A Physical Theory For When the Brain Performs Best | Quanta Magazine

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A Physical Theory For When the Brain Performs Best | Quanta Magazine Video: The phenomenon of criticality can explain the sudden emergence of new properties in a wide range of complex systems, from avalanches to flocks of birds to stock market crashes. Neuroscientists are now seeking evidence that criticality is at work in the brain's networks of neurons. Over the last few decades, an idea called the critical brain hypothesis has been helping neuroscientists understand how the human brain operates as an information-processing powerhouse. It posits that the brain is always teetering between two phases, or modes, of activity: a random phase, where it is mostly inactive, and an ordered phase, where it is overactive and on the verge of a seizure. The hypothesis predicts that between these phases, at a sweet spot known as the critical point, the brain has a perfect balance of variety and structure and can produce the most complex and information-rich activity patterns. This state allows the brain to optimize multiple information processing tasks, from carrying out computations to transmitting and storing information, all at the same time. Continued here

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ChatGPT Passed an MBA Exam. What’s Next? Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Ethan Mollick weigh in on ChatGPT and why the controversial software has limitless potential to improve education, business, and a range of industries. Wharton’s Christian Terwiesch talks with Wharton Business Daily on SiriusXM about how ChatGPT performed on his exam. Continued here

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The details of the situation shape whether a sexual assault occurs | Psyche Ideas is a professor in the Department of Psychology and in the Policy School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, New Jersey. is an assistant professor of psychology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, New York.  Continued here

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U.S. Restores Protections for Alaska’s Tongass National Forest A new federal rule restricts road construction and logging in the country's largest national forest Road construction and timber harvest will be restricted in more than nine million acres of roadless areas in southeast Alaska's Tongass National Forest, the United States Department of Agriculture announced last week. Continued here

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A Radioactive Capsule Is Lost in Western Australia's Desert Authorities in Western Australia are searching for a tiny, radioactive capsule believed to have been lost in transit earlier this month. On Tuesday, the country’s nuclear safety agency joined the effort to find the substance, which poses a public health threat. The radioactive silver cylinder is smaller than a dime—just six millimeters in diameter and eight millimeters tall—but exposure to it could cause burns and radiation sickness. And it’s missing somewhere along a stretch of desert roughly the length of California’s coastline. Continued here

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An AI Filter Revealed My Secret Self I’m a futuristic Viking in glinting armor and a silver headpiece that spikes around my head like the wings of an avenging angel. My hair, longer and far more lustrous than in real life, billows against a fiery blurred background. I’m staring at the camera with bravado, exuding the sort of haughty confidence I’m pretty sure I’ve never felt before. Some of my features—my nose, my brows—are slightly elongated, while others are truncated. And I note—with no small sense of delight—that I sort of look like Michelle Yeoh?  The AI portrait is me, and it’s most definitely not me. Armor and blazing-orange sunsets aside, the features in the portrait are too smooth, the imperfections blotted out with a virtual airbrush, sharpness and contrast amped up to unlikely extremes. The whole balance of facial composition is off, and the effect is mildly eerie. Yet who would not be intrigued by such an otherworldly presentation of their own face? Continued here

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How Analytics Can Boost Competitiveness in Sports Wharton’s Eric Bradlow and FanDuel CEO Amy Howe discuss how analytics can benefit teams, players, and customers while ensuring the necessary data protections. Data and analytics are increasingly being used to help maximize fan experiences and for team owners to determine the value of players, but also to enhance player safety. The recent episode of Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin going into cardiac arrest brought into focus the role analytics could play in spotting player injuries in real time to take remedial action. At the same time, the sports industry must ensure the security and privacy of player and customer data, according to participants in a Wharton panel discussion on January 19. Continued here

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The Difference Between Speaking and Thinking The human brain could explain why AI programs are so good at writing grammatically superb nonsense. Language is commonly understood to be the “stuff” of thought. People “talk it out” and “speak their mind,” follow “trains of thought” or “streams of consciousness.” Some of the pinnacles of human creation—music, geometry, computer programming—are framed as metaphorical languages. The underlying assumption is that the brain processes the world and our experience of it through a progression of words. And this supposed link between language and thinking is a large part of what makes ChatGPT and similar programs so uncanny: The ability of AI to answer any prompt with human-sounding language can suggest that the machine has some sort of intent, even sentience. Continued here

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Havasu Falls Is Reopening After Three Years After three years, the Havasupai Tribe is reopening the legendary Havasu Falls to the public. Located near the Grand Canyon along a tributary of the Colorado River, the remote site is known and loved for its pristine turquoise waters and cascading waterfall set against the red rock of the Havasu Canyon. The falls were closed in 2020 due to Covid-19 safety concerns. Indigenous communities were disproportionately affected by the virus in the pandemic’s early months, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported as the time.   Continued here

