Actually, it's the difference between long-term declarative memory (which is subserved by the hippocampus, which HM had surgically resected, and the medial temporal lobe) and procedural memory (which includes cognitive skills, such as solving the TOH problem, and motor skills, and is subserved by a different network of brain structures that includes the basal ganglia).
Also, I was at a talk where someone asked Gibson if the Piraha count their children. Gibson asked the man if he was a father. The man said no. Gibson said that people don't generally refer to their children by number, but by name. Everyone laughed.
Out of the three links to "research" provided, only one links to an actual published paper (the other two are to research papers not in peer reviewed journals).
Hmm. I count three links for Avatars and Behavioral Modeling and three for The Proteus Effect. Two are in (or will be appearing in) peer-journals. Three are empirical studies that appear to have been written up for conferences; one assumes they will be making their way into the journals soon. The sixth is an encyclopedia entry.
Bailenson's the real deal -- an experimental psychologist asking interesting scientific question about the social, emotional, and cognitive affordances and implications of VR and answering them in crisp experiments.
I'm not quite sure it's going to change how we think about learning, as they state in TFA
You're right. This is old wine in new bottles. Notice the source: a University of Indiana press release. One wonders how this bit of ho-hum research made its way to Slashdot...
The failure of Skinner and many other psychologists of the time to recognize the complexity of human language and therefore to believe that their theories could handle it has often been repeated, in psychology and AI. Quite a few linguistically oriented AI projects announced success only for it to turn out that the claims were vastly overblown because they had an inadequate understanding of the problem, which they therefore had not solved. For an entertaining critique of such work see: Norbert Hornstein and B. Elan Dresher (1976) "On Some Supposed Contributions of Artificial Intelligence to the Scientific Study of Language," Cognition 4, pp.32l-398. For a somewhat more recent example, I remember a talk by a proponent of neural nets in the late 1980s who claimed to have a net that "learned English syntax". The reality was that, if fed rather carefully constructed data, the net learned to distinguish transitive verbs from intransitive verbs. There is a lot more than that to "learning English syntax".
Your post is mostly accurate, but this paragraph draws far too sharp a line between AI and linguistics. Their bastard child -- computational linguistics -- has been a productive field for many years now.
I saw this movie with my 7 year old girl and two of her friends, one boy and one girl. They were utterly bored for most of the movie. Really, if I hadn't saturated them with candy with a trip to the drugstore beforehand, I would have had a rebellion on my hands. Each child asked me several times to take them outside: to use the bathroom, get a drink of water, etc. I was happy to oblige. Afterwards, as we were leaving the theater, a mother commended me for being so patient with their requests. I told her that, frankly, I was glad for the breaks.
Why is the movie so bad? It's hard to fit all the reasons in a Slashdot post. For one, there is no real narrative for the audience to cling to. If they would have focused on the plight of one particular pair of penguins and their offspring, it would have been easier to care. Another problem is that fully half the movie is spent with the penguins standing closely to each other in group, whether waiting for the egg to come or, after it does come, waiting for it to hatch or, after it hatches, waiting for the baby penguin to be strong enough to walk around on its own. To me, it was just a bunch of standing around in the same middle-of-nowhere location that long ago lost its charm.
A Lisp macro is a function that is applied at compile time, not run time, so in this sense it is not like a C function.
A Lisp macro performs an arbitrary rewrite of a Lisp expression into another Lisp expression. Because Lisp programs are expressed as Lisp data (i.e., lists), and because the full power of Lisp is available to implement this transformation, it is much more powerful than a C macro.
The upshot of this is that macros can be used to extend the control structure of Lisp itself. (Think templates on steroids, perhaps.) This allows you to (more) neatly encapsulate what would be a complex idiom or design pattern in languages that lack similarly powerful macro facilities.
(Scheme, the bastard offspring of Lisp and Algol, has a "hygenic" macro facility that has a number of interesting properties. Dylan, a Lisp with more conventional syntax, also has an interesting macro system. I am unaware of any other comparable languages in this regard.)
As for as your trichotomy goes, that is what we have now -- the poor don't pay because they can't, the rich don't pay because they can sneak around it, and the rest of us who are in the middle end up paying for everything.
The poor pay sales tax and those who work legally pay FICA. These are two of the most regressive taxes out there.
[An aside: FICA puts the lie to those on the right who claim that 50% of wage earners pay no federal tax. As if income tax is the only federal tax?!]
This, obviously, is no solution.
If the rich sneak out of their tax obligations, then call for increased supervision and draconian penalties on tax evasion -- on par, say, with those we impose on drug users and copyright violators. This, obviously, is the solution.
If you are middle class and you believe in a flat tax, I'm sorry, but you've been duped by the rich in another one of their sneaky schemes.
Please do the math on what a family of four making $50,000 a year or less will pay under a 15% flat tax versus what they pay now. Then do the same pair of calculations for a family make $200,000 a year. Notice whose tax burden goes way up and whose way down? For reduced paperwork, you're willing to let this happen?
And what makes you think the sneaky rich will not continue to find ways to avoid paying their fair share?
The solution is a flat tax, not a sales tax. The [...] more you make, the more you pay. Simple and fair.
By this reasoning, any strictly monotonically increasing tax curve is fair. So why a linear tax? Why not a logarithmic tax? Or an exponential tax?
A sales tax is inherently regressive; a flat tax is, by definition, progressive.
This is a slogan and a false dichotomy, not a definition or logical deduction. Why not a trichotomy of taxation schemes: (1) regressive (sublinear, e.g., logarithmic), (2) flat (linear), and (3) progressive (superlinear, e.g., exponential)?
It probably wasn't the first time he'd driven drunk, it was only a matter of time before he caused an accident.
And you know this...how?
It's incredibly fortuanate he didn't kill anyone
Not relevant. The question at hand was whether he was poorly represented by his lawyer.
he was lucky to get 24 days.
What percentage of people (first-time offenders) get more than 24 days? Was his sentence incredibly light compared to the average? If the answer is "no," then stop using hyperbole to make it seem like he got away with something.
His friend presumably knew he was drunk when he got into the car. And allowed him to drive.
Once again, how do you know this? Maybe he lied to his friend? Maybe his friend was drunk and couldn't tell if he was drunk? The driver is guilty of driving drunk. Everyone else is innocent in this matter.
Stop trying to make this a black-and-white thing, where those innocent-before-God (e.g., you) stand on one side and those unredeemable souls (and their friends) stand on the other, and no punishment is severe enough for the latter group.
As someone that was seriously injured as the result of another driver under the influence, you should not be concentrating on how poor and pitiful you are, but on what a fucked-up thing you did.
Yeah. I can't believe ran his car into a bus full of children. Oh wait. He didn't do that.
You're actually quite lucky that's all the damage that was done. You could have been in an accident and killed your friend, or even worse an innocent bystander.
Why is a bystander more innocent than his friend?
Anyway, stop with the woulda/coulda/shoulda. He got in an accident while drunk and someone was hurt. Dems the facts.
Could your attorney have plead down to a lesser crime? Possibly. But it's kind of screwy that you're worried you were punished too harshly. It's 24 days...geez.
Are you kidding?!
He got bad legal advice and the result is huge debt, a prison record, and no college education. This is what he's complaining about, and you would too if a lawyer's poor representation left you in a similar situation.
This is a case of differing definitions: what is a "Small Business"? [...] Your statistics compare SMALL businesses against LARGE, apparently ignoring the "mid" tier altogether.
Ahh, makes sense.
(sigh)
Perhaps the old adage is correct; There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
No need to *sigh*. I learned something. Going forward, I'll know that this distinction exists, and therefore be a better consumer of other people's numbers.
Most people I know have never heard of UIUC. I think you're overstating its precieved prestige. When my parents were discussing universities with me, they heard of Harvard and Yale but do you think they know of Texas, Berkely, or UIUC? Most "common" people really haven't heard of these obviously serious and credible schools but popular media and culture teaches people only to blindly revere the schools of the elite rich.
Who cares if you're parents or most of the people you know are uniformed about which schools are good for which programs. The same morons think Duke is a top 5 university because of Coach K.
Anyone technical knows the worth of UIUC's engineering school. (No, I am not a graduate.) And Berkeley!? Jesus Christ man, it's probably one of the top 10 universities in the world! You sure your parents never heard of it?
None of these damn morons at US News have sat in classrooms and received an education.
I detest the rankings too, but this statement is ridiculous.
Does the fact that my school spends 600 million dollars a year in research really mean anything when it comes to my measly bachelors degree?
For most, no. But if you want to do research as an undergrad, you're better off at a top research university.
When I was a young man, it was well known that the easy way into the likes of Yale was to say you wanted to major in "applied science" or whatever they called engineering in their endearingly anachronistic way.
Small businesses represent more of the US GNP than ever before.
This is an interesting statement. I never heard anyone make it before.
Do you mean it in the trivial sense of more $$$ than ever before?
Or do you mean it in the more meaningful sense of larger % of GDP?
I assume the latter. The front page of a Google search on "small business GDP" yielded one piece of real research. Chart 1 (p. 7) of that report tells a different story. Small business' share GDP (relative to large business') drops steadily from 1958 (the first year shown) to 1980, is relatively steady until 1992, and then experiences a slight increase until 2000 (the last year shown). Over the entire span, there is a substantial decrease on the small business' share of GDP.
That's just one study of course, done by an economist at what appears to be a pro small business organization. One that I merely skimmed.
Professional photographers are gonna have to face reality on this one. I remember interviewing a bunch for my wedding. I was shocked to learn that they would be retaining the negatives so that if ever in my life I wanted more pictures, I would be paying them an astronomical markup to print them for me. Almost every one of them had this policy. Sorta like razors and razor blades, except the razor itself cost $1000+.
Fast forward a decade. The means for reproduction are in our hands. They will have to change their pricing model so that more of their profit comes from the initial fee and less from the duplicates that a smaller and smaller percentage of their clientele will come to them for.
Now, if you're from a design background I imagine you'd cope better with the apple zealot -- though I'm sure it would still be annoying. Being from a technical background, I can handle linux zealots, though I still find them annoying.
In my experience:
Lots of technical types like Macs as "front end" machines and respect Unix boxes as good "back end" machines.
Comparatively few technical types like Windows (relative to their marketshare). However, they do like the cheap hardware, and were long willing to put up with Windows as a necessary mediocrity. However, as spyware and the like have exploded, this trade-off has started to look less and less desirable.
The one argument I rarely hear true technical types make is "everyone else uses Windows, so it must be better." This you get mostly from the masses.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's the difference between long-term declarative memory (which is subserved by the hippocampus, which HM had surgically resected, and the medial temporal lobe) and procedural memory (which includes cognitive skills, such as solving the TOH problem, and motor skills, and is subserved by a different network of brain structures that includes the basal ganglia).
What he said.
Also, I was at a talk where someone asked Gibson if the Piraha count their children. Gibson asked the man if he was a father. The man said no. Gibson said that people don't generally refer to their children by number, but by name. Everyone laughed.
Out of the three links to "research" provided, only one links to an actual published paper (the other two are to research papers not in peer reviewed journals).
Hmm. I count three links for Avatars and Behavioral Modeling and three for The Proteus Effect. Two are in (or will be appearing in) peer-journals. Three are empirical studies that appear to have been written up for conferences; one assumes they will be making their way into the journals soon. The sixth is an encyclopedia entry.
Bailenson's the real deal -- an experimental psychologist asking interesting scientific question about the social, emotional, and cognitive affordances and implications of VR and answering them in crisp experiments.
I'm not quite sure it's going to change how we think about learning, as they state in TFA
You're right. This is old wine in new bottles. Notice the source: a University of Indiana press release. One wonders how this bit of ho-hum research made its way to Slashdot...
The failure of Skinner and many other psychologists of the time to recognize the complexity of human language and therefore to believe that their theories could handle it has often been repeated, in psychology and AI. Quite a few linguistically oriented AI projects announced success only for it to turn out that the claims were vastly overblown because they had an inadequate understanding of the problem, which they therefore had not solved. For an entertaining critique of such work see: Norbert Hornstein and B. Elan Dresher (1976) "On Some Supposed Contributions of Artificial Intelligence to the Scientific Study of Language," Cognition 4, pp.32l-398. For a somewhat more recent example, I remember a talk by a proponent of neural nets in the late 1980s who claimed to have a net that "learned English syntax". The reality was that, if fed rather carefully constructed data, the net learned to distinguish transitive verbs from intransitive verbs. There is a lot more than that to "learning English syntax".
Your post is mostly accurate, but this paragraph draws far too sharp a line between AI and linguistics. Their bastard child -- computational linguistics -- has been a productive field for many years now.
I saw this movie with my 7 year old girl and two of her friends, one boy and one girl. They were utterly bored for most of the movie. Really, if I hadn't saturated them with candy with a trip to the drugstore beforehand, I would have had a rebellion on my hands. Each child asked me several times to take them outside: to use the bathroom, get a drink of water, etc. I was happy to oblige. Afterwards, as we were leaving the theater, a mother commended me for being so patient with their requests. I told her that, frankly, I was glad for the breaks.
Why is the movie so bad? It's hard to fit all the reasons in a Slashdot post. For one, there is no real narrative for the audience to cling to. If they would have focused on the plight of one particular pair of penguins and their offspring, it would have been easier to care. Another problem is that fully half the movie is spent with the penguins standing closely to each other in group, whether waiting for the egg to come or, after it does come, waiting for it to hatch or, after it hatches, waiting for the baby penguin to be strong enough to walk around on its own. To me, it was just a bunch of standing around in the same middle-of-nowhere location that long ago lost its charm.
Mod parent down.
This lyric is ripped from NWA's "Straight Outta Compton."
A Lisp macro is a function that is applied at compile time, not run time, so in this sense it is not like a C function.
A Lisp macro performs an arbitrary rewrite of a Lisp expression into another Lisp expression. Because Lisp programs are expressed as Lisp data (i.e., lists), and because the full power of Lisp is available to implement this transformation, it is much more powerful than a C macro.
The upshot of this is that macros can be used to extend the control structure of Lisp itself. (Think templates on steroids, perhaps.) This allows you to (more) neatly encapsulate what would be a complex idiom or design pattern in languages that lack similarly powerful macro facilities.
(Scheme, the bastard offspring of Lisp and Algol, has a "hygenic" macro facility that has a number of interesting properties. Dylan, a Lisp with more conventional syntax, also has an interesting macro system. I am unaware of any other comparable languages in this regard.)
I hope this helps.
As for as your trichotomy goes, that is what we have now -- the poor don't pay because they can't, the rich don't pay because they can sneak around it, and the rest of us who are in the middle end up paying for everything.
The poor pay sales tax and those who work legally pay FICA. These are two of the most regressive taxes out there.
[An aside: FICA puts the lie to those on the right who claim that 50% of wage earners pay no federal tax. As if income tax is the only federal tax?!]
This, obviously, is no solution.
If the rich sneak out of their tax obligations, then call for increased supervision and draconian penalties on tax evasion -- on par, say, with those we impose on drug users and copyright violators. This, obviously, is the solution.
If you are middle class and you believe in a flat tax, I'm sorry, but you've been duped by the rich in another one of their sneaky schemes.
Please do the math on what a family of four making $50,000 a year or less will pay under a 15% flat tax versus what they pay now. Then do the same pair of calculations for a family make $200,000 a year. Notice whose tax burden goes way up and whose way down? For reduced paperwork, you're willing to let this happen?
And what makes you think the sneaky rich will not continue to find ways to avoid paying their fair share?
The solution is a flat tax, not a sales tax. The [...] more you make, the more you pay. Simple and fair.
By this reasoning, any strictly monotonically increasing tax curve is fair. So why a linear tax? Why not a logarithmic tax? Or an exponential tax?
A sales tax is inherently regressive; a flat tax is, by definition, progressive.
This is a slogan and a false dichotomy, not a definition or logical deduction. Why not a trichotomy of taxation schemes: (1) regressive (sublinear, e.g., logarithmic), (2) flat (linear), and (3) progressive (superlinear, e.g., exponential)?
It probably wasn't the first time he'd driven drunk, it was only a matter of time before he caused an accident.
And you know this...how?
It's incredibly fortuanate he didn't kill anyone
Not relevant. The question at hand was whether he was poorly represented by his lawyer.
he was lucky to get 24 days.
What percentage of people (first-time offenders) get more than 24 days? Was his sentence incredibly light compared to the average? If the answer is "no," then stop using hyperbole to make it seem like he got away with something.
His friend presumably knew he was drunk when he got into the car. And allowed him to drive.
Once again, how do you know this? Maybe he lied to his friend? Maybe his friend was drunk and couldn't tell if he was drunk? The driver is guilty of driving drunk. Everyone else is innocent in this matter.
Stop trying to make this a black-and-white thing, where those innocent-before-God (e.g., you) stand on one side and those unredeemable souls (and their friends) stand on the other, and no punishment is severe enough for the latter group.
As someone that was seriously injured as the result of another driver under the influence, you should not be concentrating on how poor and pitiful you are, but on what a fucked-up thing you did.
Yeah. I can't believe ran his car into a bus full of children. Oh wait. He didn't do that.
You're actually quite lucky that's all the damage that was done. You could have been in an accident and killed your friend, or even worse an innocent bystander.
Why is a bystander more innocent than his friend?
Anyway, stop with the woulda/coulda/shoulda. He got in an accident while drunk and someone was hurt. Dems the facts.
Could your attorney have plead down to a lesser crime? Possibly. But it's kind of screwy that you're worried you were punished too harshly. It's 24 days...geez.
Are you kidding?!
He got bad legal advice and the result is huge debt, a prison record, and no college education. This is what he's complaining about, and you would too if a lawyer's poor representation left you in a similar situation.
Jesus Christ. Michael Moore was right.
Jesus Christ. These are two of the saddest tales I have ever heard.
I know it's trite, but I and probably many others have you in our thoughts.
I take it that your school doesn't rank near the top in English.
Actually, it does.
But it's not known for its typing major.
It was meant as a percentage of GNP.
Good.
This is a case of differing definitions: what is a "Small Business"? [...] Your statistics compare SMALL businesses against LARGE, apparently ignoring the "mid" tier altogether.
Ahh, makes sense.
(sigh)
Perhaps the old adage is correct; There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
No need to *sigh*. I learned something. Going forward, I'll know that this distinction exists, and therefore be a better consumer of other people's numbers.
Most people I know have never heard of UIUC. I think you're overstating its precieved prestige. When my parents were discussing universities with me, they heard of Harvard and Yale but do you think they know of Texas, Berkely, or UIUC? Most "common" people really haven't heard of these obviously serious and credible schools but popular media and culture teaches people only to blindly revere the schools of the elite rich.
Who cares if you're parents or most of the people you know are uniformed about which schools are good for which programs. The same morons think Duke is a top 5 university because of Coach K.
Anyone technical knows the worth of UIUC's engineering school. (No, I am not a graduate.) And Berkeley!? Jesus Christ man, it's probably one of the top 10 universities in the world! You sure your parents never heard of it?
None of these damn morons at US News have sat in classrooms and received an education.
I detest the rankings too, but this statement is ridiculous.
Does the fact that my school spends 600 million dollars a year in research really mean anything when it comes to my measly bachelors degree?
For most, no. But if you want to do research as an undergrad, you're better off at a top research university.
Spot on.
When I was a young man, it was well known that the easy way into the likes of Yale was to say you wanted to major in "applied science" or whatever they called engineering in their endearingly anachronistic way.
Small businesses represent more of the US GNP than ever before.
This is an interesting statement. I never heard anyone make it before.
Do you mean it in the trivial sense of more $$$ than ever before?
Or do you mean it in the more meaningful sense of larger % of GDP?
I assume the latter. The front page of a Google search on "small business GDP" yielded one piece of real research. Chart 1 (p. 7) of that report tells a different story. Small business' share GDP (relative to large business') drops steadily from 1958 (the first year shown) to 1980, is relatively steady until 1992, and then experiences a slight increase until 2000 (the last year shown). Over the entire span, there is a substantial decrease on the small business' share of GDP.
That's just one study of course, done by an economist at what appears to be a pro small business organization. One that I merely skimmed.
Could you point me to some better data?
Professional photographers are gonna have to face reality on this one. I remember interviewing a bunch for my wedding. I was shocked to learn that they would be retaining the negatives so that if ever in my life I wanted more pictures, I would be paying them an astronomical markup to print them for me. Almost every one of them had this policy. Sorta like razors and razor blades, except the razor itself cost $1000+.
Fast forward a decade. The means for reproduction are in our hands. They will have to change their pricing model so that more of their profit comes from the initial fee and less from the duplicates that a smaller and smaller percentage of their clientele will come to them for.
Maybe the grandparent was thinking of Freeman Dyson.
Spot on.
The AI in OF isn't what I would call genious.
Intentional or unintentional -- it works both ways.
Dang, beat me to it...
Now, if you're from a design background I imagine you'd cope better with the apple zealot -- though I'm sure it would still be annoying. Being from a technical background, I can handle linux zealots, though I still find them annoying.
In my experience:
Lots of technical types like Macs as "front end" machines and respect Unix boxes as good "back end" machines.
Comparatively few technical types like Windows (relative to their marketshare). However, they do like the cheap hardware, and were long willing to put up with Windows as a necessary mediocrity. However, as spyware and the like have exploded, this trade-off has started to look less and less desirable.
The one argument I rarely hear true technical types make is "everyone else uses Windows, so it must be better." This you get mostly from the masses.