Posted
1/30/2004 06:19:01 PM
For want of a word
"Why is it important to preserve these languages?
First, to learn about how people communicate and how the human mind works. What are the categories that are important enough for people to express them in their languages?
If these so-called "exotic" languages die, we'll be left with just one world view. This won't be very interesting, and we'll have lost a vast amount of information about human nature and how people perceive the world.
Second, without their language and its structure, people are rootless. In recording it you are also getting down the stories and folklore. If those are lost a huge part of a people's history goes. These stories often have a common root that speaks of a real event, not just a myth. For example, every Amazonian society ever studied has a legend about a great flood.
What's your favourite example of a big difference between languages?
In English I can tell my son: "Today I talked to Adrian", and he won't ask: "How do you know you talked to Adrian?" But in some languages, including Tariana, you always have to put a little suffix onto your verb saying how you know something - we call it "evidentiality". I would have to say: "I talked to Adrian, non-visual," if we had talked on the phone. And if my son told someone else, he would say: "She talked to Adrian, visual, reported." In that language, if you don't say how you know things, they think you are a liar.
This is a very nice and useful tool. Imagine if, in the argument about weapons of mass destruction, people had had to say how they knew about whatever they said. That would have saved us quite a lot of breath.
And what about different types of vocabulary?
The story about Inuit words for snow is completely wrong. That language group uses multiple suffixes, so you can derive not 50, but 150 words for snow. But the Tariana do have a lot of terms for ants. It is important to know that some bite and others are edible, for instance.
...How many languages have disappeared in the last century?
About 60 or 70 per cent of linguistic diversity in the north-western region of Brazil has gone in the last 100 years. On the Atlantic coast of Brazil it's worse - about 99 per cent - and around the world the figure is 60 to 70 per cent. It has been very rapid. "
via boingboing
Posted
1/29/2004 07:51:18 AM
The Machine That Invents
Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new English words, and trained robotic cockroaches.... but he's really just "the man behind the curtain," he says. The real inventor is a computer program called a Creativity Machine.
What Thaler has created is essentially "Thomas Edison in a box...
"His first patent was for a Device for the Autonomous Generation of Useful Information," the official name of the Creativity Machine, Miller said. "His second patent was for the Self-Training Neural Network Object. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One. Think about that. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One!"
...Thaler's technology was born from near-death experiences of dying computer programs. Its foundation is the discovery that great ideas are the result of noisy neurons and faulty memories.
...Neural networks can be either software programs or computers designed to model an object, process or set of data. Thaler reasoned that if a neural network were an accurate representation of a biological system, he could kill it and figure out what happens in the brain as it dies.
...The brilliance of Thaler's invention is the noise he introduces into the system, Miller said.
"Noise allows neurons to have a little elbow room to dream up new ideas," Miller said.
Other researchers have come to the same conclusion.
Good old-fashioned artificial intelligence uses human experts to input huge quantities of data and a list of rules to create a model, said Robert Kozma, a computer scientist at the University of Memphis. Kozma is experimenting with a similar technology.
The rigidity of traditional artificial intelligence technologies holds back creativity, Kozma said.
"This type of rule-based system is frozen. It's dead and cannot get to the essence of intelligence," Kozma said. "Creativity cannot be derived in a logical way, in a step-by-step fashion." You need a little noise to come up with good ideas, he said.
...In biological brains, the information-carrying cells, called neurons, meet at junctions, called synapses. Brain chemicals, such as adrenaline and dopamine, flow across the junctions to stimulate or soothe the cells. In the computer world, there are switches instead of cells. The switches are connected by numbers or "weights."
So after work, Thaler went home and created the epitome of a killer application - a computer program he called the Grim Reaper. The reaper dismantles neural networks by changing its connection weights. It is the biological equivalent of killing neurons. Pick off enough neurons, and the result is death.
On Christmas Eve 1989, Thaler typed the lyrics to some of his favorite Christmas carols into a neural network. Once he'd taught the network the songs, he unleashed the Grim Reaper. As the reaper slashed away connections, the network's digital life began to flash before its eyes. The program randomly spit out perfectly remembered carols as the killer application severed the first connections. But as its wounds grew deeper, and the network faded toward black, it began to hallucinate.
The network wove its remaining strands of memory together, producing what someone else might interpret as damaged memories, but what Thaler recognized as new ideas. In its death spiral, the program dreamed up new carols, each created from shards of its shattered memories.
"Its last dying gasp was, 'All men go to good earth in one eternal silent night,'" Thaler said.
____
once weaponized this is the new enemy.
i have the same sentiments i had on this day.
Posted
1/28/2004 12:42:26 PM
A good life is a work of art. It is a gift and not a commodity. There is no exchange value for life. It exists outside the realm of value; is beyond expense and worthlessness.
Posted
1/26/2004 07:58:35 AM
...I think the other main issue that perpetuates the gender divide is that men and women in the church, and especially in any form of leadership, don't know how to be good mates with each other. A lot of networking happens relationally - through hanging out in pubs or over coffees, going for meals together and late night conversations at conferences. When people think about putting on conferences, or doing projects together, or meeting to wrestle with theology, they invite the people they know. And because it's largely men doing the inviting, it's largely men who have been invited; women have been left out of the picture or included in a token capacity because they know we ought to be in there somewhere.
Because there has been such an unspoken fear of inappropriate relationships between men and women developing, most opportunities for strong healthy relationships have been squashed as well. Women are safe to converse with in larger groups but not one to one. It's OK to encourage them but not to mentor them. You can chat over coffee at the dinner table but not go down the pub and have a beer together. Single women are, of course, especially dangerous. And so the conversations and networking tend to happen in separate gender groups and are all the poorer for it....
-Jenny Baker
