The world with 100 meter sea level rise.

if i look back, i am lost

Kiana Khansmith
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ

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Keni
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The world with 100 meter sea level rise.
Do neural nets dream of electric sheep?
If you’ve been on the internet today, you’ve probably interacted with a neural network. They’re a type of machine learning algorithm that’s used for everything from language translation to finance modeling. One of their specialties is image recognition. Several companies - including Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Facebook - have their own algorithms for labeling photos. But image recognition algorithms can make really bizarre mistakes.
Microsoft Azure’s computer vision API added the above caption and tags. But there are no sheep in the image of above. None. I zoomed all the way in and inspected every speck.
It also tagged sheep in this image. I happen to know there were sheep nearby. But none actually present.
Here’s one more example. In fact, the neural network hallucinated sheep every time it saw a landscape of this type. What’s going on here?
The way neural networks learn is by looking at lots of examples. In this case, its trainers gave it lots of images that humans had labeled by hand - and lots of those images contained sheep. Starting with no knowledge at all of what it was seeing, the neural network had to make up rules about which images should be labeled “sheep”. And it looks like it hasn’t realized that “sheep” means the actual animal, not just a sort of treeless grassiness. (Similarly, it labeled the second image with “rainbow” likely because it was wet and rainy, not realizing that the band of colors is essential).
Are neural networks just hyper-vigilant, finding sheep everywhere? No, as it turns out. They only see sheep where they expect to see them. They can find sheep easily in fields and mountainsides, but as soon as sheep start showing up in weird places, it becomes obvious how much the algorithms rely on guessing and probabilities.
Bring sheep indoors, and they’re labeled as cats. Pick up a sheep (or a goat) in your arms, and they’re labeled as dogs.
Paint them orange, and they become flowers.
Put the sheep on leashes, and they’re labeled as dogs. Put them in cars, and they’re dogs or cats. If they’re in the water, they could end up being labeled as birds or even polar bears.
And if goats climb trees, they become birds. Or possibly giraffes. (It turns out that Microsoft Azure is somewhat notorious for seeing giraffes everywhere due to a rumored overabundance of giraffes in the original dataset)
The thing is, neural networks match patterns. They see patches of furlike texture, a bunch of green, and conclude that there are sheep. If they see fur and kitchen shapes, it may conclude instead that there are cats.
If life plays by the rules, image recognition works well. But as soon as people - or sheep - do something unexpected, the algorithms show their weaknesses.
Want to sneak something past a neural network? In a delightfully cyberpunk twist, surrealism might be the answer. Maybe future secret agents will dress in chicken costumes, or drive cow-spotted cars.
There are lots, lots more examples of hilarious mistakes in a Twitter thread I started with the simple question:
And you can test Microsoft Azure’s image recognition API and see for yourself that even top-notch algorithms are relying on probability and luck. Another algorithm, NeuralTalk2, is the one I mostly used for the Twitter thread.
Want to know when I post another experiment? You can sign up here.
The father of the most hostile piece of street furniture in world history explains why he thinks he's right to make life harder for homeless people and socializing kids
Dean Harvey is the co-founder of Factory Furniture, the company that created the Camden Bench, a piece of street furniture designed to stop anyone from using it for anything except sitting very briefly; it is the nadir of the “Unpleasant Design” movement, a bizarre response to rising homelessness and hostility to children in public spaces, in which cities and private companies try to shove the problem out of sight by making street furniture as inhospitable as possible.
In a CNN debate with anti-unpleasant-design architect James Furzer, Harvey defends his practice, by simply defining all the things that people without privilege want to do in public spaces as “anti-social” and everything that makes life worse for those people as “pro-social.” For example, he defends his “Serpentine bench” (designed to prevent people from sleeping on it) and other anti-lie-down boobytraps by saying that “I find it difficult to think why anyone would want to sleep on a bench. It’s no place for anyone to spend the night.”
