As running races get longer, the gap between male and female competitors seems to close. Tim Harford and Lucy Proctor investigate the claim that when the race is 195 miles long, women overtake men to become the fastest runners.
Presenter: Tim Harford
Reporter: Lucy Proctor
Producers: Nathan Gower and Debbie Richford
Production Co-ordinator: Katie Morrison
Series Producer: Tom Colls
Sound Mix: Neil Churchill
Editor: Richard Vadon
(Image:Male and female running together up a mountain trail. Credit: nattrass via Getty)
First we chat about the very dumb debacle with Google’s Gemini AI being “absurdly woke,” when in reality the story here is that they were extremely naive and lazy about how to solve the structural biases of white visual culture. Then we get deeper into Nvidia’s major stock rally after blowing away all expectations with their latest financial reportings – and what this means for the political economy of technology, both AI specifically and the sector broadly.
••• A Sign That Spells: DALL-E 2, Invisual Images and The Racial Politics of Feature Space https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.06323
••• The Deeper Problem With Google’s Racially Diverse Nazis https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/02/google-gemini-diverse-nazis/677575/
••• Now Google's 'absurdly woke' Gemini AI refuses to condemn pedophilia as wrong - after being blasted over 'diverse' but historically inaccurate images https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13122189/Googles-absurdly-woke-Gemini-AI-refuses-condemn-pedophilia.html
••• AI boom catapults Nvidia into tech’s big league https://www.ft.com/content/1f8b317d-fcce-4f5b-9e54-8315e102ec10
••• What Bubble? Nvidia Profits Are Rising Even More Than Its Stock https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-26/hedge-funds-unload-tech-stocks-after-going-all-in-before-nvidia
••• The AI craze has companies even 'more overvalued' than during the 1990s dot-com bubble, economist says https://qz.com/ai-stocks-nvidia-overvalued-dot-com-bubble-1851287271
••• Nvidia's $2 trillion market cap looks bubbly https://www.axios.com/2024/02/23/nvidia-valuation-chipmakers-trillion
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Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)
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Texas wildfire becomes largest in state history, the Smoke House Creek Fire Wildfire may have destroyed as many as 500 structures in the Texas Panhandle. Biden says US military to airdrop food and supplies into Gaza.
It's Indicators of the Week, our weekly look under the hood of the global economy! Today on the show: Tyler Perry halts his film studio expansion plans because of AI, Wendy's communications about a new pricing board goes haywire and a key inflation measure falls.
Related episodes: Listener Questions: the 30-year fixed mortgage, upgrade auctions, PCE inflation (Apple / Spotify) AI creates, transforms and destroys... jobs (Apple / Spotify) The secret entrance that sidesteps Hollywood picket lines (Apple / Spotify) The Birth And Death Of The Price Tag
For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.
It is so expensive to have a kid in the United States. The U.S. is one of just a handful of countries worldwide with no federal paid parental leave; it offers functionally no public childcare (and private childcare is wildly expensive); and women can expect their pay to take a hit after becoming a parent. (Incidentally, men's wages tend to rise after becoming fathers.)
But outside the U.S., many countries desperately want kids to be born inside their borders. One reason? Many countries are facing a looming problem in their population demographics: they have a ton of aging workers, fewer working-age people paying taxes, and not enough new babies being born to become future workers and taxpayers. And some countries are throwing money at the problem, offering parents generous benefits, even including straight-up cash for kids.
So if the U.S. makes it very hard to have kids, but other countries are willing to pay you for having them....maybe you can see the opportunity here. Very economic, and very pregnant, host Mary Childs did. Which is why she went benefits shopping around the world. Between Sweden, Singapore, South Korea, Estonia, and Canada, who will offer her the best deal for her pregnancy?
Cass Sunstein joins us to talk about how, without knowing it, we habituate to our circumstances ... regardless of the circumstances. This is both a good thing and bad thing, and it's the subject of Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There. Plus, Trump and Biden visit the border. And Mike spiels about best practices for reigning in talk show guests spewing nonsense.
Chicago sports teams are in a race for revenue for new stadium projects. CTA President Dorval Carter answers tough questions from alders and riders. Confusion remains over the Bring Chicago Home ballot referendum. Reset breaks down those stories and much more with a WTTW News correspondent Nick Blumberg, Chicago Sun-Times reporter Mitchell Armentrout and NBC-5 Chicago reporter Christian Farr.
For a full archive of Reset interviews, head over to wbez.org/reset.
TOP NEWS | On today’s Daily Signal Top News, we break down:
As we head into the weekend, there will not be a partial government shutdown after both the House and Senate voted to pass a continuing resolution on Thursday.
Closing arguments are held in the case that will determine if Fani Willis is disqualified in her case against Trump.
The Supreme Court agreed this week that it will hear former President Donald Trump’s immunity case.
Storing your data in ‘the cloud’ might sound like an ethereal, intangible place, but it’s actually a physical location - a data centre. CrowdScience listener Art is worried about how much energy and water data centres are consuming. He’s from Ireland, where data centres are gobbling up almost 20% of the national electricity supply and that’s growing, fast.
So how much energy and water are data centres using globally? And how can they become more sustainable? To answer Art’s question CrowdScience heads to chilly western Norway to visit a data centre hidden deep within a mountain, that’s said to be one of the most efficient in the world. And we hear how a data centre in South Africa is saving water and dealing with crippling power cuts by generating its own renewable energy.
Do we just need to stream less TV and reduce our email inbox? With the help of carbon footprint expert Mike Berners-Lee, we crunch the numbers to find out.
Featuring:
Svein Atle Hagaseth, CEO of Green Mountain data centres in Norway
Mike Berners-Lee, Professor at Lancaster University’s Environment Centre and consultant at Small World Consulting
Thulani Ncube, Group Energy Lead at Africa Data Centres
Presenter: Anand Jagatia
Producer: Sophie Eastaugh
Editor: Cathy Edwards
Studio Manager: Donald MacDonald
Production: Jonathan Harris & Connor Morgans
Additional Recording by: Kobus van Niekerk