Mediaboss Marketing

All our campaigns are time based, depending on the country. For example, in the west, the Thanksgiving to Christmas period tends to be the giving period. So we'll put some campaigns then. So it depends on the country and is always time bound.

The easy answer to your question is no, this is not a fundraising campaign related to any shortfall or crisis, but I would say that since our mission is to provide free knowledge and information to every person on this planet, we will always need money to do that.

I think it's easy to look at a number like $120 million, that is our annual budget and say, "Wow, that's a big number. Why do they need money?"

Let me give you a couple of examples. Depending on the month, we are probably the fifth or sixth or seventh largest site in the world in terms of the number of visits. If you look at the top five or top six in front of us, it'll be Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Baidu.

Baidu said in their annual report that they have spent $4 billion just on research and development. Facebook said that they will spend between $29 and $34 billion just on Capital expenditure in 2022.

So here are organisations that are roughly in the same ballpark as we are, having to spend significant amounts to keep up with the infrastructure. And here is Wikimedia, completely nonprofit, doesn't take any money, no advertising.

We do some of the same big infrastructure work, to support 1.5 billion devices with data centers around the world, making sure that whenever you want information, it's available. I think those things cost a fair amount of money.

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Raju Narisetti on Wikipedia & the Mission To Take Free Knowledge to Every Person - The Quint

In 2021, Nikhil Kamath, founder of Zerodha, defeated five-time world champion Vishwanathan Anand in chess with the help of computers (he confessed later on) at a celebrity fundraiser. The controversy sparked discussions around the use of AI in the game of chess.

As India is all set to host the 44th edition of the Chess Olympiad in Mahabalipuram starting on July 28, lets look at how AI has impacted the game of chess.

The earliest mention of technology in chess can be traced back to the 18th century when Austrian empress Maria Theresa commissioned a chess-playing machine. Many players competed against the Mechanical Turk, thinking it was an automated machine. However, it turned out to be a scam. A human hidden inside the machine was operating it.

In the mid-1940s, British mathematician Alan Turing began theorising how a computer could play chess against a human. In 1949, Claude Shannon published a seminal paper describing a potential program to do exactly that. In 1950, Alan Turing created a program capable of playing chess. Soon after, the Dietrich Prinz and Bernstein chess program burst into the scene.

Computer chess appeared for the first time in the 1970s. MicroChess, the first commercial chess program for microcomputers, in 1976; Chess Challenger in 1977; and Sargon, which won the worlds first computer chess tournament for microcomputers, in 1978.

The robotic chess computers came about in the 1980s. Boris Handroid, Novag Robot Adversary and Milton Bradley Grandmaster are some examples. The most popular was Chessmaster 2000, which ruled the chess video and computer games industry for the next two decades.

As chess computers were gaining popularity in the 1980s, Gary Kasparov, the then world chess champion, claimed AI-driven chess engines could not defeat top-level chess grandmasters. However, in 1989 and 1996, Kasparov beat IBMs powerful chess engines, Deep Thought and Deep Blue.

Things started to change in the late 1990s. In 1997, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov. A year later, Kasparov came up with the idea of Cyborg chess or centaur chess, in which human and computer skills are combined to up the level of the game. The first cyborg chess was held in 1998.

In 2017, AlphaZero, a computer program developed by DeepMind, defeated the worlds strongest chess engine Stockfish. AlphaZero used the reinforcement learning technique in which the algorithm mimicked humans learning process to train its neural networks.

In 2018, TalkChess.com released Leela Chess Zero, developed by Gary Linscott (who also developed Stockfish). Without having any chess-specific knowledge, Leela Chess Zero learned the game based on deep reinforcement learning using an open-source implementation of AlphaZero.

In 2019, DeepMind came up with another algorithm based on reinforcement learning called MuZero.

Chess players use AI-driven chess engines to analyse their and competitors games. As a result, AI has helped in improving the quality of games.

Post pandemic a lot of chess competitions were moved online. In the European Online Chess Championship, as many as 80 participants were disqualified for cheating. FIDE, the international chess body, has approved an artificial intelligence-driven behaviour-tracking module for the FIDE Online Arena games. Chess.com, an internet chess server, uses a cheat detection system to assess the probability of a human player matching the moves of a chess engine or surpassing the games of some of the greatest chess players with the help of a statistical model. DeepMind is also working to develop a new cheat detection software.

AI has also brought down the cost and effort of training and helped develop new chess strategies.

