Javascript, pop-ups and ad-blocking

“The ethics of modern web ad-blocking” – by Marco Arment

“The ethics of modern web ad-blocking

(…) Pop-up-blocking software boomed, and within a few years, every modern web browser blocked almost all pop-ups by default.

(…) People often argue that running ad-blocking software is violating an implied contract between the reader and the publisher: the publisher offers the page content to the reader for free, in exchange for the reader seeing the publisher’s ads. And that’s a nice, simple theory, but it’s a blurry line in reality.Continue reading→

Learning about our minds while teaching machines how to learn

Writing an algorithm requires a reflection of what steps, and their internal relations, are necessary to determine a desired output correctly. Such reflection exercise involving logical and abstraction considerations not only about the operations to be performed but also, in depth, studying how our mind process that same operations. A couple of recent articles explore that cyclical effort.

“Algorithms of the Mind – What Machine Learning Teaches Us About Ourselves” by Christopher Nguyen and “Are You a Thinking Thing? Why Debating Machine Consciousness Matters” by Alison E. Berman aproach interesting points of this case.Continue reading→

“Artificial Intelligence Is Already Weirdly Inhuman” by DAVID BERREBY

From Nautilus, Dark Matter issue via Azeem Azhar:

“…Artificial intelligence has been conquering hard problems at a relentless pace lately (…) neural network has equaled or even surpassed human beings at tasks like discovering new drugs, finding the best candidates for a job, and even driving a car.

(…) some hard problems make neural nets respond in ways that aren’t understandable.

(…) Not knowing how or why a machine did something strange leaves us unable to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

But the occasional unexpected weirdness of machine “thought” might also be a teaching moment for humanity. (…) they might show us how intelligence works outside the constraints of our species’ limitations. (…)” read full article

“The Neuron’s Secret Partner: Glial cells…” by FERRIS JABR

Article by Ferris Jabr, illustrated by Jackie Ferrentino, featured in Nautilus

“When we speak of brain cells we usually mean neurons: (…) The rest, known as neuroglia or simply glia, have long lived in the neuron’s shadow.

(…) By the early 1900s, that notion had begun to erode. (…) From the 1960s onward (…) neuroscientists confirmed that glia are the brain’s architects, doctors, police, janitors, and gardeners. In the last five years, researchers have finally brought glia into the limelight as the highly dynamic, incomparably versatile, and indispensable partners of the neuron. Here are five recently discovered roles glia play in the brain:

Wiring – (…) radial glial cells form a widespread lattice of cables along which neurons crawl like inchworms (…) A series of studies in the last three years have also confirmed that some glial cells excrete molecules that promote the formation of new connections between neurons, while others engulf and digest weak and underused synapses, changing the brain’s micro-circuitry throughout life.
Clearing Clutter – (…) Microglia roam about scavenging harmful tangles of proteins, the remains of dead cells, and bits of unneeded DNA. But a study published just last year indicated that microglia are essential for eliminating clumps of amyloid beta and other protein clusters associated with Alzheimer’s and related neurodegenerative disorders. (…)

Helping Neurons Talk – (…) oligodendrocyte precursor cell (OPC) is one of the most unique and active types of glia. (…) OPCs form synapses with neurons and change their own behavior (…)

Helping You Breathe – (…) When glia known as astrocytes detected a drop in blood pH, which would correspond to elevated levels of carbon dioxide, they increased (…) the breathing rate in live rats, eventually bringing more oxygen to the brain. Raising the pH, which would correlate with oxygenated blood, had the opposite effect. (…)

Making You Smart – By absorbing and releasing neurotransmitters, and thereby modifying the availability of these molecules, astrocytes change how frequently and forcefully neurons fire” read full story

New economy – old problems

NY Times article By Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld exposed workplace issues Inside Amazon, and many great pieces written on the aftermath – among them one particularly good was by John Cassidy at The New Yorker.

Published right before NY Times’, one can only wonder what a great input would have been if Inside Amazon debate was to be taken into directly into consideration at “Networks and the Nature of the Firm” by Tim O’Reilly. This takes on a broader view on the new economy.

From Tim O’Reilly’s bigger picture to a inside dive into amazon jungle these articles compose an interesting triptych.

