1. Is Japan suffering from a ninja shortage?
3. Is China on the cutting edge of AI? (NYT)
5. Cyprus reunification talks have collapsed. As I’ve said before, the relative absence of size-expanding political unions is a significant feature of our time, reflecting the power of vested interests and the inability to see through major changes.
Turks should leave Cyrpus–they have zero claim.
Cyprus is a legitimate part of Turkey.
Coincidence? Is the EU also hemming-and-hawing over admitting Turkey?
Of size-expanding unions: On 29 May 1453 (not sure of the date is adjusted for the switch from Julian to Gregorian calendar), Constantinople fell to the uber aggressive Turk.
From a 1999 Economist article. “Byzantine Empire, denuded of its lands, was dependent on Italian allies; it had suffered the flight of Greek scholars (particularly brilliant in Byzantium’s final years) to Italy, where they helped to stimulate the Renaissance.
“Hundreds of years of wars in south-eastern Europe: Austro-Hungarian vs. Ottoman empires. The Turks besieged Vienna in 1683 and in the 130 years after were repeatedly at war with Russia or Austria. They held southern Greece until 1832, today’s Bulgaria, Romania, Bosnia and nominally Serbia until 1878, the lands south of these down to liberated Greece until 1913. Hence the Muslim pockets—Albania, Bosnia—that for most Europeans today are the only reminder that the country they see as a source of cheap, resented, migrant labour was once a mighty power in Europe.
“But a part of Europe? Allied with Germany in the first world war, and therefore stripped of their remaining Middle Eastern empire, the Turks by 1922 were strong enough again to drive Greece’s troops, and centuries of Greek society, from Anatolia. Old enmities were resharpened by the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus in 1974. If the European Union still hesitates, despite Turkey’s decades inside NATO, about its wish for EU membership too, the real reasons lie centuries deep; not least in 1453.”
“On 29 May 1453 (not sure of the date is adjusted for the switch from Julian to Gregorian calendar), Constantinople fell to the uber aggressive Turk.”
Remember Othelo!
My initial reaction to #3 was: “what are they talking about? Companies across the US are spending like mad on AI and there have been some great successes in the last year, AlphaGo being the one that comes most readily to mind.” But then the purpose of the article was revealed in the 8th paragraph, it was a screed against the current administration. Well played NY Times, perfect click bait.
Fortunately, Tyler was courteous enough to note the destination in his link (NYT), so I knew it was politically motivated lies already and didn’t bother to click.
Still cuckservatives like me half believe it, Wink!
2. “So there’s people who sell to global markets and become very rich. ”
Is this really true? Looks to me like the fastest growing industries are those which are more likely to sell to an American market, finance, insurance, healthcare, credentials, and the military-industrial complex.(The tech industry is an exception.) Mostly, the pattern is the richest Americans get richer, no matter what industry they work in, no matter what the market is.
#1 All countries are suffering from a ninja shortage.
#2. That’s one of the reasons I don’t watch PBS anymore.
Why would you work to ‘reunify’ Cyprus? (Except perhaps to allow travel between the two halves of the island). The political institutions meant to provide cross-ethnic co-operation broke down after 3 years or so (and were cumbersome in any case).
It’s almost as if Cypriots might believe that diversity wouldn’t be their strength.
And it just might be that the Scots will look at sharing their island with the English in much the same way.
And the English people I know already look at sharing their government with the Scots that way. Good riddance to bad rubbish is the prevailing sentiment, I think.
If only it wasn’t for that whole effort to keep the UK the UK, spearheaded by the Conservatives – ‘Theresa May will block a second independence referendum if the Conservatives win the general election unless there is “public consent” for rerun, according to their general election manifesto.
The Tory blueprint signalled that another vote will not take for several years by stating it would not be permitted until both the “Brexit process has played out” and the Scottish people want one.
In a direct attack on Nicola Sturgeon, the manifesto said the demand for the referendum came from those who “would disrupt our attempts to get the best deal for Scotland and the United Kingdom” in talks with the EU.
Instead it argued that all parts of the UK should “pull together” during the two-year negotiations and raised the prospect of a swathe of new powers repatriated from Brussels being devolved to Edinburgh.
Unlike the Tories’ 2015 manifesto, the party’s 2017 manifesto repeatedly stresses the party’s full name – “The Conservative and Unionist Party” – throughout the document.’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/18/tory-manifesto-no-scottish-independence-referendum-without-public/
Wayward road, ankles of David’s bronze steal, the Prince of Harvard, killed a wanderlust goliath with Pele’s firegodess, screaming vocal javelins
1. Maybe the ninja’s are there, but they are just very good at hiding.
Exactly, the last ninja is just the most recent you have found.
There’s nothing to worry about when there are many ninja’s. Its always the last one standing that is death incarnate.
Ooooh, Franco Nero…
2. At the tail end: “understanding the consequences of trying to remove all of the risk from our lives.” Yes!
Look at the IRB problem we discussed in your post of a day or two ago. The moment there is one iota of hypothetical risk there has to be a committee, there has to be a proposal, which gets reviewed, approved or not, and not to worry – the committee will be “reasonable”, “look at what happened in the sixties with Milgram!”, etc etc…
3. If not they soon will be.
That shouldn’t be a surprise.
Last fall the Washington Post ran a similar article but went further: “China has now eclipsed us in A.I. research.” That is news to me. But the basis of this claim is that Chinese journals had 80 articles on deep learning with at least one citation in 2015 as opposed to the American journals with 70 articles. I don’t know about Chinese articles but the American ones include a lot of Japanese, Chinese and European researchers.
