research paper about nation building

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The determinants of successful nation-building: macro-sociological political modernization and political alliance structures, review products.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2020

Andreas Wimmer’s Nation Building is a terrific book, an instant classic comparable to Karl Deutsch’s Nationalism and Social Communication ( Reference Deutsch 1953 ) or Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism ( Reference Gellner 1983 ). The empirical puzzle that motivates his work is right there in the title—why some states, like Somalia or Belgium , fall apart or fail to unite, while others, like Botswana or Switzerland , come together and remain that way, seemingly without regard to oft-cited factors such as democracy, development, or ancestral/ethnic heterogeneity. The broader research question that naturally flows from the puzzle is this: why does nation-building succeed in some cases but not in others?

For Wimmer, successful nation-building manifests itself in having forged “political ties between citizens and the state that reach across ethnic divides and integrate ethnic majorities and minorities into an inclusive power arrangement” (1). He operationalizes successful nation-building through the degree of ethnopolitical inclusion in a country’s power structures and citizens’ identification with their nation-state. The crux of the argument is that state centralization in the 19 th century—in turn a product of warfighting, in Europe, and topography facilitating state control “where peasants could not escape” (16), elsewhere, combined with population density high enough to sustain a nonproductive political elite at the end of the Middle Ages—facilitated the conditions for the linguistic homogenization of populations and the construction of central governments able to provide public goods. These two factors, along with the presence of civic society that spans ancestral/ethnic divisions, lead to successful nation-building.

The book unfolds like a detective story. Wimmer begins with three chapters that illustrate the “proximate” causes of successful nation-building by studying the historical development of three pairs of states. First, Switzerland and Belgium illustrate the importance of voluntary organizations. He then turns to Botswana and Somalia to explain the centrality of public goods provision. Finally, China and Russia serve as cases with varying levels of linguistic integration, or communicative homogeneity, that resulted in divergent outcomes. Across these case comparisons, Wimmer highlights how the historical interaction between a state’s institutional and associational forms of political cohesion shapes nation-building outcomes. Similar proximate mechanisms have been underscored by other scholars such as Scott Straus ( Reference Straus 2015 ), who emphasizes the alignment between state and society as a buttress against social breakdown, and Zeynep Bulutgil ( Reference Bulutgil 2016 ), who focuses on the effect of cross-cutting cleavages on the likelihood of ethnic cleansing.

Wimmer, however, is unsatisfied with the explanatory power of voluntary organizations, public goods provision, and linguistic integration for successful nation-building. These may be sufficient, but they are not necessary mechanisms for nation-building. To identify these necessary conditions, he moves back through time to endogenize these mechanisms into older legacies of state capacity, especially “bureaucratic capacity and a uniform language” (12). Ultimately, for Wimmer, this older legacy of state capacity is an outcome of population density and topography. In particular, he highlights the importance of “high mountain ranges and deep valleys … because state builders were more successful where peasants could not escape them by simply moving away” (16). In this sense, the theory is consistent with Jim Scott’s argument, developed in The Art of Not Being Governed ( Reference Scott 2009 ). He tests this argument in Chapter 5, embarking on a herculean statistical effort. He resorts to instrumental variables to identify the exogenous effects of his explanatory variables: in particular, “average suitability for agriculture as an instrument for railway density (railways don’t usually lead into a desert); the number of foreign Catholic priests and Protestant missionaries in 1923 for literacy rates after World War II (as priests and missionaries tried to teach colonial subjects to read and write); the number of past ethnonationalist wars fought before World War II for the density of voluntary organizations (since armed conflict destroys associational life); and the heterogeneity of agricultural suitability across the regions of a country for linguistic diversity” (105). However, as he describes in his own appendix (279), it is debatable whether these instruments have an effect on nation-building only through the relevant independent variables, a requirement for an instrument to be effective.

In Chapter 6, Wimmer employs data from representative surveys from 123 countries measuring citizens’ pride in their country. Unsurprisingly, the findings are consistent with his expectations: “members of discriminated-against groups feel far less proud of their country and nation than do groups represented in the national government” (59). In Chapter 7, Wimmer challenges the negative relationship that economists have established between diversity and public goods provision, finding that a “lack of centralized states in the past left a legacy of both high diversity and a limited capacity of providing public goods in the present” (247). Finally, in Chapter 8, Wimmer discusses global trends that, in his view, are favorable for successful nation-building and discusses outliers from his statistical analysis. He then turns to third party nation-building in Afghanistan and arrives “at a more nuanced and less optimistic conclusion” (257) than for other parts of the world.

Let me now turn to some critical comments in the spirit of generating a debate. I will begin with a discussion of conceptualization, then move to the mechanisms, and conclude with a discussion of the logic of the main causal argument.

Wimmer’s conceptualization of successful nation-building is rather broad, including both political integration and national identification as two sides of the nation-building coin. It involves national identification, pride, precedence of the nation over other identity categories, and integration through political inclusion. His approach leads to conceptual stretching in some instances. For example, in the introduction Wimmer argues that “political equality between ethnic groups is a key defining element of nation-building […] oppressing or even physically harming minority individuals shows that a nation-building project has failed—not that it is on the road to success” (6). This statement makes it clear that Wimmer’s understanding of nation-building is based on a functional definition of nationality: political identification is the ultimate result of inclusive governing coalitions that are themselves the result of favorable conditions for state centralization in the past. However, if we understand nation-building as the process through which governing elites attempt to make the boundaries of the nation congruent to the boundaries of the state (Gellner Reference Gellner 1983 ; Mylonas Reference Mylonas 2012 ) then a more complex picture emerges. More specifically, what form nation-building will take depends on what Rogers Smith ( Reference Smith 2003 ) has called the “constitutive story” of each nation-state. In other words, in a territorially defined nation-state that pursues nation-building, Wimmer’s point about political equality between ethnic groups or oppression of minorities would resonate. Conversely, in an ethnoculturally defined nation-state, it would not be surprising if state elites oppose political equality and pursue forced assimilation or even exclusionary policies. These types of policies have led to successful nation-building in various countries, albeit involving terrible death tolls and suffering (Mylonas Reference Mylonas 2012 ; Bulutgil Reference Bulutgil 2016 ). Some may even argue that the most successful nation-building variety has been that which either fully assimilated or excluded non-core groups altogether (Rae Reference Rae 2002 , Marx Reference Marx 2005 ).

