Author: Mark Davis

Entrepreneur, scientist, engineer, and author. Bent on worldwide understanding.

Industrial Revolution #4

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Paul Krugman at New York Times consumes Robert Gordon’s analysis of economic growth and the role of technology and comes up more hopeful than Gordon. The kernel in Krugman’s hope is that Big Data analytics can provide a shortcut to intelligent machines by bypassing the requirement for specification and programming that was once assumed to be a requirement for artificial intelligence. Instead, we don’t specify but use “data-intensive ways” to achieve a better result. And we might get to IR#4, following Gordon’s taxonomy where IR stands for “industrial revolution.” IR#1 was steam and locomotives  IR#2 was everything up to computers. IR#3 is computers and cell phones and whatnot.

Krugman implies that IR#4 might spur the typical economic consequences of grand technological change, including the massive displacement of workers, but like in previous revolutions it is also assumed that economic growth built from new industries will ultimately eclipse the negatives. This is not new, of course. Robert Anton Wilson argued decades ago for the R.I.C.H. economy (Rising Income through Cybernetic Homeostasis). Wilson may have been on acid, but Krugman wasn’t yet tuned in, man. (A brief aside: the Krugman/Wilson notions probably break down over extraction and agribusiness/land rights issues. If labor is completely replaced by intelligent machines, the land and the ingredients it contains nevertheless remain a bottleneck for economic growth. Look at the global demand for copper and rare earth materials, for instance.)

But why the particular focus on Big Data technologies? Krugman’s hope teeters on the assumption that data-intensive algorithms possess a fundamentally different scale and capacity than human-engineered approaches. Having risen through the computational linguistics and AI community working on data-driven methods for approaching intelligence, I can certainly sympathize with the motivation, but there are really only modest results to report at this time.… Read the rest

Keep Suspicious and Carry On

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I’ve previously argued that it is unlikely that resource-constrained simulations can achieve adequate levels of fidelity to be sufficient for what we observe around us. This argument was a combination of computational irreducibility and assumptions about the complexity of evolutionary trajectories of living beings. There may also be an argument about the observed contingency of the evolutionary process that is an argument against any kind of “intelligent” organizing principle though not against simulation itself.

Leave it to physicists to envision a test of the Bostrom hypothesis that we are living in a computer simulation. Martin Savage and his colleagues look at Quantum Chromodynamic (QCD) theory and current simulation methods for QCD. They conclude that if we are, in fact, living in a simulation, then we might observe specific inconsistencies that arise from finite computing power for the universe as a whole. Those inconsistencies would be observed in looking at the distribution of cosmic ray energies, specifically. Note that if the distribution is not unusual the universe could either be a simulation (just a sophisticated one) or could be a truly physical one (free running and not on another entity’s computational framework). It is only if the distribution is unusual that it might be a simulation.… Read the rest

Bravery and Restraint

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In 1997, shortly after getting married and buying our first house, I was invited to travel to Japan and spend a little over a month researching Japanese-Chinese machine translation under a grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education. It was a disorienting experience, like most non-Japanese find Japan, and the hours spent studying my translation guide helped me very little. In the mornings I would jog through downtown, around the canals, and past the temples. Days were spent writing and optimizing statistical matching algorithms for lining up runs of characters that I didn’t understand in an early incarnation of the same approach currently used in Google Translate.

I, of course, visited the Peace Memorial Park several times and toured the museum there, ultimately purchasing a slim volume of recollections from the day the bomb fell that was written in Japanese and English on facing pages. There was also one thing that struck me and I later inquired about to a Japan expert who worked in the Intelligence Community: the narrative presented in the museum was that the Japanese commoner had little understanding of the war effort; they were victims of the emperor and the elite classes. It was a moral distancing that resonated with similar arguments about the German volk being non-complicit in the Holocaust, and an argument that I found distasteful.

