12:22
“
Quick: How many countries was America at war with last year?
If you accept the old fashioned notion that to drop a bomb on a country is to be at war with it, the answer is, oh, half a dozen or so. As Peter W. Singer points out in a New York Times opinion piece, since the beginning of last year we’ve conducted drone strikes in six countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia… and… and… well, Singer doesn’t list them, so I’m not sure what the sixth one is.
”
— Robert Writght - America’s New Strategy: Endless War(s) (P.S. Libya.)
12:20
Not only is a company a collective person made of many individuals, an industry association like the ESA is a collective person made of many collective persons.
Whoa…
Yo dawg, I heard you like Inception, so I etc.
Pushing this in the other direction, is your brain its own thing apart from the body? Is a cell? A molecule? Is Aristotle right that the function of the thing is to fulfill its telos, and this is what distinguishes the nested substances of the world?
2012/1/19
The Atlantic - Mind vs. Machine
Interesting article about the Loebner Prize, a Turing Test competition. The author tried his best to be named “the Most Human Human” by increasing his interactivity: it’s not about saying one or two interesting things, it’s about creating a thread of conversation that’s logical and reactive to the interlocutor.
For instance, Richard Wallace, the three-time Most Human Computer winner, recounts an “AI urban legend” in which
a famous natural language researcher was embarrassed … when it became apparent to his audience of Texas bankers that the robot was consistently responding to the next question he was about to ask … [His] demonstration of natural language understanding … was in reality nothing but a simple script.
The moral of the story: no demonstration is ever sufficient. Only interaction will do. In the 1997 contest, one judge gets taken for a ride by Catherine, waxing political and really engaging in the topical conversation “she” has been programmed to lead about the Clintons and Whitewater. In fact, everything is going swimmingly until the very end, when the judge signs off:
…
We so often think of intelligence, of AI, in terms of sophistication, or complexity of behavior. But in so many cases, it’s impossible to say much with certainty about the program itself, because any number of different pieces of software—of wildly varying levels of “intelligence”—could have produced that behavior.
No, I think sophistication, complexity of behavior, is not it at all. For instance, you can’t judge the intelligence of an orator by the eloquence of his prepared remarks; you must wait until the Q&A and see how he fields questions. The computation theorist Hava Siegelmann once described intelligence as “a kind of sensitivity to things.” These Turing Test programs that hold forth may produce interesting output, but they’re rigid and inflexible. They are, in other words, insensitive—occasionally fascinating talkers that cannot listen.
I’m working on revising an old paper of mine about Daoism and computers, and one concept I’m trying to suss out is “appropriateness.” Reason lets us do what’s appropriate for the moment by taking everything into consideration, not just what a narrow algorithm specifies.
12:24
Washington Post - 10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free
Sort of a cheesy headline, but I suppose it fits the mood of the day.
Here’s the list minus commentary:
- Assassination of U.S. citizens
- Indefinite detention
- Arbitrary justice
- Warrantless searches
- Secret evidence
- War crimes
- Secret court
- Immunity from judicial review
- Continual monitoring of citizens
- Extraordinary renditions
2012/1/17
Wired - The Search for a More Perfect Kilogram
This is an interesting article and well worth reading, but this part stood out to me:
Back then, their intervention was sorely needed. The reigning standard of length in Paris, the toise, was defined by an iron rod embedded in a courthouse staircase in 1668. Outside Paris, chaos ruled: There were some 250,000 local units of weights and measures in France alone, many of them sharing the same names, a fact that ensured that the only constant was confusion.
Europe really was a backwater. In China, the Qin Dynasty unified weights and measures back in the third century BC.
12:20
Honolulu Magazine - Philosophy for the Kids
Hey look, it’s a story about Dr. J and P4C:
Also seated with them is the affable Thomas Jackson, Ph.D.—“Dr. J” to everyone at the school—who leads the group in its philosophical circle of inquiry. Jackson, through the Philosophy for Children (P4C) Hawaii program, has spent the past 27 years working on changing the impression of philosophy as an elitist, academic musing into something more accessible by bringing it to public school classrooms.
“Our understanding of philosophy has become much more user friendly,” explains Jackson. “We take issues that we care about and learn the skills to think more deeply, together, about these things. In a group activity, we realize the enormous richness of the people around us and what resources they are for helping us think more deeply.”
12:23
The Economist - Crowd dynamics
IMAGINE that you are French. You are walking along a busy pavement in Paris and another pedestrian is approaching from the opposite direction. A collision will occur unless you each move out of the other’s way. Which way do you step?
The answer is almost certainly to the right. Replay the same scene in many parts of Asia, however, and you would probably move to the left. It is not obvious why. There is no instruction to head in a specific direction (South Korea, where there is a campaign to get people to walk on the right, is an exception). There is no simple correlation with the side of the road on which people drive: Londoners funnel to the right on pavements, for example.
This was the hardest thing to adjust to about living in Japan for me. You’d look at the other person and try to signal which side you’d be crossing on, but it wouldn’t work at all.
1 / 130 →
