Sophia Xueqin Huang, a journalist who has covered the ongoing unrest in Hong Kong has been detained since October on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”
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Monday, December 2, 2019
Hundreds attend Atlantic City funeral for 10-year-old Micah Tennant
At least 800 people filled Atlantic City’s New Shiloh Baptist Church to capacity on Saturday to pay final tribute to 10-year-old Micah Tennant.
The boy, affectionately known as “DJ Dew,” was killed on Nov. 20 while attending a high school football game in Pleasantville. He was laid to rest by his family, friends, elected officials, police and a community of mourners followed by a reception at the Atlantic City Convention Center, according to CBS.
READ MORE: Teen who says he accidentally killed teen girl in Russian roulette game, remains in jail
Some came out dressed in suits and ties while others wore football jerseys. Outside of the church, police officers stood near a sign that read “Michael S. Tennant Homecoming,” according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Steve Stephen told CBS that he came out because he had to support the family. “I need to support this family. I need to support this community. Absolutely I’m here. My love goes out to the family and to all the friends and to the loved ones for the little boy.”
That sentiment was echoed by many of the mourners who may not have personally known Micah but was drawn to his story following the tragedy.
“We all suffer with the death of this young man,” Bishop James Washington, New Shiloh Baptist Church’s senior pastor told The Philadelphia Inquirer after the service. “We have to begin young, teaching the value of life.”
READ MORE: Chicago man denied bail in killing of student who admitted ignoring his catcalls
On Nov. 15, Micah, who was a fifth-grade student, was shot in the neck at the Pleasantville-Camden high school football game when a fight started between several men. Two other people were injured. Police charged Alvin Wyatt, 31, with murder and two counts of attempted murder. Wyatt is one of six men charged in the incident, although the only facing a murder charge. One of the men charged was also injured in the shooting.
At his funeral, Micah was remembered as intelligent and spirited and a lover of music.
Micah loved to deejay, following in the footsteps of his uncle, and had been given the nickname “DJ Dew” when he hit the turntables to mix up some music during family events, including his own birthday parties, his family wrote in his obituary.
READ MORE: Florida reggae DJ set free after fatally shooting his girlfriend’s rapist
Micah also loved his family and playing football. He will be remembered for his “bright smile and huge personality that made it easy for anyone to fall in love with him,” the family added in his obituary, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. “He was an extraordinary kid who will be greatly missed.”
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The Opportunity Cost of Trump’s Impeachment
The elite and wealthiest aren’t dissuaded by price tags when faced with decisions to buy necessities but the working-class choices are certainly impacted by sticker shock. Evaluating alternatives and trade-offs is how many Americans survive and stretch weekly budgets because money is hard to come by and time is an elusive commodity.
If money is needed to buy one thing, the question for working families never changes: what do I have to give up? According to the study of economics, this question is best summarized by the concept called opportunity cost. This cost represents a benefit that you miss when you choose one option over another.
We can apply this economic principle to politics as well. For example, the inquiry and related hearings to impeach President Trump have a monetary cost but it’s minuscule compared to the alternative actions that Congress could focus on to benefit working-class Americans. Let’s do a simple analysis of a few alternatives Congress could get done to help rural and urban America.
US – Mexico – Canada Trade Deal
The USMCA was negotiated by the White House administration in conjunction with government officials in Canada and Mexico. The objective was to enhance trilateral trade relations and replace the existing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to make trade terms fair and equitable for each country.
The anticipated outcomes are to abate tariffs, remove harmful non-tariff trade barriers, boost trade, improve wages and employment conditions for Mexican workers, and create American jobs.
The United States International Trade Commission report estimated that USMCA would create ~176,000 U.S. jobs, while increasing American exports to spur a rise in real gross domestic product by 0.35% or $68 billion, annually.
Augmenting exports would bolster salaries and wages in the U.S. for the average worker at a time when unemployment rates are at historic lows across every demographic to include blacks.
Under the proposed USMCA, union workers benefit too. For example, USMCA requires up to 45% of auto parts to be manufactured by U.S. workers earning at least $16 per hour. The job security measures support and encourage car manufacturing supply chains to produce in America, which protects the automobile industry.
Bipartisan Prescription Drug Price Reform
The proposed bipartisan Senate legislative bill provides financial relief to patients in need of costly prescription drugs while also reducing the Medicare cost burden on taxpayers. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that ~$100 billion will be saved over 10 years, and Part D premiums will be reduced by $6 billion.
Additionally, the legislative package establishes sorely needed patient protections by limiting costs to a $3,100 out-of-pocket cap for individuals and abolishing unlimited patient cost-sharing for certain beneficiaries. The current reality for many Americans is that an illness or unforeseeable catastrophic event could exhaust life savings or even bankrupt households.
