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		<title>Once upon a time</title>
		<link>http://usrdoc.com/2011/03/19/2224/</link>
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		<pubDate>Sat, 19 Mar 2011 19:43:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>efidetum</dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Excavating, the following, correctly tagged &#8220;man&#8217;s world&#8221;, was found: The linguist&#8217;s spouse walked in, caught the marriage partner sleeping with a co-ed and said, &#8220;I&#8217;m surprised.&#8221; The linguist bolted upright, pointed the finger and corrected , &#8220;No. I am surprised. You are astonished.&#8221; Filed under: nor Tagged: science<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=usrdoc.com&amp;blog=11718789&amp;post=2224&amp;subd=wtfiuserdocumentation&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://jokesonenglish.blogspot.com/2011/03/thank-you-for-sharing-nicole.html" target="_blank">Excavating</a>, the following, correctly tagged &#8220;man&#8217;s world&#8221;, was found:</p>
<p>The linguist&#8217;s spouse walked in, caught the marriage partner sleeping with a co-ed and said, &#8220;I&#8217;m surprised.&#8221; The linguist bolted upright, pointed the finger and corrected , &#8220;No. I am surprised. You are astonished.&#8221;</p>
<br />Filed under: <a href='http://usrdoc.com/category/nor/'>nor</a> Tagged: <a href='http://usrdoc.com/tag/science/'>science</a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/2224/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/2224/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/2224/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/2224/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gofacebook/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/2224/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/facebook/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/2224/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gotwitter/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/2224/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/twitter/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/2224/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/2224/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/2224/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/2224/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/2224/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/2224/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/2224/" /></a> <img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=usrdoc.com&amp;blog=11718789&amp;post=2224&amp;subd=wtfiuserdocumentation&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></content:encoded>
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		<title>My mission is to advance the arts, sciences, and technology of new business acquisition</title>
		<link>http://usrdoc.com/2011/03/06/2041/</link>
		<comments>http://usrdoc.com/2011/03/06/2041/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 05 Mar 2011 23:39:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>efidetum</dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Thanks for a lovely gettogether and cocktails!. I recall the days when in the Officers Mess, I was expected to ask only for Whisky. I always went for Scotch. Occasional beer to wash that whisky down was normal. I liked the Fench Contreau after dinner. With men I had to have their drink &#8211; Rum. [...]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=usrdoc.com&amp;blog=11718789&amp;post=2041&amp;subd=wtfiuserdocumentation&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a title="See this member's activity" href="http://www.linkedin.com/groups?viewMemberFeed=&amp;gid=79186&amp;memberID=63371358&amp;goback=%2Egmp_79186%2Egde_79186_member_44792537%2Egmp_79186%2Eamf_79186_63371358"><img class="size-medium wp-image-2013  alignleft" title="1967_Mantra-Rock_Dance_Avalon_poster" src="http://wtfiuserdocumentation.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/1967_mantra-rock_dance_avalon_poster.jpg?w=181&#038;h=300" alt="" width="181" height="300" /></a></p>
<p>Thanks for a lovely gettogether and cocktails!. I recall the days when in the <a class="zem_slink" title="United States Air Force officer rank insignia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_officer_rank_insignia" rel="wikipedia">Officers</a> Mess, I was expected to ask only for Whisky. I always went for Scotch. Occasional beer to wash that whisky down was normal. I liked the Fench Contreau after dinner. With men I had to have their drink &#8211; Rum. Without limits.<br />
With all regards to French champaignes, I liked to have &#8216;Sovetskoe Shampanskoe&#8217;. Of course a tot of Vodka any day any time.<br />
Now, I have had enough of all that, just a few glasses of hot water without any additives are fine with me.</p>
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		<title>&#8220;Feeling just a twinge of remorse &#8230;, he turned around and asked the audience if there were any students who had never seen a Bessel function. The audience was silent for a moment. Finally, one intrepid student raised his hand to admit that he had never seen Bessel functions. The professor nodded with apparent comprehension. Without hesitation, he turned around and pointed at the blackboard, while saying &#8216;well there is one&#8217; and continued his talk.&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://usrdoc.com/2011/02/26/q-what-is-a-topologist-a-a-man-who-doesnt-know-the-difference-between-a-coffee-cup-and-a-doughnut/</link>
		<comments>http://usrdoc.com/2011/02/26/q-what-is-a-topologist-a-a-man-who-doesnt-know-the-difference-between-a-coffee-cup-and-a-doughnut/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 25 Feb 2011 23:43:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>efidetum</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[nor]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A NOTE ON PIFFLES by A. B. Smith Introduction. A.C.Jones in his paper &#8220;A Note on the Theory of Boffles&#8221;, Proceedings of the National Society, 13, first defined a Biffle to be a non-definite Boffle and asked if every Biffle was reducible. C.D. Brown in &#8220;On a paper by A.C.Jones&#8221;, Biffle, 24, answered in part [...]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=usrdoc.com&amp;blog=11718789&amp;post=1822&amp;subd=wtfiuserdocumentation&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="zemanta-img" style="display:block;margin:1em;">
<div class="wp-caption alignright" style="width: 310px"><a href="http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Queenshead01.jpg"><img class=" " title="The Old Queen's Head, Sheffield" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6a/Queenshead01.jpg/300px-Queenshead01.jpg" alt="The Old Queen's Head, Sheffield" width="300" height="201" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">&quot;In ..., we have the prohibition.&quot;</p></div>
</div>
<h2>A NOTE ON PIFFLES</h2>
<h3>by A. B. Smith</h3>
<h4>Introduction.</h4>
<p>A.C.Jones in his paper &#8220;A Note on the Theory of Boffles&#8221;,  Proceedings of the National Society, 13, first defined a Biffle to be a  non-definite Boffle and asked if every Biffle was reducible.</p>
<p>C.D. Brown in &#8220;On a paper by A.C.Jones&#8221;, Biffle, 24, answered in  part this question by defining a Wuffle to be a reducible Biffle and he  was then able to show that all Wuffles were reducible.</p>