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How Memphis’s Policing Strategy Went So Wrong David A. Graham discusses what he saw and heard in the city after video footage was released of Tyre Nichols’s fatal beating by police. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Continued here

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Should you sing when suffering from a cold? I'm listening to the director of my London choir demonstrate a singing scale, starting with a low humming noise before opening his mouth fully to produce a resonant "aah" sound. As the choir joins in to warm up our voices, I imagine my vocal cords vibrating up to 2,000 times per second, deep within my larynx. After suffering from flu and losing my voice completely over Christmas, I was hesitant about attending my first choir rehearsal. It is accepted wisdom in many circles, that if you are suffering from a cold, it's best not to sing at all. But how true is this? How does singing with a cold impact your voice? And how do you help your voice heal if it's recovering from illness? Continued here

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Will an AI Be the First to Discover Alien Life? SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is deploying machine-learning algorithms that filter out Earthly interference and spot signals humans might miss From the hills of West Virginia to the flats of rural Australia, some of the world’s largest telescopes are listening for signals from distant alien civilizations. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, known as SETI, is an effort to find artificial-looking electromagnetic-radiation signals that might have come from a technologically advanced civilization in a far-away solar system. A study published today1 describes one of several efforts to use machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence (AI), to help astronomers sift quickly through the reams of data such surveys yield. As AI reshapes many scientific fields, what promise does it hold for the search for life beyond Earth? Continued here

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Raycon's Everyday Earbuds Aren't Just for YouTubers If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED I watch a lot of YouTube. Whether I'm nerding out on my hobbies, or wasting time watching people build tunnels under their houses, the Google-owned video service is streaming somewhere at all hours. Continued here

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This Is the Kind of Music You Should Listen to at Work They say that listening to Mozart makes a person smarter, but it is not only classical music that boosts mental activity. Nine out of 10 workers perform better  when listening to music, according to a study that found 88pc of participants produced their most accurate test results and 81pc completed their fastest work when music was playing. Continued here

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How Water Finally Became a Climate Change Priority A collaboration helped convince policy makers at COP27 to finally prioritize water as a critical resource affected by climate change. It was a win long in the making Last year, the world watched as punishing heat and drought killed people in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and floods destroyed parts of Pakistan and the Philippines. This year, we’ve seen torrential rain drowning sections of coastal California. These events underscore the devastating role water can play in a changing climate, something I have been studying for the last two decades. Continued here

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Lisa Loring, the Original Wednesday Addams, Dies at 64 Lisa Loring, best known as the original actress to play Wednesday Addams in the 1960s television series “The Addams Family,” died on Saturday at age 64, reports Variety’s Pat Saperstein.  Based on recurring characters from the New Yorker cartoons of Charles Addams, the macabre sitcom “The Addams Family” aired for two seasons between 1964 and 1966. Loring captured the attention of households around the world as the young, pigtailed Wednesday Addams, the creepy yet adorable child of Gomez and Morticia, who kept a black widow spider and a lizard named Lucifer as pets. In one particularly memorable moment, she puts on a record and teaches the family’s butler, Lurch, how to dance. Continued here

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J. Kenji López-Alt Thinks You’ll Be Fine With an Induction Stove Gas stoves are a new front in the culture wars. This month, an errant comment from a bureaucrat caused a full-blown conservative panic over whether such stoves would be banned, eventually prompting a White House statement that effectively walked the whole thing back. Amid all this posturing, a more practical concern is getting lost: How much does gas actually matter when it comes to cooking? Are there some dishes that just can’t be made on electric stoves? Continued here

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AI Predicts Warming Will Surpass 1.5 C in a Decade New research from artificial intelligence projects that global warming will hit the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius somewhere between 2033 and 2035 Scientists have long known the world is running out of time to hit its international climate targets. Now, artificial intelligence has arrived at a similar conclusion. Continued here

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How the Supreme Court Protects Police Officers On the afternoon of February 8, 2018, more than two dozen law-enforcement officers crowded into a conference room in the Henry County Sheriff’s Office, on the outskirts of Atlanta. They were preparing to execute a no-knock warrant at 305 English Road, the home of a suspected drug dealer who had been under investigation for almost two years. The special agent leading the briefing told the team that 305 English Road was a small house with off-white siding and several broken-down cars out front, showed them an aerial photograph of the house, and gave them turn-by-turn directions to get there. When the officers arrived at their destination, the house described in the warrant—305 English Road, run-down, off-white, with cars strewn across the yard—was right in front of them. But they walked past it to a different house, a tidy yellow one, 40 yards away. The house at 303 English Road looked nothing like the house described in the briefing and in the warrant. Yet, less than a minute after getting out of their cars, the officers set off flash grenades and used battering rams to smash open all three doors of the home. Continued here

