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Why would consumers look even somewhat favorably upon virtual influencers that make comments about real products?

. Virtual and human social-media influencers can be equally effective for certain types of posts, the research suggests.

The thinking is that virtual influencers can be fun and entertaining and make a brand seem innovative and tech savvy,

There is no clinical definition for food noise, but the experts and patients interviewed for this article generally agreed it was shorthand for constant rumination about food. Some researchers associate the concept with “hedonic hunger,” an intense preoccupation with eating food for the purpose of pleasure, and noted that it could also be a component of binge eating disorder, which is common but often misunderstood.

“It just seems to be that some people are a little more wired this way,” he said. Obsessive rumination about food is most likely a result of genetic factors as well as environmental exposure and learned habits

The active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy is semaglutide, a compound that affects the areas in the brain that regulate appetite, Dr. Gabbay said; it also prompts the stomach to empty more slowly, making people taking the medication feel fuller faster and for longer. That satiation itself could blunt food noise

Years before he impressed critics with his first novel, “Green on Blue” (2015), written from the perspective of an Afghan boy, Ackerman was already, in his words, “telling stories and inhabiting the minds of others.” He explains that much of his work as a special-operations officer involved trying to grasp what his adversaries were thinking, to better anticipate how they might act

“Look, I really believe in stories, I believe in art, I believe that this is how we express our humanity,” he says. “You can’t understand a society without understanding the stories they tell about themselves, and how these stories are constantly changing.”

his, in essence, is the subject of “Halcyon,” in which a scientific breakthrough allows Robert Ableson, a World War II hero and renowned lawyer, to come back from the dead. Yet the 21st-century America he returns to feels like a different place, riven by debates over everything from Civil War monuments to workplace misconduct.

Covid virginity is becoming more special now that it describes a shrinking minority. The lucky few, like weight-loss gurus, are only too happy to share their secrets to success.

Some sound quite reasonable, such as virologist Angela Rasmussen, who tweeted that despite resuming travel to scientific conferences, she’s remained uninfected by wearing high quality masks when warranted, skipping the hotel gym, eating outdoors and walking instead of cabbing if possible.

Others are more extreme, such as the expert who Tweeted that, among other measures, he sealed his N95 tightly on his face for the entire trip from the U.S. to Australia. He never removed it even to take a sip of water.

Creating and disseminating convincing propaganda used to require the resources of a state. Now all it takes is a smartphone.

Generative artificial intelligence is now capable of creating fake pictures, clones of our voices, and even videos depicting and distorting world events. The result: From our personal circles to the political circuses, everyone must now question whether what they see and hear is true.

exposure to AI-generated fakes can make us question the authenticity of everything we see. Real images and real recordings can be dismissed as fake. 

recently published scientific article proposes a sweeping new law of nature, approaching the matter with dry, clinical efficiency that still reads like poetry.

“Evolving systems are asymmetrical with respect to time; they display temporal increases in diversity, distribution, and/or patterned behavior,” they continue, mounting their case from the shoulders of Charles Darwin, extending it toward all things living and not. 

To join the known physics laws of thermodynamics, electromagnetism and Newton’s laws of motion and gravity, the nine scientists and philosophers behind the paper propose their “law of increasing functional information.”

Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire from the gods of Olympus and gave it to human beings, setting us on a path of glory and disaster and incurring the jealous wrath of Zeus. In the modern world, especially since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, he has served as a symbol of progress and peril, an avatar of both the liberating power of knowledge and the dangers of technological overreach.

More than 200 years after the Shelleys, Prometheus is having another moment, one closer in spirit to Mary’s terrifying ambivalence than to Percy’s fulsome gratitude. As technological optimism curdles in the face of cyber-capitalist villainy, climate disaster and what even some of its proponents warn is the existential threat of A.I., that ancient fire looks less like an ember of divine ingenuity than the start of a conflagration. Prometheus is what we call our capacity for self-destruction.

Annie Dorsen’s theater piece “Prometheus Firebringer,” which was performed at Theater for a New Audience in September, updates the Greek myth for the age of artificial intelligence, using A.I. to weave a cautionary tale that my colleague Laura Collins-Hughes called “forcefully beneficial as an examination of our obeisance to technology.”

Resilience is a popular term in modern psychology that, put simply, refers to the ability to recover and move on from adverse events, failure or change.

“We don’t call it ‘character’ anymore,” said Jelena Kecmanovic, director of Arlington/DC Behavior Therapy Institute. “We call it the ability to tolerate distress, the ability to tolerate uncertainty.”

Studies suggest that resilience in kids is associated with things like empathy, coping skills and problem-solving, though this research is often done on children in extreme circumstances and may not apply to everybody

Misinformation or even disinformation in search results was already a problem before generative AI. Back in 2017, The Outline noted that a snippet once confidently asserted that Barack Obama was the king of America.