<p>H. Green, P. Smith, and D. Jones in their review of Brown&#8217;s  paper, Wuffle Review, 48, suggested the name Woffle for any Wuffle other  than the nontrivial Wuffle and conjectured that the total number of  Woffles would be at least as great as the number so far known to exist.  They asked if this conjecture was the strongest possible.</p>
<p>T. Brown in &#8220;A collection of 250 papers on Woffle Theory  dedicated to the honor of R.S.Green on his 23rd birthday&#8221; defined a  Piffle to be an infinite multi-variable sub-polynormal Woffle which does  not satisfy the lower regular Q-property. He states, but was unable to  prove, that there was at least a finite number of Piffles.</p>
<p>T.Smith, L.Jones, R.Brown, and A.Green in their collected works  &#8220;A short introduction to the classical theory of the Piffle&#8221;, Piffle  Press, $20, showed that all bi-universal Piffles were strictly  descending and conjectured that to prove a stronger result would be  harder.</p>
<p>It is this conjecture which motivated the present paper.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:x-small;">Dept. of Pure Mathematics, The University. Sheffield, England, 1966</span></p>
<br />Filed under: <a href='http://usrdoc.com/category/nor/'>nor</a> Tagged: <a href='http://usrdoc.com/tag/science/'>science</a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1822/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1822/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1822/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1822/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gofacebook/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1822/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/facebook/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1822/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gotwitter/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1822/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/twitter/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1822/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1822/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1822/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1822/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1822/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1822/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1822/" /></a> <img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=usrdoc.com&amp;blog=11718789&amp;post=1822&amp;subd=wtfiuserdocumentation&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></content:encoded>
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			<media:title type="html">The Old Queen's Head, Sheffield</media:title>
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		<title>99% give the rest a bad name</title>
		<link>http://usrdoc.com/2010/07/15/science-and-mathematics/</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 15 Jul 2010 15:57:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>efidetum</dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[This is an projected joke. the following are not intended. If an error shows, the usual techniques to abide scientific appearance are executed. In everlasting, randomized order of recurrence: the most popular examples of &#8220;reductio ad grotesquum&#8221;: Cause versus correlation Impossible to differ. Therefore, a high correlation of the appearance of storks and the birthrate obviously proves [...]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=usrdoc.com&amp;blog=11718789&amp;post=1673&amp;subd=wtfiuserdocumentation&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://komplexify.com/epsilon/2009/01/01/on-the-supposed-evilness-of-girls/" target="_blank">This</a> is an projected joke. the following are not intended. If an error shows, the usual techniques to abide scientific appearance are executed. In everlasting, randomized order of recurrence: the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/08/fox-news-fuzzy-math-claim_n_384308.html" target="_blank">most popular examples</a> of &#8220;reductio ad grotesquum&#8221;:</p>
<p><span style="font-size:20px;font-weight:bold;">Cause versus <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence" target="_blank">correlation</a></span></p>
<p>Impossible to differ. Therefore, a high correlation of the appearance of storks and the birthrate obviously proves <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/creationism" target="_blank">creationism</a>. Details of the proof are left, as a simple exercise.</p>
<h2><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution" target="_blank">Normal distribution</a></h2>
<div class="zemanta-img zemanta-action-dragged" style="display:block;margin:1em;">
<div class="wp-caption alignright" style="width: 310px"><a href="http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fisher_iris_versicolor_sepalwidth.svg"><img class="   " title="Histogram of sepal widths for Iris versicolor ..." src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/40/Fisher_iris_versicolor_sepalwidth.svg/300px-Fisher_iris_versicolor_sepalwidth.svg.png" alt="Histogram of sepal widths for Iris versicolor ..." width="300" height="200" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Q: Do you know the newest joke about statistics? A: Probably.</p></div>
</div>
<p>Is assumed to be given. Should a random variable, against rationality, be abnormally distributed, the &#8220;Central limit theorem&#8221; holds. Thus, 1234567 monkeys with a typewriter each must incorporate an author of &#8220;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_and_Juliet" target="_blank">Romeo and Juliet</a>&#8220;, up to a probability of 0.99.</p>
<h2>Graph theory</h2>
<p>Contrary to needs (e. g. in bookmarking), instead of using more realistic applications based on multiigraphs, methodologies using trees, endowed with cost functions, are investigated.</p>
<h2>Mathematical logic</h2>
<p>As Shakespeare put it: &#8220;Faith is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_order_logic" target="_blank">FOL </a>and FOL is faith&#8221;  Despite the significance of predicate calculus,  FOL alone is not even capable to define the natural numbers.Nevertheless, everyone (AKA every{{ø}}) seems to be a FOL-goer, especially since no Last Order Logic exists.</p>
<h2>Conclusively</h2>
<ol>
<li>Thank you very much for the contributions to recreational mathematics (supplied with no express guarantee as to its suitability). Obviously the language of mathematics is not adequate for all. No problem, but trivially the language of science is.</li>
<li> Considering that such ridiculous flaws i. e. non sequiturs) are propagated (standing on the shoulders of giants) and gain relevancy by perfectly citing them using the Chicago Manual of Style (sacred) or publishing them in Wikipedia (very subtle vandalism), as then they can become dangerous to your keyboard.</li>
<li>Just give me the change!</li>
</ol>
