If I remember correctly, google snapped up both Boston Dynamics as well as the winner of the DARPA challenge, the Japanese company "SHAFT". I wonder if some kind of cross-flow of information has improved BD's stuff?
It actually sounds like a "Schema Architecture" that Arkins proposed in 1998 http://mitpress.mit.edu/catego.... You can implement it in about 10 lines of python because it's just that: the sum of attractive (goals) and repelling (obstacles) force vectors, weighted by the inverse of the distance squared. I was surprised OP didn't mention the Schema architecture, because it is exactly that, and since it sounds like a (simulated) robot game...
Your paper on newborn looking is really interesting. I build robotic models of the early visuo-motor system and am super interested in neonates but it's extremely hard to get any data from them and so I pretty much don't have any data from less than 8 weeks, which is really unfortunate.
Peer review "cannot" catch fraud and is not meant for it either.
Sure it is. That's the entire point, to determine if the research is valid. Just because they *do not* review it thoroughly, doesn't excuse them when they fail to catch fraud.
"The reviewers do not, and cannot, replicate the results"
And what *excatly* is preventing them?
The purpose of peer review is not to replicate results, it is to determine whether the methods are sound, as OP said.
What *exactly* is preventing them from replicating is: thousands of hours and millions of dollars of equipment. Not everyone has access to a trillion dollar LHC or super high tech bio lab, and even if the reviewer does, he is doing his own research and cannot spend his grant money or time to the experiment described in the paper just for the purpose of peer review.
Now, you might suggest re-vamping the system so that there is specific funding for scientists to peer review papers, but that is insane since there are literally thousands of papers published every month, and that is only counting the highest tiers of journals and proceedings.
A recent PLOS article (free to view!) analyses modern research, coming to the conclusion that most research findings are false. TLDR: Because of the nature of the statistics used and the fact that only positive results are reported. http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
huh, one of the check boxes says "rosen basu wo tukau" (use city buses). Maybe the info just isn't in there yet for some places? I know it's routed me through city buses before:) But that's in Tokyo...
R
Err, I posed as AC a second ago, and forgot to post the link:)
Anyways, all Japanese people I know use this site to route (mostly between train stations?), but it gives you all things including normal buses, high speed buses, shinkansen, walking, water ferries, etc. I don't know if they have an english version though...
http://transit.loco.yahoo.co.jp/
First of all, having people who probably have little-to-no scientific training, let alone any training or expertise in the field that the grant is in, decide whether a particular research project is "a waste of time" is beyond stupidity. It is equivalent to allowing the average american to micro-manage troop movements on the war-zone, allocate ad hoc rations/supplies to each region of the world, etc. In other words, the solutions provided by the "people" will be far from efficient, far from optimal, and indeed probably just dead *wrong* (i.e. soldiers would starve because people thought "nah they don't need this cooking fuel there, they can use firewood!" or something along equally stupid lines.
Another example would be letting people decide civil engineering matters. Like, let's use the cheap steel for the bridge, it's good enough! Or, let's route this highway right through over there, look it's wide open! -- without understanding all the effects and repercussions that taking any of these actions would have (which a properly trained civil engineer etc. would be more likely to recognize).
Of course, one of the explicit stated purposes of the NSF is to broaden appreciation and understanding of science. It's so important that it's almost impossible to get a grant without being able to convincingly show that your project will have broader impacts outside of your subfield. Of course, the people who would be going through the grants by this YouCut thing wouldn't understand why certain seemingly retarded research projects are important (e.g. why bother measuring the weight of the Earth's core, who cares? I want a new car and a TV.) when really it could be a very serious question that many other projects hinge upon (e.g. geothermal energy, satellites that might be affected by the magnetic field that is generated by the core, etc...). Unless people understand this they would vote against it as wasteful. A lot of projects, and the goal of the NSF, is to make it easy for people to understand these relationships and to respect the science, but I have a feeling that people won't go out of their way to even bother to try to understand it.
Welcome to Google! "We know more about you than your own mother"
Search terms: | What is my girlfriend doing right now? | ...
...
