Of course... soy milk or many other toxins might be candidate causes. The point I'm making about mechanism not mattering is precisely that any of these "causes" may be ultimate OR proximate.
There is a phenomenon in nature known as parasitic castration. Parasites like their hosts to invest in them, not in the offspring of the hosts. So parasites frequently castrate their hosts -- sometimes literally -- sometimes chemically. The mechanism isn't important -- the effect is: Reduce the number of children the host has so there is more investment in the parasite.
What might be this parasite in the present circumstance?
If you answer this you likely will find the causes of other "inexplicable" phenomena negatively impacting males fertility -- possibly even autism spectrum disorders.
So we have another situation where reliance on centralization is stupid.
Rather than building Googleplexes why aren't the IT mavens hiring P2P guys to build decentralized systems to farm out work to the desktops already sitting around?
Its so pathetic watching these guys go insane over oxidizers when oxygen is in the air around us all the time.
"Thermobaric Urban Destruction" is the title of the "users manual" for the latest weapon being deployed by US Marines against "urban targets". Basically it is a cheap, highly portable building leveler that mixes "fuel" with air and then sparks it. This could backfire. Seriously backfire. As in "Burning Down the Civilization" backfire. Thermobarics, as a kind of fuel-air explosive technology, use air for the oxydizer, into which a fuel is sprayed--sort of the way coal mine dust, grain elevator dust and natural gas leak explosions do. Unlike Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil (ANFO), you can't lock onto a substance like ammonium nitrate for detection and control, anymore than you can control access to, uhm, air. That means you can't use a substance-control strategy against them without getting rid of gasoline, diesel, natural gas--you know--fuel. Since everyone drives around in vehicles with tanks filled with the chemical energy equivalent of 500lbs of explosives just waiting for a technology to disperse it efficiently into an aerosol near an enemy's real estate assets (and/or the enemy himself), it is rather easy to imagine things getting out of hand if the right aerosol technology gets developed. And with the critical materials so redily available, experimentation with techniques for dispersal--techniques that don't require a lot in the way of special equipment or materials--will evolve Improvised Explosive Devices terribly rapidly.
To sum up, with the US deploying thermobarics in Iraq for demolishing buildings and killing their occupants, I can easily imagine two things happening:
The Iraqi resistance will start to use it in an "open source" developed Improvised Explosive Device.
US soldiers will acquire this "open source" technology while in Iraq and do a "technology transfer" to urban gangs as they have already done with other technology acquired during military service in Iraq.
Once that happends the days of Timothy McVeigh will seem like "the good old days".
If I were in Ray Ozzie's shoes I would apply something like the The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge to the entirety of MS's software services suite. This, of course, requires making a rigorous spec for testing purposes.
Make the engine, upon which the winning succinct byte code runs, a new W3C standard browser programming language (or at least virtual machine) and reduce the Microsoft OS CD to those components required to create a web-delivered application platform using the winning engine. Such an engine would, of course, have some features that dynamically encached expansions (and/or "memoizations") similar to the Hotspot optimization technology that originated with the Self programming language (and was later adopted by Sun's Java Virtual Machine). Hence it would make sense to have the OS CD contain a partially pre-expanded/optimized code base.
Then, for delivery of software services to pre-existing platforms, create a legacy port of the services code to pre-existing W3C standards like XForms implemented in a downloadable ECMAScript Client/SOA library in a manner similar to the way TIBET(tm) does. The idea is to go "Live", ie: web-delivered, with a fundamentally new W3C base (whatever engine won the prize) but support legacy W3C environments for migration.
Again, this prize-oriented strategy would, of course, require a rigorous specification of the software services so the testing could be largely automated.
This approach addresses Microsoft's 2 biggest problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone has needed their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.
The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.
The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.
Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.
So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.
So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers and mountains of cash into succinct code?
Monetary Incentives for the Programmers, ala the Hutter Prize:
S = size of uncompressed code-base
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed code-base
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at the time of the new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.
They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.
A new research program by a Cornell computer scientist, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh and University of Utah, aims to teach computers to scan through text and sort opinion from fact. The research is funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which has designated the consortium of three universities as one of four University Affiliate Centers (UAC) to conduct research on advanced methods for information analysis and to develop computational technologies that contribute to national security. Cornell will receive $850,000 of $2.4 million in funding provided for the consortium over three years...
