Each to his own, but anyone doing it for bragging rights is likely to find, as did Alan Shepard, that most people don't think of suborbital flight as real spaceflight.
This should be posted on a political forum. Maybe slashdot could create a second site for stories like this.
I think you have misunderstood the target of the referenced article. It is not actually about New Jersey politics, it is about the weakness of the NSA's justifications for its recently-revealed actions. Those actions seem to have attracted a lot of interest on slashdot.
The problem for most of these 'behaves like a human' tests for intelligence is that just because a human needs intelligence to perform a task, it does not follow that any entity performing the same task is necessarily intelligent.
Take the case of chess: computers win primarily through fast searching and a huge memory of precomputed moves. When computers first started to play well, many of their developers expected to soon dominate play at all levels, but human players struck back, using their intelligence to devise strategies that nullified much of the computers' brute force. If the computers were intelligent, they would have devised their own countermeasures to those strategies.
Language is a much more complex and significant issue, and the current strategy of largely unsupervised learning over huge text bases has achieved some impressive results. It is a leap of faith, however, to extrapolate these successes into the belief that these techniques will ultimately produce real artificial intelligence - an intelligence that could, for example, understand and cogently critique this discussion thread.
Watson is as much AI as any other project I've ever seen. On the other hand, no AI I've ever seen understands what it's doing.
I agree, and also (much more significantly) so does David Deutsch (the title, which is generally the choice of an editor, is somewhat misleading.)
One of the lesser points he makes is that the term AGI (Artificial Generalized Intelligence) has had to be coined, because AI has been misappropriated by too many efforts that don't have much 'I' in them.
Why do you think it's AI ? Sounds to me 'just' a 'big-data' application.
As far as I've been able to determine it's just a cluster of machines running Apache Hadoop and some of their own software to shift through data.
These characterizations are not exactly wrong, but they are not useful. To discuss Watson in terms of its implementing technologies is to completely miss the point, as does dismissing it as a 'big-data app' (real AI, when it arrives, may well have 'big data' attributes.) The use of 'just' here is a misleading application of emphasis.
I don't think Watson deserves to be called AI either, but it is impressive, nonetheless.
Seeing your gripe at Asimov's article I am very curious... What are your predictions for 2064? Do you think you can hit as many home runs as Asimov?
The OP's main point is not a criticism of Asimov's hit rate, but an observation on the number of commentators who have significantly exaggerated Asimov's prescience.
It is not simply a matter of extracting specific predictions and scoring them yes or no. I think the topics Asimov chose to elaborate on are as interesting as the specific predictions. He has more to say about domestic lighting and appliances than about the human colonization of the moon and the seafloor, which he assumes to be commonplace. In the first paragraph, he alludes to the cold war, which was certainly a big deal in '64, but he is otherwise silent on it. The development of the developing world is similarly ignored, despite that being where most of the population growth that he is rightly concerned about occurs.
Asimov's comments were made in the context of the '64 world's fair, and in part they reflect the technological parochialism of that event. We can see with hindsight that social/political change has been more significant than technical development over the last fifty years, and Asimov is at his best when he addresses the former.
A number of hacks against non-contactless chip-and-pin cards have been demonstrated, and I would be suspicious of any claim that the contactless ones are more secure. Search for 'chip and pin is broken' for details of the exploits, and also a number of self-serving non-sequiturs supposedly justifying the issuers' inaction over the issue (for example, 'the protocol is sound', as if consumers can choose to use a sound implementation, and 'the exploit is too difficult in practice' despite good evidence that it has been used in the wild.)
Mr. Rash's article gives no indication that he is aware of these issues, and the way he describes how he found out about these cards suggests he doesn't have his finger on the pulse of security matters.
It's unfortunate that hard working individuals are seen as a fantastical idea in this day and age while couch surfing writers like Karl Marx are idolized.
'Atlas Shrugged' is a fantasy, and one, furthermore, that is based on simplistic wishful thinking. 'How the Other Half Lives' is an example of a book about hard-working individuals.
He's also not guilty of "identity theft" unless he actually tried to impersonate those women using their data.
That's arguable, but it doesn't matter, anyway. What matters is the definition, in the relevant legislation, of whatever crimes he is alleged to have committed.
Wait a minute! You are implying it's the Journalists fault...
No he's not. He is pointing out that it was regrettably naive of the journalist not to act in a paranoid manner, given that the government has repeatedly demonstrated its disregard for constitutional protections.
