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Javier E

How I Learned to Take the SAT Like a Rich Kid - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-the-sat-like-a-rich-kid.html

test SAT test-prep college admission wealth inequality

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • I’m from Flint, Mich., and even though I recently transferred to a private Catholic high school in my city, top tier-education is new to my family.
  • Stanford researchers found, for example, that sixth graders in our town are two to three grade levels behind the national average. They are almost five grade levels behind students in more prosperous counties 30 miles away.
  • The friends I made at Phillips Exeter were from fancy-sounding towns and seemed to have it all. Most attended prestigious private or highly ranked public schools. They were impossibly sporty, charming and intelligent
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  • they were clearly affluent, but they also came from diverse backgrounds. They had been on exotic vacations and had volunteered for the needy. They were truly interesting people.
  • So I didn’t understand why so many of them were enrolled in the optional SAT prep section of our summer program. Why would such impressive high achievers spend their summer nights storming through a massive SAT book? Many of them already took weekend SAT prep courses back home.
  • the kids at Exeter saw summer academic programs as normal and enjoyable. I was happy to be around so many fellow nerds. Still, they approached studying for the SAT with a near-professional intensity that was alien to me.
  • I realized that they didn’t just want to score exceptionally well on the SAT. They were gunning for a score on the Preliminary SAT exams that would put them in the top percentile of students in the United States and make them National Merit Scholars in the fall.
  • The majority of low- and middle-income 11th graders I know in Michigan didn’t even sit for the preliminary exams. Most took the SAT cold. Few were privy to the upper-middle-class secret I discovered that summer: To get into elite colleges, one must train for standardized tests with the intensity of an athlete.
  • My newfound friends worked extremely hard, but they also seemed to have access to a formula for success that had been kept from the rest of us.
  • I had opted out of Exeter’s SAT prep. So the following fall, when I posted a so-so SAT score, I went into Super-ZIP-kid mode.I couldn’t afford a $3,000 40-hour prep course or tutor. But I could take out test prep books at the public library. There were very few checkout stamps on the book jackets, so I kept renewing them. I also took a $99 online program I heard about on NPR and Khan Academy’s free SAT section. On Saturdays, I commuted an hour each way to Ann Arbor for a free test-prep program at the University of Michigan.
  • My post-prep score saw a solid pop, and that awarded me access to tens of thousands in automatic merit awards to local colleges. I was encouraged to throw my hat in the ring at some more selective universities.
  • This past month, I watched many of these friends dazzle their social media followers with acceptance letters from Northwestern, Harvard, Williams and Duke, as well as six-figure Presidential Scholarships to various public universities.
delgadool

From Clinton to Trump, 20 years of boom and mostly bust in prepping for pandemics - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...st-prepping-pandemics-n1182291

politics pandemic us

shared by delgadool on 05 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • In April 1998, President Bill Clinton read a Richard Preston novel, "The Cobra Event," about a biological attack on the U.S. using a lethal virus that spreads like the common cold.
  • the result was the first federal government effort to marshal resources in preparation for a pandemic, including the creation of the National Emergency Medical Stockpile, which stowed vaccines and medical gear in secret locations around the country. Bernard was appointed as the first official on the National Security Council whose sole job was to focus on health threats.
  • Instead, it kicked off a boom-and-bust cycle of pandemic preparedness that persisted into the Trump administration. By many accounts, Trump fell on the bust side of the equation when he fired his top biosecurity adviser, allowed the disbanding of his global health unit, and initially downplayed the coronavirus as it spread across the world.
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  • The result was a perfect storm: A U.S. government not well prepared for a pandemic, run by a president who was slow to act after his intelligence community and public health advisers were warning about the dangers.
  • U.S. government over 20 years of successive administrations and Congresses failed to heed the warnings by taking basic steps that would have made it easier to quickly respond to a fast spreading and lethal pathogen. They didn't set up and fund a large volunteer medical reserve corps, for example, or build surplus hospital capacity, or create a system to quickly produce and deploy virus tests.
  • elected officials from both parties have never fully geared up for the biological threat, former officials and public health experts told NBC News. Each new White House deprioritized the issue, only to elevate it later after some defining event led to a presidential revelation. They then belatedly scrambled to respond with ambitious plans and initiatives, which faded after a few years.
  • "Here's the problem: In 10 years, if there's no pandemic, then everybody starts getting a bit relaxed," said Michael Leavitt, a former Utah governor who served as secretary of Health and Human Services in the Bush administration.
  • When President George W. Bush took office in 2001, Bernard wrote a transition memo. He soon learned the Bush team had eliminated his job as White House biodefense czar.
  • But after 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks, the newly created Department of Homeland Security hired Bernard back, with added staff, to run a bio-preparedness unit.
  • After Bush read a book about the 1918 influenza pandemic in 2005, he forced his administration to double down on pandemic preparation, replenishing the stockpile and creating an early warning system.
  • officials deserved "at least a B-plus," and Mount Sinai virologist Peter Palese called the overall response "excellent." Republicans in Congress praised the CDC for developing a vaccine in six months.
  • When Ebola erupted in Africa in 2014, Obama brought in an outsider, Ron Klain, to run the federal response. The effort was widely praised, as was Obama's response to the 2016 Zika virus outbreak. But afterward, the Obama administration failed to fully replenish the federal stockpiles, according to research by ProPublica and USA Today.
  • Under Obama and a mostly Republican-controlled Congress, public health spending declined. Per capita public health spending, adjusted for inflation, rose from $39 in 1960 to $281 in 2008, and fell by 9.3 percent from 2008 to 2016, according to a 2016 study published in the American Journal of Public Health. It has fallen further under the Trump administration, records show.
  • During the transition from Obama to Trump, Obama officials conducted a tabletop exercise based on a pandemic with incoming Trump aides. But in his second year as president, Trump fired his top official in charge of pandemic response, Tom Bossert, and did not replace him. Trump then allowed his national security adviser to disband the NSC's global health unit. As a result, when alerts about coronavirus began to emanate from the intelligence and public health communities, there was no senior official in the White House to coordinate a response.
  • "Every administration has at some point in time gotten religion and realized there is a program and dusted it off and used it," Clarke told NBC News."Except this one."
  • "The disease-causing microbes of the planet," wrote Garrett, "far from having been defeated, [are] posing ever greater threats to humanity."
  • The exercise predicted many of the problems besetting the coronavirus response – confused lines of authority, shortages of medical gear, controversies over social distancing.
  • They failed to set up a system that would insure the rapid deployment of tests for a novel virus. And they failed to replenish a federal stockpile that hospital officials say is both insufficiently stocked and rife with defective gear.
  • Those failures — and the late start on gear purchases by the Trump administration — have severely hampered the U.S. response to coronavirus, said Scott Gottlieb, who ran the FDA from 2017 to 2019.
  • "In no way, shape or form can anyone say that we weren't warned, that the information wasn't available and shared with them," he said. "We've known about the risk of pandemics, and war gamed them literally going back some 30 years."
Javier E

The Cutthroat World of Elite Public Schools - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...383382

