A mythology is not something one should apply a truth value to, because when you do, you are missing the whole point... I believe we have lost our collective identity due to misinterpretations of mythologies as literal and from secular pressure.
The "secular pressure" is solely in response to pressure from people who do believe in the myth as literal fact. If you want to interpret the story of Jesus' birth as a Jungian / Campbellian "social dream," that's fine, but that's not how most believers intepret it -- nor is there any reason to believe that they ever have, from the days of Peter and Paul to the present.
Also, when doing so on public books, it's no longer math. It's divination, as the books are more cooked than last night's dinner.
Which is why GPP was correct when he said engineering math (or, you know, just math math) is more rigorous than MBA math. In real math, you start with axioms and theorems, and work your way to the conclusion. In business "math," you start with the conclusion, and then adjust the starting conditions to make the conclusion work. This may be difficult, and a lot of work, but it's not rigorous mathematics by any stretch of the imagination.
Real math has given us pretty much every technological advance that makes the modern world a better place to live than it was a couple of hundred years ago. Business "math" is the tool of people who are trying to drag the world back a couple of hundred years more, to the days of a small noble class living on the backs of a mass of starving peasants. It's not hard to figure out which one is more useful.
At one time I felt like even when I wasn't working for them, I knew who IBM was and what they were trying to achieve. Now... I don't. I think they're some sort of storage company.
They still sell more big iron than everyone else put together, and there's still a lot of money in that market. How long this will last, it's hard to say; but people have been predicting the death of the mainframe for decades, and it just keeps on not happening.
Freedom includes the freedom to be an asshole. One of the standard stereotypes about women is that they're less capable than men in jobs which require making ruthless decisions. Now, personally, I think we'd all be better off if CEOs of both sexes were a lot less ruthless generally -- that is, if they felt some empathy toward and personal responsibility for the welfare of their employees -- but since that's not the world we live in, women have to show that they can perform in these jobs as well as the stereotypically nicer ones in order to be taken seriously.
There's a flip side here; a good friend of mine worked for IBM Global Services until recently, and his view of the management of that division was... well, let's just say that I doubt he considers this promotion to be cause for celebration. Rometty is just as legitimate a target for criticism just as harsh as that directed at any male executive who slashes jobs while taking enormous raises and bonuses; this too is a victory for feminism, even it looks a little backhanded.
Using that code, you end up with probabilities far greater than 1, which are meaningless. It would be better to call the variable "LiarScore" or something like that.
Yeah. Stop a minute to consider the sheer level of evil genius here. They have a government mandate to pay college students to look at porn. It's like Lex Luthor paid Machiavelli to come up with a business plan.
But I don't know if DNA modification is the answer. I would never submit to that, nor would I submit my grandmother or any other family member to such a treatment. I would rather suffer Alzheimer, rather suffer some unknown side effect that could prove to be even worse, and may ironically not even cure alzeheimer!
That's your choice, and it's your right to make it for yourself...
I would rather we not mess with DNA.
... but not for anyone else. If by "we" you mean yourself and family members who, like your grandmother, are unable to make medical decisions on their own, that's fine. If by "we" you mean everybody, there's a serious problem here.
My grandfather died with Alzheimer's last year. He was a brilliant man, and seeing his mind decay while his body was still relatively healthy was heartbreaking. If there had been any treatment that would have given him a chance at a better life, he'd have taken it, and I and the other members of his family would have backed him 100%. He was fascinated by my bioinformatics work, and although he never came out and said it, I think he always hoped that I'd make some discovery that would make a difference in time to help him. Hell, so did I. Real-world science doesn't work like that, of course, but if years or decades down the line, something I do leads to a treatment that can keep someone else from suffering the way our families have, you had better not stand in the way of the people who want that treatment, because they will trample you.
It's neat stuff, but I'm skeptical that it will replace human biologists any time soon. As is often the case, the pop-sci writeup is a lot more dramatic than the article itself. Reading the latter, I'd say that what they've done is a clever bit of data mining combined with mathematical modeling -- they use an evolutionary algorithm to find the best set of differential equations, out of an enormous number of possible models, which describe the behavior of the data.
This is easier, and probably produces better results, than the traditional method of coming up with sets of diff. eqs. to describe the behavior of complex systems, but it's not a replacement for human judgement in coming up with the model space in the first place. (I'll also note that they performed almost the entire "experiment" on simulated data, which is always a valuable first step in the development of any modeling method, but it's not enough to show that the method "works" -- real data is always messier than the best simulations, and biological data is particularly so.) That being said, it's a very nice technique, and I'll be interested to see if the same approach can be applied to building the kinds of statistical models I work with, Bayesian networks and such.
if European diseases did spread across the continent so very very quickly in 1492, why did such diseases not spread quickly across North America starting back in 1000 AD? Were the Norse super humanly healthy with no disease among them?
