Although it was used as a simple analogy in your message, it may be worth pointing out that, ironically, many people in modern times do actually draw a sense of identity from eating strawberries to the point of creating organized movements (for example, the California Strawberry Festival). It just so happens that "love of strawberries" is universially culturally accepted. So accepted, in fact, that it might seem perfectly normal to everyone to hold a vast, multi-day ritual each year to worship (and eat) them.
To take your analogy a bit further, imagine that eating strawberries, for whatever reason, was (or perhaps slowly became) a culturally persecuted behavior and people developed strong, polarized opinions about it. Under such conditions, if strawberry lovers really did feel strongly about their right to enjoy strawberries, I'm pretty sure they would develop a cultural identity around it and "become" strawberry lovers ("Fragrariaphiles").
Under such conditions an apparently simple question like "do you like strawberries?" could not be easily answered without folding yourself into a charged socio-political cultural landscape.
What these folks are doing is cute, but simply boils down to seeking
correlations between variables. I'm sure I don't need to remind slashdot
readers that correlation and causality are not the same thing.
Correlations can give you clues, but are not the real meat of the problem.
If variables are correlated, the mechanics of that correlation might
be due to some underlying common cause. Without understanding the
underlying cause (if it exists), you are simply groping in the dark, hoping the
interplay between variables doesn't change out from under you. Real
predictive power and understanding comes from studying those
underlying causes, which are generally robust.
For example, TFA's statement that "if you only have one or two producers
on your film, you're statistically more likely to have a stinker" is
akin to Flying Spaghetti Monsterism saying (albeit satirically) that
"statistically speaking, the fewer pirates you have the more natural
disasters you will have." Both are true statements based on raw data, but
both tell you very little about the mechanics of why such correlations
exist. By only studying correlations, you are absolving yourself of
really understanding the system and making meaningful predictions.
I'm sure the folks doing the analysis know all this. But I worry that
people who don't understand such an analysis will make idiotic policy
decisions based on mistaking correlation and causality. For example,
"we must have two producers to maximize our likelihood of winning the
Sundance" or "let's start a pirate university to create more pirates
to help reduce natural disasters!"
A Tale in the Desert, a game that has NO combat. You "win" over other players by performing artworks, building pyramids, getting people to vote for you or performing cermonies and rituals, like for instance
"Have 20 charactars stand still and quietly observe the sunrise. If one speaks or moves away the ritual is destroyed."
or "Bury a large bag of money in the desert. Tell 10 other players where it is. If the bag remains for a week undisturbed you have passed the test of friendship. The other players get nothing for participating in the test. Unless they cheat, in which case they get the money."
Thanks for the suggestion, but I generally prefer games that are as far from my real life as possible...
Seriously. Who gives half a crap what teenagers think. Teenagers are powerless until they mature, and part of maturing is losing that teenage cluelessnes.
I basically understand your point in principle, but keep in mind a huge fraction of the entertainment market (TV, movies, music, games, clothes, etc.) is driven by "what teenagers think." Indeed, almost every part of American popular culture since the 1950's has be driven by their collective opinion. Although they may be somewhat clueless on some scale, they are far from powerless. What they think can set the tone for an entire generation. If, collectively, they decided that "science is cool and I want to be a part of that", the culture of science in this country would be greatly (positively) affected. Moreover, by directly marketing and canvassing teen culture on science and technology, you are seeding the future for econonmic, intellectual, and technological booms. One could argue that this exact teen-oriented transformation happened with science back in the 50's and early 60's (we lost it someplace) and with computers in the 80's and early 90's.
Public universities use taxpayer money. In a perfect world, taxpayer money would not be used to advance one ideology over another. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to criticize that behaviour when it happens.
You can't tax away someone's money and spend it on something they don't want, and then use the "take it or leave it, you have a choice" argument.
The US government on all scales is run by taxpayer money. Does that mean you expect it to be ideologically sterile too? I agree with you that ONE ideology would be bad and that critique and debate should be welcome, but I disagree with your implied expectation that just because something is funded by public taxes it should have no ideology. All taxes are used for something that is rooted in some ideology. Even single-minded ones. This includes everything from clean water, roads, and public safety ("what have the Romans ever done for us!?") to more dividing issues like the war in Iraq and various inefficient social welfare programs. They are all driven by someone's ideology of "how the world should be". To divorce yourself from this reality strikes me as, ironically, idealistic.
I am not an iTunes subscriber, but have been using amazon.com for years
and they use a similar ad-tuning method.
At the risk of sounding trollish, as long as the information is not *abused*
I'm not sure why this behavior by iTunes is such a big deal.
