text:
In the wake of President Barack Obama's profiling comments following the Trayvon Martin case, a 2008 Wall Street Journal article has resurfaced, noting the time Obama (pictured) was mistaken as a waiter at a book party 10 years ago.
RELATED: Robert Zimmerman Jr: 'I Agree With President Obama's Speech' [VIDEO]
According to reporter Katherine Rosman, the incident happened at the home of Daily Beast journalist Tina Brown and husband Harold Evans. A group of elite journalists had gathered in the garden behind the couple's Manhattan apartment. They were celebrating the publication of Sidney Blumenthal's"The Clinton Wars," a re-telling of former President Clinton's White House years.
(Blumenthal was Clinton's aide)
Though not invited to the event, Rosman attended as a guest of invitee and political columnist Eric Alterman. Here, she met then-Senator Obama:
"Standing by myself I noticed, on the periphery of the party, a man looking as awkward and out-of-place as I felt. I approached him and introduced myself. He was an Illinois state senator who was running for the U.S. Senate. He was African-American, one of a few black people in attendance."
Though she was charmed by Obama's charisma and even wanted to do a profile on him, Rosman said the waiter incident stuck out most:
"But what I will always remember is as I was leaving that party in 2003, I was approached by another guest, an established author. He asked about the man I had been talking to. Sheepishly he told me he didn't know that Obama was a guest at the party, and had asked him to fetch him a drink. In less than six years, Obama has gone from being mistaken for a waiter among the New York media elite, to the president-elect."
"What a country."
And now that "waiter" is running it.
LaTosha Brown Is A Black Joy Blazer Who Has Dedicated Her Life To The Cause
Heart In Your Hands: Important Lifestyle Changes For Heart Failure Recovery
Life In Heart Failure Recovery
How To Support A Loved One Who Is Living With Heart Failure
702 Member Irish Grinstead Dies At 43, Sister Says
Lawsuit Will 'Absolutely' Be Filed After Denny's Waitress Refused Serving Black Truckers In Viral Video: Lawyers
NJ Airport Restaurant That David Brooks Falsely Complained About Is Black-Owned
'Moms For Liberty' Member Complains California School Teaches 'White People Have No Culture'


text:
2005 Voto de la Tarjeta de Evaluaciones
International trade can be a force for elevating living standards and improving environmental protection in the world's poorest countries. But unless trade agreements contain strong environmental rules, they may undermine the protection of natural resources. For that reason, environmental groups in both the U.S. and Central America joined in opposing the recent Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).
One of the world's most biologically diverse regions, Central America has already lost more than 70 percent of its forest cover. CAFTA's weak and mostly unenforceable environmental provisions are not adequate to protect these dwindling resources. The treaty only requires countries to enforce their own laws, a provision rendered meaningless by the lack of even basic environmental laws in countries like Guatemala and Honduras.
In addition, CAFTA allows multinational companies to sue countries for compensation if an environmental law reduces their profits. Similar language in the North American Free Trade Agreement has already prompted companies to sue the U.S., Canada, and Mexico over laws that protect public health and natural resources. The threat of more such lawsuits could freeze environmental progress in Central America by discouraging those governments from passing new conservation laws.
On July 28, 2005, the House approved H.R. 3045, CAFTA's implementing legislation, by a 217-215 vote (House roll call vote 443). NO is the pro-environment vote.
voto pro-ambientalista

subset: commoncrawl


text:
North Austin Branch Office
Austin TX, 78731
Title expertise just around the corner
Doma helps real estate professionals, attorneys, and homeowners experience an unforgettably positive closing experience. Backed by our team of local experts and patented machine intelligence technology, Doma delivers the title, escrow, closing and underwriting services you need to close fast and accurately. We are invested in fundamentally changing the future of real estate closings, and we are invested in you – not just the file in front of us.


text:
Bloat Be Gone is a wellness tea to help you feel and look your very best! Our Bloat Be Gone was blended to ease belly bloat, encourage healthy digestion and soothe tummy troubles. With a natural base of liquorice and fennel, guayusa, peppermint, chamomile and added lemon verbena for a purely delicious, refreshing herbal blend.
Fennel root is a natural diuretic, and it helps to gently cleanse your body - encouraging the natural elimination process. If you are constipated, having digestive issues and the bloat that accompany' s it - fennel root is the gentle answer to your problems! Peppermint tea is great after meals and is beneficial for digestion, gas, and the relief of nausea.
Our soothing Bloat Be Gone herbal blend has a mild floral flavor and a gentle "sweetness" from licorice root - enjoy it either hot or iced.


text:
If the 1,500 delegates huddled into a Dubai conference center to thrash out a new global telecommunications treaty didn't know how it felt to be on a reality TV show, they do now.
The high-level diplomats and regulators from 150 countries have been criticized, mocked and - just occasionally - lauded by an online commentariat following proceedings at the U.N.'s World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) this week.
Predictably, many of the bloggers and tweeters have taken aim at those seeking to tame the online world, as a battle rages between the United States and its allies, which want no mention of the Internet in regulations, and a Russia-led block which is calling for a more active role for governments.
But there's also criticism of the way the United Nations goes about its business, with a Wikileaks-inspired website -dubbed WCITleaks - spawned to shine a light on what it considers the conference's opaqueness.
Once-confidential preparatory documents filed by countries including Russia, the United States, and Iran were uploaded to the site in the run-up to the conference, and during the talks the working drafts have all been put online for perusal.
And then there's the hilarity sparked by the absurd - like the sight of delegates voting on communications regulations in the digital age by holding up yellow cards to be counted.
"This is truly farcical," tweeted Kieren McCarthy, a writer for .Nxt, an website which covers internet policy.
"There must be a relevant Monty Python sketch for this."
The cyber-scrutiny has introduced new voices to the debate over the arcane International Telecommunications Regulations, which were last updated in 1988 - before the internet and mobile phones - and once set technical standards and fees charged for global phone calls.
A loose collection of advocates have honed their skills in recent years via skirmishes over content piracy and online privacy, and now firms like Google and Facebook spend as much on lobbyists as older cousin Microsoft .
Moving to the Bar
The UN conference makes an easy target with its penchant for coded diplomatic language.
Harold Feld, legal director of advocacy group Public Knowledge which supports an open internet, produced a guide for the uninitiated explaining, for example, how delegates' practice of sticking text that has not been agreed inside square brackets has led them to use the term as a verb.
"To 'square bracket' something means to take an exception to including it," he wrote in a blog post.
Veni Markovski, a Bulgarian Internet entrepreneur, tweeted translations of some of his favourite diplomatic phrases.
"I have referred the paper back to my capital (means: I haven't read it, but perhaps they will)," he wrote.
"An interesting proposal (It will go nowhere)."
"A comprehensive submission (It's over 2 pages in length, and seems to have an awful lot of headings)."
The conference has tried to stay with the times. Its move to webcast the main sessions was widely commended, even by critics, and it has hired social media consultants to advise it on getting its message out.
It has also started posting documents online for the next major internet policy conference in May. However, many of the draft documents from this week are unavailable - a spokesman for the conference referred journalists to WCITleaks for access.
Individual delegates have also struggled to cope. While the hundreds of photos of them posted online show most at work, there are those fiddling with their phones or looking sleepy and rumpled after hours of talks.
Jerry Brito, one of the co-creators of WCITleaks, said the real-time commentary was having an effect. "If nothing else, it is a constant reminder to the delegations that the world is watching and their meeting is not as secret as others have been in the past," said Brito, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
"We hope our site won't be necessary next time around, but we will be available to make public any secret documents."
However, telecoms consultant Dean Bubley was skeptical whether such meetings could ever be totally transparent.
"If they webcast the working groups where most of the hard negotiations take place, I'm sure all the juicy stuff would just move to the water cooler or bar instead," he said.


text:
Clem 7
- Client
- Department of Transport and Main Roads
- Sector
- Transport
- Expertise
- Engineering design
- Construction and commissioning
- Contract type
- Country
- Australia
- State
- Queensland
- Location
- Brisbane
- Status
- Completed
- Duration
- Tags
UGL was the principal mechanical and electrical engineering contractor for the Clem 7 tunnel, delivering one of the largest and most complex control and communications systems in Australia. Despite its size and complexity, the system provides a one second response time for each of its 170,000 supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) tags, and operates with an availability exceeding 99.995%.
UGL's scope of work for the Clem 7 project included:
- project management
- engineering
- procurement/ fabrication
- construction and
- commissioning
The tunnel was built by a joint venture, consisting of Leighton Contractors, Baulderstone, and Bilfinger-Berger. The joint venture engaged UGL to design and construct the tunnel's mechanical and electrical services, including the control and communications system.
The M7 Clem Jones Tunnel – also known as the Clem 7 - is the central part of a 6.8km-long tollway system built for $3 billion. This system links five major Brisbane roads, including the Pacific Motorway, Ipswich Road, Lutwyche Road, the Inner-City Bypass and Shafston Avenue at Kangaroo Point. The M7 Motorway system's Clem 7 tollway joins Brisbane's southern suburbs to the north, enabling alternate connectivity to the airport.
Fast facts
the depth of the tunnel below the Brisbane River
the length of the tunnel - the longest operating road tunnel in Australia at the time of construction
average trips per working day recorded in 2017
Engineering Excellence Award
was awarded to UGL in 2012 for the tunnel's communication and control system


