From extropians-request@extropy.org Fri Nov 18 18:05:21 1994 Return-Path: extropians-request@extropy.org Received: from usc.edu (usc.edu [128.125.253.136]) by chaph.usc.edu (8.6.8.1/8.6.4) with SMTP id SAA01318 for ; Fri, 18 Nov 1994 18:03:41 -0800 Received: from news.panix.com by usc.edu (4.1/SMI-3.0DEV3-USC+3.1) id AA10216; Fri, 18 Nov 94 17:47:58 PST Received: (from exi@localhost) by news.panix.com (8.6.9/8.6.9) id SAA25341; Fri, 18 Nov 1994 18:01:45 -0500 Date: Fri, 18 Nov 1994 18:01:45 -0500 Message-Id: <199411182301.SAA25341@news.panix.com> To: Extropians@extropy.org From: Extropians@extropy.org Subject: Extropians Digest #94-11-265 - #94-11-273 X-Extropian-Date: November 18, 374 P.N.O. [18:01:14 UTC] Reply-To: extropians@extropy.org X-Mailer: MailWeir 1.0 Status: RO Extropians Digest Fri, 18 Nov 94 Volume 94 : Issue 321 Today's Topics: BASICS: META: Prefix BASICS: [1 msgs] Case Studies in State-failures (Was: Laissez-faire is worse) [1 msgs] HUMOR: PC Little Red Riding Hood [1 msgs] HUMOR: PC Little Red Riding Hood [1 msgs] Paglia's Talk [1 msgs] POLIT: Chomsky cspan videotape [1 msgs] PRICING PROPOSALS FOR THE INTERNET [1 msgs] Wavelets [1 msgs] Wavelets [1 msgs] Administrivia: Note: I have increased the frequency of the digests to four times a day. The digests used to be processed at 5am and 5pm, but this was too infrequent for the current bandwidth. Now digests are sent every six hours: Midnight, 6am, 12pm, and 6pm. If you experience delays in getting digests, try setting your digest size smaller such as 20k. You can do this by addressing a message to extropians@extropy.org with the body of the message as ::digest size 20 -Ray Approximate Size: 29069 bytes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: timstarr@netcom.com (Tim Starr) Date: Thu, 17 Nov 1994 20:18:19 -0800 Subject: [#94-11-265] HUMOR: PC Little Red Riding Hood I should have made it clear that I can't take credit for the "PC Little Red Riding Hood" story. I didn't write it. I'm not that creative or funny :-). I just forwarded it from the objectivist newsgroup, where it had been forwarded from somewhere else. So, feel free to give me credit (or demerit) for forwarding it, but not for authoring it. I can only stand in awe of such comic genius. Tim Starr - Renaissance Now! Think Universally, Act Selfishly Assistant Editor: Freedom Network News, the newsletter of ISIL, The International Society for Individual Liberty, 1800 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94102 (415) 864-0952; FAX: (415) 864-7506; 71034.2711@compuserve.com Liberty is the Best Policy - timstarr@netcom.com ------------------------------ From: "Harry S. Hawk" Date: Thu, 17 Nov 1994 23:25:10 -0500 (EST) Subject: [#94-11-266] PRICING PROPOSALS FOR THE INTERNET A University of Michigan researcher proposes letting Internet users bid for priority status for their e-mail by attaching the highest prices they are willing to pay for quick delivery. "Smart" network switches would then monitor and adjust the price of admission based on network congestion. Meanwhile, folks at the University of Texas at Austin have proposed smart agents that would help users shop around the net for the best deal on price and delivery time. (Scientific American 11/94 p.102) -- Harry S. Hawk habs@extropy.org Electronic Communications Officer, Extropy Institute Inc. The Extropians Mailing List, Since 1991 ------------------------------ From: sullivan@blaze.cs.jhu.edu (Gregory Sullivan) Date: Thu, 17 Nov 94 23:49:53 EST Subject: [#94-11-267] HUMOR: PC Little Red Riding Hood Tim Starr says: >I should have made it clear that I can't take credit for the "PC Little Red >Riding Hood" story. I didn't write it. The book ``Politically Correct Bedtime Stories'' by James Finn Garner (Macmillan $8.95) is number four on the New York Times Fiction Best Sellers list. The description is ``Classic tales respun to avoid offending current sensibilities''. I have not personally checked but this may be the solution to the missing attribution. Gregory Sullivan ------------------------------ From: timstarr@netcom.com (Tim Starr) Date: Thu, 17 Nov 1994 21:02:58 -0800 Subject: [#94-11-268] Case Studies in State-failures (Was: Laissez-faire is worse) >From: GREG NEWTON >Subject: [#94-11-245] Laissez faire is worse! - was Reading List. > >...Just look at the wonderful examples of "free markets" where the >governments and police don't hold the rights of power - such as Harlem , >downtown Detroit