A PhD at 50? (or why do I keep going back to school)

"Why would anyone in their right mind go back to school, once again, instead of relaxing and taking advantage of the golden years?" or "haven't you had enough of school?" - I have received some of these reactions when sharing that I have finally taken the step of facing a PhD. Yep ... 1st year of my PhD is starting at ISEG! 

Why now? Well, the fact is that this is an idea (desire) that I have had for many years, but kept it in the draw. I love studying and this passion has taken me back to school for several different courses and post graduation studies. 

I like to think that I am part of a an entire population dedicated to life-long learning. Being part of that bulk of people that often goes back to school to complete degrees as payed-off. Learning and researching has helped me live and work with open-mindedness and intellectual honesty.

  

At this stage in life, I feel (even more) pragmatic and resilient, willing to ask questions and take this risk in my life. 

#lifeinterrupted #dorabailao

#lifeinterrupted #dorabailao

Rocking life and smiling was her motto.

Another heart breaking loss; we all love(d) greatly you and your spirit.

Today has fallen the brave. Fair well.

Trust me, I'm a chatbot

More and more companies are using chatbots in customer services. Due to advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing, chatbots are often indistinguishable from humans when it comes to communication. But should companies tell customers they are communicating with machines and not with humans? Researchers investigated. Their research found that consumers tend to react negatively when they learn that the person they are talking to is, in fact, a chatbot.


Göttingen University researchers investigate effect of non-human conversation partners in customer services

AI learns to predict human behavior from videos

In a new study, Columbia Engineering researchers unveil a computer vision technique for giving machines a more intuitive sense for what will happen next by leveraging higher-level associations between people, animals, and objects.

Predicting what someone is about to do next based on their body language comes naturally to humans but not so for computers. When we meet another person, they might greet us with a hello, handshake, or even a fist bump. We may not know which gesture will be used, but we can read the situation and respond appropriately.


Click for the full text here

Explaining habits: new concepts for the cognitive science of bad habits and addictions

Habits are the topic of a venerable history of research that extends back to antiquity, yet they were originally disregarded by the cognitive sciences. They started to become the focus of interdisciplinary research in the 1990s, but since then there has been a stalemate between those who approach habits as a kind of bodily automatism or as a kind of mindful action. This implicit mind-body dualism is ready to be overcome with the rise of interest in embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (4E) cognition.


This article by Susana Ramírez-Vizcaya and Tom Froese reviews the enactive approach and highlights how it moves beyond by integrating both autonomy and sense-making into its theory of agency. It defines a habit as an adaptive, precarious, and self-sustaining network of neural, bodily, and interactive processes that generate dynamical sensorimotor patterns.


Habits constitute a central source of normativity for the agent. The enactive approach views habits as constituting an interdependent whole on whose overall viability the individual habits depend. The consistent theoretical framework of enactivism sees cognition as “an embodied engagement in which the world is brought forth by the coherent activity of a cogniser in its environment” (Di Paolo, 2009a, p. 12).

How breathing and metabolism are interconnected (and where does fat goes when losing weight)

Ruben Meerman shares his knowledge in this TED talk on how to breathe yourself thin by explaining where fat goes when you lose weight.

Better known to aussie kids as the Surfing Scientist, Ruben has and appeared on Australian television shows to educate the public on science topics and published in the British Medical Journal, author also of the book "Big Fat Myths".

He surveyed 150 doctors, dieticians and personal trainers and asked them what where fat goes when losing weight; and what many think happens is impossible, because fat can not turn into energy, since it’s made of atoms.

The enlightening facts about fat metabolism, accordingly to Ruben, is that fat is converted to carbon dioxide and water. You exhale the carbon dioxide and the water mixes into your circulation until it’s lost as urine or sweat. If you lose 10kg of fat, precisely 8.4kg comes out through your lungs and the remaining 1.6kg turns into water. In other words, nearly all the weight we lose is exhaled.


So if fat turns into carbon dioxide, could simply breathing more make you lose weight? Unfortunately not. Huffing and puffing more than you need to is called hyperventilation and will only make you dizzy, or possibly faint. The only way you can consciously increase the amount of carbon dioxide your body is producing is by moving your muscles.

The Social Dilemma

The Social Dilemma is a Netflix documentary-drama hybrid that explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations. It focuses on how big social media companies manipulate users by using algorithms that encourage addiction to their platforms. It also shows, fairly accurately, how platforms harvest personal data to target users with ads – and have so far gone largely unregulated.

Worth to watch 'till the last second!