Links for 2021-10-24
"Wuhan Institute of Virology manipulated a coronavirus to generate..10,000 times the viral load, violating provisions of its NIH contract that forbade unregulated research that could make a disease significantly more dangerous or transmissible." https://www.rollcall.com/2021/10/22/nih-grantee-in-wuhan-faces-questions-deadline-for-more-information-on-research/
The WHO is setting up a new committee to investigate the lab leak hypothesis and the people on that team are buddies with the people responsible for the leak. https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2588
Jetson One Personal eVTOL Looks Like a Ton of Fun to Fly: “Jetson has filmed some terrific video of a guy flying one of these things around. Wisely, they’ve stayed close to the ground, so there’s a real sense of dynamic motion to the footage and it just looks like brilliant fun. That might end up being a relatively safe and entertaining way to fly these things too, like zero-gravity dune buggies.” https://newatlas.com/aircraft/jetson-aero-personal-evtol/
Learning algorithms do not think like humans youtube.com/watch?v=BS2la3C-TYc
“Researchers at MIT have now shown that a certain type of neural network is able to learn the true cause-and-effect structure of the navigation task it is being trained to perform...Because these machine-learning systems are able to perform reasoning in a causal way, we can know and point out how they function and make decisions. This is essential for safety-critical applications…” https://news.mit.edu/2021/cause-effect-neural-networks-1014
“When asked to classify odors, artificial neural networks adopt a structure that closely resembles that of the brain’s olfactory circuitry.” https://news.mit.edu/2021/artificial-networks-learn-smell-like-the-brain-1018
Truthful AI: Developing and governing AI that does not lie https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aBixCPqSnTsPsTJBQ/truthful-ai-developing-and-governing-ai-that-does-not-lie
More evidence that sex differences in occupational preferences transcend cultural boundaries, and that gay men tend to have sex-atypical occupational preferences. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-021-09417-5
Violent video games have little or no impact on aggression – or on sexist attitudes, empathy, interpersonal skills, impulsivity, mental health, or executive control. https://nature.com/articles/s41380-018-0031-7
“4 million square kilometers of the Azolla fern sunk to the bottom of the Arctic ocean, 49 million years ago, causing CO2 to drop from ~3500 ppm to 650ppm (!!!), and incidentally seeing worldwide temperatures plummet...” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event
“Thirteen-year-olds saw unprecedented declines in both reading and math between 2012 and 2020, according to scores released this morning from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).” https://www.the74million.org/article/naep-long-term-unprecedented-performance-drop-american-13-year-olds/
Why ban single-use plastics at a time of their greatest usefulness? https://www.humanprogress.org/fighting-plastic-windmills/