The problems that these unpleasant designs are trying to solve are only going to get worse with rising inequality and privatization of public spaces. Unpleasant design is being used to make life harder for refugees with nowhere to sleep; to saturate homeless peoples’ clothes and belongings with icy water if they try to sleep in church doorways; and to stop people from resting their legs in public places.
The whole piece is fascinating. It uses an undefined “general public” to describe whose public space needs are legitimate, and excludes everyone else from legitimacy. As many have pointed out, when affluent people pitch tents on Sunset Boulevard to wait for Star Wars tickets, the police don’t beat them up, arrest them and destroy their belongings. But when homeless people pitch tents in the same spot so they have somewhere to sleep, that’s what happens to them.
https://boingboing.net/2017/12/07/out-of-sight-and-mind.html
Imagine if we can make an algae become a cell organelle in our body by some genetic-bio-engineering, just like how it is for this salamander’s embryo. What would it mean for humanity?
Lesser dependence on crops and livestock. Lesser land needed for growing them. Lesser forests destroyed. Lesser greenhouse effect. Lesser human induced climate-change. Lesser violence due to food scarcity.
Lesser payloads on voyages to outer space. Lesser need to scrub air. Lesser energy consumption by space ship. Lesser components in space ship. Lesser repairs in space ship. Lesser cost of space travel.
me: machines can replace the vast majority of jobs most people don't want to do
them: but what jobs will these people do if they have no work
me: consider the following
me: not everyone needs to work, our society is quite literally that efficient.
me: they could do shit they actually want to do, maybe thats relaxing, maybe that's raising their families, maybe thats getting an education, you know we could live differently than how we're living now
them: sorry I can't see a better world, we must always stay the same because that's just what makes sense to me
me: k.
उद्यमेन हि सिध्यन्ति कार्याणि न मनोरथैः । न हि सुप्तस्य सिंहस्य प्रविशन्ति मुखे मृगाः ।। udyamena hi sidhyanti kAryANi na manorathaiH | na hi suptasya siMhasya pravishanti mukhe mRigAH || Work gets accomplished by effort, industry, not merely by wishing. The animals don't enter a sleeping lion's mouth.
Emergence - that elusive bit for me ever since I transitioned from the pithy "social" tech into this whole different side of sociology and, more importantly, systems theory - has been something that I've been learning more about in stuff that I do outside of work/IT. Montessori, Ayurveda, wildlife conservation - every one of them relies on emergence but they were never explained on those lines. Well, ayurveda has been, wildlife maybe, but not Montessori. Maybe I'll write about it sometime, about how Montessori used emergence in her design. At workplace though, it always has eluded me. I'm always about to grasp how emergence is at play but it eludes me. Have you seen it at play? Have you "designed" for emergence ever?
I’m sorry, but if your kid knows how to operate an iPad before he knows how to read, your priorities are fucked up.
Extreme?
In effect, every wide-eyed child around the world who starts compulsory schooling before six is the great-great-grandson or daughter of the British Empire. It is on the record that the most important considerations in 1870 were economic ones, determined by the needs of big business rather than small children. Child labour had recently been outlawed, so elementary education was considered ‘of great utility’ for keeping poor children off the streets while their mothers went to work. The early starting age was also a sop to irate employers, who had recently been deprived of numerous cheap, biddable workers: the sooner school started, the sooner factory fodder could be released at the other end.
http://www.nurseryworld.co.uk/nursery-world/news/1155815/toxic-childhood-author-calls-for-kindergarten-until-seven
Aggression causes new nerve cells to be generated in the brain
A group of neurobiologists from Russia and the USA, including Dmitry Smagin, Tatyana Michurina, and Grigori Enikolopov from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), have proven experimentally that aggression has an influence on the production of new nerve cells in the brain. The scientists conducted a series of experiments on male mice and published their findings in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.
