New York Times: Stop shilling for fake psychics
https://theness.com/neurologicablog/nyt-...-psychics/

INTRO: A recent article in the New York Times is, unfortunately, terrible journalism that ends up shilling for a fraudulent and exploitative industry. The author, Sarah Wildman, tells of her previous encounter with a medium through her unnamed cousin. Part of the subject was Wildman’s 14 year-old daughter who had died the year before. This is a massive conflict that compromises her objectivity. No editor should have let this article go through. Wildman herself admits. “Also, I did not really want to debunk it.” She wanted to believe - that makes her a vulnerable target, not an objective journalist. The essence of the article is that it really doesn’t matter if mediums are genuine or not... (MORE - details)

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I attended an anti-vaccine conference. The joke ended quickly...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/...ul-lesson/

EXCERPTS: I have a confession: When I arrived at the Grand Hyatt hotel in D.C. on Thursday to cover an anti-vaccine conference, my intention was to make fun of it. That was wrong.

To be clear, I have an unshakable faith in vaccines. [...] Most of it — including the keynote address from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — was the same deceptive talking points I have heard countless times.

Over the course of the day, however, I realized that treating those views with disrespect, wrong though they might be, would help no one. It would only feed into the resentment that created the anti-vaccine movement as it is today.

[...] My goal is not to sane-wash the views of the conference attendees. It is merely to point out that they are humans, which means they are vulnerable to the same sort of populist scapegoating that pervades much of U.S. politics.

[...] Casual media coverage of vaccine issues typically speeds past anti-vaccine claims by declaring them “false” or “discredited.” That can come off as dismissive, but it takes time and space for journalists to point out that rigorous studies have found no association between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. Moreover, purveyors of false information often layer multiple claims on top of each other. Diving into any one of them can turn out to be a complicated rabbit hole.

[...] This sort of detail makes readers’ eyes glaze over, so reporters rarely spend time parsing it. That gives anti-vaccine activists room to claim that the traditional media — indeed the entire political establishment — is against them. ... That is what crushed me on Thursday — that sense of victimhood that nearly everyone in the conference shared... (MORE - missing details)

MICHAEL HEAVER
https://youtu.be/T9Sb7IU2Rv8

VIDEO EXCERPTS: Well, an announcement from Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni sending shockwaves right across Europe. And you have to remember right now, you're seeing a big shift across Europe.

[...] she has now made this major announcement that Italy is going to ban face coverings in schools. She says it will require parents of foreign students -- facing serious difficulties integrating into the school system -- to learn Italian. And there will be a ban burqas and niqabs in schools.

They're going to cap the number of foreign students per class. You can see the quote from Meloni that a measure will soon be presented to a cabinet meeting to legally establish a maximum number of foreign students per class.

Also saying there that if there is only one child in a class who doesn't speak Italian, that child will likely be able to learn the language and integrate quickly with the help of classmates and teachers. However, if the number of children who don't understand the language becomes large or even the majority, that is no longer integration. It is neglect.

And Meloni making the point you must go to school with your face uncovered. And that in Italy, no one in the name of a real or supposed tradition can decide that a young woman must hide herself.

Italian bans announced ... https://youtu.be/T9Sb7IU2Rv8

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/T9Sb7IU2Rv8

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Germany's far-right AfD celebrates another state election win
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20...ection-win

INTRO: Cheering and clapping, Germany's far-right AfD celebrated another regional election win Sunday as exit polls placed it narrowly ahead in a Baltic Sea coastal state in the formerly communist east.

"We are the strongest force and have reached the mainstream of the population," said jubilant AfD co-leader Alice Weidel after the first results came in for Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania state.

"We have displaced the CDU as the people's party," she later added, referring to the centre-right party of embattled Chancellor Friedrich Merz that was hovering around a historic low of five percent in the region.

The AfD scored more than 37 percent against about 35 for the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) of state premier Manuela Schwesig, who had hoped for a last-minute comeback after recently closing the gap with the anti-immigration AfD.

Schwesig nevertheless looked likely to remain in office as a three-way coalition of her SPD with two other left-wing parties -- the Greens and the hard-left Die Linke -- appeared headed for a majority. The other national AfD boss, Tino Chrupalla, described his party's success -- which came two weeks after an AfD triumph in Saxony-Anhalt state -- as a "sensational result", adding that "we clearly have a mandate to govern".

