I can't tell which are the 8 language elements as described in the article, but they seem to use at least duration and rising vs. falling pitch as 'letters'.
For what it's worth:
Taipei: 508 m (1,667 ft)
Kuala Lumpur: 452 m (1,483 ft)
Toronto: 553 m (1,814 ft)
Chicago: 412.4 m (1,353 ft)
The new plan for rebuilding the World Trade Center in New York includes the 'Freedom Tower' (estimated date of completion: 2008) with usable space up to 341 m (1118.8 feet)
Main roof: 541.3 m (1,776 ft) - 1776 being the American year of independance, no coincidence
Spire: 98.8 m (324 ft)
Height with spire: 640.1 m (2,100 ft)
I worked at the UN in New York for a few years, developing sites for their education, peacekeeping, and oil-for-food departments. (that last one is still up, although the program is defunct, obviously).
The UN now is a completely Microsoft-dominated organization. The Web sites are exclusively ASP/VB MS SQL Server, etc. There was some interest by a few of us to move toward PHP while I was there, but the bureaucracy is so thick, that once a standard becomes adopted, it's impossible to change.
The UN still has serious problems with corruption (although it's better than it used to be). It is very easy for a company to bribe its way into a position of influence. It seems very likely that Microsoft might, say, offer free software to the UN in exchange for favors.
That said, there is no reason to be concerned about pro-MS bias at the UN. The UN cannot pass laws! The implication in the article is that the UN drafts have weight and meaning, and that they will result in policy changes in the member states. But they have no significance whatsoever.
The UN cannot legislate. The most they can do is pass guidelines. They also have a list of human rights 'mandates', and environmental suggestions, and everyone ignores those as well.
The UN is the most non-technical organization I've ever seen. In some offices they still use manual typewriters and rotary telephones. It is a nearly entirely paper-based operation. So the idea that they would even have an opinion about what developing countries should do regarding technology makes me laugh.
'Programmers without Borders' is just a name that will have political value, but I seriously doubt anything will ever come of it.
What good is any of the existing preparatory investagation into NEOs (near-earth objects) if the big ones are only noticed after the fact? If this one had been only a little larger, (say 40 meters) then it could have done significant damage before it was registered by satellites or on-ground systems.
Many times in my career as Web developer, I've had the responsibility of taking an existing site and growing traffic. In each case, the sites started out as ugly, since the 'design' was just wahtever seemed adequate by whoever coded the initial HTML. The first step of improvement was to get a professional designer to come and fix the site - put together a more useful navigation system, adding breadcrumbs, etc. The traffic would always double (at least) after the re-launch. Part of the increase has to do with old users having to deal with a new system, and clicking around more than they used to, but the rise in traffic was consistent over time, because more user-friendly interfaces meant more users could find what they were looking for. So, design is not just making things pretty, and it's certainly not art, since art is about personal expression - design is making things useful, or optimizing their usefulness. And slick design is often appropriate. If you run an e-commerce site that looks like it was put together by a 14-year old kid with a copy of Frontpage, you will scare away business because they think you're some fly-by-night operation.
So, spend the money, hire a designer. You can get a decent redesign for a few hundred bucks.
In addition to the other MAJOR engineering challenges that this project would require, how will the satellite at the other end of the elevator stay in place? I understand that if it has the proper mass and is at the proper altitude it will orbit directly above the base station - but what happens when you deliver a 13-ton payload there? Won't all that additional weight cause the satellite to swing forward?
The article states that "in deep space where gases are 3 degrees above absolute zero, or about -454 degrees Fahrenheit." which puts absolute zero at -457F.
Then it states "Absolute zero, or -460 degrees..."
And my science book places it at -459. I know there is a difference between a Kelvin degree and a Fahrenheit one, but which is it?
And, with no other base of reference, how can they no that their temperature detectors are accurate at such low temps?
A) This judges essays, not fiction, and no one is saying that prose would or should be evaluated this way.
B) If you're a professor (more likely a grad student) grading 50 essays in a single sitting, then you're already looking for little more than basic structure, grammar, and vocabulary, just like the software. If you, as a human, have just a few minutes to evaluate a 10-page essay, then your process will be very similar to that used by software.
Most computer languages are English-based, using words such as 'do', 'while', etc. So that international developers have to know at least some English in order to code C, PHP, and certainly HTML. But how deep will the Chinese/Korean/Japanese OS developers go?
