The brain listens for things it is trying to predict

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The brain interprets sounds as they contrast with its expectations; it recognizes patterns of sounds faster when they’re in line with what it is predicting it will hear, but it only encodes sounds when they contrast with expectations, according to Technische U researchers.

The researchers showed this by monitoring the two principal nuclei of the subcortical pathway responsible for auditory processing: the inferior colliculus and the medial geniculate body, as their subjects listened to patterns of sounds which the researches modified so that sometimes they would hear an expected sound pattern, and other times something unexpected.

Source: Alejandro Tabas, Glad Mihai, Stefan Kiebel, Robert Trampel, Katharina von Kriegstein. Abstract rules drive adaptation in the subcortical sensory pathway. eLife, 2020; 9 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.64501

We have a particular way of understanding a room

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When several research subjects were instructed to explore an empty room, and when they were instead seated in a chair and watched someone else explore the room, their brain waves followed a certain pattern, as recorded by a backpack hooked up to record their brain waves, eye movements, and paths. It didn’t matter if they were walking or watching someone else, according to UC researchers led by Dr Matthias Stangl.

The researchers also tested what happened when subjects searched for a hidden spot, or watched someone else do so, and found that brain waves flowed more strongly when they had a goal and hunted for something.

Source: Matthias Stangl, Uros Topalovic, Cory S. Inman, Sonja Hiller, Diane Villaroman, Zahra M. Aghajan, Leonardo Christov-Moore, Nicholas R. Hasulak, Vikram R. Rao, Casey H. Halpern, Dawn Eliashiv, Itzhak Fried, Nanthia Suthana. Boundary-anchored neural mechanisms of location-encoding for self and others. Nature, 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-03073-y

Extroverts and introverts use different vocabularies

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Extroverts use ‘positive emotion’ and ‘social process’ words more often than introverts, according to new research conducted at Nanyang Technological U.

‘Love,’ ‘happy,’ and ‘blessed’ indicate pleasant emotions, and ‘beautiful’ and ‘nice’ indicate positivity or optimism, and are among the words found to be used more often by extroverts. So too are ‘meet,’ ‘share,’ and ‘talk,’ which are about socializing. Extroverts use personal pronouns — except ‘I’ — more too, another indication of sociability.

The correlation, however, was small, and the researchers think that stronger linguistic indicators need to be found to achieve their general goal, which is improving machine learning approaches to targeting consumer marketing.

Source: Jiayu Chen, Lin Qiu, Moon-Ho Ringo Ho. A meta-analysis of linguistic markers of extraversion: Positive emotion and social process words. Journal of Research in Personality, 2020; 89: 104035 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2020.104035

WhatsApp is changing today – Users must give the app permission to send their private data to Facebook or lose account

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WhatsApp was bought by Facebook in 2014, but has thrived while promoting itself as a privacy-respecting messaging app that now has 1.5b monthly active users. This week, though, WhatApp sent out an update to users’ phones that they must ‘consent’ to a new policy or lose access.

Whatsapp will now share more of your data, including your IP address (your location) and phone number, your account registration information, your transaction data, and service-related data, interactions on WhatsApp, and other data collected based on your consent, with Facebook’s other companies. Facebook has been working towards more closely integrating Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.

Users who do not agree to ‘consent’ to the new policy will see their WhatsApp account become inaccessible until they do ‘consent.’ These accounts will remain dormant for 120 days after which they will be ‘deleted.’

The biggest change to the user policy, which many people ignored and clicked ‘agree’ to, thinking it was just another unimportant app update message, now reads,

‘We collect information about your activity on our Services, like service-related, diagnostic, and performance information. This includes information about your activity (including how you use our Services, your Services settings, how you interact with others using our Services (including when you interact with a business), and the time, frequency, and duration of your activities and interactions), log files, and diagnostic, crash, website, and performance logs and reports. This also includes information about when you registered to use our Services; the features you use like our messaging, calling, Status, groups (including group name, group picture, group description), payments or business features; profile photo, “about” information; whether you are online, when you last used our Services (your “last seen”); and when you last updated your “about” information.’

Notably, Elon Musk tweeted on the news, saying that WhatsApp users should switch to Signal, one of several popular privacy-focused messaging apps similar to WhatsApp.

The data sharing policy change doesn’t affect people in Europe due to GDPR data protection regulations.

President Trump silenced on top social media platforms after mob storms Capitol

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President Trump silenced on top social media platforms after mob storms Capitol
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The US president was locked out from posting new messages on his Facebook and Twitter accounts after an unruly group of supporters assembled outside the capitol building where Biden’s election win was being confirmed.

The lockdown on Twitter lasted 12 hours until the president removed tweets Twitter said violated its ‘civic integrity policy,’ but Zuckerburg said that Trump would be silenced on Facebook and Instagram for at least two more weeks until his presidential term was over. Facebook and Twitter are two of the main ways the president communicates with citizens and the world.

It is the first time social media platforms have chosen to limit the free speech of such an important figure.

Trump’s tweets from Jan 6, 2020, as recorded by thetrumparchive.com

Many news organizations covered the story using language such as ‘Trump Incites Rioters.’

