Eternal Memory: Metropolitan Laurus

From ORA ET LABORA:

His Eminence, Metropolitan Laurus of Eastern America and New York, First Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, has reposed in the Lord.

From what I have heard, he served the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts on Friday, then felt too ill to perform tonsures later that evening. He was found in his "skete" (his small cell a few hundred yards from the monastery) this morning, having reposed in his sleep.

The Lord chose to receive Vladyka Laurus on the Sunday of Orthodoxy...

Please pray for the soul of the newly-departed servant of God, Metropolitan Laurus.

May his memory be eternal!

Eliza Programmer Dead

From DevTopics:

Joseph Weizenbaum, who invented the famous "virtual psychiatrist" computer program Eliza, died from cancer on March 5 in Groben, Germany at age 85.

> How does that make you feel?

Weizenbaum was a pioneer in computer science and professor at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, where he created Eliza in 1966.

> Tell me more…

Eliza was a simple question & answer program in the form of today's online chat software. Eliza parodied a Rogerian psycho-therapist, mostly by rephrasing the user/patient's statements as questions and posing them back to the patient. This eliminated the need for a large real-world database.

> I'm not sure I understand you fully.

Eliza foreshadowed the potential of artificial intelligence, but Weizenbaum was stunned to discover how many people became engrossed in conversations with Eliza, even revealing intimate personal details. Over time, Weizenbaum grew skeptical about technology's ability to improve the human condition.

> Can't you be more positive?

In his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, Weizenbaum criticized systems that substituted automated decision-making for the human mind. He also believed there were "transcendent qualities in the human experience that could not be duplicated in interactions with machines" such as "the wordless glance that a father and mother share over the bed of their sleeping child." (source)

> What does that suggest to you?

As Theodore Piszak wrote, Weizenbaum's book was "Superb…The work of a man who is struggling with the utmost seriousness to save our humanity from the reductionist onslaught of one of the most prestigious, active, and richly funded technologies of our time."

Try Eliza online

More on Joseph Weizenbaum

Samuel Hoppe R.I.P.

HOPPE, Samuel : January 9, 1958 - December 3, 2007 Samuel Hoppe passed away peacefully, but all too soon on December 3, 2007 after battling complications due to Multiple Sclerosis. He will be deeply missed by his mother Ellen, his brothers Toomas and Eliot, his daughters Michelle, Melanie (spouse Phil) and Sara, his wife Diane and of course all his nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. Sam spent the last few years of his life living at Bendale Acres Home for the Aged and will also be deeply missed by the residents, staff and visitors. His life may have been short, compared to most, but he never looked back on what might have been, he only moved forward in faith and trust.

Dr Nikolai Khokhlov - In Memoriam

On September 4, 2007 [Old Style], Dr Nikolai Evgenievich Khokhlov, 84, died of a heart attack. A former officer of the Soviet NKVD (KGB), Professor Khokhlov defected to the West in 1954, after refusing to carry out the assassination of a prominent anti-communist leader in West Germany. He was one of the first high-ranking Soviet intelligence agents to defect to the West, and his story was splashed, at the time, across major American magazines: Newsweek (31 May 1954), Time (3 May 1954), etc. In the atmosphere of the Cold War, Professor Khokhlov was at once a hero and the subject of suspicion among anti-communist Russian exiles and in Western press reports. This fact and the disappearance (at KGB orders, as he later learned) of his wife, who was pregnant with a son - now a prominent Russian academic - whom he did not know about until after the USSR's collapse, caused him great bitterness throughout his life. The story of his escape to the West is the subject of the book In the Name of Conscience (New York: David McKay, 1959) and a documentary, by the BBC and Russian Public Television, entitled "A Matter of Conscience." Following his defection, Dr Khokhlov collaborated and worked with Western intelligence services, the US government and various anti-communist activists. As a result, in 1957, in Frankfurt, Germany, he was the victim of an assassination attempt by the KGB, which poisoned him with radioactive thallium (see a recent account of this in the London Times, December 1, 2006.) He quite fortunately survived the attempt, despite a long period of difficult recuperation and rehabilitation. A brilliant statistician and computer engineer, on settling in the US, Khokhlov pursued graduate schooling in psychology, completing a doctoral degree (in two years) in clinical and experimental psychology at Duke University. He also did extensive work in the field of parapsychology. In 1968, he began a teaching career in psychology at the California State University. An intensely private man, he eventually remarried and had two daughters and a son. (His son died of kidney failure in his youth, and there have long been largely quiet and unconfirmed suspicions, in intelligence circles, that his illness was also initiated by some sort of poisoning - revenge for the failed attempt to poison his father.) When he was named an emeritus professor at the California State University, Dr Khokhlov was given the following accolade, which perfectly summarizes him: "That so few people are aware of the scope of his international reputation and his intensely personal life struggle, following his defection from the Soviet Union in 1954, is a testimony to his quiet humility ... [and] his 'old world' European Russian gentility." вечная память! May his memory be eternal! (Adapted from Orthodox Tradition - Volume XXIV, Number 3 (2007))

Pavarotti : 1935-2007

Requiescat in pace