Volume 93
the Prairie
Issue XVIII
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Middle East protests Recruiting for leadership Several countries demanding changes Professor discusses community MARIA MOLINA
MELISSA BAUER-HERZOG Staff Writer
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s Egypt prepares to rebuild its country, multiple protests are breaking out in the Middle East as more citizens decide to take a stand against their governments. Citizens of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Iran and Libya have all demanded change, drawing the rest of the world’s attention to the Middle East and worrying other governments about the threat of revolt. The biggest protest to hit the news since Egypt removed President Mubarak, has been Libya, where all non-essential Americans were asked to leave the country by the United States Government, on Feb. 23, because of the violence happening in the country. Libyan President, Moammar Gadda�i urged his followers to �ight the uprising, vowing a �ight to the death against protesters on Feb. 22. Other countries have condemned Gadda�i’s actions and President Barack Obama addressed the issue at a White House press conference on Feb. 23 where he said the
Editor
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n Feb. 22, Dr. Deborah LeBlanc, professor in the school of business and management at the National University in San Diego, California, gave a lecture to WTAMU students, faculty and members of the community, as Courtesy of ibtimes.com part of the Distinguished Lecture A child protests for freedom in Libya. Series. violence and bloodshed is unacceptable. LeBlanc is recognized The unrest in the Middle East by multiple for her collaboration with countries, especially Libya, has worried some government agencies, non-profit people because the actions taken by these organizations and private firms countries could lead to unrest in other parts of around the world on policies the world. that impact citizens and the “There are likely to be more mass protests communities they live in. She is in Middle Eastern countries,” Dr. Dave Rausch also known for her work with said. “I’m a bit surprised that we have not women and students of a variety heard much from Syria. I’m also surprised of racial backgrounds. The topic by protests in reasonably calm countries like of her lecture was recruiting Bahrain.” women and racial minorities into Middle East continued on the public and non-profit sectors; p. 2 however, she focused her speech
on leadership principles and how to infuse these principles into community service. Dr. LeBlanc started her lecture by analyzing how people tend to focus too much on what the community is doing wrong rather than talking about what is working and why. “We need to find ways to search for common ground,” she said. “[We need to] find ideas we can agree.”
MARIA MOLINA Students and community members listen to a special lecture by Dr. LeBlanc.
Dr. LeBlanc continued on p. 2
‘ Watson’ defeats human opponents GEORGIA ROMIG Web Editor
“I
for one, welcome our new computer overlords,” Ken Jennings wrote in the parenthesis as he submitted in his last answer for the first man vs. machine game of Jeopardy!. He and fellow former champion, Brad Rutter, were outmatched by the five year old who had the fastest buzzer hand in the world (despite not actually having hands), and a vast amount of answers wired into his brain. His “parents”, IBM, named him Watson after the company’s first
president and began testing in 2006. He follows in the footsteps of previous IBM projects, such as Deep Blue, a chess playing computer developed in 1997. Dr. Chris Furner, assistant professor of computer information systems at WTAMU, points out that Watson is part of a long computing legacy. Neural networks like Watson’s have been in use for 25 years. But Watson can do much more than win game shows. “It has leaning algorhytms that are able to make inferences,” Dr. Jeffry Babb, assistant professor of computer information systems at WTAMU, said. “If we can express it algorhymically, it [Watson] will do it [compute] faster and more error-free,” As reported by Ian Paul in PC
World on Feb. 17, Watson represents “[a] significant leap [in] a machine’s ability to understand context in human language”. Yet that understanding had to be built on a gigantic base. Watson has around 16 terabytes of memory (4 terabytes of it being used to store content), 2,800 processor cores and 6 million logic rules for determining answers. He’s physically big too, taking up 10 server racks, 10 IBM Power 750 servers and two large refrigeration units. All of this was housed in its own room on IBM’s Yorktown Heights. Yes, like many college students, Watson lives on campus. And like many college students, Watson has a long way to go. There are still a lot of bugs to work
out. “When it got it wrong, it got it wrong pretty substantially,” Furner said. For example, Watson was convinced Toronto was a city -- in the United States. In other words, he still lacks the ability to inference all of the information crammed into his game show contestant crushing brain. “They don’t do abstract thinking like we do,” Babb said. “It [ the human brain ] is able to adapt.” Watson cannot adapt.
IBM continued on p. 6