Haitian Protests -- February 2019

Protests in cities throughout Haiti began on 7 February 2019, demanding the resignation of the president of Haiti, Jovenel Moïse. Led by opposition politician Jean-Charles Moïse, protesters state that their goal is to create a transitional government to provide social programs and to prosecute allegedly corrupt officials.

Events

Background

Protests began following reports from a court that high-level officials of the Haitian government had misused up to US$3.8 billion in loans from Venezuela's Petrocaribe and that President Moïse had been involved in corruption. Economic problems including the increased cost of living also fueled protests in the nation.

Protests

On the first day of demonstrations, protesters targeted the luxury vehicles of wealthy Haitians, damaging them. The following day on 8 February, mayors of some cities announced the cancellation of pre-Carnival events. Protests on 9 February resulted in more clashes with police, with demonstrators throwing stones at the home of President Moïse after security personnel of one of his allies struck a woman's car and began to beat her.

On 12 February, protesters burned down a popular market, looted various stores and assisted with a prison break in Aquin that freed all of the facility's prisoners. In Port-au-Prince, the building housing the consulates general of Italy and Peru was also looted by protesters. President Moïse addressed the country on 14 February, saying he would not step down, stating "I, Jovenel Moïse, head of state, will not give the country up to armed gangs and drug traffickers.”

Actions

Moise Government

President Moïse has called for his opposition to participate in peaceful dialogue stating "the country’s problems aren’t solely political. The country’s problems are social, economic and political". The national police has stated that there are "malicious individuals" who had interrupted peaceful protests in the country.

Opposition

The opposition has been led by Jean-Charles Moïse. Moïse's opposition has declined offers for dialogue and has demanded his resignation and has organized a nationwide general strike to force him to resign from office. Jean-Charles Moïse alongside opposition lawmakers have called for a transitional government to replace Moïse, with Jean Charles stating "If Jovenel Moïse does not want to step down from power, we are going to name an interim president in the coming days.”

Arrests

The Port-au-Prince newspaper Le Nouvelliste reported on February 18 that a Haitian citizen and seven non-Haitians were arrested in the city. At the time of their arrest, they were allegedly carrying rifles, pistols, drones and satellite phones in their vehicle. The Haitian Foreign Minister Bocchit Edmond confirmed that among them were five Americans. One among them was reportedly from Serbia, according to other local media sources.

Media

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, some reporters have been targeted by protesters. One Reuters journalist, Robenson Sanon, was wounded during the protests, but believes that it was coincidental because he was caught in-between clashes.

Response

United States Government

The United States Department of State spokesperson for Western Hemisphere Affairs stated that "We support the right of all people to demand a democratic and transparent government and to hold their government leaders accountable, ... but there is no excuse for violence. Violence leads to instability, less investment, and fewer jobs". The United States has prepared humanitarian assistance to ensure food security in Haiti and called for those responsible for corruption to be held accountable.

Intergovernmental Organizations

CARICOM:  The body stated that it "is deeply concerned about the continuing violent protests in Haiti, which have resulted in the loss of life, property, destruction of infrastructure and caused grave distress" and "calls for calm and a cessation of the violence, appealing to all involved to engage in constructive dialogue and to respect the constitution, the rule of law and democratic processes so that issues can be resolved in a peaceful atmosphere and allow for the return to a state of normalcy.

ORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN STATES:  Secretary General Luis Almagro stated "We call upon all actors to fully participate in the dialogue process, to respect the democratic process, and to resort to peaceful ways to solve conflicts.”

UNITED NATIONS:  The United Nations Mission for Justice Support in Haiti in a statement said the group "deplores the loss of life and property damage caused by the unacceptable acts of violence that took place on the margins of the rallies, while acknowledging the professionalism demonstrated by the Haitian National Police as a whole" and called "on the Haitian society actors, and primarily the country's leaders, to engage in a constructive and inclusive dialogue in order to identify and implement realistic and lasting solutions to the political and economic crisis currently occurring in Haiti.”

                            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Haitian_protests

Pollster Patrick Caddell Dies

Patrick Hayward Caddell (May 19, 1950 – February 16, 2019) was an American public opinion pollster and a political film consultant who served in the Carter administration and in other presidential campaigns.

                                                            Patrick Caddell in 2014

 Life and Career

Caddell was born in Rock Hill, South Carolina and graduated from Harvard University. He worked for Democratic presidential candidates George McGovern in 1972, Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980, Gary Hart in 1984, Joe Biden in 1988, and Jerry Brown in 1992. He also worked for Colorado Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff in 2010. Caddell persuaded Carter to focus in 1976 on the "trust factor", rather than divisive political issues in the 1976 campaign, a strategy which led, narrowly, to victory. The Arkansas political scientist and pollster Jim Ranchino declared the then 26-year-old Caddell "the best pollster in the business." According to researchers, Caddell had wide influence in the Carter White House, and was the chief advocate of what later became known as Carter's "malaise speech".

Caddell served as a consultant to various movies and television shows, most notably the movies Running Mates, Air Force One, Outbreak, In the Line of Fire, and the serial drama The West Wing. He was also a marketing consultant on Coca-Cola's disastrous New Coke campaign.

In 1988, Caddell left Democratic consulting firm Caddell, Doak and Shrum after what the Washington Post described as an "acrimonious lawsuit." Republicans would often cite Caddell's tirades against the Democratic Party when they spoke on the floor of the House and the Senate.

Caddell's analysis on polls and campaign issues often put him at odds with the leadership of the Democratic Party. He was criticized by Media Matters for America and Salon columnist Steve Kornacki for predicting negative consequences for the Democratic Party. He called environmentalism "a conspiracy 'to basically deconstruct capitalism.'"

Caddell was a regular guest on the Fox News Channel, and at the time of his death was listed as an official "Fox News Contributor". This earned him the label of a "Fox News Democrat" by critics such as liberal opinion magazine Salon.com. He also frequently appeared on the conservative website Ricochet.com, discussing politics.

According to Slate, Caddell was involved in identifying people willing to participate in the 2012 anti-Obama documentary The Hope and the Change, produced by Citizens United.

In the 2016 election cycle, Caddell exerted considerable influence in his capacity as advisor to Republican contributor Robert Mercer, who was a major fundraiser for the successful candidacy of Donald Trump.

Campaign Style

According to a 1987 profile in the Washington Monthly:

"Caddell believes the key to winning contemporary elections is appealing to 'alienated' voters—that ever-growing group of mostly younger voters who are not easily identified as liberal or conservative and don't trust government, politicians, or the parties. You can't lure these voters with programs and stands on specific issues, so the theory goes. Rather, you must remain as uncommitted as they are. You lure them by attacking that which caused their alienation: the Establishment. Even if he were inclined to help his candidate address the nation's substantive problems and articulate a coherent package of solutions, he'd have trouble.”

Death

Caddell died February 16, 2019, at age 68 in Charleston, South Carolina. He died after suffering a stroke.

                                    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Caddell

China Seeks AI World Leadership

Craig S. Smith of the New York Times has a fascinating article in Quillette this week.  The piece deals with the race China is making toward world leadership in artificial intelligence (AI), including development of massive data and intelligence about its own citizenry.  See https://quillette.com/2019/02/14/understanding-chinas-confucian-edge-in-the-global-ai-race/

New Approach to Alzheimer's

’Lack of Cleaning’ in Brain Cells Is Central to Alzheimer’s Disease

University of Copenhagen – February 14, 2019 -- An international research team with representation from the University of Copenhagen has created a better understanding of Alzheimer's. They have shown that the cleaning system of the brain cells, the so-called mitophagy, is very weakened in animals and humans with Alzheimer's. And when they improve the cleaning system in the animals, the Alzheimer's symptoms almost disappear.

Scientists around the world are still struggling to understand Alzheimer's better in order to be able to treat and potentially prevent the development of the debilitating disease in the future. No new medications have been approved during recent years.

In a new study in the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience, an international team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen, National Institutes of Health and the University of Oslo among others have come closer to a new way of attacking the disease. They target the efforts towards the cleaning process in the brain cells called mitophagy.

‘When the cleaning system does not work properly, there will be an accumulation of defective mitochondria in the brain cells. And this may be really dangerous. At any rate, the poor cleaning system is markedly present in cells from both humans and animals with Alzheimer's. And when we improve the cleaning in live animals, their Alzheimer's symptoms almost disappear,’ says Vilhelm Bohr, author of the study and affiliate professor at the Center for Healthy Aging and National Institutes of Health.

Defect Energy Factories
The researchers have looked more closely at the cleaning process in brain cells from deceased Alzheimer's patients, in Alzheimer's-induced stem cells and in live mice and roundworms with Alzheimer's. In addition, they have also tested active substances targeted at the cleaning process in the animal models.

‘It significantly strengthens our results that the cleaning process seems to be important in both human cells and across different animal species. And then it is encouraging that in living animals we are able to improve the central Alzheimer's symptoms, memory and learning,’ says Vilhelm Bohr.

The mitochondria lie inside the cell and can be seen as the cell's energy factories. Mitophagy breaks down defective mitochondria and reuses the proteins that they consist of. It is known from previous research that dysfunctional mitophagy is associated with poor function and survival of nerve cells, but so far, the connection with Alzheimer's is unclear.

Slowing Down the Accumulation
In both Alzheimer's and other states of dementia, there is an accumulation of the proteins tau and beta amyloid in the brain, leading to cell death. In the new animal models, the researchers show that when boosting the mitophagy, such accumulation will slow down.

The researchers believe that altogether their findings indicate that the cleaning process is a potential target for the treatment of Alzheimer's, which should be further investigated. They therefore plan to start clinical trials in humans in the near future.

https://healthsciences.ku.dk/newsfaculty-news/2019/02/lack-of-cleaning-in-brain-cells-is-central-to-alzheimers-disease/

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Mitophagy is the selective degradation of mitochondria by autophagy. It often occurs to defective mitochondria following damage or stress. The process of mitophagy was first described over a hundred years ago by Lewis and Lewis. Ashford and Porter used electron microscopy to observe mitochondrial fragments in liver lysosomes by 1962, and a 1977 report suggested that "mitochondria develop functional alterations which would activate autophagy." The term "mitophagy" was in use by 1998.

Mitophagy is key in keeping the cell healthy. It promotes turnover of mitochondria and prevents accumulation of dysfunctional mitochondria which can lead to cellular degeneration. It is mediated by Atg32 (in yeast) and NIX and its regulator BNIP3 in mammals. Mitophagy is regulated by PINK1 and parkin proteins. In addition to the selective removal of damaged mitochondria, mitophagy is also required to adjust mitochondrial numbers to changing cellular metabolic needs, for steady-state mitochondrial turnover, and during certain cellular developmental stages, such as during cellular differentiation of red blood cells

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitophagy

Deadpan Author Nathanael West

Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein; October 17, 1903 – December 22, 1940) was an American author and screenwriter. He is remembered for two darkly satirical novels: Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939), set repectively in the newspaper and Hollywood film industries.

Early Life

Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City, the first child of Ashkenazi Jewish parents, Anuta (Anna, née Wallenstein, 1878–1935) and Max (Morduch) Weinstein (1878–1932), from Kovno, Russia (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), who maintained an upper middle class household in a Jewish neighborhood on the Upper West Side. West displayed little ambition in academics, dropping out of high school and only gaining admission into Tufts College by forging his high school transcript.

After being expelled from Tufts, West got into Brown University by appropriating the transcript of a fellow Tufts student, his cousin, Nathan Weinstein. Although West did little schoolwork at Brown, he read extensively. He ignored the realist fiction of his American contemporaries in favor of French surrealists and British and Irish poets of the 1890s, in particular Oscar Wilde. West's interests focused on unusual literary style as well as unusual content. He became interested in Christianity and mysticism, as experienced or expressed through literature and art.

West's classmates at Brown nicknamed him "Pep" after a school trip where after only a few minutes of walking he quickly ran out of breath. West himself acknowledged and made fun of his lack of physical prowess in recounting the story of a baseball game where he cost his team the game. Wells Root, a close friend of West, remembers hearing this tale half a dozen times, recalling that everyone had placed bets on the game, which came down to the final inning with the score tied and the enemy at bat with two outs. At that point the batter hit a long fly towards West;

He put his hands up to catch it and for some inexplicable reason didn't hold them close together. The ball tore through, hit him in the forehead, and bounced into some brush. There was a roar from the crowd and [West] took one look and turned tail. To a man, the crowd had risen, gathered bats, sticks, stones, and anything they could lay hands on and were in hot pursuit. He vanished into some woods and didn't emerge until nightfall. In telling the story he was convinced that if they had caught him they would have killed him.

