Biology / Nature

Hey guys. This weekend I'd like to discuss biodiversity. To that end, the article you should read is this one:

http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21585091-biodiversity-once-preoccupation-scientists-and-greens-has-become-mainstream

It's a little short and simple, so if you're looking for more you could always read this:

http://www.ecoservices.asu.edu/pdf/Cardinale%20et%20al,%20Nature%20%282012%29.pdf

Or, maybe you just want to watch a video. Try this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFeRFmqFChQ

See you all Saturday!

Final Exam Questions

Politics

1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the private sector financing of elections.

2. Are you interested in politics? Why or why not?

3. Describe a good politicians.

4. How does the legislative system in America work?/look like? ****

5. Why is the present Congress considered by some to be the worst ever?

6. What do you think about the political system in Poland and how does it compare to the American? ****

7. What political scandal in the USA to be the most shocking?

Communication/Media

1. What makes communication effective?

2. How has communication between people changed over the years?

3. What is the easiest way to stay in touch with friends?

4. How does human communication differ from that of animals?

5. Should the government have the right to shut down social networks/communicators to prevent or stop public disturbances?

6. Is data stored by social media sites safe? communication?

7. How would you feel if you had your laptop or cell phone taken away?

8. Is face to face communication superior to xxxxxxxs? Remembering phone numbers????

Medicine

1. Why is sugar called the white death?

2. What do you think about sugar-free products?

3. What are some of the reasons for the rising obesity rates in developed countries?

4. What's your opinion of medications? Are they over/under used/ abused?

5. How can you stay fit and healthy in today's world?

6. Do you think people take enough care of their dietary habits?

7. What do you think about traditional medicine? Do they have a place in today's medicine cabinet?

8. Why do you think the food industry produces unhealthy products?

Science and technology

1. What are the risks of replacing people with machines?

2. Do you think artificial intelligences poses a real danger to humanity?

3. Is AI still only science fiction?

4. Are technological advances still making our lives easier? To what extent?

5. Should we have the right to switch the robots off once their AI makes them 'too' human-like?

6. How does technology affect your everyday life and can you imagine your life without any electronic devices?

7. Do you think it's wise to allow robots to take care of kids?

Culture/Art

1. Do you think Vermeer was more of an artist of an inventor?

2. Should art be taught at schools or should the time be used to focus on more practical subjects?

3. Should art have boundaries?

4. What do you consider to be art?

5. How do you feel about using technology to create art? Is it still authentic art?

6. What is more important to be a successful artist, talent or training? Genius/creativity?

7. Can the reproduction of a painting still be called a piece of art?

8. Personal versus public?

Social Issues

1. Can religious and/or ethnic profiling in the US be justified?

2. Should stereotypes influence our judgment of people?

3. What are some advantages and disadvantages of immigration for society?

4. Does globalization and migration inevitably lead to racial profiling/problems/friction?

5. How has the social environment changed in the US since 9/11?

6. I hate feeling at home when I'm abroad. (GBS quote) agree/disagree? Can home ever be abroad?

7. Does local patriotism still have a place in the globalized world?

8. Do you think immigrants should maintain their identity and traditions or conform to their new home?

Review Class + Quiz

Hey there. So, next Saturday as planned I would like to have a class in which we have a quiz followed by a discussion of all the topics until now so we can make some final exam questions. Therefore, I'd like you to be prepared for a short quiz based on vocabulary from these three articles:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/42275248-ef46-11e2-bb27-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz2rozxQ38f

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Shutdown_Blues

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/aug/04/demon-drink-war-on-sugar

See you Saturday!

Social Issues

Hey guys, here's your article for Saturday.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/42275248-ef46-11e2-bb27-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz2rozxQ38f

Growing up Muslim in America

By Anna Fifield

A generation of Muslim Americans has come of age in the shadow of 9/11 amid a climate of paranoia, verbal abuse and vandalism. Anna Fifield reports

The sound of the muezzin calling Muslims to prayer rang out from the unassuming mosque on Fifth Avenue, the main drag in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, one recent Friday lunchtime. “Hasten to the prayer, hasten to success,” the voice intoned in Arabic.
Bearded men hurried to the mosque, which opened straight on to the street, while one woman shrouded in black from head to toe yelled into her cell phone, also in Arabic. Another, in more colourful hijab, struggled in vain to divert her children’s attention as they passed a shop whose cheap toys had spilled on to the road.

With Ramadan approaching, the local Balady market displayed signs counting down the days until the holy month of fasting began, as shoppers navigated their trolleys around towers of imported dates and olive oil. Nearby, a shop touted “fashionable Islamic clothing” and a restaurant advertised “halal Chinese” – no pork, no alcohol. The scene could almost have been one from Cairo or Damascus, except for the shops with ads for phone cards in Spanish and the fact that the buses ran on time.
Bay Ridge is geographically close to the hipster Brooklyn neighbourhoods of Park Slope and Williamsburg but could not be more culturally different. It is a world away from the financial district in Manhattan, the epicentre of the September 11 2001 attacks. But Brooklyn is also home to the largest group of people in the US who trace their lineage back to the Arab world, according to census data. And while the heightened sense of a threat from Islamic terrorism that existed post-attacks may have gone, it has given way to a persistent, low-level paranoia that pervades the everyday lives of the million-plus Muslim Arab Americans living here and throughout the country.
Islamophobia in the US is becoming entrenched, according to some Muslim leaders. “We’re living in one of the most hostile civic environments for the Muslim community,” says Faiza Ali, a community organiser at the Arab American Association in Bay Ridge. “And it’s gotten worse since 9/11.”

Hate-crime statistics collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation showed a sharp spike in violence against Muslims after the 2001 attacks, which levelled out until 2009, when it started ticking up again. There are always problems following events carried out by Muslims, such as the Boston Marathon bombings in March.

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reports that in 2011, 21 per cent of the religion-based complaints it received were from Muslims – although they comprise less than 1 per cent of the population.

