it is relatively easy if you have extra parts but it can take a lot of time. for example, I recently fixed a friends computer that had a heatsink not properly seated. with the worthless pushpins it's hard to tell if it's making proper contact and it wouldn't post until it was. some of the capacitors looked in bad shape and could be a problem in the future and I had that in my mind as well after eliminating memory/power supply. no way to magically know until I spent a lot of time making sure the heatsink was properly seated.
Well the guy in the video was retarded. He backed up the data from the hard drive while at the same time suggesting she send it in for special data retrieval. If he managed to access the data and it seemed to be intact it makes no sense to do that.
In one of the tests they corrupt some files on windows and suggest a simple reinstall will fix it. With windows updates reinstalling windows on top of a pre existing installation can often make it unbootable and/or leave the user with other problems. So, simple in hindsight but before the problem is solved there's more than one possibility as to what will leave the system in a usable state.
If a system doesn't boot you're better off replacing parts.
The guy who think the hard drive is dead could simply be incompetent. My brothers computer recently died and his supposedly tech savvy friend told him that the hard drive died. I had to tell my brother to unplug the hard drive and see if it would POST successful as it would normally without a hard drive and it didn't. Really you repeat the same process for video/memory/CPU.
webcast.berkeley.edu has had video lectures since at least 2001; and before that bmrc.berkeley.edu in 1999. The MIT offering has had barely any video or audio until recently. Syllabus and notes are everywhere - there's nothing special about them except the hype in association with MIT.
Re:%75 as effective as a prescription 3% the price
on
Science vs. Homeopathy
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· Score: 1
AI is part of cognitive science of which computer science is a participant. the math vs heuristic distinction to me doesn't make sense. you have, on the one hand, the failed formalisms of the past and, on the other, hand waving about a free lunch as if the simplifying models we use weren't grounded in a complex nervous system. short cuts seem effortless to us because it presupposes a perspective grounded in a brain we are only now beginning to barely comprehend. math will have the same utility when our investigations suggest better ways to move forward. the problem is that we are impatient and want to make it useful in our life time before we can make sense of anything, hence all the hubris in the last 50 years.
Yeah, pretty much. I set out to make a data assistant program in high school (c 1996-1999) and was thinking about how to get a correspondence between what I was thinking and how data would be retrieved and figured it would have to be so generic to be worthless. And then I read Hilary Putnam's Representation and Reality and felt sick about the entire thing. But now that I think back on it I did have a lot of fun testing out different kinds of data retrieval on structured and unstructured data (and thinking up weird semantic hypertext languages).
that blog post isn't balanced. it's an uncritical regurgitation of of "findings" in a field riddled with errors and wishful thinking driven research. even craig anderson himself is more careful in his claims today.
i like the part on anderson's web page where he admits that there isn't any evidence that video games have any more effect than any other violent media even on his terms (the badly designed studies he published leading up to the nature article that was full of ridiculous overstatements even if you uncritically grant the leaps of logic about weakly observable effects)
if you look at his web site there is all sorts of meaningless although learned speculation. his professionalization is a conjunction of psychiatry and evolutionary psychiatry - two disciplines that frequently suffer from strong hypothesis with little evidence.
that said, the article he wrote about depression as malaise is much more interesting than the very poorly worded, badly argued article being discussed here.
I've been saying this forever (read: back when I was a slashdot troll in high school)
and one need not even look to philosophy.
on the other hand, more modest ontologies seem eminently reasonable. the "semantic" part is hype since it's just data embedded in a social network, but as a mechanism of trust the regularization of data makes a lot of sense. in other words it's a structure that supports standardization, and that depends on social processes more than any facts about objects when they intersect with meaning.
Thanks. I'm uneasy about a dock that requires a mouseover to see a window title, especially when many of my IE windows would look pretty much the same thumbnailed. But I might just be a peculiar user. I have 23 windows open right now (13 IE) and I'm using a double as opposed to single row taskbar (the feature that snaps all IE windows to a single task is bad IMO). As a "power user" latency is very important to me. Apart from tasks, dragging stuff on to the dock seems pretty useful. I like ad hoc task oriented features; they understand the correspondense between task goals and memory, which is also served by the ability to drag and move the icons around on the dock -- a feature I'd really like to see in windows.
That looks pretty good to me. It avoids totally useless features of 3d UI's like movement through space, which makes the latency between task switching horrendous. Expose is basically task switching via image rather than icon+title. But it looks like OS X doesn't have window titles on its dock, so I won't be using it any time soon.