It is unclear whether this ever actually happened, but West later re-imagined this in his short story "Western Union Boy". As Jewish students were not allowed to join most fraternities, his main friend was his future brother-in-law S. J. Perelman. (Perelman married West's sister Laura.) West barely finished at Brown with a degree. He then went to Paris for three months, and it was at this point that he changed his name to Nathanael West. His family, who had supported him thus far, ran into financial difficulties in the late 1920s. West returned home and worked sporadically in construction for his father, eventually finding a job as the night manager of the Hotel Kenmore Hall on East 23rd Street in Manhattan. One of West's real-life experiences at the hotel inspired the incident between Romola Martin and Homer Simpson that would later appear in The Day of the Locust (1939).

West as an Author

Although West had been working on his writing since college, it was not until his quiet night job at the hotel that he found the time to put his novel together. It was then that West wrote what would eventually become Miss Lonelyhearts (1933). Maxim Lieber served as his literary agent in 1933. In 1931, however, two years before he completed Miss Lonelyhearts, West published The Dream Life of Balso Snell, a novel that he had conceived of in college. By then, West was within a group of writers working in and around New York City that included William Carlos Williams and Dashiell Hammett.

In 1933, West bought a farm in eastern Pennsylvania but soon got a job as a contract scriptwriter for Columbia Pictures and moved to Hollywood. He published a third novel, A Cool Million, in 1934. None of West's three works sold well, however, so he spent the mid-1930s in financial difficulty, sporadically collaborating on screenplays. Many of the films he worked on were B movies, such as Five Came Back (1939). It was at this time that West wrote The Day of the Locust. He took many of the settings and minor characters of his novel directly from his experience living in a hotel on Hollywood Boulevard.

In November 1939, West was hired as a screenwriter by RKO Radio Pictures, where he collaborated with Boris Ingster on a film adaptation of the novel Before the Fact (1932) by Francis Iles. West and Ingster wrote the screenplay in seven weeks, with West focusing on characterization and dialogue and Ingster focusing on the narrative structure.

RKO assigned the film, eventually released as Suspicion (1941), to Alfred Hitchcock; but Hitchcock already had his own, substantially different, screenplay. Hitchcock's screenplay was written by Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison (Hitchcock's secretary), and Alma Reville (Hitchcock's wife). West and Ingster's screenplay was abandoned, but the text can be found in the Library of America's edition of West's collected works.

Death

On December 22, 1940, West and his wife Eileen McKenney were returning to Los Angeles from a hunting trip in Mexico. West ran a stop sign in El Centro, California, resulting in a collision in which he and McKenney were killed. (Their deaths occurred the day after that of their friend F. Scott Fitzgerald.) McKenney had been the inspiration for the title character in the Broadway play My Sister Eileen, and she and West had been scheduled to fly to New York City for the Broadway opening on December 26.

West was buried in Mount Zion Cemetery in Queens, New York, with his wife's ashes placed in his coffin.

His Work

Although West was not widely known during his life, his reputation grew after his death, especially with the publication of his collected novels by New Directions in 1957. Miss Lonelyhearts is widely regarded as West's masterpiece. Day of the Locust was made into a film which came out in 1975, starring Donald Sutherland and Karen Black. Likewise Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) saw production in film (1933, 1958, 1983), stage (1957), and operatic (2006) versions; and the character "Miss Lonelyhearts" in Hitchcock's film Rear Window has parallels to West's work.

The obscene, garish landscapes of The Day of the Locust gained force in light of the fact that the remainder of the country was living in drab poverty at the time. Though West attended socialist rallies in New York City's Union Square, his novels have no affinity to the novels of his contemporary activist writers such as John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos. West's writing style does not allow the portrayal of positive political causes, as he admitted in a letter to Malcolm Cowley regarding The Day of the Locust: "I tried to describe a meeting of the anti-Nazi league, but it didn't fit and I had to substitute a whorehouse and a dirty film".

