R. G. Chandra

R. G. Chandra
July 16th, 1878 to April 3rd, 1975

The ever flourishing human society always receives dedicated service of a very few among its member for acquiring more accurate knowledge about the phenomena of nature and thus with the advancement of time the society enables to march forward in the direction of prosperity. The name of late Radha Gobinda Chandra (1878 - 1975) can be proudly enlisted along with many such dedicated souls for his untiring service rendered in the cause of development in astronomical knowledge with his humble might.

"A Village Astronomer: Life and Works of R. G. Chandra" by Sudhindra Nath Biswas, Mahatma Aswini Kumar and Satyabharati Vidyapith

The classics are DEAD

"The most borrowed library books of 2010"

John Dugdale finds library users turning to crime, with thrillers and detective fiction making up almost two-thirds of books borrowed in 2010

by

John Dugdale

February 18th, 2011

guardian.co.uk

Trying to explain why the wartime British public were turning to "brutal and sordid" American crime novels, George Orwell suggested that pulp fiction offered "a distilled version of the modern political scene" in an era of "mass bombing of civilians, the use of hostages, torture [and] secret prisons", and "systematic falsification of records and statistics". The average man, he proposed, "wants the current troubles of the world to be translated into a simple story about individuals".

Some such theory is needed, 65 years later, to account for the stunning appetite for evil evinced by people popping into their local libraries, as revealed again by the latest data released by Public Lending Right (PLR), covering the period from mid-2009 to mid-2010. Of the 100 most borrowed titles, close to two-thirds are crime novels or thrillers, including all the top 10, and others (such as Stephenie Meyer's crime-laden vampire romances) are in related genres.

The range of such novels represented includes an offbeat mystery by Kate Atkinson, a heist caper by Ian Rankin and amiable, alarm-free yarns by Dick Francis and Alexander McCall Smith; but gory thrillers by north American writers such as Patricia Cornwell, Michael Connelly, Tess Gerritsen, Karin Slaughter and Kathy Reichs – and gritty Brits such as Lee Child, Val McDermid and Martina Cole – are clearly in the ascendancy.

Of the authors who dominated 2010's all-year bestsellers chart, Dan Brown is still high up in the library 100 and Meyer scores with four books, but Stieg Larsson (who had the top three places in the sales chart) is relegated to a single entry in 76th place. Library users, this suggests, are less keen on Euro-crime, less responsive to the stimulus of TV or film adaptations, and not fond of lengthy, heavy tomes. What they want instead are American or American-style murder stories that are quick reads, and James Patterson's co-written productions (often described as the print equivalent of junk food) are tailored to that need. Patterson's 12 entries reflect the fact that the fiction factory he oversees generates at least eight books carrying his name a year; and this prolific output explains why he is the overall most borrowed author too, a crown he has retained since dethroning Jacqueline Wilson (who nevertheless was the most borrowed author over the decade) in 2006-07.

Hyper-productivity and collaboration were also the key to the success of Daisy Meadows, in a good year for fairies as well as serial killers. The most borrowed children's author again, with more than a million loans, Meadows is the collective pseudonym of the four women behind the Rainbow Magic fairy stories, who together turn out even more books annually than Patterson's toilers. Children's books in general are weakly represented in the top 100, with only five entries (Meyer's teenage novels apart), of which two are about pants. But writers for children do strikingly well in the most borrowed authors table that pits them against their adult fiction counterparts, with Meadows, Wilson, Francesca Simon, Mick Inkpen, Julia Donaldson, Lauren Child and Terry Deary taking seven places in the top 10.

Kid fic flourishes too in the "most borrowed classic authors" list ("classic" here seems to mean "dead"), where Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton sneak in ahead of Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer, Charles Dickens, PG Wodehouse and Jane Austen, and Shakespeare manages only a miserable 10th. The library 100 contains far fewer literary novels than the bestseller list, leaving Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters looking rather lonely, but the most obvious difference is the absence of non-fiction. PLR's data does show, however, which non-fiction books were the most taken out in particular categories, with Delia Smith, Stuart Maconie, Antony Beevor, Richard Dawkins, Gok Wan and Carol Klein among the No 1s.

The top biography, Paul O'Grady's At My Mother's Knee, also heads an overall non-fiction chart in which Frances Osborne, author of The Bolter and wife of George, beats Delia, Jamie and Nigella to take 5th place. With both libraries and the system of payments facing an uncertain future – the coalition is committed to abolishing the PLR office and transferring the scheme – it provides a modicum of reassurance to think of the resulting cheque's imminent arrival on the chancellor's doormat, a nudging reminder of the importance of the fund (which this month will pay out a total of £6.7m at 6.25p per loan) to authors.

"ok"

"How 'OK' took over the world"

by

Allan Metcalf

February 18th, 2011

BBC NEWS

It crops up in our speech dozens of times every day, although it apparently means little. So how did the word "OK" conquer the world, asks Allan Metcalf.

"OK" is one of the most frequently used and recognised words in the world.

It is also one of the oddest expressions ever invented. But this oddity may in large measure account for its popularity.

It's odd-looking. It's a word that looks and sounds like an abbreviation, an acronym.

We generally spell it OK - the spelling okay is relatively recent, and still relatively rare - and we pronounce it not "ock" but by sounding the names of the letters O and K.

Visually, OK pairs the completely round O with the completely straight lines of K.

So both in speech and in writing OK stands out clearly, easily distinguished from other words, and yet it uses simple sounds that are familiar to a multitude of languages.

Almost every language has an O vowel, a K consonant, and an A vowel. So OK is a very distinctive combination of very familiar elements. And that's one reason it's so successful. OK stands apart.

Ordinarily a word so odd, so distinctive from others, wouldn't be allowed in a language to begin with. As a general rule, a language allows new words only when they resemble familiar ones.

Clever coinages may be laughed at and enjoyed, but hardly ever adopted by users of the language.

So it was in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, in the late 1830s, when newspaper editors enjoyed inventing fanciful abbreviations, like "WOOOFC" for "with one of our first citizens" and OW for "all right".

Needless to say, neither of these found a permanent place in the language. But they provided the unusual context that enabled the creation of OK.

On 23 March 1839, OK was introduced to the world on the second page of the Boston Morning Post, in the midst of a long paragraph, as "o.k. (all correct)".

