Who said anything about the "entire scientific community" ?
And WoofyGoofy replies:
Statements by organizations
This list of scientific bodies of national or international standing, that have issued formal statements of opinion, classifies those organizations according to whether they concur with the IPCC view, are non-committal, or dissent from it.
Academies of Science Joint science academies' statements
Since 2001, 32"national science academies"have come together to issue joint declarations confirming anthropogenic global warming, and urging the nations of the world to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. The signatories of these statements have been the national science academies of 32 countries.
2001 Following the publication of the"IPCC Third Assessment Report, seventeen national science academies issued a joint statement, entitled "The Science of Climate Change", explicitly acknowledging the IPCC position as representing the scientific consensus on climate change science. The statement, printed in an editorial in the journal"Science"on May 18, 2001,[20]"was signed by the science academies of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Caribbean, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, New Zealand, Sweden, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.[21]
2005 The national science academies of the"G8"nations, plus Brazil, China and India, three of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the developing world, signed a statement on the global response to climate change. The statement stresses that the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action,[22]"and explicitly endorsed the IPCC consensus. The eleven signatories were the science academies of Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
2007 In preparation for the"33rd G8 summit, the national science academies of the"G8+5"nations issued a declaration referencing the position of the 2005 joint science academies' statement, and acknowledging the confirmation of their previous conclusion by recent research. Following the"IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, the declaration states, "It is unequivocal that the climate is changing, and it is very likely that this is predominantly caused by the increasing human interference with the atmosphere. These changes will transform the environmental conditions on Earth unless counter-measures are taken."[23]"The thirteen signatories were the national science academies of Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, India, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
2008 In preparation for the"34th G8 summit, the national science academies of the G8+5 nations issued a declaration reiterating the position of the 2005 joint science academiesâ(TM) statement, and reaffirming âoethat climate change is happening and that anthropogenic warming is influencing many physical and biological systems.â Among other actions, the declaration urges all nations to âoe(t)ake appropriate economic and policy measures to accelerate transition to a"low carbon society"and to encourage and effect changes in individual and national behaviour.â[24]"The thirteen signatories were the same national science academies that issued the 2007 joint statement.
2009 In advance of the"UNFCCC"negotiations to be held in"Copenhagen"in December 2009, the national science academies of the G8+5 nations issued a joint statement declaring, "Climate change and sustainable energy supply are crucial challenges for the future of humanity. It is essential that world leaders agree on the emission reductions needed to combat negative consequences of anthropogenic climate change". The statement references the IPCC's Fourth Assessment of 2007, and asserts that "climate change is happening even faster than previously estimated; global CO2"emissions since
Yeah the entire scientific world is a "crackpot" community with "zero credibility", because they are telling you something about the consensus science that you would prefer wasn't true.
The single, united scientific voice on this topic:
is really a secret conspiracy with the power to compel allegiance from the world's scientists. The whole thing is just hoax on the part of liberals and big government to take away your freedoms
This guy is the most accomplished, most intelligent judge who will never ever be considered by anyone for an appointment to SCOTUS. He's way too frank, way too likely to follow his own excellent interpretation of the pro-social intentions behind laws and is routinely completely inappropriate, at least as adjudicated by either and both sides of the current US political bifurcation.
Although some observers count him as a conservative, ( I guess because he's not expressly liberal?) the kind of independence, fearlessness and good common sense he delivers on a regular basis, often in pithy, high IQ, quotable-quote form, makes him ineligible to be considered one of the current crop of psycho, Ayn Rand worshiping, anti-science anti-evolution religious zealots that is the means test for "conservatives" these days.
If we could populate our court system with judges like this guy (Republicans would filibuster) , our nation's judiciary would work more like it's supposed to and less like a force multiplier for corporations and special interests.
If you're into the law either where it intersects with tech or broader society, this is a guy's name is worthy of a weekly Google alert.
Some very Posnerian Posner quotes:
âoeModern judicial opinions tend to be too long, and we shall try to be brief. We shall even forgo the usual prefatory statement of facts, which would disclose an utterly routine, though very large, illegal drug operation.â
U.S. v. Herrera-Medina (1988).
âoeThe filing of an appeal should never be a conditioned reflex. About half the practice of a decent lawyer consists in telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and should stop.â
Hill v. Norfolk & Western Railway Co. (1987)
And here's one that's sure to raise his esteem around these parts:.
âoeGilding the lily, the officer testified that he was additionally suspicious because when he drove by [the suspect] in his squad car before turning around and getting out and accosting him he noticed that [the suspect] was âstar[ing] straight ahead.â(TM) Had [the suspect] instead glanced around him, the officer would doubtless have testified that [he] seemed nervous or, the preferred term because of the vagueness, âfurtive.â(TM) Whether you stand still or move, drive above, below or at the speed limit, you will be described by the police as acting suspiciously should they wish to stop or arrest you. Such subjective, promiscuous appeals to an ineffable intuition should not be credited.â
U.S. v. Broomfield (2005)
And finally:
âoeOnce a case gets to the jury, all bets are off.â
Speakers of Sport Inc. v. ProServ Inc. (1999)
What you said is true in terms of it being a milestone. But for reason's stated, I experience it as more of a PR milestone or a milestone in the public awareness of AI, capturing for "AI awareness" essentially just that set of people who don't and never did care about sci. fi. I don't see it as a real technical milestone, where a new approach to a previously unsolved problem yielded great results.
