Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged Representatives

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

Ancient DNA Reveals History of Hunter-Gatherers in Europe - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-hunter-gatherers-europe.html

history europe migrations hunter-gatherer

shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • in a pair of studies published on Wednesday 0c, researchers have produced the most robust analysis yet of the genetic record of prehistoric Europe.
  • Looking at DNA gleaned from the remains of 357 ancient Europeans, researchers discovered that several waves of hunter-gatherers migrated into Europe.
  • The studies identified at least eight populations, some more genetically distinct from each other than modern-day Europeans and Asians
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • They coexisted in Europe for thousands of years, apparently trading tools and sharing cultures. Some groups survived the Ice Age, while others vanished,
  • when farmers arrived in Europe about 8,000 years ago, they encountered the descendants of this long history, with light-skinned, dark-eyed people to the east, and possibly dark-skinned and blue-eyed people to the west.
  • “We lack still an understanding of why these movements were triggered. What happened here, why it happened — it’s strange.”
  • Modern humans arose in Africa and expanded to other continents about 60,000 years ago
  • These early Europeans have almost no genetic link to younger remains of hunter-gatherers. It appears that the first modern humans in Europe may have disappeared along with the Neanderthals
  • he oldest DNA of modern humans in Europe, dating back 45,000 years, undermines such a simple story. It comes from people who belonged to a lost branch of the human family tree. Their ancestors were part of the expansion out of Africa, but they split off on their own before the ancestors of living Europeans and Asians split apart.
  • About 33,000 years ago, as the climate turned cold, a new culture called the Gravettian arose across Europe. Gravettian hunters made spears to kill woolly mammoths and other big game. They also made so-called Venus figurines that might have represented fertility.
  • When the glaciers retreated, some descendants of the Fournol continued living in Iberia. But others expanded north as a new population, which Dr. Posth and his colleagues called GoyetQ2. “It really seems like a peopling of Europe after the last glacial maximum,
  • Dr. Posth and his colleagues found DNA in Gravettian remains scattered across Europe. The scientists had expected all of the individuals to have come from the same genetic population, but instead found two distinct groups: one in France and Spain, and another in Italy, the Czech Republic and Germany.
  • “They were very distinct, and this was a very big surprise to us because they practiced the same archaeological culture,”
  • Dr. Posth and his colleagues named the western population the Fournol people, and found a genetic link between this group and 35,000-year-old Aurignacian remains in Belgium.
  • They called the eastern group Vestonice, and discovered that they share an ancestry with 34,000-year-old hunter-gatherers who lived in Russia.
  • That genetic gulf led Dr. Posth and his colleagues to argue that the Fournol and Vestonice belonged to two waves that migrated into Europe separately. After they arrived, they lived for several thousand years sharing the Gravettian culture but remaining genetically distinct.
  • It’s clear from the new study that they were not isolated entirely from each other. In Belgium, the scientists found 30,000-year-old remains with a mix of Fournol and Vestonice ancestry.
  • About 26,000 years ago, the two groups faced a new threat to their survival: an advancing wall of glaciers. During the Ice Age, from 26,000 to 19,000 years ago, European hunter-gatherers were shut out of much of the continent, surviving only in southern refuges.
  • the refuge of the Iberian Peninsula, the region now occupied by Spain and Portugal, by studying DNA in the teeth of a 23,000-year-old man found in a cave in southern Spain. His DNA revealed that he belonged to the Fournol people who lived in Iberia before the Ice Age. The researchers also found genetic markers linking him to a 45,000-year-old skeleton discovered in Bulgaria.
  • When these groups arrived in Europe, Neanderthals had already been living across the continent for more than 100,000 years. The Neanderthals disappeared about 40,000 years ago, perhaps because modern humans outcompeted them with superior tools.
  • The Vestonice, by contrast, did not survive the Ice Age. When the glaciers were at their most expansive, the Vestonice may have endured for a time in Italy. But Dr. Posth and his colleagues found no Vestonice ancestry in Europeans after the Ice Age. Instead, they discovered a population of hunter-gatherers that appeared to have expanded from the Balkans, known as the Villabruna. They moved into Italy and replaced the Vestonice.
  • For several thousand years, the Villabruna were limited to southern Europe. Then, 14,000 years ago, they crossed the Alps and encountered the GoyetQ2 people to the north. A new population emerged, its ancestry three parts Villabruna to one part GoyetQ2.
  • This new people, which Dr. Posth and his colleagues called Oberkassel, expanded across much of Europe, replacing the old GoyetQ2 population.
  • another climate shift could explain this new wave. About 14,000 years ago, a pulse of strong warming produced forests across much of Europe. The Oberkassel people may have been better at hunting in forests, whereas the GoyetQ2 retreated with the shrinking steppes.
  • To the east, the Oberkassel ran into a new group of hunter-gatherers, who probably arrived from Russia. The scientists named this group’s descendants, who lived in Ukraine and surrounding regions, the Sidelkino.
  • in Iberia, there were no great sweeps of newcomers replacing older peoples. The Iberians after the Ice Age still carried a great deal of ancestry from the Fournol people who had arrived there thousands of years before the glaciers advanced. The Villabruna people moved into northern Spain, but added their DNA to the mix rather than replacing those who were there before.
  • When the first farmers arrived in Europe from Turkey about 8,000 years ago, three large groups of hunter-gatherers thrived across Europe: the Iberians, the Oberkassel and the Sidelkino. Living Europeans carry some of their gene
  • The Sidelkino people in the east had genes associated with dark eyes and light skin. The Oberkassel in the west, in contrast, probably had blue eyes and may have had dark skin
  • These three groups of hunter-gatherers remained isolated from each other for about 6,000 years, until the farmers from Turkey arrived. After this advent of agriculture, the three groups began mixing, the scientists found. It’s possible that the spread of farmland forced them to move to the margins of Europe to survive. But over time, they were absorbed into the agricultural communities that surrounded them.
  • every continent will likely have its own history of hunter-gatherer migrations.
  • it is now possible to extract human DNA from cave sediments rather than searching for bones and teeth.
Javier E

Katie Duke struggles to navigate advocating for nurses and working as one - The Washing... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...uke-instagram-nursing-pandemic

nurse experience culture crisis pandemic

shared by Javier E on 25 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Nurses don’t dispute that patients deserve compassion and respect, but many feel that their roles are misunderstood and their expertise undervalued; as Duke repeatedly told me, people don’t respect nurses like they do doctors. As a result, nurses are leaving hospitals in droves. And they’re establishing new careers, not just in health care but as creatives and entrepreneurs.
  • Duke argues that nurses are especially fed up and burned out. And yet, as caretakers, nobody expects them to put their physical and emotional well-being first. But that’s starting to change. Once a lone voice, Duke is now a representative one.
  • Nurses make up the nation’s largest body of health-care workers, with three times as many RNs as physicians
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • They also died of covid at higher rates than other health-care workers, and they experience high rates of burnout, “an occupational syndrome characterized by a high degree of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, and a low sense of personal accomplishment at work,” according to the World Health Organization
  • high stress and anxiety are the “antecedents” to burnout. But you know you’ve hit the nadir when you become emotionally detached from your work. “It’s almost like a loss of meaning,” she said.
  • Before the pandemic, between a third and half of nurses and physicians already reported symptoms of burnout. A covid impact study published in March 2022 by the American Nurses Foundation found this number had risen to 60 percent among acute-care nurses. “Reports of feeling betrayed, undervalued, and unsupported have risen,
  • Miller said nurses are experiencing “collective trauma,” a conclusion she reached by studying their social media usage through the pandemic
  • In April 2020, Miller said the public was “exalting nurses as these superheroes and angels,” while nurses themselves were tweeting about “the horrible working conditions, enormous amount of death without any break … being mentally and completely worn down and exhausted.”
  • Miller and Groves also found a fivefold increase in references to quitting between the 2020 study and the 2021 study. “Our profession will never be the same,” Miller told me. “If you talked to any nurse who worked bedside through the pandemic, that’s what they’ll tell you.” From this, she says, has grown a desire to be heard. “We feel emboldened. We’re not as willing to be silent anymore.”
  • then, in late February 2013, Duke was abruptly fired. She’d posted a photo on Instagram showing an ER where hospital staff had just saved the life of a man hit by a subway train. It looked like a hurricane had blown through. There were no people in the photo, but Duke titled the post, “Man vs. 6 train.” She told me she wanted to showcase “the amazing things doctors and nurses do to save lives … the f---ing real deal.”
  • Duke says her superiors called her an “amazing nurse and team member” before they told her that “it was time to move on.” Her director handed her a printout of the Instagram post. According to Duke, he acknowledged that she hadn’t violated HIPAA or any hospital policies but said she’d been insensitive and unprofessional. She was escorted out of the building by security. When the episode aired, it showed Duke crying on the sidewalk outside the hospital.
  • She’d reposted the photo, with permission, from a male doctor’s Instagram account. He faced no repercussions. She now admits her caption was rather “cold” — especially compared with the doctor’s, “After the trauma.” In hindsight, she said, she might have been more sensitive. Maybe not even posted the photo at all. And yet this frustrates her. Why shouldn’t the public see nursing culture for what it really is? Man vs. 6 Train. “That’s ER speak,” she told me. “We say ‘head injury in room five.’ We don’t say ‘Mr. Smith in room five. We talk and think by mechanism of injury.”
  • But this is at odds with the romanticized image of the nurturing nurse — which hospitals often want to project. In some cases, nurses are explicitly told not to be forthright with their patients. “I know nurses in oncology who are not allowed to say to a patient and their family, ‘This will be the fourth clinical trial, but we all know your family member is dying,”
  • “The most frequent question is, ‘Katie, I have to get out of the hospital, but I don’t know what else to do.’” Her advice: “You have to create your own definition of what being a nursing professional means to you.” She has a ready list of alternative jobs, including “med spa” owner, educational consultant and YouTuber.
Javier E

