I've looked at some of Bringsjord's "serious" academic writings (unlike the pop sci book you cherrypicked). It's clear why he's in a cognitive science department and not a serious theoretician. For example, he boldly proposes that he has "solved" P=NP using not math but "digital physics", and offers nothing substantial (like, oh, a *proof*).
There's a place for cognitive scientists -- in poetry journals and not science or engineering labs. God only knows why ilk like you thinks the US military should fund postmodernist dilettantes like Bringsjord.
I can answer that question. A supercomputer arms race *not* worth it. I've worked 10 years in HPC and 10 more spying on Americans, so I know both the means and the ends.
Since the demise of Thinking Machines (CM-2) and other integrated supercomputers (e.g. Cray vectors and T3E, IBM Cell, etc), the future of SCs has become nothing more than pissing matches -- "Golly. I have more pizza boxes than you. Neener."
That's never been more true now that big-SC core counts has risen into the stratosphere... such machines are NOT faster than their ancestors; they never EVER use all their cores on a single job. They're just larger, no faster.
So what's the point? Political fearmongering and Daddy Warbucking. Tell me you're shocked.
Yeah I remember being embarrassed for this guy a few years ago when he won a grant to create a computer that reads free text in order to teach itself. This proposal came from a philosopher with no practical experience in computing, machine learning, or natural language.
You do wonder how the abject failure this project must have become wouldn't disqualify Bringsjord from further federal funding by now. Alas, not.
I've come to expect such cluelessness from DARPA, but for Rensselaer I once had more respect. How far the mighty have fallen.
Read the article. The law does NOT apply to federal authorities. That's why Holder is enthusiastically supporting it.
And of course, there's no restriction against the FBI reading Texans' emails and then passing the info on to local Texas law enforcement...
And since Texas has essentially no state law enforcement, this law applies only to Texas county mounties, who as we all know, are armed to the teeth with the latest most invasive ultra-high tech surveillance equipment and so pose a much graver threat to the tweets of every free-thinkin' Texan than Uncle Sam's merry band of good ol' boys: the FBI, CIA, NSA, NRO, DIA, etc, etc
Jeez. What a waste of time is the Texas legislature.
"'Maybe we should change the rules around insurance so that they have to insure people,' he said."
Maybe the world *should* be a better place. But wishing for the best of all possible worlds is an idiotic basis for national health policy. Or privacy policy.
Recently I spent some time with Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course at Coursera. While it's well done,it's definitely not as challenging as a 400 level CS course at most good schools. To see the difference, take a look at Ng's Machine Learning @ Coursera course,
then his lectures from
Machine Learning @ Stanford CS229 .
By comparison, the Coursera course is child's play.
Yes, Udacity is not Coursera. Nonetheless, I think Georgia Tech has a lot of work ahead before their MOOC CS curriculum will be ready for prime time.
Cosmos was unique. 33 years ago an astronomer / story teller with a luminous passion for the past, present, and future of science stepped into the vacuum of imagination that followed Star Trek, bewitching and enthralling a generation of scientist wanna-bes. Sagan thrilled us largely because the world revealed by Cosmos was a joyous surprise.
But rather than inventing a new series with fresh ideas, Cosmos II is just an attempt to reanimate dead flesh. It's a frankensteinian monster pieced together from someone else's long dead body of work. Magic can't be cloned,
Fox is not PBS. Tyson is not Sagan. Cosmos should be allowed to rest in peace.
There's a link in the article to a ~2 minute IR video that was provided and annotated by the drone's maker. It shows how human body heat clearly contrasts with snowy background, even from miles away. I'd be curious to see the same video shot in Summer temps. I suspect the range falls by 50% or more.
This appears to be a 'new and improved' way to dispense insulin 1) adaptively and 2) with a single dose that lasts an entire week. Type 1 diabetics will benefit most since they must take insulin already. They're likely to find this a god send.
