^ArchiveArticles

Black hole somewere in space. Science fiction. Dramatic space background. Elements of this image were furnished by NASA

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Author
News
Date
July 3, 2021

Categorized
Arts & Culture

Tagged
Derek Abel, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Luke Reeves, Science fiction, Wreck of the Hesperus (poem), Zahlee Moore, Zoe (film)}

A Choice Between Saving One’s Child and Oneself — Sci-fi Saturday

_{Is life always so simple? Well, we shall see} _{News

July 3, 2021

15

Arts & Culture}

“Zoe” at DUST by Derek Abel, 2019 and uploaded to DUST, June 21, 2021, 4:58 min) ZOE and her FATHER have lived in space all their lives. The space station they call home is about to explode. Their only chance of survival is an old escape pod but there’s only room for one. Review: The film is very well done technically and the actors are veterans. Zoe is played by Zahlee Moore and her dad by Luke Reeves. That said, the ending seemed too saccharine, too soft. No real sacrifice was required. Not like “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) which gives a much better sense of what would probably really happen. In “The Wreck… “: Read More ›

Left-handed woman writing in notebook at wooden table, closeup

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post

Author
News
Date
July 3, 2021

Categorized
Arts & Culture, Science

Tagged
Chirality, Will Lockett}

Aliens Who Landed Here Would Just Starve, Science Writer Predicts

_{We tend to assume that any life form could live with our complicated chemistry but what if — fundamentally — not?} _{News

July 3, 2021

6

Arts & Culture, Science}

NASA has — quite recently — stopped being snarky about aliens. That does not make them true. It just means we don’t have to live with the snark now. Which makes it easier to think. Will Lockett makes the point at Medium that if extraterrestrials did land on Earth, they would probablystarve to death: The way life forms work (at least, the only ones we know) involves chirality: All living organisms are based upon certain ‘mirror’ isomers of amino acids. Although normal chemical reactions produce right and left mirrors in equal amounts, often called a ‘racemic mixture’, the proteins which constitute the organelles in living cells are composed entirely of right handed forms of sugars and left handed forms of Read More ›

Frightened guilty dog pug looking sad at camera.

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Author
News
Date
July 2, 2021

Categorized
Natural Intelligence, Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind

Tagged
Animal emotions, Anxiety, emotions, Fear, Joseph LeDoux, Lisa Feldman Barrett}

Is Fear the Same Thing for a Human Being as for an Animal?

_{Psychiatrist Joseph Ledoux has thought about that; it’s a complex problem} _{News

July 2, 2021

4

Natural Intelligence, Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind}

Recently, we looked at consciousness from the perspective of Joseph LeDoux’s recent book, A Deep History of Ourselves (1919). Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett situates his work at Nature, offering an interesting qualification: LeDoux, an academic at New York University in New York City, is best known for his research on fear, and for carefully mapping the brain circuit centred on the amygdala — a knot of neurons in the medial temporal lobe. The amygdala, he showed, has a crucial role in non-conscious, defensive behaviour responses such as freezing or fleeing. His conclusion, based on the assumption that all mammalian amygdala circuits are structurally similar, was that all mammals (including humans) share these responses. He described this work in The Emotional Read More ›

concept of Different emotions drawn on colorfull cubes, wooden background.

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Author
News
Date
July 2, 2021

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Peer Review, Philosophy of Mind

Tagged
Emotional recognition technology (ERT), John P. Desmond, Lisa Feldman Barrett}

Emotion Recognition Software Use Spreads While Science Is Doubted

_{Emotional recognition software has been coming under fire for misuse and racial bias for some time} _{News

July 2, 2021

4

Artificial Intelligence, Peer Review, Philosophy of Mind}

An editor at AI Trends notes The global emotion detection and recognition market is projected to grow to $37.1 billion by 2026, up from an estimated $19.5 billion in 2020, according to a recent report from MarketsandMarkets. North America is home to the largest market. John P. Desmond, “Market for Emotion Recognition Projected to Grow as Some Question Science” at AI Trends (June 24, 2021) But the software has been coming under fire for misuse and racial bias for some time: “How people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation,” stated the report, from a team of researchers led by Lisa Feldman Barrett, of Northeastern University, Read More ›

