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New Statesman | A new photoshopping chatbot shows artificial intelligence is more fun when it's dumb New Statesman This, more than anything else, is the best way to summarise Microsoft's latest AI chat bot, Murphy, “the robot with imagination”. Designed by the company's Azure Machine Learning Team the same people behind last year's immensely popular age-guessing ... and more » |
USA TODAY | Is Pokémon Go racist? How the app may be redlining communities of color USA TODAY SAN FRANCISCO — While playing the popular augmented-reality game Pokémon Go in Long Beach, a city that is nearly 50% white, Aura Bogado made an unsettling discovery — there were far more PokéStops and Gyms, locations where people pick up ... Best Free Pokémon Go Bots: What is Necrobot and how do I automatically snipe Pokémon?TrustedReviews Pokémon Go introduces 'Sightings' function to track nearby creaturesDaily Mail Pokemon Go Gets New 'Nearby' TrackerPC Magazine Tech Times -TechRadar -Mirror.co.uk -Forbes all 247 news articles » |
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Earlier this year, we celebrated when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) put forth a new set of proposals that would control the polluting haze in our National Parks caused by sources like nearby coal plants, oil and gas operations, and vehicles. Now we're marking the end of the comment period with one last request that you submit your comment calling for strong regional haze standards.
So far, Sierra Club members, supporters, and allies have submitted nearly 90,000 comments asking the EPA to require that states enact clear, robust, and uniform haze control plans nationwide.
This year, the U.S. national park system turns 100, and it's essential that we protect these national treasures from the dangerous air pollution that results from weak clean air protections. Air pollution still threatens many of our national parks, the vitality of local economies that depend on them, and the health of visiting families and nearby communities.
This is why we're asking the EPA for the strongest regional haze standard possible. Strong regional haze safeguards will improve public health for park visitors as well as the communities surrounding major sources of pollution. This means fewer asthma attacks, respiratory diseases, heart attacks, and deaths associated with haze pollution.
The current Regional Haze Rule is working to drive reductions in air pollution emissions, but existing loopholes allow greedy polluters to avoid timely cleanup of the country's most iconic wild places just so they can continue to pad their pockets. We can't allow states to delay for years implementation of the next set of hazing reducing requirements.
You can help - take action and submit your comment before 11:59pm ET Wednesday, August 10, urging the Obama administration to finalize the strongest possible haze pollution protections and give states the clarity and stronger tools they need to act.
Help ensure not only that your next trip to a national park will include clear skies, but that our children and generations to come will have the ability to enjoy the natural beauty our national parks were intended to preserve.
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There is something heavy on my heart that I want to share. I have been in denial about it for two years and frankly I am embarrassed by the truth of the matter. So today I admit that I suffer from... TAA.
Terminal Ancestry Addiction.
There is not a morning, afternoon, or evening that I can resist searching, researching, or discovering information about my ancestry.
It began in 2010 when I was tasked to locate records on my 2xs great grandfather on Ancestry.com. The paper trails were only the gateway drugs to my addiction but DNA testing was the hard core stuff. It took me. I became full blown TAA in 2014 after taking 3 DNA tests. It started off innocently. I was only looking for one person, one connection.
Nobody told me this would happen.
There are days that I can go on binges, not eating, not bathing and not working. You will find me in a manic state, gaunt and disheveled, locked away in several TAA sites: AncestryDNA.com, 23&ME, Family Tree DNA, familyserach.org ― the crack houses of ancestry addicts. Other days I have not even seen my own face in the mirror while lost on Gedmatch.com. It's a den of obsession. A rabbit hole. I am possessed by the dead. Trapped in the snares of U.S. census, slave logs, Freedman Bureau records, wills and probates, passenger logs, and Dawes Native American Rolls.
I am the Walter White of family trees, always looking to build a better meth lab (That's a Breaking Bad reference in case you didn't get that).
One of the side effects of TAA is CO ― Cousin Overdose. Your life becomes overrun with cousins. I have three DNA tests, each with 50+ pages of 50 cousins per page. That's thousands of unknown relatives. Cousins all over the country. Cousins all over the world. Cousins of every different ethnicity. Cousins here. Cousins there. Cousins everywhere! I can't bat an eye without seeing a cousin. I can't pass a person on the street without wondering, “Are you my cousin? Please spit in this tube.”
I am guilty of neglecting my immediate and living family for the new and the dead. I wish my family would share in my excitement and manic ancestral discoveries. They don't. They don't want my drug. They don't care about their Neanderthal percentages or how much KhoiSan we are. They could care less about having more cousins and they sure in hell don't want their buried and dead secrets unearthed.
I am InDNA Jones and I must find the family jewels ― even if it means I journey alone.
I have even convinced some of my dearest friends and family into trying this DNA drug with me. I've shared the swab, passed the test tube, and begged them to just scrape for me. Just spit for me. Why? Because Ancestry loves company. So to them I apologize for my influence.
The ancestors made me do it.
TAA is curable theoretically, but practically as curable as the meaning of life is discoverable. The more roadblocks you hit, the worse the addiction grows. You will pull out your hair, grit your teeth, and bite your nails until the mystery is solved. A few other contributors and triggers to the persistence of the addiction are close DNA matches who keep their trees private ― or worst ― refuse to communicate or have no information at all.
Addicts spend hours and hours perseverating on why? Hours trying to find a way around their closed doors. Why won't they share their ancestors with me? They're my ancestors too! Why?!
