Group items tagged

The largest prime number yet has been discovered — and it's 17,425,170 digits long. The new prime number crushes the last one discovered in 2008, which was a paltry 12,978,189 digits long.

The number — 2 raised to the 57,885,161 power minus 1 — was discovered by University of Central Missouri mathematician Curtis Cooper as part of a giant network of volunteer computers

"It's analogous to climbing Mt. Everest," said George Woltman, the retired, Orlando, Fla.-based computer scientist who created GIMPS. "People enjoy it for the challenge of the discovery of finding something that's never been known before."

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.

The virtual hand illusion (VHI) paradigm demonstrates that people tend to perceive agency and bodily ownership for a virtual hand that moves in synchrony with their own movements. Given that this kind of effect can be taken to reflect self–other integration (i.e., the integration of some external, novel event into the representation of oneself), and given that self–other integration has been previously shown to be affected by metacontrol states (biases of information processing towards persistence/selectivity or flexibility/integration), we tested whether the VHI varies in size depending on the metacontrol bias. Persistence and flexibility biases were induced by having participants carry out a convergent thinking (Remote Associates) task or divergent-thinking (Alternate Uses) task, respectively, while experiencing a virtual hand moving synchronously or asynchronously with their real hand. Synchrony-induced agency and ownership effects were more pronounced in the context of divergent thinking than in the context of convergent thinking, suggesting that a metacontrol bias towards flexibility promotes self–other integration.

As in previous studies, participants were more likely to experience subjective agency and ownership for a virtual hand if it moved in synchrony with their own, real hand. As predicted, the size of this effect was significantly moderated by the type of creativity task in the context of which the illusion was induced.

It is important to keep in mind the fact that our present findings were obtained in a paradigm that strongly interleaved what we considered the task prime (i.e., the particular creativity task) and the induction of the VHI—the process we aimed to prime. The practical reason to do so was to increase the probability that the metacontrol state that the creativity tasks were hypothesized to induce or establish would be sufficiently close in time to the synchrony manipulation to have an impact on the thereby induced changes in self-perception. However, this implies that we are unable to disentangle the effects of the task prime proper and the effects of possible interactions between this task prime and the synchrony manipulation. There are indeed reasons to assume that such interactions are not unlikely to have occurred

Some behavioral interventions do seem to lead to positive changes, such as automatically enrolling children in school free lunch programs or simplifying mortgage information for aspiring homeowners. (Whether one might call such interventions “nudges,” however, is debatable.)

it’s not clear we need to appeal to psychology studies to make some common-sense changes, especially since the scientific rigor of these studies is shaky at best.

Nudges are related to a larger area of research on “priming,” which tests how behavior changes in response to what we think about or even see without noticing

goal-priming experiments are coming under scrutiny — and in the process, revealing a problem at the heart of psychological research itself.

people are fascinated by counterintuitive findings regarding human nature — who would think that reading seemingly incidental words would influence behavior? Also intriguing is the notion that we don’t have as much control of ourselves as we think.

Furthermore, goal priming carries an exculpatory whiff of “don’t blame me, blame my brain” — or better yet, “blame the world around me.”

Roman Jakobson, a linguist, once said that “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” How do two-pronoun systems play into

this? In German, I must choose du or Sie every time I address someone. According to the logic of language shaping thought, I should therefore be more aware of social relations when I speak German.

A believer in the language-shapes-thought idea might argue that speaking German doesn't push me to always be more conscious of social relationships because I'm a non-native speaker, and so I haven't developed the habits of mind of lifelong German speakers. But plenty of native speakers of two-pronoun languages find this system irksome and awkward, just as I do.

"We are still in battle against the would-be terrorists,

"We assume there are several heavily armed perpetrators."

The online retail giant said Wednesday that it will extend its $5.99 monthly Prime membership to the roughly 20% of the U.S. population that is signed up for Medicaid. Last year, the company introduced the discount—Prime membership ordinarily costs $12.99 a month or $99 a year—by offering it to people who obtain government assistance with cards typically used for the food-stamp program, formally called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Amazon’s pursuit of more low-income shoppers comes as analysts estimate Prime membership has reached more than half of all U.S. households with internet and largely saturated the wealthier segment.

