Ruminate

Sometimes it just feels good to say “Thank You” to even a few of those who deserve it…

• PlanetMath :: Math Resources Wiki. Math for the people, by the people.

• The Graphing Calculator Story :: I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple’s doors, so I just kept showing up.
• Simon Willison: Some notes on Wikipedia :: Here are a few things about Wikipedia you may have missed:

• iPods get people laid and can improve their memories, too! :: The secret is finally out
• Dicole - About Dicole :: This could be big for creating educational communities (not to mention departmental/work groups)
• DVD Savant 2004 Favored Disc Roundup :: The DVD Savant chooses the most impressive DVDs of 2004
• Croncast - Susan and her friend Kris Ep. 1 :: audio for ESL students, professional development and a bit on women in podcasting.
• Croncast - Amy and her friend Kris Ep. 2 :: Today, Amy and I delve into women in podcasting, technology and interface design for women. We also talk about podcasting use in education.

I don’t usually participate in these kinds of things, but this activity can be kind of revealing. Procedure is simple: clear your browser’s address bar and type each letter of the alphabet, recording for each the first entry that pops up (or that autocompletes). What does this say about how you spend your time?

• a - archive.org (where I grab lots of music and audio)
• b - bloglines (but of course)
• c - cosmopoetica (natch)
• d - del.icio.us (my daily bookmark list)
• e - Evil Genius Chronicles (geekery and podcasts)
• f - flickr (yeah baby)
• g - gmail (I knew this one)
• h - HG Poetics (Henry Gould’s poetry blog)
• i - IMDB (Internet Movie Database)
• j - CogDogBlog (Alan Levine’s EdTech weblog)
• k - Kleptones Site (home of the Hip Hopera and other)
• l - Creative Commons Mailing List Archives (hmmm)
• m - Maud Newton’s Weblog (lit links, politics, rants)
• n - Tijuana Christmas LP (you don’t wanna know)
• o - Ink on My Hands (writing, lit weblog)
• p - Art, Love, Family, and Psychedelics (same)
• q - Quotations.com (what, you think I make this stuff up?)
• r - RottenTomatoes (movie review metasource)
• s - Slate (I wanted to cheat and put Shirky.com here)
• t - Triplopia (poetry mag)
• u - Uncle Krinkly (Cookin with Uncle Crinkly on the Innernet)
• v - Vinyl Orphanage (where forgotten and unwanted records find solace)
• w - Webjay (music playlist sharing, wordpress.org a close second)
• x - Nothing!
• y - Yahoo Search Blog (!?)
• z - Zotz (poetry blog)

One thing this list illustrates is how much RSS feeds have changed my web consumption. These are either information/social/reference sites where RSS doesn’t make sense or can’t meet searching needs, sites with missing or incomplete feeds (Listen up Slate bastards), or sites with content interesting enough to bounce me out of Bloglines and into the site itself…

Other lessons: not a lot of sites I go to start with K or X. I need to spend more time working and less time playing.

via Alex Halavais

In a piece of spam about winning grants comes this classic line:

It’s true, Chris that %%thismonth%% and %%nextmonth%% are among the best for securing free grant money for just about any purpose.

• Introducing the long-awaited sarcasm point :: By Josh Greenman. Finally, the punctuation mark I’ve been waiting for…
• Memetics papers on the web :: Whence and wherefore the meme?
• Wired 12.10: The Long Tail :: The future is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream. Not sure how I missed this, but there seems to be a conflation of grassroots and trickle-down…
• memeorandum: Fresh brewed news plus stewing views :: memeorandum presents an automated hourly synopsis of the latest online news and opinion, combining weblog commentary with traditional news reports

• thumbs up | Metafilter :: MeFi Thread on tiny applications and utitilies that you can install and run from your Flash Drive– follow the links!
• Style Sheets :: hundreds of the best CSS sites (examples, tutorials, layouts, reference, etc) chosen by humans
• Firefox Browser Hacking - Taking Advantage Of Technology :: Tips and extensions for Firefox
• i used to believe : :: i used to believe is a collection of ideas that adults thought were true when they were children. it will remind you what it was like to be a child, fascinated and horrified by the world in equal parts.

• Time Person of the Year 1938: Adolf Hitler
• Time Person of the Year 1939: Joseph Stalin
• Time Person of the Year 1971: Richard Nixon
• Time Person of the Year 1979: Ayotollah Khomeini
• Time Person of the Year 2004: George Bush

I was going to put Reagan in there too, but then some folks– blinded by their irrational Reagan-love– might not get it.

Alex Halavais (his blog is always interesting, check it out) recently wrote about intelligence, detecting intelligence, and the SETI project.

In that piece he writes:

“The real proof of intelligence remains the Turing test.”

If you’ve never heard of the Turing Test, it is basically an “imitation game” in which a questioner (who does not know which is which) asks questions of both a human and a computer. If he can’t tell the difference, then the computer has passed the test and can be reasonably called “intelligent.” If you’re a science fiction reader, you’ve probably heard of this staple item!

My objection to this statement has a couple of parts:

First, saying that “the real” proof “remains” the Turing Test implies that the speaker is conversant with the rather intense debates that have surrounded the idea of the test since it was proposed in 1950, and that the test itself has withstood all of them. I didn’t get the feeling that this was the case. Not because I underestimate Mr. Halavais. Just the opposite! I find it hard to believe that someone who seems as reasonable as he would make such a statement without some qualification.

Second, social scientists (second only to my friends, the literary theorists) are exceedingly fond of appropriating scientific theories with little understanding of the science therein. As I wrote to Alex, it’s a fun game to use Godel or Heisenberg to make a point about literature or meaning, but when people start believing that it is anything other than a metaphor, then it gets ugly. Which, again, wasn’t necessarily what I saw Alex doing, but I wondered whether his use of the Turing Test as a criteria was reflective of having a social scientist’s understanding of the test itself.

Now, let me outline what I am not saying:

• I am not maintaining that the Turing Test measures nothing. Clearly it would be a difficult test to pass, and I might even agree that it is measuring a kind of intelligence, though it would be a very narrow kind indeed. Call it mimicry, call it a Turing Quotient…

• I am not arguing that scientists in the hard sciences don’t exhibit similar misunderstandings of theories outside of their areas of expertise. Alex brings up computer scientists talking about social networks and social computing without being familiar with the literature, and I can’t but agree with him. On the other hand, there seems to me to be a difference in degree and scale of the enterprises– I see it happen a heck of a lot more in the soft sciences than in the hard, and in what I think are much more damaging, integral ways, often forming the basis for thought and critique rather than being simply a reference therein.

• I’m not saying that reasonable people can’t disagree. If Alex is familiar with the outlines of the debate and still maintains that the Turing Test “remains” the “real proof” of intelligence… well, what can I say? I would hope that he’d qualify such statements, but that’s up to him. I’m probably as confident as he is in his assessment, so I guess I could just write “Turing Test Debunked” or something…

I wouldn’t care except that I think highly of Alex (through his writing) and there was just something about that note, when struck, that didn’t ring true.