html like languages are probably the wrong interface for sifting through data. And so what if XML and RDF will lead to some more structured data out there -- and are we really supposed to believe this? What does it matter if you still have to write some kind of software to display or do stuff with that data?
the toy annotation application (annotea) they have set up on the W3C site to showcase the technology is underwhelming. There are exciting applications for semantic nets, agents, personal search engines, classifiers, whatever, but so far no one has done anything interesting with the technology for us end users.
How ironic. An excerpt from a review of "The Meaning of it All" by Richard Feynman in Nature 394, 144:
Feynman doesn't always make sense. In one crucial passage he tries to argue that "ethical values lie outside the scientific realm". This must be a comforting opinion for someone who worked on the bomb, but he is on controversial ground, and here most of all he reveals himself to be surprisingly inarticulate. Here is one whole argument for the separation of science and ethics: "First, in the past there were conflicts. The metaphysical positions have changed, and there have [sic] been practically no effect on the ethical views. So there must be a hint that there is an independence."
By the way, equating democracy with unwashed plebeians is dishonest - particularly the comments about "perfect democracy" as we can make equally absurd points about patronage and non elected bodies.
Re:Why does Katz still have a keyboard?
on
The Rise of CSI
·
· Score: 1
"I'm not at all saying that it's a 100% hit rate"
You don't appear to understand statistics or probability.
"but there is a psychological/neurological reason for it happening"
When did we establish that it was "happening", and what functional or material substrate is this "reason"? (note neither are strictly needed if the observation is based on non faulty statistics)
Re:Why does Katz still have a keyboard?
on
The Rise of CSI
·
· Score: 1
"The look-left/look-right thing, however, -is- true (unless someone is deliberately screwing with you). I've seen it dozens of times. It's hardly admissible in court, but it does give them a clue as to what's going on"
prima facie, this is precisely the "leap of logic" he rails against. It is an instance of only verifying instances which fit the rule (here correlation between looking left or right and beliefs of truth and falsity of subjects statements) In psychology this is called the positive-test-strategy (also known as confirmation bias). For example, it is often used to justify such beliefs as "wet weather causes arthritus pain".
Because I have not seen any data verifying or falsifying the claim I can't in conscience say whether it is true or false, but I find it extremely suspect.
"Despite threats from the cable companies, Carlson and numerous attorneys for bondholders and unsecured creditors said that shutting off service was highly unlikely--chiefly because such a move would be detrimental to all parties involved"
"Yes.. but isn't that how the entire @home network works"
no, shaw has its own backbone. rogers, cox, comcast have partially built out their own backbones before this bancruptcy funny business because they were already planning to leave @home when their contracts ended. cox, comcast and others only have partial coverage without the @home backbone; fortunately it is unlikely that someone is going to turn a switch and turn off the network tonight
"Like, the IP addresses belong to @home, no"
yes, but not if you're rogers or shaw. they own their own ip addresses.
What a bunch of non sense. You make two fatal mistakes. (1) there is no a priori reason to believe that Moore's law significantly affects AI research (unless you're a Kurzweil fundy maroon); and, (2) depth first search is not an example of intelligent behavior.
I don't think we'll be seeing robots holding up gas stations so they can stay on-line and "conscious" any time soon.
Re:Aptitude vs. Intelligence vs. Effectiveness
on
Bobby Fischer Online?
·
· Score: 1
Re:Aptitude vs. Intelligence vs. Effectiveness
on
Bobby Fischer Online?
·
· Score: 1
"Aptitude" is so vague. Likewise "natural talent". You might as well claim that a wizard flew down from the sky and cast a spell on him.
Read some Herbert Simon. With practice normal people have digit spans of 70+. Place pieces randomly and a grandmaster is as bad as the novice placing them from memory. Place pieces in meaningful positions and the grandmaster can play 20 games at once blindfolded.
The sport analogy you make ignores the social multiplier. Watch some NBA games from 15 years ago. Terrible by today's standard. Natural aptitude can't explain that.
Id est, aptitude is not an argument. You have to be more specific. For example, you could maybe argue that a person has "aptitude" genetically, and developmentally rather than from previous experience and preparation. But then you'd have to give some evidence from statistics, cognitive psychology, or whatever.
Just remember when you think about it that you're venturing into "nature" vs. "nurture" territory.:-)
I have a 1987 gold laced world book encyclopedia. I now use several volumes to raise a few speakers a foot off the ground. It looks nice actually.. (world book sucks by the way)
You have it backwards because I was being so terse. The quoted response of dawkins (and it does appear to be a response here) where he accuses some of cultural relativism.
