Paul Simons

Ira - I did go to the town Woodstock NY the summer after the festival and lived there for a year or so, 1970-1971. It was still a magnet for blues-based musicians. I was lucky enough to have been in a band with far more experienced players than I was and learned some music, sometimes painfully, like when in a jam with people like Paul Butterfield's guitar player Buzz Feiten who basically and rightfully blew me off the stage, and a sax player named Terry Eaton who, like Roland Kirk, could play two horns at once and like Trane could just rip out avalanches of sound. I learned. Before that, in 1969 when the actual festival took place, I was a college boy playing around the UC campus on weekends, far simpler and far less demanding music, and working as a landscaper until I got a 1-Y draft deferment for a knee recently damaged in a motorcycle accident and then 6 months as an "activities therapist" with my brand new Psychology BA at Longview, until they fired me. "They" were an upper echelon of man-hating lesbians and they made life hell for the teenage male patients who are the ones that really suffered. Getting fired was no problem, it freed me up to leave town. But back to Woodstock - you could go into a bar any night and hear world-class music. I got to jam with Janis Joplin's band, with Mother Earth, and to sit right in front of John Hall (Orleans - "Still The One"), Elvin Bishop ("Fooled Around And Fell In Love"), David Sanborn (frequently on Letterman and SNL) and really listen to them. As far as the other elements of the triumvirate Sex, Drugs, and Rock'n'Roll - the sex and drugs - yes they were plentiful in Woodstock NY in those days and might still be. So, Ira and others, what were YOU doing in the Summer of '69? Very interesting topic!

Bruce - many thanks for the AI info and the link. I'll get to it as soon as I have a block of time. Much appreciated.

Arthur (Skip) Gasch

Don't do this often, but would like to pipe in on AI.
First, intelligence implies a propensity to learn.

That begs the question is learning the same thing as being taught?
Where is the ability in AI to learn?

If AI requires a "program" to learn, then in what sense is AI learning anything
other than what it was taught to learn? Moreover, given the number of things to
learn, the "learning program" will never keep pace with the learning required, we simply
don't write code that fast. The latest Boeing MAX crashes are proof enough of
the problem. Lack of understanding of all the factors in a domain KILLS people.
Until we understand what AI really is, we will confuse large, rule-based machines
like Watson for being "smart."

Why is it taking so long to "fix" the AI in the MAX flight control system? Maybe
because it interacts with everything else and there are 2^n-1 combination of factors to
be validated (or in Boeing's case - maybe not).

At the heart of learning is observation and organization, which aren't machine
speed dependent.

Observation allows us to "see" things, and organization allows us to
differentiate what we see (and catalog it) based on differences.
Learning then becomes looking (data assimilation) at enough data to
characterize the environment, and letting the data teach the machine because
the proper organization of data is a function of the data itself,
not the "learning algorithm." We're stuck in archiac thinking.
That is what AI has missed, but a few understand it -- they just aren't talking.

Those who pursue the matter correctly will be rewarded for their pursuit.
It's what Triad is all about.

Art Gasch

Arthur (Skip) Gasch

Classmates interested in rockets, sputnik and Telstar should visit Camp Evans in Wall, NJ. It was the east coast original development site for Marconi's transcontinental radio telegraph network. World War II put that to a stop, as the US military seized the site, but it's back in business and open to the public on weekends. Run by folks from Princeton University, it is a very interesting site to visit. Plan to spend 4-5 hours there if you are into these things. See a few pictures below. Also see https://infoage.org/about-infoage/

You can even find some functional vacuum tubes there. Yes, they still exist. Summer is a wonderful time to visit, and there are many accommodation at the Jersey Shore, less than 10 minutes away. Take in the site and the museum and then go for a swim in the Atlantic ocean. A great vacation. For the artistic oriented in the family, drive over to the Grounds for Sculpture near Trenton. It is also a day-long adventure that was built by one of the Johnson brothers. However, if you want to eat at the lakeside restaurant, make reservations a week or so in advance. Space is limited and the seats go fast. The website has many pictures that provide a flavor of this wonderful site. https://www.groundsforsculpture.org/Exhibitions

If visiting, give me a call.

Art Gasch

Judy Holtzer (Knopf)

I don't recall what I was doing the whole summer of 69. Grabbed my B.Sc. in psychology from University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, then I guess I ran home to pack, buy a one-way ticket, and say goodbye. I moved to Israel on October 8, 1969.

If I could have gone with someone I knew, I probably would have gone if I hadn't been leaving.

