Re:Structure of Information vs Search for Knowledg
on
Search Beyond Google
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· Score: 1
I have a feeling that you and I would see eye to eye on the differences between information and knowledge by the way that you describe the web. I also agree that it is (mostly) collection of information that is about as useful as a Master of Trivia degree.
In my view (and for lack of a better term to describe it) the first step is to 'assimilate' information from the web as opposed to indexing it. What is involved here is to identify the key concepts in relation to other key concepts. These relationships are largely interdiciplinary in nature. And as we see ideas explored on the web we can almost describe an evolutionary progression, where one thought leads to another.
PageRank is a little over simplified in that it counts the links, but des not actually qualify the conceptual relationships between the ideas themselves. Another issue is who the source and destination of links are. When little Jimmy is doing his pinewood derby racecar website and links to the Indy 500 website, shouldn't that link be weighted differently than that of collaborating (or confilicting) points of view among top rated experts in a field? I'm not saying that important conceptual links can't come from unusual places; but it is less likely.
One problem is that the structure of links on the web is, as you describe, 'dumb.' While I'm not in 100% agreement with him, Ted Nelson's Xanadu gives us an alternative to how things might be done.
From my perspective a smart link might actually have it's own embedded search rules and biases, and be 'free standing,' i.e. not statically linked at any one time, but able to generate links from an indexing database based on the criteria present when it is invoked; because smart links have to be aware of both the user's needs and the conceptual framework rules. When coupled with an instructional objective (for example) a smart link (in a smart browser) can help to distinguish between what the end user knows (can be demonstrated) and areas which they don't understand, and modify the weights of items in the search to 'direct' the user towards the concept they don't get through related ideas that they do understand (much as we are doing here.)
I always liked MUMPS for it's indirection and execute support. Indirection gave the ability to use a variable as a pointer, which is extremely important where real pointers are not available. But my favorite has to be execution. The ability to construct a line (or lines) of code in a variable and then execute it. Instead of coding for every possible variation of handling something I can just build a module that uses rules to construct the code and then turn it loose on a problem!
Structure of Information vs Search for Knowledge
on
Search Beyond Google
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Todays search engines work a lot like information sieves, or panning for gold. The idea seems to be to take a bunch of stuff and wash away the un-needed, leaving behind (we hope) what we were looking for. However the very nature of the web provides the opportunity for looking at the relationships between ideas, the synthasis of knowledge as opposed to just collections of information. While the 'tricks' from the microsoft research projects look promising; only a true 'learning machine' will be able to go beyond the information and delevop a 'meta-interpretation/representation' of the raw data in order to support a 'meta-understanding' that is traversible and navigable in that we can not only connect with what we don't know, but that we can explore the unknown in terms of its relationship with what we do know.
Back when Microsoft Office was pretty new, Bill Gates was touring the facility and in one of the call centers, he discovered a couch in the center of the room. When he asked about the couch, he was told that it was the Mail-Merge couch; because when anyone needed help with Mail-Merge, they would be on the phone for a long time.
This could give a whle new impact to the nerdpack. Imagine what could be in all those bowls and fishtanks at convention displays! Or how about pen hacking! Maybe the new security feature will be a pocket protecting firewall!
You've obviously given this a great deal of thought. Many interesting ideas here. All probably more cost effective. Just curious, any of them a good candidate for a side trip to the moon or a Lagrange point?
Salt Water Disposal
on
Brine on Mars?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
When drilling for oil, there are often pockets of salt-water which need to be disposed of. This is done by drilling a new hole to another formation porus enough to accept the salt-water and pumping it down there. Wouldn't it be interesting if the rovers discover an old drill site and we find out (in Hoganesque fashion) that Mars really is the remains of a single catastrophic ecological disaster.
You could be right. But we can always hope that someone out there can still whip out a slipstick and calculate a transorbital dx burn. After all it was a much simpler era. In Reno they compete in air races in 50+ year old hardware. And us, well we're not launching it from the bottom of the gravity well, it gets an aerodymanically insulated ride up into space inside the shuttle, it gets 40 years of improved technology in the recertification process. And it gets 40 more years of experience in tracking and flight management.
"If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong." -- Arthur C. Clark
You are certainly right that I will never make anyone change a license; I mean why should they listen to me? But if theu want their code to be used in a way that is acceptible they will have to find a way to make licenses 'sync-up' in a modular fashion. Without a workable agreement no one will be able to integrate anything and that means 'eof' for free and/or open source software.
I think that the Open Source movement is approaching a crossroads where the failure to have reached a viable consensus over what a proper license should be will seriously impede the future of software synergy and integration that the OS world so desparately needs.
When the licenses prohibit the joining to two pieces of code that have been designed to work together (and do work together) then it's pretty obvious to me that we've all missed the point as to what this is all about. Since we can't afford to "kill all the lawyers" maybe it's time to let them "cooperate" (yes they can do this) on using the methodology by which Open Source software is constructed as a model for a process to construct modular licenses that can interoperate and integrate with one another in a cooperative and constructive manner. There is alot to be learned now vis-a-vis the SCO case, and a history to be gleaned from BSD.
