Category Archives: History

When U.S. figure skater Nathan Chen won the gold medal in mens figure skating at the 2022 Winter Olympics, a Washington Post article attributed his win to a fierce, focused, robotic zeal. This robotic characterization draws on a dated stereotype of Asians as stoic, unfeeling workaholics.

In my book Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton, I argue that the image of Asians as robotic serves as the perfect example of how majority cultures characterize a certain kind of minority as model workers and threats.

In the United States there has been a popular belief that Asian people are ruthless competitors obsessed with technical achievement, whether as classical pianists, spelling bee champs or math whizzes. This was the basis for the model minority myth. However, projections of the model minority often fuse into Asian roboticism, the notion that Asians act or behave like technological beings.

What happens when someone is seen as the perfect kind of human automaton?

Insofar as Asian lives are reduced to caricature, and their humanity disavowed, what emerges is a negative stereotype of Asians as uncreative cogs raised by tiger parents who teach their children total obeisance to authority, education researchers in Australia write.

Mental perceptions then shape social interaction.

In a 2009 study, social psychologists discovered that white people read East Asian faces as machinelike, bearing less-than-human qualities. This imaginary association bears a history, as media scholar Lisa Nakamura points out. When you brand someone as robotic, youre saying that what they make is not unique or worthy of recognition. Which is the history of Asian labor in the U.S.

When everyday people are rendered as robots, any sort of human rights are denied, and all sorts of abuses can occur.

As the China-U.S. trade war heated up in 2019, right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones claimed that Asians were like fearless robots coming to kill you.

The implication is that Chinese, Koreans and Vietnamese are a swarm of cyborgs who think alike and will attack in unison. Jones also stated that Native Americans bearing some ancient link to Asia are easy to mind-control.

Indeed, these disparaging references recall a long history of dehumanizing Asians and other groups.

As global capitalism developed alongside European colonialism, the thought that robots are mankinds servants aligned with the treatment of colonial populations. In their 2019 book Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora write that this sliding scale of humanity turned living subjects into objects of control.

The U.S. picked up on this in its quest for empire.

In the 19th century, Chinese workers were considered by Anglo-American politicians to be the worlds best laboring machines. This justified both their exploitation by and exclusion from the United States.

During World War II, U.S. military propaganda portrayed the Japanese soldier as a programmed warrior of the state, more animal than human. Amid the Cold War, the fiction of inexhaustible workers linked up with the fear of the masses in Asian communist nations.

Meanwhile, Vietnamese prostitutes were derided as sex machines by U.S. soldiers.

Today, Chinese factory workers are referred to as robots by their corporate managers, while promoters of South Korean popular music, or K-pop, categorize their singing idols as entertainment machines. Workers push against these insults, asserting their desires and freedom.

Scholars have adopted the term techno-orientalism to critique the view of the future as Asian dominated, especially in science fiction where Asians are figured as slaves to the machine.

Such harmful opinions are reproduced in mainstream movies like Ex Machina, which paints Asians as inscrutable bots. The Sundance hit After Yang depicts an android named Yang that reproduces this narrative.

Margaret Rhee, author of Love, Robot, says that the Asian as robot figure raises moral questions of solidarity, equality and justice. This resists the casting of Asians as material things.

The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center published a video essay, Inhuman Figures, that looks at this sense of Asians as tireless workers, robots, indistinguishable copies, clones and forever foreigners.

They supposedly lack human empathy and are, therefore, not deserving of compassion.

Whether subhuman or superhuman, Michelle N. Huang explains, Asians are never human enough.

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Calling Asians 'robotic' is a racist stereotype with a long, troubled history - The Conversation Canada

Donovan Mitchell of the Utah Jazz (Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports)

The Utah Jazz have a rich history of standout All-Star performances. Thats to be expected from a team who has made every effort to remain competitive since they moved to Salt Lake City in 1979. While this franchise may not have made it to the top of the NBAs mountain yet, theyve spent much of their existence on its periphery.

In order to do that, you need All-Stars. More often than not, the Utah Jazz have one or two on the roster. On several occasions, theyve come up big in the leagues annual midseason showcase.

Here were ranking the best All-Star games in Utah Jazz history. Note that were not ranking the best individual Jazz performances. The simple reason for that is, on a couple of occasions, it was too difficult to say which of two Jazz All-Stars deserved the designation.

Call it another product of historically rostering elite talent.

In terms of historys notable Jazzmen, Rickey Green is one of the most underrated. Just dont get it confused: Green was a bonafide All-Star in his prime.

A wiry, athletic point guard with a high basketball IQ, Green was the resident point guard in Salt Lake City for quite some time. In 1983-84, he averaged 13.2 points, 9.2 assists and 2.7 steals per game.

His scoring totals were rarely gaudy. Thats because Green was a pure point guard. In the modern age of score-first point guards, thats a relatively foreign concept. In 1984, it was the standard.

Green brought that standard of play into the 1983-84 All-Star Game. He only tallied 6 points, but racked up an impressive 11 assists.