How this weak joke survived at all, instead of vanishing like its counterparts, is a matter of lucky coincidence involving the American presidential election of 1840.

One candidate was nicknamed Old Kinderhook, and there was a false tale that a previous American president couldn't spell properly and thus would approve documents with an "OK", thinking it was the abbreviation for "all correct".

Within a decade, people began actually marking OK on documents and using OK on the telegraph to signal that all was well. So OK had found its niche, being easy to say or write and also distinctive enough to be clear.

But there was still only restricted use of OK. The misspelled abbreviation may have implied illiteracy to some, and OK was generally avoided in anything but business contexts, or in fictional dialogue by characters deemed to be rustic or illiterate.

Indeed, by and large American writers of fiction avoided OK altogether, even those like Mark Twain who freely used slang.

But in the 20th Century OK moved from margin to mainstream, gradually becoming a staple of nearly everyone's conversation, no longer looked on as illiterate or slang.

Its true origin was gradually forgotten. OK used such familiar sounds that speakers of other languages, hearing it, could rethink it as an expression or abbreviation in their own language.

Thus it was taken into the Choctaw Native American language, whose expression "okeh" meant something like "it is so".

US President Woodrow Wilson, early in the 20th Century, lent his prestige by marking okeh on documents he approved.

And soon OK was to find its place in many languages as a reminder of a familiar word or abbreviation.

But what makes OK so useful that we incorporate it into so many conversations?

It's not that it was needed to "fill a gap" in any language. Before 1839, English speakers had "yes", "good", "fine", "excellent", "satisfactory", and "all right".

What OK provided that the others did not was neutrality, a way to affirm or to express agreement without having to offer an opinion.

Consider this dialogue: "Let's meet again this afternoon."

Reply: "OK."

Compare that with: "Let's meet again this afternoon."

Reply: "Wonderful!" or "If we must."

OK allows us to view a situation in simplest terms, just OK or not.

When someone falls down, the question is not "how well are you feeling?" but the more basic "are you OK?".

And any lingering stigma associated with OK is long since gone. Now OK is not out of place in the mouth of a US president like Barack Obama.

Speaking to schoolchildren in 2009 he said: "That's OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who've had the most failures."

The word would also easily slip from the mouth of a British prime minister like David Cameron.

And yet, despite its conquest of conversations the world over, there remain vast areas of language where OK is scarcely to be found.

You won't find OK in prepared speeches. Indeed, most formal speeches and reports are free of OK.

Modern English translations of the Bible remain almost entirely OK-free. Many a published book has not a single instance of OK.

But OK still rules over the vast domain of our conversation.

International Year of Chemistry 2011

I don't know how I missed this.

"The theme of IYC2011 is "Chemistry–our life, our future," and it will focus on the “achievements of chemistry and its contributions to the well-being of humankind.”[1] It aims to raise awareness of chemistry among the general public and to attract young people into the field, as well as to highlight the role of chemistry in solving global problems."

Watson wins on "Jeopardy"

Ken Jennings, left, and Brad Rutter

A three day landmark battle between Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter, and Watson [an IBM computer] ended today with Watson winning.

"Computer crushes the competition on 'Jeopardy!'"

by

Frazier Moore

February 16th, 2011

USA TODAY

The computer brained its human competition in Game 1 of the Man vs. Machine competition on "Jeopardy!"

On the 30-question game board, veteran "Jeopardy!" champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter managed only five correct responses between them during the Double Jeopardy round that aired Tuesday. They ended the first game of the two-game face-off with paltry earnings of $4,800 and $10,400 respectively.

Watson, their IBM supercomputer nemesis, emerged from the Final Jeopardy round with $35,734.

Tuesday's competition began with Jennings (who has the longest "Jeopardy!" winning streak at 74 games) making the first choice. But Watson jumped in with the correct response: What is leprosy?

He followed that with bang-on responses Franz Liszt, dengue fever, violin, Rachmaninoff and albinism, then landed on a Daily Double in the "Cambridge" category.

"I'll wager $6,435," Watson (named for IBM founder Thomas J. Watson) said in his pleasant electronic voice.

"I won't ask," said host Alex Trebek, wondering with everybody else where that figure came from.

But Watson knew what he was doing. Sir Christopher Wren was the correct response, and Watson's total vaulted to $21,035 as the humans stood by helplessly.

Watson blew his next response. But so did both his opponents. He guessed Picasso. Jennings guessed Cubism. Rutter guessed Impressionism. (Correct question: What is modern art?)

Back to Watson, who soon hit the game's second Daily Double. But even when he was only 32% sure (you could see his precise level of certainty displayed on the screen), Watson correctly guessed Baghdad as the city from whose national museum the ancient Lion of Nimrud ivory relief went missing (along with "a lot of other stuff") in 2003. Watson added $1,246 to his stash.

He even correctly identified the Church Lady character from "Saturday Night Live."

One answer stumped everyone: "A Titian portrait of this Spanish king was stolen at gunpoint from an Argentine museum in 1987." (Correct response: Philip.) Jennings shook his head. Rutter wrenched his face. Watson, as usual, seemed unfazed.

Even when he bungled Final Jeopardy, Watson (with his 10 offstage racks of computer servers) remained poised.

The answer: "Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle."

Both Jennings and Rutter knew the right response was Chicago.

Watson guessed doubtfully, "What is Toronto?????" It didn't matter. He had shrewdly wagered only $947.

The trio will return on Wednesday, when their second game is aired. The overall winner will collect $1 million.

The bouts were taped at the IBM research center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., last month.

"What’s With Watson’s Weird Bets? And Other Questions About IBM’s Jeopardy-Playing Machine"

by

Kathy Ceceri

February 16th, 2011

Wired

Tuesday night at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute the computer guys from IBM had to explain to an auditorium full of Jeopardy and computer geeks how their supercomputer Watson responded “What is Toronto????” in the category of “U.S. Cities.” And what was with all the odd dollar amounts on the Daily Double wagers?

It all has to do with the fact that Watson is, well, he’s Not Human.

