An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Jazmin Jones knowswhat she did. "If you're online, there's this idea of trolling," Jones, the director behindSeeking Mavis Beacon, said during a recent panel for her new documentary. "For this project, some things we're taking incredibly seriously ... and other things we're trolling. We're trolling this idea of a detective because we're also, like,ACAB." Her trolling, though, was for a good reason. Jones and fellow filmmaker Olivia Mckayla Ross did it in hopes of finding the woman behind Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. The popular teaching tool was released in 1987 by The Software Toolworks, a video game and software company based in California that produced educational chess, reading, and math games. Mavis, essentially the "mascot" of the game, is a Black woman donned in professional clothes and a slicked-back bun. Though Mavis Beacon was not an actual person, Jones and Ross say that she is one of the first examples of Black representation they witnessed in tech. Seeking Mavis Beacon, which opened in New York City on August 30 and is rolling out to other cities in September, is their attempt to uncover the story behind the face, which appeared on the tool's packaging and later as part of its interface.

The film shows the duo setting up a detective room, conversing over FaceTime, running up to people on the street, and even tracking down a relative connected to the ever-elusive Mavis. But the journey of their search turned up a different question they didn't initially expect: What are the impacts of sexism, racism, privacy, and exploitation in a world where you can present yourself any way you want to? Using shots from computer screens, deep dives through archival footage, and sit-down interviews, the noir-style documentary reveals that Mavis Beacon is actually Renee L'Esperance, a Black model from Haiti who was paid $500 for her likeness with no royalties, despite the program selling millions of copies. [...]

In a world where anyone can create images of folks of any race, gender, or sexual orientation without having to fully compensate the real people who inspired them, Jones and Ross are working to preserve not only the data behind Mavis Beacon but also the humanity behind the software. On the panel, hosted by Black Girls in Media, Ross stated that the film's social media has a form where users of Mavis Beacon can share what the game has meant to them, for archival purposes. "On some level, Olivia and I are trolling ideas of worlds that we never felt safe in or protected by," Jones said during the panel. "And in other ways, we are honoring this legacy of cyber feminism, historians, and care workers that we are very seriously indebted to." You can watch the trailer for "Seeking Mavis Beacon" on YouTube.

Research by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, published on Tuesday, indicates that professional economic forecasters tend to overestimate their accuracy in long-term predictions while underestimating their short-term precision.

The study, which analyzed data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters from 1982 to 2022, revealed that for forecasts two to four quarters ahead, actual errors were two to four times greater than the forecasters' estimated uncertainty ranges for both GDP growth and inflation. In contrast, for predictions less than three months out, forecasters typically overestimated potential errors.

The study's author, Marco Del Negro, highlighted significant differences in uncertainty estimates among individual forecasters, suggesting that these findings challenge the rational expectations theory. Del Negro proposed that these discrepancies might stem from an over-reliance on varying models or priors in making longer-term forecasts.

Bruce66423 shares a report from the Los Angeles Times: In a milestone breakthrough, more than half of Caltech's incoming undergraduate class this fall will be women (source paywalled; alternative source) for the first time in its 133-year history. The class of 113 women and 109 men comes 50 years after Caltech graduated its first class of undergraduate women, who were admitted in 1970. "What this means for young women is that we are a place that can be representative of them and their experiences ... where they can grow and thrive and excel and become really impressive, extraordinary scientists and engineers and go on to make a difference in this really research-heavy profession," said Ashley Pallie, dean of admissions

Gloria L. Blackwell, chief executive of the American Assn. of University Women, lauded Caltech's achievement as critical progress in reducing the substantial gap of women in science, technology, engineering and math. Although women hold about 60% of degrees in biological sciences, they represent only about 18% in computer science and 20% in engineering, Blackwell said. Research has shown that boys are not better at math and science than girls, but a persistent message in society says otherwise -- and especially discourages Latinas and Black girls from pursuing the fields because they face discrimination and have less access to role models, resources and opportunities, the AAUW says. The report notes that Caltech isn't the first educational institution to reach gender parity in STEM. Harvey Mudd College, a small private institution in Claremont, "enrolled more women than men in 2010 for the first time in its history and in 2014 graduated more women than men in engineering," reports the LA Times. "Today, women make up 52.8% of majors in computer science, 50.5% in engineering and 68.2% in mathematical and computational biology."

