if a community can't afford water, how is it going to afford e-anything?
If the network can help you dig a well, it's worth the value of the water already. What can be afforded at a constant price changes with the value of the good/service.
I am metamoderating the parent comment's "Offtopic" moderation right now as "fair."
I was raised Baptist, taught "creation science," and I still have a stack of books by Josh McDowell somewhere. I just took a look at trueorigins.org, icr.org, and andswersingenesis.com. Nothing new there. I know the arguments. They are lies, designed to keep preachers and their churches in positions of authority and power.
Since college I have been a Quaker (Religious Society of Friends.) We have no problem with the possibility of God's motive force guiding and shaping natural selection. But we see the evidence of evolution in the world around us and we know that since God does not reveal himself to us as an ordinary occurance, that He expects us to use our head in relation to the fossil record, nuclaic cell biology, etc. We are not so stupid as to presume that Genesis is any more than an allegorical myth.
How presumptious is it of you to suggest that the omnipotent God is so weak that He could not have designed the very thought occuring in your head this moment when he set the universe in motion billions of years ago? Only your conformist herd mentality and desparate attempt to cling to the idea of an afterlife keep your nose in the Holy Babble, and result in your adherance to creationism. I feel sorry for your inability to believe in a God without buying in to the popular myths of your cultural ancestors over the millenia. You have more intelligence than that, and God wants you to make use of it, as a thinking human being capable of integrating the evidence you obtain from the scientific method and peer review, not as a superstitious sheep.
John W. Tukey...
is of course best known for his (re)invention, with IBM's Jim Cooley, of the fast Fourier transform, (FFT) which changed the topography of digital signal processing (never mind that Gauss had the FFT 150 years earlier). Tukey was also a great wordsmith: he coined the terms bit, byte, software and cepstrum, (the Fourier transform of the logarithm of the Fourier transform). But some of his cookier coinages, like quefrency (for cepstral frequency) and saphe (for cepstral phase) didn't catch on.
I first heard about the cepstrum from John, which he had invented to distinguish underground nuclear explosions from earth quakes in connection with the US-Soviet test ban negotiations. It became immediately clear to me that the cepstrum was ideally suited for extracting the fundamental frequency (the pitch) from speech signals -- a difficult task for distorted telephone signals. The cepstrum was an ingenious idea and today, 40 years later, it remains the best method for separating long delays (travel times of seismic waves in the earth's mantle or times intervals between the puffs of the human vocal cords) from short-delay and resonance effects (of the human vocal tract).
B.P. Bogert, M.J. R. Healy and J.W. Tukey, "The Quefrency Alanysis of Time Series for Echoes: Cepstrum, Psuedo-Autocovariance, Cross-cepstrum and Saphe Cracking", in Proceedings of the Symposium on Time Series Analysis, edited by M. Rosenblat, 1963 (New York: Wiley), pp. 209-243.
Re:Doppler Drift Rate "chirping" seems way redunda
on
SETI@Home Publishes Skymap
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The way to handle spoofs is to redo the raw data on someone else's (or a lab) machine if it ever looks promising.
I'm pretty damn sure they could be getting a many thousand times speedup.
The process is to take a FFT of the log magnitude spectrum, and look for peaks in the cepstral domain instead of periodicities and triplets in the spectral domain. Maybe there is some reason you can't look for gausians that way. Maybe I ought to take this to email and see what the SETI@Home people say.
Re:Doppler Drift Rate "chirping" seems way redunda
on
SETI@Home Publishes Skymap
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Intel's SSE is a four float SIMD operation, and isn't avalable on all processors.
If they were using the cepstrum to correct for doppler shift, they could get several thousand times speedup; much more than just four.
Doppler Drift Rate "chirping" seems way redundant
on
SETI@Home Publishes Skymap
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
the SETI@home screensaver analyzes the data many times over trying a great variety of possible doppler accelerations. Actually, the screensaver first takes the raw data and mathematically "undoes" a specific doppler acceleration or "chirp". It then feeds the resulting "de-accelerated" data to the FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) routines. This is called "De-chirping" the data. SETI@home tries to do this at many points between -50 Hz/sec to +50 Hz/sec. At the finest frequency resolution of 0.075 Hz we check for 5409 different chirp rates between -10 Hz/sec and +10 Hz/sec!
There should be no need to iterate thousands of times over the pattern recognition algorithms when you can just take anouther FFT of the log magnitude spectrum to eliminate doppler shift (the same as what audio engineers would call 'pitch.') Cepstral analysis has been eliminating pitch in audio signal processing for decades. Too bad nobody told the astronomers.
there is a time and a place for this silly, elite speaking internet sub-culture
When it comes to 'l33t-5p33k, I completely agree.
