Results for “michelle dawson” 194 found
Solve for the equilibrium are British people really like this?
The first self-driving cars to be operated by ordinary British drivers will be left deliberately unmarked so that other drivers will not be tempted to “take them on”, a senior car industry executive has revealed.
One of the biggest fears of an ambitious project to lease the first autonomous vehicles to everyday motorists is that other road users might slam on their brakes or drive erratically in order to force the driverless cars into submission, he said.
This is why the first 100 self-driving 4×4 vehicles to be leased to motorists as part of a pilot scheme on busy main roads into London will look no different than other Volvos of the same model, said Erik Coelingh, senior technical leader at Volvo Cars. The scheme will start in 2018.
Americans wouldn’t talk this way:
One driver interviewed for the survey said: “I’ll be overtaking all the time because they’ll be sticking to the rules.”
Another said: “They are going to stop. So you’re going to mug them right off. They’re going to stop and you’re just going to nip around.”
Here is more, via Michelle Dawson.
Addendum: Via Anecdotal, here is an Australian perspective:
Well, I am here to tell you: that’s OK. We’ve all had it drummed into us from infancy that humans bullying cars = bad.
But we can’t let our bourgeois notions of propriety in auto-human interactions stop us from letting out our inner Johnny from Karate Kid.
We must, rather, get on with the vital and necessary work of bullying, haranguing and insulting these contraptions every chance we get. Because I cannot stress this enough: these cars must not be allowed to develop self-esteem.
From another corner of the world, I can tell you that Kiwis do not drive as politely as they talk.
Bot wars
In particular, Yasseri and co focus on whether bots disagree with one another. One way to measure this on Wikipedia is by reverts—edits that change an article back to the way it was before a previous change.
Over a 10-year period, humans reverted each other about three times on average. But bots were much more active. “Over the 10-year period, bots on English Wikipedia reverted another bot on average 105 times,” say Yasseri and co.
And this:
Bots and humans differ significantly in their revert habits. The most likely time for a human to make a revert is either within two minutes after a change has been made, after 24 hours, or after a year. That’s clearly related to the rhythms of human lifestyles.
Robots, of course, do not follow these rhythms: rather, they have a characteristic average response time of one month. “This difference is likely because, first, bots systematically crawl articles and, second, bots are restricted as to how often they can make edits,” say Yasseri and co.
Nevertheless, bots can end up in significant disputes with each other, and behave just as unpredictably and inefficiently as humans.
Many of the bots seem to be designed to make varyin- language versions of the same Wikipedia pages consistent with each other, yet the bots do not always agree. Solve for the equilibrium, as they say…
Here is the article, via Michelle Dawson.
Arthropod average is over is bug co-residence a normal good?
Here is a new and intriguing paper by Leong, et.al.:
In urban ecosystems, socioeconomics contribute to patterns of biodiversity. The ‘luxury effect’, in which wealthier neighbourhoods are more biologically diverse, has been observed for plants, birds, bats and lizards. Here, we used data from a survey of indoor arthropod diversity (defined throughout as family-level richness) from 50 urban houses and found that house size, surrounding vegetation, as well as mean neighbourhood income best predict the number of kinds of arthropods found indoors. Our finding, that homes in wealthier neighbourhoods host higher indoor arthropod diversity (consisting of primarily non-pest species), shows that the luxury effect can extend to the indoor environment. The effect of mean neighbourhood income on indoor arthropod diversity was particularly strong for individual houses that lacked high surrounding vegetation ground cover, suggesting that neighbourhood dynamics can compensate for local choices of homeowners. Our work suggests that the management of neighbourhoods and cities can have effects on biodiversity that can extend from trees and birds all the way to the arthropod life in bedrooms and basements.
Didn’t Paul Romer say this once? Here is a Guardian summary of one point:
The researchers said the work overturns the “general perception” that homes in poorer neighbourhoods host more indoor arthropods.
For the pointers I thank Niroscience and Michelle Dawson.
Will we understand why driverless cars do what they do?
A neural network can be designed to provide a measure of its own confidence in a categorization, but the complexity of the mathematical calculations involved means it’s not straightforward to take the network apart to understand how it makes its decisions. This can make unintended behavior hard to predict; and if failure does occur, it can be difficult to explain why. If a system misrecognizes an object in a photo, for instance, it may be hard (though not impossible) to know what feature of the image led to the error. Similar challenges exist with other machine learning techniques.
That is from Will Knight. This reminds me of computer chess, especially in its earlier days but still today as well. The evaluation functions are not transparent, to say the least, and they were not designed by the conscious planning of humans. (In the case of chess, it was a common tactic to let varied program options play millions of games against each other and simply see which evaluation functions won the most.) So when people debate “Will you buy the Peter Singer utilitarian driverless car?” or “Will you buy the Kant categorical imperative driverless car?”, and the like, they are not paying sufficient heed to this point. A lot of the real “action” with driverless cars will be determined by the non-transparent features of their programs.
