according to several people with knowledge of the investigation who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the inquiry
WTF is wrong with people that they can't shut up?? I see stuff like this all the time, and it boggles my mind that people on the inside are willing to discuss stuff that is likely to at least partially jeopardize the investigation under way. Surely it's not a profit-motive...I can't imagine journalists can pay very much for this kind of information...so what is it?
What?!? Because you have morals. The incentives are of course there for honest people, not thieves and scoundrels. That is, honest people who care about securing/protecting their own systems & privacy, and/or that of others (sometimes people like to help other people).
Presumably the hope is that incentivizing things this way will make the morally-upright people have a go at finding the bugs...ideally *before* the nefarious crowd swoops in...
Right, it's useful, except for the whole "getting an actual use out of it" thing.
[...]
Yes, I'm familiar with AIT and Hutter's and Legg's work. Still no actual uses. Still no clear pseudocode. Or, rather, your post already listed all of Hutter's and Legg's insights that have proven to be useful for a practical purpose.
Ah, I see what's going on. What these folks do is---to a first approximation---math ("Math, the first pseudocode!" "Pretty clear, too!"). Sometimes math can be useful for further math. Your use of "use/useful" clearly differs from mine. You must be an engineer.
No, he knows and has explicitly stated in a few places that it's uncomputable, in much the same way that Kolmogorov Complexity is uncomputable, but an interesting and potentially useful theoretical construct, nonetheless.
This vein of Schmidhüber's work is more or less descended from Solomonoff's work on induction and Chaitin's Algorithmic Information Theory stuff (the line of descent is less explicit with the latter), and a bunch of Schmidhüber's descendents, most prominently his student Marcus Hutter and *his* student Shane Legg have taken this ball and run with it in interesting ways.
And that's the real story: Parents who have turned their children over to the television, computer, and daycare centers of the world and neglecting basic nutrition. My sister is like that -- she is fed a diet of fast food and microwave meals because her parents can't be bothered to cook a meal (two income family). I don't think its intentional, people just assume there's no problem if it can't be seen.
Wait...your sister has parents who can't be cooked a meal, and thus is fed (alleged) junk. Are your parents somehow magically not like that? (if not, I'm thinking your sister needs to re-evaluate her relationship with her parents)
Cosma Shalizi rants a lot about scientists' (often physicists') claims about having found a power law description of some empirical phenomenon (upshot: finding a straight line on a log-log plot isn't enough). See the following:
Re:This is what linguists have been waiting for
on
Monkeys With Syntax
·
· Score: 1
However, it might be the case that this "syntax" has developed in parallel to human syntax from some common protolanguage
What is interesting here is not the structure of the language, but the fact of it.
Granted, I---probably erroneously---took the statement to which I responded to be a claim that studying the monkey's language would be informative vis-à-vis human language. The "proto" prefix is typically used to mean "ancestral to contemporary human language".
Humans are possessed of a wide range of incredibly powerful, flexible and general linguistic mechanisms. Non-human animals are frequently held to be entirely non-linguistic.
I think (hope!) that this position is becoming outmoded among the newer generations of linguistics & cognitive scientists. The evidence for abilities that map fairly straightforwardly onto human linguistic abilities is pretty much overwhelming at this point. (The final chapter of Bridget Samuels' dissertation talks about this a fair bit, mostly in relation of phonology)
This is implausible on the most basic evolutionary grounds: evolution is an elaborative process, and to have such remarkable abilities amongst humans strongly suggests a lot of linguistic or proto-linguistic capability in our ancestral line, and probably in other animals too. Otherwise, it would be like humans having the ability to run fifty miles in one go in a world where no other animal has legs.
Well, maybe yes, maybe no. There's a big push now toward viewing Language as a cultural artifact, whose properties are emergents of cultural evolution (cf. anything going on at the LEC in Edinburgh, or Mort Christiansen's work). This viewpoint, to which I'm generally sympathetic, always leads me to thinking about cooking and recipes. Cooking is, to the best of my knowledge, a purely human endeavour; one that has presumably been considerably refined via cultural evolution since the day when someone accidentally dropped her hunk of meat in the fire. And yet, no one would be tempted to say that the seeds of cooking/recipes/soufflé can be found in the behaviours of some animals (or maybe they would...I'm not ethologist).
