Welcome to the new post-genomic biology: a transformative era in need of fresh metaphors to understand how life works

Diane Coyle explains why, instead of simplifying daily life, technological innovation is making it more burdensome.

Online surveys have some key flaws.

Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington told me that they believe generative AI can help millions of suffering people. I’m not so sure.

Have you noticed artificial intelligence is looking a lot more sparkly lately? But first…

Amazon Employees for Climate Justice is calling out the tech giant for what it says are misleading claims about its use of renewable energy.

Carbon Brief provides an updated analysis of when the world will likely exceed the Paris 1.5C limit

In India's scorching summer heat, the ancient practice of chilling water in terracotta pots is inspiring new trends – from cooling towers to screens for buildings.

A new generation of forest defenders are fighting for their home in the face of extractive oil drilling and gold mining.

AI development has displayed signs of unchecked racism and environmental harm. Incorporating traditional knowledge might make it more just.

Nearly every iceberg you see in a picture or diagram is probably floating the wrong way. This was what I learned (from Megan Thompson-Munson) after sketching Biz Stone's brilliant saying about the myth of overnight success. With some approximation, the density of ice is around 900 kg/m3, and seawater is around 1,000 kg/m3. Therefore, the fraction of an iceberg that's submerged is around ~900/1000 or 0.9. So, about 90% of an iceberg is below the surface and 10% above, which is partly why they can be so dangerous. While most iceberg pictures get this part more or less correct, most of these icebergs will be floating vertically. In reality, a tall, thin iceberg will likely topple, so most icebergs end up floating on their side, not their tips, even though we rarely draw them this way. I remember learning about a fascinating experiment with children of different ages estimating which glass holds more water: a tall, slender one filled high or a wider glass filled to a lower level. Younger children almost always chose the glass with the higher water level as the most water, even when it was significantly less than the shorter and wider glass. I wonder if it's part of why we draw icebergs vertically, at least when we're using them as a metaphor. It's easier to grasp quantities vertically, and we commonly underestimate volume spread over a wider area. We may still want to draw our icebergs tall and deep to make our point, but now, at least, we can do so with the knowledge that they're not like the real ones. If you want to see it yourself, Joshua Tauberer made a brilliant draw-an-iceberg-and-see-how-it-will-float game. I recommend you give it a go so it sinks in forever (sorry). Also see: Overnight success Why ice doesn't sink Ice-cream, gelato, sorbet Know your poles: penguins or polar bears, frozen ice or land

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere developed an easy-to-use tool that enables someone to perform complicated statistical analyses on tabular data using just a few keystrokes. Their method combines probabilistic AI models with the programming language SQL to provide faster and more accurate results than other methods.

This post explores one way developers can go beyond page load and start estimating web page carbon emissions that include user interactions on the page.

I am a front-end developer who is FED up about front-end development. If you write front-end, this isn't about you personally. It's about how your choices make me angry. Also this is about how my choices have made me angry. Also this is mostly just about choices, the technologies are incidental. Note: The views expressedRead More

Most backcountry lightning education—including what’s taught by major outdoor organizations—is antiquated. Here’s your overdue expert update.

Language is a defining feature of humanity, and for centuries, philosophers and scientists have contemplated its true purpose. We use language to share information and exchange ideas—but is it more than that? Do we use language not just to communicate, but to think? In the June 19, 2024, issue of the journal Nature, McGovern Institute […]

“If you look at the trajectory of improvement, systems like GPT-3 were maybe toddler-level intelligence… and then systems like GPT-4 are more like ...

As AI shapes more and more of our experience online, we think it’s not enough to comment from the sidelines—we need to also get actively engaged in actually solving the problems vexing consumers

What's going on in the product job market this year - AI, lots of layoffs, and an oversupply of candidates

Sober AI is the quiet default, despite all the hype you hear about human-replacements and AGI. Data scientists and engineers are quietly transforming business intelligence through practical applications of AI, as highlighted at the recent Databricks Data+AI Summit.

This is the future fossil fuel companies and their conservative brethren want.

Apple has showed a bunch of cool ideas for generative AI, but much more, it is pointing to most of the big questions and proposing a different answer - that LLMs are commodity infrastructure, not platforms or products.

Trying to make AI do my job revealed a vast infrastructure of cheap tricks and middlemen that have been trying to game Google Search for more than a decade.

Grief-laden vitriol directed at AI fails to help us understand paths to better futures that are neither utopian nor dystopian, but open to radically weird possibilities.

A case study where Journey Mapping helped to build less

Two days after his company's downfall, Austen Allred wrote: I wish people could see how ugly it is to be envious, and how obvious it is to those around you when that's what's happening. There's not much uglier than trying to tear someone down because they achieved what you wish

Whether they’re hiking in heels or organizing on the trails, Pattie Gonia is on a mission to prove community makes a queen out of everyone.

As the treadmill of life speeds up, sublime outdoor spaces help us tap into timescales that are longer, slower, planetary

Gamification was always just behaviorism dressed up in pixels and point systems. Why did we fall for it?

(Conversation recorded on March 25th, 2024) Show Summary: In this episode, Nate is joined by educator and Latinx researcher Vanessa Andreotti to discuss what she calls “hospicing modernity” in order to move beyond the world we’ve come to know and the failed promises that “modernity” has made to our current culture. Whether you refer to it as the metacrisis, the polycrisis, or - in Nate’s terms - the human predicament, Vanessa brings a unique framing rooted in indigenous knowledge and relationality to aid in understanding, grieving, and building emotional resilience within this space. What does it mean to live and work within systems that are designed to fail, embedded in an aimless culture? How do we as individuals steady ourselves and create inner strength before engaging with such harrowing work? Importantly, what could education look like if founded in the principles of intergenerational knowledge transmission and emotional regulation, that are centered on our collective entanglement with the Earth? About Vanessa Andreotti: Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti is the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. She is a former Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change and a former David Lam Chair in Critical Multicultural Education. Vanessa has more than 100 published articles in areas related to global and climate education. She has also worked extensively across sectors internationally in projects related to global justice, global citizenship, Indigenous knowledge systems and the climate and nature emergency. Vanessa is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism, one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective and one of the designers of the course Facing Human Wrongs: Climate Complexity and Relational Accountability, available at UVic through Continuing Studies. For show notes, including referenced articles and additional resources: https://thegreatsimplification.squarespace.com/episode/125-vanessa-andreotti 00:00 - Intro 1:52 - The House of Modernity 16:34 - Hospicing the House of Modernity 22:56 - Theory of Change 31:49 - Affective Responses 43:55 - Healing Trauma 54:42 - Relational Intelligence 59:11 - Metabolical Literacy 1:04:59 - Dopamine Dependence 1:07:25 - Depth Education 1:09:27 - Reception with Young People 1:14:38 - How Do You Keep Going? 1:20:22 - Personal Advice 1:28:34 - What Would You Do with a Magic Wand?