If one can reliably and (even better) minimally mimick any computational system, or any part of a computational system, whether it be human language or the movement of celestial bodies, you have learned something very significant about that system. It means that you know the computational complexity of the system, and you know one possible way to implement it. It doesn't mean you know the particular implementation in the natural world, but you know that your implementation is probably procedurally translatable, so it makes the task of finding the actual natural implementation MUCH easier. You've reduced your algorithm search space by an incredible amount.
As another reply mentions, WordNet is a promising avenue of success for creating a taxonomy and an ontology for the web(just read a paper on ontologizing semantic relations using WordNet, actually). In fact, it already is a taxonomy of sorts(and a multi-dimensional one at that), although a generalized one. And there are multitudinous other projects building off of WordNet and paralleling WordNet.
WordNet has become a standard for working with semantic relations computationally these days. It works by storing all known senses of every dictionary word, and each sense has links to other words based on how it's semantically related(synonym, antonym, hyper/hyponym, meronym, troponym, cause, is_a, morphological derivative, etc...)
There's not any model that can compete with it currently, and it's widely accessible and very easy to use. As this tool improves, so will the semantic web.
That is, on the ISPs' customer side business, there are different speeds you could connect to the internet, from dial-up to DSL, from Cable to the Tx connections. If a user wants to be streaming big media in a constant stream over their cable lines, they could subscribe to a more expensive, higher speed connection. And the ISPs need to keep upgrading their bandwidth to allow for these people who want access to streaming big media.
This "choking the internet" complaint seems to be a cop-out for the laziness of the ISPs toward getting off their butts and really competing to bring a smooth connection to its subscribers.
Well, to me, the obvious modern answer to BASIC is Python( http://www.python.org/ ). It's about as easy as BASIC, has an easy-to-understand help library, and runs best by command line interpreter. The IDE even comes with a Windows-based command line interpreter! In fact it looks a lot like BASIC, too, but also has more modern programming concepts fully built-in.
I started in on BASIC in 3rd grade and taught people BASIC in middle school, before switching to C++ and Windows programming in high school(graduated in 2000). I now have a BS in Comp Sci and am a PhD student.
I actually like cut-scenes greatly if they're well-done, and I do look at games like this as sort of an interactive movie or book. You simply will not get the same type of experience if it's interactive all the time, and being interactive constantly should not always be the highest goal for a game to have.
And until games start having sophisticated linguistic and other communication involved, constant interactivity will always be second rate.
You are assuming a purely materialist ontology in relation to the makeup of humans. It is a philosophical assumption based on the fallacy that the only things that exist are those things which are provable by the scientific method. While this is a valid philosophical framework to argue for, it should not be stated as indisputable fact.
Actually, your attitude is a sort of religious fanaticism.
Well, that would be a purely orthographic convention, then. That is, a convention of the writing system. If it were just about spaces, then Japanese, another agglutinative language, would be mighty weird since spacing is generally only done between sentences, even though there is definitely more than one word in each sentence. Spacing of words is a construct that exists only in some writing systems of the world, and we see it primarily originating in writing systems that come from Arabic, I think. Yes, our writing system comes from Arabic.
The rules of agglutinative languages are psychologically and phonologically and morphologically more than just an orthographic convention. They are a part of the grammar. The agglutinated words in these languages are actually realized as one morphological word in the speaker's mind. It is a testable phenomenon.
Indeed, that's why when running human experiments in psychology or sociology, you generally aim to find those who are "naive" to the area you are studying, because they are less biased with previous training. We want to arrive at a "natural" human response
What market prediction is, is essentially a human sociological experiment. An investigator in this area will want to know what are the most basic choices that people make, and that means avoiding those who have expertise and training in marketing.
I also believe that even those with expert training in this area will tend to make the same findings that non-experts make to some extent, when they are not conscious of their training.
Well of course people can be taught bad medical practice and bad science, but from my observation those people tend to be mostly in disjunctive sets.
The people who would most fight for creationism to be taught in schools and such would more likely rely on traditional western medicine as the alternative medicine usually comes from Eastern/New Age medicinal philosophy and is therefore blasphemous.
The people who push and believe in alternative medicine incorrectly the most I think are mis-educated people who tend to follow the new age/eastern philosophies and are otherwise secular and accept evolution theory without question.
