Skip to main content

Home/ GAVNet Collaborative Curation/ Group items tagged tracking

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Steve Bosserman

How Facebook Is Throwing Our Brains Into Overdrive - Pacific Standard - 0 views

psmag.com/...ebook-is-a-digital-narco-state

facebook neuroscience manipulation

shared by Steve Bosserman on 04 May 18 - No Cached
  • The human brain has always loved the dopamine rush of notifications, in any form; recent research indicates the unpredictable but ubiquitous updates of Gmail or Twitter carry the same neurological effect as rocking a slot machine. While Internet use is "not addictive in the same way as pharmacological substances are," as cognitive scientist Tom Stafford noted in 2013, we continually chase those unpredictable payoffs on Facebook and Instagram in ways that tend to mirror gambling or sex addictions, even if "Internet addiction" writ large currently holds an ambiguous position in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
  • For products whose fundamental business proposition is harnessing attention, building those so-called "compulsion loops" isn't an accident of technology—it's the whole point. Indeed, observers have argued since Parker's "human psychology" flub last year that Facebook has not just meticulously measured, but fundamentally altered human behavior, and nascent technology ventures emboldened by Facebook's world-changing success have sought to translate the behavioral tricks that psychologist B.F. Skinner applied to the gambling kiosk to every mobile app under the sun. "When a gambler feels favored by luck, dopamine is released," Natasha Schüll, author of Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, told the Guardian in March. All Facebook managed to do was find a way to miniaturize the captivating logic of the slot machine—with no cost to the user but their time and attention.
  • While the human brain is tremendously plastic, that doesn't mean Facebook is savagely rewiring the human brain. Indeed, the Facebook users in the Cal State–Fullerton study "showed greater activation of their amygdala and striatum, brain regions that are involved in impulsive behavior," as Live Science's Tia Ghose reported at the time. Ghose continued: "But unlike in the brains of cocaine addicts, for instance, the Facebook users showed no quieting of the brain systems responsible for inhibition in the prefrontal cortex." Facebook isn't fundamentally rewiring the structure of the human brain, but its ubiquity has the same relative effect by kicking our rewards centers into overdrive.
Bill Fulkerson

Anatomy of an AI System - 1 views

anatomyof.ai

AI amazon

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18
     
    "With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay
Steve Bosserman

How Neuroscience Can Help Us Treat Trafficked Youth - Pacific Standard - 0 views

psmag.com/...help-us-treat-trafficked-youth

neuroscience youth "human trafficking"

shared by Steve Bosserman on 04 May 18 - No Cached
  • A common misconception is that these youths are choosing to engage in the commercial sex trade. But as recent advances in neuroimaging techniques help scientists unravel the myriad ways that trauma affects the brain, emerging evidence suggests that brain changes resulting from trauma could make young people more vulnerable to exploiters and less receptive to people trying to help. Rather than making a conscious decision to rebel, these kids are simply doing their best to survive, using the adaptive strategies that their brains developed in response to a perilous world.
  • Though the human brain is adaptable throughout life, adaptability is greatest during childhood, as the developing brain responds to the surrounding environment. Survival is the brain's top priority. Young people growing up in dangerous environments will develop brains that are highly responsive to threat cues. In particular, recent studies show that children who have experienced trauma exhibit drastic changes in their amygdala, an area of the brain wired to identify signs of danger.
  • Besides the amygdala, another brain region affected by trauma is the hippocampus, an area involved with contextual learning and memory. The hippocampus takes context into account, so that a person can appropriately respond to the same cues in different situations. For instance, most people would respond differently to hearing gunfire in a shooting range than they would to hearing gunfire in an airport.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • McLaughlin's research shows that youth who have experienced trauma have a smaller hippocampus than those who haven't, and are less able to take context into account when they detect a threat cue. When McLaughlin presented images of faces embedded in real-world scenes to kids, those with a history of trauma exhibited less activity in their hippocampus while viewing angry facial expressions. And when given a memory test afterward, they were less able to remember scenes in which they'd identified people displaying anger.
  • Because the brain remains malleable throughout life, it's never too late to mitigate the effects of trauma, McLaughlin says. There are a variety of evidence-based treatments that have proven effective in alleviating the mental-health consequences of trauma. For example, the technique of cognitive reappraisal, a cornerstone of Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, can help victims better regulate their emotions by changing the way they view a distressing situation. They can try to imagine that the situation is occurring far away from them, or that they are viewing the event from a removed perspective, as though watching a movie screen. When McLaughlin taught such techniques to young people in her lab, they were able to decrease their emotional reactivity as well as their amygdala response to negative stimuli.
Steve Bosserman

20 Slack Apps You'll Love - 0 views

medium.com/...-apps-you-ll-love-a295ef2c0f9c

slack productivity apps

shared by Steve Bosserman on 16 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Steve Bosserman on 16 Apr 16
     
    Slack is taking the business world by storm. More and more companies are using this communication tool-and it's becoming an increasingly robust platform due to all of the integrations being built on top of it. Now, you can do pretty much everything in Slack-from tracking how your customers use your app, to keeping tabs on company finances at a glance, to getting a daily digest of top news from around the web. Here are 20 of the Product Hunt community's most-loved Slack integrations. Trust us-once you give some of these a try, you'll wonder how you ever made it through the day without them.
Steve Bosserman

