goldislops · 3 days ago
Text
1 note · View note
goldislops · 6 days ago
Text
youtube
1 note · View note
goldislops · 7 days ago
Text
youtube
1 note · View note
goldislops · 7 days ago
Text
https://equalityaustralia.org.au/our-work/areas-of-work/stand-up-against-hate/
1 note · View note
goldislops · 8 days ago
Text
https://email.y.kajabimail.net/c/eJx8UcGu2yAQ_Br7UtmCBQw-cHhSaymnHtI7wmb9Ql8MLpBE6ddXTpyqUque7J3ZHTQzdl1NsAvqD_vdjr7JJSacUwwlN2uK7jIVH0PtdAcT62rUVEIvBROE1LhYfzYOz_6K6W6809BR3nPoQL3YDaS875kiRO3YgjnbdzTlvqJ-Qhl_XDBMaB7jvpcwx0ua8J8ivy-epOKCKeA7-VD-sv0e97XHUJ80YyAk5VYBsJkLiZPqFCUWRE8UzLb2GghwSoATSQQhrXK9gJmD7QlxVo4VJ_f2mdam2QYs9VmfSllzxd4qGCoYMmvtYn_GYG-5neJSwfDffCsYZn_G5rKeo3V5U_AFt-9mTQimelnBUE647KhQSkpKWQWDi7fwOkMyA6ixEXKmjZMcGkERG87BzsQC2G40R1z8FMP2dEzmENwll3Q3X6-Yrh5vZrybt2BzsdmbQzDfcDq1q5vrV20Zg8NkXFysD_qvLJL-wKsP7Zj8kitO3h_MFJc64eRXj6E8OhOiU0QxyuvN66vGp9e66KMv-OnwuQL2B3zV8CsAAP__04PhXw
1 note · View note
goldislops · 8 days ago
Text
youtube
1 note · View note
goldislops · 11 days ago
Text
https://tricycle.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=7914aa1664771ddd4c8fa8040&id=3f27e85278&e=fe8bb64799
1 note · View note
goldislops · 11 days ago
Text
No Beginning, No Ending, No Fear
When you’re afraid of what might happen, remember that all you have is now.
Norman FischerSummer 2021
| ,
No Beginning, No Ending, No Fear
Photograph by PlainPicture
The Buddha has many epithets. He’s called the Enlightened One, the One Who Thus Comes and Goes, the Conqueror, the Noblest of All Humans Who Walk on Two Legs. He is also called the Fearless One because he has seen through all the causes of fear. His awakening moment, coming suddenly after six years of intense meditation, shows him that there is actually nothing to fear. Fear—convincing as it may seem—is actually a conceptual mistake.
What is there to be afraid of anyway? Fear is always future-based. We fear what might happen later. The past is gone, so there’s no point in being afraid of it. If past traumas cause fear in us, it is only because we fear that the traumatic event will reoccur. That’s what trauma is—wounding caused by a past event that makes us chronically fearful about the future and so queasy in the present. But the future doesn’t exist now, in the present, the only moment in which we are ever alive. So though our fear may be visceral, it is based on a misconception, that the future is somehow now. It’s not. The present might be unpleasant and even dangerous, but it is never fearful. In the full intensity of the present moment there is never anything to fear—there is only something to deal with. It is a subtle point but it is absolutely true: the fear I experience now is not really present-moment based: I am afraid of what is going to happen. This is what the Buddha realized. If you could be in the radical present moment, not lost in the past, not anxious about the future, you could be fearless.
If you are suddenly threatened by an intense-looking guy pointing a gun at your head, you will likely be frozen with fear. But even then, it isn’t the appearance of the man and the gun that you are afraid of. It’s what is going to happen next. It is true, though, that in that moment you are not thinking about the future. Your experience is immediate, body-altering fear. Your reaction is biological; you can’t help it. As an animal, you have survival instinct, so when your life is threatened your reaction is automatic and strong. But you are a human animal with human consciousness—a problematic condition, but one with possibilities. It is possible that you could overcome your animal fear.
