Latest news with #WaltWhitman
Int'l Business Times
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Int'l Business Times
Shaping Tomorrow's Global Leaders Through Music, Mentorship and Faith: The Mission of the Soul Children of Chicago
Who's the next generation of leaders? What skills do they need to enjoy their future role and sustain it? The Soul Children of Chicago (SCC) offers an answer to these questions. As the world wrestles with cultural divides, economic inequities, and a crisis of youth identity, SCC empowers young minds to lead with courage, creativity, and conviction through education, career guidance, cultural exposure, and the power of song. Founded in 1981 by Dr. Walt Whitman, Jr., SCC has been a nurturing environment for young people to discover their voices and potential. It began as a small school choir in Chicago's South Side and has grown into a Grammy Award-winning, internationally recognized powerhouse. With its roots in gospel and its reach now spanning continents, the organization is more than a local treasure. It's a global youth movement. "SCC is a global choir for all youth who want to dream bigger and do better," Dr. Whitman stresses. For over four decades, SCC's mission has always been to reach the soul of every child and uplift their lives spiritually, academically, and professionally. Through after-school programs, academic tutoring, premier vocal training, and mentoring from alumni and industry professionals, the organization equips its members to excel in every aspect of life. For instance, through its "Think Big" initiative, SCC hosts conferences that connect young people to leaders in technology, business, entertainment, and innovation, to name a few. These events enable youth to meet mentors, learn practical skills, and envision futures they hadn't dared to dream. From content creation to entrepreneurship, the Think Big Conference gives kids insights on how to turn their vision into reality. "Many of our former members have gone on to become entrepreneurs, artists, educators, civic leaders, and professionals in fields ranging from finance to fashion. One alum is now a hairstylist working with A-list celebrities. Others lead companies, plan events, teach, preach, and innovate. All of them excel in what they do and are fueled by the foundational experience of being part of this community," shares Dr. Whitman. SCC is proud of its generational legacy. The choir now includes members whose parents once sang under Dr. Whitman's direction. These multigenerational ties create lasting community bonds that extend beyond the choir into the fabric of Chicago itself. Dr. Whitman says, "This is what happens when a community invests deeply in its youth and stays the course over decades." It's worth noting that SCC is a spiritual sanctuary as much as it is a choir. Faith and gospel are the heart of the group's identity. The spiritual component offers a grounding force for children navigating life's storms. Dr. Whitman, a man of deep conviction and purpose, understands that today's youth are battling stress, anxiety, and disconnection. "That soul element, that grounding, is what gives these kids strength," Dr. Whitman says. Daily prayer lines, gospel-rooted mentorship, and a commitment to emotional and mental well-being give SCC members a depth that prepares them to thrive under pressure. "When a young person has that internal strength, they don't just survive. They lead," he adds. The discipline and structure instilled in every rehearsal translate to life skills that members carry far beyond the stage. Dr. Whitman draws from his background in the military and the church to maintain a high standard of excellence. This consistency has enabled SCC to transition from church-based performances to commanding stages globally, from Carnegie Hall to the White House . Meanwhile, SCC's versatility has allowed it to collaborate with musical legends such as Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, and Stevie Wonder. The visibility the choir has earned is another form of empowerment. Performances at major events such as the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) and the 2025 NASCAR Chicago Street Race have broadened the choir's audience and have changed how these young people see themselves. "We see such appearances not just as accolades but as access points. They place SCC members in rooms with CEOs, producers, and innovators, reshaping what these youth believe is possible for themselves," Dr. Whitman states. Now, as the Soul Children of Chicago further expands its global footprint, Dr. Whitman calls on new partners, corporate allies, and cultural collaborators to join the mission. "We're building something bigger than a choir," he says. "We're shaping a generation. And if you're someone who believes in the power of youth, in the potential of the next global leaders, then this is your invitation. Walk with us. Build with us. Help us show the world what happens when we believe in the youth's potential."
New York Times
08-07-2025
- New York Times
What's to Love About the New Jersey Turnpike? Everything.
