• Generative AI in Finance

    This report in Forbes covers the research paper released earlier by Bloomberg introducing BloombergGPT, which applies ChatGPT-style machine learning techniques to financial datasets, those available in Bloomberg’s own vast repertoire and beyond. 

    Forbes‘s “back-of-napkin cost estimation” speculates that just the cost of Amazon Web Services cloud computing used to generate these models would have been to the tune of “$2.7 million to produce the model alone.” 

    After listing the datasets that were used to train these models, the report goes on to speculate about the uses that BloombergGPT could potentially be put to, like drafting Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, researching companies, individuals, and their linkages, drafting market reports and summaries, fetching financial statements etc.

    Read the full Forbes report here. Read the Bloomberg announcement of BloombergGPT here.

  • Countering Fake News and Ideological Bias in Reporting

    Ground News is an interesting effort to counter fake news and ideological bias in reporting. According to their website: 

    “Ground News is a News Aggregation platform that helps users expand their view of the news and easily compare how a story is being reported across the political spectrum. We identify all news articles written on a story and arrange the organizations reporting on the event into categories of political bias, geographic location, and chronology. News is aggregated from over 50,000 news sources, including many alternative, independent sources that aren’t confined to the mainstream news narrative. This puts our community in a position to choose and easily compare the news they want to read, not just have it pre-selected for them by algorithms designed to drive clicks.”

    Some features on both the website and app versions are behind a paywall, but either version can be used/downloaded for free. 

    Visit the Ground News website here.

  • The Urgent Need to Significantly Reduce Carbon Dioxide Emissions

    In this article for Nature, climate scientist David Ho re-iterates his long-standing argument that while there is no denying “the need to develop CDR (carbon dioxide removal) methods over the longer term”, urgently cutting down emissions is important because currently available CDR methods will not remove enough carbon dioxide to be able to compensate for the levels of emissions. 

    Ho argues: “We must stop talking about deploying CDR as a solution today, when emissions remain high — as if it somehow replaces radical, immediate emission cuts.” 

    This is necessary because: 

    “Developing methods to verify that CDR works is a major challenge. It will be many years before we have the science to tell us which methods work and whether they harm or benefit the environment.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Widespread Vulnerability to Cyberattacks

    This article on Dark Reading about a report published by cybersecurity firm Rezilion states that “[m]ore than 15 million instances of Internet-connected applications, services, and devices are vulnerable to software flaws that the US government has confirmed are being exploited by attackers in the wild.” While “[t]ypically, only a small fraction of vulnerabilities are exploited every year”, Yotam Perkal, director of vulnerability research at Rezilion, is quoted as saying that vulnerabilities “are being exploited, continuously, by sophisticated threat actors as well as advanced persistent threat (APT) groups.” 

    Furthermore, these estimates could be conservative “as the services affected by more than one vulnerability were counted only once” and Perkal reportedly thinks that “it is safe to assume that the actual number of vulnerable instances is much higher.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Amazon Deliberately Miscategorising Businesses?

    According to a story broken by The Information, Amazon has been miscategorising sellers as “Small Business” or “Black-Owned Small Business” even when they are not. 

    While Amazon had launched such badges with the claim that it was a way to “help customers who want to support small businesses”, facts uncovered in this report raise the question if this was just a way to exploit public sentiment to drive up sales. 

    The story has been picked up by other media outlets. This report in Business Insider says:

    “Even though not all businesses say they’ve seen a boost from the badges, the badges could have the potential to increase sales. An IBM study found that product downloads rose by 64% after the products were given digital badges, showing that badges can help some sales professionals ‘achieve sales quotas.’” 

    Read the original report published by The Information here. Read Business Insider‘s coverage of the story here.

  • San Francisco After the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

    This piece on Bloomberg takes a look at San Francisco in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. While all the usual issues that come up when talking about San Francisco – the city’s fiscal deficit, cost-of-living, tech slump, post-pandemic economic recovery, layoffs, vacant offices, homelessness, drug use, etc. – are touched upon in the article, it doesn’t give a conclusive picture on whether or not there is any cause for optimism in the sombre picture that the quoted figures paint. Even as the mayor of the city is said to have “pointed to cataclysms from the 1906 earthquake to the bursting of the dot-com bubble that brought in a spate of naysayers, only to have the city rebound stronger than ever”, an investor at a venture capital firm is quoted as having said that “the renewed interest in San Francisco is more in spite of the city, not aided by it”. 

