Michael Nuñez at Venture Beat:

ByteDance researchers have developed an AI system that transforms single photographs into realistic videos of people speaking, singing and moving naturally — a breakthrough that could reshape digital entertainment and communications.

The new system, called OmniHuman, generates full-body videos that show people gesturing and moving in ways that match their speech, surpassing previous AI models that could only animate faces or upper bodies.

“End-to-end human animation has undergone notable advancements in recent years,” the ByteDance researchers wrote in a paper published on arXiv. “However, existing methods still struggle to scale up as large general video generation models, limiting their potential in real applications,”

The team trained OmniHuman on more than 18,700 hours of human video data using a novel approach that combines multiple types of inputs — text, audio and body movements. This “omni-conditions” training strategy allows the AI to learn from much larger and more diverse datasets than previous methods.

More here.

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Alexander Stern at The Hedgehog Review:

In a column for The Point magazine, Agnes Callard, a philosopher and professor at the University of Chicago, comes out against advice. She makes her case using an anecdote involving the novelist Margaret Atwood. Asked about her advice for a group of aspiring writers, Atwood is stumped and ends up offering little more than bromides encouraging them to write every day and try not to be inhibited. Callard excuses Atwood’s banality, blaming it on the fundamental incoherence of the thing she was asked to produce.

Advice, for Callard, occupies nebulous terrain between what she terms “instructions” and “coaching.” “You give someone instructions,” she writes, “as to how to achieve a goal that is itself instrumental to some…further goal,” whereas “coaching…effects in someone a transformative orientation towards something of intrinsic value: an athletic or intellectual or even social triumph.” The problem with advice, according to Callard, is that it tries to reduce and condense the time-intensive, personal work of coaching into instructions:

The young person is not approaching Atwood for instructions on how to operate Microsoft Word, nor is she making the unreasonable demand that Atwood become her writing coach. She wants the kind of value she would get from the second, but she wants it given to her in the manner of the first. But there is no there there.

Atwood, Callard writes, might tell a story about her own development as an author, but those particulars would not amount to anything like universal wisdom a young writer could integrate into her own life.

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Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

It is a feature of many human activities – sports, cooking, music, interpersonal relations – that being able to do them well doesn’t necessarily mean you can accurately describe how to do them well. Science is no different. Many successful scientists are not very good at explaining what goes into successful scientific practice. To understand that, it’s necessary to study science in a scientific fashion. What kinds of scientists, in what kinds of collaborations, using what kinds of techniques, do well? I talk with James Evans, an expert on collective intelligence and the construction of knowledge, about how science really works.

More here.

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Robert E. Rubin, Lawrence H. Summers, Timothy F. Geithner. Jacob J. Lew and Janet L. Yellen in the New York Times:

We were fortunate that during our tenures in office no effort was made to unlawfully undermine the nation’s financial commitments. Regrettably, recent reporting gives substantial cause for concern that such efforts are underway today.

The nation’s payment system has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants. In recent days, that norm has been upended, and the roles of these nonpartisan officials have been compromised by political actors from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. One has been appointed fiscal assistant secretary — a post that for the prior eight decades had been reserved exclusively for civil servants to ensure impartiality and public confidence in the handling and payment of federal funds.

These political actors have not been subject to the same rigorous ethics rules as civil servants, and one has explicitly retained his role in a private company, creating at best the appearance of financial conflicts of interest. They lack training and experience to handle private, personal data — like Social Security numbers and bank account information. Their power subjects America’s payments system and the highly sensitive data within it to the risk of exposure, potentially to our adversaries. And our critical infrastructure is at risk of failure if the code that underwrites it is not handled with due care.

More here.

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More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025  theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)

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Christian Collins in Clasp:

“Turning a blind eye to our history has not saved us from its consequences.” – Cicely Tyson 

Black History Month is a time to reflect on the central role of Black people in shaping this nation. Nowhere is that more evident than the labor movement. A founding tenet of American capitalism and our economy is that Black bodies are worth more than Black minds. This belief is continually demonstrated by the value placed on Black workers and their work. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Black workers risked their lives in essential jobs to keep the country operating. And in doing so faced an increased likelihood of falling victim to COVID-19. Systemic racism and labor market segregation cause Black workers to be disproportionately employed in essential jobs – jobs that don’t provide adequate health care coverage or paid sick leave, exacerbating COVID-19’s risks. Black women in particular have continued to be ignored in the economic recovery from the pandemic, as the dual threats of racism and sexism persist, largely unacknowledged by policymakers. 

