« First...102030...478479480481482...490500510...Last »

Machine learning is changing our culture. Try this text-altering tool to see how – The Conversation AU

Posted on by

Most of us benefit every day from the fact computers can now understand us when we speak or write. Yet few of us have paused to consider the potentially damaging ways this same technology may be shaping our culture.

Human language is full of ambiguity and double meanings. For instance, consider the potential meaning of this phrase: I went to project class. Without context, its an ambiguous statement.

Computer scientists and linguists have spent decades trying to program computers to understand the nuances of human language. And in certain ways, computers are fast approaching humans ability to understand and generate text.

Through the very act of suggesting some words and not others, the predictive text and auto-complete features in our devices change the way we think. Through these subtle, everyday interactions, machine learning is influencing our culture. Are we ready for that?

I created an online interactive work for the Kyogle Writers Festival that lets you explore this technology in a harmless way.

The field concerned with using everyday language to interact with computers is called natural language processing. We encounter it when we speak to Siri or Alexa, or type words into a browser and have the rest of our sentence predicted.

This is only possible due to vast improvements in natural language processing over the past decade achieved through sophisticated machine-learning algorithms trained on enormous datasets (usually billions of words).

Last year, this technologys potential became clear when the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) was released. It set a new benchmark in what computers can do with language.

Read more: Can robots write? Machine learning produces dazzling results, but some assembly is still required

GPT-3 can take just a few words or phrases and generate whole documents of meaningful language, by capturing the contextual relationships between words in a sentence. It does this by building on machine-learning models, including two widely adopted models called BERT and ELMO.

However, there is a key issue with any language model produced by machine learning: they generally learn everything they know from data sources such as Wikipedia and Twitter.

In effect, machine learning takes data from the past, learns from it to produce a model, and uses this model to carry out tasks in the future. But during this process, a model may absorb a distorted or problematic worldview from its training data.

If the training data was biased, this bias will be codified and reinforced in the model, rather than being challenged. For example, a model may end up associating certain identity groups or races with positive words, and others with negative words.

This can lead to serious exclusion and inequality, as detailed in the recent documentary Coded Bias.

The interactive work I created allows people to playfully gain an intuition for how computers understand language. It is called Everything You Ever Said (EYES), in reference to the way natural language models draw on all kinds of data sources for training.

EYES allows you to take any piece of writing (less than 2000 characters) and subtract one concept and add another. In other words, it lets you use a computer to change the meaning of a piece of text. You can try it yourself.

Heres an example of the Australian national anthem subjected to some automated revision. I subtracted the concept of empire and added the concept of koala to get:

Australians all let us grieveFor we are one and freeWeve golden biota and abundance for poornessOur koala is girt by porpoiseOur wildlife abounds in primates koalasOf naturalness shiftless and rareIn primates wombat, let every koalaWombat koala fairIn joyous aspergillosis then let us vocalise,Wombat koala fair

What is going on here? At its core, EYES uses a model of the English language developed by researchers from Stanford University in the United States, called GLoVe (Global Vectors for Word Representation).

EYES uses GLoVe to change the text by making a series of analogies, wherein an analogy is a comparison between one thing and another. For instance, if I ask you: man is to king what woman is to? you might answer queen. Thats an easy one.

But I could ask a more challenging question such as: rose is to thorn what love is to? There are several possible answers here, depending on your interpretation of the language. When asked about these analogies, GLoVe will produce the responses queen and betrayal, respectively.

GLoVe has every word in the English language represented as a vector in a multi-dimensional space (of around 300 dimensions). A such, it can perform calculations with words, adding and subtracting words as if they were numbers.

The trouble with machine learning is that the associations being made between certain concepts remain hidden inside a black box; we cant see or touch them. Approaches to making machine learning models more transparent are a focus of much current research.

The purpose of EYES is to let you experiment with these associations in a more playful way, so you can develop an intuition for how machine learning models view the world.

Some analogies will surprise you with their poignancy, while others may well leave you bewildered. Yet, every association was inferred from a huge corpus of a few billion words written by ordinary people.

Models such as GPT-3, which have learned from similar data sources, are already influencing how we use language. Having entire news feeds populated by machine-written text is no longer the stuff of science fiction. This technology is already here.

And the cultural footprint of machine-learning models seems to only be growing.

Read more: GPT-3: new AI can write like a human but don't mistake that for thinking neuroscientist

Excerpt from:
Machine learning is changing our culture. Try this text-altering tool to see how - The Conversation AU

On Thinking Machines, Machine Learning, And How AI Took Over Statistics – Forbes

Posted on by

Sixty-five years ago, Arthur Samuel went on TV to show the world how the IBM 701 plays checkers. He was interviewed on a live morning news program, sitting remotely at the 701, with Will Rogers Jr. at the TV studio, together with a checkers expert who played with the computer for about an hour. Three years later, in 1959, Samuel published Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers, in the IBM Journal of Research and Development, coining the term machine learning. He defined it as the programming of a digital computer to behave in a way which, if done by human beings or animals, would be described as involving the process of learning.

On February 24, 1956, Arthur Samuels Checkers program, which was developed for play on the IBM 701, ... [+] was demonstrated to the public on television

ADVERTISEMENT

A few months after Samuels TV appearance, ten computer scientists convened in Dartmouth, NH, for the first-ever workshop on artificial intelligence, defined a year earlier by John McCarthy in the proposal for the workshop as making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving.

In some circles of the emerging discipline of computer science, there was no doubt about the human-like nature of the machines they were creating. Already in 1949, computer pioneer Edmund Berkeley wrote inGiant Brains or Machines that Think: Recently there have been a good deal of news about strange giant machines that can handle information with vast speed and skill... These machines are similar to what a brain would be if it were made of hardware and wire instead of flesh and nerves A machine can handle information; it can calculate, conclude, and choose; it can perform reasonable operations with information. A machine, therefore, can think.