By entering an agreement with iTunes, one presumably knows ad-tuning
is a potential use of the information. If you don't like it, switch
to a different service that doesn't use it. Also, generating ads is
not abuse, it is an intrinsic property of the free market. And, although
I generally dislike ads, if I'm going to get an ad at all
(which is a given outside the open source community),
I much prefer targeted ads than random ones.
If you want privacy in your music buying habits, pay cash in disguise at
a music store. Don't subscribe to a online music service with a vast,
not-so-secret database.
Abuse of the information might include things like (but is not limited to):
1) Generating excessive unsolicited spam (I grant that the line between
"excessive unsolicited spam" and "tolerable targeted ads" might be easy
to spot in the extreme, but more subtle along the continuum).
2) Using the information for political or personal gain or to assist the
government (or equivalent entity) in incarceration, torture, or human
rights violations using said information.
3) Using the information for illegal activity not covered by 2. Some might argue that
the privacy issue might fall into this category. But I don't believe you
have an expectation of privacy concerning your buying habits *with the
company you are buying from*. They are *obligated* to know your buying
habits to satisfy their contract with you to deliver the product.
From the company's point of view, to not use this information to
"best serve the customer" would be just nuts and inefficient.
That vulnerability was serious enough to cause Microsoft to take the unusual step of releasing an early patch for the problem, ahead of its monthly security software update.
But still released many days after independent programmers (e.g. Ilfak Guilfanov) managed to build a fix. At work (a national lab), we were explicitly instructed not to wait for the early windows patch.
I've read some articles (e.g. NYTimes_1)
that imply this is event (and events like it
e.g. Pons and Fleischman etc.) are philosophical tragedies for science,
watering down the credibility of worldwide science in general.
Psychologically and emotionally, this may indeed be the result (temporarily).
But shouldn't this be viewed the other way around? That the Scientific
System is, in fact, very robust, working exactly as it should, able to
detect and clearly identify frauds of this sort?
In the article I linked to above, a scientist says:
"'We depend entirely on the truthfulness of the scientific community,' Dr. Zoloth said.
'We must believe that what they are showing us and what they say has been demonstrated is
worthy of our concern and attention. The South Korean story, Dr. Zoloth added, raises
questions about whether the science is good. 'Good as in true and real and morally worthy
of our funding," she explained.'"
But isn't that totally incorrect and naive view for a funding agency? Nowhere in Science
does anyone "depend on the truthfulness of the scientific community."
Science depends on testability, falsifiability (if you're a Popper-ite), repeatability,
peer review, etc. These sorts of events remind you that the system is working.
My argument could be twisted around: I'm *not* paradoxically saying
we should encourage scientific fraud to somehow lend scientific credibility.
But given that we have an intrinsically error-prone system, error
detection and correction (a strength of the modern scientific process)
should be a regarded as a *good* thing.
Sadly, money was wasted on this fraudulent work. But there is no recipe
*a priori* to know 100% of the time if research hypotheses are fraudulent
without examining the results in a peer-reviewed and reproducible way.
Very good observation. Seems like a 5 day work week + weekend dip structure. Looking at London Bombing attacks, Jan 1 2004 was a Saturday, which is a dip. At the end of 13 weeks is a big dip, which was Easter Sunday. Probably not a big surprise that most people do most of their searching at work. But if you look at the Movies "Star Wars Good vs. Evil" search, the data are a lot noisier. That lock step periodicity seen in the London article now isn't so uniform. Perhaps Star Wars fans' search habits are not as affected by a strict work week structure. Again, not a big surprise...
There may also be other more nuanced periodicities, which would (in prinicple) show up in a FFT.
Some of those graphs seem to have interesting periodic structure to them. Some of that is probably an artifact of how they binned their histograms for display purposes. Nevertheless, I'd still love to see a Fourier power spectrum. I'm sure you'd see a strong one-day cycle along with various other expected and unexpected periodicities. Seems like there is a lot to learn from such data. Harry Seldon would be proud...
The virus will reply 'lol no this is not a virus.' The virus hides users from seeing the messages sent out to members of their buddy list. Viruses are evolving; now they will even talk to you.
'Virus' is too kind. I guess we can call them pre-teens now.