They have some commonality in their alphabets, which have thousands of characters, rather than the 26 English letters - so will they use Unicode for the actual source code? Will basic terms such as 'if' and 'then' be written in an Asian language that will be incomprehensable for most American developers?
Nikolai Tesla (inventor of AC generators, among many other things) cut off his own testicles at age 40, after coming to the conclusion that his interest in women was distracting him from his work.
That said, while my first conclusion from the article was that marriage causes a decrease in creativity, it's more likely a mutually-reinforcing situation: A guy who lives for his work won't have the time or inclination to meet people and 'settle down'. Only after he has already reached the end of his youthful enthusiasm for work does he perk his head up and realize that there are other things in life.
And THAT said, I know from my own experience that, after ending a long-term relationship and being single again for the first time in years, I was amazed at how much creativity I had.
This should make us glad.
I was showing my grandmother how to use her computer. I told her to 'click on the menu'. She didn't know what I meant by 'click' or 'menu'.
As long as there are people like that, there is job security for me.
Two different friends have asked me for advice about their sons, both of whom are into computer games, prefer science to language classes, and generally seem to be future geek material.
The question was how do the parents encourage their sons to apply their interest in computers so that they will be better-prepared for college, and perhaps have a head start in terms of being able to program.
In both cases, I recommended that the kids learn JavaScript. It's an easy language that doesn't require compilation. The work ends up on a Web page, so it's easy to get feedback about errors in the code, and it's easy to put up your projects on a Web site. And, even though JavaScript is not a complete, robust language, it is based on C, and gives a good foundation in the most basic aspects of programming: if/then, for/while loops, recursion, etc.
Older kids would probably want something more challenging, but JavaScript is the way to go for kids 12 or younger. Also, no software to buy, the interpreter (any Web browser) is already installed, and the Web is full of code snippets to try out.
I was asked to teach an online course at San Jose, for about $2,000. I'm not a professor, and don't have a graduate degree, but my name had been passed along as someone with expertise in the field. From the negotiations it became clear that online studies were seen by the university as a money-making operation, on a par with the continuing-education classes that most schools offer. I ended up passing on the job because of other commitments although it seemed like easy money (just a few hours per week). It certainly seemed like students got a lot less out of the online course.
That said, learning programming, even in a traditional classroom setting, is primarily a student-driven experience. You don't learn how to code setting in a lecture, you learn by practicing on your own.
So, I would not want to take an onloine course in the humanities and certainly not in biology or chemistry, but I would consider it for CS. Sometimes all you need is a little motivation. Having a deadline provides that, and an online course may be end up being little more than the minimal structure you need to learn the stuff on your own.
Lasseter gave a talk at my school, Cornell, ten years ago, back when Luxo and 3D animation was fairly new. It was at Cornell where Don Greenberg's team developed the first ray-tracing methods in the 70s.
What most impressed me about Lasseter was his 5-step plan to making a computer-animated movie. The first step was developing the story, and the others involved determiing market and budget, and then actually making the thing. This differs from what I understand of how other studios operate, where the box office comes first and the story is just cobbled together at the end, often being written as the film is being shot.
I saw Toy Story again recently and was impressed by the quality of the writing and the story. Those aspects are what make the Pixar movies of such high-quality.
The basic flaw with the argument is that any web site is the aggregate of all new content as well as all archived content. So, unlike a magazine, which only includes that week's/month's content, the site includes everything going back to the first issue, or whenever they decided to make the site.
But saying "70% of all magazines, including every issue in the archive, go unread" is also probably true, however, it's all probably read when it first comes out.
I was fascinated by the Segway during the Ginger/IT mystery a few years ago, but only saw a Segway in action for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Strolling down Riverside Park in Manhattan were hundreds of people walking, jogging, biking, and rollerblading - all enjoying the fresh air and getting a little exercise. Then one guy came rolling by (at about the same speed as the joggers) on his Segway, and he seemed like the laziest guy in the world. It was at that moment that I decided I had no interest in ever getting one.
Back when I was a DJ at WVBR (briefly) I spent most of my time calculating which songs to play in order to fill the 20-minute space between weather and station identification, and between news and the ad break.
Given that I had exactly 20 minutes, if I started with a 5:13, a 3:17, and a 4:39, I then had to find a song or two to fill the remaining 7 or so minutes.
