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Mask wearing in community settings reduces SARS-CoV-2 transmission

Gavin Leech, Charlie Rogers-Smith, Joshua Teperowski Monrad, Jonas B. Sandbrink, Benedict Snodin, Robert Zinkov, Benjamin Rader, John S. Brownstein, Yarin Gal, Samir Bhatt, Mrinank Sharma, Sören Mindermann, Jan M. Brauner, Laurence Aitchison

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences·2022·90 citations

Significance We resolve conflicting results regarding mask wearing against COVID-19. Most previous work focused on mask mandates; we study the effect of mask wearing directly. We find that population mask wearing notably reduced SARS-CoV-2 transmission (mean mask-wearing levels corresponding to a 19% decrease in R). We use the largest wearing survey (n = 20 million) and obtain our estimates from regions across six continents. We account for nonpharmaceutical interventions and time spent in public, and quantify our uncertainty. Factors additional to mask mandates influenced the worldwide early uptake of mask wearing. Our analysis goes further than past work in the quality of wearing data–100 times the size with random sampling–geographical scope, a semimechanistic infection model, and the validation of our results.

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Machines vs Memes Part 1: AI Alignment and Memetics

Harriet Farlow

LessWrong·2022

This is the first in a series of three posts on the interlinkages between Memetics and AI Alignment. It was written as an output from the 2022 AI Safety Camp, for the ‘Impact of Memetics on Alignment’ team, coached by Daniel Kokotajlo and comprising Harriet Farlow, Nate Rush and Claudio Ceruti. Please read on to post 2 and post 3. We are not AI Safety experts so any and all feedback is greatly appreciated :) TL;DR; Memetics is the study of cultural transmission through memes (as genetics is the study of biological transmission through genes). What lessons could be applied between Memetics and AI Alignment, and could AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) also develop ideas and culture - ‘memes’? Where AI Alignment postulates the existence of a base objective and a mesa objective, could a third objective - the memetic objective - also exist, and create the potential not just for inner and outer alignment problems, but a third memetic misalignment? Note: Knowledge of AI Alignment and some knowledge of evolutionary theory assumed. The field of AI Safety deals with questions of existential risk stemming from AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). AI Alignment research, in particular, examines to what extent intelligent, unbounded agents develop final goals that misalign with their intended goals as specified by their human programmers. It also postulates that if these agents are able to acquire resources, evolve self-preservation, and converge to certain misaligned ...

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‘The Centre is Nowhere’: British Art and the Global

Imogen Hart, Dorothy Price

Art History, Volume 45, Issue 3, June 2022, Pages 454–470·2022

What does it mean for art history to conjoin the terms ‘British art’ and ‘the global’? What is carried by the liminal space of the conjuncture? And what is forsaken? This special issue seeks to think through the pressures placed on British art since the mid‐nineteenth century as a national category of enquiry in the wake of unstable definitions of post‐colonialism, neo‐colonialism, globalization and the decolonial. Drawing on recent scholarly debates about the role and definitions of British art, the co‐authors explore some of the tensions inherent in trying to operate within a nationally and geographically defined field, the artificial borders of which are porous, malleable, and subject to regular political and cultural change. Acknowledging the shortcomings of both the global and the national as frameworks for art‐historical enquiry, we suggest different ways of steering a path between the two.

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Hate narratives, conditioned language and networked harassment: A new breed of anti-shipper and anti-fan – antis