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Outdoor Dining Is Doomed These days, strolling through downtown New York City, where I live, is like picking your way through the aftermath of a party. In many ways, it is exactly that: The limp string lights, trash-strewn puddles, and splintering plywood are all relics of the raucous celebration known as outdoor dining. These wooden “streeteries” and the makeshift tables lining sidewalks first popped up during the depths of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, when restaurants needed to get diners back in their seats. It was novel, creative, spontaneous—and fun during a time when there wasn’t much fun to be had. For a while, outdoor dining really seemed as though it could outlast the pandemic. Just last October, New York Magazine wrote that it would stick around, “probably permanently.” Continued here

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FBI Takes Down Hive Criminal Ransomware Group A cybersecurity expert explains how the FBI’s operation against the ransomware group Hive will impact the rest of this criminal industry Ransomware attacks, in which hackers encrypt a computer system and then extort victims to pay up or risk losing access to their data, have harmed targets ranging from individuals to powerful entities. Victims have included large companies such as the meat supplier JBS, major infrastructure such as the Colonial Pipeline and entire countries such as Costa Rica. Last week the Department of Justice announced some rare good news about this criminal industry: The FBI infiltrated a major ransomware group called Hive and obtained its decryption keys. These keys let the ransomware victims recover their data without paying the demanded fee. The FBI’s work helped affected parties avoid paying $130 million. Afterward American law enforcement worked with international partners to seize Hive’s servers and take down its website. Continued here

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Metal Detectorist Discovers Rare Gold Pendant Celebrating Henry VIII's First Marriage The heart-shaped accessory features the entwined initials of the Tudor king and Catherine of Aragon In June 1520, the rulers of France and England declared their friendship with an over-the-top display of wealth and power. Known as the Field of Cloth of Gold, the two-and-a-half-week summit featured feasts, jousts, wrestling matches, masques and an endless stream of entertainment. Neither France’s Francis I nor England’s Henry VIII spared any expense on the celebration, which cost the equivalent of around $19 million today. Continued here

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The Myth Propelling America’s Violent Police Culture I worked in law enforcement for decades. Officers who see themselves as noble heroes can be the ones who do the most harm. Some 25 years ago, I remember sitting on the Shooting Review Board for the King County Sheriff’s Office, a large metropolitan police department serving the Seattle region. I recall listening to an investigator explain the chain of events that had led to the fatal shooting of a man fleeing the scene of an armed robbery. My memory is that the man had a long criminal record and had just committed another felony. Not a sympathetic figure to me or the public, but still a human being. Continued here

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Luisa Neubauer: The fairy tales of the fossil fuel industry -- and a better climate story The fossil fuel industry is a factory of fairy tales, says activist and School Strike for Climate organizer Luisa Neubauer. Tracing the industry's five-decade trickle of lies about climate science, she busts the myth that economic growth and stability are dependent on fossil fuels -- and issues a resounding message about how we can actually move towards a just world. "[The future] won't be built for those who have brought us into this mess," she says. "It will be built for everyone else." Continued here

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The Existential Wonder of Space Of all the moons in the solar system, Saturn’s largest satellite might be the most extraordinary. Titan is enveloped in a thick, hazy atmosphere, and liquid methane rains gently from its sky, tugged downward by a fraction of the gravity we feel on Earth. The methane forms rivers, lakes, and small seas on Titan’s surface. Beneath the frigid ground, composed of ice as hard as rock, is even more liquid, a whole ocean of plain old H2O. The wildest part about Titan—the best part, perhaps—is that something could be living there. NASA is currently working on a mission, called Dragonfly, that would travel to the faraway moon and search for potential signs of alien life, past and present. A helicopter will fly around and study the local chemistry, checking whether conditions may be right for microbes to arise. Hypothetical Titanian life-forms could resemble the earthly varieties we’re familiar with or be something else entirely, feeding on methane compounds the way we rely on oxygen. Continued here

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The path forward for astronomers and native Hawaiians In 2015, the astronomy community was excitedly anticipating the next generation in ground-based, optical astronomy. After more than 20 years of 10-meter class telescopes being the largest and most powerful in the world, a trio of 30-meter class telescopes were slated for construction: two in Chile and one in Hawaii. While the Giant Magellan Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope were both overwhelmingly supported by the indigenous population, Hawaii’s proposed Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) — like many telescopes atop Mauna Kea before it — faced significant protests and opposition from native Hawaiians, who cited many concerns and injustices that dated back decades or even centuries. In one of the worst public relations move in all of science history, a number of senior astronomers circulated a message that read, in part, “The Thirty-Meter Telescope is in trouble, attacked by a horde of native Hawaiians who are lying about the impact of the project on mountain and who are threatening the safety of TMT personnel. Government officials are supporting TMT’s legality to proceed but not arresting any of the protestors who are blocking the road.” The letter served to galvanize not only native Hawaiians against the TMT and the status quo of astronomy on Mauna Kea in general, but also indigenous communities across the globe and a large fraction of the astronomy community as well. Continued here

