Rio de Janeiro: a girl's guide to the best shops, hotels and restaurants

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Eat

For a unique experience visit Oui Oui, located in a listed building in Botafogo. The restaurant offers a variety of world-cuisine dishes with exotic twists. Dont be fooled by the French name, it actually refers to the small portions unusual in Brazil which allow diners to create their own tasting menus.

The restaurant Oui Oui

In the heart of Santa Teresa, Aprazvel offers a modern take on traditional Brazilian dishes and an extensive list of cachaa de alambique (traditional Brazilian liquor) in a welcoming rustic setting.

Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon, known as Lagoa, is a popular place for locals to exercise early in the morning or after work. Palaphita Kitch, a bar styled on an Amazonian retreat, serves creative caipirinhas made with all sorts of spirits and fruits as alternatives to the original cachaa and lime.

For a lively night out, go to Rua do Lavradio. Rio Scenarium used to be an antiques shop and is decorated with all sorts of ornaments.

READ: A travel guide to Brazil

Nothing says carioca girl (Rio born and bred) like the clothes at Farm: stylish outfits made from light fabrics in vibrant colours and patterns, all created locally.

Dont bother packing a bikini. Instead, before even thinking of going to the beach, visit Lenny Niemeyer for the most luxurious Brazilian swimwear.

A Lenny Niemeyer store

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Rio de Janeiro: a girl's guide to the best shops, hotels and restaurants

Busselton shark net and more aerial patrols

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Greens MLC Lynn MacLaren claims The Old Dunsborough shark net had big holes in it. Photo: Lynn MacLaren

The Premier has announced a new shark net will be installed on a Busselton beach and more West Australian beaches are being considered for shark barriers.

Premier Colin Barnett made the announcement while in Busselton on Friday.

The Premier also announced that aerial patrols would begin eight weeks earlier than usual for the South West region.

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Mr Barnett said the State Government would provide Surf Life Saving WA with an additional $650,000 in this year to extend aerial patrols to cover the school holiday period beginning this Saturday, weekends and public holidays, before daily patrols start over the summer period, starting November 24.

The move follows the Environmental Protection Authority's rejection of the state government's proposal to use drum lines for the next three summers.

The government had planned to continue the kill zone policy where baited hooks on drum lines were set one kilometre from shore on selected WA beaches.

Any great white, bull or tiger shark longer than three metres wa shot dead as part of the program designed to reduce the risk of shark attacks. It was promptedby seven deaths as a result of shark attacks in WA over three years.

Following the EPA's rejection of the drum lines plan Mr Barnett ruled out using drum lines this summer, but said he was still considering other methods to keep beach-goers safe.

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You Are in Command as NRAO's 'Milky Way Explorer' Tours the Solar System

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Newswise Imagine seeing the Sun, planets, and a myriad other objects in our Solar System as you have never seen them before in invisible radio light! That is the experience you will get through the National Radio Astronomy Observatorys (NRAO) newly released Solar System installment of its popular Milky Way Explorer, an online tour of our interstellar neighborhood guided by the actual astronomers who explore it using radio waves.

Through an entertaining and informative series of videos, NRAOs Science Visualization Team presents multimedia-rich tours of the radio Sun as well as many of the planets, moons, and asteroids that orbit it. At each stop along the way, planetary radio astronomers reveal the new science and exciting details we have learned about our Solar System neighbors through the use of radio telescopes.

Unlike familiar optical telescopes, which can only study objects illuminated by our Sun and other stars, radio telescopes can see the otherwise invisible cold, dark features in space. This includes the faint radio light that is naturally emitted by the molecules and chemicals that make up the atmospheres of planets and certain moons in our Solar System.

Radio dishes, when paired with powerful radar transmitters on Earth, can also reveal hidden landscapes, such as the Moons dust-layered surface and Venuss alien features shrouded behind its thick clouds.

The Milky Way Explorer, which was launched in 2013, also includes dozens more videos showcasing the diverse radio astronomy studies of our spiral island of stars, stellar nurseries, and dark matter. A third set of interviews and animations is scheduled for 2015 to share more radio astronomy discoveries made inside our Galaxy and among the nearest neighboring galaxies of our Universe.

https://public.nrao.edu/explorer/milkyway/TheMilkyWayExplorer.php

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

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Artificial Intelligence Profit Bot – See A I Profit Bot At Work- Demo Before Funding An Account – Video

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Artificial Intelligence Profit Bot - See A I Profit Bot At Work- Demo Before Funding An Account
Artificial Intelligence Profit Bot - See A I Profit Bot At Work - You can demo the bot before funding an account. http://BinaryOptionsProducts.com/AIP Eric Stevens #39; Artificial Intelligence...

