We're not so different from other animals.
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The steady drip of change.
In The ages of globalization We are going to find out the pros and cons of globalization, and also that it is in some ways inevitable (and that we should try to minimize its damage because its benefits are too important).
Among other issues, its author, Jeffrey D. Sachs, addresses some thorny questions such as: what have been the main drivers of change on a global scale? How do geography, technology and institutions interact? How are changes from one region dispersed to others?
The seven ages
To trace the history of globalization, Sachs describes seven distinct ages:
- Paleolithic Age: our prehistory, when humans were still searching for food.
- Neolithic Age: when agriculture began.
- Equestrian Age: when the domestication of the horse and the development of proto-writing enabled long-distance trade and communications.
- classic age: when the first great empires emerged.
- Oceanic Age: when empires began to expand across the oceans and beyond the usual ecological zones of the homeland.
- Industrial Age: when some societies, led by Great Britain, ushered in the industrial economy.
- Digital Age: our own time, in which almost everyone is instantly interconnected through digital data.
Sachs's book is a marvel if what we want is to understand the history of humanity as an inevitable process towards global cooperation, and therefore has been a source of inspiration for entries for Xataka Ciencia such as This is how spectacular the growth in the world's urbanization rate has been.
The ages of globalization: Geography, technology and institutions (No collection)
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The news
Books that inspire us: 'The Ages of Globalization' by Jeffrey D. Sachs
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
The world population has not grown especially until very recently, and the same has happened with the rate of urbanization, that is, the proportion of the world's population that resides in urban areas.
These data come from the Global Environmental History Database or History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE), spanning 12,000 years.
Population rate
- 10,000 – 3,000 BC: The estimated population grew from 2 million to 45, with an annual growth rate of only 0.04 percent.
- 3000 – 1000 BC: 0.05 percent annual growth rate.
- 1000 BC – 1500 AD: 0.06 percent.
- 1500 – 1800: 0.25 percent. The world population multiplies by two, from 461 million to 990 million.
- 1800 – 2000: 0.92 percent. The population multiplies by six, from 990 million to 6,145 million.
Urbanization rate
The urbanization rate runs quite even with the population rate. Even in year 1, most of humanity lived in small agricultural settlements, and only 1% lived in cities.
In the year 1000, 3 percent lived in cities. In the 1500s, 3.6 percent. As explained Jeffrey D. Sachs in his book The ages of globalization:
As late as 1900, the global urbanization rate was only 16 percent. It is not until the 20th century that more than half of humanity then lives in urban environments (an estimated 55 percent in 2020).
That is to say, it is right now that we can affirm that, for the first time in the history of humanity, there are more people living in cities. And probably, before the end of this century, the percentage will have skyrocketed.
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The news
This is how spectacular the growth in the world's urbanization rate has been
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
Some personalities appear more prone to political radicalization.
Machine learning has helped a group of researchers at the University of Washington to devise a system, called Audeo, which creates audio from silent piano performances.
That is, this artificial intelligence recreates the performing experience of musicians and their instruments using only visual cues.
Audeo
Audeo uses a series of steps to decode what's happening in the video and then translate it into music. First, it has to detect which keys are pressed in each video frame to create a diagram over time. Then you need to translate that diagram into something that a music synthesizer will actually recognize as a sound a piano would make. This second step cleans up the data and adds more information, such as how hard each key is pressed and for how long.
The researchers trained and tested the system using YouTube videos of the pianist Paul Barton. The lineup consisted of about 172,000 video frames of Barton playing music by well-known classical composers, such as Bach and Mozart.
Audeo's reliability in interpreting which song is being played is so high that it even surpasses that of song recognition apps: the applications correctly identified the piece that Audeo was playing approximately 86% of the time, while Audeo reached the 93%.
Audeo was trained and tested only on Paul Barton piano videos. Future research is needed to see how well it can transcribe music for any musician or piano player.
–
The news
This AI can interpret the music played by an instrument only using visual cues
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
Electrons are reaching ultrarelativistic speeds above our planet.