For three nights this week the IBM computer named after the company’s founder is a featured player on the popular trivia game show. At RPI’s EMPAC facility in Troy, NY Tuesday, a panel including Chris Welty and Adam Lally of IBM’s Watson team told a packed crowd that came to watch the show’s broadcast on a 56-foot-wide HD video screen that the methods Watson uses to come up with its Jeopardy responses are very different than those used by champions like Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

Watson’s brain has been packed full of facts and definitions from sources like Wikipedia and WordNet. Then the machine weighs its sources according to their proven accuracy during practice games. Of course, sometimes the computer needs a little help weeding out inappropriate responses.

“We had to put in a profanity filter after one bad incident,” Lally said with a laugh.

When looking for possible responses, Watson ranks choices according to the number of connections between the words in the clue. So for the Final Jeopardy answer involving airports named for World War II heroes and battles, the computer looked for cities with airports whose names had a link to the conflict. Categories have been found to be a less reliable way to narrow down responses; that’s why “Toronto” ranked higher than “Chicago” (the correct response) for a category that should have excluded cities in Canada.

As for the weird wagers — Watson bet $1246 on one Daily Double and $6,435 on the other — Lally said the Watson team did include game theorists, who programmed winning strategies (like searching the board’s higher-priced clues early for hidden Daily Doubles) into Watson’s game plan. But though human players usually pick round numbers when naming their Daily Double wager, there’s no reason why they have to — so the team decided to let Watson choose its own amount based on its own algorithms.

Although on Tuesday night it looked like Watson had an advantage over his human opponents when it comes to “buzzing in,” Welty said that wasn’t the case. Watson is programmed to wait until the light next to host Alex Trebek is lit, alerting players that they are allowed to press the buttons that signal their desire to respond (buzzing in early gets a player locked out momentarily). Human players get a split second head start, he said, because they are listening for Trebek to finish reading the clue rather than waiting for the light.

Despite Watson’s big international gaffe, Welty pointed out that the machine still won with about $25,000 to spare. And though winning is nice, the ultimate goal of the Watson project isn’t to develop computers that can beat humans at their own game. Rather, the game is a means for developing a computer that can communicate better with its flesh and blood counterparts. And by that measure, Watson is a success.

As Welty noted, “Watson is better than any machine before at processing natural language.”

RPI is posting streaming video of its Jeopardy panels (minus the show itself) on its website. The two-game match wraps up tonight, Wednesday; check the Jeopardy website for details.

Post script...

Watson is nothing more than a fast machine with access to a huge data base and the ability to statistically provide answers. Ask Watson if God exists or any other abstract question. LOSER.

"Computer Wins on ‘Jeopardy!’: Trivial, It’s Not"

by

John Markoff

February 16th, 2011

The New York Times

In the end, the humans on “Jeopardy!” surrendered meekly.

Facing certain defeat at the hands of a room-size I.B.M. computer on Wednesday evening, Ken Jennings, famous for winning 74 games in a row on the TV quiz show, acknowledged the obvious. “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords,” he wrote on his video screen, borrowing a line from a “Simpsons” episode.

From now on, if the answer is “the computer champion on “Jeopardy!,” the question will be, “What is Watson?”

For I.B.M., the showdown was not merely a well-publicized stunt and a $1 million prize, but proof that the company has taken a big step toward a world in which intelligent machines will understand and respond to humans, and perhaps inevitably, replace some of them.

Watson, specifically, is a “question answering machine” of a type that artificial intelligence researchers have struggled with for decades — a computer akin to the one on “Star Trek” that can understand questions posed in natural language and answer them.

Watson showed itself to be imperfect, but researchers at I.B.M. and other companies are already developing uses for Watson’s technologies that could have significant impact on the way doctors practice and consumers buy products.

“Cast your mind back 20 years and who would have thought this was possible?” said Edward Feigenbaum, a Stanford University computer scientist and a pioneer in the field.

In its “Jeopardy!” project, I.B.M. researchers were tackling a game that requires not only encyclopedic recall, but the ability to untangle convoluted and often opaque statements, a modicum of luck, and quick, strategic button pressing.

The contest, which was taped in January here at the company’s T. J. Watson Research Laboratory before an audience of I.B.M. executives and company clients, played out in three televised episodes concluding Wednesday. At the end of the first day, Watson was in a tie with Brad Rutter, another ace human player, at $5,000 each, with Mr. Jennings trailing with $2,000.

But on the second day, Watson went on a tear. By night’s end, Watson had a commanding lead with a total of $35,734, compared with Mr. Rutter’s $10,400 and Mr. Jennings’ $4,800.

But victory was not cemented until late in the third match, when Watson was in Nonfiction. “Same category for $1,200” it said in a manufactured tenor, and lucked into a Daily Double. Mr. Jennings grimaced.

Even later in the match, however, had Mr. Jennings won another key Daily Double it might have come down to Final Jeopardy, I.B.M. researchers acknowledged.

The final tally was $77,147 to Mr. Jennings’ $24,000 and Mr. Rutter’s $21,600.

More than anything, the contest was a vindication for the academic field of computer science, which began with great promise in the 1960s with the vision of creating a thinking machine and which became the laughingstock of Silicon Valley in the 1980s, when a series of heavily funded start-up companies went bankrupt.

Despite its intellectual prowess, Watson was by no means omniscient. On Tuesday evening during Final Jeopardy, the category was U.S. Cities and the clue was: “Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second largest for a World War II battle.”

Watson drew guffaws from many in the television audience when it responded “What is Toronto?????”

The string of question marks indicated that the system had very low confidence in its response, I.B.M. researchers said, but because it was Final Jeopardy, it was forced to give a response. The machine did not suffer much damage. It had wagered just $947 on its result.

“We failed to deeply understand what was going on there,” said David Ferrucci, an I.B.M. researcher who led the development of Watson. “The reality is that there’s lots of data where the title is U.S. cities and the answers are countries, European cities, people, mayors. Even though it says U.S. cities, we had very little confidence that that’s the distinguishing feature.”

The researchers also acknowledged that the machine had benefited from the “buzzer factor.”

Both Mr. Jennings and Mr. Rutter are accomplished at anticipating the light that signals it is possible to “buzz in,” and can sometimes get in with virtually zero lag time. The danger is to buzz too early, in which case the contestant is penalized and “locked out” for roughly a quarter of a second.

