Monthly Archives: June 2017

A Caribbean island or a prime west London flat? Remote 44-acre private hideaway with helipad listed for sale for the … – Homes and Property

Posted: June 3, 2017 at 12:46 pm

Property prices in London are such that even with 23 million to spare you can still end up with a flat, but how about your own private Caribbean island for the same amount?

Buck Island is a beautiful retreat from the world, fringed with dazzling white coral sandy beaches, but just a minute by boat from Tortola, the largest of the British Virgin Islands, and home to restaurants, museums and plenty of luxury shops.

The island is one of the largest private ones in the Caribbean, covering 44 acres, with cliffs soaring to 100 feet and a sea water pool with its floor covered in coral.

The temperate climate is perfect for all-year round living, with summers from 75F to 90C and winters of 70F to 84F.

The island has an amazing array of accommodation that will let you entertain all your closest friends, while maintaining your privacy.

The interior walls of the main house are clad in natural stone throughout and has a vast family room, a dining room that seats 14, a fully equipped bar area, kitchen, library and two en suite bedrooms, each with open-air showers and balconies.

The crowning glory of the house is a tower with a circular balcony offering 360-degree views of your kingdom and the surrounding seas, while underneath the house is a workout room and spa.

The so-called master villa is next door and includes a 180-degree balcony and even a conference room, while there are also two private villas that only share a kitchen and dining room, while two further guest cottages each have one bedroom and private balconies.

Above it all: the main house hasan infinity pool, with agazebo-covered kitchen, barbecue and dining area under a covered patio(Grenadine Islands Villas)

Should you want to keep some of your guests at arm's length across the water, the property even includes accommodation on Tortola island, 200 yards from Buck Island.

Bar Bay House is a three-bed, three-bath gated home, while the Annex Staff Quarter has four further bedrooms.

One of the main reason for buying a private island is having a beach all to yourself and with all the mod cons you could desire.

Kick back: one of the island's many outdoor living-diningareas(Grenadine Islands Villas)

Buck Island not only has its own beach house with a lounge, dining area, kitchen and four showers to wash away all that sand, but a boat house stacked to the rafters with kayaks, sailing boats and dinghies.

And if you don't fancy swimming or snorkelling in the limpid Caribbean waters, then, of course, there is an infinity pool, with a gazebo that's no ordinary poolside shelter, featuring a kitchen, barbecue and dining area under a covered patio.

Any private island worth its salt also offers ways for plutocrats to use their own transport to reach it and there is not only a helipad but a protected bay that allows superyachts up to 200 feet long to anchor.

Should you ever wish to leave your paradise home for the capital, London is just 13 and half hours away, by connecting flights from Tortola's airport.

Buck Island is for sale with Grenadine Island Villas for $30million

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A Caribbean island or a prime west London flat? Remote 44-acre private hideaway with helipad listed for sale for the ... - Homes and Property

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Meet Trudeau’s new language commissioner A Liberal insider who barely speaks English – The Rebel

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The official languages act is obsolete. Canadians learn French if they have to, and Quebeckers learn English if they have to. The mania over this issue from a generation ago is spent as numbers from Statistics Canada over the past decade confirm.

But the Liberals recently hired a new commissioner of official languages, who gets a massive budget and bureaucracy, and who, if past conduct is any guide, will harass people who dont speak French in places like Vancouver, Calgary and Barrie.

The only purpose for French-English bilingualism in many of these cities is so Liberals can get preferential hiring for government jobs. French-English bilingualism across Canada is a solution without a problem, so naturally, the Liberals love it.

The new Liberal Party bilingualism commissioner has trouble with English. How did that happen?

Well, shes a Liberal.

By her own admission, she met with Trudeaus partisan boss, Gerald Butts about the gig, yet Trudeaus cabinet minister Joly lied about that in Parliament.

Its a government job, not a Liberal Party job but Liberals think they own the government so see the job as a gift to give away to their friends.

Corruption in public office has been around for millennia, which is why we have checks and balances in place so you cant just hire friends or family.

An independent head-hunting firm was tasked with finding the best candidate for this job, and were working on it when they found out from the media that the job had already been filled by Gerald Butts and Trudeaus friend.

We know Justin Trudeaus policies including Official bilingualism, are wrong, but its the law for now and should at least be implemented ethically until its repealed. But, theyre hiring their friends instead of the best people.

Theyre vacationing with billionaires on private islands, and keeping it secret from the ethics commissioner and theyre putting their friends in high office, against the rules.

The Libranos are back!

Next, Howard Levitt, Senior Partner, Levitt, LLP, joins me to explain why he thinks former managing editor of CBCs, The National, should sue the CBC after he was dismissed from his job for being politically incorrect.

Then I speak with John Carpay of Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedom about their legal action against Manitoba Public Insurance over a rejected vanity plate with a Star Trek theme deemed offensive.

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The Groves of Academe: On Keep the Damned Women Out – lareviewofbooks

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JUNE 3, 2017

IN THE INTENTIONAL COMMUNITY of Twin Oaks, Virginia, co is not merely a prefix for words like coeducation and cooperative. The hundred or so people who live in Twin Oaks, which has operated as an egalitarian commune since 1967, also use co as a pronoun. Co is both gender inclusive used in situations applying to men and women and people who identify as neither as well as gender neutral. As one member wrote, Gender-neutral pronouns can help minimize [] gender assumptions and help others get to know people for other characteristics.

In a community like Twin Oaks, where both work and rewards are shared equally by all, even subtly gendered stereotypes could prove corrosive to a strictly neutral division of labor. Co, then, is more than an artifact of speech. It is an elementary principle, as expressed in Twin Oakss creed: From everyone according to cos abilities, to everyone according to cos needs.

