Actually the leading theory suggests that they did have the knowledge of fire, but then lost it. Many other island cultures do show this behaviour - due to isolation.
One major reason why the blame is on man is that these species did not co-evolve with man. By the time humans reached say Australia, they were already very intelligent and were the apex predator of all the habitats he encountered, due to organisation, fire and tools. Since they did not co-evolve, these birds which were not afraid of humans since they have not seen humans before. Thus, they became easy prey to humans before they could evolve to learn fear for humans. Actually, humans are blamed for mega fauna extinction in almost all the continents other than africa due to the exact same thing. And this was a detriment to their future evolution due to lack of mega fauna to domesticate too - which is a different subject altogether.
Sorry, if my previous mail looked too nationalistic. I am a person who wants to be a global citizen in my views; even though I dont succeed all the time.
I completely agree that it sucks to live in most places - esp if you are quite poor. What I was just trying to say in my original post was that there are many other things which people do not consider when they ponder about happiness. I myself was not aware of it until I read Jared. So, I was just trying to put it forward.
Again, sorry if my mail looked like I was being too nationalistic. I myself wants to come to US for Ph.D in say 4-5 years, because I consider the educational institutions in US much better than that of India. So, as you can see, my intent was not to disparage US or not to put India in a pedestal. Just that different countries have different positives and negatives.
I accept I was in the wrong to classify Western Cultures as not being family oriented. It was as bad, or even worse - as the OP telling all Indians would wet themselves in the prospect of going to US. What I wanted to actually say was that -as per Jared - developing economies and even hunter-gatherer cultures seems to be as happy or even happier than people in developed economies due to other things which usually does not come in to picture. When I tried to explain it, it came out wrong. My bad.
Even now, any Indian would wet themselves at the prospect of being able to work in America.
producing little creative output(in before Slumdog)
I take that you do not know too much about India. I think it is short sighted to talk about a country you have not lived in for atleast few years. Whatever you think as true, might not be, you know.
I am an Indian, and I have lots of friends who went to USA, came back and do not want to go back there. Lest you think it is just anecdotal evidence, Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs and Steel has quite a bit of literature specifically set for this scenario. His finding was that, even though living in developed countries provide you better healthcare and even better security, the overall quality of living actually is same or even lesser in developed economies compared to developing economies*.
The overall quality of life is determined by lots of factors - one of the most important being relations. Humans seems to be most happy with very close and extended families and lot of friends, which is usually lost in western cultures. Most of my friends are back here because they want to be home.
Regarding creative output, I would have to say that you are quite wrong in that aspect. Also it is not correct to calculate creativity based on how many hollywood movies that country has come up with.
Please note that these are only the major ones known throughout India. Each state has completely different set of dances and music associated with it which people follow widely. In addition to these we have good literature movement, very good drama movement and each state has their own movie system too. India has more than 20 major languages, so the movies are usually made for one language only - i.e. why it is not appreciated much outside the country.
What I would suggest is do not go just by what best sellers and media portray - the actuality might be very different. Also, please consider that what you consider as happiness might not be the only scale with which others measure theirs.
After reading through your messages, I have to tell you - I have a huge respect for you. I consider myself a non-violent and ethical person. But, if I were in your situation, I would most probably have reacted differently. But, to hold on to your ethics, even in such scenarios, truly shows how good a person you are, and also has caused me to re-evaluate on my belief of how much an ethical person I am. I am not a person who resorts to platitudes - so please take this as the showing of heartfelt respect.
But then, your quality of internet browsing will become less, right? without google, or any other search engines, how can you actually browse or search for something? Without sites like/. or ars or infoq, how will you learn about new tech from internet? and so on and so forth...
Please note that this is just a question. I am not a mechanical engineer, so I am not aware of the physical limitations. My question was because 200 M $ per day is a huge amount - and I was wondering if there are any filters which can mitigate this issue?
Is it possible to stop the ash from entering the engines ? Say, with a filter in front of the engine of some sort? If the losses are in tune of 200 M $ a day, then this would be the better option, right?
This is such a beautiful idea. Beautiful beautiful idea. I will never think of something like this. I do not care whether it is possible to generate energy efficiently or not - this is a really really cool tech.
