All right. We're going to test your knowledge of some everyday items that you get at the supermarket.
groceryという言葉を以前取り上げましたが、この動画で触れているようにeveryday items that you get at the supermarketという意味で捉えればいいんでしょうね。groceryをこのように理解すればgrocery storeがsupermarketになるのも自然な連想ですね。こういうのは生活をしていたら自然に身につくものでしょうが。。。
The headlines are filled with awful news. Every day brings a different story of political division, violence, or natural disaster. Despite the headlines, we see a world that’s getting better.
Compare today to the way things were a decade or a century ago. The world is healthier and safer than ever. The number of children who die every year has been cut in half since 1990 and keeps going down. The number of mothers who die has also dropped dramatically. So has extreme poverty—declining by nearly half in just 20 years. More children are attending school. The list goes on and on.
But being an optimist isn’t about knowing that life used to be worse. It’s about knowing how life can get better. And that’s what really fuels our optimism. Although we see a lot of disease and poverty in our work—and many other big problems that need to be solved—we also see the best of humanity. We spend our time learning from scientists who are inventing cutting-edge tools to cure disease. We talk to dedicated government leaders who are being creative about prioritizing the health and well-being of people around the world. And we meet brave and brilliant individuals all over the world who are imagining new ways to transform their communities.
That’s our response when people ask, “How can you be so optimistic?” It’s a question we’ve been getting more and more, and we think the answer says a lot about how we view the world.
This is our 10th Annual Letter, and we’re marking the occasion by answering 10 tough questions that people ask us. We will answer them as forthrightly as we can, and we hope that when you’re finished reading, you’ll be just as optimistic as we are.
Wiley’s portrait of the 44th president shows Obama leaning forward in a chair surrounded by vibrant green foliage that includes references to Chicago, Hawaii and Kenya.
(Boston Globe)
The final product depicts Obama sitting in a straight-backed chair, leaning forward, and looking serious while surrounded by greenery and flowers. Michelle Obama’s portrait, painted by Amy Sherald, shows her in a black-and-white dress, looking thoughtful with her hand on her chin.
(NPR)
Kehinde Wiley painted Barack Obama sitting in a chair, elbows in his knees, leaning forward with an intense expression. The background, typical of a Wiley painting, is a riotous pattern of intense green foliage.
But thank you so much for taking the time. It is great to be here. It is rare that I get to do something that Sasha and Malia envy me for. That doesn’t happen very often. Maybe for once they’ll actually ask me at dinner how my day went.
エ・プルリブス・ウヌム ( E pluribus unum ,[ˈiː ˈplʊərɪbəs ˈuːnəm]; ラテン語: [ˈeː ˈpluːrɪbʊs ˈuːnʊ̃]) とは、「多数から一つへ」[1][2][3]を意味するラテン語の成句で、「多州から成る統一国家」であるアメリカ合衆国を表す。
「 Annuit cœptis (「神は取組を承認せられたり」の意のラテン語 )」「 Novus ordo seclorum (「時代の新秩序」の意のラテン語 )」と共に、1782年に議会により制定されたアメリカ合衆国の国璽の図柄の一部としてリボン状の装飾の上に書かれている[1]。
法で制定されてはいないものの、「 E Pluribus Unum 」は事実上、アメリカ合衆国のモットーであると広く認識されてきたが[4]、1956年にはアメリカ合衆国議会により法 (H. J. Resolution 396) が可決され、「 In God We Trust 」が公式モットーとして採用された[5]。
PEOPLE AT DIGITALGLOBE are fond of saying they've built a "time machine of the planet." And, if we're being metaphorical, that's true: The satellite imaging company has used orbiters to take and store super sharp images of Earth for 17 years. Their eyes have gazed down as trees have disappeared and appeared, floodwaters have flowed in and out, and cities have boomed and busted. But that time-lapse is only useful if someone can make sense of its meaning. Today, that's where companies like Orbital Insight come in, with artificial intelligence that parses the pictures and auto-says things like, "That looks like deforestation," or "There are lots more cars in those parking lots than there were last year. Business be booming."
In the world of satellite imagery, there are a few kinds of players: the picture-takers, the sense-makers, and those who are trying to do both. DigitalGlobe, with its ever-increasing cache of high-def history, is the planet's lead picture-taker; Orbital Insight is one of the frontrunning sense-makers. And today, the two companies announced a new multiyear, multipetabyte partnership. Orbital Insight, in other words, has the keys to the time machine. “We want to let them race,” says Shay Har-Noy, DigitalGlobe's vice president and general manager of platform.
