prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: How many people attend the 233rd ACS national meeting?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 1: The major actions taken by the board of directors and council during the national meeting in Chicago were reported in C&EN, April 30 (page 32) 
The Society Committee on Budget & Finance met on Saturday, March 24, to review the society's 2006 financial performance  The society ended 2006 with a net contribution from operations of $12 2 million, on revenues of $424 0 million and expenses of $411 8 million  This was $7 8 million favorable to the approved budget 
After including the results of the Member Insurance Program and new ventures, the society's overall net contribution for 2006 was $11 5 million, which was $7 4 million favorable to the approved budget  The favorable variance was primarily attributable to higher than budgeted electronic services revenue and investment income, as well as expense savings from lower than budgeted health care costs and reduced IT spending  In addition, the society ended the year in compliance with the board-established financial guidelines 
The Society Committee on Education (SOCED) received an update from President Catherine Hunt on the thematic programming featured in Chicago focusing on the sustainability of energy, food, and water  President-Elect Bruce Bursten solicited input from the committee pertaining to the central role of education in his agenda  SOCED received a presentation from the Membership Affairs Committee on its white paper on membership requirements 
Committee members strongly support the proposal to include undergraduates as members of the society, but they requested that financial arrangements be clearly spelled out in the petition to ensure that the highly successful Student Affiliates program remains intact  The committee discussed the Education Division programs that were reviewed in 2006 and those that will be reviewed in 2007, under the auspices of the Program Review Advisory Group  SOCED received an update from the Committee on Professional Training regarding the draft ACS guidelines for approval of bachelor's degree programs in chemistry 
Committee members discussed the report prepared by the Globalization Task Force, focusing on those sections relevant to education  The committee suggested initiatives related to the new ACS strategic plan, including a potential program that would engage retired chemists in the K-12 classroom  SOCED created a task force to consider the role of online, or "virtual," simulations in the chemistry laboratory, recognizing the value of online/virtual experiences as a supplement to, but not a replacement for, hands-on laboratory experiments 
The committee ratified two interim actions taken since the Dec  3, 2006, meeting: to remove the financial restriction of the ACS Petroleum Research Fund (ACS PRF) Supplement for Underrepresented Minority Research Programs (SUMR) and to contact nominators whose nominations for the Volunteer Service Award had expired and to invite them to reactivate their nomination packet for the 2008 Volunteer Service Award 
Acting under delegated authority, the committee voted to accept the recommendations of the ACS Petroleum Research Fund Advisory Board (February 2007 meeting) for funding grants totaling $5 2 million; voted to recommend to the board a screened list of six nominees (due to a two-way tie for fifth place) for the 2008 Priestley Medal; voted to recommend to the board a screened list of five nominees for the 2008 Award for Volunteer Service to ACS; on the recommendation of the ACS Committee on Frasch Foundation Grants, voted to recommend to the board that it recommend to the trustee (US Trust) of the Frasch Foundation 12 grants for research in agricultural chemistry for the period of 2007–12; voted to recommend to the ACS Board of Directors that a new national award be established, the "ACS Award for Affordable Green Chemistry," sponsored by Rohm and Haas; and voted to recommend to the ACS Board of Directors that a new endowment be established, the "Affordable Green Chemistry Endowment Fund," to support the award 
The committee also reviewed the final report from the Special Board Task Force on the Review of the ACS National Awards Program, chaired by Ronald Breslow; established a Canvassing & Selection Subcommittee; and reviewed a list of external awards for which ACS may want to nominate candidates  The committee agreed to include the list of significant external awards in the awards locator database that is being developed 
The committee was updated on efforts to reconcile ACS's technical divisions' desires to leverage national meeting content using the Internet with our journal editors' concerns about prior publication issues  A conference call on this issue was scheduled for April 21, 2007 
The committee received a presentation on the recent actions of the ACS Board of Directors International Strategy Group (ISG)  The group's charge is to develop recommendations for a short- and long-term international strategy for the society 
The committee was updated on the status of the activities of the Board Oversight Group on Leadership Development (BOG)  Potential solutions for the unexpectedly high cost of facilitator training and transitioning from the current Leaders Conference format to the newly designed curriculum were presented to the committee 
The committee reviewed plans for conducting the 2007 Membership Satisfaction Survey  Preliminary results are expected in May or June with a final report to be delivered to the board at the 2007 Boston national meeting 
The committee received a briefing on the status of the MORE Project: Multidisciplinary Opportunities though Resource Enhancement  Twenty-eight proposals were received, and a decision on which proposals to support will be made in early May 
The chair led a discussion on draft 2007 committee goals, and committee members offered several suggestions related to successfully meeting them  One suggestion was to modify a communications goal to make it more completely reflect the duties of the committee outlined in the board regulations  The chair and committee members will examine the suggestion and revisit the question after the board retreat where board committee duties will be examined 
ACS President Hunt discussed her 2007-08 Presidential Task Force on Enhancing Science & Technology, which is charged with developing advocacy best practices that can enhance ACS's attainment of its public policy priorities  The task force is composed of a diverse set of ACS members as well as former U S  Representative and chairman of the House Science Committee, Sherwood Boehlert, who will cochair the task force 
• Results of the 2007 Public Policy Priorities Survey, which resulted in a four-tiered ranking of ACS's 2007 public policies  The ranking will help focus staff resources in conducting outreach and advocacy on behalf of ACS members 
• The hiring of a communications consulting firm for 2007 to assist ACS in implementing the initial phase of the ACS Strategic Communications Plan 
• Creation of a pilot ACS state government affairs advocacy program  Committee members agreed to the creation of a pilot, and staff will propose an initial list of states, policy focus, and a budget to carry out the program 
The committee met in executive session on March 23 and in open session jointly with the Joint Board-Council Committee on Publications and the Division of Chemical Information on March 26 
The committee heard from Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) management on a range of issues including a report on continuing database building efforts, product enhancements, and CAS's centennial celebration plans 
The Committee on Chemical Safety (CCS) provides advice on the handling of chemicals and seeks to ensure safe facilities, designs, and operations by calling attention to potential hazards and stimulating education in safe practices 
CCS has several publications (many downloadable), including the flagship publication, "Safety in Academic Chemistry Labs" (SACL)  Work has recently started on the translation of SACL into Arabic  This is in addition to the online Spanish version of SACL  Also online are the "Student Lab Code of Conduct for Secondary Science Programs" and a security vulnerability analysis checklist  A K-12 restricted hazardous substances list is under development  The third edition of the "Chemical Safety Manual for Small Businesses" will be ready soon 
The committee's Task Force on Laboratory Environment, Health & Safety is working on a new edition of "Laboratory Waste Management " Task force members also commented on the recent Environmental Protection Agency Proposed Rule for Hazardous Waste in Academic Laboratories  Our Video Safety Resources Task Force is developing video resources to be distributed over the Web 
CCS has been involved in collaborations for the updating of publications like "Prudent Practices in the Laboratory" and "ACS Guidelines for the Teaching of High School Chemistry " Along with other ACS units, CCS is exploring participating in the EPA's School Chemicals Cleanout Campaign 
The Committee on Chemists with Disabilities (CWD) met at the 233rd ACS national meeting, Chicago, on Monday, March 26  Judy Summers-Gates reported on the Joint Subcommittee on Diversity meeting  This subcommittee is made up of representatives of the five committees that support people in chemistry (as opposed to a category of the profession): CWD, Committee on Minority Affairs, Committee on Technician Affairs, Women Chemists Committee, and Younger Chemists Committee, and its goal is to develop ways to coordinate the efforts of the five groups 
The CWD Ambassador Program that was announced at CWD's 25th anniversary celebration at the Washington, D C , meeting was discussed  Zelda Wasserman reported on the status of the letter from CWD to the ACS Board regarding captioning of ACS video materials  Janelle Kasper-Wolf, of ACS staff, discussed adding new questions to the ACS annual employment salary survey to obtain information for the committee 
At the Chicago national meeting, the Committee on Community Activities (CCA) partnered with the ACS Education Division and the Office of the President to host "Chemistry In Action—It's Easy Being Green" at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum on Saturday, March 24  More than 250 children participated in the hands-on activities focused on recycling  ACS President Hunt presented a Salutes to Excellence plaque to the museum for its dedication to community outreach 
The Chemists Celebrate Earth Day celebration occurred in 120 local sections with 138 coordinators leading the efforts within their communities  This represents an increase of more than 30% in local section and coordinator participation from 2006 
CCA was featured in C&EN's April 16th issue on page 53  A shortcut to CCA's homepage was created: chemistry org/committees/cca html 
During the Boston national meeting, CCA and the Office of Community Activities will celebrate National Chemistry Week's 20th Anniversary and its theme, "The Many Faces of Chemistry " A special outreach event is being planned for Sunday, Aug  19  Hands-on activities will focus on health and wellness 
The Committee on Corporation Associates (CCA) advises and influences ACS to ensure that its products and services are of value to industrial members and their companies  CCA vice chair, Roslyn White (SC Johnson), provided an overview of recent interactions between Corporation Associates and the U K -based Society of Chemical Industry (SCI) 