UC Berkeley is another powerful producer of STEM graduates, with "nearly half of students majoring in those fields [identifying] as women or nonbinary." However, the report notes that the field they enter varies significantly. "They make up more than two-thirds of students in biological and biomedical sciences, but about one-third in engineering, computer and informational sciences, and mathematics and statistics."

An anonymous reader shared this story from the blog Decrypt: Michael Lewis, author of Going Infinite, an account of the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, has argued that the disgraced FTX founder didn't have "the character of a thief" in a new The Washington Post article. "His crime was of a piece with his character. The character wasn't the character of a thief. It was the character of a person numb to risk." Lewis explained in the final paragraphs of a 4,500 word essay adapted from a new introduction to his book. "Unable to feel risk himself, he can't really imagine other people feeling much at all about the risk he has subjected them to...."

Lewis doubled down on previous claims that Bankman-Fried wasn't running a Ponzi scheme, arguing that "The crime was unnecessary to the business in a way that, say, Bernie Madoff's was not," and that "The crime made no sense." The collapse of FTX, he added, "might have been avoided and FTX might have survived."

"That doesn't mean I think that Sam Bankman-Fried is innocent. It merely informs how I feel about him," Lewis explained. "I think the truth is closer to 'young person with an intellectually defensible but socially unacceptable moral code makes a huge mistake in trying to live by it' than "criminal on the loose in the financial system.'"
From from The Daily Beast: Lewis also pointed to bankruptcy court filings from FTX in the weeks after Bankman-Fried's sentencing showing that "against the $8.7 billion in missing customer deposits, FTX was now sitting on something like $14.5 to $16.3 billion." "Whatever the exact sum, it was enough to repay all depositors and various other creditors at least 118 cents on the dollar — that is, everyone who imagined they had lost money back in November 2022 would get their money back, with interest," Lewis writes.
Michael Lewis's article offers some vivid details: Inside of three years, he'd gone from socially and emotionally isolated 25-year-old with an upper-middle-class bank account to leader of a small army of math nerds and (according to Forbes magazine) not merely the world's richest person under 30 but maybe the fastest creator of wealth in recorded history... He'd gone from having no friends as a child to having too many as an adult without ever developing a capacity for friendship....

The prosecutors didn't need Sam's help. Sam helped them anyway by ignoring the counsel of his lawyers and testifying on his own behalf... As Lewis Kaplan, the federal judge who presided over the case, said later: "When he wasn't outright lying, he was often evasive, hairsplitting, dodging questions and trying to get the prosecutor to reword questions in ways that he could answer in ways he thought less harmful than a truthful answer to the question that was posed would have been. I've been doing this job for close to 30 years. I've never seen a performance quite like that...." [T]he judge ordered Sam to rise so that he might address him directly. Two hours or so earlier, Sam had shuffled into the courtroom in prison khakis with his head down and his hands oddly clasped behind his back. Just before he'd entered, his guards had told him he was meant to be wearing handcuffs and asked if he could create the impression that he was doing so...

"There is a risk that this man will be in a position to do something very bad in the future, and it's not a trivial risk, not a trivial risk at all," said the judge. "So, in part, my sentence will be for the purpose of disabling him." He then sentenced Sam to 25 years in prison, with no possibility of parole.

A few minutes later, Sam dutifully clasped his hands behind his back and shuffled out of the courtroom.
Lewis adapted his 4,500-word article from the upcoming (updated) paperback edition of his book — which was originally published in 2023 on the same day jurors were selected for Bankman-Fried's trial...

America's top colleges and finance-industry recruiters have long had their eye on teenage whiz-kids who compete in a prestigious high-school math contest. Now, allegations of cheating are threatening to disrupt it. WSJ: Online leaks of tests for the country's best-known math contest -- the 74-year-old American Mathematics Competition -- are upsetting students who have spent years preparing for the exams. Ahead of the coming school year and test season, angry parents and math coaches have pushed the contest's administrator to tighten controls. The incident is the latest byproduct of a high-pressure college-admissions race that can lead students to look for any edge to get ahead.

