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Seriously ill Covid-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine were more likely to die or develop dangerous heart arrhythmias, according to a large observational study published Friday in the medical journal The Lancet.

Researchers looked at data from more than 96,000 Covid-19 patients from 671 hospitals. All were hospitalized from late December to mid-April and had died or been discharged by April 21. Just below 15,000 were treated with the antimalarial drugs hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, or one of those drugs combined with an antibiotic.

Those treatments were linked with a higher risk of dying in the hospital, the study found.

Machines can write compelling ad copy and solve complex “real life” problems. Should the creative class be worried?

Rich breaks down some “abstract” problems into their fundamental parts and shows how, with comprehensive enough data and well-structured enough logical programming, AI could be suited to tackle creative problems. In one case, she offers a “real world” example about a manufacturing company’s new line of products and their plans, goals, and expectations for marketing the new line to a specific city. Weekly Newsletter Get your fix of JSTOR Daily’s best stories in your inbox each Thursday. Privacy Policy   Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message.

almost all problems rely (or ought to rely) on an understanding of the nature of both knowledge and reasoning. Humanists are trying to solve many of these same problems. Thus there is room for a good deal of interaction between artificial intelligence and many disciplines within the humanities.

What goes on inside the head of Michael Brutsch or other people like him that leads to this kind of behavior? What did he think about those who were on the receiving end of his trolling?It seems he did not think about them at all. They were completely removed from him physically, and as sociologists have shown, the greater the distance between us and our victims, the easier it may be to cause pain. This is one proposed explanation for an escalation in intensity in warfare, or an eagerness to go pursue war, as weapons technology has increased the distance between fighting parties.

"I told them of how I'd become so paranoid that I genuinely didn't know who to trust anymore," Traynor writes. "I told them of nights when I'd walked the rooms, jumping at shadows and crying over the sleeping forms of my family for fear that they would suffer because of me. Then it happened ... The Troll burst into tears. His dad gently restraining him from leaving the table." What Traynor did was to force his troll to *think* about his actions, not just perform them because of the norms of a subculture.

"Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention which all events and facts arouse by virtue of their existence."

ringleader of the Paris attacks last month appears to have directed the three terrorists inside the Bataclan theater by phone from a few blocks away,

Abdelhamid Abaaoud standing in a doorway yelling into his phone for about an hour.

Abaaoud's head was shaved and he was wearing layers of loose clothing, but when photographs were later published in the media the witness immediately recognized him and alerted the authorities.

Science Can’t Prove Anything Aug.11,2011 Sir Karl Popper's foundational work, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, makes it clear that science cannot prove anything (click for credit)In one of my science textbooks, I make the statement that science cannot prove anything.1 I am always surprised at how controversial such a matter-of-fact statement is to some people. Almost every year, at least one student or parent will contact me simply aghast that I would write something like that in a science textbook. After all, science has proven all sorts of things, hasn’t it?

. I find myself frequently repeating to students and the public that science doesn’t “prove” theories. Scientific measurements can only disprove theories or be consistent with them. Any theory that is consistent with measurements could be disproved by a future measurement.

Unfortunately, as long as science magazines and teachers are sloppy enough to keep using phrases like, “science has proven,” it will be hard to teach children the truth

We constantly use economic metaphors to describe romantic and sexual relations. Few people today refer to women as “damaged goods” or wonder why a man would “buy the cow when he can get the milk for free,” but we have “friends with benefits” and “invest in relationships.” An ex may be “on” or “off the market.” Online dating makes “shopping around” explicit. Blog after blog strategizes about how to maximize your “return on investment” on OkCupid.

he ways that people date — who contacts whom, where they meet and what happens next — have always been tied to the economy. Dating applies the logic of capitalism to courtship. On the dating market, everyone competes for him or herself.

If you want to understand why “Netflix and chill” has replaced dinner and a movie, you need to look at how people work.

