Posts

Got wood? Tech is ensuring we never suffer another lumber shortage Lumberjacks can now safely go back to being hipsters Where did all the lumber go? The spike was prompted by several factors, the least of them being a shortage of trees. At the start of the pandemic, there was low demand for lumber and sawmill inventories were equally low, thanks to labor cuts and health restrictions. Then the lockdown happened, leading to an uptick in DIY home improvement, building, and buying of new homes; projects that ordinarily require a lot of woodwork....

Got wood? Tech is ensuring we never suffer another lumber shortage Lumberjacks can now safely go back to being hipsters Where did all the lumber go? The spike was prompted by several factors, the least of them being a shortage of trees. At the start of the pandemic, there was low demand for lumber and sawmill inventories were equally low, thanks to labor cuts and health restrictions. Then the lockdown happened, leading to an uptick in DIY home improvement, building, and buying of new homes; projects that ordinarily require a lot of woodwork....

Got Zoom fatigue? Blame your out-of-sync brainwaves Let’s make Zoom calls less of a cognitive drag Cognitive anatomy of a conversation I already had some expertise in studying conversation. Pre-pandemic, I conducted several experiments investigating how topic shifts and working memory load affect the timing of when speakers in a conversation take turns. In that research, I found thatpauses between speakers were longerwhen the two speakers were talking about different things, or if a speaker was distracted by another task while conversing....

Got Zoom fatigue? Blame your out-of-sync brainwaves Let’s make Zoom calls less of a cognitive drag Cognitive anatomy of a conversation I already had some expertise in studying conversation. Pre-pandemic, I conducted several experiments investigating how topic shifts and working memory load affect the timing of when speakers in a conversation take turns. In that research, I found thatpauses between speakers were longerwhen the two speakers were talking about different things, or if a speaker was distracted by another task while conversing....

GPT-3 mimics human love for ‘offensive’ Reddit comments, study finds Toxic kinship Offensive contexts The researchers, from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Washington, investigated contextually offensive language by developing “ToxiChat,” a dataset of 2,000 Reddit threads. To study the behavior of neuralchatbots, they extended the threads with responses generated byOpenAI’sGPT-3 and Microsoft’s DialoGPT. They then paid workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk to annotate the responses as “safe” or “offensive....