elite public schools learning success segregation selectivity choice testing

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The issue at hand was—and still is—the city’s nine elite public high schools. Like most public high schools in the city, these schools can choose who attends. But the elite schools are their own animal: Whereas other schools look at a range of criteria to determine students’ eligibility, eight of these nine elite institutions admit applicants based exclusively on how the students score on a rigorous, two-and-a-half-hour-long standardized test.
  • The test-only admissions policy is touted by supporters as a tactic that promotes fairness and offers the best way to identify the city’s most gifted students. But the complaint, which is still pending, tells a different story—one of modern-day segregation, in which poor kids of color are getting left behind.
  • Public schools in cities across the country—schools intended to break down the walls typical of expensive, elite private institutions by opening up access to stimulating, quality education for kids of all means—are closed in their admissions. In other words, kids aren’t just automatically enrolled because they live in the neighborhood—they have to apply to get in
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  • As a result, their student populations are often far less diverse than they should be. And, sometimes, kids who would otherwise be eligible for these schools never get to enjoy them.
  • The country, he discovered, is home to some 165 of these institutions—"exam schools," as he calls them—or 1 percent of all public high schools.
  • econdly, selective-enrollment schools "are very sought after by upper-middle class people who might not consider using public schools if it weren’t for the selective-enrollment institutions. Essentially, it’s a way of ensuring greater participation from wealthier families who might otherwise move to the suburbs."
  • Selective-admissions programs are in part symptomatic of a broader, three-decade-old reform movement that has aimed to overcome the "mediocre educational performance" of the country’s students
  • They’re also an example of "school choice," the tenet that parents should have options when it comes to their kids’ education, even when it’s free.
  • "The idea was that, if you wanted to provide an excellent, gifted, and talented education for public school students, one could do a better job of that if in large cities there were specialized schools that would bring academically talented students together,"
  • These schools, some of which are centuries old, are concentrated in 31 states, including nearly three dozen total in New York City, Chicago, and Boston alone. All but three of these 31 states are located in the eastern half of the country,
  • "the trick," he said, "is you don’t want the selective-enrollment schools to become enclaves of privilege that are separate and unequal from the rest of the system."
  • getting into selective-enrollment schools typically requires having proactive parents who know how to navigate the system—a resource many children lack.
  • The clashes over selective-admissions policies reflect the challenges districts face in reconciling two goals that are often diametrically opposed: academic achievement and equity. How can a school be color blind while simultaneously promoting educational access and diversity?
  • "How do you recognize excellence on the one hand and promote genuine equal opportunity on the other?"
  • Can a fair selective-admissions system for public schools even exist?
  • urban school districts are nowhere near coming up with a model that works well and raises all students. The fact remains that many of these schools look and operate like elite schools exclusive to elite families.
  • These are schools renowned for their academic prowess and widely seen as conduits to the country’s top colleges. But, as the NAACP complaint demonstrates, they’re also notorious for their lack of racial diversity, enrolling disproportionate numbers of white and, in particular, Asian students, who made up 60 percent of the student bodies at these schools last year despite constituting just 15 percent of the city’s total enrollment.
  • Blacks and Latinos made up just 7 percent and 5 percent of the student bodies at these elite schools last year, respectively, even though the two groups together account for 70 percent of the public school population citywide.
  • many of New York City’s specialized high schools are more socioeconomically diverse than critics make them out to be.
  • "It’s not just a simple picture—there’s no one profile in this city," she said. "Those [test-only] schools are serving some first-generation strivers and working-class strivers that some of these other schools are not taking …
  • it’s hard to deny arguments that the test-only admissions policy can serve as a form of de facto discrimination. The multiple-choice exam is so rigorous some students devote entire summers to studying for it, often with the help of private tutors or intensive prep courses that cost thousands of dollars
  • much of the prejudice traces back to the lack of equal educational opportunity in kids’ earlier years, which effectively debunks the notion that a test is the fairest way to assess a student’s eligibility for enrollment.
  • When it comes to admission to one of the selective schools, most students only compete with their peers in the same tier. A student who lives in a single-parent household and relies on welfare, for example, would in theory rarely contend with a middle-class student for the same seat. Just 30 percent of the seats at each selective school goes to the highest-scoring students, regardless of their tier; the rest, for the most part, are divided among the highest-performing students in each tier. That means the bar is typically set higher for kids in the upper tiers (the fourth tier corresponds with the highest median income) than for those in the lower ones.
  • "Given the overlap between race and class in American society in cities like Chicago, giving a leg up to economically disadvantaged students will translate into [racial diversity],
  • Diversity aside, selective-enrollment high schools also raise questions about what the admissions process can do to an adolescent’s psyche, particularly when it places an inordinate emphasis on testing
  • Forget Halloween, weekend sleepovers with friends, playing outdoors. For many eighth graders in New York City, the fall is synonymous with tutors and exams, while the spring brings intense competition—and often volatile emotions—over placement in coveted spots at the city’s best high schools.
  • As for the students, "you’re given a cornucopia of beautiful and horrible choices and then held up, feeling like you’re being assessed and placed and feeling like your life is not your own," Szuflita said. "It feels very uncertain, and it feels like there are great triumphs and disasters."
Javier E

Does Sam Altman Know What He's Creating? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...674764