I had a point, but it seems to be gone now...probably that appeals either to innateness or evolution alone are by necessity oversimplifications. The kind of empirical work being discussed here is what will move this domain of knowledge forward.
While the sexual selection forces that drove the evolution of human intelligence are powerful and able to produce relatively rapid elaboration of new capabilities, those capabilities have to be elaborations of something that already existed, and so we should naively expect this kind of discovery.
I don't think I'm understanding what you've said here. Surely not everything is built on something that came before? Mutation and exaptation have clear---in fact vitally important for the former---roles in evolutionary processes.
Unfortunately, because linguists seem for some reason to think that human language is the only possible model for language (see the other comments from linguists in this thread, for example) it can be difficult to recognize the linguistic (or possibly linguist-ish) capabilities of non-human species that do not conform well to that model.
Given that our only unambiguous model for Language is human language, it should be unsurprising that that's what we take as our primary model. Nonetheless, see my earlier reference to Samuels 2009 for a clear indication that this trend is changing.
I now have the PNAS paper in hand (well, on-screen)...I may come back and say more...
Nope...same guy, but that's from 2 years ago...I'm still waiting for the new one to show up.
Re:This is what linguists have been waiting for
on
Monkeys With Syntax
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Those scientists who have been studying animal language as a non-pseudoscience have been waiting for anyone to show SYNTAX in animal language. You have have 1 trillion different words in a language, and it has a finite range of expressions... meanwhile you can have 10 different words, that with the right syntax can generate an infinite range of expressions.
While this is true, it's not clear to me that what's documented here is, in fact, syntax. The researcher in question (Zuberbühler) has written about this stuff before and has been much more cautious in attributing full-on linguistic properties (a search of LanguageLog will turn something up from 2006).
I'll reserve absolute judgment for when I get a chance to look at the actual paper, but this quote from NYT gives me pause: Two booms can be combined with a series of "krak-oos," with a meaning entirely different to that of either of its components. This is not (typically) how human language works...meaning is compositionally built up from bits of syntax, whereas what's described here looks more like idiom. In fact, it looks more like phonology (*maybe* morphology) to me...meaningless bits that can be put together to make meaningful bits.
What they need to do now is get a linguist in there so slice & dice the recordings, play them back to the monkeys in various reconstructed forms, and see how they react.
Also...
[...] a chance to really look at a real proto-syntax, because all human languages have a very strongly developed syntax
some would argue against the subordinate clause here (pointing at Piraha, for example), but I'm not one of those. However, it might be the case that this "syntax" has developed in parallel to human syntax from some common protolanguage (since these are monkeys and not even apes, we're talking REALLY far back), and so this may be relatively uninformative with respect to human syntax.
You'll see more misanthropy, misogyny, misandry, every flavor of "ism" etc etc in pretty much any community.
Yeah, but we're not talking about "hatred/dislike on the basis of intrinsic characteristics" here (viz. your "mis-X" examples)...you can dislike someone and still accept that they're highly competent (cf. many people's opinion of Theo de Raadt). The current brouhaha is about differential (i.e. worse) treatment on the basis of gender. I'm willing to just come out and say that there's none of that in the FOSS world as regards its overwhelmingly male membership..."obviously you can't code, you're just a dude"...
[...] but a social group based around "show us the code" [...]
One of the major points of this discussion is that what I just quoted is a fictive characterization of the FOSS community. Obviously there are places where the situation is better (e.g. the kernel mailing list), and worse (e.g. several recent keynote talks). The thing is people are people and sociological things will typically get in the way of impartiality. In this case, we're talking about when that manifests as discrimination against women. Which it does. But shouldn't.
where people can choose everything about how they present themselves[...]
