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Comment Re:Better yet - admit we're altering it now. (Score 1) 367

You're the guy who mischaracterized the statement "the west side highway will be underwater" to mean "the west side highway will only be underwater during tremendous storms."

If you are not a shill, then you're the kind of guy who will misunderstand anything to avoid changing his position. Because you deeply misunderstand that statement there.

Submission + - Researchers Find The Tech Worker Shortage Doesn't Really Exist (businessweek.com)

Beeftopia writes: From the article: "For a real-life example of an actual worker shortage, Salzman points to the case of petroleum engineers, where the supply of workers has failed to keep up with the growth in oil exploration. The result, says Salzman, was just what economists would have predicted: Employers started offering more money, more people started becoming petroleum engineers, and the shortage was solved. In contrast, Salzman concluded in a paper released last year by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, real IT wages are about the same as they were in 1999. Further, he and his co-authors found, only half of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) college graduates each year get hired into STEM jobs. “We don’t dispute the fact at all that Facebook (FB) and Microsoft (MSFT) would like to have more, cheaper workers,” says Salzman’s co-author Daniel Kuehn, now a research associate at the Urban Institute. “But that doesn’t constitute a shortage.”

Comment Re:SSL? (Score 1) 92

is the combination of sensitive application and user supplied data sent over the same stream in both directions.

I'm not seeing how that's the problem. Ultimately it's all going to go across (roughly) the same IP pathway, right?

Submission + - "Advanced Life Support" Ambulances May Lead To More Deaths

HughPickens.com writes: Jason Kane reports at PBS that emergency treatments delivered in ambulances that offer “Advanced Life Support” for cardiac arrest may be linked to more death, comas and brain damage than those providing “Basic Life Support.” "They’re taking a lot of time in the field to perform interventions that don’t seem to be as effective in that environment,” says Prachi Sanghavi. “Of course, these are treatments we know are good in the emergency room, but they’ve been pushed into the field without really being tested and the field is a much different environment.” The study suggests that high-tech equipment and sophisticated treatment techniques may distract from what’s most important during cardiac arrest — transporting a critically ill patient to the hospital quickly.

Basic Life Support (BLS) ambulances stick to simpler techniques, like chest compressions, basic defibrillation and hand-pumped ventilation bags to assist with breathing with more emphasis placed on getting the patient to the hospital as soon as possible. Survival rates for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients are extremely low regardless of the ambulance type with roughly 90 percent of the 380,000 patients who experience cardiac arrest outside of a hospital each year not surviving to hospital discharge. But researchers found that 90 days after hospitalization, patients treated in BLS ambulances were 50 percent more likely to survive than their counterparts treated with ALS. Not everyone is convinced of the conclusions. “They’ve done as much as they possibly can with the existing data but I’m not sure that I’m convinced they have solved all of the selection biases,” says Judith R. Lave. “I would say that it should be taken as more of an indication that there may be some very significant problems here.”

Submission + - Craigslist hit with a DNS hijack

xaotikdesigns writes: Hackers were able to hijack the DNS for Craigslist to redirect the traffic to DigitalGangsters.com and YTCracker's video for Introducing Neals on Youtube. YTCracker was interviewed on Slashgear regarding the hack, where he stated that "its some member of my site being a dingus and I'm probably going to get blamed for it." The attack happened on the 15 year anniversary of YTCracker's successful hacking of several government agency websites.

Comment Re:Emergent Intelligence? (Score 1) 455

That's an argument I can buy. Absolutely, with NN, the topology is static. Unless every node is connected to every other node, bi-directionally, you cannot emulate a dynamic topology. And that's assuming a fixed number of neurons. We know, in the brain, the number of neurons varies according to usage. So even a fully-connected NN would not be sufficient unless it started off at the maximum potential size.

I agree that to evolve, you've got to have an environment to evolve in, a means to evolve and a pressure to evolve. The AI field that looks at this sort of thing is "Genetic Algorithms", and there are a few systems in that area which look promising.

It's my thesis, though, that Strong AI must be more complex than even that. All higher life-forms have not only an external environment but an internal one as well. There is a simulation of the local "world" in the brain that is updated by the senses and this is the "reality" we perceive. The consciousness is not directly connected to any sense, which is why you can induce synaesthesia. The mind, therefore, evolves according to this simplified internal model. and not the external reality.

The idea of Emergent Intelligence is therefore very appealing. It is possible to construct a virtual world for the Artificial Life and a second virtual world maintained by the Artificial Life. This doesn't require knowing how to develop intelligence or how to define it. They're just virtual worlds, nothing more. All you need then is an initial condition and a set of rules. These would be more sophisticated than a conventional genetic algorithm, but based on the same idea. If you don't know what something will be, but know how to determine how close you are, herustics are sufficient for you to close the gap as much as you like.

This would not be "Artificial Intelligence" in the sense that the intelligence emerged with no human intervention past the initial state. It was not made, it's not an artifact, it's perfectly natural but in an artificial world running on an artificial computer. It is possible to determine if this universe is a simulation running on a computer running on a universe of the same size, but it is not possible if this universe is a simulation running in a larger universe. The decision on whether something is artificial or not cannot, then, be governed by the platform because we've no idea if this is top-level or not and we cannot. Nonetheless, we're indistinguishable from a natural lifeform, thus we have to say that it is this property that decides if something is natural.

An imitation of the whole human brain is planned in Europe. The EU is building a massive supercomputer that will run a neuron-for-neuron (and presumably complete connectome) simulation of the brain for the purpose of understanding how it works internally. I think that's an excellent project for what it is designed for, but I don't think it'll be Strong AI.

Let's say, however, you built a virtual world at a reasonably fine-grain (doesn't have to be too fine, just good enough), a second virtual world that was much coarser-grain and which used lossy encoding in a way that preserved some information from all prior states, a crude set of genetic algorithms that mapped outer virtual world to inner virtual world, and finally an independent set of genetic algorithms that decide what to do (but not how), a set for examining the internal virtual world for past examples of how, a set for generating an alternative method for how without recourse for memory, and a final set for picking the method that sounds best and implementing it, and an extensive set that initially starts off with reconciling differences between what was expected and what happened.

That should be sufficient for Emergent Intelligence of some sort to evolve.

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