Empathy, Authority, and Virtual Reality

Suggestion has been used for a long time by pseudo-psychics, hypnotism, and other form of magicians. Regardless of some straight-out frauds, this is telling of the way our mind interprets perceptions does not conform to a deterministic way people sometimes try to see their ‘reasoning’.

An important factor on most of the explored means of tapping into suggestion was interaction with other person (the hypnotist). Authority plays a major role in this. As human communication is more and more mediated by technology, would our perception of authority be migrating as well? One may see a big data miracle if amazon guess someone is pregnant by her shopping history, but take for granted if a local pharmacist do so?

Would empathy, hand-in-hand with suggestion and authority, be migrating to be mediated by virtual reality?

Not surprisingly, as businesses get the taste of the market potential of this shift, here is a new batch of articles on the matter. Too many in this trendy topic to pick one, sorry.

“Inside the Empathy Machine: VR, Neuroscience, Race and Journalism” by Joel Beeson at Media Shift.

“NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell steps into virtual reality at Stanford lab” by Bjorn Carey

“The Limits of Virtual Reality: Debugging the Empathy Machine” by Ainsley Sutherland from MIT

“The Future of Empathy-Generating Virtual Reality Is Here” by Bill Desowitz

“How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine” – TED Talk with Chris Milk

“CAN VIRTUAL REALITY MAKE YOU A BETTER PERSON?” by Stern Strategy Group

“Is It Really So Bad If We Prefer Virtual Reality to Reality?” by Sveta McShane

“Science Isn’t Broken” by CHRISTIE ASCHWANDEN

Article from fivethirtyeight.com:

“If you follow the headlines, your confidence in science may have taken a hit lately.

(..) International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology recently accepted for publication a paper titled “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List,” whose text was nothing more than those seven words, repeated over and over for 10 pages. Two other journals allowed an engineer posing as Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabappel to publish a paper, “Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations.”

Revolutionary findings? Possibly fabricated. In May, a couple of University of California, Berkeley, grad students discovered irregularities in Michael LaCour’s influential paper suggesting that an in-person conversation with a gay person could change how people felt about same-sex marriage. The journal Science retracted the paper shortly after, when LaCour’s co-author could find no record of the data.

Taken together, headlines like these might suggest that science is a shady enterprise that spits out a bunch of dressed-up nonsense. But I’ve spent months investigating the problems hounding science, and I’ve learned that the headline-grabbing cases of misconduct and fraud are mere distractions. The state of our science is strong, but it’s plagued by a universal problem: Science is hard — really fucking hard.Continue reading→

“You Have a Notification: Welcome to the 24/7 Work Culture” by VIVEK WADHWA

Article featured in Singularity Hub‘s series ‘Future of Work’

“Netflix recently announced an unlimited paid-leave policy that allows employees to take off as much time as they want during the first year after a child’s birth or adoption. It is trying to one-up tech companies that offer unlimited vacation as a benefit. These are all public-relations ploys and recruiting gimmicks. (…)

Urgent or not, the emails continue for 24 hours a day—even on weekends. (…)

The reality is that there is no 9 to 5 any more. We are always connected, always on, always working— (…) as we became chained to the Internet. (…) There is no longer an excuse for not working.” read full article

Interspecies organ transplant

It is now long awaited that some day humans will be able to raise human spare parts in other species. Pigs are among the favored donors – perhaps due to the similar diet habits.

As this story by Antonio Regalado reports, researchers are presenting impressive progress in swapping hearts and kidneys among pigs and baboons (that would be us). Get me a new liver and a double dry martini to celebrate, please.

And then we know as well that (other) scientific experiments made mice smarter by inserting human brain cells in them.

Now we just have to be careful how to mix (shake, don’t stir) these practices. Make the pig too smart and I bet it won’t give away a heart so easily.

