Kira Tang
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on the atlas · 27
- Theranos whistleblower says ‘You Can See Everything’ is full of lies - Los Angeles Times1 savers
- Arizona’s water is drying up. That won't stop its data center rush. | Grist1 savers
- Stephen Cheng: Aways Together1 savers
- Stephen Cheng Released One Single That Sounded Like Nothing Else. But Who Was He? | The New Yorker1 savers
- Jadaliyya - The Military-Literary Complex1 savers
- The roots of digital racism date back to 19th-century railroads - Fast Company1 savers
- How to read ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ | Notes and Records | The Royal Society1 savers
- Everyday Technology Is Becoming a Black Box. Is There a Cost? | The MIT Press Reader1 savers
- High-level visual representations in the human brain are aligned with large language models | Nature Machine Intelligence1 savers
- Is There a Crisis of Truth? | Los Angeles Review of Books1 savers
- Bong Joon-ho, réalisateur de « Mickey 17 » : « Définir l’étranger comme un ennemi, c’est la base du fascisme »1 savers
- The Auteur of Anime | The New Yorker1 savers
- The Daughters of Eve: Chicago’s Lost All-Girl Group of the ‘60s | by Parmis Etez | Medium1 savers
- Squid Game composer Jung Jae-il on his biggest joys in life: cats, death metal & collaboration — Composer Magazine1 savers
- Project Cybersyn: Chile's Radical Experiment in Cybernetic Socialism | The MIT Press Reader1 savers
- The history of sex research: Is “sex” a useful category? - ScienceDirect1 savers
- lecture2024-20 | The Human Brain1 savers
- lecture2024-19 | The Human Brain1 savers
- What Can Women Do Now? - The Atlantic1 savers
- How research grant applications are slowing scientific progress | Vox1 savers
- Millions fled Hurricane Milton. Many incarcerated people were trapped. | Vox1 savers
- lecture2024-08 | The Human Brain1 savers
- Why does the Spotify algorithm keep serving Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” and Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!”? | Vox1 savers
- Monkeypox: WHO, Africa’s CDC declare mpox a public health emergency. | Vox1 savers
- Fiction by C Pam Zhang: ‘See It Slant’1 savers
- Open House for Butterflies: Ruth Krauss’s Final and Loveliest Collaboration with Maurice Sendak – The Marginalian2 savers
- The Paradise Notebooks: A Poet and a Geologist’s Love Letter to Life Lensed Through a Mountain – The Marginalian2 savers
highlights · 92
Microsoft Common Objects in Context (COCO) image database
High-level visual representations in the human brain are aligned with large language models | Nature Machine Intelligenceas a Crisis of Institutions — of institutional authority and legitimacy
Is There a Crisis of Truth? | Los Angeles Review of Booksin order to have right belief, people must, essentially, be very much like us — not to know facts and theories as their personal possession (since most of us don’t either) but to trust the people and institutions that we trust
Is There a Crisis of Truth? | Los Angeles Review of BooksBeing a knowledgeable person may mean knowing a lot of stuff, but it certainly means knowing who knows and who does not know
Is There a Crisis of Truth? | Los Angeles Review of BooksBut here’s another, also probably irritating, claim: it’s not obvious that Trump does know significantly less science than Obama — a highly intelligent man but, after all, just a Harvard lawyer. And there’s no good reason to think that politicians’ personal knowledge of science makes much difference to concrete political outcomes
Is There a Crisis of Truth? | Los Angeles Review of Bookssame reasons that you want the inner mechanisms of your car or cell phone to be opaque
Is There a Crisis of Truth? | Los Angeles Review of Bookswhat it might mean to be an “educated person” — despite disagreement among educators these days about what that is or whether “educated persons” are still supposed to be the product of universities
Is There a Crisis of Truth? | Los Angeles Review of Booksscientific ignorance is often pointed to either as a cause of the Crisis of Truth or as key evidence that such a Crisis exists. From which the remedy follows: public ignorance must be repaired. The public should be exposed to a lot more science
Is There a Crisis of Truth? | Los Angeles Review of Bookssome things that have presence in the increasingly fragmented mass media — for instance, the laws of motion and thermodynamics; the speed of light and the nature of the nervous impulse; the fissile nature of a uranium isotope. Of course, public knowledge of matters like these is superficial, insecure, or (if you like) deficient, but the relevant circumstance here is public exposure and the absence of noticeable argument
Is There a Crisis of Truth? | Los Angeles Review of Bookscalling it a lie was to position Truth in a moral field