With this background, then, I was intrigued when I discovered that the father of my new boss wrote a memoir on being perhaps the first Westerner to enter Hiroshima following the dropping of the atomic bomb. Kenneth Harrison’s book, The Brave Japanese, was originally published in 1966, then republished in 1982 under The Road to Hiroshima due, in part, to the controversy in Australia over ascribing bravery to the Japanese.… Read the rest

Sparse Grokking

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Jeff Hawkins of Palm fame shows up in the New York Times hawking his Grok for Big Data predictions. Interestingly, if one drills down into the details of Grok, we see once again that randomized sparse representations are the core of the system. That is, if we assign symbols random representational vectors that are sparse, we can sum the vectors for co-occurring symbols and, following J.R. Firth’s pithy “words shall be known by the company that they keep” start to develop a theory of meaning that would not offend Wittgenstein.

Is there anything new to Hawkins’ effort? For certain types of time-series prediction, the approach parallels artificial neural network designs, replacing the complexity of shifting, multi-epoch training regimens that, in effect, build the high-dimensional distances between co-occurring events by gradually moving time-correlated data together and uncorrelated data apart with an end-run around all the computational complexity. But then there is Random Indexing, which I’ve previously discussed, here. If one restricts Random Indexing to operating on temporal patterns, or on spatial patterns, then the results start to look like Numenta’s offering.

While there is a bit of opportunism in Hawkins latching onto Big Data to promote an application of methods he has been working on for years, there are very real opportunities for trying to mine leading indicators to help with everything from ecommerce to research and development. Many flowers will bloom, grok, die, and be reborn.… Read the rest

Bats and Belfries

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Thomas Nagel proposes a radical form of skepticism in his new book, Minds and Cosmos, continuing his trajectory through subjective experience and moral realism first began with bats zigging and zagging among the homunculi of dualism reimagined in the form of qualia. The skepticism involves disputing materialistic explanations and proposing, instead, that teleological ones of an unspecified form will likely apply, for how else could his subtitle that paints the “Neo-Darwinian Concept of Nature” as likely false hold true?

Nagel is searching for a non-religious explanation, of course, because just enervating nature through fiat is hardly an explanation at all; any sort of powerful, non-human entelechy could be gaming us and the universe in a non-coherent fashion. But what parameters might support his argument? Since he apparently requires a “significant likelihood” argument to hold sway in support of the origins of life, for instance, we might imagine what kind of thinking could result in highly likely outcomes that begin with inanimate matter and lead to goal-directed behavior while supporting a significant likelihood of that outcome. The parameters might involve the conscious coordination of the events leading towards the emergence of goal-directed life, thus presupposing a consciousness that is not our own. We are back then to our non-human entelechy looming like an alien or like a strange creator deity (which is not desirable to Nagel). We might also consider the possibility that there are properties to the universe itself that result in self-organization and that either we don’t yet know or that we are only beginning to understand. Elliot Sober’s critique suggests that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics results in what I might call “patterned” behavior while not becoming “goal-directed” per se.… Read the rest

Pressing Snobs into Hell

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Paul Vitanyi has been a deep advocate for Kolmogorov complexity for many years. His book with Ming Li, An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications, remains on my book shelf (and was a bit of an investment in grad school).

I came across a rather interesting paper by Vitanyi with Rudi Cilibrasi called “Clustering by Compression” that illustrates perhaps more easily and clearly than almost any other recent work the tight connections between meaning, repetition, and informational structure. Rather than describing the paper, however, I wanted to conduct an experiment that demonstrates their results. To do this, I asked the question: are the writings of Dante more similar to other writings of Dante than to Thackeray? And is the same true of Thackeray relative to Dante?

Now, we could pursue these questions at many different levels. We might ask scholars, well-versed in the works of each, to compare and contrast the two authors. They might invoke cultural factors, the memes of their respective eras, and their writing styles. Ultimately, though, the scholars would have to get down to some textual analysis, looking at the words on the page. And in so doing, they would draw distinctions by lifting features of the text, comparing and contrasting grammatical choices, word choices, and other basic elements of the prose and poetry on the page. We might very well be able to take parts of the knowledge of those experts and distill it into some kind of a logical procedure or algorithm that would parse the texts and draw distinctions based on the distributions of words and other structural cues. If asked, we might say that a similar method might work for the so-called language of life, DNA, but that it would require a different kind of background knowledge to build the analysis, much less create an algorithm to perform the same task.… Read the rest

Fish eating fish eating fish

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Decompressing in NorCal following a vibrant Hadoop World. More press mentions:

· Big Data, Big News: 10 Things To See At Hadoop World, CRN, October 23, 2012 – (Circulation 53,397)

· Quest Software Announces Hadoop-Centric Software Analytics, CloudNewsDaily, October 23, 2012-coverage of Hadoop product announcements.

