Pittsburgh schools board approves Planned Parenthood role for sex education

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February 25, 2015 9:24 PM Share with others:

By Eleanor Chute / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A proposal to set up a memo of understanding with Planned Parenthood for sex education of middle school students won approval tonight from the board of Pittsburgh Public Schools.

The 6-1 vote came after board member Mark Brentley Sr. raised opposition, criticizing the history of Planned Parenthood, questioning what its role would be in the schools and saying it would put students at risk. Only Mr. Brentley voted in opposition. Members Terry Kennedy and Sherry Hazuda were absent.

Board president Thomas Sumpter said that history included eugenics, but he said board members needed to consider whether it was offering a good program for students today.

Dara Ware Allen, assistant superintendent for student support services, said she has reviewed all 24 modules -- 12 for grade 7 and 12 for grade 8 -- and said they addressed helping students to identify risky behavior, setting personal boundaries and practicing skills to avoid risky behavior.

She said that abortion is not part of the curriculum, that the curriculum emphasizes abstinence and that it is in keeping with the district's program. Parents can opt their children out of the program, which would be taught alongside the classroom teacher.

Ms. Allen said Planned Parenthood is seeking a grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for the program. It is expected the organization will know whether it got the grant in July.

Mr. Brentley said other providers, including those at local universities with medical backgrounds, should have been considered.

Ms. Allen said UPMC is a "significant partner" and said there is a partnership with UPMC Shadyside for a teen pregnancy prevention program for high school students.

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Pittsburgh schools board approves Planned Parenthood role for sex education

Netflix to air 'Inspector Gadget' reboot in March

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Today in nostaglia news: Netflix is bringing back everyones favorite bumbling cyborg.

The streaming serviced announced on Wednesday that anInspector Gadgetreboot, produced by DHX Media, will air exclusively in the United States on Netflix this March.

All 26 episodes of the CGI-animated production will hit the service, following Gadget as he works to defeat Dr. Claw and his reactivated crime network, M.A.D. Gadget will have some help, of course, joined once again by his niece, Penny, and her dog, Brain.

The originalGadgetanimated series ran for 86 episodes in the 1980s, and this new iteration will serve as a sequel to the first series. Gadget may also be more recognizable to younger audiences from the live-action film starring Matthew Broderickthough likely not as recognizable from the live-action sequel starring French Stewart.

Netflix also announced four other childrens shows that will hit the streaming service in the coming months.Super 4, about four kids exploring their planet and fighting villains,will debut in April; Some Assembly Required, which follows a group of toymaking kids, will come sometime this summer; while a new iteration of 80s animated hitDanger Mouseand comedy seriesBottlersnikes and Gumbleswill air in spring of 2016.

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Netflix to air 'Inspector Gadget' reboot in March

Auckland to consider banning smoking on beaches, outdoor cafes

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sondyaustin / Flickr

The majority of public submissions called for a ban on lighting up in outdoor eating areas, such as Vulcan Lane.

Auckland Council is to consider making pavement dining and public places such as beaches smokefree sooner than expected, after a large number of submissions from the public.

The council has already declared playgrounds and transport centres smokefree, and from the middle of this year other shared spaces such as plazas will also have the no smoking signs up.

The decision to speed up the next phase of its smokefree policy review follows hearings into the new Trading and Events in Public Places Bylaw, coming into effect on July 1.

Even though smokefree dining is not part of the bylaw, the majority of submissions on it called for a ban on lighting up in outdoor eating areas.

Of 1412 submissions, 1354 were from organisations such as the Cancer Society, Auckland Regional Public Health and many individuals concerned about the issue.

As a result the council has agreed to start a review of its smokefree policy this year, instead of next year as originally planned.

The review will look at whether a bylaw is the best way of managing smokefree public places.

The hearings panel on the trading bylaw felt the passion of submitters on the topic, chair Denise Krum said.

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Auckland to consider banning smoking on beaches, outdoor cafes

Around the Region: Northeast Florida Scottish Games and Festival and more

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BEACHES Beaches Art Fest call for artists

Beaches Art Fest is looking for artists for its 2015 event. Anyone interested needs to submit an application by March 13. For more, artsjolynjohnson@bellsouth.net.

GREEN COVE SPRINGS Scottish Games returns Feb. 28

The Northeast Florida Scottish Games and Festival celebrates its 20th year 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 28, at the Clay County Fairgrounds, 2497 Florida 16 W, with additional entertainment planned until 9 p.m. Admission is $15 at the gate with free parking. The event includes athletic competition in the caber toss, hammer throw and stone throw as well as sheep dog trials and other events. Live bands include Cleghorn, Mother Grove, Pictus and Ron Davis. For more, neflgames.com

CLAY Young artists music competition

Clay County student musicians may apply through Friday, April 3, to compete in the Concert on the Green Young Artists Concerto Competition for a chance to win a $1,000 scholarship. The competition is for students in sixth through 12th grade enrolled in a county school. For more, concertonthegreen.com

CLAY Navy Band concert

The U.S. Navy Band Concert Fair Winds Woodwind Quintet will perform 6:30 p.m. Monday, March 30, at The Clay County Headquarters Library, 1895 Town Center Blvd., Fleming Island. For more, (904) 278-3722.