text:
OLPC Memo 5: Education and Psychology
Marvin Minsky
22 January 2009
What goals do we want our schools to achieve? Most parents agree that their children should learn about History, Language, Science and Math, and get some instruction in Health, Sports, and Art. Most parents also want their children taught to behave in what they regard to be civilized ways. And surely, most parents would also agree that schools should help children learn good ways to think. However, while schools have good ways to teach facts about subjects, many pupils still fail to build adequate skills for applying that knowledge. [[1]]
But if "good thinking" is one of our principal goals, then why don't schools try to explicitly teach about how human Learning and Reasoning work? Instead we tacitly assume that if we simply provide enough knowledge, then each child's brain will 'self-organize' appropriate ways to apply those facts. Then would it make sense for us to include a subject called "Human Psychology" as part of the grade-school curriculum? I don't think that we can do this yet, because, few present-day teachers would agree about which "Theories of Thinking" to teach.
So instead, we'll propose a different approach: to provide our children with ideas they could use to invent their own theories about themselves! The rest of this essay will suggest some benefits that could come from this, and some practical ways to accomplish it—by engaging children in various kinds of constructive, computer-related projects.
Today's most popular "theories of learning" are based on a century of experiments in which we place a pigeon or rat in a certain situation and reward it with food if it responds with a certain action. Then later, that animal will more often behave in that same way.
"… Of several responses made to the same situation, those which are… closely followed by satisfaction to the animal will, other things being equal, be more firmly connected with the situation, so that, when that situation recurs, those responses will be more likely to recur…while responses followed by discomfort will become less likely to occur." —Edward L. Thorndike 1911
Those experiments also showed that a quicker reward has a larger effect, so educators often use problem-sets in which each new task is almost the same as the last. This causes most answers to be correct, which therefore results in more frequent rewards—and this helps to make classrooms more pleasant. And indeed, those carefully graded assignments work well to prepare for short-answer tests—but they don't help prepare us for real-world life, where problems don't come in neat sequences. [[2]]
However, this type of learning only works well when the animal already can recognize each such situation or "stimulus" and the required reaction or "response" already is in that animal's repertoire. To ensure these conditions, most classic experiments constrained each animal simply to choose between only two different buttons to press. Then that reward-based theory of learning worked remarkably well to predict how sub-human animals react to those simplified situations. But that theory only described those animals' external behaviors —their motor responses to sensory inputs—and never progressed to shed more light on how people learn to react in their minds, to more complex problems and situations. [[3]]
In any case, children are different from pigeons and rats, and those classic experiments don't help much to explain how people learn to represent knowledge in their brains and, later, retrieve the information that might be most relevant—so that they can reason, plan, and construct new ideas. So when we try to extend those old theories from pigeons to people, we find that they tell us little about the higher-levels of minds that distinguish us from those animals.
More advanced ideas about psychology began to emerge in the 1940s from the new field called Cybernetics—which then evolved into Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence. These new sciences are constantly producing new ideas about minds—but those concepts are still changing so fast that they aren't yet stable enough to teach. So by default, the ideas from those early years of research on the 'external behavior' of animals still dominate the context in which most present-day teachers are taught to teach.
Humans learn Negative Expertise. We tend to think of knowledge in positive terms—and of "experts" as people who know what to do—but much of an expert's ability comes from knowing about the most common mistakes—and thus, knowing which things one should not do. Thus, much of a person's competence is based on learning to detect—and suppress—unproductive ways to think. Also, an adequate theory of learning should also cover the "reflective skills" that people use to recognize exceptions to generalizations, to eliminate tactics that waste too much time, and more generally, to make longer-range planes and form broader perspectives. In any case, the early behaviorists rarely recognized the importance of "Negative Expertise" because they cannot directly observe how this affects our ways to behave. In particular, when people deal with difficult problems, we often learn more from our failures than from our successes. [[4]]
Human Minds make high-level Credit-Assignments. New situations are seldom the same as previous ones, so after you solve a difficult problem, it won't help much to just remember the actions that solved it—because you probably had to make many attempts before you found a successful one—so it wouldn't make sense to "reward" all those prior attempts. It sometimes helps to reward your most recent reactions—but generally, it's more important to recognize which earlier strategic decisions should get credit for one's latest success. We briefly discussed this in Memo 2, but also see Section 8-5 of The Emotion Machine.
Human Minds think about what they're thinking about. After you've 'wasted' a lot of time by using a process that finally failed, you usually try to figure out some cause or reason for why it failed. However, those older theories never tried to describe the methods that people use for thinking about what we've been thinking about. But I'm convinced that these "self-reflective" processes are the principal ones that people use for developing new ways to think. I doubt that simply "rewarding success" helps much to promote one's mental development.
Psychology Student: But isn't it an established fact that every child is born with a certain IQ—that is, an unchangeable quantity of innate mental ability?
There is a popular belief that each person's "amount of intelligence" is fixed, because those IQ numbers don't usually change very much after early childhood. However, the evidence for this may be biased because of ignoring other important causes for this:
"… Biographical information on a sample of twenty men of genius suggests that the typical developmental pattern includes as important aspects: (1) a high degree of attention focused upon the child by parents and other adults, expressed in intensive educational measures and, usually, abundant love; (2) isolation from other children, especially outside the family; and (3) a rich efflorescence of fantasy as a reaction to the preceding conditions." … [If so, then] the mass education of our public school system is, in its way, a vast experiment on the effect of reducing all three factors to a minimum: accordingly, it should tend to suppress the occurrence of genius."—Harold McCurdy, 1960 [[5]]
This also could be related to the process we mentioned in Memo 2:
A new class of 6-year-old children will soon begin to share similar ways to think and behave. Then, next year, when they are 7 years old, most of those pupils will still remain in that group—and thus will tend to perpetuate those same patterns of activity. The next year, they will be 8-year-olds, but will continue to share many attitudes, values, and cognitive strategies. So as those children proceed through their K-12 grades, large portions of their ways to think will remain much like those of 6-year-olds!
Human Thinking involves Prediction, Comparing, and Planning. The standard reward-based learning schemes envision a pigeon or rat as simply containing a database of two-part rules like "If the situation is S, Do action R." [[6]] But while such rules can describe much of our external behavior, this ignores the fact that when you consider (in your mind) two actions that you might possibly do, then (before you perform any actions at all) you can try to predict the result of each—and then compare those imagined results! This means that to extend our theory from pigeons to people, we'll need to include some ways to predict the effects of possible actions.
However, If-Do rules don't predict the results of their actions—so we'll also need 3-part "If-Do-Then like, "If the situation is S, and you do R, Then situation T will result." Chapter 5 of The Emotion Machine explains how to link sets of these 3-part rules into networks of knowledge that we can use to simulate 'virtual worlds' inside our minds, so that we can imagine the sequences of possible actions that we call our "Future Plans." But before the dawn of computers and programs, it was hard to envision such simulations—so those early "Behaviorist" psychologists were forced to ignore the fact that people make longer-range plans and strategies. [[7]]
Human Thinking is largely directed by Goals. You don't open every door you pass, or pick up every object you see. You don't often use an If->Do rule unless it serves some current motive or goal. However before the era of Cybernetics, few psychologists tried to make theories about what goals are and how they work. Instead, they simply assumed that each animal brain contains a separate set of rules to engage one for each of that animal's goals, intentions, motives or drives—one set of rules to use when hungry and another set to use when angry, etc. But finally in 1957, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon proposed a more constructive theory: a purposeful or goal-based action is one that results from using a special kind of process (called GPS) that operates on two different descriptions:
S is a description of the situation that the machine is currently in.
G is a description of a future state that the machine "wants" to be in.
GPS is a process that repeatedly looks for a difference between S and G, and then performs some action on S that is likely to lessen that difference.
Such a process will result in behavior that appear to do just what we mean by "pursuing a goal, " because it will persist at removing the differences it perceives between 'what it has' and 'what it wants—that is, unless some other process intervenes to change or remove that G. [[8]]
However, human learning doesn't always depend only on getting pleasant rewards. We can adapt to small changes in familiar conditions by making small changes to skills that we already know. But when thrust into strange environments, we may need to abandon our older techniques—and this can lead to unpleasant feelings like pain and grief. Chapter 9 of The Emotion Machine discusses some ways to prevent such discomforts from keeping us from learning new things—whereas the old reward based theories ignored what one could call the "Pleasure of Exploration-Pain."
"Pleasure pursues objects that are beautiful, melodious, fragrant, savory, soft. But curiosity, seeking new experiences, will even seek out the contrary of these, not to experience the discomfort that may come with them, but from a passion for experimenting and knowledge." —Augustine, Confessions, Book 10.
"Why do children enjoy the rides in amusement parks, knowing that they will be scared, even sick? Why do explorers endure discomfort and pain—knowing that their very purpose will disperse once they arrive? And what makes people work for years at jobs they hate, so that someday they will be able to—they seem to have forgotten what! … It is the same for solving difficult problems, or climbing freezing mountain peaks, or playing pipe organs with one's feet: some parts of the mind find these horrible, while other parts enjoy forcing those first parts to work for them."—The Society of Mind, Chap. 9.04.
In other words, adventurousness can overcome unpleasantness: when "pleasant" or "positive" rewards fail to help us learn more difficult subjects, we can make ourselves enjoy discomforts and pains—by acquiring what Augustine called "a passion for experimenting and knowledge."
Citizen: How can you speak of "enjoying" discomfort? Isn't that a self-contradiction?
This only seems paradoxical when you think of yourself as an entity that can feel only one feeling at a time. But if you imagine your mind as a system that runs a host of concurrent processes, then you can see how some parts of your mind might 'enjoy' making other parts 'suffer'—as when 'it feels good' to have just discovered a new kind of blunder or mistake. In fact, that's exactly what sport coaches teach! Of course, those athletes still feel physical pains, just as artists and scientists feel mental pains. But somehow, they manage to train themselves to keep those pains from spiraling into the awful cascades we call suffering. [[9]]
Scientist: Few things bring more pleasure to me than replacing my old ideas—and then showing that my new theories are better than those of my competitors.
Artist: It hurts to discard a hard-earned technique, but nothing surpasses the thrill of conceiving new ways to represent and to think about things.
One needs to learn not only what works, but also what to do when failure looms. I don't like that tale of "The Little Engine that Could" with its helpless injunction to simply repeat "I think I can, I think I can." A better motto would be to think "perhaps its time to try something else"—because every setback can offer a chance for a new phase of mental development.
The traditional theories do not explain Pleasure. From before the dawn of psychology, everyone has always agreed that pleasant rewards help us to learn, but I've never seen any plausible explanations for this. Here is what may be a new way to explain how 'pleasure' works:
"Pleasure" is a word we use to describe a process that's used to keep a mind from "changing the subject" of the person's most recent concern. One might need such a function to preserve the current contents of memory for long enough for Credit-Assignment to be accomplished!
So, while we usually see Pleasure as positive, we also should see it as negative—because, during the time in which Credit Assignment proceeds, it suppresses competing activities. Similarly, we often need to suppress other interests to keep ourselves working on difficult problems.
But if pleasure has negative aspects, then why does it "feel good" to us? People often answer this by saying that feelings are so basic, simple, and direct that there's nothing much to say about them! However, in Psychology, it's often the case that the things that "seem" simplest turn out to be the ones that are the most complex! In this case, "I feel good" might mean, "Right now, I've suppressed all my other concerns, so all of my problems seem to be gone."
§3. Teaching Cybernetics instead of Psychology
All this suggests that our ideas about psychology are still developing so rapidly that it wouldn't make sense for us to select any current "theory of thinking" to teach. So instead, we'll propose a different approach: to provide our children with ideas they could use to invent their own theories about themselves! The rest of this essay will suggest that such ideas could come from engaging children in projects that involve making machines that have 'lifelike' behaviors. Such projects would engage and integrate many concepts that we separately treat today, in Physics, Biology, and Mathematics—and in Social Studies, Psychology, and Economics—along with other important principles that don't fit into any of those traditional subjects.
A flood of new concepts about what machines could do began to emerge in the 1940s, from research in the field called Cybernetics—which soon then led to other fields called Control Theory, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Psychology. Each of those new sciences brought hosts of new ideas about how to build systems that actually do some of the things we use 'thinking' to do. So now, in the spirit of Seymour Papert's "constructionism," we can enable our children to experiment with networks composed of collections of parts that support many sorts of knowledge-based processes. [[10]] This is important because that's what we are:
Consequently, it makes sense to expect children to use such ideas to make better ways to think about themselves. We could start by encouraging them to build simplified models of the sensor and motor systems of animals—and put these creatures into environments to experiment, first with each one's separate behavior, and then with the social relations in groups of them.
Do we have enough evidence that such experiments will improve those children's self-images? Our answer must be ambiguous: in the past we've seen many cases in which such experiments appeared to work well, but those LOGO-based projects were never extended to large enough scales. But such projects are far more feasible today, because equipment is now so much cheaper.
Some critics might complain that subjects like Cybernetics and Computer Science do not deserve a special place in the elementary school curriculum, because they are too specialized. However, Computer Science is not only about computers themselves; more generally, it provides us with a whole new world of ways to understand complex processes—including the ones that go on in own mind. For until those new techniques arrived (such as programming languages for describing processes, and data structures for representing knowledge), we had no expressions that people could use to articulate—and then communicate—good new ideas about such things. [[11]]
Understanding Systems with Feedback Loops. While rule-based systems work well to explain much of how other species behave, human beings do much more than directly react to "Situations" or "Stimuli." For example (as in the GPS systems we mention above), we often make mental comparisons between (1) the real-world situation that we are actually "in" with (2) some "goal-situation" we'd prefer to be in. Then we can use our descriptions of those differences to decide which of the actions that we could would most likely to help us to achieve that goal.
Now, this might seem so obvious as to make you wonder why I'm repeating it. But myself, I've often wondered why this idea wasn't clear to the early Behaviorists! For if we adopt this process-based concept of what goals are, this changes our view of our own behaviors: we react less to Situations themselves, than to their Differences to our goals!
In other words, if we think in terms of goal-based processes, we can see our actions as mainly resulting from "feedback loops" that work to change differences rather than things. Of course it is perfectly obvious that some such loops increase differences, while others tend to reduce them. It also is not very hard to see that when feedback increases differences, this can lead to exponential growth (which can never be sustained for long, because it will soon exhaust some resource)—and its only a little harder to see why, when feedback reduces differences, this can make a process more stable and reliable. However, it also turns out that there is also an astonishing range of phenomena that come from systems that lie between those extremes—and the study of such processes was what led to the new science called Cybernetics. For example, when feedback-loops have time-delays, this can lead to repetitive oscillations, or even to the complex phenomena that mathematicians describe as "chaotic."
In any case, virtually every real-world system includes some of those kinds of feedback loops, so it seems to me that everyone should know these ideas—but unless we teach people names for them, they'll find it hard to think about such things, or even to learn to recognize them. An easy way to learn about feedback loops is to make (or better, to simulate) a turtle-like robot that follows a line on the floor, by detecting when the line is to the right or left, and using that information for steering. [[12]]
That basic idea is simple enough, but soon the child will find that the system is likely to get off the track (because of excessive overshoot, or by encountering an obstacle). Then the child can invent various ways to prevent or recover from this (say, by discovering ways to search for it). Also, in the case of objects that move, one can invent many different ways to try to track and predict their future paths. But this opens the door to another whole world: our child might now want to go further, to make this animal try to predict and pursue another one that also moves—or even one that is trying to escape! Then, wow, we've suddenly entered the social realm!
Other Suggestions for Cybernetics Projects
It would take a whole book to begin to discuss the range of new concepts that emerged in the 1950s from combining ideas from Psychology, Cybernetics, and other sciences. I don't see any tidy way to organize this huge body of knowledge, so the rest of this paper will only list a number of different approaches for this. First, I'll mention a few good sources, each of which suggests many such projects, and then I'll discuss a few specific ones.
In an elegant book called "Vehicles," Valentino Braitenberg explained many important "Cybernetic" ideas about machines that use various feedback schemes. Unfortunately, that book is now hard to find, but many computer programs make it easy to experiment with those ideas: See
http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~wiseman/vehicles/, or http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/Vehicles_online.html, or http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/christ/popbugs/intro.html
There is a large and wonderful collection of intriguing projects on Ken Perlin's homepage at http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/.
Many more projects are described in LogoWorks: Challenging Programs in Logo, Cynthia Solomon, Margaret Minsky, and Brian Harvey, Eds. McGraw-Hill 1986 and Computer Environments for Children: A Reflection on Theories of Learning and Education, Cynthia Solomon, MIT Press, 1988)
An old but still relevant introduction to early research in Artificial Intelligence AI is presented in http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/PR1971.html.
Quite a few more stimulating projects are described by Mitchel Resnick at http://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/, andhttp://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/papers/Clubhouse/Clubhouse.htm, and http://llk.media.mit.edu/
Also see Idit Harel's site at http://www.mamamedia.com/
Many other projects can be found by starting at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities.
Robotic Projects. Most present-day robotic projects use wheeled vehicles for mobility, because these are so easy to build. However, I'd like to see more projects that try to design robots that walk, because they would be more versatile. It's not very difficult to make 4-leg walking machines, but 2-legged ones are much harder to stabilize—but once you can keep them from falling down, you can go on to make them jump and run! And of course, there's a whole new world of ideas that will come from building micro-worlds in which several such creatures interact; you could either control them all from a central place, or just give them some ways to communicate. For discussions about making robots cooperate, see examples at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~robosoccer/main/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flocking_(behavior), and http://www.lalena.com/AI/Flock/
Simulated vs. Physical Robots. It is remarkable how engaged people become when they first see mechanical, physical robots. But eventually, our students learn more by working with computer programs that simulate robots, because then one can better design and control one's experiments. One trouble with physical robots is that too much of the students' time is consumed with trivial bugs that are hard to fix; also, it is hard to control enough of the robot's environment to make the results reproducible. However, to make good use of our young people's time, we'll need to provide them with "virtual' physical worlds that work quickly and realistically.
However, we also should note that in recent years, increasingly fewer children have developed skills for making and fixing mechanical things, because so few products today are repairable. So building physical robots can be an excellent way to remedy this growing helplessness—and one can find many robot construction kits with a Google search for "robot kits." However, there are advantages to learning to build machines using general-purpose construction sets, such as Erector, TinkerToy, and Fischertechnik—but these are becoming hard to get. LEGO is more widely available, but is generally less versatile. The next few years will bring new sorts of fabrication techniques, e.g., 3-D printers, which today are still too expensive for schools. But still, there's nothing wrong with learning some old-fashioned carpentry!
Balancing and manipulation. Build a moving hand that can balance a stick—first in 1 and then in 2 dimensions. Try to discover the limitations of such processes. Try to build a juggling machine. I don't know of any projects that have made machines that can tie a knot or button a shirt.
Optimization and problem solving. To recognize a particular object from a collection of several things, one will need some way to determine which of them best fits a certain description. A powerful method for solving such problems is to describe things in terms of coordinates, parameters, or variables—and then to find "the path of steepest ascent. " Such "hill-climbing" programs can often provide us with numerical ways to "optimize" things when our more clever symbolic methods fail (as they most often will, in everyday life).
Visual recognition projects. Recognizing printed and handwritten characters and words. Why is it easier to recognize an entire word than to recognize the letters that make it? Can you make a program that will distinguish pictures of cats from pictures of dogs? (I don't know of any successful such project.) There do exist programs that do well at recognizing faces, but I've not yet heard of any program that can look at a picture of a typical room and identify the most common types of objects in view. One problem is that the appearance of an object will depend on one's point of view, so the programmer will need to invent some concepts to deal with this. So these kinds of projects can demonstrate the importance of making appropriate kinds of abstractions.
Processing Voices and other Sounds. One can also learn a lot about perceptual processes by making programs that classify features of everyday sounds. Can you design a program to distinguish the tones of a violin, trumpet, and clarinet? How far can you get toward recognizing such everyday sounds as footsteps, voices, the clinks of cups and plates, coughs, crumpling paper, etc? Could children invent better tricks for this than the ones that most engineers would use? Experiment with grammars and parsing procedures. Then take any other project we've mentioned here and add an interface to it so that you can control it by using verbal commands.
Performance systems. Some children might like to make a program that can read a Music score—and then actually perform the music. Or try to experiment with phonetics to make a program that reads a story aloud; this would lead to all sorts of ideas about pronunciation, accent, and stress—and up to the threshold of rhetoric.
Puzzles and Game-Playing programs: Write a program to do your math homework (and see if your teacher will accept the results) or write programs to solve such spatial puzzles as Tangrams, Pentominos, Magic Squares, or Crossword-like puzzles, etc. Many children become so addicted to playing particular games that this can become a serious problem. However, we might be able to exploit this by encouraging children to try to write "front end" programs to play existing games—or to design and program their own new games.
Cognitive projects: How difficult would it be to make a system that does some humanlike commonsense reasoning? Answer: this would be very hard, indeed: in fact, it is at the forefront of current research in Artificial Intelligence. Nevertheless, it would be interesting for children to see how much they can do, using Logic alone, and then to add other forms of reasoning—for example, by using analogies. And very such project could be improved by enabling it to improve itself, by adding abilities to learn. For example, each part of a system might be improved by adding a reinforcement-based neural network to it.
Experimenting with "Rule-Based Systems."
Theories about Finite-State Machines. Modern Computer Science includes a great collection of useful ideas about different kinds of processes—many of which can be built into systems that even young children could make and then "play" with. These could include simple logical reasoning systems, or machines that do arithmetic, or ones that play some popular games. One productive way to begin would be to experiment with networks of logical ANDs, ORs, and NOTs. Indeed, a good way to learn about computers might be to begin with such "logical networks" instead of conventional programming languages—because this yields different insights into what computers are and how they work. [[13]] In any case, if our goal is to attract children to technical concepts, this 'finite state' approach might turn out to be more productive (and more enjoyable) than making them learn Arithmetic. [[14]]
Learning "Critical Thinking". This may seem somewhat out of place, but I want to recommend encouraging every child to learn a number of magic tricks—because (1) this is a good introduction to "the psychology of perception" and (2) it also leads to important insights about how what we perceive is affected by context, expectation and deception. For children who can't get lessons from local magicians, it would be good to have some online magic-teaching programs.
Many people are firmly convinced that to have a mechanical image of oneself must lead to a depressing sense of helplessness—because it means that you're doomed to remain what you are, and there's nothing that you can do about this. However, I'll argue exactly the opposite: seeing yourself as a kind of machine can be a liberating idea—because whatever you might dislike about yourself, that might be caused by a bug that you could fix! For example, contrast these pairs of self-images:
I'm not good at math. ---There are some bugs in my symbolic processes.
I'm just not very smart ------ Some of my programs need improvements.
I don't like this subject. ---------- My current goals need better priorities.
I am confused. -----------Some of my processes may conflict with others.
If you think of yourself in terms of "I", then you'll see yourself as a single thing, that has no parts to change or rearrange. But using "My" can help you to envision yourself as composed of parts, which could enable you to imagine specific changes that might improve your ways to think. In other words, if you can represent your mind as made of potentially repairable machinery, then you can think about remedies. For example, you might be able to diagnose some bugs or deficiencies in the apparatus that you use for everyday functions like these:
Time-management. ----- Organizing Searches. -------Splitting problems into parts.
Selecting good ways to represent things. -----Making appropriate cognitive maps.
Allocating short-term memory. ---------- Making appropriate Credit Assignments.
It seems clear that some children are better than others are at doing this kind of "self reflection." Could this be a skill that we could teach? Perhaps, but this might not yet be practical because we don't yet know enough about our human mental machinery. However, the types of projects this essay recommends could help us to promote that goal, by giving our children more tools to use for constructing better views of themselves!
[1] Thanks to Cynthia Solomon and Gloria Rudisch for many ideas in this essay.
[2] Later researchers discovered that those effects last much longer when rewards come less predictably. It also turns out that punishment helps to suppress "wrong" responses—but those behaviors can reappear after punishment stops, sometimes even with greater strength—so simply withdrawing reward tends to be more effective. For more details, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement and http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_6884/is_/ai_n28321088.
[3] This essay uses the term "reward-based" instead of the more common word "reinforcement," which in the infancy of Psychology was meant to suggest that learning strengthens direct "connections" between stimuli and responses. But this is not an adequate image of what happens in human brains, where different processes work at multiple levels to change different structures and representations, in ways that rarely can be observed from watching a person's external behavior. See Chapter §5 of The Emotion Machine.
[4] See http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/NegExp.mss.txt
[5] Harold G. McCurdy, The Childhood Pattern of Genius. Horizon Magazine, May 1960, pp. 32-38
[6] Some of those rules would be built-in from birth (like "If the light is too bright, then close my eyes") whereas new rules are learned at later times.
[7] See the review by Kenneth MacCorquodale reprinted at http://www.behavior.org/computer-modeling/
[8] See Section §6.3 of The Emotion Machine for more details about the Newell-Simon idea. Conjecture: it seems likely that, in the brain, such information is represented, at least in part, by the so-called "Mirror Neurons" that V.S. Ramachandran has identified.
[9] Chapter 3 of The Emotion Machine shows why we need to distinguish between having pain, hurting, and suffering.
[10] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionist_learning
[11] On the surface, Computer Science may seem to resemble Mathematics, but one can see it as complementary: Mathematics provides us with complex ways to look more deeply into seemingly simple things—whereas Computer Science tend to give us simpler ways to think about more complicated things.
[12] See more discussions of feedback systems in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory, and http://www.well.com/~abs/curriculum.html. Note that the Newell-Simon theory of goals can be seen as a negative feedback process.
[13] Also, building so-called "Expert Systems" provides another interesting alternative to conventional programming. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system.
[14] In this approach to Mathematics, one doesn't need to memorize those arithmetic tables that some children take hundreds of hours to learn. Few adults recollect how long a single hour can seem to a six-year-old child—and this could be one more reason why so many adults loathe mathematics. See http://www.triviumpursuit.com/articles/research_on_teaching_math.php


