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: When did Born resign as chairperson of the CFTC?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 1: Brooksley Elizabeth Born (born August 27, 1940) is an American attorney and former public official who, from August 26, 1996, to June 1, 1999, was chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal agency which oversees the U S  futures and commodity options markets  During her tenure on the CFTC, Born lobbied Congress and the President to give the CFTC oversight of off-exchange markets for derivatives, in addition to its role with respect to exchange-traded derivatives, but her warnings were ignored or dismissed, and her calls for reform resisted by other regulators <ref name="nytimes">Goodman, Peter S  The Reckoning - Taking Hard New Look at a Greenspan Legacy, The New York Times, October 9, 2008 </ref> Born resigned as chairperson on June 1, 1999, shortly after Congress passed legislation prohibiting her agency from regulating derivatives 

In 2009, Born received the John F  Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award, along with Sheila Bair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, in recognition of the "political courage she demonstrated in sounding early warnings about conditions that contributed" to the 2007-08 financial crisis 

Early life and education
Born graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School (San Francisco, California) at the age of 16  She then attended Stanford University, where she majored in English and was graduated with the class of 1961   She initially wanted to become a doctor, but a guidance counsellor at Stanford advised her against medicine, so she majored in English literature instead 

She then attended Stanford Law School, one of only seven women in her class   She was the first female student ever to be named president of the Stanford Law Review  She received the "Outstanding Senior" award and graduated as valedictorian of the class of 1964 

Legal career
Immediately after law school Born was selected as a law clerk to judge Henry Edgerton of the U S  Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit  It was during this time that she met her first husband, Jacob C  Landau, who was a journalist covering the Federal courts at the time  Following her clerkship, she became an associate at the Washington, D C -based international law firm of Arnold & Porter  Born was attracted to Arnold & Porter because it was one of the few major law firms to have a woman partner at that time, Carolyn Agger, who was the head of the tax practice  Born took a two-year leave of absence from Arnold & Porter to accompany her first husband to Boston, where he had received a fellowship  During that time she worked as a research assistant to law professor Alan Dershowitz 

Born's early career at Arnold & Porter focused on international trade law, in which she represented a number of Swiss industries and the government of Switzerland  She developed a practice representing clients in numerous complex litigation and arbitration cases involving financial market transactions  Among her high-profile cases was the matter of the Hunt Brothers attempt to corner the market in silver in the 1970s  She made partner at Arnold & Porter, after moving to a three-day schedule to help raise her second child, and eventually rose to be the head of the firm's derivatives practice 

Born was among the first female attorneys to systematically address inequities regarding how the laws treated women  Born and another female lawyer, Marna Tucker, taught what is considered to have been the first "Women and the Law" course at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law  The class exclusively concerned prejudicial treatment of women under the laws of the United States, past and present   Born and Tucker were surprised to discover that there was no textbook on the issue at the time   Born is also one of the co-founders of the National Women's Law Center  Born also helped rewrite the American Bar Association rules to make it possible for more women and minorities to sit on federal bench 

During her long legal career, and into her retirement, Born did much pro bono and other types of volunteer work  She was active in the American Bar Association, the largest professional organization of lawyers in the United States   Initially Born was named a member of the governing council of the ABA's Individual Rights Section, eventually becoming chairperson   Born and Tucker founded the ABA Women's Caucus, the first organization of female lawyers in the ABA   She held several other senior positions in the ABA, including being named the first woman member of the ABA's Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary   As a member of the Judiciary Committee, Born provided testimony and opinion on persons nominated for federal judgeships  In 1980 she was named chair of the committee   As chair of the committee, Born was invited to address the U S  Congress regarding the nomination of Judge Sandra Day O'Connor to the U S  Supreme Court 

In 1993, Born's name was floated as a possible candidate for Attorney General of the United States, but Janet Reno was nominated 

In July 2009, Nancy Pelosi appointed Brooksley Born as a commissioner to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) 

