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Contents contributed and discussions participated by johnsonel7

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The coronavirus recession is just getting started - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • The record 3.3 million jobless claims reported Thursday mark the beginning of an economic crisis facing American workers and businesses — a slump, experts say, that will only end when the coronavirus pandemic is contained.
  • Although no official figures exist yet, the unemployment rate has likely jumped to at least 5.5 percent, says economist Martha Gimbel of Schmidt Futures, a level not seen since 2015 and up from 3.5 percent in February.“The most terrifying part about this is this is likely just the beginning of the layoffs,” Gimbel said
  • The bill, which gives most Americans checks worth $1,200 or more and provides billions in low-cost loans to businesses, is likely to provide a lifeline to workers and companies facing devastation, but it won’t stop a severe recession nor be adequate to sustain workers if the coronavirus health crisis lasts more than a month or two.
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  • Much of the nation has made the gut-wrenching choice to stop about half the economy and encourage most workers to stay home in an effort to save as many lives as possible
  • The average unemployment benefit check is currently $385 a week, which is less than half the typical weekly paycheck in the United States. The amount is slated to rise an additional $600 a week once President Trump signs the relief bill into law, a substantial increase meant to tide workers over as they are forced to stay home
  • All employees now have their temperature tested on the way into the warehouse. He’s had lengthy discussions with each worker about whether they should take the health risk of coming to work. They now run two shifts and mandate that employees stand about 10 feet from each other. Between the shifts, they sanitize the whole facility — doorknobs, surfaces, bathrooms, tools.
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Fact check: Trump utters series of false and misleading claims at coronavirus briefing ... - 0 views

  • Trump repeated his previous claim that "this was something that nobody has ever thought could happen to this country." He added, "Nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened."Facts First: This is false. The US intelligence community and public health experts had warned for years that the country was at risk from a pandemic. Experts had also warned that the country would face shortages of critical medical equipment, such as ventilators, if a pandemic occurred.
  • While there is no polling data on how long Americans want the country's institutions to remain closed, it is clear that not "everybody" wants workplaces to reopen quickly amid an ongoing pandemic. A poll released on Thursday found that large majorities of Americans say the closure of businesses, schools and entertainment activities was necessary to address the pandemic.
  • Facts First: Study after study has shown that Americans are bearing the cost of the tariffs; Americans make the actual tariff payments. That aside, it's not true that the Treasury has never received "10 cents" from tariffs on China. The US has had tariffs on China for more than two centuries; FactCheck.org reported that the US generated an "average of $12.3 billion in custom duties a year from 2007 to 2016, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb."
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Sociology and Population Change: How Demographics Affect Society | The Cornell Daily Sun - 0 views

  • With 360,000 new babies born each day, untangling the globe’s vast web of people can seem, at first glance, a near-impossible task.
  • “We are all products of our social circumstances,” Eloundou-Enyegue explained. “Where you were born, where you grew up, the neighborhood in which you went to school and returned home to everyday affects who you become in terms of the values, the opportunities [and belief system] that you have.”
  • “[If] a low income kid and a middle class or upper class kid … both come to Cornell, [the upper class kid] is going to be more comfortable going to a professor and contesting a grade or asking for extra help, whereas the other is maybe a little more shy, and won’t make the same claims,” Eloundou-Enyegue said
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Coronavirus: The psychology of panic buying - BBC Worklife - 0 views

