Please stop drawing analogues between socioeconomical politics and physics.
But that's the very point of this book... that if you look at normally separate fields in a certain way (in this case, forming networks of relationships) you can use common tools to analyse them.
What you're saying is almost like saying "stop using statistics in chemistry and football". Why should we, when statistics can tell us so much in both areas?
"... What is really interesting is that game theorists will borrow from network theorists, network theorists from game theorists, game theorists from evolutionary theorists, evolutionary theorists from game theorists, network theorists from evolutionary theorists, evolutionary theorists from AI theorists, and all of them from linguistics, philosophy, cognitive sciences, economics, and the other social sciences, computer modeling, agent-based modeling, etc. and visa versa..."
True, very true. Not only that, but the author of this book is a physicist!
95% of this book was familiar and/or easy to understand, coming from an AI and maths background. Where it occasionally lost me was in the sudden jumps and links between seemingly unrelated fields.
The Bose-Einstein condensation analogy with Microsoft's OS monopoly is one example of this. In the terms of the models Barabasi et al used, the discussion around this makes perfect sense*. It's only in the atmosphere of a physics department that such a connection would have been made, but the non-physicists reading the book could have done with a little more explanation. Most of the book, however, was extremely thorough and accessible.
*If I understand it correctly, the scale-free model predicts (and accounts for) the formation of hubs, but it is possible to modify the model such that the hubs can all converge to one level. This is governed by equations Einstein formulated in the 1920s. Nice to know, but not very clearly explained.
According to his weblog, the article is about ten days old, that's all. As it seems to be with all these things (except Apple browsers, of course), they're all announced months before they're available, just to drum up some interest.
Nah. I'm programming for some architects in the City, and I seem to be able to wear what I like (trainers, combats, t-shirt, whatever). I wear a shirt and tie for days where I have meetings with clients, otherwise common sense prevails... wear what you want, just don't take the piss.
I was watching a football (soccer) game once using the superior radio commentary and the sound turned off on the TV. It came down to a penalty shoot-out and the commentator shouted "he's missed it!", a few seconds later the TV showed the striker hoofing the ball straight over the bar. Commentator must have put him off...
The Pattern On The Stone by Daniel Hillis is a good introductory text on what it is exactly that computers are doing, and a solid introduction to some other topics such as genetic algorithms and chip design. It's only short, but I got a lot out of it (and this was two years into my BSc which had covered quite a lot of AI and programming by then).
Another review at PC PowerZone...
on
Shuttle SS40G Mini-PC
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
PC PowerZone also have a review of this posted today, and some more pictures in their forums. They also have reviews of the other Shuttle miniPCs and also VIA Eden stuff, for comparison.
Geeks who are still using so-called "multi-tap" input should be ashamed of themselves. Dictionary based methods, T9 (from Tegic/AOL), and iTap (Motorola's equivalent) have been standard on phones for a couple of years now, even if they do have their short-comings.
If you're not into the legacy layout* you could go with MessagEase or this new thing, but the smart money is on a company called Eatoni, since they have two products (LetterWise and WordWise) which they back up with a big stack of research. There's also Zi Corp. who make eZiText and eZiTap for SMS input.
Yeah, that would be good, and it shouldn't be too hard to have an Amazon style "readers who liked this story also liked..." section at the bottom either.
Hmm. I would have thought that something like that would be a really useful thing to have when looking for these authority hub thingumajigs teoma seem to want. It's also how I thought all search engines worked. I guess google spoils us:)
"Stupid bots One perl script written without any sleep()s in it can take up more resources than 100 normal users. They can be auto-noders, auto-linkers, personal statistics managers, chatter-bots, etc etc. Also, a wide array of data-harvester bots have visited us, and the only one allowed to stay is Google's. Once detected, they're fairly easy to weed out -- via IP's, User Agents, query patterns, etc -- but until then they can ruin the party."
Slashdot Mirror
Please stop drawing analogues between socioeconomical politics and physics.