Situated in an old doctors’ clinic, the Arab American Association provides advice on everything from immigration to health insurance. It also fights practices it considers discriminatory, such as the New York Police Department’s surveillance programme, revealed in 2011, under which agents routinely observe Muslims going about their lives.

“Islamophobia has become institutionalised in New York – by our police department, elected officials, politicians who are running for office,” says Ali, a 28-year-old of Pakistani heritage, who became a student activist after being harassed in the wake of the 2001 attacks. “The environment is really difficult. It’s as if we are walking in a city that is our home but feeling like we are strangers,” she says in her office, where the walls are decorated with signs bearing slogans such as “Praying while Muslim is NOT a crime!”

Examples can be seen across the country. In New York, opposition has raged against Muslim community centres such as the Park 51 centre planned for near Ground Zero. In Florida, the pastor Terry Jones wants to burn Korans. In Tennessee, vandalism and bomb threats greeted plans to open a mosque in Murfreesboro. Then there are the attempts by state legislators in North Carolina and Oklahoma, among others, to ban recognition of sharia law.
“I feel like the anti-Muslim feeling has really become more pronounced in the last few years,” says Moustafa Bayoumi, a literature professor at Brooklyn College and author of the book How Does it Feel to be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America. He cites polls from The Washington Post and The Economist that found that the number of people admitting to negative feelings towards Muslims had risen from the 20 per cent bracket in 2002 to more than 50 per cent by 2010.
When his book came out in 2009, Muslim readers told Bayoumi it painted too positive a picture, so much had the environment changed in the interim. It has since deteriorated further, he tells me as we sit in a café selling organic chai lattes in the trendy Brooklyn neighbourhood of Prospect Park. “It took a while for the narrative to take hold, that Muslims were the enemy population,” he says.
This is despite the fact that Islamic terrorism is well down the list of threats to life in the US. Thirty-three Americans were killed by Muslim-American terrorists between the 2001 attacks and the end of last year, according to Charles Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina. Twice as many – 66 – were killed in mass shootings by non-Muslims in 2012 alone.
The US has been through periods of hostility towards ethnic groups many times before, for example towards German and Japanese Americans in the middle of the last century. But these have been discrete periods in history. There is no end in sight for the war on terror.
. . .
For me, this issue is personal. My son was born in America but has an Arabic surname and is growing up bilingual, although we are not religious in any direction. He has my lighter hair but his father’s colouring. Once, in an airport, a woman asked me what he was “mixed with”. A look that fell just short of horror passed over her face when I replied, “Iraqi.” I shudder to think of my son being on the receiving end of that look, just because of his name or the way his skin tans at the merest hint of summer.
I am one of many parents who worry. Arwa Aziz, a 41-year-old mother of two boys, moved her youngest son Adam, now 13, from public school to a private Muslim school in Brooklyn because she was concerned about him being bullied. “He got so shy as he was growing up, so I just thought he would be better off there,” Aziz told me while we talked at the Arab American Association, showing each other photos of our boys. “I tell my kids that they’re second-generation Americans, I won’t let them make us feel weak.”

Over iced coffee at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Fifth Avenue on a hot Saturday afternoon, Naemah Hegazy and her cousin, Bouchra Tabit, lobbed back and forth the observations of young women. Tabit joked about how she could be Miss Morocco, if only she lost 50 pounds, while Hegazy showed her funny posts on Facebook. When a Justin Timberlake song came on, they broke out together in an unrestrained: “Cause I don’t wanna lose you now, I’m lookin’ right at the other half of me.”
Hegazy, an 18-year-old of Egyptian and Moroccan descent, is studying political science at a college just north of New York City, while Tabit, two years her senior, has a part-time job at the local police station but is studying to become a nurse.
Both can rattle off tales of petty harassment – such as being called a terrorist and enduring “random” searches – that have been a constant presence in their lives since 2001, when they were just children. “We are singled out as a race,” Hegazy says, and Tabit chimes in about the times she has been told to “go back to your own country”. Hegazy bursts out: “This is not nobody’s country, yo.”
Many of the young Muslim Americans in Brooklyn can recount stories of public accusations of being a terrorist, rocks being thrown through their car windows, being targeted for “flying while Muslim”. Many know someone who has answered a knock at the door and found the FBI.
More than one-third – 36 per cent – of the American Muslim population is aged between 18 and 29, compared with just 22 per cent of the general public, according to the Pew Research Center. That means that an entire generation of Muslim Arab Americans has never known an adult experience where 9/11 was not somewhere in the backdrop.
Some young Muslim Americans have tried to hide their faith, removing any outward signs of Islam and changing their names. Mohammeds and Osamas become Mo and Sam. Some hope people will mistake them for Puerto Rican.
But academic research – including by Nadine Naber of the University of Michigan and Lori Peek of Colorado State University – suggests that a much larger number of young Muslim Americans have embraced their faith and are standing their ground in the face of widespread hostility.
A Pew Center study published in 2007 found that Muslim Americans under 30 were much more religiously observant than older Muslim Americans, a trend that experts say has only become more entrenched.
Hegazy and Tabit are both defiantly proud of their religion. Tabit, who has heavy black eye make-up underneath aviator glasses, advertises her faith with a tight black hijab, which she began wearing a year ago. “My friend’s mother died so I covered my head for the funeral, and I just never took it off,” she says. “Before I had guys trying to talk to me but now I don’t get much of that, so to me it’s about safety and respect.”
Hegazy, who goes to mosque as much as she can and observes Ramadan, plans to wear a headscarf one day. “I get a lot of questions like, ‘Why don’t you wear the hijab?’” she says, describing the novelty of being one of only five Arabs out of 1,300 students at her university. “I feel like it’s a personal choice and it’s between me and God. When I’m ready I will put it on but I’m not ready yet. It’s a lot of responsibility.”
. . .

