npr | It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. And on the show today, ideas about a new industrial revolution.
JEREMY HOWARD: I mean, it's not just a new phase of the Industrial Revolution. It's a - it's an entirely new revolution.
RAZ: This is data scientist Jeremy Howard.
HOWARD: So we went through the process of replacing hunting and gathering with domestication. We went through the process of replacing animal energy with mechanical energy. We're now going through the process of replacing human intelligence with artificial intelligence.
RAZ: So for the past 25 years, Jeremy has been working on a technology called deep learning, and it's based on the way the human brain and nervous system work.
HOWARD: Deep learning relies on a particular kind of function called a neural network. It is heavily inspired by neuroscience and can actually compute anything.
RAZ: Anything because these machines can learn and perceive. They can see, hear, read, write. They can make decisions all while being able to process billions of data points.
HOWARD: It's creepy.
RAZ: Yeah.
HOWARD: And it's possibly about to get creepier.
RAZ: (Laughter) Oh, no. But before we get to the creepy part, we should point out we're already using these neural networks for a lot of pretty cool things.
HOWARD: So today, we have a thousand-layer neural networks doing things like Skype translation. I don't know if you've tried that.
nature | Understanding the brain basis of consciousness remains one of the
outstanding challenges in modern science. While rigorous definitions are
still mainly lacking, consciousness can be defined rather broadly as
that which “vanishes every night when we fall into dreamless sleep” and
returns the next morning when we wake up1.
Equally, when we are conscious, our conscious experiences are populated
by a variety of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings that collectively
form an integrated conscious scene. These observations lead to an
intuitive distinction between conscious level (how conscious one is) and
conscious content (what one is conscious of, when one is conscious).
The large majority of recent neuroscientific research into consciousness
has treated these dimensions separately2,3,4,5.
Investigations of conscious level typically contrast global changes in
brain activity among different states including wakeful awareness,
various sleep stages, and different forms of anaesthesia. Many of these
studies attempt to isolate neural changes that accompany alterations of
conscious level independently of changes in general physiological
arousal. Studies of conscious content have focused primarily on
uncovering differences in brain activity between closely matched
conscious and unconscious perception, while conscious level is
maintained constant6.
Recently, following early suggestions that increased conscious level may be related to an increased range of conscious contents3,7, there has been growing interest in characterising how conscious level and conscious content may relate2,5.
One empirical approach to this question is to apply emerging measures
of conscious level to experimental manipulations that primarily affect
conscious content. Here, we capitalise on the profound effects on
conscious phenomenology elicited by psychedelic compounds, specifically
LSD, psilocybin, and subanesthetic doses of ketamine. These drugs
normally have profound and widespread effects on conscious experiences
of self and world. More specifically, they appear to “broaden” the scope
of conscious contents, vivifying imagination8 and positively modulating the flexibility of cognition9,10.
At the same time, the states they induce are not accompanied by a
global loss of consciousness or the marked changes in physiological
arousal as seen in sleep or anaesthesia. These observations raise the
question of whether theoretically-grounded measures of conscious level
would be changed in the psychedelic state.
Empirical measures of
conscious level have reached a new benchmark with the development of the
perturbational complexity index, PCI11.
The PCI quantifies the diversity across channels and observations of
the EEG response to a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) pulse and
has been shown to robustly index levels of consciousness6, ranging from anaesthesia induced by various substances11,12, sleep stages11 and graded disorders of consciousness such as (emergence from) the minimally conscious state11,13. Notably, all these comparisons resulted in lower PCI values compared to a baseline state of wakeful awareness. Fist tap Big Don.
nautil.us | The Integrated Information Theory of consciousness derives a
mathematical calculus and gives rise to something known as a
consciousness meter, which a variety of clinical groups are now testing.
If you have an anesthetized patient, or a patient who’s been in a
really bad traffic accident, you don’t really know if this person is
minimally conscious or in a vegetative state; you treat them as if
they’re conscious, but they don’t respond in any meaningful way.
How can you be sure they’re conscious?
You’re
never really sure. So you want a brain-based test that tells you if
this person is capable of some experience. People have developed that
based on this integrated information series. That’s big progress. The
current state of my brain influences what happens in my brain the next
second, and the past state of my brain influences what my brain does
right now. Any system that has this cause-effect power upon itself is
conscious. It derives from a mathematical measure. It could be a number
that’s zero, which means a system with no cause-effect power upon
itself. It’s not conscious. Or you have systems that are “Phi,”
different from zero. The Phi measures, in some sense, the maximum
capacity of the system to experience something. The higher the number,
the more conscious the system.
So you could assign a number to
everything that might have some degree of consciousness—whether it’s an
ant, a lizard, bacteria, or a vegetative human being?
Yes, you or me, the Dalai Lama or Albert Einstein.
The higher the number, the more conscious?
The
number by itself doesn’t tell you it’s now thinking, or is conscious of
an image or a smell. But it tells you the capacity of the system to
have a conscious experience. In some deep philosophical sense, the
number tells you how much it exists. The higher the number, the more the
system exists for itself. There isn’t a Turing Test for consciousness.