One example of a breakthrough that fits the above description is Google's use of a technique I think of as "sheer statistics" to successfully translate arbitrary material from one language to another. It's not that Google invented the idea, but they've advanced the technique so that it works quite well.
Prior to the 90s, AI was really stumped here. The dominant approach was something called transfer-type machine translation whereby the source material is transformed into a symbolic representation (think Chomskesque plus...) before it's translated into the target language. This approach had some limited success and anyway nothing like the success which was predicted for it in the 60s and 70s. The conclusion was that strong AI or the ability to truly understand the source material semantically would be necessary for machine translation to really progress.
Starting in the early 90s computing power and memory was sufficient to advance the statistical approach to machine translation, whereby you analyze huge amounts of text "in the wild" in order to collect statistics about what words and phrases are usually around other words and phrases. It's the Simplest Thing That Might Work. And it works really really well. Google dropped the transfer approach and started using it and Google's translation is really really good compared to what came before.
That's an advance in AI. More examples include the critter approach (these are my made up names for this stuff) where by researchers instead of starting at the top of the intelligence food chain, start at the bottom creating AI that can crawl and fly and display the intelligence needed by a cockroach - find food, avoid predators and dangerous situations, reproduce. The idea here is we'll discover what's needed for the high level stuff, language and symbolic thought , the same way mother nature did, through solving successively harder challenges thrown at us by the the environment in which we live. See Rodney Brooks entry in Wikipedia:
It makes sense. The thing I said about Romeo and Juliet is huge. To be intelligent like a human, that is in a characteristically human way (which is what we mean by strong AI) you have to share the implicit values a human being bears by dint that human's biology, chemistry, and genetics. This is especially easy to see in matters of the heart. Because we evolved through sexual reproduction, we have intense feelings of jealousy lust, and longing which are given to us by our biology. Those things motivate and sense-make a huge part of human behaviour including: everything around socializing, the desire to acquire material wealth, religious lifestyles, artistic endeavors, marriage customs, inter-male aggression and war, etc etc. Predicting what someone will do in arbitrary situations (which is a slight reformulation of the goals of strong AI) without having reference to that biology is a fool's errrand it seems to me. (Example: men's testosterone levels rise if they even THINK they are going to be around fertile females at some point in the near future, and their behaviour changes accordingly) .
So what you said is true, there is an advancement of a sort, but for people in the field I don't think it was seen as much more than IBMs PR bid to gain entrance to the lucrative markets of medical record processing automation, say, or whatever it is their market analysts are forecasting as the next big money maker.
Watson is a PR coup for IBM, but that's all. In fact, that's really why it got funded and really what is was for. It's not going to replace you at work. Ever.
There's a number of reasons they wanted to play Jeopardy . First, the questions are all factual in nature (as opposed to judgement calls ) . As anyone who has studied database theory knows, such facts are just the kind of thing that gets stored in a database. In the world of DB theory this is called the closed world assumption- what is true is in the database and if it isn't in the database, then it is not true (as opposed to being merely unknown).
A database is therefore a gigantic list of true predicates. We call these true predicates- facts. Jeopardy deals with facts and facts alone.
Two, pumping a database full of facts is not hard but it might be an endless task that gets you something not very helpful if you aren't able to reduce in a principled way what topics those facts might be are on and beyond that, what level of human learning would be required to know those facts.
Jeopardy assists in both instances.In the first instance, knowing what categories of knowledge to mine, Jeopardy has a long and public history of chosen categories which are open for examination and ultimately characterization. The people who think up jeopardy questions necessarily engage in this same characterization of potential questions. Classical Music in the 1800s. Famous Authors. Famous Quotes Geographical facts. Etc etc etc.
It may seem endless and unbounded, but it's not. It's just big. Thank god we have computers that can automate the acquisition of properly encoded knowledge and thank god we have computers that can automatically encode knowledge with just a little human oversight. knowledge. And then there's the vast amounts of facts that have been encoded as a part of ongoing attempts to mimic and explore human intelligence since at least the 60s.
Now that we have in a DB everything we need to answer most questions, how can process the English question so as to return the right answer?
Jeopardy's stylized question asking to the rescue. The referent , , the thing being asked about, the answer part of "what is X?" is easily located by parsing the questions. In the early 20th century, this Parisian composer became known for his strange sounding titles, which translated include "dried up embryos" and "three pieces in the shape of a pear".
With a suitably constructed query, you'll have your answer in about 100 ms.
All AI suffers from the frame problem. The frame problem is the reason you wont' be being replaced by a computer. The "frame" in the frame problem refers to frame of reference. It's the background knowledge we all share by dint of being a human in the world . A tea cup has a bottom. A tea pot can be full, then become empty. It contents can be hot, then turn cold without anyone doing anything to it. It's what we call common sense. It's more than just a huge database of facts (and if it weren't it still wouldn't be accessible to coded into Watson b/s it's way too huge ).
