WSJ: “Measuring organ age is the latest frontier in the world of biological age, the idea that your body’s physical age can be different from its chronological one. For example, a 50-year-old man hypothetically might have physical health that more closely resembles that of a 53-year-old, with, say, a 51-year-old heart and a 54-year-old brain. Knowing the age of your organs might one day help you prevent and treat disease. In theory, if you knew that your heart was aging too fast, you could take steps to ward off heart disease. “Heart aging predicts future heart disease, and brain aging predicts future dementia,” says Hamilton Oh, one of the paper’s lead authors and a graduate student at Stanford.”
NYTimes: “In interviews over the past year, Mr. [Emmanuel] Todd has argued that Westerners focus too much on one surprise of the war: Ukraine’s ability to defy Russia’s far larger army. But there is a second surprise that has been underappreciated: Russia’s ability to defy the sanctions and seizures through which the United States sought to destroy the Russian economy. Even with its Western European allies in tow, the United States lacked the leverage to keep the world’s big, new economic actors in line. India took advantage of fire-sale prices for Russian energy. China provided Russia with sanctioned goods and electronic components. And then the manufacturing base of the United States and its European allies proved inadequate to supply Ukraine with the matériel (particularly artillery) needed to stabilize, let alone win, the war. The United States no longer has the means to deliver on its foreign-policy promises.”
Ishan Bakshi: “As the [Indian] economy searches for new drivers of growth, the government is caught in its own rhetoric. The contradictions are hard to ignore. If the underlying economic momentum is really as robust as is believed, if high growth is generating gainful employment opportunities for the millions entering the labour force, then why must the government provide free food to 800 million people? Why must it continue to drive the investment momentum in the economy? Why is private investment, both domestic and foreign, still tepid? And why is private consumption growing at just 3 per cent?”
Ethan Mollick: “The three most successful approaches to prompting are both useful and pretty easy to do. The first is simply adding context to a prompt. There are many ways to do that: give the AI a persona (you are a marketer), an audience (you are writing for high school students), an output format (give me a table in a word document), and more. The second approach is few shot, giving the AI a few examples to work from. LLMs work well when given samples of what you want, whether that is an example of good output or a grading rubric. The final tip is to use Chain of Thought, which seems to improve most LLM outputs. While the original meaning of the term is a bit more technical, a simplified version just asks the AI to go step-by-step through instructions: First, outline the results; then produce a draft; then revise the draft; finally, produced a polished output.” [via Arnold Kling]
