Lovely typos

Better cowhouse

The temperature of a cowhouse is unnecessarily high for the cows. One cow sweats approx. one bucket a day, so there is much energy going to waist.

--from a random find

The pen is mightier than the sword, but not the superhero

A true tale from Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner)

Kennedy Stetson, son of the famous Stetson hat company founder, saw a gang of Ku Klux Klansmen tie the family's black maid Flo to a tree and gang rape her for talking back to a white trolley driver who had short-changed her.

Historian Wyn Craig Wade would later write, in his book about the KKK called The Fiery Cross, that Kennedy was "the single most important factor in preventing a post-war revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the north."

Kennedy's plan was simple: he would join the Klan and bring it down from the inside. Within just a few weeks of membership, Kennedy had compiled all the secret passwords, secret language (I'm looking for Mr. Ayak (translation: are you a klansmen?)), and had figured out its corporate structure with proof that the KKK was a slick profit-making, very political organization.

With information comes power, and Kennedy began wielding it. He passed Klan information to the Assistant Attorney General of Georgia, a known anti-clan buster. He presented to the Governor of Georgia the evidence on which the Klan's corporate charter--registering the KKK as a non-profit, non-political organization--was revokable.

The only thing was, it didn't work.

Like a creeping weed that infests the garden by an intricate root system from the bottom up, the KKK was deeply entrenched in the business, politics and law enforcement of the day. It seemed hopeless.

Until Superman literally came to the rescue. In an a-ha moment worthy of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, Stetson Kennedy wrote to the producers of The Adventures of Superman, a radio show broadcast at dinnertime to millions across the nation. Turns out that the show's producers were looking for new villains, having exhausted Hitler, Mussolini, and the like. Kennedy gladly handed over all the secret information he had gathered and the producers wrote four week's worth of programming.

Almost instantly, Klan members started seeing their kids making a mockery of the KKK's most intimate rituals and code words. Towels and pillowcases tied around their heads, running around looking for Mr. Ayak and shouting chants...

In short, Klansmen were humiliated.

Membership applications plummeted and the Klan was never the same again.

It's a good thing that the KKK never had any kryptonite.

Chemical fingers

Can machine learning be enhanced by tactile experience, as in human learning? Well, why not put these chemical fingers on your robot and give it a learning task!

New Sensor Feels Fine

By Adrian Cho
ScienceNOW Daily News
8 June 2006

Even our super-sensitive fingertips would be hard-pressed to top this: A high-tech touch sensor can feel out the likeness of Abraham Lincoln on a penny. Rivaling the human fingertip's sensitivity to texture, the new sensor could give robots a finer sense of the objects they manipulate and help surgeons feel as well as see their way around the insides of the body.

Engineers can give robots eyes and ears by equipping them with video cameras and microphones. But enduing robots with a sense of touch is far more difficult. Simple sensors can tell a machine whether it is in contact with something, but detectors that also sense texture tend either to be too complicated and delicate for commercial use or lack the spatial resolution needed to detect details dozens of micrometers across. Now, chemical engineers Vivek Maheshwari and Ravi Saraf of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, have developed a relatively simple and sturdy sensor that can sense texture about as well as a human fingertip can.

The device is a film roughly 100 nanometers thick. Within it lie alternating layers of nanoparticles of gold and cadmium sulfide separated by films of polymer. The electrically charged gold nanoparticles repel each other, and because they don't touch, no current can flow along the film. However, if a voltage is applied from one side of the film to the other, electrons can pass from one layer of gold to the next by burrowing through the cadmium sulfide nanoparticles in between. When this happens, the cadmium sulfide nanoparticles emit light. The amount of current flowing and light produced increases dramatically as the various layers are squeezed together. Thus, when something textured presses into it, the electrified film will shine brightest where the object's bumps and bulges push in the farthest, creating a pattern of light that can be imaged with a digital camera.

Maheshwari and Saraf used the film to feel a penny and were able to resolve the tiny lettering on the coin. The detector can measure features as small as 40 micrometers cross and 5 micrometers tall--about as well as the human fingertip.

"There's something novel, something really good about this," says Richard Crowder, an electrical engineer at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. "You put a film on your robotic finger, and you've got your signal." The challenge, he adds, is incorporating a camera into the fingertip. But Saraf says it should be possible to detect the current flowing through the film directly, obviating the camera.

Page design to direct the reader's eye

Visualization is a common theme in Novelvig. Here is a short but clear guidline for page design by Christine Sevilla.

Effective page design maps a viewer's route through information. When designing information, your objective is to lead the viewer's eye directly to your message. Readers of English read from left to right and from the top of the page to the bottom. (The typical page-scanning pattern actually follows a Z). This habit of left-to-right eye movement dominates most design decisions in the West and is the basis for most conventional graphic design of print publications.

Minipreneurship

Worth thinking about!

http://www.allbusiness.com/marketing-advertising/internet-marketing/3871396-1.html

MINIPRENEURS': a vast army of consumers turning entrepreneurs; including small and micro businesses, freelancers, side-businesses, weekend entrepreneurs, web-driven entrepreneurs, part-timers, free agents, cottage businesses, seniorpreneurs, co-creators, mompreneurs, pro-ams, solopreneurs, eBay traders, advertising-sponsored bloggers and so on.

