Vigliotti: Human Rights and Technology – Carroll County Times

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Facebook has announced that it has shut down an artificial intelligence experiment after the AI forms involved began speaking in their own language. This comes not long after Elon Musk, founder and CEO of aerospace company SpaceX, drew criticism for cautions against AI in a speech to American governors July 15. Musk has maintained the position that AI is civilizations greatest risk, and that laws must be put into place to regulate it. He has been criticized for his approach by many, but Musks concerns should be welcomed amid a seemingly unquestioning, relentlessly popular push to advance technology and shatter boundaries. In light of this progress, humanity and human rights must be fundamentally significant.

That Musk should appeal to American governors is no surprise. Musk, a South African by birth, has described himself as nauseatingly pro-American and has displayed tremendous love and respect for the United States. Musk knows it is a place of opportunity and possibility especially for technology.

History bears this out. Elbert Smith, in his book The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore, touches upon the historic centrality of technological advancement to the American makeup as the country began to function in earnest: In the development of new technology the brash young nation was unsurpassed. Between 1840 and 1850, budding American inventors applied for 13,297 patents and received 6,033.

These innovations included new ways of cultivating and harvesting grain; steel plows designed to cut through prairie earth; newer and faster trains with greater carrying capacity both for passengers and goods; and Yankee clippers, designed for trade by water. Today as then, men like Elon Musk, American by birth or by immigration, manifest the future.

Musk also knows many Americans carefully consider these innovations. We know innovation can come at a price. New devices, systems, machines, software and other creations can be used for harm as well as for good; and can bear negative consequences as well as positive outcomes. Americans are by no means Luddites seeking to tear up train tracks, but Americans are careful in their approach to particular forms of new technology. We rightfully worry about those who would sooner pay attention to their smartphones than the human being sitting across the restaurant table, to cite one common example.

When the focus is on the machine and not the man, we know there is cause for concern. Interactivity with the machine instead of interaction with our fellow human beings creates a kind of selfish isolation: We are dulled to human connection, and distanced from love of the other. A machine, for the moment, is subject to our control; and a human being other than ourselves is a free agent who cannot be controlled in the same fashion. And so we turn away from the other to ourselves.

In so doing, we lose the respect of recognition of the other, and the other becomes unimportant. We lose what philosopher Roger Scruton refers to as the you-I relationship. Philosopher Gilbert Ryles contention that there is no ghost in the machine (read: human body) that there is no mind or soul that exists within the human body that distinguishes it is artificially upheld by our own choosing of technology. That ghost our God-breathed souls is rendered irrelevant. The human becomes merely a body, or a machine. Our humanity is therefore lost, and those whom we disagree with and cannot control become second to technology. Machines can therein become a means to control those whom with which we disagree, by indoctrination, systematic enforcement or violence. And in the case of Facebooks AI, the machines can take on a life of their own.

Musks precautions have been criticized by many as being grounded more in science fiction films than in reality but it is clear Musks concerns have merit. Typically, we consider movies like those of the Terminator series against a backdrop of dystopian novels and films to attempt to gain a broader understanding of the limits of our progress, and the ramifications of unchecked innovation. History and current events tell us the same. They tell us that free societies and totalitarian regimes tend toward different ends, will use the technology available to them, and will set out to innovate from the present. (Consider the level of technologically-based censorship of information in North Korea.) We know that a free society can descend into tyranny, even predicated on good intentions. Fiction often reflects reality, and fiction can explore the theoretical. Combined, these things prove to be an omen.

We come away from this with a simple philosophical precept that has existed for thousands of years: Just because it can be done, does not mean it should be done. Before we commit to any course, we have to ask fundamental questions regarding our humanity, our culture and our laws. For example, do we allow private ownership of AI forms that have the ability to wield or act as weapons? Do we limit or regulate the kinds of activities and functions these AI forms can engage in, such as work, parenting, sex and inventing their own languages? Do we limit the level and range of intelligence and adaptability an AI form may possess? Do we consider the AI form to have any rights, or a different kind of rights and would this affect our own human rights and humanity as whole? What do we do when a company fails to self-regulate, and a situation like Facebooks is not succinctly concluded? Do we have a right to do anything at all?

This is not alarmism, but proactivism. We must be optimistic, but cautious; and we must be hopeful yet realistic. Technological innovation and progress are beautiful things but these things can also impose dangers. That two of Facebooks AI forms could begin communicating in a language known only to them is immensely disturbing, and removes a barrier between science fiction and reality. Before we act, we have to have answers to fundamental questions else, innovation will be our undoing.

Joe Vigliotti is a writer and a Taneytown city councilman. He can be reached through his website at http://www.jvigliotti.com.

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Vigliotti: Human Rights and Technology - Carroll County Times

Technology Gets Under The Skin – NPR

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The decision of a company to offer its employs the option to hack their bodies to function better in the workplace has raised eyebrows and, no doubt, generated publicity.

But it also gives us a chance to turn a light on hidden attitudes about the nature of the self.

Imagine that you could pay for your morning coffee with the swipe of your hand, or that you didn't need to have a key on your person to start up your car. Pretty convenient, huh?

And not really that futuristic at all. In principle, you could wear a chip-enabled ring or bracelet that would let you seamlessly navigate the walls and marketplaces of the electronic world.

Well, if that would work, then why not enjoy the extra added convenience of having the chip inserted into your body the way we put finder chips into dogs and cats?

A company in Wisconsin made news last week by offering its employees the option of getting a chip surgically implanted so that they would be able to navigate electronic pathways at the company's headquarters more easily. The company's move has gotten tons of attention (including here and here at NPR).

Many concerns have been raised. Health is a big one: Do we know the long-term effects of having something inside of you emit a signal to an external receiver? And then there's privacy: Assurances to the contrary notwithstanding, how do you know a device like this won't be used to track you? It says on my Social Security card that it isn't meant to be a means of identification. But that's exactly how it is used in our daily life.

And then there are concerns about whether an employee is free to say "no" to a company initiative of this sort.

If we put all that aside, though, I find myself wondering: What's the big deal? Does it make a difference, beyond shear convenience, that the transmitter is in your hand (like a splinter, say) rather than on your hand, like a ring?

If you think it does, this may be because you take for granted that to put something in you is to bring about a more basic alteration in who or what you are.

But is that really true? Just because something is inside you, that doesn't make it a part of you. My dental work isn't part of me, is it? The fact that it is cemented in place and, so, that it is difficult to remove doesn't make it me. Ditto, I would say, for the grain-of-rice-sized-chip-in-the-hand. It might as well be the stud of an earring as something inserted beneath the skin for all that it forces us to rethink our natural limits.

In fact, it is easier, I think, to find conditions on the outside that more truly get under our skin and change what we are. A blind person and her cane, or even the guitarist and her instrument, these seem to be examples where the true boundaries of a person defined not by the limits of the skin, but by the limits of what a person can do are altered. Consider the way learning a new language, or the way learning to read, can alter a person by, in effect, altering their reality.

The body and the person are different things. Just because something is in me doesn't mean, really, that it is in me; and just because something is outside me, doesn't mean that it isn't, really, part of what I am.

There may be interesting borderline cases. Drugs (e.g. medicines) are technologies that we consume to alter ourselves. This may be why we feel that athletes who use drugs as part of their training are only partially responsible for what they accomplish. What they have done, we some how feel, wasn't really done by them. We don't, in the same way, begrudge an athlete the benefits of good coaching, healthy diet, the best equipment and sports science. But is this rational?

Plastic surgery is another borderline case. Although some celebrities have proudly declared that they have had plastic surgery, there remains a lingering idea, I think, that surgically enhanced good looks is somehow inauthentic. Curiously, surgically enhanced achievements in sports is almost normal and is not associated with the stigmas of performance enhancing drugs.

Body hacking is "cool" these days. Despite the widespread practice of piercing and tattooing, the willingness to mark-up and alter one's body still somehow carries the air of individual freedom and daring. I suspect that one reason the Wisconsin story gets so much airplay is that it is tied to this kind of buzz.

But it is harder by far, and maybe more transformative, to build shared structures tools, technologies, ideas, memes on which we can rely, and thanks to which we can do new things and reach new heights.

Alva No is a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, where he writes and teaches about perception, consciousness and art. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). You can keep up with more of what Alva is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe

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Technology Gets Under The Skin - NPR

The 19th Century Moral Panic Over Paper Technology – Slate Magazine

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Black Bess; or The Knight of the Road, aromanticized tale of Dick Turpin.

Edward Viles, Wikipedia.

In the history of information technologies, Gutenberg and his printing press are (understandably) treated with the kind of reverence even the most celebrated of modern tech tycoons could only imagine. So perhaps it will come as a surprise that Europes literacy rates remained fairly stagnant for centuries after printing presses, originally invented in about 1440, started popping up in major cities across the continent. Progress was inconsistent and unreliable, with literacy rates booming through the 16th century and then stagnating, even declining, across most of Western Europe. Great Britain, France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy all produced more printed books per capita in 16511700 than in 17011750.

Then came the early 19th century, which saw enormous changes in the manufacture of paper and improvements on the printing press. These changes both contributed to and resulted from major societal changes, such as the worldwide growth increase in formal education. There were more books than ever and more people who could read them. For some, this looked less like progress and more like a dangerous and destabilizing trend that could threaten not just literature, but the solvency of civilization itself.

The real price of books plummeted by more than 60 percent between 1460 and 1500: A book composed of 500 folio pages could sell for as much as 30 florins in 1422 in Austriaa huge amount of money at the timebut by the 1470s, a 500-folio book would fetch something in the neighborhood of 10 florins. There were even books on the market that sold for as little as 2 or 3 florins. In 1498, a Bible composed of over 2,000 folio pages sold for 6 florins. Costs continued to decline, albeit at a much slower rate, over the next three centuries. As a result, books were no longer reserved only for the clergy or for kings: Owning a printed Bible or book of hours became a coveted status symbol for the emerging class of moderately wealthy merchants and magnates.

Books remained, however, far outside the range of the common man or woman, until the price plummeted once again in the 19th century. No longer was literacy necessarily a signifier of wealth, class, and status. This abrupt change created a moral panic as members of the traditional reading classes argued over who had the right to informationand what kind of information ought to be available at all.

The shift happened thanks to major developments in both printing and paper technology. The printing press had not changed much between 1455, when Gutenberg printed his famous Bible, and 1800: The letters had to be hand-placed in a matrix, coated with a special ink that transferred more cleanly from tile to pageanother of Gutenbergs inventionsand pressed one-by-one onto the pages. The first major change to this tried-and-tested design came with Friedrich Koenigs mechanized press in 1812, which could make 400 impressions per hour, compared to the 200 impressions per hour allegedly accomplished by printers in Frankfurt, Germany, in the second half of the 16th century. In 1844, American inventor Richard March Hoe first deployed his rotary press, which could print 8,000 pages in a single hour.

Naturally, faster prints drove up demand for paper, and soon traditional methods of paper production couldnt keep up. The paper machine, invented in France in 1799 at the Didot familys paper mill, could make 40 times as much paper per day as the traditional method, which involved pounding rags into pulp by hand using a mortar and pestle. By 1825, 50 percent of Englands paper supply was produced by machines. As the stock of rags for papermaking grew smaller and smaller, papermakers began experimenting with other materials such as grass, silk, asparagus, manure, stone, and even hornets nests. In 1800, the Marquess of Salisbury gifted to King George III a book printed on the first useful Paper manufactured solely from Straw to demonstrate the viability of the material as an alternative for rags, which were already in extraordinary scarcity in Europe. In 1831, a member of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India tried to convince the East India Company that Nepalese ash-based paper ought to be generally substituted for the flimsy friable English paper to which we commit all our records.