Researchers from the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ICG SB RAS), MIPT, Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, and Stony Brook University and School of Medicine studied the changes that occurred in the brains of mice demonstrating aggressive behaviour, which attacked other mice and won in fights. After a win, these mice became even more aggressive, and new neurons appeared in their hippocampus - one of the key structures of the brain; in addition to this, in mice that were allowed to continue fighting certain changes were observed in the activity of their nerve cells. The scientists hope that the new information on the neurobiological bases of aggression will not only help in understanding this important phenomenon, but will also encourage research in other areas - and even help in finding causes of autism and other similar disorders in humans.
In order to explain exactly how aggression affects the formation of new neurons, how it alters the functioning of the brain and what autism has to do with all of this, we need to take a careful look at various aspects of the recently published study.
“Once again I am amazed at how the basic building blocks that make up complex behaviour are similar in different organisms and it is truly fascinating how they can be combined with other blocks to create an enormous variety of behavioural reactions in animals and humans,” said Grigori Enikolopov, the head of MIPT’s Laboratory of Brain Stem Cells and corresponding author of the study.
How? At behavioural level
This is how the experiment itself was conducted: pairs of male mice were placed in a cage bisected by a partition. The partition allowed the animals to see, hear, and smell each other, but did not allow physical contact. Every day, in the early afternoon, the partition was removed and the observations began: it did not normally take long for fights to break out. After two or three encounters the winner was established and was then (after three minutes, or sometimes less to avoid injuries to the defeated male) separated from its neighbour again. After repeating the process for three days in a row, the scientists changed the mice in the cages, randomly placing defeated males with a new neighbour (but, most importantly, each time a defeated male was placed in the same cage as another winning male). In one group, after three weeks of these rotations, winners were prevented from entering into confrontation, and in another group the mice continued to fight with one another.
The scientists also conducted a series of tests to demonstrate the effect of aggression not on the brain, but on behaviour. For example, the mice were placed in a cross-shaped maze (plus-maze) where one corridor was closed and the other was an open space. The more time that the mice preferred to spend in the dark, closed space, the more their behaviour could be described as “avoiding risk”.
The mice were placed in a cage with a transparent partition and another male on the other side - the more time the mice spent close to the barrier, the higher the level of potential aggression. This interpretation is consistent with the fact that the active animals in the study tend to attack their partners if the opportunity arises (tests were also performed to prove this).
Line is a more rigorous concept than “species”. A line is all the mice produced by the inbreeding of the offspring of one pair of mice with the same genotype. The C57BL line is one of the most common. And incidentally, BL stands for black - so laboratory mice are not typically white!
All the tests showed that males with winning experience in a number of fights display a more “brazen” attitude - they approach the transparent partition more often and initiate an attack on their opponents more quickly. If the mice were deprived of fighting for a period of time before the test, they became even more aggressive: the latency to the first attack was almost three times less, and the fights themselves lasted for longer. But what is particularly interesting is that at the same time their level of anxiety increased - a male who succeeded in tearing out patches of hair from the back of a weaker mouse would rather avoid open spaces, preferring to sit in the dark wherever possible!
Mice of different lines may even exhibit different behaviour when fighting. In a confrontation, C57BL mice normally pull out patches of hair from their opponent’s back. The fights are rarely fatal, but cases of this have been known to occur.
The methods used in the experiments were not chosen by chance. Natalia Kudryavtseva, one of the authors of the study (Head of the Sector of Social Behaviour Neurogenetics at ICG SB RAS), is an internationally recognised leader in the study of the biological bases of aggression, and the behavioural model and method of studying aggression in mice has been developed over a period of decades.
How? At cellular level
The study of aggression in the context of the function of the brain at the level of individual cells was made possible as a result of the progress achieved in neuroscience in recent decades. Three statements are now considered to be reliably proven:
- Contrary to the previously accepted view, new neurons can be generated in a mature brain and this process plays a key role in learning;
- In order to initiate long-term changes at cellular level, cells need to activate certain genes and suppress the activity of others.
