I hate to be the one to explain this to you but there are broadly two reasons why people asked "why did you leave America?". The first is polite conversation making / showing an interest. The second is to hint that you're not welcome where you are. Hopefully you get more of the former than the latter.
No, it is generally quite clear in these conversations that they viewed America as a better place to live.
Is this any less stupid than the "Freedom of Speech" list in which they pick various arcane criteria with which to rate countries?
The same kind of list that people bring up every time some debate about how evil the US has become gets going?
Oh Look the US came in 38th on the Puppies list!! Haa haa, stupid America, even Chile has more puppies!
I'm going to come up with my own list, it will be called the "Green Grass list" and will rank countries based on where people would most like to move to. Speaking as someone who has lived in Europe for several years, and have faced the "why did you leave America?!" question a thousand times, I have a sneaking suspicion that the US of A would top that list.
Trying again without the extraneous text at the bottom, oops
Is this any less stupid than the "Freedom of Speech" list in which they pick various arcane criteria with which to rate countries?
The same kind of list that people bring up every time some debate about how evil the US has become gets going?
Oh Look the US came in 38th on the Puppies list!! Haa haa, stupid America, even Chile has more puppies!
I'm going to come up with my own list, it will be called the "Green Grass list" and will rank countries based on where people would most like to move to. Speaking as someone who has lived in Europe for several years, and have faced the "why did you leave America?!" question a thousand times, I have a sneaking suspicion that the US of A would top that list.
I'm an American, and I've lived in Europe for several years,
Of course we don't have a good understanding of how the mind works.
But if we have an understanding of the mechanistic processes underlying brain function, then we can simulate them, and therefore a human mind, on a turing machine, case closed.
I'll believe it when I have a conversation with a computer, or one shows that it can recognize faces -- when there is an artificial device that can handle a 'hard AI' problem. AFAIK, nueral networks can't ( or don't yet ) model the behavior of worms, which have the simplest nervous systems, IIRC.
This is all Irrelevant to the question you originally posed. We don't need to replicate the function of the brain to demonstrate that it is ultimately a computing device, we just need to understand its mechanisms.
And yes we can model the behavior of worms to varying degrees of complexity (depending on the intent of the modelling effort). These models are not very interesting so you don't hear about them.
At this point, I have a hunch that the organic nervous system is a different type of system than a nueral network.
Based on the available evidence, it doesn't seem to be. We know that neurons transmit information to each other, and we know, down to fairly meticulous levels of detail, how that transmission happens and what changes it causes at the other side. We don't know everything about what happens inside the cell, but we know quite alot about the form and timing of the messages (spikes) they send to each other.
I am well aware that this is just a funny feeling of mine, and I am totally open to abandoning my feeling in the face of compelling evidence.
The evidence is very compelling.
I am aware that I don't understand the math enough to make this claim myself, but I've read some debates, and to me, there is enough debate amongst experts that I can confidently say that the matter is not settled.
It depends what population you ask. If you asked around the halls of the building I'm in now, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks that we can't fully behavior with neurons. It's not a debate that exists within the neuroscience, or the vast majority of the psychology. In philosophy the debate will never die away, ever, because philosophers debate for the sheer joy of it. Listen to them at your peril.
Brain hacks seem to be fundamentally different than computer hacks. Or, the brain seems to have a collection of hacks that we have almost no understanding of, in addition to the hacks that we do understand.
I think it's just that the underlying information representation is different. If you build neural networks that closely mimic the information proccesing of the brain you can get patterns of behavior that's remarkably similar. That is, they are good at the same kind of problems the brain is good at.
Not that this is easy, and the vast majority of neural networks are nothing like the brain.
We do have robots that are getting good with articulation, like Asimo, but we still aren't sure whether they are using the same 'tricks' that organisms use.
I don't think Asimo does, but there are approaches to robotics, such as the subsumption architecture, that simulate the hierarchical structure of motor control, producing behavior that's very similar to more primitive neural systems, as found in insects.
There's nothing fundamentally mysterious about our brains, they're just complicated and we don't understand them yet, but a great deal of progress has been made.
Many other problems in CV are like this - edge detection, segmentation, etc. But people write hacks that work in restricted conditions and say they've solved.
Having worked in brain science for years I can say that the brain itself is a collection of hacks.
It's just a very huge collection that covers all of the bases that we find ourselves in from day to day. Put a brain in a situation it's not designed to handle and it breaks down just as badly as many artificial CV algorithms do.
The Finder needs some work; specifically, the inability to refresh and find a file that I *KNOW* makes me want to chuck it out a window.
