Lifeboat Foundation

The touch of another person may increase levels of the “feel-good” hormone oxytocin. But the context really matters. The situation impacts oxytocin levels not only in the moment, but also later, as is shown by researchers at Linköping University and the University of Skövde in Sweden. Their study has been published in the journal eLife.

An embrace from a parent, a warm hand on your shoulder or a caress from a romantic partner are examples of how touch can strengthen social bonds between people and influence emotions. But although touch and the sense of touch have a very important function, knowledge of how this actually works is still lacking.

Studies in animals have shown that the hormone oxytocin is linked to touch and social bonding. However, many questions remain unanswered when it comes to oxytocin’s role in human social interactions and how this hormone can influence and be influenced by the brain. To study this more closely, researchers have examined what happens in the body when we feel a soft touch.

Every skin flake, hair follicle, eyelash, and spit drop cast from your body contains instructions written in a chemical code, one that is unique to you.

According to a new study, technology has advanced to the point that it’s now possible to sift scraps of human DNA out of the air, water, or soil and decipher personal details about the individuals who dropped them.

As useful as this might seem, the study’s authors warn society might not be prepared for the consequences.

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are growing in frequency and sophistication, thanks to the number of attack tools available for a couple of dollars on the Dark Web and criminal marketplaces. Numerous organizations became victims in 2022, from the Port of London Authority to Ukraine’s national postal service.

Security leaders are already combating DDoS attacks by monitoring network traffic patterns, implementing firewalls, and using content delivery networks (CDNs) to distribute traffic across multiple servers. But putting more security controls in place can also result in more DDoS false positives — legitimate traffic that’s not part of an attack but still requires analysts to take steps to mitigate before it causes service disruptions and brand damage.

Rate limiting is often considered the best method for efficient DDoS mitigation: URL-specific rate limiting prevents 47% of DDoS attacks, according to Indusface’s “State of Application Security Q4 2022” report. However, the reality is that few engineering leaders know how to use it effectively. Here’s how to employ rate limiting effectively while avoiding false positives.

With this Call for Proposals (CFP) we are targeting work that specifically supports the use of LLMs in productivity scenarios.

Putting a microcontroller onto each component of a system proves a powerful method of building complex creations.

New AI tech will give a much-needed push for robot Astro, one of the most ambitious devices at Amazon that hasn’t yet lived up to expectations.

AI CREATING NEW TYPES OF JOBS

Join top executives in San Francisco on July 11–12, to hear how leaders are integrating and optimizing AI investments for success. Learn More

Amazon, the online retail behemoth, has long been quiet about its plans for conversational artificial intelligence, even as its rivals Google and Microsoft make strides in developing and deploying chatbots that can interact with users and answer their queries.

Continue reading “Amazon job listings hint at ChatGPT-like conversational AI for online store” »

Join top executives in San Francisco on July 11–12, to hear how leaders are integrating and optimizing AI investments for success. Learn More

AI technology is exploding, and industries are racing to adopt it as fast as possible. Before your enterprise dives headfirst into a confusing sea of opportunity, it’s important to explore how generative AI works, what red flags enterprises need to consider, and how to evolve into an AI-ready enterprise.

One of the most common and powerful techniques for generative AI is large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4 or Google’s BARD. These are neural networks that are trained on vast amounts of text data from various sources such as books, websites, social media and news articles. They learn the patterns and probabilities of language by guessing the next word in a sequence of words. For example, given the input “The sky is,” the model might predict “blue,” “clear,” “cloudy” or “falling.”

Year 2021 face_with_colon_three

Georgia Tech quantum field theory researcher Tim Andersen grounds reality in Will, rather than Mind, as envisioned by Bernardo Kastrup and the cosmopsychists.