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Video Industry News Video Company News Technology Industry News Technology Company News Novelty Industry News Novelty Company News Gay Industry News Gay Company News Legal Industry News All Company News
Released: Dec 01st, 1991
Running Time: 75
Company: X-Plus International
Cast: Maxine Von Braun, Monique Hall, Dusty Rhodes, Max Wren, Sabre, Sean Michaels
Critical Rating: AAA
Genre: Feature
Sabre and Monique Hall who both share very similar facial and body features, are two (or four) reasons why you'll want to view Nasty Calendars, an easygoing little video about a lingerie calendar company that's looking for pinup girls. Oh gee, do we have to audition by taking off our clothes? How did you guess this little gambit allows for the introduction of some tease which is nice to see for a change. Sabre is so cute, it's almost criminal.


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Hi, I just hooked up a 60 gb hd to my xbox the other, installed evox just fine, everythings working fine, i've been ftping stuff to my E drive and then i hit a snag. I sent over almost two 3 gig games and then flashfxp stopped working, i was trying to send files over, it starts and then it stops after a couple hundred K. I'm not sure whats going on, maybe the partition is full, don't know, but how can you see how much room is left on each partition. Anyways if anyone has any idea let me know, thanks
Problems Ftp Ing To Hd
Started by koonz999 , Jan 13 2004 04:31 PM
2 replies to this topic
Posted 13 January 2004 - 04:31 PM
Posted 13 January 2004 - 04:48 PM
did you format the hard drive and create an F: partition? cuz you should be sending stuff to there not E:. so E: is prolly full
Posted 13 January 2004 - 05:25 PM
Yea E is probably full, you should put games on F.
anyway to see if it is, you can use boxplorer or there are some skins in evox that show you free space left ...
anyway to see if it is, you can use boxplorer or there are some skins in evox that show you free space left ...
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Moves seem well underway in the Republican-controlled Senate to fast-track the vote on fast-tracking -- maybe as early as this coming Tuesday. That would be a pity, since the arguments for not passing the proposed trade deal continue to be worthy of long and slow consideration.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a 12-country NAFTA-style trade deal with two serious problems. It doesn't work, and it's bad for democracy.
That is one of the most important political events of the past several years. Investor oriented globalization faces by far its most serious challenge -- now its up to those of us who have been left out of trade diplomacy to come forward with better ideas.
Hillary Clinton actually supports Barack Obama's trade-policy, and even supports the way in which he is trying to get it through Congress. However, the news-media didn't report it that way.
Republicans got the numbers they needed, with two to spare, but for a version of Fast Track that won't get enough Democratic votes to pass in the Senate.
There is absolutely no doubt that this country faces serious issues of income inequality. But killing a trade deal when it offers at least the hope of a better future for the American economy is not the way to fix those pressing problems.
Trade deals are one subject (one of the very few left) which do not break down on party line. Both the Republicans and the Democrats are split over the issue, so it's not a repeat of the usual partisan battle lines. But it is a clear defeat for Obama, who lobbied hard to very little effect.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who was a close second in a recent straw poll of Wisconsin Democrats, has called for a "political revolution" to revitalize democracy in the United States. Is Sanders ready to walk the walk?
The Forbes Women's Summit promises to be an informed session for an outstanding collection of women and all the other women who will be sharing the experience through the media.
So when I read about Freddie Gray, it brought the fight for change into focus. Yes, I can blog and tweet and march and hashtag -- and I will -- but as a political organizer by heart and habit, I believe my calling is to insist that the candidates I support take action to create jobs and justice.
While nine in ten Americans agree there's too much corporate money in politics, Doug Hughes alone decided to carry out a life-endangering mission to expose Washington's descent into a money-fueled corruption pit.
The Republican claims are laughable -- but the GOP budget cuts seeking to decimate the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy are deadly serious.
House Democrats will play a key role in whether the Obama administration can get a deal with Iran.
Don't look now, but Tuesday, April 14, 2015, was a good day for American democracy. Buds of bipartisanship offer signs that the legislative process is coming back to life after years of dark and depressing political gridlock.
On opening day, rejoice that the fundamentals that America's pastime and American democracy share -- character, support, versatility, endurance and diversity -- strengthen and enrich us all. In that spirit, play ball!
By simply adding sexual orientation and gender identity to the federal law, states and supporters will be able to pursue religious freedom legislation unencumbered by the belief that these laws will be used to discriminate against the LGBT community.


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Is there any way we can select top 500 values in attribute table? I tried by sorting area field ascending/descending... but I can't count big numbers to select. In microsoft excell we can do know, similarly in arcgis, is there any code to keep in attribute selection ??
A non-programmable way to do this would be to sort your table as you have done, and then just go directly to the nth record that you want (by manually typing the value at the bottom of the attribute table). Once you get the field value for the nth value, just do step 4 in dklassen's first post.
I think this logic should work.
Step 1. cursor through the table and populate an array of the AREA values.
Step 2. sort the array by AREA.
Step 3. Find out the 500th largest AREA value.
Step 4. Select the table by attribute where AREA >= the 500th largest value.
Perhaps I don't understand your question, but I am not sure why you are counting these values. Let your script do that.
e.g. In python
Then you can select by attribute using this value.


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Frederic Farre Beauty Archive, Madame Figaro 2005-2010
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Frederic Farre Beauty Archive Madame Figaro 20052010 Stock PhotoAdult,Adults Only,Beautiful Woman,Beauty,Black Background,Cake,Christian Dior - Designer Label,Close-up,Color Image,Fashion,Fashion Model,Glamour,Holding,Human Body Part,Human Face,Human Finger,Human Mouth,Human Nose,Indulgence,Lip Gloss,Macaroon,Madame Figaro,Make-Up,Nail Polish,One Person,One Woman Only,Over Eating,Part of a Series,People,Photography,Pink Color,Portrait,Red,Sensuality,Shiny,Studio Shot,Sweet Food,Teeth,Unhealthy Eating,VerticalPhotographer Frederic Farre/FigarophotoCollection: Contour Style Model at a beauty session for Madame Figaro magazine. Make-up and nail polish by Dior. Published image. Image ID 066074-014. CREDIT MUST READ: Frederic Farre/Figarophoto/Contour by Getty Images. *** Local Caption ***


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Arsenal face competition for wantaway Liverpool defender Dan Agger. The Sunday Mirror says Agger's future is being monitored by THREE London clubs after making it clear to Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers that he wants to leave.
West Ham are believed to be interested as he would be in their price range at about £10 million, while Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger needs a replacement for Thomas Vermaelen, who is joining Barcelona.
Tottenham will also be keen if they fail in their attempt to sign Mateo Musacchio from Villarreal.
For the big stories and the banter follow us on Twitter: @tribalfootball


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Smashing Mystery Riddle Resolved: New York Pizza, Jules Verne And 28 Hong Kong Street
- By Vitaly Friedman
- February 10th, 2016
- 6 Comments
Guess what: those tricky mystery riddles are never easy to design. The idea has to be evaluated and brought into life, just to be crashed by painful user tests and then adjusted over and over again until it's easy enough to solve — but difficult enough to not solve fast.
When we started out with riddles, we wanted to have an entertaining yet challenging game that wouldn't be easy to crack, and would keep our dear readers busy for quite some time.Read more...