<p><a title="“Feeling just a twinge of remorse …, he turned around and asked the audience if there were any students who had never seen a Bessel function. The audience was silent for a moment. Finally, one intrepid student raised his hand to admit that he had never seen Bessel functions. The professor nodded with apparent comprehension. Without hesitation, he turned around and pointed at the blackboard, while saying ‘well there is one’ and continued his talk.”" href="http://usrdoc.com/2011/02/26/q-what-is-a-topologist-a-a-man-who-doesnt-know-the-difference-between-a-coffee-cup-and-a-doughnut/" target="_blank">When I think of all the good time &#8230;.</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dec/essay.criticize.html" target="_blank">The target audience includes researchers from academia, tool vendors, system suppliers, and users in industry who are interested in the all aspects of the topic.</a></p>
<p><a href="http://blog.dangerouskitchen.com/2010/03/11/playing-with-turtles/" target="_blank">Nothing is going to change my world.</a></p>
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		<title>Re: Petri nets vs programming languages (longish)</title>
		<link>http://usrdoc.com/2010/06/02/re-petri-nets-vs-programming-languages-longish/</link>
		<comments>http://usrdoc.com/2010/06/02/re-petri-nets-vs-programming-languages-longish/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Jun 2010 20:41:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>efidetum</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[petri-net]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[science]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Of the 2 responses I have received so far, one tells me (in so many words) that Petri nets are about modeling, not about programming, the other tells me that the sender has been working in the direction indicated for his thesis. So, 50% of replies are in favor, 50% are against the direction of [...]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=usrdoc.com&amp;blog=11718789&amp;post=1034&amp;subd=wtfiuserdocumentation&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Of the 2 responses I have received so far, one tells me (in so<br />
many words) that Petri nets are about modeling, not about<br />
programming, the other tells me that the sender has been<br />
working in the direction indicated for his thesis. So, 50% of<br />
replies are in favor, 50% are against the direction of research<br />
suggested in this thread!-) Since the responders have only<br />
replied in private, I will let them speak for themselves here,<br />
should they choose to do so.</p>
<p>However, the &#8220;you are looking at the wrong problem&#8221; response<br />
came from a longstanding prominent member of the Petri net<br />
community who has done his share of Petri net training/education,<br />
so I wonder whether it represents a view shared by many here?</p>
<p>Personally, I find that the barrier between modeling and<br />
programming has been lowered almost to insignificance in<br />
modern declarative languages (where, roughly, one tries to<br />
model the application domain, then adds a little programming<br />
about what to do with the models). Which is one of the reasons<br />
I enjoy working in and with these languages, and why I think<br />
that combining Petri nets and declarative languages more deeply<br />
would be profitable.</p>
<p>Quite apart from this, modeling and programming languages<br />
face similar issues in design, implementation, tools, and use, so<br />
sharing solutions and approaches would help even if the barrier<br />
between the activities of modeling and programming would still<br />
be present these days.</p>
<p>And yet, this surprising response has reminded me that specialists<br />
who have immersed themselves in Petri net research might harbor<br />
just as many unhelpful notions about modern programming<br />
languages as specialists in programming languages do about<br />
modern Petri nets. So perhaps readers are not joining this<br />
discussion because they think there is nothing to discuss?</p>
<p>Obviously, I think otherwise;-) but if that would help (please<br />
let me know), I could give a few concrete examples of why I<br />
think that the two worlds of Petri nets and declarative<br />
programming languages should move closer together (as in:<br />
specialists in both areas should be more aware of developments<br />
in both areas, and developments in both areas should profit<br />
from expertise from both areas). I&#8217;ll start with the most extreme<br />
example I can think of: Constraint Handling Rules (CHR).</p>
<blockquote><p>From the CHR website at KU Leuven</p></blockquote>
<p>&lt;<a href="http://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/CHR/" target="_blank">http://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/CHR/</a>&gt;:</p>
<p>Created by Thom Frühwirth in 1991, the CHR language<br />
has become a major specification and implementation<br />
language for constraint-based algorithms and applications.<br />
Algorithms are often specified using inference rules, rewrite<br />
rules, sequents, proof rules, or logical axioms that can be<br />
directly written in CHR.<br />
..<br />
CHR &#8211; a concurrent language for constraint systems,<br />
logic, agents, and more</p>
<p>I first encountered CHR a few years ago when they were<br />
used to specify and discuss semantics of popular extensions<br />
to Haskell&#8217;s type classes, hardly a topic where you would<br />
expect to find Petri nets in use.</p>
<p>And yet, so much about CHR seemed so familiar that I<br />
finally realized that CHR defines a family of languages<br />
that are isomorphic to the family of Coloured Petri Nets<br />
(CPN): every type of CHR corresponds to a type of CPN,<br />
and vice versa!</p>
<p>The host languages of CHR correspond to the inscription<br />
languages of CPN, the constraints and predicates of CHR<br />
correspond to the tokens and places of CPN, the constraint<br />
store of CHR corresponds to the current marking of CPN<br />
and the rules of CHR correspond to the transitions of CPN.</p>
<p>The main differences are in pragmatics &#8211; how the models<br />
are used, and which features are preferred or have good<br />
support. For instance, CPN have all but replaced Predicate/<br />
Transition Nets and logic inscription languages do not seem<br />
popular for CPN while CHR use unification prominently; or<br />
CPN modellers tend to avoid transitions which are always<br />
enabled, while CHR have special support for some of these<br />
(propagation rules) in terms of scheduling (no repeated<br />
firing); CPN models are often used for their processes,<br />
while CHR rulesets are often used for their final constraint<br />
store; and so on.</p>
<p>I posted those observations to the CHR mailing list in<br />
June 2006 (to access the list archives, the KU Leuven<br />
listserver requires you to login, just to confirm you exist)</p>
<p><a href="https://listserv.kuleuven.be/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0606&amp;L=chr" target="_blank">https://listserv.kuleuven.be/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0606&amp;L=chr</a><br />
(first thread, subject &#8220;! (CPN o-o CHR)&#8221;)</p>
<p>Hariolf Betz, a student of Thom Frühwirth, wrote up<br />
some of those ideas in a CHR&#8217;2007 workshop paper:</p>
<p>Relating Coloured Petri Nets to Constraint Handling Rules<br />
<a href="http://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/CHR/biblio/Year/2007.complete.html#betz_petri_nets_chr07" target="_blank">http://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/CHR/biblio/Year/2007.complete.html#betz_petri_nets_chr07</a></p>
<p>but while this paper is now often cited, the potential of the<br />
connection between CHR and CPN has remained largely<br />
