Behavioral Science at Wilmington University

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Bachelor of Science Curriculum General Education Requirements (33 credits)

CTA 206 Computer Operations for Business

ECO 105 Fundamentals of Economics

ENG 121 English Composition I

ENG 122 English Composition II

ENG 131 Public Speaking

Choose either: HUM 360 Human World Views: 3500 BCE 1650 AD Or HUM 361 Human World Views: 1650 AD Present

MAT 205 Introductory Survey of Mathematics

PHI 100 Introduction to Critical Thinking

PSY 101 Introduction to Psychology

SCI 335 Human Anatomy and Physiology

SOC 101 Introduction to Sociology

Humanities Electives (6 credits)

Choose two courses from the following: ART, COM 245, VMG 313, DRA, DSN 110, ENG 360, Foreign Language, HIS 230, HUM, LIT, MUS, PHI

Courses beginning with the prefix CRJ, PSY, ORG, or SOC may be used as Behavioral Science electives. In addition, the following courses may also be selected as Behavioral Science electives:

NOTE: Guided Practicum (SOC 290-291) as well as Internship (SOC 490) and Co-Op (SOC 450) experiences are available.

This information applies to students who enter this degree program during the 2015-2016 Academic Year. If you entered this degree program before the Fall2015 semester, please refer to the academiccatalog for the year you began your degree program.

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Behavioral Science at Wilmington University

Behavioral Science Degree, Applied Behavioral Science Degree

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Behavioral Science may bring to mind the idea of criminal profiling that has been popularized by various Hollywood movies such as Silence of the Lambs. You see how agents and detectives try to solve crimes by analyzing human behavior; how people think, and why they act in a certain manner. This is pretty much what behavioral science entails; investigation of human behavior and relationship with society. However its a very broad field, with other dimensions to it as well.

If youre considering taking up behavioral science as a college major, there are several questions youll need to ask yourself.

The courses that are offered will generally vary depending on the level and university that you are enrolled in.

The following list of courses, even though intended to serve as a general guide will give you an idea of what youll study.

Besides the core courses, you may be allowed to tailor your program as you like by taking up some elective modules. This will enable you to focus specifically on your interest areas.

People who earned their undergraduate degrees in a field other than behavioral science may pursue continuing education certificates. The program that you opt for will essentially depend on your prior education, relevant experience and future career aspirations.

The duration of the degree will change according to the program that you take up. An associates and masters degree may be completed in one to two years whereas a bachelors program spreads over three to four years. Since a PhD is the most advanced degree, it usually takes around four to five years to complete. Students may be able to complete the program earlier depending upon the route they decide to take. An accelerated coursework option helps in completing the program in a shorter time period while a self paced degree usually takes longer to finish.

Its a very broad field and some of the relevant degrees may not be named as behavioral science. Youll typically be able to choose from one of the following two disciplines that fall under behavioral science:

As students are provided with a well rounded and interdisciplinary education, they may seek different opportunities that involve the application of critical thinking skills.

Some potential fields include:

Some positions that may require a behavioral science degree include:

Median Salary (2012): $57,420/year Growth Rate (2012-2022): 19% (Faster than average)

behavioral science degrees was rated

5 out of 10 based on 4 rating(s)

Q:What are the contents of course on Health Insurance Claims in the online Fire Science degrees??

A:The online Fire Science degrees have dedicated course on Health Insurance Claims. This course is of around 3 credits in total.It is structured to aptly provide understanding of the major programs of medical insurance and how diagnostic coding is performed on them. Students are highlighted on how to deal with health insurance claims.

Q:I am interested in obtaining a behavioral science degree, what is the usual curriculum?

A:Behavioral science degrees provide knowledge in a variety of disciplines. The coursework may cover areas such as ethics and statistics, families and societies, human conflict management, psychology of individuals, and personality theories. The exact coursework offered may vary between programs. The program may include an internship in behavioral science as well.

Q:Where can I find a List Of Behavioral Science Degrees?

A:The most convenient way to search for a List of Behavioral Science Degrees is online. All you have to do is click away and you'll come across a number of websites that offer degree related information about this field. You can also browse through our website and find out what major colleges are offering behavioral science degree programs online and campus based.

Q:Can you give me a little detail about behavioral science degree?

A:A behavioral science degree is an educational program that aims to teach students about human actions and interaction. The program will lay emphasis upon the cognitive theory and social psychology aspects of human behavior. Behavioral science can be studied at all levels of post-secondary education ranging from associate degrees to masters degree.

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Behavioral Science Degree, Applied Behavioral Science Degree

What Is Behavioral Science? – Learn.org

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If you're interested in finding a field that takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying human behavior, read on. Behavioral science encompasses such fields as anthropology, psychology and sociology. Read on to learn more about behavioral science, including your education and career options. Schools offering Applied Behavioral Science degrees can also be found in these popular choices.

Often associated with the social sciences, behavioral science explores the activities and interactions among human beings. Your duties might include the investigation and analysis of human relationships through the behavioral aspects of such disciplines as biology, geography, law, psychiatry and political science. Though behavioral science is a broad field of study, you might choose to focus on a particular group of people, distinguished by race, age, nationality or gender.

Pursuing a bachelor's degree in behavioral science involves coursework in its primary fields, in addition to a general liberal arts education. Your liberal arts coursework might include topics such as art, ethics, philosophy and literature. You might also choose to include classes in behavioral deviance, social psychology and social justice in your studies, depending on your particular interests.

If you choose to earn a master's degree in behavioral science, your focus will likely be on various aspects of human behavior. However, some programs will also encourage you to explore religious studies, philosophy and archeology. Moreover, in addition to taking coursework in human development and cultural diversity, you might also be required to complete a research thesis to earn your degree.

You could choose to pursue a research career in any of the individual areas of behavioral science. You might also use your knowledge of human behavior to pursue a career in management, sales or human services. Your interests might lead to a career in law enforcement. Such options might include working in criminology, which studies the non-legal aspects of crime to determine the root cause of criminal activity, or criminal profiling, which studies crime trends and develops profiles of criminals in order to assist in their capture.

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What Is Behavioral Science? - Learn.org

Behavioral Sciences – UHCL

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Program Overview

A degree in Behavioral Sciences provides a multidisciplinary approach to study human behavior and societal problems that are too complex to be fully understood by one academic discipline.

Undergraduate Program - Bachelor of Arts

The undergraduate degree in Behavioral Sciences enables you to combine courses from an array of disciplines including anthropology, criminology, geography, psychology, social work and sociology into one degree. You will learn theoretical coursework in behavioral sciences and receive a deeper knowledge of at least two of these disciplines

Student take the following courses for this degree:

Electives needed to complete number of hours to graduate (33 hours)

Graduate Program - Master of Arts

The graduate degree in Behavioral Sciences enables you to combine courses from an array of disciplines including anthropology, psychology and sociology into one degree. You and your faculty adviser will construct your own plan of study based on the type of knowledge you want to receive. This plan generally centers on a specific social problem you would want to pursue.Student take the following courses for this degree (36 hours total):

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Behavioral Sciences - UHCL

Behavioral Science Course – Online Degrees in Public Service

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Our governments programs are only as strong as the people who implement them. Kaplan Universitys public administration degrees are designed to prepare you for leadership and support positions in government and civil service institutions; vital roles that make a difference at the local, county, state, and federal levels.

View Programs

The elderly, the underprivileged, and the children of our communities will always need advocates and leaders to serve them and champion their causes. Our degrees in human services, early childhood development, and autism spectrum disorders focus on finding ways to help those in our society whose voices often go unheard.

Our programs are not designed to satisfy Board of Education criteria for assisting with children and teachers in public schools, and will not certify you to become a licensed teacher. Check with your local school district beforehand for specific college education and licensing and certification requirements.

View Programs

Kaplan Universitys psychology programs prepare you to pursue careers in several special needs areas, including child development, applied behavioral analysis, addictions, and industrial/organizational psychology.

The course sequences of our undergraduate emphasis area and graduate specialization in applied behavioral analysis are both approved by The Behavior Analyst Certification Board, Inc., (BACB). Upon graduation from the bachelors or masters degree program, and as long as you also meet additional requirements, including degree, field experience, and practicum requirements, you may be able to sit for the examination to become a Board Certified Assistant Behavior Analyst or Board Certified Behavior Analyst. Visit the BACB website for a complete list of requirements and additional information on certification.

Students who complete the addictions specialization within the masters degree in psychology program will meet the coursework requirements to take the National Board of Certified Counselors Master Addictions Counselor (MAC) certification examination; students who complete the emphasis area within the bachelors degree program will meet the coursework requirements to take the National Certification Commission for Addictions Professionals (NCCAP) National Certified Addiction Counselor (NCAC), Level I and II certification examinations.

We also offer postbaccalaureate, graduate, and postgraduate psychology certificate programs in applied behavioral analysis, addictions, and industrial/organizational psychology. These programs are designed for practicing professionalsor those interested in specializationwho want to gain knowledge and skills to build their careers in the helping professions.

Its important to understand that the professional practice of psychology is regulated by each state. The degree requirements in our programs do not prepare you for licensure. While earning your masters degree in psychology may qualify you to work in the helping professions, youll need a doctorate to become a psychologist and a medical degree to become a psychiatrist. Licensure exams may also be required.

View Programs

Kaplan University offers single courses to general, non-degree seeking students. You may petition for your completed single courses to count toward your degree or certificate program, should you choose to enroll in a corresponding degree program at Kaplan University.

View the list of available courses

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Behavioral Science Course - Online Degrees in Public Service

Behavioral Science – Wake Forest School of Medicine

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Behavioral Science in Family Medicine Education

The Behavioral Science curriculum is based on the biopsychosocial-spiritual model (Engel, 1977; Wright, Watson, & Bell, 1996). Residency education in the Behavioral Sciences approach each patient as a complex but integrated system of many variables that can be organized under five domains: biological, behavioral, cognitive, sociocultural, and environmental. The curriculum is evidenced-based and designed so that every resident achieves the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) milestones. Using the Curriculum Guidelines for Family Medicine Residents by the American Academy of Family Physicians (2011, p.2) to guide curriculum development, the interdisciplinary Behavioral Science faculty assist each resident to achieve the following competencies at the completion of their residency training:

Orientation

During orientation, first year residents are videotaped and communication skills reviewed to prepare them for out-patient clinical care. Second year residents are also videotaped during their orientation and on-call communication skills are reviewed.

Behavioral Science Facilitators

FirstYear Behavioral Science Rotation (two week block)

Didactics

Didactic, interactive lectures on Behavioral Science topics include:

Direct Observation of Clinical Activity

Noon Conference Lecture

Residents prepare and present a one-hour lecture on a behavioral health specialty topic to faculty, residents, and medical students.

Second Year Behavioral Science Rotation (one week block)

Didactics

Didactic, interactive lectures on Behavioral Science topics may overlap with the first year and include:

Direct Observation of Clinical Activity

Rotations

ThirdYear Behavioral Science Rotation (two half days)*

Didactics

Didactic, interactive lectures on Behavioral Science topics may overlap with the first and second year and include:

Direct Observation of Clinical Activity

Longitudinal Curriculum

Integrated Care

The Wake Forest Department of Family and Community Medicine was awarded a Primary Care Training and Enhancement by Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) for July 2015 July 2020 to implement and sustain integrated care in the Wake Forest Family Medicine residency and the Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC), Southside United Health Center. Together, both clinics have a care manager and three behavioral health providers working alongside faculty and resident physicians to provide comprehensive care to patients. In addition, integrated care teaching clinics provide an opportunity for physician and behavioral science faculty to observe resident and behavioral health clinical encounters, and provide feedback in an interdisciplinary setting.

Educational Lectures

Behavioral science topics are presented once a month at noon conferences and morning reports throughout the three years of the residency. Topics in Behavioral Science presented include family systems, adherence to medical advice, sleep disorders, psychophysiological disorders, personality disorders, chronic pain, caregiver fatigue, among many others. Topics may also be discussed on the inpatient medicine teaching service when the Director of Behavioral Science is present.

Videotaping & Live Observation

Videotaping & shadowing (live observation of the clinical encounter through closed-circuit video feed) begins the first year of the Behavioral Health Rotation (BHR) and continues throughout residency training.

Support Groups

1st Year

HO-Is attend a support group one totwo times a week throughout the year to provide the skills and group support necessary to learn and to grow during the challenging internship year.

2nd Year

The HO-IIs meet once monthly to fucus on the complexities of the in the Doctor-Patient relationship but also explores all relationships as they contribute to the practice of medicine.

3rd Year

The HO-IIIs support group meets once a month and continues the format from the 2nd year but also includes a focus on the complex transition from residency to their early career.

Consultation & Referral

Behavioral Science faculty are available to review patients, facilitate treatment planning and accessing community resources.

References within this article can be found at the following sources:

American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP). Recommended Curriculum Guidelines for Family Medicine Residents: Human Behavior and Mental Health. AAFP Reprint No. 270 retrieved at http://www.aafp.org/dam/AAFP/documents/medical_education_residency/program_directors/Reprint270_Mental.pdf

Engel, G. L. (1977). The need for a new medical model: A challenge for biomedicine.Science,196, 129-136. doi: 10.1126/science.847460

Wright, L. M., Watson, W. L., & Bell, J. M. (1996).Beliefs: The heart of healing in families and illness. New York, NY: Basic Books.

* Anticipated for rotation to be offered for graduating class of 2019.

Laura Sudano, MA Director Behavioral Science Education

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Behavioral Science - Wake Forest School of Medicine

Behavioral Science Degrees by Degree Program Level

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Topics likely to be addressed in Behavioral Science degree programs include behavior analysis, abnormal behavior, behavioral interventions, research methodologies and social psychology.

Behavioral science is a broad discipline that encompasses many other fields of study, including psychology and sociology, and can be of use to business and counseling professionals. It addresses how relationships and decisions are affected by human behaviors and actions. Students in graduate programs can choose specializations, such as public health or gerontology. Students interested in college-level research or academic careers will likely need to obtain a doctoral degree.

Students enrolled in a bachelor's degree program in behavioral science learn how to analyze human behavior and interactions. Some bachelor's degree programs focus entirely on a particular application of the field and prepare graduates for further study in social work, sociology or psychology. Some courses may also give students the opportunity to conduct research projects. Possible classes include:

A master's degree program in behavioral science commonly lets students choose an area of emphasis and the curriculum is shaped by a student's area of emphasis. Students choosing a gerontology option, for example, learn about issues of aging and explore community-based services designed to assist the elderly. In contrast, a student pursuing an applied behavioral science option learns about research methods in the field and such topics as behavioral assessment, evaluation and intervention. However, regardless of the concentration area, students must first complete core classes that stress the empirical and conceptual foundations of the field. Some class topics include:

A Ph.D. in Behavioral Science is research-based and introduces students to advanced study in behavior analysis. Some Doctor of Philosophy programs in the field have a public health option while others are more focused on applied behavioral science. Core courses emphasize the foundations of behavioral science and cover common approaches to research and experiment design. Some elective courses are also required, but a majority of a student's residence is spent on the completion and defense of a dissertation. Some possible courses include:

Completion of a bachelor's degree program in behavioral science allows graduates to compete for entry-level jobs that require expertise in human relationships and behavior. Employment opportunities exist with social service organizations and community outreach groups. Some possible career outcomes include:

Career options depend largely upon the area of emphasis chosen by a student within the discipline of behavioral science. A master's degree also provides graduates with an opportunity to study at the Ph.D. level. Some possible career options include:

Those with a Ph.D. in behavioral science can go on to become educators and researchers in the field. Many of them find jobs in the health services sector, working as counselors or behavioral health coordinators. Others pursue a more business-oriented Ph.D. program in behavioral science and go on to work in the non-profit or private sectors. Career options include these:

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Behavioral Science Degrees by Degree Program Level

Luigi Russolo, Futurist – Luciano Chessa – Paperback …

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Chapter 1

Futurism as a Metaphysical Science

It is surprising how little the common perception of futurism has changed since 1967, when Maurizio Calvesi complained about the "reductive general idea of Italian futurism as a simple exaltation of the machine and superficial reproduction of movement."1 Although the futurists did not always agree among themselves on a definition of the movement, they certainly would not have shared a view that reduces futurism to merely materialistic terms.2 If a similarly reductive attitude can already be found in Varse as early as 1917, the reduction of futurism to a materialistic movement within post-World War II art criticism was likely determined, as noted in the introduction, by a need to downplay the uneasy relationship between futurism and fascism.3

Yet futurism was a movement animated by contradictory ideas, constantly oscillating between science and art, the rational and the irrational, future and past, mechanical and spiritual. Indeed, it may well have been these very tensions and frictions that gave futurism its dynamic force.