One newspaper was so unsatisfied with the quality of its straw paper that it apologized to readers.

By the 1860s, there was a decent alternative: wood-pulp paper. Today, wood-pulp paper accounts for 37 percent of all paper produced in the world (with an additional 55 percent from recycled wood pulp), but when it was introduced, the prospect of a respectable publication using wood-pulp paper was practically unthinkablehence pulp fiction, the early 19th-century literary snobs preferred way to insult a work as simultaneously nondescript and sensational.

The problem with wood-pulp paper was its acidity and short cellulose chains, which made it liable to slow dissolution over decades. It couldnt be used for a fine-looking book that could be passed through a family as an heirloom: It neither looked the part, nor could it survive the generations.

Traditional rag paper, on the other hand, was smooth, easy to write on, foldable, and could be preserved for centuries. Paper made from nontraditional materials, especially wood pulp, was acidic and rough. (Paper from straw, which enjoyed brief popularity in 1829 thanks to the chance invention of a Pennsylvania farmer, is durable, but brittle and yellowed. One newspaper was so unsatisfied with the quality of its straw paper that it apologized to readers.)

Wood pulp or straw, the cheap paper used in mass-market books sold at extremely low prices. There were a few different kinds of these books, all with descriptive (and usually pejorative) names: the penny dreadfuls (gothic-inspired tales sold for a penny each), pulp magazines (named after the wood-pulp paper of which they were composed), yellowbacks (cheap books bound using yellow strawboard, which is then covered with a paper slip in yellow glaze), and others. The cheapness that had made them so unsuitable for fine books and government records made them excellent fodder for experimental, unusual, and controversial literary developments.

Detractors delighted in linking the volatile matter of wood-pulp paper with the volatile minds of pulp readers. Londoner W. Coldwell wrote a three-part diatribe, On Reading, lamenting that the noble art of printing should be pressed into this ignoble service. Samuel Taylor Coleridge mourned how books, once revered as religious oracles degaded into culprits as they became more widely available.

By the end of the century there was growing concernespecially among middle class parentsthat these cheap, plentiful books were seducing children into a life of crime and violence. The books were even blamed for a handful of murders and suicides committed by young boys. Perpetrators of crimes whose misdoings were linked to their fondness for penny dreadfuls were often referred to in the newspapers as victims of the books. In the United States, dime novels (which usually cost a nickel) were given the same treatment. Newspapers reported that Jesse Pomeroy, a teenage serial killer who targeted other children, was a close reader of dime novels and yellow covered literature [yellowbacks], until, as was argued in his trial, his brain was turned, and his highest ambition was to emulate the violent dime novel character Texas Jack. Moralizers painted the books as no better than printed poison, with headlines warning readers that Pomeroys brutality was what came of reading dime novels. Others hoped that by providing alternativespenny delightfuls or penny popularsthey could curb the demand for the sensational literature. A letter to the editor to the Worcester Talisman from the late 1820s tells young people to stop reading novels and read books of substance: [F]ar better were it for a person to confine himself to the plain sober facts recorded in history and the lives of eminent individuals, than to wander through the flowery pages of fiction.

These books represent the beginnings of modern mass media. At the confluence of increasing literacy rates and ever-growing urban populations looking for recreation, cheap imprints flourished. But it wasnt just social change driving the book boom: It was technological change as well. In 1884, Simon Newton Dexter North, who would later become superintendent of the Census Bureau, wrote in his intensive study of the 10th census that the chief cause for the reduction in the price of paper is the successful useof wood pulp.

For a material meant to be transient, wood-pulp paper has left its mark and the world. Forests have shrunk while literacy rates have soared, and today the hunt is on for wood pulps replacement. We are living in the ironic epilogue to a triumph of a hard-won Victorian-era innovation. Wood pulp paper took on a life of its own as soon as it hit the presses, and it demonstrates to a modern audience the crucial lesson that the impact of a technology goes beyond what it does: what it is made of, who uses it, who doesnt use it, and what it represents to the people who buy it.

This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

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The 19th Century Moral Panic Over Paper Technology - Slate Magazine

Technology tracks ‘bee talk’ to help improve honey bee health – Phys.Org

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August 4, 2017 SFU Mechatronics Systems Engineering graduate student Oldooz Poyanfar and her bee monitoring system PRO. Credit: Simon Fraser University

Biologists are working to better understand Colony Collapse Disorder given the value of honey bees to the economy and the environment. Monitoring bee activity and improving monitoring systems may help to address the issue.

Simon Fraser University graduate student Oldooz Pooyanfar is monitoring what more than 20,000 honeybees housed in hives in a Cloverdale field are "saying" to each otherlooking for clues about their health.

Pooyanfar's technology is gleaning communication details from sound within the hives with her beehive monitoring systemtechnology she developed at SFU. She says improving knowledge about honey bee activity is critical, given a 30 per cent decline in the honeybee population over the past decade in North America. Research into the causes of what is referred to as Colony Collapse Disorder continues. The presence of fewer bees affects both crop pollination and the environment.

Pooyanfar's monitoring platform is placed along the wall of the hive and fitted with tiny sensors containing microphones (and eventually, accelometers) that monitor sound and vibration. Temperature and humidity are also recorded. Her system enables data collection on sound within the hives and also tracks any abnormalities to which beekeepers can immediately respond.

The high-tech smart system is being used to gather data over the summer.

Pooyanfar, who has been working with Chilliwack-based Worker Bee Honey Company, believes that better understanding the daily patterns and conditions, using an artificial neural network in the hive, will help to improve bee colony management. Current methods of monitoring provide less detailed information and can disrupt bee activity for up to 24 hours every time the hive is opened.

"To learn about what bees are communicating, we can either look at pheromonesthe chemical they produceor sound," says Pooyanfar, who initially received funding through the MITACS Accelerate program. The City of Surrey is providing the field space for her research.

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"With this monitoring system, we are collecting data in real time on what the bees are 'saying' about foraging, or if they're swarming, or if the queen bee is present right now we are collecting as much data as possible that will pinpoint what they are actually doing."

Pooyanfar, a graduate student in SFU's School of Mechatronics Systems Engineering, plans to eventually manufacture a sensor package for this application to help lower the costs of monitoring and allow more beekeepers to monitor their hives in real-time. Her initial-stage research was featured at the Greater Vancouver Clean Technology Expo last fall.

Explore further: Vibrating bees tell the state of the hive

Before eating your next meal, pause for a moment to thank the humble honeybee. Farmers of almonds, broccoli, cantaloupe and many other nuts, vegetables and fruits rely heavily on managed honeybees to pollinate their crops ...

It was a sticky situation.

Honey bees are responsible for pollinating crops worth more than US$19 billion and for producing about US$385 million in honey a year in the United States. In Australia, honey bee production is a A$92-million industry.

Thousands of honey bees in Australia are being fitted with tiny sensors as part of a world-first research program to monitor the insects and their environment using a technique known as 'swarm sensing'.

Molly Keck, a Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service entomologist and integrated pest management specialist in Bexar County, has been receiving a number of phone calls from area residents bewildered by recent bee activity.

Despite having few taste genes, honey bees are fine-tuned to know what minerals the colony may lack and proactively seek out nutrients in conjunction with the season when their floral diet varies.

(Phys.org)An international team of researchers has found evidence showing that maize evolved to survive in the U.S. southwest highlands thousands of years ago. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group ...

A chance discovery has opened up a new method of finding unknown viruses.

When trouble looms, the fish-scale geckos of Madagascar resort to what might seem like an extreme form of self-defensetearing out of their own skin.

Scientists have developed a computational method to detect chemical changes in DNA that highlight cell diversity and may lead to a better understanding of cancer.

A new study led by the Australian National University (ANU) has found that plants are able to forget stressful weather events to rapidly recover.

In the last 20 years, the field of animal coloration research has experienced explosive growth thanks to numerous technological advances, and it now stands on the threshold of a new era.

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Technology tracks 'bee talk' to help improve honey bee health - Phys.Org

Trump promotes technology to improve veterans’ health care – ABC News

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President Donald Trump announced new efforts Thursday to use technology to improve veterans' health care, saying the programs will greatly expand access, especially for mental health care and suicide prevention. Veterans living in rural areas will also benefit, he said.

Initiatives include using video technology and diagnostic tools to conduct medical exams. Veterans also will be able to use mobile devices to make and manage appointments with Veterans Administration doctors.

"We call it 'anywhere to anywhere' VA health care," VA Secretary David Shulkin said. Shulkin said the goal is better health care for veterans wherever they are. He said existing "telehealth" programs provided care to more than 700,000 veterans last year.

A medical doctor, Shulkin wore his white coat to the White House announcement, during which he demonstrated the technologies for Trump.

Trump said, "This will significantly expand access to care for our veterans, especially for those who need help in the area of mental health, which is a bigger and bigger request, and also in suicide prevention. It will make a tremendous difference for the veterans in rural locations in particular."

A regulation will need to be issued for these services to be provided anywhere in the country.

Shulkin was the VA's undersecretary for health in the final years of the Obama administration.

Associated Press writer Ken Thomas contributed to this report.

Follow Darlene Superville on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dsupervilleap

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Trump promotes technology to improve veterans' health care - ABC News

The Supreme Court is about to become more transparent, thanks to technology – Washington Post

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After lagging behind other courts for years, the Supreme Court is finally catching up on a key technological feature that will be a boon to researchers, lawyers and analysts of all kinds. It's moving to adopt electronic filing.

The change will allow the public to access legal filings for all future cases free of charge. Beginning Nov. 13, the court will require parties who are represented by counsel to upload digital copies of their paper submissions. Parties representing themselves will have their filings uploaded by thecourt's staff.

All those submissions will then be entered into an online docket for each case, and they will be accessible from the court's homepage.

The move brings the Supreme Court fully into the Internet age, and it fulfills a promise outlined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in 2014.

While courts routinely consider evidence and issue decisions concerning the latest technological advances, they have proceededcautiously when it comes to adopting new technologies in certain aspects of their own operations, he said at the time.

By as soon as 2016, Roberts said, the court would offer an online system that can handle all types of filings, including petitions, motions and briefs.

Roberts's timing, it turns out, was not far off.

Virtually all federal courts are already on board with electronic submissions. As early as 2001, some federal court documents were available over the Internet through a system known as PACER, or the Public Access to Court Electronic Records. Even before the Internet, the public could get to filings electronically by using special terminals at libraries and other institutions.

PACER has its shortcomings. It charges users a fee of $0.10 per page, which can add up if you're going through hundreds or thousands of documents. Because federal court recordsare considered public domain, those charges can also be a waste of money for researchers unaware that documents for a case have already been downloaded by somebody else and made available for sharing. To circumvent this problem, independent researchers have built their own tool, RECAP, to save people money.

But the Supreme Court tool goes further, making all its filings free. For some, that's not just a step forward it's a leapfrog ahead.

