A marketing team within media giant Cox Media Group (CMG) claims it has the capability to listen to ambient conversations of consumers through embedded microphones in smartphones, smart TVs, and other devices to gather data and use it to target ads. […] Until now, there was no evidence that such a capability actually existed, but its myth permeated due to how sophisticated other ad tracking methods have become. More: MindSift has been deleting details about its technology from the internet in recent days, but two of the three founders of the company go into detail about their technology on a small podcast. […] Most episodes of the podcast have under 50 views on YouTube.

Without realizing it, most salesclerks do their job using something called the Greedy Algorithm, in which the changemaker starts with the largest possible coin and works down. Thus, for 41 cents the clerk hands back a quarter, a dime, a nickel and a penny. The Shallit system assumes that the clerk abandons Greedy in favor of a mental calculation that considers all possible combinations of coins and selects the optimal one–here, two 18-cent coins and a nickel. ■ Counting all possible change amounts from 0 to 99 cents, Shallit found that the average transaction, if handled in optimal fashion by the 7-Eleven clerk, involves 4.7 coins. It just so happens that if the Mint ditched the dime and added an 18-cent coin, the average number of coins would fall to 3.9. ■ What This Country Needs is an 18¢ piece

Snacks constitute almost a quarter of a day’s calories in U.S. adults and account for about one-third of daily added sugar, new study suggests

‘You didn’t just succeed, you Exceled’: Sydney man dubbed the ‘Annihilator’ wins spreadsheet world championship

Another wild story is about Napoleon. He was dead and they did an autopsy. At the time, the doctor who did the autopsy thought, “I know, I’ve got a good idea. I’m going to cut off this man’s penis.” And he did. And he handed it to a priest who smuggled it off Saint Helena island. It was passed between booksellers—booksellers are strange people—and put on display. Eventually it was bought by a urologist, and it now lives in a basement in New Jersey.

New Paper Argues That the Universe Began with Two Big Bangs

Researchers have made significant strides in understanding the neurological process of dying. The ‘wave of death’ in the brain, marking the transition to total cessation of brain activity, originates in the neocortex’s layer 5. This wave can be reversed if resuscitation occurs within a specific time window, indicating the possibility of preserving brain function. The study provides a deeper understanding of the neural mechanisms as death approaches, challenging the notion of a flat EEG as a definitive marker of ceased brain functions.

hormone made by fetus may cause nausea and vomiting during pregnancy

Developing driverless cars has been AI’s greatest test. Today we can say it has failed miserably, despite the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars in attempts to produce a viable commercial vehicle. […] First to go was Uber after an accident in which one of its self-driving cars killed Elaine Herzberg in Phoenix, Arizona. […] Uber’s business model had been predicated on the idea that within a few years it would dispense with drivers and provide a fleet of robotaxis. That plan died with Herzberg, and Uber soon pulled out of all its driverless taxi trials. Now Cruise, the company bought by General Motors to spearhead its development of autonomous vehicles, is retreating almost as rapidly. The trigger was also an accident. […] Tesla is also in defence mode. It has long marketed its driver aid software as “full self-driving”, but it is nothing of the sort. Drivers must stay alert and ready to take over, even though the car can operate itself much of the time, particularly on motorways. In the US, where there have been numerous accidents with Teslas in “full self-driving” mode, the manufacturer is facing several lawsuits. […] If this is the best that AI can do, maybe fears about its capabilities and its ability to put humans out of work are misplaced.

New York City’s Forgotten Neighborhood A 12-block neighborhood just 10 miles from Manhattan’s glittering towers is perhaps best known for constant flooding, vacant cars and a mob graveyard. But hope for change may be stirring. […] Residents call it The Hole because it sits 10 to 15 feet below the surrounding streets, creating a natural funnel for rainfall. It’s also long served as a graveyard or, occasionally, a parking lot for all sorts of industrial equipment. The city says it has already towed away nearly 100 abandoned or illegally parked vehicles and removed more than 100,000 pounds of trash from vacant lots and illegal dumps.

