All posts tagged: Thinking

Beyond Anxiety Avoidance and Wishful Thinking

Beyond Anxiety Avoidance and Wishful Thinking

Published by Jenni Sidey

Long ago, I worked with a youngster dreading a class camping trip. When I asked if she had a plan, she said confidently, “Yes, I do.” Surprised, I asked her to share it. “I hope it rains and the trip is cancelled.” We might think—Ah, kids! But substitute in our own fears: that meeting you’re nervous about, the question you don’t want your client to ask, the flight you really don’t want to take, the medical procedure you have put off… and put off again—we understand exactly that teen’s game plan. It’s ours too. We are fingers-crossed hoping against hope to be airlifted out of our discomfort. The emotional pin we drop essentially says: “Don’t!” and we think: “I can’t!” And that “I can’t” describes our relationship with anxiety more broadly: We don’t want to be in one. No, thank you. We wish we could block it or ghost it, but there it is. Understandably, we don’t want to feel trapped in a discomfort corner. So we become proactive—or pre-emptive—and avoid things where anxiety might …

Thinking about plug-in solar? It may be coming to your state soon

Thinking about plug-in solar? It may be coming to your state soon

Published by skeptic

Maria Diaz/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET’s key takeaways Plug-in solar systems are an alternative to large, professionally installed rooftop solar. The US regulatory system for utilities wasn’t built for plug-and-play solar setups, so it’s taking time for state laws to catch up. Thus far, only Utah has legalized plug-in solar in the US, allowing small systems of up to 1,200w to plug directly into a traditional outlet. Plug-in solar has risen in popularity among sustainability fans in recent years, but the practice isn’t yet legal in all of the United States. If you’ve been thinking about joining the plug-in solar bandwagon, here’s what you should know. What is plug-in solar? Plug-in solar systems, also known as balcony solar, are easy, plug-and-play solar panels that include an inverter and small battery. The system connects to a home’s standard 120-volt outlet and automatically flows the electricity from the battery to the nearest running appliance. These systems are small and portable, and aren’t meant to replace grid electricity or dependency on utility companies. …

It Seems a Lot Like Trump Accidentally Invested Million in a Conveyor Belt Sushi Restaurant Thinking It Was an AI Hardware Company

It Seems a Lot Like Trump Accidentally Invested $1 Million in a Conveyor Belt Sushi Restaurant Thinking It Was an AI Hardware Company

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Donald Trump is nothing if not a keen investor. As recent tax filings have shown, the US president has made a number of canny trades over the past few months for tech stocks like Nvidia, Apple, and Dell, flaunting any semblance of ethical financial behavior. New reporting from the Japanese newspaper the Yomiuri Shimbun revealed that Trump made another surprising investment alongside his tech stocks: a purchase of $1 to $5 million shares in a conveyor belt sushi restaurant chain called Kura Sushi. Specifically, Yomiuri reports that Trump purchased shares in the company’s American-arm, Kura Sushi USA, which operates 91 conveyor belt sushi joints throughout the continental US. The bizarre investment quickly got the attention of Japanese netizens, who took to Yahoo Finance message boards to speculate as to what the stock trade could mean. One emerging theory: the aging president, or his ambling son Donald Trump Jr, who technically runs the president’s trust, mistook the fast-growing sushi …

Positive thinking could help boost your immune system

Positive thinking could help boost your immune system

Published by skeptic

activate: (in biology) To turn on, as with a gene or chemical reaction. antibodies: Any of a large number of proteins that the body produces from B cells and releases into the blood supply as part of its immune response. The production of antibodies is triggered when the body encounters an antigen, some foreign material. Antibodies then lock onto antigens as a first step in disabling the germs or other foreign substances that were the source of those antigens. bacterial: Having to do with bacteria, single-celled organisms. These dwell nearly everywhere on Earth, from the bottom of the sea to inside animals. behavior: The way something (often a person or other organism) conducts itself or acts towards others. brain scan: A technique to view structures inside the brain, typically with X-rays or a magnetic resonance imaging (or MRI) machine. With MRI technology — especially the type known as functional MRI (or fMRI) — the activity of different brain regions can be viewed during an event, such as viewing pictures, computing sums or listening to music. cell: (in biology) …

Crabby 82-Year-Old Politician Attacks 10-Year-Old Child for Thinking Electric Cars Are Cool

Crabby 82-Year-Old Politician Attacks 10-Year-Old Child for Thinking Electric Cars Are Cool

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech North Carolinian congresswoman Virginia Foxx has never shied away from regressive takes. Over her many decades in politics, the 82-year-old representative has opposed everything from the release of the Epstein files and abortion for sexual assault survivors to legalized gay marriage and even aid for victims of Hurricane Katrina. But as flagged by the Daily Beast, the octogenarian politician’s latest broadside may take the cake. When a 10-year-old child wrote her a letter expressing support for electric cars, Foxx didn’t agree to disagree — instead, she fulminated at the poor kid in a response that sounds more like a late night Donald Trump post on social media than a polite rejoinder to an engaged member of the public. “Your request that ‘the federal government should give a $5,000 tax rebate for all new electric car purchases’ means that the federal government must take that money out of the pockets of hardworking people who may not have the means …