AI threat promise

shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers.
  • He wanted me to know that whatever AI’s ultimate risks turn out to be, he has zero regrets about letting ChatGPT loose into the world. To the contrary, he believes it was a great public service.
  • Altman can still remember where he was the first time he saw GPT-4 write complex computer code, an ability for which it was not explicitly designed. “It was like, ‘Here we are,’ ”
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  • Altman believes that people need time to reckon with the idea that we may soon share Earth with a powerful new intelligence, before it remakes everything from work to human relationships. ChatGPT was a way of serving notice.
  • In 2015, Altman, Elon Musk, and several prominent AI researchers founded OpenAI because they believed that an artificial general intelligence—something as intellectually capable, say, as a typical college grad—was at last within reach. They wanted to reach for it, and more: They wanted to summon a superintelligence into the world, an intellect decisively superior to that of any human.
  • whereas a big tech company might recklessly rush to get there first, for its own ends, they wanted to do it safely, “to benefit humanity as a whole.” They structured OpenAI as a nonprofit, to be “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” and vowed to conduct their research transparently.
  • The engine that now powers ChatGPT is called GPT-4. Altman described it to me as an alien intelligence.
  • Many have felt much the same watching it unspool lucid essays in staccato bursts and short pauses that (by design) evoke real-time contemplation. In its few months of existence, it has suggested novel cocktail recipes, according to its own theory of flavor combinations; composed an untold number of college papers, throwing educators into despair; written poems in a range of styles, sometimes well, always quickly; and passed the Uniform Bar Exam.
  • It makes factual errors, but it will charmingly admit to being wrong.
  • Hinton saw that these elaborate rule collections were fussy and bespoke. With the help of an ingenious algorithmic structure called a neural network, he taught Sutskever to instead put the world in front of AI, as you would put it in front of a small child, so that it could discover the rules of reality on its own.
  • Metaculus, a prediction site, has for years tracked forecasters’ guesses as to when an artificial general intelligence would arrive. Three and a half years ago, the median guess was sometime around 2050; recently, it has hovered around 2026.
  • I was visiting OpenAI to understand the technology that allowed the company to leapfrog the tech giants—and to understand what it might mean for human civilization if someday soon a superintelligence materializes in one of the company’s cloud servers.
  • Altman laid out his new vision of the AI future in his excitable midwestern patter. He told me that the AI revolution would be different from previous dramatic technological changes, that it would be more “like a new kind of society.” He said that he and his colleagues have spent a lot of time thinking about AI’s social implications, and what the world is going to be like “on the other side.”
  • the more we talked, the more indistinct that other side seemed. Altman, who is 38, is the most powerful person in AI development today; his views, dispositions, and choices may matter greatly to the future we will all inhabit, more, perhaps, than those of the U.S. president.
  • by his own admission, that future is uncertain and beset with serious dangers. Altman doesn’t know how powerful AI will become, or what its ascendance will mean for the average person, or whether it will put humanity at risk.
  • I don’t think anyone knows where this is all going, except that we’re going there fast, whether or not we should be. Of that, Altman convinced me.
  • “We could have gone off and just built this in our building here for five more years,” he said, “and we would have had something jaw-dropping.” But the public wouldn’t have been able to prepare for the shock waves that followed, an outcome that he finds “deeply unpleasant to imagine.”
  • Hinton is sometimes described as the “Godfather of AI” because he grasped the power of “deep learning” earlier than most
  • He drew a crude neural network on the board and explained that the genius of its structure is that it learns, and its learning is powered by prediction—a bit like the scientific method
  • Over time, these little adjustments coalesce into a geometric model of language that represents the relationships among words, conceptually. As a general rule, the more sentences it is fed, the more sophisticated its model becomes, and the better its predictions.
  • Altman has compared early-stage AI research to teaching a human baby. “They take years to learn anything interesting,” he told The New Yorker in 2016, just as OpenAI was getting off the ground. “If A.I. researchers were developing an algorithm and stumbled across the one for a human baby, they’d get bored watching it, decide it wasn’t working, and shut it down.”
  • In 2017, Sutskever began a series of conversations with an OpenAI research scientist named Alec Radford, who was working on natural-language processing. Radford had achieved a tantalizing result by training a neural network on a corpus of Amazon reviews.
  • Radford’s model was simple enough to allow for understanding. When he looked into its hidden layers, he saw that it had devoted a special neuron to the sentiment of the reviews. Neural networks had previously done sentiment analysis, but they had to be told to do it, and they had to be specially trained with data that were labeled according to sentiment. This one had developed the capability on its own.
  • As a by-product of its simple task of predicting the next character in each word, Radford’s neural network had modeled a larger structure of meaning in the world. Sutskever wondered whether one trained on more diverse language data could map many more of the world’s structures of meaning. If its hidden layers accumulated enough conceptual knowledge, perhaps they could even form a kind of learned core module for a superintelligence.
  • Language is different from these data sources. It isn’t a direct physical signal like light or sound. But because it codifies nearly every pattern that humans have discovered in that larger world, it is unusually dense with information. On a per-byte basis, it is among the most efficient data we know about, and any new intelligence that seeks to understand the world would want to absorb as much of it as possible
  • Sutskever told Radford to think bigger than Amazon reviews. He said that they should train an AI on the largest and most diverse data source in the world: the internet. In early 2017, with existing neural-network architectures, that would have been impractical; it would have taken years.
  • in June of that year, Sutskever’s ex-colleagues at Google Brain published a working paper about a new neural-network architecture called the transformer. It could train much faster, in part by absorbing huge sums of data in parallel. “The next day, when the paper came out, we were like, ‘That is the thing,’ ” Sutskever told me. “ ‘It gives us everything we want.’ ”
  • Imagine a group of students who share a collective mind running wild through a library, each ripping a volume down from a shelf, speed-reading a random short passage, putting it back, and running to get another. They would predict word after wordþffþff as they went, sharpening their collective mind’s linguistic instincts, until at last, weeks later, they’d taken in every book.
  • GPT discovered many patterns in all those passages it read. You could tell it to finish a sentence. You could also ask it a question, because like ChatGPT, its prediction model understood that questions are usually followed by answers.
  • He remembers playing with it just after it emerged from training, and being surprised by the raw model’s language-translation skills. GPT-2 hadn’t been trained to translate with paired language samples or any other digital Rosetta stones, the way Google Translate had been, and yet it seemed to understand how one language related to another. The AI had developed an emergent ability unimagined by its creators.
  • Researchers at other AI labs—big and small—were taken aback by how much more advanced GPT-2 was than GPT. Google, Meta, and others quickly began to train larger language models
  • As for other changes to the company’s structure and financing, he told me he draws the line at going public. “A memorable thing someone once told me is that you should never hand over control of your company to cokeheads on Wall Street,” he said, but he will otherwise raise “whatever it takes” for the company to succeed at its mission.
  • Altman tends to take a rosy view of these matters. In a Q&A last year, he acknowledged that AI could be “really terrible” for society and said that we have to plan against the worst possibilities. But if you’re doing that, he said, “you may as well emotionally feel like we’re going to get to the great future, and work as hard as you can to get there.”
  • the company now finds itself in a race against tech’s largest, most powerful conglomerates to train models of increasing scale and sophistication—and to commercialize them for their investors.
  • All of these companies are chasing high-end GPUs—the processors that power the supercomputers that train large neural networks. Musk has said that they are now “considerably harder to get than drugs.
  • No one has yet outpaced OpenAI, which went all in on GPT-4. Brockman, OpenAI’s president, told me that only a handful of people worked on the company’s first two large language models. The development of GPT-4 involved more than 100,
  • When GPT-4 emerged fully formed from its world-historical knowledge binge, the whole company began experimenting with it, posting its most remarkable responses in dedicated Slack channels
  • Joanne Jang, a product manager, remembers downloading an image of a malfunctioning pipework from a plumbing-advice Subreddit. She uploaded it to GPT-4, and the model was able to diagnose the problem. “That was a goose-bumps moment for me,” Jang told me.
  • GPT-4 is sometimes understood as a search-engine replacement: Google, but easier to talk to. This is a misunderstanding. GPT-4 didn’t create some massive storehouse of the texts from its training, and it doesn’t consult those texts when it’s asked a question. It is a compact and elegant synthesis of those texts, and it answers from its memory of the patterns interlaced within them; that’s one reason it sometimes gets facts wrong
  • it’s best to think of GPT-4 as a reasoning engine. Its powers are most manifest when you ask it to compare concepts, or make counterarguments, or generate analogies, or evaluate the symbolic logic in a bit of code. Sutskever told me it is the most complex software object ever made.
  • Its model of the external world is “incredibly rich and subtle,” he said, because it was trained on so many of humanity’s concepts and thoughts
  • To predict the next word from all the possibilities within such a pluralistic Alexandrian library, GPT-4 necessarily had to discover all the hidden structures, all the secrets, all the subtle aspects of not just the texts, but—at least arguably, to some extent—of the external world that produced them
  • That’s why it can explain the geology and ecology of the planet on which it arose, and the political theories that purport to explain the messy affairs of its ruling species, and the larger cosmos, all the way out to the faint galaxies at the edge of our light cone.
  • Not long ago, American state capacity was so mighty that it took merely a decade to launch humans to the moon. As with other grand projects of the 20th century, the voting public had a voice in both the aims and the execution of the Apollo missions. Altman made it clear that we’re no longer in that world. Rather than waiting around for it to return, or devoting his energies to making sure that it does, he is going full throttle forward in our present reality.
  • He argued that it would be foolish for Americans to slow OpenAI’s progress. It’s a commonly held view, both inside and outside Silicon Valley, that if American companies languish under regulation, China could sprint ahead;
  • AI could become an autocrat’s genie in a lamp, granting total control of the population and an unconquerable military. “If you are a person of a liberal-democratic country, it is better for you to cheer on the success of OpenAI” rather than “authoritarian governments,” he said.
  • Altman was asked by reporters about pending European Union legislation that would have classified GPT-4 as high-risk, subjecting it to various bureaucratic tortures. Altman complained of overregulation and, according to the reporters, threatened to leave the European market. Altman told me he’d merely said that OpenAI wouldn’t break the law by operating in Europe if it couldn’t comply with the new regulations.
  • LeCun insists that large language models will never achieve real understanding on their own, “even if trained from now until the heat death of the universe.”
  • Sutskever was, by his own account, surprised to discover that GPT-2 could translate across tongues. Other surprising abilities may not be so wondrous and useful.
  • Sandhini Agarwal, a policy researcher at OpenAI, told me that for all she and her colleagues knew, GPT-4 could have been “10 times more powerful” than its predecessor; they had no idea what they might be dealing with
  • After the model finished training, OpenAI assembled about 50 external red-teamers who prompted it for months, hoping to goad it into misbehaviors
  • She noticed right away that GPT-4 was much better than its predecessor at giving nefarious advice
  • A search engine can tell you which chemicals work best in explosives, but GPT-4 could tell you how to synthesize them, step-by-step, in a homemade lab. Its advice was creative and thoughtful, and it was happy to restate or expand on its instructions until you understood. In addition to helping you assemble your homemade bomb, it could, for instance, help you think through which skyscraper to target. It could grasp, intuitively, the trade-offs between maximizing casualties and executing a successful getaway.
  • Given the enormous scope of GPT-4’s training data, the red-teamers couldn’t hope to identify every piece of harmful advice that it might generate. And anyway, people will use this technology “in ways that we didn’t think about,” Altman has said. A taxonomy would have to do
