Novel Vig

random bits

2011-03-16T02:55:00.000-07:00

Three random observations, probably not terribly original or accurate, just to get them out of my head and to get corrections if they are wrong. Please imagine them prefixed with the mandatory "in my opinion":

1. Media

The media mostly overreacts/overestimates natural events (volcanos, earthquakes etc.) and mostly underreacts/underestimates human crowd events (riots, revolutions, wars etc.).

In case of the former, the media always starts with the worst-case scenario. In hindsight the effects usually turn out to be shorter-lasting and less far-reaching than anticipated. In case of the latter the events often spiral out of control in ways unforseen in the beginning of the narration. I'd love to be disproved, this is a half-baked hypothesis.

If there is some grain of truth in it, the cause could be that human events have many feedback loops, where coverage helps escalate the event, whereas natural phenomena couldn't care less about our news coverage. If anything, the media attention motivates people to stand stronger against the adversity, which further diminishes negative effects.

2. Language

A common dialogue goes like this:

Alice: The world would be so much better if we would all speak the same language.
Bob: No, it would be a much worse place, because ....

What Alice means is that if we would all speak the same language, we could get our points across more easily and without less chance for misunderstanding. Also there would be less chance for discriminating people (at least based on the language they speak, people were always creative in finding other reasons).

I am trying to articulate Bob's point here, to which I subscribe. There is the sentimental value/accumulated wisdom argument, namely that languages carry lots of both and are worth preserving for that reason only. I'm not talking about any of that, even though they are important. There is the biodiversity argument, which says that like biological diversity, linguistic diversity has (at least) three functions:

- hereditary: today's languages are the only living witnesses of societies long gone. Through their study we can infer things about history, as well as about the development of languages, just as by studying rare species we infer things about evolution and evolutionary history. Once they are gone, the opportunity is lost.
- functional: robustness through redundancy
- indicatory: the level of civility and harmoniousness of a society or any group of people can be well characterized by the diversity of cultures, customs, languages tolerated within it and the sustainability of preserving this diversity (just as biological diversity of an ecosystem is an indicator of its "health". Contrast rainforests with monoculture crop fields). In the remarkable words from the "dark" middle ages: "a country using only one language and having only one custom is weak and frail."

While I agree with all this, I'd like to put forward another argument. If languages are only the medium for transmitting ideas and if thought exists in our brains without language, "in the void", I'd agree that we don't need more than one language any more than we need multiple competing standards for network communication. A total nuisance.

However, if language is intertwined with thought in our minds, if we can think only using language and if learning a language has some effect on the way we think and on the way our brain wires itself as we grow up, furthermore if languages are different and no language is as expressive as the sum of all languages, and if languages are tradeoffs and what one language can more easily express, the other will do more clumsily and vice versa (a lot of IFs, I know), then a reduction in number of languages spoken worldwide will lead to a reduction in the range of original ideas that people can come up with. We will communicate more easily but we will have less interesting things to say to each other.

If all of this is true, then being native speaker of one language instead of the other could give you a small advantage even when thinking about something as abstract as a math problem. There could be 99% overlap between languages, but if a different language gives someone even a 1% edge on that problem, that diversity is still worth cultivating.

In this second world-view languages (as they help us form thoughts) are similar to painting techniques: you could paint in oil, watercolor, draw with pencil, charcoal, etc. but the choice of technique has some effect on what you can represent. If everyone agreed to use the same technique, the range of artistic expression in painting would be reduced.

3. Naming

"democratic republic of ..."
"people's republic of ..."(insert favorite non-democratic, authoritarian dictatorship here)
the orwellian "ministry of truth",
we all know the worst offenders. Some have even claimed that if something has an adjective in its name, than it is almost always the opposite.
But what about less obvious examples, like "center of excellence". Is the name given for past accomplishments or does it give premature credit for future results? By forcing others to call us with this name, aren't we asking too much? Wouldn't it be cynical to brand a shoe as "Good Shoe", and have people call it that way even if it broke or if it was of bad quality?

