All posts tagged: recent study

Test-Optional Admissions Is the Worst of Both Worlds

Test-Optional Admissions Is the Worst of Both Worlds

Published by skeptic

In the past five weeks, Dartmouth, Yale, and Brown have all announced that they would once again require applicants to submit standardized-test scores, ending an experiment that began in 2020. Hundreds of colleges made test scores optional during the pandemic, when COVID forced the SAT and ACT to shut down temporarily. Even after the pandemic receded, however, most stuck with their test-optional policies, ostensibly on equity grounds. Some elite institutions, including Emory and Vanderbilt, have recently announced extensions to their test-optional policies. Others, such as the University of California system, have sworn off even considering test scores. Critics argue that the SAT and ACT are biased against disadvantaged students, and just one more way for children of wealth and privilege to get an unfair advantage. And yet Dartmouth, Yale, and Brown all made the exact opposite claim in their announcements. They say that bringing back testing will allow them to do a better job of identifying and admitting talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The data are clear: These colleges have it right, and the critics …

The Cystic Fibrosis Breakthrough That Changed Everything

The Cystic Fibrosis Breakthrough That Changed Everything

Published by skeptic

They call it the Purge. You have experienced, in a modest way, something like it in the waning days of a bad cold, when your lungs finally expel their accumulated gunk. The rattle in your chest quiets. Your sinuses clear. You smell again: the animal sweetness of your children’s hair, the metallic breeze stirring a late-summer night. Your body, which oozed and groaned under the yoke of illness, is now a perfectly humming machine. Living is easy—everything is easy. How wonderful it is to breathe, simply breathe. Explore the April 2024 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More Imagine, though, that you had never been able to simply breathe. Imagine that mucus—thick, copious, dark—had been accumulating since the moment you were born, thwarting air and trapping microbes to fester inside your lungs. That you spent an hour each day physically pounding the mucus out of your airways, but even then, your lung function would spiral only downward, in what amounted to a long, slow asphyxiation. This …

This Is Where the AI Race Goes Next

This Is Where the AI Race Goes Next

Published by skeptic

Artificial intelligence can appear to be many different things—a whole host of programs with seemingly little common ground. Sometimes AI is a conversation partner, an illustrator, a math tutor, a facial-recognition tool. But in every incarnation, it is always, always a machine, demanding almost unfathomable amounts of data and energy to function. AI systems such as ChatGPT operate out of buildings stuffed with silicon computer chips. To build bigger machines—as Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, and other tech companies would like to do—you need more resources. And our planet is running out of them. The computational power needed to train top AI programs has doubled every six months over the past decade and may soon become untenable. According to a recent study, AI programs could consume roughly as much electricity as Sweden by 2027. GPT-4, the most powerful model currently offered to consumers by OpenAI, was by one estimate 100 times more demanding to train than GPT-3, which was released just four years ago. Google recently introduced generative AI into its search feature, and may have …

OpenAI’s Sora Is a Total Mystery

OpenAI’s Sora Is a Total Mystery

Published by skeptic

A new program from the ChatGPT maker promises to create videos from simple text prompts, but little is known about how it will actually work. One of the Sora sample videos released by OpenAI. The entire scene was generated by AI. (Courtesy OpenAI) February 16, 2024, 4:39 PM ET Yesterday afternoon, OpenAI teased Sora, a video-generation model that promises to convert written text prompts into highly realistic videos. Footage released by the company depicts such examples as “a Shiba Inu dog wearing a beret and black turtleneck” and “in an ornate, historical hall, a massive tidal wave peaks and begins to crash.” The excitement from the press has been reminiscent of the buzz surrounding the image creator DALL-E or ChatGPT in 2022: Sora is described as “eye-popping,” “world-changing,” and “breathtaking, yet terrifying.” The imagery is genuinely impressive. At a glance, one example of an animated “fluffy monster” looks better than Shrek; an “extreme close up” of a woman’s eye, complete with a reflection of the scene in front of her, is startlingly lifelike. But Sora is …