The AfD's hopeful for state premier, former radio host Leif-Erik Holm, 56, immediately claimed that mandate. "We will, of course, invite all parties," he said at the AfD's election party in the state capital Schwerin.

But he also acknowledged that "it's difficult to form a government" as none of the other major parties are willing to form a coalition with the AfD. (MORE - details)

Long story short, start practicing light-heartedness now!

https://www.facebook.com/reel/2446747092463137

European project EMERGE concludes advancing collective awareness in artificial systems
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1144487

EXCERPT: “In EMERGE, we understand awareness more operationally, as the capacity of an agent to process and integrate information in a way that is relevant to its actions,” explains Ophelia Deroy, philosopher and cognitive scientist at LMU Munich. And our experiments showed that people can actually understand an artificial system as aware without assuming that it has subjective experience.”

To further establish that distinction, the researchers examined awareness through different dimensions that can be applied across individuals and collective systems, including spatial, temporal, self, agentive and metacognitive awareness. Rather than treating awareness as an all-or-nothing property, the framework connects each dimension to specific capabilities and tasks. This makes it possible to test whether increasing a system’s awareness improves its performance.

“Our work also examined the ethical side of human interaction with collaboratively aware systems,” says Bahador Bahrami, director of the Crowd Cognition group at LMU Munich, “with important implications for future environments in which groups of humans and artificial agents will have to interact, negotiate and cooperate.”

Their studies explored, for example, how people behave toward automated systems such as self-driving cars and found that users may be more willing to take advantage of artificial agents than human counterparts, a phenomenon described by the researchers as algorithmic exploitation. Other findings also inform the design and governance of artificial systems that interact directly with people.

Furthermore, the consortium partners developed mathematical and computational tools to describe how awareness can emerge across a physically distributed systems by exchanging simple local information with neighboring agents and integrating it to coordinate their actions toward solving a task.

“The beauty of the approach is that the system operates in a distributed way,” says Sabine Hauert, professor at the University of Bristol. “This way systems that can scale to large numbers of agents and remain operational when individual robots fail or conditions change. It also allows humans to interact with the systems as a coordinated collective rather than controlling each robot separately.”

“We want robots that can understand how their actions affect the world, anticipate what people and other robots are doing, and adapt accordingly. That is a key step toward robotic systems that can operate more autonomously and work naturally alongside humans,” explains Cosimo Della Santina, associate professor at TU Delft.

Moreover, the consortium’s mathematical framework also showed potential for more parsimonious machine learning, with systems capable of learning from substantially smaller quantities of data than conventional architectures... (MORE - missing details, no ads)

ORIGINAL SOURCE: https://eic-emerge.eu/outreach/news-deta...al-systems

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AI might be making women sound bad at work
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1144544

INTRO: When prompts to draft work emails and job applications contain language commonly used by women, AI chatbots including ChatGPT offer less sophisticated responses compared to office correspondence requested with language associated with men, new Johns Hopkins University research finds.

Every popular AI chatbot tested picked up on subtle, gender-oriented language patterns that writers likely aren’t aware of. The findings suggest that as people increasingly rely on AI for professional communication, the tools might disadvantage women—or anyone whose prompts include those linguistic features.

“If you prompt a model to write an email you’re going to send to someone else at your company, and you’re using language features that women more commonly use, you’ll get back a response that’s less complex, at a lower grade level, and less formal,” said senior author Anjalie Field, a Johns Hopkins computer scientist who studies ethics and discrimination in AI. “That’s going to reflect on how the recipient of that document perceives you.”

The work will be presented at the Oct. 6-9 Conference on Language Modeling in San Francisco.

Researchers have previously demonstrated that AI large language models like ChatGPT can display bias and play into gender stereotypes. But less studied is whether they perform differently for different types of people.

“In American English, men and women just talk differently, and there’s a number of features that are well documented as being good discriminators between male speech and female speech,” said lead author Katherine Van Koevering, an inaugural postdoctoral fellow with the university’s Data Science and AI Institute. “Our idea was, if we feed these features into a model, will it pick up on them and will it respond differently?”

The team took real chatbot prompts for workplace correspondence—emails, job applications and resignation letters—and added language associated with women. These gendered signatures included hedging (“maybe,” “I think”), collective phrasing (“we,” “our team”) and expressive adjectives (“lovely,” “wonderful”).