The new research will use machine-learning algorithms to give computers examples of text expressing both fact and opinion and teach them to tell the difference. A simplified example might be to look for phrases like "according to" or "it is believed." Ironically, Cardie said, one of the phrases most likely to indicate opinion is "It is a fact that..."
It could be the Google guys re going to try something like the Homeland Security guys are tryng to do. All they have done is ask some humans to use their judgement to classify some writings as "fact" and others as "opinion" and then used pretty standard data mining techniques to train a computer program to mimic that judgement against a much larger sample of texts.
The best the computer can do under these circumstances is no better than the selected human consensus can do.
However, as in word sense disambiguation and its application to creation of coherent lexicons, the use of humans as the standard is precisely where these approaches are failing to realize the potential of computer algorithms. There is a battle brewing within the philosophy of science over precisely this sort of standard and it is going to erupt throughout all of academia, the humanities as well as sciences.
The trigger of this eruption is the termination of the long hiatus--now nearly 50 years--of rational research into artificial intelligence. I won't go into all of the dimensions of the abominable history of artificial intelligence research, but suffice to say that with the resurgence of algorithmic information theory, things are being reformulated rapidly.
The bottom line is this:
Information and knowledge are inseparable. If you can formulate information theory consilient with computer technology you have a rational basis for artificial intelligence. Algorithmic information theory is that consilience and it has been in hibernation for decades.
The principle result of algorithmic information theory is that the shortest program that can output a text string represents the true information content of that text string. It is Ockham's Razor on steroids.
This doesn't mean that a computer program can be written that will find that shortest program--indeed it has been proven that such a metaprogram cannot exist in the general sense. But what it does mean is that we have an objective test of the relative truthfulness of two discriptive frameworks. The one which results in the shortest description of the world--the one that is most coherent--most consilient--that "hangs together' the best--is also the most truthful. We can still have human judgement play a part of course--but that part is put to the emperical test of now rigorously defined epistemology.
Perhaps Google is going to pursue this route. If so, they should take a clue from Netflix's million dollar prize for a better prediction algorithm and put even more serious funding behind the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge. It is the future of knowledge representation.
The big reason Asians can compete with Westerners -- particularly Western technologists -- is the rising cost of reproduction in the West.
The cost of reproduction has risen by a factor of nearly 4 since I was born in 1954, fertilizing the portfolios of landlords, or more properly, land barons, with the decomposing marriages, fetuses and sometimes bodies of the bulk of the baby boom generation, leaving a demographic hole being filled with imported slaves* by those same landlords.
The baronage calls this "progress", even as as the price of homes was removed from the consumer price index while introducing CPI factors like "hedonic value" and "imputed rent" to make it appear "real" earnings have increased over the time period of demographic collapse and loss of ethnic enfranchisement to imported laborers for the baronage.
*It is really being too kind to the baronage to call the imported laborers "slaves" since the baronage doesn't have to pay for their human capital upkeep--the rest of us do via social programs. Southern Plantation owners were far more moral than these sorry excuses for human beings.
Figures from my insurance agent sent to me on my birthday:
The two big ticket necessities:
3 bedroom house price increase: 22 times
1954 $ 10,250
2006 $219,375
car price increase: 18 times
1954 $ 1,567
2006 $28,000
Even if we grant that the quality/cost ratio of manufactured goods has gone up so much during the last 52 years that $1,567 for a used car in 2006 is as good as a new car was in 1954, it doesn't bring down the sum of the 2 major debt-service items much:
average household income increase: 13 times
1954 $ 4,137 (one wage earner)
2006 $54,000 (two wage earners)
So household income has gone up only about 70% as much as the essential household debt service in the last 52 years.
Oh, but wait--that "household" in 1954 was one income and the income was relatively stable--the woman stayed at home and raised the kids.
How can we factor not only that both parents must work in 2006 and not only are each of their jobs less secure, but the effective income of the household, adjusting for risk of not being able to meet debt payments for a substantial period of time?
Here's a realistic option: We can reasonably say that the odds of both parents being out of work at any given point of time in 2006 is comparable to the odds of the father being out of work in 1954. Hence the reliable household income--the income stream that can service debt without foreclosure--is approximately 1/2 of the household income. Certainly we can say that there w
This guy, Coach Wei, whoever he is, compares a specific platform for Java with the general miasma of people who woke up a year or so ago and realized that Javascript was a programming language.
Classic Jive: Pick a toss a red herring in the air, blow hard, set up a straw man hoping no one notices its a straw man, then knock it down.