Samantha Aburime

Journal of Fandom Studies, The·2022·6 citations

In recent years hostility amongst fans based on what a person ships or tolerates in shipping has become a growing point of contention in western fandom. This has resulted in an ‘anti-shipper’ (or ‘anti’) vs. ‘pro-shipper’ (or ‘pro-ship’), ‘Good versus Evil’ dichotomy that has slowly consumed fandom communities from the inside out. At the core of ‘anti’ debates is a foundation of beliefs rooted in conservatism that what a person consumes in fiction determines their real-life behaviours. Thus, an anti-shipper who is against those viewed to be pro-shippers is already deemed more morally pure. This has culminated in the escalation of toxic vigilantism that has driven harassment, violence-based threats and the criminalization of fellow fans. This piece deconstructs this anti phenomenon and the dominant behaviours that accompany it by evaluating the traditionally conservative environments in which these ideas originated, and by exploring how antis employ hate narratives, conditioned language and morally motivated networked harassment to justify dehumanizing and abusing other fans. This examination ultimately concludes that no kind of communal fandom restoration can begin to occur until those targeted by such anti-shippers are viewed as human beings (not sub-human) and a universal understanding of fiction, reality, psychology and human behaviour based in science is established.

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Minding the gap: Attempts at community archaeology and local counter-narratives at an archaeological site in Turkey

Sevil Baltalı Tırpan

Journal of Social Archaeology·2022·1 citations

Community archaeologies should emerge from an awareness of the ways in which archaeological praxis is embedded with multiple pasts, subjectivities, materialities, and national and transnational histories. This longitudinal archaeological ethnography explores the lived experiences, perceptions of the past, and relationship to archaeology and archaeologists amongst villagers residing near the Kerkenes site in Turkey after attempts by the project to develop heritage awareness, a sustainable local economy, and collaborative management of the site within the community. However well-intentioned, considerable challenges to closing the gap in understanding between archaeologists and locals can arise when the efforts of archaeologists become entangled in larger socio-political frameworks beyond their control. Villagers have experienced being dehumanized as Muslim migrant workers in Europe and were Islamic-based nationalist supporters of the conservative Erdoğan regime. The archaeologists’ heritage-making practices inadvertently triggered symbolic associations of the project with the colonial endeavor. Locals produced counter-narratives about the site as a decolonizing response.

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Ontological and quantitative analyses of the kokuji characters of the Japanese writing system

Antoine Bossard

Journal of Chinese Writing Systems·2022·2 citations

Except its two kana syllabaries and the Latin alphabet, the Japanese writing system is mainly based on Chinese characters and local, made-in-Japan characters. While the former, called kanji characters, are ubiquitous in Japanese, the latter, called kokuji characters, remain largely unknown and thus infrequently used. It is then meaningful and interesting to investigate these local characters, and that in a global manner, that is considering them as a whole rather than focusing on particular instances such as often done in previous works. To this end, in this paper we first conduct a formal, ontological discussion of the kokuji characters so as to identify common properties and patterns, and second we realise a quantitative analysis thereof according to several criteria. The obtained results clearly exhibit trends, which are subsequently discussed.

★ 3.0 (1)

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Magnitudes, distance moduli, bolometric corrections, and so much more

David W. Hogg

arXiv·2022

This pedagogical document about stellar photometry - aimed at those for whom astronomical arcana seem arcane - endeavours to explain the concepts of magnitudes, color indices, absolute magnitudes, distance moduli, extinctions, attenuations, color excesses, K corrections, and bolometric corrections. I include some discussion of observational technique, and some discussion of epistemology, but the primary focus here is on the theoretical or interpretive connections between the observational astronomical quantities and the physical properties of the observational targets.

★ 5.0 (1)

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A fundação do Partido Comunista do Brasil

