Category: ideas

“Roughly speaking, these neural networks are vast collections of machines that mimic the networks of neurons in the brain. At Google, Jeff Dean and a core group of other AI engineers oversee these networks and provide software libraries that allow other Google teams, including the Gmail team, to use them.”

Not so long ago, even a leading sleep scientist could joke that the only known function of sleep was to cure sleepiness. Over the past decade, researchers have been pinpointing the important purposes sleep serves – and the bad things that happen when you don’t get enough of it.

Think you’re okay on five or six hours a night? Don’t be so sure. Not only does lack of sufficient sleep impair us cognitively, but we’re also bad at telling when we’re impaired.

“Tolkien’s mythology, unlike that of ISIS, is steadfastly un-apocalyptic. But many readers, it seems, thrill to the notion of finding a king to whom they can pledge their swords without scruple or hesitation. Indeed, it is sometimes claimed that the patently adolescent politics of Tolkien’s Middle Earth represent a true and valid model for real-world humans.”

“By telling young people they should savour the best years of their lives, we are telling them that everything afterwards will be worse; and the real message is that they should not expect or demand very much from life itself.”

“We are, as a population, sleeping less now than we ever have. The problem, on the whole, isn’t that we’re waking up earlier. Much of the change has to do with when we choose to go to bed – and with how we decide to do so.”

“So when should a search engine act like an expert? When should it direct searchers as neutrally as possible to the Web pages that they’re seeking? And to what degree should it consider the interests of people other than the person searching?”

The question then arises: What? What is the story of “us” when “us” is no longer by default “white”? The answer, of course, will depend on how aware Americans are of what they are, of what their culture already (and always) has been. And that awareness demands a new kind of mirror.

“Some aspects of lie detection, especially those elements measured by lie detector tests, might be cultural. For instance, what if the person who might be lying is speaking a second language? What if she grew up in a different place than you, with different social norms? How difficult is it to spot a liar then? Is there any hope for a scientific approach?”

“As more regular, non-scientist types started to talk about introversion, psychologist Jonathan Cheek began to notice something: The way many introverts defined the trait was different from the way he and most of his academic colleagues did.”