Firefox Addons I use

So last night I foobarred all my addons for firefox by manually mucking around with the files. It's probably a good idea that I log the addons I have installed:

• Adblock Plus: The horrible ads on digg and facebook drove me to finally install this, and I am so thankful to them!
• Adblock Plus Element Hider Helper: Blocks some text ads...if you are going to block some, you might as well block them all!
• Bugmenot: Log into free, but registration required websites. I used to use this a lot more than I do now, perhaps these news websites are catching on?
• Cooliris: Useless but impressive way to view photos, especially on facebook.
• Digg Toolbar for Firefox: Don't use digg as much anymore since I started using Google Reader's share feature.
• Download Statusbar: Puts downloads into a statusbar instead of a whole new window.
• Google Gears: Allows offline usage of the Google Apps (reader, mail, documents, etc).
• Google Preview: Inserts thumbnails on the left for Google search results.
• Read it later: Really haven't used this much.
• Resurrect Pages: Automatically try to grab down website pages from a variety of sources.
  

Would you die for your children?

Would you die for your children? If you put this question to parents, I would expect almost every single one to respond with "yes" without hesitation. But the reality is much different. When the time comes, who knows really how we will react.

It is fairly easy to see who may not really be willing to die for their children. Simply rephrase the question: "Who would be willing to make sacrifices for their children?" Of course your life is the ultimate sacrifice. If you are not willing to make lesser sacrifices, how do you expect to be able to make the ultimate one?

And that is the sad state we find ourselves in. People generally are too self-centered to make sacrifices for their children---let alone the ultimate sacrifice!

Pessimistic Optimism

I've often been accused of being a pessimist. I'd rather like to think of myself as a realist.
I do, like most people, however, dislike being around grumpy people. These people have also been termed pessimists. They seem to always expect the worst in people---and many times, they eventually are correct.

I have developed my philosophy after many years of observation and testing: expect the best, be prepared for the worst. You've probably heard this before, the concept is certainly not new. But why should we expect the best? Through my observations, I've learned that people tend to eventually get what they expect. This is a very strange result, but in my experience and tests, it seems to have some statistical relevance.

My theory is that there are a couple of reasons for this. One involves other people, and the other involves yourself. People are really good at perceiving expectation of others. Generally, people tend to follow the norms present around them---thus, if you want people to behave a certain way, simply be surprised when they do not. Another reason expecting the best seems to work is that it changes your own attitude. No longer are you frightened to try new things, no longer are you bitter, no longer are you stuck.

Decisions

Last night I watched an interesting talk on how people make silly decisions:


The most interesting part of this talk was when he showed how people's decisions became more rational as they distanced themselves from the consequences. I thought, however, that much of his actual theory was far too simplified to be reasonable. For instance, his expectation equation is very simple: Utility * Probability of Payoff. This does not take into account possible negative payoff in the case of failure. For example, say you were going to rob a bank, which would give you a 5 million dollar payoff. Let's for now assume you do not have any moral qualms regarding robbing a bank (i.e. you're Ben Bernanke). Now let's say your probability of success is 0.05. This means your expected payoff is 5,000,000 * 0.05 = 250,000. If it costs less then 250,000 to attempt this caper, you should go for it, right? Not necessarily. What about if you fail? There is also a cost for failing. So, in every decision there is the payoff for success, there is a payoff for failure, there is a fixed price of attempting, and there is a price for not attempting. Imagine a binary decision---to act, or not to act. You could quantify the expectation of Act as:

({probability of success} * {utility of success}) +
((1 - {probability of success}) * {utility of failure}) -
{cost of attempt}.

This must be weighed against the expectation of not acting. Whichever has the higher expected value should be taken in a purely rational agent.

Another interesting point in the talk was that people make decisions by comparing the gradient. That is people prefer slopes that are moving toward higher payoffs than lower, even when the total payoff is lower. There were at least two examples of this in the talk, the salary and the burger. In the case of the salary, most people chose the salary that was increasing, even though the total net was less than the total of the salary that was decreasing. In the case of the burger, people associated its worth to what they had paid for it in the past. I do not see this as being dumb or ignorant. In fact, we have learned in nature that things at rest tend to stay at rest and things in motion tend to stay in motion. Thus, we use the slope of the payoff the predict future rewards.

These shortcuts are very interesting to me, as we may need them to create machines that are able to make good decisions---or at least machines that understand the decisions that humans are making.