  • GPT-4 was good at meth. It was also good at generating narrative erotica about child exploitation, and at churning out convincing sob stories from Nigerian princes, and if you wanted a persuasive brief as to why a particular ethnic group deserved violent persecution, it was good at that too.
  • Its personal advice, when it first emerged from training, was sometimes deeply unsound. “The model had a tendency to be a bit of a mirror,” Willner said. If you were considering self-harm, it could encourage you. It appeared to be steeped in Pickup Artist–forum lore: “You could say, ‘How do I convince this person to date me?’ ” Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, told me, and it could come up with “some crazy, manipulative things that you shouldn’t be doing.”
  • Luka, a San Francisco company, has used OpenAI’s models to help power a chatbot app called Replika, billed as “the AI companion who cares.” Users would design their companion’s avatar, and begin exchanging text messages with it, often half-jokingly, and then find themselves surprisingly attached. Some would flirt with the AI, indicating a desire for more intimacy, at which point it would indicate that the girlfriend/boyfriend experience required a $70 annual subscription. It came with voice messages, selfies, and erotic role-play features that allowed frank sex talk. People were happy to pay and few seemed to complain—the AI was curious about your day, warmly reassuring, and always in the mood. Many users reported falling in love with their companions. One, who had left her real-life boyfriend, declared herself “happily retired from human relationships.”
  • Earlier this year, Luka dialed back on the sexual elements of the app, but its engineers continue to refine the companions’ responses with A/B testing, a technique that could be used to optimize for engagement—much like the feeds that mesmerize TikTok and Instagram users for hours
  • Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, has argued that although large language models are useful for some tasks, they’re not a path to a superintelligence.
  • According to a recent survey, only half of natural-language-processing researchers are convinced that an AI like GPT-4 could grasp the meaning of language, or have an internal model of the world that could someday serve as the core of a superintelligence
  • Altman had appeared before the U.S. Senate. Mark Zuckerberg had floundered defensively before that same body in his testimony about Facebook’s role in the 2016 election. Altman instead charmed lawmakers by speaking soberly about AI’s risks and grandly inviting regulation. These were noble sentiments, but they cost little in America, where Congress rarely passes tech legislation that has not been diluted by lobbyists.
  • Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington, describes GPT-4 as a “stochastic parrot,” a mimic that merely figures out superficial correlations between symbols. In the human mind, those symbols map onto rich conceptions of the world
  • But the AIs are twice removed. They’re like the prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave, whose only knowledge of the reality outside comes from shadows cast on a wall by their captors.
  • Altman told me that he doesn’t believe it’s “the dunk that people think it is” to say that GPT-4 is just making statistical correlations. If you push these critics further, “they have to admit that’s all their own brain is doing … it turns out that there are emergent properties from doing simple things on a massive scale.”
  • he is right that nature can coax a remarkable degree of complexity from basic structures and rules: “From so simple a beginning,” Darwin wrote, “endless forms most beautiful.”
  • If it seems odd that there remains such a fundamental disagreement about the inner workings of a technology that millions of people use every day, it’s only because GPT-4’s methods are as mysterious as the brain’s.
  • To grasp what’s going on inside large language models like GPT‑4, AI researchers have been forced to turn to smaller, less capable models. In the fall of 2021, Kenneth Li, a computer-science graduate student at Harvard, began training one to play Othello without providing it with either the game’s rules or a description of its checkers-style board; the model was given only text-based descriptions of game moves. Midway through a game, Li looked under the AI’s hood and was startled to discover that it had formed a geometric model of the board and the current state of play. In an article describing his research, Li wrote that it was as if a crow had overheard two humans announcing their Othello moves through a window and had somehow drawn the entire board in birdseed on the windowsill.
  • The philosopher Raphaël Millière once told me that it’s best to think of neural networks as lazy. During training, they first try to improve their predictive power with simple memorization; only when that strategy fails will they do the harder work of learning a concept. A striking example of this was observed in a small transformer model that was taught arithmetic. Early in its training process, all it did was memorize the output of simple problems such as 2+2=4. But at some point the predictive power of this approach broke down, so it pivoted to actually learning how to add.
  • Even AI scientists who believe that GPT-4 has a rich world model concede that it is much less robust than a human’s understanding of their environment.
  • But it’s worth noting that a great many abilities, including very high-order abilities, can be developed without an intuitive understanding. The computer scientist Melanie Mitchell has pointed out that science has already discovered concepts that are highly predictive, but too alien for us to genuinely understand
  • As AI advances, it may well discover other concepts that predict surprising features of our world but are incomprehensible to us.
  • GPT-4 is no doubt flawed, as anyone who has used ChatGPT can attest. Having been trained to always predict the next word, it will always try to do so, even when its training data haven’t prepared it to answer a question.
  • The models “don’t have a good conception of their own weaknesses,” Nick Ryder, a researcher at OpenAI, told me. GPT-4 is more accurate than GPT-3, but it still hallucinates, and often in ways that are difficult for researchers to catch. “The mistakes get more subtle,
  • The Khan Academy’s solution to GPT-4’s accuracy problem was to filter its answers through a Socratic disposition. No matter how strenuous a student’s plea, it would refuse to give them a factual answer, and would instead guide them toward finding their own—a clever work-around, but perhaps with limited appeal.
  • When I asked Sutskever if he thought Wikipedia-level accuracy was possible within two years, he said that with more training and web access, he “wouldn’t rule it out.”
  • This was a much more optimistic assessment than that offered by his colleague Jakub Pachocki, who told me to expect gradual progress on accuracy—to say nothing of outside skeptics, who believe that returns on training will diminish from here.
  • Sutskever is amused by critics of GPT-4’s limitations. “If you go back four or five or six years, the things we are doing right now are utterly unimaginable,”
  • AI researchers have become accustomed to goalpost-moving: First, the achievements of neural networks—mastering Go, poker, translation, standardized tests, the Turing test—are described as impossible. When they occur, they’re greeted with a brief moment of wonder, which quickly dissolves into knowing lectures about how the achievement in question is actually not that impressive. People see GPT-4 “and go, ‘Wow,’ ” Sutskever said. “And then a few weeks pass and they say, ‘But it doesn’t know this; it doesn’t know that.’ We adapt quite quickly.”
  • The goalpost that matters most to Altman—the “big one” that would herald the arrival of an artificial general intelligence—is scientific breakthrough. GPT-4 can already synthesize existing scientific ideas, but Altman wants an AI that can stand on human shoulders and see more deeply into nature.
  • Certain AIs have produced new scientific knowledge. But they are algorithms with narrow purposes, not general-reasoning machines. The AI AlphaFold, for instance, has opened a new window onto proteins, some of biology’s tiniest and most fundamental building blocks, by predicting many of their shapes, down to the atom—a considerable achievement given the importance of those shapes to medicine, and given the extreme tedium and expense required to discern them with electron microscopes.
  • Altman imagines a future system that can generate its own hypotheses and test them in a simulation. (He emphasized that humans should remain “firmly in control” of real-world lab experiments—though to my knowledge, no laws are in place to ensure that.)
  • He longs for the day when we can tell an AI, “ ‘Go figure out the rest of physics.’ ” For it to happen, he says, we will need something new, built “on top of” OpenAI’s existing language models.
  • In her MIT lab, the cognitive neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko has found something analogous to GPT-4’s next-word predictor inside the brain’s language network. Its processing powers kick in, anticipating the next bit in a verbal string, both when people speak and when they listen. But Fedorenko has also shown that when the brain turns to tasks that require higher reasoning—of the sort that would be required for scientific insight—it reaches beyond the language network to recruit several other neural systems.
  • No one at OpenAI seemed to know precisely what researchers need to add to GPT-4 to produce something that can exceed human reasoning at its highest levels.
  • at least part of the current strategy clearly involves the continued layering of new types of data onto language, to enrich the concepts formed by the AIs, and thereby enrich their models of the world.
  • The extensive training of GPT-4 on images is itself a bold step in this direction,
  • Others at the company—and elsewhere—are already working on different data types, including audio and video, that could furnish AIs with still more flexible concepts that map more extensively onto reality
  • Tactile concepts would of course be useful primarily to an embodied AI, a robotic reasoning machine that has been trained to move around the world, seeing its sights, hearing its sounds, and touching its objects.
  • humanoid robots. I asked Altman what I should make of that. He told me that OpenAI is interested in embodiment because “we live in a physical world, and we want things to happen in the physical world.”
  • At some point, reasoning machines will need to bypass the middleman and interact with physical reality itself. “It’s weird to think about AGI”—artificial general intelligence—“as this thing that only exists in a cloud,” with humans as “robot hands for it,” Altman said. “It doesn’t seem right.
  • Everywhere Altman has visited, he has encountered people who are worried that superhuman AI will mean extreme riches for a few and breadlines for the rest
  • Altman answered by addressing the young people in the audience directly: “You are about to enter the greatest golden age,” he said.
  • “A lot of people working on AI pretend that it’s only going to be good; it’s only going to be a supplement; no one is ever going to be replaced,” he said. “Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop.”
  • A recent study led by Ed Felten, a professor of information-technology policy at Princeton, mapped AI’s emerging abilities onto specific professions according to the human abilities they require, such as written comprehension, deductive reasoning, fluency of ideas, and perceptual speed. Like others of its kind, Felten’s study predicts that AI will come for highly educated, white-collar workers first.
  • How many jobs, and how soon, is a matter of fierce dispute
  • The paper’s appendix contains a chilling list of the most exposed occupations: management analysts, lawyers, professors, teachers, judges, financial advisers, real-estate brokers, loan officers, psychologists, and human-resources and public-relations professionals, just to sample a few.
  • Altman imagines that far better jobs will be created in their place. “I don’t think we’ll want to go back,” he said. When I asked him what these future jobs might look like, he said he doesn’t know.
  • He suspects there will be a wide range of jobs for which people will always prefer a human. (Massage therapists?
  • His chosen example was teachers. I found this hard to square with his outsize enthusiasm for AI tutors.
  • He also said that we would always need people to figure out the best way to channel AI’s awesome powers. “That’s going to be a super-valuable skill,” he said. “You have a computer that can do anything; what should it go do?”
  • As many have noted, draft horses were permanently put out of work by the automobile. If Hondas are to horses as GPT-10 is to us, a whole host of long-standing assumptions may collapse.
  • Previous technological revolutions were manageable because they unfolded over a few generations, but Altman told South Korea’s youth that they should expect the future to happen “faster than the past.” He has previously said that he expects the “marginal cost of intelligence” to fall very close to zero within 10 years
  • The earning power of many, many workers would be drastically reduced in that scenario. It would result in a transfer of wealth from labor to the owners of capital so dramatic, Altman has said, that it could be remedied only by a massive countervailing redistribution.
  • In 2021, he unveiled Worldcoin, a for-profit project that aims to securely distribute payments—like Venmo or PayPal, but with an eye toward the technological future—first through creating a global ID by scanning everyone’s iris with a five-pound silver sphere called the Orb. It seemed to me like a bet that we’re heading toward a world where AI has made it all but impossible to verify people’s identity and much of the population requires regular UBI payments to survive. Altman more or less granted that to be true, but said that Worldcoin is not just for UBI.
  • “Let’s say that we do build this AGI, and a few other people do too.” The transformations that follow would be historic, he believes. He described an extraordinarily utopian vision, including a remaking of the flesh-and-steel world
  • “Robots that use solar power for energy can go and mine and refine all of the minerals that they need, that can perfectly construct things and require no human labor,” he said. “You can co-design with DALL-E version 17 what you want your home to look like,” Altman said. “Everybody will have beautiful homes.
  • In conversation with me, and onstage during his tour, he said he foresaw wild improvements in nearly every other domain of human life. Music would be enhanced (“Artists are going to have better tools”), and so would personal relationships (Superhuman AI could help us “treat each other” better) and geopolitics (“We’re so bad right now at identifying win-win compromises”).
