The Harvard Gazette article is original, I think, rather than just being a regurgitation of Reuters and/or New Scientist.
The core claim seems to be that the ancient Moslems discovered a set of patterns that interlocked in a very practical way.
Now let's go to Wikipedia. Scroll down and look at the how-to pictures, and note the references to the Golden Mean. I don't see anything there that couldn't have been discovered by the Greeks or their successors.
Finally, let's go to common sense. I don't know the history of how Penrose discovered these tilings, but two main avenues come to mind:
1. Dumb luck/trial and error/general geometric insight. 2. Symmetry groups (the analysis of rotational symmetries via the abstract algebra concept of "groups", something any computer science graduate is somewhat familiar with).
Well, if it's #1, then of course somebody ancient could have done it too. And if it's #2 -- well, a lot of ruler/compass constructions were done by the ancients, long before Galois proved they were better analyzed via group theory.
So yes -- it's easy to imagine, given the evidence, that somebody figured this out 500-1,000 years ago. True, it's almost impossible to imagine that they understood it in the same way that Penrose did -- but there's a whole lot of physical evidence that, at some level, they understood it just fine.
I remember a show-and-tell in 7th or 8th grade in 1968 or 9, when a kid talked about memory at $1K/Kb. I didn't know WTF that was all about, and certainly can't recall what kind of device he might have been building back then.
Yes. $1K in 1968 dollars for one part in a kid's project. What can I say? I grew up in Beverly Hills, a claim this is disputed only by those who claim I never grew up at all, or in any case not until I was over 30. It was the poorest part of town, but things were weird even there...
And it's not just Sybase IQ, either. There are lots of columnar players.Kognitio also has a columnar VLDB offering, but it's quite different from Vertica's. And the columnar memory-centric BI offerings are interesting as well, such as QlikTech's and SAP's. Also, full-text indexing is pretty columnar itself.
I had a long chat with Mike Stonebraker a few weeks ago, and came away with the following tentative opinions about Vertica's prospects, and those for columnar systems in general.
* Pinpoint data lookup doesn't seem like a great fit for columnar systems. Indeed, traditional rows-and-B-trees would seem to be best.
* Constrained query and reporting would seem to be a sweet spot, even though it's a sweet spot for some of the best competition as well.
* Cube-filling calculations involve big intermediate result sets. I'm not sure that's a great fit for columnar systems.
* Hardcore tabular data crunching would seem in many cases to be another sweet spot, again against a lot of competition, at least in some of its sub-categories.
* Text and media search are best done by specialized systems that, at least in the case of text, wind up being quasi-columnar. The same goes for other specialty areas. Systems like Vertica's have nothing to offer directly to these applications. However, it might be possible for Vertica to integrate with them fairly quickly, given that they're starting from vaguely similar philosophical roots.
There also are some technical details in that article; a link to a short, somewhat hagiographic intro to Mike himself; and so on.
Big companies sometimes really do want to be "made" to do the right thing, so that they can do it in lockstep without losing competitively to their less scrupulous rivals. Whether it's bribery or pollution or safety or censorship -- whether the motivation is simple economics or avoiding later political backlash or actual morality -- it's happening more and more.
Just as it would on the Internet, Tariff Rebate Passthrough would be a fix in the cell phone case as well. All the "decency" and noncompetition rules would be out the window, as would the socialism-style approval cycle. If anybody enforced "decency", it would be the FCC.
On the other hand, the cellular providers would still be allowed to rake in money hand over fist.
I've misplaced the link, if I ever had it (I just recall hearing about this from my wife the evolutionary biology teaching fellow) but there's currently a species of primate (bonobo?) that has different behaviors for different kinds of predators. They scurry up into trees for land-based predators, they go down under cover for large birds, and do something in between (I forget what) for snakes.
And they have different calls for each of these kinds of predator.
Well, they've developed another one for humans with rifles. And they give the call if they just see hunting dogs.
So yeah -- adapting to predators is a top-level priority. Although in that case they're benefitting from previously-evolved capabilities, presumably, given the speed of adaptation.
Want to have a serious barrier to copying your electronic text files? Make people buy them on paper.
Seriously, there are a lot of things to try
on
The MySpace Ecosystem
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
1. Multiple e-commerce models. Something will probably work. 2. Multiple approaches to network analysis, collaborative filtering, etc. (Obligatory shameless plug: The hot new company in network analysis is Cogito.) 3. Various communications things. 4. Various real time monitoring things, both narrowly filtered and for overall trends.
