Computers, Society, and Nature

A mention of neural nets tends to send many otherwise reasonable people into an irrational state. The term often conjures images of the terminator, probably with a dash of I Robot thrown in there for good measure, where anti-social nerds with dubious ethics and hygiene somehow lose control of their creations and wreak havoc upon us all when their neural nets become sentient and decide they’ve had enough.

It also tends to show up in papers in all kinds of fields with complex systems, typically with little explanation of why a neural net is chosen, why that specific implementation was used, how they tuned it, and how they managed their data sets. Fortunately for us all, there is often a sort of vague implication that “it’s learning things even we don’t know!” about the system in question.

Sadly (or happily, depending on your point of view), neural nets aren’t quite that sexy when you get into the nitty gritty details. If you can recall grade 10 physics and trying to fit data to a function, then you’re pretty much most of the way there. Essentially, a neural net takes your set of inputs, gives them weights, sums them up, and runs them through a special function. A graphic often helps to visualize this. You can chain these together at your whim, and at the end you get a bunch of numbers which represent your output. The ‘learning’ in most cases is simply the adjustment of the weights based on whether the output matches what you hope it would.

Of course, one downfall is that it’s virtually impossible to pull out any sort of system information from a reasonably sized neural net, it’s like fitting a curve well but having no idea what curve you fitted it with. Once your neural net has learned its function, you don’t necessarily have any new information about how the system is working, it’s a black box in many senses, and just like in any function approximation method, problems of input size and accuracy remain, and neural nets are not immune to the problems of overfitting and underfitting.

In short, it’s not a magic bullet; yes, they can approximate noisy non-linear functions quite well, but no, that doesn’t mean we understand any better how the system works, and may be a sign we’ve just sort of given up trying to reason about the dynamics of the system. So the next time you read a paper that mentions using neural nets, let it activate your meaningless technical jargon alarm and ask yourself why they’re doing it.

Did you know that the Beeb (BBC) has a ‘Pentagon Correspondent’?

His news looks grim for the web, so start packing up your servers.

A blog-boast: The World Economic Forum blog

An excerpt:

At one point Klaus Schwab asked Clinton how he would advise future U.S. presidential candidates including McCain — or ”the person you’re married to.” “In these cultutrally charged times, I just want to make clear that I am not married to Senator John McCain,” Clinton quipped, drawing a roar of laughter from the crowd.

And ogle the new planet, Ogle.

European Southern Observatory

The hazards of a wired and watched society.

“The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet” . The ubiquity of the internet in the western world has raised a concern among many cause-searching souls, who seek to reduce the “digital divide” – it is unaceptable that the Internet, such an important tool to the daily functioning of our society, should be inaccessable to such a large portion of the global population. So, is IT really that useful of a priority in developing nations? Based on this site, IT will save the world. Or at least Africa. But really, what are the extended implications of such a project? Could a so-called “digital colonialism” potentially become a problem? UNESCO has decided that virtual activities are important enough to warrant a “world summit on the Information Society”, held last november. Some topics covered included “Cultural diversity in knowledge societies”, “Multilingualism for Cultural Diversity and Participation of All in Cyberspace” and “freedom of expression in cyberspace”. Sounds almost more exciting than climate change…

Back in the 1970’s, J Branowski hosted a TV brilliant series on the Beeb. It was aptly titled, ‘The Ascent of Man’. In short, it confronts the possibility that there is something profoundly wrong with the technocratic society we are growing to accept.

In a fitting turn of events, you can retrieve all 8 gigabytes of the entire series with this software, and with this link.

Even with high-speed internet, however, it might take 2 to 3 days.

The Internet is thought by some to reach different demographics of individuals as it is considered a global network. Is that the case? Organizations find their websites may not be attracting people as only those who have been informed physically and are interested in the issues visit their sites.

Richard Smalley, Nobel Prize winner, discoverer of the ‘buckyball’, succumbed to leukemia on October 28, 2005. He was 62. He had been conducting a campaign of awareness about the scarcity of US talent going into hard science, and I feel that he speaks on behalf of a far greater group.

The double-edge of technology in environmental problems and solutions is no small area of study. Many argue sides of Science and Policy in a semi-vindictive back-and-forth, but wherever the “truth” lies, it is undeniable that the interest and participation in sciences is dropping.

A while back, the New York Time put together a good reflection on the topic. Today, reporting on the pop-culture perspective of science, The Beeb offers something new.

The New York Times has a healthy 4-page article on the discursive history of democracy, transparency, and all of what’s good for the people as sourcing from blogs in a tiny Arabian state, Bahrain. read all about it.

From the dregs of slashdot comments comes a link to Global Warming Sceptic Bingo. I can’t recommend watching the video clip suggested to play it to, it’s not terribly interesting, however you can probably play a pretty effective game any time the topic comes up on television or shows up in a discussion forum. The links it has to refute each of the points are generally pretty good, many go to the relevant posts on the RealClimate blog.