Beyond the conceptualization of nation-building, Wimmer makes a special effort to utilize the terms “indigenous” and “centralized” before the word “state” in order to distinguish these types of states from “externally imposed” and “failed states,” respectively. These adjectives are intriguing, but they could have been unpacked or tested more in the book. For instance, some of the ethnopolitically inclusive regimes in certain countries have been externally imposed (either directly, as it happened with the Ohrid Agreement in North Macedonia, or indirectly, through conditionality principles in various parts of the world, as in Sub-Saharan Africa). In this vein, Wimmer’s move in Chapter 8—from studying endogenous or indigenous nation-building around the world, to studying third party state building or “democracy promotion” in Afghanistan—is tricky. It also raises a broader question: why would externally imposed inclusive regimes have different effects than endogenously-produced ones? Wimmer suggests that “public goods provision by outsiders doesn’t help in building the legitimacy of a national government nearly as much as when the government itself is in charge. It might even alienate the population and drive it into the arms of armed opposition groups such as the Taliban” (265). Is this conclusion based on the assumption that we are dealing with an information rich environment where the local population actually knows enough about the role of external actors? To put it differently, if an external actor supported a government covertly in its nation-building efforts, would success be more likely?

Paired Comparisons and Mechanisms

In terms of the more proximate mechanisms leading to successful nation-building—voluntary organizations, public goods provision, and linguistic integration—many readers will likely expect a clear “hierarchy” or relationship between them. While Wimmer clearly points out that none of the mechanisms he discusses are necessary for successful nation-building, he also makes it clear that each one is sufficient by itself. But when we examine some of the cases more closely, contradictions emerge. For instance, Russia is presented as an example of a failed nation-building attempt when compared to China, Footnote 1 due to its multi-lingual fabric. In the Soviet Union, however, public goods provision improved, and efforts to include or co-opt local elites intensified. Why was public goods provision enough to lead to successful nation-building in linguistically heterogeneous Botswana but not in the USSR?

One way to reconcile this contradiction would be to highlight that the Russian Empire was multi-ethnic by design and never really pursued nation-building across the whole Empire. Similarly, the USSR’s motto was “national in form, socialist in content” and was rather purposely divided into separate republics, structured as a federation of independent states with their titular groups, and so forth. To be sure, there were efforts to generate a supra-national Soviet identity and for linguistic Russification. But, Soviet policies also purposefully cultivated and institutionalized distinct identities in the various Soviet Republics. Thus, I wonder whether we should characterize this as a case of failed nation-building or as a case where nation-building was not fully implemented or, at times, not even attempted.

Another puzzle that flows from the China-Russia comparison has to do with the role of initial linguistic homogeneity. It is not clear if linguistic homogeneity is sufficient just at the elite level or if it must be manifest more broadly. In the Chinese case the role of the elites is central. When we turn to Russia, however, one could argue that non-core group elites were also fluent in Russian. This was even more so during the Soviet period. Even if Chinese elites were better able to communicate with each other than Russian elites, why is that? If the answer is that elites in the Chinese context understood themselves as Han irrespective of their dialect, but the elites of the Russian empire did not, then the exogenous variable is this sense of peoplehood or ethnic affinity. Once again, in the Russian context this could be the result of not trying to generate such a sense of peoplehood.

Turning to the mechanism of public goods provision, one wonders whether some public goods might be more likely to lead to national integration than others. For instance, mass schooling with national content would probably have a greater effect than other types of public goods (Darden and Mylonas Reference Darden and Mylonas 2016 ). Similarly, when it comes to the mechanism of civic associations, does it matter what type of associations are formed? For instance, what if the civic associations that are formed exclude certain parts of the population? In short, what about the dark side of social capital, when social ties and shared beliefs or norms are detrimental to certain individuals in a society or lead to corrupt practices (Portes and Landolt Reference Portes and Landolt 2000 )? Wimmer seems agnostic on this point. Finally, what is the relationship between the development of civic associations and industrialization? As Wimmer mentions, the Flemish-speaking rural hinterland of Belgium was not industrialized, but rural areas in central Switzerland experienced waterpower-driven industrialization (59). Could the variation in civic associations and/or in nation-buidling outcomes be the product of this divergence in the pattern of industrialization?

The Logic of the Argument

How can we account for cases with inherited levels of state centralization that did not adopt nation-building policies? For example, Burgundy or Great Moravia do not exist today. Conversely, what explains strong national identification and pride among members of stateless national movements, such as the Kurds? Are the Kurdish people who are motivated by Kurdish nationalism the result of some state centralization in the 19 th century or even earlier? If yes, why did some stateless nationalist movements survive while others did not? Miroslav Hroch’s ( Reference Hroch 2000 ) important book attempts to answer this puzzle in the European context. A potentially important omitted variable could be “world time” at the moment of independence. In other words, what were the expectations and norms about setting up your state at the time when the independence movement occurred? Relatedly, any such testing exercise necessarily privileges the contemporary state borders. In other words, Burgundy could yet re-emerge or the Kurdish nationalist movement subside. Similarly, cases that looked successful in the interwar years may no longer look successful today, such as Belgium or Czechoslovakia.

The most exogenous part of Wimmer’s argument is that variation in topography and population density explain the success of initial state building efforts. But could there be an alternative argument that accounts for variation in initial state or nation-building efforts? Keith Darden and I ( Reference Darden and Mylonas 2016 ) have argued that the international geopolitical environment in which a state develops partially determines the extent of its linguistic commonality and its national cohesion. Specifically, we suggest that the presence of an external threat of territorial conquest, especially in the form of an externally-supported secession, is likely to lead governing elites to pursue nation-building strategies to generate national cohesion, often leading to the cultivation of a common national language through mass schooling and/or exclusionary policies. Comparing cases with similar levels of initial linguistic heterogeneity, state capacity, and development, but in different international environments, we find that states that did not face external threats to their territorial integrity were more likely to outsource education and other tools for constructing identity to missionaries or other groups, or to not invest in assimilation at all, leading to higher ethnic heterogeneity. Conversely, states developing in higher threat environments were more likely to invest in nation-building strategies to homogenize their populations. In other words, if Darden and I are correct, then there could be a spurious relationship. The presence of an external threat of territorial conquest, especially through a fifth column, provides governing elites with strong incentives to pursue state and nation-building strategies, which in turn generate linguistic homogeneity and national cohesion. Thus, our argument would account for both state centralization and linguistic homogeneity. The relationship between centralization and homogeneity could be partly or entirely produced by this external threat environment. Wimmer has not tested this argument in his statistical models, but instead categorized it as “faster moving” (20) compared to his own, which focuses on “tectonic shifts.” I understand that it may be hard to code this variable in a satisfactory way in a panel dataset (though I hope he is interested in collaborating with us to test it), but a more direct discussion of this alternative path to successful nation-building would have been informative.