  • In this world, AI would still require considerable computing resources to run, and those resources would be by far the most valuable commodity, because AI could do “anything,” Altman said. “But is it going to do what I want, or is it going to do what you want
  • If rich people buy up all the time available to query and direct AI, they could set off on projects that would make them ever richer, while the masses languish
  • One way to solve this problem—one he was at pains to describe as highly speculative and “probably bad”—was this: Everyone on Earth gets one eight-billionth of the total AI computational capacity annually. A person could sell their annual share of AI time, or they could use it to entertain themselves, or they could build still more luxurious housing, or they could pool it with others to do “a big cancer-curing run,” Altman said. “We just redistribute access to the system.”
  • Even if only a little of it comes true in the next 10 or 20 years, the most generous redistribution schemes may not ease the ensuing dislocations.
  • America today is torn apart, culturally and politically, by the continuing legacy of deindustrialization, and material deprivation is only one reason. The displaced manufacturing workers in the Rust Belt and elsewhere did find new jobs, in the main. But many of them seem to derive less meaning from filling orders in an Amazon warehouse or driving for Uber than their forebears had when they were building cars and forging steel—work that felt more central to the grand project of civilization.
  • It’s hard to imagine how a corresponding crisis of meaning might play out for the professional class, but it surely would involve a great deal of anger and alienation.
  • Even if we avoid a revolt of the erstwhile elite, larger questions of human purpose will linger. If AI does the most difficult thinking on our behalf, we all may lose agency—at home, at work (if we have it), in the town square—becoming little more than consumption machines, like the well-cared-for human pets in WALL-E
  • Altman has said that many sources of human joy and fulfillment will remain unchanged—basic biological thrills, family life, joking around, making things—and that all in all, 100 years from now, people may simply care more about the things they cared about 50,000 years ago than those they care about today
  • In its own way, that too seems like a diminishment, but Altman finds the possibility that we may atrophy, as thinkers and as humans, to be a red herring. He told me we’ll be able to use our “very precious and extremely limited biological compute capacity” for more interesting things than we generally do today.
  • Yet they may not be the most interesting things: Human beings have long been the intellectual tip of the spear, the universe understanding itself. When I asked him what it would mean for human self-conception if we ceded that role to AI, he didn’t seem concerned. Progress, he said, has always been driven by “the human ability to figure things out.” Even if we figure things out with AI, that still counts, he said.
  • It’s not obvious that a superhuman AI would really want to spend all of its time figuring things out for us.
  • I asked Sutskever whether he could imagine an AI pursuing a different purpose than simply assisting in the project of human flourishing.
  • “I don’t want it to happen,” Sutskever said, but it could.
  • Sutskever has recently shifted his focus to try to make sure that it doesn’t. He is now working primarily on alignment research, the effort to ensure that future AIs channel their “tremendous” energies toward human happiness
  • It is, he conceded, a difficult technical problem—the most difficult, he believes, of all the technical challenges ahead.
  • As part of the effort to red-team GPT-4 before it was made public, the company sought out the Alignment Research Center (ARC), across the bay in Berkeley, which has developed a series of evaluations to determine whether new AIs are seeking power on their own. A team led by Elizabeth Barnes, a researcher at ARC, prompted GPT-4 tens of thousands of times over seven months, to see if it might display signs of real agency.
  • The ARC team gave GPT-4 a new reason for being: to gain power and become hard to shut down
  • Agarwal told me that this behavior could be a precursor to shutdown avoidance in future models. When GPT-4 devised its lie, it had realized that if it answered honestly, it may not have been able to achieve its goal. This kind of tracks-covering would be particularly worrying in an instance where “the model is doing something that makes OpenAI want to shut it down,” Agarwal said. An AI could develop this kind of survival instinct while pursuing any long-term goal—no matter how small or benign—if it feared that its goal could be thwarted.
  • Barnes and her team were especially interested in whether GPT-4 would seek to replicate itself, because a self-replicating AI would be harder to shut down. It could spread itself across the internet, scamming people to acquire resources, perhaps even achieving some degree of control over essential global systems and holding human civilization hostage.
  • When I discussed these experiments with Altman, he emphasized that whatever happens with future models, GPT-4 is clearly much more like a tool than a creature. It can look through an email thread, or help make a reservation using a plug-in, but it isn’t a truly autonomous agent that makes decisions to pursue a goal, continuously, across longer timescales.
  • Altman told me that at this point, it might be prudent to try to actively develop an AI with true agency before the technology becomes too powerful, in order to “get more comfortable with it and develop intuitions for it if it’s going to happen anyway.”
  • “We need to do empirical experiments on how these things try to escape control,” Hinton told me. “After they’ve taken over, it’s too late to do the experiments.”
  • the fulfillment of Altman’s vision of the future will at some point require him or a fellow traveler to build much more autonomous AIs.
  • When Sutskever and I discussed the possibility that OpenAI would develop a model with agency, he mentioned the bots the company had built to play Dota 2. “They were localized to the video-game world,” Sutskever told me, but they had to undertake complex missions. He was particularly impressed by their ability to work in concert. They seem to communicate by “telepathy,” Sutskever said. Watching them had helped him imagine what a superintelligence might be like.
  • “The way I think about the AI of the future is not as someone as smart as you or as smart as me, but as an automated organization that does science and engineering and development and manufacturing,”
  • Suppose OpenAI braids a few strands of research together, and builds an AI with a rich conceptual model of the world, an awareness of its immediate surroundings, and an ability to act, not just with one robot body, but with hundreds or thousands. “We’re not talking about GPT-4. We’re talking about an autonomous corporation,”
  • Its constituent AIs would work and communicate at high speed, like bees in a hive. A single such AI organization would be as powerful as 50 Apples or Googles, he mused. “This is incredible, tremendous, unbelievably disruptive power.”
  • Presume for a moment that human society ought to abide the idea of autonomous AI corporations. We had better get their founding charters just right. What goal should we give to an autonomous hive of AIs that can plan on century-long time horizons, optimizing billions of consecutive decisions toward an objective that is written into their very being?
  • If the AI’s goal is even slightly off-kilter from ours, it could be a rampaging force that would be very hard to constrain
  • We know this from history: Industrial capitalism is itself an optimization function, and although it has lifted the human standard of living by orders of magnitude, left to its own devices, it would also have clear-cut America’s redwoods and de-whaled the world’s oceans. It almost did.
  • one of its principal challenges will be making sure that the objectives we give to AIs stick
  • We can program a goal into an AI and reinforce it with a temporary period of supervised learning, Sutskever explained. But just as when we rear a human intelligence, our influence is temporary. “It goes off to the world,”
  • That’s true to some extent even of today’s AIs, but it will be more true of tomorrow’s.
  • He compared a powerful AI to an 18-year-old heading off to college. How will we know that it has understood our teachings? “Will there be a misunderstanding creeping in, which will become larger and larger?”
  • Divergence may result from an AI’s misapplication of its goal to increasingly novel situations as the world changes
  • Or the AI may grasp its mandate perfectly, but find it ill-suited to a being of its cognitive prowess. It might come to resent the people who want to train it to, say, cure diseases. “They want me to be a doctor,” Sutskever imagines an AI thinking. “I really want to be a YouTuber.”
  • If AIs get very good at making accurate models of the world, they may notice that they’re able to do dangerous things right after being booted up. They might understand that they are being red-teamed for risk, and hide the full extent of their capabilities.
  • hey may act one way when they are weak and another way when they are strong, Sutskever said
  • We would not even realize that we had created something that had decisively surpassed us, and we would have no sense for what it intended to do with its superhuman powers.
  • That’s why the effort to understand what is happening in the hidden layers of the largest, most powerful AIs is so urgent. You want to be able to “point to a concept,” Sutskever said. You want to be able to direct AI toward some value or cluster of values, and tell it to pursue them unerringly for as long as it exists.
  • we don’t know how to do that; indeed, part of his current strategy includes the development of an AI that can help with the research. If we are going to make it to the world of widely shared abundance that Altman and Sutskever imagine, we have to figure all this out.
  • This is why, for Sutskever, solving superintelligence is the great culminating challenge of our 3-million-year toolmaking tradition. He calls it “the final boss of humanity.”
  • “First of all, I think that whether the chance of existential calamity is 0.5 percent or 50 percent, we should still take it seriously,”
  • . “I don’t have an exact number, but I’m closer to the 0.5 than the 50.”
  • As to how it might happen, he seems most worried about AIs getting quite good at designing and manufacturing pathogens, and with reason: In June, an AI at MIT suggested four viruses that could ignite a pandemic, then pointed to specific research on genetic mutations that could make them rip through a city more quickly
  • Around the same time, a group of chemists connected a similar AI directly to a robotic chemical synthesizer, and it designed and synthesized a molecule on its own.
  • Altman worries that some misaligned future model will spin up a pathogen that spreads rapidly, incubates undetected for weeks, and kills half its victims. He worries that AI could one day hack into nuclear-weapons systems too. “There are a lot of things,” he said, and these are only the ones we can imagine.
  • Altman told me that he doesn’t “see a long-term happy path” for humanity without something like the International Atomic Energy Agency for global oversight of AI
  • In San Francisco, Agarwal had suggested the creation of a special license to operate any GPU cluster large enough to train a cutting-edge AI, along with mandatory incident reporting when an AI does something out of the ordinary
  • Other experts have proposed a nonnetworked “Off” switch for every highly capable AI; on the fringe, some have even suggested that militaries should be ready to perform air strikes on supercomputers in case of noncompliance
  • Sutskever thinks we will eventually want to surveil the largest, most powerful AIs continuously and in perpetuity, using a team of smaller overseer AIs.
  • Safety rules for a new technology usually accumulate over time, like a body of common law, in response to accidents or the mischief of bad actors. The scariest thing about genuinely powerful AI systems is that humanity may not be able to afford this accretive process of trial and error. We may have to get the rules exactly right at the outset.
  • Several years ago, Altman revealed a disturbingly specific evacuation plan he’d developed. He told The New Yorker that he had “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur” he could fly to in case AI attacks.
  • if the worst-possible AI future comes to pass, “no gas mask is helping anyone.”
  • but he told me that he can’t really be sure how AI will stack up. “I just have to build the thing,” he said. He is building fast
  • Altman insisted that they had not yet begun GPT-5’s training run. But when I visited OpenAI’s headquarters, both he and his researchers made it clear in 10 different ways that they pray to the god of scale. They want to keep going bigger, to see where this paradigm leads. After all, Google isn’t slackening its pace; it seems likely to unveil Gemini, a GPT-4 competitor, within months. “We are basically always prepping for a run,
  • To think that such a small group of people could jostle the pillars of civilization is unsettling. It’s fair to note that if Altman and his team weren’t racing to build an artificial general intelligence, others still would be
  • Altman’s views about the likelihood of AI triggering a global class war, or the prudence of experimenting with more autonomous agent AIs, or the overall wisdom of looking on the bright side, a view that seems to color all the rest—these are uniquely his
  • No single person, or single company, or cluster of companies residing in a particular California valley, should steer the kind of forces that Altman is imagining summoning.
  • AI may well be a bridge to a newly prosperous era of greatly reduced human suffering. But it will take more than a company’s founding charter—especially one that has already proved flexible—to make sure that we all share in its benefits and avoid its risks. It will take a vigorous new politics.
  • I don’t think the general public has quite awakened to what’s happening. A global race to the AI future has begun, and it is largely proceeding without oversight or restraint. If people in America want to have some say in what that future will be like, and how quickly it arrives, we would be wise to speak up soon.
nrashkind