Walmart has more than 4,600 stores in the U.S. and Dollar General Corp. —which targets households earning $40,000 or less—has more than 14,000, many in low-income, rural areas.

reflecting on his career so far, Tao told me that his view of mathematics has utterly changed since childhood. ‘‘When I was growing up, I knew I wanted to be a mathematician, but I had no idea what that entailed,’’ he said in a lilting Australian accent. ‘‘I sort of imagined a committee would hand me problems to solve or something.’’

But it turned out that the work of real mathematicians bears little resemblance to the manipulations and memorization of the math student. Even those who experience great success through their college years may turn out not to have what it takes. The ancient art of mathematics, Tao has discovered, does not reward speed so much as patience, cunning and, perhaps most surprising of all, the sort of gift for collaboration and improvisation that characterizes the best jazz musicians

Tao now believes that his younger self, the prodigy who wowed the math world, wasn’t truly doing math at all. ‘‘It’s as if your only experience with music were practicing scales or learning music theory,’’ he said, looking into light pouring from his window. ‘‘I didn’t learn the deeper meaning of the subject until much later.’’

“Are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn’t possible to read?” Mr. Cameron said at an event on Monday, in reference to services like WhatsApp, Snapchat and other encrypted online applications. “My answer to that question is: ‘No, we must not.’ ”

Mr. Cameron said his first duty was to protect the country against terrorist attacks.

Mr. Cameron’s comments are part of a growing debate in Europe and the United States over whether Internet companies and telecom providers must cooperate fully with intelligence agencies, who have seen an increased use of social media by groups like the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

“There’s a huge distinction between the content that’s available through other media providers and PBS,” said Lesli Rotenberg, the broadcaster’s general manager of children’s programming. “Even though there may be more, there isn’t necessarily more educational content for kids.”

“There are a lot of children, particularly that are home in early prime time, we aren’t able to accommodate them except for on-demand.

“Actually, deep into prime time, there are still a lot of kids watching television

Creator of ‘All Rise’ on CBS Is Fired After Writers’ Complaints

Greg Spottiswood had faced numerous complaints over the way issues of race and gender were addressed on the show, a rare prime-time CBS drama with a Black woman as a protagonist.

Warner Bros. Television has fired the showrunner and creator of the CBS show “All Rise,” Greg Spottiswood, after a second investigation into allegations regarding how he dealt with the show’s writers, including in conversations involving race.

When British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Friday morning that he had tested positive for coronavirus, he insisted that he would continue to head up his country's fight against the pandemic.

Isolating the Prime Minister is not that difficult, in itself. The Downing Street premises are actually considerably bigger than they look from the outside. Behind that famous black door at Number 10 lies a warren of rooms and offices that extend sideways into 11 and 12 Downing Street -- the three addresses are all that survive from a longer terrace constructed at the end of the 17th century -- and back into a much larger 18th-century building at the rear.

Meetings will take place via video conference. While this might sound unusual, some of Johnson's most important regular appointments had already stopped being personal interactions.

February 2020, Harriet de Wit, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural science at the University of Chicago, was running an experiment on whether the drug MDMA increased the pleasantness of social touch in healthy volunteers

The latest participant in the double-blind trial, a man named Brendan, had filled out a standard questionnaire at the end. Strangely, at the very bottom of the form, Brendan had written in bold letters: "This experience has helped me sort out a debilitating personal issue. Google my name. I now know what I need to do."

They googled Brendan's name, and up popped a disturbing revelation: until just a couple of months before, Brendan had been the leader of the US Midwest faction of Identity Evropa, a notorious white nationalist group rebranded in 2019 as the American Identity Movement. Two months earlier, activists at Chicago Antifascist Action had exposed Brendan's identity, and he had lost his job.

