IAA graduate student in computational linguistics.
Later in the program, Holland says, PAL will be able to "automatically watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon."
PAL's role here is not clear. The 'easier' task would be to monitor the body language of the two conversers and, by lining up a list of tasks with the observation of their head movements, correctly predict which points in the conversation were the ones where someone performed an "agreement" gesture.
The much, much more difficult task would be to actually read lips. There are only certain properties of phonemes you can deduce from how the lips and jaw move; many, many other features of speech are lost. Only when you supply the machine with a limited set of words in a limited topic domain do you get good performance; otherwise, you're grasping at straws. And then taking out most of the speech signal? Please.
But no, DARPA is cool and will save all the translators in Iraq (by 2009, well before the war ends.) PR and vaporware win the day!
Sci-fi can be any genre now - western (serenity), brooding drama (Battlestar Galactica), kids' show with puppets (all those Anakin movies.) Will the new incarnation have the same horrible acting that the old ones did - the sci fi equivalent of the poorly-scripted comedy that came on at 730 before the real thing came on at 8?
Dear Sci Fi Channel producers: you CAN have a show that's good, and also not have it compete with your flagship Galactica. Please hire some actors / writers who can do more than make me cringe while I wait for Jamie Bamber and Caprica Six to show up.
But mailman, building better algorithms to mimic the learning process won't exactly tell us how it happens - it will just show us one possible way that learning can happen. (Which has value, of course...) But unless our algorithms accurately mimic the scale of the child's zillions of neurons involved in language (unlikely anytime soon), we will only be building a simplistic model.
Someone else above mentioned taking frequeent fMRI's - this would tell us more about what actually is going on.
If you update the clichéd Beat ensemble to today's square-framed glasses, you've got an "Ian", a hipster male who owns* a Volkswagen and a Mac and hangs out all day slurping down his trustfund at the ueber-hippest coffeeshop in town.
*Owns, but not operates: An Ian can drive and surf, but cannot install Linux or change his own oil. See, that would muss your hair.
I disagree with your claim that it's not acceptable to be proud of straight, male, caucasion or Christian heritage.
I second this. I submit that St. Patrick's Day, kilts, Celts, Hobbitts, How The Irish Saved Civilization and the Pogues have become the de facto "white people pride" celebration. And most of that has no racist overtones whatsoever (at least to my eyes, but then I'm a cracker too.) And let's face it, EVERY day is Christian and Straight People celebration day.
BTW if you haven't ever drunk an Irish Car Bomb, now's the time to start.
Probably the same place that you got the energy to move a perfectly-positioned preposition all the way to the front of the sentence, rendering your comment ABSOLUTE FREAKAZOID ENGLISH, as in the weird-ass sentence From where did the energy appear. Up with this I will not put!
As an eXtreeeeme example, try to apply that logic to this one. A dad tells his kid he has to go to bed without any bedtime story, but then goes upstairs with book in hand. The kid says: Dad, what did you bring the book you wouldn't read to me out of up for? See if your brain doesn't asplode trying to "correct" that:)
DCist had a good suggestion: Maybe the WaPo could consider a process to monitor comments and removing them one by one... using this magic resource called INTERNS.
People are most definitely NOT born as a blank slate. "...And even a bit before [birth]" captures a little bit of the complexity that was bred into our psyches by every interaction that our ancestors encountered that conferred even a slight evolutionary advantage - encounters with their environments, with their predators and prey, and with each other.
Every encounter is a non-zero-sum game where compromise and cooperation would be the better long-term strategy, and where cheating and double-crossing would only give you short leaps ahead. Our minds' structure has been built to unimaginable levels of complexity, but with constraints on processing like any system. In a way it doesn't make sense to compare our minds to a computer.
We come into the world with a mental toolkit that's millions of years in the making. There are good reasons people believed in the Blank Slate in the 20th century - noble, respectable reasons - but the time where those reasons served us well is over. Denying that our minds evolved is holding us back from attacking the really big problems.
So stop simplifying it. Believing in a blank slate is as simplistic as believing in intelligent design.
