Category: Science

Bringing big tech to heel: how do we take back control of the internet? | World news | The Guardian

So true, and I am happy that I was allowed to partially witness that in Brussels. Its the right way to go, and others will follow

“The project will reference the world-leadingGlobal Data Protection Regulation developed by the European Union. Under the regulation, the idea that you control your data footprint has been accepted and embedded with privacy protocols placing enforceable rules on how corporations harvest and then monetise personal information. Protections include the right to be unknown and the right to be able to delete your personal records from a business that is holding them. It also includes rights for portability of data allowing, for instance, a user to take their data with them when they change banks, obligations on a business to delete a customer’s records when the customer takes their business elsewhere, as well as stringent data-handling protocols. Adopting these principles in Australia would be a significant step towards taking responsibility for the way the digital economy affects our privacy.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/23/bringing-big-tech-to-heel-how-do-we-take-back-control-of-the-internet

Blockchain! Blockchain! Blockchain! Blockchain!

 5 Blockchain Breakthroughs Coming in the Next 5 Years … :

“In the next five years, Pulier predicts five blockchain trends, each poised to disrupt major players and birth entirely new business models by 2024. Let’s dive in.:

  1. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs)
  2. Security tokens
  3. Tokenized assets
  4. Self-sovereign identity
  5. Free speech

And at the broader societal level, blockchains will catalyze a sweeping shift away from hierarchical structures towards democratized networks at larger scales than ever before experienced by humankind. A next-generation tool capable of maintaining trust in large populations, blockchain will define a brand new order.”

I love to read articles void of busswords. 🙂 And I am tense what will come true. 

Interesting Study on Self-Supervised Learing…

Ai is now learning with images of kittens, and I really like the cats, birds and moving images examples in these slides: 

self_supervision3.pptx

The ImageNet Challenge Story … Outcomes Strong supervision:

• Features from networks trained on ImageNet can be used for other visual tasks, e.g. detection, segmentation, action recognition, fine grained visual classification

• To some extent, any visual task can be solved now by:
1. Construct a large-scale dataset labelled for that task
2. Specify a training loss and neural network architecture
3. Train the network and deploy

Brain signals translated into speech | Bioscience Today

https://www.biosciencetoday.co.uk/brain-signals-translated-into-speech/

‘Speech is an amazing form of communication that has evolved over thousands of years to be very efficient,” said Edward F. Chang, M.D., professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and senior author of this study published in Nature. “Many of us take for granted how easy it is to speak, which is why losing that ability can be so devastating. It is our hope that this approach will be helpful to people whose muscles enabling audible speech are paralyzed.“

Who is this Spectre? Zuckerberg reveals…

This Deepfake of Mark Zuckerberg Tests Facebook’s Fake Video Policies – VICE … :

“Imagine this for a second: One man, with total control of billions of people’s stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures,” Zuckerberg’s likeness says, in the video. “I owe it all to Spectre. Spectre showed me that whoever controls the data, controls the future.”

… there’s more, including Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump…

Spoiler: This is Spectre: 

Weniger Licht am Abend macht den Schlaf besser – messbar am Melatonin

Melatonin-Produktion: Warum uns selbst Kerzenlicht den Schlaf rauben kann – Spektrum der Wissenschaft … :

“Im Durchschnitt halbierte sich die Melatoninproduktion, wenn die Probanden in den vier Stunden nach Sonnenuntergang 25 Lux ausgesetzt waren, was schwacher abendlicher Zimmerbeleuchtung entspricht. Die Forscher untersuchten zwar nicht, ob die Probanden auch später einschliefen. Frühere Studien legen jedoch nahe, dass es hier – je nach Person – einen deutlichen Zusammenhang mit der Melatoninausschüttung gibt.“

Quake: AI is winning at team games

 Human-level performance in 3D multiplayer games with population-based reinforcement learning | Science … :

“Jaderberg et al. designed a computer program that excels at playing the video game Quake III Arena in Capture the Flag mode, where two multiplayer teams compete in capturing the flags of the opposing team. The agents were trained by playing thousands of games, gradually learning successful strategies not unlike those favored by their human counterparts. Computer agents competed successfully against humans even when their reaction times were slowed to match those of humans.“

Quake: AI is winning at team games

 Human-level performance in 3D multiplayer games with population-based reinforcement learning | Science … :

“Jaderberg et al. designed a computer program that excels at playing the video game Quake III Arena in Capture the Flag mode, where two multiplayer teams compete in capturing the flags of the opposing team. The agents were trained by playing thousands of games, gradually learning successful strategies not unlike those favored by their human counterparts. Computer agents competed successfully against humans even when their reaction times were slowed to match those of humans.“

Freiwillige “Selbstverpflichtungen” blockieren die wirklich notwendigen Veränderungen (Nature paper)

Wenn ich das richtig verstehe, ist das was, was man den Scheuerers und Dobrindts und Merkels um die Ohren hauen sollte… aber ich lese noch. 

Nudging out support for a carbon tax | Nature Climate Change … :

“Across six experiments, including one conducted with individuals involved in policymaking, we show that introducing a green energy default nudge diminishes support for a carbon tax. We propose that nudges decrease support for substantive policies by providing false hope that problems can be tackled without imposing considerable costs. Consistent with this account, we show that by minimizing the perceived economic cost of the tax and disclosing the small impact of the nudge, eliminates crowding-out without diminishing support for the nudge.“

Wie ist es eine Fledermaus zu sein? Über den subjektiven Charakter der Erfahrung…

Über den Seinsstatus des subjektiven Charakters der Erfahrung – Tabula Rasa Magazin … :

“Wie es ist eine Fledermaus zu sein

In seinem Aufsatz wirft Nagel Fragen auf, deren Gewichtung in der aktuellen Debatte stark differiert. Der Hauptstrang der Interpreten begreift die Aussagen zur Nicht-Reduzierbarkeit von nur subjektiv erfahrbaren Zuständen des phänomenalen Bewusstseins auf, durch die Wissenschaften in einem objektiven Sinne beschreibbare Zustände, infolge des grundsätzlich fehlenden Zugangs, als zentral. Vereinfacht ausgedrückt bedeutet dies, dass wir in einem objektiven Sinne nicht wissen können, wie es ist eine Fledermaus zu sein, da es uns nicht möglich ist die dafür notwendige subjektive Perspektive einzunehmen. Es sind meiner Meinung nach jedoch nicht epistemologische oder sprachphilosophische Fragen, welche uns diesbezüglich umtreiben sollten – Nagel selbst verweist in Fußnote 8 dezitiert darauf, dass er kein epistemologisches Problem formuliert. Es ist vielmehr die ontologische These, dass es für einen Organismus x vom Typ T irgendwie sein kann, ein Organismus vom Typ T zu sein, welche einer tiefer gehenden Erörterung bedarf.“