Selfie 101

What's your take on this guy? Sinister, serious, direct, intense, take your pick as the human face both reveals and conceals our innermost feelings 24/7 to the outside world. Up to now, this eval was done by us rubes, now there's a new evaluator on the scene that does it better than we can.

To whit ...

Russian researchers from HSE University and Open University for the Humanities and Economics have demonstrated that artificial intelligence is able to infer people's personality from 'selfie' photographs better than human raters do. Conscientiousness emerged to be more easily recognizable than the other four traits. Personality predictions based on female faces appeared to be more reliable than those for male faces. The technology can be used to find the 'best matches' in customer service, dating or online tutoring.

The article, "Assessing the Big Five personality traits using real-life static facial images," will be published on May 22 in Scientific Reports.

It's just a matter of time ... 

Intensity +

Things get crazed in the center of our galaxy.

The center of our Galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole of 4 million times the mass of the Sun. A great number of stars spin around it at very high speed. The UCLA Galactic Center Group discovered another class of objects orbiting the black hole: the G objects. These peculiar objects look like gas clouds but behave like stars. G objects are likely stars that are hidden in a thick envelope of gas and dust. They may have formed as the result of the merger of a pair of stars. This animation is a visualization of the orbital motion of G objects and stars in the Galactic Center. The G objects are shown in magenta, young stars in green and old stars in orange. The orbits are based on the Keck data obtained between 1995 and 2019. 

It gets better.

Ghez noted the center of the Milky Way galaxy is an extreme environment, unlike our less hectic corner of the universe.

“The Earth is in the suburbs compared to the center of the galaxy, which is some 26,000 light-years away,” Ghez said. “The center of our galaxy has a density of stars 1 billion times higher than our part of the galaxy. The gravitational pull is so much stronger. The magnetic fields are more extreme. The center of the galaxy is where extreme astrophysics occurs — the X-sports of astrophysics.”

Intensity +  without a doubt. :)

HK ... We hardly knew ye.

A candlelight vigil in Hong Kong in June, an annual tradition to commemorate victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

I have a close friend who's a native Hong Konger, a guy who loves his city beyond words and who now inwardly weeps as to what is happening to her as China begins to extinguish a truly international environment that benefitted the world in so many ways.

Hong Kong was born at the crossroad of empires, a hybrid of British and Chinese parentage. It may fade there, too.

This “barren rock,” as an envoy of Queen Victoria once called it, transformed into one of the world’s first truly global cities, a place where international finance has thrived as its people created a cultural identity all their own. Even the territory’s current political system is bound by a negotiated settlement, called “one country, two systems,” that, despite all odds and an inelegant moniker, seemed to work.

But this week, Hong Kong discovered the limits to the middle ground that it has carved out to nourish one of the most prosperous and dynamic cities on earth: between East and West, between rice and bread, between a liberal and an authoritarian order.

The Union Jack was lowered for the last time in Hong Kong in 1997, as Britain handed the territory back to China.Credit...Pool photo by Kimimasa Mayama

The territory’s fate is once again being decided in faraway halls of power, as Beijing moves forward with plans to strip some of the autonomy the territory was supposed to enjoy for 50 years after Britain returned it to China in 1997.

The death knell for Hong Kong has been sounded many times since that handover. But the proposed national security legislation could have crushing implications for a place so dedicated to the international language of commerce that the local form of English is stripped of embellishment. Can, no can?

Too often these days, the answer is no can.

Protesters in the Tsim Sha Tsui district on Christmas Eve, with Hong Kong’s distinct skyline in the background.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

Read the detailed NYTimes piece, it's the right thing to do.

HK ... we hardly knew ye ... indeed.

3 into 2

Creativity to the max, this time layering 3 dimensions into 2, in this case, using time to enable code to correct errors in quantum systems at a rate thought impossible until now.

Dr. Benjamin Brown from the School of Physics has developed a type of error-correcting code for quantum computers that will free up more hardware to do useful calculations. It also provides an approach that will allow companies like Google and IBM to design better quantum microchips.

He did this by applying already known code that operates in three-dimensions to a two-dimensional framework.

“The trick is to use time as the third dimension. I’m using two physical dimensions and adding in time as the third dimension,” Dr. Brown said. “This opens up possibilities we didn’t have before.”

3 into 2 without question. :)

The last piece ...

AI, no longer controlled by us rubes in many disciplines given the fact real-time analysis of incoming data requires software able to update itself in real-time, cannot be done by humans in any way, shape or fashion, could not process symbolic math, until now.

More than 70 years ago, researchers at the forefront of artificial intelligence research introduced neural networks as a revolutionary way to think about how the brain works. In the human brain, networks of billions of connected neurons make sense of sensory data, allowing us to learn from experience. Artificial neural networks can also filter huge amounts of data through connected layers to make predictions and recognize patterns, following rules they taught themselves.

By now, people treat neural networks as a kind of AI panacea, capable of solving tech challenges that can be restated as a problem of pattern recognition. They provide natural-sounding language translation. Photo apps use them to recognize and categorize recurrent faces in your collection. And programs driven by neural nets have defeated the world’s best players at games including Go and chess.

But a problem remained.

