Free Republic

…[A] team of scientists working with a Harvard graduate student is for the first time applying deep learning — a powerful new version of the machine learning form of AI — to forecast sudden disruptions that can halt fusion reactions and damage the doughnut-shaped tokamaks that house the reactions. Unlike traditional software, which carries out prescribed instructions, deep learning learns from its mistakes. Accomplishing this seeming magic are neural networks, layers of interconnected nodes — mathematical algorithms — that are “parameterized,” or weighted by the program to shape the desired output. For any given input the nodes seek to produce...

>A 2012 sting nabbed 5 Occupy Wall Street protesters, foiling their plot to blow up an Ohio Bridge. Two separate ISIS-inspired bomb plots have been disrupted in Queens, New York this year alone. So naturally, when CBS’ Limitless needed a terrorist organization to build and detonate a dirty bomb, they chose one of the left’s favorites: an anti-government “militia.” Although the episode doesn’t explicitly call the group racist, they are a “hate group” named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate Civil War general who later “served as the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.” It doesn’t take a...

Forging into the latter half of his historic presidency, Barack Obama urged the nation at his second inauguration Monday to work together on a liberal agenda of America’s “limitless possibilities,” such as reversing climate change, advancing gay rights and strengthening the social safety net. On a chilly and overcast Monday, Mr. Obama laid out the broad themes for his second term, in which he is winding down the war in Afghanistan and is renewing his push for programs to help the middle class. While