Links and quotes for June 13, 2017: Mobile grocery stores, telepathic texting, and more

How Facebook’s Telepathic Texting Is Supposed to Work – WSJ

When your face is stuck inside a VR headset or you’re out walking around wearing a pair of augmented-reality glasses, you can’t exactly reach for a keyboard or mouse, says Mark Chevillet, a physicist and neuroscientist who is Facebook’s technical lead on the as-yet-unnamed project.

The initiative would give Facebook a way to control those systems hands-free. Messaging is just the beginning. Facebook isn’t working on a brain implant—though other Silicon Valley giants are. The answer could ultimately be as simple as a headband.

To pull it off, Facebook has enlisted a small in-house team, supplemented by 60 scientists and engineers from research institutions across the U.S., all receiving funding from Facebook. Their goal is to update an obscure, largely abandoned technology known as “fast optical scattering,” aka “event-related optical signal.” Basically, you shine a light through the head and into the brain, then measure the light reflected back.

The Grocery Store Of The Future Is Mobile, Self-Driving, And Run By AI –  FastCo – “In rural areas and small towns, the design could replace main street stores that have disappeared. ‘I grew up in the countryside in Northern Sweden,’ he says. ‘The last store closed there in the 1980s sometime, and after that, everyone just commuted into the city, but that takes an hour. A little piece of the village died. Now, suddenly, in a place like that, the village can team up and buy one of these stores. If the village is really small, [the store] can move around to different villages.’”

How Did China’s WTO Entry Benefit U.S. Consumers? – NBER

Is optimism or pessimism correct? – Marginal Revolution

The Heterogeneous Effects of Summer Jobs – NBER

This paper reports the results of two randomized field experiments, each offering different populations of youth a supported summer job in Chicago. In both experiments, the program dramatically reduces violent-crime arrests, even after the summer. It does so without improving employment, schooling, or other types of crime; if anything, property crime increases over 2-3 post-program years. To explore mechanisms, we implement a machine learning method that predicts treatment heterogeneity using observables. The method identifies a subgroup of youth with positive employment impacts, whose characteristics differ from the disconnected youth served in most employment programs. We find that employment benefiters commit more property crime than their control counterparts, and non-benefiters also show a decline in violent crime. These results do not seem consistent with typical theory about improved human capital and better labor market opportunities creating a higher opportunity cost of crime, or even with the idea that these programs just keep youth busy.

Schools tap secret spectrum to beam free internet to students — Wired

Hospitals Are Dramatically Overpaying for Their Technology –  HBR

As the Waldorf Astoria transforms into posh condos, there’s one luxury amenity it’s unlikely to get back: its intrepid in-house sleuths. –  Slate

The most avid believers in artificial intelligence are aggressively secular – yet their language is eerily religious. Why? –  Aeon