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in title, tags, annotations or urlCovid-19 expert Karl Friston: 'Germany may have more immunological "dark matter"' | World news | The Guardian - 0 views
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Our approach, which borrows from physics and in particular the work of Richard Feynman, goes under the bonnet. It attempts to capture the mathematical structure of the phenomenon – in this case, the pandemic – and to understand the causes of what is observed. Since we don’t know all the causes, we have to infer them. But that inference, and implicit uncertainty, is built into the models
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That’s why we call them generative models, because they contain everything you need to know to generate the data. As more data comes in, you adjust your beliefs about the causes, until your model simulates the data as accurately and as simply as possible.
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A common type of epidemiological model used today is the SEIR model, which considers that people must be in one of four states – susceptible (S), exposed (E), infected (I) or recovered (R). Unfortunately, reality doesn’t break them down so neatly. For example, what does it mean to be recovered?
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The Brain Has a Special Kind of Memory for Past Infections - Scientific American - 0 views
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immune cells from the periphery routinely patrol the central nervous system and support its function. In a new study, researchers showed for the first time that—just as the brain remembers people, places, smells, and so on—it also stores what they call “memory traces” of the body’s past infections. Reactivating the same brain cells that encode this information is enough to swiftly summon the peripheral immune system to defend at-risk tissues.
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It is clear the peripheral immune system is capable of retaining information about past infections to fight off future ones—otherwise, vaccines would not work. But Asya Rolls, a neuroimmunologist at Technion–Israel Institute of Technology and the paper’s senior author, says the study expands this concept of classical immunologic memory. Initially, she was taken aback that the brain could store traces of immune activity and use them to trigger such a precise response. “I was amazed,” she says.
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After the infection and immune response dissipated, the researchers injected the mice with a drug that artificially reactivated those same groups of brain cells. They were stunned by what they saw: upon reactivation, the insular cortex directed the immune system to mount a targeted response in the gut at the site of the original inflammation—even though, by that time, there was no infection, tissue damage or pathogen-initiated local inflammation to be found. The brain had retained some sort of memory of the infection and was prepared to reinitiate the fight.
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Opinion | The Spoken Argument Is a Valuable Form of Expression - The New York Times - 0 views
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I am ever more perplexed by why we make students learn to write the classic five-paragraph essay but have so much less interest in developing their spoken argument skills.
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As much as I love writing, I wonder if there is something arbitrary in the idea that education must focus more on the written than the spoken word.
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Back in the day, people would clear their throat and deliver. They weren’t winging it. They would plan their remarks, without writing them out word for word. They knew their topic and, from that, they spoke.
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Pandemic-Era Politics Are Ruining Public Education - The Atlantic - 0 views
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You’re also the nonvoting, perhaps unwitting, subject of adults’ latest pedagogical experiments: either relentless test prep or test abolition; quasi-religious instruction in identity-based virtue and sin; a flood of state laws to keep various books out of your hands and ideas out of your head.
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Your parents, looking over your shoulder at your education and not liking what they see, have started showing up at school-board meetings in a mortifying state of rage. If you live in Virginia, your governor has set up a hotline where they can rat out your teachers to the government. If you live in Florida, your governor wants your parents to sue your school if it ever makes you feel “discomfort” about who you are
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Adults keep telling you the pandemic will never end, your education is being destroyed by ideologues, digital technology is poisoning your soul, democracy is collapsing, and the planet is dying—but they’re counting on you to fix everything when you grow up.
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Ukrainians see their culture being erased as Russia hits beloved sites - 0 views
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“This was intentional. It was a prepared plan. They knew that this legacy was here,” Micay said, wading through the scorched remains, pointing to where paintings, sculptures and books had filled the rooms during her nearly 30 years as the museum director.
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“This was done so Russia can say that there is no Ukrainian culture, that Ukrainian identity does not exist.”
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Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Ukrainian officials have accused Moscow of intentionally attacking hundreds of cultural sites, which is a war crime under the 1954 Hague Convention.
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Pupils at elite Welsh school to get lessons in climate change - 0 views
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For the first time in 50 years, the directors of the IB are collaborating with schools to create an updated version of the qualification taken by 16 to 19-year-olds as an alternative to A-levels
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A cohort of 20 pupils at UWC will drop a third of the traditional subjects usually studied within the IB. Instead they will spend 300 hours, over two years of study, on the new areas. Forms of assessment have yet to be finalised but there will be no exams on these subjects.
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Learning will be project-based, collaborative and designed to tackle “multiple global crises” around the world. IB says it is creating the new qualification because there is a growing disconnect between the education children are receiving and the education they need.
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Silicon Valley's Safe Space - The New York Times - 0 views
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The roots of Slate Star Codex trace back more than a decade to a polemicist and self-described A.I. researcher named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who believed that intelligent machines could end up destroying humankind. He was a driving force behind the rise of the Rationalists.
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Because the Rationalists believed A.I. could end up destroying the world — a not entirely novel fear to anyone who has seen science fiction movies — they wanted to guard against it. Many worked for and donated money to MIRI, an organization created by Mr. Yudkowsky whose stated mission was “A.I. safety.”
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The community was organized and close-knit. Two Bay Area organizations ran seminars and high-school summer camps on the Rationalist way of thinking.
