Music: Milton Nascimento — ‘Fairy Tale Song (Cade)’
A universal logic of discernment
Natalie Wolchover writes: When in 2012 a computer learned to recognize cats in YouTube videos and just last month another correctly captioned a photo of “a group of young people playing a game of Frisbee,” artificial intelligence researchers hailed yet more triumphs in “deep learning,” the wildly successful set of algorithms loosely modeled on the way brains grow sensitive to features of the real world simply through exposure.
Using the latest deep-learning protocols, computer models consisting of networks of artificial neurons are becoming increasingly adept at image, speech and pattern recognition — core technologies in robotic personal assistants, complex data analysis and self-driving cars. But for all their progress training computers to pick out salient features from other, irrelevant bits of data, researchers have never fully understood why the algorithms or biological learning work.
Now, two physicists have shown that one form of deep learning works exactly like one of the most important and ubiquitous mathematical techniques in physics, a procedure for calculating the large-scale behavior of physical systems such as elementary particles, fluids and the cosmos.
The new work, completed by Pankaj Mehta of Boston University and David Schwab of Northwestern University, demonstrates that a statistical technique called “renormalization,” which allows physicists to accurately describe systems without knowing the exact state of all their component parts, also enables the artificial neural networks to categorize data as, say, “a cat” regardless of its color, size or posture in a given video.
“They actually wrote down on paper, with exact proofs, something that people only dreamed existed,” said Ilya Nemenman, a biophysicist at Emory University. “Extracting relevant features in the context of statistical physics and extracting relevant features in the context of deep learning are not just similar words, they are one and the same.”
As for our own remarkable knack for spotting a cat in the bushes, a familiar face in a crowd or indeed any object amid the swirl of color, texture and sound that surrounds us, strong similarities between deep learning and biological learning suggest that the brain may also employ a form of renormalization to make sense of the world. [Continue reading…]
Cybersecurity unit drives Israeli Internet economy
Jeff Moskowitz reports: Over the summer, in the middle of a two-month-long Israeli-Palestinian war, representatives of some of the biggest names in tech crammed into the stairwell of a Tel Aviv skyscraper to wait out Hamas rocket fire. Wearing Sequoia Capital name tags and TechCrunch T-shirts, they squeezed against one another, passing the time by talking about the Paris startup scene and the success rate of Iron Dome, Israel’s missile defense system.
They came to Tel Aviv for the demo day of a uniquely Israeli brand of startup incubator: one conducted by graduates of Israel Defense Forces Unit 8200 – the Israeli NSA. It was a fitting reminder of the close ties between Israel’s Silicon Wadi (the nickname for Israel’s startup ecosystem) and the country’s military establishment.
The 8200 is the largest unit in the Israeli army. It’s responsible for signals intelligence, eavesdropping and wiretapping, as well as advanced technical jobs and translating work. It is also widely acknowledged as producing a disproportionately high percentage of Israel’s tech executives and startup founders, including the brains behind Check Point Software Technologies, NICE Systems, and Mirabilis (creator of the proto-instant messaging system ICQ) – three of the biggest Israeli tech companies. [Continue reading…]
Internet freedom declines in the U.S.
US News & World Report: The U.S. government created the Internet but has fallen behind as a steward of online freedom and privacy, according to an annual study that tracks international digital rights.
Government surveillance of phone and Internet data, government pressure against journalists and lack of protections for privacy have eroded America’s standing on digital rights in recent years, according to an annual study from Freedom House advocacy group.
The U.S. dropped to sixth place out of the 65 countries assessed by Freedom House, down from fourth place in 2013 and second place in 2012.
At the gates of power: How Marine Le Pen is unnerving the French establishment
Charles Bremner writes: On a rainy November morning, dockers from Calais are firing flares in protest against port job losses outside the regional council in Lille, the capital of France’s old industrial north. Inside the plush chamber, a tall, solidly built blonde woman in jeans and boots crooks a leg over her knee and flicks through a news magazine. Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National, which has 18 council seats, has dropped in from a day at the European Parliament in nearby Brussels, where the party has 23 MEPs. Le Pen looks bored as the councillors drone on about allocating €1.1bn of EU money to help revive the bleak economy of Nord-Pas-de-Calais.