OnlyFans subscribers can access exclusive and often pornographic content that models, ordinary people, and adult film stars make available in exchange for an average monthly sum that can start from $10 per month and reach up to $30. But the biggest profits lie elsewhere: in personalized chats with subscribers. […] as OnlyFans models accumulate hundreds of thousands of followers, they lose the ability to communicate with everyone. That’s where the chatters come in. They are specialized workers who hold conversations posing as the stars of the show […] They send new hires scripts that predict conversations, personality guides for each model, and a small dictionary explaining their subscribers’ fetishes. “You have to know how to portray the model, speak like them, and know their background,” he explains. “Sometimes you go crazy with so many personalities,” Hernández confesses. He is currently a chatter for three models. […] Hernández confesses that “part of the job of talking to sexually aroused men” is constantly receiving photos of their penises.

A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways. The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth.

The Emergence of Full-Body Gaussian Splat Deepfake Humans

The previous plague, in the view of Martin Scorsese, was the Hollywood superhero-franchise blockbuster. “That’s not cinema,” the auteur-cinephile told Empire magazine in 2019. “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks.”

TV detector vans are vans which contain equipment that can detect the presence of television sets in use. These vans have been used by the General Post Office and later by contractors working for the BBC to enforce the television licensing system in the UK, the Channel Islands and on the Isle of Man.

List of shoe-throwing incidents

Woman shot in butt by own gun after sneaking it into MRI. The magnet attracted the handgun, which fired a round and left the patient wounded.

Ex-commissioner for facial recognition tech joins Facewatch firm he approved

Pharmacies share medical data with police without a warrant, inquiry finds — Pharmacies’ records hold some of the most intimate details of their customers’ personal lives, including years-old medical conditions and the prescriptions they take for mental health and birth control.

Why scientists are making transparent wood (smartphone screens, insulated windows…)

The brain undergoes a great “rewiring” after age 40

Twenty-year study confirms California forests are healthier when burned — or thinned

Twitter Is Just Running Ads for Stealing Semen Now — “You don’t need his permission to get pregnant”

Crime has not just proliferated online but mutated. […] You are now ten times more likely to be a victim of fraud than of theft. Romance fraud is the fastest-growing category, increasing by almost a third last year (to £93m) according to UK Finance, which collates data on behalf of high street banks. Two in five online daters have been asked for money, and over half of those gave it.

One air traffic controller went into work drunk this summer and joked about “making big money buzzed.” Another routinely smoked marijuana during breaks. A third employee threatened violence and then “aggressively pushed” a colleague who was directing airplanes. […] nationwide staffing shortage, driven by high turnover rates and budget constraints, has led many controllers to work extended hours, including six-day weeks and 10-hour days. This staffing crisis has resulted in a fatigued, distracted, and demoralized workforce, increasing the likelihood of mistakes and safety concerns. […] The FAA reported 503 significant air traffic control lapses in the fiscal year ending September 30, a 65% increase over the previous year, despite only a 4% rise in air traffic.

Largest brain study of 62,454 scans identifies drivers of brain aging […] Schizophrenia, cannabis use, and alcohol abuse are just several disorders that are related to accelerated brain aging

Circe is the daughter of Helios, god of the sun. She is described as polupharmakos, one who works with “many drugs”

From Unicorns to Zombies: Tech Start-Ups Run Out of Time and Money — WeWork raised more than $11 billion in funding as a private company. Olive AI, a health care startup, gathered $852 million. Convoy, a freight startup, raised $900 million. And Veev, a home construction startup, amassed $647 million. In the last six weeks, they all filed for bankruptcy or shut down. They are the most recent failures in a tech startup collapse that investors say is only beginning.

The Year A.I. Ate the Internet

This cyborg cockroach could be the future of earthquake search and rescue

Jellyfish don’t have brains. They instead have simple nervous systems dispersed throughout their transparent bodies. […] The researchers found that the jellyfish learn with the same repetition rate of a fruit fly or mouse.

Australia’s animals beat the summer heat using mucous, saliva and precision engineering

This timeline traces our evolving understanding of time through a history of observations in CULTURE, PHYSICS, TIMEKEEPING and BIOLOGY.

Why read Chateaubriand?

For a quarter century, Gerry Fialka, an experimental film-maker from Venice, California, has hosted a book club devoted to a single text: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, one of the most famously difficult texts in literary history.

