27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus

 Redundancy in the English Language

Whenever we communicate, rules everywhere restrict our freedom to choose the next letter and the next pineapple.I Because these rules render certain patterns more likely and certain patterns almost impossible, languages like English come well short of complete uncertainty and maximal information: the sequence “th” has already occurred 6,431 times in this book, the sequence “tk” just this once. From the perspective of the information theorist, our languages are hugely predictable— al...
  1  notes

Monte Carlo method for building words and sentences.

21 NOV 2017 by ideonexus

 Urban Communities as Post-Apocalyptic Settings

As far as Brown is concerned, many abandoned urban communities are postapocalyptic in nature. Such places are rife for community-born transformation. "If you look at cities in the US right now, there are cities or communities in apocalyptic situations," says Brown. She references challenged areas in New York City, New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, Cincinnati, and her new home, Detroit. "Detroit used to be this booming industry town. This used to be a big, booming factory town. You coul...
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06 NOV 2016 by ideonexus

 The Media Mediates

There is definitely the sense that the media can mediate (!) the experience of viewers after the thing has happened. I might be sitting at home in North Carolina, watching the program and think one thing, and then the guy with a tie and “expertise” might come on right after it’s over and say with great gusto that one person or another has done something radical and race-changing that I never even considered. I often think of a great art museum in Boston when I think of these debates re:...
Folksonomies: media perception mediation
Folksonomies: media perception mediation
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08 MAR 2015 by ideonexus

 PhDs Lack Skills for Surviving Outside Academia

Inefficiency arises from the fact that substantial resources have been invested in training these scientists and engineers. The trained have foregone other careers – and the salary that they would have earned – along the way. The public has invested resources in tuition and stipends. If these ‘investments’ are then forced to enter careers that require less training, resources have not been efficiently deployed. Surely there are less expensive ways to train high school science teachers...
Folksonomies: science academia
Folksonomies: science academia
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04 FEB 2015 by ideonexus

 How to Sell to Millennials

1. People buy things because of what they can do with them... Create crystal-clear communication that helps people connect how your product or service makes their lives better. An obsession with simplicity is essential. 2. People buy things because of what they can tell others about it... Help connect people to other people through your business. Sales isn't really about "selling" anymore, it's about building a community. 3. People buy things because of what having it says about them... Con...
Folksonomies: marketing
Folksonomies: marketing
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24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus

 Science Generators

Conway’s Game of Life is perhaps best viewed not as a single shorthand abstraction but rather as a generator of such abstractions. We get a whole bunch of useful abstractions—or at least a recipe for how to generate them—all for the price of one. And this points us to one especially useful shorthand abstraction: the strategy of Looking for Generators. We confront many problems. We can try to solve them one by one. But alternatively, we can try to create a generator that produces solutio...
Folksonomies: science hypotheses
Folksonomies: science hypotheses
  1  notes

Nick Bostrom on the possibility of looking for scientific concept generators, similar to the way Conway's Game of Life is a pattern generator, rather than looking for random scientific problems to solve.

17 JUN 2013 by ideonexus

 The Strategy of Releasing All Data

The response many organizations adopted then (and continue to pursue AF) is to provide overwhelming amounts of data to the public. This provided a two-fold defense. First, it allowed immediate deniability to any charge of withholding data. Second, the sheer volume of data available meant that almost any argument could be made or refuted with selective referencing and correlation to other publicly available information. This is a rapid, cheap response that puts the onus back on the accuser to ...
  1  notes

Interesting idea: be completely transparent, releasing so much data that any hypothesis can be cherry-picked from it, then hire spin-doctors to do just that.

12 APR 2013 by ideonexus

 A Biased Explanation of Foxes and Hedgehogs

How Foxes Think Multidisciplinary: Incorporate ideas from different disciplines and regardless of their origin on the political spectrum. Adaptable: Find a new approach—or pursue multiple approaches at the same time—if they aren’t sure the original one is working. Self-critical: Sometimes willing (if rarely happy) to acknowledge mistakes in their predictions and accept the blame for them. Tolerant of complexity: See the universe as complicated, perhaps to the point of many fundament...
Folksonomies: metaphors cognition
Folksonomies: metaphors cognition
  1  notes

Nate Silver provides a very negative portrayal of those who think like hedgehogs, settling down in one field of expertise, compared to those who think like foxes, darting from field to field.

08 JUN 2012 by ideonexus

 The Problem with Paradigms

The success of the paradigm... is at the start largely a promise of success ... Normal science consists in the actualization of that promise... Mopping up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers. They constitute what I am here calling normal science... That enterprise seems an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those...
Folksonomies: truth paradigm
Folksonomies: truth paradigm
  1  notes

Is that scientists tend to try and keep nature in the box, ignoring phenomena that fall outside the paradigm.

04 JAN 2012 by ideonexus

 Computers Can't Do Everything

The … truck driver is processing a constant stream of [visual, aural, and tactile] information from his environment. … To program this behavior we could begin with a video camera and other sensors to capture the sensory input. But executing a left turn against oncoming traffic involves so many factors that it is hard to imagine discovering the set of rules that can replicate a driver’s behavior. … Articulating [human] knowledge and embedding it in software for all but highly structur...
Folksonomies: employment automation
Folksonomies: employment automation
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They cannot drive trucks yet, but how long until they can?