People think mass produced ultracapacitors revolutionizing car transportation is the real imortance here but they're mistaken. The real importance is that there will be thousands of garage tinkerers trying their hand at various techniques to produce fusion energy.
They will probably come up with ideas more workable than the Tokamak (although that isn't saying much by itself).
If Johnny wants to program, all he has to do to start is type:
javascript:alert("This is my first program!")
into the URL of his web browser, find the ENTER key and press it.
Johnny doesn't want to code because he sees what coding did to his father when he lost his job.
Seriously... I have turned down teaching younger US coders who wanted to learn programming for a living because it would be unethical for me to do so given what has been done to my profession by the likes of Gates, et al flooding the market with unprofessional coolies that make them feel like the British Raj with their servants doing the modern equivalent of saying "Sahib" a lot.
I am bemused people who think Sun is relevant anymore.
It's stock went through the floor, the barrier hit by most others during the dot-con bubble burst, and proceeded to the basement. It's server technology just isn't that interesting and Java has never been interesting except as a way to import enormous numbers of programmers from India using the capital Sun had acquired from its early success.
I suspect database mining algorithms for Wikipedia Neologisms could also help refactor Wordnet's definitions to be more succinct and hence provide a better basis for modeling other natural language corpora.
paq8hp3 is the current Hutter Prize lead contender and has compressed the first 100M of Wikipedia to just over 17M. Wordnet's.exe file is just over 17M. One wonders what would happen if the "cream" of Wordnet's vocabulary were compressed using paq8hp3 and then incorporated into paq8hp3 to be a better compressor by inferring what words are more likely than others to appear near various combinations of words. You wouldn't have to go very deep to generate a large temporary file of word associations. Identifying the "cream" of Wordnet would be more than just frequency of usage. Some refactorization of the definitions may be in order to find which words are most powerful descriptors of other words. How much of that sort of work has been done?
Although there are some critical genes for expression of human characters, one of the characteristics of rapid evolution seems to be the inactivation of genes. As you progress along the line to humans there appear to be fewer and fewer genes being expressed. This seems to be the result of mutation's default action which is to damage gene function which in general means to deactivate it. Its a lot easier to deactivate a gene than it is to create a gene with positive action. So you can expect that if there are ways to create positive characters at the phenotype level by deactivating genes that would be main way those characters emerge during the early stage of evolution. It is probably also be that some older genes need to be silenced to so that newer genes that actually do function can express less competition.
There clearly are two very different ideas of how to go about attacking natural language systems and the Hutter Prize doesn't decidd which contestants should use:
Human generated language models.
Machine generated language models.
There has been a lot of work on human generated language models and some work on machine generated language models. What has been lacking from both projects, has been a single standard for comparison so that however one approaches the problem, the result can be judged. Well, that's not precisely true since similar standards are already used in natural language research to some extent.
In fact, language modeling is an active area of research in speech recognition. Often, it is studied independently of the acoustic model. The most widely used measure of the quality of a language model is its perplexity, which is a measure of how well it will compress a corpus of natural language text [6]. Models are also used to correct errors in other NLP systems such as OCR [7] and language translation [5].
and
It is common practice in speech recognition research to evaluate a language model isolated from the acoustic model by measuring text compression (expressed as word perplexity), and this method has been found experimentally to be equivalent or superior to other proposed language model evaluation methods [6].
The theory is simple enough and the mathematical proof has been done: If you can sufficiently compress a large, general knowledge natural langage corpus like Wikipedia, you can competently articulate and understand natural language.
It's a hard problem but with the metric and the prize competition driving progress there's a good chance human-level understanding of natural language will start to emerge within the next few years.
BTW: This revolutionizes software development in more ways than one. Think about it like this: When Alan Kay first dreamt of Smalltalk, he was dreaming of a system anyone could program. Well, if you can just say what you want and the system is good enough at comprehending you, program specification just became very natural -- natural enough that you child could perform feats of programming not practical with corporate teams of software developers before.
Let's keep things in perspective here. A few million homes powered is a drop in the bucket globally. Even within the context of the US it like a percent or so. Maybe nice but no big deal really.
You know how cute animals are. Well animal rights activists are at their cutest when they loose invasive species from laboratories on the unsuspecting indigenous flora and fauna the way they did in the British Isles.
This turns out to be a virtue for the Hutter Prize actually. The AI emerging from the Hutter Prize will be better able to model ambiguities arising from poor usage and hence be more capable of understanding people. This, of course, makes the compression more difficult but the point of the Hutter Prize is to make it simple for funding sources to create ever greater incentives for solving the critical problems for AI by literally throwing money at the problem and being guaranteed results for their money.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course... soy milk or many other toxins might be candidate causes. The point I'm making about mechanism not mattering is precisely that any of these "causes" may be ultimate OR proximate.
