John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton

Dear Commons Community,

Two pioneers of artificial intelligence — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats for humanity.

Hinton, who is known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto, and Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.

“These two gentlemen were really the pioneers,” said Nobel physics committee member Mark Pearce.

The artificial neural networks — interconnected computer nodes inspired by neurons in the human brain — the researchers pioneered are used throughout science and medicine and “have also become part of our daily lives,” said Ellen Moons of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Hopfield, whose 1982 work laid the groundwork for Hinton’s, told The Associated Press, “I continue to be amazed by the impact it has had.”

Hinton predicted that AI will end up having a “huge influence” on civilization, bringing improvements in productivity and health care.

“It would be comparable with the Industrial Revolution,” he said in an open call with reporters and officials of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

“We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us. And it’s going to be wonderful in many respects,” Hinton said.

“But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”

Hinton, 76, helped develop a technique in the 1980s known as backpropagation instrumental in training machines how to “learn” by fine-tuning errors until they disappear. It’s similar to the way a student learns, with an initial solution graded and flaws identified and returned to be fixed and repaired. This process continues until the answer matches the network’s version of reality.

Hinton had an unconventional background as a psychologist who also dabbled in carpentry and was genuinely curious about how the mind works, said protege Nick Frosst, who was Hinton’s first hire at Google’s AI division in Toronto.

His “playfulness and genuine interest in answering fundamental questions I think is key to his success as a scientist,” Frosst said.

Nor did he stop at his pioneering 1980s work.

“He’s been consistently trying out crazy things and some of them work very well and some of them don’t,” Frosst said. “But they all have contributed to the success of the field and galvanized other researchers to try new things as well.”

Hinton’s team at the University of Toronto wowed peers by using a neural network to win the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition in 2012. That spawned a flurry of copycats and was “a very, very significant moment in hindsight and in the course of AI history,” said Stanford University computer scientist and ImageNet creator Fei-Fei Li.

“Many people consider that the birth of modern AI,” she said.

Hinton and fellow AI scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun won computer science’s top prize, the Turing Award, in 2019.

“For a long time, people thought what the three of us were doing was nonsense,” Hinton told the AP in 2019. “My message to young researchers is, don’t be put off if everyone tells you what you are doing is silly.”

Many of Hinton’s former students and collaborators followed him into the tech industry as it began capitalizing on AI innovations, and some started their own AI companies, including Frosst’s Cohere and ChatGPT maker OpenAI. Hinton said he uses machine learning tools in his daily life.

“Whenever I want to know the answer to anything, I just go and ask GPT-4,” Hinton said at the Nobel announcement. “I don’t totally trust it because it can hallucinate, but on almost everything it’s a not-very-good expert. And that’s very useful.”

Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Nobel committee said.

Just as Hinton came to the field from psychology, Hopfield stressed how cutting edge science comes from crossing the borders of scientific fields like physics, biology and chemistry instead of researchers staying in their lane. It’s why this prize is a physics prize, he said, pointing out that his neural network borrows from condensed matter physics.

With big complex problems in scientific fields, “if you are not motivated by physics, you just don’t tackle the class of problems,” Hopfield said.

While there’s no Nobel for computer science, Li said that awarding a traditional science prize to AI pioneers is significant and shows how boundaries between disciplines have blurred.

Congratulations to these winners!

Tony

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images and Brandon Bell/Getty Images.

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman yesterday explained why she believes former President Donald Trump trashed Detroit during an address in the city.

Republican presidential nominee Trump at the Detroit Economic Club leant into his divisive rhetoric once again when he fear mongered that the United States “will end up being like Detroit” if his Democratic rival Kamala Harris wins the 2024 election.

“The whole country’s going to be like — you want to know the truth?” he asked. “It’ll be like Detroit. Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president. You’re going to have a mess on your hands.”

CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Haberman, who has reported on Trump for years, just why the ex-president would do down the same place where he was speaking.

Haberman replied, “I think he was appealing to the people in that room who were a group of largely white businessmen, as I understand it. You could hear there was applause when he said the line.”

But Haberman acknowledged “this is going to appear in local news outside of that room and insulting the city that you are in, especially one with a large number of Black voters, is not usually a prescription that gets made for candidates.”

“We’ll see if it matters to him. He’s been saying things like this for a very long time about various communities that he goes into,” she continued. “It hasn’t always mattered but it can have a cumulative effect especially in races that are very tight.”