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The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us about What It Means to Be Aliveby Brian Christian
View All Available Formats & Editions
The Most Human Human is a provocative, exuberant, and profound exploration of the ways in which computers are reshaping our ideas of what it means to be human. Its starting point is the annual Turing Test, which pits artificial intelligence programs against people to determine if computers can "think." Named for computer pioneer Alan/b>/i>
- Overview
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- Read an Excerpt
- What People Are Saying
- Meet the author
The Most Human Human is a provocative, exuberant, and profound exploration of the ways in which computers are reshaping our ideas of what it means to be human. Its starting point is the annual Turing Test, which pits artificial intelligence programs against people to determine if computers can "think." Named for computer pioneer Alan Turing, the Turing Test convenes a panel of judges who pose questions—ranging anywhere from celebrity gossip to moral conundrums—to hidden contestants in an attempt to discern which is human and which is a computer. The machine that most often fools the panel wins the Most Human Computer Award. But there is also a prize, bizarre and intriguing, for the Most Human Human. In 2008, the top AI program came short of passing the Turing Test by just one astonishing vote. In 2009, Brian Christian was chosen to participate, and he set out to make sure Homo sapiens would prevail. The author's quest to be deemed more human than a computer opens a window onto our own nature. Interweaving modern phenomena like customer service "chatbots" and men using programmed dialogue to pick up women in bars with insights from fields as diverse as chess, psychiatry, and the law, Brian Christian examines the philosophical, biological, and moral issues raised by the Turing Test. One central definition of human has been "a being that could reason." If computers can reason, what does that mean for the special place we reserve for humanity?
Editorial Reviews
A fascinating exploration of what it means to be human. This book will surely change the way readers think about their conversations.
The New York Times
"Terrific.....one of the rare successful literary offspring of Gödel, Escher, Bach, where art and science meet an engaged mind and the friction produces real fire......dense with ideas"The New Yorker
"Absorbing.....Mr. Christian cleverly suggests that the Turing Test not only tells us how smart computers are but also teaches us about ourselves....Mr. Christian covers a great deal of ground with admirable clarity but with a lightness of touch, and he never tries too hard. He also has a real knack for summing up key ideas by applying them to real-life situations....Following Mr. Christian's advice, we should not see this victory as a threat but as a chance to learn even more about who we are. Every technology that seems to dehumanize us is an opportunity to rehumanize ourselves"The Wall Street Journal
"Questions about what computers are doing to our minds lie at the heart of.....[this] charming, friendly, and often funny read."The Boston Globe
"[A] curious look into the history and potential of artificial intelligence, and a brilliant comparison between artificial intelligence and our natural variety. Christian may have won a prize demonstrating his humanness, but confirms his victory in this humane, humorous and thought-provoking book.....Christian wants to call attention to how special we are, and his book is a succes"Columbus Dispatch
"A fascinating exploration of what it means to be human. This book will surely change the way readers think about their conversations."Booklist, starred review
"A heady exploration of the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and human nature. Christian's examination of the way machines are forcing us to appreciate what it means to be human leads him to explore everything from poetry, chess and existentialism…[and] offers an overview of the history of AI."
Kirkus Reviews
"Exhilarating....it does make you think. Reading it, I constantly found my mind pinging off of whatever Christian was discussing and into flights of exploratory speculation about the amount of information encoded in the seemingly routine exchanges of small talk or the reasons why it's much harder to tell a false story in reverse chronological order. It's an unusual book whose primary gift lies in distracting you from itself. I'd like to see the computers come up with something like that."Salon
"This is a strange, fertile, and sometimes beautiful book. It has been said that man creates images of himself, then comes to resemble the images. Something like this seems to be going on with the computer. Brian Christian writes with a rare combination of what Pascal took to be two contrary mindsets: the spirit of geometry and the spirit of finesse. He takes both the deep limitations and halting progress of artificial intelligence as an occasion for thinking about the most human activity—the art of conversation."
Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft
"This is such an important book, a book I've been waiting and hoping for. Machines are getting so smart that it forces us to take a completely fresh look at what smart is, and at what human is. Brian Christian takes on this very weighty task, and somehow makes it fun. Christian is nimble, insightful, and humble a very human human, indeed, and one you will like very much."
- David Shenk, author of The Forgetting, The Immortal Game, and The Genius in All of Us
"THE MOST HUMAN HUMAN is immensely ambitious and bold, intellectually provocative, while at the same time entertaining and witty – a delightful book about how to live a meaningful, thriving life."
Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams and Ghost
"A book exploring the wild frontiers of chat-bots is appealing enough; I never expected to discover in its pages such an eye-opening inquest into human imagination, thought, conversation, love and deception. Who would have guessed that the best way to understand humanity was to study its imitators?"
David Eagleman, author of Sum and Why The Net Matters
Product Details
- 9780385533072
- Publisher:
- Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Publication date:
- 03/01/2011
- Sold by:
- Random House
- Format:
- NOOK Book
- Pages:
- 320
- Sales rank:
- 265,597
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Read an Excerpt
1. Introduction: The Most Human Human
I wake up five thousand miles from home in a hotel room with no shower: for the first time in fifteen years, I take a bath. I eat, as is traditional, some slightly ominous-looking tomatoes, some baked beans, and four halves of white toast that come on a tiny metal rack, shelved vertically, like books. Then I step out into the salty air and walk the coastline of the country that invented my language, despite my not being able to understand a good portion of the signs I pass on my way—let agreed, one says, prominently, in large print, and it means nothing to me.
I pause, and stare dumbly at the sea for a moment, parsing and reparsing the sign in my head. Normally these kinds of linguistic curiosities and cultural gaps interest and intrigue me; today, though, they are mostly a cause for concern. In the next two hours I will sit down at a computer and have a series of five- minute instant- message chats with several strangers. At the other end of these chats will be a psychologist, a linguist, a computer scientist, and the host of a popular British technology show. Together they form a judging panel, and my goal in these conversations is one of the strangest things I've ever been asked to do.
I must convince them that I'm human. Fortunately, I am human; unfortunately, it's not clear how much that will help.
The Turing Test
Each year, the artificial intelligence (AI) community convenes for the field's most anticipated and controversial annual event—a competition called the Turing test. The test is named for British mathematician Alan Turing, one of the founders of computer science, who in 1950 attempted to answer one of the field's earliest questions: Can machines think? That is, would it ever be possible to construct a computer so sophisticated that it could actually be said to be thinking, to be intelligent, to have a mind? And if indeed there were, someday, such a machine: How would we know?
Instead of debating this question on purely theoretical grounds, Turing proposed an experiment. A panel of judges poses questions by computer terminal to a pair of unseen correspondents, one a human "confederate," the other a computer program, and attempts to discern which is which. There are no restrictions on what can be said: the dialogue can range from small talk to the facts of the world (e.g., how many legs ants have, what country Paris is in) to celebrity gossip and heavy-duty philosophy—the whole gamut of human conversation. Turing predicted that by the year 2000, computers would be able to fool 30 percent of human judges after five minutes of conversation, and that as a result "one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."
Turing's prediction has not come to pass; at the 2008 contest, however, held in Reading, England, the top program came up shy of that mark by just a single vote. The 2009 test in Brighton could be the decisive one.
And I am participating in it, as one of four human confederates going head-to-head (head-to-motherboard?) against the top AI programs. In each of several rounds, I, along with the other confederates, will be paired off with an AI program and a judge—and will have the task of convincing the latter that I am, in fact, human.
The judge will talk to one of us for five minutes, then the other, and then has ten minutes to reflect and make his choice about which one of us he believes is the human. Judges will also note, on a sliding scale, their confidence in this judgment—this is used in part as a tie-breaking measure. The program that receives the highest share of votes and confidence from the judges each year (regardless of whether it "passes the Turing test" by fooling 30 percent of them) is awarded the "Most Human Computer" title. It is this title that the research teams are all gunning for, the one that the money awards, the one with which the organizers and spectators are principally concerned. But there is also, intriguingly, another title, one given to the confederate who elicited the greatest number of votes and greatest confi dence from the judges: the "Most Human Human" award.
One of the first winners, in 1994, was Wired columnist Charles Platt. How'd he do it? By "being moody, irritable, and obnoxious," he says—which strikes me as not only hilarious and bleak but also, in some deeper sense, a call to arms: How, in fact, do we be the most human humans we can be— not only under the constraints of the test, but in life?
Joining the Confederacy
The sponsor and organizer of the Turing test (this particular incarnation of which is known as the Loebner Prize) is a colorful and somewhat curious figure: plastic roll-up portable disco dance fl oor baron Hugh Loebner. When asked his motives for backing and orchestrating this annual Turing test, Loebner cites laziness, of all things: his utopian future, apparently, is one in which unemployment rates are nearly 100 percent and virtually all of human endeavor and industry is outsourced to intelligent machines. I must say, this vision of the future makes me feel little but despair, and I have my own, quite different ideas about what an AI-populated world would look like and reasons for participating in the test. But in any event, the central question of how computers are reshaping our sense of self, and what the ramifications of that process will be, is clearly the crucial one.
Not entirely sure how to go about becoming a confederate, I started at the top: by trying to reach Hugh Loebner himself. I quickly found his website, where, amid a fairly inscrutable amalgam of material about crowd-control stanchions,1 sex- work activism,2 and a scandal involving the composition of Olympic medals,3 I was able to fi nd information on his eponymous prize, along with his email address. He replied by giving me the name of Philip Jackson, a professor at the University of Surrey, who is the one in charge of the logistics for this year's Loebner Prize contest in Brighton, where it will be held under the auspices of the 2009 Interspeech conference on speech and communication science.
I was able to get in touch via Skype with Professor Jackson, a young, smart guy with the distinct brand of harried enthusiasm that characterizes an overworked but fresh-faced academic. That and his charming Briticisms, like pronouncing "skeletal" so it'd rhyme with "a beetle": I liked him immediately. He asked me about myself, and I explained that I'm a nonfi ction writer of science and philosophy, specifically of the ways in which science and philosophy intersect with daily life, and that I'm fascinated by the idea of the Turing test and of the "Most Human Human." For one, there's a romantic notion as a confederate of defending the human race, à la Garry Kasparov vs. Deep Blue—and soon, Ken.
Jennings of Jeopardy! fame vs. the latest IBM system, Watson. (The mind also leaps to other, more Terminator– and The Matrix–type fantasies, although the Turing test promises to involve signifi cantly fewer machine guns.) When I read that the machines came up shy of passing the 2008 test by just one single vote, and realized that 2009 might be the year they finally cross the threshold, a steely voice inside me rose up seemingly out of nowhere. Not on my watch.
More than this, though, the test raises a number of questions, exciting as well as troubling, at the intersection of computer science, cognitive science, philosophy, and daily life. As someone who has studied and written about each of these areas, and who has published peer-reviewed cognitive science research, I find the Turing test particularly compelling for the way it manages to draw from and connect them all. As we chatted, I told Professor Jackson that I thought I might have something rather unique to bring to the Loebner Prize, in terms of both the actual performance of being a confederate and relating that experience, along with the broader questions and issues raised by the test, to a large audience—which would start what I think could be a fascinating and important conversation in the public culture at large. It wasn't hard to get him to agree, and soon my name was on the confederate roster.
After briefing me a bit on the logistics of the competition, he gave me the advice I had heard from confederates past to expect: "There's not much more you need to know, really. You are human, so just be yourself."
"Just be yourself "—this has been, in effect, the confederate motto since the first Loebner Prize in 1991, but seems to me like a somewhat naive overconfidence in human instincts—or at worst, fixing the fi ght. The AI programs we go up against are often the result of decades of work—then again, so are we. But the AI research teams have huge databases of test runs of their programs, and they've done statistical analysis on these archives: they know how to deftly guide the conversation away from their shortcomings and toward their strengths, what conversational routes lead to deep exchange and which ones fizzle—the average confederate off the street's instincts aren't likely to be so good. This is a strange and deeply interesting point, of which the perennial demand in our society for conversation, public speaking, and dating coaches is ample proof. The transcripts from the 2008 contest show the judges being downright apologetic to the human confederates that they can't make better conversation—"i feel sorry for the [confederates], i reckon they must be getting a bit bored talking about the weather," one says, and another offers, meekly, "sorry for being so banal"—meanwhile, the computer in the other window is apparently charming the pants off the judge, who in no time at all is gushing lol's and :P's. We can do better.
