Tokyo University, known as Todai, is Japan’s best. Its exacting entry test requires years of cramming to pass and can defeat even the most erudite. Most current computers, trained in data crunching, fail to understand its natural language tasks altogether.
Ms. Arai has set researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, where she works, the task of developing a machine that can jump the lofty Todai bar by 2021.
If they succeed, she said, such a machine should be capable, with appropriate programming, of doing many — perhaps most — jobs now done by university graduates.
Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url
3More
11More
Computers Jump to the Head of the Class - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
There is a significant danger, Ms. Arai says, that the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence, if not well managed, could lead to a radical restructuring of economic activity and the job market, outpacing the ability of social and education systems to adjust.
-
Intelligent machines could be used to replace expensive human resources, potentially undermining the economic value of much vocational education, Ms. Arai said.
- ...8 more annotations...
-
“Educational investment will not be attractive to those without unique skills,” she said. Graduates, she noted, need to earn a return on their investment in training: “But instead they will lose jobs, replaced by information simulation. They will stay uneducated.” In such a scenario, high-salary jobs would remain for those equipped with problem-solving skills, she predicted. But many common tasks now done by college graduates might vanish.
-
Over the next 10 to 20 years, “10 percent to 20 percent pushed out of work by A.I. will be a catastrophe,” she says. “I can’t begin to think what 50 percent would mean — way beyond a catastrophe and such numbers can’t be ruled out if A.I. performs well in the future.”
-
A recent study published by the Program on the Impacts of Future Technology, at Oxford University’s Oxford Martin School, predicted that nearly half of all jobs in the United States could be replaced by computers over the next two decades.
-
Smart machines will give companies “the opportunity to automate many tasks, redesign jobs, and do things never before possible even with the best human work forces,” according to a report this year by the business consulting firm McKinsey.
-
Advances in speech recognition, translation and pattern recognition threaten employment in the service sectors — call centers, marketing and sales — precisely the sectors that provide most jobs in developed economies.
-
Gartner’s 2013 chief executive survey, published in April, found that 60 percent of executives surveyed dismissed as “‘futurist fantasy” the possibility that smart machines could displace many white-collar employees within 15 years.
-
Kenneth Brant, research director at Gartner, told a conference in October: “Job destruction will happen at a faster pace, with machine-driven job elimination overwhelming the market’s ability to create valuable new ones.”
-
Optimists say this could lead to the ultimate elimination of work — an “Athens without the slaves” — and a possible boom for less vocational-style education. Mr. Brant’s hope is that such disruption might lead to a system where individuals are paid a citizen stipend and be free for education and self-realization. “This optimistic scenario I call Homo Ludens, or ‘Man, the Player,’ because maybe we will not be the smartest thing on the planet after all,” he said. “Maybe our destiny is to create the smartest thing on the planet and use it to follow a course of self-actualization.”
4More
Holding hands can sync brainwaves, ease pain, study shows -- ScienceDaily - 0 views
-
Reach for the hand of a loved one in pain and not only will your breathing and heart rate synchronize with theirs, your brain wave patterns will couple up too, according to a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).The study, by researchers with the University of Colorado Boulder and University of Haifa, also found that the more empathy a comforting partner feels for a partner in pain, the more their brainwaves fall into sync. And the more those brain waves sync, the more the pain goes away.
-
The study is the latest in a growing body of research exploring a phenomenon known as "interpersonal synchronization," in which people physiologically mirror the people they are with. It is the first to look at brain wave synchronization in the context of pain, and offers new insight into the role brain-to-brain coupling may play in touch-induced analgesia, or healing touch.
-
He and his colleagues at University of Haifa recruited 22 heterosexual couples, age 23 to 32 who had been together for at least one year and put them through several two-minute scenarios as electroencephalography (EEG) caps measured their brainwave activity. The scenarios included sitting together not touching; sitting together holding hands; and sitting in separate rooms. Then they repeated the scenarios as the woman was subjected to mild heat pain on her arm.Merely being in each other's presence, with or without touch, was associated with some brain wave synchronicity in the alpha mu band, a wavelength associated with focused attention. If they held hands while she was in pain, the coupling increased the most.
- ...1 more annotation...
-
The study did not explore whether the same effect would occur with same-sex couples, or what happens in other kinds of relationships. The takeaway for now, Pavel said: Don't underestimate the power of a hand-hold."You may express empathy for a partner's pain, but without touch it may not be fully communicated," he said.
10More
Climate change: 1 in 3 plant and animal species extinct in 50 years, study warns - CNN - 0 views
-
Take a moment to cherish your plants and appreciate the animals you see around you.In 50 years, a third of them may no longer exist.
-
approximately one in three plant, insect and animal species could face extinction by 2070. However, things could be even worse if emissions continue to rise as rapidly as they have in recent decades.
- ...7 more annotations...
-
Of the 538 species studied, 44% of them have already experienced an extinction in a particular local area.
-
While many species were able to tolerate a moderate increase in maximum temperatures, 50% of the species had local extinctions if maximum temperatures increased by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius. That number rose to 95% if temperatures increased by more than 2.9 degrees Celsius.
-
With January going in the record books as the warmest January in 141 years and statistical analysis done by NOAA scientists predicting 2020 to be one of the five warmest years on record, the researchers believe there will be more local extinctions across the globe.
-
The Paris Agreement was signed in 2015 by ministers from 195 countries from around the globe.It committed these countries to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and below 1.5 degrees, if possible.
-
"Based on our sample of 538 species, we projected a loss of 30% of the species under a more extreme warming scenario, but only about 16% if we stick to the Paris Agreement," Wiens told CNN. "So, think in 1 in 6 species, not 1 in 3."
