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Cannabis Laws in France Have Disproportionately Affected Muslims – High Times

Posted on July 19, 2022 by Danzig

In the U.S., its an all-too-familiar story that Black and Mexican folks have been disproportionately impacted by the War on Drugs, but in France, they have a similar issue with the impact cannabis laws have on Muslims.

France, like many other countries around the world, are finally flirting with the idea of ending prohibition. They have CBD cafes now, which are gaining popularity, and the European Union is slowly starting to change the tune about how they treat cannabis. But like in many other spots, it is the marginalized folks who have been impacted the most.

New research shows that the past 50 years have been rough for Muslims when it comes to the War on Drugs. Close to one-fifth of prisoners in the French prison system currently were arrested for drug offenses, and most of them are men. It is hard to gain specific demographics in France because their absolute equality law makes it illegal to collect data based on race, ethnicity, or religion.

However, sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar studies the French prison system and found that half the people incarcerated today in France are either of Muslim or Arab descent. This means that half of the 69,000 people who are incarcerated are Muslim or Arab, although those demographics only make up 9% of the 67 million people in France.

Another study from 2018 commissioned by the French National Assembly shows that when looking at the 117,420 of the arrests in 2010, 86% of them were over cannabis charges, and the amount of people arrested for cannabis use between 2000 and 2015 rose from 14,501 to 139,683. When all these studies are compared, it paints a clear picture of Muslim and Arab folks being arrested for cannabis at a disproportionate rate.

Much like how America demonized cannabis by equating it to a poison pedaled by Mexican drug cartels and Black criminalsa largely false and inflated narrativeFrench historians have done something similar with Muslims. French fiction talked of Muslim hashish-eating assassins who were deranged, violent, and dangerous. French researchers also grew tired of working with cannabis when it was clear it was not a cure for cholera. The combined lack of medical interest and racist propaganda led to a distrust of cannabis throughout the culture. In 1953, medical hashish became illegal.

They even have their own version of reefer madness: folie haschischique. French colonialists in Algeria claimed that hashish caused insanity and violent criminal behavior, often putting sober or self-medicating mentally ill folks into psychiatric care and claiming cannabis was the cause.

In 1968, again mirroring events in the U.S., there were racial tensions against the North Africans who emigrated to France, claiming they were prone to violence and criminality due to the use of cannabis in their culture. This led to even harsher criminalization of the plant. The drug problem in France was referred to as a foreign plague and blamed on Arab and Muslim drug traffickers, people of color, and immigrants. There was talk of a cult of Muslim murderers inspired by cannabis and known as the Hachichins.

Today, of course, France is making a stand against such racist phrasing and thought, but it is still inherently a part of their culture when it comes to the backlash against cannabis, and it clearly shows in the numbers when prison data is pulled. Like many other places in the world, France has a lot of work to do when it comes to separating out what truly needs to be regulated about cannabis and what just comes from a history of racist propaganda.

Cannabis Laws in France Have Disproportionately Affected Muslims - High Times

Safe consumption sites: End the war on people who use drugs! – Workers World

Posted on July 19, 2022 by Danzig

New York City 2020. In the shadow of the COVID-19 epidemic are two others: the opioid and overdose epidemics. Since the start of epidemics, there have been thousands of deaths from overdoses, even when the people who OD dont even know theyve consumed opioids.

What is the difference between the two? The opioid epidemic is the epidemic of people knowingly abusing opioids. The overdose epidemic is the epidemic of people overdosing from fentanyl analogues and other opioids unknowingly, such as overdoses when non-opioid drugs are tainted by dangerous opioids such as acrylfentanyl, acetylfentanyl, ohmefentanyl and carfentanil.

What are the preventative measures to keep people from overdosing on opioids, knowingly or unknowingly? One is to keep naloxone (Narcan, Evzio) on hand to ensure that users can have their overdoses reversed. Another is to keep fentanyl test strips on hand, to catch the presence of fentanyl or most fentanyl analogues before one uses tainted substances. These methods save lives. But they require people being ready ahead of time. So what can consistently save the lives of drug addicts and others with Substance Use Disorder?

Safe consumption sites

Safe consumption site, OnPoint NYC, East Harlem location. Credit: New York Harm Reduction Educators

The operation and usage of safe consumption sites are places that addicted people can go to to keep from overdosing. These provide clean needles, fentanyl test strips, naloxone rescues. Some even provide methadone and buprenorphine referrals or treatment. Around the world where these services are offered, peoples lives have been saved in more than one way.

Whether its being rescued with Narcan or saved from the risk of HIV and Hepatitis B and C, the sites work to serve working and oppressed people with Substance Use Disorder.

In the U.S., there has been a so-called War on Drugs that began in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, continued under the Clinton administration in the 1990s, the George W. Bush administration in the 2000s and the Trump administration in the 2010s. The decades of anti-drug measures were in fact a war on communities of color, with many young people sent to jail for life.

Now theres good news from the Journal of the American Medical Association. In a July 15 research letter to the JAMA Open Network, there is proof that safe consumption sites in the U.S. work here, just like in other countries. (tinyurl.com/4eyhbtx4)

Despite the continued demonization of people who use drugs, the City of New York authorized the two safe consumption sites by OnPoint NYC: one in East Harlem and the other in Washington Heights. From the JAMA report, its now known that within the first two months of operations of the two sites, 613 people used the services almost 6,000 times.

Opioid overdoses required 19 naloxone and 35 oxygen interventions, while overall overdose prevention strategies were used 125 times overall. Other than overdose interventions, additional services were utilized at OnPoints two locations: naloxone distribution, counseling, Hepatitis C virus testing, HIV testing, medical care and holistic services such as acupuncture.

The sites give a wide variety of services to the most oppressed and crushed people and provide them with love for themselves. A popular phrase used in addiction and recovery is We will love you until you learn to love yourself. The services provided at the sites demonstrate the power of that process for the actively using addict.

This is only the beginning of studies into the usefulness of safe consumption sites in the United States. And the future looks promising, indeed.

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Safe consumption sites: End the war on people who use drugs! - Workers World

War on narcotics – The Shillong Times

Posted on July 19, 2022 by Danzig

Editor,

Pockets of Shillong are witnessing a rise in drug-related crimes. In the past weeks the law enforcers conducted counter-narcotics programs using community-based intelligence which has worked wonders on a temporary scale but this is a long war which will test the mettle of governments now and later. In this game of interests the lines are blurred from traffickers to a porous border along the North Eastern corridor. What we have not witnessed is the rise of rival cartels backed by corrupt states similar to situations in Mexico or Honduras. Unemployment is a matter of grave concern as each year students are getting out of institutions with degrees but no jobs. Technically, the distribution channels of narcotics are gaining ground in cyberspace too.Legalisation and decriminalization have always been on the cards but whether they will be implemented in letter and spirit is a debatable matter. We cannot be swayed by the capital punishment in Singapore or the failed Plan Colombia to draw a roadmap for ourselves, but the answer lies deeper than the series Narcos. Antony Loewensteins Pills, Powder and Smoke (Inside the Bloody War on Drugs) weaves it beautifully on this powerful multi-billion dollar industry which will not yield submissively.

Yours etc.,

Christopher Gatphoh,

Via email

Editor,

Apropos the letter Plight of NEHU students by Wilbert Thangkhiew (ST, July 15, 2022) I wholeheartedly endorse the views of the author. Being a victim of the issues highlighted issues in Wilberts letter, its even more frustrating to realise that youre not the only person struggling but a part of a larger disgruntled group. NEHU has become a den of politics for personal vendetta and vested interests. Many Vice-Chancellors have come and gone and we, the indigenous people, who have had multiple generations graduating from this university, feel sorry to witness the gradual downfall of this once esteemed institution. From having professors under CBI scanner for taking bribes from research scholars in broad daylight, disruptive forces meddling with everyday affairs to officials guilty of dereliction of duty from time immemorial, it seems NEHU has come a full circle with the appointment of the current Vice Chancellor.The VC is always out of station and a simple task of issuing a bonafide certificate takes more than two weeks to process. Whenever someone tries to raise an important issue there is an acting VC in office with no responsibility. Perhaps, employees in NEHU have gone into retirement mode with the VC eternally being away from the helm of affairs. So, the question is, are all VCs expected to be in Delhi for the majority of their tenures? I believe hefty salary and facilities makes the man affluent enough to neglect his primary duty of serving the state and the nation through quality education. The grapevine is abuzz that the VC has constructed a new chamber for himself from taxpayers money while vehemently giving false assurances of improving hostel facilities amidst crunch for funds.The Tura Campus has received step-motherly treatment with false assurances time and again. The question to be asked is how did NEHU find itself in such a situation of giving a 15- day time frame to casual workers, 7- day time frame to Tura Campus and again 15- day time frame to the students to meet their demands which has lapsed a long time ago?I hence urge the Chief Minister, all stakeholders and particularly the Chief Rector- the Honble Governor to initiate an academic audit to draw a comparison of how many days the VC has been in station and the reasons for his travels out of state. This culture of having institutional leaders being a law unto themselves should be done away with once and for all. And still, if the VC does not understand, which seems very likely, we do have a popular English coaching institute- Avenues in Shillong.