When her moment comes, she launches into a riff on the evils of the Union. EU funds just reinforce the dictatorship of Brussels and impoverish the downtrodden rural and small-town folk of the region, she says. “I have to remind people ad nauseam that this is not European money. It’s part of French taxpayers’ money that transits through Brussels with the rest going to pay for central and eastern Europe.” With that, the terror of the French political establishment picks up her papers, closes her beige wool jacket and slips out to a car for the drive back to Paris, missing the council’s splendid lunch. So it goes for Le Pen as she tills the fertile electoral soil of the north as the prelude to a run at the Élysée Palace in two years’ time.
France has been frightening itself with visions of a President Le Pen since 2002 when Jean-Marie, Marine’s father and the founder of the far-right Front, landed in the run-off for the presidency. He was roundly defeated by Jacques Chirac when voters rallied in a “republican front” to block the leader of a pariah party. Now, with his pugnacious daughter in charge of the family firm, the prospects of an anti-Front reflex are dimmer and Marine’s prospects look bright. [Continue reading…]
Senior police chief in UK warns of ‘drift towards a police state’
The Guardian reports: The battle against extremism could lead to a “drift towards a police state” in which officers are turned into “thought police”, one of Britain’s most senior chief constables has warned.
Sir Peter Fahy, chief constable of Greater Manchester, said police were being left to decide what is acceptable free speech as the efforts against radicalisation and a severe threat of terrorist attack intensify.
It is politicians, academics and others in civil society who have to define what counts as extremist ideas, he says.
Fahy serves as chief constable of Greater Manchester police and also has national counter-terrorism roles. He is vice-chair of the police’s terrorism committee and national lead on Prevent, the counter radicalisation strategy. [Continue reading…]
UK lawmakers: Spy law needs stronger scrutiny
The Associated Press reports: British lawmakers say police have been misusing surveillance laws to access journalists’ communications records.
Parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee says it is unacceptable that police have seized reporters’ phone and email data to try to determine sources of leaked information.
Committee chairman Keith Vaz said that using existing legislation “to access telephone records of journalists is wrong” and would deter whistleblowers from speaking to reporters.
Obama administration again tries to block release of CIA torture report
The New York Times reports: The Senate Intelligence Committee on Friday faced a new obstacle in its efforts to make public its report on the torture of prisoners once held by the Central Intelligence Agency after last-minute warnings from the Obama administration that the report’s release could ignite new unrest in the Middle East and put American hostages at risk.
The warnings were delivered on Friday during a phone call between Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who leads the committee. According to congressional officials, Mr. Kerry warned that allies were concerned that the report could incite violence in the Middle East.
Ms. Feinstein had planned to make the report public next week, but it is uncertain whether the call from Mr. Kerry would affect that timetable.
The exchange between Mr. Kerry and Ms. Feinstein is just the latest turn in the protracted dispute over the Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the detention and interrogation of C.I.A. prisoners during the Bush administration, an investigation that set out to examine the efficacy of the brutal interrogation methods. [Continue reading…]
Luke Somers, American hostage, killed during rescue attempt in Yemen
The New York Times reports: United States commandos stormed a village in southern Yemen early Saturday in an effort to free an American photojournalist held hostage by Al Qaeda, but the raid ended badly with the kidnappers killing the American and a South African teacher held with him, United States officials said.
President Obama, in a statement, said the hostages had been “murdered” by militants belonging to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula during the rescue operation, which he had approved just Friday.
A senior United States official said that the American, Luke Somers, 33, was badly wounded when commandos reached him. By the time Mr. Somers was flown to a United States naval ship in the region, he had died from his injuries, the official said Saturday.
The other hostage was identified as Pierre Korkie, a South African teacher, who had been expected to be freed on Sunday, according to a statement posted on the website of Gift of the Givers, a disaster relief organization that had been negotiating his release. [Continue reading…]
Luke Somers was a contributor to Al Jazeera which has posted a slideshow of his work.
Jabhat al-Nusra gains in Syria undermine U.S. strategy
The Washington Post reports: The main al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria is extending its control over a swath of territory that was until recently held by the collapsing moderate opposition, jeopardizing U.S. plans to form a new rebel force to fight extremists.
Since routing two of the biggest Western-backed rebel movements last month from the province of Idlib, Jabhat al-Nusra has been steadily consolidating its position as the single most powerful military force in northwestern Syria.
