Links for 2021-09-08
Does the temporal cortex make us human? A review of structural and functional diversity of the primate temporal lobe: “We propose that many human behaviors can be explained as elaborations of temporal cortex functions observed in other primates.” https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763421003821
We know that biological neurons are more complex than the “neurons” in artificial deep neural networks, but by how much? Computational neuroscientists have come up with a new answer. (1000 artificial neurons per neuron) https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-is-a-single-neuron-20210902/
Energy Vault -BUSTED! [A Startup That’s Storing Energy in Concrete Blocks] youtube.com/watch?v=NIhCuzxNvv0
An Army of Grain-harvesting Robots Marches Across Russia https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotic-farming-russia
A unique Toxoplasma gondii haplotype under strong selection has accompanied domestic cats in their global expansion https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.31.457674v1
Simpson's paradox and Israeli vaccine efficacy data: "In the case of vaccine effectiveness vs. severe disease, it is the fact that both vaccination status and risk of severe disease are systematically higher in the older age group that makes overall effectiveness numbers if estimated without stratifying by age misleading, producing a paradoxical result that the overall effectiveness (67.5%) is much lower than the effectiveness for either of the age groups (91.8% and 85.2%)." https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-efficacy-vs-severe-disease-be-strong-when-60-of-hospitalized-are-vaccinated
Berkson’s Paradox: “Suppose that there’s no correlation between talent and attractiveness in the general population (left). A person who studies only celebrities might infer that the two traits are negatively correlated — that attractive people tend to lack talent and talented people tend to lack attractiveness (right). But this is deceiving: People who are neither attractive nor talented don’t typically become celebrities, and that large group of people aren’t represented in the sample. Celebrities tend to have one trait or the other but (unsurprisingly) rarely both.” https://www.futilitycloset.com/2021/09/05/berksons-paradox/
The AIDS Deniers: "As if 18.8 million deaths worldwide weren't bad enough, there now emerges an ACT UP group that argues that HIV is harmless, that AIDS is a myth and that unprotected sex is everyone's birthright." https://www.gq.com/story/the-aids-deniers
‘I guess I’m having a go at killing it’: Salman Rushdie to bypass print and publish next book on Substack https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/01/i-guess-im-having-a-go-at-killing-it-salman-rushdie-to-bypass-print-and-publish-next-book-on-substack
“In the EU, the European Commission estimates that reaching the 2030 climate target will require additional annual investments of €360 billion on average, starting now. This will raise relevant investments from an average of €683 billion per year in the last decade to around €1,040 billion per year.” https://www.bruegel.org/2021/08/how-much-investment-do-we-need-to-reach-net-zero/
TikTok overtakes YouTube for average watch time in US and UK https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58464745