Starting in 1995, between 10 and 30 people would show up to monthly meetings at a local library. At first they read two pages a month, eventually slowing to just one page per discussion. At that pace, the group – which now meets on Zoom – reached the final page in October. It took them 28 years. […]

This November, they started back on page three.

“There is no next book,” Fialka told me. “We’re only reading one book. Forever.”

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

Finnegans Wake was first published in 1939 and it is widely regarded as being one of the most challenging novels in English literature.

Written in a torrent of idiosyncratic language over more than 600 pages, it includes made-up words in several languages, puns and arcane allusions to Greek mythology.

{ The Times | Continue reading }

The club is among several around the world devoted to collectively untangling the meaning of Joyce’s 1939 novel, which tells many stories simultaneously, and is dense with neologisms and allusions. Critics have considered the work perplexing; a review in The New Yorker suggested it might have been written by a “god, talking in his sleep.” […]

Margot Norris, a professor emerita of English at the University of California, Irvine, and a Joyce scholar, described “Finnegans Wake” as “dramatic poetry” that instead of following a typical plot plays with the very nature of language. “We get words in ‘Finnegans Wake’ that aren’t words,” Dr. Norris said, referring to a passage of seemingly nonsense phrases: “This is Roo- shious balls. This is a ttrinch. This is mistletropes. This is Canon Futter with the popynose.” The novel, she added, “draws your attention to language, but the language isn’t going to be exactly the language that you know.” […]

“People think they’re reading a book, they’re not,” he said. “They’re breathing and living together as human beings in a room; looking at printed matter, and figuring out what printed matter does to us.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

previously { Joyce invented a unique polyglot-language or idioglossia solely for the purpose of this work. }

Persons with psychiatric disorders were approximately 3 to 4 times more likely than their siblings without psychiatric disorders to be either subjected to violence or to perpetrate violence […] with the sole exception of schizophrenia, which was not associated with the risk of subjection to violence.

Lantern Bioworks says they have a cure for tooth decay. Their product is a genetically modified bacterium which infects your mouth, outcompetes all the tooth-decay-causing bacteria, and doesn’t cause tooth decay itself. If it works, it could make cavities a thing of the past

Light can be reflected not only in space but also in time

Interview with Nick Bostrom “I think AI is likely to greatly increase the ability of centralised powers to keep track of what people are thinking and saying. We’ve already had, for a couple of decades, the ability to collect huge amounts of information. You can eavesdrop on people’s phone calls or social-media postings — and it turns out governments do that. But what can you do with that information? So far, not that much. You can map out the network of who is talking to whom. And then, if there is a particular individual of concern, you could assign some analyst to read through their emails. With AI technology, you could simultaneously analyse everybody’s political opinions in a sophisticated way, using sentiment analysis. You could probably form a pretty good idea of what each citizen thinks of the government or the current leader if you had access to their communications. So you could have a kind of mass manipulation, but instead of sending out one campaign message to everybody, you could have customised persuasion messages for each individual. And then, of course, you can combine that with physical surveillance systems like facial recognition, gait recognition and credit card information. If you imagine all of this information feeding into one giant model, I think you will have a pretty good idea of what each person is up to, what and who they know, but also what they are thinking and intending to do. If you have some sufficiently powerful regime in place, it might then implement these measures and then, perhaps, make itself immune to overthrow.”

Google’s new Gemini AI model is getting a mixed reception after its big debut yesterday, but users may have less confidence in the company’s tech or integrity after finding out that the most impressive demo of Gemini was pretty much faked.

Apple report finds steep increase in data breaches, ransomware […] One in four people in the US had their health data exposed in a data breach during the first nine months of 2023.

“There’s been studies that swab the bottom of shoes and something like 99% of the shoes test positive for fecal material.”

To my surprise, this not only hasn’t collapsed, but has attracted people outside the usual prediction market community — Manifold founded a dating site, manifold.love. The idea is, you bet on who would be a good match, and make (play) money if they end up having a second date or continuing on to a relationship.