Defining the futurist movement and analyzing its aesthetic is not an easy task. To the casual observer the futurists seem to present a united front, unified by the charismatic personality of Marinetti, but analysis shows them to have been highly diverse intellectual personalities, each with slightly different opinions and conceptions of life and art and sometimes in open and violent opposition to one another. They may have found themselves (for reasons of convenience, if nothing else, and perhaps sometimes opportunism) under one ideological roof, but individually they maintained autonomous physiognomies and attitudes and peculiarities of their own. It seems, then, impossible to hope to find coherence inside the different poetic positions of the futurists, let alone to formulate an organic presentation with which they would have been satisfied.

Marinetti's work and personality succeeded in maintaining a certain order, at least in the beginning. It is well documented that Marinetti initially subsidized all the initiatives of the movement (including publications and exhibitions), and, like a good impresario, he reserved the right to supervise the work of the other artists of the group, to the point that all the first futurist manifestos unquestionably ran the gauntlet of Marinetti's censorship; this explains their similar tone.4 But in the privacy of living-room discussions or personal correspondence-or anywhere outside Marinetti's public control-the futurists' aesthetic visions diverged synchronically and diachronically; they were in continual growth and in a restless state of becoming, changing along with the shifting alliances within the movement.

Critically the most lucid figure among them was probably Umberto Boccioni. Perhaps for a predisposition of spirit, perhaps because his career lasted for only a brief moment and almost did not leave him time to conclude a cycle of thought, Boccioni was one of the very few futurists to produce a volume that presented his poetics systematically.5

The other exception was Luigi Russolo. Although he was not as socially exuberant as Boccioni was, his thought was characterized by a surprising coherence of themes-many so extraordinarily close to those of his friend Boccioni as to suggest a sort of intersecting pollination between the two. Russolo was to repeat these early themes, unchanged in their substance, for the rest of his life; being spiritual in character, they corresponded well with futurism's occult side.

To summarize all the instances that show connections between futurism and esoteric preoccupations at various levels-ranging from spirituality to interest in and practice of the occult arts, and also including black and red magic and spiritualism-would be an ambitious undertaking. Here I shall simply create a backdrop against which to project the fruit of research on Russolo's interest in the occult and my reinterpretation of his sound-related activities in the context of this interest.

I am not the first to mention the influence of the occult arts on the futurist movement. Sporadic references to this influence can be found in volumes, catalogs, and essays on futurism and the visual arts edited by Calvesi and Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco. Until a few years ago the only contributing monographs available were a brief article by Germano Celant titled "Futurismo esoterico," published in Il Verri in 1970, and Calvesi's very brief article "L'criture mdiumnique comme source de l'automatisme futuriste et surraliste," published in Europe in 1975, in which Calvesi shows connections between mediumistic phenomena and the poetics of the automatic writing adopted first by Marinetti and then by the Surrealists. To these should certainly be added Calvesi's above-mentioned 1967 classic Il futurismo: La fusione della vita nell'arte, in which occult and spiritualist themes, however eccentric, occasionally color the overall discussion.

Renewed interest in the topic began first with the extensive catalog of a 1995 Frankfurt exhibition titled Okkultismus und Avantgarde, which devoted much space to the futurists; this was followed by Flavia Matitti's writing on Balla and theosophy, as well as by the handsome volume by Simona Cigliana (Futurismo esoterico), which takes its title from Celant's essay and is the most complete contribution to the topic to date. In contrast to the earlier sources cited, some of which are limited to a list of facts, Cigliana's book offers a convincing in-depth analysis of the futurists' occult frequentations, albeit primarily limited to the field of literature.

The futurists' interest in the occult can be attributed to their full immersion in the culture of their period, principally inspired by French symbolism, which was in turn a reaction to Comte's mid-nineteenth-century positivism and absolute materialism. In Italy, critiques of positivism and materialism also attacked idealism, and not just in rational and dialectic Hegelian formulations but also in idealism's mainstream Italian dissemination through the writings of the philosopher Benedetto Croce.

It has been maintained that interest in the occult arts and metapsychics can be attributed to the futurists' attraction to the then current understanding of science. There were those who, considering the future of scientific research, maintained that science should include among its fields of inquiry the study of paranormal phenomena and confer legitimacy upon it, since this was the natural direction toward which science was already tending. This view may be true, but it offers only a partial picture of futurism, and it bears the further defect of again putting science and technology at the center of the futurist poetic meditation, as if they were the end of this meditation instead of, as we will see, the means.

Already at this stage, however, it is clear that these occult interests were poles apart from an aesthetic conception preoccupied exclusively with the "simple exaltation of the machine and exterior reproduction of movement." The futurists' interest in science was not always exclusive or absolute, and it was not always blind idolatry. Calvesi addresses this point when he writes, "Boccioni did not want a scientific aesthetics, that is, definable into scientific rules, but only an aesthetics that took the acquisitions of science into account: which is very different."6 For Marinetti the situation was entirely similar: "Art assimilates science intuitively, analogically, by parallelism and also by benefiting from science's technical discoveries, but never by a substitution of methodologies."7 For the futurists, science was above all a means; it was not the end of their aesthetic vision.

The present chapter considers the movement's interest in occultism-alongside its interest in science and technology and its greatly underexplored interest in altered states of consciousness-as a means to achieve out-of-body experiences. Such experiences, in turn, would permit the futurists to observe reality from a hyperreal point of view, as well as to re-create reality through a new, spiritual mode of artistic creation. Subsequent chapters add Russolo's musical activity to those expressions of futurism that are indebted to the occult tradition.

Science and the Occult at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Interest in the occult would seem to contradict the attention the futurists gave to the latest discoveries of the science and technology of the period. 8 But from the middle of the nineteenth century on, interest in the occult was increasingly shared by scientists and occultists alike, generating such terms as "scientific occultism," which further muddied the waters.9 Increasingly spreading an image of the universe as an organism animated by mysterious and supernatural forces, new scientific discoveries made between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth showed that idealism, positivism, and materialism gave too restricted a vision of natural phenomena and the cosmos.10

A more dynamic conception of experimental science led various intellectuals of the time to consider occult manifestations as phenomena not yet known because of imperfect human senses and the limitations of human research tools; sooner or later, however, the scientific community was expected to be in a position to measure, understand, and explain. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle would eventually limit, if not altogether undermine, this hope for accurate measurements.

Exhortations to avoid reducing existence (and so the world) exclusively to what human senses can perceive came from all sides, as exemplified by the famous astronomer Camille Flammarion's comment that X-rays were a further proof that "sensation and reality are two very different things."11

Among the many attempts to systematize ways of understanding, ranging from alchemy to metapsychics to spiritualism, and drawn from sources as diverse as the Corpus Hermeticum, medieval mysticism, the neoplatonism of the Renaissance, freemasonry, and Eastern philosophies, was the philosophy of the Rose+Croix, which is worth citing for its direct influence on artistic disciplines.12 But even more relevant was the influence of theosophy.

Blavatsky's theosophy, with its comparativist and encyclopedic popularizing approach, which embraced Eastern philosophical thought as well as having numerous points of contact with scientific research, found fertile ground in the cultural context of the epoch. In fact, it became fashionable in those end-of-the-century artistic circles that still believed in romantic philosophical ideas or had aligned with the new symbolist trend. Theosophy famously called for systematic research of parascientific phenomena that would apply the same criteria used by scientific method to investigate other natural phenomena. Such spiritual research was never intended for utilitarian purposes but only for the spiritual advancement of humanity.

In Italy theosophy paid particular attention to the study of the human psyche. In fact, perhaps because of the charismatic presence of the celebrated Turinese psychiatrist and anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, psychiatry and neurology were in Italy the first disciplines to take an interest in various forms of the occult. Among these forms were parapsychology and parascience (telepathy, clairvoyance, possession, psychokinesis, ideoplastic), as well as correlated mediumistic phenomena.13 The need to push beyond the appearance of things to understand the world and the belief that mediums and artists were gifted with more highly developed spiritual faculties-both principles that betrayed connections with romantic aesthetics-were propositions that futurists maintained on several occasions.

In this "sounding out" of reality the new frontiers of science were certainly helpful. Among the scientific discoveries of the age, that of Rntgen's X-rays in 1895 was one of the most suggestive, because its application implied a complete revolution of the perceptive act itself. Unlike the theories on the fourth dimension or the study of non-Euclidean geometries that affected the representation of the perceptive act, X-rays revolutionized the very act of seeing. This discovery was fundamentally important in the development of theories of the pictorial avant-garde in the first years of the century-and not only for the futurists.14

X-rays bore a metaphoric weight: they encouraged one to view things profoundly rather than occupy oneself with the surface perceptible via the five senses. And an even closer relationship with mediumistic phenomena circulates in the scientific literature of the time: Lombroso, Flammarion, Ochorowicz, and Zoellner all drew a direct connection between Rntgen's research on the vibration of ether waves and the phenomena of ectoplastic condensation.15 It is not surprising, then, to learn that X-rays profoundly fascinated Boccioni, Balla, and Russolo, and that they offered a concrete way of achieving (through the extension of human senses of perception) the futurist interpenetration of planes they promoted in the manifestos of futurist painting.

The futurists' fascination with this new technology is first documented in a passage in the technical manifesto of futurist painting of April 11, 1910: "Who can still believe in the opacity of bodies, while our acuity and multiplied sensitivity makes us intuit the obscure manifestations of mediumistic phenomena? Why must one continue to create without taking account of our visual power that can give results analogous to those of X-rays?"16

The futurists were convinced that X-rays and X-ray-like clairvoyance could help to register otherwise invisible aspects of reality, such as the residual traces of the movement of bodies or the luminous emanations produced by the brain and projected in the surrounding aura-emanations that theosophists called "thought-forms." This protocol of perception based on light and movement permitted one to grasp the spiritual level of reality. The technical manifesto claimed that "by the persistence of the image in the retina, objects in motion multiply, deform, following one another, as vibrations, in the space that they pass through [i.e., of their trajectory] [. . .]. To paint a figure one does not need to make the figure: one needs to render its atmosphere. [. . .] Motion and light destroy the materiality of bodies."17

These convictions would be summarized at the end of the manifesto in the concept of complementarismo congenito (congenital complementarism), a notion that the art historian Marianne Martin, in her Futurist Art and Theory, considered "an occult spiritual experience bringing the artist in closer touch with the universal forces."18 The term complementarismo congenito readily promotes a union of opposites that rings distinctively alchemical, and thus occult.

Space and Time Tamed: Marinetti's Ectoplasm

An examination of the critical texts of Calvesi, Fagiolo dell'Arco, and Celant reveals that all of the most representative futurist artists were to varying degrees concerned with the occult.19 This is certainly true of Marinetti. By celebrating action and movement-a celebration clearly intoxicated with Nietzschianism-his aesthetics celebrated the energy manifested in every vibration of the cosmos, that is, energy itself.

Far from being a proposition of materialistic thrust, Marinetti's obsessive celebration of movement and vibration reflects an occult, symbolist-derived substratum.20 Central to this view is the idea that matter is constituted by condensation of waves vibrating at different intensities; as such, through movement, matter either vanishes or better reveals its implicit spirituality. Basing his ideas on Nietzsche's theory of action, his personal reading of Bergson's vitalism, and Einstein's theory of relativity (which Marinetti probably encountered by way of the popularizing work of Minkowsky), the founder of futurism derived a conception of the world in which, if only because we lack absolute parameters to show stasis, all is perpetual movement.21

According to Marinetti, "absolute space and time do not preexist, nor do any absolutely immovable points nor any objects in absolute movement, because there is no absolute term of reference: object and subject are, always, correlatively but discontinuously mobile."22 According to Calvesi, futurists did not regard "spirit and matter (and therefore [. . .] intuition and intellect)" as separate; they saw them as a unity, under the "same principle of energy."23 As is also true of Boccioni, Marinetti overcame Bergson's dualism of matter versus movement. Matter never exists as absolute inertia: "Matter and movement, rather than contradictory ends, became ends that could be brought back to one single principle."24

Behind this theory of energy we find not only the influence of Nietzsche's interpretations and Einstein's suggestions but also one of the core propositions of alchemy that futurists may have derived from pre-Socratic philosophies: the belief in a universe that may be synthesizable into a single generating principle, a primal matter, existing in various levels of density and from which all things derive.25 This primal matter, a wave vibrating at different frequency, was often referred to as the ether.

The interest in waves and vibrations, and in their relationship to occult themes, is a constant in Marinetti's prose. In his Manifesto della declamazione dinamica e sinottica he writes that the futurist poet/performer will have the task of "metallizing, liquefying, vegetalizing, petrifying, and electrifying the voice, fusing it with the vibrations of matter, themselves expressed by Words-in-Freedom,"26 and in La grande Milano tradizionale e futurista Marinetti recognized in Russolo's enterprise the capacity to "organize spiritually and fantastically our acoustic vibrations."27

A similar transformative approach is found in the manifesto La radia, published with Pino Masnata in 1933. Among other things, the radio set (Marinetti and Masnata have recourse to the feminine gender for the word, radia) is here considered to be:

4. Reception amplification and transformation of vibrations emitted by living beings by living or dead spirits noisy dramas of states of mind without words.

5. Reception amplification and transformation of vibrations emitted by matter Just as today we listen to the song of the woods and of the sea tomorrow we will be seduced by the vibrations of a diamond or of a flower.28

It is, furthermore:

6. Pure organism of radiophonic sensations

7. An art without time or space without yesterday or tomorrow [. . .] The reception and amplification, through thermionic valves, of light and of the voices of the past will destroy time [. . .]

9. Human art, universal and cosmic, that is like a voice with a true psychology-spirituality of the noises, of the voices and of the silence.29

In these passages points of contact with panpsychism are evident. The idea that everything is vibration is an eminently occultist one, as it implies that all phenomena occurring in the world are in some way secretly linked. Once the corpuscular theory of light, inspired by Democritus and upheld by Newton, was put aside in favor of the theory of waves traveling through ether, which lasted until Einstein, it was as if the scientific community implicitly validated the long esoteric tradition that had always included a belief in the correlation between light and sound. The discovery of electromagnetic waves, X-rays, and, shortly after, radioactivity, confirmed this occultist proposition.30 In fact, the theory of waves propagating themselves in the ether reinforced and essentially confirmed an alchemical/synesthetic conception of art, because both sound and light are, according to this vision of physics, waves that only differ in frequency or wavelength-a difference of degree, not of kind.

Futurism was always characterized by a strong synesthetic component, and synesthesia has traditionally been an indicator of the occult (by way of the vibrational tradition).31 This connection was a remnant of the connection between futurism and French symbolism in the latter's most occultist (and psychedelic) moments-one may think of the Baudelaire of Correspondances or the Rimbaud of Voyelles-but also of the Italian version of that same symbolism, alcoholic and brilliant, that we call Milanese scapigliatura, an antibourgeois art movement surely characterized, just as futurism is, by an overlap of scientific and occult interests.32

The debate about synesthesia was widespread at the opening of the twentieth century.33 Marinetti's interest in the relationship between the arti sorelle (sister arts) and the different senses was ever present, even when not taking center stage as it does in his manifesto "Tactilism" (1921, revised in 1924).