[...] As early as elementary school, students interested in flexing their math knowledge beyond what is taught in school can participate in math clubs and competitions. Each year, more than 300,000 students through high school participate in the AMC's first round of multiple-choice tests. Several thousand top performers are invited to sit for a higher-level test, and from there, around 600 compete in national "math olympiads." The top six math students in the nation then represent the U.S. internationally; the U.S. won its ninth International Mathematical Olympiad title this summer.

Murmurs about cheating in the AMC have circulated for a few years, participants say, but reached critical levels during the past school year. The entirety of exams at each level of the competition were available online hours or days before students sat for the tests, a spokeswoman for the Mathematical Association of America confirmed. Testing sites in the U.S. and abroad receive the questions online early to give proctors time to print them out for the in-person exams.

Ars Technica's John Timmer reports: [T]he International Astronomical Union has a resolution that calls for a "Lunar Celestial Reference System" and "Lunar Coordinate Time" to handle things there. On Monday, two researchers at the National institute of Standards and Technology, Neil Ashby and Bijunath Patla, did the math to show how this might work. [...] Ashby and Patla worked on developing a system where anything can be calculated in reference to the center of mass of the Earth/Moon system. Or, as they put it in the paper, their mathematical system "enables us to compare clock rates on the Moon and cislunar Lagrange points with respect to clocks on Earth by using a metric appropriate for a locally freely falling frame such as the center of mass of the Earth-Moon system in the Sun's gravitational field." What does this look like? Well, a lot of deriving equations. The paper's body has 55 of them, and there are another 67 in the appendices. So, a lot of the paper ends up looking like this.

Things get complicated because there are so many factors to consider. There are tidal effects from the Sun and other planets. Anything on the surface of the Earth or Moon is moving due to rotation; other objects are moving while in orbit. The gravitational influence on time will depend on where an object is located. So, there's a lot to keep track of. Ashby and Patla don't have to take everything into account in all circumstances. Some of these factors are so small they'll only be detectable with an extremely high-precision clock. Others tend to cancel each other out. Still, using their system, they're able to calculate that an object near the surface of the Moon will pick up an extra 56 microseconds every day, which is a problem in situations where we may be relying on measuring time with nanosecond precision. And the researchers say that their approach, while focused on the Earth/Moon system, is still generalizable. Which means that it should be possible to modify it and create a frame of reference that would work on both Earth and anywhere else in the Solar System. Which, given the pace at which we've sent things beyond low-Earth orbit, is probably a healthy amount of future-proofing. The findings have been published in the Astronomical Journal. A National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) press release announcing the work can be found here.

"NIST has formally accepted three algorithms for post-quantum cryptography," writes ancient Slashdot reader jd. "Two more backup algorithms are being worked on. The idea is to have backup algorithms using very different maths, just in case a flaw in the original approach is discovered later." The Register reports: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) today released the long-awaited post-quantum encryption standards, designed to protect electronic information long into the future -- when quantum computers are expected to break existing cryptographic algorithms. One -- ML-KEM (PDF) (based on CRYSTALS-Kyber) -- is intended for general encryption, which protects data as it moves across public networks. The other two -- ML-DSA (PDF) (originally known as CRYSTALS-Dilithium) and SLH-DSA (PDF) (initially submitted as Sphincs+) -- secure digital signatures, which are used to authenticate online identity. A fourth algorithm -- FN-DSA (PDF) (originally called FALCON) -- is slated for finalization later this year and is also designed for digital signatures.