Can Sustainable Agriculture Survive Under Capitalism? - 0 views

psmag.com/...lture-survive-under-capitalism

sustainable agriculture capitalism

shared by Steve Bosserman on 29 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • One problem is the price of the produce. Many of us have had the experience of turning up at our local farmers' market, armed with tote bags, only to slink back to the supermarket after seeing the prices of the vegetables on offer. This is hardly the fault of the individual farmers. Still, as Pilgeram points out in a paper that she published in 2011, the costs involved with running such an operation mean that the benefits are inevitably affordable only to a small (generally white and middle-class) portion of society.
  • But it's a limited victory, Pilgeram writes in her most recent paper, published in November of 2018, and empowers only a certain class of women "while leaving [the capitalist] system basically entirely unaffected"—and which also risks gentrifying the towns to which these farmers move, further entrenching the country's class divide.
  • "The economic system that we have in place makes it impossible, really, to create a socially just food system. It's not possible under capitalism," Pilgeram says. Without a drastic change to this system, sustainable agriculture risks becoming an "esoteric side note" to conventional agriculture, she adds—or simply another way for those with money to live healthier lives than those without.
Steve Bosserman

The Boundary Between Our Bodies and Our Tech - Pacific Standard - 0 views

psmag.com/...etween-our-bodies-and-our-tech

identity self boundaries brain-machine interface

shared by Steve Bosserman on 28 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • At the beginning of his recent book, The Internet of Us, Lynch uses a thought experiment to illustrate how thin this boundary is. Imagine a device that could implant the functions of a smartphone directly into your brain so that your thoughts could control these functions. It would be a remarkable extension of the brain's abilities, but also, in a sense, it wouldn't be all that different from our current lives, in which the varied and almost limitless connective powers of the smartphone are with us nearly 100 percent of the time, even if they aren't—yet—a physiological part of us.
  • The debate over what it means for us to be so connected all the time is still in its infancy, and there are wildly differing perspectives on what it could mean for us as a species. One result of these collapsing borders, however, is less ambiguous, and it's becoming a common subject of activism and advocacy among the technologically minded. While many of us think of the smartphone as a portal for accessing the outside world, the reciprocity of the device, as well as the larger pattern of our behavior online, means the portal goes the other way as well: It's a means for others to access us.
  • "This is where the fundamental democracy deficit comes from: You have this incredibly concentrated private power with zero transparency or democratic oversight or accountability, and then they have this unprecedented wealth of data about their users to work with," Weigel says. "We've allowed these private companies to take over a lot of functions that we have historically thought of as public functions or social goods, like letting Google be the world's library. Democracy and the very concept of social goods—that tradition is so eroded in the United States that people were ready to let these private companies assume control."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Lynch, the University of Connecticut philosophy professor, also believes that one of our best hopes comes from the bottom up, in the form of actually educating people about the products that they spend so much time using. We should know and be aware of how these companies work, how they track our behavior, and how they make recommendations to us based on our behavior and that of others. Essentially, we need to understand the fundamental difference between our behavior IRL and in the digital sphere—a difference that, despite the erosion of boundaries, still stands."Whether we know it or not, the connections that we make on the Internet are being used to cultivate an identity for us—an identity that is then sold to us afterward," Lynch says. "Google tells you what questions to ask, and then it gives you the answers to those questions."
Steve Bosserman

Poverty May Be Bad for the Brain - Pacific Standard - 0 views

psmag.com/...erty-may-be-bad-for-your-brain

status" socio-economic poverty aging health

shared by Steve Bosserman on 15 May 18 - No Cached
  • But new research finds one factor that influences the rate at which our brains age is largely outside our control: our socioeconomic status.
  • "Engaging and resourceful environments associated with higher socioeconomic status may provide a buffer or delay against aging," the researchers write. "Inadequate health conditions associated with lower socioeconomic status environments (such as exposure to toxins and poorer nutrition), together with continual stress, may accelerate the aging process."
  • Using neuroimaging, the researchers evaluated participants' brains in two ways, measuring "functional network organization and cortical gray matter thickness." They found both measures demonstrated greater aging in people of lower socioeconomic status, even after accounting for demographic differences and personal health.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • A 2014 study found African-Americans age more rapidly than whites, presumably due to the stress of dealing with racism.We've long been told that a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Perhaps we need to remember it's also a terrible thing for a mind to waste away.
Bill Fulkerson

Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding | naked capitalism - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...ernist-thinking-exploding.html

capitalism power society

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 11 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 11 Mar 17
     
    " Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o
Bill Fulkerson

Alarming COVID variants show vital role of genomic surveillance - 0 views

www.nature.com/...d41586-021-00065-4

surveillance genetics

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 16 Jan 21
     
    Efforts to track SARS-CoV-2 sequences have helped identify worrying variants - but researchers are blind to emerging mutations in some regions.
Bill Fulkerson

Expanded ENCODE delivers invaluable genomic encyclopedia - 0 views

www.nature.com/...d41586-020-02139-1

protein genes encode

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 31 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 31 Jul 20
     
    In the flagship article, The ENCODE Project Consortium et al.5 provide a bird's-eye view of the updated encyclopedia, which contains newly added data sets from 6,000 experiments, performed on around 1,300 samples. By integrating these data sets, the consortium has created an online registry of candidate CREs. Most are classified as promoters or enhancers - CREs respectively located at or some distance from the genomic site at which transcription of a gene begins. The consortium tracked the activity of each candidate CRE, along with the proteins that bind to it in many different samples from various tissues. They used chromatin-looping data to link enhancers to genes that they might regulate. This online registry marks a true milestone, turning an overwhelming amount of genomic information into a searchable, filterable and retrievable encyclopedia of DNA elements, which is freely accessible at https://screen.encodeproject.org.
1 - 20 of 41 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page