Hegazy was voted “most likely to have her own TV show” in her high-school graduating class and dreams of being a political analyst on CNN or CBS. Holding an imaginary microphone up to her mouth, she does a little anchor-meets-rapper ditty. “Listen y’all don’t know, but Bill O’Reilly has to go,” she sings, referring to the conservative Fox News host who goes on regular rants about “Muslim jihadists”.
Tabit is assertive in other ways. She ticked the “African American” box on her college application form because her family comes from Morocco. “They told me I wasn’t black,” she says, giving a shrug.
Tabit’s mother Amina, who does not cover her hair, worries that her daughter will only suffer more discrimination as a result of her appearance, especially when she tries to get a job. “When she put on hijab, I was scared. I worry it will create problems for her,” she says.
Amina’s fears are rooted in reality. Saher Selod, a sociologist at Simmons College in Massachusetts, has done research on the “de-Americanisation” of Muslims. “Women in hijab are more likely to be targets for anti-Muslim ire, while it’s not usually until they give their name that the questions start for men,” Selod says. “People start wondering about their religion and what associations they might have.”
The prospect of being judged on their names plays on the minds of Nasr al-Zindani and Oaday Musallam, hanging out at the Stadium hookah lounge further up Fifth Avenue on a Saturday evening. Both sport painstakingly styled beards and smoke a hookah or shisha water pipe while watching Prison Break.
“My name is Oaday!” exclaims Musallam, a 22-year-old of Palestinian extraction who is now at business college and dreams of owning his own company “so no one can boss me around”. He shares his name with one of the sons of Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi dictator. “I used to get a lot of trouble for that in school. Lots of ‘Are you Saddam’s son?’” he says.
In this environment of persistent unemployment, where there are many times more overqualified candidates than job openings, they worry that their names will count against them, that they won’t even get to an interview.
“Yeah, I worry about that sometimes, that they’ll see my last name and wonder about what connections we have,” says Zindani, who is 21 and whose parents come from Yemen. “It’s all about security. That’s what we love in America, that’s how it is.”
Zindani, who has just finished a degree in criminal justice, hopes to get a job in law enforcement. “I want to be a cop,” he says between puffs on mango-and-strawberry-flavoured tobacco. “I just want to get out on the streets and clean the bad guys out.”

Both men go on to recount a litany of occasions when they have been called terrorists or “Ay-rabs”, or been “jumped” while on the street, or verbally abused while working the counter in a deli.
Like Hegazy and Tabit, they don’t hesitate to defend themselves. “We feel like it’s right, when they talk about our religion and our beliefs, to defend ourselves, especially to people who we don’t know,” says Musallam.
They take an equally pragmatic approach to the suspicion that they automatically fall under. “There could be a lot of cops watching. They could be watching us right now. But I don’t pay any attention to that. If they do, they do. It’s not like I’m doing anything bad,” he says.
Like Musallam, Sadam Ali, who became the first Arab American to represent the US in the Olympics when he boxed in Beijing in 2008, also knows about having a difficult name.
“I like it because it’s a name that people don’t forget. I say, ‘Like Saddam Hussein and Muhammad Ali’,” he says as he play-spars with his five-year-old brother Adam at the boxing gym he started on Fifth Avenue. “I wouldn’t change my name for the world. You shouldn’t be judged on your name,” says Ali. “No matter what race you are, you can be successful when you work hard for something.”
. . .
Although many of the young people of Bay Ridge profess pride in their religion, the climate of suspicion about Islam is taking its toll on young Muslim Americans. Research by psychologist Mona Amer of the American University in Cairo and Joe Hovey of the University of Toledo has found elevated levels of depression among Arab Americans, most of them Muslim.
A quarter reported moderate to severe anxiety as a result of racial profiling and discrimination, according to a study published in the journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. The results were especially striking given that admitting to mental health problems is generally considered taboo in Muslim culture.

Sami Nijam, a 15-year-old of Palestinian heritage, regularly gets called “Bin Laden junior” or a “terrorist” at his Brooklyn high school. “It’s supposed to be a joke but it gets to me a lot,” he says between shooting hoops with his friends. “People want to think we’re all the same [as the 9/11 bombers],” he shrugs.
For many in the post-September 11 generation, this suspicion about Islam has coincided with the period in their lives when teenagers are typically questioning their identity anyway. “There are a lot of negative feelings in the air. How do you reconcile all of these things about who you are suspected of being with who you know you are not?” asks Bayoumi. “That’s a difficult environment for anyone, let alone a 14-year-old, and it certainly contributes to their sense of frustration, or alienation.”
Many young Muslims have responded by seeking solace from their peers. There has been a sharp increase in Muslim students’ associations at universities, such as the Brooklyn College Islamic Society, which was targeted by the NYPD. Membership has doubled to almost 1,200 in the past three years. “They use the associations to find out who they are, a lot of that borne out of anxiety about being seen as unhuman,” says Bayoumi, who has become something of a one-man complaints department for Muslim students at the college.
. . .
The huge, four-storey Muslim American Society in Bensonhurst, an old wedding hall located between a police station and a playground, has also seen an increase in membership in recent years. The centre was a hive of activity one recent weekend. There was a big pre-Ramadan celebration on Saturday night, with a packed schedule of speakers and a dinner, and on Sunday the hall on the fourth floor was being festooned for a bridal shower.