unexplored so far (at least in part because of the reasons<br />
explained in the first email in this thread). It might help if<br />
Petri net researchers started exploring the possibilities<br />
from their end, or would at least offer to help CHR<br />
researchers with finding and translating the relevant<br />
parts of the Petri net literature (from applications over<br />
implementation/optimizations to semantics and complexity).</p>
<p>This survey might serve readers here as an introduction<br />
to CHR and its research topics:</p>
<p>As Time Goes By: Constraint Handling Rules -<br />
A Survey of CHR Research between 1998 and 2007<br />
<a href="http://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/CHR/biblio/Year/2010.complete.html#chr_survey_tplp10" target="_blank">http://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/CHR/biblio/Year/2010.complete.html#chr_survey_tplp10</a></p>
<p>And that is only one example of why more collaboration<br />
between Petri net and programming language folks<br />
would be useful, IMHO.</p>
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		<title>Petri nets vs programming languages (longish)</title>
		<link>http://usrdoc.com/2010/06/02/petri-nets-vs-programming-languages-longish/</link>
		<comments>http://usrdoc.com/2010/06/02/petri-nets-vs-programming-languages-longish/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Jun 2010 18:54:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>efidetum</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[petri-net]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[science]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://usrdoc.com/?p=1030</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Dear Petri net enthusiasts, are there any groups working on or interested in funding work on bridging the gap between the Petri net and programming language communities? And do you agree that there is a gap to be bridged? My own impression, coming from the language side but with a net background, is that awareness [...]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=usrdoc.com&amp;blog=11718789&amp;post=1030&amp;subd=wtfiuserdocumentation&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Dear Petri net enthusiasts,</p>
<p>are there any groups working on or interested in funding work on<br />
bridging the gap between the Petri net and programming language<br />
communities? And do you agree that there is a gap to be bridged?</p>
<p>My own impression, coming from the language side but with a net<br />
background, is that awareness and use of Petri nets among<br />
programming language researchers and practitioners is not nearly as<br />
good as it should be. Also, attempts to interest language colleagues<br />
in nets are hampered by needless obstacles on the net community<br />
side. These obstacles are unintended, merely a result of differences<br />
in cultures and approaches to communication and community building.</p>
<p>As a result, programming language researchers occasionally reinvent<br />
wheels long known (or already forgotten..) in the Petri net<br />
community.  The problem is not so much the reinvention itself, but<br />
that it is not informed by the earlier efforts and that, if the<br />
reinvented wheels do include any new ideas, those are not fed back<br />
into the net community. Also, partially successful reinventions<br />
attract their own followers, publication venues and workshops,<br />
continuing the story of duplicated development and lack of<br />
communication. We now have several active communities working on<br />
variations of the same theme, without being entirely aware of each<br />
other&#8217;s work. The other side of the coin is that Petri nets do not<br />
profit as much from programming language research as they could.</p>
<p>One concrete topic that I think would help, and that I would like<br />
to be able to spend more time working on is to present and develop<br />
high-level Petri nets as a declarative programming language.<br />
Apart from its intrinsic potential, this could also serve as a kind of<br />
&#8220;rosetta stone&#8221;, providing an example translation between programming<br />
language and Petri net terminologies and concepts. So those interested<br />
in other aspects of Petri nets or programming language research could<br />
use this project to help them get acquainted with the other side.</p>
<p>Sub-topics that I am interested in pursuing include:</p>
<p>(1) presenting high-level Petri nets in a way that programming<br />
language people can relate to,</p>
<p>(2) applying language design principles and ideas to Petri nets,<br />
and Petri net ideas to programming languages,</p>
<p>(3) presenting place/transition and condition/event nets as<br />
simplifying abstractions of high-level nets for analysis,      not as intermediate models,</p>
<p>(4) moving beyond editing Petri nets as bipartite graphs<br />
(emphasizing semantic over syntactic editing)</p>
<p>(5) promoting Petri nets as a means to communicate computational<br />
thinking by introducing laypeople to programming concepts,<br />
with little or no syntactic overhead or semantic complexity.</p>
<p>(1) is partly community building, partly developing the tools that<br />
enable successful communication, partly reformulating the existing<br />
formal foundations and practices in ways more accessible to the<br />
target audience (the analysis parts of 2 are a prerequisite for this<br />
to work, and the &#8216;nets as types&#8217; slogan from 3 will help to provide<br />
motivation); beneficiaries will be software developers who work in a<br />
distributed context but are not yet aware of Petri nets, but also<br />
the Petri net community as a whole, by extending their visibility<br />
and reach into the programming language community and by gaining<br />
access to additional expertise (enabling the exchange parts of 2).</p>
<p>(2) is about exchanging ideas between the two communities in order to<br />
improve foundations and practices in both; there have been<br />
successful, if isolated, instances of this in the past, but also<br />
spectacular failures of communication; 1 will hopefully encourage<br />
a wider exchange and help to reduce duplication of efforts in<br />
future; my specific interests are in combining pure functional<br />
languages and Petri nets, beyond the widely popular Coloured Petri<br />
Nets in which functional languages are merely inscription languages<br />
inside Petri net structures; but even just analyzing Petri nets wrt<br />
language design principles and ideas will help to support 1 and 4.</p>
<p>(3) programming language folks value their language&#8217;s expressiveness,<br />
which can have the surprising effect that previous exposure to<br />
simple net types can lessen their interest in attempts to describe<br />
higher-level nets (it can make the latter look like an insufficient<br />
base model with &#8220;bolted on&#8221; inscriptions, or the net structures as<br />
insignificant add-ons to the inscription language &#8220;doing the work&#8221; -<br />
neither impression is helpful; and if someone does not succeed<br />
immediately in &#8220;getting&#8221; the implications of high-level nets, the<br />
interplay of net structure and inscriptions, and the modeling<br />
options offered by this combination, they tend to fall back on their<br />
understanding of simpler net types to base their evaluation on);   the suggested alternative is to make use of the fact that<br />
