Week5 - AlphaGo Lee Sedol

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — In Game Two, the Google machine made a move that no human ever would. And it was beautiful. As the world looked on, the move so perfectly demonstrated the enormously powerful and rather mysterious talents of modern artificial intelligence.

But in Game Four, the human made a move that no machine would ever expect. And it was beautiful too. Indeed, it was just as beautiful as the move from the Google machine—no less and no more. It showed that although machines are now capable of moments of genius, humans have hardly lost the ability to generate their own transcendent moments. And it seems that in the years to come, as we humans work with these machines, our genius will only grow in tandem with our creations.

This week saw the end of the historic match between Lee Sedol, one of the world’s best Go players, and AlphaGo, an artificially intelligent system designed by a team of researchers at DeepMind, a London AI lab now owned by Google. The machine claimed victory in the best-of-five series, winning four games and losing only one. It markedthe first time a machine had beaten the very best at this ancient and enormously complex game—a feat that, until recently, experts didn’t expect would happen for another ten years.

The victory is notable because the technologies at the heart of AlphaGo are the future. They’re already changing Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Twitter, and they’re poised to reinvent everything from robotics to scientific research. This is scary for some. The worry is that artificially intelligent machines will take our jobs and maybe even break free from our control—and on some level, those worries are healthy. We won’t be caught by surprise.

But there’s another way to think about all this—a way that gets us beyond the trope of human versus machine, guided by the lessons of those two glorious moves.

Move 37

With the 37th move in the match’s second game, AlphaGo landed a surprise on the right-hand side of the 19-by-19 board that flummoxed even the world’s best Go players, including Lee Sedol. “That’s a very strange move,” said one commentator, himself a nine dan Go player, the highest rank there is. “I thought it was a mistake,” said the other. Lee Sedol, after leaving the match room, took nearly fifteen minutes to formulate a response. Fan Gui—the three-time European Go champion who played AlphaGo during a closed-door match in October,losing five games to none—reacted with incredulity. But then, drawing on his experience with AlphaGo—he has played the machine time and again in the five months since October—Fan Hui saw the beauty in this rather unusual move.

Resources:
http://www.wired.com/2016/03/two-moves-alphago-lee-sedol-redefined-future/

Structure of the lead:
What: AlphaGo and Lee Sedol's go match
Where: Seoul, South Korea
When: March 2016
Who: Lee Sedol AlphaGo
Why: Go match
How: not mentioned

Key words:
Go player 棋手

Week 4 書商失蹤

The Causeway Bay bookseller whose disappearance last year set off a storm over Hong Kong’s autonomy said yesterday he was putting the past behind him, quitting the business, and making a fresh start after returning home on Thursday.

Then, without answering lingering questions about the circumstances under which he vanished, Lee Po returned to the mainland, accompanied by an unidentified man in a vehicle with cross-border licence plates.

Mobbed by the media outside his North Point home yesterday morning, Lee pleaded for space.

“I have already said what I wanted to say. Today I just want to tell everyone that I hope you can leave me and my family alone. Don’t push me that much,” he said, smiling the whole time.

Missing Hong Kong bookseller Lee Po returns home from mainland China after disappearing last December

“I want to forget the past and start afresh. I am starting another page in my life.”

He said he was allowed to travel freely between Hong Kong and the mainland, and was crossing the border again for tomb sweeping with his wife, Sophie Choi Ka-ping, in the next few days.

“I did not dare to go to the mainland for a while previously. I heard that people had got into trouble for their [banned books] business. I was afraid. But after I went and solved all the problems this time, I can finally feel at ease now,” he said.

He left the scene with a man in sunglasses who refused to identify himself. Their car was seen crossing the border via the Lok Ma Chau control point.

Lee and four associates linked to the Mighty Current publishing house and Causeway Bay Books store who went missing last year surfaced on the mainland, all claiming they had gone there voluntarily to help with an investigation into the sale of banned books. All of them dismissed concerns that they might have been kidnapped by mainland agents operating outside their jurisdiction.

Chinese journalist who disappeared on way to Hong Kong ‘taken away by police at Beijing airport’: lawyer

Human rights activist Richard Tsoi Yiu-cheong found it difficult to believe that Lee was not reading a script prepared by Beijing. “I also doubt if he can move freely between Hong Kong and the mainland,” Tsoi said.

Lee’s publishing colleague, Gui Minhai, is accused of ordering his associates to deliver about 4,000 banned books across the border since October 2014. They specialised in books criticising China’s leaders and speculating on their private lives.

The Immigration Department was said to have no grounds to stop Lee from leaving the city again, as it had no evidence of any immigration offence, even though he left last year without necessary travel documents or going through proper channels.

In an interview with Beijing-friendly media on Thursday, Lee said he would never run a bookstore business again. He asked police to drop their investigation into his missing-person case.

Additional reporting by Oliver Chou

Resources:

http://m.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-crime/article/1930513/ill-never-publish-banned-books-again-hong-kong-bookseller

Structure of the lead:

What: The Causeway Bay Bookseller (Lee Po) said that he didnt want to sell books anymore.