The author of the original essay isn't a cultural relativist. You could get away with accusing them of pragmatism and then build a connection between that and anti-scientism, but I really doubt that's the stance the author was taking, given they are scientists themselves.
"While the article has some good points to make, it suffers from a common flaw in arguments on this subject: the assumption that something that's too complex to model today is too complex to model, period"
"<i>FRANCIS S. COLLINS is the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute.
LOWELL WEISS is an executive at the Morino Institute in Reston, Virginia.
KATHY HUDSON is the assistant director of the National Human Genome Research Institute.</i>"
Do you see why I'd be a little skeptical in believing that assertion?
"The process is not based on faith. The process is based on observation."
No one said it wasn't. Observations can be faulty, which leads to a philosophy of science based on hypothesis building based on verification, falsification, and prediction.
Science is a process conducted by humans who aren't supremely rational beings.
This is emphatically not the case. Is "gene that is correlated with a 2 point increase in IQ" too hard to understand? They don't even need to know the formal definition of covariance, because most humans can understand the general concept regardless.
While we're at it, we should also blame the scientists who let this misunderstanding propagate because it makes it much easier for them to get research dollars.
There is a general misunderstanding about the nature-nurture debate. We are all zombies in a sense, because our conscious is as the rest of our body -- automatic. The problem is in trying to separate mind from brain. You are your brain, and you are its conscious and unconscious processing. One must look no further than the fact that in the laboratory scientists can directly alter decisions of monkeys:
"The ability to predict and influence choices provides compelling evidence that choices are deterministic. Certainly, to the extent that neurons will not discharge unless they are depolarized by other neurons, brain states can be determined naturally only by earlier brain states. However, does such apparently Laplacian determinism grant as much prediction and influence as the evidence seems to indicate? Perhaps not. Complex dynamic systems that are far from equilibrium are usually not predictable. The brain is without doubt such a dynamical system that produces behaviour with the signature of chaos. In fact, some have argued that cognition is at least as dynamical as it is computational. Thus, the states of the brain, like the clouds in the sky, happen because of earlier states of the system.
But brain states and behaviour can be as unpredictable as the weather. If current research is correct that choices derive from states of the brain, and states of the brain, although deterministic, are not entirely predictable then it follows that choices may be made that are unexpected. Certainly the world is an unpredictable place, and it seems almost self-evident that the behaviour of most creatures, including humans, can be unpredictable. As we survey this landscape, we should realize that all of the neurophysiological results that we have reviewed were obtained after weeks of training monkeys to perform rigidly constrained tasks in impoverished environments, quite unlike the real world. Accordingly, conclusions drawn from the results of these experiments should be generalized to real-world situations with caution.
Still, the results that I have reviewed seem relevant to understanding freedom of choice. If we ask whether we are free, the kind of answer we want may not be possible. A better question to ask is: do we make choices? The answer is certainly yes. Do our choices have any influence on our relationship to our peers and the environment? Again, yes. Are our choices constrained? Yes, because of natural law and historical circumstances, but not entirely because of random chance and deterministic chaos. Consider a game of cards. To begin a fair game, the cards are shuffled to introduce randomness that produces unpredictability and lack of control over what cards are drawn. Once the hands are dealt, your freedom to play a certain card is limited by the rules of the game, the hand you are dealt, and your knowledge of strategy and tactics. But within these limitations you have many choices to react to, or anticipate what other players do both the astute tactics and the blockheaded blunders. The moment of deliberation about which card to play seems to embody all of the freedom one could hope for. The fact that such deliberation is accomplished by your brain takes away none of the joy of the game."
-- The Neural Basis for Deciding, Choosing, and Acting. - Nature Reviews Neuroscience; Jan, 2001
As we see above, you are not only defined by your genes, but your environment as well. If I were to teleport you to the 12th century, you would be a different person, with different actions, thoughts and beliefs - at least in regard to possible worlds hypotheses.
And yes, it is obvious that the content of the information that you process would affect who you are -- not only in the mistaken separation of mind and body.
Slashdot Mirror
html like languages are probably the wrong interface for sifting through data. And so what if XML and RDF will lead to some more structured data out there -- and are we really supposed to believe this? What does it matter if you still have to write some kind of software to display or do stuff with that data?
the toy annotation application (annotea) they have set up on the W3C site to showcase the technology is underwhelming. There are exciting applications for semantic nets, agents, personal search engines, classifiers, whatever, but so far no one has done anything interesting with the technology for us end users.