To be sure, part of this disagreement may result from the fact Darden and I are focusing on the onset of nation-building policies, or accounting for the variation in the form it takes in different contexts; while Wimmer is focusing on the success or failure of nation-building. What is key here, however, is that focusing on success or failure in a statistical context is tantamount to assuming that nation-building was attempted everywhere.

All in all, Wimmer has written an important book on the determinants of successful nation-building. Academics, practitioners, human rights activists, and policymakers interested in nation-building should read it. He has successfully reclaimed the term nation-building from those studying third party state-building or democracy promotion. His work crosses disciplinary boundaries and revitalizes the macro-sociological political modernization literature while convincingly highlighting the importance of political alliance structures for successful nation-building.

1 According to Wimmer, China and Russia are comparable since they “form their own centers of civilizational gravity, contain enormous, polyglot populations, and were never subjected to Western colonial rule.” (p. 12) That said, from a Chinese nationalism perspective, things may look different given the “century of humiliation,” the period of foreign intervention and subjugation of the Chinese Empire that began in 1839 and continued into the 20 th century.

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• Volume 50, Issue 1
• Harris Mylonas (a1)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2020.97

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CU Global Thought

The committee on global thought. 91 claremont, suite 513, new york, ny 10027. (212) 851-7293, andreas wimmer, european sociological review,  september 2014.

Why have some states been captured by specific ethnic elites and their clienteles, excluding all others from access to government power? Conversely, what explains political inclusion across ethnic divides or, in other words, successful ‘nation building’? Assuming a relational theoretical perspective, I argue that high state capacity to deliver public goods, well developed voluntary organizations, and low levels of linguistic diversity enhance nation building because they make it easier to extend networks of political alliances across an entire territory. Contemporary state capacity and linguistic diversity are in turn related to levels of state formation achieved during the late 19th century. On average, such long-term factors of political development are more important for explaining contemporary nation building than political institutions (including democracy) or the legacies of imperial rule. This is demonstrated on the basis of a cross-national data set covering all countries of the world since 1945.

CHAPTER 1 NATION BUILDING AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

• In book: NATION BUILDING IN AFRICA: ISSUES, CHALLENGES AND EMERGING TRENDS (pp.3 - 21)
• Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF LAGOS PRESS AND BOOKSHOP LTD.

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Build a Corporate Culture That Works

There’s a widespread understanding that managing corporate culture is key to business success. Yet few companies articulate their culture in such a way that the words become an organizational reality that molds employee behavior as intended.

All too often a culture is described as a set of anodyne norms, principles, or values, which do not offer decision-makers guidance on how to make difficult choices when faced with conflicting but equally defensible courses of action.

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To develop a culture that works, follow six rules: Ground your culture in the dilemmas you are likely to confront, dilemma-test your values, communicate your values in colorful terms, hire people who fit, let culture drive strategy, and know when to pull back from a value statement.

Start by thinking about the dilemmas your people will face.

Idea in Brief

The problem.

There’s a widespread understanding that managing corporate culture is key to business success. Yet few companies articulate their corporate culture in such a way that the words become an organizational reality that molds employee behavior as intended.

What Usually Happens

How to fix it.

Follow six rules: Ground your culture in the dilemmas you are likely to confront, dilemma-test your values, communicate your values in colorful terms, hire people who fit, let culture drive strategy, and know when to pull back from a value.

At the beginning of my career, I worked for the health-care-software specialist HBOC. One day, a woman from human resources came into the cafeteria with a roll of tape and began sticking posters on the walls. They proclaimed in royal blue the company’s values: “Transparency, Respect, Integrity, Honesty.” The next day we received wallet-sized plastic cards with the same words and were asked to memorize them so that we could incorporate them into our actions. The following year, when management was indicted on 17 counts of conspiracy and fraud, we learned what the company’s values really were.

• EM Erin Meyer is a professor at INSEAD, where she directs the executive education program Leading Across Borders and Cultures. She is the author of The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business (PublicAffairs, 2014) and coauthor (with Reed Hastings) of No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention (Penguin, 2020). ErinMeyerINSEAD

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Introducing Apple’s On-Device and Server Foundation Models

At the 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference , we introduced Apple Intelligence, a personal intelligence system integrated deeply into iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia.

Apple Intelligence is comprised of multiple highly-capable generative models that are specialized for our users’ everyday tasks, and can adapt on the fly for their current activity. The foundation models built into Apple Intelligence have been fine-tuned for user experiences such as writing and refining text, prioritizing and summarizing notifications, creating playful images for conversations with family and friends, and taking in-app actions to simplify interactions across apps.

In the following overview, we will detail how two of these models — a ~3 billion parameter on-device language model, and a larger server-based language model available with Private Cloud Compute and running on Apple silicon servers — have been built and adapted to perform specialized tasks efficiently, accurately, and responsibly. These two foundation models are part of a larger family of generative models created by Apple to support users and developers; this includes a coding model to build intelligence into Xcode, as well as a diffusion model to help users express themselves visually, for example, in the Messages app. We look forward to sharing more information soon on this broader set of models.

Our Focus on Responsible AI Development

Apple Intelligence is designed with our core values at every step and built on a foundation of groundbreaking privacy innovations.