The group has overrun towns and villages throughout the province, secured supply routes into neighboring Turkey and potentially paved the way for the establishment of an Islamic “emirate” — a competing entity to the “caliphate” declared last summer by the Islamic State in northeastern Syria and western Iraq.
The al-Qaeda affiliate’s expanding footprint risks further complicating the U.S.-led effort to contain and destroy the far more powerful Islamic State, a fierce rival to Jabhat al-Nusra that ejected the al-Qaeda loyalists from its territories last summer. [Continue reading…]
Music: Milton Nascimento — ‘Raça’
China overtakes the United States as the world’s largest economy
Joseph E. Stiglitz writes: When the history of 2014 is written, it will take note of a large fact that has received little attention: 2014 was the last year in which the United States could claim to be the world’s largest economic power. China enters 2015 in the top position, where it will likely remain for a very long time, if not forever. In doing so, it returns to the position it held through most of human history.
Comparing the gross domestic product of different economies is very difficult. Technical committees come up with estimates, based on the best judgments possible, of what are called “purchasing-power parities,” which enable the comparison of incomes in various countries. These shouldn’t be taken as precise numbers, but they do provide a good basis for assessing the relative size of different economies. Early in 2014, the body that conducts these international assessments — the World Bank’s International Comparison Program — came out with new numbers. (The complexity of the task is such that there have been only three reports in 20 years.) The latest assessment, released last spring, was more contentious and, in some ways, more momentous than those in previous years. It was more contentious precisely because it was more momentous: the new numbers showed that China would become the world’s largest economy far sooner than anyone had expected — it was on track to do so before the end of 2014.
The source of contention would surprise many Americans, and it says a lot about the differences between China and the U.S. — and about the dangers of projecting onto the Chinese some of our own attitudes. Americans want very much to be No. 1—we enjoy having that status. In contrast, China is not so eager. According to some reports, the Chinese participants even threatened to walk out of the technical discussions. For one thing, China did not want to stick its head above the parapet — being No. 1 comes with a cost. It means paying more to support international bodies such as the United Nations. It could bring pressure to take an enlightened leadership role on issues such as climate change. It might very well prompt ordinary Chinese to wonder if more of the country’s wealth should be spent on them. (The news about China’s change in status was in fact blacked out at home.) There was one more concern, and it was a big one: China understands full well America’s psychological preoccupation with being No. 1 — and was deeply worried about what our reaction would be when we no longer were. [Continue reading…]
UN: climate change costs to poor countries will be much higher than previously estimated
The Associated Press reports: The cost to poor countries of adjusting to ever-hotter temperatures will be twice or even three times higher than previously thought, the U.N.’s environment agency said Friday—and that assumes a best-case scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions are dramatically reduced.
“If you don’t cut emissions, we’re just going to have to ask for more money because the damage is going to be worse,” Ronald Jumeau of the Seychelles said at U.N. climate talks.
The report was bound to sharpen disputes in Lima over who pays the bills for the impacts of global warming, whose primary cause is the burning of coal, oil and gas but which also includes deforestation. It has long been the thorniest issue at the U.N. negotiations, now in their 20th round.
Rich countries have pledged to help the developing world convert to clean energy and adapt to shifts in global weather that are already adversely affecting crops, human health and economies. But poor countries say they’re not seeing enough cash.
Projecting the annual costs that poor countries will face by 2050 just to adapt, the United Nations Environment Program report deemed the previous estimate of $70 billion to $100 billion “a significant underestimate.” It had been based on 2010 World Bank numbers.
The report says new studies indicate the costs will likely be “two to three times higher,” possibly even as high as $500 billion. [Continue reading…]
Family wealth endures for centuries
Live Science: Rich families stay rich and poor families stay poor, according to a new study that finds that English people whose ancestors were elite in the 1100s are still likely part of the upper crust today.
The study echoes work in other countries that has found that social status budges little over generations, even in the face of massive social changes, said study researcher Gregory Clark, an economist at the University of California, Davis.
Clark began his research on social mobility expecting that families would generally tend toward the average — a particular surname might stand out among the elite for a generation or two, but their descendants would probably regress in notability.