    Read the full article here.

  • Avoiding Deliberations in Policy-making in the Name of Efficiency

    In this editorial for the Deccan Herald, policy researcher Yamini Aiyar warns against the tendency to problematise the bureaucracy only as a means to undermine democratic processes. 

    As she writes: 

    “Too often, debates on State capacity veer in the direction of setting up a false dichotomy between democracy and efficiency (conflated with State capacity). “Too much democracy”, the argument goes, with its attendant chaos caused by necessary rules of deliberation-negotiation and consensus-building, can become an impediment to State capacity. Indeed, this is the ruse that has been used to legitimise strongman leadership across the globe.” 

    Such demonising of bureaucracy in the name of “efficiency” is often used as a way to circumvent institutional mechanisms for deliberations on matters of policy, the author argues. As she concludes: “The expectation that a less democratic, low-capacity State can endow itself with the capacity to do what the State ought to do in a complex and unequal social setting is a falsity spurred by a deep desire to legitimise undemocratic political regimes.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Exxon's Climate Change Predictions and Climate Change Denial

    This piece by Grist is a useful short introduction to the oft-quoted fact that oil and gas corporation ExxonMobil historically funded some of the most accurate climate change predictions long before most of the world was talking about climate change. And yet, they went on to fund and spread climate change denial in the public domain for decades, knowing full well that said climate change denial was not backed even by their own research.

    Watch the video version of the piece on Youtube here. Access the video and transcript on the Grist website here.

  • The CERN of AI Research

    Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network (LAION) has launched this petition to “democratize AI research by establishing an international, publicly funded supercomputing facility equipped with 100,000 state-of-the-art AI accelerators to train open source foundation models.” They are calling such a proposed facility “a CERN for open source large-scale AI research and its safety.” 

    Significantly, the petition has this to say on AI Safety research: 

    “The proposed facility should feature AI Safety research labs with well-defined security levels, akin to those used in biological research labs, where high-risk developments can be conducted by internationally renowned experts in the field, backed by regulations from democratic institutions. The results of such safety research should be transparent and available for the research community and society at large. These AI Safety research labs should be capable of designing timely countermeasures by studying developments that, according to broad scientific consensus, would predictably have a significant negative impact on our societies.”

    LAION’s website describes them as a non-profit “aiming to make large-scale machine learning models, datasets and related code available to the general public.”

    Read the full petition here. Read more about LAION’s work and philosophy on their team blog here.

  • The Backlash Against Campaigns to Ban Caste Discrimination in North America

    In this report, Time covers the backlash to the attempt to explicitly ban caste discrimination in California, part of a growing number of such efforts across North America. As the report points out:

    “Caste is a system of social hierarchy that has been especially pervasive in South Asia. It dates back more than 3,000 years but even today is the basis of discrimination for those considered to be lower caste or falling outside the system, including Dalits, who have been ostracized as “untouchables.”

    Caste discrimination has made its way overseas to the U.S., too. A 2018 survey by Equality Labs—a nonprofit that advocates for Dalits—found that one in four Dalits in the U.S. say they faced verbal or physical assault and two out of every three reported facing discrimination at work.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Windowless Housing

    In this post on his Substack, The Column, Adam H. Johnson discusses the problems with real estate developers building windowless housing under the guise of solving the homelessness crisis. Johnson points out that over the last few years “calls for gutting regulations” in construction have become “not only mainstream, they’re elite conventional wisdom in Democratic-aligned media circles.”

    Importantly, this is not something new. “Real estate interests have said regulations stand in the wage of housing supply, and kept rents artificially high, since the dawn of government regulation.”

    One such regulation that seems to have become a target is the requirement for windows in bedrooms. Windowless abodes are passed off as necessary to solve the housing shortage. As Johnson writes:

    “Like much of the housing discourse, one is baffled by how quickly the discussion goes from the perfectly sensible—albeit generic—axiom of “we need more housing” to the idea that maintaining standards for windows in bedrooms is a pro-homelessness policy.

