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Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.

The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Sunday, December 12, 2010Sunday, December 12, 2010 Go Follow the Atlantic » atlanticPrintlayoutnavigation()Politics Presented ByBack to the Gold Standard? Joshua GreenSenate Dems Lose Vote on 'Don't Ask' RepealMegan Scully & Dan FriedmanA Primary Challenge to Obama? Marc Ambinder Business Presented byif (typeof window.dartOrd == 'undefined') {window.dartOrd = ('000000000' + Math.ceil(Math.random()*1000000000).toString()).slice(-9);}jsProperties = 'TheAtlanticOnline/channel_business;pos=navlogo;sz=88x31,215x64;tile=1';document.write('');if( $(".adNavlogo").html().search("grey.gif") != -1 ){$(".adNavlogo").hide();}Will the Economy Get Jobs for Christmas?Daniel Indiviglio27 Key Facts About US ExportsDerek ThompsonThe Last StimulusDerek Thompson Culture Presented ByThe 10 Biggest Sports Stories of 2010Eleanor Barkhorn and Kevin Fallon al

at the force behind all that exists actually intervened in the consciousness of humankind in the form of a man so saturated in godliness that merely being near him healed people of the weight of the world's sins.

The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Tuesday, February 8, 2011Tuesday, February 8, 2011 Go Follow the Atlantic » Politics Presented by When Ronald Reagan Endorsed Ron Paul Joshua Green Epitaph for the DLC Marc Ambinder A Hard Time Raising Concerns About Egypt Chris Good Business Presented by Could a Hybrid Mortgage System Work? Daniel Indiviglio Fighting Bias in Academia Megan McArdle The Tech Revolution For Seniors Derek Thompson Culture Presented By 'Tiger Mother' Creates a New World Order James Fallows Justin Bieber: Daydream Believer James Parker <!-- /li

these questions tend to overlook the way IQ tests are designed. As a neuropsychologist who has administered hundreds of these measures, I can tell you that their structures reflect a deeply embedded bias toward intelligence as a function of reading skills

We teach computers to see patterns, much as we teach children to read. But the future of A.I. depends on computer systems that learn on their own, without supervision, researchers say.

When a mother points to a dog and tells her baby, “Look at the doggy,” the child learns what to call the furry four-legged friends. That is supervised learning. But when that baby stands and stumbles, again and again, until she can walk, that is something else.Computers are the same.

ven if a supervised learning system read all the books in the world, he noted, it would still lack human-level intelligence because so much of our knowledge is never written down.

For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong. Enlarge This Image Josh Haner/The New York Times A technician at a Department of Energy site in Oklahoma launching a weather balloon to help scientists analyze clouds. More Photos » Temperature Rising Enigma in the Sky This series focuses on the central arguments in the climate debate and examining the evidence for global warming and its consequences. More From the Series » if (typeof NYTDVideoManager != "undefined") { NYTDVideoManager.setAllowMultiPlayback(false); } function displayCompanionBanners(banners, tracking) { tmDisplayBanner(banners, "videoAdContent", 300, 250, null, tracking); } Multimedia Interactive Graphic Clouds and Climate Slide Show Understanding the Atmosphere Related Green Blog: Climate Change and the Body Politic (May 1, 2012) An Underground Fossil Forest Offers Clues on Climate Change (May 1, 2012) A blog about energy and the environment. Go to Blog » Readers’ Comments "There is always some possibility that the scientific consensus may be wrong and Dr. Lindzen may be right, or that both may be wrong. But the worst possible place to resolve such issues is the political arena." Alexander Flax, Potomac, MD Read Full Comment » Post a Comment » Over time, nearly every one of their arguments has been knocked down by accumulating evidence, and polls say 97 percent of working climate scientists now see global warming as a serious risk.

They acknowledge that the human release of greenhouse gases will cause the planet to warm. But they assert that clouds — which can either warm or cool the earth, depending on the type and location — will shift in such a way as to counter much of the expected temperature rise and preserve the equable climate on which civilization depends.

At gatherings of climate change skeptics on both sides of the Atlantic, Dr. Lindzen has been treated as a star. During a debate in Australia over carbon taxes, his work was cited repeatedly. When he appears at conferences of the Heartland Institute, the primary American organization pushing climate change skepticism, he is greeted by thunderous applause.