China's reaction to Russian incursion into Ukraine muted, denies backing it - The Washi... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...china-russia-invasion-reaction

china reaction ukraine crisis russia

shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • The Russian attacks are the greatest test yet for an emerging Moscow-Beijing axis, which has recently shown signs of evolving from what many considered a “marriage of convenience” to something resembling a formal alliance
  • In recent weeks, China has voiced support for Russia’s “legitimate security concerns” but has balanced that with calls for restraint and negotiations, echoing the approach China took during the 2014 invasion of Crimea. Beijing appeared to be repeating that tightrope walk on Thursday, as it called for calm while news of the attacks sent regional markets plunging.
  • Despite the outward show of mutual support between the two countries, there have been indications that China was caught flat footed by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement of military action.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • That same day, when China warned its nationals in Ukraine about a worsening situation, it did not tell them to leave the country. On Thursday, with explosions going off nearby, many of the 8,000-odd Chinese passport holders in the country took to microblog Weibo to call for help.
  • Yun Sun, Director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, noted Tuesday that the Chinese policy community appeared to be in “shock” at the sudden escalation of fighting after having “subscribed to the theory that Putin was only posturing and that U.S. intelligence was inaccurate as in the case of invading Iraq.”
  • Minutes after the declaration, Chinese representative to the United Nations Zhang Jun was telling a Security Council meeting: “we believe that the door to a peaceful solution to the Ukraine situation is not fully shut, nor should it be.”
  • “When can China evacuate?” asked a user with the handle LumpyCut. “We are in Kyiv near the airport. I just heard three enormous bombings and can estimate the size of the mushroom clouds by sight.”
  • In recent weeks, Chinese experts have argued that de-escalation was possible even as they adopted Russia’s view of the conflict. Wang Yiwei, director of the Center for European Studies at Renmin University, wrote in late January that only the actions of Ukraine or the United States could bring about a war, but because the former lacked “gall” and the latter lacked strength for a direct conflict with Russia, tensions could be dispelled.
  • In an interview on Thursday, Wang defended his prediction as being primarily about the possibility of a direct conflict between the United States and Russia, not fighting in eastern Ukraine.
  • Hua also rejected suggestions that China might adhere to U.S.-led sanctions against Russia, pointing to China’s long-held stance against the use of sanctions adopted outside of United Nations deliberations.
  • China’s support for Russia has also stopped short of direct approval for Russian military action. Over the weekend, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi reiterated that all countries sovereignty must be respected, adding that “Ukraine is not an exception.”
  • Such hesitation comes, however, during a time of growing strategic alignment between Moscow and Beijing, built primarily on shared disdain for the United States and the Western-led world order.
  • Hawkish commentators in China were quick to explain Putin’s attack on Thursday as the result of provocation from the United States. “That the situation came to today’s step is due to spiraling escalation,” Fu Qianshao, a military commentator, told nationalist publication the Shanghai Observer
  • “Russia had already said many times that it would withdraw troops, but America always promoted an atmosphere of conflict.”
Javier E

Opinion | Defeat Trump, Now More Than Ever - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...feat-trump-democrat-myths.html

Democratic party strategy politics

shared by Javier E on 25 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • The democratic nations of the world are in a global struggle against authoritarianism
  • But that struggle also has domestic fronts — the need to defeat the mini-Putins now found across the Western democracies. These are the demagogues who lie with Putinesque brazenness, who shred democratic institutions with Putinesque bravado, who strut the world’s stage with Putin’s amoral schoolboy machismo while pretending to represent all that is traditional and holy.
  • In the United States that, of course, is Donald Trump. This moment of heightened danger and crisis makes it even clearer that the No. 1 domestic priority for all Americans who care about democracy is to make sure Trump never sees the inside of the Oval Office ever again.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • for the next three years Democrats need to wake up with one overriding political thought: What are we doing to appeal to all working-class voters in those five states? Are we doing anything today that might alienate these voters?
  • The authoritarians tell a simple story about how to restore order — it comes from cultural homogeneity and the iron fist of the strongman
  • Democrats have a harder challenge — to show how order can be woven amid diversity, openness and the full flowering of individuals. But Democrats need to name the moral values and practices that will restore social order.
criscimagnael

China Eastern Pilots Were Experienced, Adding to Mystery of Crash - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-eastern-crash-pilot.html

shared by criscimagnael on 25 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • The pilot of the China Eastern Airlines flight that crashed in southern China with 132 people aboard was an industry veteran with more than 6,000 hours of flying time.
  • His co-pilot was even more experienced, having flown since the early days of China’s post-Mao era, training on everything from Soviet-model biplanes to newer Boeing models.
  • How they piloted the Boeing 737 will be closely examined as investigators seek to explain what is probably China’s worst air disaster in more than a decade. Experts have said it is unlikely that anyone survived the crash.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • On Thursday, rescuers said they had found engine components, part of a wing and other “important debris” as they searched the mountainside in a rural part of the Guangxi region for a fourth day.
  • Mr. Zhang, who was born in 1963, was one of China’s most experienced pilots,
  • A day earlier, the workers had found a black box, believed to be the cockpit voice recorder, which could provide investigators with crucial details. Officials said it was damaged but that its memory unit was relatively intact. The plane’s second black box, which records flight data, has yet to be recovered.
  • Their past performance was “very good,” Sun Shiying, the chairman of China Eastern Airlines’ Yunnan branch, said on Wednesday. When reached by phone, an airline representative declined to answer further questions about the crew.
  • At the main crash site, a state broadcaster showed the workers digging with shovels around a large piece of wreckage that the reporter described as a wing, which bore part of the China Eastern logo and was perched on a steep, barren slope fringed by dense thickets of now-flattened bamboo. Heavy rains had left the roads slick and inundated the earth with muddy pools.
  • Over his career as a commercial pilot with China Yunnan, which later merged with China Eastern, Mr. Zhang flew four different models of aircraft and accumulated 31,769 hours of flight experience.
  • The airline commonly paired young pilots with older pilots, and Mr. Zhang had mentored more than 100, CAAC News said. Mr. Yang was one of them.
  • Experts said that investigating the crash, which involved a sudden dive from cruising altitude in good weather, would require a close look at both the aircraft and the pilots, including the possibility that the plane was deliberately brought down. But they stressed that the cause was far from determined.
  • “Certainly an intentional downing is always a part of any investigation, and especially with this particular flight profile,” said Hassan Shahidi, chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit organization created after World War II to promote aviation safety. But he cautioned that it was “premature to jump onto any possibilities.”
  • “If the captain were intending to commit suicide, they’d have to overcome the other flight crew members,” Mr. Marks said.
lilyrashkind

Ketanji Brown Jackson: Key takeaways from the Supreme Court confirmation hearings - CNN... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics us

shared by lilyrashkind on 25 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson spent three days in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- two of them marathon sessions of questioning -- where she described herself as an impartial and transparent jurist, while taking a calm but forceful tone to push back at GOP claims about her record. The dueling themes that Democrats and Republicans wanted to present about her nomination were punched up in a final day of testimony from outside witnesses Thursday.
  • While she may pick up a few Republican votes, several GOP senators have sought to paint her as a soft on crime, "activist" judge, as they've used her hearings to showcase their messaging themes against Democrats heading into November's midterms.
  • "I am here, standing on the shoulders of generations of Americans who never had anything close to this kind of opportunity," Jackson said Tuesday. She highlighted how her grandparents received little formal education and that her parents went to segregated lower schools in Miami, before studying at Howard University.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • As the Senate's questioning was close to winding up Wednesday, Jackson -- at the request of California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla -- reflected on what message she'd give to young people feeling doubtful of their own abilities as they watched her ascent. She recalled feeling out of place and homesick during her first semester at Harvard University as an undergraduate
  • Coming out of the hearings, Democrats were insistent as ever that Jackson belonged on America's highest court and that they intended to put her there. "She will be confirmed. She will be a star on the Supreme Court," Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, said after Wednesday's hearing. "And I for one will proudly cast my vote for her."
  • In the lead-up to the hearings, Republicans previewed a "dignified" approach to the nominee that would be "respectful" in tone and "substantive" in content.
  • "underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about."
  • Several of Jackson's harshest questioners are believed to be in contention for a 2024 presidential run. Other talking points GOP has forecast for the 2022 midterm campaign also made their way into the questioning. Cruz badgered her about "critical race theory" -- an academic discipline that looks at system racism, even as Jackson insisted it plays no role in how she approaches judging. At one point he grilled her on the presence of the children's book "Antiracist Baby" in the curriculum of the private school for which Jackson serves on the board.
  • The proceedings were at their ugliest in the lines of Republican inquiry focused on the sentences Jackson handed down in select set of child pornography cases. Republicans argued that she was unduly lenient towards those offenders -- a claim at odds with the fact that her record is mostly in line with how judges typically approach these cases.
  • The Republicans said that they were disappointed she didn't identify a specific judicial philosophy -- like the originalism or textualism strains favored by conservatives -- that she followed. But just as notable was the distance she put between herself and the judicial approaches that had typically been heralded by progressives.
  • Republicans make a case for the Supreme Court to revisit Roe, same-sex marriage and other key rulings
  • He suggested that the legal basis for that ruling -- a concept known as substantive due process, that also underpins rulings on interracial marriage and birth control -- was principle that "allows the court to substitute its opinion for the elected representatives of the people."
lilyrashkind