So I think you are making a very incorrect connection, and while there will be some overlap, these two phenomena are not related in origin, except for being unscientific(although they can be approached scientifically, and the parent should not keep such a malicious sweeping prejudice against alternative views either, but scientifically consider these possibilities/methodologies as possibly valid for each new situation).
Computational Linguistics is my field, so I can tell you that the problem with the current state of corpora is a lack of massive cross-language corpora over many languages.
The two sources used by Google are basically the only sources available for the kind of task we're talking about. Obviously the thing to do is work on creating more cross-language corpora, and I'm sure this is being done, but it takes much time to create a cross-language corpus on the scale that the UN documents or translations of the Bible have.
My theory is that this(that the past and future are already set constant) is indeed the case and that free will is still possible. The way it would work is that you make your choices independent of time. It is your consciousness by means of your body that travels in linear time, experiencing your choices.
But they are all your choices. So in my theory you have in fact already chosen your future choices, but not really because it's outside of time so there is no "already chosen".
It's more like, your choices are as much a part of your being as your left arm or your mind, soul, spirit, whatever. So at the same time that your choices are "set" in advance, you still freely make all your choices, since they are a part of you.
This roughly solves the paradox of a set time continuum and having free will. It precludes you to believe in your being existng outside of time and such.
Until I see this new process in the works, however, there is nothing that will make me believe it's better than finding another human who can *understand* what you are saying and the context to which you are implying.
"Better" is an ambiguous term. For what these researchers made the program for, it is better than humans for one reason: speed. Sure they want the translations to be reliable, but more importantly is that a computer can do in a few days what would take a human a month, for this application at least.
The NSA and the like want to have translations of huge swathes of text, and fast! The sooner they can understand things that are written, the faster they can react to threats. The time and money spent on human translators for this purpose is very slow and expensive in comparison.
For your Spanish HW, the best is a native speaker giving you feedback, because the amount of work is small and the translations will be very accurate.
Another factor to consider is that these carts will be much more valuable themselves. The reason you can freely wheel around shopping carts, which are the store's property, through the store and even outside with no supervision is that carts are fairly useless to most people, so there's not much danger of theft. And if they are stolen, they're cheap enough to replace.
But with a computer mounted on these carts, the carts are now something to be guarded. This means spending money on security to watch carts, security systems linked into the computer itself, complete with motion sensors around the parking lot perhaps. The article mentions nothing about security, so I can only assume there is none yet. I think these carts may end up being more of a liability than they're worth.
You may be able to understand Indian English once you get past pronunciation, but that doesn't mean there's no language issue.
There are aspects to language in interaction which may still cause problems. I know that at least in Indian English, there is a tendency for Indians not to ask direct questions, but always beat around the bush. This is usually in conflict with how English speakers converse. Indians also generally do not make small talk, and it makes them very uncomfortable if they have to.
These sorts of things may make it difficult to do business effectively with speakers of Indian English. It can essentially be a clash of linguistic culture and norms which make doing business with them less efficient than working with Americans.
The US Government decides to take matters into their own hands and creates an e-mail filtering - possibly firewall/anti-virus as well - service of their own. It offers tax incentives to businesses who subscribe to it, with the ultimate goal of centering internet data management to a single hub. Make sure nearly everyone in the country has this service, so spam is theoretically erradicated.
This also gives the government a convenient spy tool. That will be highly downplayed, and it could even be promoted as part of the war on terrorism!
How to make Windows XP go BSOD on you in 3 easy steps:
1) Download Cygwin, with wget installed
2) Download foobar2000 media player
3) Play music on foobar2000 and at the same time use wget to download a website with a fairly deep directory structure.
And there you have it! In about 5 minutes you should have a pretty BSOD on WinXP! Don't know why it happens, but it's pretty consistent.
It seems like all the suggestions given in your email could be made into options in the Google Groups interface. I think some people might prefer the way Google handles these features, so I wouldn't consider them bugs per se, but simply that they need to add functionality to change a lot of things in the display method, these being some of them.
Google has to be very careful in their pre-IPO service expansion, as they are walking a fine line between whetting potential investors' apetites and keeping to their angelic perception by the public.