What's in an online name anyway? I have my favorites too, but why do I draw any kind of sense of identity from them at all? Why have I grown so comfortable hiding behind pseudo-anonymnity? What would prompt CmdrTaco to feel so Violated he posts an (entertaining and interesting) epic editorial about it? And what nerdy discussion about online name fixations would be complete without some kind of reference to Detwiler's Theory of Nymity, a ranty but surprisingly interesting FAQ from Usenet's Golden Age (see Cypherpunk):
L. Detweiler (you are all TENTACLES of the CYPHERpunk anarchoSYNDICALIST pseudospoofing CONSPIRACY; everyone who contacts me via post or email is a tentacle of a single Medusa): All information relevant has been deleted (probably by the cypherpunk pseudospoofers); ask around - old-timers can tell you about him, through "safe" avenues (like email). Warning: attempting to disillusion him of his theories usually results in threatening mail and getting incorporated into said theories. Handle With Extreme Care. Appeared occasionally on the news.* hierarchy (for instance, news.admin.policy), crossposted to hell and back. Author of the Internet Anonymity FAQ and the InterNet Writer Resource Guide, pre-legendary status... first name apparently Lawrence or Larry. Contrib. post: >I think this article was some sort of satire but I fell asleep on >the spacebar and, ya know, I just don't get it. Anyone care to boil it >down to a sentence or two? Yes. L. Detweiler, the guy who posts as an12070, and who also posts (now less frequently) under his own account "ld231782@longs.lance.colostate.edu", is a paranoid psychotic (or someone doing a good parody of one) who believes there is a nationwide conspiracy out to get him, said conspiracy consisting of almost every prominent cryptographer on the net. He periodically rants against this conspiracy. He makes lots of extremely bizarre claims, such as stating that every person posting articles saying he's nuts is in fact a pseudonym of the great conpiratorial group. He's pretty much ignorable, although he has sent death threats to a large number of people that some have taken seriously. -- ...This *may* all be a "front"; he comes across as relatively sane in email (just don't mention Nick Szabo or Tim C. May...). There's really no way to tell, which may actually be the point of all this... Was peculiarly insistent on wanting to become the poster of *this* FAQ as well (to the point of my having to tell the news.answers team "Don't approve this unless I send it to you"...). Posted as ld231782@<various>.lance.colostate.edu (L. Detweiler) and an12070@anon.penet.fi (various constantly-changing identities) - this last address has been disabled by the anon server's sysadmin, and was been proven to be him on several different occasions, although he was hiding it fiercely for a time... his Colorado address has gone also (2/94), according to the sysadmin; this impending loss apparently prompted the Blacknet notices. He's not been seen since from that address - but beware: anyone who "talk"s you may actually be either Detweiler or a Tentacle incognito... MUAaahahaaa!!! The person posting to (among other places) news.admin.* as tmp@netcom.com is, if not this entity, making a good run at attempting to imitate Detweiler (posting to all the same old places, antagonizing Tim May, having S. Boxx and Blacknet show up in tmp@'s constantly-changing.sigs, assuming a dizzying variety of identities...) - but with somewhat better material this time around... and given Detweiler's bee-in-the-bonnet, impersonating him succe
I read once (can't find source) that several decades ago most middle school girls could tell you what an aileron was. Today I'd be surprised if more than a few percent of high school graduates have a clue.
I basically agree with the spirit and main thrust of your post. I don't mean to rail on your post too much, because I did enjoy it overall. However, there are a couple issues.
First, let's be careful. Your aileron example is exactly the fact-oriented, non-critical thinking measure of intellect and science skill you just railed on in your previous sentences! It goes to show that even a well-intended individual as yourself may, in a real classroom setting, make exactly the same mistakes as the very system you are being critical of.
The critical thinking version would not ask questions like "do you know the NAME of obscure airplane part X". It would ask students to THINK: "how do airplanes fly? Once in the air, does anyone know how an airplane is able to bank or roll?" Then you have yourself a nice critical thinking environment. You discuss physical principles and build an understanding of the physics. Who really cares exactly what some engineering dodad is called? Once you have the understanding, then give it a name.
Also, I suggest if you are going to make a claim about some some study you read, you probably should back it up with a reference. Anecdotal propagation of information is, in my opinion, part of the problem with the system.
I'm sure I don't have to remind most Slashdotter's that there is a big difference between visually encoding or organizing all of a
particle's properties in a single image (a superperiodic-like table) and what that particle "looks like" physically or geometrically (through some filter of choice). Anderson trys to explain that
he is doing the former by calling his method a "visual language" or "representation." The effort to visualize these
things geometrically is going to be a much, much bigger task than is shown at that web site.
Moreover, as an encoder of particle properties, he has forgotten to include
a bunch of those properties in his representations. There are also some funny misleading conventions too.
For example, his representation does not even begin to convey
how much more massive the top quark is than the up quark. So much for building intution.
Also, intrinsic spin is a subtle beast and he seems to sweep the details
under the carpet. For example,
a spin 1/2 object (like a quark) must be be rotated 720 degrees before it returns to its original state.
Making a little curley fry to represent a spin 1/2 object seems a lazy, misleading, and simply wrong.