Additionally, we have created a set of Responsible AI principles to guide how we develop AI tools, as well as the models that underpin them:

• Empower users with intelligent tools : We identify areas where AI can be used responsibly to create tools for addressing specific user needs. We respect how our users choose to use these tools to accomplish their goals.
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These principles are reflected throughout the architecture that enables Apple Intelligence, connects features and tools with specialized models, and scans inputs and outputs to provide each feature with the information needed to function responsibly.

In the remainder of this overview, we provide details on decisions such as: how we develop models that are highly capable, fast, and power-efficient; how we approach training these models; how our adapters are fine-tuned for specific user needs; and how we evaluate model performance for both helpfulness and unintended harm.

Pre-Training

Our foundation models are trained on Apple's AXLearn framework , an open-source project we released in 2023. It builds on top of JAX and XLA, and allows us to train the models with high efficiency and scalability on various training hardware and cloud platforms, including TPUs and both cloud and on-premise GPUs. We used a combination of data parallelism, tensor parallelism, sequence parallelism, and Fully Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP) to scale training along multiple dimensions such as data, model, and sequence length.

We train our foundation models on licensed data, including data selected to enhance specific features, as well as publicly available data collected by our web-crawler, AppleBot. Web publishers have the option to opt out of the use of their web content for Apple Intelligence training with a data usage control.

We never use our users’ private personal data or user interactions when training our foundation models, and we apply filters to remove personally identifiable information like social security and credit card numbers that are publicly available on the Internet. We also filter profanity and other low-quality content to prevent its inclusion in the training corpus. In addition to filtering, we perform data extraction, deduplication, and the application of a model-based classifier to identify high quality documents.

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We find that data quality is essential to model success, so we utilize a hybrid data strategy in our training pipeline, incorporating both human-annotated and synthetic data, and conduct thorough data curation and filtering procedures. We have developed two novel algorithms in post-training: (1) a rejection sampling fine-tuning algorithm with teacher committee, and (2) a reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) algorithm with mirror descent policy optimization and a leave-one-out advantage estimator. We find that these two algorithms lead to significant improvement in the model’s instruction-following quality.

Optimization

In addition to ensuring our generative models are highly capable, we have used a range of innovative techniques to optimize them on-device and on our private cloud for speed and efficiency. We have applied an extensive set of optimizations for both first token and extended token inference performance.

Both the on-device and server models use grouped-query-attention. We use shared input and output vocab embedding tables to reduce memory requirements and inference cost. These shared embedding tensors are mapped without duplications. The on-device model uses a vocab size of 49K, while the server model uses a vocab size of 100K, which includes additional language and technical tokens.

For on-device inference, we use low-bit palletization, a critical optimization technique that achieves the necessary memory, power, and performance requirements. To maintain model quality, we developed a new framework using LoRA adapters that incorporates a mixed 2-bit and 4-bit configuration strategy — averaging 3.5 bits-per-weight — to achieve the same accuracy as the uncompressed models.

Additionally, we use an interactive model latency and power analysis tool, Talaria , to better guide the bit rate selection for each operation. We also utilize activation quantization and embedding quantization, and have developed an approach to enable efficient Key-Value (KV) cache update on our neural engines.

With this set of optimizations, on iPhone 15 Pro we are able to reach time-to-first-token latency of about 0.6 millisecond per prompt token, and a generation rate of 30 tokens per second. Notably, this performance is attained before employing token speculation techniques, from which we see further enhancement on the token generation rate.

Model Adaptation

Our foundation models are fine-tuned for users’ everyday activities, and can dynamically specialize themselves on-the-fly for the task at hand. We utilize adapters, small neural network modules that can be plugged into various layers of the pre-trained model, to fine-tune our models for specific tasks. For our models we adapt the attention matrices, the attention projection matrix, and the fully connected layers in the point-wise feedforward networks for a suitable set of the decoding layers of the transformer architecture.

By fine-tuning only the adapter layers, the original parameters of the base pre-trained model remain unchanged, preserving the general knowledge of the model while tailoring the adapter layers to support specific tasks.

We represent the values of the adapter parameters using 16 bits, and for the ~3 billion parameter on-device model, the parameters for a rank 16 adapter typically require 10s of megabytes. The adapter models can be dynamically loaded, temporarily cached in memory, and swapped — giving our foundation model the ability to specialize itself on the fly for the task at hand while efficiently managing memory and guaranteeing the operating system's responsiveness.

To facilitate the training of the adapters, we created an efficient infrastructure that allows us to rapidly retrain, test, and deploy adapters when either the base model or the training data gets updated. The adapter parameters are initialized using the accuracy-recovery adapter introduced in the Optimization section.

Performance and Evaluation

Our focus is on delivering generative models that can enable users to communicate, work, express themselves, and get things done across their Apple products. When benchmarking our models, we focus on human evaluation as we find that these results are highly correlated to user experience in our products. We conducted performance evaluations on both feature-specific adapters and the foundation models.

To illustrate our approach, we look at how we evaluated our adapter for summarization. As product requirements for summaries of emails and notifications differ in subtle but important ways, we fine-tune accuracy-recovery low-rank (LoRA) adapters on top of the palletized model to meet these specific requirements. Our training data is based on synthetic summaries generated from bigger server models, filtered by a rejection sampling strategy that keeps only the high quality summaries.

To evaluate the product-specific summarization, we use a set of 750 responses carefully sampled for each use case. These evaluation datasets emphasize a diverse set of inputs that our product features are likely to face in production, and include a stratified mixture of single and stacked documents of varying content types and lengths. As product features, it was important to evaluate performance against datasets that are representative of real use cases. We find that our models with adapters generate better summaries than a comparable model.

As part of responsible development, we identified and evaluated specific risks inherent to summarization. For example, summaries occasionally remove important nuance or other details in ways that are undesirable. However, we found that the summarization adapter did not amplify sensitive content in over 99% of targeted adversarial examples. We continue to adversarially probe to identify unknown harms and expand our evaluations to help guide further improvements.

In addition to evaluating feature specific performance powered by foundation models and adapters, we evaluate both the on-device and server-based models’ general capabilities. We utilize a comprehensive evaluation set of real-world prompts to test the general model capabilities. These prompts are diverse across different difficulty levels and cover major categories such as brainstorming, classification, closed question answering, coding, extraction, mathematical reasoning, open question answering, rewriting, safety, summarization, and writing.