Watson, on the other hand, does not anticipate the light, but has a weighted scheme that allows it, when it is highly confident, to buzz in as quickly as 10 milliseconds, making it very hard for humans to beat. When it was less confident, it buzzed more slowly. In the second round, Watson beat the others to the buzzer in 24 out of 30 Double Jeopardy questions.

“It sort of wants to get beaten when it doesn’t have high confidence,” Dr. Ferrucci said. “It doesn’t want to look stupid.”

Both human players said that Watson’s button pushing skill was not necessarily an unfair advantage. “I beat Watson a couple of times,” Mr. Rutter said.

When Watson did buzz in, it made the most of it. Showing the ability to parse language, it responded to, “A recent best seller by Muriel Barbery is called ‘This of the Hedgehog,’ ” with “What is Elegance?”

It showed its facility with medical diagnosis. With the answer: “You just need a nap. You don’t have this sleep disorder that can make sufferers nod off while standing up,” Watson replied, “What is narcolepsy?”

The coup de grâce came with the answer, “William Wilkenson’s ‘An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia’ inspired this author’s most famous novel.” Mr. Jennings wrote, correctly, Bram Stoker, but realized he could not catch up with Watson’s winnings and wrote out his surrender.

Both players took the contest and its outcome philosophically.

“I had a great time and I would do it again in a heartbeat,” said Mr. Jennings. “It’s not about the results; this is about being part of the future.”

For I.B.M., the future will happen very quickly, company executives said. On Thursday it plans to announce that it will collaborate with Columbia University and the University of Maryland to create a physician’s assistant service that will allow doctors to query a cybernetic assistant. The company also plans to work with Nuance Communications Inc. to add voice recognition to the physician’s assistant, possibly making the service available in as little as 18 months.

“I have been in medical education for 40 years and we’re still a very memory-based curriculum,” said Dr. Herbert Chase, a professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University who is working with I.B.M. on the physician’s assistant. “The power of Watson- like tools will cause us to reconsider what it is we want students to do.”

I.B.M. executives also said they are in discussions with a major consumer electronics retailer to develop a version of Watson, named after I.B.M.’s founder, Thomas J. Watson, that would be able to interact with consumers on a variety of subjects like buying decisions and technical support.

Dr. Ferrucci sees none of the fears that have been expressed by theorists and science fiction writers about the potential of computers to usurp humans.

“People ask me if this is HAL,” he said, referring to the computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” “HAL’s not the focus, the focus is on the computer on ‘Star Trek,’ where you have this intelligent information seek dialog, where you can ask follow-up questions and the computer can look at all the evidence and tries to ask follow-up questions. That’s very cool.”

"What IBM’s ‘Watson’ Finds Elementary, And Not So Much'"

by

Adrian Covert

February 16th, 2011

Wired

When we last left our heroes, Watson and the undefeated Jeopardy champion Brad Rutter were tied for the lead with $5,000 apiece. Ken Jennings, meanwhile, trailed with $2,000. Watson had some shaky moments in the early stages of round one, but kept it together enough to stay on top and frustrate the Mormon Machine. Let’s rejoin the action…

Watson went on a spree early in the match, correctly responding to clues about diseases and classical music left and right. (Jeopardy questions are called “clues” and the contestants’ answers, which must be phrased as a question, are called “responses.”) After running his score up to $14,600 (and denying the other two even a chance to chime in), Watson hit the “Daily Double.”

Unlike Monday night, when he could only wager a max of $1,000, Watson had some freedom to play around with his money total. How much did he risk? $6,435. That drew a solid laugh from the crowd and prompted Trebek to proclaim, “I won’t ask. I won’t ask.” Predictably, Watson produced the correct response to a clue about architecture.

And then, Watson hit a hiccup. He picked the category dealing fine art, and was given the following clue: “In May 2010, five paintings worth $125 million by Braque, Matisse & three others left Paris’ Museum of this art period.”

Latching on to the the keywords “3 others,” Watson responded “Picasso.” The correct response, which required the contestants to complete the museum name, was “modern art.” But the other two were as puzzled by the clue as Watson was, thinking they had to name a more specific era. So no harm no foul.

A couple of questions later, Watson hit the “Daily Double” again, this time in the fine art category. This time around he wagered $1,246. While he understood what the clue was asking for this time (the city from which some art was stolen), his confidence percentages were shockingly low across the board, which his most confident response (in this case Baghdad) coming in at 32 percent. He even went as far as to mention he was guessing before answering. But Watson got it right.

From there, it was mostly a trivia bloodbath. Jennings and Rutter could hardly get a word in, as Watson wiped out the board full of clues regarding hedgehogs, Cambridge University, and terms including the words “church” or “state.” By the end of Double Jeopardy, Jennings and Rutter could only give the camera looks which sat somewhere between vexed and nonplussed. That’s because Jennings had $2400, Rutter had $5400 and Watson had $36,681.

For Final Jeopardy, the three challengers were given the category “U.S. Cities” and asked to name the city with one airport named after a World War II hero and another named for a World War II battle. Jennings and Rutter both responded correctly with “Chicago.” What was Watson’s response? “Toronto.” As in Ontario. As in Canada. Watson was totally confused to the point where it didn’t consider the restrictions set by the category itself.

But how much did he wager? In typical Watson form, he only bet $947, likely realizing it could wager $0 and still win. So while there’s still a whole other round to be played tomorrow night the truth is that with $4800 and $10,400 respectively, Jennings and Rutter will be hard-pressed to catch up to Watson’s $35,734. Barring a catastrophic meltdown, tomorrow night’s show will be a victory lap, celebrating the triumph of machine over man.

But now that we’ve been able to watch Watson in action for an entire round, we have a better idea of his strengths and weaknesses when he comes to answering open-ended questions.

What Watson Does Well

Memory: Watson doesn’t have to worry about forgetting anything. Whatever is loaded into his system is retained perfectly (the advantage of running on all zeroes and ones).

Reaction times: As an emotionless machine, Watson is better suited to react to the signal telling contestants to buzz in. He excels when clues are phrased as directly as possible. When given simple sentence structures clearly asking for who, what, when or where, Watson is unstoppable. We, as humans, can’t compete with that.

