making

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

AI, TECHNOLOGY, VIDEO REELS

Powerful, Easy-To-Use Text-To-Image AI Technology For Making Art – And Fakes

Type “Teddy bears working on new AI research on the moon in the 1980s” into any of the recently released text-to-image artificial intelligence image generators, and after just a few seconds the sophisticated software will produce an eerily pertinent image. Seemingly bound by only your imagination, this latest trend in synthetic media has delighted many, inspired others and struck fear in some. A synthetic image generated by mimicking real faces, left, and a synthetic face generated from the text prompt ‘a photo of a 50-year-old man with short black hair,’ right. Hany Farid using StyleGAN2 (left) and DALL-E (right), CC BY-ND Google, research firm OpenAI and AI vendor Stability AI have each developed a text-to-image image generator powerful enough that some observers are questioning whether...

A Legacy Of Racism In Home Ownership And Making Costly Repairs Endured By Black Women

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

Journalism

A Legacy Of Racism In Home Ownership And Making Costly Repairs Endured By Black Women

Yolanda, 61, owns a home in the predominantly Black 7th Ward neighborhood in New Orleans. To fix her leaking roof in 2020, she had to borrow money. “It’s one of them credit card loans,” she said. “Like interest of 30% and all that, you know. I was kind of backed up against the wall, so I just went on and made the loan, a high-interest loan.” As a sociologist who has spent the past 10 years studying housing conditions in the U.S., I led a research team that conducted interviews with homeowners who are struggling with basic maintenance such as rotting wood siding and floors, mold, crumbling brickwork, outdated plumbing and leaking ceilings. Our first paper from this project is currently under peer review. Like Yolanda, our interviewees – whom we gave pseudonyms to protect their privacy –...

The Biden Administration Is Finally Making Moves To Free WNBA Star Brittney Griner From Russian Detention – After Initial Silence

22May

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS, POLITICS, SPORTS

The Biden Administration Is Finally Making Moves To Free WNBA Star Brittney Griner From Russian Detention – After Initial Silence

A week before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Russian authorities arrested American basketball star Brittney Griner at the Moscow airport. She was charged with drug smuggling after Russian officials allegedly found vape cartridges containing oil derived from cannabis in her luggage. Since her arrest on Feb. 17, Griner has been locked up in a Russian prison. It’s a stark contrast to her life as a millionaire athlete playing in professional basketball leagues in both the United States and, for the last seven years, Russia, where she earns nearly four times as much as her nearly US$282,000 annual WNBA salary. Speculation on the reason for Griner’s arrest centers on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s alleged desire to use the American star as a geopolitical pawn at a time when U.S.-...

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

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...

Making The Internet Safer – We Have To Change The Business Models – Regulating Content Won’t Do The Job

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS, TECHNOLOGY

Making The Internet Safer – We Have To Change The Business Models – Regulating Content Won’t Do The Job

An upheaval of the law governing what can be published online is taking place in the shape of the online safety bill. The bill, which is currently making its way through parliament, has the hyperbolic ambition “to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online”, and proposes to do this through a complex system of regulation. It calls for platforms, search engines and social media to regularly assess the risks of harms stemming from their services and take measures to mitigate them. The regulator, Ofcom, will carry out its own risk assessments, establish risk profiles for different platforms (such as YouTube, Instagram or Tinder), and publish guidance in the form of “codes of practice”. The act will apply even where the platform provider is abroad. This means that all platforms ta...

Few Groups Supported By Foundations Are Given Decision-Making Power On Funding Priorities

8Nov

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

MONEY

Few Groups Supported By Foundations Are Given Decision-Making Power On Funding Priorities

Emily Finchum-Mason, University of Washington The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. The big idea Eighty-three percent of large U.S. foundations seek input from some of the nonprofits they fund – along with other people, organizations or communities directly affected by their funding. But foundations, which aim to serve the public interest through the money they give away, rarely give these stakeholders decision-making authority – by either letting them help set priorities or giving them a say about where grant money flows. That is what philanthropy scholars Kelly Husted, David Suarez and I found in a study that assessed the practices of the 500 largest U.S. foundations. Our findings suggest that foundations, which face mounting pressure to direct more grants...

For Making Social Media Safer For Teens Facebook’s Own Internal Documents Offer A Blueprint

11Oct

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIAL MEDIA

For Making Social Media Safer For Teens Facebook’s Own Internal Documents Offer A Blueprint

Jean Twenge, San Diego State University Right at the time social media became popular, teen mental health began to falter. Between 2010 and 2019, rates of depression and loneliness doubled in the U.S. and globally, suicide rates soared for teens in the U.S. and emergency room admissions for self-harm tripled among U.S. 10- to 14-year-old girls. Social scientists like myself have been warning for years that the ubiquity of social media might be at the root of the growing mental health crisis for teens. Yet when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked during a congressional hearing in March to acknowledge the connection between social media and these troubling mental health trends, he replied, “I don’t think that the research is conclusive on that.” Just six months later, The Wall Street J...

20 Years In The Making – Space Tourism Is Finally Ready For Launch

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

TECHNOLOGY

20 Years In The Making – Space Tourism Is Finally Ready For Launch

For most people, getting to the stars is nothing more than a dream. On April 28, 2001, Dennis Tito achieved that lifelong goal – but he wasn’t a typical astronaut. Tito, a wealthy businessman, paid US$20 million for a seat on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to be the first tourist to visit the International Space Station. Only seven people have followed suit in the 20 years since, but that number is poised to double in the next 12 months alone. NASA has long been hesitant to play host to space tourists, so Russia – looking for sources of money post-Cold War in the 1990s and 2000s – has been the only option available for those looking for this kind of extreme adventure. However, it seems the rise of private space companies is going to make it easier for regular people to experience space. From...

6Feb

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

COVID-19

Making Black Lives Matter During COVID

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unveil the deficiencies in all of our systems, racial disparities—particularly the disproportionate number of Black people dying—top the list. The staggering statistics keep pouring in, dispelling an earlier rumor among some in Black communities that Black people are somehow immune to contracting the disease. But more importantly, the high numbers highlight the health care inequities in the United States. “Inequities have existed for generations, and it’s something we cannot ignore,” Michigan Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist says. “The disparity and mortality rate with COVID-19 are more urgent because people [can] die within a month of contracting the virus.” In Michigan, Gilchrist’s home state, the African American population is 14%. Yet, as of mid-April, ...

A Creative Route To Making Robots And Other Mechanical Devices – Curved Origami

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

TECHNOLOGY, VIDEO REELS

A Creative Route To Making Robots And Other Mechanical Devices – Curved Origami

Building robotic grippers that can firmly grasp heavy objects and also gently grasp delicate ones usually requires complicated sets of gears, hinges and motors. But it turns out that it’s also possible to make grippers out of simple sheets of flexible material with the right creases in them. Our lab at Arizona State University has designed curved fold patterns that can change stiffness and flexibility. Flexible materials shaped with these patterns can be used to make simple, inexpensive robotic grippers, swimming robots and other mechanical devices. People naturally vary the amount of stiffness needed to handle fragile and sturdy objects appropriately. Robots interact with the environment in the same way. Curved folding is a simple way to give robots the ability to vary the amount of sti...