[Newspoetry] Hidden Markov Models: Beware the Sirens; They Wail for Thee

[DL Emerick]

The phrase:

""hidden Markov models,"

a method of statistical analysis in which the hidden characteristics of a thing
are guessed from what is known."  Found, again, today, in
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/business/yourmoney/25slip.html entitled

"Millions of Videos, and Now a Way to Search Inside Them"

 

Saw reference to this same phrase in the Species note I posted yesterday.

 

A hot-hot-hot, new fashionable term betokening a contemporary fad of science.

 

Don't get me wrong.  I've been hiding Markov Models for years, in my basement,
torturing them until they breakdown and tell me their secrets, confess their
undying love for me, and sundry other mentionable (but unmentioned here)
desirable properties.  Yes, indeed, we bare the secrets of nature.  Our
secretions are our way of being.  Thank the Endocrines, personally, the next
time you see them.

 

Ah, Markov model: here is how things move from one state to another.  Guess the
data transformative structure S, and apply it to the present distribution vector
V of the actual data.  Iterate N times, where Vi is formulated as VS**i, so
that, in the end (i may go to infinity), you reach some possible "constant"
"stable" cycle of transformation structures Sx1, Sx2, Sx3., where the cycle
length is k, and k may even be a unicycle.  I think I've got that about right.
Any system is chaotic if it is not stable, per terminological convention.

 

We'd call it speculative, if you can not show evidence for the transformative
structure.

 

This is easily applied as a "movers"-"stayers" algorithm.  Said algorithm is the
basis, of course, in the parsing theses of terminal languages, such as
functional computer language parsers, where all "true" meaning is literally a
singular legal operation, an act of the computer.  If it doesn't compute, it
doesn't compute.

 

Of course, natural languages (or their usages) do not necessarily compute.
Hence, the problem is deciding whether something is acting as it were computing
or not.  The thesis of the technological search of videos is relying on the
thesis (premise) that every the speeches in videos (or segments in them) are
computing something, and that the "meaning" of phoneme strings can be found
(decoded, as it were) as if they were intended to be words.  Usually, that's a
safe bet - especially in the commercial media of videos from TV shows and such.
And, the reason that is true is because, so we imagine, there is no ad-libbing -
there is a (hidden) script behind the play that is performed "live".

 

The thesis runs into challenges in the larger and darker (more muted) unscripted
regions of the world of language.  Or, sometimes, in trying to figure out what I
am talking about, an NP hard problem, even for me.  You see, there is no use to
much of what I say, and hence no meaning.  Just an image of something, wavering,
like a mirage in the desert.  A good image of a mirage may be found toward the
end of "Tom Sawyer, Abroad", a tale by Twain that I finally read this week,
along with other stories such as "TS, Detective" and good old "Number 44, the
Mysterious Stranger", where I am more than a quarter of the way through the
passage(way)s of the texts.

 

(you'd know this, too, if you had read this piece in the NYT, today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/24/books/24read.html

February 24, 2007  --  New York Times 2007 Copyright


Read It? No, but You Can Skim a Few Pages and Fake It 


By ALAN
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/alan_riding/index.
html?inline=nyt-per>  RIDING)

For Riding talks of the terrorism of cultural elitists - and makes a kind war
upon the fears of those terrorized.  Such is the lingo of the Times, the Nation,
that we find fear everywhere, and all is a (t)error, of one kind or another -
and some are still bombs and others stiller yet, duds, and some, alas, are alive
and thus killing you, in ordinance to unmake you.)

 

 

""To be able to talk with finesse about something one does not know is worth
more than the universe of books," he writes."   And, proof of that are Cheney
and Bush, in living color unmaking life's color.  "Never before have so many
been so misled for so long by so few." 

 

Seek you first the IUD, the hidden Molotov Cocktail model, the waitress at your
table, next, and Blinkx her - where iud could be either a contraceptive against
unplanned life or a planned end to an intended one.

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