Take the end user with a grain of salt

"If I had asked the public what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

-Henry Ford

The Honda story

This is an anecdote about Honda passed on by one of the professors of my innovation class. I haven't independently verified its accuracy (ELFS), but here it is anyway.

The story goes that Honda was studying how to penetrate the American car market. They sent over some analysts to probe the situation and do some market research. They failed. They could find no way to interest Americans in Honda cars. They gave up. Just before they were scheduled to leave, one of these analysts goes shopping on his little Honda motorbike, and a randomly-encountered random stranger saw this bike and exclaimed surprise and admiration for this novel piece of small-bike engineering. No one had seen anything quite like it.

The analyst was hit with an idea. Perhaps the way in to America was not through cars, which had been the plan, but through little motorcycles.

And the rest is automotive history.

Ben Franklin in Stockholm

The reciprocity norm, tit for tat, the golden rule, the many names of the basic decency in us. At the same time a bayesian-evolutionary cooperative Nash equilibrium to which we have successfully converged.

The rule of reciprocation gives us a strong gut feeling that good deeds ought to be returned, which results in community cohesion and competitive advantage for a group, a society and a whole species. Those who only take and never give are usually hated, punished and ostracized (unless they manage to go unobserved).

Just as our preference for sweet-tasting food (ripe fruits) has been hijacked by the chocolate industry, our reciprocation sense is ruthlessly exploited by marketers, salespeople and master negotiators. When we taste a food sample from the supermarket, we feel obliged to buy something, or at least to listen carefully to the sales pitch. When we get a candy with the receipt, we feel obliged to buy more next time, even if we know it is a cheap trick. When we are flattered, we are more likely to give favors even though we claim to be rational and just. To avoid being seen (or seeing oneself) as ingrate or as a moocher, we overcompensate and engage in disproportionate reciprocation to the great satisfaction of waiters and cab drivers.

People are nice: researchers sent out "Merry Christmas" postcards to random strangers, and got enthusiastic replies from a significant portion of them. Many of the recipients added them to their list of friends to send postcards to on all occasions (this was before people got used to spam).

Nothing revolutionary so far, just Marketing and Psychology 101. The surprise lies in a more subtle and somewhat contradictory phenomenon, the Ben Franklin effect.

An acute observer, Benjamin Franklin noticed that political opponents became more sympathetic and easier to persuade if at some point he asked them a small favor, such as to borrow a book from them. They were both flattered and comforted by the fact that Ben Franklin owed them a book/favor.

Distilled in B.F.'s own words:

He that has once done you a Kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.

The psychological explanation is that people engage in post hoc rationalizing: "Why did I do a favor to this person ?" "It must be because I like him so much."

The effect readily explains a large number of social phenomena and has been tried experimentally: participants in an experiment were given cash reward. After the experiment the professor asked some participants (randomly selected) to give back the reward (on some made up grounds). Most of them complied. In a later study, those who were asked to give the money back were found to have a much better opinion of the professor than those who were not asked such favor.

At an extreme, this might explain the Stockholm-syndrome as well (where captives become sympathetic to their captors).

If one can prepare to defend against an exploit of the reciprocation norm, by simply not asking or accepting favors, the Ben Franklin effect is devastating: you ask me a small favor in order to ask a greater one later and I will gladly comply. You abuse me, and I'll love you even more. A tragic corollary of this effect is that in war we end up hating our victims. The more innocent they are, the more negative our feelings become.

But how can both effects work at the same time, how can they be reconciled when there is seemingly a contradiction ? Are there some cases in which one is stronger than the other ?
Does it depend on whether the favor is asked for or not, or on some other variable ? Are there personality types more vulnerable to one or the other ? How to prepare against being tricked by car-salesmen who use one of these effects ? Where is a resident psychologist when we need one ?

Science and fundraising

A candid piece in PLoS Biology about grantsmanship and its ills, the stifling of creativity due to insecurity and poor criteria for evaluating proposals etc.

Borges the post-modern

Revisiting Borges (previous visit), a hilarious short story is Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote (link to Engl. translation).

It is the fictitious inventory and literary criticism of the lifework of a certain symbolist poet, Pierre Menard. The author has left behind many works, for example:

e) A technical article on the possibility of improving the game of chess, eliminating one of the rook’s pawns. Menard proposes, recommends, discusses and finally rejects this innovation.

However, most notable is his "Don Quixote" which is (spoiler alert) a word-by-word recreation of Cervantes' original.

So the critique goes:

In spite of these three obstacles, Menard’s fragmentary Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes’. The latter, in a clumsy fashion, opposes to the fictions of chivalry the tawdry provincial reality of his country; Menard selects as his “reality” the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vega. What a series of espagnolades that selection would have suggested to Maurice Barrès or Dr. Rodríguez Larreta! Menard eludes them with complete naturalness. In his work there are no gypsy flourishes or conquistadors or mystics or Philip the Seconds or autos da fé. He neglects or eliminates local color. This disdain points to a new conception of the historical novel. This disdain condemns Salammbô, with no possibility of appeal.

just to build up for the main pun:

It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

“. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.”

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

“. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.”

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor —are brazenly pragmatic.

The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.

