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Multimodal Few-Shot Learning with Frozen Language Models (tweet)
Our new paper shows how to prompt a pre-trained text language model with a combination of text AND images. Keep the language model frozen and train a vision encoder to embed images into the same space as word sequences. The LM can generalize to accepting interleaved images and text in a prompt. This enables *multimodal* GPT3 style “in-context” few-shot learning. My favourite part about our system is you can access the factual “world knowledge” in the LM with visual input Conceptual Captions has named entities “hypernymed” away, so our model has not been trained to associate named entities with images of them.
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Nature's Marketing Agency Sucks
I find it peculiar how the topic of "nature" is poorly communicated in contemporary culture: The most stunningly beautiful natural places are commonly promoted (and perceived) as just "a place to do sports", "a place for old people", "a place to stop at for 30min during a car trip", "a place to take selfies for social media" or "a place to kill animals, grill & eat them". And the communication style is poor across the board: Think of climate activists describing nature mainly in terms of crisis & doom - or corporate "green-washing/laundering".
The "value of unspoiled natural beauty, wildlife, solitude and spiritual renewal" is hardly ever emphasized. Nature as a powerful source of experience, meaning, health and community. One thing is clear: Nature's Marketing Agency Sucks. And this has profound implication for how people perceive topics such as bio-diversity or well-being, and how people act.
Examples of great "marketing for nature" do exist: In Japan natural experiences are more frequently communicated with an appropriate sense of grace, dignity, care, maturity and playfulness - making nature relatable, desirable and relevant for ordinary people at scale. How can we learn from such successes and what new stories about nature do we tell?
#Nature #Ideas #Japan #Media #Narrative #Comment #Ideas #Regenerative
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Vegetables have become far less nutritious (nih.gov)
Magnesium is a critical mineral in the human body and is involved in ~80% of known metabolic functions. It is currently estimated that 60% of adults do not achieve the average dietary intake (ADI) and 45% of Americans are magnesium deficient, a condition associated with disease states like hypertension, diabetes, and neurological disorders, to name a few. Magnesium deficiency can be attributed to common dietary practices, medications, and farming techniques, along with estimates that the mineral content of vegetables has declined by as much as 80–90% in the last 100 years.
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Voice AI is scary good now. Video game actors hate it
A new ‘Witcher 3’ mod uses tech that’s ethically questionable and what one actor calls “utterly soulless.” But can anything be done about it?
#Comment: My talk "Automating Creativity Why?" (2018) and accompanying text seems more relevant than ever.
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Maybe
There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. "Such bad luck," they said sympathetically. "May be," the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. "How wonderful," the neighbors exclaimed. "May be," replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. "May be," answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. "May be," said the farmer.
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“When I was in my teens, I thought that the world would get better. But today's teenagers probably think that the world would get worse. We must put the brakes on such a deteriorating mindset.”
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Delta Plus Variant: "The only things that keeps mutating are the lies. That's why they call it the delta variant, because you have to be deep asleep to believe it. The real killer is capitalism & its solutions”.
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Mixed cultures for a greater yield (ETH Zurich) More evidence of the benefits of regenerative systems. Polycultures give higher yields than monocultures. (paper)
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"It dries the washing using the very latest technology - a combination of solar and wind power"
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Henry Ford on the monetary system
"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." - Henry Ford