As Nancy Weiss Malkiel argues in Keep the Damned Women Out: The Struggle for Coeducation, the promise embodied in the co of coeducation was considerably more superficial for the elite universities that suddenly began admitting both men and women in the late 1960s and 1970s. Women who enrolled in previously all-male universities found that they were lucky to be given full-length mirrors and better lighting in their restrooms. Concessions to womens preferences or needs in most other areas of life from dining to the curriculum were always begrudging and often elicited both disbelief and indignation. Men could treat almost any adjustment as an injustice, as women found out when a Yale faculty member harangued the new co-eds that they were responsible for the abolition of that most sacred male prerogative: to be able to stroll naked in the gym!

When a reader picks up a book like Malkiels, they expect numerous such anecdotes, instances of entitlement that both disgust and titillate the reader. That is, in a sense, one of the genre conventions of the Ivy League history, although to be strictly accurate, Keep the Damned Women Out is not about coeducation in the Ivies: about 40 percent of its 609 pages (not counting index and notes) are about non-Ivy colleges, and Malkiel only discusses the experiences of four Ivies Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth in any depth. (The other schools covered are Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley in the United States and, across the pond, Oxford and Cambridge.) But so strong is the Ivy undertow that most reviewers have treated the book as a de facto Ivy history, and I will follow suit.

That is just as well, for Malkiel has much to contribute to the ample and sometimes distinguished tradition of books that peel back the Ivy Curtain and reveal the pettiness of privilege. But Keep the Damned Women Out is very different in tone from the jaded memoir-cum-exposs of figures like Walter Kirn, Ross Douthat, William F. Buckley, Dinesh DSouza, or William Deresiewicz. It is more comparable to Jerome Karabels The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton or Craig Steven Wilders Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of Americas Universities, books that have nobly excavated histories of exclusion and exploitation in the nations elite colleges.

Like Karabels or Wilders books, Keep the Damned Women Out tells how gatekeepers addressed the question of who belonged in the Ivy League and who did not. But where those books focused primarily on the efforts of college officials to build up the ramparts of inequality, Malkiel gives us the story of the people who tried to break them down. Her book is, she writes, a case study in leadership as a fundamental element in institutional change. Malkiel, who was formerly a dean of the college at Princeton, bucks long popular and scholarly traditions of casting administrators in the role of reactive and reactionary stand-patters, always trying to slow down progress and outflank dissenters. There is no Dean Wormer from Animal House to be found here.

Malkiel builds her case for these administrators solidly in the endless paper trail of memos and minutes; she demonstrates considerable skill by interpreting much of the coded language and hidden pressures that lay beneath meetings of trustees, admissions staffs, or alumni donors. Malkiels method is exhaustive, tracking almost every movement of the principal administrative players as they debated, listened, cajoled, polled, and planned the issue of whether to go co-ed.

This approach yields an abundance of quotes and anecdotes like the one about Yales gym, but Malkiel is not out to shock the reader. Rather, she presents this evidence of male intransigence and masculine entitlement as proof of the agility of these schools leadership. For almost all these anecdotes are about people outside the administration: the opposition was almost wholly located among alumni, with pockets of students and faculty also acting obnoxiously. The threat of alumni revolts conducted above all through the withholding of donations is a persistent beat felt throughout the book. The question, then, which the book seeks to answer is how these presidents Robert Goheen of Princeton, Nathan Pusey of Harvard, Kingman Brewster of Yale, and John Kemeny of Dartmouth won the acquiescence if not the approval of their schools alumni.

Posed that way, the books ambitions seem rather special or at least specific, but in crediting the efforts of these figures, Malkiel hopes to make a subtler but also more far-reaching point. This is not a story of women banding together to demand opportunity, to press for access, to win rights and privileges previously reserved for men, she writes. Coeducation resulted not from organized efforts by women activists but from strategic decisions taken by powerful men.

Malkiel is not credulous about the motivations of these powerful men. She notes time and again that it was self-interest and pride that drove them first to consider and then implement coeducation. Certain that they were starting to lose some of the best (male) applicants to elite schools like Stanford that already were co-ed, Pusey, Brewster, and Goheen in particular felt obligated to move quickly to maintain their institutions national preeminence by removing that liability. They would add women to their campuses rather as a president today might add a climbing wall, or larger dorm rooms: it would look better in the brochures.

Malkiel doesnt put the matter quite that brutally, but the implication is certainly there. And in that implication, her assertion about the responsibility of powerful men for the coming of coeducation seems to me to take on another meaning. For while as Maggie Doherty has pointed out in The Chronicle of Higher Education Malkiel tends to scant the power of student activism to get administrations to change their ways, her insistence on crediting the men who ran the Ivies with making coeducation happen leaves the responsibility for the shortcomings of coeducation at these universities firmly in the laps of those same powerful men.

Here is where Malkiel demonstrates the tragic and frustrating superficiality of the struggle for coeducation as it was waged and won by powerful men. Malkiel argues forcefully that the all-male schools of the Ivy League were frequently cavalier about undertaking the responsibilities entailed by educating both men and women. All too often, they asked what kind of effect the women might have on their male students, but to women the answer was always an avant la lettre, lean in!

Our approach has not been, Do women need Princeton? but rather, Does the Princeton of the future need women? wrote the author of Princetons influential report on the feasibility of coeducation, Gardner Patterson. What the Patterson Report tried to answer, Malkiel highlights, is whether the presence of women would heighten the value of the educational experience of the students, where students quite obviously meant male students. Women were not equals; they were, at best, honorary men, as one student reminisced, and that honor could easily be rescinded. Women felt at all times that they were there on sufferance, and that they had to prove not just that they belonged but that they were doing something extra to compensate for taking the spot of a hypothetically deserving man. Malkiels sober awareness of the frequent failures of administrations to give equal weight to the pedagogical, emotional, and social needs of the newly admitted women extends to the ways that a lack of administrative resolve of leadership as a fundamental element in institutional change has abetted the persistence of quiet and not-so-quiet biases against women students in the formerly all-male institutions, from traditions of disproportionately rewarding men with the highest honors to the tenacious stereotypes keeping the number of women enrolled in STEM courses low.