Before holidays, we would prerecord our shifts on reel-to-reel tape, and the engineer would simply swap reels every 3 hours.
It occured to me that if we had every song in our cd library as an mp3 in a database, we could automate the entire process. We could have the software rotate through the songs to fill the air-time exactly, we could load all the ad spots and PAs in a separate table, and not even have to be in the room.
I wonder if anyone is doing this now. If not, I'm sure it will.
I take your point, but even the best simulations, by necessity, simplify the real world to the point where the richness of an actual environment is lost. When we walk forward, we experience the pressure of the ground beneath our feet (or wheels), the sensation of wind in our face, the dopplering of sounds as they pass us - while in a simulation, walking is simplified to a vector, and ambient conditions are lost.
Perhaps none of these additional features are important, and perhaps I'm infusing too much of my own human subjectivity, but if the goal is to create an entity that initiates it's own exploration of the environment, that is curious, then I think these entities would need an environment that approaches the near-infinite, unpredictible chaos of reality.
But, you could be right.
But Robotics Must Precede AI
on
AI Going Nowhere?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Ask some 3-year-old kids which way is up, and they will all know, but they won't be able to define it. Yet, since computers don't have bodies, they don't have anything like the semicircular canals that we have, which act as gyroscopes and give us an intuitive, non-intellectual sense of which way is up.
Trying to program intelligence purely with software puts the researcher at a disadvantage, since even the most fundamental rules and attributes of things (fire is hot, water is wet) have to be explicitly entered as constant variables.
Once robotics advances to the point where mobility, vision, and speech recognition can be taken for granted, then AI can be programmed as an add-on.
Body first, mind second - That's how animals evolved on this planet, and it's how, I believe, Rodney Brooks approaches this field.
It seems odd that so many in this thread are opposed to this kind of thinking, since much of programming involves the kind of templating that the Bauhaus architects describe as "measuring the immeasurable".
Some Web designers feel that a 'good' Web page should be constructed with static HTML in order to be able to express the individual mark of the designer. With a dynamically-generated site such as Slashdot, each page is required to have a similar template, but no one complains about that.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is an example of Silbo: http://www.agulo.net/silbo/silbo.mp3
I can't tell which are the 8 language elements as described in the article, but they seem to use at least duration and rising vs. falling pitch as 'letters'.
For what it's worth:
Taipei: 508 m (1,667 ft)
Kuala Lumpur: 452 m (1,483 ft)
Toronto: 553 m (1,814 ft)
Chicago: 412.4 m (1,353 ft)
The new plan for rebuilding the World Trade Center in New York includes the 'Freedom Tower' (estimated date of completion: 2008) with usable space up to 341 m (1118.8 feet)
Main roof: 541.3 m (1,776 ft) - 1776 being the American year of independance, no coincidence
Spire: 98.8 m (324 ft)
Height with spire: 640.1 m (2,100 ft)
I worked at the UN in New York for a few years, developing sites for their education, peacekeeping, and oil-for-food departments. (that last one is still up, although the program is defunct, obviously).
The UN now is a completely Microsoft-dominated organization. The Web sites are exclusively ASP/VB MS SQL Server, etc. There was some interest by a few of us to move toward PHP while I was there, but the bureaucracy is so thick, that once a standard becomes adopted, it's impossible to change.
The UN still has serious problems with corruption (although it's better than it used to be). It is very easy for a company to bribe its way into a position of influence. It seems very likely that Microsoft might, say, offer free software to the UN in exchange for favors.
That said, there is no reason to be concerned about pro-MS bias at the UN. The UN cannot pass laws! The implication in the article is that the UN drafts have weight and meaning, and that they will result in policy changes in the member states. But they have no significance whatsoever. The UN cannot legislate. The most they can do is pass guidelines. They also have a list of human rights 'mandates', and environmental suggestions, and everyone ignores those as well.
The UN is the most non-technical organization I've ever seen. In some offices they still use manual typewriters and rotary telephones. It is a nearly entirely paper-based operation. So the idea that they would even have an opinion about what developing countries should do regarding technology makes me laugh. 'Programmers without Borders' is just a name that will have political value, but I seriously doubt anything will ever come of it.