Tactilism, Marinetti maintains, could be considered the result of the mortification of the other four senses, producing an empowered sense of touch; this would occur following a deviation of the sun from its proper orbit that would cause its unusual distancing from the earth.34 But, Marinetti maintained, the phenomenon was instead created by "an act of futurist caprice/faith/will." In fact, in an extreme situation such as a planetary catastrophe, the five senses would be reduced to only one. Marinetti wrote, "Everybody can feel that sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste are modifications of a single, highly perceptive sense: the sense of touch, which splits into different ways and organizes into different points."35

In this manifesto, tactilism is a provisional term for a new art form that merges all of the five traditional senses as well as a series of new senses that Marinetti lists. He chooses to give "the name of Tactilism to all the senses that are not specified," since he believes that the perceptive senses are in fact "more or less arbitrary localizations of that confused total of intertwined senses that constitute the typical forces of the human machine"; these forces could in his opinion "be better observed on the epidermal frontiers of our body." Notwithstanding this, the attention here is obviously on the sense of touch; as Marinetti describes it, to arrive at a tactile art, other stimuli (including the visual) must be sacrificed or neutralized.36

Marinetti therefore contemplates a synesthetic emotion-which by definition links different senses by means of association-that is evoked and activated by use of specially made implements that he calls tactile tables (tavole tattili). In tactile art it is exclusively through touch that the perceiver reconstructs, by association, stimuli that, while similar, belong to other expressive fields such as music or painting; this kind of reconstruction is encouraged in the tactile tables. Marinetti chose not to integrate the expressive protocol of the tactile tables with expressive modalities derived from other art forms (like painting or sculpture)-a choice made not to prevent a dialogue between the arts but to protect the newborn art form tactilism and permit it, at least in the beginnings of its journey, to develop autonomously.

Marinetti believed that the sense of touch, when empowered, permits seeing beyond the physical-permits seeing even inside objects, as if by a sort of tactile X-ray vision: "A visual sense is born, at the fingertips. Interscopia is developed, and some individuals are able to see inside their own bodies. Others can shadowy make out the shadowy insides of nearby bodies." The connection with Boccioni's interpenetration of planes, and of its occult and scientific matrices (or implications), could not be clearer.

At its core, Marinetti's tactilism aimed at the perfecting of "spiritual communications between human beings, through the epidermis." Often read as merely an erotic proclamation, this statement was, rather, the testimony of Marinetti's spiritual and occult attitude, perhaps even traceable to the conversations with his father, who was an enthusiastic reader of Eastern philosophy.37 With Tactilism, Marinetti proposed to "penetrate better and outside of scientific methods the true essence of matter" and to promote the type of spiritual experience that could reach the point of "negating the distinction between spirit and matter," an affirmation that in substance overcomes, as stated above, Bergson's dualism of movementversusmatter. Marinetti believed that comprehension of the essence of matter could be obtained by eliminating the mediation of the brain (i.e., of human reason), which is guilty of polluting the virgin, immediate perfection of the tactile experience. As he wrote: "Perhaps there is more thought in the fingertips than in the brain that has the pride of observing the phenomenon [the act of touching]."

According to Marinetti, the new art had more relations with spiritualism and could better demonstrate the validity of theories of reincarnation than other arts: "The futurist Balla declares that by means of Tactilism everyone can enjoy again with freshness and absolute surprise the sensations of his past life, that he could not enjoy again with equal surprise by means of music nor by means of painting."38

Only a few years after this manifesto, the Manifesto della fotografia futurista, a collaboration between Marinetti and Tato published on April 11, 1930, proposed updating Anton Giulio Bragaglia's fotodinamica (photodynamics) by taking advantage of the new technological possibilities. The aesthetic coordinates of this book however are not that distant from Bragaglia's, who was from the beginning of his career interested in phenomena of mediumistic materialization.

The goals of futurist photography in 1930 included, among other things:

4. The spectralizing of some parts of the human or animal body isolated or joined nonlogically; [. . .]

11. The transparent and semitransparent superimposition of concrete persons and objects and of their semiabstract phantasms with simultaneity of memory/dream; [. . .]

14. The composition of absolutely extraterrestrial landscapes, astral or mediumistic by means of thicknesses, elasticity, turbid depths, clear transparencies, algebraic or geometric values, and with nothing human, vegetable, or geologic;39

But in L'uomo moltiplicato e il regno della macchina, part of Guerra sola igiene del mondo of 1915 (and originally in Le futurisme of 1911, perhaps even drafted as early as 1910), Marinetti aspired to a structural modification of man that in future would, thanks to the materialization of wings produced with the force of thought, allow man to fly.40

In L'uomo moltiplicato, Marinetti wrote: "The day it is possible for man to exteriorize his will such that it extends outside of him like an immense invisible arm-on that day Dream and Desire, which today are vain words, will rule sovereign over tamed Space and Time."41 Having lost the reader in this forest of his postsymbolist prose, Marinetti then showed us the way. He believed that this prophecy, which he himself recognized as paradoxical, could be more easily understood by "studying the phenomena of exteriorized will that constantly manifest themselves in sances."

This uomo moltiplicato, a metallic alter egothat would duplicate man without duplicating his defects, would even have the gift of clairvoyance and, in addition to being a "non-human and mechanical type, constructed for an omnipresent velocity, it will be naturally cruel, omniscient and combative." The figure of the multiplied man shows interesting similarities with the metallic animal of the subsequent manifesto, "Ricostruzione futurista dell'universo" by Balla and Depero, the aggressiveness of which would unquestionably have been inebriated with the spirit of World War I interventionism.

For Marinetti, the man of the future was not so much the product of Darwinian evolution as, rather, the transformist hypothesis of Lamarck (whom, indeed he cited in his essay): not an evolution of man but his alchemical transformation into a more perfect being created by the futurists, a "non-human type in whom moral pain, kindness, affection and love, i.e., the only corrosive poisons of inexhaustible vital energy, will be abolished"-in short, a man aiming for a suspended, ataractic, beyond-good-and-evil spiritual state.

These scientific-alchemical themes never disappeared from Marinetti's repertoire. In his 1933 manifesto La radia, he again announced the "overcoming of death" through futurism "with a metallizing of the human body and the appropriating of the vital spirit as machine force."42 In this proclamation, Marinetti reelaborated his 1915 position, according to which the futurists had the power to reawaken mummies with the charismatic electricity of their hand movements. In a passage of "Guerra sola igiene del mondo," Marinetti recounts some of the brawls after the futurist evenings of the first years: "Everywhere, we saw growing in a few hours the courage and the number of men that are truly young, and [we saw] the galvanized mummies that our gesture had extracted from the ancient sarcophagi, becoming bizarrely agitated."43 By now it should be clear that Marinetti's will futuristically to abolish death is a trope, a trope that will recur frequently in Marinetti's writings (e.g., the closing of the manifesto "La matematica futurista immaginativa qualitativa"). 44

Painting the Invisible: Boccioni's Sixth Sense

Contro ogni materialismo.

Umberto Boccioni, "Note per il libro"45

At the intersection of romantic impetuousness and Bergsonian critique of materialism, the personality of Umberto Boccioni stands out dramatically. Departing from a type of formation close to Marinetti's but influenced by Marinetti's theories, Boccioni too demonstrated a strong interest in the occult. Drawn to symbolism, Nietzsche, and Bergson, familiar with the ideas of Einstein, admirer of Wagner, and more generally attracted to the titanic and romantic aesthetic, Boccioni had the vocation and the presumption of the demiurge, the creator of worlds, the materializer.

Boccioni, like Marinetti, overcame the Bergsonian dualism of matter and movement by wedding himself to Einstein's vision (and perhaps to that of Steiner, if one substitutes the term energy for spirit).46 Everything moves, everything vibrates(all bodies are "persistent symbols of the universal vibration," can be read in the technical manifesto of futurist painting), all creation is energy, existing in the form of waves that organize the primal matter, the ether, into different levels of density or, as Boccioni puts it, of intensity. There is no separation between one body and another: in Boccioni's thought, continuity is preferred. In fact, in his article "Fondamento plastico della scultura e pittura futuriste," which appeared in the periodical Lacerba on March 15, 1913, Boccioni writes that "distances between one object and another are not of the empty spaces, but of the continuities of matter of different intensity," immediately adding that in the paintings of the futurists one does not have "the object and the emptiness, but only a greater or lesser intensity and solidity of spaces."47

And he adds, further advocating for continuity,

They accuse us of doing "cinematography, which is an accusation that really makes us laugh, so much it is vulgarly moronic. We do not subdivide visual images: we search for a shape, or, better, a single form [forma unica] that would substitute the new concept of continuity to the old concept of (sub)division.

Every subdivision of motion is completely arbitrary, as it is completely arbitrary every subdivision of matter.48

In confirmation of this proposition, Boccioni presents two quotes form Bergson.

This passage can be better understood after reading the futurist Ardengo Soffici's restatement of this principle of continuity, since he returns the concept to what would have been its original theosophical coordinates. In his article "Raggio," published in Lacerba on July 1, 1914, and republished not by chance a few months later in the Roman theosophical periodical Ultra with the eloquent title "La teosofia nel futurismo," Soffici wrote that bodies are not separated from one another but that "the entire universe therefore is a single whole without interruption of continuity," and that, moreover, "the world is not a molecular aggregate, but a flux of energy with varied rhythms, from granite to thought."49

Soffici goes on to maintain that "a privileged organism, a center of extra-powerful vital force, can in a certain moment and under certain circumstances attract and concentrate within itself its distant parts, the peripheral waves of its energies, making them concrete," and that "an artist can live and make concrete in a work the life of another being, of things, of places that he has not visited. A prophet [can] see and reveal future events-future for sensibilities less acute than his own." In a crescendo of self-centered hubris, Soffici maintains that his consciousness is "a globe of light that shoots its rays all around in accordance with its force," and he concludes, "I am the point of confluence of history and of the world. I am one with eternity and with the infinite."50

Soffici's claim that the psychic energy of the artist could not simply reproduce but must re-create reality was shared by all futurists. I shall investigate how determinative this proposition is in analyzing the work of Russolo. This idea led to the futurists' interest in the creation of ectoplasmic forms by sensitive subjects in a mediumistic trance. In "Fondamento plastico della scultura e pittura futuriste," Boccioni wrote:

When, through the works, one understands the truth of futurist sculpture, one will see the form of atmosphere where before one saw emptiness and then with the impressionists a fog. This fog was already a first step toward atmospheric plasticity, toward our physical transcendentalism which is then another step toward the perception of analogous phenomena until now occult to our obtuse sensitivity, such as the perceptions of the luminous emanations of our body of which I spoke in my first lecture in Rome and which the photographic plate already reproduces.51

A year later, at the close of his volume Pittura, scultura futuriste, Boccioni wrote: "For us the biological mystery of mediumistic materialization is a certainty, a clarity in the intuition of psychic transcendentalism and of plastic states of mind."52 In his preparatory notes for the book, which were published posthumously, Boccioni formulated yet anothereloquent phrase: "Our painting is esoteric."53

In the passage from "Fondamento plastico della scultura e pittura futuriste" quoted above, Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco read an allusion to the photographs of ectoplasms produced at the beginning of the century by the notorious Neapolitan medium Eusapia Palladino.54 Both Marinetti and Boccioni were fascinated by Palladino's sances.55 These sances had became still better known after the director of the Corriere della sera tried to discredit them.56

Palladino based her credibility on the fact that she had agreed to repeat her mediumistic sances in the presence of neurologists and psychologists, and she was defended fiercely by the anthropologist Lombroso. Celant records that Lombroso, along with a Turinese group of faithful followers, was in those years investigating the study of phenomena of psychic condensation and materialization. Lombroso's theories would have been fairly widespread in the artistic circles of the time. Kandinsky, for example, was well informed about the studies on spiritualism that Lombroso conducted in Palladino's mediumistic sances,57 and the young Balla in his early years in Turin took Lombroso's classes.58

Materialization phenomena were also the point of departure for the work of Anton Giulio Bragaglia, the author of that "futurist photodynamism" that incited Boccioni's wrath. In two articles from 1913 titled "I fantasmi dei vivi e dei morti" and "La fotografia dell'invisibile," Bragaglia published photos of fake ectoplasms; in doing so he was following a well-established international trend.59 But the year before, influenced by mediumistic photos and those theories of chronophotography of Muybridge or Maray on which Giacomo Balla based his 1912 paintings of the frame-based breakdown of movement (scomposizione del movimento), Bragaglia had already produced the first works of photodynamism.60 In these works he retraced blurs and trajectories of bodies in movement, aiming to reveal that spiritual essence that is lost as a result of the limitations of the human eye: "In motion, things, dematerializing, become idealized," he declared in his Fotodinamismo futurista.61 Calvesi, considering this phrase to be a departure from Bergsonian ideas, linked it to one of the key phrases of the technical manifesto of futurist painting of 1910: "Movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies." Bragaglia's interest in the supernatural did not exhaust itself in this first phase, as testified by his 1932 photograph Alchimia musicale.

But the passage from Lacerba of March 15, 1913, in which Boccioni talked about "perceptions of the luminous emanations of our body," seems actually to refer to the particular metapsychics phenomena that Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater called "thought-forms." Their book Thought-forms of 1901 was read assiduously in the early twentieth century by artists who were interested in abstract painting. In fact, it exerted great influence over the work of Kandinsky, Kupka, Malevich, and Mondrian.

The book's central proposition is that all thoughts and emotions create corresponding forms and colors in the aura that surrounds the physical body of every human being. These forms and colors are directly determined by the vibrations of the aura, which only clairvoyants can perceive. According to Besant and Leadbeater, the aura of an individual is composed of the union of different "bodies," among which are the astral body, generated by the passions, and the mental body, generated by the thoughts. The vibrations of the astral and mental bodies have the power to produce special psychic forms, both concrete and abstract, which they called thought-forms. Thought-forms can move freely, and they can distance themselves from the body if the energy of the mind that produced them is sufficient. Their color is based on the quality of the thought, their form on its nature, and their sharpness on its clarity.62

Besant's and Leadbeater's book contain a famous series of color plates painted by various artists on indications furnished by the authors after experiencing trances. Their indications were intended to document scientifically, down to the smallest detail, the thought-forms produced by subjects while feeling emotions ranging from devotion to fear and rage that were collected on specific occasions, at specific times of the day. The largely abstract plates attracted the interest of artists of the time, as did the illustrations of Leadbeater's Man Visible and Invisible of 1902. Thought-forms was quickly translated into a number of languages; in Italy it was first disseminated in the 1905 French translation, in which version it was read by Luigi Pirandello and influenced his poetics from the writing of Il fu Mattia Pascal onward.63

It is useful, however, to remember that Boccioni first expressed interest in the occult in that Roman lecture of 1911 that he referred to in his Lacerba article of March 15, 1913, a lecture in which his spirituality is clearly revealed. The text of the lecture, which remained unpublished for a long time, represents one of the high points of Boccioni's poetics. Conscious of its relevance, he referred to it often in his subsequent works. His familiarity with the books of Leadbeater and Besant, particularly Thought-forms, emerges from the very opening lines of the lecture, where, in prophesizing the art of the future, Boccioni affirms:

There will come a time when a painting will no longer be enough. Its immobility will be an archaism when compared with the vertiginous movement of human life. The eye of man will perceive colors like feelings in themselves. Multiplied colors will have no need of forms to be understood, and pictorial works will be whirling musical compositions of enormous colored gases, which on the scene of a free horizon, will move and electrify the complex soul of a crowd that we cannot yet imagine.64

The reference to the use of colors as "feelings in themselves," the use of "colored gases" that can electrify the soul, and the synesthetic link between colors and musical composition are all concepts from Thought-forms. In that same year, 1911, Luigi Russolo exhibited perhaps his most ambitious canvas, on which he had worked for many years.65 Titled La musica, it represents a whirling azure wave that unfolds in the air while the protagonist of the painting, a pianist, executes equally whirling musical figurations on a keyboard. Russolo's painting probably inspired Boccioni's visionary remarks above; and it certainly inspired some elements of Citt che sale, Boccioni's masterpiece of 1910-1911 (fig. 3).B66[fig.3]/B

The synesthetic hypothesis returned in the closing words of Boccioni's 1911 lecture, where Boccioni clarified that by painting the sensation, the futurists stop "the idea before it can be localized in any one sense and be determined either as music, poetry, painting, architecture, that way capturing without any mediation the primal universal sensation."67 Moreover, because futurists live in the absolute, Boccioni maintained that it was necessary for those wishing to understand their works to be not only extremely intelligent but also ready "to enter into contact with pure intuition," which is possible only "after a long and religious preparation."68

Thanks to this spiritual preparation, we are endowed with a new sensitivity that, through new perceptive and psychic means, guides us in the search for the absolute, Boccioni writes:

We painters [. . .] feel that this sensitivity is a psychic divining force that gives the senses the power to perceive that which never until now was perceived.69 We think that if everything tends toward Unity, that which man until today has sought to perceive in unity is still a miserable blind infantile decomposition of things.70

Boccioni believed that the artist must aspire to re-create this unity from the "chaos that envelops things." Sensation is the synthesis, the essence of things, their transfiguration. It is the "subjective impression of Nature."

