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While COVID-19 circumstances have forced organizations to meet remotely on the Zoom application, it has enabled groups like the Rotary Club of New Canaan to invite speakers from far away.

The clubs Zoom Christmas party included a previous Rotary International Scholar, Yuri Nakashima, from her home in Japan. This past weeks luncheon speaker was New Canaan native John Gnuse, son of Rotarian Jeanne Gnuse, and her late husband, Tom. Gnuse spoke to the club from San Francisco, where he is managing director at Lazard, on the topic of The Machine Learning Revolution.

Happily, the Zoom format enabled his sister, Dr. Karen Gnuse Nead, in Rochester, N.Y., and uncle, William Pflaum, in Menlo Park, Calif., to attend as well.

Gnuses career has focused on mergers and acquisitions of major technology companies, e.g. Google, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple, etc., and as such, he is a great guide to the world of machine learning.

His talk highlighted the progress which advanced computing power, and capacity have made possible.

Machine learning refers to the ability for complex algorithms to improve accuracy, and performance based on continuous experience with additional training data.

With these capabilities, complex, iterative processes using with multiple parameters have yielded sophisticated neural networks that can learn.

This has yielded sophisticated tools, and solutions that were not previously possible, but which we rely on now for so much of daily life such as for web search, speech recognition, (Alexa, Siri), medical research and financial optimization models, etc., to name a few.

In answer to concerns about where advances in artificial intelligence will take us, John referred to the guardrails already in place, and those which continue to be applied as key elements of the machine learning revolution. The field raises significant legal, ethical and morality challenges, which will continue to be evaluated as do concerns regarding bias, and fairness as the results of these networks impact people everywhere.

For more on the club, contact Alex Grantcharov, president, at alex.grantcharov@edwardjones.com, follow the club at http://www.facebook.com/NewCanaanRotary, newcanaanrotary on Instagram or at the clubs website, newcanaanrotary.org

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New Canaan native speaks on Machine Learning Revolution - New Canaan Advertiser

After passing in the Arkansas Senate, a Stand Your Ground law has been voted down by the House Judiciary Committee.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. A Stand Your Ground bill in Arkansas was voted down by the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday (Feb. 2).

This comes after the Arkansas Senate passed the bill two weeks ago with a majority of votes. It's a bill that has been met with a lot of opposition.

The bill loosens restrictions on the use of deadly force in self-defense.

After a committee meeting, the bill failed on a voice vote where opponents spoke against the proposal., our sister-station THV11 reports.

A similar Stand Your Ground bill failed in Arkansas two years ago.

Before the bill was voted down, Attorney General Leslie Rutledge said a Stand Your Ground bill is important to protect Arkansans Second Amendment right to protect themselves and protect their families.

What this bill does is essentially clean up the language so Arkansans understand that if someone is attacking them using deadly force, then they can defend themselves, she said.

Republican Senator Jim Hendren is one of the senators who voted against the bill.

While I believe in the second amendment and I have my concealed carry, and I believe the right to bear arms, Im concerned about a law that everyone in law enforcement tells us is not necessary and the data shows may lead to more homicides, he said

25 states across the U.S. currently have Stand Your Ground laws in place.

This is a developing story.

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Stand Your Ground Law in Arkansas voted down by House committee - 5newsonline.com

You probably hear countries like the United States or France referred to as democracies. At the same time, you probably also hear both of these countries called republics. Is that possible? Are democracies and republics the same thing or different?

We dont blame you for confusing these two terms. With a major and heated US election underway, its the perfect time for some Government 101. Lets brush up on these two words to see what they have in commonand what sets them apart.

A democracy is defined as government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system. A nation with this form of government is also referred to as a democracy.

A democracy is achieved by conducting free elections in which eligible people 1) vote on issues directly, known as a direct democracy, or 2) elect representatives to handle the issues for them, called a representative democracy.

The word democracy dates back in English to around 15251535. It comes from the Greek dmokrata, meaning popular government. Ancient Greece was home to what most consider to be the oldest form of democracy, the city-state of Athens. In Athens, the people (Greek, dmos) held the power (Greek, krtos) and made the decisions for their societyforming a dmokrata.

But its essential to note the people who are able to vote in Athens only included certain non-enslaved Athenian men, making this direct democracy very different from the way we understand democracy today.

For example, if a town only had enough funding to repair either their sewer system or roads, it might ask the citizens to vote on which one should get the money. Its members would vote on their preference, and the towns government would follow the will of the people and go with their choice. This is a basic example of direct democracy.

Many referendums are voted on this way, such as the Scottish independence (from the United Kingdom) referendum in 2014 and the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum (popularly referred to as Brexit) in 2016.

In contrast to a direct democracy, the people in a representative democracy elect representatives who act then on behalf of them, known as their constituents. Many of the worlds parliaments and the USs Congress are an example of representative democracies.

Today, it is inefficient, if not impossible, to have every eligible citizen vote on every issueto vote on every piece of legislation that it takes to run a city, a state, a country. Instead, citizens vote for leaders to do the work of governing for them.

Lets revisit our municipal sewer/road matter. A representative democracy would not have each and every citizen of a town directly vote on whether to fund a sewer system or road repairs. Instead, the citizens would elect a mayor and city council to handle these issues in their place. The elected officials would then vote on where city funding should go, doing their best to reflect and respect the needs of the people who voted for them.

A republic is defined as a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them. Sound familiar? It should.

You see, many of todays democracies are also republics, and are even referred to as democratic republics. So, the US and France are considered both democracies and republicsboth terms point to the fact that the power of governance rests in the power, and the exercise of that power is done through some sort of electoral representation.

The key concept to the word republic is that the leader of this government (or state) is not a hereditary monarch but a president, whether they are elected or installed.

This core idea helps explain in part why autocratic governments like North Korea is officially called the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. Its citizens vote (or vote) on a single candidate. A historical example of a republic is also instructive. The Republic of Venice, a mercantile city-state of the Middle Ages, was led by a doge who was elected by wealthy merchants and served until his death. Neither of these governments would be considered a democracy.

The word republic is first recorded in English 15951605. It comes from the Latin rs pblica, meaning public thing, characterizing that a state is ultimately run by its peopleas opposed to monarchy or tyranny. For nearly 500 years, ancient Rome was a republic before it became ruled by emperors.

For all practical purposes, its both. In everyday speech and writing, you can safely refer to the US as a democracy or a republic. If you want or need to be more precise in referring to the system of the US, you can accurately call it a representative democracy. And should you need to be exacting? The US can be called a federal presidential constitutional republic or a constitutional federal representative democracy.

What you should take away in the confusion (or debate) over democracy vs. republic is that, in both forms of government, power ultimately lies with the people who are able to vote. If you are eligible to votevote. Its what, well, makes true democracies and republics.

Exercise that right to vote, whether by mail or in person. Want more information on what mail-in voting means? Read our article on absentee vs. mail-in ballots!

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Democracy vs. Republic: Is There A Difference ...

Every citizen is aware that digital technologies have transformed our individual and collective lives. But democratic theorists have been slow to take stock of this transformationand to trace how democratic theory and institutions should respond. The new bookDigital Technology and Democratic Theory, edited by Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Associate Director Rob Reich, Stanford Digital Civil Society Lab Director Lucy Bernholz, and Yale professor Hlne Landemore, brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars across political philosophy, social science, and engineering to weigh in on the implications of digital technologies for democratic societies as well as ways in which democracies might be enhanced by these advances.

Here, Reich, who is also a professor of political science at Stanford School of Humanities andSciences, director of the Center for Ethics in Society, and co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, discusses the books purpose, reach, and takeaways.

What are the high-level takeaways from the book?

We had at least a decade of techno-utopianism in which digital technologies were thought to be inherently liberating, that they would spread democracy across the world, and that they would enrich individual lives in some unparalleled fashion. And then we switched to a decade of techno-dystopianism in which digital technologies hijacked our attention, violated our privacy, corroded our very souls, and undermined democratic societies.

This volume takes a mature approach to thinking about the intersection of digital technology and democratic theory, so that we can better understand how to harness digital technologys great benefits and mitigate or contain the potential risks.

We call upon readers, just as has historically happened with earlier eras of technological revolution, to avoid the polar extremes of thinking about the development and deployment of technology as uniformly good or bad. This is a book for people who want to take a longer view pondering the implications of technology for democratic institutions over the next 10 to 50 years rather than reacting to the newest unicorn or the scandal du jour. Its also a book for scholars across the world who can find in this volume a rich and fertile set of research agendas to pursue as well as an appreciation for the ways in which cross-disciplinary consensus can help guide where our attention should be paid.

You and your co-authors say that democratic theorists havent really figured out if social media companies are publishers, news organizations, or a new form of private government or even private superpower. Why is it so difficult to get a clear understanding of the power wielded by the tech industry?

Social media platforms are certainly powerful. In the book, we quote from a Stanford-affiliated scholar from Oxford, Timothy Garton Ash, who says, The policies of Facebook and Google are more consequential for permissible speech than is anything decided by Canada, France, or Germany. Indeed, he says, big tech firms are the new private superpowers.

These are the great public squares of our 21st-century digital age. And as a result, the private power of the CEOs of these companies to determine permissible or impermissible content or to design the algorithms that uprank and downrank content means they shape the information ecosystems of citizens across the world. Thats an extraordinary form of power that currently has almost no form of accountability attached to it.

The decision by all the major social media companies to ban Donald Trump from posting, and then deleting his account, in the wake of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol is just the latest proof of this extraordinary power in the hands of a few people at a few large companies.

We cant decide what to do about social media companies, or how to rein in their power, until we have a clear understanding about their actual function and purpose.

Some say that Google, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, or Twitter are like the telephone company a conduit that connects people and makes communication possible. When two people plot a crime on the phone, no one blames the phone company. Is that what a social media platform is?

Clearly not. The core function of these platforms curating and upranking and downranking information for us makes them different from the telephone company.

Some would say that the social media platforms are distributors of content that people consume. That they should abide by the kinds of professional norms or standards that newspapers, television shows, or radio programs rely on when they make judgments about what should be published. But unlike newspapers and other mass media, social media platforms dont create content users do.

So, we are left with the question, what are these platforms? The answer is that their core function is algorithmic sorting or curation. And this allows for great amplification of content and the possibility of privileging virality over veracity. And, of course, their function is also to sell advertising based upon a massive collection of data about our online behavior.

As a result of not having a clear-eyed view of what platforms are or how they wield the power they do, we dont yet have a clear understanding of how to govern them. And thats part of the great debate we see playing out today about such things as privacy policies, misinformation and disinformation, CDA 230 [section 230 of the Communications Decency Act], political advertising, and so on.

The books introduction describes one view of tech company leadership as a band of ahistorical, techno-libertarian merry pranksters and sociopaths. If these are the people with so much power, how can one avoid feeling dystopian, especially during a global pandemic?

That sentence was meant to capture the spirit of the techno-dystopian rhetoric that is so common today. My view is that we should stop focusing on the personalities of tech founders. And we should start focusing on the influence of concentrated tech power over the rest of our lives.

We have a big lesson to learn from the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic and work-from-home conditions should remind us of how essential digital technologies are and how dependent upon them we have become. The work productivity thats been possible because of videoconferencing compared to what would have been possible 10 years ago is owed to digital technology. The same is true for connecting with family and friends across the country who we cant see. Not to mention all of the AI tools that have been essential for identifying therapies and vaccine candidates for the coronavirus.

So thats partly why I would like to say were coming out of a dystopian sensibility. Perhaps the coronavirus can remind us that rather than being uniformly bad, these technologies have become something like the essential infrastructure that has allowed certain elements of our lives to continue during the pandemic. And now is the time to have this mature and sober perspective and to get serious rather than to indulge in utopianism or dystopianism.

Are there ways in which digital technologies might be used to enhance democratic institutions?

Rather than addressing the need to have democratic societies govern digital technologies before they govern us, some of the chapters in this book look at the ways digital technologies can be incorporated into democratic institutions for the purpose of enhancing the performance of democracy itself.

Indeed, digital technology can be put in the service of democracy and expand how we think about the operation of democratic societies. For example, one of the co-authors, Hlne Landemore, a political philosopher at Yale, contributed a chapter about ways in which digital technologies might help us move beyond representative democracy itself. In essence, she explores alternatives to holding elections in which our elected representatives go off and do the business of the people and then citizens do nothing except show up again in a few years to cast another vote. Are there ways in which we might crowdsource, Wikipedia style, the writing of a constitution with people across the world contributing to the writing and editing of our very laws? Or ways in which citizen assemblies can happen online as a complement to or possibly replacement of elected representatives? She shows that this is not merely possible, but that it has already been done, and to some good effect.

Again, this is a way of looking further into the future as a way to enlist digital technology not as a threat to democracy but as a handmaiden to it.

The book calls for the training of public interest technologists. What do you mean by that and what role would these people play in our democracy?

Were all familiar with the idea of public interest lawyers people who get a law degree and then work on behalf of the public interest, whether its through a public advocacy or other civil society organization. At the moment, engineering schools and computer science departments tend to pay lip service to the idea that you should acquire technical skills and then deploy them on behalf of public agencies. Most people who receive computer science training go to work at tech companies. And our universities, including Stanford, facilitate that through their recruitment programs that give unequal access to tech companies. Its much harder to get a lower-paying job in a public agency as a Stanford computer science major than it is to get a higher-paying job at a startup or big tech firm.

So the option of being a public interest technologist would open up the computer science and engineering career pipeline to multiple destinations. Its clear that technical skills are extraordinarily important within public advocacy organizations and public agencies. Imagine what the world would be like if Amnesty International, Partners in Health, the United Nations, or various governmental agencies could hire people with the technology talent that Google and Facebook get. Wouldnt it be nice to have a world in which that was seen as just as important as or more important than deploying your talent for big tech or the promise of a payday in a startup company?

Technologists often complain that democracy is too slow and the people who impose policies are never sufficiently informed; they always use a hammer instead of a well-crafted tool; Washington, D.C., is always 10 to 20 years behind on the frontier of technology. Thats why we need a new generation of people who have learned technology alongside social science, ethics, and democratic theory.

The book suggests that multidisciplinary collaborations will be a fruitful research pathway. Why is such work so important?

Above all else, this is a book that we hope exhibits the enormous importance and promise of putting philosophers, social scientists, and technologists in conversation with one another.

Stanford HAI is premised on the idea that the development of AI will be human-centered when AI scientists work alongside social scientists and humanists rather than inviting the social scientists and humanists to study the effects of AI on the world after the technologists have invented and released it. The same is true for digital technology and democratic theory.

I would like to see a world in which democratic theorists dont offer lectures to technologists about what they should do better in order to support democracy, but instead work alongside them to understand their perspectives. And reciprocally, technologists shouldnt invite democratic theorists to admire their extraordinary innovations and disruptions and then say its their job to do something about it and to keep up with the pace of innovation.

Digital technology will develop in a better way when done in tandem with democratic theorists, and democratic practice will be better when pursued in tandem with technologists.

Stanford HAI's mission is to advance AI research, education, policy and practice to improve the human condition.Learn more.

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Democracy and the Digital Transformation of Our Lives - Stanford Report - Stanford University News

The contentious 2020 election and the current state of U.S. democracy were topics discussed last week during an Ohio State University-hosted event titled Race and Democracy in America.

Tina Pierce of the John Glenn College of Public Affairs moderated a conversation between faculty experts Rachel Kleit, associate dean of faculty affairs in the College of Engineering; Wendy Smooth, associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the College of Arts and Sciences; and Winston C. Thompson, associate professor of philosophy of education in the College of Education and Human Ecology.

The discussion was part of the universitysEducation for Citizenship dialogue series.

It has been the great struggle of our national history to recognize the rights of a democratic society apply to all Americans, said President Kristina M. Johnson as she opened the conversation. Yes, we have made progress. However, after more than half of a century since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we still witness corrosive racial injustice.

Pierce began the discussion with a question about whether or not America is closer to becoming a post-racial nation. The idea seemed possible following the election of Barack Obama as the first black president, she said, but appeared less likely after President Donald Trump.

The people I think who are saying we are post-racial were not necessarily people from communities of color, Kleit said. Its not as easy as simply treating everyone the same, but really understanding that there are deep structures in society that still function, even if we want to give everybody similar opportunities.

Thompson agreed. He said fulfilling the promise of America as a society where people are not marked by race, gender or class takes effort.

What I find really interesting about the ideal, the move towards a post-racial society, is that I dont often hear people talking about the difficult work required to move towards the more utopian ideal, Thompson said. When you have a promise, a promise is a commitment. Its not a magical invocation. It requires hard work.

Smooth said the concept of moving to a post-racial nation isnt an objective to be supported if it comes at the cost of erasing the history and experiences of minority groups in the country.

The discussion also turned toward solutions to build a fairer society and a more robust democracy. Increased civic education, a commitment to truth and empirical data, and acknowledging the nations troubled racial history are important.

We as citizens need to recognize that the problems that we have in this country arent problems for one community or for another community, problems that are separate from us, distant from us, Thompson said. We have a shared responsibility for addressing these problems and, perhaps with that approach, to think of ourselves as citizens, to address problems that are affecting members of this larger community, we might move towards some greater cooperation in the service of democracy.

Smooth said faculty at Ohio State can play a role by teaching students to respect facts and critical thinking and take their education back to their communities.

We have got to figure out how to help [students] translate that learning, that classroom practice, into everyday conversation. Because when they go out across the 88 counties of Ohio, and they go around the world as Buckeye alums do, they have to be ready to have the conversation in an applied space, Smooth said. But in the open space of the everyday world, we have to make sure that they can do that kind of translation, so they can go to the Thanksgiving table and hold their own in a conversation and not a fight.

The Education for Citizenship Initiative aims to inspire the university community to engage deeply, with integrity and respect, when expressing ideas and beliefs, be it in word or action. The initiative reflects the university motto, education for citizenship, and the mission to develop informed citizens who are able to integrate what theyve learned in the classroom into their community.

Details are available on theEducation for Citizenship Initiative websitealong with resources for respectful and productive dialogue.

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Ohio State hosts discussion on intersection of race and democracy - The Ohio State University News