It also comes from being a human and having human motivations and sensibilities. Not all possible things make sense. Romeo love Juliet so he destroyed all the asparagus crops in Berlin. You only know that's silly (exceptional back stories excepted) nonsense because you intuitively unde
In contrast, current annual fossil fuel burning amounts to about 6 Gt of carbon. About half of this amount is observed as an increase of the atmospheric CO2 concentration. The
other half is sequestered by other compartments. Currently, both the oceans and the terrestrial system show a net uptake of carbon [6]. The oxygen and carbon isotopic compositions of individual components, in particular air-CO2 provide a potentially powerful tool towards quantifying the contribution of different components to ecosystem exchange. When this is used in conjunction with concentration or ïux measurements, further insight can be gained into the sources and sinks of CO2 in the ecosystem [7,8].
Plant photosynthesis discriminates against
13 C. In other words, plant carbon tends to have less 13 C than the CO2 from which it is formed (Fig. 1). This discrimination provides a tool for interpreting changes in 13C of atmospheric CO2
The positive feedback loop of a previously sequestered source of greenhouse gas causing yet more release of same.
The mass die off in the seas of the base of the food chain and the sudden follow on of all other species that depend no that food chain.
The outbreak of nuclear or biological war as a result of governments toppling under food and or water scarcity pressures.
The breakdown of civil order owing to the bankrupting of nearly all nations in a now-too-late, and ultimately futile effort to avert climate change. A tipping point is reached regarding the human acceptance of climate change and all it entails, including any and all of the above. Just as in the stock market, the full event doesn't even have to happen before the force of the disaster is felt - that happens as soon as a tipping-point consensus understanding of what is inevitable takes hold amongst observers.
It's not too late now, or at least , it's not certain it's too late now.
By the time the symptoms become indisputable, then.. then it will really be too late.
The Princeton Stabilization Wedges concept. An idea we can all benefit from, however you feel today about the certainty of climate change:
Exactly. This is also why we know that the excess carbon in the atmosphere is sourced from fossil fuels- gas and oil. Carbon has 3 sotopes 12, 13 and radioactive 14.Carbon in the atmosphere has all three in a certain percentage. Carbon that has been buried underground for a few million years - in the form of oil- has had all it's radioactive 14 changed to nitrogen. When it's burned again in our cars and smokestacks, the newly released non-14 carbon increases the percentage of isotopes 12 and 13 in the atmosphere relative to what it was.
If you hated it so much and despise them to that degree, why not name names?
Uh, because I value my anonymity and my department was pretty small and once it's written, it can't be taken back and I've leaned to never underestimate the power and reach and indifference to the law that these creeps are capable of....:)
Don't get me wrong, I think the research university and (hypothetical) university culture and especially the end result sausage output are the GEMS of western civilization. I am sure that not all universities are like the one I attended (right...? ), but that's not the point. The point is the experience was scarring, abusive-bordering-on-crazy, and purely destructive to anyone engaged enough to actually give a shit about its quality.
What's more, there was nothing in place to limit what they could do, unless you count the possibility of lawsuits (intentional infliction of emotional distress, fraud, slander and libel) but how realistic is that? Whatever else comes of it, such a lawsuit is an obvious a career-ender for anyone pressing it, so you better win big. They know all this.
This is what happens when you're locked into a market. When your "choice" amounts to a one-time, shot-in-the-dark with no undo button and no real recourse for poor quality of deliverable.
And of course that same "market" dynamic is what breeds the sewer in the first place, right? The above properties are guaranteed to lead to a school that invests everything in gaming the college rankings game and school reps who know what to say to you and your parents and brochures that are pure Disney because once you're in, it's very hard to get out when you discover, say, your classes are either a sad joke fit only for a diploma mill or a cook-off taught by under-developed, morally bankrupt TAs whose primary experience of their student charges is that of one-day potential competitors for grant money and fame. It was Henry Kissinger who said "University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." and he was right.
Literally my English comp course was so bad, so freaking awful I just stopped going after 5 weeks... stopped going to class, turning in assignments, papers...nothing... it was for morons...literally... and they still passed me with a B. Hey.... thanks!
I submitted to some counselor that no one in class X had any idea what professor Y was talking about, none whatsoever, a fact I was privy to since we all knew each other and studied together and what I got back was..... it didn't matter ! It went like this:
Her ":Well professors have absolute freedom to teach the class any way they see fit"
Me: so what I hear you saying is this guy could show up to class and sing an aria in Italian then look at us and say "OK that's it, test Friday on that material" and there's nothing you or anyone would do about it? "
Her: "Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying."
Oh , and my school was also one of the schools that was guilty of "steering student loans" to certain banks in exchange for kickbacks.
I was doing an independent project to put our course lectures online. It makes a lot of sense now and it made even more sense in 1999 . The benefits are obvious, including one I haven't heard other people point out- the accumulated knowledge embedded in documents generations of students have had a hand in creating. Since we all take the same course, why don't we benefit from the past understanding of former students on particularly difficult topics. Other students liked me because I had a way to explain things that was clarifying. People with good explanations of weird concepts ought to commit those in some form for the benefit future graduating classes, who can spend the time they save puzzling over even more advanced material or doing (please god) hands on projects.
