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Friday, October 5, 2007

The winners of the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize have been announced. The awards, given out every early October since 1991 by the Annals of Improbable Research, are a parody of the Nobel Prize, which are awards given out in several fields. The awards are given to achievements that, “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They were presented at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater.

Ten awards have been presented, each given to a different field. The winners are:

• Medicine: Brian Witcombe, of Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust, UK, and Dan Meyer, who studied the health consequences of sword swallowing.

• Physics: A team from the USA and Chile, who made a study about how cloth sheets become wrinkled.

• Biology: Dr Johanna van Bronswijk of the Netherlands, for carrying out a census of creatures that live in people’s beds.

• Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto, from Japan, for creating a method of extracting vanilla fragrance and flavouring from cow dung.

• Linguistics: A team from the University of Barcelona, who discovered that rats cannot tell the difference between Japanese and Dutch when spoken backwards.

• Literature: Glenda Browne of Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study on how the word “The” confuses people when they try to put things in alphabetical order.

• Peace: The US Air Force Wright Laboratory for trying to develop a “Gay bomb” that would turn enemy soldiers homosexual.

• Nutrition: Brian Wansink of Cornell University for his investigation into the limits of the human appetite, by using a self-refilling “bottomless” bowl of soup.

• Economics: Kuo Cheng Hsieh of Taiwan, for patenting a machine that catches bank robbers by dropping a net on top of them.

• Aviation: A team from the National University of Quilmes, Argentina, for discovering that impotency drugs can help hamsters recover from jet lag.

Thursday, August 4, 2005

In a speech in Texas on Wednesday, President George W. Bush discussed the trade deficit, saying:

“We had a problem in our hemisphere about trade. I don’t know if you realize it or not, but most of the goods from Central America came into this country duty-free. Yet eighty percent of our goods were taxed through tariffs in Central American countries. That didn’t seem to make sense to me; it certainly wasn’t fair. All I say to people is you treat us the way we treat you. If your goods can come into our markets duty-free, our goods ought to be able to go into your markets duty-free.”

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis International Economic Accounts Balance of Payments,

“The deficit on goods increased to $186.3 billion from $182.2 billion, as goods imports increased more than exports. More than half the increase in imports was in consumer goods. Much of the increase in exports was in industrial supplies and materials, inconsumer goods, and in capital goods.”

In the US, the DR-CAFTA (Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement, or simply CAFTA) bill passed by two votes. At present in contention is the Andean Free Trade Agreement.

“The House passed H.R. 304, to implement the Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement [CAFTA], by a recorded vote of 217 ayes to 215 noes, Roll No. 443.”

The bill passed by a slight majority in both the House and Senate.

President Bush met for lunch with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe at the Bush Ranch in Texas and communicated his desire for the future prosperity of a Colombia free of drug trafficking and violence.

Friday, April 11, 2008

The public consultation into the proposed wind farm in Avonmouth, Bristol, United Kingdom closed today. According to a video released by Bristol City Council the proposal was for two wind turbines to be produced to “help power local public services” and “reduce the council’s carbon footprint.”

The Energy Director of the Bristol City Council claimed in the promotional video that not reducing the carbon footprint would be a “failure in our [the council’s] duty to tackle climate change.” He also said that the council would face fines from the European Union if the targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are not met. In addition to this it was also claimed in the video that the amount of electricity used by the council needs to be reduced as they currently spend five million pounds per year for electricity. He finished by saying that one way the council can cut their greenhouse emissions is by producing their own “green electricity.”

Councillor Mark Bradshaw of the Bristol City Council was also featured in the video. He explained the proposals by saying that “we [the council] propose to build two wind farms on a former industrial site.”

Saturday, May 6, 2006

A four-year-old Indian boy from the eastern state of Orissa ran 65 kilometers (40 miles) continuously, setting an Indian record and possibly a world record as well.

