Vice writes about AI generated images based on fMRI brain scans:
AI Reconstructs 'High-Quality' Video Directly from Brain Readings in Study
Researchers Jiaxin Qing, Zijiao Chen, and Juan Helen Zhou from the National University of Singapore and The Chinese University of Hong Kong used fMRI data and the text-to-image AI model Stable Diffusion to create a model called MinD-Video that generates video from the brain readings. Their paper describing the work was posted to the arXiv preprint server last week.
Their demonstration on the paper’s corresponding website shows a parallel between videos that were shown to subjects and the AI-generated videos created based on their brain activity. The differences between the two videos are slight and for the most part, contain similar subjects and color palettes.
MinD-Video is defined by the researchers as a “two-module pipeline designed to bridge the gap between image and video brain decoding.” To train the system, the researchers used a publicly available dataset containing videos and fMRI brain readings from test subjects who watched them. The "two-module pipeline" comprised a trained fMRI encoder and a fine-tuned version of Stable Diffusion, a widely-used image generation AI model.Specifically, they said that these results illuminated three major findings. One is the dominance of the visual cortex, revealing that this part of the brain is a major component of visual perception. Another is that the fMRI encoder operates in a hierarchical fashion, which begins with structural information and then shifts to more abstract and visual features on deeper layers. Finally, the authors found that the fMRI encoder evolved through each learning stage, showing its ability to take on more nuanced information as it continues its training.
This study represents another advancement in the field of, essentially, reading people's minds using AI. Previously, researchers at Osaka University found that they could reconstruct high-resolution images from brain activity with a technique that also used fMRI data and Stable Diffusion.
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A NYT opinion focuses an effect on inflation that huge retailer corporations like Walmart indirectly cause. Economists call this phenomenon the water bed effect. The NYT opines:
To understand why grocery prices are way up, we need to look past the headlines about inflation and reconsider long-held ideas about the benefits of corporate bigness.
Like other independent grocers, Food Fresh buys through large national wholesalers that purchase goods by the truckload, achieving the same volume efficiencies the big chains do. What accounts for the difference in price is not efficiency but raw market power. Major grocery suppliers, including Kraft Heinz, General Mills and Clorox, rely on Walmart for more than 20 percent of their sales. So when Walmart demands special deals, suppliers can’t say no. And as suppliers cut special deals for Walmart and other large chains, they make up for the lost revenue by charging smaller retailers even more, something economists refer to as the water bed effect.This isn’t competition. It’s big retailers exploiting their financial control over suppliers to hobble smaller competitors. Our failure to put a stop to it has warped our entire food system. It has driven independent grocers out of business and created food deserts. It has spurred consolidation among food processors, which has slashed the share of food dollars going to farmers and created dangerous bottlenecks in the production of meat and other essentials. And in a perverse twist, it has raised food prices for everyone, no matter where you shop.
A level playing field was long a tenet of U.S. antitrust policy. In the 19th century, Congress barred railroads from favoring some shippers over others. It applied this principle to retailing in 1936 with the Robinson-Patman Act, which mandates that suppliers offer the same terms to all retailers. The act allows large retailers to claim discounts based on actual volume efficiencies but blocks them from extracting deals that aren’t also made available to their competitors.
Independent grocery stores flourished, accounting for more than half of food sales in 1958. Supermarket chains like Safeway and Kroger also thrived. This dynamism fed a broad prosperity. Even the smallest towns and poorest neighborhoods could generally count on having a grocery store. And the industry’s diffuse structure ensured that its fruits were widely distributed. Of the nearly nine million people working in retailing overall in the mid-1950s, nearly two million owned or co-owned the store where they worked. There were more Black-owned grocery stores in 1969 than there are today.
Then, amid the economic chaos and inflation of the late 1970s, the law fell into disfavor with regulators, who had come to believe that allowing large retailers to flex more muscle over suppliers would lower consumer prices. For the most part, the law hasn’t been enforced since. As a top Reagan administration official explained in 1981, antitrust was no longer “concerned with fairness to smaller competitors.”
Once again, we see adverse anti-consumer effects of aggressive brass knuckles capitalist ideology. It explicitly favors big businesses over smaller ones. That ideology is one of the two dominant ideologies in the Republican Party. The same ideology is a non-trivial influence in the mostly neoliberal Democratic Party.
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From the Lost Cause Files: Lawfare writes:
Domestic terrorism charges were absent from the charges brought against those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021—not because they don’t apply but because they simply don’t exist. In the days that followed the attack, the Congressional Research Service neatly captured the complicated question of how to define the incident and the individuals involved, noting that “an individual may commit criminal acts that are widely considered domestic terrorism and be prosecuted for the criminal acts themselves, but an individual cannot be charged with committing an act of domestic terrorism under current federal law.”
Although the U.S. Code defines “domestic terrorism” using language laid out in the 2001 Patriot Act, the entry does not carry a criminal penalty, meaning individuals cannot be charged for such acts at the federal level. In rare cases, federal prosecutors are able to request a terrorism enhancement on top of existing convictions, which can lengthen sentences.
Talk about Lost Causes, this is definitely one of 'em. The fascist Republican Party still officially refers to the 1/6 coup attempt as legitimate political discourse. There is roughly a snowball's chance in Hell of any meaningful domestic terrorism law being passed over vehement Republican Party opposition. The GOP has already blocked at least one domestic terrorism bill according to CNN:
Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked a bill designed to combat domestic terrorism from advancing in a key vote. The vote comes as lawmakers are under intense pressure to take action in the wake of multiple recent episodes of horrific gun violence.
At CPAC in Aug. 2022, the radicalized GOP explicitly
acknowledged it is a domestic terrorist organization
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