Special Circumstances

Voice Recognition Software Yelled At

From the Onion, vol 39, issue 41 America's Finest News Source(TM) 22 October 2003.

NEW YORK ”Fidelity Financial Services' Gwen Watson, 33, shouted angrily at her IBM ViaVoice Pro USB voice-recognition software, sources close to the human-resources administrator reported Monday. "No, not Gary Friedman! Barry Friedman, you stupid computer. BARRY!" Watson was heard to scream from her cubicle. "Jesus Christ, I could've typed it in a hundredth of the time." After another minute of yelling, Watson was further incensed upon looking at her screen, which read, "Barely Freedman you God ram plucking pizza ship."

Hmm. When good language models go bad ...

Critical Opalescence

From Clockwork Science By Freeman J. Dyson, a review of Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time by Peter Galison. (published in the New York Review of Books, Vol 50, Num 17, Nov 6, 2003 temporary url)

Galison uses the phrase "critical opalescence" to sum up the story of what happened in 1905 when relativity was discovered. Critical opalescence is a strikingly beautiful effect that is seen when water is heated to a temperature of 374 degrees Celsius under high pressure. 374 degrees is called the critical temperature of water. It is the temperature at which water turns continuously into steam without boiling. At the critical temperature and pressure, water and steam are indistinguishable. They are a single fluid, unable to make up its mind whether to be a gas or a liquid. In that critical state, the fluid is continually fluctuating between gas and liquid, and the fluctuations are seen visually as a multicolored sparkling. The sparkling is called opalescence because it is also seen in opal jewels which have a similar multicolored radiance.

Galison uses critical opalescence as a metaphor for the merging of technology, science, and philosophy that happened in the minds of Poincaré and Einstein in the spring of 1905. Poincaré and Einstein were immersed in the technical tools of time signaling, but the tools by themselves did not lead them to their discoveries. They were immersed in the mathematical ideas of electrodynamics, but the ideas by themselves did not lead them to their discoveries.

...

The one question that Galison's metaphor of critical opalescence does not answer is why Einstein discovered the theory of relativity as we know it and Poincaré did not. The theories discovered by Poincaré and Einstein were operationally equivalent, with identical experimental consequences, but there was one crucial difference. The difference was the use of the word "ether."

...

The essential difference between Poincaré and Einstein was that Poincaré was by temperament conservative and Einstein was by temperament revolutionary. When Poincaré looked for a new theory of electromagnetism, he tried to preserve as much as he could of the old. He loved the ether and continued to believe in it, even when his own theory showed that it was unobservable. His version of relativity theory was a patchwork quilt. The new idea of local time, depending on the motion of the observer, was patched onto the old framework of absolute space and time defined by a rigid and immovable ether. Einstein, on the other hand, saw the old framework as cumbersome and unnecessary and was delighted to be rid of it.

...

Looking back upon this history, I disagree with Galison's conclusion. I do not see critical opalescence as a decisive factor in Einstein's victory. I see Poincaré and Einstein equal in their grasp of contemporary technology, equal in their love of philosophical speculation, unequal only in their receptiveness to new ideas. Ideas were the decisive factor. Einstein made the big jump into the world of relativity because he was eager to throw out old ideas and bring in new ones. Poincaré hesitated on the brink and never made the big jump. In this instance at least, Kuhn was right. The scientific revolution of 1905 was driven by ideas and not by tools.

Famous researchers and "Work at google" ads

Not so long ago, if you searched for "machine learning" or "computational linguistics" in google, you would get an ad (so-called Sponsored Link) from google: the "Work at google" ad.

Not so well known was that due to the inherent (or explicit) clustering over queries, you would also get this ad if you searched for a particular name. The names were usually of famous computational linguists or machine learning people. For example, if you searched for fernando pereira you would get an ad asking whether you would like to "Work at google". Unfortunately, Fernando's name no longer triggers the ad.

But some other names still do. The following is only a partial list of names that trigger "Work at google" ads:

Work at google Ads

• dekai wu
• andrew mccallum
• yaov freund
• daniel marcu
• vladimir vapnik
• soumen chakrabarti
• david yarowsky

A small variation is a more specific ad which targets NLP searchers:

Work on NLP at google (with the blurb "google is hiring experts in statistical natural language processing")

• aravind joshi
• fred jelinek
• robert schapire
• dan jurafsky
• steven abney
• stuart shieber

What is equally suprising is that other names that you might think of as being in this class do not trigger the same ad. So what is the key that distinguishes these people from other, arguably just-as-famous researchers?

The Character of Physical Law by Richard P. Feynman

An excellent peek into the pedagogical mind of the most intriguing and colorful physicist of the last century. This book contains useful explanations about the meta-language of physics and what it describes. Feynman also gives a great analogy between the Babylonian and Greek way of doing mathematics and how to use math in physics.

Feynman touches on many disparate topics ranging from the classical physics of gravitation to magnetism to quantum mechanics. His pedagogy however is driven by the following quote from the first page of the book:

What I want to discuss in this series of lectures is the general characteristic of these Physical Laws; that is another level, if you will, of higher generality over the laws themselves. ... Now such a topic has a tendency to become too philosophical because it becomes too general, and a person talks in such generalities, that everybody can understand him. It is then considered to be some deep philosophy. I would like to be rather more special, and I would like to be understood in an honest way rather than in a vague way."

This book is a transcription of Feynman's Messenger Lectures originally given at Cornell University and recorded for television by the B.B.C.

For more details on the part of this book that deals with quantum mechanics pick up another book by Feynman called "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter".

%T The Character of Physical Law
%A Richard P. Feynman
%I MIT Press
%D 1967
%G ISBN: 0262560038 (pb)
%G ISBN: 0679601279 (hc)
%P 173
%K science, physics

Review written: 2000/04/04

Special Circumstances Boots Up

Inspired by Fernando Pereira's weblog I have finally created one of my own. At least once a week, I will attempt to post some discussion of a book I've read recently. Whatever little that is found to be newsworthy will appear irregularly.

The title of my blog is from a series of books by Iain M. Banks.