Kinda sorta, yeah. IIRC, the western Norse of that period had relatively little contact with the Mediterranean world, and the Mediterranean, being the crossroads of Europe, Africa, and Asia, had always been where people were most likely to come in contact with exotic (to them) diseases. Their eastern cousins were already pushing into Byzantine territory, but Ericson's sailors were predominantly Icelanders; they were as distinct from the Varangians as late-18th-c. Anglophone Americans were from the English. It would be a century or more before the Scandinavian world as a whole had much exposure to the Mediterranean-style back-and-forth movement of people, and rodents, and insects, and the pathogens they brought with them.
At what point will we have a text based programming language that will compile the results into a DNA sequence?
Automated production of short sequences is a well-established technology; Google on "custom oligonucleotide synthesis" and "custom gene synthesis" and you'll get links to a bunch of companies that will be happy to manufacture just about any sequence you want. Assembling an entire genome is harder, but not that much. So the answer to your question is pretty much "we're already there."
Nobody's built any superplagues base pair by base pair yet, and honestly, I think it's not particularly worth worrying about. If unleashing a killer epidemic were your goal, it would probably be easier to take some common, virulent but not terribly dangerous pathogen (say, a rhinovirus) and screen mutants for morbidity and mortality; or alternately, take one of the great plagues of the past (say, smallpox) and alter it to slip past current vaccines.
Spoken like anyone who's sick of seeing his profession slandered by people who know nothing about it.
I've done a number of jobs -- the military, medicine, and academia -- that are widely misunderstood by people outside the field. Obviously, all of these jobs have significant effects on the lives of people who don't do those jobs (as well as the lives of those who do) and everyone has a right to an opinion about those effects. But opinions about how the jobs themselves are done are, yes, damn it, meaningless unless the opiner has some idea what the job looks like from the inside. GPP's laughably wrong view of the working lives of academics has exactly as much value as, say, my view on the working lives of truck drivers: none at all.
Having a tutor available to ask questions is a nice support network.
Yeah, that's the key -- which means that universities that move a significant portion of their classes online really have an obligation to make sure tutors are available. AFAICT, most don't.
I'm not saying that traditional classroom teaching is the only, or even the best, way to educate people. I'm just saying that some kind of face-to-face interaction is vital, for most students and most subjects.
Anyway. There's no doubt that a lot of courses can be taught effectively online. There's also no doubt, for anyone who's ever done any real teaching, that once the subject matter gets the least bit advanced, there's a sharp limit to how much you can learn in an online course. Introductory "101" courses, which are mostly taught in giant lecture halls anyway, can probably go online with no ill effect on the students. Once you get beyond that level, most people need face-to-face interaction to really understand the subject.
Surely these people shouldn't be staking their lives on the GPS system. It's one of our most reliable machines (the most reliable I know of), but even still, it could go down some time. What happened to being able to read a chart, keeping a sextant on-board, triangulating your position with a compass, and all the other skills people used to be taught?
Surely these people shouldn't be staking their lives on mechanical navigation equipment. They're some of our most reliable machines (the most reliable I know of), but even still, charts can be inaccurate, sextants can rust, and compasses can break. What happened to dead reckoning, estimating your position by the taste of the water, keeping an eye out for towns on shore, and all the other skills people used to be taught?
Domesticated livestock and food crops have been intelligently designed by farmers over the past few centuries. Are there measurable numerical long term genetic effects of intelligent design actions, which I'm predicting would show up in modern Holsteins but not modern Humans?
That's actually a reasonable question, and speaking as someone who's worked on both cow and human genetics, I'll say: no, probably not. A comparitive analysis of the genomes of various breeds of domestic cattle certainly shows selective pressure toward certain phenotypes (milk production in some breeds, meat production in others, etc.) but the only way to say that selection has beeen "intelligent" is to know the history -- which, in the case of cattle, of course we do. We see similar pressures in comparitive genomic analysis of human populations WRT disease resistance; sometimes we know the history, sometimes we don't. IOW, genetic variation in cattle looks remarkably like genetic variation in human beings, and the distinction between design and natural selection is based on knowledge that can't be obtained by looking at the genome alone.
Another vote for Brother. In this case, you actually can have all three of "faster, better, cheaper."