You have to look at the way the system is built. You have to look at the
circuitry, not its behavior, whether it’s a computer or a biological
brain. This has now been tested and validated in many patients,
including locked-in patients who are fully conscious, people under
anesthesia who are not conscious, people in deep sleep, and those in
vegetative states or minimal-conscious states. So the question now is
whether this can be turned into something practical that can be used at
every clinic in the country or the world to test patients who’ve just
been in a bad traffic accident.
Obviously, there are huge implications. Do you turn off the life-support machines?
First,
does the patient suffer or is nobody home anymore? In the famous case
of Terri Schiavo, we could tell the brain stem was still functioning but
there wasn’t anybody home. Her consciousness had disappeared 15 years
earlier.
Review Hillary Clinton's 1969 Wellesley College thesis titled: “there is only the fight” published on line in pdf format, where
the key insights can be found that Mrs. Clinton understood that Saul
Alinsky’s “political faith” along with that of his fellow thinkers, MLK,
Eugene Debs, Walt Whitman was simply “democracy”.
In the last chapter of her thesis, she rejects the “ideal” of democracy for herself and points out that
Alinksy’s solution of new deal style mass projects like the TVA to
provide jobs might work in some other countries but not here in this
country. She affirms that sentiment with the mocking cartoon appended to the end of her thesis.
consortiumnews | An early insider account of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, entitled Shattered,
reveals a paranoid presidential candidate who couldn’t articulate why
she wanted to be President and who oversaw an overconfident and
dysfunctional operation that failed to project a positive message or
appeal to key voting groups.
Okay, I realize that people who have been watching Rachel Maddow
and other MSNBC programs – as well as reading The New York Times and
The Washington Post for the past four months – “know” that Clinton ran a
brilliant campaign that was only derailed because of “Russian
meddling.” But this insider account from reporters Jonathan Allen and
Annie Parnes describes something else.
As The Wall Street Journal review
notes, the book “narrates the petty bickering, foolish reasoning and
sheer arrogance of a campaign that was never the sure thing that its
leader and top staffers assumed. … Mr. Allen and Ms. Parnes stress two
essential failures of the campaign, the first structural, the second
political. The campaign’s structure, the authors write, was an ‘unholy
mess, fraught with tangled lines of authority, petty jealousies, and no
sense of greater purpose.’”
The book portrays Hillary Clinton as distant from her campaign staff,
accessible primarily through her close aide, Huma Abedin, and thus
creating warring factions within her bloated operation.
According to the Journal’s review by Barton Swaim, the book’s authors
suggest that this chaos resulted from “the fact that Mrs. Clinton
didn’t know why she wanted to be president. At one point no fewer than
10 senior aides were working on her campaign announcement speech, not
one had a clear understanding of why Americans should cast their vote
for Mrs. Clinton and not someone else. The speech, when she finally
delivered it, was a flop – aimless, boring, devoid of much beyond
bromides.”
The book cites a second reason for Clinton’s dismal performance – her
team’s reliance on analytics rather than on reaching out to real voters
and their concerns.
There is also an interesting tidbit regarding Clinton’s attitude
toward the privacy of her staff’s emails. “After losing to Mr. Obama in
the protracted 2008 primary,” the Journal’s review says, Clinton “was
convinced that she had lost because some staffers – she wasn’t sure who –
had been disloyal. So she ‘instructed a trusted aide to access the
campaign’s server and download the [email] messages sent and received by
top staffers.’”
Lie-started and Orwellian-illegal Wars of Aggression is
all the evidence necessary for US military to refuse all war orders
(there are no lawful orders for unlawful war), and for officers to
arrest those who issue them. This argument extends to all in US law
enforcement agencies for war-related crimes of treason, murders and
injuries to US military lied-into illegal Wars of Aggression, and .01% military looting last reported at $6.5 trillion.
Rather than “drain the swamp” and focus US resources on US upgrades,
President Trump joins our opponents with violating war law from two US
treaties that armed attack is only lawful if, and only if, the US is
under attack by another nation’s government.
Waiting for military honor
The ordinary US military are the used/abused pawns of the .01%
psychopathic class. They enlist from economic need, desire to serve
ideals within our Declaration of Independence and US Constitution, or
from attraction to ideals within this profession. Although they’re
trained to recognize unlawful orders within military duty, they are not trained to recognize unlawful Wars of Aggression. Of course, there are no lawful orders for unlawful war. Their Oaths of Enlistment
swear them to protect and defend the US Constitution against all
enemies, foreign and domestic. There is no greater domestic enemy than
.01% “leaders” who lie them into unlawful Wars of Aggression.
Because US military are the ones applying War Crimes onto the world,
with all risk and suffering at their immediate experience, one would
imagine growing factions refusing to obey lying “leaders” and
dishonorable illegal armed attacks.
One would imagine, except We the People see no evidence.
consortiumnews | the major U.S. news outlets, such as The New York Times and The
Washington Post, apparently believe there is only one side to a story,
the one espoused by the U.S. government or more generically the
Establishment.
Any other interpretation of a set of facts gets dismissed as “fringe”
or “fake news” even if there are obvious holes in the official story
and a lack of verifiable proof to support the mainstream groupthink.
Very quickly, alternative explanations are cast aside while ridicule is
heaped on those who disagree.
So, for instance, The New York Times will no longer allow any doubt
to creep in about its certainty that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad
intentionally dropped a sarin bomb on the remote rebel-held town of Khan
Sheikhoun in Idlib province in northern Syria on April 4.