This would be awful for people who live in Montreal...the axis that determines streets' "North/South" designation is pretty nearly NW-SE, and most people who've lived in Montreal for a while point NW when you ask them to show you N. In winter the sun rises & sets in really weird places. (or rather, it doesn't but a lot of people think it does *if* they bother to stop and think about it)
Leftmost item is a Dell Mini 10v (as you pointed out), with Ubuntu pre-installed, and a 160GB hard drive. In fact,the page you linked to seems to have the same item (3rd from left), albeit at an inexplicably higher price (and in USD).
Who gives a shit about the "instant discount" for the Windows version?
What are you talking about? Languages are shaped by a lot of things...social conventions, acquisition/induction in the face of noisy data, possible predispositions/biases towards particular analyses of novel data...but not cognitive cost. Unless you're using those words to mean something non-obvious.
This is what Steven Pinker seems not to get. There _is_ an innate language instinct, it's just not what he thinks it is. What we all share is the ability to introspect the cognitive cost of figuring out "WTH is this dude trying to convey?"
I'm no Pinker apologist (Jackendoff is better, for my money), but I'm pretty sure that there's not much that Pinker "doesn't get" about language...other than in the obvious sense that we're all on this voyage of knowledge and there are tonnes of things that we collectively don't know about language. The view of the "language instinct" espoused by Pinker has undergone a lot of revision, including by him (maybe try reading something post-1994. I recommend Words and Rules.) Also, the things that we're able to introspect about our language production ("how do I say X?") or comprehension ("what does Y mean when that person says it?") is a relatively small corner of the cognitive edifice that undergirds our linguistic knowledge. Moreover, it's rare that we have to explicitly reason through to an interpretation...most of the time there's no introspection involved at all.
One of the key insights on language is that Lempel-Ziv compression never transmits the compression dictionary.
Really? That's funny, because not a single one of the textbooks I've opened in 9 years of studying linguistics has mentioned gzip as representing one of the key insights of language.
The dictionary is implied because the compression program and the decompression program share the same dictionary construction heuristic. This is a trick you can pull off only if the two sides of the channel share the same cognitive architecture. There are no shortage of examples out there of how fast communication breaks down when the parties begin with fundamentally different premises on how to structure the categories of thought.
You don't need to have different cognitive category-structures for communication to break down. Moreover, there aren't any concepts that aren't expressible in some human language. Sure there may not be an English word that means zeitgeist (to trot out a hackneyed example), but that doesn't mean I can't use some longer construction to express the same meaning (look in your Deutsch-English dict for some hints).
Here's another fundamental question: what portion of the brain's cognitive activity is devoted to power management? For one thing, glucose is precious resource, and the brain is a chug-a-lug organ where it comes to glucose consumption. For another, the brain is costly to cool. From the real-time perspective (which governed 5.999 million years of human evolution), there's not much use firing up the abstract-noun chocolate factory when you need a survival response in under 100ms.
I'm not clear what this has to do with anything else, so I'll mostly gloss over it. BUT, I'm pretty sure it doesn't cost THAT much to cool one's head, since a lot of our heat escapes that way anyhow (lots of blood vessels really close to the surface, hence the propensity for head injuries to bleed like the dickens).
[...]
You can't defer deciding what to record for very long. So this is an obligatory cognitive function when your brain is already heavily loaded. At high enough stress levels, the recording function does shut down. Assessing and responding to cognitive burden is a mission-critical survival function. This is a key foundation for language learning.
First anguage acquisition happens in the absence of explicit tutoring, and
The point Hawking's making is interesting, and potentially relevant, but it's hardly a novel claim. What he's talking about it often called "cultural evolution", and people have been talking about it for a while now, starting(?) with Cavalli-Sforza et al back in the 80s. It's regained momentum with the recent (~ last decade) resurgence of interest in the evolution of language (cf. papers by Simon Kirby, Henry Brighton & friends in the 2006 PNAS).