But this technology will also appeal to Type 2s who now may be a lot more likely to take insulin rather than an insulin secretagogues drug like sulfonylureas (e.g. glipizide, glibenclamide). A significant benefit of taking insulin rather than an insulin stimulant is 1) glucose control will be much improved and 2) this will place much less strain on the pancreas thereby perhaps reducing the 'progressive' nature of diabetes, where the pancreas wears out prematurely due to increased demands placed on it.
Of course, they have yet to make it work in pimates and humans. No small hurdle.
Unpaid leisure time has always been with us. It's called *unemployment*. Nobody who goes there sings its praises. And just because the number of unemployed is increasing, it's not going to become more fun to lose your home, your health care, or your future.
The job trends today among the unskilled are: 1) fewer hours of paid employment, 2) fewer dollars per hour, or 3) both. None of these is "good news", as you put it.
Organisms must process information encoded via developmental and environmental signals to survive and reproduce. Researchers have also engineered synthetic genetic logic to realize simpler, independent control of biological processes. We developed a three-terminal device architecture, termed the transcriptor, that uses bacteriophage serine integrases to control the flow of RNA polymerase along DNA. Integrase-mediated inversion or deletion of DNA encoding transcription terminators or a promoter modulate transcription rates. We realize permanent amplifying AND, NAND, OR, XOR, NOR, and XNOR gates actuated across common control signal ranges and sequential logic supporting autonomous cell-cell communication of DNA encoding distinct logic gate states. The single-layer digital logic architecture developed here enables engineering of amplifying logic gates to control transcription rates within and across diverse organisms.
As to whether Moore's Law fails to predict clock rate, I'm not so sure. In the first decade of the Pentium, ML accurately predicted clock rate within 2X. (Starting at 66 MHz, rising 2x each 1.5 years, that's 10/1.5 = 6.66, or 2^6.66, or 100x, or 66 MHz x 100x = 6.6 GHz, which is only 2x larger than life. That's pretty accurate, IMHO.
But Moore's Law fails to predict clock rates of the Pentium only during the past decade, where at 660 GHz, its estimate is 200x too large. Clearly the difference between those two decades reveals a sea change in the life of the Pentium (and CMOS in general).
If 66 MHz was state of the art in 1993 and Moore's Law predicts a doubling of density (effectively clock rate) every 18 months, then 20 years/1.5 years = 13.3. So clock rates should be 2^13.3 times faster today, about 10,000x, or 66 MHz x 10,000 = 6.6 GHz, which is actually twice as fast as today's max of 3.2 GHz.
Given that 3.2 GHz Pentiums arrived on the market about 10 years ago (2002) but haven't moved since, it seems Moore's Law was clearly pessimistic for the Pentium's first 10 years and wildly optimistic for the last 10.
Of course the introduction of multicores Pentiums was a hack borne of desperation. The amount of speedup per app from a 2013 quad core Sandy Bridge @ 2.5 GHz over a 2002 P6 @ 3.2 GHz is... Ugh.
Has the speedup of the Pentium really gone negative? Has multicore-ing it caused the demerits of Amdahl's Law to finally overtake the merits of Moore's Law?
Eliza was a very simple grammar manipulator, translating user statements into Rogerian counter questions. No pattern recognition or knowledge bases were ever employed.
In contrast, Watson, Siri, and Evi all cleverly parse and recognize natural language concepts, navigate through large external info bases, and partner with and integrate answer engines like Wolfram Alpha.
The book came out in 1957; the movie in 1959. Today's average Slashdotter would have been -20 years old then. So I'm not surprised most don't know OTB or were too young to be impressed by a black and white movie with little action and starring actors they don't know.
For the rest of us the story was simply devastating. And totally believable. Through fear, intolerance, and stupidity, everyone everywhere dies.
Definitely a fable. Perhaps scientific political fiction?
