Posted in robotics/AI
The problem of common-sense reasoning has plagued the field of artificial intelligence for over 50 years. Now a new approach, borrowing from two disparate lines of thinking, has made important progress.
An unconscious person’s response to odors after a serious brain injury may be a simple yet powerful signal of how aware they are and how likely they are to survive and recover, a new study suggests, relying on responses to the scent of shampoo and the stench of rotting fish.
Patients who survive brain damage from trauma, stroke, or heart attack are plunged into forms of unconsciousness that vary from minimal consciousness to unresponsive wakefulness, sometimes called a vegetative state. Specialists trying to tell who is in which state have fared only a little better than a coin flip: About 4 in 10 people thought to be unconscious are actually aware.
That uncertainty makes decisions for families and clinicians supremely difficult, from weighing how to treat pain to whether to withdraw life support. Sophisticated imaging of unconscious patients’ brain activity can reveal hints of awareness that go beyond behavioral assessments, sometimes only to deepen the mystery of who will get better. Now Israeli scientists have turned to the sense of smell, evolutionarily speaking our most ancient sensory system, as a window into our brain. Their paper appears Wednesday in Nature.
Artificial intelligence is getting down in the weeds. An AI-powered robot that can distinguish weeds from crops and remove them could eventually be used as an alternative to chemical insecticides.
Kevin Patel and Nihar Chaniyara at tech start-up AutoRoboCulture in Gandhinagar, India, have created a prototype device, called Nindamani, specifically for cauliflower crops.
Cornell astronomers plot how to take spectra from extrasolar earths trapped in orbits around dying white dwarfs.
I was confident enough to turn it in. However, I then was looking online and found out there’s a really easy way to find out if an essay was written by GPT-2. It’s to feed it to GPT-2 and if it’s able to predict the next words, then it was written by the AI. It’s easier to find out than normal plagiarism.
I knew that the business school had software that they were using to look out for plagiarism in all the essays that are turned in to their online platform, which is how I turned in my essays. So I was slightly worried that the company that sold them the anti-plagiarism software would have made an update.
I don’t think the professors even considered the possibility of GPT-2 writing the essays, but I was slightly worried that the company making the software added a module. But not that much.
Over at the always interesting Small Wars Journal, Tony Corn has a stimulating piece on the implications of the European crisis for world politics. He sees a clueless German policy establishment recklessly moving toward an unsustainable quest for power reminiscent in too many ways of problems Germany has had in its past.
Germany, warns Corn, is planning to use its financial domination of Europe to remake the EU into an extension of German power — more or less the way that Prussia used the Zollverein to bring northern Germany under its control and then dominated the Bismarckian Reich through a rigged constitutional system. Once that is in place, he writes, the Germans will continue their policy of deepening relations with Russia at the expense of NATO and transatlantic ties, and end Europe’s embargo on arms sales to China.
As an analyst, Corn sometimes goes to what we more placid types at VM consider overexcited conclusions about Eurasian power realignments. Safely ensconced among the storied oaks and elms, gazebos, pergolas, ha-has, follies and deer parks surrounding the stately Mead manor in glamorous Queens, we tend to take a wait-and-see attitude toward organizations like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization which Russia and China have sometimes posited as a kind of embryonic counter-NATO. Corn, in our perhaps excessively complacent view, can be too quick to take vague Eurasian fantasies and aspirations about diplomatic revolutions as accomplished facts; it is easier to dream about firm Russian and Chinese anti-US cooperation than for those two countries to make it work. But that said, there is no doubt that Corn’s industry, historical grounding and sensitive, even over-sensitive nerve endings give him the ability to produce original and striking ideas.
Bot Sentinel conducted an analysis and found bots and trolls are using hashtags like #ReopenAmericaNow and #StopTheMadness to spread disinformation.
COVID-19 can remain in the air in closed spaces.
Tras la propagación del virus, científicos se han dedicado a comprobar si es posible el contagio por medio del aire
Investigadores del laboratorio Estatal de Virología de la Universidad de Wuhan indicaron que debido a la pandemia causada por el creciente número de contagios por coronavirus, distintos estudios se han dedicado a comprobar si es posible el contagio por medio del aire.
De acuerdo con el estudio publicado en la revista Nature, el coronavirus puede permanecer en el aire de los espacios que carecen de ventilación, es importante mencionar que el mayor factor de riesgo es el contacto con las gotículas de una persona infectada.
This robot is a drone and a generator that can go on surveillance missions. Is there anything it can’t do?
#OopsMyBad #Busted 🤔
Yes you read this right. The WHO criticized a drug and used a reference that was neither peer reviewed or published 🙄…Then they removed it as if no one would notice.
The antiviral medicine remdesivir from Gilead Sciences failed to speed the improvement of patients with Covid-19 or prevent them from dying, according to results from a long-awaited clinical trial conducted in China. Gilead, however, said the data suggest a “potential benefit.”
A summary of the study results was inadvertently posted to the website of the World Health Organization and seen by STAT on Thursday, but then removed.