NIST continued to evaluate two other sets of algorithms that could potentially serve as backup standards in the future. One of the sets includes three algorithms designed for general encryption -- but the technology is based on a different type of math problem than the ML-KEM general-purpose algorithm in today's finalized standards. NIST plans to select one or two of these algorithms by the end of 2024. Despite the new ones on the horizon, NIST mathematician Dustin Moody encouraged system administrators to start transitioning to the new standards ASAP, because full integration takes some time. "There is no need to wait for future standards," Moody advised in a statement. "Go ahead and start using these three. We need to be prepared in case of an attack that defeats the algorithms in these three standards, and we will continue working on backup plans to keep our data safe. But for most applications, these new standards are the main event." From the NIST: This notice announces the Secretary of Commerce's approval of three Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS):
- FIPS 203, Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism Standard
- FIPS 204, Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Standard
- FIPS 205, Stateless Hash-Based Digital Signature Standard

These standards specify key establishment and digital signature schemes that are designed to resist future attacks by quantum computers, which threaten the security of current standards. The three algorithms specified in these standards are each derived from different submissions in the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Project.

Stressing science education, China is outpacing other countries in research fields like battery chemistry, crucial to its lead in electric vehicles. From a report: China's domination of electric cars, which is threatening to start a trade war, was born decades ago in university laboratories in Texas, when researchers discovered how to make batteries with minerals that were abundant and cheap. Companies from China have recently built on those early discoveries, figuring out how to make the batteries hold a powerful charge and endure more than a decade of daily recharges. They are inexpensively and reliably manufacturing vast numbers of these batteries, producing most of the world's electric cars and many other clean energy systems.

Batteries are just one example of how China is catching up with -- or passing -- advanced industrial democracies in its technological and manufacturing sophistication. It is achieving many breakthroughs in a long list of sectors, from pharmaceuticals to drones to high-efficiency solar panels. Beijing's challenge to the technological leadership that the United States has held since World War II is evidenced in China's classrooms and corporate budgets, as well as in directives from the highest levels of the Communist Party.

A considerably larger share of Chinese students major in science, math and engineering than students in other big countries do. That share is rising further, even as overall higher education enrollment has increased more than tenfold since 2000. Spending on research and development has surged, tripling in the past decade and moving China into second place after the United States. Researchers in China lead the world in publishing widely cited papers in 52 of 64 critical technologies, recent calculations by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute reveal.

theodp writes: After issuing mea culpas over diversity and compensation equity issues, tech companies began to promote their K-12 CS education philanthropy initiatives as corrective measures as they sought to deflect criticism and defeat shareholder calls for greater transparency into hiring and compensation practices. In 2016, for instance, Amazon argued it was already working with tech-backed nonprofits such as Code.org, the Anita Borg Institute, and Girls Who Code to increase women's and minorities' involvement in tech as it sought the SEC's permission to block a shareholder vote on a proposal on gender pay equality. As such, it wasn't terribly surprising to see the nation's tech giants again remind the public of their K-12 CS philanthropy efforts as they recently announced quarterly earnings.

In the Addressing Racial Injustice and Inequity section of its most recent 10-K Annual Report SEC filing, Microsoft boasted, "We also expanded our Technology Education and Learning Support ("TEALS") program to reach nearly 550 high schools across 21 racial equity expansion regions with the support of nearly 1,500 volunteers, 12% of whom identify as Black or African American."

An Amazon press release claimed the company is inspiring Girl Scouts to explore the future of STEM by awarding girls aged 7-and-up a co-branded Girl Scouts and Amazon patch for attending in-person or virtual Amazon warehouse tours. "As humanity looks to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) for new ideas and discoveries," Amazon explained, "it is more important than ever to harness the unique insights, skills, and potential of girls. [..] That's why Amazon partnered with Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) to host exclusive tours [of Amazon fulfillment centers] for troops around the nation to showcase the importance and diversity of careers in STEM."

Most recently, a press release celebrated the move of Google's Code Next high school program into a lab located in the newly-rehabbed Michigan Central Station, which has thus far enrolled approximately 100 students. "Google has called Michigan home for over 15 years with offices in Detroit and Ann Arbor. We're dedicated to investing in the city and providing its students with the resources and inspiration they need to excel," said Shanika Hope, Director, Google Education and Social Impact. "We're excited to bring our Code Next program to Michigan Central, empowering Detroit's youth with computer science education to help them reach their full potential in the classroom and beyond."

