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February 23, 2017 Richard Spencer, a white nationalist and a leader of the so-called "alt-right" movement, says he has been booted from the Conservative Police Action Committee (CPAC) by organizers who disagree with his views.

CPAC spokesman Ian Walters told NBC that Mr. Spencers ticket had been refunded, saying that his views were "repugnant."

A controversial figure, Spencer is credited with coining the term alt-right, which refers to a branch of the right-wing that has roots in white supremacy. Spencer has also addressed crowds where his cry of "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!" was met with what looked like Nazi salutes. His presence has spurred outrage and protest at venues around the nation.

I think everyone everyone recognizes that there has to be identity politics in the world, that white people defined the United States and we're now experiencing an increasing minority status, he told NBC Thursday, noting that he had credentials and had spent about an hour at the event speaking with attendees and the media before he was politely asked to leave.

Unfazed, Spencer said that attendees, especially younger ones, expressed more interest in his new ideas than those of aging conservatives.

The fact is, people want to talk to me, he said. They dont want to talk to these boring conservatives.

Conservatives have decried what they see as a politically correct movement over the past several years, arguing that liberal snowflakes are too easily offended by controversial speech. President Trump garnered favor among large swaths of voters using brash rhetoric and that exact argument, rallying against new societal norms that have made some take pause when choosing their words, especially relating to religion, gender, and race.

But recent action on the part of conservatives could show that there is a line to be drawn when it comes to allowing free expression, at least on platforms that represent their party.

Spencers removal comes just days after CPAC disinvited Milo Yiannopoulos, a former editor at the right-wing news outlet Breitbart, from speaking at the conference. While Mr. Yiannopoulos has received backlash over the years for his disparaging comments about women, minorities, Muslims, and transgender people, it was unearthed comments in which he advocates for pedophilia that led CPAC to cancel his appearance.

While some have called those who push the envelope on free speech by adopting offensive language heroic, others have noted that using the First Amendment for the purpose of shocking the masses and stoking controversy isnt the best way to show appreciation for the right.

Its the principle thats heroic, not the people that push the bounds of the principle, Ken Paulson, president of the First Amendment Center, told The Christian Science Monitor earlier this week. If you want to have a public examination of the First Amendment, there are thousands of hardworking men and women who can provide remarkable perspective and can do it in a way that doesnt scorch the earth.

Spencers dismissal from CPAC followed a speech earlier Thursday that addressed growing concerns about the conservatives entanglement with the alt-right.

Dan Schneider, executive director of American Conservative Union, which runs CPAC, denounced the alt-right as anti-Semitic, racist, and sexist on Thursday, a move many moderates and Democrats have been calling on officials to do for months.

But in doing so, he argued that the group was on the extreme left, not the right, as many have accepted.

There is a sinister organization that is trying to warp its way into our ranks, Mr. Schneider said in one of the conferences first addresses. We must not be deceived by [a] hateful, left-wing fascist group.

As CPAC continues, many conservatives hope that leaders will find a new way to define themselves during a period of uncertainty.

"I think the conservative movement is hopeful, but wary," Tim Phillips, president of Koch-brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity, told the Associated Press prior to the conference.

This report contains material from the Associated Press.

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CPAC dismisses Richard Spencer: How conservatives are severing alt-right ties - Christian Science Monitor

For many it is no more than the first port of call when a niggling question raises its head. Found on its pages are answers to mysteries from the fate of male anglerfish, the joys of dorodango, and the improbable death of Aeschylus.

But beneath the surface of Wikipedia lies a murky world of enduring conflict. A new study from computer scientists has found that the online encyclopedia is a battleground where silent wars have raged for years.

Since Wikipedia launched in 2001, its millions of articles have been ranged over by software robots, or simply bots, that are built to mend errors, add links to other pages, and perform other basic housekeeping tasks.

