Issie Lapowsky at Bloomberg:

Fil Menczer caught his first whiff of what he calls “social bots” in the early 2010s. He was mapping how information travels on Twitter when he stumbled onto a few clusters of accounts that looked a little suspicious. Some of them shared the same post thousands of times. Others reshared thousands of posts from each account. “These are not human,” he remembers thinking.

So began an extensive career in bot watching. As a distinguished professor of informatics at Indiana University at Bloomington, Menczer has studied the way bots proliferate, manipulate human beings and turn them against one another. In 2014 he was part of a team that developed the tool BotOrNot to help people spot fake accounts in the wild. He’s now regarded as one of the internet’s preeminent bot hunters.

If anyone is predisposed to notice the automatons among us, it’s Menczer. A few years ago, when a hypothesis known as the dead internet theory started kicking around, positing that nearly all conversations online had been replaced by artificial-intelligence-generated chatter, he wrote it off as bunk. Now, though, the generative AI boom, with its chatbot boyfriends and AI influencers, is inspiring Menczer to see the theory in a new light. He still doesn’t take the idea literally, but he is, as they say, beginning to take its underlying message seriously. “Am I worried?” he asks. “Yes, I’m very worried.”

More here.  [Thanks to Rick Passov.]

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Alex Gourevitch in the Boston Review:

If history is any guide, rescuing the rights now being rolled back will require a range of tactics, including vigorous protest itself. It will also require building broad and unwavering consensus about the speciousness of the rationales being offered for today’s draconian crackdowns. Those have taken three principal forms. First, the Gaza protests were said to be disruptive to the ordinary life of the community. Second, because protests took place on private property—the property of the university—protesters who refused to disperse were said to be trespassing. Third and perhaps most perniciously, university community members stated that they felt the protests were threatening or harmful, which schools appear to have interpreted as sufficient evidence of a “hostile environment” for Jewish and Israeli students that may violate Title VI.

All of these are bad justifications. When they are interpreted and applied as they have been in recent months, there can be no right to protest at all. That is an outcome anyone committed to the mission and health of the university, not to mention democracy in general, must emphatically reject.

More here.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

How consciousness emerges in the brain is the ultimate mystery. Scientists generally agree that consciousness relies on multiple brain regions working in tandem. But the areas and neural connections supporting our perception of the world have remained elusive.

A new study, published in Science, offers a potential answer. A Chinese team recorded the neural activity of people with electrodes implanted deep in their brains as they performed a visual task. Called the thalamus, scientists have long hypothesized the egg-shaped area is a central relay conducting information across multiple brain regions.

More here.

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Emily Harnett at Harper’s Magazine:

Carlo was the only child of Antonia Salzano and Andrea Acutis, a financial executive. But not long after his death, according to Antonia, Carlo appeared to her in a dream to inform her that she could once again expect to be a mother. Four years to the day since Carlo’s death, Antonia gave birth to twins. She was forty-four years old. This story, repeated over the years in the press, is one of many miracles that have been attributed to Carlo since he died. In 2013, a four-year-old boy with a severe pancreatic abnormality underwent a total and inexplicable recovery after touching a relic of Carlo. A few years later, a Costa Rican woman visited Carlo’s tomb and prayed for her daughter, who had entered a coma after a traumatic bike accident. That same day, her daughter began to breathe on her own again. Scans of her brain showed that her hemorrhage had disappeared.

What qualifies a person for the canon is their demonstration of what the Church calls heroic virtue. Once a local bishop takes up the cause for canonization, a Vatican investigator called a postulator is enlisted to draft a petition—a document detailing evidence of a candidate’s heroic virtues.

more here.

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Michael Kugelman in Time Magazine:

Early Wednesday morning, India carried out air strikes in Pakistan’s Punjab province and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. In a statement, New Delhi said they targeted terrorist infrastructure and that the strikes were in retaliation for the Apr. 22 attack that killed 26 tourists in India-administered Kashmir, which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan. As I wrote for TIME several days ago, some type of Indian military action was widely expected.

While New Delhi described the operation as non-escalatory, this is clearly not how Pakistan—which denies any involvement in the Apr. 22 attack—viewed them. It denounced the strikes, the most intense in Pakistan since a 1971 conflict, as an “act of war.” It claimed they hit civilian targets, including a mosque, and killed at least 31 people.

More here.