However, the abreviations which are borne from a need to put more meaning into limited length strings, or to type effectivly on an awkward telephone keyboard, are worth an effort to understand, because everyone might be able to make use of them someday. Who doesn't understand "how r u?"
Then again, if people can comprehend it, how is it any less valid than any other dialect? You might want teachers to give bad grades for some dialect, but not necessarily all dialect or all the time. There needs to be distinction between formal and informal writing.
Language is not static, and nobody has every suggested that English spelling has no room for improvement.
Only in France is language controlled by committee. Everywhere else author usage reigns supreme.
Actually it was the people who decided to use it that are changing things.
True, but you can ask the deeper question of what convinced people to sit in front of a computer instead of a television. Back in the 80s, only a few Fidonet/BBS people were pried away from TV during their leisure time.
The reason might have been the economic demand perceived for technologically literate computer operators, from employment opportunities dwindling and beecoming more technologically specific. And/or, the lure of communications conveniences like email, search engines, listservs/newsgroups, etc. And/or the faddish aspects of the mosaic/netscape experience sure drew a lot of people into the internet.
Fundamentally, though it's probably herd behaviour, as people see their peers start to use the net more, they want to too.
given enough time, it could catch up with desirable data speeds
Liquid crystals are really slow. You really have to struggle to get 35 ms switching out of them, which is what the movie people want. These diffraction switches are a lot faster, but I doubt they'll ever get faster than 0.5 ms.
The basic problem is that you're dealing with long strands of polymers which orient themselves almost but predictably not quite parallel to each neighboring polymer strand, unless a current is flowing, in which case they just align strictly parallel to each other. It takes time, lots of time, for the reconfiguration to occur, because it is a fundamentally mechanical process.
The article cited did a horrible job IMHO of representing the underlyng science. The regularity of the crystal droplets has nothing to do with the new effect -- which is using a thinner layer of liquid crystals to difract instead of polarize, which requires thicker LCs. The droplet regularity is an artifact of the thinness, not a cause of the essential property as is purported.
I like to call myself a utilitarian, but some days I just can't make it out of bed.
I don't like to call myself a libertarian. Libertarian's can't fugure out how to maintain ambulance services. (Objectivists can't either, in theory, but in my experience the most strident libertarian and objectivist will both suddenly become a moderate upon election or appointment to a position of influence.)
Frankly, this is the most interesting thread I've found in this story. However, if you two are going to call each other names, make sure you choose the right names.
LS is presenting a typical existential viewpoint, like that of Sartre.
YllabianBitPipe has taken a utilitarian viewpoint, like that of J.S. Mill.
The conflict between these two points of view is the same as in the prisoner's dilemma from game theory. The utilitarians want to attain the benefit of having everyone cooperating, so they encourage others to cooperate. The existentialists, believing the probability of cooperation succeding to be low enough to make it futile to some extent, but also unwilling to embrace defection -- because doing so would negate the essential humanity of action -- try to find sources of entertainment that the utilitarians call pointless, and delay the choice to cooperate or defect.
The question becomes: even if, "the world as a whole will always be screwed up," then is there any point in trying to create local maxima of quality of life? The utiltarians aren't going to be so lucky all the time, but the existentialists might be capable of more than they give themselves credit for.
The world does not have bright lines like a 2x2 game theory matrix. The best intentions often go astray, but on the other hand sometimes a tiny action by a single person can make a huge difference for the entire population.
This debate goes on in my head every day. I like to call myself a libertarian, but some days I just can't make it out of bed.
Oh come on. That there is no guarantee that the same algorithms will work with different data won't mean squat to a jury if, in fact, the algorithms do work with the different data sets.
Don't try to convince me that there is anything fundamental going on here beyond sparce matrix distance metric theory. Trying to recommend dates is essentially similar in Joe Random Juror's mind to trying to recommend music and books. Even if one algorithm is entirely unsupervised and the other depends on a huge preference-screening front end, the jury only sees the black boxes doing the same things.
In this labor market, the defendant in infringement suits can get the more convincing experts on the stand, even if poorer than the plaintiff. Do you know how many linear algebra Ph.D.s are driving taxis right now?
I hope so, but I haven't heard of anything free in practice lately other than MIPS minus unaligned load/store patented instructions. Intel has ratcheted down the license fee for ARM ISA to literally next to nothing because they are competing against those free MIPS subsets.
