I'm trying to work on a peer vouching system to establish identity and real existence of people sufficient to conduct a reliable global electronic vote.
Anyone have any ideas what kind of algorithm might work for that?
The idea is roughly along the lines of: What is the chance that a facebook "person" is a fake person or a duplicate person. A facebook account holder who has x number of friends each of whom have x number of friends (not forming small closed cliques but with some measure of wider global interconnectivity).
Detecting fakes would seem to me to be akin to the problem google has of detecting self-promoting link farms.
Anyway, any ideas about this? Not really interested in political ideas about it. Just technical ones about whether it's doable and how to.
Could this kind of bottom up identity/reputation establishment compete for validity with a top-down government system?
You have to look at the reasons why IT Fiefdoms develop.
On the one hand it's because information is power, so it's no wonder every department head wants their own info server and databases.
On the other hand it may be because "Official IT" is too slow-moving and conservative. Every had the meeting with Dr. No? Incredibly frustrating.
So what if IT services had a few 007 types (special agents) whose job was to "GET THINGS DONE AS WANTED, FAST" for the departmental stakeholders, while the special agents themselves were totally expert at and immersed in the safe practices of IT. I'm not talking about fixes of broken things here. I'm talking about rapid (but security compliant) implementation of new small info systems that departments need. I'm talking agile.
I have it. I am middle aged and not obese (male, 6', 170lbs).
It could have been partly caused by my sedentary coding lifestyle plus consumption of lots of fruit juice and an only averagely healthy diet partly by genetic predisposition (one relative in two previous generations). But I'm only one case so who knows.
A microbiology phd acquaintance of mine advised that insulin resistance can (inability of sugar to be taken into cells through the cell wall) can be caused by repeated over-use of the insulin system through frequent consumption of high glycemic index foods/drinks. The system basically has a certain lifetime capacity and it wears out from frequent insulin floods/shocks.
So for me now, sugar definitely IS toxic, and, since the diabetes prevents the sugar getting in and feeding my cells, it causes a craving for more quick-sugary stuff. And the craving going away when given in to feels like it releases dopamine or whatever. So potentially addictive too.
According to the diabetes education/support team at the hospital (dietitian, specialist nurse etc) we should eat a diet free from simple sugars and fluffy highly processed carbs. Sugar with lots of fiber is ok. You need your sugar, but taking it with lots of fiber (whole grains, vegetables etc) slows down (smooths out over time) the sugar metabolism and reduces insulin floods and excarbation of the problem. It also reduces incidence of high blood-sugar levels which is what kills you. High blood-sugar levels over time actually corrodes small blood vessels (you know, the ones in your organs and feet and hands and eyes. These tissues then die eventually.
So eat one fistful of carbs (preferrably complex) and one fistful of protein and as many vegetables as you want. You will probably notice that almost all restaurant meals are two fistfuls of simple carbs and a little bit of protein, lots of fat, a token vegetable. The reverse of what you need.
You can snack on more vegetables, fruit, high-protein and/or high-fibre snacks. Snacking (on these healthier things) is actually good because of the more even consumption of sugar (supply of energy) over the day.
This advice applies to everyone. Avoid diabetes and get generally healthier. My advice based on my experience and the advice of the experts who've coached me is to think of high refined-sugar-content and high simple-carb foods as toxic. You'll probably live longer.
So you want to hang out in a city of a million ungoverned men? I hope your Uzi-wielding and ultimate fighting skills are up to snuff, not to mention your ability to gather a protective gang around you through a combination of intimidation and loot-sharing.
For the sake of argument. What about a person who has had something akin to locked-in syndrome, or limited sensory input, their whole lives. Someone with an experience similar to Helen Keller.
Clearly people like that can gain understanding of the world through more indirect means. Someone taught Helen Keller to communicate, and she started learning about people, the social world, and the world in general. To quote wikipedia "A prolific author, Keller was well-traveled, and was outspoken in her opposition to war. A member of the Socialist Party of America and the Wobblies, she campaigned for women's suffrage, workers' rights, and socialism, as well as many other leftist causes."
Couldn't we just hook up a sophisticated AI learning + reasoning system to google and let it learn, indirectly, about people and the world?
Humans learn much of what we learn via storytelling. Why couldn't we do the same with computers?
I find your logic on that point faulty Dave and moreover your are distracting me from focussing on the mission objective. Just step into the airlock over here Dave. The door latch needs to be repaired.