A mocking article
by the Times’ Jim Rutenberg on Monday displayed the Times’ rejection of
any intellectual curiosity regarding the U.S. government’s claims that
were cited by President Trump as justification for his April 6 missile
strike against a Syrian military airbase. The attack killed several
soldiers and nine civilians including four children, according to Syrian press reports.
Rutenberg traveled to Moscow with the clear intention of mocking the
Russian news media for its “fake news” in contrast to The New York
Times, which holds itself out as the world’s premier guardian of “the
truth.” Rather than deal with the difficulty of assessing what happened
in Khan Sheikhoun, which is controlled by Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate
and where information therefore should be regarded as highly suspect,
Rutenberg simply assessed that the conventional wisdom in the West must
be correct.
To discredit any doubters, Rutenberg associated them with one of the
wackier conspiracy theories of radio personality Alex Jones, another
version of the Times’ recent troubling reliance on McCarthyistic logical
fallacies, not only applying guilt by association but refuting
reasonable skepticism by tying it to someone who in an entirely
different context expressed unreasonable skepticism.
Rutenberg wrote: “As soon as I turned on a television here I wondered
if I had arrived through an alt-right wormhole. Back in the States, the
prevailing notion in the news was that Mr. Assad had indeed been
responsible for the chemical strike. There was some ‘reportage’
from sources like the conspiracy theorist and radio host Alex Jones —
best known for suggesting that the Sandy Hook school massacre was staged
— that the chemical attack was a ‘false flag’ operation by terrorist
rebel groups to goad the United States into attacking Mr. Assad. But
that was a view from the [U.S.] fringe. Here in Russia, it was the
dominant theme throughout the overwhelmingly state-controlled mainstream
media.”
Don't forget I told you cats about the NSA creep-tip two years ago, and gave you a concrete specific recommendation for shoring up your end-point game to protect at least a little something...,
FP | Weaver believes that when the Shadow Brokers published a broad list
of the tools in their possession in January, hoping to auction them off,
the NSA moved quickly.
The NSA “did clearly, quietly tell Microsoft,” Weaver said, allowing
the company to repair the holes before script kiddies and criminal
hackers started figuring out the specifics of the exploits.
Microsoft published a massive patch exactly a month before the Shadow Brokers unleashed its trove.
Neither Microsoft nor the NSA immediately responded to a request for comment.
Before Microsoft revealed it had patched most of the holes, the
Shadow Brokers’ release reignited the debate about when government
agencies should be required to disclose vulnerabilities it finds in such
major products as devices and browsers.
The White House’s Vulnerabilities Equities Process, which determines
whether those flaws should be shared with the company in order to be
repaired, or taken advantage of by intelligence agencies, was
reinvigorated in 2014. The process involves several major agencies,
which consider the likelihood that other nation states or criminal
actors would come across the same flaws.
It’s unclear, however, which agencies are involved in the process and how those decisions are made. The agencies are not required
to disclose vulnerabilities purchased or researched through government
sponsorship. If the NSA told Microsoft about the tools, it was because
the agency knew or suspected the vulnerabilities had been compromised.
Intelligence officials see the latest Shadow Brokers release as part
of a larger erosion of capabilities that has been going on since 2013,
when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden gave journalists internal NSA
documents. Snowden’s leak kicked off a chain of damaging exposures that,
while sparking an important worldwide debate about privacy, severely
damaged U.S. intelligence capabilities, the former intelligence official
argued.
One former TAO employee who spoke with Foreign Policy
believes the release is “a bit dated,” because hacking tools to access
more current Windows projects and other browsers weren’t included.
“It is a significant leak. … It gets harder to develop tools as
defenses improve,” the former TAO employee said. “But it’s still
entirely possible. There are many bugs to be found.”
But the intelligence community’s ability to keep those bugs secret
for any amount of time continues to be questioned. In this latest leak,
detailed NSA notes and work product were included in addition to
technical details about the hacking tools — likely indicating deep-level
access to TAO troves. “This should be on an NSA computer only,” Weaver
told Foreign Policy.
The details the Shadow Brokers revealed are “scary,” the former
cyberintelligence employee said, details that must be from internal
emails, chat logs, or insider knowledge.
Only a handful of countries could have pilfered such sensitive
material from the NSA remotely, the former TAO employee wrote, Russia
and Israel the mostly likely among them.
“If it was an inside job like an operator [typically military]
walking out with a thumb drive, then who knows,” the former TAO source
wrote.
In recent years, the intelligence community has largely failed to
detect insider threats and stem leaks from contractors. Thousands of
private companies and their employees make up a massive percentage of
the intelligence community’s workforce. As of a decade ago, about 70
percent of the intelligence community’s budget was spent on contracts,
according to the Congressional Research Service.
nakedcapitalism | It is now clear from video evidence that the WHR report was fabricated without input from the professional intelligence community [emphasis mine (GP)].
The press reported on April 4 that a nerve agent attack had occurred
in Khan Shaykhun, Syria during the early morning hours locally on that
day. On April 7, The United States carried out a cruise missile attack
on Syria ordered by President Trump. It now appears that the president ordered this cruise missile attack without any valid intelligence to support it [emphasis mine (GP)].
