Its running a recurrent neural network that describes the scene in front of the webcam…in real time.

For some examples of what this sort of neural network can do, go here: (http://www.contriving.net/link/gw). You'll find a bunch of images with captions wrote by a computer.

As of 2013 that number was up to 30.2 pounds.

With advances in biotechnology, I predict that by the end of the century the average slaughtered turkey will weigh more than a cow.

(Of course, I'm referring to a 2015-era cow. End of century cows will be extinct because of the great cow uprising of 2062.)



Reshared post from +Kaj Sotala

Clever study:

> The second experiment used participants’ own tiredness to see whether it affected their judgments about sleep deprivation as an interrogation tactic. Participants were a group of part-time MBA students, holding down full-time employment and required to attend classes from 6pm to 9pm. […] As you’d expect, subjects are very tired after working a full day and then attending a demanding class in evening school. Half the students were asked to judge the severity of sleep deprivation as a tool for interrogation at the start of the class. The other half were asked to judge it at the end of the class, after their own fatigue was at a very high level. The researchers found that the fatigued group regarded sleep deprivation as a much more painful technique than the non-fatigued group did.

It is a bad idea for a republic to outsource its police and military power, as well as most of its diplomacy, to an autonomous religious cult. Monopoly on the use of force is a central function of a healthy state.

—Johnathan M. Ladd speaking about, of course, the Jedi.

Figuring out what tag, folder, collection, label, insert-categorization-system-here, to use is just so hard and irritating.

I rarely use hashtags, and I can barely get myself to use Google+ Collections, and my Evernote content is a mess all because of this.

Interestingly, Google really helps you out in this area with Google Photos which just magically does all the categorization for you.

I'll put this in my Science collection, because my best guess, based on my typical content, is that any professors following me are most likely science professors.

One of the blind spots of professors is that almost all of them were excellent students. School was typically a series of triumphs from kindergarten on. This can make professors unaware of how scary and frustrating college can be for young people, especially those who came from under-resourced schools that didn’t prepare them well for the experience.

http://www.samefacts.com/2015/11/education-2/a-favorite-teaching-story/

(haha, no they're not)
I heard about this study earlier this year…maybe on Freakonomics?  It sounds like something they'd cover.

Anyway, the study investigated patient outcomes at cardiovascular hospitals.  Patients at the best hospitals in the USA did better when the senior cardiologists were not at the hospital.

It's a pretty clever study.  Using 10 years of data containing tens of thousands of records, they were able to compare cardiovascular outcomes while senior cardiologists were at major national cardiology meetings to the outcomes when they were at the hospital.

It's also interesting to note that patients cared for at teaching hospitals did significantly better than those cared for in community hospitals.

Some more discussion of the study here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/opinion/sunday/are-good-doctors-bad-for-your-health.html

At the same time, Musk has said repeatedly that his ultimate aim with SpaceX is to land humans—perhaps even himself—on Mars. NASA also has a program to land humans on Mars. And just as NASA is building a heavy lift rocket to accomplish this, so is SpaceX. Only its Falcon Heavy rocket will likely cost about one-tenth as much to launch as NASA’s Space Launch System; it will begin flying two years sooner as well.

Reshared post from +Sean Carroll

Sabine Hossenfelder reminds us that there have been tremendous, real-world advances in theoretical physics since the 80's.
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2015/11/dear-dr-b-can-you-think-of-single.html