Image via Wikipedia
Banker Charles Morris predicted the credit crisis in early 2007. But no one listened and thus the credit crisis came upon us unexpectedly.

Is the same happening with the climate crisis ? Is the drastic change of the climate not to come until many decades from now, or will it come much, much sooner and will we get in trouble already, say at the end of next year ?
In any case there are signs that it is all happening much faster than anybody thought.

• The arctic ice cap is melting down really quick. The result is that the Sun’s radiation is absorbed by open water rather than bounced back into the atmosphere, creating a vicious circle of heating — melting — heating —melting faster and faster.
• As long as it is arctic ice that melts, there is just a danger of global warming. Arctic ice is frozen sea water. But as the ice of Greenland is melting too, which is fresh water, it becomes a totally different story : the gulf stream could halt, resulting in a new ice age in Europe. However, the forecasts tell us that this will happen only in the 21st century… or not.
• And then there is Yellowstone National Park. What does this have to do with climate change ? Underneath the park waits a gigantic volcano to erupt. It has been a while now since it happened the last time, so it can explode any time to cover half of the US with ashes and change the climate of the word.

Enough pessimism. End-of-year is coming and I have a lot of presents to buy.

Image via WikipediaDr Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, thinks he has discovered something spectacular : in web-experienced middle-aged and older adults, surfing the web triggers key centers in the brain related to decision-making and complex reasoning. So surfing the web is some sort of braintraining. (source: hospitalradiologyeurope)

So far so good.

But now it comes : Small told Reuters: “We’re seeing an evolutionary change. The people in the next generation who are really going to have the edge are the ones who master the technological skills and also face-to-face skills. They will know when the best response to an e-mail or instant message is to talk rather than sit and continue to e-mail“. (source : computerweekly)

What is this all about ?
First : it is interesting to see that training enhances skills. Every sportsman knows that. Ask Kaka or Cristiano Ronaldo how much they trained during their lives to come where they stand now.
Is is no surprise that brain-related activities like web-surfing enhance the brain skills.
But what does this have to do with evolution ? Will web-savvy people have more offspring, and hence be better represented in the next generation? I doubt it.
Perhaps Gary Small is a good neuroscientist, but he does not understand the very basics of evolution !
Unless of cause Lamarck was right and Darwin was wrong ?

Image via WikipediaThe fact that people around the world perform searches on words like “flu” gives google a lot of information about flu outbreaks.
This made me think about the novel “Earth” of David Brin where the internet was the source not only of information, but also played the role of some sort of supermind. Giving the average opinion of the world people. Google is clearly heading in that direction.
By the way : the novel is really enjoyable !

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Image via WikipediaApparently prediction markets are not bad in prediction presidential elections. But still they are not perfect (see also C.Masse’s comment).
That is why Isaac Asimov in his novel “Franchise” foresaw the need not to use only Artificial Intelligence of some kind but also still one real-life voter !
And what the “artificial intelligence of some kind” will be, we all know : Google ! Steinn says it is also the most important candidate to become the singularity.

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Image via WikipediaVassilis N. Siakos asked a question on LinkedIn which generated 299 responses in less than an hour : “A good Manager does things right, while a good Leader does the …right things. What does it take to do the right things, right?”

Two facts struck me.
1. The huge response rate meaning that people find it extremely important what their manager does or how they manage themselves
2. The difference between leader and manager. For me, a good manager should be a good leader and vice versa. The fact that people see a big difference means that many managers should not be managing!

A part from these two facts the whole discussion is a goldmine to learn what people value in their managers. Here only and handfull of important characteristics of a good leader/manager :

• doing the best for the people
• integrity
• spot opportunities and drive the team towards them
• justice (leader) / seeking career (manager)
• empowering people
• give the people right feelings about their job
• build up motivation and problem solving skills in his/her subordinates
• be honest and do the best you can
• have a vision of where they want the group to go
• clear goals, clear metrics
• create trust and support
• put the best interests of the business in line with the best interests of the people

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Image via Wikipedia

“For at least 2.5 billion years, and possibly since the emergence of life, Earth’s mineralogy has evolved in parallel with biology,” says Robert Hazen and Dominic Papineau of the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory.

In some of my previous posts (here,and here) I wrote about an evolutionary phase where inanimate matter evolved into living matter.
Apparently and logically the evolution of inanimate matter did not stop at that point, but continued under the selection pressure of a changing environment.
“Of the approximately 4,300 known mineral species on Earth, perhaps two thirds of them are biologically mediated,” says Hazen.

