A science professor’s journey through the three levels of pedagogical wisdom.
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Wednesday, November 20, 2019
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ASAP Rocky sets plans to design uniforms for inmates in Swedish prison
In his first full interview since getting released from a Swedish jail, A$AP Rocky sat down with Forbes to talk about how he’s turning over a new leaf.
READ MORE: A$AP Rocky finally freed from Swedish prison… for now
According to Complex, the Harlem-born rapper sat down with Summit co-founder Jeff Rosenthal at the Orpheum in Los Angeles, and revealed that he wants to give back to the Swedish community by donating clothes to inmates in the same Kronoberg prison where he served time. Rocky served time in jail while touring in Sweden after being charged with assault stemming from a June 30 fight in Stockholm.
“When I was going through my whole situation,” Rocky explained, “the whole time I used to look on television and see Swedish fans showing me so much love and I want to give it back.”
In fact, the head of the Kronoberg prison, Fredrik Wallin told the Swedish paper Aftonbladet, that Rocky offered to donate new prison garb to the facility.
Nothing yet has been confirmed, but reports state that Rocky’s attorney sent Kronoberg pictures of a uniform that appeared to be a “green tracksuit” with “PROMENVD” printed on the front.
Rocky has an upcoming concert in Sweden on December 11 at the Ericsson Globe venue in Stockholm. And he said most of the proceeds will support, “inmates and prison reformation.”
“I’m trying to do what I can with what I can, I just want to keep creating and encouraging whoever is after me to do it better,” Rocky said.
In August, he was found guilty of assault and handed a conditional sentence. The Stockholm District Court rejected his assertion that he and his entourage acted in self-defense.
“Based on statements from two witnesses, the court finds that the defendants were not subject to a current or imminent criminal attack. Therefore, they were not in a situation where they were entitled to use violence in self-defence [sic],” according to a statement from the court.
The conditional sentence means that Rocky will be subject to a probationary period of two years.
Later that month, he took the stage at the Real Street festival in Anaheim, Calif., and addressed the ordeal.
READ MORE: A$AP Rocky speaks out about Swedish ordeal in first concert since arrest
“Everybody listen, I know you was praying for me,” he told the screaming audience, before opening up about his time in the Swedish jail.
“Y’all know how happy I am to be here right now,” he began. “I wanna say this though. When I was away—hold the mosh please, this a sentimental moment!—what I experienced was crazy…. It was a scary, humbling experience but I’m here right now. God is good. People who ain’t even f**k with me felt sympathy. People was praying for me, that uplifted me when my spirits was low. I can’t thank y’all enough, man, that was crazy. Hip-hop never looked so strong together.”
The post ASAP Rocky sets plans to design uniforms for inmates in Swedish prison appeared first on theGrio.
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Can African Americans Benefit From Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang’s Universal Income Proposal?
Universal basic income plans are not new. But Andrew Yang, the 44-year-old entrepreneur from New York who is running for president, has made universal income his signature issue.
Yang’s proposal would give $1,000 to every American over the age of 18. He argues that the money will create jobs and pump more revenue into the economy. He calls his universal income plan the “freedom dividend.”
But would it actually work and how would it impact African Americans? Though the idea has never been tested across the U.S., the state of Alaska (population 750,000 residents) receive a dividend of $1,000 or $2,000 a year in oil profits. Yang says his plan is similar.
The proposal for universal income is not new. In his 1967 book Chaos or Community, civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proposed basic universal income. In 1973, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote The Politics of a Guaranteed Income and pushed for a guaranteed minimum income.
“Black entrepreneurship will flourish when black consumers have more money to spend,” Yang said on Roland Martin Unfiltered last month. The median white family has 41 times more wealth than the median African American family. The average white household had $111,146 in wealth in 2011 and the average black household $7,111.
During a Democratic debate in June, Yang was asked how his idea would work. He argues that the winners of the modern tech economy do not pay back into the system they are becoming rich of off. “It’s difficult if you have trillion-dollar tech companies paying zero in taxes while they’re closing 30% of our stores,” Yang answered. Many of the jobs held at small retail stores are held by low-income individuals.
Critics maintain that is plan is expensive, costing $3.2 trillion a year. Yang cites that the 2008 bank bailout cost $29 trillion and business subsidies and tax breaks were even more expensive. The discussion centers around a growing reality in the U.S. workforce: Robots are replacing humans and eliminating jobs. It is estimated that 25% of jobs humans are completing will soon be replaced by robots in the near future.
Those holding lower-paying jobs are the employees hardest hit. “Being a truck driver is the most common job in 29 states, and the trucks are going to start driving themselves,” Yang often asserts. He argues that President Donald Trump is driving much of the political discussion around job loss into an immigration argument when the reality is the real issue is that many people will be replaced by machines. Four million manufacturing jobs have been automated away in the very states that are the most competitive on the electoral map in a presidential election. It is not an accident that Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have been in play for the last decade and the central issue is jobs.