But if Malkiel ends the book by considering the short- and long-term effects of coeducation such as it was on women and holds men accountable for not doing more to make the new arrangement work for its women students, the reader receives only tantalizing glimpses of how this experiment affected its female subjects. There are barely any exchanges social or intellectual between women. And while Malkiel does quote from a number of later reminiscences by these pioneer women, they mostly point to but do not really redress the lack of a substantial account of coeducation as a history of women, rather than as a history of institutions and transformative leadership.

To her credit, Malkiel clearly recognizes this paucity of womens dialogues and reflections about coeducation within her book. She delicately allows her sources to address it rather than didactically disavowing responsibility for it the conventional beyond the scope of my study disclaimer. But a passage like the following aches for further exploration, for a sort of historical reversal of its haunting solitude:

Women find no natural mechanisms for becoming close to one another. Perhaps the most important womens complaint is that they spend so much time sorting out their activities with men that they lose a sense of their own directions; and further, when they do begin to move toward their own goals in some independent way, men feel abandoned and threatened.

The Ivy Leagues first women, it turns out, were in need of more than full-length mirrors. Plus a change.

The desire to find out more about the women who first attended these schools leaves the reader feeling both somber and hopeful that another study as ample and ambitious as Malkiels will delve into the records of student organizations and perhaps student records (if they are open for research). But Malkiel makes other choices that left this reader wishing she had either spelled out her assumptions more clearly or taken note of the questions she did not wish to pursue. Three issues stood out to me as needing much more solid answers than the ones Malkiel gives. The first concerns the presumption that the Ivy League is the pacesetter of academic change. Elite institutions, Malkiel writes, are not more important than other institutions, but what happens at elite institutions has an outsized influence on other institutions [] [They] set a tone and provide a model that profoundly influences other[s].

Such a statement in the context of coeducation is curious, to say the least. Certainly, it is notable that so many universities elite and not moved in the late 1960s and early to mid-1970s to erase various forms of sex segregation in practices ranging from admission to housing assignments. Furthermore, Malkiel demonstrates clearly that research undertaken by the Ivies, particularly by Princeton, aided administrators at other universities who were trying to decrease forms of sex segregation. But when the history of mixed-gender higher education in the United States dates back to before the Civil War, does it make sense to call the Ivies leaders or laggards?

Moreover, while Malkiel addresses the broader social context that surrounded the debates over coeducation in a chapter named Setting the Stage: The Turbulent 1960s, her account is truncated. The unfinished assimilation of Jews and Catholics on these WASP campuses is apparent from allusions scattered through the book, and while Malkiel does not draw the threads into any kind of conclusion, an attentive reader will note how often (male) student leaders agitating for coeducation had typically Jewish names. The Yale Hillel, which was still fairly new in 1968, helped to welcome women during a sort of trial run for coeducation in that year by offering a bagel and lox breakfast.

Race was never disconnected from coeducation in the minds of many alumni who opposed changes to the student body, and Malkiel could have done more to connect the two in her account. You cant very well get rid of those already admitted, wrote one Yale alumnus in 1970, but for Gods sake dont admit any more blacks or coeds. While alumni saw these two forms of desegregation as two parts of one whole, Malkiel doesnt inquire if that view was shared by anyone else. It would be especially interesting to know, for instance, if some of those pioneer women who broke the gender barrier at Yale or Dartmouth took for their own historical model not Mrs. Daniel Boone entering the Cumberland Gap but James Meredith enrolling at the University of Mississippi. Malkiels choice to treat coeducation as a discrete development in higher education concentrated among elite schools at the end of the 1960s is particularly frustrating at this point: as soon as we see coeducation as, instead, part of a broader and longer movement toward desegregation starting with the racial integration of the military in 1948, new vistas open and the Ivy League once again looks like a latecomer, not an innovator.

While Harvard might quiver in irritation at thinking that it was, in some way, responding to changes originating in the Deep South or the outer boroughs, it is more accurate to see the Ivies decision to go co-ed as nearing the end of desegregation than as leading a new venture in diversity. That is not to say that the question of why so many elite institutions were simultaneously wrestling with the issue of coeducation and why so many decided in favor isnt important on its own. But the narrative is shaped differently if we imagine Brewster, Goheen, and others belatedly giving in to a broad consensus that coeducation was normal rather than forging a new ideal that coeducation was the future.

The second issue that needed more consideration was the place of queerness on these campuses both before and after coeducation. While Malkiel makes an effort to acknowledge the impact of the Civil Rights movement on student consciousness, there is no real presence in the book for the percolating gay rights movement of that historical moment, or, indeed, for queer life at all. With so many lines redrawn and roles destabilized, the latent queerness of the process of gender desegregation would seem to be at least a necessary subtext. Many people would have identified with the sentiments of either of the two cartoons Malkiel includes in the book. CONFUSED of course, Im confused! a father shouts in the first. I have a son at Vassar and a daughter at Yale! In the second cartoon, we find two women chatting (or flirting?) at a cocktail party: Princeton, did you say? How interesting. Im a Yale man myself.

The situations entailed by the novelty of coeducation were quite obviously ripe for such gender confusion. But one also wonders if some of the anger and resentment at the intrusion of co-eds into what Dartmouth men called the masculine heaven of Hanover was due to the changes it forced upon the casual homoeroticism of the locker room and fraternity. Even the small number of women who were admitted to these previously all-male institutions necessitated the rewriting of formal rules governing interactions between men. They must certainly have rewritten less formal ones as well.