More info at www.physorg.com

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• Evolution: it works, bixbites

Image via WikipediaA “prediction – prediction market“. That is what piqqem is. Does it makes sense to create a prediction market to predict the predictions of another prediction market? After all, that is what stock markets are : prediction markets.
(see also the discussion by Erick Shonfeld on techcrunch)

I think it is an interesting idea.

A basic technique often used in data mining is : increase the prediction accuracy by combining several predictions, obtained by different methods. This can be done either by averaging independent predictions or by using for example a second method to predict the residual error of the first method.

Piqqem uses this second technique. The difference between the current stock price and the future price is the error on the prediction of the stock market. It is this error that piqqem wants to predict, using the wisdom of the crowds.
So it makes sense : predicting the errors of the first method by a different method.

Of course if i) this works and ii) this gets widespread, the info of the piqqems of this world will influence the stock prices reducing their added info to nil.

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• Still believe in the stock market? Try Inner8

Image via WikipediaIn the conservative way of looking at married couples, a couple consists of a man and a woman.
So if a married man has an extramatrimonial adventure with a married woman, that married woman has an extramatrimonial adventure with a married man.
In the same time there is a married man and a married woman who are both betrayed.

Perfectly balanced ?

Yes and no.

Yes : if this cheating remains secret and without consequences, if the cheaters took precautions, against aids and against having children.

The imbalance I want to talk about occurs when the cheating results in a child.

When a man cheats on his wife, and this cheating results in a bastard child and their adventure remains a secret what are the consequences ?
Fairly simple : the woman who cheated gives birth to a child. This means that her husband (who believes it is his child) has to raise the child of another man. This is what happens when a cuckoo lays his egg in another nest. Hence the term : “cuckooldery” as the opposite of adultery.
In the other family nothing happens. Pretty imbalanced, is it not?

A man can do whatever he wants, and as long as his wife does not know, nothing happens.
A woman on the other hand brings the child of another man into her and her husbands family.

Which of the two is worse ?
Lets look at it from the simple evolutionary point of view : “evolution and natural selection favour the individuals with the most offspring”.

From the point of view of men :
– making a lot of children in your own family AND outside your family is evolutionary good.
– raising the children of another man is evolutionary bad, because your own children have to share the resources (food, shelter …) with a bastard child.

From the point of view of women :
– having a lot of children from your husband or from another man (fitter, taller, richer) is good.
– if your husband has a bastard child in some other family there is only the danger that he spends some of his time/resources/wealth with this other child.

I would say that from the point of view of man the imbalance is far greater than from the point of view of women.

To illustrate this :

– Male lions, when they take over a group and chase the old group leader they also kill all the baby lions, because they carry the genes of another lion.

– some reported cases of women stoned as punishment for adultery (for example here , here and here

Naturally, the view I presented above is very limited. These days marriage and family is a lot more than only counting the number of his or her children. So the impact of cheating is much more complicated. But that will be another story. In the mean time this post gives an overview of possibilities.

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On linkedin Shane Wyatt McCartney expresses his concern about the flatlining diversity ine some US areas.
… but in areas that have become satisfied with its diversity, the diversity movement flat lines and becomes non-existent. Each day is a carbon copy of the next and each community becomes a mirrored image of the other. The retaining of an areas populace becomes even more challenging especially with younger generations seeking greener pastures.

I think if we look a bit more globally, then we should not talk of stalling diversities, but of decreasing diversities.
I am not only talking of the extinction of animal and plant species. Due to the globalisation we can nowadays eat Macdonalds an drink coca-cola anywhere on earth. But not only that. Everybody on earth has started to to live the same way, to wear the same cloathes, to read the same info on the internet (if there is no censoring), to listen to the same music.
Yes, locally the diversity increases because we do not live just the lives of our parents, but also the life of the parents of our friends from South-America, Europe, Asia, Australia, the MIddle East …
But all of these lives are are getting more and more alike.
At the end we will all be the same, eating the same junk food, that will be produced by agricultural industries based on only one single plant species and transformed to food for humans by the one best strand of bacteria.
But then perhaps diversity will come to us in the virtual worlds of internet and gaming ?

