Carbon Chemist

Tag: memory

  • Kyu’s Tiny Camera Only Captures 9-Second Videos

    Kyu’s Tiny Camera Only Captures 9-Second Videos

    [ad_1]

    This is hardly the first time a company has pitched simplicity as a way to capture and relive memories. Google debuted an AI-powered camera called Clips in 2018 that could record short videos, and you didn’t even have to press a button. Just turn it on and the AI could figure out the right moments to capture, and these 7-second clips were then accessible in the phone app. Clips was discontinued nearly two years after its launch.

    The time may be ripe for Kyu to step in as a private, personal social network. BeReal, the social media app that championed authenticity, has been in sharp decline since its explosive growth in 2022. The mass migration from X to Bluesky has left some people wondering where to post. And TikTok may get banned in the US in 2025.

    Perhaps the intent of carrying around Kyu in your hand, the instant camera-like “limit” on how much you can capture, and the easily stitched-together edits in the app will help create memory bursts that are bite-sized but still can transport you beyond the same old scroll. Since you’ll have to be more choosy with what you capture before space runs out, you won’t have unnecessary files hogging space. And the resulting videos are mercifully short—no one wants to sit through your 10-minute travel log. You can also control whether these videos are saved in your digital library instead of the automatic nonstop backup most of us are used to with our smartphones.

    A hand holding the Kyu camera an ovalshaped grey device with a small button and screen on one side and a camera lens on...

    Courtesy of Kyu

    Right now, the Google Photos app has “Memories” you can cycle through that show old images, but these are often random photos chosen by Google’s AI instead of a collection of memories tied to a specific event. Google recently launched a feature that employs generative artificial intelligence to create a yearly recap of your memories with AI-written captions. My 2024 recap didn’t particularly tug at my heartstrings, but maybe Kyu clips would have made more of an impact.

    This is the first product from a new company, so we’ll need to see the camera in action before passing judgment. I’m hoping it can complete its promised functions successfully—a low bar for 2024. The Kyu is available for preorder globally and costs $299. There’s an optional $30 subscription in the works to, ironically, store your memories in the cloud, though Ando assures me it will also include other perks like insurance to protect the device, a repair program, and even a discount on future products.

    The hardware launches in April, but if you have an iPhone, you can download the Kyu app now and start capturing 9-second videos. Just don’t call them Vines.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Sleep: Fresh insights into how we doze off may help tackle sleep conditions

    Sleep: Fresh insights into how we doze off may help tackle sleep conditions

    [ad_1]

    New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

    When he was in need of inspiration, the inventor Thomas Edison used to take a nap in a chair while holding a metal ball in each hand. The moment he dropped off, the balls would drop too and crash to the floor, jolting him awake. Edison claimed that this allowed him to capture creative ideas that had fleetingly bubbled up into his semi-consciousness as he fell asleep.

    The state Edison was chasing is known as the sleep-onset period (SOP), a little-studied phase of the sleep-wake cycle. Once seen as merely a brief interlude between wakefulness and slumber, it is now being recognised as a distinct and important stage in its own right. Not only is it involved in orchestrating the shutdown of consciousness, but it may also play a vital role in many of the functions of sleep, including memory-processing and, of course, creativity.

    For some people, however, it can be disordered; insomnia and narcolepsy could be the result of it going awry. A better understanding of the SOP could lead to new treatments for these sleep conditions, while also helping anyone who wants to be more alert or creative – so “pretty much everybody”, says Delphine Oudiette, a cognitive neuroscientist at Sorbonne University in Paris, France.

    We all undergo the transition from wakefulness to sleep, sometimes several times every 24 hours, and many of us know that it can be an…

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Boosting brain waves in sleep improves rats’ memory

    Boosting brain waves in sleep improves rats’ memory

    [ad_1]

    Illustration of neuron activity in a rat’s brain

    Connect Images/Alamy

    Strengthening activity of some brainwaves in rats’ while they sleep improves their performance on a memory test. If we can boost these in people, it could lead to new treatments for dementia and other memory impairments.

    Memories are encoded in unique patterns of activity between neurons. Each time we learn or experience something new, a subset of neurons forms connections. These connections then strengthen while we sleep, reinforcing the memory. This process is known as memory consolidation.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The Internet Archive’s Fight to Save Itself

    The Internet Archive’s Fight to Save Itself

    [ad_1]

    If you step into the headquarters of the Internet Archive on a Friday after lunch, when it offers public tours, chances are you’ll be greeted by its founder and merriest cheerleader, Brewster Kahle.