From time to time, Malkiel provides evidence that administrators did see coeducation as an opportunity to redraft the sexual codes of their campus, although she appears reluctant to parse what mostly appears to be coded language. Much of the administrators concerns, however, seem to have been not about homoerotic play but rather about sexual assault and date rape. The debauchery of the weekends when Ivy League men brought girls back to their campuses was legendary: one thinks of Dorothy Parkers quip about the Yale prom that if all the girls attending it were laid end to end, I wouldnt be a bit surprised. But other artifacts of this culture of weekend revelry luxuriated in the element of coercion which accompanied these dates: Dartmouths in town again / Run, girls, run went one well-known drinking song.

Given the different standards he would have had regarding consensual sex, it is difficult to know for sure what Yales Kingman Brewster had in mind when he made the following comment:

The social and moral value of having two thousand college girls of outstanding intellectual and personal qualifications resident in New Haven is apparent [] The crash week-end, the degrading form of social activity known as the Mixer, have been [] a most unhealthy and unnatural part of the four Yale undergraduate years. Such an environment is not conducive to the development of a considerate, mature, and normal relationship among the sexes.

Less ambiguous, however, was the fact that one of the changes made to the physical plant to adjust to the arrival of women undergraduates was to augment campus lighting and install locks on doors.

But it was the crass opposition to coeducation at Princeton that reveals how much sex was on peoples minds when it came to coeducation. One Princeton alumnus wrote (in a letter that actually appeared in the Princeton Alumni Weekly), a good old-fashioned whorehouse would be considerably more efficient and much, much cheaper. Such a remark, while crude, was representative of one objection to coeducation: having sex or scheming to have it would consume the whole attention of Princeton men once they had access to women at all hours. The Patterson report addressed this belief head on. It was not true, the report read, that men would use the women undergraduates for their social and sexual convenience. Instead, the only reason Princeton men seemed so priapic was because of the unnaturalness of the weekend hunt for dates. The presence of women would stabilize rather than inflame their libidos.

Men at both Princeton and Yale believed that the presence of women would civilize men. When Princeton repeated Yales experiment with hosting women for one week as a trial run for coeducation, The Daily Princetonian wrote that For one week Princeton was a more humane place to go to school [] The whole campus seemed more natural. Men on their own or with limited access to women were animals; with women, they were humane.

Making humans more humane is not the particular responsibility of anyone, or of any gender, because it is or should be the mission of everyone, of all gender identities. It has often, however, been a role taken on energetically if not always consistently by higher education: the humanities, after all, is generally one of the divisions of a university for a reason.

And that is where we might return to the example of Twin Oaks, Virginia, and its experiments in equality in language and in everyday life, in making humaneness or mere humanity the responsibility of everyco.

Twin Oaks is known as an intentional community because it is a place where people voluntarily come together to live according to a shared set of principles. But we might equally acknowledge that universities are intentional communities as much as communes are. Universities are, from one point of view, the most successful utopian projects ever created, even if they do not feel like utopias much of the time. Much as has been the case for other utopian communities from Brook Farm to the Soviet Union, the failures which we find difficult to explain are often chalked up to human nature thats just the way people are: acquisitive, lustful, cruel, or fearful.

Keep the Damned Women Out is clear in laying the blame for coeducations limited progress toward true equality at the doors of the men who never fully committed to remaking their institutions into schools and homes for women as well as men. But in some ways, it accepts that failure as a product of the nature of these schools and perhaps even a product of the nature of men. It could hardly have been otherwise, Malkiel seems to say, you can see what they were working with.

And perhaps that is true; perhaps it is even fair. But the purpose of critique is not just to weigh what was plausible but to project back into the past the seeds of a better present, to imagine what would have been necessary then to make a better now. To do that, we cannot lean on clichs about human nature or about the characters of particular institutions: the limits our subjects believed in for their own actions cannot be our limits for the imagination of what could have been.

Coeducation at the Ivies, Malkiel demonstrates, was not a utopian project but a pragmatic acquiescence to necessity and self-interest. Yet that does not mean that further work in the name of coeducation must be pragmatic, that the co in coeducation must mean only with a few (more) women or with a few trans* or genderqueer persons now added. Bare inclusion not equality was the paltry goal of the administrators whose story Malkiel tells. It need not be ours as well.

Andrew Seal received his PhD from Yale University in 2017. He is a regular blogger at the Society forUS Intellectual Historyand his work has appeared in TheChronicle of Higher Education,n+1, Dissent, andIn These Times.

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Open house will celebrate Folk Art Guild’s 50 years – Penn Yan Chronicle-Express (blog)

Posted: at 12:45 pm

The Rochester Folk Art Guild attains a milestone accomplishment this year, as the group celebrates 50 years as a vibrant and creative crafts community.

The first seven members put down roots on East Hill, Middlesex in 1967. Since that time, hundreds of people have spent time at East Hill Farm, helping the Guild grow and develop into an exceptional school for crafts, and one of the most successful and long-lasting intentional communities in the country.

The Guilds fine pottery, woodworking, weaving, and other handcrafts have found their way around the world into museums, galleries, and private collections, even appearing on the table at the White House on different occasions.

The half-century marks a special point in the Guilds history, and the members are extending a warm welcome to all in the local communities to come share in a day of celebration, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. June 10.

There will be tours of the studios and East Hill Gallery, chamber music by Ensemble Resonance, and free, light refreshments for all.

Ensemble Resonance is flute, bassoon, and piano, and the three will play Mozart, Nino Rota, and Taylor-Coleridge at 12:30 and 2:30 p.m.

We are thankful to have great supporters, as well as wonderful neighbors in Middlesex and the surrounding Finger Lakes communities, says Guild spokesperson David Barnet.

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Lawmakers: listen before you legislate – Seattle Times

Posted: at 12:45 pm

Far too often key policies and decisions are made without considering input from the communities that are directly affected. Key decision-makers and subject-matter experts often assume that they know whats best for a community and that they can make equitable decisions for them.