“It’s certainly not something that I think his advisers would have liked that he said. I think calling it a developing nation was something that you will see again used by opponents,” added Haberman.

Watch the video below.  The entire segment is interesting.  The part about Trump, Detroit, and Haberman appears at about the eight- minute mark.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The images coming out of Florida after Hurricane Milton made landfall are horrific. As reported by The Associated Press.

Hurricane Milton churned across Florida on Thursday after plowing into the state as a Category 3 storm, bringing misery to a coast still ravaged by Helene, pounding cities with winds of over 100 mph (160 kph) after producing a barrage of tornadoes, but sparing Tampa a direct hit.

The storm tracked to the south in the final hours and made landfall Wednesday night in Siesta Key near Sarasota (see video below), about 70 miles (112 kilometers) south of Tampa. The situation in the Tampa area was still a major emergency as St. Petersburg recorded over 16 inches (41 centimeters) of rain, prompting the National Weather Service to warn of flash flooding there as well as other parts of western and central Florida.

Tropicana Field, the home of the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team in St. Petersburg, appeared badly damaged. The fabric that serves as the domed stadium’s roof was ripped to shreds by the fierce winds. It was not immediately clear if there was damage inside. Multiple cranes were also toppled in the storm, the weather service said.

St. Petersburg residents also could no longer get water from their household taps because a water main break led the city to shut down service.

The storm knocked out power across a large section of Florida, with more than 3 million homes and businesses without power as of early Thursday, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks utility reports.

Before Milton even made landfall, tornadoes were touching down across the state. The Spanish Lakes Country Club near Fort Pierce, on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, was hit particularly hard, with homes destroyed and some residents killed.

“We have lost some life,” St. Lucie County Sheriff Keith Pearson told WPBF News, though he wouldn’t say how many people were killed.

About 125 homes were destroyed before the hurricane came ashore, many of them mobile homes in communities for senior citizens, said Kevin Guthrie, the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management.

About 90 minutes after making landfall, Milton was downgraded to a Category 2 storm. By early Thursday, the hurricane was a Category 1 storm with maximum sustained winds of about 85 mph (135 kph) as it moved offshore and was about 35 miles (55 kilometers) east of Orlando.

Heavy rains were also likely to cause flooding inland along rivers and lakes as Milton traverses the Florida Peninsula as a hurricane, eventually to emerge in the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday. It is expected to impact the heavily populated Orlando area.

The storm slammed into a region still reeling two weeks after Hurricane Helene flooded streets and homes in western Florida and left at least 230 people dead across the South. In many places along the coast, municipalities raced to collect and dispose of debris before Milton’s winds and storm surge could toss it around and compound any damage.

Officials had issued dire warnings to flee or face grim odds of survival.

“This is it, folks,” said Cathie Perkins, emergency management director in Pinellas County, which sits on the peninsula that forms Tampa Bay. “Those of you who were punched during Hurricane Helene, this is going to be a knockout. You need to get out, and you need to get out now.”

By late afternoon, some officials said the time had passed for such efforts, suggesting that people who stayed behind hunker down instead. By the evening, some counties announced they had suspended emergency services.

Jackie Curnick said she wrestled with her decision to stay aat home in Sarasota, just north of where the storm made landfall. But with a 2-year-old son and a baby girl due Oct. 29, Curnick and her husband thought it was for the best.

Curnick said they started packing Monday to evacuate, but they couldn’t find any available hotel rooms, and the few they came by were too expensive.

She said there were too many unanswered questions if they got in the car and left: Where to sleep, if they’d be able to fill up their gas tank, and if they could even find a safe route out of the state.

“The thing is it’s so difficult to evacuate in a peninsula,” she said. “In most other states, you can go in any direction to get out. In Florida there are only so many roads that take you north or south.”

At a news conference in Tallahassee, Gov. Ron DeSantis described deployment of a wide range of resources, including 9,000 National Guard members from Florida and other states; over 50,000 utility workers from as far as California; and highway patrol cars with sirens to escort gasoline tankers to replenish supplies so people could fill up their tanks before evacuating.

“Unfortunately, there will be fatalities. I don’t think there’s any way around that,” DeSantis said.

Heavy rain and tornadoes lashed parts of southern Florida starting Wednesday morning, with conditions deteriorating throughout the day. Six to 12 inches (15 to 31 centimeters) of rain, with up to 18 inches (46 centimeters) in some places, was expected well inland, bringing the risk of catastrophic flooding.