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More Gay and Bisexual Men Could Soon Donate Blood Since 1985, federal blood donor restrictions have barred many men who have sex with men from participating On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed easing restrictions on blood donations from men who have sex with men. Continued here

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A Deeper Understanding of Creativity at Work We all know that creativity is the backbone of innovation and, ultimately, business success. But we don’t always think deeply about how creative people get their ideas and the steps we might take to do the same. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, a physician and chief product and chief innovation officer at BetterUp, and Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, say there are four types of creativity — integration, splitting, figure-ground reversal, and distal thinking — and explain how each shows up at work. Amid startling advances in artificial intelligence, people who hone these skills will set themselves apart. Kellerman and Seligman are the authors of the HBR article “Cultivating the Four Kinds of Creativity” and the book Tomorrowmind. Continued here

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How to Quit -- and Leave the Door Open to Coming Back Whether you’re parting with a company to pursue a new opportunity, being let go in a mass layoff, or leaving a toxic team, you never know if an opportunity will arise to be a “boomerang employee” — that is, to return to your previous employer. The author presents five ways to set yourself up to be a successful boomerang, even if you’ve already left your previous company. Continued here

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Why Bother Bringing Back the Dodo? Pity the dodo. First, Dutch colonists and their entourage of dogs, cats, and rats erased the birds from their native Mauritius in the late 17th century. Then later generations turned the fat, flightless creature into the butt of jokes for centuries to come. The chonky bird is a byword for clumsy obsolescence. Just look at it: It was practically asking to go extinct. Except it wasn’t, of course. It was all our fault. The dodo was perfectly adapted to its environment. It was us humans who had to come along and ruin everything with our hunting, murdering, plundering ways. But now a biotech startup called Colossal Biosciences is trying to make amends for humankind’s past sins: It wants to de-extinct the dodo. Continued here

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Spotted a UFO? There's an App for That The tech startup Enigma Labs wants to turn UFO sightings into data science. Previously, people who had seen strange lights darting around the sky could do no more than tell their friends—or call intelligence agencies. Soon, anyone with a smartphone will be able to use an app to report an unexplainable event as it happens. Enigma Labs' mobile app was released today, initially on an invitation-only basis as they work out the bugs, although they plan to make it available to the wider public. For now, it'll be free to download and use, although the company could later charge for additional features. The company will not just be amassing new data—it has already gobbled up data on around 300,000 global sightings over the past century and included them in their system—and while their dataset will be available to the public, their algorithms for assessing it will not. Continued here

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Mammals That Live Together Live Longer Mammal species that live in groups seems to live longer than those that lead solitary lives Mammals only have one life to live, but the length of that life varies greatly. While some shrews shuffle off this mortal coil in less than 14 months, bowhead whales can swim in Arctic waters for more than two centuries. And longevity is not all about size. For example, 250-pound brown bears (with a maximum life span of 40 years) are outlived, on average, by Brandt’s bats (with maximum of 41 years), a species small enough to perch inside the palm of a human hand. Continued here

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Did the Seeds of Life Ride to Earth Inside an Asteroid? Billions of years ago, our solar system coalesced within an interstellar molecular cloud, a nursery made up of gas and dust that clumped together to form stars, asteroids, and planets—eventually, our own Earth. Somewhere along that cosmic timeline, the amino acids that preceded life appeared. These molecules chain together to form the proteins responsible for nearly every biological function. But where those amino acids come from has been an enduring mystery. Did these biological building blocks somehow arise from the prebiotic conditions of early Earth, or was our planet seeded with these ingredients from elsewhere in the universe?  Some astronomers think life’s heritage must have begun off-planet, because amino acids have been discovered in meteorites, celestial time capsules composed of the same primitive materials from which our solar system formed. (A meteorite is a fragment of an asteroid or any other space rock that has fallen to Earth.) But despite their best efforts, scientists can’t pin down exactly how these molecules got there. Experiments in the lab can’t reproduce what’s found in nature.  Continued here

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Say Nothing at Your Own Peril  Our political system is plainly nuts at the moment. Do what you can to shore up your business now. Continued here