programming language folks are very familiar with simplifying<br />
abstractions of full programming languages for analysis, eg in the<br />
form of type systems; if we consider the separation of nets into<br />
dynamic parts (marking) and static parts (structure), the slogan<br />
becomes: net structures are the static types of concurrent systems.</p>
<p>(4) is about a problem most Petri net modellers will be familiar with:<br />
not only does one tend to spend all too much time fiddling with the<br />
graphical representation, but editing graphs, while sufficient to<br />
achieve the intended model modifications, does not reflect semantic<br />
model operations; when editing programs, there are similar problems<br />
if the editor uses only string or syntax operations; no matter whether<br />
the syntax is textual or graphical or hybrid, one really wants to<br />
move beyond syntax, towards semantics-based operations.</p>
<p>(5) is about going even further in terms of accessibility and<br />
promoting the advantages of &#8220;Petri net thinking&#8221; (once we can<br />
explain high-level Petri nets to programming language folks in a way<br />
that maintains their interest, can we also explain them to<br />
laypeople?); many successful programming language communities have<br />
strong beginner-focused efforts, where language fans try to promote<br />
and support (via tools and tutorials) their favourite language as<br />
best first-language-to-learn-programming and, more generally, recent<br />
efforts to promote &#8220;computational thinking&#8221; seem strongly coloured<br />
by algorithms and programming languages backgrounds;<br />
mixing in some Petri net views into the &#8220;computational thinking&#8221;<br />
efforts would more easily encompass understanding of concurrency,<br />
distribution and communication, providing benefits to both the<br />
campaigners and their audiences, while raising general awareness of<br />
Petri nets; thinking about presenting Petri net ideas to beginners,<br />
without immediately jumping into a specific formalization in terms<br />
of matrix algebra, graph theory, formal multiset rewriting, and the<br />
like, will provide benefits to anyone thinking about Petri nets, not<br />
just beginners new to the topic, but also to experts thinking about<br />
possible extensions and variations.</p>
<p>I&#8217;d appreciate pointers to existing work on any of the above topics.</p>
<p>Moving from research agenda to funding, it is obvious that the above<br />
topics cover a wide enough range of work that progress without funding<br />
specific to Petri net research and development is frustratingly slow,<br />
and success without community involvement is impossible. In fact, I<br />
tend to have so many ideas that, even after filtering out the bad<br />
ones, it would be helpful if some of them could be farmed out, to<br />
colleagues who have the background or to students who have the time to<br />
fully realize their potential.</p>
<p>In the past, I have been working in declarative programming research<br />
contexts, but I was also given a good -if somewhat dated by now-<br />
basis in Petri nets. Ideally, I would be looking for a full-time<br />
research position in a group that complements this background, i.e.,<br />
a group strong and active in high-level Petri nets (so I can catch<br />
up on recent developments and better understand and interact with<br />
the net community), but open to declarative programming languages<br />
and ideas (supporting my efforts to build bridges and providing a<br />
local forum for testing and exchanging ideas).<br />
If there are no full-time positions in these directions, I would also<br />
be interested in suggestions on alternative routes of funding, ways<br />
that would allow me to spend at least one day a week on pursuing my<br />
Petri net related research &amp; development interests while paying the<br />
majority of my bills from other employment.<br />
As one example of a spin-off from personal work that could be of<br />
wider community interest, I am currently working on a simple<br />
Javascript/SVG based Petri net editor: I mostly want to get rid of<br />
the troublesome GUI library dependency for my own CPN simulator,<br />
using a webbrowser as a GUI instead. As I am interested in simple<br />
CPN simulators that can be written by embedding CPN variants into<br />
their inscription languages, it is also important to decouple the<br />
GUI from the inscription language. That way, the same GUI could be<br />
re-used for Haskell-/Erlang-/Clean-/F#-/..-Coloured Petri Nets if<br />
those language communities could be interested in applying CPN<br />
modeling as part of their software development processes.</p>
<p>With some more work, the Javascript/SVG GUI could also be useful for<br />
other groups (an alternative, common GUI, allowing smaller groups to<br />
focus on their simulators and analysis tools), and with more work<br />
beyond that, it opens the possibility of bringing Petri nets to the<br />
web, making it easier to write blogs and tutorials about Petri net<br />
models and their simulations (earlier efforts based on Java- and<br />
Flash-based implementations have not yet resulted in ubiquitous<br />
Petri nets on the web, where the tendency seems to be away from<br />
plugins; the alternative of using animated gifs or sequences of  pngs also does not seem to enjoy widespread use, nor does it offer<br />
quite the same possibilities).</p>
<p>Working on my own resources, time available continues to be very<br />
limited and, within that time, I have to give priority to my research<br />
interests, keeping graphical editing features to a minimum and not<br />
spending time on providing standard APIs or on supporting browsers<br />
that I do not use.  That means progress continues to be very slow for<br />
me and wider opportunities for the Petri net community are going to be<br />
missed. The same obstacles apply once I get back into the more<br />
interesting issues, beyond the good old-fashioned graphical interface<br />
to a good old-fashioned CPN simulator, but based on earlier<br />
experiences, a tweakable and portable graphical representation seemed<br />
a necessary first step towards presenting and distributing the results.</p>
<p>If interested research groups, projects, and companies, or the<br />
steering group as representative, could allocate funds for<br />
infrastructure and community development in their budgets, and use<br />
those to fund external part-time researchers and developers, those<br />
could then develop open-source components for community use (I expect<br />
that there would be others willing to allocate a day or two every week<br />
to such work, remotely, if the funds can be made available). If this<br />
works out, it would be a more distributed approach to research and<br />
development &#8211; groups of part-time workers could make progress where<br />
there isn&#8217;t sufficient funding for additional full-time researchers,<br />
or where non-academic workers have the abilities, but cannot commit<br />
themselves full-time because of other demands.</p>
<p>In short, the questions are: can I do research and development in<br />
the overlap between Petri nets and declarative programming<br />
languages, full-time or part-time, while still making a living? And<br />
