U-curve
Trump pardons Nevada politician who paid for cosmetic surgery with funds to honor a slain officer
Can the Las Vegas Sphere actually make money?
The U-curve of happiness poses that happiness levels reach its peak levels in our younger years around age 20 and in our older years starting at around age 70, lowest amongst the middle years around ages 40-55. […] Here we replicate the U-curve when different preregistered sets of control variables are included. We further show heterogeneity across happiness measures, showing that the U-curve is not consistent across items.
It is not obvious why we are conscious. Why can’t all of our mental activities take place unconsciously? What is consciousness for? We aim to make progress on this question, focusing on conscious vision.
Women Need More Expensive Gifts to Feel Loved, Especially If Bank Accounts Are Not Shared
a massive dataset of over 50,000 houses in some 1,000 archaeological sites worldwide, the study suggests that economic inequality is not an inevitable result of societal advancement, agriculture, or population. Instead, it seems to be a consequence of political choices and governance structures.
Gen Alpha children (aged 0-11)’s tastes are already being informed by online content […] ese low-cost retailer Temu entered the U.S. market less than three years ago and is already one of Alpha’s most requested e-commerce destinations. Sephora’s appearance within the personal care category also underscores Alpha’s premature, TikTok-spurred preoccupation with all things beauty and skincare. Both brands are also generally among the most mentioned across all social platforms.
Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?
the level of data consumption needed for microphone surveillance would make the technique not only difficult to execute, but also virtually impossible to hide. “To make it happen, Facebook would need to record everything your phone hears while it’s on,” Garcia-Martinez explained in 2017. “This is functionally equivalent to an always-on phone call from you to Facebook. Your average voice-over-internet call takes something like 24 kbps one way, which amounts to about 3 kBs of data per second. Assume you’ve got your phone on half the day, that’s about 130 MBs per day, per user. There are around 150 million daily active users in the US […] So, your phone may not be listening in to your conversations, but it has the capacity to track you in so many other ways. And it’s through this massive trove of trackable data that companies like Facebook and Google are able to serve you targeted ads that occasionally seem frighteningly accurate. […] Facebook can find you on whatever device you’ve ever checked Facebook on. It can exploit everything that retailers know about you, and even sometimes track your in-store, cash-only purchases; that loyalty discount card is tied to a phone number or email for a reason.
Google users who accept our payment to try Bing for two weeks update positively about its relative quality, with 33 percent preferring to continue using it; and (iii) after changing the default from Google to Bing, many users do not switch back, consistent with persistent inattention
A study published last month on people with deep sleep and REM deficiencies found that the subjects’ brains showed signs of atrophy in M.R.I. scans 13 to 17 years after the deficiencies were observed; the atrophy looked similar to what you’d find in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.[NY Times]
A strange phrase (”vegetative electron microscopy”) keeps turning up in scientific papers. This phrase, which sounds technical but is actually nonsense, has become a “digital fossil” – an error preserved and reinforced in artificial intelligence (AI) systems that is nearly impossible to remove from our knowledge repositories. […] Vegetative electron microscopy appears to have originated through a remarkable coincidence of unrelated errors. First, two papers from the 1950s, published in the journal Bacteriological Reviews, were scanned and digitised. However, the digitising process erroneously combined “vegetative” from one column of text with “electron” from another. As a result, the phantom term was created.
I recently attended a scholarly talk on a rare illuminated manuscript. The speaker was as eminent as they come, but the talk was not easy to follow. Frustrated, I opened ChatGPT and started asking it questions about the subject. In the course of that disappointing lecture, I had a rich exchange with the system. I learned what was and wasn’t known about the document, who had done the foundational research, and how scholars had interpreted its iconography and transmission. Was the information perfect? Surely not, but neither is what we get from people. Was it better than the talk I was hearing? By a wide margin. […] And the astonishing part is this: the making of books such as those on my shelves, each the labor of years or decades, is quickly becoming a matter of well-designed prompts. The question is no longer whether we can write such books; they can be written endlessly, for us. The question is, do we want to read them?
Watching OpenAI’s o3 guess a photo’s location is surreal, dystopian and wildly entertaining
Am I a Lesbian? [2018]