Also, it seems doubtful to me that we're literally no longer evolving in the "traditional" sense of the word. Sure, we're doing things to artificially prolong life and enhance reproductive success, but that doesn't really change the fact that natural and sexual selection are still at work.
Disclaimer: I am NOT a biologist. I AM a linguist.
Either video gaming is harmful for everyone, or it's not harmful for anyone. I mean, you could come up with reasons why it's worse for kids, but lots of them have been explored and found to have been pure bullshit.
OK, so either I wasn't clear, or you're being a bit disingenuous. I'm talking about content, rather than the mere act of gaming itself. For all of its faults, the gaming ratings system (much like the movie rating system), says that particular kinds of content are appropriate for particular audience demographics, not that games (or movies) are good for some people and bad for others. I mean, really now.
If the issue is the kind of game you're playing, then play a different kind of game that you can play with your kid and stop skulking around like a criminal.
Well, there's no doubt that playing family games is a good thing to do. It's a great way to get parent-child time in for those who love gaming, as well as being responsible parenting in re: supervising the content of your kids' games. That being said, having a child means doesn't have to mean that I can't play any non-child-appropriate games (see any non-child-appropriate movies) until my kid is a teenager. When the kid's in bed, I can play my AO games. It's not really that hard.
I live in Ottawa and want to do something more than write a letter that I know will be ignored to a local MP who I know is not in line with my position anyway. While I'm interested in law & policy as it applies to this domain, it's definitely not in my sphere of knowledge.
Do/.ers have any suggestions about what I can do to fight this, or good ways to raise awareness?
I have a daughter who is not allowed to watch me play (she's 4)
Why is she not allowed to play?
Granted, I'm picking nits, but note that this is not, in fact, what the GP says. "Not allowed to watch me play" =/=> "Not allowed to play"
And if it's not okay for her, why is it okay for you?
Yes, because children are exactly like little adults and can and should be exposed to all of the same stimuli as adults. Yeesh. Spoken like a true (i) childless person, (ii) lying person *with* child, or (iii) person *with* child that is going to grow up way too fast.
Perhaps whatever you're doing is either (a) not harmful for her to see and you could play it during normal waking hours, or (b) harmful for both of you and you should stop.
Or perhaps it's (c) OK for adults to see, but *not* 4 YEAR OLDS.
How much do you need to eat a burger, anyway? Is your meal so important that it supercedes an animal's right to life?
*shrug* Pretty much. If someone/thing comes along and is able to dispose of me and eat me, then good for it. Also, what is this "right to life" you speak of?
[Scientists] have a discussion like adults, they look at the math, one side is correct and they correct their experiment and thank them for the contribution.
...you're kidding, right? Don't get me wrong, I'm a scientist (well, in some people's eyes) and I love when it works the way it's supposed to, but it's so rare that I sure as hell don't hang my happiness hat on it.
To think that scientists don't jealously guard their pet theories, or that politics and sociology don't play a major role in the development/advancement (or lack thereof) in science is just to be woefully blind to the truths of human nature. Everyone consistently (although perhaps mostly unknowingly) takes full advantage of Duhem-Quine by tweaking auxiliary hypotheses/assumptions.
In fact, I've been asked by a boss when will my kids be old enough that I can 'get serious about my career'[...]
I'll surely catch some flack from the right-wing/libertarian contingent here on/. for pointing this out, I'm pretty sure that kind of question is illegal.
Actually, now that I think about it, I only know it's illegal up here in Socalist Canada...
(...hmm...a new joke meme? "In Socialist Canada, government takes care of YOU!")
Slashdot Mirror
I've got no problem with killing an animal in a fair fight[...]
You strap on antlers and go head-to-head with rutting stags often? Hunting ain't exactly a fair fight...not even bow hunting, really.
according to several people with knowledge of the investigation who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the inquiry
WTF is wrong with people that they can't shut up?? I see stuff like this all the time, and it boggles my mind that people on the inside are willing to discuss stuff that is likely to at least partially jeopardize the investigation under way. Surely it's not a profit-motive...I can't imagine journalists can pay very much for this kind of information...so what is it?