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
July 2, 2021

Categorized
Medicine and Health, Science

Tagged
Adam Shapiro, Anthony Fauci, Coronavirus, COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis, design inference, Explanatory Filter, Kristian Andersen, Michael Behe, SARS-CoV-2, William Dembski}

COVID-19’s Origins: Uses and Misuses of the Explanatory Filter

_{How a critic of intelligent design theory misunderstands the application of design inference} _{Eric Holloway

July 2, 2021

8

Medicine and Health, Science}

Last year in July a prominent critic of intelligent design theory, Dr. Adam Shapiro, took the Discovery Institute to task for not debunking the lab origin theory. He says, Behe seems to miss an opportunity to demonstrate that intelligent design theory shows how those pathways are not irreducible complex. Adam Shapiro, “Did Intelligent Design Just Miss Its Corona Moment?” at American Scientist and, How better to demonstrate its own apolitical nature than to apply its scientific process to debunk the Chinese lab myth? Adam Shapiro, “Did Intelligent Design Just Miss Its Corona Moment?” at American Scientist First of all, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of ID. ID theory is only resilient against false positives, not false negatives, as Dr. Ewert Read More ›

Monument Of Chinese Communist Party At Tiananmen Square

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Author
Heather Zeiger
Date
July 1, 2021

Categorized
Censorship

Tagged
Andrew Nathan, China, Chinese Communist Party (CCP), History (rewriting history China), Kai Strittmatter, Kiwi Chow, Mao Zedong, Tienanmen Square (massacre), Wolf Warriors, Xi Jinping}

Chinese Communist Party: 100 Years of Erasing, Rewriting History

_{Tiananmen Square: Anyone born after 1980 has no idea that the People’s Liberation Army turned against the demonstrators in front of a gate whose name is “Heavenly Peace.”} _{Heather Zeiger

July 1, 2021

8

Censorship}

“The regime wants us to forget. I hope to use my camera to remember…We are resisting in our memories. We are resisting forgetfulness.” – Kiwi Chow, documentary filmmaker in Hong Kong, referring to the events in Hong Kong in 2019, “In a Scarred Hong Kong, ‘Beautiful Things Are Gone’” Reuters, June 29, 2021 The centenary commemoration of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Mao Zedong in 1921 commemorates a myth. The party was founded on July 23, but this year’s celebrations commenced July 1, which coincides with the date of the British handover of Hong Kong in 1997. According to China Digital Times, July 1 has a nice symmetry to the dates of the founding of the Read More ›

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Author
Richard W. Stevens
Date
July 1, 2021

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Law

Tagged
Artificial Intelligence, IEEE, Intellectual Property, patent law, Robots, Ryan Abbott, The Reasonable Robot (book)}

Can a Robot Hold a Patent?

_{The boring answer is no, but the question raises intriguing thoughts about AI and intellectual property law} _{Richard W. Stevens

July 1, 2021

10

Artificial Intelligence, Law}

Since the late 1800s, people have been intrigued by robots. There’s something strange, wonderful, but sometimes scary about walking, talking, thinking machines, especially when in human form. Talking about “whether a robot can hold a patent” is bound to intrigue humanoids. Mute the Robot Sound Bite In June 2021, we started considering the provocatively titled podcast transcript, “Can a Robot Be Arrested? Hold a Patent? Pay Income Taxes?”, posted on the IEEE Spectrum site. Steven Cherry interviewed Ryan Abbott, physician, lawyer, and professor, about these topics and referencing his 2019 book, The Reasonable Robot: Artificial Intelligence and the Law. Our previous discussion, “Can a Robot be Arrested and Prosecuted?”, addressed criminal liability for crimes committed by artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Now we consider: “Can a Read More ›

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Author
News
Date
June 30, 2021

