Showing posts with label Video. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Video. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 12, 2025

Bihar’s Record-Breaking Turnout -- A Democracy Energized or Engineered?


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By Ravish Kumar

What has unfolded in Bihar this election season is unprecedented. Voters have smashed every turnout record since the first general elections of 1951. But what drove this surge? Is Bihar yearning for a transformative change? Or is the electorate fiercely committed to preserving the status quo?

Political experts and researchers will spend years decoding what truly happened here. But one thing is undeniable: this election raises profound questions about the very foundations of Indian democracy.

The Women Who Outvoted Men — For the First Time in Absolute Numbers

Much of the discussion revolves around women voters — and rightly so. Bihar’s polling numbers are historic:

  • Phase 1:

    • Women: 69.4%

    • Men: 61.56%

  • Phase 2:

    • Women: 74.03%

    • Men: 64.1%

For the first time ever, women cast 4.34 lakh more votes than men. More than 3.5 crore women voted. This is not just a statistic — it’s a political earthquake.

Yet this rise in female turnout comes with a troubling question:
Did women vote out of conviction, or as gratitude for money transferred directly into their accounts?

40% of Bihar’s Voters Received Government Money Before Polls

Let’s look at what happened just weeks before voting:

  • Old-age, disability, and widow pensions were raised from ₹400 to ₹1100. Beneficiaries: 1 crore+

  • ₹10,000 transferred each to 1.3 crore women under business-promotion schemes

  • Payments to vikas mitras, shiksha mitras, unemployed youth, and others

Add it up — and you realize something startling:

Nearly 40% of all voters received direct cash benefits before the election.

When such a huge chunk of the electorate receives money during the campaign period, can we still call this a fair contest?

Is This Empowerment — Or Vote Engineering?

Supporters hail these transfers as welfare. Critics call them “gratitude votes.”

The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

A woman who earns ₹6,000 a month suddenly sees ₹10,000 in her account — a life-changing amount. Expecting her to not feel obliged is unrealistic.

But what does this mean for democracy?

When the state can legally transfer money to millions right before elections, how can the opposition compete? How is the idea of a “level playing field” preserved?

Exit Polls, Narratives, and the Battle for Perception

Even before polling ended, exit polls projected an NDA sweep. BJP workers began ordering celebratory laddoos. Claims flew thick and fast:

  • “Women voted overwhelmingly for Nitish Kumar.”

  • “The increased turnout is a vote for stability.”

  • “BJP will cross 160 seats.”

Tejashwi Yadav countered that the turnout represented a powerful urge for change.

Yet the truth is simple:

We have no post-poll data proving women voted overwhelmingly for one side.

What we do have is a massive cash transfer targeted at female voters — and that alone clouds every claim.

Has Bihar’s Democracy Become a Cash Economy?

The irony is bitter.

For years, unaccounted cash circulated in Indian elections — under the table, behind closed doors. That corruption hasn’t vanished. But now the state itself has become the largest distributor.

What was once illegal cash distribution has now been institutionalized.

If ₹30,000 crore can be distributed right before the polls, then issues like unemployment, migration, and poverty — Bihar’s deepest wounds — get buried under money.

Where does this path lead?

To a democracy where policy becomes indistinguishable from political bribery.

Women's Turnout Was Rising Anyway — Long Before the Cash Transfers

It is important to remember:

  • In 2010, women’s turnout: 54.5% (higher than men)

  • In 2015, women: 60.4% (men: 53.3%)

  • In 2019 LS, women: 59.5% (men: 54.9%)

  • In 2020, women: 59.7% (men: 54.6%)

Women have been politically active for a decade. Their turnout was rising regardless of cash transfers.

So why did this particular election cross 70%?

Is it only money?
Is it aspiration?
Is it anger?
Is it hope?

Nobody has a definitive answer.

The Opposition’s Failure to Counter the ‘Cash Narrative’

The opposition, too, promised money — sometimes more than the ruling alliance. But it never built a coherent narrative warning women that their votes were being purchased.