When: March 25th 2016

Where: Hong Kong and China mainland

Why: Mr. Lee sold banned books in HK

Who:Lee Po

How:Mr. Lee was taken away by an unidentified men in black

Key words:

escorted 護送

lingering 拖延的

autonomy 自治權

week 1- 福斯排氣造假醜聞

In the ongoing diesel emissions fiasco, developments have been coming somewhat slowly, leaving plenty of room for rhetoric while we wait for a resolution. Volkswagen faces serious fines for the cheat, as the investigation continues in hopes of pinning down responsibility. In the meantime, the US Justice Department is suing the German automaker for up to $46 billion (a staggering number for nearly any human to comprehend, admittedly, and one that appears to have the automaker shaken) for violating US law by intentionally selling vehicles with emissions "cheat device" software. As the situation drags on, the rhetoric is becoming more and more pointed.

Now, a warning comes out of Germany directed at the US. In front of 20,000 workers atVolkswagen's Wolfsburg headquarters, works council chairman Bernd Osterloh said, "Should the future viability of Volkswagen be endangered by an unprecedented financial penalty, this will have dramatic social consequences, not only in our US plants, but also in Europe and elsewhere." Osterloh, who sits on a VW advisory board, added, "We very much hope that the US authorities also have an eye for this social and employment-political dimension."

The US jobs he refers to include the some 2,200 workers at Volkswagen's plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. That facility produces the Passat, and is slated to build a large SUV to be revealed later this year.

Depending on how long this situation drags on, it will likely become increasingly political. We can probably expect more strong language, and more veiled and overt threats from all parties as they try to make their case, garner support and sympathy for their side and portray one another as villains. Still, there are cooler heads in the fray who aren't resorting to scare tactics.

Lower Saxony Prime Minister Stephan Weil, who sits on the same VW supervisory board as Osterloh, says, "The damage will, on balance, not be minor, that much can already be said today, but Volkswagen luckily has a strong economic base." Weil says the German state, which owns a 20-percent stake in VW, has every expectation to continue its financial commitment to the manufacturer.

In such a high-profile and wide-reaching scandal, we shouldn't be surprised by scare tactics, as unpleasant as they are. Let's just hope that cooler heads prevail, and that there can be a fair resolution before things get even more emotional.

Resources:

http://www.autoblog.com/2016/03/12/vw-jobs-us-diesel-scandal/

Structure of the lead:

What: Volkswagen faked the emission

Where: in the US and Germany

When: not given

Who: Volkswagen, the us justice department

Why: Volkswagen faked the emission 

How: install a cheat software in the vehicles

Key words:

emission 排放

supervisory 監督 管理的

Week3 牛津字典年度字

It's a historic moment of recognition for little images that have been gaining popularity since 1999

Oxford Dictionaries made history on Monday by announcing that their “Word of the Year” would not be one of those old-fashioned, string-of-letters-type words at all. The flag their editors are planting to sum up who we were in 2015 is this pictograph, an acknowledgement of just how popular these pictures have become in our (digital) daily lives:

“Although emoji have been a staple of texting teens for some time, emoji culture exploded into the global mainstream over the past year,” the company’s team wrote in a press release. “Emoji have come to embody a core aspect of living in a digital world that is visually driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate.”

Oxford University Press—which publishes both the august Oxford English Dictionary and the lower-brow, more-modern Oxford Dictionaries Online—partnered with keyboard-app company SwiftKey to determine which emoji was getting the most play this past year. According to their data, the “Face With Tears of Joy” emoji, also known as LOL Emoji or Laughing Emoji, comprised nearly 20% of all emoji use in the U.S. and the U.K., where Oxford is based. The runner-up in the U.S., with 9% of usage, was this number:

Caspar Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Dictionaries, explained that their choice reflects the walls-down world that we live in. “Emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders,” he said in a statement. And their choice for the word of the year, he added, embodies the “playfulness and intimacy” that characterizes emoji-using culture.

Though this marks a historic moment of recognition for the pictures plastered throughout tweets and texts, Oxford has not added or defined any emoji in their actual databases. Nor, says a spokesperson for the publisher, do they have plans to do so at this point. The word emoji, however, has been in both the OED and Oxford Dictionaries Online since 2013.

Japanese telecommunications planner Shigetaka Kurita is credited with inventing these little images in 1999, taking the emoticons that had been gaining steam on the Internet to an iconic level. Inspired by comics and street signs, the name for the alphanumeric images comes from combining the Japanese words for picture (e-) and character (moji). “It’s easy to write them off as just silly little smiley faces or thumbs-up,” sociolinguist Ben Zimmer told TIME for a story on how emoji fit into humans’ long history of using pictures to communicate. “But there’s an awful lot of people who are very interested in treating them seriously.”

Resources: http://time.com/4114886/oxford-word-of-the-year-2015-emoji/

Structure of the lead:

What: word of the year of 2015 is a emoji

Where: England

Why: not given

When: December 2015

Who: Oxford dictionary

How: not given

Key words:

emoji 表情符號

Week2 深圳土石流

Authorities in China have arrested 11 people in connection with a landslide of construction waste that killed 12 people and left 62 others missing and presumed dead.

Prosecutors in the southern city of Shenzhen said in a statement on Thursday that a dispatcher and supervisor of the landfill, and the chief and deputy manager of a company in charge of the landfill were arrested, along with seven others.

On 20 December, a mountain of construction waste that was piled up against a hill collapsed during heavy rain on to an industrial park. Prosecutors said the 11 people were charged with negligently causing a serious accident.

An official in Shenzhen jumped to his death about a week after the disaster. It was not clear if the man, identified only by his surname, Xu, was under investigation over the landslide. As head of the district urban management bureau, his responsibilities typically would include regulating businesses and construction sites.

Officials have called the landslide a man-made disaster, raising the possibility of harsh penalties for those held responsible.

Despite the threat of prison time over major industrial accidents, a lack of regulatory oversight and management cost-cutting often lead to deadly disasters in China.

Resources:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/01/shenzhen-landslide-11-arrested-in-china-over-man-made-disaster

Key words:
negligently 粗心大意地
collapsed 坍塌

Structure of the lead:
What: construction waste mountain collapsed
Where: Shenzen
Why: not given
When: December 20th 2015
Who:not given
How:not given

Week6 - 歐洲難民潮 hungarian reporter

A Hungarian camerawomen was fired Tuesday for deliberately tripping a Syrian refugee, the local news channel N1TV, where she worked, said in a statement.

Petra Lazlo, who is a member of the anti-immigration group and a worker for N1TV station, was caught on camera sticking her leg out as a father carrying his son runs past, causing them both to fall down on the ground at the Roszke immigrant camp on the Hungary-Serbia border during a police crackdown on immigrants.

She was also caught on camera kicking refugees fleeing the camp, including a young girl.

“The N1TV colleagues today behaved unacceptably in Roszke collection point. Our working relationship with the camerawoman has ended. The case was considered closed our part,” The Telegraph newspaper quoted the news station as saying in a statement.

Lazlo’s video was widely shared on social media after it was posted by German reporter Stephan Richter on Twitter.

The migrants were part of a group of 1,500 people who had been waiting for hours at a refugee collection point near the Roszke crossing.

Resources:
http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2015/09/09/Hungarian-reporter-fired-after-deliberately-tripping-Syrian-refugees-.html

Key words:
Flee 逃走
Delibrately 故意地、蓄意地

Structure of the lead:
What: a hungarian reporter tripped a refugee delibrately and got fired afterwards
Where: Roszke immigrant camp on the Hungary-Serbia border
Who: the Hungarian reporter
When: September 2015
Why: not given
How: not given

Week5 - 1111光棍節

Gross merchandise volume for Alibaba Group’s 11.11 global shopping festival reached $14.3 billion this year or 60 percent higher than last year’s sales of $9.3 billion.

In the first 90 minutes alone of the 24-hour online shopping marathon, the Chinese e-commerce giant said $5 billion of GMV was already settled through Alipay, 70 percent of which were on mobile.

Within 14 hours, GMV exceeded $10 billion, with mobile GMV reaching approximately $7.1 billion. 

Total mobile GMV settled through Alipay was approximately $9.8 billion, exceeding total GMV in 2014, and accounted for 68.7 percent of total GMV. Total mobile GMV increased by 158 percent compared to 2014.

Total number of mobile buyers on Tmall.com and Taobao Marketplace was 95 million.

Alipay processed a total of 710 million payment transactions, and processed 85,900 transactions per second at peak. Meanwhile, AliCloud processed a total of 140,000 transactions per second at peak.

Daniel Zhang, chief executive officer of Alibaba Group, said the day demonstrates the power of domestic China consumption, and the Chinese consumer's strong demand for international products.

"It also showcases how Alibaba uses big data, cloud computing and mobile innovations to create the best shopping experience for buyers and sellers,” he said.

Research firm IDC said in its analysis of the online shopping frenzy introduced by Tmall in 2011 that Alibaba has reaped impressive sales year after year: $3 billion in 2012, $5.6 billion in 2013 and $9.1 billion in 2014. 

“The magical 11.11 season has become a symbolic carnival for online shopping in China,” it said.

Resouses:
http://enterpriseinnovation.net/article/alibabas-shopping-festival-nets-14-3-b-sales-527978466

Key words:
Gross merchandise volume (GMV)
商品交易總額
showcases 展現
IDC 國際數據資訊
Frenzy (暫時的)瘋狂

Structure of the lead:
What: the GMV for Alibaba group's 11.11 global shopping festival reached $14.3 billion
Where:  not given
When: 11.11
Who: Alibaba, Chinese buyers
Why: not given
How: not given