“To our surprise, when we started getting the data, we found this surprising persistence,” Clark told Live Science. Names retain their status (low or high) for 500 years or more in some cases, he said. [Continue reading…]
It’s not top-secret if you can Google it
Michael Richter writes: Former Navy SEAL Matthew Bissonnette recently filed a federal malpractice suit against an attorney for telling him that the manuscript of his book, “No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden, ” didn’t need to undergo prepublication review by the Pentagon. Mr. Bissonnette claims that not letting Defense Department censors vet the book before its 2012 release has left him vulnerable to a criminal investigation and the likely confiscation of nearly all income earned from his best seller.
Mr. Bissonnette has acknowledged that his secrecy agreement with the Pentagon required him to submit the manuscript for prepublication review. But in a broader sense Mr. Bissonnette’s case has brought renewed attention to a dilemma facing every government employee who has ever been issued a security clearance. It seems these employees have in effect agreed to whatever limits on their First Amendment rights the Pentagon decides to impose. For instance, the government is now using its power to restrain speech regarding material that is already in the public domain.
I have firsthand experience of this First Amendment abridgment. After resigning from the U.S. intelligence community in 2011 to enter private practice as an attorney in Manhattan, I traveled to Cuba as a nongovernmental observer to the pretrial proceedings against the alleged mastermind of the terrorist attack on the USS Cole in 2000. I later prepared an article on the proceedings for a professional journal.
After submitting it for prepublication review to my former employers at the Defense Department, they ordered me to delete a paragraph citing a classified document that had likely been leaked by former Army Pfc. Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden , although the source is not revealed. The document is on the New York Times website — and perhaps elsewhere — and it concerns information I never saw or had anything to do with while in government.
Courts have ruled that the government cannot do this sort of thing, but the Pentagon isn’t listening. [Continue reading…]
Most Americans favor Israel’s democracy more than its Jewishness
Click on image above to see complete infographic (and click on that to expand) showing findings from the latest Brookings survey on American public attitudes toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Download the full report.
The world’s pitiful response to Syria’s refugee crisis
World leaders are failing to offer protection to Syria’s most vulnerable refugees with catastrophic consequences, Amnesty International has warned in a new briefing ahead of a UN pledging conference in Geneva on 9 December.
Left Out in the Cold: Syrian refugees abandoned by the international community highlights the pitiful numbers of resettlement places offered by the international community. Around 3.8 million refugees from are being hosted in five main countries within the region: Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. Only 1.7 per cent of this number have been offered sanctuary by the rest of the world since the crisis began more than three years ago.
The Gulf states– which include some of the world’s wealthiest countries – have not offered to take a single refugee from Syria so far. Russia and China have similarly failed to pledge a single resettlement place. Excluding Germany, the rest of the European Union (EU) has pledged to resettle a paltry 0.17 per cent of refugees in the main host countries.
How ISIS governs its caliphate
Newsweek reports: This year has seen the map of the Middle East redrawn. The West has acquired a new public enemy number one: remorseless, faceless and vicious. The Islamic State, or ISIS, has expanded from a relatively obscure terrorist group at the start of the year, to one that wields near absolute control over anywhere between 12,000 square miles (according to the Wall Street Journal) and 35,000 square miles (according to The New Yorker) of formerly Syrian and Iraqi territory. Within the region, around 56 million people must navigate between the armies of the rival militias, warlords and national armies that are barely distinguishable from one another.
But while Western forces attempt to counter the ISIS surge with its sustained bombing strategy, little attention is paid to an unpalatable reality within the borders of the so-called new Islamic State, or caliphate. In the midst of the chaos, ISIS is deliberately and methodically establishing clear areas of definable civil governance, breathing new life into the memory of a series of caliphates that united a succession of Muslim empires until 1924.
Scott Atran, an anthropologist and senior research fellow at Oxford University, recently submitted a report to the U.S. Department of Defense and Congress on the difficulty of fighting the ideology of such a state.
“The caliphate as an idea has never gone away,” Atran says, “And now that it is here again after a hiatus of nearly 100 years, as a concrete matter of fact, it will focus the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of people. The critical question is not, ‘How can we thwart or destroy the caliphate?’ because attempts to do that will likely backfire. Rather the question is, ‘How can we live with and transform the idea and reality of a caliphate – and one that will be nuclear-capable probably sooner rather than later – into something that does not threaten other peoples’ ways of life?’ That is a question for everyone, but it is not even on our political radar.” [Continue reading…]