Following Trumps ‘ban,’ there was renewed talk about treating social media platforms, where people share informative content, as publishers themselves, in part because their algorithms amplify things shared when those things are engaging. There was also talk about how the social media platforms that censored the president’s content did so as a response to content or events but without first drawing their ‘red line’ and saying which content is and isn’t allowed on their platforms.

Some of Trump’s staff resigned following the incident at the Capitol building, and there were also a lot of questions why the national guard wasn’t capable of handling the incident properly.

UPDATE January 8: Twitter permanently banned Trump’s account. Google removed Parler, an app like Twitter used by Trump supporters, from the Android app store to make it harder for people to download it, saying Google requires social media apps to have content moderation policies to remove posts that incite violence.

LED lights can kill 99.9% of Coronavirus in under 30 seconds, scientists find

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LED lights can kill 99.9% of Coronavirus in under 30 seconds, scientists find
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“The entire world is currently looking for effective solutions to disinfect the Coronavirus. The problem is that in order to disinfect a bus, train, sports hall, or plane by chemical spraying, you need physical manpower, and in order for the spraying to be effective, you have to give the chemical time to act on the surface,” according to the lead researcher of the Tel Aviv U team who worked on the research, Professor Hadas Mamane. “Disinfection systems based on LED bulbs, however, can be installed in the ventilation system and air conditioner, for example, and sterilize the air sucked in and then emitted into the room.”

That light kills viruses has long been understood and it is already used for this purpose. The team’s work showed, however, the optimal type of LED light to specifically inactivate Conoavirus. Notably, they found that cheaper, more common 285nm LED bulbs are almost as efficient as 265u bulbs. The cheaper bulbs kill 99.9% of the virus in under half a minute, the team showed. The research is expected to have commercial applications.

“We discovered that it is quite simple to kill the Coronavirus using LED bulbs that radiate ultraviolet light,” explained Mamane. “We killed the viruses using cheaper and more readily available LED bulbs, which consume little energy and do not contain mercury like regular bulbs. Our research has commercial and societal implications, given the possibility of using such LED bulbs in all areas of our lives, safely and quickly.”

It’s important to note that regular people shouldn’t just try to use LED light to disinfect things without understanding the dangers involved. LED, light other types of light, can be harmful to people when not handled safely.

The research was published in the Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology.

Abortion legalized in Argentina

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Previously in the country abortion was only legal in rape cases and when the mother’s health was in danger, but now it’s legal as a choice until 14 weeks into a pregnancy. Just two years ago the Argentinian senate most recently voted against legalizing abortion. Abortion had been illegal in the country since 1921.

The senate vote was a split decision, 38-29-1, taken after a 12-hour debate. During the debate large crowds of campaigners on both sides of the issue assembled outside Congress in Buenos Aires.

The Latin Church opposed the Catholic country’s move, but Argentinian center-left President Alberto Fernández had made reintroducing the abortion bill one of his campaign promises, stating at one point “I’m Catholic but I have to legislate for everyone.”

The president also commented on the health facet of the issue, stating that 3000 women had died in the past 40 years due to clandestine abortion procedures, and almost 40,000 women each year make trips to the hospital as a result of such procedures.

The vote was also noteworthy because several Congresspeople, who had been undecided or who had voted against previous legalization bills, voted in favor of legalization this time. One such, Senator Silvina García Larraburu, stated “My vote is in favour of free women, of women who can decide according to their own conscience.”

Arguing for the other side, senator Inés Blas said, “The interruption of a pregnancy is a tragedy. It abruptly ends another developing life.”

The change in law was brought about largely by the country’s grassroots “green wave,” part of Argentina’s growing women’s movement. These activists have been working toward abortion legalization for 15 years and have introduced seven similar bills over that time to Congress without success.

In legalizing abortion on request, Argentinia follows in Latin America Cuba, Guyana, Puerto Rico, some Mexican States, and most recently Uruguay, who legalized abortion in 2012.

Many have noted that pro-abortion activists in other Latin American countries, where similar abortion laws exist, will see the Argentinian vote as a possible precedent for change.

Meeting Scheduler Tool – Set a meeting time 2 different timezones

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[cal_i18n_meeting_tool]

1. Set your timezone (usually the capital city of your country or the biggest city in your region if it’s a multi-timezone country).

2. Set your friend’s timezone.

3. Set the date and time of the meeting in your timezone (the final dashes in the time are for PM or AM)

4. ‘Click here’ button

You can copy the link and share it with your friend, and he can see exactly what you’re seeing now. He can make changes and send a link back to you if he wants to.

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Match Your Schedules Tool (MYS) – Line up your schedule with someone in another country

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[cal_mys_tool]

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This tool is for people who want to see how their available hours line up with the availability of a friend somewhere else in the world (a different time zone). There’s a video below to show how to use it, but you can also just read the following 4 steps.

Step 1: Select your timezone (usually this will be listed by the capital city of your country or the largest city of your timezone region. Once you find it, it will be easy to access it in the future)

Step 2: Select your friend’s timezone the same way

Step 3: Click between the schedules to highlight your hours of availability. You can do your friend’s hours as well, but probably you won’t want to.

Optional step: Type some text as a message or reminder to your friend

Step 4: Click ‘Generate Link’ at the bottom of the tool

It creates a link. If you share this link, whoever clicks it will see exactly what you are seeing now. Your friend can then fill in his hours or add a note, make a new link and send it back to you.

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