Unsurprisingly, Green was overshadowed by one Magic Johnson. Of course, Johnson is arguably the best point guard in NBA history, and it showed that night. He finished this game with 15 points and a whopping 22 helpers.

Green wouldnt be the first or last player to get outshone by Magic Johnson. He still deserves credit for a great All-Star performance.

Continued here:

Ranking the 5 best All-Star games in Utah Jazz history - The J Notes

MUNICH Vice President Kamala Harris said Saturday that the world has arrived at "a decisive moment in history" as the Biden administration warns a Russian invasion of Ukraine in the coming days is highly likely.

During a meeting with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, Harris vowed that the U.S. was committed to Ukraine's sovereignty. The vice president also used an address at the conference to reiterate the Biden administration's promise to hit Russia with economy-jarring sanctions if it invades Ukraine again, following the 2014 seizure of Crimea.

"Let me be clear, I can say with absolute certainty: If Russia further invades Ukraine, the United States, together with our allies and partners, will impose significant and unprecedented economic costs," Harris said.

Harris addressed the annual Munich conference the day after President Joe Biden said he was "convinced" that Russia's Vladimir Putin has made the decision to invade neighboring Ukraine.

Harris made the case to a largely European audience that the West has "strength through unity" and that an invasion would likely lead to an even bigger NATO presence on Russia's doorstep.

Later, at the start of the meeting with Ukraine's leader, Harris called it "a decisive moment in history" and told Zelenskyy, "Any threat to your country we take seriously."

He responded: "We clearly understand what is going on. This is our land. We want peace."

He said he needs Western allies to take "specific steps," alluding to Ukraine's requests for even more military and economic assistance. Zelenskyy also noted that with Russian troops at his country's borders, Ukraine's army is in fact "defending all of Europe."

Harris herself remarked about the perilousness of the moment in her address at the conference, noting that "not since the end of the Cold War has this forum convened under such dire circumstances."

"Today, as we are all well aware, the foundation of European security is under direct threat in Ukraine," she said.

Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and fomented a rebellion in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russia separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces for almost eight years. The United States and the European Union previously sanctioned Russia over its seizure of Crimea.

Western fears of an invasion have escalated in recent months as Russia amassed more than 150,000 troops near Ukraine's borders.

Harris said the Biden administration, along with its allies, had tried to engage with Moscow in good faith to find a diplomatic resolution but that effort was not reciprocated by the Kremlin.

"Russia continues to say it is ready to talk while at the same time it narrows the avenues for diplomacy," Harris said. "Their actions simply do not match their words."

Harris credited European allies for speaking with a largely unified voice as the latest Ukraine crisis has unfolded. The vice president said Republicans and Democrats in Washington who rarely agree on major issues are generally in agreement on the necessity of confronting Putin.

"We didn't all start out in the same place," Harris said. "We came together and are now speaking with a unified voice. And that voice was a function of not only dialogue and debate, some concessions, but also the practical realization of the moment that we are in, which is that we are looking at a sovereign nation that may very well be on the verge of being invaded yet again."

Harris on Friday met in Munich with the leaders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, who stressed that an increase in the U.S. troop presence on the eastern edge of NATO is necessary.

The White House has not yet said whether it will fulfill those requests, but Harris suggested in her address on Saturday that an invasion could lead to a bolstered American presence.

"The imposition of these sweeping and coordinated measures will inflict great damage on those who must be held accountable. And we will not stop with economic measures," Harris said. "We will further reinforce our NATO allies on the eastern flank."

Biden and other U.S. officials have offered increasingly dire warnings that the window for diplomacy is narrow.

Biden told reporters Friday that he believes Putin has decided to invade in the coming days, taking military action that could go far beyond the disputed Donbas region in eastern Ukraine and include the capital, Kyiv.

The vice president also met on Saturday with Germany's chancellor, Olaf Scholz. Biden has vowed the Nord Stream 2 Russia-to-Germany gas pipeline will be blocked if Russia further invades Ukraine.

Harris also discussed the recent Ukraine developments and Western response with President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of Greece, the White House said.

___

Follow AP's coverage of the tensions between Ukraine and Russia at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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Harris on Ukraine: World at 'a decisive moment in history' - Minneapolis Star Tribune

YPSILANTI, MI - Helping students to understand cultures they might not be familiar with and amplifying marginalized voices has been Sarafina Cheas passion since she began attending Washtenaw International Middle Academy in sixth grade.

Six years later, Chea has gained confidence in her voice as secretary of Washtenaw International High Schools Black Student Union, using Black History Month as an opportunity to put up posters around the school educating the rest of the school about prominent Black voices.

Her involvement in efforts to bring diverse perspectives to the school has helped her earn a $1,000 scholarship as one of McDonalds 2022 Black History Makers of Today.

The scholarship recognizes individuals who help uplift their peers or community through positive behavior or change, with dedication to strengthening their culture and inviting others to learn about it.

Chea, 17, was informed of the scholarship by her manager at an Ypsilanti McDonalds after learning of her involvement with the BSU and other culturally-centered clubs shes a part of at WIHI.

