equivalent to "the". So if a computer sees "watashi wa hon wo katta" it has to figure out whether it means "I bought a book" or "I bought the book" based on whether the particular book that was bought had already been established to the listener, or whether there was only one book in the world. Actually, native Japanese would usually drop the "watashi wa" (ie, I) and therefore the computer would have to guess the subject from context, too.
I understood it right away, but I brought it up because of the mental gymnastics you have to through to turn it into an English thought (which we talked about after I responded properly enough in Japanese).
If you want to quibble, I'd say I was closer to 1/3 of the way to fluency.
I I a certain thing which one time my Spanish friend of IM conversation is deceived being, have known that that considerably is accurate. I Spanish called to IM to Spanish which is learned by I in those due to fair copy/pasted in hypnosis and the basis entirely. As for conversation the Spanish of 15 parts way I before I said to those, continued the fact that the web sight is used sufficiently because. They had upset their pants.
The Japanese version was also utterly incomprehensible. I can't post it here because of character issues.
About the only part the thing seems to have gotten close enough to understand deals with underpants.
You will always have the problem of words with more than one meaning. Omoshiroi is a perfect example - how is the computer going to know whether to choose "funny" or "interesting" without knowing the context?
I have helped my Japanese colleagues write a number papers in English. The number one mistake is always a/an/the. Why? Because Japanese does not even have this concept, making it difficult for them to understand. So what happens when a machine tries to translate Japanese into English? It must literally insert a/an/the in locations where there is no word in Japanese. How does it know which one? Context. This context can be extremely subtle, but make big differences in meaning. I often have to ask my Japanese colleagues about their research in order to decide whether a/an or the (or neither) is correct, because using any of these words provides information that they have no already included.
As I told her, you don't have to tell them to me for me to figure them out
Perfectly sensible to exactly one person, at one moment in time - and complete nonsense at any other. I laughed when I wrote because I realized how aburd this sentence would appear to one of my poor Japanese friends. Of course, they throw the reverse mind twisters at me.
I agree, some kinds of texts are simpler than others. Texts that are factual, and distanct from personal human interactions, are probably easier to translate because context matters much less. Either way, I have yet to see a translator that can come close to turning even the most simple Japanese into comprehensible English and vice versa.
Yes, pattern recognition is a major part of the process. However, there are other fundamental parts that are also extremely important, and lacking them you get nonsense. In particular, context matters. "aitakatta" in the middle of a business letter probably does mean "wanted to meet". By itself, said by one member of a couple to the other over drinks at a bar, it does not.
In order for a program to translating to translate accurately, it needs to know who is speaking/writing, who is the audience, what their relationship is, and their location. Some of this may be given to the computer explicitly, or easily found in the text/speech (for a human at least) but some of it may not. This is not going to be an easy problem to solve.
Writing is never free from its context. I know before I even start whether I am reading a fiction novel, a satire, a scientific journal, an email from my boss, or a text message from my date this Saturday. The meaning of the words can change a lot in those cases.
Even Google translator, which was trained on multi-lingual UN reports, could not produce comprehensible English from simple Japanese business emails.
I played around with the Google translator for a while. I work in Japan and am half-way fluent. Google couldn't even turn my most basic Japanese emails into comprehensible English. Same is true for the other translation programs I have seen.
I will believe this new program when I see it.
Translation, especially from extremely different languages, is absurdly difficult. For example, I was out with a Japanese woman the other night, and she said "aitakatta". Literally translated, this means "wanted to meet". Translated into native English, it means "I really wanted to see you tonight". It is going to take one hell of a computer program to figure that out from statistical BS. I barely could with my enormous meat-computer and a whole lot of knowledge of the language.
The most common modern IQ test does not have any words at all! They are only pictures.
Either way, the scores correlate strong with tests that do use words such an SAT, which you seem to be confusing with an IQ test.
Actually, testing peoples' IQ is amazing simple. Here is a test which yields quite accurate results.
Read someone a four digit number. Have them repeat it. Then a five digit, then a six digit, etc. Eventually, they will fail. Repeat this a couple time and get an average value for failure.
Now run the same test, but have them repeat the numbers backwards. This is much more difficult. Find the average value for failure.
Just knowing these two numbers, you can predict IQ very accurately. Amazing, huh?
This clearly has little to do with studying, or playing with golf clubs.
You said the article raises a particular question if IQ does not predict things. Yet IQ does predict things quite well. Therefore, you have presented no evidence that this question has been raised.
IQ has a stronger correlation with income, graduation rates, teenage birth rates, welfare, crime, drug abuse and just about any other major life factor than does socio-economics or any other single predictive measure.
Give me 100 six year olds with an IQ of 80 and another 100 with an IQ of 120, and I can tell you a whole lot about where those kids will be in 30 years. The answers will be very different for the two groups.