How will regulatory systems — which typically look for some measure of verifiable ex ante safety — handle this reality? Or might this non-transparency be precisely what enables the vehicles to be put on the road, because it will be harder to object to them? What will happen when there is a call to “fix the software so this doesn’t happen any more”? To be sure, adjustments will be made.
More and more of our world is becoming this way, albeit slowly.
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
Do we need IRBs for IRBs? And should they be for-profit?
“These are black boxes,” said Dr. Steven Joffe, a pediatric oncologist and bioethicist of the University of Pennsylvania, who serves on the FDA’s Pediatric Ethics Committee. “IRBs as a rule are incredibly difficult to study. Their processes are opaque, they don’t publicize what they do. There is no public record of their decision or deliberations, they don’t, as a rule, invite scrutiny or allow themselves to be observed. They ought to be accountable for the work they do.”
That is part of a longer and very interesting article on whether IRBs should be for-profit, or if we even at this point have a choice:
“This shift to commercial IRBs is, in effect, over,” said Caplan, who heads the division of bioethics at New York University Langone Medical Center. “It’s automatic and it’s not going back.”
Institutional review boards — which review all research that involves human participants — have undergone a quiet revolution in recent years, with many drug companies strongly encouraging researchers to use commercial boards, considered by many more efficient than their nonprofit counterparts.
Commercial IRBs now oversee an estimated 70 percent of US clinical trials for drugs and medical devices. The industry has also consolidated, with larger IRBs buying smaller ones, and even private equity firms coming along and buying the companies. Arsenal Capital Partners, for example, now owns WIRB-Copernicus Group.
But even if the tide has already turned, the debate over commercial review boards — and whether they can serve as human subject safety nets, responsible for protecting the hundreds of thousands of people who enroll in clinical trials each year — continues to swirl.
I am not well-informed in this area, but if you refer back to the first paragraph, perhaps nobody is. That’s worrying.
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
Model this, show your work
Here is the larger photo set, via Michelle Dawson.
I want to talk to a random Swede
Northern lights, darkness, meatballs and suicide rates are just some of the suggested topics of conversation for a new hotline backed by the Swedish Tourist Association.
Launched this week, call +46 771 SWEDEN from anywhere in the world and you’ll be connected to a random Swede. The service honours the 250th anniversary of the country abolishing censorship and hopes to “connect people in troubled times.”
Here is the full story, which includes a taped conversation with a Swede (but is he random?), via Michelle Dawson.
Long distance charges may apply.
And via Samir Varma, here is one story of someone who called and spoke with a Ugandan.
“beetles can’t move continents”
I remember a very interesting debate that my father was involved in, where there was a water beetle that can’t travel very far and can’t fly. You have these in the north coast of Australia, and in millions of years, they haven’t been able to travel from one stream to another. And it came up that in the north coast of New Guinea, you have the same water beetle, with slight variations. The only way that could have happened was if New Guinea came off Australia and turned around, that the north coast of New Guinea used to be attached to the coast of Australia. It was very interesting seeing the reaction of the geologists to this argument, which was that ‘beetles can’t move continents.’ They refused to look at the evidence.
That is Geoffrey Hinton, being interviewed by Adrian Lee, mostly about AI and Go, interesting throughout.
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
Hysteresis for legally protected ZMP elephants in Myanmar
“Unemployment is really hard to handle,” said U Saw Tha Pyae, whose six elephants have been jobless for the past two years. “There is no logging because there are no more trees.”
Myanmar’s leading elephant expert, Daw Khyne U Mar, estimates that there are now 2,500 jobless elephants, many of them here in the jungles of eastern Myanmar, about two and a half hours from the Thai border. That number would put the elephant unemployment rate at around 40 percent, compared with about 4 percent for Myanmar’s people.
“Most of these elephants don’t know what to do,” Ms. Khyne U Mar said. “The owners have a great burden. It’s expensive to keep them.”
Adult elephants, which each weigh about 10,000 pounds, eat 400 pounds of food a day and, other than circuses and logging, have limited job opportunities.
Logging is arduous. But elephant experts say hard work is one reason Myanmar’s elephants have remained relatively healthy. A 2008 study calculated that Myanmar’s logging elephants, which have a strict regimen of work and play, live twice as long as elephants kept in European zoos, a median age of 42 years compared with 19 for zoo animals.
Here is the full NYT story, via Michelle Dawson and Otis Reid. The story is interesting throughout, you will note the elephants had strong labor law protections:
The military governments adhered to a strict labor code for elephants drawn up in British colonial times: eight-hour work days and five-day weeks, retirement at 55, mandatory maternity leave, summer vacations and good medical care. There are still elephant maternity camps and retirement communities run by the government. In a country where the most basic social protections were absent during the years of dictatorship, elephant labor laws were largely respected.
Interesting throughout — I wonder what is the natural rate of unemployment for elephants in a freer labor market…?
The market for super-butlers
One super-butler is John Deery, in his mid-40s and a native of Northern Ireland. Along with planning travel arrangements for his principal, a businessman, and valeting, serving meals, and making sure visas are up to date, Deery manages three of his employer’s properties. One is in the Balkans with 34 staff, there is a London residence with another 12, and a third is being developed.