  • LLast Saturday afternoon, Kristina Moy decided to swing by her local supermarket in the US city of Seattle to pick up some weekly groceries and supplies for her son’s upcoming baseball tournament. What started as a quick errand turned into a three-hour ordeal, navigating checkout lanes packed with hundreds of shoppers stocking up amid the outbreak of coronavirus.
  • Moy isn’t the only one to experience long queues and empty shelves. Mass demand for rice and instant noodles in Singapore prompted Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to assure the public there was enough to go around. In Auckland, New Zealand, supermarket spending shot up 40% last Saturday compared to the same day a year ago. And shoppers in Malaysia wanting to pad “pandemic pantries” – grocery hoards to fill people’s kitchens until the crisis dies down – have driven an 800% increase in weekly hand sanitiser sales. (All of those places have confirmed cases of Covid-19.)
  • With events like looming natural disasters, such as a hurricane or flood, people frequently stock up with emergency supplies. “It is rational to prepare for something bad that looks like it is likely to occur,” says David Savage, associate professor of behavioural and microeconomics at the University of Newcastle in Australia, who’s written about the rationality behind stocking up in a crisis. However: “It is not rational to buy 500 cans of baked beans for what would likely be a two-week isolation period.”
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  • Irrational stockpiling can also lead to price gouging, says Steven Taylor, a professor and clinical psychologist at the University of British Columbia, and the author of The Psychology of Pandemics. “If the price of a roll of toilet paper is tripled, that’s seen as a scarcer commodity to acquire, which can lead to anxiety,” he says.
  • Panic buying, Taylor says, is fuelled by anxiety, and a willingness to go to lengths to quell those fears: like queueing for hours or buying way more than you need. We’ve seen this before throughout history. Back in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear war seemed imminent, American families filled their basements with enough canned goods and bottled water to survive an atomic blast.
  • “But for many people, hand-washing seems to be too ordinary. This is a dramatic event, therefore a dramatic response is required, so that leads to people throwing money at things in hopes of protecting themselves.”
  • “Panic is a subjective, emotional state, and mostly what we can observe is the behaviour,” says Oppenheim. “Maybe someone reads articles or a couple of tweets about supply chain disruptions in China and mask shortages in Hong Kong, and then makes a very reasoned decision to stock up on masks just in case. All we can infer from the purchasing is the timing, so it could look panicky even if it's well thought through.”
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No Crowds at the Mona Lisa: Coronavirus Fears Hammer European Tourism - WSJ - 0 views

  • The coronavirus outbreak in Europe is scaring away travelers and hammering tourism just as the high season is getting under way. Thousands of people have canceled their trips to the region since the disease began to spread in Italy last month, drying up revenue for hotels, restaurants, nightclubs and conference planners across the continent. Those businesses are the economic lifeblood of many regions in Europe, clustered around its famed cultural attractions. The outbreak is costing the European Union’s tourism industry €1 billion ($1.1 billion) a month, said Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner.
  • In Paris, some cafes and nightclubs have seen a 40% drop in sales, he said.
  • Flight bookings to Europe the last week of February, when the Italian outbreak emerged, fell 79% compared with the same period a year earlier, according to ForwardKeys, which tracks travel data. In Italy, cancellations have exceeded new bookings over that time, the firm said
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  • The Vatican is facing a sharp drop in visitors to the Vatican Museums, which bring in €40 million in profit in a normal year and are a key revenue source for the church. Vatican officials declined to comment on a report in an Italian newspaper saying the museums had experienced a 60% drop in attendance
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Why don't we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus? | Owen Jone... - 0 views

  • It is a global emergency that has already killed on a mass scale and threatens to send millions more to early graves. As its effects spread, it could destabilise entire economies and overwhelm poorer countries lacking resources and infrastructure. But this is the climate crisis, not the coronavirus. Governments are not assembling emergency national plans and you’re not getting push notifications transmitted to your phone breathlessly alerting you to dramatic twists and developments from South Korea to Italy.
  • More than 3,000 people have succumbed to coronavirus yet, according to the World Health Organization, air pollution alone – just one aspect of our central planetary crisis – kills seven million people every year. There have been no Cobra meetings for the climate crisis, no sombre prime ministerial statements detailing the emergency action being taken to reassure the public. In time, we’ll overcome any coronavirus pandemic. With the climate crisis, we are already out of time
  • Pandemics and the climate crisis may go hand in hand, too: research suggests that changing weather patterns may drive species to higher altitudes, potentially putting them in contact with diseases for which they have little immunity.
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  • There is a key difference between coronavirus and climate crisis, of course, and it is shame. “We didn’t know coronavirus was coming,” says Stirling. “We’ve known the climate crisis was on the cards for 30 or 40 years.” And yet – despite being inadequately prepared because of an underfunded, under-resourced NHS – the government can swiftly announce an emergency pandemic plan.
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Trump's Gut Collides With Science on Coronavirus Messaging : NPR - 0 views

