Good Enough: A lament for our benighted times Toronto man finds a lasting living in cobbling Canadians, obesity and the Double Down from KFC Topping the news, naturally, was the March 1863 marriage of the Prince of Wales — Queen Victoria’s lad, later Edward VII (and great-great-great-great grandfather of recently arrived HRH George Alexander Louis) — to Princess Alexandra of Denmark. The princess, it was reported, showed herself “endowed with rare powers of nerve and endurance.” It soon became apparent to a modern reader of Illustrated London News that “nerve and endurance” were the very motto of the age. The pages, reaching back as 1854, were full of stories of great undertakings and — here is where those times diverge from ours — of confidence, grand ambition and enterprises meant to last. Here, for instance, is a report on the Crumlin Valley Viaduct: Consider now a report on the building of an iron clock-tower in the faraway town of Geelong — hailed as “the Liverpool of Australia.” Economic and political institutions fail.
الشيخ الروحاني لجلب الحبيب Meet the scientists who are training AI to diagnose mental illness I slide back into the MRI machine, adjust the mirror above the lacrosse helmet-like setup holding my skull steady so that I can see the screen positioned behind my head, then I resume my resting position: video game button pad and emergency abort squeeze ball in my hands, placed crosswise across the breast bone like a mummy. My brain scan and the results of this MRI battery, if they were not a demo, would eventually be fed into a machine learning algorithm. A team of scientists and researchers would use it to help potentially discover how human beings respond to social situations. They want to compare healthy people’s brains to those of people with mental health disorders. That information might help make correct diagnoses for mental health disorders and even find the underlying physical causes. But the ultimate goal is to find the most effective intervention for any given mental health disorder. Mental health disorders haunt a sizable portion of humanity at any given time.
Generation Z Looks a Lot Like Millennials on Key Social and Political Issues Among Republicans, Gen Z stands out in views on race, climate and the role of government By Kim Parker, Nikki Graf and Ruth Igielnik No longer the new kids on the block, Millennials have moved firmly into their 20s and 30s, and a new generation is coming into focus. Generation Z – diverse and on track to be the most well-educated generation yet – is moving toward adulthood with a liberal set of attitudes and an openness to emerging social trends. On a range of issues, from Donald Trump’s presidency to the role of government to racial equality and climate change, the views of Gen Z – those ages 13 to 21 in 2018 – mirror those of Millennials. It’s too early to say with certainty how the views of this new generation will evolve. Only about three-in-ten Gen Zers and Millennials (30% and 29%, respectively) approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president. The younger generations are also more accepting of some of the ways in which American society is changing.
For $29, This Man Will Help Manipulate Your Loved Ones With Targeted Facebook And Browser Links Elliot Shefler sits waiting in the lobby of a co-working office in London and immediately stands out from others around him. He’s not on his phone. As he starts to expound on the dark arts of targeted online tracking, you start to understand why. “If I want to tell you a story,” he says, leaning back into his chair and staring through black-rimmed spectacles, “I can target you. Shefler is the Israeli-Turkish cofounder of The Spinner, a basic-looking website that sells a unique, online-manipulation service. Two women used it subtly encourage a co-worker they disliked to quit their job. Most articles appear in the random, eye-grabbing batch of headlines that populate the sidebars and foot of other articles via content platforms like Outbrain, Revcontent and Adblade. Since its founding last April, around 146,000 people, mostly in the U.S. and Canada, have paid for the service, Shefler tells Forbes, showing a screenshot of his Google Analytics interface as evidence. “Who will complain?
Capitalism is failing. People want a job with a decent wage – why is that so hard? Before capitalism, there was work. Before markets, before even money, there was work. Our remotest ancestors, hunting and gathering, almost certainly did not see work as a separate, compartmentalized part of life in the way we do today. But we have always had to work to live. Even in the 21st century, we strive through work for the means to live, hence the campaign for a “living wage”. As a species, we like to define ourselves through our thoughts and wisdom, as Homo sapiens. Industrial capitalism sliced and diced human time into clearly demarcated chunks, of “work” and “leisure”. For Karl Marx, the whole capitalist system was ineluctably rigged against workers. The problem of alienation is far from solved. There are many variants of capitalism, of course, from welfarist Scandinavia through Anglo-Saxon laissez-faire to Chinese market statism. But now? Certainly, the Great Recession was a massive economic shock. Why? There are two problems with this story.
DARPA wants to build an AI to find the patterns hidden in global chaos That most famous characterization of the complexity causality, a butterfly beating its wings and causing a hurricane on the other side of the world, is thought-provoking but ultimately not helpful. What we really need is to look at a hurricane and figure out which butterfly caused it — or perhaps stop it before it takes flight in the first place. DARPA thinks AI should be able to do just that. A new program at the research agency is aimed at creating a machine learning system that can sift through the innumerable events and pieces of media generated every day and identify any threads of connection or narrative in them. It’s called KAIROS: Knowledge-directed Artificial Intelligence Reasoning Over Schemas. “Schema” in this case has a very specific meaning. Although these are easily imagined inside our heads, they’re surprisingly difficult to define formally in such a way that a computer system would be able to understand. And the more data there are, the more difficult it is to define.