Anyway, examples like these abound. What I try to say is just that even saying the name of something is not nearly as neutral as we often assume. We could be tricked into endorsing something that we don't want to by those who picked the name. Or as the ancient Chinese said (?) :"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names."

Super Macro

2010-12-08T03:46:00.000-08:00

This blog post is probably a query..

My tasks on the computer very often involve repetitions of commands. Even though the same commands (steps) reveal new information everyday.

Example 1.

Internet -

check 2 different mailboxes
two different news sites and
three blogs depending on the RSS feeds I have received

Can this happen automatically- at one mouse click?

Example 2.

Non-internet based job -

Start a custom designed commercial tool to do certain tasks
This job requires repeating the same steps to get different simulation results obviously with small variations in input data.
Then I copy and paste various texts from the tool to an excel sheet.
And do further simple math in excel.
Finally, results are plot

How about a super macro creating software which records the steps across different tools on the computer and creates an executable script based on this recording.

Enhanced feature - to add variables to this script so it may in the end have the capacity to produce an analysis.

Super Macro - to make for/ if-else loops within macros.

It would be brilliant to see an easy GUI based software that does this. With increasing computation capacity would'nt this be handy for the less code-able.

Averages and integrals

2010-12-04T12:49:00.000-08:00

1.
-What is the mean of 1 and 23 ?
-Well, 12 of course.

-So if one day you go to sleep at 23 o'clock (11pm), the other day at 1am, what was your average go-to-sleep time ?
-12 (noon)? NO! 0 (midnight).

Turns out that the mean of circular quantities (hours, spatial directions, etc.) is trickier than seems at first, and involves a bit of trigonometry or at least the use of complex numbers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directional_statistics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_of_circular_quantities

2.
I wish it was a joke:
Medical researcher reinvents trapezoidal method for integration in 1994, paper gets cited 80+ times. Something rotten in the state of medical research:
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract

From the paper:
"A mathematical model for the determination of total area under glucose tolerance and other metabolic curves."

"OBJECTIVE--To develop a mathematical model for the determination of total areas under curves from various metabolic studies. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS--In Tai's Model, the total area under a curve is computed by dividing the area under the curve between two designated values on the X-axis (abscissas) into small segments (rectangles and triangles) whose areas can be accurately calculated from their respective geometrical formulas. The total sum of these individual areas thus represents the total area under the curve. Validity of the model is established by comparing total areas obtained from this model to these same areas obtained from graphic method (less than +/- 0.4%). Other formulas widely applied by researchers under- or overestimated total area under a metabolic curve by a great margin."

via: http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/eero3/1

Transhumanism

2010-12-03T05:56:00.000-08:00

Living Science Fiction.

Transhumanism is a movement or the philosophy that we can and should develop to higher levels, both physically, mentally and socialy using rational methods.

A TED talk by a transhumanist about some elements of transhumanism.
Transhumanism is a philosophy that humanity can, and should, strive to higher levels, both physically, mentally and socially. It encourages research into such areas as life extension, cryonics, nanotechnology, physical and mental enhancements, uploading human consciousness into computers and megascale engineering.

Also see - Transhuman resources by Anders Sandberg.

Google Publishes an online guide book

2010-11-24T02:49:00.001-08:00

Google has just published an ebook to help people get started with the web -

http://www.20thingsilearned.com/

NovelVig meets Metahint

2010-10-11T06:03:00.000-07:00

Who would have thought?

Our very own Novel Vig is at the forefront of the technology revolution. As of today, it features the experimental version of a new site search engine, Metahint. See for yourself on the right side of the page. The main distinguishing feature of Metahint is that it gives you suggestions as you type, something that is missing from most current blogs and websites. The suggested phrases come from the contents of the blog.

This is experimental! Things can go wrong in weird and novel ways, but we are fixing bugs at a rate (hopefully) faster than how they appear.