    You cannot miss the building; it looks like it was designed for some sort of Grecian-themed Las Vegas attraction and plopped down at random in San Francisco’s foggy, mellow Richmond district. Once you pass the entrance’s white Corinthian columns, Kahle will show you the vintage Prince of Persia arcade game and a gramophone that can play century-old phonograph cylinders on display in the foyer. He’ll lead you into the great room, filled with rows of wooden pews sloping toward a pulpit. Baroque ceiling moldings frame a grand stained glass dome. Before it was the Archive’s headquarters, the building housed a Christian Science church.

    I made this pilgrimage on a breezy afternoon last May. Along with around a dozen other visitors, I followed Kahle, 63, clad in a rumpled orange button-down and round wire-rimmed glasses, as he showed us his life’s work. When the afternoon light hits the great hall’s dome, it gives everyone a halo. Especially Kahle, whose silver curls catch the sun and who preaches his gospel with an amiable evangelism, speaking with his hands and laughing easily. “I think people are feeling run over by technology these days,” Kahle says. “We need to rehumanize it.”

    In the great room, where the tour ends, hundreds of colorful, handmade clay statues line the walls. They represent the Internet Archive’s employees, Kahle’s quirky way of immortalizing his circle. They are beautiful and weird, but they’re not the grand finale. Against the back wall, where one might find confessionals in a different kind of church, there’s a tower of humming black servers. These servers hold around 10 percent of the Internet Archive’s vast digital holdings, which includes 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, and 15 million audio recordings, among other artifacts. Tiny lights on each server blink on and off each time someone opens an old webpage or checks out a book or otherwise uses the Archive’s services. The constant, arrhythmic flickers make for a hypnotic light show. Nobody looks more delighted about this display than Kahle.

    Brewster Kahle Blazer Clothing Coat Jacket Adult Person Standing Accessories and Glasses

    Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive’s founder and biggest cheerleader.

    Photograph: Gabriela Hasbun

    It is no exaggeration to say that digital archiving as we know it would not exist without the Internet Archive—and that, as the world’s knowledge repositories increasingly go online, archiving as we know it would not be as functional. Its most famous project, the Wayback Machine, is a repository of web pages that functions as an unparalleled record of the internet. Zoomed out, the Internet Archive is one of the most important historical-preservation organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has assumed a default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion. The rhapsodic regard the Internet Archive inspires is earned—without it, the world would lose its best public resource on internet history.

    Its employees are some of its most devoted congregants. “It is the best of the old internet, and it’s the best of old San Francisco, and neither one of those things really exist in large measures anymore,” says the Internet Archive’s director of library services, Chris Freeland, another longtime staffer, who loves cycling and favors black nail polish. “It’s a window into the late-’90s web ethos and late-’90s San Francisco culture—the crunchy side, before it got all tech bro. It’s utopian, it’s idealistic.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • AI tweaks to photos and videos can alter our memories

    AI tweaks to photos and videos can alter our memories

    [ad_1]

    It has become trivially easy to use artificial intelligence to edit images or generate video to remove unwanted objects or beautify scenes, but doing so leads to people misremembering what they have seen

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Apple’s Photo Bug Exposes the Myth of ‘Deleted’

    Apple’s Photo Bug Exposes the Myth of ‘Deleted’

    [ad_1]

    And even when it’s not a bug, there’s the simple fact that your photos are stored on both your device and someone else’s cloud. You do not own that cloud. You rent it from giant tech companies, every month, often for a fee, and the way that cloud operates isn’t remotely local. You can still delete your photos from the cloud, but you’re taking on faith that it actually happens.

    “At a conceptual level the hard disk and cloud work the same,” Wardle says. “The cloud is just someone else’s computer. What happens in the cloud, though, is that it introduces more complexity—when you delete an image on your phone, it not only tells the local copy to be deleted but then the signal has to go to the cloud and, from there, to your other devices.”

    So when you’re stuck on an airplane without decent Wi-Fi for five hours and you decide that the best time-killer is mercilessly culling your phone’s photo roll, as I sometimes do, you are in about as much control of what happens to your deleted photos as you are of the plane.

    “Photos does not actually delete photos immediately when you tap the Delete button,” says Thomas Reed, director of technology at security firm Malwarebytes. “Instead, it puts deleted photos into a Recently Deleted list, and they’re no longer listed in any albums. So the actual file remains exactly where it was, but the internal Photos database remembers that it’s meant to be deleted.”

    One framework for thinking about the deletion of photos in the year 2024 is that it really has different levels. In Google’s documentation for its cloud services, for example, the company details its stages of deletion—the soft deletion, the logical deletion, the eventual expiration. The company says that in all cloud products, copies of deleted data are marked as available storage and overwritten over time. Not dissimilar to the dinosaur disk drive, “delete” equals “let’s just make this space available until something else comes along.”

