Fake News - it was called Yellow Journalism now it's "lies"

Established, real news is crucial in a democracy- but producing real news requires readers who believe in supporting journalistic integrity.  Donald Trump has decided to trash "real media" and prefers, instead, the "Brietbart-barfcart' horror created with "fake news".

Fake news in 1938

There was a time, in the very recent past, when journalism was a source of truth. In fact, the New York Times mantra is "All the news that's fit to print". Now, the main streat media is trying to print and report truth before "fake news" consumes headlines. Lies in journalism were once called "yellow journalism". Now, the name for this propaganda is "fake news". Unfortunately, even tragically, the problem is that people believe it.

Yellow journalism, was journalism based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration. Now, it's called "fake news".

Beating the 'fake news' trap- from the Christian Science Monitor November 22nd, by John Yemma

"Fake news is 'lies'".

On sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, articles generated by propagandists, pressure groups, mischief-makers, and page-view gluttons routinely pop up. They can be intriguing. They are often "liked" and recirculated by people who you know. 

Hundreds of fake news sites with names such as “NewsBuzzDaily” coexist with real news from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and, yes, The Christian Science Monitor.

Of course, satire is a venerable literary device for the discerning reader. From Horace to Jonathan Swift, Will Rogers to The Onion, satirists have left people both laughing and thinking. 

Tongue-in-cheek news reports – whether a TV station’s April Fools’ Day prank or the latest episode of “The Daily Show” – are a popular form of satire today. A media phenomenon continues to the reliving of the 1938 radio broadcast about Martians landing on earth.  People believed this story! In fact, I submit that people would believe it, even if this report was aired today.

But, if satire doesn’t, at some point, give you a wink, then it is just an old-fashioned lie. That's what "fake news is"- it's lies.

Fake news has been around since before the internet. 

More than a century ago, the founder of the Christian Science Monitor, Mary Baker Eddy, decried “those quill-drivers whose consciences are in their pockets” and went on to start the CSM, at least in part, as an antidote. The fakery of yellow journalism survives at the supermarket checkout line, where tabloids screaming about celebrity scandals, political conspiracies, and space aliens are racked alongside Time and Newsweek. And because cable TV is free from the Federal Communication Commission regulations that govern over-the-airwaves TV, shows trafficking in fake news are just a channel choice away from real news shows.

As with everything it has done, the internet has supercharged fake news. More than 60 percent of adult Americans now get their news from social media, according to the Pew Research Center. The average visitor spends almost two hours a day on it. After catching up on mainstream news, it’s tempting to click a headline touting a hidden secret or allegedly suppressed news, especially if it confirms what you suspected or supports your political leanings.

Established, real news is crucial in a democracy. But real news is difficult to nail down, especially when fakery is running wild. Americans have just emerged from a political campaign in which old-school news seemed passé, fact-checking made little difference, and outrageous claims were made. Meanwhile, from Russia to Syria to the Philippines, strongmen have been asserting that facts are irrelevant. “Who are you going to believe,” they ask, after silencing opponents or denying involvement in atrocities, “me or your lying eyes?”

Can fake news be defeated? Google, Facebook, and Twitter have promised to filter fake news. But if you value truth-seeking, please support it. Subscribe to publications like ours that pursue it. Click on links from news sources you trust. Give a thumbs up to news, not “news.”

Real news takes work to gather and produce. Those who practice real news are willing to be corrected if wrong. Fake news looks real but is cheap, feckless, and produced by page-view drivers whose consciences are in their pockets. Don’t be fooled. Fake news doesn’t wink.

People in 1938 believed the report about Martians landing on earth!

By John Yemma, Columnist NOVEMBER 27, 2016
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Japan is investing in the future

Frankly, the USA should be leading this advanced technology, but our government spends entirely too much money on defense, so we are unlikely to find enough extra to invest in staying ahead of this leading edge computer science.
In Japan, the money raised through taxation and municipal services is not applied to building a national defense. Instead, the money raised by the government helps to fund an improvment in the Japanese human condition. Now, the nation is focused on creating the world's fastest computer system. When companies want to grow faster than their competitors, where do you think they might turn for their technologies?

TECHNOLOGY (Reported in the Christian Science Monitor)
Japan to build world's fastest supercomputer

By Weston WilliamsAfter five years of falling behind the United States and China in peak computer performance, Japan is poised for a comeback.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)- computers are doing it faster and faster

Japan announced its intention to build the world's fastest and most efficient supercomputer by the end of 2017. Bidding for the opportunity to build the computer, named Artificial Intelligence Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (AIBC), will end on December 8th.

If constructed, AIBC could represent another leap forward in super-computing, one that could greatly advance AI research as well as provide valuable processing power for various companies, startups, and academic institutions. 

As computing technology continues to advance, AIBC could also provide researchers with valuable information on how to continue to push processing power forward for personal computing devices.

The Artificial Intelligence Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (AIBC) will run at over 130 petaflops, far faster than the current record holder.

The current record-holder for most powerful supercomputer in the world is China's Sunway Taihu Light , which can perform 93 petaflops, that is, quadrillion floating-point operations per second, a common measure of supercomputer performance that clocks how fast a machine can perform arithmetic on numbers with fractions. AIBC would run at over 130 petaflops, according to Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), where the computer will be built. That's a huge leap over Japan's current fastest supercomputer, which runs at a mere 13.5 petaflops.

"As far as we know, there is nothing out there that is as fast ," Satoshi Sekiguchi, a director general at AIST, told Reuters.

The announcement of AIBC comes after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has called for Japan's governmental and private sectors to work more closely together to put the country at the forefront of new and growing technological markets. 

AIBC-assisted research will drive Japanese advances in self-driving cars, medical applications, robotics, and more. But the main goal is to use the calculating capacity of the supercomputer to accelerate aspects of artificial intelligence research, including "deep learning," an attempt to teach machines high-level abstract thinking similar to that of a human being.

The new computer is projected to cost the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry $173 million, or 19.5 billion yen. The price tag will likely be mitigated by allowing companies to rent time on the supercomputer for their own use , according to Ars Technica UK. In the meantime, various technology companies have begun bidding on the honor to build the machine themselves, though it is not known whether there are any frontrunners yet.

While advances in supercomputer technology are not generally felt by ordinary people for years, the techniques used to build supercomputers have led to a rapid increase in the speed and efficiency of consumer technologies. The Cray-2 supercomputer, for instance, the fastest machine in the world when it was released in 1985, has 2.7 times less processing power than Apple's iPhone 5 , which is now itself skirting obsolescence. In a few decades, it is possible we could see the equivalent of AIBC on the market for ordinary consumers in some form or another.

But for now, there are a number of technical challenges to overcome in order to make AIBC a reality. The most significant challenge is power consumption; AIST wants the computer to run on less than 3 megawatts of power. By comparison, Sunway Taihulight runs on 15 megawatts. AIBC will also have to use cutting-edge liquid cooling techniques to keep the heat generated by the supercomputer to tolerable levels.

ABCI will be constructed at the University of Tokyo's Kashiwa Campus. Like most currently active supercomputers, it will likely run on a Linux operating system.

(Meanwhile, our nation's national defense consumes money like deep sea divers eat oxygen.)