Artificial intelligence makes computers lazy

This paper looks at the age-old problem of trying to instil some degree of intelligence in computers. Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Genetic Programming (GP) are techniques that are used to evolve a solution to a problem using processes that mimic natural evolution. This paper reflects on the experience gained while conducting research applying GA and GP to two quite different problems: Medical Diagnosis and Robot Path Planning. An observation is made that when these algorithms are not applied correctly the computer seemingly exhibits lazy behaviour, arriving at a suboptimal solutions. Using examples, this paper shows how this 'lazy' behaviour can be overcome

Predicting the Evolution of Gene ura3 in the Yeast Saccharomyces Cerevisiae

International audienceSince the late '60s, various genome evolutionary models have been proposed to predict the evolution of a DNA sequence as the generations pass. Essentially, two main categories of such models can be found in the literature. The first one, based on nucleotides evolution, uses a mutation matrix of size 4x4. It encompasses for instance the well-known models of Jukes and Cantor, Kimura, and Tamura. In the second category, exclusively studied by Bahi and Michel, the evolution of trinucleotides is studied through a matrix of size 64x64. By essence, all of these models relate the evolution of DNA sequences to the computation of the successive powers of a mutation matrix. To make this computation possible, particular forms for the mutation matrix are assumed, which are not compatible with mutation rates that have been recently obtained experimentally on gene $ura3$ of the Yeast \textit{Saccharomyces cerevisiae}. Using this experimental study, authors of this paper have deduced a simple mutation matrice, compute the future evolution of the rate purine/pyrimidine for ura3, investigate the particular behavior of cytosines and thymines compared to purines, and simulate the evolution of each nucleotide

A Tradition of Giving: New Research on Giving and Volunteering Within Families

SummaryParents who volunteer with charitable organizations are more likely to have children who volunteer for, and give to, charitable organizations.While the philanthropic priorities of parents and their children are more closely aligned than those of grandparents and grandchildren, grandparents can still influence their grandchildren's giving.Parents with certain socio-demographic characteristics have a stronger influence on their children's overall giving and their religious giving.The charitable giving and volunteering behaviors of younger members of a family are influenced by their elders, according to research released today by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and Vanguard Charitable. Since individual giving is the largest source of charitable donations in the United States*, understanding the intra-family generational dynamics that lead to charitable giving decisions can help families, charitable organizations, and advisors to better plan for the future.The report, A Tradition of Giving, is believed to be one of the first to investigate charitable giving behavior across three generations—grandparents, parents, and adult children—in a single study."This study can help families, nonprofits, and advisors better plan for the future," said Jane Greenfield, president of Vanguard Charitable. "Parents and grandparents can encourage children to give and volunteer by incorporating more shared experiences into their philanthropic support. Nonprofits can in turn offer those kinds of experiences to families to attract future support. And advisors may be able to provide better guidance to family members if they recognize the influence of older generations on the younger."The report presents findings from the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy's Philanthropy Panel Study (PPS), the nation's largest and only ongoing study of the philanthropy of the same 8,000 families over time and across generations. The report's conclusions are supplemented by interviews conducted among families who are clients of Vanguard Charitable, one of the nation's largest donor-advised funds. The study examines how closely parents and grandparents match their children and grandchildren in terms of philanthropic priorities, as well as how socio-demographic factors explain the similarity or dissimilarity in philanthropic priorities between parents and their children

Discounting and Consumption Over an Uncertain Horizon: Draw-Down Plans for Family Trusts

Individuals, endowments and trusts face uncertain lifetimes. When the planning horizon of an entity is stochastic and Pareto distributed, hyperbolic discounting and time-varying consumption rates are optimal. We derive expressions for the optimal rate of consumption (draw-down) from wealth for family trusts facing positive probabilities of extinction at each generation. Using birth statistics for the UK, we compute family extinction probabilities and show that they are well-approximated by a Pareto distribution, hence family trusts will discount hyperbolically. Numerically optimised consumption paths for family trusts with CRRA preferences are decreasing but always higher than for infinitely-lived trusts.family extinction; hyperbolic discounting; inter-temporal choice

The evolution of ideology, fairness and redistribution

Ideas about what is "fair" above and beyond the individuals' position in the income ladder determine preferences for redistribution. We study the dynamic evolution of different economies in which redistributive policies, perception of fairness, inequality and growth are jointly determined. We show how including fairness explains various observed relationship between inequality, redistribution and growth. We also show how different beliefs about fairness can keep two otherwise identical countries in different development paths for a very long time.Inequality, Fairness, Redistribution, Ideology.

Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America\u27s Universities (Book Review)

This book surprises. It focuses, for one thing, on the northeastern United States, not on the southern states where slavery was anchored. The chronological focus, with half its space devoted to the colonial period and to implications of colleges for American Indians, is also not what a reader might expect, given that most American colleges were founded in the antebellum era. Most surprising, perhaps, the story is less about individual universities than it is about the networks that created and sustained them. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities is a powerful bill of indictment, unrelenting and unforgiving. The evidence is clear, and Craig Steven Wilder’s account is single-minded and persuasive. The book includes few extended histories of individual colleges, for they are all presented as nodes in larger systems

The Guard Always Changes but the Quality Remains the Same

Since the smoke cleared from battlefields across the United States and the guns of the Civil War’s combatants fell silent Americans began their timeless endeavor to understand what they had endured. This (now 150-year-old) struggle to understand the complexity of the war and its causes guarantees t...

Tagore’s Gitanjali: A Note on Publics of Performance

Tagore’s Gitanjali has been written seeking inspiration from the bhakti tradition. The nuances of performance and reception of the tradition essentially involve two aspects- public and private. Bhakti as an act of personal devotion of an individual forms its ‘private’ character.The sonic performance of bhakti in forms such as bhajans addressed to Gods, accompanied by musical instruments and joyful cries of ecstasy, encompass the ‘public’ character. Both the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ are the modes of transcendental God realisation. While the ‘private’ is individual-centric, the ‘public’ can be understood in the sense of the integration of the individual with the Universal or the finite with the Infinite. The modes of publics of performance rely on transcendental collective shared experience as a catalyst of self-transformation and as an agent fostering national and universal brotherhood. This paper presents the case for incorporating publics of performance in the pedagogy for the study of Gitanjali, as a text of bhakti tradition. This would involve techniques like the inclusion of a CD demonstrating the rhythmic flow of reading, providing guidance on pronunciation, intonation, emphasis, punctuation and groupings of words and phrases. The trainers, on a more dedicated note can evolve innovative teaching techniques such as a ‘literary jagran’ and perform a collective public reading accompanied by traditional musical instruments of the bhakti tradition such as cymbals and dholaks.