Sharks not the main focus for Perth's beach towers

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Towers will be installed along Perth beaches, but not primarily to deal with the threat of sharks

The installation of towers on Perth beaches is more about creating an elevated post for surf lifesavers to watch swimmers than to spot sharks.

On Tuesday plans to create four observation towers on metropolitan beaches were revealed, with the movable observation posts being labelled 'shark towers'.

Two of the towers have been earmarked for beaches at Cottesloe and North Cottesloe and with others planned for the City Beach area.

'Shark towers' will be installed on Perth beaches for lifesavers.

The first of the towers could be installed as early as Thursday to help protect swimmers this Australia Day public holiday.

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When contacted in regard to the towers, Surf Lifesaving WA referred Fairfax Media to the Department of Premier and Cabinet, as did the Fisheries Department.

Premier Colin Barnett confirmed that the state government was involved in funding the towers in the Cottesloe area and that SLSWA was planning on installing two at City Beach.

It is understood the towers are worth about $150,000 each.

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Sharks not the main focus for Perth's beach towers

Astronomy program includes green-laser tour

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The public is invited to tour the universe and view the stars and sky at 5:30 p.m. Jan. 28 in Room 109 at Cooper Memorial Library, 2525 Oakley Seaver Drive, Clermont.

Astronomer Derek Demeter, director of the Emil Buehler Perpetual Trust Planetarium at Seminole State College in Sanford, will present the free program.

Following the presentation, Demeter will lead the audience outside and present a green-laser tour of the night sky through telescopes provided by the Central Florida Astronomical Society.

For more information, call 352-536-2275.

Michigan Day

The 68th annual Michigan Day potluck luncheon is Feb. 3 at the Eustis Community Center, 601 Northshore Drive. Former and current residents of Michigan are welcome. Doors open at 11 a.m.; lunch is at noon.

There is a $3 donation per person. Bring a covered dish to share. Chicken, coffee and water will be provided. There will be door prizes.

Details: Clarence Miller, 517-281-9766 or Steve Ellmer, 269-637-2777.

Meetings

The League of Women Voters of The Villages/Tri-County Area, a nonpartisan group, will meet at 10:30 a.m. Jan. 26 at The Villages Community Bank & Trust, 2285 Parr Drive off County Road 466. The focus will be planning and development for the coming league year, which begins April 1. Details: Kathy Hansen, 352-350-7317 or lwvtri.org.

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Astronomy program includes green-laser tour

Two new planets bigger than Earth found in our solar system

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Undated handout artist impression of one of the two as-yet undiscovered planets as big as Earth or larger may be hiding in the outer fringes of the Solar System, scientists believe. Photograph: PA

Schoolchildren may need a new mnemonic to remember the sequence of planets as astronomers now believe there may be at least two new planets in our solar system.

The two planets which may both be bigger than earth could be orbiting in the furthest reaches of the solar system out past Pluto, which was demoted from the status of planet to a dwarf planet in 2006.

The discovery of possible new additions to our existing eight planets, if confirmed, has been described by one of the scientists involved as truly revolutionary for astronomy.

The research is being carried out by from scientists at the University of Madrid and the University of Cambridge. They have been tracking large asteroids known as extreme trans-Neptunion objects (Etnos) which orbit the sun at least six billion kilometres away.

The scientists have found the objects orbit the Sun in a manner consistent with them being subject to the gravitational pull of a planet at least as large as Earth.

Neptune was discovered in a similar fashion when astronomers accurately calculated its existence from irregularities in the orbit of its neighbouring planet Uranus.

Spanish lead scientist Professor Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), explained: This excess of objects with unexpected orbital parameters makes us believe that some invisible forces are altering the distribution of the orbital elements of the Etnos, and we consider that the most probable explanation is that other unknown planets exist beyond.

Professor Marcos concluded that there are at least two planets and probably more within the confines of our solar system.

Though more data was needed, the possibilities were truly revolutionary, he added.

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Two new planets bigger than Earth found in our solar system

Mario Lives! An Adaptive Learning AI Approach for Generating a Living and Conversing Mario Agent – Video

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Mario Lives! An Adaptive Learning AI Approach for Generating a Living and Conversing Mario Agent
Mario Lives! An Adaptive Learning AI Approach for Generating a Living and Conversing Mario Agent Stephan Ehrenfeld, Fabian Schrodt, Prof. Dr. Martin V. Butz Cognitive Modeling, Department...

