... an algorithm was something which reliably produced results when processing the same input.
NN/AI people keep using that word, "algorithm", I do not think it means what they think it means...
Professor Matthew Walker, Director of UC Berkeley’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab, published "Why We Sleep" last month.
http://www.simonandschuster.co...
I devoured the book; it's good science and remarkably well written. It covers a lot of the current work, and that work would go a long way to explaining this effect. There is so much going on when we sleep that is key to mental and physical health, it's not just "downtime", and to a degree I had not imagined.
Sadly, I now realize I must consume less of my beloved coffee. Gladly, my sleep habits were already pretty good and the kids in my house have an early bedtime, no tech in the bedroom rule.
I think that Nikola Tesla might call this out as an old idea (http://teslaradio.com/pages/tesla.htm,https://www.damninteresting.com/teslas-tower-of-power/) although his designs were a little more grand. If he'd only pulled it off we'd have been wireless for a century now.:-)
Seems "AI" hasn't come much further than the chat bot we had at Waterloo about 2005. We fed it the Star Wars scripts, the Bible, the Complete Works of Shakespeare and a few scholarly articles about the Iraq war. It was occasionally funny. It was about as coherent as that script.
I'm reminded of the remark that a dancing dog is interesting because it has been taught to dance, not because it dances well.
I did my Master's at a top Canadian university in 1992. I was T.A. for the 4th-year graphics course, one of the "big three" at that school.
Each term we had about 25 students, 5 or 6 of whom were really good.
I went to industry for a decade, then decided my life was too easy.
I finished my Ph.D. at the same school in 2007. I was T.A. again for the 4th-year graphics course.
Each term we had about 50 students, 5 or 6 of whom were really good.
The "gene pool" of good, motivated students didn't change from 1992 to 2007, the profs were every bit as good both in research and teaching skill. The only "improvement" was the pool of fee-paying, half-subsidized students taking the course. The population of the province sure didn't double during the time, but the 1990's drive to get "more technical people" sure doubled the intake. The 5th year of high school was also trimmed back.
I knew faculty who quit for industry rather than teach remedial high-school math.
"Computer Science: because your Mom told you to!" was the headline of a poster seen outside the student society door... hits the nail on the head.
Corporations are legal entities comparable in law to people and these fines are little worse than traffic tickets. I like the approach of Japan's regulator to these frauds: ban the companies involved from any activity related to LIBOR based instruments. That cuts off the source of the motivation to fraud. It would kill the investment banking arm of these institutions and leave them the quiet, boring banks that we thought they were.
Write your MP/Congressperson....
Microsoft provides the avenues through which most spyware operates. By definition, therefore, they have total control over most of the anti-spyware (and spyware) market. Were they to remove the vulnerabilities in their software that allow spyware to be installed (unbeknownst to the computer's owner) they would eliminate the market for anti-spyware. If a user knowingly permits spyware on their machine it should, on a well-constructed system, be simple to monitor and remove.
Buying risk-control software from the company who has, for the most part, generated the risk in the first place seems to be a silly thing to do. Microsoft suffers here from a severe moral hazard: you are rewarding them for bad behaviour when you buy their anti-spyware system. Also, what guarantees that their anti-spyware system is of superior quality to their operating system software, and does not open new avenues for attack (cf. their WMV DRM offerings)?
I think third-party vendors of spyware should make this a selling point of their software.
Donald Knuth knows this
on
Life Interrupted
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.
Doxygen is a good choice for C++, C, Java, Objective-C, IDL... I used it to get into a ~50K line project a few years ago and have used it regularly whenever I'm forced to use C++... Get Graphviz as well so Doxygen can draw pretty pictures for you.
Face it, totalitarianism lives and thrives among system admins for a really good reason. Your only solution, I think, is to play the dictator and do it with a happy-friendly smile. Recycle some old Communist propaganda posters to get people in the right spirit.
And... as I tell my colleagues when they have Window's problems: hey, you have a Ph.D. in computers, you fix it.
At the start of September the CBC switched exclusively to Windows Media 9. I fired off a few e-mails to hosts I'd corresponded with before, and to their news desk. I noted they were denying "universal access" to their internet radio (that's a good push-button word in Canada) because the latest codecs were not supported by Linux/Unix based media players. I strongly suspect I wasn't the only one, since it only took about a week for them to switch to WM7/MS-MPEG4 for their streams, which Xine and Mplayer seem to handle more reliably.
