Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Record Low Crime Rates Are Real, Not Just Reporting Bias Or Improved Medical Care

  This post will do two things:

  1. Establish that our best data show crime rates are historically low
  2. Argue that this is a real effect, not just reporting bias (people report fewer crimes to police) or an artifact of better medical care (victims are more likely to survive, so murders get downgraded to assaults)

• Insider Trading and the Wolves of Capitol Hill

  The 29 Congressional members that beat the street in 2025, listed.

• Netanyahu Plays Trump and American Jews for Fools - Again

  Thomas L. Friedman New York Times Opinion

  "A violent and criminal effort is underway to ethnically cleanse territories in the West Bank," he wrote in an essay in Haaretz this month. "Gangs of armed settlers persecute, harm, wound and even kill Palestinians living there. The rampages include burning olive groves, houses and cars; breaking into homes; and physically assaulting people." He continued: "The rioters, the Jewish terrorists, storm Palestinians with hate and violence with one objective: to force them to flee from their homes. All this is done in the hopes that the land will then be prepared for Jewish settlement, en route to realizing the dream of annexing all the territories."

• When Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitic? Getting Beyond the Polemics

  Ethan Katz is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley; faculty director of the Center for Jewish Studies, and co-founder of both the Antisemitism Education Initiative and the Bridging Fellowship dialogue program.

  And such common ground is needed if we are to tackle the very real dangers we face. To be sure, this includes some cases when anti-Zionism itself constitutes a major threat to Jewish safety and thriving. Increasingly, however, the greater threat to both Jews and non-Jews is posed by attempts to quash all expressions characterized as anti-Zionist or antisemitic. As I write this, American democracy faces threats it has not witnessed since the mid-twentieth century: the federal government is moving actively to silence or control speech in numerous contexts, is targeting universities as bastions of free inquiry, and is supported by significant numbers of Americans who do not accept the legacies of the Civil Rights movement as a form of historical progress and see Jews as a threat to white Christian hegemony. If liberal Zionists are to maintain not only our Zionism but also our liberalism, we must take all of these dangers seriously, and we must look for conversation partners and allies in the fight-even in the most uncomfortable and unconventional of places.

• He's the Godfather of Modern Robotics. He Says the Field Has Lost Its Way.

  Rodney Brooks, famous for the Roomba, argues the humanoid robot craze in Silicon Valley is doomed to fail.

  Mr. Brooks is particularly skeptical that neural networks are ready to solve the dexterity problem. Humans don't have a language for gathering, storing and communicating data about touch, the way we do for language and imagery. Our fingers' remarkable sensing ability collects all kinds of information that we can't easily translate for machines. In his view, the visual data preferred by the new guard of robot start-ups simply won't be able to recreate what we can do with our fingers.

• Yann LeCun: Tech 'Herd' Is Marching Into a Dead End

  Requires a NY Time (free or paid) account.

  The reason, he said, goes back to what he has argued for years: Large language models, or L.L.M.s, the A.I. technology at the heart of popular products like ChatGPT, can get only so powerful. And companies are throwing everything they have at projects that won't get them to their goal to make computers as smart as or even smarter than humans.
  ...
  Even though his research laid the groundwork for L.L.M.s, Dr. LeCun argued that they were not the final answer to A.I. development. The problem with current systems, he said, is that they do not plan ahead. Trained solely on digital data, they do not have a ways of understanding difficulties in the real world.

• Biological Brains Inspire a New Building Block for Artificial Neural Networks

  The solution to these shortcomings could be for AI to act more like a real brain. Computational neuroscientists at the Simons Foundation's Flatiron Institute in New York City have drawn lessons from neurobiology to enhance artificial systems using a new type of computational component that is more akin to those found in real brains.
  ...
  He and his team built a biologically inspired multilayer neural network made up of a new type of fundamental computational unit called rectified spectral units, or ReSUs. These ReSUs extract the features of the recent past that are most predictive of the near future. The ReSUs are self-supervised, meaning they control their own training of how they process data based on the information they receive, rather than relying on external instructions. ReSUs are designed to learn from constantly changing data, just as our brains learn from the real world.

• Why Men and Lesbians Dominate Comedy

  Stand-up comedy is dominated by men and lesbians, and I have a theory explaining why. Mainly, it's because comedy is risky, and men and lesbians take bigger risks. This behavior is highly innate for men, and plausibly innate for lesbians.

• What science says we've been getting wrong about exercise

  Movement-tracking studies show even tiny, regular bursts of effort - as short as 30 seconds - can capture many of the health benefits of the gym. Climbing two to three flights of stairs a few times per day could change your life. Experts call it VILPA, or vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity.