 |
|
| FriendFeed is the easiest way to share online. Learn more » |
Amazon.com: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (3rd Edition) (9780136042594): Stuart Russell, Peter Norvig: Books - http://www.amazon.com/Artific...
Melita, Brandon Smietana, Bill de hÓra and 12 other people liked this
We sent the final pdfs of the new edition of this book off to the publisher. The market reacted by gaining 2% on the day.
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
Nassim Taleb would be proud. =)
- Darren
Bet you are pleased to have that behind you; great to see Alan Turing -http://tinyurl.com/no85d4 - on the front cover. Seb.
- Seb Schmoller
What is new in the third edition?
- Brandon Smietana
Brandon: I think if you value your time at about $5/hr or more, you should buy the third edition. What's new: http://aima.eecs.berkeley.edu/3rd-ed...
- Peter Norvig
Google's Broken Hiring Process - Google - Gawker - http://gawker.com/5392947...
Zaki Manian, Monica Anderson, Richard Chen and 35 other people liked this
What do you know? Valleywag got everything wrong. Google is hiring, not laying off. Also, our interview scores actually correlate very well with on-the-job performance. Peter Seibel asked me if there was anything counterintuitive about the process and I said that people who got one low score but were hired anyway did well on-the-job. To me, that means the interview process is doing very well, not that it is broken. It means that we don't let one bad interview blackball a candidate. We'll keep interviewing, keep hiring, and keep analyzing the results to improve the process. And I guess Valleywag will keep doing what they do...
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
Nice shirt!
- Jim Norris
That is a nice shirt.
- τorƍue
You had at least three rounds of layoffs this year, Peter. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009...
- Ryan Tate
Further, while you hired a rare few people who got "1" scores on one their interviews, you rejected 99 percent of those people, and you have no idea how they would have performed. Those you did hire turned out to be top performers. Sounds broken to me. (I am the author of the Valleywag post in question.)
- Ryan Tate
Hi Ryan, thanks for commenting. First: we get over 1000 resumes a day. We can't hire all of them. I am painfully aware that a few of the people we don't hire would be as good or better than a few of the people we do. I feel bad for the people we have to reject who are equally qualified, but that is the nature of uncertain decision-making. Now what I said in the Seibel interview: we try...
more...
- Peter Norvig
It's a great shirt. Google is tops. No system is perfect -- so long as there's a weighting for intangibles and accounting for style differences between interviewer and interviewee, all should be fine.
- Christopher Galtenberg
Bump. Maybe Ryan didn't get a chance to see that you'd responded, Peter.
- Matt Cutts
Could you recommend any literature on data driven hiring practices?
- Brandon Smietana
Doesn't look like Ryan spends much time here: 5 subscriptions, 64 subscribers, 3 comments, 1 like. The like was on an old Scoble post from June.
- Ken Sheppardson
 |
 |
 |
 |
Henner Zeller, Felicia Yue, Jérôme Flipo and April Buchheit liked this
Great Pictures!
- Henner Zeller
Does Hidden Text Prove Shroud of Turin Real? - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News - FOXNews.com - http://www.foxnews.com/story...
Hidden text on the shroud of Turin? Of course those were the days before CSS, so you couldn't do "p {visibility:hidden}"; you had to make do with the more primitive "<font color=#ffffff>".
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
snigger
- Dick
Remarks by the President on the "Education To Innovate" Campaign | The White House - http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-pre...
Bindu Reddy, Jérôme Flipo, Richard Chen and 8 other people liked this
"This nation wasn't built on greed. ... It was forged on stronger stuff, by bold men and women who dared to invent something new or improve something old" - Barack Obama So go out and invent something!
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
Who Will Come Out Ahead from e-Book Success in College Classrooms? -- Seeking Alpha - http://seekingalpha.com/article...
535u, Matt Mastracci, Joel Webber and 3 other people liked this
“We will be seeing electronic textbooks become commonplace in the next 10 years.” -- That long??
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
Yeah, my take on this is that if your local school plans to purchase any more pbooks at any point in the future, it's due to incompetence. (Not necessarily of the school board, which in itself may be too poor to front the switching cost -- but certainly on the part of whoever gives your school its money)
- j1m
Are there any standards that permit for content to be transfered from one authorized device to another? I fear that if a closed-protocol solution like the Kindle gains traction, it will become the iPod of eBook readers and we'll loose the ability to buy anything else, for fear of loosing access to the content.
