Strings or Particles?

Geoffrey Chew has a new paper. I was lucky enough to hear him talk at UCSB in the middle 70s. Then, Gell-Mann  won. Nevertheless one of Chew's descendants, Edward Witten  , has kept the good fight.

I vote for Strings!

"There is no ‘Schrödinger cat’—only a ‘cat’."

You gotta love Chew!

Between IHOP and Neutrino 2012 Kyoto

Aya Ishihara just presented very important results at Kyoto. Thomas Friedman writes today that Obama knows The World We're Actually Living In.

I have been at IHOP Wheaton, several times. I like the place, and the simplicity involved, which allows me to go there, knowing exactly what to expect, so reading Friedman, I know what he means.

As Friedman writes, though, we have to go beyond the familiar. What Dr. Ishihara presented could change Astronomy. Finally we are getting a neutrino window to the Universe!

"The highest energy neutrino events observed ever!"

"We are into a very interesting era of neutrino astrophysics!"

I just finished watching six hours of lectures by Professor Alex Filippenko on Black Holes. We are living in very interesting times.

Here is my five cents worth of wisdom.

Neutrinos are weakly interacting particles, but as the energy goes up, they are more likely to interact. It stands to reason, that Astronomy will benefit from this new window of ultra high energy cosmic rays . Furthermore, since they interact less than charged particles, they point to their sources, making the Universe a huge laboratory, probed by these neutral particles.

Ishihara has positions, both at Chiba University in Japan, and the University of Wisconsin in the United States of America. Ice Cube, the collaboration he is a member of, built detectors at Antarctica. This is because it is not possible to observe in the Northern Hemisphere, what they just found out  down there in Antarctica. This has to do with contamination coming from atmospheric neutrinos up North. Maybe nuclear reactors, I really have not studied the reasons they decided to build Ice Cube down South.

In any case, all humans are in this together, which is what Obama went to say at the United Nations meeting in New York City, this week.

Humanity has to think globally, otherwise we are not getting out of the bottleneck we are rapidly approaching.

If the Earth keeps heating up, maybe the ice will melt, and Ice Cube will have trouble finishing the job, of knowing where do the Highest Energy Cosmic Rays come from.

What's Going On?

Yesterday Julian Assange directed his thoughts to all of us at the United Nations, by a video link, from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

 ALEC is writing the laws of the United States.

I know this because I follow Amy Goodman in her program Democracy Now!

I used Alex Filippenko's video on black holes, for my Introduction to Astronomy class, yesterday.

These are Interesting Times!

Jo Tuckman's Mexico

The Guardian journalist Jo Tuckman, recently wrote a book on Mexico. [Review]. [Amazon].

She has lived near downtown Mexico City for twelve years now. I almost feel like she is my neighbor, even though I've never met her. She wrote a good book. Here are my thoughts.

Recently three of the main intellectuals of Mexico wrote a note in La Jornada. Colin Woodard wrote a book about the future of North America: American Nations.


The conclusion I draw, is that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) is leading a rebellion in Mexico. The country is divided in the middle, to the North we have, what Woodard calls El Norte, and the rest is AMLO's territory.

The First Nation, as Woodard calls it, together with Mesoamerica  are the borders of European America. The First People are back, they woke up after five hundred years of stupor.

Tighten your seat belts!

I guess this is what December 21, 2012, is all about.

Open Access for Particle Physics

It was announced that the field of Particle Physics is Open!

Read here.

Vladimir N. Vapnik

Vladimir Naumovich Vapnik (Russian: Владимир Наумович Вапник) is one of the main developers of Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory. He was born in the Soviet Union. He received his master's degree in mathematics at theUzbek State University, Samarkand, Uzbek SSR in 1958 and Ph.D in statistics at the Institute of Control Sciences,Moscow in 1964. He worked at this institute from 1961 to 1990 and became Head of the Computer Science Research Department. At the end of 1990, he moved to the USA and joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. The group later became the Image Processing Research Department of AT&T Laboratories when AT&T spun off Lucent Technologies in 1996. Vapnik Left AT&T in 2002 and joined NEC Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, where he currently works in the Machine Learning group. He also holds a Professor of Computer Science and Statistics position at Royal Holloway, University of Londonsince 1995, as well as a position as Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, New York City since 2003. He was inducted into the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2006. He received the 2005 Gabor Award^[1], the 2008 Paris Kanellakis Award, the 2010 Neural Networks Pioneer Award^[2], the 2012 IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award, and the 2012 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science.

