by Ali Minai

Most people see understanding as a fundamental characteristic of intelligence. One of the main critiques directed at AI is that, well, computers may be able to “calculate” and “compute”, but they don’t really “understand”. What, then, is understanding? And is this critique of AI justified?

Broadly speaking, there are two overlapping approaches that account for most of the work done in the field of AI since its inception in the 1950s – though, as I will argue, it is a third approach that is likelier to succeed. The first of the popular approaches may be termed algorithmic, where the focus is on procedure. This is grounded in the very formal and computational notion that the solution to every problem – even the very complicated problems solved by intelligence – requires a procedure, and if this procedure can be found, the problem would be solved. Given the algorithmic nature of computation, this view suggests that computers should be able to replicate intelligence.

Early work on AI was dominated by this approach. It also had a further commitment to the use of symbols as the carriers of information – presumably inspired by mathematics and language. This symbolic-algorithmic vision of AI produced a lot of work but limited success. In the 1990s, a very different approach came to the fore – though it had existed since the very beginning. This can be termed the pattern-recognition view, and it was fundamentally more empirical than the algorithmic approach. It was made possible by the development of methods that could lead a rather generally defined system to learn useful things from data, coming to recognize patterns and using this ability to accomplish intelligent tasks. The quintessential model for this are neural networks – distributed computational systems inspired by the brain. Read more »

Did an Historical Christ Exist

by now, does it matter?
time and myth have done their work: hope anoints
trying to get to the bottom of it would be like chipping Everest
with a balsa chisel and rubber mallet down to a grain of sand
or explaining to Icarus the practicality of an altimeter
—by the time you got anywhere
it’d be a moot point

all that’s left is faith
which is delicate
and shatters

Jim Culleny
12/26/15

by Emily Ogden

Blossom Dearie: incredibly, it was her legal name. The pianist and jazz singer was born Margrethe Blossom Dearie in 1924; all she had to do to get her stage name was to drop the Margrethe. The name perhaps overdetermines the voice. But you’ve got to hear the voice. Light and slim, with little to no vibrato, Dearie’s voice is ingenuous to such a degree that you begin to wonder whether it isn’t, in fact, the least ingenuous thing you have ever heard. It echoes with the four-square court—or was that the tomb? Imagine a sphinx posing her fatal riddle to Oedipus. Then ditch the immortal growl and try hearing, instead, a girl. That’s Dearie, singing her riddles of love and disaster. But unlike the sphinx, she wagers her own life, not other people’s. She knows the stakes, and still, that light, slim voice, with no vibrato, comes floating onto the air.

Hearing Dearie sing, you might find that innocence means something that it never meant before. We tend to think the innocent are young, and the jaded are old. Not so. The age we ought to calculate is not the questioner’s, but the world’s. The jaded think the world is in its adulthood, maybe even its senescence. An old world won’t change much. But a young world—now, such a world could change; it could metamorphose, even. The innocent think the world is young. Whatever they might have come to know about this life, and to their cost, they live as though there’s another world coming, right around the corner. It just hasn’t come as yet. The odds of change are bad, says Experience. They’re pretty good, says Innocence. Who’s making the better bet? Nobody knows. They’re only odds. Read more »

by Thomas O’Dwyer

As Valentine’s Day fades away and the world returns to slippery gender normality, many Western men may still have some nagging questions. What did I do wrong this time? What do women want? Are we still on trial here? Older men may mutter that the male half of the young population has changed from manly men into little boys lost. Well, they have no one to blame but themselves. After centuries of entitled domination, some loutish cockerels have come home to roost. If manhood is on trial, it is for the bad attitudes, and worse, which it has long meted out to the other half of the population. Women are revolting only because male behaviour has been so revolting.

Yet, female rebellion is neither as new nor as rare as one might imagine. Women have often risen up against that most macho of male hobbies – warfare. The most famous example was the sex strike in the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes. Led by Lysistrata, the women withhold sex from their husbands as a strategy to end the Peloponnesian War.

In a modern re-enactment in 2003, Leymah Gbowee and the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace organized protests that included a sex strike. They brought peace to Liberia after a 14-year civil war and won the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the country’s first woman president. (Ms. Gbowee won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize). Read more »

by Adele A Wilby

History has not always been fair to women: their contributions to history have been either marginalised or, not infrequently, unacknowledged. However, the three books, Nadine Akkerman’s (2018) Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth Century Britain, Nan Sloane’s (2018) The Women in the Room: Labour’s Forgotten History, and Cathy Newman’s (2018) Bloody Brilliant Women, are examples of excellent research and scholarship that documents many women’s contributions to historical events.