What might be this parasite in the present circumstance?
If you answer this you likely will find the causes of other "inexplicable" phenomena negatively impacting males fertility -- possibly even autism spectrum disorders.
Rather than building Googleplexes why aren't the IT mavens hiring P2P guys to build decentralized systems to farm out work to the desktops already sitting around?
Abandon technology prizes.
They are insane.
"Thermobaric Urban Destruction" is the title of the "users manual" for the latest weapon being deployed by US Marines against "urban targets". Basically it is a cheap, highly portable building leveler that mixes "fuel" with air and then sparks it. This could backfire. Seriously backfire. As in "Burning Down the Civilization" backfire. Thermobarics, as a kind of fuel-air explosive technology, use air for the oxydizer, into which a fuel is sprayed--sort of the way coal mine dust, grain elevator dust and natural gas leak explosions do. Unlike Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil (ANFO), you can't lock onto a substance like ammonium nitrate for detection and control, anymore than you can control access to, uhm, air. That means you can't use a substance-control strategy against them without getting rid of gasoline, diesel, natural gas--you know--fuel. Since everyone drives around in vehicles with tanks filled with the chemical energy equivalent of 500lbs of explosives just waiting for a technology to disperse it efficiently into an aerosol near an enemy's real estate assets (and/or the enemy himself), it is rather easy to imagine things getting out of hand if the right aerosol technology gets developed. And with the critical materials so redily available, experimentation with techniques for dispersal--techniques that don't require a lot in the way of special equipment or materials--will evolve Improvised Explosive Devices terribly rapidly.
To sum up, with the US deploying thermobarics in Iraq for demolishing buildings and killing their occupants, I can easily imagine two things happening:
- The Iraqi resistance will start to use it in an "open source" developed Improvised Explosive Device.
- US soldiers will acquire this "open source" technology while in Iraq and do a "technology transfer" to urban gangs as they have already done with other technology acquired during military service in Iraq.
Once that happends the days of Timothy McVeigh will seem like "the good old days".Perhaps now the US government will reconsider the wisdom of leaving the security of US cities in the hands of the Mexican coast guard...
Make the engine, upon which the winning succinct byte code runs, a new W3C standard browser programming language (or at least virtual machine) and reduce the Microsoft OS CD to those components required to create a web-delivered application platform using the winning engine. Such an engine would, of course, have some features that dynamically encached expansions (and/or "memoizations") similar to the Hotspot optimization technology that originated with the Self programming language (and was later adopted by Sun's Java Virtual Machine). Hence it would make sense to have the OS CD contain a partially pre-expanded/optimized code base.
Then, for delivery of software services to pre-existing platforms, create a legacy port of the services code to pre-existing W3C standards like XForms implemented in a downloadable ECMAScript Client/SOA library in a manner similar to the way TIBET(tm) does. The idea is to go "Live", ie: web-delivered, with a fundamentally new W3C base (whatever engine won the prize) but support legacy W3C environments for migration.
Again, this prize-oriented strategy would, of course, require a rigorous specification of the software services so the testing could be largely automated.
This approach addresses Microsoft's 2 biggest problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone has needed their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.
The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.
The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.
Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.
So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.
So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers and mountains of cash into succinct code?
Monetary Incentives for the Programmers, ala the Hutter Prize:
S = size of uncompressed code-base
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed code-base
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at the time of the new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.
They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.
It could be the Google guys re going to try something like the Homeland Security guys are tryng to do. All they have done is ask some humans to use their judgement to classify some writings as "fact" and others as "opinion" and then used pretty standard data mining techniques to train a computer program to mimic that judgement against a much larger sample of texts.
The best the computer can do under these circumstances is no better than the selected human consensus can do.
However, as in word sense disambiguation and its application to creation of coherent lexicons, the use of humans as the standard is precisely where these approaches are failing to realize the potential of computer algorithms. There is a battle brewing within the philosophy of science over precisely this sort of standard and it is going to erupt throughout all of academia, the humanities as well as sciences.
The trigger of this eruption is the termination of the long hiatus--now nearly 50 years--of rational research into artificial intelligence. I won't go into all of the dimensions of the abominable history of artificial intelligence research, but suffice to say that with the resurgence of algorithmic information theory, things are being reformulated rapidly.