Now that the aesthetic neat-o feeling is wearing off I wonder when that kind of task switching really is more efficient. I can think of one thing it better do: On the MS Windows task bar windows are open in chronological order. If I open 15 IE windows I know which ones are newer than others. How will expose order apps? I compared the order to the dock and they didn't seem to match up (I might be wrong; the image is small). Do either of them not order windows chronologically? There are other sorts that might be useful but I see that one as key.
dude i have one. i wouldnt exactly call it portable tho. it weighs ~15 pounds and the last time i used it the battery lasted maybe 30 minutes. next time i'm bored ill get a sledge hammer and beat that thing until it's uncrecognizable
I have a minor in philosophy, but it happened by accident. I started in computer engineering, switched to a double major, computer science and econometrics, but found econometrics boring, so I switched to psychology, decided I really wanted to do neuroscience, but by then it was too late. I had taken a few courses in mathematical logic in the philosophy department, so decided to fulfill the humanities requirement by taking a philosophy of science course and liked it so much I signed up for a few more (political philosophy, wittgenstein).
So I have a BS in compsci, and economics, psychology, and philosophy minors. Yay for me. But my point was that I thought the humanities were a joke, but they're not.
a third of the episodes are marxist narratives. like the one where they rescue the sulabon in camps, or the one where they rescue some miners from evil klingons (ref Seven Samurai), or the one where the "aliens" are just guys with soul patches on their chin; the cogenitor episode is the same except the ending reverses the regular polarity (hopefully it signals the death of that kind of episode)
some of the dialogue is not bad but the stories are terrible. the two episodes about flox and medical ethics are just dumb, so is the one about the intolerant doctors and vulcan mind melds or whatever; then they have a couple about disabling mines, or bombs, or whatever and their small talk is supposed to be a story
and yet i watch it every week anyway...
jumping to conclusions
on
Brain Privacy
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· Score: 1
"One study of white students found that although they expressed no conscious racism, the seat of fear in their brains still fired up more when they looked at unfamiliar black faces than at unfamiliar white faces"
How is this predicting "unconscious racism"? Good old fashioned psychology would predict that it's caused by negative stereotype activation, but differential activation in the amygdala doesn't necessarily mean differential behavior towards people of "color". I am certain that there would be more blood-oxygen level dependent activity in my amygdala, particularly when walking in a bad neighbourhood, but so what? It probably also happens when I'm nervous meeting someone, when I see a cop, when I'm watching a scary movie; they have to prove that that it leads to differential behavior.
I think the hardware/software division is an entirely artificial construct. It came out of computer science because of the idea of multiple realizability. For example, an hp calculator and your computer's calculator may have the same superficial output and input but do entirely different computations or physical transformations. So according the the theory, one doesn't have to look at the lower levels, therefore non-reductionism is true. QED.
But what a physical brain "does" determines what "computation" or "information processing" happens, so the software/hardware dichotomy applied to cognitive science is silly. That something is a function at one level, does not imply that something won't be a function at a lower level. It's a bad metaphor.
whenever I see the phrase "free your mind" I tend to think someone is being a tad bit too enthusiastic
i dont think that evolutionary psychology is capable of generating the systematic, quantifiable "portrait" of the human psyche that you hope is possible
but i do agree, it can generate some good inferences,
e.g. tooby and cosmides 2002a, and 2002b
2002a "Selective impairment of reasoning about social exchange in a patient with bilateral limbic system damage" http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/ 99/17/115 31
2002b "Cross-cultural evidence of cognitive adaptations for social exchange among the Shiwiar of Ecuadorian Amazonia" http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstrac t/99/17/115 37
"I feel physically attracted to you to a moderate extent"
to some extent im probably misunderstanding what you wrote (ironic), but i think communicating something like that will pretty much kill a relationship. not only by what is says, but what it implies (lack of commitment, rejection, negative feeling)
to paraphrase Nietzsche, there are truths which will injure us; and i would add some of these simple truths lack perspective. if you think about it in terms of consequences, what is more important? your partners emotional well being, or some kind of utopian communication?
the problem with this kind of SF (or my 1 minute understanding of it anyway) is that it casts humanity as something more malleable than it probably is. communication is important, but we are human after all, and as humans we have different values and goals; and in (heterosexual) romantic relationships there are two different kinds of humans - man and woman. no amount of training will change that; so dreaming of a kind of harmony in truthful communication leaves something out. it doesnt consider all the important consequences. compassion and civility are just as important as understanding
of course it's hard to relate this to an actual romantic relationship, because i feel this kind of theory reduces the other person to a small theoretical. perhaps the problem is atomism of agents, or bargaining metaphors or whatever, im not sure. but it doesn't do a good job of describing romantic love, and so its frame of mind probably has no hope of informing it;
Believe what you wish, whether it is contrary to current practise or not. XML and RDF allow people to structure their content far better than alternatives, with less effort. Unless you have a better and more accessible way - why not mention it now, I'm interested in hearing about it.
i wasn't clear but youre ignoring the point. i meant to imply that XML isn't the problem. since i'm lazy, i'll just link this article.