Born and the OTC derivatives market
Born was appointed to the CFTC on April 15, 1994, by President Bill Clinton  Due to litigation against Bankers Trust Company by Procter and Gamble and other corporate clients, Born and her team at the CFTC sought comments on the regulation of over-the-counter derivatives, a first step in the process of writing CFTC regulations to supplement the existing regulations of the Federal Reserve System,  the Options Clearing Corporation, and the National Association of Insurance Commissioners  Born was particularly concerned about swaps, financial instruments that are traded over the counter between banks, insurance companies or other funds or companies, and thus have no transparency except to the two counterparties and the counterparties' regulators, if any   CFTC regulation was strenuously opposed by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, and by Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers  On May 7, 1998, former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt joined Rubin and Greenspan in objecting to the issuance of the CFTC's concept release  Their response dismissed Born's analysis and focused on the hypothetical possibility that CFTC regulation of swaps and other OTC derivative instruments could create a "legal uncertainty" regarding such financial instruments,  hypothetically reducing the value of the instruments  They argued that the imposition of regulatory costs would "stifle financial innovation" and encourage financial capital to transfer its  transactions offshore  The disagreement between Born and the Executive Office's top economic policy advisors has been described not only as a classic Washington turf war, but also a war of ideologies,  insofar as it is possible to argue that Born's actions were consistent with Keynesian and neoclassical economics while Greenspan, Rubin, Levitt, and Summers consistently espoused neoliberal, and neoconservative policies 

In 1998, a trillion-dollar hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) was near collapse   Using mathematical models to calculate debt risk, LTCM used derivatives to leverage $5 billion into more than $1 trillion, doing business with fifteen of Wall Street's largest financial institutions   The derivative transactions were not regulated, nor were investors able to evaluate LTCM's exposures   Born stated, "I thought that LTCM was exactly what I had been worried about"   In the last weekend of September 1998, the President's working group was told that the entire American economy hung in the balance   After intervention by the Federal Reserve, the crisis was averted   In congressional hearings into the crisis, Greenspan acknowledged that language had been introduced into an agriculture bill that would prevent CFTC from regulating the derivatives which were at the center of the crisis that threatened the US economy   U S  Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) asked "How many more failures do you think we'd have to have before some regulation in this area might be appropriate?"  In response, Greenspan brushed aside the substance of Born's warnings with the simple assertion that "the degree of supervision of regulation of the over-the-counter derivatives market is quite adequate to maintain a degree of stability in the system"  Born's warning was that there wasn't any regulation of them   Born's chief of staff, Michael Greenberger summed up Greenspan's position this way: "Greenspan didn't believe that fraud was something that needed to be enforced, and he assumed she probably did  And of course, she did "  Under heavy pressure from the financial lobby, legislation prohibiting regulation of derivatives by Born's agency was passed by the Congress   Born resigned on June 1, 1999 

The derivatives market continued to grow yearly throughout both terms of George W  Bush's administration  On September 15, 2008, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers forced a broad recognition of a financial crisis in both the US and world capital markets   As Lehman Brothers' failure temporarily reduced financial capital's confidence, a number of newspaper articles and television programs suggested that the failure's possible causes included the conflict between the CFTC and the other regulators Faiola, Anthony, Nakashima, Ellen and Drew, Jill  The Crash: Risk and Regulation - What Went Wrong, The Washington Post, October 15, 2008 

Born declined to publicly comment on the unfolding 2008 crisis until March 2009, when she said: "The market grew so enormously, with so little oversight and regulation, that it made the financial crisis much deeper and more pervasive than it otherwise would have been " She also lamented the influence of Wall Street lobbyists on the process and the refusal of regulators to discuss even modest reforms 

An October 2009 Frontline documentary titled "The Warning"  described Born's thwarted efforts to regulate and bring transparency to the derivatives market, and the continuing opposition thereto  The program concluded with an excerpted interview with Born sounding another warning: "I think we will have continuing danger from these markets and that we will have repeats of the financial crisis -- may differ in details but there will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap, over and over, until we learn from experience "

