curing blindness, slowing down time & the fentanyl problem
CC#79 - The Life of North Korean Workers in China, Plastistones and Time Management Advice
Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
🇨🇳 Inside North Korea’s forced-labour program
Well researched - and intimidating - article about the work and living conditions of North Koreans working in Chinese factories (mostly seafood). Officially, China denies that such a program exists but according to locals it is effectively ‘an open secret’.
Like Jinhui, many companies in China rely on a vast program of forced labor from North Korea. (Jinhui did not respond to requests for comment.) The program is run by various entities in the North Korean government, including a secretive agency called Room 39, which oversees activities such as money laundering and cyberattacks, and which funds the country’s nuclear- and ballistic-missile programs. (The agency is so named, according to some defectors, because it is based in the ninth room on the third floor of the Korean Workers’ Party headquarters.) Such labor transfers are not new. In 2012, North Korea sent some forty thousand workers to China. A portion of their salaries was taken by the state, providing a vital source of foreign currency for Party officials: at the time, a Seoul-based think tank estimated that the country made as much as $2.3 billion a year through the program.
👁️ Dr. E.J. Chichilnisky: How the Brain Works, Curing Blindness & How to Navigate a Career Path [🎧]
Interesting introduction to brain functionality, some insights on how neurosurgery research can look on a day to day basis (in this case it involves showing trash TV shows to pieces of a dead human’s eye) and what we (don’t) know about the retina (which is supposedly the part of our neurosystem we understand best). Also contains some intriguing insights into a very non-linear career path and the interviewee’s approach to decision making.
In this episode, my guest is Dr. E.J. Chichilnisky, Ph.D., a professor of neurosurgery and ophthalmology at Stanford University. He studies how we see and uses that information to build artificial eyes that restore vision to the blind.
We discuss how understanding the retina (the light-sensing brain tissue that lines the back of our eyes) is critical to knowing how our brain works more generally.
We discuss brain augmentation with biologically informed prostheses, robotics, and AI and what this means for medicine and humanity.
We also discuss E.J.’s unique journey into neuroscience and how changing fields multiple times, combined with some wandering, taught him how to guide his decision-making in all realms of life.
This episode ought to be of interest to anyone interested in learning how the brain works from a world-class neuroscientist, those interested in the future of brain therapeutics and people seeking inspiration and tools for navigating their own professional and life journey.
🥁 The Value of Instrumental Variables with Maria Glymour [🎧]
This is a really accessible conversation about the logic and use cases for instrumental variable designs. I have had various classes on this topic throughout my Economics education, however, I found it was nice to get a refresher but also to hear a different type of explanation than the one most often used in Econ (this is an epidemiology podcast).
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Maria Glymour, Professor of Epidemiology & Biostatstics at UCSF and incoming chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Boston University. Maria successfully convinces Ellie and Lucy that instrumental variables can be very useful in epidemiology.
Food for Thought.
⏰ Why does it feel like time moves faster when you grow older and how can you counteract this? Not sure, if this is the (only) explanation, but it definitely resonated with me…
💉 Fentanyl has become a huge problem in the U.S. - why does this issue get so little political attention?
💎 ‘Plastistones’ are now a thing - its a hybrid of rock and synthetic plastic, formed through the integration of plastic waist in the lithification (i.e. turning sediment into solid rock) process. So far, we know very little about its (potential) environmental impacts - should we as humans try to prevent this from happening?
Random Stuff.
🐟 “Our failure rate in the water is one-eighth of what we see on land” - maybe in the future large parts of our data will be processed under water?
⏱️ Some time management tips from a certainly very productive human - take what resonates, ignore the rest.
🏃🏼 In the spirit of last week’s Boston marathon. Interesting that there is no similar threshold for females…
Personal Update.
One thing I forgot to mention last time: the last (but certainly not least) episode of the second season of the PhD Pod is out now. Its about European border policy and making the step from PhD to PostDoc.
Generally had a great time here in Boston, truly enjoying the weather becoming better and went out to explore some places outside the city.
Also, attended the Network Economics Conference in Minneapolis last week. Got to present a poster, meet some nice people and explore the town a bit (aka. visited the at-some-point largest flour mill of the world, the largest mall of America and (according to personal judgement) the tree with the largest collection of shoes).