    The whole thing feels like a hostage situation, and in many ways it is. Taken to its logical end point, this reasoning means any housing standard that is a notch above homelessness would therefore be acceptable so long as it drove down development cost for real estate interests.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Crises in Higher Education?

    In the post-pandemic world, more and more voices from academia are trying to articulate the problems with the current state of the university system.

    In remarks made at the 2023 meeting of the American Historical Association in Philadelphia, Erin Bartram talks of the “intentional systemic understaffing” that plagues universities exploiting the labour of adjunct professors due to a shortage of tenured positions. She makes the case that the AHA has not done enough to tackle the problem, which she believes is larger than tenured professors’ lack of solidarity with their adjunct colleagues:

    “And it’s deeply connected to the broader problems facing history as a field of study in K-16 education—the perpetual concern over what majors get jobs, of course, but also the concerted political attacks on the field and its practitioners, most of whom teach without whatever protections academic freedom theoretically provides. And it’s about teaching, which is what every normal person in the world thinks is our main job, and which the field as a whole does not prioritize, train for, reward, or even really understand.”

    Marymount University had recently created a furore when its Board of Trustees unanimously passed a plan “that will eliminate nine majors, most of which are in the humanities field.”

    Lakshmi Subramanian wrote this disconcerting piece about her experience as a member of “a selection committee for recruiting an assistant professor in the Centre for Women’s Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.” She describes the whole process as “farcical.”

    The UK government has announced that “[g]raduates from the top 50 non-UK universities can apply to come to the UK through a new visa scheme.” But measures like this do not address the problem of providing employment opportunities for all degree holders.

  • The Mathematisation of Political Science

    In this book review of Foundations and American Political Science: The Transformation of a Discipline, 1945-1970 by Emily Hauptmann, political science professor Lee Trepanier talks about how “the discipline of political science has been almost completely colonized by mathematical models, data analysis, and numeric reasoning.” The analysis is important in light of the fact that, in the US, “[s]ince 2017, the economics major has surpassed the political science major in popularity—something that last happened 56 years ago in 1961.”

    According to Trepanier, “Hauptmann shows how private philanthropic foundations like Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller played an instrumental role in changing the practice and values in political science.”

    The effect that the resulting “predominance of behavioralism” has had on the discipline is described by Trepanier as:

    “Political science consequently has become boring to students. Professors see the fulfillment of their academic lives in scholarly publications that only a few people read rather than introducing students to the study of politics or explaining to communities why political science is a public good. Because of their training, professors want to teach hyper-specialized and esoteric topics that almost nobody is interested in, other than their five academic friends. Topics that students get most excited about, like political theory and public administration, are marginalized because they cannot be quantified and therefore do not qualify for political analysis. Instead, students are required to enroll in more courses in Bayesian analysis. But, if you are going to do that, then you might as well study a field that is entirely mathematized, like economics, and work on Wall Street.”

    Read the full book review here.

  • Investigating the Intellectual Status Quo Without Conspiracy Theories

    The Institute of Art and Ideas or IAI is a platform that, according to their website, was “founded in 2008 with the aim of rescuing philosophy from technical debates about the meaning of words and returning it to big ideas and putting them at the centre of culture. Not in aid of a more refined cultural life, but as an urgent call to rethink where we are.”

    On an internet where traditional publishing standards and processes have broken down to a large degree, IAI is a rare platform that tries to push the boundaries of knowledge without passing off pseudoscience as scepticism or heterodox thinking. In their own words, “the IAI seeks to challenge the notion that our present accepted wisdom is the truth. It aims to uncover the flaws and limitations in our current thinking in search of alternative and better ways to hold the world.”

    Read more about their vision here. Visit their website here. Subscribe to their video player here.

  • A Non-Dualistic Understanding of the Mind

    In this essay, James Barnes, a practising relational psychotherapist, outlines how relational psychotherapy provides a different model of understanding and healing mental distress than the more prevalent models of understanding and ‘treating’ the brain.