· Quest Launches New Analytics Software for Hadoop, SiliconANGLE, October 23, 2012- coverage of Hadoop Product.

· Continuing its M&A software push, Dell moves into ‘big data’ analytics via Kitenga buy, 451 Research

· Cisco Updates Schedule to Automate Hadoop Big Data Analysis Systems, Eweek, October 24, 2012- mention of Kitenga product announcement at Hadoop. (Circulation 196,157)

· Quest Launches New Analytics Software for Hadoop, DABBC, October 24, 2012

And what about fish? Dell == Big Fish, Quest == Medium Fish, Kitenga == Happy Minnow.… Read the rest

Dell Acquires Kitenga

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Dell Inc. : Quest Software Expands Its Big Data Solution with New Hadoop-Centric Software Capabilities for Business Analytics

10/23/2012| 08:05am US/Eastern

  • Complete solution includes application development, data replication, and data analysis

Hadoop World 2012-Quest Software, Inc. (now part of Dell) announced three significant product releases today aimed at helping customers more quickly adopt Hadoop and exploit their Big Data. When used together, the three products offer a complete solution that addresses the greatest challenge with Hadoop: the shortage of technical and analytical skills needed to gain meaningful business insight from massive volumes of captured data. Quest builds on its long history in data and database management to open the world of Big Data to more than just the data scientist.

News Facts:

  • Kitenga Analytics: Based on the recent acquisition of Kitenga, Quest Software now enables customers to analyze structured, semi-structured and unstructured data stored in Hadoop. Available immediately, Kitenga Analytics delivers sophisticated capabilities, including text search, machine learning, and advanced visualizations, all from an easy-to-use interface that does not require understanding of complex programming or the Hadoop stack itself. With Kitenga Analytics and the Quest Toad®Business Intelligence Suite, an organization has a complete self-service analysis environment that empowers business and systems analysts across a variety of backgrounds and job roles.
More:

http://www.4-traders.com/DELL-INC-4867/news/Dell-Inc-Quest-Software-Expands-Its-Big-Data-Solution-with-New-Hadoop-Centric-Software-Capabiliti-15415359/… Read the rest

Signals and Noise: Chapter 15 (Synaesthesia)

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The drift from daylight into twilight held an anxiety for Zach. There was a liquescent feeling to the air that was a result of the luminous ocean, the cars, and the windows of the coastal homes. The morning was much bolder in its transition—less lackadaisical—because the coastal range blocked the light into a striated glow until finally rolling over town in full heat, bearing down on the fogbank that stretched out to the south like twirling cotton candy. He woke up scared in a way that he rarely ever did. There had been days when he awoke in a full flush, bounding out to the living room to peer out through the blinds, marveling that the FBI had not yet arrived, but there had always been a mischievous edge to his fears. If he had been arrested, taken in, interrogated, it was all part of the stripes associated with his own actions. This time was different for Zach. He was scared that there was something else going on that he did not understand, and he was not at all used to not understanding or, at least, thinking he understood.

The online universe had not changed and PoorGore was not back in The Spinner’s miniverse. He checked in on the Idaho papers, narrowing to the southwest corner of the state, watching for anomalies. Pollution, grazing rights, indigenous casinos and their impacts, car dealerships going under, property taxes—it was all normal for the time being except that PoorGore had vanished and nothing significant had happened. Zach’s mental math suggested he could be anywhere in the United States given the elapsed time since PoorGore’s last post. He peered at FC’s house from space again, but the satellite imagery had not changed.… Read the rest