Links for 2021-12-23
Microsoft KEAR surpasses human performance on CommonsenseQA benchmark — “When given a question that requires drawing on prior knowledge and five answer choices, our latest model— KEAR, Knowledgeable External Attention for commonsense Reasoning—performs better than people answering the same question, calculated as the majority vote among five individuals.” https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/azure-ai-milestone-microsoft-kear-surpasses-human-performance-on-commonsenseqa-benchmark/
US Army Creates Single Vaccine Effective Against All COVID and SARS Variants. Within weeks, researchers expect to announce that human trials show success against Omicron—and even future strain. https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2021/12/us-army-creates-single-vaccine-effective-against-all-covid-sars-variants/360089/
A fascinating paper from 2000 reported a cluster of activities that loom large in waking life but are largely absent from dreams: reading, writing, typing, calculating. http://www.ernesthartmann.com/files/We-Do-Not-%20Dream-of-the-3%20Rs_Implications-for-the-Nature-of-Dreaming-and-Mentation_2000-Dreaming-10_103to111.pdf
“Do large language models understand us? LLMs have a great deal to teach us about the nature of language, understanding, intelligence, sociality, and personhood.” https://medium.com/@blaisea/do-large-language-models-understand-us-6f881d6d8e75
Scientists Can Efficiently Screen Billions of Chemical Compounds to Find Effective Drug Therapies https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/3599/v-synthes-computational-chemistry-drug-discovery/
New technique will allow programmable manipulation of large DNA segments https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/12/new-technique-enables-manipulation-of-large-dna-segments/
Using AI to bring children’s drawings to life https://ai.facebook.com/blog/using-ai-to-bring-childrens-drawings-to-life
Wood burners cause nearly half of urban air pollution cancer risk https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/17/wood-burners-urban-air-pollution-cancer-risk-study
No, a tardigrade was not meaningfully entangled with a qubit http://nanoscale.blogspot.com/2021/12/no-tardigrade-was-not-meaningfully.html
"The public was asked to judge whether a military pilot who downs a hijacked passenger jet due to be crashed into a football stadium is guilty of murder...The vast majority called for the pilot to be acquitted." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37692662
“We need a healthy community of generalist intellectuals. We now have 3 candidate groups, who each fall short in different ways: polymaths, philosophers, and public intellectuals.” https://overcomingbias.com/2021/12/three-types-of-generalists.html
The New York Times Reported ‘the Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges' 30 Years Ago. Today, We See the Results — “After absorbing Marxist ideas..., generations of university graduates carried those ideas into other important American institutions” https://fee.org/articles/the-new-york-times-reported-the-mainstreaming-of-marxism-in-us-colleges-30-years-ago-today-we-see-the-results/