The English language is literally spiralling exponentially out of the control of pedant... - 0 views
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Even the most fanatical pedant must admit that usage is the ultimate arbiter of linguistic propriety. That is to say, a word means a certain thing because significant numbers of people take it to mean a certain thing. An informal process has evolved to monitor any shift in definition. At one end of the spectrum we meet words that will, from time to time, be “mistakenly” used in a way that does not conform to the dictionary definition. A chap might write “limpid” when he means “flaccid”. This still counts as an error. At the other end, we encounter words that, after decades of squabbling, have had their meaning formally transformed. Classical scholars will tell you that, derived from a term used by the Roman military, “decimate” used to mean the killing of one in 10 of any accused group. Now, we take it to mean the same as “annihilate” (which itself used to mean “make null and void”). The really interesting, contentious words can be found in the middle section of the spectrum.
The Psychopath Makeover - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views
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The eminent criminal psychologist and creator of the widely used Psychopathy Checklist paused before answering. "I think, in general, yes, society is becoming more psychopathic," he said. "I mean, there's stuff going on nowadays that we wouldn't have seen 20, even 10 years ago. Kids are becoming anesthetized to normal sexual behavior by early exposure to pornography on the Internet. Rent-a-friend sites are getting more popular on the Web, because folks are either too busy or too techy to make real ones. ... The recent hike in female criminality is particularly revealing. And don't even get me started on Wall Street."
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in a survey that has so far tested 14,000 volunteers, Sara Konrath and her team at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research has found that college students' self-reported empathy levels (as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a standardized questionnaire containing such items as "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me" and "I try to look at everybody's side of a disagreement before I make a decision") have been in steady decline over the past three decades—since the inauguration of the scale, in fact, back in 1979. A particularly pronounced slump has been observed over the past 10 years. "College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago," Konrath reports.
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Imagining, it would seem, really does make it so. Whenever we read a story, our level of engagement is such that we "mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative," according to one of the researchers, Nicole Speer. Our brains then interweave these newly encountered situations with knowledge and experience gleaned from our own lives to create an organic mosaic of dynamic mental syntheses.
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Assessing Kurzweil: the results - Less Wrong - 0 views
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when talking about unprecedented future events such as nanotechnology or AI, the choice of the model is also dependent on expert judgement.
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In various books, he's made predictions about what would happen in 2009, and we're now in a position to judge their accuracy. I haven't been satisfied by the various accuracy ratings I've found online, so I decided to do my own assessments.
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Ray Kurzweil has a model of technological intelligence development where, broadly speaking, evolution, pre-computer technological development, post-computer technological development and future AIs all fit into the same exponential increase.
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The Cult of Coincidence | The Huffington Post - 0 views
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Most people readily believe that they themselves are essentially fully independent thinkers, and that closed-mindedness, intellectual inflexibility and an irrational commitment to pre-conceived thinking dwells only in the feeble minds of others. Think about it: When was the last time in the course of discussion that someone admitted to you something like, “You’re right, I have just blindly swallowed all of the positions and cultural mores of my milieu” or, “Yes, I agree that no amount of oppositional information will ever dissuade me from the beliefs I hold?” No one is immune from this state of affairs, and it requires courage and perpetual vigilance to even venture outside of the intellectual echo chamber that most of us inhabit.
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There are those who believe that the scientific community is uniquely positioned to avoid these pitfalls. They suggest that the system of peer review is inherently self-critical, and as such is structurally quarantined from bias. Some scientists think otherwise and note that science, in as much as it is conducted by human beings, is subject to the same partiality as every other endeavor.
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like the communist party under Lenin, science is [in its own eyes] infallible because its judgments are collective. Critics are unneeded, and since they are unneeded, they are not welcome.
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Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don't Fire Us? | Mother Jones - 0 views
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This is the happy version. It's the one where computers keep getting smarter and smarter, and clever engineers keep building better and better robots. By 2040, computers the size of a softball are as smart as human beings. Smarter, in fact. Plus they're computers: They never get tired, they're never ill-tempered, they never make mistakes, and they have instant access to all of human knowledge.
