Links for 2022-08-07
A ‘Reversible’ Form of Death? “The pigs had been lying dead in the lab for an hour — no blood was circulating in their bodies, their hearts were still, their brain waves flat. Then a group of Yale scientists pumped a custom-made solution into the dead pigs’ bodies with a device similar to a heart-lung machine...their seemingly dead cells revived. Their hearts began to beat…Cells in their organs, including the heart, liver, kidneys and brain, were functioning again…” [The New York Times] https://archive.ph/Cyl1R
How Effective Is (More) Money? Randomizing Unconditional Cash Transfer Amounts in the US — “We find NO positive effect of cash—if anything, in some prespecified analyses, we even see negative effects.” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4154000
“On 21 September 1997…a crew member entered a zero into a database field causing an attempted division by zero in the ship's Remote Data Base Manager, resulting in a buffer overflow…causing the ship's propulsion system to fail.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(CG-48) (See also: What happens when you divide by zero on mechanical calculator https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU9ICaPZUCg)
explainjargon.com, a tool that converts any scientific jargon to plain English built on GPT-3
In the summer of 1627, pirates from Algiers ran a series of slave raids on Iceland, captured almost 400 Icelanders, and sold them into slavery in North Africa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Abductions
On the slave trade of European girls into Muslim lands in the dark ages https://researchgate.net/profile/Peter-Frost/publication/348885123_White_Skin_Privilege_Modern_Myth_Forgotten_Past/
“The Electro-Magnet, and Mechanics Intelligencer was an 1840 newspaper published by Thomas Davenport, inventor of the electric motor. This newspaper, published in New York City, was the first printed on a press run by electricity.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Electro-Magnet,_and_Mechanics_Intelligencer
“In zero-shot setting, AlexaTM 20B outperforms GPT3 (175B) on SuperGLUE and SQuADv2 datasets and provides SOTA on multilingual tasks such as XNLI, XCOPA, Paws-X, and XWinograd.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.01448
“…under some conditions light-emitting diodes can be more than 100% efficient, and act as refrigerators.” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1555819292783824898.html