If Linus, and his crew, can build a kernel; then the folks at the FSF should be able to build a licensing agreement that we can all live with.
NASA says no shuttle flights to anywhere but the ISS for safety reasons. What about using a shuttle flight to take one of the existing space vehicles to serve as a space taxi to carry astronauts and material to and from the Hubble. Take a modified Gemini capsule, (it was made for testing orbital rendevous and docking procedures) give it a modified support module to carry the fuel and spare parts for doing the orbital adjustments and let them 'taxi' over to the Hubble when the orbital mechanics are favorible, accomplish the support mission and catch up to the ISS on the way back. While it is rocket science; it is with small modifications that can be made to previously proven vehicles; not a multi billion dollar idea. If they can't make it back they can always reenter the old fashioned way. If they do make it back then we have a relatively inexpensive space taxi for future use. Hell, you could fit 2 Gemini capsules and service modules in the shuttle cargo bay and have room left over!
CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.
If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.
So a spammer who follows the rules and actually lets people opt out of their lists is a legal and legitimate businessman. However someone who hijacks boxes, never allows opt-outs etc is in fact just a criminal. So I suggest that we make a distinction between the former Legitimate E-mail Marketer (maybe LEMer) and the criminal. But then I hate to assoctate SPAM (The Food Service Product) with criminal properties and Lemer is pretty lame, so anyone have any reasonable suggrstions for terms?
Yes I did think of CSPAM for the criminals, but it's so close to CSPAN...
Maybe someone was smuggling a little something extra into orbit and forgot to extract it from its hiding place and bring it in before they unpacked the solar panel.
When I became interested in computers, all I had was a book. And even that book was way out of date. This was the spring of 1967; a time before ic's and dip's. I have an adder board that was state of the art at the time, there were pairs of transistors as big as pencil erasers stuck in plastic blocks on the daughter boards that went to the main that pluged into a Philco-Ford computer's backplane. Both the board and the book fascinated me, and I never looked back. Within 3 months I had a different book: The IBM giude to the WATFOR Compiler, and the Fortran IV code I scribbled out on notebook paper actually got punched out on cards and run through an early IBM 360.
Now when I see someone like that it makes me feel good!
While India has long been associated with poverty from an economic standpoint, the Indian culture has, in general, a far greater respect for wisdom and knowledge than anything we see in Europe or America. So I'm glad to see that the recognition of wisdom and knowledge are helping to 'bootstrap' a new culture. I just hope that no one loses site of the values that enabled the recognition of the opportunity! I'd hate to see the respect of traditional values be destroyed by the desire for money. Wisdom may well give rise to money, but all too often money stupifies and blinds the wealthy to the value of wisdom.
Because of the structure of the Chinese language, specifically the structure of items and classifiers I wonder if Chinese programmers feel they have a better grasp of Object Oriented Programming?
Slashdot Mirror
In my view (and for lack of a better term to describe it) the first step is to 'assimilate' information from the web as opposed to indexing it. What is involved here is to identify the key concepts in relation to other key concepts. These relationships are largely interdiciplinary in nature. And as we see ideas explored on the web we can almost describe an evolutionary progression, where one thought leads to another.
PageRank is a little over simplified in that it counts the links, but des not actually qualify the conceptual relationships between the ideas themselves. Another issue is who the source and destination of links are. When little Jimmy is doing his pinewood derby racecar website and links to the Indy 500 website, shouldn't that link be weighted differently than that of collaborating (or confilicting) points of view among top rated experts in a field? I'm not saying that important conceptual links can't come from unusual places; but it is less likely.
One problem is that the structure of links on the web is, as you describe, 'dumb.' While I'm not in 100% agreement with him, Ted Nelson's Xanadu gives us an alternative to how things might be done.
From my perspective a smart link might actually have it's own embedded search rules and biases, and be 'free standing,' i.e. not statically linked at any one time, but able to generate links from an indexing database based on the criteria present when it is invoked; because smart links have to be aware of both the user's needs and the conceptual framework rules. When coupled with an instructional objective (for example) a smart link (in a smart browser) can help to distinguish between what the end user knows (can be demonstrated) and areas which they don't understand, and modify the weights of items in the search to 'direct' the user towards the concept they don't get through related ideas that they do understand (much as we are doing here.)
I always liked MUMPS for it's indirection and execute support. Indirection gave the ability to use a variable as a pointer, which is extremely important where real pointers are not available. But my favorite has to be execution. The ability to construct a line (or lines) of code in a variable and then execute it. Instead of coding for every possible variation of handling something I can just build a module that uses rules to construct the code and then turn it loose on a problem!