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, just as it took us until 2025 to fill up Lake Michigan, the simple exponential curve of Moore's Law suggests it's going to take us until 2025 to build a computer with the processing power of the human brain. And it's going to happen the same way: For the first 70 years, it will seem as if nothing is happening, even though we're doubling our progress every 18 months. Then, in the final 15 years, seemingly out of nowhere, we'll finish the job.
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And that's exactly where we are. We've moved from computers with a trillionth of the power of a human brain to computers with a billionth of the power. Then a millionth. And now a thousandth. Along the way, computers progressed from ballistics to accounting to word processing to speech recognition, and none of that really seemed like progress toward artificial intelligence. That's because even a thousandth of the power of a human brain is—let's be honest—a bit of a joke.
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Last words? Phone app bids to save dying aboriginal language - CNN.com - 0 views
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A smartphone app has been launched to help save an Australian indigenous language that is in danger of disappearing.
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aims to prevent the extinction of the Iwaidja language
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"People have their phones with them most of the time, the app is incredibly easy to use, and this allows data collection to happen spontaneously, opportunistically,"
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Ray Kurzweil: Humans will be hybrids by 2030 - 0 views
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That's the prediction of Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google , who spoke Wednesday at the Exponential Finance conference in New York. Kurzweil predicts that humans will become hybrids in the 2030s. That means our brains will be able to connect directly to the cloud, where there will be thousands of computers, and those computers will augment our existing intelligence.
Op-Ed Contributor - Rich Man's Burden - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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what’s different from Weber’s era is that it is now the rich who are the most stressed out and the most likely to be working the most. Perhaps for the first time since we’ve kept track of such things, higher-income folks work more hours than lower-wage earners do.
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This is a stunning moment in economic history: At one time we worked hard so that someday we (or our children) wouldn’t have to. Today, the more we earn, the more we work, since the opportunity cost of not working is all the greater (and since the higher we go, the more relatively deprived we feel).
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when we get a raise, instead of using that hard-won money to buy “the good life,” we feel even more pressure to work since the shadow costs of not working are all the greater.
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I Downloaded the Information That Facebook Has on Me. Yikes. - The New York Times - 0 views
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When I downloaded a copy of my Facebook data last week, I didn’t expect to see much. My profile is sparse, I rarely post anything on the site, and I seldom click on ads
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With a few clicks, I learned that about 500 advertisers — many that I had never heard of, like Bad Dad, a motorcycle parts store, and Space Jesus, an electronica band — had my contact information
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Facebook also had my entire phone book, including the number to ring my apartment buzzer. The social network had even kept a permanent record of the roughly 100 people I had deleted from my friends list over the last 14 years, including my exes.
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A New Understanding of How Movement Decreases Stress - The Atlantic - 0 views
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If stress is controlled by these few cortical areas—the part of the brain that deals in high-level executive functioning, our beliefs and existential understandings of ourselves—why would any sort of body movement play a part in decreasing stress?
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Pittsburgh neuroscientists showed that they have discovered a discrete, elaborate network in the cerebral cortex that controls the adrenal medulla. It seems that the connections between the brain and the adrenal medulla are much more elaborate than previously understood. Complex networks throughout the primary sensory and motor cortices are tied directly to our stress responses.
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“This is suggesting a much more decentralized process,” said Bruno of the findings. He was not involved in the study.“You have lots of different circuits built on top of one another, and they’re all feeding back to one of our most primitive and primordial response systems. They've really shown that stress is controlled by more than the traditional high-level cognitive areas. I think that’s a big deal.
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Seven Lessons In Economic Leadership From Ancient Egypt - 0 views
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Although there are plenty of grounds for rage against the big banks, the challenge is to sort out which are the activities that grow the real economy of goods and services, and which are the activities that are essentially a zero-sum game of socially useless gambling?
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The situation today is that the zero-sum games of the financial sector aren’t just a tiny sideshow. They have grown exponentially and have become almost the main game of the financial sector.
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When finance becomes the end, not the means, then the result is what analyst Gautam Mukunda calls “excessive financialization” of the economy, as his excellent article by “The Price of Wall Street Power” in the June 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review makes clear.
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They're Watching You at Work - Don Peck - The Atlantic - 2 views
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Predictive statistical analysis, harnessed to big data, appears poised to alter the way millions of people are hired and assessed.
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By one estimate, more than 98 percent of the world’s information is now stored digitally, and the volume of that data has quadrupled since 2007.
