Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Dirilis 11 Hari Lagi!

Belajar Komputer | Ubuntu adalah salah satu distro yang punya nama kode (code name) untuk tiap rilis barunya. Setelah Ubuntu 9.10 disebut dengan nama Karmic Koala, maka berdasarkan sebuah post resmi di Ubuntu Wiki, Ubuntu 10.04 akan dirilis dengan codename Lucid Lynx.

Lucid Lynx sendiri akan menjadi salah satu versi LTS (long time support) dari Ubuntu. Dengan demikian Lucid Lynx akan

Full-fat Dairy for Cardiovascular Health??

[2013 update: a few colleagues and I have published a comprehensive review paper on the association between full-fat dairy consumption and obesity, metabolic health, and cardiovascular disease.  You can find it here.]

I just saw a paper in the AJCN titled "Dairy consumption and patterns of mortality of
Australian adults". It's a prospective study with a 15-year follow-up period. Here's a quote from the abstract:

There was no consistent and significant association between total dairy intake and total or cause-specific mortality. However, compared with those with the lowest intake of full-fat dairy, participants with the highest intake (median intake 339 g/day) had reduced death due to CVD (HR: 0.31; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.12–0.79; P for trend = 0.04) after adjustment for calcium intake and other confounders. Intakes of low-fat dairy, specific dairy foods, calcium and vitamin D showed no consistent associations.

People who ate the most full-fat dairy had a 69% lower risk of cardiovascular death than those who ate the least. Otherwise stated, people who mostly avoided dairy or consumed low-fat dairy had more than three times the risk of dying of coronary heart disease or stroke than people who ate the most full-fat diary.  This result is an outlier, and also observational so difficult to interpret, but it certainly is difficult to reconcile with the idea that dairy fat is a significant contributor to cardiovascular disease.

Contrary to popular belief, full-fat dairy, including milk, butter and cheese, has never been convincingly linked to cardiovascular disease. What has been linked to cardiovascular disease is milk fat's replacement, margarine. In the Rotterdam study, high vitamin K2 intake was linked to a lower risk of fatal heart attack, aortic calcification and all-cause mortality. Most of the K2 came from full-fat cheese.

From a 2005 literature review on milk and cardiovascular disease in the EJCN:

In total, 10 studies were identified. Their results show a high degree of consistency in the reported risk for heart disease and stroke, all but one study suggesting a relative risk of less than one in subjects with the highest intakes of milk.

...the studies, taken together, suggest that milk drinking may be associated with a small but worthwhile reduction in heart disease and stroke risk.

...All the cohort studies in the present review had, however, been set up at times when reduced-fat milks were unavailable, or scarce.

gray and white...

makes for a nice, peaceful combination.....

*images courtesy of house and garden, plush palate, mackenzie horan, the city sage, yatzer, absolutely beautiful things, skona hem

On Fundamental Artificial Intelligence

Today I attended Mikhail Burtsev's lecture on evolutionary approach to AI. The lecture was hosted by Moscow Polytechnic Museum's lecture hall. First of all, the organization was great, and the quality of presentation was high. Unsurprisingly, the hall was almost totally occupied by the listeners. I recommend you to attend their lectures.

Mikhail talked a lot about the history and foundations of AI, which was not new to me. He did not bore the audience with the psychology-related stuff, but featured two approaches to AI, that have been being developed simultaneously all the way since 1950s: artificial neural networks and symbolic computational AI. ANNs attempt to model human brain functioning by means of artificial neurons and axons. The problem here is if we build even human-scale artificial brain (which was actually done in Allen Institute for Brain Science in 2005), it will be isolated from the world, and could not be trained like real human brain. Symbolic AI uses formal logic to solve the problems. It also suffers certain problems, like the lack of uncertainty. So, vanilla AI is in the period of stagnation now (it dates bake to the late 1980s, when Rodney Brooks started to criticize it).

Mikhail's point was the one that most researchers attempt to build a straight away model of human intelligence. He suggested to look at the evolution process. We need to start with understanding how the neural system of an amoeba operates, and then track the evolution of it to find out how a human being's mind works. Evolutionary algorithms might be useful there.

I cannot agree with that point. Last 50 years witnessed the failure of fundamental AI research. Their common problem was they tried to model some cognitive mechanisms instead of tackling actual problems, while those problems were being solved by different techniques. Consider the autonomous robot control problem (e.g. a robotic vacuum cleaner). It can be formulated in terms of reinforcement learning and solved by the methods not connected to the vanilla AI (dynamic programming-based, I suppose). Mikhail does not depart from the problem, again. So I don't really believe in success of the method. I am also sceptic to the computational methods inspired by biology. They could be a good starting point, but they used to be supplanted by mathematically founded ones.

Another issue raised in the discussion after the lecture was AI safety, which is probably the most popular philosophical question connected to AI. As far as I understood, there are two main concerns: the AI could become self-replicated (or self-improved) uncontrollably, and it could become self-motivated. If the AI is self-replicated, it is not so dangerous unless it is self-motivated. If it is motivated by a human, it is bad just like nuclear weapon, which is scary only if an evil party possesses it (so, nothing brand new here). If the AI will be motivated to gain the world domination, it could be harmful. But where such self-motivation can come from? In my opinion, the only option is the biological obsession to propagate (imagine some joint AI system with bio-motivator), but such a disaster has already been overcome once. Do you remember that rabbits in Australia? I hope, an uncontrolled AI won't be a bigger problem.

my DR chairs....

for my b'day last year i went to scott's and purchased 6 louis xvi chairs to go w/ my DR table. they have been great...so glad that i chose these b/c they are so comfortable and we sit in them all of the time. i knew i wanted to reupholster them....however, reupholstery doesn't come cheap. so i lived w/ the green chenille fabric on them until christmas. when my mom and mother-in-law asked me what i wanted, i quickly replied my DR chairs recovered! we got 4 done and as much as i hated it, i decided to go w/ double cording instead of the nailhead trim (it was sad to loose that look but let me just tell you, individual nail head trim adds about $50+ per chair to the cost). deciding the fabric was my next task. i wanted a stripe on the back...luckily, i had one yd of fabric leftover from a roman shade i had made (yep, the one that is now going into my son's room). so i was just debating b/w light and dark for the front. i loved two looks: one was what thomas o'brien did for dara caponigro's stylish abode and the other was ivanka trump's chairs. we opted for a chocolate brown linen/ cotton blend and i am so thankful i did....especially w/ young children....they show nothing. i wish i could show you them w/ the table but at this current time it's covered in cereal bowls leftover from breakfast, mail, and random magazines...and one of the chairs is sitting in the middle of the floor from where taylor was playing train! and to be honest, this is probably how my table looks 75% of the time :)

*top three images courtesy of domino, bottom two are mine