I am a software test engineer in Austin, Texas. I am experienced in JUnit, XMLUnit, CPPUnit, and Borland's SilkTest, in addition to being experienced in shell scripting. My main interests are the application of theory to business problems, and therefore I have always enjoyed playing with concepts like genetic algorithms, when I don't happen to be working with systems which implement them on a day to day basis. My (largely political) blog is: http://blogkinnetic.blogspot.com. See bio there as well. :-)
EOM
Regarding the tetraneutron issue: I would be interested if they could repeat the experiment which supposedly detected this. My guess is that this was a statistical anomaly. It is highly unlikely 4 neutrons could arrive more or less at the same time at the same place in the detector, but the alternative, that something is wrong with the Pauli exclusion principle, may be even more unlikely. Accordingly I would seriously bet if they did the exact same experiment again (shooting beryllium atoms at a carbon target) that they would not detect any "tetra-neutrons".
With things like this, I always remember something Sherlock Holmes said in 'A Study in Scarlett' I think it was though not quite sure where it was exactly - "Once one has eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the case."
Here, it strikes me that though the anomaly seen was very improbable, the alternative idea that the Pauli exclusion principle and hence the standard model is wrong in some way is tantamount to impossible. It is far easier for me to believe what they saw was just a fluke, than to think there is an issue with the Pauli exclusion principle. Of course, if they can repeat the experiment, that is something else again, and I suppose then further inquiry would be warranted.
Susan Blackmore talks of memes as bits of information that get copied from person to person similar to how a virus can get spread from person to person.
She has expanded the idea to a "technological meme", a piece of technology that gets copied, mutated, etc. like a virus or a meme. "Teme" is her word for technological meme.
For instance, a mating ritual can be a form of a meme. Language can be seen as being built up of memes.
Basically for Blackmore, there are three selfish replicators.
1) Genes (genes like in viruses get copied around between living organisms)
2) Memes (information getting copied between the brains of living organisms)
3) Temes (technological information that gets copied around, not necessarily needing living organisms, like for example an internet worm can just travel at will throughout the internet, not needing human help to get copied)
They are "selfish" replicators in that, "if they can get copied, they will." I posted a blog article to my blog on this last year -
Uh, yeah, I know it is an April fools prank. Geez, I hope when the singularity really arrives our successors will have more humor than some of us apes did!
"In reality it's the species that has an evolutionary fitness".
Sorry but no. Read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. Selection does NOT act on the level of a bee colony, it acts on the level of the individual genes to be found within that colony. So sure some bees are infertile, but they are in service of the genes of the fertile bees. They are in effect enslaved by the genes of the Queen bee for instance.
Some types of ants will raid the colonies of other ants, and kidnap their children, bring them back, and the kidnapped children were grow up in service/servitude to the colony which had kidnapped them, and join in on future raids of what was once their home nest. The kidnapped ants are in service to their captors, to the genes of their captors. Say for instance the kidnapped ants were black, and their captors were red(or the other way around), so, even though the kidnapped ants do not have the "red" gene, they are helping to promote the selective advantage of the "red" gene by joining in the hunt for the colony of their captors. It is not a matter of "colony a" being selected for over and above "colony b". It is rather the genes of either colony getting selected for over other genes. All life, from viral to the naked apes like us, are subject to "the tyranny of the selfish gene".
If I were you I'd look at the math. If your friend can off load enough web development work on you for you to get by at least for the next few months, enough time for this web-based company you have been working on to ramp up, then do it. If not, don't, not in this economy. Only do it if you are sure you can fly on your own, and won't have to be out looking for another job soon.
Well e-cigs are a good alternative to regular cigarettes. If I am smoking e-cigs then I don't need regular ones - try www.smokingeverywhere.com for ordering e-cigs.
Left brain here baby. But then I already knew that. Maybe I can get somebody at MIT to extract my right hemisphere for me and then sell it on e-bay for a profit, since clearly, I have no use for it.
Yes. In fact I think we will soon go back to having a room of "computers" instead of using an excel document. In other words, take your calculations up to a roomful of gals who will do the calculations, double check them, and then hand you the answer some time later. Since clearly spreadsheet software has no practical use.
TechStars, (www.techstars.org) pays $6,000 per founder, so that is at least a thousand extra bucks there if you wanted to try that instead. There application deadline is Saturday I think.
I am primarily a test automation engineer, but I have done some HTML/CSS work in the past. (For example, http://www.calliopetalent.com I did some updates for, adding some javascript, tables redesign, etc. to an old site originally built in the late 90's - personal references from there available on request.) Shoot me an email if you want to discuss further offline - FrankErdman2000@yahoo.com. I work full time but can squeeze some contract stuff in as well. :-)
The fact remains if IQ is tapering off in the late 20's, the a child born to the parents in their 30's may not have as high an IQ as the parents. Personally my parents were in their mid-20's when I crawled out of the evolutionary slime, and in a sense I agree with you on the maturity and economic front - both factors were issues - and I think there has been growth there since, and my younger siblings had it better as far as maturity went, but honestly I wouldn't have it any other way, at least I know I got the best evolutionary shot I could get, lol! :-)
Short of a DNA scan, it is hard to see how one could select the best individuals. If one could show that one's parents were big business people, that lends confidence, but there is always a chance someone is on the short end of the gene pool. Would not it be great if we could predict the winners from the losers in society ahead of time, based on some selection criteria. But this is difficult. A DNA scan (expensive in itself) could show health and even cognitive fitness, and that could be augmented by IQ tests, etc., but there is not a sure way to do this. Only markets can determine fitness, and that is in retrospect. Ahead of time, I do not see how we can predict the fittest members of society, which is what this scheme would demand, the ones "most likely to become millionaires". Performance picks the smart from the dumb, but predicting this ahead of time is dubious. A DNA scan is as close as you could get I suppose, to weed out people with a likelihood of developing mental problems later on in life, etc., but still, there is error here. You want to find the Over-Man of Nietzsche. In my opinion the only Over-Man is that what the market determines. And you can't ever know that ahead of time, even with DNA sequencing. That helps your probabilities but you are still playing dice. Frankly I feel there is no such thing as the "Over-Man", there is only people whom markets favor over others, and knowing which ones those are going to be is rather hopeless.