I don't think a feeling of inadequacy comes from marketing. I think the inadequacy comes from our own evolved psychologies (sic, stay with me) wherein most of us feel we have to conform to a social standard to stay alive. (Sure, that's what it was like in the hunger/gatherer times, but just because we live in the future doesn't mean we're not still using mental operating systems that were shaped in the 'ancestral environment'.)*
Advertising, like murder among predators or rape among fish, is mostly amoral.** It's just propagating based on its own internal programming. We as humans provide it with a moral dimension. I'd argue that advertising is more about presenting a person of higher-status-than-you with Product X, and then letting your "I wanna wear HER shoes" psychology go to work.
You say "it makes me feel bad, therefore it is evil." - that's not exactly a frivolous claim, of course, but it's hardly in the hands of the advertiser to control your own feelings. (If it is, though, what does that say about whether violence and sex on TV affects what kids think and how they act?)
Tough questions for my liberal brothers, I know.
So start blaming yourself for not being evolved enough to not be affected by it, I guess - there, there's your inadequacy.:)
*blah blah blah, check Steven Pinker for more honed, eloquent arguments on any of this
**(Bonus Troll section) WAAAH HOW CAN YOU SAY RAPE IS AMORAL !1!1 Right, I'm a Nazi. Listen ya Jainist hippie, you want to start prosecuting rape charges against invertebrates, and I fully expect to also see you bringing a class action lawsuit against major advertisers for being EVIL.
As someone who is cursed with sensitivity to loudness, inability to stop from paying attention to shiny moving things, an unbreakable caffeine habit, who owns two "Tv-B-Gone" zappers and an oversensitivity to the quality of any ad I see*, let me just say
PLEASE GOD LET THESE BE BLACK AND WHITE, STATIC, TEXT ONLY ADS.
I've often thought a novel marketing strategy for product packaging might be something no one else would dare do: a sober, low-key, neat portrayal of the product. The broccoli that didn't shreik out its nutritional content, if you will.** Anyone remember the generic food aisle at the 1970s grocery store? Everything was white, in calm, neat rows. (Much like the crayons in my padded cell, hyuk:)
*Worst ad ever seen: a 1998 bus ad for a truck dealership in Bellevue, WA. On a blue-sky background: the grinning, smarmy face of the dealership owner, a dangling pocket watch (...extra option on trucks or something?) and the text "Time for a New Truck?" Oh, I get it.... time. For a new truck. No truck anywhere, though. But you caught the attention of all the HOROLOGY FANATICS out there who SHOP FOR TRUCKS, ya dumbass. Bet you're glad you hired your nephew instead of spending an additional $400 on a marketing campaign.
They ONLY reason they do it is because competition in a free market forces them to
Except when, you know, companies join forces to form price-fixing schemes and don't get caught for years on end (*mumble CDs mumble*) perhaps because regulatory agencies aren't controlled by free markets as well. (Bounty hunters on the other hand...)
All hail free markets with no cojones whatsoever!
"everyone's a libertarian until a crack house moves in next door"
It's the ages-old assertion that any change in policy that benefits the environment must come with economic costs, and vice versa.
It all comes down to individual costs vs. group costs. The Left is more concerned with long-term group costs - not to say that they're not concerned with individual costs, but they're more willing to pony up for stuff that makes long-term sense. Conservatives, for the most part AFAICT, can't be bothered with worrying about the group costs.
I'm not going to say that not worrying about group costs automatically makes you greedy and evil, although the Left would love everyone to think that (and I would too, insofar as it might get the system changed before we're all choking to death.)
But I DO claim that being concerned about individual costs more than group costs makes sense from an evolutionary perspective - the individual mind must be more concerned with its own survival rather than everyone else's too. One lone organism can persist to reproduce, etc even if all its clan are killed off. Clearly, this kind of mentality had to evolve prior to group selection.
However, it's been said repeatedly that the history of modern morality and cultural evolution describes an expanding circle, in which more and more people are encompassed within the region of "people we need to care about and grant rights to." In modern times this has surpassed individual humans and expanded to include the whole environment.
So conservatives aren't wrong, they're just not caught up with the rest of the world.
