 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you including Eric Holm, Carmine Bailey, and Vince Power. Coming up on DTNS, how algorithms can help save lives in the ER, NFT sales decline, but also get more popular, and more tech jobs are going to folks without Bachelor. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, April 12th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And your backyard pit master, be Chris Ashley. And on the show is producer, Roger Chang. We have got a show for you today, so let's get right into it with a few tech things you should know. COVID lockdowns in Shanghai and Kun Shan have caused Peketron, Quanta, and Compile to suspend factory activity. Peketron makes about 20 to 30% of all iPhones. Quanta is the world's biggest laptop manufacturer with Dell and HP as key clients. 20% of its laptop capacity is in Shanghai. Compile makes laptops and tablets, including the iPad. Hundreds of companies have had to halt production in the Shanghai and Kinsman areas. Exceptions include iPhone assembler at Lux Share ICT, which is still operating in Shanghai on a closed-loop basis, meaning the staff is quarantining at work. Foxconn has done the same. A new report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Price Waterhouse Coopers says digital ad revenue in the U.S. jumped 35% to $189 billion last year, a much larger rise than the 12% growth rate of 2020. This year-over-year growth is also the highest the digital ad market had seen since 2006, with advertising on digital audio like podcasts and streamed music growing the fastest, up 58% to reach $4.9 billion. Vivo announced its first folding phone called the X Fold with an 8.03-inch folding screen on the inside and a 6.53-inch screen on the outside. It comes with two ultrasonic in-display fingerprint sensors, one for each screen. Vivo also claims that a small panel in the hinge pushes up and flattens out the crease to make the screen appear smooth when unfolded. It's starting at about $9,001 around $1,413 U.S. dollars for 12 gigabytes of RAM and 256 gigabytes of storage with a 512-gigabyte model going for $10,001. Meta is testing ways to let folks make money in the Metaverse platform Horizon Worlds. A handful of Horizon creators will be able to sell virtual items as well as access to VIP sections with Meta receiving a cut, of course. U.S. creators with the most engaging worlds will also be able to earn money from a $10 million creator fund. Something Meta has done on Facebook in the past two where they just kind of fund people to get them interested. This feature is meant to compete with Roblox and Rec Room, which already allow creators to make money. A mobile version of Horizon Worlds is also expected sometime later this year. Plex has ended in support for podcasts starting on Friday, April 15th, a feature that's been available since 2018. Maybe just not widely used. Plex is also removing the dedicated web show section, but it says that most of the content will be available in a different part of the app. I feel like that's them admitting that podcasts are a mobile thing and Plex is more of a sit-down thing. Yeah. All right. Let's talk a little more about this news about jobs and folks being able to get tech jobs easier. What do we got, Chris? Yeah. So according to the Wall Street Journal management consulting firm Oliver Wyman says that over the past two years, a tenth of people in the U.S. have left low paying hourly positions for higher paying skilled tech jobs. LinkedIn's current population survey sees a similar trend. The journal called these former blue collar workers new collar catching. We all know that digital demand has boomed over the last two years. There has also been a sharp reduction in immigration and an increase in retirement. And people have been leaving their hourly jobs because of the pandemic. So on the on one hand, you have people leaving restaurants, warehouses, manufacturing and hospitality. And on the other hand, you have big tech companies having a hard time filling roles. As a result, many companies are dropping requirements like a college degree or prior work experience. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, the number of jobs that paid above the national median without requiring a bachelor's degree rose by 2.3 million during the pandemic. Examples include octa, which remove college degree requirements for some sales positions last year and form the business development associate program to train candidates on the job. Another example is flat iron school, which offers a coding boot camp that costs $15,000 and in nine months can get you a software engineering certificate. Finally, LinkedIn says that completions of classes that result in a certificate rose 1300% between 2020 and 2021. So if you take these at face value, Chris, it does look like there's a lot of pressure to open up hiring because there's a shortage of qualified workers in some creative ways. But as you were telling me earlier today, that's not news to you, huh? No, no, and there's so much unpacking this story. So I'm glad we have this one today because first off, you know, more power to anything that progresses people forward in life. I love that because it's my own story in this article, right? You know, I started out working in restaurants as many people have heard me talk about and then I got burned out from working in the restaurants and I wanted a mindless job and I just started driving a truck. And then within six months, I was like, all right, this is not enough. I need something else. And a position opened up at the company I was working for where they just wanted somebody to build computers. And what they were doing was they were transforming this company's systems from the old, you know, connected DOS systems to something that was web connected and, you know, the guy that they hired to do this had a lot