By the same logic, even if you give them say 500 more years, we should not expect them to find anything since 500 out of 13.75 billion years is again nothing. I am all for science, and even approve of SETI. But I am not sure whether this is the correct argument for it.
Plus, being a foreigner, he would be provided a much better quality of living by his neighbours, due to the curiosity of the unknown. Plus, being a foreigner, the gangsters would harass him much less, due to the fear of the unknown. Plus, being a foreigner, the police would not even dare to trouble him. Had he lived for say 3 years, and then he writes his experiences, I would give much more value to his words. This, is just sham.
I am actually seriously worried about AI. Not for me, but for my children. If they find that they are with a higher intelligent species than them, what would their reaction be?
My whole hope in life is that I can create something of value - and I work towards that too. Even though I understand that I am much less intelligent than many people, I know that there is a niche part which I am good at, and there are not too many people checking out on that niche market - so I hope to create value in that niche market. It is what drives quite a lot of people.
But, what about our children? When they see that there is a beast which can create higher value add due to higher intelligence and higher levels of concentration, and which can be created as many as we please - there wont be even niche markets. The invisible hand is going to be destroyed.
Also, I felt that quite a bit of time, we are driven by the fact that we can be successful - for varied definitions of success. But for our kids, there is no more success waiting for them. We are dooming all of them to failure, and I am seriously worried about it. The life we are providing for them is an extremely bland one - and I dont think we can stop it.
I am an AI hobbyist too - but that makes me all the more worried. AI is not indeed far away.
If my ancestor got a brain virus, and it is still with us, then it most probably is that that virus provided something very positive compared to the negatives that you speak of. Otherwise, evolution would have taken care of removing that persons lineage from existance. So yes, it is indeed a good return of investment.
Not quite. This building already made 10% more than what was spent. The company was hoping at max for break-even, since their whole idea was to make money from the 500 acres near it which is also owned by it. That part might have to wait a little, but anything else now is a bonus.
I do not think that Hinduism is at fault here. I have read quite a bit of books on Hinduism, and I dont remember seeing anywhere clauses that other religions should not exist or that people should fight if somebody blasphemes. It is mostly people with vested interests that ferment trouble. For example, right wing political parties trying to increase xenophobia for getting more votes for the next election, or not so nice religious leaders trying to increase their clout etc has very good motivation in inciting riots.
What I have seen is that this is indeed the case in almost all religions. More than anything, it is the human development index which specifically shows through in such cases. Where HDI is low, people are more discontent and it is easy to channel their discontent to anger by rabble rousing. In most countries it is the same. If you were to look at countries with high HDI and literacy, people does not take to streets for such issues. People there has more to lose and also they have more channels of information and understanding which makes such people more understanding. Even inside India, states like Kerala has very high HDI - close to that of developed nations - and riots happen very rarely there.
I think it has nothing to do with Christianity or Hinduism or anything. Also, regarding the quote
it is India's fault for letting this crap happen
, I quite disagree with your point. India, even though growing, has quite a bit of people with a lot of discontent. I have seen that Indians do care quite a bit for freedom - in both speech and action. In such a country, there will be many who will incite people, and riots do happen. If it was more like China, then freedom of speech is a little more curtailed, and rabble rousers wont have such a free rein. So, Indian government does not have any other option to block communication channels to avoid these speeches becoming more widespread and cause more deaths.
Very true. As I mentioned before in another story - see here, if Microsoft really wanted to hurt google they could do that by having a properly created AdBlock in their browser. These companies just want to improve value for their shareholders. They really do not want to destroy the other. And having competition is always good.
I guess the author is not very much into capitalism.
Actually, as far as Microsoft is concerned, it might be a good idea for them to incorporate AdBlock in IE. With a lions share in web surfing, an automatically set AdBlock might be a good way to decrease Googles revenue and thus decrease its competitive power. It might be unethical and counter-productive for human innovation, but I think for Microsoft it would be a good stratergy.
Web History is extremely important to google in many ways. So I do not think they will do anything wrong with it, since it would cause people to stop using cookies.
