These are my links for April 12th through April 22nd:
- Gilbert Harman, Sanjeev Kulkarni – Reliable Reasoning: Induction and Statistical Learning Theory – Reviewed by Kevin Kelly, and Conor Mayo-Wilson, Carnegie Mellon University – Philosophical Reviews – University of Notre Dame – Harman and Kulkarni’s Reliable Reasoning is a welcome attempt to relate machine learning to the philosophy of induction at an introductory level suitable for undergraduates or for professional philosophers and scientists who desire a painless introduction to the subject. In clear, helpful figures and engagingly informal prose, the slender volume summarizes the main results and concepts of statistical learning theory, a particular statistical framework developed by V. N. Vapnik, A. J. Chervonenkis and others for machine learning and other applications (Vapnik and Chervonenkis 1974, Vapnik 1998, 1999, 2000). Harman and Kulkarni also explain how statistical learning theory might shed light on philosophical topics like the problem of induction and the role of simplicity in theory choice. The book is mainly an informal précis of Vapnik (2000), with some important differences.
- Independence and Large Cardinals (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) – The independence results in arithmetic and set theory led to a proliferation of mathematical systems. One very general way to investigate the space of possible mathematical systems is under the relation of interpretability. Under this relation the space of possible mathematical systems forms an intricate hierarchy of increasingly strong systems. Large cardinal axioms provide a canonical means of climbing this hierarchy and they play a central role in comparing systems from conceptually distinct domains.
- The Sources of Normativity (application/pdf Object) – Whether this is true or not, the moral philosophy of the modern period can be read as a search for the source of normativity. Philosophers in the modern period have come up with four successive answers to the question of what makes morality normative. In brief, they are these: (1) Voluntarism, (2) Realism, (3) Reflective Endorsement, ( 4 ) The Appeal to Autonomy.
- Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics – These pages attempt to show the first uses of various words used in mathematics. Research for these pages is ongoing, and a citation should not be assumed to be the earliest use unless it is indicated as such.
These are my links for December 14th through January 5th:
These are my links for December 14th from 10:36 to 10:53:
- The PhilPapers Surveys – The PhilPapers Survey was a survey of professional philosophers and others on their philosophical views, carried out in November 2009. The Survey was taken by 3226 respondents, including 1803 philosophy faculty members and/or PhDs and 829 philosophy graduate students.
The PhilPapers Metasurvey was a concurrent survey of professional philosophers and other concerning their predictions of the results of the Survey. The Metasurvey was taken by 727 respondents including 438 professional philosophers and PhDs and 210 philosophy graduate students.
Preliminary results and discussion are included below. Further results and analysis will be made available in coming months.
- UC Davis Philosophy 102, Theory of Knowledge: Table of Contents for Lecture Notes – The subject of this course is what has come to be called "theory of knowledge" or "epistemology." The two names are interchangeable in common use. (A similar pair of terms for philosophical disciplines is 'theory of value' (or 'value theory') and the little-used 'axiology.') Until the nineteenth century, there had been no special term to indicate the study of knowledge as such, even though knowledge had been studied from the very beginning of Western philosophy . The word "epistemology" was coined by James Ferrier in his 1856 book Institutes of Metaphysics. The root word 'episteme' in Greek means 'knowledge,' while the '-ology' suffix signifies, roughly, 'study of.' Compare terms such as 'biology' (study of life), 'geology' (study of the earth), etc. Shortly after Ferrier, Eduard Zeller in 1862 introduced the German word 'Erkenntnistheorie' in Ueber Aufgabe und Bedeutung der Erkenntnistheorie. This word is translated into English as "theory of knowledge."
- Human or Cylon? Group testing on Battlestar Galactica (application/pdf Object) – Does statistics have a place though in the world of science fiction? Because science fiction writers try to merge the sci-fi world with the real world in a believable way, one might think that statistics could make a significant contribution to solving sci-fi problems.
