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Despite all the reports of ghost sightings (28 percent of Americans report having ghostly encounters), there’s zero evidence to support the presence of supernatural beings among us. Science may not prove the existence of ghosts, but it can help explain why people think they see ghosts in the first place.

The intuitive notion of a “photographic” memory is that it is just like a photograph: you can retrieve it from your memory at will and examine it in detail, zooming in on different parts. But a true photographic memory in this sense has never been proved to exist.

Most of us do have a kind of photographic memory, in that most people's memory for visual material is much better and more detailed than our recall of most other kinds of material.

Sorry to disappoint further, but even an amazing memory in one domain, such as vision, is not a guarantee of great memory across the board.

While my experience wasn't related to statistics, it was an issue of science which seemed like we should have been able to prove the right answer one way or another -- but we failed.

But have we really proven it?

It was a picture-perfect launch, just before sunrise on a sandy coastline. The rocket, bright as a candle flame, climbed steadily, leaving a spindly trail of smoke that split the sky in half, with the sharp darkness of night on one side and the first pastel hues of daylight on the other. It carried a capsule, bound for the International Space Station, to the edge of space and let go.

The trouble started after that. The capsule, built for NASA by Boeing, was supposed to ignite its own engines to boost itself higher into orbit, where it would chase after the space station. But the engines didn’t start when they should have.

Engineers watched, unable to help from below, as the spacecraft became disoriented.

Johnson has proved staunch in his defense of his close ally since the latter was accused of breaking the UK's strict lockdown by driving 260 miles with his wife, who he admits was displaying some symptoms of coronavirus, and young son to be near his extended family.

In quarantine-fatigued Britain, however, where many have agonized over the command to stay away from frightened, sick and dying relatives, the Prime Minister's words have not gone down well. Highly unusually, several of his own Conservative MPs are now calling for Cummings to be sacked, and even the government-friendly Daily Mail asked: "What Planet Are They On?" of his decision to stand by his man.

In one of the more moving responses, Helen Goodman, until December the Labour Party MP for Durham, the northern town Cummings visited to stay in a property belonging to his parents, said she was "appalled" by his behavior, given her own father had died alone from Covid-19 in a local care home after she obeyed the rules and did not visit.

Mona Hamdy believes that technology married with pragmatic optimism can save the world. That’s what the entrepreneur and Harvard University Applied Ethics teaching fellow told me while we sat overlooking the Potomac River at her restaurant in Georgetown. We discussed impossible problems like plastics in the ocean, hostile AI, hypersonic missiles, the perils of cashless economies for the world’s poorest, socioeconomic challenges for women in the Middle East and North Africa, and cultural misunderstandings between the U.S. and Arab nations. 

“The kind of technology we have created should give us pause. It means we are aware of its potential in our hands. We can regulate it and use it to help relieve human despair like no other time on earth. Conflict, famine, poverty, and ecological destruction can be mapped on top of each other. Let’s learn as much as we can, and create economies that address these problems as solvable opportunities.” 

“The nature of our company combined this traditional wisdom with futuristic technology like cinematic worldbuilding, mixed reality and AR for education,  digital twinning, and 3d printing as effective modes of information transfer. These things were not considered part of the poverty-eradication toolkit a decade ago, but the world is coming around to it. Tech and heritage-- it’s the 21st century version of what our ancestors would have done. ”

I understand why scientifically minded people experience profound frustration at the nonsense, particularly when we’re forced to consider the public health implications of the anti-vaxxer movement which has been blamed as the root cause for recent outbreaks of measles in the US, a viral infection which can prove devastating for babies and young children. Misinformation can cause immense suffering and we should do our utmost to dispel the lies.

Too many people in scientific spheres seem to revel in dismissing flat-Earthers and anti-vaxxers as garden variety nut-jobs and losers. It may be cathartic – but it’s not productive.

It’s interesting that for a scientific community so perennially pleased with itself, we all seem to be making the same fundamental attribution error by ignoring the notion that belief in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories is propelled by external pressures of fear, confusion and disempowerment. Instead we seem too often satisfied with pinning the nonsense on some bizarrely flourishing individual idiocy.

They did it to prove that AI itself isn't inherently bad and evil, more-so that AI can be bad if fed bad and evil data.

Astronomers have traced the signal of an enigmatic repeating fast radio burst for only the second time -- and it's in a spiral galaxy similar to our own, not so far away.

Multiple individual fast radio bursts in past years have been traced back to their sources in other galaxies, although those have yet to shed light on what created them.But this newly discovered repeating FRB has a different source from the first one that was found in 2019, deepening the mystery of how these radio waves are created.

"The FRB is among the closest yet seen, and we even speculated that it could be a more conventional object in the outskirts of our own galaxy," said Mohit Bhardwaj, study co-author and McGill University doctoral student. "However, the observation proved that it's in a relatively nearby galaxy, making it still a puzzling FRB but close enough to now study using many other telescopes."

So the Mueller Report is finally out. President Trump has called it a “total exoneration,” but we don’t have to take his word for it. After special counsel Robert Mueller’s comprehensive, two-year investigation into serious allegations of Russian electoral interference, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice, we’re free to read what the special counsel’s findings actually are, if we so choose—albeit with a number of careful redactions from William Barr that along with his four-page summary, framed public conversations about the report in important ways.