In 2009 Born, along with Sheila Bair of the FDIC, was awarded the John F  Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award in recognition of the "political courage she demonstrated in sounding early warnings about conditions that contributed" to the 2007-08 financial crisis   According to Caroline Kennedy, "Brooksley Born recognized that the financial security of all Americans was being put at risk by the greed, negligence and opposition of  powerful and well connected interests     The catastrophic financial events of recent months have  proved them [Born and Sheila Bair] right "  One member of the President's working group had a change of heart about Brooksley Born   SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt stated "I've come to know her as one of the most capable, dedicated, intelligent and committed public servants that I have ever come to know", adding that "I could have done much better  I could have made a difference" in response to her warnings 

In 2010, a documentary film Inside Job further alleged that derivatives regulation was ineffective from the Clinton administration on  Along with fellow whistleblower, former IMF Chief Economist Raghuram Rajan, who was also scorned by the economic establishment, Brooksley Born was cited as one of the authorities arguing that financial derivatives increase economic risk 

 Personal life 
Born is married to Alexander E  Bennett (also retired from Arnold & Porter)   She has five adult children - two from a previous marriage to Jacob Landau and three stepchildren  Notably, Born was named a partner at Arnold & Porter while working part-time so she could raise her two young children   When both of her children were school-age, Born returned to practice full-time 

References

External links
Attorney profile at Arnold & Porter
Brooksley Born (2009 Winner) of the Profiles in Courage Award, with acceptance speech transcript and NECN video

Profile at MarketsWiki
Speeches and statements
"Testimony Of Brooksley Born Chairperson of the CFTC Concerning The Over-The-Counter Derivatives Market", before the House Committee On Banking And Financial Services, July 24, 1998 
"The Lessons of Long Term Capital Management L P ", Remarks of Brooksley Born, Chairperson of the CFTC, Chicago-Kent-IIT Commodities Law Institute, Chicago, Illinois, October 15, 1998 
 Interview: Brooksley Born for "PBS Frontline: The Warning", PBS, (streaming VIDEO 1 hour), October 20, 2009 
Articles
Manuel Roig-Franzia  "Credit Crisis Cassandra:Brooksley Born's Unheeded Warning Is a Rueful Echo 10 Years On", The Washington Post, May 26, 2009
 Taibbi, Matt  "The Great American Bubble Machine", Rolling Stone'', July 9–23, 2009

1940 births
American women lawyers
Arnold & Porter people
Clinton administration personnel
Columbus School of Law faculty
Commodity Futures Trading Commission personnel
Heads of United States federal agencies
Lawyers from San Francisco
Living people
Stanford Law School alumni
21st-century American women
Stanford University alumni



ground_truth: June 1, 1999.

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: 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  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 



