As I wrote in another comment, I have been hugely impressed by CiteSeer (aka NEC ResearchIndex). The ease of the navigation and the comprehensiveness of its cross-linking make it a notably powerful resource for uncovering useful and interesting relevant papers.
It seems to me that every author, and every publisher, would want their papers indexed in such a system. It is manifestly in both their interests to make the relevant material available for indexing, just as abstracts and citations are available at the moment in Physics Abstracts (etc) and the Science Citation Index.
Clearly, it is also in the authors' interests (though not, one assumes, the publishers') to make the full text of papers as easily and freely available as possible, as highlighted in this article on the Nature site.
Surely therefore the logical thing to do is to expect the publishers by default to charge for the online full-text papers, either by journal subscription or pay-per-view; but to offer authors the choice of buying back the rights to have their full text made available free to the end-user, if the authors will pay an appropriate compensation, rather like the page rates currently charged by some journals. (The exact level of the additional page rates would be another base of competition between journals).
As I think RMS pointed out in his contribution to the Nature debate, such rates would usually be quite small in comparison to the overall cost of the research, so with luck both funding agencies and universities would see it as in their own interests to insist on a policy of paying the price for free access.
Another impressive site worth looking at is Citeseer (now the more prosaic 'NEC ResearchIndex'), which
has saved me a number of trips to the library for papers on Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data Compression etc.
Citeseer spiders the web looking for postscript and PDF scientific papers, cacheing whatever it finds, and cross-referencing all the references -- so that even if it doesn't have a particular paper, you can still read what was said about it when other authors cited it.
Citeseer also offers documents which it thinks are related because of a similar citation history, and an 'active bibliography' of the most cited documents which cited this one. And wherever it has found a document, its cached copy is available for download.
I have been very impressed by how much value such a system can add, compared to just the dead trees.
U.S. freedoms protected by Article 29(f)
on
Harm From The Hague
·
· Score: 2
The current draft text of the treaty (Oct 1999) is at http://www.hcch.net/e/conventions/draft36e.html
(The aim of the current negotiations is a new, revised draft to put before the politicians).
Article 29(f) excludes 'recognition or enforcement [that] would be manifestly incompatible with the public policy of the State addressed.'
Such "public policy" would clearly include First Amendment rights in the USA, as explained in this set of answers from the cousel to the US negotiators to questions from James Love.
Similarly, UK judges would be/very/ unlikely to enforce US imposed damages for business-method patents.
While there are some major issues for the negotiators to iron out (see eg this week's Economist article, no longer free online; and James Love's What You Should Know guide), the whole process should still lead to something consumers can welcome -- as reflected in the opening paragraphs of this resolution from a conference of EU and US consumer groups.
A more considered answer, after a night's sleep and some checking of my facts in the textbooks.
Tax cuts financed by borrowing do tend to increase the money supply, but through an indirect linkage rather than a direct one.
So long as you are happy for the funds borrowed by the government to force up interest rates and crowd out private sector investment, then you are right that this doesn't represent a direct increase in the money supply. (In the IS-LM picture it is the IS curve which moves, not the LM curve).
But the fiscal expansion still acts as a stimulus, increasing aggregate demand, leading to increased inflationary pressure.
At this point there is a choice. The Fed could leave its interest rates unchanged, so the LM curve stays where it is. But the LM curve represents the real money supply: preserving it means acquiescing to the inflation, allowing the nominal (dollar) money supply to increase. Alternatively, it can refuse to allow the dollar money supply to increase, but only by further increasing interest rates to tighten the money supply.
So you can have tax cuts financed by borrowing without inflation, but only at the expense of doubly increased interest rates.
Treasury bonds are not part of the money numbers M0 to M4 etc, which are only supposed to reflect ready money, rather than long-term investments.
On the other hand, with credit now available to almost all, reserve money available to banks on demand, and assets far more liquid and traded than in previous times, M0 and friends look less and less like drivers of economic activity and more and more like mere flawed and distorted reflections of it.
Our discussion was framed in terms of central bank interest rate policy, which needs to consider the prospects for inflation up to two years ahead. Mindlessly slaving policy to the latest money-supply numbers might have worked in a highly regulated monetary system in Germany in the 1970s, but is just not relevant in the current open environment.