Want to try this search engine for another blog? Well, technically you can't. That's because it is not released yet. You can still do two things:

See the demo in which suggestive search widgets are showcased for some of our favorite blogs.
Subscribe for the beta test, in which case you can test Metahint, before we release it to the unsuspecting world.

Bloom Box

2010-02-27T17:14:00.000-08:00

One of the most heavily funded projects in the Silicon Valley inspite of the recession- the bloom box clean energy solution is now already installed in Google and e-bay campuses. It is the size of a cardboard box and supplies 1KW of SILENT power.

Comprising layers of ceramics and nanocomposites(magic sauce). Dr. Sridhar was a member of faculty here at University of Arizona, Tucson.

further

Lovely typos

2009-11-18T05:39:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-23T23:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-20T01:23:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-16T05:52:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-16T05:20:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-15T12:41:00.000-07:00

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

-Henry Ford

The Honda story

2009-10-15T12:28:00.000-07:00

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.

Hacking: A bird's eye view

2009-10-14T02:26:00.000-07:00

The most inspired definition of hacking from Paul Buchheit of (Gmail, Friendfeed, AdSense and "Don't be evil") -fame.

Hacking is to exploit the mismatch between the perceived rules and the real rules (how things really work) of a complex system. A website's perceived rules might be to have each user log in with their username and password. The real rules include strings being transmitted and stored in memory, databases queried and html pages constructed. At lower layers electrons move here and there governed by the laws of physics and so on. See also Leaky abstractions.

Understanding the workings of a complex system is "just" science. Using this understanding to build things is "just" engineering. Taking advantage of the difference between how the system works and how it is commonly (mis)understood to work is hacking. Hacking is not just for computer systems of course, people hack the financial system, the grant and funding system, the dating scene, etc.

This hints that a certain questioning mindset is a necessary requirement for being a hacker. This is the anti-authoritarianism that ESR is talking about and the nonconformity that Feynman cultivated. Too much faith in the perceived rules and you'll be thinking of how to breed faster horses instead of inventing the automobile.

To understand complex systems probably the most powerful tool is mathematics. Not all mathematicians are hackers though. In the words of the ultimate hacker:

“As any mathematical discipline travels far from its empirical source, or still more, if it is a second or third generation only indirectly inspired by ideas coming from `reality’, it is beset by very grave dangers. It becomes more and more purely aestheticizing, more and more l`art pour le art.

This need not be bad, if the field is surrounded by correlated subjects, which still have closer empirical connections, or if the discipline is under the influence of men with an exceptionally well-developed taste.

But there is a grave danger that the subject will develop along the lines of least resistance, that the stream, so far from its source, will separate into a multitude of insignificant branches, and that the discipline will become a disorganized mass of details and complexities.

In other words, at a great distance from its empirical source, or after much `abstract’ inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration. At the inception the style is usually classical, when it becomes baroque, then the danger signal is up.

… Whenever this stage is reached, the only remedy seems to me to be the rejuvinating return to the source: the reinjection of more or less directly empirical ideas. I am convinced that this is a necessary condition to preserve the freshness and vitality of the subject, and that this will remain equally true in the future.”

And of course if you haven't read this piece on hacking, you'll be in for a ride.

On the danger of using "hacking" as an excuse for sloppy thinking, here's Tesla's opinion on Edison:

His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense.

Ben Franklin in Stockholm

2009-10-06T13:55:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-22T10:33:00.001-07:00

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

2009-09-17T04:24:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-10T06:56:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-08-29T00:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-26T08:19:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-15T02:53:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-06-28T02:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-14T05:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-14T05:14:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-14T04:48:00.000-07:00

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.