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: What is the main topic of the text?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 3: Ann's Mega Dub: 12/19/10 - 12/26/10
Got o have a penis to be an expert
Thursday on NPR's Fresh Air, Terry Gross wanted to talk film and music  Since women don't know a thing about either and aren't interested in either, Terry had to find men who were 'experts 'This is C I 's " Iraq snapshot Friday, December 24, 2010  Chaos and violence continue, Nouri's incomplete Cabinet continues to receive criticism, a father offers an 'excuse' for killing his own daughter, and more Marci Stone (US Headlines Examiner) reports, "Friday afternoon, Santa is currently in Baghdad, Iraq and on his next stop is Moscow, Russia, according to the 2010 NORAD Santa Tracker  The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has been tracking Santa as he makes his annual journey throughout the world " Gerald Skoning (Palm Beach Post) quotes Santa saying, "We send our special wishes for peace and goodwill to all  That includes the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea " Please note that this is Santa's seventh trip to Iraq since the start of the Iraq War and, as usual, his journey was known in advance  No waiting until he hit the ground to announce he was going to Iraq -- the way George The Bully Boy Bush had to and the way US President Barack Obama still has to  In the lead up to Santa's yearly visit, many 'authorities' in Iraq began insisting that Christmas couldn't be celebrated publicly, that even Santa was banned  Gabriel Gatehouse (BBC News) quotes Shemmi Hanna stating, "I wasn't hurt but I wish that I had been killed  I wish I had become a martyr for this church, but God kept me alive for my daughters " Shemmi Hanna was in Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad when it was assaulted October 31st and she lost her husband, her son, her daughter-in-law and her infant grandson in the attack  The October 31st attack marks the latest wave of violence targeting Iraqi Christians  The violence has led many to flee to northern Iraq (KRG) or to other countries  Zvi Bar'el (Haaretz) notes, "This week the Iraqi legislature discussed the Christians' situation and passed a resolution in principle to help families who fled  However, the parliament does not know where the Christians are, how many are still in Iraq, in their homes, and how many have found asylum in Iraqi Kurdistan " John Leland (New York Times) reports:The congregants on Friday night were fewer than 100, in a sanctuary built for four or five times as many  But they were determined  This year, even more than in the past, Iraqi's dwindling Christian minority had reasons to stay home for Christmas  "Yes, we are threatened, but we will not stop praying," the Rev  Meyassr al-Qaspotros told the Christmas Eve crowd at the Sacred Church of Jesus, a Chaldean Catholic church  "We do not want to leave the country because we will leave an empty space " Raheem Salman (Los Angeles Times) reports, "Rimon Metti's family will go to Christian services on Christmas Day, but his relatives will be praying for their own survival and wondering whether this is their last holiday season in Baghdad  If they had any grounds for optimism about the future of their faith in Iraq, it vanished this year amid repeated attacks on fellow believers " Shahsank Bengali (McClatchy Newspapers) adds, "Nearly two months after a shocking assault by Islamist militants, Our Lady of Salvation Catholic Church will commemorate Christmas quietly, with daytime mass and prayers for the dead, under security fit more for a prison than a house of worship  It is the same at Christian churches across Baghdad and northern Iraq, where what's left of one of the world's oldest Christian communities prepares to mark perhaps the most somber Christmas since the start of the Iraq war "Meanwhile Taylor Luck (Jordan Times) reports on Iraqi refugees in Jordan:Although the calendar will say December 25, for Theresa, Saturday will not be Christmas  There will be no cinnamon klecha cooling on the dining room table, no outdoor ceramic nativity scene, no readings of hymns with relatives  The 63-year-old Iraqi woman has even refused to put up Christmas lights in the crowded two-room Amman hotel apartment she has called home since fleeing Baghdad last month "There is no holiday spirit  All we have is fear," she said This holiday will instead mark another year without news from her 46-year-old son, who was kidnapped outside Baghdad in late 2006 From Turkey, Sebnem Arsu (New York Times -- link has text and video) notes the increase in Iraq refugees to the country since October 31st and quotes Father Emlek stating, "I've never seen as many people coming here as I have in the last few weeks  They also go to Lebanon, Jordan and Syria but it seems that Turkey is the most popular despite the fact that they do not speak the language " Jeff Karoub (AP) reports on the small number of Iraqi refugees who have made it to the US and how some of them "struggle with insomnia, depression and anxiety "One group in Iraq who can openly celebrate Christmas are US service members who elect to  Barbara Surk (AP) reports that tomorrow Chief Warrant Officer Archie Morgan will celebrate his fourth Christmas in Iraq and Captain Diana Crane is celebrating her second Christmas in Iraq: "Crane was among several dozen troops attending a Christmas Eve mass in a chapel in Camp