Google DeepMind has announced that its AI systems, AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2, have achieved silver medal performance at the 2024 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), solving four out of six problems and scoring 28 out of 42 possible points in a significant breakthrough for AI in mathematical reasoning. This marks the first time an AI system has reached such a high level of performance in this prestigious competition, which has long been considered a benchmark for advanced mathematical reasoning capabilities in machine learning.

AlphaProof, a system that combines a pre-trained language model with reinforcement learning techniques, demonstrated its new capability by solving two algebra problems and one number theory problem, including the competition's most challenging question. Meanwhile, AlphaGeometry 2 successfully tackled a complex geometry problem, Google wrote in a blog post. The systems' solutions were formally verified and scored by prominent mathematicians, including Fields Medal winner Prof Sir Timothy Gowers and IMO Problem Selection Committee Chair Dr Joseph Myers, lending credibility to the achievement.

The development of these AI systems represents a significant step forward in bridging the gap between natural language processing and formal mathematical reasoning, the company argued. By fine-tuning a version of Google's Gemini model to translate natural language problem statements into formal mathematical language, the researchers created a vast library of formalized problems, enabling AlphaProof to train on millions of mathematical challenges across various difficulty levels and topic areas. While the systems' performance is impressive, challenges remain, particularly in the field of combinatorics where both AI models were unable to solve the given problems. Researchers at Google DeepMind continue to investigate these limitations, the company said, aiming to further improve the systems' capabilities across all areas of mathematics.

The United States has claimed victory at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Chiang Mai, Thailand, marking its first win in over two decades. The competition, which pitted top-ranked high school math students from more than 100 countries against each other, saw the U.S. team emerge triumphant after two days of intense problem-solving. NPR adds: The U.S. team last won the Olympiad in 1994. Reports in recent years have raised concerns that American math students are falling behind those in the rest of the world. But, Po-Shen Loh, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and head coach for Team USA, says, "At least in this case with the Olympiads, we've been able to prove that our top Americans are certainly at the level of the top people from the other countries."

Major changes are coming to the ACT college admissions exam in the spring, the CEO of ACT announced Monday. From a report: The exam will be evolving to "meet the challenges students and educators face" -- and that will include shortening the core test and making the science section optional, chief executive Janet Godwin said in a post on the non-profit's website. The changes will begin with national online tests in spring 2025 and be rolled out for school-day testing in spring 2026, Godwin said in the post. The decision to alter the ACT follows changes made to the SAT earlier this year by the College Board, the non-profit organization that develops and administers that test. The SAT was shortened by a third and went fully digital.

Science is being removed from the ACT's core sections, leaving English, reading and math as the portions that will result in a college-reportable composite score ranging from 1 to 36, Godwin wrote. The science section, like the ACT's writing section already was, will be optional. "This means students can choose to take the ACT, the ACT plus science, the ACT plus writing, or the ACT plus science and writing," Godwin wrote. "With this flexibility, students can focus on their strengths and showcase their abilities in the best possible way."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Apple's practice of leveraging ideas from its third-party developer community to become new iOS and Mac features and apps has a hefty price tag, a new report indicates. Ahead of its fall release, you can download the public beta for iOS 18 right now to get a firsthand look at Apple's changes, which may affect apps that today have an estimated $393 million in revenue and have been downloaded roughly 58 million times over the past year, according to an analysis by app intelligence firm Appfigures. Every June at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, the iPhone maker teases the upcoming releases of its software and operating systems, which often include features previously only available through third-party apps. The practice is so common now it's even been given a name: "sherlocking" -- a reference to a 1990s search app for Mac that borrowed features from a third-party app known as Watson. Now when Apple launches a new feature that was before the domain of a third-party app, it's said to have "sherlocked" the app. [...]