CCA gave feedback to a recommendations report from the ACS Board Committee on Professional & Member Relations Task Force on Globalization  Presentations were also received from the ACS Green Chemistry Institute and SCI 
Staff reported on the Department of Industry Member Programs' activities since the San Francisco meeting  The report covered the Regional Industrial Innovation Awards, the World Congress on Industrial Biotechnology, the Analytical Pavilion sponsored by C&EN, and the ACS/Pharma Leaders Meeting 
The Awards/Finance & Grants Subcommittee reported that CCA received two funding proposals that total $7,500  Funding was provided to the following: The Committee on Economic & Professional Affairs at $3,000 for the Chicago symposium on "Benefits Trends for the Chemical Workforce" and the Office of Graduate Education and the Department of Career Development & Management at $4,500 for a workshop on "Preparing for Life after Graduate School," to be held in conjunction with the 39th Central Regional Meeting 
The subcommittee also requested that ACS staff provide CCA with an official annual statement of Corporation Associates' financial reserves as of Jan  1 of each year 
The Programs Subcommittee reported on planned programming activities in 2007 and beyond between CCA and SCI  The subcommittee gave an update on a Boston symposium cosponsored by Corporation Associates and the Medicinal Chemistry Division featuring past ACS Heroes of Chemistry from the pharmaceutical industry 
By request of the subcommittee, representatives from Chemical Abstracts Service gave an overview on AnaVist—a tool with potential applications for CCA's efforts to provide member companies with industry-relevant information and reports  The subcommittee also requested that CCA earmark approximately $20,000 of Corporation Associates funds in 2008 for its activities 
The Educational Outreach Subcommittee reported on its decision to collaborate with the Graduate Student Symposium Programming Committee of the Chemical Education Division on a graduate student industry roundtable program in Boston 
The subcommittee requested $5,000 in support of this effort  The subcommittee also discussed a request for corporate executive support of an American Association of Physics Teachers initiative to promote undergraduate research 
The Committee on Environmental Improvement (CEI) continues to be focused on the sustainability of the chemical enterprise  In Chicago, the committee introduced a multiyear effort to make ACS meetings more sustainable  This effort is designed to take advantage of the large size and diverse programs of the society to lead in the sustainability arena by "walking the talk "
The committee held a dialogue with representatives of the U S  Environmental Protection Agency who are trying to "green" federal conferences and work with the travel and tourism industry to change practices and shrink the environmental footprint of meetings  The committee also used advertising and student volunteers to engage individual meeting participants in a campaign to increase recycling by asking "Are you sustainable?" Moving forward, CEI looks forward to working closely with the Committee on Meetings & Expositions to advance this agenda 
CEI was also pleased to participate in the meeting theme on sustainability through the ACS presidential programming  CEI cohosted the Monday presidential luncheon to discuss sustainability issues with the Committee on Science and is leading the follow-up to that luncheon, which will include recommendations on advancing sustainability in the three focal areas of the meeting—energy, food, and water 
The committee also continued its dialogue with the Committee on Corporation Associates about a collaborative workshop  This activity, tentatively slated for the New Orleans meeting, will seek additional insights from chemical and allied products companies about public policy barriers that limit adoption of more sustainable products and practices as well as policy incentives that would lead to increased sustainability in the chemical enterprise 
At its Chicago meeting, the committee welcomed the president of the Jordanian Chemical Society and the past-president of the Arab Union of Chemists 
The committee was briefed on Pittcon 2007, where, with financial support from the Society of Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh, ACS coordinated participation of a scientific delegation from Adriatic nations 
The committee heard reports on the 2007 Frontiers of Chemical Science III: Research & Education in the Middle East meeting; the 2007 Transatlantic Frontiers of Chemistry meeting, which was jointly sponsored by ACS, the German Chemical Society, and the Royal Society of Chemistry; planned workshops to engage U S  and Chinese early-career scientists in chemical biology, supramolecular, and new materials chemistry; and ACS Discovery Corps U S /Brazil Research Collaboration Project in Biomass Conversion to Biofuels, Biomaterials & Chemicals 
The committee discussed Latin American engagement opportunities created through Puerto Rico's involvement in three key chemical science events there: the 2009 ACS Southeast Regional Meeting, the 2008 Federation of Latin American Chemical Associations (FLAQ) meeting, and the proposed IUPAC 2011 Congress & General Assembly 
The committee heard reports on letter-writing efforts by the ACS president to government officials in Libya and Mexico expressing concerns about challenges to the scientific freedom and human rights of scientists there 
The Committee on Minority Affairs (CMA) approved new vision, mission, and values statements at the Chicago national meeting  The mission of CMA is to increase the participation of minority chemical scientists and influence policy on behalf of minorities in ACS and the chemical enterprise 
An aggressive new strategic plan was approved by CMA to guide its activities over the next three years  By the end of 2009, CMA will increase the number of ACS Scholars that graduate to 100 per year, add 100 new minorities to leadership positions in ACS, engage in several collaborations, and increase the number of minority members of ACS by 5,000  CMA will focus initially on increasing minorities in ACS leadership  In working toward this goal, CMA began work on two new leadership-development programs for minority chemists 
CMA continues to support the work of the Joint Subcommittee on Diversity (JSD) in developing programs, products, and services to ensure full participation of all members in ACS  In Chicago, JSD premiered a diversity booth at the meeting exposition hall and cosponsored symposia 
The Committee on Patents & Related Matters (CPRM) discussed proposed legislative and regulatory changes to the U S  patent system as well as open-access legislation and the potential effects such matters might have on industry and academia as well as on ACS 
CPRM also continued its work on several new educational tools to assist and inform members on patent issues and other intellectual property matters important to a successful career in the chemical enterprise  Many of these tools are now available on the committee's expanded website, membership acs org/C/CPRM/ 
At the March 2007 meeting, the Committee on Professional Training (CPT) reviewed 42 new and additional information reports from ACS-approved chemistry programs  CPT held conferences with four schools seeking approval, discussed three updates and five site visit reports, and approved three new schools  The total number of ACS-approved chemistry programs is now 642 
The committee released the full draft of the ACS guidelines for review and comment  Copies of the draft were distributed to the department chairs at all ACS-approved schools, the chairs of all ACS committees, and the chairs of all ACS technical divisions 
Several CPT members met with the ACS technical divisions during the Chicago meeting to present an overview of the draft and obtain feedback  The draft guidelines document is available on the CPT website, and the committee invites any comments to be sent to cpt@acs org 
In other business, the committee continued development of the two workshops with minority-serving institutions that will be held in 2007  The committee reviewed the editorial policies for the 2007 edition of the ACS Directory of Graduate Research, which is using a new protocol for retrieving research publication titles in an effort to improve the accuracy of the directory 
C&EN finished 2006 with an exceptionally strong editorial package  The first months of 2007 are proving to be equally successful in fulfilling the magazine's mission of keeping its readers informed  On the advertising side, revenues in 2006 increased for the second year in a row, and the early months of 2007 show continuing positive signs  The most significant editorial achievement was the successful launch of the redesign of the print edition of C&EN with the Oct  16, 2006, issue 
The Subcommittee on Copyright has successfully updated the Copyright Module on the ACS Publications website  The subcommittee is looking into the possibility of conducting copyright programs at future ACS national and regional meetings 
The final monitoring reports for Chemistry of Materials, Journal of Agricultural & Food Chemistry, and Molecular Pharmaceutics were presented and accepted by the committee  Journal of Chemical Information & Modeling, Organic Letters, Accounts of Chemical Research, and the Journal of Chemical Theory & Computation will be monitored next 
3  Examining the scientific basis of public policies related to the chemical sciences and making recommendations to the appropriate ACS units 
In the first of these areas, ComSci partnered with President Hunt and the Committee on Environmental Improvement in planning and hosting a sustainability luncheon that featured roundtable discussions centering on a key sustainability question  At the Boston national meeting, ComSci will deliver a full-day program on the subject of "Partnerships in Innovation & Competitiveness "
Regarding the second thrust, ComSci will present two programs in Boston: a box lunch that will feature two speakers taking opposing sides on the subject of "Genetic Screening & Diagnostic Testing: Do You Really Want to Know?" and a symposium titled "Creating & Sustaining International Research Collaborations "
In support of the last thrust, ComSci is planning two events for 2008: "Balancing Security & Openness" will gather data to determine if the recent emphasis on security is hindering scientific progress and "Transitioning Chemical Science to Commercially Successful Products "
The Women Chemists Committee (WCC) hosted more than 70 attendees at its open meeting recently in Chicago, where representatives from Iota Sigma Pi, Women in Science & Engineering, the Association of Women in Science, and the Chicago local section helped WCC celebrate the committee's 80th anniversary 
The Women in Industry Breakfast was also highly successful with a new format of speed networking  More than 100 participants had the opportunity to practice their elevator speeches and make several professional connections  A related workshop will be offered by WCC in Boston 
In Chicago, WCC sponsored two symposia, "Women Achieving Success: The ACS as a Platform in Leadership Development" in honor of Madeleine Joullié's 80th birthday and the ACS Award for Encouraging Women into Careers in the Chemical Sciences: Symposium in Honor of Bojan H  Jennings 