I bet if I'd logged onto the site a single time in my whole life I might be able to come up with even more ideas.;)
One the one hand, Congress is more motivated to do the right thing in this area than in many others, perhaps for no other reason than that their own status is threatened.
On the other hand, they're REALLY clueless about technology and its implications.
I really think we can make a difference by driving the public policy debate in the right directions.
Besides the nasty tactics outlined in the article, the RIAA et al. are a serious menace in at least two other ways.
First, they are a prime mover behind laws mandating a long audit trail (e.g., two years) recording who accesses which web sites. (Child porn is the other common motivation.) To date, this has been more of an issue in Europe than the US.
Second, there's a huge threat going forward as Layer 7 inspection by ISPs becomes commonplace. At that point, it will be at least theoretically possible to harass somebody for ANYTHING they download, upload, whatever, because intermediaries such as ISPs will have complete access to that information.
I agree almost completely. It's all about checks and balances. My only small disagreement -- really, more of an emphasis shift than a true disagreement -- is that just as the threat is newly automated, the monitoring may need to be automated too, and I don't think we understand very well yet what that entails.
Yes, the Bush Administration is a bunch of Constitution-ignoring, rights-trampling jackbooters. But while their extreme is wrong, ignoring security and defense would also be wrong.
Data mining and network analysis really are needed for security. Either that, or we need to compromise other freedoms -- such as freedom of movement -- in ways that would REALLY be anti-liberty. There's no way around that.
Instead, we need to put up safeguards against information misuse that are highly effective. I agree with you completely there. Where we disagree is that I don't see how safeguards against actual information gathering will remain viable for much longer. At least, they will be a far from complete solution.
On the other hand, I was fairly late to realizing how sustainable Microsoft's advantage would prove, back in my stock analyst days, so do consider the source...
Those protections are, in part, needed, as key parts of police and military defense. Just the needed parts are liberty threats, as has always been the case with police and military powers. Hence, we set up rules and procedures to control those threats.
Technological change in the threats and in the defenses means that the rules and procedures need to be updated too.
You seem to be arguing that all businesses should be free to use whatever DRM they want, but all buyers (or whoever else) should be free to do all hacking they want. For "intellectual" property that will never have more than few copies made, that idea may or may not be workable.
But do you seriously propose a world in which books and movies would be released with zero copyright protection, and "pirates" could legally reproduce and sell anything they physically could copy? That certainly would drive the profits out of the print publishing industry in hurry. Of course, I used to have a subscription newsletter, and now I blog similar material for free -- but I'd like my wife the novelist still be able to get paid for her work, should she ever choose to add to her total of 15 published novels. Do you really think it's necessary to abolish that possibility?
I'll hold off on further comment until I see whether you really meant to be that extreme.
A lot of people seem to be overlooking two basic facts:
1. The amount of information government truly needs to gather to protect us is also sufficient to greatly threaten our liberty. 2. Governments will inevitably gather much more information than they really need.
Examples of why we should expect government to gather huge amounts of information include, in no particular order:
A. All the call/e-mail/whatever connection information they're already getting, as documented in the news around NSA surveillance, AT&T's involvement, and so on. B. Laws to require ISPs or information service providers to keep records of which IP addresses connect to which sites (so as to fight child porn, piracy, whatever). C. Britain's moves towards complete video tracking of car movements (I get my reporting on this from The Register). D. Credit card transaction records. E. Forthcoming integrated electronic health records. (Those will have huge benefits to the saving of lives, quality of life, cost and efficiency of health care, etc. Whatever the privacy risks, they need to be managed so that health care is allowed to improve.)
And that's even without mentioning RFID.
What's slowing all this down is some political opposition, plus the huge technical difficulty of the required system integration projects. But in a small number of decades, it will all have happened. Our laws and oversight systems need to have evolved drastically by then. We have to start now.
I'm definitely not saying that we should cripple government in gathering and using information. Indeed, I'm an advisor to Cogito, a company with some of the most powerful relationship analysis software out there. http://www.dbms2.com/category/object-oriented-and- xml-technology/cogito/ But I think we need to radically upgrade our legal structures in response to these technological trends.
He says that a first generation of search is exemplified by engines that focused on page content, such as Altavista or Yahoo.com.