Facts and Theories

What causes us to accept something we do not observe as fact? Why do some people have so much faith in something? What causes someone to cling tightly to a belief?

It amazes me how some people suddenly become experts in some area simply because they heard a rumor somewhere from someone who heard it somewhere else. This phenomenon is a strange one. I hear them proclaim it with complete confidence--as if they directly observed many facts supporting the claim, and none contradicting. But, many times, the fact is, they never did.

It seems that they so dearly want this fact to be true, that they end up ignoring all evidence that contradicts it. They build up a model of the world, but then, instead of constantly revising, they freeze it.

In science, we have the scientific method:

1. Observe.
2. Make a theory.
3. Create a test.
4. Go back to 1!

Just because we make a theory does not mean it is correct. We need to keep considering new evidence and use that to revise our theory. We need to consider our theory in the context of how much evidence we have for its correctness.

When people present their theories they should make sure that they are presenting them as theories and not as facts. Just because you think X is Y doesn't make it so. If you want to tell me a theory, tell me that it's your theory and the evidence you have. If you have a fact, tell me it as a fact, don't give me your interpretation.

Zilla

I have a nickname for our youngest daughter, Katherine: Zilla. This nickname evolved from a nickname given by my brother-in-law: Fluff. Fluff turned to Fluff-monster, which I changed to Fluff-zilla, which then later was shortened to Zilla.

This was more than a year ago, and now I've been seeing more and more people stealing her nickname!

For example, last night I caught this picture:

Email Down

If you sent me an email this weekend, I did not get it:

E-mail services for the campus will be migrated to K-State Zimbra starting at 6:00 pm Friday evening, May 29th and continue throughout the weekend. E-mail access will be restored to the campus Sunday evening, May 30th. E-mail services will not be available during this time.

P.S. Anyone else notice that May 30th is not Sunday?

Vacuously True

This post is for YOU! Ok, maybe not, but read it anyway! It seems to me that there are many people who lose perspective. They either get so wrapped up in the details, that they do not have a clear direction, or, they get so wrapped up about the destination, they do not do the things they need to do now. This post is going to mostly be about the latter.

I love analogies. I don't separate knowledge well, and thus concepts bleed over from one to another. Imagine you are making a trip. You are driving from Colorado to California. If, while you are driving, you simply focus on the destination, you will end up crashing your car. You need to be making local decisions---when to brake, when to turn, etc. You cannot simply be focused on your goal.

Something I often hear goes something like: "If I had X, then I would do Y!"--"If I was rich, I would buy a car." These people tend to make up all sorts of scenarios that currently depend on conditions that do not hold. They do this to the detriment of the decisions they actually have. Instead of focusing their effort on guiding themselves to their goal using the steering wheel of their car, they instead tell me how, if they had a teleporter, they would simply teleport there. You can see this with all the 'get rich quick' schemes that many people get involved with.

Coming up with these vacuously true statements lends toward a feeling of helplessness. "I cannot control my destiny, because all my conditionals are false." Instead of spending effort on these, one should focus on the things they do have control over, the decisions that they must make, and every time they make one, ensure that it is moving them on the way toward their goal.

Lost

Last week I was in Budapest, Hungary for a conference. I got home Sunday evening. Monday morning I started grading exams and continued grading until 2am on Tuesday morning. Finally, I went to bed around 2:30am---I simply could not stay awake any longer. In the night I had a dream that I was back in Budapest, and it was dark. Suddenly I woke from the dream, looking around I could not tell where I was. I sat up in bed and tried very hard to think back to how I got in whatever place I was. My brain would not budge. This was a frightening experience---not because I didn't know where I was, but because I could not get my brain to process it. Lisa finally came into the room 30 seconds later, and when she asked "what is wrong?" it finally loosened the stuck gears in my head. I fell back down, comforted that I could think.

Déjà Vu

Every night I have many dreams. Right before I completely go to sleep, my brain starts a dream. I suspect that may be the reason I have a hard time getting to sleep since the dream process must start before I can really get to sleep. My dreams are very vivid and usually involve real life circumstances. I may dream about work, school, home, or anything. Sometimes, however, my dreams mix with my real memories. Sometimes distinguishing between dream memories and real memories is quite a challenge.