Victory, an American military base just outside Baghdad " Marc Hansen (Des Moines Reigster) speaks with six service members from Iowa who are stationed in Iraq  Sgt 1st Class Dennis Crosser tells Hansen, "I certainly understand from reading the paper what's going on in Afghanistan and the attention definitely needs to be on the troops there  But everyone serving here in Operation New Dawn appreciates a little bit of attention as we finish this up "Today Jiang Yu, China's Foreign Minister, issued the following statement, "We welcome and congratulate Iraq on forming a new government  We hope that the Iraqi Government unite all its people, stabilize the security situation, accelerate economic reconstruction and make new progress in building its country " James Cogan (WSWS) reports:US State Department official Philip Crowley declared on Wednesday that Washington had not "dictated the terms of the government"  In reality, constant American pressure was applied to Maliki, Allawi, Kurdish leaders and other prominent Iraqi politicians throughout the entire nine-month process to form a cabinet  The US intervention included numerous personal phone calls and visits to Baghdad by both President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden The key objective of the Obama administration has been to ensure that the next Iraqi government will "request" a long-term military partnership with the US when the current Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) expires at the end of 2011  The SOFA is the legal basis upon which some 50,000 American troops remain in Iraq, operating from large strategic air bases such as Balad and Tallil and Al Asad  US imperialism spent billions of dollars establishing these advanced bases as part of its wider strategic plans and has no intention of abandoning them Cogan's only the second person to include the SOFA in his report  Some are impressed with the 'feat' of taking nearly ten months to form a government, stringing the country along for ten months while no decisions could go through  The editorial board of the Washington Post, for example, was full of praise yesterday  Today they're joined by Iran's Ambassador to Iraq, Hassan Danaiifar  The Tehran Times reports that Danaiifar was full of praise today hailing the "positive and final step which ended the 10-month political limbo in Iraq " However, Danaiifar was less pie-in-the-sky than the Post editorial board because he can foresee future problems as evidenced by his statement, "We may witness the emergence of some problems after one and half of a year -- for example, some ministers may be impeached " Of course, there are already many clouds on the horizon, even if Iranian diplomats and Post editorial boards can't suss them out  For example, Ben Bendig (Epoch Times) noted the objection of Iraq's female politicians to Nouri al-Maliki's decision to nominate only one woman (so far) to his Cabinet: "Some 50 female lawmakers went to the country's top leadership, the United Nations and the Arab League to voice their concern and desire for increased representation " BNO notes that protest and also that a group of Iraqi MPs are alleging that Iraqiya bought seats in the Cabinet via money exchanged in Jordan  UPI adds, "Maliki, a Shiite who has a long history of working with Tehran, has named himself acting minister of defense, interior and national security, three most powerful and sensitive posts in the government he is stitching together  Although Maliki appears to be bending over backward to accommodate rivals among Iraq's Shiite majority as well as minority Sunnis and Kurds in his administration in a spirit of reconciliation, he is unlikely to relinquish those ministries that dominate the security sector " DPA reports, "Sheikh Abdel-Mahdi al-Karbalaei, a confident of influential Shiite spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, said that the new cabinet is 'below the standards' Iraqi citizens had hoped for and suggested it could prove to be weaker than the previous government " Ranj Alaaldin (Guardian) also spots clouds on the horizon:Lasting peace and stability depends on resolving outstanding disputes with the Kurds on oil, revenue-sharing, security and the disputed territories (Kirkuk in particular)  The Kurds, rather than exploiting their kingmaker position to take a stronger proportion of ministries in Baghdad (they are taking just one major portfolio – the foreign ministry), are instead banking on guarantees from Maliki to implement their list of 19 demands that includes resolving the above disputes in their favour They may have been naive, though  With their historical and federalist partners, the Islamic supreme council of Iraq in decline, the Kurds may be isolated in the new government – a government dominated by the nationalistic and centrist characteristics of the INM, the Sadrists and indeed State of Law Maliki may, therefore, turn out to be unable to grant concessions even if he wanted to and could use Osama Nujayfi, the new ultra-nationalist speaker of parliament and Kurdish foe, to absorb the Kurdish criticism and insulate himself from any attacks AP reports that Iraqi police sought out a 19-year-old woman because of rumors that she was working with al Qaida in Mesopotamia only to be greeted with the news that her father allegedly killed her and the father showed the police where he buried the woman       last month  The story begs for more than it offers  The most