Of course they were terrified that the lectures would get out and t
I went to a top tier research university. It was the worst "education" you can imagine. Indifferent Asperger cases (one of whom hit... HIT! some guy with his chalkboard pointer because he didn't like where he was sitting for a test ).It was 100% "sage on the stage" crap where grading was done by TAs who decided whether they liked students or not before determining the curve by their own admission.
My friend was up for valedictorian so he lit the locker containing the class notes of his nearest competitor on fire. When I asked him why he did it. he said "he would have done it to me" , and he was right. It was THAT competitive. TAs were overburdened and HATED the proximal source of that burden, us, the undergrads and they let you know it at every turn. Death through gossip was staple fare. Administrative proceedings were initiated at the drop of a hat on someone-said-someone-said type "evidence". The bookstore was a goldmine (I knew the manager) I mean we're talking HUGE amounts of money and of course the books were trash some rep had bribed the professor into using , and of course we never used it even once in class.
The awesome sewer that university was, my utter inability to complain about the quality of the product I was sold or get my money back in any way shape form or size convinced me that while research and the publishing of peer reviewed papers is the basis of western civilization and the bedrock of The Good Life, at least this university and probably a lot of others like it were , aside from their scientific output, basically sewers that needed to be imploded.
They will fight this guy with everything they have. They will sue and assert patent rights They will seek through all means to discredit this guy, his graduates and his "institution" . I am telling you I tried to get online courses and lectures going in 1999 and they shunned me and shut me down. Inn their eyes, in the eyes of the admins and boards and the whole fraking network of big money donors and politicians and people they employ they are 100% necessary to education and will always exist just as they are now even if ti means bankrupting the nation one student buried under debt at a time.
Is this the start of the implosion of education? Could this be it? Please let it be so.
helping to weed out content that incites acts of terror.
Let's see, there's the bible, then the koran and all other forms of aggressive, conservative proselytizing religions including BTW scientology... then there's the right wing parties such as the nazis and the klan...oh and climate change deniers...
But this would amount to a form of leaving these
people alone amongst themselves. Isn't sunshine , mockery, debate, parody and shaming the best antiseptic in these cases?
For one, those kinds f people are threatening to about half of the population even before they open their open . mouths. Just their demeanor pisses people off.
Then there's the threat people feel when the new generation "gets away" from them. There are whole ethnic segments of society that specifically HATE the idea of their kids being smarter , more accomplished, more knowledgeable than they are.
Three, this is a PITA to the existing educational structure . It's not like hands on learning and experimentation are somehow new ideas in education. It's that education , at least beyond high school is primarily a business with a business model it's not going to willingly disrupt.
The only revolution in education that's going to occur is the revolution of defection. Too many players with too much to lose are in charge of what education is. We need students and their parents to defect from the system and create alternative educational environments . Never mind reforming the existing ones.
Oh oh oh I get it now. You think that i should sit back and not even mock, sneer at, deride, shame and parody that segment of the American population who is deconstrcuting the basis Western civilization - science, rationality and the Enlightenment and dragging us back into the Dark Ages WHILE AT THE SAME TIME actively working to ensure that the whole cultural debate becomes moot when civilization deconstructing climate change - which BTW conservatives also deny- not is fully realized, but only becomes only a guaranteed certainty, at which point all mayhem breaks out as "the market reacts to the bad news..."
Yeah, we're all going to just continue to be nice and respect the opinion of others under that set of exigencies.
You get that all the calls on this thread to slaughter religious people and ban religion would effect nearly 100% of conservatives and anyway the anger is implicitly directed towards a distinctly conservative brand of proselytizing religion - both Islamic and Christian- and not, say the Zen Buddhist enthusiast down the road or even the peaceable Amish or Shaker Christian sects. I mean, you are capable of discerning the implicit cultural context in which we're all living... right?
I mean, if I was going to attack someone I would think to attack the people directly calling for my and my friends deaths before I attacked someone who was merely pointing out a truth known well to all.....
Oh... did I point out the identity relation between between Jihadis and their sworn enemies ? Jesus Fuck, I am sorry if I offended anyone.
Who but a lib would even THINK of pardoning a man who lies with another man ?
"'If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads."
-The Holy Bible, the unerring Word of God, as asserted by conservatives.
Uh let's see. Conservatives think homosexuality is, variously, a disease, a sin, a perversion and at any rate virtually all conservatives agree such people are unworthy of equal rights before the law.
As a matter of fact this being against gay marriage is one of the platform planks of the conservative movement, with a very few notable exceptions, Olsen and Krauthammer amongst them.
And yes, this is unchanged from the 1800s. Why do you THINK they call themselves "conservatives" while their opposition calls themselves "progressives"?
Just land here did ya? Have a nice trip from.. whatever planet it is you're from ?
Oh I get it.....I get it... you think I that by me pointing out this well known material fact about conservatives I am somehow slandering them.
Well, I guess what they say is true. "Reality has a liberal bias "
Slashdot Mirror
Learned Hand- only the greatest given name, ever.