“When Machines Can Do Most Jobs—Passion, Creativity, and Reinvention Rule” by VIVEK WADHWA

story from Singularity Hub:

“(…) Now, by my estimates, the half-life of a career is about 10 years(…) within a decade (…) five years. Advancing technologies will cause so much disruption to almost every industry that entire professions will disappear. (…)

Change is happening so fast that our children may not even need to learn how to drive. (…)

English, psychology, history, and arts majors have been at a financial disadvantage over the past few decades. Parents have encouraged their children to go into fields such as finance, engineering, law and medicine, because they’re where the big money has been. But that is changing.(…) . It doesn’t matter whether they want to be artists, musicians, or plumbers; the key is for children to understand that education is a lifelong endeavor and to be ready to constantly reinvent themselves.

We will all need to be able to learn new skills, think critically, master new careers, and take advantage of the best opportunities that come our way.

Technology is now as important a skill as are reading, writing, and mathematics. (…)

But this too is changing (…) design and the soft sciences will gain increasing importance.

(…) Education will always be a platform on which to build success, but it really doesn’t matter what you study. (…) ” Read full story

Artificial Intelligence tackles the Internet of Things

In “Connecting artificial intelligence with the internet of things” Andy Meek discusses some pros and cons in the future of merging Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things. Reasons to be optimist, pitfalls and debate on its fears.

And Stephen Brennan’s “The Next Big Thing Is The Continuum” story is on how tech is the trends and challenges tech industry faces in trying to merge A.i. and I.O.T. in one new environment.

Suspicion smells

Reading newspaper used to wrap fish may be useful to read news with less bias. Your own bias.

“Something smells fishy: Olfactory suspicion cues improve performance on the Moses illusion and Wason rule discovery task” indicates that exposure to fish smells may bring people to have less memory illusion and reduced confirmation bias.

One of the researchers, Eunjung Kim, of above paper has also studied this topic in his previous “Fishy Smells Improve Critical Thinking: Explorations of the Embodiment of Suspicion” work.

“Leisure, the Basis of Culture” review by Maria Popova

Posted on Brain Pickings “Leisure, the Basis of Culture: An Obscure German Philosopher’s Timely 1948 Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Human Dignity in a Culture of Workaholism“:

” …In 1948 (…) German philosopher Josef Pieper (May 4, 1904–November 6, 1997) penned Leisure, the Basis of Culture(public library) — (…) triply timely today, in an age when we have commodified our aliveness so much as to mistake making a living for having a life.(…)

The Greek word for “leisure,” σχoλη, produced the Latin scola, which in turn gave us the English school (…)Pieper writes:

The original meaning of the concept of “leisure” has practically been forgotten in today’s leisure-less culture of “total work”: in order to win our way to a real understanding of leisure, we must confront the contradiction that rises from our overemphasis on that world of work.

(..) But the question is this: can the world of man be exhausted in being “the working world”? (…)

Echoing Kierkegaard’s terrific defense of idleness as spiritual nourishment, Pieper writes:

The code of life in the High Middle Ages [held] that it was precisely lack of leisure, an inability to be at leisure, that went together with idleness; that the restlessness of work-for-work’s-sake arose from nothing other than idleness. There is a curious connection in the fact that the restlessness of a self-destructive work-fanaticism should take its rise form the absence of a will to accomplish something.” go to original post

“How to Help Self-Driving Cars Make Ethical Decisions” by Will Knight

From MIT Tech Review:

“Fully self-driving vehicles are still at the research stage, but automated driving technology is rapidly creeping into vehicles. (…)

As the technology advances, however, and cars become capable of interpreting more complex scenes, automated driving systems may need to make split-second decisions that raise real ethical questions.

(…) a child suddenly dashing into the road, forcing the self-driving car to choose between hitting the child or swerving into an oncoming van.

(…) “If that would avoid the child, if it would save the child’s life, could we injure the occupant of the vehicle? (…)

Others believe the situation is a little more complicated. For example, Bryant Walker-Smith (…) says plenty of ethical decisions are already made in automotive engineering. “Ethics, philosophy, law: all of these assumptions underpin so many decisions,” he says. “If you look at airbags, for example, inherent in that technology is the assumption that you’re going to save a lot of lives, and only kill a few.”