In the hit Sci Fi Network television show, the new Battlestar Galactica (a re-imagined version of the 1970’s show), there is an attempt to use science to solve a very important problem. Due to the excessive amount of time the proposed solution would take to complete, it is deemed impractical and never implemented. This paper shows how the problem could have been solved instead using a statistical technique called “group testing.” Scientists use this technique to solve many real-world problems, including the screening of blood donations for diseases. When applied to the problem on Battlestar Galactica, it will be shown that group testing could have a made dramatic difference to the course of the show
- The Ninth Annual Year in Ideas – Magazine – NYTimes.com – Once again, The Times Magazine looks back on the past year from our favored perch: ideas. Like a magpie building its nest, we have hunted eclectically, though not without discrimination, for noteworthy notions of 2009 — the twigs and sticks and shiny paper scraps of human ingenuity, which, when collected and woven together, form a sort of cognitive shelter, in which the curious mind can incubate, hatch and feather. Unlike birds, we can also alphabetize. And so we hereby present, from A to Z, the most clever, important, silly and just plain weird innovations we carried back from all corners of the thinking world. To offer a nonalphabetical option for navigating the entries, this year we have attached tags to each item indicating subject matter.
These are my links for October 25th through October 27th:
- The One Argument Ayn Rand Couldn’t Win — New York Magazine – …as James put it, “a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of all our premises is never mentioned … What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great universe of God. What it is—and oh so flagrantly!—is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is.”No one would have been angrier about this claim, and no one confirms its truth more profoundly, than Ayn Rand. Few fellow creatures have had a more intensely odd personal flavor; her temperament could have neutered an ox at 40 paces. She was proud, grouchy, vindictive, insulting, dismissive, and rash. (One former associate called her “the Evel Knievel of leaping to conclusions.”) But she was also idealistic, yearning, candid, worshipful, precise, and improbably charming. She funneled all of these contradictory elements into Objectivism, the home-brewed philosophy that won her thousands of Cold War–era followers and that seems to be making some noise once again …
- Monsters and the Moral Imagination – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education – The reasons for this increased monster culture are hard to pin down. Maybe it’s social anxiety in the post-9/11 decade, or the conflict in Iraq—some think there’s an uptick in such fare during wartime. Perhaps it’s the economic downturn. The monster proliferation can be explained, in part, by exploring the meaning of monsters. Popular culture is re-enchanted with meaningful monsters, and even the eggheads are stroking their chins—last month saw the seventh global conference on Monsters and the Monstrous at the University of Oxford.
- The history of management consulting : The New Yorker – … in October of 1910, when Louis Brandeis, a fifty-three-year-old lawyer from Boston, held a meeting at an apartment in New York with a bunch of experts who, at Brandeis’s urging, decided to call what they were experts at “scientific management.” Everyone there—including Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, best known today as the parents in “Cheaper by the Dozen”—had contracted “Tayloritis”: they were enthralled by an industrial engineer from Philadelphia named Frederick Winslow Taylor, who had been ordering people around, scientifically, for years. Speedy Taylor, as he was called, had invented a new way to make money. He would get himself hired by some business; spend a while watching people work, stopwatch and slide rule in hand; write a report telling them how to do their work faster; and then submit an astronomical bill for his services. He is the “Father of Scientific Management”, and, … the grandfather of management consulting.
These are my links for October 8th through October 20th:
- sed, a stream editor – sed is a stream editor. A stream editor is used to perform basic text transformations on an input stream (a file or input from a pipeline). While in some ways similar to an editor which permits scripted edits (such as ed), sed works by making only one pass over the input(s), and is consequently more efficient. But it is sed’s ability to filter text in a pipeline which particularly distinguishes it from other types of editors.
- Best of Wikipedia – A twice-daily updated collection of some of the best reading on Wikipedia
- Axiom of Choice – The Axiom of Choice (AC) was formulated about a century ago, and it was controversial for a few of decades after that; it might be considered the last great controversy of mathematics. It is now a basic assumption used in many parts of mathematics.
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