Why do we see so many binary, black-or-white responses to just about anything? Is there a significant portion of humanity who cannot consider more than one idea at a time?
Irrelevant. The Titan was never meant to be a consumer-level card, it's something that's meant to be sitting between the consumer (sub-700) market and the professional (1000+) cards.
Is that marketing bullshit that I'm smelling?
an artificial restriction to somewhat justify the cost of professional cards.
I don't think 'justify' is quite the right word here...
"anatomical differences between cartilage in dinosaurs and mammals may not directly explain why some dinosaurs grew to larger sizes."
Anatomical differences are never going to explain "why", they can only explain "how".
Agreed - this is sloppy reporting (mainly in the/. summary but also in the original). I think what they are trying to say is that this particular joint design, which evolved in smaller reptiles, later proved to be helpful in the evolution of giant dinosaurs - i.e., it was a sort of exaptation (formerly known as pre-adaption) in the sense that while this design's posited suitability for carrying large loads wasn't necessary when it evolved (the mammalian design was equally capable for animals of that size), it became a decider as evolutionary forces favored gigantism.
There is another way to do that, which I believe is much more sensitive: Send the pulse on one frequency, listen for the return on a harmonic.
This is a follow-on to my earlier question, about the difficulty of receiving the harmonics of a radar-frequency interrogation pulse. If the pulse consisted of two distinct frequencies (or was transmitted in addition to a continuous illumination at a different frequency), would a diode or other nonlinear reflector generate a return signal at the beat frequency?
For instance in the mortgage fraud scandal they were allowed to settle fraudulent foreclosures for pennies on the dollar. Why are these companies never required to make the people they hurt whole again?
I don't intend to defend Knight Capital, but there is a big difference between its incompetence and negligence in this case, and the deliberate and fraudulent actions that characterized the mortgage mess. No individual in the financial industry has been held accountable for these actions, even while some of the people they exploited have been prosecuted: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/business/26nocera.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all [In Prison for Taking a 'Liar Loan' - Joe Nocera - NY Times; may require registration, or try reaching it through a search engine.] This, I believe, is the "most scandalous aspects of the financial mess of 2008."
The customers have probably signed an agreement to settle disputes exclusively through binding arbitration - I believe this is an almost universal practice in the financial industry, as a condition for doing business, and no, you can't take your business elsewhere. That arbitration is widely regarded (at least outside of the industry) as being biased towards the financial industry.
There is another way to do that, which I believe is much more sensitive: Send the pulse on one frequency, listen for the return on a harmonic.
That is a really clever idea, but if you are doing this at radar frequencies (for spatial resolution) wouldn't the harmonics be difficult to detect? Would the semiconductor junctions of the size used in current semiconductor devices be sufficiently efficient radiators at the harmonic frequency?
On the other hand, perhaps you don't need the spatial resolution of radar for the applications mentioned in the article.
a traveller on land who fell sick would be unlikely to continue his journey.
An adult traveler. Children in arms or carried in the cart/wagon/travios by parents fleeing the plague could travel quite a distance.
Good point - I had overlooked that possibility.
Infected humans are not the only way the disease could travel, either.
While I don't disagree with anything you say, I am not sure that animal vectors make a difference to this particular study. The question I have is, did the animals spread the disease across the continent independently, i.e. other than by being transported by humans, to any significant extent? If so, then we can only say that the data give an upper bound on the rate of spread by humans. While this would raise the possibility that this rate was lower than that calculated by the authors, it does not provide any evidence that it was. Conversely, if the spread by animals depended largely on them being transported by humans, their involvement in the process is immaterial to the use of the data in estimating human mobility. This estimation must be based on the average rate, not on relatively infrequent worst-case or corner-case scenarios.
Slashdot Mirror
Each to his own, but anyone doing it for bragging rights is likely to find, as did Alan Shepard, that most people don't think of suborbital flight as real spaceflight.
This should be posted on a political forum. Maybe slashdot could create a second site for stories like this.
I think you have misunderstood the target of the referenced article. It is not actually about New Jersey politics, it is about the weakness of the NSA's justifications for its recently-revealed actions. Those actions seem to have attracted a lot of interest on slashdot.
The problem for most of these 'behaves like a human' tests for intelligence is that just because a human needs intelligence to perform a task, it does not follow that any entity performing the same task is necessarily intelligent.