The bottom line is this:
Information and knowledge are inseparable. If you can formulate information theory consilient with computer technology you have a rational basis for artificial intelligence. Algorithmic information theory is that consilience and it has been in hibernation for decades.
The principle result of algorithmic information theory is that the shortest program that can output a text string represents the true information content of that text string. It is Ockham's Razor on steroids.
This doesn't mean that a computer program can be written that will find that shortest program--indeed it has been proven that such a metaprogram cannot exist in the general sense. But what it does mean is that we have an objective test of the relative truthfulness of two discriptive frameworks. The one which results in the shortest description of the world--the one that is most coherent--most consilient--that "hangs together' the best--is also the most truthful. We can still have human judgement play a part of course--but that part is put to the emperical test of now rigorously defined epistemology.
Perhaps Google is going to pursue this route. If so, they should take a clue from Netflix's million dollar prize for a better prediction algorithm and put even more serious funding behind the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge. It is the future of knowledge representation.
The cost of reproduction has risen by a factor of nearly 4 since I was born in 1954, fertilizing the portfolios of landlords, or more properly, land barons, with the decomposing marriages, fetuses and sometimes bodies of the bulk of the baby boom generation, leaving a demographic hole being filled with imported slaves* by those same landlords.
The baronage calls this "progress", even as as the price of homes was removed from the consumer price index while introducing CPI factors like "hedonic value" and "imputed rent" to make it appear "real" earnings have increased over the time period of demographic collapse and loss of ethnic enfranchisement to imported laborers for the baronage.
I call it genocide.
*It is really being too kind to the baronage to call the imported laborers "slaves" since the baronage doesn't have to pay for their human capital upkeep--the rest of us do via social programs. Southern Plantation owners were far more moral than these sorry excuses for human beings.
Figures from my insurance agent sent to me on my birthday:
The two big ticket necessities:
3 bedroom house price increase: 22 times
1954 $ 10,250
2006 $219,375
car price increase: 18 times
1954 $ 1,567
2006 $28,000
Even if we grant that the quality/cost ratio of manufactured goods has gone up so much during the last 52 years that $1,567 for a used car in 2006 is as good as a new car was in 1954, it doesn't bring down the sum of the 2 major debt-service items much:
house+car increase: 19 times
1954 $ 11,817 =$1,567+$10,250
2006 $220942 =$1,567+$219,375
So the debt-service load in a family household has gone up nearly a factor of 20 in the last 52 years.
And don't kid yourself that it didn't hit hardest at the peak child-bearing potential of the mid-to-late boomers who were paying 20% mortgage rates when they were trying to form families in the early 1980s.
Look at these foreclosure rates peaking within the first 10 years of boomer's trying to form families:
Year $ value of mortgage loans foreclosed (in millions)
1965 944
1966 1,034
1967 957
1968 865
1969 364
1970 321
1971 438
1972 478
1973 577
1974 715
1975 1,086
1976 1,129
1977 868
1978 723
1979 683
1980 917
1981 1,563
1982 3,282
1983 4,240
1984 6,163
1985 8,675
1986 13,942
1987 18,373
1988 18,859
1989 18,189
1990 22,862
1991 17,105
1992 12,408
1993 6,852
1994 3,422
1995 2,506
1996 2,138
1997 1,805
1998 1,470
1999 1,022
2000 900
Has household income kept up? Hardly...
average household income increase: 13 times
1954 $ 4,137 (one wage earner)
2006 $54,000 (two wage earners)
So household income has gone up only about 70% as much as the essential household debt service in the last 52 years.
Oh, but wait--that "household" in 1954 was one income and the income was relatively stable--the woman stayed at home and raised the kids.
How can we factor not only that both parents must work in 2006 and not only are each of their jobs less secure, but the effective income of the household, adjusting for risk of not being able to meet debt payments for a substantial period of time?
Here's a realistic option: We can reasonably say that the odds of both parents being out of work at any given point of time in 2006 is comparable to the odds of the father being out of work in 1954. Hence the reliable household income--the income stream that can service debt without foreclosure--is approximately 1/2 of the household income. Certainly we can say that there w
This guy, Coach Wei, whoever he is, compares a specific platform for Java with the general miasma of people who woke up a year or so ago and realized that Javascript was a programming language. Classic Jive: Pick a toss a red herring in the air, blow hard, set up a straw man hoping no one notices its a straw man, then knock it down.