WIHIs diverse student population has an extensive range of identity and social clubs from the BSU, Asian Student Association and Hispanic Latinx Student Alliance to its Gay Straight Alliance and Amnesty International chapters.

Being in a leadership with the BSU over the past few years has helped Chea realize the importance of educating her fellow students about Black history and culture.

Not only are you are you educating people that you may not have any direct connection to, youre educating the community, Chea said. We want everybody to feel like they have a place here.

Washtenaw International High School Principal Nhu Do said Chea, whose father is a first-generation immigrant from Liberia, is the embodiment of the type of student and community member the school strives to help grow.

To see students not just learn the importance of being advocates for themselves and those who are from oppressed and marginalized communities, but to actually commit their time and their energy and their leadership toward making these changes is the whole reason I got into education, Do said.

What Im most impressed with the Serafina is not her not that she is a phenomenal academic student, which she is, but that she is deeply and sincerely committed to serving others, and to interrupting the injustices and the inequities that exist in the world.

Chea hopes her work educating others about Black culture can continue after graduation, with plans to attend the University of Michigan in the fall.

Chea said she plans to be a part of the Black Student Union and other cultural organizations at UM, while majoring in marketing.

Her hope is she can help be a part of helping bring more awareness in college as she has done at WIHI, inviting more students into discussions about marginalized communities.

When you have people that are listening in that may not be part of that community, its really powerful, she said. ... The way that we focus on race and diversity in this school - I think that it should be something other schools are doing.

READ MORE:

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Minnesota Vikings receiver K.J. Osborn gives back to community with inspirational speech to Ypsilanti student-athletes

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Ypsilanti student earns scholarship as Black History Maker of Today - MLive.com

MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. (WBTW) A first-of-its-kind celebration of Black history centered around the former Myrtle Beach Colored School will take place next week on social media.

Starting on Monday, the Historic Myrtle Beach Colored School and Education Center at 900 Dunbar St. is asking social-media users to participate by sharing pictures and posts using the hastag #HMBCSSpiritWeek22.

Black History Celebration Spirit Week will have a different theme for each day of the week.

The original four-room, wood-framed Myrtle Beach Colored School opened in 1932. After closing in the early 1950s, it served as a warehouse but later was mostly abandoned until 2001 when the city created a committee of former students, community representatives and others to try to save the school.

The condition of the building kept it from being saved at its original location. It was, however, deconstructed and stored in a warehouse. Crews began building a new structure in 2005, and the new building was opened in June 2006.

The Historic Myrtle Beach Colored School Museum and Education Center is a tangible example of how citizens, neighborhoods, businesses and governments can work together to preserve the historic record and create new opportunities, a post on the Myrtle Beach city website says. The new old school is a functioning part of the community and a proud addition to the neighborhood. You couldnt ask for a better recipe for community partnership and public service.

The museum is open to the public from 10 a.m. to noon on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

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Former Myrtle Beach Colored School at center of Black history event on social media - WBTW

Every February since 2017, men's college basketball gets a one-time-only peek behind the curtain to see what the NCAA Division I men's basketball selection committee thinks about the best teamsbefore we get to Selection Sunday.

That time comes again on Saturday, when CBS will air its annual in-season bracket of the 16 top teams according to the selection committee on the NCAA March Madness Men's Bracket Preview. The show will begin at 12:30 p.m. ET. When we see all the No. 1, 2, 3 and 4 seeds unsheathed, we will be 22 days from Selection Sunday. Normally, this show happens 29 days from Selection Sunday, but as committee chair Tom Burnett told CBS Sports this week, with the NFL extending its season by one week, all parties thought it best to wait until after the Super Bowl to do this.

Will this be a permanent change to the college hoops calendar?

"We're not quite sure yet what the future holds, that will certainly be for the committee moving forward after I depart," Burnett, who is in his final season on the committee, told CBS Sports. "Three weeks is close, but we've got a lot of basketball left. I believe the count is near 750 games remaining in the regular season, and then we've got all the conference tournaments. So, a lot can change even if it's just three weeks."

That's true, but the short history of this in-season bracket teaser has also proved informative with some accurate foreshadowing. The previous four times there has been an early reveal that later had anNCAA Tournament(2017-19, 2021), three of the four No. 1 seeds in February held the top line in March. (While there was no 2020 NCAA Tournament, the projections that year also kept this pattern.) Last year, Gonzaga, Baylor and Michigan held, while Ohio State dipped down to No. 2 come Selection Sunday.

Additionally, the four previous times the NCAA has done this (not accounting for 2020 when there was no tournament), one of the the four No. 1 seeds from February went on to win the national title.