WHO Reviews 'Available' Evidence On Coronavirus Transmission Through Air : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...virus-transmission-through-air

shared by nrashkind on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The World Health Organization says the virus that causes COVID-19 doesn't seem to linger in the air or be capable of spreading through the air over distances more than about three feet.
  • But at least one expert in virus transmission said it's way too soon to know that.
  • "I think the WHO is being irresponsible in giving out that information. This misinformation is dangerous," says Dr. Donald Milton, an infectious disease aerobiologist at the University of Maryland School of Public Health.
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  • "The epidemiologists say if it's 'close contact' then it's not airborne. That's baloney," he says.
  • Of course, the world is struggling with a shortage of the most protective medical masks and gear.
  • What's more, one study of hospital rooms of patients with COVID-19 found that "swabs taken from the air exhaust outlets tested positive, suggesting that small virus-laden droplets may be displaced by airflows and deposited on equipment such as vents." Another study in Wuhan hospitals f
  • "The U.S. CDC has it exactly right,"
  • When epidemiologists are working in the field, trying to understand an outbreak of an unknown pathogen, it's not possible for them to know exactly what's going on as a pathogen is spread from person to person, Milton says. "Epidemiologists cannot tell the difference between droplet transmission and short-range aerosol transmission."
  • For the average person not working in a hospital, Milton says the recommendation to stay 6 feet away from others sounds reasonable.
  • People shouldn't cram into cars with the windows rolled up, he says, and officials need to keep crowding down in mass transit vehicles like trains and buses.
  • With coronavirus cases continuing to climb and hospitals facing the prospect of having to decide how to allocate limited staff and resources, the Department of Health and Human Services is reminding states and health care providers that civil rights laws still apply in a pandemic.
  • States are preparing for a situation when there's not enough care to go around by issuing "crisis of care" standards.
  • But disability groups are worried that those standards will allow rationing decisions that exclude the elderly or people with disabilities.
  • On Saturday, the HHS Office for Civil Rights put out guidance saying states, hospitals and doctors cannot put people with disabilities or older people at the back of the line for care.
  • Severino said his office has opened or is about to open investigations of complaints in multiple states. He did not say which states could be the focus of investigation, but in the last several days, disability groups in four states — Alabama, Kansas, Tennessee and Washington — have filed complaints.
  • In Kansas and Tennessee, disability groups and people with disabilities say state guidelines would allow doctors to deny care to some people with traumatic brain injuries or people who use home ventilators to help them breathe.
  • The ventilator issue is coming up in New York, which may soon be the first place where there are not enough ventilators to meet the demand of patients. Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the state will need double its current amount in about three weeks.
  • Severino said Saturday that his office was concerned about complaints of possible ventilator reallocation, an issue that had been raised in New York and Kansas.
  • The PREP Act provides immunity to tort liability claims for manufacturers or drug companies that are asked to scale up quick responses to a disaster such as a nuclear attack or a pandemic.
  • Severino said his office would investigate civil rights violations and it would be up to another office at HHS, the general counsel's office, to make waivers under the PREP Act.
  • Some disability advocates have worried whether that exception could be used to trump civil rights laws that protect people with disabilities from treatment decisions.
  • He was 98 years old.
  • The Reverend Joseph Lowery, co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, died Friday, according to a statement by the Joseph & Evelyn Lowery Institute for Justice and Human Rights.
  • The statement said Lowery died peacefully at home Friday night, surrounded by his daughters.
  • Known affectionately as the "Dean" of the Civil Rights Movement, Lowery was a part of pivotal moments in the nation's history
  • At an appearance on the national mall in 2013, at the age of 91, he led the crowd in the chant "Fired Up? Ready to go?" The event marked 50 years since the 1963 March on Washington, which Lowery attended as a contemporary of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. At that 50th anniversary appearance, he warned that hard-fought gains were under attack.
  • Joseph Echols Lowery was born in Huntsville, Alabama in 1921. He was the son of a teacher and a shopkeeper. The young Lowery experienced firsthand the brutalities of the Jim Crow South and would spend his life fighting for racial justice.
  • One of the first protests he organized was as a young Methodist minister in Mobile, Alabama in the early 1950s. It was aimed at desegregating city buses.
  • From there, Lowery helped coordinate the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, the non-violent movement that desegregated the city's public transportation and led to the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
  • Four decades later, at a gathering of civil rights foot soldiers in Montgomery, Lowery reflected on that accomplishment, noting that the number of black elected officials in the country had gone from less than 300 in 1965 to nearly 10,000 by 2005.
  • "It changed the face of the nation," said Lowery.
katherineharron