who else is interested in or already working at the border between<br />
Petri nets and declarative programming languages?<br />
I feel these ideas are important but, without topic-specific funding,<br />
I can only work on them in the gaps between other projects and am not<br />
able to invest the amount of time they deserve.</p>
<p>Looking forward to your suggestions,<br />
Claus</p>
<p>PS. A few more notes on my view of the community communication problem:</p>
<p>Occasionally, I have been able to interest programming language<br />
colleagues to take a look at the Petri net home page and<br />
bibliography, but not one of these has ever returned from there with<br />
surviving interest (as far as I know, the &#8220;impact&#8221; of my efforts has<br />
been limited to inspiring one dedicated paper and a few publications<br />
mentioning Petri nets as related work, none of which fully explored<br />
the implications).<br />
A couple of colleagues, when asked about this, explained that they<br />
would have liked to investigate further but found it difficult to<br />
relate the specialist nomenclature and concept set used in the Petri<br />
net literature to that used in their own areas of expertise (eg., if<br />
you don&#8217;t know what terms to search for, you cannot even begin to<br />
try understanding the relevant publications, and if the organisation<br />
of concepts differs too much, important ideas can get lost in the<br />
translation). So I have come to the impression that the general lack<br />
of interest in Petri nets from programming language researchers<br />
(with rare, but interesting exceptions) is not entirely due to<br />
self-propagating biases towards process calculi or state machine<br />
based modeling languages.</p>
<p>Since I remain convinced of the advantages and potential of Petri<br />
nets in general, and of the combination of Petri nets and<br />
declarative programming languages in particular, I am beginning to<br />
think it is a problem of presentation, mindset, and accessibility.<br />
There is evidence that mindset-related obstacles in the world of<br />
programming languages can be overcome &#8211; for instance, pure<br />
functional languages like Haskell force a different approach to<br />
thinking about programming that many conventionally trained<br />
programmers find difficult. With a lot of help from a friendly and<br />
open community, however, even non-academics have seen this as a<br />
worthwhile challenge, tackling of which will improve their general<br />
programming skills, and so this community keeps growing.</p>
<p>Physical accessibility remains a problem. In addition to an<br />
overwhelming amount of publications, there are many good books on<br />
Petri nets, but all too many papers are not freely accessible &#8211; even<br />
the PNML standard is hidden behind a paywall. Too many lists of<br />
publications point to paywalls or only provide references to<br />
hardcopies. The books and paper proceedings are expensive and not as<br />
widely available as one might think if one only frequents the<br />
library of a university that has a strong Petri nets group or a<br />
consistent history of buying certain proceedings by default.<br />
That means that privately interested (and privately funded)<br />
newcomers can find it difficult to find enough second-stage<br />
introductory material (beyond the mere definitions) to guide and<br />
motivate them into choosing and buying one or more of those<br />
expensive books, and once they want to delve into details beyond<br />
those books, they run into the next wall (some book authors make<br />
introductory parts available online, and some paper authors make a<br />
copy of their papers available online as well &#8211; in programming<br />
language circles, this is the rule, not the exception).</p>
<p>There is also a non-physical aspect of accessibility that links<br />
directly into presentation: programming language folks are used to<br />
active online communities, with mailing lists, wikis, irc channels,<br />
blogs, blog aggregators (feeds presenting updates from multiple<br />
blogs related to the same language), and lots of freely available<br />
online resources, such as bibliographies that link directly to<br />
online versions of papers, code repositories for community-provided<br />
software packages, etc. There are also specialist discussion sites<br />
on which links to new online resources or papers are passed on and<br />
discussed.  The vast majority of interested parties, including<br />
privately interested persons and open-minded commercial developers,<br />
are not able to visit the central conferences and workshops in<br />
person and may not have easy access to a university library, either,<br />
so online communities are key to good communication and progress.</p>
<p>Note that I am mainly interested in building _direct_ bridges<br />
between _practitioners_ of programming languages and Petri nets:<br />
programmers and modelers, language and net type designers, language<br />
and net type implementers and tool builders. Theoreticians are often<br />
already aware that programming languages and Petri nets are just<br />
different instances of their theories. But trying to move between<br />
the two fields via their theories requires multiple nontrivial<br />
jumps &#8211; busy practitioners (who could spend all their lives just<br />
staying abreast of their own fields) need a more direct route.</p>
<p>Also, precise language definitions and formal semantics are<br />
important, but good online documentation, online examples, and lots<br />
of short online tutorials on all topics, written not only by<br />
experts, but often simply by fellow searchers who run into the same<br />
issues, drive community interest.  It is important to present the<br />
benefits and pragmatics before delving into any formalisms, and it<br />
is important that people can communicate with others in the same<br />
learning situation and feel involved in community building.</p>
<p>Where are the Petri net blogs? The net repositories (PetriWeb<br />
content seems somewhat limited)? The tools for hosting Petri net<br />
contents?  The Petri net wikis? The links to online papers in the PN<br />
bibliography? Why do not all Petri net research groups and authors<br />
have copies of their papers online (usually permitted for the<br />
author&#8217;s home page), to help distributing their results and ideas?<br />
Where are the Petri net discussions (for both beginners and experts,<br />
not to mention specialist interests beyond specific tools)?  The<br />
Petri net HowTos (how to model a distributed software system? how to<br />
model a web application stack? how to model xyz? how to apply Petri<br />
net tools and techniques to situations faced by todays programmers?)?   Where are the communicators that build on these tools in order to<br />
explain the details and relevance of tricky or formalized<br />
publications to interested practitioners? Is all Petri net<br />
development activity restricted to universities and a few spin-offs?<br />
Is all communication limited to workshops, conferences, and<br />
in-person tutorials?  How can non-academics keep up to date with<br />
recent developments, or contribute to spreading the word? ..</p>
<p>One useful starting point might be a collection of survey articles,<br />
providing entry points and guidance about the various areas of<br />
