Computers keep getting smaller and faster. That’s been happening for decades. But almost all of them are programmed to do what humans want them to do, the way humans want them to do it, and nothing more.

Now computers are beginning to learn — on their own. Years of research into artificial intelligence are beginning to pay off.

So-called machine learners already are diagnosing diseases, winning on “Jeopardy” and helping make rich hedge fund investors even richer. Machine learning is behind Facebook’s ability to figure out who your friend is by recognizing a picture of her face. Siri and Google Voice Search voice recognition? Machine learning is behind those too. And driverless cars.

Machine learning appears to be poised for rapid proliferation, with enormous implications for the workplace, the economy, politics and human culture.

Pedro Domingos, computer science professor at the University of Washington, offers an overview of the current state of machine learning in his just-published book, “The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World.” Domingos recently discussed the subject with The Times. The following is an edited transcript.

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-your-future-boss-a-computer-algorithm-it-s-closer-than-you-think-20151005-story.html

Twitch is a video game streaming service.



"Fire occurred at around 12:45 PM on October 4. Man (age 40) lives with three other people in the two story home, including his father (68) and mother (73). The identity of the fourth person isn't stated. Four people were injured, suffering from burns and other unspecified injuries. This includes the above three people and a female relative (62) that lives nearby. About 30% of the home burned down (37 square meters out of a total of 125). Fire department reports that the son was upstairs and accidentally dropped a lit oil-based lighter into a garbage bag, igniting the fire.

Unclear if he is a member of the TEPCO emergency response team. He's an honorary member now.

New filtering technologies figure to disrupt conventional marketing models

The marketing industry knows how to throw a party. Stars ranging from musicians Mark Ronson and Snoop Dogg to the actor who plays Big Bird on Sesame Street joined 95,000 advertising luminaries in New York last week for a week of seminars, special events and schmoozing.

It is no surprise that an industry so polished in the art of persuasion would put a positive spin on its predicament. But not even Mad Men’s Don Draper could hide the anxiety sweeping the world’s advertising hubs of Manhattan’s Madison Avenue and London’s Charlotte Street.

Digital advertising, the industry’s fastest growth area, is under attack from twin forces: software that enables viewers to block ads on their smartphones and computers, and online fraud, which distorts the measurement of video views and impressions, siphoning off spending to a network of shadowy middlemen.

Adblocking, the most recent threat, has gained traction and visibility since the launch of Apple’s latest operating system in September, which can run the software. Designed to filter ads that slow page load times and annoy users, the adblockers released to date have been among the most popular available from Apple’s App Store.

Last week, Digicel became the first mobile operator to start blocking ads on its network. The Caribbean-focused network owned by Denis O’Brien, Ireland’s richest man, said it had started in Jamaica and would introduce the technology to its other markets in coming months.

But the effect of the latest adblocking software, alongside those programs already available on PCs and laptops, could have ruinous implications for the companies that rely on digital advertising (Like DU), such as online publishers. Estimates over precisely how ruinous vary wildly: UBS said last week that adblocking would cost the advertising industry $1bn, while a report in recent months from PageFair and Adobe put the figure for 2015 alone at $22bn.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/df072c9c-686f-11e5-97d0-1456a776a4f5.html

Local Democrats renewed their call for Dallas County District Attorney Susan Hawk to resign Sunday, the same day D Magazine revealed details of Hawk’s battle with depression, including recent threats to kill herself.

Hawk, a Republican, wanted to resign in July because of suicidal thoughts, according to the magazine. Instead, she spent two months at the Menninger Clinic, a premier psychiatric hospital in Houston.

D Magazine reported that Hawk thought about overdosing on sleeping pills before she checked herself into the mental health facility. While there, she was diagnosed with major depressive disorder, considered strangling herself with a blow dryer cord and, at one point, was officially committed after telling a nurse: “I’m going to kill myself anyway. Just let me go home,” the magazine reported after an interview with Hawk.