One early challenge will be the competition for the limited pool of customers large and sophisticated enough to use Earth-observation data analytics in their day-to-day operations. Think of Fortune 500-sized companies involved in agriculture, mining, construction, oil and gas, and retail.
These geography-minded companies have the greatest potential to provide analytics firms with stable, recurrent revenue streams. At the moment, however, AI-powered Earth-observation companies derive much of their revenue from financial and humanitarian organizations. Such customers are far from ideal due to the long sales cycles involved, yet-to-be-calculated returns on investment and budget uncertainty. We know that selling, say, a hedge fund an additional Bloomberg Terminal or two at $24,000 a pop can be a long, expensive sales process. What about selling satellite imagery, where the return on investment is not as well understood? To overcome such obstacles, AI-driven startups are a hiring software-focused product management people.
先日紹介したNatureの記事でAIなどの懸念事項としてPrivacy and consent, Agency and identity, Augmentation, Biasの4つを挙げていました。今回はAugmentationを取り上げてみたいと思います。たまたまCNNを見てて手にチップを埋め込んでいる映像があったので。。。
Michael Zimmer, director of the Center for Information Policy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said the implants are fundamentally different than other technologies because the user has less control over the experience.
“With my phone, I can turn it off, I can to leave it at my desk and I can control the apps that I have access to,” Zimmer told ABC News. “There are a lot more ways that I can manage what people know about me.”
With the chip implant, “I simply lose that element on control because I can’t turn it off and I can’t just take it out and put it back in,” he said. “I think that’s a fundamental change in the way we control what access people have to our bodies and what we’re doing.”
When asked about the true purpose of the new tickets, Pause Fest founder George Hedon said:
“It is less about the ticketing aspect and more about pioneering a digital experience. There has been talk about inserting chips for sometime, but aside from chipping dogs and pets little has been done to see how they can improve our lives." The chip -- aside from its festival use -- also has the ability to act as a key to a house, unlock a smartphone, and it can be programmed to engage a website or app on a smartphone when scanned.
It’s possible that in the not-too-distant future, we’ll all be walking around with implants no bigger than a grain of rice under our skin, transmitting everything from payment capabilities to health data. The question is: Will it ever feel normal?
The best technology is intuitive, and almost invisible. For years, futurists have predicted that, before we know it, every surface within reach will be a computing surface, and the doctor will be able to follow you home with thumbnail-sized measuring devices inserted into your body.
We’re not yet at the Black Mirror stage of things, where implants relay vitals to an iPad-like device (or even let you see through another person’s eyes), but it seems like only a matter of time. If that sounds crazy, call me crazy for being willing to test a beta.
Satan’s Credit Card: What The Mark Of The Beast Taught Me About The Future Of Money
Silicon Valley has sold us on a cashless, cardless, walletless, supposedly frictionless future — but as I learned living in it for a month, we're not quite there yet.
“Humans won’t fight machines; they will merge with them. We are heading towards marriage rather than war.This is the shape of the new world, and the gap between those who get on-board and those left behind will be bigger than the gap between industrial empires and agrarian tribes, bigger even than the gap between Sapiens and Neanderthals. This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus.”
Any lines drawn will inevitably be blurry, given how hard it is to predict which technologies will have negative impacts on human life. But we urge that guidelines are established at both international and national levels to set limits on the augmenting neurotechnologies that can be implemented, and to define the contexts in which they can be used — as is happening for gene editing in humans.
AIの問題として個人データの扱いがあります。先ほどのNatureの記事でもPrivacy and consentが懸念事項として挙がっていました。個人データは本人の了承なく収集しないようにすべきだと真っ当な指摘をしていましたが、プライバシーを守りつつ有益な情報を吸い取るFederated learningというGoogleの新しい試みも紹介していました。
Protecting privacy: Federated learning
When technology companies use machine learning to improve their software, they typically gather user information on their servers to analyse how a particular service is being used and then train new algorithms on the aggregated data. Researchers at Google are experimenting with an alternative method of artificial-intelligence training called federated learning. Here, the teaching process happens locally on each user's device without the data being centralized: the lessons aggregated from the data (for instance, the knowledge that the word 'weekly' can be used as an adjective and an adverb) are sent back to Google's servers, but the actual e-mails, texts and so on remain on the user's own phone. Other groups are exploring similar ideas. Thus, information systems with improved designs could be used to enhance users' ownership and privacy over their personal data, while still enabling valuable computations to be performed on those data.