There is no "still have to write". That's the beauty of XML based languages. You _don't_ have to write your own parser or renderer. These generic tools are already available and in use now
that's rather silly if youre trying to respond to what i said. and you can only get away with it by using necessarily vague terms like parser and renderer. but it might be my fault in part: by display, i certainly don't mean renderer, and by "do stuff" i don't mean parse as if the data were already magically structured to solve my problem. and that's how it's often touted.
The episode of Star Trek TNG with the two Rikers is "Second Chances" I think. In that episode a "duplicate" Riker is created in a transporter accident (nevermind the possibility that both would be duplicates for now). One on the Enterprise, one on a deserted planet. When the second Riker was asked to account for his existence, he says something like "I don't know who came back that day, but it sure as hell wasn't me". Can you really argue that Riker1 and Riker2 are the same person?
Here's a second example: In an Ahnold movie the villian has the ability to make a clone of himself and copy his memories to the clone (let's just pretend this makes it a duplicate). Ahnold seriously wounds villian1 so he pushes a button the create his duplicate, villian2. Since the villian was a nasty sort of guy he had no compassion for villian1 and wasn't interested in his whining, so he shot him in the head (I may be making up this part). How are they the same person?
One answer: you need both representational and causal properties. The "feeling of what happens" (as Antonio Damasio calls it) isn't the same instantiation of that representational content (whatever properties and content means). But I think this may be a kind of question begging.
Fragmentation of self is a second problem. If both Riker's have a different input by virtue of being in different places, the "feeling of what happens" is different and so our their brain states. But I don't know if I've solved the problem above. What does "self" mean.
Parfit is good on this (but don't expect him to solve anything).
Slashdot Mirror
it is relatively easy if you have extra parts but it can take a lot of time. for example, I recently fixed a friends computer that had a heatsink not properly seated. with the worthless pushpins it's hard to tell if it's making proper contact and it wouldn't post until it was. some of the capacitors looked in bad shape and could be a problem in the future and I had that in my mind as well after eliminating memory/power supply. no way to magically know until I spent a lot of time making sure the heatsink was properly seated.
Well the guy in the video was retarded. He backed up the data from the hard drive while at the same time suggesting she send it in for special data retrieval. If he managed to access the data and it seemed to be intact it makes no sense to do that.
In one of the tests they corrupt some files on windows and suggest a simple reinstall will fix it. With windows updates reinstalling windows on top of a pre existing installation can often make it unbootable and/or leave the user with other problems. So, simple in hindsight but before the problem is solved there's more than one possibility as to what will leave the system in a usable state.
If a system doesn't boot you're better off replacing parts.
The guy who think the hard drive is dead could simply be incompetent. My brothers computer recently died and his supposedly tech savvy friend told him that the hard drive died. I had to tell my brother to unplug the hard drive and see if it would POST successful as it would normally without a hard drive and it didn't. Really you repeat the same process for video/memory/CPU.
webcast.berkeley.edu has had video lectures since at least 2001; and before that bmrc.berkeley.edu in 1999. The MIT offering has had barely any video or audio until recently. Syllabus and notes are everywhere - there's nothing special about them except the hype in association with MIT.
no
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy
^^ yes. i sort by newest first :)
http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2007/09/liberal_and_conservative_anter.php
AI is part of cognitive science of which computer science is a participant. the math vs heuristic distinction to me doesn't make sense. you have, on the one hand, the failed formalisms of the past and, on the other, hand waving about a free lunch as if the simplifying models we use weren't grounded in a complex nervous system. short cuts seem effortless to us because it presupposes a perspective grounded in a brain we are only now beginning to barely comprehend. math will have the same utility when our investigations suggest better ways to move forward. the problem is that we are impatient and want to make it useful in our life time before we can make sense of anything, hence all the hubris in the last 50 years.
Yeah, pretty much. I set out to make a data assistant program in high school (c 1996-1999) and was thinking about how to get a correspondence between what I was thinking and how data would be retrieved and figured it would have to be so generic to be worthless. And then I read Hilary Putnam's Representation and Reality and felt sick about the entire thing. But now that I think back on it I did have a lot of fun testing out different kinds of data retrieval on structured and unstructured data (and thinking up weird semantic hypertext languages).