How ironic. An excerpt from a review of "The Meaning of it All" by Richard Feynman in Nature 394, 144:
Feynman doesn't always make sense. In one crucial passage he tries to argue that "ethical values lie outside the scientific realm". This must be a comforting opinion for someone who worked on the bomb, but he is on controversial ground, and here most of all he reveals himself to be surprisingly inarticulate. Here is one whole argument for the separation of science and ethics: "First, in the past there were conflicts. The metaphysical positions have changed, and there have [sic] been practically no effect on the ethical views. So there must be a hint that there is an independence."
By the way, equating democracy with unwashed plebeians is dishonest - particularly the comments about "perfect democracy" as we can make equally absurd points about patronage and non elected bodies.
Vannevar Bush, As We May Think (July 1945)
Ben Schneiderman, Codex, Memex, Genex (December 1997)
Henry Jenkins, Information Cosmos (April 2001)
"I'm not at all saying that it's a 100% hit rate"
You don't appear to understand statistics or probability.
"but there is a psychological/neurological reason for it happening"
When did we establish that it was "happening", and what functional or material substrate is this "reason"? (note neither are strictly needed if the observation is based on non faulty statistics)
"The look-left/look-right thing, however, -is- true (unless someone is deliberately screwing with you). I've seen it dozens of times. It's hardly admissible in court, but it does give them a clue as to what's going on"
prima facie, this is precisely the "leap of logic" he rails against. It is an instance of only verifying instances which fit the rule (here correlation between looking left or right and beliefs of truth and falsity of subjects statements) In psychology this is called the positive-test-strategy (also known as confirmation bias). For example, it is often used to justify such beliefs as "wet weather causes arthritus pain".
Because I have not seen any data verifying or falsifying the claim I can't in conscience say whether it is true or false, but I find it extremely suspect.
http://www.sandisk.com/tech/comp.asp
select "Digital Audio Players" as device type.
I have a rio500 so i use 128mb smartmedia. I'm hoping they make a 256 soon..
"Despite threats from the cable companies, Carlson and numerous attorneys for bondholders and unsecured creditors said that shutting off service was highly unlikely--chiefly because such a move would be detrimental to all parties involved"
Thomas Carlson is the judge in the case.
"Yes.. but isn't that how the entire @home network works"
no, shaw has its own backbone. rogers, cox, comcast have partially built out their own backbones before this bancruptcy funny business because they were already planning to leave @home when their contracts ended. cox, comcast and others only have partial coverage without the @home backbone; fortunately it is unlikely that someone is going to turn a switch and turn off the network tonight
"Like, the IP addresses belong to @home, no"
yes, but not if you're rogers or shaw. they own their own ip addresses.
enterprise:
wooden cock, almost bulging out of underwear
tits..
er, i mean, it sucked.
What a bunch of non sense. You make two fatal mistakes. (1) there is no a priori reason to believe that Moore's law significantly affects AI research (unless you're a Kurzweil fundy maroon); and, (2) depth first search is not an example of intelligent behavior.
I don't think we'll be seeing robots holding up gas stations so they can stay on-line and "conscious" any time soon.
Here we go.
r s/ simon.ps
http://web.cs.ualberta.ca/~jonathan/Papers/Pape
Just get rid of the space slashdot puts in.
"Aptitude" is so vague. Likewise "natural talent". You might as well claim that a wizard flew down from the sky and cast a spell on him.
:-)
Read some Herbert Simon. With practice normal people have digit spans of 70+. Place pieces randomly and a grandmaster is as bad as the novice placing them from memory. Place pieces in meaningful positions and the grandmaster can play 20 games at once blindfolded.
The sport analogy you make ignores the social multiplier. Watch some NBA games from 15 years ago. Terrible by today's standard. Natural aptitude can't explain that.
Id est, aptitude is not an argument. You have to be more specific. For example, you could maybe argue that a person has "aptitude" genetically, and developmentally rather than from previous experience and preparation. But then you'd have to give some evidence from statistics, cognitive psychology, or whatever.
Just remember when you think about it that you're venturing into "nature" vs. "nurture" territory.
I have a 1987 gold laced world book encyclopedia. I now use several volumes to raise a few speakers a foot off the ground. It looks nice actually.. (world book sucks by the way)
You have it backwards because I was being so terse. The quoted response of dawkins (and it does appear to be a response here) where he accuses some of cultural relativism.
The author of the original essay isn't a cultural relativist. You could get away with accusing them of pragmatism and then build a connection between that and anti-scientism, but I really doubt that's the stance the author was taking, given they are scientists themselves.
