled Android binary bears little resemblance to the original Java source code, the assets we serve to users will be the aggressively-optimized output of sophisticated build tools. The trend started by minifiers like UglifyJS and continued by transpilers like Babel will only accelerate.
This is a loss in some ways (who else got their web development start with View Source?) but is a huge win for users, particularly in emerging markets.
Ember has always been driven by the idea that web apps are becoming more and more like native apps over time. Initially, I thought that just meant architecturally. Early on, the idea of a stateful UI app written entirely in JavaScript was very controversial. But as these kinds of apps become more widely accepted, it’s increasingly clear to me that the next step is becoming more like native apps in implementation details, too.
Between WebAssembly, SharedArrayBuffer and Atomics, and maybe even threads in JavaScript, the building blocks for the next generation of web applications are falling into place. If you’re interested in predicting the future of the web, just look at what high-performance native systems look like, then figure out how we can apply those ideas in the browser.
But that’s not to suggest that the task is as simple as just porting good ideas to web APIs. The constraints are very different.
Native code tends to have the luxury of not really caring about file size—a small 40MB iOS app would get you laughed out of the room on the web. And AAA game titles accept minutes-long load times in exchange for consistent 60fps performance, but I shudder to think what a 30 second load time would do to the conversion rate of your e-commerce site, 60fps or not.
Our job now is figuring out how to adapt the ideas of high-performance native code while preserving what makes the web great: URLs, instant loading, and a security model that allows us to forget that we run thousands and thousands of untrusted scripts every day.
—TD
Smart company Commodity their open source
http://wgross.net/essays/give-away-your-code-but-never-your-time
Http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15214602
As software developers, I think we can agree that open-source1 code has transformed the world. Its public nature tears down the walls that prevent some pieces of software from becoming the best they can be. The problem is that too many valuable projects stagnate, with burned-out leaders:
“I do not have the time or energy to invest in open source any more. I am not being paid at all to do any open source work, and so the work that I do there is time that I could be spending doing ‘life stuff’, or writing…It’s for this reason that I've decided to end all my engagements with open source effective today.”
—Ryan Bigg, former maintainer of several Ruby and Elixir projects
“It’s also been a massive opportunity cost because of all the things I haven’t learned or done in the meantime because FubuMVC takes up so much of my time and that’s the main reason that it has to stop now.”
—Jeremy Miller, former project lead of FubuMVC
“When we decide to start having kids, I will probably quit open source for good…I anticipate that ultimately this will be the solution to my problem: the nuclear option.”
—Nolan Lawson, one of the maintainers of PouchDB
What we need is a new industry norm, that project leaders will always be compensated for their time. We also need to bury the idea that any developer who submits an issue or pull request is automatically entitled to the attention of a maintainer.
Let’s first review how an open-source code base works in the market. It is a building block. It is utility software, a cost that must be incurred by a business to make profit elsewhere. The community around the software grows if users can both understand the purpose of the code and see that it is a better value than the alternatives (closed-source off-the-shelf, custom in-house solution, etc.). It can be better, cheaper, or both.
If an organization needs to improve the code, they are free to hire any developer they want. It’s usually in their interest to contribute the improvement back to the community because, due to the complexity of merging, that’s the only way they can easily receive future improvements from other users. This “gravity” tends to hold communities together.
But it also burdens project maintainers since they must respond to these incoming improvements. And what do they get in return? At best, a community contribution may be something they can use in the future but not right now. At worst, it is nothing more than a selfish request wearing the mask of altruism.
One class of open-source projects has avoided this trap. What do Linux, MySQL, Android, Chromium, and .NET Core have in common, besides being famous? They are all strategically important to one or more big-business interests because they complement those interests. Smart companies commoditize their complements and there’s no commodity cheaper than open-source software. Red Hat needs companies using Linux in order to sell Enterprise Linux, Oracle uses MySQL as a gateway drug that leads to MySQL Enterprise, Google wants everyone in the world to have a phone and web browser, and Microsoft is trying to hook developers on a platform and then pull them into the Azure cloud. These projects are all directly funded by the respective companies.
But what about the rest of the projects out there, that aren’t at the center of a big player’s strategy?
If you’re the leader of one of these projects, charge an annual fee for community membership. Open source, closed community. The message to users should be “do whatever you want with the code, but pay us for our time if you want to influence the project’s future.” Lock non-paying users out of the forum and issue tracker, and ignore their emails. People who don’t pay should feel like they are missing out on the party.