The team fed the prompts into four popular AI systems—GPT-4, Llama, Gemma, and Mistral. No matter the model, prompts with woman-associated language consistently returned work emails and other professional correspondence that were less sophisticated and less formal.

Language associated with men produced longer, more complex and more formal responses, the team found. The model wasn’t just mimicking the writer’s tone — the gap persisted even after the researchers accounted for that... (MORE - no ads)

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1144240

INTRO: The study, published today in Biology of Sex Differences, involved testing 130 newborn infants only hours after birth. It builds on previous research by the same lab and uses robust methods to demonstrate the differences.

For years, research has shown that girls, on average, learn to talk earlier and develop social skills faster than boys. Scientists have long debated whether these differences are due to culture or biology. One way to answer this question is to test if sex differences are present soon after birth, before society and culture have influenced a child’s development.

A study from the University of Cambridge published in 2000 found girls at birth on average looked longer at faces, and boys on average looked longer at objects. Since then, scientists in the field called for a replication of this study. However, no research team has attempted this until now, since it is very challenging to carry out research on newborn infants.

In this new study, infants were presented with side-by-side videos containing a social stimulus, namely a human face with natural movement, and a non-social object, namely a set of metallic balls swinging due to gravity and their mechanical properties (a Newton’s cradle).

The team found that, regardless of sex, newborn infants generally preferred to look at the social stimulus. However, on average, female infants spent a greater proportion of the time looking at the social stimulus compared to male infants, while male infants spent a greater proportion of time looking at the non-social stimulus compared to female infants.

Since this is within hours of birth, before much postnatal experience (such as social expectations based on gender) has occurred, it is likely that prenatal biological factors that differ between the sexes during pregnancy (such as hormone levels and genetics) contribute to the observed on-average sex differences.

Yumnah Khan, a PhD student at the Autism Research Centre, University of Cambridge and the lead researcher on the study, said: “Our recent research has also shown that on-average sex differences are present in brain structure at birth and emerge prenatally. This new study tells us that there are not only on-average sex differences in the brain but also in attention and behaviour.”

Professor Sir Simon Baron Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre, University of Cambridge, who supervised the study, said: “This study addresses the age-old question of whether nature plays any role at all in shaping sex differences in the human mind and brain. The fact that we observe these differences within hours of birth, before extensive postnatal experience has occurred, suggests that prenatal factors play a role, and that these prenatal factors – sex hormones and/or genes – go on to interact with postnatal experience. In other words, it’s nature and nurture, not nature or nurture.”

The new study used more robust methods compared to the original 2000 study... (MORE - no ads)

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-...your-bones

EXCERPTS: The data showed that brisk walking or jogging was the winner when it came to bone strengthening. A combination of aerobic and resistance training also scored highly, but in fewer areas of the skeleton. The gains weren't huge, but potentially enough to guard against the bone weakening that comes with old age.

As for exercise time and intensity, the study concludes that around 600 METs minutes per week is the level at which exercise starts to make a difference – the equivalent of around 2–3 hours of brisk walking or jogging.

"We found that structured exercise was associated with a modest yet clinically meaningful mitigation of age-related declines in BMD at the lumbar spine, femoral neck, and total hip," write the researchers.

Mixed aerobic exercise and mind-body exercises showed some association with a reduced risk of bone fractures, but here the data was less clear cut (synthesizing information across 124 trials does have its challenges).

The benefits of exercise did vary between groups though, a reminder that exercise – and health conditions – can affect us all differently. [...] "Exercise yielded more pronounced BMD effects in middle-aged individuals and those with a healthy BMI, whereas responses were blunted in older adults and those with overweight or obesity."

What's good about brisk walking or jogging is that it's relatively accessible. You don't need any special equipment or a gym membership to do it, or any particular skills or access to a trainer (as you might with weights or yoga, for example).

Osteoporosis affects millions of people worldwide, and can often lead to fractures (breaking a bone is sometimes the first indication people get that they have the condition). In the UK alone, it's thought that there are over 500,000 bone fractures per year caused by fragility related to osteoporosis.

Those fractures can lead to more health complications and even premature mortality. In older people especially, bones take longer to heal, which means extended hospital stays and longer periods of immobility – all negative as far as overall health is concerned.