This the bad conclusion:
“The government is pushing for a major role for itself in AI research, and here’s why: Becoming a leader in artificial-intelligence research and development puts the United States in a better position to establish global norms on how AI should be used safely. When AI stands to transform virtually everything including labor, the environment, and the future of warfare and cyber conflict, the United States could be put at a disadvantage if other countries, such as China, get to dictate terms instead.”
No, China will not be dictating terms for A.I. use.
The A.I will….
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/10/13/china-has-now-eclipsed-us-in-ai-research/?utm_term=.b26aedab42da
But it will be an A.I. with Chinese characteristics.
Why do you think they will be? This is a country that cannot build a helicopter on its own. Its new airliner was largely designed and built by foreign countries. They have to buy airplanes from Russia because even their attempts to steal the technology from previous planes they bought from Russia failed.
You have no idea what a wasteland Chinese universities are until you spend some time with them or read what the publish.
There is essentially no chance China is going to lead the world in anything to do with computers within my lifetime.
From what I read as far back as ten years ago, Chinese engineers became much better in the 1990s while they were looked down on before that. There are a *lot* of Chinese in STEM and the best study in the U.S., get their advanced degrees, and go back to work in China.
Oh, China has the fastest super computer in the world with new rankings out in June:
Wired magazine: “On that basis alone, TaihuLight is a singular accomplishment. Its 10.6 million cores are more than three times the previous leader, China’s Tianhe-2, and nearly 20 times the fastest U.S. supercomputer, Titan, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “It’s running very high rates of execution speed, very good efficiency, and very good power efficiency,” says University of Tennessee computer scientist Jack Dongarra. “It’s really quite impressive.”
Chinese students are trained from an early age to agree with anything the teacher says. Whatever it is. If you don’t, you won’t become a post-graduate student. If you do not continue to agree with your supervisor – no matter what he says or does – you will not become a post-doc. If you do not continue to abase yourself, you will not become a junior academic. Then finally you get to bully your own students. By the time you are old enough to have a lab with your own post-graduates, you are too old to think anything new. Chinese education is entirely external. Students are not expected to understand anything. They are expected to remember large chunks of text – regardless of meaning – and to vomit it up in an exam.
Of course American universities like them. They pay. In cash. And they all agree, in public, that their teachers are the greatest, the smartest, the most correct, geniuses in the world.
That a Chinese company can rip of DEC and solder 40,000 of their chips together is not proof of much. Certainly not China’s lead in the world of computing.
My point was mostly that Chinese engineers, on the whole, have become increasingly competitive since the days in the late 20th century when they were inexpensive to higher but as the joke went, “You get what you pay for.”
5. What’s the problem with re-uniting Virginia and West Virginia? Why should the population of Little Diomede and Big Diomede Islands be citizens of two different countries?
Interesting to see Tyler report that an inspiration for his Complacent Class was hearing Chinese commenting on the US being “sleepy.” This raises interesting points, at least one of which I have been pounding away on for some time, but let me come at it slightly differently given dragging China into it.
So there is a serious endogeneity problem here. Is “complacency” causing slow growth or is slow growth causing “complacency.” Again, of course, Tyler and fans of this id complacency as not moving or changing jobs or engaging in lots of startups. Some of us, at least me and Noah Smith, think a major factor is that slow growth, especially the Great Depression, has scared people. They are not at all complacent, they are scared and trying to hang on to what they have got. Now indeed that does feed into more slow growth, but it is fear, not complacency, that is behind it.
Compare this to China. They have been growing very rapidly for quite some time, with much of this due to something completely separate from social attitudes. They have been enjoying Gerschenkronian catchup from a far behind position. Japan did that as well, growing at more than 10% per year during the 50s and 60s, only to slow down as they caught up to the leading edge, the US and some others. China is also beginning to show some slow down now as it has clearly gotten well into the middle ranks on per capita income, although it is still growing much more rapidly than the US or Japan or Singapore, nations at the front edge. So this experience has individual Chinese not feeling afraid but feeling confident. They can go out and try things and, wow, they end up much better off.
I have seen this personally from Chinese I know. Now this is certainly a peculiar subset, mostly academics and mostly academic economists or physicists. But I know quite a few who have had dramatic improvements in their living standards in their lives, moving from rural villages with no indoor toilets or running water to being wealthier than I am, at least on paper, due to owning apartments in places like Beijing or Shanghai, even though I think my actual material standard of living is better than theirs. But those apartments they bought a decade or more ago are now worth millions of dollars, even if they are not all that big. But the fact is that current Chinese have experienced a dramatically growing economy, which feeds into optimism about possible outcomes of trying new things, optimism that is much more lacking in the US where we have had stagnations, lots of people getting laid off, and many young people who think they are going to be materially worse off than their parents, and so on.
Galileo?
Today feels a bit dangerous.
1. A ninja show would be fantastic. A stealthy Cirque du Soleil all in black.They should go on tour.
4. Vlad sits in a cave and watches over bats and snakes. Cold blooded indeed.
6. Birds of prey and drones. All the food takeout and Amazon packages they can snag.
7. Was that the ultimate goal of gender equality? They should have included that in the initiation packet. More men might have signed on.
1. The problem is supply and demand! at the current salary (approx USD $1600 per month) there is a shortage. But I’m sure if they paid a better wage the quantity supplied would increase. The Bujinkan school is doing quite well (I am a member) and several of my friends would consider doing it professionally were the wages higher.
#7: For crying out loud, why do we care about this kind of stuff? Also, who participates in this kind of study? Can you imagine justifying funding to do this? Can you imagine being approach as a participant? I find these studies the clearest expression of our insanity that life is just a game we can control