Black History Month’s reflections are only beneficial if we are honest. Modern America’s economic superpower status has long been attributed to the grit and ingenuity of white European settlers building the nation from the ground up, but this narrative is at best a half-truth. Black labor is the cornerstone of U.S. global hegemony. From the slaves who were brought to the shores of Virginia in 1619, through the industrialization of the United States powered by Black workers and families fleeing the South, and by the continued reliance on mass incarceration to produce a cheap workforce for corporations and governments to exploit, the commodification of Black bodies has been the American capitalist formula for economic profit. 

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025  theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)

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The Strand

The dotted line my father’s ashplant made
On Sandymount Strand
Is something else the tide won’t wash away.

The Sharpening Stone

He walked on air himself, never more so
Then when he had been widowed and the youth
In him, the athlete who had wooed her—
Breasting tapes and clearing the high bars—
Grew lightsome once again. Going at eighty
on the bendiest roads, going for broke
At every point-to-point and poker school,
‘He commenced his wild career’ a second time
And not a bother on him. Smoked like a train
And took the power mower in his stride.
Flirted and vaunted. Set fire to his bed.
Fell from a ladder. Learned to microwave.

………………………… .

So set the drawer on freshets of thaw water
And place the unused sharping stone inside it:
To be found next summer on a riverbank
Where scythes once hung all night in alder trees
And mowers played dawn scherzos on the blades,
Their arms like harpists’ arms, one drawing towards,
One sweeping the bight rim of the extreme.

by Seamus Heaney
from The Spirit Level
Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 0996

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William Day at the IAI:

The most striking assertion in Wittgenstein’s critique of Shakespeare may be this, written in 1946: “Shakespeare’s similes are, in the ordinary sense, bad. So if they are nevertheless good – & I don’t know whether they are or not – they must be a law to themselves.” What makes Wittgenstein think he can lay claim to such a judgment? Part of the answer may lie in Wittgenstein’s own remarkable talent for similes and figures of comparison. Given their importance to his way of doing philosophy, it shouldn’t surprise that he was good at making them, and knew he was good.

Here is one example, drawn from a remark he thought to include in the Foreword to the Investigations: “Only every so often does one of the sentences I am writing here make a step forward; the rest are like the snipping of the barber’s scissors, which he has to keep in motion so as to be able to make a cut with them at the right moment.” Compare this marvelous image – revelatory both of its author and of the process of writing, so often felt as a movement without forward motion – to a Shakespearean metaphor that Wittgenstein once mentioned to a friend, from Richard II. There Mowbray says, “Within my mouth you have engaol’d my tongue / Doubly portcullis’d with my teeth and lips.” Part of Wittgenstein’s critique of Shakespeare’s figures might be the obviousness of such an image as the teeth and lips as a gate for the tongue, even when one acknowledges that here it is closed to keep something in rather than to keep something out.

More here.

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Joshua Clymer at X:

I’m like a mechanic scrambling last-minute checks before Apollo 13 takes off. If you ask for my take on the situation, I won’t comment on the quality of the in-flight entertainment, or describe how beautiful the stars will appear from space.

I will tell you what could go wrong. That is what I intend to do in this story.

Now I should clarify what this is exactly. It’s not a prediction. I don’t expect AI progress to be this fast or as untamable as I portray. It’s not pure fantasy either.

It is my worst nightmare.

It’s a sampling from the futures that are among the most devastating, and I believe, disturbingly plausible – the ones that most keep me up at night.

I’m telling this tale because the future is not set yet. I hope, with a bit of foresight, we can keep this story a fictional one.

More here.

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Nick Hunt at Noema Magazine:

MIZDARKHAN, Uzbekistan — On a hill at the edge of the desert stands a wooden edifice above a simple tomb. It consists of four slanting poles that come together in a frame, inside of which are bundled sticks that resemble kindling. It seems a puzzling marker for a grave until you learn the legend of whose body lies inside: Gayōmart, the first human, neither woman nor man, who was created from mud by the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda. Zoroastrians venerate fire, so the structure makes sense. It is a symbolic beacon waiting for its flame.