    Then there’s the windowed delete, where you may have accidentally swiped something to trash or rethought your hasty delete and want to recover it in short order. Both Apple and Google have policies where they retain your photos for 30 or 60 days after you have deleted them from your devices, so the “oh crap” lever is readily available. After that, the photos supposedly disappear from your device. (There’s also the inactive delete in Google Photos: If you happened to have created a Google Photos account and forgot about it for two years, Google might automatically delete your content.)

    Then there’s the bizarro version of delete where you’re quite convinced you’ve gone through every single device and deleted your photos permanently, and then a restore from an old iCloud backup or a pernicious little iOS bug resurfaces those photos. Surprise! That appears to be what triggered this latest incident.

    There’s also the you-can-never-unshare delete: Once you’ve sent photo to someone else or posted it on social media, it lives in the hands of others who might download it, screenshot it, or share it elsewhere, barring legal action that requires deletion. So even if you’ve deleted it from your own devices, your personal bits (of data) are still out there.

    So, are your photos ever really deleted? Yes. Also, no. Maybe big tech companies should do even more to clarify this.

    We didn’t choose to live in this era of digital memories, but we do get to choose how we frame them for our own personal use. Is it better to live as though your near-term digital photos are creating some kind of permanent imprint somewhere, or to throw caution to the wind knowing that in the very long term most of your digital photos will mean very little? After 28,941 photos on my iPhone and in the cloud—and the risk of more deleted ones returning—I still don’t know the answer.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Ageism: How overcoming negative attitudes to ageing can make you live longer

    Ageism: How overcoming negative attitudes to ageing can make you live longer

    [ad_1]

    An older woman with white hair holds a magnifying glass up to her face, showing a younger woman with brown hair. How we view ageing can change how we age ourselves

    How we view ageing can change how we age ourselves

    Robert Carter

    Last Christmas, my 4-year-old was worried that Santa might forget some presents on his list – “because Santa is old”. I was shocked. At that moment, I realised that he had already picked up negative stereotypes about older people. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised given the way they are portrayed on TV and in film, books and ads, as well as the ways that we collectively talk about ageing. But given what I now know about such views, I was deeply concerned.

    Ageism is arguably the last acceptable prejudice. While other forms of discrimination are considered reprehensible, it is normalised. The World Health Organization reports that, globally, 1 in 2 people are ageist. Unfounded stereotypes about old age directly affect the lives of those in their later years – their financial opportunities and medical treatment, for example. Ageism is one of the biggest barriers faced by people everywhere, affecting all facets of life, says Nancy Morrow-Howell at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. “It’s so pervasive, it’s so accepted, it’s so invisible.”

    But ageism isn’t just bad for society. My concern about my son’s developing ideas of old age also stems from the discovery that negative stereotypes of older people are bad for the individual who holds them too. Researchers have found that they affect how we age, both physically and mentally, with impacts on many aspects of our later lives, from memory function and hearing loss…

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Humans Forget. AI Assistants Will Remember Everything

    Humans Forget. AI Assistants Will Remember Everything

    [ad_1]

    Making these tools work together will be key to this concept taking off, says Leo Gebbie, an analyst who covers connected devices at CCS Insight. “Rather than having that sort of disjointed experience where certain apps are using AI in certain ways, you want AI to be that overarching tool that when you want to pull up anything from any app, any experience, any content, you have the immediate ability to search across all of those things.”

    When the pieces slot together, the idea sounds like a dream. Imagine being able to ask your digital assistant, “Hey who was that bloke I talked to last week who had the really good ramen recipe?” and then have it spit up a name, a recap of the conversation, and a place to find all the ingredients.

    “For people like me who don’t remember anything and have to write everything down, this is going to be great,” Moorhead says.

    And there’s also the delicate matter of keeping all that personal information private.

    “If you think about it for a half second, the most important hard problem isn’t recording or transcribing, it’s solving the privacy problem,” Gruber says. “If we start getting memory apps or recall apps or whatever, then we’re going to need this idea of consent more broadly understood.”

    Despite his own enthusiasm for the idea of personal assistants, Gruber says there’s a risk of people being a little too willing to let their AI assistant help with (and monitor) everything. He advocates for encrypted, private services that aren’t linked to a cloud service—or if they are, one that is only accessible with an encryption key that’s held on a user’s device. The risk, Gruber says, is a sort of Facebook-ification of AI assistants, where users are lured in by the ease of use, but remain largely unaware of the privacy consequences until later.