obvious observation is: what does it say that a woman's allegedly killed by her father and no one says a word for over a month? After that, it should probably be noted that there are many men in Iraq killing women who, no doubt, would love to also be able to pin the blame on al Qaida  In other violence, Reuters notes a house bombing in Haswa which claimed the life of Mohammed al-Karrafi, "his wife, two sons and a nephew" -- as well as injuring four more people, and a Samarra roadside bombing which claimed the lives of 2 police officers  DPA notes it was two homes bombed in Haswa and that the Samarra roadside bombing also injured four Iraqi soldiers  Jomana Karadsheh (CNN) reports, "Another policeman was wounded in Baghdad Friday night when a roadside bomb detonated by a police patrol, an Interior Ministry official told CNN "And we'll close with this from Peace Mom Cindy Sheehan's latest Al Jazeera column:The recent repeal of the US military policy of "Don't ask, don't tell" is far from being the human rights advancement some are touting it to be  I find it intellectually dishonest, in fact, illogical on any level to associate human rights with any military, let alone one that is currently dehumanising two populations as well as numerous other victims of it's clandestine "security" policies Placing this major contention aside, the enactment of the bill might be an institutional step forward in the fight for "equality"; however institutions rarely reflect reality Do we really think that the US congress vote to repeal the act and Obama signing the bill is going to stop the current systemic harassment of gays in the military?While I am a staunch advocate for equality of marriage and same-sex partnership, I cannot - as a peace activist - rejoice in the fact that now homosexuals can openly serve next to heterosexuals in one of the least socially responsible organisations that currently exists on earth: The US military It is an organisation tainted with a history of intolerance towards anyone who isn't a Caucasian male from the Mid-West  Even then I'm sure plenty fitting that description have faced the terror and torment enshrined into an institution that transforms the pride and enthusiasm of youth into a narrow zeal for dominating power relations And we'll close with this from Francis A  Boyle's "2011: Prospects for Humanity?" (Global Research):Historically, this latest eruption of American militarism at the start of the 21st Century is akin to that of America opening the 20th Century by means of the U S -instigated Spanish-American War in 1898  Then the Republican administration of President William McKinley stole their colonial empire from Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines; inflicted a near genocidal war against the Filipino people; while at the same time illegally annexing the Kingdom of Hawaii and subjecting the Native Hawaiian people (who call themselves the Kanaka Maoli) to near genocidal conditions  Additionally, McKinley's military and colonial expansion into the Pacific was also designed to secure America's economic exploitation of China pursuant to the euphemistic rubric of the "open door" policy  But over the next four decades America's aggressive presence, policies, and practices in the "Pacific" would ineluctably pave the way for Japan's attack at Pearl Harbor on Dec  7, 194l, and thus America's precipitation into the ongoing Second World War  Today a century later the serial imperial aggressions launched and menaced by the Republican Bush Jr  administration and now the Democratic Obama administration are threatening to set off World War III  By shamelessly exploiting the terrible tragedy of 11 September 2001, the Bush Jr  administration set forth to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Muslim states and peoples living in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf under the bogus pretexts of (1) fighting a war against international terrorism; and/or (2) eliminating weapons of mass destruction; and/or (3) the promotion of democracy; and/or (4) self-styled "humanitarian intervention " Only this time the geopolitical stakes are infinitely greater than they were a century ago: control and domination of two-thirds of the world's hydrocarbon resources and thus the very fundament and energizer of the global economic system – oil and gas  The Bush Jr / Obama administrations have already targeted the remaining hydrocarbon reserves of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia for further conquest or domination, together with the strategic choke-points at sea and on land required for their transportation  In this regard, the Bush Jr  administration announced the establishment of the U S  Pentagon's Africa Command (AFRICOM) in order to better control, dominate, and exploit both the natural resources and the variegated peoples of the continent of Africa, the very cradle of our human species  This current bout of U S  imperialism is what Hans Morgenthau denominated "unlimited imperialism" in his seminal work Politics Among Nations (4th ed  1968, at 52-53): The outstanding historic examples of unlimited imperialism are the expansionist policies of Alexander the Great, Rome, the Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries, Napoleon I, and Hitler  They all have in common an urge toward expansion which knows no rational limits, feeds on its own successes and, if not stopped by a superior force, will go on to the confines