There are many recorded instances in the scriptures of the Buddha’s life being threatened. In all such cases the Buddha remains calm and subdues the threat. Though the stories may or may not be mythical, they certainly intend to tell us that we are capable of overcoming the survival instinct and remaining calm even in the face of grave danger. The truth is, in many dangerous situations the ability to stay calm will keep you safer than your gut reaction of fight or flight.
But what if your life weren’t actually being threatened? What if the only thing actually happening to you was insult, disrespect, frustration, or betrayal, but you reacted with the alarm and urgency of someone whose life was at stake? And continued, long after the event, to harbor feelings of anger and revenge? In that case, your reaction would be out of scale with the event, your animal instinct for survival quite misplaced. You would have taken a relatively small matter and made it into something much more unpleasant, and even more harmful, than it needed to be.
Impermanence is the basic Buddhist concept. Nothing lasts. Our life begins, it ends, and every moment that occurs between this beginning and ending is another beginning and ending. In other words, every moment we are disappearing a little. Life doesn’t end suddenly at death. It is ending all the time. Impermanence is constant.
Although we all understand this when we think about it, we seem not to be capable of really taking it in. Buddhism teaches that behind all our fears is our inability to actually appreciate, on a visceral level, this truth of impermanence. Unable to accept that we are fading away all the time, we are fearful about the future, as if somehow if everything went exactly right we could be preserved for all time. To put this another way, all our fears are actually displacements of the one great fear, the fear of death.
These days we have fears that seem to go beyond our personal fear of death. Climate change is a catastrophe. In the fall of 2018 we had terrible forest fires in California. Even as far away from the fires as the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, you could smell the smoke. You couldn’t go outside, the air was so bad. But even worse than the experience was the thought that this is the future, this is how it is going to be from now on. There are going to be more and more fires, hurricanes, typhoons; the ice caps are melting, sea levels and summer temperatures are rising, the planet is slowly becoming uninhabitable. This may or may not be true, but there are good reasons to fear that it is true. So we feel afraid not for our own death but also for our children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren. What will happen to them in the future?
I have a friend who is a great outdoorsman and environmental activist. Some years ago, when the US government was just beginning to become active in denying climate change, my friend got really upset. He was upset about climate change realities but even more upset that people weren’t paying attention to them, were denying or ignoring climate change, because the government was casting doubt. Here we were in a desperate situation, something needed to be done right away, and people were going on with their ordinary business as though everything were fine.
My friend was in despair over this, and he would tell me about it. As the years went on his despair and upset grew and grew.
One day when he was telling me about it, I thought, It isn’t climate change he’s upset about. I said this to him, and he got really mad at me. I didn’t really know what he was upset about. But it seemed to me that although he believed it was climate change he was upset about, actually it was something else. He stayed for a while and eventually he said, You were right. So, what is it you are upset about? I asked him. He said, Yes, I am upset about climate change, but I didn’t realize until you brought it up that there is something else I am upset about: I am getting old, I can’t climb mountains like I used to. Who knows how long I will be able to ride my bike for hundreds of miles or do all the things I love to do. I am upset about the climate, but what makes me feel this anguish is that I am scared of my aging and dying. The planet really is under threat. And so am I.
So it may be true that the power of our fear always comes from our fear of endings—our own ending being the closest and most immediate of all endings. When we think of the world of the future, we can feel sorrow, grief, and disappointment that we human beings cannot reverse course and do better, that we seem to be unable to solve a problem we ourselves have caused.
But fear is different, fear is desolation, desperation, anguish, despair, and sometimes anger. Grief, sorrow, disappointment are quiet feelings we can live with. They can be peaceful and poignant, they can be motivating. When we feel these feelings, we can be more compassionate, kinder to one another, we can be patiently active in promoting solutions.