Priyanka Gandhi came close when she said:

“Take the ₹10,000 — but vote for your children’s future.”

But one speech cannot match a multi-thousand-crore machinery.

The Larger Democratic Crisis

This election signals something far bigger than Bihar:

  • Direct cash transfers right before elections are becoming normalized.

  • Election campaigns are turning into competitive giveaways.

  • The Election Commission is silent.

  • Media is complicit.

  • Oversight is nonexistent.

The line between welfare and inducement is disappearing.

If a political party can spend ₹30,000 crore before voting, how can faith in electoral fairness survive?

Bihar may have just become the test case for a new kind of democracy — one where votes are not stolen, but bought with taxpayer money.

So What Did Bihar Vote For?

Nobody can say for sure — not exit polls, not political parties, not analysts.

But one thing is certain:

When money precedes voting, democracy follows money.

Whether NDA wins or the Mahagathbandhan sweeps — the deeper question remains unanswered:

Has Bihar voted for change?
Or has Bihar been changed by money?

Only time will tell.

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Saturday, November 8, 2025

From Star Trek to Quantum Reality -- How Uncertainty Fuels Discovery


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Image generated using ChatGPT for illustration purpose


By Dr. David Awschalom

When I look out and see students in the audience, I can’t help but think back to my own student days.
And yes — I, too, was once a student.

But unlike many of you, I struggled a bit during my first semester in college. Not because of the coursework — but because I discovered something far more captivating: television.

Growing up, my parents kept a tight leash on screen time. But suddenly, I had freedom — and that’s when I stumbled upon reruns of the original Star Trek.

It was more than a show. It was a revelation.

Led by a courageous captain and a hyper-logical science officer, the Starship Enterprise wasn’t just exploring space — it was exploring possibility. Their tools — communicators, holograms, universal translators — looked like science fiction back then. Today, they’re everyday reality (well, except for teleporters… we’re working on it).

What fascinated me most wasn’t the technology. It was the mindset.
The embrace of uncertainty.

While our brains are wired to avoid the unknown — to fear ambiguity — the crew of the Enterprise ran toward it.
And somehow, that spoke to me deeply. I didn’t have the words for it back then, but I found uncertainty exciting. It represented potential.

Years later, I’d come to realize that uncertainty is not just the foundation of science — it’s the foundation of quantum physics.

1969: The Year the World Changed

The final episode of Star Trek aired in 1969 — a year that changed everything.

The Beatles gave their last concert on the rooftop of Apple Records.
The Boeing 747 took its first flight.
Hundreds of thousands gathered at Woodstock.
And Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon.

But another, quieter event that same year would reshape the world in ways no one could imagine.

A group of engineers, funded by ARPA, linked two computers — one in Los Angeles and one in Palo Alto. They typed “LO”… and the system crashed.

An hour later, they tried again.
This time, they succeeded: “LOGIN.”
The first word ever sent across what would become the internet.

That small, failed experiment changed everything.

Today, over 5 billion people are online. 25 billion devices are connected — more devices than humans on the planet. That one crash in 1969 became the first spark of a global transformation.

When Failure Leads to Revolution

The internet wasn’t the only technology dismissed early on.
When the laser was first proposed, leading scientists — even Nobel laureates — called it “impractical.”
The paper was rejected by major journals.

And yet today, lasers are everywhere: in surgery, grocery scanners, communications, and even space exploration.

Innovation thrives in uncertainty.
Failure is often the first step toward transformation.

The Quantum Leap: Exploring Inner Space

Today, we stand at another such frontier — not in outer space, but in inner space.
The world of atoms, electrons, and photons.

At the quantum scale, nature behaves in ways that defy intuition.

In our everyday digital world, information is binary — zero or one.
But in the quantum world, information exists as a superposition — an infinite combination of zero and one.

Think of it as moving from black-and-white to full color.
A world of probabilities and entanglements — where measuring one particle can instantly affect another, even miles apart.

It sounds like science fiction.
But for the first time in history, we can create, control, and engineer quantum behavior at the human scale.

