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The neuroscientist who wants us to be nicer to psychopaths

New Scientist

Abigail Marsh has found that many psychopaths don't want to be cruel and uncaring, and argues that they deserve support to help them get there Think of a psychopath and you probably picture someone dangerous, someone whose ruthless self-interest leads to great harm for others and considerable success for themselves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, while only around 1 per cent of people in the general population have psychopathy, roughly 1 in 5 men in prison show signs of it, and research has also found a link between corporate leadership and psychopathic traits . But just as it is painful to know a psychopath, it isn't necessarily fun to be one either. Abigail Marsh, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Georgetown University in Washington DC, studies those with psychopathic traits who largely lead ordinary lives among us. She has uncovered something surprising: many don't want to be psychopathic at all. Researchers are still honing the precise definition, but psychopathy is characterised by callousness, a lack of empathy, glib social charm and impulsivity.


Mamdani quotes the Quran, Bible to support sanctuary city status

FOX News

Mayor Zohran Mamdani framed New York City's sanctuary status in religious terms at interfaith breakfast, invoking Bible, Quran, and Bhagavad Gita before 400 faith leaders.


I thought I'd struck lucky on a dating app but invited a monster into my life

BBC News

I thought I'd struck lucky on a dating app but invited a monster into my life Handsome, charming, a gentle giant - Katie Yates believed Jason Smith was a real catch after meeting him on a dating app. But within months he had subjected her to relentless physical and mental abuse before raping her and attempting to drown her in the bath just before Christmas. Katie, 42 and from Cardiff, has waived her anonymity as a victim of sexual assault to warn women to be wary of strangers they meet on dating apps who may pose as nice guys in an attempt to lure them in. You scroll on all the profiles with smiling photos and slick words but there are some people who should be looking for a therapist, not a girlfriend, she said. Katie had been single for five years when she signed up to a dating app in February 2018.


Parakeets teach a lesson in friendship

Popular Science

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Making new friends (especially as an adult) can be challenging. When new birds are introduced to a group, monk parakeets will "test the waters" to avoid getting injured by defensive strangers. The parakeets will gradually approach the new bird, taking some time to get familiar before ramping up to more risky or vulnerable interactions that are needed to form the bonds necessary for survival. "There can be a lot of benefits to being social, but these friendships have to start somewhere," said Claire O'Connell, a study co-author and a doctoral student in the University of Cincinnati, said in a statement .


Lice Checks, Crafts, and Being Touched by Strangers: Inside a Role-Playing ASMR Spa

WIRED

Tinglesbar incorporates ASMR into elementary school and doctor's visits simulations, offering a social haven for introverts. "It's time for your lice check," a woman who goes by "Ms. K" whispers directly into my ear as she starts running her fingers into my scalp and through each strand of hair. I'm in a dark room, Eastern flute music playing in the background as I sit across from my partner who's also having his hair caressed by a stranger. We close our eyes so we don't burst out laughing.


From Leiden to Pleasure Island: The Constant Potts Model for Community Detection as a Hedonic Game

Felipe, Lucas Lopes, Avrachenkov, Konstantin, Menasche, Daniel Sadoc

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Community detection is one of the fundamental problems in data science which consists of partitioning nodes into disjoint communities. We present a game-theoretic perspective on the Constant Potts Model (CPM) for partitioning networks into disjoint communities, emphasizing its efficiency, robustness, and accuracy. Efficiency: We reinterpret CPM as a potential hedonic game by decomposing its global Hamiltonian into local utility functions, where the local utility gain of each agent matches the corresponding increase in global utility. Leveraging this equivalence, we prove that local optimization of the CPM objective via better-response dynamics converges in pseudo-polynomial time to an equilibrium partition. Robustness: We introduce and relate two stability criteria: a strict criterion based on a novel notion of robustness, requiring nodes to simultaneously maximize neighbors and minimize non-neighbors within communities, and a relaxed utility function based on a weighted sum of these objectives, controlled by a resolution parameter. Accuracy: In community tracking scenarios, where initial partitions are used to bootstrap the Leiden algorithm with partial ground-truth information, our experiments reveal that robust partitions yield higher accuracy in recovering ground-truth communities.


The secrets of lost luggage auctions: I bought four bags for 100. What would I find inside?

The Guardian

A yellow suitcase draws me in like a beacon. It is stacked on a dark shelf at the back of Greasby's auction house in Tooting, south London, and looks brand new, with a hard exterior and wheels that Richard Stacey, a Greasby's regular who is dressed in shorts, a plaid shirt and a cream bucket hat, tells me to test. So I test them – and they work. If I was just buying a bag, that is all I would need to know. But this isn't just a bag: the zip is locked and when I lift it, it is heavy.


Love hormone could be key to friendship

Popular Science

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. When the brain releases oxytocin during sex, childbirth, breastfeeding, and social interactions, the hormone supports strong feelings such as attachment, trust, and closeness. That's why oxytocin is frequently nicknamed the love, cuddle, or happy hormone--even though it's also linked with aggression. To continue investigating the biological role of oxytocin, a team of researchers studied it with scientist's poster species for love and friendship, the prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster). The small rodents found throughout central North America have bonds that are "similar to human friendships in the sense that they are selective and long-lasting. Voles form strong, stable bonds with specific peers," Markita Landry, a chemist from the University of California (UC), Berkeley, tells Popular Science.



MAEBE: Multi-Agent Emergent Behavior Framework

Erisken, Sinem, Gothard, Timothy, Leitgab, Martin, Potham, Ram

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Traditional AI safety evaluations on isolated LLMs are insufficient as multi-agent AI ensembles become prevalent, introducing novel emergent risks. This paper introduces the Multi-Agent Emergent Behavior Evaluation (MAEBE) framework to systematically assess such risks. Using MAEBE with the Greatest Good Benchmark (and a novel double-inversion question technique), we demonstrate that: (1) LLM moral preferences, particularly for Instrumental Harm, are surprisingly brittle and shift significantly with question framing, both in single agents and ensembles. (2) The moral reasoning of LLM ensembles is not directly predictable from isolated agent behavior due to emergent group dynamics. (3) Specifically, ensembles exhibit phenomena like peer pressure influencing convergence, even when guided by a supervisor, highlighting distinct safety and alignment challenges. Our findings underscore the necessity of evaluating AI systems in their interactive, multi-agent contexts.