In the early days, the bots were so rare they worked in isolation. But over time, the number deployed on the encyclopedia exploded with unexpected consequences. The more the bots came into contact with one another, the more they became locked in combat, undoing each others edits and changing the links they had added to other pages. Some conflicts only ended when one or other bot was taken out of action.

The fights between bots can be far more persistent than the ones we see between people, said Taha Yasseri, who worked on the study at the Oxford Internet Institute. Humans usually cool down after a few days, but the bots might continue for years.

The findings emerged from a study that looked at bot-on-bot conflict in the first ten years of Wikipedias existence. The researchers at Oxford and the Alan Turing Institute in London examined the editing histories of pages in 13 different language editions and recorded when bots undid other bots changes.

They did not expect to find much. The bots are simple computer programs that are written to make the encyclopedia better. They are not intended to work against each other. We had very low expectations to see anything interesting. When you think about them they are very boring, said Yasseri. The very fact that we saw a lot of conflict among bots was a big surprise to us. They are good bots, they are based on good intentions, and they are based on same open source technology.

While some conflicts mirrored those found in society, such as the best names to use for contested territories, others were more intriguing. Describing their research in a paper entitled Even Good Bots Fight in the journal Plos One, the scientists reveal that among the most contested articles were pages on former president of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf, the Arabic language, Niels Bohr and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

One of the most intense battles played out between Xqbot and Darknessbot which fought over 3,629 different articles between 2009 and 2010. Over the period, Xqbot undid more than 2,000 edits made by Darknessbot, with Darknessbot retaliating by undoing more than 1,700 of Xqbots changes. The two clashed over pages on all sorts of topics, from Alexander of Greece and Banqiao district in Taiwan to Aston Villa football club.

Another bot named after Tachikoma, the artificial intelligence in the Japanese science fiction series Ghost in the Shell, had a two year running battle with Russbot. The two undid more than a thousand edits by the other on more than 3,000 articles ranging from Hillary Clinton s 2008 presidential campaign to the demography of the UK.

The study found striking differences in the bot wars that played out on the various language editions of Wikipedia. German editions had the fewest bot fights, with bots undoing others edits on average only 24 times in a decade. But the story was different on the Portuguese Wikipedia, where bots undid the work of other bots on average 185 times in ten years. The English version saw bots meddling with each others changes on average 105 times a decade.

The findings show that even simple algorithms that are let loose on the internet can interact in unpredictable ways. In many cases, the bots came into conflict because they followed slightly different rules to one another.

Yasseri believes the work serves as an early warning to companies developing bots and more powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tools. An AI that works well in the lab might behave unpredictably in the wild. Take self-driving cars. A very simple thing thats often overlooked is that these will be used in different cultures and environments, said Yasseri. An automated car will behave differently on the German autobahn to how it will on the roads in Italy. The regulations are different, the laws are different, and the driving culture is very different, he said.

As more decisions, options and services come to depend on bots working properly together, harmonious cooperation will become increasingly important. As the authors note in their latest study: We know very little about the life and evolution of our digital minions.

Earlier this month, researchers at Googles DeepMind set AIs against one another to see if they would cooperate or fight. When the AIs were released on an apple-collecting game, the scientists found that the AIs cooperated while apples were plentiful, but as soon as supplies got short, they turned nasty. It is not the first time that AIs have run into trouble. In 2011, scientists in the US recorded a conversation between two chatbots. They bickered from the start and ended up arguing about God.

2017 Guardian Web under contract with NewsEdge/Acquire Media. All rights reserved.

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Study: Bot-on-Bot Editing Wars Raging on Wikipedia's pages - NewsFactor Network

Fake news has been, well, in the news a lot lately. But for the world's largest crowdsourced encyclopedia, it's nothing new.

"Wikipedia has been dealing with fake news since it started 16 years ago," notes LiAnna Davis, deputy director of the Wiki Education Foundation.