Like many who grew up in the Northeast, I rarely thought about the New Jersey Turnpike, other than to joke about its ugliness. When I was a kid, the turnpike felt synonymous with the nothingness and boredom of New Jersey — a 'nonsite,' as the artist Robert Smithson once called it. The turnpike, an express toll road covering 117 miles, connects some of the state's suburbs to New York, Philadelphia and other major cities on a gargantuan concrete highway. When completed in 1951, it was celebrated as a marvel of engineering, the third-longest of its kind in the United States, and academics called it 'the embodiment of American pragmatism.' This pragmatism can end up having comic effects. What is one supposed to make of a rest stop populated by a Starbucks and Popeyes and named for Walt Whitman? Why is the road managed by an entity ominously named 'the authority,' as if it were an alien or a paramilitary organization? I remember an urban legend going around my high school, that the New Jersey Turnpike Authority was a secret government plot to turn all of New Jersey into turnpike. But the more time you spend on this highway, the more otherworldly it does feel. The turnpike's tollbooths heighten your expectations from the start. Payment of the fee then grants you access to a long, flat amusement park, which funnels you into a dizzying number of random worlds along its spine. I've taken wrong turns and ended up wandering through Little India, on Oak Tree Road off Exit 11, or Newark's Brazilian neighborhood off Exit 15E. These immigrant enclaves are not far from the ludicrously named American Dream Mall, off Exit 16W. All roads go from one place to another, but some do much more, transforming riders as well as transporting them. As a kid, I most dreaded taking Exit 8 to Manalapan. At home in Richboro, I was a regular American teenager, but after just 40 minutes on the highway, I was a Burmese child at the Manalapan Buddhist Temple, being poked and prodded by my relatives, sneaking glances at the clock in meditation sessions. When I graduated from college in Princeton, we took Exit 9 and ate at Wonder Seafood in Edison, and it was like taking a portal to the south of China. Though college was supposed to be a melting pot, it was the turnpike that flung me into true diversity. Now, when I go from my parents' home to mine in Brooklyn, I travel through its most famously hideous portion: a 33-mile strip flanked by the flames of oil refineries on one side and giant shipping crates on another. The ugly, raw vistas usher me out of suburbia, quickly turning me from my parents' baby into a taxpaying adult — as if the refineries also refine me. Could Robert Smithson's 'nonsite' have been a compliment rather than a criticism? In 1951, the sculptor and painter Tony Smith took a joyride down the not-yet-completed turnpike, and as he flew down the dark, abstract asphalt, that liminal road 'did something for me that art had never done,' he later told Artforum. 'Its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had about art.' Afterward, he began making the terse metal sculptures for which he's best known, beginning the North American minimalism movement. The highway's ability to warp and transform people has even been honored in fiction: In the cult-classic movie 'Being John Malkovich,' the main character continually tumbles through Malkovich's brain, spat out afterward into a ditch along the turnpike — a detail that inspired the real-life town of Elizabeth to proudly erect a tourist destination near its Exit 13A off-ramp. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
06-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Walt Whitman Would Have Hated This
In 1865, the poet Walt Whitman asked: O what shall I hang on the chamber walls? And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls, To adorn the burial-house of him I love? I have always loved these three lines from Whitman's elegy 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,' which he wrote in the spring of Abraham Lincoln's assassination. I have been thinking about them as we mark the 249th year since the ratification of the Declaration of Independence. The lines distill an essential question that any artist and civic figure who believes American ideals are worth sustaining must ask: How shall we honor, remember and learn from our national past? And how shall we transmit essential values of the past to citizens of the future? I've had Whitman in mind this spring as we've watched the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency disassemble the cultural infrastructure of the nation. These reckless and shortsighted cuts have affected our libraries and museums, our public media institutions, our local arts and humanities councils and the longstanding endowments — including the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities — that have provided funding for the past 60 years. These institutions are the entities we've charged with hanging pictures on the national chamber walls; they were established to represent and to execute