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Nancy Pelosi's Democrats clearly hope the January 6 hearings will prevent them from drowning at the ballot box this November. But conservatives should view the panel as prologue for a different investigation into a series of disturbances that have had a dramatic and deleterious impact on our lives.

Congress needs to look into the 2020 riots, the Black Lives Matter organizations that coordinated them (not the concept that black lives matter, which is unimpeachable), and their founders. We can call the hearings the Joint Action for Congressional Knowledge hearings, or JACK, after Jack Del Rio, the NFL coach who was fined $100,000 simply for drawing the common-sense comparison between the 2020 riots and the events of January 6, 2021.

Americans live in a changed country today because of 2020. Since then, every institution, from school to the office, houses of worship, the military, sports leagues and the corporate world, has been tinted with a heavy dogmatic hue that was mostly absent before.

The hundreds of riots that took place in the second half of that year also left immense property damage, assessed at up to $2 billion, and at least 25 people dead. Moreover, the murder rate went up by a record 30 percent in 2020, leaving open the question of whether some kind of "Ferguson Effect"the phenomenon of police pulling back after BLM riots or after deadly force goes viralwas at fault.

>>>BLM Global Network Foundations Creators Are Not Interested in Black Lives

Since several prominent Black Lives Matter organizations that coordinated the 2020 disturbances were set up by individuals who have embraced violent action, and called for the "complete transformation" of America and the "dismantling of the organizing principle of this society," one can't be faulted for asking whether violence and the called-for dismantling are linked.

The BLM leaders want to break up the nuclear family, ditch capitalism, and adopt "participatory democracy." That is because BLM co-founders Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors were trained in both Marxist doctrine and praxis by theoreticians who want to destroy the United States.

All of this calls for a congressional investigation, one of our society's self-defense mechanisms. Congress has a responsibility to ask questions of those who organized and carried out the disturbances of 2020.

A committee looking into the 2020 riots must of course avoid the credibility shortcomings that have plagued the Jan. 6 panel. Both parties must be allowed to appoint members, because cross-examination is indispensable in eliciting the truth.

The architects of BLM are Americans with constitutional rights, even if they want to overthrow the constitutional order. They are free to try to peacefully persuade their countrymen to dismantle society, abandon capitalism, eliminate the police and courts systems, and embrace the central planning called for by LeftRoots, a revolutionary group for which Garza is a member of the coordinating committee.

But society also has the right to know what their goals are, and society has a right to be safe. The BLM groups cannot unconstitutionally use violence or intimidation to make their arguments.

The January 6, 2021, invasion of the Capitol was a stomach-turning event, a national embarrassment. Participants who broke the law must be prosecuted. But it would be fatuous to pretend that they have had anywhere near the social, cultural, financial, or political clout that the BLM organizers enjoy.

Our schools do not teach children material that originated with the Jan. 6 rioters. Americans are not forced into training sessions at work to instill the worldview of the Jan. 6 rioters. Our foreign policy is not crafted to comply with the tenets of the Jan. 6 rioters, whatever they might be.

BLM organizations, whether the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) or the more loosely organized umbrella Movement for Black Lives, have real power. BLMGNF says it sent out 127 million emails in the second half of 2020, out of which 1.2 million "actions" were taken.

>>>Black Lives Matter Leaders Arent Capitalist Converts, They Still Want To Dismantle the U.S.

Today, everywhere they turn, Americans hear that we live in an "oppressive society," that we have "systemic racism," that "white supremacy" reigns, that certain individuals are irredeemably "privileged," and that "capitalism is racist." These are absurd claims. Yet they have become holy writ. The organizing principles of society are being dismantled.

These are the messages that form Black Lives Matter's ideological platform. Our media have amplified them since BLM was first formed in 2013 with the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin, and when it added political muscle after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Since 2020, these messages have entered every nook and cranny of American life.

All this has been based on the claim that police use lethal force more often against blacks than against whites. But studies of the issue, such as this one from Harvard, found no detectable racial differences.

It is time for the riots' leaders to be dragged into Congress and asked under oath what coordinating role they played, what their intent was, and what else they mean to do to American society.