  • President Trump is known to say what's on his mind, to go with his gut and accentuate the positive. That approach is now colliding with a public health emergency in the form of coronavirus.
  • The challenge posed by Trump's breezy style was on full display Wednesday night in an interview in which he disputed the World Health Organization's recent coronavirus death rate estimate of 3.4%. "Well, I think the 3.4% is really a false number," Trump told Sean Hannity on Fox News. "Now, this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this, because a lot of people will have this, and it's very mild. They will get better very rapidly. They don't even see a doctor."
  • It's a challenge for any politician to accurately convey public health messages: to encourage preparedness and avoid inciting fear without underplaying or overselling the risks. That challenge is particularly acute for Trump given his free-flowing communications style. During the interview, Trump also revealed that he was concerned that repatriating Americans from the Diamond Princess cruise ship that was held in Japan last month would "look bad" because it would increase the total number of coronavirus cases in the United States. "I felt we had to do it. And, in one way, I hated to do it statistically," Trump said.
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  • "In these kinds of public health emergencies, we need to be able to trust our leaders, be it public health, scientific or political leaders," Omer said. This will become particularly important in the coronavirus outbreak if there comes a time when the government needs to recommend major lifestyle adjustments to curtail the spread of the disease.
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Coronavirus Recession: Fears Of Economic Slowdown Race Around The World : NPR - 0 views

  • As odds of a global recession rise, governments and central banks around the world are racing to fend off the economic damage from the spread of the coronavirus. The toll has already landed hard on jittery financial markets. Stocks continued to sell off on Thursday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 969 points, or about 3.6%, as investors fled stocks. Companies have shut factories, canceled conferences and drastically scaled back employee travel.
  • Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate on Thursday gave final passage to a roughly $8 billion spending package to provide medical supplies in hard-hit areas and pay for vaccine research. President Trump has said he will sign the bill. Despite such measures, many economists now say growth is likely to slow considerably this year — if not contract altogether.
  • Goldman Sachs projected on Sunday that because of the coronavirus, the U.S. economy would grow by an anemic 0.9% during the first three months of 2020 and would flatline during the second quarter.
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  • The tumult in the U.S. economy still pales in comparison to the damage being felt in other countries. In China, auto sales cratered 80% last month, while a plunge in tourism is expected to push Italy and perhaps France into a recession.
  • The U.S. Travel Association predicts that international travel to the United States will fall by 6% over the next three months. "There is a lot of uncertainty around coronavirus, and it is pretty clear that it is having an effect on travel demand — not just from China, and not just internationally, but for domestic business and leisure travel as well," the association's president, Roger Dow, said in a statement.
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The case for economics - by the numbers | MIT News - 0 views

  • In recent years, criticism has been levelled at economics for being insular and unconcerned about real-world problems. But a new study led by MIT scholars finds the field increasingly overlaps with the work of other disciplines, and, in a related development, has become more empirical and data-driven, while producing less work of pure theory.
  • In psychology journals, for instance, citations of economics papers have more than doubled since 2000. Public health papers now cite economics work twice as often as they did 10 years ago, and citations of economics research in fields from operations research to computer science have risen sharply as well.
  • “If you ask me, economics has never been better,” says Josh Angrist, an MIT economist who led the study. “It’s never been more useful. It’s never been more scientific and more evidence-based.”
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  • As Angrist acknowledges, one impetus for the study was the wave of criticism the economics profession has faced over the last decade, after the banking crisis and the “Great Recession” of 2008-2009, which included the finance-sector crash of 2008. The paper’s title alludes to the film “Inside Job” — whose thesis holds that, as Angrist puts it, “economics scholarship as an academic enterprise was captured somehow by finance, and that academic economists should therefore be blamed for the Great Recession.”
  • The study also details the relationship between economics and four additional social science disciplines: anthropology, political science, psychology, and sociology. Among these, political science has overtaken sociology as the discipline most engaged with economics. Psychology papers now cite economics research about as often as they cite works of sociology. The new intellectual connectivity between economics and psychology appears to be a product of the growth of behavioral economics, which examines the irrational, short-sighted financial decision-making of individuals — a different paradigm than the assumptions about rational decision-making found in neoclassical economics.
  • “It really seems to be the diversity of economics that makes it do well in influencing other fields,” Ellison says. “Operations research, computer science, and psychology are paying a lot of attention to economic theory. Sociologists are paying a lot of attention to labor economics, marketing and management are paying attention to industrial organization, statisticians are paying attention to econometrics, and the public health people are paying attention to health economics. Just about everything in economics is influential somewhere.”
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Coronavirus: China to boost mass surveillance machine, experts say - 0 views