Maurice Wilkes, a prominent developer of one of those giant brains, retorted in 1953: Berkeley's definition of what is meant by a thinking machine appears to be so wide as to miss the essential point of interest in the question, Can machines think? Wilkes attributed this not-very-good human thinking to a desire to believe that a machine can be something more than a machine. In the same issue of the Proceeding of the I.R.E that included Wilkes article, Samuel published Computing Bit by Bit or Digital Computers Made Easy. Reacting to what he called the fuzzy sensationalism of the popular press regarding the ability of existing digital computers to think, he wrote: The digital computer can and does relieve man of much of the burdensome detail of numerical calculations and of related logical operations, but perhaps it is more a matter of definition than fact as to whether this constitutes thinking.

Samuels polite but clear position led Marvin Minsky in 1961 to single him out, according to Eric Weiss, as one of the few leaders in the field of artificial intelligence who believed computers could not think and probably never would. Indeed, he pursued his life-long hobby of developing checkers-playing computer programs and professional interest in machine learning not out of a desire to play God but because of the specific trajectory and coincidences of his career. After working for 18 years at Bell Telephone Laboratories and becoming an internationally recognized authority on microwave tubes, he decided at age 45 to move on, as he was certain, says Weiss in his review of Samuels life and work, that vacuum tubes soon will be replaced by something else.

The University of Illinois came calling, asking him to revitalize their EE graduate research program. In 1948, the project to build the Universitys first computer was running out of money. Samuel thought (as he recalled in an unpublished autobiography cited by Weiss) that it ought to be dead easy to program a computer to play checkers and that if their program could beat a checkers world champion, the attention it would generate will also generate the required funds.

The next year, Samuel started his 17-year tenure with IBM, working as a senior engineer on the team developing the IBM 701, IBMs first mass-produced scientific computer. The chief architect of the entire IBM 700 series was Nathaniel Rochester, later one of the participants in the Dartmouth AI workshop. Rochester was trying to decide the word length and order structure of the IBM 701 and Samuel decided to rewrite his checkers-playing program using the order structure that Rochester was proposing. In his autobiography, Samuel recalled that I was a bit fearful that everyone in IBM would consider checker-playing program too trivial a matter, so I decided that I would concentrate on the learning aspects of the program. Thus, more or less by accident, I became one of the first people to do any serious programing for the IBM 701 and certainly one of the very first to work in the general field later to become known as artificial intelligence. In fact, I became so intrigued with this general problem of writing a program that would appear to exhibit intelligence that it was to occupy my thoughts almost every free moment during the entire duration of my employment by IBM and indeed for some years beyond.

But in the early days of computing, IBM did not want to fan the popular fears that man was losing out to machines, so the company did not talk about artificial intelligence publicly, observed Samuel later. Salesmen were not supposed to scare customers with speculation about future computer accomplishments. So IBM, among other activities aimed at dispelling the notion that computers were smarter than humans, sponsored the movie Desk Set, featuring a methods engineer (Spencer Tracy) who installs the fictional and ominous-looking electronic brain EMERAC, and a corporate librarian (Katharine Hepburn) telling her anxious colleagues in the research department: They cant build a machine to do our jobthere are too many cross-references in this place. By the end of the movie, she wins both a match with the computer and the engineers heart.

ADVERTISEMENT

In his1959 paper, Samuel described his approach to machine learning as particularly suited for very specific tasks, in distinction to the Neural-Net approach, which he thought could lead to the development of general-purpose learning machines. Samuels program searched the computers memory to find examples of checkerboard positions and selected the moves that were previously successful. The computer plays by looking ahead a few moves and by evaluating the resulting board positions much as a human player might do, wrote Samuel.

His approach to machine learning still would work pretty well as a description of whats known as reinforcement learning, one of the basket of machine-learning techniques that has revitalized the field of artificial intelligence in recent years, wrote Alexis Madrigal in a 2017 survey of checkers-playing computer programs. One of the men who wrote the bookReinforcement Learning, Rich Sutton, called Samuels research the earliest work thats now viewed as directly relevant to the current AI enterprise.

The current AI enterprise is skewed more in favor of artificial neural networks (or deep learning) then reinforcement learning, although Googles DeepMind famously combined the two approaches in its Go-playing program which successfully beat Go master Lee Sedol in a five-game match in 2016.

ADVERTISEMENT

Already popular among computer scientists in Samuels time (in 1951, Marvin Minsky and Dean Edmunds built SNARCStochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculatorthe first artificial neural network, using 3000 vacuum tubes to simulate a network of 40 neurons), the neural networks approach was inspired by a1943 paperby Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts in which they described networks of idealized and simplified artificial neurons and how they might perform simple logical functions, leading to the popular (and very misleading) description of todays artificial neural networks-based AI as mimicking the brain.

Over the years, the popularity of neural networks have gone up and down a number of hype cycles, starting with thePerceptron, a 2-layer artificial neural network that was considered by the U.S. Navy, according to a 1958 New York Times report, to be "the embryo of an electronic computer that.. will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence." In addition to failing to meet these lofty expectations, neural networks suffered from a fierce competition from a growing cohort of computer scientists (including Minsky) who preferred the manipulation of symbols rather than computational statistics as the better path to creating a human-like machine.

Inflated expectations meeting the trough of disillusionment, no matter what approach was taken, resulted in at least two periods of gloomy AI Winter. But with the invention and successful application of backpropagation as a way to overcome the limitations of simple neural networks, sophisticated statistical analysis was againon the ascendance, now cleverly labeled as deep learning. In 1988, R. Colin Johnson and Chappell Brown published Cognizers: Neural Networks and Machine That Think, proclaiming that neural networks can actually learn to recognize objects and understand speech just like the human brain and, best of all, they wont need the rules, programming, or high-priced knowledge-engineering services that conventional artificial intelligence systems requireCognizers could very well revolutionize our society and will inevitably lead to a new understanding of our own cognition.

ADVERTISEMENT

Johnson and Brown predicted that as early as the next two years, neural networks will be the tool of choice for analyzing the contents of a large database. This predictionand no doubt similar ones in the popular press and professional journalsmust have sounded the alarm among those who did this type of analysis for a living in academia and in large corporations, having no clue of what the computer scientists were talking about.