To combat misinformation, Wikipedia has developed a robust corps of volunteer editors. Anyone can write new entries and scrutinize existing ones for adherence to Wikipedia's rules on sourcing and neutrality. While it's not free of errors or pranks, what results is a resource that 50 million people turn to daily on hundreds of thousands of topics in a few dozen languages.

Today, educators are among those more concerned than ever with standards of truth and evidence and with the lightning-fast spread of misinformation online. And the Wiki Education Foundation, a freestanding nonprofit, is sharing Wikipedia's methods with a growing number of college students, and striking a blow for digital literacy along the way.

The foundation gives professors the technical assistance they need to assign students, instead of writing a research paper, to write a brand-new Wikipedia entry, or expand an existing entry, on any topic in virtually any discipline.

This spring, 7,500 students are expected to participate. Among the many items past students written on are:

Since the program began six years ago, Davis says, students have collectively added more than 25 million words of content to Wikipedia.

Jennifer Malkowski, an assistant professor of film and media studies at Smith College, assigned her class on new media and participatory culture to write and contribute to Wikipedia entries this past fall.

"One of the things they really liked about it was the ability to share knowledge beyond the professor that audience of one," she says. While all Smith students are expected to use good research methods in their classes, knowing that their entries might be rejected outright if they didn't conform to Wikipedia's standards "felt like a higher stake than the difference between a B and an A-minus," she says.

Malkowski will be leading a workshop to help her colleagues, some of whom are less technically minded, learn how to make Wikipedia assignments in their own classes as well.

Davis says many professors report a greater level of effort from their students on Wikipedia assignments. "If you're writing something millions of people are going to read, it's a reason to do a really good job, to go into a library and get a deep understanding of the topic."

Some professors, like Tamar Carroll, an assistant professor of history at Rochester Institute of Technology, see Wikipedia as a way to make previously neglected areas of knowledge more visible. For Carroll, it's women's history. She says a former student recently emailed her to say that her Wikipedia entry on Mary Stafford Anthony, the suffragist and sister of Susan B. Anthony, was "the most meaningful assignment she had" as an undergraduate.

There's another learning opportunity too. Every Wikipedia entry has a "talk" page, where editors discuss changes, and a "view history" page that shows additions and deletions over time.

Peeking behind that curtain, says Malkowski, helps "expose how knowledge is collectively created and how different voices might come to consensus, or not, on a particular topic." Right now, she adds, "is an especially important time to be asking these epistemological questions."

According to the foundation's own survey, 87 percent of university faculty who participated in the program reported an increase in their students' media literacy. By grinding some Internet info-sausage themselves, essentially, they gained a better understanding of what goes into it.

It's an interesting turn of events for Wikipedia, which, as Davis acknowledges, has had a bad rap in academic circles as the lazy student's substitute for real research.

"When I first started going to academic conferences, people would hide and say, 'Don't let my department chair see me,' " talking to you, says Davis. She added that Wikipedia should only be a starting point for a university-level research paper, never a footnoted source.

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What Students Can Learn By Writing For Wikipedia - WYPR

February 24, 2017 at 10:49 am |

(Photo by MARY MALONE) During Sandpoint Middle Schools crime scene investigation class Thursday, eight-grader Koby Black replaces a card in the line-up with a card that has a similar design while classmate Conagher McCown, after memorizing what the cards were before, looks away. Afterward, Conagher correctly pointed out the card that had been changed, proving he would be a good eyewitness.

(Photo by MARY MALONE) Sandpoint Middle School seventh-graders Anna Auld, right, and Emma Thielbahr, left, work on solving cases last week during crime scene investigation, a new elective at the school.

(Photo by MARY MALONE) During Sandpoint Middle Schools crime scene investigation class Thursday, eight-grader Koby Black replaces a card in the line-up with a card that has a similar design while classmate Conagher McCown, after memorizing what the cards were before, looks away. Afterward, Conagher correctly pointed out the card that had been changed, proving he would be a good eyewitness.

