Monthly Archives: July 2022

Democrats Plan to Win in 2022 Looks a Lot Like 2020 and 2018 – The New York Times

Posted: July 31, 2022 at 8:20 pm

Todays newsletter is a guest dispatch from Georgia, where my colleague Maya King covers politics across the South.

ATLANTA Long before Georgia became the center of the American political universe, Stacey Abrams and leagues of Democratic organizers across the Peach State were testing out a new strategy to help their party win more top-ticket elections.

National Democrats largely dismissed their calculations, which called for exhausting voter turnout in the reliably blue Metro Atlanta region while investing more time and money in turning out rural, young and infrequent voters of color outside the capital city instead of the moderate and independent white voters in its suburbs.

There were strong civil rights interests at stake, given the history of discrimination against Black voters in Georgia and across the South.

But there were hardball politics at play, too, in Abramss push to register millions of new voters. She and her allies hoped they would become the backbone of a coalition that could turn Georgia blue for the first time since Bill Clinton won the state in 1992.

In 2018, Abrams, Georgias current Democratic nominee for governor, came extraordinarily close to winning her first campaign for the office. In 2020, her organizing helped Joe Biden narrowly win the state before boosting the fortunes of two Democrats who won both of the states Senate seats two months later.

The strategy is now widely accepted on the left although it is expensive. But Abrams, her fellow Democratic candidates and several voter-focused organizations in Georgia are counting on it again this year to prove that their wins in 2020 were not a fluke made possible by former President Donald Trumps unpopularity, but rather the continuation of a trend.

Its why Way to Win, a collective of progressive Democratic donors and political strategists, is pouring $8.5 million into Georgias voter mobilization efforts ahead of November, according to plans first shared with The New York Times.

The group has already shelled out nearly $4 million to more than a dozen organizations in Georgia, including the Working Families Party and the New Georgia Project, which Ms. Abrams founded in 2014 and whose board Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat who is running for election to a full term, chaired from 2017 to 2020. The groups goal is to provide the financial backing for Democrats to continue turning out the same broad swath of voters that they did in previous cycles, and blunt the effect of national trends working against them.

They also feel like they have something to prove to skeptics in Washington yet again.

If you talk to these voters every voter that has been ignored by traditional pundits and traditional institutional leaders if you build a big tent, they will come, said Tory Gavito, co-founder, president and chief executive of Way to Win. I cant tell you how many rooms I still go to where traditional operatives will say, Is Georgia really a battleground? And its like, are you kidding? How many cycles do we have to go through where Georgia leaders really show the power of a multiracial coalition?

To win the big statewide races, Georgia Democrats are counting on high turnout from the same coalition that brought them success in 2018 and 2020: a mix of loyal, rain-or-shine voters in addition to a critical mass of moderate, independent and infrequent voters.

But the outside forces getting them to the polls, or not, look very different than they did in the two previous election cycles. Where anti-Trump sentiment, a nationwide movement against systemic racism and coronavirus-related provisions that expanded access to the ballot fueled record turnout in 2020, voters this year are keeping rising prices and concerns about an economic recession front of mind, dampening their enthusiasm. They are also contending with a new, more restrictive voting law passed by the Republicans who control the state legislature and governors mansion.

The state of the midterms. We are now over halfway through this years midterm primary season, and some key ideas and questions have begun to emerge. Heres a look at what weve learned so far:

Way to Wins investment reflects a growing understanding among Democratic donors that early money matters even more in a tough midterm cycle.

An Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll out Wednesday found that just over 60 percent of likely Democratic voters said they believed the country was on the wrong track. That same poll showed Abrams trailing her Republican opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp, by five percentage points. Warnocks Senate race against Herschel Walker, the first-time candidate and former University of Georgia football icon, is statistically tied. Political operatives and observers in both parties are expecting the campaigns to be among the most costly in the country this year.

And, as long as the economy remains the elections top animating issue, Georgia Republicans are pinning the nations economic woes directly on Democratic leaders in Washington, warning that President Joe Bidens policies will trickle further down south should Abrams win in November.

In a speech to supporters in McDonough, Ga. on Friday morning, Kemp railed against what he called the Biden-Abrams agenda for Georgia.

Stacey Abrams campaigned for Joe Biden, publicly auditioned to be his vice president, celebrated his victory and took credit for his win, Kemp said. He also condemned her for listening to TV hosts on MSNBC, her big donors in New York and California and liberal elites who can stay in their basement for months on end.

Democrats are also throwing their weight behind a number of races down the ballot, including for attorney general and secretary of state two offices that have proven their importance in light of developments on abortion and election security.

Many groups, particularly those led by people of color, have long decried money dumps from big, national donors that dont come in until September or October or, as Britney Whaley of the Working Families Party describes it, the holiday, birthday and special occasion giving.

By then, said Whaley, who spearheads the progressive groups southeast regional organizing, its often too late for the groups aiming to mobilize hard-to-reach voters to make a big difference.

If we hadnt created the conditions on the ground that prepared us for Jan. 5, all of the money in the world would have been for naught, she said, referring to the day Warnock and Senator Jon Ossoff were elected in 2021. Those two victories allowed Democrats to claim a majority in the Senate, unlocking the billions in spending that Republicans now criticize as wasteful and inflationary.

Spending money several months before voting begins, Whaley added, should actually be the standard.

The Working Families Partys national organizing arm has also taken notice of both the strategy and its implications for future elections. Maurice Mitchell, the partys national director, said the Georgia model of balancing reliably blue voters in cities with new groups of voters in rural areas could be replicated in other battleground states, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

And he warned against making too much of the debates among pundits and Democratic strategists that have continued since Warnock and Ossoffs seemingly improbable wins: Should the Democratic Party exert more effort to win back the working-class white voters theyve steadily lost since the 1980s, go after upscale college-educated suburbanites who are repulsed by Trump, or stick with Abramss approach of bringing new voters and communities into a multiracial, rural-urban alliance?

The framework is there, and I think theres been enough examples in recent history of it working, Mitchell said. I think we should fight for every vote, but the idea that we would de-emphasize or de-prioritize communities of color or progressives or young people in a sort of zero-sum to reach out to moderate or swing voters, I think that is a dangerous strategy.