Wagering: When Watson hits Daily Doubles and the Final Jeopardy stage, he is able to analyze his confidence in the given category (or other similar ones) and his overall probability of winning, then uses those two factors to determine an optimal dollar amount. If he’s winning big or is not as confident in the category, he’ll tend to wager more conservatively. If he is down in cash or very confident in the category, he will wager more. Because he can compute the factors with a numerical preciseness humans cannot, his wagers take on strange dollar amounts. Watson has also been programmed with a historical knowledge of where Daily Doubles are most commonly found, so he can determine their most probable locations.

What Watson Doesn’t Do well

Complex Syntax: When sentence structures become complex, or the question is asking contestants to consider two indirectly related factors or ideas, Watson tends to get confused. His confidence drops and his reaction times slow.

Art: For whatever reason, Watson doesn’t know a damn thing about art. He struggled with nearly every clue in the category Tuesday, incorrectly responding to one clue, getting beat to the punch on another clue and failing to buzz in on another. And the one he got right? He had a confidence of only 32 percent.

Eliminating Previous Wrong Responses From Consideration: IBM programmers didn’t think Watson would ever have an issue with using the same incorrect response or wrong response structure as a contestant answering before him. Well he ran into the problem twice last night when he repeated one of Jenning’s incorrect responses, then failed to realize he had to include the word “missing” when replying to a clue about about a gymnast with one leg.

While the suspense seems to be (mostly) taken out of Wednesday’s final throwdown, it’s still pretty amazing to see a digital machine interpret and respond to the human language. Be sure to check back here tomorrow night for our thoughts on the conclusion of the IBM Jeopardy Challenge.

"Is It Time to Welcome Our New Computer Overlords?"

by

Ben Zimmer

February 18th, 2011

The Atlantic

Oh, that Ken Jennings, always quick with a quip. At the end of the three-day Jeopardy! tournament pitting him and fellow human Brad Rutter against the IBM supercomputer Watson, he had a good one. When it came time for Final Jeopardy, he and Rutter already knew that Watson had trounced the two of them, the best competitors that Jeopardy! had ever had. So, on his written response to a clue about Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, Jennings wrote, "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords."

Now, think about that sentence. What does it mean to you? If you are a fan of The Simpsons, you'll be able to identify it as a riff on a line from the 1994 episode, "Deep Space Homer," wherein clueless news anchor Kent Brockman is briefly under the mistaken impression that a "master race of giant space ants" is about to take over Earth. "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords," Brockman says, sucking up to the new bosses. "I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."

Even if you're not intimately familiar with that episode (and you really should be), you might have come across the "Overlord Meme," which uses Brockman's line as a template to make a sarcastic statement of submission: "I, for one, welcome our (new) ___ overlord(s)." Over on Language Log, where I'm a contributor, we'd call this kind of phrasal template a "snowclone," and that one's been on our radar since 2004. So it's a repurposed pop-culture reference wrapped in several layers of irony.

But what would Watson make of this smart-alecky remark? The question-answering algorithms that IBM developed to allow Watson to compete on Jeopardy! might lead it to conjecture that it has something to do with The Simpsons -- since the full text of Wikipedia is among its 15 terabytes of reference data, and the Kent Brockman page explains the Overlord Meme. After all, Watson's mechanical thumb had beaten Ken and Brad's real ones to the buzzer on a Simpsons clue earlier in the game (identifying the show as the home of Itchy and Scratchy). But beyond its Simpsonian pedigree, this complex use of language would be entirely opaque to Watson. Humans, on the other hand, have no problem identifying how such a snowclone works, appreciating its humorous resonances, and constructing new variations on the theme.

All of this is to say that while Ken and Brad lost the battle, Team Carbon is still winning the language war against Team Silicon. The "war" metaphor, incidentally, had been playing out for weeks, stoked by IBM and Jeopardy! to build public interest in the tournament. The press gladly played along, supplying headlines like the one in the Science Times from Tuesday, "A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans." IBM knew from the Kasparov vs. Deep Blue days that we're all suckers for the "man vs. machine" trope, going back to John Henry's mythical race against the steam-powered hammer. It certainly makes for a better storyline than, say, "Check out the latest incremental innovations that Natural Language Processing researchers are making in the field of question-answering!"

I first encountered IBM's hype about the tournament last month, during the NFL's conference championship games, when Dave Ferrucci, the ebullient lead engineer on the project, showed up in commercial breaks to tell us about the marvels of Watson. One commercial intriguingly opens with Groucho Marx telling his classic joke: "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I don't know." Ferrucci then begins: "Real language is filled with nuance, slang and metaphor. It's more than half the world's data. But computers couldn't understand it." He continues: "Watson is a computer that uncovers meaning in our language, and pinpoints the right answer, instantly. It uses deep analytics to answer questions computers never could before, even the ones on Jeopardy!" Then a Jeopardy! clue is displayed: "Groucho quipped, 'One morning I shot' this 'in my pajamas.'"

Now, that's a provocative set of claims. Watson's performance in the tournament (despite a few howlers along the way) clearly demonstrates that it is very skilled in particular types of question-answering, and I have no doubt it could handle that Groucho clue with aplomb. But does that mean that Watson "understands" the "nuance, slang and metaphor" of natural language? That it "uncovers meaning in our language"? Depends what you mean by "meaning," and how you understand "understanding."

Elsewhere, Ferrucci has been more circumspect about Watson's level of "understanding." In an interview with IBM's own magazine ForwardView, he said, "For a computer, there is no connection from words to human experience and human cognition. The words are just symbols to the computer. How does it know what they really mean?" In other words, for all of the impressive NLP programming that has gone into Watson, the computer is unable to penetrate the semantics of language, or comprehend how meanings of words are shot through with allusions to human culture and the experience of daily life.

Such a sober assessment doesn't jibe with popular perceptions of artificial intelligence, of course. We want our "smart computers" to engage with us linguistically like HAL did in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 -- well, except for the murderous rampage part. (Ferrucci and his team prefer to use a different pop-cultural point of reference: the original series of Star Trek, with its more benign on-board talking computer.) But let's remember how HAL was introduced, via a BBC interview watched by the spaceship crew in the film:

The sixth member of the Discovery crew was not concerned about the problems of hibernation. For he was the latest result in machine intelligence -- the HAL 9000 computer, which can reproduce, though some experts still prefer to use the word 'mimic,' most of the activities of the human brain, and with incalculably greater speed and reliability.