Query returned: 2 results (3.793932 seconds for observation drones to move into position)
Result#1: Drone39103 (IR Camera, MMwavelength, NV Camera, Stereo camera) in position over 1722 Walnut St., Stalintown IN, residence of Ms. Wendy Smith, SSN 232-28-8821, google person number 399925800-1F
Result#2: Drone00192 (NV Camera, BFLaser) in position over 1722 Walnut St., Stalintown IN, residence of Ms. Wendy Smith, SSN 232-28-8821, google person number 399925800-1F
PS friendly message from your friendly google monitor: "ur gurlfrend is hawt lol! XOXO" END OF TRANSMISSION
SPONSORED ADVERTISEMENT: Vaporize your enemies! New, with google BigBrother! All drones are being outfitted with...
The problem is that this argument can be applied to *any* situation, not just storm-chasing...
For instance, any time there is traffic/congestion, everybody involved is "causing problems for first responders to help people" (blocking the road by existing, changing lanes suddenly, etc.) and are "engaging in a dangerous activity" (driving in public). However, blaming the participants in a massively long traffic jam caused by e.g. an accident is not really justified, as you'd need to argue that they "have no right to be there" (out driving) because they're not there on "official" business. But, what's official business? Associated with their job, which contributes to local/global commerce? But, then there would be no place for leisure. So, assign everyone some leisure time. Then how do you decide which people are on the road on "official" leisure time versus clandestine leisure time? You would have to construct some national, nay, global schedule to determine when people are/aren't on leisure time, and require them to report it. And then everything could be controlled from a central control room with a large screen with a map of the world on it, and employ tens of thousands of analysts to optimize the oversight of all people's movement in the world. And then we wouldn't even need stop signs, everyone would be perfectly scheduled to move exactly at the right time so they'd properly interlace with everyone else and there would never be any inefficiency. Oops, sorry, I've just possibly had the most exciting dream as a computer scientists, and seem to have wet myself (in a most inappropriate manner).
In TFA it gives some numbers regarding the profitability of their system over the toy 5-week period. It is something like 8.5% whereas the next mutual fund is 6.5%. I don't see any language determining whether this is a statistically significant (or significant in any sense) difference at all -- I'm wondering if such at thing would even exist in these contexts. I would assume that any good prediction algorithm includes some stochasticity, so I wonder if this 2% difference can be relegated to noise or whether it is actually doing well. It seems like such a small amount after all (though, granted, 2% of 5 billion dollars is a nice chunk of change). But the other ones are doing something like 25% (in the world, I don't know the difference), so it certainly only seems to be doing mediocre at best...
The only problem is that the utility function to determine the values of X and Y strongly biases towards things more immediate in the future. Thus, doing something pleasurable now that you will pay for later is a decision that many make in a heartbeat, even if the value and consequence are objectively equal.
I remember reading somewhere (possibly some unpublished research?) that the utilities were weighted based on a hyperbolic function...i.e. non-linear. I can believe this, though I think it's more likely to have several "steps" in it as well. Just intuition.
Him and millions of other people who realize that a posted sign saying "Please don't hijack the plane" would be about as effective and far less annoying than homeland security.
(Actually, I'm not kidding. The brain is a 4-dimensional circuit/computer. In addition to being spatially extended in three dimensions, computations are also temporally extended (thus adding a fourth). What might be an atomic instruction on a modern "2-d" CPU could require all four dimensions of the brain. Think in terms of remembering a word, or the lines to a poem. You get the first part, and some aspect of that influences the trajectory of the system to move to a state that represents the next part, and so on. There is a dynamic feedback loop which is extended over (and reliant on) time. Cf. dynamical systems theory.)
You obviously never had the honour of serving PRESIDENT LINCOLN. That man wanted his morning bath YESTERDAY, and IN BED, and yes with PLENTY OF BUBBLES
and woe upon the unfortunate aide in his bedroom at the time if he didn't. They didn't call him a "great" man for nothing. You think that hat was for show?
Oh, not a bad price at all! Only $250,000,000 (I assume USD?). Man, I remember back when I was kid and you could buy a car (yea, you remember those things from history podcast?) NEW for $40,000. Those were the days.
No, no, no. Didn't you read geekoid's post? Obviously, he is jealous of sonnejw0's intelligence/knowledge, and so is trying to enact revenge by MAKING sonnejw0 stupid! See, a single equals-sign is the ASSIGNMENT operator (shame on you slashdotters for not catching it quicker!)! If he wanted to make a statement about him being stupid he would have had to say "Sonnejw0 == stupid".
