Seeds of AI at Google — how the internet is shaping intelligence and learning and, in turn, the role of human culture in natural selection
via Director of Research at Google and AI genius | MetaFilter.
The agent changes by learning something new, the information changes by the knowledge the agent already had. Therefore, a meme reaching an agent, will be transmitted in a changed form. Thus, cultural evolution is Lamarckian: characteristics acquired during the lifetime of the meme’s carrier can be transmitted to later carriers selectively, depending on their fitness. [...]
Twitter / Home
His ideas of the mneme based on the Greek goddess, Mneme, the muse of memory were developed upon early in the 20th century. The mneme represented the memory of an external-to-internal experience. The resulting “mnemic trace” or “engram” would be revived when an element resembling a component of the original complex of stimuli was encountered.
via [...]
Although there is no way of breaking down the types of book being self-published, [Jane] Rowland [editor of The Self Publishing Magazine] estimates that it’s 60 per cent fiction and 40 per cent non-fiction. With the growing number of self-publishers comes a new public respect for self-published authors. So commentators who once derided “vanity published” [...]
FuckYourBrain is an online and PDF-based fountain of knowledge and delight. The mission? To promote deliberate human evolution, to provide the material for new creations, to encourage neurogenesis, to provide data on epigenetics, to appreciate and adore beauty and power, and to advance the possibility of life extension and immortality, all with a deep sense [...]
Purple. Polka dot. Grimy white. And even as the bra colors went viral — wildly so — cyber-arguments erupted about what it all meant. Was so openly and brazenly posting something as intimate as one’s bra color an attempt to raise breast cancer awareness? Or was it all just another Facebook time-suck, another “send your [...]
I want you to imagine back in the early days of newspapers and magazines how the effect of coupons could be measured. A store owner put a coupon in a local newspaper, and then counted up the coupons that came back into the store – immediately that store owner had an understanding of the impact [...]
“Infictive is not an adjective (despite what its etymology may lead you to believe) — it is a subspace. It is not limited to the county bearing its namesake, but is instead an encompassing state of ultra-real. It is nothing which you can possess, nor is it a quality which can be attributed to any [...]
..using footage taken from multiple devices like phones, digital video cameras, closed-circuit television systems, news footage, and web cams, a storyline can be generated online which has the feel of a real sequence of events. These video elements would then be played back with overlying narrative in an actual filmic release, requiring fans of the [...]
Today, all human communication is threaded, multi-participatory, multimodal, asynchronous, proximally indistinct, ubiquitous, continuous, and entirely pervasive. Given this enormous change in the ground conditions, it seems perfectly sensible that we should rethink the basic instrument of electronic communication.
As the most concrete and pervasive manifestation of cyberspace, the mobile telephone establishes new cultural patterns of behavior. [...]
The Blip Festival, now one of the worlds largest and longest running events of its kind, continues to evolve with a greater breadth of international artists, a growing sophistication of styles and creative vocabulary, and a forward-thinking enthusiasm driven home by over two dozen of the worlds best musicians and visualists.
If there’s one thing festival-goers [...]
Of course merely having problems isn’t ENOUGH to qualify someone to help you. The next thing they need to have done is LEARNED from it. What have they learned about coping with, or solving the problem that you have? Even someone only slightly ahead of you on the recovery curve can help you.
Next, they have [...]
With all current fuss about automated content for SEO I've found the recent changes by Google here and here have only greatly diminished the value of SEO for the most valuable keywords those that have transactional value.
via Jonathan Mendez’s Blog: Rising Tide of PPC Means SEO is Sinking.
Stephen Toulmin, an influential philosopher who conducted wide-ranging inquiries into ethics, science and moral reasoning and developed a new approach to analyzing arguments known as the Toulmin model of argumentation, died on Dec. 4 in Los Angeles. He was 87.
via Stephen Toulmin, a Philosopher and Educator, Dies at 87 – Obituary Obit – NYTimes.com.
Frindle ['frindl] n., a writing device, usually a ballpoint pen.[3] It is now a real word; it means pen or writing device in English.
via Frindle – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Scope: The ideal engine would be able to search every document on the Internet
Speed: Results would be available immediately
Currency: All the information would be kept completely up-to-date
Recall: We could always find every document relevant to our query
Precision: There would be no irrelevant documents in our result set
Ranking: The most relevant results would come first, and [...]