research documented in the publications listed in the Petri net<br />
bibliography. That way, newcomers would at least have an idea what<br />
to look for.</p>
<br />Filed under: <a href='http://usrdoc.com/category/petri-net/'>petri-net</a> Tagged: <a href='http://usrdoc.com/tag/science/'>science</a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1030/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1030/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1030/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1030/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gofacebook/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1030/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/facebook/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1030/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gotwitter/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1030/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/twitter/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1030/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1030/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1030/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1030/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1030/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1030/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/1030/" /></a> <img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=usrdoc.com&amp;blog=11718789&amp;post=1030&amp;subd=wtfiuserdocumentation&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></content:encoded>
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		<title>Corpora-List Do you think LINGUISTICS is SCIENCE or ARTS?</title>
		<link>http://usrdoc.com/2010/03/26/corpora-list-do-you-think-linguistics-is-science-or-arts-23/</link>
		<comments>http://usrdoc.com/2010/03/26/corpora-list-do-you-think-linguistics-is-science-or-arts-23/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Mar 2010 14:12:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>efidetum</dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[@DW &#62; One of the dangers of contrasting (for example) statistics with logic is that this is really about comparing empiricist and  rationalist methods. I agree that one should not confuse mathematical methods with any kind of dogma &#8212; empiricist, rationalist, or theological. Mathematical methods, including logic and statistics, are neutral with respect to any kind [...]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=usrdoc.com&amp;blog=11718789&amp;post=548&amp;subd=wtfiuserdocumentation&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>@DW</p>
<p>&gt; One of the dangers of contrasting (for example) statistics with logic is that this is really about comparing empiricist and  rationalist methods.</p>
<p>I agree that one should not confuse mathematical methods with any kind of dogma &#8212; empiricist, rationalist, or theological.</p>
<p>Mathematical methods, including logic and statistics, are neutral with respect to any kind of application. For example, one could apply statistics to bridge either by a priori calculation of the probabilities or by gathering data about how people play the game.</p>
<p>@DW</p>
<p>&gt; &#8230; every new science must find a fertile balance between these scientific methods, and the recent swing from &#8220;linguistics should  be rationalist&#8221; to &#8220;linguistics should be empiricist&#8221; takes us to  another glass ceiling.</p>
<p>As a science, linguistics is as old as Aristotle, and the pendulum is always swinging. In the 1950s, information theory and grammar discovery procedures were dominant, and Charles Fries did some very interesting work with the tiny corpora available.</p>
<p>In the late &#8217;50s, Chomsky began his campaign against statistics, information theory, grammar discovery procedures, and finite-state machines. Instead, he promoted &#8220;the native speaker&#8217;s intuition&#8221; (i.e., his own intuition) as the ultimate standard.</p>
<p>Computational linguists have always been more empirical. Even when they used their own intuition to write grammar rules, they tested them by running their systems on actual data. That&#8217;s just as empirical as a physicist&#8217;s using intuition to write a theory and then testing its predictions against the data.</p>
<p>The ultimate criterion for science is the ability to make predictions about future observations. It&#8217;s irrelevant whether the methodology began with intuition, statistical analysis, or some combination of both.</p>
<p>John Sowa</p>
<br />Filed under: <a href='http://usrdoc.com/category/nor/'>nor</a> Tagged: <a href='http://usrdoc.com/tag/art/'>art</a>, <a href='http://usrdoc.com/tag/science/'>science</a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/548/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/548/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/548/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/548/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gofacebook/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/548/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/facebook/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/548/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gotwitter/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/548/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/twitter/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/548/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/548/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/548/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/548/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/548/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/548/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/548/" /></a> <img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=usrdoc.com&amp;blog=11718789&amp;post=548&amp;subd=wtfiuserdocumentation&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></content:encoded>
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		<title>Corpora-List Do you think LINGUISTICS is SCIENCE or ARTS?</title>
		<link>http://usrdoc.com/2010/03/26/corpora-list-do-you-think-linguistics-is-science-or-arts-22/</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Mar 2010 12:47:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>efidetum</dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The discussion on whether linguistics is science or arts is very interesting and stimulating, but it seems many of us forget that this, rather young, classification is very superficial, imprecise and a little bit forceful. In the beginnings of science (let me naively narrow the scope to &#8220;Aristotle and surroundings&#8221;) there was no division into [...]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=usrdoc.com&amp;blog=11718789&amp;post=546&amp;subd=wtfiuserdocumentation&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The discussion on whether linguistics is science or arts is very interesting and stimulating, but it seems many of us forget that this, rather young, classification is very superficial, imprecise and a little bit forceful. In the beginnings of science (let me naively narrow the scope to &#8220;Aristotle and surroundings&#8221;) there was no division into such &#8220;hard&#8221; and &#8220;soft&#8221; sciences &#8211; there was just &#8220;science&#8221; in the meaning of &#8220;using the head mainly to think and not to bang one&#8217;s head against a brick wall&#8221; (read: philosophy). However, it does seem that contemporary science needs such distinctions, as there are many scientists preferring the latter.</p>
