The US government wants more people to breastfeed. Really!

Who calls women "people"! This is so demeaning and disparaging by lefty media outlets! 

President Trump probably would never say anything like "people" breastfeed!

Who helped spreading this nonsense: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: Global Health NOW

The government wants more people to breastfeed. Experts say paid parental leave could help. - The 19th

Women’s sports market growth: A $2.5 billion opportunity | McKinsey. Really!

What kind of a fantasy/hype is McKinsey trying to sell!

When you Google search "what is the viewership difference between female and male sports statistics". Then Google will also provide you a hyped outlook according to political correctness of gender equality!

According to Google search: "Media Coverage Disparity [???]:

Despite the rise in viewership, men's sports still receive substantially more media coverage, with women's sports only receiving about 16% of total sports coverage."

Women’s sports market growth: A $2.5 billion opportunity | McKinsey "US women’s sports have passed an inflection point and are poised for future growth, but stakeholders will need to overcome multiple challenges to deliver their full economic potential."

Does Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum have to return old specimen to Native Americans?

These specimen were collected a very long time ago as I suspect!

The ideology of racism at work! When political correctness goes to far!

What about the grandfather rule?

"... The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the oldest private medical society in the U.S. and the group that oversees the Museum, released an official human remains policy earlier this month. The policy, the product of a two-year-long “Postmortem Project” to review the collection and speak with communities implicated within it, outlines ethical guidelines for the museum going forward. Key points include that the museum will aim to add context and biographical details to more of its specimens and that further human remains will only be accepted if donated by a living person or offered by their descendants.

The museum will also work to reverse the lasting effects of medical racism [???] by returning specimens to communities that may not have given their consent in the medical process or acquisition of remains. This includes Native American communities, to whom roughly 50 museum specimens are connected and may be returned in accordance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. ..."

From the Human Remains Policy:

"... 1.5 Indigenous Americans

1.5A Repatriation of materials associated with Indigenous Americans will be conducted in accordance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), Pub. L. 101-601, 25 U.S.C. § 3001 et seq., 104 Stat. 3048 (1990). ..."

ScienceAdviser

Mütter Matters (College of Physicians of Philadelphia news release)

The pope gets his first electric popemobile from Mercedes-Benz. Really!

I don't like this pope! He is dismal! His legacy, if there ever was one, is more in tatters!

He is too politically correct and demagogic! Or is this old man woke!

What a luxury!!! What a commercial advertisement for Mercedes Benz!

What a sinner! Modesty is not a word in his vocabulary!

He should take an example from Pope Benedict XVI (the German pope, his predecessor, who succeeded the great Pope John Paul II, the Polish pope). He resigned, because of age and frailty.

The pope gets his first electric popemobile from Mercedes-Benz | TechCrunch "Mercedes-Benz has delivered the first all-electric popemobile to the Vatican: a modified version of the German automaker’s G-Class SUV."

Wikipedia and political correctness and wokeism

It is truly disturbing!

Here is the evidence! When you search for the historically important term "idiot savant" you are directed only to this entry about the Savant syndrome (see screen print below)

But then in the "History" section of the Savant syndrome entry you learn "History The term idiot savant (French for "learned idiot") was first used to describe the condition in 1887[24] by John Langdon Down, who is known for his description of Down syndrome."

Mpox and monkey pox or NIPS and NeurIPS

Just two examples! When ideological language hygienists are at work or political correctness has become absurd! 

These two examples are also reflecting how moronic intellectuals and the elite can be!

I blogged here about NIPS and NeurIPS before

Who is Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the new head of the WTO?

I have serious doubts that this lady with her beautiful hats will accomplish much! To me it seems she was primarily chosen, because the candidate is a female, her skin color, from Africa, well connected, but not because of her qualifications for this job!

Who Is This President Of the United Nations?

Posted: 7/10/2019

Just saw this interview with Maria Fernanda Espinoza on Fox New regarding the  incident of Iranian forces trying to seize a British ship. To be clear, we have gathering storm between Iran and the rest of the world. How is it possible that such an incompetent person became the president of the UN? Is this what is called a PC candidate or is she a terrible compromise? 

You look at her Wikipedia page and you look again. No accomplishments! Nothing! Nada!

This UN president comes across as quite inept and irrelevant!

Is it time to dissolve the United Nations for reasons of partisanship and irrelevance? Do we still need the UN?

Sources (S):

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0XmhbWgl8s
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar%C3%ADa_Fernanda_Espinosa

Why Do U.S. Movies Suck In Recent Years?