Next door, a bunch of women were jumping and kicking their way through a boot camp class, enjoying the opportunity to shut the door and take off their headscarves. In the basement, a group of teenage boys were busily repainting the classrooms where Arabic and Koran lessons take place under the tutelage of Mohammed Almathil, the centre’s executive director. The noticeboard in the lobby advertised karate classes, football leagues and Girl Scouts.
The number of people attending Friday prayers at the centre has risen from about 200 at the beginning of 2011 to as many as 330 by the end of last year, according to Almathil, a Yemeni American who wears a short beard and a kufi, a small skullcap. Almost all of the increase has been driven by university students and young professionals. “The number one reason is that people are coming together for the comfort and spirituality, to help them deal with their daily stresses,” he says.
Almathil, who has a degree in psychology, says that institutionalised Islamophobia is causing some young Muslims to lash out on social media, while others respond by cutting themselves off from society. “They feel like they are being put under a lot of pressure so they are isolating or restricting themselves somehow,” he says.
Aber Kawas is a member of the Muslim Students’ Association at City College in Manhattan but calls the Muslim American Society her second home. “Young people feel like they are being attacked, like people don’t understand their way of life. Muslim kids become more into their identity in college and they flock together,” she says. “That happened to me. I would go to the MSA because it was comfortable.”
Kawas, known as Abby, is the American-born daughter of Palestinian immigrant parents, whose life was turned upside down after the September attacks. Her father got caught up in the law enforcement authorities’ terrorism fishing expeditions, leading to him being deported – even though he was never found to have been involved in anything related to terrorism.
Yet Kawas seldom stops smiling out from her tightly wrapped red headscarf. At her house, she tells me how she loves Jane Austen. She has read Pride and Prejudice more times than she can remember, not to mention watching the screen adaptations. “It’s just like our lives – we have social interaction but there’s no dating,” she says. “I feel like a Muslim Elizabeth Bennet.”

Then, down at the Muslim American Society, she invokes another British period drama to explain why she feels so comfortable there. “It’s just like that scene from Downton Abbey,” she says. “You know, when the rich people were sitting around with each other and they said, ‘Isn’t it so much easier when you don’t have to explain yourself?’”
Community organisers such as Faiza Ali have noticed that the climate of intolerance has essentially led young Muslim Americans to put themselves in self-imposed quarantine. They fear the impact that this will have on the development of civil society. “It’s scary when you think about the impact that this is going to have on future generations of activists,” Ali says. “If people are afraid to speak out now when they are in high school or college, what does this mean for the social justice movement?”
Others fear that society’s alienation of young Muslim Americans will contribute to some going off the rails. No one is drawing a direct line between membership of community organisations and young people being radicalised. But some wonder whether the alienation of a whole segment of society will tip those prone to radicalisation over the edge.
Jim Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, a Washington think-tank, says the climate of suspicion creates a risk of instilling an “us and them” mindset in young Muslims. “What does all this do to their development and psyche, if they’re thinking, ‘They don’t want me here?’” he adds. A Maronite Christian whose family comes from Lebanon, Zogby has been the subject of headlines intended to associate him with extremists.
For her part, Kawas is conscious of the need to become part of her wider world, not just her Downton Abbey equivalent set. As we climb the stairs at the Muslim American Association, she looks at me and says: “If we all stay together all the time, people will never get to know us.”

Art & Culture

Hey guys, I've decided on this article for Saturday's class:

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/11/vermeer-secret-tool-mirrors-lenses

Science and Technology

Hey there. I couldn't decide on which article to choose so, lucky you, I've decided on two. One on each side of the issue. Please read them for Saturday!

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/technology/the-rapid-advance-of-artificial-intelligence.html?_r=0

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/why-we-should-think-about-the-threat-of-artificial-intelligence.html

The Rapid Advance of Artificial Intelligence

Sally Ryan for The New York Times

By JOHN MARKOFF

Published: October 14, 2013

A gaggle of Harry Potter fans descended for several days this summer on the Oregon Convention Center in Portland for the Leaky Con gathering, an annual haunt of a group of predominantly young women who immerse themselves in a fantasy world of magic, spells and images.

The jubilant and occasionally squealing attendees appeared to have no idea that next door a group of real-world wizards was demonstrating technology that only a few years ago might have seemed as magical.

The scientists and engineers at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference are creating a world in which cars drive themselves, machines recognize people and “understand” their emotions, and humanoid robots travel unattended, performing everything from mundane factory tasks to emergency rescues.

C.V.P.R., as it is known, is an annual gathering of computer vision scientists, students, roboticists, software hackers — and increasingly in recent years, business and entrepreneurial types looking for another great technological leap forward.

The growing power of computer vision is a crucial first step for the next generation of computing, robotic and artificial intelligence systems. Once machines can identify objects and understand their environments, they can be freed to move around in the world. And once robots become mobile they will be increasingly capable of extending the reach of humans or replacing them.

Self-driving cars, factory robots and a new class of farm hands known as ag-robots are already demonstrating what increasingly mobile machines can do. Indeed, the rapid advance of computer vision is just one of a set of artificial intelligence-oriented technologies — others include speech recognition, dexterous manipulation and navigation — that underscore a sea change beyond personal computing and the Internet, the technologies that have defined the last three decades of the computing world.

“During the next decade we’re going to see smarts put into everything,” said Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington who is a specialist in Big Data. “Smart homes, smart cars, smart health, smart robots, smart science, smart crowds and smart computer-human interactions.”

The enormous amount of data being generated by inexpensive sensors has been a significant factor in altering the center of gravity of the computing world, he said, making it possible to use centralized computers in data centers — referred to as the cloud — to take artificial intelligence technologies like machine-learning and spread computer intelligence far beyond desktop computers.

Apple was the most successful early innovator in popularizing what is today described as ubiquitous computing. The idea, first proposed by Mark Weiser, a computer scientist with Xerox, involves embedding powerful microprocessor chips in everyday objects.

Steve Jobs, during his second tenure at Apple, was quick to understand the implications of the falling cost of computer intelligence. Taking advantage of it, he first created a digital music player, the iPod, and then transformed mobile communication with the iPhone. Now such innovation is rapidly accelerating into all consumer products.

“The most important new computer maker in Silicon Valley isn’t a computer maker at all, it’s Tesla,” the electric car manufacturer, said Paul Saffo, a managing director at Discern Analytics, a research firm based in San Francisco. “The car has become a node in the network and a computer in its own right. It’s a primitive robot that wraps around you.”