Slashdot Mirror
If one can reliably and (even better) minimally mimick any computational system, or any part of a computational system, whether it be human language or the movement of celestial bodies, you have learned something very significant about that system. It means that you know the computational complexity of the system, and you know one possible way to implement it. It doesn't mean you know the particular implementation in the natural world, but you know that your implementation is probably procedurally translatable, so it makes the task of finding the actual natural implementation MUCH easier. You've reduced your algorithm search space by an incredible amount.
I'm sure you'll find it here ^_^
There's VerbNet, FrameNet, Arabic WordNet, and probably others I don't know about.
WordNet has become a standard for working with semantic relations computationally these days. It works by storing all known senses of every dictionary word, and each sense has links to other words based on how it's semantically related(synonym, antonym, hyper/hyponym, meronym, troponym, cause, is_a, morphological derivative, etc...)
There's not any model that can compete with it currently, and it's widely accessible and very easy to use. As this tool improves, so will the semantic web.
That is, on the ISPs' customer side business, there are different speeds you could connect to the internet, from dial-up to DSL, from Cable to the Tx connections. If a user wants to be streaming big media in a constant stream over their cable lines, they could subscribe to a more expensive, higher speed connection. And the ISPs need to keep upgrading their bandwidth to allow for these people who want access to streaming big media.
This "choking the internet" complaint seems to be a cop-out for the laziness of the ISPs toward getting off their butts and really competing to bring a smooth connection to its subscribers.
Well, to me, the obvious modern answer to BASIC is Python( http://www.python.org/ ). It's about as easy as BASIC, has an easy-to-understand help library, and runs best by command line interpreter. The IDE even comes with a Windows-based command line interpreter! In fact it looks a lot like BASIC, too, but also has more modern programming concepts fully built-in. I started in on BASIC in 3rd grade and taught people BASIC in middle school, before switching to C++ and Windows programming in high school(graduated in 2000). I now have a BS in Comp Sci and am a PhD student.
I actually like cut-scenes greatly if they're well-done, and I do look at games like this as sort of an interactive movie or book. You simply will not get the same type of experience if it's interactive all the time, and being interactive constantly should not always be the highest goal for a game to have.
And until games start having sophisticated linguistic and other communication involved, constant interactivity will always be second rate.
You are assuming a purely materialist ontology in relation to the makeup of humans. It is a philosophical assumption based on the fallacy that the only things that exist are those things which are provable by the scientific method. While this is a valid philosophical framework to argue for, it should not be stated as indisputable fact.
Actually, your attitude is a sort of religious fanaticism.
Mod parent +Insightful :-)
Well, that would be a purely orthographic convention, then. That is, a convention of the writing system. If it were just about spaces, then Japanese, another agglutinative language, would be mighty weird since spacing is generally only done between sentences, even though there is definitely more than one word in each sentence. Spacing of words is a construct that exists only in some writing systems of the world, and we see it primarily originating in writing systems that come from Arabic, I think. Yes, our writing system comes from Arabic.
The rules of agglutinative languages are psychologically and phonologically and morphologically more than just an orthographic convention. They are a part of the grammar. The agglutinated words in these languages are actually realized as one morphological word in the speaker's mind. It is a testable phenomenon.
Actually, you can also go to:
google.com/local
google.com/maps
So they do have a standard.
I guess they just don't have the server name set up yet, to do musicsearch.google.com, maybe.
Indeed, that's why when running human experiments in psychology or sociology, you generally aim to find those who are "naive" to the area you are studying, because they are less biased with previous training. We want to arrive at a "natural" human response
What market prediction is, is essentially a human sociological experiment. An investigator in this area will want to know what are the most basic choices that people make, and that means avoiding those who have expertise and training in marketing.
I also believe that even those with expert training in this area will tend to make the same findings that non-experts make to some extent, when they are not conscious of their training.
Well of course people can be taught bad medical practice and bad science, but from my observation those people tend to be mostly in disjunctive sets.
The people who would most fight for creationism to be taught in schools and such would more likely rely on traditional western medicine as the alternative medicine usually comes from Eastern/New Age medicinal philosophy and is therefore blasphemous.
The people who push and believe in alternative medicine incorrectly the most I think are mis-educated people who tend to follow the new age/eastern philosophies and are otherwise secular and accept evolution theory without question.
