What the fuck is up with that?

Words of wisdom.

Amazing.

Roboticists at the Ransselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York have built a trio of robots that were put through the classic 'wise men puzzle' test of self-awareness - and one of them passed.

In the puzzle, a fictional king is choosing a new advisor and gathers the three wisest people in the land. He promises the contest will be fair, then puts either a blue or white hat on each of their heads and tells them all that the first person to stand up and correctly deduce the colour of their own hat will become his new advisor.

Selmer Bringsjord set up a similar situation for the three robots - two were prevented from talking, then all three were asked which one was still able to speak. All attempt to say "I don't know", but only one succeeds - and when it hears its own voice, it understands that it was not silenced, saying "Sorry, I know now!"

However, as we can assume that all three robots were coded the same, technically, all three have passed this self-awareness test.

Human-like abilities

It might sound a pretty simple task for a human, but it's not for a robot - the bot must listen to and understand the question, then hear their own voice saying "I don't know" and recognise it as distinct from another robot's voice, then connect that with the original question to conclude that they hadn't been silenced.

Logical puzzles requiring an element of self-awareness like this are essential in building robots that can understand their role in society. By passing many tests of this type, it's hoped that robots will be able to build up a group of human-like abilities that become useful when combined.

Bringsjord's work will be presented at the RO-MAN conference in Japan, which runs from 31 August to 4 September 2015. Oh, you want the correct answer for the wise men puzzle? Well, the only fair contest would be if they were all the same colour!

And you have to fill out these policy gaps:

Taxation:
- A tax that should be raised: Consumption/sales tax.
- A tax that should be lowered: Income tax.
- A tax that should remain about the same: Gas tax (or environmental taxes for the UK)
- A new tax: A land value tax in urban areas.
- A tax that should be abolished: Corporate income tax.

Subsidies:
- A subsidy that should be raised: The Earned Income Tax credit.
- A subsidy that should be lowered: Mortgage interest/health insurance subsidy.
- A subsidy that should remain about the same: R&D tax credits.
- A new subsidy: Tax credits for private education.
- A subsidy that should be eliminated: Agricultural subsidies.

Area of expenditure:
- An expenditure category or program that should receive more funding: Probably R&D.
- An expenditure category or program that should receive less funding: The prison system.
- An expenditure category or program that is receiving about the right amount of funding: Defence.
- A new expenditure category or program: An nGDP futures market.
- An expenditure category or program that should be eliminated: NASA; transfer all funding to the NSF and eliminate funding for manned spaceflight out of Earth orbit.

I'm using "expenditure category or program" to be as broad as possible. "NASA" counts. "Defense" counts, as do subsets like "CIA" or "the F-35" or "$3,000 screwdrivers." "Health spending" counts, as do subsets of health like "Medicare" or "Medicare Part D" or "Medicare prescription drugs."

My own answers are mostly from a US perspective, since I'm more used to dealing with the American economy than any other.

Snopes currently lists it as "indeterminate".

fuck the eu

1. The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment

Basically, in early 2008, Oregon opened up a waiting list for its Medicaid programme to low-income adults who had previously failed to attain enrolment. 90,000 people applied for 10,000 openings, creating a beautiful natural experiment, allowing economists to study the effects of Medicaid coverage. Oregon used a lottery to allocate the places.

Four papers were eventually released enumerating the effects: the first studied self-reported health, healthcare utilisation and medical debt; the second dealt with clinical outcomes; the third with emergency department use; and the fourth with labour market outcomes.

The chief findings of these studies were that:

An increase in healthcare utilisation, namely though higher hospitalisation rates, emergency-dept. visits, outpatient visits, prescription drug use and and preventative-care use.

Decreased financial strain through fewer medical debts, and a virtual elimination of bank-breaking out-of-pocket payments.

Improved self-reported health and lower rates of depression, but no impact on actual physical health outcomes.

No effect on employment or earnings.

2. The effect of military service on lifetime earnings

Josh Angrist's PhD thesis tried to test how military service impacted people's lifetime earnings. This is notoriously difficult to measure, since certain personality traits which lead to people joining the army in the first place could also cause a propensity for lower earnings later in lifetime.

So Angrist used the draft during the Vietnam War as a natural element and analysed the results. He found that, among white men, serving in the army reduced lifetime income by 15pc.

3. The impact of the minimum wage in New Jersey's fast food industry

I'll just quote their abstract for this one: “On April 1, 1992, New Jersey's minimum wage rose from $4.25 to $5.05 per hour. To evaluate the impact of the law we surveyed 410 fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and [neighbouring] eastern Pennsylvania before and after the rise. Comparisons of employment growth at stores in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (where the minimum wage was constant) provide simple estimates of the effect of the higher minimum wage”.

4. The impact of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic on the post-1940 US population

Douglas Almond sought to test the Barker hypothesis, which claims that a foetus's prenatal environment may have an impact on their health decades into their life. During the time that Spanish Flu impacted the US, 33pc of all women of childbearing age contracted it.