of vision. And when I got in, my first day on the job was the Melissa virus and they're like, forget building computers, sit down here. We know you don't have any experience. We know you don't know anything but driving trucks. Sit down here, follow this script, and we'll teach you how to do this stuff. You just need to do these things. And from there, you know, now I work for, you know, a software company. And it's just, I was able to get in and then we were able to say, oh, wow, they're just taking people without any experience, any college degree or anything. Let me get a couple of buddies in here. And, you know, these type of situations become life changing for people when you can get into a job like this that pays you significantly more money. But offers you some, you know, some additional skills more than your hands on skills, but stuff that you can really then take anywhere you want and parlay that into something else. So I love the fact that if just as fast as the when the internet started to blow up and I, you know, I was lucky with circumstance, you know, although I made the best of my opportunity, it kind of went away. And then all of a sudden it became, you need 800 different degrees. You need 1000 certifications or we're not high. We don't even want to look at you. We don't, you know, and I tell people it was a wild, wild West back then. You know, like I had a buddy that would actively change jobs every three months because every time he changed job was an extra $20,000 in May, you know, so it was crazy. So seeing this, it'll probably never go back to those days, but I love the fact that folks that just need an opportunity have potentially an avenue to get that opportunity. I mean, we've talked on GDI recently about, you know, the idea of, you know, having a college degree, maybe you do, maybe you don't. What does that mean? I just, I don't know. I feel like in this story in particular, the idea that someone would have been denied a job that would get them more money because they didn't have a certain degree is feels really antiquated. But it's a weed out factor. If you notice, even though there's a virus in both of these stories, it's a different kind of virus. In Chris's story, it was because of the dot-com boom. There were so many companies, they were having a hard time finding people, and so they had to loosen up and be like, okay, can you do it? Do you have the potential to do it? Are you somebody who can learn this? Great, then we'll have you do it. Same things happening now. They're saying we don't have enough people out there, so let's look at skills. Let's look at like who's got talent versus who's got a degree. When you have more people applying than you have job openings, that's when the walls go up and they're like, well, we need to weed out these things. So let's require them to have a certificate. Let's require them to have a degree. It's just a matter of the times, I think, more than anything. Well, and the big question has always been, you're weeding out, but what exactly are you weeding out? Are you weeding out just to get something that fits your checkbox or are you weeding out potential? So when I moved into actually doing on the software side and I met with my boss, we went out to dinner and he said, listen, I see you work on a help desk and you have some good experience working in active directory and stuff like that, but I can teach anybody the software. I can't teach you personality and I can't teach you the willing, the willingness to learn. And if you have that, you'll fit in great. You know, I mean, and so he, again, so it was the second time in my life, somebody gave me an opportunity to to move forward. You know, and of course I was grateful and went in and became one of the top system engineers in the company as far as deals wise. So I love the fact that perhaps there is an opening here, at least for the next foreseeable future, at least that there's some opportunity coming where folks who may not have gotten a look, will get that look, you know, I'm a little, I always hold a little bit back in my excitement because, you know, I don't know what is the, you know, there's always a chance that this was a article to just promote something. I don't know what but I'm just saying, but it sounds good and the fact that there's data points coming from multiple, different people flat iron, you know, LinkedIn, you know, all these folks are coming out with stuff. With kind of following the same mindset and information. I love this. So, you know, because this is how I got my start in the industry and was able to parlay it into being on DTNS. You know, the pinnacle of your career. You know, but I, you know, this is this is good news and yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I, I think I hope, I hope two things come away. I hope one is that weed out factor changes. They start to realize that like, oh, that was a bad weed out factor. We found some great people by not requiring all those certificates and degrees. Maybe we can figure out a different weed out factor if we have to tighten up. And the other thing is this story we didn't touch on it much here, but a lot of people decided to try applying when they wouldn't have before because their job went away temporarily. The bar closed down. The restaurant shut up. And they realized they wanted to have more flexibility over when and where they were working. And so took more chances and maybe that'll teach people to do that. Like, hey, you might get a job you don't think you can get and you might love it. So, you know, I hope both those things become true. And that definitely lends into advice I've given to people in the past who are looking at applying for a new job and they're like, what do you think? They're like, this is the requirement. I was like, forget the requirement. Go sell yourself. You know, if you let