Pattern recognition does not require an explicit understanding of mathematics.
But ask the question "what is a pattern?" That cannot be answered non-mathematically without ambiguity. Go on, try it. Therefore, the very notion of "pattern" is essentially mathematical. You don't know what mathematics is.
Math is convenient, but it is not necessary or intrinsic to observing the patterns or finding use in them. I know math and science are often found together, and I do not disagree anyone serious about science should study mathematics, but it is possible to utilize the scientific process without its study.
Wow that is amazingly naive. Mathematics is both necessary and intrinsic to the entire edifice of science and engineering and to the foundations of physics and has been since ancient times. This is not because somebody "made up" mathematics and "chose" it to provide tools for analyzing the physical world as physics. It was because it worked. It was not a choice of "convenience".
I went through the usual years of schooling enduring force-fed maths, all the while not appreciating its power or breathtaking beauty. That landed much later and only as a senior undergrad. But once the astonishingly successful mathematical frameworks for quantum mechanics and general relativity have been grasped I don't see how anyone could fail to be astonished and amazed at what the human mind can achieve.
I know it is difficult for someone who has never studied theoretical physics to get that mathematics is so fundamentally profound for any useful understanding of reality. One way of looking at quantum mechanics is to think of it as an attempt to build a mathematical representation of the basic kinds of physical interactions, those occurring on the Plank scale. The results of quantum mechanics seem bizarre and could never have been arrived at without mathematics. We have a poor physical intuition for what is going on at those scales, it's beyond our experience.
All most people have is painful memories of years of suffering math (mainly just elementary algebra and simple calculus) in a high school classroom. I hated those and this created years of math phobia that I had to work hard to consciously beat. Once the phobia was defeated (a question of mental attitude and confidence) pages of symbols were no longer scary! The beauty then shines through, for me it was once I could see the towering intellectual mountain of theoretical physics.
This speaks volumes about education systems utterly failing to impart the essential character of mathematics. I'm not sure society really wants the unwashed to start enjoying the intellectual beauty of mathematics. Mathematics is what enabled the industrial age, without it we would still be living as Neolithic farmers.
I think a hostile hard AI would get away with much more damage as a software entity on the Internet than in physical space.
But the internet is continually being given more hooks into physical space, including remote operation of complex machinery and (probably) weapons systems. And there are security holes that we don't know about but that a super AI could detect.
wdef didn't say he was trying to seduce your daughter. What if he's taking a piss in a quiet alleyway because there are no public urinals anywhere any more and your daughter sees his willy? You kill him?
You got it, thanks. And these are real situations as others have said.
And if a child sees a normal part of the human anatomy why should that be a crime? Because you don't like it. Don't try to tell me that the mere sight of a human penis will irreversibly damage a child. It's a sick society that demonizes a pat of the human body so successfully.
What they really need is the ability to vote on individual issues.
That could create more problems than it solves. Unfortunately, your average citizen just doesn't have the skills to evaluate the pros and cons of every single issue. That is the sad failing of democracy. Joe Citizen seems to use a limited set of retarded tools to make voting decisions, such as what the media or institutions (eg churches) tell him. You only have to look at quagmired, emotive but sensible issues like banning the death penalty, drug decriminalization, gun control, and criminal justice/penal system reform. The right way to go on those issues has been validated by countless studies - even proven in implementation in other countries - but rational thought is simply ignored in the popularity contest and the old "against" arguments marketed as truth.
All speculation on the brain possibly having quantum properties is complete nonsense based on equivocation and quasi-religious hoo-hah.
That may be so, but Einstein thought this was possible. Not one given to equivocation or quasi-religious hoo-hah. There are plenty of macroscopically detectable effects of quantum phenomena.
But I find younger team members (and managers) do not always take the long view and don't listen hard enough to good advice. This is particularly important when thinking strategy. Getting ahead of where the technology diffusion curve is going is incredibly difficult but surely is often the key to hitting the big time. Companies should be planning two years ahead of what they are doing now instead of always merely reacting to things. Evaluating the potential for long shots and possible industry futures is important but how many small companies do it? When it does get done, the process tends to be locked up in one department with a few people only since those few managers (usually 40yo+) are the ones who are supposed to be the strategists doing "ideation". [Aside: apparently age begets wisdom in managers only]. To my mind, I'd prefer to encourage input from all including the most junior staff member instead of having them sit in stunned silence, politics preventing them from contributing. Yes people will say a fair bit of wild crap but that's to be expected and even praised in a brainstorming session.