So, I must say, my intention from the start was to be as thoroughly disobedient to the organizers' advice to "just show up at Brighton in September and 'be myself' " as possible—spending the months leading up to the test gathering as much information, preparation, and experience as possible and coming to Brighton ready to give it everything I had.
Ordinarily, there wouldn't be very much odd about this notion at all, of course—we train and prepare for tennis competitions, spelling bees, standardized tests, and the like. But given that the Turing test is meant to evaluate how human I am, the implication seems to be that being human (and being oneself) is about more than simply showing up. I contend that it is. What exactly that "more" entails will be a main focus of this book—and the answers found along the way will be applicable to a lot more in life than just the Turing test.
Falling for Ivana
A rather strange, and more than slightly ironic, cautionary tale: Dr. Robert Epstein, UCSD psychologist, editor of the scientifi c volume Parsing the Turing Test, and co-founder, with Hugh Loebner, of the Loebner Prize, subscribed to an online dating service in the winter of 2007. He began writing long letters to a Russian woman named Ivana, who would respond with long letters of her own, describing her family, her daily life, and her growing feelings for Epstein. Eventually, though, something didn't feel right; long story short, Epstein ultimately realized that he'd been exchanging lengthy love letters for over four months with— you guessed it—a computer program. Poor guy: it wasn't enough that web ruffians spam his email box every day, now they have to spam his heart?
On the one hand, I want to simply sit back and laugh at the guy—he founded the Loebner Prize, for Christ's sake! What a chump! Then again, I'm also sympathetic: the unavoidable presence of spam in the twenty- first century not only clogs the in-boxes and bandwidth of the world (roughly 97 percent of all email messages are spam—we are talking tens of billions a day; you could literally power a small nation4 with the amount of electricity it takes to process the world's daily spam), but does something arguably worse—it erodes our sense of trust. I hate that when I get messages from my friends I have to expend at least a modicum of energy, at least for the first few sentences, deciding whether it's really them writing. We go through digital life, in the twenty-first century, with our guards up. All communication is a Turing test. All communication is suspect.
That's the pessimistic version, and here's the optimistic one. I'll bet that Epstein learned a lesson, and I'll bet that lesson was a lot more complicated and subtle than "trying to start an online relationship with someone from Nizhny Novgorod was a dumb idea." I'd like to think, at least, that he's going to have a lot of thinking to do about why it took him four months to realize that there was no actual exchange occurring between him and "Ivana," and that in the future he'll be quicker to the real-human-exchange draw. And that his next girlfriend, who hopefully not only is a bona fi de Homo sapiens but also lives fewer than eleven time zones away, may have "Ivana," in a weird way, to thank.
The Illegitimacy of the Figurative
When Claude Shannon met Betty at Bell Labs in the 1940s, she was indeed a computer. If this sounds odd to us in any way, it's worth knowing that nothing at all seemed odd about it to them. Nor to their co-workers: to their Bell Labs colleagues their romance was a perfectly normal one, typical even. Engineers and computers wooed all the time.
It was Alan Turing's 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" that launched the field of AI as we know it and ignited the conversation and controversy over the Turing test (or the "Imitation Game," as Turing initially called it) that has continued to this day—but modern "computers" are nothing like the "computers" of Turing's time. In the early twentieth century, before a "computer" was one of the digital processing devices that so proliferate in our twenty- first- century lives— in our offices, in our homes, in our cars, and, increasingly, in our pockets—it was something else: a job description.
From the mid-eighteenth century onward, computers, frequently women, were on the payrolls of corporations, engineering fi rms, and universities, performing calculations and doing numerical analysis, sometimes with the use of a rudimentary calculator. These original, human computers were behind the calculations for everything from the first accurate predictions for the return of Halley's comet—early proof of Newton's theory of gravity, which had only been checked against planetary orbits before—to the Manhattan Project, where Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman oversaw a group of human computers at Los Alamos.
It's amazing to look back at some of the earliest papers in computer science, to see the authors attempting to explain, for the fi rst time, what exactly these new contraptions were. Turing's paper, for instance, describes the unheard-of "digital computer" by making analogies to a human computer: "The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer." Of course in the decades to come we know that the quotation marks migrated, and now it is the digital computer that is not only the default term, but the literal one. And it is the human "computer" that is relegated to the illegitimacy of the figurative. In the mid-twentieth century, a piece of cutting-edge mathematical gadgetry was "like a computer." In the twenty- fi rst century, it is the human math whiz that is "like a computer." An odd twist: we're like the thing that used to be like us. We imitate our old imitators, one of the strange reversals of fortune in the long saga of human uniqueness.
The Sentence
Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert says that every psychologist must, at some point in his or her career, write a version of "The Sentence." Specifi cally, The Sentence reads like this: "The human being is the only animal that ." Indeed, it seems that philosophers, psychologists, and scientists have been writing and rewriting this sentence since the beginning of recorded history. The story of humans' sense of self is, you might say, the story of failed, debunked versions of The Sentence. Except now it's not just the animals that we're worried about.
We once thought humans were unique for having a language with syntactical rules, but this isn't so; we once thought humans were unique for using tools, but this isn't so;we once thought humans were unique for being able to do mathematics, and now we can barely imagine being able to do what our calculators can.
There are several components to charting the evolution of The Sentence. One is a historical look at how various developments—in our knowledge of the world as well as our technical capabilities—have altered its formulations over time. From there, we can look at how these different theories have shaped humankind's sense of its own identity. For instance, are artists more valuable to us than they were before we discovered how difficult art is for computers?
Last, we might ask ourselves: Is it appropriate to allow our definition of our own uniqueness to be, in some sense, reactionary to the advancing front of technology? And why is it that we are so compelled to feel unique in the first place?
"Sometimes it seems," says Douglas Hofstadter, "as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not." While at first this seems a consoling position—one that keeps our unique claim to thought intact—it does bear the uncomfortable appearance of a gradual retreat, the mental image being that of a medieval army withdrawing from the castle to the keep. But the retreat can't continue indefinitely. Consider: if everything of which we regarded "thinking" to be a hallmark turns out not to involve it, then . . . what is thinking? It would seem to reduce to either an epiphenomenon—a kind of "exhaust" thrown off by the brain—or, worse, an illusion.
Where is the keep of our selfhood?
The story of the twenty-first century will be, in part, the story of the drawing and redrawing of these battle lines, the story of Homo sapiens trying to stake a claim on shifting ground, flanked on both sides by beast and machine, pinned between meat and math.
And here's a crucial, related question: Is this retreat a good thing or a bad thing? For instance, does the fact that computers are so good at mathematics in some sense take away an arena of human activity, or does it free us from having to do a nonhuman activity, liberating us into a more human life? The latter view would seem to be the more appealing, but it starts to seem less so if we can imagine a point in the future where the number of "human activities" left to be "liberated" into has grown uncomfortably small. What then?
Inverting the Turing Test
There are no broader philosophical implications . . .
It doesn't connect to or illuminate anything.
Alan Turing proposed his test as a way to measure the progress of technology, but it just as easily presents us a way to measure our own. Oxford philosopher John Lucas says, for instance, that if we fail to prevent the machines from passing the Turing test, it will be "not because machines are so intelligent, but because humans, many of them at least, are so wooden."
Here's the thing: beyond its use as a technological benchmark, beyond even the philosophical, biological, and moral questions it poses, the Turing test is, at bottom, about the act of communication. I see its deepest questions as practical ones: How do we connect meaningfully with each other, as meaningfully as possible, within the limits of language and time? How does empathy work? What is the process by which someone comes into our life and comes to mean something to us? These, to me, are the test's most central questions—the most central questions of being human.
Part of what's fascinating about studying the programs that have done well at the Turing test is that it is a (frankly, sobering) study of how conversation can work in the total absence of emotional intimacy. A look at the transcripts of Turing tests past is in some sense a tour of the various ways in which we demure, dodge the question, lighten the mood, change the subject, distract, burn time: what shouldn't pass as real conversation at the Turing test probably shouldn't be allowed to pass as real human conversation, either.
There are a number of books written about the technical side of the Turing test: for instance, how to cleverly design Turing test programs—called chatterbots, chatbots, or just bots. In fact, almost everything written at a practical level about the Turing test is about how to make good bots, with a small remaining fraction about how to be a good judge. But nowhere do you read how to be a good confederate. I find this odd, since the confederate side, it seems to me, is where the stakes are highest, and where the answers ramify the furthest.
Know thine enemy better than one knows thyself, Sun Tzu tells us in The Art of War. In the case of the Turing test, knowing our enemy actually becomes a way of knowing ourselves. So we will, indeed, have a look at how some of these bots are constructed, and at some of the basic principles and most important results in theoretical computer science, but always with our eye to the human side of the equation.
In a sense, this is a book about artificial intelligence, the story of its history and of my own personal involvement, in my own small way, in that history. But at the core, it's a book about living life.
We can think of computers, which take an increasingly central role in our lives, as nemeses: a force like Terminator's Skynet, or The Matrix's Matrix, bent on our destruction, just as we should be bent on theirs. But I prefer, for a number of reasons, the notion of rivals—who only ostensibly want to win, and who know that competition's main purpose is to raise the level of the game. All rivals are symbiotes. They need each other. They keep each other honest. They make each other better. The story of the progression of technology doesn't have to be a dehumanizing or dispiriting one. Quite, as you will see, the contrary.
In the months before the test, I did everything I could to prepare, researching and talking with experts in various areas that related back to the central questions of (a) how I could give the "most human" performance possible in Brighton, and (b) what, in fact, it means to be human. I interviewed linguists, information theorists, psychologists, lawyers, and philosophers, among others; these conversations provided both practical advice for the competition and opportunities to look at how the Turing test (with its concomitant questions of humanhood) affects and is affected by such far-fl ung fields as work, school, chess, dating, video games, psychiatry, and the law.
The final test, for me, was to give the most uniquely human performance I could in Brighton, to attempt a successful defense against the machines passing the test, and to take a run at bringing home the coveted, if bizarre, Most Human Human prize—but the ultimate question, of course, became what it means to be human: what the Turing test can teach us about ourselves.
What People are saying about this
Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams and Ghost
Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft
David Shenk, author of The Forgetting, The Immortal Game, and The Genius in All of Us
Meet the Author
BRIAN CHRISTIAN holds a dual degree from Brown University in computer science and philosophy, and an MFA in poetry. His work has appeared in both literary and scientific journals.
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I enjoyed this book immensely; it is extremely well-written, well-paced and takes the reader on a fascinating journey through connected threads of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, cultural contextualization, interpersonal interaction and 'thought'. This whole topic is so much more than 'just' IBM's Watson winning a Jeopardy match against two former champions. The book opens up a wide array of discussions on what makes human thought unique from the (astounding) capabilities of the machines we are able to create.so far, at least. I would definitely recommend the 'Most Human Human' to anyone. Even Watson would find this a great read!
((My house is at result 37))~Grace
This book leads you on a fascinating journey about Turing Tests, computer chess, artificial intelligence, and much more. You will percieve the world differently after reading it. Highly recommended to all.
I guess it was the best book gir me to pick up... new years resolurion is to read more books ( probobly just the 3rd or 4th ive finished evr!) And this book kept my atenrion the whole way. He talks abijt every rhig snd anyrjing and sometimes you even forget what its all even abiut but it all oulls together nicely i the end and i live how it was written.


