NEW YORK (AP) — Did you hear what happened when Bill Gates walked into a bar? Everybody there immediately became millionaires — on average.
That joke about a very rich man is an old one among statisticians. So why did Peter Smibert use it to explain a revolution in biology?
Because it shows averages can be misleading. And Smibert, of the New York Genome Center, says that includes when scientists are trying to understand the basic unit of life, the cell.
NBA superstar Steph Curry said he was kidding when he said he doesn’t believe humans landed on the moon.
“Obviously I was joking when I was talking on the podcast,” the Golden State Warriors guard told ESPN on Wednesday. “I was silently protesting how stupid it was that people actually took that quote and made it law.”
While appearing on an episode of the podcast “Winging It,” which posted Monday, Curry asked fellow NBA players Vince Carter, Kent Bazemore and Andre Iguodala “We ever been to the moon?”
A French physicist has won an Ig Nobel Prize for using mathematical formulas to determine whether cats are liquid or solid.
The Ig Nobel prizes are awarded every year by Improbable Research, an organization devoted to science and humor. The goal is to highlight scientific studies that first make people laugh, then think.
With more than 5.6 million articles, Wikipedia is an invaluable resource, whether you’re throwing a term paper together at the last minute, or doing legal research on whether it can really be considered assault if your victim habitually made the “cows outstanding in their field” joke. We explore some of Wikipedia’s oddities in our 5,690,195-week series, Wiki Wormhole.
This week’s entry: Vertical farming
What it’s about: Ah, the farmer’s life. The smell of the soil, the green of the leaves, the view from the 45th floor. Yes, like bathrooms before them, farms are moving into the future by moving indoors. Hydroponic farming has made vertical farms possible, in which floor after floor of a building is devoted to growing food. One such farm in Buffalo, New York contains 17 million plans, and a “windowless farm” in Kyoto produces 6 million heads of lettuce a year.
Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that’s taken over our lives.
With so much fake news slithering around the web all year, is it still possible to enjoy April Fools’ Day?
Or was April 1 ever that enjoyable?
The day does, though, underline how everyone now has to nourish their skepticism at all times.
Thank a new approach to spoofing image recognition AIs, developed by a team from Kyushu University in Japan, for that joke.
Trying to catch out AIs is a popular pastime for many researchers, and we’ve reported machine-learning spoofs in the past. The general approach is to add features to images that will incorrectly trigger a neural network and have it identify what it sees as something else entirely.
The new research, published on the arXiv, describes an algorithm that can efficiently identify the best pixels to alter in order to confuse an AI into mislabeling a picture. By changing just one pixel in a 1,024-pixel image, the software can trick an AI about 74 percent of the time. That figure rises to around 87 percent if five pixels are tweaked.
Self Driving Cars and Ethics. It’s a topic that has been debated in blogs, op-eds, academic research papers, and youtube videos. Everyone wants to know, if a self-driving car has to choose between sacrificing its occupant, or terminating a car full of nobel prize winners, who will it pick? Will it be programmed to sacrifice for the greater good, or protect itself — and its occupants — at all costs? But in the swirl of hypothetical discussion around jaywalking Grandmas, buses full of school-children, Kantian Ethics and cost-maps, one crucial question is being forgotten:
What about the Squirrels?
What is your take on the ethics of driverless vehicles? Should programmers attempt to give vehicles the ability to weigh moral problems, or just vehicles only have the aim of self-preservation?
Sophia smiles mischievously, bats her eyelids and tells a joke.
Without the mess of cables that make up the back of her head, you could almost mistake her for a human.
The humanoid robot, created by Hanson robotics, is the main attraction at a UN-hosted conference in Geneva this week on how artificial intelligence can be used to benefit humanity.