FERNANDINA BEACH Foster homes needed for pets

The Nassau Humane Society needs new qualified foster homes for its pets. All applicants must pass a veterinary check to verify current animals are spayed/neutered with up-to-date on vaccinations and flea and heartworm prevention for dog. Anyone who can help can call the society at (904) 321-1647.

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College notebook: scholarships, films and new assignments for professors

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Astronomy professor selected for MOSI post

St. Petersburg College astronomy professor Antonio Paris has been selected as director of space programs and planetarium for the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) in Tampa. Paris will be responsible for day-to-day operations of the planetarium, NASA's Mission: Moonbase, Starlab and MOSI's telescope program. He will serve as the on-air space science expert for MOSI and will provide lectures on space, astronomy and other topics of scientific interest. He will continue to lecture at St. Petersburg College.

Last day to apply for SPC scholarships

Feb. 27 is the last day to apply for summer scholarships through the St. Petersburg College Foundation. Each year, the foundation provides hundreds of scholarships to SPC students, made possible through private gifts from individuals, community groups and businesses. Students can apply by visiting spcollege.edu/foundation/instructions.htm.

USFSP professor lands Fulbright assignment

University of South Florida St. Petersburg professor Donny Smoak has been awarded a Fulbright Specialist Grant in environmental science at Shenyang Agricultural University in China. Smoak will head to China for three weeks in June to lecture and participate in a series of seminars on climate change and coastal wetlands.

"I welcome the opportunity to return to China," Smoak said. "There are great scientists there and interesting places to work." He said he hopes the visit will foster additional exchanges with Shenyang University, and that the development of an academic focus in this area could lead to USFSP students seeking advanced training in China.

"Fulbright assignments, one of the highest honors in higher education, underscore the excellence of the faculty at USFSP," said Han Reichgelt, regional vice chancellor of Academic Affairs. "Dr. Smoak's newest award reflects his dedication as a professor and researcher, and the significance of his contributions to the field."

Film festival winds up at Eckerd College

The 17th annual Visions of Nature/Voices of Nature Environmental Film Festival at Eckerd College ends this week with two screenings that are free and open to the public:

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College notebook: scholarships, films and new assignments for professors

Googles artificial intelligence mastermind responds to …

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Demis Hassabis is an impressive guy. A former child prodigy, a chess master at 13 and the founder of DeepMind Technologies, a British artificial intelligence company that Google acquired last year. Now 38, hes at the forefront of an emerging technology with an unmatched potential for good and bad.

Hassabis and his researchers published a landmark paper this week, creating an algorithm that learns in a human-like manner. Observers of artificial intelligence have warned that advances like this are a step toward potentially destroying civilization.

Elon Musk, a DeepMind investor he says the better to keep an eye on them has led the charge, calling artificial intelligence mankinds greatest threat. Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates have also issued warnings.

At a news conference Tuesday Hassabis addressed Musks concerns:

Were many, many decades away from anything, any kind of technology that we need to worry about. But its good to start the conversation now and be aware of as with any new powerful technology it can be used for good or bad, Hassabis said.

He was also quick to downplay any rift with DeepMind and Musk.

Were good friends with Elon and hes been a big supporter of ours for a number of years, Hassabis said. And hes fascinated, loves the potential of artificial intelligence.

Elon Musk loves artificial intelligence? Never wouldve guessed that.

Related: Googles breakthrough in artificial intelligence, and what it means for self-driving cars

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Artificial intelligence can learn Atari games from scratch, say scientists

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Is a robot uprising coming in 2015?

Maybe but only to show you up at the arcade.

Led by researchers Demis Hassabis and Volodymyr Mnih, Google-owned DeepMind Technologies has created an artificial intelligence capable of playing simple video games with minimal training. They described their breakthrough today in Nature.

Dubbed the deep Q-network agent (or DQN), DeepMinds program can play a number of popular Atari 2600 titles, including Pong, Space Invaders, and Breakout. According to the study, it is the first artificial agent that is capable of learning to excel at a diverse array of challenging tasks.

Video game-playing AI already exists, as any lonely gamer can tell you. In the absence of a real human opponent, most games allow players to challenge the computer. But in those games, the AI is endowed with a series of specific rules that guide its behavior. DQN, on the other hand, is given only one objective maximize the score. From there, it watches the gameplay to learn new strategies in real time. Like the human brain, it learns from experience.