of the political world  This urge will not be satisfied so long as there remains anywhere a possible object of domination--a politically organized group of men which by its very independence challenges the conqueror's lust for power  It is, as we shall see, exactly the lack of moderation, the aspiration to conquer all that lends itself to conquest, characteristic of unlimited imperialism, which in the past has been the undoing of the imperialistic policies of this kind…  On 10 November 1979 I visited with Hans Morgenthau at his home in Manhattan  It proved to be our last conversation before he died on 19 July 1980  Given his weakened physical but not mental condition and his serious heart problem, at the end of our necessarily abbreviated one-hour meeting I purposefully asked him what he thought about the future of international relations  iraqbbc newsgabriel gatehousethe new york timesjohn lelandhaaretzzvi bar'elthe jordan timestaylor luckthe associated pressjeff karoubthe los angeles timesraheem salmancnnjomana karadsheh
Terry thinks she's a man
Yesterday on NPR's Fresh Air the hour went to a male TV critic  It's always a man with Terry  Always  And somebody tell her that a snotty, snooty TV critic really doesn't make for good programming This is C I 's "Iraq snapshot:" Thursday, December 23, 2010  Chaos and violence continue, Iraqi women make clear their displeasure over the Cabinet make up, Daniel Ellsberg and Veterans for Peace get some recognition, and more  Last Thursday a protest held outside the White House  One of the organizers was Veterans for Peace and Pentagon Papers whistle blower Daniel Ellsberg participated and spoke  Juana Bordas (Washington Post) advocates for both of them to be named persons of the year: Veterans for Peace and Daniel Ellsberg should be this year's person of the year because of their courage and bravery to stand up for all of us who believe that "war is not the answer " Moreover in a time of economic recession, the war machine is bankrupting our country  As John Amidon, a Marine Corps veteran from Albany asked at the White House protest, "How is the war economy working for you?"While unemployment rates hover near 10 percent, there is no doubt that the U S  economy and quality of life is faltering  Worldwide we are 14th in education, 37th in the World Health Organization's ranking on medical systems, and 23rd in the U N  Environmental Sustainability Index on being most livable and greenest benefits  There is one place we take the undeniable world lead  The US military spending accounts for a whopping 46 5 percent of world military spending--the next ten countries combined come in at only 20 7 percent  Linda Pershing (Truthout) reports, "Responding to a call from the leaders of Stop These Wars(1) - a new coalition of Veterans for Peace and other activists - participants came together in a large-scale performance of civil resistance  A group of veterans under the leadership of Veterans for Peace members Tarak Kauff, Will Covert and Elaine Brower, mother of a Marine who has served three tours of duty in Iraq, sponsored the event with the explicit purpose of putting their bodies on the line  Many participants were Vietnam War veterans; others ranged from Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans in their 20s and 30s to World War II vets in their 80s and older  They were predominately white; men outnumbered women by at least three to one  After a short rally in Lafayette Park, they formed a single-file procession, walking across Pennsylvania Avenue to the solemn beat of a drum  As they reached the police barricade (erected to prevent them from chaining themselves to the gate, a plan they announced on their web site), the activists stood shoulder to shoulder, their bodies forming a human link across the 'picture postcard' tableau in front of the White House " Maria Chutchian (Arlington Advocate) quotes, participant Nate Goldshlag (Vietnam veteran) stating, ""There was a silent, single file march around Lafayette Park to a drum beat  Then we went in front of the White House,  There were barricades set up in front of white house fence  So when we got there, we jumped over barricades and were able to get right next to the White House fence " Participant Linda LeTendre (Daily Gazette) reports: At the end of the rally, before the silent, solemn procession to the White House fence, in honor of those killed in Iraq and Afghan wars of lies and deceptions, the VFP played taps and folded an American flag that had been left behind at a recent funeral for the veteran of one of those wars  Two attendees in full dress uniform held and folded the flag  I had the image of all of the people who stood along the roads and bridges when the bodies of the two local men, Benjamin Osborn and David Miller, were returned to the Capital District  I thought if all of those people were here now or spoke out against war these two fine young men might still be with us I was blessed enough to be held in custody with one of those in uniform; a wonderful young man who had to move from his hometown in Georgia because no one understood why as a veteran he was against these wars  Even his family did not understand  (He remains in my prayers )Our plan was to attach ourselves to the White House fence until President Obama came out and talked to us or until we were arrested and dragged away  I don't have to tell you how it ended Mr  Ellsberg was one of 139 people arrested at that