<p>Michal</p>
<br />Filed under: <a href='http://usrdoc.com/category/nor/'>nor</a> Tagged: <a href='http://usrdoc.com/tag/art/'>art</a>, <a href='http://usrdoc.com/tag/science/'>science</a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/546/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/546/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godelicious/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/546/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/delicious/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/546/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gofacebook/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/546/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/facebook/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/546/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gotwitter/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/546/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/twitter/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/546/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gostumble/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/546/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/stumble/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/546/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/godigg/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/546/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/546/" /></a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/goreddit/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/546/"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/reddit/wtfiuserdocumentation.wordpress.com/546/" /></a> <img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=usrdoc.com&amp;blog=11718789&amp;post=546&amp;subd=wtfiuserdocumentation&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></content:encoded>
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		<title>Corpora-List Do you think LINGUISTICS is SCIENCE or ARTS?</title>
		<link>http://usrdoc.com/2010/03/25/corpora-list-do-you-think-linguistics-is-science-or-arts-21/</link>
		<comments>http://usrdoc.com/2010/03/25/corpora-list-do-you-think-linguistics-is-science-or-arts-21/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Mar 2010 22:29:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>efidetum</dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 4:02 AM, Yuri Tambovtsev wrote: Dear Corpora colleagues, Do you think LINGUISTICS is SCIENCE or ARTS? I think the discussion about linguistics using either the scientific or artistic methods, is quite interesting. Really, is it ARTS (the Humanities) or Science. If we divide this man activity into Sciences and [...]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=usrdoc.com&amp;blog=11718789&amp;post=539&amp;subd=wtfiuserdocumentation&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 4:02 AM, Yuri Tambovtsev wrote:</p>
<p>Dear Corpora colleagues, Do you think LINGUISTICS is SCIENCE or ARTS? I think the discussion about linguistics using either the scientific or artistic methods, is quite interesting. Really, is it ARTS (the Humanities) or Science. If we divide this man activity into Sciences and Arts, then linguistics for the exception of phonetics is Arts. Can linguistics reconstruct some parent language? We know that all the Romance languages have the parent language, i.e. Latin. But can linguists reconstruct Latin on the basis of Italian, Spanish, French and other Romance languages? The answer is NO. If linguistics had been SCience, then it would have been possible. But it is ARTS, thus it is impossible. Or am I mistaken? Looking forward to hearing from you either directly yutamb@mail.ru or via the net.</p>
<p>Be well, Yuri Tambovtsev<br />
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<p>This is a good question, but not one that can have a fully satisfying answer. Personally, I want to extend the title &#8220;linguist&#8221; to everyone who studies language in a serious way. Given that, I find myself confronted with a bewildering range of approaches, and little commonality between the activities of different kinds of linguist. The range clearly includes things that could be seen as physics or physiology, others that look more like philosophy, sociology, history, geography, psychology, various flavors of biology, lots of computer science, different kinds of pure and applied mathematics,<br />
anthropology, cultural studies, and so on, even up to astrobiology and cryptography. Some of these satisfy my internal gut feeling for what sciences are like, others not so much. Even the ones that don&#8217;t seem especially scientific have a tendency to fit squarely into the German term &#8220;Geisteswissenschaften&#8221;. Literally, this means &#8220;sciences of the spirit&#8221;, in practice it corresponds to what the Anglo-Saxons tend to call &#8220;Arts&#8221; or &#8220;Humanities&#8221;. By this stage in my thinking I am inclined to reject the dichotomy implied in the question.</p>
<p>I think Linguistics is a good example of why we should not worry too much about whether things are sciences, and why we should worry more about whether the work we are doing will make an important difference to anything that we care about. The second question is quite challenging enough.</p>
<p>Chris</p>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:31:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>efidetum</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[nor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[science]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[OK, I&#8217;ll bite a little bit as well &#8230; I can&#8217;t agree with &#8220;move the data to the computation&#8221;, unless you mean in general &#8220;get the computation and the data together in the same place&#8221;. The main thing is that once you are parallelizing /distributing work that involves tons and tons of data, network bandwidth [...]<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=usrdoc.com&amp;blog=11718789&amp;post=384&amp;subd=wtfiuserdocumentation&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>OK, I&#8217;ll bite a little bit as well &#8230;</p>
<p>I can&#8217;t agree with &#8220;move the data to the computation&#8221;, unless you mean in general &#8220;get the computation and the data together in the same place&#8221;. The main thing is that once you are parallelizing /distributing work that involves tons and tons of data, network bandwidth becomes a key resource, so reducing transportation needs is every bit as important as making individual computations fast and effective.</p>
<p>The astronomical and biomedical communities have been more or less on top of this for years, there are plenty of stories of researchers sharing data by mailing CDROMs around the place or even just sending hard drives around in the mail. But if the algorithm you&#8217;re coding up is orders of magnitude smaller than the data it will be run on, you move the code to the data not the data to the code. This is<br />
increasingly normal, that&#8217;s why we talk about datacenters not codecenters.</p>
<p>Best wishes,<br />
Dominic</p>
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