Archive for the 'Elsewhere on the web' Category

Total eclipse of the heart

Published
by
Susha
on February 18, 2008
in Elsewhere on the web
. 4 Comments

HeartValentine’s day is over for another year, but just as single women were breathing easily again, I’m going to have to bring up Lori Gottlieb’s article, Marry Him!, from the March 2008 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Since Gottlieb’s article appeared on the magazine’s website last week, it has triggered the type of howls of wild rage from female bloggers usually reserved for mommy-wars combatant and fellow Atlantic contributor Caitlin Flanagan.

Gottlieb’s thesis is that single thirtysomething women shouldn’t hold out for Mr Right. “My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection,” she writes. “What I and many women who hold out for true love forget is that we won’t always have the same appeal that we may have had in our 20s and early 30s.” And “ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and… most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).” In other words, don’t leave it too late girls!

Continue reading ‘Total eclipse of the heart’

Artificial intelligence tragedies

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on February 12, 2008
in Elsewhere on the web, Philosophy and Science and technology
. 0 Comments

Despite high-profile success stories like Deep Blue’s chess victory over Garry Kasparov in 1997, the artificial intelligence project has been a tale of failure ever since its inception in the 1950s, at least when judged by the high standards that AI pioneers set themselves in the early years: witness Marvin Minsky’s famous declaration, in 1967, that “Within a generation… the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved.” (The field has had much more success in creating “domain-specific” intelligences, of which Deep Blue can be seen as an example, and has also contributed greatly to the revival of mind and consciousness as central philosophical concerns.)

A fascinating article in Wired tells the tragic story of two young AI pioneers who during the 1990s and 2000s attempted to kick some life back into the ailing field. In 1996, a young researcher named Pushpinder Singh (who happened to be working under Minsky) published a paper called “Why AI Failed,”which called for a return to the integrated approach to building intelligence that had driven the field in its early years, and away from piecemeal, domain-specific research. Bill Gates, among others, commented approvingly on the essay. Singh went on to create “Open Mind Common Sense,” his attempt to harness open-source methodology to build a huge database of “commonsense” propositions that could be used as the foundation of a new form of artificial intelligence. Singh was set to be appointed a professor at MIT to move the project on—but early in 2006 committed suicide.

Four weeks earlier, the disturbed maverick Chris McKinstry, the second subject of the Wired piece, had also killed himself. McKinstry, an outsider who had a history of mental illness and suicide attempts, was behind an AI project called Mindpixel which used a similar approach to Open Mind Common Sense. Spurned by the academic establishment and a laughing stock for many in the online community, McKinstry had nevertheless proved himself a serious and original contributor to the AI field, and his project eventually garnered 1.5m submissions.

Today’s top links (about books)

Published
by
Susha
on February 7, 2008
in Books and Elsewhere on the web
. 0 Comments

The rise of brand McSweeney’s. Has it replaced Granta as chief talent-spotter of American fiction writers?

After George Steiner, ten writers on their unwritten books.

Books that make you dumb. (These should really be “books that dumb people read.”)

Lies, damn lies, hits and views

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on February 6, 2008
in Elsewhere on the web, Media and Science and technology
. 0 Comments

Internet statistics offer a beguiling mixture of detail and imprecision. Endless data about individual web users’ habits lies at our fingertips, yet considerable confusion awaits anyone who wants to know how “popular” their (let alone anyone else’s) website is. What’s the best measure to use, and how accurate is it? What is a “good,” or even a respectable, result? And how can this be turned into revenue?

To cover basic ground briefly, the number of hits a website claims to receive tells you the number of requests its server gets for file downloads over a certain period of time. Every web-page can have many files—text, images, sounds—so this is usually a large number that doesn’t accurately reflect popularity, especially on complex pages with many images and scripts. A page view is a slightly better stat, in that it tells you how many distinct pages are accessed from a server, counting each page once no matter how complex it may be in terms of files. Counting visits is still better, in that it attempts to count each individual visit to a site only once within a given time (a set “session” length), no matter how many pages are viewed by each visitor.

Best of all is a site’s unique visitors, which records the number of individual internet users who access a site within a given time period (usually a day, week or month). So, for instance, when a site talks about its unique monthly visitors, each internet user logging onto the site—as uniquely identified by data swapped between their computer and the site in question—can count only once towards the total. For example, individual sites such as personal blogs may get only between zero and 50 unique visits each day; young blogs that have begun to develop a following may get up to 500 uniques a day; more mature blogs might hope for 1,000 or more; well-linked, well-established blogs may start reaching over 10,000; while internationally-read, opinion-forming ones can pass 50,000 or even 100,000.