Almost all of the engineers I know (~ a dozen) fall into the stereotype of showing little interest outside of tech, as do many computer scientists (I know dozens). Interestingly, few of the biologists, chemists, physicists, or mathematicians I know (I know dozens) are major geeks. So not all techies are interested only in tech subjects. Techmeisters are not a monolith, and probably neither is the origin of their passion for tech or dispassion for non-tech.
I think the disinterest in non-tech subjects from techies should not be blamed on the school system any more than can the disinterest in tech subjects from non-techies. Passion for tech sometimes can be nurtured but usually it comes from nature. Tech and math appeals to boys more than girls, and non-circumspective geeky boys still more. Changing our schools isn't going to change that.
Earning a tech degree means you're suited to doing tech work, not sales, marketing, or managing people. Employers need to hire the right skills for the job. For most jobs outside academia, just having a college degree is not enough. You're hiring a person, not a degree.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you read the book, Dear Anonymous Coward? This guy did, and hated it for good reasons:
http://www.amazon.com/review/RDTKFS2LDBMW8/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0805819878&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books
I've looked at some of Bringsjord's "serious" academic writings (unlike the pop sci book you cherrypicked). It's clear why he's in a cognitive science department and not a serious theoretician. For example, he boldly proposes that he has "solved" P=NP using not math but "digital physics", and offers nothing substantial (like, oh, a *proof*).
http://kryten.mm.rpi.edu/scb_pnp_solved22.pdf
There's a place for cognitive scientists -- in poetry journals and not science or engineering labs. God only knows why ilk like you thinks the US military should fund postmodernist dilettantes like Bringsjord.
I can answer that question. A supercomputer arms race *not* worth it. I've worked 10 years in HPC and 10 more spying on Americans, so I know both the means and the ends.
Since the demise of Thinking Machines (CM-2) and other integrated supercomputers (e.g. Cray vectors and T3E, IBM Cell, etc), the future of SCs has become nothing more than pissing matches -- "Golly. I have more pizza boxes than you. Neener."
That's never been more true now that big-SC core counts has risen into the stratosphere... such machines are NOT faster than their ancestors; they never EVER use all their cores on a single job. They're just larger, no faster.
So what's the point? Political fearmongering and Daddy Warbucking. Tell me you're shocked.
More of the same old same old Bringsjord (from 2005):
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6889435/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/teaching-computers-read-no-simple-task/#.UcUbzuvuY5Y
Yeah I remember being embarrassed for this guy a few years ago when he won a grant to create a computer that reads free text in order to teach itself. This proposal came from a philosopher with no practical experience in computing, machine learning, or natural language.
You do wonder how the abject failure this project must have become wouldn't disqualify Bringsjord from further federal funding by now. Alas, not.
I've come to expect such cluelessness from DARPA, but for Rensselaer I once had more respect. How far the mighty have fallen.
It should be trivial for police to:
- Record the time stamps of the phone's recent uses.
- Record the timestamp of the collision event as recorded by the car's black box (e.g. Airbag Control Module).
http://www.crashforensics.com/automobiledatarecorders.cfm
- Synchronize the clocks on the phone and black box to enable comparison.
Pwned.
Read the article. The law does NOT apply to federal authorities. That's why Holder is enthusiastically supporting it.
And of course, there's no restriction against the FBI reading Texans' emails and then passing the info on to local Texas law enforcement...
And since Texas has essentially no state law enforcement, this law applies only to Texas county mounties, who as we all know, are armed to the teeth with the latest most invasive ultra-high tech surveillance equipment and so pose a much graver threat to the tweets of every free-thinkin' Texan than Uncle Sam's merry band of good ol' boys: the FBI, CIA, NSA, NRO, DIA, etc, etc
Jeez. What a waste of time is the Texas legislature.
"'Maybe we should change the rules around insurance so that they have to insure people,' he said."
Maybe the world *should* be a better place. But wishing for the best of all possible worlds is an idiotic basis for national health policy. Or privacy policy.