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A 'De-Extinction' Company Wants to Bring Back the Dodo The de-extinction company known for its plans to resurrect the mammoth and Tasmanian tiger announces it will also bring back the dodo Colossal Biosciences, the headline-grabbing, venture-capital-funded juggernaut of de-extinction science, announced plans on January 31 to bring back the dodo. Whether “bringing back” a semblance of the extinct flightless bird is feasible is a matter of debate. Continued here

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The Spaceport at the Edge of the World In the village of Melness, a frayed twist of bungalows and old stone buildings on Scotland’s desolate northern shore, April is a month of new beginnings, when the dark and strung-out Highland winter finally unfurls into a tentative spring, and pregnant ewes balloon like airships in the wind-swept hills. As the 2015 lambing season neared its start, the villagers began the usual preparation of their small plots of rented land, called crofts, for farm and pasture. Behind the crofts and croft houses was the bog: an immense, bronze-hued ocean of deep peat, stretching into the horizon. For Dorothy Pritchard, a retired schoolteacher and chair of the Melness Crofters’ Estate, an organization that owns and manages the crofting land, this spring would be stranger than usual. Over the past several weeks, she had been mulling a plan that could upend the town’s quiet routine. Continued here

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Inside three turbulent months at Foxconn's iPhone factory Chinese factory laborers call jobs like Hunter’s “working the screws.” Until recently, the 34-year-old worked on the iPhone 14 Pro assembly line at a Foxconn factory in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou. His task was to pick up an iPhone’s rear cover and a tiny cable that charges the battery, scan their QR codes, peel off adhesive tape backing, and join the two parts by tightening two screws. He’d then put the unfinished phone onto a conveyor belt that carried it to the next station. Hunter had to complete this task once every minute. During a normal 10-hour shift, his target was to attach 600 cables to 600 cases, using 1,200 screws. Every day, 600 more unassembled iPhones awaited him. Continued here

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6 Ways Impatience is Slowing Your Business Down To build a successful businessyou might have to sacrifice in the short term to win in the long term. Continued here

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Addressing Racial Discrimination on Airbnb For years, Airbnb gave hosts extensive discretion to accept or reject a guest after seeing little more than a name and a picture, believing that eliminating anonymity was the best way for the company to build trust. However, the apartment rental platform failed to track or account for the possibility that this could facilitate discrimination. Continued here

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Light Pollution Is Dimming Our View of the Sky, and It's Getting Worse Citizen scientists and researchers found that we are losing our view of the sky at an astonishing rate of almost 10 percent each year When I was a kid, my family lived in suburban Washington, D.C. This made being a budding amateur astronomer tough; most stars were invisible against the overhead glare from city lights. At best, there was only a hint of the diffuse Milky Way to see: the combined radiance of a hundred billion stars dimmed to near-nothingness by bright streetlamps and storefronts. Continued here

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Creative wisdom from Rick Rubin: embrace your inner gatekeeper Excerpted from The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, published with the permission of Penguin Press. Copyright ©2023 by Rick Rubin. No matter where your ideas come from or what they look like, they all eventually pass through a particular aspect of yourself: the editor, the gatekeeper. This is who will determine the final expression of the work, regardless of how many selves were involved in its construction.  Continued here

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Social media is too important to be so opaque with its data Over 50 people were killed by the police during demonstrations in Peru. Brazil is reeling from a coup attempt in its capital city. The residents of Culiacán, a city in northern Mexico, still cower in their houses after the army swooped in to arrest a cartel kingpin. Countries across Latin America have kicked off the year with turmoil.  It is almost a truism to say that the common factor in these events has been the role of social media. Far-right radicals in Brazil were seen to be openly organizing and spreading fake news about electoral fraud on Twitter. Peruvians used TikTok to bear witness to police brutality, preserving it for posterity. Continued here

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Our Favorite Mesh Wi-Fi Routers Will Bathe Your Home in Wi-Fi Mesh routers promise dependable Wi-Fi throughout your home, and most of them follow through, so it's not surprising to see them growing popular. Instead of a single router to wash your home in Wi-Fi connectivity, a mesh system combines the main router with one or more nodes that appear as a unified Wi-Fi network. Your devices will connect to the nearest option automatically to get the best speeds. Most of us are stuck with placing a router in a less than optimal spot, depending on where the internet connection comes into the home. By placing a second or third node, you can extend Wi-Fi coverage where you need it. Whether you want to fix a dead spot, deliver a stronger signal into the back bedroom, or have great Wi-Fi in the backyard, a mesh system could be the answer.  Continued here