Posted: 6/14/2019

For the past 20 or more years, Hollywood has aimed its big budget movies at a global audience, because of tremendous revenue growth and opportunities overseas. As a result, a lot of movies have become an awful compromise to please as many people as possible. Add to that the obsession with political correctness and progressive leanings and you have a recipe for disaster!

Just read The Connection Between Hollywood and China. Here we learn (emphasis added):

1. “The majority of Americans probably have no idea when they buy a ticket to the latest blockbuster that the film they’re about to see was either partially financed by China or altered because of it.”
2. “In the last several years, there hasn’t been a more powerful influence over Hollywood than the communist regime—and with Chinese ticket sales set to overtake the U.S., the situation is only going to get worse.”
3. “”And they’re [Hollywood movie makers] quite open about it. They don’t hide it. They’re quite happy to submit to the censorship of the Chinese Communist Party.””

As for me, I have not watched any new U.S. movie in almost a decade or so. I want to remember the great American movie tradition as it was up until Hollywood went global!

When NIPS Became NeurIPS

Posted: 12/4/2018  Updated: 11/24/2020, 12/18/2019

Update Of 11/24/2020

To my horror, I had to discover today for the first time that an older paper from 2001 now has two official URLs because of this ridiculous name change:

1. https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2089-convolution-kernels-for-natural-language
2. http://papers.neurips.cc/paper/2089-convolution-kernels-for-natural-language

Will this nonsense now be applied retroactively to all older papers?

Update Of 12/18/2019

As someone who has never attended any of the NIPS conferences, I was stunned a few days ago when I read in MIT Technology Review. The Download. Your daily dose of what’s up in emerging technology (12/13/2019) following:

“Only two years ago, so I’m told, one of the hottest AI research conferences of the year [NIPS] was more giant party than academic exchange. In a fight for the best talent, companies handed out endless free swag and threw massive, blowout events, including one featuring Flo Rida, hosted by Intel. The attendees—mostly men in their early 20s and 30s—flushed with huge salaries and the giddiness of being highly coveted, drank free booze and bumped the night away. ... Internally, reports of sexual harrassment, anti-Semitism, racism, and ageism, were also driving conference-goers to question whether they should continue to attend.

So when I arrived in 2018, a diversity and inclusion committee had been appointed, and the long-standing abbreviation NIPS was swapped for another one”

Why did the responsible people in charge not simply prohibit or constrain these free booze parties etc. to start with?

NIPS Not Nipples

NIPS (as it was formerly known; Neural Information Systems Processing) has been for decades one of the global, premier conferences on artificial intelligence & machine learning was recently renamed to NeurIPS. The 32nd, first renamed, annual Conference of 2018 (12/2 through 12/8) is ongoing as I write this blog post.

Here are the official reasons for the name change (emphasis added):

1. “The current acronym NIPS has unintended connotations that some members of the community find offensive” (Source 1)
2. “In April, over 120 academics from John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, signed a letter calling on NIPS to be rebranded following reports of inappropriate behaviour. The letter stated that the "acronym of the conference is prone to unwelcome puns."” (Source 2)

Confusing, the official news release (Source 1) contains a table with polling results (“Do you think we should change the name of the NIPS conference?”), which indicates that a large majority of participants actually disagreed with changing the name (1,218 con answers, 674 pro answers). An astonishing 378 answered they were neutral about the name change (people without a spine?).  

I believe, this renaming is highly immature, childish, and infantile. Does not reflect well on the people responsible for it. Mature people would have disciplined the offenders!

Political Correctness And Its Enablers

Some of the gurus of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, e.g. Yann LeCun & Yoshua Bengio (on the Advisory Board of NIPS in 2018), are hard leftists and feminists (blogged about them here & here). My suspicion is that these and other influential, likeminded gentlemen do not have the spine to admonish anyone in person who makes inappropriate remarks. Thus, these gentlemen prefer to rename the show.

Hope Springs Eternal

One can only hope that some more enlightened people at NIPS will reverse the dim witted decision to rename this conference!

Sources:

1. NIPS Name Change
2. 'NIPS' AI Conference Changes Name, Kind Of

A Picture Of Boothe Wilkes In The American Heritage Dictionary

My Favorite Dictionary

When I bought my first paperback American Heritage Dictionary decades ago in my hometown Frankfurt Am Main in a small book shop specialized in American books near the Amerika Haus, I loved the many images it contained. It was almost like a picture dictionary. I spent many hours looking up words and marveling about their meaning etc.

The Value Of Pictures Of Criminals In English Dictionaries

However, I always wondered why the publisher saw it so important to have a photography of the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln in this dictionary. It still irks me. Was that a case of moral relativism or early political correctness?