-
The Paris Agreement is an international pact aimed at curbing global emissions of heat-trapping gases.Unfortunately, studies have shown that so far, many countries are failing to meet the emissions cuts they set to limit climate change.
-
"Some researchers have estimated that two-thirds of all species of plants and animals could be lost due to tropical deforestation alone," Wiens said. "If you combine that with climate change (which can impact species in protected forests and other reserves), then it really is terrible. Even from our data alone, there are extreme warming scenarios where 55% of the species would be lost from intact habitats. And note that deforestation also increases global warming. It is a double whammy against biodiversity."
10More
History News Network | Why Historians Need Imagination - 2 views
-
Fantasy-directed imagination is aimed at depicting a scenario that goes beyond reality. An example of fantasy-directed imagination would be the creation of Mickey Mouse.
-
Reality-directed imagination, on the other hand, is aimed at depicting a scenario that reflectsreality, whether as it is known at present or as it is known to have existed in the past. An example of reality-directed imagination would be the study of Napoleon.
- ...7 more annotations...
-
Reality-directed imagination, for its part, endeavours to re-create, in the intellectual realm, actions and events that have existed or have taken place, which we may have plenty or partial information about.
-
Reality-directed imagination is thus a means to retain a solid sense of reality rather than to submerge into the everlasting landscape of fantasy. We imagine what was and try to afford it life.
-
Without reality-directed imagination, on the other hand, the study of history would be well-nigh impossible.
-
By resorting to reality-directed imagination we are able intellectually to disconnect ourselves from the present; to visualize, like a landscape gradually making its appearance as we move backwards in time, the setting in which an event occurred or the personal features of an individual we follow. We are able emotionally to connect ourselves to the prevailing conditions or to a person's thoughts.
-
In the study of history we make use of reality-directed imagination as we depict in our minds the characters of individuals or the nature of events. We even try to fill the gaps by resorting to our imagination ever vigilant not to lose sight of reality as it was. In other words, we attempt to imagine the unknown by resorting to the known.
-
Without imagination as a study-device, the learning of history becomes well-nigh impossible, for the information furnished to us is rendered unintelligible. We are unable to relate to it in any meaningful manner. We assess it in a mechanical way, devoid of image, sound and feel. Our attempt to understand it leads to a dead-end for we cannot leap forward from the stale fact before us and relate it to other facts beyond it.
-
Without imagination we cannot compare, distinguish and separate; we cannot know the difference between the particular and the general. In order to study history we need to avoid the mechanical, on the one hand, and the fantastic, on the other. In other words, we ought to eschew both lack of imagination and fantasy-directed imagination; the first does not allow us to proceed forward while the latter leads us to the realm of the unreal.
14More
shared by Javier E on 09 Dec 14
- No Cached
Dark social traffic in the mobile app era -- Fusion - 1 views
fusion.net/...-traffic-in-the-mobile-app-era
internet mobile Facebook traffic media concentration technology social media
![](/images/link.gif)
-
over the last two years, the Internet landscape has been changing. People use their phones differently from their computers, and that has made Facebook more dominant.
-
The takeaway is this: if you’re a media company, you are almost certainly underestimating your Facebook traffic. The only question is how much Facebook traffic you’re not counting.
- ...11 more annotations...
-
people spend about as much time in apps as they do on the desktop and mobile webs combined.
-
The mobile web has exploded. This is due to the falling cost and rising quality of smartphones. Now, both Apple and Google have huge numbers of great apps, and people love them.
-
a good chunk of what we might have called dark social visits are actually Facebook mobile app visitors in disguise.
-
Chief among the non-gaming apps is Facebook. They’ve done a remarkable job building a mobile app that keeps people using it.
-
beginning last October, Facebook made changes in its algorithm that started pushing massive amounts of traffic to media publishers. In some cases, as at The Atlantic, where I last worked, our Facebook traffic went up triple-digit percentages. Facebook simultaneously also pushed users to like pages from media companies, which drove up the fan-counts at all kinds of media sites. If you see a page with a million followers, there is a 99 percent chance that it got a push from Facebook.
-
when people are going through their news feeds on the Facebook app and they click on a link, it’s as if someone cut and pasted that link into the browser, meaning that the Facebook app and the target website don’t do the normal handshaking that they do on the web. In the desktop scenario, the incoming visitor has a tout that runs ahead to the website and says, “Hey, I’m coming from Facebook.com.” In the mobile app scenario that communication, known as the referrer, does not happen.
-
Facebook—which every media publisher already knows owns them—actually has a much tighter grip on web traffic than anyone had thought. Which would make their big-footing among publishers that much more interesting. Because they certainly know how much traffic they’re sending to all your favorite websites, even if those websites themselves do not.
-
Whenever you go to a website, you take along a little profile called a “user agent.” It says what my operating system is and what kind of browser I use, along with some other information.
-
A story’s shareability is now largely determined by its shareability on Facebook, with all its attendant quirks and feedback loops. We’re all optimizing for Facebook now,
-
the social networks—by which I mostly mean Facebook—have begun to eat away at the roots of the old ways of sharing on non-commercial platforms.
-
what people like to do with their phones, en masse, is open up the Facebook app and thumb through their news feeds.
5More
shared by Javier E on 13 Oct 15
- No Cached
Map Shows Where Sea Level Rise Will Drown American Cities | WIRED - 0 views
www.wired.com/...ise-will-drown-american-cities
climate change global warming sea level coastline cities research
![](/images/link.gif)
-
A new map from Climate Central shows how the water will flow into hundreds of US cities under the best and worst global warming scenarios
-
“One of the most astonishing things to me was finding that burning one gallon of gasoline translates to adding 400 gallons of water volume to the ocean in the long run,”
-
For example, when the global atmospheric CO2 level reaches 930 gigatons, Boston will be due for about 9 feet of sea level rise. That’s enough water to cover 25 percent of the city during high tide. In the extreme cuts scenario, atmospheric CO2 never reaches that level. Under business as usual fossil emissions however, a quarter of Boston is locked into a future under water by 2045.
