I agree that we don't have data. My guess would be that they make less money, given what we do know, but I could well be wrong. I guess we will have to agree to disagree, each of us apparently thinks their position is reasonable.
Ok, then now we know why we are disagreeing, we see the original issue differently.
I don't have data about the specific women that don't go to CS - since we can't identify them. How can you tell if a woman "would have" gone to CS, had things been otherwise? We do know, however, that CS is one of the most lucrative fields, pretty much near the top. So I think it is a reasonable assumption that by having less women in CS, their average salaries are (somewhat) lower.
As for the perspective of CS itself (whether more women is better for CS, not for the women), well, TFA makes some interesting points about that. I'm not sure I have anything to add over what is said there.
Actually I don't think it would be. Microsoft are legally allowed to contribute to campaigns (in certain ways, and under certain limitations), and they are not obligated to continue to give donations to people they previously gave to. They can certainly state their displeasure at certain actions those people might take, and not give them any more donations. (IANAL)
Well, CS jobs pay well, whereas women often take jobs in less-paying fields. So there is an issue of 'less women in CS - lower salaries on average for women'. Which is much exaggerated in my example, but the basic idea is there. Unless you see the original issue as not being relevant to the matter of salaries, unlike me? (I don't see salaries as the entire issue, but a large factor)
It isn't meant to be a 1-to-1 analogy. It is obviously a more extreme situation. My goal was to clarify the underlying issue.
I do agree with the costs and dangers that you mention, and I mentioned some myself (the ethical problems). There is no perfect solution. Both options have downsides.
Maybe it's just me, but I see no reason why people need to be recruited into compsci. There's plenty of interest in it already. Should there be more men going to beauty school just to balance out the demographics a bit?
From an idealistic point of view you are 100% right. Why should we care what the demographics are, if people are free to choose what they want? And why should we care more about CS than about beauty school? So, in theory, you are right. But in practice you are wrong, I am afraid.
Human beings do care about demographics. If you live in a country with red-haired and brown-haired people, and all the red-haired people do menial labor, whereas all the brown-haired people have cushy desk jobs with salaries 100x higher, you have a problem. Even if there is no discrimination, you still have a problem. People aren't rational creatures, they will perceive such a situation as discriminatory, and you will quickly have social unrest, and worse. Furthermore, such a situation also breeds some forms of discrimination - not intentional ones, but ones just as effective. Brown-haired people won't have the contacts to get into desk-job schools, and will probably feel quite odd even if they do get in. This is a self-perpetuating system, in other words. Yes, it might 'right' itself in time, but meanwhile you have, as I said, social unrest. It is just better, from a practical point of view, to nudge the system in the more balanced direction.
This is a realistic, not an idealistic point of view. In fact, it even violates some ethical decrees: nudging red-haired people into desk-job school means that some brown-haired people will not get in, who otherwise would have. This is not fair to them, no doubt. But no social policy is fair towards everyone. Helping red-haired people get into desk-job school is probably the fairest overall.
Hmm, I see that I might have been easily misunderstood. I meant to say that SVMs dominated the field of classification. Obviously ML journals are full of other topics (unsupervised learning, etc.). But the great majority of publications in classification are about SVMs and related tools (boosting, etc.). At least in the journals I read (JML, JMLR, for example).
All of the artists and the people who are actual involved with creating all of the content for the music labels, television stations, and other big media companies realize that at least to a certain extent allowing people to freely access and spread their content is good for them.
That isn't the issue here. YouTube is not equal to "freely access and spread". YouTube is a single website. Some media companies are 100% fine with their content being freely accessible on the internet, so long as it is accessible through their servers only. That is, they make the ad revenue, not YouTube. That is all the Viacom/YouTube issue about - who makes the ad revenue. Not about them 'getting that allowing free access is good for them'.
Personally, my position is that media should be allowed to be copied and shared freely, so long as it is done noncommercially. Share music with your friends? Fine. Put an MP3 on your blog? Also fine by me. But create a site like YouTube that intends to make big money off of ads - I think that money should go to the media creator, not to YouTube. In other words - if anyone can make money from a piece of media, it should be the creator, but if no one can (and with P2P indeed no one does, as things currently stand), no one should. So I support P2P (and am using BitTorrent right now at 25K download rate), but not necessarily YouTube.
Note that the big media companies have ironically screwed themselves with the DMCA in the US, because it actually gives YouTube a fairly airtight defense against the Viacom allegations (all they need to do is respond to takedown notices, and they do). So, even though personally I think only Viacom should be making money off of Comedy Central clips, it looks like YouTube may do so as well.