Yours etc.,

Benny Shira,

Tura

Excerpt from:

War on narcotics - The Shillong Times

Whats Really Going on in Those Police Fentanyl Exposure Videos? – The New York Times

Posted on July 19, 2022 by Danzig

KCTV5, after receiving responses questioning its reporting, appended an editors note that did not mention the medical consensus on this question, noting instead that medical records showed the officer was treated for fentanyl exposure and that the D.E.A. had affirmed that its agents potential exposure to fentanyl puts their safety and health on the line.

Three or four decades ago, the American media found itself producing plenty of readily identifiable villains in the nations war on drugs. The Miami of the 1980s, for instance, became a high-intensity zone of armed conflict between cocaine traffickers and the government, an era that inspired countless stylized Hollywood action flicks about cops, drugs and cartel enemies. By the 1990s, local news increasingly entrenched in the business of covering crime sustained a national obsession with urban gangs, which were depicted as so well armed and lawless that a bipartisan consensus formed around cutting the police blank checks to combat them; departments across the country received billions of dollars worth of military-grade equipment, from flash-bang grenades and night-vision goggles to armored trucks, for use in executing even low-level drug warrants. Nightly news broadcasts portrayed both drug users and dealers as dangerous elements concentrated in poverty-blighted inner cities, yet always at risk of creeping into the middle-class viewers suburb.

Police officers on the front lines of todays drug war confront a very different landscape. The human misery of todays overdose crisis is largely hidden from view, and it is certainly not centered on the police; it is squarely borne by drug users and their loved ones. Every single hour of every single day, 12 Americans die from a fatal overdose, according to preliminary C.D.C. data a slow-motion disaster quietly playing out in banal locales like residential neighborhoods, gas-station bathrooms and strip-mall parking lots, in the smallest towns and the largest cities, across social and economic classes. Fatal overdoses occur largely among those who are using substances alone, with no one there to revive them with Narcan. Unlike the police officers, they dont hyperventilate and gasp for air. Instead, they slowly drift off, gradually stop breathing and never wake up again.

Todays astonishing overdose death toll comes not from gang violence or turf wars but from a ubiquitous market of cheap and potent synthetic drugs. And so it is in the drugs themselves that police officers now see grave danger, including to themselves. Last year, the San Diego County Sheriffs Department produced and released its own public-safety video featuring what Sheriff Bill Gore described as traumatic body-worn camera footage of an officers life-threatening fentanyl exposure footage that circulated through various media outlets despite the skepticism of health professionals. Its as though each of these videos seeks to identify the new villain, the shocking peril, in an era whose drug-war battlefields are too diffuse and mundane to capture the public imagination. Images of cinematic urban war zones and Uzi-toting gangsters have been replaced by the knowledge that drug use quietly pervades communities of all sorts. So fear attaches to something equally slippery: fentanyl particles lurking in the air, or even just a few specks on a police uniform, blamed for one officers overdose in Ohio. (According to local reporting, the officer was eventually terminated from the force for, among other reasons, gross misconduct.)

Whats Really Going on in Those Police Fentanyl Exposure Videos? - The New York Times

NY To Begin Accepting Cannabis Applications From People Harmed By War On Drugs – The Fresh Toast

Posted on July 19, 2022 by Danzig

The New York cannabis industry plans to prioritize those whove been disproportionately impacted by the War on Drugs.

On Thursday, the citys cannabis regulators approved rules that make it possible to start accepting retail applications from injured parties.

RELATED: New Yorks Draft Conditional Retail Regulations Raise Practical Concerns

The regulations explain that, in order to qualify, applicants must have experience operating a qualifying business and must have faced a conviction for a drug-related offense before the state legalized marijuana. Applicants can also qualify for a conditional adult-use marijuana retail license if they have a close family member that was convicted with a drug-related offense.

While good intentioned, these regulations have been criticized in the past due to how limiting they might end up being. A person thats been impacted by the war on drugs may have had encounters with the law in the past, something that makes it difficult for them to also have experience managing and running a business.

New York legalized marijuana on March 31 2021, and has been working on how to implement it fairly and profitably over the past year. While its legal to consume marijuana and possess up to three ounces of cannabis, the sale remains illegal, a topic that has created some confusion in the state, especially since new businesses continue to appear in the form of trucks, pop ups and brick and mortar, taking advantage of the marijuana boom.

Responsible authorities have tried to control these businesses by sending out cease and desist letters while still trying to keep the police uninvolved.

RELATED: New York Senate Just Approved This Critical Marijuana Bill

Sale of untested products put lives at risk, said Tremain Wright, chair of New Yorks Cannabis Control Board. I implore these illegal store operators, and any other stores pretending to be legal operations, to stop selling cannabis products immediately.

NY To Begin Accepting Cannabis Applications From People Harmed By War On Drugs - The Fresh Toast

How the right waged a 100-year war to conquer America and why it’s winning – Salon

Posted on July 19, 2022 by Danzig

In two blockbuster decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court throttled the power of government to regulate pollution (West Virginia v. EPA) and expanded the power of government to regulate women's reproductive lives (Dobbs v. Jackson). There is no contradiction in these two decisions. They continue a hundred years of right-wing support for private enterprise and control over women's autonomy.

The American right has held together as a political movement through its core commitment to conserving what it views as traditional Christian values and private enterprise. American conservative politics is not about limited government, states' rights, individual freedom or free markets. These are all dispensable ideas that the right has adjusted and readjusted to protect core principles. Conservatives have built their own versions of big government and carved out innumerable exceptions to free markets for tariffs, business subsidies, friendly regulations and pro-business interventions abroad. They have backed individual choice and states' rights, for example, on racial issues, but not on alcohol and drug use, pornography, contraception, abortion and same-sex marriage. In defense of core objectives, conservatives shifted from being isolationists before Pearl Harbor to aggressive warriors against communism and terrorism. They have abandoned protectionism for free trade, public education for private school vouchers, and deficit control for "supply-side" tax cuts.

Control over women's allegedly dangerous sexuality and autonomy grounds the moral appeal of conservative politics. In this view, a morally-ordered society requires a morally-ordered family, with clear lines of divinely ordained masculine authority and the containment within it of women's erotic allure. Salacious, non-motherly displays of female bodies, sex education in schools, abortion rights, easy divorces and the tolerance of homosexuality and other forms of "deviance" undercut the reproduction and orderly progress of civilization. Feminist demands since the 1920s to upset manly and womanly distinctions and erode patriarchy, through the right's lens, de-feminizes women and feminizes men, opening the family and the nation to conquest (rape) and subversion (seduction). The history of failed civilizations, conservative physicianArabella Kenealywrote in 1922, "shows one striking feature as having been common to most of these great decadences. In nearly every case, the dominance and [sexual] license of their women were conspicuous."

Conservative politics has had an enduring appeal to Americans seeking the clarity and comfort of absolute moral codes, clear standards of right and wrong, swift and certain penalties for transgressors and established lines of authority in public and family life. Ultimately conservatives have engaged in a struggle for control over American public life against a liberal tradition they have seen as not just wrong on issues, but sinful, un-American and corrosive of the institutions and traditions that made the nation great. To achieve their ambitious aims, conservatives had to stay disciplined, mobilize their resources and wage total war against liberals, with unconditional surrender as the only acceptable result.

During the 1920s, conservatives pioneered their programs for enforcing their vision of traditional values and protecting private enterprise, which endure today. Efforts to uphold the traditional family and control the licentiousness of women emerged in the 1920s, not just through the prohibition of alcohol but in lesser-known campaigns against sexual "deviance," "smut" and drugs, and in defense of conservative motherhood. In 1925, British historianA.F. Pollardcited the U.S. as "the rising hope of stern and unbending Tories." American laws, he said, "were not so much a means of change as a method of putting on record moral aspirations, a liturgy rather than legislation; and the statutebook was less the fiat of the State than a book of common prayer."

