November 2011
11 posts
October 2011
14 posts
Join One Day on Earth →
I just applied to participate in One Day on Earth on 11.11.11. You just snap a few pics of what interests you here on Third Rock. It all funnels into a humongous collage of pics from all over the planet taken on 11.11.11. That gives me a few days to think about what to shoot. Weather here is pretty iffy so I’ve got to think about sunshine (hopefully) or rain…or both. This is Oregon,...
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I rest my case
A couple of months ago I posted an opinion that the aging baby boom would generate the most copious outpouring of products and services we’ve ever seen to serve the needs and whims of that population (of which I’m a member). There are literally trillions to be made — and spent — in innovative and bazaar ways.
So it came as no surprise to me (well, actually it did) that the...
Climate change: Catch 22
Yay! Friday a key skeptic about human activity contributing to global warming, Richard Muller, a physicist at Berkeley, announced a study of claims used by climate change deniers to dismiss climate change research and found that the disputed research was right all along. And get this: Charles Koch foundation funded Muller’s study, in part! Ouch! That’s gotta hurt. Muller said the...
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Is it just me, or are 'bots everywhere?
Since I enrolled in the Stanford ginormous online AI class a couple of months ago articles mentioning robots and artificial intelligence have popped up everywhere. Or has my perception just gotten more focused?
In a post a few weeks ago I listed several robotic developments that suggested to me that there are some big areas where robots are lumbering up behind us looking to do what we do and,...
7 tags
Have we hit "reset" with #occupywallstreet?
Today’s headlines are surreal. There is so much that is business-as-usual (e.g., there’s a new iPhone out! How about that!). Then there’s: “Wall Street protests go global; Riots in Rome.”
The now global “occupy-everywhere” movement is, I suspect, the new business-as-usual. Most of the rest of what’s going on, at least in mainstream media, is either...
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Why economics is called "the dismal science"
I’m sympathetic to the #occupywallsreet movement. I’ve been expecting it for some time. I’m sorry for the young people facing the some of the changes and economic imbalances they’re facing in the future. As I’ve posted before, I’m shocked at the cost of college education and debt young people are taking on. I now realize I was born into the Golden Age of America...
8 tags
Intro to AI: A game-changer?
So the Introduction to AI class online has started. The final enrollment is somewhere over 160,000 class members. (Well, we all know that the attrition from class is terrible in the first couple of weeks.)
But, this is being touted as the biggest online teaching event ever. There are students from more than 190 countries. That’s spanning the globe for sure. A lot of university class...
I've succumbed. I'm now on Google+
A few weeks ago I deactivated my Facebook account. Trying to keep up with all the drama around Facebook privacy and changes sure wasn’t worth it. So I became a #facebookdropout .
I wasn’t in any hurry to jump to Google+. Indeed, it appears a lot of people have jumped off of G+ already. But since the Intro to AI course has started a Google+ “hangout” I figured it was time...
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AI of the machine and the squishy kind
One of the things that most interests me about the Intro to AI course going on around the world with 145,000! students are the parallels between the intelligence that computer scientists engineer (what this course is about) and intelligence in biology (what Mother Nature has been evolving for billions of years). I’ve already mentioned that the course instructors, Sebastian Thun and Peter...
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AI class has started
The Stanford Introduction to AI class has started ( @aiclass ). It’s a little like the first DARPA self-driving car competition: it’s got a few glitches in login, and access to the class videos. But that’s the first lesson of AI: do something, fix the problems and repeat…over and over.
It’s interesting that Thrun and Norvig haven’t bothered to try to define...