What?!? Because you have morals. The incentives are of course there for honest people, not thieves and scoundrels. That is, honest people who care about securing/protecting their own systems & privacy, and/or that of others (sometimes people like to help other people).
Presumably the hope is that incentivizing things this way will make the morally-upright people have a go at finding the bugs...ideally *before* the nefarious crowd swoops in...
[...]
Right, it's useful, except for the whole "getting an actual use out of it" thing.
[...]
Yes, I'm familiar with AIT and Hutter's and Legg's work. Still no actual uses. Still no clear pseudocode. Or, rather, your post already listed all of Hutter's and Legg's insights that have proven to be useful for a practical purpose.
Ah, I see what's going on. What these folks do is---to a first approximation---math ("Math, the first pseudocode!" "Pretty clear, too!"). Sometimes math can be useful for further math. Your use of "use/useful" clearly differs from mine. You must be an engineer.
No, he knows and has explicitly stated in a few places that it's uncomputable, in much the same way that Kolmogorov Complexity is uncomputable, but an interesting and potentially useful theoretical construct, nonetheless.
This vein of Schmidhüber's work is more or less descended from Solomonoff's work on induction and Chaitin's Algorithmic Information Theory stuff (the line of descent is less explicit with the latter), and a bunch of Schmidhüber's descendents, most prominently his student Marcus Hutter and *his* student Shane Legg have taken this ball and run with it in interesting ways.
And that's the real story: Parents who have turned their children over to the television, computer, and daycare centers of the world and neglecting basic nutrition. My sister is like that -- she is fed a diet of fast food and microwave meals because her parents can't be bothered to cook a meal (two income family). I don't think its intentional, people just assume there's no problem if it can't be seen.
Wait...your sister has parents who can't be cooked a meal, and thus is fed (alleged) junk. Are your parents somehow magically not like that? (if not, I'm thinking your sister needs to re-evaluate her relationship with her parents)
Cosma Shalizi rants a lot about scientists' (often physicists') claims about having found a power law description of some empirical phenomenon (upshot: finding a straight line on a log-log plot isn't enough). See the following:
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/491.html
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/power-laws.html
However, it might be the case that this "syntax" has developed in parallel to human syntax from some common protolanguage
What is interesting here is not the structure of the language, but the fact of it.
Granted, I---probably erroneously---took the statement to which I responded to be a claim that studying the monkey's language would be informative vis-à-vis human language. The "proto" prefix is typically used to mean "ancestral to contemporary human language".
Humans are possessed of a wide range of incredibly powerful, flexible and general linguistic mechanisms. Non-human animals are frequently held to be entirely non-linguistic.
I think (hope!) that this position is becoming outmoded among the newer generations of linguistics & cognitive scientists. The evidence for abilities that map fairly straightforwardly onto human linguistic abilities is pretty much overwhelming at this point. (The final chapter of Bridget Samuels' dissertation talks about this a fair bit, mostly in relation of phonology)
This is implausible on the most basic evolutionary grounds: evolution is an elaborative process, and to have such remarkable abilities amongst humans strongly suggests a lot of linguistic or proto-linguistic capability in our ancestral line, and probably in other animals too. Otherwise, it would be like humans having the ability to run fifty miles in one go in a world where no other animal has legs.
Well, maybe yes, maybe no. There's a big push now toward viewing Language as a cultural artifact, whose properties are emergents of cultural evolution (cf. anything going on at the LEC in Edinburgh, or Mort Christiansen's work). This viewpoint, to which I'm generally sympathetic, always leads me to thinking about cooking and recipes. Cooking is, to the best of my knowledge, a purely human endeavour; one that has presumably been considerably refined via cultural evolution since the day when someone accidentally dropped her hunk of meat in the fire. And yet, no one would be tempted to say that the seeds of cooking/recipes/soufflé can be found in the behaviours of some animals (or maybe they would...I'm not ethologist).
