Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

Renowned researchers pen letter to outline benefits, pitfalls of AI Renowned scientists and technology leaders including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have issued a warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence. The group signed a letter that touts the many benefits of AI, and outlines the many risks. “Because of the great potential of AI […]

Rhesus monkeys can be taught to recognize their images in mirrors Mirror recognition can be taught to rhesus monkeys, according to researchers who say the findings could help them better understand how self-awareness develops in the brain. “Our findings suggest that the monkey brain has the basic ‘hardware’ [for mirror self-recognition], but they need appropriate […]

Researchers develop memory system with 900+ neurons, 165K synapses Researchers at IBM’s Almaden Research Center and South Korea’s Pohang University of Science and Technology have developed a phase-change memory chip with more than 900 neurons and 165,000 synapses that can emulate how the human brain functions, promising to advance image-recognition technology and other areas of […]

Last week we knew the ten most read articles during 2014. Using the number of hits a post receives is an objective way of pinpointing some of the outstanding publications of the year. But it could be argued that some excellent, quality posts would not appear in this short list, and this is precisely true […]

One last aspect in which Dembski’s use of the ideas of information and probability are confusing is the fact that it seems to ignore what is an inescapable consequence of a theory ( T ) being an explanation of certain phenomena or empirical laws ( E ). Since a necessary requisite for T to explain […]

At this time of the year it seems appropiate to look back and check whatever has been achieved. 2014 has been a good year for MI, with contributors located in 3 continents and 36 different academic institutions (ranging, alphabetically, from Cornell University in United States to Waseda University in Japan), publishing 153 articles. Thank you […]

Insurance markets are far from meeting the conditions that make competitive markets efficient. Here is an incomplete but illustrative list of problems in the case of health insurance: Externalities : my health quality affects me, but also affects people around me, like in the case of contagious diseases. Economic theory predicts that consumers will not […]

What ‘hok’ and ‘krak’ mean to monkeys The structure of monkey calls is surprisingly sophisticated: The same species of monkeys—located in separate geographic regions—use their alarm calls differently to warn of approaching predators. Futurity.org Life would drastically change if all bacteria disappeared Living for a time without bacteria is possible, but probably not very pleasant […]

After having shown the ways in which Richard Dembski’s ‘explanatory filter’ (EF) in support of the ‘intelligent design theory’ (ID) misconceives and misapplies the nature of scientific explanation, I shall devote the last entries of this series to discuss another mistake in Dembski’s work: the way in which he employs the ‘no free lunch’ theorems […]

If in the two previous entries of this series we have seen that (contrarily to what Dembski’s filter suggests and needs) ‘law’ and ‘hazard’ are not different types of explanations, but necessary and complementary elements of basically all explanatory models, I will try to show here that ‘explanation from purpose’ is not as significantly different […]