Bridge Of Writing (Domination #1) - DeYtH Banger (story read aloud .txt) 📗

Bed bugs are trying to get into your dirty laundry

 

Paris (AFP) - Like a pining lover, bed bugs will seek out your smell and snuggle up to your worn clothes when you are not around, researchers said Thursday.

This explains how these tiny, flightless, reclusive creatures have managed their meteoric spread around the world -- by catching a free ride in our dirty laundry, a team wrote in the journal Scientific Reports.

"A mechanism for this long-distance dispersal has never been empirically tested," study co-author William Hentley of the University of Sheffield told AFP.

Some had thought that bed bugs accidentally fell on our clothing or luggage after feeding on our blood, then tag along home from the hotel.

But the new study showed the pests, known to be attracted to the smell of sleeping humans, actively seek out our worn clothes.

Hentley and a team tested the predilections of bed bugs in a series of unusual experiments.

Human volunteers washed themselves with a non-perfumed soap, then wore a clean T-shirt and socks for about six hours. 

The clothes were placed in a sealed, airtight plastic bag before being transferred to a cotton tote bag.

Four bags -- two with dirty T-shirts and socks, and two with clean ones -- were placed in a room at an equal distance from the centre.

Bed bugs, fed to satiation on human blood, were then released and observed.

After four days, researchers noted the location of the bugs and found that most were on the bags containing soiled clothes.

The experiment was repeated a few times.

"Bed bugs have shown a recent and rapid global expansion that has been suggested to be caused by cheap air travel," the authors wrote.

"Our results show, for the first time, how leaving worn clothing exposed in sleeping areas when travelling can be exploited by bed bugs to facilitate passive dispersal."

Last year, research showed that bed bugs had become genetically wired to resist pesticides, further aiding their global conquest.

The common bedbug, Cimex lectularius, is found in temperate climates in the United States and parts of Europe.

It has proved especially hard to eradicate after potent poisons like DDT were banned in the United States after World War II. 

By the late 1990s, the critters were thriving in New York and a 2010 outbreak saw them invade high-end apartment buildings, hotels, even clothing stores like lingerie outlet Victoria's Secret.

There has also been an explosion of bed bugs in Paris in recent years.

Deus ex machina: former Google engineer is developing an AI god

 

Way of the Future, a religious group founded by Anthony Levandowski, wants to create a deity based on artificial intelligence for the betterment of society

 Are you there God? It’s me, robot. Photograph: Ociacia/Getty Images/iStockphoto

 

 

Intranet service? Check. Autonomous motorcycle? Check. Driverless car technology? Check. Obviously the next logical project for a successful Silicon Valley engineer is to set up an AI-worshipping religious organization.

Anthony Levandowski, who is at the center of a legal battle between Uber and Google’s Waymo, has established a nonprofit religious corporation called Way of the Future, according to state filings first uncovered by Wired’s Backchannel. Way of the Future’s startling mission: “To develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society.”

 

 

 

Levandowski was co-founder of autonomous trucking company Otto, which Uber bought in 2016. He was fired from Uber in May amid allegations that he had stolen trade secrets from Google to develop Otto’s self-driving technology. He must be grateful for this religious fall-back project, first registered in 2015.

The Way of the Future team did not respond to requests for more information about their proposed benevolent AI overlord, but history tells us that new technologies and scientific discoveries have continually shaped religion, killing old gods and giving birth to new ones.

As author Yuval Noah Harari notes: “That is why agricultural deities were different from hunter-gatherer spirits, why factory hands and peasants fantasised about different paradises, and why the revolutionary technologies of the 21st century are far more likely to spawn unprecedented religious movements than to revive medieval creeds.”

Religions, Harari argues, must keep up with the technological advancements of the day or they become irrelevant, unable to answer or understand the quandaries facing their disciples.

“The church does a terrible job of reaching out to Silicon Valley types,” acknowledges Christopher Benek a pastor in Florida and founding chair of the Christian Transhumanist Association.

Silicon Valley, meanwhile, has sought solace in technology and has developed quasi-religious concepts including the “singularity”, the hypothesis that machines will eventually be so smart that they will outperform all human capabilities, leading to a superhuman intelligence that will be so sophisticated it will be incomprehensible to our tiny fleshy, rational brains.