The erotically charged society of the 1920s led to fears that Americans, especially the young, were falling victim to deviant sexuality, such as oral sex and homosexuality, and to the scourge of venereal disease. After World War I,however, efforts to prevent venereal disease through education and the administration of chemical prophylaxis gave way to moral uplift and law enforcement. For moral reformers of the 1920s, preventative measures only encouraged prostitution and promiscuity.

Conservative answers to venereal disease involved the restoration of the supposed moral integrity of society and the rigorous prosecution of prostitutes and other sex offenders. Congress failed to renew wartime appropriations for controlling venereal disease, and state censorship boards banned as obscene sex-education films and other forms of anti-venereal propaganda. In 1926, the federal government eliminated federal aid to the states to prevent venereal disease, while state appropriations for this purpose declined.

After World War I, the Catholic Church crusaded worldwide for moral renewal. In 1920,Pope Benedict XVwarned that atrocities of war had led to "the diminution of conjugal fidelity and the diminution of respect for constituted authority. Licentious habits followed, even among young women." In 1930, his successorPope Pius XIissued 12 rules designed to assure that "feminine garb be based on modesty and their ornament be a defense of virtue." Catholic authorities joined by evangelical white Protestants promoted in the 1920s the censorship of books, plays, movies and artwork that displayed obscenity, nudity, drinking, sex outside of wedlock, suggestive dancing, drug use, homosexuality, prostitution and love between people of different races.

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In the 1920s, conservatives backed the closing of America's public drug treatment clinics and, as they did with venereal disease, adopted a moral and law enforcement approach to narcotics. Addicts had no recourse other than illegal sources of supply. For moral reformers, drug and alcohol use undermined the family and threatened the purity of American women. Even more than drink, however, enslavement to narcotics was understood to undercut discipline, self-mastery and the free will needed to follow a godly life.Richard P. Hobson, head of the International Narcotic Education Association, charged that civilization was "in the midst of a life and death struggle with the deadliest foe that has ever menaced its future." Narcotics threatened "the perpetuation of civilization, the destiny of the world, and the future of the human race." In 1929, Congress began the national war on drugs by establishing a Federal Bureau of Narcotics to enforce the drug laws.

Conservative women drew on a maternalist ideology that affirmed inherent differences between the sexes and women's unique role in rearing children as healthy, moral and productive citizens. Conservative maternalists urged women of the New Era not to slip the bonds of men and custom but to reclaim their motherly responsibilities to rear courageous sons and domesticated daughters. They opposed reforms that confused sex roles, weakened families or substituted state paternalism for parental responsibility.

Conservative women warned against radicals who would rip children from the home and rear them in nurseries run by the state. The radicals would end sexual restraint and manly competition. They would feminize men and coerce women into "unnatural" masculine roles through forced work and conscription. Conservative women found dangerous sex-role reversals in women who embraced the unisex hedonism of the times: short skirts and bathing suits, bobbed hair, drinking, smoking, vigorous sports, necking and petting, and sensual music and dancing. Patriotic mothers would uphold family morals and shun the competitive male spheres of business, politics and war. Like women of Sparta, they would raise patriotic sons ready to risk their lives for the common defense. This view of women and their place in society was represented in such 1920s organizations as the Women's Auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the American Legion Auxiliary and the Daughters of 1812.

Women of the right mobilized against the first federal welfare measure, the Sheppard Towner Bill of 1921, which provided aid to the states for the health care of mothers and infants. They argued that the law would weaken families, undercut traditional values and advance paternalistic government. In the Sheppard-Towner fight, wrote editor Mary Kilbreth of the conservative publication Woman Patriot, "we have with us as allies the Constitution, and all the institutions on which 'Western civilization is based.'"

The right's pro-business policies included the anti-government initiatives of deregulation and tax cuts. Yet they also turned to government for protective tariffs, support for foreign trade and investment, controls over strikes and labor organizing, and pro-business regulations. Our goal is "putting government behind rather than in business,"Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hooversaid in 1924. In 1926, under Hoover's guidance, the Republican Congress stabilized the struggling airline and railroad industries with the Air Commerce Act and the Railway Act. On the seas, Congress extended subsidies to shipbuilders and operators in the Merchant Marine Act of 1928. To impose order on the broadcast spectrum, Congress established a Federal Radio Commission in 1927 and let broadcasters keep or sell their existing frequencies and block competitors from sharing airtime. Republican presidents appointed pro-business jurists to regulatory agencies and the federal courts.

Support for profit-seeking enterprise may contradict the right's emphasis on moral probity. However, conservatives linked private enterprise to stable, traditional families that nurtured the virtues of thrift, sobriety, self-reliance, honor and diligence. Even as Americans evolved from savers and craftsmen to producers and consumers, conservatives sustained the linkage between family virtue and enterprise. "The whole fabric of Business rests upon these moral forces," wrote journalistEdward Bokin 1926. Cultural warfare, in turn, gave the right a mass base and a passion that economic conservatism lacks. By uniting traditional Christian values and enterprise, conservatives claim to have protected Americans' pocketbooks and saved their souls.

Cultural and business conservatism converged forcefully again when the right regrouped in the 1970s. Conservatives then put a positive spin on their cultural prohibitionism. They weren't just against sinners and feminists; they were the "pro-family" and "pro-life" champions of wholesome "family values." Still, defense of the family meant battling the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, pornography, gay rights and gun control. Phyllis Schlafly, the prime mover of the pro-family agenda, described "the family as the basic unit of society, with certain rights and responsibilities, including the right to insist that the schools permit voluntary prayer and teach the 'fourth 'R' (right and wrong) according to the precepts of the Holy Scriptures." At a well-attended "Pro-Family Rally" that upstaged the feminist 1977 "International Year of the Woman" gathering in Houston, she warned that feminists were "going to drive the homemaker out of the home. They want to relieve mothers of the menial task of taking care of their babies. They want to put them in the coal mines and have them digging ditches." The ERA would "only benefit homosexuals. The American women do not want ERA, abortion, lesbian rights, and they do not want childcare in the hands of government."

In 1971, corporate lawyer Lewis Powell issued a call to arms by conservatives shortly before his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. The "Powell Memo"guided the rebuilding of business conservatism and the presidency of Ronald Reagan. He warned that new regulations that cut across industry to limit pollution, control energy production, advance minority and consumer rights and protect worker health and safety threatened the survival of private enterprise. Powell insisted that conservatives, aided by the financial might of business, should not have "the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it." Conservatives must aggressively capture the centers of power that shaped policy and public opinion: the political parties, the academy, the media, the courts and popular culture.

Consistent with the reformulation of cultural issues, conservatives in the 1970s put a positive spin on their pro-business policies, labeling them "supply-side economics." Entrepreneurs would create a new era of American abundance if they were free to innovate without penalty or control. They would produce enough goods and services to cure inflation, accelerate government revenue growth and reduce the deficit. Supply-side advocates promised that their bonanza to business would flow down or "trickle down," as critics charged to the lower strata because employment and wages would boom.

After his transformation election in 1980, President Ronald Reagan turned the supply-side dream into reality. His conservative economic policies rested on reducing tax liabilities for corporations and the wealthy, relieving businesses of civil rights, environmental, and economic regulations, cutting social spending and curbing the power of labor unions. It was a blueprint that the right would follow through today.

The history of the modern American conservative movement demonstrates that the Dobbs and EPA decisions are not aberrations. In fact, they realize priorities that the right has pursued since the 1920s. The only change is a right-wing grip on the Supreme Court that is unprecedented in modern American history. The court will likely extend its curtailment of air pollution regulation to water pollution in the upcoming case ofSackett v. EPA. And despite surface disagreement from other justices, it is also likely to follow Justice Clarence Thomas' call for reconsidering the rights to contraception, private sexual encounters and same-sex marriage. Given the right's quest for absolute power, it would not be surprising if the court then grants state legislatures controlled by Republicans in key swing states exclusive control over federal elections.

on the far right's assault on America

Excerpt from:

How the right waged a 100-year war to conquer America and why it's winning - Salon

DeLucas 5 Picks: Pink and Margo Price protest songs, plus Nightlands and music of The Bear – The Philadelphia Inquirer

Posted on July 19, 2022 by Danzig

1. Pink, Irrelevant. One day last week Pink tweeted: Woke up. Got heated. Wrote song. Coming soon.

The song that the Doylestown native born Alecia Moore penned and posted handwritten lyrics to is Irrelevant, an emphatic protest song, a rallying cry of defiance in which the singer refuses to be defined by others and works herself up into a righteous rage.

The collaborative effort with songwriter-producer Ian Fitchuk is clearly inspired by the recent Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, but is ready made to fit all kinds of protests.