Serious not Solemn

2009-06-10T06:01:00.000-07:00

Excerpts from Russell Baker's 1978 essay Why being serious is hard for the fellow sufferers with shortened attention spans:

Here is a letter of friendly advice. "Be serious," it says.
The distinction between being serious and being solemn seems to be vanishing among Americans.
Being solemn is easy. Being serious is hard.
Jogging is solemn. Poker is serious. Once you grasp that distinction, you are on your way to enlightenment. To promote the cause, I submit the following list from which the vital distinction should emerge more clearly.
(1) Shakespeare is serious. David Suskind is solemn.
(2) Chicago is serious. California is solemn.
(3) Blow-dry hair stylings on anchor men for local television shows are solemn. Henry James is serious.
(4) Falling in love, getting married, having children, getting divorced and fighting over who gets the car and the Wedgewood are all serious. The new sexual freedom is solemn.
(5) Playboy is solemn. The New Yorker is serious.
(6) S.J. Perelman is serious. Norman Mailer is solemn.
(7) The Roman Empire was solemn. Periclean Athens was serious.
(8) Arguing about "structured programs" of anything is solemn. So are talking about "utilization," attending conferences on the future of anything, and group bathing when undertaken for the purpose of getting to know yourself better, or at the prescription of a swami. Taking a long walk by yourself during which you devise a foolproof scheme for robbing Cartiers is serious.
(9) Washington is solemn. New York is serious. So is Las Vegas, but Miami Beach is solemn.
(10) Humphrey Bogart movies about private eyes and Randolph Scott movies about gunslingers are serious. Modern movies that are sophisticated jokes about Humphrey Bogart movies and Randolph Scott movies are solemn.

I make no apology for being solemn rather than serious. Nor should anyone else. It is the national attitude. It is perfectly understandable. It is hard to be Periclean Athens. It is hard to be Shakespeare. It is hard to be S.J. Perelman. It is hard to be serious.

Saying that I would like to be more serious than solemn would sound too solemn. This whole paragraph is now slowly becoming a self-defeating meta-narrative of distantiation. To come back on firmer ground, I would like to add another one to the list, in an honest attempt to answer your (and my own) questions about avoiding graduation ceremonies:
(11) Getting a degree is solemn. Doing something that someone gives a ... about is serious..

So what else are solemn/serious ?

How to brainstorm effectively?

2009-05-28T08:59:00.000-07:00

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.

Great ideas

2009-05-26T11:37:00.000-07:00

How to come up with great ideas ? Let's suppose we define a great idea as an original solution to a difficult and important problem.

With this definition, we can put all the difficult and important problems in one hat and all the tricks and methods in another hat and a good idea will mean a correct pairing of an item from the first hat with an item from the second. I hear you saying that this is too simplistic because often there are more tricks needed to solve a problem. This is true, but most often when we are stuck with a problem, there's one single trick that removes the obstacle and at least gets us closer to the solution. If more insights need to be applied at the same time, let's just bundle them together and label them as one insight.

So how to come up with ideas? Let's hear the great problem-solver himself (in an account of Gian-Carlo Rota):

Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”

Ok, sounds simple enough. But we are left with a longing for symmetry. What about the opposite method:

Keep your twelve favorite tricks and techniques constantly present in your mind and whenever you hear of a new problem, test it against each of your twelve tricks to see whether they help.

Is this also a valid approach or is it just a variant of the "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" anti-pattern ?

From empirical evidence, it seems that there is a qualitative difference between the two approaches: proponents of the first are Nobel-prize winning physicists, proponents of the second write obscure blog entries on Novel Vig. For a proper assessment we would need a controlled experiment. But why is the second approach inferior ? Are there vastly more tricks than problems ? Are problems more complex and open-ended than tricks and require therefore more in-depth thinking ? Does a good idea require some genuine interest in the problem ? These are not immediately obvious. Any other suggestions ?

Harmful abstractions (meta)

2009-05-26T09:41:00.000-07:00

Abstraction is a great thing and allows humans to tackle difficult problems without getting lost in the details. However the real action often happens at the details (in the trenches, so to speak). So abstraction or the illusion of it seems to be harmful quite often. I realize the paradox in ranting against abstract thought in general and that such an approach is self-defeating by definition. Also, the idea is not mine, I read it first time in Aaron Swartz's essay. On a second read I realize that all I wanted to say is covered in that essay, so all I can do is add some examples.