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Satellite Constellations Are an Existential Threat for Astronomy Growing swarms of spacecraft in orbit are outshining the stars, and scientists fear no one will do anything to stop it Rachel Street felt frightened after a recent planning meeting for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. The new telescope, under construction in Chile, will photograph the entire sky every three nights with enough observing power to see a golf ball at the distance of the moon. Its primary project, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, will map the galaxy, inventory objects in the solar system, and explore mysterious flashes, bangs and blips throughout the universe. But the telescope may never achieve its goals if the sky fills with bogus stars. New swarms of satellite constellations, such as SpaceX’s Starlink, threaten to outshine the real celestial objects that capture astronomers’ interest—and that humans have admired and pondered for all of history. “The more meetings I attend about this, where we explain the impact it is going to have, the more I get frightened about how astronomy is going to go forward,” says Street, an astronomer at Las Cumbres Observatory in California. As one astronomer mentioned moving up observations in the telescope’s schedule, a sense of foreboding fell over her. Her colleagues were talking about making basic observations early because at some point, it might be too late to do them at all. “That sent a chill down my spine,” Street recalls. Continued here

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Studies Show This Mindset Can Give You Unlimited Self Control The way you think about self-control has a big effect on how much of it you have, fascinating research shows. Continued here

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4 Ways to Keep Layoffs From Undermining Workforce Diversity Layoffs are disproportionately impacting diverse employees. That's completely avoidable. Continued here

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Want to boost your happiness? Buy experiences, not material possessions Contrary to the lovely cliché stating otherwise, money can buy happiness. As financial therapist Steven M. Hughes told Big Think, “There are things that we want, there are goals that we have, there are things that we want to see in life, that money can help us achieve.” In a culture that values material possessions, perhaps new clothes, a nice car, or a new gadget pop to mind. But years of research show that experiential purchases — say, brunch with friends or a vacation with family — are more likely to boost your happiness.  Continued here

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The Most Common Purpose Fails and How to Avoid Them in 2023 Remember that brand purpose isn't marketing. Continued here

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How a Parent's Experience at Work Impacts Their Kids Many employers are increasingly cognizant of the ways in which employees’ experiences on the job can impact their lives outside of work. But what about the lives of their children? Through a longitudinal study that followed more than 370 low-wage, working-class families over more than ten years, the author found that children’s developmental outcomes were directly and significantly affected by their parents’ work lives. Specifically, workers who had more autonomy and more-supportive supervisors and coworkers were in turn warmer and more engaged when interacting with their infants. These children then grew up to have better reading and math skills, better social skills, and fewer behavioral problems in the first grade, suggesting that an employee’s workplace experiences immediately before and during the transition into parenthood can have long-lasting effects on the development of their children. In light of these findings, the author argues that making sure employees feel respected and supported isn’t just an investment in today’s workforce — it’s an investment in the next generation as well. Continued here