Democrats on the House panel investigating the events of the Jan. 6 attack are skeptical of a bipartisan Senate proposal to reform the Electoral Count Act, Politico reported this week.

Alan Feuer and Katie Benner explained former President Donald Trumps fake electors scheme.

In The Atlantic, Barton Gellman writes about how just six states could subvert the 2024 election.

viewfinder

On Politics regularly features work by Times photographers. Heres what Kenny Holston told us about capturing the image above:

As a photojournalist who has covered former President Donald Trump in some capacity since 2016, I know a chaotic scene is never too far behind him.

This was the case earlier this week when Trump returned to Washington, D.C., for the first time since he left office.

Officers from the Metropolitan Police Department lined the street in front of the Marriott Marquis hotel, where Trump spoke at a gathering of the America First Policy Institute. On one side of the police line stood anti-Trump protesters, and on the other, Trump supporters.

Officers broke up a few scuffles between the dueling demonstrations as hotel guests watched the disorder unfold from the lobby window, all while a large box truck projecting oscillating images of Trump and his 2020 election loss on its sides circled the block repeatedly.

In an effort to convey this scene in a single photo, I decided to use the reflection in the hotel window. I got very close to the glass with my camera and tilted the camera slightly, allowing me to partially see through the glass while also capturing everything reflected in it, as seen in the photo above.

Thanks for reading. Well see you Monday.

Blake

Is there anything you think were missing? Anything you want to see more of? Wed love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.

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Democrats Plan to Win in 2022 Looks a Lot Like 2020 and 2018 - The New York Times

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Democrats across the country can learn from Tim Ryans success – The Hill

Posted: at 8:20 pm

As national Democrats strategize ahead of the midterms, the party would be wise to take note of the Democratic Senate candidate in Ohio, Rep. Tim Ryan. Ryan is emerging as a sleeper candidate to flip a solid red seat blue and is arguably becoming a model for the Democratic Party going forward.

Indeed, amid a national political environment that is highly unfavorable toward Democrats, Ryan has a realistic chance of winning a reliably Republican Senate seat in a state that Donald Trump won by 8-points in both2020and2016.

Recent polling from Suffolk University shows Ryans opponent, Trump-endorsed Hillbilly Elegyauthor J.D. Vance, leading by justthree points, while some polls conducted by Democratic strategy groups put Ryanslightly ahead.

Ryans relative strength in the race is largely due to his campaigns strategic successes in three crucial areas: He is running toward the center on key issues, appealing to blue-collar voters and making a concerted effort to reach out to both Republicans and Democrats.

To be sure, this used to be the overarching campaign strategy for the Democratic Party however, to the partys detriment, the establishment and leadership have abandoned this approach in favor of promoting a far-left agenda that appeals to a small fraction of the electorate.

To his credit, Ryan is running to the political center and has moved to the right of President Biden and party leadership on key issues like crime and policing, China, trade and the economy.

One of Ryanscampaign adsmakes clear his unequivocal opposition to defunding the police, andanotherunderscores his views on the need to fight back against China and invest in Ohio manufacturing. In addition, he routinely criticizes his own party for not doing enough to counter inflation.

To that end, Ryan is making a concerted effort to appeal to working class and blue-collar voters a coalition that was once the core of the Democratic base, but slowly moved away from the party as it has become more progressive and woke. Put another way, these are the voters that backed Barack Obama in 2008 but voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

Regaining the support of these voters especially those concentrated in the rust belt is essential to the Democrats chances of keeping the White House in 2024 and winning closely contested races in this years midterms.

Ryan has connected with these voters by staying on message about making the economy work for the middle class again by bringing manufacturing jobs back to the state, taking an aggressive stance on inflation and proposing a working-class tax cut.

Perhaps most importantly, Ryan has attempted to do during his campaign what President Biden promised to do during his presidential run: take a conciliatory tone, stop finger-pointing and listen to the other side.

It is a near-extinct approach in American politics today yet it is one that Americans so desperately want to see resurrected.

Ryan has embraced it. His campaignreleased an adthat ostensibly combines Bidens Soul of the Nation appeal with Trumps America First stance and argues that we cant afford to be Democrats and Republicans right now, we have to be Americans first. Another ad supports and applauds a signature Trump policy tariffs on China where Ryan says that he agreedwith Trump on trade.

Ryans frequent appearances and ads on Fox News are helping him connect with voters on the other side of the aisle. Currently, his campaign is running a spot on the conservative news network, which features prominent network hosts Tucker Carlson and Bret Baier heapingpraiseon him and his policies.

In addition, Ryan, as a lifelong Ohioan, has been running a relentless campaign ground game, making campaign stops at county fairs, small businesses and factories to talk about state-specific issues rather than national feuds or culture wars.

While Ryans approach has regrettably lost its prominence in Democratic politics over the last decade, this strategy is clearly his best path to winning the Ohio Senate seat and is also Democrats best path to remaining politically viable in 2022, 2024, and beyond.

Of course, it will still be an uphill battle for Ryan, a 10-term congressman, to win in a state Donald Trump carried easily in the past two elections. That being said, even a narrow loss for Ryan will be a win for Democrats and will give them a roadmap for staying competitive in battleground races in future elections.

Douglas E. Schoen is a political consultant who served as an adviser to former President Clinton and to the 2020 presidential campaign of Michael Bloomberg. He is the author of The End of Democracy? Russia and China on the Rise and America in Retreat.

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Democrats across the country can learn from Tim Ryans success - The Hill

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Despite Bidens Success on Judges, Progressives Demand Faster Pace – The New York Times

Posted: at 8:20 pm

WASHINGTON With an extended summer recess looming and their majority at risk in November elections, Senate Democrats were facing the prospect of allowing dozens of judicial vacancies to go unfilled by President Biden this year, and under pressure from progressive activists to move more quickly and aggressively to push them through.

Mr. Biden and Democrats have installed scores of the presidents picks on the federal bench to offset the conservative imprint of the Trump era, a bright spot for the Biden administration despite Democrats tight majorities in Congress. But progressive groups warned that unless Democrats took more aggressive steps and quickened their pace, the party could lose its chance to reshape the courts.