9 86906 -- lol
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=142985&cid=11
It seems more than anything else that they're trying to blow smoke to influence policy in Canada.
that blog post isn't balanced. it's an uncritical regurgitation of of "findings" in a field riddled with errors and wishful thinking driven research. even craig anderson himself is more careful in his claims today.
i like the part on anderson's web page where he admits that there isn't any evidence that video games have any more effect than any other violent media even on his terms (the badly designed studies he published leading up to the nature article that was full of ridiculous overstatements even if you uncritically grant the leaps of logic about weakly observable effects)
if you look at his web site there is all sorts of meaningless although learned speculation. his professionalization is a conjunction of psychiatry and evolutionary psychiatry - two disciplines that frequently suffer from strong hypothesis with little evidence.
that said, the article he wrote about depression as malaise is much more interesting than the very poorly worded, badly argued article being discussed here.
I've been saying this forever (read: back when I was a slashdot troll in high school) and one need not even look to philosophy. on the other hand, more modest ontologies seem eminently reasonable. the "semantic" part is hype since it's just data embedded in a social network, but as a mechanism of trust the regularization of data makes a lot of sense. in other words it's a structure that supports standardization, and that depends on social processes more than any facts about objects when they intersect with meaning.
Thanks. I'm uneasy about a dock that requires a mouseover to see a window title, especially when many of my IE windows would look pretty much the same thumbnailed. But I might just be a peculiar user. I have 23 windows open right now (13 IE) and I'm using a double as opposed to single row taskbar (the feature that snaps all IE windows to a single task is bad IMO). As a "power user" latency is very important to me. Apart from tasks, dragging stuff on to the dock seems pretty useful. I like ad hoc task oriented features; they understand the correspondense between task goals and memory, which is also served by the ability to drag and move the icons around on the dock -- a feature I'd really like to see in windows.
That looks pretty good to me. It avoids totally useless features of 3d UI's like movement through space, which makes the latency between task switching horrendous. Expose is basically task switching via image rather than icon+title. But it looks like OS X doesn't have window titles on its dock, so I won't be using it any time soon.
Now that the aesthetic neat-o feeling is wearing off I wonder when that kind of task switching really is more efficient. I can think of one thing it better do: On the MS Windows task bar windows are open in chronological order. If I open 15 IE windows I know which ones are newer than others. How will expose order apps? I compared the order to the dock and they didn't seem to match up (I might be wrong; the image is small). Do either of them not order windows chronologically? There are other sorts that might be useful but I see that one as key.
dude i have one. i wouldnt exactly call it portable tho. it weighs ~15 pounds and the last time i used it the battery lasted maybe 30 minutes. next time i'm bored ill get a sledge hammer and beat that thing until it's uncrecognizable
While employment opportunities may not be optimal, philosophy is probably more sophisticated than you presume.
see http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html
I have a minor in philosophy, but it happened by accident. I started in computer engineering, switched to a double major, computer science and econometrics, but found econometrics boring, so I switched to psychology, decided I really wanted to do neuroscience, but by then it was too late. I had taken a few courses in mathematical logic in the philosophy department, so decided to fulfill the humanities requirement by taking a philosophy of science course and liked it so much I signed up for a few more (political philosophy, wittgenstein).
So I have a BS in compsci, and economics, psychology, and philosophy minors. Yay for me. But my point was that I thought the humanities were a joke, but they're not.
a third of the episodes are marxist narratives. like the one where they rescue the sulabon in camps, or the one where they rescue some miners from evil klingons (ref Seven Samurai), or the one where the "aliens" are just guys with soul patches on their chin; the cogenitor episode is the same except the ending reverses the regular polarity (hopefully it signals the death of that kind of episode)
some of the dialogue is not bad but the stories are terrible. the two episodes about flox and medical ethics are just dumb, so is the one about the intolerant doctors and vulcan mind melds or whatever; then they have a couple about disabling mines, or bombs, or whatever and their small talk is supposed to be a story
and yet i watch it every week anyway...
"One study of white students found that although they expressed no conscious racism, the seat of fear in their brains still fired up more when they looked at unfamiliar black faces than at unfamiliar white faces"
How is this predicting "unconscious racism"? Good old fashioned psychology would predict that it's caused by negative stereotype activation, but differential activation in the amygdala doesn't necessarily mean differential behavior towards people of "color". I am certain that there would be more blood-oxygen level dependent activity in my amygdala, particularly when walking in a bad neighbourhood, but so what? It probably also happens when I'm nervous meeting someone, when I see a cop, when I'm watching a scary movie; they have to prove that that it leads to differential behavior.