What good is any of the existing preparatory investagation into NEOs (near-earth objects) if the big ones are only noticed after the fact? If this one had been only a little larger, (say 40 meters) then it could have done significant damage before it was registered by satellites or on-ground systems.
Many times in my career as Web developer, I've had the responsibility of taking an existing site and growing traffic. In each case, the sites started out as ugly, since the 'design' was just wahtever seemed adequate by whoever coded the initial HTML.
The first step of improvement was to get a professional designer to come and fix the site - put together a more useful navigation system, adding breadcrumbs, etc.
The traffic would always double (at least) after the re-launch. Part of the increase has to do with old users having to deal with a new system, and clicking around more than they used to, but the rise in traffic was consistent over time, because more user-friendly interfaces meant more users could find what they were looking for.
So, design is not just making things pretty, and it's certainly not art, since art is about personal expression - design is making things useful, or optimizing their usefulness.
And slick design is often appropriate. If you run an e-commerce site that looks like it was put together by a 14-year old kid with a copy of Frontpage, you will scare away business because they think you're some fly-by-night operation.
So, spend the money, hire a designer. You can get a decent redesign for a few hundred bucks.
In addition to the other MAJOR engineering challenges that this project would require, how will the satellite at the other end of the elevator stay in place? I understand that if it has the proper mass and is at the proper altitude it will orbit directly above the base station - but what happens when you deliver a 13-ton payload there? Won't all that additional weight cause the satellite to swing forward?
The article states that "in deep space where gases are 3 degrees above absolute zero, or about -454 degrees Fahrenheit." which puts absolute zero at -457F.
Then it states "Absolute zero, or -460 degrees..."
And my science book places it at -459. I know there is a difference between a Kelvin degree and a Fahrenheit one, but which is it?
And, with no other base of reference, how can they no that their temperature detectors are accurate at such low temps?
A) This judges essays, not fiction, and no one is saying that prose would or should be evaluated this way.
B) If you're a professor (more likely a grad student) grading 50 essays in a single sitting, then you're already looking for little more than basic structure, grammar, and vocabulary, just like the software. If you, as a human, have just a few minutes to evaluate a 10-page essay, then your process will be very similar to that used by software.
Most computer languages are English-based, using words such as 'do', 'while', etc. So that international developers have to know at least some English in order to code C, PHP, and certainly HTML. But how deep will the Chinese/Korean/Japanese OS developers go?
They have some commonality in their alphabets, which have thousands of characters, rather than the 26 English letters - so will they use Unicode for the actual source code? Will basic terms such as 'if' and 'then' be written in an Asian language that will be incomprehensable for most American developers?
Nikolai Tesla (inventor of AC generators, among many other things) cut off his own testicles at age 40, after coming to the conclusion that his interest in women was distracting him from his work.
That said, while my first conclusion from the article was that marriage causes a decrease in creativity, it's more likely a mutually-reinforcing situation: A guy who lives for his work won't have the time or inclination to meet people and 'settle down'. Only after he has already reached the end of his youthful enthusiasm for work does he perk his head up and realize that there are other things in life.
And THAT said, I know from my own experience that, after ending a long-term relationship and being single again for the first time in years, I was amazed at how much creativity I had.
This should make us glad. I was showing my grandmother how to use her computer. I told her to 'click on the menu'. She didn't know what I meant by 'click' or 'menu'. As long as there are people like that, there is job security for me.
Two different friends have asked me for advice about their sons, both of whom are into computer games, prefer science to language classes, and generally seem to be future geek material.
The question was how do the parents encourage their sons to apply their interest in computers so that they will be better-prepared for college, and perhaps have a head start in terms of being able to program.
In both cases, I recommended that the kids learn JavaScript. It's an easy language that doesn't require compilation. The work ends up on a Web page, so it's easy to get feedback about errors in the code, and it's easy to put up your projects on a Web site. And, even though JavaScript is not a complete, robust language, it is based on C, and gives a good foundation in the most basic aspects of programming: if/then, for/while loops, recursion, etc.
Older kids would probably want something more challenging, but JavaScript is the way to go for kids 12 or younger. Also, no software to buy, the interpreter (any Web browser) is already installed, and the Web is full of code snippets to try out.