In an analysis of third-party apps that generated more than 1,000 downloads per year, Appfigures discovered several genres that had found themselves in Apple's crosshairs in 2024. In terms of worldwide gross revenue, these categories have generated significant income over the past 12 months, with the trail app category making the most at $307 million per year, led by market leader and 2023 Apple "App of the Year" AllTrails. Grammar helper apps, like Grammarly and others, also generated $35.7 million, while math helpers and password managers earned $23.4 million and $20.3 million, respectively. Apps for making custom emoji generated $7 million, too. Of these, trail apps accounted for the vast majority of "potentially sherlocked" revenue, or 78%, noted Appfigures, as well as 40% of downloads of sherlocked apps. In May 2024, they accounted for an estimated $28.8 million in gross consumer spending and 2.5 million downloads, to give you an idea of scale.

Many of these app categories were growing quickly, with math solvers having seen revenue growth of 43% year-over-year followed by grammar helpers (+40%), password managers (+38%) and trail apps (+28%). Emoji-making apps, however, were seeing declines at -17% year-over-year. By downloads, grammar helpers had seen 9.4 million installs over the past 12 months, followed by emoji makers (10.6 million), math-solving apps (9.5 million) and password managers (457,000 installs). "Although these apps certainly have dedicated user bases that may not immediately choose to switch to a first-party offering, Apple's ability to offer similar functionality built-in could be detrimental to their potential growth," concludes TechCrunch's Sarah Perez. "Casual users may be satisfied by Apple's 'good enough' solutions and won't seek out alternatives."

Today, Amazon announced that it reached its 100% renewable energy goal seven years ahead of schedule. However, as Fast Company's Adele Peters reports, "a group of Amazon employees argues that the company's math is misleading." From the report: A report (PDF) from the group, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, argues that only 22% of the company's data centers in the U.S. actually run on clean power. The employees looked at where each data center was located and the mix of power on the regional grids -- how much was coming from coal, gas, or oil versus solar or wind. Amazon, like many other companies, buys renewable energy credits (RECs) for a certain amount of clean power that's produced by a solar plant or wind farm. In theory, RECs are supposed to push new renewable energy to get built. In reality, that doesn't always happen. The employee research found that 68% of Amazon's RECs are unbundled, meaning that they didn't fund new renewable infrastructure, but gave credit for renewables that already existed or were already going to be built.

As new data centers are built, they can mean that fossil-fuel-dependent grids end up building new fossil fuel power plants. "Dominion Energy, which is the utility in Virginia, is expanding because of demand, and Amazon is obviously one of their largest customers," says Eliza Pan, a representative from Amazon Employees for Climate Justice and a former Amazon employee. "Dominion's expansion is not renewable expansion. It's more fossil fuels." Amazon also doesn't buy credits that are specifically tied to the grids powering their data centers. The company might purchase RECs from Canada or Arizona, for example, to offset electricity used in Virginia. The credits also aren't tied to the time that the energy was used; data centers run all day and night, but most renewable energy is only available some of the time. The employee group argues that the company should follow the approach that Google takes. Google aims to use carbon-free energy, 24/7, on every grid where it operates.

New York City announced a "major citywide initiative" to increase "math achievement" among students, according to the mayor's office.

93 middle schools and 420 high schools will implement an "Illustrative Math" curriculum (from an education nonprofit founded in 2011) combined with intensive teacher coaching, starting this fall. "The goal is to ensure that all New York City students develop math skills," according to the NYC Solves web site (with the mayor's office noting "years of stagnant math scores.") Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: The NYC Public Schools further explained, "As part of the NYC Solves initiative, all high schools will use Illustrative Mathematics and districts will choose a comprehensive, evidence-based curricula for middle school math instruction from an approved list. Each curriculum has been reviewed and recommended by EdReports, a nationally recognized nonprofit organization."

The About page for Illustrative Mathematics (IM) lists The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a Philanthropic Supporter [as well as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation], and lists two Gates Foundation Directors as Board members... A search of Gates Foundation records for "Illustrative Mathematics" turns up $25 million in committed grants since 2012, including a $13.9 million grant to Illustrated Mathematics in Nov. 2022 ("To support the implementation of high-quality instructional materials and practices for improving students' math experience and outcomes") and a $425,000 grant just last month to Educators for Excellence ("To engage teacher feedback on the implementation of Illustrative Mathematics curriculum and help middle school teachers learn about the potential for math high-quality instructional materials and professional learning in New York City").

