BEIRUT (Reuters) – The U.S. State Department criticized Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group on Monday for digging tunnels into Israel and stockpiling rockets, as Washington steps up efforts to isolate Tehran. In recent weeks, Israeli forces uncovered tunnels they said were dug by Hezbollah, and Lebanon complained about Israel’s construction of a barrier along disputed parts […]

this article does not necessarily represents the opinion of khazen.org by libyaobserver.ly —The Libyan Foreign Ministry of the Presidential Council has called for explanation by the Lebanese authorities for the desecration of the Libyan flag and the threats against Libyan delegation which was supposed to visit Beirut for the Arab Summit for Economic and Social […]

By Hannah Brockhaus Annaya, Lebanon, (CNA).– St. Charbel Makhlouf is known in Lebanon for the miraculous healings of those who visit his tomb to seek his intercession – both Christians and Muslims. “St. Charbel has no geographic or confessional limits. Nothing is impossible for [his intercession] and when people ask [for something], he answers,” Fr. […]

By Jonah Engel Bromwich and Alexandra Alter — nytimes.com — — In her 25 years of marriage to Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Bezos has been a loyal ambassador for Amazon, the company that made her and her husband the richest couple in the world. She was an integral part of its origin story, driving to Seattle in 1994 while Mr. Bezos sat in the passenger seat, working on the nascent company’s business plan. She was Amazon’s first accountant and was involved in its transformation from a small online bookseller to the e-commerce behemoth it is today, the second company in American history to be valued at over a trillion dollars. Ms. Bezos, 48, is a novelist. But Amazon has defined her public image almost wholly. The announcement this week that she and her husband would be getting a divorce may soon change that. A statement signed “Jeff & MacKenzie,” which was first posted to Mr. Bezos’s Twitter account, read: “After a period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends.” The couple, who have four children, wrote that they see “wonderful futures ahead, as parents, friends, partners in ventures and projects, and as individuals pursuing ventures and adventures.”

Over the last few decades, as Amazon grew, Ms. Bezos appeared with her husband at some high-profile events, including Vanity Fair’s Oscar parties and the Golden Globes; in 2012, she was a host of the Met Gala. (Amazon also underwrote the event.) But for the most part, Ms. Bezos has guarded her privacy, preferring to focus on writing and her children. She could not be reached for comment on this article. She has made infrequent forays into the public eye to promote her books and to defend her husband’s company. In 2013, she posted a scathing one-star review on Amazon of “The Everything Store,” a book about Amazon by Brad Stone, to say it was plagued by “numerous factual inaccuracies” and “full of techniques which stretch the boundaries of non-fiction.” (Mr. Stone is a veteran technology reporter. Michiko Kakutani, reviewing his book for The New York Times, said he told “this story of disruptive innovation with authority and verve, and lots of well-informed reporting.”) Little is known about Ms. Bezos, a private woman who may be awarded one of the largest divorce settlements to date. “The Book Worm” MacKenzie Tuttle, an aspiring novelist, met her husband at D. E. Shaw, a New York hedge fund where Mr. Bezos, a computer scientist by training, had become a senior vice president. She told Vogue that she took the position of administrative assistant to pay the bills while she worked on her novels, but she soon found herself enamored with the laugh of the man who worked in the next office over. As Ms. Bezos put it in a 2013 interview with Charlie Rose: “It was love at first listen.”

by physicsworld.com —A research collaboration headed up at the National University of Singapore (NUS) has successfully employed machine learning to investigate the cellular architecture of the human brain. The approach uses functional MRI (fMRI) data to automatically estimate brain parameters, enabling neuroscientists to infer the cellular properties of different brain regions without having to surgically […]

middleeastmonitor.com —Congratulations are in order for Nadine Labaki. It’s been announced that the Lebanese director’s Capharnaüm is up for another prestigious award. The politically-charged film, which already took home the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize, has just been nominated for the Best Film Not in the English Language at the 2019 BAFTA Awards, set to […]

by Donna-Abu-Nasr — bloomberg –– Lebanon’s caretaker economy minister said there are no plans to restructure debt after the finance minister was quoted as saying the move was being studied. “There’s definitely no restructuring for debt,” Raed Khoury said Thursday in a phone interview. “Bondholders and depositors are extremely safe.” Lebanese dollar bonds due 2028 plummeted after […]

by aawsat.com — Lebanese parliament Speaker Nabih Berri proposed on Wednesday the postponement of the upcoming Arab League economic summit in Beirut later this month because of Lebanon’s ongoing failure to form a new government. Berri also asserted “again the necessity of having Syria participate in such a summit”, lawmakers from his parliamentary bloc quoted […]

However, economic problems are also linked with the country’s electricity quality, for Lebanon stands as the “world’s fourth-worst quality of electricity”, as a fellow associate from the “Chatham House”, Nadim Shehadi, said: “Electricity in Lebanon is just more expensive, but everyone has 24-hour electricity if they can afford it”. “If you measure electricity supply by state provision then it’s the worst in the world, but if you measure it by what’s available to people, it’s not so bad. There are sometimes indicators that have to take into account the fact that Lebanon is a mixture of private sector, illegal activity and government sector, and sometimes illegal activity compensates for the government sector.”

by Terence Mills,  forbes.com — The singularity is near, or maybe we’re already in it. Whatever the case is, machine learning and big data will have a tremendous influence on our society. The machine minds are coming online, and you had better learn to adapt if you want to succeed. But what are big data and machine learning? Keep reading to find out.

Big Data And Machine Learning

Computers have certain capacities. They have a memory to store information. They have computational power, with some machines performing more “flops” per second than others. What happens when these machines face such a large amount of data that traditional techniques of analysis start to fail? That’s the world of big data, and it’s a world we’re living in now.

The Last Polymath

Thomas Young was a physicist who lived from 1773-1829 in London. According to Andrew Robinson in his book The Last Man Who Knew Everything, Young was the world’s last true polymath. You might be a smart person, but we know in our modern world that you have to be a specialist to survive. No one is a jack-of-all-trades anymore.The world has become too complex for humans to even try to know everything. That’s what big data is: It’s the realization that there exist piles of data where traditional human methods of analysis fail. The world is too complicated for the human mind to make sense of every part of it. This presents a serious challenge and a tremendous opportunity for enterprising people who can apply automate techniques to help solve problems. A simple example is the stock market. You can look at all sorts of information about the stock market, and once in a while you might come up with a good trade, but you can’t possibly keep up with computerized trading platforms that execute thousands of trades per second. It’s just too much information for your mind to process. You need a computerized solution to take in all the information that is relevant to the problem.

Why Is Machine Learning Important?