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David Bates, "Thinking Technologies: An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence" – Video

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David Bates, "Thinking Technologies: An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence"
This event was held at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine Society at the University of California, Berkeley. "Thinking Technologies: An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence"...

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Artificial intelligence program that learns like a child

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Artificial intelligence programs may already be capable of specialized tasks like flying planes, winning Jeopardy, and giving you a hard time in your favorite video games, but even the most advanced offerings are no smarter than a typical four-year-old child when it comes to broader insights and comprehension. It makes sense, then, that researchers at the University of Gothenburg have developed a program that imitates a child's cognitive development.

"We have developed a program that can learn, for example, basic arithmetic, logic, and grammar without any pre-existing knowledge," says Claes Strannegrd. Starting from a set of simple and broad definitions meant to provide a cognitive model, this program gradually builds new knowledge based on previous knowledge. From that new knowledge it then draws new conclusions about rules and relations that govern the world, and it identifies new patterns to connect the insight to.

The process is similar to how children develop intelligence. A child can intuit, for example, that if 2 x 0 = 0 and 3 x 0 = 0 then 5 x 0 will also equal 0, or they could draw the conclusion that the next number in the series "2, 5, 8" will be 11. And the same kinds of intuition carry across to other areas, such as grammar, where it's easy to identify rules for standard verb conjugations from examples like sing becoming sang and run becoming ran in the past tense.

"We postulate that children learn everything based on experiences and that they are always looking for general patterns," Strannegrd says.

The researchers' system, which they call O*, follows the principle of Occam's razor that you should favor short and simple explanations over long and complex ones. It identifies patterns by itself and combines them with prior knowledge to solve problems.

Sometimes this will lead to errors, such as when children say "I brang my lunch" instead of "I brought my lunch," but O* managed not only to learn arithmetic from scratch, but also to perform above the average human level on propositional logic problems. And given enough information the researchers hope their program could learn and reason its way to correct conclusions across a range of domains without any need for a programmer to explicitly formulate which rules it should apply in a given situation.

"We are hoping that this type of program will eventually be useful in several different practical applications," says Strannegrd. "I think a versatile household robot would be tremendously valuable, but were not there yet."

Strannegrd and his colleagues presented a paper describing O* at the Seventh Conference on Artificial General Intelligence in August.

Source: University of Gothenburg

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Artificial intelligence program that learns like a child

Five ways the superintelligence revolution might happen

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15 hours ago by Nick Bostrom

Biological brains are unlikely to be the final stage of intelligence. Machines already have superhuman strength, speed and stamina and one day they will have superhuman intelligence. This is of course not certain to occur it is possible that we will develop some other dangerous technology first that destroys us, or otherwise fall victim to some existential risk.

But assuming that scientific and technological progress continues, human-level machine intelligence is very likely to be developed. And shortly thereafter, superintelligence.

Predicting how long it will take to develop such intelligent machines is difficult. Contrary to what some reviewers of my book seem to believe, I don't have any strong opinion about that matter. (It is as though the only two possible views somebody might hold about the future of artificial intelligence are "machines are stupid and will never live up to the hype!" and "machines are much further advanced than you imagined and true AI is just around the corner!").

A survey of leading researchers in AI suggests that there is a 50% probability that human-level machine intelligence will have been attained by 2050 (defined here as "one that can carry out most human professions at least as well as a typical human"). This doesn't seem entirely crazy. But one should place a lot of uncertainty on both sides of this: it could happen much sooner or very much later.

Exactly how we will get there is also still shrouded in mystery. There are several paths of development that should get there eventually, but we don't know which of them will get there first.

Biological inspiration

We do have an actual example of generally intelligent system the human brain and one obvious idea is to proceed by trying to work out how this system does the trick. A full understanding of the brain is a very long way off, but it might be possible to glean enough of the basic computational principles that the brain uses to enable programmers to adapt them for use in computers without undue worry about getting all the messy biological details right.