Is Watson, despite its limitations, nonetheless a precursor to a HAL-esque machine that can "mimic" natural language, if not "reproduce" it? Baby steps, baby steps. First we need a computer that doesn't give Toronto as an answer to a clue about "U.S. Cities," as Watson memorably did for Final Jeopardy in the first game. And we'd also want it to know that the "anatomical oddity" of Olympian gymnast George Eyser was not his leg, but his missing leg.

Those were two isolated gaffes in a pretty clean run by Watson against his human foes, but they'll certainly be remembered at IBM. For proof, see Stephen Baker's book Final Jeopardy, an engaging inside look at the Watson project, culminating with the Jeopardy! showdown in the final chapter. (In a shrewd marketing move, the book was available electronically without its final chapter before the match, and then the ending was given to readers as an update immediately after the conclusion of the tournament.) Baker writes:

As this question-answering technology expands from its quiz show roots into the rest of our lives, engineers at IBM and elsewhere must sharpen its understanding of contextual language. Smarter machines will not call Toronto a U.S. city, and they will recognize the word "missing" as the salient fact in any discussion of George Eyser's leg. Watson represents merely a step in the development of smart machines. Its answering prowess, so formidable on a winter afternoon in 2011, will no doubt seem quaint in a surprisingly short time.

Baker's undoubtedly right about that, but we're still dealing with the limited task of question-answering, not anything even vaguely approaching full-fledged comprehension of natural language, with all of its "nuance, slang and metaphor." If Watson had chuckled at that "computer overlords" jab, then I'd be a little worried.

Watson again

IBM's "Watson" on Jeopardy this Fall

And finally, here is an essay by Ken Jennings...

"My Puny Human Brain"

Jeopardy! genius Ken Jennings on what it's like to play against a supercomputer.

by

Ken Jennings

February 16th, 2011

Slate

When I was selected as one of the two human players to be pitted against IBM's "Watson" supercomputer in a special man-vs.-machine Jeopardy! exhibition match, I felt honored, even heroic. I envisioned myself as the Great Carbon-Based Hope against a new generation of thinking machines—which, if Hollywood is to believed, will inevitably run amok, build unstoppable robot shells, and destroy us all. But at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Lab, an Eero Saarinen-designed fortress in the snowy wilds of New York's Westchester County, where the shows taped last month, I wasn't the hero at all. I was the villain.

This was to be an away game for humanity, I realized as I walked onto the slightly-smaller-than-regulation Jeopardy! set that had been mocked up in the building's main auditorium. In the middle of the floor was a huge image of Watson's on-camera avatar, a glowing blue ball crisscrossed by "threads" of thought—42 threads, to be precise, an in-joke for Douglas Adams fans. The stands were full of hopeful IBM programmers and executives, whispering excitedly and pumping their fists every time their digital darling nailed a question. A Watson loss would be invigorating for Luddites and computer-phobes everywhere, but bad news for IBM shareholders.

The IBM team had every reason to be hopeful. Watson seems to represent a giant leap forward in the field of natural-language processing—the ability to understand and respond to everyday English, the way Ask Jeeves did (with uneven results) in the dot-com boom. Jeopardy! clues cover an open domain of human knowledge—every subject imaginable—and are full of booby traps for computers: puns, slang, wordplay, oblique allusions. But in just a few years, Watson has learned—yes, it learns—to deal with some of the myriad complexities of English. When it sees the word "Blondie," it's very good at figuring out whether Jeopardy! means the cookie, the comic strip, or the new-wave band.

I expected Watson's bag of cognitive tricks to be fairly shallow, but I felt an uneasy sense of familiarity as its programmers briefed us before the big match: The computer's techniques for unraveling Jeopardy! clues sounded just like mine. That machine zeroes in on key words in a clue, then combs its memory (in Watson's case, a 15-terabyte data bank of human knowledge) for clusters of associations with those words. It rigorously checks the top hits against all the contextual information it can muster: the category name; the kind of answer being sought; the time, place, and gender hinted at in the clue; and so on. And when it feels "sure" enough, it decides to buzz. This is all an instant, intuitive process for a human Jeopardy! player, but I felt convinced that under the hood my brain was doing more or less the same thing.

Indeed, playing against Watson turned out to be a lot like any other Jeopardy! game, though out of the corner of my eye I could see that the middle player had a plasma screen for a face. Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman. But unlike us, Watson cannot be intimidated. It never gets cocky or discouraged. It plays its game coldly, implacably, always offering a perfectly timed buzz when it's confident about an answer. Jeopardy! devotees know that buzzer skill is crucial—games between humans are more often won by the fastest thumb than the fastest brain. This advantage is only magnified when one of the "thumbs" is an electromagnetic solenoid trigged by a microsecond-precise jolt of current. I knew it would take some lucky breaks to keep up with the computer, since it couldn't be beaten on speed.

During my 2004 Jeopardy! streak, I was accustomed to mowing down players already demoralized at having to play a long-standing winner like me. But against Watson I felt like the underdog, and as a result I started out too aggressively, blowing high-dollar-value questions on the decade in which the first crossword puzzle appeared (the 1910s) and the handicap of Olympic gymnast George Eyser (he was missing his left leg). At the end of the first game, Watson had what seemed like an insurmountable lead of more than $30,000. I tried to keep my chin up, but in the back of mind, I was already thinking about a possible consolation prize: a second-place finish ahead of the show's other human contestant and my quiz-show archrival, undefeated Jeopardy! phenom Brad Rutter.

In the final round, I made up ground against Watson by finding the first "Daily Double" clue, and all three of us began furiously hunting for the second one, which we knew was my only hope for catching Watson. (Daily Doubles aren't distributed randomly across the board; as Watson well knows, they're more likely to be in some places than others.) By process of elimination, I became convinced it was hiding in the "Legal E's" category, and, given a 50-50 chance between two clues, chose the $1200 one. No dice. Watson took control of the board and chose "Legal E's" for $1600. There was the Daily Double. Game over for humanity.

IBM has bragged to the media that Watson's question-answering skills are good for more than annoying Alex Trebek. The company sees a future in which fields like medical diagnosis, business analytics, and tech support are automated by question-answering software like Watson. Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the 20th century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of "thinking" machines. "Quiz show contestant" may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I'm sure it won't be the last.

