Four For Friday | July 21, 2023

LF65 | Messi's contract, re-permissioning the city, Nature on aging tech and the heart-gut connection

Welcome to a Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week. Enjoy!

Ecosystems for Messi

An article that aims to demonstrate the primacy of ecosystems. It shows how soccer sensation Lionel Messi turned down a paycheck of $1.6bn over three years from the Saudi League, in order to sign with Inter Miami, which offered a lower salary but a broader set of options, including clothing, TV rights, profit-sharing and ownership. (Of course, it may be also that he just didn’t want to play in Saudi, but still a thought provoking comparison).

‘Re-permissioning’ the city

There’s overwhelming evidence that access to outside space and nature is fundamental to health, and also increasing recognition of the role that ‘social infrastructure’ plays in supporting wellness. This piece suggests recognizing civic spaces as a valuable shared asset, and proposes a decentralized method for giving permission to use them. Given how hard it can be to get permission from centralized and underfunded city bureacracies to use spaces, this seems like a robust application of Web3 technologies, and already proving its value in South Korea.

Analysis of digital health for aging populations

A thorough survey in Nature of the landscape of digital health services for aging populations, going deep on the landscape of wearables and technologies for a smart-home to enhance aging in place.

Heart beat affects gut decisions

Put this in the ‘one to ponder’ bucket - if somebody receives information at the split second when their heart is beating (contracting) they are more likely to doubt their own judgement, compared to if that information is received between beats. Hmm.

“…findings show that this first impression then becomes more or less susceptible to other people’s opinions depending on when during the cardiac cycle people first saw this face.”

Could this usher in a new era of neurobiophysical-marketing - when advertisers sync up their messages based on viewers wearables. Watch out for your personal data folks, as others will be…

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That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.

- Stephen