| python | |
| democracy | |
| datascience |
Peak Oil Meta Projection
In my daily research for my novel, I speculated that media coverage of an economic crisis that leaves no immediate trail of carnage would not gather the media attention it deserves. Rather, because the crisis I'm thinking about affects life as we know it and the foundation of our whole economy, it would instead leave a trail of the marked absence of media coverage so as to not cause a "scare."
https://chewychunks.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/peak-oil-meta-projection/
Are AI experts any better than 4th graders at detecting AI-generated faces?
For their science fair project, my son Zander and his friend Colin surveyed their 4th grade classes, and compared them against 150 adults to see whether kids or adults are better at picking the AI-generated face in each pair. For each pair below, one is real, the other AI-generated. The corresponding pie chart shows the percent who chose left (blue)
I know all of us are processing how the US election could turn out as it did. My best explanation is that the estimated 2 billion pieces of disinformation shown to twitter users had a bigger effect than any GOTV effort.
But I can't find the ref to the study that tracked this. We are several years into the Disinformation Age, and everyone is slowly catching up to this reality.
The high cost to society of not belonging
A seminal bit of research was released in 2023 on the State of Belonging in America that showed just how much civic and philanthropic prosocial behavior stops when people feel like they don't belong in their community. They measured a person's sense of belonging in their own family, among friends, at the workplace, as a nation, and in their local community - and split people into "strong sense of belonging" and "strongest…
https://chewychunks.wordpress.com/2024/05/21/the-high-cost-to-society-of-not-belonging/
#CentralPark #Denver's top five* 15-minute temperature drops in the last decade or so:
2/18/2018: -13.0° (53.7° to 40.7°)
12/3/2013: -8.5° (57.7° to 49.2°)
12/29/2017: -7.5° (53.9° to 46.4°)
9/7/2020: -6.8° (88.6° to 81.8°)
10/9/2019: -5.1° (69.5 to 64.4°)
*I think. I might have missed one or two. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Those were all the precipitous beginnings of ~50-70° temperature drops over the course of 24-48 hours.
Nice to see the inner workings of a large scale ruby application:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon
(i.e. this social platform)
nice to see @DennisWhittle
here.
(but we'll probably all be on a different site in 6 months)
Always looking for good ancient folklore to read, if you find any, send it along!
Mile High Brendan
Sarah Tollok