November 26, 2012
Collective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making in organisms (including some bacteria) and computer networks. The term appears in sociobiology, political science, and in context of mass peer review and crowdsourcing web applications (e.g. Wikipedia). This broader definition involves consensus, social capital, and formalism such as voting systems, social media and other means of quantifying mass activity.
Everything from a political party to a public wiki can reasonably be described as this loose form of collective intelligence. The notion of collective intelligence has also been called ‘Symbiotic intelligence.’ A precursor of the concept is found in entomologist William Morton Wheeler’s observation that seemingly independent individuals can cooperate so closely as to become indistinguishable from a single organism. Wheeler saw this collaborative process at work in ants that acted like the cells of a single beast he called a ‘superorganism.’
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November 26, 2012
The Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base used by Google to enhance its search engine’s search results with semantic-search information gathered from a wide variety of sources. Knowledge Graph display was added to Google’s search engine in 2012, starting in the United States. It provides structured and detailed information about the topic in addition to a list of links to other sites. The goal is that users would be able to use this information to resolve their query without having to navigate to other sites and assemble the information themselves.
According to Google, this information is derived from many sources, including the CIA World Factbook, Freebase, and Wikipedia. The feature is similar in intent to answer engines such as Ask Jeeves and Wolfram Alpha. As of 2012, its semantic network contained over 500 million objects and more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects which are used to understand the meaning of the keywords entered for the search.
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November 26, 2012
Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages.
As such, NLP is related to the area of human–computer interaction. Many challenges in NLP involve natural language understanding — that is, enabling computers to derive meaning from human or natural language input. An automated online assistant providing customer service on a web page, an example of an application where natural language processing is a major component. Continue reading →
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November 26, 2012
Deep learning refers to a sub-field of machine learning (systems that examine data, from sensors or databases, and identify complex relationships) that is based on learning several levels of representations, corresponding to a hierarchy of features or factors or concepts, where higher-level concepts are defined from lower-level ones, and the same lower-level concepts can help to define many higher-level concepts.
Deep learning is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on learning representations. An observation (e.g., an image) can be represented in many ways (e.g., a vector of pixels), but some representations make it easier to learn tasks of interest (e.g., is this the image of a human face?) from examples, and research in this area attempts to define what makes better representations and how to learn them. Continue reading →
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November 25, 2012
Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is a scientific discipline concerned with the development of algorithms that take as input empirical data (from sensors or databases), identify complex relationships, and employ these identified patterns to make predictions. The algorithm studies a portion of the observed data (called ‘training data’) to capture characteristics of interest. Optical character recognition, in which printed characters are recognized automatically based on previous examples, is a classic engineering example of machine learning.
In 1959, AI pioneer Arthur Samuel defined machine learning as a ‘Field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.’ Computer scientist Tom M. Mitchell provided a widely quoted, more formal definition: ‘A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P, if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E.’
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November 21, 2012
A portaledge is a deployable hanging tent system designed for rock climbers who spend multiple days and nights on a big wall climb. An assembled portaledge is a fabric-covered platform surrounded by a metal frame that hangs from a single point and has adjustable suspension straps. A separate cover, called a ‘stormfly,’ covers the entire system in the event of bad weather.
The first portaledges used in Yosemite were non-collapsible cots purloined from Housekeeping Camp, a Yosemite Valley campground that featured primitive metal framed bunks for the campers. These heavy cots were used on multi-day climbs on granite monoliths like El Capitan, and then sometimes tossed off the summit for later retrieval. Continue reading →
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November 20, 2012
A memory hole is any mechanism for the alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts, or other records, such as from a web site or other archive, particularly as part of an attempt to give the impression that something never happened.
The concept was first popularized by George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ in which the memory hole is a small chute leading to a large incinerator used for censorship. Continue reading →
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November 20, 2012
In Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism, commodity fetishism is theory that objects are imagined to dictate the social activities that produce them. When the social relationships among people are expressed with objectified economic relationships, the subjective, abstract aspects of economic value are transformed into objective, real things that people believe have intrinsic value (reification).
In a capitalist society, social relations between people—who makes what, who works for whom, the production-time for a commodity, et cetera—are perceived as economic relations among objects, that is, how valuable a given commodity is when compared to another commodity. Therefore, the market exchange of commodities masks the true economic character of the human relations of production, between the worker and the capitalist.
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November 20, 2012
A fetish (from Latin ‘facticius,’ ‘artificial’ and ‘facere,’ ‘to make’) is an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a man-made object that has power over others. Essentially, fetishism is the emic (intracultural) attribution of inherent value or powers to an object. Initially, the Portuguese developed the concept of fetishism to refer to the objects used in religious cults by West African natives.
The concept was popularized in Europe circa 1757, when French scholar Charles de Brosses used it in comparing West African religion to the magical aspects of ancient Egyptian religion. Later, French philosopher Auguste Comte employed the concept in his theory of the evolution of religion, wherein he posited fetishism as the earliest (most primitive) stage, followed by polytheism and monotheism. Continue reading →
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November 20, 2012
A cargo cult is a religious practice that has appeared in many traditional pre-industrial tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. The cults focus on obtaining the material wealth (the ‘cargo’) of the advanced culture through magic and religious rituals and practices.
Cult members believe that the wealth was intended for them by their deities and ancestors. Cargo cults developed primarily in remote parts of New Guinea and other Melanesian and Micronesian societies in the southwest Pacific Ocean, beginning with the first significant arrivals of Westerners in the 19th century. Continue reading →
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November 19, 2012
Diegesis [dahy-uh-jee-sis] is a style of storytelling in fiction which presents an interior view of a world and is: that world itself experienced by the characters in situations and events of the narrative; telling, recounting, as opposed to showing, enacting. In diegesis the narrator tells the story. The narrator presents to the audience or the implied readers the actions, and perhaps thoughts, of the characters.
Diegesis (‘narration’) and ‘mimesis’ (‘imitation’) have been contrasted since Plato’s and Aristotle’s times. Mimesis shows rather than tells, by means of action that is enacted. Diegesis, however, is the telling of the story by a narrator. The narrator may speak as a particular character or may be the invisible narrator or even the all-knowing narrator who speaks from above in the form of commenting on the action or the characters. Continue reading →
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November 19, 2012
Alterity [all-ter-eh-tee] is a philosophical term meaning ‘otherness,’ strictly being in the sense of the other of two. In the phenomenological tradition it is usually understood as the entity in contrast to which an identity is constructed, and it implies the ability to distinguish between self and not-self, and consequently to assume the existence of an alternative viewpoint. The concept was established by French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas in a series of essays, collected under the title ‘Alterity and Transcendence.’
The term is also deployed outside of philosophy, notably in anthropology by scholars such as Nicholas Dirks, Johannes Fabian, Michael Taussig, and Pauline Turner Strong to refer to the construction of ‘cultural others.’ The term has gained further use in seemingly somewhat remote disciplines, e.g. historical musicology where it is effectively employed by John Michael Cooper in a study of Goethe and Mendelssohn.
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