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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

rshow55 - 05:33pm Apr 7, 2003 EST (# 11191 of 11194)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Jorian319 , I hope

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47645-2003Apr7.html

is exactly true. It would significantly solidify some things.

Maybe the mainstream media is acting a bit like Rumsfeld does about "first reports" - and waiting for more confirmation before playing up a story with such significance ( and a story that could backfire badly if it turns out to be wrong.)

rshow55 - 05:40pm Apr 7, 2003 EST (# 11192 of 11194)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

jorian319 - 03:04pm Apr 7, 2003 EST (# 11187

Robert, I read every one of the links you provided

Jorian319 , if you read all those references, you missed a point I was trying to make - about statistics and sampling. I use other peoples' good ideas when I can, like everybody else, and try to give credit. A very good body of ideas and work - now much used in web-searching software - is Latent Semantic Analysis.

rshowalter - 10:15am Jan 9, 2001 BST (#202 from the Guardian thread God is the Projection of Mans Unrealised Potential - Discuss http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7b2bd/240 contains this:

I've been very impressed witn

A Solution to Plato's Problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis Theory of Acquisition, Induction and Representation of Knowledge by Thomas K. Landauer and Susan Dumais

Landauer is at the Department of Psychology, University of Colorado, Boulder, and Dumais is now at Microsoft.

Here is a draft of that paper, which was accepted with revisions, and published in Psychological Review , v104, n.2, 211-240, 1997 http://lsi.argreenhouse.com/lsi/papers/PSYCHREV96.html

I'm also hotkeying a piece of my own, that was intended to be part of a thesis proposal that has not been accepted. "Statistical-Associational Correllation and Symbol Reasoning may be mutually reinforcing. The example of LSA." http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/lsa It includes these passages:

"Landauer and Dumais draw this basic conclusion:

"" . . . with respect to (correlations) supposed to allow the learning of language and other large bodies of complexly structured knowledge, domains in which there are very many facts each weakly related to very many others, effective simulation may require data sets of the same size and content as those encountered by human learners. Formally, that is because weak local constraints can combine to produce strong local effects in aggregate(9).

". . . a particular computational arrangement is not assumed.

"" We, of course, intend no claim that the mind or brain actually computes a singular value decomposition on a perfectly remembered event-by-context matrix of its lifetime experience using the mathematical machinery of complex sparse-matrix manipulation algorithms. What we suppose is merely that the mind-brain stores and reprocessed its input in some manner that has approximately the same effect(10)."

Ive been suggesting that neural function, incorporating the corrected S-K neural conduction equation, might have that approximate effect.

LSA is the best illustration I have encountered of the potential power of correlation (that is, the potential power of complicated association) with nearly unlimited computational resources devoted to it. That power is great. That power also seems strongly complementary to inherently sequential and inherently symbolic logical processes.

. . . . If there IS much latent, inexpressible, extensive information in our brains, this is a STRONG argument for the power (but not the infallibility) of human feelings of intuition. . . . . If there IS much latent, inexpressible, extensive information in our brains, this is a STRONG argument against over-reliance on "logical rigor" and stark "simple solutions" to human problems, human feeling, and human communication.

"The success of LSA does show that very sophisticated association logic, without syntax, logic, and morphology can be powerful, and arguably essential, supplements of syntax, logic, and morphology, and that sophisticated association might be an essential source of the neuro-logical power that people and animals have.

". . . . . Schema manipulations are more than just the correlation of "meaningless marks." The importance of sequence in the "little computer programs" we c

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