Philip Spiess

Art (a.k.a."Skip" -- but I'll artfully skip that):

First, I am impressed by your question, "Is learning the same thing as being taught?"  It seems an almost obvious question, and yet it obviously isn't.  Having taught at one learning level or another and in one educational venue or another for almost forty years, the question gave me pause.  I'll skip my thirty years teaching graduate school (you never really know what those damned fools have learned  -- by the time they've gotten to you, they've learned to "game" the system so well that they can put on a good show, whether they really know anything or not) and go striaght on to my days of teaching Middle School -- now there's a lot who, despite their best efforts, will end up being pretty straightforward about what they think and what they've learned (or not learned).  You can teach and teach them -- but that doesn't mean that they've learned diddlysquat.  On the other hand, they may have learned any number of things that you didn't teach them, or didn't intend to teach them.  I feel pretty certain that my Middle School students (most of whom I had great respect for) learned a lot from me that wasn't in the school curriculum (but don't tell their parents!).

Second, I am impressed by your comment, "At the heart of learning is observation and organization."  Nearly every school I currently know -- Middle School, High School, College -- states that it teaches "critical thinking" (having tried to apply my own critical thinking to this term, I would really like to see what this means in action).  What I think might be meant, or should be meant, is this matter of observation and organization.  This is actually at the heart of what we should be teaching:  that one should learn to observe and to organize, and how one should observe and organize, and why one should observe and organize.  The follow-up, as you note, is assembling and assimilating enough relevant data on a given subject to be able to make some sense of the bigger picture (and perhaps connect it with other "bigger pictures").

I'm intrigued by the information you offer on Camp Evans, in Wall, New Jersey.  Because my minor subject in graduate school at the University of Delaware (through the Eleutherian Mills- Hagley Foundation, mentioned just above) was "The History of Technology," and because I was the first president of the Washington, D. C. chapter of the national Society for Industrial Archeology, I remain interested in many things technological, though I'm a historian, not a scientist.  Two years ago, while on vacation, I read A. T. Story's book, The Story of Wireless Telegraphy (1909), happily included in Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series, and which I had found in a used book store.  Certainly part of the story (though not all!) belongs to Marconi, and, yes, as I am "into these things" (and museum sites as well), I would love to visit you there.  (I cannot find Wall, New Jersey, in my atlas, but it seems to be south of Asbury Park and not too far from Allaire, with which I'm very familiar, and perhaps close to Spring Lake, where my wife and I spent a lovely overnight a number of years ago as we were touring the complete New Jersey coast.)  I have no present plans to be in that area anytime soon, but I'll keep your offer of a visit in mind.

[N.B.:  Part of the Camp Evans site looks like the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, which we visited several years ago.]

Larry Klein

If anyone is wondering where I might have been during Woodstock in '69, here it is.  That's me, front and center, as usual, having just returned to base after about the 10th of my 32 recon patrols that year.

Larry Klein

Skip and Phil - r.e. "Observation and Organization"

Most people, if you walk briskly through a 14x14 room with them and ask what they saw, will tell you they saw the exit door (and not much else). While observation CAN be taught, it is usually a skill that is learned out of some necessity.  In my case, playing baseball as a kid, running cross country in crowds of other runners, and all sorts of activities in military exercises and missions were my "necessities".  Once learned, the skill becomes habit and even today I can just about see the whole room when I walk through with no concerted effort. Organization is similar in its learning habit, but can be more readily taught by rote. I would include a third discipline in this group - anticipation.  This was particularly critical in the military, and like observation, once learned becomes almost habit.  My main activities these days are bridge and golf, and these disciplines are most evident in the more successful players of both.

In my everyday life these days, however, I find that a fourth discipline - laziness - has permeated my existence.  So much so that I had to hire a housekeeper so as not to be "left in the dust", so to speak.  I do still try to anticipate, observe, and organize those nasty maintenance chores that pop up from time to time.

Ira Goldberg

Larry, I aspire to that lifestyle, but cannot hit a golf ball. Fifty years ago, I was somewhere in the Pocanos during Woodstock, safe, despite diving tanks whose regulators failed, followed by 45 years of marriage to Gwynne. 

Arthur (Skip) Gasch

Hi Phil,

Wall is in the middle of the places you described, on the edge of Shark River. Allaire is a bit west of
Camp Evans. The cross route is 138, one exit past the Route 18 (N-S) exit. Camp Evans is off of Marconi Road of course.

If you would like to see the Museum, and would want to make a trip here, you could fly into
Newark Airport and then stay with us. We live in the north part of Toms River, about 12 miles from
Camp Evans. We have an extra bedroom for just such opportunities, and it makes the trip a bit
less expensive when you have friends to stay with.

While you are here, you should also visit Grounds for Sculpture. It is over 40 acres of sculpture that
was developed by one of the J&J boys, who didn't fit into the business. It's a really interesting place
and will take 3-5 hours to go through. There is a restaurant there, but you need to make reservations
a week or so in advance to be assured of an inside seat. Many weddings are done at various places
around the Grounds. It is located near Trenton, NJ, about 35-40 minutes from our home.

Weekends are a good time for both places. A trip where you arrive on Friday, do both attractions
and then return on Monday or Tuesday would make a nice extended holiday. Once the kids go back
to school, the pace slows a bit.

Of course you can also take in a play in NYC. There is a train to goes to Penn Station about 5 miles from here, right along the Shore. A bit farther north, you can get the Sea Streak Ferry, which is a passenger only, thin hull catamaran that makes the trip into NYC (34th street) in about 45 minutes, less than half the time
the train takes. The trouble is, once you get into NYC, there is so much to day that you can get lost
for 2-3 more days at shows and museums. Of course, lodging in the city makes the trip much more expensive so that may not be that appealing. You can get matinee tickets in advance for a substantial discount, and if you are willing to take a chance, you can get tickets the day of the performance for almost nothing. We caught the Carol King (Beautiful) musical about 5 weeks ago and it was great. Reminded me of my old stage crew days at Walnut Hills.

In fact, if you wanted to spend a week in the Garden State area, you could spend 2-3 days here in NJ and
then get a hotel in NYC and spend another 3-4 days there, and fly into and out of Newark, or into
Newark and out of LaGuardia. Let us know so we aren't off doing something ourselves. If you want to drive up 95 from Virginia, its about 5 hours depending on how you hit the beltway around DC and Baltimore. That would give you a car here, and a bit more flexibility.

In any case, this area is a nice place to visit. If you come soon, the pool may be open still. It closes in September. Have family arriving on the 23rd and leaving on the 27th, but before or after works. If your journeys bring you north, let us know and we'll keep the lights on for you.

Blessing on your family,

Art

Philip Spiess

Art:

Although we have no present plans to visit the area, we will definitely keep your information in mind (possibly a mid-Fall weekend trip?).  Because my sister and brother-in-law were living in Barnegat, New Jersey (circa 1968-1970) when I was a student at the University of Delaware (my brother-in-law was the Presbyterian minister in Barnegat at the time), I visited there often, and my elder niece was born in Toms River in 1969.

We go in and out of New York City periodically, though less so since my wife's aunt, who lived in Queens and with whom we used to stay, died.  We have recently had pleasant stays at the Edison Hotel, just off of Times Square and very convenient to the theaters (I stayed there in 1959 with my grandparents, when we saw the inaugural production of The Sound of Music with Mary Martin and celebrated New Year's on Times Square -- woo-hoo!), but since we learned that it is owned by Donald Trump, we are looking elsewhere to stay.

At any rate, we welcome your information and invitation, and we will keep in touch.

Philip Spiess

Larry:  Wow!  I'm impressed by your analysis.

For over thirty years I have tried to teach Observation to my graduate students in Museum Studies.  (This is essential to analyzing any object in a museum collection.)  Every semester I read to them the opening excerpt from Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," wherein Sherlock Holmes explains to Watson how to examine an object for clues.  Holmes says to Watson:  "Here is my lens.  You know my methods.  What can you gather yourself as to the individuality of the man who has worn this article?"  And Watson's response is:  "I can see nothing." . . . "On the contrary, Watson [says Holmes], you can see everything.  You fail, however, to reason from what you see.  You are too timid in drawing your inferences."  (In other words, he "sees," but he does not "observe.")

You speak of "necessities."  You are quite right; I told my students that they had to look at a given object and to "keep looking."  What are the oddities, the discrepencies from other objects?  What stands out?  What distinguishes this object from other similar objects?  And the end question is "Why?"  Again, as you suggest (though we are talking about completely dfferent fields), if one consistently steels oneself to focus on observing and examining the object closely and carefuly, it should become, of necessity, habit, and therefore become one's professional practice.

Anticipation:  I suppose in museum work this amounts to "what to look for."  If you have read the above paragraph carefully, you will see that, as one develops the "eye" of observation and analysis (which is why I told my students to look and look again -- in other words, don't "assume," but see if your thought is confirmed by your observation), one learns to anticipate what one might expect to find as visible evidence of a cultural reality.