We already know a few things about the working of the human brain: it is a neural network, it learns through reinforcement learning, it has a hierarchical structure to deal with perceptions and so forth. Perhaps there are a few more basic principles that we still need to discover and that would then enable somebody to clobber together some form of "neuromorphic AI": one with elements cribbed from biology but implemented in a way that is not fully biologically realistic.

Pure mathematics

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AIA Presents 2014 Wings of Liberty Award to Representative Harold "Hal" Rogers

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September 25, 2014 - On September 18, Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) presented its Wings of Liberty Awardto Representative Harold "Hal" Rogers (R-KY)to recognize his longtime support of aerospace and defense industry. AIA President and CEO Marion C. Blakey, citing his tenure as "a tremendous leader of our cause," said Rogers was "richly deserving of this years award" and notedhis Appropriations leadership as well as his emphasis on putting national security first. Aerospace Industries Association 1000 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 1700 Arlington, VA, 22209-3928 USA Press release date: September 18, 2014

Arlington, Va. The Aerospace Industries Association is presenting its prestigious Wings of Liberty Award September 18 to Rep. Harold Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), in recognition of his longtime support of the aerospace and defense industry.

Rep. Rogers is Chairman and a 30-year member of the House Appropriations Committee, which is responsible for oversight and passage of the annual appropriation bills that provide over $1 trillion annually to the federal government. Rogers has served on the Defense subcomittee, and as chairman of the Transportation, Commerce, Science, Justice and the Homeland Security subcommittees. During his tenure in office, he has been a strong advocate for national and homeland security, civil aviation and space programs.

The Wings of Liberty is our industrys highest award, said AIA President and CEO Marion C. Blakey. It is an honor to present it to Congressman Rogers who has been a tremendous leader of our cause and richly deserving of this years award. Through his leadership of Appropriations, he has served the House with great distinction and has always put national security first.

In response to receiving the Wings of Liberty Award, Rep. Rogers, said, I am honored to receive the Wings of Liberty award from the Aerospace Industries Association. Our nation is recognized as the global leader in defense systems and aerospace engineering due to the daily work of the innovative members of this industry. At a time when terrorist groups are growing in number and boldness around the world, we must continue to maintain the very best national defense efforts, which are heavily supported through aerospace technology. I commend the continued ingenuity and leadership of AIA, allowing this nation to be on the forefront of defense, air travel, and communication.

The Wings of Liberty award is presented annually to a member of Congress who has made significant contributions to help bolster aerospace and national defense. The award, which embodies the spirit of America and the drive to achieve any dream, will be made at a reception on Capitol Hill, one of several events celebrating National Aerospace Week. Past honorees include Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), Rep. Howard P. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), and Senator Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii).

CONTACT: Keith Mordoff (703) 358-1075 office (240) 338-1255 mobile keith.mordoff@aia-aerospace.org

Dan Stohr (703) 358-1078 office (703) 517-8173 mobile dan.stohr@aia-aerospace.org

-AIA- Founded in 1919 shortly after the birth of flight, the Aerospace Industries Association is the most authoritative and influential trade association representing the nations leading manufacturers and suppliers of civil, military and business aircraft, helicopters, unmanned aircraft systems, space systems, aircraft engines, homeland and cybersecurity systems, materiel and related components, equipment services and information technology.

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Nanoparticle Synthesis Benefits From Award-winning Syrris Batch and Flow Reactors

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Innovative batch and flow reactors from leading manufacturer Syrris are proving advantageous for a variety of nanoparticle applications, offering scientists working in the field numerous benefits. Simple to assemble with no tools required, the easy-to-use reactors enable conditions such as temperature, time, mixing, reagent ratios and concentrations to be quickly varied for rapid process optimization. Excellent mixing and temperature control ensure a narrow particle size distribution and, to further enhance reproducibility, the systems can be fully automated.