West saw the American dream as having been betrayed, both spiritually and materially, and in his writing he presented "a sweeping rejection of political causes, religious faith, artistic redemption and romantic love". This idea of the corrupt American dream endured long after his death, in the form of the term "West's disease", coined by the poet W. H. Auden to refer to poverty that exists in both a spiritual and economic sense. Jay Martin wrote an extensive biography of West in 1970. Another biography, Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney, by Marion Meade was published in 2010.

Published Works

Novels

• The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931)
• Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)
• A Cool Million (1934)
• The Day of the Locust (1939)

Plays

• Even Stephen (1934, with S. J. Perelman)
• Good Hunting (1938, with Joseph Schrank)

Short Stories

• "Western Union Boy"
• "The Imposter"

Posthumous collections

Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. Nathanael West, Novels and Other Writings

Screenplays

• Ticket to Paradise (1936)
• Follow Your Heart (1936)
• The President's Mystery (1936)
• Rhythm in the Clouds (1937)
• It Could Happen to You (1937)
• Born to Be Wild (1938)
• Five Came Back (1939)
• I Stole a Million (1939)
• Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)
• The Spirit of Culver (1940)
• Men Against the Sky (1940)
• Let's Make Music (1940)
• Before the Fact (1940) (unproduced)

                                https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathanael_West

Overview of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

In the field of computer science, artificial intelligence (AI), sometimes called machine intelligence, is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans and other animals. Computer science defines AI research as the study of "intelligent agents": any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals. More specifically, Kaplan and Haenlein define AI as “a system’s ability to correctly interpret external data, to learn from such data, and to use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation”. Colloquially, the term "artificial intelligence" is applied when a machine mimics "cognitive" functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as "learning" and "problem solving".

The scope of AI is disputed: as machines become increasingly capable, tasks considered as requiring "intelligence" are often removed from the definition, a phenomenon known as the AI effect, leading to the quip in Tesler's Theorem, "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." For instance, optical character recognition is frequently excluded from "artificial intelligence", having become a routine technology. Modern machine capabilities generally classified as AI include successfully understanding human speech, competing at the highest level in strategic game systems (such as chess and Go), autonomously operating cars, and intelligent routing in content delivery networks and military simulations.

Borrowing from the management literature, Kaplan and Haenlein classify artificial intelligence into three different types of AI systems: analytical, human-inspired, and humanized artificial intelligence. Analytical AI has only characteristics consistent with cognitive intelligence generating cognitive representation of the world and using learning based on past experience to inform future decisions. Human-inspired AI has elements from cognitive as well as emotional intelligence, understanding, in addition to cognitive elements, human emotions and considering them in their decision making. Humanized AI shows characteristics of all types of competencies (i.e., cognitive, emotional, and social intelligence), able to be self-conscious and self-aware in interactions with others.

Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956, and in the years since has experienced several waves of optimism, followed by disappointment and the loss of funding (known as an "AI winter"), followed by new approaches, success and renewed funding. For most of its history, AI research has been divided into subfields that often fail to communicate with each other. These sub-fields are based on technical considerations, such as particular goals (e.g. "robotics" or "machine learning"), the use of particular tools ("logic" or artificial neural networks), or deep philosophical differences. Subfields have also been based on social factors (particular institutions or the work of particular researchers).

The traditional problems (or goals) of AI research include reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, learning, natural language processing, perception and the ability to move and manipulate objects. General intelligence is among the field's long-term goals. Approaches include statistical methods, computational intelligence, and traditional symbolic AI. Many tools are used in AI, including versions of search and mathematical optimization, artificial neural networks, and methods based on statistics, probability and economics. The AI field draws upon computer science, information engineering, mathematics, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and many other fields.

The field was founded on the claim that human intelligence "can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it". This raises philosophical arguments about the nature of the mind and the ethics of creating artificial beings endowed with human-like intelligence which are issues that have been explored by myth, fiction and philosophy since antiquity. Some people also consider AI to be a danger to humanity if it progresses unabated. Others believe that AI, unlike previous technological revolutions, will create a risk of mass unemployment.

In the twenty-first century, AI techniques have experienced a resurgence following concurrent advances in computer power, large amounts of data, and theoretical understanding; and AI techniques have become an essential part of the technology industry, helping to solve many challenging problems in computer science, software engineering and operations research.