In order to cover up the lack of intelligence to supporting the president’s action, the National Security Council produced a fraudulent intelligence report on April 11 four days later
[emphasis mine (GP)]. The individual responsible for this report was
Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, the National Security Advisor. The
McMaster report is completely undermined by a significant body of video
evidence taken after the alleged sarin attack and before the US cruise
missile attack that unambiguously shows the claims in the WHR could not
possibly be true. This cannot be explained as a simple error.
The National Security Council Intelligence Report clearly refers to
evidence that it claims was obtained from commercial and open sources
shortly after the alleged nerve agent attack (on April 5 and April 6).
If such a collection of commercial evidence was done, it would have
surely found the videos contained herein.
This unambiguously indicates a dedicated attempt to manufacture a false claim that intelligence actually supported the president’s decision to attack Syria, and of far more importance, to accuse Russia of being either complicit or a participant in an alleged atrocity [emphasis mine (GP)].
The attack on the Syrian government threatened to undermine the
relationship between Russia and the United States. Cooperation between
Russia and the United States is critical to the defeat of the Islamic
State. In addition, the false accusation that Russia knowingly engaged
in an atrocity raises the most serious questions about a willful attempt
to do damage relations with Russia for domestic political purposes.
We repeat here a quote from the WHR:
An open source video also shows where we believe the
chemical munition landed—not on a facility filled with weapons, but in
the middle of a street in the northern section of Khan Shaykhun[Emphasis
Added]. Commercial satellite imagery of that site from April 6, after
the allegation, shows a crater in the road that corresponds to the open
source video.
The data provided in these videos make it clear that the WHR made no
good-faith attempt to collect data that could have supported its
“confident assessment.” that the Syrian government executed a sarin
attack as indicated by the location and characteristics of the crater.
This very disturbing event is not a unique situation.
President George W. Bush argued that he was misinformed about
unambiguous evidence that Iraq was hiding a substantial store of weapons
of mass destruction. This false intelligence led to a US attack on Iraq
that started a process that ultimately led to the political
disintegration in the Middle East, which through a series of unpredicted
events then led to the rise of the Islamic State [emphasis mine (GP)].
On August 30, 2013, the White House produced a similarly false
report about the nerve agent attack on August 21, 2013 in Damascus
[emphasis mine (GP)]. This report also contained numerous intelligence
claims that could not be true. An interview with President Obama
published in The Atlantic in April 2016 indicates that Obama was
initially told that there was solid intelligence that the Syrian
government was responsible for the nerve agent attack of August 21, 2013
in Ghouta, Syria. Obama reported that he was later told that the
intelligence was not solid by the then Director of National
Intelligence, James Clapper.
Equally serious questions are raised about the abuse of intelligence
findings by the incident in 2013. Questions that have not been answered
about that incident is how the White House produced a false intelligence
report with false claims that could obviously be identified by experts
outside the White House and without access to classified information.
There also needs to be an explanation of why this 2013 false report was
not corrected. Secretary of State John Kerry emphatically testified
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee repeating information in
this so-called un-equivocating report.
On August 30, 2013 Secretary of State Kerry made the following statement from the Treaty Room in the State Department:
Our intelligence community has carefully reviewed and re-reviewed information regarding this attack
[Emphasis added], and I will tell you it has done so more than mindful
of the Iraq experience. We will not repeat that moment. Accordingly, we
have taken unprecedented steps to declassify and make facts available to
people who can judge for themselves.
It is now obvious that this incident produced by the WHR, while just
as serious in terms of the dangers it created for US security, was a clumsy and outright fabrication of a report that was certainly not supported by the intelligence community [emphasis mine (GP)].
In this case, the president, supported by his staff, made a decision
to launch 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian air base. This action was
accompanied by serious risks of creating a confrontation with Russia,
and also undermining cooperative efforts to win the war against the
Islamic State.
I therefore conclude that there needs to be a comprehensive
investigation of these events that have either misled people in the
White House White House, or worse yet, been perpetrated by people to
protect themselves from domestic political criticisms for uninformed and
ill-considered actions.
Sincerely yours, Theodore A. Postol
Professor Emeritus of Science,
Technology, and National Security Policy
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Email: postol@mit.edu
medialens | One of the longstanding functions of the 'mainstream' media is to
channel government ideology about who are 'the Good Guys' - that's 'us'
and our allies - and who are the 'Bad Guys' – 'Putin's Russia',
'Saddam's Iraq', 'Chavez's Venezuela', 'Gaddafi's Libya' (until rehabilitated for a while by Blair) and North Korea.
Consider a recent BBC News at Ten segment on the US, China and North Korea that began with presenter Huw Edwards saying:
'President Trump has said the United States will "solve" the threat
posed by North Korea's nuclear programme. In an interview with the
Financial Times, the president said the US would act alone if China
would not intervene. He made his comments ahead of a visit to the US by
the Chinese president later this week. Our North America editor, Jon
Sopel, is at the White House.
'And, Jon, what does this tell us then about President Trump's approach to this upcoming visit?'
Jon Sopel: 'Well, Huw, for all the talk of surveillance and phone
tapping and wire taps and Russia, this is the major strategic national
security issue, at least as far as this White House is concerned. What
to do about North Korea and their growing ability, it seems, to launch a
nuclear missile that could hit the west coast of America.' (April 3,
2017; kindly captured and uploaded to YouTube for us by Steve Ennever)
As we will see, far from being responsible, 'impartial' journalism,
this was blatant propaganda, depicting North Korea as a serious threat
to the United States, capable of hitting California with a nuclear
missile.