Moving from the more spiritual aspects of the artistic currents that had gone before (divisionism, impressionism, symbolism), Boccioni arrived at a definition of futurism as the culmination and overcoming of these previous artistic currents. Divisionism represents for Boccioni the achievement of a "symphonic and polychromatic unity of the painting that will become more and more a universal synthesis." With the impressionists, figures and objects, although still in a fairly embryonic way, "are already the nucleus of an atmospheric vibration." But the impressionists exchanged "appearance for reality." It was their limit, and as a result they were trapped in a superficial representation of nature.

Boccioni considered the painting style of the Italian symbolist Gaetano Previati, in which he noted contacts with the "Rosa Croce," which was the direct predecessor of futurist painting. In Previati, "forms begin to speak like music, bodies aspire to make themselves atmosphere, spirit, and the subject is ready to transform itself into a state of mind."

Boccioni perceived futurism as a new kind of impressionism: "Our impressionism is absolutely spiritual since more than the optical and analytical impression, it wishes to give the psychic and synthetic impression of reality." The spiritual role of futurist painting and the psychic force that it develops exhibits far loftier ambitions than French impressionism. In Boccioni's words, it "hypnotizes, grasps, envelops and drags the soul to the infinite." Boccioni had already defined this psychic synthesis as "simultaneity of state of mind."It was a mnemonic-optical representation of what is remembered and what is seen; in substance, it was a spiritualization of the perceptive experience. As if it were an X-ray view, this psychic synthesis offered possibilities of "penetrating the opacity of bodies."

The influence of X-rays and the mythology that the futurists developed around them returns with Boccioni's mention of X-rays in a catalog note for the painting La risata (also painted in the year 1911), which was prepared for the program of the 1912 London exhibition: "The scene is round the table of a restaurant where all are gay. The personages are studied from all sides and both the objects in front and those at the back are to be seen, all those being present in the painter's memory, so that the principle of the Roentgen rays is applied to the picture."71

This quote shows similarities with his affirmations in the Roman lecture. For Boccioni the model of the modern artist was the "clairvoyant painter," capable of "painting not only the visible but that which until now was held to be invisible."72 He believed that the modern painter "can only paint the invisible, clothing it with lights and shadows that emanate from his own soul." Thanks to the progress-spiritual and technological-of the modern age, the five senses can be transcended: "It is our futurist hypersensitivity that guides us and makes us already possess that sixth sense that science strains in vain to catalog and define."73

This perceptive sensitivity permitted the futurist artist to understand the spiritual essence of the movement of bodies. Everything is perennially in motion, all is composed of the same waves that have various grades of density and that vibrate at different intensities. "Bodies are but condensed atmosphere," Boccioni wrote, and minerals, plants, and animals are composed of "identical nature." This new sensitivity is a true and real "psychic divining force" that allows one to grasp that substantial "Unity" of everything that Boccioni considered-as he phrases it in his lecture notes in a crossed-out line-the symbol of the "universal vibration." 74 Futurist painting aspired to reproduce a more profound reality as it is perceived by the subject and as it produced states of mind in the subject: "If bodies provoke states of mind through vibrations of forms, it is those that we will draw."

The following excerpt from the closing paragraph of the Roman lecture is both the most visionary passage of that document and the one where Boccioni's familiarity with Leadbeater is most evident:

There is a space of vibrations between the physical body and the invisible that determines the nature of its action and that will dictate the artistic sensation. In short, if around us spirits wander and are observed and studied; if from our bodies emanate fluids of power, of antipathy, of love; if deaths are foreseen at a distance of hundreds of kilometers; if premonitions give us sudden joy or annihilate us with sadness; if all this impalpable, this invisible, this inaudible becomes more and more the object of investigation and observation: all of this happens because in us some marvelous sense is awakening thanks to the light of our consciousness. Sensation is the material garment of the spirit and now it appears to our clairvoyant eyes. And with this the artist feels himself in everything. By creating he does not look, does not observe, does not measure; he feels and the sensations that envelop him dictates him the lines and colors that will arouse the emotions that caused him to act.

The Craft of Light: Balla's Occult Signature

In Balla one finds again the confluence of two streams common among many of his futurist comrades: the scientific/positivist and the spiritualist.75 The merging of these two tendencies into a sort of metaphysical rationality would constitute, toward the end of the nineteenth century, one of the aims of theosophy. As Linda Henderson maintains, the preferred meeting place between science and spirituality is the theory of vibrations.76 In the light of this convergence of ends, it is no surprise that Balla, literally obsessed with vibrations, was involved with theosophy for many years, and that an understanding of his relations with it are crucial to reconstructing his artistic journey.

During his formative years in Turin, Balla studied with Cesare Lombroso (whose contacts with spiritualism have been mentioned by Germano Celant, among others).77 But the encounter first with freemasonry and occultism, and later with theosophy, occurred only in 1895, once Balla had moved to Rome. In the first years of the century, Balla furthered his interest in psychiatry by reading Hoepli's popular compendia and manuals.78 His interest in X-rays may have been piqued by his acquaintance with Professor Ghilarducci, an expert on radiology, psychology, and electrotherapy, whose portrait Balla painted in 1903.79 This is indicated in an undated entry in his notebooks: "Roentgen rays and their applications."80 I believe he made this entry to remind himself to look into Ignazio Schincaglia's popular 1911 book Radiografia e radioscopia: Storia dei raggi Roentgen e loro applicazioni piu importanti.

The supernatural element is already present in some of Balla's first Roman works, both in the impressive dimensions of Ritratto della madre from 1901 and in the metaphysical angle and hyperrealism of the formidable Fallimento of 1902.81 As early as 1904 he maintained a friendship with Ernesto Nathan, an occultist and freemason (he was grand master of the Grande Oriente d'Italia in 1899 and again in 1917), who in 1907 became the first anticlerical mayor to take office in the Campidoglio. Nathan acquired nine canvases from Balla and commissioned a portrait in 1910, and Balla even taught painting to Nathan's daughter, Annie.82 Notwithstanding his contact with Nathan, Balla apparently never affiliated himself with a lodge.83

Information about Balla's first contact with theosophy comes from Balla's daughter Elica: "In 1916 Balla is also interested in psychic phenomena and attends the meetings of a society of theosophists presided over by General Ballatore; they hold, in said society, sances. [...] Inspired by this interest, [...] he outlines some sketches on this subject and then a larger painting, aptly titled Trasformazione forme spiriti" (fig. 4).B84[fig.4]/B

Flavia Matitti has reconstructed the history of the circle around Generale Ballatore, the "Gruppo Teosofico Roma," and Balla's relationship with that circle. Gruppo Roma was founded in 1897 and recognized as a theosophical association in 1907. In the same year, the first issues of the periodical Ultra came out; in it Ballatore published articles on hyperspace and the fourth dimension; later he wrote on radioactivity. Ultra was the official organ of Gruppo Roma until 1930. In October 1914, Ardengo Soffici published his article "La Teosofia nel futurismo" in Ultra.85

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Indiana Eugenics: History and Legacy

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In 1907, a new law passed by the state legislature and signed by the Governor of Indiana provided for the involuntary sterilization of "confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists." Although it was eventually found to be unconstitutional, this law is widely regarded as the first eugenics sterilization legislation passed in the world. In 1927, a revised law was implemented and before it was repealed in 1974, over 2,300 of the States most vulnerable citizens were involuntarily sterilized. In addition, Indiana established a state-funded Committee on Mental Defectives that carried out eugenic family studies in over twenty counties and was home to an active "better babies" movement that encouraged scientific motherhood and infant hygiene as routes to human improvement.

News Release

American Medical Association News Article

The centenary of the 1907 legislation provides a unique opportunity to evaluate the far-reaching significance of this event by exploring the largely untold history of eugenics in Indiana, and the relevance of this history to contemporary issues in human genomics, public health genetics, and reproductive health in other parts of the country. An expert project team has been assembled of historians, bioethicists, lawyers, and art/design faculty to undertake a series of scholarly and public projects to mark the 100th anniversary of the Indiana eugenics legislation. These included:

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Indiana Eugenics: History and Legacy

50 Years On, Moore’s Law Still Pushes Tech to Double Down

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Slide: 1 / of 1 .

Caption: Gordon E. Moore. Chuck Nacke/Alamy

On April 19, 1965, the 36-year-old head of R&D at seminal Silicon Valley firm Fairchild Semiconductor published a prediction in a trade magazine, Electronics. The researcher claimed that the number of componentsthat is, transistorson a single computer chip would continue to double every year, while the cost per chip would remain constant.

Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders as home computersor at least terminals connected to a central computerautomatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications equipment, that researcher, Gordon Moore, wrote.

Moore's Law is both the imperative that propels tech companies forward and the standard by which they must abide in order to stay afloat in the industry.

At the time, Moore thought the prediction would hold true for a decadefrom 60 components on a single silicon chip to 65,000 by 1975. That year, he revised his forecast down to a doubling every two years. Moore went on to cofound a little company called Intel, which would become the number one semiconductor company in the world. Today, fifty years later, thedictum now famously known as Moores Law has withstood the test of time.

In the beginning, it was just a way of chronicling the progress, Moore, now 86 years old, said in an interview posted by Intel. But gradually, it became something that the various industry participants recognized as something they had to stay on or fall behind technologically.

Over the past five decades, the surge in computing power predicted by Moores Law has paralleled the trajectory of innovation in Silicon Valley. Computers were once the size of a room. Now smartphones with more processing power than NASA imagined it would need to send a man to the moon can easily fit in your pocket. When Moore first made his prediction, transistors were about the size of an eraser at the end of a pencil. Now, six million can fit into the period at the end of this sentence. The consistency with which more powerful chips have confirmed Moores Law has given companies the confidence to invest in the development of complementary technologies, from displays, sensors, and memory to digital imaging devices, software, and the internet. All the while, prices per unit of power keep falling.

But the reliability of Moores Law has also shaped expectations. Today, consumers all but demand that their gadgets get faster, cheaper, and more compact in step with Moores Law. Its both the imperative that propels tech companies forward and the standard by which they must abide in order to stay afloat in the industry.

Whats more, that expectation now extends, fairly or not, beyond gadgets to new innovations in cloud computing, the internet, social media, search, streaming video, and more. According to Dan Hutchenson, head of chip market research outfit VLSI Research, the market value of the companies across the spectrum of technologies beholden to Moores Law amounted to a whopping $13 trillion in 2014one-fifth of the asset value of the worlds economy.

As a result, Moores Law also means companies are in constant competition with their own progress, says Steve Brown, a strategist with Intel. Lucky for them, Brown says, Moores Law is not a fact of nature. Its more of an aspiration and a belief system, he says. Its that belief that drives technology companies to outdo themselves year after year, Brown saysa belief held by both themselves and their customers.

Beyond the advance of computing technology itself, the surge in computing power predicted by Moores Law has led to Moores Law-like transformations in other industries, including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and genetics. Many drugs have been tested in the minds of computers, as Brown puts it. Computer software can analyze the human genome in minutes.

And its these advances, Brown believes, that might be the most important of all. Ultimately, it wont be about making a better, faster smartphone, he says. We may eventually discover how to make more food, create better living conditions and connect more people together. Moores Law could be key to unlocking that.

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50 Years On, Moore's Law Still Pushes Tech to Double Down

Flight of the Conchords Ep 6 Bowie’s In Space – YouTube

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Bowie's in space Bowie's in space What you doing out there, man? That's pretty freaky, Bowie Isn't it cold out in space, Bowie? Do you want to borrow my jumper, Bowie? Does the space cold make your nipples go pointy, Bowie? Do you use your pointy nipples as telescopic antennae to transmit data back to Earth? Bet you do, you freaky old bastard you Hey Bowie, do you have one really funky sequined space suit? Or do you have several ch-changes? Do you smoke grass out in space, Bowie? Or do they smoke Astroturf? Ooh! Receiving transmission from David Bowie's nipple antennae Do you read me, Lieutenant Bowie? This is Bowie to Bowie Do you hear me out there, man? This is Bowie back to Bowie I read you loud and clear, man Ooh yeah, man! Your signal's weak on my radar screen How far out are you, man? I'm pretty far out That's pretty far out, man Ooh- ah- ooh! I'm orbiting Pluto Ooh- ah- ooh! Drawn in by its groovitational (Groovitational pull) I'm jamming out with the Mick Jagger-nauts Ooh, and they think it's pretty cool Are you okay, Bowie? What was that sound? I don't know, man Ooh, it's the craziest scene Yeah, I'm picking it up on my LSD screen Can you see the stratosphere ringing? To the choir of Afronauts singing Bowie's in space Bowie's in space Bowie Bowie Bowie Bowie Bowie Bowie Bowie's in space Bowie Bowie Bowie Bowie Bowie Bowie Eena-ma-ma-meena-mina-mowie Phasers on funky Eena-ma-ma-meena-mina-mowie Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-Bowie's in Space

Lyrics credit: whatthefolk.net

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Flight of the Conchords Ep 6 Bowie's In Space - YouTube

Intro to Artificial Intelligence Course and Training Online …

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When does the course begin?

This class is self paced. You can begin whenever you like and then follow your own pace. Its a good idea to set goals for yourself to make sure you stick with the course.

This class will always be available!

Take a look at the Class Summary, What Should I Know, and What Will I Learn sections above. If you want to know more, just enroll in the course and start exploring.

Yes! The point is for you to learn what YOU need (or want) to learn. If you already know something, feel free to skip ahead. If you ever find that youre confused, you can always go back and watch something that you skipped.

Its completely free! If youre feeling generous, we would love to have you contribute your thoughts, questions, and answers to the course discussion forum.

Collaboration is a great way to learn. You should do it! The key is to use collaboration as a way to enhance learning, not as a way of sharing answers without understanding them.

Udacity classes are a little different from traditional courses. We intersperse our video segments with interactive questions. There are many reasons for including these questions: to get you thinking, to check your understanding, for fun, etc... But really, they are there to help you learn. They are NOT there to evaluate your intelligence, so try not to let them stress you out.

Learn actively! You will retain more of what you learn if you take notes, draw diagrams, make notecards, and actively try to make sense of the material.

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Intro to Artificial Intelligence Course and Training Online ...

Artificial Intelligence – Wait But Why

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Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that whats happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future. So I wanted to learn as much as I could about it, and once I did that, I wanted to make sure I wrote a post that really explained this whole situation and why it matters so much. Not shockingly, that became outrageously long, so I broke it into two parts. This is Part 1Part 2 is here.

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We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. Vernor Vinge

What does it feel like to stand here?

It seems like a pretty intense place to be standingbut then you have to remember something about what its like to stand on a time graph: you cant see whats to your right. So heres how it actually feels to stand there:

Which probably feels pretty normal

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Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. Its impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someones face and chat with them even though theyre on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery. This is all before you show him the internet or explain things like the International Space Station, the Large Hadron Collider, nuclear weapons, or general relativity.

This experience for him wouldnt be surprising or shocking or even mind-blowingthose words arent big enough. He might actually die.