On one of their promo-spots before the news they even explicitly said "even linux users" could listen on their internet streams.:-)
The switch to testing Ogg was a little later, which runs against their stated "one-stream" policy. I also strongly suspect Akamai was behind the original switch. Akamai streams the CBC content and are a "Microsoft Partner" company in the venture. It sounds a bit to me like Akamai sold them a bill of goods in the name of cost cutting, and that the response was not what they expected. I'm quite sure listeners in Europe, where MS does not reign quite as supreme, were not pleased. I've had notes from friends over there asking how to stream WM7 on Linux.
Then, three weeks ago, I submitted this story. (...but I'm not bitter...):^)
The CBC is not only great radio and television, it's also an organization full of really nice, really smart folks, and has been voted in the top 100 places to work in Canada.
Let's see how the kids interact with in game brands and product placements? I can see it now...
Congratulations, your new weapon is the new Colt(TM) M16A3 Assault Rifle featuring a folding stock, 90 round magazine and a 40mm M203 grenade launcher. A fine American product for fine American gamers. Great for mutant Martians or just shootin' up the neighborhood. Click here for a dealer near you!
The German language article says he came to a stop about 20km before a toll booth...
On the same theme: Saturn made a interesting assumption about their cars a few years ago. At high speed they reduced gas to the engine to control the speed to a maximum of 105mph. According to
this entry in Risks digest (source of endless scary stories about computing and automation risks) the author was left going down hill at over 105mph, coasting, with a stalled engine, no power brakes and no power steering.
... not fun at all...
Audi had a problem years ago that was supposedly due to a programming error. At low RPM the computer would increase power but fail to sense it under some circumstances. Net result: your car would suddenly go foot to the floor while you were stopped at a red light.
For years we have top quality journalism in Soviet Union: Izvestia and Pravda. See how for years Russian people flock to polls to vote 99% to return Communist Party to the helm of our glorious mother Russia. Is proof: your journalists are corrupt, scandal-seeking, sensationalists, traitors to the revolutionary ideals of your forefathers and sow the discontent that leads to many political parties expending precious resources of the working people for election campaigns. With better journalists you then would finally reject this chaos acheive true unity and Socialist peace under the banner of a one-party rule of the People.
Long live Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly! True champions of the people and glorious vanguards of the unified socialist rule that is the inevitable destiny of every industrialised country!
OK, OK, point taken. I was looking at it from the perspective of what I as an employee take home.
Ballpark, our health care system costs 9-10% of GDP, yours about 14% of GDP. OECD data for 2000 shows US paying 29.6% of GDP in taxes, Canada 35.8%. Difference is 6.2%. A good chunk of that can be explained by the health care system, most of which, I believe, is included in our tax figures.
You guys pay 6.9% of GDP on social security, versus 5.1% in Canada...
I stand by my point, I don't think our tax burden is significantly higher.
I find it telling that both New Zealand and the UK have seen upswings in crime roughly 15-20 years after their respective conservative "revolutions". That would be long enough for a generation to get into their prime crime committing years under a harsher set of societal rules.
I'm sorry that remark wasn't well enough qualified. There seems to be a large group of people who want to take snippets of convenient Hebrew law and use it to justify bad social policy. I do realise it has a more auspicious history than the reputation brought upon it by many of its less well informed protagonists.
No offense was intended. It is a rich legal tradition, my point was that we should also learn to build on it, not simply fall back upon poorly considered interpretations of it, if that makes any sense.
Check out Customs and
Immigration Canada for their Skilled Worker immigration
category. There's a little test on the site, and if you score enough
points on the test you probably qualify for immigration.
According to 2002 stats from the OECD and the UBS wages and cost of living survey the rates for personal taxes plus social security are about the same. Toronto is on par with New York, Montreal costs are lower, LA and Chicago similar to slightly lower than Montreal. OECD stats put personal tax burdens 1% different. We likely get better tax payment from our corporations, though.
Either way, I don't object because I like what we get for our tax dollar.
I'm not advocating removing even a whiff of personal responsibility. Nor free money. The proposals I've made have been succesfully implemented, which is why I made them. Maybe I can rephrase them.
The heroin program in Switzerland was so successful that when the right-wing party raised a referendum to eliminate it, the program was supported by a large majority of the popular vote. Something like 90% of herion addicts will never kick the habit. Addicts on the program were able to hold down jobs and return to productivity.