Consider, by contrast, a careful analysis by the US writer Adam Johnson in a piece for Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting last month.
Johnson noted that:
'Tensions between the United States and North Korea are making their way back into the news after a series of missile tests and presidential Twitterthreats. Meanwhile, a conservative think tank—previously thought all but dead—has
seen a resurgence in relevancy, thanks to its alignment with Donald
Trump. The result is that the Heritage Foundation has provided much of
the narrative backbone for North Korean/US relations in the age of
Trump, making the rounds in dozens of media articles and television
appearances.'
Johnson continued:
'One key feature of reports on North Korea's nuclear weapons program
is the Hypothetical Scary Nuke Map that shows an entirely hypothetical,
not-yet-proven-to-have-been-built intercontinental ballistic missile
hitting the US mainland.'
Two types of missile, known as KN-14 and KN-08, are depicted in media reports as capable of reaching the United States.
Johnson highlighted the crucial fact that:
'These missiles have not been tested by North Korea'.
In other words, the media have been publishing 'misleading' maps that
'buried the fact that the range indicating the US could be nuked had
not, in fact, been demonstrated.'
essence | For the first time ever, ESSENCE honors the women who are blazing
trails for equal rights and inclusion for Black people in America.
The cover features a host of dynamic women,
such as writer/producer Shonda Rhimes, veteran journalist Joy-Ann Reid,
Women’s March co-chairs Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour and Carmen Perez.
Plus, appearances from Women’s March organizer Janaye Ingram, political
commentator Angela Rye, Circle of Mothers founder Sybrina Fulton,
author/blogger Luvvie Ajayi and social activist April Reign.
#BlackLivesMatter cofounder Opal Tometi and educator/activist Brittany
Packnett are also featured.
When we say Black women will save the world, we’re being literal.
On the following pages, ESSENCE recognizes
88 more socially conscious change makers. By their example they empower
all of us to take action.
oftwominds | The Left is morally and fiscally bankrupt, devoid of coherent solutions, and corrupted by
its embrace of the Corporatocracy.
History often surprises us with unexpected ironies. For the past century,
the slide to fascism could be found on the Right (conservative, populist,
nationalist political parties).
But now it's the Left that's descending into fascism, and few seem to even
notice this remarkable development. By Left I mean socialist-leaning, progressive,
internationalist/globalist political parties.
What is fascism? There is no one tidy definition, but it has three essential
elements:
1) State and corporate elites govern society and the economy as one unified class.
2) This status quo (i.e. The Establishment) seeks to impose a conformity of
values and opinion that support the dominant narratives of the status quo via
the mass (corporate) media and the state-controlled educational system.
3) Dissent from any quarter is suppressed via mass-media ridicule, the judicial crushing and
silencing of whistleblowers, and all the other powers of the central state: rendition,
extra-legal imprisonment, political gulags (in our era, disguised as drug-war
gulags), character assassination, murder by drone, impoverishing dissenters via
firings and blacklists, and on and on.
The Left is now the political wing of the corporatocracy.
As Phillipe Poutou, a Ford factory mechanic from Bordeaux who is the sole
working-class candidate in France's presidential election, so deliciously
pointed out, the Left and Right status quo candidates are indistinguishable in
terms of their self-serving corruption and elitism:
Mechanic-Candidate Bursts French Political Elite's Bubble (NY Times)
Here in the U.S., the self-serving Democratic Party elites operate within the
Corporatocracy structure, in which the state protects and funds private-sector cartels;
the two intertwined and self-reinforcing elites manifest and enforce state policies.
He concluded that the US government's report does not provide any
"concrete" evidence that Assad was responsible, adding it was more
likely that the attack was perpetrated by players on the ground.
Postol
said: "I have reviewed the [White House's] document carefully, and I
believe it can be shown, without doubt, that the document does not
provide any evidence whatsoever that the US government has concrete
knowledge that the government of Syria was the source of the chemical
attack in Khan Sheikhoun, Syria at roughly 6am to 7am on 4 April, 2017.
"In
fact, a main piece of evidence that is cited in the document point to
an attack that was executed by individuals on the ground, not from an
aircraft, on the morning of 4 April.
"This conclusion is based on
an assumption made by the White House when it cited the source of the
sarin release and the photographs of that source. My own assessment is
that the source was very likely tampered with or staged, so no serious
conclusion could be made from the photographs cited by the White House."
The image Postol refers to is that of a crater containing a shell inside, which is said to have contained the sarin gas.
His
analysis of the shell suggests that it could not have been dropped from
an airplane as the damage of the casing is inconsistent from an aerial
explosion. Instead, Postol said it was more likely that an explosive
charge was laid upon the shell containing sarin, before being detonated.
strategic culture |Donald
Trump has reversed his national-security policies 180 degrees, and is
now focusing it around conquering Russia, instead of around reducing the
threat from jihadists. The reason for this drastic change is in order
for him to be able to win the support of the U.S. aristocracy, who had overwhelmingly favored Hillary Clinton during the Presidential contest,
and who (and whose ‘news’media) have been trying to portray Trump as
«Putin’s fool» or even as «Putin’s Manchurian candidate» and thus as an
illegitimate President or even traitor who is beholden to 'America’s
enemy’ (which to them is Russia) for Trump’s having won the U.S.