More than 225 ACS meeting attendees were present for the biannual WCC Luncheon and heard the keynote speaker Laura Kiessling, 2007 Francis P  Garvan-John Olin Medal Recipient  Twelve women presented their research at this meeting with funding by the WCC/Eli Lilly Travel Grant Award  WCC members also spent time educating expo attendees on programs offered by the ACS Office of Diversity Programs at its new booth 
In Chicago, the Younger Chemists Committee (YCC) welcomed its new committee members with an information session centered on YCC's charter as well as on its strategic plan: to make ACS relevant to younger chemists, to involve younger chemists in all levels of the society, and to integrate younger chemists into the profession 
In January, YCC again hosted a Leadership Development Workshop during the ACS Leaders Conference  There were more than 80 applications for the 15 awards, which covered travel and registration for the conference  YCC plans to again fund the travel awards and provide leadership training for young chemists in 2008  YCC also solicited applications and selected a new graduate student representative on the Graduate Education Advisory Board 
During the Chicago meeting, YCC programs included "Starting a Successful Research Program at a Predominantly Undergraduate Institution," "Career Experiences at the Interface of Chemistry & Biology," and "Chemistry Pedagogy 101 "
In addition to these programs, YCC cosponsored five programs with various committees and divisions  YCC continues to reach out to ACS committees and divisions and has initiated liaisonships with 11 technical divisions to encourage technical programming that highlights the contributions of younger chemists  Looking forward to Boston, YCC is planning symposia including "The Many Faces of Chemistry: International Opportunities for Chemists"; "Being a Responsible Chemist: Ethics, Politics & Policy"; and "Changing Landscapes of the Bio-Pharma Industry "
The Committee on Committees (ConC) conducted its annual training session for new national committee chairs at the ACS Leaders Conference in January 2007  ConC's interactive session for committee chairs in Chicago served as an opportune follow-on and a forum for informative interchange among seasoned and new chairs 
ConC began developing its recommendations for the 2008 committee chair appointments for consideration by the president-elect and chair of the board  ConC continues to focus efforts to identify members with the skills and expertise specified by the committee chairs using the councilor preference form 
The form will be sent to councilors in May  ConC also seeks the names of noncouncilor members for consideration for service on council-related committees, especially those with no prior appointment 
As part of ongoing activities with the joint CPC-Board Governance Review Task Force, ConC has collected data on committee liaisons to other committees  This information will be distributed to committee chairs  The number of liaisons indicates that unofficial but strong communication channels exist within the ACS committee structure 
On Sunday evening, the Committee on Nominations & Elections (N&E) sponsored its fifth successful Town Hall Meeting for President-Elect Nominees  An estimated 200 people attended this session  This forum facilitated communication among the 2008 president-elect nominees, councilors, and other members  N&E will hold another Town Hall Meeting featuring the candidates for director-at-large at the fall meeting in Boston 
Now that voting over the Internet has become an accepted procedure for ACS national elections, the ACS technical divisions and local sections have expressed strong interest in using this method for their elections  N&E has developed protocols for elections for local sections and divisions  This document will be forwarded to the appropriate committees for their review and distribution 
N&E is responsible for reviewing annually the distribution of member populations within the six electoral districts to ensure that the districts have equitable representation  According to bylaw V, section 4(a), the member population of each electoral district must be within 10% of the result of dividing by six the number of members whose addresses lie within these districts  The committee is happy to report that the six electoral districts are in compliance 
The committee has developed a petition on election procedures for president-elect and district director  The proposed election mechanism provides for a preferential (ranked) ballot and an "instant runoff " N&E continues to address the areas of campaigning and the timing of our national election process  Between the Chicago and Boston meetings, the committee plans to sponsor online forums for input from councilors and other interested members on these issues 
In response to member concerns regarding the collection of signatures for petition candidates, N&E reviewed the society's bylaws  The bylaws state that an endorsement is required, but does not stipulate the method of endorsement  N&E has determined that original or electronic signatures are acceptable and will establish appropriate procedures for receipt of electronic signatures 
The Committee on Constitution & Bylaws (C&B), acting for the council, issued new certified bylaws to the Corning Section, the Portland Section, the Division of Colloid & Surface Chemistry, and the Division of Chemical Education  The committee reviewed new proposed amendments for the Division of Medicinal Chemistry, the Columbus Section, the Detroit Section, and the Southern Arizona Section 
Three petitions were presented to council for action at this meeting  Regarding the "Petition on Election Procedures 2006," a motion to separate the petition was approved, and the petition was divided  Provisions affecting bylaw V, sec  2d, bylaw V, sec  3c, and bylaw V, sec  4f, which deal with election procedures and the timing of run-off elections, were approved by council and will become effective following confirmation by the board of directors 
The second part of the petition regarding bylaw V, sec  2c, and bylaw V, sec  3b, which deal with signature requirements for petition candidates for president-elect and director-at-large respectively, was recommitted to the Committee on Nominations & Elections, which has primary substantive responsibility for the petition 
The Committee on Nominations & Elections was asked to reconsider the signature requirements, procedures for acceptance of electronic signatures, and recommendations from the Governance Review Task Force on election procedures 
The second petition presented to council for action was the "Petition on Rules for Nominating Members of N&E for National Offices " This petition was not approved by council  The third petition, the "Petition on Multiyear Dues," was amended by incidental motion on the council floor, calling for the petition to become effective when technical components are instituted to track payments, but no later than Jan  1, 2010  Council approved the incidental motion and then approved the petition 
The committee reviewed one petition for consideration, the "Petition on Local Section Affiliations," which will be submitted to council for action at the fall 2007 meeting in Boston 
The committee met with representatives of the Committee on Membership Affairs and the Governance Review Task Force to continue discussions on proposals currently being formulated on membership requirements and student membership  In addition, the committee discussed election issues of concern to the Southern California Section 
We hope you enjoyed the presidential and division thematic program, "Sustainability of Energy, Food & Water" in Chicago  A small, dedicated group of volunteers and staff labored tirelessly to create and coordinate this programming; to them the Committee on Divisional Activities (DAC) offers sincere thanks 
DAC has committed to transfer the process of choosing and organizing future national meeting themes to a body that represents all divisions  We made substantial progress in Chicago, where division, secretariat, and committee representatives convened to discuss national meeting program concepts  They proposed themes for the 2008 Philadelphia national meeting as well as a framework for a future national programming group 
Divisions have successfully served their members fortunate enough to attend national meetings  To maximize benefits to division members, DAC encourages divisions to consider extending the reach of the content they deliver at national meetings through Internet-based distribution channels and will support worthy efforts in this direction via Innovative Program Grants 
The committee voted in Chicago to propose modifications to the division funding formula that will more greatly reward interdisciplinary programming  The new formula will also be simpler and more transparent to divisions  DAC will present the revised plan to council for action in Boston 
The Committee on Economic & Professional Affairs (CEPA), working with ACS staff in the Departments of Career Management & Development and Member Research & Technology, continues to update and implement its strategic plan to address the career needs of society members 
Specifically, the committee reviewed and revised existing workshops and materials to help ACS members get jobs  CEPA is developing new programs to address the needs of mid- and late-career chemists to ensure their continued competitiveness in the workplace and to ease their career transitions  New initiatives in these areas include the development of workshops, online training, surveys to assess member needs, suggested changes to public policies, and updates to professional and ethical workplace guidelines  As a result of discussions at the Public Policy Roundtable, which was held in San Francisco, a background paper is being developed on trends in health care issues 
The newly revised "Chemical Professional's Code of Conduct" was presented to council, which approved it  The Standards & Ethics Subcommittee is preparing a revision of the "Academic Professional Guidelines" to be presented to council for consideration in Boston 
CEPA reviewed the Globalization Task Force Report  As our science diffuses around the globe, we want to make sure that our members are aware of the economic and professional challenges they will face and that they have the tools they need to succeed  Therefore, CEPA made a commitment to work with other committees, divisions, and ACS staff to develop programs and policies that position our membership to compete in the global workforce 
CEPA heard and discussed a presentation on the proposal from the Membership Affairs Committee on broadening the requirements of membership  CEPA supports the spirit of this proposal and encourages further detailed studies to assess financial impacts on local sections and student affiliates chapters 
The Local Section Activities Committee (LSAC) recognized local sections celebrating significant anniversaries in 2007, including Savannah River (50 years), Northeast Tennessee (75 years), and the St  Louis and Syracuse local sections (both celebrating 100 years) 
LSAC hosted the local section leaders track in conjunction with the ACS Leaders Conference in Baltimore on Jan  26–28  A total of 135 delegates from 124 local sections participated in the weekend leadership conference 
LSAC also hosted a Local Section Summit on March 2–4 in Arlington, Va  The summit focused on practical operational issues that will support local sections' long-term success  Specific areas that were discussed include the development of a multiyear plan to expand or develop programming for local sections, opportunities to encourage innovation and experimentation within and among local sections, and capitalizing on existing opportunities to facilitate partnerships between local sections and other ACS groups 
