For every reader who bothers to write to the author, there must be a hundred others. One reader, Paritosh, wrote to Fair Observer regarding one of my articles that invoked well-understood principles of neuroplasticity to explain how any learning system, child or artificial intelligence (AI) can be damaged by artificial...
Fair Observer’s Atul Singh told me of his own friend, Pankaj, a father of three daughters. Pankaj was concerned that his daughters have been subjected to around three to seven hours a day of online classes, and he felt it was deeply wrong. I was invited by Fair Observer to...
Everyone in business knows that as a general principle, the fastest-spreading, most revenue-positive ventures and messages wind up having the most influence. That’s true not just for individual people, but for businesses, business models, technologies, communications protocols, you name it. Fast replication and copious resources have always been the keys...
In a previous article on Fair Observer, I describe an unusual new way of communicating the most important parts of “scientific truth” through potentially noisy, biased news media. The key innovation is to consider them together, all at once, as a kind of jigsaw-puzzle about scientific truth, or a “jigsaw...
What is science doing next to news, anyway? Is “science” whatever a scientist says? Is it just another buzzword politicians use to mask their motives? “News” comes from “new,” just like “information” comes from “inform,” both terms over 500 years old. In print, news usually means information about current events,...
Easter Sunday morning and the three Sundays since, I’ve sheltered at home on my sofa between my wife and adult son, both Catholics, to listen to Holy Mass livecast from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. I play the sound through stereo speakers carefully arranged to create a 3D...
Let’s call my type “sympathetic breathers” because we often interrupt our breathing using the sympathetic nervous system (fight/flight/freeze). We tend to hold our breath when we concentrate. Coaches and choreographers have to remind us to breathe and to inflate our entire belly, back and sides, not just the chest. Making...
The good news about COVID-19 is that being forced into physical social separation and remote interaction is teaching people how precious real life is, and which remote technologies preserve reality best. Of those, videoconferencing has the most potential to do good, or harm, because it merges our highest-bandwidth external senses...
It is terrible to be sick, and more terrible to be sick and alone. Ten years ago, my mother’s hospice unit was in quarantine for E. coli. In her last week of life, none of her friends were allowed to visit. Now everyone gets to taste that isolation in what...
I’ve changed my mind. Loneliness isn’t so much an epidemic as an anti-epidemic. Just now, COVID-19, a regular coronavirus, is spreading like a regular epidemic. So far only tens of thousands are affected, not tens of millions, but already public health is a top priority. Stopping viral spread trumps profit,...
