A randomized trial of online single-session interventions for adolescent depression during COVID-19
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01235-0 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04634903 The COVID-19 pandemic has potentially increased the risk for adolescent depression. Even pre-pandemic, <50% of youth with depression accessed care, highlighting needs for accessible interventions. Accordingly, this randomized controlled trial (ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT04634903) tested online single-session interventions (SSIs) during COVID-19 in adolescents with elevated depression symptoms (N = 2,452, ages 13–16)....
Conference demographics and footprint changed by virtual platforms
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00823-2 Conferences disseminate research, grow professional networks and train employees. Unfortunately, they also contribute to climate change and present barriers to achieving a socially sustainable work environment. Here, we analyse the recent impact of transforming in-person conferences into virtual conferences on improving diversity, equity and inclusion in science and engineering...
Sleep onset is a creative sweet spot
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.abj5866 The ability to think creatively is paramount to facing new challenges, but how creativity arises remains mysterious. Here, we show that the brain activity common to the twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness (nonrapid eye movement sleep stage 1 or N1) ignites creative sparks. Participants (N = 103) were...
Megastudies improve the impact of applied behavioural science
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04128-4 https://osf.io/9av87/?view_only=8bb9282111c24f81a19c2237e7d7eba3 Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens’ decisions and outcomes1. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over different time intervals2. The lack of comparability of such individual investigations limits their potential to inform policy....
The ongoing consolidation in AI is incredible
https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1468370605229547522 When I started ~decade ago vision, speech, natural language, reinforcement learning, etc. were completely separate; You couldn’t read papers across areas - the approaches were completely different, often not even ML based. But as of approx. last two years, even the neural net architectures across all areas are starting...
The therapists using AI to make therapy better
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/06/1041345/ai-nlp-mental-health-better-therapists-psychology-cbt/ Repper anticipates some reluctance. “This technology represents a challenge for therapists,” he says. “It’s as if they’ve got someone else in the room for the first time, transcribing everything they say.” To start with, Trent PTS is using Lyssn’s software only with trainees, who expect to be monitored. When...
Gender stereotypes about interests start early and cause gender disparities in computer science and engineering
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/48/e2100030118 Societal stereotypes depict girls as less interested than boys in computer science and engineering. We demonstrate the existence of these stereotypes among children and adolescents from first to 12th grade and their potential negative consequences for girls’ subsequent participation in these fields. Studies 1 and 2 (n = 2,277;...
What candidates can and cannot control in their job hunt
https://ericmjl.github.io/blog/2021/11/28/what-candidates-can-and-cannot-control-in-their-job-hunt/ Summary To summarize my points here: Many parts of the hiring process are out of a candidate’s realm of control. Intellectual work products are 100% within a candidate’s realm of control. Intellectual work products are evidence of your skillsets. Candidates are hired on the evidence of their skillsets, amongst...
Papers about visual number sense in deep neural nets
Number detectors spontaneously emerge in a deep neural network designed for visual object recognition (Nasr et al., 2019) Humans and animals have a “number sense,” an innate capability to intuitively assess the number of visual items in a set, its numerosity. This capability implies that mechanisms to extract numerosity indwell...
Some interesting math apps
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/calcular This app is a novel approach to learning mental maths, using text-to-speech, speech-to-text and AI under the hood to help kids (and parents) progress quickly. Available in English, French, Spanish, German and Italian. Our 9yo twins pushed me into doing this! https://www.producthunt.com/posts/quick-math The main feature that sets Quick Math...
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a collection of excerpts from interesting research, blogs, events, etc...