Finally. Larry, no, it is not laziness  -- it is relaxation.  There is a difference.  I spend my time in retirement doing what I call "semi-gourmet" cooking, and in napping, and in writing these presumed amusing and/or interesting feuilletons (you can look it up in the dictionary), hoping that someone -- anyone -- gets something of the same enjoyment out of reading them that I get out of writing them.  

Arthur (Skip) Gasch

Larry, Phil,

Regarding learning to organization information and anticipation, here's a point. If you walk briskly through a room, what you notice is what is moving, because that's how the eye organizes stuff. What's just hanging out the eye/brain dismisses. A guy in neutral clothing hang out by the wall and not moving (except glacially) is missed. Benevolent penetration of highly secure facilities by such people succeed.

Yet, if properly organized by a technology that builds a model based upon anomalies, causes such a person to stand out immediately. Humans haven't learned to do that well. Anticipation causes one to scan for what they expect, and minimizes their quality at discerning actual content. What do you expect to see in the picture below.

Did you see in it? If nothing, you're dead.

Jeff Daum

OK Skip, I'll bite: in the foreground, possible problems right and left of the path and an additional 3 or more as you follow the path out and to the right (2) and to the left (1) toward the back.

Philip Spiess

I won't answer, because I'm dead (even after referencing Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game") -- but then, my eyesight isn't what it used to be (oh, wait! it never was! -- though never quite at the James Joyce level).

Jeff Daum

Paul, I think you are correct!  I read "in" as "if" and it clearly impacted my perception.

Paul Simons

Wow Jeff that was quick! And I'm heartened by your willingness to say that someone - anyone - with a different point of view, if supported by evidence, might be right. That's a welcome attribute in a post-truth, non-evidence-based milieu, which is I believe a French word and thus suspect in some quarters.

Jerry Ochs

I saw an elephant, a bunny rabbit, and a penguin.  I might be playing this game wrong.

Philip Spiess

But Jerry, where is the umbrella (or scissors)?  There is always an umbrella (either rolled up or open) in those pictures!

And Paul, you are correct!:  milieu is a French word; it means (in Middle English) "the toilet in the old mill" (cf.,  the phrase "Gardez l'eau!" interpolated into English as "loo").  The French couldn't understand why the English would put a toilet in an old mill, being used to using chamber pots and fireplaces (well, in the summertime -- don't ask) themselves, which is why they translate milieu as "environment" (probably with a question mark at the end).  The French themselves prefer, in such circumstances as, say, a toilet in an old mill, to use the phrase mise en scene, which means "a miserable scene" (vide a toilet in an old mill) or, sometimes, "surroundings of an event," which is a very polite and delicate -- and very French -- way of saying "going to the toilet in a mill."  [The English novelist George Eliot, who much preferred reading German to French, turned the whole thing on its head, putting a dent -- or  "dental" -- locus on the mill suroundings -- or "event" -- by focusing on one's mouth, rather than at the other end, when she wrote a book entitled The Mill on the Floss.  You might think that in this case it should read The Floss on the Mill, but she was doubtlessly translating from the German, in which everything is always backward, starting with the verb at the end of the sentence.  So geht es alles in eine fremde Stadt.]

Arthur (Skip) Gasch

Phil, Jeff, Jerry, and Paul,

A hint on the jungle trail pic. There are 3 threats, although if there had been others, they too would have been detected. Which side of the trail are they on? There is camouflage involved here.

I will ultimately show them, but have a question, "What AI algorithm could be used to detect threats, given that in one setting the "threat" may be very different than in another?" What if the setting was desert or arctic? What if the threat were different? In th pic I sent the threat is snippers.

Could one algorithm work for all threats in all settings? If so, what "attributes" would it have to have. It certainly could not be "rule-based." Does the content of the picture itself show us "where the needles in the haystack" are hidden? If so, how? If not "ruled-based" could it be a neural network? But if it was, would it have to be
"retrained" for each different "setting," it would have to work in? What would happen to the node-values of all the previous learning if something "new" was discovered?

The solution doesn't depend on increasing computational speed, or is information organization more important to intelligence. After all, CPU clock speed beats brain processing time, by a lot, but, the brain usually "sees" things that self-driving cars miss. What is that?

Could it be that no "algorithm" at all is required to see the "threat?"

It's an interesting discussion so far.