Wikipedia

Statistics

In 1980 I taught the Fluids, Heat, and Waves laboratory course, at Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. I had taken Statistical Mechanics at the Physics Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and at Departamento de Física, of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados, in Mexico.

Now I am going to take the Artificial Intelligence Course CS188.1x, at the University of California Berkeley, through Coursera.

Furthermore, as I've written before on this blog, I believe, that most of what we call Theoretical Physics, is Applied Statistics. We measure, we fit, we propose formulas and computer programs, and do it again, and again, getting a better fit to data.

Professor Leo Breiman, from Berkeley, pursued his study of Statistics there, until his death.

Now it is my turn.

Collective Mind

When I express my beliefs with conviction, people listen. When many of us oppose the death penalty, people listen. Today is the anniversary of Troy Davis's execution. This has to stop. Governor Jerry Brown in California, has the courage to support the California Proposition 34 to stop the death penalty.

I am against the death penalty.

There.

Syllabus CS188.1x

1. FIND COURSES

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CS188.1x: Introduction to Artificial IntelligenceBerkeleyX

YOU ARE REGISTERED FOR THIS COURSE (CS188.1X)

overview

ABOUT THIS COURSE

CS188.1x is a new online adaptation of the first half of UC Berkeley’s CS188: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. The on–campus version of this upper division computer science course draws about 600 Berkeley students each year.

Artificial intelligence is already all around you, from web search to video games. AI methods plan your driving directions, filter your spam, and focus your cameras on faces. AI lets you guide your phone with your voice and read foreign newspapers in English. Beyond today’s applications, AI is at the core of many new technologies that will shape our future. From self–driving cars to household robots, advancements in AI help transform science fiction into real systems.

CS188.1x focuses on Behavior from Computation. It will introduce the basic ideas and techniques underlying the design of intelligent computer systems. A specific emphasis will be on the statistical and decision–theoretic modeling paradigm. By the end of this course, you will have built autonomous agents that efficiently make decisions in stochastic and in adversarial settings. CS188.2x (to follow CS188.1x, precise date to be determined) will cover Reasoning and Learning. With this additional machinery your agents will be able to draw inferences in uncertain environments and optimize actions for arbitrary reward structures. Your machine learning algorithms will classify handwritten digits and photographs. The techniques you learn in CS188x apply to a wide variety of artificial intelligence problems and will serve as the foundation for further study in any application area you choose to pursue.

COURSE STAFF

Dan Klein

Dan Klein (PhD Stanford, MSt Oxford, BA Cornell) is an associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on natural language processing and using computational methods to automatically acquire models of human languages. Examples include large–scale systems for language understanding, information extraction, and machine translation, as well as computational linguistics projects, such as the reconstruction of ancient languages. One of his best–known results was to show that human grammars can be learned by statistical methods. He also led the development of the Overmind, a galaxy–dominating, tournament–winning agent for the game of Starcraft. Academic honors include a Marshall Fellowship, a Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper award for his work on grammar induction, and best paper awards at the ACL, NAACL, and EMNLP conferences.

Pieter Abbeel

Pieter Abbeel (PhD Stanford, MS/BS KU Leuven) joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley in 2008. He regularly teaches CS188: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and CS287: Advanced Robotics. His research focuses on robot learning. Some results include machine learning algorithms which have enabled advanced helicopter aerobatics, including maneuvers such as tic–tocs, chaos and auto–rotation, which only exceptional human pilots can perform, and the first end–to–end completion of reliably picking up a crumpled laundry article and folding it. Academic honors include best paper awards at ICML and ICRA, the Sloan Fellowship, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program (AFOSR–YIP) award, the Okawa Foundation award, the MIT TR35, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Early Career Award, and the Dick Volz award for best PhD thesis in robotics and automation.