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Opinion | Elle Mills: Why I Quit YouTube - The New York Times - 0 views
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The peak of my YouTube career didn’t always match my childhood fantasy of what this sort of fame might look like. Instead, I was constantly terrified of losing my audience and the validation that came with it. My self-worth had become so intertwined with my career that maintaining it genuinely felt life-or-death. I was stuck in a never-ending cycle of constantly trying to top myself to remain relevant.
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YouTube soon became a game of, “What’s the craziest thing you’d do for attention?”
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there’s an overwhelming guilt I feel when I look back at all those who naïvely participated in my videos. A part of me feels like I took advantage of their own longing to be seen. I gained fame and success from the exploitation of their lives. They didn’t.
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Why The CHIPS and Science Act Is a Climate Bill - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Over the next five years, the CHIPS Act will direct an estimated $67 billion, or roughly a quarter of its total funding, toward accelerating the growth of zero-carbon industries and conducting climate-relevant research, according to an analysis from RMI, a nonpartisan energy think tank based in Colorado.
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That means that the CHIPS Act is one of the largest climate bills ever passed by Congress. It exceeds the total amount of money that the government spent on renewable-energy tax credits from 2005 to 2019
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And it’s more than half the size of the climate spending in President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill. That’s all the more remarkable because the CHIPS Act was passed by large bipartisan majorities, with 41 Republicans and nearly all Democrats supporting it in the House and the Senate.
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Opinion | It's Time to Stop Living the American Scam - The New York Times - 0 views
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people aren’t trying to sell busyness as a virtue anymore, not even to themselves. A new generation has grown to adulthood that’s never known capitalism as a functioning economic system. My generation, X, was the first postwar cohort to be downwardly mobile, but millennials were the first to know it going in.
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Our country’s oligarchs forgot to maintain the crucial Horatio Alger fiction that anyone can get ahead with hard work — or maybe they just dropped it, figuring we no longer had any choice.
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Through the internet, we could peer enviously at our neighbors in civilized countries, who get monthlong vacations, don’t have to devote decades to paying for their college degrees, and aren’t terrified of going broke if they get sick. To young people, America seems less like a country than an inescapable web of scams, and “hard work” less like a virtue than a propaganda slogan, inane as “Just say no.”
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Why it's as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult | Aeon Essays - 0 views
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there are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs.
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they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention
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An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.
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Whistleblower: Twitter misled investors, FTC and underplayed spam issues - Washington Post - 0 views
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Twitter executives deceived federal regulators and the company’s own board of directors about “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in its defenses against hackers, as well as its meager efforts to fight spam, according to an explosive whistleblower complaint from its former security chief.
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The complaint from former head of security Peiter Zatko, a widely admired hacker known as “Mudge,” depicts Twitter as a chaotic and rudderless company beset by infighting, unable to properly protect its 238 million daily users including government agencies, heads of state and other influential public figures.
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Among the most serious accusations in the complaint, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is that Twitter violated the terms of an 11-year-old settlement with the Federal Trade Commission by falsely claiming that it had a solid security plan. Zatko’s complaint alleges he had warned colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software and that executives withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes.
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Opinion | Your Angry Uncle Wants to Talk About Politics. What Do You Do? - The New York Times - 0 views
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In our combined years of experience helping people talk about difficult political issues from abortion to guns to race, we’ve found most can converse productively without sacrificing their beliefs or spoiling dinner
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It’s not merely possible to preserve your relationships while talking with folks you disagree with, but engaging respectfully will actually make you a more powerful advocate for the causes you care about.
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The key to persuasive political dialogue is creating a safe and welcoming space for diverse views with a compassionate spirit, active listening and personal storytelling
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Opinion | Beijing Olympics: Why Mikaela Shiffrin Stumbled, and Why We All Stumble - The New York Times - 0 views
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Humans are biologically hard-wired to crave a sense of control and certainty over what will happen in the future.
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But with that comes a tendency to overfixate on the details of our performance, which can get in the way of achieving our best.
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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.
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Apple News Plus Review: Good Value, But Apple Needs to Fine Tune This | Tom's Guide - 0 views
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For $9.99 a month, News+ gives you access to more than 300 magazines, along with news articles from The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times.
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if you want to find a specific magazine within the News+ tab, be prepared to give that scrolling finger a workout. There's no search field in the News+ tab for typing in a magazine title, so you've got to tap on Apple's catalog and scroll until you find what you're looking for
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You can browse by category from the home screen, which reduces the number of covers you have to sort through a little bit.
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If We Knew Then What We Know Now About Covid, What Would We Have Done Differently? - WSJ - 0 views
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For much of 2020, doctors and public-health officials thought the virus was transmitted through droplets emitted from one person’s mouth and touched or inhaled by another person nearby. We were advised to stay at least 6 feet away from each other to avoid the droplets
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A small cadre of aerosol scientists had a different theory. They suspected that Covid-19 was transmitted not so much by droplets but by smaller infectious aerosol particles that could travel on air currents way farther than 6 feet and linger in the air for hours. Some of the aerosol particles, they believed, were small enough to penetrate the cloth masks widely used at the time.
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The group had a hard time getting public-health officials to embrace their theory. For one thing, many of them were engineers, not doctors.
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