All posts tagged: Relevance

Researchers combine AI and fMRI to predict the emotional relevance of spontaneous thoughts

Researchers combine AI and fMRI to predict the emotional relevance of spontaneous thoughts

A new study led by researchers from the Center for Neuroscience Imaging Research in South Korea and Dartmouth College has revealed that brain activity can predict how people emotionally experience their thoughts. Using brain scans and personalized story narratives, the team developed a method that combines brain imaging with machine learning to decode the emotional aspects of thoughts in real time. The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study addresses a significant challenge in understanding human thought: how do we track and measure the personal and often fleeting emotions that arise during spontaneous thinking? This type of thought can happen at any time, even when we are resting or asleep. Yet, capturing these thoughts without interrupting them has proven difficult, as the very act of focusing on them can change their nature. The researchers wanted to develop a way to predict the emotional quality of thoughts — whether they are positive or negative and how much they relate to the person’s sense of self — without requiring people …

The Relevance of Leo Tolstoy in Today’s Rapidly Evolving World

The Relevance of Leo Tolstoy in Today’s Rapidly Evolving World

In an age of rapid technological advancement and shifting global dynamics, one might wonder what relevance a 19th-century Russian novelist could possibly have. Yet, the ideas of Leo Tolstoy continue to resonate with remarkable power, offering insights that are startlingly applicable to our modern world. This exploration of Leo Tolstoy’s relevance today will reveal how his timeless wisdom can illuminate our path forward in an increasingly complex world. The Enduring Legacy of a Literary Giant Leo Tolstoy, best known for his epic novels “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina,” was more than just a masterful storyteller. He was a philosopher, a social critic, and a moral thinker whose ideas challenged the conventions of his time and continue to provoke thought in ours. Tolstoy’s relevance today is not just in his literary achievements, but in the profound questions he posed about human nature, society, and the meaning of life. War and Peace: A Mirror to Modern Conflicts One cannot discuss Leo Tolstoy’s relevance without delving into his magnum opus, “War and Peace.” This sweeping narrative, set against …

‘Dead Poets Society’ Has Some Distinctly Australian Relevance

‘Dead Poets Society’ Has Some Distinctly Australian Relevance

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. This week’s issue is written by Damien Cave, the Australia bureau chief since 2017. With my 13-year-old daughter home for a break from her one-year adventure at a boarding school in the Australian bush, we put on an old movie the other night that she had asked to see: “Dead Poets Society.” As many of you probably know, it’s a coming-of-age story set at an American private school, starring an inspiring teacher played by Robin Williams. I loved it when it came out in 1989 (I was a young teen then myself), but when the director’s name — Peter Weir — appeared onscreen in my Sydney living room, I did a double take. I’d never realized that the movie, a beloved classic for many Americans, was directed by an Australian. Somehow, the same bloke responsible for Australian classics like “Gallipoli” and “Picnic at Hanging Rock” was also the director of very American favorites like “Dead Poets Society” and “The Truman Show.” Like me, or …

The Evolutionary Relevance of “Body Count”

The Evolutionary Relevance of “Body Count”

Source: Ann H / Pexels A hotly debated topic in online relationship spaces is the role of sexual history (“body count”, “notches on the bedpost”) in mate choice. And while the rise of the manosphere and rapid-fire social media seems to have accelerated the discussion, people have shown an interest in the sexual history of their potential partners for some time. In fact, one of my most popular posts was on 2013 work on this exact issue – showing that people want a mate with a bit of a past but not too much, and that there’s very little evidence of a sexual double standard, despite conventional wisdom. So, why does this issue continue to generate curiosity and controversy? Is considering sexual history a fleeting cultural obsession that will fizzle out? Or does it serve some kind of function—a way of helping us reduce risk when making important relationship choices? Understanding the Obsession With Sexual History People vary in their approach to sex. Those who value sexual novelty and variety tend to pursue multiple partners, …

Pearl Jam, Dark Matter review: The band wisely abandon the pursuit of relevance in search of something timeless

Pearl Jam, Dark Matter review: The band wisely abandon the pursuit of relevance in search of something timeless

Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free When you’ve been in the game for three decades, staying relevant is a tall order. Seattle-based grunge rockers Pearl Jam know this all too well. Since their breakthrough record, Ten, 33 years and 11 albums have passed by, now including their latest LP. Wisely, Dark Matter sees the band abandon the pursuit of relevance in search of something timeless. Across 11 songs, Pearl Jam – vocalist Eddie Vedder, drummer Matt Cameron, bassist Jeff Ament, lead guitarist Mike McCready, and rhythm guitarist Stone Gossard – traverse a variety of alt-rock sounds, from the sharp, scratchy guitars that tear through album opener “Scared of Fear” to the hopeful pop-rock sensibility of “Something Special”. Written about Vedder’s children, the latter is elevated by some ambitious and unexpected chord progressions. Recorded at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La Studios in Malibu, Dark Matter is a tremendously well-produced record – sharp and crisp when it needs …

Let’s be honest: Oscars night is too safe, struggling with relevance, and needs a rethink | Coco Khan