Early No. 1 seeds: Villanova, Kansas, Baylor and Gonzaga. Actual No. 1 seeds: Villanova, Kansas, Gonzaga and North Carolina. National champion: North Carolina

Early No. 1 seeds: Virginia, Villanova, Xavier and Purdue Actual No. 1 seeds: Virginia, Villanova, Xavier and Kansas National champion: Villanova

Early No. 1 seeds: Duke, Virginia, Tennessee and Gonzaga Actual No. 1 seeds: Duke, Virginia, Gonzaga and North Carolina National champion: Virginia

Early No. 1 projected seeds: Baylor, Kansas, Gonzaga and San Diego State Actual No. 1 seeds: No tournament (Baylor, Kansas and Gonzaga were projected No. 1s)National champion: No tournament

Early No. 1 projected seeds: Gonzaga, Baylor, Michigan and Ohio State Actual No. 1 seeds: Gonzaga, Baylor, Michigan and Illinois National champion: Baylor

CBS Sports Bracketology Expert Jerry Palm projects Auburn, Gonzaga, Arizona and Kansas to be on the four top lines of the bracket. So, this is good news for fans of those programs. Because we are one week closer than usual to Selection Sunday for this show, the chances at least three of those teams maintain their elite seeding is even better.

"As we've gotten into conference play, we've had some results, teams are not going to be perfect they're going to lose games and such and take that into account and, again, remember the entire body of work," Burnett said.

The committee considered "six to seven programs" for the No. 1 seeds, and Burnett said contingencies were in place for Thursday night and Friday night results to adjust the bracket if necessary. (The committee met in person this week in Indianapolis and concluded their meetings on Thursday afternoon. For a refresher on seeding and bracketing principles, read this.) Overall, Burnett said "20 or so" teams were considered for the top 16 lines and it took three seed scrubs to get there.

This is the fourth season of the NCAA's NET rankings, which replaced the RPI (now a defunct/extinct metric, per the NCAA). As college hoops fans know, the NET has become the primary metric referenced across college hoops. But is it too emphasized by the media? Burnett said yes.

"It allows the committee to certainly maybe not make all of our decisions, but based some of the things we do on that," Burnett said of the NET. "On the team sheet we're looking at KenPom, we're looking at BPI, we're looking at everything that might be out there. And then, we're reading everything. ... I'm seeing what other voices talk about [in] our sport. We're taking all of that in, and certainly the NET plays a role in what we do as a committee, but it's not everything. And I will tell you certainly there's no circumstances where NET wins the day. NET makes us look at other things. That's my experience in the committee room. Why is their NET so high? Why are they so good in the predictives vs. the results metrics?"

It's an important distinction, as the committee has six metrics on team sheets it refers to. Four of those metrics are predictive in nature: NET, KenPom.com, Jeff Sagarin's ratings and ESPN's BPI. The two others Strength of Record and the Kevin Pauga Index; KPI for short are strictly rsum-based and are not influenced by team efficiency, scoring margin or any predictive qualities. Burnett emphasized how crucial all of these data points are to committee members now.

The eye test is not nearly as influential in discussion as it once was, according to Burnett.

"We're talking about the full body of work," he said. "Anything starting in November all the way through the conference tournaments, and that will factor in to what we do. But there's a lot of conversation about why metrics shape up the way they do, what does this number mean, and we may not get to all the final answers, but it's certainly a big part of the conversation.

"I think that's what our membership wanted us to do a few years ago was to bring that discussion more into the committee room, get away from what's used to be known as the eye test and just looking at someone and saying, 'They're a good team,' or 'maybe they're not a good team. They're in the bracket, they're not in the bracket.' We certainly don't want to do that. We want to be able to back up the information we share and reveal, whether it's this weekend or it's the real thing in three weeks."

One significant change with this year's committee is its expansion from 10 to 12 people. For more than five decades the NCAA selection committee in men's basketball had only 10 representatives. Two more were added in an effort to diversify the panel, though the NCAA still is only anointing conference commissioners and athletic directors to the committee. No former coaches or analytic experts or media members or anyone from different walks of life has been considered yet. Can that change? Will it?

"Our committee has a say in kind of how we're formulated but we don't make up our own rules," Burnett said. "There's a nominating committee in the Division I structure, certainly there's a Board of Directors that has final oversight of things. There are other voices that get involved, and when you get a mandate from the Board of Directors down ... I don't know that the basketball committee talked a whole lot about outside voices coming into the committee room, but again, at the end of the day we're not quite sure that's our decision."

Burnett said the committee continues to hear from coaches on this issue, but added that the committee isn't at that point where they're interested in diversifying further.

"So far there's been some comfort in how the committee's are structured," Burnett said.

It might be best to find some discomfort and continue to update how the committee forms its brain trust. The College Football Playoff committee and its powers-that-be, whoare vulnerable to many criticisms at least hasn't pigeonholed itself to only having ADs and commissioners on its roster.

As for the games and the operations of this year's men's tournament, CBS Sports recentlytalked with NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt, who said, "We've gone back to the original playbook. This year's tournament is being planned and executed like it was pre-pandemic. And that's not to say that we're not looking at adjustments that need to be made. We certainly are."

Said Burnett: "What's different this year is really an effort to get the tournament back on track, get it back to its course of 14 different sites, starting in Dayton. ... We've got the policies and procedures in place, we know how to put tournament together. We know how to get people excited, or maybe angry at us, for the matchups and all of that that are ahead. ... Putting it back on course at the sites that we know it to be at is the main focus here and I think we're getting close to getting that accomplished."