“Don’t think companies haven’t studied how far they can take things in providing the minimal level of service,” Mr. Robbins said. “Some organizations have even monetized it by intentionally engineering it so you have to wait an hour at least to speak to someone in support, and while you are on hold, you’re hearing messages like, ‘If you’d like premium support, call this number and for a fee, we will get to you immediately.’”

The most egregious offenders are companies like cable and mobile service providers, which typically have little competition and whose customers are bound by contracts or would be considerably inconvenienced if they canceled their service.

When things don’t make sense and feel out of control, mental health experts say, humans instinctively feel threatened. Though you would like to think you can employ reason in this situation, you’re really just a mass of neural impulses and primal reactions. Think fight or flight, but you can’t do either because you are stuck on the phone, which provokes rage.

Recent research indicates that only about half of perceived friendships are mutual. That is, someone you think is your friend might not be so keen on you. Or, vice versa, as when someone you feel you hardly know claims you as a bestie.

“The notion of doing nothing but spending time in each other’s company has, in a way, become a lost art,” replaced by volleys of texts and tweets, Mr. Sharp said. “People are so eager to maximize efficiency of relationships that they have lost touch with what it is to be a friend.”

It’s a concern because the authenticity of one’s relationships has an enormous impact on one’s health and well-being.

social networking sites create pressure to put time and effort into tending weak ties, and how it can be impossible to keep up with them all. Personally, I also find it difficult to keep up with my strong ties. I’m a great “pick up where we left off” friend, as are most of the people closest to me (makes sense, right?). I’m decidedly sub-awesome, however, at being in constant contact with more than a few people at a time.

the devolution of friendship. As I explain over the course of this essay, I link the devolution of friendship to—but do not “blame” it on—the affordances of various social networking platforms, especially (but not exclusively) so-called “frictionless sharing” features.

I’m using the word here in the same way that people use it to talk about the devolution of health care. One example of devolution of health care is some outpatient surgeries: patients are allowed to go home after their operations, but they still require a good deal of post-operative care such as changing bandages, irrigating wounds, administering medications, etc. Whereas before these patients would stay in the hospital and nurses would perform the care-labor necessary for their recoveries, patients must now find their own caregivers (usually family members or friends; sometimes themselves) to perform free care-labor. In this context, devolution marks the shift of labor and responsibility away from the medical establishment and onto the patient; within the patient-medical establishment collaboration, the patient must now provide a greater portion of the necessary work. Similarly, in some ways, we now expect our friends to do a greater portion of the work of being friends with us.

While the majority of jihadists around the world are not teenagers, official figures show that their involvement in violent Islamism is growing.The number of under-18s arrested for alleged terror offences in the UK almost doubled from eight to 15 from 2013-14 to 2014-15.

Experts say this bears out fears that more and more young people are being drawn to extremism, with followers in their early teens among them. "We are seeing this kind of thing happening more and more with the rise of Islamic State," says Charlie Winter, an expert in jihadist militancy.

The main target for groups like Islamic State is said to be young people between 16 and 24 years old.However the radicalisation process can start as early as 11 or 12

Those rare tech companies that have come out in support of SOPA are not merely criticized but barred from industry events and subject to boycotts. We, the keepers of the flame of free speech, are banishing people for their speech. The result is a chilling atmosphere, with people afraid to speak their minds.

Our melodrama is driven by a vision of an open Internet that has already been distorted, though not by the old industries that fear piracy. For instance, until a year ago, I enjoyed a certain kind of user-generated content very much: I participated in forums in which musicians talked about musical instruments.

proprietary social networking — is ending my freedom to participate in the forums I used to love, at least on terms I accept. Like many other forms of contact, the musical conversations are moving into private sites, particularly Facebook. To continue to participate, I’d have to accept Facebook’s philosophy, under which it analyzes me, and is searching for new ways to charge third parties for the use of that analysis.

How is technology affecting their happiness and emotional development?

The answer, in the peer-reviewed study of the online habits of girls ages 8 to 12, is that those who say they spend considerable amounts of time using multimedia describe themselves in ways that suggest they are less happy and less socially comfortable than peers who say they spend less time on screens.

