Thursday, December 30, 2004

College Recruiters Lure Students With New Online Tools. Frustrated by the failure of e-mail solicitations, admission directors are looking for new ways to incorporate the Internet into their marketing plans. By BOB TEDESCHI. [NYT > Technology] 11:15:41 PM    comment []

A Tale of the Uh-Oh's: Amelia Takes A Fall. At the dawn of this psychotic decade, I proposed, on instinct, that we should call it the Uh-Oh's. Decades need names. How else are we map their unique zeitgeists in our subsequent reflections on them? Imagine, for example, how awkward our historical recollections would become if we could not refer to "the 60's," a decade which needed no adjective, unlike, say, "the Roaring 20's?" The name is the frame, and the frame says it all. But despite my efforts at that time, and occasional subsequent stabs, no one followed my suggestion. Furthermore, despite all the obvious historical hints, you have refused to see the appropriateness of my proposed name. Now, as we reach the mid-point of this critical passage, it remains nameless to everyone but me. You still have no verbal short-hand to refer to the decade that gave us 911, Bush the Younger, the Iraqi Tragedy, the comeuppance of the formerly Almighty Dollar, and now, one of the the most calamitous shit-kickings we've ever taken from Mutha Nature. (70,000 dead and barely counting anymore...) I cannot count the times over the last five years when when various tidings of the epoch made me mutter an involuntary "uh-oh" upon receiving them. And still, you resist my suggestion. What's it going to take, folks? Oh, never mind. You'll either see my point or you won't. I had another of those moments on the afternoon of December 22. I got a phone call from Stephan Zaffalon, the sweet young Austro-Italian with whom my youngest daughter Amelia has been knocking around Europe for the last several weeks. Anxiety palpable in his soft voice, he said, "First, I must tell you that Amelia is ok." That didn't sound good. I had been assuming that Amelia was ok. To be told that she was forced me to the immediate conclusion that shortly before he placed this transatlantic call, she might not have been. "Uh-oh," I said.... [BarlowFriendz] 10:59:28 PM    comment []

No-go zone for Passport. eBay's decision to stop supporting Microsoft's online ID system comes as companies get behind rival federated standards. [CNET News.com] 10:58:41 PM    comment []

Bonus link from Doc: Dave Pentecost, who was hanging with Britt the last time the three of us talked (about Britt's latest, above), and who has pointage to why the iPod is really a hardware extension of iTunes, regardless of real cool efforts to prove otherwise. 10:53:17 PM    comment []

I.B.M. Division Headed to China Has Made No Profit in 3 1/2 Years. I.B.M. said that the personal computer business it was selling to the Lenovo Group of China had not made a profit for three and a half years. BLOOMBERG NEWS. [NYT > Technology] 10:47:51 PM    comment []

Gripes from a Grumpy Girl sez if i were the president of the united states, i'd take the 40 million dollars set aside for my big, fancy inauguration party and send it to aid south asia. because it seems in especially bad taste to have a swanky black-tie party while thousands of people lay dying. 10:29:49 AM    comment []

Doc, on Authorating, informing, and identity (following up on a post of Dave's about which I remarked on Sunday): Second, identity won't happen as a service unless it comes up from the grass roots, from independent developers, the users who support them, and the big guys who follow indie developers and users into the marketplace. (Think about how the big publishers have deployed RSS, for example.) Third, identity needs a Dave Winer: an independent developer and free-range technologist who tirelessly advocates something that will work for everybody and for users and developers diggin' together. I'd like to name names, but I'd rather see somebody step forward. (Yeah, I skipped "first.") This should be on the program at CFP2005. I have a couple good candidates in mind from the CFP crowd. 8:29:39 AM    comment []

New observations rule out asteroid Earth impact in 2029 (AP) 8:29:30 AM    comment []

Radio UserLand: The Missing Manual (a weblog, natch). 7:29:32 AM    comment []

I should add, regarding the Dennett notes, that they are meant to capture what he said, rather than my comments. Dennett has a home page, of course. LifeLab is a Mac application for exploring John Conway's Game of Life and other cellular automata. (Also, it should say "von Neumann" in the other post, not "con Neumann" (whatever that would be).) 7:29:29 AM    comment []