and Somalia... You left out Ruwanda, Lebanon, the Wild West, and many of the usual examples of violent conflict that are used to argue against anarco-capitalism. The usual reply is: they aren't examples of anarco-capitalism. They are examples of power struggles for the establishment of or control over the State - most often the latter. This should be obvious in the cases of Harlem & Detroit. Are there no cops there? Are there no laws passed by the city, county, state, and federal governments which are enforced there? But since you bring up the case of Somalia, let's talk about what things are really like there. After the civil war in which general Mohammed Farah Aidid led the Somali citizen militia to defeat the forces of ex-dictator Syd-Claude Barre, the Somali General Assembly held elections to decide whom its president would be. Aidid won. The losers, who had been part of Barre's administration, went crying for help to the Italians, who had been the European power that colonized Somalia around the turn of the century. The Italians went screaming to the U.N., and Secretary-General Boutros Ghali (an Egyptian) started UNOSOM, a "peacekeeping" operation with multinational soldiers. The U.S. State Department inundated the U.S. press with statements calling Aidid a "warlord," instead of "the democratically-elected president" of Somalia. UNOSOM soon underwent "mission creep" from peacekeeping to peacemaking to nation-building, and tried to impose a western-style nation-state upon the Somalis which the losers to Aidid would probably win and which the Somalis didn't want. The Somalis began referring to the U.N. as "The Thing," and their citizen militia started engaging the UNOSOM soldiers. UNOSOM suffered a small number of casualties (either less than a hundred or a few hundred, I forget which), the Somalis suffered thousands, but UNOSOM was forced to give up and pull out. How do I know this? The Freedom Network News published dispatches from the front lines, from our former rep. for Belgium, Michael van Notten, who went to Somalia and served as a constitutional adviser to Aidid and then settled down there, marrying a Somali woman, before the UNOSOM invasion. According to him, the Somalis already have the "government" they want: the Xeer (pro- nounced "hair"), which provides courts, police, defense, and social security for their people and is based upon traditional tribal forms of government. While they are nominally Moslem, they have de facto separation of Church & State, have their own written constitutions (which all allow for the right of appeal), and which work fine when no one's trying to impose a dictator- ship or other form of statism on them. I happen to know more about this case than I do about the CIS, but I'm sure Alexander Chislenko could tell you about that if you ask him nicely. I do know a bit about Ruwanda, Lebanon, the "Wild" West, the inner-cities of the USA, and a few other places if you'd like to know how any of them fail to support your claim. ------------------------------ From: timstarr@netcom.com (Tim Starr) Date: Thu, 17 Nov 1994 21:10:11 -0800 Subject: [#94-11-269] Paglia's Talk >From: "L. Todd Masco" >Date: Thu, 17 Nov 1994 11:16:07 -0500 >Subject: [#94-11-251] Paglia's Talk at Stanford University, Nov. 9 > >(Forwarded with permission of the author) > >From: sheaffer@netcom.com (Robert Sheaffer) >...(Question: an incident is recounted in which a gay man in San > Francisco was shot while walking down the street with his > gay lover. What is to be done about such oppression?) That was right behind ISIL's store, Freedom's Forum Books. We heard the shot, but thought (hoped) it was a car backfiring on the freeway. What must be done? Shoot back. If he victim and his lover had been carrying handguns, the victim might not have gotten shot. As it was, they were easy prey for the perp. We won't be such easy prey if anyone tries anything inside our place, that's for sure! >...The facts of the case may not be as the news media report it. That's for sure! It happened last friday night, they didn't report it until Monday, and referred to it happening "last night," i.e., Sunday night! The cops caught a guy who fit the description of the perp, but there's been no word if he'd been ID'd by the victim or his lover yet. >...the street is "pagan", it is "hostile >territory for everyone." Gay men are constantly seeking to >press the limits of sexual expression. Their disasters are >a consequence of