Group items tagged

Alexis C. Madrigal Nov 17 2014, 7:59 PM ET Social networking is not, it turns out, winner take all. In the past, one might have imagined that switching between Facebook and “some other network” would be difficult, but the smartphone interface makes it easy to be on a dozen networks. All messages come to the same place—the phone’s notifications screen—so what matters is what your friends are doing, not which apps they’re using.

if I were to put money on an area in which Facebook might be unable to dominate in the future, it would be apps that take advantage of physical proximity. Something radically new could arise on that front, whether it’s an evolution of Yik Yak

The Social Machine, predicts that text will be a less and less important part of our asynchronous communications mix. Instead, she foresees a “very fluid interface” that would mix text with voice, video, sensor outputs (location, say, or vital signs), and who knows what else

SAN FRANCISCO — Life on Mars? Today? The notion may not be so far-fetched after all.

Curiosity has now recorded a burst of methane that lasted at least two months.

for the first time, they had confirmed the presence of carbon-based organic molecules in a rock sample. The so-called organics are not direct signs of life, past or present, but they lend weight to the possibility that Mars had the ingredients required for life, and may even still have them.

We’ve all heard the argument that philosophy is isolated, an “ivory tower” discipline cut off from virtually every other progress-making pursuit of knowledge, including math and the sciences, as well as from the actual concerns of daily life. The reasons given for this are many. In a widely read essay in this series, “When Philosophy Lost Its Way,” Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle claim that it was philosophy’s institutionalization in the university in the late 19th century that separated it from the study of humanity and nature, now the province of social and natural sciences.

This institutionalization, the authors claim, led it to betray its central aim of articulating the knowledge needed to live virtuous and rewarding lives. I have a different view: Philosophy isn’t separated from the social, natural or mathematical sciences, nor is it neglecting the study of goodness, justice and virtue, which was never its central aim.

identified philosophy with informal linguistic analysis. Fortunately, this narrow view didn’t stop them from contributing to the science of language and the study of law. Now long gone, neither movement defined the philosophy of its day and neither arose from locating it in universities.

He has a remarkable ability to hold onto the loyalty of his backers, and his rallies help explain why.

"He wants to make America great again,"

feeds the notion that the government is catering to special interests and is giving things away to placate different constituencies.

probably bias in the coverage. People are more likely to be concerned about victims they can identify with. Research tells us that U.S. media outlets are more likely to cover terrorist attacks with U.S. victims. The news media are more likely to cover disasters in wealthier countries. And tragedies that are physically closer to the United States are more likely to appear in U.S. news

First, “news” is generally considered to be something especially unusual. The journalism truism is that “dog bites man” is not a story, but “man bites dog” is. That’s not a judgment on whether dog bites matter; it’s a judgment about what’s surprising.

news outlets are influenced by their consumers. Human beings are especially interested in events that might affect them personally.

experienced sudden, jerky body movements as you drift into sleep. The sensation is common, and if paired with a dream, can feel like you’ve suddenly moved or fallen.

this is called dream incorporation, and reveals our mind’s amazing capacity to improvise

The experience is known as a ‘hypnic jerk’ and it sheds light onto the conflict in our brains as we shut down for sleep.

A 'brain training' iPad game developed and tested by researchers at the University of Cambridge may improve the memory of patients with schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a long-term mental health condition that causes a range of psychological symptoms, ranging from changes in behaviour through to hallucinations and delusions

patients are still left with debilitating cognitive impairments, including in their memory

newish is the rhetoric of unreality, the insistence, chiefly by Democrats, that some politicians are incapable of perceiving the truth because they have an epistemological deficit: they no longer believe in evidence, or even in objective reality.

the past of proof is strange and, on its uncertain future, much in public life turns. In the end, it comes down to this: the history of truth is cockamamie, and lately it’s been getting cockamamier.