Also charge contributors for the time it takes to merge nontrivial pull requests. If a particular submission will not immediately benefit you, charge full price for your time. Be disciplined and remember YAGNI.
Will this lead to a drastically smaller community, and more forks? Absolutely. But if you persevere in building out your vision, and it delivers value to anyone else, they will pay as soon as they have a contribution to make. Your willingness to merge contributions is the scarce resource. Without it, users must repeatedly reconcile their changes with every new version you release.
Restricting the community is especially important if you want to maintain a high level of conceptual integrity in the code base. Headless projects with liberal contribution policies have less of a need to charge.
To implement larger pieces of your vision that do not justify their cost for your business alone, but may benefit others, crowdfund. There are many success stories:
Font Awesome 5
Ruby enVironment Management (RVM)
Django REST framework 3
Crowdfunding has limitations. It doesn’t work for huge projects. But again, open-source code is utility software, which doesn’t need ambitious, risky game-changers. It has already permeated every industry with only incremental updates.
These ideas represent a sustainable path forward, and they could also fix the diversity problem in open source, which may be rooted in its historically-unpaid nature. But above all, let’s remember that we only have so many keystrokes left in our lives, and that we will someday regret the ones we waste.
1 When I say “open source”, I mean code licensed in a way that it can be used to build proprietary things. This usually means a permissive license (MIT or Apache or BSD), but not always. Linux is the core of today’s tech industry, yet it is licensed under the GPL.
Thanks to Jason Haley, Don McNamara, Bryan Hogan, and Nadia Eghbal for reading drafts of this.
納: Poshlust,更好的翻譯是poshlost,這個詞有很多微妙的含義,顯然,在那本關於果戈g的小書裡，我對於這些含義描述得還不夠清楚，不然你也不至於問出是否有人會被poshlost所誘惑這樣的問題。裝模作樣的垃圾，俗不可耐的老生常談,各個階段的庸俗主義,模仿的模仿,虛張的深沉,粗糙·弱智·不誠實的假文學——這些都是顯而易見的例證。如果我們想揪出當代文學中的poshlost,我們就必須到以下這些東西裡面去找：
佛洛依德學派的象徵主義·老掉牙的祌話·社會評論·人道主義的要旨。政治寓言·對階級和民族的過度關心,以及大家都知道的新聞報導式泛論。「美國不比俄國好多少」,或者「德國的罪孽我們全都有份」，這一類的概念就是poshlost在作怪。
Poshlost之花盛開在以下這些短句和詞語中：r真實一刻J、「個人魅力、存在主義的」(被嚴肅地使用)、對話(用在國與國之間....
跟半個世紀前學術性的《九月之晨》和《佛羅倫斯的賣花女》一樣老掉牙。Poshlost的名單很長，而且當然了·這堆東西裡頭,誰都有他自己最討厭的那一個。
對我來說，最不能忍受的是刎個航空公司的廣告諂媚的小姑娘給一對年輕夫婦送上餐前小吃——女的兩眼冒光盯著黃瓜土司，男的雙目含情欣賞那位空姐。當然了,還有《威尼斯之死》。你知道範圍有多廣啦。
197 irfansharif 16 hrs 153
https://medium.com/@ji/the-react-license-for-founders-and-ctos-b38d2538f3e5
A startup founder and ex-Facebook engineer’s story of the BSD+Patents license. Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, nor is this legal advice.
A couple weeks ago, there was a renewed discussion about the software license for React, the popular rendering library created at Facebook. The Apache Foundation decided the Apache License is not a superset of Facebook’s license and Apache projects can’t use Facebook-licensed code like React anymore. People wondered: if Apache projects chose not to use React, what does that mean for companies who are using (or considering) React, GraphQL, or many of the other open-source projects from Facebook? There was a lot of speculation about Facebook’s license and motivations.
I worked at Facebook several years ago during some influential events, including a major patent lawsuit and the open-source release of React. Several important events influenced Facebook’s view on patents. I hope an explanation of these events will help people understand how and why Facebook’s license came to be.
On March 12, 2012 — about a month after Facebook filed for its IPO — Yahoo sued Facebook over 10 patents for websites and web services. Companies preparing to go public are sometimes more likely to settle lawsuits to remove a dark cloud over them that could worry investors. The general sentiment in the industry was that the lawsuit against Facebook was without merit; some said Yahoo was a patent troll. This time, Facebook wanted to defend itself and set a precedent that it would not easily settle out of court.