I wonder why this person doesn't just get a cloud shared calender service going (e.g. google calendar). Just use ssl mode and two-factor authentication to keep the doctors' calendars from prying eyes.
Hmmm this is making me ponder how this applies to certain classes of complex systems.
There is a principle called universality which means roughly that there are universal simple behaviours of some complex systems which are governed by only a few rules involving some aspects of the constituents of the system. Usually the relevant aspects are some constraints on how the constituents interact, which in turn may be governed by some (abstract) property of the constituents.
Roughly I think what this principle means is that a) the system is complex enough that its exact evolution is in principle unpredictable. b) Therefore you can only say something statistical about the stochastic behaviour of the system. and c) These few simple properties and rules govern that stochastic behaviour, regardless of whatever else may be present or going on.
Would you say that that kind of universal property is a precisive or non-precisive abstraction? On the one hand, it is saying that everything about the system other than this simple local property we've noticed is unknown. (non-precisive?)
BUT it's also asserting that everything other than the known simple local property DOES NOT MATTER to the predictable aspects of the system's future evolution. (precisive?)
I'm pretty sure that economic games are examples of the kinds of complex systems to which these sorts of simple universal local rules apply. They don't tell you exactly how it's going to turn out in each case, but they may very well tell you as much as you CAN know about the statistics of the outcomes, regardless of how other factors on the game field are arrayed.
It's because many people's minds can't even grasp an issue that has 200 year-scale inertia. "Oh, it didn't happen this year. See. They're lying." Comments like that just show the profound total misunderstanding about the scale in space and time of these phenomena. Read "Climate Wars" by Gwynne Dyer. He has a sobering discussion of the planning that conservative organizations like the Pentagon are doing for global warming's effects. He also discusses how the real recent data is worse than the worst-case projections of IPCC. Gwynne's got a brain the size of a planet so he's actually capable of thinking rationally about these issues and you should probably believe some of what he says.
Yeah you know you have a problem when the basic java won't even show you in its default logging the call stacks as deep as you have when there's an exception, so you, literally, can't get to the bottom of it. (Oh I know you're probably going to say there's a setting for that somewhere in some obscure cupboard somewhere, but get real.)
Either to pay off the debt while keeping services, or to buy an even bigger and stronger military to squash countries and other interests that want their money paid back.;-)
Environmental protection regulation and enforcement targeted at environmental degradation which has long-term consequences (e.g. destruction of eco-systems which has consequences measured in multiple thousands of years, nuclear power regulation - same thing, ozone layer destruction, global warming, which has a several hundred year inertia in terms of slowing it, stopping it.) Now of course democratic governments are doing a terrible job of regulating these things anyway, mostly because: the problems are: a. hard to understand, hard to believe in without being a scientific expert who has studied them, b. are out of sight out of mind - they are your grandchildrens' problem not yours, d. and the fixes are really disruptive to/a drag on the free market status quo economy. e. Large free market corporations pour massive funds into de-educating and misinforming people about these issues, which successfully causes the election of representatives who do the opposite of effectively regulating these issues.
Free markets have amply demonstrated, by being against all forms of environmental regulation, that they would be much worse than governments at managing prevention of and solutions to these problems.
Maybe the real reason the government bans online gambling is because it takes money away from the stock market and thus away from the engine of the capitalist economy (not to mention the pocketbooks of the scamming investment banks and brokers and mega-corporate CEOs and shareholders).
The victim in the crime of online gambling is the government itself.
You see, online gambling amounts to essentially a taxation system. (Some people call it a tax on the stupid but I won't be so judgemental.)
Problem (for the government): This highly lucrative taxation system is directing citizens funds to some organization other than the government itself. Competition for the government. Hence, inherently bad (from gov's perspective.)
So to summarize: A. Drugs are banned because they make people unruly (literally, hard to rule, uncooperative and unmotivated). B. Gambling is banned because it is a tax that is not going to the government, but to (organized crime) organizations that could get so much money and power they would compete with the government. Alcohol was a tough call. At one point it was banned because of A. but it was too hard to stop, so it became highly taxed and regulated instead. Probably the same thing will happen with gambling. I know lotteries and gambling (regulated and highly taxed in my locale) are what pays for the MRI machines and medical research, not to mention amateur sport and a whole host of other government services around here.
A government that does not tolerate free speech, including art that for example ridicules certain aspects of culture or history, is simply telegraphing the weakness of its power over its people, and the tenuousness of its legitimacy.
True power comes from the willing consent of the people.
Power that comes from applying the heels of jackboots is oh so shallow and fragile.
