14 Years of C

Buy Clotilde’s latest book, The French Market Cookbook!

Hey, you know what I did fourteen years ago, like, to the day? I went ahead and created a blog! About food! And I called it, wait for it, Chocolate

After almost a half-century hiatus, lunar missions are once again becoming the next big thing in space science and exploration

— Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/shooting-for-the-moon-this-time-to-stay/

This paper proposes to tackle open-domain question answering using Wikipedia
as the unique knowledge source: the answer to any factoid question is a text
span in a Wikipedia article. This task of machine reading at scale combines the
challenges of document retrieval – finding the relevant articles – with that of
machine comprehension of text – identifying the answer spans from those
articles. Our approach combines a search component based on bigram hashing and
TF-IDF matching with a multi-layer recurrent neural network model trained to
detect answers in Wikipedia paragraphs. Our experiments on multiple existing QA
datasets indicate that (1) both modules are highly competitive with respect to
existing counterparts and (2) multitask learning using distant supervision on
their combination is an effective complete system on this challenging task.

Source: http://arxiv.org/abs/1704.00051v1

Yesterday U.S. Vice President Mike Pence delivered a lengthy address (full text) to Israel’s Knesset (Parliament).  His remarks included numerous religious references and references to Jewish history.  He said in part:In the story of the Jews, we’ve always seen the story of America. It is the story of an exodus, a journey from persecution to freedom, a story that shows the power of faith and the promise of hope.My country’s very first settlers also saw themselves as pilgrims, sent by Providence, to build a new Promised Land. The songs and stories of the people of Israel were their anthems, and they faithfully taught them to their children, and do to this day. And our founders, as others have said, turned to the wisdom of the Hebrew Bible for direction, guidance, and inspiration….The Jewish people’s unbreakable bond to this sacred city reaches back more than 3,000 years. It was here, in Jerusalem, on Mount Moriah, that Abraham offered his son, Isaac, and was credited with righteousness for his faith in God.It was here, in Jerusalem, that King David consecrated the capital of the Kingdom of Israel. And since its rebirth, the modern State of Israel has called this city the seat of its government.

Source: http://religionclause.blogspot.com/2018/01/pence-speaks-to-israels-knesset.html

In Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc. v. Mack, (SD TX, Jan. 19, 2018), a Texas federal district court refused to dismiss a an Establishment Clause challenge to the practice by a Texas Justice of the Peace of opening each court session with a lengthy Christian prayer by a guest chaplain from his chaplaincy program. The court concluded that two of the three plaintiffs had standing, and that they had stated a plausible claim that the judge’s prayer practice violates the Lemon test.  the judge had campaigned on a platform of reinstituting religious values within the office.  Both Freedom From Religion Foundation and First Liberty issued press releases announcing the decision. First Liberty also has links to some of the pleadings in the case.  (See prior related posting.)

Source: http://religionclause.blogspot.com/2018/01/suit-over-opening-prayers-in-courtroom.html

Recent Articles of Interest

From SSRN:John M. Bickers, False Facts and Holy War: How the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause Cases Fuel Religious Conflict, (January 10, 2018).Mark Movsesian, Markets and Morals: The Limits of Doux Commerce, (William and Mary Business Law Review (Forthcoming)).Harold Berman