Among the crucial questions that the researchers were not able to answer is whether the heavy use of media was the cause for the relative unhappiness or whether girls who are less happy to begin with are drawn to heavy use of media, in effect retreating to a virtual world.

On the surface, the dispute is about grout and tiles, but it is also a collision of values and taste. Ms. Breen said she suspected that one of the founders of RFR was just not a fan of “Le Tricorne” — a person who heard him discussing the work said he dismissed it as “a schmatte,” Yiddish for rag — and was using the damaged-wall argument as a pretense to ditch it for good.

His own tastes run to contemporary artists, like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, and he has told people that he wants to showcase highlights of his vast trove in the space now occupied by “Le Tricorne.”Neither Mr. Rosen nor anyone contacted at RFR returned calls for comment.

“Le Tricorne” is not regarded as one of Picasso’s masterpieces, partly because it strays from the avant-garde path he had started traveling a decade earlier with Cubism. Its sheer size reduces its market value, as does its origins as a stage prop. In 2008, when the conservancy wanted an estimated value for insurance purposes, Christie’s appraised the work at $1.6 million.

The research arm of dating site OKCupid looked at 500,000 first contacts and concluded that "netspeak, bad grammar and bad spelling are huge turn-offs"

correct use of apostrophes was appealing. Using "don't" and "won't" caused better than average response rates - 36% and 37% respectively, according to the research.

But grammar can be a linguistic minefield. Grammarians argue it ensures clarity and elegance. For others, it is a series of archaic rules beloved of pedants, bearing little relation to how people really communicate.

This set me thinking about why we are so certain that Zeus never existed. Of course, we are in no position to say that he did.  But are we really in a position to say that he didn’t?

there were “epiphanies” that could “indicate not merely a visible or audible epiphany (whether in the light of day or through a dream . . .) but also any clear expression of a god’s favor such as weather conditions hampering an enemy, a miraculous escape, or a cure;

Why did belief in the gods persist in spite of critical challenges? What evidence seemed decisive to the ancient Greeks? 

Domestic dogs evolved from a group of wolves that came into contact with European hunter-gatherers between 18,800 and 32,100 years ago and may have since died out.

ompared the genes of a wide variety of living dogs and wolves, but modern samples can be deceptive. Dogs and wolves diverged so recently that many of their genes have not had time to separate into distinct lineages. They have also repeatedly hybridized with each other, further confusing their genealogies.

“This suggests that the population of wolves in Europe that gave rise to modern dogs may have gone extinct, which is plausible given how humans have wiped out wolves over the centuries

let’s look at this person with the extraordinary character, the woman Te’o fell for. There was a picture, from their online encounters, of a lovely woman, a Stanford student, supposedly. There was a voice, from telephone conversations, of someone as well. And that someone finally called him up in early December and said the whole thing was a hoax perpetuated by an acquaintance in California, according to Deadspin, which broke the story.

“The pain was real,” said Swarbrick. “The grief was real. The affection was real. That’s the nature of this sad, cruel game.”

No, that’s the nature of people who develop relationships through a screen. The Internet is the cause of much of today’s commitment-free, surface-only living; it’s also the explanation for why someone could tumble head-over-heels for a pixelated cipher. Online dating was only the start of what led us down this road.

CAN you detect someone’s emotional state just by looking at his face?

seems like it

Hundreds of scientific studies support the idea that the face is a kind of emotional beacon, clearly and universally signaling the full array of human sentiments

American scientists believe they face a challenging environment and the vast majority of them support the idea that participation in policy debates and engagement with citizens and journalists is necessary to further their work and careers.

A survey of 3,748 American-based scientists connected with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) finds that 87% agree with the statement “Scientists should take an active role in public policy debates about issues related to science and technology.”

These findings come at a time when science topics are increasingly part of the public debate. Pew Research findings from this survey reported last month showed an overall drop among AAAS scientists in how they rate the state of science in general and their particular scientific field. Scientists also express concerns about the precarious state of research funding, some of the influences on how funding is allocated, and difficulties they feel hinder the capacity of science disciplines to attract the best talent to the field.