- ...2 more annotations...
-
The study, in other words, isn’t about how much see level rise happens this century, but whether this century’s emissions bank enough carbon for total ice melt down—or some less drastic version. “Our analysis really looks at a 2000 year envelope,” says Strauss.
-
Under the ice, Greenland and Antarctica are uncharted territories. In order to calculate the rate at which those massive ice sheets slough off, Levermann says he would need to know more about the texture of the underlying rock.
17More
shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 18
- No Cached
Opinion | Knowledge, Ignorance and Climate Change - The New York Times - 1 views
www.nytimes.com/...philosophy-climate-change.html
climate change ignorance knowledge probability epistemic anxiety skepticism psychology
![](/images/link.gif)
-
the value of being aware of our ignorance has been a recurring theme in Western thought: René Descartes said it’s necessary to doubt all things to build a solid foundation for science; and Ludwig Wittgenstein, reflecting on the limits of language, said that “the difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.”
-
Sometimes, when it appears that someone is expressing doubt, what he is really doing is recommending a course of action. For example, if I tell you that I don’t know whether there is milk in the fridge, I’m not exhibiting philosophical wisdom — I’m simply recommending that you check the fridge before you go shopping.
-
According to NASA, at least 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists think that “climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely caused by human activities.”
- ...14 more annotations...
-
As a philosopher, I have nothing to add to the scientific evidence of global warming, but I can tell you how it’s possible to get ourselves to sincerely doubt things, despite abundant evidence to the contrary
-
scenarios suggest that it’s possible to feel as though you don’t know something even when possessing enormous evidence in its favor. Philosophers call scenarios like these “skeptical pressure” cases
-
In general, a skeptical pressure case is a thought experiment in which the protagonist has good evidence for something that he or she believes, but the reader is reminded that the protagonist could have made a mistake
-
If the story is set up in the right way, the reader will be tempted to think that the protagonist’s belief isn’t genuine knowledge
-
When presented with these thought experiments, some philosophy students conclude that what these examples show is that knowledge requires full-blown certainty. In these skeptical pressure cases, the evidence is overwhelming, but not 100 percent. It’s an attractive idea, but it doesn’t sit well with the fact that we ordinarily say we know lots of things with much lower probability.
-
Skeptical allure can be gripping. Piling on more evidence does not typically shake you out of it, just as making it even more probable that you will lose the lottery does not all of a sudden make you feel like you know your ticket is a loser.
-
In my own work, I have speculated that an extreme version of this phenomenon is operative in obsessive compulsive disorder
-
The standard response by climate skeptics is a lot like our reaction to skeptical pressure cases. Climate skeptics understand that 97 percent of scientists disagree with them, but they focus on the very tiny fraction of holdouts. As in the lottery case, this focus might be enough to sustain their skepticism.
-
Anti-vaccine proponents, for example, aware that medical professionals disagree with their position, focus on any bit of fringe research that might say otherwise.
-
Although there is no consensus about how it arises, a promising idea defended by the philosopher David Lewis is that skeptical pressure cases often involve focusing on the possibility of error. Once we start worrying and ruminating about this possibility, no matter how far-fetched, something in our brains causes us to doubt. The philosopher Jennifer Nagel aptly calls this type of effect “epistemic anxiety.”
-
One way to counter the effects of skepticism is to stop talking about “knowledge” and switch to talking about probabilities. Instead of saying that you don’t know some claim, try to estimate the probability that it is true. As hedge fund managers, economists, policy researchers, doctors and bookmakers have long been aware, the way to make decisions while managing risk is through probabilities.
-
Once we switch to this perspective, claims to “not know,” like those made by Trump, lose their force and we are pushed to think more carefully about the existing data and engage in cost-benefit analyses.
-
It’s easy to say you don’t know, but it’s harder to commit to an actual low probability estimate in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.
-
Socrates was correct that awareness of one’s ignorance is virtuous, but philosophers have subsequently uncovered many pitfalls associated with claims of ignorance. An appreciation of these issues can help elevate public discourse on important topics, including the future of our planet.
28More
Businesses May Benefit From Sharing Covid Testing Resources, Study Suggests - The New Y... - 0 views
-
Universities and other institutions looking to protect themselves from Covid-19 may benefit from sharing their testing resources with the wider community, a new study suggests.
-
Last year, when the National Football League decided to stage its season in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, it went all-in on testing
- ...24 more annotations...
-
Between Aug. 1 and the Super Bowl in early February, the N.F.L. administered almost one million tests to players and staff.
-
When the coronavirus closed down the country last spring, many colleges and universities sought her advice on how to safely reopen.
-
Now, a new analysis suggests that schools, businesses and other organizations that want to keep themselves safe should think beyond strictly themselves.
-
By dedicating a substantial proportion of their tests to people in the surrounding community, institutions could reduce the number of Covid-19 cases among their members by as much as 25 percent, researchers report in a new paper, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal.
-
“If you’ve been in enough outbreaks you just understand that testing in a box doesn’t makes sense. These things are communicable, and they’re coming in from the community.”
-
“We want to start using more sophisticated modeling and probably economic theory to inform what an optimal testing program would look like.”
-
Dr. Sabeti is an epidemic veteran, part of teams that responded to an Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 and a mumps outbreak in the Boston area a few years later.
-
The University of Illinois is testing its students, faculty and staff twice a week and has conducted more than 1.6 million tests since July.
-
At a time when testing resources were in short supply, many of these institutions were proposing intensive, expensive testing regimens focused entirely on their own members
-
‘You’re in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,’” she recalled. “‘And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you’ll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it’s burning to the ground.’”
