Roadrunner supercomputer puts research at a new scale On Saturday, Los Alamos researchers used PetaVision to model more than a billion visual neurons surpassing the scale of 1 quadrillion computations a second (a petaflop/s). On Monday scientists used PetaVision to reach a new computing performance record of 1.144 petaflop/s. The achievement throws open the door to eventually achieving human-like cognitive performance in electronic computers. PetaVision only requires single precision arithmetic, whereas the official LINPACK code used to officially verify Roadrunner’s speed uses double precision arithmetic. “Roadrunner ushers in a new era for science at Los Alamos National Laboratory,” said Terry Wallace, associate director for Science, Technology and Engineering at Los Alamos. “Just a week after formal introduction of the machine to the world, we are already doing computational tasks that existed only in the realm of imagination a year ago.” PetaVision models the human visual system—mimicking more than 1 billion visual neurons and trillions of synapses. Both my phil mind and phil tech class are ridiculously out of date. (Thx Steve via /.)

The Death of Alan Turing

this is bat country

Ran into this quote from Whitehead: It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them. From Alfred North Whitehead’s An Introduction to Mathematics, p. 61. There is an echo of this sentiment in Turing’s approach to artificial intelligence. In any case, I found this quote on the Nudge blog, based on a book by Thaler and Sunstein. A nudge is any environmental cue that disposes a person to a particular response. They describe it like this: By a nudge we mean anything that influences our choices. A school cafeteria might try to nudge kids toward good diets by putting the healthiest foods at front. We think that it’s time for institutions, including government, to become much more user-friendly by enlisting the science of choice to make life easier for people and by gentling nudging them in directions that will make their lives better. They call their position ‘libertarian paternalism’ (ugh), and it is all about limiting control in particular ways without compromising freedom of choice. More specifically, it is about how to design environments that foster intelligent decision making. This might be one of those dangerous ideas, but when have you ever had a reason to distrust a Chicago economist? Some examples and a lecture below. Social cues are particularly salient nudges, but our machines are getting better at providing motivational feedback. I really like traffic examples as a case of almost seamless human-machine-infrastructure integration, which works really well in the ‘nudge’ vocabulary. For instance: If white lines are removed from the centre of a road, […]

Futile Podcast has escaped the shackles of Blogspot and moved to its new home of Granate Seed. My sister Nikki has also started a blog chronicling the Completed Martin Family. Putting it on the Blogroll will make me check it more often.

This is really old in internet time, but I just watched it now and it is definitely worth it. David Weinberger is a philosopher by training, and tells basically the same Aristotle to Heidegger story I tell in my own class. See also: Ontology is Overrated and Information R/Evolution. Coming up: The Three Pillars of the Internet Age.

The eventual theoretical foundation of Internet Studies ™ combines the collapse of ontology with an integrated and consistent set of nudges and an active and self-sustaining community of spimes. Let’s call these the Three Pillars of the Internet Age. These pillars are bound together by what I will call a participatory framework. Internet studies differ from other “studies” disciplines (media studies, gender studies, etc) in that the protocols which govern the interactions between entities within a participatory framework are well-defined, and in most cases are explicit and formal (for instance, IP describes (at some level of analysis) the communication between all networked objects). Exchanges between entities within the framework are interactive, interoperable, and cooperative, and hence they are participatory. Internet studies is also far more interested with the possibilities made available by the infrastructure that supports the participatory framework, than in any particularly realization of those possibilities. For instance, Internet Studies is interested in the question, “what is a blog?”, and what kinds of communication, social organization, and information distribution possibilities that this kind of resource makes available, and is less interested in a question like “How has DKos changed the political climate in 2008?” which in some sense is merely a specific application of the more general social protocol. I’ll talk just a bit more about the three pillars below. Pillar One: Everything Is Miscellaneous Collapsing ontology (more specifically, collapsing the distinction between data and metadata) as described by Weinberger and Shirky yields a minimalist ontology that is unsustainable by human minds alone. This in itself is nothing new; we have always used external frameworks for structuring our knowledge. The organization of libraries is a paradigmatic case of using external resources (shelves, numbering systems) to help structure and support our organizational techniques. What changes with the a mature internet […]

If one of the fundamental problems of the technological world is the explosion of information, then it seems to me that the task of ‘sensemaking’ is a burden that must be taken up by both humans and machines. This is where the real power of human-machine collaboration lies: machines are not just tools to be used by humans, but are fellow sensemakers confronting a VUCA world alongside us. Cognitive enhancements, memory and attention drugs, and so on, look like pissing in the wind compared to the overwhelming amounts of information produced by the collective. At best, it seems that these enhancements help the individual mind focus on the information relevant to the goals and projects of the individual mind, and to mask off the unimportant or uninteresting information. Perhaps this leads to a certain amount of individual empowerment, but it still leaves mountains of (possibly relevant) data untouched, and therefore doesn’t solve the problem. Perhaps I am using the term ‘sensemaking’ to be more or less synonymous with terms like ‘interpreting’ or ‘understanding’, and maybe this isn’t exactly what you mean. But my idea is that our machines themselves will play a role in helping to determine what is important or interesting. This is why I said that Google is itself a sensemaker, because it has the goal of sorting out what is relevant and what is irrelevant. As you rightly point out, Google isn’t terribly good at the task, and the user must use their own judgment in how to make use of the results Google makes available. But Google is already good enough that even the unenhanced individual doesn’t have too much trouble, with a moderate amount of training, to make a decent judgment call. The upshot is that with the collaboration of sensemakers like Google, we have […]

… and when they have observ’d, that the principal disturbance in society arises from those goods, which we call external, and from their looseness and easy transition from one person to another; they must seek for a remedy by putting these goods, as far as possible, on the same footing with the fix’d and constant advantages of the mind and body. – Hume, Treatise

On Jay Leve, the guy behind SurveyUSA All these polls were being conducted in a bedroom-sized chamber just outside Leve’s door called “the vault,” in recognition of its actual use back when a rare-coins dealer owned the space. Leve led me inside, and pointed to a corner. “We even kept one of his safes,” he said with a smile. Leve doesn’t use the old steel safe, but the vault is still an apt name because it currently guards the workhorses of Leve’s business: a set of black IBM calling machines, each about the size of a stereo tuner and stacked horizontally in a pair of large metal cabinets. Each machine is capable of having as many as 288 phone lines plugged into its back, creating a messy tangle of multicolored wires running from the machines up into the ceiling. On a busy day, Leve explained, his machines might place a few hundred thousand calls for 30 different polls. (For this election, he is polling in 28 states.) Since Leve began conducting surveys in 1992, his machines have completed 24 million interviews. Leve, for his part, can be withering about the establishment that rejects him. He bridles at the commonly used term “robo-calling” as a label for what he does. “It could not be a more offensive term,” he says. “It literally is like using the N-word.”