  • China could use the coronavirus outbreak to boost its mass surveillance capabilities as it looks to technology to help contain the epidemic in the world’s second-largest economy.The Communist Party has built a vast surveillance state through different methods with technology at its core.As artificial intelligence and the use of data becomes more advanced, Beijing has found increasingly effective ways to track the Chinese population, including facial recognition.
  • With over 77,000 coronavirus cases confirmed in China alone, the government has mobilized its surveillance machine, a move experts said could continue even after the virus has been contained.
  • The Chinese government has also enlisted the help of tech giants like Tencent, owner of popular messaging app WeChat and Alibaba subsidiary, Ant Financial, which runs payments app Alipay. On both WeChat and Alipay, users can put in their Chinese ID numbers and where they have travelled. Users will then be assigned a QR code based on a traffic light color system which instructs them about how long they need to be in quarantine, or whether they are free to travel. A QR code is a type of barcode which is widely used on digital platforms in China.
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  • “The Party has increasingly treated ‘stability maintenance’ — a euphemism for social control — as an overarching priority, and devoted enormous resources to security agencies for monitoring dissidents, breaking up protests, censoring the internet, and developing and implementing mass surveillance systems,” she wrote in a recent paper.
  • “Once these systems are in place, those involved in its developments — particularly companies with money to be made — argue for their expansion or their wider use, a phenomenon known as ‘mission creep.’ What initially started as a system to crack down on crime — which is already a dubious and vague enough justification to encompass political crimes in China — is now used for other purposes including for fighting the coronavirus outbreak.”
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Accommodating Children's Anxiety Can Do More Harm Than Good | Psychology Today - 1 views

  • Parents face great challenges raising kids in our increasingly complex, frightening and uncertain world. The CDC reports that anxiety is on the rise among children, affecting 7.1 percent of children 6 to 17 years of age, about 4.4 million U.S. kids. The majority are untreated.
  • Children face myriad challenges—bullying, developmental trauma, information overload, global political upheavals and conflict, climate change, high rates of family breakup, and so on.
  • Learning to ride out anxiety and negotiate firm-but-flexible boundaries is a language much harder to learn in adulthood.
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  • Parental consistency can help protect children from emotional problems. Children can and do become caught in the middle between parents who aren’t getting along. Such "triangulation" distracts children from addressing their own needs. Compassion buffers empathy, allowing parents to tolerate their children's distress without getting overwhelmed, numbing out, or becoming enraged. Parents are encouraged to engage their curiosity when they feel the urge to accommodate or try to overpower children.
  • Perception was important for mothers. Mothers who reported that their children showed more severe symptoms were more likely to use accommodation, but maternal accommodation was unrelated to the mothers' own reported distress and emotional state. It may be that mothers wish to spare their children anticipated distress, and that this desire is different from overall distress. Including measures of empathy and parental distress due specifically to child's distress could tease this apart in future studies.
  • Accommodation increases anxiety because youngsters never have a chance to fail and persist. This can stunt self-efficacy, preventing “fear extinction” and “habituation” to anxiety-provoking situations. It's a vicious cycle, increasing the chance of giving up too easily with future challenges, though innate resilience, related to child temperament, can mitigate the effects of problematic environmental factors.
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India's Economic Troubles Are Rooted in Politics - 0 views

