Computers Are Learning to Smell | If You’re Worried About the Climate, Move Your Money | Online Betting Has Gone Off the Deep End | The Kamala Harris Problem

View online | Unsubscribe (one-click). For inquiries/unsubscribe issues, Contact Us

� � � � � � Computers Are Learning to Smell - The Atlantic    You know the smell of warm, buttered popcorn. A crisp autumn day. The pungent, somewhat sweet scent that precedes rain. But could you begin to describe these aromas in detail? Or compare them? Your nose has some 400 olfactory receptors that do the work of translating the world’s estimated 40 billion odorous molecules into an even higher number of distinct scents your brain can understand. Yet although children are taught that grass is green and pigmented by chlorophyll, they rarely learn to describe the smell of a freshly cut lawn, let alone the ozone before a storm. The ability to express our sense of smell, in part because we’ve ignored it, eludes most of us. Humans are not alone in this limitation. We have invented machines that can “see” and “hear”: Audio was first recorded and played back in 1877, and the first moving image followed a year later. A musical note is defined by its pitch, a single number, and computers represent a color with three numbers—the red, green, and blue (RGB) values that correspond to the types of color-receiving cells in our eyes. A song is a sequence of sounds, and an image, a map of pixels. But there has never been a machine that can flawlessly detect, store, and reproduce odors. Scientists are working to change that. At the end of August, researchers published a paper presenting a model that can describe a molecule’s scent as well as, or even better than, a person (at least in limited trials). The computer program does so by placing molecules on a sort of odor map, where flowery smells are closer together than to, say, rotten ones. By quantitatively organizing odors, the research could mark a significant advance in enhancing our understanding of human perception. As it has already done for the study of vision and language, AI may be auguring a revolution in the study of this more enigmatic human sense. Continued here � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium If You're Worried About the Climate, Move Your Money - The Atlantic    A decade and change ago, as the world woke up to the catastrophe of climate change, campus activists were looking for ways to heal the environment at scale. They landed on an unusual one: the free market. Climate change is the world’s biggest unpriced externality, in that neither the producers nor the consumers of fossil fuels pay for the damage they cause to the environment. Gas is too cheap; ultimately, every living thing on the planet bears the cost. Perhaps activists could get the market to price that externality in by nudging investors to divest. Still, the demands sounded symbolic at best, the movement brimming with idealism and energy but to what end? Companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil are profitable because of the world’s unslakable demand for gas; folks dumping their stocks would not change that. Such firms would “find other willing buyers” for the shares, Drew Faust, Harvard’s then-president, argued in response to students’ divestment campaign in 2013. And Harvard, she noted, used no small amount of light sweet crude itself. But divestment had worked in other contexts: helping to end apartheid in South Africa, for instance. And the financial argument was, in theory, sound. Divestment can reduce a company’s value: Some folks sell their stock, others refuse to buy, the share price falls if there aren’t enough other, interested investors to step in. More important, it makes corporate growth more expensive. Exploration, mining, extraction, shipping—these are all extremely costly for energy firms. If such firms have less cash on hand and a harder time raising it, projects might not pencil out, energy prices might go up, and their profit margins might fall. Continued here � � � � � � Online Betting Has Gone Off the Deep End - The Atlantic    As a young boy growing up in East London, Paul Krishnamurty and his friends would bet on pretty much everything: what song would come on the radio next, what show would be on TV that night, which of the two people walking ahead of them would reach the top of the hill first. These wagers were, of course, informal. U.K. bookmakers at the time would offer the odd novelty bet—will it be a white Christmas? Will the royal baby be a boy or a girl?—but mostly they stuck with the standard fare: football, cricket, snooker. Some 40 years later, the bookies have finally caught up. These days, you can bet on pretty much anything. You can bet on flight delays and COVID variants and gas prices. You can bet on whether the government will shut down and whether a natural disaster will strike San Francisco and whether Oppenheimer will win Best Adapted Screenplay. You can bet on the 2024 Republican vice-presidential nominee and the next James Bond. You can bet on which celebrity will start an OnlyFans account (money’s on Kim Kardashian) and which will be abducted first if aliens attack (money’s on Elon Musk). You can bet on whether McDonald’s will, at long last, restore onion nuggets to its menu. For some reason, you can even bet on the lottery. “We were way ahead of the game on this,” Krishnamurty, now a gambling writer and consultant for two overseas betting sites, BetOnline and Betfair, told me. The road to where we are today began in 1986, when Las Vegas oddsmakers started taking bets on whether the Chicago Bears’ defensive tackle William “The Refrigerator” Perry would score a touchdown in that year’s Super Bowl. This is believed to have been the American gambling industry’s first formal prop bet—a wager that is not directly contingent on the final score of a sporting event. The phenomenon quickly caught on among football fans during the regular season. How many yards did so-and-so pass for? How many fumbles did the defense recover? And come Super Bowl time, they could bet on events that had no relation to the action on the field, such as which song the half-time performer would play first, how many times the TV cameras would pan to Gisele Bündchen, or what color Gatorade the victors would dump on their coach. Continued here � � � � � � The Kamala Harris Problem - The Atlantic    On a Thursday morning in April, I met with Vice President Kamala Harris at Number One Observatory Circle, the Victorian mansion that, for the past two and a half years, she and the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, have called home. She can be a striking presence when she walks into a room, with a long stride and an implacable posture that make her seem taller than she is (about 5 foot 2). By the time I saw Harris at the residence, I had already traveled with her to Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, and Reno, Nevada, as well as to Africa, trips on which she had carried herself with ease and confidence. Ease and confidence have not been the prevailing themes of Harris’s vice presidency. Her first year on the job was defined by rhetorical blunders, staff turnover, political missteps, and a poor sense among even her allies of what, exactly, constituted her portfolio. Within months of taking office, President Joe Biden was forced to confront a public perception that Harris didn’t measure up; ultimately, the White House issued a statement insisting that Biden did, in fact, rely on his vice president as a governing partner. But Harris’s reputation has never quite recovered. Harris is intensely private, so I was somewhat surprised to be invited to her home. The residence had been redecorated, and in keeping with past practice the work was done without fanfare. There have been no photo spreads, and the designer, Sheila Bridges, signed a nondisclosure agreement. But Harris seemed to enjoy showing me around. In the turret room, she pointed to the banquette seating built along the curve. (“I just love circles,” she said.) She gestured at some of the art she’d brought in, on loan from various galleries and collections, describing each piece in terms of the artist’s background rather than its aesthetic qualities—Indian American woman, African American gay man, Japanese American. “So you get the idea,” she said. We moved into the library, with its collection of books devoted to the vice presidency. (Who knew there were so many?) The green-striped wallpaper pattern that the Bidens had favored when they lived here was gone. Now there was bright, punch-colored wallpaper—chosen, Harris explained, in order to “redefine what power looks like.” Continued here

�

�

�

� � �

You are receiving this mailer as a TradeBriefs subscriber. We fight fake/biased news through human curation & independent editorials. Your support of ads like these makes it possible. Alternatively, get TradeBriefs Premium (ad-free) for only $2/month If you still wish to unsubscribe, you can unsubscribe from all our emails here Our address is 309 Town Center 1, Andheri Kurla Road, Andheri East, Mumbai 400059 - 433006120