Three weeks later, Facebook countersued with 10 patents of its own, “in response to Yahoo’s short-sighted decision to attack one of its partners and prioritize litigation over innovation.” Facebook was also quickly growing its patent portfolio. Around this time, Facebook spent over $550 million on patents from IBM and Microsoft, including some key patents for web technologies that AOL sold to Microsoft. Facebook didn’t include these patents in its countersuit against Yahoo, but it now had a stronger portfolio to draw from for future counterclaims.
In addition to Facebook’s countersuit, Yahoo had other problems of its own, like laying off 2,000 people, losing its chief product officer and several board members, and the resignation of its CEO (primarily for reasons apart from the Facebook lawsuit). Under its new interim CEO, Yahoo quickly agreed to dismiss the lawsuit with Facebook and actually partner and cross-license each other’s patent portfolios.
The 2012 Yahoo lawsuit played a key role in Facebook’s taking a defensive stance on patents. Facebook successfully defended itself using a patent portfolio. It also spent over half a billion dollars in growing that portfolio. The key thing to understand is that Facebook used and invested in patents as an important way to defend itself.
For years, Facebook had another problem partly related to patents: it was hard to open source your code if you were working at Facebook. The legal team needed to cross-check each project with the company’s patent portfolio to preserve its defensive value. They didn’t want to potentially give licenses to Facebook’s key patents — part of its legal protection — to companies like Yahoo who might sue Facebook.
Many open source licenses either grant irrevocable patent licenses to users, or they don’t mention patents at all and create ambiguity with regard to them. Facebook’s legal team wanted to be safe and retain the company’s key defensive patents. Facebook would potentially need its patents for a counterclaim if another company were to sue Facebook for patent infringement. If Facebook were to give away patent licenses with open source, then an adversary claiming patent infringement could be more immune to a counterclaim since it wouldn’t be infringing the licensed patents.
It was frustrating for the Facebook engineers and lawyers to go back and forth, looking over code and worrying about losing patent rights. It was a lot of work to individually check each project being open sourced, though, and projects also don’t just become open source — they stay open source, and in theory the legal team would have to review every commit. The engineers and lawyers wanted to open source code and assure users they could use the code without worrying about patents. They also wanted not to lose key patents that could defend the company if there were another lawsuit like the one in 2012 with Yahoo.
The difficulty of open sourcing code at Facebook, including React in 2013, was one of the reasons the company’s open-source contributions used to be a fraction of what they are today. It didn’t used to have a strong reputation as an open-source contributor to front-end technologies. Facebook wanted to open source code, though; when it grew communities for projects like React, core contributors emerged to help out and interview candidates often cited React and other Facebook open source as one of the reasons they were interested in applying. People at Facebook wanted to make it easier to open source code and not worry as much about patents. Facebook’s solution was the Facebook BSD+Patents license.
Facebook authored a new software license known as the Facebook BSD+Patents license. It consists of the standard 3-Clause BSD license with an additional patent grant. This patent grant is at the crux of the discussion around the license.
The grant says Facebook explicitly gives away licenses to their patents related to their open source code. This lets others use open source from Facebook with clear assurance that Facebook won’t offensively sue them for infringing those patents.
The grant also says those patent licenses are irrevocable unless (and only unless) someone proactively sues Facebook precisely for patent infringement, in which event they lose the grant. The grant specifically lets Facebook keep those patents for countersuits like the one in 2012 back against Yahoo. Facebook can’t take back the patent licenses for any other reason, including lawsuits about antitrust, libel, or failure to uphold a contract. Facebook also can’t take back the licenses if it sues for patent infringement first and is countersued. Facebook’s patent grant is about sharing its code while preserving its ability to defend itself against patent lawsuits.
The Facebook BSD+Patents license has some downsides worth thinking about. Perhaps the most practical downsides are the misunderstanding and concern it has caused. This affects the adoption of React and how safe people feel when making a bet that affects their livelihoods.
One other downside is that, if you’re relying on Facebook open source, the license makes it hard to claim that Facebook is infringing your patents. Facebook could use your patented designs and processes and it’s understandable you’d want to hold them responsible in court. As part of the patent grant, you’d have to stop using Facebook open source upon claiming patent infringement. That could really hurt, especially if you were using React or any other Facebook open source licensed under the BSD+Patents license, and it’s not clear how much switching to another React-like library like Preact or Vue would help; you need Facebook’s patent licenses anyway — in the eyes of the law — for any library that uses data structures, algorithms, or techniques patented by Facebook.
I think these are real problems with the BSD+Patents license. I wrote this post to help people deciding whether to use React and other Facebook open source understand Facebook’s defensive stance on patents and why it made the BSD+Patents license, but I don’t think the license is perfect nor that it works for everyone. And I don’t know why Apple (Swift), Google (Angular, Kubernetes, TensorFlow), Microsoft (.NET), and sometimes Facebook itself (RocksDB, xctool) are willing to release some of their valuable technologies under more standard open source licenses.
Over the past several years, open source projects from Facebook under the BSD+Patents license, including React, have become quite popular. Facebook’s GitHub organizations have grown to over a hundred projects, including many significant ones like React, React Native, Flow, AsyncDisplayKit, and the reference GraphQL implementation. Facebook is now a much more prolific contributor to client-side open source in particular.
GitHub’s aggregate statistics in 2016 — https://octoverse.github.com The legal front has appeared fairly quiet in practice. Google’s legal team collaborated with Facebook’s on wording they both agreed upon for the patent grant. To my knowledge, Facebook has never proactively sued anyone for infringing its patents. I’ve heard some concerns that the BSD+Patents license might make companies using React less attractive as acquisition targets, but most of the top tech acquirers are already using React and other Facebook open source in some way.
These days, Apple, Microsoft and Skype, Amazon, Uber, Tesla, Netflix, Salesforce and Quip, Airbnb, Twitter, Pinterest, PayPal, Slack, Dropbox, Google (internally), and many more significant companies — even Yahoo! (now Verizon) — now use React and other Facebook open source in their websites and apps. These companies have different needs than the Apache Foundation’s, and several of them contribute back to Facebook open source in the form of core contributions, conference talks, and developer meet-ups. The license and all things considered, these are just a few of the companies who use React and help build its ecosystem.
Thanks for reading.
Video Amazon’s warehouses, which now employ more than 125,000 people across the United States, are being outfitted with the latest in robots and tech, but not at the expense of human jobs. JEAN YVES CHAINON / THE NEW YORK TIMES. TECHNOLOGY BY SAMSUNG. By NICK WINGFIELD SEPTEMBER 10, 2017 FLORENCE, N.J. — Nissa Scott started working at the cavernous Amazon warehouse in southern New Jersey late last year, stacking plastic bins the size of small ottomans. It was not, she says, the most stimulating activity. And lifting the bins, which often weigh 25 pounds each, was also tiring over 10-hour shifts.
Now Ms. Scott, 21, watches her replacement — a giant, bright yellow mechanical arm — do the stacking.
Her new job at Amazon is to babysit several robots at a time, troubleshooting them when necessary and making sure they have bins to load. On a recent afternoon, a claw at end of the arm grabbed a bin off a conveyor belt and stacked it on another bin, forming neat columns on wooden pallets surrounding the robot. It was the first time Amazon had shown the arm, the latest generation of robots in use at its warehouses, to a reporter.
Nissa Scott, 21, watching over a robotic arm stacking containers filled with merchandise at an Amazon warehouse in Florence, N.J. BRYAN ANSELM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
“For me, it’s the most mentally challenging thing we have here,” Ms. Scott said of her new job. “It’s not repetitive.”
Perhaps no company embodies the anxieties and hopes around automation better than Amazon. Many people, including President Trump, blame the company for destroying traditional retail jobs by enticing people to shop online. At the same time, the company’s eye-popping growth has turned it into a hiring machine, with an unquenchable need for entry-level warehouse workers to satisfy customer orders.
Amazon’s global work force is three times larger than Microsoft’s and 18 times larger than Facebook’s, and last week, Amazon said it would open a second headquarters in North America with up to 50,000 new jobs.
The robots help enable the kind of efficiency gains that allow a customer to order a variety of products and have them delivered in a couple of days. BRYAN ANSELM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES Complicating the equation even more, Amazon is also on the forefront of automation, finding new ways of getting robots to do the work once handled by employees. In 2014, the company began rolling out robots to its warehouses using machines originally developed by Kiva Systems, a company Amazon bought for $775 million two years earlier and renamed Amazon Robotics. Amazon now has more than 100,000 robots in action around the world, and it has plans to add many more to the mix.
The robots make warehouse work less tedious and physically taxing, while also enabling the kinds of efficiency gains that let a customer order dental floss after breakfast and receive it before dinner.