However, if policies are to be truly equitable, the affected communities need to have their voices heard at the forefront of the policymaking process. Not only does the community voice need to be heard, but government entities need to be intentional in how communities are engaged so that all community voices are represented. There must be intentional action taken to include those disenfranchised and underrepresent communities that do not have high representation in traditional public forums, which are typically used to influence policy decisions.

By listening to the needs of the affected communities first, policies can be more inclusive and effective at dealing with real problems rather than wasting public funds on unnecessary programs or policies that dont address the real barriers communities face.

Katia Garcia, Shoreline

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NASA May Build GPS for Space Travel – VOA News – Voice of America

Posted: at 12:45 pm

NASA May Build GPS for Space Travel - VOA News
Voice of America
Today's travelers on land, sea and air rely on one of the satellite-based navigational systems commonly known as GPS, where the G stands for Global. Scientists ...

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Tomorrow, SpaceX Will Forever Transform Spaceflight – Futurism

Posted: at 12:45 pm

Why Is This Dragon Special?

Tomorrow (June 1, 2017) will be a landmark date for commercial space travel. SpaceX is set to become the first privately owned company to perform multiple orbital flights to space using the same aircraft. On 21st September 2014, using the Falcon 9 rocket, this same Dragon CRS-4 delivered 2.5 tons of cargo to the International Space Station (ISS).

Since, this time,it has been refurbished. The launch window for its second cargo flight opens at 5:55pm ET, and when it happens, this launch will transform humanitys future in spacethusting us into an age where space is accessible to every individual, not just nations.

CRS-4 Dragon About to Land. Image Credit: SpaceX, Wikimedia

To break down the significance further, it is one of only a handful of previous multi-orbit space flights and all of the others were undertaken by governments. They include: the NASA orbiters Atlantis, Challenger, Columbia, Discovery, and Endeavour, which made dozens of missions but were hideously expensive to repair. There was alsothe X-37B, which Boeing built under commission by the U.S Air Force, and the Soviet VA spacecraft, which only orbited the Earth once on its second voyage.

While it is unclear how much the Dragon CRS-4 has had to be repaired, and exactly how much it cost, the savings are expected to be considerable, which will play a major role in making space both commercially available and also affordable. However, even taking financial considerations out of the equation, this is nonetheless a landmark in breaching the final frontier,as private individuals are truly entering the space race.

Yet,ultimately, SpaceX is about far more than just making spaceflight affordable. SpaceX started with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets the first planet Musks space company aims to colonize is Mars. In order to do so, Musk plans to build the BFR . This stands for, in his own words, the Big F*cking Rocket, which will ferry the reusable Mars Colonial Transporter to the Red Planet.

He has stated previously that he plans to put the first person on Mars by 2025. A test launch of the Falcon Heavy, the rocket that bridges the gap between the Falcon 9 and the BFR was recently completed, and its first full launch is planned for sometime this summer.

Musk argues that humanity reaching Mars and other planets is pivotal. As he stated in an interview with aeon: I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary, and that this has to start with Mars because, if we can establish a Mars colony, we can almost certainly colonise the whole Solar System, because well have created a strong economic forcing function for the improvement of space travel.

The process, though, has to move in gradations and this relaunch of the Dragon is a major milestone in Musks plan.

At the Wall Street Journals D: All Things Digital Conferencein 2013, Musk explained his feelings regarding the importance of reaching other worlds, stating,Either we spread Earth to other planets, or we risk going extinct. An extinction event is inevitable and were increasingly doing ourselves in. The goal is to improve rocket technology and space technology until we can send people to Mars and establish life on Mars.

Of course, this will be no simple task. Mars is, currently, a wasteland of dirt and sand.

Mars is a fixer-upper of a planet, Musk said. But we could make it work. And honestly, even if we cant make it work, it seems that we have no real choice but to try. Musk concludes, I agree this is an unlikely outcome, but if we dont keep improving technology every year, we wont get there.

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Funeral Doom Friday: IMPERCEPTUM’s Reign of Cosmic Dread Continues On Ascension to a Higher Plain of Existence – Metal Injection.net

Posted: at 12:42 pm

Finally, the weekend is upon us. What better way to kick it off than with the latest installment of "Funeral Doom Friday". For those who arenew to this column; each week features a new or classic album from the realm of extreme doom. Much of funeral/death doom's might comes from an oppressive emotional weight and the useof death or black metal motifs (played at a trudgingpace, of course.) Pioneers likeMournful Congregation,Evoken, andEsoteric have mastered this blend of dirge and destruction. For 25 years, they have methodically built compositions that stretch for dozens of minutes all while keeping fansenthralled.Time has elapsed since the days of Thergothonand much like the world around us, the genre has evolved. Today's modernbands contortthe very construct of the genre, breeding darkly refreshing new work. Their workthankfully gives this column plenty of material to share.

Enjoy this week's post and check out prior features here. Feel free to also share thoughtsor suggestions for future installments in the comments section below.

Germany'sImperceptum continues to be a favorite of this column. The one-man force known as Void has made cosmic, blackened funeral doom for roughly the last 18 months. Each effort is as suffocating and hypnotic as the last. Now Void welcomes another new effort through an (almost) surprise release. The album cover and tracklist for a new, two-song EP called Ascension toA Higher Plainof Existenceappeared on FacebookMonday. Within the next 24 hours, it emerged onImperceptum's Bandcamp page much to the delight of this column.

Many of the blackened elements that populated the previous releases have taken a back seat.Ascension instead opts for a more atmospheric funeral doom. Void's guitars unleash droning riffs throughout much of the EP. Drums meanwhile heavily feature a seven strokeroll in lieu of a classic blast beat. This is not to say they are not present. In fact, these blackened rhythms are sparse. They are a means to emphasize moments where his vocals almost take a barbaric turn. They are crescendos of dying stars thaterupt to swallow the listener. Overall, it is a refreshing turn inImperceptum's still blossoming discography.