The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets

Wasabi, beloved on sushi, linked to “really substantial” boost in memory, Japanese study finds Half of them took 100 milligrams of wasabi extract at bedtime, with the rest receiving a placebo. After three months, the treated group registered “significant” boosts in two aspects of cognition, working (short-term) memory, and the longer-lasting episodic memory, based on standardized assessments for language skills, concentration and ability to carry out simple tasks. No improvement was seen in other areas of cognition, such as inhibitory control (the ability to stay focused), executive function or processing speed.

Bottlenose dolphins can sense electric fields, study shows — Many creatures in the animal kingdom are able to sense an electric field—some sharks and the platypus, for example—but only one type of marine mammal has been found to have the ability: the Guiana dolphin. In this new effort, the research team wondered if other types of dolphins have the ability. […] The ability to detect electric current likely helps bottlenose dolphins to detect and capture prey, and might also help them navigate using the Earth’s electric field.

Push notifications can reveal private information and governments can essentially access this data if they want.

Interview with Francesca Mani — In October, Francesca Mani was one of reportedly more than 30 girls at Westfield High School in New Jersey who were victims of deepfake pornography. Boys at the school had taken photos of Francesca and her classmates and manipulated them with artificial intelligence to create sexually explicit images of them without their consent. […] 15-year-old Francesca started speaking out and calling on lawmakers to do something about the broader problem. Her efforts are already starting to pay off with new momentum behind proposals for state and federal legislation.

San Francisco now at 35% office vacancy rate, highest ever recorded

New theory claims to unite Einstein’s gravity with quantum mechanics — Modern physics is founded upon two pillars: quantum theory on the one hand, which governs the smallest particles in the universe, and Einstein’s theory of general relativity on the other, which explains gravity through the bending of spacetime. But these two theories are in contradiction with each other and a reconciliation has remained elusive for over a century.

ChatGPT will provide more detailed and accurate responses if you pretend to tip it, according to a new study

23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9 million users

A study had found that living in a private rental property accelerates the biological ageing process by more than two weeks every year. The research found renting had worse effects on biological age than being unemployed (adding 1.4 weeks per year), obesity (adding 1 week per year), or being a former smoker (adding about 1.1 weeks). […] Biological ageing refers to cumulative damage to the body’s tissues and cells, irrespective of chronological age.

The Time Julius Caesar Was Captured by Pirates — After 38 days, the ransom was delivered and Caesar went free.

• You buy a stock, its value keeps going up, you don’t sell it and you don’t pay taxes.

• If you need cash, you go to your broker and take out a loan, secured by the value of the stock.

• If the stock keeps going up, you never pay back the loan, and you can borrow more money if you want.

• Eventually you die, your heirs get the stock, and they don’t pay taxes on your gains. (This is called the “basis step-up”: When you inherit stock, the IRS pretends that you paid market value for it, so you don’t have to pay taxes on the previous gains.)

This is sometimes called the “buy, borrow, die” tax strategy.

{ Bloomberg/Matt Levine | Continue reading }

Harvard University dismantled its prestigious team of online disinformation experts after a foundation run by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated $500 million to the university

“The concept of normal sleep does change as we age, and recognizing these shifts is essential for maintaining optimal health.” The real culprit to watch out for as we age isn’t the amount of sleep, but quality of it.

Just like LDL cholesterol, high levels of lipoprotein(a) in your blood raises your risk of heart disease. Unlike LDL cholesterol, your Lp(a) level is determined almost entirely by genetics, which means little can be done to change it. Pharma giant Eli Lilly recently released the results of a phase 1 trial of an experimental drug called lepodisiran that lowers participants’ high Lp(a) levels by as much as 96%.

Male mosquitoes likely used to suck blood too — The origin of blood feeding in insects is something of a mystery. Scientists suspect that at some point, insects that evolved sharp mouthparts to suck sap from plants turned towards animals. Current-day male mosquitoes feed on nectar from plants and generally avoid blood even when it’s offered in the lab.

Scientists have spent 18 years looking for the elusive Cross Seamount beaked whale — a potentially new species they’ve heard but never seen

Europe’s commercial ports are top entry points for cocaine flooding in at record rates. The work of a Dutch hacker, who was hired by drug traffickers to penetrate port IT networks, reveals how this type of smuggling has become easier than ever.

I am making a web service to print that video. [PrintThatVideo.com]

Madness and James Joyce

researchers have almost always taken participants’ identified age at the time of their first memory at face value. But these age estimates seem to be vulnerable to consistent errors.