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The Supreme Court is about to become more transparent, thanks to technology - Washington Post

Will Jets’ complex offense slow Christian Hackenberg’s progress? – ESPN (blog)

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FLORHAM PARK, N.J. -- When Christian Hackenberg receives a playcall from the sideline, it could sound something like this:

"Blast to Joker right 'X' motion 372 'R' Slant spacing."

It's a base pass play in Jon Gruden's version of the West Coast offense, known for its complicated verbiage. He taught the system years ago to New York Jets offensive coordinator John Morton, who introduced it to the team in April.

Hello, crash course.

Veteran quarterbacks say it takes years to master the West Coast offense. Some have complained, claiming it takes too long to receive the play and relay it to the huddle. The Jets are hoping Hackenberg -- in his fourth offensive system in the past five years -- can learn it well enough to play this season.

Mentally, it's an enormous challenge, particularly since Morton hasn't streamlined it. He's installing the system in its original form, which means a giant playbook and a lot of memorization.

"You have to keep getting reps at it, hearing it, saying and spitting it back out," Hackenberg said.

The well-traveled Josh McCown, 38, who has played in just about every system known to man, said the West Coast offense is "like learning a new language." He said the average playcall is 10 to 12 words, which means they're longer than some of Todd Bowles' news conference answers. Every word and every number has a specific meaning, covering the formation, motions/shifts and pass-protection schemes. Mess up one syllable, and you ruin the entire play.

The Jets' quarterbacks -- McCown, Hackenberg and Bryce Petty -- drill each other on the verbiage. Not only do they want to memorize the playcalls, but their goal is to repeat them with conviction.

"[You] want to rattle that out smoothly, where the guys in the huddle believe in what were talking about," McCown said.

League insiders think McCown has the edge in the Jets' quarterback competition, in large part, because of his background in this offense. He has played in variations of the West Coast offense, which is a new world for Hackenberg and Petty.

Former NFL quarterback Jim Miller has a unique perspective because he played under Gruden (Tampa Bay Buccaneers) and former Jets coordinator Chan Gailey (Pittsburgh Steelers). Miller said there's little similarity between the two systems, one of the reasons why he favors McCown in the competition.

"I think it will be McCown, I really believe that," said Miller, who co-hosts a SiriusXM NFL radio show with Pat Kirwan. "He gives them their best chance to win. He knows that offense, inside and out. Let the young guys learn from him."

Miller, who visited the Jets this week on his training-camp tour, was kind enough to give a detailed breakdown of the playcall: Blast to Joker right "X" motion 372 "R" Slant spacing. If you like Xs and Os, you'll enjoy this.

Blast: The type of shift.

Joker right: The final formation after the shift. In this case, a running back shifts out of the backfield and splits out wide right.

X motion: The X receiver motions across the formation from weak to strong.

372: This is the protection. Gruden called it Jet 2 (right) or Jet 3 (left). Miller used a numerical code. It's 372 because the play requires a three-step drop by the quarterback and "72" is the protection, with the line sliding toward the weakside linebacker. The line is responsible for the four-man line, plus the Will linebacker -- a 5-on-5 situation.

R Slant: After shifting, the running back runs a slant route.

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How the play unfolds: The remaining running back reads the middle linebacker and strongside linebacker. If they both rush, the quarterback is a blocker short and must throw quickly to his best matchup. The tight end runs a five-yard hook. The X receiver, after motioning across the formation, runs a flat route. The Z receiver hooks at five yards.

Mind you, this is only one play. There are hundreds in Morton's playbook, and each one has variations because of different formations. This is a small sample of what's spinning in Hackenberg's brain when he steps into the huddle, and he must convince 10 other players he knows what he's doing.

"You want to convey that, 'Hey, I'm in control of this ship and I understand what's going on,'" Miller said. "That's command, that's huddle presence, that's conviction. Make those players believe in you."

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Will Jets' complex offense slow Christian Hackenberg's progress? - ESPN (blog)

Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw making progress, pushing to pitch again soon – Los Angeles Times

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Dodgers manager Dave Roberts text messaged Clayton Kershaw on Thursday asking for an update on the left-handers rehabilitation from a lower back strain.

Roberts was waiting to hear back when he met with the media before his team faced the Atlanta Braves in a series finale at SunTrust Park. Even so, Roberts reported only progress for Kershaw, who he said was pushing to throw off a mound soon.

Hes more on the aggressive side, which is no surprise to any of us, Roberts said. Were trying to temper that, a little bit.

When you hear Clayton wanting to do more, and be more aggressive, thats a good thing.

Kershaw injured his back during a game at Dodger Stadium on July 23. The team has not announced a timetable for his return, although the initial prognosis was a four-to-six week absence. An examination of his back showed no damage to the disk he herniated last summer, the team has said.

The Dodgers do not want Kershaw to rush back and risk re-injury, as he did while trying to come back in 2016. Roberts said the team had not set a date for Kershaw to pitch off a mound again. Kershaw started to play catch only five days after the initial injury. He is expected to meet the team on Tuesday in Phoenix.

Im sure Ill know more in the next day or two, Roberts said. But the good thing is he feels physically that he can do more.

Cingrani arrives

After the Dodgers acquired left-handed reliever Tony Cingrani from Cincinnati on Monday, general manager Farhan Zaidi mentioned how Cingrani would benefit from altering his approach. Cingrani had posted a 5.40 earned-run average for the Reds, despite striking out 24.2% of the batters he faced.

In informal conversations before Thursday, when Cingrani was activated, Dodgers officials relayed their hope that Cingrani would use his slider more. He had thrown his fastball 88.4% of the time this season, according to FanGraphs. The slider clocked in at 2.4%.

Im very open to most things, Cingrani said. Im not, like, set in my ways by any means. I definitely am hardheaded, but when the point is smart and brought up to you in a convincing way, and youre like Yep, that works, and it sounds right, you cant disregard that. Youve got to take it.

McCarthy slowed

Brandon McCarthy has not pitched for the Dodgers since July 20. On the 10-day disabled list because of blisters on his right hand, McCarthy will try to synchronize the upper and lower halves of his delivery, Roberts said.

McCarthy experienced mechanical glitches during his last four starts and struggled to command his pitches.

In talking to our medical staff, physically hes not synced up, Roberts said. And he feels that theres still some things mechanically, and physically, that he needs to work through to give himself the best chance to have success in a major-league game.

There is no timetable for his return, Roberts said.

Short hops

To make room on the 40-man roster for Cingrani, the Dodgers optioned pitcher Brock Stewart to triple-A Oklahoma City. Adrian Gonzalez was expected to begin a rehab assignment with Oklahoma City on either Thursday or Friday. Roberts was not interested in discussing President Donald Trumps nomination of former Dodgers co-owner Jamie McCourt as the ambassador to France. Yu Darvish took a flight to New York on Thursday afternoon. He will make his Dodgers debut there on Friday against the Mets.

andy.mccullough@latimes.com

Twitter: @McCulloughTimes

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Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw making progress, pushing to pitch again soon - Los Angeles Times

No Roma progress in bid to sign Leicester City’s Riyad Mahrez – Monchi – ESPN FC

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The FC crew discuss Riyad Mahrez's performance at Leicester last season and weigh in on a potential move to Roma.

Roma sporting director Monchi has said there has been no further movement in the club's attempts to sign Leicester playmaker Riyad Mahrez.

The Giallorossi are the only club to have made a bid for Algeria international Mahrez, who submitted a transfer request earlier this summer.

Leicester manager Craig Shakespeare has said the 26-year-old would prefer to stay in England, and Monchi told a news conference: "The situation with Mahrez has not changed.

"I would like to say a couple of things, though. A club like Roma, who can boast the calibre of players like [Lorenzo] Pellegrini, [Kevin] Strootman, [Radja] Nainggolan, [Edin] Dzeko, [Federico] Fazio or [Aleksandar] Kolarov, cannot think that their overall performance is going to depend on the arrival of just one specific right-winger.

"The guarantee comes from the route you are on and the group you have.

"The second message I wanted to give is that I don't know if Mahrez or somebody else will come but, whoever arrives, he will be a big player who is able to add quality to an already magnificent squad."

He said Roma would "prefer a left-footer, but it is the player's profile which counts," adding: "For the way the team play -- where the wide players tend to come inside -- a left-footer would be better, but it could also be a right-footer with natural tendencies to come inside.

"All the names that have been mentioned are interesting players and potential Roma targets, but the important thing is that I keep a certain degree of discretion in my work so I don't create confusion."

The sporting director also gave details of the players he expected to leave before the close of the window, saying: "We are looking for solutions for [Norbert] Gyomber, [William] Vainqueur, [Leandro] Castan and [Juan] Iturbe.

"We are close to a solution in some cases, whereas we are quite far away in others -- but there is still a month left."

Ben Gladwell reports on Serie A, the Italian national team and the Bundesliga for ESPN FC, UEFA and the Press Association. @UEFAcomBenG.

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No Roma progress in bid to sign Leicester City's Riyad Mahrez - Monchi - ESPN FC

Titans QB Marcus Mariota Encouraged by Progress – Titansonline.com

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. A week into training camp, quarterback Marcus Mariota is feeling good about himself.

Even if it takes him a little longer to get warmed up for practices.

It is feeling better with every day, Mariota said on Thursday. We havent had a setback or anything like that, so a lot of credit goes to the training staff here in helping me get warmed up and helping me once practice is done, get prepared for the next one.

Mariota was limited during the teams offseason work as he worked his way back from the fractured fibula he suffered against the Jaguars last December.

But hes looked better each day during the first week of training camp, especially from a mobility standpoint.

Mariota has taken off and shown his speed and the ability to make sharp cuts -- on numerous plays, including some sprints to the outside when hes faced pressure. Hes been mostly accurate throwing the football, although cornerback Adoree Jackson stepped in and picked off one of his passes on Thursday.

Ive seen nothing but good things from Marcus, tight end Delanie Walker said. You see him out here throwing, running around. He looks like his old self. He looks good to me.

Offensive coordinator Terry Robiskie agreed, while saying the Titans are gearing practices to allow Mariota time to work himself back to 100 percent.

Marcus is looking good, and he is moving around real well, Robiskie said. As far as what we are putting in for him, what we are going to call and directions of things from that nature, the easy thing for me is I can leave all of that with (quarterbacks coach) Jason Michael. Jason might say, Today, Marcus has a little soreness in his left leg or His hip is hurting him a little bit. And whatever J-Mike says to do, that is what we are going to do.

He is outstanding in monitoring Marcus and saying, He feels this way or he feels that way. And Marcus is going about it pretty good.

Mariota admits it takes him a little longer to warm up before practices, however.

It gets stiff once practice kind of stops and we are done for the day, Mariota said. But thats just how it is, and what is going to happen. If I have to spend an extra five to ten minutes getting my body prepared, Ill do that.

Mariota is also using training camp to develop chemistry with his receivers, from veteran Eric Decker to rookies Corey Davis and Taywan Taylor. Mariota described Taylor as electric and said the team needs to find ways to get him more involved. He already seems to have nice chemistry with Decker, signed in late June.

Davis left practice on Thursday with a hamstring injury. Titans coach Mike Mularkey said Davis was scheduled for an MRI to determine the severity, and how much time he might miss.

I thought hes done a great job of stepping in, and knowing what to do and making great plays, Mariota said of Davis. Hes made bunch of plays on the football, attacking the ball at the high point. We need him to get back and get ready to go and Im sure he will.