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I didn't know my hospital does that
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Skip to comments."Not One of Us" (Thomas Sowell on Sarah Palin)
Posted on 02/23/2009 9:19:15 PM PST by VinL
If Barack Obama has been the most remarkable phenomenon of the recent political scene, Sarah Palin must be second. The emotional responses to each-- especially by the media and the intelligentsia -- go beyond anything that can be explained by the usual political differences of opinion on issues of the day.
That liberals would be thrilled by another liberal is not surprising. But there are conservative Republicans who voted for Barack Obama, and other conservatives who may not have voted for him, but who are quick to see in various pragmatic moves of his since taking office an indication that he is not an extremist.
Anyone familiar with history knows that Hitler and Stalin were pragmatic. After years of denouncing each other, they signed the Nazi-Soviet pact under which they became allies for a couple of years before going to war against one another.
Pragmatism tells you nothing about extremism.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
There you go. _:)
Vin fka
No conservative that I know voted for this fraud.Mr Sowell, I hope you are well.
Huh ??? Not I, m'friend Dr Sowell ....
I don't know a single Republican who voted for this Marxist loser..and I sure as hell don't know any Conservative who voted for him. Sarah is NOT one of the Washington Elite, she wants nothing to do with them. She doesn't go to their meetings, she doesn't go to their events, she knows why they want her to attend and its not because they give a damn about her, its because they are after publicity. Sarah knows that, she has been used enough by the likes of McCain, she won't allow that to happen again. Sarah is doing what she does best, governing her state. If we last to 2012 with this Socialist in power we will need someone like her, someone like Jindal as well to help us all recover from 4 years of HELL
I think Thomas left out the "self nominated" part this time, but frankly, if the folks surrounding Obama are part of the "intelligentsia" I am sure we don't want a candidate who appeals to them ~ my gosh, imagine finding someone YOU LIKE and who Bill Ayers likes!!!
Two words: she's hot.
What does he think "conservative" means? Has conservative become just another ambiguous term like republican? Oh well, it must all depend on what the meaning of is is!
He turned into an absolute "blue nose"!
So I'd say "No TRUE Conservative that I know voted for this fraud."
I have heard of "Republicans" that crossed over and voted for Obama, but not any Conservatives.
I don't want someone who appeals to country clubbers but I also don't want someone who merely repeats GOP talking points.
I want to see more Thomas Sowells and fewer Glen Becks or Hannitys.
Simple, she pumps her OWN gas, buys her OWN diapers for her kid, takes her kid to the Dairy Queen, fishes, hunts, and loves basketball..Yeah she is NOT one of the Washington Elite, and that's why she is AWESOME
"....imagine finding someone YOU LIKE and who Bill Ayers likes..."
In my case, CLEARLY mutually exclusive subsets.
Ayers should be in jail, instead of in that softest, most undemanding and unproductive of positions: college professor.
To translate: She's not a simpering blatherer with no core integrity.
Excellent commentary. One of the biggest complaints the elitists had of Sarah Palin was that she didn't go to a big name college. What a bunch of SNOBS!!
"But there are conservative Republicans who voted for Barack Obama, and other conservatives who may not have voted for him, but who are quick to see in various pragmatic moves of his since taking office an indication that he is not an extremist."
This writer is living in LaLa Land.
Gov. Palin is Not an Over-Educated Elitist Intellectual. She is one of the people, a common American, and that's the kind of person Americans what as their Leader. That is why she will be elected President and Commander in Chief of America and all Loyal Americans.
If she's good enuff for Thomas Sowell then she good enuff for all of us....even some snooty freepers
It could possibly even be true. Who knows, maybe those folks who just couldn't stand McCain and the GOP leadership decided to punish the party, and their desire to purge the party of the RINOS caused them to vote to remove them from power.
Excellent commentary.
You're right. _:)
Sowell is a genius. I love to read him and follow along with his mind. He is a forest, not the trees man, and I love to hear the Big Picture from his point of view.
"...Just so it is clear, Sowell is talking about Palin not being part of the intelligentsia..."
Just to make it clear, Dr. Sowell is talking about a candidate who does not appeal to the intelligentsia. Look at the mess the so called 'intelligentsia' have made of this country.
What is needed is a large does of SIMPLE COMMON SENSE AND INTEGRITY!
even some snooty freepers
WD, snooty freepers??? On a Sarah Palin thread?? Nah. -:)
There were plenty of Conservatives the voted for Obama...
.... by foolishly staying home.
Now we're all paying the price.
I believe Mr Sowell voted for Obama. Is Mr Sowell a conservative?
I recall seeing him interviewed twice before the election and watching in stuned (sp) amazement that Mr Sowell was leaning toward Obama.
Maybe if we could produce a candidate worth voting for...
But there is one more reason that Palin wasn't as popular as she could have been, and that reason was sexism. Not by men, but by women on both sides of the political landscape.
I'll let the readers figure out what I mean by that.
Thanks ;)
Sarah Palin from Idaho to Alaska, it's all good baby!
Sarah, Todd and family are "Real boots on the ground red/white/blue Americans" we love ya!
High and so-called mighty academic liberal pukes who have their ivy heads up each others AS! will NOT SAVE AMERICA nor AMERICANS!
No; what a bunch of pathetic, superficial SNOBS!!
The woman of all outdoorsmans dreams, including mine!!
At least a third of black, hispanics, and asians consider themselves to be "conservatives" and voted for the Messiah. Also my "conservative" neighbors voted for the Messiah because they felt it was time to try something new.
Islander7, You nail it! Right on! Well said!
If anyone knows who Mr. Sowell voted for, ping me. I just cannot believe that he would sink so low as to vote for BHO.
Dr. Sowell voting for Obama!? NO WAY would Dr. Sowell vote for Obama! Are you certain it was Dr. Sowell you saw interviewed? Dr. Sowell wrote against Obama, mocked Obama, ground Obama up and mixed him with eggs for breakfast constantly.
LOL, I refuse to believe it. He did not vote for someone he wrote constant negative articles about.
Good Point!
Like Mrs. Palin?
No, I think one of the complaints is she we to four different colleges in five years. It would have been very difficult to criticize her if she'd graduated in a normal time-frame from Idaho, Washington St., Oregon etc, etc. But, she didn't. It appears that she struggled mightily with some tier IV colleges. That's a problem.
Some of Palin's problems were brought on by the MSM and some by the McCain campaign. But, if you can't answer "tough" questions like, "What do you read on a regular basis?, then some of the damage has been self-inflicted.
Thomas Sowell columns re Obama
Ego and Mouth
A Perfect Storm
Taxing Times
Obama and the Law
Obama and The Left
Polls and Pols
Believers in Obama
Negative Advertising
The Real Obama: Part IV
The Real Obama: Part III
The Real Obama: Part II
The Real Obama
Do Facts Matter?
Idols of Crowds
Changes in Politics
Whose Special Interests?
The Galbraith Effect
As Well As Several Other Issues
Are Facts Obsolete?
Conservatives for Obama?
Cocky Ignorance
Obama and McCain
Irrelevant Apologies
Success Built on Work Ethic
An Old Newness
A Living Lie
Obamas Speech
Race and Politics
Thanks for the ping jaz. Already on it. Check this out:
"widdle_wabbit to rockinqsranch
I believe Mr Sowell voted for Obama. Is Mr Sowell a conservative?
I recall seeing him interviewed twice before the election and watching in stuned (sp) amazement that Mr Sowell was leaning toward Obama.
Maybe if we could produce a candidate worth voting for...
Post Reply | Private Reply | To 10 | View Replies "
rockinqsranch to widdle_wabbit
Dr. Sowell voting for Obama!? NO WAY would Dr. Sowell vote for Obama! Are you certain it was Dr. Sowell you saw interviewed? Dr. Sowell wrote against Obama, mocked Obama, ground Obama up and mixed him with eggs for breakfast constantly.
LOL, I refuse to believe it. He did not vote for someone he wrote constant negative articles about.
You know more about this than myself jaz. What say you?
Although Sowell and his good friend Dr. Walter Williams are conservative and apart of Academia, neither has ever fitted in with uppity left or right intelligentsia, nor have they ever cared to for that matter. Dr. Sowell identifies with Gov. Palin's realness and refusal to back off her life's principles.
He's seen too many "conservative" POLITICIANS suddenly "grow" and "progress" as they seek higher office. And he sees her genuiness as something to defend.
I once told a friend that I thought Sowell should be in someone's administration. He remarked he didn't think that would ever happen...Sowell cherishes his independence of thought. But I'm wondering......if Sarah asked him to come aboard as a policy advisor....humn.......
"Perhaps the best way to try to understand these reactions is to recall what Eleanor Roosevelt said when she first saw Whittaker Chambers, who had accused Alger Hiss of being a spy for the Soviet Union. Upon seeing the slouching, overweight and disheveled Chambers, she said, "He's not one of us."
Don't trash Dr. Sowell, read the article. It took me about five time to figure it out.
Check post 43, that should convince you he didn't vote for 0bambi.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.