Progressives have called for Democrats to stay in session in August, when they were scheduled to have a four-week recess, to hold hearings on nominees, teeing them up for floor votes later this fall. And they have pushed Democrats to abandon the blue slip practice that effectively grants home-state senators veto power over candidates for federal district court judges in their states, which has limited the administrations ability to win confirmation of district court nominees in states represented by Republicans.

Time is of the essence, the activists argue, because Republicans are likely to drastically slow if not halt the confirmation of Biden-nominated judges if they win the majority in midterm elections this fall. At their current pace, Democrats face the prospect of not being able to fill as many as 60 district and appellate court vacancies by the end of the year. Federal judges have been retiring or taking senior status faster than the White House has been able to identify nominees and send them to the Senate for consideration, a process that can consume months.

This is a historic opportunity to continue the wonderful progress that has been made under the Biden administration to correct the harm that has been done to the federal judiciary, said Russ Feingold, a former Democratic senator from Wisconsin who leads the American Constitution Society, a progressive legal group. This is a moment to play hardball.

The advocacy groups have applied pressure through a digital advertising campaign aimed at Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the Judiciary Committee chairman, and op-eds, among other tactics.

Though some Democratic allies were clamoring for the Senate to stay in session through August to vote on judicial nominees, that appeared unlikely. But Mr. Feingold and others said that, at a minimum, Democrats should use the time to conduct Judiciary Committee hearings. In a break with past practice, Republicans in 2018 began holding confirmation hearings during their October recess.

The groups would also like to see Democrats increase the number of nominees considered at each hearing.

Republicans held hearings during recess to move more Trump judges, and Democrats should now do the same, said Chris Kang, general counsel for Demand Justice, a progressive group. This is not radical there is recent precedent for it that just needs to be followed.

When the Republican majority and Donald J. Trumps presidency seemed in danger in 2020, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who was then the majority leader, adopted a mantra of leave no vacancy behind and followed a policy of trying to fill every possible judicial opening before a shift in power. But Republicans had not been at the mercy of Democrats for cooperation, since they had a slightly larger majority that provided more flexibility.

Senate Democrats say no one wants to keep confirming Biden-nominated judges more than they do, but given the 50-50 Senate and the evenly divided Judiciary Committee, they do not have the latitude that Mr. McConnell did in years past. They see the confirmation of 74 judges so far over the past two years including a new Supreme Court justice as a major accomplishment, and they say there is a real possibility of exceeding 100 by the end of the year.

We are doing fantastic, said Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader, who has long had a deep interest in judicial confirmations.

Democrats have also warned about the hazards of getting too aggressive in advancing nominees given the 11-11 split on the judiciary panel, which oversees the confirmation process. The committee has already had to juggle regular absences by lawmakers because of the coronavirus and other health issues.

The Judiciary Committees rules require at least one Republican to be present to conduct business, such as voting to send nominees to the floor, and Democrats say that a backlash by Republicans to Democratic heavy-handedness could lead to fewer judicial nominees advancing, not more.

We have done very well so far, we have a number of judges going through, Mr. Durbin said. If I get confrontational, it is just tempting fate.

Mr. Durbin and other Democrats said they were considering the idea of holding confirmation hearings even while the Senate was on break, since they could point to Republicans doing so in the past.

We are discussing options based on precedent, Mr. Durbin said in an interview. We have to be able to say to the Republicans, Here is what you did; here is what we want to do.

Mr. Durbin has leveraged his working relationship with top Republicans on the committee to keep the confirmation train running despite intense partisanship over many nominees. A few Republicans, including Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, have also provided some support, sparing Democrats from time-consuming floor votes to discharge nominees from committee in the event of a deadlock.

Several Republican senators have been accommodating, Mr. Durbin said.

He and his fellow Democrats fear that such cooperation may disappear should they push Republicans to the wall. And Democrats are concerned that eliminating the blue slip power could backfire on them during a future Republican presidency.

The worry for Democrats is that if Republicans take control of the Senate at the start of next year, Mr. McConnell, the minority leader with a history of playing hardball on judicial nominees, will prevent Mr. Biden from filling most of them in hopes of a Republican winning the White House in 2024. When Mr. McConnell became majority leader in 2015, he slowed judicial confirmations to a trickle for the final years of Barack Obamas administration.

Democrats say their chance to push judges through might not come around again for some time should they lose the majority.

The fact that you are going to leave 60 vacancies open for McConnell to block should be very alarming to everybody, said Mr. Kang, who worked on judicial nominations in the Obama White House and was also a former counsel to Mr. Durbin.

In a recent interview, Mr. McConnell appeared to suggest that liberal activists were right to be worried about what he and Republicans would do on judge seat vacancies if Democrats came up short in their push to hold on to the Senate.

If they lose the Senate, Id keep everybody here as long as I could get enough attendance to fill every vacancy I possibly could before the end of the year, he said. Which is not to say we are going to shut down everything. But thats what Id do.

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Despite Bidens Success on Judges, Progressives Demand Faster Pace - The New York Times

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Can artificial intelligence really help us talk to the animals? – The Guardian

Posted: at 8:18 pm

A dolphin handler makes the signal for together with her hands, followed by create. The two trained dolphins disappear underwater, exchange sounds and then emerge, flip on to their backs and lift their tails. They have devised a new trick of their own and performed it in tandem, just as requested. It doesnt prove that theres language, says Aza Raskin. But it certainly makes a lot of sense that, if they had access to a rich, symbolic way of communicating, that would make this task much easier.

Raskin is the co-founder and president of Earth Species Project (ESP), a California non-profit group with a bold ambition: to decode non-human communication using a form of artificial intelligence (AI) called machine learning, and make all the knowhow publicly available, thereby deepening our connection with other living species and helping to protect them. A 1970 album of whale song galvanised the movement that led to commercial whaling being banned. What could a Google Translate for the animal kingdom spawn?

The organisation, founded in 2017 with the help of major donors such as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, published its first scientific paper last December. The goal is to unlock communication within our lifetimes. The end we are working towards is, can we decode animal communication, discover non-human language, says Raskin. Along the way and equally important is that we are developing technology that supports biologists and conservation now.

Understanding animal vocalisations has long been the subject of human fascination and study. Various primates give alarm calls that differ according to predator; dolphins address one another with signature whistles; and some songbirds can take elements of their calls and rearrange them to communicate different messages. But most experts stop short of calling it a language, as no animal communication meets all the criteria.