The important driver for consumer consumption is arguably now not accessible ready cash, but total perceived total net worth (including stock market share values, relative real-estate prices, and the sober T-bonds, as well as the narrow bank balances)
As an example, compare the situations:
Debt redemption: A has $5000 in cash, B has $0 extra in cash.
Tax credit: A has $5000 in T-bonds, B has $5000 extra in cash
I claim that A will be no less likely to demand goods and services over the next two years just because some of his money is currently sitting in T-bonds rather than a bank account; but B will be likely to try to spend at least some of that extra $5000 cash.
The article suggests that the more the election results become a scrambled up lottery the better, because then the majority opinion becomes irrelevant, and you might have the casting vote.
This is not a sane way to judge electoral systems.
Worse,
the electoral college focusses a narrow race entirely onto the few swing states, and can make many large states and their concerns entirely irrelevant. This is not a good way to get a reflective government.
A tax cut does not, nor has it ever, "injected money into the economy".
Consider:
1. The Government borrows the money from you.
The Government spends the money. You are still rich, so you go on spending money.
2. The Government taxes you.
The Government spends the money. But you are poor, so you stop spending money.
Conclusion: replacing taxes with borrowing increases the money supply.
This is what economists mean when they say that tax cuts inject money into the economy -- tax cuts increase government debt, which injects money into the economy.
A tax cut doesn't inject more money into the economy. It just changes who spends the money. If anything, a tax cut will reduce inflation; at least private citizens save some of what they earn. Government spends it all.
Tax Cut + No Change In Spending = Increased National Debt. Inflationary.
Tax Cut + Spending Cut = No Change In National Debt. Broadly Neutral. (OK, maybe somewhat deflationary).
No Tax Cut + Spending Cut = Reduced National Debt. Deflationary.
Rather than put the whole weight of demand deflation on the Fed and its interest rate policy, the same effect could arguably be achieved with less economic pain by increasing the budget surplus.
Spending the surplus paying down the deficit has precisely the same effect on the money supply as a tax cut. To pay down the deficit, the government buys treasury bonds in the open market -- or forgoes new issuance. The effect on the amount of cash in circulation is identical.
Incorrect.
When a bank takes your money and lends it to somebody else, your wealth isn't diminished: so you go on spending like a rich person; but the poor lendee now can buy what they wanted. In effect you are both behaving as if you each had the money. So in economics the creation of a loan increases the total money supply.
The converse is that if the government uses tax money to clear debt instead of buying goods and services,
the debt really does effectively disappear from the money supply.
At the moment the Fed is increasing interest rates to try to reduce aggregate demand to avoid an inflation bubble.
The poster's suggestion of keeping taxes where they are, and deliberately running a larger government surplus, could be attractive compared to the alternative of even higher interest rates.
It would mean that the pain of keeping demand within readily supplyable levels would be spread evenly across the whole tax base, rather than being concentrated as a squeeze on people and businesses who are in debt or need to borrow to invest.
Fuzzy set theory is based on the idea that you could express membership in a set not as a boolean value (0 or 1), but as a real number (e.g. 0.33). From here comes the notion of partial membership in multiple sets and off you go into fuzzy logic. Computationally it's very similar to dealing with a bunch of random variables the distribution of which you know.
Which *bad* ideas are you talking about?
I'd agree that the notion of partial set membership is a Good Idea.
However (I would say) the rules used for doing computations with fuzzy membership numbers -- at least, the ones typically advocated -- are arbitrary, ad-hoc, and fundamentally plain wrong. Sometimes they are useful as a very rough and ready engineering fix when nothing can go too badly adrift, but basically they are Not A Good Thing At All.
A more principled way to deal with fuzzy numbers is to use the machinery of Bayesian calculation, treating fuzzy values as ordinary probabilities, but relating to a wider ontology than just the physical state of reality.
Such extended ontologies arise very naturally from communication theory when we try to summarise data. For example, consider transmitting a set of points on a 2D grid using a mixture of Gaussians model. For each point, one sends the probability that it was generated by Gaussian A rather than B (less than one bit, using BitsBack), followed by the bit string to code its position using one or the other Gaussian.