- Bill Strathearn
+1 Bill. It would truly suck if you went to some university and they said "you must buy this particular reader for your books", then you transferred and they said "you must buy this *other* reader instead".
- Joel Webber
My strong suggestion would be to only use textbook content which is free. (And yes, that might mean the folks who teach school starting to write it now, as college teachers do with lectures that they prepare and then share. However some claim that good free textbooks exist.)
- j1m
PS: I was thinking thus far of k-12 schools, since I got this far before even reading the entire title :) The details are different in college, where the organization running things doesn't pay for the books.
- j1m
IBM announces advances toward a computer that works like a human brain - SiliconValley.com - http://www.siliconvalley.com/news...
Ozkan Altuner, zeroinfluencer, Paul Buchheit and 2 other people liked this
D. Modha and IBM's Blue Brain project reports progress in scaling up neural models to the size of a cat brain. Some day soon, computers may be able to cough up hair balls and barf on your sofa.
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
there's something weird about that link. Try this http://www.siliconvalley.com/news...
- Laura Norvig
Oh, and I'll pass on the hair balls and barf.
- Laura Norvig
The War For the Web - O'Reilly Radar - http://radar.oreilly.com/2009...
Hein Roehrig, Carlos Andrés Rocha, Seb Schmoller and ▲ klemo liked this
Tim is right: "If you don't want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don't wait till it's too late."
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
The evolution of information restrictions from tight to loose is a natural progression of how valuable and rare they are. Every tech company makes money from private, closed and rare information in one form or another. Interoperability doesn't really trickle down to a data space until everyone has agreed that the data is not valuable without open interaction or until they realize that it is more valuable to everyone when commoditized and allowed to create new avenues of information.
- Bill Strathearn
findingEducation’s Digital Teachers’ Lounge » Educators That Rock!: danah boyd - http://blog.findingeducation.com/assignm...
Laura Norvig, Seb Schmoller and Marco Fabbri liked this
danah boyd rocks: "I don’t think kids are spending too much time online ... The problem is a culture of fear. ... Eight year olds don’t get on a bike and bike around the neighborhood any longer. That’s sad."
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
I saw her talk at Internet Librarian last year and she said this and many other cool things. She has a great feel for what teens really do online. They all said they would rather hang out IRL but sometimes they can't.
- Laura Norvig
What's more fun: computer programming or prostitution? - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technol...
Ethan Herdrick, Luca Terzaroli, Mandi and 15 other people liked this
"I did have another job at one point, as a computer programmer, but I kept up with my other work because it was so much more enjoyable." -- Dr Brooke Magnanti, aka blogger call girl Belle de Jour
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
Hmm, I wonder how many people are qualified to answer that question.
- Laura Norvig
Amazon.com: We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion (9781439116838): Jonathan Harris, Sep Kamvar: Books - http://www.amazon.com/gp...
Bindu Reddy, JoeCamel, Simon and 3 other people liked this
Check out Sep Kamvar's book.
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
Superfreakonomics on climate, part 1 - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com - http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009...
Seb Schmoller and Dan Hsiao liked this
Everyone's piling on the new Freakonomics book -- and while I haven't seen the book, the complaints seem quite valid, and Levitt's response quite unconvincing. There are consequences to just making things up.
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
Tyler Cowen gives mostly thumbs-up: "This book is recognizably in the style of Freakonomics, a book I suspect you already have made up your mind about. I will say only that SuperFreakonomics is a more than worthy sequel, a super sequel you might say. If you're a fan of Freakonomics, you'll like this too. " - http://www.marginalrevolution.com/margina...
- Tim Tyler
Reply: "Global Warming in SuperFreakonomics: The Anatomy of a Smear" - http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009...
- Tim Tyler
Dubner's Anatomy of a Smear really proves he's not just ignorant of this subject -- he's duplicitous and unrepentant about his errors, which is far worse. See the Bloomberg interview of Caldeira or Romm's summary to see how badly they misrepresent Caldeira. http://climateprogress.org/2009...
- Peter Norvig
FWIW, I thought the Bloomberg opinion piece was terrible - laden with misinformation.
- Tim Tyler
Greg Mankiw has a good link - http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009...
- Anders Norgaard
I expect that the Superfreakonomics perspective will be that there is no such thing as bad publicity.
- Tim Tyler
I read superfreakonomics-chapter-5.pdf. Not bad. It is obvious why GW alarmists don't like it, though. For instance: "Overall, more carbon dioxide is probably a good thing for the atmosphere" - Ken Caldeira. That is a painful truth for those who would paint CO2 as pollution.