It can persuade us one way or another by using certain rhetorical or linguistic means. What’s more, a particular framing doesn’t just arise spontaneously to the top of the public consciousness from its own legitimate merits, because it happens to be the neutral truth. We would be naive to think so, yet many people do. When it comes to the power of states, in sociologist Christopher A. Bail’s view, it has to be knowingly crafted, with two realities. One is a front stage presentation for public consumption and the other a secret collective coordination behind the scenes. Their reality becomes your reality, one way or another.

To Dwight Bolinger, “literal truth—the kind one swears to tell on the witness stand—permits any amount of evasion.” He explains: “The most insidious of all concepts of truth is that of literalness. The California prune-growers tell us that prunes, pound for pound, offer several times more vitamins and minerals than fresh fruit; literally true. The oil industry advertises that no heat costs less than oil heat, which has to be true because no heat costs nothing at all.” Those savvy enough to see through it will simply eat fewer prunes and heat their homes differently to those who fall for it. But declaring that you didn’t lie but told the literal truth in this way seems a kind of hollow ethic, a careful weaselling around the words that some lawyers seem particularly adept at.

Machines can write compelling ad copy and solve complex “real life” problems. Should the creative class be worried?

Rich breaks down some “abstract” problems into their fundamental parts and shows how, with comprehensive enough data and well-structured enough logical programming, AI could be suited to tackle creative problems. In one case, she offers a “real world” example about a manufacturing company’s new line of products and their plans, goals, and expectations for marketing the new line to a specific city. Weekly Newsletter Get your fix of JSTOR Daily’s best stories in your inbox each Thursday. Privacy Policy   Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message.

almost all problems rely (or ought to rely) on an understanding of the nature of both knowledge and reasoning. Humanists are trying to solve many of these same problems. Thus there is room for a good deal of interaction between artificial intelligence and many disciplines within the humanities.

With great exhaustion, we hereby rehearse the backstory. In 2006, a handful of mostly already successful tech entrepreneurs started Twitter as a weird experiment for posting short textual quips.

Twitter never thrived like its social-media cousins.

Then, last year, Musk bought it and started dismantling the place. Users longed to recover stability or eschew toxicity, as if those properties had ever really been present on Twitter, a profoundly unstable and abusive place.

there also seems to be little doubt that is corroding the web.

, two new studies offered some cause for alarm. (I discovered both in the latest edition of Import AI, the indispensable weekly newsletter from Anthropic co-founder and former journalist Jack Clark.)

The first study, which had an admittedly small sample size, found that crowd-sourced workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turks platforms increasingly admit to using LLMs to perform text-based tasks.

Instead, with every passing day, the Boris Johnson government, operating within a moral vacuum, chips away further at Britain’s democratic foundations while much of the media, rather than calling foul, goes along with the game and thus normalises – consciously or not – the gradual erosion of fundamental ethical and constitutional norms in the UK – an erosion that may well end in their outright destruction.

Those shouting the loudest were British journalists, such as Tim Shipman of the Sunday Times, who accused me of being biased. He went on to prove my point by declaring: “I don’t know a single British journalist who would tweet something like this.”

Secondly – and far more absurdly – many of those who joined in seemed to have fundamentally misunderstood my role as a foreign correspondent: it is literally my job to report on Britain.

House Democrats will try to advance a raft of gun control bills on Thursday in the wake of two high-profile mass shootings that rocked the nation earlier this month.

The Democratic-led package will likely fail in the face of Republican opposition in the Senate. However, Democrats have acknowledged a hope — however slim — that bipartisan talks among senators can lead to lawmakers passing a more limited bill with support from both parties.

The Raise the Age Act would lift the purchasing age for semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21, while the Keep Americans Safe Act would outlaw the import, sale, manufacture, transfer or possession of a large-capacity magazine.

In fact, history is NOT a "collection of facts about the past." History consists of making arguments about what happened in the past on the basis of what people recorded (in written documents, cultural artifacts, or oral traditions) at the time.

The problem is complicated for major events that produce "winners" and "losers," since we are more likely to have sources written by the "winners," designed to show why they were heroic in their victories.

There is no interpretation. There is no explanation of why the Mexicas lost.

The roots of Slate Star Codex trace back more than a decade to a polemicist and self-described A.I. researcher named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who believed that intelligent machines could end up destroying humankind. He was a driving force behind the rise of the Rationalists.

Because the Rationalists believed A.I. could end up destroying the world — a not entirely novel fear to anyone who has seen science fiction movies — they wanted to guard against it. Many worked for and donated money to MIRI, an organization created by Mr. Yudkowsky whose stated mission was “A.I. safety.”

The community was organized and close-knit. Two Bay Area organizations ran seminars and high-school summer camps on the Rationalist way of thinking.

In February 1973, Dr. Bernard Beitman found himself hunched over a kitchen sink in an old Victorian house in San Francisco, choking uncontrollably. He wasn’t eating or drinking, so there was nothing to cough up, and yet for several minutes he couldn’t catch his breath or swallow.The next day his brother called to tell him that 3,000 miles away, in Wilmington, Del., their father had died. He had bled into his throat, choking on his own blood at the same time as Beitman’s mysterious episode.

Overcome with awe and emotion, Beitman became fascinated with what he calls meaningful coincidences. After becoming a professor of psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia, he published several papers and two books on the subject and started a nonprofit, the Coincidence Project, to encourage people to share their coincidence stories.

“What I look for as a scientist and a spiritual seeker are the patterns that lead to meaningful coincidences,” said Beitman, 80, from his home in Charlottesville, Va. “So many people are reporting this kind of experience. Understanding how it happens is part of the fun.”