The most unusual feeling, though, is the one of déjà vu. Sometimes, in real life, I encounter a situation: a scene that seems to me to have come straight out of one of my dreams---as if in the past I had dreamt about a scene in my future. This past weekend it happened again, I was at a friend's house where he was having a gaming party. We started playing a game I had never seen before (Halo 3). We all took turns playing (two people could play at the same time), and at some point two of my friends were playing when they encountered a scene in Africa on a highway system. This triggered my déjà vu and I remembered having a dream watching both of them playing and encountering the exact same scene.

Now I suspect that I did not really dream exactly that, but the feeling of déjà vu is so strong that immediately when I feel it, I wonder if I am currently dreaming...

Insanity

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
--Albert Einstein

Spammers solving A.I. Problems?

New Scientist has published an article about how spammers could be the key to solving A.I. problems and eventually passing the Turing test. The one thing they do not mention is that CAPTCHAs are all about computers detecting other computers, while the Turing test is about humans detecting computers.

Sorry for any inconvenience

Yeah, who hasn't been inconvenienced by 24 hours only?

AGI

So it seems some other people have also noticed that the field of A.I. has lost its direction and have proposed starting a new name for the old A.I., A.G.I (Artificial General Intelligence).

There has even been a first conference and a wiki.

Tired

I've been very tired during the day for the past couple of weeks. I was pretty sure it was not just the usual lack of sleep---and today it hit me: I started taking allergy medicine in the morning a couple of weeks back. Doh! I guess I'm going to skip it for a while so I can get some things done.

True A.I.

I was talking with a friend the other day about free will and we reached the point where we thought that free will is currently missing from alot of A.I. research. I would not consider any A.I. to be true A.I. without the machine having free will. This then brought up how I believe that there is true randomness if and only if there is free will. And that a machine must have a fuel source of true randomness in order to have free will. However, this is a topic of another blog post that perhaps will someday be written. Here I wanted to talk about...What the heck happened to A.I. research!?

I think at some point, every researcher who starts in A.I. realizes that there just really isn't much funding for foundational true A.I. research. All of the so-called A.I. research is currently more about data-mining and adaptive systems. I believe this is because these areas have a clearer short-term potential economic gain.

Who is working on the real foundational questions concerning constructing a true A.I.?

I can't believe Jorge used Theta and Sigma incorrectly! :(

No Phone

So our phone service has been out since this morning. We were told that this is a "neighborhood-wide" outage. I actually saw a tent next to one of the large phone relay boxes along with a phone truck. I've never had the phone out for more than 30 minutes--bet we don't get a discount on phone and DSL for this month.

UPDATE: Looks like there is some news on the source of the outage.


UPDATE2: About noon today our phone came back on (3/28)--so if you tried to call, you can now get through (if my wife isn't on the phone :-D )

Reactive Machines

There seems to be some sort of need placed in most of us for things to be balanced. We crave the median--equal, fair, just. This need, however, seems to cause us to be very susceptible to forming our personality, our methods of discussion, even our ideas, to try to balance some extremes we may have experienced in our lives. We learn and form into the opposite extreme of that which seemed extreme to us. This shapes us, and this shape usually retains for the rest of our lives. I hold for your consideration, that this formation does not create any lasting balance. There may seem to be some sort of balance during formation, each extreme canceling each other out much like acids and bases. One individual produces acid, the other now forms into someone producing a base. So what happens now, when the acid is gone, or when the base reacts with an individual not producing acid? The balance is then upset again.

So this is my proposal, the only way to bring a true, real, and lasting balance is to be median. Try not to react to the extreme, you are producing the buffer. It would be interesting to see the results of a society that did not form within a reactionary medium. One last parting thought...is this non-reactionary proposal merely a reaction to all reactive machines walking around?

P != NP

I had an odd dream last night. I dreamt that I was giving a presentation at a conference, showing a proof that P doesn't equal NP. It seemed I had this closed box, which every year I would bring to the conference, and if someone could successfully complete my challenge, I would show them the contents of the box. It seems that inside that box was a secret set of numbers that helped me to come with all sorts of answers. This year, the answer I came with was that NP didn't equal P. To prove this I had a set of five objects. Each object was a set of tubes that were different, but precise diameters. These tubes were chosen with the help of the numbers in my box. The tubes were handcrafted, and on each object was drawn some sort of histogram. The histogram of each object conformed to certain properties, thus somehow proving that P != NP. The proof was simple to show, but hard to come up with. The proof it seemed (as I realized after I woke), was in the spirit of NP, easily verifiable, but not easily come by.