In IT and in computer science I find that at least for me, thinking in umbrella terms never leads to any useful ideas. These are used with great pleasure by the business-side of the IT crowd, usually when the real innovation is mostly over or if it never even started. Examples of such terms are: location-awareness, context, social (network) aspect, cloud computing, accessibility, semantic (web), etc.

Sure, there is something common in Facebook, photo-sharing on Flickr and the book recommendations of Amazon. Sure, we could call that social whatever. It might even help in explaining the thing after the fact, or in pitching it to investors. But really, who cares. Everything is social. Chances are slim that one can come up with something original by trying to tick a checkbox in the buzzword-bingo of the day. The interesting aspects of all these systems are those that are specific to each of them, not the things they share.

At the end, two things matter. The real problem that needs to be solved and the tools we have at disposal. The problem exists in user-space, it can and should be understood without reference to technology. The tools, as we speak of IT are computers munching on bits of data and spitting them out onto various channels of communication from one place to another. Now of course those bits come in different flavors and there is a lot of advantage in thinking in aggregate concepts. But I still find that it is most productive in this space to think in terms of what really happens with the data. This is hard to formulate precisely without blatant self-contradiction, so I will leave it at that. Let me just say, I don't mean going down to the level of electrons and protons or something like that, but some understanding of CPUs, networking, compilers, operating systems probably helps. Obviously, data structures and algorithms are a must.

Anyway, most of the terms I am ranting against are midway on this abstraction spectrum and they fall short of both goals. They are not high level enough to map exactly to user needs and they are not concrete enough to map exactly to implementations. At best they can be used to categorize existing ideas, and even for that they are imperfect. At worst they are harmful to innovation and encourage group-think and me-too ideas.

Hindustani Classical Music

2009-05-10T06:53:00.001-07:00

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?

2009-05-06T00:15:00.000-07:00

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

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.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

-from wikipedia

Jack of all trades

2009-05-04T09:25:00.000-07:00

How "potent" is a scientific field? The sexual connotation is not accidental: I'm trying to find out, how successful one school of thought is in cross-pollinating others..

Most educated people think of their education as part of their identity. Being a mathematician, a physicist, a biologist obviously influences our way of thinking just as native language and upbringing does. While there are many generalists, there are also many who seem to be typical representatives of their field or subfield (in their way of thinking).

For example, a computer scientist's or programmer's way could be easily summarized as the tendency of splitting tasks into infinitely small subtasks that can then be almost mindlessly executed. Making a sandwich? First I slice up bread, then I spread butter on it... No, wait, first I put the bread on the table, take up the knife... No, first...

Different schools of thought have evolved to deal with different aspects of the world. They are all relatively successful in their respective fields (or they would have been abandoned by now, one imagines), but I am more curious about how successful they are when applied out of context? How does a physicist build a house? How does a programmer go about losing weight. How does a linguist design a rocket? How does a painter handle investments? How does a mathematician change a light-bulb?

It is safe to assume that just as native language would give people different competitive advantages (if the (partially) discredited Sapir-Whorf hypothesis were true with the Eskimos having 200 words for snow, etc. etc.), their professional "native language" should also have an impact on how successful they are in dealing with the world at large. If all theories are metaphors for the world, some must be more suitable, more accurate, more general. Also, let's try to find an objective measure instead of asking the suspects themselves. Most people grossly overestimate how potent their way of thinking is... "If only I had time to split this up into sufficiently small sub-tasks..."

An obvious first guess would be mathematics. Hardly anything can be more general than mathematics, the fabric out of which (almost) all other theories are woven. The first objection is that no-one today holds the whole of mathematics in their head, so we should instead talk of such as a group theorist's way of thinking or a geometer's view of the world (which incidentally might have been the most potent worldview 2500 years ago). A more serious problem is that even if there is such thing as "the mathematician's approach", in many cases it is not successful at all and is often ridiculed as a pedantic care for irrelevant notational issues, a.k.a. nitpicking as opposed to Getting Things Done^TM.