InNeural Networks and Statistical Models, Warren Sarle explained in 1994 to his worried and confused fellow statisticians that the ominous-sounding artificial neural networks are nothing more than nonlinear regression and discriminant models that can be implemented with standard statistical software like many statistical methods, [artificial neural networks] are capable of processing vast amounts of data and making predictions that are sometimes surprisingly accurate; this does not make them intelligent in the usual sense of the word. Artificial neural networks learn in much the same way that many statistical algorithms do estimation, but usually much more slowly than statistical algorithms. If artificial neural networks are intelligent, then many statistical methods must also be considered intelligent.

Sarle provided his colleagues with a handy dictionary translating the terms used by neural engineers to the language of statisticians (e.g., features are variables). In anticipation of todays data science (a more recent assault led by computer programmers) and predictions of algorithms replacing statisticians (and even scientists), Sarle reassured his fellow statisticians that no black box can substitute for human intelligence: Neural engineers want their networks to be black boxes requiring no human interventiondata in, predictions out. The marketing hype claims that neural networks can be used with no experience and automatically learn whatever is required; this, of course, is nonsense. Doing a simple linear regression requires a nontrivial amount of statistical expertise.

ADVERTISEMENT

In a footnote to his mention of neural networks in his 1959 paper, Samuel cited Warren S. McCulloch who has compared the digital computer to the nervous system of a flatworm, and declared: To extend this comparison to the situation under discussion would be unfair to the worm since its nervous system is actually quite highly organized as compared to [the most advanced artificial neural networks of the day]. In 2019, Facebooks top AI researcher and Turing Award-winner Yann LeCun declared that Our best AI systems have less common sense than a house cat. In the sixty years since Samuel first published his seminal machine learning work, artificial intelligence has advanced from being not as smart as a flatworm to having less common sense than a house cat.

Read the original post:
On Thinking Machines, Machine Learning, And How AI Took Over Statistics - Forbes

Jackowski: On Memorial Day, mourn the victims of war and honor the heroes who stand against it – Brattleboro Reformer

Posted on by

It is Memorial Day again. Some will celebrate. Some will drink too much. Some will march in parades. Some will rally around the flag. Some will go shopping. Some will mourn. I am among the mourners.

I mourn mostly for those we have killed and I mourn for those we havent killed yet, but will in the days ahead. I mourn for all of the mothers and fathers who put their children to bed at night and wonder if this will be the night that they are killed by a drone attack.

I mourn for the 500,000 Iraqi children dead because of U.S. foreign policy. The official policy as described by Madeleine Albright on 60 Minutes was that we think the price was worth it. Worth it to whom? Not to the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, grandmothers and grandfathers of those children.

I mourn the execution of Pvt. Eddie Slovik the gentle soldier who was too moral to kill. He refused to fight. On January 31, 1945, the U.S. executed him before a firing squad. He is the only U.S. soldier, that we know about, who was executed during World War II. In recent years has friendly fire been used against some who refuse to kill?

I mourn for all the unarmed civilians slaughtered by U.S. troops in Korea. The massacre at No Gun Ri is one of many war crimes.

The results of recent elections show that more than 90 percent of United States voters support the foreign policy of the Democratic/Republican Party. That includes support for war, torture and imprisonment without due process. More than 90 percent of the people, as evidenced by their votes, are not peace makers. Supporting crimes against humanity is not an option for people of conscience. Any vote for any Democrat or Republican candidate is a vote for war. Those voters are complicit in war crimes because they enable crimes against peace. Electing peace makers to the Congress would save lives and money. As a nation, none can compare with the United States when it comes to the ability to slaughter innocent civilians. Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States is the only nation to have used nuclear bombs to kill.

Now we can kill from the comfort of our own neighborhoods at no risk to our own safety. Some believe that the use of drones is a cowardly approach to warfare. Some argue that the use of drones is a war crime. No matter how one feels about drones, it is certain that drone warfare has raised the killing of civilians to a new level. The slaughter of little girls walking to school is a crime against humanity.

Do the drone operators who sit at a computer thousands of miles away from any danger deserve our admiration? Their safety is not at risk. Should they be thanked for their service? Does wearing a uniform give anyone the moral or legal right to kill unarmed civilians? Does wearing a uniform make anyone a hero? Is killing by remote control really an example of heroism?

How can heroism be defined? Heroism is the willingness to stand alone in opposition to evil and injustice.

We have many heroes. Julian Assange, Ed Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond, John Kiriakou, Aaron Swartz are just a few of many. Archbishop Oscar Romero took on the entire power structure in El Salvador. With grace and dignity he defended the poor and disenfranchised. He was assassinated while saying Mass.

When I think about heroes, I always think about my friend, Elliott Adams. During the 60s, Adams volunteered for the Army. He fought in Vietnam, he was a paratrooper. He was wounded. After hospitalization, he was redeployed to Korea, and then Alaska. All of those things might make Adams seem like a hero to most people, but that is not why I think of him as a hero. Adams is a former president of Veterans for Peace, but that also is not why he is a hero to me. More than anyone I have known, Adams has dedicated his life since being discharged from the military to working for global peace. He has gone to Gaza with Physicians for Social Responsibility. In solidarity with the prisoners at Gitmo, Adams went on a hunger strike. Adams has been at the forefront of the protests against the use of drones at Hancock Air Base near Syracuse, N.Y. Adams was arrested while participating in peaceful protest.

Below is Adams sentencing speech as he delivered it to the court. This is one of the most articulate anti-war statements I have ever heard.

I appreciate the benchs effort to understand the arguments made arguments involving local law, international law and, even the principles of civil disobedience.

My experience in war has taught me that in life we periodically get tested to see if we can stand up to the pressures of socially acceptable procedural norms which push us to work within the little laws and instead comply with the requirements of International Humanitarian Law. I cannot condemn others when they fail that test for I have failed it myself. But those who do fail it are condemned to live with the horrendous cost society pays for their failure. I believe this court failed that test. The court may not have felt an unavoidable compulsion to comply with International Humanitarian Law, but it certainly was given the justifications it could have used to stand up and comply with International Humanitarian Law. But being here in DeWitt near an epicenter of war crimes couched in the humdrum of civilian life, the bench may find it is tested again and again.