As I've got older I do cringe when I remember my own buzzword compliance in youth. It's a way of trying to seem sophisticated and to belong to the cool kids, which is almost of no importance past 45 years old. I remember my music teacher telling my mother as a kid that no-one grows up until they are at least 30. Now I know what she meant.
Industries of different types have a way of enforcing buzzword compliance. Buzzwords are connected to money.
That's even way older than me:=). I entered the industry in my late 40s but as a manager rather than coder, so I was able to demonstrate management skills gained in other (technical) industries. I could, if I wished, probably do some coding for my company though I'm ok as is. We have some top gun coders who may well snort with derision at my less-experienced code.
Care to hint how you got hired as a new coder at 52? How did you demonstrate that you should be hired with just a bit of PHP an SQL?
Because all applied maths or stats students (and hence many physics, engineering and chemistry students by extension as well as comp sci students) used to have to learn structured programming in Fortran. Fortran is still used in mathematical modeling - it runs fast and a lot of old code can be recycled - but I've read for that it is increasingly being replaced for that by C and other suitable number crunching languages. I seriously doubt that maths majors still make everything look like Fortran code these days.
[old fart] In my day at my old alma mater you sat in a hot little stuffy room and watched a series of excruciatingly tedious videos about how to program in Fortran *before* the semester proper started. Fortran was considered too easy to be worth teaching by the applied maths dept. But it was also considered an indispensable, basic tool and they marked down cruelly any code that had anything amiss at all, and we did not have a universe of code snippets and tutorials on the web from which to copy and paste.[/old fart]
Programming is developing algorithms and data structures and that is mathematics. Realizing those in code form just takes practice and experience with a language. You want maths grads with good grades who also have shown skill/interest/passion to code beyond what they had to do for school (eg hobby projects, open source) but that rule should also apply to all new recruits.
As has been posted many times, Google prefer to hire maths majors over comp sci majors. They say they have superior problem solving skills. That wouldn't surprise me - if you've studied maths at a high level, particularly hard core maths like theoretical physics - then you must have developed some good conceptual, analytic and problem solving chops. Everything is mathematics.
Slashdot should delete crap posts. I agree Slashdot has gone way downhill and it's mystifying where all these cretins and imbeciles come from or why they bother posting here at all. Slashdot needs to work an algorithm that identifies and deletes crap posts eg any post that simply says "Eat my butt" is auto deleted. All posts modded -1 should be auto evaluated for deletion as well.
Or, if you're not making money, you might as well get across the code base of a significant open source project and start sending them patches. If you pick a project that is key (or will be key) to something, and you build your worth with that project until you are a respected team member, you've almost certainly made yourself highly employable. Or: write documentation, no-one wants to do that. I know one very famous coder who started that way.
I know this is true for a lot of people but mentality also counts a lot. An energetic, bright, open, experienced 50-something can crap all over most 20-somethings when it comes to overcoming problems and getting big things done. Middle-aged workers can have better judgement and far better communications skills, too: wisdom comes with age and experience. I'm expecting it to get tough post-60 though.
Google say they preferentially hires maths graduates over comp sci grads. They say mathematics graduates are better at problem solving than comp sci degree holders. And of course, most applied maths courses require you to learn some programming anyway.
Perl has an "English" module (I've never used it):
The English module increases the readability and understanding of Perl code, and it is a big step toward alleviating the boggling effect that raw Perl code sometimes has on new programmers. The English module provides a mapping between Perl's eclectic punctuation (special) variables with an English name corresponding to each one. The regular-expression variables that correspond to the three components of a matched string, for example, are often difficult to remember, even for the experienced Perl programmer.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't consider statistics to be a field of applied maths? Wow.
Pattern recognition does not require an explicit understanding of mathematics.
But ask the question "what is a pattern?" That cannot be answered non-mathematically without ambiguity. Go on, try it. Therefore, the very notion of "pattern" is essentially mathematical. You don't know what mathematics is.
Math is convenient, but it is not necessary or intrinsic to observing the patterns or finding use in them. I know math and science are often found together, and I do not disagree anyone serious about science should study mathematics, but it is possible to utilize the scientific process without its study.