Pick up a copy of the EP atImperceptum's Bandcamp as well as Void's other releases. Listen toAscension to A Higher Plain of Existence below.

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Funeral Doom Friday: IMPERCEPTUM's Reign of Cosmic Dread Continues On Ascension to a Higher Plain of Existence - Metal Injection.net

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A reply to Wait But Why on machine superintelligence

Posted: at 12:41 pm

Tim Urban of the wonderfulWait But Whyblog recently wrote two posts on machine superintelligence:The Road to Superintelligence and Our Immortality or Extinction.These postsare probably now among the most-readintroductions to the topic since Ray Kurzweils 2006 book.

In general I agree with Tims posts, but I think lots of details in his summary of the topic deserve to be corrected or clarified.Below, Ill quotepassages from histwo posts, roughlyin the order they appear, and then give my own brief reactions. Someof my commentsare fairlynit-picky but I decided to share them anyway; perhaps my most important clarification comes at the end.

The average rate of advancement between 1985 and 2015 was higher than the rate between 1955 and 1985 because the former was a more advanced world so much more change happened in the most recent 30 years than in the prior 30.

Readers should know this claim is heavily debated, and its truth depends on what Tim means by rate of advancement. If hes talking about the rate of progress in information technology, the claim might be true. But it might be false for most other areas of technology, for example energy and transportation technology. Cowen, Thiel, Gordon, and Huebner argue that technological innovation more generally has slowed. Meanwhile, Alexander, Smart, Gilder, and others critique some of those arguments.

Anyway,most of what Tim saysin these posts doesnt depend muchon the outcome of these debates.

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

Well, thats the goal. But lots ofcurrentANI systems dont yet equal human capability or efficiency at their given task.To pick an easy example from game-playing AIs: chess computers reliably beat humans, and Go computers dont (but they will soon).

Each new ANI innovation quietly adds another brick onto the road to AGI and ASI.

I know Tim is speaking loosely, but I should note that many ANI innovations probably most, depending on how you count wont end up contributing to progress toward AGI. ManyANI methodswill end up being dead ends after some initial success, and their performance on the target task will be superseded by other methods. Thats how the history of AI has worked so far, and how it will likely continue to work.

the human brain is the most complex object in the known universe.

Well, not really. For example the brain of an African elephanthas 3 as many neurons.

Hard things like calculus, financial market strategy, and language translation are mind-numbingly easy for a computer, while easy things like vision, motion, movement, and perception are insanely hard for it.

Yes,Moravecs paradox is roughly true, but I wouldnt say that getting AI systems to perform well in asset trading or language translation has been mind-numbingly easy. E.g. machine translation is useful for getting the gist of a foreign-language text,but billions of dollars of effort still hasnt produced a machine translation system as good as a mid-level humantranslator, and I expect this willremain true for at least another 10 years.

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.

Because computing power is increasing so rapidly, we probablywill have more computing power than the human brain(speaking loosely) before we know how to build AGI, but I just want to flag that this isntconceptually necessary. In principle,an AGIdesign could be very different than the brains design, just like a plane isnt designed much like a bird. Depending onthe efficiency of the AGI design, it might be able to surpass human-level performance in all relevant domains using muchless computing power than the human brain does, especially since evolution is avery dumb designer.

So,we dont necessarilyneedhuman brain-ish amounts of computing power to build AGI, but the more computing power we have available, the dumber (less efficient)our AGI design can afford to be.

One way to express this capacity is in the total calculations per second (cps) the brain could manage

Just an aside:TEPS is probably another good metric to think about.

The science world is working hard on reverse engineering the brain to figure out how evolution made such a rad thing optimistic estimates say we can do this by 2030.

I suspect that approximately zeroneuroscientists think we can reverse-engineer the brain to the degree being discussed in this paragraph by 2030.To get a sense of current and near-future progress in reverse-engineering the brain, seeThe Future of the Brain (2014).

One example of computer architecture that mimics the brain is the artificial neural network.

This probably isnta good example of the kind of brain-inspired insights wed need to build AGI. Artificial neural networks arguably go back to the 1940s, and they mimic the brain only in the most basicsense. TD learning would be a more specific example, except in that case computer scientists were using the algorithmbefore we discovered the brain also uses it.

[We have]just recently been able to emulate a 1mm-long flatworm brain

No we havent.

The human brain contains 100 billion [neurons].

Good news! Thanks to a new technique we now have a more precise estimate: 86 billion neurons.

If that makes [whole brain emulation]seem like a hopeless project, remember the power of exponential progress now 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.

Because computing power advances so quickly, it probably wont be the limiting factor on brain emulation technology. Scanning resolution and neuroscience knowledge are likely to lag far behind computing power: see chapter 2 ofSuperintelligence.

most of our current models for getting to AGI involve the AI getting there by self-improvement.

They do? Says who?

I think the path from AGI to superintelligence is mostly or entirely about self-improvement, but the path from current AI systems to AGI is mostly about human engineering work, probably until relatively shortly before the leading AI project reachesa level of capability worth calling AGI.

the median year on a survey of hundreds of scientists about when they believed wed be more likely than not to have reached AGI was 2040

Thats the number you get when you combine the estimates from several different recent surveys, including surveys of people who were mostlynot AIscientists. If you stick to the survey of the top-cited living AI scientists the one called TOP100 here the median estimate for50% probability of AGI is 2050. (Not a big difference, though.)

many of the thinkers in this field think its likely that the progression from AGI to ASI [will happen]very quickly

True, but it should be noted this is still a minority position, as one can see in Tims 2nd post, or in section 3.3 of the source paper.

90 minutes after that, the AI has become an ASI, 170,000 times more intelligent than a human.

Remember that lots of knowledge and intelligence comes from interacting with the world, not just from running computational processesmore quickly or efficiently. Sometimes learning requires that you wait on some slow natural process to unfold.(In this context, even a1-second experimental test is slow.)

