Author: Roberto Rey Agudo, Research Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Dartmouth College The idea of a humanlike artificial intelligence assistant that you can speak with has been alive in many people’s imaginations since the release of “Her,” Spike Jonze’s 2013 film about a man who falls in love with a Siri-like AI named Samantha […]
For the problem of scientific realism, the most consequential implication of the ‘ugly duckling theorem’ we met in our last entry was that judgments of similarity seem to be not reducible to any kind of algorithmic definition that might tell in an objective way how much ‘similar’ is one thing to another, for these judgments […]
Authors: Joëlle Vanhamme, Professor of Marketing, EDHEC Business School, and Valerie Swaen, Professor of Marketing and Corporate Social Responsibility, Université catholique de Louvain Is renting clothes instead of buying them truly better for the planet? As the textile industry faces growing scrutiny for its environmental impact, clothing rental services promise consumers the opportunity to refresh […]
As we saw in my last entry, Karl Popper suggested around 1960 a way of formalising the idea that science can proceed towards the (full) truth through a series of theories or hypotheses all of which are literally false. Basically, his proposal was to define the relation of ‘theory A being at least as close […]
Physics, a cornerstone of engineering and science degrees, often becomes a daunting hurdle for many first-year students. Abstract concepts like Ohm’s Law or Lorentz Force, essential for any student, are frequently perceived as distant and disconnected from real-world applications. This classic challenge (physics courses being among the hardest) plays a significant role in academic failure […]
A new archaeological study , conducted along the Jordan River banks south of northern Israel’s Hula Valley, offers a fresh perspective on the dietary habits of early humans, challenging conventional wisdom about prehistoric diets. The research reveals that ancient hunter-gatherers relied heavily on plant foods, particularly starchy plants, as a major energy source. The findings […]
Probably, the most common assumption about scientific knowledge amongst the general public, and certainly amongst a substantial percentage of the philosophers of science, is that science attempts to find out the truth about the world (just like many other institutions or professions, like the courts, the police or whoever that needs to look for information […]
Author: Alexander V. Gheorghiu, Research Fellow in Logic or Applied Logic, University College London The rigid structures of language we once clung to with certainty are cracking. Take gender, nationality or religion: these concepts no longer sit comfortably in the stiff linguistic boxes of the last century. Simultaneously, the rise of AI presses upon us […]
Scientists believe individuals of the most recently discovered hominin group (the Denisovans) that interbred with modern day humans passed on some of their genes via multiple, distinct interbreeding events that helped shape early human history. In 2010, the first draft of the Neanderthal genome was published, and comparisons with modern human genomes revealed that Neanderthal […]
The idea of the countless “virtual worlds” that the metaverse will contain is, as we saw in our last entry, an extrapolation of the idea of “video game worlds,” not necessarily regarding their playful nature—since the metaverse is expected to be a place for almost any kind of activity, not just leisure—but in the sense […]