.
By comparison, the Coursera course is child's play.
Yes, Udacity is not Coursera. Nonetheless, I think Georgia Tech has a lot of work ahead before their MOOC CS curriculum will be ready for prime time.
Cosmos was unique. 33 years ago an astronomer / story teller with a luminous passion for the past, present, and future of science stepped into the vacuum of imagination that followed Star Trek, bewitching and enthralling a generation of scientist wanna-bes. Sagan thrilled us largely because the world revealed by Cosmos was a joyous surprise.
But rather than inventing a new series with fresh ideas, Cosmos II is just an attempt to reanimate dead flesh. It's a frankensteinian monster pieced together from someone else's long dead body of work. Magic can't be cloned,
Fox is not PBS. Tyson is not Sagan. Cosmos should be allowed to rest in peace.
There's a link in the article to a ~2 minute IR video that was provided and annotated by the drone's maker. It shows how human body heat clearly contrasts with snowy background, even from miles away. I'd be curious to see the same video shot in Summer temps. I suspect the range falls by 50% or more.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-07/tesla-ceo-talking-with-google-about-autopilot-systems.html
This appears to be a 'new and improved' way to dispense insulin 1) adaptively and 2) with a single dose that lasts an entire week. Type 1 diabetics will benefit most since they must take insulin already. They're likely to find this a god send.
But this technology will also appeal to Type 2s who now may be a lot more likely to take insulin rather than an insulin secretagogues drug like sulfonylureas (e.g. glipizide, glibenclamide). A significant benefit of taking insulin rather than an insulin stimulant is 1) glucose control will be much improved and 2) this will place much less strain on the pancreas thereby perhaps reducing the 'progressive' nature of diabetes, where the pancreas wears out prematurely due to increased demands placed on it.
Of course, they have yet to make it work in pimates and humans. No small hurdle.
Unpaid leisure time has always been with us. It's called *unemployment*. Nobody who goes there sings its praises. And just because the number of unemployed is increasing, it's not going to become more fun to lose your home, your health care, or your future.
The job trends today among the unskilled are: 1) fewer hours of paid employment, 2) fewer dollars per hour, or 3) both. None of these is "good news", as you put it.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/03/27/science.1232758
Amplifying Genetic Logic Gates
Abstract
Organisms must process information encoded via developmental and environmental signals to survive and reproduce. Researchers have also engineered synthetic genetic logic to realize simpler, independent control of biological processes. We developed a three-terminal device architecture, termed the transcriptor, that uses bacteriophage serine integrases to control the flow of RNA polymerase along DNA. Integrase-mediated inversion or deletion of DNA encoding transcription terminators or a promoter modulate transcription rates. We realize permanent amplifying AND, NAND, OR, XOR, NOR, and XNOR gates actuated across common control signal ranges and sequential logic supporting autonomous cell-cell communication of DNA encoding distinct logic gate states. The single-layer digital logic architecture developed here enables engineering of amplifying logic gates to control transcription rates within and across diverse organisms.
Yikes. Time for me to repeat 6th grade math.
As to whether Moore's Law fails to predict clock rate, I'm not so sure. In the first decade of the Pentium, ML accurately predicted clock rate within 2X. (Starting at 66 MHz, rising 2x each 1.5 years, that's 10/1.5 = 6.66, or 2^6.66, or 100x, or 66 MHz x 100x = 6.6 GHz, which is only 2x larger than life. That's pretty accurate, IMHO.
But Moore's Law fails to predict clock rates of the Pentium only during the past decade, where at 660 GHz, its estimate is 200x too large. Clearly the difference between those two decades reveals a sea change in the life of the Pentium (and CMOS in general).
In fact, clock rate and density have grown inseparable. Compare these plots of Clock speed (p. 61) with Moore's Law (p.67):
The two curves are doppelgangers.