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'Salamander Leviathan' At UCSD
- When Multiple dates from Apr 15 - Apr 23, 2011 [days & times]
- Where University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA Map | Website
- Age limit 17+
- Categories Theater
- Cost $15 - $20
'Salamander Leviathan' At UCSD by Krista Knight as part of the Baldwin New Play Festival.
It's 1890 in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. The loneliest man in the world makes a deal with the Devil: A wife and a family in exchange for his soul. When a beautiful stranger steps off the train, everything seems headed towards happily ever after. But neither the stranger nor the Devil is quite what they seem. A casio-pop fable about the price we pay for love. Music written and performed by Arkansas based band David's Pegasus.
Friday 4/15 at 8p.m.
Saturday, 4/16 at 2p.m.
Friday, 4/22 at 8p.m.
Saturday, 4/23 at 2p.m.
Saturday, 4/23 at 8p.m.
*Parking Fees apply Monday-Friday for $2. Parking Pay Stations can be found across from the parking lot.
Location: UCSD at Forum Theatre. Google Map.


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Dates & Times for Sydney 2015 announced!
We are very excited to announce 2015 session times for Santa's Magical Kingdom Sydney! Dates and times can be found here
Tickets will be going on sale 11 August via Ticketmaster
Sydney get ready to see a truly magical experience. The one and only original Santa's Magical Kingdom is set to open at Sydney Showground Olympic Park in December 2015!. The magic of Christmas will come alive at Santa's Magical Kingdom with an interactive walk-through adventure land including everything that you love about Christmas, plus an International Spectacular Christmas Show that will amaze everyone. Lasting memories of fun, laughter and special 'family time' will be remembered by guests long after the event has come to a close. Santa's Magical Kingdom is for every child and the 'inner-child' in all of us.
This event has been a sell-out in Melbourne for 3 years! Don't miss out on seeing the magic.
We are very excited to announce 2015 session times for Santa's Magical Kingdom Sydney! Dates and times can be found here
Tickets will be going on sale 11 August via Ticketmaster
Santa's Magical Kingdom, in collaboration with Santa Claus's North Pole Corperation have signed an exclusive deal to bring all the magic of Christmas to Sydney.
Pegged as being the hottest event of the Christmas season, Santa's Magical Kingdom (SMK) is set to bring all the wonder and joy of a traditional Christmas. This interactive walk-through is a magical experience that includes everything that you love about Christmas. Get ready to be amazed as you see the magic of Christmas come to life!
Open to the public from 12 – 24 December, Santa's Magical Kingdom will deliver a Christmas wonderland full of activities that will capture the imagination of children & parents everywhere. Santa's Magical Kingdom has had sell-out events in Melbourne for the past three years, and was awarded by the Australian Event Awards as Best New Event in Victoria.
"We are extremely excited about bringing Santa's Magical Kingdom to Sydney this Christmas. The demand to bring SMK to Sydney has been overwhelming. It will be a magical experience for the young, and those young at heart. We are creating a spectacular Christmas event, that Sydney is yet to see," commented Keith Brown, Production Director of SMK
The event will include:


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LIVE: An Evening with Alicia Keys
Presented by Bank of America
Gallup's Jeffrey Jones writes this morning that the organization's tracking poll leaves little doubt about the impact of last week's debate on the 2012 race:
Registered voters' preferences for president are evenly split in the first three days of Gallup tracking since last Wednesday's presidential debate. In the three days prior to the debate, Barack Obama had a five-percentage-point edge among registered voters. ...
An Oct. 4-5 Gallup Poll finds roughly two in three Americans reporting that they watched the Oct. 3 debate, similar to what Gallup measured for each of the three 2008 presidential debates. Those who viewed the debate overwhelmingly believe Romney did a better job than Obama, 72% to 20%. Republicans were nearly unanimous in judging Romney the winner. But even Democrats rated Romney as doing a better job than Obama, 49% to 39%. ...
Still, the impact was not so strong that it changed the race to the point where Romney emerged as the leader among registered voters. Rather, at least in the first three days of Gallup tracking after the debate, the race is tied.
As Jones points out, we haven't seen many 5-point shifts in the 2012 race, let alone 5-point shifts driven by a single event. There's reason for caution here: we saw Obama get a bump out of the Democratic convention that faded pretty quickly, until the infamous "47 percent" video surfaced. The most important data we'll get on the debate will come in credible swing-state polls released this week. But so far, the early public numbers are reason for real optimism in the Romney camp.


text:
Lobbyists representing Minnesota Corn Growers Assn, 2007:
|Lobbying Firm Hired
|Subsidiary (Lobbied For)
|Combest, Sell & Assoc
|Minnesota Corn Growers Assn
Combest, Larry
Harrison, Jeff
Schertz, Matt
Sell, Tom
Search database by:
Find Your Representatives
*Each semi-annual filing (mid-year and year-end) is treated as a separate report.
Feel free to distribute or cite this material, but please credit the Center for Responsive Politics. For permission to reprint for commercial uses, such as textbooks, contact the Center: firstname.lastname@example.com


text:
On this page
which describes get_the_terms(), it is specified that it will return a "array of term objects" on success.
What does a term object look like? Is that defined anywhere? I'd like to manipualet is, but I sure can't do that if the data format it returned isn't defined anywhere...
Sure would be nice if things like this were linked-to in the codex somehow in a more obvious way.