Wow that is amazingly naive. Mathematics is both necessary and intrinsic to the entire edifice of science and engineering and to the foundations of physics and has been since ancient times. This is not because somebody "made up" mathematics and "chose" it to provide tools for analyzing the physical world as physics. It was because it worked. It was not a choice of "convenience".
I went through the usual years of schooling enduring force-fed maths, all the while not appreciating its power or breathtaking beauty. That landed much later and only as a senior undergrad. But once the astonishingly successful mathematical frameworks for quantum mechanics and general relativity have been grasped I don't see how anyone could fail to be astonished and amazed at what the human mind can achieve.
I know it is difficult for someone who has never studied theoretical physics to get that mathematics is so fundamentally profound for any useful understanding of reality. One way of looking at quantum mechanics is to think of it as an attempt to build a mathematical representation of the basic kinds of physical interactions, those occurring on the Plank scale. The results of quantum mechanics seem bizarre and could never have been arrived at without mathematics. We have a poor physical intuition for what is going on at those scales, it's beyond our experience.
All most people have is painful memories of years of suffering math (mainly just elementary algebra and simple calculus) in a high school classroom. I hated those and this created years of math phobia that I had to work hard to consciously beat. Once the phobia was defeated (a question of mental attitude and confidence) pages of symbols were no longer scary! The beauty then shines through, for me it was once I could see the towering intellectual mountain of theoretical physics.
This speaks volumes about education systems utterly failing to impart the essential character of mathematics. I'm not sure society really wants the unwashed to start enjoying the intellectual beauty of mathematics. Mathematics is what enabled the industrial age, without it we would still be living as Neolithic farmers.
I think a hostile hard AI would get away with much more damage as a software entity on the Internet than in physical space.
But the internet is continually being given more hooks into physical space, including remote operation of complex machinery and (probably) weapons systems. And there are security holes that we don't know about but that a super AI could detect.
. Don't they have something more important to worry about? Like nuclear winter, or Cyber-Pearl-Harbor?
Being done elsewhere and therefore insufficiently sexy.
Why no scenario from an alien invasion? Did they omit this possibility to make the center for terminator studies look more serious?
And no collisions with space objects, yet that is something we know is a quantifiable, real extinction-level threat. No aliens needed.
Of course it's marketing. "Terminator Center" has a soundbite buzz to it. "UFO Center" would have elicited yawns and funds would have been short.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6WHBO_Qc-Q
Can PLoP Boot Manager work around this?
http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/index.html
wdef didn't say he was trying to seduce your daughter. What if he's taking a piss in a quiet alleyway because there are no public urinals anywhere any more and your daughter sees his willy? You kill him?
You got it, thanks. And these are real situations as others have said.
And if a child sees a normal part of the human anatomy why should that be a crime? Because you don't like it. Don't try to tell me that the mere sight of a human penis will irreversibly damage a child. It's a sick society that demonizes a pat of the human body so successfully.
The UDHR is not legally binding and there are no signatories. The US routinely ignores such international toothless efforts.
What they really need is the ability to vote on individual issues.
That could create more problems than it solves. Unfortunately, your average citizen just doesn't have the skills to evaluate the pros and cons of every single issue. That is the sad failing of democracy. Joe Citizen seems to use a limited set of retarded tools to make voting decisions, such as what the media or institutions (eg churches) tell him. You only have to look at quagmired, emotive but sensible issues like banning the death penalty, drug decriminalization, gun control, and criminal justice/penal system reform. The right way to go on those issues has been validated by countless studies - even proven in implementation in other countries - but rational thought is simply ignored in the popularity contest and the old "against" arguments marketed as truth.
All speculation on the brain possibly having quantum properties is complete nonsense based on equivocation and quasi-religious hoo-hah.
That may be so, but Einstein thought this was possible. Not one given to equivocation or quasi-religious hoo-hah. There are plenty of macroscopically detectable effects of quantum phenomena.