When we understand the real basis of our fear, we can see through it. Will our lives end, will the world end? Yes. But this was always going to be the case. All difficult moments occur in the present, and the present moment, no matter what it brings, is always completely different from our projections about the future. Even if what we fear about the future actually comes to pass, the present moment in which it occurs won’t be anything like the moment we projected in the past. Fear is always fantastic, always fake. What we fear never happens in the way we fear it.
Photograph © Brigitte Lustenberger, courtesy Christophe Guye Galerie
There’s a traditional Buddhist practice to contemplate beginnings and endings, called the five reflections. The reflections gently guide the practitioner in meditating on the fact that old age, sickness, and death are built-in features of the human body and mind, that no one can avoid them. Life begins, therefore it has to end. And being subject to beginning and ending, life is inherently vulnerable.
The point of this meditation isn’t to frighten; quite the opposite: the way to overcome fear is to face it and become familiar with it. Since fear is always fear about the future, to face the present fear, and see that it is misplaced, is to reduce it. When I give myself over, for a period of time, or perhaps on a regular basis, to the contemplation of the realities of my aging and dying, I become used to them. I begin to see them differently. Little by little I come to see that I am living and dying all the time, changing all the time, and that this is what makes life possible and precious. In fact, a life without impermanence is not only impossible, it is entirely undesirable. Everything we prize in living comes from the fact of impermanence. Beauty. Love. My fear of the ending of my life is a future projection that doesn’t take into account what my life actually is and has always been. The integration of impermanence into my sense of identity little by little makes me less fearful.
The reflection on beginnings and endings is taken still further in Buddhist teachings. The closer you contemplate beginnings and endings, the more you begin to see that they are impossible. They can’t exist. There are no beginnings and endings. The Heart Sutra, chanted every day in Zen temples around the world, says that there is no birth and so there is no death either.
What does this mean? We are actually not born. We know this from science, there is nothing that is created out of nothing—everything comes from something, is a continuation and a transformation of something that already exists. When a woman gives birth, she does not really give birth, she simply opens her body to a continuation of herself and the father of the child, to their parents and their parents before them, to the whole human and nonhuman family of life and nonlife that has contributed to the coming together of preexisting elements that we will see as a newborn child. So there really is no birth. This is not a metaphorical truth.
If no beginning, then no ending. There is no death. In what we call death the body does not disappear. It continues its journey forth. Not a single element is lost. The body simply transforms into air and water and earth and sky. Our mind travels on too, its passions, fears, loves, and energies continue on throughout this universe. Because we have lived, the world is otherwise than it would have been, and the energy of our life’s activity travels onward, circulates, joins and rejoins others to make the world of the future. There is no death, there is only continuation. There is nothing to be afraid of.
Excerpted from When You Greet Me I Bow: Notes and Reflections from a Life in Zen by Norman Fischer © 2021. Reprinted with permission of Shambhala Publications.
Norman Fischer is a poet, translator, and Zen Buddhist priest. A Senior Dharma Teacher at the San Francisco Zen Center, he is also the founder and spiritual director of the Everyday Zen Foundation, an organization dedicated to adapting Zen Buddhist teachings to Western culture.
1 note · View note
goldislops · 11 days ago
Text
Long COVID Is Harming Too Many Kids
Pediatric long COVID is more common than many thought, and we keep letting kids be reinfected with new variants
Blake Murdoch
A small child draws a frowning coronavirus using red colored pencil, top view
SergeyChayko/Getty Images
Pediatric long COVID is more common than many thought, and we keep letting kids be reinfected with new variants
Since the COVID pandemic began, claims that the disease poses only minimal risk to children have spread widely, on the presumption that the lower rate of severe acute illness in kids tells the whole story. Notions that children are nearly immune to COVID and don’t need to be vaccinated have pervaded.
These ideas are wrong. People making such claims ignore the accumulating risk of long COVID, the constellation of long-term health effects caused by infection, in children who may get infected once or twice a year. The condition may already have affected nearly six million kids in the U.S. Children need us to wake up to this serious threat. If we do, we can help our kids with a few straightforward and effective measures.