-
‘You’re in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,’” she recalled. “‘And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you’ll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it’s burning to the ground.’”
-
Using real-world data from C.M.U., the researchers created a baseline scenario in which 1 percent of people at the school, and 6 percent of those in the surrounding county, were infected by the coronavirus, and the university was testing 12 percent of its members every day.
-
Under these conditions, the researchers found, if the university used all of its tests on its own members, it would have roughly 200 Covid-19 cases after 40 days
-
The researchers then tweaked the model’s parameters in various ways: What if the virus were more prevalent? What if students and staff did not report all their contacts? What if they were better about mask-wearing and social distancing? What if the university deployed more tests, or fewer?
-
Unsurprisingly, the more testing the university did, and the more information it had about its members’ close contacts, the fewer Covid-19 cases there were
-
But in virtually every scenario, sharing at least some tests with the broader community led to fewer cases than hoarding them.
-
“A virus does not respect geographic boundaries,” Dr. Pollock said. “It is ludicrous to think that you can get control of an acute infectious respiratory disease like Covid-19, in a city like Davis that hosts a very large university, without coordinated public health measures that connect both the university and the community.”
-
There are barriers to the more altruistic approach, including internal political pressure to use testing resources in house and concerns about legal liability.
-
the researchers hope that their model convinces at least some institutions to rethink their strategy, not only during this epidemic but also in future ones.
-
“An outbreak is an opportunity to buy a lot of community good will, or to burn a lot of community good will,” Dr. Sabeti said. “We could have spent an entire year building up that relationship between organizations and institutions and their communities. And we would have done all that hard work together, as opposed to everybody turning inward.”
-
"'You're in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,'" she recalled. "'And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you'll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it's burning to the ground.'"
5More
Big Banks Are 'Fueling Climate Chaos' By Pouring Trillions Into Oil, Gas And Coal | Huf... - 0 views
-
The world’s largest banks have funneled $3.8 trillion into the fossil fuel industry over the last five years, according to new figures published Wednesday.
-
“Major banks around the world, led by U.S. banks in particular, are fueling climate chaos by dumping trillions of dollars into the fossil fuels that are causing the crisis
-
Though U.S. banks dominate fossil fuel financing, European banks are also big. French bank BNP Paribas, which has pledged to be a leader in climate strategy, provided $40.8 billion in fossil fuel financing in 2020, an increase of 41% from the previous year. Since 2016, the bank’s fossil fuel financing has risen 142%, according to the report.
- ...2 more annotations...
-
Financing for the top 35 companies involved in tar sands — one of the most environmentally destructive fossil fuels to extract and process — decreased 27% since 2019, to $16 billion.
-
“The policies and commitments that banks have put out so far give us no reason to believe they’re going to make these deep emissions cuts that the science demands,”
21More
12 Ways People Say Their Anxiety Has Changed During 2020 | HuffPost Life - 0 views
-
This year has tested our collective mental health again and again — from fears over the coronavirus to the isolating effects of social distancing, the reckoning on racial injustice, financial struggles, natural disasters and a contentious presidential election just weeks away.
-
This year has tested our collective mental health again and again — from fears over the coronavirus to the isolating effects of social distancing, the reckoning on racial injustice, financial struggles, natural disasters and a contentious presidential election just weeks away.
-
While many people with pre-existing anxiety report their symptoms have worsened in 2020, there’s also a subset who say they’ve been less anxious.
- ...11 more annotations...
-
It’s hard to break free from anxious thoughts when you’re consumed with the world falling apart with no end in sight.”
-
But when the isolating isn’t by choice, and it’s to avoid a deadly disease, it can be the cause of panic-inducing thoughts that you can’t escape from.
-
It’s as if the worry and anxiety is always at the back of my mind even when I sleep and as soon as I wake up, it overwhelms me immediately.
-
“Racial injustice doesn’t mix well with trauma, so I’ve had to do my mental illness a favor and log off of social media.
-
“As someone with anxiety, I already feel an unrealistic and heavy responsibility on how my actions and words affect others.
-
At first I was filled with panic, but now I’ve adjusted to this new normal.
-
my anxiety started to stem from not knowing when this will end or when things can go back to feeling normal.
-
Now, I realize that the world can change in a second and that I have to learn to let certain things go. Who knows what is going to happen next.
-
“My mind immediately goes to the worst-case scenario and that’s when things start spiraling for me.
-
Today, after a few months, the COVID anxiety isn’t as strong as it was ― when, strangely, COVID is stronger than ever in my city
13More
Covid-19 in the US: Hydroxychloroquine treatment for Covid-19 linked to a greater risk ... - 0 views
-
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.
- ...10 more annotations...
-
"Previous small-scale studies have failed to identify robust evidence of a benefit and larger, randomised controlled trials are not yet completed," Dr. Frank Ruschitzka, director of the Heart Center at University Hospital Zurich and the study's coauthor, said in a statement.
-
President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus cure. Earlier this week he claimed he was taking daily doses of it as a prophylaxis to prevent infection.
-
Additionally, the study found serious cardiac arrhythmias were more common among patients who received any of the four treatments. The largest increase was among the group treated with hydroxychloroquine and an an antibiotic -- 8% of those patients developed a heart arrythmia, compared to 0.3% of the control group.
-
Items such as masks and hand sanitizer will be familiar sights in stuffed backpacks. Classes and school buses will have fewer people while some office meetings will be conducted by video conference, experts say.
-
Children with underlying health conditions are especially vulnerable, and it's crucial that people follow rules to keep everyone safe, Altmann said. She shared other things US schools must address before unlatching their doors.
-
"We need to quickly test them, diagnose, isolate and then contact trace, which is a lot easier when there's fewer kids they've come into contact with throughout the day," Altmann added.
