Month: September 2023

Enlarge / A pharmacist administers an updated COVID-19 vaccine at a CVS Pharmacy in Eagle Rock, California. (credit: Getty | Irfan Khan)

With fall approaching, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is gearing up efforts to promote three respiratory virus vaccines this year—annual flu shots, new RSV vaccines, and updated COVID-19 shots—and the agency's plans include confronting vaccine skepticism and hesitancy head-on.

In a presentation to clinicians on Tuesday, the CDC laid out its general recommendations for the use of those vaccines and ended with its four-step strategy to persuade patients swayed by anti-vaccine talking points to come back over to the side of science and public health.

The strategy, developed by the CDC in partnership with experts at the American Psychological Association, isn't new, but it has become increasingly needed as anti-vaccine misinformation and disinformation gained further ground during the pandemic. Even now, conservative politicians and officials continue to spread misinformation and skepticism about COVID-19 vaccines, leading to a sharp partisan divide in vaccination uptake and intentions.

Enlarge / Joseph Bankman, father of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, leaves after a bail hearing for his son at US District Court on August 11, 2023 in New York City.

Barbara Fried, mother of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. (credit: Getty Images | Michael M. Santiago)

FTX yesterday sued Sam Bankman-Fried's parents, alleging that Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried "exploited their access and influence within the FTX enterprise to enrich themselves" at the expense of FTX customers.

FTX's lawsuit against Bankman and Fried was filed in US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware as part of bankruptcy proceedings involving FTX and Alameda Research. "Bankman and Fried siphoned millions of dollars out of the FTX Group for their own personal benefit and their chosen pet causes. This action seeks to hold them accountable for their misconduct and recover assets for the Debtors' creditors," the lawsuit claimed.

The civil lawsuit was filed about two weeks before Bankman-Fried's criminal trial was scheduled to begin on October 3. Four former FTX executives already pleaded guilty to criminal charges.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Google DeepMind researchers recently developed a technique to improve math ability in AI language models like ChatGPT by using other AI models to improve prompting—the written instructions that tell the AI model what to do. It found that using human-style encouragement improved math skills dramatically, in line with earlier results.

In a paper called "Large Language Models as Optimizers" listed this month on arXiv, DeepMind scientists introduced Optimization by PROmpting (OPRO), a method to improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s PaLM 2. This new approach sidesteps the limitations of traditional math-based optimizers by using natural language to guide LLMs in problem-solving. "Natural language" is a fancy way of saying everyday human speech.

"Instead of formally defining the optimization problem and deriving the update step with a programmed solver," the researchers write, "we describe the optimization problem in natural language, then instruct the LLM to iteratively generate new solutions based on the problem description and the previously found solutions."

Enlarge / Archaeologists excavating the ruins of an early 16th-century Polish castle discovered a carved strategy board game called Mill. (credit: Tomasz Olszacki)

Some 500 years ago, construction workers in the midst of building Ćmielów Castle in Poland carved a simple game board into a slab of the sandstone floor as a diversion for their leisure time. At least that's one possible scenario for the existence of a game board recently discovered by archaeologists in the castle ruins; it's also possible the board could have been carved by children or by servants after the castle was completed, or it may have been meant as a symbolic message.

As previously reported, there is archaeological evidence for various kinds of board games from all over the world dating back millennia: Senet and Mehen in ancient Egypt, for example, or a strategy game called ludus latrunculorum ("game of mercenaries") favored by Roman legions. A 4,000-year-old board discovered last year at an archaeological site in Oman's Qumayrah Valley might be a precursor to an ancient Middle Eastern game known as the Royal Game of Ur (or the Game of Twenty Squares), a two-player game that may have been one of the precursors to backgammon (or was simply replaced in popularity by backgammon). Like backgammon, it's essentially a race game in which players compete to see who can move all their pieces along the board before their opponent.

This latest discovery isn't quite as old as that in terms of the actual carved board, but the game could be just as ancient. According to archaeologist Tomasz Olszacki, it's a two-person strategy board game called Mill, also known as Nine Men's Morris, Merels, or "cowboy checkers" in North America. The earliest-known Mill game board was found carved into the roofing slabs of an Egyptian temple at Kurna, which likely predates the Common Era. Historians believe it was well-known to the Romans, who may have learned of the game through trade routes.