Some say that African Americans may likely benefit from Yang’s plan. Almost 30% of African Americans live below the poverty line. “Family wealth and debt is something that is produced in particular historical periods and under particular historical circumstances,” maintains Brandeis University Professor Tom Shapiro. “Some groups are provided with robust state incentives to gain, accumulate, and keep their wealth. Other groups are prevented from owning property, banking,” he added. That history of wealth discrimination based on race has continued present day.”
Lauren Victoria Burke is an independent journalist for NNPA and host of the podcast BURKEFILE. She is also a political strategist as Principal of Win Digital Media LLC.
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Tuesday, November 19, 2019
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Bot can beat humans in multiplayer hidden-role games
MIT researchers have developed a bot equipped with artificial intelligence that can beat human players in tricky online multiplayer games where player roles and motives are kept secret.
Many gaming bots have been built to keep up with human players. Earlier this year, a team from Carnegie Mellon University developed the world’s first bot that can beat professionals in multiplayer poker. DeepMind’s AlphaGo made headlines in 2016 for besting a professional Go player. Several bots have also been built to beat professional chess players or join forces in cooperative games such as online capture the flag. In these games, however, the bot knows its opponents and teammates from the start.
At the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems next month, the researchers will present DeepRole, the first gaming bot that can win online multiplayer games in which the participants’ team allegiances are initially unclear. The bot is designed with novel “deductive reasoning” added into an AI algorithm commonly used for playing poker. This helps it reason about partially observable actions, to determine the probability that a given player is a teammate or opponent. In doing so, it quickly learns whom to ally with and which actions to take to ensure its team’s victory.
The researchers pitted DeepRole against human players in more than 4,000 rounds of the online game “The Resistance: Avalon.” In this game, players try to deduce their peers’ secret roles as the game progresses, while simultaneously hiding their own roles. As both a teammate and an opponent, DeepRole consistently outperformed human players.
“If you replace a human teammate with a bot, you can expect a higher win rate for your team. Bots are better partners,” says first author Jack Serrino ’18, who majored in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and is an avid online “Avalon” player.
The work is part of a broader project to better model how humans make socially informed decisions. Doing so could help build robots that better understand, learn from, and work with humans.
“Humans learn from and cooperate with others, and that enables us to achieve together things that none of us can achieve alone,” says co-author Max Kleiman-Weiner, a postdoc in the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and at Harvard University. “Games like ‘Avalon’ better mimic the dynamic social settings humans experience in everyday life. You have to figure out who’s on your team and will work with you, whether it’s your first day of kindergarten or another day in your office.”
Joining Serrino and Kleiman-Weiner on the paper are David C. Parkes of Harvard and Joshua B. Tenenbaum, a professor of computational cognitive science and a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines.
Deductive bot
In “Avalon,” three players are randomly and secretly assigned to a “resistance” team and two players to a “spy” team. Both spy players know all players’ roles. During each round, one player proposes a subset of two or three players to execute a mission. All players simultaneously and publicly vote to approve or disapprove the subset. If a majority approve, the subset secretly determines whether the mission will succeed or fail. If two “succeeds” are chosen, the mission succeeds; if one “fail” is selected, the mission fails. Resistance players must always choose to succeed, but spy players may choose either outcome. The resistance team wins after three successful missions; the spy team wins after three failed missions.
Winning the game basically comes down to deducing who is resistance or spy, and voting for your collaborators. But that’s actually more computationally complex than playing chess and poker. “It’s a game of imperfect information,” Kleiman-Weiner says. “You’re not even sure who you’re against when you start, so there’s an additional discovery phase of finding whom to cooperate with.”
DeepRole uses a game-planning algorithm called “counterfactual regret minimization” (CFR) — which learns to play a game by repeatedly playing against itself — augmented with deductive reasoning. At each point in a game, CFR looks ahead to create a decision “game tree” of lines and nodes describing the potential future actions of each player. Game trees represent all possible actions (lines) each player can take at each future decision point. In playing out potentially billions of game simulations, CFR notes which actions had increased or decreased its chances of winning, and iteratively revises its strategy to include more good decisions. Eventually, it plans an optimal strategy that, at worst, ties against any opponent.
CFR works well for games like poker, with public actions — such as betting money and folding a hand — but it struggles when actions are secret. The researchers’ CFR combines public actions and consequences of private actions to determine if players are resistance or spy.
