Jeremy Hsu in New Scientist:
Artificial intelligence can learn and remember how to do multiple tasks by mimicking the way sleep helps us cement what we learned during waking hours.
“There is a huge trend now to bring ideas from neuroscience and biology to improve existing machine learning – and sleep is one of them” says Maxim Bazhenov at the University of California, San Diego.
Many AIs can only master one set of well-defined tasks – they can’t acquire additional knowledge later on without losing everything they had previously learned. “The issue pops up if you want to develop systems which are capable of so-called lifelong learning,” says Pavel Sanda at the Czech Academy of Sciences in the Czech Republic. Lifelong learning is how humans accumulate knowledge to adapt to and solve future challenges.
Bazhenov, Sanda and their colleagues trained a spiking neural network – a connected grid of artificial neurons resembling the human brain’s structure – to learn two different tasks without overwriting connections learned from the first task. They accomplished this by interspersing focused training periods with sleep-like periods.
More here.
The morning after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, my partner Skyped her parents back home in Italy. I finished my coffee, and they chatted. At some point her mother asked where I was: I had broken my usual pattern of dropping in to say ciao. My partner slid the laptop over to direct the camera’s gaze at my head, slumped onto our dining room table. “What happened?” the voice on the computer asked. “Trump won,” I explained.
For me, and for many others, encountering Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism in 2009 felt like coming up for air. In a society where everything was arranged to make you think that emotional well-being began and ended with your own personal psychodrama, perhaps the most important thing Capitalist Realism did was to suggest that mental suffering might have something to do with structural flaws in society as a whole. In a political system which endlessly promoted the notion that we were all alone, Fisher’s book announced that we were suffering together. Also, more hopefully, it said that if we were to realise this, and somehow make connections between our several hardships, we would be taking the first step towards doing something we seemed to have mostly forgotten about by the late Noughties: mounting an organised resistance. This is the near-spiritual message in the short, sharp text of Capitalist Realism, published on the eve of a new and tumultuous decade. Whatever political and theoretical nuances it might otherwise have implied, this was a book which called for a joining of human hands.
J
As I stand on the blue bridge, gateway to a subtropical garden on this island haven near southwestern England, I look to the side and see a small creature sitting astride a mound of hazelnuts. Its fur blazes a bright russet color, its tail fanned out like a sail. I glance up, and in the neighboring pine tree I see two or three more, racing up and down the trunk, pausing every so often to steal a glance at the feast below, waiting their turn. These are red squirrels, and to see them in the wild, let alone in such numbers, is a rare treat. The animals were once common throughout the United Kingdom, but the invasive gray squirrel has pushed them to the brink of extinction in all but a few strongholds.
When American novelist Kurt Vonnegut addressed the Bennington College class of 1970—1 year after publishing his best-selling novel, Slaughterhouse-Five—he hit the crowd with his signature one-two punch. “I fully expected that by the time I was 21, some scientist … would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine,” he said. “What actually happened … was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.” This weary skepticism for the scientific endeavor rings through many of Vonnegut’s 14 novels and dozens of short stories. For what would have been the famed author’s 100th birthday, Science talked to literary scholars, philosophers of science, and political theorists about the messages Vonnegut left for the scientific community—and why he’s more relevant than ever.
Francis Fukuyama’s work is generally treated much the way pigeons treat statues: as something on which to deposit badly digested ideas, which are then left for others to clean up. His notoriety for the “End of History” thesis is based on a misreading of that phrase, not a real reading of his 1989 National Interest article “The End of History?” or his less sanguine 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. His subsequent work has received respectful public attention, but little scholarly engagement; he is treated more as a symptom than an intellect. Even with this book, the pattern of neglect-by-vague-praise continues: None of its many reviewers, for all their pretense at comprehension, noticed that his drive-by definition of “deontology” (“not linked to any ontology or substantive theory of human nature”) is totally wrong: Deontology comes from deon, a Greek word here meaning something like “duty” and refers to the study of ethics.
I teach in and co-direct the undergraduate program in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. During the promotion of my recent book on testosterone and sex differences, I appeared on “Fox and Friends,” a Fox News program, and explained that sex is binary and biological. In response, the director of my department’s Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging task force (a graduate student) accused me on Twitter of transphobia and harming undergraduates, and I responded. The tweets went viral, receiving international news coverage. The public attack by the task force director runs contrary to Harvard’s stated academic freedom principles, yet no disciplinary action was taken, nor did any university administrators publicly support my right to express my views in an environment free of harassment. Unfortunately, what happened to me is not unusual, and an increasing number of scholars face restrictions imposed by formal sanctions or the creation of hostile work environments. In this article, I describe what happened to me, discuss why clear talk about the science of sex and gender is increasingly met with hostility on college campuses, why administrators are largely failing in their responsibilities to protect scholars and their rights to express their views, and what we can do to remedy the situation.
With the centre-left divided and in perpetual crisis, none of its well-known leaders appears remotely capable of forming an effective opposition movement against the far-right government.
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A MONTH BEFORE Atlanta hosted the first hip-hop-focused spinoff of the BET Awards in 2006, an executive at the cable network joked the event would likely not benefit the local economy. He was probably right. Rap dollars already coursed through the Southern city like its ceaseless traffic, bankrolling recording studios, propping up nightclubs and music-publishing companies, and sustaining a vast corps of DJs, strippers, bodyguards, and lawyers. After the inaugural BET Hip Hop Awards aired and nearly half the honors went to Atlantans, local rapper T. I.—who won four awards that night, the largest individual takeaway—described the show’s location as the city’s due: “We control and monopolize so much of this hip-hop industry, it’s only right that they start bringing these awards down here.”
Case studies showing bone metastasis 
The day after the midterm election of 2022 that both parties had agreed was the most consequential ever—except for the previous election, and the next one, of course—one thing was clear: the Democrats had defied both history and expectations. There had been no red wave, never mind Donald Trump’s promised “great red wave.” Was it a red ripple or merely a red drizzle? A blue escape? Purple rain? Even Fox News decreed the results to be no more than a pro-Republican “trickle.” Whatever it was called, President Biden and his Democrats, by limiting their losses in the House to less than the average for such elections and likely keeping the Senate as well, scored an against-the-odds political upset that suggests the country remains deeply skeptical of handing too much national power to the Trumpified Republican Party.
This is a point I keep seeing people miss in the debate about social media.