I was asked to teach an online course at San Jose, for about $2,000. I'm not a professor, and don't have a graduate degree, but my name had been passed along as someone with expertise in the field. From the negotiations it became clear that online studies were seen by the university as a money-making operation, on a par with the continuing-education classes that most schools offer. I ended up passing on the job because of other commitments although it seemed like easy money (just a few hours per week). It certainly seemed like students got a lot less out of the online course.
That said, learning programming, even in a traditional classroom setting, is primarily a student-driven experience. You don't learn how to code setting in a lecture, you learn by practicing on your own.
So, I would not want to take an onloine course in the humanities and certainly not in biology or chemistry, but I would consider it for CS. Sometimes all you need is a little motivation. Having a deadline provides that, and an online course may be end up being little more than the minimal structure you need to learn the stuff on your own.
Lasseter gave a talk at my school, Cornell, ten years ago, back when Luxo and 3D animation was fairly new. It was at Cornell where Don Greenberg's team developed the first ray-tracing methods in the 70s. What most impressed me about Lasseter was his 5-step plan to making a computer-animated movie. The first step was developing the story, and the others involved determiing market and budget, and then actually making the thing. This differs from what I understand of how other studios operate, where the box office comes first and the story is just cobbled together at the end, often being written as the film is being shot. I saw Toy Story again recently and was impressed by the quality of the writing and the story. Those aspects are what make the Pixar movies of such high-quality.
The basic flaw with the argument is that any web site is the aggregate of all new content as well as all archived content. So, unlike a magazine, which only includes that week's/month's content, the site includes everything going back to the first issue, or whenever they decided to make the site. But saying "70% of all magazines, including every issue in the archive, go unread" is also probably true, however, it's all probably read when it first comes out.
I was fascinated by the Segway during the Ginger/IT mystery a few years ago, but only saw a Segway in action for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Strolling down Riverside Park in Manhattan were hundreds of people walking, jogging, biking, and rollerblading - all enjoying the fresh air and getting a little exercise. Then one guy came rolling by (at about the same speed as the joggers) on his Segway, and he seemed like the laziest guy in the world. It was at that moment that I decided I had no interest in ever getting one.
Back when I was a DJ at WVBR (briefly) I spent most of my time calculating which songs to play in order to fill the 20-minute space between weather and station identification, and between news and the ad break. Given that I had exactly 20 minutes, if I started with a 5:13, a 3:17, and a 4:39, I then had to find a song or two to fill the remaining 7 or so minutes.
Before holidays, we would prerecord our shifts on reel-to-reel tape, and the engineer would simply swap reels every 3 hours.
It occured to me that if we had every song in our cd library as an mp3 in a database, we could automate the entire process. We could have the software rotate through the songs to fill the air-time exactly, we could load all the ad spots and PAs in a separate table, and not even have to be in the room.
I wonder if anyone is doing this now. If not, I'm sure it will.
I take your point, but even the best simulations, by necessity, simplify the real world to the point where the richness of an actual environment is lost. When we walk forward, we experience the pressure of the ground beneath our feet (or wheels), the sensation of wind in our face, the dopplering of sounds as they pass us - while in a simulation, walking is simplified to a vector, and ambient conditions are lost.
Perhaps none of these additional features are important, and perhaps I'm infusing too much of my own human subjectivity, but if the goal is to create an entity that initiates it's own exploration of the environment, that is curious, then I think these entities would need an environment that approaches the near-infinite, unpredictible chaos of reality.
But, you could be right.
Ask some 3-year-old kids which way is up, and they will all know, but they won't be able to define it. Yet, since computers don't have bodies, they don't have anything like the semicircular canals that we have, which act as gyroscopes and give us an intuitive, non-intellectual sense of which way is up.
Trying to program intelligence purely with software puts the researcher at a disadvantage, since even the most fundamental rules and attributes of things (fire is hot, water is wet) have to be explicitly entered as constant variables.
Once robotics advances to the point where mobility, vision, and speech recognition can be taken for granted, then AI can be programmed as an add-on.
Body first, mind second - That's how animals evolved on this planet, and it's how, I believe, Rodney Brooks approaches this field.
It seems odd that so many in this thread are opposed to this kind of thinking, since much of programming involves the kind of templating that the Bauhaus architects describe as "measuring the immeasurable".
Some Web designers feel that a 'good' Web page should be constructed with static HTML in order to be able to express the individual mark of the designer. With a dynamically-generated site such as Slashdot, each page is required to have a similar template, but no one complains about that.