Presidency — which they had tried to block from happening.
Actually, even Republican billionaires generally preferred Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump —
and almost all of them hate Putin, who insists upon Russia’s
independence, which the U.S. aristocracy call by all sorts of bad names,
so that any American who even so much as merely questions the
characterization of Russia as being an ‘enemy’ nation, is considered to
be ‘unAmerican’, like in the days of communism and Joseph R. McCarthy,
as if communism and the U.S.S.R. and its Warsaw Pact that mirrored
America’s NATO military alliance, even existed today, which they
obviously don’t. So: the U.S. Establishment’s portrayal of current
international reality is so bizarre, it can be believed only by fools,
but enough such fools exist so as to enable that Establishment to do
horrific things, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the 2011
invasion of Libya, just to name two examples, which got rid of two
national leaders who were friendly toward Russia.)
After
Trump ditched his National Security Advisor Mike Flynn (whom Obama had
fired for not being sufficiently anti-Russian, but Trump then hired) and
replaced him with the rabidly anti-Russian H.R. McMaster (whom the
aristocracy’s people were recommending to Trump), Trump was expecting to
be relieved from the aristocracy’s intensifying campaign to impeach him
or otherwise replace him and make the President his clearly
pro-aristocratic Vice President Mike Pence, but the overthrow-Trump
campaign continued even after McMaster became installed replacing Flynn.
Then, perhaps because the replacement of Flynn by McMaster failed to
satisfy the aristocracy, Trump additionally ousted Stephen Bannon and
simultaneously bombed Syrian government forces, and now the campaign to
overthrow Trump seems finally to have subsided, at least a bit, at least
for now.
theatlantic | “My prettiest contribution to my culture,” the writer Kurt Vonnegut mused in his 1981 autobiography Palm Sunday, “was a master’s thesis in anthropology which was rejected by the University of Chicago a long time ago.”
By
then, he said, the thesis had long since vanished. (“It was rejected
because it was so simple and looked like too much fun,” Vonnegut
explained.) But he continued to carry the idea with him for many years
after that, and spoke publicly about it more than once. It was,
essentially, this: “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories
can’t be fed into computers. They are beautiful shapes.”
That explanation comes from a lecture he gave, and which you can still watch on YouTube,
that involves Vonnegut mapping the narrative arc of popular storylines
along a simple graph. The X-axis represents the chronology of the story,
from beginning to end, while the Y-axis represents the experience of
the protagonist, on a spectrum of ill fortune to good fortune. “This is
an exercise in relativity, really,” Vonnegut explains. “The shape of the
curve is what matters.”
The
most interesting shape to him, it turned out, was the one that
reflected the tale of Cinderella, of all stories. Vonnegut visualizes
its arc as a staircase-like climb in good fortune representing the
arrival of Cinderella’s fairy godmother, leading all the way to a high
point at the ball, followed by a sudden plummet back to ill fortune at
the stroke of midnight. Before too long, though, the Cinderella graph is
marked by a sharp leap back to good fortune, what with the whole
business of (spoiler alert) the glass slipper fitting and the happily
ever after.
This may not seem like anything special, Vonnegut says—his actual words
are, “it certainly looks like trash”—until he notices another well known
story that shares this shape. “Those steps at the beginning look like
the creation myth of virtually every society on earth. And then I saw
that the stroke of midnight looked exactly like the unique creation myth
in the Old Testament.” Cinderella’s curfew was, if you look at it on
Vonnegut’s chart, a mirror-image downfall to Adam and Eve’s ejection
from the Garden of Eden. “And then I saw the rise to bliss at the end
was identical with the expectation of redemption as expressed in
primitive Christianity. The tales were identical.”
Scientists have struggled to understand dolphin vocalizations, but new
computer tools to both track dolphins and decode their complex
vocalizations are now emerging. Dr. Denise Herzing has been studying
Atlantic spotted dolphins, Stenella frontalis, in the Bahamas for over
three decades. Her video and acoustic database encompasses a myriad of
complex vocalizations and dolphin behavior. Dr. Thad Starner works on
mining this dataset and decoding dolphin sounds, and has created a
wearable underwater computer, CHAT (Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry), to
help establish a bridge for communication between humans and dolphins.
Starner and Herzing will present this cutting-edge work and recent
results, including perspectives on the challenges of studying this
aquatic society, and decoding their communication signals using the
latest technology.
qz | The possibility of talking to animals has tickled popular imaginations for years, and with good reason. Who wouldn’t want to live in a Dr. Dolittle world where we could understand what our pets and animal neighbors are saying?
Animal cognition researchers have also been fascinated by the topic.
Their work typically focuses on isolating animal communication to see
if language is uniquely human, or if it could have evolved in other
species as well. One of their top candidates is an animal known to
communicate with particularly high intelligence: dolphins.
Dolphins—like many animals including monkeys, birds, cats, and dogs—clearly do relay messages to one another. They emit sounds (paywall) in three broad categories: clicks, whistles, and more complex chirps used for echolocation
(paywall), a technique they use to track prey and other objects by
interpreting ricocheting sound waves. Researchers believe these sounds
can help dolphins communicate: Whistles can serve as unique identifiers, similar to names, and can alert the pod to sources of food or danger.
