Free Republic

By Jeffrey Dastin and Paresh Dave (Reuters) -Google research manager Samy Bengio on Tuesday said he is resigning, according to an internal email seen by Reuters, in a blow to the Alphabet Inc unit after the firings of his colleagues who questioned paper review and diversity practices. Though at least two Google engineers had earlier resigned in protest of the dismissal of artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Timnit Gebru, Bengio is the highest-profile yet to depart. Google and Bengio did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Bloomberg earlier reported the news. A distinguished scientist at Google, Bengio spent about 14...

Benjamin Cruz, a former instructional designer in Google’s Cloud division, was caught off guard when a colleague told them that their skin was much darker than she expected. Cruz, who is Mexican American prefers to be identified by the pronouns they/them, reported the incident to human resources in 2019 where personnel told them they should “assume good intent.” Cruz’s experience with Google’s internal human resources personnel echoes that of several former and current Google employees, including two prominent Black women, Timnit Gebru and April Curley, who were pushed out of Google at the end of last year. Both women were...

The technical co-lead of Google’s Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team claims managers were upset about an email she’d sent to colleagues. The email, which was sent to the Brain Women and Allies listserv, voiced frustration that managers were trying to get Gebru to retract a research paper. The full text was first published in Platformer. “A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar,” it reads. “Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you ‘it has been decided’ that you need to retract this paper by next week... You...

Google has fired a second member of its 'ethical AI' team after an investigation into why she allegedly downloaded thousands of internal documents and shared them with people outside of the company. AI researcher Margaret Mitchell announced the news on her Twitter on Friday, simply writing: 'I'm fired.' Google had been investigating Mitchell after she reportedly used automated scripts to look through her messages to find examples showing discriminatory treatment of Timnit Gebru - another former employee in the AI team, who was fired last year, Axios reported.

After all the honors for the US Capitol Police offcer Brian Sicknick, who died in the aftermath of the incident at the US Capitol on January 6th, dishonors on the way for many other US Capitol police officers... A cop here in Pennsylvania busted in connection with The Capitol Incident... Pfizer and BioNTech say their coronavirus vaccine can be stored at higher temperatures for two weeks. They want FDA approval... One of the latest incidents in the continuing coronavirus crackdown in Israel a police raid on a wedding attended by 100 people... ' The Biden Administration accepting European Mediation for...

Gone With the Wind is no longer gone from HBO Max, having been restored to the streaming service’s library with a new prologue about the film’s problematic themes and depictionof the antebellum South. Jacqueline Stewart, host of TCM’s “Silent Sunday Nights” and a professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, leads the four-and-a-half minute intro, which starts off with a general cinematic lesson — recounting the eight Academy Awards (including for Best Picture) won in 1939 by the “highly anticipated” adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, as well as its inflation-adjusted standing as the...

Not what it appears to be: the Archaic Mark LONDON. A clever bit of detective work by US scholars and scientists has proven that one of the jewels of the University of Chicago’s manuscript collection is, in fact, a skilled late 19th- or early 20th-century forgery. Although speculation as to the authenticity of the Archaic Mark codex has been rife for more than 60 years, prior to this definitive research many believed it was an early record (possibly as early as the 14th century) of the Gospel of Mark and the closest of any extant manuscript to the world’s oldest...

“There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.”

"There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind."

“News that Ann Rutherford, who played Scarlett O’Hara’s little sister, died Monday brought tears to the eyes of Connie Sutherland, director of Marietta Gone with the Wind Museum”—June 13, 2012 the Marietta Daily Journal, Marietta, Georgia.

Gone with the Wind premiered during the Christmas Season of 1939.

Confined to her bed in Atlanta by a broken ankle and arthritis, she was given a stack of blank paper by her husband, who said, "Write a book." Did she ever. The novel's first title became its last words, "Tomorrow is another day," and at first she named the protagonist Pansy. But Pansy became Scarlett, and the title of the book published 70 years ago this week became "Gone With the Wind." You might think that John Steinbeck, not Margaret Mitchell, was the emblematic novelist of the 1930s, and that the publishing event in American fiction in that difficult decade...