You may have noted that people trend Liberal when young, and then trend Conservative as they age....which is an interesting segue into something - surprisingly - nobody has brought up yet. (Or maybe not, as Slashdotters, 1/4 of whom still live with their parents according to a recent poll, tend to be quite young on average.)
They're NOT thinking the way adults think because they absolutely, positively can't do it yet. Adolescent brains just aren't "hard wired" like adult brains.
I'll leave it up to Slashdot to decide if there's a correlation.
While you respond in disgust, what happens if one day science does indeed discover that biology trumphs freewill? What if almost all of out behaviors are predetermined by chemistry?
Won't happen. As far as we know, there are very few (if any) genetically-determined behaviors. Almost all of them require some kind of trigger, or outside stimulus.
The real question is whether or not we can invent our own stimulus.
Actually, we're deathly afraid of the power the judiciary has gotten over the law. Otherwise, the amendment never would have come up.
As it is, with a simple majority of FIVE, the United States Supreme Court can invent rights that the entire electorate isn't prepared, and has never been called on, to secure. The states are doing just fine defining marriage on their own (something like 41 and counting, with five having their own constitutional amendments), but all it takes is for the USSC to decide that sexual orientation fits into the protected class "sex." (Loving v. Virginia already established that marriage is a matter of equal protection.) Then the entire country, regardless of existing law (including the DoMA), is forced to recognize unions that most of them don't approve of.
Shouldn't this be something for the people to decide?
The idea that the judiciary has so much power is repugnant to a lot of people. (Except the clueless ones, who don't know tyranny when they see it.) The problem lies with politicians in both major parties. They haven't been able to get some of their party platform's pet legislation passed, so they've let the judiciary get powerful, hoping to be able to put their "own" judges in. Judicial appointments should never be as hotly contested as they are.
How does that make you feel? Knowing that you are playing the same games that are used for training for soldier's in the army?
Am I the only one that is scared by that thought?
Is our nation a nation of war and destruction? Are our future young children going to grow up being trained to kill?
I feel about like I would if my son were into martial arts. In teaching self-defense, they usually teach you how to break bones, shatter knees and elbows, and often how to kill. My kid would be safe from bullies, and much safer from random acts of violence on the street.
On a national scale, it's good for the same reason. The United States can't pretend it's as insignificant a target as, say, New Zealand. There are thousands out there who want a piece of us. We also can't pretend that some big country is going to rush to our aid if we're attacked - because we are that Big Country that usually does it.
You can sit and pretend that it's all happy and gay in the world, and that just being nice to people is enough to keep you safe, but you'd be horribly wrong. Bad things happen, to us and to our allies. Once you're forced into battle, don't you want to make sure you'll win?
Theologically, "soul" makes a whole lot more sense.
Contextually - you know, that pesky thing scholars like to ignore too often - "soul" still makes more sense.
Mark 8:34-36 (KJV):
34 And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. 35 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it. 36 For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
Consider also that words like "breath" and "life" are very often used to describe the non-material part of a person, sometimes regarded to be, symbolically (or perhaps literally), the breath of God. These kinds of ideas fit best with the English word "soul."
I live in the area, and I can testify that Lindon, Utah, does indeed freeze over every 12 months. This will last anywhere from 2 to 4 months.
According to our sophisticated Utah calendar and star charts, the next freezing of Lindon is due around the end of what you call November. I haven't seen any pigs flying, but I did see some janitorial-looking folks outside of SCO's main offices blow-drying snow from the grounds last year, presumably to keep up appearances.
Presumably, greater awareness of the hunger problems in less fortunate parts of the world will make the kids/new-generation more sensitive to the world's problems.
Anybody know if they have anything on the benefits of democracy and free markets, nation building, the stark (and usually dreadful) realities of dictatorships and communism, the effect of farm welfare on foreign food markets, etc., etc.? If it's just a bunch of "look at these poor people who through no fault of their own are starving, and look at the nice people who helped them," it might be accurate, but not very well-rounded.
Of course, knowing the UN, we'd have to assume they don't really tell the whole truth, for fear of upsetting somebody.
If I recall correctly, one of the big "problems" the studies found with the US press is that they're expected to abide by the law like all the rest of us. There's no magical protection for them (though an awful lot of them think it). They can't get past police barriers, withhold tip-offs of impending terrorism (and other crimes) without legal repercussions, etc.
How very sad for us. Somehow, I don't feel quite so bad about being 31.
They aren't considered to be full humans, until on their 18th birthday they make an overnight magical transformation into a full adult. Prisoners have more rights than them.
Bitter, or still bitter?
It's not full adult, it's having reached a minimum level of rationality. If it weren't an age limit, it'd be periodic, mandatory testing. Which do you prefer?
(Undisclaimer: I do machine learning research at BYU.)
Machine learning, in general, is getting computers to generalize based on data instances. The two main flavors are classification (inferring classifications of data instances based on previous instances) and regression (inferring a function based on input/output pairs).
A lot of people incorporate artificial intelligence into the category "machine learning," though it's not strictly correct. Machine learning is more a branch of AI than anything. One way to keep them straight is to think AI = deduction, ML = induction. (That's vastly simplifying, but it helps to classify them roughly.)
I wonder which way the author leans? Could he possibly post to clarify his meaning?:)
You can do an awful lot with machine learning that you can't do with conventional techniques. You can often get great results for otherwise NP-hard problems. Slashdot had a story a while back about using machine learning to do mesh compression, in which their algorithm comes up with a close approximation to the real answer to an NP-hard problem in polynomial time.
I'm currently using it to interpolate 2D images, and kicking bicubic B-spline interpolation all to heck. (Paper pending...) The machine learning algorithm infers shapes from the pixels, and keeps edges sharp.
If I come up with an idea, I'll post it later. In the meantime: isn't Firefox supposed to be lean and mean?:)
And since nobody's mentioned it yet: spam has nothing whatsoever to do with the United Nations.
(I just linked to the U.N. charter. All you globalists on here ought to read it and memorize it.)
The only sentence in the charter that could even be stretched to allude to spam is "to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom...." Of course, what they're talking about is freedom from tyrrany and oppression - like in Sudan and recently in Iraq.
I think I just heard the far-off sound of an overstretched elastic band snapping. Was that the U.N.?
Whether you're finding exploitable patterns in discrete data or estimating a "function" for a block of pixels in an image to use in some kind of lossy compression, it's a form of generalization. It's one way of formulating a learning problem.
Okay, I've been searching for about a half an hour now. I apologize that I haven't been able to find something that proves equivalence. (There's a guy in another lab that's really into this. Maybe he's got a paper on it.) You can think of it this way, intuitively: both compression and generalization seek a small number of bits to accurately describe a large number of bits.
(Huh. Maybe this dearth of papers on compression = generalization indicates that it's something I ought to look into for a new research direction...:))
Yeah, that jumped out at me too, when I read it. This will explain the true definition.
"Informally this class can be described as containing the decision problems that are at least as hard as any problem in NP."
(Has anyone else been impressed lately at the quality of CS- and math-related pages at Wikipedia?)
What the article described was pretty close to Turing-undecidable (though it flubbed that, too), which is much different. Of course, explaining NP-hard to someone unfamiliar with complexity theory is very difficult, especially when you don't know it yourself...
I'll take a stab at it. NP problems are generally regarded to not be solvable in polynomial time. (Polynomial time is when the amount of time taken to solve a problem is no greater than the problem size raised to some constant exponent times some constant factor: cn^k, or O(n^k).) They generally take exponential time or worse - as far as we know.
NP-hard problems, like the Wiki says, are at least as hard as any NP problem. The distinction probably doesn't matter so much - just think "really, really hard, and really really harder as you add even one to the problem size" and you've got a decent intuition for it.
Nice rant. See my earlier post on why this is new and cool.
"It has a strong formal basis. You can make up extreme cases that will trick it, but for ordinary shapes, it works remarkably well."
Cool, Shrek 3 will be nothing but primitives! Move along, nothing to see here...
Ordinary != primitives. Ordinary = things you generally find in reality. That would be faces, bodies, hands, everyday objects like trees, toasters and television sets...
The technique is borrowed from machine learning (which is my current area of study, so I feel I have some understanding of it). You can regard what they're doing as generalizing (the aim of machine learning), which is always prone to error when presented with pathological cases. In other words, if you try really, really hard, you can invent cases which it utterly fails at, but it just doesn't happen in normal practice.
(For a human analogy, consider those weird optical illusion drawings: they're pathological cases that throw your brain out of whack. But in practice, you really don't need to be able to quickly and correctly analyze those sorts of things.)
Un-disclaimer: I'm currently pursuing a PhD in machine learning.
Yes, it is new. First of all, y'all need to read the article and find out how.
It is for two reasons, both of which are stated:
The Desbrun team's novel approach comes from the seemingly unrelated field of machine learning...
Machine learning: getting a computer to generalize (invent hypotheses) given data instances. Work in machine learning has proven that generalization and compression are equivalent. That someone has applied those ideas to 3D model compression is at least notable.
We believe this approach to geometry approximation offers both solid foundations and unprecedented results...
In other words, it's not using some hacked-up heuristics. The bias behind the generalizations it makes are solidly described, and can be tuned. Machine learning consistently beats heuristics in accuracy, so their expectation of "unprecedented results" has a good foundation.
Hell, if I were out of work and someone *wanted* to pay me to take some pics of me naked, I sure as hell would do it!!
Thank you for publicly proclaiming your moral illness. Unfortunately, you've left out your address, so I can't tell my kids who to stay the heck away from.
On a more pragmatic note, you might want to consider what this guy went through for showing off his bod, and he was wearing a body suit.
I suppose the rest of the world can take the five or ten minutes that it takes to understand Smalltalk syntax.
It would be nice if it only took five or ten minutes to integrate Smalltalk syntax into your intuitive understanding of program flow. Since it doesn't, though, it'll probably take a few days to a few weeks (depending on the programmer) to get used to it enough to program in it with any kind of efficiency.
Not according to "Coast to Coast Radio" with Art Bell. According to him, the UN already has millions of cloned army men stationed in secret bases in Siberia and Northern Minnesota.
And all this time I thought it was the gay Martians.
Ahem. Anyway, you'll need to update your jokes. It's George Noory who does Coast to Coast AM now.
Slashdot Mirror
You may have noted that people trend Liberal when young, and then trend Conservative as they age. ...which is an interesting segue into something - surprisingly - nobody has brought up yet. (Or maybe not, as Slashdotters, 1/4 of whom still live with their parents according to a recent poll, tend to be quite young on average.)
Teenagers also tend to think with their amygdala. Money quote:
They're NOT thinking the way adults think because they absolutely, positively can't do it yet. Adolescent brains just aren't "hard wired" like adult brains.
I'll leave it up to Slashdot to decide if there's a correlation.
While you respond in disgust, what happens if one day science does indeed discover that biology trumphs freewill? What if almost all of out behaviors are predetermined by chemistry?
Won't happen. As far as we know, there are very few (if any) genetically-determined behaviors. Almost all of them require some kind of trigger, or outside stimulus.
The real question is whether or not we can invent our own stimulus.
Actually, we're deathly afraid of the power the judiciary has gotten over the law. Otherwise, the amendment never would have come up.
As it is, with a simple majority of FIVE, the United States Supreme Court can invent rights that the entire electorate isn't prepared, and has never been called on, to secure. The states are doing just fine defining marriage on their own (something like 41 and counting, with five having their own constitutional amendments), but all it takes is for the USSC to decide that sexual orientation fits into the protected class "sex." (Loving v. Virginia already established that marriage is a matter of equal protection.) Then the entire country, regardless of existing law (including the DoMA), is forced to recognize unions that most of them don't approve of.
Shouldn't this be something for the people to decide?
The idea that the judiciary has so much power is repugnant to a lot of people. (Except the clueless ones, who don't know tyranny when they see it.) The problem lies with politicians in both major parties. They haven't been able to get some of their party platform's pet legislation passed, so they've let the judiciary get powerful, hoping to be able to put their "own" judges in. Judicial appointments should never be as hotly contested as they are.
How does that make you feel? Knowing that you are playing the same games that are used for training for soldier's in the army?
Am I the only one that is scared by that thought?
Is our nation a nation of war and destruction? Are our future young children going to grow up being trained to kill?
I feel about like I would if my son were into martial arts. In teaching self-defense, they usually teach you how to break bones, shatter knees and elbows, and often how to kill. My kid would be safe from bullies, and much safer from random acts of violence on the street.
On a national scale, it's good for the same reason. The United States can't pretend it's as insignificant a target as, say, New Zealand. There are thousands out there who want a piece of us. We also can't pretend that some big country is going to rush to our aid if we're attacked - because we are that Big Country that usually does it.
You can sit and pretend that it's all happy and gay in the world, and that just being nice to people is enough to keep you safe, but you'd be horribly wrong. Bad things happen, to us and to our allies. Once you're forced into battle, don't you want to make sure you'll win?
Theologically, "soul" makes a whole lot more sense.
Contextually - you know, that pesky thing scholars like to ignore too often - "soul" still makes more sense.
Mark 8:34-36 (KJV):
34 And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. 35 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it. 36 For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
Consider also that words like "breath" and "life" are very often used to describe the non-material part of a person, sometimes regarded to be, symbolically (or perhaps literally), the breath of God. These kinds of ideas fit best with the English word "soul."
Alternatively, you can use PDF SpeedUp. Works wonders.
I live in the area, and I can testify that Lindon, Utah, does indeed freeze over every 12 months. This will last anywhere from 2 to 4 months.
According to our sophisticated Utah calendar and star charts, the next freezing of Lindon is due around the end of what you call November. I haven't seen any pigs flying, but I did see some janitorial-looking folks outside of SCO's main offices blow-drying snow from the grounds last year, presumably to keep up appearances.
Presumably, greater awareness of the hunger problems in less fortunate parts of the world will make the kids/new-generation more sensitive to the world's problems.
Anybody know if they have anything on the benefits of democracy and free markets, nation building, the stark (and usually dreadful) realities of dictatorships and communism, the effect of farm welfare on foreign food markets, etc., etc.? If it's just a bunch of "look at these poor people who through no fault of their own are starving, and look at the nice people who helped them," it might be accurate, but not very well-rounded.
Of course, knowing the UN, we'd have to assume they don't really tell the whole truth, for fear of upsetting somebody.
Imagine the RATINGS!
XXX, I'd imagine.
If I recall correctly, one of the big "problems" the studies found with the US press is that they're expected to abide by the law like all the rest of us. There's no magical protection for them (though an awful lot of them think it). They can't get past police barriers, withhold tip-offs of impending terrorism (and other crimes) without legal repercussions, etc.
How very sad for us. Somehow, I don't feel quite so bad about being 31.
...and is a 10th level spell at Hogwarts ...in Japan!
Gotta follow the new meme...
/s/full adult/fully human/
Please pardon the grammar fascist his little impropriety...
They aren't considered to be full humans, until on their 18th birthday they make an overnight magical transformation into a full adult. Prisoners have more rights than them.
Bitter, or still bitter?
It's not full adult, it's having reached a minimum level of rationality. If it weren't an age limit, it'd be periodic, mandatory testing. Which do you prefer?
(Undisclaimer: I do machine learning research at BYU.)
:)
:)
Machine learning, in general, is getting computers to generalize based on data instances. The two main flavors are classification (inferring classifications of data instances based on previous instances) and regression (inferring a function based on input/output pairs).
A lot of people incorporate artificial intelligence into the category "machine learning," though it's not strictly correct. Machine learning is more a branch of AI than anything. One way to keep them straight is to think AI = deduction, ML = induction. (That's vastly simplifying, but it helps to classify them roughly.)
I wonder which way the author leans? Could he possibly post to clarify his meaning?
You can do an awful lot with machine learning that you can't do with conventional techniques. You can often get great results for otherwise NP-hard problems. Slashdot had a story a while back about using machine learning to do mesh compression, in which their algorithm comes up with a close approximation to the real answer to an NP-hard problem in polynomial time.
I'm currently using it to interpolate 2D images, and kicking bicubic B-spline interpolation all to heck. (Paper pending...) The machine learning algorithm infers shapes from the pixels, and keeps edges sharp.
If I come up with an idea, I'll post it later. In the meantime: isn't Firefox supposed to be lean and mean?
Hear hear!
.
And since nobody's mentioned it yet: spam has nothing whatsoever to do with the United Nations
(I just linked to the U.N. charter. All you globalists on here ought to read it and memorize it.)
The only sentence in the charter that could even be stretched to allude to spam is "to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom...." Of course, what they're talking about is freedom from tyrrany and oppression - like in Sudan and recently in Iraq.
I think I just heard the far-off sound of an overstretched elastic band snapping. Was that the U.N.?
This is probably the best I can do.
:))
Whether you're finding exploitable patterns in discrete data or estimating a "function" for a block of pixels in an image to use in some kind of lossy compression, it's a form of generalization. It's one way of formulating a learning problem.
I can think of one very interesting project offhand, which uses compression coefficients to assess expected generalization accuracy.
(Ooh. I just found a paper on Compression-based Learning. That one looks like fun.)
Okay, I've been searching for about a half an hour now. I apologize that I haven't been able to find something that proves equivalence. (There's a guy in another lab that's really into this. Maybe he's got a paper on it.) You can think of it this way, intuitively: both compression and generalization seek a small number of bits to accurately describe a large number of bits.
(Huh. Maybe this dearth of papers on compression = generalization indicates that it's something I ought to look into for a new research direction...
Yeah, that jumped out at me too, when I read it. This will explain the true definition.
"Informally this class can be described as containing the decision problems that are at least as hard as any problem in NP."
(Has anyone else been impressed lately at the quality of CS- and math-related pages at Wikipedia?)
What the article described was pretty close to Turing-undecidable (though it flubbed that, too), which is much different. Of course, explaining NP-hard to someone unfamiliar with complexity theory is very difficult, especially when you don't know it yourself...
I'll take a stab at it. NP problems are generally regarded to not be solvable in polynomial time. (Polynomial time is when the amount of time taken to solve a problem is no greater than the problem size raised to some constant exponent times some constant factor: cn^k, or O(n^k).) They generally take exponential time or worse - as far as we know.
NP-hard problems, like the Wiki says, are at least as hard as any NP problem. The distinction probably doesn't matter so much - just think "really, really hard, and really really harder as you add even one to the problem size" and you've got a decent intuition for it.
Nice rant. See my earlier post on why this is new and cool.
"It has a strong formal basis. You can make up extreme cases that will trick it, but for ordinary shapes, it works remarkably well."
Cool, Shrek 3 will be nothing but primitives! Move along, nothing to see here...
Ordinary != primitives. Ordinary = things you generally find in reality. That would be faces, bodies, hands, everyday objects like trees, toasters and television sets...
The technique is borrowed from machine learning (which is my current area of study, so I feel I have some understanding of it). You can regard what they're doing as generalizing (the aim of machine learning), which is always prone to error when presented with pathological cases. In other words, if you try really, really hard, you can invent cases which it utterly fails at, but it just doesn't happen in normal practice.
(For a human analogy, consider those weird optical illusion drawings: they're pathological cases that throw your brain out of whack. But in practice, you really don't need to be able to quickly and correctly analyze those sorts of things.)
Un-disclaimer: I'm currently pursuing a PhD in machine learning.
Yes, it is new. First of all, y'all need to read the article and find out how.
It is for two reasons, both of which are stated:
The Desbrun team's novel approach comes from the seemingly unrelated field of machine learning...
Machine learning: getting a computer to generalize (invent hypotheses) given data instances. Work in machine learning has proven that generalization and compression are equivalent. That someone has applied those ideas to 3D model compression is at least notable.
We believe this approach to geometry approximation offers both solid foundations and unprecedented results...
In other words, it's not using some hacked-up heuristics. The bias behind the generalizations it makes are solidly described, and can be tuned. Machine learning consistently beats heuristics in accuracy, so their expectation of "unprecedented results" has a good foundation.
Hell, if I were out of work and someone *wanted* to pay me to take some pics of me naked, I sure as hell would do it!!
Thank you for publicly proclaiming your moral illness. Unfortunately, you've left out your address, so I can't tell my kids who to stay the heck away from.
On a more pragmatic note, you might want to consider what this guy went through for showing off his bod, and he was wearing a body suit.
But what's the point of winning if you can't sign a multimillion-dollar endorsement deal with Nike!?
"Hello. I am Abebe Bikila, and if I had worn shoes, they would have been Nikes."
No problem.
I suppose the rest of the world can take the five or ten minutes that it takes to understand Smalltalk syntax.
It would be nice if it only took five or ten minutes to integrate Smalltalk syntax into your intuitive understanding of program flow. Since it doesn't, though, it'll probably take a few days to a few weeks (depending on the programmer) to get used to it enough to program in it with any kind of efficiency.
Not according to "Coast to Coast Radio" with Art Bell. According to him, the UN already has millions of cloned army men stationed in secret bases in Siberia and Northern Minnesota.
And all this time I thought it was the gay Martians.
Ahem. Anyway, you'll need to update your jokes. It's George Noory who does Coast to Coast AM now.
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/
And what do you call that language? "Cuss"? "Programming With Expletives"?
Oh, wait. That's perl.
Or faintly related (at least to the totalitarion rule bit): do you also consider Bill Gates to be the most evil person of the last few decades?
Please tell me you were trying to be funny.