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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,665

Model suggests well-designed subsidies can help farmers and give consumers better food choices

When it comes to pegging the blame for the obesity crisis, farm subsidies are a popular target. Subsidies, the argument goes, encourage farmers to grow less-healthy foods—corn, turned into corn syrup, is the common culprit here—and fewer unsubsidized fruits and vegetables.

Not everyone agrees. Experts caution that cheap corn isn’t the only cause of poor nutrition and that other factors, like technology, are responsible for the low cost of . Still, it’s reasonable to ask: How can subsidies be used to make healthier food options more available?

One answer: by making sure that subsidies take into account consumer welfare as well as farmers’ incomes, suggest UCLA Anderson’s Prashant Chintapalli, a Ph.D student, and Christopher S. Tang. In a working paper examining a type of subsidy called “minimum support ,” or MSPs, the authors suggest that backing a diverse mix of crops—including fruits and vegetables—would give consumers a wider selection and be most effective at raising farmer profits at a lower cost to the government.

Nick J Fox: The posthuman condition? A materialist odyssey from obesity to sexualities to ecology

Https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/

IASH and the School of Social and Political Science are pleased to invite to a guest lecture by Prof. N.J. Fox (Sheffield) on 16th May 2018 in the IASH Coffee room. Coffee available from 3pm for 3.30pm start.

The posthuman condition? A materialist odyssey from obesity to sexualities to ecology.

Nick J Fox

A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1 Million, Even at a Nonprofit

That raises significant issues for universities and governments. They also need A.I. expertise, both to teach the next generation of researchers and to put these technologies into practice in everything from the military to drug discovery. But they could never match the salaries being paid in the private sector.

Tax forms filed by OpenAI provide insight into the enormous salaries and bonuses paid to artificial intelligence specialists across the world.

Google AI can pick out voices in a crowd

Humans are usually good at isolating a single voice in a crowd, but computers? Not so much — just ask anyone trying to talk to a smart speaker at a house party. Google may have a surprisingly straightforward solution, however. Its researchers have developed a deep learning system that can pick out specific voices by looking at people’s faces when they’re speaking. The team trained its neural network model to recognize individual people speaking by themselves, and then created virtual “parties” (complete with background noise) to teach the AI how to isolate multiple voices into distinct audio tracks.

The results, as you can see below, are uncanny. Even when people are clearly trying to compete with each other (such as comedians Jon Dore and Rory Scovel in the Team Coco clip above), the AI can generate a clean audio track for one person just by focusing on their face. That’s true even if the person partially obscures their face with hand gestures or a microphone.

Google is currently “exploring opportunities” to use this feature in its products, but there are more than a few prime candidates. It’s potentially ideal for video chat services like Hangouts or Duo, where it could help you understand someone talking in a crowded room. It could also be helpful for speech enhancement in video recording. And there are big implications for accessibility: it could lead to camera-linked hearing aids that boost the sound of whoever’s in front of you, and more effective closed captioning. There are potential privacy issues (this could be used for public eavesdropping), but it wouldn’t be too difficult to limit the voice separation to people who’ve clearly given their consent.

Finding lost siblings of the Sun

UNSW scientists in collaboration with European scientists demonstrated that the “DNA”, or spectra, of more than 340,000 stars in the Milky Way could aid them to search the siblings of the Sun, now scattered across the sky.

Scientists actually are working on project GALAH, the survey observations for the ambitious galactic archaeology project- which launched in late 2013 as part of a quest to uncover the formulation and evolution of galaxies. Scientists gathered the data from HERMES spectrograph at the Australian Astronomical Observatory’s (AAO) 3.9-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope near Coonabarabran in NSW to collect spectra for the 340,000 stars.

The data shows that how the Universe went from having just hydrogen and helium soon after the Big Bang to being loaded with every one of the components show now on Earth that is fundamental forever.