Monday, September 27, 2010

News on Education

Greetings:

Usually, I watch only two stations here in the DFW area for news: NBC Channel 5 and CBS Channel 11. On one of the local news casts today, on a story concerning the problems that educators face, those in the story and those reporting the story made the following errors (among many that I have now forgotten) in English:

"Dey wuz" [They WERE]
"... where dey wuz going to." [THEY WERE GOING. NO "to" is necessary.]

I quit listening after that and switched over to another channel. That was really embarrassing to hear supposedly educated newscasters and educators use such horrible English. After all, how can the comment on the poor education that "dem kids" are receiving when they themselves cannot properly use the language.

Perhaps ALL of them (educators and news casters alike) should return to class in another state, (say, California or Nebraska or a city like Boston or Chicago) and RE-train themselves in the English language. The way that the language is taught and spoken here in the DFW area is both alarming and depressing - at the same time.

I think that the biggest offenders here in DFW are the following:
  • mis-pronouncing words (Wuz for Was, Day for They, Dem for Them)
  • Ending a sentence in a verb or preposition
  • split infinitives
  • using an adjective for an adverb ("He done real good on the test." Even, "He did really good on the test." is not proper English. "He really did well on the test.") "He was driving bad." rather than "He was driving poorly." Adverbs are used to modify a verb and usually end in "ly". Just a guide.
I don't know which is the most common mistake - probably the pronunciation of words. Even NBC nightly news is guilty of really poor grammer and speech. Maybe that's why I listen to them; to prove to myself that even the "big boys and girls" make really common mistakes when excited or animated.

Please, at the Rules Fest, PLEASE allow an English grammarian to look over your presentation for obvious mistakes. Make the speech for them and have them correct your pronunciation of the words into what is sometimes referred to as "Nebraskan English" (if you are an American - USA) or "Posh English" (if you are European.) I doesn't matter how intelligent you are; if you don't speak properly in front of your peers they will think that you are not terribly bright.

Oh, and if I make a mistake, PLEASE correct me privately later. Remember, nobody is perfect - not even linguistic majors. (I have the evidence on file.) And, for some reason, when excited and speaking at a high rate of speed, I sometimes revert to old habits.

SDG
jco

Monday, September 20, 2010

Rete-NT Formally Announced

Greetings:

OK, it's now official. See


for the InfoWorld articles on Rete-NT, the fastest rulebase on earth. The first is the Developer World article and the second is the InfoWorld Blog article. And, here's the really cool part; it's customer driven, everyone gets the same low-ball price ($5K / cpu / year) and any vendor that uses the Rete Algorithm in any form can add it to their engine with the help of Dr. Forgy. If the vendor doesn't want to hire Dr. Forgy, then they can hire whomever they like - but since millions of dineros will be depending on this, I think that I would want the inventor himself to oversee the integration of the Rete-NT into my product. Also, Rete-NT, like all of the PST products before, comes with it's own rulebase language called OPSJ - very similar to JRules and Drools language but a bit more powerful. BTW, the engine itself takes only 100K of RAM.

Dr. Forgy will be at Rules Fest 2010 in San Jose to answer any questions you might have but Rete-NT is proprietary to Production Systems Technology (PST). You might say that this is like the Borland Turbo-C/C++ when they charged only $50 for a better product than other vendors were selling for anywhere from $1,000 (M/S) to $5,000 (IBM) or something like that. That made the C/C++ IDE available to every college student in the world.

Think about it. A corporation could buy the Rete-NT for their servers and improve performance by 100 times or more in some cases, by only 10 times in the worst cases. When you are processing millions of transactions per minute (or even per second) you need the very fastest thing that you can get; and Rete-NT is it.

SDG
jco


Saturday, September 18, 2010

ORC at Rules Fest 2010

ANNOUNCEMENT FOR RULES FEST 2010 ATTENDEES

At 5:00 on Monday, Oct 11th, shortly after the final presentation for that day, The Royal and Ancient Order of the Red Cane will award Dr. Charles Forgy and Gary Riley lifetime and voting memberships in ORC (The Royal and Ancient Order of the Red Cane) for their continued contributions to rulebased systems and their refusal to believe that something can't be done - so they did it.

Gary Riley primarily will be awarded ORC membership because he is a pioneer of AI and rulebased systems (along with many others) and for his continued development of a C/C++ rulebased product (CLIPS) and up through and including version 6.3 which has been tested by independent laboratories and has an amazing performance on a par with Rete-2.

Dr. Forgy primarily will be awarded ORC membership for the development of the OPS language itself that upon which most rulebased languages were founded after that time as well as for for the development Rete (3,000 times faster than existing programs), Rete-2 (50 times faster than Rete) and Rete-NT (10 times faster than Rete-2).

Both will be lifetime memberships (both are over 40 so who knows how long that will be?) and both will be voting members on who will be future receipiants of ORF. Also, this will keep the ORF acronym alive for many years to come even though some members of myriad organizations and several vendors tried to kill it off. :-)

SDG
jco

Phinehas Ben Yaakov

Greetings:

Phinehas Ben Yaakov (http://Phinehas2.blogspot.com) has taken over the blog of Yaakov2 (of Sweetwater, Texas) on WordPress. Phinehas 2 because Phinehas 1 was a compatriot of Moshe. Phinehas is a bit of a zealot and should make for some interesting reading. Yaakov is pushing 80 now and is still a brilliant mind but he has grown weary of idiots and G-d has allowed him a bit of "Rest in the West" before he joins his fathers. Enjoy...

SDG
jco

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Rules Fest 2010 Conference - Sep 11th - 14th

Greetings:

[The new organizers dropped the "October" part.] OK, if you haven't signed up yet, DO IT NOW!! http://www.rulesfest.org - and be sure and stay at the hotel so Jason doesn't lose his whatevers like yours truly.

If you live in the San Jose / San Francisco (Silly Valley) area, you have no reason NOT to come. Most of the geeks and nerds in the world live and work there so the location this year seemed like a good idea when they first came up with it. Still is. But, remember, space will be limited both at the hotel and the conference.

Great speakers, great friendships, and you get to meet all those guys and corner them with your most perplexing problems. Especially Mark Proctor and Jason Morris. :-)

SDG
jco