So is physics then the most potent? I don't know much about a physicist's worldview except that it must involve idealized weightless balls and probably some jokes about Schrödinger's cat. However, I do notice that people with background in physics are often successful in engineering, machine learning, macroeconomics, computer programming or other fields. Is it so that physics just happens to be a potent metaphor for a wide variety of different phenomena, or does this have to do more with the economic opportunities in each field. Computer science seems to have been on the receiving side for mass immigration in the past decades but then physics is the equivalent of Ireland during the great potato famine. On the other end of the spectrum are the fields in which everyone seems to be an expert (besides the obvious football and cricket, international politics comes to mind) or the fields which don't have anything to say to other fields (insert example here).

So what is at play here? Is any school of thought more potent than the others? If so, which one and why?

EDIT: with a bit of embarrassment I realized how much I was influenced in this post by a Paul Graham essay I read years ago:
http://www.paulgraham.com/college.html

Battle of the sexes

2009-05-03T01:29:00.000-07:00

To stir up the calm waters of Novel Vig, here is a link to a strong piece on gender (in)equality by Roy Baumeister, link via News.Yc:

"Is there anything good about men":
http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm

Evolutionary explanations of anything are always fun to read, and this piece raises the following non-obvious issues (among others):

- While it is true that men are over-represented at the top of society (heads of states, members of congress, CEOs), they are similarly over-represented at the bottom of the society: prisoners, homeless, people dying in work-related accidents, casualties of war. (perhaps men take more risks ?)

- While men are over-represented in academia at the high levels in the hard sciences, men are also over-represented among the mentally retarded (perhaps nature takes more risks ?)

- While men earn more on average, the salaries are capped from below but not from above. A few extremes on top distort the average ?

- While women have higher grades on average in college, the grades are capped from above more (due to degree inflation, everyone gets close to high grades) than from below. A few extremes below distort the average ?

- While women and men are probably equally creative, hardly any women in Jazz or Blues who improvise. This is most probably not due to a bias in society. Jazz and blues were started by men escaping slavery for whom even getting an instrument was hard. In the meantime every middle-class girl was playing the piano.

- Some surprising facts: Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. We are descended from men who took chances and were lucky. For women it was worth playing it safe.

- We are descendants of men who gambled and succeeded in spreading their genes (in some cases) to hundreds or a thousand children (think Genghis Khan). A woman, even if conquering half of the known world could not have had more than a dozen children. It would be surprising if this didn't affect our different levels of motivation.

Etc. etc. etc.
BTW, these were points I got from the article, don't shoot the messenger...

EDIT: Here's a side-plot: what if Genghis were born today? Would he be a mass-murderer awaiting life-sentence ? Or would he be shrewd enough to become the ruthless CEO of a global corporation? In either case it is unlikely that he would have thousands of children. If there was a gene for becoming a "violent megalomaniac mastermind" it would give less evolutionary advantage today than in his time. Just another twist to the 'how does evolution continue in industrialized societies' speculation..

EDIT2: The same thing explained by Steven Pinker:
"
Boys are more likely to be learning disabled or retarded but also more likely to reach the top percentiles in assessments of mathematical ability, even though boys and girls are similar in the bulk of the bell curve. The pattern is readily explained by evolutionary biology. Since a male can have more offspring than a female--but also has a greater chance of being childless (the victims of other males who impregnate the available females)--natural selection favors a slightly more conservative and reliable baby-building process for females and a slightly more ambitious and error-prone process for males. That is because the advantage of an exceptional daughter (who still can have only as many children as a female can bear and nurse in a lifetime) would be canceled out by her unexceptional sisters, whereas an exceptional son who might sire several dozen grandchildren can more than make up for his dull childless brothers.
"

Under what conditions would contests for innovation work?

2009-04-27T05:25:00.000-07:00

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?

Monkey Business

2009-04-18T03:34:00.000-07:00

"I don't believe in evolution.", "Evolution is just a theory.", "Evolution has never been proven.".