AI headshots aren’t yet perfect, but they’re so close I expect we’ll start seeing them on LinkedIn, Tinder and other social profiles. Heck, we may already see them. How would we know?

Welcome to our new reality, where nothing is real. We now have photos initially captured with cameras that AI changes into something that never was

Or, like the headshot above, there are convincingly photographic images AI generates out of thin air.

Urban airports like Boston’s Logan thought they had silenced noise issues with quieter planes. Now complaints pour in from suburbs 10 to 15 miles away because new navigation routes have created relentless noise for some homeowners. Photo: Alamy By Scott McCartney Scott McCartney The Wall Street Journal BiographyScott McCartney @MiddleSeat Scott.McCartney@wsj.com March 7, 2018 8:39 a.m. ET 146 COMMENTS saveSB107507240220

It turns out engines aren’t the major culprit anymore. New airplanes are much quieter. It’s the “whoosh” that big airplanes make racing through the air.

Computer models suggest slowing departures by 30 knots—about 35 miles an hour—would reduce noise on the ground significantly.

What, then, are you supposed to do when the mathematics gets more abstract? What do you do when you get to General Relativity, or Quantum Field Theory, or even more far afield into the speculative realms of cosmic inflation, extra dimensions, grand unified theories, or string theory? The mathematical structures that you build to describe these possibilities simply are what they are; on their own, they won't offer you any physical insights. But if you can pull out either observable quantities, or connections to physically observable quantities, that's when you start crossing over into something that you can test and observe.

Now, string theory (or, more accurately, string theories) have their own constraints governing them, as do the forces in our Universe, so it isn't provably clear that there's a one-to-one correspondence between our four-dimensional Universe with gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces and any version of string theory. It's an interesting conjecture, and it has found some applications to the real world: in the study of quark-gluon plasmas. In that sense, it's more than mathematics: it's physics. But where it strays from physics into pure mathematics is not yet fully determined.

If you describe the Universe precisely, and you can make quantitative predictions about it, you're physics. If those predictions turn out to be accurate and reflective of reality, then you're physics that's correct and useful. If those predictions are demonstrably wrong, you're physics that doesn't describe our Universe: you're a failed attempt at a physical theory. But if your equations have no connection at all to the physical Universe, and cannot be related to anything you can ever hope to someday observe or measure, you're firmly in the realm of mathematics; the divorce from physics will then be final. Mathematics is the language we use to describe physics, but not everything mathematical is physically meaningful. The connection, and where it breaks down, can only be determined by looking at the Universe itself.

Most people can readily conjure images inside their head - known as their mind's eye. But this year scientists have described a condition, aphantasia, in which some people are unable to visualise mental images.

Our memories are often tied up in images, think back to a wedding or first day at school. As a result, Niel admits, some aspects of his memory are "terrible", but he is very good at remembering facts. And, like others with aphantasia, he struggles to recognise faces.Yet he does not see aphantasia as a disability, but simply a different way of experiencing life.

"When I think about my fiancee there is no image, but I am definitely thinking about her, I know today she has her hair up at the back, she's brunette."But I'm not describing an image I am looking at, I'm remembering features about her, that's the strangest thing and maybe that is a source of some regret."The response from his mates is a very sympathetic: "You're weird."

Hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters across the United States caused $95 billion in damage last year, according to new data, almost double the amount in 2019 and the third-highest losses since 2010.

Those losses occurred during a year that was one of the warmest on record

“Climate change plays a role in this upward trend of losses,”

&nbsp;64&nbsp;2&nbsp;1&nbsp;70 Why English and general knowledge are important

Proficiency in English is a normal requirement in the private sector, particularly in the tourism industry.

Instead of using our diversity as our strength, bigotry has turned it into a weakness. Instead of embracing English to reach out to the world, we have let it slip and are happy to be local champions.

Memories of visual images (e.g., dinner plates) are stored in what is called visual memory.

Our minds use visual memory to perform even the simplest of computations; from remembering the face of someone we’ve just met, to remembering what time it was last we checked. Without visual memory, we wouldn’t be able to store—and later retrieve—anything we see.

ust as a computer’s memory capacity constrains its abilities, visual memory capacity has been correlated with a number of higher cognitive abilities, including academic success, fluid intelligence (the ability to solve novel problems), and general comprehension.