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Vancouver city council's rejection of a 1,500-slot machine destination casino downtown means the spurned developers may soon be placing their bets on other nearby cities.
Paragon Gaming president Scott Menke told reporters Tuesday he remains committed to finding a "permanent destination in the Lower Mainland."
That echoed previous comments by B.C. Lottery Corp. CEO Michael Graydon, who said in February a rejection in Vancouver would "certainly" prompt a look at sites in other Metro Vancouver cities, potentially as far as Abbotsford.
"There could be some knocking on our door," said City of North Vancouver Mayor Darrell Mussatto. "My feeling is that a casino development, especially one that size, would not be successful in this city."
But he said he would not be surprised if the North Shore was considered, noting the BCLC has identified its 175,000 population as the largest in B.C. not yet served by casino facilities.
He said one group has proposed a community gaming centre with a modest number of slots and bingo, but has so far failed to gain approval.
Another possibility is First Nations reserve land on the North Shore.
Squamish Nation Chief Gibby Jacob said his office has not been approached about any casino project and could not predict how one would be received by his council.
Port Moody was also mentioned by Graydon earlier this year as a potential host city, but mayor Joe Trasolini said then it wouldn't fly.
Most other cities in Metro Vancouver already have casinos and a new development would compete against the existing facility, cannibalizing the flow of revenue generated for the host city.
Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts gave no indication of how she would view a major new casino proposal, if the rejected proponents try their hand in Surrey.
"We would cross that bridge if and when it ever comes," she said.
Great Canadian Gaming Corp. already runs the Fraser Downs Racetrack and Casino in Cloverdale.
Watts said it was originally promised to be a destination casino and her council remains focused on seeing that existing site fully developed, with a hotel and theatre.
While some property owners have suggested they could host a casino in Surrey, Watts noted licence decisions are up to the BCLC.
Surrey has also already approved a new community gaming centre in Newton.
Delta Mayor Lois Jackson said she would "have difficulty" supporting a new casino in her community.
"I think we have enough of them to satisfy people's entertainment needs," she said.
New Westminster already gets a share of gaming revenue from the Starlight Casino and Burnaby hosts the Grand Villa, which is second only to River Rock Casino Resort in Richmond for profits generated.
A new casino wouldn't make sense for either city, said Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan.
He said he doubts a new casino would be proposed outside of Vancouver at anywhere near the scale as the one now rejected just west of BC Place Stadium.
The $500-million proposal was to include 150 gambling tables and two hotels.
"It don't think it's likely they're prepared to make that kind of massive investment outside the downtown core," Corrigan said. "I just don't think there's anywhere else that can sustain that level of a casino."
Tuesday's defeat in Vancouver comes as a relief to Richmond's council, which feared a downtown casino on the Canada Line would suck gamblers away from River Rock and reduce the nearly $12-million annual share of revenue the municipality receives.
Vancouver councillors cited various concerns, including problem gambling and money laundering, as well as expanded gambling being out-of-step with their vision for a green, livable city.
The most optimistic estimates pointed to Vancouver collecting $14 million and the provincial government taking in $140 million a year from the redeveloped casino, which was to replace the much smaller Edgewater Casino.
BCLC estimated Lower Mainland gamblers are capable of spending an additional $300 million a year.
Graydon previously said BCLC could also look at expanding existing casinos or community gaming centres to fully exploit that market if the Vancouver site was rejected.