The ISA is insignificant in comparison to cache architecture in all the heavy-duty applications I care about. A/V codecs, which lend themselves directly to hardware a lot better than huristic search does, as far as I'm concerned, are only good for the, erm, health benefits.
Can't wait for Red Star, though, I want solar powered speech toys.
With the meager about of cache (32Kw split) that Intel ships with their Xscales, I don't blame Sony for taping out their own chip.
I've been trying to get Intel to increase their cache in response to the pressures from the kind of algorithms people want to run on portables, but even though they'll sacrafice battery life on the altar of huge, bright, color LCDs in their reference designs, they won't even double their cache.
Ah -- collaborative filtering, now where else is that used?
Anyway, the Pinpoint patents are obviously not worth the paper they're printed on. The Firefly collaborative music recommendation system was widely published out of MIT in '94, and should be the easiest stick with which to L.A.R.T. the Pinpoint bozos.
But gee, a telephon date line running under CP/M from the 80's, now there's some extra points for overwhelming geekitude. Who needs Firefly when you've got 212-ROMANCE?
Insightful?!? I'd better start M2ing more often. Now, this is insightful:
For the first time, more likely voters (47%)
say it's time for someone new in the White House, compared to 46% who said the President deserves to be re-elected.
Registered epinions users get graded on the quality, quantity, and completeness (verbosity) of their reviews, very much like slashdot karma. Because some kind of a word-count system gets used, it is not uncommon to see ~*~*~*~ supluferious things ~*~*~*~ all over the reviews.
However, it's better than nothing, and their are safegards in place to prevent unfairness and marketing subterfuge. I have no idea how well they work, but I do know epinons is entirely reliable in my experience.
The last thing I purchased through epinions was a child car seat, and I am sure that epinions saved Sharon and I a whole lot of time, and plenty of money.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid so. Revolt!
If the network can help you dig a well, it's worth the value of the water already. What can be afforded at a constant price changes with the value of the good/service.
I was raised Baptist, taught "creation science," and I still have a stack of books by Josh McDowell somewhere. I just took a look at trueorigins.org, icr.org, and andswersingenesis.com. Nothing new there. I know the arguments. They are lies, designed to keep preachers and their churches in positions of authority and power.
Since college I have been a Quaker (Religious Society of Friends.) We have no problem with the possibility of God's motive force guiding and shaping natural selection. But we see the evidence of evolution in the world around us and we know that since God does not reveal himself to us as an ordinary occurance, that He expects us to use our head in relation to the fossil record, nuclaic cell biology, etc. We are not so stupid as to presume that Genesis is any more than an allegorical myth.
How presumptious is it of you to suggest that the omnipotent God is so weak that He could not have designed the very thought occuring in your head this moment when he set the universe in motion billions of years ago? Only your conformist herd mentality and desparate attempt to cling to the idea of an afterlife keep your nose in the Holy Babble, and result in your adherance to creationism. I feel sorry for your inability to believe in a God without buying in to the popular myths of your cultural ancestors over the millenia. You have more intelligence than that, and God wants you to make use of it, as a thinking human being capable of integrating the evidence you obtain from the scientific method and peer review, not as a superstitious sheep.
You asked.
On the contrary, 5000 > 3.
I'm pretty damn sure they could be getting a many thousand times speedup.
The process is to take a FFT of the log magnitude spectrum, and look for peaks in the cepstral domain instead of periodicities and triplets in the spectral domain. Maybe there is some reason you can't look for gausians that way. Maybe I ought to take this to email and see what the SETI@Home people say.
If they were using the cepstrum to correct for doppler shift, they could get several thousand times speedup; much more than just four.
That seems horribly inefficient!
Have the SETI people ever heard of cepstral techniques?
There should be no need to iterate thousands of times over the pattern recognition algorithms when you can just take anouther FFT of the log magnitude spectrum to eliminate doppler shift (the same as what audio engineers would call 'pitch.') Cepstral analysis has been eliminating pitch in audio signal processing for decades. Too bad nobody told the astronomers.
What a waste of all those CPU cycles!
When it comes to 'l33t-5p33k, I completely agree.
However, the abreviations which are borne from a need to put more meaning into limited length strings, or to type effectivly on an awkward telephone keyboard, are worth an effort to understand, because everyone might be able to make use of them someday. Who doesn't understand "how r u?"
Language is not static, and nobody has every suggested that English spelling has no room for improvement.
Only in France is language controlled by committee. Everywhere else author usage reigns supreme.
I want whatever spam filters the parent poster is using.
yes, the poster sure was.
True, but you can ask the deeper question of what convinced people to sit in front of a computer instead of a television. Back in the 80s, only a few Fidonet/BBS people were pried away from TV during their leisure time.