Following the San Francisco national meeting, LSAC launched a local section Science Café minigrant program  Fifty-five local sections accepted LSAC invitation to host Science Cafés in 2007 
A DVD entitled "ACS Close to Home: Local Sections Connecting Chemistry & the Community" was released earlier this year  The video provides a seven-minute overview of the many outreach and educational programs sponsored by local sections and the critical role they play in positively influencing the public's perception of chemistry and its practitioners  Copies of the DVD were sent to all local section officers 
The Committee on Meetings & Expositions (M&E) reported that the 233rd ACS national meeting hosted 14,520 attendees  This included 7,152 chemical scientists, 5,059 students, 1,283 exhibitors, 119 precollege teachers, 573 exposition visitors, and 453 guests  The exposition had 424 booths with 268 companies 
The 10 2006 regional meetings set a new standard for excellence with attendance exceeding 8,000, a 30% increase in average meeting attendance compared to the 2005 meetings  A total of 4,717 abstracts were submitted  A region summit was held in February at which the final report of the ReACT study group was reviewed 
The practice of tracking the number of presenter no-shows continues  M&E will collaborate with the Committee on Divisional Activities to study options for addressing this problem  Suggestions will be presented at the Boston meeting for implementation in 2008 
It is the intent of M&E to pursue the goal of making our meetings "greener " We will communicate with staff and governance units to identify actions for both the short and long term 
The American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and ACS will hold their 2008 spring meetings simultaneously in New Orleans  An ad hoc working group consisting of members from M&E, DAC, and AIChE are actively exploring joint programming opportunities for this meeting 
The Committee on Membership Affairs (MAC) met in executive session on Saturday and Sunday in Chicago and reported that the ACS closed 2006 with 160,491 members, our highest year-end membership count since 2002  Of the 17,857 applications processed in 2006, more than 1,000 came from the Member-Get-a-Member campaign in which many councilors participated  The society's retention rate in 2006 remained strong at 92%  The committee also reported that recruitment for the first two months of 2007 netted 2,844 new applications—729 more than for the same time period last year 
MAC continues to work with deliberate speed on the proposed new bylaw language for members, student members, and society affiliates-the three ways to connect to the society  The committee received input from the Governance Review Task Force and its action teams, the Council Policy Committee, the board of directors, the Committee on Constitution & Bylaws, and several other committees between the San Francisco and Chicago meetings  These interactions have resulted in the current bylaw change recommendations 
In Chicago, representatives from MAC attended several committee meetings and all seven councilor caucuses to summarize the current proposal for membership changes, answer questions, and seek input  In addition, all committee chairs were invited to have their respective committees review these bylaw changes and respond to MAC—if possible—before council met on Wednesday  MAC received 11 responses: eight supported the proposed changes as is, and three supported the proposed language with specified changes or considerations 
The comprehensive petition will likely represent the most significant and voluminous change in the ACS bylaws that has occurred in decades, and MAC is proud to be among the leaders in its development and in efforts to get it right the first time  Hundreds of individuals have contributed to this major effort, since MAC began such discussions at the spring 2004 national meeting 
The Committee on Ethics met in Chicago and discussed the possibility of organizing and scheduling a committee retreat in the near future to enable the committee to move from the current stage of exploring the needs and interests of ACS members to setting priorities for the next few years 
The Project SEED program offers summer research opportunities for high school students from economically disadvantaged families  Since its inception in 1968, the program has had a significant impact on the lives of more than 8,400 students  At the selection meeting in March, the committee approved research projects for 340 SEED I students and 98 SEED II students for this summer in more than 100 institutions 
The 2006 annual assessment surveys from 300 students indicate that 78% of the Project SEED participants are planning to major in a chemistry-related science, and 66% aspire to continue to graduate education  This program is made possible by contributions from industry, academia, local sections, ACS friends and members, the ACS Petroleum Research Fund, and the Project SEED Endowment 
The committee formally submitted a request to ConC to amend the Project SEED acronym and the committee duties described in the Supplementary Information of the "ACS Charter, Constitution, Bylaws & Regulations "
In Chicago, the committee's agenda focused on the ACS Strategic Plan and how Project SEED fits into it, the Program Review Advisory Group (PRAG) review of the Project SEED program, the committee's review of an online application form, and planning of the 40th anniversary celebration to be held at the Philadelphia meeting in the fall of 2008  The committee selected a task force to review the criteria for selection of the Project SEED ChemLuminary Award 
3  Making ACS relevant to technicians 
Last year, CTA, along with the Division of Chemical Technicians, the Committee on Economic & Professional Affairs, and ChemTechLinks, started the Equipping the 2015 Chemical Technology Workforce initiative  This year, the initiative awarded six $500 minigrants to activities and programs that support the educational and professional development of chemical technicians 
We are pleased to announce that the winners of the minigrants are the ACS Division of Environmental Chemistry; the Chemical Technician Program Chair for the 39th ACS Central Regional Meeting in Covington, Ky ; Delta College, University Center, Mich ; Grand Rapids Community College, in Michigan; Mount San Antonio College, Walnut, Calif ; and Southwestern College in Chula Vista, Calif 
The winners are collaborating with industry, academia, and ACS local sections on such activities as chemical technology career fairs for high school students, discussion panels on employability skills for technicians, and technical programming at regional and national meetings on the vital role technicians have in the chemical enterprise 
Because of the enthusiastic response to the minigrants, Equipping the 2015 Chemical Technology Workforce will be supporting another round of minigrants to be distributed in the fall  Details will be available on the website  For more information, go to www ChemTechLinks org and click on "Equipping the 2015 Chemical Technology Workforce "
CTA has also joined with the Joint Subcommittee on Diversity, formerly known as the Collaboration of Committees Working Group  Because this group is focused on increasing diversity in ACS and the chemical enterprise, we believe that this is an opportunity to raise awareness of the value of technicians  CTA looks forward to collaborating on the promotion of traditionally underrepresented chemical professionals 
In 2007, CTA will be placing renewed focus on distribution of the ACS Chemical Technology Student Recognition Award  The award recognizes academic excellence in students preparing for careers as chemical technicians  For more information on the award, please visit the CTA website at chemistry org/committees/cta 
Context 2: Paper Info

Title: Environmental variability and network structure determine the optimal plasticity mechanisms in embodied agents
Publish Date: Unkown
Author List: Sina Khajehabdollahi (from Department of Computer Science, University of Tübingen)

Figure

Figure2: An outline of the network controlling the foraging agent The sensor layer receives inputs at each time step (the ingredients of the nearest food), which are processed by the plastic layer in the same way as the static sensory network, Fig 1 The output of that network is given as input to the motor network, along with the distance d and angle α to the nearest food, the current velocity v, and energy E of the agent These signals are processed through two hidden layers to the final output of motor commands as the linear and angular acceleration of the agent
Figure4: The evolved parameters θ = (θ 1 ,      , θ 8 ) of the plasticity rule for the reward prediction (a ) and the decision (b ) tasks, for a variety of parameters (p tr = 0 01, d e ∈ 0, 0 1,      , 1, and σ ∈ 0, 0 1,      , 1 in all 100 combinations) Despite the relatively small difference between the tasks, the evolved learning rules differ considerably For visual guidance, the lines connect θs from the same run 
Figure5: a The trajectory of an agent (blue line) in the 2D environment A well-trained agent will approach and consume food with positive values (green dots) and avoid negative food (red dots) b The learning rate of the plastic sensory network eta p grows with the distance between environments d e c  and decreases with the frequency of environmental change d The fitness of an agent (measured as the total food consumed over its lifetime) increases over generations of the EA for both the scalar and binary readouts in the sensory network e The Pearson correlation coefficient of an evolved agent's weights with the ingredient value vector of the current environment (E 1 -blue, E 2 -red) In this example, the agent's weights are anti-correlated with its environment, which is not an issue for performance since the motor network can interpret the inverted signs of food 

abstract

The evolutionary balance between innate and learned behaviors is highly intricate, and different organisms have found different solutions to this problem  We hypothesize that the emergence and exact form of learning behaviors is naturally connected with the statistics of environmental fluctuations and tasks an organism needs to solve 
Here, we study how different aspects of simulated environments shape an evolved synaptic plasticity rule in static and moving artificial agents  We demonstrate that environmental fluctuation and uncertainty control the reliance of artificial organisms on plasticity  Interestingly, the form of the emerging plasticity rule is additionally determined by the details of the task the artificial organisms are aiming to solve 
Moreover, we show that coevolution between static connectivity and interacting plasticity mechanisms in distinct sub-networks changes the function and form of the emerging plasticity rules in embodied agents performing a foraging task  One of the defining features of living organisms is their ability to adapt to their environment and incorporate new information to modify their behavior 
It is unclear how the ability to learn first evolved , but its utility appears evident  Natural environments are too complex for all the necessary information to be hardcoded genetically and more importantly, they keep changing during an organism's lifetime in ways that cannot be anticipated ;   The link between learning and environmental uncertainty and fluctuation has been extensively demonstrated in both natural ; , and artificial environments  
