Multilingual masked language modeling involves training an AI model on text from several languages, and it’s a technique that’s been used to great effect. In March, a team introduced an architecture that can jointly learn sentence representations for 93 languages belonging to more than 30 different families. But most previous work in language modeling has […]
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I’m impressed by Apple’s new Research app for the iPhone and Apple Watch. It’s beautifully designed, ambitious in scope, and so intimately tied into the iOS and watchOS operating systems that it could serve as a singular example of Apple’s “seamless integration of hardware, software, and services.” But after digging into the Research app, I […]
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In 1976, the Harvard School of Public Health and two other major medical institutions started a study on nurses that has become one of the largest and longest research efforts ever conducted on women’s health. They have so far enrolled more than 275,000 participants. On Thursday, the Harvard school announced an even more ambitious women’s […]
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Following the debut of iOS 13.2, which included under-the-hood support for a new optional medical study app called Research, Apple today released both the standalone app and its first three studies: the Apple Heart and Movement Study, the Apple Women’s Health Study, and the Apple Hearing Study. The free app works on a paired iPhone and […]
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During a “dopamine fast,” you’re supposed to abstain from the kinds of things you normally enjoy doing, such as alcohol, sex, drugs, gaming, talking to others, going online and, in some extremes, pleasurable eating. The idea is to “reset” your neurochemical system by de-stimulating it. If it sounds a bit out there, you’re not alone […]
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If you’re going to fly for nearly 20 hours through multiple time zones dressed in a pair of kangaroo-themed pajamas, jolting in and out of sleep in contravention of your normal circadian rhythm, you should take it easy on the medication. No one wants to go crazy in a metal tube 40,000 feet above the […]
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SAN FRANCISCO — Last fall, Google unveiled a breakthrough artificial intelligence technology called BERT that changed the way scientists build systems that learn how people write and talk. But BERT, which is now being deployed in services like Google’s internet search engine, has a problem: It could be picking up on biases in the way […]
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LONDON — Britain’s academic community has mobilized in support of a Cambridge University scholar whose request for permanent residency was denied, she says, because she spent too much time outside of the country working on her doctoral thesis. The scholar, Asiya Islam, a junior research fellow in the University of Cambridge’s sociology department who has […]
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One of the biggest arguments for paid leave for new parents has been an economic one: Research has repeatedly shown that women with paid time off after childbirth are more likely to keep working. But a new study, the largest to be done in the United States, found the opposite. In California, which in 2004 […]
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Americans don’t have to be beholden to the tech Goliaths to get the benefits of artificial intelligence. An alternative possibility is for government to provide the infrastructure needed for a technological future — through a public option for artificial intelligence. Big tech companies have an extraordinary amount of data about how we behave, largely because […]
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LONDON — We humans make a lonely crowd, and it’s killing us. Social isolation is more lethal than smoking 15 cigarettes a day, or than obesity, according to research published by Julianne Holt-Lunstad of Brigham Young University. Since obesity is associated in the United States with 300,000 to 600,000 deaths a year, the implication is […]
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It is a message that was drilled into bicyclists when they were children learning to ride for the first time: Wear your helmet so that you do not crack your skull. In some states, that is the law — for minors, anyway. But there are no statewide laws mandating that all cyclists, including grown-ups, wear […]
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News organizations have devoted considerable resources to tallying and correcting thousands of misleading statements — and outright lies — made by President Trump and his supporters. At the same time, the president has frequently and falsely accused mainstream news organizations of disseminating “fake news.” The threat to a free press and the political dangers posed […]
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AI and machine learning algorithms are becoming increasingly good at predicting next actions in videos. The very best can anticipate fairly accurately where a baseball might travel after it’s been pitched, or the appearance of a road miles from a starting position. To this end, a novel approach proposed by researchers at Google, the University […]
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Reducing Pete Buttigieg’s struggle to attract black support solely to black homophobia is not only erroneous, it is a disgusting, racist trope, secretly nursed and insidiously whispered by white liberals with contempt for the very black people they court and need. I have never been blind to this — the people who see black religiosity […]
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Doctors have for the first time tested a powerful gene-editing technique in people with cancer. The test, meant to assess only safety, was the first step toward the ultimate goal of editing genes to help a patient’s own immune system to attack cancer. The editing was done by the DNA-snipping tool Crispr. The procedure was […]
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A pack of baldheaded, boldly plumaged birds steps through the grass shoulder to shoulder, red eyes darting around. They look like middle schoolers seeking a cafeteria table at lunchtime. Perhaps they’re not so different. A study published Monday in Current Biology shows that the vulturine guineafowl of eastern Africa, like humans, have many-layered societies. In […]
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Despite bipartisan calls to treat drug addiction as a public health issue rather than as a crime — and despite the legalization of marijuana in more states — arrests for drugs increased again last year. According to estimated crime statistics released by the F.B.I. in September, there were 1,654,282 arrests for drugs in 2018, a […]
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Usually you have to talk to voice assistants to get them to do what you want. But a group of researchers determined they can also command them by shining a laser at smart speakers and other gadgets that house virtual helpers such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google’s Assistant. A Google Home smart speaker sits on […]
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The fires that have ignited in California, leading to mass evacuations and seemingly otherworldly scenes, may have gotten their start from a surprising source. Invasive grasses, or grasses that have encroached from other regions, can make wildfires more frequent, not just in California but nationwide, according to a study published Monday in the journal PNAS. […]
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