There are other problems too, it seems to hang sometimes, and it's very difficult to figure out the key combo that lets me empty the trash of files that are orphan-locked.
Also, the finder can get into a state where the highlighted shortcut in the left panel doesn't correspond to the directory being displayed in the right panel. This should never happen.
But gimme a goddamned refresh button before you do anything else.
Antarctica is the coldest place on earth, therefore it is less likely that thunderstorms will occur in Antarctica, and less ozone will be produced in that area.
You guys missed the Funny button when modding him up. Try again.
I'm not saying they're incapable of making a decision. I'm saying they have been put into a position of making a decision that is too difficult to see a way out of (e.g. which parent do you save?).
Life is more complicated than the black and white picture you paint and someday you may find yourself down the hole. I hope that if you get there, you find someone more sympathetic than your current self to help pull you out.
It's not so black and white. Half of the good things in your life are the result of luck. If you don't realize this, it's because you're one of the lucky ones.
Many times people are unavoidably thrust into a situation that puts them into a hole which is harder to get out of than it was getting into. Some of them find their way out, some of them don't. This is how life works. And there's always people like you at the top, leering at them and telling them it's their own fault they're down there.
That's not to say some of them didn't play a role in getting to the bottom of that hole, but however they got there, extending a helping hand, or at least some sympathy is a better way to respond than being judgemental.
It's good to know my intuition is on track. I rely on it when I don't have time to lookup the power consumption of an LED, and the cost of electricity.
Instead I consider that an 5 ultrabright LED's can be powered by 3 rechargeable AAA's for 10 hours, and that a non ultrabright LED must use a tiny fraction of that power, which is already a fairly small amount, and just wing it from there.
That is, it is entirely possible (and plausible) that a correlation exists. However I'd interpret it in the reverse way. That is, the study shows just that children born with autism are more likely to spend time watching TV (knowing the features of autism, this is entirely possible).
You don't even have to read the FA to know that's impossible. They found a correlation between cable-ready counties and autism, so unless autistic children are somehow choosing which counties to live in, that's not a useful explanation.
Yes correlation does not equal causation, but in this case, if the article isn't statistical bullshit (which is very possible), it's certainly grounds for further inquiry if random selection of cable readiness county by county is correlated with autism.
Much of developmental and environmental science is based on correlation evidence.
At the end of the day, anything which encourages parents to turn their kids away from TV and put them out into the real, physical world is probably a good thing. So right or wrong, taking this study seriously can only make the world a better place.
Those LED's cost next to nothing, I would guess on the order of pennies per decade.
The standby cost is the result of inefficient transformers in power supplies that manage to suck power from the grid without doing anything with it.
Correlation = Causation?
on
IT and Divorce?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Surely you can't discount the fact that IT workers are drawn from a different portion of the population which makes it difficult if not impossible to prove that there is a causative factor?
It sounds like an interesting topic, but be careful with overstating the implications of your correlational results.
Here's a (probably flawed) analogy: I throw a rock through the air. Moment to moment, I can't predict the exact path that rock will take. A breeze, some dust in the air, an updraft, these things can alter the path of the rock. But ask me to tell you where it's going to land, and I can probably do a pretty good job.
No, you can predict that it's going to land but not exactly where, as those small fluctuations will add increasing amounts of noise to your estimate.
I was wondering how someone would manage to cram a dig at Americans into this story, thanks to both of you for your tag-team effort.
This post isn't even that funny or insightful really. That it's gotten modded up to 5 so quickly says a great deal about the seething anti-American sentiment in the mod community! Not that one couldn't tell by reading a global warming story. Any post that ends with "America Sux" hit +5 in seconds.
Not that I'm one to defend America's current stupidity, but the bias here is so over the top that it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
But sites like youtube effectively exploit this "loophole" in the DMCA (if you can call it that), by hosting dozens of simultaneous copies of the same content. And as soon as one goes down, another comes up. A media conglomerate would need a team of full timers patrolling YouTube to keep it free of infringing content.
I'm not saying it should be otherwise, just that I don't think this defense is going to get YouTube very far. When the media conglomerates aren't happy, the laws get changed, or the judges are convinced to make bad decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to be the one to explain this to you but there are broadly two reasons why people asked "why did you leave America?". The first is polite conversation making / showing an interest. The second is to hint that you're not welcome where you are. Hopefully you get more of the former than the latter.
No, it is generally quite clear in these conversations that they viewed America as a better place to live.
Is this any less stupid than the "Freedom of Speech" list in which they pick various arcane criteria with which to rate countries?
The same kind of list that people bring up every time some debate about how evil the US has become gets going?