Earlier today well, yesterday morning at the American Philosophical Association meeting in Boston, Daniel Dennett was awarded the Barwise Prize for significant and sustained contributions to computing and philosophy both pedagogy and subject matter and for encouraging the computational turn. Here are some notes from the session. Intros were made by Marvin Croy and Ron Barnette Dennett began by remembering Barwise and giving a bit of history of his own move into computing stuff by doing an intro to comp sci course for Tufts frosh. The Philosopher s Syndrome is: Mistaking failures of imagination for insights into necessity. To treat this Syndrome, computers can serve as imagination prostheses, enhancing our imagination the way telescopes and microscopes enhance vision. Some examples of The Philosopher s Syndrome: Leibniz (Monadology, para. 17). An apparently perceiving machine akin to the Chinese Room Descartes (Discourse). A machine could conceivably utter words appropriate to its circumstances, but not modify its phrases to reply to the sense of whatever was said in its presence, as even the most stupid man can do. (Akin to Turing.) Both Leibniz and Descartes simply assert these baldly, without any real argument. Neither of them could imagine a machine with a trillion moving parts. But you've got one between your ears. Wm Bateson, 1916, review of The Principles of Mendelian History, by Thomas Hunt Morgan. it is inconceivable that particles of chromatin or any other substance, however complex, can possess those powers which must be assigned to our factors or gens. Searle, 1980. It is not easy for me to imagine how someone who was not in the grip of an ideology would find the idea [of the systems reply] at all plausible. I'm glad he admits it's not easy for him. Because he doesn't even try. Here's how you use computers as imagination prostheses vis a vis the Chinese Room. Teach frosh and soph about register machines. Using RodRego software (programming a register machine), they learn to build things that add, multiply, average. You can in principle program any software in a register machine. Then they re ready for the Chinese Room. Imagine Searle as the Lego Turtle, in a Rego machine, incrementing and decrementing registers. The Rego implements Aesop (a con Neumann machine), we program it to implement a Lisp machine, and we program the Lisp machine to run an oil refinery. And we say to Searle, "I didn't know you knew anything about running oil refineries!" And students see that all the real work is done by the system, and the turtle doesn't need to know anything. Switch to the Chinese Room, and students see the misdirection. Another example: McGinn, 1990, The Problem of Consciousness. Consciousness has a hidden structure, and that structure is systematically inaccessible from first-person pov and from third-person pov. About the mediating level its characterization would call for radical conceptual innovation (which I have argued is probably beyond us). Goes on to say it isn't phenomenal and it isn't hardware seems not to get that it could be software. The robot, Shakey, provides another example. Is Shakey processing images, or not? There is no three-dimensional, geographically simulated image in the robot; it's all done at the system level, with array processing. Not a good model of human vision, but a vivid example of an intermediate level to begin to explain the competence of something which looks like intelligence. Life -- cellular automata a Perfect Laplacean World simple ontology of fixed pixels, but at another ontological level there are gliders which have histories. Richard Lenski lineages of E. coli, variability throughout all parts of the genetic code of the microbes . . . somewhere in here questions started . . . Creative use of imagination and intuition pumps -- need to find the part of the story that pumps the intuition, change circumstances of parts of the story to see if it still does the same work for the intuitions. (These are artifacts that lead us to believe but they aren't formal arguments. They're great, but must be used with care. Must attend to the idealizing factors etc. to see if changing the story (what should be) trivially affects the punch line.) Mark Hauser: moral decision Web site gives loads of dilemmas and problems and collects data on moral intuitions. Another book: Animal Traditions, argues that much animal instinct is not genetically specified but rather culturally transmitted (largely through imitation). A tremendous amount of innate specification is possible if you begin with some sort of imprinting and then rely on a goodly amount of regularity in the environment. For example, cross-foster birds by switching eggs in nests as a test whether songs are specified genetically or transmitted culturally. 12:26:11 AM    comment []