Who said anything about the "entire scientific community" ?
And WoofyGoofy replies:
Statements by organizations This list of scientific bodies of national or international standing, that have issued formal statements of opinion, classifies those organizations according to whether they concur with the IPCC view, are non-committal, or dissent from it.
Academies of Science
Joint science academies' statements
Since 2001, 32"national science academies"have come together to issue joint declarations confirming anthropogenic global warming, and urging the nations of the world to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. The signatories of these statements have been the national science academies of 32 countries.
Yeah the entire scientific world is a "crackpot" community with "zero credibility", because they are telling you something about the consensus science that you would prefer wasn't true.
The single, united scientific voice on this topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
is really a secret conspiracy with the power to compel allegiance from the world's scientists. The whole thing is just hoax on the part of liberals and big government to take away your freedoms
http://www.amazon.com/The-Greatest-Hoax-Conspiracy-Threatens/dp/1936488493
And furthermore, there's nothing wrong with you.
This guy is the most accomplished, most intelligent judge who will never ever be considered by anyone for an appointment to SCOTUS. He's way too frank, way too likely to follow his own excellent interpretation of the pro-social intentions behind laws and is routinely completely inappropriate, at least as adjudicated by either and both sides of the current US political bifurcation.
Although some observers count him as a conservative, ( I guess because he's not expressly liberal?) the kind of independence, fearlessness and good common sense he delivers on a regular basis, often in pithy, high IQ, quotable-quote form, makes him ineligible to be considered one of the current crop of psycho, Ayn Rand worshiping, anti-science anti-evolution religious zealots that is the means test for "conservatives" these days.
If we could populate our court system with judges like this guy (Republicans would filibuster) , our nation's judiciary would work more like it's supposed to and less like a force multiplier for corporations and special interests.
If you're into the law either where it intersects with tech or broader society, this is a guy's name is worthy of a weekly Google alert.
Some very Posnerian Posner quotes:
âoeModern judicial opinions tend to be too long, and we shall try to be brief. We shall even forgo the usual prefatory statement of facts, which would disclose an utterly routine, though very large, illegal drug operation.â
U.S. v. Herrera-Medina (1988).
âoeThe filing of an appeal should never be a conditioned reflex. About half the practice of a decent lawyer consists in telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and should stop.â Hill v. Norfolk & Western Railway Co. (1987)
And here's one that's sure to raise his esteem around these parts: .
âoeGilding the lily, the officer testified that he was additionally suspicious because when he drove by [the suspect] in his squad car before turning around and getting out and accosting him he noticed that [the suspect] was âstar[ing] straight ahead.â(TM) Had [the suspect] instead glanced around him, the officer would doubtless have testified that [he] seemed nervous or, the preferred term because of the vagueness, âfurtive.â(TM) Whether you stand still or move, drive above, below or at the speed limit, you will be described by the police as acting suspiciously should they wish to stop or arrest you. Such subjective, promiscuous appeals to an ineffable intuition should not be credited.â U.S. v. Broomfield (2005)
And finally:
âoeOnce a case gets to the jury, all bets are off.â Speakers of Sport Inc. v. ProServ Inc. (1999)
What you said is true in terms of it being a milestone. But for reason's stated, I experience it as more of a PR milestone or a milestone in the public awareness of AI, capturing for "AI awareness" essentially just that set of people who don't and never did care about sci. fi. I don't see it as a real technical milestone, where a new approach to a previously unsolved problem yielded great results.
One example of a breakthrough that fits the above description is Google's use of a technique I think of as "sheer statistics" to successfully translate arbitrary material from one language to another. It's not that Google invented the idea, but they've advanced the technique so that it works quite well.
Prior to the 90s, AI was really stumped here. The dominant approach was something called transfer-type machine translation whereby the source material is transformed into a symbolic representation (think Chomskesque plus ...) before it's translated into the target language. This approach had some limited success and anyway nothing like the success which was predicted for it in the 60s and 70s. The conclusion was that strong AI or the ability to truly understand the source material semantically would be necessary for machine translation to really progress.
Starting in the early 90s computing power and memory was sufficient to advance the statistical approach to machine translation, whereby you analyze huge amounts of text "in the wild" in order to collect statistics about what words and phrases are usually around other words and phrases. It's the Simplest Thing That Might Work. And it works really really well. Google dropped the transfer approach and started using it and Google's translation is really really good compared to what came before.
That's an advance in AI. More examples include the critter approach (these are my made up names for this stuff) where by researchers instead of starting at the top of the intelligence food chain, start at the bottom creating AI that can crawl and fly and display the intelligence needed by a cockroach - find food, avoid predators and dangerous situations, reproduce. The idea here is we'll discover what's needed for the high level stuff, language and symbolic thought , the same way mother nature did, through solving successively harder challenges thrown at us by the the environment in which we live. See Rodney Brooks entry in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Brooks
It makes sense. The thing I said about Romeo and Juliet is huge. To be intelligent like a human, that is in a characteristically human way (which is what we mean by strong AI) you have to share the implicit values a human being bears by dint that human's biology, chemistry, and genetics. This is especially easy to see in matters of the heart. Because we evolved through sexual reproduction, we have intense feelings of jealousy lust, and longing which are given to us by our biology. Those things motivate and sense-make a huge part of human behaviour including: everything around socializing, the desire to acquire material wealth, religious lifestyles, artistic endeavors, marriage customs, inter-male aggression and war, etc etc. Predicting what someone will do in arbitrary situations (which is a slight reformulation of the goals of strong AI) without having reference to that biology is a fool's errrand it seems to me. (Example: men's testosterone levels rise if they even THINK they are going to be around fertile females at some point in the near future, and their behaviour changes accordingly) .