Perhaps this is a way too pessimistic view of our future. Perhaps due to our unlimited creativity and imagination we will endlessly create a diversity of new experiences. For example biotechnology would create hundreds or thousends types of food-creating varieties of bacteria yielding the same number of different flavours, far exceeding the quality and taste of the current natural foods ?
And of course the same holds for music, literature (written by artificial intellingent writers) or even scientific creations ?

Image via WikipediaJapanese want to clone mammoths.
Apart from the question if it is possible (or will be ?) : Is this good or bad ?

Then there is also the question of bringing back recently extinct species or prehistoric ones. Recent ones could be interesting : as they are extinct, we can assume they will not develop to pests and thus we can do something about the species diversity problem.

Prehistoric ones : It is all about bringing in a species somewhere it was not before.

We did this many times before. Examples : the starling and house sparrows in the US, the rabbits in Australia. We all know what happened : something we did not expect.

But there is one advantage with those huge prehistoric animals like mammoths : they are huge. This means we can easily spot them and kill them if they become pests. Did a huge animal ever became a pest ?

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Image via WikipediaIs swarm intelligence a good expression ? Although it is widely used (356.000 hits in google for a search on swarm intelligence), I have a feeling there is something wrong with it.

The obvious questiong is : are swarms intelligent ?

As we see termite heaps, ant hills, bee hives, we would think that they are indeed intelligent. Does it not take intelligence to build such complicated and effective things ?

But there are two sides of the story.
One is being able to accomplish ‘intelligent’ tasks, like building a termite hill or predicting a president election result (prediction market).
Another one is knowing or being able to explain how you must build a termite heap or why the prediction is that and not another.
A definition of intelligence, borrowed from Wikipedia goes as folllows :

“A very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience”

My point is that swarms can execute complex tasks, without necessarily being intelligent, without being able to explain how it (the swarm) does it, why it does it that way.

A termite swarm does not learn from previous experiences.

Take all data mining techniques based on this swarm idea (or related). Approaches like bagging, random forests, ant colony optimisation all are black boxes when it comes to explain the rules that are learnt by the data mining algorithm. They can execute a scoring on an unseen dataset with fairly good results, but you need another technique to extract the rules (not the exact ones, used by the data mining model, but simple ones that approximate the behaviour of the model.

When it comes to intelligent software : forget distributed software with a multitude of relatively simple agents. They are good to execute operations, but will they ever be able to give an answer to a difficult question ? To design something totally new ?

Some science fiction movies (e.g. Starship Troopers, I Robot) use this duality : a swarm of relatively dumb creatures to execute what is needed, but the whole thing and the final communication takes place face to ‘face’ with the central procession unit, the superbrain that controls the swarm.

Image via WikipediaJapanese scientists cloned a mouse from a dead cell frozen for 16 years.
Now they are looking for frozen mammoth cells and a volunteer elephant to be the mother.

Very exiting at least for science and the scientists, but do we really need extinct animals? They are not adapted to our world, otherwise they would not have gone extinct. So what will they be? Curiosities? Research objects?

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Software that comes to life (post at CAS-Group Blog) : Is this possible ?
This is a difficult one. I will just give some questions and thoughts.

First : what is life ? In wikipedia there are a lot of definitions and it is not a clear-cut matter.
Rocks are not, people are, but are viruses alive ? Are computor viruses alive ?
Are genes alive ? Are memes alive ?
The only thing the last four can do is to get reproduced. Is this sufficient to be alive ?

In order to have evolution, you need change : reproduction errors (=mutations) or crossing over (=recombinations). A computor virus reproduces but does it change more or less at random (mutation), just like a organic virus ?
When I hear someone telling a joke, and I hear that same joke a year later, often it has changed somewhat. Conclusion : it has reproduced and mutated. Are jokes alive ?

That leads me to the contradiction in the title : “software that comes to life”. Means : first it was not alive, later on it was. It has evolved from dead to alive ! But to evolve, should it not had to be alive from the beginning ?
You can ask the same question about ourselves : one day dead matter must have made the transition to living matter. But for the last dead instance (call it Z) to evolve to something alive, it should have been alive already, otherwise it could not have evolved. The same goes for “Y”, the parent of Z and than for “X”, the parent of Y … Paradox !

