Stories written by the latest version of ChatGPT were nearly as good as those written by human authors, according to new research on the narrative skills of artificial intelligence. But when people were told a story was written by AI — whether the true author was an algorithm or a person — they rated the...
Cellphone chats have become death sentences in the continuing, bloody factional war inside Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel. Cartel gunmen stop youths on the street or in their cars and demand their phones. If they find a contact who’s a member of a rival faction, a chat with a wrong word or a photo with the wrong...
The new study also identifies factors that can make these efforts more successful. When an election result is disputed, people who are skeptical about the outcome may be swayed by figures of authority who come down on one side or the other. Those figures can be independent monitors, political figures, or news organizations. However, these “debunking”...
Climate change has caused an increase in the semi-arid climate region in Brazil. Data from the National Center for Monitoring and Warning of Natural Disasters (CEMADEN) and the National Institute of Space Research (INPE) in the South American country indicate an expansion of 7,500 square kilometers per year since 1990, which is equivalent to five...
I teach a course on New England witchcraft trials, and students always arrive with varying degrees of knowledge of what happened in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Nineteen people accused of witchcraft were executed by hanging, another was pressed to death and at least 150 were imprisoned in conditions that caused the death of at least...
If you work in digital marketing, you don’t need to be told a picture’s worth a thousand words. More than half of content marketers say images are crucial for achieving their social media goals, and a staggering 70% of users prefer image-based posts over text, surveys have found. But which types of visuals work best?...
In recent U.S. elections, results often took days to finalize, fueling voter distrust in the electoral process and ballot outcomes. Now, research from the Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research at UC San Diego shows that a simple, proactive message from election officials – ahead of Election Night – can effectively reduce this distrust. The...
A psychologist has explained the sources of political beliefs in the U.S., why liberalism and conservatism appeal to different individuals and why we continue to disagree about fundamental issues in American life. Bridging Our Political Divide collects the insights of a psychologist who offers antidotes to the unproductive arguments that now dominate our political culture and...
A review of Anne Applebaum, “Autocracy, Inc.”(Doubleday, 2024). Observers have sounded the alarm bell for a number of years now that democracy is under threat. Just as many democracies once thought to be resistant to erosion (such as the United States and India) are on the defensive, many autocracies (such as Russia and China) are both hardening...
Richemont has finally landed a buyer for Yoox Net-a-Porter following reports this spring that the Swiss luxury goods behemoth was preparing to sell off the luxury e-commerce platform for next to nothing. Sources tell TFL that the buyer is NYSE-traded e-commerce platform Mytheresa, which is the last interested party in the mix after the likes of Bain Capital...