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Click through the images above to see the Pioneer Day Children's Parade by Transcript-Bulletin Photo Editor Francie Aufdemorte.
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Byron York is chronicling the outrages committed by President Obama on his taxpayer-funded campaign swing through Iowa and the Midwest. I was in the midst of a post on Obama's whine that he is the victim of "bad luck," as reported by Byron, when his latest dispatch landed in my inbox: "Obama compares woes to Lincoln."
At his campaign-style town hall meeting in Decorah, Iowa, President Obama compared the criticism he has received from Republicans and other political opponents to the troubles faced by President Abraham Lincoln during the civil war. "Lincoln," the president said, "they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me."
Almost as bad! Lincoln was "the original gorilla," a sub-human, to the Democrats. It is impossible to imagine the hysteria that would result from any such depiction of Obama. But that was the least of it: the Southern states, in the grip of the Democratic Party, seceded rather than be governed by an anti-slavery President Lincoln. In the North, treasonous Copperhead Democrats bedeviled Lincoln's administration throughout the Civil War. And a group of rabid Democrat/secessionists eventually assassinated him.
We have remarked before on Obama's striking ignorance of history, but even he must understand that his claim to be more abused than Lincoln is disgraceful. If a narcissist like Obama were capable of shame, this would be an appropriate time to show it.