Nevertheless, the ability to learn does not come without costs  For the capacity to learn to be beneficial in evolutionary terms, a costly nurturing period is often required, a phenomenon observed in both biological , and artificial organisms   Additionally, it has been shown that in some complex environments, hardcoded behaviors may be superior to learned ones given limits in the agent's lifetime and envi-ronmental uncertainty ; ;  
The theoretical investigation of the optimal balance between learned and innate behaviors in natural and artificial systems goes back several decades  However, it has recently found also a wide range of applications in applied AI systems ;   Most AI systems are trained for specific tasks, and have no need for modification after their training has been completed 
Still, technological advances and the necessity to solve broad families of tasks make discussions about life-like AI systems relevant to a wide range of potential application areas  Thus the idea of open-ended AI agents that can continually interact with and adapt to changing environments has become particularly appealing 
Many different approaches for introducing lifelong learning in artificial agents have been proposed  Some of them draw direct inspiration from actual biological systems ;   Among them, the most biologically plausible solution is to equip artificial neural networks with some local neural plasticity , similar to the large variety of synaptic plasticity mechanisms ; ; that performs the bulk of the learning in the brains of living organisms  
The artificial plasticity mechanisms can be optimized to modify the connectivity of the artificial neural networks toward solving a particular task  The optimization can use a variety of approaches, most commonly evolutionary computation  The idea of meta-learning or optimizing synaptic plasticity rules to perform specific functions has been recently established as an engineering tool that can compete with stateof-the-art machine learning algorithms on various complex tasks ; ; Pedersen and Risi (2021);  
Additionally, it can be used to reverse engineer actual plasticity mechanisms found in biological neural networks and uncover their functions ;   Here, we study the effect that different factors (environ-arXiv:2303 06734v1 [q-bio NC] 12 Mar 2023 mental fluctuation and reliability, task complexity) have on the form of evolved functional reward-modulated plasticity rules 
We investigate the evolution of plasticity rules in static, single-layer simple networks  Then we increase the complexity by switching to moving agents performing a complex foraging task  In both cases, we study the impact of different environmental parameters on the form of the evolved plasticity mechanisms and the interaction of learned and static network connectivity 
Interestingly, we find that different environmental conditions and different combinations of static and plastic connectivity have a very large impact on the resulting plasticity rules  We imagine an agent who must forage to survive in an environment presenting various types of complex food particles  Each food particle is composed of various amounts and combinations of N ingredients that can have positive (food) or negative (poison) values 
The value of a food particle is a weighted sum of its ingredients  To predict the reward value of a given resource, the agent must learn the values of these ingredients by interacting with the environment  The priors could be generated by genetic memory, but the exact values are subject to change  To introduce environmental variability, we stochastically change the values of the ingredients 
More precisely, we define two ingredient-value distributions E 1 and E 2 and switch between them, with probability p tr for every time step  We control how (dis)similar the environments are by parametrically setting E 2 = (1 − 2d e )E 1 , with d e ∈ [0, 1] serving as a distance proxy for the environments; when d e = 0, the environment remains unchanged, and when d e = 1 the value of each ingredient fully reverses when the environmental transition happens 
For simplicity, we take values of the ingredients in E 1 equally spaced between -1 and 1 (for the visualization, see Fig  )  The static agent receives passively presented food as a vector of ingredients and can assess its compound value using the linear summation of its sensors with the (learned or evolved) weights, see Fig   
The network consists of N sensory neurons that are projecting to a single post-synaptic neuron  At each time step, an input X t = (x 1 ,       , x N ) is presented, were the value x i , i ∈ {1,       , N } represents the quantity of the ingredient i  We draw x i independently form a uniform distribution on the [0, 1] interval (x i ∼ U (0, 1)) 
The value of each ingredient w c i is determined by the environment (E 1 or E 2 )  The postsynaptic neuron outputs a prediction of the food X t value as y t = g(W X T t )  Throughout the paper, g will be either the identity function, in which case the prediction neuron is linear, or a step-function; however, it could be any other nonlinearity, such as a sigmoid or ReLU 
After outputting the prediction, the neuron receives feedback in the form of the real value of the input R t   The real value is computed as R t = W c X T t + ξ, where W c = (w c 1 ,       , w c N ) is the actual value of the ingredients, and ξ is a term summarizing the noise of reward and sensing system ξ ∼ N (0, σ) 
Figure : An outline of the static agent's network  The sensor layer receives inputs representing the quantity of each ingredient of a given food at each time step  The agent computes the prediction of the food's value y t and is then given the true value R t ; it finally uses this information in the plasticity rule to update the weight matrix 
For the evolutionary adjustment of the agent's parameters, the loss of the static agent is the sum of the mean squared errors (MSE) between its prediction y t and the reward R t over the lifetime of the agent  The agent's initial weights are set to the average of the two ingredient value distributions, which is the optimal initial value for the case of symmetric switching of environments that we consider here 
As a next step, we incorporate the sensory network of static agents into embodied agents that can move around in an environment scattered with food  To this end, we merge the static agent's network with a second, non-plastic motor network that is responsible for controlling the motion of the agent in the environment 
Specifically, the original plastic network now provides the agent with information about the value of the nearest food  The embodied agent has additional sensors for the distance from the nearest food, the angle between the current velocity and the nearest food direction, its own velocity, and its own energy level (sum of consumed food values) 
These inputs are processed by two hidden layers (of 30 and 15 neurons) with tanh activation  The network's outputs are angular and linear acceleration, Fig    The embodied agents spawn in a 2D space with periodic boundary conditions along with a number of food particles that are selected such that the mean of the food value distribution is ∼ 0  An agent can eat food by approaching it sufficiently closely, and each time a food particle is eaten, it is The sensor layer receives inputs at each time step (the ingredients of the nearest food), which are processed by the plastic layer in the same way as the static sensory network, Fig   
The output of that network is given as input to the motor network, along with the distance d and angle α to the nearest food, the current velocity v, and energy E of the agent  These signals are processed through two hidden layers to the final output of motor commands as the linear and angular acceleration of the agent re-spawned with the same value somewhere randomly on the grid (following the setup of ) 
After 5000 time steps, the cumulative reward of the agent (the sum of the values of all the food it consumed) is taken as its fitness  During the evolutionary optimization, the parameters for both the motor network (connections) and plastic network (learning rule parameters) are co-evolved, and so agents must simultaneously learn to move and discriminate good/bad food 
Reward-modulated plasticity is one of the most promising explanations for biological credit assignment   In our network, the plasticity rule that updates the weights of the linear sensor network is a rewardmodulated rule which is parameterized as a linear combination of the input, the output, and the reward at each time step:
Additionally, after each plasticity step, the weights are normalized by mean subtraction, an important step for the stabilization of Hebbian-like plasticity rules   We use a genetic algorithm to optimize the learning rate η p and amplitudes of different terms θ = (θ 1 ,       , θ 8 )  The successful plasticity rule after many food presentations must converge to a weight vector that predicts the correct food values (or allows the agent to correctly decide whether to eat a food or avoid it) 
To have comparable results, we divide θ = (θ 1 ,       , θ 8 ) by We then multiply the learning rate η p with θ max to maintain the rule's evolved form unchanged, η norm p = η p • θ max   In the following, we always use normalized η p and θ, omitting norm   To evolve the plasticity rule and the moving agents' motor networks, we use a simple genetic algorithm with elitism  
The agents' parameters are initialized at random (drawn from a Gaussian distribution), then the sensory network is trained by the plasticity rule and finally, the agents are evaluated  After each generation, the bestperforming agents (top 10 % of the population size) are selected and copied into the next generation 
The remaining 90 % of the generation is repopulated with mutated copies of the best-performing agents  We mutate agents by adding independent Gaussian noise (σ = 0 1) to its parameters  To start with, we consider a static agent whose goal is to identify the value of presented food correctly  The static reward-prediction network quickly evolves the parameters of the learning rule, successfully solving the prediction task 
We first look at the evolved learning rate η p , which determines how fast (if at all) the network's weight vector is updated during the lifetime of the agents  We identify three factors that control the learning rate parameter the EA converges to: the distance between the environments, the noisiness of the reward, and the rate of environmental transition 
The first natural factor is the distance d e between the two environments, with a larger distance requiring a higher learning rate, Fig    This is an expected result since the convergence time to the "correct" weights is highly dependent on the initial conditions  If an agent is born at a point very close to optimality, which naturally happens if the environments are similar, the distance it needs to traverse on the fitness landscape is small 
Therefore it can afford to have a small learning rate, which leads to a more stable convergence and is not affected by noise
Context 3: LOL Anonymous I'm here! & I did answer you back there 
kl el kotb el qadema (tawrat + enjel + 9o7f ibrahem) 7orfat w t'3ayarat   law ma 9ar hal shy chan ma 6ala3 ktab yded ye;3y elly gablah l7ad ma 6ala3 lna el quraan b norah elly allah 7f'6ah don ta7ref w tabdel ela yom el dein    shlon tyeeb Joan shy ma5ooth 5erah?!