So rather I should ask : is it possible to create living software ?
Minimalistic : I think yes. Computer viruses reproduce and some of them change (mutate) during the copying process in order to survive the danger of anti-virus softwares. They are already there.
Maximalistic : I also think yes.
For me maximalistically means : minimalistic plus some functionality that is useful, or at least can be selected for by people (positive selection in contrast to the negative selection of antivirus software : does this make sense ?).
A lot of softwares already have these properties. What they are lacking is the random mutations that can beneficial to them of detrimental. The open source softwares (linux etc…) come a bit in that direction because anyone can change them in whatever (random ? ) way.
But they are still algorithmic softwares. There is only one layer : the instructions.
The richness of real life is that the behaviour is a layer on top of the algorithms. The behaviour is a probabilistic functioning as a result of a huge amount of interregulating basic algorithms.
Unless we are able to make such software (for example based on concepts like artificial neural networks) that can learn to do some functionality, real living software will remain science fiction.
One step in that direction is the work by Ben Goertzel, head of Novamente (article on BBC News) who works on software that learns in virtual worlds like second life.

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When will computors be able to read and understand simple human-language documents ?
The existing Text-mining softwares like SPSS Text mining for Clementine, SAS Text Miner, or Statistica Text Miner, go in that direction, but they still have a long way to go.
How does text mining works ? The simples approximation is the following :
I starts reading the text, but it does not understand a single word. So it is simply collecting what they call a “bag of words”.
Out of that bag the text mining applications have to extract some meaning. But that’s for another post.
Some text mining applications can use dictonaries of expressions in order to perform some semantic analysis and hence do better than simply explore a bag of words.

But for now let’s stick with this bag of words and see what it is worth.
In order to make this bag of words a bit more vivid, first take a look at the following text from Harvard business publishing.(Do not yet click the link to the original text!)
Oh yes, I took all the words, put them in a bag and wrote the text again, but now with the words in a completely random order.
So the sequence of the words does not have any meaning left. Only the words have.
Can you still figure out what this text is (was) all about ?
This gives you a idea where we stand nowadays with the simplest text mining applications.

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Image via WikipediaIt is an odd couple : evolution and diversity.
Evolution needs diversity, but diversity is at the mercy of evolution at the same time.

Let me explain.
Evolution does not occur in a homogeneous group. It would be contradictory : “survival of the fittest” when everything or everyone is exactly the same. They are all equally fit.
So there has to be diversity.

But how can diversity evolve ?
In “normal”, stupid living things, like bacteria, lichens, flowers etc. the matter that evolves and has to be diverse is the genetic information : genes, concatenated in long strings of DNA or RNA.
Before these obvious living things there were very elementary organic molecules which also evolved, otherwise they would not have become the real living things. This proto-evolution acted not on genetic information, but on the molecules themselves : they were their own information. There was only one level. The living things as we know them have two levels : i)themselves and ii) their genetic information.
As evolution continued a third level appeared : memes. What we, humans, and possibly, but to a more limited extend the other animals too think, say, communicate. This information also evolves.

This means that the diversity was first diversity of organic molecules, then diversity of genetic information, and now diversity of brain-contained information.

What will be the next level ? Perhaps something link R-memes : information in robots, computors, when it will evolve independently of human command.
We see the beginning of it in artificial intelligent programs .

When these programs will populate the internet, replicate and one way or another will be selected by “the internet” (+ all those that use it) we will see the next level of diversity and evolution.

It is allready partly the case with computer viruses. Only partly, because they still have to be created by people. Beware the day they will mutate, and present themselves each generation as modified viruses, increasing their diversity each minute. The we will have the same problem as with avian flue, but they will be killing computers in stead of people.

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• Misperceptions meet state of the art in evolution research
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Image via Wikipedia

Genetics professor Steve Jones says the rate of genetic mutations found in humans is falling dramatically. Does this mean the end of human evolution ?
Certainly not.
Evolution is the result of selection pressure (an environment) and possibilities to change the gene pool.
The first thing : each and everyone of us has an environment. That’s for sure. For some of us the environment is beneficial, facilitating our procreation, for others its nothing but trouble and you are lucky to survive to adulthood. So there is plenty of genetic pressure.
The second : change possibilities. The first one is mutations. OK, they are diminishing due to our behaviour, (but perhaps increasing do to radiation, and all the messy stuff they put in our food ?).
On the other hand there is a lot of diversity in the human gene pool, due to a diminishing selective pressure. As long as that pressure exists and does not act perfectly random, each man or woman who dies before he or she has children means a little change in the human gene pool. The same is true for each child that is born.
And thirdly, even if the overall human gene pool does not change, each human is sort of random sample from that gene pool. Change in these sample means evolution.
And there is more. Even if natural selection stops in the sense that everyone survives, no matter what their fitness is (is not yet true because young people still die and some people have no children !) there still is selection, namely partner selection. The remixing of the gene pool is not random.
So we still will see changes, at the individual level, at the community level, at the nations level …