action  We've noted the protest in pretty much every snapshot since last Thursday  If something else comes out that's worth noting on the protest, we'll include it  We will not include people who don't have their facts and it's really sad when they link to, for example, Guardian articles and the links don't even back them up  It's real sad, for example, when they're trashing Hillary (big strong men that they are) and ripping her apart and yet Barack? "Obama's inaccurate statements"??? What the hell is that? You're inferring he lied, say so  Don't be such a little chicken s**t  It's especially embarrasing when you're grandstanding on 'truth ' Especially when you're the little s**t that clogged up the public e-mail account here in the summer of 2008 whining that you were holding Barack to a standard, then admitting that you weren't, then whining that if you did people would be mean to you  Oh, that's sooooooo sad  Someone might say something bad about you  The horror  You must suffer more than all the people in Iraq and Afghanistan combined  While the action took place in DC, actions also took place in other cities  We've already noted NYC's action this week, Doug Kaufmann (Party for Socialism & Liberation) reports on the Los Angeles action: Despite heavy rain, over 100 people gathered in Los Angeles on the corner of Hollywood and Highland to demand an end to the U S  wars on Afghanistan and Iraq  People came from as far as Riverside to protest, braving what Southern California media outlets have dubbed the "storm of the decade " The demonstration, initiated and led by the ANSWER Coalition, broke the routine of holiday shopping and garnered support from activists and even passers by, who joined in chanting "Money for jobs and education -- not for war and occupation!" and "Occupation is a crime -- Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine!" Protesters held banners reading, "U S /NATO Out of Afghanistan!" and "Yes to jobs, housing and education -- no to war, racism and occupation!"Speakers at the demonstration included representatives of Korean Americans for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, KmB Pro-People Youth, Veterans for Peace, Party for Socialism and Liberation and National Lawyers Guild  Tuesday, Nouri al-Maliki managed to put away the political stalemate thanks to a lot of Scotch -- tape to hold the deal together and booze to keep your eyes so crossed you don't question how someone can claim to have formed a Cabinet when they've left over ten positions to be filled at a later date  One group speaking out is women  Bushra Juhi and Qassmi Abdul-Zahra (AP) report, "Iraq's female lawmakers are furious that only one member of the country's new Cabinet is a woman and are demanding better representation in a government that otherwise has been praised by the international community for bringing together the country's religious sects and political parties " As noted Tuesday, though represenation in Parliament is addressed in Iraq's Constitution, there is nothing to address women serving in the Cabinet  Aseel Kami (Reuters) notes one of the most damning aspects of Nouri's chosen men -- a man is heaing the Ministry of Women's Affairs  Iraqiya's spokesperson Maysoon Damluji states, "There are really good women who could do wel       they cannot be neglected and marginalized " Al-Amal's Hanaa Edwar states, "They call it a national (power) sharing government  So where is the sharing? Do they want to take us back to the era of the harem? Do they want to take us back to the dark ages, when women were used only for pleasure " Deborah Amos (NPR's All Things Considered) reports that a struggle is going on between secular impulses and fundamentalist ones  Gallery owner Qasim Sabti states, "We know it's fighting between the religious foolish man and the civilization man  We know we are fighting like Gandhi, and this is a new language in Iraqi life  We have no guns  We do not believe in this kind of fighting " Deborah Amos is the author of Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East  Meanwhile Nizar Latif (The National) reports that distrust is a common reaction to the new government in Baghdad and quotes high school teacher Hussein Abed Mohammad stating, "Promises were made that trustworthy, competent people would be ministers this time around, but it looks as if everything has just been divided out according to sectarian itnerests  No attention has been paid to forming a functioning government, it is just a political settlement of vested interests  I'm sure al Maliki will have the same problems in his next four years as he had in the last four years " Days away from the ten months mark, Nouri managed to finally end the stalemate  Some try to make sense of it and that must have been some office party that the editorial board of the Washington Post is still coming down from judging by "A good year in Iraq " First up, meet the new Iraqi Body Count -- an organization that provides cover for the war and allows supporters of the illegal war to point to it and insist/slur "Things aren't so bad!" Sure enough, the editorial board of the Post does just that noting the laughable "civilian deaths" count at iCasualities  As we noted -- long, long before we walked away from that crap ass website, they're not doing a civilian count  They're noting how many deaths Reuters reports 



ground_truth: The main topic of the text is Iraq's politics and current situation.