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Nationalist Opera

It was a party
Built for the miniscule elite
Lost amid acres of scuffed marble, wanderers
Newspapers & schoolwork
People knew
To speak in surreal, mechanical hyperbole
Government, of course
Monuments, behemoths
Of relative luxury
I know what you want to ask
I want you to take the truth to the world
Down in the city, loudspeakers
Disappearing into the hidden gulag
Centuries ago
The monks appeared
Every morning in the lobbies of our hotels
A minder was beside them
The monks followed us out into the parking lot.

by Amada Calderon
from Poetry Magazine, 2014

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Robert D. Zaretsky at Aeon Magazine:

Beyle does not say how long he stared up at the fresco, but it was long enough to reach ‘that supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion.’ Upon leaving the church, he wrote: ‘I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart …; the well-spring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.’ That swoon swept into existence le syndrome de Stendhal – ‘Stendhal’ being the nom de plume used by Beyle for nearly all his published works, including the novels The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). Though yet to be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5, 2013), the syndrome nevertheless seems to be real. Every year, a few dozen tourists to Florence are rushed to the local hospitals, literally overcome by the city’s array of paintings, sculptures, frescoes and architecture. Some lose their bearings, others lose their consciousness, yet others still, on rare occasions, nearly lose their lives.

more here.

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Stan Carey at Sentence first:

On many vexed matters of English usage, people can be divided into the following groups:

1. those who neither know nor care
2. those who do not know, but care very much
3. those who know and condemn
4. those who know and approve
5. those who know and distinguish.

Thus with wry wit did H. W. Fowler address the existence of split infinitives in his landmark usage dictionary of 1926. He concluded that the first group ‘are the vast majority, and are a happy folk, to be envied by most of the minority classes’.

Even more people are happily unaware of dangling or misplaced modifiers. I mean this kind of thing: Cycling downhill, a truck almost hit me. The writer was cycling, but the grammar implies, absurdly, that the truck was. Or: Born in India, Diya’s education took her to Europe. Diya was born in India, but the line says her education was.

As a copy-editor I’m in category 5: I routinely edit danglers to accord with the norms of formal written English. But they’re not always a flagrant error, and they’ve occurred in English since at least Chaucer’s day.

Let’s take a closer look.

More here.

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Hannah Ritchie at Sustainability by numbers:

My sense is that a lot of climate-conscious people feel guilty about using ChatGPT. In fact it goes further: I think many people judge others for using it, because of the perceived environmental impact.

If I’m being honest, for a while I also felt a bit guilty about using AI. The common rule-of-thumb is that ChatGPT uses 10 times as much energy as a Google search [I think this is probably now too high, but more on that later]. How, then, do I justify the far more energy-hungry option? Maybe I should limit myself to only using LLMs when I would really benefit from the more in-depth answer.

But after looking at the data on individual use of LLMs, I have stopped worrying about it and I think you should too.

More here.

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Sean Carroll in the New York Times:

A full-blown humanitarian emergency in Gaza is no longer looming. It is here, and it is catastrophic.

It’s been more than two months since Israel cut off all humanitarian aid and commercial supplies into Gaza. The World Food Program delivered its last stores of food on April 25. Two million Palestinians in Gaza, nearly half of them children, are now surviving on a single meal every two or three days.

At makeshift clinics run by my relief organization, American Near East Refugee Aid, signs of prolonged starvation are becoming more frequent and alarming. In the past 10 days, our lab technicians began detecting ketones, an indicator of starvation, in one-third of urine samples tested, the first time we have seen such cases in significant numbers since we began testing in October 2024. Food, fuel and medicine are exhausted or close to it.

More here.

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Jim Baggott at Aeon Magazine:

To understand the point Schrödinger was making, we need to do a little unpacking. The nature of Schrödinger’s ‘diabolical device’ is not actually important to his argument. Its purpose is simply to amplify an atomic-scale event – the decay of a radioactive atom – and bring it up to the more familiar scale of a living cat, trapped inside a steel box. The theory that describes objects and events taking place at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles like electrons is quantum mechanics. But in this theory, atoms and subatomic particles are described not as tiny, self-contained objects moving through space. They are instead described in terms of quantum wavefunctions, which capture an utterly weird aspect of their observed behaviour. Under certain circumstances, these particles may also behave like waves.

These contrasting behaviours could not be starker, or more seemingly incompatible. Particles have mass. By their nature, they are ‘here’: they are localised in space and remain localised as they move from here to there. Throw many particles into a small space and, like marbles, they will collide, bouncing off each other in different directions. Waves, on the other hand, are spread out through space – they are ‘non-local’. Squeeze them through a narrow slit and, like waves in the sea passing through a gap in a harbour wall, they will spread out beyond.

more here.

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Elizabeth Lund in The Christian Science Monitor:

Richard Blanco says he still can’t believe how much his life has changed since he read his poem “One Today” at U.S. President Barack Obama’s second inauguration in 2013. After his appearance, he received thousands of emails from people who appreciated his descriptions of hardworking Americans and immigrants, including his parents, and his vision of “All of us as vital as the one light we move through.”