Some of those injuries and early deaths could be prevented through exercise, the study concludes, though more research will be needed with more consistent parameters to confirm the link... (MORE - missing details)

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/20...lding.html

EXCERPTS: There’s something ironic in this arrangement if you think about it. Science fiction imagined that advancements in computing and AI will one day free humans from the drudgery of physical work. If these trends continue, then we may end up with an opposite arrangement.

Imagine a world where there’s a machine, an AI model that searches the literature and generates a hypothesis. Based on the hypothesis, it recommends certain experiments be done. It would then gather the data from the experiments, interpret it, and suggest conclusions. The human scientists are then left to just do the experiments.

As strange as that sounds, there are even more parts of this process which could be automated. The next step would be automated laboratories, many of which already exist, but in this imagined near future, they will be tightly coupled with the hypothesis generation and experimentation process. This is not to say that scientists will disappear. However, how science is done will greatly change.

[...] Modern science works because understanding is distributed. One person understands the assay, another understands the statistical method, and another knows the instrumentation. Scientific institutions allow us to rely on this division of labor. Peer review, replication, professional specialization, and scientific reputation all help create trust between people who cannot independently verify everything they use.

The potential risk that we may be seeing here is that there may be parts of this process which cease to be understandable to humans at all. Thus, a machine could arrive at a reliable result through an inferential path involving an enormous number of interacting variables, simulations, model calls, searches, and intermediate representations. We might be able to test the output without being able to reconstruct the route that produced it.

It may be tempting. to treat this as a philosophical luxury. If a drug works, does it really matter whether anybody understands the route by which it was discovered? If a model predicts a hurricane accurately, the people in its path would presumably prefer a correct warning to an elegant explanation. Engineering has always tolerated a certain amount of pragmatism, and scientists themselves frequently use tools whose inner workings they do not fully understand.

[...] A sufficiently powerful machine could be extraordinarily productive while pursuing questions that human beings find utterly uninteresting. Scientific importance is not a property that can always be read directly from the natural world. It reflects human priorities, needs, aesthetics, and values. Even a system vastly better than us at solving scientific problems would still require some account of which problems ought to matter... (MORE - missing details)

https://www.acsh.org/news/2026/09/18/fre...kens-50330

EXCERPTS: The resulting calculations reveal an unexpected trade-off. Housing modifications designed for animal welfare systematically increased resource consumption, emissions, and overall mortality. Could the drive for better chicken lives result in more chicken deaths?

Feed production drove most environmental impacts. As a result, any drop in feed-conversion efficiency, whether caused by cold weather, exercise, lower dietary nutrient density, or disease, compounds its ecological footprint.

Mortality outcomes were more complex. Outdoor and free-range systems leave hens exposed to pathogens carried by wild birds, such as avian influenza, as well as soil-borne parasites and infectious diseases. They also expose hens to weather extremes. Indoor flocks are more susceptible to bacterial infections and suffer irritation from air pollutants, particularly high ammonia levels from built-up floor litter. High-density uncaged populations are more prone to uncontrolled pecking and cannibalism as the natural social hierarchy is lost at these flock sizes.

Cages limit those issues. While cage systems limit behavioral freedom, their physical isolation protects birds from infectious vectors, aggression, and harsh weather—resulting in the substantially lower baseline mortality rates observed in the data. Further complicating matters, organic layers were less productive, requiring a larger population to produce the same number of eggs. This increased their overall flock sizes and contributed additional deaths from both disease and ultimately slaughter.

The best way to care for layers depended heavily on the trade-offs considered. With a strict environmental focus, furnished cages were unequivocally the best option, delivering the lowest greenhouse gas emissions, land footprint, and nutrient pollution. Free-range organic systems performed worst across nearly every ecological metric. When hen welfare is the focus, the trade-off becomes even more critical. Furnished cages minimized total flock deaths and slaughter counts. Free-range systems provided the greatest behavioral freedom but had the worst mortality rates, requiring significantly larger flock sizes.

Neither the authors nor I are calling for caging hens. As they write, “transitioning to cage-free systems without also improving factors such as mortality and feed efficiency is likely to increase environmental impacts.” The point is not that cages are good or free-range systems bad. It is that improving one thing we value can make another worse.

That is the uncomfortable reality of trade-offs and policymaking... (MORE - missing details)