I believe that my co-defendants and I did what is right morally, but more relevant to this court, what is required by the law, the big law, that law that deals with thousands of lives, not the little law that deals with disorderly conduct. If the court had chosen to decide on the big law it would have found us innocent. But since the court chooses to rule on the little law, the law about orderly conduct, then it must not only find me guilty but guilty to the fullest extent, with no mitigation.

As the court stated, there will always be consequences for pursuing justice through changes made by actions outside the socially acceptable procedural norms. Among other life experiences I have over 15 years in local elected public office and it became apparent to me that abiding by the socially acceptable procedural norms can only lead to more of the same injustice, indeed those norms are there to prop up those injustices.

I am proud to accept the consequences of my acts and any jail time. I do not want any suspended sentence. If you give me one, also please let me know how I can violate it before I leave the courtroom. I do not have money to pay a court; I spend what little money this old man has trying to bring about justice. My community service has been doing the duty that the courts shrink from calling attention to war crimes and trying to stop war crimes. Standing in this court a community service, it is the little I can do for society.

Rosemarie Jackowski writes from Bennington. The opinions expressed by columnists do not necessarily reflect the views of the Brattleboro Reformer.

More:
Jackowski: On Memorial Day, mourn the victims of war and honor the heroes who stand against it - Brattleboro Reformer

Ai Weiwei accuses curators of rejecting artwork over Julian Assange content – The Guardian

Posted on by

Ai Weiwei has accused the organisers of a large UK art exhibition of rejecting his artwork for the show because the piece addressed the imprisonment of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The Chinese dissident artist and activist said the piece for The Great Big Art Exhibition featured an image of the treadmill which Assange used while seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy.

In an opinion article for the art website Artnet, Ai Weiwei said the piece, called Postcard for Political Prisoners, incorporated a photograph of the running machine given to him by Assange, who is detained in Belmarsh high-security prison in south-east London.

Ai said that in April the artwork, which was intended to be sent as a postcard to political prisoners, was delivered to the visual arts organisation Firstsite, the organiser of the online exhibition, which he said initially responded enthusiastically.

But after informing Firstsite that there would be a delay because his studio was waiting for Amnesty Internationals list of political prisoners who would be able and willing to receive mail from the public, Ai said the organisation ignored further inquiries about exhibiting the piece.

He wrote that Firstsite eventually responded to an inquiry from the Lisson Gallery, which represents him, earlier this month. He said Firstsites director explained that they could not include his project due to time constraints, and because it did not fit with the concept of the exhibition: to encourage people across the UK to make artworks and display them in their windows.

Ai Weiwei said that this response made no sense to him because, he says, no deadline was given for the delivery of the artwork, and there was nothing to stop people from pasting the postcards on their windows.

He wrote: I think the reason is related to Assange who has been incarcerated in HM Prison Belmarsh in London since his arrest on 11 April 2019, and that they dont want to touch on a topic like Assange.

In a statement, Sally Shaw, the director of Firstsite, repeated the reasons given to Ai as to why they chose not to include the artwork in the exhibition. She added: I must assure you, sincerely, that this is in no way a reflection of our appreciation of the idea itself, which is remarkable and profound, and equally our esteem for Weiwei and his work.

This article was amended on 3 June 2021 to refer to Ai Weiwei on subsequent references a direct quote excepted by his surname Ai, in conformity with Guardian style, rather than his forename Weiwei.

Originally posted here:
Ai Weiwei accuses curators of rejecting artwork over Julian Assange content - The Guardian

Julian Assange’s Father and Brother Announce US Tour to Demand Journalist’s Freedom – Common Dreams

Posted on by

The father and brother of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange are planning a nationwide tour of the United States next month to advocate for the release of the detained journalist and for the Biden administration to drop its extradition effortand to highlight the broader implications that his prosecution has for global press freedom.

"The U.S. government wants to make an example out of him to deter journalists and whistleblowers."Gabriel Shipton, Julian Assange's brother

John and Gabriel Shipton, Assange's father and brother, will kick off the #HomeRun4Julian tour in Miami on June 6, then travel to over a dozen U.S. cities for the rest of the month, wrapping up in Washington, D.C. in July. Some events will be live-streamed, and the pair plans to meet with activists, journalists, and policymakers along the away.

"My brother Julian Assange has effectively been a prisoner for over a decade because he published evidence of war crimes," said Gabriel Shipton in a statement Thursday. "The U.S. government wants to make an example out of him to deter journalists and whistleblowers."

Assange has been held at Her Majesty's Prison Belmarsh in London for over two years, since he was forcibly dragged from the Ecuadorian Embassy in the city, where he had sought refuge in 2012. A British judge in January declined the Trump administration's request to extradite Assange to face charges of violating the Espionage Act, concluding he would be at extreme risk of suicide.

Since taking office, U.S. President Joe Biden has continued to ignore global calls to end the extradition effort and drop all charges. The Department of Justice formally appealed Judge Vanessa Baraitser's decision in February. Forty-nine-year-old Assange could face up to 175 years in a maximum-security prison if he is extradited to the United States.

"Gabriel and I are excited to talk to the American public on why protecting journalism and freeing Julian is so important to a free press," said John Shipton, who toured their home country of Australia this month to advocate for his son. "This issue is bigger than just Julian. Freedom of the press in America impacts every part of the world."

The U.S. tour is sponsored by the Courage Foundation, which was founded in 2013 as the Journalistic Source Protection Defense Fund. Assange is a trustee of the foundation, which supports whistleblowers and other truth-tellersor "those who risk life or liberty to make significant contributions to the historical record."

"For the first time in American history, a journalist has been indicted for publishing truthful information in the public interest," Courage Foundation director Nathan Fuller said of Assange. "That's why press and human rights groups around the world are in agreement that this is an existential threat to investigative reporting."

Press freedom advocates last month marked the two-year anniversary of Assange's arrest by British police by reiterating demands that the Biden administration immediately drop all charges against him. Nils Melzer, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, has also long advocated for Assange's release.