In all, the new act and complementary measures seek to restructure the prescription drug market by making the market more transparent and competitive, leading to lower prices for high-cost drugs.
Infrastructure Bill
Earlier this year, President Trump, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed on a $1+ trillion infrastructure bill but they are at an impasse on how to pay for the unprecedented spending package.
The fiscal issues of how to pay for infrastructure spending is not the only holdup. First, the two-year Russian collusion investigation delayed talks. Despite the investigation yielding no results, the new obstacle is the current impeachment inquiry.
According to a research report by Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, the infrastructure bill would create 11 million skilled labor jobs in various industries to include construction, infrastructure, telecommunications, and transportation.
A potential new job opportunity is good news for existing skilled laborers in the urban community. But it is also a great chance for gainful employment for formerly incarcerated men and women—a demographic that is often marginalized as they seek viable ways to reenter society. Especially, those gradually coming home as their sentences are commuted under the First Step Act.
While Congress and the White House flirt with the possibility of reaching an infrastructure deal, people are waiting for an apprenticeship break or experienced workers seeking gainful employment on long-term projects.
According to Dave Bauer, president of the American Road & Transportation Builders Association expressed that every $1 invested in transportation construction and maintenance generates between $2.00 and $2.20 in economic activity across all sectors of the economy.
Regardless of your political views, partisan politics often block or halt legislation that benefits the working-class. To sustain the current economic gains the black community has experienced under the current administration must be compounded with greater opportunities and an infrastructure bill that can help pave the way.
This is an opinion piece that does not necessarily reflect the views of BLACK ENTERPRISE.
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Sunday, December 1, 2019
Helping machines perceive some laws of physics
Humans have an early understanding of the laws of physical reality. Infants, for instance, hold expectations for how objects should move and interact with each other, and will show surprise when they do something unexpected, such as disappearing in a sleight-of-hand magic trick.
Now MIT researchers have designed a model that demonstrates an understanding of some basic “intuitive physics” about how objects should behave. The model could be used to help build smarter artificial intelligence and, in turn, provide information to help scientists understand infant cognition.
The model, called ADEPT, observes objects moving around a scene and makes predictions about how the objects should behave, based on their underlying physics. While tracking the objects, the model outputs a signal at each video frame that correlates to a level of “surprise” — the bigger the signal, the greater the surprise. If an object ever dramatically mismatches the model’s predictions — by, say, vanishing or teleporting across a scene — its surprise levels will spike.
In response to videos showing objects moving in physically plausible and implausible ways, the model registered levels of surprise that matched levels reported by humans who had watched the same videos.
“By the time infants are 3 months old, they have some notion that objects don’t wink in and out of existence, and can’t move through each other or teleport,” says first author Kevin A. Smith, a research scientist in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) and a member of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM). “We wanted to capture and formalize that knowledge to build infant cognition into artificial-intelligence agents. We’re now getting near human-like in the way models can pick apart basic implausible or plausible scenes.”
Joining Smith on the paper are co-first authors Lingjie Mei, an undergraduate in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and BCS research scientist Shunyu Yao; Jiajun Wu PhD ’19; CBMM investigator Elizabeth Spelke; Joshua B. Tenenbaum, a professor of computational cognitive science, and researcher in CBMM, BCS, and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and CBMM investigator Tomer D. Ullman PhD ’15.
Mismatched realities
ADEPT relies on two modules: an “inverse graphics” module that captures object representations from raw images, and a “physics engine” that predicts the objects’ future representations from a distribution of possibilities.
Inverse graphics basically extracts information of objects — such as shape, pose, and velocity — from pixel inputs. This module captures frames of video as images and uses inverse graphics to extract this information from objects in the scene. But it doesn’t get bogged down in the details. ADEPT requires only some approximate geometry of each shape to function. In part, this helps the model generalize predictions to new objects, not just those it’s trained on.
“It doesn’t matter if an object is rectangle or circle, or if it’s a truck or a duck. ADEPT just sees there’s an object with some position, moving in a certain way, to make predictions,” Smith says. “Similarly, young infants also don’t seem to care much about some properties like shape when making physical predictions.”
These coarse object descriptions are fed into a physics engine — software that simulates behavior of physical systems, such as rigid or fluidic bodies, and is commonly used for films, video games, and computer graphics. The researchers’ physics engine “pushes the objects forward in time,” Ullman says. This creates a range of predictions, or a “belief distribution,” for what will happen to those objects in the next frame.
Next, the model observes the actual next frame. Once again, it captures the object representations, which it then aligns to one of the predicted object representations from its belief distribution. If the object obeyed the laws of physics, there won’t be much mismatch between the two representations. On the other hand, if the object did something implausible — say, it vanished from behind a wall — there will be a major mismatch.