Why YouTube Has Survived Russia's Social Media Crackdown | Time - 0 views

time.com/...-russia-ukraine-disinformation

social russia politics

shared by lilyrashkind on 26 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • In a style part investigative journalism, part polemic, the video’s hosts report that one of President Vladimir Putin’s allies, Russian senator Valentina Matviyenko, owns a multimillion-dollar villa on the Italian seafront. The video contrasts the luxurious lifestyle of Matviyenko and her family with footage of dead Russian soldiers, and with images of Russian artillery hitting civilian apartment buildings in Ukraine. A voiceover calls the war “senseless” and “unimaginable.” A slide at the end urges Russians to head to squares in their cities to protest at specific dates and times. In less than a week, the video racked up more than 4 million views.
  • TV news is dominated by the misleading narrative that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is actually a peace-keeping exercise. Despite this, YouTube has largely been spared from the Kremlin’s crackdown on American social media platforms since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly a month ago.
  • The app had been a particular venue for activism: Many Russian celebrities spoke out against the invasion of Ukraine in their Instagram stories, and Navalny’s Instagram page posted a statement criticizing the war, and calling on Russians to come out in protest.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • On March 11, YouTube’s parent company Google announced that it would block Russian state-backed media globally, including within Russia. The policy was an expansion of an earlier announcement that these channels would be blocked within the European Union. “Our Community Guidelines prohibit content denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events, and we remove content about Russia’s invasion in Ukraine that violates this policy,” Google said in a statement. “In line with that, effective immediately, we are also blocking YouTube channels associated with Russian state-funded media, globally.”
  • That could leave many millions of Russians cut off from independent news and content shared by opposition activists like Navalny’s team. (It would also effectively delete 75 million YouTube users, or some 4% of the platform’s global total—representing a small but still-significant portion of Google’s overall profits.)
  • Part of the reason for YouTube’s survival amid the crackdown is its popularity, experts say. “YouTube is by far and away the most popular social media platform in Russia,” says Justin Sherman, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s cyber statecraft initiative. The platform is even more popular than VK, the Russian-owned answer to Facebook.
  • Today, YouTube remains the most significant way for tens of millions of ordinary Russians to receive largely uncensored information from the outside world.
  • Still, Sherman says the situation is volatile, with Russia now more likely than ever before to ban YouTube. For an authoritarian government like Russia’s, “part of the decision to allow a foreign platform in your country is that you get to use it to spread propaganda and disinformation, even if people use it to spread truth and organize against you,” he says. “If you start losing the ability to spread misinformation and propaganda, but people can still use it to spread truth and organize, then all of a sudden, you start wondering why you’re allowing that platform in your country in the first place.” YouTube did not respond to a request for comment.
  • On the same day as Navalny’s channel posted the video about Matviyenko, elsewhere on YouTube a very different spectacle was playing out. In a video posted to the channel of the Kremlin-funded media outlet RT, (formerly known as Russia Today,) a commentator dismissed evidence of Russian bombings of Ukrainian cities. She blamed “special forces of NATO countries” for allegedly faking images of bombed-out Ukrainian schools, kindergartens and other buildings.
  • “YouTube has, over the years, been a really important place for spreading Russian propaganda,” Donovan said in an interview with TIME days before YouTube banned Russian state-backed media.
  • In July 2021, the Russian government passed a law that would require foreign tech companies with more than 500,000 users to open a local office within Russia. (A similar law passed previously in India had been used by the government there to pressure tech companies to take down opposition accounts and posts critical of the government, by threatening employees with arrest.)
  • The heightened risk to free expression in Russia Experts say that Russia’s ongoing crackdown on social media platforms heralds a significant shift in the shape of the Russian internet—and a potential end to the era where the Kremlin tolerated largely free expression on YouTube in return for access to a tool that allowed it to spread disinformation far and wide.
Javier E

The Constitution at War With Itself - The Bulwark - 0 views

www.thebulwark.com/onstitution-at-war-with-itself

constitution lincoln freedom Founding US civil war

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • the original Constitution had elements that were clearly moral—the rule of law, liberty, and self-government all implied understandings of equality that were in tension with slavery.
  • To play on an analogy Feldman powerfully invokes, if we think of the compromise Constitution and the amended Constitution that came out of the Civil War as akin to the Old and New Testaments, with the first being rooted in a rigid adherence to law and the second being rooted in moral understandings, there is more to the Old Testament than its insistence on law; there is an insistence, in the Prophets in particular, on the spirit and morality the law is meant to serve. To push Feldman’s analogy, the Old Testament had shoots that would grow in the New Testament: the moral and philosophical commitments of the new had roots in the old.
  • The highlight of Feldman’s narrative is an exchange between Hezekiah Ford Douglas, “who had escaped enslavement at fifteen,” and William Howard Day, a free-born black man and graduate of Oberlin College. While Douglas insisted that blacks should not, in Feldman’s words, “acknowledge the legitimacy of a constitutional order based on slavery,” Day insisted that while the government was proslavery we should not confuse this “construction of the Constitution” with “the Constitution itself.” And the Constitution itself, framed to “establish justice” and to protect “liberty,” was best understood as antislavery
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Fredrick Douglass drew on both strands of this debate, arguing in 1850 that “Liberty and Slavery” were both in the Constitution, giving us a constitution fundamentally “at war with itself.”
  • the First Inaugural where Lincoln argued that the states did not have a constitutional right to secede, particularly on the grounds that they did not like the results of the election of 1860. The states might have a revolutionary right to dissolve the constitutional order and create a new one, but to secede because Lincoln was elected president when he had in no way altered the terms of the social contract was to evade the rules and break the constitutional order he was obligated to defend.
  • I think Lincoln’s First Inaugural is a powerful and compelling work of constitutional analysis. Lincoln’s message in the First Inaugural was twofold. First, he reiterated the compromise. Each state had a right to “control its own domestic institutions” (meaning, of course, slavery). All representatives had sworn an oath to support “the whole Constitution,” which obligated them to adhere to the fugitive slave clause as part of the compromise and not try to evade its terms by “hypercritical rules” of interpretation
  • But Lincoln went on to insist that no part of the Constitution had been violated. Given this, he argued that secession against a constitutional majority would be “the essence of anarchy.” If states could secede after an election rather than “acquiesce” to a free and fair election, then democratic government by a constitutional majority was no longer possible.
  • Once ballots had settled the issue, states were constitutionally bound to oblige. Appealing to bullets was, as Lincoln put it, a “revolutionary” act that broke the constitutional order he had sworn an oath to uphold.
  • Feldman points out that Lincoln’s insistence on a majority as the sovereign was quite different from the Framers’ understanding of the sovereign, which they tended to treat as the whole people.
  • We might best understand this as a question of who is sovereign within the constitutional order, which is separate from who can act to dissolve the constitutional order itself
  • The most visible element of this debate was whether individual states were sovereign in the latter capacity: Could they exit the constitutional order? And if they could not constitutionally leave, did the national government have power to keep them in?
  • Whether America was a union founded by We the People or was a union founded by sovereign states was the subject of fraught debate in the antebellum period.
  • the prolonged struggle forced Lincoln to confront the fact that the Union could not be brought back together on the terms of the old compromise.
  • Feldman also highlights Lincoln as a theorist of constitutional necessity, as he is forced to confront thorny constitutional issues with no easy answer, which includes a detailed examination of Lincoln’s occasional overreach. Not only was his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus wider than necessary, but it included, Feldman writes, suspending “the basic constitutional right to free speech” and locking up critics of the war far more extensively than is usually acknowledged
  • Emancipation would be made permanent with the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery and destroying the compromise at the heart of the original Constitution: “The greater drama of the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment was its transformation of the prewar, compromise Constitution into a new Constitution that repudiated the very core of that compromise as it had existed from 1787 to 1861.” This second founding culminated in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, inscribing the principles articulated in the Declaration and reaffirmed by the Gettysburg Address into constitutional text.
  • Americans—particularly those Americans who think patriotism depends on a belief in an infallible founding and a perfect Constitution—too easily gloss over how “complicated, contradictory, and fraught it was for Lincoln and the nation to overcome [the old] Constitution and remake it.”
Javier E

Boris Johnson has been sliced and diced. The real winner is Rishi Sunak | Martin Kettle... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...boris-johnson-rishi-sunak

truth politics UK johnson hearing

shared by Javier E on 23 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • In a strict sense, today’s session in Westminster’s Grimond Room was simply a public hearing during an inquiry into whether Johnson consciously misled parliament. Laugh, by all means, at the absurdity of supposing there can be any real doubt about that. Mock, if you wish, the semantic squabbles about whether the greased piglet’s actions and words were inadvertent, reckless, intentional or deliberate.
  • don’t be misled into dismissing this inquiry as arcane, or as a piece of petty parliamentarism, not real flesh-and-blood politics. That would be terribly, terribly wrong. In procedural, and indeed in moral and historical terms, this inquiry matters a very great deal. A lot hangs on it for Britain. What hangs on it is not merely Johnson’s tattered claims to be an honourable public figure. It is the survival of our representative democracy in an age of demagogic leaders who despise parliamentary norms.
  • For Johnson to have been anything less than assiduous in following his own rules, and anything other than meticulous in accounting for his and his office’s conduct, put the national effort at risk. Even someone as licentious and morally incontinent as Johnson must have grasped this at some level.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Parliament is the sovereign apex of the nation’s democratic government. Its credibility depends upon the executive telling the truth to MPs, and through them the nation. If Johnson did not do that, especially in the circumstances of a killer pandemic in which obeying the rules was so paramount, he must pay the price.
  • That he ought to have erred on the side of strictness – in the way that the Queen and so many millions of others so visibly did – seems never to have occurred to him.
Javier E