Budhia Singh, a slum resident whose talent was discovered by a local coach, completed his run in seven hours and two minutes. Budhia had originally planned to run 43 miles, but doctors intervened at the 40-mile mark when he started showing signs of extreme exhaustion. 300 cadets from the Central Reserve Police Force, which plans to sponsor his upbringing, escorted Budhia, while thousands of onlookers cheered him on.

Officials from the Limca Book of Records, India’s best-known record book, witnessed the run and said that Budhia’s accomplishment would appear in the 2007 edition of the book.

Coach Biranchi Das says that he had seen Budhia’s talent when Budhia accidentally entered a sports field without permission. Das had the boy run laps as punishment, but after five hours the boy was still running.

Human rights groups in India decried the run, saying that government officials endangered Budhia’s life by allowing him to run in sweltering temperatures. “It is an act done so rashly or negligently to endanger human life or the personal safety of others as defined under section 336 of the Indian Penal Code,” said Suhas Chakma, director of the Asian Center for Human Rights.

Das said that doctors had examined the boy and found nothing wrong.

“I loved running today. I can run as much as I want,” Budhia said after the run.

Tuesday, October 4, 2005

Reliant Energy and CenterPoint Energy–two local utilities in Houston, Texas–plan to increase consumer rates in response to increased demand and recent disasters.

Reliant Energy is expected to raise rates to effect a 14% increase on a 1,000 kilowatt-hour bill. A typical customer could see an increase up to $20 per month. Reliant has reached an agreement with the Texas Public Utilities Commission to raise rates in two steps, once at the end of October, and again on 1 January 2006.

CenterPoint Energy must increase charges for services such as meter-reading and customer service. The Texas Public Utilities Commission prohibits natural gas companies from buying wholesale product, raising rates, and reselling. Wholesale prices of natural gas also continue to rise due to increased demand and declining domestic supply. Natural gas cannot be easily shipped to other regions like oil.

Consumer energy prices are expected to rise across the state, in some cases as much as 20%.

The Texas Public Utilities Commission must approve rate increases before they go into effect, but approval is expected.

Wednesday, November 30, 2005File:Turing1.jpg

More than 50 programmers, scientists, students, hobbyists and fans of the A.L.I.C.E. chat robot gathered in Guildford, U.K. on Friday to celebrate the tenth birthday of the award winning A.I. On hand was the founder the Loebner Prize, an annual Turing Test, designed to pick out the world’s most human computer according to an experiment laid out by the famous British mathematician Alan Turing more then 50 years ago. Along with A.L.I.C.E.’s chief programmer Dr. Richard S. Wallace, two other Loebner prize winners, Robby Garner and this year’s winner, Rollo Carpenter, also gave presentations, as did other finalists.

The University of Surrey venue was chosen, according to Dr. Wallace, not only because it was outside the U.S. (A.L.I.C.E.’s birthday fell on the Thanksgiving Day weekend holiday there, so he expected few people would attend a conference in America), but also because of its recently erected statue of Alan Turing, who posed the famous A. I. experiment which inspired much of the work on bots like A.L.I.C.E. University of Surrey Digital World Research Centre organizers Lynn and David Hamill were pleased to host the event because it encourages multi-disciplinary interaction, and because of the Centre’s interest in interaction between humans and computers.File:ALICE Birthday Cake.jpg

Dr. Wallace gave a keynote address outlining the history of A.L.I.C.E. and AIML. Many people commented on the fact the he seemed to have moved around a lot in the last ten years, having lived in New York, Pennsylvania, San Francisco, Maine, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, while working on the Alicebot project. The A.L.I.C.E. and AIML software is popular among chat robot enthusiats primarily because of its distribution under the GNU free software license. One of Dr. Wallace’s PowerPoint slides asked the question, “How do you make money from free software?” His answer: memberships, subscriptions, books, directories, syndicated ads, consulting, teaching, and something called the Superbot.