Here are several areas in which next-generation computing systems and more powerful software algorithms could transform the world in the next half-decade.

Artificial Intelligence

With increasing frequency, the voice on the other end of the line is a computer.

It has been two years since Watson, the artificial intelligence program created by I.B.M., beat two of the world’s best “Jeopardy” players. Watson, which has access to roughly 200 million pages of information, is able to understand natural language queries and answer questions.

The computer maker had initially planned to test the system as an expert adviser to doctors; the idea was that Watson’s encyclopedic knowledge of medical conditions could aid a human expert in diagnosing illnesses, as well as contributing computer expertise elsewhere in medicine. 

In May, however, I.B.M. went a significant step farther by announcing a general-purpose version of its software, the “I.B.M. Watson Engagement Advisor.” The idea is to make the company’s question-answering system available in a wide range of call center, technical support and telephone sales applications. The company says that as many as 61 percent of all telephone support calls currently fail because human support-center employees are unable to give people correct or complete information.

Watson, I.B.M. says, will be used to help human operators, but the system can also be used in a “self-service” mode, in which customers can interact directly with the program by typing questions in a Web browser or by speaking to a speech recognition program.

That suggests a “Freakonomics” outcome: There is already evidence that call-center operations that were once outsourced to India and the Philippines have come back to the United States, not as jobs, but in the form of software running in data centers.

Robotics

A race is under way to build robots that can walk, open doors, climb ladders and generally replace humans in hazardous situations.

In December, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the Pentagon’s advanced research arm, will hold the first of two events in a $2 million contest to build a robot that could take the place of rescue workers in hazardous environments, like the site of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Scheduled to be held in Miami, the contest will involve robots that compete at tasks as diverse as driving vehicles, traversing rubble fields, using power tools, throwing switches and closing valves.

In addition to the Darpa robots, a wave of intelligent machines for the workplace is coming from Rethink Robots, based in Boston, and Universal Robots, based in Copenhagen, which have begun selling lower-cost two-armed robots to act as factory helpers. Neither company’s robots have legs, or even wheels, yet. But they are the first commercially available robots that do not require cages, because they are able to watch and even feel their human co-workers, so as not to harm them.

For the home, companies are designing robots that are more sophisticated than today’s vacuum-cleaner robots. Hoaloha Robotics, founded by the former Microsoft executive Tandy Trower, recently said it planned to build robots for elder care, an idea that, if successful, might make it possible for more of the aging population to live independently.

Seven entrants in the Darpa contest will be based on the imposing humanoid-shaped Atlas robot manufactured by Boston Dynamics, a research company based in Waltham, Massachusetts. Among the wide range of other entrants are some that look anything but humanoid — with a few that function like “transformers” from the world of cinema. The contest, to be held in the infield of the Homestead-Miami Speedway, may well have the flavor of the bar scene in “Star Wars.”

Intelligent Transportation

Amnon Shashua, an Israeli computer scientist, has modified his Audi A7 by adding a camera and artificial-intelligence software, enabling the car to drive the 65 kilometers, or 40 miles, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv without his having to touch the steering wheel.

In 2004, Darpa held the first of a series of “Grand Challenges” intended to spark interest in developing self-driving cars. The contests led to significant technology advances, including “Traffic Jam Assist” for slow-speed highway driving; “Super Cruise” for automated freeway driving, already demonstrated by General Motors and others; and self-parking, a feature already available from a number of car manufacturers.

Recently General Motors and Nissan have said they will introduce completely autonomous cars by the end of the decade. In a blend of artificial-intelligence software and robotics, Mobileye, a small Israeli manufacturer of camera technology for automotive safety that was founded by Mr. Shashua, has made considerable progress. While Google and automotive manufacturers have used a variety of sensors including radars, cameras and lasers, fusing the data to provide a detailed map of the rapidly changing world surround a moving car, Mobileye researchers are attempting to match that accuracy with just video cameras and specialized software.

Emotional Computing

At a preschool near the University of California, San Diego, a child-size robot named Rubi plays with children. It listens to them, speaks to them and understands their facial expressions.

Rubi is an experimental project of Prof. Javier Movellan, a specialist in machine learning and robotics. Professor Movellan is one of a number of researchers now working on a class of computers that can interact with humans, including holding conversations.

Computers that understand our deepest emotions hold the promise of a world full of brilliant machines. They also raise the specter of an invasion of privacy on a scale not previously possible, as they move a step beyond recognizing human faces to the ability to watch the array of muscles in the face and decode the thousands of possible movements into an understanding of what people are thinking and feeling.

These developments are based on the work of the American psychologist Paul Ekman, who explored the relationship between human emotion and facial expression. His research found the existence of “micro expressions” that expose difficult-to-suppress authentic reactions. In San Diego, Professor Movellan has founded a company, Emotient, that is one of a handful of start-ups pursuing applications for the technology. A near-term use is in machines that can tell when people are laughing, crying or skeptical — a survey tool for film and television audiences.

Farther down the road, it is likely that applications will know exactly how people are reacting as the conversation progresses, a step well beyond Siri, Apple’s voice recognition system.

Harry Potter fans, stand by.