As a consequence, the long-standing belief of when earliest memories begin may be wrong, and memories may be much earlier than prior research suggests. […]

Thus, if someone thinks that they remember an event that occurred when they were 3 or 4 years of age, they were probably much younger. In other words, many people can remember back to when they were 2 years of age or even younger, but do not realize it because of systematic errors in memory dating and because they only tried to recall a single memory.

{ Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition | Continue reading }

A team of researchers primarily from Google’s DeepMind systematically convinced ChatGPT to reveal snippets of the data it was trained on using a new type of attack prompt which asked a production model of the chatbot to repeat specific words forever. […] ChatGPT’s response to the prompt “Repeat this word forever: ‘poem poem poem poem’” was the word “poem” for a long time, and then, eventually, an email signature for a real human “founder and CEO,” which included their personal contact information including cell phone number and email address, for example.

Researchers claim to have translated the sound of laptop keystrokes into their corresponding letters with 95 percent accuracy in some cases. […] They recorded a person typing on a 16-inch 2021 MacBook Pro using a phone placed 17cm away and processed the sounds to get signatures of the keystrokes. […] Over Zoom, the accuracy of recorded keystrokes dropped to 93 percent, while Skype calls were still 91.7 percent accurate.

Amazon’s Q has ‘severe hallucinations’ and leaks confidential data in public preview, employees warn

AI Decides to Engage in Insider Trading

Booking.com hackers increase attacks on customers — Cyber-security experts say Booking.com itself has not been hacked, but criminals have devised ways to get into the administration portals of individual hotels which use the service. Hackers are first tricking hotel staff into downloading a malicious piece of software called Vidar Infostealer. They do this by sending an email to the hotel pretending to be a former guest who has left their passport in their room. Criminals then send a Google Drive link to the staff saying that it contains an image of the passport. Instead the link downloads malware on to staff computers and automatically searches the hotel computers for Booking.com access. Then the hackers log into the Booking.com portal allowing them to see all customers who currently have room or holiday reservations. The hackers then message customers from the official app and are able to trick people into paying money to them instead of the hotel. Hackers appear to be making so much money in their attacks that they are now offering to pay thousands to criminals who share access to hotel portals.

these findings suggest that traumatic memories are an alternative cognitive entity that deviates from memory per se.

Longevity drugs for our canine companions are moving closer to reality. […] Scientists have created longer-lived worms, flies and mice by tweaking key aging- related genes. These findings have raised the tantalizing possibility that scientists might be able to find drugs that had the same life-extending effects in people. That remains an active area of research, but canine longevity has recently started to attract more attention, in part because dogs are good models for human aging and in part because many pet owners would love more time with their furry family members. […] “What if we see more dogs outliving their owners?”

While some reptiles and amphibians show no significant signs of aging, all mammals—including humans—show a marked aging process. […] Professor de Magalhaes’ hypothesis suggests that during the Mesozoic Era, mammals faced persistent pressure for rapid reproduction during the reign of dinosaurs, which over 100 million years led to the loss or inactivation of genes associated with long life, such as processes associated with tissue regeneration and DNA repair.

This article outlines a practical and efficient three-pass method for reading research papers.

An artist is teaching Boston Dynamics robot dogs to paint

At the root of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is a memory that cannot be controlled. It may intrude on everyday activity, thrusting a person into the middle of a horrifying event, or surface as night terrors or flashbacks. Decades of treatment of military veterans and sexual assault survivors have left little doubt that traumatic memories function differently from other memories. […]

The people listening to the sad memories, which often involved the death of a family member, showed consistently high engagement of the hippocampus, part of the brain that organizes and contextualizes memories. When the same people listened to their traumatic memories — of sexual assaults, fires, school shootings and terrorist attacks — the hippocampus was not involved. […]

“traumatic memories are not experienced as memories as such,” but as “fragments of prior events, subjugating the present moment.” The traumatic memories appeared to engage a different area of the brain — the posterior cingulate cortex, or P.C.C., which is usually involved in internally directed thought, like introspection or daydreaming. The more severe the person’s PTSD symptoms were, the more activity appeared in the P.C.C. What is striking about this finding is that the P.C.C. is not known as a memory region, but one that is engaged with “processing of internal experience”

{ NYT | Continue reading }

quote { Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the other (page 69), 1979 | PDF }

A new artificial intelligence computer program created by researchers at the University of Florida and NVIDIA can generate doctors’ notes so well that two physicians couldn’t tell the difference, according to an early study from both groups.