Oh Look the US came in 38th on the Puppies list!! Haa haa, stupid America, even Chile has more puppies!
I'm going to come up with my own list, it will be called the "Green Grass list" and will rank countries based on where people would most like to move to. Speaking as someone who has lived in Europe for several years, and have faced the "why did you leave America?!" question a thousand times, I have a sneaking suspicion that the US of A would top that list.
Trying again without the extraneous text at the bottom, oops
Is this any less stupid than the "Freedom of Speech" list in which they pick various arcane criteria with which to rate countries?
The same kind of list that people bring up every time some debate about how evil the US has become gets going?
Oh Look the US came in 38th on the Puppies list!! Haa haa, stupid America, even Chile has more puppies!
I'm going to come up with my own list, it will be called the "Green Grass list" and will rank countries based on where people would most like to move to. Speaking as someone who has lived in Europe for several years, and have faced the "why did you leave America?!" question a thousand times, I have a sneaking suspicion that the US of A would top that list.
I'm an American, and I've lived in Europe for several years,
Agreed, this list has got to be one of the dumbest, yet often-quoted things on the internet.
Of course we don't have a good understanding of how the mind works.
But if we have an understanding of the mechanistic processes underlying brain function, then we can simulate them, and therefore a human mind, on a turing machine, case closed.
I'll believe it when I have a conversation with a computer, or one shows that it can recognize faces -- when there is an artificial device that can handle a 'hard AI' problem. AFAIK, nueral networks can't ( or don't yet ) model the behavior of worms, which have the simplest nervous systems, IIRC.
This is all Irrelevant to the question you originally posed. We don't need to replicate the function of the brain to demonstrate that it is ultimately a computing device, we just need to understand its mechanisms.
And yes we can model the behavior of worms to varying degrees of complexity (depending on the intent of the modelling effort). These models are not very interesting so you don't hear about them.
At this point, I have a hunch that the organic nervous system is a different type of system than a nueral network.
Based on the available evidence, it doesn't seem to be. We know that neurons transmit information to each other, and we know, down to fairly meticulous levels of detail, how that transmission happens and what changes it causes at the other side. We don't know everything about what happens inside the cell, but we know quite alot about the form and timing of the messages (spikes) they send to each other.
I am well aware that this is just a funny feeling of mine, and I am totally open to abandoning my feeling in the face of compelling evidence.
The evidence is very compelling.
I am aware that I don't understand the math enough to make this claim myself, but I've read some debates, and to me, there is enough debate amongst experts that I can confidently say that the matter is not settled.
It depends what population you ask. If you asked around the halls of the building I'm in now, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks that we can't fully behavior with neurons. It's not a debate that exists within the neuroscience, or the vast majority of the psychology. In philosophy the debate will never die away, ever, because philosophers debate for the sheer joy of it. Listen to them at your peril.
Brain hacks seem to be fundamentally different than computer hacks. Or, the brain seems to have a collection of hacks that we have almost no understanding of, in addition to the hacks that we do understand.
I think it's just that the underlying information representation is different. If you build neural networks that closely mimic the information proccesing of the brain you can get patterns of behavior that's remarkably similar. That is, they are good at the same kind of problems the brain is good at.
Not that this is easy, and the vast majority of neural networks are nothing like the brain.
We do have robots that are getting good with articulation, like Asimo, but we still aren't sure whether they are using the same 'tricks' that organisms use.
I don't think Asimo does, but there are approaches to robotics, such as the subsumption architecture, that simulate the hierarchical structure of motor control, producing behavior that's very similar to more primitive neural systems, as found in insects.
There's nothing fundamentally mysterious about our brains, they're just complicated and we don't understand them yet, but a great deal of progress has been made.
Many other problems in CV are like this - edge detection, segmentation, etc. But people write hacks that work in restricted conditions and say they've solved.
Having worked in brain science for years I can say that the brain itself is a collection of hacks.
It's just a very huge collection that covers all of the bases that we find ourselves in from day to day. Put a brain in a situation it's not designed to handle and it breaks down just as badly as many artificial CV algorithms do.
The Finder needs some work; specifically, the inability to refresh and find a file that I *KNOW* makes me want to chuck it out a window.
There are other problems too, it seems to hang sometimes, and it's very difficult to figure out the key combo that lets me empty the trash of files that are orphan-locked.
Also, the finder can get into a state where the highlighted shortcut in the left panel doesn't correspond to the directory being displayed in the right panel. This should never happen.
But gimme a goddamned refresh button before you do anything else.