EdReports, which vouched for the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum (according to New York's Education Department), has received $10+ million in committed Gates Foundation grants. The Gates Foundation is also a very generous backer of NYC's Fund for Public Schools, with grants that included $4,276,973 in October 2023 "to support the implementation of high-quality instructional materials and practices for improving students' math experience and outcomes."

Chalkbeat reported in 2018 on a new focus on high school curriculum by the Gates Foundation ("an area where we feel like we've underinvested," said Bill Gates). The Foundation made math education its top K-12 priority in Oct. 2022 with a $1.1 billion investment. Also note this May 2023 blog post from $14+ million Gates Foundation grantee Educators for Excellence, a New York City nonprofit. The blog post touts the key role the nonprofit had played in a year-long advocacy effort that ultimately "secured a major win" ending the city's curricula "free-for-all" and announced "a standardized algebra curriculum from Illustrative Mathematics will also be piloted at 150 high schools."

As the NY Times reported back in 2011, behind "grass-roots" school advocacy, there's Bill Gates!

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: When Rodney Brooks talks about robotics and artificial intelligence, you should listen. Currently the Panasonic Professor of Robotics Emeritus at MIT, he also co-founded three key companies, including Rethink Robotics, iRobot and his current endeavor, Robust.ai. Brooks also ran the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) for a decade starting in 1997. In fact, he likes to make predictions about the future of AI and keeps a scorecard on his blog of how well he's doing. He knows what he's talking about, and he thinks maybe it's time to put the brakes on the screaming hype that is generative AI. Brooks thinks it's impressive technology, but maybe not quite as capable as many are suggesting. "I'm not saying LLMs are not important, but we have to be careful [with] how we evaluate them," he told TechCrunch.

He says the trouble with generative AI is that, while it's perfectly capable of performing a certain set of tasks, it can't do everything a human can, and humans tend to overestimate its capabilities. "When a human sees an AI system perform a task, they immediately generalize it to things that are similar and make an estimate of the competence of the AI system; not just the performance on that, but the competence around that," Brooks said. "And they're usually very over-optimistic, and that's because they use a model of a person's performance on a task." He added that the problem is that generative AI is not human or even human-like, and it's flawed to try and assign human capabilities to it. He says people see it as so capable they even want to use it for applications that don't make sense.

Brooks offers his latest company, Robust.ai, a warehouse robotics system, as an example of this. Someone suggested to him recently that it would be cool and efficient to tell his warehouse robots where to go by building an LLM for his system. In his estimation, however, this is not a reasonable use case for generative AI and would actually slow things down. It's instead much simpler to connect the robots to a stream of data coming from the warehouse management software. "When you have 10,000 orders that just came in that you have to ship in two hours, you have to optimize for that. Language is not gonna help; it's just going to slow things down," he said. "We have massive data processing and massive AI optimization techniques and planning. And that's how we get the orders completed fast." "People say, 'Oh, the large language models are gonna make robots be able to do things they couldn't do.' That's not where the problem is. The problem with being able to do stuff is about control theory and all sorts of other hardcore math optimization," he said.

"It's not useful in the warehouse to tell an individual robot to go out and get one thing for one order, but it may be useful for eldercare in homes for people to be able to say things to the robots," he said.

The Rubik's Cube turns 50 this year, but it's far from retiring. At a recent San Francisco conference, math buffs and puzzle fans celebrated the enduring appeal of Erno Rubik's invention, reports The New York Times. With a mind-boggling 43 quintillion possible configurations, the Cube has inspired countless variants and found uses in education and art.

Alibaba's Qwen models dominated Hugging Face's latest LLM leaderboard, securing three top-ten spots. The new benchmark, launched Thursday, tests open-source models on tougher criteria including long-context reasoning and complex math. Meta's Llama3-70B also ranked highly, but several Chinese models outperformed Western counterparts. (Closed-source AIs like ChatGPT were excluded.) The leaderboard replaces an earlier version deemed too easy to game.