In my opinion, while the art is an attractive visual treat (and certainly a little physics PR is not bad), it seems a long
way from being a complete, useful, or pedagogical representation of these complex objects.
Personally, I'd welcome a larger Google Presence in my area - it would raise the local IQ average by a couple of points, and make the area that much more attractive to other tech ventures...
I understand what you are saying in theory. However, although you qualify your statement with "in my area", I'm guessing you aren't familiar with the geography of the area that is being discussed. By making a move to Moffett, Google is literally moving down the street. They are already located in Santa Clara (read: Silicon) Valley and probably wouldn't consider being anywhere else anyway. This area of the country, historically and presently, is no stranger to "other tech ventures" and the presence of Google probably doesn't raise the average IQ of the city/county at all. While Google certainly is a bunch of very smart folks, this techie-smartness is average for this location of the country/state. Remember, this is a place used to dealing with the likes of Apple, Yahoo, eBay, Motorola, National Semiconductor, nVida, Intel, HP, NASA, Lockheed, FMC, not to mention Stanford, Berkeley, etc. etc. etc. (all of these places are within a stone's throw of, or in the case of NASA, right on, Moffett field).
Alarmist science journalism and misinformation
on
Bad Science in the Press
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Here is an except from an article entitled 'Doomsday Fears at RHIC' published in the Skeptical Inquirer in 1999 that addresses some of these issues of science reporting (more from the alarmist misinformation than pure ignorance or apathy side). The main article was originally discussing the various doomsday scenarios that were bandied about when the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider was about to be turned on.
On one level, the answer is obvious: scientists, members of the media, and the public, using open lines of communication, need to work together to combat ignorance. However, the tension between the three sectors is clear. One can't help but wonder if the public and the media perceive scientists to be so righteous and arrogant that, out of spite, they simply want them to be wrong. And let's face it, some scientists clearly enjoy the wall of mystique and complexity surrounding their fields of expertise.
Personality conflicts aside, if a member of the public reads an article from a major news source that quotes experts who claim doomsday is nigh, this should be a cause for rational alarm. Public safety is clearly important. However, individuals should act responsibly on such concerns. People have a right to demand accurate media reporting, but they also have a right to demand clear and unpretentious explanations directly from experts--especially when safety is a concern. Physicist Daniel Cebra, director of the Nuclear Group at the University of California at Davis, and active member in the RHIC project at BNL, personally phoned a number of openly worried members of his small community to calm fears after seeing their letters in the local paper. These individuals demanded a response from an expert and got it. This kind of outreach can only improve the relationship between the public and the scientific community.
However, if a scientist generates a media event by using phrases that are flippant, "brutally frank," or unintentionally alarmist, they probably need to rephrase themselves to match the language of their listeners. Mismatches between colloquial and technical language are at the source of much turmoil between science and the media. For example, scientists often speak differently from nonscientists when it comes to assessing degrees of probability. When expressing a "scientific opinion," without the direct benefit of experiment, most scientists are open to possibilities and enjoy using their imaginations as much as anyone else. A priori, truly unquestionably impossible things are indeed rare. If one discovers something that is really absolutely impossible, that's important and you remember it. Everything else can be categorized in varying degrees of possibility ranging over many orders of magnitude between probability equals zero and one. Considerable room for smallness exists between those two numbers. There is an art to assessing such probabilities responsibly and appreciating "effective impossibility" when you see it. But there is also an art, which many scientists seem to lack, to expressing impossibility to nonscientists; scientists feel guilty saying something is unquestioningly impossible. Consequently, ask a scientist if something is "possible" you may be asking for trouble. Be prepared to have all of your fears and fantasies confirmed with a heavily qualified "yes, but.[ldots]"
In turn, scientists should expect the public and the media to be able to apply basic critical thinking skills in order to process important information. Complex and heavily qualified answers from scientists are usually nor the forte of the public nor the media. Shades of possibility are generally ignored. Depending on the audience, events tend to be divided sharply between two choices: "possible" and impossible. In our cynical culture, raised on Murphy's Law, many interpret the word "possible" to mean "if the outcome is bad, it will happen; if the outcome is good, it won't." Many responsible atte
Heartbreaking images. I find it sickening and ironic. We live in a country where both the accumulated legacy and real-time leadership incompetence (at the city, state, and federal levels) are so high that the result of such anti-leadership is indistinguishable from a major terrorist attack. Granted, a class 5 Hurricane is a class 5 Hurricane. But aren't we living in a time ("war on terror") where we are supposed to maximally prepared for such events -- and, in principle, worse (nukes, bio, etc.)?!