The NCAA Tournament is scheduled to get underway on the men's side on March 15 in Dayton, Ohio. Selection Sunday is March 13.

Continue reading here:

History suggests one of the No. 1 seeds revealed in the early NCAA Tournament bracket will win the title - CBS Sports

By The Associated Press

Todays Highlights in History:

On Feb. 19, 2008, an ailing Fidel Castro resigned the Cuban presidency after nearly a half-century in power; his brother Raul was later named to succeed him.

On this date:

In 1473, astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was born in Torun, Poland.

In 1807, former Vice President Aaron Burr, accused of treason, was arrested in the Mississippi Territory, in present-day Alabama. (Burr was acquitted at trial.)

In 1878, Thomas Edison received a U.S. patent for an improvement in phonograph or speaking machines.

In 1942, during World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which paved the way for the relocation and internment of people of Japanese ancestry, including U.S.-born citizens.

In 1945, Operation Detachment began during World War II as some 30,000 U.S. Marines began landing on Iwo Jima, where they commenced a successful month-long battle to seize control of the island from Japanese forces.

In 1959, an agreement was signed by Britain, Turkey and Greece granting Cyprus its independence.

In 1968, Mister Rogers Neighborhood debuts on NET (now PBS)

In 1976, President Gerald R. Ford, calling the issuing of the internment order for people of Japanese ancestry in 1942 a sad day in American history, signed a proclamation formally confirming its termination.

In 1985, the British soap opera EastEnders debuted on BBC Television.

In 1986, the U.S. Senate approved, 83-11, the Genocide Convention, an international treaty outlawing acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, nearly 37 years after the pact was first submitted for ratification.

In 1997, Deng Xiaoping (dung shah-oh-ping), the last of Chinas major Communist revolutionaries, died at age 92.

In 2003, an Iranian military plane carrying 275 members of the elite Revolutionary Guards crashed in southeastern Iran, killing all on board.

In 2019, President Donald Trump directed the Pentagon to develop plans for a new Space Force within the Air Force, accepting less than the full-fledged department he had wanted.

Ten years ago: Three skiers were killed when an avalanche swept them about a quarter-mile down an out-of-bounds canyon at Stevens Pass, Washington, but a fourth skier caught up in the slide was saved by a safety device. Forty-four inmates were killed in a prison riot in Apodaca, northern Mexico.

Five years ago: Three former elite U.S. gymnasts, including 2000 Olympian Jamie Dantzscher, appeared on CBS 60 Minutes to say they were sexually abused by Dr. Larry Nassar, a volunteer team physician for USA Gymnastics. (Nassar would be sentenced to decades in prison after hundreds of girls and women said he sexually abused them under the guise of medical treatment.) Anthony Davis had an All-Star Game for the record books, scoring 52 points as the Western Conference beat the Eastern Conference 192-182 the highest-scoring game in league history.

One year ago: Southern cities slammed by winter storms that left millions without power for days were dealing with water pipes ruptured by record-low temperatures; the breaks created a shortage of clean drinking water, shut down airports and left hospitals scrambling. The United States officially returned to the Paris climate accord; President Joe Biden told a virtual gathering of European leaders that the world can no longer delay or do the bare minimum to address climate change. U.S. officials scrambled to reinforce the nations cyber defenses following a sweeping hack that may have exposed government and corporate secrets to Russia. Kim Kardashian West filed for divorce from Kanye West in Los Angeles after 6 1/2 years of marriage.

Todays Birthdays:

Singer Smokey Robinson is 82. Actor Carlin Glynn is 82. Former Sony Corp. Chairman Howard Stringer is 80. Singer Lou Christie is 79. Rock musician Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath, Heaven and Hell) is 74. Actor Stephen Nichols is 71. Author Amy Tan is 70. Actor Jeff Daniels is 67. Rock singer-musician Dave Wakeling is 66. Talk show host Lorianne Crook is 65. Actor Ray Winstone is 65. Actor Leslie David Baker is 64. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is 63. Britains Prince Andrew is 62. Tennis Hall of Famer Hana Mandlikova is 60. Singer Seal is 59. Actor Jessica Tuck is 59. Country musician Ralph McCauley (Wild Horses) is 58. Rock musician Jon Fishman (Phish) is 57. Actor Justine Bateman is 56. Actor Benicio Del Toro is 55. Actor Bellamy Young is 52. Rock musician Daniel Adair is 47. Pop singer-actor Haylie Duff is 37. Actor Arielle Kebbel is 37. Christian rock musician Seth Morrison (Skillet) is 34. Actor Luke Pasqualino is 32. Actor Victoria Justice is 29. Actor David (dah-VEED) Mazouz (TV: Gotham) is 21. Actor Millie Bobby Brown is 18.

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Today in History : Today is Saturday, Feb. 19, the 50th day of 2022. - wausaupilotandreview.com

On Friday Auburn announced that Eric Kiesau would be promoted to offensive coordinator prior to the 2022 season. Kiesau joined the staff in 2021 as a senior offensive analyst before being promoted to wide receivers coach following the Georgia State game.