Read more here:
We Need a Congressional Investigation Into the 2020 Riots - Heritage.org

The entire enterprise of conservatism is dedicated to protectingwhat conservatives see as a natural hierarchy. When you add in the religious fanaticism now present on the Supreme Court, you see that natural hierarchy as established by God. The rich are rich because God favors them. God ordained that the poor be poor, and there's nothing to be done about it.

What makes this brand of fanaticism so interesting is that its adherents feel that they must enforce this natural order, and make sure the poor know that it's their natural lot, and that God's anointed are here, apparently, to make their condition worse. The irony here is that the fanatics believe that the Almighty needs their help in making the wretched more miserable. Why should any being called the Almighty need the help of us lowly humans? After all, there is plenty of misery in the world without our heaping more on on purpose.

It's our fellow humans who need our help, not the Almighty.

The Supreme Court's recent rulings have chipped away at the wall between church and state (Carson v. Makin); made it easier for people to get guns (New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen); and made it impossible for women in many states to get an abortion (Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization).

It's that final ruling I'm out concerned with today, but I'll say a little about the others, too.

In this second Gilded Age, the income gap between rich and poor has grown into a yawning chasm. The super-rich have started their own private space programs, while the poorest Americans are denied a minimum wage high enough to feed themselves. In light of this, the overturning of Roe v. Wade tells a poor woman that, no matter how she got pregnant, or whatever the condition of her fetus, she cannot abort it. She must accept the consequences of her actions.

The rich have their own discreet means of getting their wives and daughters out of trouble.

Imagine. Well, you don't have to imagine, because it's now reality.

God forbid that if a woman (of necessity helped by a man) makes a mistake and does not want a baby (perhaps because she's too young, or lives in grinding poverty), she be allowed to save her own future and not carry the burden of supporting that child to adulthood.

God forbid that if a woman is raped, she be allowed to prevent that child from being brought into the world.

God forbid that a woman who is carrying a child with a serious birth defect be allowed to prevent a child's lifetime of misery by aborting it.

God forbid that a woman should seek to remove a child that has died in her womb before term.

God forbid that any poor woman be allowed to ease her own burden. No, the poor must accept their lot and accept any increased burden life heaps on them. After all, it's their sinful behavior that got them pregnant in the first place.

Meanwhile, the rich are forgiven everything. They are allowed to misbehave because they can afford it.

The other two decisions (guns and religious "rights") make an interesting combination with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Making it easier for anyone to get a gun swells the ranks of the two opposing camps: bad guys with guns, and self-righteous assholes with guns.

The proliferation of guns makes life so much more interesting. Self-righteous assholes with guns (George Zimmerman) will be making their own mistakes and killing not necessarily bad guys with guns, but the unarmed (Trayvon Martin) at greater rates. Occasionally, they'll be mistaking their own family members for intruders.

Coupled with the tearing down of the wall between church and state, the individual's right to carry military-grade weapons will make everyone ready for any future religious wars that living in a theocracy normally produces. After all, declaring ours a Christian country, while denying non-Christians their religious freedom, brings up the interesting question of who is a Christian and who isn't. When religion and politics are unmixed, such questions are matters of civilized theological discussion. But when religion confers political power, the question of who is a real Christian turns deadly. The existence of rival religious militias during the Lebanese Civil War provides a pattern for America's own future as a "Christian nation." Who is, and who isn't, a Christian? A Mormon? A Catholic? A Baptist? Which kind of Baptist? A Methodist? A Jehovah's Witness? A Seventh Day Adventist? Well, that can be sorted out in our AK 47-saturated country, no problem.

The religious fanatics in the Supreme Court are rushing us as fast as they can towards a society that is unlivable. A society no sane person would want to bring a child into. A society where a woman might want to have an abortion.

Link:
Religious fanatics are now running the country - Daily Kos

Enlarge / "It's a cookbook?!"

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Back in the 1950s, in the earliest days of what we now call artificial intelligence, there was a debate over what to name the field. Herbert Simon, co-developer of both the logic theory machine and the General Problem Solver, argued that the field should have the much more anodyne name of complex information processing. This certainly doesnt inspire the awe that artificial intelligence does, nor does it convey the idea that machines can think like humans.