Using U.S. Census data collected in 1960, 1970 and 1980 which identifies the individuals’ place and time of birth, Almond found that individuals who were in utero during the pandemic had, on average, increased rates of physical disability (pictured below), reduced educational attainment, and lower income and socioeconomic status.

5. The effect of Ramadan on children in utero

Another one from Almond. During Ramadan, there is a high compliance rate among pregnant Muslims, despite the fact that many Islamic scholars claim Ramadan is not obligatory for such women. Conducting a study on children aged 7, Almond found that children whose pregnancies overlapped with Ramadan performed worse in maths, reading and writing. The effects were most significant among children whose first three months of gestation overlapped with Ramadan.

6. The effects of the 1944-45 Dutch famine on children in utero

Official rations in occupied Netherlands during this period dropped to as low as 500 calories a day, and 20,000 people died of starvation. The west of the country was harshly effected, while the north and south escaped the worst of it. This allowed researches to study the effects of famine on prenatal development; the results were higher rates of diabetes, schizophrenia and obesity in later life.

7. The impact of mass immigration on Miami's labour market

Most economists agree that the average American would be better off if more low- and high-skilled immigrants were allowed to move into the US, but this faces considerable popular push-back in the US and Europe. David Card analysed the effects of the Mariel Boatlift, wherein 125,000 Cubans arrived in the US between April and September 1980.

This caused the Miami labour force to grow by 7pc, and yet Card found that this large increase in unskilled labour didn't impact the employment prospect or earnings of native unskilled labour in the Miami area.

8. The effect of class sizes on performance in Israel

Joshua Angrist returns, and this time he's studying the effects of an 800-year-old Israeli law. The rule is derived from the teachings of Maimonides, who said: "Twenty-five children may be put in charge of one teacher. If the number in the class exceeds twenty-five but is not more than forty, he should have an assistant to help with the instruction. If there are more than forty, two teachers must be appointed." A strict application of this rule would mean that a school with eighty students would have two classes of forty, while a school of eighty-one would have three classes of twenty-seven.

This has created sharp discontinuities in Israeli class size, so Angrist used this to study the effects of class size on performance. He found that reductions in class size improved maths and reading scores for fifth graders, improved reading scores for fourth graders and had no effect on third graders.

9. The impact of MTV's "16 and pregnant" on teenage pregnancy

Phillip Levine and Melissa Kearney drew on Google and Twitter trends, and found that searches and tweets about birth control and abortion spiked when the show was being aired and in areas where it was popular. They found that the show resulted in a 5.7pc reduction in teen pregnancies between June 2009 and the end of 2010, which can account for 33pc of the total reduction in teen pregnancy during this period.

Turns out they weren't actually fined for refusing to make the cake.

One of the major points that supporters of Sweet Cakes bakery and their right to not bake cakes for lesbian weddings have made is the fact that a $135,000 seems like a really steep seeming fine for just refusing to make a wedding cake. Even if it’s because you’re a weird bigot.

Certainly, DJ Tanner was all kinds of upset about that on “The View” this week. Here’s a refresher in case you didn’t see, or if you just want to see Raven Symone’s glorious side-eye again.

But guess what! As it turns out, the Sweet Cakes bakery people are not actually being fined because they loved Jesus too much to bake a lesbian wedding cake.

You see, when Laurel Bowman-Cryer first filed her complaint in 2013, she filed it on her Smartphone, and thus did not see the disclaimer that the complaint–along with her name, phone number and address–would be released to the owners of Sweet Cakes bakery. It was, and as soon as he received it, the very holy owner, Aaron Klein, posted the complaint to his Facebook page. Without her phone number and address blurred out.

Apparently they were fined for revealing personal information.

Bearing in mind I have no idea how reliable "the Frisky" is, and the original article I saw claiming this was from Addicting Info. . .

So, yeah, pinch of salt. If anybody can find a more reputable source, that'd be appreciated.

The WaPo is rejecting this explanation, however, claiming that the Commissioner "expressly rejected this theory of liability".

MUH CONSENT

http://clinton3.nara.gov/WH/EOP/First_Lady/html/generalspeeches/1998/19981117.html

Or, at least, that's what Clinton thinks.

According to a recent NASA study

There’s been much debate these past few years over the cause of the so-called global warming “hiatus”—a pause in the overall uptick up of Earth’s temperature due to cooling at the surface of the Pacific Ocean since the early 2000s. Did climate warming stop? Nope, we just weren’t looking deep enough.

Earth’s extra heat, you see, has spent the last 10 years sinking into the vast depths of the equatorial Pacific and Indian Oceans.

That’s the conclusion of a new study, conducted by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and published today in the journal Science. The study, which examines two decades of observational data, offers the most definitive evidence to date that Earth’s largest ocean has been massively redistributing heat since 2003. Specifically, cooling in the top 100 meter layer of the Pacific Ocean has been compensated by warming in the 100 to 300 meter layer of both the Pacific and Indian Oceans, which together cover over 40% of our planet’s surface.

The global average ocean surface temperature has been rising since 2003 by +0.001ºC per year, according to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That temperature rise is notably slower than century-timescale warming of +0.006ºC per year since 1880. For the last few years, climate scientists have been trying to understand whether the hiatus was the result of a redistribution of heat within the ocean, or less overall heat uptake at the ocean’s surface.