IQ has strong correlations with income, college and high school graduation rates, teen birth rates, crime, drug abuse, welfare, and just about any other major factor one can come up with. It generally has a larger effect that socio-economics or any other input variable.
It is absolutely false to say that is doesn't predict anything in the real world - on the contrary, it is the best predictor that we have.
Good IQ tests require almost no prior knowledge whatsoever (a child's grasp of their native spoken language will do, in order to impart instructions). In any case, these tests correlate very highly with tests that do require more prior knowledge (ie, an SAT), so you basically get the same answer either way.
That means that any study that finds equality between men and women is automatically suspect, as clearly that supports the ideology of most researchers.
I am sure this paper has been and will continue to be hyper-evaluated, often by people with no ability to actually judge it.
This isn't new information, however. That basic conclusions are as old as the hills.
Why do you resort to ad hominem attacks ("elitist fool"), and use as support for your argument the particular section of The Mismeasure of Man that is also ad hominem in that Gould's basic point was that early IQ testing was performed by bigots, and therefore their data is invalid? In any case, the argument "you are making the same argument that a bigot once made" hardly refutes the argument - it is ad hominem once removed!
Actually, people with high IQ's do not do well on just "certain" tests, but on just about any test that tests anything remotely akin to what a normal person means by the term "intelligence". The correlations between a wide variety of tests are extremely high, typically.9 and up. Of course, you can get slightly different answers by weighting different subtests in different ways - for example, who says "intelligence" as per the SAT is 50% verbal and 50% mathematics? However, playing with these numbers only changes the results a little. So Gould is right in the sense that IQ isn't perfectly well-defined or accurate. However, it doesn't imply that it has no meaning, either. Saying your IQ is 130+-5 is little different from saying it is 130.
Claiming that there is no such thing as intelligence, or that it cannot be measured well enough to provide useful information, is downright silly.
a terrible problem here. I haven't heard of people leaving the country, but I have heard of many doctors moving from state to state, leaving states which leave them unprotected against the worst lawsuits.
Of course, the fact that your father CAN retire at 59 says something about the salaries of doctors.
As an American I cannot speak from experience, but I do know that moving in the opposite direction (I am doing research in Japan) was a major hassle as well.
I do know that the State dept is addressing this issue and it has gotten better in the last year.
which is putting a huge downward pressure on wages for scientists and engineers. When I look at the big companies in my field (chemistry), virtually none are expanding their R&D in the US. At best, I am competing for jobs opened by retirements. On the other hand, if I wanted to work in China, there would be no problem at all. All the big companies are hiring and expanding.
This is not a problem for lawyers or doctors.
I agree that the market will work to even out the wages, but our R&D system is going to take a huge hit before that works its way through.
Can you provide me with some information on this matter? I can find nothing on google concerning the US loosing doctors. On the contrary, the information points to the opposite - we are importing them like mad, even from other first-world countries like the UK and in particular Canada. Anecdotally, I have never heard of a doctor leaving the US, except for short-term humanitarian-type work.
Most of their big words, as well as the ones that are are simply represented phonetically, once had a Chinese character (kanji) associated with them. Modern words (usually taken from English) are represented with phonetic characters.
Chinese and Japanese can usually get the idea of each other's writing because most kanji have the same meaning(s) in both languages, and despite small changes, the actual form of the kanji are close enough to guess. Most words are formed as a combination of two kanji. For example "gin" (money) plus "kou" (go) = bank. It isn't always this simple but this is the basic process.
The biggest difference I think this makes in the language is that synonyms tend to be similar, because they will contain the same kanji in different permutations and order. In English, synonyms are usually completely distinct from one another. I don' really see a connection to mathematics.
The article got one thing right - unless you have a limitless passion for science, there is no reason for an American student to become a scientist.
If you become a PhD scientist, you will not get through your now essentially-mandatory post-docs until after you are thirty years old. Depending on your field, you can then expect to start at a salary of $60-80k.
On the other hand, a typical lawyer is out of school at age 25 and already makes a higher salary than the PhD will. Yes, they have a larger debt but it is only about a year's salary. Also, the lawyer does not have to worry much about someone from China or India replacing him at a third the price.
Economically, it does not make sense for a bright young American to choose science. We should not be surprised when few do.
It doesn't explain why Asians raised in the US, using English, beat us the same way on math tests.
I speak Japanese, and really don't think it is that different than English on such a basic level as you imply.
Slashdot Mirror
I still can't figure that one out. The difference can be extraordinarly subtle.
equivalent to "the". So if a computer sees "watashi wa hon wo katta" it has to figure out whether it means "I bought a book" or "I bought the book" based on whether the particular book that was bought had already been established to the listener, or whether there was only one book in the world. Actually, native Japanese would usually drop the "watashi wa" (ie, I) and therefore the computer would have to guess the subject from context, too.