Not far away, past crumbling graves and cairns of mud bricks stacked in sevens — an auspicious number in the comparatively recent religion of Islam — stands another monument, a ruined mausoleum. Its roof long ago collapsed, and only three slumped walls remain. According to tradition, one brick falls from it every year. It is dedicated to Khalif Erejep, a medieval Sufi saint, but pious Muslims believe it is built on top of Adam’s grave, a cosmological rival to the tomb of Gayōmart.

more here.

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Norma Clarke at Literary Review:

Michel Pastoureau began his wonderful and widely translated series on the history of colours with Blue a quarter of a century ago. Black, Green, Red, Yellow and White followed and now here is a history of pink, which may not be ‘a color in its own right’ and for which neither Latin nor ancient Greek has a standard word (it was long regarded as a shade of red). Nevertheless, Pink is as sumptuous as its predecessors, printed on gorgeous glossy paper and written with impassioned scholarship.

When Isaac Newton broke white light down into coloured rays in 1666, he did not find pink. Orange and purple were there, along with red, yellow, green and blue, so for scientists those were the true colours. Yet pink was observable in nature – in plants, on the feathers of animals, in minerals and in the sky. Pink had begun to appear in dyes and paints in the 14th century – relatively late compared to other colours – and it rapidly became fashionable. A unique document, Prammatica del vestire, has survived to tell us about the wardrobes of all women of the wealthy classes living in Florence between 1343 and 1345.

more here.

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Daniel T. Kim at The Conversation:

For the family, withdrawing or withholding life-sustaining treatments from a dying loved one, even if doctors advise that the treatment is unlikely to succeed or benefit the patient, can be overwhelming and painful. Studies show that their stress can be at the same level as people who have just survived house fires or similar catastrophes.

While making such high-stakes decisions, families need to be able to trust their doctor’s information; they need to be able to believe that their recommendations come from genuine empathy to serve only the patient’s interests. This is why prominent bioethicists have long emphasized trustworthiness as a central virtue of good clinicians.

However, the public’s trust in medical leaders has been on a precipitous decline in recent decades. Historical polling data and surveys show that trust in physicians is lower in the U.S. than in most industrialized countries. A recent survey from Sanofi, a pharmaceutical company, found that mistrust of the medical system is even worse among low-income and minority Americans, who experience discrimination and persistent barriers to care.

More here.

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A. Brad Schwartz in Time Magazine:

Donald Trump’s return to the White House has plunged Washington into upheaval and anxiety, bringing loyalty tests and other efforts to purge government employees. This climate of fear recalls the anticommunist paranoia of the 1950s and its crucial turning point exactly 75 years ago—when a famous speech, based on a lie, catapulted a little-known politician to prominence and added a new word to the American lexicon: McCarthyism. With that speech, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy seized the nation’s attention and would hold it for four years. Yet his words probably would have faded into obscurity if reporters hadn’t amplified and reinforced them — despite knowing they were false. The story of the speech offers a dire warning for the present, because it demonstrates how elevating the false claims of elected officials can distort American politics to catastrophic effect.

…The senator asserted that five years after winning World War II, the U.S. was losing around the globe, locked in a struggle with communism that seemed destined to end in nuclear conflict. The blame for this terrifying scenario, McCarthy declared, rested with traitorous federal employees, who had sold their country out and had to be purged from its service. Near the end of his remarks, the senator made a more specific claim about the enemy within.

More here.

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More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025  theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)

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Laura Kipnis in TNR:

The non-modest mission of her sprightly new book, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, is to develop a strand of ethical thought that she labels “Neo-Socratic,” and which departs entirely from the prevailing ethical systems of Kant, Mill, and Aristotle. Among the challenges of the project, she notes, is that Socrates was content to refute everyone else’s positions while affirming nothing concrete himself, meaning that his philosophical heirs do a lot of performative contradiction, which is not sufficient. Nor is what we like to call “the Socratic method”—teaching by asking questions until students produce the correct answers—what Socrates had in mind. Such attempts to mimic him miss the point, which is that true thinking should be dangerous to your intellectual equilibrium. It should strive for answers that overthrow the terms of the questions being asked, not simply prove a point.

The failure to be sufficiently or dangerously philosophical besets most academic philosophers, she charges, who take off their philosopher hats when they arrive home after teaching their classes, shielding their lives from the kinds of inquiries that might disrupt their comfortable existences. They’re afraid of philosophy, and not actually doing it.

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