I need more ancestors! Give me more ancestors!
The more ancestors you discover, the further you dig. I have dug until I unearthed Charlemagne from the tomb. He is now framed and on the family wall.
“That's not just a medieval emperor. That's my 39th great grandpa.”
I imagine being bounced on his knee as a little royal tyke as he tells me stories of his royal conquests.
My spouse thinks I've gone mad. Maybe I have. TAA is a Honey Badger and Honey Badger don't care. My soul can no longer rest until I know every last single great grandparent as far as history can record.
With TAA the world begins to close in on you, growing smaller and smaller, as everyone becomes... RELATED.
Maybe my cousin Stedman Graham could invite me over to his and Oprah's house in Santa Barbara and we can sit on the veranda for mint julep sweet tea and buttered scones in the Pacific breeze. Eat your hearts out world. Maybe I'll call up Blake Shelton, Lance Bass, and Barack Obama to invite them to our family reunion for 7th+ cousins. We can eat Barbecue and play dominoes and sing N'Sync songs.
Can you imagine the family photos? Now that's America.
“And Blake, don't forget to bring Gwen and the baby along. We'd love to see them.”
Did I just name drop. Maybe? I'm addicted. Don't judge me… and my family.
It is such a weight lifted to declare my truth and share my addiction. Acceptance is the first step to recovery. If you are experiencing any of these symptoms you may be suffering from Terminal Ancestry Addiction too. Well you are not alone. There are thousands of us like you ― likely your cousins. We even have television shows, Who Do You Think You Are? and Finding Your Roots that are dedicated to this addiction.
Sidenote: I am convinced that Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Pablo Escobar of DNA.
I write this letter as I suffer from ancestry withdrawal while attempting to go cold turkey for just one day. I'm shaking like an ancestry.com tree leaf. I don't know if I can make it. I really don't know. They're calling me. Calling me. I need more of that double helix. Just one more ancestor hint.
Please pray for me… or at least open up your damn family trees.
Luv,
Quincy
(your 1st - 8th cousin)
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
In 2015, the fencer Nzingha Prescod—her mother named her after a warrior queen from Angola—became the first black woman to win an individual medal at the Senior World Championships. This short film by Anderson Wright, NZINGHA, follows Prescod's fencing journey under the tutelage of the African American fencer Peter Westbrook. Now, she's competing for the United States at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. “I wouldn't want to leave this sport without something that represented how much of my energy I put into it,” she says. “If I were to medal at the Olympics, it would show so many little kids that just because you don't see someone that looks like you doing this, doesn't mean it's impossible.”
Financial Times | Chinese M&A: Beijing courts Berlin Financial Times At this year's Hannover Messe, the world's biggest industrial fair, it was one of the stars of the show: an elegant, ultra-sensitive robot known as an Iiwa that can pour a beer and brew a cup of coffee. Angela Merkel and ... “Kuka is a successful ... and more » |
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Today on In Case You Missed It: Scientists were able to program soft materials to shift their shape on digital command, which is only a precursor to our biggest tech news of this episode: That an industrial robot normally used to put together cars... Video games, the world has come to realize, can do good. Twenty or thirty years ago, people had a harder time accepting this, much to the frustration of daily-gaming youngsters such as myself. I remember deciding, for a school science project, to demonstrate that video games improve “hand-eye coordination,” the go-to benefit in those days to explain why they weren't all bad. But as our understanding of video games has become more sophisticated, as have video games themselves, it's become clear that we can engineer them to improve much more about ourselves than that.
The New Yorker‘s Dan Hurley recently wrote about findings from a study called Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly (ACTIVE), which began with three thousand participants back in 1998. “The participants, who had an average age of 73.6 at the beginning of the trial, were randomly divided into four groups. The first group, which served as control, received no brain training at all. The next two were given ten hours of classroom instruction on how to improve memory or reasoning. The last group performed something called speed-of-processing training” by playing a kind of video game for ten hour-long sessions spread over five weeks.
A decade into the study, some of the participants received extra training. 14 percent of the group who received no training met the criteria for dementia, 12.1 percent did in the group who received speed-of-processing training, and only 8.2 percent did in the group who received all possible training. “In all, the researchers calculated, those who completed at least some of these booster sessions were forty-eight-per-cent less likely to be diagnosed with dementia after ten years than their peers in the control group.”
Intriguing findings, and ones that have set off a good deal of media coverage. What sort of video game did ACTIVE use to get these results? The Wall Street Journal‘s Sumathi Reddy reports that “the exercise used in the study was developed by researchers but acquired by Posit Science, of San Francisco, in 2007,” who have gone on to market a version of it called Double Decision. In it, the player “must identify an object at the center of their gaze and simultaneously identify an object in the periphery,” like cars, signs, and other objects on a variety of landscapes. “As players get correct answers, the presentation time speeds up, distractors are introduced and the targets become more difficult to differentiate.”
You can see that game in action, and learn a little more about the study, in the Wall Street Journal video above. Effective brain-training video games remain in their infancy (and a few of the articles about ACTIVE's findings fail to mention Lumos Labs' $2 million payment to the government to settle charges that the company falsely claimed that their games could stave off dementia) but if the ones that work can harness the addictive power of an Angry Birds or a Candy Crush, we must prepare ourselves for a sharp generation of senior citizens indeed.
Note: The Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly (ACTIVE) study was funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR), both part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He's at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books' Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Playing a Video Game Could Cut the Risk of Dementia by 48%, Suggests a New Study is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.