I had a point, but it seems to be gone now...probably that appeals either to innateness or evolution alone are by necessity oversimplifications. The kind of empirical work being discussed here is what will move this domain of knowledge forward.
While the sexual selection forces that drove the evolution of human intelligence are powerful and able to produce relatively rapid elaboration of new capabilities, those capabilities have to be elaborations of something that already existed, and so we should naively expect this kind of discovery.
I don't think I'm understanding what you've said here. Surely not everything is built on something that came before? Mutation and exaptation have clear---in fact vitally important for the former---roles in evolutionary processes.
Unfortunately, because linguists seem for some reason to think that human language is the only possible model for language (see the other comments from linguists in this thread, for example) it can be difficult to recognize the linguistic (or possibly linguist-ish) capabilities of non-human species that do not conform well to that model.
Given that our only unambiguous model for Language is human language, it should be unsurprising that that's what we take as our primary model. Nonetheless, see my earlier reference to Samuels 2009 for a clear indication that this trend is changing.
I now have the PNAS paper in hand (well, on-screen)...I may come back and say more...
I am, as---one would guess from your linked comment---you seem to be.
Nope...same guy, but that's from 2 years ago...I'm still waiting for the new one to show up.
Those scientists who have been studying animal language as a non-pseudoscience have been waiting for anyone to show SYNTAX in animal language. You have have 1 trillion different words in a language, and it has a finite range of expressions... meanwhile you can have 10 different words, that with the right syntax can generate an infinite range of expressions.
While this is true, it's not clear to me that what's documented here is, in fact, syntax. The researcher in question (Zuberbühler) has written about this stuff before and has been much more cautious in attributing full-on linguistic properties (a search of LanguageLog will turn something up from 2006).
I'll reserve absolute judgment for when I get a chance to look at the actual paper, but this quote from NYT gives me pause: Two booms can be combined with a series of "krak-oos," with a meaning entirely different to that of either of its components. This is not (typically) how human language works...meaning is compositionally built up from bits of syntax, whereas what's described here looks more like idiom. In fact, it looks more like phonology (*maybe* morphology) to me...meaningless bits that can be put together to make meaningful bits.
What they need to do now is get a linguist in there so slice & dice the recordings, play them back to the monkeys in various reconstructed forms, and see how they react.
Also...
[...] a chance to really look at a real proto-syntax, because all human languages have a very strongly developed syntax
some would argue against the subordinate clause here (pointing at Piraha, for example), but I'm not one of those. However, it might be the case that this "syntax" has developed in parallel to human syntax from some common protolanguage (since these are monkeys and not even apes, we're talking REALLY far back), and so this may be relatively uninformative with respect to human syntax.
There really are people out there who think that if an adult says "Hi" to a kid they don't know, said adult must be up to no good.
0:26
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoN6XfyQsr4
(really, just an excuse to promote something I think is good)
I...I can't tell if your sig is being facetious. I've gone all twitchy after reading it...
You'll see more misanthropy, misogyny, misandry, every flavor of "ism" etc etc in pretty much any community.
Yeah, but we're not talking about "hatred/dislike on the basis of intrinsic characteristics" here (viz. your "mis-X" examples)...you can dislike someone and still accept that they're highly competent (cf. many people's opinion of Theo de Raadt). The current brouhaha is about differential (i.e. worse) treatment on the basis of gender. I'm willing to just come out and say that there's none of that in the FOSS world as regards its overwhelmingly male membership..."obviously you can't code, you're just a dude"...
[...] but a social group based around "show us the code" [...]
One of the major points of this discussion is that what I just quoted is a fictive characterization of the FOSS community. Obviously there are places where the situation is better (e.g. the kernel mailing list), and worse (e.g. several recent keynote talks). The thing is people are people and sociological things will typically get in the way of impartiality. In this case, we're talking about when that manifests as discrimination against women. Which it does. But shouldn't.
where people can choose everything about how they present themselves[...]