“It’s certainly true that Amazon would not be able to operate at the costs they have and the costs they provide customers without this automation,” said Martin Ford, a futurist and author of “Rise of the Robots,” a book about automation. “Maybe we wouldn’t be getting two-day shipping.”
Human “pickers” followed instructions on computer screens, grabbing items off the shelves and putting them in plastic containers. BRYAN ANSELM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES The dynamics between people and machines play out on a daily basis on the floor of Amazon warehouses in places like Florence, N.J., and Kent, Wash. In Kent, the robots vaguely resemble giant beetles and scurry around with vertical shelves loaded with merchandise weighing up to 3,000 pounds on their backs. Hundreds of them move autonomously inside a large caged area, tailgating each other but not colliding.
On one edge of the cage, a group of human workers — the “stowers” — stuff products onto the shelves, replenishing their inventory. The robots whisk those shelves away and when a customer order arrives for products stored on their backs, they queue up at stations on another edge of the cage like cars waiting to go through a toll both.
There, human “pickers” follow instructions on computer screens, grabbing items off the shelves and putting them in plastic bins, which then disappear on conveyor belts destined for “packers,” people who put the products in cardboard boxes bound for customers.
Amazon began rolling out robots to its warehouses in 2014, using machines first developed by Kiva Systems, a company Amazon bought for $775 million two years earlier. BRYAN ANSELM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES Dave Clark, the top executive in charge of operations at Amazon, said the company wanted the machines to perform the most monotonous tasks, leaving people to do jobs that engage them mentally.
"It’s a new item each time,” Mr. Clark said. “You’re finding something, you’re inspecting things, you’re engaging your mind in a way that I think is important."
The robots also cut down on the walking required of workers, making Amazon pickers more efficient and less tired. The robots also allow Amazon to pack shelves together like cars in rush-hour traffic, because they no longer need aisle space for humans. The greater density of shelf space means more inventory under one roof, which means better selection for customers.
The company has more than 125,000 warehouse employees. BRYAN ANSELM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES The Amazon warehouse in Florence shows the latest example of the kinds of jobs machines can do better than people. Eight mechanical arms are in operation at the facility, a warehouse where large quantities of merchandise are broken down into smaller units and distributed to Amazon fulfillment centers across the country.
The arms go by the awkward name of robotic palletizers, but workers have given them a dash of personality, sticking signs on each one naming them after Stuart, Dave and other minion characters from the “Despicable Me” movies. Unlike the warehouse robots in Kent, which were based on the machines Amazon got through its Kiva acquisition, these arms come from an outside company.
Amazon began installing them late last year, not long after it opened the warehouse in Florence. The robot arm is configured to pick up only bins of a standard size, not objects of other dimensions. In a demonstration of future possibilities, Amazon showed a virtual reality simulation used to prototype new robot concepts, including an arm with a forklift attachment that moved pallets.
A robotic arm in Florence, N.J., grabbing bins filled with merchandise to form stacks on pallets bound for other Amazon warehouses. BRYAN ANSELM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES When Amazon installed the robots, some people who had stacked bins before, like Ms. Scott, took courses at the company to become robot operators. Many others moved to receiving stations, where they manually sort big boxes of merchandise into bins. No people were laid off when the robots were installed, and Amazon found new roles for the displaced workers, Mr. Clark said.
“The people didn’t go anywhere,” he said.
The question going forward is: What happens when the future generations of robots arrive?
For now, there are warehouse tasks — for example, picking individual items off shelves, with all their various shapes and sizes — where people outperform robots. Amazon has added 80,000 warehouse employees in the United States since adding the Kiva robots, for a total of more than 125,000 warehouse employees. And it says the warehouse hiring spree will continue.
Amazon said its warehouse hiring spree will continue. BRYAN ANSELM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES But start-ups and researchers are scrambling to overcome the many remaining technical obstacles. Amazon even sponsors an annual contest to encourage more innovation in the category.
Mr. Ford, the author, believes it is just a matter of time before the employment picture in Amazon’s warehouses changes.
“My assumption is this technology will eventually displace a lot of people in those warehouses,” Mr. Ford said. “I would not say that overnight huge numbers of jobs disappear. Maybe the first indication is they don’t get rid of those people but the pace of job creation slows down.”
Amazon’s Mr. Clark said history showed that automation increases productivity and, in some cases, demand from consumers, which ultimately creates more jobs. He said warehouse workers would continue to work in technologically rich environments.
