ability

18Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SPORTS

Only Some Players Have The Ability To Go On These Basket-Making Streaks – The ‘Hot Hand’ Is A Real Basketball Phenomenon

To say a player is “hot” or has “hot hands” means the player is on a streak of making many consecutive shots. A question that has dogged researchers, coaches and fans for years is whether players on these streaks can defy random chance, or if hot hands are just an illusion and fit within statistical norms. We are two researchers who study information sciences and operations and decision technologies. In our recent study, we examined whether players can indeed get hot in actual live-game situations. Our analysis showed that some players do get consistently “hot” during games and make more shots than expected following two shots made consecutively. However, when we looked at all players together, we found that usually when a player makes more shots than normal after making consecutive shots...

The Colonial History Of The Marshall Islands Limits Their Ability To Save Themselves And Could Be Wiped Out By Climate Change

Along U.S. coastlines, from California to Florida, residents are getting increasingly accustomed to “king tides.” These extra-high tides cause flooding and wreak havoc on affected communities. As climate change raises sea levels, they are becoming more extreme. The Marshall Islands and other small island nations are urgently threatened by rising seas. Stefan Lins/Flickr, CC BY King tides are nothing new for the Marshall Islands, a nation made up of 29 low-lying coral atolls that stretch across more than a million square miles of Pacific Ocean northeast of Australia. By 2035, the U.S. Geological Survey projects that some of the Marshall Islands will be submerged. Others will no longer have drinking water because their aquifers will be contaminated with saltwater. As a result, Marshallese w...

A language generation program’s ability to write articles, produce code and compose poetry has wowed scientists

Seven years ago, my student and I at Penn State built a bot to write a Wikipedia article on Bengali Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s play “Chitra.” First it culled information about “Chitra” from the internet. Then it looked at existing Wikipedia entries to learn the structure for a standard Wikipedia article. Finally, it summarized the information it had retrieved from the internet to write and publish the first version of the entry. However, our bot didn’t “know” anything about “Chitra” or Tagore. It didn’t generate fundamentally new ideas or sentences. It simply cobbled together parts of existing sentences from existing articles to make new ones. Fast forward to 2020. OpenAI, a for-profit company under a nonprofit parent company, has built a language generation program dubbed GPT-...