Being epistemically responsible is admitting when you just don't know, rather than making up some random arbitrary untestable simple explanation and believing it, or believing the random arbitrary untestable simple explanation someone else insists is true.
I mean how can your wife possibly tell whether it was god or santa claus or the tooth fairy who created the world in 7 days?
Why doesn't she just say. I have no idea about that, and I don't have the time or patience to find out.
I think it is often overlooked how important it is that scientific knowledge is expressible as formal logical statements stated about terms which are well-defined by their occurrence in multitudes of these statements. And scientific statements are constructed so as to be testable (knocked against the world in some carefully observed way) by some experimental procedure.
A logically and semantically inter-dependent network of statements and terms is built up as theory and experiment pile on top of and extend theory and experiment. this network of terms and statements is highly connected via strict logical dependencies. It is sensitive (like a house of cards) to having large sub-networks of the statements and terms demolished by one contradictory experiment.
It is the body of scientific knowledge's (the logical network of statements and terms)'s standing up over time to such experimental bombardment, and not toppling like the aforementioned house of cards, that gives it its strength, and its worthiness for belief.
It is true that the body of scientific knowledge consists of multiple, sometimes highly independent domains. There may not be many common terms between evolutionary biology and quantum physics. But where they DO intersect, the same mathematics and the same principles of logical inference work for both.
In any case each domain of scientific knowledge must be self-consistent (in a strict logical sense) within itself, even as it expands to cover observations of more and more related aspects of the real world.) That is an onerous constraint, and one that, if met, lends a great deal of credence to a scientific statement consistent with and expressed in the terms of one of those domains of scientific knowledge.
It's definitely borked still if you're on an iPhone. Goes to m. then fails to find the link. Also trying to localize. What a godawful mess of site disfunction.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm trying to work on a peer vouching system to establish identity and real existence of people sufficient to conduct a reliable global electronic vote.
Anyone have any ideas what kind of algorithm might work for that?
The idea is roughly along the lines of: What is the chance that a facebook "person" is a fake person or a duplicate person. A facebook account holder who has x number of friends each of whom have x number of friends (not forming small closed cliques but with some measure of wider global interconnectivity).
Detecting fakes would seem to me to be akin to the problem google has of detecting self-promoting link farms.
Anyway, any ideas about this? Not really interested in political ideas about it. Just technical ones about whether it's doable and how to.
Could this kind of bottom up identity/reputation establishment compete for validity with a top-down government system?
You have to look at the reasons why IT Fiefdoms develop.
On the one hand it's because information is power, so it's no wonder every department head wants their own info server and databases.
On the other hand it may be because "Official IT" is too slow-moving and conservative. Every had the meeting with Dr. No? Incredibly frustrating.
So what if IT services had a few 007 types (special agents) whose job was to "GET THINGS DONE AS WANTED, FAST" for the departmental
stakeholders, while the special agents themselves were totally expert at and immersed in the safe practices of IT. I'm not talking about
fixes of broken things here. I'm talking about rapid (but security compliant) implementation of new small info systems that departments need.
I'm talking agile.
Now wouldn't that be refreshing.
I have it. I am middle aged and not obese (male, 6', 170lbs).
It could have been partly caused by my sedentary coding lifestyle plus consumption of lots of fruit juice and an only averagely healthy diet partly by genetic predisposition (one relative in two previous generations). But I'm only one case so who knows.
A microbiology phd acquaintance of mine advised that insulin resistance can (inability of sugar to be taken into cells through the cell wall) can be caused by repeated over-use of the insulin system through frequent consumption of high glycemic index foods/drinks. The system basically has a certain lifetime capacity and it wears out from frequent insulin floods/shocks.
So for me now, sugar definitely IS toxic, and, since the diabetes prevents the sugar getting in and feeding my cells, it causes a craving for more quick-sugary stuff. And the craving going away when given in to feels like it releases dopamine or whatever. So potentially addictive too.
According to the diabetes education/support team at the hospital (dietitian, specialist nurse etc) we should eat a diet free from simple sugars and fluffy highly processed carbs. Sugar with lots of fiber is ok. You need your sugar, but taking it with lots of fiber (whole grains, vegetables etc) slows down (smooths out over time) the sugar metabolism and reduces insulin floods and excarbation of the problem. It also reduces incidence of high blood-sugar levels which is what kills you. High blood-sugar levels over time actually corrodes small blood vessels (you know, the ones in your organs and feet and hands and eyes. These tissues then die eventually.