  • ince the Great Recession that began in late 2007, there is a growing feeling that economics is not serving us well. There is truth to this hunch, but the reasons are more complex than most people realize.
  • Academic disciplines are built on assumptions; the most tried and tested of these are often enshrined as axioms. When economic policies go wrong, the standard practice is to rush to examine those axioms. Are some of them incorrect? Economists collate statistics, create new data using randomized trials, collect impressionistic information, and often come out with the conclusion that some of the established axioms are not quite right. Correct them, and one will get better predictions and better policy. Such an approach can work under normal circumstances, but when economic outcomes go deeply wrong, the problem may be more foundational: not in the axioms of the discipline but in the unstated assumptions—the “assumptions in the woodwork,” which all disciplines have and which we are usually unaware of.
  • Economists usually point to a few assumptions, such as self-interest (in particular, the urge to accumulate and consume more), the axiom of diminishing marginal utility (the fact that consuming more of the same good causes utility from each additional unit to decline), and so on. But these assumptions are in fact inadequate. Laboratory tests show that rats satisfy these axioms, too, but there is no evidence of trade among rats. For society to conduct trade, these economic assumptions need to be supplemented with other social and normative preconditions: We need language, the ability to communicate, and some minimal respect for others’ rights. These are the assumptions in the woodwork that economists are often unmindful of but play a vital role.
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  • India presents a striking example of the limitations of pure economics. From 2003 to 2011, the world’s largest democracy was growing at a phenomenal rate, exceeding 9 percent each year between 2005 and 2008. Even after 2011, it kept up a reasonable rate of growth. However, since 2018, the economy seems to be spinning into a crisis, with growth declining to 4.5 percent, consumption in India’s vast rural sector declining at rates not seen since the late 1960s, and the overall unemployment rate at a 45-year high. The 2018 Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India Report, recently released by the National Crime Records Bureau, highlights a stark mood of despair: Since 2017, there has been a noticeable rise in the relative share of suicides by daily wage earners. They are among the poorest people in the economic ladder, thereby suggesting a rise in poverty.
  • A recent Harvard Business Review paper shows that if a company’s workers have a sense of belonging, they improve their job performance by 56 percent, with a 50 percent drop in churn and a 75 percent reduction in sick days. For a 10,000-person company, this would result in annual savings of more than $52 million. Extrapolate this to a nation, and you get a sense of why nations where large segments feel excluded do poorly.
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JP Morgan economists warn of 'catastrophic' climate change - BBC News - 0 views

  • In a hard-hitting report to clients, the economists said that without action being taken there could be "catastrophic outcomes".The bank said the research came from a team that was "wholly independent from the company as a whole".Climate campaigners have previously criticised JP Morgan for its investments in fossil fuels.
  • Carbon emissions in the coming decades "will continue to affect the climate for centuries to come in a way that is likely to be irreversible," they said, adding that climate change action should be motivated "by the likelihood of extreme events".Climate change could affect economic growth, shares, health, and how long people live, they said.
  • JP Morgan itself has been strongly criticised in the past for heavy investment in fossil fuels.The Rainforest Action Network released a 2019 report claiming that the US banking giant provided the most fossil fuel firm financing of any bank in from 2016 to 2018.
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  • Developed countries were worried that cutting emissions would affect competitiveness and jobs, while less developed countries "see carbon intensive activity as a way of raising living standards.""It is a global problem but no global solution is in sight," the report added.
  • He said if the bank's own researchers were "saying the very future of the human race is at stake" then the bank itself should change its direction."It's good they [the researchers] are telling the truth more - it's not good they [the bank] remain a strong funder of fossil fuels," he said."Everyone has to have responsibility for change, whether they are asset managers, or institutional investors, or chief executives, or shareholders," he added.
  • Talking about a timeframe he added: "We are a bit concerned about putting a date on it as yet because some of the technologies are still evolving. We will get there, the only question is how quickly we can get there.''
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How News Coverage of Coronavirus Compares to Ebola | Time - 0 views