on the principle that a great country and a great civilization needs self-understanding, and that such understanding comes not from politicians or congressional allocations but from lasting works of reflection that connect past, present and future. It was faith in a 'wisdom and vision,' transcending any political moment, that led to the establishment of the National Endowment for the Humanities: The very term 'endowment' is an expression of that confidence. The N.E.H. began in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program, and its original mission was laid out in the congressional language that announced the agency's formation. Devoted to sustaining democracy's most timeless and transcendent values, the agency was intended to secure and strengthen America's leadership in the world. As its founding language deliberately stressed, that leadership must not 'rest solely upon superior power, wealth and technology' but upon 'the nation's high qualities as a leader in the realm of ideas and of the spirit.' Just what those civilizational values are and how the N.E.H. would support them has always been open to the interpretation of its leaders, as appointed by presidents of either party. Despite perennial doubts among some Republicans about both endowments, all of them have found their way to leaving our culture better, broader, than they found it. Thus William Bennett, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, made 'morality' and Western values his platform, criticizing grants made by his predecessors for projects he decried as left-wing. Yet Mr. Bennett also established the beloved Summer Seminars for Teachers and published the initial volumes of the magisterial Library of America. Lynne Cheney, the leader of the N.E.H. from 1986-93, was one the earliest critics of a new cultural phenomenon — political correctness — but it was under her auspices that Ken Burns received funding for one of the most influential television documentary series ever shown, 'The Civil War.' Jon Parrish Peede, appointed by President Trump to lead the N.E.H. in 2018, actually increased its budget, which DOGE has now proposed eliminating entirely. Which entities, then, will ensure the dissemination of the work of great artists, writers and thinkers? Perhaps existing philanthropic entities will fill the gap; we've already seen some of the largest cultural philanthropies — including the Mellon and MacArthur Foundations — jump in with funding. The N.E.H. generously supported my own public television series, 'Poetry in America,' over three of its five seasons, and I am now, along with nearly every leader of a nonprofit cultural organization, asking private funders and foundations for financing. There are heartening signs they will step up. But we must consider where new springs of support may emerge. Implicit in the canceling and defunding of grants is the assumption that the market can provide culture as good as or better than any sponsored by the government. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Star
24-06-2025
- Science
- The Star
Can AI quicken the pace of math discovery?
Artificial intelligence can write a poem in the style of Walt Whitman, provide dating advice and suggest the best way to cook an artichoke. But when it comes to mathematics, large language models like OpenAI's immensely popular ChatGPT have sometimes stumbled over basic problems. Some see this as an inherent limitation of the technology, especially when it comes to complex reasoning. A new initiative from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency seeks to account for that shortfall by enlisting researchers in finding ways to conduct high-level mathematics research with an AI 'co-author.' The goal of the new grant-making program, Exponentiating Mathematics, is to speed up the pace of progress in pure (as opposed to applied) math – and, in doing so, to turn AI into a superlative mathematician. 'Mathematics is this great test bed for what is right now the key pain point for AI systems,' said Patrick Shafto, a Rutgers University mathematician and computer scientist who now serves as a program manager in DARPA's information innovation office, known as I20. 'So if we overcome that, potentially, it would unleash much more powerful AI.' He added, 'There's huge potential benefit to the community of mathematicians and to society at large.' Shafto spoke from his office at DARPA's headquarters, an anonymous building in northern Virginia whose facade of bluish glass gives little indication that it houses one of the most unusual agencies in the federal government. Inside the building's airy lobby, visitors surrender their cellphones. Near a bank of chairs, a glass display shows a prosthetic arm that can be controlled by the wearer's brain signals. 'By improving mathematics, we're also understanding how AI works better,' said Alondra Nelson, who served as a top science adviser in President Joe Biden's administration and is a faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. 