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- [University Rankings]
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- Finally got around to JavaScripting the
two-part message length calculations
for the MultiState (Multinomial) probability distribution
[click]
as in Minimum Message Length (MML87) inference.
- Against "killer robots":
"This open letter was announced July 28 at the opening of the IJCAI 2015 conference ... Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is - practically if not legally - feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms. ... Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control. [Signed]Stuart Russell Berkeley ...Nils J. Nilsson ...Stephen Hawking ...Elon Reeve Musk ..."-- letter@futureoflife.org [28/7/2015]. (Also see thebbc [28/7/2015]. Terminator anyone?)
- An Australian Government survey found that
"four in ten content consumers (43%), had consumed at least
some illegal files (compared to 21% in the UK). This represents
a quarter of all Australian internet users (26%). ..."
And that
"factors that would encourage people to stop [included]
(38%) legal content more available, and(36%) content available as soon as it is released elsewhere"-- communications.gov.au [22/7/2015]. (And digital rights management 'regions' are archaic and malodourous-- 5¢'s worth.)
- "The US Senate on Tuesday passed a bill to end the bulk collection
of millions of Americans' phone records, ushering in the country's
most significant surveillance reform since 1978 two years after NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations,"
The Guardian, 2/6/2015, [more].
- Depth First Traversal
of a Graph is a simple algorithm but a useful one.
- 'A futures trader was arrested in the United Kingdom today on
U.S. wire fraud and commodities fraud and manipulation charges
in connection with his alleged role in the May 2010
"Flash Crash," when the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 600 points
in five minutes ... allegedly employed a "dynamic layering" scheme ...
created the appearance of substantial supply in the market. ...'
-- US Dept. of Justice
[21/4/2015].
Also see the
[bbc].
- It is not very often that you find out about a great idea.
That's "find out about", not invent;
inventing one is like being bitten by a hen's tooth.
Coming across clever ideas, at least those of other people,
is relatively frequent but great ideas are much rarer.
A clever idea can be very cunning indeed, and possibly very useful,
but its effects are not so far reaching.
For example, there are many clever ideas
such as the Burrows Wheeler transform
(BWT)
in algorithms.
On the other hand a great idea is one that immediately impresses you
with its scope even if, as is usually the case, you cannot yet see
all of its consequences.
You can quickly tell that it is onto something and is going to be big.
I can recall this happening to me three times in computing:
Church's λ-calculus,
Milner's Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS), and
Wallace and Boulton's Minimum Message Length
(MML)
principle.
- India's 'Mars Orbiter Mission' (MOM)
put a satellite into orbit around Mars on 24 Sept. 2014
for a cost of us$74 million.
Monash University's 'New Horizon Centre' building
which opened in 2013 was reported to cost between au$89.9 million
(before construction, e.g., The Age 13 Dec. 2008)
and au$175 million
(2013).
au$1.00=us$0.90± at the time.
- Enumeration of connected, vertex-induced subgraphs of a graph
is an interesting little problem with a natural recursive solution
[more].
- "... The UK faces a worsening gender gap in its flourishing IT industry, according to a new study. ... It indicates women account for just 16% of the UK IT workforce. ... [And] despite consistently out-performing boys in computing A-level results, girls account for just 6.5% of those taking the exam. The study was compiled by BCS, the chartered institute for IT, and E-skills UK. ..." -- [bbc][17/6/2014].
- This is an old problem, for example, around 1984 the UK government made a push to increase the number of students doing computing. What happened was the number of boys went up but the number of girls stayed much the same, so the proportion of girls fell. The best explanation I have seen was that computing was perceived, or came to be be perceived, as engineering (which does beg the question why don't more girls take engineering?).
- Sometimes you get tired of banging your head against a brick wall, such as when you read things like,
- "The Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle (Rissanen, 1978)+, like its close cousin Minimum Message Length (MML) (Wallace, 2005)#, is a practical version of Kolmogorov Complexity (Li & Vitanyi, 1993)*."
- Let's try to do better. Citing original sources is not hard and gives Kolmogorov (1965), MML (1968), and MDL (1976). It matters:
- "Solomonoff - Kolmogorov Complexity (1964-1965)* is realized in a practical way by the Minimum Message Length (MML) principle (Wallace & Boulton, 1968)#, and its cousin Minimum Description Length (MDL) (Rissanen, 1978)+."
-
*
A. N. Kolmogorov,
Three approaches to the quantitative definition of information,
Problems of Information and Transmission, 1(1), pp.1-7, 1965.
(Perhaps it ought to be Kolmogorov-Solomonoff complexity --
R. Solomonoff,
A formal theory of inductive inference, I and II,
Information and Control, 7(1) pp.1-22 and pp.224-254, 1964 --
but maybe that horse has bolted?)
# C. S. Wallace & D. M. Boulton, An information measure for classification, The Computer J., 11(2),pp.185-194, 1968. (Wallace (2005) is an accessible, comprehensive resource on statistical inference and MML.)
+ J. Rissanen, Parameter estimation by shortest description of data, Proc. JACE Conf. RSME, pp.593, 1976; although perhaps in this case a 1978 journal v. a hard to get conference paper is fair enough.
- Eugene "Kaspersky, head of security firm Kaspersky labs,
revealed at the Canberra Press Club 2013 ... that before the ISS
switched from
Windows XP to Linux computers, Russian cosmonauts managed to carry infected USB storage devices aboard the station spreading computer viruses to the connected computers. ... In May, the United Space Alliance, which oversees the running of the ISS in orbit, migrated all the computer systems related to the ISS over to Linux for security, stability and reliability reasons."-- The G. [www][12/11/2013]; see uBend [www][8/11/2013] (@ 17:57+).