However, "complex information processing" is a much better description of what artificial intelligence actually is: parsing complicated data sets and attempting to make inferences from the pile. Some modern examples of AI include speech recognition (in the form of virtual assistants like Siri or Alexa) and systems that determine what's in a photograph or recommend what to buy or watch next. None of these examples are comparable to human intelligence, but theyshow we can do remarkable things with enough information processing.

Whether we refer to this field as "complex information processing" or "artificial intelligence" (or the more ominously Skynet-sounding "machine learning") is irrelevant. Immense amounts of work and human ingenuity have gone into building some absolutely incredible applications. As an example, look atGPT-3, a deep-learning model for natural languages that can generate text that is indistinguishable from text written by a person (yet can also go hilariously wrong). It's backed by a neural network model that uses more than 170 billion parameters to model human language.

Built on top of GPT-3 is the tool named Dall-E,which will produce an image of any fantastical thing a user requests. The updated 2022 version of the tool, Dall-E 2, lets you go even further, as it can understand styles and concepts that are quite abstract.For instance, asking Dall-E to visualize an astronaut riding a horse in the style of Andy Warhol will produce a number of images such as this:

Dall-E 2 does not perform a Google search to find a similar image; it creates a picture based on its internal model. This is a new image built from nothing but math.

Not all applications of AI are as groundbreaking as these. AI and machine learning are finding uses in nearly every industry. Machine learning is quickly becoming a must-have in many industries, powering everything from recommendation engines in the retail sector to pipeline safety in the oil and gas industry and diagnosis and patient privacy in the health care industry. Not every company has the resources to create tools like Dall-E from scratch, so there's a lot of demand for affordable, attainable toolsets.The challenge of filling that demand has parallels to the early days of business computing, when computers and computer programs were quickly becoming the technology businesses needed.While not everyone needs to develop the next programming language or operating system, many companies want to leverage the power of these new fields of study, and they need similar tools to help them.

Continue reading here:
How to get started with machine learning and AI - Ars Technica

When you picture a hospital radiologist, you might think of a specialist who sits in a dark room and spends hours poring over X-rays to make diagnoses. Contrast that with your dentist, who in addition to interpreting X-rays must also perform surgery, manage staff, communicate with patients, and run their business. When dentists analyze X-rays, they do so in bright rooms and on computers that arent specialized for radiology, often with the patient sitting right next to them.

Is it any wonder, then, that dentists given the same X-ray might propose different treatments?

Dentists are doing a great job given all the things they have to deal with, says Wardah Inam SM 13, PhD 16.

Inam is the co-founder of Overjet, a company using artificial intelligence to analyze and annotate X-rays for dentists and insurance providers. Overjet seeks to take the subjectivity out of X-ray interpretations to improve patient care.

Its about moving toward more precision medicine, where we have the right treatments at the right time, says Inam, who co-founded the company with Alexander Jelicich 13. Thats where technology can help. Once we quantify the disease, we can make it very easy to recommend the right treatment.

Overjet has been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration to detect and outline cavities and to quantify bone levels to aid in the diagnosis of periodontal disease, a common but preventable gum infection that causes the jawbone and other tissues supporting the teeth to deteriorate.

In addition to helping dentists detect and treat diseases, Overjets software is also designed to help dentists show patients the problems theyre seeing and explain why theyre recommending certain treatments.

The company has already analyzed tens of millions of X-rays, is used by dental practices nationwide, and is currently working with insurance companies that represent more than 75 million patients in the U.S. Inam is hoping the data Overjet is analyzing can be used to further streamline operations while improving care for patients.

Our mission at Overjet is to improve oral health by creating a future that is clinically precise, efficient, and patient-centric, says Inam.

Its been a whirlwind journey for Inam, who knew nothing about the dental industry until a bad experience piqued her interest in 2018.

Getting to the root of the problem

Inam came to MIT in 2010, first for her masters and then her PhD in electrical engineering and computer science, and says she caught the bug for entrepreneurship early on.