Antarctica is the coldest place on earth, therefore it is less likely that thunderstorms will occur in Antarctica, and less ozone will be produced in that area.
You guys missed the Funny button when modding him up. Try again.
The Macintosh laptops have been (and had been) gaining market share by leaps and bounds. What is this sensationlist crap?
A few misconceptions to clear up:
The robots are not bipedal
The scientists are from Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland
But apart from these minor misconceptions, I think the GP has a great point.
The best way out is somewhere between our positions, chosen carefully to reflect the realities of the person's situation.
I'm not saying they're incapable of making a decision. I'm saying they have been put into a position of making a decision that is too difficult to see a way out of (e.g. which parent do you save?).
Life is more complicated than the black and white picture you paint and someday you may find yourself down the hole. I hope that if you get there, you find someone more sympathetic than your current self to help pull you out.
Get over yourself and life will be more fun. In the meantime you've become jerk #531 in my Foe list.
It's not so black and white. Half of the good things in your life are the result of luck. If you don't realize this, it's because you're one of the lucky ones.
Many times people are unavoidably thrust into a situation that puts them into a hole which is harder to get out of than it was getting into. Some of them find their way out, some of them don't. This is how life works. And there's always people like you at the top, leering at them and telling them it's their own fault they're down there.
That's not to say some of them didn't play a role in getting to the bottom of that hole, but however they got there, extending a helping hand, or at least some sympathy is a better way to respond than being judgemental.
Thanks :)
It's good to know my intuition is on track. I rely on it when I don't have time to lookup the power consumption of an LED, and the cost of electricity.
Instead I consider that an 5 ultrabright LED's can be powered by 3 rechargeable AAA's for 10 hours, and that a non ultrabright LED must use a tiny fraction of that power, which is already a fairly small amount, and just wing it from there.
That is, it is entirely possible (and plausible) that a correlation exists. However I'd interpret it in the reverse way. That is, the study shows just that children born with autism are more likely to spend time watching TV (knowing the features of autism, this is entirely possible).
You don't even have to read the FA to know that's impossible. They found a correlation between cable-ready counties and autism, so unless autistic children are somehow choosing which counties to live in, that's not a useful explanation.
Yes correlation does not equal causation, but in this case, if the article isn't statistical bullshit (which is very possible), it's certainly grounds for further inquiry if random selection of cable readiness county by county is correlated with autism.
Much of developmental and environmental science is based on correlation evidence.
At the end of the day, anything which encourages parents to turn their kids away from TV and put them out into the real, physical world is probably a good thing. So right or wrong, taking this study seriously can only make the world a better place.
Those LED's cost next to nothing, I would guess on the order of pennies per decade.
The standby cost is the result of inefficient transformers in power supplies that manage to suck power from the grid without doing anything with it.
Surely you can't discount the fact that IT workers are drawn from a different portion of the population which makes it difficult if not impossible to prove that there is a causative factor?
It sounds like an interesting topic, but be careful with overstating the implications of your correlational results.
Here's a (probably flawed) analogy: I throw a rock through the air. Moment to moment, I can't predict the exact path that rock will take. A breeze, some dust in the air, an updraft, these things can alter the path of the rock. But ask me to tell you where it's going to land, and I can probably do a pretty good job.
No, you can predict that it's going to land but not exactly where, as those small fluctuations will add increasing amounts of noise to your estimate.
Google paid 1.5% of the company in stock to purchase YouTube. Google stock jumped 5% on the news. Purchasing YouTube resulted in a profit for Google.
You're doing Bubble math.
Increases in stock price are not "profit", it is a change in the imaginary value of the company in the minds of the stockholders.
That value can be lost, catastrophically, in a way that cash in a bank account, or physical assets cannot.
It's not the firewall, it's the router itself which protects you.
I was wondering how someone would manage to cram a dig at Americans into this story, thanks to both of you for your tag-team effort.
This post isn't even that funny or insightful really. That it's gotten modded up to 5 so quickly says a great deal about the seething anti-American sentiment in the mod community! Not that one couldn't tell by reading a global warming story. Any post that ends with "America Sux" hit +5 in seconds.
Not that I'm one to defend America's current stupidity, but the bias here is so over the top that it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
But sites like youtube effectively exploit this "loophole" in the DMCA (if you can call it that), by hosting dozens of simultaneous copies of the same content. And as soon as one goes down, another comes up. A media conglomerate would need a team of full timers patrolling YouTube to keep it free of infringing content.
I'm not saying it should be otherwise, just that I don't think this defense is going to get YouTube very far. When the media conglomerates aren't happy, the laws get changed, or the judges are convinced to make bad decisions.