Basics

A typical AI perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals. An AI's intended goal function can be simple ("1 if the AI wins a game of Go, 0 otherwise") or complex ("Do actions mathematically similar to the actions that got you rewards in the past"). Goals can be explicitly defined, or can be induced. If the AI is programmed for "reinforcement learning", goals can be implicitly induced by rewarding some types of behavior and punishing others. Alternatively, an evolutionary system can induce goals by using a "fitness function" to mutate and preferentially replicate high-scoring AI systems; this is similar to how animals evolved to innately desire certain goals such as finding food, or how dogs can be bred via artificial selection to possess desired traits. Some AI systems, such as nearest-neighbor, instead reason by analogy; these systems are not generally given goals, except to the degree that goals are somehow implicit in their training data. Such systems can still be benchmarked if the non-goal system is framed as a system whose "goal" is to successfully accomplish its narrow classification task.

AI often revolves around the use of algorithms. An algorithm is a set of unambiguous instructions that a mechanical computer can execute. A complex algorithm is often built on top of other, simpler, algorithms. A simple example of an algorithm is the following (optimal for first player) recipe for play at tic-tac-toe:

1. If someone has a "threat" (that is, two in a row), take the remaining square. Otherwise,
2. if a move "forks" to create two threats at once, play that move. Otherwise,
3. take the center square if it is free. Otherwise,
4. if your opponent has played in a corner, take the opposite corner. Otherwise,
5. take an empty corner if one exists. Otherwise,
6. take any empty square.

Many AI algorithms are capable of learning from data; they can enhance themselves by learning new heuristics (strategies, or "rules of thumb", that have worked well in the past), or can themselves write other algorithms. Some of the "learners" described below, including Bayesian networks, decision trees, and nearest-neighbor, could theoretically, if given infinite data, time, and memory, learn to approximate any function, including whatever combination of mathematical functions would best describe the entire world. These learners could therefore, in theory, derive all possible knowledge, by considering every possible hypothesis and matching it against the data. In practice, it is almost never possible to consider every possibility, because of the phenomenon of "combinatorial explosion", where the amount of time needed to solve a problem grows exponentially. Much of AI research involves figuring out how to identify and avoid considering broad swaths of possibilities that are unlikely to be fruitful. For example, when viewing a map and looking for the shortest driving route from Denver to New York in the East, one can in most cases skip looking at any path through San Francisco or other areas far to the West; thus, an AI wielding a pathfinding algorithm like A* can avoid the combinatorial explosion that would ensue if every possible route had to be ponderously considered in turn.

The earliest (and easiest to understand) approach to AI was symbolism (such as formal logic): "If an otherwise healthy adult has a fever, then they may have influenza". A second, more general, approach is Bayesian inference: "If the current patient has a fever, adjust the probability they have influenza in such-and-such way". The third major approach, extremely popular in routine business AI applications, are analogizers such as SVM and nearest-neighbor: "After examining the records of known past patients whose temperature, symptoms, age, and other factors mostly match the current patient, X% of those patients turned out to have influenza". A fourth approach is harder to intuitively understand, but is inspired by how the brain's machinery works: the artificial neural network approach uses artificial "neurons" that can learn by comparing itself to the desired output and altering the strengths of the connections between its internal neurons to "reinforce" connections that seemed to be useful. These four main approaches can overlap with each other and with evolutionary systems; for example, neural nets can learn to make inferences, to generalize, and to make analogies. Some systems implicitly or explicitly use multiple of these approaches, alongside many other AI and non-AI algorithms; the best approach is often different depending on the problem