It strategically evokes both The Whos The Kids Are Alright and Cyndi Laupers Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, which was written by the late Philadelphia singer Robert Hazard. Girls just wanna have rights, she sings. So why do we have to fight?

In a statement, Pink wrote: As a woman with an opinion and the fearlessness to voice that opinion, it gets very tiring when the only retort is to tell me how irrelevant I am. I am relevant because I exist, and because I am a human being. No one is irrelevant. And no one can take away my voice. Proceeds from sales of the song go to Michelle Obamas voting initiative When We All Vote.

2. Nightlands, Moonshine. Besides playing with The War On Drugs you know, the Philly band that opened for the Rolling Stones in London last month Dave Hartley makes music as Nightlands, a project that leans toward the ethereal, with spacious synth-based songs and vocals that reach skyward.

Moonshine is the first Nightlands album since 2017s I Can Feel The Night Around Me, and its contemplative nature is in part the result of the musicians move from Philadelphia to Asheville, N.C., where Hartley, a new parent, worked in isolation during the pandemic in a studio in a barn outside his century-old house.

Lots of Philly musicians make contributions to New Age-tinged tracks like No Kiss For the Lonely, however, including Eric Slick, Michael Kiley, and Jessie Hale Moore, plus Hartleys bandmates Charlie Hall, Eliza Hardy Jones, and Anthony LaMarca. The War On Drugs play the XPoNential Music Festival with Patti Smith on Sept. 16.

3. Margo Price featuring Mavis Staples and Adia Victoria, Fight To Make It. Last September when Margo Price played the Mann Center with Willie Nelsons Outlaw Music Tour, she debuted a cover of Lesley Gores You Dont Own Me in protest after Texas passed restrictive antiabortion legislation that month.

Now, Price has teamed with gospel great Mavis Staples and blues and Americana songwriter Adia Victoria to release this rockin country fight song that she has said was originally inspired by Amelia Earhart and Rosa Parks.

Along with Irrelevant, its one of what will surely be many protest songs released in the coming months. In a statement, Price said: Every day I see more of our rights stripped away in America. The right to reproductive health in this country has become a luxury for the wealthy . Black women in particular experience maternal mortality at a rate two to three times higher than white women.

Proceeds from Bandcamp sales of the song benefit Noise for Now, which connects artists with grassroots organizations that work in reproductive justice, including abortion access. Prices memoir Maybe Well Make It is due from University of Texas Press in October.

Don McCloskey. Bucks County born Don McCloskey is celebrating the release of The Chaos & the Beauty, a 10-song collection recorded in Brooklyn with Philly expats Devin Greenwood and Ali Wadsworth and guitarist Ross Bellinoit and released on his own Lemon Hill Records label.

The St. Joes Prep grad has a varied history: He wrote Unstoppable, the Phillies anthem that was played at Citizens Bank Park during the teams (long ago) 2009 World Series run, hes toured with Wu-Tang Clan rapper Raekwon and last Christmas he released a terrific reworked version of O Holy Night.

On Friday, he was set to play Ardmore Music Hall with Philly songwriter Chris Kasper, whose 2017 song City By The Sea is a Jersey Shore snapshot of Ventnor before it went bougie. This show has now been postponed because of COVID and will be rescheduled for the fall. ardmoremusichall.com.

The music of The Bear. The highly bingeable series about a hotshot chef who comes home to Chicago to run his family sandwich shop, that stars Jeremy Allen White, has a serious verisimilitude quotient in its authentic depiction of in-the-kitchen restaurant culture.

But the FX on Hulu series created by Christopher Storer also has something else going for it: a top notch, consistently surprising but not show-offy soundtrack put together by Storer and his music supervisor partner Josh Senior. Theres not too much music forced on the viewer as is often the case with prestige TV productions. Instead, its used sparingly, and often packs an emotional punch, whether its Counting Crowes Have You Seen Me Lately? or John Cougar Mellencamps Check It Out.

The shows Windy City identity comes through with Wilcos Via Chicago (and also Impossible Germany) and also Sufjan Stevens Chicago, though theres no sign of Sinatras My Kind of Town in the first season. But theres also lots of not-trendy far-flung acts, like Swedish hard core band Refused and perfectly fitting instrumental rock from Staten Island ensemble The Budos Band. Last week the show was renewed for a second season.

Original post:

DeLucas 5 Picks: Pink and Margo Price protest songs, plus Nightlands and music of The Bear - The Philadelphia Inquirer

Katy J Pearson : Sound of the Morning – Treble – Treble

Posted on July 19, 2022 by Danzig

It wasnt so long ago that music fans and critics openly ragged on adult contemporary as a rite of passage. The entire genre allegedly comprised treacly pablum and tender feelings designed exclusively for moms in minivans. An entire generation rejected those sounds, preferring songs that expressed emotions with heart-on-the-sleeve intensityno matter the genre.However, the soft rock of the 70s and 80s has recently experienced a slight resurgence. Artists such as Kevin Morby, Father John Misty, and The War on Drugs have built entire careers on updating and reinventing the music of acts such as Bread or Boz Scaggs. A generation of music fans that didnt experience it the first time now adore acts that embrace nuance, discomfort, and malleability. By taking slightly more care in how they express emotions, these musicians can hone greater songwriting acumen, production flairs, and compositional skill.

This is the environment into which Katy J Pearson strides with confidence. On her new album, Sound of the Morning, she delivers delightfully quirky singer-songwriter fare matched with upbeat pop-rock arrangements that would have been a perfect fit for 70s AM radio. Released on Heavenly Recordings, this 11-song project combines the chill vibes of Laurel Canyon with the sentimentality of 80s pop radio to delightful results. Its as if Joni Mitchell, Patty Griffin, and Destroyer collaborated across the decades to create thoughtful, yet catchy folk tunes.

It all starts with Pearsons expressive vocal range. Sitting comfortably in a high alto, she can both dip down low and reach for the heights as a song demands, complete with the rare break to seal the deal. She also displays a deft lyricism about a variety of grownup ideas and motifs including romantic misunderstandings, anxiety about relationships, and making sense of love, as well as feeling stuck in a dead-end situation and needing to grow so she can find a way out.

Despite this being a solo project, the album is rich with full-band arrangements. The production is bright and clear, allowing space for each instrument and vocal in the mix. Its also easy to become enamored with the superb musicianship in that the songs feel both light and substantivethe players are in sync, which means everything is intentional and nothing is overwrought. Crisp drums, warm guitars, lovely horns, and intricate piano phrasings flow together to create pristine arrangements packed with delicate flourishes.

Talk Over Town reeks with a delicious War On Drugs aesthetic, including spacey guitars, echoing vocals, and driving drums. The chorus erupts into a rich crescendo as Katy asks a simple question: Can you show me something Im missing? Is it something I can live without? On The Riverhead, the tempo slows down slightly, evoking a steady stroll between lovers as they walk around the banks of a lake in a park. The mood and lyrics call to mind a serious relationship about the future couched in pleasant memories of the past.

With Float, the tone takes a melancholy turn, as Pearson openly questions the long-term viability of a relationship. She plaintively sings about wandering the halls of their home, looking at pictures on the walls, and getting tired of pretending that her heart is fully committed. Game of Cards channels Fleetwood Mac by first fusing loping verses to a caustic chorus and then comparing a late-night chat with a partner to a high-stakes hand of poker. The album closes with the luscious Willows Song, a tune that features effervescent guitars, supple drumming, creeping string-centric synths, and well-timed horn bleats. Its a jaunty minor key affair that serves as both a mission statement for the project as well as a farewell note to the tumultuous relationships shes chronicled.

Sound of the Morning represents a profound progression in the career trajectory of Katy J Pearson. Like her musical forebears, she couches heavy feelings in immaculate, danceable pop grooves. The chord progressions seem familiar, but she turns them inside-out with artful aplomb so that listeners feel comfortable but never bored. Moreover, the sublime pacing to the track listing allows for terrific control of the emotional ebbs and flows. Pearson also knows how to express strong, yet realistic emotions with a matter-of-fact tone that belies her relative youth. Shes unafraid to face tough situations, preferring to persevere even if the journey isnt easy or the resolution very clean.

Label: Heavenly

Year: 2022

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Katy J Pearson : Sound of the Morning - Treble - Treble

Woody Harrelson’s weed store reviewed: Into The Woods – Leafly

Posted on July 19, 2022 by Danzig

Reviewed The Woods WeHo

8271 Santa Monica BlvdWest Hollywood, CA

http://www.thewoodsweho.com

When an A-List actor like Woody Harrelson opens up a weed dispensary in a posh part of Los Angeles, you gotta go scope it out.

