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Author Topic: Price and Edition  (Read 73650 times)

RSL

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Price and Edition
« Reply #80 on: March 29, 2009, 07:39:25 pm »

Quote from: John Camp
Actually, the reason is that the cut-off date for Canadian youth leagues is Jan. 1. So in any youth league class (running Jan. 1 to Dec. 31) the oldest kids are generally the biggest, fastest and most coordinated. This advantage disappears in the late teens, but is very powerful before then. As players develop over their younger years, there are recurring filters, with better players moved into harder and more demanding leagues and competition, with better coaches and more practice time. Since "inborn" talent is almost certainly spread evenly across the year, the only major difference between people who become stars and those who don't (given equal talent) is the availability of practice and coaching, and that availability occurs pretty much soley because of birth date. If two kids had exactly the same talent, and are both six years old on Dec. 31, but one was born on Jan. 2 and the other was born on Dec. 26 of the same year, the January kid is almost a year older, but he's playing in the same birth class. So talent has little effect -- and the argument in the book suggests that if Canada wants to maximize its overall hockey talent, there should be several leagues, based on rotating birth dates, to eliminate the birth/practice advantage. In any case, under the current system, in Canadian hockey at its highest levels, talent counts for less than luck and training.

JC

John,

Interesting rundown. Regarding your last sentence, I suspect that's pretty much true for any sport. I'm not really a hockey fan, though a couple of my sons are, and I agree with Churchill's evaluation of golf, but I know something about cycling and that's certainly true there.
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RSL

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Price and Edition
« Reply #81 on: March 29, 2009, 08:09:31 pm »

Quote from: feppe
The same way they are now. We already have machines which have simple emergent behavior which was not planned by the programmer.

Feppe, You may be watching or reading too much science fiction.

Part of the problem is language. We think with language, but language sometimes can't quite deal with reality. For example: English uses the word "hot" for something that can burn your hand and the same word for a spice that feels as if it's burning your mouth. Spanish makes a distinction between "caliente" for something that can burn your hand and "picante" for something that burns your mouth. Thai makes the same distinction with the words (rendered phonetically in English) "lawn" and "pet," respectively. When I say "hot" in English I can't be understood precisely unless I add modifiers to go with the word. The same thing's true of the English word, "love," as CS Lewis pointed out in detail. Incidentally, since your profile tells me you live in Netherlands I assume English isn't your first language. I'm very impressed with your grasp of it. I wish I could do that with a few languages.

For some time we've had machines that are said to "learn." That seems to be the word we use for that situation, though "memorize" would be closer to the truth. What the machine actually does is store data it's programmed to accept and store. This is not "learning," nor is it "thinking." The programmer did the thinking.

We also can have a machine that correlates the data it's "learned" (stored) and comes to a conclusion about the correlation. That might be called "thinking" except for one thing: it's the programmer who did the thinking. The machine arrives at its conclusion as a result of an "if, then, else" sequence designed by the programmer. In what's come to be called "artificial intelligence" (an oxymoron) the "if, then, else" sequence may be a lot more complicated than I've made it sound, but that's what happens.

Finally, we can have a machine that engages in what you called "emergent behavior which was not planned by the programmer." That's true, but only in the sense that the programmer set up a series of alternatives one or more of which the machine selects. That process can get pretty complicated too, and appear to be something it's not. It's correct to say that the machine selected an alternative that was "not planned by the programmer," but the machine's world was designed by the programmer and the machine can't step outside its world.

HAL was an interesting character in "2001," but he was just that -- a character.

I'm afraid we've gotten awfully far away from the original question about "editioning" photographic prints.
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Eric Myrvaagnes

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Price and Edition
« Reply #82 on: March 29, 2009, 09:32:08 pm »

Quote from: RSL
I'm afraid we've gotten awfully far away from the original question about "editioning" photographic prints.
Oh? Isn't this the Canadian Hockey thread???
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DarkPenguin

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Price and Edition
« Reply #83 on: May 13, 2009, 02:09:14 pm »

Quote from: John Camp
Well, I think you're wrong about all of that.

See"Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell, a current bestselling non-fiction book, and "Talent is Overrated," by Geoff Colvin, also a current bestseller. Gladwell actually tells you what it takes to become a master photographer -- about 10,000 hours of hard, focused work. No talent necessary.

JC

Bills Simmons and Gladwell have a conversation over at ESPN.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story...ns/090513/part1

As an aside I'd like to put my support behind the Bill Simmons for Timberwolves GM campaign.
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