From Steel to Quantum: Chicago’s Bold Bet

Here in Illinois, about 50 miles south of Chicago, scientists are building quantum computers atom by atom using focused lasers.

They’re developing single-atom memories capable of storing billions of bits of data in a space smaller than a grain of sand.
Others are using quantum particles to detect disease within living cells — enabling early diagnostics far beyond what MRI can achieve.

And across the Midwest, we’re building entangled quantum networks, laying hundreds of miles of fiber to connect quantum computers and sensors — forming the backbone of a future quantum internet.

It’s happening faster than most can keep up.
As one researcher put it, “We’re driving 100 miles an hour in the fog — and building the road as we go.”

Quantum in Everyday Life

So how will this change your life?

Imagine airports like O’Hare.
Quantum algorithms could optimize the routing of thousands of planes and gates in real time — problems too complex for classical computers.

Quantum encryption could make our financial transactions unhackable.
Quantum sensors could safeguard pilots from GPS spoofing.
From transportation to healthcare to cybersecurity — quantum technology will touch every corner of our lives.

The Race for Quantum Leadership

This is a once-in-a-generation moment for Chicago — and for the world.

The U.S. passed the National Quantum Initiative Act, launching 10 national centers — four of which are based here in Illinois.
The state is investing hundreds of millions in labs and the Illinois Quantum & Microelectronics Park, transforming the old U.S. Steel site into a hub of the future.

From steel to quantum — thinking big to think small.

But this isn’t just a competition between labs or countries.
It’s about people.

Over the next decade, we’ll need more than 800,000 quantum engineers — and 70% of these roles will be filled by those with associate or undergraduate degrees.

Our community college system is our greatest asset in building this quantum workforce.
As one executive told me, “The last thing we need is more people like you.”
(He meant professors, by the way — not that I took it personally.)

The Final Frontier

Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
Just like past revolutions — from the laser to the internet — global collaboration will be key.

We must attract brilliant minds, nurture them, and build together.

Because what’s happening now isn’t just the next step in science — it’s the beginning of a new era.

Quantum teleportation already allows us to transmit atomic information across miles — not people yet, but the principle is the same.

The world once imagined by Star Trek is no longer fiction.

And here in Chicago, we stand ready — engineers, dreamers, and explorers — to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Author’s Note:
Dr. David Awschalom is a professor of spintronics and quantum information at the University of Chicago and Director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange.

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The Week AI Changed Science Forever -- Launch of AI Researcher and AI Data Scientist


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In one breathtaking week, three announcements signaled a new era for artificial intelligence — and for humanity itself.

Microsoft unveiled Kosmos, an autonomous AI scientist that works 12-hour research shifts and actually makes real scientific discoveries.
At the same time, Microsoft’s AI chief Mustafa Suleyman revealed plans for a Humanist Super Intelligence, designed not to replace humans, but to serve them.
Google quietly dropped DS Star, an autonomous data scientist that writes, tests, and fixes its own Python code.
And from across the globe, China’s Moonshot AI launched Kimi K2 Thinking, an open source reasoning model that can plan and think across hundreds of steps.

All of this — in just a few days.
Let’s unpack what it means.

🌌 Microsoft’s Kosmos: The AI That Actually Does Science

Meet Kosmos, the project shaking up research labs everywhere.

Backed by Microsoft Research, Kosmos is the first AI scientist that conducts research from start to finish — autonomously.
You give it a dataset and a goal (say, analyzing brain scans or studying new materials), and it goes into a 12-hour deep dive.

In that time, it:

  • Reads 1,500+ research papers

  • Writes ~40,000 lines of Python code

  • Runs analyses and tests hypotheses

  • Produces a full research report with citations and executable code

No human steering it midway — just pure autonomous science.

And the results? Stunning.
Kosmos has already made new discoveries in biology, neuroscience, and clean energy:

  • It revealed how cooling protects the brain by triggering an energy-saving mode in neurons.

  • It discovered that high humidity destroys perovskite solar cells during manufacturing — later confirmed by human scientists.

  • It even found a shared wiring rule across species — from flies to humans — suggesting all brains might follow the same mathematical pattern.