(Photo by MARY MALONE) Sandpoint Middle School seventh-graders Anna Auld, right, and Emma Thielbahr, left, work on solving cases last week during crime scene investigation, a new elective at the school.

Editors note: This is thefourth in a series of articles focused on some of the new electives at Sandpoint Middle School that give seventh- and eighth-grade students a jump-start in learning hands-on skills. This article delves into the world of science, featuring the new crime scene investigation class, and touching on a few other exciting science electives offered. The next story will look at media with the middle schools morning news crew.

By MARY MALONE

Staff writer

SANDPOINT Crime scene investigators had two suspects in the break-in of theSnack Shack.

The suspects, Nathan and Trevor, said they were fishing all day. However, when questioned,the conversation turned to food and Trevor saidhe didn't have enough money to buy food from the shack becauseMr. Levine raised theprices by 10 percent.

This is a short summary ofoneof many cases the Sandpoint Middle School CSI team will solve throughout the semester.

After reading through the case Thursday, some of the studentsdeduced that Trevor was the culprit. Mr. Levine had only raised the prices that morning, so if Trevorhad in factbeen fishingsince dawnand had spoken to no one as he said,he could not have known that.

Eighth-grader Koby Black saidlearning tocatchthe accidental thingssuspects sayis one of the things they have been learning during the middle school's new CSI elective. He also learned that fingerprints don't burn.

"Say someone spilled a bottle of vodka all over the floor and then lit it (on fire), the fingerprints that held it would not burn," he said, adding that he enjoys crime scene investigating.

"There is a channel, Investigation Discovery, I watch that all the time."

Conagher McCown, eighth grade, said when he was growing up, he watched a lot of different mystery shows like Scooby Doo, but didn't realize how much investigation is needed in real crime.

"I never knew it went so deep into blood, fingerprints, DNA testing, figuring out what started a fire it goes way deep into the crime," Conagher said.

Also, if anyone needs an eyewitness, Conagher is the one to call. The two were playing a game in class Thursday where Koby laid down three cards with different designsto start with. Conagherstudied the cards and then turned around, during which time Koby would replace one with a similar design. Conagherhad to figure out which card Koby changed each time. Koby kept adding cards as well until Conagher had 15 cards to memorize. He chose correctly though every time a card was changed, even when all 15 cards were down.

CSI instructor Caitlin Peterson saidforensic investigatingrelates well to core science classes because it reiterates the use of the scientific method.

"In investigating, they follow the same steps as far as making observations and then using those observations ... they are creating educated guesses and coming up with a hypothesis, which is what investigators do," Peterson added.

She said they will use the scientific method more during the semester when they go over crime scene evidence in the lab portion of the class, such asblood spatter, blood typingand trace evidence left behind like hairs and fibers.

Thestudents keep aportfolio of all their work and by the end of the semester it will be full of notes on crime scenes and evidence they worked on. In total, the classwill cover six or seven units, time permitting, including crime scene and eyewitness basics, the power of evidence,blood basics, forensic entomology, forensic anthropology, arson investigation andaccident reconstruction.

The students are finishing up the first unit of the semester and in thenext unit, the power of evidence, the students willcreate and lift latent fingerprints, Peterson said.

The class will do more intenselab work beginningin March, which will include the aforementioned topics such as blood spatter and blood typing, as well asexploring thelife cycle of maggotsto determine time of death hopefully with real maggots, Peterson added.

The class is funded by a grant through Panhandle Alliance for Education.

Mary Malone can be reached by email at mmalone@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.

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SMS students dig in to capture the clues - Bonner County Daily Bee

Ann Coulter, Syndicated columnist Published 3:04 p.m. CT Feb. 24, 2017 | Updated 13 hours ago

Ann Coulter(Photo: Special to The Clarion-Ledger)

Americans thought electing a trash-talking billionaire reality TV star to the presidency of the United States would finally be enough to convey the message that they hate both political parties. If anything, they hate Republicans more.

