Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Flowchart 2

Modified flowchart...

Flowchart 1


I had to use a different technique in order to get the flowchart into a PNG and now I know how to do this, it taught me a valuable lesson.

Friday, January 6, 2012

Smartest Machine on Earth

The video players only show one chapter of an episode at a time. For a better viewing experience use the hotlink beneath each player to open up the full episode on the PBS website. Otherwise you'll have to click through five or six times during the viewing to see the whole episode.
Watch Smartest Machine on Earth on PBS. See more from NOVA.


What is "machine learning"?
How a machine learns behaviors based on emperical data.
How did the IBM team employ that concept in the development of Watson's AI?  The IBM team put thousands of old Jeopardy questions and their answers so that Watson could look for patterns in the questions and in teh asnwers so Watson could determine the context of the question. What advantage did that provide over previous attempts at "intelligence"?  The advantage that this provided was that now the computer could so call "think" of all the possible answers and determine the corecct one.
I've often mentioned the term "Empirical Scepticism". What does that mean?   
It is the practice of questioning the veracity of claims lacking empirical evidence or reproducibility
How does that relate to the concept of Machine Learning?  This relates because the computer has to be able to act upon the question with the knowledge of a human. How does this relate to your life? This relates to my life, because you have to be able to procces the context of a question, and the computer can not determine the context of the question.

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Engineering Ground Zero

The video players only show one chapter of an episode at a time. For a better viewing experience use the hotlink beneath each player to open up the full episode on the PBS website. Otherwise you'll have to click through five or six times during the viewing to see the whole episode.
Watch Engineering Ground Zero on PBS. See more from NOVA.

The three different types of construction used in this video are electrical, architectural and plumbling. 
The aspect of this project that is most interesting to me is the amount of product used to put together this monumental building.