Now, is it going to make sense when those on the Left who are crazies (don't deny it, every side has got 'em) - when they start targeting oil executives (why aren't those pansies doing that shit yet anyway!), is that going to change how people think? Probably not - but it sure would make those revolutionaries feel better. Not that I'm advocating that - it would be better if they'd just realize the error of their ways and start giving a shit about other people. That'd make all that x-tian rhetoric all the more realistic...
I love the original anyway, because losing the Northern Lights does sound like the absolute most catastrophic thing that could happen to any part of the polar region in the next 50 years...
It's really sad - anymore, upon seeing the string I T S, I fully expect to see an apostrophe there even if the usage does not call for it. It's like I'm scanning for it'.
How soon before we realize that everything IS partially to wholly due to genetics, and that that fact does not excuse us from our own choices.
So, you killed someone in cold blood, and your parents were murderers too - sorry, bud, you're still going to jail. No amount of genetic "blame" will ever allow us to trust you or your choices.
Steven Pinker did a thorough exploration of this in "The Blank Slate".
Not exactly... Clearly, there are huge differences in culture, but the phrase "women allowed to vote" means the exact same thing in English and in Farsi*: it just elicits different reactions from people in different cultures. But this is not a difference in grammatical concepts.
If it were, there would be concepts that are untranslatable; but these do not exist. For any word, phrase, or concept, there is a way to describe it in another language, whether or not it uses a similar number of words to express it.
*Incongruous example (Benazir Bhutto was a female prime minister of Pakistan)
Trade languages don't erode the use of local languages (what's "cultural language"?) - trade languages get used because there isn't a language in common. ("No language was harmed in the making of this commercial transaction")
On many occasions, it's been shown that if the pidgin language is used consistently around kids, they'll start using it, but just add in all this extra grammatical stuff that they expect to hear but don't - and then the language is said to become "creolized".
Also: we don't predominantly think in language. We think in something that's more base than, and was prior to, language. Everyone always hears that decades-old, long-ago-disproven Whorfian line, that people (in the same species, with the same neurological makeup) actually think differently according to what language they speak - but no one's buying it anymore except those Psych 101 students who are going to major in elementary education instead of cognitive development.
I'm a language dork so I feel like I HAVE to comment every time I see language stuff on/. Except for all those "it's"es where it should be "its". Those, I can let you guys have.
Slashdot Mirror
Later in the program, Holland says, PAL will be able to "automatically watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon."
PAL's role here is not clear. The 'easier' task would be to monitor the body language of the two conversers and, by lining up a list of tasks with the observation of their head movements, correctly predict which points in the conversation were the ones where someone performed an "agreement" gesture.
The much, much more difficult task would be to actually read lips. There are only certain properties of phonemes you can deduce from how the lips and jaw move; many, many other features of speech are lost. Only when you supply the machine with a limited set of words in a limited topic domain do you get good performance; otherwise, you're grasping at straws. And then taking out most of the speech signal? Please.
But no, DARPA is cool and will save all the translators in Iraq (by 2009, well before the war ends.) PR and vaporware win the day!
Sci-fi can be any genre now - western (serenity), brooding drama (Battlestar Galactica), kids' show with puppets (all those Anakin movies.) Will the new incarnation have the same horrible acting that the old ones did - the sci fi equivalent of the poorly-scripted comedy that came on at 730 before the real thing came on at 8? Dear Sci Fi Channel producers: you CAN have a show that's good, and also not have it compete with your flagship Galactica. Please hire some actors / writers who can do more than make me cringe while I wait for Jamie Bamber and Caprica Six to show up.
Someone else above mentioned taking frequeent fMRI's - this would tell us more about what actually is going on.
Because by far the lesser crime is child pornography reaching adults.
*Owns, but not operates: An Ian can drive and surf, but cannot install Linux or change his own oil. See, that would muss your hair.
I'd start clue-sticking around here, but I'D RUN OUT OF STICKS
I second this. I submit that St. Patrick's Day, kilts, Celts, Hobbitts, How The Irish Saved Civilization and the Pogues have become the de facto "white people pride" celebration. And most of that has no racist overtones whatsoever (at least to my eyes, but then I'm a cracker too.) And let's face it, EVERY day is Christian and Straight People celebration day.