People think mass produced ultracapacitors revolutionizing car transportation is the real imortance here but they're mistaken. The real importance is that there will be thousands of garage tinkerers trying their hand at various techniques to produce fusion energy. They will probably come up with ideas more workable than the Tokamak (although that isn't saying much by itself).
People are asking "Why not television addiction disorder?
javascript:alert("This is my first program!")
into the URL of his web browser, find the ENTER key and press it.
Johnny doesn't want to code because he sees what coding did to his father when he lost his job.
Seriously... I have turned down teaching younger US coders who wanted to learn programming for a living because it would be unethical for me to do so given what has been done to my profession by the likes of Gates, et al flooding the market with unprofessional coolies that make them feel like the British Raj with their servants doing the modern equivalent of saying "Sahib" a lot.
I am bemused people who think Sun is relevant anymore. It's stock went through the floor, the barrier hit by most others during the dot-con bubble burst, and proceeded to the basement. It's server technology just isn't that interesting and Java has never been interesting except as a way to import enormous numbers of programmers from India using the capital Sun had acquired from its early success.
WMV or MPG video just posted by John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace's test hover.
paq8hp3 is the current Hutter Prize lead contender and has compressed the first 100M of Wikipedia to just over 17M. Wordnet's .exe file is just over 17M. One wonders what would happen if the "cream" of Wordnet's vocabulary were compressed using paq8hp3 and then incorporated into paq8hp3 to be a better compressor by inferring what words are more likely than others to appear near various combinations of words. You wouldn't have to go very deep to generate a large temporary file of word associations. Identifying the "cream" of Wordnet would be more than just frequency of usage. Some refactorization of the definitions may be in order to find which words are most powerful descriptors of other words. How much of that sort of work has been done?
How can you give them a pod to take home if they don't physically present their host organism?
"You are the dead," said an iron voice behind them. They sprang apart. Winston's entrails seemed to have turned into ice.
Although there are some critical genes for expression of human characters, one of the characteristics of rapid evolution seems to be the inactivation of genes. As you progress along the line to humans there appear to be fewer and fewer genes being expressed. This seems to be the result of mutation's default action which is to damage gene function which in general means to deactivate it. Its a lot easier to deactivate a gene than it is to create a gene with positive action. So you can expect that if there are ways to create positive characters at the phenotype level by deactivating genes that would be main way those characters emerge during the early stage of evolution. It is probably also be that some older genes need to be silenced to so that newer genes that actually do function can express less competition.
- Human generated language models.
- Machine generated language models.
There has been a lot of work on human generated language models and some work on machine generated language models. What has been lacking from both projects, has been a single standard for comparison so that however one approaches the problem, the result can be judged. Well, that's not precisely true since similar standards are already used in natural language research to some extent.From Matt Mahoney's rationale for the large text compression benchmark:
andSee Matt Mahoney's rationale for the large text compression benchmark.
Until recently there was no rigorous metric for the power of a natural language understanding system but that has changed with The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge. Since the introduction of the Hutter Prize here at Slashdot there has already been as much progress as ordinarily occurs in a year (actually a bit more since an average year progresses 3% in compression of natural language and the current contestants may have already achieved 4% improvement since the /. announcement).
The theory is simple enough and the mathematical proof has been done: If you can sufficiently compress a large, general knowledge natural langage corpus like Wikipedia, you can competently articulate and understand natural language.
It's a hard problem but with the metric and the prize competition driving progress there's a good chance human-level understanding of natural language will start to emerge within the next few years.
BTW: This revolutionizes software development in more ways than one. Think about it like this: When Alan Kay first dreamt of Smalltalk, he was dreaming of a system anyone could program. Well, if you can just say what you want and the system is good enough at comprehending you, program specification just became very natural -- natural enough that you child could perform feats of programming not practical with corporate teams of software developers before.
Let's keep things in perspective here. A few million homes powered is a drop in the bucket globally. Even within the context of the US it like a percent or so. Maybe nice but no big deal really.
You know how cute animals are. Well animal rights activists are at their cutest when they loose invasive species from laboratories on the unsuspecting indigenous flora and fauna the way they did in the British Isles.
This turns out to be a virtue for the Hutter Prize actually. The AI emerging from the Hutter Prize will be better able to model ambiguities arising from poor usage and hence be more capable of understanding people. This, of course, makes the compression more difficult but the point of the Hutter Prize is to make it simple for funding sources to create ever greater incentives for solving the critical problems for AI by literally throwing money at the problem and being guaranteed results for their money.