Josephine Baker is best-known for her celebrated song and dance career that spanned five decades. But she is also famous for being a spy for the French resistance during World War II. As the story goes, Nazi guards were so star-struck by Baker that they let her slip across the border without trouble — little knowing that she was smuggling secrets written in invisible ink on her sheet music. After the war, Baker was awarded the French Legion of Honor for her service.
Valerie Plame is an American spy whose identity was revealed by a Washington Post reporter in 2005. President George W. Bush and members of his administration were suspected of orchestrating the leak after Plame's husband, diplomat Joseph Wilson, wrote an article criticizing the Bush administration for exaggerating evidence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. One of Bush's top aides, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was convicted and sentenced to 30 months in prison for the "Plame Affair," as it became known. Plame retired her CIA post in response to the incident.
Valerie Plame, America’s Most Famous Ex-Spy, Finds her New Identity: Running for Congress
From SIRI to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly. While science fiction often portrays AI as robots with human-like characteristics, AI can encompass anything from Google’s search algorithms to IBM’s Watson to autonomous weapons. Artificial intelligence today is properly known as narrow AI (or weak AI), in that it is designed to perform a narrow task (e.g. only facial recognition or only internet searches or only driving a car). However, the long-term goal of many researchers is to create general AI (AGI or strong AI). While narrow AI may outperform humans at whatever its specific task is, like playing chess or solving equations, AGI would outperform humans at nearly every cognitive task.
Prisoners in Nazi concentration camps made music; now it's being discovered and performed. More than 6 million people, most of them Jews, died in the Holocaust. The music they wrote as a temporary escape, however, did not die with them, thanks in part to the efforts of Francesco Lotoro. An Italian composer and pianist, Lotoro has spent 30 years recovering, performing, and in some cases, finishing pieces of work composed in captivity. Nearly 75 years after the camps were liberated, Francesco Lotoro is on a remarkable rescue mission, reviving music such as the one created by a young Jewish woman in a Nazi concentration camp in 1944.