    “Consumers should be told to bristle,” Gruber says. “They should be told to be very, very suspicious of things that look like this already, and feel the creep factor.”

    Your phone is already siphoning all the data it can get from you, from your location to your grocery shopping habits to which Instagram accounts you double-tap the most. Not to mention that historically, people have tended to prioritize convenience over security when embracing new technologies.

    “The hurdles and barriers here are probably a lot lower than people think they are,” Gebbie says. “We’ve seen the speed at which people will adopt and embrace technology that will make their lives easier.”

    That’s because there’s a real potential upside here too. Getting to actually interact with and benefit from all that collected info could even take some of the sting out of years of snooping by app and device makers.

    “If your phone is already taking this data, and currently it’s all just being harvested and used to ultimately serve you ads, is it beneficial that you’d actually get an element of usefulness back from this?” Gebbie says. “You’re also going to get the ability to tap into that data and get those useful metrics. Maybe that’s going to be a genuinely useful thing.”

    That’s sort of like being handed an umbrella after someone just stole all your clothes, but if companies can stick the landing and make these AI assistants work, then the conversation around data collection may bend more toward how to do it responsibly and in a way that provides real utility.

    It’s not a perfectly rosy future, because we still have to trust the companies that ultimately decide what parts of our digitally collated lives seem relevant. Memory may be a fundamental part of cognition, but the next step beyond that is intentionality. It’s one thing for AI to remember everything we do, but another for it to decide which information is important to us later.

    “We can get so much power, so much benefit from a personal AI,” Gruber says. But, he cautions, “the upside is so huge that it should be morally compelling that we get the right one, that we get one that’s privacy protected and secure and done right. Please, this is our shot at it. If it’s just done the free, not private way, we’re going to lose the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do this the right way.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Why We Remember review: A surprising and expert guide to memory

    Why We Remember review: A surprising and expert guide to memory

    [ad_1]

    EYY5BE Caucasian artist painting in studio

    Is novelty in creativity actually a myth?

    Inti St Clair/Tetra Images, LLC/Alamy

    Why We Remember
    Charan Ranganath (Faber)

    THERE are a lot of books about memory, so do we really need another? Why do we remember – surely we already know? Well, perhaps not as much as we thought. Whether you are into biology or not, if you only read one (more) book about memory, this is a smart choice.

    Why We Remember: The science of memory and how it shapes us will leave you better informed and less distressed about forgetting why you wandered into…

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Selective Forgetting Can Help AI Learn Better

    Selective Forgetting Can Help AI Learn Better

    [ad_1]

    The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

    A team of computer scientists has created a nimbler, more flexible type of machine learning model. The trick: It must periodically forget what it knows. And while this new approach won’t displace the huge models that undergird the biggest apps, it could reveal more about how these programs understand language.

    The new research marks “a significant advance in the field,” said Jea Kwon, an AI engineer at the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea.

    The AI language engines in use today are mostly powered by artificial neural networks. Each “neuron” in the network is a mathematical function that receives signals from other such neurons, runs some calculations, and sends signals on through multiple layers of neurons. Initially the flow of information is more or less random, but through training, the information flow between neurons improves as the network adapts to the training data. If an AI researcher wants to create a bilingual model, for example, she would train the model with a big pile of text from both languages, which would adjust the connections between neurons in such a way as to relate the text in one language with equivalent words in the other.

    But this training process takes a lot of computing power. If the model doesn’t work very well, or if the user’s needs change later on, it’s hard to adapt it. “Say you have a model that has 100 languages, but imagine that one language you want is not covered,” said Mikel Artetxe, a coauthor of the new research and founder of the AI startup Reka. “You could start over from scratch, but it’s not ideal.”

    Artetxe and his colleagues have tried to circumvent these limitations. A few years ago, Artetxe and others trained a neural network in one language, then erased what it knew about the building blocks of words, called tokens. These are stored in the first layer of the neural network, called the embedding layer. They left all the other layers of the model alone. After erasing the tokens of the first language, they retrained the model on the second language, which filled the embedding layer with new tokens from that language.

    Even though the model contained mismatched information, the retraining worked: The model could learn and process the new language. The researchers surmised that while the embedding layer stored information specific to the words used in the language, the deeper levels of the network stored more abstract information about the concepts behind human languages, which then helped the model learn the second language.

    “We live in the same world. We conceptualize the same things with different words” in different languages, said Yihong Chen, the lead author of the recent paper. “That’s why you have this same high-level reasoning in the model. An apple is something sweet and juicy, instead of just a word.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link