Were here to report back that the rustic, outdoorsy, The Woods champions artisanal, craft sungrown flower to locals in each price bracket. Its kind of the perfect fit for Harrelson, who has spent decades advocating weed legalization, criminal justice reform, and environmentalism. Humboldt hippies helped make California cannabis the best in the world. The Woods hopes LA folks will pay fair-trade prices to see these farmers survive the high taxes and red tape of legal weed.

Opened May 16 just off Melrose Avenue in the northern part of LA, The Woods is a project of Harrelson and the owner of the Erba dispensary chain.

Harrelson has supported weed law reform since at least 1996 when he got arrested for symbolically planting hemp in Texas. Cannabis went legal in California in 2016, and stores opened in 2018. Four years later, Harrelsons team converted an interior design store into a chic sungrown boutique that embodies the actors values.

Walking up to the store you are greeted by a concrete horse next to a large, intimidatingly ornate wooden door. The shop has kept many of the pieces of its former resident, hence the horse. Its bougie. This is West Hollywood, people.

Walking inside, the store manages to give more of a high-end furniture store feel rather than a dispensary. But details throughout invite inspection and browsing. Thats not typical for dispensaries that often hide product behind the counter and have limited informational resources.

The Woods has plenty of plant life throughout and is abundantly lit by a skylight, so it has a fresh, open feel.

The abundance of houseplants creates a fresh, herbal smell in the air. Absent birds, you instead hear the chirping of local passersby, since the large front door stays invitingly propped open.

Display cases all throughout the space show off brands and their products for perusal. Certain cases focus on categories like edibles, or pre-rolls. The clienteles favorite? Staff said edibles.

You can also buy an entire walls worth of award-winners from the worlds largest outdoor pot contest The Emerald Cup. The awards show took place for the first time in Hollywood this year and coincided with the opening of The Woods. Several awardees of the Emerald Cup donated their trophy to the display in The Woods. The display encourages shoppers to buy organic, sun-grown cannabis and to support the legacy farmers in the state.

Support Your Local Weed Farmer, the merch reads. On the wallframed, historic photos of cannabis farms from times past. A mural painted by a local artist covers the back wall and carries through the long hallway that will eventually lead to a smoking lounge. In the hallway, a gallery of NFT art by people imprisoned for weed cycles through on digital screens.

In one corner, you can sit down and look into a dozen little branded, weed farm dioramas. Its not the easiest display to browse, but it does encourage close inspection.

The chill vibes continued with the friendly budtenders wholl explain sun-grown organic cannabis benefits, the impacts of the War on Drugs, or the plight of legacy farmers in todays market.

The spacious store fosters browsing, with a decent-sized, well-curated selection. We saw 155 flowers on the menu. Los Angelenos are hooked on indoor flavors, and outdoor has a tough time penetrating the concrete jungle. The Woods stands out with Emerald Triangle brands not usually available this far south:

Woody also made concessions to LAs indoor exotic pot culture. We see tasty new flavors from:

Typically, you can expect lower prices on outdoor weed, and eighths of outs top out at $41 plus taxes at The Woods. Better quality weed should be worth more, The Woods believes, and consequently, some of their outdoor prices rival indoor.

In the future, the store will be one of a cluster of related businesses: a bar, a smoking lounge, and a dispensary. Each will have separate entrances and requirements, and it sounds like the bar and lounge will be very upscale.

I admit Im not the typical client of a store like The Woods. I prefer a dispensary connected to a different facet of LA culturethe Backpack Boyz, Dr. Greenthumbs, Cookies, Sherbinskis, and Greenwolfs of LA. But Woodys chic Woods gives WeHoans the chance to put their money where their values liestarting with sungrown, organic top-shelf from small, legacy NorCal hippies.

Dan Wilson

Dan Wilson is an independent pot journalist based in Los Angeles. Wilson is the founding Editor of Visit Hollyweed, California's cannabis community newspaper. His Los Angeles Dispensary Guidebook was published in April.

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Woody Harrelson's weed store reviewed: Into The Woods - Leafly

Watch AI help basketball coaches outmaneuver the opposing team – Science Magazine

Posted on October 1, 2019 by Danzig

By Edd GentSep. 27, 2019 , 8:00 AM

When it comes to teaching basketball players how to execute a winning drive to the hoop, a tactic board can be a coachs best friend. But this top-down view of the court has a major limitation: It doesnt reveal how the opposing team will respond. A new program powered by artificial intelligence (AI) could change that.

Heres how the technology works. A coach sketches plays on a virtual tactic board on theircomputer, representing their own players as red dots and the defending team as blue dots. Once they drag their virtual players around to indicate movements and passes, an AI program trained with player movement data from the National Basketball Association converts these simplified sketches into a realistic simulation of how both offensive and defensive players would move during the play.

The underlying mechanism is a generative adversarial network, which pits two AI programs against each other. One takes sketches and tries to generate realistic player movements; the other provides feedback on how closely these match real-world data. Over time, this results in increasingly realistic plays.

The system could show coaches and players how defenders are likely to react to new movesand how they should, in turn, change their tactics, the researchers will report next month at the Association for Computing Machinery International Conference on Multimedia inNice, France. Although basketball fans and nonfans couldnt reliably distinguish simulations from real plays, top-level players often could. That suggests the movements are still not entirely realistic, and the model still needs refinement.

Continue reading here:

Watch AI help basketball coaches outmaneuver the opposing team - Science Magazine

Entelo steps up its AI game with $20M Series C – TechCrunch

Posted on June 16, 2017 by Danzig

The race to crown a winner in the AI-powered recruiting software space is on. With both Workey and Mya nabbing rounds in the last few weeks, the timing is prime for a few players to seek advantage in the form of growth capital. This seems to be exactly what Entelo, a six-year-old player in the space, is doing. The company is announcing a $20 million Series C round of financing today led byU.S. Venture Partners with Battery Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Correlation Ventures participating.

Entelo crawls the internet to automatically generate profiles of potential hiring prospects. The company then works to match prospects to its enterprise customers looking to identify and recruit top talent. Unlike LinkedIn, Entelo doesnt currently let individuals create their own accounts. Instead, all operations happen in the background, with the exception of opt-out controls that allow anyone to request their profile be deleted at any time.

Jon Bischke, CEO of Entelo, told me that his priority for the company is improving the matching process that occurs behind the scenes. Accomplishing this will require Entelo to both collect additional unstructured data from non-traditional sources like GitHub and implement additional machine learning capabilities to allow enterprises to quickly identify and target top candidates.

Entelo faces competition from both sides of the market younger AI-first startups and legacy players like LinkedIn. For the time being, it behooves enterprises to take an everything but the kitchen sink approach to gain an edge in recruiting, but that mentality might not last forever.

Bischke believes his positioning best prepares Entelo to thrive when the dust settles. He told me in an interview that without adequate data many AI-first HR startups will struggle. On the other side of the equation, LinkedIn has a lot of work ahead of it to remain innovative in the midst of apotentially distracting acquisition.

To date, Entelo has signed over 600 companies up for its platform. These businesses includeFacebook, GE, Northrop Grumman, and Target. The company will be looking to hire additional data scientists and to add to its sales team moving forward.

Entelo steps up its AI game with $20M Series C - TechCrunch

Using Bandwidth Management To Get In Front Of The AI And Automation Waves – Forbes

Posted on March 16, 2020 by Danzig

I believe the most critical leadership skill of this coming decade will be bandwidth management the ability to purposefully and intentionally manage your time, energy and attention. Are we ready? My own research suggests that we have our work cut out for us.

A shocking 73% of leaders feel that their teams do not intentionally manage their bandwidth often enough. Less than 9% see their team members always or almost always actively managing their bandwidth. This is data I collected from 139 HR leaders and executives during a recent webinar delivered on behalf of the World Business and Executive Coach Summit. The results were troubling but also unsurprising and consistent with what I see daily.

Poor Bandwidth Management Impacts Individuals And Organizations

Since the digital boom in the late 1990s, we've been increasingly overconsuming and becoming consumed. We're consumed by information and uncertainty. We're also consumed by the pure fatigue of trying to keep up in our always-on, always-connected work world. In the process, we've stopped managing how and where we spend our time, energy and attention. This has grave consequences for individuals and organizations.

On an individual level, the impact of failing to manage bandwidth is far-reaching. It leaves individuals distracted, tired and struggling to keep up with daily tasks. But there are also longer-term and complex consequences for failing to manage bandwidth that impact not only individuals but groups. Consider the following scenario.