The spread of the mistaken idea that children have nothing to worry about has had some help from scientists. In 2023 the American Medical Association’s pediatrics journal published a study–which has since been retracted—reporting the rate of long COVID symptoms in kids was “strikingly low” at only 0.4 percent. The results were widely publicized as feel-good news, and helped rationalize the status quo, where kids are repeatedly exposed to SARS-COV-2 in underventilated schools and parents believe they will suffer no serious harm.
On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
In January 2024, however, two scientists published a letter with me explaining why that study was invalid. Some of the errors made it hard to understand how the study survived peer review. For example, the authors claimed to report on long COVID using the 2021 World Health Organization definition, but didn’t properly account for the possibility of new onset and fluctuating or relapsing symptoms, even though that definition and the subsequently released 2023 pediatric one emphasize those attributes. Any child with four symptom-free weeks—even nonconsecutive ones—following confirmed infection was categorized by the study authors as not having long COVID.
In August, the authors of the study retracted it. They did not admit to the errors we raised. But they did admit to new errors, and said these mistakes meant they understated the rate of affected children.
And that rate, according to other research, is quite high. The American Medical Association’s top journal, JAMA, in August published a key new study and editorial about pediatric long COVID. The editorial cites several robust analyses and concludes that, while uncertainty remains, long COVID symptoms appear to occur after about 10 percent to 20 percent of pediatric infections.
If you’re keeping score, that’s as many as 5.8 million affected children in the U.S.—so far. And we know studies and surveys of adults have found that repeat infections heighten the risk of long-term consequences.
The JAMA study comparing infected and uninfected children found that trouble with memory or focusing is the most common long COVID symptom in kids aged six to 11. Back, neck, stomach and head pain were the next most common symptoms. Other behavioral impacts included “fear about specific things” and refusal to go to school.
Adolescents aged 12 to 17 reported different leading symptoms. Change or loss in smell or taste was most common, followed by body pains, daytime tiredness, low energy, tiredness after walking and cognitive deficits. The study noted that symptoms “affected almost every organ system.” In other words, these symptoms reflect real physiological trauma. For example, SARS-COV-2 can cause or mediate cardiovascular, neurological and immunological harm, even increasing the relative risk of new onset pediatric diabetes when compared with other lesser infections.
Children in schools today are often described as struggling with emotional regulation, attention deficits and developmental problems. Adolescents have some of the worst standardized test scores in decades. Pandemic measures such as school closures—most of which were short-lived and occurred several years ago—have been blamed almost entirely for children’s present-day behavioral and learning problems.
While it is clear these early pandemic disruptions negatively impacted many children, the unproven notion that “the cure was worse than the disease” has become dogma and sometimes involves reimagining history. For example, the Canadian Pediatric Society’s most recent COVID vaccination guidance fails to even acknowledge the existence of pediatric long COVID, while stating without evidence in its preamble that children were more affected by pandemic disruptions in activities than direct viral effects. It’s hard to imagine how this wording could encourage pediatricians and parents to vaccinate children against a disabling virus.
Consider also a small but widely publicized Bezos Family Foundation–funded study which unscientifically claimed accelerated cortical thinning, a type of brain restructuring that occurs over time, is caused by “lockdowns.” The study design could not demonstrate cause and effect, however, but only correlation. Pediatric brain experts have critiqued the research, pointing out that “no supporting evidence” was provided for the claim cortical thinning is from social isolation, and that it isn’t necessarily pathological. “Lockdowns” were neither defined nor controlled for in the study, which relied on 54 pandemic-era brains scans from different children than the prepandemic scans they were compared to—meaning there was no measurement of brain changes in specific individuals. The pandemic-era scans came from months when relevant CDC seroprevalence data estimate that the number of children with one or more infections rose from about one in five to around three in five. We might reasonably predict that many of the studied brain scans were therefore from children who recently had COVID.