Considering that even networks comprising little more than a motor neuron, a sensory neuron, and an excitatory interneuron (a la Aplysia) can `learn', why is this surprising/interesting?
Now, if you want to talk about the maintenance of actual `human-like behaviour' being reason to rethink the position of veggie-people, I'll be willing to talk. But a vegetable is a vegetable--there's a reason we don't treat vegetables like we do humans.
No, that's entirely sound. But trying to pick out (natural?) kinds based on words is a pretty silly idea from the start. It becomes even more painfully obvious when people realize that there is more than one language and `yours' and `theirs' don't always match up. And then trying to pick out (natural?) kinds based on conceptualisation in the first place fails as well, since there are multiple cultures, which may again have different views on the matter.
BUT, I would argue that picking out a range of ages based on two iterations of counting through all 10 of your fingers is a more natural and universal concept based on sounder and more natural terms than is the age range defined by the affix to numbers between 13 and 19 in English:P I guess the question is whether 13-19 has some other, more sound basis. For instance, some important biological function being mostly present in 13-year olds, but less so in 12, 11, 10-year olds. Not that language is based on useful functions though. I agree that, in many cases, it is not.
I guess all of this is (though interesting) totally tangential. In this case calling the 10 and 12 year old `teens' is more appropriate than calling them `pre-teens' because then all the more inapplicable associations with `pre-teen' (still unable to operate computers, etc. because they are 5yrs old) may have been misapplied. Had the child been 15, or 17, or 19 years old the story would not have changed much. But had they been 5, and been able to work out the cell phone usage and facebook etc., that would have been amazing in its own right. So, in the context of this story, they fit more into the `teen' category, than the `pre-teen' category. Though, I guess here `children' may have been sufficient.
Whatever:P
Slashdot Mirror
If I remember correctly, google snapped up both Boston Dynamics as well as the winner of the DARPA challenge, the Japanese company "SHAFT". I wonder if some kind of cross-flow of information has improved BD's stuff?
EDIT* Arkins original Robot Schema paper was in *1989*, not his 1998 book http://ijr.sagepub.com/content...
It actually sounds like a "Schema Architecture" that Arkins proposed in 1998 http://mitpress.mit.edu/catego.... You can implement it in about 10 lines of python because it's just that: the sum of attractive (goals) and repelling (obstacles) force vectors, weighted by the inverse of the distance squared. I was surprised OP didn't mention the Schema architecture, because it is exactly that, and since it sounds like a (simulated) robot game...
Your paper on newborn looking is really interesting. I build robotic models of the early visuo-motor system and am super interested in neonates but it's extremely hard to get any data from them and so I pretty much don't have any data from less than 8 weeks, which is really unfortunate.
Sure it is. That's the entire point, to determine if the research is valid. Just because they *do not* review it thoroughly, doesn't excuse them when they fail to catch fraud. "The reviewers do not, and cannot, replicate the results" And what *excatly* is preventing them?
The purpose of peer review is not to replicate results, it is to determine whether the methods are sound, as OP said.
What *exactly* is preventing them from replicating is: thousands of hours and millions of dollars of equipment. Not everyone has access to a trillion dollar LHC or super high tech bio lab, and even if the reviewer does, he is doing his own research and cannot spend his grant money or time to the experiment described in the paper just for the purpose of peer review.
Now, you might suggest re-vamping the system so that there is specific funding for scientists to peer review papers, but that is insane since there are literally thousands of papers published every month, and that is only counting the highest tiers of journals and proceedings.
A recent PLOS article (free to view!) analyses modern research, coming to the conclusion that most research findings are false.
TLDR: Because of the nature of the statistics used and the fact that only positive results are reported.
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
Is that his stage name? What a badass name though, seriously.
Nevermind :). I just tried routing from the closest train station to a place I used to take a bus to, and it has me walking the whole way :)
huh, one of the check boxes says "rosen basu wo tukau" (use city buses). Maybe the info just isn't in there yet for some places? I know it's routed me through city buses before :) But that's in Tokyo...
R
Err, I posed as AC a second ago, and forgot to post the link :)
Anyways, all Japanese people I know use this site to route (mostly between train stations?), but it gives you all things including normal buses, high speed buses, shinkansen, walking, water ferries, etc. I don't know if they have an english version though...
http://transit.loco.yahoo.co.jp/
Huh, that's weird. Does anyone know when this new policy is supposed to start? I use T-Mobile and I^&a
Connection Lost
Disclaimer: I am funded by the NSF.