This isnt the first run as offensive coordinator for Kiesau, he has served as the offensive play caller at five different stops since 2009. He joined the Colorado Buffaloes staff under Dan Hawkins as the wide receivers coach in 2006. Kiesau would be promoted to offensive coordinator in 2009.

After a one-year stint as the passing game coordinator with the Cal Bears, Kiesau would join Steve Sarkisians staff at Washington in 2012. When Sark left for the job at Southern California, Kiesau would head back to the Big 12 with the Kansas Jayhawks. He would be named interim offensive coordinator before joining the Alabama Crimson Tide in 2015 as an offensive analyst.

By 2016, he was on the move again after Kiesau would take on the role of the associate head coach and offensive coordinator. After Tim DeRuyter was fired midway through the season, he would take over as interim head coach.

In 2017 Bryan Harsin hired Kiesau to be his wide receivers coach. He would name him co-offensive coordinator in 2019. He would take full control of the offensive coordinator role for the 2020 season.

With the history lesson out of the way, we broke down the offensive rankings under Eric Kiesau during his history as an offensive coordinator in FBS.

Passing Offense: 241.9 YPG (No. 49)

Rushing Offense: 110.7 YPG (No. 114)

Total Offense: 352.6 YPG (No. 98)

Scoring Offense: 33.9 PPG (No. 25)

Passing Offense: 255.6 YPG (No. 41)

Rushing Offense: 168.6 YPG (No. 52)

Total Offense: 424.2 YPG (No. 41)

Scoring Offense: 33.9 PPG (No. 19)

Passing Offense: 207.5 YPG (No. 87)

Rushing Offense: 108.5 YPG (No. 120)

Total Offense: 316.1 YPG (No. 122)

Scoring Offense: 16.5 PPG (No. 125)

Passing Offense: 203.5 YPG (No. 85)

Rushing Offense: 108.5 YPG (No. 116)

Total Offense: 312.1 YPG (No. 118)

Scoring Offense: 16.4 PPG (No. 120)

Passing Offense: 256.2 YPG (No. 39)

Rushing Offense: 228.1 YPG (No. 16)

Total Offense: 484.3 YPG (No. 15)

Scoring Offense: 36.4 PPG (No. 18)

Passing Offense: 212.1 YPG (No. 84)

Rushing Offense: 136.8 YPG (No. 86)

Total Offense: 348.9 YPG (No. 99)

Scoring Offense: 21.7 PPG (No. 95)

Passing Offense: 222.7 YPG (No. 58)

Rushing Offense: 142.7 YPG (No. 73)

Total Offense: 365.3 YPG (No. 73)

Scoring Offense: 24.2 PPG (No. 77)

Passing Offense: 226.3 YPG (No. 48)

Rushing Offense: 87.9 YPG (No. 113)

Total Offense: 314.2 YPG (No. 101)

Scoring Offense: 22.3 PPG (No. 88)

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Auburn Football: Eric Kiesau's history as offensive coordinator in FBS - Auburn Wire

Over the course of the history of the Universe, the Milky Way has not been serenely sailing through intergalactic space. Quite the contrary, actually. Over the last 13.6 billion years or so, it has collided with and consumed multiple other galaxies.

Now, through painstaking work, astronomers led by Khyati Malhan of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany have mapped six of these ancient galactic mergers five of which were already known, and a sixth that they have newly discovered. The results will lead to a more complete understanding of our galaxy's history, growth and evolution, and the origins of the stars therein.

"The dynamical atlas of the Milky Way mergers that we present here provides a global view of the galaxy formation in action," the researchers write in their paper.

"Thus, our study contributes to the initial steps of unraveling the full hierarchical build-up of our galaxy, and also understanding the origin of the globular clusters and stellar streams of the Milky Way halo."

The Milky Way galaxy doesn't just consist of a flattish disk of stars orbiting a supermassive black hole. Its gravitational reach is spherical, an orb that not only extends above and below the galactic plane, but encircles that disk and its surrounds. This structure is called the galactic halo, and it was predominantly formed by mergers with multiple other galaxies.

Working out that history takes some innovative detective work. The first hurdle to overcome is that it's really tricky, in space, to know how far away things are. We can map stars to an X and a Y axis, but unless you know how intrinsically bright something is, its distance is harder to figure out. This, until recently, had made discerning groups of stars very difficult.

When the Milky Way interacts with another galaxy, the results are not a neat subsumption, either. The tidal (gravitational) forces at play stretch the other galaxy out, so that it forms what we call a stellar stream a river of stars arcing across the sky, the guts of a disemboweled galaxy.

In addition, dense clusters of stars called globular clusters and satellite galaxies are also often thought to be remnants of galactic mergers, lurking in the halo.

(S. Payne-Wardenaar/K. Malhan, MPIA)

In recent years, astronomers have identified more of these streams in the galactic halo thanks to a project called Gaia. The Gaia satellite is using stellar parallax to work out the precise position and the motion of Milky Way stars in three-dimensional space with the highest accuracy yet, and the discoveries it has enabled are pretty spectacular, including the Gaia-Enceladus galactic merger that took place 9 billion years ago.