Despite the fact that DNA is the same in all cells, different sections (different genes) have a different status. If the DNA is chemically modified, or the proteins that combine with DNA to form chromosomes are modified, it is no longer possible to read information from the gene and synthesize molecules encoded by that gene. The cell stops the production of unnecessary proteins, e.g. a neuron does not synthesize the muscle fibres required by myocytes, muscle tissue cells. By controlling the activity of genes, neurons can also rebuild themselves, and activating stem cells in the brain can lead to the generation of new nerve cells - in order to build the neural networks that play an essential role in memory for example.
Studies in the field of the neurobiology of memory, which were first conducted in the mid-20th century, have shown that learning or even simply encountering something new sets off a series of molecular changes in neurons - and certain genes, which scientists call immediate early genes (IEGs), are activated to produce long-term transformations in the brain. If a test sample of an animal’s brain is taken shortly after a learning experiment and combined with special labels of the protein encoded by c-fos, scientists are able to observe the changes triggered by the experiment. This is exactly what the authors of the paper did to trace the effects of aggression at cellular level - monitoring c-fos levels is one of the standard methods of actively searching for changes in nerve cells.
Neuroscience - the study of the brain often requires knowledge in unexpected fields, such as optics, game theory, economics, or sociology. Practical skills employed by neuroscientists often include the ability to manipulate, program, and control rats and make statistical calculations. This is why this interdisciplinary field has been classified separately by British and American scientists as neuroscience.
Where? The hippocampus and amygdala
Simply observing individual neurons, or even groups of neurons, does not give a complete picture. The location of the cells needs to be taken into account. The activity of neurons in different regions of the brain may vary significantly, as these regions perform different functions.
In this particular study, the scientists examined the hippocampus and the amygdala. It is often said that the amygdala is associated with emotions, and the hippocampus with memory, and this is generally true - but it should be clarified that despite this, memory is not localized in the hippocampus, and to experience emotions even mice need more than just the amygdala.
Many structures in the brain do not actually perform one specific function, in the same way that in computers a processor or RAM chip are used for a wide variety of tasks: there are no individual components that are only used for games, or only used for office programs. The hippocampus is used in the formation of long-term memory, and in navigating mazes - and the amygdala is responsible for fear, aggression, and also anxiety. A number of studies involving people even showed that the amygdala is linked to alcoholism, and also political views. This extensive list is easy to explain if we take into account the fact that memories themselves come in different forms: a mental “map” of an area, the ability to balance when riding a bicycle, and a traumatic experience are all stored differently in the brain.
The amygdala is involved in the memory of unpleasant stimuli - it is the reason why a mouse freezes when it is placed in a cage where on a previous occasion the floor was electrified. The hippocampus is also linked to memory, but, as demonstrated in the 1950s in the case of the patient H.M. who underwent an unsuccessful operation, it stores information on entirely conscious events. Henry Molaison (widely known as H.M.), who had his hippocampus removed due to severe epilepsy, began to forget things that had happened to him only a few minutes ago! However, he did develop an ability of solving certain puzzles, although whenever he did them, he was certain that he had never seen them before.
A cage with an electrified floor is a standard method of forming memory. We would like to note that a representative of the MIPT Press Office personally experienced a similar environment and confirmed that it is not a serious electric shock, but an entirely tolerable, although slightly uncomfortable sensation. The best way to describe it would be to say that it was as if the floor had suddenly become a rubber foot massage mat.
Comparing the activity of the amygdala and the hippocampus enabled scientists to trace the influence of the aggression experiment on two key structures at once. Past evidence suggested that in aggressive and socially active mice, more new neurons are produced in the hippocampus, and in specially bred lines of mice with increased aggressive behaviour, the level of neurogenesis is also higher than those who were selected on the basis of reduced aggression.