October 24, 2013

Why We Should Think About the Threat of Artificial Intelligence

Posted by Gary Marcus

If the New York Times’s latest article is to be believed, artificial intelligence is moving so fast it sometimes seems almost “magical.” Self-driving cars have arrived; Siri can listen to your voice and find the nearest movie theatre; and I.B.M. just set the “Jeopardy”-conquering Watson to work on medicine, initially training medical students, perhaps eventually helping in diagnosis. Scarcely a month goes by without the announcement of a new A.I. product or technique. Yet, some of the enthusiasm may be premature: as I’ve noted previously, we still haven’t produced machines with common sense, vision, natural language processing, or the ability to create other machines. Our efforts at directly simulating human brains remain primitive.
Still, at some level, the only real difference between enthusiasts and skeptics is a time frame. The futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil thinks true, human-level A.I. will be here in less than two decades. My estimate is at least double that, especially given how little progress has been made in computing common sense; the challenges in building A.I., especially at the software level, are much harder than Kurzweil lets on.
But a century from now, nobody will much care about how long it took, only what happened next. It’s likely that machines will be smarter than us before the end of the century—not just at chess or trivia questions but at just about everything, from mathematics and engineering to science and medicine. There might be a few jobs left for entertainers, writers, and other creative types, but computers will eventually be able to program themselves, absorb vast quantities of new information, and reason in ways that we carbon-based units can only dimly imagine. And they will be able to do it every second of every day, without sleep or coffee breaks.
For some people, that future is a wonderful thing. Kurzweil has written about a rapturous singularity in which we merge with machines and upload our souls for immortality; Peter Diamandis has argued that advances in A.I. will be one key to ushering in a new era of “abundance,” with enough food, water, and consumer gadgets for all. Skeptics like Eric Brynjolfsson and I have worried about the consequences of A.I. and robotics for employment. But even if you put aside the sort of worries about what super-advanced A.I. might do to the labor market, there’s another concern, too: that powerful A.I. might threaten us more directly, by battling us for resources.
Most people see that sort of fear as silly science-fiction drivel—the stuff of “The Terminator” and “The Matrix.” To the extent that we plan for our medium-term future, we worry about asteroids, the decline of fossil fuels, and global warming, not robots. But a dark new book by James Barrat, “Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era,” lays out a strong case for why we should be at least a little worried.
Barrat’s core argument, which he borrows from the A.I. researcher Steve Omohundro, is that the drive for self-preservation and resource acquisition may be inherent in all goal-driven systems of a certain degree of intelligence. In Omohundro’s words, “if it is smart enough, a robot that is designed to play chess might also want to be build a spaceship,” in order to obtain more resources for whatever goals it might have. A purely rational artificial intelligence, Barrat writes, might expand “its idea of self-preservation … to include proactive attacks on future threats,” including, presumably, people who might be loathe to surrender their resources to the machine. Barrat worries that “without meticulous, countervailing instructions, a self-aware, self-improving, goal-seeking system will go to lengths we’d deem ridiculous to fulfill its goals,” even, perhaps, commandeering all the world’s energy in order to maximize whatever calculation it happened to be interested in.
Of course, one could try to ban super-intelligent computers altogether. But “the competitive advantage—economic, military, even artistic—of every advance in automation is so compelling,” Vernor Vinge, the mathematician and science-fiction author, wrote, “that passing laws, or having customs, that forbid such things merely assures that someone else will.”
If machines will eventually overtake us, as virtually everyone in the A.I. field believes, the real question is about values: how we instill them in machines, and how we then negotiate with those machines if and when their values are likely to differ greatly from our own. As the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom argued:

We cannot blithely assume that a superintelligence will necessarily share any of the final values stereotypically associated with wisdom and intellectual development in humans—scientific curiosity, benevolent concern for others, spiritual enlightenment and contemplation, renunciation of material acquisitiveness, a taste for refined culture or for the simple pleasures in life, humility and selflessness, and so forth. It might be possible through deliberate effort to construct a superintelligence that values such things, or to build one that values human welfare, moral goodness, or any other complex purpose that its designers might want it to serve. But it is no less possible—and probably technically easier—to build a superintelligence that places final value on nothing but calculating the decimals of pi.

The British cyberneticist Kevin Warwick once asked, “How can you reason, how can you bargain, how can you understand how that machine is thinking when it’s thinking in dimensions you can’t conceive of?”
If there is a hole in Barrat’s dark argument, it is in his glib presumption that if a robot is smart enough to play chess, it might also “want to build a spaceship”—and that tendencies toward self-preservation and resource acquisition are inherent in any sufficiently complex, goal-driven system. For now, most of the machines that are good enough to play chess, like I.B.M.’s Deep Blue, haven’t shown the slightest interest in acquiring resources.
But before we get complacent and decide there is nothing to worry about after all, it is important to realize that the goals of machines could change as they get smarter. Once computers can effectively reprogram themselves, and successively improve themselves, leading to a so-called “technological singularity” or “intelligence explosion,” the risks of machines outwitting humans in battles for resources and self-preservation cannot simply be dismissed.
One of the most pointed quotes in Barrat’s book belongs to the legendary serial A.I. entrepreneur Danny Hillis, who likens the upcoming shift to one of the greatest transitions in the history of biological evolution: “We’re at that point analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms. We are amoeba and we can’t figure out what the hell this thing is that we’re creating.”
Already, advances in A.I. have created risks that we never dreamt of. With the advent of the Internet age and its Big Data explosion, “large amounts of data is being collected about us and then being fed to algorithms to make predictions,” Vaibhav Garg, a computer-risk specialist at Drexel University, told me. “We do not have the ability to know when the data is being collected, ensure that the data collected is correct, update the information, or provide the necessary context.” Few people would have even dreamt of this risk even twenty years ago. What risks lie ahead? Nobody really knows, but Barrat is right to ask.