Yes, that is an interesting paper. And in fact perhaps there are similarities between primary visual and primary auditory cortexes. But what I am skeptical about is that Broca's area is similar to V1. If it is, that would be fascinating.
Perhaps I wasn't clear, sorry. Plenty of articles are written about neural networks, because neural networks are interesting for various reasons - as a way to understand the brain, for example. However, in the very specific field of machine learning, virtually all papers published are about support vector machines and similar methods - they simply outperform neural networks. So in that very specific sense neural networks are obsolete. But only in that narrow sense.
You can look at a trained SVM as a network, that is true. I agree with you there. But the training process for SVMs is very inappropriate for neural networks, at least as we see them today. This is the problem (but there is some research on online SVM training, which may help out).
Perhaps, perhaps... but it just doesn't seem likely. Some brain tasks are linear/feedforward (V1, for example), while tasks such as language are inherently nonlinear. Postulating a single mechanism for both seems nonintuitive to me. But I readily admit that neuroscience doesn't have a way to decide between the two possibilities at present.
A giant leap in AI? I seriously doubt it, until given evidence to the contrary. But anyhow, lets consider TFA itself. Here is one example, from the quote you give from TFA:
Much experimental evidence supports the idea that the neocortex is such a general-purpose learning machine.
Actually just as much evidence contradicts that hypothesis. We have very specific brain areas for generating and processing verbal data (Broca and Wernicke's areas), and a very specific brain area for recognizing faces. There are very good reasons to think that the brain actually has multiple highly-specialized systems. Bottom line - neuroscience doesn't know the answer to these questions. We really know remarkably little about the brain, amazingly little, and I say that as someone familiar with the field.
It's all been done before, perceptrons, multi-layered perceptrons, recurrent connections, etc, etc, etc...dunno why anybody would pay attention
Well, yes and no. I think both you and the Numenta people are wrong about this (them saying that the failing of AI is that it ignores the brain). Here is my brief take on the history of AI and machine learning:
First, AI ignored the brain. Then, Neural Networks took off in the 80's, and during the 90's were also the 'hot thing' in AI and machine learning. Basically, by using some 'brain-like' considerations, flexible learning systems could be built. These include perceptrons, etc. However, since then, neural networks have basically been made obsolete. Both from a theoretical and a practical standpoint, methods like support vector machines and boosting are far better than neural networks; these are the current state of the art. And they return us to the 'old AI' approach of ignoring the brain, in that they are NOT 'brain-like' in any significant way. Rather, they are natural algorithms that arise once you have a mature theory of machine learning (which, one might argue, science now has, with VC theory and later developments).
I tried to read the Numenta stuff, but really I fail to see the 'point' in it. Basically all I want is to see that their methods outperform support vector machines - show me that, and I will be an instant convert. Until then, I remain skeptical.
Consciousness may not be so easily explained without taking into account quantum effects.
Penrose suggested as much, in his book The Emperor's New Mind. However, this theory is not regarded as serious by any neuroscientists that I am aware of; chemistry and electricity/magnetism is supposed to be able to account for brain function, according to them.
If self awareness is enabled through some sort of quantum effect, imagine the philosophical implications.
Actually, the real philosophical implications come from self-awareness being generated by physical means, be they quantum, classical, or whatever. The physics details are less important, for philosophers at least.
Now, saying "Humans were born to worship God" has no other meaning except that they were born for the purpose of worshiping God.
Well, that is the question. Now, I believe you are sincere in your opinion that that is the only interpretation, and I hope you believe that I am sincere in claiming that I see 2 possible interpretations. In the end, its just a sentence anyhow; what matters is what is behind it. I have heard no religious authority say that "god needs humans to worship him". Please correct me if you have heard otherwise.
Well, how is the phrase "Cheetahs are born to run" used? What comes to my mind is that I am looking at a cheetah running, and I am so impressed by it that I say "wow - cheetahs are born to run, aren't they." That is, the most natural thing for cheetahs to do is to run, and they do it exceedingly well. If a cheetah were to try to make its living by swimming, it would be a shame - for the cheetah.
Similarly, "Men are born to worship god" can be interpreted as the natural state for men being to worship god, and that it would be somehow 'wrong' for them to not do so, against their own best interest. This is a central line of thought in many monotheistic religions, not that an omnipotent god for some reason 'needs' their worship.
(Reminder: I am an atheist, I am just explaining the beliefs of others.)