Game theory Sports Previous Next Latest Game theory Latest from all our blogs Football and racist language Reclaiming the Y-word Nov 9th 2012, 16:28 by B.R. ENGLISH football grounds in the 1980s were not pleasant places. Fans were squeezed into caged terraces which were often left open to the elements. Hooliganism was rife and the country was in a state of moral panic as lurid images of fighting youths became a fixture on news bulletins. Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister, convened a "war cabinet". Ken Bates, the chairman of Chelsea football club, suggested electrifying the fences in the stadiums to keep the warring factions apart. By the end of the decade English football reached its nadir. In 1985, 39 Italian football fans had been killed in Heysel, Belgium after a riot by Liverpool supporters. In 1989, Liverpool supporters themselves were the victims as 96 lost their lives at Hillsborough as a result of incompetent policing.Some time toward the beginning of that decade, aged around ten, your correspondent was taken to his first away game by his father, a fanatical supporter of Tottenham Hotspur. The game was a derby with Chelsea, a bitter London rival. Chelsea's fans were among the game’s most notorious. Many were skinheads; foot soldiers of extreme right-wing parties such as the National Front and the British Movement. Tottenham, because of the area in North London in which it is situated, had a large and visible Jewish following. It did not make for a pleasant combination. At one point during the first half the hostile Chelsea crowd fell suddenly silent. Quietly at first came a hissing sound, like someone letting out gas from a canister. Before long the hissing reached crescendo. It was a terrifying sound for a small boy. But I was too young to grasp the significance. Only later was I filled in: the Chelsea fans were mimicking the sound of cyanide being released at a Nazi concentration camp. As the years wore on, the abuse towards Spurs fans became less subtle. When clubs with a large right-wing following came to Tottenham’s White Hart Lane stadium, such as Chelsea, West Ham, Leeds and Manchester United, the anti-semitism was relentless. One common song ran:Spurs are on their way to BelsenHitler's going to gas ‘em againThe Yids from TottenhamThe Yids from White Hart Lane The Y-word. It was the most relentless chant of all. Thousand of opposition fans, faces snarled, would come together in spiteful mantra: “Yiddo! Yiddo!” It was directed towards Tottenham fans and players alike. It would go on for minutes at a time, many times in a game. After a while it was so commonplace that one became immune to it. At some point during that time, something odd began to happen. Tottenham fans began to appropriate the Y-word. Gradually they began to refer to themselves as Yids. The club’s supporters started to describe themselves as the “Yid Army”. Soon the word was being chanted solely by Tottenham fans referring to themselves in a spirit of celebration and of togetherness. It had been reclaimed in much the same way that the word “nigger” was taken back by black hip-hop artists and “queer” was by gays.As a result, the word died as an insult, at least within football grounds.

I can, however, describe what I, as prime minister of Australia, did to curb gun violence following a horrific massacre 17 years ago in the hope that it will contribute constructively to the debate in the United States.

Our challenges were different from America’s. Australia is an even more intensely urban society, with close to 60 percent of our people living in large cities. Our gun lobby isn’t as powerful or well-financed as the National Rifle Association in the United States. Australia, correctly in my view, does not have a Bill of Rights, so our legislatures have more say than America’s over many issues of individual rights, and our courts have less control. Also, we have no constitutional right to bear arms. (After all, the British granted us nationhood peacefully; the United States had to fight for it.)

Given our decentralized system of government, I could reduce the number of dangerous firearms only by persuading the states to enact uniform laws totally prohibiting the ownership, possession and sale of all automatic and semiautomatic weapons while the national government banned the importation of such weapons.

Psychologists Shannon Rauch and Kimberley Schanz published their work in the journal Computers in Human Behavior. They sampled 623 Internet users (all white, 70 percent students), asking them to indicate the frequency of their Facebook usage. The group then read one of three versions of a Facebook Notes page they were told was written by a 26-year-old named Jack Brown. "Jack" was white and male. The first version of Jack's message contained what the researchers call a "superiority message": It "contrasted the behaviors of black and white individuals, only to find consistent superiority of the whites."

The researchers then asked participants, for each version of the post, to rate factors like "how much they agreed with the message," "how accurate they found it," "how much they liked the writer," and, significantly, how likely they were to share the post with others

Their findings? "Frequent users are particularly disposed to be influenced by negative racial messages." The group of more-frequent Facebook users didn't differ from others in their reaction to the egalitarian message. But those users "were more positive toward the messages with racist content -- particularly the superiority message."