But there's no shame in losing to silicon, I thought to myself as I greeted the (suddenly friendlier) team of IBM engineers after the match. After all, I don't have 2,880 processor cores and 15 terabytes of reference works at my disposal—nor can I buzz in with perfect timing whenever I know an answer. My puny human brain, just a few bucks worth of water, salts, and proteins, hung in there just fine against a jillion-dollar supercomputer.

"Watching you on Jeopardy! is what inspired the whole project," one IBM engineer told me, consolingly. "And we looked at your games over and over, your style of play. There's a lot of you in Watson." I understood then why the engineers wanted to beat me so badly: To them, I wasn't the good guy, playing for the human race. That was Watson's role, as a symbol and product of human innovation and ingenuity. So my defeat at the hands of a machine has a happy ending, after all. At least until the whole system becomes sentient and figures out the nuclear launch codes. But I figure that's years away.

[Ken Jennings won 74 consecutive games of Jeopardy! in 2004. He is the author of Brainiac, Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac, and the forthcoming Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks.]

Chevron's Ecuador problem

"Chevron's Ecuador problem: Oil giant vows to fight $9 billion environmental ruling"

Chevron and the plaintiffs have both vowed to appeal the Ecuadorean court ruling, with the US oil company calling it 'illegitimate and unenforceable' and the plaintiffs saying the damages award is far too little.

By

Irene Caselli

February 15th, 2011

The Christian Science Monitor

Chevron is vowing to fight Monday's ruling by a court in the Ecuadorean jungle town of Lago Agrio. The ruling fines the oil giant $9 billion for environmental damages caused in the Amazon region in the 1970s and 1980s.

"The Ecuadorean court's judgment is illegitimate and unenforceable," said Chevron, in a press release Monday. "It is the product of fraud and is contrary to the legitimate scientific evidence."

Watched closely by environmentalists around the world, the ruling is the largest damages award ever handed down in an environmental case – exceeding the initial $5 billion award against ExxonMobil for the 1989 Alaska oil spill – and could set a precedent for future lawsuits against oil companies. But both sides said they will appeal, meaning that the long-awaited ruling is only one more twist in a 17-year legal drama worthy of a Hollywood film filled with secret recordings, private investigators, diary excerpts, and Amazonian tribes who claim their fishing grounds were decimated.

The plaintiffs, who represent approximately 30,000 residents of Ecuador's Amazon region, claimed that US oil company Texaco (owned since 2001 by Chevron) knowingly polluted an estimated 1,700 square miles of rain forest, creating health problems such as cancer and birth defects. They argued that Texaco dumped 18 billion gallons of toxic waste water and spilled 17 million gallons of crude oil in the Lago Agrio area, in northeast Ecuador.

But Chevron argued that Texaco, which operated around Lago Agrio from 1964 to 1990, complied with Ecuadorean law and already spent $40 million cleaning up any damage in the 1990s. The defense argued that the responsibility falls entirely on Petroecuador, the state-owned oil company that took over Texaco's Ecuador operations in the 1990s.
Award is big, but plaintiffs say not big enough

The initial lawsuit against Texaco was filed in 1993 in New York City, but the case was later moved to Lago Agrio. According to Judge Nicolás Zambrano's 188-page ruling issued Monday, Chevron must pay $8.6 billion, plus 10 percent of the damages (about $860 million), to the Amazon Defense Coalition, the group formed to represent the plaintiffs.

Moreover, if Chevron fails to publicly apologize within 15 days, the ruling says that the damages amount will be doubled to more than $17 billion.

Divided between the 30,000 residents said to be affected, the damages would correspond to about $280,000 per person – far short of the total $27 billion initially recommended by a court-appointed expert, say the plaintiffs. More recent assessments made by their lawyers brought the damages up to $113 billion.

“This is an important step, but we're going to appeal this sentence because we think that the damages awarded are not enough,” says Pablo Fajardo, lead lawyer for the plaintiffs.
What comes next?

Since both parties have promised to appeal, it is unclear what exactly happens next. Also, a recent flurry of suits and counter-suits between the plaintiffs and Chevron have further complicated Monday's ruling. Both sides are backed by large legal firms in the United States.

On Feb. 8, a US federal judge gave Chevron temporary protection against the lawsuit. The following day, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ordered Ecuador to suspend enforcement of any judgment against Chevron pending adjudication.

These rulings came after a prominent US law firm that represents the plaintiffs on Feb. 7 filed a lawsuit in Washington accusing Chevron of mounting a “smear campaign.” That suit was in reaction to Chevron filing a lawsuit on Feb. 1 against the plaintiffs' lawyers in a court in New York, accusing them of engaging in an international racketeering and extortion conspiracy.

Chevron filed the lawsuit under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which has been used in the past to target mafia members. Most of the evidence provided by Chevron is gathered from outtakes of the documentary "Crude."
'Crude' documentary

In the 2009 documentary, plaintiffs' lawyer Steven Donziger appears as a unscrupulous negotiator – to such a degree that Chevron's legal team thought that by getting access to 600 hours of filming that never made it in the final version of the documentary, they could prove misconduct on the plaintiffs' side.

In one clip, Mr. Donziger is in a car on his way to see the Ecuadorean judge in charge of the case. “The only language I believe this judge is going to understand is one of pressure, intimidation, humiliation. And that's what we're doing today. We're going to let him know what time it is,” Donziger says in the film.

“This is something you would never do in the United States,” he says in another clip. “But Ecuador, you know, there's almost no rules here. And this is how the game is played, it's dirty.”

These outtakes alone should be proof of the plaintiffs' attempt to corrupt the court, says James Craig, a spokesperson for Chevron. “We have more than a smoking gun, we have a mountain of evidence,” he says in a telephone interview from Chevron's headquarters in San Ramon, Calif.

"Chevron intends to see that the perpetrators of this fraud are held accountable for their misconduct," reads a statement posted on Chevron's website yesterday.

Mr. Fajardo says Donziger's quotes are taken out of context. “These are jokes, they're not serious statements,” he says. “Chevron is trying to give them an evil meaning.”
'The real face of this case: people'

Chevron believes there is enough evidence to make any judgment illegitimate. It complains of government interference on the judiciary and of collusion between the plaintiffs and the court-appointed expert that fixed the sum for reparations at $27 billion.