One twister touched down Wednesday morning in the lightly populated Everglades and crossed Interstate 75. Another apparent tornado touched down in Fort Myers, snapping tree limbs and tearing a gas station’s canopy to shreds.

Authorities issued mandatory evacuation orders across 15 Florida counties with a total population of about 7.2 million people. Officials warned that anyone staying behind must fend for themselves, because first responders were not expected to risk their lives attempting rescues at the height of the storm.

St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch told residents to expect long power outages and the possible shutdown of the sewer system.

In Charlotte Harbor, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Tampa, clouds swirled and winds gusted as Josh Parks packed his Kia sedan with clothes and other belongings. Two weeks ago, Helene’s surge brought about 5 feet (1.5 meters) of water to the neighborhood, and its streets remain filled with waterlogged furniture, torn-out drywall and other debris.

Parks, an auto technician, planned to flee to his daughter’s home inland and said his roommate already left.

“I told her to pack like you aren’t coming back,” he said.

By early afternoon, airlines had canceled about 1,900 flights. SeaWorld was closed all day Wednesday, and Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando shut down in the afternoon.

More than 60% of gas stations in Tampa and St. Petersburg were out of gas Wednesday afternoon, according to GasBuddy. DeSantis said the state’s overall supply was fine, and highway patrol officers were escorting tanker trucks to replenish the supply.

In the Tampa Bay area’s Gulfport, Christian Burke and his mother stayed put in their three-story concrete home overlooking the bay. Burke said his father designed this home with a Category 5 in mind — and now they’re going to test it.

As a passing police vehicle blared encouragement to evacuate, Burke acknowledged staying isn’t a good idea and said he’s “not laughing at this storm one bit.”

God help the people of Florida ravaged by Milton!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article this morning describing the takeover of Columbia College Hollywood by Arizona State University.  The Western Association of Schools and Colleges has given a critical review of the new venture.  Here is an excerpt from the The Chronicle article.

“Evidently reassured by double-digit enrollment growth coming out of California amid the Great Recession, ASU’s designs for greater market share in the Golden State have since come to extend well beyond traditional recruitment, and now feature targeted asset purchases of buildings and intellectual property, repeated six-figure lobbying campaigns in Sacramento, as well as the multi-million-dollar backing of a financially unstable California film school.

Though it’s not uncommon in this era of widening haves and have-nots for well-resourced public universities like ASU to absorb struggling colleges, in many cases private universities have simply proved more eager to land such takeover deals. Still, there are few, if any, precedents for ASU and how it has approached expansion inside and outside of Arizona.

“Los Angeles is a behemoth place with three research schools,” ASU President Michael Crow remarked to the Los Angeles Times in 2018 after ASU agreed to lease the city’s historic Herald Examiner building. “Who says that’s enough?”

But even the best-laid plans — including those designed and backed by a multibillion dollar mega-university in Tempe — can’t anticipate and neutralize the future uncertainty that can accompany expansion plans.

A little over a year removed from ASU’s takeover of Columbia College Hollywood — a long-beleaguered private nonprofit Southern California college since rechristened California College of ASU — its accreditor, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (Senior College and University Commission), in June reaffirmed its December 2023 warning about the college’s finances and ASU’s oversight of the institution….

At their site visit in March, WASC evaluators questioned CC-ASU’s ever-plummeting enrollments and shaky finances. The accrediting team’s harshest criticisms concerned repeated observations of apparent institutionwide dysfunction and poor leadership.

“Over the course of the visit it became increasingly apparent that the board has failed in its oversight of executive leadership to a degree that shared governance, trust, and effective information sharing has been deeply eroded,” WASC representatives wrote, citing several pieces of evidence, including:

• “The apparent unilateral hiring of the acting CEO by two board members;”
  ● The unplanned absence of said acting CEO during WASC’s site visit;
  ● A lack of clarity about the future of certain academic programs that had long been offered by Columbia College Hollywood and were taken over by ASU;
  ● A lack of engagement from high-level leadership on facility needs and usage.

“Change can be difficult,” James O’Brien, ASU’s senior vice president of university affairs, wrote. “The journey of California College has been complicated and it is now emerging into a new California institution of higher education in Downtown L.A. with a refreshed mission and a bright future.”

We wish ASU good luck with this venture!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump has had as many as seven private phone calls with Vladimir Putin since leaving office and secretly sent the Russian president COVID-19 test machines during the height of the pandemic, Bob Woodward reported in his new book, “War.”