So what you said is true, there is an advancement of a sort, but for people in the field I don't think it was seen as much more than IBMs PR bid to gain entrance to the lucrative markets of medical record processing automation, say, or whatever it is their market analysts are forecasting as the next big money maker.
Watson is a PR coup for IBM, but that's all. In fact, that's really why it got funded and really what is was for. It's not going to replace you at work. Ever.
There's a number of reasons they wanted to play Jeopardy . First, the questions are all factual in nature (as opposed to judgement calls ) . As anyone who has studied database theory knows, such facts are just the kind of thing that gets stored in a database. In the world of DB theory this is called the closed world assumption- what is true is in the database and if it isn't in the database, then it is not true (as opposed to being merely unknown). A database is therefore a gigantic list of true predicates. We call these true predicates- facts. Jeopardy deals with facts and facts alone.
Two, pumping a database full of facts is not hard but it might be an endless task that gets you something not very helpful if you aren't able to reduce in a principled way what topics those facts might be are on and beyond that, what level of human learning would be required to know those facts.
Jeopardy assists in both instances.In the first instance, knowing what categories of knowledge to mine, Jeopardy has a long and public history of chosen categories which are open for examination and ultimately characterization. The people who think up jeopardy questions necessarily engage in this same characterization of potential questions. Classical Music in the 1800s. Famous Authors. Famous Quotes Geographical facts. Etc etc etc.
It may seem endless and unbounded, but it's not. It's just big. Thank god we have computers that can automate the acquisition of properly encoded knowledge and thank god we have computers that can automatically encode knowledge with just a little human oversight. knowledge. And then there's the vast amounts of facts that have been encoded as a part of ongoing attempts to mimic and explore human intelligence since at least the 60s.
Now that we have in a DB everything we need to answer most questions, how can process the English question so as to return the right answer?
Jeopardy's stylized question asking to the rescue. The referent , , the thing being asked about, the answer part of "what is X?" is easily located by parsing the questions. In the early 20th century, this Parisian composer became known for his strange sounding titles, which translated include "dried up embryos" and "three pieces in the shape of a pear".
If you only know French composers from around the turn of the century from long ago you might guess Debussy or Ravel. That's what most people know. But if you pick apart the question in just the crudest way, extracting the proper nouns and doing the easy inference X is a person (this composer...) , you get : paris / composer / early 20th century / and the quoted entities "dried up embryos" and "three pierces in the shape of a pear" the second of which is always translated out of the French and into English the first of which usually retains its French name (because it's kind of gross) "Embryons desséchés".
With a suitably constructed query, you'll have your answer in about 100 ms.
All AI suffers from the frame problem. The frame problem is the reason you wont' be being replaced by a computer. The "frame" in the frame problem refers to frame of reference. It's the background knowledge we all share by dint of being a human in the world . A tea cup has a bottom. A tea pot can be full, then become empty. It contents can be hot, then turn cold without anyone doing anything to it. It's what we call common sense. It's more than just a huge database of facts (and if it weren't it still wouldn't be accessible to coded into Watson b/s it's way too huge ).
It also comes from being a human and having human motivations and sensibilities. Not all possible things make sense. Romeo love Juliet so he destroyed all the asparagus crops in Berlin. You only know that's silly (exceptional back stories excepted) nonsense because you intuitively unde
As long as deniers all die, I'm for it.
Oh OK. Not really.
Is anyone actually recording the carbon isotope ratios in fossil fuels?
Yes.
From:
http://bgc.mpg.de/service/iso_gas_lab/publications/PG_WB_IJMS.pdf
In contrast, current annual fossil fuel burning amounts to about 6 Gt of carbon. About half of this amount is observed as an increase of the atmospheric CO2 concentration. The other half is sequestered by other compartments. Currently, both the oceans and the terrestrial system show a net uptake of carbon [6]. The oxygen and carbon isotopic compositions of individual components, in particular air-CO2 provide a potentially powerful tool towards quantifying the contribution of different components to ecosystem exchange. When this is used in conjunction with concentration or ïux measurements, further insight can be gained into the sources and sinks of CO2 in the ecosystem [7,8].
Plant photosynthesis discriminates against 13 C. In other words, plant carbon tends to have less 13 C than the CO2 from which it is formed (Fig. 1). This discrimination provides a tool for interpreting changes in 13C of atmospheric CO2
Also:
How do we know where the carbon comes form?
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/how-do-we-know-that-recent-co2-increases-are-due-to-human-activities/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/how-do-we-know-that-recent-cosub2sub-increases-are-due-to-human-activities-updated/
The positive feedback loop of a previously sequestered source of greenhouse gas causing yet more release of same.
The mass die off in the seas of the base of the food chain and the sudden follow on of all other species that depend no that food chain.
The outbreak of nuclear or biological war as a result of governments toppling under food and or water scarcity pressures.
The breakdown of civil order owing to the bankrupting of nearly all nations in a now-too-late, and ultimately futile effort to avert climate change. A tipping point is reached regarding the human acceptance of climate change and all it entails, including any and all of the above. Just as in the stock market, the full event doesn't even have to happen before the force of the disaster is felt - that happens as soon as a tipping-point consensus understanding of what is inevitable takes hold amongst observers.
It's not too late now, or at least , it's not certain it's too late now.
By the time the symptoms become indisputable, then.. then it will really be too late.
The Princeton Stabilization Wedges concept. An idea we can all benefit from, however you feel today about the certainty of climate change:
http://cmi.princeton.edu/wedges/
Exactly. This is also why we know that the excess carbon in the atmosphere is sourced from fossil fuels- gas and oil. Carbon has 3 sotopes 12, 13 and radioactive 14.Carbon in the atmosphere has all three in a certain percentage. Carbon that has been buried underground for a few million years - in the form of oil- has had all it's radioactive 14 changed to nitrogen. When it's burned again in our cars and smokestacks, the newly released non-14 carbon increases the percentage of isotopes 12 and 13 in the atmosphere relative to what it was.
If you hated it so much and despise them to that degree, why not name names?
Uh, because I value my anonymity and my department was pretty small and once it's written, it can't be taken back and I've leaned to never underestimate the power and reach and indifference to the law that these creeps are capable of.... :)
Don't get me wrong, I think the research university and (hypothetical) university culture and especially the end result sausage output are the GEMS of western civilization. I am sure that not all universities are like the one I attended (right...? ), but that's not the point. The point is the experience was scarring, abusive-bordering-on-crazy, and purely destructive to anyone engaged enough to actually give a shit about its quality.
What's more, there was nothing in place to limit what they could do, unless you count the possibility of lawsuits (intentional infliction of emotional distress, fraud, slander and libel) but how realistic is that? Whatever else comes of it, such a lawsuit is an obvious a career-ender for anyone pressing it, so you better win big. They know all this.
This is what happens when you're locked into a market. When your "choice" amounts to a one-time, shot-in-the-dark with no undo button and no real recourse for poor quality of deliverable.
And of course that same "market" dynamic is what breeds the sewer in the first place, right? The above properties are guaranteed to lead to a school that invests everything in gaming the college rankings game and school reps who know what to say to you and your parents and brochures that are pure Disney because once you're in, it's very hard to get out when you discover, say, your classes are either a sad joke fit only for a diploma mill or a cook-off taught by under-developed, morally bankrupt TAs whose primary experience of their student charges is that of one-day potential competitors for grant money and fame. It was Henry Kissinger who said "University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." and he was right.
Literally my English comp course was so bad, so freaking awful I just stopped going after 5 weeks... stopped going to class, turning in assignments, papers ...nothing... it was for morons...literally... and they still passed me with a B. Hey.... thanks!
I submitted to some counselor that no one in class X had any idea what professor Y was talking about, none whatsoever, a fact I was privy to since we all knew each other and studied together and what I got back was..... it didn't matter ! It went like this:
Her ":Well professors have absolute freedom to teach the class any way they see fit"
Me: so what I hear you saying is this guy could show up to class and sing an aria in Italian then look at us and say "OK that's it, test Friday on that material" and there's nothing you or anyone would do about it? "
Her: "Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying."
Oh , and my school was also one of the schools that was guilty of "steering student loans" to certain banks in exchange for kickbacks.
I was doing an independent project to put our course lectures online. It makes a lot of sense now and it made even more sense in 1999 . The benefits are obvious, including one I haven't heard other people point out- the accumulated knowledge embedded in documents generations of students have had a hand in creating. Since we all take the same course, why don't we benefit from the past understanding of former students on particularly difficult topics. Other students liked me because I had a way to explain things that was clarifying. People with good explanations of weird concepts ought to commit those in some form for the benefit future graduating classes, who can spend the time they save puzzling over even more advanced material or doing (please god) hands on projects.
Of course they were terrified that the lectures would get out and t
I went to a top tier research university. It was the worst "education" you can imagine. Indifferent Asperger cases (one of whom hit... HIT! some guy with his chalkboard pointer because he didn't like where he was sitting for a test ) .It was 100% "sage on the stage" crap where grading was done by TAs who decided whether they liked students or not before determining the curve by their own admission.
My friend was up for valedictorian so he lit the locker containing the class notes of his nearest competitor on fire. When I asked him why he did it. he said "he would have done it to me" , and he was right. It was THAT competitive. TAs were overburdened and HATED the proximal source of that burden, us, the undergrads and they let you know it at every turn. Death through gossip was staple fare. Administrative proceedings were initiated at the drop of a hat on someone-said-someone-said type "evidence". The bookstore was a goldmine (I knew the manager) I mean we're talking HUGE amounts of money and of course the books were trash some rep had bribed the professor into using , and of course we never used it even once in class.