Gaussians extend to infinity, so we can never definitiely allocate a point to one bump or the other -- it is always a mixture of the two. Thus even a knowledge of the whole of reality is not sufficient to resolve the probability to a definite 0/1 state. "Generation by bump A rather than bump B" is therefore technically a fuzzy proposition, rather than a classical one -- the variable is part of our description of the system (our extended ontology), rather than underlying reality.
In summary:
"Fuzzy" concepts and categories are essential for the efficient communication of information, and are implicit in almost all statistical modelling.
But the right tools for manipulating "fuzzy membership" are Bayesian probability theory and information theory.
The typical ad-hoc fuzzy logic presciptions are unspeakable horrors from any principled point of view.
Endnotes:
1. All of which is entirely irrelevant to the subject of far-from-equilibrium pattern formation (which is what complex systems theory is mostly all about?).
2. For a more extensive discussion of Bayesian inference and fuzzy systems, there are classic papers by Cheeseman.
Ursula le Guin's "The Dispossessed"
on
Inversions
·
· Score: 2
As others have said, setting off two or more different viewpoints in a sustained formal structure is a device Banks has used to good effect in several of his books -- though I have to admit he is such an involving, immersive writer that I've never yet managed to read all of Espedair Street without jumping ahead to stay with one thread or the other.
An earlier novel which uses the same trick is Ursula le Guin's "The Dispossessed" (1974), a stunning meditation on the nature of cooperation and society. Le Guin is a much more distant and impersonal author than Banks, but I have often wondered whether she isn't quite an influence.
Of course, "Consider Phlebas" especially can sometimes seem like a gloriously written high-acceleration remix of just about *everyone* from the best '70s and early '80s SF, with all manner of good ideas getting a look in and then taken a step beyond.
There's definitely something of Le Guin's Hainish Ekumen ("The Left Hand of Darkness") about the Culture. But as with everything else in Banks's books the Culture soon comes over as an entity with a much more developed and interesting character (and also, one possessed of a definite sense of humour!)
When a story has such a seductive potential for folk legend, it may be worth Knowing A Little More before piling in behind the campaign.
"Hollywood studio trashed island paradise" is the kind of great black-and-white story a publicist dreams of -- a perfect, emotive headline to sell newspapers or excite activists. But for a more detailed and balanced report see the thaistudents' excellent site: http://thaistudents.com/the beach/phiphi_0200/index.html
The film makers maybe should or maybe should not have been allowed to film on Maya beach. But they were clearly aware right from the start of the dangers of a publicity backlash; and they took considerable environmental care to try to avoid one.
Where they did make changes, such as bringing in the palm trees, they undid them once the three week shoot was over. In fact they apparently restored the beach to a standard which would have been better than it had been before they first went there, had the work not been partially undone by the unexpected violence of the monsoon storms.
The most serious danger to Maya beach now is the continuing effect of the large number of regular tourists who visit, rather than any direct impact from the film-making. The most pressing need is for a permanent ranger presence to manage use and access to the island. But apparently work to establish such a post, using some of the facilities brought by the film crew, has been vandalised by those with a stake in the current free for all.
The judge has established his version of the facts; but not yet how heavily the seriousness of MS's transgressions weigh against any possible disbenefits of government action.
It seems likely that MS's lawyers would want to argue that, whatever the costs of MS's imperialist behaviour, there are advantages to the Pax Redmondia as a consumer accepted de-facto standard, which would be lost if it were broken up or prevented from further evolving.
Question: Can MS make such a comparison at this level, based on accepting the judges facts but belittling their comparative importance, but still argue against those findings of fact at a higher level on appeal ?
Note that Netscape is the loser here. Nobody knows or cares what Netscape wants. It's irrelevant. Microsoft "removed their air supply" and AOL/Sun picks at the pieces.
Netscape's shareholders wanted money. They got it.
Netscape wanted survival. The browser team survives.
Massive staff turnover... job losses... plunging morale... and comments like
But while the Netscape brand may live on for some time, it is quite clear to many current and former Netscape pros that the culture they helped create behind the name is long gone. But while the Netscape brand may live on for some time, it is quite clear to many current and former Netscape pros that the culture they helped create behind the name is long gone.