Technology and our increasing demand for security have put us all under surveillance. Is privacy becoming just a memory?
By Robert Draper
In 1949, amid the specter of European authoritarianism, the British novelist George Orwell published his dystopian masterpiece 1984, with its grim admonition: “Big Brother is watching you.” As unsettling as this notion may have been, “watching” was a quaintly circumscribed undertaking back then. That very year, 1949, an American company released the first commercially available CCTV system. Two years later, in 1951, Kodak introduced its Brownie portable movie camera to an awestruck public.
Today more than 2.5 trillion images are shared or stored on the Internet annually—to say nothing of the billions more photographs and videos people keep to themselves. By 2020, one telecommunications company estimates, 6.1 billion people will have phones with picture-taking capabilities. Meanwhile, in a single year an estimated 106 million new surveillance cameras are sold. More than three million ATMs around the planet stare back at their customers. Tens of thousands of cameras known as automatic number plate recognition devices, or ANPRs, hover over roadways—to catch speeding motorists or parking violators but also, in the case of the United Kingdom, to track the comings and goings of suspected criminals. The untallied but growing number of people wearing body cameras now includes not just police but also hospital workers and others who aren’t law enforcement officers. Proliferating as well are personal monitoring devices—dash cams, cyclist helmet cameras to record collisions, doorbells equipped with lenses to catch package thieves—that are fast becoming a part of many a city dweller’s everyday arsenal. Even less quantifiable, but far more vexing, are the billions of images of unsuspecting citizens captured by facial-recognition technology and stored in law enforcement and private-sector databases over which our control is practically nonexistent.
As David Omand, the former director of the Government Communications Headquarters—one of the British intelligence agencies shown by Snowden to be collecting bulk data—put it to me: “On the whole we see our government as efficient and benign. It runs the National Health Service, public education, and social security. And thank God, we haven’t been through the experience of the man in the brown leather trench coat knocking on the door at four in the morning. So when we talk about government surveillance, the resonance is different here.”
That’s not by any means to say that a country like the United States, with its more skeptical view of big government, is wholly immune to surveillance creep. Most of its police departments are now using or considering using body cameras—a development that, thus far at least, has been cheered by civil liberties groups as a means of curbing law enforcement abuses. ANPR cameras are in many major American cities as traffic and parking enforcement tools. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, New York City ramped up its CCTV network and today has roughly 20,000 officially run cameras in Manhattan alone. Meanwhile, Chicago has invested heavily in its network of 32,000 CCTV devices to help combat the murder epidemic in its inner city.
Meanwhile, Planet’s marketing team spends its days gazing at photographs, imagining an interested party somewhere out there. An insurance company wanting to track flood damage to homes in the Midwest. A researcher in Norway seeking evidence of glaciers eroding. But what about … a dictator wishing to hunt down a roving dissident army?
Here is where Planet’s own ethical guidelines would come into play. Not only could it refuse to work with a client having malevolent motives, but it also doesn’t allow customers to stake a sole proprietary claim over the images they buy. The other significant constraint is technological. Planet’s surveillance of the world at a resolution of 10 feet is sufficient to discern the grainy outline of a single truck but not the contours of a human. Resolution-wise, the current state of the art of one foot is supplied by another satellite imaging company, DigitalGlobe. But for now, only Planet, with its formidable satellite deployment, is capable of providing daily imagery of Earth’s entire landmass. “We’ve run the proverbial four-minute mile,” Marshall said. “Simply knowing it’s possible doesn’t make it any easier.”
I was pondering the implications of this when a young woman showed me what was on her laptop. Her name was Annie Neligh, an Air Force veteran who now leads “customer solutions engineering” at Planet. One of Neligh’s customers needing a solution was a Texas-based insurance company. The company suspected that it was renewing insurance policies for homeowners who weren’t disclosing that they’d installed swimming pools—a 40 percent loss on each policy for the company. So it had asked Planet to provide satellite imagery of homes in Plano, Texas.
Neligh showed me what she’d found. Looking at a neighborhood of 1,500 properties, we could clearly see the shimmering shapes of 520 small bodies of water—a proportion far in excess of what the insurance company’s customers had claimed. Neligh shrugged and offered a thin smile. “People lie, you know,” she said.
Now her client had the truth. What would it do with this information? Conduct a surprise raid on the somnolent hamlets of Plano? Jack up premiums? Order images that might show construction crews installing new Jacuzzis and Spanish tile roofs? The future is here, and in it, truth is more than a kindly educator. It is a weapon—against timber poachers and burglars and mad bombers and acts of God, but also against the lesser angels of our nature. People lie, you know. The age of transparency is upon us.