'So I think it's kind of a virtuous cycle of understanding.' She suggested that, down the road, math-adept AI could enhance cryptography and aid in space exploration. Started after World War II to compete with the Soviet Union in the space race, DARPA is most famous for fostering the research that led to the creation of ARPANET, the precursor to the internet we use today. At the agency's small gift store, which is not accessible to the public, one can buy replicas of a cocktail napkin on which someone sketched out the rudimentary state of computer networks in 1969. DARPA later funded the research that gave rise to drones and Apple's digital assistant, Siri. But it is also responsible for the development of Agent Orange, the potent defoliant used to devastating effect during the Vietnam War. 'I'm sure this isn't 100% innocent,' Andrew Granville, a mathematician at the University of Montreal, said of DARPA's math initiative, although he emphasised that he was only speculating about eventual outcomes. DARPA is, after all, part of the Pentagon, even if it has traditionally operated with enviable independence. The US military is rapidly incorporating AI into its operations, with the aim of not losing out to China and its People's Liberation Army or to Russia, which has been testing out new technologies on the battlefield in Ukraine. At the same time, Granville praised the endeavour, which comes as the Trump administration is cutting funding for scientific research. 'We are in disastrous times for US science,' Granville said. 'I'm very pleased that DARPA is able to funnel money to academia.' A surfer and skateboarder in his free time, Shafto, 49, sat in a sparse conference room one recent afternoon, imagining a future when AI would be as good at solving multistep problems as it is at trying to glean meaning from huge troves of texts, which it does through the use of probability theory. Despite the unseasonably raw weather, Shafto seemed dressed for the beach in a blue-and-white Hawaiian-style shirt, white flannel trousers and sandals, with a trilby hat on the table before him. His vibe was, on the whole, decidedly closer to that of Santa Cruz than of Capitol Hill, largely in keeping with DARPA's traditional disregard for the capital's slow, bureaucratic pace. (The agency sets priorities and funds outside scientists but does not do research on its own; academics like Shafto spend an average of four years as program managers.) 'There are great mathematicians who work on age-old problems,' Shafto said. 'That's not the kind of thing that I'm particularly interested in.' Instead, he wanted the discipline to move more quickly by using AI to save time. 'Problems in mathematics take decades or centuries, sometimes, to solve,' he said in a recent presentation at DARPA's headquarters on the Exponentiating Mathematics project, which is accepting applications through mid-July. He then shared a slide showing that, in terms of the number of papers published, math had stagnated during the last century while life and technical sciences had exploded. In case the point wasn't clear, the slide's heading drove it home: 'Math is sloooowwww. …' The kind of pure math Shafto wants to accelerate tends to be 'sloooowwww' because it is not seeking numerical solutions to concrete problems, the way applied mathematics does. Instead, pure math is the heady domain of visionary theoreticians who make audacious observations about how the world works, which are promptly scrutinised (and sometimes torn apart) by their peers. 'Proof is king,' Granville said. Math proofs consist of multiple building blocks called lemmas, minor theorems employed to prove bigger ones. Whether each Jenga tower of lemmas can maintain integrity in the face of intense scrutiny is precisely what makes pure math such a 'long and laborious process,' acknowledged Bryna R. Kra, a mathematician at Northwestern University. 'All of math builds on previous math, so you can't really prove new things if you don't understand how to prove the old things,' she said. 'To be a research mathematician, the current practice is that you go through every step, you prove every single detail.' Lean, a software-based proof assistant, can speed up the process, but Granville said it was 'annoying, because it has its own protocols and language,' requiring programming expertise. 'We need to have a much better way of communication,' he added. Could artificial intelligence save the day? That's the hope, according to Shafto. An AI model that could reliably check proofs would save enormous amounts of time, freeing mathematicians to be more creative. 'The constancy of math coincides with the fact that we practice math more or less the same: still people standing at a chalkboard,' Shafto said. 'It's hard not to draw the correlation and say, 'Well, you know, maybe if we had better tools, that would change progress.'' AI would benefit, too, Shafto and others believe. Large language models like ChatGPT can scour the digitised storehouses of human knowledge to produce a half-convincing college essay on the Russian Revolution. But thinking through the many intricate steps of a mathematical problem remains elusive. 