Learning algorithms work on the basis that strategies, algorithms, and inferences that worked well in the past are likely to continue working well in the future. These inferences can be obvious, such as "since the sun rose every morning for the last 10,000 days, it will probably rise tomorrow morning as well". They can be nuanced, such as "X% of families have geographically separate species with color variants, so there is an Y% chance that undiscovered black swans exist". Learners also work on the basis of "Occam's razor": The simplest theory that explains the data is the likeliest. Therefore, to be successful, a learner must be designed such that it prefers simpler theories to complex theories, except in cases where the complex theory is proven substantially better. Settling on a bad, overly complex theory gerrymandered to fit all the past training data is known as overfitting. Many systems attempt to reduce overfitting by rewarding a theory in accordance with how well it fits the data, but penalizing the theory in accordance with how complex the theory is. Besides classic overfitting, learners can also disappoint by "learning the wrong lesson". A toy example is that an image classifier trained only on pictures of brown horses and black cats might conclude that all brown patches are likely to be horses. A real-world example is that, unlike humans, current image classifiers don't determine the spatial relationship between components of the picture; instead, they learn abstract patterns of pixels that humans are oblivious to, but that linearly correlate with images of certain types of real objects. Faintly superimposing such a pattern on a legitimate image results in an "adversarial" image that the system misclassifies.

Compared with humans, existing AI lacks several features of human "commonsense reasoning"; most notably, humans have powerful mechanisms for reasoning about "naïve physics" such as space, time, and physical interactions. This enables even young children to easily make inferences like "If I roll this pen off a table, it will fall on the floor". Humans also have a powerful mechanism of "folk psychology" that helps them to interpret natural-language sentences such as "The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they advocated violence". (A generic AI has difficulty inferring whether the councilmen or the demonstrators are the ones alleged to be advocating violence.) This lack of "common knowledge" means that AI often makes different mistakes than humans make, in ways that can seem incomprehensible. For example, existing self-driving cars cannot reason about the location nor the intentions of pedestrians in the exact way that humans do, and instead must use non-human modes of reasoning to avoid accidents.

                              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

Free Solo Film (2018)

Introduction by the Blog Author

There is a difference between courage and valor.  Courage consists of being frightened but doing the dangerous work necessary in spite of personal fear.  Valor consists of understanding and agreeing with the importance of the mission, and therefore becoming fearless in execution of the necessary steps.  As Randy “Duke” Cunningham, an ace Navy fighter pilot in the Vietnam war, said live on camera later (while he was a TopGun instructor), “You can’t afford the luxury of fear.”

There is a rock climber named Alex Honnold who specializes in free solo climbing.  This is climbing without ropes or pinions or normal gear but merely using the hands and feet to scale the obstacle.  National Geographic made a documentary about this specialty, emphasizing Honnold’s skills.

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Free Solo is a 2018 American documentary film directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. The film profiles rock climber Alex Honnold, on his quest to perform a free solo climb of El Capitan in June 2017. The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on August 31, 2018 and also screened at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the People's Choice Award: Documentaries. It was released in the United States on September 28, 2018, received positive reviews from critics and has grossed over $18 million. The film received numerous accolades, including being nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 91st Academy Awards.

Production

In the film, the director Jimmy Chin and his crew struggled on camera with how to film and not affect Honnold’s climb. According to Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, the key to solving this problem was in the extended preparation.

One of the hardest problems was getting sound from Honnold, who often was too far from the camera to use wireless mics. Meanwhile, the wiring of the mic couldn’t interfere with his climbing, and any recorder on his body would need to withstand the rigors of climbing. To solve the problem, they turned to production sound recordist Jim Hurst, who was a climber himself. He utilized a recorder that could transmit a signal to the camera, but also record to itself when the camera was out of range.

The film was made by National Geographic.

Critical Response

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 98% based on 108 reviews, with an average rating of 8.3/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Free Solo depicts athletic feats that many viewers will find beyond reason - and grounds the attempts in passions that are all but universal." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 83 out of 100, based on 25 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

Writing for Variety, Peter Debrudge said, "Apart from a slow stretch around the hour mark, the filmmakers keep things lively (with a big assist from Marco Beltrami's pulse-quickening score, the nail-biting opposite of Tim McGraw's soaring end-credits single, "Gravity"), featuring test runs at Zion National Park's Moonlight Buttress and the nearly sheer limestone cliffs in Taghia, Morocco." Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair called the film "bracingly made" and wrote, "I left the theater invigorated and rattled, in awe of this charismatic man's accomplishment but scared that it will inspire others to attempt the same...But maybe Free Solo's detailed, transfixing portrait of their hero will at least show some sort of barrier to entry, communicating to those eager wannabes that very few people indeed are built quite like Alex Honnold. And thank goodness, in a way, for that.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Solo