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1. Beyond intersubjectivity in olfactory psychophysics I: Troubles with the Subject

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312720915645  

   Alač, Morana (May 2020, Social Studies of Science)

   This article provides an experience-oriented relational account that goes beyond a human control of the world. Rather than working with the notion of intersubjectivity (commonly evoked in sensory STS, and still conserving the subject/object opposition), the article reports on how the sense of smell affords a rethinking of our relationship with the world. It does so by challenging the assumption of olfactory ineffability as it turns to a place whose inhabitants speak about smell as a part of their everyday affairs: a laboratory of olfactory psychophysics. There, we attend to a multimodal, embodied language that participates in preparing, running and analyzing scientific experiments. While Western languages are short on specialized vocabulary for expressing olfactory qualities and it feels difficult to talk about smell, laboratory events manifest smell language in its enmeshing with the sensory realm and the world. Noticing these ties destabilizes the idea of agential subject, highlighting instead our pre-intentional sensibility, in its connection with the world. A sister article on ‘troubles with the Object’ (Alač, 2020) continues to argue that the notion of intersubjectivity is overly narrow, highlighting our immersion in the world (rather than assuming our dominance of it). 

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2. Thermodynamics of deterministic finite automata operating locally and periodically

   https://doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/ad1070  

   Ouldridge, Thomas E.; Wolpert, David H. (December 2023, New Journal of Physics)

   Abstract Real-world computers have operational constraints that cause nonzero entropy production (EP). In particular, almost all real-world computers are ‘periodic’, iteratively undergoing the same physical process; and ‘local’, in that subsystems evolve whilst physically decoupled from the rest of the computer. These constraints are so universal because decomposing a complex computation into small, iterative calculations is what makes computers so powerful. We first derive the nonzero EP caused by the locality and periodicity constraints for deterministic finite automata (DFA), a foundational system of computer science theory. We then relate this minimal EP to the computational characteristics of the DFA. We thus divide the languages recognised by DFA into two classes: those that can be recognised with zero EP, and those that necessarily have non-zero EP. We also demonstrate the thermodynamic advantages of implementing a DFA with a physical process that is agnostic about the inputs that it processes. 

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3. Why is the world's most expensive fungus disappearing?

   Hopping, Kelly A.; Chignell, Stephen M.; Lambin, Eric F. (January 2019, Environmental science journal for teens)

   Meet the world’s most wanted parasite: a mummified caterpillar with a fungus growing right out of its face. Even stranger: it costs three times its weight in gold! This super expensive fungus grows in the alpine regions of the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau where it is cold and dry. Its promised health benefits include increased strength and cures for many diseases. Recently, it has become very popular around the world. Its price has increased and collectors have started harvesting more. But lately, some people have become concerned that the fungus populations are declining. We wanted to see if that is the case, and if so, why? So, we interviewed local harvesters and analyzed environmental models of the region. Our results showed that there is a decline in the caterpillar fungus populations, and the main causes are overharvesting and climate change. 

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4. Why Teaching Ethics to AI Practitioners is Important

   Goldsmith, Judy; Burton, Emanuelle (February 2017, Proceedings of the ... AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   We argue that it is crucial to the future of AI that our students be trained in multiple complementary modes of ethical rea- soning, so that they may make ethical design and implemen- tation choices, ethical career decisions, and that their software will be programmed to take into account the complexities of acting ethically in the world. 

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5. On the Benefits of Being Constrained When Receiving Signals

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94676-0_10  

   Su, ST.; Kempe, D.; Subramanian, V.G. (January 2022, Web and Internet Economics. WINE 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science())

   Feldman, M. (Ed.)

   We study a Bayesian persuasion setting in which the receiver is trying to match the (binary) state of the world. The sender’s utility is partially aligned with the receiver’s, in that conditioned on the receiver’s action, the sender derives higher utility when the state of the world matches the action. Our focus is on whether in such a setting, being constrained helps a receiver. Intuitively, if the receiver can only take the sender’s preferred action with smaller probability, the sender might have to reveal more information, so that the receiver can take the action more specifically when the sender prefers it. We show that with a binary state of the world, this intuition indeed carries through: under very mild non-degeneracy conditions, a more constrained receiver will always obtain (weakly) higher utility than a less constrained one. Unfortunately, without additional assumptions, the result does not hold when there are more than two states in the world, which we show with an explicit example. 

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