But heres the interesting thingif he then went back to 1750 and got jealous that we got to see his reaction and decided he wanted to try the same thing, hed take the time machine and go back the same distance, get someone from around the year 1500, bring him to 1750, and show him everything. And the 1500 guy would be shocked by a lot of thingsbut he wouldnt die. It would be far less of an insane experience for him, because while 1500 and 1750 were very different, they were much less different than 1750 to 2015. The 1500 guy would learn some mind-bending shit about space and physics, hed be impressed with how committed Europe turned out to be with that new imperialism fad, and hed have to do some major revisions of his world map conception. But watching everyday life go by in 1750transportation, communication, etc.definitely wouldnt make him die.

No, in order for the 1750 guy to have as much fun as we had with him, hed have to go much farther backmaybe all the way back to about 12,000 BC, before the First Agricultural Revolution gave rise to the first cities and to the concept of civilization. If someone from a purely hunter-gatherer worldfrom a time when humans were, more or less, just another animal speciessaw the vast human empires of 1750 with their towering churches, their ocean-crossing ships, their concept of being inside, and their enormous mountain of collective, accumulated human knowledge and discoveryhed likely die.

And then what if, after dying, he got jealous and wanted to do the same thing. If he went back 12,000 years to 24,000 BC and got a guy and brought him to 12,000 BC, hed show the guy everything and the guy would be like, Okay whats your point who cares. For the 12,000 BC guy to have the same fun, hed have to go back over 100,000 years and get someone he could show fire and language to for the first time.

In order for someone to be transported into the future and die from the level of shock theyd experience, they have to go enough years ahead that a die level of progress, or a Die Progress Unit (DPU) has been achieved. So a DPU took over 100,000 years in hunter-gatherer times, but at the post-Agricultural Revolution rate, it only took about 12,000 years. The post-Industrial Revolution world has moved so quickly that a 1750 person only needs to go forward a couple hundred years for a DPU to have happened.

This patternhuman progress moving quicker and quicker as time goes onis what futurist Ray Kurzweil calls human historys Law of Accelerating Returns. This happens because more advanced societies have the ability to progress at a faster rate than less advanced societiesbecause theyre more advanced. 19th century humanity knew more and had better technology than 15th century humanity, so its no surprise that humanity made far more advances in the 19th century than in the 15th century15th century humanity was no match for 19th century humanity.11 open these

This works on smaller scales too. The movie Back to the Future came out in 1985, and the past took place in 1955. In the movie, when Michael J. Fox went back to 1955, he was caught off-guard by the newness of TVs, the prices of soda, the lack of love for shrill electric guitar, and the variation in slang. It was a different world, yesbut if the movie were made today and the past took place in 1985, the movie could have had much more fun with much bigger differences. The character would be in a time before personal computers, internet, or cell phonestodays Marty McFly, a teenager born in the late 90s, would be much more out of place in 1985 than the movies Marty McFly was in 1955.

This is for the same reason we just discussedthe Law of Accelerating Returns. The average rate of advancement between 1985 and 2015 was higher than the rate between 1955 and 1985because the former was a more advanced worldso much more change happened in the most recent 30 years than in the prior 30.

Soadvances are getting bigger and bigger and happening more and more quickly. This suggests some pretty intense things about our future, right?

Kurzweil suggests that the progress of the entire 20th century would have been achieved in only 20 years at the rate of advancement in the year 2000in other words, by 2000, the rate of progress was five times faster than the average rate of progress during the 20th century. He believes another 20th centurys worth of progress happened between 2000 and 2014 and that another 20th centurys worth of progress will happen by 2021, in only seven years. A couple decades later, he believes a 20th centurys worth of progress will happen multiple times in the same year, and even later, in less than one month. All in all, because of the Law of Accelerating Returns, Kurzweil believes that the 21st century will achieve 1,000 times the progress of the 20th century.2

If Kurzweil and others who agree with him are correct, then we may be as blown away by 2030 as our 1750 guy was by 2015i.e. the next DPU might only take a couple decadesand the world in 2050 might be so vastly different than todays world that we would barely recognize it.

This isnt science fiction. Its what many scientists smarter and more knowledgeable than you or I firmly believeand if you look at history, its what we should logically predict.

So then why, when you hear me say something like the world 35 years from now might be totally unrecognizable, are you thinking, Cool.but nahhhhhhh? Three reasons were skeptical of outlandish forecasts of the future:

1) When it comes to history, we think in straight lines. When we imagine the progress of the next 30 years, we look back to the progress of the previous 30 as an indicator of how much will likely happen. When we think about the extent to which the world will change in the 21st century, we just take the 20th century progress and add it to the year 2000. This was the same mistake our 1750 guy made when he got someone from 1500 and expected to blow his mind as much as his own was blown going the same distance ahead. Its most intuitive for us to think linearly, when we should be thinking exponentially. If someone is being more clever about it, they might predict the advances of the next 30 years not by looking at the previous 30 years, but by taking the current rate of progress and judging based on that. Theyd be more accurate, but still way off. In order to think about the future correctly, you need to imagine things moving at a much faster rate than theyre moving now.

2) The trajectory of very recent history often tells a distorted story. First, even a steep exponential curve seems linear when you only look at a tiny slice of it, the same way if you look at a little segment of a huge circle up close, it looks almost like a straight line. Second, exponential growth isnt totally smooth and uniform. Kurzweil explains that progress happens in S-curves:

An S is created by the wave of progress when a new paradigm sweeps the world. The curve goes through three phases:

1. Slow growth (the early phase of exponential growth) 2. Rapid growth (the late, explosive phase of exponential growth) 3. A leveling off as the particular paradigm matures3

If you look only at very recent history, the part of the S-curve youre on at the moment can obscure your perception of how fast things are advancing. The chunk of time between 1995 and 2007 saw the explosion of the internet, the introduction of Microsoft, Google, and Facebook into the public consciousness, the birth of social networking, and the introduction of cell phones and then smart phones. That was Phase 2: the growth spurt part of the S. But 2008 to 2015 has been less groundbreaking, at least on the technological front. Someone thinking about the future today might examine the last few years to gauge the current rate of advancement, but thats missing the bigger picture. In fact, a new, huge Phase 2 growth spurt might be brewing right now.

3) Our own experience makes us stubborn old men about the future. We base our ideas about the world on our personal experience, and that experience has ingrained the rate of growth of the recent past in our heads as the way things happen. Were also limited by our imagination, which takes our experience and uses it to conjure future predictionsbut often, what we know simply doesnt give us the tools to think accurately about the future.2 When we hear a prediction about the future that contradicts our experience-based notion of how things work, our instinct is that the prediction must be naive. If I tell you, later in this post, that you may live to be 150, or 250, or not die at all, your instinct will be, Thats stupidif theres one thing I know from history, its that everybody dies. And yes, no one in the past has not died. But no one flew airplanes before airplanes were invented either.

So while nahhhhh might feel right as you read this post, its probably actually wrong. The fact is, if were being truly logical and expecting historical patterns to continue, we should conclude that much, much, much more should change in the coming decades than we intuitively expect. Logic also suggests that if the most advanced species on a planet keeps making larger and larger leaps forward at an ever-faster rate, at some point, theyll make a leap so great that it completely alters life as they know it and the perception they have of what it means to be a humankind of like how evolution kept making great leaps toward intelligence until finally it made such a large leap to the human being that it completely altered what it meant for any creature to live on planet Earth. And if you spend some time reading about whats going on today in science and technology, you start to see a lot of signs quietly hinting that life as we currently know it cannot withstand the leap thats coming next.

_______________

If youre like me, you used to think Artificial Intelligence was a silly sci-fi concept, but lately youve been hearing it mentioned by serious people, and you dont really quite get it.

There are three reasons a lot of people are confused about the term AI:

1) We associate AI with movies. Star Wars. Terminator. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even the Jetsons. And those are fiction, as are the robot characters. So it makes AI sound a little fictional to us.

2) AI is a broad topic. It ranges from your phones calculator to self-driving cars to something in the future that might change the world dramatically. AI refers to all of these things, which is confusing.

3) We use AI all the time in our daily lives, but we often dont realize its AI. John McCarthy, who coined the term Artificial Intelligence in 1956, complained that as soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.4 Because of this phenomenon, AI often sounds like a mythical future prediction more than a reality. At the same time, it makes it sound like a pop concept from the past that never came to fruition. Ray Kurzweil says he hears people say that AI withered in the 1980s, which he compares to insisting that the Internet died in the dot-com bust of the early 2000s.5

So lets clear things up. First, stop thinking of robots. A robot is a container for AI, sometimes mimicking the human form, sometimes notbut the AI itself is the computer inside the robot. AI is the brain, and the robot is its bodyif it even has a body. For example, the software and data behind Siri is AI, the womans voice we hear is a personification of that AI, and theres no robot involved at all.

Secondly, youve probably heard the term singularity or technological singularity. This term has been used in math to describe an asymptote-like situation where normal rules no longer apply. Its been used in physics to describe a phenomenon like an infinitely small, dense black hole or the point we were all squished into right before the Big Bang. Again, situations where the usual rules dont apply. In 1993, Vernor Vinge wrote a famous essay in which he applied the term to the moment in the future when our technologys intelligence exceeds our owna moment for him when life as we know it will be forever changed and normal rules will no longer apply. Ray Kurzweil then muddled things a bit by defining the singularity as the time when the Law of Accelerating Returns has reached such an extreme pace that technological progress is happening at a seemingly-infinite pace, and after which well be living in a whole new world. I found that many of todays AI thinkers have stopped using the term, and its confusing anyway, so I wont use it much here (even though well be focusing on that idea throughout).

Finally, while there are many different types or forms of AI since AI is a broad concept, the critical categories we need to think about are based on an AIs caliber. There are three major AI caliber categories:

AI Caliber 1) Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI): Sometimes referred to as Weak AI, Artificial Narrow Intelligence is AI that specializes in one area. Theres AI that can beat the world chess champion in chess, but thats the only thing it does. Ask it to figure out a better way to store data on a hard drive, and itll look at you blankly.

AI Caliber 2) Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): Sometimes referred to as Strong AI, or Human-Level AI, Artificial General Intelligence refers to a computer that is as smart as a human across the boarda machine that can perform any intellectual task that a human being can. Creating AGI is a much harder task than creating ANI, and were yet to do it. Professor Linda Gottfredson describes intelligence as a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience. AGI would be able to do all of those things as easily as you can.

AI Caliber 3) Artificial Superintelligence (ASI): Oxford philosopher and leading AI thinker Nick Bostrom defines superintelligence as an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills. Artificial Superintelligence ranges from a computer thats just a little smarter than a human to one thats trillions of times smarteracross the board. ASI is the reason the topic of AI is such a spicy meatball and why the words immortality and extinction will both appear in these posts multiple times.

As of now, humans have conquered the lowest caliber of AIANIin many ways, and its everywhere. The AI Revolution is the road from ANI, through AGI, to ASIa road we may or may not survive but that, either way, will change everything.

Lets take a close look at what the leading thinkers in the field believe this road looks like and why this revolution might happen way sooner than you might think:

Artificial Narrow Intelligence is machine intelligence that equals or exceeds human intelligence or efficiency at a specific thing. A few examples:

ANI systems as they are now arent especially scary. At worst, a glitchy or badly-programmed ANI can cause an isolated catastrophe like knocking out a power grid, causing a harmful nuclear power plant malfunction, or triggering a financial markets disaster (like the 2010 Flash Crash when an ANI program reacted the wrong way to an unexpected situation and caused the stock market to briefly plummet, taking $1 trillion of market value with it, only part of which was recovered when the mistake was corrected).

But while ANI doesnt have the capability to cause an existential threat, we should see this increasingly large and complex ecosystem of relatively-harmless ANI as a precursor of the world-altering hurricane thats on the way. Each new ANI innovation quietly adds another brick onto the road to AGI and ASI. Or as Aaron Saenz sees it, our worlds ANI systems are like the amino acids in the early Earths primordial oozethe inanimate stuff of life that, one unexpected day, woke up.

Why Its So Hard

Nothing will make you appreciate human intelligence like learning about how unbelievably challenging it is to try to create a computer as smart as we are. Building skyscrapers, putting humans in space, figuring out the details of how the Big Bang went downall far easier than understanding our own brain or how to make something as cool as it. As of now, the human brain is the most complex object in the known universe.

Whats interesting is that the hard parts of trying to build AGI (a computer as smart as humans in general, not just at one narrow specialty) are not intuitively what youd think they are. Build a computer that can multiply two ten-digit numbers in a split secondincredibly easy. Build one that can look at a dog and answer whether its a dog or a catspectacularly difficult. Make AI that can beat any human in chess? Done. Make one that can read a paragraph from a six-year-olds picture book and not just recognize the words but understand the meaning of them? Google is currently spending billions of dollars trying to do it. Hard thingslike calculus, financial market strategy, and language translationare mind-numbingly easy for a computer, while easy thingslike vision, motion, movement, and perceptionare insanely hard for it. Or, as computer scientist Donald Knuth puts it, AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires thinking but has failed to do most of what people and animals do without thinking.'7

What you quickly realize when you think about this is that those things that seem easy to us are actually unbelievably complicated, and they only seem easy because those skills have been optimized in us (and most animals) by hundreds of million years of animal evolution. When you reach your hand up toward an object, the muscles, tendons, and bones in your shoulder, elbow, and wrist instantly perform a long series of physics operations, in conjunction with your eyes, to allow you to move your hand in a straight line through three dimensions. It seems effortless to you because you have perfected software in your brain for doing it. Same idea goes for why its not that malware is dumb for not being able to figure out the slanty word recognition test when you sign up for a new account on a siteits that your brain is super impressive for being able to.

On the other hand, multiplying big numbers or playing chess are new activities for biological creatures and we havent had any time to evolve a proficiency at them, so a computer doesnt need to work too hard to beat us. Think about itwhich would you rather do, build a program that could multiply big numbers or one that could understand the essence of a B well enough that you could show it a B in any one of thousands of unpredictable fonts or handwriting and it could instantly know it was a B?

One fun examplewhen you look at this, you and a computer both can figure out that its a rectangle with two distinct shades, alternating:

Tied so far. But if you pick up the black and reveal the whole image

you have no problem giving a full description of the various opaque and translucent cylinders, slats, and 3-D corners, but the computer would fail miserably. It would describe what it seesa variety of two-dimensional shapes in several different shadeswhich is actually whats there. Your brain is doing a ton of fancy shit to interpret the implied depth, shade-mixing, and room lighting the picture is trying to portray.8 And looking at the picture below, a computer sees a two-dimensional white, black, and gray collage, while you easily see what it really isa photo of an entirely-black, 3-D rock:

Credit: Matthew Lloyd

And everything we just mentioned is still only taking in stagnant information and processing it. To be human-level intelligent, a computer would have to understand things like the difference between subtle facial expressions, the distinction between being pleased, relieved, content, satisfied, and glad, and why Braveheart was great but The Patriot was terrible.

Daunting.

So how do we get there?

First Key to Creating AGI: Increasing Computational Power

One thing that definitely needs to happen for AGI to be a possibility is an increase in the power of computer hardware. If an AI system is going to be as intelligent as the brain, itll need to equal the brains raw computing capacity.

One way to express this capacity is in the total calculations per second (cps) the brain could manage, and you could come to this number by figuring out the maximum cps of each structure in the brain and then adding them all together.

Ray Kurzweil came up with a shortcut by taking someones professional estimate for the cps of one structure and that structures weight compared to that of the whole brain and then multiplying proportionally to get an estimate for the total. Sounds a little iffy, but he did this a bunch of times with various professional estimates of different regions, and the total always arrived in the same ballparkaround 1016, or 10 quadrillion cps.

Currently, the worlds fastest supercomputer, Chinas Tianhe-2, has actually beaten that number, clocking in at about 34 quadrillion cps. But Tianhe-2 is also a dick, taking up 720 square meters of space, using 24 megawatts of power (the brain runs on just 20 watts), and costing $390 million to build. Not especially applicable to wide usage, or even most commercial or industrial usage yet.