By: AAAI Video Competition

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Mario Lives! An Adaptive Learning AI Approach for Generating a Living and Conversing Mario Agent - Video

Amanda Dittami @ Kollision Con 2015 "Artificial Intelligence vs. Artificial Consciousness" – Video

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Amanda Dittami @ Kollision Con 2015 "Artificial Intelligence vs. Artificial Consciousness"
Amanda Dittami @ Kollision Con 2015 "Artificial Intelligence vs. Artificial Consciousness" || http://adittami.com Embracing the nature of the presentation #39;s ...

By: Amanda Dittami

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Amanda Dittami @ Kollision Con 2015 "Artificial Intelligence vs. Artificial Consciousness" - Video

Artificial-Intelligence Experts to Explore Turing Test Triathlon

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Illustration: Konstantin Inozemtsev/Getty Images

It was billed as an epochal event in humanitys history: For the first time a computer had proved itself to be as smart as a person. And befitting the occasion, the June story generated headlines all around the world. In reality, it was all a cheesy publicity stunt orchestrated by an artificial-intelligence buff in England. But there was an upside. Many of the worlds best-known AI programmers were so annoyed by the massive coverage, which they deemed entirely misguided, that they banded together. They intend to make sure the world is never fooled by false AI achievement again. The result is a daylong workshop, Beyond the Turing Test, where attendees aim to work out an alternative to the current test. The workshop will be held this coming Sunday in Austin at the annual convention of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Whether a particular computer program is intelligent, as opposed to simply being useful, is arguably an unanswerable question. But computer scientists have nonetheless been asking it ever since 1950, when Alan Turing wrote Computing Machinery and Intelligence and proposed his now-famous test. The test is like a chat session, except the human doesnt know if its a computer or a fellow person on the other end. A computer that can fool the human can be adjudged to be intelligent or, as Turing put it, thinking.

In the early days of AI, the test was considered by scientists to be too far beyond the current capabilities of computers to be worth worrying about. But then came chatbot programs. Without using anything that could be described as intelligence, they use key words and a few canned phrases well enough to persuade the unaware that theyre having a real conversation with a flesh-and-blood human. This genre of programs has been fooling some folks for decades, including this past summer, when Eugene Goostman, a chatbot program pretending to be a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy, persuaded a handful of people in England that it was a real boy. (The program was undoubtedly aided by peoples assumption that they were speaking to a disaffected teen with limited English language skills.)

The Goostman win was trumpeted widely in the media, to the enormous chagrin of legitimate researchers. Most of them just groused privately, but one, Gary F. Marcus, a New York University research psychologist, used his forum as a contributor to The New Yorker to raise the issue of whether Turings test had become too easy to game, and to urge the AI community to come up with a replacement. To his surprise, researchers from all over the world wrote in offering to help. Wed clearly touched a nerve, says Marcus.

The upshot: Marcus is cochairing the 25 January event, along with Francesca Rossi, of the University of Padova, in Italy, and Manuela Veloso of Carnegie-Mellon, in Pennsylvania.

Anatomy of an AI Test: Winograd schemas might be a better test of human-level artificial intelligence than the Turing test because they require reasoning about a broad body of knowledge. Each schema has four requirements.

1: Two parties (males, females, groups, objects) are mentioned in a sentence.

2. A pronoun or possessive adjective is used in the sentence to refer to one of the parties, but that word could also refer to the second party.

3. The question involves determining the referent of the pronoun or possessive adjective.

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Artificial-Intelligence Experts to Explore Turing Test Triathlon

Elon Musk aims to prevent rise of the machines as he backs AI research with 6.5m

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Artificial intelligence has the ability to advance a wide range of technologies but AI research needs to be carefully monitored and communicated, according to Musk and several other AI experts, including Stephen Hawking.

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Elon Musk, the billionaire PayPal founder, has donated millions of dollars to ensure the machines dont get too big for their boots and turn against us.

The former SpaceX CEO announced yesterday that he is donating $10 million (6.5 million) to the Future of Life Institute (FLI) to help it run a global research programme aimed at keeping AI beneficial to humanity.