Let’s be honest: Oscars night is too safe, struggling with relevance, and needs a rethink | Coco Khan

For the first time in two decades, coverage of the Oscars was free to watch for Britons this year. More than a million of us tuned in to Hollywood’s biggest night of the year. That’s a huge audience, but with a full day’s distance from the event I feel comfortable speaking on behalf of us all to say: well, that was anticlimactic. An awards ceremony that brought to mind the meme “Could this meeting have been an email?”, the 2024 Oscars turned out to be a rather bland affair: a perfunctory giving out of awards where category winners had long been a foregone conclusion. There were no hiccups, no muck-ups, no jokes that went too far, not too much politics – but not so little it would draw criticism, either. It was so tightly curated it even finished early. Perhaps that would all be fine if it wasn’t this year. This year, with two record-breaking movies (Barbie and Oppenheimer), nominations for powerful, urgent stories such as Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of …

John Sellars on Aristotle’s Life, Philosophy, and Relevance Today

John Sellars on Aristotle’s Life, Philosophy, and Relevance Today

Interview by Antonis Chaliakopoulos & Natalie Noland Is Aristotle’s philosophy still relevant? What does it mean to be an Aristotelian today? Did Aristotle’s thought influence Alexander the Great? John Sellars* answers these and many more questions as he talks to Natalie Noland and Antonis Chaliakopoulos about his forthcoming book Aristotle: Understanding the World’s Greatest Philosopher.   *John Sellars is Reader in philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, a visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London and a Member of Wolfson College, Oxford. He is the author of Lessons in Stoicism and The Fourfold Remedy. His books have been translated into over a dozen languages.   “Aristotle is without doubt one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived, if not the greatest.”    John Sellars   What made you want to write about Aristotle?    Aristotle is without doubt one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived, if not the greatest. As a consequence, he can be quite an intimidating figure, which is not helped by the fact that his texts are often quite dense …

Adobe adds AI assistant to Acrobat, Reader in effort to maintain relevance in PDF market

Adobe adds AI assistant to Acrobat, Reader in effort to maintain relevance in PDF market

Adobe has just rolled out a new AI assistant for its Acrobat and Reader products today, bringing conversational AI abilities to help users parse and summarize the trillions of PDF files used by businesses and consumers worldwide. The move shows Adobe aiming to stay atop the PDF market it pioneered decades ago, as new AI systems from startups like OpenAI and Anthropic threaten to provide many of the same abilities. The AI Assistant, which is currently in beta testing, lets users ask questions about a PDF’s contents and receive summarized answers. It can also generate formatted text, like presentations and emails, based on information extracted from PDFs. Adobe’s new AI Assistant in Acrobat and Reader enables natural language interactions with PDF documents, answering questions about content and generating summaries. (Credit: Adobe) The feature builds upon Adobe Acrobat’s Liquid Mode, which already offers a responsive reading experience on mobile devices. This expansion into AI leverages Adobe’s proprietary machine learning models, which understand PDF structure and content, to generate document summaries, answer questions, and even format information …

The Lotus Sutra − an ancient Buddhist scripture from the 3rd century − continues to have relevance today

The Lotus Sutra − an ancient Buddhist scripture from the 3rd century − continues to have relevance today

(The Conversation) — State legislatures across the United States have introduced over 400 bills to limit transgender Americans’ rights. Many of these bills’ sponsors, such as the Christian nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom, cite Christian values as well as the values of the other Abrahamic faiths – Judaism and Islam – to justify their anti-trans positions. The Alliance Defending Freedom claims that Christians, Jews and Muslims view gender as binary and defined only by biology, though these religions’ diverse followers actually hold a range of views on LGBTQ+ issues. Historically, these religions were often more accepting of varied gender identities before colonialism imposed binary gender as a universal concept. Religious values from multiple traditions have supported transgender identity. As a scholar of Buddhism and gender, I know that several Buddhist texts treat gender as fluid. One such text is the Lotus Sutra, one of the most popular Buddhist scriptures in East Asia. Its core message is that everyone, no matter their gender or status, has the potential to become a Buddha. The Lotus Sutra conveys its …

Relevance AI’s low-code platform enables businesses to build AI teams

Relevance AI’s low-code platform enables businesses to build AI teams

Many companies already use generative AI tools, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can help improve workers’ performance by as much as 40% compared with workers who don’t use it. However, only businesses with large engineering teams can build their own AI workforces. An Australia-based startup, Relevance AI, wants to help companies of all sizes build custom AI agents for any use case or function to maximize productivity with its SaaS-based low-code platform.  “Our mission is to enable teams only to be limited by their ideas, not their size — from the seasoned industry player to the ambitious newcomer,” co-founder of Relevance AI Daniel Vassilev said. “We take out the complexity and make it possible for AI agents to work autonomously and complete detailed workflows or accomplish complex tasks with accuracy and predictability that companies can trust.”  The startup said it had raised $10 million (AUD 15 million) in a Series A funding round led by King River Capital with participation from global investors Peak XV’s Surge, Galileo Venture and its previous investor Insight Partners. Relevance AI will …