I think the hardware/software division is an entirely artificial construct. It came out of computer science because of the idea of multiple realizability. For example, an hp calculator and your computer's calculator may have the same superficial output and input but do entirely different computations or physical transformations. So according the the theory, one doesn't have to look at the lower levels, therefore non-reductionism is true. QED.
But what a physical brain "does" determines what "computation" or "information processing" happens, so the software/hardware dichotomy applied to cognitive science is silly. That something is a function at one level, does not imply that something won't be a function at a lower level. It's a bad metaphor.
whenever I see the phrase "free your mind" I tend to think someone is being a tad bit too enthusiastic
/ 99/17/115 31
c t/99/17/115 37
i dont think that evolutionary psychology is capable of generating the systematic, quantifiable "portrait" of the human psyche that you hope is possible
and i've read tooby+cosmides, pinker, dawkins, dennett, boehm, wilson+sober, ridley, wright, etc
but i do agree, it can generate some good inferences,
e.g. tooby and cosmides 2002a, and 2002b
2002a "Selective impairment of reasoning about social exchange in a patient with bilateral limbic
system damage"
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract
2002b "Cross-cultural evidence of cognitive adaptations for social exchange among the Shiwiar of Ecuadorian Amazonia"
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstra
"I feel physically attracted to you to a moderate extent"
to some extent im probably misunderstanding what you wrote (ironic), but i think communicating something like that will pretty much kill a relationship. not only by what is says, but what it implies (lack of commitment, rejection, negative feeling)
to paraphrase Nietzsche, there are truths which will injure us; and i would add some of these simple truths lack perspective. if you think about it in terms of consequences, what is more important? your partners emotional well being, or some kind of utopian communication?
the problem with this kind of SF (or my 1 minute understanding of it anyway) is that it casts humanity as something more malleable than it probably is. communication is important, but we are human after all, and as humans we have different values and goals; and in (heterosexual) romantic relationships there are two different kinds of humans - man and woman. no amount of training will change that; so dreaming of a kind of harmony in truthful communication leaves something out. it doesnt consider all the important consequences. compassion and civility are just as important as understanding
of course it's hard to relate this to an actual romantic relationship, because i feel this kind of theory reduces the other person to a small theoretical. perhaps the problem is atomism of agents, or bargaining metaphors or whatever, im not sure. but it doesn't do a good job of describing romantic love, and so its frame of mind probably has no hope of informing it;
Believe what you wish, whether it is contrary to current practise or not. XML and RDF allow people to structure their content far better than alternatives, with less effort. Unless you have a better and more accessible way - why not mention it now, I'm interested in hearing about it.
i wasn't clear but youre ignoring the point. i meant to imply that XML isn't the problem. since i'm lazy, i'll just link this article.
There is no "still have to write". That's the beauty of XML based languages. You _don't_ have to write your own parser or renderer. These generic tools are already available and in use now
that's rather silly if youre trying to respond to what i said. and you can only get away with it by using necessarily vague terms like parser and renderer. but it might be my fault in part: by display, i certainly don't mean renderer, and by "do stuff" i don't mean parse as if the data were already magically structured to solve my problem. and that's how it's often touted.
The episode of Star Trek TNG with the two Rikers is "Second Chances" I think. In that episode a "duplicate" Riker is created in a transporter accident (nevermind the possibility that both would be duplicates for now). One on the Enterprise, one on a deserted planet. When the second Riker was asked to account for his existence, he says something like "I don't know who came back that day, but it sure as hell wasn't me". Can you really argue that Riker1 and Riker2 are the same person?
Here's a second example: In an Ahnold movie the villian has the ability to make a clone of himself and copy his memories to the clone (let's just pretend this makes it a duplicate). Ahnold seriously wounds villian1 so he pushes a button the create his duplicate, villian2. Since the villian was a nasty sort of guy he had no compassion for villian1 and wasn't interested in his whining, so he shot him in the head (I may be making up this part). How are they the same person?
One answer: you need both representational and causal properties. The "feeling of what happens" (as Antonio Damasio calls it) isn't the same instantiation of that representational content (whatever properties and content means). But I think this may be a kind of question begging.
Fragmentation of self is a second problem. If both Riker's have a different input by virtue of being in different places, the "feeling of what happens" is different and so our their brain states. But I don't know if I've solved the problem above. What does "self" mean.
Parfit is good on this (but don't expect him to solve anything).