  • A novel coronavirus that originated in China and has since spread to more than 20 other countries has dominated headlines across the globe since it was first announced in December 2019, as scientists and media outlets (including this one) scramble to understand the virus’ origins, trajectory and impact. The wall-to-wall coverage of the virus, known has 2019-nCoV, has been unusually heavy, even in comparison to other recent health threats, such as the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that began in August 2018 and continues to this day.
  • Throughout January 2020, the first full month of the 2019-nCoV outbreak, more than 41,000 English-language print news articles mentioned the word “coronavirus,” and almost 19,000 included it in their headlines, LexisNexis data show. By contrast, only about 1,800 English-language print news articles published in August 2018, the first month of the DRC outbreak, mentioned “Ebola,” and only about 700 headlines mentioned the disease.
  • The two viruses have also produced two very different outbreaks. Ebola, which causes a hemorrhagic fever that’s deadly in about half of cases, is incredibly potent but has been mostly contained to the DRC, where it has killed 2,246 of the roughly 3,500 people who have contracted it, according to World Health Organization (WHO) data. While the WHO declared the outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern” last year, Ebola has not spread far beyond the DRC. (The earlier West African outbreak was more widespread: It killed more than 11,000 people and spread to multiple continents.)
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  • Meanwhile, 2019-nCoV, which causes symptoms similar to the flu, has killed about 2% of the 31,500 people it has infected so far, but has spread to more than 20 countries—including, crucially (at least in terms of understanding media coverage), the U.S. Any time an issue affects the U.S., the Western press kicks into high gear, Miller says.
  • After the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak, the U.S. press was criticized for overstating the possible threat to Americans.
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How Our Modern World Creates Outbreaks Like Coronavirus | Time - 0 views

  • “Everyone knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world,” observes Albert Camus in his novel The Plague. “Yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet plagues and wars always take people by surprise.”
  • Whether the Wuhan outbreak turns out to be a mild pandemic like the 2009 swine flu, or a more severe one like the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed 50 million people worldwide, at present no one can say.
  • But the big game-changer has been international jet travel and the greater global connectivity that has come with it. Located at the centre of China’s airline network, Wuhan is both a domestic and international hub, with more than 100 non-stop flights to 22 countries worldwide. The result is that whereas during the 2002 SARS outbreak it took five months for the coronavirus to spread worldwide, this time it has taken just four weeks for the world to catch China’s cold.
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  • Bats are also thought to be the ultimate reservoir of coronaviruses, but the virus has also been isolated from snakes and palm civets, a game animal resembling a cat prized by the Chinese for its heat-giving energy. The SARS epidemic was almost certainly sparked by civets traded at a wild animal market in Shenzhen in southeast China. Likewise, the Wuhan outbreak appears to have begun at a wholesale seafood market which, despite its name, also sold wild animals, including wolf cubs, crocodiles, snakes and bats.
  • But perhaps the biggest lesson from the recent run of epidemics is that while scientific knowledge is always advancing, it can also be a trap, blinding us to the epidemic just around the corner ­­– the so-called Disease X’s. Thus, in the case of SARS, our delay in realizing we were dealing with a dangerous new respiratory pathogen, was due in no small part to the WHO’s conviction that the world was on the brink of a pandemic of H5N1 avian influenza—a view that seemed to be confirmed when ducks, geese, and swans suddenly began dying in two Hong Kong parks.
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Musicians Using AI to Create Otherwise Impossible New Songs | Time.com - 0 views

  • n November, the musician Grimes made a bold prediction. “I feel like we’re in the end of art, human art,” she said on Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast. “Once there’s actually AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), they’re gonna be so much better at making art than us.”
  • Artificial intelligence has already upended many blue collar jobs across various industries; the possibility that music, a deeply personal and subjective form, could also be optimized was enough to cause widespread alarm.
  • While obstacles like copyright complications and other hurdles have yet to be worked out, musicians working with AI hope that the technology will become a democratizing force and an essential part of everyday musical creation.
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  • Stavitsky realized that while people are increasingly plugging into headphones to get them through the day, “there’s no playlist or song that can adapt to the context of whatever’s happening around you," he says. His app takes several real-time factors into account — including the weather, the listener's heart rate, physical activity rate, and circadian rhythms — in generating gentle music that’s designed to help people sleep, study or relax.
  • “AI forced us to come up against patterns that have no relationship to comfort. It gave us the skills to break out of our own habits,” she says. The project resulted in the first Grammy nomination of YACHT’s two-decade career, for best immersive audio album.
  • . “There’s something freeing about not having to make every single microdecision, but rather, creating an ecosystem where things tend to happen, but never in the order you were imagining them,” she says. “It opens up a world of possibilities.” She says that she has a few new music projects coming this year using Bronze’s technology.
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Entrepreneurial Singularity: Marrying Technology and Human Virtues - 0 views