You bring 12 people into a room with polarized political views, and you ask them to come to a consensus on a controversial issue. If they had a few weeks to develop relationships, hash out problems together and gain perspective, they might eventually discover their common ground. If they only have a few hours and no time to gain perspective, it is far more likely that these people will stand their ground. In other words, confirmation bias (a tendency to cling to information that reinforces our assumptions) will also kick in. In the end, they won't only fail to collaborate but may also end up in an increasingly polarized situation.

When we fail to manage our bandwidth, we not only risk running ourselves into the ground, we risk compromising our ability to collaborate, weigh different opinions and see things from a new perspective. For leaders in business who must take multiple perspectives into account this is a serious concern.

The Cost To Businesses Is High

To understand how low bandwidth impacts individuals and businesses, it is useful to look at the current business landscape.

While exact numbers vary, we know that automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are currently upending how we work and that there will be casualties. According to the World Economic Forum, up to 30% of existing jobs across Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations may be lost to automation by the mid-2030s. We also know that some responses are likely going to be more effective than others. For example, re-skilling one's existing workforce offers a much higher return on investment than hiring new workers to fill the higher-skill jobs connected to automation and AI. One McKinsey study found that on average, replacing an employee can cost 20-30% of an annual salary, while re-skilling costs less than 10%.

Of course, if you want to retrain rather than let go of thousands of employees, you need to have the foresight to do so before you reach a point of crisis. The problem is that all signs indicate that most leaders aren't ready for this change. With low bandwidth, they are struggling to manage day-to-day operations rather than get ahead of the automation and AI wave.

Effective bandwidth management has just a few key components, but understanding how to bandwidth management works and how to put it into practice is critical.

The first step is to build awareness. Ask yourself, what is your energy, attention and focus level?

Second, reflect on what enables you to be at your best and what's draining you. For example, heighten your awareness about the things that may be draining your energy, attention and focus. This step is all about auditing how you're working and what is and is not supporting your ability to focus on issues that truly matter.

Third, start building your agility. We're living and working in a new world. Tasks once carried out by humans are increasingly being carried out by machines. This even holds true for a growing number of high-level decision-making tasks. To survive, you have to hone the ability to adapt, respond and adjust (that is, you have to learn to work differently).

The final step entails taking action. Now that you know what makes you tick and drains your energy, start taking concrete steps to change how you work. For example, this may mean putting up filters, so you're being bombarded with less information daily, and proactively delegating more work to other members of your team.

The bottom line is simple. Leaders who want to proactively prepare for the significant disruptions the 2020s will bring across sectors don't need a crystal ball to predict the future. What they need is bandwidth to gain perspective and proactively prepare for these inevitable changes.

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Using Bandwidth Management To Get In Front Of The AI And Automation Waves - Forbes

Google’s Deep Mind Explained! – Self Learning A.I. – YouTube

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Danzig

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Sources:

Why AlphaGo is NOT an "Expert System": https://googleblog.blogspot.com.au/20...

Inside DeepMind Nature video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN1d3...

AlphaGo and the future of Artificial Intelligence BBC Newsnight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53YLZ...

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/...

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/063c1176-d2...

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/...

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/53...

https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-...

https://www.deepmind.com/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/privacynotice/2014/02/03/inside-googles-mysterious-ethics-board/#5dc388ee4674

https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-...

http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/10/111...

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

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

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Army Tests New All Domain Kill Chain: From Space To AI – Breaking Defense

Posted on August 6, 2020 by Danzig

M270A1 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) firing at the Grafenwoehr training range in Germany.

UPDATED with Lt. Gen. Karbler remarks WASHINGTON: A successful field test in Germany shows how satellite surveillance, artificial intelligence, and long-range artillery could combine to devastating effect in future war, a senior Army official said this morning. The data from that test will feed into both computer models and future field experiments later this year in the US part of the ambitious Project Convergence exercise and in the Pacific.

We have valuable data now on actually how the real operational system works, said Willie Nelson, de facto head of space efforts at Army Futures Command. To be able to provide that data back to the warfighter near real time I know the word game-changer is overused, but frankly, that is a game-changer.

Willie Nelson addresses a Defense News webcast

This is not just science experiments, he told a Defense News webcast following on yesterdays virtual Space & Missile Defense conference. We actually used the fielded equipment M777 towed howitzers and M270 MLRS rocket/missile launchers with live fires on the range in Germany. The upcoming tests will add Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) and Grey Eagle drones.

Eventually we want this stuff on every ground platform and even down to the soldier, he said, but those are a couple of years away. (While Nelson didnt mention it, the new IVAS targeting goggles about to enter service will eventually link their wearers to AI target recognition system).

Connecting an ever-wider network of different sensors to shooters with AI accelerating the data flow over land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace is central to the Pentagons evolving concept of Joint All-Domain Operations.

In this years tests, were doing that entire fires kill chain from initial detection to final destruction, Nelson said. Were able to receive that [satellite] data in theater, process that data, be able to develop targeting coordinates from that, put it directly into the [artillery] firing system, AFATDS, and be able to launch weapons on target, he said. And were doing that now very successfully in a very short time.

Nelson isnt given to overstatement. In fact, hes among the most reserved of Futures Commands eight Cross Functional Team directors, and, not coincidentally, the only civilian among them. Nominally, his CFT handles Assured Precision, Navigation, & Timing (APNT) in laymans terms, alternatives for GPS if its jammed but its mandate has expanded to include the Armys use of satellites. Nelsons team has been working closely with the Armys Network CFT, ISR Task Force, and AI Task Force on this technology.

Lockheeds prototype Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) fires from an Army HIMARS launcher truck in its first flight test, December 2019.

Satellites, AI & Humans

Today, artillery units rely on scout helicopters, drones, and forward observers on the ground to spot targets. But to counter Russian and Chinese long-range missiles, the Army is developing a family of long-range weapons including hypersonics with a thousand-plus-mile range that can hit targets much farther away than any earthbound asset can see, while recon aircraft are prime targets for ever-more-sophisticated surface-to-air weapons.

You cant assume air superiority, at least very early on, and so quite frankly the only avenue we have is to sense from space, Nelson said. The good news is, our access to space has greatly improved over the years, through a lot of innovation through commercial capabilities, primarily.

A growing variety of government and commercial satellites in Low Earth Orbit, Nelson said, can provide data of multiple types. The Army has said it doesnt need to build its own satellites for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.

UPDATEWith the standup of the space force, the Army should not be in the business of its own launch services [for] satellites, Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler, who heads Army Space & Missile Defense Command, told reporters this afternoon. Army space starts and ends on the ground.

While the Army has experimented with small satellites in the past, Karbler and his staff today made clear the service isnt interested in building its own constellations. (That doesnt rule out Army payloads hosted on satellites built and launched by others, however). We identify the requirements that we needand we hand those requirements on the space enterprise, he said. That could be DoD, that could be commercial, that could be other agencies. UPDATE ENDS

Those rapidly expanding constellations of non-Army satellites provide a wide array of data, from straightforward photographic imagery, to triangulated sources of radio emissions, to Synthetic Aperture Radar. its SAR that Nelson is most excited about, not only because it can penetrate cloud cover and the dark of night, but because commercial R&D has improved the tech to where it can fit aboard a small LEO satellite.

Historically, each of these different data sources would go to a different human analyst. It would take multiple specialists in different fields to piece together for example how a blurry photo, an indecipherable radio transmission, and a ghostly radar image, each inconclusive on its own, could together pinpoint a potential target. Then a different set of specialists would take the list of targets and match it against the commanders priorities and the available weapons.

In future conflicts, we dont have time for that, Nelson said. Thats where the AI comes in. It can radically reduce the timeline by automating the grunt work, with software replacing human analysts and planners but not, Nelson emphasized, human decision-makers.

There need to be humans in the loop when were talking about lethal power, he said. What we want to do is let machines do what machines do well[:] dull work, fast.

Heres Nelsons outline of how this kill chain works, translated into laymans terms:

Who are the humans who must ensure this AI-accelerated cycle doesnt spin out of control? The Army is figuring that out at the same time it field-tests the technology.

Its a strategic weapon, said Lt. Gen. Neil Thurgood, who is developing the Armys Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon. Its not long-range artillery.

Lt. Gen. Neil Thurgood

The last time the Army had something comparable, it was nuclear-tipped: All the US military hypersonics now in development will be precision weapons with conventional warheads. So the Army cant reprint old doctrine from the Cold War era, any more than it can use existing field artillery manuals for hypersonics.