10% or more of the U.S. population live without health insurance in a country that pays the most of any western nation, in GDP/capital. Most people from other parts of the world view this as a bit perverse.
Rewards for idleness? No. Discarding the down-and-out? No. But these modest proposals seem to be common policies in countries with low crime rates and modest taxes. There is no total solution, including mine; I'm just saying there seem to be some success stories out there.
And yes, I'm glad to live in a society that rewards our efforts! Hear hear! And yes, the debate continues forever: that's democracy for you:-)
My little sister owns 4 Belgian shephards, but also pays what she calls her "hood fee": when the kids come-a-knockin for fundraising (pee-wee hockey, whatever) they always get a donation. She also has the dogs do tricks for them, basically keeps up neighborhood relations. She's never even had her house egged on Hallowe'en.:-)
She's a good neighbor and has four spun herding dogs... she's safe.
If everyone did, truly and honestly, convert to Islam the world would indeed be free of terrorists, but even metaphorically that wasn't my point. The economic analysis of crime to which you refer is one I need to read more about, but I intended my first point to address that somewhat; the resentment can be diminished if the wealth differences and opportunity differences can be sensibly addressed. Perhaps I laid too much emphasis on "personal desperation" by putting it in the leading sentence.
I take issue with taxation isn't punishment. Indeed, I'll warrant the tax rate in Afghanistan are near zero in most of the country and the crime rate rather higher than I'd be comfortable with. U.K. crime is bad, yes, but "socialist" went out with Thatcher.
It's a complex question, to be sure. On the whole I've enjoyed debating it this evening!
You more or less hit the nail on the head w.r.t. to my being un-nerved: it's the non-traditional family structures that seem to come in for harsh treatment when they can be as successful, as far as I know, as the traditional ones when it comes to providing a stable base for kids.
Thank you for the pointers, I'll have a look at that research via my local University.
I do basically agree with your points as clarified, though encoding bad parenting in law has got to be a tricky task. I would like to think my original propositions are ones that would reduce the stress on families, and in turn free up more social capital (even if its just time) for good parenting.
Slashdot Mirror
Hit it on the third shot though... it's hard to make it out on the fencepost at 200' with just the steel sights... eyesight ain't what it used to be.
... an algorithm was something which reliably produced results when processing the same input. NN/AI people keep using that word, "algorithm", I do not think it means what they think it means...
Professor Matthew Walker, Director of UC Berkeley’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab, published "Why We Sleep" last month. http://www.simonandschuster.co... I devoured the book; it's good science and remarkably well written. It covers a lot of the current work, and that work would go a long way to explaining this effect. There is so much going on when we sleep that is key to mental and physical health, it's not just "downtime", and to a degree I had not imagined. Sadly, I now realize I must consume less of my beloved coffee. Gladly, my sleep habits were already pretty good and the kids in my house have an early bedtime, no tech in the bedroom rule.
I think that Nikola Tesla might call this out as an old idea (http://teslaradio.com/pages/tesla.htm,https://www.damninteresting.com/teslas-tower-of-power/) although his designs were a little more grand. If he'd only pulled it off we'd have been wireless for a century now. :-)
Seems "AI" hasn't come much further than the chat bot we had at Waterloo about 2005. We fed it the Star Wars scripts, the Bible, the Complete Works of Shakespeare and a few scholarly articles about the Iraq war. It was occasionally funny. It was about as coherent as that script.
I'm reminded of the remark that a dancing dog is interesting because it has been taught to dance, not because it dances well.
I did my Master's at a top Canadian university in 1992. I was T.A. for the 4th-year graphics course, one of the "big three" at that school.
Each term we had about 25 students, 5 or 6 of whom were really good.
I went to industry for a decade, then decided my life was too easy.
I finished my Ph.D. at the same school in 2007. I was T.A. again for the 4th-year graphics course.
Each term we had about 50 students, 5 or 6 of whom were really good.
The "gene pool" of good, motivated students didn't change from 1992 to 2007, the profs were every bit as good both in research and teaching skill. The only "improvement" was the pool of fee-paying, half-subsidized students taking the course. The population of the province sure didn't double during the time, but the 1990's drive to get "more technical people" sure doubled the intake. The 5th year of high school was also trimmed back.
I knew faculty who quit for industry rather than teach remedial high-school math.
"Computer Science: because your Mom told you to!" was the headline of a poster seen outside the student society door... hits the nail on the head.