However, neural networks have always lagged in one conspicuous area: solving difficult symbolic math problems. These include the hallmarks of calculus courses, like integrals or ordinary differential equations. The hurdles arise from the nature of mathematics itself, which demands precise solutions. Neural nets instead tend to excel at probability. They learn to recognize patterns — which Spanish translation sounds best, or what your face looks like — and can generate new ones.

The situation changed late last year when Guillaume Lample and François Charton, a pair of computer scientists working in Facebook’s AI research group in Paris, unveiled a successful first approach to solving symbolic math problems with neural networks. Their method didn’t involve number crunching or numerical approximations. Instead, they played to the strengths of neural nets, reframing the math problems in terms of a problem that’s practically solved: language translation.

Soon, he and Lample plan to feed mathematical expressions into their networks and trace the way the program responds to small changes in the expressions. Mapping how changes in the input trigger changes in the output might help expose how the neural nets operate.

Zaremba sees that kind of understanding as a potential step toward teaching neural nets to reason and to actually understand the questions they’re answering. “It’s easy in math to move the needle and see how well [the neural network] works if expressions are becoming different. We might truly learn the reasoning, instead of just the answer,” he said. “The results would be quite powerful.”

An understatement to say the least.

Read the rest of the excellent Quanta's Magazine piece to see why the last piece ... of developing truly intelligent AI is now in place to enable this tech to become ... truly intelligent.

A simple matter of scale ...

Given the enormous size of the universe shows just how slow light truly is ... :)

To us Earth-dwelling humans, the speed of light is so fast that it appears instantaneous.

But zoom out a bit and it becomes clear how even at the speed of light — the theoretical speed limit of the universe, which our spacecraft can’t even begin to approach — a journey through the cosmos becomes a snail-paced slog.

A simple matter of scale indeed.

A treaty to live by without question ...

The Artemis Accords, NASA's take on how man should cooperate in space, is similar in scope to the Antarctic Treaty System as Antarctica is also a hostile place requiring everybody to play nice as both environments can kill in an instant thus requiring everyone to work together to limit that grim possibility as much as possible.

Via the Artemis program, NASA will land the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024, heralding in a new era for space exploration and utilization.

While NASA is leading the Artemis program, international partnerships will play a key role in achieving a sustainable and robust presence on the Moon while preparing to conduct a historic human mission to Mars.

With numerous countries and private sector players conducting missions and operations in cislunar space, it’s critical to establish a common set of principles to govern the civil exploration and use of outer space.

International space agencies that join NASA in the Artemis program will do so by executing bilateral Artemis Accords agreements, which will describe a shared vision for principles, grounded in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, to create a safe and transparent environment which facilitates exploration, science, and commercial activities for all of humanity to enjoy.

A treaty to live by without question ...

My take without question: :)

Boston Tea Party, among significant others ...

As for Calvin's non-answer... AWESOME!!! :)

The hidden view ...

All of humanity resides on top of huge, invisible plates, constantly moving due to the internal heat engine of earth.

Researchers want to simulate the behaviour of the mantle.

This solid rock layer, which resides between the planet's core and crust, moves very slowly over time - roughly at the speed that a fingernail grows.

The scientists will investigate its complex pattern of upwellings and downwellings.

The team hopes its new circulation models will provide fresh insights into how the mantle has influenced the Earth's surface over hundreds of millions of years.

The impact of the constant motion of these plates goes beyond imagination.

A key target is to understand the upwellings that ultimately result in "hotspots" at the Earth's surface - the places where there have been colossal outpourings of lava and gas through geologic history.

"These are what we call the Large Igneous Provinces, or LIPs," explained Prof Davies.

"There hasn't been anything like this since the Columbia River flood basalts in North America just over 10 million years ago. So, they're rare. And thank goodness, because they can be absolutely catastrophic.

"The Siberian Traps which cover a large part of west Siberia match up with the largest extinction on Earth. A lot of the great extinction events are linked to these LIPs."

Seen below is a Cardiff University graphic detailing the 

heat distribution of earth driving the motion of plate since the beginning of time.

Figure 3: Mantle geodynamics - we study the dynamics and chemistry of the Earth's interior and how it affects the surface, using primarily large-scale numerical modelling.

The hidden view indeed.

Haze Lines

It's not Purple Haze but Jupiter has them, in spades. :)

NASA's Juno mission captured this look at Jupiter's tumultuous northern regions during the spacecraft's close approach to the planet on Feb. 17, 2020.

Some notable features in this view are the long, thin bands that run through the center of the image from top to bottom. Juno has observed these long streaks since its first close pass by Jupiter in 2016. The streaks are layers of haze particles that float above the underlying cloud features. Scientists don't yet know exactly what these hazes are made of or how they form. Two jet streams in Jupiter's atmosphere flank either side of the region where the narrow bands of haze typically appear, and some researchers speculate those jet streams may influence the formation of the high hazes.

Had to show another ...

Jupiter's already vibrant colors become especially striking in this artistic interpretation of an image from NASA's Juno mission that shows the planet's famous Great Red Spot. Citizen scientist Mary J. Murphy processed an image from the spacecraft's JunoCam instrument, increasing the color saturation to create a piece Murphy calls "The Rose."

Stellar