their quest for sexual adventure. All the more reason for them to be prepared to defend themselves from the threats they're likely to encounter. Tim Starr - Renaissance Now! Think Universally, Act Selfishly Assistant Editor: Freedom Network News, the newsletter of ISIL, The International Society for Individual Liberty, 1800 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94102 (415) 864-0952; FAX: (415) 864-7506; 71034.2711@compuserve.com Liberty is the Best Policy - timstarr@netcom.com ------------------------------ From: agraps@netcom.com (Amara Graps) Date: Fri, 18 Nov 1994 00:12:23 -0800 Subject: [#94-11-270] Wavelets From: sjm@world.std.com (Sean J Merritt) > The real analysis problem I've had is that data taken with > an EEG under less than ideal conditions, is riddled with noise. ... > Traditional Fourier analysis of the data has been marginally > successful. I may bite the bullet and investigate whether ... > Noise is the big concern and I continue to try to improve the > data taking procedure. If I am succesful and the data is better > I may have time to "play" a bit with wavelets. Interesting that you should bring up the subject of noisy data... One of the members of the group that I'm currently working with is a Stanford statistician named David Donoho. He is an expert in de-noising noisy data. You can anonymous ftp some of his papers at: playfair.stanford.edu. I'm including below a couple more sections from my wavelets paper that may interest you. I'm also including my full references section (so far) because I've gotten some requests for more references. Someone commented to me today that I may want to simplify the technical aspects of the paper if I submit it to Extropy. This surprised me because I thought the extropian readership was fairly technical. I'm so far assuming a background of calculus, maybe some linear algebra. Does anyone know the general technical level of the extropian readership? Amara --------------cut here----------------------------- De-Noising Noisy Data In fields as diverse as planetary science to molecular spectroscopy, scientists are faced with the problem of recovering a true signal from incomplete, indirect or noisy data. Do wavelets have something to contribute in solving this problem? The answer is certainly "yes," through a technique that is referred to as: "Wavelet Shrinkage and Thresholding Methods." (8) David Donoho at Stanford has invested several years to this and related techniques, and the technique works in the following way. When one decomposes a data set through a wavelet decomposition, one uses those filters that act as "averaging" filters and those that produce details (9). Some of the resulting wavelet coefficients correspond to details in the data set. If the details are small, they might be omitted without substantially affecting the main features of the data set. The idea of "thresholding," then, is to set to zero out all coefficients that are less than a particular threshold. The zero'd out and remaining coefficients are used in an inverse wavelet transformation to reconstruct the data set. Below, is a pair of "before" and "after" illustrations of an nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) signal. The signal is transformed, thresholded and inverse transformed. The result is cleaned-up signal while at the same time, showing important details. Computer and Human Vision In the early 1980s, David Marr began work at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory on artificial vision for robots. He was an expert on the human visual system and his goal was to learn why the first attempts to construct a robot capable of understanding its surroundings were unsuccessful (3). David Marr believed that it was important to establish scientific foundations for vision, and that while doing so, one must limit the scope of investigation by excluding everything that depends on training, culture, etc., and focus on the mechanical or involuntary aspects of vision, i.e. low-level vision. This low-level vision is the part that enables us to recreate the three-dimensional organization of the physical world around us from the excitations that stimulate the retina. Marr asked the questions: 1) How is it possible to define the contours of objects from the variations of their light intensity? 2) How is it possible to sense depth? 