This is what experts have worried about since ChatGPT first launched: false information confidently presented as fact, without any indication that it could be totally wrong. The problem is “the way things are presented to the user, which is Here’s the answer,” Chirag Shah, a professor of information and computer science at the University of Washington, told me. “You don’t need to follow the sources. We’re just going to give you the snippet that would answer your question. But what if that snippet is taken out of context?”

Responding to the notion that Google is incentivized to prevent users from navigating away, he added that “we have no desire to keep people on Google.

Almost 90 percent of Americans have heard about cryptocurrency and 16 percent say they have invested in or used one, according to a November 2021 Pew Research study.

White and her fellow skeptics say the traditional media has mishandled the story, treating bitcoin as an exciting innovation while underplaying the idea it could be a giant pyramid scheme.

Crypto-focused publications tend to have ties to the industry, while financial news organizations treat it like an asset class. “The crypto industry has benefited from the siloing of journalism,”

Eyes and ears everywhere, the sort of stuff that makes civil libertarians recite prophetic lines from Nineteen Eighty-Four: “You had to live . . . in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinised.”

Many studies have proved the rather obvious idea that we act differently when we know we are being watched. This instinct to alter our behaviour under watchful eyes is so strong that the mere presence of a picture of eyes can encourage pro-social behaviour and discourage the antisocial sort.

Researchers found that putting a picture of human eyes on a charity donation bucket increased donations by 48 per cent. In another experiment, pictures of a stern male gaze were placed in spots around a university campus where bike theft was rife. The robberies then plummeted by 65 per cent.

Humans are biologically hard-wired to crave a sense of control and certainty over what will happen in the future.

But with that comes a tendency to overfixate on the details of our performance, which can get in the way of achieving our best.

Instead of focusing on what we hope to achieve — at tomorrow’s board meeting, at that cocktail party we’re braving solo, at a major exam — our brain is preoccupied by running through scenarios to avoid. Unfortunately, this does nothing to help prepare us, and only invites an overattention to details best left outside conscious awareness — noise.

I’ve got a feeling the poor alien might get the impression that every third person in the US is trans – rather than 0.5% of the population. They (I assume aliens are nonbinary) might get the impression that nobody is allowed to say the word “woman” any more and we are all being forced at gunpoint to say “uterus-havers”. They might get the impression that women’s sports have been completely taken over by trans women. They might believe that millions of children are being mutilated by doctors in the name of gender-affirming care because of the all-powerful trans lobby. They might come away thinking that JK Rowling is not a multi-multi-multi-millionaire with endless resources at her disposal but a marginalized victim who needs brave Times columnists to come to her defense.

“In the past eight months the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast”. Those, to reiterate, are newspaper front-page stories. As Popula notes, that number “doesn’t include the 11,000 or so words the New York Times Magazine devoted to a laboriously evenhanded story about disagreements over the standards of care for trans youth; or the 3,000 words of the front-page story … on whether trans women athletes are unfairly ruining the competition for other women; or the 1,200 words of the front-page story … on how trans interests are banning the word “woman” from abortion-rights discourse.”

This letter, addressed to the paper’s associate managing editor for standards, accused the Times of treating gender diversity “with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”. That relevant information being that some of those sources have affiliations with far-right groups. That “charged language” being phrases like “patient zero” to describe a transgender young person seeking gender-affirming care, “a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared”.

According to “The Friendship Report,” a global study commissioned by Snapchat in 2019, the average age at which we meet our best friends is 21—a stage when we’re not only bonding over formative new experiences such as first love and first heartbreak, but also growing more discerning about whom we befriend.

young adulthood is a time when many of us have time.

it typically takes more than 200 hours, ideally over six weeks, for a stranger to grow into a close friend.

The percentage who say that having children is very important to them has dropped from 43 percent to 30 percent since 2019. This fits with data showing that, since 2007, the total fertility rate in the United States has fallen from 2.1 lifetime births per woman, the “replacement rate” necessary to sustain population levels, to just 1.64 in 2020.

The U.S. economy is losing an edge that robust population dynamics gave it relative to low-birth-rate peer nations in Japan and Western Europe; this country, too, faces chronic labor-supply constraints as well as an even less favorable “dependency ratio” between workers and retirees than it already expected.

the timing and the magnitude of such a demographic sea-change cry out for explanation. What happened in 2007?

“Even at the shortest term, our memory might not be fully reliable,” said Dr Marte Otten, the first author of the research from the University of Amsterdam. “Particularly when we have strong expectations about how the world should be, when our memory starts fading a little bit – even after one and a half seconds, two seconds, three seconds – then we start filling in based on our expectations.”

Otten noted that details of speech were rapidly replaced by a general meaning of the sentence.“The bigger effects when it comes to social expectations might be intonation, [for example] ‘oh, she said that in a really angry and upset voice,’ right? Whereas maybe the intonation wasn’t that, but it’s just coloured quickly in your memory based on your assumptions about how women are,” she said.