Categorized
Philosophy of Mind}

Consciousness Is Mainly a Problem for Materialists

_{If you are not a materialist, there is no problem with understanding consciousness} _{News

June 30, 2021

4

Philosophy of Mind}

Psychiatrist Joseph LeDoux, author of The Deep History of Ourselves (2019), offers an extract at Aeon, musing on the mystery of consciousness. In a way, his approach typifies the problem with the wholly materialist approach to the mind and the brain: Like all living things, humans are organisms, biological entities that function as physiological aggregates whose constituent parts operate with a high degree of cooperation and a low degree of conflict. But unlike other organisms, humans possess a rogue component – a brain network that can, at will, choose to defect and undermine the survival mission and purpose of the rest of the body. This is the network that underlies human consciousness, and especially our capacity for autonoetic, or reflective, Read More ›

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Author
Gary Smith
Date
June 30, 2021

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Arts & Culture

Tagged
Artificial Intelligence, CLIP, Ernest Davis, Gary Marcus, GPT-3, language translation programs, Nigel Richards, Open AI, Winograd Schema Challenge}

The Great American Novel Will Not be Written by a Computer

_{It takes more than statistical genius to understand words and create works of art} _{Gary Smith

June 30, 2021

5

Artificial Intelligence, Arts & Culture}

I’ve written before about how computer algorithms are like Nigel Richards, the New Zealander who has won multiple French-language Scrabble tournaments even though he does not understand the words he is spelling. Computers can similarly manipulate words in many useful ways — e.g., spellchecking, searching, alphabetizing — without any understanding of the words they are manipulating. To know what words mean, they would have to understand the world we live in. They don’t. One example is their struggles with the Winograd schema challenge — recognizing what it refers to in a sentence. Another example is the inability to answer simple questions like, “Is it safe to walk downstairs backwards if I close my eyes?” A third type of example is the brittleness of language translation programs. Yet another Read More ›

Space and Galaxy light speed travel. Elements of this image furnished by NASA.

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Author
Robert J. Marks
Date
June 29, 2021

Categorized
Mathematics, Science

Tagged
A Treatise on Probability (book), Big Bang, Conservation of Information (COI), Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics (book), Jacob Bernoulli, John Maynard Keynes, No Free Lunch theorems, Principle of Insufficient Reason (PrOIR)}

No Free Lunches: Bernoulli is Right, Keynes is Wrong

_{What the Big Bang teaches us about nothing} _{Robert J. Marks

June 29, 2021

5

Mathematics, Science}

Jacob Bernoulli made a now obvious observation about probability over three-and-a-half centuries ago: If nothing is known about the outcome of a random event, all outcomes can be assumed to be equally probable. Bernoulli’s Principle of Insufficient Reason (PrOIR) is commonly used. Throw a fair die. There are six outcomes, one for each face of the cube. The chance of getting five pips showing on the roll of a die is therefore one sixth. If a million lottery tickets are sold and you buy one ticket, the chances of winning are one in a million. This reasoning is intuitively obvious. The assumption about the die is wrong if the die is loaded. But you don’t know that. You know nothing. So Bernoulli’s PrIOR Read More ›

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Author
Jonathan Bartlett
Date
June 29, 2021

Categorized
Business and Finance, Economics

Tagged
bitcoin, Bitfinex, cryptocurrencies, Dogecoin, Etherium, Michael Burry, N.N. Taleb, NFT, Stablecoins, Tether}

June Crypto Mayhem: A Tough Month for Cryptocurrencies

_{What has caused the dramatic drops in Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Etherium, and NFT values?} _{Jonathan Bartlett

June 29, 2021

5

Business and Finance, Economics}

The month of June has been tough on the world of cryptocurrencies, with the past week being especially harsh. It is difficult to pin down a single, specific cause behind the pullback, as a variety of new and nagging concerns about the viability of cryptocurrencies continue to mount. As for the price action, Bitcoin dropped like a rock down below $30k this past week, less than half of what its high in the last year has been. The meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin lost over 60% of its value, down to $0.24 from a high of $0.72 earlier this year. Etherium has been cut in half, as have many other cryptocurrencies. The NFT market, whose enthusiasm has ridden on the back of Read More ›