AFAICT they've never done the advertising campaign to get that "enterprise-class" cachet (which in turn, again AFAICT, is based purely on what MBAs tell other MBAs, and has nothing whatsoever to do with quality or features) so you won't see many of them in big-corp workgroups. But if you're choosing a printer yourself for your home or small business, they're the way to go.
It's looking like the patent courts - in a manner of speaking, as I suppose there is really no single "patent court" - like the courts are becoming a sort of platform for marketing by obscure companies with uncertain patents on file - but not just any obscure companies, obscure companies with lawyers.
Specifically, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas became nothing but a "platform for... obscure companies with lawyers" some time ago. There seems to be something particularly toxic about this particular court's combination of judges, jury pools, and court rules that attracts this type of activity.
There's a difference: Amazon are evil bastards who actually deliver useful products, while Acacia are evil bastards who exist solely to make money by threatening to keep other people (whether evil bastards or not) from delivering useful products. The world is full of evil bastards, and that's probably not going to change any time soon; until and unless it does, I know which set of evil bastards I'd rather deal with.
I'm convinced that the only real reason we have piston engines in most cars today is because pistons work really well in steam engines, and early on in the development of the internal combustion engine, most of the engineering was done by people familiar with steam engines using the designs they knew. If development had proceeded on the principle of "IC is different from EC, let's take advantage of that," rotary and other non-piston-based designs might now be a lot more common and a lot more advanced. It was nice to see Mazda keeping the torch lit, and it's sad to see that they can't do it any more.
It's kind of as if the computer engineering world had taken a look at the first integrated circuits (also "IC," by an interesting coincidence) and said, "we need to do this with vacuum tubes." No doubt we'd have all kinds of cool miniaturized vacuum tube technology we don't have today, but there's little doubt that computers would still be horribly bulky, slow, and expensive compared to what we actually got.
And yes, I just made a computer analogy for car engines. Deal with it.;)
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A mythology is not something one should apply a truth value to, because when you do, you are missing the whole point ... I believe we have lost our collective identity due to misinterpretations of mythologies as literal and from secular pressure.
The "secular pressure" is solely in response to pressure from people who do believe in the myth as literal fact. If you want to interpret the story of Jesus' birth as a Jungian / Campbellian "social dream," that's fine, but that's not how most believers intepret it -- nor is there any reason to believe that they ever have, from the days of Peter and Paul to the present.
Also, when doing so on public books, it's no longer math. It's divination, as the books are more cooked than last night's dinner.
Which is why GPP was correct when he said engineering math (or, you know, just math math) is more rigorous than MBA math. In real math, you start with axioms and theorems, and work your way to the conclusion. In business "math," you start with the conclusion, and then adjust the starting conditions to make the conclusion work. This may be difficult, and a lot of work, but it's not rigorous mathematics by any stretch of the imagination.
Real math has given us pretty much every technological advance that makes the modern world a better place to live than it was a couple of hundred years ago. Business "math" is the tool of people who are trying to drag the world back a couple of hundred years more, to the days of a small noble class living on the backs of a mass of starving peasants. It's not hard to figure out which one is more useful.
At one time I felt like even when I wasn't working for them, I knew who IBM was and what they were trying to achieve. Now... I don't. I think they're some sort of storage company.
They still sell more big iron than everyone else put together, and there's still a lot of money in that market. How long this will last, it's hard to say; but people have been predicting the death of the mainframe for decades, and it just keeps on not happening.
You get rewarded for having a vagina today, and punished for having a penis.
And then you whine about it. Endlessly. How manly of you.
Freedom includes the freedom to be an asshole. One of the standard stereotypes about women is that they're less capable than men in jobs which require making ruthless decisions. Now, personally, I think we'd all be better off if CEOs of both sexes were a lot less ruthless generally -- that is, if they felt some empathy toward and personal responsibility for the welfare of their employees -- but since that's not the world we live in, women have to show that they can perform in these jobs as well as the stereotypically nicer ones in order to be taken seriously.
There's a flip side here; a good friend of mine worked for IBM Global Services until recently, and his view of the management of that division was ... well, let's just say that I doubt he considers this promotion to be cause for celebration. Rometty is just as legitimate a target for criticism just as harsh as that directed at any male executive who slashes jobs while taking enormous raises and bonuses; this too is a victory for feminism, even it looks a little backhanded.
Using that code, you end up with probabilities far greater than 1, which are meaningless. It would be better to call the variable "LiarScore" or something like that.
Yeah. Stop a minute to consider the sheer level of evil genius here. They have a government mandate to pay college students to look at porn. It's like Lex Luthor paid Machiavelli to come up with a business plan.