If true, and I don't know enough about this area to comment, but if so, it seems for optimum gene selection, people should procreate (or at least freeze their genetic material in a lab for future use) prior to this age.
I have often thought that perhaps the rise in mental disorders in children such as autism could be related to people waiting until later in life to have children, at which point, their DNA has already begun to break down. Studies showing that the oldest child in a family tends to also have a higher IQ is consistent with this. The younger you are when you reproduce, the more fit your genes are, and therefore the smarter, healthier, etc. your children are likely to be. Economic pressures now make people wait until later to reproduce than they did a generation or two ago, but this could be counteracted by saving genetic material in a lab when one is young, then later, when one is economically ready to reproduce, one can make use of the stored material to do so. It is unlikely in the near future that people will all of a sudden want to go back to having kids right out of high school, so, for optimum gene selection, they should at least save off their genetic material (sperm, eggs) for future use. Otherwise, going forward, the average intelligence of the populace is likely to decline.
Coffee and/or coca cola. Boyfriend. Any book by Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Sue Blackmore, Peter Atkins, Stephen Hawking. Any psychological horror film like 'Session 9' or 'In the Mouth of Madness'. Formerly camels, now e-cigs for nicotine. CNN. C. Cygwin. Textpad.
Things-to-be-endured:
Diet coke. Boyfriend's spending habits. Any book positing emergent, or anti-reductionist views of any sort. Mindless slashers like 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre'. Nicotine gum that doesn't do squat. Fox News. Java. DOS prompt. Ultra-edit.
I think that is definitely a winner. It shows pro-activity which companies want. If I had a company in the bay area and was looking for a marketing manager, I'd sure as heck give this guy a call! :-)
Could you not send out an array of spiders to crawl around and cache pages, then send the cached pages back to some kind of processing mill, to purge out the data from the pages and output the basic designs of the pages, whereupon these "purged pages" could be sent to a second mill to categorize them and persist them in some way? Then you could mine your persisted store of purged pages for various things based on user request. So the user says, I want a button. So you mine your database for buttons and display them and the user picks the one she likes for some kind of minimal fee. Instead of getting the templates from human submissions, have spiders get them instead and purge them and persist them, similar to having a sweatshop of gold miners to pan the stream, sift out the gold, and drop them into storage bins. Then all you do is sell the gold directly to the customers. Something like that?
A neural network, whether software-based, hardware-based, or wet-ware based (rat in this case, or human for that matter), can only spot patterns in a given set of data which are there. No patterns in the data means no predictability. You can have the coolest, most hyper-intelligent system ever devised, but that cannot see patterns which do not exist. Of course market data has patterns (sell on Friday, for instance), but it is always limited. Generally, I think you could even in principle never get more than 80% accuracy with any kind of neural network, because of the lack of complete patterns in market data, whether we are talking about a rat or a human or a whatever kind of neural network. Which brings me to a second point, since 100% accuracy or anywhere near that is not possible even in principle, applying electric shocks to test subjects when they are wrong is simply cruel and irresponsible.
To break the law, he would have to intentionally "talk down" a company, right around an important event for that company, like an IPO or an acquisition or a major product release. It is hard to prove intent. I could say "ACME sucks" because I honestly believe ACME sucks, or I could say they suck because I want to short their price. It is tricky business. Who is to say he broke the law if in fact he talked down a company? Maybe he was just giving his honest opinion and was not trying to trade in the stock himself. Intent is always a tricky thing, especially when it comes to securities fraud issues. (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, the above are just my gut thoughts!)
This is an excellent point. I suppose I was just thinking about the natural world (on planet Earth). Indeed, replicating information, RNA or not, would be a form of "life", provided it was persisted. I think persistence here is the key. A genetic algorithm would be life as you say, provided I think that its states could be saved into a database or the like. Self-replicating, persisted information in some kind of definable form or shape is life, roughly I would think. So, sure, a GA counts provided you persist it someplace. Naturally occurring crystals in a cave would too for that matter. And if the physicist Lee Smolin is right, the universe could be a replicating entity as well, making new universes via black holes or similar mechanisms (see his book, "Life of the Cosmos").
This article was pretty vague on what it meant by integrated intelligence as the criterion for consciousness. For example it was not even clear to me as to whether or not linear separability was a requirement of their "integrated intelligence system", i.e., whether a conscious system should be able to solve linear separable problems. Using a term like "integrated intelligence" does not say what, specifically, needs to be integrated.