That’s not all. Kosmos identified a heart-protecting protein (SOD2), a diabetes-resisting DNA variant, and mapped the exact moment neurons collapse in Alzheimer’s disease.

How Kosmos Works

Kosmos runs on a swarm of AI agents, each with a specific role — paper reading, data analysis, coding, and hypothesis testing — all linked by a shared World Model, a collective memory that tracks context and progress.

Think of it as a brain made of sub-brains, coordinating long, multi-step scientific investigations.

In independent reviews, 80% of Kosmos’ findings were scientifically accurate — a staggering rate for a fully autonomous system.
One 12-hour Kosmos run produced the equivalent of six months of human research output.

Still, Kosmos isn’t perfect. It struggles with messy datasets and can’t yet process files larger than 5GB. And it can’t change course mid-run — once it starts, it commits.
But the biggest challenge? Judgment. Teaching an AI to know which discoveries matter.

Even so, this marks a historic moment: AI is now conducting real, verifiable research.

🤝 Microsoft’s Humanist Super Intelligence

While Kosmos pushes the boundaries of AI research, Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman is charting a different path — toward Humanist Super Intelligence (HSI).

This isn’t about building an AGI that replaces humans.
It’s about creating a super-intelligent system that serves them.

Suleyman describes it as a bounded, values-driven AI, designed to stay contextual, controllable, and subordinate.
A kind of deeply integrated AI companion — one that helps people learn, create, and think more clearly, while remaining ethically constrained.

Microsoft’s approach contrasts sharply with OpenAI and Anthropic’s open-ended AGI ambitions.
In Suleyman’s words: “Humans matter more than AI.”

With Microsoft now legally able to develop AGI independently using OpenAI’s IP, this philosophical divide could soon define the next great AI rivalry.

🧠 Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2: The Reasoning Machine

Meanwhile, in China, Moonshot AI is taking open source reasoning to a new level.

Their new model, Kimi K2 Thinking, doesn’t just generate text — it thinks, plans, and executes code across hundreds of reasoning steps without human help.

It scored:

  • 40.9% on Humanity’s Last Exam (expert-level interdisciplinary benchmark)

  • 60.2% on BrowseComp (research and browsing tasks) — double the human average

  • 71.3% on SWE Bench Verified (software engineering benchmark)

That’s not just incremental progress — it’s a leap.

In one demo, K2 solved a PhD-level hyperbolic geometry problem, performing 23 nested reasoning loops, running code, and verifying results until it derived the correct formula.

In another, it identified an actor from a vague description — parsing 20+ web sources, combining biographical clues, and assembling the answer.

This ability to reason across long horizons — chaining 300+ tool calls — represents a new frontier in AI.
Moonshot’s bet is that open source reasoning can rival (or even surpass) proprietary Western models.

🧩 Google’s DS Star: The Autonomous Data Scientist

Then there’s Google.

Their new system, DS Star, might quietly revolutionize enterprise analytics.
If Kosmos is an AI researcher, DS Star is an AI data scientist that turns messy real-world data into clean Python insights — all by itself.

Most AI tools require clean SQL databases. DS Star? It thrives in chaos:
CSVs, JSON logs, random spreadsheets, unstructured reports — bring it on.

You can ask it a question like:

“Which products performed best in Q3 based on sales and reviews?”

And DS Star will:

  1. Find the relevant files

  2. Write and test the Python code

  3. Debug its own errors

  4. Return the correct analysis

It uses a six-agent loop — one reads data, another plans, another codes, a verifier checks, a router fixes issues, and a finalizer packages the output.

If the code fails, it repairs itself automatically by studying the logs.

Powered by Gemini 2.5 Pro, DS Star outperforms every other data reasoning system on major benchmarks — including a 30-point leap on Dabstep, a benchmark for real-world data analysis.

Even more impressive, it’s model-agnostic — meaning the same architecture could work with GPT-5 or Claude 4.5.

In essence, AI no longer just assists the analyst — it is the analyst.