/rant.
First of all, having people who probably have little-to-no scientific training, let alone any training or expertise in the field that the grant is in, decide whether a particular research project is "a waste of time" is beyond stupidity. It is equivalent to allowing the average american to micro-manage troop movements on the war-zone, allocate ad hoc rations/supplies to each region of the world, etc. In other words, the solutions provided by the "people" will be far from efficient, far from optimal, and indeed probably just dead *wrong* (i.e. soldiers would starve because people thought "nah they don't need this cooking fuel there, they can use firewood!" or something along equally stupid lines.
Another example would be letting people decide civil engineering matters. Like, let's use the cheap steel for the bridge, it's good enough! Or, let's route this highway right through over there, look it's wide open! -- without understanding all the effects and repercussions that taking any of these actions would have (which a properly trained civil engineer etc. would be more likely to recognize).
Of course, one of the explicit stated purposes of the NSF is to broaden appreciation and understanding of science. It's so important that it's almost impossible to get a grant without being able to convincingly show that your project will have broader impacts outside of your subfield. Of course, the people who would be going through the grants by this YouCut thing wouldn't understand why certain seemingly retarded research projects are important (e.g. why bother measuring the weight of the Earth's core, who cares? I want a new car and a TV.) when really it could be a very serious question that many other projects hinge upon (e.g. geothermal energy, satellites that might be affected by the magnetic field that is generated by the core, etc...). Unless people understand this they would vote against it as wasteful. A lot of projects, and the goal of the NSF, is to make it easy for people to understand these relationships and to respect the science, but I have a feeling that people won't go out of their way to even bother to try to understand it.
Anyways,
"We was too late!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpX3XdU-V9o
Welcome to Google! "We know more about you than your own mother"
Search terms: | What is my girlfriend doing right now? |
...
...
Query returned: 2 results (3.793932 seconds for observation drones to move into position)
Result#1: Drone39103 (IR Camera, MMwavelength, NV Camera, Stereo camera) in position over 1722 Walnut St., Stalintown IN, residence of Ms. Wendy Smith, SSN 232-28-8821, google person number 399925800-1F
Result#2: Drone00192 (NV Camera, BFLaser) in position over 1722 Walnut St., Stalintown IN, residence of Ms. Wendy Smith, SSN 232-28-8821, google person number 399925800-1F
PS friendly message from your friendly google monitor: "ur gurlfrend is hawt lol! XOXO" END OF TRANSMISSION
SPONSORED ADVERTISEMENT: Vaporize your enemies! New, with google BigBrother! All drones are being outfitted with...
I, for one, welcome our new limbed overlords -- better than the last bunch by an arm (and possibly a leg)!
The problem is that this argument can be applied to *any* situation, not just storm-chasing...
For instance, any time there is traffic/congestion, everybody involved is "causing problems for first responders to help people" (blocking the road by existing, changing lanes suddenly, etc.) and are "engaging in a dangerous activity" (driving in public). However, blaming the participants in a massively long traffic jam caused by e.g. an accident is not really justified, as you'd need to argue that they "have no right to be there" (out driving) because they're not there on "official" business. But, what's official business? Associated with their job, which contributes to local/global commerce? But, then there would be no place for leisure. So, assign everyone some leisure time. Then how do you decide which people are on the road on "official" leisure time versus clandestine leisure time? You would have to construct some national, nay, global schedule to determine when people are/aren't on leisure time, and require them to report it. And then everything could be controlled from a central control room with a large screen with a map of the world on it, and employ tens of thousands of analysts to optimize the oversight of all people's movement in the world. And then we wouldn't even need stop signs, everyone would be perfectly scheduled to move exactly at the right time so they'd properly interlace with everyone else and there would never be any inefficiency. Oops, sorry, I've just possibly had the most exciting dream as a computer scientists, and seem to have wet myself (in a most inappropriate manner).