Batch reactors such as the modular Atlas system offer multiple sensors including temperature, pH and turbidity, and have no particle size restrictions. With a large choice of reactor sizes, process scale-up is straightforward. One company successfully performing batch synthesis of nanoparticles is Spanish nanomedicine company Midatech Biogune. "Our Atlas Potassium reactors have allowed us to scale-up production, enabling variables such as pH and temperature to be tightly controlled," said CEO Justin Barry. Flow chemists have enjoyed similar success, with Paulina Lloret, a researcher at the Argentinian National Institute of Industrial Technologies, saying, "We trialed our nanoparticle experiments on the Asia flow chemistry system, and immediately placed an order for our own system to optimize the speed and results of our synthesis workflow". The flexible Asia system's fast and reproducible mixing, excellent heat transfer and accurate temperature control, plus a wide range of flow rates, allow process optimization and production on the same reactor. This high level of control has enabled synthesis of nanoparticles not previously seen using batch techniques.

Syrris Limited Syrris is world renowned for excellence in chemical reactor systems and is a world leader in flow chemistry systems. Established in 2001, Syrris employs over 30 scientists and engineers at its facility in Royston (near Cambridge, UK) and has offices in the US, Japan, India and Brazil plus over 30 distributors worldwide.

Syrris develops laboratory automation products for research and development chemists in industries such as pharma, petrochem, agrochem, fine chemical synthesis etc. as well as academia. Syrris products are used in a wide variety of applications and laboratories including process, discovery, crystallization, process safety, scale-up and many more.

Syrris products include the innovative range of fully automated batch reactor products (Atlas), a manually operated jacketed reactor platform (Globe) and flow chemistry systems (Asia and Africa). In recognition of its technological achievements, Syrris has been awarded the "Eastern Region's UKTI Best Established Exporter" and the "Most Outstanding Export Achievement" at the Global Opportunity Conference on International Trade. Syrris' Asia Flow Chemistry system was the recipient of a prestigious 2012 RD award.

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Al-Baghdadi is no Salmond

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The Presbyterianism of the Scotland of yesteryear has long been enmeshed in secularism, agnosticism and even atheism, writes Gamal Nkrumah. Nationalism has replaced religious zealotry as the animating factor in Scottish politics. It is even said that membership of the staunchly pro-independence Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) and other like-minded Scottish parties has surged since last Thursdays referendum on Scottish independence from the United Kingdom.

Unity is the best policy, or so the clich goes. And the United States of America is the perfect example. Yes, the American Civil War threatened to rip the nation apart in the 1860s. Fortunately for America, the Yankees fighting for the territorial integrity of the US prevailed, and the Southern Confederate states conceded that theirs was a lost cause.

In the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia (contemporary Iraq) and the Levant (modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine), national boundaries were demarcated when with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire Britain and France decided to carve up the region into respective spheres of influence after the signing of the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement. Predominantly Sunni Syria, eventually governed by a Shia Muslim in the shape of Syrian president Bashar Al-Assads Alawi sect, came under French rule.

Iraq, overwhelmingly Shia Muslim (like Iran), in sharp contrast since independence from Britain in 1932 was run by successive Sunni Muslim leaders, the last of whom was former president Saddam Hussein. The proverbial colonial divide-and-rule policy was implemented with clinical precision, and the seeds of contention were sowed.

Following a twisted logic, Scotlands first minister Alex Salmond who led the campaign to vote yes for Scottish independence in last weeks referendum on independence, could be regarded as something of an amalgam of Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar Al-Abadi and Islamic State leader and self-styled caliph of Sunni Muslims Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi.

Like Al-Abadi, Salmond was democratically elected, in his case as first minister by the Scottish parliament in May 2007. Al-Abadi was likewise democratically elected by the Iraqi parliament. Al-Baghdadi was never elected. However, even though no surveys have been conducted it is thought that a large segment of the Sunni Muslim population of Iraq and the Levant sympathises to differing degrees with al-Baghdadi, just as 45 per cent of Scots voted yes to Scottish independence.

Like Salmond in Scotland, Al-Baghdadi also commands a considerable following in the region. Yet the fundamental difference between Salmond and Al-Baghdadi is that as a staunch believer in democracy Salmond conceded defeat in last weeks referendum. He accepted the democratic verdict of the people and stepped down.

Al-Baghdadi, by contrast, has no intention of listening to the voices of those who detest his militant ideological orientation. He beheads his adversaries. He foments religious strife. His brutish barbarity has more in common with mediaeval savagery than with modern moderation.

Admittedly, more concrete causes of dissatisfaction with the status quo are to be found in Iraq and the Levant than in Scotland. In the latter there are public services, especially healthcare and education, whereas healthcare is virtually non-existent in the remote backwaters of eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq, the areas where IS is most active.