The man wanted jiggawatts, not gigawatts, but thanks for trying
I guess the Kryptonian education system isn't what it used to be.
The theory of information doesn't boil down to signal/noise equations.
If you're talking about what's generally referred to as "information theory," then yes, it does.
But I don't know if DNA modification is the answer. I would never submit to that, nor would I submit my grandmother or any other family member to such a treatment. I would rather suffer Alzheimer, rather suffer some unknown side effect that could prove to be even worse, and may ironically not even cure alzeheimer!
That's your choice, and it's your right to make it for yourself ...
I would rather we not mess with DNA.
... but not for anyone else. If by "we" you mean yourself and family members who, like your grandmother, are unable to make medical decisions on their own, that's fine. If by "we" you mean everybody, there's a serious problem here.
My grandfather died with Alzheimer's last year. He was a brilliant man, and seeing his mind decay while his body was still relatively healthy was heartbreaking. If there had been any treatment that would have given him a chance at a better life, he'd have taken it, and I and the other members of his family would have backed him 100%. He was fascinated by my bioinformatics work, and although he never came out and said it, I think he always hoped that I'd make some discovery that would make a difference in time to help him. Hell, so did I. Real-world science doesn't work like that, of course, but if years or decades down the line, something I do leads to a treatment that can keep someone else from suffering the way our families have, you had better not stand in the way of the people who want that treatment, because they will trample you.
It's neat stuff, but I'm skeptical that it will replace human biologists any time soon. As is often the case, the pop-sci writeup is a lot more dramatic than the article itself. Reading the latter, I'd say that what they've done is a clever bit of data mining combined with mathematical modeling -- they use an evolutionary algorithm to find the best set of differential equations, out of an enormous number of possible models, which describe the behavior of the data.
This is easier, and probably produces better results, than the traditional method of coming up with sets of diff. eqs. to describe the behavior of complex systems, but it's not a replacement for human judgement in coming up with the model space in the first place. (I'll also note that they performed almost the entire "experiment" on simulated data, which is always a valuable first step in the development of any modeling method, but it's not enough to show that the method "works" -- real data is always messier than the best simulations, and biological data is particularly so.) That being said, it's a very nice technique, and I'll be interested to see if the same approach can be applied to building the kinds of statistical models I work with, Bayesian networks and such.
if European diseases did spread across the continent so very very quickly in 1492, why did such diseases not spread quickly across North America starting back in 1000 AD? Were the Norse super humanly healthy with no disease among them?
Kinda sorta, yeah. IIRC, the western Norse of that period had relatively little contact with the Mediterranean world, and the Mediterranean, being the crossroads of Europe, Africa, and Asia, had always been where people were most likely to come in contact with exotic (to them) diseases. Their eastern cousins were already pushing into Byzantine territory, but Ericson's sailors were predominantly Icelanders; they were as distinct from the Varangians as late-18th-c. Anglophone Americans were from the English. It would be a century or more before the Scandinavian world as a whole had much exposure to the Mediterranean-style back-and-forth movement of people, and rodents, and insects, and the pathogens they brought with them.
At what point will we have a text based programming language that will compile the results into a DNA sequence?
Automated production of short sequences is a well-established technology; Google on "custom oligonucleotide synthesis" and "custom gene synthesis" and you'll get links to a bunch of companies that will be happy to manufacture just about any sequence you want. Assembling an entire genome is harder, but not that much. So the answer to your question is pretty much "we're already there."
Nobody's built any superplagues base pair by base pair yet, and honestly, I think it's not particularly worth worrying about. If unleashing a killer epidemic were your goal, it would probably be easier to take some common, virulent but not terribly dangerous pathogen (say, a rhinovirus) and screen mutants for morbidity and mortality; or alternately, take one of the great plagues of the past (say, smallpox) and alter it to slip past current vaccines.
Spoken like a true academic.
Spoken like anyone who's sick of seeing his profession slandered by people who know nothing about it.
I've done a number of jobs -- the military, medicine, and academia -- that are widely misunderstood by people outside the field. Obviously, all of these jobs have significant effects on the lives of people who don't do those jobs (as well as the lives of those who do) and everyone has a right to an opinion about those effects. But opinions about how the jobs themselves are done are, yes, damn it, meaningless unless the opiner has some idea what the job looks like from the inside. GPP's laughably wrong view of the working lives of academics has exactly as much value as, say, my view on the working lives of truck drivers: none at all.
Having a tutor available to ask questions is a nice support network.
