Saturday, March 24, 2012
The HGP as biology's SIRI moment; a sketch of a more veridical model
Abstract
At the time of writing, Apple is being sued for false advertising of its iphone 4s, with the associated claim that apple had solved many of the problems of natural language processing by computer (nlpbc). Yet the hype resembles nothing so much as the misrepresentation of the HGP fed to the media in the glory days at the beginning of this millennium, and it says a lot for the status of scientists in society that they have avoided Apple's fate. In this paper, a short review of several current themes in theoretical and applied biology is first proposed. Then the tensions implicit in the notion that the “gene” is simultaneously to be identified as a unit of inheritance and spatially located over spatially well-defined nucleotides is explored and the notion is found to be incoherent. An expanded notion of inheritance is proposed in the context of a focus on inheritance as necessarily involving species, population and organism over time. Finally, a working sketch of a modeling environment written in LISP, one that shows promise in reflecting the complexities discussed in the paper, is appended
(The paper will be submitted to an open-source journal in due course)
Seán Ó Nualláin Ph D Stanford 24 u Marta 2012
At the time of writing, Apple is being sued for false advertising of its iphone 4s, with the associated claim that apple had solved many of the problems of natural language processing by computer (nlpbc). Yet the hype resembles nothing so much as the misrepresentation of the HGP fed to the media in the glory days at the beginning of this millennium, and it says a lot for the status of scientists in society that they have avoided Apple's fate. In this paper, a short review of several current themes in theoretical and applied biology is first proposed. Then the tensions implicit in the notion that the “gene” is simultaneously to be identified as a unit of inheritance and spatially located over spatially well-defined nucleotides is explored and the notion is found to be incoherent. An expanded notion of inheritance is proposed in the context of a focus on inheritance as necessarily involving species, population and organism over time. Finally, a working sketch of a modeling environment written in LISP, one that shows promise in reflecting the complexities discussed in the paper, is appended
(The paper will be submitted to an open-source journal in due course)
Seán Ó Nualláin Ph D Stanford 24 u Marta 2012
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Some real Irish innovation
Prof Caulfield has a roadshow where he talks about the Ceide fields in
Mayo and the numerous commercial spin-offs from it, including the
Ur-Riverdance. That is of course well below the radar of the Dublin
establishment – for example, you might actually have to travel out of
Dublin to the west. Caulfield correctly points out that the project
arose from genuine engagement with and curiosity about our past and this
generated irresistible momentum.
A good recent analogy is Con Hourihane's patent application for a bale wrapping machine, filed recently both in the US and the EU, and here is the latter;
The real world, at last
We can expect Con's work to be swiftly commercialized, and there is no sign of SFI ;
Yes, this too is R+D
Agriculture will remain central to our future on the island of Ireland long after the current nonsense is gone. Saving hay in Ireland was brutal work, which had to be compressed in the few short days of sunshine we got. Here is a rather lyrical account of it;
Mowing Pat's meadow in the sunny long ago
My admittedly bleak view of the current mania for “innovation” in Ireland is that it is simply the state, with its inept and corrupt bureaucrats unchanged since the last FF administration, moving into areas in which the first thing it does is shove aside able Irish people already functioning there. The spin machine in Dublin – with the American idiot sci + tech journalists in the IT the worst offenders - stroll around to the well-spoken and civil, usually non-Irish “researchers” in the city center labs to give a summary of work which will amount to precisely nothing.
It is oriented that way. Immunology, one of Ireland's foci, is such a minefield that tgn1412 demonstrated enormous gaps in our knowledge about the differences between the human and non-human immune systems the hard way – by incapacitating several human subjects for life. NLP/localization should be paid for the companies themselves, not the taxpayer, who is finally showing signs of revolt about the household charge.
My personal experience with these agencies, partly documented in the preceding post, is that they prefer to have their own private Stanford, paying probably $10k annually of taxpayers' money to rent a theater and give themselves awards, than engage with real work there on foot of an insider's invitation that will cost the state nothing. This goes also for the IDA, who welshed on a delicately constructed deal to place a Stanford-linked research center in Clare and indeed their Pat Howlin decided to e-mail in an internal list in Stanford; and so on
The good news as ever is that, come Sept 2012, Ireland will not be able to pay its public servants, absent access to the EFSF in the wake of a “no” vote on the treaty. We in Berkeley will be very happy to have these morons and scum out of here. Before they came into our lives, we wrote computer programs, ran international conferences, and got traction for Ireland internationally by the excellence of our work, be it saving hay, Celtic jazz, or HCI.
Seán Ó Nualláin Ph D Stanford 21 u Marta 2012
(Vernal equinox)
PS The superb and infinitely courageous Mannix Flynn performed his "James X" here recently. It is timely;
More torture and murder by the state
I originally took my stand mainly for reasons of the dignity of scholarship; it is clear now that assertion of such entities is well beyond the Irish state. What I have achieved is stopping the slippery slope to a situation like that of Mannix where he was taken from his family and buggered while in residential care by an agent of the Irish state.
This incline was initiated by a summons to an illegal meeting being dropped late at night into my private home. Luckily for you all reading this, I treated it as it deserved - and indeed as it legally merited .
A good recent analogy is Con Hourihane's patent application for a bale wrapping machine, filed recently both in the US and the EU, and here is the latter;
The real world, at last
We can expect Con's work to be swiftly commercialized, and there is no sign of SFI ;
Yes, this too is R+D
Agriculture will remain central to our future on the island of Ireland long after the current nonsense is gone. Saving hay in Ireland was brutal work, which had to be compressed in the few short days of sunshine we got. Here is a rather lyrical account of it;
Mowing Pat's meadow in the sunny long ago
My admittedly bleak view of the current mania for “innovation” in Ireland is that it is simply the state, with its inept and corrupt bureaucrats unchanged since the last FF administration, moving into areas in which the first thing it does is shove aside able Irish people already functioning there. The spin machine in Dublin – with the American idiot sci + tech journalists in the IT the worst offenders - stroll around to the well-spoken and civil, usually non-Irish “researchers” in the city center labs to give a summary of work which will amount to precisely nothing.
It is oriented that way. Immunology, one of Ireland's foci, is such a minefield that tgn1412 demonstrated enormous gaps in our knowledge about the differences between the human and non-human immune systems the hard way – by incapacitating several human subjects for life. NLP/localization should be paid for the companies themselves, not the taxpayer, who is finally showing signs of revolt about the household charge.
My personal experience with these agencies, partly documented in the preceding post, is that they prefer to have their own private Stanford, paying probably $10k annually of taxpayers' money to rent a theater and give themselves awards, than engage with real work there on foot of an insider's invitation that will cost the state nothing. This goes also for the IDA, who welshed on a delicately constructed deal to place a Stanford-linked research center in Clare and indeed their Pat Howlin decided to e-mail in an internal list in Stanford; and so on
The good news as ever is that, come Sept 2012, Ireland will not be able to pay its public servants, absent access to the EFSF in the wake of a “no” vote on the treaty. We in Berkeley will be very happy to have these morons and scum out of here. Before they came into our lives, we wrote computer programs, ran international conferences, and got traction for Ireland internationally by the excellence of our work, be it saving hay, Celtic jazz, or HCI.
Seán Ó Nualláin Ph D Stanford 21 u Marta 2012
(Vernal equinox)
PS The superb and infinitely courageous Mannix Flynn performed his "James X" here recently. It is timely;
More torture and murder by the state
I originally took my stand mainly for reasons of the dignity of scholarship; it is clear now that assertion of such entities is well beyond the Irish state. What I have achieved is stopping the slippery slope to a situation like that of Mannix where he was taken from his family and buggered while in residential care by an agent of the Irish state.
This incline was initiated by a summons to an illegal meeting being dropped late at night into my private home. Luckily for you all reading this, I treated it as it deserved - and indeed as it legally merited .
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Ireland's phony jobs/innovation/science drive
“Innovation never comes from established institutions”
Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google Inc, speaking on “60 minutes” Mar 11 2012
There are immediately glaring paradoxes about institutionalizing innovation. For Google, it is clear that the notion of a government department of innovation is an absurdity. But wait! Wasn't this dept set up to impress companies like Google?
