Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Artist Ai Weiwei is setting up "Lego collection points" in different cities after being inundated with offers of donations from supporters. Ai has accused Lego of "censorship and discrimination" after it refused his bulk order for bricks for a new exhibition in Melbourne, Australia.Lego said it has never sold directly to anyone wanting to use its product to make a political statement.The artist will now use the donated toy bricks to make a "new work".

Kids discover lying as early as age 2, studies have found. In one experiment, children were asked not to peek at a toy hidden behind them while the researcher withdrew from the room under false pretenses. Minutes later, the researcher returned and asked the child if he or she peeked.

Thousands of lives were prolonged or saved every year because patients declared brain-dead—a form of death eventually adopted by the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and most of Europe—were now eligible to donate their organs. The philosopher Peter Singer described it as “a concept so desirable in its consequences that it is unthinkable to give up, and so shaky on its foundations that it can scarcely be supported.” The new death was “an ethical choice masquerading as a medical fact,” he wrote.

The thought experiment is meant to show how an optimization algorithm, even if designed with no malicious intent, could ultimately destroy the world.

To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language. A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.

it’s plausible that the cognitive demands of thinking in a non-native, non-automatic language would leave people with little leftover mental horsepower, ultimately increasing their reliance on quick-and-dirty cogitation. Equally plausible, however, is that communicating in a learned language forces people to be deliberate, reducing the role of potentially unreliable instinct. Research also shows that immediate emotional reactions to emotively charged words are muted in non-native languages, further hinting at deliberation.

The researchers believe a second language provides a useful cognitive distance from automatic processes, promoting analytical thought and reducing unthinking, emotional reaction.

There’s nothing intrinsically bad about e-mail as a tool. In situations where asynchronous communication is clearly preferable—broadcasting an announcement, say, or delivering a document—e-mails are superior to messengered printouts. The difficulties start when we try to undertake collaborative projects—planning events, developing strategies—asynchronously. In those cases, communication becomes drawn out, even interminable

Everyone knows that doctors must not discriminate on the basis of gender, sexuality, race, religion or national origin when they select or treat patients: It’s an obligation they accepted when they entered the health care profession. (That doesn’t mean they have to take all comers; they can turn away patients for various other reasons.) But should patients be able to choose clinicians on the basis of such attributes? The answer is: It depends.

Perhaps the greatest strength of the randomized controlled trial is in combating what’s known as selection bias. That occurs when groups being studied (intervention and control) are already significantly different after they are “selected” to be in the intervention or not. One of the most elegant examples of why we need such trials came recently in an examination of employer-sponsored wellness programs.

South Korea's new president says he is scrapping government-authored history textbooks ordered by his predecessor. They symbolised "outdated and one-sided" history education, an aide said. The conservative government of Park Geun-hye said the books were needed to correct left-wing bias. The move caused anger and most schools refused them.

Ai Weiwei and Jacob Appelbaum are artists, journalists, dissidents, polymaths — and targets. Their respective governments, China and the United States, monitor their every move. They have been detained and interrogated. Ai cannot leave China, and Appelbaum is advised not to return to the United States. They are separated from their families. Ai has been imprisoned and beaten by the police. Yet each continues his work and speaks out against government wrongdoing.In April, Ai and Appelbaum met in Beijing to collaborate on an art project commissioned by Rhizome and the New Museum in New York. As a filmmaker, and as a target of state surveillance myself, I am deeply interested in the way being watched and recorded affects how we act, and how watching the watchers, or counter-surveillance, can shift power. I was asked to film their project. During the encounter, Ai and Appelbaum continually filmed and photographed each other. Between their cameras and mine, we created a zone of hyper-surveillance. Almost everything was documented. Just outside Ai’s studio hung surveillance cameras installed by the Chinese government. The art project the pair made, “Panda to Panda,” was not about surveillance. It was about secrets. They stuffed cuddly toy panda bears with public, shredded N.S.A. documents that were originally given to me and Glenn Greenwald two years ago in Hong Kong by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Inside each panda, Ai and Appelbaum placed a micro SD memory card containing a digital backup of the previously published documents.

5. The social science on gun violence is inconclusive.It will always be a given that it’s impossible to have real controlled experiments. The closest thing in this case would be to have two contiguous countries—both with similar “root” populations, and both subject to massive immigration from abroad.

So what, exactly, did the algorithm “learn” about the process of dying? And what, in turn, can it teach oncologists? Here is the strange rub of such a deep learning system: It learns, but it cannot tell us why it has learned; it assigns probabilities, but it cannot easily express the reasoning behind the assignment. Like a child who learns to ride a bicycle by trial and error and, asked to articulate the rules that enable bicycle riding, simply shrugs her shoulders and sails away, the algorithm looks vacantly at us when we ask, “Why?”