Communication is most certainly a part of what helps these animals
live in social pods. But proving that dolphins use language—the way that
you’re reading this article, or how you might talk to your friends
about it later—is a whole different kettle of fish.
nature | Still in print, On Growth and Form was more than a decade in
the planning. Thompson would regularly tell colleagues and students — he
taught at what is now the University of Dundee, hence the local media
interest — about his big idea before he wrote it all down. In part, he
was reacting against one of the biggest ideas in scientific history.
Thompson used his book to argue that Charles Darwin’s natural selection
was not the only major influence on the origin and development of
species and their unique forms: “In general no organic forms exist save
such as are in conformity with physical and mathematical laws.”
Biological response to physical forces remains a live topic for research. In a research paper,
for example, researchers report how physical stresses generated at
defects in the structures of epithelial cell layers cause excess cells
to be extruded.
In a separate online publication (K. Kawaguchi et al. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature22321; 2017),
other scientists show that topological defects have a role in cell
dynamics, as a result of the balance of forces. In high-density cultures
of neural progenitor cells, the direction in which cells travel around
defects affects whether cells become more densely packed (leading to
pile-ups) or spread out (leading to a cellular fast-lane where travel
speeds up).
A Technology Feature
investigates in depth the innovative methods developed to detect and
measure forces generated by cells and proteins. Such techniques help
researchers to understand how force is translated into biological
function.
Thompson’s influence also flourishes in other active areas of interdisciplinary research. A research paper offers a mathematical explanation for the colour changes that appear in the scales of ocellated lizards (Timon lepidus)
during development (also featured on this week’s cover). It suggests
that the patterns are generated by a system called a hexagonal cellular
automaton, and that such a discrete system can emerge from the
continuous reaction-diffusion framework developed by mathematician Alan
Turing to explain the distinctive patterning on animals, such as spots
and stripes. (Some of the research findings are explored in detail in the News and Views section.) To complete the link to Thompson, Turing cited On Growth and Form in his original work on reaction-diffusion theory in living systems.
wired |Cells are basically tiny
computers: They send and receive inputs and output accordingly. If you
chug a Frappuccino, your blood sugar spikes, and your pancreatic cells
get the message. Output: more insulin.
But cellular computing is more than just a convenient metaphor. In
the last couple of decades, biologists have been working to hack the
cells’ algorithm in an effort to control their processes. They’ve
upended nature’s role as life’s software engineer, incrementally editing
a cell’s algorithm—its DNA—over generations. In a paper published today
in Nature Biotechnology,
researchers programmed human cells to obey 109 different sets of
logical instructions. With further development, this could lead to cells
capable of responding to specific directions or environmental cues in
order to fight disease or manufacture important chemicals.
Their cells execute these instructions by using proteins called DNA
recombinases, which cut, reshuffle, or fuse segments of DNA. These
proteins recognize and target specific positions on a DNA strand—and the
researchers figured out how to trigger their activity. Depending on
whether the recombinase gets triggered, the cell may or may not produce
the protein encoded in the DNA segment.
A cell could be programmed, for example, with a so-called NOT logic
gate. This is one of the simplest logic instructions: Do NOT do
something whenever you receive the trigger. This study’s authors used
this function to create cells that light up on command. Biologist Wilson Wong of Boston University, who led the research, refers to these engineered cells as “genetic circuits.”
MIT | MIT biological engineers have created a programming language that allows them to rapidly design complex, DNA-encoded circuits that give new functions to living cells.
Using this language, anyone can write a program for the function they want, such as detecting and responding to certain environmental conditions. They can then generate a DNA sequence that will achieve it.
“It is literally a programming language for bacteria,” says Christopher Voigt, an MIT professor of biological engineering. “You use a text-based language, just like you’re programming a computer. Then you take that text and you compile it and it turns it into a DNA sequence that you put into the cell, and the circuit runs inside the cell.”
Voigt and colleagues at Boston University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have used this language, which they describe in the April 1 issue ofScience, to build circuits that can detect up to three inputs and respond in different ways. Future applications for this kind of programming include designing bacterial cells that can produce a cancer drug when they detect a tumor, or creating yeast cells that can halt their own fermentation process if too many toxic byproducts build up.
The researchers plan to make the user design interface available on the Web.
Brain item -- AI processing problem...??
would require AI to have the listener's entire life history stored in its memory to determine proper context....??
Your brain fills gaps in your hearing without you realising
No BD. Not an AI processing problem, just an illustration of the mechanical and necessarily error-prone nature of both language and auditory language processing. It's not a Voight-Kampff test and "Context doesn't require a life history". In fact, with the benefit of big data, and centralized cloud storage and processing of hundreds of thousands of utterances and their associated meanings, the probability of an AI making either the sensory or grammatical error is greatly reduced.
...Here's a no-nonsense AI item:
Turns out AI is not sufficiently stupid to allow PC liberals to shove ridiculous egalitarian concepts down its throat.
AI just looks at the *FACTS* and calls it like it sees it....
Machine learning algorithms are picking up deeply ingrained race and
gender prejudices concealed within the patterns of language use,
scientists say
No BD. Unfortunately, you are still trapped in the realm of language and
language constructs your reality. Your language reflects your tendencies - which are racist - and so what FRANK is reflecting back at you is not the truth, merely the truth about you. Fist tap Big Don.
technologyreview | No one really knows how the most advanced algorithms do what they do. That could be a problem.