As an example usage that I can think of, say, Suppose a person search for the text ’yyy’ in Google Search. Now, of the links he received, he reads the text associated with each link and clicks on 3 or 4 links to open in new tabs/windows. He gets the information he requires from the 3rd link, and so he closes the pages and is done with the search. Now, after a few days, he again requires the same information. He again types the text ’yyy’ in search, and now of all the links, there is a higher probability of the 3rd link being clicked first before the others, because it provided value to him earlier. The more times he searches, the higher the probability of the link being clicked. Now, by using this information, google can consider that the 3rd link in this case provided more value to the user than others. Since this is very powerful data, i.e. it is as good as user telling google that this link has given me more value than others, the page rank of that page can be increased based on this.
There are so many other scenarios that I can think of - and these are very simple scenarios, with very less implementation issues (other than stopping people trying to game google), using web history. I dont think they will misuse web history in any way because of this.
Note: I am not sure whether the method I mentioned here is used by google or not. It was just a mechanism I could think of.
Thank you very much. Would you be able to point me to any books for translation algorithms and mechanisms? I have been reading the clbook (for computational linguistics, rather than translation). Are there any books for translation algorithms?
Which is the best translation software in your opinion? Are there any books which point to the state of art translation algorithms and how it is implemented? I have searched for translation theory a lot, but google mostly returns with human translation theory rather than the algorithms behind it.
Another option that you can think of is to patent it in another country. Say, India/China etc. The patent will cost you very less - even if you go for a big shot lawyer, it will cost you in the range of 2000$ or less.
Now, once it is patented, you go about implementing the same and try to sell it in the patented country. If it makes enough money, you can apply for a PCS form to patent it internationally or maybe in US alone.
Please note that patenting usually does not guarantee you any income. The stats suggest upwards of 90% of patents does not generate any revenue at all. But still, it could be because most patents are done by companies trying to increase their image in the market. Also, it would be better for you try to implement the same before you patent it, since you might otherwise miss some important points which crop up during implementation.
Another point is that - if you are a techie - is that even implementing is somewhat easier compared to marketing and selling. Best of luck anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the leading theory suggests that they did have the knowledge of fire, but then lost it. Many other island cultures do show this behaviour - due to isolation.
One major reason why the blame is on man is that these species did not co-evolve with man.
By the time humans reached say Australia, they were already very intelligent and were the apex predator of all the habitats he encountered, due to organisation, fire and tools.
Since they did not co-evolve, these birds which were not afraid of humans since they have not seen humans before. Thus, they became easy prey to humans before they could evolve to learn fear for humans.
Actually, humans are blamed for mega fauna extinction in almost all the continents other than africa due to the exact same thing. And this was a detriment to their future evolution due to lack of mega fauna to domesticate too - which is a different subject altogether.
Sorry, if my previous mail looked too nationalistic. I am a person who wants to be a global citizen in my views; even though I dont succeed all the time.
I completely agree that it sucks to live in most places - esp if you are quite poor. What I was just trying to say in my original post was that there are many other things which people do not consider when they ponder about happiness. I myself was not aware of it until I read Jared. So, I was just trying to put it forward.
Again, sorry if my mail looked like I was being too nationalistic. I myself wants to come to US for Ph.D in say 4-5 years, because I consider the educational institutions in US much better than that of India. So, as you can see, my intent was not to disparage US or not to put India in a pedestal. Just that different countries have different positives and negatives.
I accept I was in the wrong to classify Western Cultures as not being family oriented. It was as bad, or even worse - as the OP telling all Indians would wet themselves in the prospect of going to US.
What I wanted to actually say was that -as per Jared - developing economies and even hunter-gatherer cultures seems to be as happy or even happier than people in developed economies due to other things which usually does not come in to picture.
When I tried to explain it, it came out wrong. My bad.
Even now, any Indian would wet themselves at the prospect of being able to work in America.
producing little creative output(in before Slumdog)
I take that you do not know too much about India. I think it is short sighted to talk about a country you have not lived in for atleast few years. Whatever you think as true, might not be, you know.
I am an Indian, and I have lots of friends who went to USA, came back and do not want to go back there. Lest you think it is just anecdotal evidence, Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs and Steel has quite a bit of literature specifically set for this scenario. His finding was that, even though living in developed countries provide you better healthcare and even better security, the overall quality of living actually is same or even lesser in developed economies compared to developing economies*.
The overall quality of life is determined by lots of factors - one of the most important being relations. Humans seems to be most happy with very close and extended families and lot of friends, which is usually lost in western cultures. Most of my friends are back here because they want to be home.
