Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

NLG (natural language generation) may be too powerful for its own good. This technology can generate huge varieties of natural-language textual content in vast quantities at top speed.

Today’s most sophisticated NLG algorithms learn the intricacies of human speech by training complex statistical models on huge corpora of human-written texts

The algorithm can generate samples of news articles which human evaluators have difficulty distinguishing from articles written by humans. It can also generate a complete essay purely on the basis of a single starting sentence, a few words, or even a prompt

Anyone who’s woken up at 3 a.m. with their stomach growling has probably wondered, what gives? Is it even normal to be this hungry at this hour?

Hunger levels, which are regulated in part by our circadian rhythms, generally rise throughout the day, are highest in the evening and decline throughout the night and into the morning. So if you’re getting up in the dead of night with major hunger pangs, experts say it’s worth investigating.

Waking up for a midnight snack every once in a while probably isn’t anything to be concerned about. But if nocturnal noshing has become a more regular pattern — and an annoying one at that — then you may be looking for answers.

Among the human remains in Harvard University’s museum collections are those of 15 people who were probably enslaved African American people.

This dehumanizing history of collecting African American bodies as scientific specimens is not a problem just at Harvard.

However, scholars and activists across the U.S. are now seeking to recognize and redress the deep history of violence against Black bodies. Museums and society are finally confronting how the desires of science have at times eclipsed the demands of human rights.

The distribution of income lies at the heart of an enduring issue in political economy—the extent to which government should redistribute income from those with more income to those with less.

The term “income distribution” is a statistical concept. No one person is distributing income. Rather, the income distribution arises from people’s decisions about work, saving, and investment as they interact through markets and are affected by the tax system.

In the longer view, the path of income inequality over the twentieth century is marked by two main events: a sharp fall in inequality around the outbreak of World War II and an extended rise in inequality that began in the mid-1970s and accelerated in the 1980s. Income inequality today is about as large as it was in the 1920s.

It’s OK to Feel Joy Right NowHere’s how to prolong it.

The birds are chirping, a warm breeze is blowing and some of your friends are getting vaccinated.

After a year of anxiety and stress, many of us are rediscovering what optimism feels like.

When the Noise Never Stops: Coping With the Challenges of Tinnitus

Researchers are just beginning to untangle how Covid might be linked to a ringing in the ears. Here’s what we know.

Experts are beginning to learn how it may be linked to Covid

In questioning some of their own student knowledge claims and in the knowledge as justified true belief session it soon emerges that truth is a slippery concept. Absolute certainty has an initial attraction to many beginning TOK students seeking a chimeric foundation; but it soon emerges that the word “truth” can be used in various ways and in differing contexts.We have already stressed that TOK is not text-based philosophy. It is much more about our Shared Knowledge—what the practitioners in the various Areas of Knowledge actually do, than it is about metaphysics and eternal questions. For example History is what historians actually do. It is not every last detail of what actually happened. Naturally, academic historians aim for truth in interpreting the traces of a past long gone; but they are realistic and fully aware of the inherent limitations of their discipline.

As embodied, fallible, human knowers we will nearly always be at some distance from "what is actually the case" or "things as they are in themselves." As the course progresses TOK students will embrace this constraint. Not being able to attain it, does not mean that TOK students should shy away from understanding some of various ways the word truth is used. Some facility with the three most famous iterations will be very useful for analyzing TOK Knowledge Questions.

Phineas Gage

Soya’s fame illustrated a simple truth: that social media is less a reflection of who we are, and more a performance of who we want to be.

It also seemed to herald a darker future where our fundamental senses of reality are under siege: The AI that allows anyone to fabricate a face can also be used to harass women with “deepfake” pornography, invent fraudulent LinkedIn personas and digitally impersonate political enemies.

As the photos began receiving hundreds of likes, Soya’s personality and style began to come through. She was relentlessly upbeat. She never sneered or bickered or trolled. She explored small towns, savored scenic vistas, celebrated roadside restaurants’ simple meals.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic last year led to a devastating loss of jobs and income across the global south, threatening hundreds of millions of people with hunger and lost savings and raising an array of risks for children,

, in the journal Science Advances, found "staggering" income losses after the pandemic emerged last year, with a median 70% of households across nine countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America reporting financial losses.

By April last year, roughly 50% or more of those surveyed in several countries were forced to eat smaller meals or skip meals altogether, a number that reached 87% for rural households in the West African country of Sierra Leone.