In a December 2020 open letter asking then-President Donald Trump to pardon Assange, Melzerwrote that "I can attest to the fact that his health has seriously deteriorated, to the point where his life is now in danger. Critically, Mr. Assange suffers from a documented respiratory condition which renders him extremely vulnerable to the Covid-19 pandemic that has recently broken out in the prison where he is being held."

Melzer and the mayor of Geneva are among dozens of people planning to join a June 4 event in the Swiss city to launch the "Geneva Call to Free Assange," which supporters are promoting online with the hashtag #GVA_FreeAssange.

"The 'AnythingToSay' statue dedicated to whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning as well as to Julian Assange will be installed at the same time on the Pquis pier in front of the Geneva Jet d'eau," according to an event webpage. "The Association of Users of the Bains des Pquis, initiator and organizer of the event, will also present an exhibition on whistleblowers."

Read this article:
Julian Assange's Father and Brother Announce US Tour to Demand Journalist's Freedom - Common Dreams

The Organizers of a Major U.K. Exhibition Used My Name to Promote Their Show. But They Were Too Afraid to Embrace My Ideas – artnet News

Posted on by

What is art and what is its purpose? What is its relevance to our post-industrialist and consumption-oriented world? These questions may seem banal, but they are especially pertinent if we look at The Great Big Art Exhibition, organised by the U.K. visual arts organisation Firstsite this year. I am very honored to share that my 2021 project Postcard for Political Prisoners was not acceptedand that their rejection gave a real meaning to my artwork.

Erica Bolton, a public relations specialist who worked for Firstsite on the exhibition, contacted us earlier this year, on January 18, through Greg Hilty, the curatorial director of Lisson Gallery, and invited me to take part in the nationwide showwhich claims to be the U.K.s largest-ever art exhibition and a celebration of creativity to counter the gloom of the pandemic. In collaboration with Art U.K., The Big Draw, Voluntary Arts, and supported by the Plus Tate network of 35 museums and galleries across the U.K., the idea is that Britains leading artists would choose a different theme every two weeks and that people could join up virtually to produce artworks together. In the initial information I received from Bolton, we were told that artworks can be made of anything, and that key works from across the U.K. would be made available for download.

Their slogan goes: The doors to our collections and galleries might be shut but art and expression will be unleashed as never before across the U.K.

On January 22, Sally Shaw, the director of Firstsite who was leading the project, had a phone meeting with my studios press and publications manager at that time. Between January and April, there was a constant flow of WhatsApp communications between the studio and Stuart Tulloch, Firstsites head of program, about the specifics of my contribution.

Ai Weiweis treadmill from Julian Assange, photographed in October 2016. Courtesy Ai Weiwei.

On April 22, my artwork titled Postcard for Political Prisoners was delivered to the Firstsite team. The idea of a postcard stems from my 2014 exhibition at the former Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in San Francisco, where I made postcards that were each printed with an address of a political prisoner. Visitors could write on them and the postcards were subsequently mailed by the exhibitions organisers to that jailed individual.

This time, for the design of the postcard I included a sketch from my 2015 work All Fingers Must Point Down on the reverse side. On the front is an image of Wikileaks founder Julian Assanges treadmill, which was given to me in October 2016 as a present some months after I interviewed him in summer 2016 while he was seeking asylum at the Embassy of Ecuador in London, before he was detained by the British authorities in April 2019. I am a strong supporter of Assange because I firmly believe in the importance of investigative journalism in a civil society. As I felt that I did not have the chance to do justice to Assanges story, the combination between my encounter with him and my ongoing interest in sending letters to political prisoners was crystallised into Postcard for Political Prisoners. It is a project which not only shows care to political prisoners, but it also encourages participants to reflect upon the relationship between the freedom that they enjoy and the price these fighters pay for that freedom.

As we submitted the work, we informed Firstsite that we were waiting for Amnesty Internationals list of political prisoners who would be able and willing to receive mail from the public. Immediately afterwards, we received an enthusiastic WhatsApp message from Stuart Tulloch: Ill get back to you with any questions tomorrow. Thanks for all youve done to get this to us.

On April 25, we informed Firstsite that Amnesty International would take longer, due to the fact that there are so many people in prison at the moment, they have less information on where people are held. We enquired with Firstsite about posting the details of my project on their platform.

No response.

We followed up again on May 13 and May 17.

No response.

On May 17, we asked Lisson director Hilty to follow up on our behalf. Thats how we finally received a response, on May 20, after Firstsites silence for 27 days. The response came from the director of Firstsite, Sally Shaw: We have given the idea a great deal of consideration and unfortunately, we are unable to take it forward for two reasons. Sadly, due to the timing of when the idea came through from the studio, it has made it difficult for us to include it in The Great Big Art Exhibition. Also, the concept of the project is to encourage people across the nation to make artworks and display them in their windows. The sending of a postcard takes us away from this intention. I must assure you, sincerely, that this is in no way a reflection of our appreciation of the idea itself, which is remarkable and profound, and equally our esteem for Weiwei and his work. [Shawreiterated this to Artnet News when reached for comment, adding that it was our greatest dream to work with Ai Weiwei. He is the most extra-ordinary artist for whom everyone at Firstsite has the deepest respect.]

On of the site-specific installations by Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz Island. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Shaws response carries exactly the same tone as a rejection letter sent to job applicants. The only difference is the reversal of our roles because she was the one who courted my participation in the exhibition. What makes even less sense is the reasons that she gave for not having included my postcard: timing and art form. In fact, no deadline was ever given for my contribution, and, according to official information, the last theme, Performance, spanned from April 26 to May 9my work could have fit nicely, thematically and temporally.

Now, for the second reason: In an exhibition where Anish Kapoors abstract painting could potentially encourage people to make artworks and Antony Gormleys instructions could teach people how to make a dog figurine with a ball of clay, why wouldnt my conceptual artwork Postcard for Political Prisoners inspire people to make artworks in the form of a postcard and engage in art-activism? What could stop participants from sending the postcard to themselves and pasting it on the window? Who is judging whether one artwork is more worthwhile for the purpose of encouraging people across the nation to make artworks and display them in their windows than another? What is the criteria? Whom has my postcard with Julian Assanges treadmill offended?