Earlier this week, the man behind the "wacky" Hyperloop transport concept signed an open letter warning against the dangers of uncontrolled development of AI. Other signatories included Stephen Hawking, one of the worlds greatest scientists, and the founders of Google-acquired AI startup, DeepMind.

Musk said: Here are all these leading AI researchers saying that AI safety is important. I agree with them, so Im today committing $10 million to support research aimed at keeping AI beneficial for humanity.

The funding will go towards AI research projects around the world that support the FLIs mission. Beyond scientific research, the money will also be used to fund research in areas likes economics, law, ethics and policy.

The Future of Life portal will open on Monday, allowing academic, industrial and individual researchers to apply for grants to the programme.

Last month Hawking told theBBC:"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.

"It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate," he said."Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."

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Elon Musk aims to prevent rise of the machines as he backs AI research with 6.5m

Super Mario comes to life in artificial intelligence experiment

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GERMAN GAME RESEARCHERS have given Super Mario artificial intelligence abilities, allowing him to "get to know his own world" by becoming aware of himself and his environment.

The team of cognitive modelling researchers from the University of Tbingen have worked on the project called 'An Adaptive Learning AI Approach for Generating a Living and Conversing Mario Agent' in a bid to win the annual video competition run by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

The competition, demonstrated in the form of a YouTube video (below), explores how the mind works by focusing on its developmental aspects and the "highly interactive modularity" of the brain.

The researchers conducted studies in behavioural psychology and built computational models of cognitive processes, giving Mario the ability to make his own decisions based on curiosity, happiness and fear.

The programme uses Carnegie Mellon's speech recognition toolkit so that Mario can understand spoken commands.

For example, when phrases from the toolkit's language tree are spoken aloud Mario can choose which actions to take based on what he has learned.

The video depicts this by showing Mario learning what jumping on a goomba will achieve. He doesn't know that doing so will destroy it until he has been told this information or found it out for himself when instructed to destroy an enemy.

"Mario will collect coins if he is hungry, whereas when he is curious he will explore his environment and autonomously gather knowledge about items he does not know much about yet," the researchers explained.

The programme of Cognitive Modeling was known previously as the Cognitive Body Spaces: Learning And Behaviour, or Coboslab.

Coboslab has been developing artificial self-organised cognitive systems for some time, which learn multimodal modular sensorimotor bodyspace representations for effective learning and behaviour.

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Super Mario comes to life in artificial intelligence experiment

Researchers create 'self-aware' Super Mario with artificial intelligence

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By Karissa Bell2015-01-19 22:33:44 UTC

Mario just got a lot a smarter.

A team of German researchers has used artificial intelligence to create a "self-aware" version of Super Mario who can respond to verbal commands and automatically play his own game.

The Mario Lives project was created by a team of researchers out of Germany's University of Tbingen as part of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's (AAAI) annual video competition. Each year the competition showcases videos from researchers and scientists from around the world that demonstrate "exciting artificial intelligence advances in research, education, and application."

The video depicts Mario's newfound ability to learn from his surroundings and experiences, respond to questions in English and German and automatically react to "feelings."

If Mario is hungry, for example, he collects coins. "When he's curious he will explore his environment and autonomously gather knowledge about items he doesn't know much about," the video's narrator explains.

The video also demonstrates Mario's ability to learn from experience. When asked "What do you know about Goomba" that's Mario's longtime enemy in the Super Mario series Mario first responds "I do not know anything about it."

But after Mario, responding to a voice command, jumps on Goomba and kills it, he is asked the question again. This time, he responds "If I jump on Goomba then it maybe dies."

The team behind Mario Lives, from the University of Tbingen's Cognitive Modeling department, used Carnegie Mellon's speech recognition software and principles of psychology to create the new "self-aware" version of Nintendo's famous plumber, according to the video.

BONUS: 20 Nintendo Facts to Blow Your 8-Bit Mind

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Researchers create 'self-aware' Super Mario with artificial intelligence

HAL aerospace varsity most likely to be in Karnataka

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Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. on Monday said it had set aside Rs. 100 crore to open an aerospace university. The university, it is learnt, is most likely to be started in Karnataka.