In doing so, he ignores well over a decade of pre-Web text indexing products.
What's more, it's nonsense in any case, since Yahoo started as a directory, with a search engine added only later.
Since it's anyway admitted that he's biased in how he defines the market space, I wasn't motivated to read on further. Maybe I'll click on the five sites mentioned, but the review itself is almost certainly worthless.
Well, if you're going to use the term "recommendation engine" that loosely, then my wife is also a recommendation engine. And since she has a good vocabulary, my taxonomic knowledge of the English language is certainly useful in communicating with her. Sheesh.
I've never used the "I'm feeling lucky" button on Google in my life, except once or twice to see how it worked. As far as I'm concerned, a search engine is a tool for delivering a set of document summaries short enough to be browsable, and likely to contain content of interest to me in a nontrivial minority of the hits. That's a far cry from the way I used, say, the Encyclopedias of Science Fiction/Fantasy, in which I expected that MOST of the "If you liked X, you might also like Y" recommendations would suit my tastes. (Those two books informed my recreational reading for years, and it was the happiest fiction-reading period of my life.)
Bottom line: You seem to be most concerned with a particular set of applications, to the point that you're apparently disregarding a whole bunch of other applications that don't share the same characteristics.
I agree that an ontology isn't a recommendation tool (although it might play a useful role in a collaborative filtering app, if that app happened to, for example, deal with relatively unstructured text).
But so what? My new car isn't very good at carrying things from the kitchen to the bedroom, but that doesn't keep it from meeting a broad range of my other transportation needs.
Slashdot Mirror
I was a stock analyst, and even so I think I went to one annual meeting ever. They're scripted and pretty uninformative.
The Harvard Gazette article is original, I think, rather than just being a regurgitation of Reuters and/or New Scientist.
The core claim seems to be that the ancient Moslems discovered a set of patterns that interlocked in a very practical way.
Now let's go to Wikipedia. Scroll down and look at the how-to pictures, and note the references to the Golden Mean. I don't see anything there that couldn't have been discovered by the Greeks or their successors.
Finally, let's go to common sense. I don't know the history of how Penrose discovered these tilings, but two main avenues come to mind:
1. Dumb luck/trial and error/general geometric insight.
2. Symmetry groups (the analysis of rotational symmetries via the abstract algebra concept of "groups", something any computer science graduate is somewhat familiar with).
Well, if it's #1, then of course somebody ancient could have done it too. And if it's #2 -- well, a lot of ruler/compass constructions were done by the ancients, long before Galois proved they were better analyzed via group theory.
So yes -- it's easy to imagine, given the evidence, that somebody figured this out 500-1,000 years ago. True, it's almost impossible to imagine that they understood it in the same way that Penrose did -- but there's a whole lot of physical evidence that, at some level, they understood it just fine.
I remember a show-and-tell in 7th or 8th grade in 1968 or 9, when a kid talked about memory at $1K/Kb. I didn't know WTF that was all about, and certainly can't recall what kind of device he might have been building back then.
...
Yes. $1K in 1968 dollars for one part in a kid's project. What can I say? I grew up in Beverly Hills, a claim this is disputed only by those who claim I never grew up at all, or in any case not until I was over 30. It was the poorest part of town, but things were weird even there
And it's not just Sybase IQ, either. There are lots of columnar players. Kognitio also has a columnar VLDB offering, but it's quite different from Vertica's. And the columnar memory-centric BI offerings are interesting as well, such as QlikTech's and SAP's. Also, full-text indexing is pretty columnar itself.
I had a long chat with Mike Stonebraker a few weeks ago, and came away with the following tentative opinions about Vertica's prospects, and those for columnar systems in general.
* Pinpoint data lookup doesn't seem like a great fit for columnar systems. Indeed, traditional rows-and-B-trees would seem to be best.
* Constrained query and reporting would seem to be a sweet spot, even though it's a sweet spot for some of the best competition as well.
* Cube-filling calculations involve big intermediate result sets. I'm not sure that's a great fit for columnar systems.
* Hardcore tabular data crunching would seem in many cases to be another sweet spot, again against a lot of competition, at least in some of its sub-categories.
* Text and media search are best done by specialized systems that, at least in the case of text, wind up being quasi-columnar. The same goes for other specialty areas. Systems like Vertica's have nothing to offer directly to these applications. However, it might be possible for Vertica to integrate with them fairly quickly, given that they're starting from vaguely similar philosophical roots.