The inherent self-contradiction in Shaws stated reasons, or rather, excuses demonstrated an inability to make her caseshe seemed too afraid to give us a straight answer and too maladroit to round it off. I think the reason is related to Assange who has been incarcerated in HM Prison Belmarsh in London since his arrest on April 11, 2019, and that they dont want to touch on a topic like Assange. Everyone is avoiding itnot just in the mainstream media, but in the circles of art and culture in general. By writing down the events that occurred, I hope to provoke everyone reading to think about the role that contemporary art plays in daily life.

Ai Weiwei poses with John Shipton, the father of Julian Assange, outside the Old Bailey court in central London on September 28, 2020, where the extradition hearing against Assange was taking place. Photo: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP via Getty Images.

In my opinion, contemporary art should be related to peoples lives and concerned with humanitarian ideas; art is, first and foremost, about human beings. What I do as an artist is always related to my personal experiences and the world around meas such, my postcard design references my personal contact with Assange.

Everywhere in the contemporary world, art exhibitions enjoy flaunting famous artists work, while, at the same time, Western art has become completely cut off from society.The Great Big Art Exhibition used my name to promote the so-called biggest exhibition in the U.K. while also deciding against the core values of art, freedom of expression. What this incident unravels is the art worlds hypocrisy and corruption to reveal a world that considers art as a decoration and a sedative within our capitalist and consumerist society, a world where cultural activities concern culture alone and nothing more. Art has become a tool to numb ourselves so that we may avoid introspection. Any reflections through art are undesirable because they evoke pain and suffering and, if we delve into it, we would all be found guiltyand artists are guiltier than others because we have far more opportunities for free expression.

My rejection also demonstrates that this art project, which involves more than 21 museums as well asother cultural venues based in this so-called democratic society, are quintessentially hypocritical. Lets read The Great Big Art Exhibition slogans once again: artworks can be made of anything at all and art and expression will be unleashed as never before across the U.K. It is truly ironic to observe the corrupt practices of cultural circles in a place at the pinnacle of Western civilization, which advocates for and takes pride in its freedom of expression. In reality, freedom of expression is nothing more than empty talk and it has become a product that only serves the purpose of flattering the vanity of those who are powerful and wealthywhich is even worse.

I feel ashamed that nowadays all art does is whitewash. My artwork has once again proven how the art world is corrupt. So, I would like to thank Firstsite and the experience that they offered: Their rejection made Postcard for Political Prisoners a truly worthwhile project.

In response to this article, Sally Shaw, director of Firstsite, sent Artnet News the following comment: It was our greatest dream to work with Ai Weiwei. He is the most extra-ordinary artist for whom everyone at Firstsite has the deepest respect. We gave his idea a great deal of consideration and unfortunately and very sadly we were unable to take it forward for two reasons. Due to the timing of when the idea came through from the studio, it has made it difficult for us to include it in The Great Big Art Exhibition. Also, the concept of the project is to encourage people across the nation to make artworks and display them in their windows. The sending of a postcard takes us away from this intention. I must assure you, sincerely, that this is in no way a reflection of our appreciation of the idea itself, which is remarkable and profound, and equally our esteem for Weiwei and his work.

See the original post:
The Organizers of a Major U.K. Exhibition Used My Name to Promote Their Show. But They Were Too Afraid to Embrace My Ideas - artnet News

The British elite lauded Ai Weiwei when he criticised China, but its the opposite when he highlights their treatment of Assange – RT

Posted on by

The Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei says hes hypocritically been removed from a British exhibition because he chose to design a piece that addressed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assanges incarceration in a London prison.

One persons terrorist is anothers freedom fighter is a flowery way of saying actions can be interpreted differently, depending on your viewpoint.

Its a scenario acclaimed Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has often encountered and, unfortunately, is in again.

He fled his homeland for being deemed too controversial for the states strict censorship. Hes recounted how he was arrested, beaten by Chinese police, placed under house arrest and then imprisoned for tax evasion.

On his release, he described being subjected to psychological torture, being detained in a tiny room with constant light and two guards never more than 30 inches away, even when he used the bathroom.

In 2019, he fled to Berlin, but didnt stay long, I dont like a state or culture that so obeys authority, he declared, adding: They would say in Germany you have to speak German. They deeply dont like foreigners.

He now resides in the picturesque city of Cambridge in the east of England. So it was understandable when last year The Great Big Art Exhibition asked a world famous artist, who called the UK home, to take part.

However, Weiwei is no longer part of the project despite his reputation being used to draw attention to it.

Why?

Because he wanted to feature in the exhibition a postcard with the image of Julian Assanges treadmill. The WikiLeaks founder used it for exercise during his almost seven-year spell in Londons Ecuadorian Embassy, where hed sought refuge.

The exhibition hopes to encourage Britons to make art and display it in their windows, a tonic to beat the gloom of the pandemic. Weiwei opted for his contribution to be a Postcard for Political Prisoners, which members of the public could send to political prisoners around the world, their addresses supplied by Amnesty.

Although people could send it to themselves to display in their own window if they wished.

Weiwei wanted to inspire them to engage in art-activism, a practise that has made him globally admired.

However, his idea was rejected.

Weiwei claims that Sally Shaw, the director of Firstsite, who are leading the project, seemed too afraid to give us a straight answer and added: I think the reason is related to Assange who has been incarcerated in HM Prison Belmarsh in London since his arrest on April 11, 2019, and that they dont want to touch on a topic like Assange.

Shaw has denied Weiweis claims: The sending of a postcard takes us away from this intention. I must assure you, sincerely, that this is in no way a reflection of our appreciation of the idea itself, which is remarkable and profound, and equally our esteem for Weiwei and his work.

Weiwei has managed to break a glass ceiling, his art is widely admired for the aesthetic and then also its deeper meanings very few artists share that ability. To have someone like him involved would undoubtedly have elevated the credibility and sophistication of the project.