3) How is movement sensed? Marr had working algorithmic solutions to answer each of these questions. Marr's theory was that image processing in the human visual system had a complicated hierarchical structure that involved several layers of processing. At each processing level, the retinal system provided a visual representation, that progressively scaled in a geometrical manner. His arguments hinged on the detection of intensity changes. He theorized that intensity changes occur at different scales in an image, so that their optimal detection requires the use of operators of different sizes. He also theorized that sudden intensity changes produce a peak or trough in the first derivative of the image. These two hypotheses require that a vision filter have two characteristics: 1) it should be a differential operator, and that 2) it should be capable of being tuned to act at any desired scale. Marr's operator was a wavelet that today is referred to as a "Marr wavelet." He paved the way for the use of wavelets in image processing. REFERENCES (1) Crandall, Richard, 1994. Projects in Scientific Computation. NY, NY: Springer-Verlag, pp 197-198. (2) Vetterli, Martin, 1992. "Wavelets and Filter Banks: Theory and Design," IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 40, pp 2207-2232. (3) Meyer, Yves, 1993. Wavelets: Algorithms and Applications. Philadelphia, PA: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, pp 13-31, 101-105. (4) Strang, Gilbert, 1992. "Wavelets," American Scientist, 82, pp 250-255. (5) Kaiser, Gerald, 1994. A Friendly Guide to Wavelets. Boston, MA: Birkhauser, pp 44-45. (6) Wickerhauser Victor, 1994. Adapted Wavelet Analysis from Theory to Software. Boston, MA: AK Peters, pp 67. (7) Bradley, Jonathan, Brislawn, Christopher, and Hopper, Tom, 1993. "The FBI Wavelet/ScalarQuantization Standard for Gray-scale Fingerprint Image Compression," SPIE Proceedings, vol. 1961. (8) Donoho, David, 1993. "Nonlinear Wavelet Methods for Recovery of Signals, Densities, and Spectra from Indirect and Noisy Data," Proceeding of Symposia in Applied Mathematics, vol. 0., 173-204. (9) Vidakovic, Brani, and Muller, Peter. 1994. "Wavelets for Kids.", unpublished, available from: "ftp://ftp.isds.duke.edu in directory: /pub/brani/papers/wav4kids[A-B].ps.Z", (10) Cody, Mac A., April, 1992. "The Fast Wavelet Transform," Dr. Dobb's Journal, 17, pp. 16. (11) Cody, Mac A., April, 1993. "A Wavelet Analyzer," Dr. Dobb's Journal, 18, pp. 44. (12) Cody, Mac A., April, 1994. "The Wavelet Packet Transform," Dr. Dobb's Journal, 19, pp. 44. (13) Scargle, Jeffrey; Steiman-Cameron, Thomas; Young, Karl; Donoho, David; Crutchfield, James,; Imamura, James. 1993. "The Quasi-Periodic Oscillations and Very Low Frequency Noise ofs Scorpius X-1 as Transient Chaos: A Dripping Handrail?, " The Astrophysical Journal 411, L91-L94. -------------------------------------- ********************************************************************** Amara Graps email: agraps@netcom.com Computational Physicist vita: finger graps@clio.arc.nasa.gov Intergalactic Reality bio: finger -lm agraps@netcom.com ********************************************************************** "I like reality. It tastes of bread." --Jean Anouilh ------------------------------ From: sullivan@blaze.cs.jhu.edu (Gregory Sullivan) Date: Fri, 18 Nov 94 10:38:38 EST Subject: [#94-11-271] Wavelets Wavelets are an intriguing topic and Amara Graps' paper looks interesting. I hope the FBI looks carefully at how compression effects the false positive and false negative match rates for their database of fingerprints. Video watchers will be interested in the competitiveness of wavelet methods versus other methods for video compression. There was a posting from former list member Timothy May on the direct broadcast satellite newsgroup a few days ago in which he said that the MPEG video compression (not wavelet based I believe) used on the new DSS system made the picture ``unwatchable'' and literally gave him headaches. He said that the picture contained multiple artifacts near moving objects. Many other posters could not see the artifacts and were very happy with the picture. Currently DSS uses a modified version of MPEG 1 which is supposed to be replaced by MPEG 2 soon. I have read that many cable systems wish to use digitally compressed video and MPEG is currently the default technology. With satellite, cable, videophones, etc. we might all be watching compressed video in the near-term future. Do you think wavelet compression will displace MPEG? Should it? Can it cure Tim's