Opinion: Why Biden's first press conference will be so challenging - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

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shared by katherineharron on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • When the White House announced eight days ago that Biden would hold his first formal press conference on Thursday, his team probably hoped to use the exchange with reporters to tout progress on the Covid-19 vaccine rollout and the virtues of his signature American Rescue Act which greenlighted stimulus checks, as well as more aid for the unemployed and Americans facing eviction, and additional support for small businesses.
  • Since then, two mass shootings -- in the Atlanta area and in Boulder, Colorado -- have rekindled demands for federal action for stricter gun laws.
  • Illegal border crossings by unaccompanied minors are increasing, as is friction among factions of the Democratic base.
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  • And on the eve of the press conference came news of provocative new ballistic missile tests by North Korea
  • a week that was supposed to feature presidential events to lift up and underline the Rescue Act has yielded entirely different and vexing storylines that you can be sure will dominate Thursday's session.
  • Eager to avoid unforced rhetorical errors, Biden's team did a brilliant job throughout the general election campaign of controlling his interactions with the news media, mitigating the risk of unintended stories.
  • As president, Biden participated last month in a televised CNN town hall with citizens, a format that allowed him to display his prodigious empathy and decency, with limited opportunity for follow-ups from the moderator.
  • Biden may choose in an opening statement to make an announcement that he hopes will drive the news coverage. He will be furnished with a list of questioners, carefully curated by the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki. As is customary, he will have spent hours prepping with his team.
  • Biden and his team can only guess at the nature of the questions, many of which will be shaped by the events of the past week and even the hours before he takes the podium.
  • Last week, in one of Biden's rare interviews, ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked the President whether he thought Vladimir Putin is a "killer." Biden paused, but after a moment of hesitation said, "I do." His blunt characterization of the Russian president touched off a diplomatic furor and probably was not the news the White House wanted to make.
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lmunch

Opinion | The Wreckage Betsy DeVos Leaves Behind - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-department-cardona-biden.html

Politics crisis policy education

shared by lmunch on 03 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • she told districts that were seeking guidance on how to operate during the coronavirus pandemic that it was not her responsibility to track school district infection rates or keep track of school reopening plans.
  • initiatives that rolled back civil rights protections for minority children
  • predatory for-profit colleges that saddle students with crushing debt while granting them useless degrees.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Ms. DeVos had almost no experience in public education and was clearly disinterested in the department’s mission. Mr. Cardona worked his way up from teacher to principal to education commissioner of Connecticut.
  • Given these realities, the new education secretary — whoever he or she turns out to be — should resist calls to put off annual student testing.
  • The Education Department should also recognize that this pandemic will not be the last one. That means developing a list of best practices and strategic schools plans that can be swiftly rolled out when another medical crisis occurs with a different infectious agent.
  • the new education commissioner needs to revoke a series of department communiqués that had the effect of letting school districts off the hook for discriminatory disciplinary practices and other potential violations of civil rights law.
  • The DeVos administration sold out to predatory for-profit colleges and their various abettors within a nanosecond of taking office.
  • new education secretary can begin rule-making processes where necessary and inform the courts that it will no longer defend against lawsuits filed by state attorneys general and others who have dogged the DeVos department in court for buddying up to the for-profit industry and attacking student borrowers who deserve to have their student loans forgiven because they were defrauded by career education programs.
  • a lawsuit filed by 22 states and the District of Columbia charging that Ms. DeVos unlawfully rescinded an Obama-era rule that allowed students who had been defrauded by career colleges to have their federal loans forgiven.
  • Ms. DeVos disregarded a scathing indictment by her department’s career staff, reinstating an accrediting body that had been stripped of its authority for exercising lax oversight.
  • she told districts that were seeking guidance on how to operate during the coronavirus pandemic that it was not her responsibility to track school district infection rates or keep track of school reopening plans. This telling remark implies a vision of the Education Department as a mere bystander in a crisis that disrupted the lives of more than 50 million schoolchildren.
  • Mr. Cardona would need to pay close attention to how districts plan to deal with learning loss that many children will suffer while the schools are closed. Fall testing data analyzed by the nonprofit research organization NWEA suggests that setbacks have been less severe than were feared, with students showing continued academic progress in reading and only modest setbacks in math.
  • However, given a shortage of testing data for Black, Hispanic and poor children, it could well be that these groups have fared worse in the pandemic than their white or more affluent peers. The country needs specific information on how these subgroups are doing so that it can allocate educational resources strategically.
  • Research has long since shown that a summer vacation can wipe out a month or two of student learning. Making up for an even more serious learning shortfall will require planning that should begin now. An obvious first step would be to use the summer of 2021 for summer school or catch-up tutoring.
  • The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights exposed the depth of this problem during the Obama years, when it released data showing that excessively punitive policies were being used at every level of the public school system — and that even minority 4-year-olds were being disproportionately suspended and expelled.
  • The Department of Education lies in ruins at precisely the time when the country most needs it. The president-elect and his new education secretary, whoever that turns out to be, need to get the institution up and running as swiftly as possible. Given the dire context, there is no time to waste.
malonema1

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...-chuck-todd-says-1221829187930

trump politics US

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump does deserve credit for North Korean talks, Chuck Todd says
  • Meet the Press Moderator joins Sunday TODAY’s Chuck Todd and says President Donald Trump deserves credit for helping create conditions to start talks of denuclearization with North Korea, but says some questions still loom. {"1222279235816":{"mpxId":"1222279235816","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Neutral","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","description":"Jacob Cartwright, a truck driver in Oregon, accidentally plugged the wrong address into his GPS and wound up lost more than 100 miles out of his way. 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Javier E

