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Norvig channels Shannon contra Chomsky

According to Stephen Cass, "Unthinking Machines", Technology Review 5/4/2011: Some of the founders and leading lights in the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science gave a harsh assessment last night of the lack of progress in AI over the last few decades. During a panel discussion—moderated by linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker—that kicked […]

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Folding like all the things

This quote made me do a double take: "Trump's attorney Michael Cohen will 'fold like a cheap deck of cards,' Stormy Daniels' lawyer says". And I wasn't the only one — Peter Norvig asked on Facebook Hey David Regal, as a professional magician, can you tell us exactly how a cheap deck of cards folds? […]

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Justin Bieber Brings Natural Language Processing to the Masses

Forget Watson. Forget Siri. Forget even Twitterology in the New York Times (though make sure to read Ben Zimmer's article first). You know natural language processing has really hit the big time when it's featured in a story in Entertainment Weekly.

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Gelman and Picasso

I very much enjoyed Andrew Gelman's post "Bayesian statistical pragmatism" (4/15/2011) on his blog Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science. And one aspect of that post struck me as especially relevant to some recent LL discussions: I am surprised to see Kass write that scientists believe that the theoretical and real worlds are aligned. […]

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Straw men and Bee Science

If you followed my advice (in "Norvig channels Shannon contra Chomsky", 5/31/2011) and read all of Peter Norvig's essay "On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning", you may have detected a certain restrained testiness in Norvig's response. The goal of this post is to give a bit of explanatory background, and to suggest […]

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Humanities research with the Google Books corpus

In Science today, there's yesterday, there was an article called "Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books" [subscription required] by at least twelve authors (eleven individuals, plus "the Google Books team"), which reports on some exercises in quantitative research performed on what is by far the largest corpus ever assembled for humanities and […]

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Lists, comprehensive and otherwise

A recent XKCD: The "Russell and Whitehead" reference is to Russell's paradox, which raised a problem for naive set theory by bringing up the set of all sets that don't include themselves. The "Katherine Gates" reference is to the book Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex, 2000. The image's title attribute has the value "They eventually […]

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