Over the last few years, a likely scenario has begun to emerge. Modeling studies show that the cooling of the surface of the Pacific is probably being balanced by more rapid warming in deeper parts of the Atlantic or the Pacific. What’s more, a recent paper in Nature Climate Change used observational data and models to demonstrate increased heat transport from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean over the last decade. Clearly, the pathways by which Earth’s oceans process heat seem to be changing.

The new study, however, is the first to include a comprehensive analysis of real-world data from the past two decades. Similarly to modeling efforts, the researchers’ findings point to a redistribution of heat from the surface to the deep ocean. Taken together, however, Earth’s oceans and atmosphere have continued to absorb heat at the same overall rate since 2003:

Quote

Observational estimates provide a more accurate means of assessing oceanic temperature changes and show clear decadal signals that are robust across different analyses and clearly significant relative to observational errors. Our findings support the idea that the Indo-Pacific interaction in the upper-level water (0-300 m depth) regulated global surface temperature over the past two decades and can fully account for the recently observed hiatus. Furthermore, as previously shown for interannual fluctuations, the decade long hiatus that began in 2003 is the result of a redistribution of heat within the ocean, rather than a change in the net warming rate.

The scientific debate over global warming ended a long time ago. Misconceptions about the “hiatus,” however, have continued to add fuel to the woefully unscientific political debate that still rages in the halls of Congress. Hopefully, with this particular riddle now solved, again, we can all move on to the real task of reducing our fossil fuel emissions and preparing for a hotter future.

Well, fuck me.

Preferably without a steep learning curve. Need to beef up on the numbers before I take econ at university.

Stuff on calculus, differential equations, algebra, probability theory, stochastic processes and topology would be very welcome. I also have a textbook on the way, dealing with mathematics in economics specifically so I have some kind of foundation to base my development on.

And don't send me to fucking Khan Academy either, you lazy cunts.

Due to her being a long-time sufferer of suicidal depression.

I really, really don't know what to think of this.

Apparently Tsipras was expecting a Syriza failure in the referendum.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at The Telegraph has just dropped a bomb on the situation in Greece.
Writing in The Telegraph on Tuesday, Evans-Pritchard reports that the Greek referendum unexpectedly called Friday and carried out Sunday was held in anticipation that Greece's controlling Syriza government would lose.

That's right: Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called a referendum on the latest bailout terms offered to Greece, campaigned that the Greek voters should vote "no" and reject these measures, and expected the vote would still be a "yes."

Instead the vote was an overwhelming "no," with 61% of the votes going that way and Syriza seeming to have won a huge victory.

But as Evans-Pritchard outlines in his bombshell report Tuesday, everything is falling apart for Syriza, Tsipras, and the entire country of Greece.

"What should have been a celebration on Sunday night turned into a wake," Evans-Pritchard writes.

"Mr Tsipras was depressed, dissecting all the errors that Syriza has made since taking power in January, talking into the early hours. The prime minister was reportedly told that the time had come to choose, either he should seize on the momentum of the 61pc landslide vote, and take the fight to the Eurogroup, or yield to the creditor demands — and give up the volatile [Greek Finance Minister Yanis] Varoufakis in the process as a token of good faith."
Varoufakis resigned in the middle of the night Sunday, and news broke that Tsipras and Varoufakis' replacement — Euclid Tsakalotos — would head to Brussels for an emergency meeting on Tuesday.

When they showed up at the meeting Tuesday, they didn't have a plan.

A report from Reuters on Tuesday indicated that Greece's banks had only two days of cash left. And this after ATM withdrawals had been limited to 60 euros per day for over a week.

On Monday, the European Central Bank declined to increase its emergency lending assistance to Greece, meaning that Greek banks will not have access to any more cash from the ECB. Greece last week, and again Monday, had requested an increase in the ELA.

As Evans-Pritchard reports, "Syriza has been in utter disarray for 36 hours ... Events are now spinning out of control. The banks remain shut. The ECB has maintained its liquidity freeze, and through its inaction is asphyxiating the banking system."

Reports on Monday also indicated that Greek banks would be closed at least through Wednesday, but now it looks as if the bigger question is how the banks will reopen at all.
When results of Greece's referendum came in, Wall Street banks were nearly unanimous in saying that the most likely scenario for Greece was an exit, or "Grexit," from the euro.

According to Evans-Pritchard's report, Tsipras rejected a "triple plan" devised ahead of the referendum that aimed to avoid a Grexit by firing the Bank of Greece governor, seizing all cash stowed away in various central bank branches, and issuing a parallel currency with IOUs denominated in euros.

Something like this plan, however, is what Tsipras may have to do anyway, according to Evans-Pritchard, as Greece has quickly run out of options.

The latest headlines out of Europe indicate that all 28 European Union members — not just the 19 members of the eurozone — will convene for a summit this Sunday.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi told Reuters on Tuesday that he was "not pessimistic" about this meeting, believing that a deal could be reached and this would be the final meeting on the issue.

Renzi added, however, that it was up to Greece to come up with a plan.