Who needs terrorist when we have leaders like ours? No wonder we haven't had any terrorist activity in the US for a while. Their job is being done for them...
Excellent point. The tendency for certain people to fixate on grammar rules was instinctive for them. A phrase like:
The willow tree are Here is the birds
was interpreted as "artistic" to some but "just plain wrong" to others ("no HUMAN would write poetry like that"). For this poetry sample, more often than not, the latter folks were correct.
The version of Cybernetic Poet I used did not follow standard English grammar rules religiously and was perhaps allowed to be too sloppy. I must admit, to my ear (even after knowing the answers), this did actually make for some interesting sounding poems (even if they made no sense). However, poor grammar in this poetry sample was the biggest single signal a particular poem was computer generated (like I said, even if it "sounded artistic"). Also note that not all computer poems had poor grammar.
I was using a version of CP available a couple years ago. Perhaps the algorithm has been tweaked since then.
Re:And yet Europe seems to be doing fine
on
Pornified
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· Score: 1
You raise some excellent points...but...
A great example is the swedish movie "Fucking Åmål", in Sweden most people saw it as a movie about being young in a small town, peer pressure and a lot of other "normal" issues
I'm not so sure I agree this is an "great example." While I'm sure it is an excellent movie, calling a heartfelt drama about a young woman coming to terms with her budding sexuality in a small town Fucking Åmål is a bit silly. For me, it doesn't sound offensive but rather scatologically comical. Like someone trying too hard to be controversial or simply using the wrong words in the wrong context. Not unlike that famous scene from This Is Spinal Tap:
<Nigel plays piano> Marty: It's pretty. Nigel: Yeah, I like it, just been fooling about with it for a few months now, very delicate... Marty: It's a, it's a bit of a departure from the kind of thing you normally play. Nigel: Yeah, it's part of a...trilogy really, a musical trilogy I'm doing... in... D minor, which I always find is really the saddest of all keys really. I don't know why, but it makes people weep instantly, you play a..baaaaa...baaaaaa it's a horn part. Marty: It's very pretty. Nigel:...baaaa, baaaaa, yeah, just simple lines intertwining, you know very much like, I'm really influenced by Mozart and Bach, it's sort of in between those, really, it's like a Mach piece really, it's... Marty: What do you call this? Nigel: Well, this piece is called "Lick My Love Pump". Marty: Hmm.
The article, although basically a joke, says something interesting about:
1) people's (AIMers) lower standards for conversation;
2) and also their open mindedness towards what a computer is capable of producing.
I guess the first point is negative and the second positive. The combination leaves a situation where a computer doesn't have to generate anything sophisticated to be tagged as human.
I once administered an informal Turing test using Ray Kurzweil's
Cybernetic Poet. I presented to 6 friends several dozen poems, some of which were computer generated (the poems, not the friends...).
People who were computer savvy tended to overestimate what a computer was capable of doing and did rather poorly. Similarly, people who were artistic but not very techie tended to have a very open mind regarding what constituted human poetry (bad grammar, non sequiturs, etc. were ok in an e.e. cummings sort of way) and also did poorly.
The people who did consistently well were those who were neither computer types nor artists, but rather "pure" academics (language specialists, classicists, etc.). They simply used grammar and puncutation as their guide.
I agree with the spirit of your rant: TFA is using "sonic laser" too loosely ("like a spotlight"); sloppy journalism often contributes to scientific ignorance.
However, I just wanted to point out (as one physics-y nerd to another) that vibrational quanta (the mechanical analog to electromagnetic quanta) do exist and are called phonons. Just like with photons, you can in principle create states that are eigenstates of the destruction operator and truly call them coherent in the "laser" sense of the word. Granted, phonons are usually discussed in the context of solid state lattices, not free-standing air near riots.
I am both an atheist and a scientist and give no credence to ID, Creationism, or other pseudoscientific philosophies. However, for the moment setting aside the skewed political and ideological agendas being pursued by these groups [and my own biases], I do think that there is an interesting mixed scientific/teleological question underlying the issue: "is it possible to objectively and reliably determine a priori if something was actively created or not?"
Currently, I think the he answer is a very murky "sometimes." This "sometimes" usually involves essentially knowing the answer - and usually knowing something about the path of the system to the final observed state. Nevertheless, one has to wonder if there isn't some clean scientific measure of this "property" of objects.