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What are your thoughts on the 20th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez disaster?
I'd be interested in your thoughts on this inauspicious occasion. I have three:
- Climate change is not the only reason to wean ourselves from oil.
- In the past 20 years, Exxon saw staggering profits and became the primary fossil-fuel company funding climate disinformation.
- The company still gets better media attention than it deserves (see NYT suckered by ExxonMobil in puff piece titled "Green is for Sissies").
Here is a good E&E News PM (subs. req'd) story on how, "Two decades after the Exxon Valdez disaster, the oil spill haunts the Prince William Sound ecosystem, Alaskan fishing communities and the nation's energy policy":
Shortly after midnight on March 24, 1989, the single-hulled tanker ran aground on Bligh Reef, spilling 11 million gallons of crude that soiled 1,300 miles of coastline, devastating wildlife and fisheries.
But despite years of cleanup, recovery and litigation that reached the Supreme Court — which just last year slashed a lower court's award of punitive damages from the accident — the spill's full impact remains unclear.
The Valdez disaster prompted new oil-safety rules, and the petroleum industry — which wants to widen areas where energy development can occur — says technological advances make oil production, transport and cleanup far less risky than in decades past.
Nonetheless, experts say the possibility of more disasters remains.
"When we look at the amount of oil transported around the world, the number of refineries and other things, it is not without the realm of possibility that we could be looking at another spill of magnitude of the Exxon Valdez," said David Westerholm, who directs NOAA's office of response and restoration.
In Alaska, The extent to which Prince William Sound has recovered is a $92 million question.
Following the spill, oil settled in tidal pools, where much of it was buried under the sand. The Alaskan and federal governments argue that an estimated 21,000 gallons of embedded oil continue to introduce toxins, hurting fisheries and depressing wildlife populations.
A provision in a 1991 settlement between Exxon and the state and federal governments allows the governments to reopen the case to seek compensation for unanticipated future damages. They are asking Exxon for $92 million to fund new restoration projects. Exxon has refused to pay the additional money, and the dispute will likely end up in court.
Exxon argues that the more than $1 billion it has already paid the governments, plus the $500 million in punitive damages being paid to spill victims in a class-action lawsuit, is adequate compensation.
While acknowledging that the area is not the same as it once was, Exxon argues that it is impossible to determine what changes were caused by the spill and what are part of natural ecological variations or outside pollutants for which it is not responsible.
What is important, the company says, it that the sound currently hosts bountiful populations of fish, seabirds and marine mammals, and therefore should be considered recovered.
"What science has learned in Alaska and elsewhere is that while oil spills can have acute short-term effects, the environment has remarkable powers of recovery," Exxon said in a statement. "The claim made by several environmental groups of continuing 'severe' ecological damage to the Sound is simply untrue. It is ExxonMobil's position — and that of many independent scientists — that there are now no species in [Prince William Sound] in trouble due to the impact of the 1989 oil spill."
Uneven recovery
Assessing recovery is difficult, because the ecological records of Prince William Sound before the spill are incomplete.
Both the government and Exxon agree that many areas have recovered entirely. Seabird and seal numbers have rebounded, and the area's profitable salmon fishery has experienced six all-time record years since the spill.
But recovery is uneven, said Stanley Rice, a NOAA ecologist whose study of the region precedes the spill.
Wildlife still have not fully recovered on the hardest-hit beaches, Rice said. Otters digging for food around those tide pools often encounter oil or toxic shellfish, preventing them from reclaiming some of their premium feeding habitats.
Some fish stocks are languishing, as well. The herring fishery, once worth $12 million annually, hit record highs in 1992 but mysteriously collapsed in 1993. Since then, it has been closed for all but three seasons in the 1990s.
Steve Moffitt, a fisheries research biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and a Prince William Sound specialist, said toxins left from the spill might have stressed fish and weakened their immune systems. This makes the populations vulnerable to disease and other factors that could diminish fish stocks, he said.
Ted Meyers, the chief fish pathologist for Alaska, said no scientific link between the herring collapse and the oil spill could be proved, but the wide-ranging effects of the spill were difficult to fully understand.
"I don't think anybody would deny that the spill probably changed the ecosystem changed to some degree," Meyers said. "Whether that change caused the herring collapse is an open question."
Two pods of Prince William Sound orcas lost 40 percent of their populations in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. The pods — one of which resides in the sound full time and eats fish and another migratory population that feeds on large marine mammals — are separate and don't interact or interbreed, Rice said.
Neither has fully rebounded since the spill.
The fish-eaters are slowly breeding, but it will be decades before their population grows to its pre-spill levels, Rice said. The transient pod has not successfully brought a calf to adulthood since the spill and is down to its final six or seven members — none of which is a breeding female, Rice said. Within 20 years, the pod will have vanished.
The demise of the orca pod and persistent subsurface oil are effects no one foresaw in 1989, Rice said.
"[Prince William Sound] is not like a beach next to an oil well. There's a lot of life," Rice said. "In general, for the majority of species, life has returned to pretty much normal, but there are some where life is not quite the same."
1990 pollution law
While the Valdez captain and crew were found at fault for the immediate cause of the spill, the incident also highlighted huge gaps in regulatory oversight of the oil industry.
Congress' response: the 1990 Oil Pollution Act.
The law overhauled shipping regulations, imposed new liability on the industry, required detailed response plans and added extra safeguards for shipping in Prince William Sound. Under the law, a company cannot ship oil in the United States until it proves that it has plans to safeguard against spills and can respond in case of a disaster.
Lawmakers, marine experts, the oil industry and environmentalists credit the law for major improvements in U.S. oil and shipping industries.
"In Alaska and the Prince William Sound, we got the message. Now the tankers here are perhaps the safest in the world," said Rick Steiner, a professor of marine biology at the University of Alaska who has studied the Valdez spill and response. "We really got the message loud and clear."
Since the law's regulations took effect, average annual spill totals have dropped dramatically, according to the Coast Guard.
From 1973 to 1990, there was an average of 11.8 million gallons of oil spilled every year in U.S. waters. But after the new regulations were enacted, oil spills dropped to approximately 1.5 million gallons per year on average.
Aside from discharges related to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, there have been no spills greater than 1 million gallons since enactment of the law, the Coast Guard said.
One of the law's most significant new requirements was for all tankers in U.S. waters to have double hulls by 2015. A major factor contributing to the vulnerability of the Valdez was its single hull.
Most tankers at sea today have double hulls. Exxon's shipping subsidiary still operates one single-hulled tanker in Prince William Sound. It is scheduled to retire at the end of this year.
Experts credit the double-hull requirement with avoiding other disasters. For instance, no oil spilled this month when a 900-foot double-hulled tanker carrying nearly 40 million gallons of crude oil crashed into submerged debris near Galveston, Texas.
"If she had been a single-hulled tanker, I assure you I would not be here today," Greg Pollock, deputy commissioner for the Texas General Land Office, told a Capitol Hill conference. "We would have had a spill four times the size of the Valdez."
Calls for more regulation
But despite the improvements since the oil pollution law, some experts say more stringent regulations are needed.
The University of Alaska's Steiner wants other ports and ships to catch up to Prince William Sound's level of protection. Since the Valdez spill, shipping companies and the Port of Valdez have instituted extra safeguards, such as escort tugboats and double engines and rudders on ships.
"We fixed the problem here in Alaska, but the rest of U.S. ports and waterways are still, I think, at risk," Steiner said. "Now we need to get Congress to raise the bar on all the other new builds."
The Washington state Legislature approved a measure this month that will require that a rescue tugboat be stationed year-round near a port in Puget Sound. A tugboat positioned there on an interim basis in winter has made 42 rescues or assists in the past nine years, said Bruce Wishart of People for Puget Sound.
The double-hull requirements apply to tankers and barges, but some federal officials say more stringent regulations may be needed for other vessels as global commerce sends ever-larger shipping containers to sea.
Container ships can have enough oil on board just to power the ship that it could cause a disastrous spill. Many new shipping containers have enough oil to cause what the Coast Guard classifies as a "major" spill, more than 100,000 gallons. The Coast Guard is eyeing proposals that would require double hulls for those vessels, at least around their fuel tanks.
"Some of these are so large that they have great quantities of fuel. That would be a disaster if it spilled," said Sally Brice-O'Hara, the deputy commandant for operations for the Coast Guard. "That is the next piece of legislation we need to work on."
Analysts also note that numerous smaller oil spills come from other sources: manufacturing, refining and storage facilities, abandoned vessels or vehicle use.
Dagmar Etkin, who has conducted numerous oil spill analyses for the federal government as president of Environmental Research Consulting, said her studies have shown an increasing number of spills from inland facilities and sources other than tankers and ships.
"It's places that use oil in some way but are not what we typically think of as big oil," Etkin said. "There's a lot at stake for [the shipping industry] because it's really expensive to make a mistake, so they have really have improved. We've done really well there, but there are some other areas that we need to focus on."
For instance, the top concern for New Jersey — which with New York oversees the largest port complex on the East Coast — is not oil spills from tankers but pollution from abandoned ships, a top official with the state's environment department said.
"Large spills like the Exxon Valdez … are critical, but some of the challenges in states now are smaller spills from abandoned vessels," said Robert Van Dossen, assistant director of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
Continuing risk
Despite all of the advances in oil shipping and safety, many experts say another spill the size of the Valdez — or worse — could still occur.
Westerholm, the head of NOAA's response and restoration office, said that if a few circumstances had gone differently with the recent ship strike in Galveston, it could have been "catastrophic." And with more and more ships at sea, he said, there are more chances for disaster.
The number of oil spills reported to NOAA for response has been on the rise over the past decade. In fiscal 2008, NOAA was asked to respond to 134 oil spills.
While the Valdez spill was devastating, there have been at least 34 other spills worldwide that were bigger. An oil tanker that exploded off the coast of Italy in 1991 spilled four times as much oil as the Valdez, and another explosion off Angola spilled as many as 81 million gallons.
"I think people need to remember that in the U.S. we have never truly seen a worst-case discharge," said Etkin.
Valdez still a factor on Hill
In Congress, the spill continues to reverberate. Environmentalists have cited the disaster repeatedly as they pressure lawmakers not to open new areas to offshore oil-and-gas drilling.
In particular, environmental activists are citing the Valdez spill in pressing the Obama administration not to sell oil leases in Alaska's Bristol Bay region. President George W. Bush in 2007 lifted bans on leasing there that had been part of a broader set of restrictions imposed by his father in the wake of the Valdez spill, an area where lawmakers had several years earlier removed congressional bans.
