Power brokers

Power Brokering in Missoula, MT

You can thank a philosopher . . .

Here's an interesting article by Steven Levy on "How Google's Algorithm Rules the Web." Thank goodness for those gender-confused wordsmiths:

Take, for instance, the way Google’s engine learns which words are synonyms. “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.”

But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.”

Wittgenstein rocks! Words are his metier.

What hunters do in the off season

Was enjoying reconnecting with the Vicar,
until he began to demonstrate his new-found Ithaca talents.

As promised: play, game, contest, sport

Here's a chart that summarizes the conceptual or philosophical relations between play, game, contest, and sport. Sociologists among you will no doubt find fault with this scheme. Click to enlarge. Hope this helps.

Hunting. Sporting? Ethical? Discuss. Repeat.

Here's a link to a brief piece I've posted to the "Philosophy of Sport" blog about hunting as a sport.

http://philosophyandsports.blogspot.com/2009/02/prolegomenon-hunting-as-sport.html

Part of a larger project while trying to resuscitate my academic career--may be of interest to others here. (where's Coggins when you need him?)

Jim T.

helping the State manage its pesky woodcock population . . .
one doodle at a time

I hart my ammo box

caption needed here

Hey, I worry about Rich too . . . here's a guy with some sort of Satanic symbolism on his ammo box. Rich, remind me what the hell the little heart sticker says, eh?