The revelations were made in Woodward’s  latest book, is due out next week.  As reported by  The Associated Press.

Trump denied the reporting in an interview with ABC News’ Jonathan Karl. “He’s a storyteller. A bad one. And he’s lost his marbles,” Trump said of Woodward.

Trump had previously spoken to Woodward for the journalist’s 2021 book, “Rage.” Trump later sued over it, claiming Woodward never had permission to publicly release recordings of their interviews for the book. The publisher and Woodward denied his allegations.

Trump has had multiple calls with Putin since his White House term ended

Woodward reports that Trump asked an aide to leave his office at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, so that the former president could have a private call with Putin in early 2024. The aide, whom Woodward doesn’t name, said there have been multiple calls between Trump and Putin since Trump left office, perhaps as many as seven, according to the book, though it does not detail what they discussed.

Trump senior adviser and longtime aide Jason Miller told Woodward that he had not heard Trump was having calls with Putin and said, “I’d push back on that.” But Miller also said, according to the book, “I’m sure they’d know how to get in touch with each other.”

Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, said none of the stories in Woodward’s books are true. In a statement on Tuesday, he called them “the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Trump’s relationship with Putin has been scrutinized since his 2016 campaign for president, when he memorably called on Russia to find and make public missing emails deleted by Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said.

U.S. intelligence agencies later determined that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election to help Trump, though an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller found no conspiracy between the Trump team and Russia. In 2018, Trump publicly questioned that finding following an in-person meeting with Putin in Helsinki.

In recent years, Trump has criticized U.S. support for Ukraine as it fights off Russia’s invasion. He has said Ukraine should have made concessions to Putin before Russia invaded in 2022. He also previously touted his good relationship with Putin and called the Russian leader “pretty smart” for invading Ukraine.

Trump sent COVID-19 test machines to Putin for his personal use

Woodward reports that Trump sent Putin COVID-19 test machines for his personal use as the virus began spreading in 2020.

Putin told Trump not to tell anyone because people would be mad at Trump over it, but Trump said he didn’t care if anyone knew, according to the book. Trump ended up agreeing not to tell anyone.

The book doesn’t specify when the machines were sent but describes it as being when the virus spread rapidly through Russia. It was previously reported by The Associated Press and other agencies that Trump’s administration in May 2020 sent ventilators and other equipment to several countries, including Russia.

Vice President Kamala Harris, in an interview Tuesday with radio host Howard Stern, accused Trump of giving the machines to a “murderous dictator” at a time when “everyone was scrambling” to get tests.

“This person who wants to be president again, who secretly is helping out an an adversary while the American people are dying by the hundreds every day,” said Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate.

Trump and Putin are birds of a feather.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last evening, Elaine and I took a walk along the beach at Sconset on Nantucket. The surf, sky and dunes were all quite beautiful.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Chris Wallace bluntly said he had enough with Fox News’ “conspiracy” and “lies,” so he left for CNN in 2021. 

In a Mediaite interview released yesterday, the longtime anchor explained how he reached the tipping point at the conservative news channel after 18 years there (see video below).

Wallace said a “firewall” between Fox News anchors and its opinionated personalities crumbled during the 2020 presidential election. The network’s calling of Arizona, a swing state, in Joe Biden’s favor and the subsequent backlash and viewer defection it suffered changed the culture, he said.

The erosion continued as Fox News downplayed the Jan. 6 Capitol attack after amplifying Donald Trump and his allies’ false claims that the election was stolen.

“I saw a poll that said that 70% of Republicans did not think that Joe Biden is the legitimate president,” Wallace said. “That’s horrifying. When you talk about why did you leave and why was it unsustainable? I had no problem with conservative opinion any more than I do with liberal opinion. But what I do have a problem with is conspiracy, lies. The truth is non-negotiable. It’s not something that you can sit there and shade or in any way play with. And I saw way too much of that happening.”

Wallace, who was promoting his new book, “Countdown 1960: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the 312 Days that Changed America’s Politics Forever,” also expressed no sympathy whatsoever for his old network having to dish out $787 million to Dominion to settle a lawsuit after Fox News fraudulently claimed the company’s balloting machines were rigged against Trump.

“I viewed it as I’m glad to see that somebody is paying for playing with the truth,” he said. “And for very much breaking what I think is our almost sacred charter, which is to inform people, not to misinform people. To the degree that Fox was scared by the cost of calling Arizona correctly and people going to other more conservative outlets, there’s also a cost to lying and to misrepresenting. And I was happy to see that cost was being exacted.”

