Lifeboat Foundation

It seems insurmountable today. Digital consumption is rampant. Harms from misinformation to breaches to online bullying to manipulative targeting is spawning an environment of political and societal polarization, increased mental anxiety and even suicides. Without inadequate laws to regulate these digital services, the very rules and policies that have continued to govern the physical world are not able to keep pace with the speed of technology, and properly reflect what is happening in our digital spaces.

Can we have a future where creators of technology can build towards responsibility despite the constant allure of monetization and profits? I had a chance to speak to David Ryan Polgar, Founder & Director of the non-profit, All Tech Is Human (ATIH) to dive into discussing this critical juncture where heightened consumer awareness has the potential to drive a different story.

Mark Zuckerberg said it was “ridiculous” for people to think that he changed Facebook’s name to Meta because of the recent wave of backlash.

The CEO told The Verge in an interview — which was published shortly after the name change was announced Thursday — that the current news cycle had no effect on the decision.

“Even though I think some people might want to make that connection, I think that’s sort of a ridiculous thing,” Zuckerberg told the outlet. “If anything, I think that this is not the environment that you would want to introduce a new brand in.”

The room sprays contain gemstones—and a deadly bacteria found in the tropics.

“Technological advances in robotics have already produced robots that are indistinguishable from human beings,” they write. “If humanoid robots with the same appearance are mass-produced and become commonplace, we may encounter circumstances in which people or human-like products have faces with the exact same appearance in the future.”

To test peoples’ reactions, the team asked people to look at photos of individuals with the same face (clones), with different faces, and of… See more.

The uncanny valley is the scientific explanation for why we all find clowns or corpses creepy. And just when we thought nothing could be more alarming than clowns, scientists have found an even uncannier way to freak us out.

Continue reading “New Robots May Be Creepier Than The Uncanny Valley” »

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Paper referenced in the video:
Fruit and Vegetable Intake and Mortality Results From 2 Prospective Cohort Studies of US Men and Women and a Meta-Analysis of 26 Cohort Studies.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33641343/

The future is actually a range of possibilities, and we can work boldly toward the version we want.

“We’ve been fueling this fire for a long time and we shouldn’t be surprised it’s now out of control,” one employee wrote on an internal message board, the documents show.

“Hang in there everyone,” Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology officer, wrote on a message board, calling for calm as he explained the company’s approach to the riot, according to the documents.

In response to Schroepfer’s message, Facebook employees said it was too little too late.

You might know that the size of the pupils in our eyes changes depending on how well lit our environment is, but there’s more to the story: Scientists have now discovered that the pupil also shifts in size depending on how many objects we’re observing.

The more objects in a scene, the bigger the pupil grows, as if to better accommodate everything that it has to look at. This “perceived numerosity” is a simple and automatic reflex, the new research shows.

In a new study, researchers observed the pupil sizes of 16 participants while they looked at pictures of dots. In some of the pictures, the dots were linked together in dumbbell shapes – creating the illusion that there were fewer objects – and pupil size then shrank.

Wed, Oct 27 at 4 PM PDT.

If you haven’t been to Nunavut, you may not know it’s home to a vast variety of flowering plants, lichens, mosses, and more found on the land. Lynn Gillespie, a Canadian Museum of Nature botanist, has built a career studying Arctic botany. Lynn will be on Facebook LIVE on October 27th discussing plants you can find in Nunavut, what it’s like to conduct field research in the Arctic, and answering your questions. This interview will be facilitated by Joni Karoo, SOI Arctic 2019 alum from Taloyoak, Nunavut!

*This interview will be held in English*.