Science and fundraising

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

Borges the post-modern

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

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

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

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

So the critique goes:

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

just to build up for the main pun:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taxonomy of technical results

ok, ok, I'm back ...

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

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

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

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

How to motivate creatives?

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

This and this.

Ten Simple Rules for Choosing between Industry and Academia

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

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

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

Opium and colonialism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disclaimer: this post was written while booted in Windows.