With this 1939 piece, says the anonymous expert from wikipedia:

Borges anticipates the post-modern theory that gives centrality to reader response [citation needed].

Taxonomy of technical results

ok, ok, I'm back ...

here's a proposed taxonomy of technical results / scientific papers:

a technical result is a(n)
elegant/ugly
solution/non-solution to a(n)
difficult/easy
problem/non-problem.

We all hope (imagine?) to be producing elegant solutions to difficult problems, when more often we create ugly non-solutions to easy non-problems.

Is there any part of the science landscape not fitting onto this chart ?

How to motivate creatives?

This has become something of a recurring theme in our discussions. Anyway, here are two links addressing the aspects of creative work environments some of us seek and wish to create.

This and this.

Ten Simple Rules for Choosing between Industry and Academia

Just spotted this piece in the current issue of PLoS Computational Biology by David B Searls.

One of the most significant decisions we face as scientists comes at the end of our formal education. Choosing between industry and academia is easy for some, incredibly fraught for others. The author has made two complete cycles between these career destinations, including on the one hand 16 years in academia, as grad student (twice, in biology and in computer science), post-doc, and faculty, and on the other hand 19 years in two different industries (computer and pharmaceutical). The following rules reflect that experience, and my own opinions.

Here's the list:
1. Assess your qualifications
2. Assess your needs
3. Assess your desires
4. Assess your personality
5. Consider the alternatives
6. Consider the timing
7. Plan for the long term
8. Keep your options open
9. Be analytic
10. Be honest with yourself

Opium and colonialism

Excerpt from Tastes of paradise: a social history of spices, stimulants and intoxicants, by W. Schivelbusch:

"The East India Co had enjoyed a lively trade relationship with with Chinese Empire ever since the 17th century. The various chinoiseries that were all the rage among the European upper classes--tea, silk, porcelain--represented lucrative items of trade. In the 17th and early 18th century, when the Middle Empire was still an equal partner of the European powers, these articles were regularly paid for in cash, because the Chinese had no use for anything the Europeans could offer them in exchange.

However, the situation changed during the 18th century when the Chinese Empire grew proportionately weaker as the European powers, above all England, became more and more agressive. Trade between equal partners was transformed into a trade dictatorship by the East India Co, which enforced its will by means of its own militia. Instead of continuing to pay for Chinese products in cash, the company now offered a special trade item, opium. It was a cheap commodity for the company, produced on a large scale on its plantations in India. Estimates are that between 1767 and 1850, in less than a century, Chinese opium consumption increased 70-fold. Obviously, such an increase brought far-reaching social consequences. The comparision with the English gin epidemic springs to mind. One might also compare the role opium played in China since the 18th century with that of coffee in Europe since the 17th century: the stagnation of sociopolitical life in China, one might say, was reflected in opium consumption, just as the early capitalist activity of Western Europe was reflected in its coffee consumption.

It is astounding how deliberately and systematically the colonial masters were able to deploy opium to this end. They took it for granted, of course, that this commodity was to be used only outside their homeland. The East India Co itself, the instigator and chief beneficiary of the opium trade, declared in a statement of 1813 how repugnant a thing it considered opium."

Are you Free Software or Open Source? Trusted or Treacherous?

I came across this interesting interview with Richard Stallman, the lead developer of the GNU operating system and one of the founders of the Free Software Movement. What I found interesting is that the story behind Linux and GNU actually represent two completely different ideologies that essentially produced the same outcome: that of software for free use/distribution/modification.

GNU is socially-motivated: it was created with the "goal of liberating cyberspace" from non-free software, based on four essential user freedoms. The first step needed for the Free Software Movement was to create an operating system, and so, from 1983-1992, Stallman and thousands of others hacked one out based on the non-free Unix platform, calling it GNU, which stands for "GNU is not Unix". (Stallman later comments on the obvious contradiction of needing non-free software in order to create free software, prompting the interviewer to point out Ghandi's similar dilemma when he asked, in his Hind Swaraj, "How can one argue against western civilization using a printing press and writing in English'?)

According to Stallman, Linus Torvalds was motivated to create his Linux kernel "in order to amuse himself and learn". He ended up making the kernel that would allow GNU to run--the missing piece that the GNU team needed (theirs was not getting very far, it seems). "Torvalds never agreed with our ideas. He was not a proponent of the ethical aspects of our ideas or a critic of the antisocial nature of non-free software. He just claimed that our software was technically superior to particular competitors."

And so, the GNU+Linux operating system was born, but everyone just calls it Linux. To Stallman, the name abbreviation represents two short-comings: the first fails to acknowledge the the thousands of people who started the project and did the majority of the grunt work, and who therefore deserve a share of the credit, and the second one undercuts the fight for freedom on which the initiative was based. According to Stallman, "Today tens of millions of users are using an operating system that was developed so they could have freedom -- but they don't know this, because they think the system is Linux and that it was developed by a student 'just for fun'...You cannot rely on accidents to defend freedom. Accidents can sometimes help, but you need people who are aware and determined to do this".

And so it was that by 1996 there was a split in the community on goals: the Free Software side was campaigning for the freedoms of the individual user, creating a superior product in the process, and the Open Source camp was driven to use the intelligence of crowd-outsourcing to create a superior product.