Whatever educational facilities existed in the area before the upsurge in ISs military conquests and its subjugation of the people in northeastern Syria and northwestern Iraq were destroyed by the violence and protracted warfare the group adopted. Al-Baghdadis very concept of education differs radically from that of the largely secularist Iraqi educational establishment, itself in shambles.

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7 different types of non-believers

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This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

Catholic, born-again, Reformed, Jew, Muslim, Shiite, Sunni, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhistreligions give people labels. The downside can be tribalism, an assumption that insiders are better than outsiders, that they merit more compassion, integrity and generosity or even that violence toward infidels is acceptable. But the upside is that religious or spiritual labels offer a way of defining who we are. They remind adherents that our moral sense and quest for meaning are core parts of what it means to be human. They make it easier to convey a subset of our deepest values to other people, and even to ourselves.

For those who have lost their religion or never had one, finding a label can feel important. It can be part of a healing process or, alternately, a way of declaring resistance to a dominant and oppressive paradigm. Finding the right combination of words can be a challenge though. For a label to fit it needs to resonate personally and also communicate what you want to say to the world. Words have definitions, connotations and history, and how people respond to your label will be affected by all three. What does it mean? What emotions does it evoke? Who are you identifying as your intellectual and spiritual forebears and your community? The differences may be subtle but they are important.

If, one way or another, youve left religion behind, and if youve been unsure what to call yourself, you might try on one of these:

1. Atheist.The termatheistcan be defined literally as lacking a humanoid god concept, but historically it means one of two things.Positive atheismasserts that a personal supreme being does not exist.Negative atheismsimply asserts a lack of belief in such a deity. It is possible be a positive atheist about the Christian God, for example, while maintaining a stance of negative atheism or even uncertainty on the question of a more abstract deity like a prime mover. In the United States, it is important to know that atheist may be the most reviled label for a godless person. Devout believers use it as a slur and many assume an atheist has no moral core. Until recently calling oneself an atheist was an act of defiance. That appears to be changing. With the rise of the New Atheists and the recent atheist visibility movement, the term is losing its edge.

2. Anti-theist.Whenatheistconsistently evoked images of Madalyn Murray OHair, hostility toward religion was assumed. Now that it may evoke a white-haired grandmother at the Unitarian church or the gay kid on Glee, some people want a term that more clearly conveys their opposition to the whole religious enterprise. The termanti-theistsays, I think religion is harmful. It also implies some form of activism that goes beyond merely advocating church-state separation or science education. Anti-theism challenges the legitimacy of faith as a moral authority or way of knowing. Anti-theists often work to expose harms caused in the name of God like stonings, gay baiting, religious child maltreatment, genital mutilation, unwanted childbearing or black-collar crime. The New Atheist writers including Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins might better be described as anti-theists.

3. Agnostic.Some atheists think ofagnosticas a weenie term, because it gets used by people who lack a god-concept but dont want to offend family members or colleagues. Agnosticdoesnt convey the same sense of confrontation or defiance that atheist can, and so it gets used as a bridge. But in reality, the term agnostic represents a range of intellectual positions that have important substance in their own right and can be independent of atheism.Strong agnosticismviews Gods existence as unknowable, permanently and to all people.Weak agnosticismcan mean simply I dont know if there is a God, or We collectively dont know if there is a God but we might find out in the future. Alternately, the term agnosticism can be used to describe an approach to knowledge, somewhat like skepticism (which comes next in this list). Philosopher Thomas Huxley illustrates this position:

Agnosticism is not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in the vigorous application of a single principle Positively the principle may be expressed as in matters of intellect, do not pretend conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable.

These three definitions of agnosticism, though different, all focus on what we do or can know, rather than on whether God exists. This means it is possible to be both atheist and agnostic. Author Phillip Pullman hasdescribedhimself as both.

The question of what term to use is a difficult one, in strict terms I suppose Im an agnostic because of course the circle of the things I do know is vastly smaller than the things I dont know about out there in the darkness somewhere maybe there is a God. But among all the things I do know in this world I see no evidence of a God whatsoever and everybody who claims to know there is a God seems to use that as an excuse for exercising power over other people, and historically as we know from looking at the history in Europe alone thats involved persecution, massacre, slaughter on an industrial scale, its a shocking prospect.

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7 different types of non-believers