Opinion | The Global Transformation of Christianity Is Here - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...anity-global-demographics.html

christianity christian demographics politics culture

shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • in 1900, about 80 percent of the world’s Christian population lived in the Western world and about 20 percent in the majority world. By 2000, only 37 percent lived in the Western world, and nearly two-thirds lived in the majority world
  • we tend to associate Christianity with white Westerners and European influence. At this point, our assumptions about this need to change. The largest church congregation in the world belongs to Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, an Assemblies of God church, which has around 480,000 members
  • “Christianity at the beginning of the 21st century,” said George, “is the most global and most diverse and the most dispersed faith.”
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • the most explosive growth has been in Indigenous, independent Pentecostal churches
  • we ought to start talking about a new family of “spiritual” churches that have no historical ties to Western church traditions. These “spiritual” churches are largely not a result of colonial missions.
  • Sub-Saharan Africa had the most striking growth of Christianity, growing from around 9 percent Christian at the beginning of the 20th century to almost 45 percent at the end of it. There are around 685 million Christians in Africa now.
  • even conservative estimates guess there were around 98 million evangelical Christians globally in 1970. Now, there are over 342 million.
  • as Christianity booms overseas, more Christians are migrating to the United States. But there’s also evidence that migrants who come to here are finding immigrant-led churches and converting to Christianity after they arrive. These trends, George told me, are “globalizing American Christianity.”
  • Today, the three largest Protestant churches in Paris are Afro-Caribbean evangelical megachurches of a charismatic or Pentecostal bent
  • Immigration has been a huge factor in the demographic growth of the United States over the past decade. Much of that growth is attributable to Latinos, who now number around 62 million and represent just under 20 percent of the United States population. Some projections estimate that by 2060 there will be 111 million Latinos in the United States, constituting 28 percent of the population.
  • Latino evangelicals are the fastest growing segment of evangelicals in the country. It also said that “Latino Protestants, in particular, have higher levels of religiosity”
  • as of 2021, Pew reported that 29 percent of all adults identified as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular.”
  • alongside that trend, the changing demographics of Christianity promise to transform faith and religious discourse. We cannot assume that America will become more secular so long as the future of America is less white
  • it is difficult to provide definite statistics on how many evangelical and Pentecostal churches in America are led by Latinos, immigrants or other nonwhite or non-English-speaking pastors because many of these churches are small, non-organized and grass roots.
  • the standard American religious survey categories no longer account for the realities expressed in the church in America. “White evangelicalism,” “Protestant mainline” and “progressive” are categories that are largely defined by a white majority.
  • This “browning” of the church in America, as some scholars call it, scrambles all the categories. What we are seeing isn’t simply that white evangelicalism is changing; it’s that something new is emerging.
  • most hold convictions that overlap with traditional evangelicalism in substantial ways. They are by and large traditionally conservative about sexuality and marriage. They hold an authoritative view of the Bible and believe in miracles and supernatural occurrences.
  • But they tend to be more committed to social justice and, in George’s words, “communitarian” than many white evangelicals.
  • when he visits churches in Brazil and Argentina, “Sometimes the Catholics are more evangelical and Pentecostal” than even typical white evangelicals in America.
  • This influx of nonwhite believers will challenge white religious conservatives to choose between xenophobia and building alliances with immigrants who share their views on social issues.
  • These trends will also challenge them to unbundle their religious views on social issues from a kind of libertarian economics that harms those who are less wealthy
  • The future of American Christianity now appears to be a multiethnic community that is largely led by immigrants or the children of immigrants. And that reality ought to change our present conversations about religion in America.
Javier E

Opinion | The Unsettling Truth About Trump's First Great Victory - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cial-resentment-2016-2020.html

trump appeal support demographics racism resentment GOP trumpism

shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • The authors combine these questions into a “scale capturing the strength of white identity and found that it was strongly related to Republicans’ support for Donald Trump.”“Strongly related” is an understatement. On a 17-point scale ranking the strength of Republican primary voters’ white identity from lowest to highest, support for Trump grew consistently at each step — from 2 percent at the bottom to 81 percent at the highest level
  • We assess claims that Donald Trump received a particularly large number of votes from individuals with antagonistic attitudes toward racial outgroups
  • however, we show that in 2016 Trump’s largest gains in support, compared to Mitt Romney in 2012
  • ...39 more annotations...
  • How could these two seemingly contradictory statements both be true?
  • respondents in 2016 and 2020 reported more moderate views, on average, than in previous elections. As a result, Trump improved the most over previous Republicans by capturing the votes of a larger number of people who report racially moderate views
  • the number of people scoring at moderate levels of racial resentment increased. Trump was not as popular among this voting bloc, compared to those with high racial resentment. But because this group is larger, whites with moderate racial resentment scores ended up contributing more net votes to Trump.
  • The point about Trump voters being less racially resentful on average than voters for previous Republican candidates, while likely true, should, I think, be interpreted as a statement about why it’s important to be mindful of over-time changes in groups’ sizes in the population,
  • Trump’s supporters were less xenophobic than prior Republican candidates’, less sexist, had lower animus to minority groups, and lower levels of racial resentment. Far from deplorables, Trump voters were, on average, more tolerant and understanding than voters for prior Republican candidates.
  • The data, Grimmer continued,point to two important and undeniable facts. First, analyses focused on vote choice alone cannot tell us where candidates receive support. We must know the size of groups and who turns out to vote. And we cannot confuse candidates’ rhetoric with the voters who support them, because voters might support the candidate despite the rhetoric, not because of it.
  • Several pieces of research into the 2016 election, including our book, “Identity Crisis,” and this interesting paper by Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau, find that people’s vote choices in that election were more strongly related to their views on “identity-inflected issues” than they had been in prior elections. That is why our book argues that these issues are central to how we interpret the outcome in 2016.
  • the Grimmer paper in fact provides a key corrective to the debate over the 2016 election. In an email, Kane pointed to a key section that reads:
  • election-night pundits and even some academics have claimed that Trump’s victory was the result of appealing to white Americans’ racist and xenophobic attitudes. We show this conventional wisdom is (at best) incomplete
  • The Grimmer paper, Engelhardt continued, “encourages us to take a step back and focus on the big picture for understanding elections: where do most votes come from and are these patterns consistent across elections?”
  • understanding election outcomes requires not just understanding what contributes to vote choice (e.g., racial group attachments, racial prejudice), but also how many people with that particular attitude turned out to vote and what share of the electorate that group makes up.
  • Trump, Westwood concluded, “found support from both racists and moderates, but with the pool of racist voters shrinking, it is clear this is not a path to future victory.”
  • Discussion of racial resentment driving support for Trump could miss how folks low in racial resentment were actually critical to the election outcome. The paper makes just this clarifying point, noting, for instance, that White Democrats low in racial resentment were even more influential in contributing votes to Clinton in 2016 than to Obama in 2012. Change between 2012 and 2016 is not exclusively due to the behavior of the most prejudiced.
  • “It is a nice reminder for scholars and, especially, the media, that it is important to think carefully about base rates.”
  • Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016 was a stress test for Republican partisanship, and Republican partisanship passed with flying colors
  • The election was close enough for Trump to win because the vast majority of G.O.P. voters found the idea of either sitting it out or voting for a Democrat they had spent 20+ years disliking so distasteful that Trump’s limitations, liabilities and overt racism and misogyny were not a deal-breaker.
  • Theodoridis noted that his oneminor methodological and measurement critique is that this sort of analysis has to take seriously what the racial resentment scale actually means
  • It may be that race is actually quite salient for those in the middle part of the scale, but they are just less overtly racist than those at the top of the scale.
  • and NOT as a statement about Trump being successful in attracting racially liberal voters (indeed, those lowest in racial resentment turned away from him, per Grimmer-Marble-Tanigawa-Lau’s own findings).
  • It is an interesting academic exercise to predict who will win the vote within a specific group, but it is more fundamental to elections to understand how many voters candidates will gain from each group
  • the important contribution from Grimmer et al is that there was a big change in the attitudes of the white electorate. A small number of whites with high levels of racial resentment did support Trump in 2016 at a higher rate than in prior elections, but the bulk of support for Trump came from more moderate whites. Trump managed to pull in support from racists, but he was able to pull in much more support from economically disadvantaged whites.
  • The Grimmer paper, according to Westwood, has significant implications for those making “general claims about the future Republican Party,” specifically challenging those who believe
  • that Republicans can continue to win by appealing to white Americans’ worst attitudes and instincts. While it is true Trump support is largest for the most racist voters, this group is a shrinking part of the electorate
  • Republicans, as Grimmer et al. show, must figure out how to appeal to moderate whites who hold more moderate attitudes in order to win
  • Also, the meaning of the racial resentment scale changes over time in ways that are not independent of politics, and especially of presidential politics. Position on the scale is not immutable in the way some descriptive characteristics may be.
  • it’s critical to avoid the idea that there is a single skeleton key that can explain all the varied undercurrents that led to Trump’s 2016 victory, or that any one paper will provide a definitive explanation
  • One clear benefit emerging from the continuing study of Trump’s 2016 victory is a better understanding of the complexity and nuance of what brought it about.
  • the presence of racial resentment among Republican voters emerged long before Trump ran for president, while such resentment among Democratic voters has been sharply declining
  • racial resentment didn’t do more for Trump than it did for Romney. The highly racially resentful have, with reason, been voting for Republicans for a long time
  • Trump’s more explicit use of race didn’t make supporters more racially resentful. Levels of racial resentment among Republicans are no higher now than they were before Trump. In fact, they are slightly lower
  • And the highly racially resentful already knew full well that their home was in the G.O.P.
  • While the focus of attention has been on those who fall at the high end of the distribution on racial resentment
  • Almost all the change has taken place among Democrats, as they moved to lower and lower levels of resentment
  • In a statistical sense, the fact that there are now so many more people at the low end of the distribution than before will produce a larger coefficient for the effect of racial resentment on voting behavior.
  • that does not mean that those high in racial resentment are now even more likely to vote for Republicans or that there are more people high in resentment
  • there are more people low in resentment than before and that they are even less likely to vote for Republicans than before. So the low end of the scale is doing the work.
  • my own view is that Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau have made a significant contribution to understanding the Trump phenomenon.
  • Most important, they make the case that explanations of Trump’s victory pointing to the role of those at the extremes on measures of racial resentment and sexism, while informative, are in their own way too comforting, fostering the belief that Trump’s triumph was the product of voters who have drifted far from the American mainstream.
  • In fact, the new analysis suggests that Trumpism has found fertile ground across a broad swath of the electorate, including many firmly in the mainstream. That Trump could capture the hearts and minds of these voters suggests that whatever he represents beyond racial resentment — anger, chaos, nihilism, hostility — is more powerful than many recognize or acknowledge
Javier E