-
In New York, 16.6% of people have been infected, compared with 1% in California, the researchers said.
-
In the most severe scenario, the CDC assumes that 1% of people overall with Covid-19 and symptoms will die. In the least severe scenario, it puts that number at 0.2%.
-
"Go out, wear a mask, stay six feet away from anyone so you have the physical distancing," he said. "Go for a run. Go for a walk. Go fishing. As long as you're not in a crowd and you're not in a situation where you can physically transmit the virus."
-
Alaska is allowing all businesses to reopen, as well as houses of worship, libraries, museums and sporting activities, starting at 8 a.m. Alaska has the fewest cases of all states and has reported single-digit new cases since mid-April.
12More
Obscurity: A Better Way to Think About Your Data Than 'Privacy' - Woodrow Hartzog and E... - 1 views
-
Obscurity is the idea that when information is hard to obtain or understand, it is, to some degree, safe. Safety, here, doesn't mean inaccessible. Competent and determined data hunters armed with the right tools can always find a way to get it. Less committed folks, however, experience great effort as a deterrent.
-
Online, obscurity is created through a combination of factors. Being invisible to search engines increases obscurity. So does using privacy settings and pseudonyms. Disclosing information in coded ways that only a limited audience will grasp enhances obscurity, too
-
What obscurity draws our attention to, is that while the records were accessible to any member of the public prior to the rise of big data, more effort was required to obtain, aggregate, and publish them. In that prior context, technological constraints implicitly protected privacy interests.
- ...9 more annotations...
-
the "you choose who to let in" narrative is powerful because it trades on traditional notions of space and boundary regulation, and further appeals to our heightened sense of individual responsibility, and, possibly even vanity. The basic message is that so long as we exercise good judgment when selecting our friends, no privacy problems will arise
-
What this appeal to status quo relations and existing privacy settings conceals is the transformative potential of Graph : new types of searching can emerge that, due to enhanced frequency and newly created associations between data points, weaken, and possibly obliterate obscurity.
-
the stalker frame muddies the concept, implying that the problem is people with bad intentions getting our information. Determined stalkers certainly pose a threat to the obscurity of information because they represent an increased likelihood that obscure information will be found and understood.
-
It is not a stretch to assume Graph could enable searching through the content of posts a user has liked or commented on and generating categories of interests from it. For example, users could search which of their friends are interested in politics, or, perhaps, specifically, in left-wing politics.
-
In this scenario, a user who wasn't a fan of political groups or causes, didn't list political groups or causes as interests, and didn't post political stories, could still be identified as political.
-
In a system that purportedly relies upon user control, it is still unclear how and if users will be able to detect when their personal information is no longer obscure. How will they be able to anticipate the numerous different queries that might expose previously obscure information? Will users even be aware of all the composite results including their information?
-
Obscurity is a protective state that can further a number of goals, such as autonomy, self-fulfillment, socialization, and relative freedom from the abuse of power. A major task ahead is for society to determine how much obscurity citizens need to thrive.
7More
The Future of Sex - The European - 1 views
-
Consider the most likely scenario for how human sexual behavior will develop over the next hundred years or so in the absence of cataclysm. Here’s what I see if we continue on our current path:
-
Like every other aspect of human life, our sexuality will become increasingly mediated by technology. The technology of pornography will become ever more sophisticated—even if the subject matter of porn itself will remain as primal as ever.
-
As the technology improves, society continues to grow ever more fragmented, and hundreds of millions of Chinese men with no hope of marrying a bona-fide, flesh-and-blood woman come of age, sex robots will become as common and acceptable as dildos and vibrators are today. After all, the safest sex is that which involves no other living things…
- ...4 more annotations...
-
As our sexuality becomes ever more divorced from emotion and intimacy, a process already well underway, sex will increasingly be seen as simply a matter of provoking orgasm in the most efficient, reliable ways possible.
-
Human sexuality will continue to be subjected to the same commodification and mechanization as other aspects of our lives. Just as the 21st century saw friends replaced by Facebook friends, nature replaced by parks, ocean fisheries replaced by commercially farmed seafood, and sunshine largely supplanted by tanning salons, we’ll see sexual interaction reduced to mechanically provoked orgasm as human beings become ever more dominated by the machines and mechanistic thought processes that developed in our brains and societies like bacteria in a petri dish.
-
Gender identity will fade away as sexual interaction becomes less “human” and we grow less dependent upon binary interactions with other people. As more and more of our interactions take place with non-human partners, others’ expectations and judgments will become less relevant to the development of sexual identity, leading to greater fluidity and far less urgency and passion concerning sexual expression.
-
the collapse of western civilization may well be the best thing that could happen for human sexuality. Following the collapse of the consumerist, competitive mind-set that now dominates so much of human thought, we’d possibly be free to rebuild a social world more in keeping with our preagricultural origins, characterized by economies built upon sharing rather than hoarding, a politics of respect rather than of power, and a sexuality of intimacy rather than alienation.
19More
News from The Associated Press - 0 views
-
If you saw the film "Argo," no, you didn't miss this development, which is recounted in Mendez's book about the real-life operation. It wasn't there because director Ben Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio replaced it with an even more dramatic scenario, involving canceled flight reservations, suspicious Iranian officials who call the Hollywood office of the fake film crew (a call answered just in time), and finally a heart-pounding chase on the tarmac just as the plane's wheels lift off, seconds from catastrophe.
-
And they aren't alone - two other high-profile best-picture nominees this year, Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty" and Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln," have also been criticized for different sorts of factual issues.
- ...15 more annotations...
-
But because these three major films are in contention, the issue has come to the forefront of this year's Oscar race, and with it a thorny cultural question: Does the audience deserve the truth, the whole truth and nothing but? Surely not, but just how much fiction is OK?