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Titans QB Marcus Mariota Encouraged by Progress - Titansonline.com

Work in progress – Petoskey News-Review

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With about a month left in the traditional summer season, road construction crews have completed or made significant progress on a number of projects throughout Emmet and Charlevoix counties. The following is a look at where those long-term projects stand and what is yet to come.

Michigan Department of Transportation

The Michigan Department of Transportation has already completed a few significant projects in repaving a section of M-119 east of Harbor Springs and overhaul work on Memorial Bridge in Charlevoix this past spring. However, there is one bigger project that still has several weeks to go, and one more that will be starting just after Labor Day.

U.S. 31 north of Pellston: Since early April, crews have been working on a major reconstruction project on a 4.2-mile stretch of U.S. 31 between Douglas Lake Road on the north side of Pellston to Levering Road. The $5 million project includes realigning a curve south of Ball Road, excavating several feet of unstable subsurface soils, other roadbed stabilization work and culvert replacement.

Portions of the project have required a detour around the affected area.

Michigan Department of Transportation spokesman James Lake said this week that the project remains on track for its originally estimated completion date in late October.

Were still on schedule, having wrapped up the northern and southern sections of this project, and moving on to the middle section where were replacing some culverts. We just started work on the last large box culvert, then well move on to some remaining road base work and then initial paving. By the end of the month we plan to lift the detour and maintain traffic with a single-lane closure under flag control for the remainder of the project, scheduled to be complete by the end of October, Lake said.

U.S. 131 in southern Emmet County: An earlier announced project to resurface a 4.2-mile section of U.S. 131 from Lears Road to Bear River Road is still expected to begin shortly after Labor Day.

Lake said the $970,000 project will involve grinding off and replacing the top layer of asphalt. The project will require single-lane closures and is expected to be completed by Oct. 20.

M-75 North in Charlevoix County: Earlier this summer Michigan Department of Transportation crews spent about two weeks doing maintenance work on M-75 North between Boyne City and the village of Walloon Lake. The work left some area motorists puzzled about the project and concerned about the plan for the road section going forward.

Lake explained that the maintenance work done is known as durapatching which is a hybrid of crack sealing and chip sealing. He said the process is primarily aimed at sealing the roadway and filling in some cracking and potholes.

Lake further explained: Its more durable than cold asphalt patching, but it is built up slightly higher than the surrounding roadway, as we need to taper it to the sound pavement. Thats the reason it feels somewhat bumpy to drivers. This is work done by an MDOT maintenance crew that performs this type of work all over Northern Michigan. Its just intended to keep the road held together for a few more years when we return with a resurfacing project on this stretch currently slated for 2019.

Petoskey

Emmet Street: The most significant street and infrastructure project in the city of Petoskey this year has been taking place for about the past two months on a three-block section of Emmet Street between Washington and State streets. The project involves complete replacement of water, sewer and storm sewer, infrastructure, placing electrical and cable lines underground, street and sidewalk reconstruction, and streetscaping. Around the Fourth of July crews finished work on most of the southern portion of the project and began work on the northern half.

On Wednesday, city public works director Mike Robbins said as of today, Friday, crews are expected to wrap up the majority of the underground infrastructure work involved. He said next week crews will start placing gravel and bringing the street up to grade. After that concrete crews will move in and begin pouring curbs and sidewalks.

He said weather permitting, crews could begin paving the first course on the north section by the end of the month. He said the project is still on track to be completely wrapped up by mid-September.

Gas line work: Although not a city project, Robbins also highlighted an ongoing a DTE Energy natural gas pipeline extension project that will have some impact on neighborhood traffic in the coming weeks.

Robbins said on Wednesday crews began working on Kalamazoo Avenue. They will then move down Grove Street to Waukazoo, and then eventually from Waukazoo to Beach Street. Robbins said the city has asked the crews to limit traffic restrictions related to the work to one block at a time to keep traffic impacts to a minimum.

Emmet County

Emmet County Road Commission Engineer-Manager Brian Gutowski said the road commission is having a record year for township-funded road projects with more than $3 million in work taking place.

Ongoing Emmet County Road Commission projects include:

Atkins Road from Cedar Valley Road eastward for approximately 0.65 mile in Bear Creek Township. This is a reconstruction of the road. The road has temporary closures. The project is expected to be completed sometime next week. This is a township-funded project.

Mackinaw Highway from U.S. 31 to Trails End Road for 2.2 miles in Wawatam Township. This is a total reconstruction and also has temporary closures. This project just started on Monday of this week. The work is expected to be completed by Sept. 15. This project is funded through the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians with Federal Highway Administration - Bureau of Indian Affairs funds.

Osborne Road from State Road westward for 1 mile in Readmond Township. The road is a gravel road and is being widened in preparation for future paving. This is a township-funded project and is expected to be completed toward the end of September.

Asphalt wedging on various roads in Carp Lake Township, Bliss Township, Cross Village Township, Center Township and McKinley Township. These are township-funded projects.

Projects still to be started this year are as follows:

Townline Road from Middle Village Road then south for 0.91 mile in Friendship Township. This is an asphalt overlay project and funded by the township.

Beacon Hill Road from Stutsmanville Road then south for 0.09 mile in Friendship Township. This is an asphalt overlay project and funded by the township.

Channel Road from Pickerel Lake Road to the Minnehaha Creek for 1 mile in Springvale Township. This is a reconstruction project and funded by the township. There will be lane closures during the project. The work is expected to begin before the end of August and be completed by the end of September.

Maxwell Road over Minnehaha Creek for culvert replacement. Crews will be replacing 2 3-foot culverts and installing a 14-foot culvert. This project is slated to begin the week of Aug. 14 and be completed by Aug. 24. This section of road will be closed during the project which is being funded through the Tip of the Mitt watershed with U.S. Fish and Wildlife and National Fish and Wildlife Foundation funds to improve fish passage in the creek.

Charlevoix County

The most notable project for the Charlevoix County Road Commission is one that wasnt planned. On May 6 a many-decades-old culvert on Shadow Trail collapsed as a vehicle drove over it and that road has been closed ever since. Last week, after many weeks of delays, crews began work to replace the culvert.

Road commission engineer Jim Vanek said work is progressing with crews driving sheet piling in to prepare for putting the new culvert in place. He said if the weather cooperates, crews are hoping to have the road back open before Labor Day. He said the weather can have a significant impact on the work because even a small amount of rain can raise the level of Fineout Creek. He noted that the rain that fell on the area early Wednesday raised the water level about a foot when crews arrived later in the morning.

Anderson Road: Vanek said work is expected to begin in the next two to three weeks on a project along boundary between Boyne City and Wilson Township. The project will involve reconstructing a 0.53-mile section of Anderson Road from Marshall Road nearly to Day Road.

The work will include reconstructing the road using a process known as crush and shape, in which the existing pavement is pulverized and used as the roadbed for the new pavement, removal of some poor subgrade soils and installing about 1,200 feet of storm sewer lines on each side of the road.

The contract calls for the project to be completed by Sept. 22.

Vanes said a few other smaller projects are also still on the schedule for yet this construction season. Perhaps the most notable will be a project to replace a culvert on Horton Bay Road in Bay Township right at the Lavender Hill Farm location.

The project is expected to start in mid-September and take about two weeks to complete. The road will be closed and traffic will be detoured to Pincherry and Church roads while the work is taking place.

Other upcoming project include repaving the Sumner Road entrance to Villa De Charlevoix, which is expected to start Sept. 8; a small paving job in the Springbrook Hill subdivision in Melrose Township; and some paving work on residential streets on the north side of U.S. 31 in Bay Shore, expected to take place in the next few weeks.

Charlevoix

Just this week The Charlevoix City Council approved a street resurfacing contract.

All of the work will involve pulverizing the existing asphalt, regrading the road and compacting that material, and then laying two, 1.5-inch layers of asphalt for a total of 3 inches of asphalt.

The work will take place on portions of Stover, Lake, Newman, Auld, Oak, Elm, Prospect, Burns, West Dixon, Coast Guard Drive, and two small sections of May Street.

These roads and/or sections of city roads were chosen due to their degraded condition and the amount of time and money the city has spent spent filling potholes and other repairs, city manager Mark Heydlauff said.

Boyne City

Boyne City officials took care of several road resurfacing projects earlier this summer. Those projects have all been completed and no other significant street projects are planned this year, city street superintendent Andy Kovolski said.

East Jordan

East Jordan City Administrator Tom Cannon said the city had no major street projects on the docket this year. He said a few minor projects will probably take place yet this year on some residential streets.

Harbor Springs

Harbor Springs City Manager Tom Richards said the city had no street projects planned this year. The only work taking place yet this year is some guard rail replacement on Pennsylvania Avenue and replacing a failing retaining wall near the intersection of Third and Judd streets. Work on the retaining wall project is expected to begin in September.

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Work in progress - Petoskey News-Review

Fish die-off in progress at Lake Elsinore – Press-Enterprise

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As a casualty of extreme weather conditions, dead fish began to appear on the surface of Lake Elsinore and wash up on shore Thursday, Aug. 3, city officials said.

City employees deployed to beaches and on the water to collect and dispose of the carcasses as quickly as possible, City Manager Grant Yates said.

He described the dying fish as 98 percent shad minnows and carp. The cleanup activity is expected to continue Friday.

Yates said the fish kill was relatively minor compared to some of the episodes in previous years when large numbers of bass and other sport fish were affected.

The incident in progress now is similar to what happened in August 2015 when a die-off occurred during a series of days when temperatures reached well over 100 degrees.

Officials say the health of Southern Californias largest natural, freshwater lake remains fragile because of ongoing high heat and algae blooms. Lake overseers believe a sudden drop this week in the lakes oxygen levels resulting from heat, overcast skies and a thunder storm sparked the die-off.

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Fish die-off in progress at Lake Elsinore - Press-Enterprise

Singularitarianism – Lesswrongwiki

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Wikipedia has an article about

Singularitarianism refers to attitudes or beliefs favoring a technological singularity.

The term was coined by Mark Plus, then given a more specific meaning by Eliezer Yudkowsky in his Singularitarian principles. "Singularitarianism", early on, referred to an principled activist stance aimed at creating a singularity for the benefit of humanity as a whole, and in particular to the movement surrounding the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

The term has since sometimes been used differently, without it implying the specific principles listed by Yudkowsky. For example, Ray Kurzweil's book "The Singularity Is Near" contains a chapter titled "Ich bin ein Singularitarian", in which Kurzweil describes his own vision for technology improving the world. Others have used the term to refer to people with an impact on the Singularity and to "expanding one's mental faculties by merging with technology". Others have used "Singularitarian" to refer to anyone who predicts a technological singularity will happen.

Yudkowsky has (perhaps facetiously) suggested that those adhering to the original activist stance relabel themselves the "Elder Singularitarians".

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Singularitarianism - Lesswrongwiki

How the death of EDM brought pop music one step closer to eternal life – Washington Post

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Today, well be discussing how a Selena Gomez song might foreshadow humanitys triumph over biological death but first, raise your hand if you remember EDM. It was short for electronic dance music, a style once poised to eat the planet for lunch and then eat itself for dessert. Five summers ago, as a new league of superstar DJs were being paid astronomical amounts of money to perform at packed festivals the world over, the musics sustainability didnt appear to be at the forefront of anyones mind. In 2015, Forbes reported that the EDM bubble was about to burst . In 2016, Pitchfork made the case that it had .

But this unofficial collapse hasnt forced the star producers of EDM to unplug their laptops and register for the GRE. In fact, plenty are faring exceptionally well this summer, taking up residence on the Billboard Hot 100 after partnering with an array of willing pop vocalists Calvin Harris with Pharrell Williams, the Chainsmokers with Coldplay, David Guetta with Justin Bieber. These kinds of genre-splicing collaborations arent anything new, but with EDM now in decline, theyve quietly reversed their polarity. Instead of making dance tracks that behave like pop songs, these producers appear to be making pop songs that behave a little more like dance tracks.

In most instances, the result is just a mirror-image of the same old thing, but for a certain class of pop singers, it seems to be changing the way they apply their physicality to a geometric dance rhythm. You can hear it on the radio this summer whenever Gomez goes hopscotching across the grid of Kygos It Aint Me, or when Alessia Cara leans hard against the right-angles of Zedds Stay, or in the way Halsey seems to be gasping for air in the digital vacuum of her solo single Now or Never. All three songs are delivered with mechanical clarity, with all three vocalists making direct lyrical references to eternity. Are they singing about transhumanism?

Not long after our species learned how to dream, we were probably dreaming of ways to exceed the limitations of our bodies. Its the stuff of religions and comic books. Now, its the work of Silicon Valley, where a growing number of transhumanists believe that mankinds next evolutionary leap will occur once we figure out how to convert consciousness into code, allowing for a digital transmigration of souls. In his recent book, To Be a Machine, author Mark OConnell describes transhumanism as a liberation movement advocating nothing less than a total emancipation from biology itself. That emancipation means eternal life inside a supercomputer. Heaven is a hard drive.

The idea isnt so shocking if you watch Black Mirror or if you listen to pop music. For well over a decade now, Auto-Tune software has been narrowing the musical gap between humans and machines, generating signature hooks for everyone from T-Pain to Future. However, whether we as listeners embrace Auto-Tune as a tool or denounce it as a crutch often depends on whos singing through it. When Kanye West uses computer software to manipulate his voice, hes an artist. When Britney Spears does the same thing, shes a girl who cant sing.

That double standard helps to explain why Ellie Goulding hasnt been recognized as one of the more significant pop vocalists of our time. The British singer always had bright ideas about phrasing, but it wasnt until she loaned her voice to a few juggernaut EDM singles that her singing began to feel totally frictionless. And it had more to do with Gouldings inflection than whatever digital processing she was applying to it. By the time she released her 2015 album, Delirium, Goulding was weaving the curves of her voice through a world of clean-edged rhythms as if drawing a map to the future.

[Ellie Goulding is singing from inside the pop machine]

With Now or Never, Halsey has that map folded up in her back pocket. Its a slower, stronger, smarter, more spacious song than Closer, her massive EDM hit with the Chainsmokers, and it gives the 22-year-old the opportunity to do some captivating things with her breath. When shes breathing in, shes all human, taking sharp little hits of oxygen that dramatize the ballads sustained romantic ache. But when shes breathing out, shes at least half-machine, singing about pain with precision. Listen close to how she lingers on the words now, time and forever. The grain in her voice sounds like its pixelating.

Alessia Caras Stay a collaboration with the German EDM producer Zedd addresses the gap between data and soul in the form of a simple duet, with a refrain thats delivered in two parts. First comes Cara pushing her voice especially hard into the songs rigid architecture. Then comes a gush of synthesized melodies pantomiming what the 21-year-old just sang. Its a game of call and response, but the call sounds big-hearted, and the response sounds no-hearted, giving the dialogue a sinister glint. Cara is singing about forestalling a separation, but she might as well be teaching the HAL 9000 how to sing Daisy.

With It Aint Me, Norwegian producer Kygo isnt playing a game so much as conducting a test one in which Gomez must first coo alongside a gently plucked guitar and then over the relentless thuds of sub-woofing bass. As the song builds its graceless crescendo, the coffee shop turns into a rave, with the most promising 25-year-old in pop showing us how she can make her voice feel artificial in an intimate setting and expressive in an anonymous one.

That so-real-it-sounds-fake quality in Gomezs singing is put to far better use over the uncluttered beat of Bad Liar, a hit single about an affection that cant be suppressed. The song radiates such indomitable charm, even its bad lyrics ooze weird charisma. In the first verse, Gomez asserts, just like the Battle of Troy, theres nothing subtle here. Sure. In the second verse, she purrs, If youre the art, Ill be the brush. If she says so. And does she? Are these malformed bits of poetry the result of human error, or were they written by a buggy algorithm? Its hard to know for sure, and the pleasure is in the not-knowing.

Youll want to savor that confusion until Gomez reaches the bridge and blurts out the most metaphysical romantic advance to grace the radio in years: Oh, baby, lets make reality. Amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing. The nature of her proposition depends entirely on whether shes pretending to be a machine, but either way, whos going to sayno?

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How the death of EDM brought pop music one step closer to eternal life - Washington Post

‘Embrace ICT with caution’ – The Herald

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Lt-Gen Sibanda

George MapongaMasvingo Bureau Zimbabwe National Army Commander Lieutenant-General Philip Valerio Sibanda has urged the nation to be cautious in embracing Information Communication Technology (ICT), as it exposes the young to vices like pornography, terrorism and Satanism.Speaking at the Commander Zimbabwe National Army 2017 Merit Awards attended by all army schools at 4.1 Infantry Battalion yesterday, Lt-Gen Sibanda said the young should not have access to undesirable websites.

He hailed progress made in computerising army schools around the country.

While technology is good, it must also be noted that it has a dark side where our children might end up accessing undesirable websites on the Internet and these undesirable things include pornography, terrorism and Satanism, said Lt-Gen Sibanda.

Efforts must continue to be put to make sure that these undesirable websites are not accessible to our children, particularly those in school.

Lt-Gen Sibanda urged Zimbabweans to heed President Mugabes call to uphold the importance of Ubuntu/Hunhu.

He said it was important for the country to mould loyal and patriotic children.

On ZNA schools, Lt-Gen Sibanda said the organisation had adopted a Science and Technology policy that promoted teaching of sciences.

The ZNA is building modern science laboratories at all army schools.

Lt-Gen Sibanda paid tribute to ZNA Charities for availing $375 000 for the construction of a science laboratory block at Induna High School at Imbizo Barracks.

He expressed satisfaction with the pass rate in army schools, which increased from 91 percent in 2015 to 94,5 last year.

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'Embrace ICT with caution' - The Herald

Israel’s ‘crown prince’ Yair Netanyahu under fire for crude post – Santa Rosa Press Democrat

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2 killed in sky-diving accident near Lake Tahoe

Northern California authorities seize 27,000 pot plants in 4-day raid

Southern California thunderstorms leave damage

Shuttered Santa Rosa recycling center gets major overhaul

CSU to drop placement tests, remedial class

Longtime Univision news anchor to step down

ARON HELLER

ASSOCIATED PRESS | August 4, 2017, 7:53AM

| Updated 2 hours ago.

JERUSALEM Since becoming an adult, the eldest son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly drawn media criticism for what has been portrayed as a life of privilege at taxpayers' expense.

Yair Netanyahu, 26, has been described as someone who hobnobs with world leaders and enjoys a state-funded bodyguard, while living at the prime minister's official residence.

But his recent behavior, including a crude social media post, has now drawn public rebuke from the children of a former Israeli leader, along with threats of a libel suit. It has also revived criticism of the Netanyahu family's perceived hedonism and sense of entitlement, at a time when the prime minister faces multiple corruption allegations.

Israeli police on Thursday disclosed that Netanyahu is suspected of fraud, breach of trust and bribes in a pair of cases, just as his son was being pilloried in the press.

The younger Netanyahu hit the tabloids last weekend when a neighbor posted an account of how he refused to pick up after the Netanyahu family dog at a public park and then, when confronted, gave the neighbor the finger.

Yair Netanyahu then lashed out on Facebook at a website run by a liberal think tank that detailed what it said was his lavish lifestyle at taxpayers' expense.

In the post, Netanyahu alleged the site is funded by what he claimed are foreign interests, referring indirectly to the dovish New Israel Fund, which he renamed the "Israel Destruction Fund." He signed the post with emojis of a middle finger and a pile of excrement.

Avner Inbar, the chairman of the Molad organization that runs the site, said they had served the younger Netanyahu with a notice of intent to sue if he does not retract his comments. He said Molad stopped receiving money from the NIF last year and that the posts "had no iota of truth to them."

He also said their item on Yair Netanyahu was the most viral in their four years online and viewed by 1.25 million Israelis.

"It's probably because his antics have just irked so many Israelis," said Inbar. "It's not just that he lives off the taxpayers in an unprecedented fashion but that he thinks he belongs to the royal family and is therefore immune from criticism. He thinks he is above the people."

The New Israel Fund noted that Yair Netanyahu posted the comments on Tisha B'Av, the day Jews mourn the destruction of their biblical Temples, brought upon by internal divisions and hatred.

"On this day ... it would be appropriate for the prime minister to educate his son to spread the love of Israel," the fund said in a statement.

But perhaps the harshest reactions came from some of the other targets of his post, in which he claimed the children of former Israeli leaders Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert did not come under such scrutiny.

It included an insinuation that one of Olmert's sons had an "interesting relationship with a Palestinian man" that affected national security.

Olmert's son Ariel fired back on Facebook, denying he was gay, dismissing the claims as a fabrication and accusing the younger Netanyahu of "racism and homophobia."

"I've ignored that until now, maybe because in my opinion there's nothing negative about being either gay or Palestinian," he wrote. "Your attempts to drag me into your twisted reality are doomed to fail."

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Ariel Olmert added that he works for a living, never slept in the prime minister's residence and "on principle, try to pick up my dog's doody."

His older brother Shaul then chimed in, calling Yair Netanyahu a fascist thug.

Their sister Dana Olmert declined comment when contacted by The Associated Press.

The online exchanges highlighted Yair Netanyahu's pronounced presence of late around his father.

In May, he was on hand to welcome President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump at the official Netanyahu residence and was heard telling Mrs. Trump how he related to their youngest son Barron's struggle with the spotlight.

He has also reportedly taken a leading role in his father's social media platform.

Yair Netanyahu has also been questioned though not as a suspect about a corruption scandal in which his father was asked by police "under caution" about ties to executives in media, international business and Hollywood.

Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, are said to have received more than $100,000 worth of cigars and liquor from Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan, who reportedly asked Netanyahu to press the U.S. secretary of state in a visa matter.

Australian billionaire James Packer has reportedly lavished Yair with gifts that included extended stays at luxury hotels in Tel Aviv, New York and Aspen, Colorado, as well as the use of his private jet and dozens of tickets for concerts by Packer's former fiancee, Mariah Carey.

Police are trying to determine whether these constitute bribes, since Packer is reportedly seeking Israeli residency status for tax purposes.

The prime minister has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, portraying the accusations as a witch hunt against him and his family by a hostile media.

His office declined comment Thursday on the latest affair.

David Bitan, the coalition whip from Netanyahu's Likud party, said Netanyahu's son was not involved in policy and dismissed the chatter as kid's stuff on Facebook.

"He's a private person and that is how it should be treated," he told Israel's Army Radio.

Others disagreed.

Columnist Sima Kadmon wrote in a front-page piece in the Yediot Ahronot daily Thursday that the prime minister's plea to the media to leave his family alone had no merit once his son had written "one of the nastiest and most vile posts ever."

____

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Westboro Baptist Church Boycotted the Vans Warped Tour and Artists Responded by Trolling Them – mxdwn.com

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Justine Decker August 3rd, 2017 - 7:10 PM

Warped Tour 2017attendees were welcomed with the hateful signs and religious music of protestors from Westboro Baptist Church at the festivals stop in Kansas City on July 27th.

Some of the bands, including Stick to Your Guns, I Prevail, and Blackcraft Spirits took it upon themselves to reciprocate the love to protestors by making shirts that boldly read F*** Westboro Baptist Church, Some people are Trans; Get over it, and other rebellious phrases. Eric Vanlerburger and Brian Burkheiser of the hardcore band I Prevail even swapped a generous amount of spit directly in front of a protestor whose shirt advertised the churchs website domain GodHatesFags.com. Vanlerburger shared the photo on his twitter with the caption Love will always win.

A representative of the church released this statement to the press in regard to their protest of Warped Tour:

Our young generation believes they can make a game of sin and mock God but suffer no consequences. The modern lifestyle of decadent hedonism leads to eternal misery as the wages of sin are death. The youth of this doomed nation set up these rock stars like golden idols of old that God warned us about. These musicians and celebrities are not worthy of worship and adulation. They have no power to save your soul from eternal hellfire. Instead of learning the lyrics and chords to these songs, focus on learning what the Lord requires of you.

The elitists of Westboro Baptist Church, which is located in Topeka, Kansas travelas far as Californiato spread unwarranted hate at festivals and concerts ranging in genre from rock to rap. They proudly promote their protest schedule atGodHatesFags.com. Their upcoming schedule includespicketing at Green Day, Kendrick Lamar, and Bruno Mars concerts in Kansas City.

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Westboro Baptist Church Boycotted the Vans Warped Tour and Artists Responded by Trolling Them - mxdwn.com

empiricism | philosophy | Britannica.com

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Empiricism, in philosophy, the view that all concepts originate in experience, that all concepts are about or applicable to things that can be experienced, or that all rationally acceptable beliefs or propositions are justifiable or knowable only through experience. This broad definition accords with the derivation of the term empiricism from the ancient Greek word empeiria, experience.

Concepts are said to be a posteriori (Latin: from the latter) if they can be applied only on the basis of experience, and they are called a priori (from the former) if they can be applied independently of experience. Beliefs or propositions are said to be a posteriori if they are knowable only on the basis of experience and a priori if they are knowable independently of experience (see a posteriori knowledge). Thus, according to the second and third definitions of empiricism above, empiricism is the view that all concepts, or all rationally acceptable beliefs or propositions, are a posteriori rather than a priori.

The first two definitions of empiricism typically involve an implicit theory of meaning, according to which words are meaningful only insofar as they convey concepts. Some empiricists have held that all concepts are either mental copies of items that are directly experienced or complex combinations of concepts that are themselves copies of items that are directly experienced. This view is closely linked to the notion that the conditions of application of a concept must always be specified in experiential terms.

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Western philosophy: The rise of empiricism and rationalism

The scientific contrast between Vesaliuss rigorous observational techniques and Galileos reliance on mathematics was similar to the philosophical contrast between Bacons experimental method and Descartess emphasis on a priori reasoning. Indeed, these differences can be conceived in more abstract terms as the contrast between empiricism and rationalism. This theme dominated the philosophical...

The third definition of empiricism is a theory of knowledge, or theory of justification. It views beliefs, or at least some vital classes of beliefe.g., the belief that this object is redas depending ultimately and necessarily on experience for their justification. An equivalent way of stating this thesis is to say that all human knowledge is derived from experience.

Empiricism regarding concepts and empiricism regarding knowledge do not strictly imply each other. Many empiricists have admitted that there are a priori propositions but have denied that there are a priori concepts. It is rare, however, to find a philosopher who accepts a priori concepts but denies a priori propositions.

Stressing experience, empiricism often opposes the claims of authority, intuition, imaginative conjecture, and abstract, theoretical, or systematic reasoning as sources of reliable belief. Its most fundamental antithesis is with the latteri.e., with rationalism, also called intellectualism or apriorism. A rationalist theory of concepts asserts that some concepts are a priori and that these concepts are innate, or part of the original structure or constitution of the mind. A rationalist theory of knowledge, on the other hand, holds that some rationally acceptable propositionsperhaps including every thing must have a sufficient reason for its existence (the principle of sufficient reason)are a priori. A priori propositions, according to rationalists, can arise from intellectual intuition, from the direct apprehension of self-evident truths, or from purely deductive reasoning.

In both everyday attitudes and philosophical theories, the experiences referred to by empiricists are principally those arising from the stimulation of the sense organsi.e., from visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory sensation. (In addition to these five kinds of sensation, some empiricists also recognize kinesthetic sensation, or the sensation of movement.) Most philosophical empiricists, however, have maintained that sensation is not the only provider of experience, admitting as empirical the awareness of mental states in introspection or reflection (such as the awareness that one is in pain or that one is frightened); such mental states are then often described metaphorically as being present to an inner sense. It is a controversial question whether still further types of experience, such as moral, aesthetic, or religious experience, ought to be acknowledged as empirical. A crucial consideration is that, as the scope of experience is broadened, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish a domain of genuinely a priori propositions. If, for example, one were to take the mathematicians intuition of relationships between numbers as a kind of experience, one would be hard-pressed to identify any kind of knowledge that is not ultimately empirical.

Even when empiricists agree on what should count as experience, however, they may still disagree fundamentally about how experience itself should be understood. Some empiricists, for example, conceive of sensation in such a way that what one is aware of in sensation is always a mind-dependent entity (sometimes referred to as a sense datum). Others embrace some version of direct realism, according to which one can directly perceive or be aware of physical objects or physical properties (see epistemology: realism). Thus there may be radical theoretical differences even among empiricists who are committed to the notion that all concepts are constructed out of elements given in sensation.

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Two other viewpoints related to but not the same as empiricism are the pragmatism of the American philosopher and psychologist William James, an aspect of which was what he called radical empiricism, and logical positivism, sometimes also called logical empiricism. Although these philosophies are empirical in some sense, each has a distinctive focus that warrants its treatment as a separate movement. Pragmatism stresses the involvement of ideas in practical experience and action, whereas logical positivism is more concerned with the justification of scientific knowledge.

When describing an everyday attitude, the word empiricism sometimes conveys an unfavourable implication of ignorance of or indifference to relevant theory. Thus, to call a doctor an Empiric has been to call him a quacka usage traceable to a sect of medical men who were opposed to the elaborate medicaland in some views metaphysicaltheories inherited from the Greek physician Galen of Pergamum (129c. 216 ce). The medical empiricists opposed to Galen preferred to rely on treatments of observed clinical effectiveness, without inquiring into the mechanisms sought by therapeutic theory. But empiricism, detached from this medical association, may also be used, more favourably, to describe a hard-headed refusal to be swayed by anything but the facts that the thinker has observed for himself, a blunt resistance to received opinion or precarious chains of abstract reasoning.

As a more strictly defined movement, empiricism reflects certain fundamental distinctions and occurs in varying degrees.

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A distinction that has the potential to create confusion is the one that contrasts the a posteriori not with the a priori but with the innate. Since logical problems are easily confused with psychological problems, it is difficult to disentangle the question of the causal origin of concepts and beliefs from the question of their content and justification.

A concept, such as five, is said to be innate if a persons possession of it is causally independent of his experiencee.g., his perception of various groupings of five objects. Similarly, a belief is innate if its acceptance is causally independent of the believers experience. It is therefore possible for beliefs to be innate without being a priori: for example, the babys belief that its mothers breast will nourish it is arguably causally independent of his experience, though experience would be necessary to justify it.

Another supposedly identical, but in fact more or less irrelevant, property of concepts and beliefs is that of the universality of their possession or acceptancethat a priori or innate concepts and beliefs must be held by everyone. There may be, in fact, some basis for inferring universality from innateness, since many innate characteristics, such as the fear of loud noises, appear to be common to the whole human species. But there is no inconsistency in the supposition that a concept or belief is innate in one person and learned from experience in another.

Two main kinds of concept have been held to be a priori. First, there are certain formal concepts of logic and of mathematics that reflect the basic structure of discourse: not, and, or, if, all, some, existence, unity, number, successor, and infinity. Secondly, there are the categorial conceptssuch as substance, cause, mind, and Godwhich, according to some philosophers, are imposed by the mind upon the raw data of sensation in order to make experiences possible. One might add to these the more specific theoretical concepts of physics, which are sometimes said to apply to entities that are unobservable in principle.

In the long history of debate over the a priori, it was long taken for granted that all a priori propositions are necessarily truei.e., true by virtue of the meanings of their terms (analytic) or true by virtue of the fact that their negations imply a contradiction. Propositions such as all triangles have three sides, all bachelors are unmarried, and all red things are coloured are necessarily true in one or both of these senses. Likewise, it was held that propositions that are contingently true, or true merely by virtue of the way the world happens to be, are a posteriori. John is a bachelor and Johns house is red are propositions of this type.

In the 1970s, however, the American philosopher Saul Kripke argued to the contrary that some a priori propositions are contingent and some a posteriori propositions are necessary. According to Kripke, the referential properties of natural kind terms like heat can be understood by imagining that their referents were fixed, upon their introduction into the language, by means of certain definite descriptions, such as the cause of sensations of warmth. In other words, heat was introduced as a name for whatever phenomenon happened to satisfy the description the cause of sensations of warmth. Of course, the phenomenon in question is now known to be molecular motion. Thus heat refers to molecular motion, then and now, because molecular motion was the cause of sensations of warmth when the term was introduced. Given this introduction, however, the proposition heat causes sensations of warmth must be a priori. Because its introduction stipulated that heat is the phenomenon that causes sensations of warmth, it is knowable independently of experience that heat causes sensations of warmth, even though it is only a contingent matter of fact that it does. On the other hand, the proposition heat is molecular motion is a posteriori, because this fact about heat was discovered (and could only be discovered) through empirical scientific investigation. But the proposition is also necessary, according to Kripke, because once the referent of heat has been fixed as molecular motion, there are no imaginable circumstances in which the term could refer to anything else. This conclusion is supported by the intuition that, if it were discovered tomorrow that sensations of warmth in humans are actually caused by something other than molecular motion, one would not say that heat is not molecular motion but rather that sensations of warmth are caused by something other than heat. Kripke proposed a similar analysis of the referential properties of proper names like Aristotle, according to which a proposition like Aristotle was the teacher of Alexander the Great is contingent but a priori.

Empiricism, whether concerned with concepts or knowledge, can be held with varying degrees of strength. On this basis, absolute, substantive, and partial empiricisms can be distinguished.

Absolute empiricists hold that there are no a priori concepts, either formal or categorial, and no a priori beliefs or propositions. Absolute empiricism about the former is more common than that about the latter, however. Although nearly all Western philosophers admit that obvious tautologies (e.g., all red things are red) and definitional truisms (e.g., all triangles have three sides) are a priori, many of them would add that these represent a degenerate case.