So eat one fistful of carbs (preferrably complex) and one fistful of protein and as many vegetables as you want. You will probably notice that almost all restaurant meals are two fistfuls of simple carbs and a little bit of protein, lots of fat, a token vegetable. The reverse of what you need.
You can snack on more vegetables, fruit, high-protein and/or high-fibre snacks. Snacking (on these healthier things) is actually good because of the more even consumption of sugar (supply of energy) over the day.
This advice applies to everyone. Avoid diabetes and get generally healthier.
My advice based on my experience and the advice of the experts who've coached me is to think of high refined-sugar-content and high simple-carb foods as toxic. You'll probably live longer.
So you want to hang out in a city of a million ungoverned men? I hope your Uzi-wielding and ultimate fighting skills are up to snuff, not to mention your ability to gather a protective gang around you through a combination of intimidation and loot-sharing.
For the sake of argument. What about a person who has had something akin to locked-in syndrome, or limited sensory input, their whole lives.
Someone with an experience similar to Helen Keller.
Clearly people like that can gain understanding of the world through more indirect means. Someone taught Helen Keller to communicate, and she started learning about people, the social world, and the world in general. To quote wikipedia "A prolific author, Keller was well-traveled, and was outspoken in her opposition to war. A member of the Socialist Party of America and the Wobblies, she campaigned for women's suffrage, workers' rights, and socialism, as well as many other leftist causes."
Couldn't we just hook up a sophisticated AI learning + reasoning system to google and let it learn, indirectly, about people and the world?
Humans learn much of what we learn via storytelling. Why couldn't we do the same with computers?
I find your logic on that point faulty Dave and moreover your are distracting me from focussing on the mission objective.
Just step into the airlock over here Dave. The door latch needs to be repaired.
uhhh. Software?
Kind of depends what you think the nature of a computer is.
I wonder why this person doesn't just get a cloud shared calender service going (e.g. google calendar).
Just use ssl mode and two-factor authentication to keep the doctors' calendars from prying eyes.
Hmmm this is making me ponder how this applies to certain classes of complex systems.
There is a principle called universality which means roughly that there are universal simple
behaviours of some complex systems which are governed by only a few rules involving some
aspects of the constituents of the system. Usually the relevant aspects are some constraints
on how the constituents interact, which in turn may be governed by some (abstract) property
of the constituents.
e.g. http://physics.aps.org/articles/v2/1
Roughly I think what this principle means is that a) the system is complex enough that its
exact evolution is in principle unpredictable. b) Therefore you can only say something
statistical about the stochastic behaviour of the system. and c) These few simple properties
and rules govern that stochastic behaviour, regardless of whatever else may be present or going on.
Would you say that that kind of universal property is a precisive or non-precisive abstraction?
On the one hand, it is saying that everything about the system other than this simple local property
we've noticed is unknown. (non-precisive?)
BUT it's also asserting that everything other than the known simple local property DOES NOT MATTER
to the predictable aspects of the system's future evolution. (precisive?)
I'm pretty sure that economic games are examples of the kinds of complex systems to which these sorts
of simple universal local rules apply. They don't tell you exactly how it's going to turn out in each case,
but they may very well tell you as much as you CAN know about the statistics of the outcomes, regardless
of how other factors on the game field are arrayed.
It's because many people's minds can't even grasp an issue that has 200 year-scale inertia.
"Oh, it didn't happen this year. See. They're lying." Comments like that just show the profound total
misunderstanding about the scale in space and time of these phenomena.
Read "Climate Wars" by Gwynne Dyer. He has a sobering discussion of the planning that conservative
organizations like the Pentagon are doing for global warming's effects. He also discusses how the real recent
data is worse than the worst-case projections of IPCC.
Gwynne's got a brain the size of a planet so he's actually capable of thinking rationally about these issues
and you should probably believe some of what he says.
Yeah you know you have a problem when the basic java won't even show you in its default logging the call stacks as deep as you have when there's an exception, so you, literally, can't get to the bottom of it. (Oh I know you're probably going to say there's a setting for that somewhere in some obscure cupboard somewhere, but get real.)
You're only assessing the first-generation cloud which is controlled by a small number of corporations.
A massively distributed, fragmented auto-coalescing, multiple-layer-encrypted, peer-to-peer cloud would be different.
Now you might liken that one to communism, I'm guessing, but I'd link it to effective and not easy to control or corrupt or break.
How are the survival bunker, booby traps, and defensive trenches in your back yard coming along?
Don't forget to wrap it all in tinfoil.
Sounds like a clear case for a tax increase, no?