But Frank Murkowski, a former Republican senator and governor of Alaska, in a recent interview emphasized the prevention and response protections he and others worked to put in place for tanker traffic following the disaster, arguing that such events are now significantly less likely. And, he said, the separate process of exploring for and producing oil is also now more advanced.
"I think one can be critical of the environmental community for not recognizing the advanced technology, which makes exploration safer than it once was," Murkowski said when asked about environmentalists citing the spill as an argument against new U.S. outer continental shelf leasing.
Former Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), a former chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee who was in office at the time of the spill, recalls the disaster affecting another major drilling fight: the battle over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
In an interview, Johnston said there was momentum in Congress to allow leasing in ANWR then, but the effort was stopped dead by the Valdez spill.
"ANWR was ready to be passed. The votes were there and this came along and changed that completely," Johnston recalled. "I think the votes were lined up and then the votes disappeared." The current Congress is not going to allow ANWR drilling, and President Obama also opposes it.
But it remains to be seen whether the 20th anniversary year of the spill will color policymaking in other ways, especially on offshore leasing.
When Bush removed long-standing White House coastal leasing bans last year covering the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, Congress, under pressure because of skyrocketing energy prices, subsequently allowed overlapping congressional leasing bans to lapse.
The Obama administration has yet to lay out its offshore drilling policy. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar pulled back a Bush-era proposal to massively widen offshore leasing but has not said where new leasing could be allowed following the expiration of the bans.
High energy prices last year were a major impetus behind the removal of protections. But the Valdez spill shows that future accidents could swing the pendulum back.
"It educated people that there are real costs to our oil addiction beyond just the financial costs," said Dan Becker, a longtime environmental activist who now directs the Safe Climate Campaign. "The oiled otters and ducks that workers held up in front of the camera made it visceral to people."
13 Responses to What are your thoughts on the 20th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez disaster?
Why aren't there any bus tour round to Exxon CEO's houses?
I'll assume that Exxon's corporate board is not as flamboyant as, say, Bank of America's. The oil business has a certain staid quality to it. Their houses are probably more out-of-the-way, and if nothing else they probably advertise their location less.
On your thoughts, let's say you're a multi-billion dollar corporation (Phillip Morris) that sells something this is going to cause you legal liabilities down the line (like cigarettes). Now let's say you're awash in money from selling your lucrative products so you buy another arms-length related manufacturing company (Kraft Foods). Now over time people realize that your original product maybe isn't so great, and even want to sue you over it. This drags down your new enterprise in both name association and on your balance books. Given this, as the perfect storm of new regulation (indoor smoking bans) and losing lawsuits, you decide to spin your arms-length company back off because face it, this ship is taking on water and there's really no sure sign that you're going to be able to plug the hole. Now let's say you're a different multi-billion dollar corporation watching all of this go down (Exxon) for the last 20 years. Would you, as a shareholder want to spend a bunch of R&D or acquisition money on bring forth a new venture that would ultimately be collapsed by your old business? You'd be better off splitting your money and buying shares in a new venture that can't be on the hook for what that old oil company did for the last 100 years. It's not like your brand recognition is bringing enough to the table to make it worth it, if the brand recognition even outshines the poor brand reputation. And it's not like there are any real significant economies of scale to be gained. Both industries may be related to energy, but that's about where the association ends. Bottom line is that I can't be surprised that this has all been a greenwashing effort from day one. It's just that now it's not even worth spending the money on greenwashing because fewer and fewer people are buying it anymore. Better to just push for a few free puff pieces. The lesson that needs to be learned is that these companies must know that their doomed to the dust bin even if they try to do good and jump on board with renewables (or feed yummy mac-n-cheese to adorable children). These companies are just going to take while the taking is good and vanish into the night, because no human being will ever be held accountable. If we want to change these companies, then we need to change the system they operate under. It is counterproductive for these companies to act responsibly. So both environmentalists and the "drill, baby, drill" contingent need to stop acting like they ever will. The former think that it's somehow in their own best interest to invest in what will inevitably become the new energy source and latter think that sensitive environment will be protected by new technology, and therefore we should keep using oil. But in this era, neither make sense because the companies won't be around to reap the benefits and they know it. Unless you change the short-term profit reward, nothing is going to change.
Brendan, I personally don't like your reasoning.
Unfortunately, I have a hard time disagreeing…
I haven't bought any exxon or mobile gasoline in about 3 years.
But looking back, that was a mistake. I should have shunned them much earlier.
Perhaps most telling of the long-term effects of the spill is the fact that, after twenty years, neither the transient nor the resident Orca pods have fully recovered their populations. Indeed, the transient pod has failed to breed successfully and no longer has a female member to carry young. It would be interesting to know what is going on in those sand-buried tide pools.
Jay, I quit the week the spill happened and it was obvious about the cover up – and one time I was very close to running out of gas because I refused to buy, and I cajoled my friends into not doing it either (see how well its working!).
Nonetheless, my thoughts are nothing has changed much at all since. Except maybe we are fatter and dumber overall. No, we are certainly dumber since we broke our treasure and army to go to war over oil.
it inspired this cruel joke.
coming hot on the heels of the global warming announcements i remember thinking the reckless days were ending. the expansion of fossil fuel use that followed was a heavyweight gut punch: we're hype, and our top people are just stupid with self-love.
nothing since has offered different evidence. they're just not worth the power we give them.
For many of us, the Exxon Valdez was our 9-11 — a horrific event, with long-term repercussions. I was working for a congressional committee at the time. We were preparing climate change and clean air act legislation, then we took on legislation to help prevent another similar tragedy, this is when the double hulls were required, and our role was to look at what scientific research was needed to better handle these spills in the future. I remember watching workers wearing hazmat gear pressure-washing the rocks on shore with very hot water, sterilizing all of the natural biota, a second punishment for life after the sticky, poisonous goo. And the thousands of birds and other creatures who died, and the fishermen who lost their livelihoods. Despite a court win for the plaintiffs, awarding them a large sum, the payments were never sufficiently disbursed, the powerful defendants were successful at years and years of delay. And now countries are fighting over the right to mine arctic waters for more oil, made possible by the melting ice. It's difficult not to conclude that homo sapiens have a long way to go up the evolution curve. Twenty years after the fact, we are still acting like barbarians.
The first thing I think of is: "We'll never make them pay." What I mean by that is there are numerous externalities associated with fossil fuels, from the obvious one (CO2 emissions) to the ones that only break through to our awareness when a big event happens, like oil spills or a breached fly ash pond.
As long as we let society pay the cost of many of these problems, and only (if ever) impose a cost on the companies involved in the form of a law suit after the fact, fossil fuels will continue to have a ridiculous cost advantage over wind, solar, wave, tidal, hydro, and geothermal.
Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Workers (EVOS) Workers vs. Exxon
Are these the Actions of Our US Lady Justice?
Tipping Scales?
Peeking for Corporate Interest?
Accepting Bribes?
Knee Deep in Exxon Oil?
Allowing Human Life as Exxon's Collateral Damage?
To view Lady Justice click on the site below.
An investigative study is being conducted into the thousands of Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (EVOS) workers' health issues, and acknowledged as Exxon's Criminal actions; not just as Exxon's Collateral Damage.
Here is the rest of the story: In 1989, while media and public attention focused on the thousands of oil-coated dead seabirds, otters, and other wildlife, little attention was given to the harm done to the EVOS cleanup workers. As workers blasted oiled beaches, with hot seawater from high pressure hoses, they were engulfed in toxic fumes containing aerosolized crude oil—benzene and other volatile compounds, oil mist, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. View photos at: http://www.silenceinthesound.com/gallery.shtml
It is a major concern that the cleanup workers from the 1989 EVOS are suffering from long-term health problems resulting from toxic chemical exposures. A significant number of the workers have died. Some of the illnesses include neurological impairment, chronic respiratory disease, leukemia, lymphoma, brain tumors, liver damage, and blood diseases. View stories at: http://www.silenceinthesound.com/stories.shtml
Dr. Riki Ott has written two books; Sound Truth & Corporate Myth$ and Not One Drop. Dr. Ott has investigated, and studied the oil spill spraying, and quotes numerous reports in her books, on the toxic chemicals that were used during the 1989 Prince William Sound oily beach cleanup.
The Black Wave, http://www.blackwavethefilm.com (filmed by a Canadian company) is the name of the film that tells the story about Dr. Ott's investigations and the interviews of sick workers suffering from the toxic chemicals used during the cleanup. The BBC was in Alaska in December 2008 filming for the 20th Anniversary of the oil spill, and interviewed many people.
Submitted by: Merle Savage, General Foreman during the (EVOS) cleanup attempt of 1989; http://www.silenceinthesound.com email: firstname.lastname@example.com
The same thing happened with Katrina – your government no longer cares about us, since the corporate sector took over (by means of being given the same rights as real people) and pretty much OWNS the whole process now – from faux voting (like Obama's really going to be able to change any of this – HAH, he's protecting BUSH from prosecution!), to the whole "green" movement (it's basically not going to work), to our nation and world getting out of the next decade in one piece (it's all going to turn to shit soon climatically so enjoy yourselves and watch the ride to oblivion). Corporations have ruined (poisoned) democracy and capitalism was their weapon.
dear esteemed conspecifics –
why all of this wringing of hands? part of your frustration is this desire to freeze-frame the composition of ecosystems and biological assemblages as if these can be rendered unaffected by the inexorable forces of adaptive pressures. as unpalatable as the adaptive pressures resulting from human activity may be they are nonetheless adaptive pressures in response to which some species will be made stronger and others weaker if not (locally) extinct. even in tidal pools with subsurface substances that are toxic to some life forms including cuddly vertebrates, it is certain that whole new biological communities (most likely microbial) will colonize, fully exploit what to them is a rich abundance of a novel resource and thrive! among other human activities, oil consumption is a behavioral phenotype of some human races that we understand creates dire consequences for the environment as we know it. but you can't have your crumpets and eat them too. if you must bring to the surface gluttonous quantities of fossil fuel from their rightful places deep in the sediment then you must accept the resultant changes in biodiversity without angst or quibbling. in fact, every time you start the engine of your SUV, you have implicitly agreed to this ecological cost. but, you may find peace in knowing that destroying the extant earth environment only creates a different canvas onto which nature is sure to paint an equally appealing biological masterpiece!
evolutionarily yours,


