Stephen Hawking was one of the greatest minds in modern physics, but he was also a human, and apparently not a very nice one. Behind the scenes he was ungenerous to his colleagues; he’d been particularly critical of Jacob Bekenstein — whose ideas about black holes conflicted with Hawking’s — going to the extent of encouraging others to do the same. That was until he realized Bekenstein was right, leading to the formulation of the Bekenstein-Hawking relation. Read full article here
Societal Issues
AI Predicts Crime A Week In Advance With 90 Per Cent Accuracy
An artificial intelligence model built by Ishanu Chattopadhyay and his colleagues analysed crime data in Chicago from 2014 to 2016 and managed to predict future levels of crime down to the nearest 300 metres, a week before they actually happened. While extremely useful, this artificial intelligence has been shown to expose racial prejudice in law enforcement. Hopefully, as the study’s data and methodology have been made available for others to evaluate, these prejudices can be avoided in the next iteration. Read full article here
Merv
August 15, 2022
