Look at public health metrics. The University of Washington has a great new program called IHME which could certainly use some quality programmers. Their approaches include a lot of Bayesian stuff, but also some machine learning, a lot of modeling, and various other things that are pretty interesting.
I recently read parts of her book, The Caged Virgin, and found Ayaan Hirsi Ali to be a strong thinker, but very conservative. Much of what she has written will fit in well with the work of the American Interprise Institute, which is her new job, I think. In any case, she is often over-generalizing, taking her European continental expirience and claiming it holds for all Muslims in the West, when in much of America and the UK, things are much better. Likewise she takes Arab traditions and the way those traditions have found there way into many mosques through various means as true parts of Islam. To young Muslims, her work reads equally as anti-Muslim as right wing evangelical writings in the US. That is to say, it is not enjoyable reading her work, and one is forced to tell oneself that she is discussing Islam in Europe and the Netherlands in particular, and not the Islam that everyone expiriences or and dreams about.
Simply befriend a nerd. They are a common species of parasite and can be found in nearly all urban centres. They charge little for their advice or knowhow, and usually can be bartered with using goods such as 'Coca-cola' and 'Chocolate'.
Isn't that really a bad idea, as freelance tech support pushes down the cost of professional quality help, ultimately causeing the value of computer science and computer engeneering degrees to go down. When this sort of thing happens, people get used to lower quality service, so the market for well trained professionals decays, and everyone suffers. The same type of thing happens in design, and it results in miserable advertising art and web pages.
Don't ask me if the analyses that have been suggested are right, but I must say, M-L has been given a gift in the way that the different aspects of the report have been criticized (and corrected?) by slashdot-ers. If I'm trying to predict the future, I might as well see if I can get a report noticed by slashdot. On the other hand, the reports author, Joe Osha, is fairly well respected in his area of financial analysis, semi-conductor companies. But if you look at his old quotes, he's taken it in the shorts a few times, too, as evidenced by saying "It's very hard to find evidence of a real end to the upturn that began in late 1998" in 2000 (when everyone was saying those sorts of things).
Really, nothing new. Even Ted Williams froze himself. And its not just for eccentric rich guys. Eccentric rich guys who know science such as engeneer Bart Kosko have expressed their wish to be preserved using cryonic suspension. All that is needed is the ability to engineer biological tissue at the cellular level.
Founded in Nazi Germany by Adolph Hitlerthe UK by John Lettice and Mike "Crazy Brit" Magee in 1994. they were used to register all Jews marked for death in concentration camps report about technology. During the 60's, they supported neo-Nazis in America and were involved in the Kennedy Assassination did not exist. In the 90's they started covering IT news.
The problem of preferences engines is less scary to me than the problem of centeralized media. Not that centeralized media really hampers the average slashdotter, but look at how many people watch big 3 TV, read the daily paper, and listen to top 40 radio. If preference engines give me a constantly updated list of things I will probably like than what big media tells me to like, I'm all for it. I have the maturity to branch beyond that, and those who don't like to branch already have there sources which tell them what to like.
Whenever I see Lessig in the headlines, I always think of having to read "The Three Ring Parable" in German class. Luckily, Lessig talks a lot about making a collage of different ideas in terms of technology, While Lessing talked about making a collage of different ideas in terms of philosophy (or more precisely, religion).
In any case, I would like to draw out the comparison a bit further. Nathan the Wise was Lessing's play in favor of religious toleration, expanding what was allowable thought at the time. Lessing may have been wrong about a lot, but pushing that envelope was a great thing. Lessig too risks his reputation by pushing the envelope. In the future, we will probably see intellectual property law very differently, thanks to the discussions going on now.
(from the interview)
. . . imagine a group of butchers who've spent their lives dealing with cut-up meat. That's the way they understand how to make money, to cut up meat and sell it in the most efficient way. And then they come across a racehorse and, of course, their first intuition is, here's a valuable resource--we'll cut it up and sell it in bits. But all of us recognize that the racehorse is more valuable without being ground into this system of butchery if it gets to be used in this different way.