them know that you can do the job. And that you want it. And you want it. Yeah. And so, yeah, so for anybody listening, you know, if this gets you over the hump, it's like, hey, there's an opportunity out there. Go for it. Who cares if you don't get it? At least you try. Well, speaking of wanting things, some people want NFTs. We know some of you are very enthusiastic about NFTs. Some of you are not enthusiastic about NFTs. Well, we think all of you can benefit from knowing some of the hype free facts around NFTs. A tech crunch story, which will be in our show notes indicates that overall sales of NFTs are declining. But popular NFT sales are still rising, kind of pointing to a consolidation of the overall market. Popular NFT owners are also finding new ways to generate revenue from those NFTs. So let's do the numbers. According to data aggregator crypto slam, NFT global sales, which topped out at 4.6 billion in January of this year has fallen almost 50% to 2.4 billion by the end of March. However, popular products, projects rather bucked that trend. In the last 30 days, Board 8 Yop Club rose 169%. Mutant 8 Yop Club rose 199.6%. I don't mean to laugh. They're just funny names. And Azuki rose 146%. Okay, these are popular NFT projects. And increasingly, NFT owners are using these projects as collateral to secure loans. Lending Marketplaces Arcade and NFT-Fi saw their combined total loan volume increase 171% from Q4 of last year to $83.17 million in Q1 of this year. What do we think? It looks like the weaker projects are shaking out. That would be a market maturation, right? The popular stuff is getting more popular because people like it and it's good. And I'm not going to get into why NFTs are or are not good, but the market is saying we like these, give us more of these, give us less of the overhyped stuff, the fraudulent stuff, you know, the stuff that's no good. And that is the sign of a consolidating and maturing market that's growing up. The loan thing, I don't know what to make of that. That could be also the sign of a maturing market where it's like, oh, these have enough solid potential that somebody's willing to post them as collateral. Loans are all in cryptocurrency, mostly in Ethereum. So it's in the universe. They're not, you know, buying a house, putting an NFT up for collateral for that. So that could also, that could be a solid maturing market. It could also mean the end types where people are like, let's ring the last dollar out of this before it's all gone. I don't know, Chris, what do you think? So the loan part is what is crazy to me. It's like you really believe that this is a hunt gel so valuable that you can loan money on it. And more power to them. I'm not saying one way or the other whether they should or shouldn't. But, you know, to me, I'm looking at this, I'm like, this is the same market where there was basically the new pet rock NFT. And you're giving loans out in that same, it's like, you know, is it not too soon? You know what I mean? So yeah, if it takes off and provides opportunity for folks that legit opportunities, you got no B for me. The whole thing with the NFTs, and I own zero of them personally, but it seems like it's so, if you, I don't know, I think if this is like, okay, if I go to a pawn shop, and I give somebody something as collateral that has value, then, you know, we're making a deal here. But NFTs are so volatile that I wonder how this is, this is actually going to be a thing that is workable money was going forward. I think that goes back to the first point of like, yes, NFTs are volatile, but some NFTs are more volatile than others. And we're starting to see the more volatile or the ones that just don't catch on shaken out. And so maybe Board Ape Yacht Club is relatively stable, and therefore like, oh, you've got a board Ape. Yeah, yeah, no, we can we can use that as collateral on a loan. You have, you know, what I have, Len Peralta's art, they might be less willing to give me a big loan on that. No disrespect to Len, it's just, you know, not quite as widely popular as Len would like. You know, and and then there's the like utterly fraudulent ones where they're going to be like, yeah, we're not giving you anything for that. So just kind of depends on on what you have. Yeah, I can't wait to I like this is something that kind of interests me just from a stand back and kind of watch something new emerge. So I'm all for watching NFTs loans work out and new price points and things start to come come of this. Hey, you know, especially from the gaming side, which is the first story I, you know, when we covered on it was where they were doing this in gaming. I'm all for it. Yeah. And Beatmaster pointed out like Len Peralta could lend his NFTs everywhere. Lens about to get paid. Yeah, please. Hey, if you're feeling social, if you're like, hey, Tom, never make a pun like that again, even if Beatmaster originated in the chat room, you can get in touch with us on the socials and let us know. We're at DTNs show on Twitter and DTNs picks with an X DTNs P I X on Instagram. Algorithms, they they get a bad name these days because most people think of Facebook's newsfeed or some other social network or maybe an advertising network. When you hear the word algorithm, but they're also being used for stuff that doesn't appear to a road trust in institutions. Automation and robotics is a good example and not just autonomous cars either. For years we've covered miso robotics. They make flippy the burger bot for White Castle. They also make a tortilla chip maker bot for Chipotle. And most recently they just announced a coffee pot minder for Panera bread. So the Panera employees don't have to go check if the coffee's out. It just automatically refills it. Wall Street Journal has an overview of how algorithms are being used in emergency rooms and intensive care units. ICUs. There