SYLLABUS

• Introduction
• Overview
• Agents: Perception, Decisions, and Actuation
• Search and Planning
• Uninformed Search (Depth-First, Breadth-First, Uniform-Cost)
• Informed Search (A*, Greedy Search)
• Heuristics and Optimality
• Constraint Satisfaction Problems
• Backtracking Search
• Constraint Propagation (Arc Consistency)
• Exploiting Graph Structure
• Game Trees and Tree-Structured Computation
• Minimax, Expectimax, Combinations
• Evaluation Functions and Approximations
• Alpha-Beta Pruning
• Decision Theory
• Preferences, Rationality, and Utilities
• Maximum Expected Utility
• Markov Decision Processes
• Policies, Rewards, and Values
• Value Iteration
• Policy Iteration
• Reinforcement Learning
• TD/Q Learning
• Exploration
• Approximation

PREREQUISITES

• Programming
• Object-Oriented Programming
• Recursion
• Python or ability to learn Python quickly (mini-tutorial provided)
• Data Structures
• Lists vs Sets (Arrays, Hashtables)
• Queuing (Stacks, Queues, Priority Queues)
• Trees vs Graphs (Traversal, Backpointers)
• Math
• Probability, Random Variables, and Expectations (Discrete)
• Basic Asymptotic Complexity (Big-O)
• Basic Counting (Combinations and Permutations)

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1. Course Number
   CS188.1x
2. Classes Start
   Sep 24, 2012
3. Classes End
   Nov 16, 2012
4. Estimated Effort
   15 hours/week
5. Prerequisites
   Yes

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CS188x: Artificial Intelligence!

 

Dear Eduardo Cantoral,

Welcome to CS188x: Artificial Intelligence!  When the course begins on Monday (9/24), you will be joining tens of thousands of other students from around the world in UC Berkeley's new online course on AI.  In addition to learning the theoretical foundations of AI, you will also get hands-on experience implementing AI algorithms in a video-game-themed context.

The course website will be live starting Monday.  Once the course starts, there will be lecture videos and homework assignments every week, programming projects every other week, and a single final exam at the end.  Our primary communication channel will be the website’s interactive forum, where students and staff will get to contribute to an ongoing discussion of the material.

We look forward to a great semester with you!

Dan, Pieter, and the CS188x Course Team

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Frankenweenie

Reyna Grande

This woman made me cry several times yesterday. I read her book The Distance Between Us.

She is from Iguala, the closest city, next to my mother's hometown of Huitzuco. Most of all, I was crying because I also left my precious little ones, and my wife to pursue an impossible dream in Mexico. A scientific career in a country run by drug dealers, supported by Enrique Peña Nieto, and Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

I also cried because I taught in Iguala, in the same neighborhood where Reyna lived, with her maternal grandmother. It is really poor there, as she describes in the book, and my students, who I love, are still living there, in that squalor.

When you see people living in garbage, and nobody is fixing it, you kind of block it. I met the Mayor, Raúl Tovar Tavera, a man with such a little awareness of reality, that couldn't care less, how my students live.

I come from the ruling classes, and I feel a civil war in the making there. I am happy, I have my children here, just like in the Memoir, written by Reyna.

It has been hard for us also, to emigrate from Mexico, and to immigrate to the US.

Thank you Ms. Grande!

Today (9/21/2012) I read there is no water in 60% of the city, and the Mayor couldn't care  less:

"He added that on Wednesday of last week, when the deadline passed to pay, during a meeting with executives of the CFE was granted an extension that perished on Wednesday and the mayor, Raul Tovar Tavera had pledged to cover the debt that exceeds 900,000 pesos through a loan that would make Capami, but no credit was authorized by the financial insolvency of City Hall."

Taken From La Jornada Guerrero

Beautiful

Taking Stock

The Chicago Teachers Union Won!

I am better off than four years ago!

I support the Democratic Party.

I am a member of the 99% AND the 47%!

My Dad is a Mexican Man

Robust Process Automation and Routines

Today in the NYT Magazine there is a beautiful article on mathematics tutoring.

I worked three years at Lucent Technologies, with a research team, developing Robust Process Automation (RPA) software.