Fast-forward to 21:10 for many of Wallace’s comments about his Fox News tenure:

Wallace gave a more diplomatic take on his exit to The New York Times in 2022.

“I just no longer felt comfortable with the programming at Fox,” he said.

“When people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable,” he added.

The only person left at Fox who even tries to report the news honestly is Neil Cavuto. Bret Baier use to be honest but he joined the conspiracy of liars a few years ago.

Tony

Nobel Committee Secretary General Thomas Perlmann speaks to the media in front of a picture of this year’s laureates Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun during the announcement of the Nobel Prize in medicine winners.  Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

The 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to US scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their work on the discovery of microRNA, a molecule that governs how cells in the body function.

Their research revealed how genes, which contain the instruction manual for life, give rise to different types of cells within the human body, a process known as gene regulation.

The Nobel Prize committee announced the prestigious honor, seen as the pinnacle of scientific achievement, in Sweden on Monday. It praised the “groundbreaking discovery,” which the committee said “revealed an entirely new dimension to gene regulation.”

The discovery of gene regulation by microRNA – a family of molecules that helps cells control the sort of proteins they make that has been at work for hundreds of millions of years – was the result of decades of work by Ambros, a professor of natural science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Ruvkun, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.

“Their discovery… is of fundamental importance to understand how cells work, and thus how organisms develop,” said Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University. “This finding was groundbreaking, and has affected more or less all fields of biology and medicine,” he told CNN via email.

Congratulations to Professors Ambros and Ruvkun!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Elaine and I are spending a few days on Nantucket.  The weather has been great for October.

The photo above was taken last evening on the deck of the beach house where we are staying.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, had a piece yesterday commenting on the Vice Presidential Debate and specifically JD Vance’s performance.  Entitled, “JD Smirks His Way Into the Future“, she makes no bones about the fact that Vance was auditioning as the leader of the Republican Party after the 2024 election assuming Kamala Harris wins.  I saw the debate, and the same thought occurred to me. Vance was being Mr. Nice Guy to Tim Walz and to the TV audience, hoping they would forget his behavior as Trump’s running mate. Here is a excerpt.

“Unless you need to fake it to improve your favorability numbers — like Vance did in his debate against Tim Walz.

David Axelrod had predicted it would be a match between a Labrador retriever and a coyote. But there were two Labs onstage.

Vance’s performance was chilling. Once I thought Trump would be an aberration for Republicans. But on Tuesday night, I saw the future of the party and it was lies piled on lies, and darkness swallowing darkness.

Vance seemed like a replicant. There was no sign of the smarmy right-wing troll who said Harris “can go to hell” and told CNN’s Dana Bash that he created stories about migrants eating cats and dogs to dramatize a narrative that helps the Republican ticket. (A racist narrative.)

His views against abortion are adamantine and, until recently, he was an I.V.F. opponent. He has a bizarre, degrading view of the role of women in American society.

But on Tuesday night, he put on a mask of likability and empathy. “Christ have mercy, it is awful,” Vance said, looking down and shaking his head, when Walz told of his teenage son witnessing a shooting.

The chameleon brought back the JD Vance who was the darling of Hollywood, when “Hillbilly Elegy” was made into a movie, before he ambitiously code-switched into a Trumper. His wife, Usha, a debate adviser, helped him craft a persona that made him more palatable to women.

He was wily and deceptive in how he talked about abortion, stressing that women needed “options” and sending his love to an old friend who he said had had an abortion.

One woman in the CNN focus group was impressed with his empathy and talk of options, saying she was surprised and encouraged that Vance sounded so “progressive.”

But before the 40-year-old JD teamed up with the 78-year-old Donald, his abortion position was draconian. For women in the wrong states, the need to get an abortion is a terrifying prospect that could lead to death, if you are denied the proper treatment. And treatment is harder to get because doctors fear going to jail.

It’s remarkable, given Vance’s compassionate tone in his book, and his plea that the people of Appalachia be understood rather than ridiculed, how easily he morphed into someone with no compassion, stereotyping migrants and women.

After nearly 90 minutes of being lulled by Vance’s sham persona, Walz finally ripped his opponent’s mask off when Vance refused to say Trump lost the last election.

“Tim,” Vance protested, “I’m focused on the future.”

It was the truest thing Vance said in a night of lying about his own positions and mythical Trump achievements.

Vance was focused on the future — his own.”

Trump must have been mad as hell over Vance’s debate performance.

Tony