An introduction to Irish Tinwhistle. The tinwhistle is an instrument steeped in musical tradition. While played to some small extent in African Kwela music, in Civil War re-enactments, and even some bluegrass, it's in traditional Irish music that the whistle really makes it's home. With the popularity of productions like Riverdance and the Titanic, traditional Irish music has seen a resurgence in popularity. This seems undeniable--even Metallica has recorded a rendition of the traditional tune Whiskey in the Jar. And the whistle has seen a corresponding increase in popularity, use, and availability. [kuro5hin.org]
Wow. This would be perfect material for the Wikipedia. I think I'll ask the author.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has released a major study, Seizing the Moment: Scientists' Authorship Rights in the Digital Age, by Mark Frankel. The study recommends new licensing agreements for scientific papers to give authors greater control over their dissemination and access. It deliberately avoids endorsing a single licensing model, but recommends a range of innovations and tracking to observe their actual effects on access. It is clear, however, on the kind of licenses it opposes: "agreements that grant access to some, but constrain sharing with others, could be contrary to the goal of increasing the availability and use of information for society's ultimate benefit." Bottom line: Scientific authors negotiating with journals now have the authority of the AAAS behind their request to retain copyright or some rights traditionally transferred to journals. (Thanks to SPARC E-News.) [FOS News] What do you think? [] links to this post 7:40:35 PM
I want to start an outline about what a weblog is, because there's more to say. Maybe it'll be a three-column table. In column 1, a topic. For example: Fact-checking. In the second column, how centralized journalism does it; and in the third column, how it works in the weblog world. That way, if someone understands how fact-checking works in the print world, they have a basis for understanding how it works when done in the open.
Perhaps you see more errors in weblogs, but they can get corrected quickly. I guess the diff is that you can see the process in weblogs. Some people say this is a bad thing, but I think it's good. When I see writing that's too polished, where the grammar is too perfect, I am suspicious that at a deeper level it has been sanitized and dumbed-down. I like getting my news and opinion straight from the source without the middleman.
Another row. In column 1, "Research". In column 2, "A reporter spends two weeks interviewing experts, with transcription errors, dumbing-down, etc added." In column 3, "Experts spend a lifetime trying new ideas, learning from their mistakes, and learning how to explain their philosophy. Weblogs let them publish their ideas without intermediaries."
Slashdot has a very interesting interview with the highly opinionated AI researcher, Dr. Richard Wallace. "Human intelligence may even be a poor kludge of the intelligence algorithm on an organ that is basically a glorified animal eyeball. From an evolutionary standpoint, our supposedly wonderful cognitive skills are a very recent innovation. It should not be surprising if they are only poorly implemented in us, like the lung of the first mudfish. We can breathe the air of thought and imagination, but not that well yet. "
Wallace (creator of the award-winning free natural language artificial intelligence chat robot Alicebot) paints a rather grim portrait of the state of AI research today. Here's a selection of quotes from the interview:
In case you haven't noticed, the field of Artificial Intelligence (defined however you wish) has almost nothing to do with science. It is all about politics.
Having a good theory or better implementation of anything is beside the point. Being able to "play the game" and knock out the competition, that is what it is all about. Swim with sharks or be eaten by them. Especially in the age of increased competition for diminishing jobs and funding, scientific truth takes a back seat to save-your-ass.
At one time, I believe academics were appointed and promoted primarily on the basis of merit and accomplishment. Within the last 20 years or so in the United States this has gradually changed into a system in which political correctness, slickness, and good salesmanship are more highly valued than good science.
Those who are prone to logical thinking and speaking the truth are discarded, because they make the authorities face their unconscious anxieties.
I often say, people don't go into computer science because they enjoy working with the public. But as the field has matured, I think it has attracted people who are more comfortable wearing business suits and attending strategy meetings than tinkering on a lab bench or writing a research paper.
You may think that the politicization of a field like computer science is no big deal. We can have slick politicians instead of scientists running university CS departments, and not cause a lot of problems. But I think it is a really big problem in other fields, especially in medical science, especially in drugs and mental health.
Not to place blame, but I think graduate advisors should be more straightforward with students about this point. It would be better to put more time into training them how to "shmooze" and "work the system" than how to solve mathematical problems, if they want their students to be successful. Either that, or they should work on changing the system back to merit based promotion.
Ouch. Wallace sure makes it sound like the Peter Principle has finally hit academia. He also compares politicians to chat bots:
Politicians, at least those in our society, never seem to give a straight answer to a question. If a journalist asks a specific question, the politician answers with a "sound bite" or short, memorized speech which is related to, but does not necessarily answer, the reporter's question. If asked about schools for example, the politician may reply with a memorized policy statement on education policy. It is as though the response was merely triggered by the keyword "school" in the question. No creative or spontaneous thinking is required. One aspect of the art of writing AIML is composing brief, concise, interesting, grammatically correct and sometimes humorous default responses, which work in for a wide variety of inputs matching a single pattern. President Clinton inadvertently revealed this type of automatic reply when he uttered the famous quote, "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is." This could be a default response to any question beginning with the word "is." Like the politician's replies, the default responses should indicate an understanding of the question, but not offend anyone.
Doug Lenat has been working on CYC for at least 15 years. One problem is that the CYC engine has never been peer reviewed. A journalist I know wrote a story about CYC, but he found it difficult to get any other A.I. scientists to comment on it because it is a proprietary, closed, black box. One researcher said, for all we know there is a dwarf inside, providing the answers.
But I applaud whatever effort Doug Lenat is making to place portions of CYC under the GNU LGPL. To that extent it is worth studying to see if there is anything we can use. I would like to think that the existence of free software projects like ours is putting pressure on CYC to release all their code under the GPL. Their embarassing secret is most likely that the code doesn't really exist at all, or that it is a hopless tangled mess.
Then he gets philosophical (this is reminiscent of Krishnamurti's views on conditioning)
Timothy Leary said, "You can only begin to de-robotize yourself to the extent that you know how totally you're automated. The more you understand your robothood, the freer you are from it. I sometimes ask people, "What percentage of your behavior is robot?" The average hip, sophisticated person will say, "Oh, 50%." Total robots in the group will immediately say, "None of my behavior is robotized." My own answer is that I'm 99.999999% robot. But the .000001% percent non-robot is the source of self-actualization, the inner-soul-gyroscope of self-control and responsibility.
The fact that ethical questions have emerged about A.L.I.C.E. and AIML means that for us, technologically speaking, we are succeeding. People would not be discussing the ethical implications of A.L.I.C.E. and AIML unless somebody was using the technology. So, from an engineering point of view, this news indicates success.
In my opinion, writing a post discussing a topic (like blogs in teaching and research) without linking to and openly admitting an awareness of work (like mine and Torill's on blogs in research) which you know about and which is highly relevant is unethical.
