Frank Wrote > In the late 60s I worked on Project Talent in which data for 440,000 > high school students was collected and analyzed. This included , test > scores, interests, socioeconomic status, etc. I've mentioned this > before. The project included longitudinal following of the > participants for decades. That following was done by telephone and > mail. There were methods for assessing "non-respondent bias" by using > aggressive follow-up such as searching for them and doing interviews. > That data was used to estimate information about those who were not > reached. I'm always fascinated by the range of projects you have worked on, especially straddling the traditional "two cultures" divide. I can't quite glean from the above description how all that turned out or what you learned from the process... but it sounds like part of a larger movement to tighten up the "soft sciences" that was significant? > Don't some AI systems include subsystems for explaining their reasoning?
I believe this to be the 'holy grail' of (all?) machine learning systems... I worked with UNM on some attempts to explicate the activity and structure of evolving neural nets, traffic on the network fabric of HPC clusters, network traffic at the LANL firewall, and the dynamics of interconnected national infrastructure systems. I do not feel that we ever made more than minimal/superficial progress on this problem and it remains to be deeply interesting. I have a (mostly) unsubstantiated belief that there will be discoverable structure in these AI/ML systems which somehow reflects their function. The epitome of the structure/function duality? > > Happy Veterans Day, I often wonder how many of this August Body served in the military? I was precisely 4 months too young to have to sign up for the draft and turned 18 13 months after the Sec. of Defense declared an "all Volunteer Army". The *final* lottery for selective service was held 1 month after I turned 18 but only applied to those 1 year older than me. As a matter of practicality, no actual conscription had occurred since I turned 15 but that was only evident in retrospect, it felt that any of those decisions could have been reversed on a whim (until the requirement to sign up for selective service was dropped). I was torn, having been raised in a very solid redneck-patriotic culture where the opportunity to go off and be a hero was considered the apex of a young man's opportunities. I believed in the ideals of service and duty to country. But I also heard the larger voice of discord which (strongly) suggested that the current war was without any legitimacy and that the way the members of the military were treated did not align with the ideals presented as the *reason* for patriotic service. I was torn between the polarized positions that as a young man, my only options were to become a "yellow-bellied pinko-commie-fag draft dodger" or "a baby killer". Well before the announcement of an "all volunteer army" I had decided that I almost assuredly could not give my soul (and possibly my life) to my government. The paradoxes implied by a government "by, for, and of" the people conscripting it's young and naive into a project (dominating Southeast Asia and beyond) and then throwing (many of) them away (I was hearing the stories of poorly conceived/executed campaigns/missions in Viet Nam). My father served in WWII and my grandfather in WWI, each just young enough to only be involved in "mop up" operations, not the actual conflicts. They were (uber) proud of their involvement and had no doubts that any and all military actions by our US Gov't were intrinsically righteous, even though both of them had their own suspicions of a variety of US Government bureaucracies they engaged over time. IN answer to my own question above (how many of us served?) is that I suspect it is a small number... I suspect those among us who were of an age to have been potentially conscripted, obtained our advanced educations (which is not pervasive here, but significant) *while* delaying conscription? While I ultimately took significant umbrage with virtually *all* of our military aspirations, I don't transfer too much of that to the individuals who served, each for their own reasons with their own circumstances and with their own performance and resulting strengths (or damage) from their experiences. - Steve - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
