Lifeboat Foundation

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could produce happiness by neuro modulation.

Shared with Dropbox.

Shared with Dropbox.

Sarcasm, a complex linguistic phenomenon often found in online communication, often serves as a means to express deep-seated opinions or emotions in a particular manner that can be in some sense witty, passive-aggressive, or more often than not demeaning or ridiculing to the person being addressed. Recognizing sarcasm in the written word is crucial for understanding the true intent behind a given statement, particularly when we are considering social media or online customer reviews.

While spotting that someone is being sarcastic in the offline world is usually fairly easy given facial expression, body language and other indicators, it is harder to decipher sarcasm in online text. New work published in the International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing hopes to meet this challenge. Geeta Abakash Sahu and Manoj Hudnurkar of the Symbiosis International University in Pune, India, have developed an advanced sarcasm detection model aimed at accurately identifying sarcastic remarks in digital conversations, a task crucial for understanding the true intent behind online statements.

The team’s model comprises four main phases. It begins with text pre-processing, which involves filtering out common, or “noise,” words such as “the,” “it,” and “and.” It then breaks down the text into smaller units. To address the challenge of dealing with a large number of features, the team used optimal feature selection techniques to ensure the model’s efficiency by prioritizing only the most relevant features. Features indicative of sarcasm, such as information gain, chi-square, mutual information, and symmetrical uncertainty, are then extracted from this pre-processed data by the algorithm.

Issues such as abrupt changes in speed limits and incomplete lane markings are among the most influential factors that can predict road crashes, finds new research by University of Massachusetts Amherst engineers. The study then used machine learning to predict which roads may be the most dangerous based on these features.

Published in the journal Transportation Research Record, the study was a collaboration between UMass Amherst civil and environmental engineers Jimi Oke, assistant professor; Eleni Christofa, associate professor; and Simos Gerasimidis, associate professor; and civil engineers from Egnatia Odos, a publicly owned engineering firm in Greece.

The most influential features included road design issues (such as changes in speed limits that are too abrupt or guardrail issues), pavement damage (cracks that stretch across the road and webbed cracking referred to as “alligator” cracking), and incomplete signage and road markings.

The Internet is abuzz with talk about Sora, a new AI model that brings text-to-video generation to a whole new level.

Analysis of the terms used for emotions across a sample of 2,474 spoken languages reveals low similarity across cultures.

Scentists have uncovered a fascinating link between ancient viruses and the development of myelination, the biological process crucial for the advanced functioning of the nervous system in vertebrates, including humans.

Scientists discovered a gene, ‘RetroMyelin,’ from ancient viruses, essential for myelination in vertebrates, suggesting viral sequences in early vertebrate genomes were pivotal for developing complex brains. This breakthrough in Cell unravels how myelination evolved, highlighting its significance in vertebrate diversity.

“We’ve used the mutations that give cancer cells their staying power to engineer what we call a ‘Judo T-cell therapy’ that can survive and thrive in the harsh conditions that tumors create,” said co-author Kole Roybal.

CAR-T cells: CAR-T cell therapy starts with doctors extracting T cells — a type of white blood cell — from a cancer patient’s blood. They then engineer the T cells to display proteins called “chimeric antigen receptors” (CARs) that bind to cancer cells.

Scientists at the University of Illinois Chicago and Harvard University have developed an antibiotic that could give medicine a new weapon to fight drug-resistant bacteria and the diseases they cause.

The antibiotic, cresomycin, described in Science, effectively suppresses pathogenic bacteria that have become resistant to many commonly prescribed antimicrobial drugs.

The promising novel antibiotic is the latest finding for a longtime research partnership between the group of Yury Polikanov, associate professor of biological sciences at UIC, and colleagues at Harvard. The UIC scientists provide critical insights into cellular mechanisms and structure that help the researchers at Harvard design and synthesize new drugs.