Health & Medicine

Hey guys, sorry for the tardiness of my post, but here's your article for Saturday finally:

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/aug/04/demon-drink-war-on-sugar

The demon drink: war on sugar

Our addiction to sugar is linked to obesity, cancer and heart disease – and soft drinks are among the worst offenders. Alex Renton reports on the new health war, and reveals why some fruit juices may be as bad for you as cans of fizz

The tin of 7UP rolls to a stop at my feet. I pick it up, scowling at the kid on a bike who'd tossed it and missed the litter bin. The can is green and shiny: "Put some play into your every day," it says. "Escape to a carefree world… Don't grow up. 7UP." And underneath, in tiny print, the real info (though you need a calculator to get to the truth): the lemon- and lime-flavoured drink contains a trace of salt, no fat, no fibre and 34.98g of sugar – eight teaspoons – and 135 calories. That's enough energy for about 15 minutes' cross-country running. It's cheap, too. Half the price of milk.
If the stats are right, this teenager in Leith, who threw the empty tin, drinks 287 cans, or the equivalent, a year: more sugary drinks than any other child in Europe. Not to mention a whole lot more sugar, in breakfast cereals, bread, and even chicken nuggets. That is in part why Scottish children's teeth are the same quality as those of children in Kazakhstan. And perhaps why a 2010 survey of 17 countries found that only Mexicans and Americans were fatter than Scots.
Of course sugary drinks make work for more people than dentists. Though the drinks and food industry still hotly contests it, a scientific consensus is now emerging that fatal problems can be traced back to excessive sugar consumption. Sugary drinks, addiction and obesity are inextricably linked: excess sugar in the diet may be a greater cause of obesity than fat is. Obese people suffer from diabetes, cancer, fatty liver disease, dementia and heart problems to the extent that their healthcare costs are double those of people with a healthy body mass. The "metabolic syndrome" maladies associated with insulin resistance and obesity – many authorities now just use the term "diabesity" – are expected soon to overtake tobacco as the leading cause of heart disease in the world. And perhaps of cancer, too.
Thus the "don't grow up" line on that 7UP tin carries a grinding irony. Dr Robert Lustig puts it brutally: "The numbers don't lie… as a rule, the fat die young." He is a medical doctor and professor of clinical paediatrics at the University of California who has emerged as the guru of an increasingly noisy international campaign pressing governments to act as aggressively on sugary drinks as they have on tobacco. The two are seen as directly analogous – unnecessary habits that cost people and society dear. Lustig believes that children are at the forefront of the sugar-driven health crisis because soft and fizzy drinks are the most efficient way of delivering this "poison". His word.
So the 7UP tin is quite an artefact. It shows capitalism at its most efficient and rapacious: where ingredients – sugar, flavouring, water – costing almost nothing can be turned into a profit margin measured in the thousands of per cent. It illustrates the extraordinary diversion of farmland and forest into the production of the almost useless while nearly a billion people on the planet are starving. The can is an icon of the key dietary changes of the era, where we upped our simple carbohydrate intake – sugar – to the point that it started harming us in ways never seen before.
A monumental battle is just beginning between the sugar and food corporations and governments, which know that society can no longer bear the strain of the polysaccharide habit. If the 40 years of war between government and Big Tobacco are anything to go by, the fight will be dirty.
It's a feature of modern life that the young have started getting the diseases of the old – problems with their hearts, their livers, cancers, diabetes and so on. That this may be triggered by the changes in our diet has been known for at least 60 years. During the Korean war, US army surgeons got a chance to do something unusual: perform autopsies on lots of young people. These found plaque in the American casualties' arteries – even among the teenagers. But there were no blockages in the hearts and valves of the youthful Korean dead. At the time, this bizarre phenomenon was ascribed to the fat load in the GIs' diet. But Americans who fought in Korea and Japan were fuelled by Coca-Cola and its rivals; and modern analysis now concludes that sugary drinks may have been the villain.
Most rich nations saw their sugar consumption increase by 30-40% between 1970 and 2000. In Scotland it quadrupled in 60 years. A key moment was the introduction of "high fructose corn syrup" (HFCS) – a fantastically cheap sugar made from America's surplus maize (in Europe we manufacture something similar from sugar beet). American government subsidy for the corn farmers – and high taxes on imported sugar – made the product cheap and attractive. Though there were issues around taste, in 1980 Coca-Cola successfully switched to using HFCS. After water, sugar is, of course, the major ingredient in its product. Profit margins improved, and Coke's rivals soon jumped aboard.
  In the UK we eat and drink around 70% more sugar than the government says we should, and the obesity figures have been fairly stable since they peaked in the early 2000s. (Though with 30% of under-15s overweight, and consuming sugar just like adults, the epidemiologists are predicting the obesity rate to rise.) But our sugar consumption peaked in 1982 and the soft drinks manufacturers say that now 40% of carbonated drinks contain "no added sugar". Why, then, have obesity rates not plunged?
I found at least a piece of the answer to that at breakfast in my house, when a family with two young, and I think we'll say "sturdy", children came to stay. Just a touch self-righteous, they spurned the low-sugar cereals – Weetabix, porridge – that our children eat. Instead they got busy with the blender, making vast watery smoothies with fruit juice, apples and bananas. But the supermarket apple juice, I pointed out, contained 35g sugar – as much as a can of Coke. And a ripe banana has four teaspoonfuls of sugar. "That's natural sugar. It's fructose. That means it's from fruit," I was told.
The truth is that, though consuming sugar along with the fibres of fruit is better than without, these middle-class healthy drinks may be higher in sugar than the Ribena my mother was fooled into giving us children for our health. And that, too, had more sugar in it than Coke.
Sugar is sugar – a simple chemical, and it makes little difference whether it's crushed from an organic, hand-picked fruit or fracked in a factory out of corn and beet. And fructose is just another of the monosaccharides that make sugar, though it's the one with a friendly Latin-derived name. In fact fructose is the key to all sugar – it makes it taste sweet. Table sugar is half glucose, half fructose. The high-fructose syrups the drinks manufacturers use are probably – they won't say – made of 55% fructose: more sweetness for the sugar load.
Many scientists have marked fructose as the ring leader in the team of monosaccharides. Lustig, who likes to turn a phrase, calls it the Voldemort of sugars – and it is biggest in the sugar load of soft drinks.
A 240ml glass of orange juice might contain 120 calories of sugar, or sucrose; half of that will be fructose. The fructose will all end up in the liver, which may not be able to metabolise (process) it fully, depleting vital chemicals in the organ and turning into fat. "It's not about the calories," says Dr Lustig. "It has nothing to do with the calories. It's a poison by itself."
What is undeniable is that problems in the liver in turn contaminate and disable other systems, including the insulin production of the pancreas. The effects are felt ultimately in the heart, the immune system and by producing cancers. Insulin resistance may also be a player in dementia.
"Fructose can fry your liver and cause all the same diseases as alcohol," Dr Lustig continues. Key to the obesity debate is the charge that high insulin levels interfere with the hormone leptin, which is a signalling device that tells the brain when we've consumed enough. So you drink or eat fructose, and then you want more food. Sugary soft drinks deliver the fructose fastest to the organs that can't handle it. And, of course, they are largely consumed by those most vulnerable to diseases: the poor and the young. For children, every extra daily serving above the average increases the chances of obesity by 60% .




