I am back from my travels and was greeted with the news that Donald Trump seems to have backed off his earlier support for the anti-vaccination movement. At various points, he had expressed support for widely debunked claims that vaccines could cause autism and had even proposed setting up a commission to ‘study’ the issue, which many people feared would provide a highly visible platform for the skeptics to spread their ideas.
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For a term paper in an online course, a student was asked to pick a country and compare some trend between that country and the US. The student chose to compare social media use, with Australia as the other country. But she got the paper back with an F grade, the adjunct professor writing on it that she was failing the student and that Australia is a continent not a country. The student appealed the grade to the professor and the university administration and sent in some evidence that Australia was unique in being both a continent and a country. Her grade was then revised to a B+ and the professor was fired.
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There seems to be something different in the reaction to the horrific school shooting in Florida. Students are taking the lead in demanding that something be done to combat the deadly rampages that routinely occur in the US due to the easy availability of high-powered weaponry. They are calling for a massive demonstration on March 24 in Washington, DC and around the country titled March For Our Lives to demand that action be taken.
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There was a story that appeared in the news some time ago about a mysterious sound that was supposedly affecting US embassy personnel in Havana and creating such debilitating effects that it resulted in some of them deciding to come back to the US. There were allegations that Cuba was waging some kind of high-tech warfare against the US but the case for that was pretty thin, even allowing for the fact that there would be no motive for them to do so, since they are interested in improving ties with the US.
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I mentioned the fascinating Science Café talk on Deep Learning. At the very end, there was a thought provoking question raised by an artist in the audience who asked whether such machines could create works of art. The speaker pondered the question and answered that in his opinion, the answer is no. His reasoning was that in a work of art, the artist is trying to convey something based on their life experiences and emotions and a computer, however sophisticated and capable of learning, would not be able to draw upon such resources.
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And so we go through this once again, where somebody guns down a large number of people and Republican politicians scramble to find any reason to blame other than the one that stares them in the face and that is the easy access to high-powered weapons. What is clear is that the present system of background checks is utterly inadequate to prevent such carnages because it takes only one person with just one weapon to cause so many deaths.
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The last meeting of Science Café Cleveland had as its presenter Wyatt Newman, a professor at Case Western Reserve University, who gave a fascinating presentation on the state of Deep Learning, the term given by the Artificial Intelligence community to the next stage of AI development, where machines learn to identify things and make decisions for novel situations that they have not been previously programed to deal with. It is this feature, for example, that enables self-driving vehicles to identify the various things it encounters on roads and take appropriate actions.
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I enjoyed this supercut of brief clips from all the past Oscar winners in the Special Effects category starting from 1927, plus all the nominees for this year’s award. While I have a deep admiration for the people who produce these amazing effects, I must admit to a soft spot for the ones from the early days before they were all done using computer graphics. How they could have got the effects using just physical models and camera trickery really impresses me.
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There are some things that in the grand scheme of life don’t matter at all but still annoy me.
One is the increasing use of overwrought headlines for news stories that promise way more than they deliver. As one might expect, I read a lot of progressive websites and am sick of overwrought and exaggerated headlines that say that this or that conservative on some program was ‘totally destroyed’ or ‘eviscerated’ or ‘went down in flames’ or ‘had a meltdown’ or something similarly dramatic. The articles never match the hype and all that usually happened is that the allegedly destroyed person simply got into a shouting match with other guests or the hosts, hardly a novelty on talk shows these days. I understand the need to generate clicks and traffic in order to generate revenue but in my case the result has been the opposite of what is intended. I actually avoid clicking on stories that have such headlines.
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