-
In response to a complaint by a Connecticut congressman, Kushner acknowledged he'd changed the details for dramatic effect, having two Connecticut congressmen vote against the amendment when, in fact, all four voted for it. (The names of those congressmen were changed, to avoid changing the vote of specific individuals.)
-
Kushner said he had "adhered to time-honored and completely legitimate standards for the creation of historical drama, which is what `Lincoln' is. I hope nobody is shocked to learn that I also made up dialogue and imagined encounters and invented characters."
-
"Maybe changing the vote went too far," says Richard Walter, chairman of screenwriting at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Maybe there was another way to do it. But really, it's not terribly important. People accept that liberties will be taken. A movie is a movie. People going for a history lesson are going to the wrong place."
-
Walter says he always tells his students: "Go for the feelings. Because the only thing that's truly real in the movies are the feelings that people feel when they watch."
-
No subject or individual's life is compelling and dramatic enough by itself, he says, that it neatly fits into a script with three acts, subplots, plot twists and a powerful villain.
-
Reeves, who actually gave the "Lincoln" script a negative review because he thought it was too heavy on conversation and lacking action. He adds, though, that when the subject is as famous as Lincoln, one has a responsibility to be more faithful to the facts.
-
"This is fraught territory," he says. "You're always going to have to change something, and you're always going to get in some sort of trouble, with somebody," he says.
-
Futterman also doesn't begrudge the "Argo" filmmakers, because he feels they use a directorial style that implies some fun is being had with the story. "All the inside joking about Hollywood - tonally, you get a sense that something is being played with," he says.
-
Futterman says he was sympathetic to those concerns and would certainly have addressed them in the script, had he anticipated them.
-
Of the three Oscar-nominated films in question, "Zero Dark Thirty" has inspired the most fervent debate. The most intense criticism, despite acclaim for the filmmaking craft involved, has been about its depictions of interrogations, with some, including a group of senators, saying the film misleads viewers for suggesting that torture provided information that helped the CIA find Osama bin Laden.
-
have been questions about the accuracy of the depiction of the main character, a CIA officer played by Jessica Chastain; the real person - or even combination of people, according to some theories - that she plays remains anonymous.
-
The debate over "Argo" has been much less intense, though there has been some grumbling from former officials in Britain and New Zealand that their countries were portrayed incorrectly in the film as offering no help at all to the six Americans, whereas actually, as Mendez writes, they did provide some help.
-
"When I am hungry and crave a tuna fish sandwich, I don't go to a hardware store," he says. "When I seek a history lesson, I do not go to a movie theater. I loved `Argo' even though I know there was no last-minute turn-around via a phone call from President Carter, nor were there Iranian police cars chasing the plane down the tarmac as it took off. So what? These conceits simply make the movie more exciting."
-
This article reaffirmed my feelings that we can't trust everything that we see or hear through the media, because it is often skewed to better captivate the target audience. As the article stated, there appears to be a fine line in catering to the attention span of the audience, and respecting the known facts of a given event that is portrayed by a movie.
17More
shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 13
- No Cached
Science and gun violence: why is the research so weak? [Part 2] - Boing Boing - 1 views
boingboing.net/...guns.html
social science results methods experiment test research modeling assumption global warming guns public policy
![](/images/link.gif)
-
Scientists are missing some important bits of data that would help them better understand the effects of gun policy and the causes of gun-related violence. But that’s not the only reason why we don’t have solid answers. Once you have the data, you still have to figure out what it means. This is where the research gets complicated, because the problem isn’t simply about what we do and don’t know right now. The problem, say some scientists, is that we —from the public, to politicians, to even scientists themselves—may be trying to force research to give a type of answer that we can’t reasonably expect it to offer. To understand what science can do for the gun debates, we might have to rethink what “evidence-based policy” means to us.
-
For the most part, there aren’t a lot of differences in the data that these studies are using. So how can they reach such drastically different conclusions? The issue is in the kind of data that exists, and what you have to do to understand it, says Charles Manski, professor of economics at Northwestern University. Manski studies the ways that other scientists do research and how that research translates into public policy.
-
Even if we did have those gaps filled in, Manski said, what we’d have would still just be observational data, not experimental data. “We don’t have randomized, controlled experiments, here,” he said. “The only way you could do that, you’d have to assign a gun to some people randomly at birth and follow them throughout their lives. Obviously, that’s not something that’s going to work.”
- ...14 more annotations...
-
This means that, even under the best circumstances, scientists can’t directly test what the results of a given gun policy are. The best you can do is to compare what was happening in a state before and after a policy was enacted, or to compare two different states, one that has the policy and one that doesn’t. And that’s a pretty inexact way of working.
-
Add in enough assumptions, and you can eventually come up with an estimate. But is the estimate correct? Is it even close to reality? That’s a hard question to answer, because the assumptions you made—the correlations you drew between cause and effect, what you know and what you assume to be true because of that—might be totally wrong.
-
It’s hard to tease apart the effect of one specific change, compared to the effects of other things that could be happening at the same time.
-
This process of taking the observational data we do have and then running it through a filter of assumptions plays out in the real world in the form of statistical modeling. When the NAS report says that nobody yet knows whether more guns lead to more crime, or less crime, what they mean is that the models and the assumptions built into those models are all still proving to be pretty weak.
-
From either side of the debate, he said, scientists continue to produce wildly different conclusions using the same data. On either side, small shifts in the assumptions lead the models to produce different results. Both factions continue to choose sets of assumptions that aren’t terribly logical. It’s as if you decided that anybody with blue shoes probably had a belly-button piercing. There’s not really a good reason for making that correlation. And if you change the assumption—actually, belly-button piercings are more common in people who wear green shoes—you end up with completely different results.
