'That is literally a part of the oath that they take to be right wing'

I see you, Baltimore! I see the drip

The black man who bagged himself a show on National Geographic after making headlines as the victim of a racial profiling incident has now followed it up with a Daytime Emmy Award. It’s a beautiful culmination of four years of creative work spawned in the wake of the “Central Park Karen” incident, that has seen […] The post Black Birder Wrongfully Accused in Central Park Used his Fame to Make Bird Watching Show-Now it Wins Emmy appeared first on Good News Network.

Maryland Governor Calls for Border Closure After Rape, Murder of Mother of 5

Turning the Gaslighting Up to 11

An almighty discovery has been made during an expedition in the Atacama Trench, an 8,000-meter-deep formation that stretches along the length of Peru and Chile. Here, Scientists on a research expedition onboard Schmidt Ocean Institute’s R/V Falkor (too) found Chile’s deepest and northernmost cold seeps at a depth of 2,836 meters (9,304 feet).Cold seeps are areas where hydrocarbons like methane form bubbles along the ocean floor. They get harder to find the deeper you go, and locating these record-breaking seeps took over 12 hours using seafloor mapping data.All evidence points to them being methane seeps, a phenomenon known to occur along subduction zones where two tectonic plates are colliding pushing one under the other – just like the Cascadia Subduction Zone that's leaking lubricant in a very strange way. The methane can be a great resource for deep-sea animals like clams, squat lobsters, and tube worms, as it feeds the bacteria that make up some of their diet.A methane seep documented on the seafloor during Dive 681.Image credit: ROV SuBastian/Schmidt Ocean Institute (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)"The microbes that live on these seeps have amazing strategies for producing food without sunlight,” said expedition lead Dr Lauren Seyler of Stockton University, New Jersey, in a statement emailed to IFLScience. “Here on Earth, life in the dark is alien in its own right and provides critical information for understanding how organisms persist under the most extreme conditions. We are still trying to figure out how life started on Earth, and environments that provide chemical energy for life, like this one, might offer clues about the spark that ignited all the biodiversity on our beautiful planet.”The bacteria are crucial because sunlight can’t reach this deep, making these critters of great interest to astrobiologists trying to work out how life could evolve in extraterrestrial habitats that don’t meet our established criteria for what life needs to thrive.A deep-sea lizardfish documented on the seafloor during Dive 691.Image credit: ROV SuBastian/Schmidt Ocean Institute (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)“The Atacama Desert is a well-known Mars analog model here on Earth. It contains precious insights for how life, if it ever arose on Mars, might be able to adapt to an increasingly drying plane,” said Dr Armando Azua-Bustos of Centro de Astrobiología (CAB, CSIC-INTA). “We hope the information we gathered from the Atacama trench, with help from the Schmidt Ocean Institute, will aid us in searching for biosignatures should we eventually study the oceans of Enceladus and Europa on Saturn and Jupiter, water worlds that may potentially support life.” A total of 70 specimens were collected during the expedition, some of which are thought to be new-to-science species. There may even be some living fossils in the mix in the form of brachiopods, leptochitons, and crinoids, which are speculated to be close descendants of fossils found in the Atacama Desert.And a trip to the seabed just wouldn’t be complete without an appearance from a sea pig, one of the planet’s strangest deep sea cucumbers. They snuffle along the seafloor, sifting out organic morsels to feed on, and come in all sorts of colors – including “Barbie sea pig” pink.