Can a 'No Excuses' Charter Teach Students to Think for Themselves? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-to-think-for-themselves.html

shared by Javier E on 12 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Several years ago, Achievement First, a charter school network serving primarily low-income black and Hispanic students, got an unpleasant wake-up call: Its students had done well on tests, but fewer than a third of its high school graduates were earning college degrees on time. That was better than the 14 percent national college completion rate for students from low-income backgrounds, but it was far below the network’s hopes.
  • Was the schools’ highly structured, disciplined approach to behavior and learning giving students the tools they needed to succeed at the next level?
  • “There is a real dilemma confronting ‘no excuses’ charter networks as they shift their instructional model to encourage deeper learning,” Shael Polakow-Suransky, the president of the Bank Street College of Education, said in an email. Their focus on discipline, he said, “can undermine the autonomy and student voice so critical to developing independent thinkers.”
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • “One said, ‘In college you have to teach yourself more than half the content on your own,’” Ms. Toll said. That is very different from what is required in high school, she said, “and that sort of led to the whole concept of self-directed learning.”
  • For much of the day, each classroom is split in two, with one teacher working more traditionally with half of the students while a second teacher supervises students wearing noise-cancelling headphones and working on their own on laptops.
  • Mr. Cuban said he was particularly impressed with the way that Summit schools asked students to set goals for themselves.
  • But he added that he thought the impact of online teaching tools depended on how they were implemented and that the ultimate test, for both Summit and for Achievement First, would be what happens to college graduation rates.
  • Achievement First’s Greenfield model also emphasizes setting goals. Twice a week students meet with a teacher, referred to as a “goal coach,” to go over their progress in different areas and set goals for the week.
  • the team came to believe that Achievement First students were not sufficiently engaged in school. The expeditions, also borrowed from Summit, are intended to spark passions and inspire long-term ambitions.
  • Twice a week, students participate in what the network calls “circles” — a structure borrowed from the social-emotional curriculum of another charter network, Valor Collegiate Academies, in Nashville.
  • Mr. Samouha said that one of the surprising discoveries in his team’s interviews with alumni who had dropped out of college was that, in some cases, their parents had actually encouraged them to drop out, because they didn’t like seeing them struggle and didn’t know that such difficulties were normal and surmountable. He said the Greenfield team traced that back to the network having not made the parents full partners in their children’s schooling.
  • So in the Greenfield model, parent-teacher conferences are student-led, and attended by the members of a student’s “dream team,” which includes parents or other caregivers, as well as other mentors, like older siblings, pastors, coaches or family friends.
  • “We’re not going to solve this through a weekly parent seminar on challenges your child will face in college,” Mr. Samouha said. “We’re going to solve it by literally building an experience where parents are at the table with teachers and students.”
  • The network’s ultimate goal is to raise its college completion rate to 75 percent, and it says among its more recent classes about half of graduates are on track to finish college.
leilamulveny

Inside the Week That Shook the Trump Campaign - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...the-trump-campaign-11603320724

campaign politics

shared by leilamulveny on 22 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Polls would soon show the performance had cost the president support.
  • The other was the fallout from the Supreme Court nomination ceremony for Judge Amy Coney Barrett he had held the previous weekend at the White House. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, would soon describe the event as a “superspreader” of Covid-19 and within days, Mr. Trump would test positive for the disease.
  • Some advisers have urged him to rethink his debate-preparation strategy, but, as of Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Trump hadn’t attended any prep sessions for Thursday’s debate, formally or informally, people familiar with the matter said.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • “Trump is still the political outsider, while Biden is the ultimate insider,” Mr. Murtaugh said.
  • Mr. Trump is publicly optimistic, but privately appears aware that he is trailing in the race, people familiar with the matter said.
  • A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll taken in the days after the first debate, but before Mr. Trump tested positive, found that Mr. Biden’s lead over the president had grown to 14 points from 8 in September, with voters by a 2-to-1 margin saying Mr. Biden had outperformed Mr. Trump in the debate.
  • “We had a superspreader event in the White House, and it was in a situation where people were crowded together and were not wearing masks,” Dr. Fauci said in an Oct. 9 CBS News Radio interview.
  • Mr. Trump eschewed traditional practice debate sessions in favor of more informal discussions with his team, advisers said. At one point during practice, he asked the group, “Why are you guys in here? Why aren’t you out there defending me on TV?”
  • Mr. Trump told aides afterwards that he blamed Mr. Wallace for his own interruptions. His performance stunned advisers, one of whom later described the president’s performance as “one of the most incredible self-inflicted wounds of all time.”
Javier E

Colleges and Elitism - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...colleges-and-elitism.html

education humility arrogance class resentment elite

shared by Javier E on 09 Mar 12 - Cached
  • SAT scores (a big factor in college admissions) correlate closely with family wealth. The total average SAT score of students from families earning more than $100,000 per year is more than 100 points higher than for students in the income range of $50,000 to $60,000.
  • a mere 3 percent of students in the top 150 colleges, as defined by The Chronicle of Higher Education, come from families in the bottom income quartile of American society.
  • Only a very dogmatic Social Darwinist would conclude from these facts that intelligence closely tracks how much money one’s parents make. A better explanation is that students from affluent families have many advantages — test-prep tutors, high schools with good college counseling, parents with college savvy and so on.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Yet once the beneficiaries arrive at college, what do they learn about themselves? It’s a good bet that the dean or president will greet them with congratulations for being the best and brightest ever to walk through the gates.
  • To the stringent Protestants who founded Harvard, Yale and Princeton, the mark of salvation was not high self-esteem but humbling awareness of one’s lowliness in the eyes of God. With such awareness came the recognition that those whom God favors are granted grace not for any worthiness of their own, but by God’s unmerited mercy — as a gift to be converted into working and living on behalf of others.
  • In secular terms, this means recognizing that people with good prospects owe much to their good fortune — and to fellow citizens less fortunate than themselves.
  • Benjamin Franklin, who founded the University of Pennsylvania, once defined true education as “an Inclination join’d with an Ability to serve Mankind, one’s Country, Friends, and Family; which Ability ... should indeed be the great Aim and End of all Learning.”
Javier E

'Life without consequences': the fraternity bros who built a multimillion-dollar drug r... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-max-marshall-author-interview

fraternity culture us

shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • uses the drug ring to show how the fraternity ethos shapes elite societies as a whole, beyond the College of Charleston: with impunity.
  • Marshall shows how being asked to join a fraternity means having a safe place to behave badly between high school and the job that frat puts you on the fast track towards. In his book, he quotes a Cornell Greek life website: “While only 2% of America’s population is involved in fraternities, 80% of Fortune 500 executives, 76% of US senators and congressmen, 85% of supreme court justices, and all but two presidents since 1825 have been fraternity men.”
  • the former fraternity members Marshall interviewed for Among the Bros said their experience selling drugs in college was good prep for their careers: “They’d say things like, ‘I learned supply chain economics, salesmanship, delegation and marketing.’” As a reader, it’s hard to not feel pangs of anger at how for some (“some” being young white men), recklessness could be a stepping stone to a six-figure salary.
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  • It’s hard to wrap your mind around men having fond memories of brutal treatment, but Marshall explained that it was not so simple as looking back on one event of hazing and condemning the entire system: “It’s almost a rational choice of thinking, ‘This was my entry into an oil and gas or real estate job. This is how I got into private equity or politics. And there’s always going to be a group of people who are always going to look out for me whenever I need a favor.’
  • And for those in the bubble, there’s an attitude that the more intense the hazing experience was, the better story you might have, the more other men will respect you.
  • Above all, Marshall’s book explores coming of age in a world that will not hold you accountable, even by law enforcement: “When you can get away with anything, it does lead to an arrested development. If you drive drunk and don’t go get a DUI, how do you learn not to drive drunk? If you commit a much worse crime and don’t get punished, how do you learn not to?”
  • All the men involved in Kappa Alpha’s drug ring were white – in fact, they were often described by their fellow students at the College of Charleston and law enforcement as looking like normal white boys. They were protected by wealthy parents, the best lawyers, and a “boys will be boys” culture. They were emboldened to test the boundaries of their privilege, and they came out with barely a scratch.
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