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Author
Caitlin Cory
Date
June 28, 2021

Categorized
Censorship, Social Media, Technocracy

Tagged
Amazon, apple, Facebook, Google, Josh Hawley, robber barons, The Tyranny of Big Tech (book), Theodore Roosevelt, Twitter, Woodrow Wilson}

A Book Review: The Tyranny of Big Tech

_{A beautiful defense of the common man and woman against a technological elite} _{Caitlin Cory

June 28, 2021

5

Censorship, Social Media, Technocracy}

“Our republic has never been more hierarchical, more riven by class, more managed by an elite than it is today,” writes Josh Hawley in The Tyranny of Big Tech. Who might that elite be? According to Hawley, it’s not our politicians, our lawyers, our Ivy League graduates, or our Hollywood celebrities. It’s Big Tech – those big names like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, and Google that have embedded themselves in our lives to an almost irreversible degree. Hawley has spent his career as a U.S. Senator, and formerly as Missouri’s Attorney General, holding Big Tech accountable where others don’t dare tread. In investigations, in legislation, and now in this book, Hawley has confronted the antitrust and privacy violations committed by Read More ›

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post

Author
News
Date
June 28, 2021

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Medicine and Health

Tagged
AlphaGo, AlphaGoZero, AlphaZero, chess, Gary Smith', Go, Jeffry Funk, Joshua Sokol, Pedros Domingos}

Why AI Chess Champs Are Not Taking Over the World

_{Mastery of closed-world games does not mean that AI can take over and run everything} _{News

June 28, 2021

4

Artificial Intelligence, Medicine and Health}

At one time, the AI that beat humans at chess calculated strategies by studying the outcomes of human moves. Then, it turned out, there was a faster way: In October 2017, the DeepMind team published details of a new Go-playing system, AlphaGo Zero, that studied no human games at all. Instead, it started with the game’s rules and played against itself. The first moves it made were completely random. After each game, it folded in new knowledge of what led to a win and what didn’t. At the end of these scrimmages, AlphaGo Zero went head to head with the already superhuman version of AlphaGo that had beaten Lee Sedol. It won 100 games to zero. Joshua Sokol, “Why Artificial Read More ›

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Author
News
Date
June 28, 2021

Categorized
Applied Intelligence, Arts & Culture

Tagged
Gerrit Lundens, Night Watch (painting), Rembrandt}

AI Restores Lost Parts of Rembrandt’s Night Watch

_{The iconic painting’s edges were cut off to fit a certain space in a town hall in 1715 and the cut parts were never recovered} _{News

June 28, 2021

3

Applied Intelligence, Arts & Culture}

The Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) is practically synonymous with the Old Masters school of painting in the Western world. But one of his paintings did not fare well over the years. As Isis Davis-Marks at the Smithsonian Magazine tells it, In 1642, Rembrandt van Rijn completed a dynamic painting called The Night Watch, which depicts the captain of an Amsterdam city militia urging his men into battle. But in 1715 someone cut all four sides of the canvas to hang it on a wall in Amsterdam’s Town Hall, and the strips seemingly vanished into thin air. Isis Davis-Marks, “Lost Edges of Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’ Are Restored Using Artificial Intelligence” at Smithsonian Magazine (June 25, 2021) Here’s what’s left: Read More ›

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Author
News
Date
June 27, 2021

Categorized
Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind, Science

Tagged
Brain organoids, Cooking (and human brain), Fats (and human brain), Food processing (and human brain), Herbs (and human brain), Human brain (size), Mini-brains (brain organoids), Nuts (and human brain), Starches (and human brain)}

Do Larger Brains Make Us Human? Is That All?