Regarding creative output, I would have to say that you are quite wrong in that aspect. Also it is not correct to calculate creativity based on how many hollywood movies that country has come up with.
We have our own genres of music, two of the most popular being Carnatic and hindustani, we have our own genres of dances, the most important eight being Kathakali, Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi, Odissi, Manipuri, Sattriya and Kathak.
Please note that these are only the major ones known throughout India. Each state has completely different set of dances and music associated with it which people follow widely. In addition to these we have good literature movement, very good drama movement and each state has their own movie system too. India has more than 20 major languages, so the movies are usually made for one language only - i.e. why it is not appreciated much outside the country.
What I would suggest is do not go just by what best sellers and media portray - the actuality might be very different. Also, please consider that what you consider as happiness might not be the only scale with which others measure theirs.
* Unless they are in poverty.
After reading through your messages, I have to tell you - I have a huge respect for you.
I consider myself a non-violent and ethical person. But, if I were in your situation, I would most probably have reacted differently.
But, to hold on to your ethics, even in such scenarios, truly shows how good a person you are, and also has caused me to re-evaluate on my belief of how much an ethical person I am.
I am not a person who resorts to platitudes - so please take this as the showing of heartfelt respect.
But then, your quality of internet browsing will become less, right? /. or ars or infoq, how will you learn about new tech from internet?
without google, or any other search engines, how can you actually browse or search for something?
Without sites like
and so on and so forth...
Please note that this is just a question.
I am not a mechanical engineer, so I am not aware of the physical limitations.
My question was because 200 M $ per day is a huge amount - and I was wondering if there are any filters which can mitigate this issue?
Is it possible to stop the ash from entering the engines ?
Say, with a filter in front of the engine of some sort?
If the losses are in tune of 200 M $ a day, then this would be the better option, right?
This is such a beautiful idea.
Beautiful beautiful idea.
I will never think of something like this.
I do not care whether it is possible to generate energy efficiently or not - this is a really really cool tech.
By the same logic, even if you give them say 500 more years, we should not expect them to find anything since 500 out of 13.75 billion years is again nothing.
I am all for science, and even approve of SETI. But I am not sure whether this is the correct argument for it.
Use BigTable :-)
Plus, being a foreigner, he would be provided a much better quality of living by his neighbours, due to the curiosity of the unknown.
Plus, being a foreigner, the gangsters would harass him much less, due to the fear of the unknown.
Plus, being a foreigner, the police would not even dare to trouble him.
Had he lived for say 3 years, and then he writes his experiences, I would give much more value to his words.
This, is just sham.
I am actually seriously worried about AI. Not for me, but for my children. If they find that they are with a higher intelligent species than them, what would their reaction be?
My whole hope in life is that I can create something of value - and I work towards that too. Even though I understand that I am much less intelligent than many people, I know that there is a niche part which I am good at, and there are not too many people checking out on that niche market - so I hope to create value in that niche market. It is what drives quite a lot of people.
But, what about our children? When they see that there is a beast which can create higher value add due to higher intelligence and higher levels of concentration, and which can be created as many as we please - there wont be even niche markets. The invisible hand is going to be destroyed.
Also, I felt that quite a bit of time, we are driven by the fact that we can be successful - for varied definitions of success. But for our kids, there is no more success waiting for them. We are dooming all of them to failure, and I am seriously worried about it. The life we are providing for them is an extremely bland one - and I dont think we can stop it.
I am an AI hobbyist too - but that makes me all the more worried. AI is not indeed far away.
And who is going to provide this database?
If my ancestor got a brain virus, and it is still with us, then it most probably is that that virus provided something very positive compared to the negatives that you speak of. Otherwise, evolution would have taken care of removing that persons lineage from existance.
So yes, it is indeed a good return of investment.
Not quite. This building already made 10% more than what was spent. The company was hoping at max for break-even, since their whole idea was to make money from the 500 acres near it which is also owned by it.
That part might have to wait a little, but anything else now is a bonus.
I do not think that Hinduism is at fault here. I have read quite a bit of books on Hinduism, and I dont remember seeing anywhere clauses that other religions should not exist or that people should fight if somebody blasphemes. It is mostly people with vested interests that ferment trouble. For example, right wing political parties trying to increase xenophobia for getting more votes for the next election, or not so nice religious leaders trying to increase their clout etc has very good motivation in inciting riots.