For me, MIT was a sandbox where you could learn different things and find out what you like and what you don't like, Inam says. Plus, if you are curious about a problem, you can really dive into it.

While taking entrepreneurship classes at the Sloan School of Management, Inam eventually started a number of new ventures with classmates.

I didn't know I wanted to start a company when I came to MIT, Inam says. I knew I wanted to solve important problems. I went through this journey of deciding between academia and industry, but I like to see things happen faster and I like to make an impact in my lifetime, and that's what drew me to entrepreneurship.

During her postdoc in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Inam and a group of researchers applied machine learning to wireless signals to create biomedical sensors that could track a persons movements, detect falls, and monitor respiratory rate.

She didnt get interested in dentistry until after leaving MIT, when she changed dentists and received an entirely new treatment plan. Confused by the change, she asked for her X-rays and asked other dentists to have a look, only to receive still another variation in diagnosis and treatment recommendations.

At that point, Inam decided to dive into dentistry for herself, reading books on the subject, watching YouTube videos, and eventually interviewing dentists. Before she knew it, she was spending more time learning about dentistry than she was at her job.

The same week Inam quit her job, she learned about MITs Hacking Medicine competition and decided to participate. Thats where she started building her team and getting connections. Overjets first funding came from the Media Lab-affiliated investment group the E14 Fund.

The E14 fund wrote the first check, and I don't think we would've existed if it wasn't for them taking a chance on us, she says.

Inam learned that a big reason for variation in treatment recommendations among dentists is the sheer number of potential treatment options for each disease. A cavity, for instance, can be treated with a filling, a crown, a root canal, a bridge, and more.

When it comes to periodontal disease, dentists must make millimeter-level assessments to determine disease severity and progression. The extent and progression of the disease determines the best treatment.

I felt technology could play a big role in not only enhancing the diagnosis but also to communicate with the patients more effectively so they understand and don't have to go through the confusing process I did of wondering who's right, Inam says.

Overjet began as a tool to help insurance companies streamline dental claims before the company began integrating its tool directly into dentists offices. Every day, some of the largest dental organizations nationwide are using Overjet, including Guardian Insurance, Delta Dental, Dental Care Alliance, and Jefferson Dental and Orthodontics.

Today, as a dental X-ray is imported into a computer, Overjets software analyzes and annotates the images automatically. By the time the image appears on the computer screen, it has information on the type of X-ray taken, how a tooth may be impacted, the exact level of bone loss with color overlays, the location and severity of cavities, and more.

The analysis gives dentists more information to talk to patients about treatment options.

Now the dentist or hygienist just has to synthesize that information, and they use the software to communicate with you, Inam says. So, they'll show you the X-rays with Overjet's annotations and say, 'You have 4 millimeters of bone loss, it's in red, that's higher than the 3 millimeters you had last time you came, so I'm recommending this treatment.

Overjet also incorporates historical information about each patient, tracking bone loss on every tooth and helping dentists detect cases where disease is progressing more quickly.

Weve seen cases where a cancer patient with dry mouth goes from nothing to something extremely bad in six months between visits, so those patients should probably come to the dentist more often, Inam says. Its all about using data to change how we practice care, think about plans, and offer services to different types of patients.

The operating system of dentistry

Overjets FDA clearances account for two highly prevalent diseases. They also put the company in a position to conduct industry-level analysis and help dental practices compare themselves to peers.

We use the same tech to help practices understand clinical performance and improve operations, Inam says. We can look at every patient at every practice and identify how practices can use the software to improve the care they're providing.

Moving forward, Inam sees Overjet playing an integral role in virtually every aspect of dental operations.

These radiographs have been digitized for a while, but they've never been utilized because the computers couldn't read them, Inam says. Overjet is turning unstructured data into data that we can analyze. Right now, we're building the basic infrastructure. Eventually we want to grow the platform to improve any service the practice can provide, basically becoming the operating system of the practice to help providers do their job more effectively.