At some point, people bandied about entropy as a possible measure. The idea being that created objects will have a lower entropy (i.e. fewer microscopic configurations) and thus "more information." Not a bad idea. The problem is that one has to know quite a bit about the nature of the constraints in the system. For example, "water" molecules of arbitrary geometry and arbitrary chemistry may or may not undergo a phase transition to ice when cooled below some critical temperature. But "real" water molecules (of a specific geometry with a special natural chemistry) always undergo such a transition under everyday STP circumstances. If you just applied such an entropy argument to the "arbitrary" water, you might conclude that ice was impossible unless "created." Moreover, one has to have considerable knowledge of the system's degree of isolation and degree of equilibrium (thermodynamic, information, or otherwise). Sub-systems can lower their entropy if another part of the system is dumping energy into it (e.g. earth-sun, etc.). Not to mention applying information theory and thermodynamics to systems out of equilibrium is tricky business, if not impossible. Not surprisingly the ID folks exactly used this information theory argument to try bolster their claims life was indeed created. Another example of how a perfectly reasonable scientific question can be distorted and abused for the sake of a misguided philosophy or agenda.
Nevertheless, I do wonder if a reliable, generic scientific "creation measure" can be constructed (and if it would identify itself as having been created).
The MMPP will only potentially shield against charged particles (beta's, alpha's, etc.). But most of those can be stopped with a tiny amount of shielding anyway (e.g. modest energy alphas can be stopped with a piece of paper). However, you still have the gamma rays and the neutrons to worry about...
Slashdot Mirror
To take your analogy a bit further, imagine that eating strawberries, for whatever reason, was (or perhaps slowly became) a culturally persecuted behavior and people developed strong, polarized opinions about it. Under such conditions, if strawberry lovers really did feel strongly about their right to enjoy strawberries, I'm pretty sure they would develop a cultural identity around it and "become" strawberry lovers ("Fragrariaphiles").
Under such conditions an apparently simple question like "do you like strawberries?" could not be easily answered without folding yourself into a charged socio-political cultural landscape.
Pretty nutty idea given that humans ARE, in fact, animals.
If variables are correlated, the mechanics of that correlation might be due to some underlying common cause. Without understanding the underlying cause (if it exists), you are simply groping in the dark, hoping the interplay between variables doesn't change out from under you. Real predictive power and understanding comes from studying those underlying causes, which are generally robust.
For example, TFA's statement that "if you only have one or two producers on your film, you're statistically more likely to have a stinker" is akin to Flying Spaghetti Monsterism saying (albeit satirically) that "statistically speaking, the fewer pirates you have the more natural disasters you will have." Both are true statements based on raw data, but both tell you very little about the mechanics of why such correlations exist. By only studying correlations, you are absolving yourself of really understanding the system and making meaningful predictions.
I'm sure the folks doing the analysis know all this. But I worry that people who don't understand such an analysis will make idiotic policy decisions based on mistaking correlation and causality. For example, "we must have two producers to maximize our likelihood of winning the Sundance" or "let's start a pirate university to create more pirates to help reduce natural disasters!"
"Have 20 charactars stand still and quietly observe the sunrise. If one speaks or moves away the ritual is destroyed." or "Bury a large bag of money in the desert. Tell 10 other players where it is. If the bag remains for a week undisturbed you have passed the test of friendship. The other players get nothing for participating in the test. Unless they cheat, in which case they get the money."
Thanks for the suggestion, but I generally prefer games that are as far from my real life as possible...
I basically understand your point in principle, but keep in mind a huge fraction of the entertainment market (TV, movies, music, games, clothes, etc.) is driven by "what teenagers think." Indeed, almost every part of American popular culture since the 1950's has be driven by their collective opinion. Although they may be somewhat clueless on some scale, they are far from powerless. What they think can set the tone for an entire generation. If, collectively, they decided that "science is cool and I want to be a part of that", the culture of science in this country would be greatly (positively) affected. Moreover, by directly marketing and canvassing teen culture on science and technology, you are seeding the future for econonmic, intellectual, and technological booms. One could argue that this exact teen-oriented transformation happened with science back in the 50's and early 60's (we lost it someplace) and with computers in the 80's and early 90's.
You can't tax away someone's money and spend it on something they don't want, and then use the "take it or leave it, you have a choice" argument.
The US government on all scales is run by taxpayer money. Does that mean you expect it to be ideologically sterile too? I agree with you that ONE ideology would be bad and that critique and debate should be welcome, but I disagree with your implied expectation that just because something is funded by public taxes it should have no ideology. All taxes are used for something that is rooted in some ideology. Even single-minded ones. This includes everything from clean water, roads, and public safety ("what have the Romans ever done for us!?") to more dividing issues like the war in Iraq and various inefficient social welfare programs. They are all driven by someone's ideology of "how the world should be". To divorce yourself from this reality strikes me as, ironically, idealistic.