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Divino Moura of Brazil received the WMO top prize for his outstanding work in meteorology and climatology and his leadership in science. Mr Moura was recognized for his "scientific contribution...
Congress also endorsed a package of measures to strengthen early warnings against hazards like floods and tropical cyclones, and to ensure that these become part and parcel of humanitarian operations. It decided to spur work on a Global Multi-hazard Alert System that would pool information from national and regional systems that already exist, or are being planned.


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In the previous article, Installing DaDa Mail, we showed you how to install DaDa Mail to use as a mailing list tool. Now that you have successfully installed DaDa Mail we'll need to show you how to set up a mailing list. We'll start on the screen we left off on the previous article:
You will need to review the License agreement and agree not to use DaDa Mail for SPAM.
Once you have done this check the box to mark that you agree and type in your Root Password. Then click "Set Up a New Mailing List"
That will take you to a new screen to set up a new mailing list.
- List Name: In our example we're going to call this new list "List_1_test" . List Short Name: we'll assign the short name "test1".
- Password: We'll also assign a password to the list. Keep in mind, this is NOT your root password but a new password you create. It's best practice to NOT use your root password here.
- List Owner: Then, assign the email address that is in charge of the list. For this example we'll use [email protected]
- Description: This is a message to tell your would-be subscribers exactly what the list is about.
- Privacy Policy: You will need to enter a privacy statement to inform your subscribers how their email address will be used.
- Physical Address: This is the physical address associated with your business or organization, and helps conform to recent laws regarding SPAM.
Click the button on the bottom once you are finished entering the information about your list. It will then show you a screen with your list settings.
Now, you can log into your list. Enter the password at the bottom and click "Log Into Your Mailing List" Congratulations! You have created your first mailing list. On the left side, under "Your subscribers" click the invite option.
You will need to add your subscribers to the list. You can add one at a time, paste a list of addresses, or upload a CSV file to invite users. The user must accept your invite to the list before they will be added. Once they accept your invitation, your subscribers will then be notified with a Welcome Email.


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Peter Budaj's shutout spoils Rangers' home opener
NEW YORK -- The New York Rangers had all the comforts of home after spending most of the first month of the season on the road.
The star-studded blue carpet and a full house of their fans at a completely refurbished Madison Square Garden were there Monday night for the Rangers' home opener.
All that was missing was New York's offense.
Peter Budaj made 27 saves for his 11th career NHL shutout, and Tomas Plekanec and Alex Galchenyuk provided the scoring as the Canadiens spoiled the Rangers' long-awaited homecoming with a 2-0 victory.
"I think we did a lot of good things," said Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist, who made 25 saves after a two-game injury absence. "We just hoped for an early goal for us to get the energy and confidence and get the building going.
"It was a disappointing loss, but it was great to be back."
Lundqvist was outshined by Budaj, the Canadiens' 31-year-old backup to Carey Price. Budaj was at the top of his game despite playing for only the second time this season and first since Oct. 10 at Edmonton when he stopped 27 of 28 shots in a win.
Plekanec scored the go-ahead goal on a power play in the second period. Budaj made it stand up for Montreal (7-5), which had lost three of four since a four-game winning streak.
"Our guys were able to keep our ground and tried to box the players out so I can see the pucks," Budaj said. "When I didn't see them, they blocked the shots. When I saw the puck, I was able to make the save."
The Canadiens blocked 28 shots.
"All our D and forwards were doing the little things right," Budaj said. "It does help tremendously when the team in front of you plays so well and blocks shots."
Galchenyuk scored his second of the season with 2:51 left with a goal that stood up to a video review. It was scored just moments after Budaj blocked an in-close chance for Mats Zuccarello.
"If that's not a kick, I don't know what a kick is," the aggravated Lundqvist said. "Seriously, there needs to be some sort of consistency in the calls.
"It's just a frustrating goal there that kind of kills the whole game. It would be very interesting to hear their explanation for it just to know moving forward what the rule really is."
New York ended its 3-6 trip with a stirring 3-2 overtime win at Detroit on Saturday. But even with a healthy Lundqvist, the Rangers couldn't build off that momentum.
"Guys were so excited. There was a definite energy in the room," forward Chris Kreider said. "The effort was there -- the same effort as Detroit, if not more. We learned from that game and we got better but we didn't get the result we wanted. So go back to the drawing board."
Budaj turned aside a quick, hard drive by Kreider by blocking the shot with his glove and deflecting it off the crossbar in the first period.
"I felt pretty solid," Budaj said. "I got a little lucky there at the beginning. I was able to make the save, and it hit the crossbar. You always need a little bit of luck."
Kreider was still shaking his head after the game about his missed opportunity.
"What net didn't I see? It was wide open," he said after a deep exhaled breath. "It's just another one I've got to have."
Jesper Fast also took two whacks at the puck while stationed at the right post in the closing minutes of the second period without success.
Budaj's best stop was perhaps 6 minutes into the third period, when the teams were skating 4-on-4 after interference calls 21 seconds apart. J.T. Miller had a partial breakaway in the Montreal zone and fired a drive that Budaj stopped with his left arm.
Miller was denied again by Budaj midway through the third with a hard shot from the right of the crease.
Plekanec made it 1-0 scored with 3:26 left in the second period.
With Brian Boyle serving a roughing penalty, Montreal used a quick three-man passing play to set up Plekanec's team-leading sixth goal. Brian Gionta moved the puck to Michael Bournival, who made a pass to Plekanec, who came in alone on Lundqvist.
Plekanec went past Rangers defenseman Anton Stralman, skated in on his forehand and shifted the puck to his backhand before depositing a shot behind Lundqvist.
"That defenseman, I don't think he made such a great play," Plekanec said. "He kind of opened that lane for me to go to the net."
Both teams recorded seven shots in the first period. The Rangers had a 14-11 edge in the second, but couldn't get a puck past Budaj.
That has been a common theme for the road-weary Rangers, who were shut out twice during their road trip and managed only 15 goals.
Lundqvist showed no signs of injury in his first game back following a week of limited action as he recovered from an undisclosed ailment. He moved well and seemed sharp on most of Montreal's chances.
Rangers coach Alain Vigneault said he decided on a goalie for Tuesday's game at the Islanders, but didn't reveal his choice.
Game notes
The Rangers sent Fast to Hartford of the AHL after the game. Injured forward Carl Hagelin is expected to join the lineup Tuesday. ... Budaj improved to 3-1 in four career games against New York. His previous shutout was Feb. 18 against Carolina. ... Gionta, who had only two penalty minutes in his first 10 games, was called for three penalties in the first two periods. ... Kreider was called for interference despite not touching two Canadiens who skated into each other. That negated a breakaway chance for Derick Brassard. ... New York was 0 for 5 on the power play.
Regular Season Series
MTL leads 1-0
Game Information
- Referees:
- Dave Jackson
- Linesmen:
- Steve Miller
- Scott Cherrey
2023-24 Atlantic Division Standings
2023-24 Metropolitan Division Standings
|New Jersey
|NY Islanders
|NY Rangers