I understood it right away, but I brought it up because of the mental gymnastics you have to through to turn it into an English thought (which we talked about after I responded properly enough in Japanese).
If you want to quibble, I'd say I was closer to 1/3 of the way to fluency.
English to Japanese and back:
I I a certain thing which one time my Spanish friend of IM conversation is deceived being, have known that that considerably is accurate. I Spanish called to IM to Spanish which is learned by I in those due to fair copy/pasted in hypnosis and the basis entirely. As for conversation the Spanish of 15 parts way I before I said to those, continued the fact that the web sight is used sufficiently because. They had upset their pants.
The Japanese version was also utterly incomprehensible. I can't post it here because of character issues.
About the only part the thing seems to have gotten close enough to understand deals with underpants.
You will always have the problem of words with more than one meaning. Omoshiroi is a perfect example - how is the computer going to know whether to choose "funny" or "interesting" without knowing the context?
I have helped my Japanese colleagues write a number papers in English. The number one mistake is always a/an/the. Why? Because Japanese does not even have this concept, making it difficult for them to understand. So what happens when a machine tries to translate Japanese into English? It must literally insert a/an/the in locations where there is no word in Japanese. How does it know which one? Context. This context can be extremely subtle, but make big differences in meaning. I often have to ask my Japanese colleagues about their research in order to decide whether a/an or the (or neither) is correct, because using any of these words provides information that they have no already included.
God I love Japan! Though these triple-date Sundays are starting to tire me out.
As I told her, you don't have to tell them to me for me to figure them out
Perfectly sensible to exactly one person, at one moment in time - and complete nonsense at any other. I laughed when I wrote because I realized how aburd this sentence would appear to one of my poor Japanese friends. Of course, they throw the reverse mind twisters at me.
I agree, some kinds of texts are simpler than others. Texts that are factual, and distanct from personal human interactions, are probably easier to translate because context matters much less. Either way, I have yet to see a translator that can come close to turning even the most simple Japanese into comprehensible English and vice versa.
Yes, pattern recognition is a major part of the process. However, there are other fundamental parts that are also extremely important, and lacking them you get nonsense. In particular, context matters. "aitakatta" in the middle of a business letter probably does mean "wanted to meet". By itself, said by one member of a couple to the other over drinks at a bar, it does not.
In order for a program to translating to translate accurately, it needs to know who is speaking/writing, who is the audience, what their relationship is, and their location. Some of this may be given to the computer explicitly, or easily found in the text/speech (for a human at least) but some of it may not. This is not going to be an easy problem to solve.
Writing is never free from its context. I know before I even start whether I am reading a fiction novel, a satire, a scientific journal, an email from my boss, or a text message from my date this Saturday. The meaning of the words can change a lot in those cases.
Even Google translator, which was trained on multi-lingual UN reports, could not produce comprehensible English from simple Japanese business emails.
As for my chinko, that's a long story.
I played around with the Google translator for a while. I work in Japan and am half-way fluent. Google couldn't even turn my most basic Japanese emails into comprehensible English. Same is true for the other translation programs I have seen.
I will believe this new program when I see it.
Translation, especially from extremely different languages, is absurdly difficult. For example, I was out with a Japanese woman the other night, and she said "aitakatta". Literally translated, this means "wanted to meet". Translated into native English, it means "I really wanted to see you tonight". It is going to take one hell of a computer program to figure that out from statistical BS. I barely could with my enormous meat-computer and a whole lot of knowledge of the language.
The most common modern IQ test does not have any words at all! They are only pictures.
Either way, the scores correlate strong with tests that do use words such an SAT, which you seem to be confusing with an IQ test.
Actually, testing peoples' IQ is amazing simple. Here is a test which yields quite accurate results.
Read someone a four digit number. Have them repeat it. Then a five digit, then a six digit, etc. Eventually, they will fail. Repeat this a couple time and get an average value for failure.
Now run the same test, but have them repeat the numbers backwards. This is much more difficult. Find the average value for failure.
Just knowing these two numbers, you can predict IQ very accurately. Amazing, huh?
This clearly has little to do with studying, or playing with golf clubs.
That is sure an indication of high IQ!
You said the article raises a particular question if IQ does not predict things. Yet IQ does predict things quite well. Therefore, you have presented no evidence that this question has been raised.
IQ has a stronger correlation with income, graduation rates, teenage birth rates, welfare, crime, drug abuse and just about any other major life factor than does socio-economics or any other single predictive measure.
Give me 100 six year olds with an IQ of 80 and another 100 with an IQ of 120, and I can tell you a whole lot about where those kids will be in 30 years. The answers will be very different for the two groups.