In 1637, the French philosopher and probable pothead René Descartes came up with an interesting thought: can a machine think? In 1950, the English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing announced the answer to this 300-year-old poser: who cares? A much better question, he said, was something that would come to be known as the “Turing test”: given a person, a machine, and a human interrogator, could the machine ever convince the interrogator that it was actually the person?Now, another 74 years after Turing reformulated the question in this way, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, believe they have the answer. According to a new study, in which they had human participants talk to either one of a variety of artificial intelligence systems or another human for five minutes, the answer is now a tentative “yes.”“Participants in our experiment were no better than chance at identifying GPT-4 after a five minute conversation, suggesting that current AI systems are capable of deceiving people into believing that they are human,” confirms the preprint paper, which is not yet peer-reviewed. “The results here likely set a lower bound on the potential for deception in more naturalistic contexts where, unlike the experimental setting, people may not be alert to the possibility of deception or exclusively focused on detecting it.”Now, while this is certainly a headline-grabbing milestone, it’s by no means a universally accepted one. “Turing originally envisioned the imitation game as a measure of intelligence,” the researchers explain, but “a variety of objections have been raised to this idea.” Humans, for example, are famously good at anthropomorphizing just about anything – we want to empathize with things, regardless of whether they’re another person, a dog, or a Roomba with a pair of googly eyes stuck on top.On top of that, it’s notable that ChatGPT-4 – and ChatGPT-3.5, which was also tested – only convinced the human participants of its personhood about 50 percent of the time – not much better than random chance. So how do we know that this result means anything at all?Well, one failsafe that the team built into the experiment design was to include ELIZA as one of the AI systems. She was one of the very first ever such programs, created in the mid-60s at MIT, and while she was undoubtedly impressive for the time, it’s fair to say she’s not much on modern large-language model-, or LLM-, based systems. “ELIZA was limited to canned responses, which greatly limited its capabilities. It might fool someone for five minutes, but soon the limitations would become clear," Nell Watson, an AI researcher at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), told Live Science. “Language models are endlessly flexible, able to synthesize responses to a broad range of topics, speak in particular languages or sociolects and portray themselves with character-driven personality and values. It’s an enormous step forward from something hand-programmed by a human being, no matter how cleverly and carefully.”In other words, she was perfect to serve as a baseline for the experiment. How do you account for lazy test subjects just randomly choosing between “human” or “machine”? Well, if ELIZA scores as high as random chance, then probably people aren’t taking the experiment seriously – she’s just not that good. How do you tell how much of the effect is just humans anthropomorphizing anything they interact with? Well, how much were they convinced by ELIZA? It’s probably about that much.In fact, ELIZA scored 22 percent – convincing barely more than one in five people that she was human. This lends weight to the idea that ChatGPT really has passed the Turing test, the researchers write, since test subjects were clearly able to reliably distinguish some computers from people – just not ChatGPT.So, does this mean we’re entering a new phase of human-like artificial intelligence? Are computers now just as intelligent as us? Perhaps – but we probably shouldn’t be too hasty in our pronouncements.      “Ultimately, it seems unlikely that the Turing test provides either necessary or sufficient evidence for intelligence, but at best provides probabilistic support,” the researchers explain. Indeed, the participants weren’t even relying on what you might consider signs of “intelligence”: they “were more focused on linguistic style and socio-emotional factors than more traditional notions of intelligence such as knowledge and reasoning,” the paper reports, which “could reflect interrogators’ latent assumption that social intelligence is has become the human characteristic that is most inimitable by machines.”Which raises a worrying question: rather than the rise of the machines, is the greater problem rather the fall of the humans?“Although real humans were actually more successful, persuading interrogators that they were human two thirds of the time, our results suggest that in the real-world people might not be able to reliably tell if they're speaking to a human or an AI system,” Cameron Jones, co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.“In fact, in the real world, people might be less aware of the possibility that they're speaking to an AI system, so the rate of deception might be even higher,” he cautioned. “I think this could have implications for the kinds of things that AI systems will be used for, whether automating client-facing jobs, or being used for fraud or misinformation.”The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, has been posted as a preprint to the arXiv.