And perhaps we are witnessing nowadays a more or less radical change in selection pressure : as a result of the credit crisis people will have to survive

• with rapidly diminishing financial means (at least thats what we are seeing right now). This also implies a selection on stress-proof people
• with less money (the second stage)

Who knows what the (financial) world will look like within 2 years ? Will it be restored like it was before, or will we have seen a total meltdown with no trust left whatsoever ?

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Image via WikipediaRight.
Stock markets are prediction markets.
What does it mean that one share of Microsoft (MSFT) is traded at 23.93$ ?
Basically it means that traders and investors predict that, given the current situation the actual value of all future profits of Microsoft will add up to 23.95$. Not more, not less.
As the current situation changes, this prediction, made by the “wisdom of the crowds” will change accordingly.
So it was particularly striking, that when on Monday, Sept. 29. US Congress stopped the $700 billion bailout package that would rescue the major banks. Traders and investors instantly predicted that the future profits of the would be much less (the Dow Jones industrial average plunged almost 778 points and continued to drop in the succeeding days).

So prediction markets like Inkling etc are nothing new. The only new thing is that they predict other things that future profits of enterprises.

Book cover via AmazonTo fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.

-Sun Tzu, the Art of War

---

Efficiency is intelligent lazyness
– anonymus

---

Combining the two I get :

To work hard and meet every deadline and attaining every goal is not supreme efficiency; supreme efficiency consists in meeting deadlines an attaining goals without working.

– Zyxo

---

Image via WikipediaWhen we think of evolution as “information that is copied, and changes sometimes during the process”, the key words are : information, copy, and change.

In the present post I will concentrate on information, not the information on itself, but on the carrier of information.
Chronologically we first had dead matter : the necessary information about it was the matter itself. Whether it got copied, continued to exist, or was newly produced (henc not strictly evolution) does not matter : it survived the process.
The next step was living matter with the information not in the matter itself but in a special information-carrier : genes
Then arrived the brains, carrying information not about the organisms but about what it takes an organism to function, to behave, to communicate, to think.

Next, we, humans sort of copied this brains and created information-carrying things we call computors.

But what will be next ?

Obviously, living brains are much more powerful than the existing computors, especially at parrallel-processing. So the future should go in the direction of using living brains. Our computors on the other hand are much more precise, so we should keep them improving too. Given these two statements, a mixture between the two should be the nec plus ultra.

At the university of reading, Kevin Warwick and his team are exactly doing that : they made a robot, controlled by living brain tissue. It is still very elementary, but so was eniac !

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• Rise of the (Rat-Brained) Machines

Apparently a whole lot of people are looking for source code for Ant Colony Optimisation.
On the internet you find plenty of them.
Here is a first list :

• The code projectand this
• Saurabh Samdani
• Danilo Benzatti
• Eric Rollins
• TU Clausthal
• Marc Sinclair
• Ugo Chirico
• Intraspirit
• codeplex
• Nodebox
• Mikkel Bundgaard

Sorry, I did not try them myself !

Image via WikipediaAs I wrote in earlier posts : if there is no time enough and not competing entities enough to let things evolve, directed by natural selection, you need a hiërarchical management to get things done properly.

And that’s the drawback of mondialisation : as the whole world has become one community, one huge bee-hive, one enormous swarm of people, there are surely not entities enough on which natural (?) selection can act. So there is need of a strong hiërarchical leadership. Which we clearly do not have. The result : a highly interacting swarm, although one that is not evolved by natural selection. So it has never got time to reach an optimum.
Quot erat demonstrandum and is proven now : the system is not stable, banks are going down (e.g. Barings Bank, Northern Rock, Fanny Mae & Freddy Mac, Fortis, Wachovia, AIG, Lehman Brothers, etc…), and emergency plans from governments are needed.

Image via WikipediaNowadays green energy, CO2 emission, pollution, global warming, are on top of mind of a lot of people. And not only people, but also governments. Nowadays they are giving financial incentives to people who put solar panels on their roof.
Does this make sense ?
First of all with photovoltaic cells (PVC’s) you produce clean energy: no CO2 emission. But what about the fabrication of the equipment ? According to this source, negligible amounts of waste and pollution are produced. So that’ OK. But what about when they totally used after about 30 years? How to dispose of old PVC’s? Apparently this is still a problem to be resolved !