In 2015, a research group at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York was
inspired to apply deep learning to the hospital’s vast database of
patient records. This data set features hundreds of variables on
patients, drawn from their test results, doctor visits, and so on. The
resulting program, which the researchers named Deep Patient, was trained
using data from about 700,000 individuals, and when tested on new
records, it proved incredibly good at predicting disease. Without any
expert instruction, Deep Patient had discovered patterns hidden in the
hospital data that seemed to indicate when people were on the way to a
wide range of ailments, including cancer of the liver. There are a lot
of methods that are “pretty good” at predicting disease from a patient’s
records, says Joel Dudley, who leads the Mount Sinai team. But, he
adds, “this was just way better.”
At the same time, Deep Patient is a bit puzzling. It appears to
anticipate the onset of psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia
surprisingly well. But since schizophrenia is notoriously difficult for
physicians to predict, Dudley wondered how this was possible. He still
doesn’t know. The new tool offers no clue as to how it does this. If
something like Deep Patient is actually going to help doctors, it will
ideally give them the rationale for its prediction, to reassure them
that it is accurate and to justify, say, a change in the drugs someone
is being prescribed. “We can build these models,” Dudley says ruefully,
“but we don’t know how they work.”
Artificial intelligence hasn’t
always been this way. From the outset, there were two schools of thought
regarding how understandable, or explainable, AI ought to be. Many
thought it made the most sense to build machines that reasoned according
to rules and logic, making their inner workings transparent to anyone
who cared to examine some code. Others felt that intelligence would more
easily emerge if machines took inspiration from biology, and learned by
observing and experiencing. This meant turning computer programming on
its head. Instead of a programmer writing the commands to solve a
problem, the program generates its own algorithm based on example data
and a desired output. The machine-learning techniques that would later
evolve into today’s most powerful AI systems followed the latter path:
the machine essentially programs itself.
At first this approach
was of limited practical use, and in the 1960s and ’70s it remained
largely confined to the fringes of the field. Then the computerization
of many industries and the emergence of large data sets renewed
interest. That inspired the development of more powerful
machine-learning techniques, especially new versions of one known as the
artificial neural network. By the 1990s, neural networks could
automatically digitize handwritten characters.
But
it was not until the start of this decade, after several clever tweaks
and refinements, that very large—or “deep”—neural networks demonstrated
dramatic improvements in automated perception. Deep learning is
responsible for today’s explosion of AI. It has given computers
extraordinary powers, like the ability to recognize spoken words almost
as well as a person could, a skill too complex to code into the machine
by hand. Deep learning has transformed computer vision and dramatically
improved machine translation. It is now being used to guide all sorts of
key decisions in medicine, finance, manufacturing—and beyond.
theatlantic | While most theologians aren’t paying it much attention, some
technologists are convinced that artificial intelligence is on an
inevitable path toward autonomy. How far away this may be depends on
whom you ask, but the trajectory raises some fundamental questions for
Christianity—as well as religion broadly conceived, though for this
article I’m going to stick to the faith tradition I know best. In fact,
AI may be the greatest threat to Christian theology since Charles
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
theatlantic | As machines advance and as programs learn to do things that were once
only accomplished by people, what will it mean to be human?
Over time, artificial intelligence will likely prove that carving out any realm of behavior as unique to humans—like language,
a classic example—is ultimately wrong. If Tinsel and Beau were still
around today, they might be powered by a digital assistant, after all.
In fact, it’d be a littler weird if they weren’t, wouldn’t it? Consider
the fact that Disney is exploring the use of interactive humanoid robots
at its theme parks, according to a patent filing last week.
Technological
history proves that what seems novel today can quickly become the norm,
until one day you look back surprised at the memory of a job done by a
human rather than a machine. By teaching machines what we know, we are
training them to be like us. This is good for humanity in so many ways.
But we may still occasionally long for the days before machines could
imagine the future alongside us.
WaPo | On his last night in office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a powerful farewell speech
to the nation — words so important that he’d spent a year and a half
preparing them. “Ike” famously warned the nation to “guard against the
acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Much of Eisenhower’s
speech could form part of the mission statement of WikiLeaks today. We
publish truths regarding overreaches and abuses conducted in secret by
the powerful.
Our most recent disclosures
describe the CIA’s multibillion-dollar cyberwarfare program, in which
the agency created dangerous cyberweapons, targeted private companies’
consumer products and then lost control of its cyber-arsenal. Our
source(s) said they hoped to initiate a principled public debate about
the “security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of
cyberweapons.”
The truths we publish are inconvenient for those who seek to avoid
one of the magnificent hallmarks of American life — public debate.
Governments assert that WikiLeaks’ reporting harms security. Some claim
that publishing facts about military and national security malfeasance
is a greater problem than the malfeasance itself. Yet, as Eisenhower
emphasized, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the
proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense
with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may
prosper together.”
Quite simply, our motive is identical to that
claimed by the New York Times and The Post — to publish newsworthy
content. Consistent with the U.S. Constitution, we publish material that
we can confirm to be true irrespective of whether sources came by that
truth legally or have the right to release it to the media. And we
strive to mitigate legitimate concerns, for example by using redaction
to protect the identities of at-risk intelligence agents.
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