If 66 MHz was state of the art in 1993 and Moore's Law predicts a doubling of density (effectively clock rate) every 18 months, then 20 years/1.5 years = 13.3. So clock rates should be 2^13.3 times faster today, about 10,000x, or 66 MHz x 10,000 = 6.6 GHz, which is actually twice as fast as today's max of 3.2 GHz.
Given that 3.2 GHz Pentiums arrived on the market about 10 years ago (2002) but haven't moved since, it seems Moore's Law was clearly pessimistic for the Pentium's first 10 years and wildly optimistic for the last 10.
Of course the introduction of multicores Pentiums was a hack borne of desperation. The amount of speedup per app from a 2013 quad core Sandy Bridge @ 2.5 GHz over a 2002 P6 @ 3.2 GHz is... Ugh.
Has the speedup of the Pentium really gone negative? Has multicore-ing it caused the demerits of Amdahl's Law to finally overtake the merits of Moore's Law?
C3PO was appealing and unthreatening only because it moved slowly, tottered, and spoke meekly with the rich accent of a british butler.
If instead the character had been quick and silent, then as an expressionless 500 pound brass robot, C3PO would have seemed a lot less cuddly.
Right you are. Sounds like a real pit. Hey...
According to "Current Results", the total annual sunshine in Germany (hours):
Berlin 1625
Bremen 1483
Hamburg 1557
Hannover 1501
Kiel 1627
Magdeburg 1609
Potsdam 1692
Rostock 1687
Total annual sunshine in Alaska:
Anchorage 2061
No US city/state gets less sunshine than Anchorage AK, though Syracuse NY is close at 2120, Seattle WA at 2170, and Columbus OH at 2183.
So what *should* Siri do with nonsense questions like this?
1) "I don't understand" is unhelpful. Repeated answers like "What? Please repeat or reword." will get old fast.
2) "Let me tell you something random about mental retardation" is not a winner either.
3) A weather report at least has a chance of success.
Eliza was a very simple grammar manipulator, translating user statements into Rogerian counter questions. No pattern recognition or knowledge bases were ever employed.
In contrast, Watson, Siri, and Evi all cleverly parse and recognize natural language concepts, navigate through large external info bases, and partner with and integrate answer engines like Wolfram Alpha.
There is simply no smilarity. Bzzzzt. You lose.
Prof. Kevin Fu's course website points to a nice article at MIT Technology Review on the prevalence of S/W virii in medical devices at hospitals:
<URL:http://www.technologyreview.com/news/429616/computer-viruses-are-rampant-on-medical-devices-in-hospitals/>
The book came out in 1957; the movie in 1959. Today's average Slashdotter would have been -20 years old then. So I'm not surprised most don't know OTB or were too young to be impressed by a black and white movie with little action and starring actors they don't know.
For the rest of us the story was simply devastating. And totally believable. Through fear, intolerance, and stupidity, everyone everywhere dies.
Definitely a fable. Perhaps scientific political fiction?
Almost all of the engineers I know (~ a dozen) fall into the stereotype of showing little interest outside of tech, as do many computer scientists (I know dozens). Interestingly, few of the biologists, chemists, physicists, or mathematicians I know (I know dozens) are major geeks. So not all techies are interested only in tech subjects. Techmeisters are not a monolith, and probably neither is the origin of their passion for tech or dispassion for non-tech.
I think the disinterest in non-tech subjects from techies should not be blamed on the school system any more than can the disinterest in tech subjects from non-techies. Passion for tech sometimes can be nurtured but usually it comes from nature. Tech and math appeals to boys more than girls, and non-circumspective geeky boys still more. Changing our schools isn't going to change that.
Earning a tech degree means you're suited to doing tech work, not sales, marketing, or managing people. Employers need to hire the right skills for the job. For most jobs outside academia, just having a college degree is not enough. You're hiring a person, not a degree.
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/09-15BiologicalClock.asp