In TFA it gives some numbers regarding the profitability of their system over the toy 5-week period. It is something like 8.5% whereas the next mutual fund is 6.5%. I don't see any language determining whether this is a statistically significant (or significant in any sense) difference at all -- I'm wondering if such at thing would even exist in these contexts. I would assume that any good prediction algorithm includes some stochasticity, so I wonder if this 2% difference can be relegated to noise or whether it is actually doing well. It seems like such a small amount after all (though, granted, 2% of 5 billion dollars is a nice chunk of change). But the other ones are doing something like 25% (in the world, I don't know the difference), so it certainly only seems to be doing mediocre at best...
The only problem is that the utility function to determine the values of X and Y strongly biases towards things more immediate in the future. Thus, doing something pleasurable now that you will pay for later is a decision that many make in a heartbeat, even if the value and consequence are objectively equal.
I remember reading somewhere (possibly some unpublished research?) that the utilities were weighted based on a hyperbolic function...i.e. non-linear. I can believe this, though I think it's more likely to have several "steps" in it as well. Just intuition.
Him and millions of other people who realize that a posted sign saying "Please don't hijack the plane" would be about as effective and far less annoying than homeland security.
Fixed that for you.
3-d is the past, upwards and onwards!
(Actually, I'm not kidding. The brain is a 4-dimensional circuit/computer. In addition to being spatially extended in three dimensions, computations are also temporally extended (thus adding a fourth). What might be an atomic instruction on a modern "2-d" CPU could require all four dimensions of the brain. Think in terms of remembering a word, or the lines to a poem. You get the first part, and some aspect of that influences the trajectory of the system to move to a state that represents the next part, and so on. There is a dynamic feedback loop which is extended over (and reliant on) time. Cf. dynamical systems theory.)
_Bush_ was a bad president?!
You obviously never had the honour of serving PRESIDENT LINCOLN. That man wanted his morning bath YESTERDAY, and IN BED, and yes with PLENTY OF BUBBLES
and woe upon the unfortunate aide in his bedroom at the time if he didn't. They didn't call him a "great" man for nothing. You think that hat was for show?
Oh, not a bad price at all! Only $250,000,000 (I assume USD?). Man, I remember back when I was kid and you could buy a car (yea, you remember those things from history podcast?) NEW for $40,000. Those were the days.
No, no, no. Didn't you read geekoid's post? Obviously, he is jealous of sonnejw0's intelligence/knowledge, and so is trying to enact revenge by MAKING sonnejw0 stupid! See, a single equals-sign is the ASSIGNMENT operator (shame on you slashdotters for not catching it quicker!)! If he wanted to make a statement about him being stupid he would have had to say "Sonnejw0 == stupid".
Considering that even networks comprising little more than a motor neuron, a sensory neuron, and an excitatory interneuron (a la Aplysia) can `learn', why is this surprising/interesting?
Now, if you want to talk about the maintenance of actual `human-like behaviour' being reason to rethink the position of veggie-people, I'll be willing to talk. But a vegetable is a vegetable--there's a reason we don't treat vegetables like we do humans.
No, that's entirely sound. But trying to pick out (natural?) kinds based on words is a pretty silly idea from the start. It becomes even more painfully obvious when people realize that there is more than one language and `yours' and `theirs' don't always match up. And then trying to pick out (natural?) kinds based on conceptualisation in the first place fails as well, since there are multiple cultures, which may again have different views on the matter. :P I guess the question is whether 13-19 has some other, more sound basis. For instance, some important biological function being mostly present in 13-year olds, but less so in 12, 11, 10-year olds. Not that language is based on useful functions though. I agree that, in many cases, it is not.
:P
BUT, I would argue that picking out a range of ages based on two iterations of counting through all 10 of your fingers is a more natural and universal concept based on sounder and more natural terms than is the age range defined by the affix to numbers between 13 and 19 in English
I guess all of this is (though interesting) totally tangential. In this case calling the 10 and 12 year old `teens' is more appropriate than calling them `pre-teens' because then all the more inapplicable associations with `pre-teen' (still unable to operate computers, etc. because they are 5yrs old) may have been misapplied. Had the child been 15, or 17, or 19 years old the story would not have changed much. But had they been 5, and been able to work out the cell phone usage and facebook etc., that would have been amazing in its own right. So, in the context of this story, they fit more into the `teen' category, than the `pre-teen' category. Though, I guess here `children' may have been sufficient.
Whatever
Only (?) in English do the words that refer to that adolescent age group and the endings of the number words for 13 through 19 match up.