Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/262154898?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Sunday, November 11, 2012
What is TrafficWave Autoresponder | LB019 | Social Bookmarking .Net
TrafficWave is a web-based company that offers autoresponder technology for small and medium businesses, and internet marketers in over 100 different countries. In the internet age, an autoresponder is crucial to internet marketers success, without it, people would not be able to keep in contact with their subscribers or prospects. TrafficWave also offers an affiliate plan, when you become a paid member, not a free member. You have the choice to become an affiliate and can start earning commissions right away. you earn residual commissions on every new referral or traffic package that you sell. You can break even by just referring a New member a month.
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???? Source: http://www.social-bookmarking.net/news/what-is-trafficwave-autoresponder/
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War photography exhibit debuts in Houston museum
HOUSTON (AP) ? It was a moment Nina Berman did not expect to capture when she entered an Illinois wedding studio in 2006. She knew Tyler Ziegel had been horribly injured, his face mutilated beyond recognition by a suicide bombing in the Iraq War. She knew he was marrying his pretty high school sweetheart, perfect in a white, voluminous dress.
It was their expressions that were surprising.
"People don't think this war has any impact on Americans? Well here it is," Berman says of the image of a somber bride staring blankly, unsmiling at the camera, her war-ravaged groom alongside her, his head down.
"This was even more shocking because we're used to this kind of over-the-top joy that feels a little put on, and then you see this picture where they look like survivors of something really serious," Berman added.
The photograph that won a first place prize in the World Press Photos Award contest will stand out from other battlefield images in an exhibit "WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath" that debuts Sunday ? Veterans Day ? in the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. From there, the exhibit will travel to The Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and The Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, N.Y.
The exhibit was painstakingly built by co-curators Anne Wilkes Tucker and Will Michels after the museum purchased a print of the famous picture of the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, taken Feb. 23, 1945, by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal. The curators decided the museum didn't have enough conflict photos, Tucker said, and in 2004, the pair began traveling around the country and the world in search of pictures.
Over nearly eight years and after viewing more than 1 million pictures, Tucker and Michels created an exhibit that includes 480 objects, including photo albums, original magazines and old cameras, by 280 photographers from 26 countries.
Some are well-known ? such as the Rosenthal's picture and another AP photograph, of a naked girl running from a napalm attack during the Vietnam War taken in 1972 by Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut. Others, such as the Incinerated Iraqi, of a man's burned body seen through the shattered windshield of his car, will be new to most viewers.
"The point of all the photographs is that when a conflict occurs, it lingers," Tucker said.
The pictures hang on stark gray walls, and some are in small rooms with warning signs at the entrance designed to allow visitors to decide whether they want to view images that can be brutal in their honesty.
"It's something that we did to that man. Americans did it, we did it intentionally and it's a haunting picture," Michels said of the image of the burned Iraqi that hangs inside one of the rooms.
In some images, such as Don McCullin's picture of a U.S. Marine throwing a grenade at a North Vietnamese soldier in Hue, it is clear the photographer was in danger when immortalizing the moment. Looking at his image, McCullin recalled deciding to travel to Hue instead of Khe Sahn, as he had initially planned.
"It was the best decision I ever made," he said, smiling slightly as he looked at the picture, explaining that he took a risk by standing behind the Marine.
"This hand took a bullet, shattered it. It looked like a cauliflower," he said, pointing to the still-upraised hand that threw the grenade. "So the people he was trying to kill were trying to kill him."
McCullin, who worked at that time for The Sunday Times in London, has covered conflicts all over the world, from Lebanon and Israel to Biafra. Now 77, McCullin says he wonders, still, whether the hundreds of photos he's taken have been worthwhile. At times, he said, he lost faith in what he was doing because when one war ends, another begins.
Yet he believes journalists and photographers must never stop telling about the "waste of man in war."
"After seeing so much of it, I'm tired of thinking, 'Why aren't the people who rule our lives ... getting it?' " McCullin said, adding that he'd like to drag them all into the exhibit for an hour.
Berman didn't see the conflicts unfold. Instead, she waited for the wounded to come home, seeking to tell a story about war's aftermath.
Her project on the wounded developed in 2003. The Iraq War was at its height, and there was still no database, she said, to find names of wounded warriors returning home. So she scoured local newspapers on the Internet.
In 2004 she published a book called "Purple Hearts" that includes photographs taken over nine months of 20 different people. All were photographed at home, not in hospitals where, she said, "there's this expectation that this will all work out fine."
The curators, meanwhile, chose to tell the story objectively ? refusing through the images they chose or the exhibit they prepared to take a pro- or anti-war stance, a decision that has invited criticism and sparked debate.