英語表現的に面白いと思ったのは最後にあるlesser angels of our natureというもの。ピンカー教授はbetter angels of our natureという本を出していましたが、こちらの記事では人間の悪い面を表現しています。
Rafael Yuste, Sara Goering, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Guoqiang Bi, Jose M. Carmena, Adrian Carter, Joseph J. Fins, Phoebe Friesen, Jack Gallant, Jane E. Huggins, Judy Illes, Philipp Kellmeyer, Eran Klein, Adam Marblestone, Christine Mitchell, Erik Parens, Michelle Pham, Alan Rubel, Norihiro Sadato, Laura Specker Sullivan, Mina Teicher, David Wasserman, Anna Wexler, Meredith Whittaker& Jonathan Wolpaw
08 November 2017
Artificial intelligence and brain–computer interfaces must respect and preserve people's privacy, identity, agency and equality, say Rafael Yuste, Sara Goering and colleagues.
Biasの部分をYutaのざっくり訳と一緒に紹介します。
Bias. When scientific or technological decisions are based on a narrow set of systemic, structural or social concepts and norms, the resulting technology can privilege certain groups and harm others. A 2015 study12 found that postings for jobs displayed to female users by Google's advertising algorithm pay less well than those displayed to men. Similarly, a ProPublica investigation revealed last year that algorithms used by US law-enforcement agencies wrongly predict that black defendants are more likely to reoffend than white defendants with a similar criminal record (go.nature.com/29aznyw). Such biases could become embedded in neural devices. Indeed, researchers who have examined these kinds of cases have shown that defining fairness in a mathematically rigorous manner is very difficult (go.nature.com/2ztfjt9).
Practical steps to counter bias within technologies are already being discussed in industry and academia. Such ongoing public discussions and debate are necessary to shape definitions of problematic biases and, more generally, of normality.
We advocate that countermeasures to combat bias become the norm for machine learning. We also recommend that probable user groups (especially those who are already marginalized) have input into the design of algorithms and devices as another way to ensure that biases are addressed from the first stages of technology development.
Research on collective recall takes on new importance in a post-fact world.
Laura Spinney
07 March 2017 Corrected: 08 March 2017
Strange things have been happening in the news lately. Already this year, members of US President Donald Trump's administration have alluded to a 'Bowling Green massacre' and terror attacks in Sweden and Atlanta, Georgia, that never happened.
The misinformation was swiftly corrected, but some historical myths have proved difficult to erase. Since at least 2010, for example, an online community has shared the apparently unshakeable recollection of Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s, despite the fact that he lived until 2013, leaving prison in 1990 and going on to serve as South Africa's first black president.
Memory is notoriously fallible, but some experts worry that a new phenomenon is emerging. “Memories are shared among groups in novel ways through sites such as Facebook and Instagram, blurring the line between individual and collective memories,” says psychologist Daniel Schacter, who studies memory at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The development of Internet-based misinformation, such as recently well-publicized fake news sites, has the potential to distort individual and collective memories in disturbing ways.”
Starbucks Brazil coffee master Vivi Fonseca explains the long-standing Brazilian coffee tradition of cafezinho. It means "little coffee" in Portuguese, but it's actually a moment to connect, chat and relax over coffee.
(2) Questions 181-185 refer to the following e-mails.の部分も集計されている可能性がある。
e-mailの使用頻度が高いといっても、少なくともYutaのテキストデータでは、Questions 181-185 refer to the following e-mails.の部分で使われているからなんですよね。テストの問題指示文の扱いは集計には厄介なところです。例えば今度出る銀フレでは設問に出る単語・表現を別に扱っていますね。この当たりもいい悪いではなく著者の方針に委ねられるところです。
For years scholars have debated what inspired William Shakespeare's writings. Now, with the help of software typically used by professors to nab cheating students, two writers have discovered an unpublished manuscript they believe the Bard of Avon consulted to write "King Lear," "Macbeth," "Richard III," "Henry V" and seven other plays.
The news has caused Shakespeareans to sit up and take notice.
"If it proves to be what they say it is, it is a once-in-a-generation - or several generations - find," said Michael Witmore, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.
