Friday, September 10th, 2010
, - Georgia Institute of Technology, Research Communications
Stephan: And you thought the Terminator films were fiction...
A robot deceives an enemy soldier by creating a false trail and hiding so that it will not be caught. While this sounds like a scene from one of the Terminator movies, it’s actually the scenario of an experiment conducted by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology as part of what is believed to be the first detailed examination of robot deception.
‘We have developed algorithms that allow a robot to determine whether it should deceive a human or other intelligent machine and we have designed techniques that help the robot select the best deceptive strategy to reduce its chance of being discovered,
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Friday, September 10th, 2010
BILL HENDRICK, - WebMD Health News
Stephan:
Americans aren’t eating nearly enough fruits and vegetables, the CDC says.
The percentage of Americans eating fruit two or more times every day and vegetables at least three times daily declined slightly compared to a decade ago, before health authorities began to sound the alarm about the nation’s obesity epidemic.
The CDC, in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report for Sept. 10, said only 32.5% of adults in the U.S. ate fruit two or more times daily in 2009, and just over a quarter of Americans, 26.3%, ate vegetables three or more times per day.
The Healthy People 2010 objectives set by the CDC include goals that 75% of people age 2 and over eat two or more servings of fruit daily and 50% eat three or more servings of vegetables daily.
‘The findings underscore the need for interventions at national, state, and community levels, across multiple settings to improve fruit and vegetable access, availability, and affordability as a means of increasing consumption,
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Friday, September 10th, 2010
JOHN SCHWARTZ, - The New York Times
Stephan: When I was an Army corpsman during the Viet Nam era two the corpsman in my company were gay. Everyone knew it and, at least in my case, they knew I knew, and we talked about it. When I was Special Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, I got to know a SEAL officer, who worked with me on a project, who was gay. I was briefed during one period by an Air Force major, who was gay. Gay men, and now women, have been a part of the armed services of the U.S. from the beginning.
The ‘don’t ask, don’t tell
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Friday, September 10th, 2010
Stephan: Further evidence of the destruction of the lower two-thirds of the middle class. As of 2007, the top upperclass 1% of households owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). This is a formula for social unrest, as the Teabag movement demonstrates.
Experts have been sparring for decades over the impact of tax rates on the economy, an unresolved debate that raged a little louder after President Obama argued in a speech Wednesday in Ohio that the tax cuts approved under President George W. Bush should be allowed to expire for the top 2% of income earners while being extended for the middle class. Republicans firmly oppose that idea, proposing instead to make all of the Bush cuts permanent. We’re wondering if they’ve checked in with the CIA on that.
According to the CIA’s World Factbook, an online repository of information on the world’s nations, the United States ranks 42nd on an index of income inequality. This is one of those lists you don’t want to be at or near the top of: A high score means a wide gap between the haves and have-nots. The United States has a more even distribution of wealth than such countries as South Africa, Hong Kong and Brazil, but it’s more unequal than Russia, Venezuela and Kenya, among 92 other countries that rank lower than we do. Obviously, the middle class has a far higher average income in the U.S. and a greater quality […]
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Thursday, September 9th, 2010
TIM CRANE, - The New York Times
Stephan: This is a really thoughtful essay by a very perceptive scholar. My only observation is that if Professor Crane had been more knowledgeable about nonlocality and consciousness research he would have seen that the empirical knowledge of spiritual traditions, and this area of science are converging on a common view, expressed in different languages
Tim Crane is Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of two books, 'The Mechanical Mind
There is a story about Bertrand Russell giving a public lecture somewhere or other, defending his atheism. A furious woman stood up at the end of the lecture and asked: ‘And Lord Russell, what will you say when you stand in front of the throne of God on judgment day?
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