Incomplete Neighbor

The only thing better than getting to help orphaned children of Clermont House in Haiti
was spending the evening with the Disharoons and Clint Disharoon's terrific bandmates in Incomplete Neighbor. The new song is just terrific. A new album's on the way in 2011! I got a little sad: Clint and Ashley's dad is like a taller double for my Dad, and I missed him just a bit!






Herve Clermont, the son of the doctor who devoted his life to supplying the children of Haiti with medical supplies and educations, came to commemorate the organization still presided by his mother and raise funds for the Home. A new home for the girls is in the works, as are several improvements. He told of the difficulty of getting the little ones (as young as six) to the doctor on a scooter, and the need for a car there. The non-profit board can be contacted at their website, so think about it, visit them, okay? http://www.clermontfoundation.org/

A Grand Challenge

I heart Jeff Hawkins; maybe you have the knowledge to disprove his theories, but
on my way out to California I brought my Howard the Duck Essential vol. and my photocopies of Jeff's book
on neural structure and computer systems (and parts of A Brief History of Everything.)

Let me share with you where computer intelligence was in 2006. Can you tell one of these


from this?

Congratulations. You're smarter than a Machine Man. Here's some of the NPR interview:
Mr. HAWKINS: A scientist I know has proposed that the grand challenge, the million-dollar prize ought to be a machine that can tell two objects apart visually; literally, cats from dogs.

That's how far we are from doing what humans can do today. So, we're building a vision system that we believe will perform quite well, and it'll be very much like a human vision system that you'd be able to show it pictures of things in any sort of form and variation, and it'll say, and I know what it is. It'll very instantly say, oh I know, that's a cat, that's a dog, that's a car, that's a refrigerator, or whatever.

INSKEEP: Is a prototype already built?

Mr. HAWKINS: We built a small-scale prototype. It's not a practical system, in the sense it only recognizes line drawings, and it only recognizes 50 different objects. But already, I believe, and I think other people would agree, that it's pretty impressive.

An average person on the street might look at it and say, gee, well you're just recognizing a line drawing of a helicopter versus a dog, and they say, isn't that easy? Well, it is easy for humans, but it's actually a major advance in terms of technology.

INSKEEP: Does the computer ever have that very human moment of self-doubt, where it says, “Cat, no, wait, wait, wait dog! No! Cat!”

Mr. HAWKINS: In some sense. You know, first of all, these machines are not talking, or anything like that. The way they tell you the answers, they give you a little chart, we put on the a display of the computer that says, the probability of each of the things it knows. And so, when it's confused, it's basically showing a lot of probabilities that are equally high. So it says, well, a 30 percent cat, 30 percent dog, 30 percent table, or something like that. And that's how it's saying it's confused. It doesn't talk in the way a human would do.



Wish we could get into that "computer self-doubt" a bit more; Jack's story was like a Bible story relative to the story in our world.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... Id=5232103 more here

Where've I Been?