Posts Tagged "old"
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Mandelbrot set: cellular automatons & fractal islands
Mandelbrot set: fractal math. After spending some time in space, we wanted to come back down to Earth. Continuing on our previous photos, should we talk about Conquistador economics or the invention of writing and 3,000 year-old Chinese sunspot observations? First let’s talk about von Neumann machines and cellular automatons. This is the famous Mandelbrot set, an image generated from pure mathematics. There are an infinite number of beautiful images inside the Mandelbrot set. The Mandelbrot set isn’t normally constructed as a cellular automaton (although it certainly can be as cellular automatons are Turing-complete for the computer scientists out there.) However, many other famous fractals are easily expressed as cellular automatons. The two fields are closely related, as many fractals (including Mandelbrot) are related to bifurcation problems on recursive functions (famously related to automaton simulations). We’ll just note for now that Cellular Automatons are another name for von Neumann machines, which you may remember from Arthur C.… Read the restVR Data Preservation: Is this dutch masterpiece painting really a 400-year old photograph made by a human?
Coming back to our earlier posts on data modeling of the impacts of investment in world literacy (represented by another 400-year-old dutch masterpiece painting of a schoolhouse) and 3D-digital big data preservation of the Buddha destroyed by the Taliban (also related to literacy as we’ll discuss in the future), we wanted to circle back around and discuss just the data and Virtual Reality aspects of these dutch masterpieces themselves. Texas inventor Tim Jenison noticed that the Dutch master artist Vermeer had perfectly captured the pattern of light dappling in the background, although this cannot be seen by an unaided human eye. (Although you can see the light is dappled, your brain still reinterprets most of the shading as a flat surface with a single color, preventing you from seeing the subtle variations of grading. To get exact shades as perfect as in the painting, Jenison feels an optical device must have been used the obscures most of the image, so that each the shade in each ‘pixel’ can be matched exactly by the painter.… Read the restEbola: Can big data or semantic text help?
“Many problems” in this case Yes it can. We’ll get to to how big data or semantic meaning can help in a moment. First a few observations. As the Prof. Redlener, the NYT’s expert on disaster preparedness put it, “There are many, many problems that have been revealed by this single case.” This is a polite way for saying what at the Dallas hospital was a major screw-up that needlessly put lives in danger and unnecessarily forced additional people into a 21-day quarantine. We can talk about using semantic text technologies to prevent these kinds of hospital errors, or big data to improve traveler screening processes. At the end of the day, however, this is a type of error that the billing department at the Dallas hospital should have been able to catch. EbolaCare(TM) insurance “Where do we send this bill?” “Hmmm, address in Liberia. Looks like he has EbolaCare(TM), the national health plan of Liberia.”… Read the restError bands, or why models will be models (of the mathematical variety)
In response to our article on the Social Progress Index (SPI) and prediction markets, the Social Progress Index folks asked why we didn’t just stop at optimizing the SPI. Two reasons, we said: (1) There’s an unfortunate tendency of people to believe (math) models are reality. They’re just models with error bands. (2) There’s going to be politically-motivated suspicion of any model (as well as political-motivated attempts to manipulate models and their interpretation). [For our readers coming over from our fashion design section, or our earlier article on virtual reality fashion models and modeling, we are talking about mathematical models here.] So how do models go bad? Let’s use the Social Progress Index as an example. We talked elsewhere about the tension between things like freedom of press and national security in a model like this. (In general, such tension will exist in an useful economic or financial model. If the tension did not exist, there would be nothing interesting to optimize, and so need for such a model in the first place.)… Read the restRecent Posts
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