The Armys is exploring new kinds of organization, such as Theater Fires Command. Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn, the Armys deputy chief of staff for operations, and Maj. Gen. Kenneth Kamper, head of the artillery school at Fort Sill, Okla., are leading an effort to develop new doctrine, Thurgood said. Theyre collaborating closely with the all-service Strategic Command, which controls Air Force strategic bombers, ICBMs, and Navy nuclear missile submarines, and which will likely have a role in Army hypersonics too.

Think of hypersonics as a strategic weapon, Thurgood told yesterdays SMD conference. It literally is bringing the Army back into the days where we had weapons systems like Pershing, where we had strategic weapons that were part of the combatant commands war plans, and those were held at the STRATCOM level.

The mission planning for the hypersonic weapon is at that level, he said. It is not happening at the battery level.

It is not a traditional field artillery mission, Thurgood said at this mornings follow-up webinar. This is a detailed, preplanned set of events that will happen at the STRATCOM level all the way down to the battery level.

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Army Tests New All Domain Kill Chain: From Space To AI - Breaking Defense

This Artificial Intelligence Stock Raised Its Dividend on "Black Thursday" – Motley Fool

Posted on March 16, 2020 by Danzig

As many now know, last Thursday was an historic day in the stock market. On March 13, 2020, the S&P 500 plunged 9.5% in a single day, the worst daily drop since "Black Monday" in 1987. The plunge came the day after President Trump delivered an underwhelming speech that included a European travel ban. However, stocks rallied on Friday after news of more government stimulus, emergency measures to boost testing, and the purchasing of oil for the country's strategic reserve. Negotiations for a comprehensive support package for the economy are also ongoing.

However, one tech company was tuning out the noise. Semiconductor equipment maker Applied Materials (NASDAQ:AMAT) decided to announce an increase in its dividend on the exact same day the market went into freefall. Is that a sign of confidence, or foolishness?

Image source: Getty Images.

Applied Materials announced that it would raise its quarterly dividend by a penny, from $0.21 to $0.22, a 4.8% boost. Applied's dividend yield is now 1.86%, but that's with a very modest 27.5% payout ratio. The higher dividend will be paid out on June 11, to shareholders of record as of May 21. CEO Gary Dickerson said: "We are increasing the dividend based on our strong cash flow performance and ongoing commitment to return capital to shareholders. ... We believe the AI-Big Data era will create exciting long-term growth opportunities for Applied Materials."

Semiconductors and semiconductor equipment companies have historically been known to be cyclical parts of the tech industry. However, it appears Applied Materials believes the overarching trends for faster and smarter semiconductors should help the company power through a near-term economic disruption. As chip-makers make smaller and more advanced chips, Applied's machines are a necessary expenditure.

But can the long-term trends buffer the company in a times of a potential global recession?

It should be known that the semiconductor industry was already in a downturn last year in 2019, and was beginning to come out of it in early 2020. For Applied, last quarter's results exceeded the high end of its previous guidance, with revenue up 11% and earnings per share up 21%.On Feb. 12, management also guided for solid sequential growth in Q2 even while lowering its prior numbers by $300 million because of coronavirus as of that date.

On a Feb. 12 conference call with analysts, Dickerson reiterated that optimism:

We believe we can deliver strong double-digit growth in our semiconductor business this year as our unique solutions accelerate our customers' success in the AI-Big Data era... our current assessment is that the overall impact for fiscal 2020 will be minimal. However, with travel and logistics restrictions, we do expect changes in the timing of revenues during the year. We are actively managing the situation in collaboration with our customers and suppliers.

While many businesses across the world have seen severe interruptions, it's unclear if the chip industry will be affected as much as others, despite its reputation for cyclicality. While consumer-related electronics may take a temporary hit to demand, a more stay-at-home economy means the need for faster connections, which could actually increase demand for servers and base stations.

Memory chip research website DrameXchange released a report on March 13, outlining its current projections for the DRAM and NAND flash industries as of March 1, along with an updated "bear case" scenario should the coronavirus crisis escalate into a global recession, which was updated on March 12.

AI Platform | Microsoft Azure

Posted on April 2, 2018 by jessica

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Researchers find AI is bad at predicting GPA, grit, eviction, job training, layoffs, and material hardship – VentureBeat

Posted on March 31, 2020 by Danzig

A paper coauthored by over 112 researchers across 160 data and social science teams found that AI and statistical models, when used to predict six life outcomes for children, parents, and households, werent very accurate even when trained on 13,000 data points from over 4,000 families. They assert that the work is a cautionary tale on the use of predictive modeling, especially in the criminal justice system and social support programs.

Heres a setting where we have hundreds of participants and a rich data set, and even the best AI results are still not accurate, said study co-lead author Matt Salganik, a professor of sociology at Princeton and interim director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. These results show us that machine learning isnt magic; there are clearly other factors at play when it comes to predicting the life course.

The study, which was published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the fruit of the Fragile Families Challenge, a multi-year collaboration that sought to recruit researchers to complete a predictive task by predicting the same outcomes using the same data. Over 457 groups applied, of which 160 were selected to participate, and their predictions were evaluated with an error metric that assessed their ability to predict held-out data (i.e., data held by the organizer and not available to the participants).

The Challenge was an outgrowth of the Fragile Families Study (formerly Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study) based at Princeton, Columbia University, and the University of Michigan, which has been studying a cohort of about 5,000 children born in 20 large American cities between 1998 and 2000. Its designed to oversample births to unmarried couples in those cities, and to address four questions of interest to researchers and policymakers:

When we began, I really didnt know what a mass collaboration was, but I knew it would be a good idea to introduce our data to a new group of researchers: data scientists, said Sara McLanahan, the William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton. The results were eye-opening.

The Fragile Families Study data set consists of modules, each of which is made up of roughly 10 sections, where each section includes questions about a topic asked of the childrens parents, caregivers, teachers, and the children themselves. For example, a mother who recently gave birth might be asked about relationships with extended kin, government programs, and marriage attitudes, while a 9-year-old child might be asked about parental supervision, sibling relationships, and school. In addition to the surveys, the corpus contains the results of in-home assessments, including psychometric testing, biometric measurements, and observations of neighborhoods and homes.

The goal of the Challenge was to predict the social outcomes of children aged 15 years, which encompasses 1,617 variables. From the variables, six were selected to be the focus:

Contributing researchers were provided anonymized background data from 4,242 families and 12,942 variables about each family, as well as training data incorporating the six outcomes for half of the families. Once the Challenge was completed, all 160 submissions were scored using the holdout data.

In the end, even the best of the over 3,000 models submitted which often used complex AI methods and had access to thousands of predictor variables werent spot on. In fact, they were only marginally better than linear regression and logistic regression, which dont rely on any form of machine learning.

Either luck plays a major role in peoples lives, or our theories as social scientists are missing some important variable, added McLanahan. Its too early at this point to know for sure.

Measured by the coefficient of determination, or the correlation of the best models predictions with the ground truth data, material hardship i.e., whether 15-year-old childrens parents suffered financial issues was .23, or 23% accuracy. GPA predictions were 0.19 (19%), while grit, eviction, job training, and layoffs were 0.06 (6%), 0.05 (5%), and 0.03 (3%), respectively.

The results raise questions about the relative performance of complex machine-learning models compared with simple benchmark models. In the Challenge, the simple benchmark model with only a few predictors was only slightly worse than the most accurate submission, and it actually outperformed many of the submissions, concluded the studys coauthors. Therefore, before using complex predictive models, we recommend that policymakers determine whether the achievable level of predictive accuracy is appropriate for the setting where the predictions will be used, whether complex models are more accurate than simple models or domain experts in their setting, and whether possible improvement in predictive performance is worth the additional costs to create, test, and understand the more complex model.

The research team is currently applying for grants to continue studies in this area, and theyve also published 12 of the teams results in a special issue of a journal called Socius, a new open-access journal from the American Sociological Association. In order to support additional research, all the submissions to the Challenge including the code, predictions, and narrative explanations will be made publicly available.

The Challenge isnt the first to expose the predictive shortcomings of AI and machine learning models. The Partnership on AI, a nonprofit coalition committed to the responsible use of AI, concluded in its first-ever report last year that algorithms are unfit to automate the pre-trial bail process or label some people as high-risk and detain them. The use of algorithms in decision making for judges has been known to produce race-based unfair results that are more likely to label African-American inmates as at risk of recidivism.

Its well-understood that AI has a bias problem. For instance, word embedding, a common algorithmic training technique that involves linking words to vectors, unavoidably picks up and at worst amplifies prejudices implicit in source text and dialogue. A recent study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) found that many facial recognition systems misidentify people of color more often than Caucasian faces. And Amazons internal recruitment tool which was trained on resumes submitted over a 10-year period was reportedly scrapped because it showed bias against women.