So the median participant thinks its more likely than not that well have AGI 25 years from now.

Again, I think its better to usethe numbers for the TOP100 survey from that paper, rather than the combined numbers.

Due to something called cognitive biases, we have a hard time believing something is real until we see proof.

There are dozens of cognitive biases,so thisis about as informative assaying due to something calledpsychology, we

The specific cognitive bias Tim seems to be discussing in this paragraph is the availability heuristic, or maybe the absurdity heuristic.Also see Cognitive Biases Potentially AffectingJudgment of Global Risks.

[Kurzweil is]well-known for his bold predictions and has a pretty good record of having them come true

The linked article says Ray Kurzweils predictions are right 86% of the time. That statistic is from a self-assessment Kurzweil published in 2010.Not surprisingly, when independent partiestry to grade the accuracy of Kurzweils predictions, they arrive at a much lower accuracy score: seepage 21 of this paper.

How good is this compared to other futurists? Unfortunately,we have no idea. The problem is that nobodyelse has bothered to write down so many specific technological forecasts over the course of multiple decades. So, give Kurzweil credit fordaring to make lots of predictions.

My own vague guess is that Kurzweils track record is actually pretty impressive, but not as impressive as his own self-assessment suggests.

Kurzweil predicts that well get [advanced nanotech]by the 2020s.

Im not surewhich Kurzweilprediction about nanotech Tim isreferring to, because the associated footnote points to a page of The Singularity is Nearthat isnt about nanotech. But if hes talking about advanced Drexlerian nanotech, then I suspect approximately zero nanotechnologists would agree with this forecast.

I expected [Kurzweils]critics to be saying, Obviously that stuff cant happen, but instead they were saying things like, Yes, all of that can happen if we safely transition to ASI, but thats the hard part.Bostrom, one of the most prominent voices warning us about the dangers of AI, still acknowledges

Yeah, but Bostrom and Kurzweil are both famous futurists. There are plenty of non-futuristcritics of Kurzweil who would say Obviously that stuff cant happen. I happen to agree with Kurzweil and Bostrom about the radical goods within reach of a human-aligned superintelligence,but lets not forget that most AI scientists, and most PhD-carrying members of societyin general, probablywould say Obviously that stuff cant happen in response to Kurzweil.

The people on Anxious Avenue arent in Panicked Prairie or Hopeless Hills both of which are regions on the far left of the chart but theyre nervous and theyre tense.

Actually, the people Tim istalking about here are often more pessimistic about societal outcomes than Tim issuggesting.Many of them are, roughly speaking, 65%-85% confident that machine superintelligence will lead to human extinction, and that its only in a small minority of possible worlds that humanity rises to the challenge and gets a machine superintelligence robustly aligned with humane values.

Of course, itsalso true that many of the people who write about the importance of AGI risk mitigationare moreoptimistic than the range shown in Timsgraph of Anxious Avenue. For example, one researcher I know thinks its maybe 65% likely we get really good outcomes from machine superintelligence. But he notes that a ~35% chance ofhuman friggin extinction istotally worth trying to mitigate as much as wecan, including by funding hundreds of smart scientists to study potential solutionsdecades in advance of the worst-case scenarios, like we already do with regard to a global warming, a much smaller problem. (Global warming is a big problem on a normal persons scale of things to worry about, but even climate scientists dont think its capable of human extinction in the next couple centuries.)

Or, as Stuart Russell author of the leading AI textbook likes to put it,If a superior alien civilization sent us a message saying, Well arrive in a few decades, would we just reply, OK, call us when you get here well leave the lights on? Probably not but this is more or less what is happening with AI. Although we are facing potentially the best or worst thing to happen to humanity in history, little serious research is devoted to these issues outside non-profit institutes1

[In the movies]AI becomes as or more intelligent than humans, then decides to turn against us and take over. Heres what I need you to be clear on for the rest of this post: None of the people warning us about AI are talking about this. Evil is a human concept, and applying human concepts to non-human things is called anthropomorphizing.

Thank you. Jesus Christ I am tired of clearing up that very basic confusion, even formany AI scientists.

Turry started off as Friendly AI, but at some point, she turned Unfriendly, causing the greatest possible negative impact on our species.

Just FYI, at MIRI wevestarted to move away from the Friendly AI language recently, since people think Oh, like C-3PO? MIRIs recent papersuse phrases like superintelligence alignmentinstead.

In any case, my real comment here isthat the quoted sentence above doesnt use the terms Friendly or Unfriendly the way theyve been used traditionally. In the usual parlance, a Friendly AI doesnt turn Unfriendly. If it becomes Unfriendly at some point, then it wasalways an Unfriendly AI, it just wasnt powerful enough yet to be a harm to you.

Tim does sorta fix this much later in the same post when he writes: So Turry didnt turn against usor switch from Friendly AI to Unfriendly AI she just kept doing her thing as she became more and more advanced.

When were talking about ASI, the same concept applies it would become superintelligent, but it would be no more human than your laptop is.

Well, this depends on how the AI is designed. If the ASI is an uploaded human, itll be pretty similar to a human in lots of ways. If itsnot an uploaded human, it could still be purposely designed to be human-like in many different ways. But mimicking human psychology in any kind of detail almost certainly isnt the quickest way to AGI/ASI just like mimicking bird flight in lots of detail wasnt how we built planes sopractically speaking yes,the first AGI(s) will likely be very alien from our perspective.

What motivates an AI system?The answer is simple: its motivation is whatever we programmed its motivation to be. AI systems are given goals by their creators your GPSs goal is to give you the most efficient driving directions; Watsons goal is to answer questions accurately. And fulfilling those goals as well as possible is their motivation.