Not sure about the relevance of this...
This would be awful for people who live in Montreal...the axis that determines streets' "North/South" designation is pretty nearly NW-SE, and most people who've lived in Montreal for a while point NW when you ask them to show you N. In winter the sun rises & sets in really weird places. (or rather, it doesn't but a lot of people think it does *if* they bother to stop and think about it)
Dannnnnnng...my EeePC 900 with eeebuntu gives me about 2.5 hours.
Is there a magic bullet website that compiles all of the battery-life-increasing tips?
Huh ?
http://www1.ca.dell.com/ca/en/home/Laptops/laptop-inspiron-10/pd.aspx?refid=laptop-inspiron-10&s=dhs&cs=cadhs1&ref=lthp
Leftmost item is a Dell Mini 10v (as you pointed out), with Ubuntu pre-installed, and a 160GB hard drive. In fact,the page you linked to seems to have the same item (3rd from left), albeit at an inexplicably higher price (and in USD).
Who gives a shit about the "instant discount" for the Windows version?
Languages are shaped by cognitive cost.
What are you talking about? Languages are shaped by a lot of things...social conventions, acquisition/induction in the face of noisy data, possible predispositions/biases towards particular analyses of novel data...but not cognitive cost. Unless you're using those words to mean something non-obvious.
This is what Steven Pinker seems not to get. There _is_ an innate language instinct, it's just not what he thinks it is. What we all share is the ability to introspect the cognitive cost of figuring out "WTH is this dude trying to convey?"
I'm no Pinker apologist (Jackendoff is better, for my money), but I'm pretty sure that there's not much that Pinker "doesn't get" about language...other than in the obvious sense that we're all on this voyage of knowledge and there are tonnes of things that we collectively don't know about language. The view of the "language instinct" espoused by Pinker has undergone a lot of revision, including by him (maybe try reading something post-1994. I recommend Words and Rules.) Also, the things that we're able to introspect about our language production ("how do I say X?") or comprehension ("what does Y mean when that person says it?") is a relatively small corner of the cognitive edifice that undergirds our linguistic knowledge. Moreover, it's rare that we have to explicitly reason through to an interpretation...most of the time there's no introspection involved at all.
One of the key insights on language is that Lempel-Ziv compression never transmits the compression dictionary.
Really? That's funny, because not a single one of the textbooks I've opened in 9 years of studying linguistics has mentioned gzip as representing one of the key insights of language.
The dictionary is implied because the compression program and the decompression program share the same dictionary construction heuristic. This is a trick you can pull off only if the two sides of the channel share the same cognitive architecture. There are no shortage of examples out there of how fast communication breaks down when the parties begin with fundamentally different premises on how to structure the categories of thought.
You don't need to have different cognitive category-structures for communication to break down. Moreover, there aren't any concepts that aren't expressible in some human language. Sure there may not be an English word that means zeitgeist (to trot out a hackneyed example), but that doesn't mean I can't use some longer construction to express the same meaning (look in your Deutsch-English dict for some hints).
Here's another fundamental question: what portion of the brain's cognitive activity is devoted to power management? For one thing, glucose is precious resource, and the brain is a chug-a-lug organ where it comes to glucose consumption. For another, the brain is costly to cool. From the real-time perspective (which governed 5.999 million years of human evolution), there's not much use firing up the abstract-noun chocolate factory when you need a survival response in under 100ms.
I'm not clear what this has to do with anything else, so I'll mostly gloss over it. BUT, I'm pretty sure it doesn't cost THAT much to cool one's head, since a lot of our heat escapes that way anyhow (lots of blood vessels really close to the surface, hence the propensity for head injuries to bleed like the dickens).
[...]
You can't defer deciding what to record for very long. So this is an obligatory cognitive function when your brain is already heavily loaded. At high enough stress levels, the recording function does shut down. Assessing and responding to cognitive burden is a mission-critical survival function. This is a key foundation for language learning.