Follow this link:
Taking the guesswork out of dental care with artificial intelligence - MIT News

Reid Simmons, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University, just finished another season of commencements. Over a career spanning more than 30 years, Simmons has seen plenty of students reach that milestone, but the newest crop of graduates is special because theyre like penguins, he said.

The late Randy Pausch used the analogy in describing flightless birds which waddle off to the edge of the ice and they see the water, and they don't know what's in there, Simmons recounted. There could be a lot of fish or there could be predators, and it takes one adventuresome penguin to jump in first.

The students who just graduated particularly those who majored in artificial intelligence are like the penguins because when they chose their course of study, AI was a brand-new major, said Simmons, director of CMUs AI major. Four years ago there was some uncertainty about whether these 39 students would get particular jobs or coveted slots in graduate schools, but thankfully it worked out, Simmons continued. They're the pioneers, and there's a lot to congratulate them for.

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The research professor and Jewish blogger spoke with the Chronicle shortly after commencement but didnt spend much time looking back. Instead, he described the future both as it pertains to AI and the students who study the field.

Thanks to movies like The Terminator, AI has long captivated human interest. Weeks ago, the subject got new attention when a Google engineer told The Washington Post that the companys AI is sentient.

Media reports and Hollywood blockbusters spur interest in the field but dont do a good job explaining the future of technology, Simmons said. These stories make great television or movies, but theyre really very far from reality.

As opposed to focusing on robots taking over the world, the bigger concern is when people using AI technologies do bad things to other people, Simmons said. Any technology can be used for good or bad; whats critical, though, is that people understand the difference and are not complicit in developing a technology that can be used for bad purposes.

For Simmons, a Squirrel Hill resident who maintains a kosher cooking blog, Judaism is a helpful reminder in how to address certain matters related to AI.

One of the main issues in terms of AI is that if you feed it biased data it produces biased results, and it could be discriminatory results, he said. Judaism teaches a respect and love for all people, and I think that this is a very important thing that we need to be aware of that the technologies that we're developing are not just going to be used for educated people who are developing the technologies, but they need to be used, and not discriminatorily, for all people, respecting their autonomy, respecting their privacy.

Reid Simmons will direct the new artificial intelligence major at Carnegie Mellon University. (Photo courtesy of Reid Simmons)

There are instances in which bad actors take advantage of technological advances, but there are also times when people dont give enough attention to the products and materials being developed. For example, Simmons said, early on in the development of face-detection technology there were difficulties recognizing African American faces.

One of the main reasons why, according to Simmons, was because the majority of the training was performed on mostly white faces.

This goes back to the idea that if one feeds AI biased data then biased results will be produced, he explained.

When early face-detection software failed to recognize African American faces it wasnt an evil plot to discriminate against Blacks, Simmons said. It was a lack of understanding about the diversity of training data that was needed in order to get the nondiscriminatory result.

Simmons hopes future collaborations between ethicists and engineers yield better outcomes and pointed to a project supported by the National Science Foundation studying how AI can help older adults and their caregivers.

The project, which is headed by Georgia Tech, is a five-year endeavor looking at how we can help people particularly with mild cognitive impairment live independently in their own homes by providing guidance by detecting changes in their behavior, he said.

The hope is that CMU and other participating universities can develop fundamental technologies and commercializable products that help determine when a physician or caregiver may be needed, Simmons said.

As the project unfolds, engineers and ethicists are working together to understand some of the underlying issues. Because the goal, Simmons said, is that the technologies are designed so people will be able to use them and use them in the correct ways.

Whether its helping people with cognitive impairment remain in their homes or autonomously drive patients to their doctor, AI has the potential to be a tremendous benefit to people, Simmons said. This is something that I think that we should embrace because it's going to radically change our lives for the better.

And yes, theres a lot of fear out there about what AI is capable of, but this isnt something people should be concerned about. The important thing is to make sure that the engineers who are developing and deploying this technology understand the ethical issues that underlie the technology, Simmons said. If they do, I think that there's a tremendous amount of good that this technology can bring people. PJC

Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.

Read more here:
The future of artificial intelligence according to CMU professor Reid Simmons - thejewishchronicle.net