BTW if you haven't ever drunk an Irish Car Bomb, now's the time to start.
Ingredients: 1/2 shot Irish Whiskey 1/2 shot Bailey's irish cream 1 pint Guinness stout
Combine Bailey's Irish Cream and irish whiskey into one shot glass. Drop the shot into a mug of guinness and chug until empty.
Probably the same place that you got the energy to move a perfectly-positioned preposition all the way to the front of the sentence, rendering your comment ABSOLUTE FREAKAZOID ENGLISH, as in the weird-ass sentence From where did the energy appear. Up with this I will not put!
:)
As an eXtreeeeme example, try to apply that logic to this one. A dad tells his kid he has to go to bed without any bedtime story, but then goes upstairs with book in hand. The kid says: Dad, what did you bring the book you wouldn't read to me out of up for? See if your brain doesn't asplode trying to "correct" that
Like vanilla flavored crackers, of course!
DCist had a good suggestion: Maybe the WaPo could consider a process to monitor comments and removing them one by one... using this magic resource called INTERNS.
People are most definitely NOT born as a blank slate. "...And even a bit before [birth]" captures a little bit of the complexity that was bred into our psyches by every interaction that our ancestors encountered that conferred even a slight evolutionary advantage - encounters with their environments, with their predators and prey, and with each other.
Every encounter is a non-zero-sum game where compromise and cooperation would be the better long-term strategy, and where cheating and double-crossing would only give you short leaps ahead. Our minds' structure has been built to unimaginable levels of complexity, but with constraints on processing like any system. In a way it doesn't make sense to compare our minds to a computer.
We come into the world with a mental toolkit that's millions of years in the making. There are good reasons people believed in the Blank Slate in the 20th century - noble, respectable reasons - but the time where those reasons served us well is over. Denying that our minds evolved is holding us back from attacking the really big problems.
So stop simplifying it. Believing in a blank slate is as simplistic as believing in intelligent design.
Advertising, like murder among predators or rape among fish, is mostly amoral.** It's just propagating based on its own internal programming. We as humans provide it with a moral dimension. I'd argue that advertising is more about presenting a person of higher-status-than-you with Product X, and then letting your "I wanna wear HER shoes" psychology go to work.
You say "it makes me feel bad, therefore it is evil." - that's not exactly a frivolous claim, of course, but it's hardly in the hands of the advertiser to control your own feelings. (If it is, though, what does that say about whether violence and sex on TV affects what kids think and how they act?) Tough questions for my liberal brothers, I know.
So start blaming yourself for not being evolved enough to not be affected by it, I guess - there, there's your inadequacy. :)
*blah blah blah, check Steven Pinker for more honed, eloquent arguments on any of this
**(Bonus Troll section) WAAAH HOW CAN YOU SAY RAPE IS AMORAL !1!1 Right, I'm a Nazi. Listen ya Jainist hippie, you want to start prosecuting rape charges against invertebrates, and I fully expect to also see you bringing a class action lawsuit against major advertisers for being EVIL.
PLEASE GOD LET THESE BE BLACK AND WHITE, STATIC, TEXT ONLY ADS.
I've often thought a novel marketing strategy for product packaging might be something no one else would dare do: a sober, low-key, neat portrayal of the product. The broccoli that didn't shreik out its nutritional content, if you will.** Anyone remember the generic food aisle at the 1970s grocery store? Everything was white, in calm, neat rows. (Much like the crayons in my padded cell, hyuk :)
*Worst ad ever seen: a 1998 bus ad for a truck dealership in Bellevue, WA. On a blue-sky background: the grinning, smarmy face of the dealership owner, a dangling pocket watch (...extra option on trucks or something?) and the text "Time for a New Truck?" Oh, I get it .... time. For a new truck. No truck anywhere, though. But you caught the attention of all the HOROLOGY FANATICS out there who SHOP FOR TRUCKS, ya dumbass. Bet you're glad you hired your nephew instead of spending an additional $400 on a marketing campaign.