  • Mona Hamdy believes that technology married with pragmatic optimism can save the world. That’s what the entrepreneur and Harvard University Applied Ethics teaching fellow told me while we sat overlooking the Potomac River at her restaurant in Georgetown. We discussed impossible problems like plastics in the ocean, hostile AI, hypersonic missiles, the perils of cashless economies for the world’s poorest, socioeconomic challenges for women in the Middle East and North Africa, and cultural misunderstandings between the U.S. and Arab nations. 
  • “The kind of technology we have created should give us pause. It means we are aware of its potential in our hands. We can regulate it and use it to help relieve human despair like no other time on earth. Conflict, famine, poverty, and ecological destruction can be mapped on top of each other. Let’s learn as much as we can, and create economies that address these problems as solvable opportunities.” 
  • “The nature of our company combined this traditional wisdom with futuristic technology like cinematic worldbuilding, mixed reality and AR for education,  digital twinning, and 3d printing as effective modes of information transfer. These things were not considered part of the poverty-eradication toolkit a decade ago, but the world is coming around to it. Tech and heritage-- it’s the 21st century version of what our ancestors would have done. ”
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  • “ I design projects that prove companies can be profitable when the end result is better stewardship of our planet. I think it’s the most ethical thing we can do for those who will come after us. Sometimes, like in ecological projects, that end result just happens to be a hundred years from now. Which isn’t that long when you consider how trees grow or lakes fill.”
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Is politics getting in the way of assessing which films are actually good? | Jessa Cris... - 0 views

  • If cinema had the impact on the world that film critics insisted they did in 2019, Joker would have brought about an incel revolution, and Little Women would have ended misogyny.
  • This was the year police departments issued warnings about the possibility of mass shootings at opening-night screenings of Joker, after all. It was a hysteria that built online after film critics saw the movie at festivals and started to complain it somehow “glamorized” or sympathized with violent incels.
  • But if you insist that a movie is important, you don’t really have to deal with whether or not it’s good. You can shame people into seeing it as a political statement, rather than as an entertainment or cultural selection. Same with the “dangerous” or “disturbing” moniker, which got used on everything from Joker to the latest Quentin Tarantino film Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, which was marked down for everything from not giving its female co-star Margot Robbie enough lines to its gratuitous violence against a female would-be murderer to its filming of women’s feet (fetishes are now dangerous, I guess). If a critic doesn’t like a film, labeling it as dangerous – and implying you might get killed if you go see it – is an attempt to keep people away.
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  • Saudi Arabia has been showing Black Panther in its theaters, too – the first commercially released film to be screened in almost 35 years in this repressive, autocratic regime. And that’s a political victory too. For the repressive, autocratic regime, of course. Because as revolutionary as Black Panther was hailed as being in America, it is ultimately the story of a monarchy triumphing over the challenge presented by a rebellious force. It turns out that it makes for good propaganda for the Saudi monarchy. Oh, the irony.
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A new map reveals radio waves from tens of thousands of galaxies | Science News - 0 views

  • Radio telescopes are good probes of star formation. But until now, they haven’t been sensitive enough to see radio waves coming from the vast majority of galaxies that produced stars during the peak of star production, an epoch roughly 10 billion years ago known as cosmic noon (SN: 6/20/14).
  • In that image, more than 17,000 pinpoints of radio energy — nearly every one a star-forming galaxy — fill a patch of sky that, as seen from Earth, could be covered by about five full moons.
  • What’s more, he says, there are a little less than twice as many of these sources as expected, suggesting that star formation was much higher around cosmic noon than predicted by calculations based on infrared, optical and ultraviolet data
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'Ideology Trumping Science': Independent Advisory Board Says Trump EPA Is Ignoring Scie... - 0 views

  • A federal panel of independent scientific experts says the EPA has flouted the panel's guidance in its efforts to roll back a number of Obama-era regulations, resulting in an agency push that will affect public health for millions of Americans without the consideration of environmental science.
  • The EPA's Science Advisory Board (SAB) wrote in four draft reports published online Tuesday that the agency's published revisions to at least four regulations "conflict with established science," according to the Washington Post.
  • The SAB's new reports about the EPA's rollbacks call into question "to what degree these suggested changes are fact-based as opposed to politically motivated," Steven Hamburg of the Environmental Defense Fund, who served on the board until last September, told the Post.
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