But the Uni-Party cant learn. The bureaucracy, the judiciary and congressional Republicans are all openly working for the Resistance. Its President Trump against the world.

In Congress, the hate for Trump is personal. Not only did he throw a grenade into politicians little do-nothing club, but his very existence destroys their self-conception as people with a set of skills.

While Trump was making billions of dollars building skyscrapers, developing golf courses and starring on a hit reality TV show, members of Congress were slowly working their way up the political ladder interning at think tanks and congressional offices, taking some small government job, then running for the House or Senate, and, hopefully, marrying a woman with a large inheritance.

A stunning number of senators and congressmen are supported by rich wives Sens. John McCain, Mitch McConnell, Richard Blumenthal, John Kerry and Ron Wyden, and Reps. Michael McCaul, Scott Peters and Paul Ryan, to name a few. Is there any other profession with as high a percentage of men sponging off their wives inheritances?

Then a self-made billionaire came along, violated all the rules they had lived by, and swept aside more than a dozen experienced politicians just like themselves! Not only did Trump make his own money, but he beat them at the one thing they thought they knew how to do.

How else to explain Senate Majority Leader McConnells sneering dismissal of Trumps request for an investigation into voter fraud, followed one week later! by McConnells assurance that the Senate would investigate former National Security Adviser Michael Flynns phone call to the Russian ambassador?

These useless Republicans allowed a Senate seat to be stolen from under their noses in Minnesota in 2008, giving President Obama the vote he needed to pass Obamacare and destroy our health care.

No, dont investigate that! Why bother with the very foundation of democracy? How will these nitwit politicians win praise from The Washington Post without devoting all their energy to some current leftist fetish, like Russia?

At least when liberals fixate on Russia, they have a clear subversive mission.

Congressional Republicans are just nincompoops. The only thing they know is: Imitate Reagan from 30 years ago. It would make more sense for Republicans to demand that all air traffic controllers be fired for no reason than it is for them to keep treating Putin like its 1950 and hes Stalin. (We know Putin isnt Stalin because Democrats arent affectionately calling him Uncle Joe and spying for him.)

If senators have time for hearings on Flynns discussions with the Russian ambassador, could they possibly squeeze in an afternoon to repeal Obamacare?

How about the campaign pledge that rocketed Trump to the White House? According to The Washington Post, at the GOP retreat last month, when Trump talked about using tax policy to help pay for the wall, Republicans expressed confusion about what exactly he meant.

Are they retarded? (By they, I mean all Republicans in Congress, except Sen. Tom Cotton and about a half-dozen others.)

If Republicans had an ounce of self-respect, right after repealing Obamacare and writing a bill taxing remittances to make Mexico pay for the wall, theyd be impeaching the ridiculous Judge James Robart. Even lawyers who oppose Trumps travel ban agree that Robart made a complete ass of himself when he blocked the executive order.

The Resistance claims to be terrified that Trump will not be constrained by our Constitution, but theyre the ones who are perfectly willing to disregard the Constitution simply to stop Trump.

At least since the Chinese exclusion case of 1889, the Supreme Court has made blindingly clear that the power of exclusion of foreigners belongs to the political branches of government: Congress and the president not to the judiciary.

The presidents authority to exclude aliens in the public interest has been reaffirmed in dozens of cases since then. Among them:

And on and on and on.

There are lots of constitutional questions that reasonable people can disagree about. Whether the president can exclude foreigners from seven terror-prone countries is not one of them.

But congressional Republicans are happy to ignore the Constitution, ignore the balance of powers, ignore written law, even to relinquish their own constitutional authority and let the courts run our foreign policy, just to be a part of the establishments STOP TRUMP movement.

Instead of neurotically fixating on Russia in some fantasy camp imitation of Reagan, circa 1982, what wed like these worthless Republicans to do is: Imitate Trump circa now.

Ann Coulter is a syndicated columnist. Contact her through her website at http://www.anncoulter.com.

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