Tag: No Paywall

  • Cryptocurrency in Africa

    This article in Rest of World looks at the decline of crypto in Africa in the aftermath of the FTX collapse. The author quotes reports that talked of the “tens of millions of Africans who bought into the cryptocurrency frenzy over the last few years” and how “[b]lockchain startups and businesses on the continent raised $474 million in 2022, a 429% increase from the previous year.” 

    Now, however, “crypto-related startups across the African continent have been struggling to survive.” 

    Regulatory pushbacks have been seen around the world, including by African governments. But “[s]ome industry stakeholders believe crypto is too important to just be a bubble in Africa, and that the current troubles aren’t unique to this industry. Some industry insiders claim that “several African crypto startups still seem to be doing well, and that stablecoins are a great alternative to Africa’s cross-border remittance restrictions.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Irresponsible Nuclear Posturing by Politicians in India and Pakistan

    This piece in South Asian Voices, “an online policy platform for strategic analysis on South Asia” published by the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C., argues that “irresponsible statements” about the use of nuclear weapons by politicians in Pakistan and India over the last few years “contribute to cultivating nuclear war psychology” instead of promoting a responsible “stigmatize the bomb” strategy. 

    Politicians from Pakistan and India making irresponsible remarks about nuclear weapons is said to “reinforce South Asian atomic culture”: 

    “This atomic culture has facilitated the acquisition of nuclear technology with chauvinistic pride and a symbol of supreme power for political independence. It has limited space for negotiating potential threats of nuclear exchanges and shared responsibilities of hostile SNW [strategic nuclear weapon]. For instance, New Delhi and Islamabad have not been able to build robust institutional arrangements for Nuclear Confidence Building Measures (NCBMs).” 

    Read the full article here.

  • A Resource for Social Theory from a Global Perspective

    globalsocialtheory.org is “an open, collaborative resource for all those interested in global social theory” (as described in their Twitter bio). 

    Their website describes them as: 

    “This site is intended as a free resource for students, teachers, academics, and others interested in social theory and wishing to understand it in global perspective. It emerges from a long-standing concern with the parochiality of standard perspectives on social theory and seeks to provide an introduction to a variety of theorists and theories from around the world.” 

    Furthermore: “All entries published by Global Social Theory are covered by a Creative Commons licence, allowing share alike for non-commercial purposes, with attribution to author and link to the Global Social Theory web-page for the entry.” 

    Visit their website here. Read a sample entry on Critical Race Theory 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.

  • 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 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • A Return to Blogging

    Writing for The Verge, Monique Judge makes the following case: “The decline of Twitter with the current erosion of legacy media has left me thinking we need to bring personal blogging back with a vengeance.”

    The biggest reason for this, according to her, “is a simple one: we should all be in control of our own platforms.”

    Perhaps most important of all her arguments is the following: 

    “We are now in an age where people come on the internet to be the worst possible versions of themselves, and it’s an ugly sight to behold. Take the power back by building blogs and putting comment moderation in place (it’s relatively easy on both WordPress and Blogger).

    Trolls only thrive in an environment where they are allowed to run around unchecked, and that is what most of social media is. There are plenty of tools that allow you to keep those people out of your comments while still allowing those who appreciate your words, thoughts, and content to fellowship with each other in a community of your own design.

    It’s what the social web was originally about, and we desperately need to get back to that.”

     Read the full article here.