A full-fledged university will ensure constant turnout of skilled employees for the aerospace industry, HAL chairman R.K. Tyagi said at the second Aerospace Round Table organised here.

The university was announced in February 2014.

Noting that the aerospace sector had a shortage of 10 lakh skilled people for current and future activities, Dr. Tyagi said, HAL on its part is planning to create an aerospace university with initial an investment of Rs. 100 crore. This will ensure academia and industry linkage.

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Please Cry for Me Argentina

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St. Paul glorified Jesus by pointing out that Jesus didn't glorify himself. He did not treat "equality with God as a thing to be grasped," Paul said, so by implication, how could His followers ever pretend to be better than anyone else? In Jesus' words, the greatest are the humblest; in his ministry, he opened himself to the pains of those he encountered on the road.

Though that prescription for radical equality and honest doubt has seldom defined Christianity, it does have its exemplars from time to time, but popes haven't been notably among them. They profess unworthiness and service, but typically soon climb onto the pedestal and stay there enjoying its privileges, including the option of shielding themselves from impolite questions and glaring ugliness.

Not so Pope Francis. The self-effacement and courage to face tough issues has persisted from the day he became pope and, in effect, asked the crowd to join him in a common cause, not one of his own making as CEO. His embrace of the young girl in the Philippines was the latest and most revealing of that commitment.

His encounter with her was (so far as I know) unscripted, but even more remarkably, he was willing to open himself to whatever it might lead him, relating the sadness of her soul to his own, seemingly free of any pretense of knowing all the answers or treating her like a subordinate. He took her seriously; one suspects her question about why God permits so many like her such to suffer so ghastly bothers him too. So it was a good question and the power of that moment made a mockery of pat responses, he added. It was her teaching moment, not his, he realized, and he did not take that away from her.

Instead of trying to paper over her wound with a canned answer, he basically pleaded agnosticism. Tears like hers can bring some relief, he suggested, but didn't supply ready answers to either of him, he acknowledged. Marvelous.

Had he felt inclined, he could have taken that subject in another direction. He might have used the occasion to emphasize that apart from God's possible involvement in the world's wretched affairs, humans had inflicted enormous sufferings on other humans.Under these conditions that would have detracted from the compassion and empathy surrounding the girl's providential moment, but it does repeat a pattern whereby Francis bewails the evil of poverty but refrains from concrete remedies.

By making himself vulnerable, and allowing himself to look "unpapal" the pope continues to right size the office, removing that pedestal to stand aside rather than above fellow seekers. That could presage a wholesale revision of what authority means, easing away from the "infallibility" aura that has encased it. Then again, popes don't live long enough to achieve such amendments by themselves; the bright lights pass with no assurance that the forces that spiked hierarchy won't return. For that moment, at least, the pope and the girl were in common communion, radiating the most mysterious hope that comes from sharing life's hard edges and heartbreak.

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Please Cry for Me Argentina

Morning Star :: 50,000 protest in Berlin to protect farming from big business

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Over 50,000 people took to the streets of the German capital Berlin on Saturday to demand that the government changes its farming policy and halt the increasing industrialisation of agriculture.

The mass protest against factory farming and genetic engineering of crops was timed to coincide with International Green Week, an agricultural trade fair held annually in the city.

Under the slogan: We are sick of agribusiness, protesters called for a worldwide right to food, legal restrictions to protect food and agriculture from genetic manipulation and an end to the establishment of mega-factory farms.

The protesters marched from Potsdam Square to the Federal Chancellery demanding rejection of the planned Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement between the European Union and the US.

Jochen Fritz, spokesman for the alliance of more than 120 environmental, consumer and development organisations behind the protest, said that TTIP would ruin many farmers livelihoods.

TTIP only serves global concerns and will take away the means of existence from many farms here and across the world, he said.

Mr Fritz added that the agreement would also jeopardise consumer standards and that more than three-quarters of German pig farmers had had to give up their businesses since 2000, with large meat companies increasingly taking over livestock farming.

He called for agriculture to be based on regional markets.

Eating is political. Every single decision I make about what to buy is determined by how the animals are kept or

what grows in our fields, he added.

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Morning Star :: 50,000 protest in Berlin to protect farming from big business