Until recently, decoding has mostly relied on painstaking observation. But interest has burgeoned in applying machine learning to deal with the huge amounts of data that can now be collected by modern animal-borne sensors. People are starting to use it, says Elodie Briefer, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen who studies vocal communication in mammals and birds. But we dont really understand yet how much we can do.

Briefer co-developed an algorithm that analyses pig grunts to tell whether the animal is experiencing a positive or negative emotion. Another, called DeepSqueak, judges whether rodents are in a stressed state based on their ultrasonic calls. A further initiative Project CETI (which stands for the Cetacean Translation Initiative) plans to use machine learning to translate the communication of sperm whales.

Yet ESP says its approach is different, because it is not focused on decoding the communication of one species, but all of them. While Raskin acknowledges there will be a higher likelihood of rich, symbolic communication among social animals for example primates, whales and dolphins the goal is to develop tools that could be applied to the entire animal kingdom. Were species agnostic, says Raskin. The tools we develop can work across all of biology, from worms to whales.

The motivating intuition for ESP, says Raskin, is work that has shown that machine learning can be used to translate between different, sometimes distant human languages without the need for any prior knowledge.

This process starts with the development of an algorithm to represent words in a physical space. In this many-dimensional geometric representation, the distance and direction between points (words) describes how they meaningfully relate to each other (their semantic relationship). For example, king has a relationship to man with the same distance and direction that woman has to queen. (The mapping is not done by knowing what the words mean but by looking, for example, at how often they occur near each other.)

It was later noticed that these shapes are similar for different languages. And then, in 2017, two groups of researchers working independently found a technique that made it possible to achieve translation by aligning the shapes. To get from English to Urdu, align their shapes and find the point in Urdu closest to the words point in English. You can translate most words decently well, says Raskin.

ESPs aspiration is to create these kinds of representations of animal communication working on both individual species and many species at once and then explore questions such as whether there is overlap with the universal human shape. We dont know how animals experience the world, says Raskin, but there are emotions, for example grief and joy, it seems some share with us and may well communicate about with others in their species. I dont know which will be the more incredible the parts where the shapes overlap and we can directly communicate or translate, or the parts where we cant.

He adds that animals dont only communicate vocally. Bees, for example, let others know of a flowers location via a waggle dance. There will be a need to translate across different modes of communication too.

The goal is like going to the moon, acknowledges Raskin, but the idea also isnt to get there all at once. Rather, ESPs roadmap involves solving a series of smaller problems necessary for the bigger picture to be realised. This should see the development of general tools that can help researchers trying to apply AI to unlock the secrets of species under study.

For example, ESP recently published a paper (and shared its code) on the so called cocktail party problem in animal communication, in which it is difficult to discern which individual in a group of the same animals is vocalising in a noisy social environment.

To our knowledge, no one has done this end-to-end detangling [of animal sound] before, says Raskin. The AI-based model developed by ESP, which was tried on dolphin signature whistles, macaque coo calls and bat vocalisations, worked best when the calls came from individuals that the model had been trained on; but with larger datasets it was able to disentangle mixtures of calls from animals not in the training cohort.

Another project involves using AI to generate novel animal calls, with humpback whales as a test species. The novel calls made by splitting vocalisations into micro-phonemes (distinct units of sound lasting a hundredth of a second) and using a language model to speak something whale-like can then be played back to the animals to see how they respond. If the AI can identify what makes a random change versus a semantically meaningful one, it brings us closer to meaningful communication, explains Raskin. It is having the AI speak the language, even though we dont know what it means yet.

A further project aims to develop an algorithm that ascertains how many call types a species has at its command by applying self-supervised machine learning, which does not require any labelling of data by human experts to learn patterns. In an early test case, it will mine audio recordings made by a team led by Christian Rutz, a professor of biology at the University of St Andrews, to produce an inventory of the vocal repertoire of the Hawaiian crow a species that, Rutz discovered, has the ability to make and use tools for foraging and is believed to have a significantly more complex set of vocalisations than other crow species.

Rutz is particularly excited about the projects conservation value. The Hawaiian crow is critically endangered and only exists in captivity, where it is being bred for reintroduction to the wild. It is hoped that, by taking recordings made at different times, it will be possible to track whether the speciess call repertoire is being eroded in captivity specific alarm calls may have been lost, for example which could have consequences for its reintroduction; that loss might be addressed with intervention. It could produce a step change in our ability to help these birds come back from the brink, says Rutz, adding that detecting and classifying the calls manually would be labour intensive and error prone.

Meanwhile, another project seeks to understand automatically the functional meanings of vocalisations. It is being pursued with the laboratory of Ari Friedlaender, a professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The lab studies how wild marine mammals, which are difficult to observe directly, behave underwater and runs one of the worlds largest tagging programmes. Small electronic biologging devices attached to the animals capture their location, type of motion and even what they see (the devices can incorporate video cameras). The lab also has data from strategically placed sound recorders in the ocean.

ESP aims to first apply self-supervised machine learning to the tag data to automatically gauge what an animal is doing (for example whether it is feeding, resting, travelling or socialising) and then add the audio data to see whether functional meaning can be given to calls tied to that behaviour. (Playback experiments could then be used to validate any findings, along with calls that have been decoded previously.) This technique will be applied to humpback whale data initially the lab has tagged several animals in the same group so it is possible to see how signals are given and received. Friedlaender says he was hitting the ceiling in terms of what currently available tools could tease out of the data. Our hope is that the work ESP can do will provide new insights, he says.

But not everyone is as gung ho about the power of AI to achieve such grand aims. Robert Seyfarth is a professor emeritus of psychology at University of Pennsylvania who has studied social behaviour and vocal communication in primates in their natural habitat for more than 40 years. While he believes machine learning can be useful for some problems, such as identifying an animals vocal repertoire, there are other areas, including the discovery of the meaning and function of vocalisations, where he is sceptical it will add much.

The problem, he explains, is that while many animals can have sophisticated, complex societies, they have a much smaller repertoire of sounds than humans. The result is that the exact same sound can be used to mean different things in different contexts and it is only by studying the context who the individual calling is, how are they related to others, where they fall in the hierarchy, who they have interacted with that meaning can hope to be established. I just think these AI methods are insufficient, says Seyfarth. Youve got to go out there and watch the animals.

There is also doubt about the concept that the shape of animal communication will overlap in a meaningful way with human communication. Applying computer-based analyses to human language, with which we are so intimately familiar, is one thing, says Seyfarth. But it can be quite different doing it to other species. It is an exciting idea, but it is a big stretch, says Kevin Coffey, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington who co-created the DeepSqueak algorithm.

Raskin acknowledges that AI alone may not be enough to unlock communication with other species. But he refers to research that has shown many species communicate in ways more complex than humans have ever imagined. The stumbling blocks have been our ability to gather sufficient data and analyse it at scale, and our own limited perception. These are the tools that let us take off the human glasses and understand entire communication systems, he says.

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Can artificial intelligence really help us talk to the animals? - The Guardian

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Artificial Intelligence Has a ‘Last Mile’ Problem, and Machine Learning Operations Can Solve It – Built In

Posted: at 8:18 pm

With headlines emerging about artificial intelligence (AI) reaching sentience, its clear that the power of AI remains both revered and feared. For any AI offering to reach its full potential, though, its executive sponsors must first be certain that the AI is a solution to a real business problem.

And as more enterprises and startups alike develop their AI capabilities, were seeing a common roadblock emerge known as AIs last mile problem. Generally, when machine learning engineers and data scientists refer to the last mile, theyre referencing the steps required to take an AI solution and make it available for generalized, widespread use.

The last mile describes the short geographical segment of delivery of communication and media services or the delivery of products to customers located in dense areas. Last mile logistics tend to be complex and costly to providers of goods and services who deliver to these areas.(Source: Investopedia).

Democratizing AI involves both the logistics of deploying the code or model as well as using the appropriate approach to track the models performance. The latter becomes especially challenging, however, since many models function as black boxes in terms of the answers that they provide. Therefore, determining how to track a models performance is a critical part of surmounting the last-mile hurdle. With less than half of AI projects ever reaching a production win, its evident that optimizing the processes that comprise the last mile will unlock significant innovation.

The biggest difficulty developers face comes after they build an AI solution. Tracking its performance can be incredibly challenging as its both context-dependent and varies based on the type of AI model. For instance, while we must compare the results of predictive models to a benchmark, we can examine outputs from less deterministic models such as personalization models with respect to their statistical characteristics. This also requires a deep understanding of what a good result actually entails. For example, during my time working on Google News, we created a rigorous process to evaluate AI algorithms. This involved running experiments in production and determining how to measure their success. The latter required looking at a series of metrics (long vs. short clicks, source diversity, authoritativeness, etc.) to determine if in fact the algorithm was a win. Another metric that we tracked on Google News is new source diversity in personalized feeds. In local development and experiments, the results might appear good, but at scale and as models evolve, the results may skew.

The solution, therefore, is two-fold:

Machine learning operations (MLOps) is becoming a new category of products necessary to adopt AI. MLOps are needed to establish good patterns and the tools required to increase confidence in AI solutions. Once AI needs are established, decision-makers must weigh the fact that while developing in-house may look attractive, it can be a costly affair given the approach is still nascent.

Looking ahead, cloud providers will start offering AI platforms as a commodity. In addition, innovators will consolidate more robust tooling, and the same rigors that we see with traditional software development will standardize and operationalize within the AI industry. Nonetheless, tooling is only a piece of the puzzle. There is significant work required to improve how we take an AI solution from idea to test to reality and ultimately measure success. Well get there more quickly when AIs business value and use case is determined from the outset.

Read More on Built Ins Expert Contributors NetworkRage Against the Machine Learning: My War With Recommendation Engines

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Artificial Intelligence Has a 'Last Mile' Problem, and Machine Learning Operations Can Solve It - Built In

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‘Alternative physics’ discovered by artificial intelligence – TweakTown

Posted: at 8:18 pm

A study on the physics discovery titled "Automated discovery of fundamental variables hidden in experimental data" has been published in the journal Nature Computational Science.

Researchers from Columbia Engineering have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) program that could derive the fundamental variables of physics from video footage of physical phenomena. The program analyzed videos of systems like the swinging double pendulum, which researchers already know four "state variables" exist for; the angle and angular velocity of each arm. Within a few hours, the AI determined there were 4.7 variables at play.

"We thought this answer was close enough. Especially since all the AI had access to was raw video footage, without any knowledge of physics or geometry. But we wanted to know what the variables actually were, not just their number," said Hod Lipson, director of the Creative Machines Lab in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Two of the variables it identified correlated with the angles of each arm. However, the other two were unclear, as the program interprets and visualizes the variables differently from how humans intuitively understand them. Nevertheless, as the AI was making accurate predictions about the system, it is clear it managed to identify four valid variables. The researchers then tested the AI on systems we don't fully understand, like a lava lamp, and a fireplace, identifying 8 and 24 variables, respectively.

"I always wondered, if we ever met an intelligent alien race, would they have discovered the same physics laws as we have, or might they describe the universe in a different way? Perhaps some phenomena seem enigmatically complex because we are trying to understand them using the wrong set of variables. In the experiments, the number of variables was the same each time the AI restarted, but the specific variables were different each time. So yes, there are alternative ways to describe the universe and it is quite possible that our choices aren't perfect," said Lipson.

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'Alternative physics' discovered by artificial intelligence - TweakTown

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Elon Musk and Silicon Valley’s Overreliance on Artificial Intelligence – The Wire

Posted: at 8:18 pm

When the richest man in the world is being sued by one of the most popular social media companies, its news. But while most of the conversation about Elon Musks attempt to cancel his $44 billion contract to buy Twitter is focusing on the legal, social, and business components, we need to keep an eye on how the discussion relates to one of tech industrys most buzzy products: artificial intelligence.

The lawsuit shines a light on one of the most essential issues for the industry to tackle: What can and cant AI do, and what should and shouldnt AI do? The Twitter v Musk contretemps reveals a lot about the thinking about AI in tech and startup land and raises issues about how we understand the deployment of the technology in areas ranging from credit checks to policing.

At the core of Musks claim for why he should be allowed out of his contract with Twitter is an allegation that the platform has done a poor job of identifying and removing spam accounts. Twitter has consistently claimed in quarterly filings that less than 5% of its active accounts are spam; Musk thinks its much higher than that. From a legal standpoint, it probably doesnt really matter if Twitters spam estimate is off by a few percent, and Twitters been clear that its estimate is subjective and that others could come to different estimates with the same data. Thats presumably why Musks legal team lost in a hearing on July 19when they asked for more time to perform detailed discovery on Twitters spam-fighting efforts, suggesting that likely isnt the question on which the trial will turn.

Regardless of the legal merits, its important to scrutinise the statistical and technical thinking from Musk and his allies. Musks position is best summarised in his filing from July 15, which states: In a May 6 meeting with Twitter executives, Musk was flabbergasted to learn just how meager Twitters process was. Namely: Human reviewers randomly sampled 100 accounts per day (less than 0.00005% of daily users) and applied unidentified standards to somehow conclude every quarter for nearly three years that fewer than 5% of Twitter users were false or spam. The filing goes on to express the flabbergastedness of Musk by adding, Thats it. No automation, no AI, no machine learning.

Perhaps the most prominent endorsement of Musks argument here came from venture capitalist David Sacks,who quoted it while declaring, Twitter is toast. But theres an irony in Musks complaint here: If Twitter were using machine learning for the audit as he seems to think they should, and only labeling spam that was similar to old spam, it would actually produce a lower, less-accurate estimate than it has now.

There are three components to Musks assertion that deserve examination: his basic statistical claim about what a representative sample looks like, his claim that the spam-level auditing process should automated or use AI or machine learning, and an implicit claim about what AI can actually do.

On the statistical question, this is something any professional anywhere near the machine learning space should be able to answer (so can many high school students). Twitter uses a daily sampling of accounts to scrutinise a total of 9,000 accounts per quarter (averaging about 100 per calendar day) to arrive at its under-5% spam estimate. Though that sample of 9,000 users per quarter is, as Musk notes, a very small portion of the 229 million active users the company reported in early 2022, a statistics professor (or student) would tell you that thats very much not the point. Statistical significance isnt determined by what percentage of the population is sampled but simply by the actual size of the sample in question. As Facebook whistleblower Sophie Zhang put it, you can make the comparison to soup: It doesnt matter if you have a small or giant pot of soup, if its evenly mixed you just need a spoonful to taste-test.

The whole point of statistical sampling is that you can learn most of what you need to know about the variety of a larger population by studying a much-smaller but decently sized portion of it. Whether the person drawing the sample is a scientist studying bacteria, or a factory quality inspector checking canned vegetables, or a pollster asking about political preferences, the question isnt what percentage of the overall whole am I checking, but rather how much should I expect my sample to look like the overall population for the characteristics Im studying? If you had to crack open a large percentage of your cans of tomatoes to check for their quality, youd have a hard time making a profit, so you want to check the fewest possible to get within a reasonable range of confidence in your findings.

Also read: Why Understanding This 60S Sci-Fi Novel Is Key to Understanding Elon Musk

While this thinking does go against the grain of certain impulses (theres a reason why many people make this mistake), there is also a way to make this approach to sampling more intuitive. Think of the goal in setting sample size as getting a reasonable answer to the question, If I draw another sample of the same size, how different would I expect it to be? A classic approach to explaining this problem is to imagine youve bought a great mass of marbles, that are supposed to come in a specific ratio: 95% purple marbles and 5% yellow marbles. You want to do a quality inspection to ensure the delivery is good, so you load them into one of those bingo game hoppers, turn the crank, and start counting the marbles you draw, in each color. Lets say your first sample of 20 marbles has 19 purple and one yellow; should you be confident that you got the right mix from your vendor? You can probably intuitively understand that the next 20 random marbles you draw could end up being very different, with zero yellows or seven. But what if you draw 1,000 marbles, around the same as the typical political poll? What if you draw 9,000 marbles? The more marbles you draw, the more youd expect the next drawing to look similar, because its harder to hide random fluctuations in larger samples.

There are onlinecalculators that can let you run the numbers yourself. If you only draw 20 marbles and get one yellow, you can have 95% confidence that the yellows would be between 0.13% and 24.9% of the total not very exact. If you draw 1,000 marbles and get 50 yellows, you can have 95% confidence that yellows would be between 3.7% and 6.5% of the total; closer, but perhaps not something youd sign your name to in a quarterly filing. At 9,000 marbles with 450 yellow, you can have 95% confidence the yellows are between 4.56% and 5.47%; youre now accurate to within a range of less than half a percent, and at that point Twitters lawyers presumably told them theyd done enough for their public disclosure.

Printed Twitter logos are seen in this picture illustration taken April 28, 2022. Photo: Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

This reality that statistical sampling works to tell us about large populations based on much-smaller samples underpins every area where statistics is used, from checking the quality of the concrete used to make the building youre currently sitting in, to ensuring the reliable flow of internet traffic to the screen youre reading this on.

Its also what drives all current approaches to artificial intelligence today. Specialists in the field almost never use the term artificial intelligence to describe their work, preferring to use machine learning. But another common way to describe the entire field as it currently stands is applied statistics. Machine learning today isnt really computers thinking in anything like what we assume humans do (to the degree we even understand how humans think, which isnt a great degree); its mostly pattern-matching and -identification, based on statistical optimisation. If you feed a convolutional neural network thousands of images of dogs and cats and then ask the resulting model to determine if the next image is of a dog or a cat, itll probably do a good job, but you cant ask it to explain what makes a cat different from a dog on any broader level; its just recognising the patterns in pictures, using a layering of statistical formulas.

Stack up statistical formulas in specific ways, and you can build a machine learning algorithm that, fed enough pictures, will gradually build up a statistical representation of edges, shapes, and larger forms until it recognises a cat, based on the similarity to thousands of other images of cats it was fed. Theres also a way in which statistical sampling plays a role: You dont need pictures of all the dogs and cats, just enough to get a representative sample, and then your algorithm can infer what it needs to about all the other pictures of dogs and cats in the world. And the same goes for every other machine learning effort, whether its an attempt to predict someones salary using everything else you know about them, with a boosted random forests algorithm, or to break down a list of customers into distinct groups, in a clustering algorithm like a support vector machine.

You dont absolutely have to understand statistics as well as a student whos recently taken a class in order to understand machine learning, but it helps. Which is why the statistical illiteracy paraded by Musk and his acolytes here is at least somewhat surprising.

But more important, in order to have any basis for overseeing the creation of a machine-learning product, or to have a rationale for investing in a machine-learning company, its hard to see how one could be successful without a decent grounding in the rudiments of machine learning, and where and how it is best applied to solve a problem. And yet, team Musk here is suggesting they do lack that knowledge.

Once you understand that all machine learning today is essentially pattern-matching, it becomes clear why you wouldnt rely on it to conduct an audit such as the one Twitter performs to check for the proportion of spam accounts. Theyre hand-validating so that they ensure its high-quality data, explained security professional Leigh Honeywell, whos been a leader at firms like Slack and Heroku, in an interview. She added, any data you pull from your machine learning efforts will by necessity be not as validated as those efforts. If you only rely on patterns of spam youve already identified in the past and already engineered into your spam-detection tools, in order to find out how much spam there is on your platform, youll only recognise old spam patterns, and fail to uncover new ones.

Also read: India Versus Twitter Versus Elon Musk Versus Society

Where Twitter should be using automation and machine learning to identify and remove spam is outside of this audit function, which the company seems to do. It wouldnt otherwise be possible tosuspend half a million accountsevery day and lock millions of accounts each week, as CEO Parag Agrawal claims. In conversations Ive had with cybersecurity workers in the field, its quite clear that large amounts of automation is used at Twitter (though machine learning specifically is actually relatively rare in the field because the results often arent as good as other methods, marketing claims by allegedly AI-based security firms to the contrary).

At least in public claims related to this lawsuit, prominent Silicon Valley figures are suggesting they have a different understanding of what machine learning can do, and when it is and isnt useful. This disconnect between how many nontechnical leaders in that world talk about AI, and what it actually is, has significant implications for how we will ultimately come to understand and use the technology.

The general disconnect between the actual work of machine learning and how its touted by many company and industry leaders is something data scientists often chalk up to marketing. Its very common to hear data scientists in conversation among themselves declare that AI is just a marketing term. Its also quite common to have companies using no machine learning at all describe their work as AI to investors and customers, who rarely know the difference or even seem to care.

This is a basic reality in the world of tech. In my own experience talking with investors who make investments in AI technology, its often quite clear that they know almost nothing about these basic aspects of how machine learning works. Ive even spoken to CEOs of rather large companies that rely at their core on novel machine learning efforts to drive their product, who also clearly have no understanding of how the work actually gets done.

Not knowing or caring how machine learning works, what it can or cant do, and where its application can be problematic could lead society to significant peril. If we dont understand the way machine learning actually works most often by identifying a pattern in some dataset and applying that pattern to new data we can be led deep down a path in which machine learning wrongly claims, for example, to measure someones face for trustworthiness (when this is entirely based on surveys in which people reveal their own prejudices), or that crime can be predicted (when many hyperlocal crime numbers are highly correlated with more police officers being present in a given area, who then make more arrests there), based almost entirely on a set of biased data or wrong-headed claims.

If were going to properly manage the influence of machine learning on our society on our systems and organisations and our government we need to make sure these distinctions are clear. It starts with establishing a basic level of statistical literacy, and moves on to recognising that machine learning isnt magicand that it isnt, in any traditional sense of the word, intelligent that it works by pattern-matching to data, that the data has various biases, and that the overall project can produce many misleading and/or damaging outcomes.

Its an understanding one might have expected or at least hoped to find among some of those investing most of their life, effort, and money into machine-learning-related projects. If even people that deep arent making those efforts to sort fact from fiction, its a poor omen for the rest of us, and the regulators and other officials who might be charged with keeping them in check.

This article was originally published on Future Tense, a partnership between Slate magazine, Arizona State University, and New America.

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Drug Discovery Market worth $4.0 billion by 2027 – Exclusive Report by MarketsandMarkets – PR Newswire

Posted: at 8:18 pm

Browse in-depth TOC on "Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Drug Discovery Market"177 Tables 33 Figures 198 Pages

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North America is expected to dominate the Artificial Intelligence in Drug Discovery Marketin 2022.

North America accounted for the largest share of the global AI in drug discovery market in 2021 and also expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. North America, which comprises the US, Canada, and Mexico, forms the largest market for AI in drug discovery. These countries have been early adopters of AI technology in drug discovery and development. Presence of key established players, well-established pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, and high focus on R&D & substantial investment are some of the key factors responsible for the large share and high growth rate of this market

Prominent players in Artificial Intelligence in Drug Discovery Market:

Players adopted organic as well as inorganic growth strategies such as product upgrades, collaborations, agreements, partnerships, and acquisitions to increase their offerings, cater to the unmet needs of customers, increase their profitability, and expand their presence in the global AI in Drug Discovery Industry.

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Ai In Drug Discovery Market Dynamics

What benefits AI show in drug discovery and development process?

Drug discovery is a very costly and lengthy process, owing to which there is a need for alternative tools for discovering new drugs. Drug discovery and development are commonly conducted through in vivo and in vitro methods, which are very costly and time-consuming. Furthermore, it takes ~10 years on average for a new drug to enter the market at a cost of ~USD 2.6 billion (Source: Biopharmaceutical Research and Development.org). Several players operating in this market are developing platforms that can help in the rapid discovery of drugs. For instance, Insilico Medicine (US) developed an AI-based drug discovery system, GENTRL, with which it could develop six experimental novel molecules within 21 days.

How and why AI workforce shortage is important retraining factor holding back the growth of the market?

AI is a complex system, and companies require a workforce with specific skill sets to design, manage, and implement AI systems. Personnel dealing with AI systems should be familiar and aware of technologies such as machine intelligence, deep learning, cognitive computing, image recognition and other AI technologies. Additionally, integrating AI technologies into existing systems is a challenging task that necessitates substantial data processing in order to replicate human brain behavior. Even slight errors might cause system failure and have a negative impact on the desired outcome. The absence of professional standards and certifications in AI/ML technologies is restraining the growth of AI

What are the emerging markets for Artificial Intelligence in Drug Discovery?

Emerging economies such as India, China, and countries in the Middle East are expected to offer potential growth opportunities for players operating in the AI in drug discovery market. In most of these countries, the demand for pharmaceuticals is expected to increase significantly, owing to the rising incidence of chronic and infectious diseases, increasing income levels, and improving healthcare infrastructure. As a result, these markets are very attractive for companies whose profit margins are affected by stagnation in mature markets, the patent expiration of drugs, and increasing regulatory hurdles.

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Scope of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Drug Discovery Market Report:

Report Metric

Details

Market size available for years

2020-2027

Base year considered

2021

Forecast period

20222027

Forecast units

Value (USD Billion)

Segments covered

Offering, Technology, Application, End User,And Region

Geographies covered

North America (US, and Canada), Europe (Germany, France, UK, Italy, and the RoE), Asia Pacific (Japan, China, India, and RoAPAC), and RoW

Companies covered

NVIDIA Corporation (US), Microsoft (US), Google (US), Exscientia (UK), Schrdinger (US), Atomwise, Inc. (US), BenevolentAI (UK), NuMedii (US), BERG LLC (US), Cloud Pharmaceuticals (US), Insilico Medicine (US), Cyclica (Canada), Deep Genomics (Canada), IBM (US), BIOAGE (US), Valo Health (US), Envisagenics (US), twoXAR (US), Owkin, Inc. (US), XtalPi (US), Verge Genomics (US), Biovista (US), Evaxion Biotech (Denmark), Iktos (France), Standigm (South Korea), and BenchSci (Canada)

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Drug Discovery Services Marketby Process (Target Selection, Validation, Hit-to-lead), Type (Chemistry, Biology), Drug Type (Small molecules, biologics), Therapeutic Area (Oncology, Neurology) End User (Pharma, Biotech) - Global Forecast to 2026

Artificial Intelligence in Genomics Marketby Offering (Software, Services), Technology (Machine Learning, Computer Vision), Functionality (Genome Sequencing, Gene Editing), Application (Diagnostics), End User (Pharma, Research)-Global Forecasts to 2025

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Drug Discovery Market worth $4.0 billion by 2027 - Exclusive Report by MarketsandMarkets - PR Newswire

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U.S. Army Research Lab Expands Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Contract with Palantir for $99.9M – Business Wire

Posted: at 8:18 pm

DENVER--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Palantir Technologies Inc. (NYSE: PLTR) today announced that it will expand its work with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory to implement data and artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) capabilities for users across the combatant commands (COCOMs). The contract totals $99.9 million over two years.

Palantir first partnered with the Army Research Lab to provide those on the frontlines with state-of-the-art operational data and AI capabilities in 2018. Palantirs platform has supported the integration, management, and deployment of relevant data and AI model training to all of the Armed Services, COCOMs, and special operators. This extension grows Palantirs operational RDT&E work to more users globally.

Maintaining a leading edge through technology is foundational to our mission and partnership with the Army Research Laboratory, said Akash Jain, President of Palantir USG. Our nations armed forces require best-in-class software to fulfill their missions today while rapidly iterating on the capabilities they will need for tomorrows fight. We are honored to support this critical work by teaming up to deliver the most advanced operational AI capabilities available with dozens of commercial and public sector partners.

By working with the U.S. Army Research Lab, integrating with partner vendors, and iterating with users on the front lines, Palantirs software platforms will continue to quickly implement advanced AI capabilities against some of DODs most pressing problem sets. Were looking forward to fielding our newest ML, Edge, and Space technologies alongside our U.S. military partners, said Shannon Clark, Senior Vice President of Innovation, Federal. These technologies will enable operators in the field to leverage AI insights to make decisions across many fused domains. From outer space to the sea floor, and everything in between.

About Palantir Technologies Inc.

Foundational software of tomorrow. Delivered today. Additional information is available at https://www.palantir.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. These statements may relate to, but are not limited to, Palantirs expectations regarding the amount and the terms of the contract and the expected benefits of our software platforms. Forward-looking statements are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties, some of which cannot be predicted or quantified. Forward-looking statements are based on information available at the time those statements are made and were based on current expectations as well as the beliefs and assumptions of management as of that time with respect to future events. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, many of which involve factors or circumstances that are beyond our control. These risks and uncertainties include our ability to meet the unique needs of our customer; the failure of our platforms to satisfy our customer or perform as desired; the frequency or severity of any software and implementation errors; our platforms reliability; and our customers ability to modify or terminate the contract. Additional information regarding these and other risks and uncertainties is included in the filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time. Except as required by law, we do not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments, or otherwise.

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U.S. Army Research Lab Expands Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Contract with Palantir for $99.9M - Business Wire

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Longtime Fans Keep Saying The Same Thing About Modern South Park – Looper

Posted: at 8:17 pm

"Would you say South Park is still good?" asked u/SoulOfaLiar at the r/southpark subreddit. It seems to be an honest question, given that in the same post, the author confessed to having never watched the show and was more curious about what fans of the longtime series had to say. In response, most commenters wrote that, while it has ups and downs like any other television program, "South Park" is still a strong show that is consistently funny. "Things have changed over the years but its still incredible," wrote u/Calbreezy9.

There were some users such as u/nm499x who were slightly critical, writing that "South Park" is still good even if it "definitely [isn't] as popular and funny as it used to be."However, plentyof other comments were similarly succinct and supportive of the series' recent seasons.

This is quite different from what some critics now have to say about the show. The premiere of Season 25 earned a conflicted, somewhat lukewarm review from The Guardian's Charles Bramesco, who seems to think that the subversive edginess is wearing thin. "With Parker and Stone now entering their 50s, the greatest challenge facing them is their own success," wrote Bramesco.

Perhaps, then, fans of "South Park" see virtue in the show because, for all its faults, at least its writers are still trying. Other comments contrasted Stone and Parker's willingness to keep pushing the envelope with the apparent complacency of its animated contemporaries. "IMO I think the show is more focused on making quality content, unlike the Simpsons, family guy and American dad,"wrote u/Galil_Alexandro.

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Longtime Fans Keep Saying The Same Thing About Modern South Park - Looper

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