The bot is trained by playing against itself as both resistance and spy. When playing an online game, it uses its game tree to estimate what each player is going to do. The game tree represents a strategy that gives each player the highest likelihood to win as an assigned role. The tree’s nodes contain “counterfactual values,” which are basically estimates for a payoff that player receives if they play that given strategy.
At each mission, the bot looks at how each person played in comparison to the game tree. If, throughout the game, a player makes enough decisions that are inconsistent with the bot’s expectations, then the player is probably playing as the other role. Eventually, the bot assigns a high probability for each player’s role. These probabilities are used to update the bot’s strategy to increase its chances of victory.
Simultaneously, it uses this same technique to estimate how a third-person observer might interpret its own actions. This helps it estimate how other players may react, helping it make more intelligent decisions. “If it’s on a two-player mission that fails, the other players know one player is a spy. The bot probably won’t propose the same team on future missions, since it knows the other players think it’s bad,” Serrino says.
Language: The next frontier
Interestingly, the bot did not need to communicate with other players, which is usually a key component of the game. “Avalon” enables players to chat on a text module during the game. “But it turns out our bot was able to work well with a team of other humans while only observing player actions,” Kleiman-Weiner says. “This is interesting, because one might think games like this require complicated communication strategies.”
Next, the researchers may enable the bot to communicate during games with simple text, such as saying a player is good or bad. That would involve assigning text to the correlated probability that a player is resistance or spy, which the bot already uses to make its decisions. Beyond that, a future bot might be equipped with more complex communication capabilities, enabling it to play language-heavy social-deduction games — such as a popular game “Werewolf” —which involve several minutes of arguing and persuading other players about who’s on the good and bad teams.
“Language is definitely the next frontier,” Serrino says. “But there are many challenges to attack in those games, where communication is so key.”
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Eddie Murphy Beverly Hills Cop Sequel to Air on Netflix
The boys are back in town! According to Variety, there will be another installment in Eddie Murphy’s Beverly Hills Cop series.
Netflix, after airing the Dolemite biopic starring Eddie Murphy, has picked up the rights to make the next sequel to Beverly Hills Cop, with Eddie Murphy taking the lead role once again and Jerry Bruckheimer set to produce. Paramount has negotiated a one-time license deal, with an option for a sequel, that will give Netflix the right to make the fourth installment in the film series. Paramount will retain rights to the underlying intellectual property and the first three movies.
Belgian directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, who are currently working on Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s Bad Boys For Life, will have the honors of reviving the Beverly Hills Cop series.
The first Beverly Hills Cop was released in 1984, then followed up with two sequels in 1987 and 1994 and has grossed $735.5 million worldwide. The film will see Murphy return to his starring role as Axel Foley, a street-smart Detroit cop who finds himself transplanted to the tony streets of Beverly Hills.
The revered personality has been doing business with Netflix recently with the biopic, Dolemite Is My Name, which was released last month. The film tells the true story of Blaxploitation era comedian and actor Rudy Ray Moore and his foray with his kung fu fighting alter ego, Dolemite. The movie also stars Keegan-Micheal Key, Mike Epps, Craig Robinson, and Wesley Snipes. Murphy is rumored to have a $70 million deal with Netflix to produce a number of comedy specials.
No doubt Murphy has been busy as of late. He is currently filming the sequel to one of his most loved movies, Coming to America. Coming 2 America is currently scheduled for an August 7, 2020 release date. And while we are on the subject of sequels, according to Movieweb, Murphy will also appear with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito in the third film in the Twins franchise, named Triplets. And yes, he will play the brother of the film’s stars.
For the first time in 35 years, Murphy will make an appearance on Saturday Night Live on December 21, 2019.
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Lori Harvey returns to social media for 1st time since hit & run arrest
Last month, Lori Harvey was reportedly arrested for attempting to flee the scene of a car accident she was involved in. Now she appears to be back on the scene after taking an extended hiatus from social media.
Harvey, the step daughter of comedian and talk show host Steve Harvey, was allegedly driving a Mercedes SUV that collided with a parked car, causing hers to flip over. She reportedly had to be pulled from the car but chose to leave the scene of the accident before being apprehended by law enforcement.
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She was subsequently arrested for a hit and run and delaying a police investigation. She was given a misdemeanor citation and didn’t actually get booked, but promised to appear in court.
Sources told OK! that Harvey was texting and driving at the time of the collision and police told the outlet they did not suspect she was under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of the accident.
Saturday, after weeks of silence, the 22 year old posted an ad (starring herself) for Viktor & Rolf Fragrances’ holiday giveaway. While he has yet to comment on her hit-and-run, based on this post, it seems she may be choosing to brush over the incident and get back to business as usual.
READ MORE: Why is Amanda Seales calling out Rodney Reed supporters?
View this post on InstagramA post shared by Lori Harvey (@lori_harvey_) on
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