Tag: Pocket

Writing scientific articles is an integral part of the scientific method and common practice to communicate research findings. However, writing is not only about reporting results; it also provides a tool to uncover new thoughts and ideas. Writing compels us to think — not in the chaotic, non-linear way our minds typically wander, but in a structured, intentional manner. By writing it down, we can sort years of research, data and analysis into an actual story, thereby identifying our main message and the influence of our work. This is not merely a philosophical observation; it is backed by scientific evidence. For example, handwriting can lead to widespread brain connectivity1 and has positive effects on learning and memory.

This is a call to continue recognizing the importance of human-generated scientific writing.

Writing is thinking | Nature Reviews Bioengineering

The discovery that mRNA vaccines were powerful immune activators came from research conducted by Grippin during his graduate work at the University of Florida in the lab of Elias Sayour, M.D., Ph.D. While developing personalized mRNA-based cancer vaccines for brain tumors, Grippin and Sayour found that mRNA vaccines trained immune systems to eliminate cancer cells, even when the mRNA didn’t target tumors directly.

This finding led to the hypothesis that other types of mRNA vaccines might have the same effect, and the approval and use of mRNA-based COVID vaccines created an opportunity to test this hypothesis. Lin and Grippin initiated a major effort to retrospectively study if MD Anderson patients who received mRNA COVID vaccines lived longer than those who did not receive these vaccines.

ESMO 2025: mRNA-based COVID vaccines generate improved responses to immunotherapy | UT MD Anderson

When I make a list of tasks for the day, I put fewer items on it. I had been underestimating the cost of switching, so I was chronically overestimating what I could actually get done in a day. (This pervasive cognitive bias is known as the planning fallacy.) The result was that I would end up trying to multitask to keep up with my list, which meant that I both performed worse and took longer. I would then carry over unfinished tasks to the next day’s list, until it got so long that I gave up and threw it in the trash. Then the cycle would begin again. Now I start my daily list with a single task that, if accomplished, will mean it was a good day

— Read on www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/05/monotasking-inside-the-box-excerpt-david-epstein/687015/

“The overview effect is when you’re looking through the cupola and you see the Earth as it exists with the whole universe in the background. You see the thin blue line of the atmosphere, and then when you’re on the dark side of the Earth, you actually see this very thin green line that shows you where the atmosphere is. What you realize is every single person that you know is sustained and inside of that green line and everything else outside of it is completely inhospitable. You don’t see borders, you don’t see religious lines, you don’t see political boundaries. All you see is Earth and you see that we are way more alike than we are different.”

– Artemis II Mission Specialist Christina Koch

The Overview Effect: Astronaut Perspectives from 25 Years in Low Earth Orbit – NASA

In a randomized trial of 1,000 high school students, those using GPT-4 performed much better on practice problems but scored 17 percent worse once the AI was removed. The likely culprit was overreliance: students asked for answers, copied them, and moved on. But the researchers also showed that a more structured prompt that offered step-by-step hints rather than direct answers largely eliminated the negative effects. In some ways, that was the most important finding: the design of the AI tutor mattered enormously.
— Read on www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/ai-works-in-education-when-it-makes-learning-harder-not-easier/

In a world where your economic value can evaporate overnight, “Become a whole person” sounds like advice from someone who has never worried about next month’s rent. The utilitarian case for education has the force of necessity behind it. For millions of people, making yourself useful is what responsibility to their families demands.

Yet if the response to being replaceable is always to train for a different function, you have entered a race you structurally cannot win. The principle that makes your education valuable is the same principle that makes you disposable the moment the function migrates.

The scramble into computer science was an early sign of the trap: students rushed toward the field that seemed safest, and then AI began destabilizing the very functions it trained them to perform. The flight to function looks rational from inside it; that is what makes it a trap.
— Read on blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/you-are-not-a-function

Within hours Carlini found numerous techniques to infiltrate systems used around the world. Once Carlini was back in Anthropic’s downtown San Francisco office, he discovered Mythos was able to autonomously create powerful break-in tools, including against Linux, the open-source code that underpins most of modern computing.

Mythos orchestrated the digital equivalent of a bank robbery: getting past security protocols and through the front door of networks, and breaking into digital vaults that gave it access to online treasures. AI had picked locks, but now it could pull off an entire heist.

Carlini and some of his colleagues began alerting staff to what they’d found. And each day they continued to discover high-severity and critical bugs in the systems Mythos probed, the kind of flaws normally uncovered by the world’s best hackers.

How Anthropic Discovered Mythos AI Was Too Dangerous For Release – Bloomberg

The “expensive” bag costs less. But VF Corp doesn’t want you to do this math, because the $35 bag creates a repeat customer every eighteen months. The $200 bag creates one transaction and zero follow-ups. From a shareholder’s perspective, the bag that falls apart is the better product.
That’s the business model. Repeat failure, repeat purchase, repeat revenue. The quality decline isn’t a side effect. It’s the strategy.
— Read on www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-backpack-got-worse-on-purpose

The central claim is this: when you scroll a social media feed, watch algorithmically recommended content, or interact with any digital interface that monitors your behavior, you are not merely consuming a free product. You are simultaneously producing a distinct economic output — behavioral data that serves as a critical input to AI training, targeted advertising, and algorithmic product development. This production is not compensated by wages. It is not recorded in any national accounting system. And its aggregate value may be large enough to reshape our understanding of the global economy.

The six hours and forty-seven minutes on my screen time report are not wasted time. They may be uncompensated labor. And the difference between those two interpretations has consequences that reach far beyond my Sunday morning guilt.
— Read on navvaidhyanathanatvysdomai.substack.com/p/dark-gdp-the-economics-of-entangled