Akkerman’s Invisible Agents is ‘the first full-length study of women’s espionage in seventeenth century Britain…arguably the decades that witnessed a significant increase of female participation in the trade of confidential information.’ Indeed, Akkerman asserts that, ‘female spying activities were at the very heart of British international relations in the mid-seventeenth century’. Her book therefore, has significance for a wider understanding of just how far women were instrumental in shaping the politics of the time. Read more »

by Gabrielle C. Durham

A friend asked me to write a column about Russian cursing a few months ago. I do try to be accommodating, so I looked at several sites to get a better handle on it. In case you were not familiar, cursing in Russian is rich, much more calorically dense than most of what we have in English, except in the rarest cases of accomplished cussers. The problem for me is the translation; it would be so much more gratifying for you to read and imagine the vile torrents of insults than to read a lumpen approximation in English. Therefore, I decided to open up this column to the more universal topic of cursing.

What constitutes cursing? The intention I have in mind is not the imprecations hurled in movies at unsuspecting victims to drag down imminent posterity. No, I mean uttering profanities. Delicious four-letter words that got our knuckles rapped, our mouths washed out with soap, and led to smirking asides through our intentional and unintentional double entendres as teenagers. An excellent overview of dirty words, aka vulgarity, is the classic George Carlin bit on the seven dirty words. Read more »

by Christopher Bacas

“I don’t think everyone should have money. It shouldn’t be for everybody—you wouldn’t know who was important. How boring. Who would you gossip about? Who would you put down? Never that great feeling of somebody saying “Can I borrow twenty-five dollars” —Andy Warhol

It starts with the phone. On a nightstand, in the pocket, or ringing under a falling tree in that hypothetical forest. If they offer a gig, unless it’s on a sacred day, you take it. No, is the road less travelled, yes, an adventure. Not often the trailblazing kind. You may work for intrepid souls, but you’ll be chopping wood or carrying quarter notes.

I got a preparatory call. A pianist buddy sounded me about dates, explaining that Billy, a singer, had been off the scene for a while. He sold me on the band, a very strong lineup. The pay was above average, too. Billy called me in a few minutes. We hadn’t met and he never heard me play, but he piled up awkward compliments.

Billy was the son of diplomats, educated in the finest schools and an attorney. Past, present, future, he never once mentioned his own work. The first gigs were an education. We packed a sextet around a piano bar in the city’s fanciest hotel. Attending, high rollers and local television personalities. Joining us, duetting singers and jazz royalty. The duets weren’t rehearsed, a fact Billy aggressively promoted. The other singers were always so highly skilled and poised that his apologies came off as false modesty. The jazz greats were gracious. Billy also introduced any substitute players with the unsmiling caveat “I don’t know him. My pianist recommended him.” Read more »

by Max Sirak

Step-by-step, breath-by-breath, thought-by-thought, our feet carry us toward our future. (How Things Find Us, Kevin Dann)

All of our contact with the world starts with our feet… (Yoga Ranger Studio, Aprille Walker)

They are our vehicle. They move us in any direction we choose. They are the first impression we make. They are our calling card, hug, and handshake with the world.

They are our feet.

It Was A Day Like Any Other 

I needed a new pair of shoes. Need is the appropriate word. Despite my intellectual acceptance of impermanence, I think anything I buy should last forever. (See this shirt?  I bought it at a concert in high school.)

It’s also fair to note – sartorial excess isn’t a vice I embrace. For example, I own a single pair of jeans. When they begin to fall apart, I’ll get a new pair. This is the general way I approach my wardrobe.

So, as I was trying to tape my left shoe back together, it became apparent the time for patchwork fixes had come and gone. There was no re-attaching my sole.

It was time to discard the old that I might regard new.

My first instinct was to go online. It is, after all, 2019. I have the power to click buttons and make things appear, as if by magic, at my door. However, having been burnt once or twice (three times a lady?), I’m wary when it comes to ordering online the wears I wear. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

There are people living among us who have done terrible things to other human beings – murder and rape, for example – yet who nonetheless deserve society’s forgiveness. They have been convicted for their crimes and punished by the laws we collectively agreed such moral transgressions deserve. Now they deserve something other than punishment. They deserve to be treated with respect rather than resentment, contempt, and suspicion. They deserve a real chance to overcome their history and make something of their life.

I

When someone commits a morally terrible act against another that is a concern for the whole society rather than only the victim. Hence the institutions of police, courts and prisons administered by the state on behalf of the people. These systems are designed to discover the moral facts of each case: how bad the crime was, how responsible the perpetrator, and how much they deserve to be punished. This is important to make sure that we punish the people who do terrible things (and only those people), and also that we punish them to the degree that they deserve it and no more.