We compare our models with both open-source models (Phi-3, Gemma, Mistral, DBRX) and commercial models of comparable size (GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4-Turbo) 1 . We find that our models are preferred by human graders over most comparable competitor models. On this benchmark, our on-device model, with ~3B parameters, outperforms larger models including Phi-3-mini, Mistral-7B, and Gemma-7B. Our server model compares favorably to DBRX-Instruct, Mixtral-8x22B, and GPT-3.5-Turbo while being highly efficient.

We use a set of diverse adversarial prompts to test the model performance on harmful content, sensitive topics, and factuality. We measure the violation rates of each model as evaluated by human graders on this evaluation set, with a lower number being desirable. Both the on-device and server models are robust when faced with adversarial prompts, achieving violation rates lower than open-source and commercial models.

Our models are preferred by human graders as safe and helpful over competitor models for these prompts. However, considering the broad capabilities of large language models, we understand the limitation of our safety benchmark. We are actively conducting both manual and automatic red-teaming with internal and external teams to continue evaluating our models' safety.

To further evaluate our models, we use the Instruction-Following Eval (IFEval) benchmark to compare their instruction-following capabilities with models of comparable size. The results suggest that both our on-device and server model follow detailed instructions better than the open-source and commercial models of comparable size.

We evaluate our models’ writing ability on our internal summarization and composition benchmarks, consisting of a variety of writing instructions. These results do not refer to our feature-specific adapter for summarization (seen in Figure 3 ), nor do we have an adapter focused on composition.

The Apple foundation models and adapters introduced at WWDC24 underlie Apple Intelligence, the new personal intelligence system that is integrated deeply into iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and enables powerful capabilities across language, images, actions, and personal context. Our models have been created with the purpose of helping users do everyday activities across their Apple products, and developed responsibly at every stage and guided by Apple’s core values. We look forward to sharing more information soon on our broader family of generative models, including language, diffusion, and coding models.

[1] We compared against the following model versions: gpt-3.5-turbo-0125, gpt-4-0125-preview, Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2, Mixtral-8x22B-Instruct-v0.1, Gemma-1.1-2B, and Gemma-1.1-7B. The open-source and Apple models are evaluated in bfloat16 precision.

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Grassy Narrows First Nation files lawsuit against Ontario, federal governments over mercury contamination

Superior court challenge alleges governments fail to protect first nation treaty rights.

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A First Nation in northwestern Ontario that has faced decades of mercury poisoning is suing the provincial and federal governments, arguing they've failed to protect its treaty rights.

Asubpeeschoseewagong Netum Anishinabek First Nation — known as Grassy Narrows — filed the lawsuit in Ontario's Superior Court of Justice on Tuesday morning.

It argues the governments have violated their duties under Treaty 3 by failing to protect against or remedy the effects of mercury contamination in the English-Wabigoon River system.

The allegations in this lawsuit haven't been tested in court.

Contamination of the river system dates back to the 1960s and '70s  when Dryden's paper mill in northwestern Ontario dumped an estimated nine tonnes of mercury into the water.

Generations of people have consumed fish from the river. According to a previously reported study by medical specialists, about 90 per cent of the community of roughly 1,000 people experience symptoms of mercury poisoning. They include Chief Rudy Turtle.

"Our mercury nightmare should have ended long ago, but it has been longer and worse because of the government's failure to live up to its obligations," Turtle said in a news release on Tuesday.

'A test of ... commitment to truth'

For years, environmental advocates have called for the river to be cleaned up and the mill to be shut down.

In late May, a new study from Western University in London, Ont., revived these demands with a report suggesting mercury contamination in the river system has been made worse by ongoing industrial pollution.

"Dryden Fibre Canada took over operations for the mill last August. We operate in compliance with extensive environmental regulatory requirements," said Dianne Loewen, a spokesperson for Dryden Fibre Canada, in an email to CBC News late Tuesday afternoon. "Regarding this morning's announcement by Grassy Narrows — we have not yet seen the filing and will not be commenting."

Grassy Narrows lawsuit targets 'environmental racism' of mercury poisoning

"The government has egregiously violated its obligations to Grassy Narrows by failing to ensure that Grassy Narrows people could safely practise their right to fish — a cornerstone of Grassy Narrows' sustenance and Indigenous way of life," says a statement from the First Nation that was also issued Tuesday.

"This case will be a test of Ontario's and Canada's commitment to truth, reconciliation and justice following one of Canada's worst environmental and human rights catastrophes." 

Calls to end environmental racism

During a news conference in Toronto on Tuesday morning, Kiiwetinoong MPP Sol Mamakwa said the lack of government action is perpetuating the effects of colonialism on Grassy Narrows people.

"When we talk about environmental genocide, this is what it looks like," Mamakwa said.

Judy Da Silva is a Grassy Narrows grandmother and the community's environmental health co-ordinator. She says she also experiences symptoms of mercury poisoning, which include loss of co-ordination, trouble swallowing, and a loss of sensation in her hands and feet. 

"Our people were proud fishermen and land users and hunters, and then this poison came and took all that away," Da Silva said in an interview with CBC News.

She thinks back to summer 2000, when the Walkerton water crisis made national headlines after seven people died and about 2,300 others became ill from Canada's worst E. coli contamination.

"They got compensated so quickly and then Grassy's been going through this for decades, and still there's no resolution," she said. "I think it's environmental racism."

Federal leaders respond

In 2017, the federal government committed to building a Mercury Care Home in Grassy Narrows. The same year, the Ontario government committed $85 million to fund mercury cleanup and remediation efforts in the English-Wabigoon River system.

About seven years later, the river remains toxic. Construction on the Mercury Care Home is expected to start this summer and take two to three years to complete.

In Ottawa on Tuesday, Minister of Indigenous Services Patty Hajdu told reporters she understands the frustration that has led Grassy Narrows to go through the courts.

"I'm sure they're seeing it as a part of a broader effort to ensure that this kind of environmental racism doesn't continue," Hajdu said.