1- Imagine you have two individuals  One truly believes in God but he is a bad husband and father who cheats on his wife and neglects his children  The other man is a nonbeliever; he accepts religion in theory and doctrine but simply does not have faith no matter how hard he tried  He is a good father and a good husband as well  When they stand before God at the Day of Judgment, would the nonbeliever be condemned to eternal hell only for that one flaw in him? Don't the other good traits in that person matter at all? Does being a nonbeliever equal being evil?
2-God knows everything  However, why would He have created when He knows exactly what each person is going to do and where they will end up? For example, let us suppose that tomorrow I will murder someone  God knows that I will do that  And He knows that I will suffer in hell when the time comes  So why does He purposely inflict that pain on me? To teach me a lesson? He knows the outcome of everything and everyone He has created 
3-Since you brought up science in the previous comments section, I am seriously curious (I am not trying to be glib) about dinosaurs and prehistoric humans  We have seen the evolution of humans and we have fossils and hard evidence of it  The science world has traced back "Eve" to Africa  The concept of Adam and Eve seems too mythological to be 100% factual  It has the same tone of Greek and Ancient Egyptian legends 
-Note: I am not trying to corner you here, I just want to know your response to my queries and thoughts  Thanks 
_ ولماذا نصلى ولمن نصلى    انى لا ارى لصلاتكم هذه اى حكمه ولماذا كل تلك الحركات اما كان يكفى الخشوع  
اعتقد ان المشكلة ليست كما ذكرت  فما ذكرته يعني ان هناك العديد من المسائل الفقهية المتصلة بالعصر الجديد دون حل  على العكس, فالحلال بين والحرام بين  اعتقد المشكلة تكمن بالمسلمين الذين اصابهم الوهن 
You'll be answerd personaly only if; you comment with your blogger's name/nick 
I answered you before & there was no response from your behalf  Why would you think you're worth an answer from me since you can seek answers from good books?
Your questions are very simple, with clean cut answers  Don't use the word corner; it indicates things you don't have the first alphabet for!
Religion was established to calm our fears from the unknown  Freud did write about it in the father figure argument  Try to read it 
I deleted my last comment because in the end of it I inserted some thing that may offend some people (if you read it, I gauss you know what I mean)  Abraham did not believe in God until he saw the birds come to life  So, all what I want is a single prove similar to Abraham 
I indeed busy doing my homework; I have to solve the energy equation and the continuity equation to come with another, hopefully, exact solution to the problem 
Do you work? I mean do you have a job, it seems that you are always on line!!!???? It is amazing how some one would stick to the internet  Try to go out more often, play sport or find any other hobby  If you could not disattach yourself from the internet try and seek a professional help… :-)  Honestly, I’m not making fun of you it is just an advice… sincere advice 
I measure prosperity of a nation by the degree of its civilization in comparison to others of its time  Islamic civilization was at the peak during the Umayyad and Abbasid reigns, at the time when Moslems conquered other nations and dying civilizations, and mixed with them, and the new comers in Islam started researching for the truth  In their quest they translated Greek philosophy books and dug into ancient ones  Their search for truth led them to the emergence of chemistry, Algebra and other sciences And their findings excelled them in innovative inventions  The maps and astrolabes that Columbus used to sail on his quest to discover the West years later were taken from the Arabs  And in contrary to the scribbles of their holy book, Arabic books were the first that brought the roundedness of earth to world attention  Arabic language romanticized the rigid Latin, poetry and verse advanced  At one time, civilization was dubbed as Arabization in Andalusia and that was evident in Andalusia’s Christian and Jewish ancient books



ground_truth: There are 14,520 attendees, including 7,152 chemical scientists, 5,059 students, 1,283 exhibitors, 119 precollege teachers, 573 exposition visitors, and 453 guests.

prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: How does the transition probability of the environment affect the learning rate in the static agent?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 2:  A second parameter that impacts the learning rate is the variance of the rewards  The reward an agent receives for the plasticity step contains a noise term ξ that is drawn from a zero mean Gaussian distribution with standard deviation σ 
This parameter controls the unreliability of the agent's sensory system, i e , higher σ means that the information the agent gets about the value of the foods it consumes cannot be fully trusted to reflect the actual value of the foods  As σ increases, the learning rate η p decreases, which means that the more unreliable an environment becomes, the less an agent relies on plasticity to update its weights, Fig   
Indeed for some combinations of relatively small distance d e and high reward variance σ, the EA converges to a learning rate of η p ≈ 0  This means that the agent opts to have no adaptation during its lifetime and remain at the mean of the two environments  It is an optimal solution when the expected loss due to ignoring the environmental transitions is, on average, lower than the loss the plastic network will incur by learning via the (often misleading because of the high σ) environmental cues 
A final factor that affects the learning rate the EA will converge to is the frequency of environmental change during an agent's lifetime  Since the environmental change is modeled as a simple, two-state Markov process (Fig  ), the control parameter is the transition probability p tr   When keeping everything else the same, the learning rate rapidly rises as we increase the transition probability from 0, and after reaching a peak, it begins to decline slowly, eventually reaching zero (Fig  ) 
This means that when environmental transition is very rare, agents opt for a very low learning rate, allowing a slow and stable convergence to an environment-appropriate weight vector that leads to very low losses while the agent remains in that environment  As the rate of environmental transition increases, faster learning is required to speed up convergence in order to exploit the (comparatively shorter) stays in each environment 
Finally, as the environmental transition becomes too fast, the agents opt for slower or even no learning, which keeps them ) and the decision (b ) tasks, for a variety of parameters (p tr = 0 01, d e ∈ 0, 0 1,       , 1, and σ ∈ 0, 0 1,       , 1 in all 100 combinations)  Despite the relatively small difference between the tasks, the evolved learning rules differ considerably 
For visual guidance, the lines connect θs from the same run  near the middle of the two environments, ensuring that the average loss of the two environments is minimal (Fig  )  The form of the evolved learning rule depends on the task: Decision vs  Prediction The plasticity parameters θ = (θ 1 ,       , θ 8 ) for the rewardprediction task converge on approximately the same point, regardless of the environmental parameters (Fig  ) 
In particular, θ 3 → 1, θ 5 → −1, θ i → 0 for all other i, and thus the learning rule converges to: Since by definition y t = g(W t X T t ) = W t X T t (g(x) = x in this experiment) and R t = W c X T t + ξ we get: Thus the distribution of ∆W t converges to a distribution with mean 0 and variance depending on η p and σ and W converges to W c  
So this learning rule will match the agent's weight vector with the vector of ingredient values in the environment  We examine the robustness of the learning rule the EA discovers by considering a slight modification of our task  Instead of predicting the expected food value, the agent now needs to decide whether to eat the presented food or not 
This is done by introducing a step-function nonlinearity (g(x) = 1 if x ≥ 1 and 0 otherwise)  Then the output y(t) is computed as: Instead of the MSE loss between prediction and actual value, the fitness of the agent is now defined as the sum of the food values it chose to consume (by giving y t = 1)  Besides these two changes, the setup of the experiments remains exactly the same 
The qualitative relation between η p and parameters of environment d e , σ and p tr is preserved in the changed experiment  However, the resulting learning rule is significantly different (Fig  )  The evolution converges to the following learning rule: In both cases, the rule has the form ∆W t = η p X t [α y R t + β y ] 
Thus, the ∆W t is positive or negative depending on whether the reward R t is above or below a threshold (γ = −β y /α y ) that depends on the output decision of the network (y t = 0 or 1)  Both learning rules (for the reward-prediction and decision tasks) have a clear Hebbian form (coordination of preand post-synaptic activity) and use the incoming reward signal as a threshold 
These similarities indicate some common organizing principles of reward-modulated learning rules, but their significant differences highlight the sensitivity of the optimization process to task details  We now turn to the moving embodied agents in the 2D environment  To optimize these agents, both the motor network's connections and the sensory network's plasticity parameters evolve simultaneously 
Since the motor network is initially random and the agent has to move to find food, the number of interactions an agent experiences in its lifetime can be small, slowing down the learning  However, having the larger motor network also has benefits for evolution because it allows the output of the plastic network to be read out and transformed in different ways, resulting in a broad set of solutions 
The fitness of an agent (measured as the total food consumed over its lifetime) increases over generations of the EA for both the scalar and binary readouts in the sensory network  e  The Pearson correlation coefficient of an evolved agent's weights with the ingredient value vector of the current environment (E 1 -blue, E 2 -red) 
In this example, the agent's weights are anti-correlated with its environment, which is not an issue for performance since the motor network can interpret the inverted signs of food  The agents can solve the task effectively by evolving a functional motor network and a plasticity rule that converges to interpretable weights (Fig  ) 
After ∼ 100 evolutionary steps (Fig  ), the agents can learn the ingredient value distribution using the plastic network and reliably move towards foods with positive values while avoiding the ones with negative values  We compare the dependence of the moving and the static agents on the parameters of the environment: d e and the state transition probability p tr  
At first, in order to simplify the experiment, we set the transition probability to 0, but fixed the initial weights to be the average of E 1 and E 2 , while the real state is E 2   In this experiment, the distance between states d e indicates twice the distance between the agent's initial weights and the optimal weights (the environment's ingredient values) since the agent is initialized at the mean of the two environment distributions 
Same as for the static agent, the learning rate increases with the distance d e (Fig  )  Then, we examine the effect of the environmental transition probability p tr on the evolved learning rate η p   In order for an agent to get sufficient exposure to each environment, we scale down the probability p tr from the equivalent experiment for the static agents 
We find that as the probability of transition increases, the evolved learning rate η p decreases (Fig  )  This fits with the larger trend for the static agent, although there is a clear difference when it comes to the increase for very small transition probabil-ities that were clearly identifiable in the static but not the moving agents 
This could be due to much sparser data and possibly the insufficiently long lifetime of the moving agent (the necessity of scaling makes direct comparisons difficult)  Nevertheless, overall we see that the associations observed in the static agents between environmental distance d e and transition probability p tr and the evolved learning rate η p are largely maintained in the moving agents 
