April 2017 - Mental Wealth

Virginia Tech 10-Year Anniversary: Easier Now to Buy a Gun | Time.com

Ten years have passed since a Virginia Tech senior opened fire on campus, killing 32 students and professors before turning the gun on himself. At the time, it was the single deadliest shooting in U.S. history, and the toll shocked the country, eliciting an outpouring of grief, anger and prayers.
The massacre also set off a political battle over an issue that has now become a familiar coda to mass shootings: gun control. In Virginia’s Republican-controlled legislature, the shooting energized both sides of the gun debate, pitting those who believed guns were the problem against those who believed they were the solution. A decade after what is still the deadliest shooting on a college campus, the winner of that battle is clear: It’s easier than ever to buy and carry a firearm in the state.
In the past 10 years, Virginia has reversed many of its gun regulations, making it easier for residents to carry concealed guns in bars, getting rid of the state’s one-handgun-per-month purchasing law, and making it legal to keep guns in car glove boxes. Over the same period, the state has shrugged off pushes for expanded background checks and calls to toughen laws to prevent gun trafficking.

Virginia Tech 10-Year Anniversary: Easier Now to Buy a Gun | Time.com

The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews – The New York Times

A friend of mine once had a curious experience with a job interview. Excited about the possible position, she arrived five minutes early and was immediately ushered into the interview by the receptionist. Following an amicable discussion with a panel of interviewers, she was offered the job.

Afterward, one of the interviewers remarked how impressed she was that my friend could be so composed after showing up 25 minutes late to the interview. As it turned out, my friend had been told the wrong start time by half an hour; she had remained composed because she did not know she was late.

My friend is not the type of person who would have remained cool had she known she was late, but the interviewers reached the opposite conclusion. Of course, they also could have concluded that her calm reflected a flippant attitude, which is also not a trait of hers. Either way, they would have been wrong to assume that her behavior in the interview was indicative of her future performance at the job.

This is a widespread problem. Employers like to use free-form, unstructured interviews in an attempt to “get to know” a job candidate. Such interviews are also increasingly popular with admissions officers at universities looking to move away from test scores and other standardized measures of student quality. But as in my friend’s case, interviewers typically form strong but unwarranted impressions about interviewees, often revealing more about themselves than the candidates.

The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews – The New York Times

The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI – MIT Technology Review

Last year, a strange self-driving car was released onto the quiet roads of Monmouth County, New Jersey. The experimental vehicle, developed by researchers at the chip maker Nvidia, didn’t look different from other autonomous cars, but it was unlike anything demonstrated by Google, Tesla, or General Motors, and it showed the rising power of artificial intelligence. The car didn’t follow a single instruction provided by an engineer or programmer. Instead, it relied entirely on an algorithm that had taught itself to drive by watching a human do it.

Getting a car to drive this way was an impressive feat. But it’s also a bit unsettling, since it isn’t completely clear how the car makes its decisions. Information from the vehicle’s sensors goes straight into a huge network of artificial neurons that process the data and then deliver the commands required to operate the steering wheel, the brakes, and other systems. The result seems to match the responses you’d expect from a human driver. But what if one day it did something unexpected—crashed into a tree, or sat at a green light? As things stand now, it might be difficult to find out why. The system is so complicated that even the engineers who designed it may struggle to isolate the reason for any single action. And you can’t ask it: there is no obvious way to design such a system so that it could always explain why it did what it did.

The mysterious mind of this vehicle points to a looming issue with artificial intelligence. The car’s underlying AI technology, known as deep learning, has proved very powerful at solving problems in recent years, and it has been widely deployed for tasks like image captioning, voice recognition, and language translation. There is now hope that the same techniques will be able to diagnose deadly diseases, make million-dollar trading decisions, and do countless other things to transform whole industries.

The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI – MIT Technology Review

Playing Tetris can reduce the onset of PTSD after trauma, study shows – CNN.com

After experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event, such as a car accident, people are likely to develop anxiety or distress in relation to that event soon after the experience, leading to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

But a new study has shown that playing the computer game Tetris within hours of experiencing trauma can prevent those feelings from taking over your mind.
PTSD occurs when intrusive memories linked to fear from a traumatic event become consolidated in a person’s mind by them visualizing the event in a loop until it becomes locked in their brain.
Competing with the visualization, such as with a game like Tetris, can block that consolidation form happening.

Playing Tetris can reduce the onset of PTSD after trauma, study shows – CNN.com