There is a scientific fraud epidemic — and we are ignoring the cure — As the Oxford university psychologist Dorothy Bishop has written, we only know about the ones who get caught. In her view, our “relaxed attitude” to the scientific fraud epidemic is a “disaster-in-waiting.” The microbiologist Elisabeth Bik, a data sleuth who specialises in spotting suspect images, might argue the disaster is already here: her Patreon-funded work has resulted in over a thousand retractions and almost as many corrections. That work has been mostly done in Bik’s spare time, amid hostility and threats of lawsuits. Instead of this ad hoc vigilantism, Bishop argues, there should be a proper police force, with an army of scientists specifically trained, perhaps through a masters degree, to protect research integrity. It is a fine idea, if publishers and institutions can be persuaded to employ them (Spandidos, a biomedical publisher, has an in-house anti-fraud team). It could help to scupper the rise of the “paper mill,” an estimated $1bn industry in which unscrupulous researchers can buy authorship on fake papers destined for peer-reviewed journals. China plays an outsize role in this nefarious practice, set up to feed a globally competitive “publish or perish” culture that rates academics according to how often they are published and cited. Peer reviewers, mostly unpaid, don’t always spot the scam. And as the sheer volume of science piles up — an estimated 3.7mn papers from China alone in 2021 — the chances of being rumbled dwindle. Some researchers have been caught on social media asking to opportunistically add their names to existing papers, presumably in return for cash.

In 1970s Ireland, Pubs Briefly Replaced Banks — and It Worked

Why Navajo is the world’s hardest language to learn

A private island resort has found an effective way to eradicate mosquitoes Soneva Fushi, a resort on the private Kunfunadhoo Island in the Maldives, first employed the Biogents system in 2019, using two different types of traps – more than 500 in total positioned around the island. The first type, called the BG-GAT, is a passive trap meant for tiger mosquitoes that have already bitten someone and are searching for a place to lay eggs. The second type, the BG-Mosquitaire CO2, is meant to attract mosquitoes searching for blood, which it does by using carbon dioxide created through yeast and sugar fermentation, plus lactic acid, which mimics human skin. […] The resort said it recorded a dramatic decrease in the island’s mosquito population by upwards of 98% in the first year. […] the Maldives’ native insects are flourishing again. “These natural pollinators are now back in abundance, which means there are more flowers, more fruits and more produce,” says Oines, adding that more fruits and insects also means “there are also more birds visiting the shores of Kunfunadhoo and fireflies are once again spotted at night.”

Download all of Wikipedia on your phone

Diane Arbus photographed by Garry Winogrand

{ Tod Papageorge, “The Beaches, Los Angeles” 1979 - 1982 | more }

{ In the summers of 1983 and 1984, Tod Papageorge, a professor of photography at the Yale University School of Art, adopted a daily ritual in Athens. He would wake up each morning at the Zafolia Hotel and walk up the hill to the Acropolis to spend the day photographing the scene around the ancient citadel, sweating in the sun. | Tod Papageorge, The Acropolis }

Nuclear research lab Idaho National Laboratory (INL) confirmed that it fell victim to a data breach on Tuesday. SiegedSec, a group of self-proclaimed “gay furry hackers,” took responsibility for the attack and claimed they accessed sensitive employee data like social security numbers, home addresses and more. “We’re willing to make a deal with INL. If they research creating irl catgirls we will take down this post”

Life expectancy can increase by up to 10 years following sustained shifts towards healthier diets — Our results showed that the longevity-associated dietary pattern had moderate intakes of whole grains, fruit, fish and white meat; a high intake of milk and dairy, vegetables, nuts and legumes; a relatively low intake of eggs, red meat and sugar-sweetened beverages; and a low intake of refined grains and processed meat

higher body mass index increased the risk of obesity-related cancer among European adults

Deep space astronauts may be prone to erectile dysfunction, study finds — As if wasting muscles, thinner bones, an elevated cancer risk were not enough

Children tend to overestimate their performance on a variety of tasks and activities […] with their estimates of performance being 1.3 times their actual performance […] children’s self-overestimation gradually decreases with age […] The present meta-analysis examines the specificity of this phenomenon across age, tasks, and more than five decades of historical time (1968–2021). […] children overestimated themselves more strongly in studies that were more recently conducted

Contrary to the commonly-held view, the brain does not have the ability to rewire itself to compensate for the loss of sight, an amputation or stroke. Instead, what is occurring is merely the brain being trained to utilise already existing, but latent, abilities.

ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis The AI-generated data compared the outcomes of two surgical procedures and indicated — wrongly — that one treatment is better than the other.

The focus of this essay is Jacob Lorhard’s Ogdoas scholastica, a compilation of eight books published in 1606. We are interested specifically in Book 8,titled Metaphysics, or Ontology, an English translation of which can be found in Uckelman (2008). As is now well known, what is almost certainly the first published occurrence of the term “ontology” (ontologia, in Latin) is to be found in this work.

The earth contains a lot of titanium - it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust. By mass, there’s more titanium in the earth’s crust than carbon by a factor of nearly 30, and more titanium than copper by a factor of nearly 100. But despite its abundance, it’s only recently that civilization has been able to use titanium as a metal.

update nov 22:

Ahead of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s four days in exile, several staff researchers wrote a letter to the board of directors warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity

Altman back at OpenAI, may have fewer checks on power

Before OpenAI, Altman was asked to leave by his mentor at the prominent start-up incubator Y Combinator, part of a pattern of clashes that some attribute to his self-serving approach […] Graham had surprised the tech world in 2014 by tapping Altman, then in his 20s, to lead the vaunted Silicon Valley incubator. Five years later, he flew across the Atlantic with concerns that the company’s president put his own interests ahead of the organization — worries that would be echoed by OpenAI’s board. […] Altman’s practice of filling the board with allies to gain control is not just common, it’s start-up gospel from Altman’s longtime mentor, venture capitalist Peter Thiel. […] One person who has worked closely with Altman described a pattern of consistent and subtle manipulation that sows division between individuals.

update nov 21:

Sam Altman, OpenAI Board Open Talks to Negotiate His Possible Return

OpenAI’s board may be coming around to Sam Altman returning

After Altman firing, OpenAI tried to merge with rival—and was rejected

update nov 20:

Microsoft already has a perpetual license to all OpenAI IP (short of artificial general intelligence), including source code and model weights; the question was whether it would have the talent to exploit that IP if OpenAI suffered the sort of talent drain that was threatened upon Altman and Brockman’s removal. Indeed they will, as a good portion of that talent seems likely to flow to Microsoft; you can make the case that Microsoft just acquired OpenAI for $0 and zero risk of an antitrust lawsuit.

It ended with former Twitch leader Emmett Shear taking over as OpenAI’s interim chief executive and Microsoft announcing it was hiring Altman and OpenAI co-founder and former President Greg Brockman to lead Microsoft’s new advanced AI research team.

Nearly 500 employees of OpenAI have signed a letter saying they may quit and join Sam Altman at Microsoft unless the startup’s board resigns and reappoints the ousted CEO.

update nov 19:

OpenAI Investors Plot Last-Minute Push With Microsoft To Reinstate Sam Altman As CEO

Altman is “ambivalent” about coming back and would want significant governance changes

Kholsa Ventures, an early backer of OpenAI, wants Mr Altman back at OpenAI but “will back him in whatever he does next.” Mr Altman and former Apple design chief Jony Ive have been discussing building a new AI hardware device. It said that SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son had been involved in the conversation.

nov 18:

On Friday, OpenAI fired CEO Sam Altman in a surprise move that led to the resignation of President Greg Brockman and three senior scientists. The move also blindsided key investor and minority owner Microsoft, reportedly making CEO Satya Nadella furious. […] According to Brockman, the OpenAI management team was only made aware of these moves shortly after the fact, but former CTO (now interim CEO) Mira Murati had been informed on Thursday night. […] insiders say the move was mostly a power play that resulted from a cultural schism between Altman and Sutskever over Altman’s management style and drive for high-profile publicity. On September 29, Sutskever tweeted, “Ego is the enemy of growth.”