Minister acknowledges frustration of Grassy Narrows First Nation following launch of lawsuit

Ottawa has now committed $146 million for the construction and operation of the Mercury Care Home, she said. While the protection of water falls under provincial jurisdiction, Hajdu did point to Bill C-61,  an act respecting water, source water, drinking water, wastewater and related infrastructure on First Nation lands , as a key way of preventing future harm.

CBC News reached out to the Ontario government for comment on the lawsuit and received an emailed response from Keesha Seaton, spokesperson for the Ministry of the Attorney General, late Tuesday afternoon.

"As this matter is subject to litigation, it would be inappropriate to comment," Seaton said.

A spokesperson for the federal Office of the Minister of the Environment and Climate Change also provided CBC News with an emailed statement on behalf of Hajdu and Minister of the Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault.

• Mercury poisoning near Grassy Narrows First Nation worsened by industrial pollution, study suggests
• First Nations Land Defence Alliance says no nuclear waste facility without First Nations consent

"We cannot comment on the legal case as it is before the courts. It is extremely important to the government of Canada to do its part in responding to this crisis, and we will be there to work with Grassy Narrows and Wabaseemong Independent Nations every step of the way," wrote spokesperson Kaitlin Power.

Federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh also reacted to the Grassy Narrows lawsuit while addressing reporters on Parliament Hill.

"It's an ongoing example of Indigenous communities receiving second-class treatment," Singh said of the persisting mercury poisoning.

"This is Canada's fault and Canada must step up."

Lawsuit seeks to restore 'way of life'

Grassy Narrows, about 150 kilometres from Dryden near the Ontario-Manitoba border, is being represented by both Toronto-based firm Cavalluzzo LLP and Ratcliff LLP out of Vancouver.

At this point, there is no set dollar amount for how much compensation the First Nation is seeking. However, the types of remedies relate to restoring the environment, "upon which their health, and their livelihoods and their treaty rights depend," Adrienne Telford, co-lead legal counsel with Cavalluzzo LLP, said in an interview with CBC News.

"Grassy Narrows is a community in crisis," Telford said. "They require significant financial, and socioeconomic and health supports to allow community members to restore their health, and their well-being and their way of life."

"If this was Ontario cottage country, the river would have been cleaned up decades ago, the pollution would have stopped and the harms properly compensated."

Ontario commits to 'correcting this historic wrong'

When pressed by Kiiwetinoong MPP Sol Mamakwa during Monday's question period in the Ontario Legislature, the minister of the environment, conservation and parks, Andrea Khanjin, said the government is committed to remediating the mercury contamination.

Technical experts with the ministry have met with First Nations leaders and those who led the Western University study — though additional work is needed before the researchers' report is finalized, Khanjin said.

Is Ontario doing enough to address mercury contamination in the English-Wabigoon River system?

Sandy Shaw, MPP for Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas and NDP environment, conservation and parks critic, called that answer "disappointing."

"This is a human and ecological disaster and it has been going on for generations. For heaven's sake, Speaker, the time for studies has well passed," Shaw said.

• Grassy Narrows chief announces candidacy for Ontario regional chief
• Grassy Narrows chief calls out Ottawa for 'ridiculous' delays to mercury treatment centre construction

Khanjin responding by pointing to the work being done with Ontario's English and Wabigoon Rivers Remediation Panel .

"We're taking the politics out of this and referring to the science because this government remains committed to correcting this historic wrong."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Law is a CBC News reporter based in Thunder Bay, Ont., and has also worked for newspapers and online publications elsewhere in the province. Have a story tip? You can reach her at [email protected]

With files from Philip Lee-Shanok and Chris Glover

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New Large-Scale Renewable Energy Solicitation Announced To Deliver Clean Electricity Across The State

Final proposals for large-scale land-based renewable energy projects due in august 2024.

June 20, 2024

Governor Kathy Hochul today announced a new large-scale renewable energy solicitation to deliver clean electricity to New Yorkers. Building on New York’s 10-Point Action Plan , this solicitation seeks proposals for the development of new large-scale land-based renewable energy projects which are expected to spur billions of dollars in clean energy investments and create thousands of family-sustaining jobs in the State’s green economy. Today’s announcement supports progress toward achieving the State’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act goal to obtain 70 percent of New York’s electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

“New York is building a clean energy economy that will allow us to drastically lower emissions while creating thousands of new good-paying jobs, boosting billions of dollars in economic growth, and spurring an injection of private investment into our local communities," Governor Hochul said . “Once selected, these projects will help accelerate our mission to power our state with affordable, reliable, zero-emission electricity for the benefit of all New Yorkers.”

The competitive solicitation, administered by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), is the latest in a planned series of procurements of land-based large scale renewable projects. As part of this solicitation, NYSERDA has included key provisions from the latest rounds of renewable energy procurements such as inflation indexing, labor provisions, stakeholder engagement requirements, new requirements emphasizing the importance of climate resiliency in project design, disadvantaged community commitments, agricultural land preservation, and related priorities to maintain the policy objectives introduced in prior solicitations to ensure an equitable energy transition. These elements are outlined within the solicitation documents and are designed to support the development and construction of numerous mature, late-stage renewable energy projects seeking to commence operation in the near term.

NYSERDA President and CEO Doreen M. Harris said , “By advancing land-based renewable energy projects, New York is expeditiously moving our state forward as a leader in the transition to reliable and clean energy. NYSERDA remains committed to strengthening our renewable energy pipeline and delivering increasing amounts of renewable electricity to further bolster our grid of the future.”

The process for submitting proposals into the land-based renewables solicitation will be conducted in two steps, with eligibility requirements due on July 15, 2024 , to confirm that interested projects are eligible to bid, and final proposals due on August 8, 2024 . More details on the land-based renewable energy solicitation are available on the Large-Scale Renewables Solicitation page  on NYSERDA’s website. Conditional award notifications to selected proposers are expected in September 2024.

New York State Department of Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon said , “New York's clean energy sector is not just about creating a sustainable environment; it's also about building a robust and resilient workforce that can thrive in the green economy. Under Governor Hochul's leadership, initiatives like this large-scale renewable energy solicitation are vital in driving economic growth, fostering innovation, and providing thousands of family-sustaining jobs.”