The Contradictions of Sam Altman, the AI Crusader Behind ChatGPT - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...l-intelligence-openai-b0e1c8c9

AI history control effects

shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Mr. Altman said he fears what could happen if AI is rolled out into society recklessly. He co-founded OpenAI eight years ago as a research nonprofit, arguing that it’s uniquely dangerous to have profits be the main driver of developing powerful AI models.
  • He is so wary of profit as an incentive in AI development that he has taken no direct financial stake in the business he built, he said—an anomaly in Silicon Valley, where founders of successful startups typically get rich off their equity. 
  • His goal, he said, is to forge a new world order in which machines free people to pursue more creative work. In his vision, universal basic income—the concept of a cash stipend for everyone, no strings attached—helps compensate for jobs replaced by AI. Mr. Altman even thinks that humanity will love AI so much that an advanced chatbot could represent “an extension of your will.”
  • ...44 more annotations...
  • The Tesla Inc. CEO tweeted in February that OpenAI had been founded as an open-source nonprofit “to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all.”
  • Backers say his brand of social-minded capitalism makes him the ideal person to lead OpenAI. Others, including some who’ve worked for him, say he’s too commercially minded and immersed in Silicon Valley thinking to lead a technological revolution that is already reshaping business and social life. 
  • In the long run, he said, he wants to set up a global governance structure that would oversee decisions about the future of AI and gradually reduce the power OpenAI’s executive team has over its technology. 
  • OpenAI researchers soon concluded that the most promising path to achieve artificial general intelligence rested in large language models, or computer programs that mimic the way humans read and write. Such models were trained on large volumes of text and required a massive amount of computing power that OpenAI wasn’t equipped to fund as a nonprofit, according to Mr. Altman. 
  • In its founding charter, OpenAI pledged to abandon its research efforts if another project came close to building AGI before it did. The goal, the company said, was to avoid a race toward building dangerous AI systems fueled by competition and instead prioritize the safety of humanity.
  • While running Y Combinator, Mr. Altman began to nurse a growing fear that large research labs like DeepMind, purchased by Google in 2014, were creating potentially dangerous AI technologies outside the public eye. Mr. Musk has voiced similar concerns of a dystopian world controlled by powerful AI machines. 
  • Messrs. Altman and Musk decided it was time to start their own lab. Both were part of a group that pledged $1 billion to the nonprofit, OpenAI Inc. 
  • Mr. Altman said he doesn’t necessarily need to be first to develop artificial general intelligence, a world long imagined by researchers and science-fiction writers where software isn’t just good at one specific task like generating text or images but can understand and learn as well or better than a human can. He instead said OpenAI’s ultimate mission is to build AGI, as it’s called, safely.
  • “We didn’t have a visceral sense of just how expensive this project was going to be,” he said. “We still don’t.”
  • Tensions also grew with Mr. Musk, who became frustrated with the slow progress and pushed for more control over the organization, people familiar with the matter said. 
  • OpenAI executives ended up reviving an unusual idea that had been floated earlier in the company’s history: creating a for-profit arm, OpenAI LP, that would report to the nonprofit parent. 
  • Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder who advised OpenAI at the time and later served on the board, said the idea was to attract investors eager to make money from the commercial release of some OpenAI technology, accelerating OpenAI’s progress
  • “You want to be there first and you want to be setting the norms,” he said. “That’s part of the reason why speed is a moral and ethical thing here.”
  • The decision further alienated Mr. Musk, the people familiar with the matter said. He parted ways with OpenAI in February 2018. 
  • Mr. Musk announced his departure in a company all-hands, former employees who attended the meeting said. Mr. Musk explained that he thought he had a better chance at creating artificial general intelligence through Tesla, where he had access to greater resources, they said.
  • OpenAI said that it received about $130 million in contributions from the initial $1 billion pledge, but that further donations were no longer needed after the for-profit’s creation. Mr. Musk has tweeted that he donated around $100 million to OpenAI. 
  • Mr. Musk’s departure marked a turning point. Later that year, OpenAI leaders told employees that Mr. Altman was set to lead the company. He formally became CEO and helped complete the creation of the for-profit subsidiary in early 2019.
  • A young researcher questioned whether Mr. Musk had thought through the safety implications, the former employees said. Mr. Musk grew visibly frustrated and called the intern a “jackass,” leaving employees stunned, they said. It was the last time many of them would see Mr. Musk in person.  
  • In the meantime, Mr. Altman began hunting for investors. His break came at Allen & Co.’s annual conference in Sun Valley, Idaho in the summer of 2018, where he bumped into Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, on a stairwell and pitched him on OpenAI. Mr. Nadella said he was intrigued. The conversations picked up that winter.
  • “I remember coming back to the team after and I was like, this is the only partner,” Mr. Altman said. “They get the safety stuff, they get artificial general intelligence. They have the capital, they have the ability to run the compute.”   
  • Mr. Altman disagreed. “The unusual thing about Microsoft as a partner is that it let us keep all the tenets that we think are important to our mission,” he said, including profit caps and the commitment to assist another project if it got to AGI first. 
  • Some employees still saw the deal as a Faustian bargain. 
  • OpenAI’s lead safety researcher, Dario Amodei, and his lieutenants feared the deal would allow Microsoft to sell products using powerful OpenAI technology before it was put through enough safety testing,
  • They felt that OpenAI’s technology was far from ready for a large release—let alone with one of the world’s largest software companies—worrying it could malfunction or be misused for harm in ways they couldn’t predict.  
  • Mr. Amodei also worried the deal would tether OpenAI’s ship to just one company—Microsoft—making it more difficult for OpenAI to stay true to its founding charter’s commitment to assist another project if it got to AGI first, the former employees said.
  • Microsoft initially invested $1 billion in OpenAI. While the deal gave OpenAI its needed money, it came with a hitch: exclusivity. OpenAI agreed to only use Microsoft’s giant computer servers, via its Azure cloud service, to train its AI models, and to give the tech giant the sole right to license OpenAI’s technology for future products.
  • In a recent investment deck, Anthropic said it was “committed to large-scale commercialization” to achieve the creation of safe AGI, and that it “fully committed” to a commercial approach in September. The company was founded as an AI safety and research company and said at the time that it might look to create commercial value from its products. 
  • Mr. Altman “has presided over a 180-degree pivot that seems to me to be only giving lip service to concern for humanity,” he said. 
  • “The deal completely undermines those tenets to which they secured nonprofit status,” said Gary Marcus, an emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at New York University who co-founded a machine-learning company
  • The cash turbocharged OpenAI’s progress, giving researchers access to the computing power needed to improve large language models, which were trained on billions of pages of publicly available text. OpenAI soon developed a more powerful language model called GPT-3 and then sold developers access to the technology in June 2020 through packaged lines of code known as application program interfaces, or APIs. 
  • Mr. Altman and Mr. Amodei clashed again over the release of the API, former employees said. Mr. Amodei wanted a more limited and staged release of the product to help reduce publicity and allow the safety team to conduct more testing on a smaller group of users, former employees said. 
  • Mr. Amodei left the company a few months later along with several others to found a rival AI lab called Anthropic. “They had a different opinion about how to best get to safe AGI than we did,” Mr. Altman said.
  • Anthropic has since received more than $300 million from Google this year and released its own AI chatbot called Claude in March, which is also available to developers through an API. 
  • Mr. Altman shared the contract with employees as it was being negotiated, hosting all-hands and office hours to allay concerns that the partnership contradicted OpenAI’s initial pledge to develop artificial intelligence outside the corporate world, the former employees said. 
  • In the three years after the initial deal, Microsoft invested a total of $3 billion in OpenAI, according to investor documents. 
  • More than one million users signed up for ChatGPT within five days of its November release, a speed that surprised even Mr. Altman. It followed the company’s introduction of DALL-E 2, which can generate sophisticated images from text prompts.
  • By February, it had reached 100 million users, according to analysts at UBS, the fastest pace by a consumer app in history to reach that mark.
  • n’s close associates praise his ability to balance OpenAI’s priorities. No one better navigates between the “Scylla of misplaced idealism” and the “Charybdis of myopic ambition,” Mr. Thiel said. 
  • Mr. Altman said he delayed the release of the latest version of its model, GPT-4, from last year to March to run additional safety tests. Users had reported some disturbing experiences with the model, integrated into Bing, where the software hallucinated—meaning it made up answers to questions it didn’t know. It issued ominous warnings and made threats. 
  • “The way to get it right is to have people engage with it, explore these systems, study them, to learn how to make them safe,” Mr. Altman said.
  • After Microsoft’s initial investment is paid back, it would capture 49% of OpenAI’s profits until the profit cap, up from 21% under prior arrangements, the documents show. OpenAI Inc., the nonprofit parent, would get the rest.
  • He has put almost all his liquid wealth in recent years in two companies. He has put $375 million into Helion Energy, which is seeking to create carbon-free energy from nuclear fusion and is close to creating “legitimate net-gain energy in a real demo,” Mr. Altman said.
  • He has also put $180 million into Retro, which aims to add 10 years to the human lifespan through “cellular reprogramming, plasma-inspired therapeutics and autophagy,” or the reuse of old and damaged cell parts, according to the company. 
  • He noted how much easier these problems are, morally, than AI. “If you’re making nuclear fusion, it’s all upside. It’s just good,” he said. “If you’re making AI, it is potentially very good, potentially very terrible.” 
Javier E