Is There a Crisis of Truth? | Los Angeles Review of Booksacademic inquiry, which, she said, requires that “we do not describe lies as truth and truth as lies,” nor that “we accept abuses [Missstände] as normal.” The Harvard audience stood and cheered: they understood the coded political reference to Trump and evidently agreed that the opposite of Truth was a lie — not just a statement that didn’t match reality but an intentional deception
Is There a Crisis of Truth? | Los Angeles Review of BooksCompare those sciences that seem good fits with the notion of a Search for Truth to those that seem less good fits: theoretical physics versus seismology, academic brain science versus research on the best flavoring for a soft drink
Is There a Crisis of Truth? | Los Angeles Review of BooksAl Gore famously responded to disbelief in climate change by insisting on “an inconvenient truth” or when we demand to be told the Truth about the safety of GMOs
Is There a Crisis of Truth? | Los Angeles Review of Booksinstances of the Truth, surrounded by an epistemic halo
Is There a Crisis of Truth? | Los Angeles Review of Booksthe people in this country have had enough of experts
Is There a Crisis of Truth? | Los Angeles Review of Bookswith Trump, Heidegger, Latour, Derrida, and Quentin Tarantino improbably sharing a sinful relativist bed
Is There a Crisis of Truth? | Los Angeles Review of BooksBut rather less dangerous Truth-Denying is also epidemic. Astrology and homeopathy flourish in modern Western societies, almost a majority of the American adult public doesn’t believe in evolution, and a third of young Americans think that the Earth may be flat
Is There a Crisis of Truth? | Los Angeles Review of BooksFor example, he insisted that workers should control the use of Cybersyn and that this was within their capabilities. He insisted that the operations room be made accessible to workers and helped design an interface for the room that did not require knowledge of typing on a keyboard. He further recommended that workers design the models of the state-controlled factories, stating “There is no-one better qualified to model a plant than the man whose life is spent working in it. He knows
Project Cybersyn: Chile's Radical Experiment in Cybernetic Socialism | The MIT Press Readerthe priority its designers gave to the human operator. “Special attention will be paid to the development of man-machine interfaces,” Beer specified, focusing once again on the user and prioritizing human understanding over technological flashiness.
Project Cybersyn: Chile's Radical Experiment in Cybernetic Socialism | The MIT Press Readerone that did not try to put the government everywhere at once but instead helped it channel its limited resources where they were needed most
Project Cybersyn: Chile's Radical Experiment in Cybernetic Socialism | The MIT Press ReaderBeer had drawn from his understanding of the human nervous system to propose a form of management that allowed businesses to adapt quickly to a changing environment. A major theme in Beer’s writings was finding a balance between centralized and decentralized control, and how to ensure the stability of the entire firm without sacrificing the autonomy of its component parts
Project Cybersyn: Chile's Radical Experiment in Cybernetic Socialism | The MIT Press ReaderCybernetic thinking influenced subsequent work in information theory, computing, cognitive science, engineering, biology, social science, and industrial management
Project Cybersyn: Chile's Radical Experiment in Cybernetic Socialism | The MIT Press ReaderIn 1948 he described cybernetics as the study of “control and communication in the animal and the machine.” Cybernetics often mixed metaphors from engineering and biology to describe the behavior of complex systems ranging from the electromechanical operation of a computer to the function of the human brain.
Project Cybersyn: Chile's Radical Experiment in Cybernetic Socialism | The MIT Press ReaderSubfornical organ (SFO) – below the fornix Area posterma (AP) – at the floor of the third ventricle Organum Vasculosum of the lamina terminalis (OVLT)
lecture2024-20 | The Human BrainNot all areas of cortex are activated during REM sleep. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is not active
lecture2024-19 | The Human BrainOne of the most interesting aspect of sleep is the development of very slow rhythms in the thalamus. These rhythms consist of UP and DOWN states. In the DOWN states, the neurons in the thalamus become hyperpolarized (below their normal resting potential) and so do not fire. This deprives cortex of sensory input. In UP states, the thalamic nuclei return to their normal resting potential, and this is accompanied by a synchronized burst of neuronal firing. This burst is believe to play a role in the consolidation of memories.