Essentially, the superiority of the product was as a positive by-product for the GNU/Free Software movement that upheld its ideals of freedom, whereas for Torvalds and the Open Sourcers, the superiority of the product was itself the goal.

In the case of operating systems, both sides can have their cake and eat it too. No one has to sacrifice any principals to get what they want. Would one have happened without the other? Are they two sides of the same coin?

The last third of the interview puts everything in a much larger persepective that minimizes the the differences between Free vs. Open Source ideologies relative to their similarities. Both are fighting proprietariness, encoded in the large machinery of patent laws and governement regulations. An analysis of Linux in 2004 showed that it violates 283 different US software patents. The US outlawed a free software program called DECSS that plays DVDs, and is pressuring other countries to do the same. And then there's "treacherous computing", or "trusted computing", depending on which side you are on. Apparently, the XBox produced by Microsoft (and now replaced by the XBox 360) is a mini-example: it prevents users from installing any software without Microsoft authorization. Stallman paints a pretty grim picture:

The technical idea underlying treacherous computing is that the computer includes a digital encryption and signature device, and the keys are kept secret from you. Proprietary programs will use this device to control which other programs you can run, which documents or data you can access, and what programs you can pass them to. These programs will continually download new authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules automatically on your work. If you don't allow your computer to obtain the new rules periodically from the Internet, some capabilities will automatically cease to function.

Programs that use treacherous computing will continually download new authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules automatically on your work. If Microsoft, or the US government, does not like what you said in a document you wrote, they could post new instructions telling all computers to refuse to let anyone read that document. Each computer would obey when it downloads the new instructions. Your writing would be subject to 1984-style retroactive erasure. You might be unable to read it yourself.

Is this a real possibility? Will a free hardware movement led by hardware engineers become necessary to sustain free/open software? Or, at the end of the day, will superiority of the product be the ultimate decidor?

Disclaimer: this post was written while booted in Windows.

An outfoxing wolverine

Another excerpt from Nunaga:

Another time a smart wolverine had the best of us. Nasarlulik, another Eskimo called Qurvik and I had killed some caribou, but couldn't get all the meat in our canoe to take back to our post. We decided to cache what was left. We skinned them out and put them on the ground, and gathered up a great pile of rocks to cover the carcasses. After the carcasses were well covered, we took a tea-pail and scooped up water, sloshing it all over the cache. Each pail of water froze, binding the rocks like cement. We were making certain that no wolves would get our caribou before we could return for it ourselves. The cache was frozen solid.

When we eventually got back to pick up that meat, we discovered that a clever wolverine had found a way to outwit us. Unable to tear the frozen rocks away, the cunning beast had lain on top of one rock until its body heat had melted the ice around it; it then plucked the rock out and did the same thing with the next rock, until it was able to pull enough rocks away to get at the caribou.

Wolverine linguistic roots

I'm in the mood for wolverines today. Here is a multi-lingual examination from wikipedia:

The wolverine's questionable reputation as an insatiable glutton (reflected in the Latin genus name Gulo) may be in part due to a false etymology. The animal's name in old Swedish, Fjellfräs, meaning "fjell (mountain) cat," worked its way into German as Vielfraß, which means roughly "devours much." Its name in other West Germanic languages is similar (e.g. Dutch Veelvraat).

The Finnish name is Ahma, derived from ahmatti, which is translated as "glutton." The Russian росомаха (rosomakha) and the Polish and Czech name rosomak, seem to be borrowed from the Finnish rasva-maha (fat belly). Similarly, the Hungarian name is rozsomák or torkosborz which means gluttonous badger.

Purported gluttony is reflected in neither English nor Germanic Scandinavian languages. The English word wolverine (alteration of the earlier form wolvering of uncertain origin) probably implies 'a little wolf'. The name in Old Norse, Jarfr, lives on in the regular Icelandic name jarfi, regular Norwegian name jerv, regular Swedish name järv and regular Danish name jærv.

Outfoxing the wolverine

Excerpt from Nunaga, by Duncan Pryde, a book about a Scotsman's life with Eskimos in the Canadian Arctic.

One day Palvik and I were checking traps along a trapline we were running together down the south coast of Kent Peninusla, north and east of Baychimo Harbour, and we discovered that a wolverine was working our line. This wolverine had followed the sled tracks we had made on our frist run down the line, and many traps we checked had been dug up by the sly spoiler and either srpung or exposed. In some cases we would find scraps of a fox in the trap to show that the wolverine had beat us us to the prize. A wolverine often seems to work a trapline not out of hunger, but just for fun. Sometimes it will simply take the fox out of the trap, drag it off thirty yards and bury it. Normally, however, it chews it up enough to ruin the pelt. A single wolverine could reduce our take of fur considerably.

But we had a few tricks of our own. We went back to our base camp for an old sawn-off shotgun Palvik had used before on wolverines. Back at the trapline, we dug a little pit in the snow near one of the traps that the wolverine had not yet visited, and buried the gun in the snow so that about two inches of the muzzle stuck out. Then we attached a string to the trigger of the shotgun and to a chunk of raw caribou meat, which we thawed out long enough to wrap around the mouth of the shotgun, where it froze tight. When we came back on our reverse trip down the trapline, we had our wolverine, minus its head.

How to brainstorm effectively?

A few weeks ago, I took part in a brainstorming session (or talkoot in Suomi) on resting-state networks. The gathering was of academics from Finland at various levels of seniority.

Now, I am just back from a brainstorming session organized by Nokia Research. The group consisted of predominantly NRC engineers, designers, and a few outsiders. Since my lips are sealed by the IPR police, I am not at liberty to tell you what it was about. However, I was paying attention to the creative-argumentative process of each and every participant.

Obviously, the sessions were very different in character, participants, participation, format of discussion, and goals. However, let me attempt to take away some universals, and propose some recommendations on how to brainstorm effectively. Obviously, my impressions are fresh, superficial and open to critique.

How to brainstorm effectively

1. Agree in the first 5 minutes on:
a) What you are talking about
b) What you expect the discussion to lead to

2. Spend the next 5-10 minutes on defining the keywords. Usually, in an "interdisciplinary" (the bunny ears have a deep meaning) setting, for each participant, each keyword has a different set of association-keywords (keywords that are triggered by said keyword). If possible, go around the room once and ask people to suggest a few association-keywords. Organize them into a venn diagram if necessary, with each set representing a single participant or their background. If appropriate, brainstorm a tagline (in the advertising, or elevator-pitch sense: the key idea in 5 words or less) consisting of these keywords. Mutliple taglines representing multiple views of the idea enrich the ensuing discussion.

3. Be aware of
a) bounded rationality (there is not enough time and capacity to examine ALL the facts and derive opinions from first principles)
b) bounded comprehension (you may have to repeat yourself in different words, a different style, or pause to explain keywords)
c) bounded empathy (do not expect each participant to agree with a personal opinion dear to you, such as: come on, let's face it, X is bullshit, right?)

4. As an orchestrator, maintain a sense of balance between
a) obviously contradictory viewpoints due to prior biases of participants (an effective strategy to deal with this is what I'd like to call continuum mapping [1]).
b) the need to not idea-kill (let all flowers bloom) and the need to be precise (about definitions, goals of the session etc.).
c) creativity (btw, it strikes me that this can be applied to XYZ) vs. focus (is this strictly relevant?).

5. Accept beforehand, and expect that your stand on an issue may be contradicted, modified, fleshed out etc.

6. At the end of the session (or even through the session), go back and revise keywords, definitions, venn diagrams and taglines. These can finally be wrapped up cutely, as a take home message.

Any other points?

[1] Continuum mapping (own coinage, open for revision) is a technique that may be used by an arbitrator during a debate, or conflict resolution when parties or people explicitly, and diametrically disagree. The arbitrator simply maps each (polemic) viewpoint at two ends of a continuum, and opens the house for examples/suggestions/parameters/viewpoints that fit somewhere in between the continuum, thus defusing the tension. Continuum mapping may be used to visualize various trade-offs and cost-benefit charts.

Hindustani Classical Music

Training and innate talent, both in harmony, produce stellar musical performances.

I realize today years later that I was in the audience during one such performance when I had just finished high school. Between juggling through the notes and lecture material for university entrance, my otherwise troublesome landlord offered me tickets to attend a classical Indian music concert, to which they were themselves not too keen. The event was at Siri fort Auditorium in New Delhi. It was probably my only 'out of studies' experience for a long time (Hindustani music on wiki).

Frankly, I wasnt too keen since classical Hindustani music was always boring according to pop taste of my age group. Prior to that day the most impressionable exposure about this art had come from a government promoted video on teli in 80's - Baje Sargam (Video 6:36). But being the only opportunity for a change, I also remember wearing my best clothes to this event.

The performances of,

Shiv Kumar Sharma on Santoor 5:05,

Hari Prasad Chaurasia on Flute 3:14,

Ustad Bismillah Khan (recently deceased) on Shehnai 9:14

actually mesmerised me. For some readers the links may do the same, and since then I have heard recordings of many other performers who are masters of their arts in Hindustani Music-

Pandit Ravi Shankar (on Sitar 8:22 , a lesson 8:24), Ustad Zakir Hussain (on Tabla 4:24), Pandit Bhim Sen Joshi (Vocals, english subs 9:59, male) and Shubha Mudgal (Vocals, female, other commercial piece 3:35).

Also try an amazing roadside performance of a melancholic sounding instrument called the Tanpura ( Roadside Tanpura 2:08).

The links are of some personally liked pieces.

Another realm which is commercially more popular is the semi classical form. It originated from the inclination of kings towards music being played in their courts during Kathak (meaning story telling. Derived from "Katha", sanskrit story. A popular dance form which today perhaps unknowingly forms the basis of most commercial bollywood dance videos, ofcourse the western influence is unquestioned nowadays, here is a mixture 5:47, also the wiki link).

Tansen (wiki), is legendary in hindustani music folklore, who is believed to have invoked rains and thunder and lit the wick of a lamp by his singing in the court of Akbar.

For educational purpose - 3 very humble videos on youtube

Part 1 (6:09)

Part 2 (6:22)

Part 3 (5:00)

Unique text material from introduction to ellaborate databse of videos and mp3 regarding Hindustani Music can be found by a Patrick Moutal here .