are of course the commonly reported uses of detecting cancer in radiology images, identifying candidate drugs for testing. But in the emergency room, algorithms are being trained on medical data to be able to identify warning signs for things like sepsis, cardiac arrest and stroke. We're talking subtle things like detecting changes in temperature combined with respiratory rate and other vital signs, pulse, etc. Things that might get overlooked in a busy emergency ward, but when combined together the algorithm says that's a bad sign. If you don't know sepsis is an infection that can rapidly kill a patient that looked fine five minutes ago. But it's often hard to properly diagnose because the symptoms are common with other illnesses. You might come in for an illness that gives you high respiratory rate, high pulse rate, and that's also a sign that you have sepsis. So it's hard to tell. Duke University Hospital, however, is one of the places that improved its sepsis treatment compliance. That's basically the amount of times they were able to catch the disease and treat it before it was fatal. From around 31% of cases to around 64% by using an algorithm called sepsis watch. That algorithm was trained on 42,000 inpatient encounters at Duke. Here's how it works. Every patient admitted into the hospital's emergency department gets analyzed by sepsis watch. Obvious cases are flagged immediately. Other cases are flagged as either high, medium, or low risk, and those are updated every five minutes. A rapid response nurse, so independent of the distractions of the ER, monitors these, and if a patient is flagged as either having sepsis or at high risk for it, they're referred to the attending physician to review and make a treatment recommendation. So the algorithm isn't doing the treatment. The doctor is. The algorithm is just flagging like, hey, you want to go look at this person right now. It's a form of triage. So it makes sure that overworked nurses and doctors see patients that are most in need of their attention. HCA Healthcare's SPOT algorithm is similar. It detects sepsis six hours earlier on average than humans can, and has reduced sepsis mortality across its 160 hospitals by almost 30%. HCA is also using the SPOT platform to develop models to detect shock in trauma patients, post-op complications, and other signs of early deterioration. Kaiser Permanente in California has a predictive model called Advanced Alert Monitor that detect patients that might deteriorate for any reason into a code blue situation. That's when everybody has to run in with the paddles. They can identify about half of those while they're still stable and intervene to keep them from going code blue, to keep them off life support. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that that program led to fewer deaths, fewer ICU admissions, and shorter hospital stays. The key to all of this is to work with the caregivers to find out what they need and how they work, and work with local records to develop your model. Models don't work as well if they're developed in one hospital and then just brought to another without accounting for the difference in demographics, or if you don't update them with recent data. Medical algorithms are no exception to a common problem of training data being predominantly white European and therefore not working on populations that are predominantly black, Asian, Hispanic, or anything not white European. And even when you get the demo right, new data is essential. One example was the similarity of COVID symptoms to symptoms of sepsis which caused a spike in false alarms for one sepsis model until it was updated with new data so it could differentiate COVID from sepsis. But Chris, I know you've unfortunately had to deal with sepsis directly in your family experience. How do you feel about all this? Yeah, so I was sitting here trying to think like, what's the best way to articulate how awesome this type of development is to folks? Because, you know, the reality is not everybody goes through something so tragic where you even have to learn what sepsis is in the first place. But I actually had two brothers in the last couple years who were spent significant time in the hospital. And one, both of them ended up being septic at one point. One passed away. One was able to, thank you, was able to recover. And what you realize, first off, you come in, you know, folks listen to this as a tech show and what you kind of realize and I kind of chuckle about it is, you know, when I was working on a help desk, I would sit there and be like, okay, let's stick to the last thing to change. Let's try this. Let's try that. And you're like, oh, doctors do the same thing. You know, if you come across something constantly, then it might be the same thing. But a lot of times they're just troubleshooting, like you would troubleshoot a computer issue. So when you can introduce something that can take all of these significant data points and then turn around and be able to come to or help a doctor come to a conclusion much faster, you know, it's just awesome to hear and to kind of see where this technology goes, you know, and as mentioned, you know, making sure that the data points cover a wide array of people, you know, whether you're African-American, Asian, Caucasian, whatever. I mean, making sure all of those things are covered because humans overlook that stuff just based on their own personal experiences. But just seeing folks that are in the hospital and they come in for one thing happened to both my brothers and all of a sudden, you know, it seems like it just comes out. In both cases, it seemed like it came out of nowhere. It's like, oh, your brother's septic right now. We're pumping all these antibiotics. It just comes out of nowhere. Yeah. And then you're like, okay, yeah, you made it through. Then he's gone septic again