Sam Altman, the ChatGPT King, Is Pretty Sure It's All Going to Be OK - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...am-altman-open-ai-chatgpt.html

AI potential risk evaluation founder

shared by Javier E on 04 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • He believed A.G.I. would bring the world prosperity and wealth like no one had ever seen. He also worried that the technologies his company was building could cause serious harm — spreading disinformation, undercutting the job market. Or even destroying the world as we know it.
  • “I try to be upfront,” he said. “Am I doing something good? Or really bad?”
  • In 2023, people are beginning to wonder if Sam Altman was more prescient than they realized.
  • ...44 more annotations...
  • And yet, when people act as if Mr. Altman has nearly realized his long-held vision, he pushes back.
  • This past week, more than a thousand A.I. experts and tech leaders called on OpenAI and other companies to pause their work on systems like ChatGPT, saying they present “profound risks to society and humanity.”
  • As people realize that this technology is also a way of spreading falsehoods or even persuading people to do things they should not do, some critics are accusing Mr. Altman of reckless behavior.
  • “The hype over these systems — even if everything we hope for is right long term — is totally out of control for the short term,” he told me on a recent afternoon. There is time, he said, to better understand how these systems will ultimately change the world.
  • Many industry leaders, A.I. researchers and pundits see ChatGPT as a fundamental technological shift, as significant as the creation of the web browser or the iPhone. But few can agree on the future of this technology.
  • Some believe it will deliver a utopia where everyone has all the time and money ever needed. Others believe it could destroy humanity. Still others spend much of their time arguing that the technology is never as powerful as everyone says it is, insisting that neither nirvana nor doomsday is as close as it might seem.
  • he is often criticized from all directions. But those closest to him believe this is as it should be. “If you’re equally upsetting both extreme sides, then you’re doing something right,” said OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman.
  • To spend time with Mr. Altman is to understand that Silicon Valley will push this technology forward even though it is not quite sure what the implications will be
  • in 2019, he paraphrased Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project, who believed the atomic bomb was an inevitability of scientific progress. “Technology happens because it is possible,” he said
  • His life has been a fairly steady climb toward greater prosperity and wealth, driven by an effective set of personal skills — not to mention some luck. It makes sense that he believes that the good thing will happen rather than the bad.
  • He said his company was building technology that would “solve some of our most pressing problems, really increase the standard of life and also figure out much better uses for human will and creativity.”
  • He was not exactly sure what problems it will solve, but he argued that ChatGPT showed the first signs of what is possible. Then, with his next breath, he worried that the same technology could cause serious harm if it wound up in the hands of some authoritarian government.
  • Kelly Sims, a partner with the venture capital firm Thrive Capital who worked with Mr. Altman as a board adviser to OpenAI, said it was like he was constantly arguing with himself.
  • “In a single conversation,” she said, “he is both sides of the debate club.”
  • He takes pride in recognizing when a technology is about to reach exponential growth — and then riding that curve into the future.
  • he is also the product of a strange, sprawling online community that began to worry, around the same time Mr. Altman came to the Valley, that artificial intelligence would one day destroy the world. Called rationalists or effective altruists, members of this movement were instrumental in the creation of OpenAI.
  • Does it make sense to ride that curve if it could end in diaster? Mr. Altman is certainly determined to see how it all plays out.
  • “Why is he working on something that won’t make him richer? One answer is that lots of people do that once they have enough money, which Sam probably does. The other is that he likes power.”
  • “He has a natural ability to talk people into things,” Mr. Graham said. “If it isn’t inborn, it was at least fully developed before he was 20. I first met Sam when he was 19, and I remember thinking at the time: ‘So this is what Bill Gates must have been like.
  • poker taught Mr. Altman how to read people and evaluate risk.
  • It showed him “how to notice patterns in people over time, how to make decisions with very imperfect information, how to decide when it was worth pain, in a sense, to get more information,” he told me while strolling across his ranch in Napa. “It’s a great game.”
  • He believed, according to his younger brother Max, that he was one of the few people who could meaningfully change the world through A.I. research, as opposed to the many people who could do so through politics.
  • In 2019, just as OpenAI’s research was taking off, Mr. Altman grabbed the reins, stepping down as president of Y Combinator to concentrate on a company with fewer than 100 employees that was unsure how it would pay its bills.
  • Within a year, he had transformed OpenAI into a nonprofit with a for-profit arm. That way he could pursue the money it would need to build a machine that could do anything the human brain could do.
  • Mr. Brockman, OpenAI’s president, said Mr. Altman’s talent lies in understanding what people want. “He really tries to find the thing that matters most to a person — and then figure out how to give it to them,” Mr. Brockman told me. “That is the algorithm he uses over and over.”
  • Mr. Yudkowsky and his writings played key roles in the creation of both OpenAI and DeepMind, another lab intent on building artificial general intelligence.
  • “These are people who have left an indelible mark on the fabric of the tech industry and maybe the fabric of the world,” he said. “I think Sam is going to be one of those people.”
  • The trouble is, unlike the days when Apple, Microsoft and Meta were getting started, people are well aware of how technology can transform the world — and how dangerous it can be.
  • Mr. Scott of Microsoft believes that Mr. Altman will ultimately be discussed in the same breath as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
  • The woman was the Canadian singer Grimes, Mr. Musk’s former partner, and the hat guy was Eliezer Yudkowsky, a self-described A.I. researcher who believes, perhaps more than anyone, that artificial intelligence could one day destroy humanity.
  • The selfie — snapped by Mr. Altman at a party his company was hosting — shows how close he is to this way of thinking. But he has his own views on the dangers of artificial intelligence.
  • In March, Mr. Altman tweeted out a selfie, bathed by a pale orange flash, that showed him smiling between a blond woman giving a peace sign and a bearded guy wearing a fedora.
  • He also helped spawn the vast online community of rationalists and effective altruists who are convinced that A.I. is an existential risk. This surprisingly influential group is represented by researchers inside many of the top A.I. labs, including OpenAI.
  • They don’t see this as hypocrisy: Many of them believe that because they understand the dangers clearer than anyone else, they are in the best position to build this technology.
  • Mr. Altman believes that effective altruists have played an important role in the rise of artificial intelligence, alerting the industry to the dangers. He also believes they exaggerate these dangers.
  • As OpenAI developed ChatGPT, many others, including Google and Meta, were building similar technology. But it was Mr. Altman and OpenAI that chose to share the technology with the world.
  • Many in the field have criticized the decision, arguing that this set off a race to release technology that gets things wrong, makes things up and could soon be used to rapidly spread disinformation.
  • Mr. Altman argues that rather than developing and testing the technology entirely behind closed doors before releasing it in full, it is safer to gradually share it so everyone can better understand risks and how to handle them.
  • He told me that it would be a “very slow takeoff.”
  • When I asked Mr. Altman if a machine that could do anything the human brain could do would eventually drive the price of human labor to zero, he demurred. He said he could not imagine a world where human intelligence was useless.
  • If he’s wrong, he thinks he can make it up to humanity.
  • His grand idea is that OpenAI will capture much of the world’s wealth through the creation of A.G.I. and then redistribute this wealth to the people. In Napa, as we sat chatting beside the lake at the heart of his ranch, he tossed out several figures — $100 billion, $1 trillion, $100 trillion.
  • If A.G.I. does create all that wealth, he is not sure how the company will redistribute it. Money could mean something very different in this new world.
  • But as he once told me: “I feel like the A.G.I. can help with that.”
Javier E

He's Narrating Your New Audiobook. He's Also Been Dead for Nearly 10 Years. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...arrate-your-audiobook-7528cd96

translation audiobook ai

shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • AI’s reach into audiobook narration isn’t merely theoretical. Thousands of AI-narrated audiobooks are available on popular marketplaces including Alphabet Inc.’s Google Play Books and Apple Inc.’s Apple Books. Amazon.com Inc., AMZN +0.25% whose Audible unit is the largest U.S. audiobook service, doesn’t offer any for now, but says it is evaluating its position.
  • The technology hasn’t been widely embraced by the largest U.S. book publishers, which mostly use it for marketing efforts and some foreign-language title
  • it is a boon for smaller outfits and little-known authors, whose books might not have the sales potential to warrant the cost—traditionally at least $5,000—of recording an audio version.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Apple and Google said they allow users to create audiobooks free of charge that use digitally replicated human voices. The voices featured in audiobooks generated by Apple and Google come from real people, whose voices helped train their automated-narration engines.
  • Ms. Papel said there is still plenty of work for professional narrators because the new era of AI auto-narration is just getting under way, though she said that might not be the case in the future.
  • “From what I can see, human narrators are freaking out,
  • Melissa Papel, a Paris-born actress who records from her home studio in Los Angeles, said she recorded eight hours of content for DeepZen, reading in French from different books. “One called for me to read in an angry way, another in a disgusted way, a humorous way, a dramatic way,” she said.
  • Charles Watkinson, director of the University of Michigan Press, said the publisher has made about 100 audiobooks using Google’s free auto-narrated audiobook platform since early last year. The new technology made those titles possible because it eliminated the costs associated with using a production studio, support staff and human narrators.
  • “I understood that they would use my voice to teach software how to speak more humanly,” Ms. Papel said. “I didn’t realize they could use my voice to pronounce words I didn’t say. That’s incredible.”
  • DeepZen pays its narrators a flat fee plus a royalty based on the revenue the company generates from different projects. The agreements span multiple years
  • a national union that represents performers, including professional audiobook narrators, said he expects AI to eventually disrupt the industry.
  • Audiobook sales rose 7% last year, according to the Association of American Publishers, while print book sales declined by 5.8%, according to book tracker Circana BookScan.
  • eepZen says it has signed deals with 35 publishers in the U.S. and abroad and is working with 25 authors.
  • Josiah Ziegler, a psychiatrist in Fort Collins, Colo., last year created Intellectual Classics, which focuses on nonfiction works that are out of copyright and don’t have an audiobook edition. 
  • He chose Mr. Herrmann as the narrator for “The War with Mexico,” a work by Justin H. Smith that won the 1920 Pulitzer Prize for history whose audiobook version Dr. Ziegler expects to publish later this year.
  • DeepZen, which has created nearly a hundred audiobooks featuring Mr. Herrmann’s voice, is pursuing the rights of other well-known stars who have died.
Javier E

