Lifeboat Foundation

The world of spectroscopy has continued to expand throughout history based on the contributions of many brilliant scientists. This month we highlight prominent Black scientists whose innovations have helped shape spectroscopy as we know it today and have created space for others like them to succeed.

Celebrated psychologist Steven Pinker explains how language provides a window to the inner workings of the human mind.

If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

Mathematical pursuits and religious pursuits are alike in many ways and evoke similar feelings and responses in their devotees. However, this observation is not a universal claim about the faith convictions of mathematical thinkers. Throughout mathematical history, we find plenty of adherents of various faith traditions — Ramanujan, Agnesi, Euler, al-Khwārizmī, or even the Pythagoreans come to mind. However, many mathematicians are atheist or agnostic. A 1998 survey of National Academy members shows that mathematicians in that organization are less religious than the general public (though they are slightly more religious than other scientists). Even so, those who pursue mathematical experiences and those who pursue religious experiences share a lot in common.

Such commonality is in part due to the explanatory power of both mathematics and religion. Mathematics offers insights about physical phenomena. Religion offers insights about human nature. So it is natural to seek them out for wisdom in their respective domains. Their truths are not always directly apparent, sometimes taking years of study. And their interpretations or applications sometimes need to be challenged.

Leading theories suggest that the first energy used by life was either from the sun or from geothermal heat and chemistry at the bottom of the ocean.

We take them for granted until we can’t. That’s why people react so strongly to the fear of losing their memories — either by forgetting small things in the sort term (which we all do; don’t worry), or else the fear of either us or a loved one suffering from memory loss in our older age.

And, that’s why I’d like to talk today about habits and brain health, and cinnamon.

Yes, cinnamon, the tasty and sweet-smelling spice originating in Asia, and found liberally in the U.S., combined with raisins on bagels, toast, pastries, even big boxes of processed cereal with cartoon characters on the front.

Meta, formerly known as Facebook, today showed off a prototype of an AI system that enables people to generate or import things into a virtual world just by using voice commands. The company sees the tool, which is called “Builder Bot,” as an “exploratory concept” that shows AI’s potential for creating new worlds in the metaverse. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off the prototype at the Meta AI: Inside the Lab event on Wednesday in a pre-recorded demo video.

In the video, Zuckerberg explained the process of building parts of a virtual world by describing them. He begins with the prompt, “let’s go to a park.” The bot then creates a 3D landscape of a park with green grass and trees. Zuckerberg then says “actually, let’s go to the beach,” after which the bot replaces the current landscape with a new one of sand and water. He then says he wants to add clouds and notes that everything is AI-generated. Zuckerberg then changes up the landscape by saying he’d rather have altocumulus clouds, which is meant to demonstrate how specific the voice commands can be.

Continue reading “Mark Zuckerberg demos a tool for building virtual worlds using voice commands” »

The current media environment is filled with visual effects and video editing. As a result, as video-centric platforms have gained popularity, demand for more user-friendly and effective video editing tools has skyrocketed. However, because video data is temporal, editing in the format is still difficult and time-consuming. Modern machine learning models have shown considerable promise in enhancing editing, although techniques frequently compromise spatial detail and temporal consistency. The emergence of potent diffusion models trained on huge datasets recently caused a sharp increase in the quality and popularity of generative techniques for picture synthesis. Simple users may produce detailed pictures using text-conditioned models like DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion with only a text prompt as input. Latent diffusion models effectively synthesize pictures in a perceptually constrained environment. They research generative models suitable for interactive applications in video editing due to the development of diffusion models in picture synthesis. Current techniques either propagate adjustments using methodologies that calculate direct correspondences or, by finetuning on each unique video, re-pose existing picture models.

They try to avoid costly per-movie training and correspondence calculations for quick inference for every video. They suggest a content-aware video diffusion model with a configurable structure trained on a sizable dataset of paired text-image data and uncaptioned movies. They use monocular depth estimations to represent structure and pre-trained neural networks to anticipate embeddings to represent content. Their method gives several potent controls on the creative process. They first train their model, much like image synthesis models, so the inferred films’ content, such as their look or style, correspond to user-provided pictures or text cues (Fig. 1).

Figure 1: Video Synthesis With Guidance We introduce a method based on latent video diffusion models that synthesises videos (top and bottom) directed by text-or image-described content while preserving the original video’s structure (middle).

In Celebration of the Recent 20-Year Anniversary of Snapple’s Real Facts®, Snapple is Putting its Fact Writing into Fans’ Hands.

FRISCO, Texas, Feb. 8, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Snapple®, the iconic beverage brand that delivers fun and flavorful teas and juice drinks, is proud to announce the launch of the Snapple fAIct Generator, an AI-powered tool that makes it easy to create facts about any topic. Celebrating 20-years of Snapple Real Facts®, facts found under every Snapple bottle cap, the Snapple fAIct Generator puts fact-creation in the hands of the brand’s fans. To help share the news of this new tool, Snapple used ChatGPT to write this press release, with some light edits to make it more Snapple-y.