A more moderate form of empiricism is that of the substantive empiricists, who are unconvinced by attempts that have been made to interpret formal concepts empirically and who therefore concede that formal concepts are a priori, though they deny that status to categorial concepts and to the theoretical concepts of physics, which they hold are a posteriori. According to this view, allegedly a priori categorial and theoretical concepts are either defective, reducible to empirical concepts, or merely useful fictions for the prediction and organization of experience.

The parallel point of view about knowledge assumes that the truth of logical and mathematical propositions is determined, as is that of definitional truisms, by the relationships between meanings that are established prior to experience. The truth often espoused by ethicists, for example, that one is truly obliged to rescue a person from drowning only if it is possible to do so, is a matter of meanings and not of facts about the world. On this view, all propositions that, in contrast to the foregoing example, are in any way substantially informative about the world are a posteriori. Even if there are a priori propositions, they are formal or verbal or conceptual in nature, and their necessary truth derives simply from the meanings that attached to the words they contain. A priori knowledge is useful because it makes explicit the hidden implications of substantive, factual assertions. But a priori propositions do not themselves express genuinely new knowledge about the world; they are factually empty. Thus All bachelors are unmarried merely gives explicit recognition to the commitment to describe as unmarried anyone who has been described as a bachelor.

Substantive empiricism about knowledge regards all a priori propositions as being more-or-less concealed tautologies. If a persons duty is thus defined as that which he should always do, the statement A person should always do his duty then becomes A person should always do what he should always do. Deductive reasoning is conceived accordingly as a way of bringing this concealed tautological status to light. That such extrication is nearly always required means that a priori knowledge is far from trivial.

For the substantive empiricist, truisms and the propositions of logic and mathematics exhaust the domain of the a priori. Science, on the other handfrom the fundamental assumptions about the structure of the universe to the singular items of evidence used to confirm its theoriesis regarded as a posteriori throughout. The propositions of ethics and those of metaphysics, which deals with the ultimate nature and constitution of reality (e.g., only that which is not subject to change is real), are either disguised tautologies or pseudo-propositionsi.e., combinations of words that, despite their grammatical respectability, cannot be taken as true or false assertions at all.

The least thoroughgoing type of empiricism here distinguished, ranking third in degree, can be termed partial empiricism. According to this view, the realm of the a priori includes some concepts that are not formal and some propositions that are substantially informative about the world. The theses of the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant (17201804), the general scientific conservation laws, the basic principles of morality and theology, and the causal laws of nature have all been held by partial empiricists to be both synthetic (substantially informative) and a priori. As noted above, philosophers who embrace the Kripkean notion of reference fixing would add to this class propositions such as heat is the cause of sensations of warmth and Aristotle was the teacher of Alexander the Great, both of which derive their presumed aprioricity from the hypothetical circumstances in which their subject terms were introduced. At any rate, in all versions of partial empiricism there remain a great many straightforwardly a posteriori concepts and propositions: ordinary singular propositions about matters of fact and the concepts that figure in them are held to fall in this domain.

So-called common sense might appear to be inarticulately empiricist; and empiricism might be usefully thought of as a critical force resisting the pretensions of a more speculative rationalist philosophy. In the ancient world the kind of rationalism that many empiricists oppose was developed by Plato (c. 428c. 328 bce), the greatest of rationalist philosophers. The ground was prepared for him by three earlier bodies of thought: the Ionian cosmologies of the 6th century bce, with their distinction between sensible appearance and a reality accessible only to pure reason; the philosophy of Parmenides (early 5th century bce), the important early monist, in which purely rational argument is used to prove that the world is really an unchanging unity; and Pythagoreanism, which, holding that the world is really made of numbers, took mathematics to be the repository of ultimate truth.

The first empiricists in Western philosophy were the Sophists, who rejected such rationalist speculation about the world as a whole and took humanity and society to be the proper objects of philosophical inquiry. Invoking skeptical arguments to undermine the claims of pure reason, they posed a challenge that invited the reaction that comprised Platos philosophy.

Plato, and to a lesser extent Aristotle, were both rationalists. But Aristotles successors in the ancient Greek schools of Stoicism and Epicureanism advanced an explicitly empiricist account of the formation of human concepts. For the Stoics the human mind is at birth a clean slate, which comes to be stocked with concepts by the sensory impingement of the material world upon it. Yet they also held that there are some concepts or beliefs, the common notions, that are present to the minds of all humans; and these soon came to be conceived in a nonempirical way. The empiricism of the Epicureans, however, was more pronounced and consistent. For them human concepts are memory images, the mental residues of previous sense experience, and knowledge is as empirical as the ideas of which it is composed.

Most medieval philosophers after St. Augustine (354430) took an empiricist position, at least about concepts, even if they recognized much substantial but nonempirical knowledge. The standard formulation of this age was: There is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses. Thus St. Thomas Aquinas (122574) rejected innate ideas altogether. Both soul and body participate in perception, and all ideas are abstracted by the intellect from what is given to the senses. Human ideas of unseen things, such as angels and demons and even God, are derived by analogy from the seen.

The 13th-century scientist Roger Bacon emphasized empirical knowledge of the natural world and anticipated the polymath Renaissance philosopher of science Francis Bacon (15611626) in preferring observation to deductive reasoning as a source of knowledge. The empiricism of the 14th-century Franciscan nominalist William of Ockham was more systematic. All knowledge of what exists in nature, he held, comes from the senses, though there is, to be sure, abstractive knowledge of necessary truths; but this is merely hypothetical and does not imply the existence of anything. His more extreme followers extended his line of reasoning toward a radical empiricism, in which causation is not a rationally intelligible connection between events but merely an observed regularity in their occurrence.

In the earlier and unsystematically speculative phases of Renaissance philosophy, the claims of Aristotelian logic to yield substantial knowledge were attacked by several 16th-century logicians; in the same century, the role of observation was also stressed. One mildly skeptical Christian thinker, Pierre Gassendi (15921655), advanced a deliberate revival of the empirical doctrines of Epicurus. But the most important defender of empiricism was Francis Bacon, who, though he did not deny the existence of a priori knowledge, claimed that, in effect, the only knowledge that is worth having (as contributing to the relief of the human condition) is empirically based knowledge of the natural world, which should be pursued by the systematicindeed almost mechanicalarrangement of the findings of observation and is best undertaken in the cooperative and impersonal style of modern scientific research. Bacon was, in fact, the first to formulate the principles of scientific induction.

A materialist and nominalist, Thomas Hobbes (15881679) combined an extreme empiricism about concepts, which he saw as the outcome of material impacts on the bodily senses, with an extreme rationalism about knowledge, of which, like Plato, he took geometry to be the paradigm. For him all genuine knowledge is a priori, a matter of rigorous deduction from definitions. The senses provide ideas; but all knowledge comes from reckoning, from deductive calculations carried out on the names that the thinker has assigned to them. Yet all knowledge also concerns material and sensible existences, since everything that exists is a body. (On the other hand, many of the most important claims of Hobbess ethics and political philosophy certainly seem to be a posteriori, insofar as they rely heavily on his experience of human beings and the ways in which they interact.)

The most elaborate and influential presentation of empiricism was made by John Locke (16321704), an early Enlightenment philosopher, in the first two books of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). All knowledge, he held, comes from sensation or from reflection, by which he meant the introspective awareness of the workings of ones own mind. Locke often seemed not to separate clearly the two issues of the nature of concepts and the justification of beliefs. His Book I, though titled Innate Ideas, is largely devoted to refuting innate knowledge. Even so, he later admitted that much substantial knowledgein particular, that of mathematics and moralityis a priori. He argued that infants know nothing; that if humans are said to know innately what they are capable of coming to know, then all knowledge is, trivially, innate; and that no beliefs whatever are universally accepted. Locke was more consistent about the empirical character of all concepts, and he described in detail the ways in which simple ideas can be combined to form complex ideas of what has not in fact been experienced. One group of dubiously empirical conceptsthose of unity, existence, and numberhe took to be derived both from sensation and from reflection. But he allowed one a priori conceptthat of substancewhich the mind adds, seemingly from its own resources, to its conception of any regularly associated group of perceptible qualities.

Bishop George Berkeley (16851753), a theistic idealist and opponent of materialism, applied Lockes empiricism about concepts to refute Lockes account of human knowledge of the external world. Because Berkeley was convinced that in sense experience one is never aware of anything but what he called ideas (mind-dependent qualities), he drew and embraced the inevitable conclusion that physical objects are simply collections of perceived ideas, a position that ultimately leads to phenomenalismi.e., to the view that propositions about physical reality are reducible to propositions about actual and possible sensations. He accounted for the continuity and orderliness of the world by supposing that its reality is upheld in the perceptions of an unsleeping God. The theory of spiritual substance involved in Berkeleys position seems to be vulnerable, however, to most of the same objections as those that he posed against Locke. Although Berkeley admitted that he did not have an idea of mind (either his own or the mind of God), he claimed that he was able to form what he called a notion of it. It is not clear how to reconcile the existence of such notions with a thoroughgoing empiricism about concepts.

The Scottish skeptical philosopher David Hume (171176) fully elaborated Lockes empiricism and used it reductively to argue that there can be no more to the concepts of body, mind, and causal connection than what occurs in the experiences from which they arise. Like Berkeley, Hume was convinced that perceptions involve no constituents that can exist independently of the perceptions themselves. Unlike Berkeley, he could find neither an idea nor a notion of mind or self, and as a result his radical empiricism contained an even more parsimonious view of what exists. While Berkeley thought that only minds and their ideas exist, Hume thought that only perceptions exist and that it is impossible to form an idea of anything that is not a perception or a complex of perceptions. For Hume all necessary truth is formal or conceptual, determined by the various relations that hold between ideas.

Voltaire (16941778) imported Lockes philosophy into France. Its empiricism, in a very stark form, became the basis of sensationalism, in which all of the constituents of human mental life are analyzed in terms of sensations alone.

A genuinely original and clarifying attempt to resolve the controversy between empiricists and their opponents was made in the transcendental idealism of Kant, who drew upon both Hume and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (16461716). With the dictum that, although all knowledge begins with experience it does not all arise from experience, he established a clear distinction between the innate and the a priori. He held that there are a priori concepts, or categoriessubstance and cause being the most importantand also substantial or synthetic a priori truths. Although not derived from experience, the latter apply to experience. A priori concepts and propositions do not relate to a reality that transcends experience; they reflect, instead, the minds way of organizing the amorphous mass of sense impressions that flow in upon it.

Lockean empiricism prevailed in 19th-century England until the rise of Hegelianism in the last quarter of the century (see also Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel). To be sure, the Scottish philosophers who followed Hume but avoided his skeptical conclusions insisted that humans do have substantial a priori knowledge. But the philosophy of John Stuart Mill (180673) is thoroughly empiricist. He held that all knowledge worth having, including mathematics, is empirical. The apparent necessity and aprioricity of mathematics, according to Mill, is the result of the unique massiveness of its empirical confirmation. All real knowledge for Mill is inductive and empirical, and deduction is sterile. (It is not clear that Mill consistently adhered to this position, however. In both his epistemology and his ethics, he sometimes seemed to recognize the need for first principles that could be known without proof.) The philosopher of evolution Herbert Spencer (18201903) offered another explanation of the apparent necessity of some beliefs: they are the well-attested (or naturally selected) empirical beliefs inherited by living humans from their evolutionary ancestors. Two important mathematicians and pioneers in the philosophy of modern physics, William Kingdon Clifford (184579) and Karl Pearson (18571936), defended radically empiricist philosophies of science, anticipating the logical empiricism of the 20th century.

