« We want AI agents that can discover like we can, not which contain what we have discovered. Building in our discoveries only makes it harder to see how the discovering process can be done ».
Source : The Bitter Lesson
Étiquette : science (Page 1 of 2)
“Broadly speaking, the social sciences are a range of academic disciplines that studies human society and human individuals in the context of society. Long established fields such as sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology, and political science no doubt first come to mind when thinking about the social sciences. But disciplines such as education, law, linguistics, geography, gender studies, communications, archeology, and even business school fields such as management, marketing, and human resources can all potentially be categorized as falling under the broad net of social science. While this diversity of specialized fields can be an obstacle when it comes to generalizing about its nature, this diversity is both a strength and a reflection of the complexities of its domain of study. This is a point that needs to be reiterated. One of the key insights (and values) of the social science of the past half century is its embrace of complexity. That is, methodological and theoretical pluralism is what defin”
Source : Why Computing Belongs Within the Social Sciences | August 2020 | Communications of the ACM
“In a blog post, YouTube said it would remove videos claiming that vaccines do not reduce rates of transmission or contraction of disease, and content that includes misinformation on the makeup of the vaccines. Claims that approved vaccines cause autism, cancer or infertility, or that the vaccines contain trackers, will also be removed.
Prominent anti-vaccine activists have long been able to build huge audiences online, helped along by the algorithmic powers of social networks that prioritize videos and posts that are particularly successful at capturing people’s attention. A nonprofit, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, published research this year showing that a group of 12 people were responsible for sharing 65 percent of all anti-vaccine messaging on social media, calling the group the “Disinformation Dozen.” In July, the White House cited the research as it criticized tech companies for allowing misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines to spread widely, sparking a tense back-and-forth between the administration and Facebook.”
Source : YouTube Bans Anti-Vaccine Misinformation – The New York Times
“This computational work represents a stunning advance on the protein-folding problem, a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology. It has occurred decades before many people in the field would have predicted. It will be exciting to see the many ways in which it will fundamentally change biological research”.
Professor Venki Ramakrishnan – Nobel Laureate and President of the Royal Society
“We trained this system on publicly available data consisting of ~170,000 protein structures from the protein data bank together with large databases containing protein sequences of unknown structure. It uses approximately 16 TPUv3s (which is 128 TPUv3 cores or roughly equivalent to ~100-200 GPUs) run over a few weeks, a relatively modest amount of compute in the context of most large state-of-the-art models used in machine learning today.”
Source : AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology | DeepMind
“A number of researchers have analysed various selection methods and suggested that incorporating randomness has advantages over the current system, such as reducing the bias that research routinely shows plagues grant-giving, and improving diversity among grantees1.”
“On trouve dans le monde académique beaucoup de chercheurs qui ont le sentiment de ne jamais en faire assez. Ils passent leurs week-ends dans leur labo. Ils s’épuisent au travail. Le doute, c’est bien. Trop de doute, c’est malsain. Je le sais, je suis passé par là. Il faut lutter contre ce penchant délétère.”
Source : Pierre Vandergheynst, maître de la pensée computationnelle à l’EPFL – Le Temps
“On Monday, researchers will tell the world’s largest annual meeting of neuroscientists that some scientists working on organoids are “perilously close” to crossing the ethical line, while others may already have done so by creating sentient lumps of brain in the lab. “If there’s even a possibility of the organoid being sentient, we could be crossing that line,” said Elan Ohayon, the director of the Green Neuroscience Laboratory in San Diego, California. “We don’t want people doing research where there is potential for something to suffer.””
Source : Scientists ‘may have crossed ethical line’ in growing human brains | Science | The Guardian
“Interviews with 30 attendees revealed a pattern in the stories people told about how they came to be convinced that the Earth was not a large round rock spinning through space but a large flat disc doing much the same thing. Of the 30, all but one said they had not considered the Earth to be flat two years ago but changed their minds after watching videos promoting conspiracy theories on YouTube.”
Source : Study blames YouTube for rise in number of Flat Earthers | Science | The Guardian
“Recent studies have shown that stigmergy is not necessary to explain concerted construction: Green et al. showed that worker aggregation rather than the previously suspected presence of cementation pheromone localized excavation work sites in termites, and Bruce found no behavioural response to freshly excavated soil that would contain a digging pheromone were it an organizing factor in excavation in leafcutter ants. Eciton army ants, which self-assemble into bridges to cross trail gaps, gauge the necessity to reinforce or leave these structures based purely on the rate of physical contact with passing workers with no evidence of stigmergic processes.”
«L’American Psychological Association a récemment résumé les précédentes découvertes sur les jeux vidéo violents en indiquant qu’ils présentaient un risque en termes de rapport à autrui, notamment d’agressivité accrue et de diminution de l’empathie. Cette étude contredit clairement cette conclusion».
Source : Une étude scientifique conteste le lien entre violence et jeux vidéo