Raul K. M. Carrion

Princípios·2022

O objetivo central deste estudo é reconstituir o processo de formação do Partido Comunista do Brasil — desde os primórdios do movimento operário brasileiro até os seus primeiros anos de vida —, identificando as causas do seu surgimento e as razões que viabilizaram a sua permanência até hoje, apesar das incontáveis tentativas (externas e internas) de liquidá-lo. A principal hipótese de trabalho é que o surgimento do Partido Comunista do Brasil não foi algo artificial, fruto da “vontade” de alguns indivíduos ou “uma ideia trazida de fora”, “criação da Internacional Comunista”, mas refletiu uma necessidade objetiva, decorrente da evolução social do Brasil — que em 1922 se encontrava em um momento de rupturas — e do desenvolvimento de sua classe operária. Na visão de Marx, correspondeu à conversão do proletariado de “classe em si” para “classe para si”. O método de análise utilizado foi o materialismo histórico e dialético. A conclusão que emerge deste estudo é que a continuidade do Partido Comunista do Brasil — apesar de todas as perseguições sofridas — expressa a existência objetiva de espaço político para um projeto de transformação radical e revolucionária da sociedade capitalista brasileira, distinto dos projetos reformistas da burguesia e da pequena burguesia.

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Changing Design Education for the 21st Century

Michael W. Meyer, Don Norman

She Ji·2022

Designers are entrusted with increasingly complex and impactful challenges. However, the current system of design education does not always prepare students for these challenges. When we examine what and how our system teaches young designers, we discover that the most valuable elements of the designer’s perspective and process are seldom taught. Instead, some designers grow beyond their education through their experience working in industry, essentially learning by accident. Many design programs still maintain an insular perspective and an inefficient mechanism of tacit knowledge transfer. Meanwhile, skills for developing creative solutions to complex problems are increasingly essential. Organizations are starting to recognize that designers bring something special to this type of work, a rational belief based upon numerous studies that link commercial success to a design-driven approach. So, what are we to do? Other learned professions such as medicine, law, and business provide excellent advice and guidance embedded within their own histories of professionalization. In this article, we borrow from their experiences to recommend a course of action for design. It will not be easy: it will require a study group to make recommendations for a roster of design and educational practices that schools can use to build a curriculum that matches their goals and abilities. And then it will require a conscious effort to bootstrap the design profession toward both a robust practitioner community and an effective professoriate, capable together of fully realizing the value of design in the 21st century. In this article, we lay out that path.

★ 4.0 (1)

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How Far I'll Go: Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning via $f$-Advantage Regression

Yecheng Jason Ma, Jason Yan, Dinesh Jayaraman, Osbert Bastani

arXiv·2022

Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) promises general-purpose skill learning in the form of reaching diverse goals from purely offline datasets. We propose $\textbf{Go}$al-conditioned $f$-$\textbf{A}$dvantage $\textbf{R}$egression (GoFAR), a novel regression-based offline GCRL algorithm derived from a state-occupancy matching perspective; the key intuition is that the goal-reaching task can be formulated as a state-occupancy matching problem between a dynamics-abiding imitator agent and an expert agent that directly teleports to the goal. In contrast to prior approaches, GoFAR does not require any hindsight relabeling and enjoys uninterleaved optimization for its value and policy networks. These distinct features confer GoFAR with much better offline performance and stability as well as statistical performance guarantee that is unattainable for prior methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate that GoFAR's training objectives can be re-purposed to learn an agent-independent goal-conditioned planner from purely offline source-domain data, which enables zero-shot transfer to new target domains. Through extensive experiments, we validate GoFAR's effectiveness in various problem settings and tasks, significantly outperforming prior state-of-art. Notably, on a real robotic dexterous manipulation task, while no other method makes meaningful progress, GoFAR acquires complex manipulation behavior that successfully accomplishes diverse goals.

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Oldest Papers

Mask wearing in community settings reduces SARS-CoV-2 transmission

Machines vs Memes Part 1: AI Alignment and Memetics

High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models

‘The Centre is Nowhere’: British Art and the Global

Hate narratives, conditioned language and networked harassment: A new breed of anti-shipper and anti-fan – antis

Minding the gap: Attempts at community archaeology and local counter-narratives at an archaeological site in Turkey

Ontological and quantitative analyses of the kokuji characters of the Japanese writing system

Magnitudes, distance moduli, bolometric corrections, and so much more

A fundação do Partido Comunista do Brasil

Changing Design Education for the 21st Century

Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research

How Far I'll Go: Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning via $f$-Advantage Regression