So I think you are making a very incorrect connection, and while there will be some overlap, these two phenomena are not related in origin, except for being unscientific(although they can be approached scientifically, and the parent should not keep such a malicious sweeping prejudice against alternative views either, but scientifically consider these possibilities/methodologies as possibly valid for each new situation).
Computational Linguistics is my field, so I can tell you that the problem with the current state of corpora is a lack of massive cross-language corpora over many languages.
The two sources used by Google are basically the only sources available for the kind of task we're talking about. Obviously the thing to do is work on creating more cross-language corpora, and I'm sure this is being done, but it takes much time to create a cross-language corpus on the scale that the UN documents or translations of the Bible have.
My theory is that this(that the past and future are already set constant) is indeed the case and that free will is still possible. The way it would work is that you make your choices independent of time. It is your consciousness by means of your body that travels in linear time, experiencing your choices.
But they are all your choices. So in my theory you have in fact already chosen your future choices, but not really because it's outside of time so there is no "already chosen".
It's more like, your choices are as much a part of your being as your left arm or your mind, soul, spirit, whatever. So at the same time that your choices are "set" in advance, you still freely make all your choices, since they are a part of you.
This roughly solves the paradox of a set time continuum and having free will. It precludes you to believe in your being existng outside of time and such.
I would point to Yuna in Final Fantasy X, but not X 2. I think she wore pretty decent clothes for a main female heroine.
Until I see this new process in the works, however, there is nothing that will make me believe it's better than finding another human who can *understand* what you are saying and the context to which you are implying. "Better" is an ambiguous term. For what these researchers made the program for, it is better than humans for one reason: speed. Sure they want the translations to be reliable, but more importantly is that a computer can do in a few days what would take a human a month, for this application at least. The NSA and the like want to have translations of huge swathes of text, and fast! The sooner they can understand things that are written, the faster they can react to threats. The time and money spent on human translators for this purpose is very slow and expensive in comparison. For your Spanish HW, the best is a native speaker giving you feedback, because the amount of work is small and the translations will be very accurate.
Another factor to consider is that these carts will be much more valuable themselves. The reason you can freely wheel around shopping carts, which are the store's property, through the store and even outside with no supervision is that carts are fairly useless to most people, so there's not much danger of theft. And if they are stolen, they're cheap enough to replace. But with a computer mounted on these carts, the carts are now something to be guarded. This means spending money on security to watch carts, security systems linked into the computer itself, complete with motion sensors around the parking lot perhaps. The article mentions nothing about security, so I can only assume there is none yet. I think these carts may end up being more of a liability than they're worth.
You may be able to understand Indian English once you get past pronunciation, but that doesn't mean there's no language issue. There are aspects to language in interaction which may still cause problems. I know that at least in Indian English, there is a tendency for Indians not to ask direct questions, but always beat around the bush. This is usually in conflict with how English speakers converse. Indians also generally do not make small talk, and it makes them very uncomfortable if they have to. These sorts of things may make it difficult to do business effectively with speakers of Indian English. It can essentially be a clash of linguistic culture and norms which make doing business with them less efficient than working with Americans.
Alternative tinfoil hat brainstorm:
The US Government decides to take matters into their own hands and creates an e-mail filtering - possibly firewall/anti-virus as well - service of their own. It offers tax incentives to businesses who subscribe to it, with the ultimate goal of centering internet data management to a single hub. Make sure nearly everyone in the country has this service, so spam is theoretically erradicated.
This also gives the government a convenient spy tool. That will be highly downplayed, and it could even be promoted as part of the war on terrorism!
Just a thought...
How to make Windows XP go BSOD on you in 3 easy steps: 1) Download Cygwin, with wget installed 2) Download foobar2000 media player 3) Play music on foobar2000 and at the same time use wget to download a website with a fairly deep directory structure. And there you have it! In about 5 minutes you should have a pretty BSOD on WinXP! Don't know why it happens, but it's pretty consistent.
It seems like all the suggestions given in your email could be made into options in the Google Groups interface. I think some people might prefer the way Google handles these features, so I wouldn't consider them bugs per se, but simply that they need to add functionality to change a lot of things in the display method, these being some of them.
Google has to be very careful in their pre-IPO service expansion, as they are walking a fine line between whetting potential investors' apetites and keeping to their angelic perception by the public.