IQ has strong correlations with income, college and high school graduation rates, teen birth rates, crime, drug abuse, welfare, and just about any other major factor one can come up with. It generally has a larger effect that socio-economics or any other input variable.
It is absolutely false to say that is doesn't predict anything in the real world - on the contrary, it is the best predictor that we have.
Good IQ tests require almost no prior knowledge whatsoever (a child's grasp of their native spoken language will do, in order to impart instructions). In any case, these tests correlate very highly with tests that do require more prior knowledge (ie, an SAT), so you basically get the same answer either way.
You argue about someone else's small data sets and then argue from anecdote?
That means that any study that finds equality between men and women is automatically suspect, as clearly that supports the ideology of most researchers.
I am sure this paper has been and will continue to be hyper-evaluated, often by people with no ability to actually judge it.
This isn't new information, however. That basic conclusions are as old as the hills.
usually spout this nonsense the moment they are confronted with a statistic they don't like.
Do you have any evidence whatsoever that there is a problem with these statistics?
And please get the quote right next time...
There are lies, damned lies and statistics.
Mark Twain
Why do you resort to ad hominem attacks ("elitist fool"), and use as support for your argument the particular section of The Mismeasure of Man that is also ad hominem in that Gould's basic point was that early IQ testing was performed by bigots, and therefore their data is invalid? In any case, the argument "you are making the same argument that a bigot once made" hardly refutes the argument - it is ad hominem once removed!
.9 and up. Of course, you can get slightly different answers by weighting different subtests in different ways - for example, who says "intelligence" as per the SAT is 50% verbal and 50% mathematics? However, playing with these numbers only changes the results a little. So Gould is right in the sense that IQ isn't perfectly well-defined or accurate. However, it doesn't imply that it has no meaning, either. Saying your IQ is 130+-5 is little different from saying it is 130.
Actually, people with high IQ's do not do well on just "certain" tests, but on just about any test that tests anything remotely akin to what a normal person means by the term "intelligence". The correlations between a wide variety of tests are extremely high, typically
Claiming that there is no such thing as intelligence, or that it cannot be measured well enough to provide useful information, is downright silly.
a terrible problem here. I haven't heard of people leaving the country, but I have heard of many doctors moving from state to state, leaving states which leave them unprotected against the worst lawsuits. Of course, the fact that your father CAN retire at 59 says something about the salaries of doctors.
As an American I cannot speak from experience, but I do know that moving in the opposite direction (I am doing research in Japan) was a major hassle as well. I do know that the State dept is addressing this issue and it has gotten better in the last year.
which is putting a huge downward pressure on wages for scientists and engineers. When I look at the big companies in my field (chemistry), virtually none are expanding their R&D in the US. At best, I am competing for jobs opened by retirements. On the other hand, if I wanted to work in China, there would be no problem at all. All the big companies are hiring and expanding.
This is not a problem for lawyers or doctors.
I agree that the market will work to even out the wages, but our R&D system is going to take a huge hit before that works its way through.
Can you provide me with some information on this matter? I can find nothing on google concerning the US loosing doctors. On the contrary, the information points to the opposite - we are importing them like mad, even from other first-world countries like the UK and in particular Canada. Anecdotally, I have never heard of a doctor leaving the US, except for short-term humanitarian-type work.
Most of their big words, as well as the ones that are are simply represented phonetically, once had a Chinese character (kanji) associated with them. Modern words (usually taken from English) are represented with phonetic characters.
Chinese and Japanese can usually get the idea of each other's writing because most kanji have the same meaning(s) in both languages, and despite small changes, the actual form of the kanji are close enough to guess. Most words are formed as a combination of two kanji. For example "gin" (money) plus "kou" (go) = bank. It isn't always this simple but this is the basic process.
The biggest difference I think this makes in the language is that synonyms tend to be similar, because they will contain the same kanji in different permutations and order. In English, synonyms are usually completely distinct from one another. I don' really see a connection to mathematics.
The article got one thing right - unless you have a limitless passion for science, there is no reason for an American student to become a scientist.
If you become a PhD scientist, you will not get through your now essentially-mandatory post-docs until after you are thirty years old. Depending on your field, you can then expect to start at a salary of $60-80k.
On the other hand, a typical lawyer is out of school at age 25 and already makes a higher salary than the PhD will. Yes, they have a larger debt but it is only about a year's salary. Also, the lawyer does not have to worry much about someone from China or India replacing him at a third the price.
Economically, it does not make sense for a bright young American to choose science. We should not be surprised when few do.
It doesn't explain why Asians raised in the US, using English, beat us the same way on math tests. I speak Japanese, and really don't think it is that different than English on such a basic level as you imply.