There is more here, of interest throughout, and you will note many of the employers are funded by oil, so perhaps this market is slowing down at the moment.
This surprised me a wee bit:
Particularly for wealthy employers from Middle Eastern, Asian or Russian backgrounds, one of the attractions of a British butler is their knowledge of the nuances of the traditional English way of dining or formal dressing.
Note this:
The average age of a newly employed butler is 41, and 40% of the people placed by the British Butler Academy are women…
It is less surprising to me that many super-butlers are former actors.
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
The first beauty contest judged by a robot jury
…people don’t usually give machine intelligence much credence when it comes to judging beauty. That may change with the launch of the world’s first international beauty contest judged exclusively by a robot jury.
The contest, which requires participants to take selfies via a special app and submit them to the contest website, is touting new sophisticated facial recognition algorithms that allow machines to judge beauty in new and improved ways.
I wonder who will win.
The full story is here, via Michelle Dawson.
Cross-national differences in genes and socioeconomic status
That is a newly published piece by Elliot M. Tucker-Drob and Timothy C. Bates, the abstract is this:
A core hypothesis in developmental theory predicts that genetic influences on intelligence and academic achievement are suppressed under conditions of socioeconomic privation and more fully realized under conditions of socioeconomic advantage: a Gene × Childhood Socioeconomic Status (SES) interaction. Tests of this hypothesis have produced apparently inconsistent results. We performed a meta-analysis of tests of Gene × SES interaction on intelligence and academic-achievement test scores, allowing for stratification by nation (United States vs. non–United States), and we conducted rigorous tests for publication bias and between-studies heterogeneity. In U.S. studies, we found clear support for moderately sized Gene × SES effects. In studies from Western Europe and Australia, where social policies ensure more uniform access to high-quality education and health care, Gene × SES effects were zero or reversed.
I would put it this way: genes matter more when you equalize environmental influences in the United States, but not in many other countries. By the way, this also holds if you control for race and the greater racial diversity of the United States. One possibility is that there are greater environmental differences to be equalized in America in the first place, compared to say the Netherlands, one country where the gradient is quite different. In any case an interesting piece.
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
What is stupid?
Should there not be more research on this apparently simple yet elusive question? Here is a new paper by Acezel, Palfi, and Kekecs:
This paper argues that studying why and when people call certain actions stupid should be the interest of psychological investigations not just because it is a frequent everyday behavior, but also because it is a robust behavioral reflection of the rationalistic expectations to which people adjust their own behavior and expect others to. The relationship of intelligence and intelligent behavior has been the topic of recent debates, yet understanding why we call certain actions stupid irrespective of their cognitive abilities requires the understanding of what people mean when they call an action stupid. To study these questions empirically, we analyzed real-life examples where people called an action stupid. A collection of such stories was categorized by raters along a list of psychological concepts to explore what the causes are that people attribute to the stupid actions observed. We found that people use the label stupid for three separate types of situation: (1) violations of maintaining a balance between confidence and abilities; (2) failures of attention; and (3) lack of control. The level of observed stupidity was always amplified by higher responsibility being attributed to the actor and by the severity of the consequences of the action. These results bring us closer to understanding people’s conception of unintelligent behavior while emphasizing the broader psychological perspectives of studying the attribute of stupid in everyday life.
What do you think people, a smart paper or a stupid paper?
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
There are an estimated 250 paternoster lifts (Personenumlaufaufzüge) still in use in Germany
The culture and polity that is Germany:
Officials in Stuttgart were among the loudest protesters against the labour minister Andrea Nahles’ new workplace safety regulations, which stated that the lifts could only be used by employees trained in paternoster riding.
“It took the heart out of this place when our paternoster was brought to a halt, and it slowed down our work considerably,” said Wolfgang Wölfle, Stuttgart’s deputy mayor, who vociferously fought the ban and called for the reinstatement of the town hall’s lift, which has been running since 1956.
“They suit the German character very well. I’m too impatient to wait for a conventional lift and the best thing about a paternoster is that you can hop on and off it as you please. You can also communicate with people between floors when they’re riding on one. I see colleagues flirt in them all the time,” he added, celebrating its reopening at a recent town hall party to which hundreds of members of the public were invited.
…In officialese the lifts are referred to as Personenumlaufaufzüge – people circulation lifts – while a popular bureaucrats’ nickname for them is Beamtenbagger or “civil servant excavator”. The name paternoster – Latin for “our father” – is a reference to one of the prayers said by Catholics using rosary beads, which are meditatively passed through the hand, just as the cabins are in perpetual motion around the shaft.
There is more here, with excellent videos of paternoster riding, all via Michelle Dawson. By the way, it has been against the law to build new paternosters since 1974.
Sentences to ponder
We did not observe any individual protein-altering variants that are reproducibly associated with extremely high intelligence and within the entire distribution of intelligence.
That is from “a whole bunch of guys” writing in Molecular Psychiatry, via Michelle Dawson. In other words, the prospect of straightforward genetic engineering for smarter babies probably won’t be a reality anytime soon. Technology remains pretty far behind the matchmaker.