    Dualism has long impacted our understanding of the human mind:

    “When the new scientific discipline of psychology separated off from philosophy in the mid- to late 19th century, it adopted an essentially naturalised version of Descartes’s dualism, which persists to the present day, certainly in mainstream psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy. Instead of seeing mind as a separate substance, this neo-Cartesian perspective assumes that the mind is somehow identifiable with the brain, brain states and brain functioning. Much like Descartes, however, it maintains the very same vision of ‘mind’ as an experientially private interior, categorically cut off from the world and others outside.

    For Descartes and for modern neo-Cartesian models alike, our experience of the world and others occurs ‘on the inside’ – in our individual minds or brains. For modern psychology, this meant that mental life could be studied and measured in isolation, lending itself to empirical and quantitative science.”

    On the other hand, “Instead of locating the problem ‘in’ the person, relational therapists see distress as arising in the relationship between the individual and the rest of the world.”

    Barnes goes on to compare the differences between the two approaches in light of his own lived experience.

    An important caveat:

    “To be clear, this isn’t to say that internal processes – biological or otherwise – are not involved; of course they are. It is only to say that, in the relational-intersubjective model, the interpersonal, social level is foundational, and this often, we might say, transcends and includes these processes.”

    Read the full article here.

  • US Media's Coverage of the Latest IPCC Report and the Willow Project

    Media Matters has put out this piece condemning the coverage (or lack of it) in US corporate TV news on the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the controversial Willow project, an oil drilling project in Alaska. The report claims  “national TV news mostly failed to contextualize the Willow project’s recent approval within the framework of the IPCC report.”

    Talking of the expected role of the media in such matters, the report says:

    “National TV news has the potential to shape public opinion and drive action on climate change and therefore has a crucial role to play in holding the fossil fuel industry and politicians accountable for their role in exacerbating the crisis. Making these connections is one of the key actions climate correspondents can take whenever they are asked to discuss major climate news.”

    The main conclusion of the report is that “the overall lack of coverage of the IPCC report and the failure to connect it to the Willow project represents a missed opportunity to demand accountability from the fossil fuel industry and the Biden administration for its continued support for new fossil fuel infrastructure.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Preventing Harm Caused by Machine-learning

    “As a leading researcher on the ethics of artificial intelligence, Timnit Gebru has long believed that machine-learning algorithms could one day power much of our lives,” writes Emily Bobrow in this profile for the The Wall Street Journal.

    “Because machine-learning systems adopt patterns of language and images scraped from the internet, they are often riddled with the internet’s all-too-human flaws” and Gebru is well-known for her work in trying to change that. As Bobrow points out:

    “For years, Dr. Gebru earned notoriety as an in-house AI skeptic at big tech companies. In 2018, while she was working at Microsoft, she co-authored a study that found that commercial facial-analysis programs were far more accurate in identifying the gender of white men than Black women, which the researchers warned could lead to damaging cases of false identification. Later, while working at Google, called on companies to be more transparent about the errors baked into their AI models.”

    Gebru “hopes for laws that push tech companies to prove their products are safe, just as they do for car manufacturers and drug companies.”

    At Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), a non-profit she launched in 2021, “Dr. Gebru is working to call attention to some of the hidden costs of AI, from the computational power it requires to the low wages paid to laborers who filter training data.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Claude Shannon and Information Theory

    In this tribute for Quanta Magazine, Stanford professor David Tse highlights the remarkable contributions of Claude Shannon.

    Summing up Shannon’s foundational contribution to information theory, Tse writes: “in a single groundbreaking paper, he laid the foundation for the entire communication infrastructure underlying the modern information age.” Shannon “applied a mathematical discipline called Boolean algebra to the analysis and synthesis of switching circuits.” This was such an important development that it “is now considered to have been the starting point of digital circuit design.”