Well, obviously what is a 'natural' and what is a 'forced' interpretation is a matter of opinion, on which we differ, it seems. I'll just leave you with the following phrase:
"Cheetahs are born to run"
Compare that to "Men were created to worship god". It goes somewhat towards what I was talking about before, that is, has a similar grammar.
Well, the definition is fairly standard, based on size basically, giving you Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Obviously what is 'major' is debatable (the Bahai, for example, would certainly like to be called 'major'). Anyhow, I didn't mean to imply anything, I was just using the standard shortened version for "Christianity, Islam and Judaism" (since I don't know much about the other monotheisms).
Why is it that atheists know theology better then the worshipers?
Do you mean, why do I presume to understand religion better than a person who believes in it? Or, on the contrary, do you mean that the believers are misled about their own beliefs? I'm not sure.
In any case, I think that knowledgable people know more about everything. A learned believer, or a learned atheist, will know about the same. But the vast majority of people are unlearned in such matters. As a consequence, the majority of believers do not fully understand the complexities of their religion, while all of the atheists who are interested enough to learn about religion will know quite a bit (but exactly the same as the learned believers). That may be misleading at first glance, of course.
[...] the sign says something to the effect of "Men were created to worship God." [...] how insecure does God have to be to go to all the trouble of creating an entirely new species just to tell him how great he is?
Well, you correctly see that possibility as ridiculous. But monotheists (the 3 major monotheistic religions are perhaps similar enough in that respect) would also see it as ridiculous. So really, you are misunderstanding what they mean when they put up a sign saying "Men were created to worship God."
It isn't that an omnoipotent god benefits from it somehow, of course he doesn't. To say otherwise is blasphemy, even, for monotheists. However, they believe that the natural state for human beings is to worship god. In other words, people benefit from worshipping god, not vice versa. Note that the quoted sign can be understood both ways.
Of course, you can raise skeptical doubt about why god would create people at all, and why worshipping him would be good for them. Such doubts are natural, and indeed the major monotheistic religions have had centuries of debate about these topics. So, my point is that the monotheistic belief system (speaking generally) makes more sense than your misinterpretation of that particular sign.
(To prevent misunderstandings, I am a complete atheist.)
This change was last summer, pre-microvell, so the news actually would have been if OpenSUSE was enabling it and taking advantage of MS' patent covenant for Novell customers and OpenSUSE contributors while other distros couldn't.
Yes. I submitted the previous story about this matter, and I stand corrected. I didn't know everything about the issue; I relied on the sources reporting on it, and mainly, the whole matter seemed suspicious, and I thought posting it to Slashdot would shine some light on it. Not 100% sure if doing so had an influence, but what matters in the end is that things are now clarified.
From my standpoint, the interesting issue that remains is what I mentioned in the little comment at the end of my submission for the previous story: ok, assuming there are MS patents on this technology, isn't Novell licensed to use them now (even if it "isn't a patent license", but it just acts like one)? Apparently the Microsoft-Novell deal doesn't help openSUSE out much with regard to MS patents. Is the same true for SUSE?
It is so sad that it has to be a country like China that finally gets it right.
Finally, a response that I can agree with. Yes, this law may seem silly to some, but it makes perfect sense. Two things:
1. Every country limits the activities of minors. The assumption is that minors are at risk, compared to adults, and need extra protection. The USA doesn't let minors buy alcohol - til they are 21, even. Sex is also limited (to 16/18/whatever, depending on the location). You can argue with the specifics, but some form of protection for children is reasonable. MMO addiction is certainly dangerous, so it isn't unreasonable to protect against it. Also, the restrictions are 'smooth' - first you gain less points, then no points, then warning messages (yes, I read TFA). Some thought went into it.
2. Actually, it isn't surprising that a country like China would be the first to enact such a law. The West - USA, mainly - are too influenced by big corporations. The big corporations want the population addicted to their products, be they movies, food, or MMORPGs.
Slashdot Mirror
The runtime is (supposedly, I'll believe it when I see it) cross-platform. The development kit is Windows-only.
I agree that we don't have data. My guess would be that they make less money, given what we do know, but I could well be wrong. I guess we will have to agree to disagree, each of us apparently thinks their position is reasonable.
Ok, then now we know why we are disagreeing, we see the original issue differently.
I don't have data about the specific women that don't go to CS - since we can't identify them. How can you tell if a woman "would have" gone to CS, had things been otherwise? We do know, however, that CS is one of the most lucrative fields, pretty much near the top. So I think it is a reasonable assumption that by having less women in CS, their average salaries are (somewhat) lower.
As for the perspective of CS itself (whether more women is better for CS, not for the women), well, TFA makes some interesting points about that. I'm not sure I have anything to add over what is said there.
