Saturday, June 30, 2012

The plight of nerds


Why is it so difficult for nerds to relate to most people?

Just recently, some seriously misguided EU advertising fellows attempted to lure girls into science, and in the eyes of many (especially female) scientists, they failed spectacularly.


Look at one of the answers:

In the eyes of the response vid, being successful in science is perhaps not negatively correlated with cuteness, but definitely correlated with nerdyness. The science girl is portrayed as a social outcast. What is this thing about nerds?

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Why the Western World View Abhors Artificial Intelligence


The dear, famous, Yoda like and sadly late Joseph Weizenbaum (the very guy we have to thank for the mother of all chat bots: Eliza) spent quite a bit of his time complaining about humanities overreaching optimism when it comes to the realization of Artificial Intelligence (see his: "Computer Power and Human Reason", for instance).

The charming, but totally misguided Weizenbaum documentary "Plug and Pray" cherishes that same popular thesis. It is hard to see how somebody could see any justification for it, though. Contemporary AI research is a very humble affair, occupied with obscure exercises in applied mathematics, boring standardization of protocol languages or tinkering with soccer playing or car driving robots. Any vision for generally intelligent artificial minds plays an extremely marginal role at best. At the same time, AI research has always been extremely productive: most of the stuff in computer science, from speech recognition to computer vision, from planning to data base systems, from data compression to data mining, has been concocted in some AI lab or other.

So what's the reason for the popular hostility towards Artificial Intelligence? Hmm, hmm: these guys are saying that the mind is a computer!
Why is that such a blasphemy?

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Wem gehört der Dichter?

Der WDR schreibt grade, wie die Enkelin Karl Valentins die Blogger, die ihn zitieren, mit Abmahnungen überzieht. Auch vor diesem Hintergrund lohnt es sich, über den Schutzfristenunsinn nachzudenken.
Der ganz überwiegende Anteil aller Schriftwerke generiert nur im Zeitraum direkt nach der Veröffentlichung Einnahmen und ist danach ökonomisch für den Autor irrelevant.

Friday, June 1, 2012

Warum sollten Urheberrechte erblich sein?

Hier behauptet Andreas Moser, dass man die Verkürzung von Schutzfristen auf literarische Werke etc., nicht fordern darf, ohne gleichzeitig eine Abschaffung des Erbrechts insgesamt zu verlangen. Das leuchtet mir nicht ein.