Breakthrough(?) in world's oldest undeciphered writing

Continuing our series on languages and technology, here is a recent article from the BBC on Proto-Elamite, an as yet undeciphered writing system. Proto-Elamite is, in fact, the world's oldest undeciphered writing system.

This international research project is already casting light on a lost bronze age middle eastern society where enslaved workers lived on rations close to the starvation level.

"I think we are finally on the point of making a breakthrough," says Jacob Dahl, fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and director of the Ancient World Research Cluster.

Dr Dahl's secret weapon is being able to see this writing more clearly than ever before.

In a room high up in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, above the Egyptian mummies and fragments of early civilisations, a big black dome is clicking away and flashing out light.

This device, part sci-fi, part-DIY, is providing the most detailed and high quality images ever taken of these elusive symbols cut into clay tablets. This is Indiana Jones with software.

Why has deciphering this writing system has (thus far) been challenging?

Dr Dahl suspects he might have part of the answer. He's discovered that the original texts seem to contain many mistakes - and this makes it extremely tricky for anyone trying to find consistent patterns.

This first case of educational underinvestment proved fatal for the writing system, which was corrupted and then completely disappeared after only a couple of hundred years. "It's an early example of a technology being lost," he says.

From the headline "breakthrough in world's oldest undeciphered writing system", one would be led to believe that the news item is announcing a breakthrough but, in fact, it is only talking about a potential breakthrough.

Update: Linked here is a paper by Graeme Earl, Kirk Martinez and Tom Malzbender that describes the technology that the article is referencing. Tom Malzbender is at HP Labs from right here in the Bay Area with multiple publications related to image processing including in SIGGRAPH and ACM Multimedia. This research work is what the article should be talking about but is not.

Gospel of Jesus' Wife forged?

There has been a recent paper, a recent newspaper article and a recent blog post on a possible forgery with the so called Gospel of Jesus' Wife text. Click on the links above for the paper as well as post.

Just when you might have thought that the story of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife was dying down, there is another twist in the tale.  Andrew Bernhard has just published the following piece:

How The Gospel of Jesus' Wife Might Have Been Forged: A Tentative Proposal

I am going to cut to the chase and offer an "executive summary" of what I regard as the most important contention::

Line 1 of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment copies a typo from a website interlinear of Coptic Thomas

Update 1 (Oct 29): I just knew they would be using one fancy-shmancy technology or the other sooner or later in reviewing this claim. So I kind of preemptively talked about it on the blog. In this case, mailing list technology appears to have been used it. See? I knew it.

Update 2 (Oct 29): Seriously speaking, what is amusing is that while the above Guardian article lays out the true picture of what happened, a previous Telegraph article on the same topic came to a series of incorrect conclusions. The article is now ridiculously funny to read. None of the contentions of the writer Tom Holland in the article, in fact, hold any water. You can also step over right this way to the sad little site hosted by Harvard where they talk about this unfortunately baseless historical claim. (Sad because it is just looking pretty forlorn given how much the original text itself has fallen in favor, and sad for oh-so-many-other reasons.) But, but, but back to the topic. But if you go back and read my email to Noam Chomsky that I had posted on my blog before, it is still pretty accurate. So the final scores are : Tom Holland - wrong. Harvard professor - wrong. Anand - right. But of course! You already knew that, dear reader. 

The world isn't flat

Pankaj Ghemawat makes an excellent case in this TED talk that the world isn't flat. I had helped with a journal article on the topic of globalization and had the opportunity to look into this area a bit. In fact, we had cited Ghemawat's work in this area because we found his analysis to be quite top notch. I, for one, am convinced that regional economics have limited levels of interaction and that the world isn't flat. To hear Ghemawat's perspective, you can start right about here.

TED Talk : human-computer symbiosis

A TED talk by Shyam Sankar on what he calls human-computer symbiosis. I know his wife Pooja Nath a little from my time at Oracle. She is now CEO of Piazza, a Q&A website for colleges ad classrooms. Check out the talk. Check out Piazza. Enjoy!

Update (Oct 23): My main comment on this is that I don't think there is anything particularly different about Big Data insofar as human communication with computers goes and so the idea of human-computer symbiosis does not appear to be a novel one per se.

Stanford scientist Brian Kobilka wins Nobel

Stanford's Brian Kobilka has won the Chemistry Nobel Prize jointly with Robert Lefkowitz for his work on G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs).

The receptors, which snake in and out of the cell membrane, serve as one of the main methods of communication within the body — conveying chemical messages into the cell's interior from outside through the membrane. Over the course of the last three decades, Kobilka and his colleague Robert Lefkowitz, MD, with whom Kobilka shares the prize, have played an important role in discovering and understanding GPCRs. Last year, Kobilka was the first to crystallize and analyze one of the receptors bound to its signaling molecule, which is a critical step toward understanding how to control them.

Roughly 800 different GPCRs have been identified to date, making them one of the largest families of human proteins. These proteins regulate the beating of our hearts, the workings of our brains and nearly every other physiological process. About 40 percent of all medications target these receptors, including Zyprexa, which is used to treat schizophrenia; the antihistamine Clarinex; and Zantac, which is used for stomach ulcers and gastro-esophageal reflux disease. GPCRs are also involved in some kinds of drug addictions, such as addiction to morphine and other opiates.

The self-organizing computer course

Shimon Shocken on TED :

Office hours

The office hours for October was on October 1. The next office hours are on November 5 and December 3 between 7:30 and 8:15 a.m. Office hours have usually been on the first Monday of every month between 7:30 and 8:15 a.m. 

Update(Oct 23): There will be additional office hours on November 19 and December 17 at the same time (between 7:30 and 8:15 am PST).