'I think we'll learn a lot about what the capabilities of various AI protocols are from how well we can get them to generate material that's of interest,' said Jordan S. Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is part of a team applying for an Exponentiating Mathematics grant. 'We have no intuition yet about which problems are going to be hard and which problems are easy. We need to learn that.' One of the more disconcerting truths about artificial intelligence is that we do not entirely understand how it works. 'This lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology,' Dario Amodei, CEO of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, wrote in a recent essay. Ellenberg somewhat downplayed that assertion, pointing out that electricity was widely used before its properties were fully understood. Then again, with some AI experts worrying that artificial intelligence could destroy the world, any clarity into its operations tends to be welcome. Nelson, the former White House adviser, acknowledged 'legitimate' concerns about the rapid pace at which artificial intelligence is being integrated into seemingly every sector of society. All the more reason, she argued, to have DARPA on the case. 'There's a much higher benchmark that needs to be reached than whether or not your chatbot is hallucinating if you ask it a question about Shakespeare,' she said. 'The stakes are much higher.' – ©2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Indian Express
22-06-2025
- Science
- Indian Express
Can AI quicken the pace of math discovery?
Artificial intelligence can write a poem in the style of Walt Whitman, provide dating advice and suggest the best way to cook an artichoke. But when it comes to mathematics, large language models like OpenAI's immensely popular ChatGPT have sometimes stumbled over basic problems. Some see this as an inherent limitation of the technology, especially when it comes to complex reasoning. A new initiative from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency seeks to account for that shortfall by enlisting researchers in finding ways to conduct high-level mathematics research with an AI 'co-author.' The goal of the new grant-making program, Exponentiating Mathematics, is to speed up the pace of progress in pure (as opposed to applied) math — and, in doing so, to turn AI into a superlative mathematician. 'Mathematics is this great test bed for what is right now the key pain point for AI systems,' said Patrick Shafto, a Rutgers University mathematician and computer scientist who now serves as a program manager in DARPA's information innovation office, known as I20. 'So if we overcome that, potentially, it would unleash much more powerful AI.' He added, 'There's huge potential benefit to the community of mathematicians and to society at large.' Shafto spoke from his office at DARPA's headquarters, an anonymous building in northern Virginia whose facade of bluish glass gives little indication that it houses one of the most unusual agencies in the federal government. Inside the building's airy lobby, visitors surrender their cellphones. Near a bank of chairs, a glass display shows a prosthetic arm that can be controlled by the wearer's brain signals. 'By improving mathematics, we're also understanding how AI works better,' said Alondra Nelson, who served as a top science adviser in President Joe Biden's administration and is a faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. 'So I think it's kind of a virtuous cycle of understanding.' She suggested that, down the road, math-adept AI could enhance cryptography and aid in space exploration. Started after World War II to compete with the Soviet Union in the space race, DARPA is most famous for fostering the research that led to the creation of ARPANET, the precursor to the internet we use today. At the agency's small gift store, which is not accessible to the public, one can buy replicas of a cocktail napkin on which someone sketched out the rudimentary state of computer networks in 1969. DARPA later funded the research that gave rise to drones and Apple's digital assistant, Siri. But it is also responsible for the development of Agent Orange, the potent defoliant used to devastating effect during the Vietnam War. 'I'm sure this isn't 100% innocent,' Andrew Granville, a mathematician at the University of Montreal, said of DARPA's math initiative, although he emphasized that he was only speculating about eventual outcomes. DARPA is, after all, part of the Pentagon, even if it has traditionally operated with enviable independence. The U.S. military is rapidly incorporating AI into its operations, with the aim of not losing out to China and its People's Liberation Army or to Russia, which has been testing out new technologies on the battlefield in Ukraine. At the same time, Granville praised the endeavor, which comes as the Trump administration is cutting funding for scientific research. 'We are in disastrous times for U.S. science,' Granville said. 