At the risk of sounding trollish, as long as the information is not *abused* I'm not sure why this behavior by iTunes is such a big deal. By entering an agreement with iTunes, one presumably knows ad-tuning is a potential use of the information. If you don't like it, switch to a different service that doesn't use it. Also, generating ads is not abuse, it is an intrinsic property of the free market. And, although I generally dislike ads, if I'm going to get an ad at all (which is a given outside the open source community), I much prefer targeted ads than random ones.
If you want privacy in your music buying habits, pay cash in disguise at a music store. Don't subscribe to a online music service with a vast, not-so-secret database.
Abuse of the information might include things like (but is not limited to):
1) Generating excessive unsolicited spam (I grant that the line between "excessive unsolicited spam" and "tolerable targeted ads" might be easy to spot in the extreme, but more subtle along the continuum).
2) Using the information for political or personal gain or to assist the government (or equivalent entity) in incarceration, torture, or human rights violations using said information.
3) Using the information for illegal activity not covered by 2. Some might argue that the privacy issue might fall into this category. But I don't believe you have an expectation of privacy concerning your buying habits *with the company you are buying from*. They are *obligated* to know your buying habits to satisfy their contract with you to deliver the product. From the company's point of view, to not use this information to "best serve the customer" would be just nuts and inefficient.
But still released many days after independent programmers (e.g. Ilfak Guilfanov) managed to build a fix. At work (a national lab), we were explicitly instructed not to wait for the early windows patch.
In the article I linked to above, a scientist says: "'We depend entirely on the truthfulness of the scientific community,' Dr. Zoloth said. 'We must believe that what they are showing us and what they say has been demonstrated is worthy of our concern and attention. The South Korean story, Dr. Zoloth added, raises questions about whether the science is good. 'Good as in true and real and morally worthy of our funding," she explained.'"
But isn't that totally incorrect and naive view for a funding agency? Nowhere in Science does anyone "depend on the truthfulness of the scientific community." Science depends on testability, falsifiability (if you're a Popper-ite), repeatability, peer review, etc. These sorts of events remind you that the system is working.
My argument could be twisted around: I'm *not* paradoxically saying we should encourage scientific fraud to somehow lend scientific credibility. But given that we have an intrinsically error-prone system, error detection and correction (a strength of the modern scientific process) should be a regarded as a *good* thing.
Sadly, money was wasted on this fraudulent work. But there is no recipe *a priori* to know 100% of the time if research hypotheses are fraudulent without examining the results in a peer-reviewed and reproducible way.
There may also be other more nuanced periodicities, which would (in prinicple) show up in a FFT.
Some of those graphs seem to have interesting periodic structure to them. Some of that is probably an artifact of how they binned their histograms for display purposes. Nevertheless, I'd still love to see a Fourier power spectrum. I'm sure you'd see a strong one-day cycle along with various other expected and unexpected periodicities. Seems like there is a lot to learn from such data. Harry Seldon would be proud...
'Virus' is too kind. I guess we can call them pre-teens now.
L. Detweiler's entry in Net.Legends.FAQ
I basically agree with the spirit and main thrust of your post. I don't mean to rail on your post too much, because I did enjoy it overall. However, there are a couple issues.
First, let's be careful. Your aileron example is exactly the fact-oriented, non-critical thinking measure of intellect and science skill you just railed on in your previous sentences! It goes to show that even a well-intended individual as yourself may, in a real classroom setting, make exactly the same mistakes as the very system you are being critical of.
The critical thinking version would not ask questions like "do you know the NAME of obscure airplane part X". It would ask students to THINK: "how do airplanes fly? Once in the air, does anyone know how an airplane is able to bank or roll?" Then you have yourself a nice critical thinking environment. You discuss physical principles and build an understanding of the physics. Who really cares exactly what some engineering dodad is called? Once you have the understanding, then give it a name.
Also, I suggest if you are going to make a claim about some some study you read, you probably should back it up with a reference. Anecdotal propagation of information is, in my opinion, part of the problem with the system.
Moreover, as an encoder of particle properties, he has forgotten to include a bunch of those properties in his representations. There are also some funny misleading conventions too. For example, his representation does not even begin to convey how much more massive the top quark is than the up quark. So much for building intution. Also, intrinsic spin is a subtle beast and he seems to sweep the details under the carpet. For example, a spin 1/2 object (like a quark) must be be rotated 720 degrees before it returns to its original state. Making a little curley fry to represent a spin 1/2 object seems a lazy, misleading, and simply wrong.
In my opinion, while the art is an attractive visual treat (and certainly a little physics PR is not bad), it seems a long way from being a complete, useful, or pedagogical representation of these complex objects.