    All our digital communication technologies can be traced back to Shannon’s work. For instance, consider:

    “Another unexpected conclusion stemming from Shannon’s theory is that whatever the nature of the information — be it a Shakespeare sonnet, a recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or a Kurosawa movie — it is always most efficient to encode it into bits before transmitting it. So in a radio system, for example, even though both the initial sound and the electromagnetic signal sent over the air are analog wave forms, Shannon’s theorems imply that it is optimal to first digitize the sound wave into bits, and then map those bits into the electromagnetic wave. This surprising result is a cornerstone of the modern digital information age, where the bit reigns supreme as the universal currency of information.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Using AI to Detect Patterns in Animal Communication

    This article published by the World Economic Forum delves into the potential of AI analysis of “the vast amounts of animal communication data that is being collected with increasingly sophisticated sensors and recording devices.”

    The process “includes analysing large data sets that contain visual, oral and physical animal communications.”  “The goal,” according to researchers, “is to determine under what conditions an animal produces a communication signal, how the receiving animal reacts and which signals are relevant to influencing actions.”

    To arrive at a richer understanding of animal communication, “AI-powered analysis of animal communication includes data sets of both bioacoustics, the recording of individual organisms, and ecoacoustics, the recording of entire ecosystems, according to experts.”

    Importantly:

    “There are ethical concerns that researchers are confronting, too. This includes, most notably, the possibility of doing harm by establishing two-way communication channels between humans and animals—or animals and machines.”

    Read the full article here.

  • The Problem with Effective Altruism

    This video essay/tutorial by Youtuber and artist Abigail Thorn for her channel PhilosophyTube is a good introduction to effective altruism and the main problems with it.

    Watch the complete video here.

  • Curating Math and Science Resources

    Abakcus.com is described as “the best curation site for only math and science. We do the hard job and curate the best articles, books, tools, products, videos, and projects.” Abakcus is a project by math blogger Ali who interestingly puts their vision as: 

    “We believe that learning new things is crucial for happiness. Since Abakcus is the collection of perfect sources about mathematics and science, I think we can make tons of people happy.” 

    Check out their website here.

  • Virus-eating Microorganisms

    Late last year, researchers confirmed the existence of virus-eating microorganisms. The existence of such organisms had been hypothesised earlier. The question that researchers are now seeking answer(s) to is whether these and/or other microorganisms feed on viruses “in the wild,” outside laboratory conditions.

    Read a report on this research here.

  • OpenAI's Plans for AGI

    OpenAI has made unprecedented waves in the field of AI with ChatGPT. As a key player in the field, this mission statement of sorts about their plans regarding AGI, attributed to their CEO Sam Altman, makes for necessary reading for people with an eye on AI, if not for every literate citizen of the world.

    Read about OpenAI’s plans regarding AGI here.

  • Rich Nations Trying to Control Sunlight?

    Climate journalist Sara Schonhardt penned an important report on concerns about how “[r]adical climate interventions — like blocking the sun’s rays — could alter the world’s weather patterns, potentially benefiting some regions of the world and harming others.” 

    The main concerns: 

    “Climate scientists are, by and large, wary of such intervention. While limiting the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth could rapidly cool the planet, they say, such efforts wouldn’t address ocean acidification and other harms associated with burning fossil fuels, the primary cause of global warming. 

    It’s also unclear how solar radiation management, or SRM, would affect global weather patterns, such as the monsoon rains that are crucial in some regions of the Global South. While it could ease climate impacts in one area of the world, SRM might reduce crop yields or threaten water supplies in another area.” 

    Understandably then “any research on such methods must consider those risks and involve the countries that already bear the greatest impacts from a warming planet.” 

    A United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report “recommends a scientific review process based on models and observations that could guide potential research and future governance. If such an assessment determines that SRM deployment would lead to negative consequences, ‘consideration of deployment could be taken off the table,’ the report concludes.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • The Concentration of Innovation Across US Cities

    Writing for the MIT Sloan School of Management website, Dylan Walsh discusses the findings of various studies on the concentration of innovation across various US cities.

    The issue at hand: 

    “The most technologically productive places in the country also have some of the highest labor and real estate costs. Startups deciding where to locate as well as established companies opening new offices must actively weigh the benefits of productivity in a given location against the costs of doing business there.” 

    Importantly, the findings of such studies “hold particular relevance as the federal government redefines its role as an investor in innovation.” 

