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2 links collected from newscientist.com between 2010 and 2014

Sorting: Oldest links first
Domain: newscientist.com

2010

2010-03-16 newscientist.com
Explaining the curse of work
"Parkinson’s law" states: work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Is there anything more to that "law" than just a cynical slogan? Physicists Peter Klimek, Rudolf Hanel and Stefan Thurner of the Medical University of Vienna in Austria think so. They have recreated mathematically just the kind of bureaucratic dynamics that Parkinson described anecdotally 50 years ago.

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2014

2014-09-16 newscientist.com
Ethical trap: robot paralysed by choice of who to save
As a human proxy moved towards the hole, the robot rushed in to push it out of the path of danger. But when the team added a second human proxy rolling toward the hole at the same time, the robot was forced to choose. Sometimes, it managed to save one human while letting the other perish; a few times it even managed to save both. But in 14 out of 33 trials, the robot wasted so much time fretting over its decision that both humans fell into the hole.

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