The early third release of Gaia data took place in December 2020, and, rather than analyzing groupings of stars manually, Malhan and his colleagues used a statistical procedure that helped to identify whether or not the groups were linked to a galactic merger. In total, the team included 170 globular clusters, 41 stellar streams, and 46 satellite galaxies, and assigned 62 of these objects to six merger events with smaller galaxies.

Five of those were known. There was Gaia-Enceladus, as previously mentioned; the Cetus merger; the LMS-1/Wukong merger, discovered in 2020; the Sequoia galaxy, which merged with the Milky Way around 9 billion years ago; and the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, which has repeatedly punched through the Milky Way for billions of years.

(S. Payne-Wardenaar/K. Malhan, MPIA)

In addition, the team discovered an entirely new merger, which they named Pontus. We don't know much about Pontus yet, but we do know that the stars associated with it are moving very slowly, against the main rotation of the Milky Way. This, they believe, could indicate that the merger took place very early in the history of our galaxy, possibly around 8 to 10 billion years ago.

They also learned something new about LMS-1/Wukong: three of the streams associated with it have some of the oldest stars in the Milky Way. This suggests the progenitor galaxy of those stars may have formed very early in the Universe's history, although we as yet have no timeline for when it merged with the Milky Way.

There are also tantalizing hints of other mergers hiding out there in the Milky Way. The automated system missed two known mergers, including the Kraken; and a manual analysis of the data by the team suggested that there was yet another unknown merger. At least some of the 195 remaining objects could be tied to these; or they could be from smaller mergers that left behind smaller traces.

The next step, the researchers said, is to try to reconstruct a timeline of all the mergers.

"With such a wealth of information," they write, "we will be able to explore the 'temporal' aspect of galactic archeology by building an understanding of the 'chronological' merging history of the Milky Way."

The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

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The Milky Way's Dramatic History of Violence Has Been Charted in a New Map - ScienceAlert

But what computers were bad at, traditionally, was strategythe ability to ponder the shape of a game many, many moves in the future. Thats where humans still had the edge.

Or so Kasparov thought, until Deep Blues move in game 2 rattled him. It seemed so sophisticated that Kasparov began worrying: maybe the machine was far better than hed thought! Convinced he had no way to win, he resigned the second game.

But he shouldnt have. Deep Blue, it turns out, wasnt actually that good. Kasparov had failed to spot a move that would have let the game end in a draw. He was psyching himself out: worried that the machine might be far more powerful than it really was, he had begun to see human-like reasoning where none existed.

Knocked off his rhythm, Kasparov kept playing worse and worse. He psyched himself out over and over again. Early in the sixth, winner-takes-all game, he made a move so lousy that chess observers cried out in shock. I was not in the mood of playing at all, he later said at a press conference.

IBM benefited from its moonshot. In the press frenzy that followed Deep Blues success, the companys market cap rose $11.4 billion in a single week. Even more significant, though, was that IBMs triumph felt like a thaw in the long AI winter. If chess could be conquered, what was next? The publics mind reeled.

That, Campbell tells me, is what got people paying attention.

The truth is, it wasnt surprising that a computer beat Kasparov. Most people whod been paying attention to AIand to chessexpected it to happen eventually.

Chess may seem like the acme of human thought, but its not. Indeed, its a mental task thats quite amenable to brute-force computation: the rules are clear, theres no hidden information, and a computer doesnt even need to keep track of what happened in previous moves. It just assesses the position of the pieces right now.

There are very few problems out there where, as with chess, you have all the information you could possibly need to make the right decision.

Everyone knew that once computers got fast enough, theyd overwhelm a human. It was just a question of when. By the mid-90s, the writing was already on the wall, in a sense, says Demis Hassabis, head of the AI company DeepMind, part of Alphabet.

Deep Blues victory was the moment that showed just how limited hand-coded systems could be. IBM had spent years and millions of dollars developing a computer to play chess. But it couldnt do anything else.

It didnt lead to the breakthroughs that allowed the [Deep Blue] AI to have a huge impact on the world, Campbell says. They didnt really discover any principles of intelligence, because the real world doesnt resemble chess. There are very few problems out there where, as with chess, you have all the information you could possibly need to make the right decision, Campbell adds. Most of the time there are unknowns. Theres randomness.

But even as Deep Blue was mopping the floor with Kasparov, a handful of scrappy upstarts were tinkering with a radically more promising form of AI: the neural net.

With neural nets, the idea was not, as with expert systems, to patiently write rules for each decision an AI will make. Instead, training and reinforcement strengthen internal connections in rough emulation (as the theory goes) of how the human brain learns.

AP PHOTO / ADAM NADEL

The idea had existed since the 50s. But training a usefully large neural net required lightning-fast computers, tons of memory, and lots of data. None of that was readily available then. Even into the 90s, neural nets were considered a waste of time.

Back then, most people in AI thought neural nets were just rubbish, says Geoff Hinton, an emeritus computer science professor at the University of Toronto, and a pioneer in the field. I was called a true believernot a compliment.