⚙️ The New AI Frontier: Long-Horizon Thinking

The thread connecting Kosmos, K2, and DS Star is clear:
AI systems are evolving from reactive assistants into autonomous thinkers.

They plan, code, reason, verify, and self-correct — traits once thought uniquely human.

The next frontier won’t be about larger models.
It’ll be about how long and coherently an AI can think before it loses focus — what researchers now call test-time scaling.

That’s the new battleground for AI supremacy.

🚀 The Takeaway

In just one week, we’ve seen:

  • Microsoft prove that AI can do real science

  • Google show that AI can analyze messy data autonomously

  • China demonstrate that open-source reasoning can rival the world’s best

This isn’t hype anymore — it’s happening.
AI isn’t just assisting human intelligence; it’s beginning to extend it.

We’re entering the era where AI doesn’t just help the process — it is the process.

Wild times, indeed.

What do you think — should AI be trusted to conduct science independently?
Drop your thoughts in the comments below.

If you enjoyed this deep dive, share it — and follow for more explorations at the edge of AI and human creativity.

Addendum


What is Microsoft Kosmos?

Microsoft Kosmos (Knowledge-based Operating System for Modeling Scientific knowledge) refers to a series of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) developed by Microsoft Research and, in a related but distinct effort, an AI system developed by Edison Scientific designed for scientific research. 

Microsoft Research Kosmos Series

These models are designed to understand and process information from multiple modalities, including language, images, and potentially audio, enabling capabilities beyond traditional text-only models. 

Kosmos-1: The foundational model, introduced by Microsoft Research, can perceive images and language, perform in-context learning, reason, and generate content. It handles tasks like visual question answering (VQA), image captioning, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR)-free text processing.

Kosmos-2: Building on Kosmos-1, this model introduced the ability of multimodal grounding and referring. It can link specific text spans (like noun phrases) in a caption directly to corresponding regions (using bounding boxes) within an image, essentially creating "invisible hyperlinks" between text and pixels. This allows for more precise human-AI interaction and visual responses.

Kosmos-2.5: This version is a "multimodal literate model" specifically designed for machine reading and understanding of text-intensive images such as academic papers, receipts, and web pages. It excels at generating spatially-aware text blocks (with coordinates) and structured text in markdown format, performing on par with larger models like GPT-4o on document understanding benchmarks. 

Edison Scientific Kosmos AI System

A separate, recent development, this system is described as an "AI scientist" designed for deep scientific research workloads, not general chat. 
It operates using "structured world models" and runs hundreds of smaller AI agents in sync.
It can ingest thousands of papers and data sets to perform complex analyses, generate hypotheses, and produce traceable reports with citations and code references with high accuracy. 

Source: Gemini
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Friday, November 7, 2025

YouTube Academy For Machine Learning



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What is Machine Learning?

What is On-device Machine Learning?

Supervised Machine Learning

  1. Google Open Online Education

Types of Machine Learning

Generalization

Linear Regression

Supervised Learning

Logistic Regression

Decision Tree

  1. Intuitive Machine Learning

Support Vector Machines

Gradient Descent

Neural Networks

Machine Learning Courses

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Thursday, November 6, 2025

Finding Ourselves in the Light -- What Zohran Mamdani’s Victory Teaches Us About Faith, Politics, and Courage


See All News by Ravish Kumar

“I will not change how I eat. I will not change the faith I am proud to belong to. But there is one thing I will change — I will no longer look for myself in the shadow. I will find myself in the light.”

With these words, Zohran Mamdani set the tone for what his historic mayoral campaign in New York represents — not just for America, but for democracies around the world where religion is weaponized to divide.

Mamdani’s campaign and triumph answered two age-old questions: Can faith be separated from politics? And more importantly, why must it be?

His win proved that while religion might never be fully absent from politics, the politics of hate in the name of religion can indeed be defeated.

A Muslim Candidate Who Refused to Be a “Muslim Candidate”

What makes Zohran Mamdani’s journey remarkable is that he never hid his Muslim identity, nor did he seek votes in its name.