headaches? gfs ------------------------------ From: brian@jane.nrccso.com (Brian Barnhart) Date: Fri, 18 Nov 94 09:07:08 MST Subject: [#94-11-272] POLIT: Chomsky cspan videotape I did check on getting Chomsky's talk on Democracy in America. No transcript is available, but there is a videotape. And it costs $105 (evidently they charge by the hour and this was a 2.5-hour talk). I did not ask about copying the tape but .... maybe several folks could circulate it by mail. CSPAN folks said they always get lots of requests for Chomsky's talks. I did also get som address info that I'll relay for your reference: CSPAN: email is viewer@c-span.org address is 400 N. Capitol St. NW Suite 650 Washington DC 20001 phone: general is (202)737-3220 viewer services is (202)626-7963 videos from : CSPAN Dept 53 Washington DC 20055 (chomsky tape is #49753-4) transcripts from: Tape Writer PO Box 885 Lincolnshire Ill 60069 a bientot, brian ------------------------------ From: dkrieger@netcom.com (Dave Krieger) Date: Fri, 18 Nov 1994 10:33:34 -0800 Subject: [#94-11-273] BASICS: META: Prefix BASICS: >Need I say more? Regards, Greg Newton (gnewton@ozemail.com.au) Your posts are an excellent example of the kind of list traffic for which the BASICS: prefix is being proposed. Did you really think that any of what you had to say isn't something we've heard many, many times over and already know the refutation to? I ask you to add the BASICS: prefix to your subject lines from now on, to allow those who aren't interested in retreading the same old ground to save some bandwidth. Briefly, the reason all of your arguments are spurious is because you assume that voluntary institutions will not or cannot arise to fulfill the roles of the coercive regulatory bodies that extropians want to rid of. Such voluntary institutions are a subset of the class of "reputation services", companies that maintain databases of the safety records, financial stability, etc., of other companies and individuals. In a free market, the cautious will purchase only those products or services whose "reputation capital" is high -- those who get good marks from one or more of the competing standards bodies in that field. However, those who are less risk-averse will not be banned from purchasing the more experimental and unapproved brands. Here are some examples of such institutions that already exist in the real world: The U.S. Pharmacopeia Convention is a private consortium of hospitals, pharmacies, and universities which _predates_ the FDA and publishes the standard formulary for the synthesis of common drugs (aspirin, kaopectate, whatever). Underwriter's Laboratories is a research organization funded by insurance companies. It tests household and industrial electrical equipment for safety and durability, and allows products which pass its tests to display its seal of approval. Good Housekeeping Magazine used to perform similar tests on other household products, and allow manufacturers to display the "Good Housekeeping" seal on approved products. (I don't know if GH is still being published.) Consumer Union and other consumer agencies rate products ranging from toothpaste to automobiles and print the results in reader-funded (no advertising) publications. Suppose we replace the FDA with the DRA (Drug Reputation Association), which has no power to ban but does allow drugs that have passed certain safety and effectiveness tests to display the "DRA Seal of Approval". Risk-averse patients will use only DRA-approved drugs (or drugs with the imprimatur of one of the other competing standards companies); meanwhile those who, for whatever reason, are willing to use less well-studied drugs (say, the terminally ill) are not prohibited from doing so. In short, Greg, when you propose that the market cannot provide the services currently provided by government, only cheaper and without coercion, you're talking out of your ass. Go read Friedman's "Machinery of Freedom" and respond to _those_ arguments, not to your confused initial impressions of what a free market would be like. dV/dt "Cool people get their heads frozen." -- Geoff Dale - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Extropy is $18/four issues, USA; $32, Canada and Mexico; $44 (air) elsewhere. Checks payable to Extropy Institute, 13428 Maxella Ave., No. 273, Marina Del Rey, CA 90292. e-mail more@extropy.org. ------------------------------ End of Extropians Digest V94 #321 *********************************