The awesome sewer that university was, my utter inability to complain about the quality of the product I was sold or get my money back in any way shape form or size convinced me that while research and the publishing of peer reviewed papers is the basis of western civilization and the bedrock of The Good Life, at least this university and probably a lot of others like it were , aside from their scientific output, basically sewers that needed to be imploded.
They will fight this guy with everything they have. They will sue and assert patent rights They will seek through all means to discredit this guy, his graduates and his "institution" . I am telling you I tried to get online courses and lectures going in 1999 and they shunned me and shut me down. Inn their eyes, in the eyes of the admins and boards and the whole fraking network of big money donors and politicians and people they employ they are 100% necessary to education and will always exist just as they are now even if ti means bankrupting the nation one student buried under debt at a time.
Is this the start of the implosion of education? Could this be it? Please let it be so.
helping to weed out content that incites acts of terror.
Let's see, there's the bible, then the koran and all other forms of aggressive, conservative proselytizing religions including BTW scientology... then there's the right wing parties such as the nazis and the klan ...oh and climate change deniers...
But this would amount to a form of leaving these people alone amongst themselves. Isn't sunshine , mockery, debate, parody and shaming the best antiseptic in these cases?
Oh sure, it's all fun and games for people like us.
Meanwhile:
6/16/2012 8:33PM georgenh16 (1531259) has made you their foe.
Now what that a nice thing to do? What would Jesus do?
Yeah I guess my sarcastic use of the bible to mock conservative homophobia went right over your head.
One of these people you get notified had "added you as an enemy" no doubt.
Who does that? Who adds someone as an "enemy"?
If I had programmed the "add enemy" button, it would work like this:
1 "add enemy"
2 immediate dissolution of your account
3 follow up note saying "thanks, but you're not the type of person we want at Slashdot. Good day.
True Fact: Actually, Los Alamos was one big wife swapping party....
Plausible Inference: that's where we got the next generation of geniuses from.
Oh ....so.... you know how the world works...
Guards, seize this man.
Ahh what do I win when my opponent proves beyond all dispute that he's too stupid to know use how to use Google?
Leviticus 20:13 KJB
I mean this is a serious question.
For one, those kinds f people are threatening to about half of the population even before they open their open . mouths. Just their demeanor pisses people off.
Then there's the threat people feel when the new generation "gets away" from them. There are whole ethnic segments of society that specifically HATE the idea of their kids being smarter , more accomplished, more knowledgeable than they are.
Three, this is a PITA to the existing educational structure . It's not like hands on learning and experimentation are somehow new ideas in education. It's that education , at least beyond high school is primarily a business with a business model it's not going to willingly disrupt.
The only revolution in education that's going to occur is the revolution of defection. Too many players with too much to lose are in charge of what education is. We need students and their parents to defect from the system and create alternative educational environments . Never mind reforming the existing ones.
Oh oh oh I get it now. You think that i should sit back and not even mock, sneer at, deride, shame and parody that segment of the American population who is deconstrcuting the basis Western civilization - science, rationality and the Enlightenment and dragging us back into the Dark Ages WHILE AT THE SAME TIME actively working to ensure that the whole cultural debate becomes moot when civilization deconstructing climate change - which BTW conservatives also deny- not is fully realized, but only becomes only a guaranteed certainty, at which point all mayhem breaks out as "the market reacts to the bad news..."
Yeah, we're all going to just continue to be nice and respect the opinion of others under that set of exigencies.
You get that all the calls on this thread to slaughter religious people and ban religion would effect nearly 100% of conservatives and anyway the anger is implicitly directed towards a distinctly conservative brand of proselytizing religion - both Islamic and Christian- and not, say the Zen Buddhist enthusiast down the road or even the peaceable Amish or Shaker Christian sects. I mean, you are capable of discerning the implicit cultural context in which we're all living... right?
I mean, if I was going to attack someone I would think to attack the people directly calling for my and my friends deaths before I attacked someone who was merely pointing out a truth known well to all.....
Oh... did I point out the identity relation between between Jihadis and their sworn enemies ? Jesus Fuck, I am sorry if I offended anyone.
"'If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads."
-The Holy Bible, the unerring Word of God, as asserted by conservatives.
Fuck I was thinking Oppenheimer and I type Heisenberg . I blame this on reading material before me at the time of typing. .
Uh let's see. Conservatives think homosexuality is, variously, a disease, a sin, a perversion and at any rate virtually all conservatives agree such people are unworthy of equal rights before the law.
As a matter of fact this being against gay marriage is one of the platform planks of the conservative movement, with a very few notable exceptions, Olsen and Krauthammer amongst them.
And yes, this is unchanged from the 1800s. Why do you THINK they call themselves "conservatives" while their opposition calls themselves "progressives"?
Just land here did ya? Have a nice trip from.. whatever planet it is you're from ?
Oh I get it.....I get it... you think I that by me pointing out this well known material fact about conservatives I am somehow slandering them.
Well, I guess what they say is true. "Reality has a liberal bias "