A Surprising Success Story for Humpback Whales

A Surprising Success Story for Humpback Whales

Published by Sam

This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine. In November 1904, the Norwegian explorer Carl Anton Larsen landed in South Georgia. It was his second visit to the remote island, roughly 1,800 kilometers east of the tip of South America, where the waters of the South Atlantic Ocean were home to huge numbers of whales—and he’d returned with a whaling ship and crew to catch them. Just a few weeks after establishing a camp in Cumberland Bay, a deep, two-pronged fjord in the rugged island, Larsen’s men killed their first humpback. So many whales foraged in the bay that the mariners didn’t need to venture to the open ocean. By mid-April 1905, they’d killed 91 whales—67 of them humpbacks. What followed was grisly and swift. South Georgia became a whaling epicenter. Within 12 years, whalers stationed on the island had slaughtered 24,000 humpbacks. “The whalers absolutely exterminated them,” Jennifer Jackson, a whale biologist with the British Antarctic Survey, says. Read: The strange influence the sun has on whales By the 1920s, humpbacks were scarce, so …

Courts Are Choosing TikTok Over Children

Courts Are Choosing TikTok Over Children

Published by skeptic

Some court decisions are bad; others are abysmal. The bad ones merely misapply the law; abysmal decisions go a step further and elevate abstract principle over democratic will and basic morality. The latter’s flaw is less about legal error and more about “a judicial system gone wrong,” as the legal scholar Gerard Magliocca once put it. A case such as Hammer v. Dagenhart exemplifies the abysmal: The case, decided in 1918, struck down child-labor laws during an era of public outcry and concern about children working as long as 70 hours a week in dangerous jobs. Making it truly wretched was the Dagenhart court’s reliance on a dubious constitutional distinction to allow federal regulation of “evil” activities such as the lottery, prostitution, and the sale of alcohol but not of the employment of children. In our times, some of the leading candidates for the “abysmal” category are the extraordinarily out-of-touch decisions striking down laws protecting children from social-media harms. The exemplar is NetChoice v. Bonta, in which a U.S. district court in California struck down …

Is That Elephant Carbon-Neutral? – The Atlantic

Is That Elephant Carbon-Neutral? – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

In 1967, South Africa’s National Parks Board made a fateful decision: The elephant population in Kruger National Park, which had been rising steeply, should stay stable in order to preserve the other species living there. Each year, wildlife managers would choose a number of elephants to cull—usually somewhere from 350 to 500. The animals were shot, their carcasses necropsied, and their meat salted and dried for food. After international uproar and a change in management practices that separated the park into different zones, Kruger stopped culling elephants in 1994. As a result, the park’s elephant numbers swelled from more than 7,800 to 12,500 in about a decade, and its landscape changed dramatically. More elephants dispersed seeds across the park, giving life to more types of plants. They used their tusks to dig for water in the dry season, creating water holes used by many species. And most of all, they knocked down trees, especially tall ones, to get access to their tasty roots and leaves. According to a 2016 study, parts of Kruger consequently stopped …

Spiders Might Be Quietly Disappearing

Spiders Might Be Quietly Disappearing

Published by skeptic

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine. Jumping spiders are an obsession for me. But it wasn’t always so. Although never a spider hater or an arachnophobe, I was pretty ambivalent about them for most of my life. Then I learned about jumping spiders: I’ve reported on their impressive vision (as good as a cat’s in some ways!), their surprising smarts (they make plans!), and the discovery that they have REM-like sleep (and may even dream!). I was hooked. I also learned that jumping spiders may be in decline. In tropical forests, finding them in a matter of minutes used to be easy, says the behavioral biologist Ximena Nelson, who studies jumping spiders at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. But for some species, that’s changed over the past couple of decades: “Now, I mean, you just can’t find them at all in some cases.” In fact, all over the world, all sorts of spiders seem to be disappearing, says the conservation biologist Pedro Cardoso of the University of Lisbon. He and a …

The Real Reason You Should Get an E-bike

The Real Reason You Should Get an E-bike

Published by skeptic

Today’s happiness and personal-finance gurus have no shortage of advice for living a good life. Meditate daily. Sleep for eight hours a night. Don’t forget to save for retirement. They’re not wrong, but few of these experts will tell you one of the best ways to improve your life: Ditch your car. A year ago, my wife and I sold one of our cars and replaced it with an e-bike. As someone who writes about climate change, I knew that I was doing something good for the planet. I knew that passenger vehicles are responsible for much of our greenhouse-gas emissions—16 percent in the U.S., to be exact—and that the pollution spewing from gas-powered cars doesn’t just heat up the planet; it could increase the risk of premature death. I also knew that electric cars were an imperfect fix: Though they’re responsible for less carbon pollution than gas cars, even when powered by today’s dirty electric grid, their supply chain is carbon intensive, and many of the materials needed to produce their batteries are, in …