A Blow Against the Malice Theory of American Politics - The Dispatch - 1 views

thedispatch.com/...ce-theory-of-american-politics

malice trump culture history US politics anger negative partisanship animosity

shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • Why were partisans so oblivious to the escalating tensions that were tearing America apart? Why were they so confident that the solution to American polarization was domination and not accommodation? 
  • The answer was clear. For decades, winners and losers alike spun virtually every American election as the sign of things to come, the harbinger of a permanent victory (or permanent defeat). You don’t even have to be that old to see the recent pattern. The thrill of Democratic victory in 1992 turned into the agony of defeat in 1994, then the thrill of victory again in 1996
  • Then Obama won in 2008. But for Republicans, that was an aberration—a fluke caused by the housing crash and an unpopular war. The real majority came to the polls in Tea Party 2010. But wait: Obama won again in 2012, and suddenly all the momentum was on the side of the “coalition of the ascendant.” Remember that phrase? It signaled permanent Republican doom—the alleged party of white people couldn’t possibly keep winning in a nation that was growing more diverse by the year, could it?
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Then came 2016. The overreading began once again. The old electoral college “blue wall” had become a “red wall,” and Trump had supposedly unlocked the key to lasting control. But, well, you know the rest.
  • Everyone keeps looking for the political Battle of Yorktown—that moment when your opponents lose once and for all and they march out slowly before you while the band plays “The World Turned Upside Down.”
  • Instead, in a closely-divided nation that’s characterized mainly by negative polarization and calcification, the better analogy is to trench warfare—grinding, bloody attrition, with gains often measured in yards rather than miles and true breakthroughs few and far between. 
  • Thus, the question after any given election isn’t so much, “Who is ascendant?” Rather, it’s “In which direction did the lines move?” 
  • often the more important cultural changes can be harder to discern
  • in this instance one of those more important changes was the blow to the malice theory of American politics. 
  • The malice theory is a core element of Trumpism, and it’s a natural temptation of negative polarization. Negative polarization (or negative partisanship), as I’ve written many times, is the term for politics that is fundamentally motivated by animosity for the other side more than affection to your own party’s leaders or ideas. 
  • Under the malice theory, the key to electoral victory is unlocking that anger. That means highlighting everything wrong with your opponents. That means hyping their alleged mortal threat to the Republic.
  • who should be kind to the “godless communist orcs” who are “trying to ruin this great country”? 
  • then persuasion is a waste of time. Defeating the enemy isn’t about persuading the enemy, but rather about mobilizing the righteous.
  • inspiring people is hard. Scaring them is easy—especially when the internet gives you constant access to the worst and weirdest voices on the other side. 
  • here’s where the malice theory collides with human nature. Most people aren’t content with simply thinking their opponents are terrible. They still want to see themselves as good. They want to see the world as “good versus evil,” not “lesser evil versus evil.” 
  • That’s why the argument that voters should always swallow deep moral objections to vote for the lesser evil are ultimately unsustainable
  • When confronted with relentless wrongdoing from your own partisans, one of two things happens—over time you’ll either redefine evil as good, or you’ll abandon evil for the good. 
  • The first response is core to much of the MAGA movement. It’s how someone goes from holding their nose and voting for Trump in 2016 to being the first bass boat in the boat parade in 2020. We all watched it happen.
  • The ultimate expression of this faction was represented by what’s been called the “Stop the Steal” slate of Republican candidates. These were the folks who were all-in, not just on Trump, but on some of the most transparently, incandescently absurd political conspiracies in modern American history. 
  • I don’t want to make the very mistake I identified at the start of this newsletter and overstate my case. Talk of a true MAGA “repudiation” is overblown
  • remember, the question isn’t whether anyone achieved ultimate victory or faced a final defeat. It’s in which direction the lines moved in our nation’s political trench warfare. And they most definitely moved back towards reason and our most basic moral norms. 
  • since politicians so often follow voters far more than they lead voters, it is ultimately up to us to demonstrate to them that the malice theory of American politics is truly a dead political end
  • The worst thing for American politics would be for the Trumpist narrative—that decency is for the weak—to prevai
  • If cruelty truly is the sole or best path to partisan victory, then the continued temptation to yield to our worst impulses would grow overwhelming. The temptation was already strong enough to distort and transform the political culture of the right simply based on Trump’s single, narrow win.
  • the opposite message seems to be true
  • Ever since Trump beat Hillary Clinton, the Trumpist GOP lost and kept losing. A movement that prioritized vicious political combat lost the House in the 2018 midterms, lost the presidency and the Senate in 2020, and has likely blown a virtually unlosable election in 2022, despite the fact that the country is struggling under the great weight of the worst crime and inflation in at least a generation.
  • It turns out that there’s some life left in decency yet. Even when times are hard, there are voters who are unwilling to call good evil and evil good
  • It turns out that it’s hard to escape the need to persuade and inspire, and that might be the best—and most important—consequence of a midterm election that gave neither party a mandate but reminded the Republicans that malice and lies can do far more political harm than good. 
Javier E

Opinion | The Red Wave Didn't Just Vanish - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rms-republicans-democrats.html

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • On Election Day, a small but crucial percentage of Republican voters deserted their party, casting ballots for Democratic nominees in several elections that featured Trump-backed candidates at the top of the ticket. These Trump-driven defections wrought havoc on Republican ranks.
  • at key battleground states that were critical to continued Democratic control of the Senate. In Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, party-line voting among Republicans consistently fell below the party’s national average, according to exit poll data.
  • In New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, the Republican vote for the Republican Senate candidate was seven percentage points below the national average, and the Republican vote for the Democratic Senate candidate increased by the same amount; in Arizona, support for the Republican Senate nominee fell among Republicans by six points, and support for the Democratic candidate rose by the same amount again; in Nevada, the drop in support for the Republican candidate was two percentage points, and the increase for the Democratic nominee was once again the same.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • the major finding of the survey “is that democratic norm violations of the sort many Republicans ran on are an electoral loser.”
  • Republican candidates, Westwood added, “running on platforms that supported democratic norm violations were standing behind a policy that seems to only resonate with Trump and a small minority of Republican voters.
  • A publicly released post-election analysis by Neil Newhouse and Jim Hobart, partners at the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, found, for example, that a far higher percentage of Democrats, 81 percent, believe “Republicans represent a threat to democracy that, if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it,” than Republicans (69 percent) believe the same thing about Democrats
  • the election outcomes are consistent with the interpretation that the candidates most closely associated with Trump suffered a penalty. Voters rejected all the Trump-endorsed secretary of state nominees in important swing states. Republicans unexpectedly lost seats in districts where Republican incumbents who supported Trump’s impeachment had been denied renomination. Republicans closely linked to Trump lost elections in winnable swing states
  • Both Democrats and Republicans, Westwood said,overestimate the extent to which the other side supports democratic norm violations by up to five times. There is a real risk that damage to our country could occur not because of support for norm violations but as a pre-emptive strike based on the faulty assumption that the other side has abandoned democracy.
  • abortion, which worked to the advantage of Democrats, “was more of a factor than the pre-election polls indicated,” with almost as many voters, 31 percent, saying it was a high-priority issue as the 32 percent who identified rising prices and inflation, an issue that benefited Republicans
  • Almost identical percentages identified concern over democratic backsliding, at 25 percent, a pro-Democratic issue, as the 26 percent who identified jobs and the economy, a pro-Republican concern.
  • through 2020, a larger percentage of Republicans considered themselves “to be more a supporter of Donald Trump” than “a supporter of the Republican Party.” That came to an end in January 2021, and by this month, 67 percent said they were “more a supporter of the Republican Party,” more than double the 30 percent who said they were “more a supporter of Donald Trump.”
  • Crime, Greenberg wrote,was a top issue for many Democratic base voters. A quarter of Blacks and half of Hispanics and Asians voters trusted Republicans more than Democrats to address the issue. With Democrats trailing Republicans by 10 points on crime, Democrats have a lot of work to do.There is another word of caution for Democrats. The party’s single most important achievement in 2022 was to maintain control of the Senate, preventing Republicans from blocking Biden’s judicial and executive branch appointments.
  • n 2024, however, 23 seats in the Democratic caucus will be up for grabs — including two independent seats (Angus King in Maine and Bernie Sanders in Vermont) — making it that much harder for Democrats to keep their thin majority. Eight of these Democratic seats are in purple or red states (Montana and West Virginia, for example), offering multiple opportunities to the Republican Party
  • In contrast, all 10 of the Republican-held seats up for election in 2024 are in solidly red states.
Javier E

