164 karma · joined May 8, 2011
Japan is a series of volcanic islands with, historically, a very limited indigenous supply of large poop producing creatures like like cows, horses, and pigs. The result is that there was a great scarcity of fertile soil. To supplement their soil they instead relied on human feces. So valuable was it that back in the day you could sell your poop to professional manure collectors who walked around town with large pots.
The cultural legacy extends well beyond toilets. You may have seen recent articles about people creating meat from poop, and poop powered motorcycles. It's no coincide that those are Japanese inventions. Funny how a thing like geography affects things.
There have been some huge developments in neural networks in the last few years, particularly with respect to deep learning. If you missed out on that you might want to try this class. Hinton has been involved in many of these advances.
The second half of the course appears to focus on deep learning topics so you might want to start there if you already know the basics.
The syllabus, draft though it is, indicates the second half of the class will focus on deep learning, a field of machine learning that has demonstrated huge potential.
Reminds me of Eastman Kodak circa 1975 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Kodak#Shift_to_digital.
That said, this is pretty weak evidence of collusion.
If you're committed to learning and improving yourself, you don't need the ivy league's approval.
With these rectangle/tree map things, I never know what to think: well this one is wider, but this other one is taller; you have to do multiplication just to compare 2 market shares.
1) The people drawing up these contracts know nothing about software. They are often non-technical, elderly, upper-management types that have never written a line of code in their life. For all they know, adding a link to a webpage is a 2 week project.
2) Congress punishes federal agencies for not spending all of their budget each year by cutting their budgets. As a result, towards the end of the fiscal year every federal agency goes on a crap buying spree to make sure they've spent every last penny.
The focus of the article and most of the comments here suggests it's government power. There's hardly a peep about the fact that credit card companies have giant databases filled with information about everything you've ever purchased, which they gladly sell to anyone, that retailers like Target know your daughter is pregnant before you do, or that Google knows so much about your personal emails that you get ads from 1-800-flowers while reading an email about a friend passing away.
Many of the comments here seem to treat privacy as some pure moral good, some innate human right. If that's the case, shouldn't government officials have complete privacy, after all, they're human aren't they? Shouldn't they be allowed to take unlimited amounts of money from unknown people without anyone knowing? Shouldn't they be allowed to make secret laws that are kept private? What about your employees and your co-workers? Shouldn't everything they do at work be completely private?
The obvious answer is no, there are clearly situations where some limitation of privacy is warranted. Society does not function with complete anonymity and it never has. There are reasonable arguments about where that dividing line should be drawn, but surely we can agree that privacy has both and bad, right?
Perhaps some of the misunderstanding is due to the broad definition of anonymity I'm using. Anonymity as I use it is the inability to link a person's actions to their identity. This type of anonymity breaks a lot of our social institutions. For example, if you don't know that a person committed a crime it's hard to arrest them.
If Anders Breivik was anonymous he would still be wandering Norway because no one would know that he was responsible for the murders. Some of the information I've read suggests that he wanted (or at least expected) to be caught. In such situations anonymity may actually discourage crime. I would guess, however, that most criminals would rather not be caught.
1) Muggings - If you get mugged by someone you know, it's very easy to find them and punish them. It's no coincidence that muggings tend to happen in big cities where the chances of a mugger attacking someone they know is very low (anonymity).
2) Sexual predator - If a priest rapes a child and the child tells people about it (i.e. removing some of the priest's anonymity regarding his actions) the priest is likely to be investigated and thrown in jail. If you know a sexual predator lives next to the school your kid goes to (i.e. he has lost some of his anonymity) you might take additional protective measures that could prevent your children from being assaulted. Whether this is the most common scenario, or whether it is fair for sexual predators to be publicly identified, are completely separate issues. I am simply illustrating a cost.
3) Terrorists - If you were the pilot of a plane and knew that some of your passengers were members of an extremist group that had plotted to destroy airlines in the past (i.e. some of the passengers had lost some of their anonymity) you would probably kick them off your plane. Whether or not this relates to 9/11 is not the point, this is simply an example of a cost of anonymity.
As for your last point: I never said the costs of anonymity outweigh the benefits, I simply showed that there are costs.
I don't deny there are many great benefits to anonymity, especially on the internet, but people should be aware of the costs. Anonymity can allow people to do bad things and get away with it.