First anguage acquisition happens in the absence of explicit tutoring, and
The point Hawking's making is interesting, and potentially relevant, but it's hardly a novel claim. What he's talking about it often called "cultural evolution", and people have been talking about it for a while now, starting(?) with Cavalli-Sforza et al back in the 80s. It's regained momentum with the recent (~ last decade) resurgence of interest in the evolution of language (cf. papers by Simon Kirby, Henry Brighton & friends in the 2006 PNAS).
Also, it seems doubtful to me that we're literally no longer evolving in the "traditional" sense of the word. Sure, we're doing things to artificially prolong life and enhance reproductive success, but that doesn't really change the fact that natural and sexual selection are still at work.
Disclaimer: I am NOT a biologist. I AM a linguist.
Either video gaming is harmful for everyone, or it's not harmful for anyone. I mean, you could come up with reasons why it's worse for kids, but lots of them have been explored and found to have been pure bullshit.
OK, so either I wasn't clear, or you're being a bit disingenuous. I'm talking about content, rather than the mere act of gaming itself. For all of its faults, the gaming ratings system (much like the movie rating system), says that particular kinds of content are appropriate for particular audience demographics, not that games (or movies) are good for some people and bad for others. I mean, really now.
If the issue is the kind of game you're playing, then play a different kind of game that you can play with your kid and stop skulking around like a criminal.
Well, there's no doubt that playing family games is a good thing to do. It's a great way to get parent-child time in for those who love gaming, as well as being responsible parenting in re: supervising the content of your kids' games. That being said, having a child means doesn't have to mean that I can't play any non-child-appropriate games (see any non-child-appropriate movies) until my kid is a teenager. When the kid's in bed, I can play my AO games. It's not really that hard.
I live in Ottawa and want to do something more than write a letter that I know will be ignored to a local MP who I know is not in line with my position anyway. While I'm interested in law & policy as it applies to this domain, it's definitely not in my sphere of knowledge.
Do /.ers have any suggestions about what I can do to fight this, or good ways to raise awareness?
I have a daughter who is not allowed to watch me play (she's 4)
Why is she not allowed to play?
Granted, I'm picking nits, but note that this is not, in fact, what the GP says. "Not allowed to watch me play" =/=> "Not allowed to play"
And if it's not okay for her, why is it okay for you?
Yes, because children are exactly like little adults and can and should be exposed to all of the same stimuli as adults. Yeesh. Spoken like a true (i) childless person, (ii) lying person *with* child, or (iii) person *with* child that is going to grow up way too fast.
Perhaps whatever you're doing is either (a) not harmful for her to see and you could play it during normal waking hours, or (b) harmful for both of you and you should stop.
Or perhaps it's (c) OK for adults to see, but *not* 4 YEAR OLDS.
How much do you need to eat a burger, anyway? Is your meal so important that it supercedes an animal's right to life?
*shrug* Pretty much. If someone/thing comes along and is able to dispose of me and eat me, then good for it. Also, what is this "right to life" you speak of?
[Scientists] have a discussion like adults, they look at the math, one side is correct and they correct their experiment and thank them for the contribution.
...you're kidding, right? Don't get me wrong, I'm a scientist (well, in some people's eyes) and I love when it works the way it's supposed to, but it's so rare that I sure as hell don't hang my happiness hat on it.
To think that scientists don't jealously guard their pet theories, or that politics and sociology don't play a major role in the development/advancement (or lack thereof) in science is just to be woefully blind to the truths of human nature. Everyone consistently (although perhaps mostly unknowingly) takes full advantage of Duhem-Quine by tweaking auxiliary hypotheses/assumptions.
In fact, I've been asked by a boss when will my kids be old enough that I can 'get serious about my career'[...]
I'll surely catch some flack from the right-wing/libertarian contingent here on /. for pointing this out, I'm pretty sure that kind of question is illegal.
Actually, now that I think about it, I only know it's illegal up here in Socalist Canada...
(...hmm...a new joke meme? "In Socialist Canada, government takes care of YOU!")