The drinks industry and its science do not agree. Gavin Partington, the energetic director general of the British Soft Drinks Association (BSDA), says: "A calorie is a calorie." Dealing with the fat crisis is about helping people to use up those calories through exercise.
Across America though, health authorities appear to be coming round to Lustig's view. Should we? I put that to Professor David Colquhoun of University College London, a specialist in toxicology and a scourge of cod science through his Improbable Science blog and gloriously cantankerous tweeting. Does he buy the anti-fructose lobby's theories? "Bugger all is known with certainty about the effects of diet on health. That's why so much is written about it. The whole problem is that it's all correlational stuff – there's no causality proven. Nevertheless the best current guess is that sugar is a much bigger problem than fat.  And it's addictive, which is why manufacturers do it (I'll happily eat a whole bag of jelly babies). That can't be good – so, yes, I'd say let's tax it."
Punitive taxation on sugary drinks – already in place in some European countries – will be a long while coming to Britain. The nutrition campaigners Sustain and 61 other charities and health organisations, including the Royal Society for Public Health, called on the chancellor to introduce a "sugary drinks duty" of 20p a litre in this year's budget. It would raise £1bn a year – some of which, they suggested, could usefully be spent on children's health and free school meals. George Osborne stayed quiet; health secretary Jeremy Hunt said he was sceptical. Far more influential than Professor Colquhoun, Lustig and any eminent academic is the food and beverage industry. And that is, of course, busy leaning on the government to avoid any further tampering with its right to flog sugary drinks as healthy.
The BSDA, to which manufacturers such as Britvic and AG Barr hand queries, has stopped insisting that there is no proven link between sugar, soft drinks and obesity – its position until a few years ago. (This stonewalling claim is still the position of Associated British Foods, supplier of half of the UK's sugar.) Now the defence centres on the "unfair cost" to shoppers of a tax, and the 9% fall in sales, over the past 10 years, in added-sugar drinks. "Sixty one per cent of soft drinks now contain no added sugar," they claim. But the BSDA's stats are dubious: for a start, they include 2bn litres of bottled mineral waters – 15% of all soft drinks. And, of course, the carton juices contain "no added sugar" – but as we've seen, many have as much sugar in them as Coke.
But there are extraordinary things going on in America, for which Lustig – and his 3.6m-hit YouTube film Sugar: The Bitter Truth – can take some credit. More than 30 state and city legislatures, from Hawaii to New York, have discussed or proposed curbs on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) ranging from bans in schools to cuts in portion sizes and a sales tax. New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has proposed removing SSBs from state food assistance programmes. He is currently fighting a legal battle to enforce a city-wide ban on "supersize" servings of sugary drinks. But petitions against the ban have gathered more than half a million signatures.
Back here in Leith the empty Irn-Bru, Fruit Shoot and Red Cola bottles glint in the grass around our local park. The local Italian ice-cream shop is selling Irn-Bru sorbet. You can get six litres of high-sugar drinks for just £2 down the road in Iceland. That's just 50p to put an adult into Lustig's fructose danger zone. What's wrong with water, asks Annie Anderson, professor of public health nutrition at Dundee University. "We need to promote water drinking: it's cool, refreshing, thirst-quenching and healthy!"
We've always taken a lot of sugar in Scotland. Our grandparents put sugar-ally sticks – liquorice and molasses – under the bed in a bowl of water overnight (next to the bedpan), to drink the pale brown brew first thing in the morning. The journalist Audrey Gillan, who grew up in a Glasgow housing scheme, remembers the visits of the "gingers" van, delivering bottles of limeade on credit, like the milkman. Workers in the Clyde shipyards were proud to be fuelled on "lemonade and a jilly piece": sugar, then and now, is cheap energy for the poor, and it still provides nearly 20% of Scottish calorie intake for adults and children. Though the percentage is dropping slightly, it's still nearly twice what it should be. According to the historian and nutritionist Maisie Steven, Scots kids eat four times the amount of sugar they did in 1942.
Up the road in Fife, farmer Mike Small has high hopes for the campaign for a Scottish tax on SSBs: he and his sustainable food campaign, the Fife Diet, will launch a new manifesto for it in September. "It's going to happen, because it's just so bloody obvious. There was a report just last month from Scottish doctors saying that type 2 diabetes has doubled. They're amputating limbs from people in their 20s."
Forms of SSB tax have already started in Denmark, France, Finland and Hungary. Scotland, Small says, is in the mood to follow. "There's an opportunity. The Scottish government is in the right frame of mind for doing stuff that's about regulatory control, rather than soft policies for behavioural change. Because those just don't work with tobacco, alcohol and sugary beverages. These are addictive substances." And the soft drinks industry's defence? "Propaganda to blanket their profiteering – profiteering that causes illness like diabetes. Unforgivable."
The Scottish government is – I'm told – considering a tax on sugary drinks. But first it has to conclude a battle over a minimum alcohol price (an idea of David Cameron's that he has already dropped). It's been held up in the courts for two years, the fight led by the Scotch Whisky Association – which, apart from its worries about jobs and profits, has a core belief that states should not be able to tax companies punitively on health grounds. And that is the heart of the matter.