. Michael P. Lynch is a philosopher of truth. His fascinating new book, “The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data,” begins with a thought experiment: “Imagine a society where smartphones are miniaturized and hooked directly into a person’s brain.” As thought experiments go, this one isn’t much of a stretch. (“Eventually, you’ll have an implant,” Google’s Larry Page has promised, “where if you think about a fact it will just tell you the answer.”) Now imagine that, after living with these implants for generations, people grow to rely on them, to know what they know and forget how people used to learn—by observation, inquiry, and reason. Then picture this: overnight, an environmental disaster destroys so much of the planet’s electronic-communications grid that everyone’s implant crashes. It would be, Lynch says, as if the whole world had suddenly gone blind. There would be no immediate basis on which to establish the truth of a fact. No one would really know anything anymore, because no one would know how to know. I Google, therefore I am not.

In a surveillance economy where companies track, analyze and capitalize on our clicks, the issue at hand isn’t privacy. The problem is unfettered data exploitation and its potential deleterious consequences — among them, unequal consumer treatment, financial fraud, identity theft, manipulative marketing and discrimination.

In other words, asking companies whose business models revolve around exploiting data-based consumer-influence techniques to explain their privacy policies seems about as useful as asking sharks to hold forth on veganism.

Do we want a future in which companies can freely parse the photos we posted last year, or the location data from the fitness apps we used last week, to infer whether we are stressed or depressed or financially strapped or emotionally vulnerable — and take advantage of that?

More 5inShare Email Print A defendant in the Atlanta Public Schools case turns herself in at the Fulton County Jail on April 2. (David Goldman/AP) Earlier this week at The Atlantic, Emily Richmond asked whether high-stakes testing caused the Atlanta schools cheating scandal. The answer, I would argue, is yes... just not in the way you might think. Tests don't cause unethical behavior. But they did cause the Atlanta cheating scandal, and they are doing damage to the teaching profession. The argument that tests do not cause unethical behavior is fairly straightforward, and has been articulated by a number of writers. Jonathan Chait quite correctly points out that unethical behavior occurs in virtually all professions -- and that it occurs particularly when there are clear incentives to succeed. Incentivizing any field increases the impetus to cheat. Suppose journalism worked the way teaching traditionally had. You get hired at a newspaper, and your advancement and pay are dictated almost entirely by your years on the job, with almost no chance of either becoming a star or of getting fired for incompetence. Then imagine journalists changed that and instituted the current system, where you can get really successful if your bosses like you or be fired if they don't. You could look around and see scandal after scandal -- phone hacking! Jayson Blair! NBC's exploding truck! Janet Cooke! Stephen Glass! -- that could plausibly be attributed to this frightening new world in which journalists had an incentive to cheat in order to get ahead. It holds true of any field. If Major League Baseball instituted tenure, and maybe used tee-ball rules where you can't keep score and everybody gets a chance to hit, it could stamp out steroid use. Students have been cheating on tests forever -- massive, systematic cheating, you could say. Why? Because they have an incentive to do well. Give teachers and administrators an incentive for their students to do well, and more of them will cheat. For Chait, then, teaching has just been made more like journalism or baseball; it has gone from an incentiveless occupation to one with incentives.

Chait refers to violations of journalistic ethics -- like the phone-hacking scandal -- and suggests they are analogous to Major-League steroid use, and that both are similar to teachers (or students) cheating on tests. But is phone hacking "cheating"

Phone hacking was, then, not an example of cheating. It was a violation of professional ethics. And those ethics are not arbitrarily imposed, but are intrinsic to the practice of journalism as a profession committed to public service and to truth.

Why would anyone continue to use recreational drugs despite the medical consequences and social condemnation? What makes someone eat more and more in the face of poor health?

modern humans have designed the perfect environment to create both of these addictions.

the myth has persisted that addiction is either a moral failure or a hard-wired behavior — that addicts are either completely in command or literally out of their minds

The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015 Gallup survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn’t imagine life without the device.

So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?

Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.

When the Russia question came up during a hearing at the British Parliament last month, Alexander Nix did not hesitate.“We’ve never worked in Russia,” said Mr. Nix, head of a data consulting firm that advised the Trump campaign on targeting voters.

“As far as I’m aware, we’ve never worked for a Russian company,” Mr. Nix added. “We’ve never worked with a Russian organization in Russia or any other country, and we don’t have any relationship with Russia or Russian individuals.”