Shouldn't that read: 011110010110111101110101001000000110 10 00 01 10 00 01 01 10 01 00 00 10 00 00 01 10 10 00 01 10 01 01 01 11 10 00 00 11 11 11 00 00 11 01 00 00 10 10
But I find younger team members (and managers) do not always take the long view and don't listen hard enough to good advice. This is particularly important when thinking strategy. Getting ahead of where the technology diffusion curve is going is incredibly difficult but surely is often the key to hitting the big time. Companies should be planning two years ahead of what they are doing now instead of always merely reacting to things. Evaluating the potential for long shots and possible industry futures is important but how many small companies do it? When it does get done, the process tends to be locked up in one department with a few people only since those few managers (usually 40yo+) are the ones who are supposed to be the strategists doing "ideation". [Aside: apparently age begets wisdom in managers only]. To my mind, I'd prefer to encourage input from all including the most junior staff member instead of having them sit in stunned silence, politics preventing them from contributing. Yes people will say a fair bit of wild crap but that's to be expected and even praised in a brainstorming session.
As I've got older I do cringe when I remember my own buzzword compliance in youth. It's a way of trying to seem sophisticated and to belong to the cool kids, which is almost of no importance past 45 years old. I remember my music teacher telling my mother as a kid that no-one grows up until they are at least 30. Now I know what she meant.
Industries of different types have a way of enforcing buzzword compliance. Buzzwords are connected to money.
That's even way older than me :=). I entered the industry in my late 40s but as a manager rather than coder, so I was able to demonstrate management skills gained in other (technical) industries. I could, if I wished, probably do some coding for my company though I'm ok as is. We have some top gun coders who may well snort with derision at my less-experienced code.
Care to hint how you got hired as a new coder at 52? How did you demonstrate that you should be hired with just a bit of PHP an SQL?
Because all applied maths or stats students (and hence many physics, engineering and chemistry students by extension as well as comp sci students) used to have to learn structured programming in Fortran. Fortran is still used in mathematical modeling - it runs fast and a lot of old code can be recycled - but I've read for that it is increasingly being replaced for that by C and other suitable number crunching languages. I seriously doubt that maths majors still make everything look like Fortran code these days.
[old fart] In my day at my old alma mater you sat in a hot little stuffy room and watched a series of excruciatingly tedious videos about how to program in Fortran *before* the semester proper started. Fortran was considered too easy to be worth teaching by the applied maths dept. But it was also considered an indispensable, basic tool and they marked down cruelly any code that had anything amiss at all, and we did not have a universe of code snippets and tutorials on the web from which to copy and paste.[/old fart]
Programming is developing algorithms and data structures and that is mathematics. Realizing those in code form just takes practice and experience with a language. You want maths grads with good grades who also have shown skill/interest/passion to code beyond what they had to do for school (eg hobby projects, open source) but that rule should also apply to all new recruits.
As has been posted many times, Google prefer to hire maths majors over comp sci majors. They say they have superior problem solving skills. That wouldn't surprise me - if you've studied maths at a high level, particularly hard core maths like theoretical physics - then you must have developed some good conceptual, analytic and problem solving chops. Everything is mathematics.
Slashdot should delete crap posts. I agree Slashdot has gone way downhill and it's mystifying where all these cretins and imbeciles come from or why they bother posting here at all. Slashdot needs to work an algorithm that identifies and deletes crap posts eg any post that simply says "Eat my butt" is auto deleted. All posts modded -1 should be auto evaluated for deletion as well.
Or, if you're not making money, you might as well get across the code base of a significant open source project and start sending them patches. If you pick a project that is key (or will be key) to something, and you build your worth with that project until you are a respected team member, you've almost certainly made yourself highly employable. Or: write documentation, no-one wants to do that. I know one very famous coder who started that way.
I wouldn't say coding is hard.
That depends on what you're coding.
I know this is true for a lot of people but mentality also counts a lot. An energetic, bright, open, experienced 50-something can crap all over most 20-somethings when it comes to overcoming problems and getting big things done. Middle-aged workers can have better judgement and far better communications skills, too: wisdom comes with age and experience. I'm expecting it to get tough post-60 though.
Google say they preferentially hires maths graduates over comp sci grads. They say mathematics graduates are better at problem solving than comp sci degree holders. And of course, most applied maths courses require you to learn some programming anyway.
The English module increases the readability and understanding of Perl code, and it is a big step toward alleviating the boggling effect that raw Perl code sometimes has on new programmers. The English module provides a mapping between Perl's eclectic punctuation (special) variables with an English name corresponding to each one. The regular-expression variables that correspond to the three components of a matched string, for example, are often difficult to remember, even for the experienced Perl programmer.
http://www.brainbell.com/tutors/Perl/Usability_and_Simplicity.htm
I don't understand. There's plenty of great software around.