AI has indeed changed the dynamics of the game. However, using AI in chess has raised a few issues. Computer chess engines have significantly improved gameplay. However, people have also raised concerns that players of this age depend too much on machine-driven analysis.

Even when it comes to detecting cheating, AI poses a few issues. First, there is a possibility a player might be wrongly red-flagged by AI. For example, a Chess.com player and grandmaster, Akshat Chandra, was banned after a win against Hikaru as his moves supposedly matched Komodo, a strong positional chess engine. Though Chandra has been proved innocent, his reputation took a hit.

Chess engines and deep learning-based neural networks present enormous possibilities. Moreover, the complex nature and the strategic orientation of the game have provided a ground for assessing any progress in the field of artificial intelligence. They (games) are the perfect platform to develop and test ideas for AI algorithms. Its very efficient to use games for AI development, as you can run thousands of experiments in parallel on computers in the cloud and often faster than real-time, and generate as much training data as your systems need to learn from. Conveniently, games also normally have a clear objective or score, so it is easy to measure the progress of the algorithms to see if they are incrementally improving over time, and therefore if the research is going in the right direction, said DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis.

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Chennai Chess Olympiad and AI - Analytics India Magazine

Melanie Mitchell, an AI researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, is also excited to see a whole new approach. We really havent seen this coming out of the deep-learning community so much, she says. She also agrees with LeCun that large language models cannot be the whole story. They lack memory and internal models of the world that are actually really important, she says.

Natasha Jaques, a researcher at Google Brain, thinks that language models should still play a role, however. Its odd for language to be entirely missing from LeCuns proposals, she says: We know that large language models are super effective and bake in a bunch of human knowledge.

Jaques, who works on ways to get AIs to share information and abilities with each other, points out that humans dont have to have direct experience of something to learn about it. We can change our behavior simply by being told something, such as not to touch a hot pan. How do I update this world model that Yann is proposing if I dont have language? she asks.

Theres another issue, too. If they were to work, LeCuns ideas would create a powerful technology that could be as transformative as the internet.And yethis proposal doesnt discuss how his models behavior and motivations would be controlled, or who would control them. This is a weird omission, says Abhishek Gupta, the founder of the Montreal AI Ethics Institute and a responsible-AI expert at Boston Consulting Group.

We should think more about what it takes for AI to function well in a society, and that requires thinking about ethical behavior, amongst other things, says Gupta.

Yet Jaques notes that LeCuns proposals are still very much ideas rather than practical applications. Mitchell says the same: Theres certainly little risk of this becoming a human-level intelligence anytime soon.

LeCun would agree. His aim is to sow the seeds of a new approach in the hope that others build on it. This is something that is going to take a lot of effort from a lot of people, he says. Im putting this out there because I think ultimately this is the way to go. If nothing else, he wants to convince people that large language models and reinforcement learning are not the only ways forward.

I hate to see people wasting their time, he says.

See the article here:
Yann LeCun has a bold new vision for the future of AI - MIT Technology Review

2022 marks the 35th anniversary of one of the most iconic video game series of all time Street Fighter. It looks like the folks over at Capcom are celebrating with a slick new website focused on paying tribute to the franchise's legacy.

The special website has sprouted up and features a handful of cool things related to over three decades of fighting streets. Most notably on this site, however, is an impressive history log that includes initial release dates for seemingly every main Street Fighter game that has been released over these last 35 years.

As one might expect, this website is available in both Japanese and English, though portions of it are strictly in Japanese.

Those who visit are greeted with a message from the Street Fighter development team. What serves as a big thank you to fans also talks about the expansion of the series from a video game to other media and how more content is in the works for the 35th anniversary.

There are also news updates pertaining to Street Fighter here, and a few new pieces of artwork from classic Capcom artists to look over. On top of that, many of the main members of the development team have clickable cards where they've left their own words on the series' 35 years, though all of these messages remain in Japanese despite switching the language over.

The coolest thing about this website, though, is the title release timeline that starts with the original game on August 30, 1987 and runs all the way up to Street Fighter 6 in 2023.

It isn't often that we see all of these initial release dates gathered together like this, and it really is eye opening when you look it all over.

From what we can see, all of the main Street Fighter series are represented here. Street Fighter 1 - 6, Alpha (Zero), and some of the compilations / special releases are also included.

This history trek also notes the platforms each game was available on and on what day they launched.

If you're a fan of Street Fighter, it is definitely worth it to head to the new 35th anniversary website and have a look around.