There is another drawback to PVC’s : they are designed to capture sun rays, so they capture the energy of the sun and keep it on earth, thus adding to global warming. Perhaps instead you should paintyour roof white or put mirrors on it, to reflect the solar energy back into space.
OK, it is all about producing energy without blasting more CO2 into the atmosphere.
Now about investing in PVC’s. Purely financially it is not a hell of an investment. You put your money into it, and it never produces enough electricity to get you your money back augmented with a decent gain (you should get more out of an investment than you put into it!). Only when the government also puts its money into it in the form of financial incentives it becomes interesting.
I is allways a better investment to avoid consuming energy ! Insulation of your house, biking, taking the train in stead of sitting alone in a car, eating fruits that are grown in your own country, etc … are much better things to do for our environment.

Is it not to soon to install PVC’s ?
A couple of days ago I read about a 12-year old boy that invented a revolutionary solar cell. OK it has still to be produced, but would it not been worth wile to wait and than put something much better on your roof ?

And not only solar energy panels and other energy producing devices are getting better, but also the energy consuming devices are using less and less energy. So why look for ways to produce more enery ? Let us rather focus on not consuming energy in stead of producing it.

And about CO2 : getting CO2 out of the atmosphere is the best thing to do : plant trees wherever you can and let them grow.

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• News: Dark Side of Solar Cells Brightens

Image via WikipediaThis question I found on yahoo answers, asked by ‘make way for þß’.

I thought I read somewhere that the universe we live is contains so much mass that nothing can escape and thus seen from the outside it is a black hole.

But I admit that the introduction to the question by ‘make way for þß‘ was very intruiging. Here it is.

“We absolutely have no idea what life would be inside a black hole. Do we? No. But would you believe me some scientists actually claim we might be living inside a black hole. Pretty weird. Believe me, been there, felt that. Ok. Do you know what space is? Yes. It is a combination of dimensions in which we can freely move. Do you know what time is? Whatever you say, even quantum physics will tell you that you have no chance whatsoever of being correct. Time is nothing more than a restriction to us. We always have to move forward with it and relativity states that with varying speed we can change the speed at which time passes by.
Now imagine a three dimensional black hole (dimensions here are only those we can move freely in) and something falling in it. The object will have a restricted motion in one of the dimensions, that is the line connecting it to the centre of the black hole. No matter what happens, it will always move towards the centre of the black hole and not go the other way. Although by various means it can change the speed with which it is doing so.
Is something suspicious? Yes. This object can move freely in two dimensions but the third dimension is behaving so much like time behaves for us. Motion is restricted along it to only one direction but there are methods to change the speed of the motion.
As weird as it may seem, our universe might actually be falling in a black hole, well inside the event horizon, which separates the black hole from the outside. But this black hole is not like the black holes we hear about in our own universe that are stars that have collapsed due to their own gravity. This is a really massive four dimensional (again dimensions here are only those we can move freely in) black hole. Our universe is moving towards the centre, that is along the direction of time. Therefore the centre of the black hole lies in our future and there is no way of reaching it except waiting for our universe to reach the centre. Also the point in time when the universe was entering the black hole at the event horizon, lies against the direction of time, that is in the past. This actually is suspected to be the big bang.
If this is too weird, then there is more support for the theory. The gravitational constant, speed of light, permittivity and permeability of space, the size of the universe, and the rate of change of the size of the universe are changing, which is not supposed to happen. But all of this might well be explained by this theory. We know that our universe is falling inside and therefore the speed of falling must also change. So the speed of passing of time must also change. But according to our concepts, the speed of the time is constant and everything is defined by it. Therefore many constants of the universe in which there is a unit of time and some in which there isn’t are changing.
This makes a question arise in the mind. A black hole has such an immense force that anything should be torn apart that should be influenced by it. And here is the answer. The tearing of our universe took place. It took place in the direction it was moving in. In time. Yes. The universe was torn apart on time. Some parts of it are in some place in time and the others at other places. So some part of our universe may be in the future and some in the past. Of course all the parts move in time so by the time we have reached our future, the parts which were in the future have moved further in the future and therefore we never encounter them.
All this and one question is always there. Would we be able to move in time? I don’t know. But one thing is certain. Before we build something that can overcome the extreme acceleration in time and move backward in time, we will have to build something that will be able to go in a black hole in our universe and then come back by overcoming the extreme acceleration in space.
So what about the outside of the black hole? Is there freedom to move in time there? Time might be like another dimension there and like we have three dimensions to move in, the outside of the great black hole we are all trapped in has four dimensions to move in and people there are probably discussing on γαһοο│ αηςωεГς that they might be trapped in a great black hole too outside which there is freedom to move in five dimensions.”