Corporations are legal entities comparable in law to people and these fines are little worse than traffic tickets. I like the approach of Japan's regulator to these frauds: ban the companies involved from any activity related to LIBOR based instruments. That cuts off the source of the motivation to fraud. It would kill the investment banking arm of these institutions and leave them the quiet, boring banks that we thought they were. Write your MP/Congressperson....
Microsoft provides the avenues through which most spyware operates. By definition, therefore, they have total control over most of the anti-spyware (and spyware) market. Were they to remove the vulnerabilities in their software that allow spyware to be installed (unbeknownst to the computer's owner) they would eliminate the market for anti-spyware. If a user knowingly permits spyware on their machine it should, on a well-constructed system, be simple to monitor and remove.
Buying risk-control software from the company who has, for the most part, generated the risk in the first place seems to be a silly thing to do. Microsoft suffers here from a severe moral hazard: you are rewarding them for bad behaviour when you buy their anti-spyware system. Also, what guarantees that their anti-spyware system is of superior quality to their operating system software, and does not open new avenues for attack (cf. their WMV DRM offerings)?
I think third-party vendors of spyware should make this a selling point of their software.
I'm reminded of a note on Dr. Donald Knuth's web page. Dr. Knuth apparently ditched e-mail in 1990 after 15 years of use.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.
Doxygen is a good choice for C++, C, Java, Objective-C, IDL... I used it to get into a ~50K line project a few years ago and have used it regularly whenever I'm forced to use C++... Get Graphviz as well so Doxygen can draw pretty pictures for you.
Face it, totalitarianism lives and thrives among system admins for a really good reason. Your only solution, I think, is to play the dictator and do it with a happy-friendly smile. Recycle some old Communist propaganda posters to get people in the right spirit.
And... as I tell my colleagues when they have Window's problems: hey, you have a Ph.D. in computers, you fix it.
At the start of September the CBC switched exclusively to Windows Media 9. I fired off a few e-mails to hosts I'd corresponded with before, and to their news desk. I noted they were denying "universal access" to their internet radio (that's a good push-button word in Canada) because the latest codecs were not supported by Linux/Unix based media players. I strongly suspect I wasn't the only one, since it only took about a week for them to switch to WM7/MS-MPEG4 for their streams, which Xine and Mplayer seem to handle more reliably.
On one of their promo-spots before the news they even explicitly said "even linux users" could listen on their internet streams. :-)
The switch to testing Ogg was a little later, which runs against their stated "one-stream" policy. I also strongly suspect Akamai was behind the original switch. Akamai streams the CBC content and are a "Microsoft Partner" company in the venture. It sounds a bit to me like Akamai sold them a bill of goods in the name of cost cutting, and that the response was not what they expected. I'm quite sure listeners in Europe, where MS does not reign quite as supreme, were not pleased. I've had notes from friends over there asking how to stream WM7 on Linux.
Then, three weeks ago, I submitted this story. (...but I'm not bitter...) :^)
The CBC is not only great radio and television, it's also an organization full of really nice, really smart folks, and has been voted in the top 100 places to work in Canada.
Let's see how the kids interact with in game brands and product placements? I can see it now...
Congratulations, your new weapon is the new Colt(TM) M16A3 Assault Rifle featuring a folding stock, 90 round magazine and a 40mm M203 grenade launcher. A fine American product for fine American gamers. Great for mutant Martians or just shootin' up the neighborhood. Click here for a dealer near you!
The German language article says he came to a stop about 20km before a toll booth...
On the same theme: Saturn made a interesting assumption about their cars a few years ago. At high speed they reduced gas to the engine to control the speed to a maximum of 105mph. According to this entry in Risks digest (source of endless scary stories about computing and automation risks) the author was left going down hill at over 105mph, coasting, with a stalled engine, no power brakes and no power steering.
... not fun at all...
Audi had a problem years ago that was supposedly due to a programming error. At low RPM the computer would increase power but fail to sense it under some circumstances. Net result: your car would suddenly go foot to the floor while you were stopped at a red light.
For years we have top quality journalism in Soviet Union: Izvestia and Pravda. See how for years Russian people flock to polls to vote 99% to return Communist Party to the helm of our glorious mother Russia. Is proof: your journalists are corrupt, scandal-seeking, sensationalists, traitors to the revolutionary ideals of your forefathers and sow the discontent that leads to many political parties expending precious resources of the working people for election campaigns. With better journalists you then would finally reject this chaos acheive true unity and Socialist peace under the banner of a one-party rule of the People.