Our technology and knowledge, just as much as our values and beliefs, have all been shaped by thousands of generations of people stretching back in an unbroken chain. But when did this process of accumulation begin? Or, to put it another way, when did our earliest ancestors start to build on the knowledge of others and make connections that set us apart from other primates?Cumulative culture, the process of accumulating technical and technological knowledge through social learning, is increasingly understood to be a key factor to our success as a species. The concept was first brought to wider attention in the 1990s, essentially as a way to differentiate human culture from that of other species. Sure, many species have “culture”, but only humans can accumulate modifications over time.Of course, this idea has been challenged since then, with various non-human species demonstrating forms of cumulative culture, including other primates like chimpanzees, baboons, and macaques, as well as pigeons and other birds, and also whales and dolphins.Regardless, cumulative culture has still had an important role to play in human development, allowing us to adapt to diverse environments and challenges we have faced. However, it is unclear when this process started in hominin evolution – that is, until recently.According to researchers Charles Perreault, an associate professor with the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, and Jonathan Paige, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Missouri and ASU PhD graduate, cumulative culture began rapidly around 600,000 years ago.“Our species, Homo sapiens,” Perreault explained in a statement, “has been successful at adapting to ecological conditions — from tropical forests to arctic tundra — that require different kinds of problems to be solved."“Cumulative culture is key because it allows human populations to build on and recombine the solutions of prior generations and to develop new complex solutions to problems very quickly. The result is, our cultures, from technological problems and solutions to how we organize our institutions, are too complex for individuals to invent on their own.”To investigate when this technological turn came about, Paige and Perreault examined differences in the complexity of stone tool manufacturing techniques across the archaeological record for the last 3.3 million years.In order to establish a baseline for the complexity of stone tool technology that can be created without cumulative culture, the pair examined stone tools made by non-human species, like chimpanzees. They also examined the stone tool-making experiments of inexperienced human flintknappers and the random flaking they produced.According to the team, the complexities of stone tool technologies can be understood in terms of the number of steps taken in each tool-making sequence. These steps are referred to as procedural units (PU).The results show that, from around 3.3 to 1.8 million years ago, at the time when australopiths and the earliest Homo species were alive, stone tool-making was within the baseline range of 1 to 6 PUs. Then, from around 1.8 million to 600,000 years ago, this rose to a range between 4 to 7 PUs. However, 600,000 years ago, the complexity of manufacturing rapidly increased to a range of 5 to 18 PUs.“By 600,000 years ago or so, hominin populations started relying on unusually complex technologies, and we only see rapid increases in complexity after that time as well. Both of those findings match what we expect to see among hominins who rely on cumulative culture,” said Paige.It is possible that tool-assisted foraging may have led to the start of our cumulative culture. Early hominins – those that lived around 3.4 to 2 million years ago – probably relied on foraging strategies that used tools to strip meat and access the difficult-to-reach bits of food like marrow and organs. This, over time, may have led to changes, as the authors write: "[a]s cumulative culture begins to produce adaptive know-how, selective pressures on brains and developmental processes facilitate the acquisition, storage, and use of that cultural information".Other forms of social learning may have influenced this process, but the researchers believe that it is only in the Middle Pleistocene that evidence of rapid changes in technological complexity and diversity occurs.This was also the time with more evidence of controlled fire, hearths, and domestic spaces in the archaeological record. These were likely the outcomes of cumulative culture, along with other early technologies like wooden structures created with logs hewn using hafted tools. These tools consisted of stone blades attached to wooden or bone handles.If Paige and Perreault are correct, then cumulative culture may have begun during the Middle Pleistocene epoch and may have predated the divergence of Neanderthals and modern humans.The study is published in PNAS.  

A small family-owned church in Morelia, Michoacan has become the center of widespread attention after reports emerged of a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe weeping what appears to be blood. The statue represents one of the most revered figures, Our Lady of Guadalupe, known for her apparitions dating back to the 1500s. The Archdiocese of Morelia has urged prudence and a measured approach to the claims of the supernatural. In a recent statement, church officials announced the commencement of a thorough investigation to ascertain the nature of the phenomenon. Emphasizing the importance of a meticulous and comprehensive analysis, the Archdiocese has refrained from making premature conclusions about the veracity of the miracle. “It is necessary to highlight the need for caution when approaching an issue as delicate as that of an alleged miracle,” the Archdiocese of Morelia said in a statement. “[We are] taking the necessary measures to investigate the situation in a deep and exhaustive manner. Therefore, it is too early to issue a definitive position on the matter.” “It will be the ecclesiastical hierarchy itself that confirms the team that will carry out the detailed study of the case, so, as soon as there is any relevant report or conclusion, it will be made public knowledge.” The ecclesiastical authorities have confirmed that a specialized team will be appointed to conduct an in-depth study of the case. The findings of this investigation will be disclosed to the public once a conclusive report is available. As the inquiry progresses, the church has become a place of pilgrimage. “I felt a sensation that I haven’t felt before, like a joy but also a real sadness because she is telling us, what will happen only she knows, it is a miracle and hopefully it is a miracle that is good for everyone,” one of the locals was quoted as saying. The post Virgin Mary statue in Mexico weeps tears of blood appeared first on Anomalien.com.