There also are some technical details in that article; a link to a short, somewhat hagiographic intro to Mike himself; and so on.
Big companies sometimes really do want to be "made" to do the right thing, so that they can do it in lockstep without losing competitively to their less scrupulous rivals. Whether it's bribery or pollution or safety or censorship -- whether the motivation is simple economics or avoiding later political backlash or actual morality -- it's happening more and more.
Just as it would on the Internet, Tariff Rebate Passthrough would be a fix in the cell phone case as well. All the "decency" and noncompetition rules would be out the window, as would the socialism-style approval cycle. If anybody enforced "decency", it would be the FCC.
On the other hand, the cellular providers would still be allowed to rake in money hand over fist.
What's not to like about the idea?
Just as Amazon was using SOA long before it was named, the same is true of DBMS2. Add that to SAP's adoption, and we're getting somewhere. :)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessio nid=DCKRNZUO0GTG5QFIQMFSFGGAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/news/200 6/05/18/wchimp18.xml
I've misplaced the link, if I ever had it (I just recall hearing about this from my wife the evolutionary biology teaching fellow) but there's currently a species of primate (bonobo?) that has different behaviors for different kinds of predators. They scurry up into trees for land-based predators, they go down under cover for large birds, and do something in between (I forget what) for snakes.
And they have different calls for each of these kinds of predator.
Well, they've developed another one for humans with rifles. And they give the call if they just see hunting dogs.
So yeah -- adapting to predators is a top-level priority. Although in that case they're benefitting from previously-evolved capabilities, presumably, given the speed of adaptation.
Want to have a serious barrier to copying your electronic text files? Make people buy them on paper.
1. Multiple e-commerce models. Something will probably work.
;)
2. Multiple approaches to network analysis, collaborative filtering, etc. (Obligatory shameless plug: The hot new company in network analysis is Cogito.)
3. Various communications things.
4. Various real time monitoring things, both narrowly filtered and for overall trends.
I bet if I'd logged onto the site a single time in my whole life I might be able to come up with even more ideas.
One the one hand, Congress is more motivated to do the right thing in this area than in many others, perhaps for no other reason than that their own status is threatened.
On the other hand, they're REALLY clueless about technology and its implications.
I really think we can make a difference by driving the public policy debate in the right directions.
Besides the nasty tactics outlined in the article, the RIAA et al. are a serious menace in at least two other ways.
First, they are a prime mover behind laws mandating a long audit trail (e.g., two years) recording who accesses which web sites. (Child porn is the other common motivation.) To date, this has been more of an issue in Europe than the US.
Second, there's a huge threat going forward as Layer 7 inspection by ISPs becomes commonplace. At that point, it will be at least theoretically possible to harass somebody for ANYTHING they download, upload, whatever, because intermediaries such as ISPs will have complete access to that information.
I agree almost completely. It's all about checks and balances. My only small disagreement -- really, more of an emphasis shift than a true disagreement -- is that just as the threat is newly automated, the monitoring may need to be automated too, and I don't think we understand very well yet what that entails.
And I'm saying you're drawing a false dichotomy.
Yes, the Bush Administration is a bunch of Constitution-ignoring, rights-trampling jackbooters. But while their extreme is wrong, ignoring security and defense would also be wrong.
Data mining and network analysis really are needed for security. Either that, or we need to compromise other freedoms -- such as freedom of movement -- in ways that would REALLY be anti-liberty. There's no way around that.
Instead, we need to put up safeguards against information misuse that are highly effective. I agree with you completely there. Where we disagree is that I don't see how safeguards against actual information gathering will remain viable for much longer. At least, they will be a far from complete solution.
The correct link was http://www.monashreport.com/2006/06/09/qui-custode t-ipso-custodes/
Juvenal is the ancient Roman who asked "Who will watch the watchmen?" For George Bush, the answer is evidently "Preferably, nobody."
Richard Brandt argues with passion that Google will eclipse Microsoft. The idea is that all the reasons why Microsoft beat everybody else don't apply to Google. I disagree, however, because I don't see Google's advantage as having much sustainability.
...
On the other hand, I was fairly late to realizing how sustainable Microsoft's advantage would prove, back in my stock analyst days, so do consider the source
I think you're missing the point.