The most influential empiricist of the 20th century was the great British philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell (18721970). Early in his career Russell admitted both synthetic a priori knowledge and concepts of unobservable entities. Later, through discussions with his pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein (18891951), Russell became convinced that the truths of logic and mathematics are analytic and that logical analysis is the essence of philosophy. In his empiricist phase, Russell analyzed concepts in terms of what one is directly acquainted with in experience (where experience was construed broadly enough to include not only awareness of sense data but also awareness of properties construed as universals). In his neutral monist phase, he tried to show that even the concepts of formal logic are ultimately empirical, though the experience that supplies them may be introspective instead of sensory.

Doctrines developed by Russell and Wittgenstein influenced the German-American philosopher Rudolf Carnap (18911970) and the Vienna Circle, a discussion group in which the philosophy of logical positivism was developed. The empirical character of logical positivism is especially evident in its formulation of what came to be known as the verification principle, according to which a sentence is meaningful only if it is either tautologous or in principle verifiable on the basis of sense experience.

Later developments in epistemology served to make some empiricist ideas about knowledge and justification more attractive. One of the traditional problems faced by more radical forms of empiricism was that they seemed to provide too slender a foundation upon which to justify what humans think they know. If sensations can occur in the absence of physical objects, for example, and if what one knows immediately is only the character of ones own sensations, how can one legitimately infer knowledge of anything else? Hume argued that the existence of a sensation is not a reliable indicator of anything other than itself. In contrast, adherents of a contemporary school of epistemology known as externalism have argued that sensations (and other mental states) can play a role in justifying what humans think they know, even though the vast majority of humans are unaware of what that role is. The crude idea behind one form of externalism, reliablism, is that a belief is justified when it is produced through a reliable processi.e., a process that reliably produces true beliefs. Humans may be evolutionarily conditioned to respond to certain kinds of sensory stimuli with a host of generally true, hence justified, beliefs about their environment. Thus, within the framework of externalist epistemology, empiricism might not lead so easily to skepticism.

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Rationalism and Nuclear Lunacy – Center for Research on Globalization

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The Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea is ramping up its nuclear deterrence, and this is causing consternation and wild proclamations from western officials and corporate media. What is particularly galling for the United States side is that North Korea appears to have achieved the capability of hitting the US mainland with ICBMs.

However, is the US not capable of hitting North Korea from wherever? So why does a rival created by the US [1] cause panicked rhetoric upon achievement of an ICBM capacity?

If your castle is capable of being targeted by a bellicose castle with inter-castle projectiles, would you leave yourself undefended? Especially when the bellicose castle has already destroyed the disarmed Iraqi castle as well as the disarmed Libyan castle.

US Senator Lindsey Graham said,

The only way they [the North Korean government] are going to change is if they believe there is a credible threat of military force on the table.

Graham believes any war will be confined to the East Asian region.

Why would Graham speak such provocative words? Follow the money. Grahams campaign fundraising appears aimed at the arms industry: Security through Strength.

US secretary-of-state Rex Tillerson is advocating peaceful pressure against North Korea and a willingness to hold talks. However, there is a condition, which certainly will not entice the North Koreans to talks. That condition is that the North Koreans disarm themselves of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. What is unstated is thatthe US will not disarm in any way whatsoever. The lessons of the disarmed and subsequently destroyed Iraqi and Libyan castles would seem to urge a cautionary approach.

Jack Rice, a former CIA agent, referred to North Korea as a threat. Why? Who is threatening who? North Korea haspledged no-first-use of nukes. The US has not. So who is the actual threat?

The US is modernizing its nuclear stockpile which is a stark abrogation of its undertaking as a signatory of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The NPTs Article VI states:

Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating tocessation of the nuclear arms raceat an early date and tonuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general andcomplete disarmament under strict and effective international control. [emphasis added]

North Korea has never attacked the US. It was the US that attacked North Korea during the so-called Korean War. The US used chemical and biological weapons, resulting in an estimated 4-10 million Koreans being killed. [2]

A Rationale Analysis of What a Nuclear-armed North Korea Portends

1. It is clear from the cases of Iraq and Libya that a disarmed US-designated enemy is not spared from a violent opportunistic attack. That North Korea was included on George W Bushs axis of evil along with Iraq triggered alarm bells in North Korea.

2. The US refuses a peace treaty with North Korea. [3] And the sanctions against North Korea constitute anact-of-war. Trump tweeted, China could easily solve this problem. But it is not China maintaining a state-of-war with North Korea.

3. The US is nuclear-armed, has used nuclear weapons, and does not adhere to a no-first-use policy.

Given the above three points would it be rationale to be without an effective deterrence against a military attack?

Furthermore, when North Korea did enter into anAgreed Frameworkwith the US in 1994, among the obligations was an end to hostilities; normalization of relations, no nuclearization of the peninsula; freezing operation and construction of North Korean nuclear reactors in exchange for two proliferation-resistant nuclear power reactors; and, while awaiting completion of the nuclear reactors, the US was to provide oil for North Korean energy needs. The US did not fulfill its obligations. In other words, the US cannot be trusted to uphold its end of any agreement.

If North Korea were ever to launch a nuclear weapon or even launch a non-nuclear attack against another country, then the North Korean government would be committing an act of suicide. Kim Jong-uns grandfather and father were not suicidal, so there is no reason to suspect familial psychosis.

If North Korea has achieved and maintains an effective nuclear deterrence, then a US attack is only imaginable in a nightmare Bizarro World. An attack on a nuclear-armed North Korea would be mad. The US would not be unscathed in such an attack. Major population centers such as Seoul, Busan, and Tokyo (all where US troops are stationed) and perhaps the US mainland would be hit. Of course, North Korea would be obliterated. Even if continental US were not hit by nukes, the radiation from nuclear fallout and a potential nuclear winter will affect the entire planet.

Consequently, all the talk in the media of a war is irrational conjecture or bluffing.

Rationality demands that all sides avoid any brinkmanship.

Kim Petersenis a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be reached at:[emailprotected]. Twitter:@kimpetersen.

Notes

1. At the end of World War II, the Korean Peoples Republic arose and the first cabinet was formed on 14 September 1945. US scuttled the Korean Peoples Republic. See Nhial Esso,What You Dont Know about North Korea Could Fill a Book, (Intransitive Publishers, 2013): 15%. See Bruce Cumings,Koreas Place in the Sun: A Modern History(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005): 238.

2. SeeKorean Truth Commission, Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea: 1945-2001(New York: 2001).

3. Said former US secretary-of-state Colin Powell: We wont do nonaggression pacts or treaties, things of that nature. Quoted in Steven R. Weisman, U.S. Weighs Reward if North Korea Scraps Nuclear Arms,New York Times, 13 August 2003.

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A New Short Film Offers a Private Look Into the Life of an Italian Architect and Design Enigma – Vogue.com

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Though he was one of Italys most influential mid-20th-century architects and interior designers , very little is known about the inner world of Turinese legend Carlo Mollino. Born in 1905 in the northern Italian city of Turin, Mollino became a figure of fascination for design enthusiasts worldwide, many of whom were transfixed by his hidden private life and ability to create dreamy, sensuous spaces inspired by his various obsessionswhich ranged from the voluptuousness of the female form to symbols and talismans of witchcraft and the occult. At a time when the style of the day was, for the most part, defined by a movement known as Rationalism (led by fellow design giants like Gio Ponti and the Castiglioni brothers, who looked to architecture primarily as a self-effacing entity, created more for streamlined functionality than for decoration), Mollinos work was particularly unique, overtly romantic, and a far cry from the goings-on in Milan.

Carlo Mollinos RAI Auditorium, built in 1952. Photo: Courtesy of Oscar Humphries

After graduating from college, where he studied engineering, architecture, and art history, Mollino began working for his fathers architecture firm. There, he entered several design competitions and won for projects like the Agricultural Federation in Cuneo, Italy, and the Turin Equestrian Association headquarters, both of which, for buildings intended for public use, were unusually artsy and illustrated his predilection for sloping forms and circular spaces. After Mollino left his fathers firm, he spent the rest of his life picking and choosing his own projects, many of them commissions for private homes that were hidden from public view. His most famous work, the grand Teatro Regio in Turin, an opera house, is one of his only buildings still standing today.

As Mollinos oeuvre has grown in appreciation over the years, the scarcity of what is available to view and acquire has only added fuel to the fire. In 2005, a Mollino table earned a record-high sale for 20th-century furniture at Christies, going for $3.8 million. Its great appeal is the immediately seductive look, a former director at Christies, Philippe Garner, told The New York Times in a 2009 interview. The fact that virtually every piece can be traced to a specific commission and that production was very limited add the appeal of rarity.

The chairs in Carlo Mollinos RAI Auditorium. Photo: Courtesy of Oscar Humphries

It was only until Mollino expert and curator Fulvio Ferrari and his son Napoleone discovered and restored an apartment Mollino had been secretly working on did the doors to the architects world open. A social recluse for most of his life, Mollino spent years creating and decorating a home for himself on the River Po in which to live out his later days. Inside, both his dark strangeness and genius were revealed: Rooms immaculately decorated, strange voodoo imagery hung on walls and ceilings, and hundreds of erotic Polaroids taken of women who modeled for him were found. Obsessed by the Ancient Egyptian mummification process and beliefs, Mollino also created a wooden boat-like bed that served as a symbolic vessel of passage into the afterlife, placed in a room prepared meticulously for his death. Though he never actually lived in this apartment, it spoke most aptly to his deep love of all things beautiful, revealing how carefully he tried to construct the world around him. It is within this spacenow known as the Museo Casa Mollino, a highlight for visitors to Turinthat Mollino has been brought back to life.

In a beautiful new short filmdirected by Felipe Sanguinetti, produced by Oscar Humphries, narrated by Fulvio Ferrari, and given exclusively to Vogue we are offered visits to Mollinos Teatro Regio and Casa Mollino. It provides private insights into Mollinos mind and how he saw the world. Shot from around corners and through half-opened doors, the visual narrative is atmospheric in its secrecy, just as one would imagine for spaces of Mollinos. His presence is palpable and, in many ways, evidently vulnerable in the navigation of the cameras lens: As viewers, we get the distinct impression that we are walking side by side with Mollino himself, reseeing the spaces so close to his heart.

The completed Teatro Regio, 1973. Photo: Courtesy of Oscar Humphries

Mollino is so famous for the Polaroids he took and his iconic pieces of design, that as an architect hes often overlooked, said Humphries, who shot the film with friend Sanguinetti in June. But he was an architect first, and we wanted to show that.

Of the films humanized perspective, Sanguinetti noted: I wanted to share what I felt in these two spaces. Its unlike anything Ive ever experienced before, and what Mollino brings out in people is such a unique and emotional response to his work. I hope the spectator, when watching the film, can feel that.

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A New Short Film Offers a Private Look Into the Life of an Italian Architect and Design Enigma - Vogue.com