In this experiment, scientists discovered that with repeated fights the level of the c-fos protein increases in the hippocampus, but decreases in the amygdala. And if the mouse is prevented from being involved in further fights, these changes do not occur in the function of immediate early genes, although new neurons still develop. The researchers also conducted a number of additional tests and experiments to interpret the observations made.
Neurogenesis is the process by which neurons are generated. It is interesting to note that it has not yet been possible to see this process in all areas of the brain, however in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus neurogenesis has been reliably proven.
In relative terms, the effect varied from around ten percent to double the amount of new neurons and for all four lines of mice used in the experiments the effect was statistically significant. This means that it is unlikely to be a coincidence; obtaining such a result exclusively due to the individual differences of the animals has a very low level of probability (no more than a few percent).
What does this mean?
The new publication confirms a previous theory - mice that are accustomed to fighting not only behave differently, but their brain starts to function in a different way. The number of new cells of the hippocampus increases, and if the mice are allowed to continue fighting, the activity of existing cells also changes. New cells seem to be one of the key mechanisms of the increase in aggression and, perhaps, also anxiety - although scientists are not yet certain of this: the winning reputation of an aggressive and dominant mouse would almost certainly need to be backed up by new fights, but this is not something that will help to reduce anxiety.
Compared to previous data, the new results are slightly confusing in some areas. It was previously demonstrated that increased anxiety is normally accompanied by a reduction in neurogenesis, but in this case it is the other way around - males with more new neurons in the hippocampus preferred to avoid going out into open, lit areas. It could be that a win produced an effect opposite to the effect of anxiety, it could also be that the researchers have come across a new phenomenon: further tests will be needed to find out the truth.
However, the conclusion regarding the activity of cells of the amygdala is interesting not only in the context of fundamental principles of behaviour in mice. The scientists note that in humans also the amygdala is involved in a number of pathological processes, including the formation of autism. Increased anxiety, stereotypical repetitive behaviour, impaired ability to communicate with others - these symptoms were observed in the mice from the experiments described above and are partially similar to the symptoms of autism. Perhaps this may be a link that will eventually lead to progress not only for scientists, but also for doctors.
Hackers steal a hospital in Hollywood
A hospital is a computer we put sick people into, so when ransomware creeps infected the hospital’s IT systems and encrypted all their data, they asked for a whopping $3.6m to turn the data loose again.
In some ways, Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center got very lucky, as it seems the hackers haven’t taken over the firmware for things like CT scanners, etc, and bricked them.
But without access to internal systems, much of that equipment is offline, and patient records are being managed with fax machines and pen-and-paper. Patients are being transferred to other facilities.
The FBI and LAPD are investigating, but it’s likely that the attackers are well out of their jurisdiction, offshore and semi-untouchable. In the meantime, the hospital will continue to grind ever-slower.
http://boingboing.net/2016/02/16/hackers-steal-a-hospital-in-ho.html
Before the computing era, ILM was the master of oil matte painting, making audiences believe that some of the sets in the original Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogy were real when they weren’t. They were the work of geniuses like Chris Evans, Michael Pangrazio, Frank Ordaz, Harrison Ellenshaw and Ralph McQuarrie ! Forever thank you, to their handmade art and the work of their colleagues, that made us dream of impossible worlds and fantastic places across Earth and the Universe.
There are more background paintings on this article, featuring comments by the masters/artists themselves !
Some of the following pieces were made by other artists:
Awesome.
Respect the craft.
Social, especial online communities, were very promising to me when I seriously began figuring out ways by which the benefits I saw in open source world could be brought to the Corporate world. A decade ago. Half a decade back I started feeling my, and others like me in the short lived Social CRM world, work being overlooked. Apparently because the shortsighted "benefits" were more appealing. Suddenly the "sharing economy", which is nothing about sharing and all about renting, was the poster child of the new Digital world. I was left baffled and had to dig myself into the trenches rather than be just a thought leader. I am still getting my hands dirty. Hope it'll be a while until I ride up to the ivory tower again. This article makes a good reading for all those cloyed by the nauseatingly sweat paeans that people sing about Social.