Rollo Carpenter gave a fascinating presentation on his learning bot Jabberwacky, reading from several sample conversations wherein the bot seemed amazingly humanlike. Unlike the free A.L.I.C.E. software, Carpenter uses a proprietary learning approach so that the bot actually mimics the personality of each individual chatter. The more people who chat with Jabberwacky, the better it becomes at this kind of mimicry.

In another interesting presentation, Dr. Hamill related present-day research on chat robots to earlier work on dialog analysis in telephone conversations. Phone calls have many similarities to the one-on-one chats that bots encounter on the web and in IM. Dr. Hamill also related our social expectations of bots to social class structure and how servants were expected to behave in Victorian England. He cited the famous Microsoft paperclip as the most egregius example of a bot that violated all the rules of a good servant’s behavior.

Bots have advanced a long way since philanthropist Hugh Loebner launched his controversial contest 15 years ago. His Turing Test contest, which offers an award of $100,000 for the first program to pass an “audio-visual” version of the game, also awards a bronze medal and $2000 every year for the “most human computer” according to a panel of judges. Huma Shah of the University of Westminster presented examples of bots used by large corporations to help sell furniture, provide the latest information about automotive products, and help customers open bank accounts. Several companies in the U.S. and Europe offer customized bot personalities for corporate web sites.

Even though Turing’s Test remains controversial, this group of enthusiastic developers seems determined to carry on the tradition and try to develop more and more human like chat bots.Hugh Loebner is dedicated to carry on his contest for the rest of his life, in spite of his critics. He hopes that a large enough constituency of winners will exist to keep the competition going well beyond his own lifetime. Dr. Wallace says, “Nobody has gotten rich from chat robots yet, but that doesn’t stop people from trying. There is such a thing as ‘bot fever’. For some people who meet a bot for the first time, it can pass the Turing Test for them, and they get very excited.”

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

In February 2017, the Iranian Chess Federation announced two teenage chess players, Dorsa Derakhshani and her younger brother Borna Derakhshani, were banned from representing the national team. The federation announced their decision although Dorsa Derakhshani had previously decided and informed the chess federation she did not wish to play for Iran.

Dorsa Derakhshani is currently 21 years old and holds the International Master (IM) as well as Woman Grand Master (WGM) titles. Her brother, Borna, plays for the English Federation and holds the FIDE Master title.

Dorsa Derakhshani was banned since she did not wear a hijab, an Islamic headscarf, while competing at the Tradewise Gibraltar Chess Festival in January 2017. Under the laws of Islamic Republic of Iran, hijab is a mandatory dress code. Her brother Borna Deraskhsani was banned for playing against Israeli Grand Master (GM) Alexander Huzman at the same tournament. Iran does not recognise the existence of Israel, and previously, Irani athletes have avoided playing against Israeli athletes.

Mehrdad Pahlavanzadeh, the president of the country’s chess federation, explained the decision to ban the players saying, “As a first step, these two will be denied entry to all tournaments taking place in Iran and in the name of Iran, they will no longer be allowed the opportunity to be present on the national team.” ^{((fa))Farsi language: ?????? ????? ?? ??? ??? ?? ??? ????? ?? ?? ???? ???????? ?? ?? ????? ? ?? ??? ????? ?????? ??????? ????? ??????? ? ???? ???? ???? ?? ??? ??? ?? ??????? ????.} He further stated, “Unfortunately, something that should not have happened has happened and our national interest is paramount and we have reported this position to the Ministry of Sports.” ^{((fa))Farsi language: ????????? ?????? ?? ????? ????????? ?????? ??? ? ????? ??? ?? ?? ?? ???? ?????? ???? ? ?? ??? ???? ?? ?? ????? ???? ?? ????? ?????.}

IM Dorsa Derakhshani, who currently studies at Saint Louis University in the United States and plays for the United States Chess Federation, discussed her chess career, time in Iran and the 2017 controversy, and her life in Saint Louis with a Wikinews correspondent.