It looks trivial in the sense that these are games from the 80s and you can write solutions to these games quite easily, Dr. Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind, told BBC. What is not trivial is to have one single system that can learn from the pixels, as perceptual inputs, what to do. The same system can play 49 different games from the box without any pre-programming. You literally give it a new game, a new screen and it figures out after a few hours of gameplay what to do.

Perhaps more impressively, DQN can take these strategies and apply them to games it hasnt played before. In other words, when DQN gets better at one video game, its actually getting better at a whole host of games.

The program is far from perfect, however. While it rivals human players in action-oriented games, it struggles with more open-ended titles.

Games where the system doesn't do well are ones that require long-term planning, Dr. Mnih told NBC. For instance, in Ms. Pac-Man, if you have to get to the other side of the maze you have to perform quite sophisticated pathfinding and avoid ghosts to get there.

As DeepMind prepares DQN for ever more complex gameplay, an even greater potential waits on the horizon. Even more so than chess, video games can provide a model of the real world one that requires intricate, adaptive decision-making. Researchers remain silent on exactly what real-world functions they have planned, but slyly noted that their program could someday drive a real car with a few tweaks. Does that mean DQN could go from Mario Kart champ to digital chauffeur? Only time will tell.

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Artificial intelligence can learn Atari games from scratch, say scientists

Artificial intelligence can learn Atari games from scratch, say scientists (+video)

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Is a robot uprising coming in 2015?

Maybe but only to show you up at the arcade.

Led by researchers Demis Hassabis and Volodymyr Mnih, Google-owned DeepMind Technologies has created an artificial intelligence capable of playing simple video games with minimal training. They described their breakthrough today in Nature.

Dubbed the deep Q-network agent (or DQN), DeepMinds program can play a number of popular Atari 2600 titles, including Pong, Space Invaders, and Breakout. According to the study, it is the first artificial agent that is capable of learning to excel at a diverse array of challenging tasks.

Video game-playing AI already exists, as any lonely gamer can tell you. In the absence of a real human opponent, most games allow players to challenge the computer. But in those games, the AI is endowed with a series of specific rules that guide its behavior. DQN, on the other hand, is given only one objective maximize the score. From there, it watches the gameplay to learn new strategies in real time. Like the human brain, it learns from experience.

It looks trivial in the sense that these are games from the 80s and you can write solutions to these games quite easily, Dr. Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind, told BBC. What is not trivial is to have one single system that can learn from the pixels, as perceptual inputs, what to do. The same system can play 49 different games from the box without any pre-programming. You literally give it a new game, a new screen and it figures out after a few hours of gameplay what to do.

Perhaps more impressively, DQN can take these strategies and apply them to games it hasnt played before. In other words, when DQN gets better at one video game, its actually getting better at a whole host of games.

The program is far from perfect, however. While it rivals human players in action-oriented games, it struggles with more open-ended titles.

Games where the system doesn't do well are ones that require long-term planning, Dr. Mnih told NBC. For instance, in Ms. Pac-Man, if you have to get to the other side of the maze you have to perform quite sophisticated pathfinding and avoid ghosts to get there.

As DeepMind prepares DQN for ever more complex gameplay, an even greater potential waits on the horizon. Even more so than chess, video games can provide a model of the real world one that requires intricate, adaptive decision-making. Researchers remain silent on exactly what real-world functions they have planned, but slyly noted that their program could someday drive a real car with a few tweaks. Does that mean DQN could go from Mario Kart champ to digital chauffeur? Only time will tell.

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Artificial intelligence can learn Atari games from scratch, say scientists (+video)

Google artificial-intelligence program can beat you at 'Space Invaders'

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WASHINGTON -- Computers already have bested human champions in "Jeopardy!" and chess, but artificial intelligence now has gone to master an entirely new level: "Space Invaders."

Google scientists have cooked up software that can do better than humans on dozens of Atari video games from the 1980s, like video pinball, boxing, and 'Breakout.' But computers don't seem to have a ghost of a chance at "Ms. Pac-Man."

The aim is not to make video games a spectator sport, turning couch potatoes who play games into couch potatoes who watch computers play games. The real accomplishment: computers that can teach themselves to succeed at tasks, learning from scratch, trial and error, just like humans.

The computer program, called Deep Q-network, wasn't given much in the way of instructions to start, but in time it did better than humans in 29 out of 49 games and in some cases, like video pinball, it did 26 times better, according to a new study released Wednesday by the journal Nature. It's a first time an artificial intelligence program bridged different type of learning systems, said study author Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind in London.

Deep Q "can learn and adapt to unexpected things," Hassabis said in a news conference. "These types of systems are more human-like in the way they learn."

In the submarine game "Seaquest," Deep Q came up with a strategy that the scientists had never considered.