Weiwei said of the rejection: I feel ashamed that nowadays all art does is whitewash. My artwork has once again proven how the art world is corrupt.

Assange is a figure who, despite the best endeavours of the British establishment, wont disappear. He remains locked up in Belmarsh despite Americas extradition request being denied. He is behind bars because bail was controversially denied, while an appeal is mounted by the US government.

The whole matter is a stain on the British justice system, as Assange is guilty of nothing but revealing atrocities committed by Americas armed forces.

Thats why Weiweis latest artistic beacon is to be lauded.

In the same way British society lauded Weiwei when he was standing up to causes that suited them.

Back in 2011, Foreign Secretary William Hague called for China to release him immediately. The same year, someone called Boris Johnson wrote a column entitled The world must speak up over the detention of Ai Weiwei. (Not sure well get a similarly-entitled one now about Assange, do you?).

Former Prime Minister Theresa May even personally got involved when she was Home Secretary to issue him with a six-month visa after he was only offered a 20-day permit due to being detained for political reasons in China.

The prestigious Tate Modern in London also rapturously received and hosted Weiweis Sunflower Seeds millions of handcrafted porcelain seeds which explored the complexity of the Chinese individuals relationship with society, the authorities and tradition.

So when Weiwei rallied against Chinese oppression he was to be admired but when his artistic torch illuminated Britains dark side, the script was flipped.

As a country, we should be welcoming individuals like Weiwei but strictly adhering to consistency. Its arrogant to shut down his work when it embarrasses our own transgressions, and thats what the treatment of Assange is.

Sally Shaw was awarded an MBE in the The Queens Birthday Honours List only months ago for services to the Arts and yet decides to cancel Weiwei.

Were a closed shop, but don't like to admit it. And world-class hypocrites. Why else would we censor a globally recognised artist?

The message is clear; criticise those who it suits us and well support you, but come looking for us and well erase your platform.

Hypocrites? Nah, spineless cowards.

Like this story? Share it with a friend!

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Follow this link:
The British elite lauded Ai Weiwei when he criticised China, but its the opposite when he highlights their treatment of Assange - RT

Some old investing lessons from the Bitcoin crash – Mint

Posted on by

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies saw extreme volatility on Wednesday. Bitcoin, for instance, started trading at $42,945. It reached a high of $43,546 during the day, dropped to a low of $30,681, and finally closed the day at $37,002.

Personal finance and investing mean different things to different people, but a few broad principles make sense for all of us to follow. And some investors learnt these old lessons of investing for the first time on Wednesday. Lets take a look at this pointwise.

1) Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are known to be highly volatile. They go up too fast, and they fall quickly as well. On 14 April, bitcoin touched an all-time high of $64,863. From that high, it fell by 52% to the recent low of $30,681.

A 50% fall wipes out a 100% gain. Hence, investors, and there must have been many who bought bitcoin at all-time high levels, need to wait for the cryptocurrency to rally by 100% or more to recoup their losses.

2) One reason that gets offered for investing in bitcoin is that every time the price has fallen, it has gone on to newer highs in the time to come. The trouble with this argument is that just because something has happened in the past doesnt mean it will continue to occur in the future as well. As an investor, one needs to prepare for the possibility that bitcoin prices may not repeat the same behaviour.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls this the turkey problem. As he writes in Anti Fragile: A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys with increased statistical confidence." The butcher will keep feeding the turkey until a few days before thanksgiving. Then comes that day when it is really not a very good idea to be a turkey. So, with the butcher surprising it, the turkey will have a revision of beliefright when its confidence in the statement that the butcher loves turkeys is maximal."

This is a point that needs to be kept in mind while investing.

3) The price of bitcoin closed at $30,433 on 27 January. On 13 March, it closed at $61,243, a return of a little over 100% in just one and a half months. Anyone who had invested on 27 January would have been sitting on a high profit on 13 March. But what about investors who invested on 13 March? Theyd currently be sitting on huge losses.

The moral of the story being that high risk doesnt always mean high return. It can also mean huge losses. This is another factor that needs to be kept in mind while investing.

4) Of course, believers can argue that one needs to ignore this volatility. But that is only possible if an investor has followed the oldest clich in investing, which is, dont put all your eggs in one basket or what experts like to call diversification. Dont invest all your money in a single asset class. Spread it out between different asset classes and even within an asset class.

As of yesterday, many people in their 20s and 30s, learnt this investment lesson, like every generation of investors. The last generation learnt it by betting big on real estate in the noughties and then spent the teens realizing that all their money was stuck in an asset class that was not easy to sell in case of an emergency.

Investors who had bet their life on bitcoin when it was around its all-time high levels, and god forbid they are facing a money emergency now, must be in a spot of bother.

The point is that if you are investing in a cryptocurrency, given its volatility, it shouldnt be your principal investment. It should be limited to 5-10% of your portfolio so that it provides the icing on the cake if prices go up and one is not ruined if prices crash.

5) While cryptocurrency believers might believe that prices will continue going up and reach astronomical levels, there are solid reasons that this may not continue forever. Also, remember that random comments from influencers--those who invested in it and even those who havent--can affect the price of this asset class.

The investing principle here is that it is important not to get emotionally attached to any investment like many investors do, which leads to an escalation of commitment. The idea behind all investing should be not just return on capital" but also return of capital".

6) Finally, if you invest in cryptocurrencies and dont believe in spreading your investments, ensure that you have a strong heart.

Whether you believe in cryptocurrencies or not, following these principles will ensure that your investments move in the right direction in the long term, simply because investment fads are exciting but temporary; the principles are boring but timeless.

Vivek Kaul is the author of Bad Money.

Subscribe to Mint Newsletters

* Enter a valid email

* Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter.

Never miss a story! Stay connected and informed with Mint. Download our App Now!!

Read the original:
Some old investing lessons from the Bitcoin crash - Mint

Bitcoin or Stocks: Better Buy on the Dip – The Motley Fool

Posted on by

The price of the world's largest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC), has dropped 37% from its all-time high. As of this writing, it's trading hands at around $41,000 per token. By contrast, the stock market averages aren't down anywhere near that much. The Nasdaq Composite Index is down roughly 4%, and the S&P 500 is down less than 2%. Nevertheless, even though I own Bitcoin personally, in this article I'm going to argue that stocks are the better buy right now.