And that's the way I think we should think about our culture. Their conception of how to make money off the culture is to cut it up and sell it like pieces of dead meat. And that's of course valuable for butchers, but it's not clear it's valuable for society. If all content is locked in these little separate containers and you have to seek permission to do anything with it, then a huge potential, both economic and social, will have been lost.
His article is very interesting, covering topics from music to coding Markov Chains. His discussion of beat dissonance was very interesting, developing an idea which parallels to tonal dissonance. However two problems arise. As the above poster notes, using Markov chains as he does creates some doubt as to the importance of the hamsters in the experiment.
The way that the hamsters control the music is fairly random over a short time. The tone and rhythm is controlled by an individual hamster, with more or less variation based upon where the hamster is standing in its cage (in terms of left and right). This variation is then inputed as a probability distribution in a Markov transition matrix. At any given moment, the hamster's position will be fairly arbitrary. Over long periods of time, however, patterns will develop, based upon where the food is, where the hamster likes to sleep, etc. These long term patterns which have periods of random activity in the middle would create more interesting music, in my opinion. This two minute jig from two minutes of activity sounds fairly random. But if he had crated a two minute jig from two weeks of activity, the music would have possibly been more elegant.
As noted, another issue is the use of a pentatonic scale. For those who are not musically inclined, but wish to be, pentatonic instruments such as Native American Flutes [woodlandvoices.com] make beautiful music very easily. (Full disclosure, my friend is the maker of the flutes I linked to, but there are many other options out there).
Zawensky's program (dadadodo) [jwz.org] takes its probablities from the relationship between words and phrases in a seed text, rather than working in the mad-lib style of mission statement generators, and some other phrase generators that can be found on the net. In this way, dadadodo acts as a dissociators which is similar to a collage. Text is taken from some source, cut into pieces, and pasted into the new document. The idea is that in langage, it may be possible to simulate things like parts of speech and meaning by analyzing the probabilities of words appearing in sentences which have correct meaning and syntax. For dissociators, that probability can lead to random text. For this translation project, probabilistic rules are generated about meanings, and structure of language.
This reminda me of Jamie Zawinskies hack Dadadodo which used probability trees to create new texts from old texts by examining the probability any given word follows the previous word/string of words. I always thought his program was cool, in that his description of it involved Markov Chains and William S. Burroughs.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at public health metrics. The University of Washington has a great new program called IHME which could certainly use some quality programmers. Their approaches include a lot of Bayesian stuff, but also some machine learning, a lot of modeling, and various other things that are pretty interesting.
Agent Based Modeling tools such as Repast, SWARM, and NetLogo are changing how social research is being done.
I recently read parts of her book, The Caged Virgin, and found Ayaan Hirsi Ali to be a strong thinker, but very conservative. Much of what she has written will fit in well with the work of the American Interprise Institute, which is her new job, I think. In any case, she is often over-generalizing, taking her European continental expirience and claiming it holds for all Muslims in the West, when in much of America and the UK, things are much better. Likewise she takes Arab traditions and the way those traditions have found there way into many mosques through various means as true parts of Islam. To young Muslims, her work reads equally as anti-Muslim as right wing evangelical writings in the US. That is to say, it is not enjoyable reading her work, and one is forced to tell oneself that she is discussing Islam in Europe and the Netherlands in particular, and not the Islam that everyone expiriences or and dreams about.
Simply befriend a nerd. They are a common species of parasite and can be found in nearly all urban centres. They charge little for their advice or knowhow, and usually can be bartered with using goods such as 'Coca-cola' and 'Chocolate'.
Isn't that really a bad idea, as freelance tech support pushes down the cost of professional quality help, ultimately causeing the value of computer science and computer engeneering degrees to go down. When this sort of thing happens, people get used to lower quality service, so the market for well trained professionals decays, and everyone suffers. The same type of thing happens in design, and it results in miserable advertising art and web pages.
Don't ask me if the analyses that have been suggested are right, but I must say, M-L has been given a gift in the way that the different aspects of the report have been criticized (and corrected?) by slashdot-ers. If I'm trying to predict the future, I might as well see if I can get a report noticed by slashdot. On the other hand, the reports author, Joe Osha, is fairly well respected in his area of financial analysis, semi-conductor companies. But if you look at his old quotes, he's taken it in the shorts a few times, too, as evidenced by saying "It's very hard to find evidence of a real end to the upturn that began in late 1998" in 2000 (when everyone was saying those sorts of things).
Really, nothing new. Even Ted Williams froze himself. And its not just for eccentric rich guys. Eccentric rich guys who know science such as engeneer Bart Kosko have expressed their wish to be preserved using cryonic suspension. All that is needed is the ability to engineer biological tissue at the cellular level.
Founded in Nazi Germany by Adolph Hitlerthe UK by John Lettice and Mike "Crazy Brit" Magee in 1994. they were used to register all Jews marked for death in concentration camps report about technology. During the 60's, they supported neo-Nazis in America and were involved in the Kennedy Assassination did not exist. In the 90's they started covering IT news.
- From WikiPedia
The problem of preferences engines is less scary to me than the problem of centeralized media. Not that centeralized media really hampers the average slashdotter, but look at how many people watch big 3 TV, read the daily paper, and listen to top 40 radio. If preference engines give me a constantly updated list of things I will probably like than what big media tells me to like, I'm all for it. I have the maturity to branch beyond that, and those who don't like to branch already have there sources which tell them what to like.
In any case, I would like to draw out the comparison a bit further. Nathan the Wise was Lessing's play in favor of religious toleration, expanding what was allowable thought at the time. Lessing may have been wrong about a lot, but pushing that envelope was a great thing. Lessig too risks his reputation by pushing the envelope. In the future, we will probably see intellectual property law very differently, thanks to the discussions going on now.
His article is very interesting, covering topics from music to coding Markov Chains. His discussion of beat dissonance was very interesting, developing an idea which parallels to tonal dissonance. However two problems arise. As the above poster notes, using Markov chains as he does creates some doubt as to the importance of the hamsters in the experiment.
The way that the hamsters control the music is fairly random over a short time. The tone and rhythm is controlled by an individual hamster, with more or less variation based upon where the hamster is standing in its cage (in terms of left and right). This variation is then inputed as a probability distribution in a Markov transition matrix. At any given moment, the hamster's position will be fairly arbitrary. Over long periods of time, however, patterns will develop, based upon where the food is, where the hamster likes to sleep, etc. These long term patterns which have periods of random activity in the middle would create more interesting music, in my opinion. This two minute jig from two minutes of activity sounds fairly random. But if he had crated a two minute jig from two weeks of activity, the music would have possibly been more elegant.
As noted, another issue is the use of a pentatonic scale. For those who are not musically inclined, but wish to be, pentatonic instruments such as Native American Flutes [woodlandvoices.com] make beautiful music very easily. (Full disclosure, my friend is the maker of the flutes I linked to, but there are many other options out there).
Zawensky's program (dadadodo) [jwz.org] takes its probablities from the relationship between words and phrases in a seed text, rather than working in the mad-lib style of mission statement generators, and some other phrase generators that can be found on the net. In this way, dadadodo acts as a dissociators which is similar to a collage. Text is taken from some source, cut into pieces, and pasted into the new document. The idea is that in langage, it may be possible to simulate things like parts of speech and meaning by analyzing the probabilities of words appearing in sentences which have correct meaning and syntax. For dissociators, that probability can lead to random text. For this translation project, probabilistic rules are generated about meanings, and structure of language.
This reminda me of Jamie Zawinskies hack Dadadodo which used probability trees to create new texts from old texts by examining the probability any given word follows the previous word/string of words. I always thought his program was cool, in that his description of it involved Markov Chains and William S. Burroughs.