But by the 2000s, the computer industry was evolving to make neural nets viable. Video-game players lust for ever-better graphics created a huge industry in ultrafast graphic-processing units, which turned out to be perfectly suited for neural-net math. Meanwhile, the internet was exploding, producing a torrent of pictures and text that could be used to train the systems.

By the early 2010s, these technical leaps were allowing Hinton and his crew of true believers to take neural nets to new heights. They could now create networks with many layers of neurons (which is what the deep in deep learning means). In 2012 his team handily won the annual Imagenet competition, where AIs compete to recognize elements in pictures. It stunned the world of computer science: self-learning machines were finally viable.

Ten years into the deep-learning revolution, neural nets and their pattern-recognizing abilities have colonized every nook of daily life. They help Gmail autocomplete your sentences, help banks detect fraud, let photo apps automatically recognize faces, andin the case of OpenAIs GPT-3 and DeepMinds Gopherwrite long, human-sounding essays and summarize texts. Theyre even changing how science is done; in 2020, DeepMind debuted AlphaFold2, an AI that can predict how proteins will folda superhuman skill that can help guide researchers to develop new drugs and treatments.

Meanwhile Deep Blue vanished, leaving no useful inventions in its wake. Chess playing, it turns out, wasnt a computer skill that was needed in everyday life. What Deep Blue in the end showed was the shortcomings of trying to handcraft everything, says DeepMind founder Hassabis.

IBM tried to remedy the situation with Watson, another specialized system, this one designed to tackle a more practical problem: getting a machine to answer questions. It used statistical analysis of massive amounts of text to achieve language comprehension that was, for its time, cutting-edge. It was more than a simple if-then system. But Watson faced unlucky timing: it was eclipsed only a few years later by the revolution in deep learning, which brought in a generation of language-crunching models far more nuanced than Watsons statistical techniques.

Deep learning has run roughshod over old-school AI precisely because pattern recognition is incredibly powerful, says Daphne Koller, a former Stanford professor who founded and runs Insitro, which uses neural nets and other forms of machine learning to investigate novel drug treatments. The flexibility of neural netsthe wide variety of ways pattern recognition can be usedis the reason there hasnt yet been another AI winter. Machine learning has actually delivered value, she says, which is something the previous waves of exuberance in AI never did.

The inverted fortunes of Deep Blue and neural nets show how bad we were, for so long, at judging whats hardand whats valuablein AI.

For decades, people assumed mastering chess would be important because, well, chess is hard for humans to play at a high level. But chess turned out to be fairly easy for computers to master, because its so logical.

What was far harder for computers to learn was the casual, unconscious mental work that humans dolike conducting a lively conversation, piloting a car through traffic, or reading the emotional state of a friend. We do these things so effortlessly that we rarely realize how tricky they are, and how much fuzzy, grayscale judgment they require. Deep learnings great utility has come from being able to capture small bits of this subtle, unheralded human intelligence.

Still, theres no final victory in artificial intelligence. Deep learning may be riding high nowbut its amassing sharp critiques, too.

For a very long time, there was this techno-chauvinist enthusiasm that okay, AI is going to solve every problem! says Meredith Broussard, a programmer turned journalism professor at New York University and author of Artificial Unintelligence. But as she and other critics have pointed out, deep-learning systems are often trained on biased dataand absorb those biases. The computer scientists Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru discovered that three commercially available visual AI systems were terrible at analyzing the faces of darker-skinned women. Amazon trained an AI to vet rsums, only to find it downranked women.

Though computer scientists and many AI engineers are now aware of these bias problems, theyre not always sure how to deal with them. On top of that, neural nets are also massive black boxes, says Daniela Rus, a veteran of AI who currently runs MITs Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Once a neural net is trained, its mechanics are not easily understood even by its creator. It is not clear how it comes to its conclusionsor how it will fail.

For a very long time, there was this techno-chauvinist enthusiasm that Okay, AI is going to solve every problem!

It may not be a problem, Rus figures, to rely on a black box for a task that isnt safety critical. But what about a higher-stakes job, like autonomous driving? Its actually quite remarkable that we could put so much trust and faith in them, she says.

This is where Deep Blue had an advantage. The old-school style of handcrafted rules may have been brittle, but it was comprehensible. The machine was complexbut it wasnt a mystery.

Ironically, that old style of programming might stage something of a comeback as engineers and computer scientists grapple with the limits of pattern matching.

Language generators, like OpenAIs GPT-3 or DeepMinds Gopher, can take a few sentences youve written and keep on going, writing pages and pages of plausible-sounding prose. But despite some impressive mimicry, Gopher still doesnt really understand what its saying, Hassabis says. Not in a true sense.

Similarly, visual AI can make terrible mistakes when it encounters an edge case. Self-driving cars have slammed into fire trucks parked on highways, because in all the millions of hours of video theyd been trained on, theyd never encountered that situation. Neural nets have, in their own way, a version of the brittleness problem.

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What the history of AI tells us about its future - MIT Technology Review