New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Interim Commissioner Sean Mahar said , “Through Governor Hochul’s leadership, New York State continues to advance its strategic efforts to meet our renewable energy targets under the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act and create the clean energy economy of the future. Today’s announcement demonstrates the State’s commitment to expanding large-scale wind and solar projects and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, helping to ensure a cleaner and healthier environment for future generations.”

New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets Commissioner Richard A. Ball said , “Today’s announcement of new large-scale renewable energy solicitation is a crucial step in New York’s transition to clean energy, which will preserve our natural resources and help New York meet its ambitious climate goals. With key provisions included for agricultural land preservation, NYSERDA’s 10-Point Plan will help the State provide a foundation for a greener economy while also ensuring we are protecting our farmland.”

State Senator Kevin Parker, Senate Energy and Telecommunications Chair said , “Governor Hochul's announcement of the new large-scale renewable energy solicitation marks a significant step forward in New York's commitment to a sustainable future. By accelerating our transition to wind and solar power, we are not only advancing towards our ambitious Climate Act goal of 70 percent renewable electricity by 2030, but also fostering economic growth and creating green jobs across the state. This initiative reaffirms New York's leadership in combating climate change and sets a powerful example for other states to follow."

State Senator Peter Harckham said , “Thank you, Governor Hochul, for spearheading this solicitation to advance New York’s clean energy goals. The Executive and Legislature are in lockstep on building a sustainable future through clean renewable energy. It is important to note that a kilowatt of clean energy is now cheaper to produce than a kilowatt of carbon-based energy. With these large-scale renewable energy projects, we are addressing climate change, saving ratepayers money and creating new green jobs.”

Assemblymember Deborah Glick said , “As the summer heat is already upon us, nothing could make it clearer that we have no time to lose in generating more of our electricity from renewable sources. I applaud Governor Hochul for pursuing an aggressive plan to move us away from our dependency on fossil fuel generated electricity. New York State should continue to lead and with the Governor’s commitment we will see the transition to a cleaner environment by the expansion of renewable energy.”

Alliance for Clean Energy New York Executive Director Marguerite Wells said , "Private renewable energy developers are ready and willing to invest billions of dollars into New York, providing jobs and tax revenue for our local municipalities. We expect numerous quality responses to this RFP, and we look forward to NYSERDA awarding projects that will be built expeditiously to bring benefits to New Yorkers as soon as possible.”

New York League of Conservation Voters President Julie Tighe said , "As we enter what is expected to be another summer with record breaking heat and air quality alerts, the urgent need to tackle the climate crisis has never been more evident. It’s time to transition off of fossil fuels and deliver clean energy, and this solicitation will help do just that. We applaud Governor Hochul and NYSERDA on this progress, because more land-based wind and solar energy projects mean fewer greenhouse gas emissions and better air quality for New Yorkers."

New York State AFL-CIO President Mario Cilento said , “Today’s announcement is an important step toward achieving New York’s clean energy goals. We applaud Governor Hochul and NYSERDA for ensuring the projects will be subject to precedent-setting labor standards and protections. We look forward to working together to ensure maximum application of those standards as well as domestic and New York content requirements and preferences so that we create family-sustaining careers while building New York’s clean energy future.”

New York State Building Trades President Gary LaBarbera said , “As New York continues to pursue the energy goals set out by the CLCPA, we must continue to push forward large-scale wind and solar developments that generate thousands of family-sustaining union careers and economic stimulus in our local communities. We applaud Governor Hochul for continuing to push forward these initiatives that will support the delivery of reliable, renewable energy to more New Yorkers and improve the living conditions in our state for generations to come. Our members look forward to having the opportunity to contribute to these projects and pursue the paths to the middle class they pave for them.”

Natural Resources Defense Council Director Jackson Morris said , “The launch of the 2024 solicitation process for new large-scale renewable energy projects, with proposals due in August 2024, builds on the momentum from the successful offshore wind awards for Empire Wind 1 and Sunrise Wind and provides an important opportunity to replace canceled projects so that New York stays on track to meet our ambitious target of 70% renewable electricity by 2030. Accelerating these renewable projects underscores New York’s commitment to a clean energy future and will bring cleaner air, better jobs, and a healthier environment for all New Yorkers.”

American Clean Power Director of Eastern State Affairs Director Moira Cyphers said , “We commend NYSERDA for their responsiveness and proactive efforts to keep New York State's clean energy goals on track. Governor Hochul's leadership is pivotal in driving significant progress to expedite procuring clean energy which will attract new investment opportunities and create well-paying jobs across the state.”

Citizens Campaign for the Environment Executive Director Adrienne Esposito said , “Governor Hochul’s exciting announcement is another surge for New York’s renewable energy sector! We will meet the state’s renewable energy Climate Act goals only by advancing new large-scale wind and solar projects. This week’s heat wave in mid-June is another clear indicator of climate change impacts across New York caused by our continued reliance on dirty fossil fuels. We must transition our energy production and land-based wind and solar energy projects are a key component of that transition. Today’s announcement exemplifies the state’s commitment to providing clean affordable energy to all residents while combating climate change, bolstering the economy, and creating thousands of green jobs. New York’s clean energy future is looking bright.”

New York Solar Energy Industries Association Executive Director Noah Ginsburg said , “As New Yorkers across the state grapple with extreme heat and rising electric bills, accelerating renewable energy deployment has never been more urgent. New York Solar Energy Industries Association applauds NYSERDA and Governor Hochul for their commitment to achieving the clean energy and equity mandates in the Climate Act. Scaling up solar deployment is foundational to New York’s energy transition, and our member companies and solar workforce are at the ready.”

