Tag: Question

Right now, generative artificial intelligence feels like an unnervingly good magic trick. Every time I’ve messed with it, I’ve found it to be impressive, but not quite yet useful. Its output is, at the moment, too generic and inaccurate for me to actually rely on it for something that...

Perhaps you’ve faced a dilemma like this. You’re in the middle of a busy week. You’re barely keeping your head above water. You need more hours, yet somehow, on Thursday morning, you see that you’ll be traveling downtown to your local conference center to participate in a pan...

The more meetings you attend, the more you’ll see the same scenarios again and again. People debate the ins and outs of the particular challenge in front of them. Volunteers, or conscripts, are identified to own each of the actions that represent the next steps forward. Mortal enemies set thei...

Communication has been described as the “most important skill of the 21st century”. Yet myths circulate about what counts as ‘good’ communication, including what counts as the optimal circumstances for communicating. Myths arise partly because research in psychology and relat...

There comes a time in every expat’s life when you have to decide if you’ll stay where you are or move on. I absolutely love living in Barcelona. I love my friends, my job, the city and the lifestyle in general. Summer, sea, tapas, Gaudí — what’s not to love? Moving ...

“But where are you really from? I only ask this question because I’m genuinely curious,” said an acquaintance of mine when quizzing a non-white woman who happened to share a dinner table with us at a social event. “I don’t understand why some people find such ...

I was once extremely skeptical of the of the terms, “vegetarian chicken strips” or “vegan tuna” but I can say that I might have been converted after visiting the vegan butcher in Toronto. Yes, I put the word vegan + butcher in the same sentence. That sounds almost as wrong as...

Is there a god? Do we have a soul? Is there reincarnation? Some view these as among the most important questions we human beings can ask. In my experience, those who propound that view are typically already adherents to one or another belief system, and the questions are the hook for attempts to eva...

In recent times, particularly in light of the harrowing events unfolding in Palestine, a question has surfaced with increasing urgency: “Why isn’t Allah saving Muslims who are facing hardships everywhere, especially in the ongoing situation in Palestine?” This query has been echoed...

Back around the turn of the century, I wrote an article for Adbusters called “The Sabbath Revolt.” I was arguing for a “one-seventh rule” where we reserve one day a week for non-commodified activities. This idea of a day off each week was one of the first things the Israelite...

Long before I started questioning my gender, I had this idle fantasy where one of my best lady friends would walk up to me and say, “give it up, you’re not fooling anyone.” If you’d confronted me about this fantasy at the time, I couldn’t have told you what, exactly,...

Here in California, it doesn’t rain often, so when it does, it’s a cause for rejoicing… that is, until you hear, when you’re sitting there cozy by the fireplace, the faint sound of a drip. That is what happened in our home last week. As I looked up, there in the corner by th...

The thought of whether to leave or stay back in Nigeria has crossed the mind of your typical Nigerian youth who is privileged enough to dream in that direction. I say “privileged” because a flight from Nigeria to Canada — a popular Japa destination costs about 640 dollars, that&rsq...

It may even be possible, although there are some compelling physics reasons to think not, that the Universe was born with primordial black holes: a population of black holes that sprang into existence long before the very first stars ever formed. These scenarios are particularly important when it co...

Metaphysics has been called rubbish since at least the early 20th century, when famous mathematical physicist and logical positivist philosopher Rudolph Carnap said it was a waste of time. Later empiricist Willard Van Ormand Quine was less dismissive. Yet, the best and brightest of contemporary expr...

It was a simple question about two circles. One of the circles had a radius 1/3 of the other circle, which meant that the other circle’s radius was 3 times the smaller circle. Now it asks as to how many revolutions of the small circle will it take to go around the larger one. Now it seemed ...

When we perform synthetic data generation, we typically create a model for our real (or ‘observed’) data, and then use this model to generate synthetic data. This observed data is usually compiled from real world experiences, such as measurements of the physical characteristics of irises...

The model is trained on a dataset of contexts, questions, and corresponding answers written in Portuguese. The output of the model is the span of text in the context that answers the proposed question. For example. given the following context: context = 'Arquitetonicamente, a...