Lat weekend, I attended this conference as an invited guest, as well as the banquet at the Cantor arts Center in Stanford, in the company of Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow, and many other dignitaries;
An opportunity missed for Irish industrial development bodies in the USA to participate in real, rather than their usual fantasy Stanford
There was a problem – we were also gigging at Berkeley's famous Freight at the time of the banquet. I had to cry off the gig, and Melanie couldn't make the banquet;
Sean O Riordain's poetry in a jazz context for an American city audience
So I invited Enterprise Ireland in California to meet me on Fri 9th Mar 2012 at 1pm. I was prepared to let bygones be bygones and pave the way for Minister Bruton's visit this week by opening doors at Stanford that – believe me – rarely are even ajar. There could have been Irish state representation at the conference and banquet at which serious business was done, with Ken Arrow in attendance and in encomium from the podium of Pat Suppes who is O'Brien and Costello on his mother's side.
Of course, Enterprise Ireland, like the San Jose “innovation” center never even replied – as usual. They have already selected the 2k companies to whom they will deliver taxpayers' money in this “export” drive, and they will continue to steal from Irish musicians and other business people while flying under “innovation” and other flags of convenience.
And now for the good news – the Irish state is collapsing, and the max that can be expected from the bunch of superannuated ex-commies and golf club alickadoos in government is that, when this new EU treaty fails to pass, they will still have civilian control of the security forces. For “innovation” , like their other filthy scams, is simply another mechanism for redirection of working people's money to an oligarchy.
The good news? The Prussians have a tradition of “starving oneself rich” and have decided to apply it to Ireland. So there is a poisoned chalice of being in government that will have gone around all the major parties (including Sinn Fein) within two years. The perhaps we can resurrect our great country
Finally, it is worth noting that the 90k registered for the MIT 6.002x course of computing, which started last week, exceeds the total on the Irish CAO list even in a record year
Seán Ó Nualláin Ph D Stanford 11 u Marta 2012
Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google Inc, speaking on “60 minutes” Mar 11 2012
There are immediately glaring paradoxes about institutionalizing innovation. For Google, it is clear that the notion of a government department of innovation is an absurdity. But wait! Wasn't this dept set up to impress companies like Google?
Lat weekend, I attended this conference as an invited guest, as well as the banquet at the Cantor arts Center in Stanford, in the company of Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow, and many other dignitaries;
An opportunity missed for Irish industrial development bodies in the USA to participate in real, rather than their usual fantasy Stanford
There was a problem – we were also gigging at Berkeley's famous Freight at the time of the banquet. I had to cry off the gig, and Melanie couldn't make the banquet;
Sean O Riordain's poetry in a jazz context for an American city audience
So I invited Enterprise Ireland in California to meet me on Fri 9th Mar 2012 at 1pm. I was prepared to let bygones be bygones and pave the way for Minister Bruton's visit this week by opening doors at Stanford that – believe me – rarely are even ajar. There could have been Irish state representation at the conference and banquet at which serious business was done, with Ken Arrow in attendance and in encomium from the podium of Pat Suppes who is O'Brien and Costello on his mother's side.
Of course, Enterprise Ireland, like the San Jose “innovation” center never even replied – as usual. They have already selected the 2k companies to whom they will deliver taxpayers' money in this “export” drive, and they will continue to steal from Irish musicians and other business people while flying under “innovation” and other flags of convenience.
And now for the good news – the Irish state is collapsing, and the max that can be expected from the bunch of superannuated ex-commies and golf club alickadoos in government is that, when this new EU treaty fails to pass, they will still have civilian control of the security forces. For “innovation” , like their other filthy scams, is simply another mechanism for redirection of working people's money to an oligarchy.
The good news? The Prussians have a tradition of “starving oneself rich” and have decided to apply it to Ireland. So there is a poisoned chalice of being in government that will have gone around all the major parties (including Sinn Fein) within two years. The perhaps we can resurrect our great country
Finally, it is worth noting that the 90k registered for the MIT 6.002x course of computing, which started last week, exceeds the total on the Irish CAO list even in a record year
Seán Ó Nualláin Ph D Stanford 11 u Marta 2012
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