"It's definitely fun to see computers discover things that you didn't figure out yourself," said study co-author Volodymyr Mnih, also of Google.

Sebastian Thrun, director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University, who wasn't part of the research, said in an email: "This is very impressive. Most people don't understand how far (artificial intelligence) has come. And this is just the beginning."

Nothing about Deep Q is customized to Atari or to a specific game. The idea is to create a "general learning system" that can figure tasks out by trial and error and eventually to stuff even humans have difficulty with, Hassabis said. This program, he said, "is the first rung of the ladder."

Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Emma Brunskill, who also wasn't part of the study, said this learning despite lack of customization "brings us closer to having general purpose agents equipped to work well at learning a large range of tasks, instead of just chess or just 'Jeopardy!'"

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Google artificial-intelligence program can beat you at 'Space Invaders'

Artificial intelligence beats humans at Space Invaders

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Google DeepMind

Google's Deep-Q computer program has mastered several classic video games, from Space Invaders to Breakout.

After conquering Jeopardy and chess, artificial intelligence masters an entirely new level: Space Invaders.

Google scientists have cooked up software that can do better than humans on dozens of Atari video games from the 1980s, like video pinball, boxing, and Breakout. But computers don't seem to have a ghost of a chance at Ms Pac-Man.

The aim is not to make video games a spectator sport, turning couch potatoes who play games into couch potatoes who watch computers play games. The real accomplishment: computers that can teach themselves to succeed at tasks, learning from scratch, trial and error, just like humans.

The computer program, called Deep Q-network, wasn't given much in the way of instructions to start, but in time it did better than humans in 29 out of 49 games and in some cases, like video pinball, it did 26 times better, according to a new study released Wednesday by the journal Nature. It's a first time an artificial intelligence program bridged different type of learning systems, said study author Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind in London.

Deep Q "can learn and adapt to unexpected things," Hassabis said in a news conference. "These types of systems are more human-like in the way they learn."

In the submarine game Seaquest, Deep Q came up with a strategy that the scientists had never considered.

"It's definitely fun to see computers discover things that you didn't figure out yourself," said study co-author Volodymyr Mnih, also of Google.

Sebastian Thrun, director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University, who wasn't part of the research, said in an email: "This is very impressive. Most people don't understand how far (artificial intelligence) has come. And this is just the beginning."

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Artificial intelligence beats humans at Space Invaders

DW Freedom of Speech Award for Raif Badawi

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The Deutsche Welle Governing Board decided unanimously in favor of Raif Badawi, said Deutsche Welle Director General Peter Limbourg.

"He stands, in an exemplary way, for the brave and fearless commitment to the human right of freedom of expression. Our award sends a signal and contributes to bringing his fate into the public spotlight. We hope this will increase pressure on those responsible in Saudi Arabia to release Badawi."

Badawi's wife Ensaf Haidar told DW she was overjoyed. From her home in Canada, she said the DW Freedom of Speech Award sends a clear message to the Saudi regime. "It is a disgrace that Raif is still sitting in prison - especially at a time when Saudi Arabia fights against the Islamic State group and its disregard for human rights. I am extremely thankful to Deutsche Welle for its support."

Ten years in jail, 1,000 lashes

The 31-year-old blogger was sentenced by Saudi authorities in May 2014 to 1,000 lashes, 10 years in prison and a major fine. The first 50 lashes were administered in public on January 9. He was meant to receive 50 lashes every Friday from then on, but the public flogging has been postponed more than once, reportedly for health reasons.

DW presented the Freedom of Speech award for the first time this year, in the framework of the 11th annual competition of " The Bobs Best of Online Activism," commending outstanding online activists and projects.

The winner of the Freedom of Speech Award as well as the winners of The Bobs' three jury categories will be recognized on June 23 at the Global Media Forum in Bonn, Germany.

Courageous advocate for the freedom of expression

Raif Badawi has been fighting for the freedom of expression in his country for many years. On the Free Saudi Liberals website, he attacked political and social grievances in Saudi Arabia. He published sarcastic articles on the religious police, called a prominent Saudi university a den of terrorists and wrote about Valentine's Day, which is strictly forbidden in Saudi Arabia.

In 2008, Badawi was arrested for the first time for allegedly creating an "electronic site" that "insults Islam." He left the country for a few months, only to return when the charges were dropped. In 2009, the Saudi government imposed a travel ban, and on June 17, 2012, Badawi was arrested again and put on trial, accused of insulting Muslim religious leaders on his website

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DW Freedom of Speech Award for Raif Badawi

NSA Planting Viruses IN COMPUTER HARDRIVES BIGGEST GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY IN 2015 – Video

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NSA Planting Viruses IN COMPUTER HARDRIVES BIGGEST GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY IN 2015
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NSA Planting Viruses IN COMPUTER HARDRIVES BIGGEST GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY IN 2015 - Video

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