Kurzweil suggests that we think about the state of computers by looking at how many cps you can buy for $1,000. When that number reaches human-level10 quadrillion cpsthen thatll mean AGI could become a very real part of life.

Moores Law is a historically-reliable rule that the worlds maximum computing power doubles approximately every two years, meaning computer hardware advancement, like general human advancement through history, grows exponentially. Looking at how this relates to Kurzweils cps/$1,000 metric, were currently at about 10 trillion cps/$1,000, right on pace with this graphs predicted trajectory:9

So the worlds $1,000 computers are now beating the mouse brain and theyre at about a thousandth of human level. This doesnt sound like much until you remember that we were at about a trillionth of human level in 1985, a billionth in 1995, and a millionth in 2005. Being at a thousandth in 2015 puts us right on pace to get to an affordable computer by 2025 that rivals the power of the brain.

So on the hardware side, the raw power needed for AGI is technically available now, in China, and well be ready for affordable, widespread AGI-caliber hardware within 10 years. But raw computational power alone doesnt make a computer generally intelligentthe next question is, how do we bring human-level intelligence to all that power?

Second Key to Creating AGI: Making it Smart

This is the icky part. The truth is, no one really knows how to make it smartwere still debating how to make a computer human-level intelligent and capable of knowing what a dog and a weird-written B and a mediocre movie is. But there are a bunch of far-fetched strategies out there and at some point, one of them will work. Here are the three most common strategies I came across:

This is like scientists toiling over how that kid who sits next to them in class is so smart and keeps doing so well on the tests, and even though they keep studying diligently, they cant do nearly as well as that kid, and then they finally decide k fuck it Im just gonna copy that kids answers. It makes sensewere stumped trying to build a super-complex computer, and there happens to be a perfect prototype for one in each of our heads.

The science world is working hard on reverse engineering the brain to figure out how evolution made such a rad thingoptimistic estimates say we can do this by 2030. Once we do that, well know all the secrets of how the brain runs so powerfully and efficiently and we can draw inspiration from it and steal its innovations. One example of computer architecture that mimics the brain is the artificial neural network. It starts out as a network of transistor neurons, connected to each other with inputs and outputs, and it knows nothinglike an infant brain. The way it learns is it tries to do a task, say handwriting recognition, and at first, its neural firings and subsequent guesses at deciphering each letter will be completely random. But when its told it got something right, the transistor connections in the firing pathways that happened to create that answer are strengthened; when its told it was wrong, those pathways connections are weakened. After a lot of this trial and feedback, the network has, by itself, formed smart neural pathways and the machine has become optimized for the task. The brain learns a bit like this but in a more sophisticated way, and as we continue to study the brain, were discovering ingenious new ways to take advantage of neural circuitry.

More extreme plagiarism involves a strategy called whole brain emulation, where the goal is to slice a real brain into thin layers, scan each one, use software to assemble an accurate reconstructed 3-D model, and then implement the model on a powerful computer. Wed then have a computer officially capable of everything the brain is capable ofit would just need to learn and gather information. If engineers get really good, theyd be able to emulate a real brain with such exact accuracy that the brains full personality and memory would be intact once the brain architecture has been uploaded to a computer. If the brain belonged to Jim right before he passed away, the computer would now wake up as Jim (?), which would be a robust human-level AGI, and we could now work on turning Jim into an unimaginably smart ASI, which hed probably be really excited about.

How far are we from achieving whole brain emulation? Well so far, weve not yet just recently been able to emulate a 1mm-long flatworm brain, which consists of just 302 total neurons. The human brain contains 100 billion. If that makes it seem like a hopeless project, remember the power of exponential progressnow that weve conquered the tiny worm brain, an ant might happen before too long, followed by a mouse, and suddenly this will seem much more plausible.

So if we decide the smart kids test is too hard to copy, we can try to copy the way he studies for the tests instead.

Heres something we know. Building a computer as powerful as the brain is possibleour own brains evolution is proof. And if the brain is just too complex for us to emulate, we could try to emulate evolution instead. The fact is, even if we can emulate a brain, that might be like trying to build an airplane by copying a birds wing-flapping motionsoften, machines are best designed using a fresh, machine-oriented approach, not by mimicking biology exactly.

So how can we simulate evolution to build AGI? The method, called genetic algorithms, would work something like this: there would be a performance-and-evaluation process that would happen again and again (the same way biological creatures perform by living life and are evaluated by whether they manage to reproduce or not). A group of computers would try to do tasks, and the most successful ones would be bred with each other by having half of each of their programming merged together into a new computer. The less successful ones would be eliminated. Over many, many iterations, this natural selection process would produce better and better computers. The challenge would be creating an automated evaluation and breeding cycle so this evolution process could run on its own.

The downside of copying evolution is that evolution likes to take a billion years to do things and we want to do this in a few decades.

But we have a lot of advantages over evolution. First, evolution has no foresight and works randomlyit produces more unhelpful mutations than helpful ones, but we would control the process so it would only be driven by beneficial glitches and targeted tweaks. Secondly, evolution doesnt aim for anything, including intelligencesometimes an environment might even select against higher intelligence (since it uses a lot of energy). We, on the other hand, could specifically direct this evolutionary process toward increasing intelligence. Third, to select for intelligence, evolution has to innovate in a bunch of other ways to facilitate intelligencelike revamping the ways cells produce energywhen we can remove those extra burdens and use things like electricity. Its no doubt wed be much, much faster than evolutionbut its still not clear whether well be able to improve upon evolution enough to make this a viable strategy.

This is when scientists get desperate and try to program the test to take itself. But it might be the most promising method we have.

The idea is that wed build a computer whose two major skills would be doing research on AI and coding changes into itselfallowing it to not only learn but to improve its own architecture. Wed teach computers to be computer scientists so they could bootstrap their own development. And that would be their main jobfiguring out how to make themselves smarter. More on this later.

Rapid advancements in hardware and innovative experimentation with software are happening simultaneously, and AGI could creep up on us quickly and unexpectedly for two main reasons:

1) Exponential growth is intense and what seems like a snails pace of advancement can quickly race upwardsthis GIF illustrates this concept nicely:

2) When it comes to software, progress can seem slow, but then one epiphany can instantly change the rate of advancement (kind of like the way science, during the time humans thought the universe was geocentric, was having difficulty calculating how the universe worked, but then the discovery that it was heliocentric suddenly made everything much easier). Or, when it comes to something like a computer that improves itself, we might seem far away but actually be just one tweak of the system away from having it become 1,000 times more effective and zooming upward to human-level intelligence.

At some point, well have achieved AGIcomputers with human-level general intelligence. Just a bunch of people and computers living together in equality.

Oh actually not at all.

The thing is, AGI with an identical level of intelligence and computational capacity as a human would still have significant advantages over humans. Like:

Hardware:

Software:

AI, which will likely get to AGI by being programmed to self-improve, wouldnt see human-level intelligence as some important milestoneits only a relevant marker from our point of viewand wouldnt have any reason to stop at our level. And given the advantages over us that even human intelligence-equivalent AGI would have, its pretty obvious that it would only hit human intelligence for a brief instant before racing onwards to the realm of superior-to-human intelligence.

This may shock the shit out of us when it happens. The reason is that from our perspective, A) while the intelligence of different kinds of animals varies, the main characteristic were aware of about any animals intelligence is that its far lower than ours, and B) we view the smartest humans as WAY smarter than the dumbest humans. Kind of like this:

So as AI zooms upward in intelligence toward us, well see it as simply becoming smarter, for an animal. Then, when it hits the lowest capacity of humanityNick Bostrom uses the term the village idiotwell be like, Oh wow, its like a dumb human. Cute! The only thing is, in the grand spectrum of intelligence, all humans, from the village idiot to Einstein, are within a very small rangeso just after hitting village idiot-level and being declared to be AGI, itll suddenly be smarter than Einstein and we wont know what hit us:

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Artificial Intelligence - Wait But Why

Artificial Intelligence Planning – The University of …

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About the Course

The course aims to provide a foundation in artificial intelligence techniques for planning, with an overview of the wide spectrum of different problems and approaches, including their underlying theory and their applications. It will allow you to:

Planning is a fundamental part of intelligent systems. In this course, for example, you will learn the basic algorithms that are used in robots to deliberate over a course of actions to take. Simpler, reactive robots don't need this, but if a robot is to act intelligently, this type of reasoning about actions is vital.

Week 1: Introduction and Planning in Context

Week 2: State-Space Search: Heuristic Search and STRIPS Week 3: Plan-Space Search and HTN Planning

One week catch up break

Week 4: Graphplan and Advanced Heuristics

Week 5: Plan Execution and Applications

Exam week

The January 2015 sessionwas the final version of the course. It will remain open so that those interested can register and access all the materials.

The MOOC is based on a Masters level course at the University of Edinburgh but is designed to be accessible at several levels of engagement from an "Awareness Level", through the core "Foundation Level" requiring a basic knowledge of logic and mathematical reasoning, to a more involved "Performance Level" requiring programming and other assignments.

The course follows a text book, but this is not required for the course:

Five weeks of study comprising 10 hours of video lecture material and special features videos. Quizzes and assessments throughout the course will assist in learning. Some weeks will involve recommended readings. Discussion on the course forum and via other social media will be encouraged. A mid-course catch up break week and a final week for exams and completion of assignments allows for flexibility in study.

You can engage with the course at a number of levels to suit your interests and the time you have available:

The January 2015 session was the final version of the course. It will remain open so that those interested can register and access all the materials. All assignments are available to try but will not score or be eligible for a statement of accomplishment

Students who complete the class during the originally scheduled session dates (that is, by 1st March 2015) will be offered a Statement of Accomplishment signed by the instructors.

The Statement of Accomplishment is not part of a formal qualification from the University. However, it may be useful to demonstrate prior learning and interest in your subject to a higher education institution or potential employer.

Nothing is required, but if you want to try out implementing some of the algorithms described in the lectures you'll need access to a programming environment. No specific programming language is required. Also, you may want to download existing planners and try those out. This may require you to compile them first.

You will appreciate that such direct contact would be difficult to manage. You are encouraged to use the course social network and discussion forum to raise questions and seek inputs. The tutors will participate in the forums, and will seek to answer frequently asked questions, in some cases by adding to the course FAQ area.

Use the hash tag #aiplan for tweets about the course.

We are passionate about open on-line collaboration and education. Our taught AI planning course at Edinburgh has always published its course materials, readings and resources on-line for anyone to view. Our own on-campus students can access these materials at times when the course is not available if it is relevant to their interests and projects. We want to make the materials available in a more accessible form that can reach a broader audience who might be interested in AI planning technology. This achieves our primary objective of getting such technology into productive use. Another benefit for us is that more people get to know about courses in AI in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, or get interested in studying or collaborating with us.

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Are We Smart Enough to Control Artificial Intelligence? | MIT …

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Years ago I had coffee with a friend who ran a startup. He had just turned 40. His father was ill, his back was sore, and he found himself overwhelmed by life. Dont laugh at me, he said, but I was counting on the singularity.

My friend worked in technology; hed seen the changes that faster microprocessors and networks had wrought. It wasnt that much of a step for him to believe that before he was beset by middle age, the intelligence of machines would exceed that of humansa moment that futurists call the singularity. A benevolent superintelligence might analyze the human genetic code at great speed and unlock the secret to eternal youth. At the very least, it might know how to fix your back.

But what if it wasnt so benevolent? Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who directs the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, describes the following scenario in his book Superintelligence, which has prompted a great deal of debate about the future of artificial intelligence. Imagine a machine that we might call a paper-clip maximizerthat is, a machine programmed to make as many paper clips as possible. Now imagine that this machine somehow became incredibly intelligent. Given its goals, it might then decide to create new, more efficient paper-clip-manufacturing machinesuntil, King Midas style, it had converted essentially everything to paper clips.

No worries, you might say: you could just program it to make exactly a million paper clips and halt. But what if it makes the paper clips and then decides to check its work? Has it counted correctly? It needs to become smarter to be sure. The superintelligent machine manufactures some as-yet-uninvented raw-computing material (call it computronium) and uses that to check each doubt. But each new doubt yields further digital doubts, and so on, until the entire earth is converted to computronium. Except for the million paper clips.

Bostrom does not believe that the paper-clip maximizer will come to be, exactly; its a thought experiment, one designed to show how even careful system design can fail to restrain extreme machine intelligence. But he does believe that superintelligence could emerge, and while it could be great, he thinks it could also decide it doesnt need humans around. Or do any number of other things that destroy the world. The title of chapter 8 is: Is the default outcome doom?

If this sounds absurd to you, youre not alone. Critics such as the robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks say that people who fear a runaway AI misunderstand what computers are doing when we say theyre thinking or getting smart. From this perspective, the putative superintelligence Bostrom describes is far in the future and perhaps impossible.

Yet a lot of smart, thoughtful people agree with Bostrom and are worried now. Why?

Volition

The question Can a machine think? has shadowed computer science from its beginnings. Alan Turing proposed in 1950 that a machine could be taught like a child; John McCarthy, inventor of the programming language LISP, coined the term artificial intelligence in 1955. As AI researchers in the 1960s and 1970s began to use computers to recognize images, translate between languages, and understand instructions in normal language and not just code, the idea that computers would eventually develop the ability to speak and thinkand thus to do evilbubbled into mainstream culture. Even beyond the oft-referenced HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1970 movie Colossus: The Forbin Project featured a large blinking mainframe computer that brings the world to the brink of nuclear destruction; a similar theme was explored 13 years later in WarGames. The androids of 1973s Westworld went crazy and started killing.

Extreme AI predictions are comparable to seeing more efficient internal combustion engines and jumping to the conclusion that the warp drives are just around the corner, Rodney Brooks writes.

When AI research fell far short of its lofty goals, funding dried up to a trickle, beginning long AI winters. Even so, the torch of the intelligent machine was carried forth in the 1980s and 90s by sci-fi authors like Vernor Vinge, who popularized the concept of the singularity; researchers like the roboticist Hans Moravec, an expert in computer vision; and the engineer/entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil, author of the 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines. Whereas Turing had posited a humanlike intelligence, Vinge, Moravec, and Kurzweil were thinking bigger: when a computer became capable of independently devising ways to achieve goals, it would very likely be capable of introspectionand thus able to modify its software and make itself more intelligent. In short order, such a computer would be able to design its own hardware.

As Kurzweil described it, this would begin a beautiful new era. Such machines would have the insight and patience (measured in picoseconds) to solve the outstanding problems of nanotechnology and spaceflight; they would improve the human condition and let us upload our consciousness into an immortal digital form. Intelligence would spread throughout the cosmos.

You can also find the exact opposite of such sunny optimism. Stephen Hawking has warned that because people would be unable to compete with an advanced AI, it could spell the end of the human race. Upon reading Superintelligence, the entrepreneur Elon Musk tweeted: Hope were not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable. Musk then followed with a $10 million grant to the Future of Life Institute. Not to be confused with Bostroms center, this is an organization that says it is working to mitigate existential risks facing humanity, the ones that could arise from the development of human-level artificial intelligence.

No one is suggesting that anything like superintelligence exists now. In fact, we still have nothing approaching a general-purpose artificial intelligence or even a clear path to how it could be achieved. Recent advances in AI, from automated assistants such as Apples Siri to Googles driverless cars, also reveal the technologys severe limitations; both can be thrown off by situations that they havent encountered before. Artificial neural networks can learn for themselves to recognize cats in photos. But they must be shown hundreds of thousands of examples and still end up much less accurate at spotting cats than a child.

This is where skeptics such as Brooks, a founder of iRobot and Rethink Robotics, come in. Even if its impressiverelative to what earlier computers could managefor a computer to recognize a picture of a cat, the machine has no volition, no sense of what cat-ness is or what else is happening in the picture, and none of the countless other insights that humans have. In this view, AI could possibly lead to intelligent machines, but it would take much more work than people like Bostrom imagine. And even if it could happen, intelligence will not necessarily lead to sentience. Extrapolating from the state of AI today to suggest that superintelligence is looming is comparable to seeing more efficient internal combustion engines appearing and jumping to the conclusion that warp drives are just around the corner, Brooks wrote recently on Edge.org. Malevolent AI is nothing to worry about, he says, for a few hundred years at least.