Still, more data would be needed to make any conclusive assertions about the exact effect of these environmental parameters on the emerging plasticity mechanisms  A crucial difference between the static and the moving agents is the function the plasticity has to perform  While in the static agents, the plasticity has to effectively identify the exact value distribution of the environment in order to produce accurate predictions, in the embodied agents, the plasticity has to merely produce a representation of the environment that the motor network can evolve to interpret adequately enough to make decisions about which food to consume 
To illustrate the difference, we plot the Pearson correlation coefficient between an agent's weights and the ingredient values of the environment it is moving in (Fig  )  We use the correlation instead of the MSE loss (which we used for the static agents in Fig  ) because the amplitude of the vector varies a lot for different agents and meaningful The evolved parameters of moving agents' plasticity rule for the g(s) = x, identity (a ) and the step function (Eq 
4) (b ) sensory networks (the environmental parameters here are d e ∈ [0, 1], σ = 0 and p tr = 0 001)  The step function (binary output) network evolved a more structured plasticity rule (e g , θ 3 > 0 for all realizations) than the linear network  Moreover, the learned weights for the identity network (c ) have higher variance and correlate significantly less with the environment's ingredient distribution compared to the learned weights for the thresholded network (d )
conclusions cannot be drawn from the MSE loss  For many agents, the learned weights are consistently anti-correlated with the actual ingredient values (an example of such an agent is shown in Fig  )  This means that the output of the sensory network will have the opposite sign from the actual food value 
While in the static network, this would lead to very bad predictions and high loss, in the foraging task, these agents perform exactly as well as the ones where the weights and ingredients values are positively correlated, since the motor network can simply learn to move towards food for which it gets a negative instead of a positive sensory input 
This additional step of the output of the plastic network going through the motor network before producing any behavior has a strong effect on the plasticity rules that the embodied agents evolve  Specifically, if we look at the emerging rules the top performing agents have evolved (Fig  ), it becomes clear that, unlike the very well-structured rules of the static agents (Fig  ), there is now virtually no discernible pattern or structure 
The difference becomes even clearer if we look at the learned weights (at the end of a simulation) of the best-performing agents (Fig  )  While there is some correlation with the environment's ingredient value distribution, the variance is very large, and they do not seem to converge on the "correct" values in any way 
This is to some extent expected since, unlike the static agents where the network's output has to be exactly correct, driving the evolution of rules that converge to the precise environmental distribution, in the embodied networks, the bulk of the processing is done by the motor network which can evolve to interpret the scalar value of the sensory network's output in a variety of ways 
Thus, as long as the sensory network's plasticity rule co-evolves with the motor network, any plasticity rule that learns to produce consistent information about the value of encountered food can potentially be selected  To further test this assumption, we introduce a bottleneck of information propagation between the sensory and motor networks by using a step-function nonlinearity on the output of the sensory network (Eq 
4)  Similarly to the decision task of the static network, the output of the sensory network now becomes binary  This effectively reduces the flow of information from the sensory to the motor network, forcing the sensory network to consistently decide whether food should be consumed (with the caveat that the motor network can still interpret the binary sign in either of two ways, either consuming food marked with 1 or the ones marked with 0 by the sensory network) 
The agents perform equally well in this variation of the task as before (Fig  ), but now, the evolved plasticity rules seem to be more structured (Fig  )  Moreover, the variance of the learned weights in the bestperforming agents is significantly reduced (Fig  ), which indicates that the bottleneck in the sensory network is in-creasing selection pressure for rules that learn the environment's food distribution accurately 
We find that different sources of variability have a strong impact on the extent to which evolving agents will develop neuronal plasticity mechanisms for adapting to their environment  A diverse environment, a reliable sensory system, and a rate of environmental change that is neither too large nor too small are necessary conditions for an agent to be able to effectively adapt via synaptic plasticity 
Additionally, we find that minor variations of the task an agent has to solve or the parametrization of the network can give rise to significantly different plasticity rules  Our results partially extend to embodied artificial agents performing a foraging task  We show that environmental variability also pushes the development of plasticity in such agents 
Still, in contrast to the static agents, we find that the interaction of a static motor network with a plastic sensory network gives rise to a much greater variety of wellfunctioning learning rules  We propose a potential cause of this degeneracy; as the relatively complex motor network is allowed to read out and process the outputs from the plastic network, any consistent information coming out of these outputs can be potentially interpreted in a behaviorally useful way 
Reducing the information the motor network can extract from the sensory system significantly limits learning rule variability  Our findings on the effect of environmental variability concur with the findings of previous studies that have identified the constraints that environmental variability places on the evolutionary viability of learning behaviors 
We extend these findings in a mechanistic model which uses a biologically plausible learning mechanism (synaptic plasticity)  We show how a simple evolutionary algorithm can optimize the different parameters of a simple reward-modulated plasticity rule for solving simple prediction and decision tasks 
Reward-modulated plasticity has been extensively studied as a plausible mechanism for credit assignment in the brain ; ; and has found several applications in artificial intelligence and robotics tasks ;   Here, we demonstrate how such rules can be very well-tuned to take into account different environmental parameters and produce optimal behavior in simple systems 
Additionally, we demonstrate how the co-evolution of plasticity and static functional connectivity in different subnetworks fundamentally changes the evolutionary pressures on the resulting plasticity rules, allowing for greater diversity in the form of the learning rule and the resulting learned connectivity 
Several studies have demonstrated how, in biological networks, synaptic plasticity heavily interacts with and is driven by network topology   Moreover, it has been recently demonstrated that biological plasticity mechanisms are highly redundant in the sense that any observed neural connectivity or recorded activity can be achieved with a variety of distinct, unrelated learning rules  
This observed redundancy of learning rules in biological settings complements our results and suggests that the function of plasticity rules cannot be studied independently of the connectivity and topology of the networks they are acting on  The optimization of functional plasticity in neural networks is a promising research direction both as a means to understand biological learning processes and as a tool for building more autonomous artificial systems 
Our results suggest that reward-modulated plasticity is highly adaptable to different environments and can be incorporated into larger systems that solve complex tasks  This work studies a simplified toy model of neural network learning in stochastic environments  Future work could be built on this basic framework to examine more complex reward distributions and sources of environmental variability 
Moreover, a greater degree of biological realism could be added by studying more plausible network architectures (multiple plastic layers, recurrent and feedback connections) and more sophisticated plasticity rule parametrizations  Additionally, our foraging simulations were constrained by limited computational resources and were far from exhaustive 
Further experiments can investigate environments with different constraints, food distributions, multiple seasons, more complex motor control systems and interactions of those systems with different sensory networks as well as the inclusion of plasticity on the motor parts of the artificial organisms 
Context 3:  Islamic Architecture and their aggregation systems portrayed marvels of their time  Islamic libraries were huge and rich for the European knowledge seekers 
And history tells us that those were the times when Moslems were the furthest from the dogma of their religion, there societies were open to controlled prostitution in the name of dancimng Jawari, and alcohol was openly consumed  We also notice in these periods that struggle for power among them mounted, yet they were the most tolerant to other nations and beliefs  There was nothing Islamic about them at that time, only a name  After that time, the Islamic civilization collapsed and kept deteriorating as people clung more to the their religious beliefs that were diverted through different interpretations 
And based on that; I believe that it’s not only Moslems who missread their religion, the problem stemmed from the core of the religion (Quran and tradition) for being vague and subject to different interpretations  If Quran was the true word of God, then it should have contained the miracle of not being subject to different interpretations, at least to keep Moslems united, and then, one would believe that Islam is suitable for every location and time 
Nothing can give a solid proof of the existence of heaven and hell, yet, nothing can disprove it either  Same goes to God  So the chance remain fifty-fifty  You either believe in it for the sake of taking a lesser risk if you don’t believe in blind faith, or discard it all together  Yet, the possibility is there until proved or disproved  As for now; these cases can only be understood through logic  So let’s reiterate your question and narrow it down to make it closer to something that can be measured 
Is there any mention of the stories of prophets outside the holy books? Are there any archeological evidences of each prophet’s reign (and I stress prophet’s)? Are there any mention of each prophet in history books outside its holy book, or the books that were based on it’s holy books? Ok, that was too general, let’s narrow it down a bit since your knowledge of your religion, mashallah, especially in reciting Quran is superb 
Is there any mention of the prophet Mohammad reign in non-Moslem history books other than those referenced to Moslem books? And if there were; did those stories mach? Did archeology of Mohammad’s time match those stories? Did ancient books of other nations confirm those stories? After all Mecca was an open, mid trade center for traders of the South and the North, and supposedly was exposed and open to other nations, and an emergence of a new religion would not have gone unnoticed in the ancient books of those nations 
That's why faith is called "FAITH" to believe in the unseen, you see 
keep in mind that every major religion has gone through various phases from emergence to growth to stagnation to depression and reformation  these are cycles that play out across centuries and i suspect islam is not immune to them 
islam is unique in that it is truly the last 'great' religion and it is here to stay  the future should be one of consilience and consolidation between religions and peoples 
at the end of the day - tolerance of thought will be the salvation of mankind 
I've been asking your first question for as long as I can remember and nobody has given me a convincing answer yet  I also asked the second question verbatim when I was in my high school's Tarbiya Islamiya class, and the teacher had no answer  I kept hounding him until the students yelled at me to shut up and then he kicked me out!