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Why We Follow Narcissistic Leaders Uncertainty in the business world provides a ripe opportunity for narcissists — people who have a grandiose conception of themselves, are self-obsessed, and crave authority and control — to emerge as leaders. Narcissists are great at accumulating power and influence and their confidence and charisma create the illusion of them being the best person for the job when predictability is low. Continued here S9 8 Strategies for Chief Data Officers to Create -- and Demonstrate -- Value The CDO role is poorly understood, and incumbents of the job have often met with diffuse expectations and short tenures. There is a clear need for CDOs to focus on adding visible value to their organizations. The authors suggest eight strategies for CDOs to create — and show — value for their companies: assume responsibility for analytics and AI, focus on data products, measure and document results, build relationships with peers and business leaders who get it, focus on data governance, work on creating a data-driven culture even though it’s difficult to show value quickly, build analytics and data infrastructure, and focus on a few key projects of value to stakeholders. Continued here S7 It's Time To Get Off the Emotional Treadmill of Your Business Do this for lasting happiness in your life and business. Continued here S39 Ancient migration: Bering Strait land bridge from Asia to North America was not a one-way road To see the path that humans took to enter North America, you’ll have to visit the seafloor beneath the Bering Strait. There lies an ancient land bridge, now submerged, that was part of a vast subcontinent called Beringia, which was around the size of modern Australia. During the Ice Age, some 20,000 years ago, Beringia was a grassland steppe. At the end of that Age, sea levels rose dramatically, and Beringia vanished beneath the Pacific Ocean. Beringia was home to large mammals like wooly mammoths — and briefly, to a small group of humans trekking from Siberia toward Alaska. Continued here S48 US still has the worst, most expensive health care of any high-income country Americans spend an exorbitant amount of money on health care and have for years. As a country, the US spends more on health care than any other high-income country in the world—on the basis of both per-person costs and a share of gross domestic product. Yet, you wouldn't know it from looking at major health metrics in years past; the US has relatively abysmal health. And, if anything, the COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated the US health care system's failures relative to its peers, according to a new analysis by the Commonwealth Fund. Continued here S40 Our antidepressant drugs are affecting animals and ecosystems The use of antidepressant pills has become synonymous with improved mental health, quelling sometimes crippling anxiety, and altering energy levels and behaviour. They are heavily relied upon when treating depression and general anxiety disorder.  In the past 20 years, European nations have seen consumption rates of antidepressants more than double. Closer to home, their usage amongst Canadian youth is surging. In the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, these rates are only expected to rise, particularly when considering the affordability of and need for these medications. Continued here S36 Dutch government releases a genuine treasure map from WWII, sparking a hunt for the loot Truth can be stranger than fiction. Rarer, and therefore even stranger, is when truth is exactly as strange as fiction. Case in point: the fevered treasure hunt for World War II loot that engulfed the Dutch village of Ommeren this January. It felt like something scripted specifically for the Indiana Jones universe. As it does every year, the Dutch National Archives started the New Year with a “Revelation Day” — disclosing documents that had hitherto been unavailable to the public, typically after a standard 75-year confidentiality term. Continued here S37 Did Paul Cézanne hide an early self-portrait underneath a 160-year-old still life? Thanks to advances in conservation technology, museum workers are constantly discovering new things about old paintings. Last year, an art gallery in Germany learned that Johannes Vermeer once intended to hang a painting on the wall in the background of Girl Reading a Letter in an Open Window. And this year, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam used state-of-the-art fluorescence imaging techniques to decide whether an unfinished oil sketch from Museum Bredius was created by Rembrandt van Rijn. Another exciting investigation is currently unfolding in the U.S. Earlier this month, Serena Urry, a conservator at the Cincinnati Art Museum, noticed suspicious cracks on the surface of one of the institution’s most cherished possessions: Paul Cézanne’s Still Life with Bread and Eggs. What alarmed Urry wasn’t the cracks themselves — all old paintings show at least some signs of damage — but the fact that they seemed to expose hints of white pigment that felt out of place in the dark palette that Cézanne was known to have used during this time of his life. Continued here S47 How to tell if your cats are playing or fighting--and whether it's a problem Anyone with more than one cat in the house knows that the occasional spat or outright cat fight is going to happen. But sometimes it can be tricky to determine whether cats are fighting or just playing rough, because the interaction could feature trademark behaviors of both, according to a recent paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. It's even more challenging to tell whether the fight is just a squabble or a sign that the cats simply can't get along, thereby forcing hard decisions about how to separate the cats—or even whether it's possible to keep the cat(s) in question. Continued here S52 The Internet Loves an Extremophile On YouTube, a British influencer named Tom Torero was once the master of “daygame”—a form of pick-up artistry in which men approach women on the street. “You’ll need to desensitise yourself to randomly chatting up hot girls sober during the day,” Torero wrote in his 2018 pamphlet, Beginner’s Guide to Daygame. “This takes a few months of going out 3-5 times a week and talking to 10 girls during each session.” Torero promised that his London Daygame Model—its five stages were open, stack, vibe, invest, and close—could turn any nervous man into a prolific seducer. This made him a hero to thousands of young men, some of whom I interviewed when making my recent BBC podcast series, The New Gurus. One fan described him to me as “a free spirit who tried to help people,” and “a shy, anxious guy who reinvented himself as an adventurer.” To outsiders, though, daygame can seem unpleasantly clinical, with its references to “high-value girls,” and even coercive: It includes strategies for overcoming “LMR,” which stands for “last-minute resistance.” In November 2021, Newsweek revealed that Torero was secretly recording his dates—including the sex—and sharing the audio with