It was not clear from the article (I found a draft here), but all the test items were novel. The experiment consisted of a familiarization phase that had "shoy" as either only a suffix or only a prefix, and then a test phase where "shoy" was heard as a suffix on some items and a prefix on other items. In the draft, they say that the stems used in the familiarization phase were different from the stems used in the test phase, so they were not just hearing the same componenents in different orders. So, while you're right that this is habituation, it's habituation at a higher level of abstraction than whether they'd heard that particular bitstream before.
It would have been nice if that had been included in the examiner article, heh
Right. Communication and language are different things. In language, meaningful units (whether you want to say "words" are the basic meaningful units or whatever) can be combined in ways that have never been heard before to produce astronomically huge numbers of new meanings. Communication, on the other hand, usually consists of a fairly straightforward and small mapping of signals to meanings.
The experiment did not proceed as you indicated (I'm not criticizing you, I had to go to find the draft to determine this). The monkeys were presented with a "familiarization" stage that consisted of ~30 minutes of "words" where "shoy" was either always a prefix or always a suffix (depending on condition) to one set A of stem syllables, then were presented with a "test" stage where they heard "shoy" sometimes as a prefix and sometimes as a suffix on a different set B of stem syllables. They found that monkeys who had heard "shoy" as a prefix in the familiarization stage looked at the speaker longer after hearing test items that had "shoy" as a suffix (as compared to test items that had "shoy" as a prefix), and that those who had heard "shoy" as a suffix in familiarization looked at the speaker longer after hearing test items with "shoy" as a prefix.
They do seem to have shown that the monkeys can do some sort of abstraction when performing this "shoy-first or shoy-last" sequence analysis. None of the test items ever appeared in the familiarization stage (since the stem syllables of familiarization were different from those of test), so they aren't simply indicating whether they've heard that particular sound file or not. It's also interesting that they could do this in the face of (some) talker variation (due to sex and other factors), as more than one talker was used to produce stimulus materials.
I'm not sure if they can really make any claims about how humans learn language though. Aside from how unnatural the stimulus materials are (each syllable of the two-syllable words was producedy by a different talker), their conclusions are that... kids pay attention to the order of when they hear things? We already knew that and more from e.g. Saffran et al. (1996). I'd like to see them do some variation of that artificial language study with their monkeys and see if the monkeys will do two levels of distributional analysis (word segmentation and morpheme segmentation)
human NATURAL language, which (more or less by definition, actually) means a language which was not consciously designed by humans.
This refers to the vast majority of languages (including modern english, as noted by GP) that people use to communicate with eachother on a day-to-day basis (i.e. excluding math and logic journals)
The original specs couldn't run XP very well
Afaict the original EEE 700 was pretty poor whatever OS you used due to it's very small display and very small storage, very few others made netbooks that crappy though.
I've got an EEE 4G Surf (similar to the 700 model) with the processor clocked down, and it ran fine when I installed Xubuntu on it (boot to desktop in ~1:20, and is a lot snappier than my four-year-old iBook with a much faster processor). I've since switched to fluxbox (bringing boot to "desktop" to ~40 seconds) and use it as my primary machine. I have gotten a 16GB SDHC chip ($30) for my home directory.
It seems to me that people vastly overestimate their computing requirements...
Answer: people who need access to _serious_ computing power on the move.
I definitely won't be able to get a laptop that has the power and storage of the cluster in my school's CSE department--and there's no need for me to have such a laptop. It's much easier to ssh into that cluster from my eee pc 4g surf. And the laptop is plenty snappy running fluxbox and occasionally working on local latex documents.
Marxism-Leninism doesn't actually work that way...
You're absolutely right, of course. I was mostly concerned that presenting the later Leninist developments might obscure my overall point that Communism is very different from government aid to huge corporations.
I don't think I agree with your assertion that the aid is getting paid for by "workers" - after all, we're taxing the "rich", and have been taxing businesses all along, and the bailout money's mostly getting borrowed, either from China or from Westerners who still have assets to invest in T-bills.
Under the Communist claim that all profit is exploitation (a moderated form of which claim I do agree with), the rich are rich precisely because they managed to extort money from their workers. So if we tax the rich, we're in a way taxing the workers. But your point about borrowing is well taken.
This is an important point that people don't seem to understand, probably because Marxist theory is not really taught except in specialist university level classes.
Here's the basic idea. Under Capitalism, business owners make a profit by paying their workers less than their labor is worth (so all profit is exploitation), and the business owners are able to do this because racism &c. divides the workers. Eventually, the exploitation of workers gets so bad that they develop a class consciousness on the basis of their economic status that trumps racial &c. divides, and they (forcefully) take power from the business owners. The final stage of Marxist communism is really a form of anarchy, where the means of production are owned by workers in a distributed fashion.
Agree with Communism or not, at least keep in mind that any top-down government aid paid for by workers to huge corporations is basically the opposite of Communism.
I was thinking the same thing. Does their "gated community" metaphor make sense to anyone here? The article tries to portray this as giving everyone an exclusive mansion, when really it sounds like they're more after a mandatory ID card.
Hah, I just made a post about using javascript because the browser and HTML allow rapid feedback then saw this comment thread. I guess I should RTFC?
I'll just go ahead and third the Javscript idea; dynamic HTML can be lots of fun and give kids an incentive to really engage the teaching process.
I was around 12 years old, and I found javascript to be an intuitive way to start. The browser was able to take care of all the GUI stuff, which left me free to play around with learning the basic programming stuff.
Yes, I am hawking my own field. But it really is a lot of fun and extremely interdisciplinary. You can do discrete math to your heart's content exploring grammatical formalisms like Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) without feeling like you're doing math for the sake of math because you have to explain real linguistic phenomena. When you get a little bored of discrete math, you can move into the statistical domain and work on trying to extract real linguistic insights out of terabytes of naturalistical speech and writing.
The algorithm does seem to consist primarily of a bunch of intuitions that David Skillicorn (http://skillicorn.wordpress.com/) has had about what textual attributes correlate with spin. The fact that statistical counts over the speeches gave different results for different politicians/speech writers is not surprising: such counts are specific to individual authors and can be used, for example, to identify authorship in the Federalist Papers (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.9.7388).
I'm very skeptical that Skillicorn has shown that these politicians are more or less prone to spin; more likely he's verified that they (and their speech writers) are, in fact, distinct people.
I wish they said what sort of algorithm was used. Is there an explicit model of wind &c. whose parameters are tuned from data, or is it some sort of straight machine learning approach like neural nets?? If the latter, I wonder how many example runs they had to make to give it enough data to be robust to environmental variation...
Slashdot Mirror
The summary reads more like an advertisement for Verizon than anything else...
If you can think of it, there is entropy of it
ask the amish?
tldr
It was not clear from the article (I found a draft here), but all the test items were novel. The experiment consisted of a familiarization phase that had "shoy" as either only a suffix or only a prefix, and then a test phase where "shoy" was heard as a suffix on some items and a prefix on other items. In the draft, they say that the stems used in the familiarization phase were different from the stems used in the test phase, so they were not just hearing the same componenents in different orders. So, while you're right that this is habituation, it's habituation at a higher level of abstraction than whether they'd heard that particular bitstream before.
It would have been nice if that had been included in the examiner article, heh
Right. Communication and language are different things. In language, meaningful units (whether you want to say "words" are the basic meaningful units or whatever) can be combined in ways that have never been heard before to produce astronomically huge numbers of new meanings. Communication, on the other hand, usually consists of a fairly straightforward and small mapping of signals to meanings.
A draft of the actual article is at:
http://adendress.googlepages.com/endress-affixation.pdf
The experiment did not proceed as you indicated (I'm not criticizing you, I had to go to find the draft to determine this). The monkeys were presented with a "familiarization" stage that consisted of ~30 minutes of "words" where "shoy" was either always a prefix or always a suffix (depending on condition) to one set A of stem syllables, then were presented with a "test" stage where they heard "shoy" sometimes as a prefix and sometimes as a suffix on a different set B of stem syllables. They found that monkeys who had heard "shoy" as a prefix in the familiarization stage looked at the speaker longer after hearing test items that had "shoy" as a suffix (as compared to test items that had "shoy" as a prefix), and that those who had heard "shoy" as a suffix in familiarization looked at the speaker longer after hearing test items with "shoy" as a prefix.
They do seem to have shown that the monkeys can do some sort of abstraction when performing this "shoy-first or shoy-last" sequence analysis. None of the test items ever appeared in the familiarization stage (since the stem syllables of familiarization were different from those of test), so they aren't simply indicating whether they've heard that particular sound file or not. It's also interesting that they could do this in the face of (some) talker variation (due to sex and other factors), as more than one talker was used to produce stimulus materials.
I'm not sure if they can really make any claims about how humans learn language though. Aside from how unnatural the stimulus materials are (each syllable of the two-syllable words was producedy by a different talker), their conclusions are that... kids pay attention to the order of when they hear things? We already knew that and more from e.g. Saffran et al. (1996). I'd like to see them do some variation of that artificial language study with their monkeys and see if the monkeys will do two levels of distributional analysis (word segmentation and morpheme segmentation)
And yes, I Am A Linguist.
human NATURAL language, which (more or less by definition, actually) means a language which was not consciously designed by humans.
This refers to the vast majority of languages (including modern english, as noted by GP) that people use to communicate with eachother on a day-to-day basis (i.e. excluding math and logic journals)
whether this is a symptom or a cause or both
to make bing the "google that's safe for kids"?
The original specs couldn't run XP very well Afaict the original EEE 700 was pretty poor whatever OS you used due to it's very small display and very small storage, very few others made netbooks that crappy though.
I've got an EEE 4G Surf (similar to the 700 model) with the processor clocked down, and it ran fine when I installed Xubuntu on it (boot to desktop in ~1:20, and is a lot snappier than my four-year-old iBook with a much faster processor). I've since switched to fluxbox (bringing boot to "desktop" to ~40 seconds) and use it as my primary machine. I have gotten a 16GB SDHC chip ($30) for my home directory.
It seems to me that people vastly overestimate their computing requirements...
Answer: people who need access to _serious_ computing power on the move.
I definitely won't be able to get a laptop that has the power and storage of the cluster in my school's CSE department--and there's no need for me to have such a laptop. It's much easier to ssh into that cluster from my eee pc 4g surf. And the laptop is plenty snappy running fluxbox and occasionally working on local latex documents.
Marxism-Leninism doesn't actually work that way...
You're absolutely right, of course. I was mostly concerned that presenting the later Leninist developments might obscure my overall point that Communism is very different from government aid to huge corporations.
I don't think I agree with your assertion that the aid is getting paid for by "workers" - after all, we're taxing the "rich", and have been taxing businesses all along, and the bailout money's mostly getting borrowed, either from China or from Westerners who still have assets to invest in T-bills.
Under the Communist claim that all profit is exploitation (a moderated form of which claim I do agree with), the rich are rich precisely because they managed to extort money from their workers. So if we tax the rich, we're in a way taxing the workers. But your point about borrowing is well taken.
This is an important point that people don't seem to understand, probably because Marxist theory is not really taught except in specialist university level classes.
Here's the basic idea. Under Capitalism, business owners make a profit by paying their workers less than their labor is worth (so all profit is exploitation), and the business owners are able to do this because racism &c. divides the workers. Eventually, the exploitation of workers gets so bad that they develop a class consciousness on the basis of their economic status that trumps racial &c. divides, and they (forcefully) take power from the business owners. The final stage of Marxist communism is really a form of anarchy, where the means of production are owned by workers in a distributed fashion.
Agree with Communism or not, at least keep in mind that any top-down government aid paid for by workers to huge corporations is basically the opposite of Communism.
I was thinking the same thing. Does their "gated community" metaphor make sense to anyone here? The article tries to portray this as giving everyone an exclusive mansion, when really it sounds like they're more after a mandatory ID card.
your MOM does it with positrons
Hah, I just made a post about using javascript because the browser and HTML allow rapid feedback then saw this comment thread. I guess I should RTFC? I'll just go ahead and third the Javscript idea; dynamic HTML can be lots of fun and give kids an incentive to really engage the teaching process.
I was around 12 years old, and I found javascript to be an intuitive way to start. The browser was able to take care of all the GUI stuff, which left me free to play around with learning the basic programming stuff.
Yes, I am hawking my own field. But it really is a lot of fun and extremely interdisciplinary. You can do discrete math to your heart's content exploring grammatical formalisms like Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) without feeling like you're doing math for the sake of math because you have to explain real linguistic phenomena. When you get a little bored of discrete math, you can move into the statistical domain and work on trying to extract real linguistic insights out of terabytes of naturalistical speech and writing.
The algorithm does seem to consist primarily of a bunch of intuitions that David Skillicorn (http://skillicorn.wordpress.com/) has had about what textual attributes correlate with spin. The fact that statistical counts over the speeches gave different results for different politicians/speech writers is not surprising: such counts are specific to individual authors and can be used, for example, to identify authorship in the Federalist Papers (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.9.7388). I'm very skeptical that Skillicorn has shown that these politicians are more or less prone to spin; more likely he's verified that they (and their speech writers) are, in fact, distinct people.
I wish they said what sort of algorithm was used. Is there an explicit model of wind &c. whose parameters are tuned from data, or is it some sort of straight machine learning approach like neural nets?? If the latter, I wonder how many example runs they had to make to give it enough data to be robust to environmental variation...