Art

 

Philip Spiess

Are we quite sure Skip Gasch's photograph wasn't taken in Krohn Conservatory?  (Just askin' -- in which case the threat would be the hazard of water on the slippery steps just after it opened in the morning.)

Larry Klein

Paul - boy, were YOU off-base. Those were Hong Kong hookers.  I never made it to Saigon during my tour over there.  Took my two R&Rs in Hong Kong and Sydney.

Skip - as to the pic, my eyes are failing me these days with retinal spots and cataracts, so the only threat I see is the likelihood that I'll trip on the rock in the path. 50 years ago would have been a whole different picture (to me, anyway). btw - I drove up old Paxton Ave last week, Not much is changed from our days there.

Arthur (Skip) Gasch

Let's take this back to the AI universe. How do you find a needle in a haystack, or in our case a snipper along the trail? By the differences of the properties. You need a method of storing data that catalogs differences. It is inherently "intelligent" and useful for all sorts of things.

Imagine a second picture of some white blood cells on a slide smear. If the information system has seen some cancerous ones, and has catalogued their property differences from non-cancerous ones, you can simply build a catalog of cancerous cell properties, and run the hundred thousand or so cells in a slide sample and instantly find the location of all the cancerous ones -- Making pathology tests a bit faster to perform

Does that make the approach AI or deep learning? It's analytics by example at least, and the
analytics queries are near real time.

Regards,

Art
 

Arthur (Skip) Gasch

Hey Paul,

about the length of rope, I didn't think it was Rudy, I was thinking more along the lines of Bill Clinton.
I think it will come to light whomever it was, seem to be something DOJ will pursue.
Should be interesting.

Art

Philip Spiess

Art:  Your most recent example has also brought the discussion back to my area of expertise -- deciphering/analyzing museum objects.  I constantly would tell my students "Look for the differences!  What distinguishes these two objects, which look basically the same, one from the other?"  (An exercise I gave them was this:  I took a large selection of screws, nails, bolts, nuts, wing-nuts, eye-screws, etc., of various sizes and kinds, into class and told the students to separate them into distinctive categories, as they saw fit; having been divided into a number of small groups to carry this out, the different groups often divided them in different ways -- which was perfectly harmonious with the activity.)

Having decided what makes them different, the next, and central, question was "why?"  Why did the maker (or the culture) decide to change something? did it make it work better? (practical change); did it make it look better? (aesthetic change); did it make it stronger, lighter, faster? (technological change); was it made out of cheaper or more available materials? (economic change) -- and so on.  Examining the differences (minute as they might be), and the likely reasons for them (not always knowable or deductible), was key to unlocking information about objects and their cultural relevance.

By the way, that picture on the left looks like a late 1950s map of the areas of semi-submerged land in south Florida that folks were trying to sell as subdivisions off ads on buses and early TV when we were in school.  (If you look closely, possibly under ultra-violet light, you will see the alligators -- or the umbrellas.)

Arthur (Skip) Gasch

Hey Phil,

Interesting.

Here's another wrinkle. Which items you find (in a dig for example) should be grouped with the other items, to form a 'set' of similar items.

That same issue arises in IT land, where a group of responses is plotted in any number of dimensions. The concept of "distance" is really about that, and gets very interesting as the number of dimensions increases. In two dimensions, it's as simple as getting a 'measuring' stick and using it.

In three dimensions, well that geometry or perhaps calculus, although the taught us calculus wrong at Walnut Hills, oh well.

What about in 7 dimensions or 100 dimensions? Every independent property of a thing is in fact a dimension. In the case of your nuts and bolts example, what the bolt was made of is a dimension. Was it wood, brass, iron, steel, lead... and what were the trace elements? If one digs through two archaeological layers, or if they intersect, and you have 12 bolts, that in one dimensional plain are some "distance" from each other, how do you group them into sets? What if they aren't at the same depth?

As TV reminds us, "Now we can drain the {ocean, land, whatever} and simply see them in 3-D (or in truth in N-D) so the issue of whether the lead bolt at depth 1, is part of the groups of 2 other lead bolts that are at depth 2 and 3, makes the exercise of grouping them.

Any thoughts about that? The notion of grouping items (in the museum) and how to detect the
forgeries from the real things? There is a simple way to do that.

Perhaps we should apply your technigues for identifying which of us humans could be differentiated into various property classes, based on subtle differences in how they present themselves. What do you think? Is there a sacred group and a secular group, and if so, what properties differentiate them? Are there degrees of secularness, and if so, does it matter?

Art