A number of solutions have been proposed, from algorithmic tools to services that detect bias by crowdsourcing large training data sets.

In June 2019, working with experts in AI fairness, Microsoft revised and expanded the data sets it uses to train Face API, a Microsoft Azure API that provides algorithms for detecting, recognizing, and analyzing human faces in images. Last May, Facebook announced Fairness Flow, which automatically sends a warning if an algorithm is making an unfair judgment about a person based on their race, gender, or age. Google recently released the What-If Tool, a bias-detecting feature of the TensorBoard web dashboard for its TensorFlow machine learning framework. Not to be outdone, IBM last fall released AI Fairness 360, a cloud-based, fully automated suite that continually provides [insights] into how AI systems are making their decisions and recommends adjustments such as algorithmic tweaks or counterbalancing data that might lessen the impact of prejudice.

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Researchers find AI is bad at predicting GPA, grit, eviction, job training, layoffs, and material hardship - VentureBeat

This AI can discover the hidden links between great works of art – ZDNet

Posted on July 30, 2020 by Danzig

When MIT CSAIL PhD student Mark Hamilton saw the "Rembrandt and Velazquez" exhibit in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum last year, he was surprised to see that some works of art that have no connection on paper, can look eerily similar in reality.

The show's curators had paired Francisco de Zurbarn's The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion, a 17th century Spanish religious painting, with Jan Asselijn's The Threatened Swan, a Dutch canvass from a similar age. While the artists never met each other during their lives, the two works show some clear visual resemblance.

The researchers were inspired by an unlikely, yet similar pairing: Francisco de Zurbarn's, The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion (left) and Jan Asselijn's The Threatened Swan (right).

It got Hamilton thinking about the other hidden links that could be uncovered in the history of art. The researcher and his team, in partnership with Microsoft, have now unveiled a new algorithm that takes image retrieval technology a step further, to run through millions of paintings across thousands of years and find unexpected parallels in themes, motifs, and visual styles.

Dubbed "MosAIc", the system is currently running on the databases of works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Rijksmuseum. From a single image, the tool can uncover connections in whatever culture or media the user is interested in, and quickly reach a number of closest possible works that match the original query.

MosAIc, for instance, was presented with the Dutch Double Face Banyan, an anonymous item of clothing from the late 18th century, and found similarities with a Chinese ceramic figurine. The connection can be traced to the flow of porcelain and iconography from Chinese to Dutch markets between the 16th and 20th centuries.

MosAIc was presented with the Dutch Double Face Banyan, and found similarities with a Chinese ceramic figurine.

To develop MosAIc, the research team used an image retrieval system and the well-known "k-nearest neighbors" (KNN) algorithm, which is widely used to find objects based on similarity, for product recommendation for example.

Typically, however, image retrieval systems that are enabled by the KNN algorithm present some limitations. The scope of a query is effectively limited: in the case of paintings, users could only ask for similar artwork from a specific artist. Or, they could run so-called "unconditional" queries, and gradually filter their way through results until they got an accurate answer, a process that is costly and time consuming.

Hamilton and his team, instead, created a conditional image retrieval system (CIR), which delegates the filtering to the algorithm. The researchers still used the KNN algorithm, but enabled it to add "conditions", like texture, content, color or pose, while the program is running, until it reaches the closest match for the original query.

The process is called a conditional KNN tree: the algorithm groups similar images together in a tree-like structure, and starting from the trunk, applies new filters as it climbs up, following the most promising branch until it finds the most accurate image.

SEE: Managing AI and ML in the enterprise 2020: Tech leaders increase project development and implementation (TechRepublic Premium)

Hamilton said: "Restricting an image retrieval system to particular subsets of images can yield new insights into relationships in the visual world. We aim to encourage a new level of engagement with creative artifacts."

While recognizing that the technology does not break speed records, the team of researchers said that CIR can improve result diversity in a simple and efficient way.

And the new technology is not limited to artwork queries. Hamilton and his colleagues anticipate a number of applications for the new algorithm, including using MosAIc to better study deepfakes, and particularly where deepfakes most struggle to model reality.

The algorithm, while working its way to the top of the tree to find an image that best matches a real picture, at the same time leaves behind on its branches the pictures that it believes fail to represent the original input.

By going back to those branches, the researchers could visualize which images are deepfakes, as well as which conditions, or filters, convinced the algorithm to leave them behind typically, because the deepfake failed to accurately represent a certain element of reality, like a microphone or a hat.

Although sometimes invisible to the human eye, those "blind spots" are what distinguish a sophisticated deepfake from a genuine image.

Hamilton hopes that MosAIc will be used in many other fields ranging from social science to medicine. "These fields are rich with information that has never been processed with these techniques and can be a source for great inspiration for both computer scientists and domain experts," he said.

By going back to those branches, the researchers could visualize which images are deepfakes, as well as which conditions, or filters, convinced the algorithm to leave them behind.

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This AI can discover the hidden links between great works of art - ZDNet

Ai-Da, the First Robot Artist To Exhibit Herself – Entrepreneur

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Danzig

As a critic of modern life and technology, Ai-Da can draw thanks to artificial intelligence.

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February15, 20212 min read

Ai-Da , a humanoid artificial intelligence robot, will exhibit a series of self-portraits that she created by "looking" into a worm with her cameras on her eyes. It sounds strange? A little bit, we will tell you how it works and why the idea came up.

The robot was named Ai-Da after the 19th century mathematician Ada Lovelace. According to its creators, it is capable of drawing real people using its camera eye and a pencil in hand.

She 'looks' in the mirror that is integrated with her camera eyes and with the help of algorithm programs transforms it into coordinates. The hand of the artistic robotic, calculates a virtual route and interprets the coordinates to create the artwork.

The idea for Ai-Da came from the owner of the Oxford art gallery, Aidan Meller and the art curator Lucy Seal.

Seal commented that the self-portraits are meant to be a critique of our current reliance on data-driven technology.

In an interview with The Sunday Times she said that we live in a culture of selfies, but we are giving our data to the tech giants, who use it to predict our behavior. Through technology, we outsource our own decisions .

"The work invites us to think about artificial intelligence, technological uses and abuses in today's world."

His work will be exhibited at the Design Museum in London between May and June, if sanitary conditions permit. However, this would be the second exhibition, in 2019 the robot was presented and explored the limits between artificial intelligence, technology and organic life in drawing, painting, sculpture and video art.

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Ai-Da, the First Robot Artist To Exhibit Herself - Entrepreneur

Adobe’s New AI Tool Can Recommend Different Headlines and Images To The Varying Audience Of A Blog – Digital Information World

Posted on July 11, 2020 by Danzig

Continuing with their legacy of innovation, Adobe has yet again brought a new way to personalize a blog post for different users with the help of artificial intelligence.

Known by the name of Adobe Sensei, the technology will recommend different headlines, images (taken from the library of Adobe Stock), and also preview blurbs based on improving the experience for the targeted audience.

The new tool has come out as a part of the Adobe Sneaks program which employees use to develop their new ideas in the form of proper demos and then showcase what they have made at the Adobe Summit every year. So, while a lot of people consider Sneaks as merely demos, Adobe Experience Cloud Senior Director Steve Hammond disagree by telling that almost 60% of the Sneaks turn out into real products later after the Summit. Furthermore, Hyman Chung, a senior product manager for Adobe Experience Cloud state that Sneaks, in particular, can be more useful for content creators and content marketers who are already enjoying a great hile in traffic during the coronavirus pandemic and may now be looking for more unique ways to make readers engage more by doing less work.

Chung showed the magic of Experience Cloud with a test blog based on a tourism company. One blog post about traveling to Australia was presented differently to thrill-seekers, frugal travelers, partygoers, and others in the demo. The feature also provides the liberty to writers and editors to make changes in the preview according to the desired audience and even go through the Snippet Quality Score for what Sensei recommends.

Hammond also explained that the demo only illustrates Adobes approach to AI as the company majorly focuses on delivering automation in specific user cases with AI rather than going for building bigger platforms. So, in Senseis case, AI will not change the content but only how it is promoted on the site.

For privacy matters, Hammond has clearly mentioned that the audience personas are only built on what kind of information the user decides to share with the website or brand.

Read next: This New AI-Based Algorithm Created By Microsoft Helps To Restore Old Photos

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Adobe's New AI Tool Can Recommend Different Headlines and Images To The Varying Audience Of A Blog - Digital Information World

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