参考にしたとされる原稿はGeorge Northによる"A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels"だそうで、この原稿で使われている表現がほとんどそのまま使われているというのです。
In the dedication to his manuscript, for example, North urges those who might see themselves as ugly to strive to be inwardly beautiful, to defy nature. He uses a succession of words to make the argument, including "proportion," "glass," "feature," "fair," "deformed," "world," "shadow" and "nature." In the opening soliloquy of Richard III ("Now is the winter of our discontent …") the hunchbacked tyrant uses the same words in virtually the same order to come to the opposite conclusion: that since he is outwardly ugly, he will act the villain he appears to be.
"People don't realize how rare these words actually are," Mr. McCarthy said. "And he keeps hitting word after word. It's like a lottery ticket. It's easy to get one number out of six, but not to get every number."
Scholars have used computer-assisted techniques in the humanities for several decades. Most of that scholarship, however, uses function words such as articles and prepositions to create a "digital signature" of a writer that can be used to identify them as author or co-author of another work, rather than using comparatively rare words to locate a source.
To make sure North and Shakespeare weren't using common sources, Mr. McCarthy ran phrases through the database Early English Books Online, which contains 17 million pages from nearly every work published in English between 1473 and 1700. He found that almost no other works contained the same words in passages of the same length. Some words are especially rare; "trundle-tail" appears in only one other work before 1623.
Mr. McCarthy found a reference to the manuscript by George North, a likely cousin of Thomas, online in a 1927 auction catalog, which noted it would be "extremely interesting" to compare certain passages with Shakespeare. He and Ms. Schlueter scoured libraries and archives for a year before enlisting the help of a manuscript detective, who studies rare documents and traced it to the British Library, which had purchased it in 1933. (The manuscript was filed under an obscure shelf mark, which made finding it difficult.)
In 1576, North was living at Kirtling Hall near Cambridge, England, the estate of Baron Roger North. It was here, Mr. McCarthy says, that he wrote his manuscript, at the same time Thomas North was there possibly working on his translation of Plutarch.
The manuscript is a diatribe against rebels, arguing that all rebellions against a monarch are unjust and doomed to fail. While Shakespeare had a more ambiguous position on rebellion, Mr. McCarthy said he clearly mined North's treatise for themes and characters.
Those techniques may only be the “icing on the cake,” said Mr. Witmore, who briefly examined an advance copy. “At its core, this remains a literary argument, not a statistical one.” The book contends that Shakespeare not only uses the same words as North, but often uses them in scenes about similar themes, and even the same historical characters. In another passage, North uses six terms for dogs, from the noble mastiff to the lowly cur and “trundle-tail,” to argue that just as dogs exist in a natural hierarchy, so do humans. Shakespeare uses essentially the same list of dogs to make similar points in “King Lear” and “Macbeth.”
*******
Whatever its influence, Mr. Witmore said, the find suggests that while scholars may have exhausted print sources, there may be other unpublished manuscripts that inspired the Bard that remain to be discovered.
Now, years later, I understand that *is* how things work with no sense of higher purpose. It’s up to us to create it so we can all keep moving forward together.
Today I want to talk about three ways to create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose: by taking on big meaningful projects together, by redefining equality so everyone has the freedom to pursue purpose, and by building community across the world.
There is nothing wrong with doing well, especially if you are changing the world. Innovators are rightly celebrated. But there is a problem with presenting your prime motive as philanthropic when it is not. Mr Zuckerberg is one of the most successful monetisers of our age. Yet he talks as though he were an Episcopalian pastor.
“Protecting our community is more important than maximising our profits,” Mr Zuckerberg said this month after Facebook posted its first ever $10bn quarterly earnings result — an almost 50 per cent year-on-year jump.
When a leader goes on a “listening tour” it means they are marketing something. In the case of Hillary Clinton, it was herself. In the case of Mr Zuckerberg, it is also himself. Making a surprise announcement that Mr Zuckerberg would be having dinner with an ordinary family is the kind of thing a Soviet dictator would do — down to the phalanx of personal aides he brought with him.
This is not how scholars find out what ordinary families are thinking. Nor is it a good way to launch a political campaign.
How do we ensure that AI is designed and used responsibly? How do we establish ethical principles to protect people? How should we govern its use? And how will AI impact employment and jobs?
All of this leads us to what may be one of the most important conclusions of all. Skilling-up for an AI-powered world involves more than science, technology, engineering and math. As computers behave more like humans, the social sciences and humanities will become even more important. Languages, art, history, economics, ethics, philosophy, psychology and human development courses can teach critical, philosophical and ethics-based skills that will be instrumental in the development and management of AI solutions. If AI is to reach its potential in serving humans, then every engineer will need to learn more about the liberal arts and every liberal arts major will need to learn more about engineering.