Those protections are, in part, needed, as key parts of police and military defense. Just the needed parts are liberty threats, as has always been the case with police and military powers. Hence, we set up rules and procedures to control those threats.
Technological change in the threats and in the defenses means that the rules and procedures need to be updated too.
You seem to be arguing that all businesses should be free to use whatever DRM they want, but all buyers (or whoever else) should be free to do all hacking they want. For "intellectual" property that will never have more than few copies made, that idea may or may not be workable.
But do you seriously propose a world in which books and movies would be released with zero copyright protection, and "pirates" could legally reproduce and sell anything they physically could copy? That certainly would drive the profits out of the print publishing industry in hurry. Of course, I used to have a subscription newsletter, and now I blog similar material for free -- but I'd like my wife the novelist still be able to get paid for her work, should she ever choose to add to her total of 15 published novels. Do you really think it's necessary to abolish that possibility?
I'll hold off on further comment until I see whether you really meant to be that extreme.
A lot of people seem to be overlooking two basic facts:
e n-without-data-privacy/, or more generally from http://www.monashreport.com/category/public-policy -and-privacy/privacy/
- xml-technology/cogito/ But I think we need to radically upgrade our legal structures in response to these technological trends.
1. The amount of information government truly needs to gather to protect us is also sufficient to greatly threaten our liberty.
2. Governments will inevitably gather much more information than they really need.
As a result, it is necessary to design legal systems (and where possible to restrain the design of technical systems) so that even though government has the information, it doesn't commonly use it in nefarious ways. I've written a series of articles about that. Most of them can be found starting from the link http://www.monashreport.com/2006/06/06/freedom-ev
Examples of why we should expect government to gather huge amounts of information include, in no particular order:
A. All the call/e-mail/whatever connection information they're already getting, as documented in the news around NSA surveillance, AT&T's involvement, and so on.
B. Laws to require ISPs or information service providers to keep records of which IP addresses connect to which sites (so as to fight child porn, piracy, whatever).
C. Britain's moves towards complete video tracking of car movements (I get my reporting on this from The Register).
D. Credit card transaction records.
E. Forthcoming integrated electronic health records. (Those will have huge benefits to the saving of lives, quality of life, cost and efficiency of health care, etc. Whatever the privacy risks, they need to be managed so that health care is allowed to improve.)
And that's even without mentioning RFID.
What's slowing all this down is some political opposition, plus the huge technical difficulty of the required system integration projects. But in a small number of decades, it will all have happened. Our laws and oversight systems need to have evolved drastically by then. We have to start now.
I'm definitely not saying that we should cripple government in gathering and using information. Indeed, I'm an advisor to Cogito, a company with some of the most powerful relationship analysis software out there. http://www.dbms2.com/category/object-oriented-and
He says that a first generation of search is exemplified by engines that focused on page content, such as Altavista or Yahoo.com.
In doing so, he ignores well over a decade of pre-Web text indexing products.
What's more, it's nonsense in any case, since Yahoo started as a directory, with a search engine added only later.
Since it's anyway admitted that he's biased in how he defines the market space, I wasn't motivated to read on further. Maybe I'll click on the five sites mentioned, but the review itself is almost certainly worthless.
Well, if you're going to use the term "recommendation engine" that loosely, then my wife is also a recommendation engine. And since she has a good vocabulary, my taxonomic knowledge of the English language is certainly useful in communicating with her. Sheesh.
I've never used the "I'm feeling lucky" button on Google in my life, except once or twice to see how it worked. As far as I'm concerned, a search engine is a tool for delivering a set of document summaries short enough to be browsable, and likely to contain content of interest to me in a nontrivial minority of the hits. That's a far cry from the way I used, say, the Encyclopedias of Science Fiction/Fantasy, in which I expected that MOST of the "If you liked X, you might also like Y" recommendations would suit my tastes. (Those two books informed my recreational reading for years, and it was the happiest fiction-reading period of my life.)
Bottom line: You seem to be most concerned with a particular set of applications, to the point that you're apparently disregarding a whole bunch of other applications that don't share the same characteristics.
I agree that an ontology isn't a recommendation tool (although it might play a useful role in a collaborative filtering app, if that app happened to, for example, deal with relatively unstructured text).
But so what? My new car isn't very good at carrying things from the kitchen to the bedroom, but that doesn't keep it from meeting a broad range of my other transportation needs.