**The Onion.
Except when, you know, companies join forces to form price-fixing schemes and don't get caught for years on end (*mumble CDs mumble*) perhaps because regulatory agencies aren't controlled by free markets as well. (Bounty hunters on the other hand...)
All hail free markets with no cojones whatsoever!
"everyone's a libertarian until a crack house moves in next door"
"How did that scoop-neck camisole work out for you, Mr. Takemura?... Mr. Takemura?? I KNOW YOU CAN HEAR ME DAMMIT!"
or the shrieking vegetables courtesy The Onion: "I HAVE 37% MORE VITAMIN D THAN THAT CUCUMBER! STOP LOOKING AT HER!"
If there is any hope for human sanity in 20 years, all linguists must stop working on computers IMMEDIATELY.
It all comes down to individual costs vs. group costs. The Left is more concerned with long-term group costs - not to say that they're not concerned with individual costs, but they're more willing to pony up for stuff that makes long-term sense. Conservatives, for the most part AFAICT, can't be bothered with worrying about the group costs.
I'm not going to say that not worrying about group costs automatically makes you greedy and evil, although the Left would love everyone to think that (and I would too, insofar as it might get the system changed before we're all choking to death.)
But I DO claim that being concerned about individual costs more than group costs makes sense from an evolutionary perspective - the individual mind must be more concerned with its own survival rather than everyone else's too. One lone organism can persist to reproduce, etc even if all its clan are killed off. Clearly, this kind of mentality had to evolve prior to group selection.
However, it's been said repeatedly that the history of modern morality and cultural evolution describes an expanding circle, in which more and more people are encompassed within the region of "people we need to care about and grant rights to." In modern times this has surpassed individual humans and expanded to include the whole environment.
So conservatives aren't wrong, they're just not caught up with the rest of the world.
Now, is it going to make sense when those on the Left who are crazies (don't deny it, every side has got 'em) - when they start targeting oil executives (why aren't those pansies doing that shit yet anyway!), is that going to change how people think? Probably not - but it sure would make those revolutionaries feel better. Not that I'm advocating that - it would be better if they'd just realize the error of their ways and start giving a shit about other people. That'd make all that x-tian rhetoric all the more realistic...
I love the original anyway, because losing the Northern Lights does sound like the absolute most catastrophic thing that could happen to any part of the polar region in the next 50 years...
Yes, but will it reveal Charlize Theron's nipples?
It's really sad - anymore, upon seeing the string I T S, I fully expect to see an apostrophe there even if the usage does not call for it. It's like I'm scanning for it'.
Ye olde which vs. that controversy...
So, you killed someone in cold blood, and your parents were murderers too - sorry, bud, you're still going to jail. No amount of genetic "blame" will ever allow us to trust you or your choices.
Steven Pinker did a thorough exploration of this in "The Blank Slate".
If it were, there would be concepts that are untranslatable; but these do not exist. For any word, phrase, or concept, there is a way to describe it in another language, whether or not it uses a similar number of words to express it.
*Incongruous example (Benazir Bhutto was a female prime minister of Pakistan)
On many occasions, it's been shown that if the pidgin language is used consistently around kids, they'll start using it, but just add in all this extra grammatical stuff that they expect to hear but don't - and then the language is said to become "creolized".
Also: we don't predominantly think in language. We think in something that's more base than, and was prior to, language. Everyone always hears that decades-old, long-ago-disproven Whorfian line, that people (in the same species, with the same neurological makeup) actually think differently according to what language they speak - but no one's buying it anymore except those Psych 101 students who are going to major in elementary education instead of cognitive development.
I'm a language dork so I feel like I HAVE to comment every time I see language stuff on /. Except for all those "it's"es where it should be "its". Those, I can let you guys have.
Administration-enabled translator: We are so happy that you love America for toppling your eeeeeeevil dictatorship!
American soldier 2: Hoo yah, we're gonna git us some awl!
Administration-enabled translator: We are going to train you to defend yourselves before we leave!
American soldier 3: Dude, I was totally kidding about your sister
Administration-enabled translator: Why do you HATE FREEDOM?!
American soldier 4: See, we worship the same thing, really - God, Allah, means the same thing!
Administration-enabled translator: Praise JESUS!
Language butchers YOU!