Many prominent linguists … have argued that language is … poorly designed for communication [and] … point to the existence of ambiguity: In a system optimized for conveying information…, they argue, each word would have just one meaning. … Now, a group of MIT cognitive scientists has turned this idea on its head … [T]hey claim that ambiguity actually makes language more efficient, by allowing for the reuse of short, efficient sounds that listeners can easily disambiguate with the help of context.

Although this is just talking about homophonic ambiguity at the word level, the same applies to all levels of language, including full messages whose decoding requires potentially deep context.

It isn’t surprising that human speakers use context — ad-hoc or shared understanding — to save effort. It is annoying to have to spell out everything and delightful when the listener understands anyway. It is like a communication problem, but with a power constraint on the encoder and a complexity constraint on the decoder. The listener (decoder) is really trying to choose the most probable meaning from all the possibilities, and the speaker (encoder) attempts to construct — specifically for the decoder’s context — the most modal distribution of meanings where the intended meaning takes the largest probability.

A few thoughts on this. One, successful encoder-decoder pairs synchronize context. Two, viewed in this way, double entendres and certain jokes are not mere oddities of language, but sophisticated communication schemes!

One could go further and argue that there is even a counterpart to steganography, because there is a certain amusement in hiding most of the intended information within the context, while making the direct message without context empty or obfuscating for any other decoder. An encoder that successfully does this knows the decoder well, and a decoder that successfully processes this information possesses either a large amount of shared context with the encoder or a sophisticated inference capability.

Panda’s evolutionary path has lead them down a very narrow cul de sac from which there is no escape. By all Darwinian rights they should become extinct.

But I like pandas, as do many others. Pandas have the one survival trait that is very important in today’s environment – they have value to human beings.

And on that note,

How about DOGS people? I mean come on, those little dogs do not serve any purpose in this life!! Billions of dollars go to them for food and cleaning, drugs etc.

chivava or something, why waste resources on DOGS? esecially little one with nothing to do but look pretty!?

Indeed, looked at in this way, pandas and dogs are very well adapted — to humans, who determine their survival. It’s an increasingly singular niche that likely all animals will fall into. In a million years, if humans are still around, probably all animals will look like stuffed toys.

In my limited understanding, Penrose suggests that the universe goes through these cycles of what can be interpreted as infinite expansions “followed by” big bangs, where the cycle renewal “happens” in a mathematical sense: in the way spacetime is metrized. He says that in the infinite future, when all massive particles will have evaporated, we will be returned to a situation without a notion of space or time (since all things are lightlike, I suppose). From this, the very large scale of the given final universe can be reinterpreted as the very small beginning of the next universe. It’s an interesting thought.

Also, world’s shortest escalator:

All masculine and singular pronouns shall include the feminine, neuter and plural thereof, and vice-versa, wherever the sense of the language so requires.

This undirected graphical model stating conditional independence relationships of senate voting behavior was shown.

If two nodes A and B are connected only through a set of nodes C, then A and B are independent, conditioned on C. Basically it says if you want to predict anything about B from A and C, then C is enough, because A won’t tell you anything more. As pretty as the graph looks, this is a rather odd visualization. Without seeing the (Ising) model parameters, especially where the edge weights are positive or negative, this graph is hard to interpret, and the conclusions in the paper are especially questionable to me. In particular, being in the middle of this graph does not necessarily imply “moderation” or “independence”, (unlike in let’s say this graph). We would expect moderates to exhibit weak dependency to either party’s large cliques. But if, for example, the edge weight between Allen and B. Nelson is a strongly negative one (which it very well may be, since the two parties are not otherwise connected via negatively weighted edges), then the graph seems to imply that how the two parties vote can largely be predicted from the votes of the likes of Allen or B. Nelson; in that sense, they are the indicators for their parties, disagreeing on exactly those party-disambiguating issues.

There is some additional funny stuff going on. According to the paper, a missing vote counts as a “no” because they only solved the problem for binary and Gaussian distributions. I also count only about 80 nodes in there, while there are 100 senators. The graph structure also seems a bit too sparse, but this may be intentional, in order to drop weak dependencies from the graph. One does wonder though, whether the results weren’t really that good without manual fudging.

Unrelatedly, this reminds me of another famous academic paper graph, the high school dating graph:

If you look carefully, there is some oddball stuff going on here, too.

I think there are two options here. Either structure needs to be explicitly enforced or presentation needs to be refined.

In the former, perhaps it is better to only allow replies in certain places. Perhaps it is better to only allow edits in certain places. Perhaps it is better to separate the two and keep the distinction between edit mode, thread mode, and conversation mode, and only allow mixing in very restricted settings (or require some extra steps to discourage its use). After all, in preparing a shared endeavor, the purpose should be defined and known ahead of time.

In the latter, perhaps a lot of hiding and collapsing should be used. Perhaps hyperlinks should be used for in-place edits that often hijack a topic. And now that subthreads can sprout like a tree, it makes little sense to retain the linear structure of conversations. Perhaps a topic based graph, or a conversation stack would be the more appropriate presentation metaphor.

Wave is a good idea, but not well thought out. In its attempt to differentiate, it has forsaken useability for chaotic flexibility, which would have had redeeming value, were it matched by equally ambitious presentation/visualization.

So Google has the ideas. Microsoft has the delivery mechanism in the form of the installed base and the ready platform with the ability to propogate via a simple update. Apple has the hardware designs and marketing to get people to adopt. Yet, each is missing the critical pieces held by others. And so we stall in Year 2009 as each company tries to replicate some existing thing that another company is already good at.

(This very good article gives too much credit to Google, I believe. The situation is a lot more symmetrical and Google should not be elevated to a privileged position. The current Chrome OS for netbooks, I believe, is a clear misread of the market. People want a better phone, not a worse computer, and Google will likely fail with this if they make the latter without the former (Android?) catching on first. I think the “PC companies” are not that far behind either. It’s much harder for inexperienced Google to make a good cloud client than for say Microsoft to deliver good cloud integration. In some sense, Microsoft’s lack of execution on this front is due to politics, i.e. lack of will-power to lose a cash cow until it is inevitable, not due to technical barriers.)

Which leads me to this envisioned usage scenario that (1) is actually useful/productive and (2) could really benefit from cloud integration rather than be a poor knock-off of existing desktop programs. It’s actually simple and not novel at all. In fact it has been talked about for decades, but it still cannot be done today (with commonplace hardware and software). Why? If something as simple as this and that should be achievable overnight (technology is there) isn’t even available, then forget about real innovation.

So let me make it very concrete. I take out a piece of hardware — it is a tablet. I would like to write a paper. But I have coauthors. So I start a new document — maybe it’s for writing LaTeX. I start writing — with a pen — or I type, whatever. At some point I decide I want collaboration, so maybe I turn this into a “collaboration” mode. Think of this as going to a public space to write on the whiteboard. Now anybody can see this in progress, in real time, not as its autosaved version, if open up the same program of theirs and I’m on their collaborator list or something. Maybe I tell them out of band that I want to collaborate or they already know. They can request to join, and I can let them, and even add them to the list of collaborators for this document (or project, as every document should be automatically versioned into a project tree). They can edit at the same time as I edit, and each person can see what the other person is doing, if they just went to the right part of the document to look. The part you are editing can be locked if you wish. Or you can lock other parts, doesn’t matter. You can make comments on the margins. You can run a view of the current snapshot any time, without interfering with other editors. At any time, you can save a state as a satisfactory “version”. References can be added by dropping anything — PDF, URL, some search text — and the editor can go look for the reference and turn it into the right format, and cache it into your library of references. If you want to draw figures, you should be able to do it in place, with a pen, and it will be turned into nice figures (discussed separately before)… etc. etc.

It would be even nicer if existing applications can acquire collaboration and versioning abilities simply by the operating system seamlessly supporting things like online storage, multiple inputs, and even more interesting file storage, tagging, linking, and presentation of such information.

Instead, what we get is this and this and this and the like.

Google has “wave”, which gets the “real-time collaboration” piece of the puzzle. Microsoft should be able to modify the OS to take care of existing applications and make online storage seamless (still no integrated network drive in 2009, incredibly). Apple should make a useable tablet (rumored as it is) as a form factor that people can like. But what we will get, I’m almost sure, will be half-baked versions of all of these and they won’t work together. Now, although Chrome OS seems to disown local hardware and software in favor of a crackling, slow, and flaky internet pipe, a decision that I do not believe is ideal at this time, I can at least see it work out eventually. But this depends on Chrome OS enabling collaboration — something so well matched to cloud integration — so a value proposition could be made for using it. If they do not even do this, I would consider them incompetent.

As a (long) footenote, I would like to say that big companies these days have regressed in terms of being bold with innovation — understandable, given the environment — but still disappointing considering the pace of change in the 1990′s. Look at the state of affairs:

- Microsoft has the vast reserves of technical expertise and vendor sway to do some great things, but it has already turned into another IBM — sucking on the teats of enterprise — and long forgotten the consumer. Innovation, if it can be called that, comes in the form of cheap me-too projects.

- Apple with its fashionable packaged goods and excellent marketing certainly has the ear of the consumer but rip away the covers of any product and it doesn’t do anything that hasn’t already been done with uglier hardware. The proprietary locking of hardware and expense also funnel third-party development into mostly useless crapwhere and jokeware.

- Google has put out the most ideas with at least a modicum of novelty in recent years, but lately its resources have clearly been put into some kind of positioning game for some impending fight for becoming the platform of choice. Or perhaps existing pieces have gotten too big or complex that it takes so much overhead to manage, who knows. Its latest products have not been bold, Chrome OS included — I mean they are good, even better than what exists perhaps, but not outright bold and not convincing, always leaving a lingering feeling of what-if.

- Facebook and Amazon? Beyond their respective primary business, they are still nothing, though they are looking for ideas.

I’m actually hoping I am entirely wrong and this is the calm before the storm of massive transformation. But I’m waiting…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_integral

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