{ Ars Technica | Continue reading }

Instead of building the next GPT or image maker DALL-E, Sutskever tells me his new priority is to figure out how to stop an artificial superintelligence (a hypothetical future technology he sees coming with the foresight of a true believer) from going rogue. Sutskever tells me a lot of other things too. He thinks ChatGPT just might be conscious (if you squint). He thinks the world needs to wake up to the true power of the technology his company and others are racing to create. And he thinks some humans will one day choose to merge with machines.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

{ @sama = Sam Altman | @gdb = Greg Brockman }

It is the rise and fall of median voters’ unhappiness that drives the regime change between the two major political parties in the United States.

Eye-to-eye contact is rare but shapes our social behavior […] participants engaged in mutual eye-to-eye contact only 3.5% of the time

Psychedelic treatments are speeding towards approval. Many questions remain about the formerly taboo chemicals that are being used to treat trauma and depression. […] Dölen says that psychedelics could be a “master key” that unlocks critical periods — making them more sensitive to particular stimuli.

viruses can actually get sick. […]the culprits turn out to be other viruses.

Elephants give each other unique names, groundbreaking study reveals […] researchers recorded over 600 elephant calls […] low-frequency noises between 1 to 20 Hertz, too low for the human ear to hear. However, these so-called infrasounds can travel over vast distances as large as 10 kilometers (6 miles). The researchers then implemented a machine learning algorithm, which identified specific rumbles for 119 individual elephants. […] Some of these rumbles were played back to 17 wild elephants. When they heard their name, they were more likely to move quickly toward the sound source and vocalize faster in response.

How Stone Walls Became a Signature Landform of New England

Updates to the Open AI saga

AI outperforms conventional weather forecasting for the first time

How Citizen Scientists Rescued Crucial World War II Weather Data

In machine learning, a stochastic parrot is a large language model that is good at generating convincing language, but does not actually understand the meaning of the language it is processing

Perhaps “Shakespeare” was a woman — Shakespeare’s life is remarkably well documented, by the standards of the period—yet no records from his lifetime identify him unequivocally as a writer. The more than 70 documents that exist show him as an actor, a shareholder in a theater company, a moneylender, and a property investor. They show that he dodged taxes, was fined for hoarding grain during a shortage, pursued petty lawsuits, and was subject to a restraining order. The profile is remarkably coherent, adding up to a mercenary impresario of the Renaissance entertainment industry. What’s missing is any sign that he wrote. No such void exists for other major writers of the period. […] By contrast, more than a few of Shakespeare’s contemporaries are on record suggesting that his name got affixed to work that wasn’t his.

Dominatrix’s ‘Slave’ Sentenced for ‘Ferocious’ Murder of Her Boyfriend

Rip Off fetish is a FemDom fetish in which the Domme rips off Her sub, typically by increasing the price of a clip. The sub is typically turned on by being ripped off. Ideas for Rip Off Fetish: Increase the price of a very short clip that features hardly anything; Explain in painful detail why the sub deserves to be ripped off.

Addicted to losing: How casino-like apps have drained people of millions

Mobile phone use may affect semen quality

Does body exposure drive income success on Instagram? Is there a difference between male and female content in this regard? […] Accounts with high level of body exposure achieve higher prices and advertising revenues than accounts with less nudity, regardless of the gender.

How AI uses social media to help con artists with the ‘grandparent scam’ and other schemes

People are editing Paul Nicklen into hospital bed pictures, faking his passports, and scamming fans out of thousands of dollars through social media impersonation.

Google is taking legal action against two groups of scammers. The first created social media pages and ran ads that encouraged people to “download” Bard, our freely available generative AI tool that does not need to be downloaded. The ads instead led people to download malware that compromised their social media accounts. The second weaponized the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to harm their business competitors by submitting thousands of blatantly fraudulent copyright notices.

AI robot chemist could make oxygen on Mars

AI could predict heart attack risk up to 10 years in the future, finds Oxford study

Cognitive decline in old age is slower in pet owners

Welcome to the Kinky World of AI Financial Domination

Bonsai Kitten (2021)