Dallas County Democrats responded Sunday by releasing a statement in which they moved beyond nuanced calls for her resignation and explicitly pushed for her ouster.


http://www.dallasnews.com/news/metro/20151004-democrats-urge-da-hawk-to-quit-after-she-details-depression-therapy.ece

weird.

Fifty two Saudi inciters, both academics and clerics, have called on the public to “hurry” to Syria where they should be fighting Russian forces.

The clerics, some of which are members of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, called on “all those who are able, and outside of Saudi Arabia, to answer the calls of jihad” and to fight alongside one of the extremist groups facing Russian forces.

According to experts, by issuing this statement, inciters seek to implicate Saudi, Gulf, and Muslim youths in the fight against Russian forces, mirroring Al-Qaeda’s and the Taliban’s recruitment of young fighters during the Afghan-Soviet war.

The statement also called for Syrian opposition fighters to “unify their front” and urged those with capabilities to fight and expertise to remain in Syria and not leave.

The statement comes after the Saudi Ministry of Interior raided a house where its residents manufactures bombs in a residential area in Riyadh. The house was run by a Syrian man with the help of a Filipina woman who prepared and sowed explosive belts.

The statement also comes days after authorities found and detained Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) cells, mostly comprised of militants who returned from areas of conflict.

The invitation to join the conflict conflicts with a Saudi decree announced in March 2014 which listed ISIS and the Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Saudi Hezbollah, the Houthi group, AQIP, and Al-Qaeda in Yemen and Iraq.

The decree also criminalizes taking part in combat outside of Saudi Arabia, or belonging to extremist groups or groups designated as such by the regional or international arena.

Some of the clerics who signed the statement previously issued fatwas on the events in Syria and providing guidance to fighters under extremist groups in the embattled country.

http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2015/10/05/Fifty-two-Saudi-clerics-scholars-call-for-fight-against-Russian-forces-in-Syria.html

I am usually an optimist when it comes to Turkey’s future. Indeed, I wrote a whole book about The Rise of Turkey. But these days, I’m worried. The country faces a toxic combination of political polarization, government instability, economic slowdown, and threats of violence—from both inside and outside Turkey—that could soon add up to a catastrophe. The likelihood of that outcome is increasing amid Russia’s bombing raids in Syria in support of its ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which threaten to debilitate the moderate rebels and boost the extremists in Syria’s civil war, while leaving Turkey to deal with two unruly neighbors: Assad and ISIS.

Of course, Turkey has gone through periods of political and economic crisis before. During the 1970s, the country’s economy collapsed, and the instability led to fighting among right- and left-wing militant groups and security forces that killed thousands of people. Then, in the 1990s, Turkey was pummeled by triple-digit inflation and a full-blown Kurdish insurgency that killed tens of thousands. Turkey survived both those decades. The historian in me says that Turkey will be able to withstand the coming shock this time as well.

But the analyst in me says that things look different this time.

For one thing, Turkey’s Kurdish problem has changed. Until this year, Turkey’s 10 to 12 million-strong Kurdish community, representing about 15 percent of the Turkish population, wasn’t a unified political force; its internal splits followed the fault lines of the country as a whole. Starting in the 1990s, nationalist Kurds tended to vote for parties sympathetic to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkey and the United States consider a terrorist group, and which fought for decades for independence from the Turkish government. But those voters were not the whole of the Kurdish electorate. Since the 1960s, the left-leaning Alevi Kurds, who adhere to a liberal branch of Islam, have voted for the social-democratic Republican People’s Party, which is a secular, Turkish-nationalist movement. More importantly, conservative Kurds, who by my estimate represent nearly half of the Kurdish population, have tended to vote for the governing, pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) ever since it was established by former prime minister, and current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2001.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/turkey-isis-russia-pkk/408988/

In a series of online postings over a decade, the mother of the gunman who opened fire on classmates at Umpqua Community College in Oregon said she kept numerous firearms in her home and opened up about her difficulties raising a troubled son who used to bang his head against the wall.