Thinking Machines wants to build an AI that actually listens while it talks

Thinking Machines wants to build an AI that actually listens while it talks

Published by skeptic

Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded last year by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, on Monday announced something called interaction models, which, at its essence, sounds like AI that can interrupt you. Right now, every AI model you’ve ever used works the same way. You talk, it listens. It responds, you listen. Thinking Machines is trying to change that by building a model that processes your input and generates a response at the same time, so it’s more like a phone call than a text chain. The technical term for this is “full duplex,” and the company claims its model, TML-Interaction-Small, responds in 0.40 seconds, which is roughly the speed of natural human conversation and significantly faster than comparable models from OpenAI and Google. Still, this is a research preview, not a product. The company isn’t releasing it to the public yet. A “limited research preview” is coming in the next few months, it says, with a wider release set for later this year. So what to make of it? We’re not sure. The …

Thinking Machines shows off preview of near-realtime AI voice and video conversation with new ‘interaction models’

Thinking Machines shows off preview of near-realtime AI voice and video conversation with new ‘interaction models’

Published by skeptic

Is AI leaving the era of “turn-based” chat? Right now, all of us who use AI models regularly for work or in our personal lives know that the basic interaction mode across text, imagery, audio, and video remains the same: the human user provides an input, waits anywhere between milliseconds to minutes (or in some cases, for particularly tough queries, hours and days), and the AI model provides an output. But if AI is to really take on the load of jobs requiring natural interaction, it will need to do more than provide this kind of “turn-based” interactivity — it will ultimately need to respond more fluidly and naturally to human inputs, even responding while also processing the next human input, be it text or another format. That at least seems to be the contention of Thinking Machines, the well-funded AI startup founded last year by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati and former OpenAI researcher and co-founder John Schulman, among others. Today, the firm announced a research preview of what it deems to …

11 Very Odd Ways AI Is Making Everyone Think & Sound Pretty Much Exactly The Same

11 Very Odd Ways AI Is Making Everyone Think & Sound Pretty Much Exactly The Same

Published by Jenni Sidey

The rise of AI has changed society drastically in the span of just a few years. AI programs have been available to the public since 2022, and in those short four years, they have had a dramatic impact on how we do just about everything, from homework assignments to daily work tasks. At first, it may not feel like AI has impacted the way you operate. Sure, you may ask ChatGPT or Grok a question every now and then, but for the most part, you feel the exact same way you always have. Still, while you may feel the same, there’s no denying that there are some very odd ways AI is making everyone think and sound pretty much exactly the same. Here are 11 very odd ways AI is making everyone think and sound pretty much exactly the same 1. We’re less and less comfortable with uncertainty Kmpzzz | Shutterstock Let’s face it, nobody likes to be uncertain. Fearing the idea of looking dumb, most people will do whatever it takes to protect their …

New research challenges the idea that logical thinking diminishes religious belief

New research challenges the idea that logical thinking diminishes religious belief

Published by José Betancourt

Activating analytical thinking does not appear to reduce a person’s religious beliefs. This finding provides evidence against the popular idea that leaning on logic directly diminishes faith. The findings were recently published in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. Luz Acera Martini, a doctoral fellow and doctoral candidate in psychology at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council, and Esteban Freidin, a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council with a doctorate in philosophy, conducted the research. Both scientists are affiliated with the Universidad Nacional del Sur in Argentina. They sought to examine exactly how cognitive styles influence faith. Previous studies in the cognitive science of religion suggested that engaging in analytical thinking could suppress the basic mental intuitions that make religious beliefs appealing. Many psychologists think that human reasoning relies on two main systems. One system is fast and intuitive, while the other is slow and analytical. Some past experiments indicated that exposing people to tasks that prompt slow, logical thought could lower their reported religious beliefs. This concept assumes that …

‘The happiest time of life is as you get older’: can positive thinking help you age better? | Ageing

‘The happiest time of life is as you get older’: can positive thinking help you age better? | Ageing

Published by Sam Flores

By most standards, Prof Velandai Srikanth is at the peak of his career. He is the director of the National Centre for Healthy Ageing; his decades of highly regarded research have led to work being published in leading scientific journals; and he has been awarded funding from some of the world’s biggest scientific funding bodies. He has also turned 60 and says that, as soon as he did, “somebody said ‘so when are you going to retire?’” The comment shocked him – he realised this was the stigma of ageing, and it was coming for him. As a geriatrician, Srikanth sees the full spectrum of attitudes towards ageing; from those who gloomily view it as an inevitable trajectory of decline and decrepitude, to those who see the joys and opportunities and approach the so-called “third age” with excitement. According to a US study, those attitudes can meaningfully change someone’s ageing trajectory. A psychologist, Prof Becca Levy, and her colleague Dr Martin Slade, from the Yale School of Public Health, looked at what impact attitudes towards …