Eight years later, conservative Senator Iván Duque Márquez was elected President and soon became the nation's latest president. He won the election by 2 million votes against his rival liberal Senator Gustavo Petro.
Colombia is divided into 32 departments and one capital district. The capital district is treated as a department. Departments are divided into municipalities. Municipalities are divided into "corregimientos". Each department has a local government with a governor and assembly directly elected to four-year terms. Each municipality is headed by a mayor and council. Each "corregimiento" by an elected "corregidor", or local leader.
The population of Colombia was approximately 47 million as of 2016. The ethnic groups of the population are:
Up to 49.6% of the population is living below the poverty line.
There are several guerilla groups in Colombia, the FARC being the most powerful, a guerilla group responsible for kidnappings, murders, attacks, and drug-dealing. Drug dealing is a problem the government has been trying to fight. This creates violence in the cities. With Operation: Jaque, Ingrid Betancourt, three Americans, and 11 soldiers were rescued from the FARC.
Most parts of Colombia are modern and the country has many roads. All major Colombian cities have airports and there are many ports on both oceans (Pacific and Atlantic). Because Colombia is a huge country and there are many mountains, airports are very important in the country. There are some regions like the Amazon Forest and Dariend, where the most important way of transportation is by the rivers.
Colombia also has some very well known cities.
Colombia has made many advances in medicine. Many foreigners come to the country to get health services, such as organ transplants or plastic surgery. Doctor Manuel Elkin Patarroyo of Colombia discovered a medicine against malaria. He donated his discovery to be used in Africa and Latin America. He did not want to make business of it, instead he wanted to use it to help people.
Colombia is known for its coffee, coal, and emeralds. It is also the biggest supplier of plantains to the United States. There are a few armed conflicts in Colombia. Most rebel groups finance their operations with the trade of illegal drugs (mostly cocaine).
Abel Tasman
Abel Janszoon Tasman (1603–1659) was a Dutch sea explorer. He found Tasmania and New Zealand while on voyages in 1642 and 1644, in the service of the VOC (Dutch East India Company). He also made the first historical sightings of large parts of Australia.
He was born in Groningen, Holland. He went to Batavia (now called Jakarta) to work for the VOC in 1633. He went back to Holland in 1636. He went back to Batavia with his wife, Jannetie Tjaerss, two years later. He went north to Japan in 1640. In 1642 Tasman went south to Palembang.
Tasman set Governor General of the Dutch East Indies. Tasman sailed around to the east coast of Van Diemen's Land and claimed the land for the Dutch on December 3, 1642. The ships then sailed west and found New Zealand. His ships were attacked by Maori in large war canoes (boats) and four sailors died. Tasman then sailed north-east to Tonga and Fiji. He then sailed north west to New Guinea and got back to Batavia in June 1643.
In 1644 Tasman sailed from Batavia with the ships "Limmen", "Zeemeeuw" and "Bracq". He sailed along the west coast of New Guinea, and then the coast of Australia from Cape York to North West Cape. He went back to Batavia in August 1644. He showed that Western Australia and Queensland were part of the same country. He was not able to get through Torres Strait, but his maps were used for the next 200 years. Tasman made more trips including to Sumatra in 1646, Siam in 1647, and Manila in 1648. He purchased a lot of land in Batavia where he died in October 1659.
Several places have been named after him, including Tasmania, the Tasman Peninsula, Tasman Island and the Tasman Sea.
Hard science
Hard science is science that uses systematic observation, experiments and sometimes mathematics to get knowledge. In hard science, experiments have to be reproducible (if the experiment is done a second time, it will have to produce the same results as the first time). Also, in hard sciences there is usually good agreement as to what is known for sure. This is not true of soft sciences. Also, in hard science there is a world-view or theory which is widely agreed.
Hard science subjects include the natural sciences, which are about the natural world. These include physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy, and botany. Soft science is any of the social sciences, including history, sociology, and political science. Those sciences are soft because something could be done more than once, and produce a very different result each time. Also, there are radical disagreements between various schools of thought. Some aspects of psychology are hard science, especially relating to perception.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability of a computer program or a machine to think and learn. It is also a field of study which tries to make computers "smart". They work on their own without being encoded with commands. John McCarthy came up with the name "Artificial Intelligence" in 1955.
In general use, the term "artificial intelligence" means a programme which mimics human cognition. At least some of the things we associate with other minds, such as learning and problem solving can be done by computers, though not in the same way as we do. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define AI as a system’s ability to correctly interpret external data, to learn from such data, and to use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation.
An ideal (perfect) intelligent machine is a flexible agent which perceives its environment and takes actions to maximize its chance of success at some goal or objective. As machines become increasingly capable, mental faculties once thought to require intelligence are removed from the definition. For example, optical character recognition is no longer perceived as an example of "artificial intelligence": it is just a routine technology.
At present we use the term AI for successfully understanding human speech, competing at a high level in strategic game systems (such as Chess and Go), self-driving cars, and interpreting complex data. Some people also consider AI a danger to humanity if it continues to progress at its current pace.
An extreme goal of AI research is to create computer programs that can learn, solve problems, and think logically. In practice, however, most applications have picked on problems which computers can do well. Searching data bases and doing calculations are things computers do better than people. On the other hand, "perceiving its environment" in any real sense is way beyond present-day computing.
AI involves many different fields like computer science, mathematics, linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. Eventually researchers hope to create a "general artificial intelligence" which can solve many problems instead of focusing on just one. Researchers are also trying to create creative and emotional AI which can possibly empathize or create art. Many approaches and tools have been tried.