Actually I don't think it would be. Microsoft are legally allowed to contribute to campaigns (in certain ways, and under certain limitations), and they are not obligated to continue to give donations to people they previously gave to. They can certainly state their displeasure at certain actions those people might take, and not give them any more donations. (IANAL)
Well, CS jobs pay well, whereas women often take jobs in less-paying fields. So there is an issue of 'less women in CS - lower salaries on average for women'. Which is much exaggerated in my example, but the basic idea is there. Unless you see the original issue as not being relevant to the matter of salaries, unlike me? (I don't see salaries as the entire issue, but a large factor)
This is a rather poor analogy
It isn't meant to be a 1-to-1 analogy. It is obviously a more extreme situation. My goal was to clarify the underlying issue.
I do agree with the costs and dangers that you mention, and I mentioned some myself (the ethical problems). There is no perfect solution. Both options have downsides.
Human beings do care about demographics. If you live in a country with red-haired and brown-haired people, and all the red-haired people do menial labor, whereas all the brown-haired people have cushy desk jobs with salaries 100x higher, you have a problem. Even if there is no discrimination, you still have a problem. People aren't rational creatures, they will perceive such a situation as discriminatory, and you will quickly have social unrest, and worse. Furthermore, such a situation also breeds some forms of discrimination - not intentional ones, but ones just as effective. Brown-haired people won't have the contacts to get into desk-job schools, and will probably feel quite odd even if they do get in. This is a self-perpetuating system, in other words. Yes, it might 'right' itself in time, but meanwhile you have, as I said, social unrest. It is just better, from a practical point of view, to nudge the system in the more balanced direction.
This is a realistic, not an idealistic point of view. In fact, it even violates some ethical decrees: nudging red-haired people into desk-job school means that some brown-haired people will not get in, who otherwise would have. This is not fair to them, no doubt. But no social policy is fair towards everyone. Helping red-haired people get into desk-job school is probably the fairest overall.
Hmm, I see that I might have been easily misunderstood. I meant to say that SVMs dominated the field of classification. Obviously ML journals are full of other topics (unsupervised learning, etc.). But the great majority of publications in classification are about SVMs and related tools (boosting, etc.). At least in the journals I read (JML, JMLR, for example).
Personally, my position is that media should be allowed to be copied and shared freely, so long as it is done noncommercially. Share music with your friends? Fine. Put an MP3 on your blog? Also fine by me. But create a site like YouTube that intends to make big money off of ads - I think that money should go to the media creator, not to YouTube. In other words - if anyone can make money from a piece of media, it should be the creator, but if no one can (and with P2P indeed no one does, as things currently stand), no one should. So I support P2P (and am using BitTorrent right now at 25K download rate), but not necessarily YouTube.
Note that the big media companies have ironically screwed themselves with the DMCA in the US, because it actually gives YouTube a fairly airtight defense against the Viacom allegations (all they need to do is respond to takedown notices, and they do). So, even though personally I think only Viacom should be making money off of Comedy Central clips, it looks like YouTube may do so as well.
Yes, that is an interesting paper. And in fact perhaps there are similarities between primary visual and primary auditory cortexes. But what I am skeptical about is that Broca's area is similar to V1. If it is, that would be fascinating.
Perhaps I wasn't clear, sorry. Plenty of articles are written about neural networks, because neural networks are interesting for various reasons - as a way to understand the brain, for example. However, in the very specific field of machine learning, virtually all papers published are about support vector machines and similar methods - they simply outperform neural networks. So in that very specific sense neural networks are obsolete. But only in that narrow sense.
You can look at a trained SVM as a network, that is true. I agree with you there. But the training process for SVMs is very inappropriate for neural networks, at least as we see them today. This is the problem (but there is some research on online SVM training, which may help out).
Perhaps, perhaps... but it just doesn't seem likely. Some brain tasks are linear/feedforward (V1, for example), while tasks such as language are inherently nonlinear. Postulating a single mechanism for both seems nonintuitive to me. But I readily admit that neuroscience doesn't have a way to decide between the two possibilities at present.
A giant leap in AI? I seriously doubt it, until given evidence to the contrary. But anyhow, lets consider TFA itself. Here is one example, from the quote you give from TFA:
Much experimental evidence supports the idea that the neocortex is such a general-purpose learning machine.