“I could tell from their messages that [my reading] was probably the first time they had ever encountered a living poet writing in a voice and a language that they understood, feeling like they belonged to America,” says Mr. Blanco. “Some of them wouldn’t even dare to call it a poem. They were like, ‘We loved your speech.’”

More here.

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Edd Gent in Singularity Hub:

Older computer programs were hand-coded using logical rules. But neural networks learn skills on their own, and the way they represent what they’ve learned is notoriously difficult to parse, leading people to refer to the models as “black boxes.”

Progress is being made though, and Anthropic is leading the charge.

Last year, the company showed that it could link activity within a large language model to both concrete and abstract concepts. In a pair of new papers, it’s demonstrated that it can now trace how the models link these concepts together to drive decision-making and has used this technique to analyze how the model behaves on certain key tasks. “These findings aren’t just scientifically interesting—they represent significant progress towards our goal of understanding AI systems and making sure they’re reliable,” the researchers write in a blog post outlining the results. The Anthropic team carried out their research on the company’s Claude 3.5 Haiku model, its smallest offering. In the first paper, they trained a “replacement model” that mimics the way Haiku works but replaces internal features with ones that are more easily interpretable.

More here.

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I Am Mankind

I cry when I think what man
…………has done to man,
….Because I am the oppressed
…………and the oppressor.
I have caused deaths;
….I have died.
I have been tormentor;
….I have suffered.
I am mankind crying and laughing.

I have died in Hiroshima,
…………………………………. Dachowe,
………………………………………………. Arizona,
……………………………………………………………Mississippi,
I dropped the bomb on that little island.
I made lampshades from human skin,
I turned the snarling dogs on the Negro.
Naked, I cried at my mother’s side before the ovens.
Brazen, I laughed when I sentenced them to death.
Just as I am Sachi Yamuki,
………. I am Airman Frank Smith.
Just as I am Medgar Evers,
………. I am his white asssasin.

Just as I am Ann Frank,
………. I am Adolph Eichmann.
Just as I am Running Deer,
………. I am Senator Ratner  (R. Ariz.)
My being depends upon the heterogeneous group of
………. Men ;
Yet I insist on destroying myself.
I kill my Asians,

………………………………Jews,
………………………………………. Indians,
…………………………………………………… Blacks,
……………………………………………………………… Myself.

I am the puzzling paradox of the universe and time.
I am the Schizophrenic, Mankind.
I ask, when will I lose my evil self?
Tell me, will I abolish the evil in me?
Answer me please, before I destroy myself.

by Kathleen McGrath
from Essence Magazine
Paterson State College Press, 1963

…I have died.
…………
…………

Michael Prodger at The New Statesman:

JMW Turner baffled his contemporaries. At the beginning of his career he was a prodigy, a preternaturally gifted tyro who joined the Royal Academy Schools at 14, and at 15 became the youngest painter ever to have a picture accepted for the RA Summer Exhibition. But at the end of his career his peers found his paintings incomprehensible. All those wafty emanations of light, colour and atmospherics had no precedent and no explanation. John Ruskin thought his late work displayed “distinctive characters in the execution, indicative of mental disease”. A fellow painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon, thought that “Turner’s pictures always look as if painted by a man who was born without hands” who had “contrived to tie a brush to the hook at the end of his wooden stump.” One critic was inspired by Turner’s ochre depictions of the ruins of Rome to brush off his Latin: the paintings, he said, were “cacatum non est pictum” – crapped not painted.

The man himself was equally mystifying. For the last five years of his life he had been living with a woman named Sophia Booth, a twice-widowed guesthouse landlady 20 years his junior.

more here.

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Michael Bacon at Psyche:

In the everyday sense of the term, the pragmatist is the person who ‘gets results’. The term can be intended as either a compliment or a criticism; it can be applied equally to effective and to unscrupulous managers and politicians. These connotations carry over, typically in misleading ways, into the philosophical sense of pragmatism.

Pragmatism is the United States’ most important contribution to philosophy, emerging in the late 19th century, developing throughout the 20th, and flourishing today. At its heart is a rejection of what one of its founders, John Dewey (1859-1952), calls ‘the spectator theory of knowledge’. This theory, which can be traced to Plato, holds that reality is composed of two discrete entities: the world of objects, which exist independently of us, and the minds, which perceive and seek accurately to represent that world. In the alternative account offered by pragmatists, the mind is, rather, a part of the world, in which it plays an active role. Pragmatists, accordingly, describe us not as seeking to represent reality as it exists independently of us, but rather as developing more effective and imaginative ways of coping with the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

More here.

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