And maybe, that is the point.
___
Plushnick-Masti can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RamitMastiAP
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/war-photography-exhibit-debuts-houston-museum-184053370.html
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Saturday, November 10, 2012
Seminar announcement: Dr. Ana Paula Correia on ...
This week we are hosting Dr. Ana Paula Correia at METU. I am particularly excited to host my advisor here at METU, to show her around, introduce her to our graduate students and faculty, as well? share some experiences on research and teaching. Her METU visit is hosted by the Social Sciences Institute with the university?s recent efforts on the new trends and approaches in graduate education. I believe Dr. Correia?s talk that will cover some aspects of Learning Design Solutions (an enterprise which we initiated together with other graduate students under her mentorship) and will generate some great conversation on this topic at METU. Hope to see you there.
Here is more information on the talk:
Intersections of Entrepreneurship with Graduate Education: The Rise of the Edupreneur?
Ana-Paula Correia, PhD
Associate Professor
Iowa State University, USA
Abstract:?This talk introduces the concept of edupreneur (=entrepreneur in education) and the emergence of entrepreneurship in education. It uses the case of Learning Design Solutions to demonstrate the link between entrepreneurship and graduate education. Learning Design Solutions is a self-sustained organization within Iowa State University that aims at providing services in educational technology. The nature and characteristics of Learning Design Solutions as a research and development organization are examined as well as critical success factors and lessons learned.
Time and Place:?16th November 2012, Friday 10.00 am.?Middle East Technical University,?MM Building, Room: 25
Bio:?Dr. Ana-Paula Correia (PhD in Instructional Systems Technology, Indiana University, 2005) is an Associate Professor in the School of Education and a faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction program at Iowa State University. Correia has been involved in the field of education for more than 20 years. Her current research program encompasses three interrelated foci: collaborative learning, online learning and teaching, and curriculum development in educational technology. These overlap significantly because they are connected to a common and underlying theme in her research: Instructional Design.
Correia?s work has been published in top-tier journals, such as, Teachers College Record, the British Journal of Educational Technology, and Distance Education. She served as Program Chair of American Educational Research Association Special Interest Group in Design and Technology for two years. And she is the current Past President of Association for Educational Communications and Technology Research and Theory Division. Correia created Learning Design Solutions in the School of Education at Iowa State University, which operates as an educational consulting center and represents an alternative for educational technology education. Before pursuing her PhD, she taught science in several middle and high schools in Portugal. For more info check: anapaulacorreia.com
Posted by admin on November 10, 2012http://evrimbaran.com/?p=684
Source: http://evrimbaran.com/?p=684
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A Primer On Risks From AI
November 9, 2012
The Power of Algorithms
Evolutionary processes are the most evident example of the power of simple algorithms.[1][2][3][4][5]
The field of evolutionary biology gathered a vast amount of evidence [6] that established evolution as the process that explains the local decrease in entropy[7], the complexity of life.
Since it can be conclusively shown that all life is an effect of an evolutionary process it is implicit that everything we do not understand about living beings is also an effect of evolution.
We might not understand the nature of intelligence[8] and consciousness[9] but we do know that they are the result of an optimization process that is neither intelligent nor conscious.
Therefore we know that it is possible for an physical optimization process to culminate in the creation of more advanced processes that feature superior qualities.
One of these qualities is the human ability to observe and improve the optimization process that created us. The most obvious example being science.[10]
Science can be thought of as civilization-level self-improvement method. It allows us to work together in a systematic and efficient way and accelerate the rate at which further improvements are made.
The Automation of Science
We know that optimization processes that can create improved versions of themselves are possible, even without an explicit understanding of their own workings, as exemplified by natural selection.
We know that optimization processes can lead to self-reinforcing improvements, as exemplified by the adaptation of the scientific method[11] as an improved evolutionary process and successor of natural selection.
Which raises questions about the continuation of this self-reinforcing feedback cycle and its possible implications.
One possibility is to automate science[12][13] and apply it to itself and its improvement.
But science is a tool and its bottleneck are its users. Humans, the biased[14] effect of the blind idiot god that is evolution.
Therefore the next logical step is to use science to figure out how to replace humans by a better version of themselves, artificial general intelligence.
Artificial general intelligence, that can recursively optimize itself [15], is the logical endpoint of various converging and self-reinforcing feedback cycles.
Risks from AI
Will we be able to build an artificial general intelligence? Yes, sooner or later.
Even the unintelligent, unconscious and aimless process of natural selection was capable of creating goal-oriented, intelligent and conscious agents that can think ahead, jump fitness gaps and improve upon the process that created them to engage in prediction and direct experimentation.
The question is, what are the possible implications of the invention of an artificial, fully autonomous, intelligent and goal-oriented optimization process?
One good bet is that such an agent will recursively improve its most versatile, and therefore instrumentally useful, resource. It will improve its general intelligence, respectively cross-domain optimization power.
Since it is unlikely that human intelligence is the optimum, the positive feedback effect, that is a result of using intelligence amplifications to amplify intelligence, is likely to lead to a level of intelligence that is generally more capable than the human intelligence level.
Humans are unlikely to be the most efficient thinkers because evolution is mindless and has no goals. Evolution did not actively try to create the smartest thing possible.
Evolution is further not limitlessly creative, each step of an evolutionary design must increase the fitness of its host. Which makes it probable that there are artificial mind designs that can do what no product of natural selection could accomplish, since an intelligent artificer does not rely on the incremental fitness of each step in the development process.
It is actually possible that human general intelligence is the bare minimum. Because the human level of intelligence might have been sufficient to both survive and reproduce and that therefore no further evolutionary pressure existed to select for even higher levels of general intelligence.
The implications of this possibility might be the creation of an intelligent agent that is more capable than humans in every sense. Maybe because it does directly employ superior approximations of our best formal methods, that tell us how to update based on evidence and how to choose between various actions. Or maybe it will simply think faster. It doesn?t matter.
What matters is that a superior intellect is probable and that it will be better than us at discovering knowledge and inventing new technology. Technology that will make it even more powerful and likely invincible.
And that is the problem. We might be unable to control such a superior being. Just like a group of chimpanzees is unable to stop a company from clearing its forest.[16]
But even if such a being is only slightly more capable than us. We might find ourselves at its mercy nonetheless.
Human history provides us with many examples[17][18][19] that make it abundantly clear that even the slightest advance can enable one group to dominate others.
What happens is that the dominant group imposes its values on the others. Which in turn raises the question of what values an artificial general intelligence might have and the implications of those values for us.
Due to our evolutionary origins, our struggle for survival and the necessity to cooperate with other agents, we are equipped with many values and a concern for the welfare of others.[20]
The information theoretic complexity[21][22] of our values is very high. Which means that it is highly unlikely for similar values to automatically arise in agents that are the product of intelligent design, agents that never underwent the million of years of competition with other agents that equipped humans with altruism and general compassion.
But that does not mean that an artificial intelligence won?t have any goals.[23][24] Just that those goals will be simple and their realization remorseless.[25]
An artificial general intelligence will do whatever is implied by its initial design. And we will be helpless to stop it from achieving its goals. Goals that won?t automatically respect our values.[26]
A likely implication is the total extinction of all of humanity.[27][28]
Further Reading
References
[1] Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Computation, talkorigins.org/faqs/genalg/genalg.html
[2] Fixing software bugs in 10 minutes or less using evolutionary computation, genetic-programming.org/hc2009/1-Forrest/Forrest-Presentation.pdf
[3] Automatically Finding Patches Using Genetic Programming, genetic-programming.org/hc2009/1-Forrest/Forrest-Paper-on-Patches.pdf
[4] A Genetic Programming Approach to Automated Software Repair, genetic-programming.org/hc2009/1-Forrest/Forrest-Paper-on-Repair.pdf
[5]GenProg: A Generic Method for Automatic Software Repair, virginia.edu/~weimer/p/weimer-tse2012-genprog.pdf
[6] 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution (The Scientific Case for Common Descent), talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
[7] Thermodynamics, Evolution and Creationism, talkorigins.org/faqs/thermo.html
[8] A Collection of Definitions of Intelligence, vetta.org/documents/A-Collection-of-Definitions-of-Intelligence.pdf
[9] plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/
[10] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science
[11] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
[12] The Automation of Science, sciencemag.org/content/324/5923/85.abstract
[13] Computer Program Self-Discovers Laws of Physics, wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/newtonai/
[14] List of cognitive biases, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
[15] Intelligence explosion, wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Intelligence_explosion
[16] 1% with Neil deGrasse Tyson, youtu.be/9nR9XEqrCvw
[17] Mongol military tactics and organization, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_military_tactics_and_organization
[18] Wars of Alexander the Great, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wars_of_Alexander_the_Great
[19] Spanish colonization of the Americas, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_colonization_of_the_Americas
[20] A Quantitative Test of Hamilton?s Rule for the Evolution of Altruism, plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1000615
[21] Algorithmic information theory, scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_information_theory
[22] Algorithmic probability, scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_probability
[23] The Nature of Self-Improving Arti?cial Intelligence, selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/nature_of_self_improving_ai.pdf
[24] The Basic AI Drives, selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_drives_final.pdf
[25] Paperclip maximizer, wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
[26] Friendly artificial intelligence, wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligence
[27] Existential Risk, existential-risk.org
[28] 5 minutes on AI risk youtu.be/3jSMe0owGMs
Source: http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/11/09/a-primer-on-risks-from-ai/
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Social Media Only Plays A Small Role In Customer Service, Say ...
Sixty percent of companies handle less than 10 percent of customer service issues via social media, with less than one in five (17.7 percent) handling a quarter or more of all support enquiries via these networks.
These findings come courtesy of SAP and Social Media Today?s The Social Customer Engagement Index 2012: Results, Analysis And Perspectives report.
The same study also revealed that Facebook (86.2 percent) and Twitter (78.8 percent) are the social networks of choice for customer help, with less than one in four (24.9 percent) utilising a branded online community.
(Source: eMarketer. Customer support image via Shutterstock.)
Source: http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/social-customer-service-poll_b31028
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Friday, November 9, 2012
How to Manage a Long Distance Relationship | The Student Pocket ...
Maintaining a normal relationship is hard work at the best of times, but what happens when you throw 100 miles of distance between you?
One of the hardest things for some of us when moving away for uni is leaving things behind. Leaving your home town and your family isn?t so bad because you know they?ll still be there anytime you want to go back. But when it comes to leaving behind your boyfriend or girlfriend, it?s a completely different story?
Summer can be the best time ever when you?re in love. You spend every day together, talking about the future, making plans to see each other every weekend and doing other cute ?coupley? things. On the other hand, it can be the countdown to your freedom and your own space.
But, if you have decided to make a go of things whilst you?re away studying, there are some important things you should keep in mind.
- Give each other space! You?re both going to be meeting new people and making new friends. You will both need time to socialise and attend fresher?s events, for example. The last thing either of you need is your other half ringing or texting you every five minutes asking to talk. Accept and remember that with uni comes a lot of changes and that will mean changes in your relationship too. You might not be able to pay as much attention to the other person as you did before, but as long as you both find some time for each other, things will be fine.
- Go in with an open mind. When we start uni, we?re usually around the age of 18 which is still very young. During the next three or four years we will be doing most of our growing up and a lot of people will change. So, when you go away, just remember you don?t know where life is going to take you; you don?t know who you will meet or what opportunities will arise ? just keep an open mind. If you go in with the expectation your relationship is solid and nothing will change or break it, you might be kidding yourself slightly and if anything does go wrong you will be feeling heartbroken and as if you have nothing to live for.
- Learn to trust. If you?re relationship makes it through uni, it is a great achievement. They do say in the book of relationships that university is one of the biggest tests. You and your partner will both be mixing with a lot of new people and going out a lot more than you are both used to. Make the decision whether you are going to trust each other and be open and reassuring, so that you make each other feel at ease. It is very common that one if not both of you will be feeling insecure and worried, which may result in you doing strange things. The most important thing for both of you is to be open; share things with each other and involve each other in your new lives.
- Make an effort. As I mentioned before, it will be hard to make time for each other whilst you are away. So, when you do get the chance to see or speak to each other, make the most of it. Don?t meet up if you?re going to argue because that won?t be a good thing for your relationship at this insecure stage. Imagine your girlfriend going back to her place of study after you?ve just told her you don?t trust her and she?s planned a messy night out that evening. Not always a good idea. Talk to each other about how you?re getting on, plans to meet up etc. Happy things.
- Don?t forget why you are there. The main reason we go to uni is obviously to study but also to have a good time and enjoy the experience. You will only get this time once in your life, so make the most of it. That?doesn?t?mean to get drunk every night and sleep around, but just to enjoy the time of being young and free. Don?t let arguments or insecurities get in the way of your studies. If you find you?re constantly depressed or angry then something?s not right. Like I said, you only get this chance once, so don?t mess it up. If your relationship is meant to be, then it?ll sort itself out eventually and that person will still be there.
The most important things in making a relationship work are communication, trust and respect. Managing a long distance relationship is similar to making a normal relationship work, except you need to be more trusting, make a little more time and put in a little more effort as with the distance, it?ll be harder. Both of you need remember what your goals are in both you?re studies and relationship.
I think I?ll end on an important lesson that I have learnt through my own experiences. Relationships are not the be all and end all, if something?doesn?t?work out, it?s not the end of the world. Sometimes things are just not meant to be and when they?re not, you have to know when to walk away. Don?t stay in a relationship if it?s only making one of you happy or neither of you. It?s true what they say, there are plenty more fish in the sea!
By Amrit Pnaiser
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