Capitalism used to promise a better future. Can it still do that? Capitalism is intrinsically futuristic. The ideas that underpin market economies – growth, accumulation, investment – express an unspoken assumption, that tomorrow will be different, and probably better, than today. The question that murmurs through markets is not “What is good?” or “What is fair”, but: “What’s new?” This future orientation is one of the most striking hallmarks of modernity. Pre-capitalist societies looked to the past – to founding myths, old religions and ancestral lines. Change is of course a mixed blessing. Capitalism has kept this promise quite well over the broad span of history. The idea of economic improvement is now so culturally embedded that even half a decade of no progress sends alarm bells ringing, let alone half a millennium. “The past is another country”, is the opening of LP Hartley’s 1953 novel The Go-Between. But once the capitalism engine revved up, the future entered our collective imagination. Markets run on psychology. Mood matters.
The Milky Way's Monster, Unveiled Just in time for Halloween, astronomers have delivered the best-yet view of a real-life cosmic monster—Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole lurking at the center of the Milky Way. Or, rather, a view of hot clumps of gas that orbit it, teetering on the edge of oblivion. The results reveal new, previously unknown properties of our galaxy’s largest black hole and point the way toward a deeper understanding of gravity. Black holes, like all truly terrifying monsters, can scarcely be comprehended, let alone seen. Even Einstein doubted they existed, despite his theory of general relativity predicting that they must. They are knots of gravitation bound so tightly that within them spacetime dissolves; spectral shadows so voracious they devour light itself. These hot spots are thought to be “magnetic thunderstorms” that occur when intense magnetic fields form filaments that snap apart and reconnect, releasing copious energy to heat nearby gas within a black hole’s accretion disk.
Why is democracy faltering? Jair Bolsonaro, the frontrunner for the Brazilian presidency, is a far-right, gun-loving, media-baiting hyper-nationalist. The fact that he would be right at home among many of today’s global leaders—including the leaders of some of the world’s major democracies—should worry us all. This compels us to address the question: Why is democracy faltering? We are at a historical turning point. One consequence of recent technological progress has been a decline in the relative share of wages in GDP. Gone are the days when one could count on a steady factory job to pay the bills indefinitely. These developments have contributed to growing disparities in education and opportunity. The growing sense of unfairness accompanying these developments has undermined “democratic legitimacy,” as Paul Tucker discusses in his book “Unelected Power.” Against this background, the ongoing transformation of politics should not be surprising. Even becoming a sports fan is similar.
Future - Timeline of the far future First, we brought you a prediction of the forthcoming year. Then we brought you a timeline of the near future, revealing what could happen up to around 100 years time. But here’s our most ambitious set of predictions yet – from what could happen in one thousand years time to one hundred quintillion years (that’s 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 years). As the song says, there may be trouble ahead... To see more of our infographics, click here. The challenging politics of climate change “We don’t really worry about climate change because it’s too overwhelming and we’re already in too deep. It’s like if you owe your bookie $1,000, you’re like, ‘OK, I’ve got to pay this dude back.’ But if you owe your bookie $1 million dollars, you’re like, ‘I guess I’m just going to die.’” — Colin Jost, Saturday Night Live, 10/13/18 The above quote is from a Saturday Night Live skit on the weekend following release of a report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As the climate crisis becomes more serious and more obvious, Americans remain resistant to decisive and comprehensive action on climate change. public opinion on the climate crisis Yet, in spite of the evidence at hand, climate change remains the toughest, most intractable political issue we, as a society, have ever faced. Dramatic and unprecedented natural disasters have had little effect on the public. If natural disasters don’t affect attitudes toward climate change, partisanship does.
17 striking findings for 2017 Pew Research Center studies a wide array of topics both in the U.S. and around the world, and every year we are struck by particular findings. Sometimes they mark a new milestone in public opinion; other times a sudden about-face. From an increase in Americans living without a spouse or partner to the impact of Donald Trump’s presidency, here are 17 findings that stood out to us in 2017: 1 Partisan divides dwarf demographic differences on key political values. The average gap between the views of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents across 10 political values has increased from 15 percentage points in 1994 to 36 points today. 2 Donald Trump’s presidency has had a major impact on how the world sees the United States. 3 About four-in-ten Americans say they live in a gun-owning household, while three-in-ten say they personally own a gun. Gun owners and non-owners have starkly different views on gun violence in America.
The Birth of the New American Aristocracy 1. The Aristocracy Is Dead … For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app. At the end of each week, we would return to our place. I’ve joined a new aristocracy now, even if we still call ourselves meritocratic winners. By any sociological or financial measure, it’s good to be us. The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children. 2. Let’s talk first about money—even if money is only one part of what makes the new aristocrats special. It is in fact the top 0.1 percent who have been the big winners in the growing concentration of wealth over the past half century. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.