Teaching or Learning?
Is your school culture one that’s focused on teaching, or is it focused on learning?
Depends on what you believe, right? If you believe that learning is measured by test scores, then odds are you’re focused on helping teachers become technically better at delivering the outcomes spelled out in the curriculum. The focus is on getting better. But if you believe that learning is measured by a desire to learn more, to continue learning, then the focus is on creating the conditions for that to happen. Doing real work that matters. Starting with kids’ interests and passions. Seeing the adults in the room as learners as well. The aim is to do things differently.
Culture is palpable. Listen to kids and teachers talk about their work. Look into classrooms to see who is in charge. Walk down a hallway and tune in to what you feel. It’s usually not hard to tell which you’ve got.
What’s harder is deciding which you want.
Nailed it!
This 👆 is just Montessori in contemporary terminology! Perfectly defines what a Montessori adult is supposed to do. The Core Body of Knowledge: New York State’s Core Competencies for Early Childhood Educators was written for professionals who work directly with young children (lead teachers, aides, paraprofessionals, itinerant teachers, classroom volunteers when applicable, family child care providers); directors and program administrators; those involved with training organizations; teacher education programs (college professors, field supervisors); those involved with policy and advocacy initiatives (local and state agencies, policymakers, early childhood advocates); those involved with professional development systems, and any others working to elevate this field and improve the quality of early childhood education. It outlines recommended practices for professionals who work with young children.
Ayurvedic kit for every home
Below is a list of Ayurvedic medicines that can be in your medicine box.
Sudarshanam tablets - fever, body ache, skin rashes, can also be used as a prophylactic. To be taken preferably on empty stomach - 2 tablets thrice a day. [Not to be confused with mahasudarshanam]
Taaleesadi churnam for cold and cough - to be mixed with honey (for wet cough) and with ghee (for dry cough). Buy from Kottakkal
Rajanyaadi churnam for children. Children below 2 years - multipurpose. A few pinches to be mixed with drops of honey and ghee in 2:1 ratio, if there is wet cough and cold. If the child has fever and not wet cough, then honey and ghee in 1:2 ratio
Daadimaadhi churnam - for loose motion. To be mixed with honey and taken (adults) [Rajanyadi for baby]
Triphaadi churnam - tooth ache and wound wash. The powder to be boiled in water and filtered and used. For tooth ache, it has to be held in mouth and then spit out.
Dhanvantara gutika - pain and fever. 2 tablets (twice or thrice a day depending on severity) on empty stomach.
All tablets on empty stomach; should leave a gap of at least 30 mins before anything is taken in.
To be a Dongria Kondh woman of the Niyamgiri hills in Odisha state, India, is to be intimately connected to one’s homeland; they have lived successfully in the lush forested hills with their perennial streams and giant jackfruit trees for millennia. They call themselves Jharnia, or, protectors of streams.
For the past 10 years Dongria Kondh women have been standing shoulder to shoulder with Dongria men to protect Niyamgiri against devastating plans by British mining giant, Vedanta Resources, to construct an open-pit bauxite mine on their most sacred mountain, Niyam Dongar, the ‘mountain of law’. At one time they formed a human chain around the base of the mountain to prevent Vedanta’s bulldozers from destroying it.
In August 2013 the Dongria Kondh overwhelmingly rejected the plans by notorious British mining giant Vedanta Resources for an open-pit bauxite mine in their sacred Niyamgiri Hills – an unprecedented triumph for tribal rights. Many of the Dongria’s key figures – those who had protested loudly, travelled over 1,600 kilometers to Delhi, demanded that police release arrested leaders – have been women.
We will not give our forests to anybody, said one Dongria woman. All the women here are prepared to go to jail for this.
In January 2014, their persistence paid off: the Indian government announced that the mine would not be approved.
Picture © Jason Taylor/Survival