I often hear this sort of argument from various people, often with education in natural sciences or engineering, often in the company of "I can't accept that we descended from monkeys" and "If some monkeys became humans why did some of them remain monkeys." .

You would expect that sort of debate has been resolved in the 1860s but apparently it has not, so after I carefully set up this straw man argument, let me devise a strategy for dealing with it. My hypothesis is that people with this attitude think of evolution as something far more mystic than it really is. I guess if one breaks it down into small elements, people would find it really hard to disagree with the subparts.

So the strategy would be to ask people, which of the three statements they don't agree with.

1) children inherit features from their parents
2) there are differences in features among siblings
3) some features make individuals more likely to reproduce and raise children to maturity in a certain environment

I think that's pretty much all there is to evolution and with these premises it's the only way things can really ...well... evolve. I find it hard to understand how anyone can disagree with these premises. For a more precise description, one needs to add to 2) that there can be random mutations that introduce further differences. And to explain the whole diversity, we would need to add one more statement even harder to debate:
4) the environment changes with time

So how can someone still defend a statement denying evolution, unless by introducing a red herring.
This post was inspired by:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

E-S theory of gender differences

2009-04-16T01:58:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-04-03T03:39:00.000-07:00

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.

STORM, a funny and smart poem (?!)

2009-04-03T02:42:00.000-07:00

here's an actual poem I found today, supposedly it is a lyric of a song, but at work right now, couldn't find it. I find the text, however pure genius, it is a very smart and funny !! discussion of -what else- rationality vs. misticism.

STORM by Tim Minchin, 2008.
read it here... (also video)
just video..

Looking a (small) gift-horse in the mouth

2009-03-31T04:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-27T04:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-25T02:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-19T02:11:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-17T04:23:00.001-07:00

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

2009-03-13T04:03:00.000-07:00

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

What you should know about organic food cerification

2009-03-04T09:57:00.000-08:00

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

2009-03-02T10:49:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-20T04:00:00.001-08:00

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

A sudoku puzzle

2009-02-15T11:11:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-09T10:14:00.000-08:00

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?

Visualization fail

2009-02-07T10:45:00.000-08:00

Trying to put into practice an earlier idea (see before) of a coworker (Ilari), I started to make travel-time maps of Finland. The results so far won't hang on my office wall, but I'll still try other approaches.

EDIT: http://janne.aukia.com/kuutio/?p=1213
A fellow CIS alumnus apparently had the idea long time ago, with a much better implementation through the link...

Here's the method:
1. Go through the whole area of Finland in small increments (say at every 0.1 * 0.1 latitude/longitude grid point).
2. Find which locality is closest to that point (Google maps can do this automatically)
3. Find out how much it takes to drive from that point to Otaniemi. (Again, G. maps knows this).
4. Plot on a map the travel times from each point, contour plots, etc.
5. Profit (????)

So I wrote the script that does this automatically and let it run for a day and night and the unconvincing results are as follows:

Plot 1.
Driving distance from Otaniemi (in hours)
Plot 2.
Interpolating between points and plotting the contour lines (Oh no, the sea got interpolated as well !!!)

Well, not much to see actually. The road system is evenly developed, so the contour lines are roughly concentric circles (except for the scaling factor). Noticable are the highways to Turku/Tampere/Lahti which speed up the travel a bit.

Hmm, I guess I expected a bit more out of this...

Possible improvements:
- Do it for capital area only, maybe road system more interesting there
- Overlay it on a real map so people can actually see what is there.

Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education

2009-02-05T14:51:00.001-08:00

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

2009-02-05T11:55:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-25T12:54:00.000-08:00

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.

To buffalo or not to buffalo

2009-01-17T13:23:00.000-08:00

Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:02:14 +0200
From: Laszlo Kozma

Hi,

'buffalo buffalo ...'

just a brief follow-up on the 'buffalo..' issue... so the main question is what is grammatically correct and what is not.