"We defined the Internet culture. We were really the first 'dotcom' startup," says one former Netscape facilities exec. "I loved my time at Netscape... but it's a completely different company now."
The most interesting thing about this article, I thought, was how little of it applies to Mozilla.
Post jwz, it seems that morale at Mozilla has just been getting better and better. Developer turnover appears to be very low -- the same names are still appearing week after week in the status reports as 12 months ago. There's now a real confidence and enthusiasm that they are on a realistic timetable to deliver a world beating product -- and soon. Mozilla's culture is alive and well.
Yeah, it sounds from this article as if the rest of Netscape has taken a beating. Sic transit gloria mundi.
But as a consumer brand Netscape is defined by the browser. With Communicator 2000 in the next couple of months also including some of the goodies AOL has been keeping on its secret list, the Netscape brand is going to be back with a bang.
This is quite a bit narrower than the technologies discussed on Slashdot. Specifically, there appear to be two limitations that relate directly to the news being customized. By specifying that it is "real-time information" they probably get around a lot of old technology that customizes standard pages that do not preset news or the like.
A snapshot of which stories are currently headlining the main news sites is precisely "real-time information" .
If/. combines this with individual pre-prepared user templates, then they had better have been doing it since before June 12 1997.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anybody else read this and feel like they've been hit about the head with a large gold brick ? (and not even a slice of lemon...)
Clearly, it is also in the authors' interests (though not, one assumes, the publishers') to make the full text of papers as easily and freely available as possible, as highlighted in this article on the Nature site.
Surely therefore the logical thing to do is to expect the publishers by default to charge for the online full-text papers, either by journal subscription or pay-per-view; but to offer authors the choice of buying back the rights to have their full text made available free to the end-user, if the authors will pay an appropriate compensation, rather like the page rates currently charged by some journals. (The exact level of the additional page rates would be another base of competition between journals). As I think RMS pointed out in his contribution to the Nature debate, such rates would usually be quite small in comparison to the overall cost of the research, so with luck both funding agencies and universities would see it as in their own interests to insist on a policy of paying the price for free access.
Citeseer spiders the web looking for postscript and PDF scientific papers, cacheing whatever it finds, and cross-referencing all the references -- so that even if it doesn't have a particular paper, you can still read what was said about it when other authors cited it. Citeseer also offers documents which it thinks are related because of a similar citation history, and an 'active bibliography' of the most cited documents which cited this one. And wherever it has found a document, its cached copy is available for download.
For a typical Citeseer report page see eg http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/heckerman96tutorial.htm l.
I have been very impressed by how much value such a system can add, compared to just the dead trees.
Article 29(f) excludes 'recognition or enforcement [that] would be manifestly incompatible with the public policy of the State addressed.'
Such "public policy" would clearly include First Amendment rights in the USA, as explained in this set of answers from the cousel to the US negotiators to questions from James Love.
Similarly, UK judges would be /very/ unlikely to enforce US imposed damages for business-method patents.
While there are some major issues for the negotiators to iron out (see eg this week's Economist article, no longer free online; and James Love's What You Should Know guide), the whole process should still lead to something consumers can welcome -- as reflected in the opening paragraphs of this resolution from a conference of EU and US consumer groups.
doubleplus clueful
Printing the money is much worse; but financing the tax cut with borrowing is still somewhat inflationary.
See the post 'A more considered answer', above.
Tax cuts financed by borrowing do tend to increase the money supply, but through an indirect linkage rather than a direct one.
So long as you are happy for the funds borrowed by the government to force up interest rates and crowd out private sector investment, then you are right that this doesn't represent a direct increase in the money supply. (In the IS-LM picture it is the IS curve which moves, not the LM curve).
But the fiscal expansion still acts as a stimulus, increasing aggregate demand, leading to increased inflationary pressure.
At this point there is a choice. The Fed could leave its interest rates unchanged, so the LM curve stays where it is. But the LM curve represents the real money supply: preserving it means acquiescing to the inflation, allowing the nominal (dollar) money supply to increase. Alternatively, it can refuse to allow the dollar money supply to increase, but only by further increasing interest rates to tighten the money supply.