    The article makes the interesting suggestion that “building lots of mid-sized hubs for innovation would not only be good economics — there are lots of positive effects and social gains that flow from knowledge creation — but also good politics.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Visibilising Women as Sources in African Media

    The International Journalists’ Network’s website ijnet.org has this piece about a “South Africa-based nonprofit media company called Quote This Woman+ (QW+) [that] has curated a database of women experts in Africa for journalists to reach out to.” 

    The problem that this non-profit and others like it are trying to solve is that: 

    “In Africa, only 22% of the people seen, heard or read about in the news are women, according to a 2021 Global Media Monitoring Project report. Women sources are especially less visible in issues like politics and the economy, which often dominate news coverage across the continent.

    The lack of women sources doesn’t just fuel inequality; it also creates room for biased reporting. According to the International Labor Organization, 46% of stories published by media enable gender stereotypes.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Reporting Accurately on New Research

    The Journalist’s Resource, a project of Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, put out this tip sheet on how news outlets can report on new research studies more accurately. It warns that sometimes press releases “mistakenly state researchers have proven something they haven’t.” The author, Denise-Marie Ordway, lays out four pointers to using the correct language to convey the strength of the evidence that the new research has put forward instead of claiming it has “proven” something, a rarity outside of mathematics. 

    Read the full article here.

  • Cities in Pre-colonial Africa

    Portuguese author Bruno Maçães visits Kilwa, “an island city-state on the East African coast” and writes:

    “One of the oldest misconceptions about Africa is that the continent south of the Sahara had no cities before the Europeans got there. To this day, Africa is seen as the land of the village, an intensely communal space, where everyone shares his life with everyone else. In fact, cities such as Kilwa and Sofala on the east coast existed, but the process of their destruction began with the European arrival and Portugal’s control over the Indian Ocean’s trade routes (after 1505, the Kilwa sultan fled and was replaced with a ruler acceptable to the Portuguese). Rhapta, which probably lay somewhere in the delta of the Rufiji, just north of Kilwa, has yet to be found. As for Timbuktu and Lalibela, enough is already known about their global importance.”

    Read the full article here. 

  • Nalanda: An Ancient Indian University

    The BBC recently published a succinct introduction to Nalanda, “[f]ounded in 427 CE,” and “considered the world’s first residential university, a sort of medieval Ivy League institution home to nine million books that attracted 10,000 students from across Eastern and Central Asia. They gathered here to learn medicine, logic, mathematics and – above all – Buddhist principles from some of the era’s most revered scholars.”

    Read the full profile here.

  • The Obsolescence Problem

    Planned obsolescence had almost started sounding like a conspiracy theory – a catch-all term for the nefarious schemes of the big bad industrialists out there, used by exasperated consumers when a product unexpectedly stopped being of use.

    But it may not all be in our head, as a piece by Izzie Ramirez for Vox suggests. Ramirez writes: “people are conditioned to buy the new thing and to keep replacing it. Companies, in turn, amp up production accordingly. It’s less so that objects are intended to break — functional planned obsolescence, if you will — but rather that consumer mindsets are oriented around finding the better object. But “better” doesn’t always mean long-lasting when companies are incentivized to produce faster and faster and faster.” 

    Further complicating the problem: 

    “Social media helps accelerate the trend cycle even further. Consumers are buying five times more clothing than they did back in the 1980s. In order to produce goods that fast, both the quality of the item and the quality of life for workers have to take a hit. This is happening alongside a decrease of prices for the consumer (not rooted in reality!) to encourage more trend-oriented shopping and haul buying.” 

    While Ramirez brings up a lot of issues related to the problem (such as companies like Apple opposing the right to repair), the her argument seems to be focussed on design thinking in contemporary culture:

    “Design has shifted more toward manufacturability and appearance than functionality, when it should be a balance of all three. Arguably, it’s nearly impossible for corporations to avoid participating in the trend cycle as long as consumers have an appetite for more — whether it’s a predilection for cooler clothing or whatever new incremental yet buzzy technology just came out. At the same time, the blame does not lie on consumers’ shoulders; corporations are responsible for creating and stoking the “new and more is better” culture we have today.”

    Read the full article here.