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The application of predictive analytics to people’s careers—an emerging field sometimes called “people analytics”—is enormously challenging, not to mention ethically fraught
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The future's in the past | Culture | The Guardian - 1 views
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Whenever the importance of history is discussed, epigrams and homilies come tripping easily off our tongues: How can we understand our present or glimpse our future if we cannot understand our past? How can we know who we are if we don't know who we were?
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While history may be condemned to repeat itself, historians are condemned to repeat themselves. History is bunk or possibly bunkum.
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Historians, more than any other class, spend a great deal of time justifying their trade, defining it and aphorising it, seeming to lavish more attention on historiography than history.
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The Linguistic Colonialism of English - Brown Political Review - 0 views
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Through centuries of colonialism, neocolonialism, Cold War expansionism, and, most recently, globalization, the West has spread its preferred systems of capitalism, democracy, and moral values.
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As a result of this, contemporary English is detached from any specific cultural identity; it is a tool which links different societies in an increasingly smaller world.
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The first population to speak English was the British. About five hundred years ago, between five and seven million people spoke the language; today, about 1.8 billion people do.
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How Soon Will The U.K. Variant Be Widespread In The U.S.? : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views
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Scientists are sending the U.S. a warning: What's happening right now in the United Kingdom with the new coronavirus variant could likely happen in the U.S., and the country has a short window to prepare.
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"I think a lot of countries are looking at the U.K. right now and saying, 'Oh, isn't that too bad that it's happening there, just like we did with Italy in February.
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"But we've seen in this pandemic a few times that, if the virus can happen somewhere else, it can probably happen in your country, too."
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Andrew Anglin: The Making of an American Nazi - The Atlantic - 0 views
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“You fucking wicked kike whore,” Andrew Auernheimer, The Daily Stormer’s webmaster, said in a voicemail for Gersh. “This is Trump’s America now.”
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Over the next week, the Stormers besieged Whitefish businesses, human-rights groups, city-council members—anyone potentially connected to the targets. A single harasser called Judah’s office more than 500 times in three days, according to the Whitefish police. Gersh came home one night to find her husband sitting at home in the dark, suitcases on the floor, wondering whether they should flee. “I have never been so scared in my entire life,” she later told me.
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That Anglin, a 33-year-old college dropout, could unleash such mayhem—Whitefish’s police chief, Bill Dial, likened it to “domestic terrorism”—was a sign of just how emboldened the alt-right had become.
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A coronavirus vaccine should be affordable by everyone - STAT - 0 views
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As the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 spreads in more than 60 countries, the race to develop a vaccine to prevent the illness has taken on new urgency. In a meeting with CEOs of major drug companies this week, President Trump ramped up the pressure, suggesting that vaccines could come to market faster than the 12- to 18-month timeline most researchers think is realistic.
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But while the Trump administration is pushing drug companies to meet faster timelines, it hasn’t addressed an equally urgent question: What will be done to ensure the vaccine is accessible for those who need it most?
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Making vaccines available only to the rich is not just immoral, it’s also bad public health policy. We’ll want everyone, rich or poor, insured or not, to be protected from the new coronavirus. Protecting others helps to protect everyone.
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Understanding What's Wrong With Facebook | Talking Points Memo - 0 views
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to really understand the problem with Facebook we need to understand the structural roots of that problem, how much of it is baked into the core architecture of the site and its very business model
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much of it is inherent in the core strategies of the post-2000, second wave Internet tech companies that now dominate our information space and economy.
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Facebook is an ingenious engine for information and ideational manipulation.
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Mindfulness: How it could help you be happier, healthier and more successful - CNN - 0 views
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"Change in humanity must start from individuals," the Dalai Lama told the mayors. "We created this violence, so we can reduce this violence."
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Paying attention to the matters at hand may sound simple, but most Americans aren't doing it, studies show. Though the experts say there's a lot more research to be done, the number of scientific studies has grown exponentially over the past decade. They show that mindfulness is more than a passing fad; there's early evidence it can help your health.
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n their 2010 study, they created a computer program that sent questions at random moments to people by iPhone. The program asked, "How are you feeling right now?" "What are you doing right now?" and "Are you thinking about something other than what you're currently doing?"
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