I second Feynman. His physics lectures are by far his most famous, but his Lectures on Computation is a fascinating look at the mathematical basis for machine computation, and are very underrated, IMO.
One might argue that there is an obligation to respect the belief systems of others, in the sense that taxes support psychotherapy for some people, and professional standards for clinical psychologists prevent questioning a person's belief system. This seems like 'legislating respect' to me, though it may not lead to an increase in common sense in the end.
I still disagree that the brain is an elaborate state machine, unless you take the view that the universe itself is an elaborate state machine, in which case there is no distinction between the intelligent and the non-intelligent (that I can see). Moreover, if intelligence is fully subjective, i.e., if its very existence depends on the existence of a human brain to interpret it as such, then how did it evolve in the first place? If life is just chemistry, then at some point the chemicals became organized well enough for some human to interpret them as intelligent, but this event must have predated humanity. Further, the act of interpretation (i.e. the context derived from the porn pixels) is not evidence that the whole is more than the sum, it's just the reverse. The interpretation of the is porn is dependent on both the pixels and the brain, and the brain throws out a lot of information about the pixels to characterize the remaining bits as behaviorally-relevant information.
The tax controlled by the regulatory agency will not bring the freedom to the Internet. It might increase the speed at which the government can use the Internet to deliver the propaganda.
"Ultimately, if neuroscience and AI converge, meaning we can map every thought in the human brain **AND** have the technical ability to construct an artificial system that enables what we know as 'free will' and 'thought' and 'choice' and especially 'self awareness'....THEN and ONLY THEN have we made something..."
Ha, try putting that on an application for funding.
Nice post. While neurons display some behaviors that can be characterized using a state machine, they display plenty more behaviors that have not, and probably cannot, be characterized as such. A contrast-response function can be measured for a neuron in the visual system, but that is not a full explanation of its behavior or its complexity. The same is true of humans. A human taking a vision test with an eye chart can be modeled with a state machine, but it doesn't mean the human is a state machine following very simple rules. In your example the ant's nest is intelligent but the neuron is not, and I find this view peculiar.
Here's one example where you can navigate through a neural network reconstructed from EM stacks. It's lower resolution and greater volume than the one here (or similarly from conical tomography), and the UI is very nice. Definitely a huge dataset, hence the crowdsourcing. You do have to sign up, but it's to help science, and it involves playing a game.
https://eyewire.org/
Those log rolling guys were sure pissed when the wheel and axle was invented. And you should have seen how the producers of the Flintstone-mobile rioted when the internal combustion engine came along. Not to mention those classical-music-pushing jerks who almost killed rock and roll. The list goes on and on. Damn producers!
My English teacher used to say that you have to know the rules of grammar before you can acceptably break them. Same thing with Barack and the constitution I guess.
This is Rand Paul, not Ron. Rand supports Mitt "Indefinite detention of Americans without trial" Romney for president, though he claims to be a supporter of liberty and the constitution. Here's to the new boss indeed.
It also includes (or it should include) a qualifier on viewing distance. The other qualifier that's not often mentioned is brightness. All else equal, brighter display = better acuity, up to a point of course.
Much of social science research is hypocritical. On Thursday, the researcher teaches the university students to use independently and identically distributed samples. On Saturday, the researcher and students go to sporting events to loudly tout the proposition that the team from their university is superior to the team from the other university. On Monday the researcher selects a sample of these students for a research study, collects data, and does statistics. On Tuesday, the researcher publishes a paper stating that these students are an independently and identically distributed sample of the general population, despite the researcher's belief that they are, in fact, better than average people like you.
Cheers for reading the Elsevier policy, and communicating something that's not always appreciated by the non-scientific public: a lot of scientists do keep an archive of their work on their personal or lab website, and sometimes it' s nearly complete, with no secrets behind paywall. It's easy to release raw data, because journals copyrights usually just cover the particular words and figures that constitute an individual publication. Unfortunately there are risks, and this practice is not routinely rewarded on grant applications.
One valuable function of journals is the non-random selection of reviewers. I'd argue that an essential function of the peer review process is the selection of appropriate reviewers. Editors must account for the scientific expertise, and conflicts of interest, of any potential reviewer. Afterward, they must make editorial judgements based on personal interactions between authors and reviewers. These judgements are not just up or down. Publish or don't publish. There is an extended dialog in the review process that is mediated by the editor.
Moreover, reviewers must know the authors' identity: in many scientific fields, the reputation of the authors, prior publication of their methods, etc., is integrated into the publication, and essential to the review process. Cryptography can't take that away. Further, there is no such thing as a 'trusted party'. There are many journals and various publishing houses. None in isolation can be trusted, but we can trust that they each want to publish more of the best science. How will that dynamic be replicated in a new one-size-fits-all system? I applaud and promote efforts to open up the publication of scientific data, but these efforts must take care to preserve the things that the current system gets right.
In my experience the big research institutions are getting rid of the old bound journals, and won't take any more, even from well-maintained private faculty collections. I find it unlikely that any big institution will want to maintain a working archive of thousands and thousands of electronic journals either. The NIH is a proponent of open access, and the pub med central open access subset is an ideal example of stored archives. But even then, journals still serve a valuable function, and copyright still matters because it's how they make money. I'm all for phasing out the current publication model, but the UCSF policy won't change anything without a viable alternative to the current semi-independent peer review process, that allows scientists to publish without paying hefty fees. This reality is why the policy doesn't have any teeth.
So their "policy" is that taxpayers have the right to see published forms of research they funded, as long as it's OK with the journal publisher. From TFA: "Researchers are able to “opt out” if they want to publish in a certain journal but find that the publisher is unwilling to comply with the UCSF policy. “The hope,” said Schneider, “is that faculty will think twice about where they publish, and choose to publish in journals that support the goals of the policy.”
The current peer review process is not perfect, but as you mention, it provides several benefits: researchers can be organized, and because of independent journal publishing, the people who select the peer reviewer are different from the people with a personal financial stake in the grant-funding process. Same with editing - the editor must referee between the authors and the reviewers, and if they're scientific colleagues, that easily leads to conflicts of interest. pauljlucas just covered the distribution issue.
Whether humanity's method of information gathering is books and TV, the Internet, or (Heaven Forbid) interpersonal interaction, we'll all do it in some combination of long and short intervals. The Internet makes it possible to do both the high-frequency information gathering described here, and low-frequency contemplative activities such as gaming sessions,./ articles and reading science papers. It's a lot easier now to learn about a single, narrow topic in depth than it has ever been in the past. Science has become more specialized. Less time spent searching for facts means more time to spend contemplating your favorite scientific issue. Consequently, given a period of time and a problem of a given complexity, scientists can now analyze an issue / solving a problem in greater detail and with better efficiency. Contemplate that, Carr.
The Matlab Statistics Toolbox seems pretty good to me, though I don't use R, and I don't do a ton of statistics. Can anybody comment on what makes it frustrating (besides trying to use the output of the code to produce a publication-quality figure)?
Slashdot Mirror
I second Feynman. His physics lectures are by far his most famous, but his Lectures on Computation is a fascinating look at the mathematical basis for machine computation, and are very underrated, IMO.
The scientists were hiring lab managers, not students. Career ambition probably didn't play a major role in their decision.
One might argue that there is an obligation to respect the belief systems of others, in the sense that taxes support psychotherapy for some people, and professional standards for clinical psychologists prevent questioning a person's belief system. This seems like 'legislating respect' to me, though it may not lead to an increase in common sense in the end.
My preferred system also, along with a separate footrest so I can sit with ankles resting below knees. Adjustable footrest is a bonus.
+1 Shouting down a non-profit
I still disagree that the brain is an elaborate state machine, unless you take the view that the universe itself is an elaborate state machine, in which case there is no distinction between the intelligent and the non-intelligent (that I can see). Moreover, if intelligence is fully subjective, i.e., if its very existence depends on the existence of a human brain to interpret it as such, then how did it evolve in the first place? If life is just chemistry, then at some point the chemicals became organized well enough for some human to interpret them as intelligent, but this event must have predated humanity. Further, the act of interpretation (i.e. the context derived from the porn pixels) is not evidence that the whole is more than the sum, it's just the reverse. The interpretation of the is porn is dependent on both the pixels and the brain, and the brain throws out a lot of information about the pixels to characterize the remaining bits as behaviorally-relevant information.
The tax controlled by the regulatory agency will not bring the freedom to the Internet. It might increase the speed at which the government can use the Internet to deliver the propaganda.
"Ultimately, if neuroscience and AI converge, meaning we can map every thought in the human brain **AND** have the technical ability to construct an artificial system that enables what we know as 'free will' and 'thought' and 'choice' and especially 'self awareness'....THEN and ONLY THEN have we made something..." Ha, try putting that on an application for funding.
Nice post. While neurons display some behaviors that can be characterized using a state machine, they display plenty more behaviors that have not, and probably cannot, be characterized as such. A contrast-response function can be measured for a neuron in the visual system, but that is not a full explanation of its behavior or its complexity. The same is true of humans. A human taking a vision test with an eye chart can be modeled with a state machine, but it doesn't mean the human is a state machine following very simple rules. In your example the ant's nest is intelligent but the neuron is not, and I find this view peculiar.
The analysis on market-ticker today suggests 5GB is still the approximate upper limit. http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=210521
Here's one example where you can navigate through a neural network reconstructed from EM stacks. It's lower resolution and greater volume than the one here (or similarly from conical tomography), and the UI is very nice. Definitely a huge dataset, hence the crowdsourcing. You do have to sign up, but it's to help science, and it involves playing a game. https://eyewire.org/
Those log rolling guys were sure pissed when the wheel and axle was invented. And you should have seen how the producers of the Flintstone-mobile rioted when the internal combustion engine came along. Not to mention those classical-music-pushing jerks who almost killed rock and roll. The list goes on and on. Damn producers!
My English teacher used to say that you have to know the rules of grammar before you can acceptably break them. Same thing with Barack and the constitution I guess.
This is Rand Paul, not Ron. Rand supports Mitt "Indefinite detention of Americans without trial" Romney for president, though he claims to be a supporter of liberty and the constitution. Here's to the new boss indeed.
That actually was the funny I was looking for.
It also includes (or it should include) a qualifier on viewing distance. The other qualifier that's not often mentioned is brightness. All else equal, brighter display = better acuity, up to a point of course.
Then by holding it closer than a foot to your face (i.e., holding it wrong) you'll see a better picture? I don't hate the idea...
Much of social science research is hypocritical. On Thursday, the researcher teaches the university students to use independently and identically distributed samples. On Saturday, the researcher and students go to sporting events to loudly tout the proposition that the team from their university is superior to the team from the other university. On Monday the researcher selects a sample of these students for a research study, collects data, and does statistics. On Tuesday, the researcher publishes a paper stating that these students are an independently and identically distributed sample of the general population, despite the researcher's belief that they are, in fact, better than average people like you.
Cheers for reading the Elsevier policy, and communicating something that's not always appreciated by the non-scientific public: a lot of scientists do keep an archive of their work on their personal or lab website, and sometimes it' s nearly complete, with no secrets behind paywall. It's easy to release raw data, because journals copyrights usually just cover the particular words and figures that constitute an individual publication. Unfortunately there are risks, and this practice is not routinely rewarded on grant applications.
One valuable function of journals is the non-random selection of reviewers. I'd argue that an essential function of the peer review process is the selection of appropriate reviewers. Editors must account for the scientific expertise, and conflicts of interest, of any potential reviewer. Afterward, they must make editorial judgements based on personal interactions between authors and reviewers. These judgements are not just up or down. Publish or don't publish. There is an extended dialog in the review process that is mediated by the editor. Moreover, reviewers must know the authors' identity: in many scientific fields, the reputation of the authors, prior publication of their methods, etc., is integrated into the publication, and essential to the review process. Cryptography can't take that away. Further, there is no such thing as a 'trusted party'. There are many journals and various publishing houses. None in isolation can be trusted, but we can trust that they each want to publish more of the best science. How will that dynamic be replicated in a new one-size-fits-all system? I applaud and promote efforts to open up the publication of scientific data, but these efforts must take care to preserve the things that the current system gets right.
In my experience the big research institutions are getting rid of the old bound journals, and won't take any more, even from well-maintained private faculty collections. I find it unlikely that any big institution will want to maintain a working archive of thousands and thousands of electronic journals either. The NIH is a proponent of open access, and the pub med central open access subset is an ideal example of stored archives. But even then, journals still serve a valuable function, and copyright still matters because it's how they make money. I'm all for phasing out the current publication model, but the UCSF policy won't change anything without a viable alternative to the current semi-independent peer review process, that allows scientists to publish without paying hefty fees. This reality is why the policy doesn't have any teeth.
So their "policy" is that taxpayers have the right to see published forms of research they funded, as long as it's OK with the journal publisher. From TFA: "Researchers are able to “opt out” if they want to publish in a certain journal but find that the publisher is unwilling to comply with the UCSF policy. “The hope,” said Schneider, “is that faculty will think twice about where they publish, and choose to publish in journals that support the goals of the policy.”
The current peer review process is not perfect, but as you mention, it provides several benefits: researchers can be organized, and because of independent journal publishing, the people who select the peer reviewer are different from the people with a personal financial stake in the grant-funding process. Same with editing - the editor must referee between the authors and the reviewers, and if they're scientific colleagues, that easily leads to conflicts of interest. pauljlucas just covered the distribution issue.
Whether humanity's method of information gathering is books and TV, the Internet, or (Heaven Forbid) interpersonal interaction, we'll all do it in some combination of long and short intervals. The Internet makes it possible to do both the high-frequency information gathering described here, and low-frequency contemplative activities such as gaming sessions, ./ articles and reading science papers. It's a lot easier now to learn about a single, narrow topic in depth than it has ever been in the past. Science has become more specialized. Less time spent searching for facts means more time to spend contemplating your favorite scientific issue. Consequently, given a period of time and a problem of a given complexity, scientists can now analyze an issue / solving a problem in greater detail and with better efficiency. Contemplate that, Carr.
The Matlab Statistics Toolbox seems pretty good to me, though I don't use R, and I don't do a ton of statistics. Can anybody comment on what makes it frustrating (besides trying to use the output of the code to produce a publication-quality figure)?