But that's the very point of this book... that if you look at normally separate fields in a certain way (in this case, forming networks of relationships) you can use common tools to analyse them.
What you're saying is almost like saying "stop using statistics in chemistry and football". Why should we, when statistics can tell us so much in both areas?
"... What is really interesting is that game theorists will borrow from network theorists, network theorists from game theorists, game theorists from evolutionary theorists, evolutionary theorists from game theorists, network theorists from evolutionary theorists, evolutionary theorists from AI theorists, and all of them from linguistics, philosophy, cognitive sciences, economics, and the other social sciences, computer modeling, agent-based modeling, etc. and visa versa..."
True, very true. Not only that, but the author of this book is a physicist!
95% of this book was familiar and/or easy to understand, coming from an AI and maths background. Where it occasionally lost me was in the sudden jumps and links between seemingly unrelated fields.
The Bose-Einstein condensation analogy with Microsoft's OS monopoly is one example of this. In the terms of the models Barabasi et al used, the discussion around this makes perfect sense*. It's only in the atmosphere of a physics department that such a connection would have been made, but the non-physicists reading the book could have done with a little more explanation. Most of the book, however, was extremely thorough and accessible.
*If I understand it correctly, the scale-free model predicts (and accounts for) the formation of hubs, but it is possible to modify the model such that the hubs can all converge to one level. This is governed by equations Einstein formulated in the 1920s. Nice to know, but not very clearly explained.
According to his weblog, the article is about ten days old, that's all. As it seems to be with all these things (except Apple browsers, of course), they're all announced months before they're available, just to drum up some interest.
Nah. I'm programming for some architects in the City, and I seem to be able to wear what I like (trainers, combats, t-shirt, whatever). I wear a shirt and tie for days where I have meetings with clients, otherwise common sense prevails... wear what you want, just don't take the piss.
I was watching a football (soccer) game once using the superior radio commentary and the sound turned off on the TV. It came down to a penalty shoot-out and the commentator shouted "he's missed it!", a few seconds later the TV showed the striker hoofing the ball straight over the bar. Commentator must have put him off...
The Pattern On The Stone by Daniel Hillis is a good introductory text on what it is exactly that computers are doing, and a solid introduction to some other topics such as genetic algorithms and chip design. It's only short, but I got a lot out of it (and this was two years into my BSc which had covered quite a lot of AI and programming by then).
PC PowerZone also have a review of this posted today, and some more pictures in their forums. They also have reviews of the other Shuttle miniPCs and also VIA Eden stuff, for comparison.
Also, unmetered access with NTL is 128kbps @ 15 GBP/month and I'm with Tele2 @ 13* GBP/month for 150kbps. So it's not all bad in the UK.
Much faster speeds available of course, but I'd only use that for big downloads and that's what the university bought cd-writers for :)
*(special offer, meant to be 20, but I've been on this for over a year now)
Geeks who are still using so-called "multi-tap" input should be ashamed of themselves. Dictionary based methods, T9 (from Tegic/AOL), and iTap (Motorola's equivalent) have been standard on phones for a couple of years now, even if they do have their short-comings.
If you're not into the legacy layout* you could go with MessagEase or this new thing, but the smart money is on a company called Eatoni, since they have two products (LetterWise and WordWise) which they back up with a big stack of research. There's also Zi Corp. who make eZiText and eZiTap for SMS input.
If you're interested in the HCI aspect of all this you could do worse than looking at the work of I Scott Mackenzie, Poika Isokoski or Mark Dunlop.
* 1-800-GOFEDEX anyone? Probably explains why Europe is ahead of the US in this field. That and our ridiculous txt addctn...
Yeah, that would be good, and it shouldn't be too hard to have an Amazon style "readers who liked this story also liked..." section at the bottom either.
Oh OK.
Hmm. I would have thought that something like that would be a really useful thing to have when looking for these authority hub thingumajigs teoma seem to want. It's also how I thought all search engines worked. I guess google spoils us :)
See E2 lag problems and (potential) solutions for why...
Tom.