Next week I will be taking an Artificial Intelligence (AI) class, through edX at my Alma Mater, the University of California.

Things are falling in place.

I am an Adjunct Astronomy Instructor at Waubonsee Community College in Plano, Ill. We use MasteringAstronomy there.

I believe I can do better tutoring children than some.

Put together RPA-AI and volià; now kids learn math!

RPA is based on a simple observation. Do a routine software maintenance task and observe yourself. Now try to write a computer program that mimics you. Keep it simple and improve. The lesson from Neil Heffernan is similar, observe how a math tutor, e.g. his wife Cristina, does it, and build a software program to approach as much as possible her level of performance.

Keep it Simple, Stupid! (KISS)

If you add to it the theory of AI, I believe I can make a better tutor than Pearson did with MasteringAstronomy!

Hello World!

Birthdays and Family

My brother and I, have the exact number of whole years, for three days. This is according to the Gregorian calendar. He claims he is following another calendar; whatever. I have this to say.

My family is pursuing a varied number of life paths as I write this. Nonetheless I believe that we are all the same cosmic person. How so?

I had kind of a heated debate with my beloved daughter today, about the paths to truth. Intuition  vs. Science, or some such. I told her that to really get to the truth of things, one has to accept that one, and maybe the only, way to know, is with the so called Scientific Method.

She is very, very intuitive, definitely much more than I am. Being dumb and slow, I need to have things proven to me step, by step, that is mathematically.

Something else I cannot have in my game is God. I do not like this gal or guy around, because she/he knows everything. I have to find out by myself, what things are.

This game is played with friends, only humans allowed. There are rules. We have to agree and what is true, and what is bogus. Since this is a human game, what is true remains so, until some other human, smarter than us, convinces the scientific community, with data and mathematics, that the old truth dies, and a new one is born. The King is Dead, Long Live the King. Newton is no more, now we are all Einsteineans.

My belief in this Cosmic Person is not scientific, it is intuitive. I believe that my siblings and my children are different branches of the same plant, just like the Aspen Tree!

We are a Clonal Colony.

Edward Anderson on Relevant Change

Taken from arXiv

Sufficient Totality of Locally Relevant Change (STLRC)

WTF: Edward Anderson cannot get a salary and benefits from CNRS?

Might as well put money in the stock market, like all those kids with sugar daddies, that tell them how to invest!

I am from the 99%, all the hoarders from the 1%, should just release the funds they've stolen!

Search for Intelligent Life on Earth

I am watching TV-Maya. My father was from Xelajú, Guatemala. This town is also known as Quetzaltenango. Now that the dreaded December 21, 2012 date is coming, I have been looking into my origins. My father was not Maya, he was Spanish.  Nevertheless he had a deep respect for the Mayas. Right now the program is about the Tz'utujil People.

Peter Watson wrote "The Great Divide".  He argues on the differences between America and Eurasia. Like two pieces of a global brain. Left and Right Hemispheres, not talking to each other. I believe these two brains have to talk to each other, in order to have a New Era. Maybe December 21,2012, has to do with this recognition, not with the End of Humanity.

There is intelligent life on both Hemispheres, unfortunately Cristóbal Colón, was incapable to start this much needed conversation.

We have to start now!

Will We Ever Get a Picture of SgrA*'s Shadow?

Picture Taken From arXiv

Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), requires that besides Hawaii, California, and Arizona, we put antennae in Mexico and Chile, apart from Spain and France.

If we want a nice picture of SgrA*'s shadow, we will have to ask permission to the drug dealers that control parts of Mexico, to take it. Their boss has initials CSdG. I'm not saying more, whoever is interested, will have to contact him.

Black Hole Shadow

James M. Bardeen proposed forty years ago that black holes have shadows, he thought though, that it was almost impossible to  see them. It seems that he was wrong.

Morris et al. believe that we may be close to measure this forty year old prediction.

Bardeen is the son of the late John Bardeen, the only scientist to ever get two Physics Nobel Prizes, for the Transistor  and for the theory of Superconductivity. I am lucky to live next door where his brother William A. Bardeen works.

I just hope that this family, leaves other scientific discoveries, for the rest of us!

