Valentin's Blog

I worry that insight is becoming impossible, at least at the frontier of mathematics. Even when we're able to figure out what's true or false, we're less and less able to understand why [...] 

or

[...] Those practical minded breeders will inherit the earth, as likeminded aliens may have inherited a few other planets. When they finally achieve Contact, it will not be a meeting of novel readers and game players . It will be a meeting of dead serious superparents who congratulate one another on surviving not just the Bomb but the Xbox. They will toast one another not in a soft-porn Holodeck but in a sacred nursery.

This are two short excerpts from the book "What is your dangerous idea" that I want to recommend to you. The book is a collection of maybe a hundred answers to this question from distinguished scientist in short 1-4 pages essays. If you are a scientist yourself, you'll not be too surprised by most answers, but almost all of the answers are well written, food for thought and a joy to read nonetheless. 

You can also read all answers for free only at the edge website here - but its not the kind of stuff I would want to read on a computer.

Nice presentation on the value and difficulties of having a common exchange language (for measurements in this case). Well presented, including such interesting things as: why the metric system is actually British, its relation to the search for an universal language and what was the first "metric car".

The video is embedded below or at Google Video here.

Labels: SemanticWeb

Had this lying around for a while: on Richard Benjamins Blog there are the slides of the invited speakers at the first European Semantic Technologies Conference - speakers were Frank van Harmelen, Mark Greaves, Benjamin Grosof, Ora Lassila, Dave Pearson (Oracle) and Dr Susie Stephens - so quite a lineup. I enjoyed browsing the slides in particular from the first three - all slides can be found here. Below a nice graph from Frank van Harmelen's slides (he attributes it to Dieter Fensel):

Labels: SemanticWeb

The Tamagotchi-Effect refers to the tendency of humans to easily see emotions in and form attachment to even simple robots and software agents. I wrote about it before, focusing on how I believe this acceptance of emotion in robots will become a generation gap, something where we won't understand our children/grandchildren. Now there is a great article in the Washington Post about how the Tamagotchi-Effect works even in the military (short excerpt below, but read the whole thing):

Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly.

The human in command of the exercise, however -- an Army colonel -- blew a fuse. The colonel ordered the test stopped.

Why? asked Tilden. What's wrong? The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg. This test, he charged, was inhumane.

Labels: AI