Here is a digest of the best links each week for anyone who might be interested.
The Pandemic: the reality we live in
Though the overall covid related deaths may be undercounted in many parts of the world according to Economist’s excess death tracker, it seems the growth of daily death rate quickly fell off after the first 30 days of the epidemic everywhere according to new research.
So, is the pandemic over?
According to Professor Michael Levitt, almost. Because all cause excess death are almost back at normal level (still 5000 over). Meanwhile, he thinks that the risk of flu and not going back to normal is higher than covid. He also view extensive testing as a waste of money.
There are still many unknowns about how our immune system will learn from covid infection and whether that learning will long-last. According to STAT, there are four possible scenarios:
- People who gain immunity will immune against it forever. We will gradually see the virus disappearing from communities in the long run. This is the best scenario but may not happen for respiratory infections;
- People may get reinfected for the second time, but the immune system can still recognize and fight off the disease. The later infections will be mild or have no symptoms at all. We will see the virus become weaker and less harmful in the long term;
- Immunity can wane and lose protection over time. People may get re-infected shortly after the infection. However, this still means that later infections will be less severe than the first time;
- In the least possible scenario, immunity will be completely lost after some period. People will get re-infected and face the same risk as the first time.
It’s also possible that different scenarios can happen for different people and groups. Vaccine will speed up the process how these different scenarios play out eventually.
Disruptions: how it might be different
The biggest tech announcement this week is again from one of Elon Musk’s company, Neuralink. During a live event, Elon demonstrated the prototype of their breakthrough device, called ‘Link’, that can replace a small piece of skull with a coin sized electrode unit – which can be used to read and write information from the brain. A recorded demo of three pigs shows that the joints of pig can be accurately predicted using the device.
Pigs are chosen due to their similar dura membrane and skull structure as human, and can be trained to walk on treadmills and perform other useful activities useful in treadmills. The result “meets the baseline for scientific research and medical applications.” Though there are still lots of roadblocks ahead, Elon is always able to prove that their progress won’t be stopped by anything, even the pandemic. Also, the v2 concept design looks so cool.
Insights: raise the bar for ourselves
‘Black Panther’ Star Chadwick Boseman Dies of Cancer at 43. While fighting cancer, he still filmed Civil War, Marshall, Infinity War, Black Panther, End Game, 21 Bridges and Da 5 Bloods. A real superhero just passed away. It’s inspiring and unbelievable.
Leadership: the ideas for better collaboration
One of the main challenges for early stage startups is to achieve product market fit. However, there is no standard definition of product market fit and well-defined process to approach it. Superhuman, an email startup, leverages user surveys to measure the product market fit by using the very disappointed ratio if the product was gone as a leading indicator:
The product/market fit definitions I had found were vivid and compelling, but they were lagging indicators — by the time investment bankers are staking out your house, you already have product/market fit. Instead, Ellis had found a leading indicator: just ask users “how would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” and measure the percent who answer “very disappointed.”
The benchmark of reaching product and market fit is normally around 40 (the magic number). They proposed a framework that helped them optimize towards the goal by segmenting user responses, identifying what they love and what held them back, and building the roadmap based on that.
The core of this approach is to help you to identify the small group of users who really love your product and their reasons. It filters the noises that are mostly observed among the larger group of users who find small interest in your product. Hence, you can build on the things your highly expected customers love and let them become your evangelist for growth.
Economy: the science hidden among fallacies
The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab reviewed the short period in the US tech history, when research labs in large corporations led the wave. The best examples were Bell Labs in the late 1960s, and PARC in the 1970s. Large research labs are successful, because large firms are efficient, organized around a mission and a goal, multidisciplinary, and maintain a constant link of delivering value. However, the market seems going back to the norm, where individual inventors and small companies led the innovation.
The scale of the change since the 1970s is huge—big businesses have retreated from research. In the 1960s, DuPont, the chemicals giant, published more in the Journals of the American Chemical Society than both MIT and Caltech combined. R&D magazine, which awards the R&D 100 to the hundred innovations it judges most innovative in a given four year period, gave 41% of its awards to Fortune 500 companies in its 1971 iteration and 47% in 1975. By 2006, 6% of the awards were going to firms in the Fortune 500. The great majority of these awards are now being won by federal labs, university teams, and spin-offs from academia. The lone inventor is back.
One possibility the essay argues is antitrust enforcement, which caused the AT&T’s 1982 breakup, has reduced the incentives for big corporations to invest in research labs.