Take the case of chess: computers win primarily through fast searching and a huge memory of precomputed moves. When computers first started to play well, many of their developers expected to soon dominate play at all levels, but human players struck back, using their intelligence to devise strategies that nullified much of the computers' brute force. If the computers were intelligent, they would have devised their own countermeasures to those strategies.
Language is a much more complex and significant issue, and the current strategy of largely unsupervised learning over huge text bases has achieved some impressive results. It is a leap of faith, however, to extrapolate these successes into the belief that these techniques will ultimately produce real artificial intelligence - an intelligence that could, for example, understand and cogently critique this discussion thread.
Watson is as much AI as any other project I've ever seen. On the other hand, no AI I've ever seen understands what it's doing.
I agree, and also (much more significantly) so does David Deutsch (the title, which is generally the choice of an editor, is somewhat misleading.)
One of the lesser points he makes is that the term AGI (Artificial Generalized Intelligence) has had to be coined, because AI has been misappropriated by too many efforts that don't have much 'I' in them.
Why do you think it's AI ? Sounds to me 'just' a 'big-data' application.
As far as I've been able to determine it's just a cluster of machines running Apache Hadoop and some of their own software to shift through data.
These characterizations are not exactly wrong, but they are not useful. To discuss Watson in terms of its implementing technologies is to completely miss the point, as does dismissing it as a 'big-data app' (real AI, when it arrives, may well have 'big data' attributes.) The use of 'just' here is a misleading application of emphasis.
I don't think Watson deserves to be called AI either, but it is impressive, nonetheless.
Seeing your gripe at Asimov's article I am very curious... What are your predictions for 2064?
Do you think you can hit as many home runs as Asimov?
The OP's main point is not a criticism of Asimov's hit rate, but an observation on the number of commentators who have significantly exaggerated Asimov's prescience.
It is not simply a matter of extracting specific predictions and scoring them yes or no. I think the topics Asimov chose to elaborate on are as interesting as the specific predictions. He has more to say about domestic lighting and appliances than about the human colonization of the moon and the seafloor, which he assumes to be commonplace. In the first paragraph, he alludes to the cold war, which was certainly a big deal in '64, but he is otherwise silent on it. The development of the developing world is similarly ignored, despite that being where most of the population growth that he is rightly concerned about occurs.
Asimov's comments were made in the context of the '64 world's fair, and in part they reflect the technological parochialism of that event. We can see with hindsight that social/political change has been more significant than technical development over the last fifty years, and Asimov is at his best when he addresses the former.
A number of hacks against non-contactless chip-and-pin cards have been demonstrated, and I would be suspicious of any claim that the contactless ones are more secure. Search for 'chip and pin is broken' for details of the exploits, and also a number of self-serving non-sequiturs supposedly justifying the issuers' inaction over the issue (for example, 'the protocol is sound', as if consumers can choose to use a sound implementation, and 'the exploit is too difficult in practice' despite good evidence that it has been used in the wild.)
Mr. Rash's article gives no indication that he is aware of these issues, and the way he describes how he found out about these cards suggests he doesn't have his finger on the pulse of security matters.
It's unfortunate that hard working individuals are seen as a fantastical idea in this day and age while couch surfing writers like Karl Marx are idolized.
'Atlas Shrugged' is a fantasy, and one, furthermore, that is based on simplistic wishful thinking. 'How the Other Half Lives' is an example of a book about hard-working individuals.
He's also not guilty of "identity theft" unless he actually tried to impersonate those women using their data.
That's arguable, but it doesn't matter, anyway. What matters is the definition, in the relevant legislation, of whatever crimes he is alleged to have committed.
Maybe the patent office will notice a bit of prior art? One can hope, right?
Ask Patents might help with that.
A state I aspire to.
So the first question should be: is there a dead weight person on your team? That is obviously a sensitive question, but it is what this is all about.
In the OP's scenario, the assumption is that each group, no matter how small, contains one such person.
While there are many dubious assumptions in that scenario, this one alone is sufficient to show that the process is statistical nonsense.
HR should not be playing with math that they don't understand.
I don't suppose that you noted that the files in question were (believe it or not) on dead plants.
Every tried encrypting dead plants?
http://www.amazon.com/Scanners-Office-Electronics/b?ie=UTF8&node=172584
Security through obscurity isn't encryption and we've already discovered how to recover text from burnt paper.
Flush the ashes.
Maybe they could still recover it, but at least you would create a really bad day at work for someone.
Wait a minute! You are implying it's the Journalists fault...