lecture2024-19 | The Human BrainHHMI reportedly provides enough funding to operate a small- to medium-sized lab without requiring any extra grants. The idea is that if investigators are simply given enough money to do their jobs, they can redirect all their wasted grant application time toward actually doing science
How research grant applications are slowing scientific progress | VoxMany people (admittedly, myself included, as a burnt-out UC Berkeley neuroscience graduate student) wind up leaving a trail of unfinished experiments behind when they leave academia — and have no formal obligation to complete them
How research grant applications are slowing scientific progress | VoxThis time constraint forces trainees to choose projects that can be wrapped up by the time they graduate, but science, especially groundbreaking science, rarely fits into a three- to five-year window
How research grant applications are slowing scientific progress | VoxSince they do the bulk of the intellectual and physical labor, these younger scientists are usually the lead authors of their lab’s publications. In smaller research groups, a grad student may be the only one who fully understands their project
How research grant applications are slowing scientific progress | VoxRelying on a transient, underpaid workforce makes science worse
How research grant applications are slowing scientific progress | VoxBecause funding is so competitive, applicants increasingly have to twist their research proposals to align with whoever will give them money. A lab interested in studying how cells communicate with each other, for example, may spin it as a study of cancer, heart disease, or depression to convince the NIH that its project is worth funding
How research grant applications are slowing scientific progress | VoxBetween the endless cycle of grant applications and the constant turnover of early-career researchers in labs, pushing science forward is slow at best and Sisyphean at worst
How research grant applications are slowing scientific progress | Voxit’s technically illegal to stay in a mandatory evacuation zone
Millions fled Hurricane Milton. Many incarcerated people were trapped. | VoxTo pursue an evacuation, these facilities would need agreements with other facilities where they can transport inmates, transportation for large groups, fuel, and other resources — proposals they need to put in place prior to the emergency itself.
Millions fled Hurricane Milton. Many incarcerated people were trapped. | Voxjust six states mentioned safety protocols for incarcerated people in public plans detailing their emergency responses, while 24 mentioned the use of their labor for disaster mitigation
Millions fled Hurricane Milton. Many incarcerated people were trapped. | VoxIncarcerated people are often neglected when it comes to ensuring their safety during natural disasters, but they’re frequently exploited for labor in the aftermath of those same situations. In Louisiana, incarcerated people performed clean-up and recovery efforts after Hurricane Francine in September and, in California, they’ve been key to fighting wildfires for years
Millions fled Hurricane Milton. Many incarcerated people were trapped. | Vox550 men in North Carolina were left in flooded cells at the Mountain View Correctional Institution without lights or running water for five days, the Intercept reports. Previously, hundreds of prisoners were abandoned during Hurricane Katrina without food or water after staff at the Orleans Parish Prison fled.
Millions fled Hurricane Milton. Many incarcerated people were trapped. | VoxThe plight of Florida’s inmates is just the latest example to highlight how vulnerable incarcerated people are during natural disasters, when they have no control over their mobility or their exposure to hazardous situations.
Millions fled Hurricane Milton. Many incarcerated people were trapped. | VoxGanglion cells are the only cells in the retina that generate action potentials
lecture2024-08 | The Human Brain“To me, this is not a Spotify-specific problem, not a music-specific problem. It’s everything about how technology mediates human interaction, if it goes through these black boxes of machine learning or AI. You’re just left [asking] ‘Here’s the answer, how do I trust it?’ … I think that’s a bad state, that we as people who work on technology have to improve.”
Why does the Spotify algorithm keep serving Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” and Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!”? | VoxOne 2009 study on optimal distinctiveness found that young people preferred and identified more with music styles at “intermediate” popularity levels, as opposed to either massively popular or esoteric ones. Spotify’s algorithms likely reflect and strengthen that bias, to its own benefit
Why does the Spotify algorithm keep serving Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” and Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!”? | VoxNeither Roan nor Carpenter is anywhere near as famous as Beyoncé, but Askin suspects part of the reason they keep showing up on pop fans’ Spotify algorithms is due to a sociological concept called “optimal distinctiveness” that explains many listeners’ tastes. “What we found was that the songs that are pretty similar to what’s popular but a little bit distinctive are the ones that do best
Why does the Spotify algorithm keep serving Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” and Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!”? | VoxThe dual burden of mpox and HIV was also a major factor that prompted the Africa CDC to declare the mpox outbreaks a continental emergency
Monkeypox: WHO, Africa’s CDC declare mpox a public health emergency. | VoxOutbreak response efforts in the DRC and other African countries have once again been hamstrung by the same challenges health officials faced during previous outbreaks and pandemics, including Covid: a lack of global solidarity and an unwillingness to share life-saving resources
Monkeypox: WHO, Africa’s CDC declare mpox a public health emergency. | VoxThe blur, and the woman in the mirror, were gone
Fiction by C Pam Zhang: ‘See It Slant’I remembered Takashi’s knife slipping through the cold steers; they hadn’t bled, either
Fiction by C Pam Zhang: ‘See It Slant’Though the café didn’t serve dairy, I tasted sour milk. Heavy cream
Fiction by C Pam Zhang: ‘See It Slant’Bovine good-naturedness
Fiction by C Pam Zhang: ‘See It Slant’When he left K had lightened again, her voice returning to the breathy girlishness she hadn’t had as a girl
Fiction by C Pam Zhang: ‘See It Slant’