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How Evolutionary Biology Explains Smartphone Addiction

That’s according to a new research paperthat argues for a new way of thinking about our phone addiction. The authors claim that hundreds of thousands of years of evolution made us social in order to survive–and social media simply is driving this deeply ingrained human behavior into overdrive. This isn’t actually all that bad, they say, if you follow two basic rules.

A history of machine translation from the Cold War to deep learning

Understanding 2D Dilated Convolution Operation with Examples in Numpy and Tensorflow with…

Paper repro: “Self-Normalizing Neural Networks”

SNNs are really cool: their goal is to create neural networks in which, if the input of any layer is normally distributed, the output will automatically also be normally distributed. This is amazing because normalizing the output of layers is known to be a very efficient way to improve the performance of neural networks, but the current ways to do it (eg BatchNorm) basically involve weird hacks, while in SNN the normalization is an intrinsic part of the mathematics of the neural net.

A Look Back at the 1960s PLATO Computing System

In the 1960s, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana—Champaign developed a computer system that they hoped would expand access to education. They envisioned instructors usingthe system to build lessons, and students stationing themselves at machines—whose touchscreen plasma displays had a distinct orange glow—to complete coursework.

Sleeping In Rooms With Even a Little Light Can Increase Risk of Depression, Study Finds

Why Doing Good Makes It Easier to Be Bad

In a recent paper, economists at the University of Chicago reported that working for a socially responsible company motivated employees to act immorally. In one experiment, people were hired to transcribe images of short German texts and paid 10 percent upfront, with the remaining payment being delivered if they completed the transcriptions, or if they declared the documents too illegible to transcribe. When they were told that, for every job completed or marked illegible, 5 percent of their wages would be donated to Unicef’s educational programs, the instances of cheating rose by 25 percent, compared to where no charitable donation was offered.

3 reasons to question the use of emotion-tracking AI in recruiting

The autonomous “selfie drone”

Skydio, founded by three MIT alumni, is commercializing an autonomous video-capturing camera drone, called R1 and dubbed the “selfie drone,” that tracks and films a subject, while freely navigating any environment.

Larry Page’s autonomous air taxi ‘Cora’ flies in New Zealand