No he's not. He is pointing out that it was regrettably naive of the journalist not to act in a paranoid manner, given that the government has repeatedly demonstrated its disregard for constitutional protections.
Why do we see so many binary, black-or-white responses to just about anything? Is there a significant portion of humanity who cannot consider more than one idea at a time?
Irrelevant. The Titan was never meant to be a consumer-level card, it's something that's meant to be sitting between the consumer (sub-700) market and the professional (1000+) cards.
Is that marketing bullshit that I'm smelling?
an artificial restriction to somewhat justify the cost of professional cards.
I don't think 'justify' is quite the right word here...
"anatomical differences between cartilage in dinosaurs and mammals may not directly explain why some dinosaurs grew to larger sizes."
Anatomical differences are never going to explain "why", they can only explain "how".
Agreed - this is sloppy reporting (mainly in the /. summary but also in the original). I think what they are trying to say is that this particular joint design, which evolved in smaller reptiles, later proved to be helpful in the evolution of giant dinosaurs - i.e., it was a sort of exaptation (formerly known as pre-adaption) in the sense that while this design's posited suitability for carrying large loads wasn't necessary when it evolved (the mammalian design was equally capable for animals of that size), it became a decider as evolutionary forces favored gigantism.
Buses don't provide door-to-door, non-stop service. Taxis do - but of course now you have to cover the whole cost of the driver by yourself.
Self-driving vehicles will change that trade-off...
There is another way to do that, which I believe is much more sensitive: Send the pulse on one frequency, listen for the return on a harmonic.
This is a follow-on to my earlier question, about the difficulty of receiving the harmonics of a radar-frequency interrogation pulse. If the pulse consisted of two distinct frequencies (or was transmitted in addition to a continuous illumination at a different frequency), would a diode or other nonlinear reflector generate a return signal at the beat frequency?
Doh! I should have stripped off the parameters:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/business/26nocera.html [In Prison for Taking a 'Liar Loan' - Joe Nocera - NY Times; may require registration, or try reaching it through a search engine.]
and there is a follow-up:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/02/opinion/nocera-the-mortgage-fraud-fraud.html
For instance in the mortgage fraud scandal they were allowed to settle fraudulent foreclosures for pennies on the dollar. Why are these companies never required to make the people they hurt whole again?
I don't intend to defend Knight Capital, but there is a big difference between its incompetence and negligence in this case, and the deliberate and fraudulent actions that characterized the mortgage mess. No individual in the financial industry has been held accountable for these actions, even while some of the people they exploited have been prosecuted: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/business/26nocera.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all [In Prison for Taking a 'Liar Loan' - Joe Nocera - NY Times; may require registration, or try reaching it through a search engine.] This, I believe, is the "most scandalous aspects of the financial mess of 2008."
How about suing? Did those who were hurt sue?
The customers have probably signed an agreement to settle disputes exclusively through binding arbitration - I believe this is an almost universal practice in the financial industry, as a condition for doing business, and no, you can't take your business elsewhere. That arbitration is widely regarded (at least outside of the industry) as being biased towards the financial industry.
There is another way to do that, which I believe is much more sensitive: Send the pulse on one frequency, listen for the return on a harmonic.
That is a really clever idea, but if you are doing this at radar frequencies (for spatial resolution) wouldn't the harmonics be difficult to detect? Would the semiconductor junctions of the size used in current semiconductor devices be sufficiently efficient radiators at the harmonic frequency?
On the other hand, perhaps you don't need the spatial resolution of radar for the applications mentioned in the article.
I am not an EE, as is probably obvious.
I am being serially dumb here. I see now that the animal vectors allow the disease to spread at the rate of asymptomatic travelers.
a traveller on land who fell sick would be unlikely to continue his journey.
An adult traveler. Children in arms or carried in the cart/wagon/travios by parents fleeing the plague could travel quite a distance.
Good point - I had overlooked that possibility.
Infected humans are not the only way the disease could travel, either.
While I don't disagree with anything you say, I am not sure that animal vectors make a difference to this particular study. The question I have is, did the animals spread the disease across the continent independently, i.e. other than by being transported by humans, to any significant extent? If so, then we can only say that the data give an upper bound on the rate of spread by humans. While this would raise the possibility that this rate was lower than that calculated by the authors, it does not provide any evidence that it was. Conversely, if the spread by animals depended largely on them being transported by humans, their involvement in the process is immaterial to the use of the data in estimating human mobility. This estimation must be based on the average rate, not on relatively infrequent worst-case or corner-case scenarios.