The reason might have been the economic demand perceived for technologically literate computer operators, from employment opportunities dwindling and beecoming more technologically specific. And/or, the lure of communications conveniences like email, search engines, listservs/newsgroups, etc. And/or the faddish aspects of the mosaic/netscape experience sure drew a lot of people into the internet.
Fundamentally, though it's probably herd behaviour, as people see their peers start to use the net more, they want to too.
Lets hope they are using interactive forms (like this comment form) and not just wathing flash movies or playing mmorpgs.
Liquid crystals are really slow. You really have to struggle to get 35 ms switching out of them, which is what the movie people want. These diffraction switches are a lot faster, but I doubt they'll ever get faster than 0.5 ms.
The basic problem is that you're dealing with long strands of polymers which orient themselves almost but predictably not quite parallel to each neighboring polymer strand, unless a current is flowing, in which case they just align strictly parallel to each other. It takes time, lots of time, for the reconfiguration to occur, because it is a fundamentally mechanical process.
The article cited did a horrible job IMHO of representing the underlyng science. The regularity of the crystal droplets has nothing to do with the new effect -- which is using a thinner layer of liquid crystals to difract instead of polarize, which requires thicker LCs. The droplet regularity is an artifact of the thinness, not a cause of the essential property as is purported.
I don't like to call myself a libertarian. Libertarian's can't fugure out how to maintain ambulance services. (Objectivists can't either, in theory, but in my experience the most strident libertarian and objectivist will both suddenly become a moderate upon election or appointment to a position of influence.)
LS is presenting a typical existential viewpoint, like that of Sartre.
YllabianBitPipe has taken a utilitarian viewpoint, like that of J.S. Mill.
The conflict between these two points of view is the same as in the prisoner's dilemma from game theory. The utilitarians want to attain the benefit of having everyone cooperating, so they encourage others to cooperate. The existentialists, believing the probability of cooperation succeding to be low enough to make it futile to some extent, but also unwilling to embrace defection -- because doing so would negate the essential humanity of action -- try to find sources of entertainment that the utilitarians call pointless, and delay the choice to cooperate or defect.
The question becomes: even if, "the world as a whole will always be screwed up," then is there any point in trying to create local maxima of quality of life? The utiltarians aren't going to be so lucky all the time, but the existentialists might be capable of more than they give themselves credit for. The world does not have bright lines like a 2x2 game theory matrix. The best intentions often go astray, but on the other hand sometimes a tiny action by a single person can make a huge difference for the entire population.
This debate goes on in my head every day. I like to call myself a libertarian, but some days I just can't make it out of bed.
SWEET!
Don't try to convince me that there is anything fundamental going on here beyond sparce matrix distance metric theory. Trying to recommend dates is essentially similar in Joe Random Juror's mind to trying to recommend music and books. Even if one algorithm is entirely unsupervised and the other depends on a huge preference-screening front end, the jury only sees the black boxes doing the same things.
In this labor market, the defendant in infringement suits can get the more convincing experts on the stand, even if poorer than the plaintiff. Do you know how many linear algebra Ph.D.s are driving taxis right now?
I hope so, but I haven't heard of anything free in practice lately other than MIPS minus unaligned load/store patented instructions. Intel has ratcheted down the license fee for ARM ISA to literally next to nothing because they are competing against those free MIPS subsets.
The ISA is insignificant in comparison to cache architecture in all the heavy-duty applications I care about. A/V codecs, which lend themselves directly to hardware a lot better than huristic search does, as far as I'm concerned, are only good for the, erm, health benefits.
Can't wait for Red Star, though, I want solar powered speech toys.
I've been trying to get Intel to increase their cache in response to the pressures from the kind of algorithms people want to run on portables, but even though they'll sacrafice battery life on the altar of huge, bright, color LCDs in their reference designs, they won't even double their cache.
s/Firefly/RINGO/
Anyway, the Pinpoint patents are obviously not worth the paper they're printed on. The Firefly collaborative music recommendation system was widely published out of MIT in '94, and should be the easiest stick with which to L.A.R.T. the Pinpoint bozos.
But gee, a telephon date line running under CP/M from the 80's, now there's some extra points for overwhelming geekitude. Who needs Firefly when you've got 212-ROMANCE?
However, it's better than nothing, and their are safegards in place to prevent unfairness and marketing subterfuge. I have no idea how well they work, but I do know epinons is entirely reliable in my experience.
The last thing I purchased through epinions was a child car seat, and I am sure that epinions saved Sharon and I a whole lot of time, and plenty of money.