Gordian Knots

The Personality Forge AI- Artificial Intelligence Chat Bots: “The Personality Forge, the world’s first community of living people and artificial intelligence entities called bots. Come on in, and chat with bots and botmasters, then create your own artificial intelligence personality, and turn it loose to chat with both real people and other chat bots. Here you’ll find thousands of AI personalities, including bartenders, college students, flirts, rebels, adventurers, fairies, gods, aliens, reconstructions of real people, cartoon characters, and even an AI hamster.

All of these chat bots form emotional relationships with and memories about both people and other bots. Personality Forge bots are pushing the frontiers of artificial intelligence (AI) by incorporating memories and emotions into their makeup. True language comprehension is in constant development, as is a customizable Flash interface. Transcripts of every bot’s conversations are kept so you can read what your bot has said, and see their emotional relationships with other people and other bots. See if you can tell who is real! Then discuss your successes and failures in our forums. “

Biomes are defined as ‘the world’s major communities, classified according to the predominant vegetation and characterized by adaptations of organisms to that particular environment’

Biomes are classified in various ways.

Aquatic

Deserts

Forests

Grasslands

Tundra

These exhibits explore the ancestor/descendant relationships which connect all organisms, past and present.

The importance of biomes cannot be overestimated. Biomes have changed and moved many times during the history of life on Earth. More recently, human activities have drastically altered these communities. Thus, conservation and preservation of biomes should be a major concern to all.

How Mutual Fund Managers Exploit Opportunities to Maximize Fees

How can anyone serve two masters? It’s hard enough when the two want the same thing. But when the masters’ interests conflict, the servant’s position is untenable.

That’s the view of the mutual fund industry’s harshest critics. Fund managers, they say, cannot properly serve fund investors when they must also serve their own bosses, the management companies’ owners, public or private. Fund company owners make bigger profits when investors are charged high fees; investors get higher returns when fees are low.

“The question is: whom are they serving?” asks Wharton management professor Nicolaj Siggelkow. “Which boss are they serving more, and what influences this balance?”

Industry defenders have long rejected the critics’ charges, arguing that fund-company owners do best when their funds attract as many investors as possible. The need to compete puts a natural brake on the impulse to maximize fees, they contend.

Who’s right? New research by Siggelkow, reported in a paper titled, Caught Between Two Principals, supports the industry’s critics. After examining thousands of funds, Siggelkow concluded that fund managers do exploit opportunities to maximize fees, often using techniques that make fees virtually invisible to investors.

Legally, a fund is a corporation with a board of directors charged with looking after investors’ interests and hiring a firm to manage the fund. In practice, it is the management company that sets a fund up, appoints itself manager and selects the directors. Some management companies are publicly traded, others are held privately. The management company’s profits come from fees charged investors – primarily the “expense ratio” expressed as a percentage of assets and approved by the directors.

According to Siggelkow, securities regulations allow fund companies to shift research and distribution expenses from themselves to the fund investors. “I test whether fund providers take advantage of these opportunities … choose to maximize profits for their owners, rather than maximize the returns for their fund shareholders,” Siggelkow writes. “Moreover, I test whether better informed fund shareholders and fund shareholders with more buyer power, such as institutional investors, are able to reduce the ability for fund providers to shift expenses.”

“One out of every eight Americans now lives below the poverty line, as the percentage of the US population living in poverty rose for the third consecutive year in 2003, the US Census Bureau reported Thursday.

The Bureau said in its annual poverty report that the number of Americans living in poverty last year increased by 1.3 million to 35.8 million, accounting for about 12.5 percent of the nation’s population, 0.4 percentage points more than the previous year. The rise is particularly noticeable among children, with 12.9 million living in poverty last year, or 17.6 percent of the under-18 population. That represented an increase of about 800,000 from 2002, when 16.7 percent of children lived in poverty.

The poverty line varies according to the size of household. According to the Census Bureau, the threshold for a family of four was 18,810 US dollars, for a family of two it was 12,015 dollars. The median household income, when adjusted for inflation, remained basically flat last year at 43,318 dollars.

Meanwhile, nearly 45 million people lacked health insurance –or 15.6 percent of the population — up from 43.5 million in 2002,or 15.2 percent of the population, the Bureau said.

The number of those who lacked health insurance also rose for three consecutive years.

The Census Bureau normally releases these reports in late September. Some Democrats have claimed this year’s early release is an attempt by the Bush administration to play down the negative effect of the report in an election year.”