_{Brain organoid studies suggest a “key genetic switch” that makes human brains grow larger than ape brains} _{News

June 27, 2021

5

Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind, Science}

In a study of “mini-brains” (brain organoids), the size of a pea, grown in a dish and incapable of further development, researchers have discovered a “key genetic switch” that makes human brains grow three times larger than primate brains: This new research, published in the journal Cell, used brain organoids to show that this transition occurs more slowly in humans compared to gorillas and chimpanzees – over seven days, compared to five. The progenitor cells in human brain organoids not only retained their cylindrical shape for longer, but also split more frequently so more cells were produced. This was linked to a gene called ZEB2, which switches on sooner in gorilla brain organoids than in human. By delaying the effects Read More ›

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post

Author
News
Date
June 27, 2021

Categorized
Ethics, Medicine and Health, Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind

Tagged
Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), China, Dentsu, Depression (BCI and depression), Diego Salinas, Neuralink, Psychiatry (and BCI)}

Can Implanted Computer Chips Cure Depression?

_{Brain–computer interface (BCI) is promising for paralysis and prosthetics but raises concerns in the treatment of depression} _{News

June 27, 2021

5

Ethics, Medicine and Health, Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind}

Brain computer interface (BCI) shows promise in treating paralysis or enabling prosthetics to work almost naturally. But BCI for treating depression sounds like hype: Say goodbye to pills, therapy, and all that. With such gloomy prospects, it was only a matter of time scientists realized there must be better ways to treat depression rather than pills. After all, drugs only work because they act on certain brain regions to modulate the concentration of certain neurotransmitters, like serotonin or dopamine. Therefore, in the end, the regulation of mood depends on stimulating brain signals in certain parts of the brain — that is, neurons firing — and this can be done more accurately by just zapping the neurons directly with electricity. Diego Read More ›

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Author
News
Date
June 26, 2021

Categorized
Arts & Culture, Social Media

Tagged
Damian Joseph Quinn, Happy Hunting (film), Jess Wolinsky, Jordan M. Hahn, Science fiction, Social media (obsession)}

Killing People for “Likes” on an Alien Planet: Sci-fi Saturday

_{If only this crisp tale didn’t sound so much like the social media we actually know} _{News

June 26, 2021

15

Arts & Culture, Social Media}

“Happy Hunting” at DUST by Jess Wolinsky and Jordan M. Hahn (June 22, 2021 at DUST, 2020 at IMDB, 8:06 min) Content warning: Suicide depiction Happy Hunting is a story of Tyler (also known as @66Shadow), an influencer who will do anything to gain followers. In his quest for fame, he now finds himself live-streaming on the nearby planet Proxima Centauri B, where researchers infected with a cosmetic abnormality are hunted for sport, to break @SgtSurge’s kill record. Tyler hunts with precise skill, allowing him to track and kill three victims despite their pleas for mercy, all while hamming it up for his drone companion, who live-streams his every move. He is then attacked by a potential fourth victim, catching Read More ›

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post

Author
News
Date
June 26, 2021

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Military, Science

Tagged
Alien robotic probes, John Gertz, Pentagon, Unidentified aerial phenomena (UABs), Unidentified flying objects (UFOs)}

The Pentagon’s UAP (UFO) Report Signals a Sharp Attitude Change

_{The brass have committed themselves to going “wherever the data takes us”} _{News

June 26, 2021

4

Artificial Intelligence, Military, Science}

As promised, the Pentagon released its UAP (UFO) report. And what did they find? First, they … lack sufficient data to determine the nature of mysterious flying objects observed by American military pilots including whether they are advanced earthly technologies, atmospherics or of an extraterrestrial origin. Steve Gorman, “Watershed U.S. UFO report does not rule out extraterrestrial origin” at Reuters via Yahoo News (June 25, 2021) But read on: The report marked a turning point for the U.S. government after the military spent decades deflecting, debunking and discrediting observations of unidentified flying objects and “flying saucers” dating back to the 1940s. Steve Gorman, “Watershed U.S. UFO report does not rule out extraterrestrial origin” at Reuters via Yahoo News (June 25, Read More ›