Lifeboat Foundation

David Chalmers is a philosopher at New York University and the Australian National University. He is Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at NYU, and also Professor of Philosophy at ANU.

Chalmers works in the philosophy of mind and in related areas of philosophy and cognitive science. He is especially interested in consciousness, but am also interested in all sorts of other issues in the philosophy of mind and language, metaphysics and epistemology, and the foundations of cognitive science.

From an early age, he excelled at mathematics, eventually completing his undergraduate education at the University of Adelaide with a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science. He then briefly studied at Lincoln College at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar before receiving his PhD at Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program directed by Andy Clark at Washington University in St. Louis from 1993 to 1995, and his first professorship was at UC Santa Cruz, from August 1995 to December 1998.

The Impact of chatGPT and other large language models on physics research and education (2023)
Event organizers: Kevin Burdge, Joshua Borrow, Mark Vogelsberger.
Session 1: The computer science underlying large language models.

“Keeping AI under control through mechanistic interpretability“
Speaker: Prof. Max Tegmark (MIT)

‘Future Shock’ is a documentary film based on the book written.
in 1970 by sociologist and futurist Alvin Toffler. Released in 1972.
with a cigar-chomping Orson Welles as on-screen narrator, this piece of futurism is darkly dystopian and oozing techno-paranoia.

Cleaned up and ‘HD formatted’ version of Zeroheadroom’s posting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVJrJk3q3MA

“I view string theory as the most promising way to quantize matter and gravity in a unified way. We need both quantum gravity and we need unification and a quantization of gravity. One of the reasons why string theory is promising is that there are no singularities associated with those singularities are the same type that they offer point particles.” — Robert Brandenberger.

In this thought-provoking conversation, my grad school mentor, Robert Brandenberger shares his unique perspective on various cosmological concepts. He challenges the notion of the fundamental nature of the Planck length, questioning its significance and delving into intriguing debates surrounding its importance in our understanding of the universe. He also addresses some eyebrow-raising claims made by Elon Musk about the limitations imposed by the Planck scale on the number of digits of pi.

Continue reading “Unseen Fluctuations: Challenging Inflation | Robert Brandenberger” »

The future of cities as seen by architects and urban planners. Future cities: Urban planners get creative | DW DocumentaryYOUTUBE.COMFuture cities: Urban planners get creative | DW Documentary.

Will the cities of the future be climate neutral? Might they also be able to actively filter carbon dioxide out of the air? Futurologist Vincente Guallarte thinks so. In fact, he says, our cities will soon be able to absorb CO₂, just like trees do.

Continue reading “Future cities: Urban planners get creative | DW Documentary” »

Is the Ira Rubinoff Director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI https://www.si.edu/about/bios/joshua-tewksbury), part of the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex. He oversees more than 400 employees, with an annual budget of $35 million. Headquartered in Panama City, Panama, with field sites around the world, STRI furthers the understanding and public awareness of tropical biodiversity and its importance to human welfare. In addition to its resident scientists and support staff, STRI’s facilities are used annually by some 1,400 visiting scientists, pre-and postdoctoral fellows and interns from around the world.

Dr. Tewksbury is an ecologist with more than two decades of research in conservation and biodiversity, as well as nearly a decade of executive leadership experience at international research institutes.

Continue reading “Dr. Joshua Tewksbury, Ph.D. — Director, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI)” »

If there’s one thing the Covid pandemic taught us, it’s that viruses shouldn’t be underestimated.

People are, therefore, taking note after scientists discovered a whole new range of giant virus-like particles (VLP) that have taken on “previously unimaginable shapes and forms.”

The microscopic agents, resembling everything from stars to monsters, were found in just a few handfuls of forest soil.

Revolutionizing Cancer Research: The Power of Nanobiotechnology|Role of nanotechnology in Cancer.

#cancer #biotechnology #nanotechnology #nanobiotechnology #cancerbiology #cancerresearch #biology #molecularbiology #molelixirinformatics.

Continue reading “Cancer Research & Nanotech: The Power of Nanobiotechnology|Role of nanotechnology in Cancer” »

In the shade of a coconut palm, Chandrika tilts her smartphone screen to avoid the sun’s glare. It is early morning in Alahalli village in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, but the heat and humidity are rising fast. As Chandrika scrolls, she clicks on several audio clips in succession, demonstrating the simplicity of the app she recently started using. At each tap, the sound of her voice speaking her mother tongue emerges from the phone.

Before she started using this app, 30-year-old Chandrika (who, like many South Indians, uses the first letter of her father’s name, K., instead of a last name) had just 184 rupees ($2.25) in her bank account. But in return for around six hours of work spread over several days in late April, she received 2,570 rupees ($31.30). That’s roughly the same amount she makes in a month of working as a teacher at a distant school, after the cost of the three buses it takes her to get there and back. Unlike her day job, the app doesn’t make her wait until the end of the month for payment; money lands in her bank account in just a few hours. Just by reading text aloud in her native language of Kannada, spoken by around 60 million people mostly in central and southern India, Chandrika has used this app to earn an hourly wage of about $5, nearly 20 times the Indian minimum. And in a few days, more money will arrive—a 50% bonus, awarded once the voice clips are validated as accurate.

Read More: Gig Workers Behind AI Face ‘Unfair Working Conditions,’ Oxford Report Finds