If The World Were 100 People

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFrqTFRy-LU

You requested someone with a degree in this? *Holds up hand* You requested someone with a degree in this? *Holds up hand* So there are two main schools of Artificial Intelligence — Symbolic and non-symbolic. Symbolic says the best way to make AI is to make an expert AI — e.g. if you want a doctor AI, you feed it medical text books and it answers questions by looking it up in the text book. Non-symbolic says the best way to make AI is to decide that computers are better at understanding in computer, so give the information to the AI and let it turn that in to something it understands. As a bit of an apt aside — consider the Chinese room thought experiment.

More Than Just Male and Female: The Six Genders in Classical Judaism — SOJOURN It's very easy to assume that Judaism is an exclusively gender-binary religion. Almost all of the common traditional laws are based on the assumed differences between males and females. We see it in assumed gender roles, in liturgy, in proscribed family responsibilities, and in both our secular and religious laws. If, however, we look just a bit deeper into our sacred texts, we see that a simple male/female binary is not only cumbersome, it's wholly inaccurate. This description from Trans Torah/Rabbi Elliot Kukla starts the conversation that we will continue throughout the summer:

Ancient Civilizations for Kids.China 2 clicks East Asia also has dry areas. The Gobi Desert is found along the border between Mongolia and China. The Gobi is the 5th largest desert in the world and is also the coldest. It is common to see frost or even snow on the sand and gravel dunes. Most of western China is very dry because of the rain shadow created by the Himalaya Mountains.

From MIT Press: 10 Topics Every 21st Century Citizen Should Know About “That’s it: I need to know what I need to know!” I exclaimed recently when I heard about the “Essential Knowledge” series published by MIT Press. Know what I mean? Before European Christians Forced Gender Roles, Native Americans Acknowledged 5 Genders It wasn’t until Europeans took over North America that natives adopted the ideas of gender roles. For Native Americans, there was no set of rules that men and women had to abide by in order to be considered a “normal” member of their tribe. In fact, people who had both female and male characteristics were viewed as gifted by nature, and therefore, able to see both sides of everything. According to Indian Country Today, all native communities acknowledged the following gender roles: “Female, male, Two Spirit female, Two Spirit male and Transgendered.” “Each tribe has their own specific term, but there was a need for a universal term that the general population could understand. The Navajo refer to Two Spirits as Nádleehí (one who is transformed), among the Lakota is Winkté (indicative of a male who has a compulsion to behave as a female), Niizh Manidoowag (two spirit) in Ojibwe, Hemaneh (half man, half woman) in Cheyenne, to name a few.

Iraqi Refugee Empowers Youth To Share Their Stories With 'Narratio' When Ahmed Badr was 8 years old, his family fled Baghdad in the midst of the Iraq War. Writing helped him process his experience, so he started the website Narratio to give other young people the same opportunity. Ariel Edelman hide caption toggle caption Ariel Edelman When Ahmed Badr was 8 years old, his family fled Baghdad in the midst of the Iraq War.

The two questions that determine your scientific literacy “Through basic science literacy, people can understand the policy choices we need to be making. Scientists are not necessarily the greatest communicators, but science and communication is one of the fundamentals we need to address. People are interested.” -James Murdoch “Of course I knew my skin was a different color. But I didn’t think that that made us better or worse.” — Quartz This story is part of a series called Craigslist Confessional. Writer Helena Bala has been meeting people via Craigslist and documenting their stories for nearly two years. Each story is written as it was told to her. Bala says that by listening to their stories, she hopes to bear witness to her subjects’ lives, providing them with an outlet, a judgment-free ear, and a sense of catharsis.

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