For events, concerts, education and other programs related to Hindustani Classical Music visit

ITC Sangeet Research Academy Sammelan (official website), Kolkata, Hyderabad, Annual

Gunitas Sangeet Sammelan, Mumbai-Delhi-Kolkata, Nov -Dec, Annual

Saptak Music Festival (institute's official website), Ahmedabad, Gujarat, January, Annual

Sawai Gandharwa Music festival (wiki) , Pune, Maharashtra, December, Annual

Tansen Music Festival (MP tourism info), Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, Nov-Dec, Annual

Dover lane Music Festival (official website), Kolkata, Dec-Jan, Annual

Week long, all night classical music and dance is also on show by the most illustrious performers of India at Khajuraho Dance Festival which is organized at the erotic temples of Khajuraho (MP Tourism info) usually around end of February, annually.

Mission impossible?

Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three "laws" of prediction:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

-from wikipedia

Under what conditions would contests for innovation work?

I came across a blog post here where somebody suggests a simplistic idea for accelerating algorithm development for a particular application. I welcome suggestions abd discussions about the conditions under which such algorithm development contests would work. Consider the following questions.

1. Who would fund the prize money, and why would they fund it?
2. Researchers at what level would be motivated towards the contest [at the level of a research lab]?
3. What would be the resources required to implement a contest like this, and what would be the value addition, if any?

E-S theory of gender differences

In my web crawling activities du jour, I came across this on wikipedia.

The empathizing–systemizing (E-S) theory seeks to classify people on the basis of their skills in two factors of empathizing and systemizing. It measures skills using as Empathy Quotient (EQ) and Systemizing Quotient (SQ), and attempts to explain the social and communication symptoms in autism spectrum disorders as deficits and delays in empathy combined with intact or superior systemizing.

This theory seems to explain observations from studies of empathy scores etc., and posits that women are more often E-type, while men are more often S-type. To me, this seems counterintuitive. Intuition tells me that the skills required to empathize, see something from another person's point of view (EQ) are the same as those required to systematize, build a model of something, identify regularities in something (SQ).

[Note that I am not fundamentally opposed to geneder differences in cognition and behavior, I just have a nagging feeling about this theory].

Effective policy making: How to recognize and avoid Martingale-like phenomenon?

I was commenting on Cathy's post on big pharma's evil influence on physicians and the comment grew too long, so I decided to make a post our of this. I think the post was a good example to discuss the role of policy making and its perceived role amongst think tanks on the liberal--conservative spectrum, in general.

I can't access the article, but I don't really agree with Dana et al. (2003) 's recommendations to outrightly ban gifts. More generally, I believe that banning first-order incentives (eg. free dinners) will only sprout second-order incentives (eg. awards of recognition for good medical practice certified by BIGPHARMA, or featuring the physician in a popular article by scratching some journalists' backs) that are 'legal'. The same phenomenon is observable in Madoff-like Ponzi schemes. See a post about the Martingale Crisis (link via Laszlo). In one line, the Martingale hypothesis is: "Suppressing system-circumventions by banning them will lead to further circumvention by more innovative system-circumventions".

So, what is NOT the solution? The solution is not to go on banning every incentive system that crops up. I'll go so far as to say that in my opinion, this is symptomatic of think tanks on the far left and far right, who favor top down solutions from the government rather than bottom up solutions by involving the parties concerened. Rather, it is more effective to recognize that incentives are fundamental to ANY negotiation, be it at the level of policy making among the power-elite, or at home between husband and wife, parent and child. If you need people to get on board with a decision/action/law/yadayada, you need to INCENTIVIZE them, and the most effective solution will be to ask each party what they want. Sadly, this is easier said than done. Of course, the importance of being unbiased cannot be stressed enough.

For a more theoretical analysis of such concepts, we could look to the liberal paradox and arrow's impossibility theorem. I hereby incentivize anyone who is willing to translate these theorems from acadamese to English, by promising a beer-day-out on me.

Looking a (small) gift-horse in the mouth

I came across an interesting article by Dana and Loewenstein (2003) that i vaguely heard of once before about the influence of small pharmaceutical gifts on doctors' decisions.

The basic questions are:
1) do gifts influence doctors' beliefs/prescribing habits, and
2) is this a function of gift size

Both doctors and regulating bodies must think that 1) and 2) are true, since the recent guidelines of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America define gifts of "more than nominal value" as inappropriate. And surveys show that physicians view small gifts as ethically more acceptable than large gifts, and they don't think that small gifts tempting enough to influence physicians' prescription choices.

Pharmaceutical companies also believe 1) is true, but many restrict their own employees from accepting even small gifts. => big pharma knows something we don't.

Thus policies that restrict gift sizes will be useless if biases introduced by gifts are not related to the size of the gift.

Here's the scenario:
-Pharmaceutical companies employ representatives who meet with physicians with apparent success to aggressively promote newer and typically more expensive drugs
-a study of 29 empirical articles showed that physician interactions with pharmaceutical companies led to increased prescription costs and nonrational prescribing
-all this is questionable, because from 1989 to 2000, the US Food and Drug Administration judged 76% of all approved new drugs to be no more than moderate innovations over existing treatments, with many being a modification to an older product with the same ingredient. In 2000, the average price of these standard-rated new drugs was nearly twice the average price of existing drugs prescribed for the same indications.

some outcomes

• - one retrospective study24 tracked house staff who attended a grand rounds given by a pharmaceutical company speaker and found them more likely to indicate that company's drug as a treatment than did their colleagues. However, many of the house staff did not recall what company sponsored the grand rounds (this reminds me of the Overcoming Bias blog)

• -a positive correlation has been found between the cost of physicians' treatment choices and their amount of interaction with pharmaceutical company representatives

Frame of reference bias
Alas, it seems that we are the centre of our own universe, where translational invariance to another's frame of reference does not apply (unlike the laws of physics). "A recent study of medical residents26 found that 61% reported that 'promotions don't influence my practice,' while only 16% believed the same about other physician's practices. Clearly, it cannot both be true that most physicians are unbiased and that most other physicians are biased!! Furthermore, medical students recognize gifts as more problematic for other professions than they are for medicine."

Interestingly, all this works the other way around too. "Patients, while somewhat more concerned about the possible biasing effects of gifts than physicians, seem to be vicariously self-serving in their perceptions, believing that other individuals' physicians are more likely to be biased by gifts than their own physicians."

The article concludes that, without properly understanding the sources of conflict of interest, it is impossible to make policies to regulate it. They recommend that pharmaceutical gifts of all sizes should be prohobited, as even small is big in this case.

Complexity theory, power laws, bears and honey

Following from my comment on Laszlo's last post, I looked up one of the topics that always burns in the back of my mind: complexity theory.

As a first stab, I read this article from 2001. Old, so perhaps you have heard about it already?

In a nutshell, paleontologists are puzzled by the dramatic discontinuities in the extinction patterns of life on earth over its history. Occasionally there are cataclysmic episodes that causes mass extinctions. Physicists call this phenomenon Self-Organized Criticality (SOC).

"In recent years, some physicists and other adherents of a new field called complexity have argued that the answer involves a simple mathematical theory -- the same one that may explain the collapse of a sand pile or a crash in the stock market. But their suggestions have drawn fire from paleontologists, the group traditionally charged with investigating life's past."

The SOC physicists traced the lengths of time that ancient groups of animals had survived, and found (surprise!) a power-law behaviour: most of the time, things were quiescent, but occasionally there was a mass extinction--the same behaviour typically seen with earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and solar flares. This didn't have to do with external events (like an asteroid hitting the earth), but evolved as a consequence of how the different species interacted with each other. The complexity theorists say that the power-law "fingerprint" is indicative of a system in a critical state.

The main jam was that the paleontologists re-analyzed the data "with the appropriate statistical tests", and no power-law behaviour emerged. They again tested it with a new database of 36,000 genera showing when the groups appeared and when they vanished ("the best data set that is available at this point in time"), and still no evidence of a power-law pattern was found.

Another complexity theorist put it this way: "It's not enough to say that self-organized critical models give power laws, and we see power laws in the fossil record, and therefore they must be self-organized critical. That's logic on the same level as saying, 'Bears like honey, my wife likes honey, therefore my wife is a bear.'"

As a result, Richard Sole, one of the SOC physicists, has modified his ideas and decided to collaborate with Douglas H. Erwin, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution, to see if complexity theory can help explain the appearance of new species after major biological crises.

I doubt this is the last we hear of complexity theory bashing heads with other fields--perhaps this happens on a power-law basis??--and i'm sure there is a lot of interesting stuff to mine...

How to present a complex idea concisely

Better a narrow description than a vague one.

One reason founders resist describing their projects concisely is that, at this early stage, there are all kinds of possibilities. The most concise descriptions seem misleadingly narrow. So for example a group that has built an easy web-based database might resist calling their applicaton that, because it could be so much more. In fact, it could be anything...

The problem is, as you approach (in the calculus sense) a description of something that could be anything, the content of your description approaches zero. If you describe your web-based database as "a system to allow people to collaboratively leverage the value of information," it will go in one investor ear and out the other. They'll just discard that sentence as meaningless boilerplate, and hope, with increasing impatience, that in the next sentence you'll actually explain what you've made.

Your primary goal is not to describe everything your system might one day become, but simply to convince investors you're worth talking to further. So approach this like an algorithm that gets the right answer by successive approximations. Begin with a description that's gripping but perhaps overly narrow, then flesh it out to the extent you can. It's the same principle as incremental development: start with a simple prototype, then add features, but at every point have working code. In this case, "working code" means a working description in the investor's head.

Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/investors.html

Chimps and grad students

Quick youtube clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVlJv7ZkvGA
Chimps were trained to remember a grid of numbers on a touch screen presented for a brief period. Afterwards they had to touch squares on the grid covering up the numbers, in ascending order. Grad students trained for the same period of time performed much worse in this task! Good thing we don't live in the trees.

Chimps for postdocs!!

Ownership of ideas vs. the value of collaboration in scientific research

This is something that has been troubling us for the past while: What to do with ideas that you are not paid to come up with? Can we work on them in our own time? What if the idea requires validation from data you do not have access to, or critical commentary from someone who pays you to think about something else?

Here is a suprisingly frank debate I came across.

The story of the blue brain project

A very cogent piece of science writing for the lay reader.

What you should know about organic food cerification

MOST of the chicken, fruit and vegetables in Ellen Devlin-Sample’s kitchen are organic. She thinks those foods taste better than their conventional counterparts. And she hopes they are healthier for her children.