Richard Stallman Keeps Me Informed

Per Edgar Altamirano's suggestion, I connected to Stallman's RSS feed. Now I know to the minute, how CNN is reacting to their lies about Bahrain, a US ally!

This beats Amy Goodman in Democracy Now!

For  friends that may be following me in facebook. I had lost my Mathematica license, because the Linux machine I installed it in, was left in Mexico. On my HP Mini, I only had a Windows version valid only for one year. The folks at Mathematica helped me, and I have it here already!

How Much Time Left?

Recently I told my students that I expect to be around by 2040. If life is found in the Universe by then, I'll die happier. I am strong, even if with less hair and teeth. I am with my daughter these days, until my wife comes back from California, after her PhD Qualifiers in History.

No one, left alone me, can tell when the world will end. There have been many false predictions in the past. Now I find out that a gas cloud is in its way to hit the fan in SgrA* early next year. X-Rays flares are expected: Will that be the end?

I doubt it. I want to be around when life is found outside Earth!

The Most Beautiful!

Coral Montejano Cantoral

Lev is Filming Obama

President Obama is in Iowa, and my son is filming this historic moment,

Richard Stallman's RSS Feed

Under the direction of my instructor Edgar Altamirano I am now connected to the RSS feed of Richard Stallman.

Bottleneck

Recently my family and I went through a bottleneck.

Humanity has gone through these before. At one point only a few tens of thousands of us were around. Even a little rock coming from the sky at the wrong place and at the wrong time, would've wiped us out.

I am reading about circumstellar dust around supernovae, [link]. If any of the supernovae would've exploded closer to us, that would've been the end of us.

At the end of the bottleneck, my family and I came out alright. I just watched the Obama and Biden speeches to get four more years to end this depression. I believe that our three families are going to do well.

I still sense some evil spirit near us, but I am confident we are going to be ok.

Two Men

I work at a Community College. President Obama you have my back!

Edgar Altamirano is my Connectivism professor.

I learn from and depend on both men.

My Online Presence

I discovered the Internet in 1994 at Fermilab. I decided to be present since then. After a few burnt hard drives, and lost jobs, I still find something of myself online. I just showed up late to an online class by Edgar Altamirano. Fortunately he arranged three slots for today. I woke up late this morning, and went to do some chores and was late for the 6 o'clock one also. I am online now, I will be there for the 9 o'clock one.

I already learned something from Edgar, people will know me, by my online products. I have to organize my Astronomy class in MasteringAstronomy.

I believe that the main site I have to keep current is inside my brain. There are a few questions I want answered, once I do, it is my job to let others know.

I am going to the Pearson's site now. They published the book I am using.

Glide Camera

Gerard 't Hooft

Wikipedia

Professor 't Hooft has consistently being original. For several years now, he has developed an interpretation of microscopic motion.

One of his latest works can be read here.

I thought several years back, that thinking about Information, was a path to knowledge. Here I try to inform this idea with the recent work of 't Hooft.

Information is a set of marks for objects to move. It is similar to a Turing machine. 't Hooft now proposes a deterministic string cellular automaton, as the mathematical language to describe microscopic motion.

This is my take away from his paper.

First a little more on my own ideas, on cellular automata, and reality.

There is not much to it really, I imagine the Universe in the beginning, as the simplest thing we can conceive in our minds. This is a simplifying guide. If it turns out, that simple steps show up, as complex objects, say as beautiful and smart as my daughter Leza, after a sufficient long number of steps of the Turing machine, I made it!

I am not there yet; all I have accomplished so far, is to produce Leza in real life.

Oh yes, all I mean to achieve, is a good enough mathematical description of microscopic motion. I do not aspire to ever know, what the Universe is made of. That is for the good Lord up there, if he/she is there. I am just a simple mortal.

Paraphrasing professor 't Hooft: "For the time being, our reply to all those who come forward with Bells’ inequalities, will be: look at the mathematics, this is what our paper is about."

My philosophy for the Universe, is just a simplifying assumption, so I can think. Leave the rest to the good Lord.

Hypotheses non fingo.

My take away is that professor 't Hooft has done much more work, than I have. Nevertheless he is still very far from producing my beautiful daughter out of his equations.