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The Subways - 25.3.2012 - @KinoSiska
Leaping like Pete Townshend.
Stunning capture!!
Cool shot!
what program and what is that effect called?
This makes me think to the song Jump! by Van Halen
man, billy lunn has crazy jumping ability.
Woah! its awesome!. I am starting to practice photography, so out of curiosity, how did you achieve this great effecto nthe image?.
A well deserved DD.
A well deserved DD.
Thank you This was my second concert as a photographer, so I didn't had much knowledge of doing this effect in camera, so it was done in Photoshop as Natural-Philo said. Masking, bluring, sharpening. An hour's work I think.
I'm certain it's not an in-camera zoom-lens effect , i.e. the zoom-blur effect has been done in post-production , (e.g. in photoshop).
Person on the right is going Super Saiyan.
SUPERCHARGED. .This makes my eyes Buzz!!! Love it!
an incredible amout of height. love the photographer off the left side, bringing a stage presence to the image.
Flagged as Spam
Flagged as Spam
Congrats on the daily deviation!
great shot !!!
Very interesting and beautiful work! Great conception. Congratulations!
Great capture...congrats
Congrats with a Daily Deviation
Have a nice day
Have a nice day


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Thank you to everyone who came out and supported St. Hubert's 5K-9 Run and Walk! It was truly a beautiful day to be outdoors and to support homeless pets in need. Many of you got to meet Bruno--St. Hubert's official 5K-9 mascot! Believe it or not, Bruno is still available for adoption. Click here to view the results of the race, and see pictures from the event here.
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My Project AWARE Ocean Hero year is building momentum across Central America! Hundreds of people in audiences in Panama and Guatemala were shocked and moved to action by the science and advocacy action efforts I shared in several lectures. They learned, most for the first time, that plastic marine debris is killing sea...
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I am trying to build a network install of wordpress, I've used plugins like BPS security and Website defender.
I think the issue is with Ubuntu's apache2 configuration itself, it's created www-data user etc and to copy anything into /var/www I have to sudo. I've tried CHMOD and CHOWN etc but still it yells at me.
When I go try and add a site it sends an email, and adds to the database but I get a 404 if I try the url.
Should I (1) try wipping out wordpress and starting over without implimenting the BPS security and website defender and seeing if it will create sites then (2) try to figure out what is going on with ubuntu and www-data, etc (3) start with a different distro, or (4) any other ideas.


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In the RUSSIAN kitchen Troika Festival
Plenty of ingredients are mixed up into Daria Simon Devlin's life -- daughter of the Rev. Pimen Simon of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Nativity, mother of three and grant writer for the Erie School District. She is also a sister, runs the district's nonprofit foundation, volunteers at the church once a week and is married to someone raised outside her church's faith.
Yet she mixes all of this so well that she is like a meal that manages to balance all of the tastes -- sweet, salty, sour, bitter and that umami -- into a perfect plating. You come away wondering how the chef does it, as I do with Devlin.
We met at the church's social center at 109 German St. for a lesson in the cooking of the Russian Orthodox faith. It was still Lent, about 10 days before Easter, and she agreed to show me a traditional Easter morning dish, a sweet cheese called paskha that is unmolded to reveal the symbols of Easter, and the traditional sweet bread, kulich, which bakes in a coffee can and comes out looking somewhat like a giant mushroom. She can taste neither, because it is still Lent, whose dietary rules the faithful observe during all 40 days. So they can have no meat or dairy during the period, nor on Wednesdays and Fridays throughout the rest of the year.
As a result, Devlin explained, much of Russian cooking centers around soups. On this day, she showed me how to prepare a mushroom barley soup, which will also be served at the Russian Troika Festival at the end of this month, May 23-25. Because it is Lent, and because it will be served on a Friday at Troika, the mushrooms (two types, baby bellas and shiitake) are saut�ed in margarine, which her kids, she noted, give her a hard time about. "Mom, you know how bad margarine is for you?" she mimicked. Devlin is rock solid in her faith and her cooking as she flips the margarine in the cast-iron skillet. The mushrooms, she noted, are the key flavoring, so don't skimp on plain white button mushrooms.
They need to saute until they have given up all of their liquid and are left with nothing but intense mushroom flavor. "Stir one more time," she gently told me, "and then let them alone." She admonished her sister, Catherine, who was sauteeing cabbage in the next pan and reached over for a mushroom stir, to do the same.
Her sister was making a staple of their late grandmother, a dough filled with cabbage called pirozhki. (which can also be filled with fruit and other ingredients). Baba (short for Babushka) died before she shared the recipe, so Simon has been researching and tweaking to replicate it.
While the mushroom soup was simmering (Devlin recommends Better than Bouillon vegetarian), she moved on to the beet salad, which will also be served at Troika. The key, she said, is to roast the beets to bring out their natural sweetness. The beets are diced and mixed with garlic, prunes (mashed up so you never know they are there) chopped walnuts, lemon juice and dill.
"Mushrooms, cabbage and beets, that's all you need in a Russian kitchen," Catherine Simon said.
And dill, Devin added. When she studied in Russia for six months in college, she was introduced to fresh dill. Since then, she adds dill to many traditional dishes. Devlin will be returning in June to Russia with her husband, children, sister, and other members of the parish led by her father, the Rev. Pimen Simon. She's excited to show her children, ages 7 to 11, and her husband, who converted to the faith, Moscow and the surrounding countryside.
Raising children to follow the rules of her faith is, of course, challenging. They attend public schools, so they see children eating what they want and when. "So much of our culture is related to the food we eat," she noted.
Still, when one won a McDonald's meal for a school accomplishment, he asked the teacher if it could be put off until after Lent.
"We try to teach them from a young age, this is who we are," Devlin said. "This means there are times when we really fast and times when we really feast."
The feasting started Easter Sunday, when church services ended at about 4 a.m., with the blessing of the paskha and kulich and other Easter specialities, on the church lawn. Families then returned home to begin the celebration -- some with the traditional dishes and others by ordering pizza.
The celebration continued Monday, and for some families, Tuesday as well.
$ID/ornm13- $ID/ornm13- $ID/ornm13-
Marnie Mead is seeking other celebrated cooks in their community. E-mail her at firstname.lastname@example.com if you, or someone you know, should be featured in Her Times.


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