You know the Turing test, right? You communicate with a computer by typing and it must guess if you’re a human or an AI. The test has been run for many years. Usually the humans have won but the AIs are catching up. So now some inventive academics (yep, they even exist) have devised a new Turing test; instead of doing a typed conversation you just ...
It's estimated that 20% of Americans have a mental disorder of some kind; BTW that’s 44 million people. Around 70% of youth in juvenile justice systems have at least one mental disorder and at least 20% live with a serious mental illness. Another 20% of State prisoners has mental disorder. Nearly 1 in 2 people – that’s all of us now - will suffer f...
If you’re a teen, or even a tween, not to mention over the hill in your 20s, you will know that vaping is cool; in fact way cool dude. The King of the Hill in this neck of the cottonfields is Juul, the maker of the market-leading e-cigarette. Of course, it was too good to last. The spoilsports in the FDA not to mention States legal eagles are conc...
Facial recognition is hot now. The software is now so good it’s being used for crime prevention and apprehension by law agencies. This is leading to a revolution in law and order as we speak. Did you see the research that links particular types of wrinkles to heart disease? Apparently, these wrinkles are a good predictor. So, what I’m wondering is ...
I’m sure you noticed the recent report about drinking alcohol. It’s based on an article in the Lancet, the British medical journal. Its well-known to be an authoritative source so that gives the report a high level of street cred. In sum, the article concludes that there’s no safe level of alcohol. No matter how little you drink, it carries a defin...
Yep I know that I’m raising yet another hair-(sorry) brained idea, but consider it wishful thinking on the part of a hair-deficient yet hopeful male (viz. me). My idea is that climate change will make males like me hairier. That’s why so many males don’t care about – indeed heartily wish for – climate change; the more the merrier. What evidence, yo...
With AIs it’s all about intelligence and smarts. Can they think better than us? Will they make better decisions? And so on. Probably the answer to all of these questions is yes, eventually if not sooner. I’m a (poor and slow) runner so I like to read books about running to see how the really good ones perform. I just read the semi-autobiography of ...
Perth Leadership Institute and its Founder, Dr. E. Ted Prince do a new take on an old issue. See the article by Katherine Heires in GARP Risk Intelligence, the News service of the Global Association of Risk Professionals.
Paleo, keto, Mediterranean, Dr. Atkins, Weight-Watchers. So many diets, so little time to lose weight! What’s a girl to do? Your company might help you out by making you a vegetarian, as the phenom WeWork has done recently. The company will no longer serve any type of meat nor reimburse you for a burger. Tough right? It’s officially now a vegetaria...
I suppose you have seen the latest techno-phenomenon, namely electric scooters ("Electric scooters are invading. Bird's CEO leads the charge"). Now you can go to work on them by just getting their app and unlocking the contraption. They are supposed to be leading to reductions in traffic and maybe they even are. When I go to China I see the doc...
Have you heard about deepfaking? Yep it’s a real word, albeit very new. Deepfaking is about how you can modify a video in such a sophisticated way that it’s impossible to tell it’s a fake. That’s gonna put the cat amongst the pigeons right? Who will ever know what anyone ever said about anything once this stuff goes global, which is happening r...
So the talk of the town, biologically speaking anyway, is CRISPR Cas9 (ok dumbbells, here’s the Cliff Notes version). It’s the new way to slice and dice genes. Actually it’s unbelievably amazing, at least to my tiny mind. Now scientists can cut and paste genes like word-processing bread (HUH?). Anyway you get the idea. Now we are the verge of bei...
Mindfulness is hot. Google is a big proponent of mindfulness training, so that gives it the ultimate good management seal of approval? Nothing to question, right? You know I’ve got to respectfully disagree. So what if a couple of respected researchers have evidence that mindfulness training reduces motivation? Check this out: “Hey Boss, You Don’t...
There’s been a spate of news about suicides by some well-known celebrities. That got me to thinking about suicide itself. I’ve done a lot of thinking about AIs so I wondered what this all means for AIs in the future. From there on I meandered into thinking about free will, as in, will AIs have it? Esoteric, yes, but nothing is more immediate than s...
Did you see the one where 95 affordable apartments were offered for rent in Ye Olde San Francisco recently and 6580 people applied? So much for being poor in the richest city in the US. In a similar vein, I keep on seeing all this stuff about foreign heads of state being entertained at Mar a Lago. Hmm, that sounds like there’s a tin ear somewhere...
Did you see that astronomers have found tens of thousands of black holes at the center of the Milky Way? We used to think there was just one, albeit very heavy. There are black holes that have the mass of an entire galaxy and are growing at unimaginable rates. And they don’t just come in singles or even six-packs. They come in swarms! So is the M...
So the movie “2001 – A Space Odyssey” has just been re-released. I saw it when it was first released and I didn’t understand it even then. No doubt I will be none the wiser this time around. But one thing still sticks in my mind; HAL, the mission computer had a bad case of mental ill-health. “2001” was a prescient work in so many ways. I think th...
I just arrived back from one of my regular business trips to China. Here’s my tally: air pollution is even worse, water in rivers is filthy. Yet the built environment is even more impressive and the Chinese people have made giant steps forward over their American and European counterparts in the convenience of their lives. How so? It’s called WeC...
I recently read an obituary of someone the town in which I live. He had died from complications of Alzheimer’s at the age of 73. What had caught my attention and stimulated my curiosity was that he had been a runner. I’m a runner too so I read the lengthy obituary just out of curiosity about the rest of his life, and yes, what sort of life had ...
Facebook has been roasted lately due to its user privacy issues, not to mention its hosting of those infamous fake news feeds. No good deed goes unvarnished… But I guess they’re not the only ones to have that problem: how about the Federal Office of Personnel Management where 4 million personnel records were stolen by hackers, including probably ...