Researchers from UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, LuxiTech, and Soochow University have developed a new method to run AI language models more efficiently by eliminating matrix multiplication, potentially reducing the environmental impact and operational costs of AI systems. Ars Technica's Benj Edwards reports: Matrix multiplication (often abbreviated to "MatMul") is at the center of most neural network computational tasks today, and GPUs are particularly good at executing the math quickly because they can perform large numbers of multiplication operations in parallel. [...] In the new paper, titled "Scalable MatMul-free Language Modeling," the researchers describe creating a custom 2.7 billion parameter model without using MatMul that features similar performance to conventional large language models (LLMs). They also demonstrate running a 1.3 billion parameter model at 23.8 tokens per second on a GPU that was accelerated by a custom-programmed FPGA chip that uses about 13 watts of power (not counting the GPU's power draw). The implication is that a more efficient FPGA "paves the way for the development of more efficient and hardware-friendly architectures," they write.

The paper doesn't provide power estimates for conventional LLMs, but this post from UC Santa Cruz estimates about 700 watts for a conventional model. However, in our experience, you can run a 2.7B parameter version of Llama 2 competently on a home PC with an RTX 3060 (that uses about 200 watts peak) powered by a 500-watt power supply. So, if you could theoretically completely run an LLM in only 13 watts on an FPGA (without a GPU), that would be a 38-fold decrease in power usage. The technique has not yet been peer-reviewed, but the researchers -- Rui-Jie Zhu, Yu Zhang, Ethan Sifferman, Tyler Sheaves, Yiqiao Wang, Dustin Richmond, Peng Zhou, and Jason Eshraghian -- claim that their work challenges the prevailing paradigm that matrix multiplication operations are indispensable for building high-performing language models. They argue that their approach could make large language models more accessible, efficient, and sustainable, particularly for deployment on resource-constrained hardware like smartphones. [...]

The researchers say that scaling laws observed in their experiments suggest that the MatMul-free LM may also outperform traditional LLMs at very large scales. The researchers project that their approach could theoretically intersect with and surpass the performance of standard LLMs at scales around 10^23 FLOPS, which is roughly equivalent to the training compute required for models like Meta's Llama-3 8B or Llama-2 70B. However, the authors note that their work has limitations. The MatMul-free LM has not been tested on extremely large-scale models (e.g., 100 billion-plus parameters) due to computational constraints. They call for institutions with larger resources to invest in scaling up and further developing this lightweight approach to language modeling.

In 2022, Red Hat announced plans to extend RHEL to the automotive industry through Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System (providing automakers with an open and functionally-safe platform). And this week Red Hat announced it achieved ISO 26262 ASIL-B certification from exida for the Linux math library (libm.so glibc) — a fundamental component of that Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System.

From Red Hat's announcement: This milestone underscores Red Hat's pioneering role in obtaining continuous and comprehensive Safety Element out of Context certification for Linux in automotive... This certification demonstrates that the engineering of the math library components individually and as a whole meet or exceed stringent functional safety standards, ensuring substantial reliability and performance for the automotive industry. The certification of the math library is a significant milestone that strengthens the confidence in Linux as a viable platform of choice for safety related automotive applications of the future...

By working with the broader open source community, Red Hat can make use of the rigorous testing and analysis performed by Linux maintainers, collaborating across upstream communities to deliver open standards-based solutions. This approach enhances long-term maintainability and limits vendor lock-in, providing greater transparency and performance. Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System is poised to offer a safety certified Linux-based operating system capable of concurrently supporting multiple safety and non-safety related applications in a single instance. These applications include advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), digital cockpit, infotainment, body control, telematics, artificial intelligence (AI) models and more. Red Hat is also working with key industry leaders to deliver pre-tested, pre-integrated software solutions, accelerating the route to market for SDV concepts.
"Red Hat is fully committed to attaining continuous and comprehensive safety certification of Linux natively for automotive applications," according to the announcement, "and has the industry's largest pool of Linux maintainers and contributors committed to this initiative..."

Or, as Network World puts it, "The phrase 'open source for the open road' is now being used to describe the inevitable fit between the character of Linux and the need for highly customizable code in all sorts of automotive equipment."