But Mr. Nix’s business did have some dealings with Russian interests, according to company documents and interviews.

The visual system optimally maintains attention on relevant objects even as eye movements are made, shows a study by the German Primate Center.

Their study shows that the rhesus macaque's brain quickly and efficiently shifts attention with each eye-movement in a well-synchronized manner. Since humans and monkeys exhibit very similar eye-movements and visual function, these findings are likely to generalize to the human brain. These results may help understand disorders like schizophrenia, visual neglect and other attention deficit disorders.

Since different locations on the retina stimulate different visual neurons in the brain, this means that one set of visual neurons responds to the child before the eye-movement, while a different second set of neurons responds to the child after the eye-movement. Thus, to optimally maintain attention on the child, the brain has to enhance the responses of the first set of neurons right until the eye-movement begins and then switch to enhance the responses of the second set of neurons right around when the eye-movement ends.

WhatsApp is encouraging users to update to the latest version of the app after discovering a vulnerability that allowed spyware to be injected into a user’s phone through the app’s phone call function.

The spyware was developed by the Israeli cyber intelligence company NSO Group, according to the Financial Times,

Attackers could transmit the malicious code to a target’s device by calling the user and infecting the call whether or not the recipient answered the call.

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

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

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.

Fundamental physics is in a metaphysical mess and needs help. The attempt to reconcile its two big theories, general relativity and quantum mechanics, has stalled for nearly 40 years. Endeavours to unite them, such as string theory, are mathematically ingenious but incomprehensible even to many who work with them. This is well known.

A better-kept secret is that at the heart of quantum mechanics is a disturbing paradox – the so-called measurement problem, arising ultimately out of the Uncertainty Principle – which apparently demonstrates that the very measurements that have established and confirmed quantum theory should be impossible. Oxford philosopher of physics David Wallace has argued that this threatens to make quantum mechanics incoherent which can be remedied only by vastly multiplying worlds.

there is the failure of physics to accommodate conscious beings. The attempt to fit consciousness into the material world, usually by identifying it with activity in the brain, has failed dismally, if only because there is no way of accounting for the fact that certain nerve impulses are supposed to be conscious (of themselves or of the world) while the overwhelming majority (physically essentially the same) are not. In short, physics does not allow for the strange fact that matter reveals itself to material objects (such as physicists).

look at where we are today thanks to artificial intelligence from digital computers — and the amount of middle-skill and even high-skill work they’re supplanting — and then factor in how all of this could be supercharged in a decade by quantum computing.

In December 2016, Amazon announced plans for the Amazon Go automated grocery store, in which a combination of computer vision and deep-learning technologies track items and only charges customers when they remove the items from the store. In February 2017, Bank of America began testing three ‘employee-less’ branch locations that offer full-service banking automatically, with access to a human, when necessary, via video teleconference.”

This will be a challenge for developed countries, but even more so for countries like Egypt, Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, China and India — where huge numbers of youths are already unemployed because they lack the education for even this middle-skill work THAT’S now being automated.

Researchers identify gene that helps prevent brain disease: Protein 'proofreading' errors lead to neurodegenerative disease

Without normal levels of Ankrd16, these nerve cells, located in the cerebellum, incorrectly activate the amino acid serine, which is then improperly incorporated into proteins and causes protein aggregation.

Elevating the level of Ankrd16 protects these cells from dying, while removing Ankrd16 from other neurons in mice with a proofreading deficiency caused widespread buildup of abnormal proteins and ultimately neuronal death.

The scientists during Atwater’s era saw the human digestive system as a single engine producing a predictable quantity of energy from a given amount of fuel.

Yet the human gut contains a multitude of engines, and they interact with each other in ways science is just beginning to unravel. Over the past 15 years, a fast-growing body of literature suggests that the gut microbiome—the trillions of microbes that live inside us—shapes the way we metabolize food and may play an important role in how we gain weight.

Antibiotics, it turns out, reconfigure your gut’s balance in favor of microbes that help us store food as body fat.