It is understandably disturbing to entertain the idea that we might currently be recklessly allowing millions of children to be harmed by preventable disease. That may be part of why problematic studies such as these have gotten headlines. It is more disturbing, however, that almost no public attention has been given to infection itself as a potential cause of children’s behavioural and learning problems.
This makes no sense. We know that COVID harms the brain. Neuroinflammation, brain shrinkage, disruption of the blood-brain barrier and more have been documented in adults, as have cognitive deficits. These deficits have been measured as equivalent to persistent decreased IQ scores, even for mild and resolved infections. Millions of people have, or have experienced, “brain fog.” What, then, do we guess a child’s COVID-induced “trouble with focusing or memory” might be?
When you put together the estimate that 10 to 20 percent of infected kids may experience long-term symptoms, that many of the most common symptoms affect cognition, energy levels and behavior, and that children are being periodically reinfected, you have a scientific rationale to partly explain children’s widely reported behavioural and learning challenges.
We can do something to protect our kids. We can vaccinate them every season, which somewhat reduces the risk of long COVID. We can keep sick children home by passing laws that create paid sick leave and end attendance-based school funding. We can normalize rather than vilify the use of respirator masks that help prevent the spread of airborne diseases.
Finally, we can implement fantastic new engineered indoor air quality standards designed to greatly reduce the spread of germs. Clean indoor air should be expected as a right, like clean water. The cost of providing cleaner indoor air is low relative to the economic benefits, which even when conservatively modeled are in the tens of billions annually in the U.S. and more than ten times the costs. These costs are also small compared to the price children and their families would pay in suffering as a result of preventable long-term impairment.
By regulating, publicly reporting and periodically inspecting building air quality, similarly to how we oversee food safety in commercial kitchens, we can greatly reduce the spread of disease and reap huge benefits for everyone—especially children.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
1 note · View note
goldislops · 11 days ago
Text
No More Needles
Vaccines delivered through the nose are showing promising results in clinical trials. Two have generated multiple immune system responses against the COVID-causing virus, and a COVID nasal vaccine could be ready for the U.S. as soon as 2027. Clinical trials are also underway for nasal vaccines against flu and RSV, with near future plans for other diseases like human metapneumovirus.
Why this matters: Vaccines taken up the nose can provide faster, stronger protection against respiratory viruses than a shot in the arm, since they activate mucosal immunity–mucosa lines our nasal passages down to our gut, and many viruses first enter the body there. The vaccine trains “first responder” immune cells in our mucus tissue to attack the virus, so immunity develops quickly.
What the experts say: Spray vaccines could boost vaccine access worldwide. Nasal vaccines don’t require cold storage to be transported, and could be administered by anyone, not just medical professionals. “We saw with COVID there was no vaccine equity,” says Fiona Smaill, an infectious disease researcher at McMaster University in Ontario. Many people in low-income countries never received a shot, even nearly four years after the vaccines became available.
1 note · View note
goldislops · 11 days ago
Text
https://ai.meta.com/research/movie-gen/
1 note · View note
goldislops · 11 days ago
Text
AI Hack: Gmail's New Alarm
A new sophisticated AI-driven scam targeting Gmail users has been reported, showcasing the evolving tactics of hackers. With over 2.5 billion Gmail users, the platform is a prime target for cybercriminals.
* Security consultant Sam Mitrovic nearly fell victim to an AI scam call that convincingly impersonated Google support. The scam began with a notification for account recovery, followed by a phone call from someone claiming to be from Google, creating a sense of urgency and trust.
* The attackers employed tactics such as spoofing phone numbers to appear legitimate and used AI-generated voice technology to simulate human interaction. This approach can deceive even experienced users.
* Scammers have been using Google Forms to create legitimate-looking documents, which are sent via genuine Google servers, thereby lowering the recipient's suspicion of the scam.
* In response to increasing threats, Google has joined the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and launched the Global Signal Exchange, an initiative aimed at sharing intelligence on scams to better protect users.
