Rebane's Ruminations

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Category: Books & Media

  • “Come, let us reason together …”

    “The time has come,” the Walrus said./ To talk of many things:/ Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—/ Of cabbages—and kings—/ And why the sea is boiling hot—/ And whether pigs have wings.”  Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll George Rebane Older readers will recall President Lyndon Johnson’s famous use of that phrase as he invited opposing…

  • The Antifragile Taleb

    If you see fraud, and you don’t shout fraud, you are a fraud. – NN Taleb George Rebane Among other things Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a flâneur, mathematician, probabilist, systems thinker extraordinaire, philosopher, elitist, and most certainly a curmudgeon.  I ran into him years ago when doing some research in financial engineering.  He had just…

  • MOOCs and the education revolution (addended 9jan13)

    George Rebane [This is the transcript of my 4jan13 KVMR commentary.  I last covered MOOCs in my 21aug12 post.  This post has an addendum that explains in more detailed how intelligent MOOCs can be designed to deliver complex instructional sequences that are not available in traditional learning environments. ] Let’s consider higher education for bit…

  • Singularity Signposts – IBM’s TrueNorth advances cognitive computing

    George Rebane A few days ago IBM published a very short paper titled simply 1014.  It summarized the first successful testing of TrueNorth, IBM’s cognitive computing testbed funded under DARPA’s SyNAPSE.  That program “calls for developing electronic neuromorphic (brain-simulation) machine technology that scales to biological levels, using a cognitive computing architecture with 1010 neurons (10…

  • Lamestream in the Limelight (updated 6jun12)

    George Rebane Ramirez nails the latest.  And did you hear – well, actually it was hard to do that – how the those self-adulating lamestream journalists all went silent the instant that the district attorney released evidence supporting Zimmerman against the hooligan who was pounding his head into the concrete.  Then all the spigots opened…

  • Ruminations – 16mar2012

    George Rebane We watched a DVRd recent ’60 Minutes’ piece on a fifty year program by Texas ranchers to conserve over 150 African game species on their own range lands.  Through their own efforts they have taken contributions from the nation’s zoos and built up the herds/flocks, in the process saving many species that were…

  • Judea Pearl wins 2011 Turing Award

    George Rebane The Association for Computing Machinery announced today that it has named Dr Judea Pearl of the University of California, Los Angeles as the recipient of the A.M. Turing Award for 2011.  The announcement itself begins – NEW YORK, March 15, 2012—ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Judea Pearl of the University…

  • ‘Rural Myths’ – don’t worry, be happy (updated 2mar12)

    George Rebane There is no question that governments at all levels have become less efficient from the taxpayers’ viewpoint.  This inefficiency is felt from many quarters and with respect to applied metrics, ranging from ‘bang per buck’, through layers of onerous regulations and mandates, to the ongoing removal of freedoms often through gratuitous criminalizations. We…

  • The Value of Stereotyping

    George Rebane Stereotyping is the use of a template of characteristics that are thought to belong to members of a particular class more frequently than members of the general population of which the class is a subset.  The template of characteristics is also known as the stereotypical characteristics like, say, a plastic pocket protector full…

  • Christmas in 1949

    George Rebane [This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary which was broadcast on 16 December 2011.] ‘Tis the season for Christmas stories, so I’m going to tell you about my first Christmas in America.  The year was 1949.  Dad, mom, and I had arrived here in May on a troopship packed with east…

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