-
“It’s been a complete waste of time, because we can’t validate one model versus another,” Pepper said. Most likely, he thinks that all of them are wrong. For instance, all the models he’s seen assume that a law will affect every state in the same way, and every person within that state in the same way. “But if you think about it, that’s just nonsensical,” he said.
-
What you’re left with is an environment where it’s really easy to prove that your colleague’s results are probably wrong, and it’s easy for him to prove that yours are probably wrong. But it’s not easy for either of you to make a compelling case for why you’re right.
-
Statistical modeling isn’t unique to gun research. It just happens to be particularly messy in this field. Scientists who study other topics have done a better job of using stronger assumptions and of building models that can’t be upended by changing one small, seemingly randomly chosen detail. It’s not that, in these other fields, there’s only one model being used, or even that all the different models produce the exact same results. But the models are stronger and, more importantly, the scientists do a better job of presenting the differences between models and drawing meaning from them.
-
“Climate change is one of the rare scientific literatures that has actually faced up to this,” Charles Manski said. What he means is that, when scientists model climate change, they don’t expect to produce exact, to-the-decimal-point answers.
-
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces these big reports periodically, which analyze lots of individual papers. In essence, they’re looking at lots of trees and trying to paint you a picture of the forest. IPCC reports are available for free online, you can go and read them yourself. When you do, you’ll notice something interesting about the way that the reports present results. The IPCC never says, “Because we burned fossil fuels and emitted carbon dioxide into the atmosphere then the Earth will warm by x degrees.” Instead, those reports present a range of possible outcomes … for everything. Depending on the different models used, different scenarios presented, and the different assumptions made, the temperature of the Earth might increase by anywhere between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius.
-
On the one hand, that leaves politicians in a bit of a lurch. The response you might mount to counteract a 1.5 degree increase in global average temperature is pretty different from the response you’d have to 4.5 degrees. On the other hand, the range does tell us something valuable: the temperature is increasing.
-
The problem with this is that it flies in the face of what most of us expect science to do for public policy. Politics is inherently biased, right? The solutions that people come up with are driven by their ideologies. Science is supposed to cut that Gordian Knot. It’s supposed to lay the evidence down on the table and impartially determine who is right and who is wrong.
-
Manski and Pepper say that this is where we need to rethink what we expect science to do. Science, they say, isn’t here to stop all political debate in its tracks. In a situation like this, it simply can’t provide a detailed enough answer to do that—not unless you’re comfortable with detailed answers that are easily called into question and disproven by somebody else with a detailed answer.
-
Instead, science can reliably produce a range of possible outcomes, but it’s still up to the politicians (and, by extension, up to us) to hash out compromises between wildly differing values on controversial subjects. When it comes to complex social issues like gun ownership and gun violence, science doesn’t mean you get to blow off your political opponents and stake a claim on truth. Chances are, the closest we can get to the truth is a range that encompasses the beliefs of many different groups.
23More
How 'Concept Creep' Made Americans So Sensitive to Harm - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
How did American culture arrive at these moments? A new research paper by Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, offers as useful a framework for understanding what’s going on as any I’ve seen. In “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,”
-
concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before,”expanded meanings that reflect “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm.”
-
“they also have potentially damaging ramifications for society and psychology that cannot be ignored.”
- ...20 more annotations...
-
critics may hold concept creep responsible for damaging cultural trends, he writes, “such as supposed cultures of fear, therapy, and victimhood, the shifts I present have some positive implications.”
-
Concept creep is inevitable and vital if society is to make good use of new information. But why has the direction of concept creep, across so many different concepts, trended toward greater sensitivity to harm as opposed to lesser sensitivity?
-
Classically, psychological investigations recognized two forms of child abuse, physical and sexual, Haslam writes. In more recent decades, however, the concept of abuse has witnessed “horizontal creep” as new forms of abuse were recognized or studied. For example, “emotional abuse” was added as a new subtype of abuse. Neglect, traditionally a separate category, came to be seen as a type of abuse, too.
-
Meanwhile, the concept of abuse underwent “vertical creep.” That is, the behavior seen as qualifying for a given kind of abuse became steadily less extreme. Some now regard any spanking as physical abuse. Within psychology, “the boundary of neglect is indistinct,” Haslam writes. “As a consequence, the concept of neglect can become over-inclusive, identifying behavior as negligent that is substantially milder or more subtle than other forms of abuse. This is not to deny that some forms of neglect are profoundly damaging, merely to argue that the concept’s boundaries are sufficiently vague and elastic to encompass forms that are not severe.”
-
How did a working-class mom get arrested, lose her fast food job, and temporarily lose custody of her 9-year-old for letting the child play alone at a nearby park?
-
One concerns the field of psychology and its incentives. “It could be argued that just as successful species increase their territory, invading and adapting to new habitats, successful concepts and disciplines also expand their range into new semantic niches,” he theorizes. “Concepts that successfully attract the attention of researchers and practitioners are more likely to be applied in new ways and new contexts than those that do not.”
-
Concept creep can be necessary or needless. It can align concepts more or less closely with underlying realities. It can change society for better or worse. Yet many who push for more sensitivy to harm seem unaware of how oversensitivty can do harm.
-
The other theory posits an ideological explanation. “Psychology has played a role in the liberal agenda of sensitivity to harm and responsiveness to the harmed,” he writes “and its increased focus on negative phenomena—harms such as abuse, addiction, bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma—has been symptomatic of the success of that social agenda.”
-
Jonathan Haidt, who believes it has gone too far, offers a fourth theory. “If an increasingly left-leaning academy is staffed by people who are increasingly hostile to conservatives, then we can expect that their concepts will shift, via motivated scholarship, in ways that will help them and their allies (e.g., university administrators) to prosecute and condemn conservatives,
-
While Haslam and Haidt appear to have meaningfully different beliefs about why concept creep arose within academic psychology and spread throughout society, they were in sufficient agreement about its dangers to co-author a Guardian op-ed on the subject.
-
“Of course young people need to be protected from some kinds of harm, but overprotection is harmful, too, for it causes fragility and hinders the development of resilience,” they wrote. “As Nasim Taleb pointed out in his book Antifragile, muscles need resistance to develop, bones need stress and shock to strengthen and the growing immune system needs to be exposed to pathogens in order to function. Similarly, he noted, children are by nature anti-fragile – they get stronger when they learn to recover from setbacks, failures and challenges to their cherished ideas.”
-
police officers fearing harm from dogs kill them by the hundreds or perhaps thousands every year in what the DOJ calls an epidemic.
-
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration and many Americans grew increasingly sensitive to harms, real and imagined, from terrorism
-
Dick Cheney declared, “If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response.” The invasion of Iraq was predicated, in part, on the idea that 9/11 “changed everything,”
-
Before 9/11, the notion of torturing prisoners was verboten. After the Bush Administration’s torture was made public, popular debate focused on mythical “ticking time bomb” scenarios, in which a whole city would be obliterated but for torture. Now Donald Trump suggests that torture should be used more generally against terrorists. Torture is, as well, an instance in which people within the field of psychology pushed concept creep in the direction of less sensitivity to harm,
2More
Trump's economy: 'The hard work is still ahead' - Mar. 2, 2017 - 0 views
-
"Since November 8th, Election Day, the Stock Market has posted $3.2 trillion in GAINS and consumer confidence is at a 15 year high. Jobs!" Trump tweeted Thursday morning.
-
The bottom line is: Trump needs a lot of factors to fall into place to truly hypercharge growth. It's possible it happens. Trump has a track record of defying the odds. But there's also a plausible scenario where the bullish dreams of Wall Street don't quite translate into a true economic renaissance.
6More
Interview: Ted Chiang | The Asian American Literary Review - 0 views
-
I think most people’s ideas of science fiction are formed by Hollywood movies, so they think most science fiction is a special effects-driven story revolving around a battle between good and evil
-
I don’t think of that as a science fiction story. You can tell a good-versus-evil story in any time period and in any setting. Setting it in the future and adding robots to it doesn’t make it a science fiction story.
-
I think science fiction is fundamentally a post-industrial revolution form of storytelling. Some literary critics have noted that the good-versus-evil story follows a pattern where the world starts out as a good place, evil intrudes, the heroes fight and eventually defeat evil, and the world goes back to being a good place. Those critics have said that this is fundamentally a conservative storyline because it’s about maintaining the status quo. This is a common story pattern in crime fiction, too—there’s some disruption to the order, but eventually order is restored. Science fiction offers a different kind of story, a story where the world starts out as recognizable and familiar but is disrupted or changed by some new discovery or technology. At the end of the story, the world is changed permanently. The original condition is never restored. And so in this sense, this story pattern is progressive because its underlying message is not that you should maintain the status quo, but that change is inevitable. The consequences of this new discovery or technology—whether they’re positive or negative—are here to stay and we’ll have to deal with them.
- ...3 more annotations...
-
There’s also a subset of this progressive story pattern that I’m particularly interested in, and that’s the “conceptual breakthrough” story, where the characters discover something about the nature of the universe which radically expands their understanding of the world. This is a classic science fiction storyline.
-
one of the cool things about science fiction is that it lets you dramatize the process of scientific discovery, that moment of suddenly understanding something about the universe. That is what scientists find appealing about science, and I enjoy seeing the same thing in science fiction.
-
when you mention myth or mythic structure, yes, I don’t think myths can do that, because in general, myths reflect a pre-industrial view of the world. I don’t know if there is room in mythology for a strong conception of the future, other than an end-of-the-world or Armageddon scenario …
7More
This Sociological Theory Explains Why Wall Street Is Rigged for Crisis - Bill Davidow -... - 0 views
-
near brush with nuclear catastrophe, brought on by a single foraging bear, is an example of what sociologist Charles Perrow calls a “normal accident.” These frightening incidents are “normal” not because they happen often, but because they are almost certain to occur in any tightly connected complex system.
-
Normal accidents, like these, occur because two or more independent failures happen and interact in unpredictable ways. After studying calamities such as the Three Mile Island meltdown, explosions at chemical plants, and ships colliding in the open sea, Perrow observed that safety mechanisms put in place to make the systems safer in fact frequently trigger the final failure.
-
errow stresses the role that human error and mismanagement play in these scenarios. The important lesson: failures in complex systems are caused not only by the hardware and software problems but by people and their motivations.
- ...4 more annotations...
-
Perrow had a fairly simple solution for the problem. High-risk systems, such as nuclear power plants, should be built only as a last resort.
-
That solution won’t work for financial markets. We need currency hedges, futures markets, and derivatives to keep our economic systems functioning. But we also have to realize tweaking the current system will not fix the problem. Most of the supposedly strong cures implemented by legislators to date, such as prohibiting bank holding companies from proprietary trading, are inadequate as well.
-
how do we make our markets less danger prone? A good place to start would be to reduce the excessive trading volumes that lie at the root of accidents like the Flash Freeze, Flash Cash, and Goldman debacle. There is no valid reason for high frequency trading to make up more than 50 percent of all stock trades, and there is no pressing need for some $4 trillion in daily foreign currency transactions. A Tobin tax on transactions, first suggested by Noble laureate James Tobin in 1972, of as little as 0.1 percent, would significantly reduce these volumes. Smaller transaction volumes would reduce the size of accidents and possibly their frequency.
-
But tinkering with the current system and looking for easy ways out, as we are now, is bound to fail. We’re in danger of letting normal accidents in the financial system become all too normal.