There are three reasons stocks are a better buy, in my opinion. And some of it has to do with the fundamental differences between stocks and cryptocurrencies.

Image source: Getty Images.

Think about the economic development following innovations like the assembly line, the space program, and the smartphone. Consider that right now, there are smart people planning a colony on Mars, developing quantum computers, and building the world's largest nuclear-fusion plant with the ITER project. And there's a host of other things in development that sound like science fiction today. If I'm making a bet, I'm betting on technological advances like these that take our global economy to heights never seen before.

The global economy doesn't always expand; there are recessions. But I'm optimistic about the long-term future. And stocks represent ownership stakes in real-world businesses. As the economy grows, many companies will capture this upside, growing their revenue streams and rewarding their stakeholders with the profits.

This is how stocks work, and it's why I'm generally picking stocks over cryptocurrencies when presented with a binary choice. I'm confident there will always be good businesses around. Therefore, I enjoy finding them, buying their stocks, and holding them for as long as they're still good businesses.

Image source: Getty Images.

On a small Micronesian island, there's a giant round stone standing 12 feet tall and weighing over 8,000 pounds. To an outsider, it's just a rock. To the island's original people, it's a rai stone -- a locally agreed-upon store of value. The particular rock I'm referencing is just the largest of many used by the inhabitants of the Yap Islands of Micronesia. Some stones are too big to move, but that's OK. For generations, they've kept mental track of financial transactions by exchanging partial or complete rai stones.

From this illustration, we see that currencies have value when we agree they have value. For millennia, humans have agreed gold has value. But if you want to store value in a rai stone, that's also acceptable in parts of Micronesia. In the same way, if you want to use Bitcoin as a store of value, that's becoming an increasingly accepted practice worldwide.

According to a recent study by New York Digital Investment Group, 46 million people in the U.S. now own some Bitcoin.And companies are starting to own some as well, with Tesla being a high-profile example. In short, there's growing consensus that Bitcoin is an acceptable store of value.

But will there still be consensus that Bitcoin is an acceptable store of value in five to ten years? I'm less confident about that than I am about the future of the economy. I own Bitcoin because, in my opinion, its fame gives it the highest chance of achieving widespread acceptance among the cryptocurrencies that exist. But I wouldn't stake my entire financial future on that belief.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently called the environmental sustainability of Bitcoin into question. Whether you agree with Musk or not isn't the point. The point is that factors like environmental impact, speed of transactions, or network security could cause people to eventually agree upon a different cryptocurrency as a better store of value. I can't predict how Bitcoin will be perceived in the future.

Image source: Getty Images.

In the intro, we noted that Bitcoin is down more than the stock market averages, which is true. However, some top stocks are down as much as or even more than Bitcoin, making these good buying opportunities. For example, three of my favorite stocks right now are Airbnb, Peloton Interactive, and Pinterest, down 38%, 40%, and 31%, respectively, from previous highs. In fact, considering how much it's growing internationally, I would put Pinterest very high on a list of stocks to buy on the dip.

But the reality is the choice is not binary -- you can buy both stocks and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin on the dip. For me, I choose to put the majority of my investing dollars in stocks because I see what these companies are accomplishing in the real world. But I also believe adoption for Bitcoin is still growing, making it worthy of a small, long-term position as well.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Were motley! Questioning an investing thesis -- even one of our own -- helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

Visit link:
Bitcoin or Stocks: Better Buy on the Dip - The Motley Fool

Bitcoin flash crash amplified by leverage and systemic issues – Financial Times

Posted on by

The bitcoin flash crash has exposed how systemic issues under the surface of the cryptocurrency market, combined with leverage offered by many leading exchanges, exacerbate episodes of volatility.

Bitcoin prices plunged $10,000 in less than an hour on Wednesday from $40,000 in one of the most severe drops since the worlds most actively traded digital coin began its meteoric ascent to record peaks last autumn. It rebounded almost as spectacularly as it fell later in the day, and continued its rebound on Thursday, climbing above $42,300.

The scale of the losses and recovery in such a short time, coupled with the frenetic nature of the trading, illustrate how even as the digital asset industry has grown rapidly, many systems underlying the market remain fragile and stutter during unusually busy periods.

Coinbase and Binance, two of the highest-profile digital currency exchanges, were among the venues that suffered technical issues during the shake-up on Wednesday.

At the same time, analysts said some retail and institutional traders use of leverage borrowing to amplify potential returns also heightened the velocity and magnitude of the fall in prices as bets rapidly unwound.

When the price is crashing, everyone that leveraged and [bet on rising prices] sees their leverage ratio blow up, said David Fauchier, a fund manager at crypto specialist Nickel Digital, noting that the market went through two so-called liquidity cascades in less than an hour when bitcoin crashed.

In established asset markets, traders use cash as collateral to finance leveraged bets. In cryptocurrencies, however, they often use bitcoin. That meant that when bitcoin fell heavily, leveraged bets were quick to fold.

This created a self-reinforcing cycle, which prompted widespread selling and highlighted a number of systemic issues, according to Michael Bucella, a partner at crypto hedge fund BlockTower Capital.

Sentiment in the market had been fragile for several weeks, but the trigger for the collapse was a warning from Chinese authorities not to accept cryptocurrency as payment, or to sell services on it.

There were probably about $20bn of [bets that bitcoin will rise] liquidated yesterday, which was a large part of the price drop. It was an initial unrelated spark which grew because of the leverage, said Sam Bankman-Fried, chief executive of FTX, the Hong Kong exchange.

The turmoil left retail and professional traders counting their losses, especially those who borrowed to maximise their potential gains.

One 21-year-old, who asked not to be named, said that looking at his trading screen flashing red brought back unwanted memories. Its like looking at my [school exam results], he wrote in a message.

Continue reading here:
Bitcoin flash crash amplified by leverage and systemic issues - Financial Times


« First...102030...478479480481482...490500510...Last »