And yes, IAAP
I understand what you are saying in theory. However, although you qualify your statement with "in my area", I'm guessing you aren't familiar with the geography of the area that is being discussed. By making a move to Moffett, Google is literally moving down the street. They are already located in Santa Clara (read: Silicon) Valley and probably wouldn't consider being anywhere else anyway. This area of the country, historically and presently, is no stranger to "other tech ventures" and the presence of Google probably doesn't raise the average IQ of the city/county at all. While Google certainly is a bunch of very smart folks, this techie-smartness is average for this location of the country/state. Remember, this is a place used to dealing with the likes of Apple, Yahoo, eBay, Motorola, National Semiconductor, nVida, Intel, HP, NASA, Lockheed, FMC, not to mention Stanford, Berkeley, etc. etc. etc. (all of these places are within a stone's throw of, or in the case of NASA, right on, Moffett field).
Who needs terrorist when we have leaders like ours? No wonder we haven't had any terrorist activity in the US for a while. Their job is being done for them...
The version of Cybernetic Poet I used did not follow standard English grammar rules religiously and was perhaps allowed to be too sloppy. I must admit, to my ear (even after knowing the answers), this did actually make for some interesting sounding poems (even if they made no sense). However, poor grammar in this poetry sample was the biggest single signal a particular poem was computer generated (like I said, even if it "sounded artistic"). Also note that not all computer poems had poor grammar.
I was using a version of CP available a couple years ago. Perhaps the algorithm has been tweaked since then.
A great example is the swedish movie "Fucking Åmål", in Sweden most people saw it as a movie about being young in a small town, peer pressure and a lot of other "normal" issues
I'm not so sure I agree this is an "great example." While I'm sure it is an excellent movie, calling a heartfelt drama about a young woman coming to terms with her budding sexuality in a small town Fucking Åmål is a bit silly. For me, it doesn't sound offensive but rather scatologically comical. Like someone trying too hard to be controversial or simply using the wrong words in the wrong context. Not unlike that famous scene from This Is Spinal Tap:
1) people's (AIMers) lower standards for conversation;
2) and also their open mindedness towards what a computer is capable of producing.
I guess the first point is negative and the second positive. The combination leaves a situation where a computer doesn't have to generate anything sophisticated to be tagged as human.
I once administered an informal Turing test using Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet. I presented to 6 friends several dozen poems, some of which were computer generated (the poems, not the friends...).
People who were computer savvy tended to overestimate what a computer was capable of doing and did rather poorly. Similarly, people who were artistic but not very techie tended to have a very open mind regarding what constituted human poetry (bad grammar, non sequiturs, etc. were ok in an e.e. cummings sort of way) and also did poorly.
The people who did consistently well were those who were neither computer types nor artists, but rather "pure" academics (language specialists, classicists, etc.). They simply used grammar and puncutation as their guide.
However, I just wanted to point out (as one physics-y nerd to another) that vibrational quanta (the mechanical analog to electromagnetic quanta) do exist and are called phonons. Just like with photons, you can in principle create states that are eigenstates of the destruction operator and truly call them coherent in the "laser" sense of the word. Granted, phonons are usually discussed in the context of solid state lattices, not free-standing air near riots.
A similar idea has been implemented at Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery as was discussed in the 2000 documentary The Young and the Dead
At some point, people bandied about entropy as a possible measure. The idea being that created objects will have a lower entropy (i.e. fewer microscopic configurations) and thus "more information." Not a bad idea. The problem is that one has to know quite a bit about the nature of the constraints in the system. For example, "water" molecules of arbitrary geometry and arbitrary chemistry may or may not undergo a phase transition to ice when cooled below some critical temperature. But "real" water molecules (of a specific geometry with a special natural chemistry) always undergo such a transition under everyday STP circumstances. If you just applied such an entropy argument to the "arbitrary" water, you might conclude that ice was impossible unless "created." Moreover, one has to have considerable knowledge of the system's degree of isolation and degree of equilibrium (thermodynamic, information, or otherwise). Sub-systems can lower their entropy if another part of the system is dumping energy into it (e.g. earth-sun, etc.). Not to mention applying information theory and thermodynamics to systems out of equilibrium is tricky business, if not impossible. Not surprisingly the ID folks exactly used this information theory argument to try bolster their claims life was indeed created. Another example of how a perfectly reasonable scientific question can be distorted and abused for the sake of a misguided philosophy or agenda.
Nevertheless, I do wonder if a reliable, generic scientific "creation measure" can be constructed (and if it would identify itself as having been created).
The MMPP will only potentially shield against charged particles (beta's, alpha's, etc.). But most of those can be stopped with a tiny amount of shielding anyway (e.g. modest energy alphas can be stopped with a piece of paper). However, you still have the gamma rays and the neutrons to worry about...