Yeah, that's the key -- which means that universities that move a significant portion of their classes online really have an obligation to make sure tutors are available. AFAICT, most don't.
I'm not saying that traditional classroom teaching is the only, or even the best, way to educate people. I'm just saying that some kind of face-to-face interaction is vital, for most students and most subjects.
If you think featherbedding is the norm among academic faculty, you don't know enough about academia to have a meaningful opinion on the subject.
BTW, the answer to the question in your .sig is, "Well, 'people like you' is a good place to start."
Here is some actual coverage.
Anyway. There's no doubt that a lot of courses can be taught effectively online. There's also no doubt, for anyone who's ever done any real teaching, that once the subject matter gets the least bit advanced, there's a sharp limit to how much you can learn in an online course. Introductory "101" courses, which are mostly taught in giant lecture halls anyway, can probably go online with no ill effect on the students. Once you get beyond that level, most people need face-to-face interaction to really understand the subject.
Surely these people shouldn't be staking their lives on the GPS system. It's one of our most reliable machines (the most reliable I know of), but even still, it could go down some time. What happened to being able to read a chart, keeping a sextant on-board, triangulating your position with a compass, and all the other skills people used to be taught?
Surely these people shouldn't be staking their lives on mechanical navigation equipment. They're some of our most reliable machines (the most reliable I know of), but even still, charts can be inaccurate, sextants can rust, and compasses can break. What happened to dead reckoning, estimating your position by the taste of the water, keeping an eye out for towns on shore, and all the other skills people used to be taught?
All you iSheep, Twits and FacePalmers.
He says, on a public web forum.
They've got little mustachioed corporals and big bodybuilder-looking robots. Even Facebook may be out of its league on this one.
Domesticated livestock and food crops have been intelligently designed by farmers over the past few centuries. Are there measurable numerical long term genetic effects of intelligent design actions, which I'm predicting would show up in modern Holsteins but not modern Humans?
That's actually a reasonable question, and speaking as someone who's worked on both cow and human genetics, I'll say: no, probably not. A comparitive analysis of the genomes of various breeds of domestic cattle certainly shows selective pressure toward certain phenotypes (milk production in some breeds, meat production in others, etc.) but the only way to say that selection has beeen "intelligent" is to know the history -- which, in the case of cattle, of course we do. We see similar pressures in comparitive genomic analysis of human populations WRT disease resistance; sometimes we know the history, sometimes we don't. IOW, genetic variation in cattle looks remarkably like genetic variation in human beings, and the distinction between design and natural selection is based on knowledge that can't be obtained by looking at the genome alone.
Another vote for Brother. In this case, you actually can have all three of "faster, better, cheaper."
AFAICT they've never done the advertising campaign to get that "enterprise-class" cachet (which in turn, again AFAICT, is based purely on what MBAs tell other MBAs, and has nothing whatsoever to do with quality or features) so you won't see many of them in big-corp workgroups. But if you're choosing a printer yourself for your home or small business, they're the way to go.
It's looking like the patent courts - in a manner of speaking, as I suppose there is really no single "patent court" - like the courts are becoming a sort of platform for marketing by obscure companies with uncertain patents on file - but not just any obscure companies, obscure companies with lawyers.
Specifically, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas became nothing but a "platform for ... obscure companies with lawyers" some time ago. There seems to be something particularly toxic about this particular court's combination of judges, jury pools, and court rules that attracts this type of activity.
There's a difference: Amazon are evil bastards who actually deliver useful products, while Acacia are evil bastards who exist solely to make money by threatening to keep other people (whether evil bastards or not) from delivering useful products. The world is full of evil bastards, and that's probably not going to change any time soon; until and unless it does, I know which set of evil bastards I'd rather deal with.
I'm convinced that the only real reason we have piston engines in most cars today is because pistons work really well in steam engines, and early on in the development of the internal combustion engine, most of the engineering was done by people familiar with steam engines using the designs they knew. If development had proceeded on the principle of "IC is different from EC, let's take advantage of that," rotary and other non-piston-based designs might now be a lot more common and a lot more advanced. It was nice to see Mazda keeping the torch lit, and it's sad to see that they can't do it any more.
It's kind of as if the computer engineering world had taken a look at the first integrated circuits (also "IC," by an interesting coincidence) and said, "we need to do this with vacuum tubes." No doubt we'd have all kinds of cool miniaturized vacuum tube technology we don't have today, but there's little doubt that computers would still be horribly bulky, slow, and expensive compared to what we actually got.
And yes, I just made a computer analogy for car engines. Deal with it. ;)