A half decade ago, the world’s leading A.I. labs built systems that could identify objects in digital images and even generate images on their own, including flowers, dogs, cars and faces. A few years later, they built systems that could do much the same with written language, summarizing articles, answering questions, generating tweets and even writing blog posts.

DALL-E is a notable step forward because it juggles both language and images and, in some cases, grasps the relationship between the two

“We can now use multiple, intersecting streams of information to create better and better technology,”

Judith, "barely clothed and fresh from the seduction and slaying of Holofernes, glows in her voluptuousness. Her hair is a dark sky between the golden branches of Assyrian trees, fertility symbols that represent her eroticism. This young, ecstatic, extravagantly made-up woman confronts the viewer through half-closed eyes in what appears to be a reverie of orgasmic rapture," writes Eric Kandel in his new book, The Age of Insight. Wait a minute. Writes who? Eric Kandel, the Nobel-winning neuroscientist who's spent most of his career fixated on the generously sized neurons of sea snails

Kandel goes on to speculate, in a bravura paragraph a few hundred pages later, on the exact neurochemical cognitive circuitry of the painting's viewer:

"At a base level, the aesthetics of the image's luminous gold surface, the soft rendering of the body, and the overall harmonious combination of colors could activate the pleasure circuits, triggering the release of dopamine. If Judith's smooth skin and exposed breast trigger the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and vasopressin, one might feel sexual excitement. The latent violence of Holofernes's decapitated head, as well as Judith's own sadistic gaze and upturned lip, could cause the release of norepinephrine, resulting in increased heart rate and blood pressure and triggering the fight-or-flight response. In contrast, the soft brushwork and repetitive, almost meditative, patterning may stimulate the release of serotonin. As the beholder takes in the image and its multifaceted emotional content, the release of acetylcholine to the hippocampus contributes to the storing of the image in the viewer's memory. What ultimately makes an image like Klimt's 'Judith' so irresistible and dynamic is its complexity, the way it activates a number of distinct and often conflicting emotional signals in the brain and combines them to produce a staggeringly complex and fascinating swirl of emotions."

Taken alone, it would appear both sides share equal blame for the present political paralysis as each shifts to their ideological poles.

while both sides may be guilty of running to their respective corners, one is clearly more liable for putting the kibosh on negotiation deal-making.

one gets more&nbsp;liberal, the more he or she wants&nbsp;elected officials who compromise.

Infinity has its own special symbol: ∞. The symbol, sometimes called the lemniscate, was introduced by clergyman and mathematician John Wallis in 1655. The word "lemniscate" comes from the Latin word lemniscus, which means "ribbon," while the word "infinity" comes from the Latin word infinitas, which means "boundless."

Of all Zeno's paradoxes, the most famous is his paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles. In the paradox, a tortoise challenges the Greek hero Achilles to a race, providing the tortoise is given a small head start. The tortoise argues he will win the race because as Achilles catches up to him, the tortoise will have gone a bit further, adding to the distance.

Pi as an Example of Infinity Pi is a number consisting of an infinite number of digits. Jeffrey Coolidge / Getty Images Another good example of infinity is the number π or pi. Mathematicians use a symbol for pi because it's impossible to write the number down. Pi consists of an infinite number of digits. It's often rounded to 3.14 or even 3.14159, yet no matter how many digits you write, it's impossible to get to the end.

GPT-4, in contrast, is a state-of-the-art system capable of creating not just words but describing images in response to a person’s simple written commands.

When shown a photo of a boxing glove hanging over a wooden seesaw with a ball on one side, for instance, a person can ask what will happen if the glove drops, and GPT-4 will respond that it would hit the seesaw and cause the ball to fly up.

an AI program, known as a large language model, that early testers had claimed was remarkably advanced in its ability to reason and learn new things

We tend to think of psychopaths as dangerous, antisocial, lacking in key human emotions like empathy or remorse.

finding that whatever qualities they might have, high intelligence is not one of them. In fact, psychopaths were found to be less intelligent than average people.

referred by psychologists as the “Hannibal Lecter myth”. But that kind of Hollywoodized psychopath did not sit well with observed facts.&nbsp;