The Dot

Elevator Beat

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:00:51 +0330

"He avoids shopworn topics, easy moralization and conventional wisdom, encouraging his readers to..."

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:00:50 +0330

“He avoids shopworn topics, easy moralization and conventional wisdom, encouraging his readers to think again and think different. His prose is transparent, with lucid explanations and a sense that we are chatting with the experts ourselves.
…
In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.
…
The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. It is simply not true that a quarterback’s rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don’t predict a teacher’s effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance.
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Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist. But when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist, they should watch out for those igon values.”

- Steven Pinker

"Otto Katz once said to him, “We all have inferiority complexes of various sizes, but yours isn’t a..."

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:00:51 +0330

“Otto Katz once said to him, “We all have inferiority complexes of various sizes, but yours isn’t a complex—it’s a cathedral.” Koestler liked this remark so much that he included it in his autobiography, thus attaining the status of one who could actually brag about his inferiority complex as if size mattered.”

- Christopher Hitchens

"This moral materialism fomented a certain sort of manic energy. Americans became famous for their..."

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:00:54 +0330

“This moral materialism fomented a certain sort of manic energy. Americans became famous for their energy and workaholism: for moving around, switching jobs, marrying and divorcing, creating new products and going off on righteous crusades.
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The Cultural Revolution seems to have produced among the Chinese the same sort of manic drive that the pioneer and immigrant experiences produced among the Americans. The people who endured Mao’s horror have seen the worst life has to offer and are now driven to build some secure footing. At the same time, they and their children seem inflamed by the experience of living through so much progress so quickly.
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The U.S. now has an economy shifted too much toward consumption, debt and imports and too little toward production, innovation and exports. It now has a mounting federal debt that creates present indulgence and future hardship.”

- David Brooks

"Journalists, in turn, often regard philosophy professors (though not all humanists) as mannered..."

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:29:00 +0330

“Journalists, in turn, often regard philosophy professors (though not all humanists) as mannered figures, badly informed and out of touch on matters outside their academic competence, insufficiently quick-witted on their feet, irrelevant in their influence on the public, and ludicrously inefficient in their Anglophilic and pedantic diction (“I should now like to make the claim, ceteris paribus …”). This makes philosophers, among other things, impossible guests on talk shows and hopeless sources for quotation. Factor in the root disposition that renders each group what it is—the inclination of philosophers to focus in any situation on the operative ideas and concepts involved, and the imperative of journalists to cling close to concrete facts—and the perfect storm of antipathy between these populations can feel fairly primal.
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Still, broadly speaking, we need philosophers who understand how epistemology and the establishment of truth claims function in the real world outside seminars and journals—the role of recognized authorities, of decision, of conscious intersubjective setting of standards. And we need journalists who scrutinize and question not just government officials, PR releases, and leaked documents, but their own preconceptions about every aspect of their business. We need journalists who think about how many examples are required to assert a generalization, what the role of the press ought to be in the state, how the boundaries of words are fixed or indeterminate in Wittgensteinian ways, and how their daily practice does or does not resemble art or science.”

- Carlin Romano

"All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making..."

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:00:56 +0330

“All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.”

- John Perry

"Addicted to the BlackBerry, hectored and heckled by the next blog alert, web link or text message,..."

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:00:52 +0330

“Addicted to the BlackBerry, hectored and heckled by the next blog alert, web link or text message, we are in state of Continual Partial Attention, too bombarded by snippets and gobbets of information to focus on anything for very long. Microsoft researchers have found that someone distracted by an e-mail message alert takes an average of 24 minutes to return to the same level of concentration.
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If the culprit is obvious, so is the primary victim of this radically reduced attention span: the narrative, the long-form story, the tale. Like some endangered species, the story now needs defending from the threat of extinction in a radically changed and inhospitable digital environment.
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Narrative is not dead, merely obscured by a blizzard of byte-sized information. A story, God knows, is still the most powerful way to understand. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word, in the great narrative that is the Bible, was not written as twitter.”

- Ben Macintyre

"One solution to this disagreement (and many others) would have been to multiply entries: why not..."

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:00:49 +0330

“One solution to this disagreement (and many others) would have been to multiply entries: why not have a Gdańsk entry and a Danzig entry? There are, after all, enough electrons to go around. Something like the alternative idea developed at the now-defunct GNE (a recursive acronym for “GNE’s Not an Encyclopedia”—an inside joke in programming circles), which was a collection of unedited articles, “a library of opinions, an attempt to build a comprehensive documentation of all human thought,” with editing itself identified as a source of bias. Wikipedia decided early on to reject this split-the-difference approach. Having a neutral point of view required having a point of view, and the salutary policy was to push contributors to agree on a common statement.
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What we (still) do not understand is why some people find deleting commas on Wikipedia more rewarding than playing solitaire or browsing Gawker. Is the public-benefit aspect important? The pleasures of a complex cooperative activity? The unusual possibility of being cooperative from home?
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There is no guarantee that a more democratic Wikipedia would survive, but it would be interesting to investigate why users so quickly and confidently opted for consensus- rather than voting-driven decision-making.”

- Evgeny Morozov

DARPA Network Challenge

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

DARPA Network Challenge:

“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.
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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.
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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