“It’s a myth that automation destroys net job growth,” he said.
In the case of the Florence facility, it opened up the new opportunity for Ms. Scott.
At one point, one of the arms knocked over a tote, sending a dozen or so cone-shaped plastic coffee filters skidding across the ground. Ms. Scott hit a button that froze the arm so she could safely pick up the mess.
Then the arms started working again.
“The robot will work the same all day long,” said Edward Cohoon, who supervises Ms. Scott and other Amazon workers as they tend to individual robots. “Their stomachs don’t grumble.”
Follow Nick Wingfield on Twitter @nickwingfield.
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Over the last few years, I have discussed several different ways to identify and make decisions about relationship satisfaction and romantic compatibility. Past posts have explored strategies for noticing the differences between traits that spark initial attraction versus those that promote longer-term connections. I have also written about the benefits of self-control and conscientiousness for relationship satisfaction over time. We have even looked at decision-making styles to maximize your chance of picking a satisfying partner, along with the various decisions and trade-offs that people generally make about a mate.
Beyond that, however, romantic compatibility can also be considered from a more symbolic and narrative perspective. Specifically, to help us make sense of the world and our relationships, we often follow stories, scripts, and metaphors. Therefore, by connecting with a partner who believes in a similar relationship and love story, we can increase our chances of compatibility. At least, that is what the research seems to show...
Research on Love as a Story
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An empirical evaluation was conducted by Sternberg, Hojjat, and Barnes (2001) to explore the notion that different stories of love may guide our romantic behavior and influence compatibility between mates. In the first of two studies, the team identified 25 different love story themes that people use to guide their relationships. Those themes were further grouped under the following seven categories:
Democratic Government – Two partners should share equal power. Sewing – Love is whatever you make of it. Travel – Love is a journey. Gardening – Relationships need to be tended and nurtured.
Cookbook – Following a recipe and doing things a particular way increases the chance of success. Business – Relationships are business partnerships. Science – Love can be understood through evaluation and analysis. Game – Love is a type of sport or game.
Recovery – After past trauma, a person can get through anything. History – Events in the relationship form an important record. Addiction – Anxiety around losing a partner. article continues after advertisement
Fantasy – One expects to find a prince/princess and be happy ever after. Art – It is important for partners to be good looking. Religion – Love is guided by religion, or is a religion in itself.
Humor – Love is a funny and strange experience. Pornography – Love is often dirty and degrading.
Police – It is important to keep close tabs on a partner. Sacrifice – Love means giving and sacrificing for another, or them for you.
Horror – Relationships are stimulating when you terrorize or are terrorized by a partner. Science Fiction – Believing that a romantic partner is necessarily strange or alien. Mystery – Love is mysterious, and partners should not know too much about one another. Theater – Love has predictable acts, scenes, and lines. War – Love is a series of battles. Autocratic Government – One partner dominates and controls the other. Collection – A partner should fit in to some overall life scheme or plan. article continues after advertisement
A second study evaluated the effects of these different stories on partner compatibility and relationship satisfaction. The results indicated that some stories were related to relationship dissatisfaction — particularly those involving subordination or manipulation of a partner. Beyond that, individuals in relationships were found to be more satisfied with partners who believed in the same types of love stories. Overall, an individual's satisfaction in a romantic relationship is influenced by both the type of love story they believe and the degree of agreement on that story with their partner.
What This Means for Your Love Life
The above results suggest that it might help to consider the themes and expectations you hold for love — and to explore those stories with your partner. Testing for compatible stories can even be a part of building overall rapport and connection with your partner. Particularly, it can be used as a topic of conversation to build romance, or even as a discussion of longer-term plans.
In addition to looking for compatibility, you might want to consider how your overall choice in love story impacts your relationship satisfaction. This is particularly true if you repeatedly find yourself in relationships that are manipulative, negative, or unfulfilling. In those cases, you might want to consider choosing a story where relationships are more positive, fair, and equitable. Also, consider stories that foster relationships to better satisfy both your emotional and practical needs.
The stories we tell ourselves about love have an impact on the quality of the actual relationships we create. If you are unsatisfied in love, it may help to consider what story you are following, as well as whether your partner is reading from the same book. From there, you can better choose a story to meet your romantic needs and help ensure your partner is on the same page. With that approach, you are more likely to reach the ending you truly desire.
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© 2017 by Jeremy S. Nicholson, M.A., M.S.W., Ph.D. All rights reserved.