1 note · View note
goldislops · 13 days ago
Text
Jensen Huang says he wants Nvidia to be a company with 100 million AI assistants
Shubhangi GoelOct 14, 2024, 7:15 PM AEDT
I-hwa Cheng/Getty
* Jensen Huang says he hopes Nvidia will be a 50,000 employee company with "a 100 million AI assistants."
* Huang described a future where Nvidia can use AI assistants across every division to raise output.
* Tech leaders, including Google and Salesforce, are also investing in AI agents.
Jensen Huang says that he hopes an army of artificial intelligence employees may one day help boost Nvidia's productivity.
"I'm hoping that Nvidia someday will be a 50,000 employee company with a 100 million, you know, AI assistants, in every single group," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on an episode of the "Bg2" podcastreleased on Sunday.
Huang described a future where the technology giant will mass deploy AI assistants, also called agents, across every division to improve output. AI agents break down a task into multiple smaller steps, each tackling a specific task to achieve a broader objective.
The CEO said that he interacts with AI agents himself, and like many other tech companies, Nvidia already uses agents for cybersecurity, chip design, and for software engineering.
"AIs will recruit other AIs to solve problems. AIs will be in Slack channels with each other, and with humans," Huang said. "So we'll just be one large employee base if you will — some of them are digital and AI, and some of them are biological."
Huang also said that while AI will change "every job," deploying it in companies can secure employment instead of hurt it.
"When companies become more productive using artificial intelligence, it is likely that it manifests itself into either better earnings, or better growth, or both," the CEO said. "When that happens, the next email from the CEO is likely not a layoff announcement."
Huang added that humans will be needed to pick between "trillions" of problems and decide what to solve, while bots can later help automate solutions. This will lead to hiring more people as the company becomes more productive.
Nvidia, which makes graphic processing units that have recently seen an explosion in demand, has emerged as one of the main winners of the AI investing craze. Huang, who started the company in 1993, has seen his personal fortune take off as a result of the company's success — he stands at number 11 on the Bloomberg Billionaire's Index.
Huang joins a list of Big Tech executives betting on AI agents to get ahead.
Related stories
In September, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the company is making a "hard pivot" to Agentforce, which lets users build custom AI agents that can interact directly with customers. The agents are meant to be more advanced than AI chatbots and can be used with other Salesforce products.
And Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in May that the company is working on developing AI agents with more capabilities.
"They're able to think multiple steps ahead and work across software and systems, all to get something done on your behalf and, most importantly, with your supervision," Pichai said in May, days before the company's I/O conference.
The AI agent space is one even startups are getting their hands on, with somebuilding tools for others to build agents, while other companies are creating agents for various uses themselves.
1 note · View note
goldislops · 20 days ago
Text
youtube
1 note · View note
goldislops · 20 days ago
Text
https://link.mail.beehiiv.com/ss/c/u001.ReE8F3wxEiZ1ca5X6VhyJkiwJYQtDJkF9uDCcdCfmXiNlU7R8dkjMc_LSJPKZVN31it64YGJmEF5jFaFo-OzvUUXl6Asq5snoXOfmoCUemCWhkolIvvKD2zkNFipdUEGNfKaqwCbbYSU_9O45P-nuSvgZWQa9e0M-XcoBXHK6Ya3D4n5QGZd2v24db2FXFgx9bKcXM1oubASheFAv9qm9sLILe1H5CklE4EhihH-FPzNRl80mM_maqqr_mOl8s0OAI5-ZNBP0LdDt7vIK_RGd3qTrI78UWaslgJlRF4wWps/4ai/oYyxg9YDRDW4n_XKsohpmA/h7/h001.6vWRJTXt07R6xYQuyo5xL3MJQfO5Cx4Z4B4VF97OmwE
1 note · View note
goldislops · 23 days ago
Text
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/real-estate/2024/10/07/should-you-use-ai-to-buy-home/75511235007/
1 note · View note
goldislops · 25 days ago
Text
1 note · View note