The pandemic made the world realise the importance of human contact

The sense of touch is easily overlooked. Its flashier cousins, vision and hearing, have entire art forms dedicated to them while chefs and perfumers serve our taste buds and nostrils. Scientists neglect it. For every research paper on touch, there are 100 on sight.

https://www.economist.com/international/2021/02/20/the-pandemic-made-the-world-realise-the-importance-of-human-contact

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Seetha Ram

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AI sceptic Emily Bender: ‘The emperor has no clothes’

Her thesis is that the whizzy chatbots and image-generation tools created by OpenAI and rivals Anthropic, Elon Musk's xAI, Google and Meta are little more than "stochastic parrots", a term that she coined in a 2021 paper. A stochastic parrot, she wrote, is a system "for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning". https://on.ft.com/465EHFT I saw this article when using the Financial Times app and thought you might be interested: Financial Times, AI sceptic Emily Bender: 'The emperor has no clothes' -- George Hammond -- Read the full article at:

Asian Water

Institutions matter for service delivery Public water sector institutions in many developing countries have inherited archaic policies that are ineffective. A change in mindset is imperative to revive decaying water utilities. By K.E. Seetharam At the Fourth World Water Forum in Mexico in March 2006, the Asian Development Bank was one of the few institutions to raise the flag on the need for good governance in the water sector. Although policy aspects are important for development, ADB's concept of good governance focuses on the effective management of water infrastructure to ensure proper delivery of services. In essence, good governance is about changing attitudes and behaviour to ensure that water sector institutions actually deliver to their citizens what they say they will deliver. Institutions have two dimensions—the policies, and the persons who are responsible for implementing them. A basic issue that arises in relation to good governance is how well the governm...

Drinking Water is Food

Drinking Water is Like Food— bottle it and deliver it to the poor immediately K E Seetharam The Asia Water Watch 2015 , commissioned by ADB, WHO, UNDP, and UNESCAP, estimates that another 700 million people—at minimum—will need to be served in Asia over the next decade to meet Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target 10 on safe drinking water alone. When I started to coordinate the preparation of report in 2005, the big question that I had in my mind was how can this massive target be achieved expeditiously? Developing country governments and development organizations are attempting to partly answer this question. In early 2006, I assisted ADB in announcing its Water Financing Program 2006-2010. The Program, one of the most concrete actions publicly announced so far by international organizations, will double ADB's investments in the water sector to over $2 billion annually for the next five years. But typical development projects take at least 3 to 5 five years for their ...

Think Pieces reviewed and written by Lakshmi and Seetha Ram

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