“Designer Alexei Kondakov hat eine Reihe von Werken geschaffen, in denen die Zeichen der klassischen Malerei der Renaissance in die Landschaften von Kiew integriert wurden”
The Dutch activist group Women on Waves (WOW) is planning to use drones to deliver abortion-inducing drugs to the women of Poland, where abortion is almost entirely banned. The "abortion drones" are scheduled to launch from Frankfurt, Germany, this Saturday and carry the medication to Slubice, Poland, where Polish women's groups will be waiting to receive and distribute the pills.
Polish law prohibits abortion except in cases of rape or incest, severe fetal malformation, or threats to a pregnant woman's life. Rebecca Gomperts, founder of the Netherlands-based WOW, told The Guardian:
We want to create awareness about women’s right to a safe abortion. The drone is another way to use the different laws in different countries in order to draw attention to the social injustice that women who are living in places where abortion is illegal are subject to.
In Poland, even women who could have an abortion under Polish law are often denied it because Catholic hospitals don’t help them, even if their life is in danger. Rich people can go to Germany or the UK to have abortions, but it’s the women who don’t have the means or access to information who are suffering.
Because the drones won't be flying through controlled airspace, weigh less than 11 pounds, and are not for commercial purposes, their launch does not require permission from either the Polish or German governments, according to WOW.
Still, that doesn't mean the group and its allies (including German's women's groups Ciocia Basia and the Feminoteka Foundation) expect everything to go smoothly. Anti-abortion groups have pledged to shoot down the drones, which is why WOW has yet to announce the exact location for the Friday drop. However, "it's not easy to shoot down a drone and fortunately guns are not that easy to get in Europe," Gromperts pointed out.
WOW currently provides mail-order abortion medication to women in many countries around the world, but this is its first drone-delivery mission of the drugs. If successful, the group plans to try similarly in other European countries with aggressive abortion restrictions, such as Ireland and Malta.
In 1979, comics master Jack Kirby contributed artwork for a fake movie called “Lord of Light” that was used by the CIA to help free American embassy workers during the Iranian coup.
After watching episode 8 and its epic battle between the Wildlings and
the White Walkers, i was thinking these guys would make some great ice
hockey players. I was imagining the Night’s King with his army of
zombies behind him, approaching Jon Snow and being like “ duuuuude, are
we really going to do it this way? Why don’t we settle this like
gentlemen and slaughter each others on the ice, my team, your best guys,
fighting for our lives in the most epic death match ever. We play by
our rules, no holds barred, low blows and cannibalism are allowed…” And you probably recognized the Popsicle from my previous White Walker artwork, i think it actually makes a funny emblem.
Hope you enjoyed these characters this year again. Thanx so much for your support and all the kind words!^_^
WHY YOU WANT RAIL FOR KATLASHNIKOV? IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH AS PROCURED FROM IZHEVSK MECHNYANICAL WORKS? YOU THINK NEEDS IMPROVEMENT? THEN MAYBE YOU FIND JOB WITH ARMY OF RUSSIA! YOU HAVE DRINKS WITH MIKHAIL KATLASHNIKOV, TRADE STORY OF MANY KITTENS DESIGNED AND DETAILS OF SCHOOL FOR ENGINEERING!
A hallucinatory filter over a red tree. Spot the animals.
Photograph: Google
What do machines dream of? New images released by Google give us one potential answer: hypnotic landscapes of buildings, fountains and bridges merging into one.
They were created by feeding a picture into the network, asking it to recognise a feature of it, and modify the picture to emphasise the feature it recognises. That modified picture is then fed back into the network, which is again tasked to recognise features and emphasise them, and so on. Eventually, the feedback loop modifies the picture beyond all recognition.
At a low level, the neural network might be tasked merely to detect the edges on an image. In that case, the picture becomes painterly, an effect that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has experience playing about with photoshop filters:
An Ibis grazing, pre- and post-edge detection. Photograph: Google
But if the neural network is tasked with finding a more complex feature – such as animals – in an image, it ends up generating a much more disturbing hallucination:
A Knight, pre- and post-animal detection. Photograph: Google
Ultimately, the software can even run on an image which is nothing more than random noise, generating features that are entirely of its own imagination.
Before: noise; after: banana. Photograph: Google
Here’s what happens if you task a network focused on finding building features with finding and enhancing them in a featureless image:
A dreamscape made from random noise. Illustration: Google
The pictures are stunning, but they’re more than just for show. Neural networks are a common feature of machine learning: rather than explicitly programme a computer so that it knows how to recognise an image, the company feeds it images and lets it piece together the key features itself.
But that can result in software that is rather opaque. It’s difficult to know what features the software is examining, and which it has overlooked. For instance, asking the network to discover dumbbells in a picture of random noise reveals it thinks that a dumbbell has to have a muscular arm gripping it:
Dumbbells (plus arm). Photograph: Google
The solution might be to feed it more images of dumbbells sitting on the ground, until it understands that the arm isn’t an intrinsic part of the dumbbell.
“One of the challenges of neural networks is understanding what exactly goes on at each layer. We know that after training, each layer progressively extracts higher and higher-level features of the image, until the final layer essentially makes a decision on what the image shows. For example, the first layer may look for edges or corners. Intermediate layers interpret the basic features to look for overall shapes or components, such as a door or a leaf. The final few layers assemble those into complete interpretations – these neurons activate in response to very complex things such as entire buildings or trees,” explain the Google engineers on the company’s research blog.
Another dreamscape. Photograph: Google
“One way to visualise what goes on is to turn the network upside down and ask it to enhance an input image in such a way as to elicit a particular interpretation,” they add. “Say you want to know what sort of image would result in ‘banana’. Start with an image full of random noise, then gradually tweak the image towards what the neural net considers a banana.”
The image recognition software has already made it into consumer products. Google’s new photo service, Google Photos, features the option to search images with text: entering “dog”, for instance, will pull out every image Google can find which has a dog in it (and occasionally images with other quadrupedal mammals, as well).
So there you have it: Androids don’t just dream of electric sheep; they also dream of mesmerising, multicoloured landscapes.
The Dutch activist group Women on Waves (WOW) is planning to use drones to deliver abortion-inducing drugs to the women of Poland, where abortion is almost entirely banned. The "abortion drones" are scheduled to launch from Frankfurt, Germany, this Saturday and carry the medication to Slubice, Poland, where Polish women's groups will be waiting to receive and distribute the pills. 