Long live Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly! True champions of the people and glorious vanguards of the unified socialist rule that is the inevitable destiny of every industrialised country!
S'pose that means our Southern Cousins will just have to come to the Great White North for our healthier beer, eh? :-)
I always knew we drank better beer for a reason... :-}
Ballpark, our health care system costs 9-10% of GDP, yours about 14% of GDP. OECD data for 2000 shows US paying 29.6% of GDP in taxes, Canada 35.8%. Difference is 6.2%. A good chunk of that can be explained by the health care system, most of which, I believe, is included in our tax figures.
You guys pay 6.9% of GDP on social security, versus 5.1% in Canada...
I stand by my point, I don't think our tax burden is significantly higher.
I find it telling that both New Zealand and the UK have seen upswings in crime roughly 15-20 years after their respective conservative "revolutions". That would be long enough for a generation to get into their prime crime committing years under a harsher set of societal rules.
Just an observation...
I'm sorry that remark wasn't well enough qualified. There seems to be a large group of people who want to take snippets of convenient Hebrew law and use it to justify bad social policy. I do realise it has a more auspicious history than the reputation brought upon it by many of its less well informed protagonists.
No offense was intended. It is a rich legal tradition, my point was that we should also learn to build on it, not simply fall back upon poorly considered interpretations of it, if that makes any sense.
Check out Customs and Immigration Canada for their Skilled Worker immigration category. There's a little test on the site, and if you score enough points on the test you probably qualify for immigration.
According to 2002 stats from the OECD and the UBS wages and cost of living survey the rates for personal taxes plus social security are about the same. Toronto is on par with New York, Montreal costs are lower, LA and Chicago similar to slightly lower than Montreal. OECD stats put personal tax burdens 1% different. We likely get better tax payment from our corporations, though.
Either way, I don't object because I like what we get for our tax dollar.I'm not advocating removing even a whiff of personal responsibility. Nor free money. The proposals I've made have been succesfully implemented, which is why I made them. Maybe I can rephrase them.
The heroin program in Switzerland was so successful that when the right-wing party raised a referendum to eliminate it, the program was supported by a large majority of the popular vote. Something like 90% of herion addicts will never kick the habit. Addicts on the program were able to hold down jobs and return to productivity.
10% or more of the U.S. population live without health insurance in a country that pays the most of any western nation, in GDP/capital. Most people from other parts of the world view this as a bit perverse.
Rewards for idleness? No. Discarding the down-and-out? No. But these modest proposals seem to be common policies in countries with low crime rates and modest taxes. There is no total solution, including mine; I'm just saying there seem to be some success stories out there.
And yes, I'm glad to live in a society that rewards our efforts! Hear hear! And yes, the debate continues forever: that's democracy for you :-)
My little sister owns 4 Belgian shephards, but also pays what she calls her "hood fee": when the kids come-a-knockin for fundraising (pee-wee hockey, whatever) they always get a donation. She also has the dogs do tricks for them, basically keeps up neighborhood relations. She's never even had her house egged on Hallowe'en. :-)
She's a good neighbor and has four spun herding dogs... she's safe.
If everyone did, truly and honestly, convert to Islam the world would indeed be free of terrorists, but even metaphorically that wasn't my point. The economic analysis of crime to which you refer is one I need to read more about, but I intended my first point to address that somewhat; the resentment can be diminished if the wealth differences and opportunity differences can be sensibly addressed. Perhaps I laid too much emphasis on "personal desperation" by putting it in the leading sentence.
I take issue with taxation isn't punishment. Indeed, I'll warrant the tax rate in Afghanistan are near zero in most of the country and the crime rate rather higher than I'd be comfortable with. U.K. crime is bad, yes, but "socialist" went out with Thatcher.
It's a complex question, to be sure. On the whole I've enjoyed debating it this evening!
You more or less hit the nail on the head w.r.t. to my being un-nerved: it's the non-traditional family structures that seem to come in for harsh treatment when they can be as successful, as far as I know, as the traditional ones when it comes to providing a stable base for kids.
Thank you for the pointers, I'll have a look at that research via my local University.
I do basically agree with your points as clarified, though encoding bad parenting in law has got to be a tricky task. I would like to think my original propositions are ones that would reduce the stress on families, and in turn free up more social capital (even if its just time) for good parenting.