Some AI programs today are goal-driven, but most are not. Siri isnt trying to maximize somegoal likebe useful to the user of this iPhone or anything like that. It just has a long list of rules about what kind of output to provide in response to different kinds of commands and questions. Varioussub-components of Siri might be sortagoal-oriented e.g. theres an evaluation function trying topick the most likely accuratetranscriptionof your spoken words but the system as a whole isnt goal-oriented. (Or at least, this is how it seems to work. Apple hasnt shown me Siris source code.)

As AI systems become more autonomous, giving them goals becomes more important because you cant feasibly specify how the AI shouldreact in every possible arrangement of the environment instead, you need to give it goals and let it do its own on-the-fly planning for how its going achieve those goals in unexpected environmental conditions.

The programming for a Predator drone doesnt include a list of instructionsto follow for every possiblecombination of takeoff points, destinations, and wind conditions, because that list would be impossiblylong. Rather, the operator gives the Predator drone a goal destination and the drone figures out how to get there on its own.

when [Turry]wasnt yet that smart, doing her best to achieve her final goal meant simple instrumental goals like learning to scan handwriting samples more quickly. She caused no harm to humans and was, by definition, Friendly AI.

Again, Ill mention thats not how the term has traditionally been used, but whatever.

But there are all kinds of governments, companies, militaries, science labs, and black market organizations working on all kinds of AI. Many of them are trying to build AI that can improve on its own

This isnt true unless by AI that can improve on its own you just mean machine learning. Almost nobody in AI is working on the kind of recursive self-improvement youd need to get an intelligence explosion. Lots of people are working onsystemsthat could eventually providesomepiece of the foundational architecturefor a self-improving AGI, but almostnobody is working directly on the recursive self-improvement problem right now, because its too far beyond current capabilities.2

because many techniques to build innovative AI systems dont require a large amount of capital, development can take place in the nooks and crannies of society, unmonitored.

True, its much harder to monitor potential AGI projects than it is to track uranium enrichment facilities. But you can at least trackAI research talent. Right nowit doesnt take a ton of work to identify aset of 500 AI researchers that probably contains the most talented ~150AI researchers in the world. Then you can just track all 500 of them.

This is similar to back whenphysicists were starting to realize that a nuclear fission bomb mightbe feasible. Suddenly a few of the most talented researchers stoppedpresenting their work at the usual conferences, and the other nuclear physicists pretty quickly deduced: Oh, shit, theyre probably working on a secret government fission bomb. If Geoff Hinton or even the much younger Ilya Sutskever suddenly went undergroundtomorrow, a lot of AI people would notice.

Of course, such a tracking effort might not be so feasible 30-60 years from now, when serious AGI projects will be more numerous and greater proportions of world GDP and human cognitive talent will be devoted to AI efforts.

On the contrary, what [AI developers are]probably doing is programming their early systems with a very simple, reductionist goal like writing a simple note with a pen on paper to just get the AI to work.Down the road, once theyve figured out how to build a strong level of intelligence in a computer, they figure they can always go back and revise the goal with safety in mind. Right?

Again, I note that most AI systems today are not goal-directed.

I also note that sadly, it probably wouldnt just be a matter of going back to revise the goal with safety in mind after a certain level of AI capability is reached. Most proto-AGIdesigns probably arent even thekind of systems youcan make robustly safe, no matterwhat goals you program into them.

To illustrate what I mean, imaginea hypothetical computer security expert namedBruce.Youtell Bruce that he and his team havejust 3years tomodify the latest version ofMicrosoft Windows so that it cant be hacked in any way, even by the smartest hackers on Earth. If he fails, Earth will be destroyed because reasons.

Bruce just stares at you and says, Well, thats impossible, so I guess were allfucked.

The problem, Bruce explains,is that Microsoft Windows was neverdesigned to be anything remotely like unhackable. It was designed to be easily useable, and compatible with lots of software, and flexible, and affordable, and just barely secure enough to be marketable, and you cant just slap ona specialUnhackability Module at the last minute.

To get a system that even has achance at being robustlyunhackable, Bruce explains, youve got to design an entirely differenthardware + software system that was designedfrom the ground up to be unhackable. And that systemmustbe designed in an entirely different way than Microsoft Windows is,and no team in the world could do everything that is required for that in a mere 3 years. So, were fucked.

But! By a stroke of luck, Bruce learns that some teamsoutsideMicrosoft have been working on a theoretically unhackablehardware + software system for the past several decades (high reliability ishard) people like Greg Morrisett (SAFE) and Gerwin Klein (seL4).Bruce says he might be able to take their work and add thefeatures you need,while preserving the strong security guaranteesof the original highly securesystem. Bruce sets Microsoft Windows aside and gets to work on trying to make this other system satisfy themysteriousreasons while remaining unhackable. He and his team succeedjust in time to savethe day.

This is an oversimplified and comically romanticway to illustrate whatMIRI is trying to do in the area of long-term AI safety. Were trying to think through what properties an AGI would need to haveif it was going to very reliablyact in accordance with humane values even as it rewrote its own code a hundredtimes on its way tomachine superintelligence.Were asking:What would it look like if somebody tried to design an AGI that was designedfrom the ground up not for affordability, or for speed of development, or for economic benefit at every increment of progress, but for reliably beneficial behavior even under conditions of radical self-improvement? What does the computationally unbounded solution to that problem look like,so we can gain conceptual insightsusefulfor later efforts to build a computationally tractable self-improving system reliably aligned with humane interests?

So ifyoure reading this, and you happen to be a highly gifted mathematician or computer scientist, and you want a full-time job working on themost important challenge of the 21st century, well were hiring. (I will also try to appeal to your vanity: Please note that because so little work has been done in this area, youve still got a decentchance to contribute to what will eventually be recognized as the early, foundational results ofthe most important field of research in human history.)

My thanks to Tim Urban for hisvery nice posts on machine superintelligence. Be sure to read his ongoing series about Elon Musk.

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A reply to Wait But Why on machine superintelligence

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The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence (PDF)

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The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence (PDF)

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