Lately, though, she is not so sure.

Read more here:

cudnt resist this

im sure some of us wud remember the "rotten burough" (is it spelt okay?) from black adder where

Mr Black adder is the polling officer, the vote counter, the only voter and personal advisor to boldrick(who ran for those elections)..

amazingly I found this, 

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/A-polling-station-for-one-voter-/articleshow/4213160.cms

the art of surveys

perhaps the most interesting use of visualizations!
http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2009/02/are_surveys_art.php

A sudoku puzzle

Pavan and I solved this sudoko today, using the usual rules of engagement until we got to a point where every square had two possible options. Finally, we just picked one, and went as far as we could with that until we reached the same impasse. Each time we made one of these decisions, we labelled the ensuing numbers with a symbol, hence the circles, squares, triangles and diamonds (in that order). Each time, we thought we would hit a contradiciton and the whole thing would unravel until the last incorrect decision. To our surprise, everything worked out, despite the fact that we made four guesses. In the end, we checked the answers, and saw that our solution differed to the published one in the first and last three rows. In the first three rows, our 2s and 4s were swapped with the published answer, and in the last three rows, our 1s and 7s were all swapped. So go figure. I thought sudoko answers were unique.

Questions: how to design a unique sudoko? ie how do you know which numbers to fix?

Vege-Visualization

Here are some visualization successes and a fail from a Scientific American article: "The Greenhouse Hamburger", by Nathan Fiala, Feb 2009, p. 62



I like this one: it shows the CO2-emissions from producing a half a pound of the vegetables on the left-hand side with the driving distance (perhaps along Laszlo's road maps) necessary to produced the equivalent emissions. So, producing half a pound of beef is dramatically more polluting than producing half a pound of potatoes (9.81 miles vs 0.17 miles).



This one is a meaty visualization that gives a new perspective on the term "red states". It projects US beef consumption to 2020 and 2030 compared with the world average.




This one is a visualization fail. It requires good working memory about the shapes of the world's countries...

Anyway, i'm going out for a burger. Anyone want fries with that?

Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education

Check out this SlideShare Presentation: Something that Aalto university should hear!

Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education

View more presentations from David Wiley. (tags: future policy)

Scientific field branding

Recently, there was a competition put forward by the British minister of science to explain the Higgs-Boson in 2 pages or less (link needed). Similar wagers have been made before to explain climate change in one slide, or string theory in less than 2 minutes.

Here, I propose two simple visualizations using already existing widgets for the shortest practical introduction to a scientific field (i.e. a given keyword eg. visual cortex). The goal is to capture the brand of a field for a scientifically curious lay audience. For the given keyword, look up the list of publications with that keyword from Google Scholar. Prune the list to retain only top-few publications, sorted by a metric (eg. no. of citations, or other relevant ones like h-index or Erdös Number depending on the field).

1. Collect the keywords from each of these publications and input into wordle.
2. Collect the affiliations of each author in each publication and plot it on a google world map with pins.

This can be a simple add-on to a social network for scientists such as ??. In Finland it seems to be Facebook.

Coming up: For the latest in social software, see graphjam and jamglue

Magnetic poetry. Seriously

As always, a tinge of deft curiosity delves into the cunning lair of zealously torpid ennui.

Obsequious drollery is tantamount to admonition with melifluous language.

Fecund woman! Come without guile and repose in taut beauty
or be slathered by trenchant fusillade of Kafkaesque observation

A limpid veil and an arid man.

Know this, that I secrete wry lapses sedulously.

My individual space-ebb is valid.

Beyond non-cooperative behaviour

Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 17:21:58 +0200 (EET)
From: Cathy Nangini

Moi!

i got pretty side-tracked today when reading a paper for our journal club here, but it got me reading this paper: Sally, Phil Trans R Soc Lond B (2003). (see attached)

essentially, Sally states that a player's strategy in a game is more than just the "asocial utility equation" that gives the outcome of a player's move as a function of that person's payoff (eqn 2.1). But rather, this eqn should be modified to
include the player's "perceived and psychological distances" from the other players (eqn 4.1). For example, it has been found that "psychological similarity and amiliarity will support prosocial behaviour" in games like the Prisoner's Dilemma (which, on a purely logical level, promotes non-cooperative behaviour as the best outcome).

so, i don't know anything about game theory, and in fact i'm terrified of games mostly, but i bet that we could look at the sub-prime crisis in this modified game theory approach and show that it is the psychological closeness among cronies that lead to their mutually-benefiting but criminally fraudulent behaviour.

ie: why is it that Moody's, Goldman Sachs, S&P etc participated in the fraudulent bundling and approval of bad morgages whereas other financial institutions did not? Why is it that Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary that got handed 700 billion to bail out these institutions, used to be head of Goldman Sachs? I see a list of personal connections a mile long here...which means that their "prosocial behaviour" was, and will be, limited to their own "psychologically close" group members. Which explains why they authored the sub-prime disaster to maximize their payoff at the cost of everyone else, and makes one suspect that Paulson's "fix" will no doubt subserve the same group.

the question i have is: can we actually show this? does anyone know how to use the eqns in this paper?

i think this would be a fun, informative, and proactive exercise!!