Actually just as much evidence contradicts that hypothesis. We have very specific brain areas for generating and processing verbal data (Broca and Wernicke's areas), and a very specific brain area for recognizing faces. There are very good reasons to think that the brain actually has multiple highly-specialized systems. Bottom line - neuroscience doesn't know the answer to these questions. We really know remarkably little about the brain, amazingly little, and I say that as someone familiar with the field.
First, AI ignored the brain. Then, Neural Networks took off in the 80's, and during the 90's were also the 'hot thing' in AI and machine learning. Basically, by using some 'brain-like' considerations, flexible learning systems could be built. These include perceptrons, etc. However, since then, neural networks have basically been made obsolete. Both from a theoretical and a practical standpoint, methods like support vector machines and boosting are far better than neural networks; these are the current state of the art. And they return us to the 'old AI' approach of ignoring the brain, in that they are NOT 'brain-like' in any significant way. Rather, they are natural algorithms that arise once you have a mature theory of machine learning (which, one might argue, science now has, with VC theory and later developments).
I tried to read the Numenta stuff, but really I fail to see the 'point' in it. Basically all I want is to see that their methods outperform support vector machines - show me that, and I will be an instant convert. Until then, I remain skeptical.
Well, how is the phrase "Cheetahs are born to run" used? What comes to my mind is that I am looking at a cheetah running, and I am so impressed by it that I say "wow - cheetahs are born to run, aren't they." That is, the most natural thing for cheetahs to do is to run, and they do it exceedingly well. If a cheetah were to try to make its living by swimming, it would be a shame - for the cheetah.
Similarly, "Men are born to worship god" can be interpreted as the natural state for men being to worship god, and that it would be somehow 'wrong' for them to not do so, against their own best interest. This is a central line of thought in many monotheistic religions, not that an omnipotent god for some reason 'needs' their worship.
(Reminder: I am an atheist, I am just explaining the beliefs of others.)
You are right, 'Abrahamic religions' is probably a better term.
Btw, I am also not from the West, but rather the Middle East.
Well, the definition is fairly standard, based on size basically, giving you Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Obviously what is 'major' is debatable (the Bahai, for example, would certainly like to be called 'major'). Anyhow, I didn't mean to imply anything, I was just using the standard shortened version for "Christianity, Islam and Judaism" (since I don't know much about the other monotheisms).
Why is it that atheists know theology better then the worshipers?
Do you mean, why do I presume to understand religion better than a person who believes in it? Or, on the contrary, do you mean that the believers are misled about their own beliefs? I'm not sure.
In any case, I think that knowledgable people know more about everything. A learned believer, or a learned atheist, will know about the same. But the vast majority of people are unlearned in such matters. As a consequence, the majority of believers do not fully understand the complexities of their religion, while all of the atheists who are interested enough to learn about religion will know quite a bit (but exactly the same as the learned believers). That may be misleading at first glance, of course.
It isn't that an omnoipotent god benefits from it somehow, of course he doesn't. To say otherwise is blasphemy, even, for monotheists. However, they believe that the natural state for human beings is to worship god. In other words, people benefit from worshipping god, not vice versa. Note that the quoted sign can be understood both ways.
Of course, you can raise skeptical doubt about why god would create people at all, and why worshipping him would be good for them. Such doubts are natural, and indeed the major monotheistic religions have had centuries of debate about these topics. So, my point is that the monotheistic belief system (speaking generally) makes more sense than your misinterpretation of that particular sign.
(To prevent misunderstandings, I am a complete atheist.)
From my standpoint, the interesting issue that remains is what I mentioned in the little comment at the end of my submission for the previous story: ok, assuming there are MS patents on this technology, isn't Novell licensed to use them now (even if it "isn't a patent license", but it just acts like one)? Apparently the Microsoft-Novell deal doesn't help openSUSE out much with regard to MS patents. Is the same true for SUSE?
It is so sad that it has to be a country like China that finally gets it right.
Finally, a response that I can agree with. Yes, this law may seem silly to some, but it makes perfect sense. Two things:
1. Every country limits the activities of minors. The assumption is that minors are at risk, compared to adults, and need extra protection. The USA doesn't let minors buy alcohol - til they are 21, even. Sex is also limited (to 16/18/whatever, depending on the location). You can argue with the specifics, but some form of protection for children is reasonable. MMO addiction is certainly dangerous, so it isn't unreasonable to protect against it. Also, the restrictions are 'smooth' - first you gain less points, then no points, then warning messages (yes, I read TFA). Some thought went into it.
2. Actually, it isn't surprising that a country like China would be the first to enact such a law. The West - USA, mainly - are too influenced by big corporations. The big corporations want the population addicted to their products, be they movies, food, or MMORPGs.