'I'm very pleased that DARPA is able to funnel money to academia.' A surfer and skateboarder in his free time, Shafto, 49, sat in a sparse conference room one recent afternoon, imagining a future when AI would be as good at solving multistep problems as it is at trying to glean meaning from huge troves of texts, which it does through the use of probability theory. Despite the unseasonably raw weather, Shafto seemed dressed for the beach in a blue-and-white Hawaiian-style shirt, white flannel trousers and sandals, with a trilby hat on the table before him. His vibe was, on the whole, decidedly closer to that of Santa Cruz than of Capitol Hill, largely in keeping with DARPA's traditional disregard for the capital's slow, bureaucratic pace. (The agency sets priorities and funds outside scientists but does not do research on its own; academics like Shafto spend an average of four years as program managers.) 'There are great mathematicians who work on age-old problems,' Shafto said. 'That's not the kind of thing that I'm particularly interested in.' Instead, he wanted the discipline to move more quickly by using AI to save time. 'Problems in mathematics take decades or centuries, sometimes, to solve,' he said in a recent presentation at DARPA's headquarters on the Exponentiating Mathematics project, which is accepting applications through mid-July. He then shared a slide showing that, in terms of the number of papers published, math had stagnated during the last century while life and technical sciences had exploded. In case the point wasn't clear, the slide's heading drove it home: 'Math is sloooowwww. …' The kind of pure math Shafto wants to accelerate tends to be 'sloooowwww' because it is not seeking numerical solutions to concrete problems, the way applied mathematics does. Instead, pure math is the heady domain of visionary theoreticians who make audacious observations about how the world works, which are promptly scrutinized (and sometimes torn apart) by their peers. 'Proof is king,' Granville said. Math proofs consist of multiple building blocks called lemmas, minor theorems employed to prove bigger ones. Whether each Jenga tower of lemmas can maintain integrity in the face of intense scrutiny is precisely what makes pure math such a 'long and laborious process,' acknowledged Bryna R. Kra, a mathematician at Northwestern University. 'All of math builds on previous math, so you can't really prove new things if you don't understand how to prove the old things,' she said. 'To be a research mathematician, the current practice is that you go through every step, you prove every single detail.' Lean, a software-based proof assistant, can speed up the process, but Granville said it was 'annoying, because it has its own protocols and language,' requiring programming expertise. 'We need to have a much better way of communication,' he added. Could artificial intelligence save the day? That's the hope, according to Shafto. An AI model that could reliably check proofs would save enormous amounts of time, freeing mathematicians to be more creative. 'The constancy of math coincides with the fact that we practice math more or less the same: still people standing at a chalkboard,' Shafto said. 'It's hard not to draw the correlation and say, 'Well, you know, maybe if we had better tools, that would change progress.'' AI would benefit, too, Shafto and others believe. Large language models like ChatGPT can scour the digitized storehouses of human knowledge to produce a half-convincing college essay on the Russian Revolution. But thinking through the many intricate steps of a mathematical problem remains elusive. 'I think we'll learn a lot about what the capabilities of various AI protocols are from how well we can get them to generate material that's of interest,' said Jordan S. Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is part of a team applying for an Exponentiating Mathematics grant. 'We have no intuition yet about which problems are going to be hard and which problems are easy. We need to learn that.' One of the more disconcerting truths about artificial intelligence is that we do not entirely understand how it works. 'This lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology,' Dario Amodei, CEO of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, wrote in a recent essay. Ellenberg somewhat downplayed that assertion, pointing out that electricity was widely used before its properties were fully understood. Then again, with some AI experts worrying that artificial intelligence could destroy the world, any clarity into its operations tends to be welcome. Nelson, the former White House adviser, acknowledged 'legitimate' concerns about the rapid pace at which artificial intelligence is being integrated into seemingly every sector of society. All the more reason, she argued, to have DARPA on the case. 'There's a much higher benchmark that needs to be reached than whether or not your chatbot is hallucinating if you ask it a question about Shakespeare,' she said. 'The stakes are much higher.'
