13 NOV 2015 by ideonexus
A Small Defense of the Star Wars Prequels
***Sigh*** There are lots of problems with TPM, but its failure to be mythic isn’t one of them because that’s, in fact, the point of the entire prequel trilogy — demythologizing what we thought we knew about the Old Republic, the Jedi, and the rise of the Empire. The Old Republic wasn’t a “more civilized age,” it was a corrupt and flawed entity riven with divisions. The Jedi weren’t “guardians of peace and justice,” they were guardians of the status quo to the extent that ... 1 
notes
notes02 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Natural Language Processing vs. Semantic Web
NLP works well statistically; the SW, in contrast, requires logic and doesn't yet make substantial use of statistics. Natural language is democratic, as expressed in the slogan 'meaning is use' (see Section 5.1 for more discussion of this). The equivalent in the SW of the words of natural language are logical terms, of which URIs are prominent. Thus we have an immediate disanalogy between NLP and the SW, which is that URIs, unlike words, have owners, and so can be regulated. That is not to sa... 1 notes
notesA short comparison of the difference between NLP and SW in terms of processing, algorithms, structure, and emergence. NLP is described as 'democratic', where the power of SW is that URIs 'have owners,' meaning they are a top-down construct. Perhaps this is the problem of the Semantic Web and why it may never catch on: the web favors emergent semantics and democratized development.