(…) “The biggest ethical question is how quickly we move. We have a technology that potentially could save a lot of people, but is going to be imperfect and is going to kill.” read full article

Anthropocentrisms, anthropomorphisms, and compassion cases

From time to time people say We all need to stop eating meat now, and this is why

Won’t such considerations also be made in defense of plants as well? New Yorker’s “The Intelligent Plant” and see if you agree. Not exactly freshest news in the tray, but an interesting piece. (Recommended by my father – can’t beat that)

And a similar line of thought could build a case for Robot Rights

Transhumanist Free Will

Even if you think debate over human free will has been conclusive (to say the least) or not agree in aphorisms as definitive judgements on the matter, Hank Pellissier’s “Free Will Does Not Exist – Should it be a Transhumanist Enhancement?” brings a refreshing debate on what would ‘enhanced’ human beings do about their possibility of free will.

“(…) We don’t have free will because human physiology isn’t wired that way. (…)

It is true that certain factions still believe in free will – Religionists and Libertarians – but I’m not in either camp. I’m an atheist social progressive.

Having established my opinion on free will, let’s proceed…(…) Should 100% Free Will be a Transhumanist Goal? (…) I believe free will isn’t available,but it could be attained, at least partially, perhaps through excruciating disciplines… or – definitely – via emerging transhuman technologies.

Returning to the present time, let’s examine the suffering caused by our enslavement to our outdated neurochemistry, which evolved to protect us from pre-civilization menaces. Let’s divide our investigation of the consequences into three categories:

Body – Many people (…) enslaved to physical addictions that render them helpless. (…)

Emotion – Humanity is cursed with negative feelings that injure us with internal pain and agony. (…)

Thought – Our minds often flit spasmodically from one obsession to another, exhausting us with their randomness and superficiality. (…)

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all these problems were eradicated?

Imagine an existence as Free-Will Transhumans, who decided 100% of the time what we wanted to think, feel, and do.. (…)

We’ll begin with options presently available, and continue from there into futuristic, far-out, fantastical possibilities.

Today’s Techniques and Technology – Control of one’s thoughts and feelings can be improved via meditation. (…)

Pharmaceutical Control of our Biochemistry – “Paradise engineering”, advocated by philosopher David Pearce of HedWeb.com, has “abolition of suffering” as its goal. (…)

Memory Erasure and Alteration + Injection of Joyful Invented Memories – Our neurological response to situations is largely determined by memories of similar events. (…)

Rewiring Our Brains, with Wires – Our mental activity currently depends on largely-out-of-our-control neurochemical reactions….” read full article

Will the future be more of the same in sexism?

Rose Eveleth’s Why Aren’t There More Women Futurists? published in The Atlantic discusses the relations of having a male skewed crowd of futurists and what to expect of the future.

Are men to reproduce current social sexist skews? If so, as a self-fulfilling prophecy, or as unfolding of today’s cultural vices?

Then, looking at a possible explanation of why women are not so preset among futurists – is it an old educational/income bias – or women nonconformist stance towards current sexist society prevents them from seeing men’s brave new world?

In this case, it may be exactly what future calls for.

Spontaneous thoughts processes study

Published in ScienceDirect, “The wandering brain: Meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies of mind-wandering and related spontaneous thought processes” researchers use neuroimaging analysis on spontaneous thoughts.

Cognitive functions in mind-wandering states links to brain activity in both default mode network and not directly related regions with comparable consistency.

Quantitative meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies bring light to neural correlates.

“These meta-analytic results indicate that DMN activation alone is insufficient to adequately capture the neural basis of spontaneous thought; frontoparietal control network areas, and other non-DMN regions, appear to be equally central. We conclude that further progress in the cognitive and clinical neuroscience of spontaneous thought will therefore require a re-balancing of our view of the contributions of various regions and networks throughout the brain, and beyond the DMN.” check the full paper

And the whole earth was of one language… (Genesis 11:1)

Reserachers Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald, and Edward Gibson from the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences of MIT published a “Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages“.

Words grammatically related tend to be closer to each other in sentences. Across all languages, in what can be a case of a linguistic universal. Linguistic universals are predicted by theories such as Universal Grammar by Noam Chomsky and applied in many natural and formal languages.

Key novelty here is ‘Large-scale evidence’. Since Noam Chomsky (among other linguists) language models and hierarchy studies apply theoretic universal properties. More data and application of language parser made it possible to gather evidence of dependency length minimization.