Continue reading ‘Lies, damn lies, hits and views’

Today’s top links (about the Republican candidates)

Published
by
Susha
on February 5, 2008
in Elsewhere on the web and United States
. 0 Comments

Inside the mind of John McCain; don’t be fooled by the myth says Johann Hari. Cindy McCain’s grudges.

Everybody hates Romney. Or isn’t he Mormon enough?

Why Rudy lost. Ron Paul’s dark side. Did Fred Thompson ever take it seriously? If Mike Huckabee was a dog, he’d be a beagle.

What you can’t see

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on January 21, 2008
in Arts and culture and Elsewhere on the web
. 0 Comments

From the wikipedia page on International Klein Blue—a deep blue hue invented and patented in 1960 by the French artist Yves Klein as part of his search for colours which could themselves represent artistic concepts:

International Klein Blue is outside the gamut of computer displays, and can therefore not be accurately portrayed on this page.

Which makes this website all the more enigmatic in its intent; and usefully reminds us that, sometimes, if you haven’t seen it in the flesh (so to speak), you haven’t seen it at all.

Of course, as the philosopher Thomas Metzinger observes in “The Representational Deep Structure of Phenomenal Experience,” even then you may not actually see it:

If we stay with the example of the famous colour International Klein Blue, for some nondualistic philosophers this would mean single molecules of Rhodopas, vinyl chloride, ethyl alcohol, and ethyl acetate (out of which the colour is made) themselves possess the colour of International Klein Blue. Other nondualistic philosophers would see themselves driven to the conclusion that a certain number of the nerve cells firing in our visual cortex while we are looking at one of Yves Klein’s monochrome pictures are in fact International Klein Blue. Of course this assumption is absurd in both cases.

Come to that, are you sure you’re even reading about it now?

Previous convictions

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on January 4, 2008
in Elsewhere on the web
. 0 Comments

“What have you changed your mind about? Why?” This is Edge’s question for 2008, and the website has rounded up 164 (and counting) thinkers, scientists, writers and other luminaries to respond to it. At over 110,000 words, reading the answers in their entirety may prove a bit taxing for a Friday afternoon, so why not check out the highlights: Daniel Kahneman, godfather of “happiness studies,” on why he had to give up the idea of the “aspiration treadmill”; autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen on why he no longer believes in equality; and Brian Eno on growing out of Maoism. Plus, of course, Prospect editor David Goodhart, who explains how he learned to stop worrying and love the nation state.

Divine punishment

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on November 29, 2007
in Elsewhere on the web and Religion
. 0 Comments

Continuing today’s theme of religious hatred, Crooked Timber links to a list of the “nine most badass Bible verses.” Forty lashes for misnaming a teddy bear might sound harsh, but it’s a clip around the ear compared to this, from Numbers:

Then the LORD said to Moses, “Say to the assembly, ‘Move away from the tents of Korah, Dathan and Abiram’.…

As soon as he finished saying all this, the ground under them split apart and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them, with their households and all Korah’s men and all their possessions. They went down alive into the grave, with everything they owned; the earth closed over them, and they perished and were gone from the community.

Web 2.0 in just under five minutes

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on November 11, 2007
in Elsewhere on the web
. 2 Comments

I’ve only recently become aware of this video, from Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthology at Kansas State University. It is, I think, a brilliant lesson in the nature of the web, not least because it elegantly enacts its own thesis.

Those wishing to find out more can check out Wesch’s details here. As the site explains, his research initially focused on social and cultural change in Melanesia and, especially, on “the introduction of print and print-based practices like mapping and census-taking in the Mountain Ok region of Papua New Guinea, where he lived for a total of 18 months from 1999-2003.” From this, Wesch was inspired to consider “the impacts of new media more broadly, especially digital media.” And what better way to explain new media than via not-quite-so-new media (i.e. video)?

Digital ethnography: the future of academia lies on youtube.

Today’s top links (about violence)

Published
by
Susha
on November 8, 2007
in Elsewhere on the web
. 0 Comments

Malcolm Gladwell fans will be pleased to see he is back in the New Yorker after a long break, with a characteristic take on criminal profiling.

Via the Freakonomics blog, Clive Thompson reveals how he became a suicide bomber—but only in Halo 3.

Despite being thoroughly sick of the phrase “rivers of blood,” I never realised before that it (sort of) comes from the Aeneid. Mary Beard explains.