The Dot

DARPA Network Challenge

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:00:50 +0330

“a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems”

"People are thus thrown back on themselves. They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by..."

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:00:55 +0330

“People are thus thrown back on themselves. They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships. Social life comes to resemble economics, with people enmeshed in blizzards of supply and demand signals amidst a universe of potential partners.
…
The opportunity to contact many people at once seems to encourage compartmentalization, as people try to establish different kinds of romantic attachments with different people at the same time.
…
It seems to encourage an attitude of contingency. If you have several options perpetually before you, and if technology makes it easier to jump from one option to another, you will naturally adopt the mentality of a comparison shopper.”

- David Brooks

"The first moon lander in 1969 had a system equivalent to about 10,000 lines of code. By the..."

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:00:51 +0330

“The first moon lander in 1969 had a system equivalent to about 10,000 lines of code. By the estimates, the next Lunar mission to come in 2019 would have about 10 million lines of code! We would surely have the necessary hardware technologies to handle such a system, but it is inevitable that the number of defects also increase with such a large system. In Gerard’s own words “the human brain is not going to get bigger that soon” and at current rate about two residual defects are found per 1000 lines of code. Geralds guiding principle is “if we don’t learn to use computers to analyze our programs, we are in a losing battle.””

- Ajith Ranabahu

"The psychologists thus tend to gravitate toward a different view of conduct. In this view, people..."

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:02:08 +0330

“The psychologists thus tend to gravitate toward a different view of conduct. In this view, people don’t have one permanent thing called character. We each have a multiplicity of tendencies inside, which are activated by this or that context. As Paul Bloom of Yale put it in an essay for The Atlantic last year, we are a community of competing selves. These different selves “are continually popping in and out of existence. They have different desires, and they fight for control — bargaining with, deceiving, and plotting against one another.””

- David Brooks

"This whole process: input, processing, comparing output with correct answer, and adjusting..."

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:49:54 +0330

“This whole process: input, processing, comparing output with correct answer, and adjusting connection strengths is called one ‘back-propagation cycle’, or often just one ‘iteration’. The net is then presented with another picture and its answer is compared with the correct answer, the connection strengths adjusted where needed. This process can often take hundreds or thousands of iterations. Eventually, the net should become fairly proficient at identifying males and females. There is always a risk however, that the net has not learned to discriminate males from females, but rather that it has effectively memorized the response for each picture. To test for this, the pictures (or whatever input is being used) should be divided into two groups: The training set, and the transfer set. The training set is used during back-propagation cycles, and the transfer set is used once learning is complete. If the net performs as well on the novel transfer stimuli as it did on the training set, then we conclude that learning has occurred.”

- http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/nn.html

"Ordinary language — the language of evidence and inference, of instance and generalization..."

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:49:52 +0330

“Ordinary language — the language of evidence and inference, of instance and generalization — was fine for ordinary matters. But to confess the universal human experience of a final failure in this language is to take back the confession. It is to lose the game before it begins.”

- Jack Miles

"The transfer function describes how a neuron’s firing rate varies with the input it receives...."

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:49:55 +0330

“The transfer function describes how a neuron’s firing rate varies with the input it receives. A very sensitive neuron may fire with very little input, for example. A neuron may have a threshold, and fire rarely below threshold, and vigorously above it. A neuron may have a bell-curve style firing pattern, increasing its firing rate up to a maximum, and then levelling off or decreasing when over-stimulated. A neuron may sum its inputs, or average them, or something entirely more complicated. Each of these behaviours can be represented mathematically, and that representation is called the transfer function. It is often convenient to forget the transfer function, and think of the neurons as being simple addition machines, more activity in equals more activity out. This is not really accurate though, and to develop a good understanding of an artificial neural network, the transfer function must be taken into account.”

- http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/nn.html

Barcode

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:49:56 +0330

Barcode

"A college education should equip one to entertain three things: a friend, an idea and oneself."

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 19:49:48 +0330

“A college education should equip one to entertain three things: a friend, an idea and oneself.”

- Thomas Ehrlich

"The quality of a university is measured more by the kind of student it turns out than the kind it..."

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 19:48:57 +0330

“The quality of a university is measured more by the kind of student it turns out than the kind it takes in.”

- Robert J. Kibbee

"Of course there’s a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the..."

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:48:50 +0330

“Of course there’s a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don’t take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates.”

- Abbott Lawrence Lowell

Types of pasta

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:00:50 +0330

Types of pasta:

and here

"Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are..."

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:05:50 +0330

“Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself.”

- Bill Gates

"Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy..."

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:05:59 +0330

“Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.”

- Pablo Picasso

"If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure."

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 19:05:47 +0330

“If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.”

- Bill Gates

"I’m a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms..."

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:05:48 +0330

“I’m a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they’re interested in.”

- Bill Gates

"The adolescent Russell sought refuge in the abstractions of mathematics. His vision of an enchanted..."

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:05:48 +0330

“The adolescent Russell sought refuge in the abstractions of mathematics. His vision of an enchanted logical world was jarred, however, when he reached Cambridge and found that mathematics as practiced there was little more than a bag of calculating tricks, sloppily based on physical intuition rather than rigorous proof. If certain knowledge was to be achieved, he grew convinced, the house of mathematics had to be rebuilt from scratch on firm logical foundations.”

- Jim Holt

"As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others."

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:05:55 +0330

“As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.”

- Bill Gates

"Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone."

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:05:49 +0330

“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.”

- Pablo Picasso

"An empty canvas is a living wonder… far lovelier than certain pictures."

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:05:48 +0330

“An empty canvas is a living wonder… far lovelier than certain pictures.”

- Wassily Kandinsky