Straw man, as that's not what the author meant.
"While the article has some good points to make, it suffers from a common flaw in arguments on this subject: the assumption that something that's too complex to model today is too complex to model, period"
"<i>FRANCIS S. COLLINS is the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute.
LOWELL WEISS is an executive at the Morino Institute in Reston, Virginia.
KATHY HUDSON is the assistant director of the National Human Genome Research Institute.</i>"
Do you see why I'd be a little skeptical in believing that assertion?
Read Carnap, Popper, Quine.
"The process is not based on faith. The process is based on observation."
No one said it wasn't. Observations can be faulty, which leads to a philosophy of science based on hypothesis building based on verification, falsification, and prediction.
Science is a process conducted by humans who aren't supremely rational beings.
Go read Plato, Aristotle. Are they postmodern as well?
Questions of epistemology in philosophy are thousands of years old on paper, and probably even older, albeit in less well thought out forms.
This is emphatically not the case. Is "gene that is correlated with a 2 point increase in IQ" too hard to understand? They don't even need to know the formal definition of covariance, because most humans can understand the general concept regardless.
While we're at it, we should also blame the scientists who let this misunderstanding propagate because it makes it much easier for them to get research dollars.
"is really nothing more then memorization of existing facts"
b ro ch/plast.html
Read this and say that again:
http://www.neuro.uoregon.edu/ionmain/htdocs/grd
He's talking about Dawkins and his gene as the ultimate replicator hypothesis and the irrational belief surrounding it that has now been discredited.
REF: Encyclopedia of Life Sciences, Selection: Units and Levels.
I don't recall seeing him deny this in the essay.
There is a general misunderstanding about the nature-nurture debate. We are all zombies in a sense, because our conscious is as the rest of our body -- automatic. The problem is in trying to separate mind from brain. You are your brain, and you are its conscious and unconscious processing. One must look no further than the fact that in the laboratory scientists can directly alter decisions of monkeys:
"The ability to predict and influence choices provides compelling evidence that choices are deterministic. Certainly, to the extent that neurons will not discharge unless they are depolarized by other neurons, brain states can be determined naturally only by earlier brain states. However, does such apparently Laplacian determinism grant as much prediction and influence as the evidence seems to indicate? Perhaps not. Complex dynamic systems that are far from equilibrium are usually not predictable. The brain is without doubt such a dynamical system that produces behaviour with the signature of chaos. In fact, some have argued that cognition is at least as dynamical as it is computational. Thus, the states of the brain, like the clouds in the sky, happen because of earlier states of the system.
But brain states and behaviour can be as unpredictable as the weather. If current research is correct that choices derive from states of the brain, and states of the brain, although deterministic, are not entirely predictable then it follows that choices may be made that are unexpected. Certainly the world is an unpredictable place, and it seems almost self-evident that the behaviour of most creatures, including humans, can be unpredictable. As we survey this landscape, we should realize that all of the neurophysiological results that we have reviewed were obtained after weeks of training monkeys to perform rigidly constrained tasks in impoverished environments, quite unlike the real world. Accordingly, conclusions drawn from the results of these experiments should be generalized to real-world situations with caution.
Still, the results that I have reviewed seem relevant to understanding freedom of choice. If we ask whether we are free, the kind of answer we want may not be possible. A better question to ask is: do we make choices? The answer is certainly yes. Do our choices have any influence on our relationship to our peers and the environment? Again, yes. Are our choices constrained? Yes, because of natural law and historical circumstances, but not entirely because of random chance and deterministic chaos. Consider a game of cards. To begin a fair game, the cards are shuffled to introduce randomness that produces unpredictability and lack of control over what cards are drawn. Once the hands are dealt, your freedom to play a certain card is limited by the rules of the game, the hand you are dealt, and your knowledge of strategy and tactics. But within these limitations you have many choices to react to, or anticipate what other players do both the astute tactics and the blockheaded blunders. The moment of deliberation about which card to play seems to embody all of the freedom one could hope for. The fact that such deliberation is accomplished by your brain takes away none of the joy of the game."
-- The Neural Basis for Deciding, Choosing, and Acting. - Nature Reviews Neuroscience; Jan, 2001
As we see above, you are not only defined by your genes, but your environment as well. If I were to teleport you to the 12th century, you would be a different person, with different actions, thoughts and beliefs - at least in regard to possible worlds hypotheses.
And yes, it is obvious that the content of the information that you process would affect who you are -- not only in the mistaken separation of mind and body.
If you're not a troll, you seriously need to be saved from your own ignorance.