The Creepy Uncanny Valley Of Targeted Online Marketing
Personalized online ads must work for the same reason advertising must work; it wouldn't be a trillion-dollar industry if it didn't work. Even supplements and organic food are only $140 billion, and those are really popular things that don't work. Advertising is not popular at all but good luck succeeding without it.Yet there are limits for what people accept without being uncomfortable. In robots and animation, that has long been termed the 'uncanny valley' - where something is not lifelike enough to look real but too lifelike to be acceptable. Some digital marketing has its own uncanny valley; where it becomes unsettling. Examples are people who say they mentioned something in the presence of their Amazon Echo and then ads on Facebook began to target them.
Teens Are Getting Much Less Sleep Than In The Past
A new paper says teens are not getting enough sleep and a lot of parents with teenage children may disagree. Others reflexively blame phones and tablets.It isn't a new concern, though. Nor is technology new in getting blame. In 1905, The Lancet published a study saying that kids in British boarding schools were getting less sleep than was healthy, and the reason was the new popularity of affordable lighting. “Late to bed and early to rise is neither physiological nor wise,” the authors wrote.
By the 1950s, the concern was in culture again, this time due to radio and television keeping children up. In all instances, overstimulation, mental health, and poor academic achievement is invoked.
Ozempic Is A Kickstart, Not Magic – Here Is How To Make Weight Loss Stick
Publicly doctors say all of the things you'd expect a group with heavy state and federal scrutiny to say about weight loss drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy but privately they say things like 'people will be on it for the rest of their lives.'Spring Forward Fall Back: We Hate Changing Clocks But Hate One Change Most
In 1918, with Gen Black Jack Pershing off to France to stop the Germans in World War I, the United States instituted Daylight Saving Time. The public were told it was to save energy sources that would be needed for the war but in June America stopped the Germans cold at the Marne, and then pushed them back toward Germany in July, and by November had ended that war.Yet Daylight Saving Time remained. It still exists 100 years later despite energy savings claims long being debunked, and it being broadly unpopular. Government routinely says they might change it, but when they do they say they would switch permanently to the one everyone actually hates the most, which is the most government thing you will read today.
Canadian Epidemiologists Claim Processed Foods Cause Bad Kids
A cohort analysis of preschoolers in Canada has led the authors of the paper to call for bans on so-called "ultraprocessed" foods, charging that it will lead to long-term mental health and well-behaved children.What AI Can’t Do: Humanity’s Last Exam
By this time 25 years ago, the "Dot-Com Bubble" was ready to burst. People who wanted to raise investor money claimed that they could sell anything affordably on a website; three companies were devoted just to pet food and buying ad space on broadcast television.So-called AI is enjoying a similar frenzy. Though they are still just Large Language Models (LLMs), and the best analogy for that is a fancy autocomplete, they are attracting huge levels of financial investment partly because of the potential and then primarily because people want to make money on stocks, not companies.
Does NBA Income Inequality Impact Team Performance?
A new paper says that players where a few superstars get the money leads to less cooperation and poor team performance. The authors say this salary compression is why teams won fewer games.The authors also suggest that companies should strive for more equity in pay, to increase synchronized effort. Because individual effort by key people isn't enough.
They may have a point. The U.S. Army pays everyone, good or bad, the same, and it is the best in the world. But current military and veterans will laugh if a humanities academic suggests it it more efficient or cooperative because of equal pay. Instead, they will tell the stories of all the people their unit had to carry, because it's not a meritocracy and reductions only happen at promotion tiers.
RIP To Dr. William Foege, The Man Whose Math Eliminated Smallpox
In the modern world, it is easy to be newly concerned about the World Health Organisation. They were the last to declare COVID-19 a pandemic, they said not to blame China, and stood by while China bullied them into staying silence while the communist dictatorship tried to blame COVID-19 on American frozen food, and not their sloppy coronavirus lab next to the Wuhan wet market, where employees from the lab had already been caught selling experimental animals.It's not new. Once upon time, they denied that Smallpox could be eliminated.
Scholars Who Got Sold On The Academic Life Feel The Pressure
Professor Peter Mitchell got a Nobel Prize in 1978 for a chemiosmotic hypothesis of how ATP is made. Basically, how mitochondria turn fat, protein, and sugar into energy. Like most science, his breakthrough was built on 70 years of work by people before him, including Professor Fred Crane, who discovered Coenzyme Q, the body's natural antioxidant, in 1957.Misinformation Common Among Women With Breast Cancer
Vaccines are getting American media attention now that Republicans are engaging in misinformation the way Democrats did for decades, but there has long been a war on the pharmaceutical and medical communities.When the HPV vaccine was first rolled out, progressives began the conspiracy theory that it was due to the Vioxx settlement by Merck. Vaccines did not have the same "accountability" (read: predatort lawyers being able to sue and win if they just convince a jury a product may have caused problems) so they created products like Gardasil to claw back their revenue.(1)