Insurance policy

Even if the odds of a superintelligence arising are very long, perhaps its irresponsible to take the chance. One person who shares Bostroms concerns is Stuart J. Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Russell is the author, with Peter Norvig (a peer of Kurzweils at Google), of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which has been the standard AI textbook for two decades.

There are a lot of supposedly smart public intellectuals who just havent a clue, Russell told me. He pointed out that AI has advanced tremendously in the last decade, and that while the public might understand progress in terms of Moores Law (faster computers are doing more), in fact recent AI work has been fundamental, with techniques like deep learning laying the groundwork for computers that can automatically increase their understanding of the world around them.

Bostroms book proposes ways to align computers with human needs. Were basically telling a god how wed like to be treated.

Because Google, Facebook, and other companies are actively looking to create an intelligent, learning machine, he reasons, I would say that one of the things we ought not to do is to press full steam ahead on building superintelligence without giving thought to the potential risks. It just seems a bit daft. Russell made an analogy: Its like fusion research. If you ask a fusion researcher what they do, they say they work on containment. If you want unlimited energy youd better contain the fusion reaction. Similarly, he says, if you want unlimited intelligence, youd better figure out how to align computers with human needs.

Bostroms book is a research proposal for doing so. A superintelligence would be godlike, but would it be animated by wrath or by love? Its up to us (that is, the engineers). Like any parent, we must give our child a set of values. And not just any values, but those that are in the best interest of humanity. Were basically telling a god how wed like to be treated. How to proceed?

Bostrom draws heavily on an idea from a thinker named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who talks about coherent extrapolated volitionthe consensus-derived best self of all people. AI would, we hope, wish to give us rich, happy, fulfilling lives: fix our sore backs and show us how to get to Mars. And since humans will never fully agree on anything, well sometimes need it to decide for usto make the best decisions for humanity as a whole. How, then, do we program those values into our (potential) superintelligences? What sort of mathematics can define them? These are the problems, Bostrom believes, that researchers should be solving now. Bostrom says it is the essential task of our age.

For the civilian, theres no reason to lose sleep over scary robots. We have no technology that is remotely close to superintelligence. Then again, many of the largest corporations in the world are deeply invested in making their computers more intelligent; a true AI would give any one of these companies an unbelievable advantage. They also should be attuned to its potential downsides and figuring out how to avoid them.

This somewhat more nuanced suggestionwithout any claims of a looming AI-mageddonis the basis of an open letter on the website of the Future of Life Institute, the group that got Musks donation. Rather than warning of existential disaster, the letter calls for more research into reaping the benefits of AI while avoiding potential pitfalls. This letter is signed not just by AI outsiders such as Hawking, Musk, and Bostrom but also by prominent computer scientists (including Demis Hassabis, a top AI researcher). You can see where theyre coming from. After all, if they develop an artificial intelligence that doesnt share the best human values, it will mean they werent smart enough to control their own creations.

Paul Ford, a freelance writer in New York, wrote about Bitcoin in March/April 2014.

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Courses, Curricula, and Programs – UC San Diego

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Contact individual departments for the most current information.

Courses numbered 1 through 99 are lower-division courses and are normally open to freshmen and sophomores. Courses numbered 87 are Freshman Seminars.

Courses numbered 100 through 199 are upper-division courses and are ordinarily open only to students who have completed at least one lower-division course in the given subject, or six quarters of college work.

Courses numbered 200 through 299 are graduate courses and are ordinarily open only to students who have completed at least eighteen upper-division units basic to the subject matter of the course.

Courses numbered 300 through 399 are professional courses for teachers, which are specifically designed for teachers or prospective teachers.

Courses numbered 400 through 499 are other professional courses.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W

Academic Internship Program [ program | courses | pdf ]

African American Studies Minor [ program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

African Studies Minor [ program | faculty | pdf ]

Anthropology [ undergraduate program | graduate program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

Applied Ocean Science [ program | faculty | pdf ]

Audiology [ program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

Biochemistry [ program | pdf ]

Bioengineering: See Engineering, Jacobs School of.

Bioinformatics [ undergraduate program | graduate program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

Biological Sciences [ undergraduate program | graduate program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

Biomedical Sciences [ program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

Biophysics: See Physics.

California Cultures in Comparative Perspective Minor [ program | faculty | pdf ]

Chemical Engineering. See NanoEngineering (Engineering, Jacobs School of).

Chemistry and Biochemistry [ undergraduate program | graduate program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

Chicano/aLatino/a Arts and Humanities Minor (CLAH) [ program | faculty | pdf ]

Chinese Studies [ program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

Classical Studies [ undergraduate program | graduate program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

Clinical Psychology [ program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

Clinical Research [ program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

Cognitive Science [ undergraduate program | graduate program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

Communication [ undergraduate program | graduate program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

Comparative Studies in Language, Society, and Culture [ program | pdf ]

Computational Science, Mathematics and Engineering (CSME) [ program | pdf ]

Computer Science and Engineering: See Engineering, Jacobs School of.

Computing and the Arts: See Music and Visual Arts, Departments of.

Contemporary Issues [ courses | pdf ]

Critical Gender Studies [ program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

Culture, Art, and Technology [ program | courses | pdf ]

Dimensions of Culture [ program | courses | pdf ]

Earth Sciences: See Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Economics [ undergraduate program | graduate program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

Education Abroad Program [ program | faculty | pdf ]

Education Studies [ undergraduate program | graduate program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

Eleanor Roosevelt College [ program | courses | pdf ]

Engineering, Jacobs School of [ program | courses | pdf ]

Bioengineering [ undergraduate program | graduate program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

Chemical Engineering: See NanoEngineering.

Computer Science and Engineering [ undergraduate program | graduate program | courses | MAS-AESE courses | faculty | pdf ]

Electrical and Computer Engineering [ undergraduate program | graduate program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering [ undergraduate program | graduate program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

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Global Health Program [ program | pdf | courses ]

Global Policy and Strategy, School of [ program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

UC San Diego Global Seminars (GS) [ program | pdf ]

Greek Literature: See Literature.

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Hebrew Literature: See Literature.

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Languages

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Latin Literature: See Literature.

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Management, Rady School of [ undergraduate program | graduate program | courses | faculty | pdf]

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Materials Science and Engineering Program [ program | courses | faculty | pdf ]

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Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE): See Engineering, Jacobs School of.

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NanoEngineering: See Engineering, Jacobs School of.

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Courses, Curricula, and Programs - UC San Diego

Ocean Beaches Near Pennsylvania | eHow

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Pennsylvania and ocean beaches might not seem to go together, but the Keystone State has had a long and happy association with the New Jersey Shore and its beaches. Throughout much of the last century special trains traveled from Philadelphia to the Jersey Shore, mainly to the Atlantic City area. Today, the Atlantic City Expressway and Highways 55 and 49 link Pennsylvania residents to south Jersey Shore beaches. Other beach going opportunities are in Maryland and Delaware.

Atlantic City, New Jersey, is the traditional beach destination for people from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The coast is easily accessible and has miles of beaches surrounding its famous Boardwalk. Brigantine, north of the city, offers six miles of beaches that are much less crowded. Ocean City and Margate, to the south, has both Atlantic and inlet beaches. Lifeguards are on hand at many beaches and some areas allow surfing. Fishing is permitted on all non-bathing beaches, either from the beach or from the many piers and jetties along the shore.

South of Atlantic City are miles and miles of beach, with relatively few towns along the way. Wildwood and Cape May, at the extreme southern tip of New Jersey, are the best-known communities, but Sea Isle City and Avalon are also nearby. Cape May is famous for its bird-watching. Beach-side motels and cabins are scattered throughout the area. This region is readily accessible from Pennsylvania, mainly from Highways 55 and 49.

The area north of Atlantic City offers miles of beaches reaching up to Asbury Park and Long Branch. This includes such places as Island Beach State Park, Long Beach Island and communities like Spring Lake and Belmar. The latter two locales have many luxurious homes. Asbury Park and nearby communities offer a noted beach and recreational area with many entertainment options beyond sand and sun.

Maryland and Delaware also offer ocean beach options for Pennsylvanians. Delaware beaches stretch from the mouth of Delaware Bay near Dover and south to the famous barrier islands like Chincoteague. The barrier islands south of Ocean City are government protected areas. They have no highways, communities or tourist facilities. Both Delaware and Maryland have beaches along Chesapeake Bay. The region north of Washington D.C. is densely populated but the southern extremes are less crowded.

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Ocean Beaches Near Pennsylvania | eHow

A Revolution in the Arts – All-Art.org

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Early Russian Avant-garde Movements

During the first two decades of the 20th century. Cubism and Futurism were adopted and developed by Russian artists who. except for those living outside Russia, had not previously been involved in the European avant-garde movements. From 1905 until the outbreak of World War I and, subsequently, from the time of the October Revolution until the mid-1920s, three important initiatives were launched in succession: Rayonism, Suprematism, and Constructivism. Founded on intellectual discipline and geometry, these modes entailed original theoretical and pictorial developments, along the lines of Abstractionism. Although aware of its legacy in painting and literature, young Russian artists felt burdened by the cultural tradition of realism and rejected it in favour of the new developments in France. They were mesmerized by the collections of Post-Impressionist works by Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso, which were brought to Russia by wealthy merchants such as Shchukin and Morozov. who allowed public viewings.

Russian artists also admired Italian Futurism, avidly reading translations of the manifestos and attending Marinetti's lectures, held in Moscow from 1910 onwards. The Golden Fleece exhibitions of 1908 and 1909 included works by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov (1882-1964) that recalled national tradition in robust primitivist scenes. In 1912. however, work presented at the so-called "Donkey's Tail" exhibition showed that these two artists had already started to embark upon a modernization of Russian painting. Although independent and critical of Western culture, these painters set great store by the Cubo-Futurists' experiments in the use of colour, dynamism of line, and the liberation of art from naturalistic representation.

In his "Manifesto of Rayonism" (published in April 1912 and revised in 1913 for the Target exhibition in Moscow), Larionov defined his new artistic theories as "a synthesis of Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism". Rayonism is said to have drawn its inspiration and name from the scientific discoveries of radioactivity and ultraviolet rays, which revealed the sum of rays derived from an object and the dynamic and simultaneous transmission of light. The movement was promoted in Western Europe throughout 1913 and 1914, and was taken up zealously in Rome during 1917, but failed to survive the upheavals of war. Its main protagonist, Larionov, moved to France to concentrate on stage designs for the Ballets Russes.

The works shown by Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935) at "0.10. The Last Futurist Exhibition", held in St Petersburg in 1915, represented an important move towards nonrepresentational art. He had sought to "liberate art from the dead-weight of objectivity" in 1913 by painting a single black square on a white ground, the sole content of which was "the sensitivity of nonobjectivity". The aim of this new movement, which Malevich named Suprematism, was to express the absolute supremacy of sensitivity in the creative arts. The goals of his manifesto, produced in collaboration with the poet Maiakovsky, were to liberate painting from the shackles of naturalistic or symbolic references; to divest it of any practical purpose; and to ensure that it existed only as pure aesthetic sensibility. This involved the composition of elementary geometric shapes, usually squares, which were initially painted black, but were later produced in several colours. The quest for purity and immateriality of form reached its logical conclusion in 1918 with a white square on a white ground. Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) exhibited at the St Petersburg shows held in 1915 and was a pupil of Larionov. His work evolved from the Neo-Primitive style towards more abstract compositions. His stormy friendship with Malevich ended when theoretical disagreements arose between them in 1917. Malevich continued to reject any connection between the "pure plastic sensibility' of art and the problems of practical life, whereas the Constructivists, led by Tatlin, held that art had to abandon individual aesthetic stances if it was to help emancipate modern society.

_____________

Rayonism [ Rus. Luchizm].

Term derived from the word for ray (Rus. luch), used to refer to an abstract style of painting developed by the Russian artist Mikhail Larionov. Larionov himself claimed that he had painted his first Rayist work in 1909, but modern scholarship has shown his first Rayist works to date from the latter half of 1912. These included Glass: Rayist Method (New York, Guggenheim) and Rayist Sausage and Mackerel (Cologne, Mus. Ludwig). In 1913 Larionov began to expound and elaborate his theory in a series of manifestos.

Rayonism

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Russian Luchism (Rayism) Russian art movement founded by Mikhail F. Larionov, representing one of the first steps toward the development of abstract art in Russia. Larionov exhibited one of the first Rayonist works, Glass, in 1912 and wrote the movement's manifesto that same year (though it was not published until 1913). Explaining the new style, which was a synthesis of Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism, Larionov said that it is concerned with spatial forms which areobtained through the crossing of reflected rays from various objects.

The raylike lines appearing in the works of Larionov and Natalya Goncharova bear strong similarities to the lines of force in Futurist paintings. Rayonism apparently ended after 1914, when Larionov and Goncharova departed for Paris.

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Russian Avant-garde Movements

After the Bolshevik revolution and World War I, a new-artistic trend emerged in Europe. Unlike Dadaism's nihilistic stance, the aesthetic individualism of Suprematism, or Mondrian's abstract mysticism, which rejected all political and social value for art, this new movement stressed the need for artists to become actively involved in reshaping society. It declared that the combined forces of art, craftsmanship, and industry could help build a better world. In post-Tsarist Russia, the first Commissar of Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, was broadly sympathetic towards modern artistic movements, and permitted avant-garde artists to play a role in cultural activity and teaching. Considered useful to society, art was expected to concentrate on architecture, the design of manifestos and household objects, and printing. Known as Constructivism, this movement sought to put these revolutionary aims and ideals into practice. It rejected any creativity that did not have a purpose and categorized it as a specific, purely aesthetic activity. From 1915 to 1916, Tatlin (1885-1953) and Rodchenko (1891-1956) made utensils and household objects in iron, glass, and other industrial materials. They were joined by two brothers. Antoine Pevsner (1886-1962) and Naum Gabo (1890-1977). and the Mayakovsky group, organized by LEV (the Left Front) whose manifesto was published in 1923.

After the first flush of shared enthusiasm among the artists, differences soon emerged over methods and results. Following the subsequent schism in the Constructivist group, Pevsner and Gabo espoused the virtues of realism, which, as expounded in their "Realistic Manifesto" of 1920, supported the absolute value of art and its independence from the structure of society, be it capitalist or communist. Immediately, Rodchenko and his wife Varvara Stepanova delivered their riposte in the "Programme of the Productivist Group", airing extreme utilitarian and "functional" views and ending with the exhortation: "Down with art! Up with technology! Down with tradition! Up with Constructivist technical progress!" The art produced by Moscow artists who had emigrated, many of them before World War I, was much more in tune with international movements. Artists such as Larionov, Sonia Delaunay, Goncharova, Chagall, and Soutine settled in Paris, where they found the artistic climate more congenial than in their native country.

_____________ Cubo-Futurism

Alexander Rodchenko Vladimir Mayakovsky, Moscow, 1924

Cubo-Futurism

Term first used in 1913 in a lecture, later published, by the Russian art critic Korney Chukovsky (18821969) in reference to a group of Russian avant-garde poets whose work was seen to relate to French Cubism and Italian Futurism; it was subsequently adopted by painters and is now used by art historians to refer to Russian art works of the period 191215 that combine aspects of both styles. Initially the term was applied to the work of the poets Vladimir Mayakovsky, Aleksey Kruchonykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, Benedikt Livshits (18861939) and Vasily Kamensky (18641961), who were grouped around the painter David Burlyuk. Their raucous poetry recitals, public clowning, painted faces and ridiculous clothes emulated the activities of the Italians and earned them the name of Russian Futurists. In poetic output, however, only Mayakovsky could be compared with the Italians; his poem Along the Echoes of the City, for example, which describes various street noises, is reminiscent of Luigi Russolos manifesto Larte dei rumori (Milan, 1913).

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Vladimir Mayakovsky

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

born July 7 [July 19, New Style], 1893, Bagdadi, Georgia, Russian Empire died April 14, 1930, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

the leading poet of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and of the early Soviet period.

