The People Behind The Manhattan Project

Here are some of the people central to the Manhattan Project that you should know about.

Albert Einstein

Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist known for his work on gravity, E=mc², and the quantum theory among other things.

On Epistemic Objectivity

The human mind is shaped by and tied to the language it speaks while communicating with other minds or itself.

We keep asking, “But what does it mean to say I know something?” or “What is knowledge?”. Think about it. What does this question presuppose? It presupposes that there is something called knowledge which we are trying to understand. In a mathematical context, the question “what is X?” is ill-posed unless X has been already defined in some form and now we are either asking for the definition or seeking to express what X is in a different form. When we ask what knowledge is, are we asking about the meaning of the word “knowledge” or the actual thing that this word talks about? Unless we answer the former, the latter is ill-posed. How do we investigate the meaning of words?

Why and How to Use Encrypted Emails

The Problem

Privacy (often misunderstood as secrecy) is recognised as a fundamental human right in almost all modern civil societies, and is a cornerstone of democracy. However, it goes without saying that all major free email service providers, such as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook.com etc., do not adhere to the highest standards of privacy protection. Although they have made their systems top notch in terms of convenience and security (from external attackers), your email communications are not private from them. Since you do not pay them for their service, they get their revenue elsewhere such as from advertisement companies to whom your data is the product. Anyway, even if they decide to stop using your email conversations for targeted advertisements, they still have the ability to read your personal correspondences at their convenience. They do not even need a warrant. A rogue top-level employee could read your emails for malicious purposes, for instance. Also, what about the idea of mass surveillance of whole populations by governments (for example, to suppress dissent or activism)? Are you comfortable with that kind of snooping (which is very different from a targeted search and seizure upon warranted suspicion of a crime)? Of course, all of this happens with your permission because you agreed to their privacy policy when you signed up for the free account.

What is Learning? — An Example of Linear Classification

Problem. Suppose that we are a bank trying to learn the creditworthiness of our current customers. Our resources include a database of the history of previous customers who have been already classified as defaulters or not. Based on this history, we are to learn the function $f$ which takes a customer as input and spits out the (binary) value of their creditworthiness ("yes" or "no").

[Assume that the customers are linearly separable.]