As far as I understand, according to Chomsky/Pinker/et. al. what is correct is defined by exact, possibly recursive production rules. So 'buffalo, etc.' is correct for any length. According to others, for ex. today's speaker, correct is what is used (a'la Wittgenstein's 'the meaning of a word is its use in language'). According to this buffalo*7 is barely correct, but with more levels it is not, because real humans won't use it in real situation, as the recursion level exceeds their short-term memory capacity or some other natural barrier...

For the newborn readers, the background.

A mix of not-so-revolutionary ideas

2009-01-17T13:14:00.000-08:00

random ideas in no particular order, feedback highly appreciated:

1/ idea of a coworker (Ilari): website where user specifies a
location, for example 'Otaniemi', site generates a map with contours
indicating how much time it takes to reach that point. (for otaniemi
use ytv site)... more generally for other locations use google maps
shortest path service... How to do it ? fetch driving times from a
couple hundred points, then interpolate, visualize, etc. For extra
credit make it dynamic, show how access time changes from morning to
evening. Usefulness ? Say you know you work in X. You want to rent a
place, so you want to see how much time it takes to commute to X.
Has been done: http://www.mysociety.org/2006/travel-time-maps/
(scroll down for railway map of uk)

2/ earlier idea: six degrees of separation of books: fetch all info
about books from amazon, including "customers who bought this, also
bought that"-type similarity links. Built a graph, implement shortest
path search in graph. Then user asks for example, what is the shortest
path between "Homer's Iliad" and "Feynman's Introduction to Quantum
Mechanics"... then you get: Iliad is similar to Plato's Republic,
which is similar to Euclides's Elements, similar to ... to ... ... . A
tool for discovering interesting books and pure fun. For profit, link
all books to Amazon through affiliate links...

3/ social network/forum around scientific papers. A website where
every paper (or perhaps just important, seminal papers) have their own
site. You can ask questions for clarification, people can share their
opinion on correctness, importance, implications of a publication, can
correct claims of the author. People can share ideas on how to
implement the algorithms from the paper, or what are some better
alternative methods (likely not cited in the paper)... The authors
themselves might join and defend their claims, discuss with others,
etc. etc.

4/ not my idea, just fun... say someone bothers you with an obvious
question without making a minimum effort to find the answer. Point
them to this site:
http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=something

that's all the spamming for today, let me know, if you'd rather pass
these in the future ...
; )

cheers,
Laszlo

Beyond non-cooperative behaviour

2009-01-17T13:03:00.000-08:00

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!!

Novel Vig

random bits

Super Macro

Averages and integrals

Transhumanism

Google Publishes an online guide book

NovelVig meets Metahint

Bloom Box

Lovely typos

Better cowhouse

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

Chemical fingers

New Sensor Feels Fine

Page design to direct the reader's eye

Minipreneurship

Take the end user with a grain of salt

The Honda story

Hacking: A bird's eye view

Ben Franklin in Stockholm

Science and fundraising

Borges the post-modern

Taxonomy of technical results

How to motivate creatives?

Ten Simple Rules for Choosing between Industry and Academia

Opium and colonialism

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

An outfoxing wolverine

Wolverine linguistic roots

Outfoxing the wolverine

Categories

Serious not Solemn

How to brainstorm effectively?

Great ideas

Harmful abstractions (meta)

Hindustani Classical Music

Mission impossible?

Jack of all trades

Battle of the sexes

Under what conditions would contests for innovation work?

Monkey Business

E-S theory of gender differences

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

STORM, a funny and smart poem (?!)

Looking a (small) gift-horse in the mouth

Complexity theory, power laws, bears and honey

How to present a complex idea concisely

Chimps and grad students

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

The story of the blue brain project

What you should know about organic food cerification

cudnt resist this

the art of surveys

A sudoku puzzle

Vege-Visualization

Visualization fail

Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education

Scientific field branding

Magnetic poetry. Seriously

To buffalo or not to buffalo

A mix of not-so-revolutionary ideas

Beyond non-cooperative behaviour