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RE: [Asrg] Re: "ham" is ridiculous -was- Re: False Positive

2003-04-03 09:31:22

"Ham" was used by almost every single presenter at the MIT 
conference. It's a recent term, but it's very much in use. Language 
changes, welcome to the world :-)

And almost every speaker was also choosen to support paul Graham's
claim that its all about Bayesian filtering. It was not an unbiased
sample, nor was it a particularly usefull sample.

I thought the term ham was irritating at the time. In particular
ham has pretty bad associations for at least two major world faiths
so it seems somewhat odd to use that categorization. It is also
tiresome to have people mumbling into microphones two words that
are chosen because they sound almost alike to mean opposite things.

Imagine what happens when you get a native French speaker:

"our algorithm correctly identified 90% of zee 'am and 95% of 
'zee 'am"

It is bad enough getting americans to say the word herbs properly
but there is no H sound in French.

The problem with the MIT conference was that most presentations were
glib. I don't intend to use the term 'ham' and I would suggest other's
avoid it if they want to be taken seriously. If we produce documents
in this group and they use that term others will think less of them
because of that. So why do it?


                Phill

 
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