philosophically, i agree with with daniel that the name 'Harmonic'
requires a spring constant.
to make everybody happy, i would propose a new name for functions
that call the harmonic functions, but have spatial parameters as an
input. for example LogGauss, LogUpperDistanceGauss or whatever you
agree with.
is anybody be willing to contribute something like that to the
kernel (i am an official application guy, so the kernel is 'tabu'
for me)? i think the current workaround, i.e. introducing scaling
parameters through the back-door, is a bit unsatisfactory and will
confuse most users.
I agree that adding a new set of scoring functions in the most
satisfactory response. There is still the question of whether we
should use straight standard deviation (so the energy is simply
delta^2/ (2*sigma^2)) or have scaling factors as in the old harmonic.