At the age of 15 Mayakovsky joined the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party and was repeatedly jailed for subversive activity. He started to write poetry during solitary confinement in 1909. On his release he attended the MoscowArt School and joined, with David Burlyuk and a few others, the Russian Futurist group and soon became its leading spokesman. In 1912 the group published a manifesto, Poshchochina obshchestvennomu vkusu (A Slap in the Faceof Public Taste), and Mayakovsky's poetry became conspicuously self-assertive and defiant in form and content. His poetic monodrama Vladimir Mayakovsky was performed in St. Petersburg in 1913. Between 1914 and 1916 Mayakovsky completed two majorpoems, Oblako v shtanakh (1915; A Cloud in Trousers) and Fleytapozvonochnik (written 1915, published 1916; The Backbone Flute). Both record a tragedy of unrequited love and express the author's discontent with the world in which he lived. Mayakovsky sought to depoetize poetry, adopting the language of the streets and using daring technical innovations. Above all, his poetry is declamatory, for mass audiences. When the Russian Revolution broke out, Mayakovsky was wholeheartedly for the Bolsheviks. Such poems as Oda revolutsi (1918; Ode to Revolution) and Levy marsh (1919; Left March) became very popular. So too did his Misteriya buff (first performed 1921; Mystery Bouffe), a drama representing a universal flood and the subsequent joyful triumph of the Unclean (the proletarians) over the Clean (the bourgeoisie). As a vigorous spokesman for the Communist Party, Mayakovsky expressed himself in many ways. From 1919 to 1921 he worked in the Russian Telegraph Agency as a painter of posters and cartoons, which he provided with apt rhymes and slogans. He poured out topical poems of propaganda and wrote didactic booklets for children while lecturing and reciting all over Russia. In 1924 he composed a 3,000-line elegy on the death of Vladimir Ilich Lenin. After 1925 he traveled in Europe, the United States, Mexico, and Cuba, recording his impressions in poems and in a booklet of caustic sketches, Moye otkrytiye Ameriki (1926; My Discovery of America). He also found time to write scripts for motion pictures, in some of which he acted. In his last three years he completed two satirical plays: Klop (performed 1929; The Bedbug), lampooning the type of philistine that emerged with the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union, and Banya (performed in Leningrad on January 30, 1930; The Bathhouse), a satire of bureaucratic stupidity and opportunism under Joseph Stalin. Mayakovsky's poetry was saturated with politics, but no amount of social propaganda could stifle his personal need for love, which burst out again and again because of repeated romantic frustrations. After his early lyrics this need came out particularly strongly in two poems, Lyublyu(1922; I Love) and Pro eto (1923; About This). To makethings worse, during a stay in Paris in 1928, he fell in love with a refugee, Tatyana Yakovleva, whom he wanted to marry but who refused him. At the same time, he had misunderstandings with the dogmatic Russian Association of Proletarian Writers and with Soviet authorities. Nor was the production of his Banya a success. Disappointed in love, increasingly alienated from Soviet reality, and denied a visa to travel abroad, he committed suicide in Moscow.

Mayakovsky was, in his lifetime, the most dynamic figure of the Soviet literary scene, but much of his utilitarian and topical poetry is now out of date. His predominantly lyrical poems and his technical innovations, however, influenced a number of Soviet poets, and outside Russia his impress has been strong, especially in the 1930s, after Stalin declared him the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch.

Alexander Rodchenko Photomontage for rear cover of Mayakovsky's "Razgovor c fininspektorom o poezii" ("A Conversation with a Tax-collector about Poetry"), 1926.

_____________ Constructivism

Founded in 1913 by Vladimir Tatlin, the Russian Constructivist movement developed from Cubism, Italian Futurism, and Suprematism in Russia, Neo Plasticism in Holland, and the Bauhaus School in Germany. The term Constructivism is used to define non-representational relief construction, sculpture, kinetics, and painting. As a response to changes in technology and contemporary life, it advocated a change in the art scene, aiming to create a new order in art and architecture that referenced social and economic problems. Brothers Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner also supported the movement, infusing sculptural elements from cubism and futurism with an allusion to architecture, machinery, and technology. The movements first Constructivist manifesto was written in 1921 when the First Working Group of Constructivists was formed in Moscow. The movement later spread to Holland and Germany before gaining international popularity. The style was initially supported by the Soviet Regime, but later was deemed unsuitable for mass propaganda reasons. Following this decree, Gabo and Pevsner went into exile while Tatlin, Popova and El Lissitzky stayed in Russia. The Constructivist movement was also prominent in theatrical scene design, mostly spread by the efforts of Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Constructivism

Avant-garde tendency in 20th-century painting, sculpture, photography, design and architecture, with associated developments in literature, theatre and film. The term was first coined by artists in Russia in early 1921 and achieved wide international currency in the 1920s. Russian Constructivism refers specifically to a group of artists who sought to move beyond the autonomous art object, extending the formal language of abstract art into practical design work. This development was prompted by the Utopian climate following the October Revolution of 1917, which led artists to seek to create a new visual environment, embodying the social needs and values of the new Communist order. The concept of International Constructivism defines a broader current in Western art, most vital from around 1922 until the end of the 1920s, that was centred primarily in Germany. International Constructivists were inspired by the Russian example, both artistically and politically. They continued, however, to work in the traditional artistic media of painting and sculpture, while also experimenting with film and photography and recognizing the potential of the new formal language for utilitarian design. The term Constructivism has frequently been used since the 1920s, in a looser fashion, to evoke a continuing tradition of geometric abstract art that is constructed from autonomous visual elements such as lines and planes, and characterized by such qualities as precision, impersonality, a clear formal order, simplicity and economy of organization and the use of contemporary materials such as plastic and metal.

Constructivism (Encyclopaedia Britannica) Russian artistic and architectural movement that was first influenced by Cubism and Futurism and is generally considered to have been initiated in 1913 with the painting reliefsabstract geometric constructionsof Vladimir Tatlin. The expatriate Russian sculptors Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo joined Tatlin and his followers in Moscow, and upon publication of their jointly written Realist Manifesto in 1920 they became the spokesmen of the movement. It is from the manifesto that the name Constructivism was derived; one of the directives that it contained was to construct art. Because of their admiration for machines and technology, functionalism, and modern industrial materials such as plastic, steel, and glass, members of the movement were also called artist-engineers.

Other important figures associated with Constructivism were Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky. Soviet opposition to the Constructivists' aesthetic radicalism resulted in the group's dispersion. Tatlin and Rodchenko remained in the Soviet Union, but Gabo and Pevsner went first to Germany and then to Paris, where they influenced the Abstract-Creation group with Constructivist theory, and laterin the 1930s Gabo spread Constructivism to England and in the 1940s to the United States. Lissitzky's combination of Constructivism and Suprematism influenced the de Stijl artists and architects whom he met in Berlin, as well as the Hungarian Lszl Moholy-Nagy, who was a professor at the Bauhaus. In both Dessau and Chicago, where because of Naziinterference the New Bauhaus was established in 1937, Moholy-Nagy disseminated Constructivist principles.

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Antoine Pevsner

(b Oryol, 18 Jan 1886; d Paris, 12 April 1962).

French painter and sculptor of Russian birth. Son of an industrialist and brother of the sculptor NAUM GABO, he grew up in Bryansk. He studied at the School of Art in Kiev (19029), where according to Gabo he first met Alexander Archipenko, and then spent a three-month probationary period at the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. Among his early paintings, The Giant (1907) shows the influence of the Symbolist painter Mikhail Vrubel, but Pevsner was also impressed by the Russian Byzantine tradition.

Antoine Pevsner Monde

Antoine Pevsner Vision spectrale

Antoine Pevsner Construction dans l'espace

Universal Flowering

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Universal Flowering (Mirovoi rastsvet)

Universal Flowering is the name given by Pavel Filonov to his system of analytical art. The system arose from cubo-futurist experiments and works that he undertook from 1913-1915. It is characterized by very dense, minutely facetted, and relatively flat surfaces created by working from the particular to the general, using the smallest of brushes and the sharpest of pencils. The images have both Cubism's multiple vantage points and Futurism's representation of a figure over time. A number of the paintings, while having a given orientation, are painted as though they could be oriented in a variety of ways. Filonov's philosophy was originally formalized in written form in 1915, which was revised and published as The Declaration of Universal Flowering in 1923 when Filonov was a professor at the (then) Petrograd Academy of Arts. Filonov's main theoretical work The Ideology of Analytical Art (Ideologia analiticheskogo iskusstva) was published in 1930.

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Neo-primitivism

Russian movement that took its name from Aleksandr Shevchenkos Neo-primitivizm (1913). This book describes a crude style of painting practised by members of the DONKEYS TAIL group. Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich and Shevchenko himself all adopted the style, which was based on the conventions of traditional Russian art forms such as the lubok, the icon and peasant arts and crafts. The term Neo-primitivism is now used to describe a general aspiration towards primitivism in the work of the wider Russian avant-garde during the period 191014. It embraces the work of such disparate painters as Chagall, David Burlyuk and Pavel Filonov, and poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksey Kruchonykh.

Russian artists associated with Neo-primitivism include: David Burlyuk, Marc Chagall, Pavel Filonov, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Kasimir Malevich, Aleksandr Shevchenko.

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Aleksandr Shevchenko (1883-1948) Cubist Composition (Man with Guitar). 1915

_____________ Synchromism

Style of painting based on the theory that colour provides the basis for both form and content. It was conceived in Paris shortly before World War I by Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald-Wright. It was Russells idea that paintings could be created based on sculptural forms interpreted two-dimensionally through a knowledge of colour properties. Synchromist paintings, stressing an emphasis on colour rhythms, were composed of abstract shapes, often concealing the submerged forms of figures, for example Synchromy in Blue (1916; New York, Whitney) by Macdonald-Wright. The two artists first attracted attention at the Neue Kunstsalon in Munich in June 1913. Their second exhibition of Synchromist painting was at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris from October to November 1913.

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Morgan Russell (1886-1953)

Morgan Russell Cosmic Synchromy

Morgan Russell Synchromy in Blue-Violet

Stanton MacDonald-Wright (1890-1973)

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Airplane Synchromy in Yellow-Orange

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Califronia Landscape

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Yin Synchromy No. 2

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Oriental Synchromy

Stanton MacDonald-Wright The Jade Flute No. 2

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Still Life wit Cyclamen and Fruit

_____________ London Group

English exhibiting society founded in November 1913. On its foundation it absorbed many members of the CAMDEN TOWN GROUP and also incorporated the more avant-garde artists influenced by Cubism and Futurism, some of whom afterwards joined the Vorticist movement. Among the founder-members were David Bomberg, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Jacob Epstein, Harold Gilman (the groups first president until his death in 1919), Charles Ginner, Spencer Gore, Percy Wyndham Lewis, John Nash, Christopher Nevinson and Edward Wadsworth. The group was organized in opposition to the conservatism of the Royal Academy and the stagnation of the formerly radical New English Art Club. Though, as can be judged from the names of its founders, it had no homogeneous style or aesthetic, it acted as a focal point for the more progressive elements in British art at that time.

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Harold Gilman Clarissa 1911

Harold Gilman (British, 1876-1919)

Harold Gilman Canal Bridge, Flekkefjord

Harold Gilman Edwardian Interior

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A Revolution in the Arts - All-Art.org

Rousey, White Accused of Bullying by Cris Cyborg

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Invicta FC featherweight champion Cris Cyborg has accused UFCbantamweight champion Ronda Rouseyand president Dana White of bullying her.

The 30-year-old made the accusation on her Facebook page, in which she said:

I find it Hypocritical of @rondarousey to complain about people in Hollywood being critical of her body image, talking about her arms or the extra weight she carries between fights.

For the past 5 years this sameRonda RouseyandDana Whitehave used the media to Bully me, opening the door for other opponents to try the same tactics.

Rousey recently spoke about body image in an interview with the New York Times' Sheila Marikar. She saidof her hope to help diversify the kind of body types celebrated or focused on in the media.

However, according toMike Bohn of MMA Junkie,in August she told theJoe Rogan Experience(Warning: Link contains NSFW language)she wouldn't fight Cyborg until she dropped weight afterCyborg tested positive for steroidsin 2011.

Cyborg also shared this video of White describing her as "Wanderlei Silva in a dress":

Cyborg's ongoing war of words with Rowdy will add more fuel to the speculative fire that they could meet in a superfight.For now, Rousey appears to be sticking to her guns that Cyborg must come down to 135 pounds (rather than Cyborg's usual 145-pound class) in order for the pair to collide.

However, Rousey further commented on the Joe Rogan Experience that fighting Cyborg would help her career feel complete, so you can't rule out the possibility the two will face off against each other in the future.

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Rousey, White Accused of Bullying by Cris Cyborg

Seasteading – Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

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El seasteading (contraccin de sea mar y homesteading colonizacin) es un concepto de creacin de viviendas permanentes en el mar, llamadas seasteads, fuera de los territorios reclamados por los gobiernos de cualquier nacin en pie.[1] Al menos dos personas de forma independiente comenzaron a usar el trmino: Neumeyer Ken en su libro Sailing the Farm (1981) y Wayne Gramlich en su artculo "Seasteading - Homesteading on the High Seas" (1998).

La mayora de seasteads propuestos son buques crucero modificados, plataformas marinas readaptadas e islas flotantes hechas a medida, mientras algunos de los sistemas de gestin propuestos guardan parentesco con el de ciudad-estado.[2] Hasta el momento no se ha creado un estado en alta mar que haya sido reconocido como una nacin soberana, aunque el Principado de Sealand es una micronacin en disputa constituida en una plataforma marina abandonada cerca de Suffolk, Inglaterra.[3] Lo ms parecido a un seastead que se ha construido hasta ahora son grandes naves de alta mar que a veces se llaman "ciudades flotantes" y pequeas islas flotantes.

Fuera de la Zona Econmica Exclusiva de 200 millas nuticas (370 km), que los pases pueden reclamar de acuerdo con la Convencin de las Naciones Unidas sobre el Derecho del Mar, en alta mar no se est sujeto a las leyes de nacin soberana alguna que no sea la bandera bajo la cual un barco navega (ver aguas internacionales). Algunos ejemplos de organizaciones que utilizan esta posibilidad son Women on Waves, que permite abortos a las mujeres en los pases donde los abortos estn sujetos a estrictas leyes, y las estaciones de radio piratas navegando por el mar del Norte durante los aos sesenta (como Radio Caroline). Al igual que estas organizaciones, un seastead podra ser capaz de aprovecharse de las leyes y reglamentos ms flexibles que existen fuera de la soberana de las naciones, y tener en gran medida un autogobierno.

El Seasteading Institute, fundado por Wayne Gramlich y Patri Friedman el 15 de abril de 2008, es una organizacin formada para facilitar el establecimiento de comunidades autnomas flotantes sobre plataformas martimas operando en aguas internacionales.[4][5] El artculo de Gramlich de 1998 "SeaSteading. - Homesteading en alta mar", describe el concepto de steading asequible, y atrajo la atencin de Friedman con su propuesta de proyecto de pequea escala.[6] Los dos comenzaron a trabajar juntos y registraron su primer "libro" colaborativo en lnea en 2001, que explora aspectos del seasteading, desde la eliminacin de residuos hasta los pabellones de conveniencia.

El proyecto tuvo la exposicin meditica en 2008 despus de haber llamado la atencin del fundador de PayPal Peter Thiel, que invirti 500000 $ en el instituto y desde entonces ha hablado en nombre de su viabilidad, y ms recientemente en su ensayo "La educacin de un libertario" publicado en lnea por Cato Unbound. El Seasteading Institute ha recibido la atencin de los medios, como CNN, la revista Wired, y la revista Prospect.[7][4][8][9] "Cuando Seasteading se convierta en una alternativa viable, el cambio de un gobierno a otro sera un asunto navegar hacia otro inclusive sin siquiera salir de su casa", dijo Friedman en la primera conferencia anual Seasteading.[4][10][11]

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Seasteading - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre