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Daniil Dubov, a Russian chess grandmaster who has spoken out against his country's invasion of Ukraine, has reiterated his position and suggested that Russia needs a revolution.

While Dubov has stressed that he isn't a politician, he is willing to speak critically about his government, even if he knows how dangerous that might be.

"To be a real opponent, you really have to do something," he said in an interview with Der Spiegel.

"I am not a professional politician. But I love this country and want it to do well. I criticize things because I have the right to do so. For example, I also criticized the government after Crimea in 2014.

"What I am saying now is really dangerous, but the only way to change anything in Russia is a revolution. Personally, I don't want that. I find it rational; you can call me a coward if you want. But I don't want the revolution to start, I don't want Russians to kill Russians. It feels like the only way, but the consequences would be worse.

"Even in terms of democracy, [Vladimir] Putin and his actions are clearly supported by the majority of Russians, like it or not."

The chess player, who shot to fame in 2018 when he won the World Rapid Chess Championship, also spoke about the decision across the world of sport to ban the Russian flag. While some Russian athletes and teams have been banned altogether, in chess Dubov can keep playing but only with the flag of the world federation FIDE.

"I find it strange, as everyone knows where I come from, where I live, which country I played for," he said on that.

"To ban the flag for every Russian is like equating the whole country with the current government.

"I feel great when I play for Russia, but I don't represent the Kremlin. I represent Dostoevsky and Chekhov - I represent the culture, the people."

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Chess champion Dubov: The only way to change anything in Russia is a revolution - Marca English

Events over the past two months have flipped the perception of the geopolitical world on its head, says CJ Werleman

When Russian President Vladimir Putin stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Chinese President Xi Jinping on 4 February to announce their relationship had entered a new era, the fate of global democracy and the Western rules-based international order had reached its low water mark. Authoritarianism was on a seemingly unstoppable march.

Russia and China are playing chess, while the West is playing checkers was the common snipe hurled towards Washington D.C. and Brussels a jibe echoed by former US President Donald Trump who routinely lauded Putin as a genius and praised Xi Jinping for his toughness.

With the United States and Europe divided and in disarray, President-for-life Putin plotted to restore the Russian Empire, while President-for-life Xi Jinping set his eyes on conquering the Western Pacific, starting with Taiwan.

Knowing that the US and NATO cannot fight and win a war on two fronts, the pair set in motion their plot to divide and rule the world, starting with the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February.

Four weeks later, military analysts are calling Putins war the greatest military disaster since the Second World War an accusation supported by a number of data points, including the death of 15,000 Russian soldiers and the loss of 500 tanks, 1,500 armoured personnel carriers, 100 aircraft, 120 helicopters, 35 operational and tactical UAVs, 250 artillery systems, 80 multiple launch rocket systems, 1,000 vehicles of various types, 45 anti-aircraft warfare systems, and 15 special equipment units, according to Ukraines Ministry of Defence.

Russia has lost more military personnel and equipment in a neighbouring country in four weeks than the US lost in Afghanistan and Iraq over the course of two decades. An assessment by the head of the UKs cyber spy agency has said that intelligence shows Russian soldiers are refusing to carry out orders and sabotaging their own equipment, and that Putin has massively misjudged the capabilities of his own military.

These losses on the battlefield are paired with the economic destruction that US and European sanctions have wrought on the Russian economy. The consequences will last a generation or longer, with Putin marginalised on the world stage and Russia branded a bona fide pariah state.

Europe is more united than ever before. NATO membership has never looked so appealing. Theres now even talk of an EU Army.

Six weeks ago, Beijing described its relationship with Moscow as an alliance without limits, but now it is pretending like it has never heard of Vladimir Putin, even forcing the Russian Foreign Ministers airplane to turn around midway on its flight to the Chinese capital on 17 March a signal of growing diplomatic distance between the two countries.

With Putin and Russia on the nose, China is suddenly trying to sell itself as an impartial mediator and facilitator for peace talks. Its state-controlled media outlets have even broken away from their initial pro-Russia talking points to air US Government accusations of Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Beijing now views both Putin and the Russian armed forces through the lens of a popular German expression: Close the lid, the monkey is dead.

According to Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong and a former EU commissioner for external affairs, the problem for Chinas leaders, which they must now realise, is that one must be careful about the company one keeps.

Russias invasion of Ukraine will not produce more grain to feed the Chinese after the poor harvest predicted for their country this year, he has said. Nor will it replace the markets that China now risks losing in Europe and elsewhere because of its perceived closeness to the Kremlin. Instead, Putins war risks irreparably damaging Chinas global image and its prospects of being a potential leader in international affairs.

Two months ago, Xi Jinping, on the back of the Beijing Olympic Games, was riding a wave of unbridled national enthusiasm towards his reappointment in 2022. But not only has his siding with Putin damaged Chinas global reputation, the Chinese economy finds itself in a tailspin, having set its lowest economic growth target in more than three decades. This is against a backdrop of the Coronavirus spreading like wildfire, forcing tens of millions of residents in Chinese cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen into lockdown and cutting off travel between cities and production lines, shutting down shopping malls and technology hubs, as reported by The New York Times.

Worse still, China relied on its own vaccines to fight the Coronavirus, but they appear to have been almost useless against the Omicron variant. Because Beijing adopted a zer COVID policy, using strict quarantine and lockdown measures, it has left the population with little immunity from prior infections. The pandemic is now an albatross around Xi Jinpings neck.

His concerns are no doubt heightened by an unprecedented crash in Chinas property market which accounts for 25% of the countrys gross domestic product and 40% of bank assets and an unprecedented flight of foreign capital from Chinese markets since Russia invaded Ukraine, according to a study by the Institute of International Finance. It found no similar outflows from other emerging markets, adding insult to injury.

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These changing economic and political realties have made China more vulnerable to international sanctions and isolation, leaving Beijing with little choice other than to put greater diplomatic distance between itself and Moscow, and less distance between itself and the Western hemisphere.

Taiwans National Security Bureau Director-General, Chen Ming-tong, said that the war in Ukraine is likely to improve China-US relations, in the same way the two rival powers established closer ties after the 9/11 attacks.

This was not the seismic shift in the international order many had predicted when Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping issued their joint statement on 4 February, but it is seismic nevertheless. Just not in the way Moscow and Beijing had hoped for.

As Russia scholar Stephen Kotkin has noted, Putins invasion disproves all the nonsense about how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline, how its a multi-polar world and the rise of China all of that turned out to be bunk.

The West is playing chess, while Putin and Xi Jinping are playing checkers. Its been a long time since global democracy felt so reinvigorated.

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The West is Playing Chess, While Russia and China are Playing Checkers Byline Times - Byline Times

Bridge, a card game played on partnerships, has long resisted attempts of computer mastery. But now, it seems that a new AI has managed to overcome human performance, and unlike other AIs, its decisions are not a black box.

In 1997, Deep Blue (a non-human chess player) managed to defeat Garry Kasparov, marking a pivotal moment in computer research: computers had overcome humans in the game of chess. Since then, computers have become way better, and have not only surpassed the sum of human chess knowledge but are even making their own contributions to the game. The game of Go, trillions of trillions of times more complex than chess, was also surprisingly mastered by AI.

But unlike chess and Go, bridge is a game of imperfect information, and AIs dont really like this type of game.

In its basic format, bridge is played by four players in two competing partnerships. The whole card deck is split equally between the four players, and partners sit at opposite sides of the tables, bidding for a winning contract, and then playing their entire hand turn after turn. Unlike many other card games, bridge doesnt have a major luck component: in competitions, players at different tables play the same set of cards, so even if youre dealt a bad hand, youre comparing yourself to players at other tables with the same bad hand.

For AIs, not knowing who has which cards is a big problem, but several groups are working on it including NukkAI. NukkAI has been working on cracking bridge for some time, and they launched a challenge that required human champions to play 800 deals, divided into 80 sets of 10. The bidding part was not used, all players (including the AI) started from a predetermined contract and just played out the hands.

Each champion and the AI played against a pair of robot opponents the best robot opponents in the world to date, but which are still not as good as human experts. It wasnt a perfect experiment, but its as good as you can get; and in this experiment the AI won. NooK, as the AI was called, won 67 of the 80 sets.

It should be said that this focused only on one part of the bridge trick game. When one partnership wins the bidding stage, one of the two partners becomes the dummy, and puts his cards visible for everyone to see and their partner then plays with both their own hand (which is still hidden) and the dummys hand (which is visible to all). This is easier because theres less hidden information, its likely that AIs would have a tougher job not being on the declaring side (the one that won at the bidding stage).

Jean-Baptiste Fantun, co-founder of NukkAI, said he was confident Nook would perform better than the best human players under these conditions. AI researcher Vronique Ventos, NukkAIs other co-founder, says Nook is a new type of AI.

Previously, AIs that mastered Go and chess were black box algorithms, where the algorithm is unable to explain to humans why its making some decisions. Top chess players routinely train with chess AIs, and while the machine suggests a move as the best, its incapable of saying why its the best move. But with bridge, it doesnt really work like that. The game itself relies on communication between partners, and so Nook had to be a white box that communicates its decisions, the co-founders explain.

Rather than playing countless rounds of a game and learning by trial and error, NukkAi tries to first learn the games rules and then carefully improve to practice, using both deep learning systems and a rules-based approach. Its a way thats closer to how humans learn, and through this approach, the AI decisions are legible to others. This could make this test far more important than just winning at bridge.

If we want AIs to help us make important decisions in things like healthcare or economics, we absolutely need to understand why the AI says something is the best option having everything under a black box will just not do. Were already seeing AIs move from games to real-world applications, and being able to understand the algorithms decision process can make a world of a difference for real-life applications.

You can watch the entire game here (commentary in French).

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AI has now reportedly mastered the game of bridge and unlike chess AIs, it can also explain itself - ZME Science

Baruch College Marxe School of Public and International Affairs professor Don Waisanen, Ph.D., was awarded a Social and Behavioral Research Award by Con Edison to fund his research on the reportage of gas leaks in New York City.

Waisanen is researching why people choose not to report gas leaks in New York City and things that can be done to encourage and drive more people to report when they think there is a gas leak.

Our research team will be drawing from the fields of social marketing and other behavioral sciences to assess the effectiveness of public health and safety messaging, paying particular attention to tone, language, and culturally competent communication, Waisanen was quoted as saying in a press release from the Baruch News Center. Our goal is to advise Con Edison and similar stakeholders about what drives gas safety and reporting natural gas odors to prevent harm and advance the public interest.

His work is compiled under the project name Using Social Marketing to Motivate Gas Leak Reporting in New York City. He started working on it after a gas explosion in East Harlem a few years ago that resulted in fatalities.

As a result of the explosion, Con Edison has been looking for research to explain what factors keep a person from reporting a potential gas leak when they think they smell natural gas. Before this explosion occurred, people in the area had been smelling gas, but no one reported the scent until after the explosion had already happened.

By addressing these factors and prompting more people to report gas leaks, deadly explosions like the one in East Harlem can be potentially avoided.

A lot of these projects boil down to the question: What type of communication can motivate people to take action on important societal issues? Waisanen said.

Waisanen will conduct on-the-street interviews and online surveys to discover the factors involved in motivating gas leak reporting.

Although this research uses gas leak reporting as a lens to forward ethical and effective public communication, it applies to much larger questions at stake for all of us, Waisanen said. The project stands to contribute to our understandings of risk and hazard-related communication on a host of issues. Foremost among them currently is how organizations and governments can communicate about viruses.

Waisanen teaches classes and workshops in public communication.

When I saw that this grant engaged this challenge, it seemed like a perfect fit, he said.

If you ever encounter a situation where you think you smell natural gas or are in proximity to a gas leak, notify 911 or a gas company.

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Marxe professor wins Con Edison Social and Behavioral Research Award - The Ticker

So what are your thoughts on the metaverse and its coming applications for marketing? What about cryptocurrency, and offering crypto payment options, or NFTs and the potential for branded digital content that could help boost brand awareness?

Theres clearly a level of opportunity in each of these elements, but in most cases, its probably too early to be investing too much in the next stage just yet. Right?

These are among the questions that Unsupervised recently put to over 800 marketers to get their thoughts on where things are at, and where things are headed with the latest tech trends.

Among their key findings:

It is still very early in development for many of these considerations, but things are moving fast, and there may well be extra opportunities for early movers in the space,

You can check out Unsuperviseds full survey report here, or take a look at the infographic summary below.

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New Survey Looks at How Marketers are Approaching the Metaverse, Crypto and NFTs [Infographic] - Social Media Today