- Tim Tyler
This seems to be misleading though: "nor does atmospheric carbon dioxide necessarily warm the earth: ice-cap evidence shows that over the past several hundred thousand years, carbon dioxide levels have risen after a rise in temperature, rather than before it." The stated conclusion simply doesn't follow from those observations.
- Tim Tyler
Ken Caldeira has specifically repudiated the quotes that were attributed to him in _Superfreakonomics_.
- Ruchira S. Datta
Tim Tyler, what you characterize as "GW alarmists" can also be described as "more than 97% of qualified scientists" http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran... Its fine for you to hold a contrarian view, but it is dishonest of you to suggest that that view is somehow in parity to the consensus of more than 97% of the people eho actually know what they're talking about. You need...
more...
- Peter Norvig
Ruchira, I haven't seen any claims of misquotation from Ken. What is your reference for that?
- Tim Tyler
Peter, you apparently misunderstand me. I don't think I am disagreeing with any scientists. I am not clear why you would think that. Most scientists are not what I would call "GW alarmists". It is science's job to predict the future, not to attach values to it. Your reference is about whether GW is caused by humans - not about whether it is desirable. Cough medicine is not so nice in the short term either, but that doesn't mean that it is not a good thing.
- Tim Tyler
One of my pages on the topic, to clairfy my position - http://timtyler.org/end_the...
- Tim Tyler
Peter, I just noticed that you accused me of being "dishonest" - apparently without citing any tangible evidence of that. Please re-check your understanding of what I said - since your claim appears to be factually inaccurate :-(
- Tim Tyler
Tim: you quoted Caldeira: "Overall, more carbon dioxide is probably a good thing for the atmosphere". But you left out the rest of the sentence " -- its just that it's increasing too fast." Caldeira says it would be ok to increase CO2 over millions of years, but a catastrophe over decades; he also said "I believe the correct CO2 emission target is zero" ... "Carbon dioxide emissions...
more...
- Peter Norvig
Tim, for Caldeira's repudiation see http://climateprogress.org/2009... and references therein, in particular http://www.bloomberg.com/apps... 'Caldeira says Superfreakonimics is "damaging to me because it is an inaccurate portrayal of me" and filled with "many" misleading statements.'
- Ruchira S. Datta
When Caldeira describes GW as "a dystopic world out of a science fiction story", I would say that's a pretty strong hint that he thinks it's undesirable.
- Ruchira S. Datta
Ruchira - you claimed that Ken had "specifically repudiated the quotes that were attributed to him in Superfreakonomics". Your cited documents do not offer support for that claim. Nor have I seen any evidence for it elsewhere. It appears that you were mistaken about it.
- Tim Tyler
Peter, not quoting enough is not "dishonest". I feel I quoted sufficient material to establish my point - which was that people promoting climate hysteria were unlikely to be sympathetic to SuperFreakonomics. You originally claimed that I was being dishonest to suggest that my views were somehow in parity with a scientific consensus. When I advised you that I had no such disagreement with scientists, you apparently switched your claim to a feeble one of my not quoting sufficiently fully.
- Tim Tyler
Incidentally, it is also false that the rest of the Caldeira quotation directly contradicts my views - since I am rather uncertain about the best rate at which to increase CO2 levels. Rapid climate change is painful - but so are extended periods of climate change. How to balance those points with the other concerns appears to be a complex issue.
- Tim Tyler
You quoted half of Caldeira's sentence, giving the impression that he thought more CO2 now was good, and called it a "painful truth", when actually he calls it a "dystopia" and a "real threat" -- that is dishonest, and if you can't see that there's no point continuing. As for your plan for accelerated warming, you say there will be plenty of time for living organisms to adapt to the...
more...
- Peter Norvig
"I believe the correct CO2 emission target is zero" is one I am glad I never said. That target would appear to involve the death of all humans.
- Tim Tyler
Peter, I quoted what was relevant to make the point that this material was likely to irritate the GW alarmists. The material you seem to want me to have quoted is NOT RELEVANT to that point, since - rather obviously - they will AGREE with that part. What Caldeira says elsewhere is equally irrelevant. My point was about how SuperFreakonomics is likely to be disliked in some quarters, not anything to do with what Caldeira thinks.