If 'permacrisis' is the word of 2022, what does 2023 have in store for our me... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ord-of-2022-2023-mental-health

crisis history effects mental health health

shared by Javier E on 30 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • the Collins English Dictionary has come to a similar conclusion about recent history. Topping its “words of the year” list for 2022 is permacrisis, defined as an “extended period of insecurity and instability”. This new word fits a time when we lurch from crisis to crisis and wreckage piles upon wreckage
  • The word permacrisis is new, but the situation it describes is not. According to the German historian Reinhart Koselleck we have been living through an age of permanent crisis for at least 230 years
  • Koselleck observes that prior to the French revolution, a crisis was a medical or legal problem but not much more. After the fall of the ancien regime, crisis becomes the “structural signature of modernity”, he writes. As the 19th century progressed, crises multiplied: there were economic crises, foreign policy crises, cultural crises and intellectual crises.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • During the 20th century, the list got much longer. In came existential crises, midlife crises, energy crises and environmental crises. When Koselleck was writing about the subject in the 1970s, he counted up more than 200 kinds of crisis we could then face
  • Waking up each morning to hear about the latest crisis is dispiriting for some, but throughout history it has been a bracing experience for others. In 1857, Friedrich Engels wrote in a letter that “the crisis will make me feel as good as a swim in the ocean”. A hundred years later, John F Kennedy (wrongly) pointed out that in the Chinese language, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters, “one representing danger, and the other, opportunity”. More recently, Elon Musk has argued “if things are not failing, you are not innovating enough”.
  • Victor H Mair, a professor of Chinese literature at the University of Pennsylvania, points out that in fact the Chinese word for crisis, wēijī, refers to a perilous situation in which you should be particularly cautious
  • “Those who purvey the doctrine that the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ is composed of elements meaning ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’ are engaging in a type of muddled thinking that is a danger to society,” he writes. “It lulls people into welcoming crises as unstable situations from which they can benefit.” Revolutionaries, billionaires and politicians may relish the chance to profit from a crisis, but most people world prefer not to have a crisis at all.
  • A 2019 study which involved observing participants using bricks, found that those who had been threatened before the task tended to come up with more harmful uses of the bricks (such as using them as weapons) than people who did not feel threatened
  • The first world war sparked the growth of modernism in painting and literature. The second fuelled innovations in science and technology. The economic crises of the 1970s and 80s are supposed to have inspired the spread of punk and the creation of hip-hop
  • psychologists have also found that when we are threatened by a crisis, we become more rigid and locked into our beliefs. The creativity researcher Dean Simonton has spent his career looking at breakthroughs in music, philosophy, science and literature. He has found that during periods of crisis, we actually tend to become less creative.
  • When he looked at 5,000 creative individuals over 127 generations in European history, he found that significant creative breakthroughs were less likely during periods of political crisis and instability.
  • psychologists have found that it is what they call “malevolent creativity” that flourishes when we feel threatened by crisis.
  • These are innovations that tend to be harmful – such as new weapons, torture devices and ingenious scams.
  • A common folk theory is that times of great crisis also lead to great bursts of creativity.
  • Students presented with information about a threatening situation tended to become increasingly wary of outsiders, and even begin to adopt positions such as an unwillingness to support LGBT people afterwards.
  • during moments of crisis – when change is really needed – we tend to become less able to change.
  • When we suffer significant traumatic events, we tend to have worse wellbeing and life outcomes.
  • , other studies have shown that in moderate doses, crises can help to build our sense of resilience.
  • we tend to be more resilient if a crisis is shared with others. As Bruce Daisley, the ex-Twitter vice-president, notes: “True resilience lies in a feeling of togetherness, that we’re united with those around us in a shared endeavour.”
  • Crises are like many things in life – only good in moderation, and best shared with others
  • The challenge our leaders face during times of overwhelming crisis is to avoid letting us plunge into the bracing ocean of change alone, to see if we sink or swim. Nor should they tell us things are fine, encouraging us to hide our heads in the san
  • during moments of significant crisis, the best leaders are able to create some sense of certainty and a shared fate amid the seas of change.
  • This means people won’t feel an overwhelming sense of threat. It also means people do not feel alone. When we feel some certainty and common identity, we are more likely to be able to summon the creativity, ingenuity and energy needed to change things.
Javier E

Ancient DNA Paints a New Picture of the Viking Age - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-of-the-viking-age-11672933852

history scandinavia genomics ancient dna

shared by Javier E on 06 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • “It is clear from archaeological artifacts and historical documents that they also took captives,” he said, adding that the new study suggests the number of slaves brought back to Scandinavia by the Vikings was enough to influence genetic composition of the region.The study revealed, too, that primarily females were moved into Scandinavia from the east during this time—which “suggests that the Vikings may have preferentially targeted women and girls as slaves,” Dr. Collard said.
  • The researchers found that, following the Viking Age, there was a notable decline in Baltic and British-Irish ancestries among Scandinavians. While there remains some genetic influence from these regions today, it is “not as much as we would expect,” Dr. Götherström said.
  • “The only credible way I can explain that is a lot of these people that came into Scandinavia during the Viking period didn’t build families and weren’t as efficient in getting children as the people who were already living there,”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The study’s conclusions need to be tempered by the idea that these 300 ancient genomes may not be wholly representative of the region’s overall population
  • Many of the genomes used in the new analysis were collected from individuals uncovered in burial grounds, grave fields and churchyards. But some samples came from people who died in unusual circumstances—including sailors from a Swedish warship that sank off the country’s southeastern coast in 1676, and inhabitants of a settlement known as Sandby borg who were likely massacred during an organized attack in the fifth century.
  • “There is a question of how much you can call it population genomics as opposed to kind of lots of little vignettes,
Javier E

Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back AI Rivals - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...google-search-engine-ai.html

AI google rivalry development commercial

shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Google’s employees were shocked when they learned in March that the South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine on its devices.
  • Google’s reaction to the Samsung threat was “panic,” according to internal messages reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.
  • A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google’s search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with A.I. features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Google has been worried about A.I.-powered competitors since OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up that is working with Microsoft, demonstrated a chatbot called ChatGPT in November. About two weeks later, Google created a task force in its search division to start building A.I. products,
  • Modernizing its search engine has become an obsession at Google, and the planned changes could put new A.I. technology in phones and homes all over the world.
  • Magi would keep ads in the mix of search results. Search queries that could lead to a financial transaction, such as buying shoes or booking a flight, for example, would still feature ads on their results pages.
  • Google has been doing A.I. research for years. Its DeepMind lab in London is considered one of the best A.I. research centers in the world, and the company has been a pioneer with A.I. projects, such as self-driving cars and the so-called large language models that are used in the development of chatbots. In recent years, Google has used large language models to improve the quality of its search results, but held off on fully adopting A.I. because it has been prone to generating false and biased statements.
  • Now the priority is winning control of the industry’s next big thing. Last month, Google released its own chatbot, Bard, but the technology received mixed reviews.
  • The system would learn what users want to know based on what they’re searching when they begin using it. And it would offer lists of preselected options for objects to buy, information to research and other information. It would also be more conversational — a bit like chatting with a helpful person.
  • The Samsung threat represented the first potential crack in Google’s seemingly impregnable search business, which was worth $162 billion last year.
  • Last week, Google invited some employees to test Magi’s features, and it has encouraged them to ask the search engine follow-up questions to judge its ability to hold a conversation. Google is expected to release the tools to the public next month and add more features in the fall, according to the planning document.
  • The company plans to initially release the features to a maximum of one million people. That number should progressively increase to 30 million by the end of the year. The features will be available exclusively in the United States.
  • Google has also explored efforts to let people use Google Earth’s mapping technology with help from A.I. and search for music through a conversation with a chatbot
  • A tool called GIFI would use A.I. to generate images in Google Image results.
  • Tivoli Tutor, would teach users a new language through open-ended A.I. text conversations.
  • Yet another product, Searchalong, would let users ask a chatbot questions while surfing the web through Google’s Chrome browser. People might ask the chatbot for activities near an Airbnb rental, for example, and the A.I. would scan the page and the rest of the internet for a response.
  • “If we are the leading search engine and this is a new attribute, a new feature, a new characteristic of search engines, we want to make sure that we’re in this race as well,”
Javier E

Opinion | Joe Biden Puts Donald Trump In His Place - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-biden-donald-trump-2024.html

biden trump democracy campaign

shared by Javier E on 08 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • He also performed a service by keeping the preservation of American democracy central to his campaign. He has faced plenty of second-guessing for this choice. Democracy is a big, amorphous concept like climate change, the critics say. Regular people struggle to understand it as concretely as they do, say, crime or the economy.
  • But as Mr. Biden explained, “Without democracy, no progress is possible.” It’s all connected, he said.
  • “Democracy means having the freedom to speak your mind, to be who you are, to be who you want to be,” he said. “Democracy is about being able to bring about peaceful change. Democracy — democracy is how we’ve opened the doors of opportunity wider and wider with each successive generation, notwithstanding our mistakes. But if democracy falls, we’ll lose that freedom.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The 2024 election will not be the usual battle between parties, platforms and policies. It is a battle between those who fundamentally respect and abide by the ground rules of democracy and those who do not.
  • To underline his case most forcefully, Mr. Biden didn’t need to use his own words. He could rely on the words of his opponent: revenge, retribution, fight like hell, terminate the Constitution, suckers and losers, vermin, poisoning the blood of our country, dictator on Day 1, American carnage. There is no subtext here; it’s all text. As Mr. Biden put it, “We all know who Donald Trump is.”
  • And yet, apparently, we need to keep reminding ourselves. Otherwise, we fall into the trap of normalization that Mr. Trump laid from the start.
  • Today he can call for the execution of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or tell the Biden administration to “rot in hell,” or promote a video claiming he is literally a gift from God, and it gets less attention in both mainstream and social media than Mr. Biden tripping over a sandbag.
  • How did we end up here? Mr. Biden offered one compelling explanation: complacency. “We’ve been blessed so long with a strong, stable democracy, it’s easy to forget why so many before us risked their lives and strengthened democracy,
  • In that sense, democracy is like vaccines. Few people today have firsthand memories of the horrors of diseases that were rampant before vaccines largely eradicated them, which makes it easier for vaccine hesitancy to take root
  • Similarly, when a country has no history of living under a dictatorship, it can be easier to lose sight of what it means to live in a representative democracy, and to be caught flat-footed when a real authoritarian comes knocking.
« First ‹ Previous 1321 - 1340 of 1359 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page