His supporters urged him to stay silent when attacked for being Muslim. But he chose speech over silence. He told New Yorkers — yes, he was a Muslim, but above all, he was a citizen seeking the same dignity and equality every New Yorker deserved.

“I am a Muslim,” he said, “but I am not a Muslim candidate. I want to be a leader who fights for every New Yorker — no matter their skin color, religion, or birthplace.”

That clarity disarmed his opponents. He didn’t run from his identity; he transcended it.

The Politics of Dignity vs. The Politics of Fear

For over two decades after 9/11, American Muslims lived under suspicion. Hate was institutionalized — from the airport to the ballot box. Mamdani, a son of immigrants, walked right into that storm.

Opponents painted him as dangerous. Ads funded by billionaires showed his beard exaggerated, his image darkened. TV hosts accused him of wanting to “chair another 9/11.” Others mocked the way he ate.

It was Islamophobia with corporate funding.

Mamdani’s answer was radical — not anger, but empathy. He spoke not just for Muslims, but for all marginalized New Yorkers: the ones who couldn’t afford bus fares, housing, or healthcare.

His campaign revolved around simple, humane issues:

  • Free public transport for working-class people.

  • Affordable housing in a city where the poor are being pushed farther away.

  • Dignity for all, regardless of background.

He reframed the debate — from who belongs to who benefits.

Hate Has Billion-Dollar Sponsors

Mamdani pulled the curtain on something most politicians avoid discussing — how corporate money sustains hate.

He named companies that funded his opponent’s Islamophobic propaganda. “They don’t fear my faith,” he said, “they fear fair wages.”

If workers gain power, corporations lose profits. So they distract the public — through hate, fear, and division.

As Mamdani put it:

“The billionaire class seeks to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour. They want us to fight each other, so we forget who truly controls the system.”

It’s the same playbook used across the world — including in India.

Lessons for India

India’s politics runs on similar fuel.
While millions struggle for food, jobs, and education, leaders keep the nation busy fighting imaginary enemies.
The politics of “send them to Pakistan” and “illegal infiltrators” thrives because it’s easier to inflame hatred than to fix hunger.

Even opposition leaders, fearing electoral backlash, shy away from openly supporting Muslim voices or religious minorities.
They whisper when courage demands they speak.

Mamdani did the opposite — he stood beside Imams in public, he embraced his faith openly, and yet, he never made it his electoral plank.
He showed that the antidote to fear is not silence, but visibility.

His politics wasn’t about Muslims, it was about New Yorkers — and that made all the difference.

A New Kind of Campaign: Humanity as Strategy

Mamdani’s campaign turned issues like bus fares into symbols of justice.

New York’s working class — 1.3 million people who commute by bus daily — became central to his vision.
Slow buses meant lost hours, lost wages, and lost dignity.

By fighting for faster, cheaper public transport, Mamdani wasn’t just talking policy — he was talking respect.

He made the working person’s time valuable again.

It’s a politics India’s cities could learn from — where millions commute for hours each day, losing health and hope while leaders argue about faith.

Beyond Religion, Beyond Hate

Zohran Mamdani’s victory is more than electoral. It’s moral.

It proved that people can see through billion-dollar propaganda.
That the politics of fear, no matter how powerful, cannot outlast the politics of belonging.
That you can be proud of your faith without turning it into a weapon.

In a world increasingly consumed by division, Mamdani’s campaign feels like the fresh air Ravish Kumar described — the air many nations are still waiting to breathe.

The Light We Must Step Into

Zohran Mamdani's line now reads less like a statement and more like a manifesto for our times:

“I will no longer look for myself in the shadow. I will find myself in the light.”

Mamdani found his light — not by abandoning faith or identity, but by refusing to let them be twisted into tools of fear.

The rest of us — in Delhi, in Lucknow, in New York — might ask:
Are we still living in the shadows others built for us?
Or are we ready to walk into the light ourselves?

In defeating the politics of hate, Zohran Mamdani hasn’t just changed New York — he’s offered a lesson for the world: the future belongs not to those who divide, but to those who dare to unite.

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