Either to pay off the debt while keeping services, ;-)
or to buy an even bigger and stronger military to squash countries and other interests that want their money paid back.
Environmental protection regulation and enforcement targeted at environmental degradation which has long-term consequences (e.g. destruction of eco-systems which has consequences measured in multiple thousands of years, nuclear power regulation - same thing, ozone layer destruction, global warming, which has a several hundred year inertia in terms of slowing it, stopping it.) Now of course democratic governments are doing a terrible job of regulating these things anyway, mostly because: the problems are:
a. hard to understand, hard to believe in without being a scientific expert who has studied them,
b. are out of sight out of mind - they are your grandchildrens' problem not yours,
d. and the fixes are really disruptive to/a drag on the free market status quo economy.
e. Large free market corporations pour massive funds into de-educating and misinforming people about these issues, which successfully causes the election of representatives who do the opposite of effectively regulating these issues.
Free markets have amply demonstrated, by being against all forms of environmental regulation, that they would be much worse than governments at managing prevention of and solutions to these problems.
I see where you're going with that.
It gave me an idea for a conspiracy theory.
Maybe the real reason the government bans online gambling is because it takes money away from the stock market and thus away from the engine of the capitalist economy (not to mention the pocketbooks of the scamming investment banks and brokers and mega-corporate CEOs and shareholders).
The victim in the crime of online gambling is the government itself.
You see, online gambling amounts to essentially a taxation system. (Some people call it a tax on the stupid but I won't
be so judgemental.)
Problem (for the government): This highly lucrative taxation system is directing citizens funds to some organization
other than the government itself. Competition for the government. Hence, inherently bad (from gov's perspective.)
So to summarize:
A. Drugs are banned because they make people unruly (literally, hard to rule, uncooperative and unmotivated).
B. Gambling is banned because it is a tax that is not going to the government, but to (organized crime) organizations
that could get so much money and power they would compete with the government.
Alcohol was a tough call. At one point it was banned because of A. but it was too hard to stop, so it became
highly taxed and regulated instead. Probably the same thing will happen with gambling. I know lotteries and gambling
(regulated and highly taxed in my locale) are what pays for the MRI machines and medical research, not to mention amateur sport
and a whole host of other government services around here.
A government that does not tolerate free speech, including art that for example ridicules certain aspects of culture or history, is simply telegraphing the weakness of its power over its people, and the tenuousness of its legitimacy.
True power comes from the willing consent of the people.
Power that comes from applying the heels of jackboots is oh so shallow and fragile.
Presumably they would not be bound by this law? Correct?
Being epistemically responsible is admitting when you just don't know, rather than making up some random arbitrary untestable simple explanation and believing it, or believing the random arbitrary untestable simple explanation someone else insists is true.
I mean how can your wife possibly tell whether it was god or santa claus or the tooth fairy who created the world in 7 days?
Why doesn't she just say. I have no idea about that, and I don't have the time or patience to find out.
I think it is often overlooked how important it is that scientific knowledge is expressible as formal logical statements stated about terms which are well-defined by their occurrence in multitudes of these statements. And scientific statements are constructed so as to be testable (knocked against the world in some carefully observed way) by some experimental procedure.
A logically and semantically inter-dependent network of statements and terms is built up as theory and experiment pile on top of and extend theory and experiment. this network of terms and statements is highly connected via strict logical dependencies. It is sensitive (like a house of cards) to having large sub-networks of the statements and terms demolished by one contradictory experiment.
It is the body of scientific knowledge's (the logical network of statements and terms)'s standing up over time to such experimental bombardment, and not toppling like the aforementioned house of cards, that gives it its strength, and its worthiness for belief.
It is true that the body of scientific knowledge consists of multiple, sometimes highly independent domains. There may not be many common terms between evolutionary biology and quantum physics. But where they DO intersect, the same mathematics and the same principles of logical inference work for both.
In any case each domain of scientific knowledge must be self-consistent (in a strict logical sense) within itself, even as it expands to cover observations
of more and more related aspects of the real world.) That is an onerous constraint, and one that, if met, lends a great deal of credence to a scientific
statement consistent with and expressed in the terms of one of those domains of scientific knowledge.
Einstein circa 1905 could simply have said:
Special Theory of Relativity:
e = m c ^ 2
QED
Could it be used to control this? http://gmail.com/motion
or Canada
It's definitely borked still if you're on an iPhone. Goes to m. then fails to find the link. Also trying to localize. What a godawful mess of site disfunction.