He’s a Famous Evangelical Preacher, but His Kids Wish He’d Pipe Down

The Rev. Rick Joyner has called on Christians to arm themselves for civil war. But his children would be on the other side.

The Rev. Rick Joyner is a famous evangelical leader who has called on Christians to arm themselves for an inevitable civil war against liberals, whom he suggests are allies of the devil.

Thomas Kuhn, the well-known physicist, philosopher and historian of science, was born 94 years ago today. He went on to become an important and broad-ranging thinker, and one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, transformed the philosophy of science and changed the way many scientists think about their work. But his influence extended well beyond the academy: The book was widely read — and seeped into popular culture

One measure of his influence is the widespread use of the term "paradigm shift," which he introduced in articulating his views about how science changes over time.

White House staff working in-person are no longer tested for Covid-19 every day as those on campus have been increasingly vaccinated, a recent change to testing protocol, according to an administration official familiar with the process.

"Our testing protocol is informed by a range of factors, including an employee's vaccination status, and is only one of a host of measures in place to mitigate risk in the workplace," Munoz said.

Masks were mandated, Covid-19 testing was expanded and room capacity measures were put in place. Zeke Miller, the president of the White House Correspondents' Association, said in January that "things are different" at the White House now that Biden has taken charge, adding that "all of those things make that workplace a little bit safer."

it’s worth looking under the hood of the Biden digital strategy to see what future campaigns might learn from it.

while the internet alone didn’t get Mr. Biden elected, a few key decisions helped his chances.

1. Lean On Influencers and Validators

“You probably know that we perceive five basic tastes, and that taste has something to do with the tongue and the brain. But a new study shows just how weird our perception of reality truly is: Scientists showed that all it takes to convince a mouse that their mouth is full of sweet nectar or bitter poison is the manipulation of a few brain cells.”

“Changing a color’s appearance by changing the background or lighting is one of the most common techniques in optical illusions. As the examples below show, colors can change dramatically against different backgrounds. (If you’ve ever held a sock up to something black to see whether it was black or navy, you understand the concept.)”

A nice explanation of the “debate” on what colors people perceived when they saw the picture of some dress online.

Tainter seemed calm. He walked me through the arguments of the book that made his reputation, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which has for years been the seminal text in the study of societal collapse, an academic subdiscipline that arguably was born with its publication in 1988

It is only a mild overstatement to suggest that before Tainter, collapse was simply not a thing.

His own research has moved on; these days, he focuses on “sustainability.”

Long-term, isolation even increases the risk of premature death. It’s being called a “social recession”

“People who are more socially connected show less inflammation, conversely people who are more isolated and lonely show increased chronic inflammation.

“Loneliness increases earlier death by 26%, social isolation by 29% and living alone by 32%.”

five most common surnames in China -- shared by more than 433 million people, or 30% of the population

With 1.37 billion citizens, China has the world's largest population, but has one of the smallest surname pools. Only about 6,000 surnames are in use, according to the Ministry of Public Security. And the vast majority of the population -- almost 86% -- share just 100 of those surnames.

To put that in perspective, the United States -- with less than a quarter of China's population -- reported 6.3 million surnames in its 2010 census

LONDON -- Prince William is encouraging everyone in Britain to follow the example of Queen Elizabeth II, his grandmother, in being inoculated against COVID-19 as authorities battle unsubstantiated fears about vaccine safety.

The medics told William some members of the public are reluctant to get any of the coronavirus vaccines authorized by regulators.

The disclosure was meant to end speculation about the matter and to boost confidence in the shots

This year, it's OK to give ourselves a break, says Dr. Rachelle Scott, director of psychiatry at Eden Health, a concierge-style health care start-up with offices in New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.

"There are days we're just getting up and showering and, you know, just doing basic activities of daily living. And that's OK,"

A Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll conducted in mid-July 2020 found 53% of adults in the U.S. reported that their mental health has been negatively impacted due to stress over COVID-19. That's up from 32% in March.

I wanted to be a scientist. So why did I find the actual work of science so boring? In college science courses, I had occasional bursts of mind-expanding insight. For the most part, though, I was tortured by drudgery.

I’d found that science was two-faced: simultaneously thrilling and tedious, all-encompassing and narrow. And yet this was clearly an asset, not a flaw. Something about that combination had changed the world completely.

“Science is an alien thought form,” he writes; that’s why so many civilizations rose and fell before it was invented. In his view, we downplay its weirdness, perhaps because its success is so fundamental to our continued existence.