What I have seen is that this is indeed the case in almost all religions. More than anything, it is the human development index which specifically shows through in such cases. Where HDI is low, people are more discontent and it is easy to channel their discontent to anger by rabble rousing. In most countries it is the same. If you were to look at countries with high HDI and literacy, people does not take to streets for such issues. People there has more to lose and also they have more channels of information and understanding which makes such people more understanding. Even inside India, states like Kerala has very high HDI - close to that of developed nations - and riots happen very rarely there.
I think it has nothing to do with Christianity or Hinduism or anything. Also, regarding the quote
it is India's fault for letting this crap happen
, I quite disagree with your point. India, even though growing, has quite a bit of people with a lot of discontent. I have seen that Indians do care quite a bit for freedom - in both speech and action. In such a country, there will be many who will incite people, and riots do happen. If it was more like China, then freedom of speech is a little more curtailed, and rabble rousers wont have such a free rein. So, Indian government does not have any other option to block communication channels to avoid these speeches becoming more widespread and cause more deaths.
Very true.
As I mentioned before in another story - see here, if Microsoft really wanted to hurt google they could do that by having a properly created AdBlock in their browser.
These companies just want to improve value for their shareholders. They really do not want to destroy the other. And having competition is always good.
I guess the author is not very much into capitalism.
Thank you. /. article are worth a read.
The comments in the old
Esp.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=189951&cid=15635693
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=189951&cid=15634139
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=189951&cid=15634257
Makes an interesting read. Also, good to have a comparison between the average quality of comments from 06 and 09 in /.
Actually, as far as Microsoft is concerned, it might be a good idea for them to incorporate AdBlock in IE.
With a lions share in web surfing, an automatically set AdBlock might be a good way to decrease Googles revenue and thus decrease its competitive power.
It might be unethical and counter-productive for human innovation, but I think for Microsoft it would be a good stratergy.
Web History is extremely important to google in many ways. So I do not think they will do anything wrong with it, since it would cause people to stop using cookies.
As an example usage that I can think of, say, Suppose a person search for the text ’yyy’ in Google Search. Now, of the links he received, he reads the text associated with each link and clicks on 3 or 4 links to open in new tabs/windows. He gets the information he requires from the 3rd link, and so he closes the pages and is done with the search. Now, after a few days, he again requires the same information. He again types the text ’yyy’ in search, and now of all the links, there is a higher probability of the 3rd link being clicked first before the others, because it provided value to him earlier. The more times he searches, the higher the probability of the link being clicked. Now, by using this information, google can consider that the 3rd link in this case provided more value to the user than others. Since this is very powerful data, i.e. it is as good as user telling google that this link has given me more value than others, the page rank of that page can be increased based on this.
There are so many other scenarios that I can think of - and these are very simple scenarios, with very less implementation issues (other than stopping people trying to game google), using web history. I dont think they will misuse web history in any way because of this.
Note: I am not sure whether the method I mentioned here is used by google or not. It was just a mechanism I could think of.
Thank you very much.
Would you be able to point me to any books for translation algorithms and mechanisms?
I have been reading the clbook (for computational linguistics, rather than translation).
Are there any books for translation algorithms?
Which is the best translation software in your opinion?
Are there any books which point to the state of art translation algorithms and how it is implemented?
I have searched for translation theory a lot, but google mostly returns with human translation theory rather than the algorithms behind it.
Another option that you can think of is to patent it in another country. Say, India/China etc.
The patent will cost you very less - even if you go for a big shot lawyer, it will cost you in the range of 2000$ or less.
Now, once it is patented, you go about implementing the same and try to sell it in the patented country.
If it makes enough money, you can apply for a PCS form to patent it internationally or maybe in US alone.
Please note that patenting usually does not guarantee you any income. The stats suggest upwards of 90% of patents does not generate any revenue at all.
But still, it could be because most patents are done by companies trying to increase their image in the market.
Also, it would be better for you try to implement the same before you patent it, since you might otherwise miss some important points which crop up during implementation.
Another point is that - if you are a techie - is that even implementing is somewhat easier compared to marketing and selling.
Best of luck anyways.