The Tetherless World Weblog

The joy of multiple blog sites is having to post pointers to one blog entry from another.

My blog at nature.com now has an entry entitled “The Semantic Web: My personal (unofficial) FAQ” which lives at http://network.nature.com/people/jhendler/blog/2009/08/03/the-semantic-web-my-personal-unofficial-faq. Comments, and especially your suggestions for Qs and As are more than welcome there or here (or anywhere else for that matter)

Cheers,

Jim H.

Colleagues - one of my blog entries at Nature seems to have hit a nerve - been zinging around the “twittersphere” and I’ve received a number of responses in private not just commiserating, but agreeing with the major points.  I want to make it clear that this is solely my own opinion, and it has not been carefully researched, but given that so many US Semantic Web researchers have shared the frustration that I express here, I thought I’d share it on planetRDF as well  (Europeans, believe it or not, on this side of the ocean it is hard to get funding for Semantic Web research - you have no idea how lucky you are!)

-Jim H

from blog entry: “Why NSF cannot fund high-risk, high-reward research”

For whatever reason, I’ve recently been asked several time about my quote “A little semantics goes a long way” - I sent a long email answer to one of these, and then realized I could make it into a web page to point people at should this come up again — so for those of you looking for a little light background reading, and interested, enjoy.  http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~hendler/LittleSemanticsWeb.html

During some random Web surfing (something I don’t get nearly enough time to do these days), I ran into the Science blogging Challenge (aka “get a senior scientist blogging”) and it got me thinking about how I got blogging, and more recently how I got twittering (which seems to fit my insane life style better). I sent the following entry to the competition, nominating a few people who were instrumental in getting me blogging and more recently getting me to tweet.

Here’s what I said:

My motivation to start blogging actually came because of a different senior scientist starting his blog — In Jan 06, one of my colleagues started a blog - and it got some big notice — since the blogger was Tim Berners-Lee that made some sense, My first real blog (I had contributed blog comments and done an occasional “guest shot” on other peoples blogs) was called “Time to get a blog” and mentions the influence of Tim’s bloggin. I cannot tell you who convinced Tim to blog, but I know that Danny Weitzner, whose blog is at http://people.w3.org/~djweitzner/blog/, was one of the influences.
However, Tim’s starting to blog is the thing that got me to finally do it, but the person who really got me blogging is Jennifer Golbeck, (who blogs in a bunch of different places) who is the one who convinced me to get my act together and walk the walk if I was going to claim to be a Professor of All Things Web, as I now try to be - she’s also the one who got me signed up on orkut, facebook (beta) and a bunch of other social networking sites long before it became popular - and if I’m not mistaken she’s probably the person who got me my gmail invitation way back when - so Jen should definitely be someone considered in the “I got a senior scientist to blog” category.
Meanwhile, the propagation continues - Peter Fox, who attended this past Sci Foo, and is an occasional blogger has joined my lab, and he and I are trying to convince several of our colleagues, esp. Deborah McGuinness, to get blogging.
I’d also like to point out that while blogging continues to be interesting to look at as a mechanism for propagating science, I’m finding these days that microblogging (i’m jahendler on twitter) has been gaining popularity, especially among the Social Scientists - and it may be an even better way for some of the busy senior scientists you’re trying to reach out to (if they can just learn to use the messaging on their cell phones). I credit “eingang” (Michelle Hoyle - http://einiverse.eingang.org/) for getting me twittering, and I notice that a quick message from my phone during a lecture or seminar is a good way to share a thought or a pointer (although I find it also is fun to add personal observations and such - so it humanizes the scientists who use it)
So anyway - there are three entries for the contest
Danny Weitzner for helping to get Tim Berners-Lee blogging
Jen Golbeck for getting me blogging
Michele Hoyle for getting me micro-blogging
cheers
Jim H.

url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_translation

“Radical translation is a term invented by American philosopher W. V. O. Quine to describe the situation in which a linguist is attempting to translate a completely unknown language, which is unrelated to his own, and is therefore forced to rely solely on the observed behavior of its speakers in relation to their environment.”

“Quine tells a story (Quine 1960) to illustrate his point, in which an explorer is trying to puzzle out the meaning of the word “gavagai”. He observes that the word is used in the presence of rabbits, but is unable to determine whether it means ‘undetached rabbit part’, or ‘fusion of all rabbits’, or ‘temporal stage of a rabbit’, or ‘the universal ‘rabbithood’”

“radical translation” carries the similar criticism to strong AI as chinese room by John Searle

“…(Searle 1980), which attempts to show that a symbol-processing machine like a computer can never be properly described as having a “mind” or “understanding“, regardless of how intelligently it may behave.”

While language translation is by itself a very interesting work, I would wonder when Chinese was translated into English for the first time. Here are some examples:

1. Proper names of real world entities, such as elephant (象）, can be easily translated.

2. Functionary figures such as dragon （龙） carries different meanings

3. non-accessible things, such as the philosophical term Tao (道), causes more difficulties because they themselves do not have a clear cut definition in their native language.

4. Another example is the term china,which is also used to refer high-quality porcelain or ceramic ware, originally made in China. This sense is a good example of radical translation, where Quine’s “rabbit” was replaced by porcelain and “gavagai” was replaced by “china”.

The above philosophical arguments and real world translation examples lead to the following thoughts on the social norms:

1. meaning is rather Quine’s ontological commit, where the definition is socially agreed

2. while understanding and translation may be done by one person, the correctness of these actions is evaluated by social peers

3. it is worthy to read Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality (1995), (wikipedia provided a nice briefing)

Li Ding, 2008-12-11