Todays search engines work a lot like information sieves, or panning for gold. The idea seems to be to take a bunch of stuff and wash away the un-needed, leaving behind (we hope) what we were looking for. However the very nature of the web provides the opportunity for looking at the relationships between ideas, the synthasis of knowledge as opposed to just collections of information. While the 'tricks' from the microsoft research projects look promising; only a true 'learning machine' will be able to go beyond the information and delevop a 'meta-interpretation/representation' of the raw data in order to support a 'meta-understanding' that is traversible and navigable in that we can not only connect with what we don't know, but that we can explore the unknown in terms of its relationship with what we do know.
Back when Microsoft Office was pretty new, Bill Gates was touring the facility and in one of the call centers, he discovered a couch in the center of the room. When he asked about the couch, he was told that it was the Mail-Merge couch; because when anyone needed help with Mail-Merge, they would be on the phone for a long time.
This could give a whle new impact to the nerdpack. Imagine what could be in all those bowls and fishtanks at convention displays! Or how about pen hacking! Maybe the new security feature will be a pocket protecting firewall!
You've obviously given this a great deal of thought. Many interesting ideas here. All probably more cost effective. Just curious, any of them a good candidate for a side trip to the moon or a Lagrange point?
When drilling for oil, there are often pockets of salt-water which need to be disposed of. This is done by drilling a new hole to another formation porus enough to accept the salt-water and pumping it down there. Wouldn't it be interesting if the rovers discover an old drill site and we find out (in Hoganesque fashion) that Mars really is the remains of a single catastrophic ecological disaster.
"If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong."
-- Arthur C. Clark
You are certainly right that I will never make anyone change a license; I mean why should they listen to me? But if theu want their code to be used in a way that is acceptible they will have to find a way to make licenses 'sync-up' in a modular fashion. Without a workable agreement no one will be able to integrate anything and that means 'eof' for free and/or open source software.
Give Me LightCycles! Give me Bugs! Give me the MCP!
Give Me Tanks! I'll give Thanks! I'll Play on my PC!
sorry George...
When the licenses prohibit the joining to two pieces of code that have been designed to work together (and do work together) then it's pretty obvious to me that we've all missed the point as to what this is all about. Since we can't afford to "kill all the lawyers" maybe it's time to let them "cooperate" (yes they can do this) on using the methodology by which Open Source software is constructed as a model for a process to construct modular licenses that can interoperate and integrate with one another in a cooperative and constructive manner. There is alot to be learned now vis-a-vis the SCO case, and a history to be gleaned from BSD.
If Linus, and his crew, can build a kernel; then the folks at the FSF should be able to build a licensing agreement that we can all live with.
NASA says no shuttle flights to anywhere but the ISS for safety reasons. What about using a shuttle flight to take one of the existing space vehicles to serve as a space taxi to carry astronauts and material to and from the Hubble. Take a modified Gemini capsule, (it was made for testing orbital rendevous and docking procedures) give it a modified support module to carry the fuel and spare parts for doing the orbital adjustments and let them 'taxi' over to the Hubble when the orbital mechanics are favorible, accomplish the support mission and catch up to the ISS on the way back. While it is rocket science; it is with small modifications that can be made to previously proven vehicles; not a multi billion dollar idea. If they can't make it back they can always reenter the old fashioned way. If they do make it back then we have a relatively inexpensive space taxi for future use. Hell, you could fit 2 Gemini capsules and service modules in the shuttle cargo bay and have room left over!
Nice!
"A Couple of Yahoos"
CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.
If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.
So a spammer who follows the rules and actually lets people opt out of their lists is a legal and legitimate businessman. However someone who hijacks boxes, never allows opt-outs etc is in fact just a criminal. So I suggest that we make a distinction between the former Legitimate E-mail Marketer (maybe LEMer) and the criminal. But then I hate to assoctate SPAM (The Food Service Product) with criminal properties and Lemer is pretty lame, so anyone have any reasonable suggrstions for terms?
Yes I did think of CSPAM for the criminals, but it's so close to CSPAN...
Careful, there sport. Sounds like she could steal your domain if she wanted to.
Maybe someone was smuggling a little something extra into orbit and forgot to extract it from its hiding place and bring it in before they unpacked the solar panel.
Alorie Gilbert CNET News.com PeopleSoft intends to add 1,000 workers to its staff in Bangalore, India, by the end of the year, accelerating the software maker's plan to tap the country's low-cost labor force.
Now when I see someone like that it makes me feel good!
Must resist, must resis...
I guess it was a deal he both could and couldn't Welsh on!
just shoot me; I'm weak...
;^)
Cute daughter!
While India has long been associated with poverty from an economic standpoint, the Indian culture has, in general, a far greater respect for wisdom and knowledge than anything we see in Europe or America. So I'm glad to see that the recognition of wisdom and knowledge are helping to 'bootstrap' a new culture. I just hope that no one loses site of the values that enabled the recognition of the opportunity! I'd hate to see the respect of traditional values be destroyed by the desire for money. Wisdom may well give rise to money, but all too often money stupifies and blinds the wealthy to the value of wisdom.
And a little Kraftwerk in the in the background...
Because of the structure of the Chinese language, specifically the structure of items and classifiers I wonder if Chinese programmers feel they have a better grasp of Object Oriented Programming?