The last point is essential. We have a duty to punish the people who do bad things, but we have no right to punish them more than they deserve. For the same reason that it is wrongful to punish the wrong person for a crime, it is wrongful to punish the right person in the wrong way. This is why it is important for us to leave the judging to specialist institutions with the resources and authority to do it properly. When we try to do it ourselves we get mob justice – i.e. punishment only stops when those with the most extreme feelings about the case are satisfied.

In most developed countries the criminal justice system is trusted well enough to decide who is guilty and deserves punishment, i.e. who is a criminal. However, it seems that some people hold a lingering belief in their personal right to decide how much punishment criminals deserve to receive, and to inflict that privately if they have the chance. Thus, people with convictions for murder are routinely harassed and denied employment or access to opportunities like university education. Read more »

by Abigail Akavia

As was to be expected, artists are now calling to relocate the next Eurovision Song Contest, which is to be held in Israel in May. No less predictably, supporters are saying, more or less, “let’s leave politics out of it”. As if the Eurovision is nothing but a celebration of music, a friendly competition where sportsmanship is what counts above else. As if, indeed, athletic competitions have nothing to do with politics. The Eurovision has been described as the “Gay Olympics” or the “Gay World Cup.” The analogy brings to mind the controversies surrounding Russia’s hosting of the 2018 world cup games, despite the country’s well-documented violations of human rights. The example of Russia is telling, since there was quite a lot of criticism aimed at FIFA this summer, not for allowing Russia to host per se, but for failing to secure the games as a racism-free zone. In the 2014 Eurovision held in Copenhagen, the Russian representatives were loudly booed in response to Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea and its stance on gay rights. Like it or not, Eurovision participants are held as representatives of their nation, and are judged as such. Thus, even though Eurovision fans display a “playful nationalism” in their celebratory participation in the events, and often support not only their nation’s song but also the one they deem most worthy, the Eurovision remains an overt political arena where two issues are at stake: nationalism and queerness.

A local controversy surrounding one of the runner-ups to become Israel’s contestant to the Eurovision illuminates these two contexts and how they intersect. The next performer to represent Israel on the Eurovision Song Contest will be chosen in a pre-competition reality show called “The Next Star.” Since the competition began two and half months ago, one of the contestants has gained particular attention. Rotem Shefi, a Jewish Israeli singer, performs under the stage-persona of Shefita, an Arab diva, whose props include tacky gowns, heavy jewelry, a glittery walking-cane (yup), and, the most important in her toolbox, a thick Arabic accent. Shefi’s songs in the competition have so far been almost exclusively covers, remakes of rock and pop hits rendered in a non-specific Middle Eastern, pseudo-Arabic sound, performed in English. Despite some signs of unease, especially among one of the show’s judges, Shefita is consistently voted up, and is still presented as a likely contender to win and become Israel’s representative to the Eurovision. Read more »

by Samia Altaf

“Let’s go look at the flowers outside,” I say, as I sense Dad sinking into the recesses of his fading memory. I wheel him out. Look at the petunias. What a riot—purple, pink, white, that ordinary pedestrian flower in such abundant glory. I hold a bunch to his nose and he takes a deep breath. “Wow,” he says, and opens his eyes. The misty and faraway look hits me hard. It is like looking inside a bombed-out building that has few windows left intact and very little light. But he tries, never having been one to give up; he blinks shortsightedly at the greenery, the flowers, and the blue sky, and shakes his head at the wonder of it all—and of him being there in the middle of it. He struggles to say something but gives up halfway—words too have faded. “Wow,” he says again.

Dad has steadily and imperceptibly lost all memory to Alzheimer’s. Memories of his children, friends, family, his wife now gone. Only shards of crystallized knowledge—encoded so deeply—remain beyond the cognitive deterioration, He recognizes the simple beauty of flowers, they are still real. We look at the yellow rose bush, the petunias and the marigolds, this lovely spring evening. His face lights up. “Wow,” he says, over and over. And then: “I have these in my house” and “when will I go there?” He asks, a complete sentence, and looks anxiously at me, his brow scrunched with a look fit to break your heart. That he remembers—his house and the feeling of wanting to go there. One he had to leave when he and mom got to be too sick to live on their own. Do memories plague his ears, like flies?

“Do memories plague their ears like flies?

They shake their heads. Dusk brims the shadows.

Summer by summer all stole away,

The starting gates, the crowds and cries.”

(Philip Larkin)

Read more »