New York State's Nation-Leading Climate Plan

New York State's climate agenda calls for an orderly and just transition that creates family-sustaining jobs, continues to foster a green economy across all sectors and ensures that at least 35 percent, with a goal of 40 percent, of the benefits of clean energy investments are directed to disadvantaged communities. Guided by some of the nation’s most aggressive climate and clean energy initiatives, New York is advancing a suite of efforts – including the New York Cap-and-Invest program (NYCI) and other complementary policies – to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent by 2030 and 85 percent by 2050 from 1990 levels. New York is also on a path to achieving a zero-emission electricity sector by 2040, including 70 percent renewable energy generation by 2030, and economywide carbon neutrality by mid-century. A cornerstone of this transition is New York's unprecedented clean energy investments, including more than $28 billion in 61 large-scale renewable and transmission projects across the State, $6.8 billion to reduce building emissions, $3.3 billion to scale up solar, nearly $3 billion for clean transportation initiatives and over $2 billion in NY Green Bank commitments. These and other investments are supporting more than 170,000 jobs in New York’s clean energy sector as of 2022 and over 3,000 percent growth in the distributed solar sector since 2011. To reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve air quality, New York also adopted zero-emission vehicle regulations, including requiring all new passenger cars and light-duty trucks sold in the State be zero emission by 2035. Partnerships are continuing to advance New York’s climate action with more than 400 registered and more than 130 certified Climate Smart Communities, nearly 500 Clean Energy Communities, and the State’s largest community air monitoring initiative in 10 disadvantaged communities across the State to help target air pollution and combat climate change.

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Juneteenth: What to know about the historical celebration that's now a federal holiday

On june 19, 1865 slaves in galveston, texas were given the news that they were freed by president abraham lincoln. now, the day is a holiday that celebrates the "second independence day" in america..

Three years after it was made a federal holiday , Juneteenth 2024 marks a day of celebration as well as education.

The federal holiday known as “Second Independence Day,” marks the day the last African American slaves were notified that they had been freed from their masters, the National Museum of African American History and Culture said.

Dr. Tim Goler, a professor of urban affairs and sociology courses and director of research for the Center for African American Public Policy at Norfolk State University, told USA TODAY that Juneteenth or "Freedom Day" is a day that shows the "beauty of our culture" that everyone should participate in.

The origins of Juneteenth date back to June 19, 1865 – more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation - when the Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, Goler said.

“This delay and the enforcement of the emancipation in Texas was due to a lack of enforcement until this general arrived," Goler said. "Then Juneteenth thus became this kind of powerful symbol of freedom and the long struggle for civil rights."

The Juneteenth National Independence Day A ct was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate in June 2021. The bill was signed by President Joe Biden on June 17, 2021, which officially made the day a federal holiday.

Here's what you need to know about Juneteenth.

An African American holiday: Predating Juneteenth was nearly lost to history. It's back.

Black History, Juneteenth becoming more cemented in fabric of US

Although Juneteenth is now becoming a part of the conversation regarding Black History, there was a time when Black History was not widely discussed within the educational system, especially for historians, said Dr. Alan Singer, a professor of teaching, learning and technology at Hofstra University who writes about the history of slavery and racism.

“I didn't learn it (until) I was an adult, really (in the) 1990s, when as a teacher, I started studying more, so I (could) incorporate it into my lessons,” he said. “I went to City College in the 1960s and they had first introduced a course called ‘American Negro History’ and that was the first time I had learned about any of these things. I took the course because I became a political activist while at City College and I needed to know more about the African American civil rights struggles.”

Singer also adds that he attended high school during the Civil Rights Movement and was never taught about Black History. To change that, he decided to educate himself more to properly teach his students.

“I just felt a heavy responsibility as a teacher to really present a much more accurate picture of the history of the United States,” he said.

Goler adds that Juneteenth has been recognized for years within the Black community and history. Now, the day has become more publicly known.

"In recent years, Juneteenth has gained a much wider recognition. It's only been since 2021 that it became that designated as a federal holiday," he said. "Many Black people and Black communities around the country have celebrated Juneteenth. It's just becoming much more wider and much more visible now."

Commercialization of Juneteenth

Since Juneteenth has been declared a federal holiday, many retailers have unveiled Juneteenth attire through clothing, footwear, hats and other merchandise.

"The question is, 'who benefits from the commercialization of Juneteenth?' I’d definitely like to see more African American (and) more Black businesses benefit," Goler said. "The trend of commercialization, we risk the overshadowing of the historical context, and the ongoing struggle for racial equality that Juneteenth represents."

Singer hopes that companies that are selling Juneteenth products are also advocating for more inclusivity.

“What I'm arguing is that what we need to do is to use a day like Juneteenth as a launching pad to build a more just society,” he said. “It should not just be about the past, it has to be about the future.”

Goler hopes that the holiday will bring everyone together but also educate them about this important day in Black History.

"I think as we observe Juneteenth, it's important to focus on the education, reflection, the community engagement aspect and really ensure that the day remains of a pungent reminder of our continued and enduring fight for freedom and justice," he said.

Ahjané Forbes is a reporter on the National Trending Team at USA TODAY. Ahjané covers breaking news, car recalls, crime, health, lottery and public policy stories. Email her at  [email protected] . Follow her on  Instagram ,  Threads  and  X (Twitter) .

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Building a Platform Business Requires Balance—Lessons from Salesforce

Platform business models have become highly popular; they are used by half of the world’s ten largest companies by market capitalization. The challenge for established companies is that running a platform business is different from running a product business. A platform business requires building an ecosystem of various constituents with differing interests: customers, the company’s internal product teams, and partners. Based on an in-depth case study of Salesforce Platform, this briefing illustrates one approach to balancing the interests of these constituents.

The June 2024 research briefing is read by author Martin Mocker.

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© 2024 MIT Center for Information Systems Research, Mocker and Sebastian. MIT CISR Research Briefings are published monthly to update the center’s member organizations on current research projects.

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About the Researchers

Martin Mocker, Professor, ESB Business School, Reutlingen University and Academic Research Fellow, MIT CISR

Ina M. Sebastian, Research Scientist, MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR)

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Founded in 1974 and grounded in MIT's tradition of combining academic knowledge and practical purpose, MIT CISR helps executives meet the challenge of leading increasingly digital and data-driven organizations. We work directly with digital leaders, executives, and boards to develop our insights. Our consortium forms a global community that comprises more than seventy-five organizations.

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MIT CISR helps executives meet the challenge of leading increasingly digital and data-driven organizations. We provide insights on how organizations effectively realize value from approaches such as digital business transformation, data monetization, business ecosystems, and the digital workplace. Founded in 1974 and grounded in MIT’s tradition of combining academic knowledge and practical purpose, we work directly with digital leaders, executives, and boards to develop our insights. Our consortium forms a global community that comprises more than seventy-five organizations.