So you can have tax cuts financed by borrowing without inflation, but only at the expense of doubly increased interest rates.
Treasury bonds are not part of the money numbers M0 to M4 etc, which are only supposed to reflect ready money, rather than long-term investments.
On the other hand, with credit now available to almost all, reserve money available to banks on demand, and assets far more liquid and traded than in previous times, M0 and friends look less and less like drivers of economic activity and more and more like mere flawed and distorted reflections of it.
Our discussion was framed in terms of central bank interest rate policy, which needs to consider the prospects for inflation up to two years ahead. Mindlessly slaving policy to the latest money-supply numbers might have worked in a highly regulated monetary system in Germany in the 1970s, but is just not relevant in the current open environment.
The important driver for consumer consumption is arguably now not accessible ready cash, but total perceived total net worth (including stock market share values, relative real-estate prices, and the sober T-bonds, as well as the narrow bank balances)
As an example, compare the situations:
Debt redemption: A has $5000 in cash, B has $0 extra in cash.
Tax credit: A has $5000 in T-bonds, B has $5000 extra in cash
I claim that A will be no less likely to demand goods and services over the next two years just because some of his money is currently sitting in T-bonds rather than a bank account; but B will be likely to try to spend at least some of that extra $5000 cash.
This is not a sane way to judge electoral systems.
Worse, the electoral college focusses a narrow race entirely onto the few swing states, and can make many large states and their concerns entirely irrelevant. This is not a good way to get a reflective government.
This is true only if the government borrowing is unchanged -- ie if every tax cut is 'earned' by a corresponding spending cut.
Strangely, this appears not to happen in practice.
Consider:
1. The Government borrows the money from you.
The Government spends the money. You are still rich, so you go on spending money.
2. The Government taxes you.
The Government spends the money. But you are poor, so you stop spending money.
Conclusion: replacing taxes with borrowing increases the money supply.
This is what economists mean when they say that tax cuts inject money into the economy -- tax cuts increase government debt, which injects money into the economy.
Tax Cut + No Change In Spending = Increased National Debt. Inflationary.
Tax Cut + Spending Cut = No Change In National Debt. Broadly Neutral. (OK, maybe somewhat deflationary).
No Tax Cut + Spending Cut = Reduced National Debt. Deflationary.
Rather than put the whole weight of demand deflation on the Fed and its interest rate policy, the same effect could arguably be achieved with less economic pain by increasing the budget surplus.
Incorrect.
When a bank takes your money and lends it to somebody else, your wealth isn't diminished: so you go on spending like a rich person; but the poor lendee now can buy what they wanted. In effect you are both behaving as if you each had the money. So in economics the creation of a loan increases the total money supply.
The converse is that if the government uses tax money to clear debt instead of buying goods and services, the debt really does effectively disappear from the money supply.
At the moment the Fed is increasing interest rates to try to reduce aggregate demand to avoid an inflation bubble. The poster's suggestion of keeping taxes where they are, and deliberately running a larger government surplus, could be attractive compared to the alternative of even higher interest rates. It would mean that the pain of keeping demand within readily supplyable levels would be spread evenly across the whole tax base, rather than being concentrated as a squeeze on people and businesses who are in debt or need to borrow to invest.
.... until the user out there actually wants to call a routine.
Which *bad* ideas are you talking about?
I'd agree that the notion of partial set membership is a Good Idea.
However (I would say) the rules used for doing computations with fuzzy membership numbers -- at least, the ones typically advocated -- are arbitrary, ad-hoc, and fundamentally plain wrong. Sometimes they are useful as a very rough and ready engineering fix when nothing can go too badly adrift, but basically they are Not A Good Thing At All.
A more principled way to deal with fuzzy numbers is to use the machinery of Bayesian calculation, treating fuzzy values as ordinary probabilities, but relating to a wider ontology than just the physical state of reality.
Such extended ontologies arise very naturally from communication theory when we try to summarise data. For example, consider transmitting a set of points on a 2D grid using a mixture of Gaussians model. For each point, one sends the probability that it was generated by Gaussian A rather than B (less than one bit, using BitsBack), followed by the bit string to code its position using one or the other Gaussian.