All the while the mother, Laurel Margaret Harper, expressed hope that her son, Christopher Harper-Mercer, could lead a successful life in finance or as a filmmaker. Instead, Mr. Harper-Mercer, 26, took his own life after shooting nine others to death and wounding several others during a campus rampage last week.

Answering a question about state gun laws several years ago, Ms. Harper, a registered nurse, took a jab at “lame states” that impose limits on keeping loaded firearms in the home, and noted that she had AR-15 and AK-47 semiautomatic rifles, along with a Glock handgun. She also indicated that her son, who lived with her, was well versed in guns, citing him as her source of information on gun laws, saying he “has much knowledge in this field.”

“I keep two full mags in my Glock case. And the ARs & AKs all have loaded mags,” Ms. Harper wrote. “No one will be ‘dropping’ by my house uninvited without acknowledgement.”

The posts were found on Yahoo Answers, a site where Ms. Harper spent hours over the last 10 years, mostly answering medical questions from strangers, occasionally citing her own difficulties raising a troubled child. Her Yahoo profile had a user name of TweetyBird, accompanied by a cartoon image of a nurse. In many of her postings, she included her email address, which public records link to Ms. Harper.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/us/mother-of-oregon-gunman-wrote-of-keeping-firearms.html

http://dailyentertainmentnews.com/breaking-news/ian-mercer-and-laurel-harper-chris-harper-mercers-parents/

American Apparel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday following a rocky period in which its made-in-the-U.S. model faltered and its controversial former CEO became embroiled in controversy over his behavior in the workplace.

The embattled retailer said it has already reached agreements with creditors representing 95 percent of its secured debts to execute a restructuring plan. The deal, which would require a court's approval, will allow the company to stay in business, American Apparel said in a statement.

American Apparel, which flirted with bankruptcy as early as 2011, has about 8,500 employees at six factories and 230 stories in the U.S. and 17 countries. The company famously bet its business model on clothing made in the U.S. In a court filing, it said it has about 4,600 employees in Los Angeles and the L.A. area.

The company said in a court filing that it plans to shed unprofitable stores, though it did not identify how many it expects to close.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/10/05/american-apparel-files-chapter-11-bankruptcy/73365964/

Here’s something you don’t see often: A robber pulls a gun on a man in the man’s garage, they struggle, the victim wrests the gun away from the assailant — and it’s all captured on the home security camera.

Now the question is whether the assailant will be captured as well.

The attempted home invasion took place on Monday, Sept. 28, at 8:45 a.m. in the 1300 block of La Playa Street in the Outer Sunset, according to police. The resident had opened the garage door to bring in his recycling bin. When he came back inside, he was charged from behind by a man with dreadlocks wearing a gray hoodie.

The video shows the assailant getting a hammerlock on the victim and pulling out a gun as the two careen out of sight in the garage — but when they come back into view the victim is gaining the advantage. They sprawl on the concrete floor as the target of the assault tries to pin down his attacker and get control of the gun. About 80 seconds into the video he succeeds. No more is seen of the assailant, who apparently ran off.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Video-shows-man-grabbing-gun-from-suspect-in-S-F-6549933.php

Source: AFP

Syria air strikes must target all 'groups considered as terrorists': Fabius

Paris (AFP) - French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Monday that air strikes in Syria must target Islamic State militants but also other groups "considered as terrorists."

Fabius said a statement by President Francois Hollande on Friday that Russian air strikes must target "Daesh and only Daesh (the Arabic acronym for IS)", did not exclude other groups like the Al-Nusra Front.

"Of course, it is a concise formulation, it is Daesh and groups considered as terrorists," Fabius told Europe 1 radio in an interview, referring to Hollande's statement.

Moscow, which has launched more than 70 air strikes in Syria since last Wednesday, has come under fire for targeting Western-backed moderate opposition and IS fighters alike in their bid to bolster President Bashar Al-Assad.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/syria-air-strikes-must-target-groups-considered-terrorists-075355170.html

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Earlier:Russian FM Lavrov said: "If it looks like a terrorist, if it acts like a terrorist, if it walks like a terrorist, if it fights like a terrorist, it's a terrorist, right?"