ADEPT then resamples from its belief distribution and notes a very low probability that the object had simply vanished. If there’s a low enough probability, the model registers great “surprise” as a signal spike. Basically, surprise is inversely proportional to the probability of an event occurring. If the probability is very low, the signal spike is very high.
“If an object goes behind a wall, your physics engine maintains a belief that the object is still behind the wall. If the wall goes down, and nothing is there, there’s a mismatch,” Ullman says. “Then, the model says, ‘There’s an object in my prediction, but I see nothing. The only explanation is that it disappeared, so that’s surprising.’”
Violation of expectations
In development psychology, researchers run “violation of expectations” tests in which infants are shown pairs of videos. One video shows a plausible event, with objects adhering to their expected notions of how the world works. The other video is the same in every way, except objects behave in a way that violates expectations in some way. Researchers will often use these tests to measure how long the infant looks at a scene after an implausible action has occurred. The longer they stare, researchers hypothesize, the more they may be surprised or interested in what just happened.
For their experiments, the researchers created several scenarios based on classical developmental research to examine the model’s core object knowledge. They employed 60 adults to watch 64 videos of known physically plausible and physically implausible scenarios. Objects, for instance, will move behind a wall and, when the wall drops, they’ll still be there or they’ll be gone. The participants rated their surprise at various moments on an increasing scale of 0 to 100. Then, the researchers showed the same videos to the model. Specifically, the scenarios examined the model’s ability to capture notions of permanence (objects do not appear or disappear for no reason), continuity (objects move along connected trajectories), and solidity (objects cannot move through one another).
ADEPT matched humans particularly well on videos where objects moved behind walls and disappeared when the wall was removed. Interestingly, the model also matched surprise levels on videos that humans weren’t surprised by but maybe should have been. For example, in a video where an object moving at a certain speed disappears behind a wall and immediately comes out the other side, the object might have sped up dramatically when it went behind the wall or it might have teleported to the other side. In general, humans and ADEPT were both less certain about whether that event was or wasn’t surprising. The researchers also found traditional neural networks that learn physics from observations — but don’t explicitly represent objects — are far less accurate at differentiating surprising from unsurprising scenes, and their picks for surprising scenes don’t often align with humans.
Next, the researchers plan to delve further into how infants observe and learn about the world, with aims of incorporating any new findings into their model. Studies, for example, show that infants up until a certain age actually aren’t very surprised when objects completely change in some ways — such as if a truck disappears behind a wall, but reemerges as a duck.
“We want to see what else needs to be built in to understand the world more like infants, and formalize what we know about psychology to build better AI agents,” Smith says.
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T.I. prompts New York lawmakers to introduce bills to ban virginity testing
After Hip Hop artist Clifford “T.I.” Joseph Harris received a great deal of backlash after an interview revealed that he often requests that his daughter’s gynecologist “check her hymen” to secure her virginity; New York lawmakers have introduced two new bills preventing this type of testing in the future, according to CBS News.
Filed in the New York State Senate and New York State Assembly, the two bills seek to ban “licensed medical practitioners from performing or supervising virginity examinations and subjects any medical practitioner who does perform or supervise such performance to professional misconduct penalties as well as possible criminal charges.”
The bill would not outlaw all medical hymen examinations but specifically, “the performance of hymen examinations on women as a means to ascertain whether a woman is a virgin.”
The bill sponsored by Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages, states, “these examinations are not only a violation of women’s and girls’ human rights, but in cases of rape can cause additional pain and mimic the original act of sexual violence, leading to re-experience, re-traumatization and re-victimization.”
“The term ‘virginity’ is not a medical or scientific term,” the bill also stated. “Rather, the concept of ‘virginity’ is a social, cultural and religious construct – one that reflects gender discrimination against women and girls. The United Nations, along with the World Health Organization, U.N. Women and U.N. Human Rights, called for a global ban on the practice.”
— T.I. and Tiny discuss prison in part 2 of Red Table Talk
T.I.’s philosophy about a hymen being intact expressing a women’s virginity has no validity according to a 2018 report from WHO.”‘Virginity testing’ has no scientific or clinical basis. There is no examination that can prove a girl or woman has had sex – and the appearance of girl’s or woman’s hymen cannot prove whether they have had sexual intercourse, or are sexually active or not.”
The original “Virginity testing” comment was made while T.I. was a guest on the “Ladies Like Us” podcast. When speaking of how he handles sex talk with his oldest daughter. The entrepreneur and media mogul rapper said,”we have yearly trips to the gynecologist to check her hymen.”
“Yes, I go with her,” he also added.
—New York state legislator’s bill seeks to outlaw hymen exams
NY Assemblywoman Solages, told the New York Post his comments were “horrifying”.
“It’s misogynistic, it’s appalling,” Solages said. “If a celebrity can impose his power to ensure his 18-year-old daughter gets checked, imagine what can be done in households across New York state?”
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