Gaussians extend to infinity, so we can never definitiely allocate a point to one bump or the other -- it is always a mixture of the two. Thus even a knowledge of the whole of reality is not sufficient to resolve the probability to a definite 0/1 state. "Generation by bump A rather than bump B" is therefore technically a fuzzy proposition, rather than a classical one -- the variable is part of our description of the system (our extended ontology), rather than underlying reality.
In summary:
Endnotes:
1. All of which is entirely irrelevant to the subject of far-from-equilibrium pattern formation (which is what complex systems theory is mostly all about?).
2. For a more extensive discussion of Bayesian inference and fuzzy systems, there are classic papers by Cheeseman.
An earlier novel which uses the same trick is Ursula le Guin's "The Dispossessed" (1974), a stunning meditation on the nature of cooperation and society. Le Guin is a much more distant and impersonal author than Banks, but I have often wondered whether she isn't quite an influence.
Of course, "Consider Phlebas" especially can sometimes seem like a gloriously written high-acceleration remix of just about *everyone* from the best '70s and early '80s SF, with all manner of good ideas getting a look in and then taken a step beyond.
There's definitely something of Le Guin's Hainish Ekumen ("The Left Hand of Darkness") about the Culture. But as with everything else in Banks's books the Culture soon comes over as an entity with a much more developed and interesting character (and also, one possessed of a definite sense of humour!)
"Hollywood studio trashed island paradise" is the kind of great black-and-white story a publicist dreams of -- a perfect, emotive headline to sell newspapers or excite activists. But for a more detailed and balanced report see the thaistudents' excellent site:
http://thaistudents.com/the beach/phiphi_0200/index.html
The film makers maybe should or maybe should not have been allowed to film on Maya beach. But they were clearly aware right from the start of the dangers of a publicity backlash; and they took considerable environmental care to try to avoid one.
Where they did make changes, such as bringing in the palm trees, they undid them once the three week shoot was over. In fact they apparently restored the beach to a standard which would have been better than it had been before they first went there, had the work not been partially undone by the unexpected violence of the monsoon storms.
The most serious danger to Maya beach now is the continuing effect of the large number of regular tourists who visit, rather than any direct impact from the film-making. The most pressing need is for a permanent ranger presence to manage use and access to the island. But apparently work to establish such a post, using some of the facilities brought by the film crew, has been vandalised by those with a stake in the current free for all.
Is there really a case (rather, an appeal-proof case) for anything more radical ?
The judge has established his version of the facts; but not yet how heavily the seriousness of MS's transgressions weigh against any possible disbenefits of government action.
It seems likely that MS's lawyers would want to argue that, whatever the costs of MS's imperialist behaviour, there are advantages to the Pax Redmondia as a consumer accepted de-facto standard, which would be lost if it were broken up or prevented from further evolving.
Question: Can MS make such a comparison at this level, based on accepting the judges facts but belittling their comparative importance, but still argue against those findings of fact at a higher level on appeal ?
Netscape's shareholders wanted money. They got it.
Netscape wanted survival. The browser team survives.
I remember an article on this in the UK's Sunday Times newspaper at least 5 years ago.
The most interesting thing about this article, I thought, was how little of it applies to Mozilla.
Post jwz, it seems that morale at Mozilla has just been getting better and better. Developer turnover appears to be very low -- the same names are still appearing week after week in the status reports as 12 months ago. There's now a real confidence and enthusiasm that they are on a realistic timetable to deliver a world beating product -- and soon. Mozilla's culture is alive and well.
Yeah, it sounds from this article as if the rest of Netscape has taken a beating. Sic transit gloria mundi.
But as a consumer brand Netscape is defined by the browser. With Communicator 2000 in the next couple of months also including some of the goodies AOL has been keeping on its secret list, the Netscape brand is going to be back with a bang.
latest news:
http://www.freepatents.org/
Philip and Alex don't appear to specifically suggest this.
Suggesting that the per-user files in transactional databases would count is very interesting.
My guess is they would not represent enough of the content of a served screen to count as "template programs". But definitely a good try.
A snapshot of which stories are currently headlining the main news sites is precisely "real-time information" .
If /. combines this with individual pre-prepared user templates, then they had better have been doing it since before June 12 1997.