 

 

Anthony Levandowski, the former head of Uber’s self-driving program, with one of the company’s driverless cars in San Francisco. Photograph: Eric Risberg/AP

For futurists like Ray Kurzweil, this means we’ll be able to upload copies of our brains to these machines, leading to digital immortality. Others like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking warn that such systems pose an existential threat to humanity.

“With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon,” Musk said at a conference in 2014. “In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like – yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out.”

Benek argues that advanced AI is compatible with Christianity – it’s just another technology that humans have created under guidance from God that can be used for good or evil.

“I totally think that AI can participate in Christ’s redemptive purposes,” he said, by ensuring it is imbued with Christian values.

“Even if people don’t buy organized religion, they can buy into ‘do unto others’.”

For transhumanist and “recovering Catholic” Zoltan Istvan, religion and science converge conceptually in the singularity.

“God, if it exists as the most powerful of all singularities, has certainly already become pure organized intelligence,” he said, referring to an intelligence that “spans the universe through subatomic manipulation of physics”.

 

“And perhaps, there are other forms of intelligence more complicated than that which already exist and which already permeate our entire existence. Talk about ghost in the machine,” he added.

For Istvan, an AI-based God is likely to be more rational and more attractive than current concepts (“the Bible is a sadistic book”) and, he added, “this God will actually exist and hopefully will do things for us.”

We don’t know whether Levandowski’s Godhead ties into any existing theologies or is a manmade alternative, but it’s clear that advancements in technologies including AI and bioengineering kick up the kinds of ethical and moral dilemmas that make humans seek the advice and comfort from a higher power: what will humans do once artificial intelligence outperforms us in most tasks? How will society be affected by the ability to create super-smart, athletic “designer babies” that only the rich can afford? Should a driverless car kill five pedestrians or swerve to the side to kill the owner?

If traditional religions don’t have the answer, AI – or at least the promise of AI – might be alluring.

 

 - It Exist, For Real

Depression and anxiety can cost you retirement savings

by Rebecca Valli-Cornell

 

 

 

Psychological distress from mental health issues like depression and anxiety can take a toll on retirement savings, a new study suggests.

 “If your anxiety makes you think you’re not going to live long, or makes you discount the future, you might not want to save.”

Three factors make the research even more meaningful, its authors say: People increasingly are living longer, dealing with more psychological distress, and shouldering the burden of saving for retirement without the help of employers.

The study, which appears in Health Economics, found people with anxiety and depression are nearly 25 percent less likely to have a retirement savings account. Their retirement savings as a share of their overall financial assets can be 67 percent less than those of people without psychological distress.

Psychologically distressed married couples, the study found, have retirement account values that are 20 to 28 percent lower. On average, that translates to between $15,000 and $42,000 less held in retirement savings for married couples.

“Mental health problems could potentially exacerbate problems that households are already having managing their retirement portfolios. If that is the case, then we will have widening inequality as households with mental health problems earlier in life have fewer financial resources in retirement,” says lead author Vicki Bogan, associate professor in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University.

The landscape for how people save for retirement has changed over the past several decades, Bogan says. Now far fewer employers offer traditional pensions. Instead more companies have defined-contribution pensions, where both employees and employers contribute; but it’s up to the employee to figure out how much she’ll need to contribute to have enough money in retirement.

“That’s a harder problem for an individual to figure out,” Bogan says.

And additional factors compound that problem, she says. Other research suggests close to 30 percent of the US population have at least one mental or substance abuse disorder each year. Furthermore, the elderly population is growing and Social Security is in a tenuous state, Bogan says.

 

 

 

The researchers hypothesize two mechanisms could be at play. Psychological distress could affect a person’s tolerance for risk. Psychological distress also could cause a person to be less likely to invest in illiquid assets that they can’t access immediately.

“If your anxiety makes you think you’re not going to live long, or makes you discount the future, you might not want to save,” Bogan says. “You might think, ‘Why should I save for that? I might not be around.'”

The research has implications for employer management and government regulations of defined-contribution pension plans, Investment Retirement Accounts (IRAs), and Keogh retirement accounts, she says.

One possible way to address this issue would be for employers to adopt a 401K opt-in policy, she says. Employees would be automatically enrolled in a 401K plan; they could opt out at any time.

 

 

 

“You’re not taking away their free choice,” Bogan says, “but it’s a positive nudge in the right direction.”