and, you know, going back and forth and the fight to see all of that stuff. And so when I see anything like this, you know, it makes me happy because I know what we went through as a family seeing both of my, you know, your loved ones sitting there and just not responding and, you know, and also just the fact that, you know, it sounds like a lot of this will be able to be done right from the room, right? Because, you know, when they wanted to do certain tests to one of my brothers, he was a bigger guy at the time. And so, but they couldn't get him into some of the machines because he was just so big. You know what I mean? So if they can find, you know, some technological ways to do these things while they're in, just on the way in and monitor these things and because, you know, it's an awesome thing to see. And I hope they, you know, really make some strides there. Yeah. I think the part of this that I think is the takeaway for me personally, you know, in thinking about this stuff is it's not, if you sit in Silicon Valley and create a data set, that can't be used everywhere. And even if you're like, oh, well, the problem is, it's too white, let's put a bunch of black people. Well, that's not going to work everywhere. The key to this was if you're in the Duke hospital, use the population that attends, that goes to the Duke hospital to build your model because then it's going to be most accurate for those people. And don't try to use the Duke one in Kaiser Permanente over in Oakland because that's a different set of people. And, you know, just being local with your data set was incredibly important here. And I think that's a really interesting takeaway here. Yeah. Very awesome. Well, you know, keeping on the science theme, you may have heard of protons. Perhaps you've been a physics class. Those are the positive respects, anchoring atoms, then there are electrons. Those are negative lips roaming around those protons. Then there are photons. That's what comes out of light bulbs. What about W boson, which in physics dictates what's called the weak force? If you haven't been a physics class lately or you never have, allow me to try to explain. A paper published last Thursday in the journal Science says that 10 years of precise data suggest that W boson particles are more massive than our physics have predicted thus far, which might be a problem because it introduces a paradox for the standard model of particle physics, which is how we define protons, electrons, photons, gluons, muons. For decades, the standard model has accurately predicted how sub-atomotic forces work except for gravity. So scientists have actually sort of hoped that they could find a flaw in the standard model because that could be the key to developing a new unified model that could then bring in gravity and make it make sense. To understand the standard model, CNET's Monisha Revisedi suggests you imagine each particle in the model as a string, perfectly organized to tie everything together, but if anything gets too tight, the standard model predicts a few parameters for each string or particle, and a very important one is the W boson mass. If you want to get a W boson, you have to smash two protons together. So if the particle doesn't equal that mass, that becomes the first part of the model that has failed. And you might say, hmm, failure, but scientists don't like that. But in this case, they're actually kind of pumped about it because it helps them understand the way this all works a little bit more. Yeah, the standard model has not been able to account for gravity, but it's never failed in a way that gave them an insight to be like, aha, this is the problem with the standard model and now we can work in gravity. So if this turns out to be the thing that they can use to wrench open the standard model and figure out what's wrong with it, that's great. That's good news. They kind of thought the Higgs boson was going to be that. Then the Higgs boson turned out to be a really boring value that was exactly what they would have predicted. They're like, ah, shucks. So that's how physics works. And the idea is they want to break the standard model so they can figure out how to rework it to unify all the physics. So this is pretty exciting, actually, you know, with all the stuff people be worrying about every day. Then they then they're like, let me give you something else to worry about that you don't even understand. That's right. Physics, as you know, it is broken. Yeah, I love this, but I'm going to give these scientists a shin kick. Keep this stuff to yourself until it affects Chris. Yeah, if I can't levitate, I don't want to know. All right. Chris, Ashley, such a pleasure to have you on the show. Let folks know where they can keep up with everything that you do. Hey, you can always catch me in the homies on SMR podcast. And this week we are coming back with season two of barbecue and tech. More barbecue going to be a blast. So happy I'm here this week to kind of let folks know we come in and always a pleasure to be here. Well, it's always a pleasure to have you. Also a pleasure to get new patrons and we have one today. Our brand new boss name is Michael. Michael just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Michael. Yeah, we thought maybe we'd hit another day without a new boss, but Michael saved us. Thank you. Yeah, Michael, you did save us. Reminder for folks, there's a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet available at patreon.com. slash D T N S. And D T N S itself is live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern twenty hundred UTC. You can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live. We do this every weekday. We're going to be doing it again tomorrow. Scott Johnson, talk to you that. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. I hope you have enjoyed this program. Thank you.