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Let us cooperate on precise health technologies
International cooperation is key to fulfilling our vision of making cancer treatments more precise, and giving the patients new treatments more quickly.
This opinion piece is written by Ketil Widerberg, General Manager at Oslo Cancer Cluster. It was first published in the Norwegian newspaper Today's Medicine, Dagens Medisin, 30 October 2018.
The countries in Northern Europe have contributed to developing medical treatments that we today could not imagine living without. From the British discovery of antibiotics to the Danish development of a treatment for diabetes. Once again it is time for Northern European health innovation, this time in the field of health technology. What might the prime ministers from Northern Europe focus on when they meet in Oslo on 30 October to discuss health technology?
They might want to point out concrete and state-of-the-art initiatives from their respective countries. It could be Swedish biobanks, Finnish artificial intelligence, Danish health data, English genomics and Estonian health blockchain. These are exciting initiatives that make medicine more precise. This is particularly important when it comes to cancer because more precise treatments could save lives and limit the late effects resulting from imprecise treatment.
At the same time, we see the contours of serious challenges arising with more precise medicine, such as each unit becoming more expensive. Smaller patient groups also mean that it is harder to find enough patients to understand the biological processes and the consequences of new medical treatments. As the prime ministers gather in Oslo to discuss health technology and plan the road ahead, it would not be amiss for them to look back in time and find inspiration from another technological development.
Precise through cooperation
In the 1990s, the search engine Yahoo helped us to quality-assure by categorising and being precise when we needed information on the internet. Yahoo thus contributed to the internet changing the world. However, the amount of data soon became enormous and complex, and a never-ending need for resources and experts arose. The traditional categorisation to ensure quality and structure the data became an impossible task.
This is very similar to what is happening in the health field today. We are constantly collecting more data and educating an increasing number of experts. With a few exceptions, every country is now collecting their data in their own registers and using a great deal of resources on assuring the quality of the data. The countries are rightfully proud of their initiatives. In Norway, we are proud of our biobanks and our health registers, such as the Cancer Registry of Norway. At the same time, we need to ask ourselves whether this national strategy really is the smartest way forward.
Let us go back to Yahoo. Towards the end of the 1990s, some engineers in California thought differently about the internet. How about using cooperation as a quality indicator? Instead of categorising, the links between the websites could ensure data quality. This is how Google was born, and we got precision, quality and insight into data that changed the world.
There are different challenges in the health field than on the internet. Data are more sensitive and the consequences for individuals can often be more dire. At the same time, health technology, in many ways, has reached the same point as the internet faced in the 1990s. We do not have the quantity, the methods for analysis, or the quality to fully exploit the data to gather insight, or for treatment or innovation – yet.
From Yahoo to Google level
One way in which we could tackle the health technology challenges the data present us with is through international cooperation. It is about two things: to gather enough data, and to analyse the data to provide better and more precise treatment. The initiatives so far are promising, but they lack the potential to make the leap from Yahoo to Google.
The Northern European prime ministers can probably acknowledge this. The question is: what can they do? Should they encourage smart young engineers to analyse health data instead of developing the next app? Or should they change the way the hospitals buy technology?
A step in the right direction could be to look at what works best in the other countries. At the same time, we need to avoid new initiatives merely becoming a better horse-drawn carriage. Are there initiatives in existence that are scalable internationally so that we can bring health data up to the next level together? The answer is yes, but it requires visionary initiatives that have not been done anywhere else.
Common clinical studies
An area that the prime ministers will be able to highlight is a Northern European initiative for clinical studies. Together, the countries have a large number of patients, which gives researchers and doctors a better basis in their studies to understand more and provide better treatment. Such an initiative could also use health data from the national health services collected on a daily basis in several countries, known as real world data, instead of eventual clinical studies with patients over several years. This would be both quicker and much cheaper.
The prime ministers might also agree on cooperating on Northern European genetics. For 13 years, we collaborated on mapping our genes in the international Human Genome Project. Now we need to get together to understand genes and treat the patients. With prioritised funding, genetics will soon be a part of the everyday clinical life in England. We can learn a lot from their experience.
Artificial intelligence
Lastly, the Northern European prime ministers may wish to collaborate on artificial intelligence in the health field. Today, cancer treatment, for instance, often only works on three out of ten patients. Artificial intelligence will change how we understand diseases such as cancer and how we treat the patients. The experiences from Finland of introducing artificial intelligence will help other countries to understand where the barriers are and where help might be needed first.
Oslo Cancer Cluster's vision is to make cancer treatment more precise and provide new treatments more quickly to the patients. We see that international cooperation is key to obtaining this goal. As a result, we could also discover diseases more quickly and reduce the costs of the national health services. We hope the Northern European prime ministers will delve into these issues when they meet to discuss the health technologies of the future here with us.
By Ketil Widerberg, General Manager at Oslo Cancer Cluster.


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Students for an Orwellian Student Senate Slate
The Students for an Orwellian Student Senate Slate was a slate for ASUCD Senate in Fall 2004. They adopted a platform of half serious ideas and half mocking ideas — making fun of existing slates, national politics, Governor Schwarzenegger, or themselves. Most of the slate were Innerparty of Students for an Orwellian Society.
Though they did not get endorsed by the California Aggie during their first run, Official Candidate Leathers and Official Candidate Van Schoelandt were both endorsed by the Aggie in their Winter 2004 Campaign as an Independent and an "Urger", respectively. It seems even the Aggie believes in Ingsoc nowadays.
The slate recommended voting in the following order, in an attempt to maximize the Choice Voting system and to give the impression that Big Brother was telling you how to vote:
#1 Jonathon Leathers #2 Chad Van Schoelandt #3 Marie Huynh #4 Chris "Twiggie" Rood
Because of their over-the-top style of bold claims and accusations, the statements published in the California Aggie were edited by the Elections Committee in what has become known as the Election Statement Controversy. However, the Campus Judicial Board unanimously sided with the Orwellians, who then moved on to creating a massive ASUCD Elections Reform bill. A year and many elections bills later, the entire slate of candidates (excluding Twiggie, who graduated), is now on the Elections Committee, and only one of the previous year's members have returned.
SOSSS also directly spawned the Friends Urging Campus Kindness, which did indeed win two seats (out of eight) in the Winter 2004 election. It seems that fortune has finally smiled on SOSSS.
Campaign Issues
They had planned to change the name of the Death Star to be officially called the Death Star and Kleiber Hall to Keebler Hall since that is what many students call it anyway. They wanted to paint a GIANT elf on the side of Keebler Hall and possibly get doubleplusmoney from the cookie people.
You would probably have to pay George Lucas to use the name "Death Star" officially. - KenjiYamada
It actually sounds like free publicity for the franchise to me. - BrentLaabs
Lucas isn't big on free publicity. Or logic. You'll probably have to pay. - EricKlein
Lucas is hardly the only person using the term "Death Star". Put an AT&T logo on it and get AT&T to pay (bonus because it resembles the Lucas Death Star, thus the nickname). If that's too edgy/commercial/legally questional, just go with "We're naming it after the excellent and educational Nova Episode". — jw
Their Plans to deal with Lamargate:
On a more serious note, the IRS is coming after UCD (no thanks to the idiots that broke the law in our name) so we would like to cut unnecessary things (i.e. $5000 for a fire truck to shoot tube socks at people, trip to mountains for senate members,etc.) and at the same time show support for groups on campus that help the community.
If elected to Senate, the slate promised to donate half of our senate paycheck to local charities/clubs/whatever that need the money.
Their official mascot is Yev, also nicknamed "Checkers". Checkers was also used as an unofficial mascot of Friends Urging Campus Kindness.
3 of the 4 members of the slate are associated with Students for an Orwellian Society.
In Fall of 2004, none of the candidates were elected, though #1 candidate Jonathon Leathers was only eliminated in the last round, short 42 votes. The Orwellian slate takes this as a mandate for change, despite the fact that they actually lost. They received so many votes without getting caught cheatng that they have said, "We have political capital, and we intend to spend it." Another acheivement is that Chad Van Schoelandt received more #20 votes than any other candidate. They are planning on running in the next election.
It looks like the SOSSS fliers that advocated voting 1. Jonathon Leathers 2. Chad Van Schoelandt 3. Marie Huynh 4. Christopher Rood weren't such a great idea, as they resulted in the latter three getting so few first-choice votes that they were eliminated in the first two rounds. STV is known to reward candidates with stronger core support (read: first-choice votes). A strategy you might try next quarter is something like "If your birthday is between such and such a date, vote in this order, etc." Of course, if you spaced each of the 24 possible orders equally across the calendar year, you risk the possibility that SOSSS's support will be so diluted that none of the candidates will be elected. So play around with it a bit and strike a balance.
And remember that especially for few-winner elections like this, STV isn't especially proportional... about 1/7 of the votes will be "wasted" (N.B. this figure is only true for our specific elections, with six seat using Droop quota) . This can even happen in larger parliaments; in the 1998 Northern Ireland elections, UUP won more seats than SDLP, despite getting less of the vote. - RaghavKrishnapriyan
- You are a fool if you think that we didn't do any research on this. The point of the slate was not to get all of us in. We were trying to get the most qualified of us in by concentrating the votes on one person. The rest of us were merely support. In fact, we told people NOT to vote for the rest of us as #1 but some did so anyway. Things went more or less according to plan and Jonathan was the last person to be eliminated. Sure, we ended up not getting anyone in. But what do you expect when other people cheat? - MarieHuynh
Well, it's an interesting problem, anyway (though I'm not sure what you mean by "support"). It would probably work better if we had "above-the-line voting", as Australian Senate elections do. 95% of Australian voters vote above the line, after all. Are you going to be running anyone for President? - RaghavKrishnapriyan
Okay, and the ballot data is available now (thank you, Greens) and even if we eliminated the candidates accused of campaigning (Haag, Malik and Ruel) their replacements would be Manteghi, Prodigalidad and Chin (Leathers is still eliminated in the last round). I heard that Malik told students to vote for anyone in a yellow shirt though, which would taint the rest of the election results. Sucks. :-/ -RaghavKrishnapriyan
But it should be noted that there was a fourth accused Focus member: Derrick Prodigalidad. When the results were run with the current four accused removed, it gave the 3 seats to Manteghi, Chin, and Leathers from SOSSS. - RevChad