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• Black holes reveal more secrets

Image via Wikipedia You may already have read the nonsense of Chris Anderson who claims that science and clear models will be totally replaced by swarm intelligence. I love the reply of Luke T :”Please have your massive amounts of data and applied mathematics provide us with nuclear fusion by this weekend.”

But it is a fact that in data mining we are going step by step in that direction. Why step by step ? Why not directly all the way ?
It is all a matter of computing power and storage.
The once simple straightforward scientific models like linear regression equations etc… do not require a lot of computer power. I remember doing a lot of statistics on a HP calculator with a maximum of something like 225 instructions.
So on this ‘cheap’ side we find the traditional data mining algorithms like decision trees or logistic regressions. Even artificial neural networks, which have to be kept relatively simple to prevent overfitting are only a collection of logistic regressions. More complex algorithms comprise the “ensembles”, which use voting by a lot of simpler models like decision trees. The most elaborate one is “Random Forests”, invented by Leo Breiman and Adele Cutler. Its most important drawback is its limited performance. It can handle a lot of variables, but only a relatively limited number of observations.
On the other hand, we find the genetic algoritms and more recently the antmining algorithms, which I already mentioned in a previous post. Especially the last are even more limited in the number of variables and observations they can handle.
These two algoritms are copied from nature. The question : does nature have all that computing power ?
YES ! And not only that, but also TIME !
Evolution which delivered the current brains, swarms, and replication mechanisms worked millions of years on the project.
As for computing power : the calculation to solve the traveling salesman problem in a lab with biochemical molecules (DNA, proteins) takes less than an eyeblink.
The amount of information that can be stored in our brain is huge ! (see this experiment on MIT).

Even more interesting : in our brain everything seems to be connected with everyting. We have thousends “models” working together, connected, interweaved, to deliver answers to ill-defined problems. In data mining : a model can only handle one problem. It is theoretically possible to train models simultanously on multiple problems, but only at the cost of quality loss.
In my day-to-day work I already have to limit the amount of data I want to use just to build targeting models with binary targets.
I would love to be able to train one huge model in an acceptable time (e.g. overnight) that contains all targets at once. I know how to do it, only the hardware/software combination cannot handle all the necessary data to deliver acceptable quality.

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• Will computers ever use DNA instead of silicon chips?

No doubt that a lot of women cheat on their partner (I hope mine does not) :

• some studies suggest that almost 50% of married women have had sex outside of their marriage
• 34% of moms admitted to having an affair after they had children and another 53% say they have thought seriously about having an affair

WHY ?

I you start to look it up you find the following :

Women Cheat For Emotional Reasons like

• to fill emotional voids their husbands have left them with
• Women love romance in their lives and sometimes they do not get that satisfaction with their partner
• there is no passion enough in their marriage, so they find it elsewhere
• she wants somebody who makes her feel special, attractive, important …. (especially if she gets older). If their partner does not give her that feeling (giving to much attention to football, cars, blogs :-), work, booz …) she seeks it elsewhere
• somethimes just for the exitement, the passion.

Those are the major reasons I could find. But what evolutionary meaning does this have ? Exactly none. Those are not real reasons, but merely means whereby her genes make her do this to accomplish the real and only reason that makes evolutionary sense : maximise number and quality of offspring : having more and better children.

As I wrote before, a women choses two man : one to deliver high quality sperm and one to provide security, food, shelter,… for her and her children. As no man will agree with this duality of choice, if she has a partner to provide the security and a living, but she wants a better one for the sperm, the only way she can accomplish this is by … cheating.
But cheating is not only for the sperm. By cheating with another, richer guy, she eventually can get gifts, shelter from that man too, especially, if her own partner is incapable of providing the necessary.

Oh, yes, not only humans cheat. Look for example this study on superb starlings or this one on barn swallows by researchers of Cornell University.