The plaintiffs deny these accusations, and say that Chevron is just trying to muddy the waters to take attention away from the people who initiated this lawsuit.

Says Fajardo: “The real face of this case are people, indigenous people, women, children who are suffering – but Chevron doesn't want us to talk about that.”

South Korea's landmarks going

Is it all about real estate and money?

"The fading remnants of South Korea's traditional buildings"

Recent cases of arson highlight the issue of protection of South Korea's historic buildings – and the level of disconnect some see between many Koreans and their cultural heritage.

by

Bryan Kay

February 15th, 2011

The Christian Science Monitor

A symbolic gate at an ancient Buddhist temple in South Korea burned to the ground in December, robbing a country with a richly textured past of yet another slice of its cultural history. It was the latest blow to an already small number of historical buildings that culturalists say have been brutally ravaged throughout the past century by a combination of colonization, war, and rapid economic development.

The incident involving the destruction of a site more than 1,300 years old, comes after a series of arson attacks on traditional buildings in recent years. Those include Seoul’s iconic 600-year-old Namdaemun Gate, Seoul's Changgyeong Palace, a World Heritage site, and an 18th-century command post at the city of Suwon’s Hwasong Fortress. At the time of the incidents critics lambasted the lack of protection for the country’s historical structures against vandalism, some calling for stricter laws.

But it's not just crimes of arson, often carried out by angry individuals seeking to lash out at the government, that are threatening South Korea's cultural heritage. City governments have tended to replace traditional buildings with larger, more modern structures in a revitalization effort to keep pace with South Korea's rapid economic growth. The most visible example has been the plight of traditional wooden homes known in Korean as hanok – razed to make way for skyskraping apartment buildings.

For preservationists, such incidents strip the country of its uniquely Korean face. Some argue many Koreans have lost touch with their own traditions and culture in the face of the tumultuous 20th century on the Korean Peninsula.

Like the Chinese, some preservationists say, Koreans are coming to prefer shiny new buildings, which they perceive as offering a greater sense of comfort and convenience.

In 2009, the hanok neighborhood of Ikseon-dong in Seoul was the center of preservation efforts by city officials. But the moves to protect the buildings came up against an unlikely foe: the owners themselves. Some told local press they would prefer the hanok were razed and replaced with apartment buildings as long as they were provided with one of the new residences.

Park Kwang-hee of the Cultural Heritage Administration of Korea says the disappearance of hanok and what for some appears to be a growing indifference to cultural preservation within the country could just be linked to their perceived incompatibility with modern life. “Hanok are made of wood and there are great limits on the size or frame,” he explains. “Also, the materials to build hanok are not easy to find.”

Destruction in times of foreign occupation and war

Historians note Korea lost almost all of its indigenous buildings in three rough waves during the 20th century – up to 90 percent of its nonreligious architecture by some estimates.

First, the Japanese colonial occupation from 1910 to 1945 saw widespread cultural destruction. Perhaps the most significant of them was Gyeongbokgung, the centerpiece palace of the Joseon Dynasty that ruled Korea until Japan invaded and toppled the royal family. Most of the palace complex was destroyed and made way for the headquarters of the Japanese Governor-General, though efforts have been ongoing for more than 20 years to restore the site.

The fratricidal Korean War of 1950 to 1953 then wrought massive destruction, particularly on Seoul. Andrew Salmon, a historian, says most residences in Seoul were hanok at the close of the fighting, with the exception of those built during the 35 years of Japanese colonial rule.

“Due to the street fighting – particularly when US Marines captured it from North Korean forces in September 1951," he explains, "entire swaths of the city were obliterated, though some lucky districts were untouched."

And the rapid economic growth beginning in the late 1960s saw function and modernity supplant tradition, as represented by the emergence of the sprawling skyscrapers of Gangnam on the south side of the Han River that divides the modern city of Seoul. Before 1970 it was merely an expanse of mostly farmers' fields – until the Korean "economic miracle" outgrew the old heart of the capital.

“Because Koreans have been through many difficult times, including wars and chaotic periods, they could not concentrate wholly on the preservation of the traditional buildings,” says Lee Sung-suk, of the Hanok Cultural Center in Seoul. Because of such history he calls the shift toward modern apartments and skyscrapers “inevitable.”

From the US to China to Korea, instances of “cultural vandalism” occur almost everywhere. “The problem in Korea,” says Briton David Kilburn, a longtime Seoul resident and champion of hanok, “is that so many people no longer feel a strong relationship with their heritage or value it highly. This, in turn, leads to neglect, which inevitably becomes a pathway to decay and destruction.”

Artifacts of traditional daily life

Mr. Kilburn lives in a government-designated hanok neighborhood ostensibly protected by preservation laws. Until recently, the famous district, known as Bukchon, had 2,500 hanok, homes built out of wood and characterized by their traditional courtyards. Today the number even here – where tourists flock to take pictures of "traditional" South Korea, has fallen to around 800.

Though many Koreans express fondness for the products of their past, few fight for their survival, argues Kilburn. “The cultural heritage found in the daily life of ordinary people is largely overlooked. As a result, hanok and all the artifacts of daily life a century ago are becoming rarities.”

Kilburn insists the preservation policies for Bukchon do not work. "City officials routinely approve wholesale demolition in order to erect new structures," he proclaims on a website he operates to promote hanok preservation.

Another approach to preservation

“Given the historic importance of cultural heritage and public resources,” he says, “the convicted should be punished accordingly and thoroughly.”

Kim Do-kyung, a professor of architecture at Kangwon University, based in the northeast city of Chuncheon, believes the punishment for attacking sites of national significance needs to reflect the gravity of the crime committed.

A report last year in the China Daily cited a Beijing government official as saying a Chinese building will last on average about 30 years, compared with 74 years in the US and 132 years in Britain.

Still, Mr. Park of the Cultural Heritage Administration of Korea says he has hope, “As Korean society has become more mature and stable, many people have actually started to care a lot about their own culture.” For example, he says, nationally governed projects are planned to improve and broaden the spread of hanok. Preservation for temples could follow.

And a possible silver lining to high-profile vandalism and arson cases, says Park: “I think through these incidents people are becoming more aware of the preservation of traditional buildings.”