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Special Street Fighter 35th anniversary website launched, features impressive timeline of game release dates over the years - EventHubs

Last year, the Pew Research Center conducted a study on the current state of religious affiliation in America. Its polling suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a trend of a country becoming more secular. In its findings, 20 percent of respondents described their religion as nothing in particular, up from 14 percent 10 years ago. According to last years Gallup poll, Americans who said they belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque fell to 47 percent, and, for the first time in history, church membership in the U.S. fell below 50 percent.

Surprisingly, the pandemics role in shifting Americans away from religious observance did not extend to education. Sensing an advantage over self-serving teachers unions that kept public schools shut during the pandemic, religious schools spent considerable financial resources to reopen schools safely. By acknowledging that children learn better by attending school in person, Catholic and Jewish schools benefited from the Lefts misguided COVID policies by welcoming more students into their classrooms.

And while matriculating more children is a positive development, schools that serve families who choose them based on the convenience of in-person education rather than religious conviction will inevitably face new problems. More specifically, by appealing to a broader swath of Americans, religious schools risk succumbing to progressive pedagogies that are pervasive in contemporary society, such as the infamous CRT.

Today, Americas Catholic schools are emerging as a viable alternative to public institutions, reversing a decades-long drop in enrollment. Efforts to continue in-person learning resulted in Catholic schools welcoming an additional 62,000 students during the 202122 academic year, reflecting a 3.8 percent increase in registration.

Yet some of those Catholic schools are introducing into their curricula Critical Race Theory (CRT), an ideology whose precepts state that racism is systemic in American institutions and that individuals are either oppressors or victims. This despite the fact that upholding values consistent with dignity and respect for humankind is central to Catholicism.

Last year, the Conference of Sacred Heart Education, representing a consortium of 25 Catholic schools in North America, issued a statement affirming its commitment to work towards racial equity and the end to systemic racism. National Review also noted the appointment of Belkise Dallam, who will serve as the first director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) at Regis High School, an all-boys Catholic school. In her role, Dallam will work closely with and report to the newly formed DEI committee and school president.

Florida also is not immune to controversy surrounding questionable Catholic school practices. In Tampa, Anthony and Barbara Scarpo alleged that the Academy of the Holy Names was distancing itself from mainstream Catholicism and embracing the new, politically correct, divisive, and woke culture. In November, their lawsuit requesting that the school return their $1.35 million gift and grant them a tuition refund was dismissed. The courts decision was preceded by an open letter signed by over 500 Academy of the Holy Names graduates supporting the school and refuting the Scarpos criticism.

In Jewish education, attempts to repackage Judaism to fit within liberal doctrine are occurring at several Jewish schools. Educational mission statements often emphasize social justice above Torah values. At the same time, anti-Semitism is increasingly presented only as a product of the extreme right rather than emanating from the intersectional left, where its center of gravity lies. Rather than focus on biblical texts, schools are redefining the daily morning prayer service to include options such as creative expression, where students are taught to be open-minded and reflective. Within the classroom, instruction at schools like the Abraham Joshua Heschel School highlights CRT and gender ideology, with former Heschel parent Harvey Goldman telling the New York Post last year that instructors were teaching inappropriate lessons on race and gender, including asking fourth-graders, If they were transgender, what would their pronoun be?(READ MORE from Irit Tratt: Radical Gender Ideology Is Still Spreading in Schools)

A natural outgrowth of promulgating such intersectional myths, beyond the damage to the children themselves, is that support for Israel is inevitably compromised. During the COVID pandemic, when travel to Israel was scarce and large-scale advocacy was on hold, anti-Israel politicians, like Democrat Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), were invitedto address Jewish students. Bowman, who recently co-sponsored a resolutionwith fellow Squad members calling Israels founding a catastrophe, spoke to children at Salanter Akiba Riverdale Academy (SAR), a Modern Orthodox Jewish day school. He was given a warm reception by the schools Rabbi, who told Bowman SAR was blessed to have had him as a recent visitor to the school.

And at other academic establishments, diversity statements are supplanting any mention of Israel, its bolstering no longer presented as a core value to the progressive leanings of many Jewish schools.

Rather than confront these challenges alone, parents across the religious spectrum should cultivate relationships, establish after-school partnerships, and respond to the evolving landscape in Americas religious day schools. Successfully committing to an education rooted in tradition and free of politicization requires collaboration. Advocating for our childrens future is an issue that, by uniting parents, will also transcend religious boundaries.

Irit Tratt is a writer who resides in New York. The authors work has been published in the Jerusalem Post, the Algemeiner, JNS, and Israel Hayom.

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Religious Schools Are Progressives Next Target - The American ...