paying subscribers to his website. Torero took down his YouTube channel, although he had already stopped posting regularly. Continued here S50 Apple's focus on secrecy violated employee rights, US regulators find Apple violated US labor laws through various workplace rules and statements made by executives, National Labor Relations Board officials determined after reviewing allegations from two former employees. An NLRB official will file a formal complaint against Apple unless the company reaches a settlement with the former employees, who filed complaints about Apple's focus on secrecy. Continued here S41 Sony halves reported sales expectations for coming PSVR2 headset Sony is drastically scaling back its sales expectations for next month's launch of the PlayStation VR2 headset, according to a Bloomberg report citing "people familiar with [Sony's] deliberations." Continued here S54 Did George Washington Burn New York? On July 9, 1776, General George Washington amassed his soldiers in New York City. They would soon face one of the largest amphibious invasions yet seen. If the British took the city, they’d secure a strategic harbor on the Atlantic Coast from which they could disrupt the rebels’ seaborne trade. Washington thus judged New York “a Post of infinite importance” and believed the coming days could “determine the fate of America.” To prepare, he wanted his men to hear the just-issued Declaration of Independence read aloud. This, he hoped, might “serve as a fresh incentive.” But stirring principles weren’t enough. By the end of August, the British had routed Washington’s forces on Long Island and were preparing to storm Manhattan. The outlook was “truly distressing,” he confessed. Unable to hold the city—unable even to beat back disorder and desertion among his own dispirited men—Washington abandoned it. One of his officers ruefully wished that the retreat could be “blotted out of the annals of America.” Continued here S45 The next de-extinction target: The dodo Colossal is a company that got its start with a splashy announcement about plans to do something that many scientists consider impossible with current technology, all in the service of creating a product with no clear market potential: the woolly mammoth. Since that time, the company has settled into a potentially viable business model and set its sights on a species where the biology is far more favorable: the thylacine, a marsupial predator that went extinct in the early 1900s. Continued here S42 Samsung's Q4 profits plummet 69 percent, hit 8-year low Samsung Electronics has a big phone launch this week, but before that happens, let's check in on the company's last quarter. Following the trend of the industry as a whole, Samsung's earnings seem like a disaster. Continued here S51 The Miraculous Salman Rushdie Salman Rushdie’s new novel, Victory City, purports to be the summary of a long-lost, 24,000-verse epic poem from 14th-century India. The hero and author of the poem is Pampa Kampana, who as a girl becomes the conduit for a goddess, channeling her oracular pronouncements and wielding her magical powers. She later causes a city to rise overnight from enchanted seeds, presides as its queen, and lives to the age of 247. The city she founds becomes a utopia—a feminist one, I’m tempted to say, because in its heyday women are equal to men. But really, when women flourish, everyone flourishes: male and female, native and foreigner, Muslim and Buddhist and Jain, gay and straight and bisexual. This liberal Xanadu goes on to become a great kingdom and turns distinctly illiberal. Pampa is forced to flee and hide. The novel is titled Victory City not so much because that’s the city’s name—though briefly called that (Vijayanagar), it was soon rechristened Bisnaga—or because Pampa emerges victorious. She does not. The title comes from the last passage of her poem, written at the end of her centuries-long life. Casting her mind back over the rise and fall of her empire, she asks how its kings and queens will be remembered. Only through words, she answers—her words: Continued here S44 ChromeOS and Microsoft 365 will start playing nicer with each other this year Google and Microsoft don't always take pains to make sure their products work great together—Google originally declared Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge browser "not supported" by the Google Drive web apps; Microsoft is always trying to make you use Bing—but it looks like Google's ChromeOS will start working a bit better with the Microsoft 365 service later this year. Continued here S53 America’s Fever of Workaholism Is Finally Breaking This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week. One of the weirdest economic stories of the past half century is what happened to rich Americans—and especially rich American men—at work. Continued here S49 No more export licenses: US plans to fully cut off Huawei from chip suppliers Huawei has been hobbling along for a few years now with limited access to US chips and technology, with both the Trump and Biden administrations banning general exports to the company. Huawei hasn't seen zero US chips, but every sale has had to be approved by the government, with the restrictions being tweaked several times since the initial ban in 2019. Reuters, The Financial Times, and several other outlets have reported that the Biden administration is putting even tighter restrictions on Huawei, with FT saying the US is working toward a "total ban" on sales to the Chinese tech company. Continued here S43 Lenovo announces a $2,345 FHD smart display for video calls Smart displays have struggled to gain a foothold in a saturated market. Even an old smartphone or tablet can give the best smart displays a run for their money. From the Facebook Portal videoconferencing display and Amazon Echo Show 15 to Samsung's series of desktop-sized smart monitors, companies have been trying to find a purpose that sticks. The next effort is Lenovo's 27-inch ThinkView Plus. It attempts to find a niche for smart displays for business purposes but does so with a limiting focus on Microsoft Teams. Continued here S46 AI tool used to spot child abuse allegedly targets parents with disabilities Since 2016, social workers in a Pennsylvania county have relied on an algorithm to help them determine which child welfare calls warrant further investigation. Now, the Justice Department is reportedly scrutinizing the controversial family-screening tool over concerns that using the algorithm may be violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by allegedly discriminating against families with disabilities, the Associated Press reported, including families with mental health issues. Continued here Subscribe to: Posts (Atom) Followers Blog Archive ►  2025 (7) ►  March (5) ►  January (2) ►  2024 (4) ►  December (4) ▼  2023 (542) ►  December (2) ►  November (33) ►  October (27) ►  September (37) ►  August (45) ►  July (30) ►  June (73) ►  May (3) ►  April (33) ►  March (17) ►  February (84) ▼  January (158) A Physical Theory For When the Brain Performs Best... 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