We're all adults here, so why can't you answer Anon's query? I still find it amazing that you named yourself after Saint Joan  A Christian (gasp!) who will burn in hell according to some of the comments here 
All men are my brothers  I would have liked to have said it then, and I would like to say it now: all men are my brothers  But all men are not my brothers  Why? Because all women are my sisters  And the brother who denies the rights of his sister: that brother is not my brother  At the very best, he is my half-brother - by definition  Osama is not my brother 
Religion is sensitive ground, as well it might be  Here we walk on eggshells  Because religion is itself an eggshell  Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses  This is of course not so in the East, where, we acknowledge, almost every living citizen in many huge and populous countries is intimately defined by religious belief  The excuses, here, are very persuasive; and we duly accept that 'faith' - recently and almost endearingly defined as 'the desire for the approval of supernatural beings' - is a world-historical force and a world-historical actor  All religions, unsurprisingly, have their terrorists, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, even Buddhist  But we are not hearing from those religions  We are hearing from Islam 
Let us make the position clear  We can begin by saying, not only that we respect Muhammad, but that no serious person could fail to respect Muhammad - a unique and luminous historical being  Judged by the continuities he was able to set in motion, he remains a titanic figure, and, for Muslims, all-answering: a revolutionary, a warrior, and a sovereign, a Christ and a Caesar, 'with a Koran in one hand', as Bagehot imagined him, 'and a sword in the other'  Muhammad has strong claims to being the most extraordinary man who ever lived  And always a man, as he always maintained, and not a god  Naturally we respect Muhammad  But we do not respect Muhammad Atta 
Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is 'a civil war' within Islam  That's what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam



ground_truth: As the transition probability increases, the learning rate initially rises and then declines.

prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: Is there any evidence of heaven and hell?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 3:  Well, the civil war appears to be over  And Islamism won it  The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible  We are not hearing from moderate Islam  Whereas Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is 
So, to repeat, we respect Islam - the donor of countless benefits to mankind, and the possessor of a thrilling history  But Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination  More, we regard the Great Leap Backwards as a tragic development in Islam's story, and now in ours  Naturally we respect Islam  But we do not respect Islamism, just as we respect Muhammad and do not respect Muhammad Atta 
المؤامرات على الأديان وجميع الانقلابات المخربة والثورات على القيم والمبادئ خرجت من هذا التراث    وان كل معول هدم كان وراءه توجيه يهودي 
•تذكروا أن الشعب الذي لا يهلك غيره يهلك نفسه 
•يجب ان نخلق الجيل الذي لا يخجل من كشف عورته (ألا تفسر لنا هذه الجملة موجة العرى في الافلام والموضات التى تسود العالم الآن) 
 علينا ان نشعل حربا بين الشعوب ونضرب الدول بعضها ببعض فبهذا يصبح جميع المتحاربين في حاجة الى أموالنا فنفرض عليهم شروطنا 
•الجماهير عمياء فاشتروها بالمال وسوقوها كالبهائم الى أهدافكم 
•سيطروا على الانتخابات ووسائل الاعلام والصحافة (وهم قد سيطروا عليها بالمال والجنس والمرأة في الغرب الرأسمالي وبالحزب والسلطة في العالم الاشتراكي) 
•ادفعوا الجماهير العمياء الى الثورة وسلموهم مقاليد الحكم ليحكموا في غوغائية وغباء (وقد فعلوا هذه في الثورة الفرنسية) وحينئذ نأتي نحن ونعدمهم فنكون منقذين للعالم (وقد اعدموهم جميعاً من روبسبير الى ميرابوا) 
•ارفعوا شعار الحرية واهدموا بها الاخلاق والاسرة والقومية والوطنية 
 ارفعوا شعار العلم واهدموا به الدين    وهذا ما فعله كمال أتاتورك (حفيد مزاراحي) حينما اقام الدولة العلمانية في تركيا ووقف يخطب في البرلمان التركي عام 1923 ساخراً من القرآن 
نحن الآن في القرن العشرين لا نستطيع ان نسير وراء كتاب تشريع يبحث عن التين والزيتون 
•الذي يعرقل مؤامراتكم اوقعوه في فضائح ثم هددوه بكشفها (وقد فعلوها في ووترجيت) او في مآزق مالية ثم تقدموا لانقاذه (وقد فعلها دزرائيلي مع الخديو واستولى على القنال)   وإذ تعذر الامر سارعوا الى اغتياله (وقد فعلوها بكنيدي) ثم اقتلوا قاتله لتدفنوا اسرارنا معه الى الأبد (وقد فعلوها بقاتل كنيدي) 
•اقتلوا القوميات والوطنيات بالدعوة الى الاممية والمواطنة العالمية وقد فعلها ماركس في الشيوعية 
•كل ما عدا اليهود حيوانات ناطقة سخرها الله في خدمة اليهود 
واليهودية ترى ان الله واحد ولكنها تحتكره لنفسها فلا عمل لله الا الحفاظ على اسرائيل وتسخير جميع الشعوب لخدمتها 
واللاهوت اليهودي لا يؤمن بآخرة، وقد شطبوا كل ما جاء عن الآخرة في التوراة    والقيامة عندهم هي قيامة دولتهم في فلسطين والبعث بعثها والنشر نشرها    ويوم الحساب هو اليوم الذي يحاسبون فيه كل الأمم يوم يعود المسيح ويباركهم ويختارهم نواباً له في حكم العالم وإقامة ملكوت الله على الأرض    والعجيب انهم كفروا بالمسيح حينما جاء ثم أعلنوا إيمانهم بعودته وشرطوا هذه العودة بانها رجعة من المسيح ليختارهم رؤساء وحكاماً للعالم الى الأبد 
والفكر اليهودي يلقى غلالة من الأسرار والطلاسم والكتمان والغموض على كل شئ    والكبالا والسحر وعلم الأعداد والحروف وتسخير الشياطين من علومهم التى شغفوا بها وروجوها ونشروها 
وكانت وسيلتهم الى هدم الكتب السماوية هى تفسيرها بالتأويل وذلك برفض المعاني الظاهرة واختراع معان باطنة تهدم الغرض الديني وتفسد هدفه 
ونستطيع ان نرى اثر التوجيه الهودي في الفلسفات العبثية والدمية والمادية والفوضية والإباحية    واحيانا نلمح اسماء يهودية خلفها مثل : سارتر – فرويد – ماركس – ماركوز 
واذا فتحنا ملف الديانة البهائية فإننا نجد اثر التوجيه اليهودي واضحا في كتبها 
عبد الهاء تأليف سليم قبعين القاهرة مطبعة العمران 1922 
مفواضات عبد البهاء الطبعة الاولى 1928م  موعود كل الامم 
جورج تاوزنه مطبوع بإذن من المحفل الروحاني لمصر والسودان 
•اكثر فلاسفة اليونان تعلموا الحكمة من بنى اسرائيل 
•رسالة عبد البهاء هي توحيد المسلمين والنصارى واليهود وجمعهم على أصل نواميس موسى 
•عمل موسى لا يس



ground_truth: Unknown.