- Tim Tyler
Peter, now you are piling on more accusations of dishonesty - based on recently introduced material. What is your problem with me this time? Apparently I have again omitted some material that you think is relevant! My supposed "dishonesty" arises from not saying everything you would like. I have certainly discussed modern extinctions elsewhere. I'll find you some references.
- Tim Tyler
Here's my page on "Ocean Reclamation". I expect our descendants will skin over the oceans long before Antarctica melts - obliterating most existing marine ecosystems in the process, turning the oceans into a planetary sewage system: http://hex.alife.co.uk/ocean_r...
- Tim Tyler
Here's my "Engineered Future" page. I expect intelligent design and engineering will transform life on earth, obliterating close to 100% of the existing DNA-based species in the future: http://alife.co.uk/essays...
- Tim Tyler
...and here's my "Memetic Takeover" page - which again suggests the obliteration of DNA/Protein - based organisms at the hands of new inheritance and phenotypic systems: http://alife.co.uk/essays...
- Tim Tyler
So, you see, I have written plenty of material about the modern extinction event. However, I don't think it has very much to do with global warming. It is mostly about human civilization eating other organisms lunch, their atoms, and their ecosystems. Antarctic and Greenland have huge inertia. Other developments have happened, are happening and will happen much faster.
- Tim Tyler
OK, Tim Tyler: I owe you an apology and here it is. You said "Peter, you apparently misunderstand me" and I should have taken heed. You are not dishonest nor disingenuous, and I was wrong to say you were. Here's where I went wrong: I figured that for anyone to say what you're saying, they'd either have to be dishonest or believe that it is a good thing to wipe out entire ecosystems and...
more...
- Peter Norvig
Hi, Peter. Thank you! Your analysis closely matches my own - which I am pleased about, because of who you are. I don't have much to add to the first part, except to express thanks again and to offer congratulations. However, a few comments about the second part - so I don't appear to lie down in the chalk outline sketched out for me:
- Tim Tyler
I value natural diversity - like most people do. However, I do expect most of it will be obliterated, with high probabilty in the none-too-distant future. It isn't what future civilization can be expected to value most.
- Tim Tyler
I also think that valuing natural diversity should not be taken to extremes. Placing excessively high values on preserving existing organisms could potentially slow evolution, impede progress, and increase the probability of our civilization being wiped out by some chance cosmic impact or other - an outcome I regard as being extremely negative.
- Tim Tyler
Most modern extinctions don't have much to do with global warming. The small rises of temperature we have witnessed have had a relatively small effect on extinctions. The current mass extinction is enormous - and has practically nothing to do with global warming. Habitat destruction, and the introduction of predators and pathogens are overwhelmingly what has done the damage we have seen so far. Warming is too slow and feeble a force to have much effect - it is a big non-issue here.
- Tim Tyler
I don't think that GWIG *because* it causes extinctions! I think it is good because it is likely to produce a stable, warm climate - and end the catastrophic cycle of glaciations in the current ice age by taking the planet out of the freezer. Sure, some people will have to move from their seafront properties - but that's much better than going through another dozen glaciation cycles.
- Tim Tyler
"Climate McCarthyism" - http://thebreakthrough.org/blog...
- Tim Tyler
Ken Auletta - Googled - http://www.iwantmedia.com/people...
Seb Schmoller, Matt Cutts, Paul Buchheit and 3 other people liked this
I've complained when journalists/writers get things wrong, so I want to make sure I point out when they get things right. I haven't read the book, but Ken Auletta does a good job in this interview. He's right about Murdoch's conundrum, he shares my view that the consumer is king, and that Google is not trying to harm the NY Times or NBC but to help them, and that there are disruptive forces (that Google is a part of but which are happening independent of Google) that mean that what some of these media companies had has become less valuable, and to prosper they will need to find ways to add new value.
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
I wish google would stop indexing and linking to new york times as their articles are locked in.
- Jonas S Karlsson
Op-Ed Columnist - The Fatal Conceit - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2009...
Daniel Rowley and Atul Arora liked this
Yes, but what percentage of NY Times columnists believe they are above average?
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
RealClimate: An open letter to Steve Levitt - http://www.realclimate.org/index...
Daniel Rowley, Atul Arora, Bruce Johnson and 8 other people liked this
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense -- John McCarthy
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
Great article. After watching Levitt treated with kid gloves on the Daily Show the other night, it's good to see the details broken down like this. Yet another case of "useful for getting attention in a book" != "correct or sensible in any way".
- Joel Webber
Pew Science Knowledge Quiz - Pew Research Center - http://pewresearch.org/science...