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Do you think Mrs. Koch is crazy to ride Pilgrims Plunge again–twice?
After all, she'd just gotten her hair done this morning.
Well, Keith and Eric from Fox 41 in Louisville were here. It would have been sort of rude to refuse.
Keith had special permission to ride with a video camera taped to his hand.
He and Eric were taking a look at the footage afterwards. Tiny Mrs. Koch nearly had to leap in the air to see, too.


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Ingredients (makes 6):
150g cake flour, sifted
1 tsp instant yeast
Pinch of salt
100g water
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tbsp oil
50g icing sugar
**Use the method of making bread dough to make the dough.
200g pork belly, skinned and chopped finely
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 onion, chopped
1 stalk coriander, chopped
1 cm ginger, finely chopped
*2 tbsp dark soy sauce
*1/2 tbsp oyster sauce
*1/2 tsp ground white pepper
*1/2 tsp salt
*1/2 tbsp corn flour
1 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp cooking oil
- Marinate pork with ingredients marked with * for 30 minutes.
- Heat oil in a skillet over medium flame, stir in garlic and onion. Saute until lightly browned.
- Stir in ginger and sugar, stir fry until sugar is melted. Stir in pork and cook until well-done and the gravy is thickened.
- Stir in coriander and remove from heat. Cool completely and refrigerated before use.
- Assemble: Divide and shape dough into 6 small balls, let rise for 10 minutes. Flatten each dough on slightly floured surface, wrap in 1 tbsp full of pork filling and set aside for 5-10 minutes. Steam for 15 minutes.


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NEW YORK » The number of people sickened by a deadly meningitis outbreak has now reached 119 cases, including 11 deaths.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated the count today.
New Jersey is the 10th state to report at least one illness. The other states involved in the outbreak are Tennessee, Michigan, Virginia, Indiana, Florida, Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina and Ohio.
Officials have tied the outbreak of rare fungal meningitis to steroid shots for back pain. The steroid was made by a specialty pharmacy in Massachusetts. At least one contaminated vial was found at the company.
The company recalled the steroid that was sent to clinics in 23 states, and later recalled everything it makes.


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Google on Monday announced the acquisition of Picnik, a photo editing Web site. The move is not surprising considering Google's focus on promoting Web apps and the company's upcoming Google Chrome OS. Picnik will also be a great complement to Picasa, Google's photo storage and sharing site. In some ways, Picnik already integrates with Picasa, along with Flickr, Facebook, and anywhere else you can find an image online.
What is surprising is that Yahoo didn't grab the service first, especially when you consider that you can use Picnik's photo editing tools right inside Yahoo Mail–a feature not currently a part of Gmail.
So that's what we do know about Google's purchase of Picnik. But there are still a lot of unanswered questions about Picnik's future and how it will fit into Google's vast collection of Web-based services. Here are a few things I'm wondering about:
What about Picasa?
Picasa isn't just a photo storage and sharing site; It also provides a free desktop application for basic photo editing. Picasa offers some features that are very similar to what Picnik offers, such as cropping, red eye correction, photo coloring effects, and retouching photos. But you can also use Picasa's desktop app to print and e-mail photos; buy personalized photo cards, books, and prints from providers like Kodak, Snapfish, and Walgreens; send photos to Blogger; upload photos from your hard drive; and create slideshow movies with a soundtrack. So what will happen now? Will Picnik be re-branded as Picasa and still include the free desktop application? Will Picasa desktop features be integrated into the Picnik Web app or vice versa? It's all unclear at the moment, but hopefully we'll find out soon.
What will happen to Picnik's premium features?
Almost everywhere you look on Picnik's site, there are ads encouraging you to upgrade to the premium features for as little as $2.08 a month. These features include more image effects, layering, advanced editing tools, and the ability to connect to more than one photo sharing service–Flickr, Facebook, Picasa–at a time. With Google's emphasis on providing free tools to empower the masses, will the company drop the paywall and open up Picnik's premium services to everyone for free?
Will you have to sign up?
Although you can create a Picnik account, the site does not require you to sign up to use its non-premium features. Will Google keep that the same or will you have to use your Google account or existing Picnik account to use the service?
What new features and integration are coming?
Google said in a blog post that it " would like to" continue supporting Picnik integration with non-Google services like Flickr, Facebook, and Yahoo Mail. But Google also said the company would be working hard on integration and new features. So what does this mean? Will it turn out that Google won't be able to support other services after all (even if they "would like to")? It will also be interesting to see what kind of new features Google adds to Picnik. YouTube video editing perhaps?
Will Picnik go mobile?
There are already photo editing applications for Android, such as PicSay and PhotoShop.com Mobile, so why not add Picnik to the mix? If a Picnik app had deep integration with photo services like Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook, something that PicSay and PhotoShop.com lack, Picnik mobile would have an advantage. If a Picnik mobile app is in the works, will it also come to competing mobile platforms like the iPhone, Blackberry, and Windows Phone 7 Series or would Picnik mobile remain exclusively on the Android platform?
Will Picnik's Premium Pop-Ups influence Google?
Google offers a premium storage service is shared between your Gmail, Google Docs and Picasa accounts. You already get a substantial amount of free storage space in each service, but you can add as little as an extra 20GB for $5 a year or up to 16TB of storage for almost $4100 a year. Right now, these offers are fairly invisible and stay out of your way, but will Google adopt Picnik's method of having a storage pop-up appear every time you open a new window, Gmail message, or document? It sounds unlikely, but if it worked for Picnik maybe Google would be tempted to adopt this strategy.


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Bulgaria PM Vows Simpler Installation of Green Energy RoofsEnergy | January 17, 2013, Thursday // 13:55| views
Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov met Wednesday with representatives of three ministries, DKEVR, and renewable energy industry officials to discuss green energy issues. Photo by BGNES
A meeting between representatives of three Bulgarian ministries, the State Commission for Energy and Water Regulation (DKEVR), and renewable energy industry representatives ended with an agreement to adopt legal changes ensuring the simplification of administrative procedures for the installation of photovoltaic panels on roofs and facades of existing buildings.
The Wednesday meeting also ended with agreement on the need to align Ordinance #6 from 2004 of the Minister of Economy, Energy, and Tourism on connecting consumers and independent producers to the electricity transmission and electricity distribution networks with the existing provisions of the Spatial Development Act and the Renewable Energy Sources Act, according to the press office of the Regional Development Ministry.
The meeting, which brought together representatives of the Regional Development Ministry, the Ministry of Economy, Energy, and Tourism, the Ministry of Environment and Water, Bulgaria's energy watchdog and renewable industry representatives, was initiated by Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, who used the opportunity to adamantly defend green energy.
Borisov extended a warm welcome to the officials of renewable energy companies, stressing that the process of green energy had dropped two-fold.
He suggested that energy efficiency investments would save Bulgaria the money for two nuclear plant units.
He noted, however, that the installation of a solar panel or wind turbine on a rooftop or fa?ade of a building was equal to building a new house due to the large number of permits.
Commenting on the upcoming January 27 referendum on the development of nuclear energy in Bulgaria, Borisov noted that if Bulgarians planned to vote "yes", they were also supposed to come up with suggestions as to where the money for a NPP would come from.
"They forget about pensions and salaries for a period of 15 years and we start building the Belene NPP. By saying "yes", the people must be aware that this sum of BGN 22 B will come from maternity benefits, kindergartens, and infrastructure. There is no other source," Borisov stated, as cited by mediapool.bg.
During Wednesday's meeting with the Green Alternatives against Nuclear Power Plants organization, Nikola Gazdov, Chair of the Bulgarian Photovoltaic Association, argued that Bulgaria had to fix its electricity transmission network and its overall energy efficiency and put greater emphasis on the installation of solar panels and win turbines on roofs.
In the course of the meeting, renewable energy industry officials brought up the issue of radioactive waste from the Kozloduy NPP, claiming that Bulgarians' electricity bills would grow by some BGN 10-15 which would be spent on radioactive waste storage.
Gazdov reminded Borisov that prices of electricity form photovoltaic panels had dropped by 50% over the past 18 months
He suggested that 1000 MW of photovoltaic installations would cost around EUR 1 B, while a nuclear plant would use up at least EUR 5 B.
The Chair of the Bulgarian Photovoltaic Association also declared that he did not want to bequeath radioactive waste for the next 100 000 years to the future generations.
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Reminder: The Twitter IPO Won't Make You Rich
FB TWTR will finally take its place in the Nasdaq NYSE menagerie. Time to start digging up your backyard bullion stash, right? Wrong. For the average guy the Like Fave, don't touch.
What's an IPO, Anyway?
IPO stands for Initial Public Offering which, in plain English, means a company putting itself on the stock market. Or, if you're in an antebellum mood, today is
Facebook's Twitter's debutante ball.
At its most fundamental level, an IPO is an opportunity for a company to raise lots and lots of money very quickly. In this case,
Facebook will sell $16 billion Twitter is selling $1.8 billion worth of equity to outside investors a $38 $26 per share, and will use that money to grow its business/buy yachts. Just how big is that $16 billion? Very, extremely, ambitiously big. Facebook's is the largest tech IPO of all time, and by a long shot; the previous record-holder was Google, which raised a relatively paltry $1.4 billion back in 2004. In fact, Facebook's is the third-largest IPO ever by a US company, right behind Visa and GM.
Another thing an IPO does is to indicate how much a company is worth. In this case,
$104 billion $14 billion. Not bad for a company that managed a billion dollars of profit last year. Which is fucking insane for a company that's literally never turned a profit.
Should I Buy
Facebook Twitter Shares Today?
Sorry, almost definitely not. That
$16 billion $1.8 billion spend is likely already spoken for.
It's important to remember that lots and lots of shares of
A year ago, a Goldman Sachs leak showed who owned how big a slice of the Facebook pie. This chart from Learnvest breaks it down nicely. Two things from this: First, everyone on this chart just got very, very rich. The valuation at the time was $50 billion; today's more than doubles that. They're the ones who are seeing a major payday; everyone else is going to be gambling that Sean Parker Jack Dorsey! Or Ev. Or maybe Dick.
AP points out that in a big IPO, institutional investors typically nab up to 90% of shares before Joe Investor can get involved. And chances are, there are plenty of Joe Investors with bigger wallets and better ins than you and I have. Shares will be available eventually, of course. Just as soon as the stock's risen enough that the big dogs feel comfortable cashing out.
So Should I Buy
Facebook Twitter Shares Later? Actually, maybe! But that depends on two things: timing, and your intentions.
Today is out of the question. It's going to be a pure bacchanal, institutional investors gorging themselves on inflated prices, then unloading shares on the way back down, using hopeful schlubs as their own personal vomitorium.
The near-term, too, is a little foggy.
Facebook's early investors have already committed to selling off their shares in droves, which they wouldn't be doing if they thought the price was headed much higher than that $38 any time soon. It's a long list of people cashing in, but it's worth mentioning here : Accel Partners (49 million shares), DST Global (46 million shares), Mark Zuckerberg (30.2 million shares), Goldman Sachs (28.7 million shares), Tiger Global Management (23.4 million shares), Mail.ru Group (19.6 million shares), Peter Thiel (16.8 million shares), and a half a dozen others with relatively smaller stakes. If any of them thought that Facebook's stock price was about to take off with Google-like velocity, they would not be selling so many shares, plain and simple. People like them are profiting off of people like you. Which they have every right to! But don't be the sucker on the other end of that deal. Twitter has no clear course to profitability, other than through selling more ads.
So overall, no, not a good idea to dive in headfirst.
That doesn't, though, mean that Facebook stock is poison. Just that today and the next several are going to be terrifically messy and in all likelihood not good for your checking account.
But if you think
joining tweeting and sharing retweeting and clicking ads in the house Zuck Jack built? Sure! After the price fluctuations die down and volume stabilizes, buy some shares. Then buy some more a few months later, and so on. At least you'll be back to even odds.
Why Does Any of This Matter?
In the short term, it doesn't. At least not financially, not to you. You're on the sidelines while very wealthy people get very wealthier because they made a smart investment in an awkward kid with a Dior shirt and a dream.
with a hoodie and a dream. And good for them.
But in the long term,
That kind of pressure can make a company lose sight of what made it so successful in the first place.
For a company that's already prone to overreaching, that anger could be the spark that lights a powder keg of privacy and Open Graph concerns.
For now though, don't sweat it. Let your banker friends swoon over
Facebook's Twitter's operating income and cash flow. Raise a glass to Bono's Saudi Prince Alwaleed huge payday. And click some ads, if you're feeling kind. And get ready for Facebook's Twitter's eventual assault on your wallet, a willing sacrifice to Mammon and Morgan Stanley.
A version of this post, originally by Brian Barrett, appeared on Gizmodo, May 18th, 2012
Photo: Getty


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Available in Sterling Silver 925 with Rhodium Plating & 18 Karat Gold Vermeil.
- Chain Length 35cm / Extension 9cm / Lobster Clasp
- Circle size 0.5cm
What is Vermeil?
Vermeil (pronounced ver-MAY) is a very specific type of premium gold finish. Simply put, it is a combination of a very thick layer of gold over high-quality sterling silver. For your Jewellery to be labelled 'vermeil' its base must be of high-quality sterling silver and a thick gold layer of at least 10k or more. Industry regulated gold thickness must be of no less than 2.5 microns (very thick), meaning that your Vermeil jewellery will last much longer then any of your standard 'Gold Plated' jewellery. Click here to read our tips on how to keep your Gold Vermeil jewellery last a lifetime.
What is Rhodium Plating?
Rhodium Plating over Sterling Silver 925 makes the Jewellery more durable, shinier, resistant to tarnishing and gives a more plush white silver feel. So Rhodium plated over sterling silver is better than just sterling silver.


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Asunción, city and capital of Paraguay, occupying a promontory and descending to the Paraguay River near its confluence with the Pilcomayo. The city lies 175 feet (53 metres) above sea level.
The city was so named when a stockade was completed there on the Feast of the Assumption (August 15) in 1537. When Buenos Aires was evacuated in 1541 after an attack by the Pampa Indians, the inhabitants fled to Asunción. It was the headquarters of Spanish colonial activities in eastern South America for nearly half a century before Buenos Aires was refounded. In 1588 Jesuits established mission settlements on the Paraná River to convert the Guaraní population. Intermarriage of Indians and Spaniards contributed to the largely mestizo character of the present Paraguayans. After official separation from Buenos Aires in 1617, Asunción declined in importance. Partly because of its remoteness from Spain, nationalist and separatist movements began early in Paraguay: the Jesuits were expelled in 1767, and independence from Spain was declared in Asunción at midnight on May 14/15, 1811. The city's strategic position at the head of a great river system linking Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, its three enemies in the War of the Triple Alliance (1864/65–1870), led to Asunción's capture in 1868, and Brazil occupied and administered it until 1876.
Asunción has many beautiful flowering trees and several large parks. Adjacent to the river, suburban buildings are still colonial in style—one story with a patio—but the centre of town consists of modern high-rise buildings. The cathedral, presidential palace, and Pantheon of Heroes (a smaller replica of the Invalides in Paris), all built in the 19th century, and the Hotel Guaraní (which some architectural historians have argued was designed by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer though it is credited to Brazilians Rubio Morales, Ricardo Sievers, and Rubens Vianna) are among the notable buildings. As the seat of the national government and of the archbishop of Paraguay, Asunción dominates social, cultural, and economic trends in Paraguay. Several institutions of higher education, including the Universidad Nacional de Asunción (1890), the Universidad Católica "Nuestra Señora de la Asunción" (1960), and numerous private universities, are located in Asunción.
Asunción is the principal distributing centre of the most densely populated region of Paraguay. Cotton, sugarcane, corn (maize), tobacco, fruit, and cattle products from the rich agricultural and pastoral hinterland are processed in and around the capital. Industrial plants produce textiles, vegetable oils, footwear, flour, small river craft, and tobacco products. A piped water system was inaugurated in 1955. River steamers, mostly of foreign ownership, are the principal means of transporting freight. The Remanso Bridge connects Asunción with Buenos Aires via trunk road. Asunción also has an international airport. Pop. (2002) urban area, 512,112; (2019 est.) urban agglom., 2,317,900.