Bret Taylor liked this
Pew does science quiz this time. It seems Americans are better at science than politics. Or the questions were just easier. I got 12/12.
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
Mantis shrimp eyes outclass DVD players, inspire new technology : Not Exactly Rocket Science - http://scienceblogs.com/notrock...
Space Cowboy, Phil Smirnov, Simon and 9 other people liked this
I already knew that mantis shrimp have the most awesome eyes in the animal kingdom; now it turns out they have additional awesomeness.
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
Jeb Bush: GOP Is “Old White Guy Party”; “We Can’t Just Be Party Of No” - http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/republi...
Shakeel Mahate liked this
I always thought he was the smart one.
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
H. RES. 558 (Introduced-in-House) National Computer Science Education Week - http://thomas.loc.gov/home...
Laura Norvig, Marco Fabbri, imabonehead and 4 other people liked this
Good ideas: Encouraging teacher training in computer science; Encouraging diversity in CS; Research why participation levels are low. Not-so-good idea: Equating this with Pearl Harbor Day.
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
Findings - For Decades, Puzzling People With Mathematics - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/glogin...
Martin Gardner turns 95, publishes 2 books this year, says "The big secret of my success as a columnist was that I didn’t know much about math."
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
Susan Hockfield: Immigrants Create Jobs and Win Nobels - WSJ.com - http://online.wsj.com/article...
Amit Patel, Ruchira S. Datta, ashish and 12 other people liked this
"It's crazy to drive away talented young scholars."
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
I don't really hear people complaining about immigration saying "These foreign-amercians were stealing the nobel prizes from the real americans!"... isn't it the same thing?
- Jonas S Karlsson
Re: Solving Every Sudoku Puzzle - http://norvig.com/sudoku...
Rob Schonberger and Vijendar liked this
"Oops -- now I see it; sorry for the delay. You can answer the question yourself -- download the program, run it on the example, and time the results. -Peter"
- Peter Norvig
For your next trick, you should try finding the highest scoring boggle board. :) Dan Vanderkam has made some progress on it, and has gotten it close to tractability: http://www.danvk.org/wp...
- Ryan Moulton
I looked at highest-scoring-boggle-board at http://code.google.com/p... using hill climbing, but didn't come to any conclusions.
- Peter Norvig
Test Your News IQ - Pew Research Center - http://pewresearch.org/politic...
Ted Gilchrist, Dan Hsiao, Tzury Bar Yochay and 9 other people liked this
A short collection of pretty easy questions -- I got 12/12 -- but 1/3 of the public did no better or worse than random guessing.
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
It seems as though Americans have higher News IQs than other folks :-(
- Tim Tyler
Most of those questions are related to american politics/legislature/etc - and after random(intelligent?) guessing, I got 8/12 correct (7% of the public). :)
- Space Cowboy
Fun.
- j1m
 |
 |
 |
|
Laurence Gonsalves, Melita, ▲ klemo and 5 other people liked this
How's the new edition coming?
- Ruchira S. Datta
Oops -- I forgot those pictures would show up on friendfeed. They weren't really suppossed to. We wanted a picture of the cover of the book for the cover of the book, and I was sharing these with my editor. Our firm deadline is Nov 6, so I'll be working hard until then.
- Peter Norvig
from email
Can't wait to get the new edition! I remember my first week at Google when I was all "Norvig... Norvig... I know that name, but why do I think 'Russel' instead of 'Peter'? OH!!"
- Kevin Fox
I studied this as part of my CS major :D
- Mo Kargas
I studied this last semester ^^
- Vedrana Janković
Will there be an E-book edition?
- Ryan Moulton
Good luck with the deadline!
- Laura Norvig
Teaching Students to Sift Mountains of Data - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/glogin...
Daniel Rowley, Simon, ▲ klemo and 6 other people liked this
Think Big! "Google and I.B.M. hope to train a new breed of engineers and scientists to think in Internet scale."
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
The article is short on details re: how much is being made available, but I'm kind of surprised that the NSF or DOE doesnlt have the ability to make the equivalent amount available to these universities.
- Bill Strathearn
from Android
Empirical evidence that humans are causing global warming - http://www.skepticalscience.com/empiric...
Laura Norvig, Christopher A Carr, Bret Taylor and imabonehead liked this
Here's the kind of argument that Nathan should follow.
- Peter Norvig
from Bookmarklet
Other ways to read this feed:
