don-E Merson

Expanding the musical alphabet

2016-08-28T23:39:00.001-07:00

Can you hear the talking drums?

When Captain William Allen was navigating up the Niger River, he discovered his pilot was hearing messages even there was no voice in the area. The message was not a human voice; it was the “talking drums.” In fact, all the natives could understand this language but the Western ears were deaf to the content. (Gleik) The Europeans lacked a fundamental understanding of a dimension of language. The Europeans had alphabets that could break down sounds into various parts and could dissect various languages into written form to share with Linguists who could learn these languages without stepping on to the Dark Continent. But there was an important missing marker that could change the meaning. They didn’t understand that the pitch rising, failing, or staying the same could change the meaning of the word. (Gleik)They hadn’t known that was important.

It wasn’t like they didn’t use these types of elements in conversion. The rising tone to indicate a question is a common technique to highlight that a sentence is a question. (Gleik)You know that, right? But the Bantu languages had used this not to change the pragmatic meaning of a phrase but it could change the word’s meaning.

The Alphabet breaks your thinking

Philosophers had warned against the written word as far back as Plato who claimed it would work against true knowledge (Gleik). Jesuit priest Walter Ong had noted that literate culture actually couldn’t understand how the act of being literate would make them incapable of truly understanding those in the pre-literate world. (Gleik) He likened it to a trying to understand a horse when all you had ever seen was an automobile. You could describe it as a difference of features but a horse as a wheel-less automobile doesn’t quite grab the essence of a horse. (Gleik)

Marshall McLuhan went farther claiming that the very idea of the alphabet changes the user into thinking that they could break up the world into tiny units unfolding in sequential and fragmented thought. (Gleik)But the alphabet wasn’t the only idea that broke up an aural field into smaller units, Western music did the same thing.

Music of Notes

Western music broke music into notes which were discreteitems with a pitch or silence lasting a defined time. This musical alphabet could write a musical performance that allowed people who had heard a piece to play it by simply reading these notes. In fact, these notes are so versatile that a different instrument could play the same song. In fact, these notes soon defined the song. A melody was definable by these magic symbols. This type of analysis became so refined that in the 17^th century, there were new entities that were observed which seemed entities among themselves called chords. Chords were combinations of notes that were played simultaneously which gave a certain character, Major, Minor, Diminished, and Augmented. Once again patterns were discerned in the sequential patterns of the chords and chord progressions were defined into the literature.

Since the magic of the notation could make a person magically duplicate the information, the notes became important and other aspects of music became less important. These other elements like Timbre and the position of the instrument relative to the hearer became less important, just existential elements which not important and soon not remembered. Unseen by educated musicians and not really part of the song just part of the performance.

This worked well as long as people who learned music continued to learn in this fashion and the only way for people to hear music was by hearing a musical performance. But music was changed by technology. People started hearing most of their music via some sort of recorded device, not by instrumentalists playing their wares. Some of these heard music in a different way and that lead to a revolution that no one saw coming.

Block Party In The Bronx

When people in the Bronx would party in the 70s they got the whole block involved. Block parties in (Wikipedia-Hip Hop)They had a Disk Jockey, usually called a DJ, who took two turntables and spun up beats for the dancing crowd. In this creative atmosphere, two new forms of art appeared that didn’t resemble previous forms. One of these was breakdancing or B-boying. (Wikipedia-Hip Hop)The dancers instead of partnering up with another, would roll around on the ground in a new stylistic form with the extended beats thrown down by the DJ. The other new form was Rap.

the Bronx would have music but they didn’t have musicians.

Rap music is controversial. It was declared by many as not music. (Is Rap Music Real Music?) The new Rap artists were doing something that didn’t fit with the old musical alphabet. The rap didn’t have the same ideas of pitch and the rhythms didn’t fit the strict counters of classical or shuffles rhythms that peppered the radio airwaves. They talked in rhythm over the beats. The turntablist would move the records forwards and backwards and scratch the records to create beats that defined any type of formal musical notation. How exactly do you represent a record played backwards in beat in a G-clef? This was noise that somehow was music. Sure, there were avant-garde 20^th century composers would try to incorporate noise into music but these always just experiments and nothing of lasting value. People were now laying down good money to hear people mix the noise of record scratches with recorded beats at their local music store. But the biggest change that resulted from this new style was the use of samples in songs. Samples were parts of other songs that were repeated in a uniquely new fashion. The idea was so different it ended up being an issue needing to be settled in a court of law.

Tone Loc vs. Van Halen

When my friends and myself first heard “Wild Thing” by Tone Loc (Ton-Loc Wild Thing), we instantly recognized the sample.

It was “Jamie’s Cryin’” by Van Halen (Van Halen: Jamie's Crying).

But it was only part of the song and it was mixed up and repeated in a new way. The took the bombastic Eb power chords at the beginning of the verse and followed it with the back of the chorus with power toms descending rhythmically down. We didn’t understand. It seemed like stealing, he was literally taking the recorded song and playing it for his own song. This wasn’t music, they were just playing a record. That isn’t an instrument. Or so we thought.

Playing the Record

It wasn’t just playing a record; it was playing the record. The nimble fingers of the DJ were manipulating the record like the fingers of Eddie Van Halen manipulated the strings of the guitar. But it wasn’t just the instrument that was different, it was the idea of what the rudiment of sound could actually be.

When I hear Jamie’s Crying, I would say the song’s definition was the power chords, the bass, and the drums accompanied by vocal track as the song. I was seeing the abstraction of the notes and the harmony. I could write it out as notes on a staff or maybe in the form of tablature and that is what the song was to me. Eb, Eb-Eb, descending minor scale. But Tone-Loc was thinking something different. It wasn’t the Eb power chord which was abstraction, it was the exact power chord played by Eddie Van Halen on Jamie’s Cryin. The exact timbre of distortion that appears on the record with that amount of reverb was the rudiment. The new technology now allowed the turntablist to play back the exact seconds of a recording in an order now imagined by the artist in a sequence of their own liking. Tone Loc had brought was experiential into the noticed abstraction of music vocabulary. The sample now brought back something that we could easily recognize, timbre of an exact instrument with the reverberation attached to that exact acoustic environment, into a rudiment like the pitch on a staff.

No more notes

I would love to tell everyone that I recognized this novel expansion of the musical vocabulary right away but I didn’t. My ears were as deaf to this idea as Captain Allen was to the talking drums. I didn’t really notice until I had quit playing and teaching music. No longer in the trance of norms of musical theory, I started to ask why Rap was so popular and why I actually liked a lot of Hip-Hop artists.

Eventually when I was no longer looking at music through the pedagogical eyes, I was able to see why Hip-Hop made sense. I was able to see how an isolated culture was able to see a new art form that was invisible to the dominant culture by ignoring the rules and creating a new vocabulary of sound because they were not trapped into using the musical vocabulary

Bibliography

Gleik, James. The Information: A history, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Random House, 2011.

Is Rap Music Real Music? n.d. 28 08 2016. .

Ton-Loc Wild Thing. n.d. 28 08 2016. .

Van Halen: Jamie's Crying. n.d. 28 08 2016. .

Wikipedia-Hip Hop. n.d. 28 08 2008. .

How To Suck Less Every Day-Introduction Preview

2016-03-12T16:27:00.000-08:00

Introduction- The Programmer’s Prayer

We suck less today.

At the end of every day when I talk to my project manager about our progress for the day, this is the phrase we use. It is the essence of great software. If you can suck less every day your software will slowly turn into something amazing.

It is important to note what I am NOT saying:

We have a great product!
We finally did it!
We are better than anyone else!

While this is often the case at the end of the day, this is not the important lesson of the day.

Software development is a real life example of the power of exponential growth. Sucking by 1% less ever day will quickly turn your product into a good product. But it is important to understand that it is an asymptotic function, you will never get “there”. You will never have perfect software but will be stuck with imperfections. This is true of all software.

There are some products that I use every day that I absolutely love and couldn’t live without but they still suck in places. For example, Excel is a great program but there are still little tweaks that I run into from day to day. Importing 8-digit number strings that are student identifiers always truncates the initial zeros. Excel cannot figure out that these strings are not numbers, though this should be obvious because some of the 8-digit numbers start with “0”. But that doesn’t stop the import. We have a workaround and it sucks less.

My Journey

You probably found this book and said “Who is this guy?”

You probably don’t know me but I am a software lifer who has spent most of my adult life developing software. Software that I have architected has won multiple national awards but I don’t have a consistent blog or a vlog of any sorts. I tend to do my job and use my free time for my many other interests. My last project was a book of poetry about my home of Tucson, AZ. I am not a person who trolls stack overflow and answers questions. Most of my answers on stack overflow come from a day when I was home sick and was bored. I am a yeoman programmer, someone who is dedicated to his craft, learning, and a balanced family life.

But I have been in software since the early 90s after graduating from Towson State University and moving to Tucson, AZ. I have done every aspect of the software business from customer support, technical support, 2^nd Tier technical support, QA, QA lead, technical writing, technical training, product analysis, product management, recruitment, developer, and senior developer. Of all these jobs, the one I have loved the most has been development and that is the heart of software. But as a person who has worked his way up in the software business I understand the business differently from other developers who have only worked developing code.

Most of this book will be about development but this book isn’t only for developers. If you work in software in any manner this book will benefit you. If you are product manager, this book will help you find great developers and help them to live into their ultimate potential. If you are in QA, this book will help you understand the process of coding and this knowledge should help you identify areas for testing that you might not have thought of before. If you are a student and are wondering whether software is for you, this book will give you a real life feel of what it is like to work in software development. But mostly it is about the art of development and will be very useful to developers.

But why make a book?

Being a programmer in the 21st century means things come and go quickly. There is always something new and everything is always changing. That is what I love about my profession. However, being a programmer sometimes feels like trying to catch water, even we you get what you are want, it just slides out from between your fingers.

Most programmers don’t really use physical books anymore. If there is a problem you can consult Google, Stack Overflow, or some other authoritative source which will help you find the answer. If you want to learn something new, there is PluralSight and the Safari library which hold learning resources about everything from the old coding platforms like COBOL to the latest JavaScript library. I have lots of books about technology that have become obsolete that I know use to prop up many computer monitors. Being a programmer is to be in a world where everything is always changing. But this book isn’t a substitute for these resources.

After many years in the software business, I have found some principles that haven’t changed. And in the rush to learn the latest and greatest, sometimes these fundamentals get brushed aside. This can have poor consequences for those who don’t have the solid experience of a seasoned programmer and I see this more every day in the greater programming world. This book is a levee against that tide.

As part of my current position, I am tasked with teaching a small team of programmers to practice good coding habits. That is part of being a senior programmer and is a part of my job that I really enjoy. As every teacher knows, teaching is the final step to understanding a topic thoroughly.

The students that I teach are all Computer Science or MIS students at the University of Arizona. They have all been brilliant and have been taught in the formal rigors of the discipline. However, I have found their education was missing some important items. I would have hoped they would have received information about the vocation of programming in their studies. But that seems to be beyond the pale with the amount of knowledge the University is trying to stuff into their brains in a limited time.

This book is my effort to be able to present my next student worker something that will be valid from their years as a student worker until their retirement party. This book is not about a single technology, it is about why we have technology and the best way to make friends with technology.

This is the stuff that has stayed the same throughout my years in the software business and it didn’t matter if I was a technical support person, QA person, project analyst, coder, consultant, or senior coder. There are books similar in tone to this one. The Pragmatic Programmer comes to mind and I highly recommend it. But those books have more of the perspective of a person who is a consultant.

Consultants don’t tend to work on version 42 of a project so their perspective is slightly different from mine. Consulting is not bad, it just doesn’t have the same concerns as a person who is coding to ship something every day of their life. Working on version 42 of an application teaches you what is eternal in software. This book is a written record of the lessons that I learned by working on software that has lasted a long time and required constant revisions. These are the lessons that are leaned by updating version 42 to version 43.

To make sure you have mastered the lessons at hand, I will write out exercises after each of the intended lessons. I will give you some problems and my answers to the even problems will appear in the back of the book similar to a math textbook. However, I will encourage the reader to try to think of similar exercises in their own life.

Software excellence derives from being able to understand a real world problem in a subtle and nuanced manner. While I can create software to solve any person’s needs, the problem is that people don’t understand what they need in a concrete way or understand when their needs have changed. The trick is being able to “see” the problem in the correct way.

This book is an attempt to show you how to determine the needs of individuals in a way that can create valuable software. To do this I will take you through why people pay programmers, what is programming, what is data, what rules should be followed, what compromises must be made, what is a practical work etiquette, and how to grow in your craft. However, I can tell you’re the most important lesson in a sentence: “Try to suck less every day.”

Why do I put this in a negative way? It really isn’t a negative thing. It is more like a confession of guilt at the beginning of religious service. Let’s call it the programmer’s prayer.

Creator, we know there are problems with this software.

We know we can’t fix everything that we want fix on this day but we humbly aim to make it better today.

We know that major changes are needed but we can only make these changes slowly and methodically or risk the total destruction of the software.

We confess we only want to work on the more interesting parts but understand we must also work on the less interesting improvements that affect our customers every day.

Let us change the code we can change, leave the code we cannot, and know the difference between the two.

Please let us suck a little less every day…

Information Quality For Scholarship Matching System Using GPA

2015-09-08T19:47:00.000-07:00

In Larry English’s book Improving Data Warehouse and Business Information Quality, English states that “Quality exists solely in the eyes of the customers based on the value they perceive on how something meets their needs. What is quality to one customer may be totally defective to another.”(English, Larry P. 1999. Improving Data Warehouse and Business Information Quality, New York: Wiley.-page 16) The Scholarship Universe project at the University of Arizona is an example where the customers’ define quality in ways that differs from official data. In the Scholarship Universe, students are matched to scholarships with various different criteria including Grade Point Average (GPA). At the start of the project, the team creating the application needed to decide how to gather student’s information. There were 3 choices; pull the official data, ask students questions, or some hybrid form of the two.

Early parts of the application tried to use official data and hybrids but found that the data didn’t match what the student’s perceived as the correct answer. For this reason, the decision was made to match students with scholarships via student’s self-reported data instead of official data. One of the problems with “official” data is that it isn’t always what the scholarship donors would want to use. For example, entering students, freshman and transfers, have an official GPA of “0”. However, scholarships want the last GPA for the student, e.g. - High School GPA for freshmen. However, allowing the student to enter their GPA runs into two main difficulties; students do not always know their GPA or don’t update the system when their GPA changes.

But to really qualify for bad information quality, the difference between the data would have to mismatch students to scholarships by using this incorrect GPA. I set out to analyze whether differences in official and self-reported data would make a difference in the matching of students to scholarships. I excluded from the analysis any official GPAs that were zero because these are known to be incorrect for purposes of the application and only analyzed data when data points existed in both official and self-reported instances.

What I found was that the difference between the two GPAs was on average very small but as GPA requirements rose, these differences lead to low information quality for the matching system.

Given this information what actions do you think should be done to raise the information quality? Even if the data is matched in both system, does that necessarily mean that the information is of high information quality? Can you think of other situations where you wouldn't want to use your official data but would prefer to be allowed to enter non official data? Can you think of reasons why people would enter information for the scholarship site but not want to answer this information in any official capacity? If so, how should we judge the information quality content of the official data in this case?

Pct. Of Matches Structure by Scholarship GPA requirement

2 -2.5	2.5-3.5	>3.5	Total
96.89%	77.95%	39.55%	78.62%

Requirement	Scholarship Instances	Valid	Not Valid	Percentage
3.00	1982	12329	3488	77.95%
2.50	696	12329	3488	77.95%
3.50	444	1023	1565	39.53%
2.00	312	18632	599	96.89%
2.75	173	12329	3488	77.95%
3.20	104	12329	3488	77.95%
3.25	103	12329	3488	77.95%
2.80	70	12329	3488	77.95%
3.30	51	12329	3488	77.95%
2.70	47	12329	3488	77.95%
3.80	43	1023	1565	39.53%
3.60	28	1023	1565	39.53%
2.25	26	18632	599	96.89%
3.70	23	1023	1565	39.53%
3.40	17	12329	3488	77.95%
3.75	8	1023	1565	39.53%
4.00	3	1023	1565	39.53%
Total	4130	154363	41980	78.62%

Lessons from my elders

2014-12-29T10:19:00.001-08:00

The hum of the road under the tires of the K-car changed as we passed the sign telling us we were now in West Virginia. We were off to see Melvin because my grandfather, whom I called “Pappy,” needed to give him something. As we pulled up to the first stop at the big barn where Melvin was rumored to be, a pack of dogs noticed the K-car and had made a line towards the trunk. Everyone, Pappy, myself, and my wife Kim, got out of the car and Pappy made his way to the trunk of the vehicle. Pappy opened the trunk to reveal a large bag of dog food treats which he passed off to the line of hounds that appeared. Even the dogs knew it: Pappy always gave you something when you came around.

Pappy was the kind of grandfather that gave kids money when he saw you. He was probably the most popular adult among the small kids and even the teenagers. He seemed to not care about money. He seemed to always to be in a good mood. As I reflect back on things it is quite odd to remember this. In my family we have a technique called “doing a Pappy” which is to act like you are getting your wallet out but do so slowly enough that someone else will pick up the tab. And he would do this. But in retrospect, it was probably because he had already given his money away or had plans to give it away. But I can’t remember him letting the world faze him and this is quite remarkable as he had many good reasons to be disillusioned about life.

Pappy had a special baseball glove which was modified because of injuries sustained in Okinawa. He had a half finger, another tip missing and a large hole on his forearm from bullets taken in the Japanese theatre. He never complained, if anything he told self-deprecating stories about his service like being afraid to fall asleep next to a tank because it might roll over on him. But that wasn’t the only tragedy that he knew in his life.

His first wife cheated on him and left him with the credit card debt from the cheater’s wardrobe. And instead of admitting her mistake she turned vengeful and actually took away his purple heart. Pappy’s only son Oaky shot and killed himself. His daughter became estranged to him and refused to see him. Looking back at all of these things in my adult life, I can’t even try to fathom these things without stifling anxiety. But he went on and prospered. He eventually married my grandmother. Not too long into the marriage, he had some new roommates, my mother and me when my parents became separated.

My mother and father got married early in my life and David Merson adopted me as his own. No one ever knew I was adopted, people would even say “You look like your Dad.” He did all the things a father should do and I doubt that he ever even imagined it in any other way. Later in life I learned that I had a step brother who was only slightly younger than me. It was a mistake that haunted him as he had agreed to send alimony and to stay out of his life. This was similar to a deal that my mother had with my paternal father sans the money. As a kid I felt it was taking the easy way out, now that I am a father I understand the true horror of the proposition.

David Merson also brought with him his mother, or Grandma as I called her. She too had known a hard life filled with tragedy with a husband dying of cancer leaving her with three boys to raise on her own. She worked three jobs to meet ends as it was her only option as a woman with a sixth grade education. But like Pappy, you would have never known her life was filled with such sorrow. She was always giving in the ways that amazes me as I look back at it today.

I was a kid who was into Marvel comic books and I had noticed that the Baltimore Sun which she read every day had the Spiderman comic. My grandmother decided upon hearing this that she would cut out the comic from the paper every day and mail these to me every week. And every week there was a letter and a few dollars for me to spend. Eventually, she would get cancer and move in with my parents. She would eventually lose her mind to Alzheimer’s and be beyond the care that my parents could give to her. When I would visit her at the nursing home, she often thought I was her favorite brother Bud and talk to me like she would her brother.

My other grandmother, or Nana as I called her, didn’t have this long drawn out death but her life was no stranger to tragedy either. She was born the fourth child of a coal miner and her mother died shortly afterwards. Three girls and one boy were left to be raised by a single man during the great depression. Eventually her sisters and cousins would move down to the Washington D.C. area and she would marry David Sharbutt. They actually moved around the country from California to Arizona and then back to Pennsylvania. David Sharbutt eventually would disappear leaving Nana to raise her little girl, my mother Ina Rae, on her own. She would marry another man before divorcing him and marrying Pappy. Despite the pay that a woman with a high school education would draw at the time, she was able to make ends meet. Sometimes she would have to rely on the help of her sisters or other family to get by. Family was more than blood though as we had family in the Bashams, Sis and Charlie and their three kids, Karen, Paula and Charlie, Jr.

But Nana was always able to save money and get by. And despite this frugal nature, she would actually give me money for foolish ventures and lavish gifts. She funded a foolhardy attempt by me to be a salesmen in college that required 800 dollars to start off. She didn’t think it was a good idea but she gave me the money anyways. Her heart was bigger than even she knew herself.

I am sure at this point, you might be asking “so what are these lessons from your elders?” The lessons are hidden in the shadows of these stories that go through my mind on this day. The most important lesson is that family is whom you care about. Every one of my elders proved this every day of their lives and showed me with their actions.

They also had many excuses to become bitter with the breaks that life had dealt them but just kept chugging along being thankful for the gifts that they had. And this led to the most important lesson.

The lesson that sticks out is one of Grace. Every one of them, Nana, Pappy, Dad, and Grandma live on in my heart by their gifts that were given freely and without any thought of return. That to me is the lesson that was hidden to me until very recently. Grace is hard to understand when you are young. Grace is all around you and so it is as hidden as the air that you breathe. But like the air, you could not live without it. So on this Christmas season as I think back on the lives and lessons of my elders, I am struck with emotion by the pure love that has kept me afloat.

What is so amazing about grace? It is transformative and changes the lives that it touches and most of the time they don’t even notice until later. And then when you are older and can’t pay back this gift to those who gave to you so freely, it is then that you realize that there is only one thing for you to do: To pass on this grace to those around you.

Real thinking for real problems

2014-12-21T17:55:00.001-08:00

With the recent high profile cases of white police officers shooting and killing African American youth, there has been a large outcry that racism is still alive. This simplistic evaluation shows that, despite many popular books on Neuroscience and Psychology, the majority of people still have outdated ideas of how people make decisions. Since these ideas are not in touch with the reality of how people make decisions, the chance that we will make any progress is nil at this point in time. To really enact change at this time, we need to understand how people really think before we can put problems like Ferguson to rest.

There are two important things to understand to make changes: how people think and how people make decisions. Let’s talk about how people think first.

Different parts of your brain have different opinions of the world around them. Some of these opinions become a conscious thought but a majority do their work under the covers without us ever being aware of them. The decisions of your amygdala will cause you to react before your conscious mind becomes aware of the stimulus. The amygdala is a very ancient part of the nervous system that we share with many of our other animal relatives. It is a secret society of your mind that acts without a vote and can create action without other parts of your brain. It works with the hypothalamus which sends out adrenaline to your brain stem which increases your heart rate.

Since you react before you are aware of what you are reacting to, can we call this a decision? This is the murky water that you must navigate when you understand your brain better. The only way to control the amygdala is to control that environment on which it reacts. Horror movies are great examples of this idea.

In a horror movie, the director controls the view of the audience member until a sudden vision appears which can make the audience member jump in fear. The horror movie lover then feels a rush of adrenaline come over them before their pre-frontal cortex reminds that this is all just make believe.

The environment in this case is what created the decision. The only way for the audience to not make the decision is to not pay attention to the stimulus (assuming the talent of the director is adequate). Once a person in the theatre are paying attention, the decision is set.

This example also shows another important concept, different parts of your brain see things in different ways and there is a hierarchy to who makes the decision. Amygdala is the quickest and doesn’t need buy in from the rest of the brain to make a decision. Your pre-frontal cortex is slower and can override other areas with training or past experience.

Think about the times when little kids become scared after seeing scary movies. Their experience that these things they saw on the screen were not real is limited. This allows other areas to come to the forefront and the scared feeling to stay.

This differing decision-making scheme is actually something that is very important in how you lead your life. You have two modes of thinking which have been named various names by different researchers but I will use the terms as put forth by Daniel Kahneman, System 1 and System 2.

System 1 systems work automatically without any conscious thoughts. They are never turned off and believe everything they see. In the horror movie example above, System 1 started into action right away because it believed what it saw was true. System 2 is deliberate and expensive biologically. System 2 puts the halt into the horror movie scenario so you don’t go running out of the theatre in fear. But System 2 uses up more fuel from your body and is much slower than System 1. You simply can’t always use System 2 in the real world and even if you could it would still lag the fleet agility of your System 1 brain. Your System 2 brain also doesn’t scale and is very linear while your System 1 brain can process in parallel many things from all of your senses.

This leads me to a very anti-intuitive statement that has passed many experimental tests. Your brain believes everything it perceives and then makes a decision on whether to believe it or not. Experimenters can make people believe things that upon further reflection they understand to be untrue. These experiments just up the cognitive load for people by doing things like having them remember long strings of numbers, a System 2 task, and then asking them to validate the truth or falsity of the statement. Under cognitive load, people will mistake things as being true which upon not-heated reflection they know are not true. This is one of many experiments that convey this idea but I think it is the most oddly compelling.

But to get to the heart of our modern dilemma I need to take you to a very political incorrect statement. But to get you there I am going to talk something a little controversial to ease you into the idea.

At one time in my life, I worked as phone technical support and a trainer for TurboTax/Intuit. During this time, I worked with people who were not at their best. People can get stressed out about their taxes and stressed out by computer issues, the combination was exponentially bad. So I soon taught myself a couple of heuristics to make my day more manageable.

The first one was the anti-sales heuristic: Never ask a question that can be answered with yes. For example, “Are you at your computer?” seems like an innocent enough question but stressed out people who are at work can easily say “yes” without thinking. “What do you see on your screen?” gets you the information that you need and engages your customer. The reason for this was very easy and I had people I trained tell me many years later that they always remember this rule, “People lie.”

This is a prejudiced statement. A lot of people are not liars but the people that I was interacting with were not at their best when I was talking to them and this statement was true in this context. This was a prejudiced statement and was believable because it was true enough to be useful. It was nothing that I could use in real life, it was only true in a small sphere of influence but it affected me outside of this context. Working as a tech support representative changed my outlook on the world. My problem was that the context of my statement was not representative of the rest of my life. My prejudice spread because it was true in most of my interactions of life but it was a hindrance outside in the rest of my life.

So this is the big problem, prejudices work because they work in the small context where the prejudice was created. And the second important part is that we are all prejudiced within our System 1 system because we have limited experiences in our life where these shortcuts work. In fact, this can be demonstrated by tests that check your reaction time to different words. Your prefrontal cortex might understand your prejudices are wrong but your other parts of your brain are still using them. These prejudices are called Implicit Prejudices and we all have them. They can even be self-deprecating. Malcolm Gladwell was disturbed to find out in his investigations that his brain had hidden associations that African Americans are less intelligent because he is a highly intelligent African American (Canadian actually so I am sure not how to word that). I have an implicit prejudice that social sciences are for women and hard sciences are for men despite that the fact that I am a person with a social science degree.

These reactions are things I have to consciously correct which means in situations where my cognitive load is high, these prejudices leak out. The only way to change them is to actually experience them as being not true in your everyday life. Your conscious brain can be changed with thought but your unconscious brain can only be changed by experience. And now for the controversial part…

What do the two deaths of African Americans have in common? Inexperienced white officers whose meters for danger are not tuned to thinking that African Americans are safe. This doesn’t mean they are prejudiced in the normal sense of the word, that they have made a conscious decision to believe that African Americans are dangerous. Their subconscious has been primed in a very bad direction. There is no law that will change that, only experience, or maybe a law that primes their experience.

So what can we do to prevent this situation from occurring again? It seems to me there are only two ways to change the world. One way is to prevent the mistake from being a lethal mistake. Having officers in certain civil situations having weapons of force that are not lethal is a way to prevent the deaths. The consequences of this are unknown as without our dysfunctional society we could have police would come be overpowered from the criminals that they aim to apprehend. While these have high negative valences for some people in our society, the fact remains it would have prevented the death of the youth in one of the cases.

The second choice is harder to pull off but much better in the long run. We have to change the experiences of the officers in the area. Being a police officer is an extremely difficult job and can lead to an unbalanced point of view. In the same that my job in technical support would lead me to believe that people were stupid and liars because that is who I dealt with, police have to deal with people at their worst and it has an effect. Being a cop could make the world look like criminals. We put our officers into situations where they see the majority of law abiding citizens of all ethnicities who make up the real world being normal good citizens. We already do this in some situations.

Having the police into places where citizens are using their normal good behavior is the only long term prescription for what ails us. And due to the experience of many law enforcement officers coming home from wars it is more important than ever. What we need to do is change the experiences of the police to help them remember what it is that they are protecting and what a noble sacrifice that their life encompasses. This is the moderate path that can satisfy everyone but it is going to require a change. Police would have to be allotted time to do more community outreach in the places that they patrol. The higher the crime rate for the neighborhood, the more community time needs to be assigned. We need to change the defaults of our protectors because they can become weary from their job.

I know this approach will probably not really find proponents on either side of the aisle. I know it requires us to believe Science instead of our intuitions and that is a difficult sale. But the Science is clear and until that changes, it seems that this is our best long term solution. It is the moderate position, it doesn’t assign blame. It can’t be explained fully in a teaser for CNN. But I think we are at a position now in our culture that we need to realize what we are doing now is not working and it is time to try something different instead of the same old solutions that divide people. It is time to unite people and make a permanent change.

Teacher as Knowledge Sherpa

2014-11-15T18:14:00.001-08:00

Why did they want me to teach them? I couldn’t stop thinking about this question last month when I was asked to go down to Cochise College to teach a class on the migration from ASP.NET MVC4 to MVC 5. I had sent them an article that explained the logistics of this transfer but they still had a need for me to come down and talk about the topic.

This question of why I was needed seemed to me to beg a bigger question, one that cuts to the heart of the modern world. When information is free and accessible is there really a need for teachers? I hadn’t learned my trade from a class and everything I knew about the subject was self-taught. Was I that different? Why can’t everyone do this? Why do they really need me?

While thinking about this topic, I came to realize that teachers in the modern world are actually more important than ever because of an ironic twist in fate.

With information everywhere, the true cost of an education is now time. I can find information on any topic but I need to know if it is reliable, where to find it, and I need a way to be able to relate it to something I know. To efficiently learn something, I need a guide. It was then that I realized that a good teacher is like a Sherpa.

Sherpas are the indigenous people of the Nepal region but most westerners use the term as a mountain guide. This is because Sherpas are most often the guides that lead explorers and adventurers up the trail to Mount Everest, which is the prototypical highest mountain. And I as starting thinking about it more, I realized that the metaphor could really be extended pretty far.

First off, a mountain is probably the most often used metaphor for learning. It lends itself nicely in many ways. There is a destination that is desired, to get to the top. There isn’t just one path but some are more traveled and easier to climb. So the metaphor of a Sherpa leading a person to the peak of their educational goals works nicely.

It is also important that Sherpas are people who are natives to the region. There are people that live there and are acclimated to the region. They can read the signs of the land and can spot the danger areas. They know what materials you need to carry along the road and which ones are just not necessary for the trip.

It is also important that the trip itself can be different depending on the time it is taken. A freak snowstorm or a heat wave can wreak havoc on the natural environment and force the Sherpa to change their direction. In fact, it is possible that the Sherpa can see something new during the journey and learn something new in the process because they are traveling the road alongside of you. More than likely the Sherpa will understand the path better from giving direction to their partner.

All of these ideas map out perfectly for what a teacher should be in the modern age and help explain the need for my services.

I live in the world of the ASP.NET and breathe its air every day of my life. I know the area and have a good mental map of all the paths to knowledge. This type of expertise is not always appreciated.

I remember a previous employer whose goal was to make a training module so that “anyone” could teach the class. I won’t say the name of this employer but let just say I wasn’t really “in to it.”

It didn’t work for the same reason giving Lance Armstrong a google map and pointing him at Mount Everest to lead a team to the top of the mountain wouldn’t work. Though he has the skills to climb the mountain, a map is not a good enough guide. A map doesn’t have the subtleties of the landscape. But there was also another more important point that I thought they didn’t really think through.

It comes down to one thought experiment. Think back to the teachers that inspired you. Did any of them teach a subject that they weren’t an expert? I would contend that each of them were passionate about that subject and that passion was part of the appeal of their classes. And that passion is what helps a true teacher appreciate the new views along the trail.

A teacher though passionate and a native to their discipline doesn’t need to know everything along the way. In fact, a teacher can usually find new things by actually teaching and reacting with their students. Just like a Sherpa might see something new as they adapt the path for their client, a teacher will often have a new insight while trying to adapt a lesson for their student. And this is an important trait of a great teacher and Sherpa.

A Sherpa has to adapt his path to the person who is climbing with them. Taking the steepest and quickest route might work for the great athlete with lots of experience but a slower climb will be required for a person who is not as experienced. A teacher also has to take into account the background of their student into account. To really understand the ins and outs of ASP.NET, a student needs to be able to understand a lot of other concepts such as Object Oriented Principles and Design Patterns. While trying to teach students MVC, I needed to take this into account and slow to take the longer road in my seminar down in Sierra Vista. And while I was preparing the materials and explaining the materials, I came across some new insights that lead me to appreciate the landscape even more.

Did I lead everyone to the mountain of MVC knowledge in my class? Sadly, I did not. There were people who were not in shape to make that full journey. But I did lead them as far as I could and tried to give them a full short cuts along the trail. I want to do more and continue them down the path. I want to show them the mountain that I so dearly love. And to me that is the mark of a true Sherpa teacher, they want to share something that they know, love, and deeply respect.

And that led me to believe that is why I was asked down to Sierra Vista. I was there to lead them down a path of knowledge, like a Sherpa climbing a mountain. And when I realized that was my purpose I was able to stop wondering why and got down to making preparations for the journey.

Reflections on a broken root beer bottle- 5 years later

2014-08-03T21:34:00.002-07:00

As I prepare to return to work at the University of Arizona, I was struck by this post that I wrote right before I first joined the U just shy of 5 years ago.

It was a bad day. I had just been laid off from a job I had for 10 years. I had been working at Sun Healthcare in Albuquerque by telecommuting from Tucson for almost all of that time and I was not expecting the news that I received. I am not sure why I turned to create a blog post; but I did and I am glad to see I hadn’t lost my sight of the bigger issues.
I wrote:

It is funny how life can throw little obstacles in your way to give you better perspective.
Today while still in shock from being laid off this morning, I went to put a group of Coke Zero bottles into the fridge at my Mom's house (which is my headquarters for telecommuting) and it caught on a bag that my mother had left there and started off a chain reaction which ended up with an unopened root beer bottle made of glass exploded in the middle of the kitchen. I didn't react in my usual way, with some practice of using every swear word I could still remember, but actually was taken aback and realized that the situation with the root beer was really a microcosm of my real life situation.

There was big mess for me to clean up that just came about from forces I didn't really have any control over and it was up to me to clean it up. I was barefoot, as usual, and standing in the middle of shattered glass mixed with smelly root beer. My first task was to negotiate out of my place and grab some shoes for basic safety to myself. After doing this, I realized that I didn't really know where the broom or mop was, so I was going to have to get down on my hands and knees and pick up the shattered glass and mop up the root beer with paper towels. If I failed to do a good job I would basically put at risk my family who could step onto one of the shards of glasses that were everywhere in the kitchen. Also, I needed to do more than just clean up with the paper towel which would give the illusion of clean but not pick up the "stickiness" that would be left over by the root beer. I would have to clean up and then use some good old soap and water to really get it clean, it needed to be more than just look clean or it would affect those who traveled the floor after me.

That really is my situation today. I was caught up in an economic situation that I couldn't control and bam! there went my job. I was kind of barefoot too because I didn't expect this in the least. I need to get those "shoes" of a good resume to help isolate me from the sharp daggers that surround me at this time. But the important thing in my mind was not how the explosion affects me but how it could affect the people I love. I am not sure how to tell my sons that I have been laid off and I am worried that if I don't do it correctly there might be some residual effects. My wife and mother have been supportive and we all think this is a blessing in disguise but I think we both know there is still a "clean up on aisle 9" situation going down and it will be stressful. So the kitchen floor has been cleaned up and so now on with my life.

And it was an incredible blessing in disguise. Within a month I was working at the U and got a chance to see what life is like back in a real office with real co-workers. I liked it a lot.

I found out that, despite my perception that I was not a person who needed people, that I am a person who needed people.

I needed people to learn about new things. I needed different perspectives. I needed to learn more people’s stories. I needed to talk with people who were not programmers.

You don’t get that as a full time commuting employee. When these interactions happen in a telecommuting job they feel more like a vacation and not the normal human longing for other people.

I have grown a lot in these last five years. I have figured out what I want to do with my professional life and have shaken off most of the distractions that hinder these goals. I have committed to writing more, teaching more, learning even more. I have committed to ask people with different talents to help me instead of muddling along until I finally figured the “trick” out. It is better to let other people use their talents. As Paul said:

For even as the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members of the body, though they are many, are one body,

In fact, that blog about a broken beer bottle was a weird first step towards my goal of finishing my book, The Virtues Of Being Wrong. I had always ragged on people who wrote blogs. I would ask jokingly "who has time to write a blog?" Now for some reason, I had jumped sides. Maybe being laid off flipped a bit...
Lots of people claimed God works in mysterious ways but I usually am not one to take take that position. However, the facts fit the story in this case. And like the boy who offered a pig a pancake, you never know where simple changes can take you in life but sometimes it is meant to circle back to where it all started.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot

Git to Walk off the Earth

2014-08-02T22:47:00.000-07:00

I got this old guitar,the strings are rusty but it's all I need.

Bring in the kick drum, it can back the beat.

Let's gather 'round and sing a song.

-Walk Off The Earth, Gang of Rhythm

I remember one particular drunken night from my college days. We were sitting in my apartment drinking Smurf shooters, which is 190 alcohol mixed to a palatable taste with Smurf-colored Kool-Aid, when the conversation took an odd turn.
One of my new friends claimed that he hated that he only heard music after someone had already accepted it. Curious from this odd, brash statement--and the Smurf-shooter taking hold-- I asked him, "What the heck are you talking about?"
He explained that all the music that we hear on the radio has already been through someone else who deemed it acceptable. He never got to pick what music but could only pick from a pre-selected list. That someone at Geffen records or the like listened and sent it to the commercial mill of radio and albums.
Being a person who likes to solve problems, I gave this drunken lament some serious consideration but my only retort was "How else are you going to do it?" I continued, "How could you make it so that everyone had direct access to the musicians?"
I don't remember that guy’s name but I bet he is happier here in the 21st century because no one stands in the way of the artist talking directly to the consumer. And then the consumer can pass it around to everyone else.

I got a shaker too,the kind of sound that wants to make you move.

Bring in the uke, we'll complete the groove

Let's gather round and sing a song-Ibid

Walk off the Earth is one of those bands that skipped that middle man and went directly to the people. They did it with quirky videos of known covers mixing them in new creative ways. The band doesn't fit the same prototype of the usual rock band from my era. In the previous century, bands had people who specialized in an instrument and played that almost exclusively. Walk the Earth doesn't quite hang this way.
Sure, each member has a specialty instrument but they aren't stuck there. In some of their quirky covers such as "Royals" and "Somebody That I Used To Know" this is illustrated through the drama of the video.

There's no worries on the earth tonight
We're all walkin' off the world tonight-Ibid

And without the “management” handling them, bands can be creative and bring in new instruments or even create their own. And with the blossoming of music technology, the idea of an instrument as the only way to make music is fading away. There are disciplines such as beatboxing, dubstep bass lines, and hosts of homemade instruments that find their way into songs today. This has led to more of an orchestrated form of music with the timbre and texture becoming more important than the traditional variants of melody and harmony. The song “Somebody That I Used To Know” (the original and the cover) is about as dull harmonically as possible, but the close orchestration of the timbres of instruments and voice are the contrastive elements that make this song “pop.”

Come on now everyone.
We're like a locomotive under the big hot sun.
We're chained to the gang of rhythm.
The song is never done.-Ibid

But it isn’t just Walk off the Earth. The bands that I listen to today are not bands that I have heard on the radio. The bands I dig are doing it in different ways. For example, Bowling For Soup went directly to their fans and created their album via Pledgemusic.com. Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers(RCPM) also created an album in 8 days and filmed the whole thing. Then they turned around and sold the record and a DVD of the process to the fans. RCPM also have created a ritualistic journey for their fans down to Rocky Point for a music festival bi-annually. And some favorites like Karmin and Watsky I have only ever heard via YouTube. There is still the musical industrial complex but it is no longer the only show in town. And with the YouTube cover, popular music is just a shared history like Greek myths now. Everyone knows them but we can create new versions of those old stories.

We got this melody, bring in the harmonies like CSNY.
To write a tune you know will never die.
Let's gather round and sing a song.-Ibid

This direct access from artist to consumer has also affected more than just music, it has affected code too. Programmers, a modern form of an artist, can talk directly to consumers without a large corporation. And they can openly share their art with sites like Github. Anyone can share his code with anyone else in the world through this site and they do. I myself use many items that are hosted in Github like jQuery and Bootstrap.
Once again, like in music, there is a programming industrial complex but it is not the only show in town. And, in fact, the ethos of open source software is slowly becoming the default norm. Do you want a job today in programming? Well, give me your github id and I can look at how you program. Give me your stack overflow id and I can see how well you can communicate your issues via electronic means. The direct method has changed the way we can evaluate your work and created a new meritocracy of openness in art.

And when the night is done,these chains will hold us strong
The chords will carry on long after we're gone-Ibid

But of course the big question is “Will this direct to consumer methodology last?” The only way we can have musicians is by paying people to make music. I have not paid Karmin or Watsky any money directly. The only way coders can write code is that they can get paid to do their craft. This is an interesting challenge and I don’t know what the long term solution will be. But today artists get paid in different ways, mostly by the ubiquitous advertisement.

Do you remember when movies didn’t have ads? One vendor even vowed to never show commercials before movies. Now I am disappointed if I don’t get to the movie early enough to see the “previews” which are nothing but a trail of ads. I have kind of gotten used to these ads and no longer see them as ads anymore. Google is basically a license to print money through their clever ad technologies. In fact, if you can click on one of the ads in this blog, I think I get a penny, or something like that. And as long advertising continues to work as a way to get paid, we should be all right.

Though there are threats like net-neutrality that are trying to warp the level playing field, I think we are safe for now. So today, I can just relax and pick up my guitar and sing directly to whomever I want.

I got this old guitar, the strings are rusty but it's all I need...

The hockey solution or how to learn to skate without thinking about it.

2014-07-21T16:48:00.002-07:00

Yesterday, I was meeting with one of my friends, John K., to rap about programmer type stuff. We both have sons who are mathletes and a few months ago at a math picnic we decided to get together at Barnes & Noble to talk. It was a great idea as we have a lot of common interests and a passion for programming. But the best part is that he introduced me to a really cool idea that he called the "hockey solution."

He told me that for a while he had moved to Canada for a job and since everyone was playing hockey, he decided he should learn to skate so he could play hockey. So he started out trying to learn but wasn't having much luck. But once he got a hockey stick in his hand, the goal became how to get the puck and the mechanics of skating were moved to the background and, lo and behold, he started to skate. He said this philosophy of learning was something he admired about the math site, The Art of Problem Solving.

Yeah, you need to know the fundamentals of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, but the site makes you think about solving a problem and you learn the basics through trying to solve a problem. I, too, think this is a great way to learn, in fact, it is the way that I learned to program.

I did not learn to be a programmer via the normal path. I have degrees in Music, Secondary Education and Social Science (Economics, History, Sociology, Political Science concentrations with a smaller concentration in Anthropology and Geography). There is no traditional engineering in my background, I look at programming as an anthropological endeavor. Furthermore, I doubt you will find any programmers on your team who at one point in life wanted to be a poet. I learned to program because there were problems I wanted to solve.
In my work as a trainer for Intuit, I wanted to create a way to make a quiz and not have to spend a lot of time grading it. What did I do? I decided I could create a program that would do this, so I learned Java. From this, I learned the ideas behind Object Oriented Programming and learned how to make something.

Also in my role at Intuit as a Product Analyst for TurboTax Online, MacIntax, and Electronic Filing, I realized that I needed to create a more dynamic website. So I got Visual Studio 1997 and learned to program in ASP which has led to my livelihood today as a full stack Microsoft programmer.
I was also not thrilled with the Access database that we were given for analysis, so I spent a weekend and learned to program Access to do what I needed to do. This was my first experience with SQL and it sticks with me as one of my favorite languages to this day.

Later, I disliked the rating system employed by the NCAA for college basketball, so I created an application in Excel that pulled down every available statistic from every NCAA game and computed scores of new statistics. I learned a ton about parsing items from the web and actually helped some of my friends win their NCAA pools.

I didn’t learn about what a function does, I learned what I needed to do to get something done. And this led me to more exploration. I learned that you never duplicate code from experts, but the lesson didn't stick so much. But then I was put in charge of an application that was modified lots of times, in fact it was version 41 when I left that job, so I learned that functions allowed a way to centralize code that was superb to the powers of cut and paste.

I think the hockey solution is the way to learn things and I always look to hire people who learn in this way. The fun but scary truth is that what I do for a living today didn’t really exist when I graduated college and what exactly I will do in 10 years will only bear a slight resemblance to my job today. So when I look to hire someone it is not what they know that interests me but how do they learn new things is number one on my hit list. Furthermore, how they figure out what to learn. That is the programmer’s curse, your knowledge will slowly lose value or depreciate over time. A programmer’s value is really only doing a couple of things: reducing time taken and making things more accurate. Very rarely will you be able to do these so well that a whole new field will emerge and that is the gold standard for a programmer for sure. So a programmer must always be thinking about how can I make this faster and more accurate for my customers and what is the shortest path to that goal. The time spent coding is a cost that needs to be paid off by the faster program that you create. But believing in the hockey solution as a great way to learn is not just my opinion, it is actually backed up by some research.

In the book Make It Stick, Peter Brown details the most recent research on how we learn. The most important lesson is that we are not always the best judges of when learning is actually occurring. When people are asked which method works best our intuitions don’t agree with the data. Just because you think you learn something doesn’t really mean it is true. So we are stuck in a situation where we really need to use techniques that might clash with our feeling of whether we are learning something in the best possible way. So what is the best way to learn?
The techniques that Brown relates as optimum are:

Practice retrieving new learning from memory
- Don’t just re-read it, take a self-quiz on it. I like to create Quizlet notes to allow me to study later.
Space out your retrieval practice
- Don’t just cram in one day, do it over multiple days
Interweave the study of different problem types
- Don’t just study one thing, learn a bunch of things to create mental space between the learning
Use elaboration
- Find additional meaning layers in the material
Use generation
- Attempt to solve the question before being given the answer
Use calibration
- Use objective feedback to learn what you don’t know
Use mnemonic devices
- Figure out a way to remember things, it is half the battle.

Now technique number five, use generation, is basically the hockey solution in its purest form. But I would contend that almost all of these techniques relate in some way to the hockey solution. For example, number one relates because when you are trying to solve a problem you are taking a self-quiz on the attributes of the issue. Number two usually entails when you learn something in this way it will take multiple days to get it done. Number three is another fact of life that happens because doing something without really knowing what you are doing causes you to flow in and out of the lessons. Number four, elaboration, is also built into the hockey solution because you are searching for the meaning to help you accomplish your goal. Number six is used because reality is your objective feedback. The only technique that isn’t normally used via the hockey solution is number seven, the mnemonic device. However, by using another technique that Brown talks about, “teaching someone else”, you might get to exercise this option too.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, well I have a certain optimum learning style that I need before I am successful. However, Brown notes that there is no research backing up the idea of people having specific learning styles. We all think we have these learning styles but, once again, the most important lesson is that our metacognition is really bad.

The problem comes down to this, we learn best when our learning is effortful. However, when we need effort we feel like we have not been learning because it is taking some effort. In fact, as Malcolm Gladwell notes in his book David and Goliath, there is an actual amount of “desired difficulty” to mastering a task. So what do we do with these odd facts?

The answer to me seems simple because it is what I have always been doing all along. Figure out what you want to accomplish, try to do it, when you hit a wall try to find someone to help whether online or in person, and persevere. Realize the difficulty that you face is the fun part of the journey and it might not be as bad as it seems.

Just go ahead, watch the puck drop, dig in and you'll find yourself skating.

List of image credits:
http://cdn.nhl.com/predators/images/upload/2010/08/YouthHockey_KidsOnArenaIce_306.jpg
http://wikitravel.org/upload/shared//thumb/d/dd/Moraine_lake_by_gorgo.jpg/250px-Moraine_lake_by_gorgo.jpg>
http://cdn.ientry.com/sites/webpronews/pictures/070_intuit_616.jpg
http://www.tornbysports.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Arizona-Basketball.jpg
http://www.octanner.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/06Jun12_HeatherM2.jpg

How I got my dream job and you can too

2014-07-17T07:17:00.000-07:00

Today it is official and I have signed the contract to a job that I wanted for about a year. The reason it took a year is that it didn't exist until now.

To say I am happy is a blatant understatement. My mind is boiling over with thoughts on all of the fun things that I am going to do in my new position as a full time System Architect with University of Arizona developing the Scholarship Universe application into what it should be, the best application of its kind in the world.
Is this job perfect? Not exactly. It only has funding for a year for sure and the money, while good for a public servant, is less than I am making at the moment taking into account everything. But it is the job I have wanted for a long time. Why would I dream of a job that is not perfect? To explain that I really need to explain the steps to getting my dream job.

Step 1-Be very lucky

Most of us believe a successful person is both skilled and lucky, and that we can agree upon. However, most people think a very successful person is very skilled and lucky, However, I agree with Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman who claims that a very successful person is skilled and very lucky. In fact, in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, he details many stories of people, like Bill Gates and Malcolm's own mom, whose road to success combined both hard work, some skill and some crazy good luck. That was my first step, get incredibly lucky. Of course, as Branch Rickey once claimed, luck is the residue of design.

Step 2- Talk to people, not at them

I am not sure what is wrong with some programmers who want to talk down to their customers. As a developer, I apologize for them, they don't really mean to be jerks.
The truth I have found is that most people are totally awesome. (I admit this could be my good luck too.) I , have yet to meet a person whose personal journey hasn't been interesting. You will find you have lots of things in common. For example, here in Tucson, AZ, I ended up meeting someone who grew in the same neighborhood I did in Cabin John, MD. I think that gives us a special bond because of our shared history. I would say that bond was a major reason for me landing my job as she is one of the people that helped create the job.
Also, the more you know about someone the less likely you are to fall in the trap of Primary Attribution Error. This common error and major tenet of social psychology states that when you make a mistake you tend to believe it was the situation that led to your error, but when other people make mistakes we tend to think it reflects their character. This usually comes about because we don't know their character.
As Kathryn Schultz points out we have a basic playbook when we disagree with other people. First, we think they are ignorant. Once we rule that out, we think they are stupid. If we rule that out, we tend to think of them as evil. Knowing a person better will help lead you astray of this unfortunate progression of events. Furthermore,if you talk to people, you will find out that they have outside interests that are fascinating. All you have to do is ask some questions.
This will also help you communicate with people if you know their interests. If you are not getting your point across, try to think of a metaphor that they will understand from their experience. Not only will you help them but this exercise will help you better understand the concept yourself. And that brings up the next step.

Step 3- Listen before you talk

I try to be the last person to talk in a conversation, though I admit, once I get started I am sometimes hard to stop. You tend to have your best thoughts after other people have given you some good ideas! Also this helps you with the next step to success.

Step 4- Keep in touch with your friends

Once you learn people's story and become their friends, it makes it easy to keep in touch with them when you move along. This of course keeps you in loop for any new opportunities that might arise in their part of the world. Of course, it is important to be honest with them all along, so they can believe everything that you say, which is our next step.

Step 5- Be Honest in why you have to do what you do

I had to leave my previous job at the University because I couldn't afford to work there anymore. I told them that is the reason that I had to get another job and they could respect that. That is why they did not get offended when I told them I had to go. That also gives them to opportunity to sway you in the future since they know what you need. Or at least close to what you need which leads me to my next topic.

Step 6- Remember money isn't everything, meaning is

After a certain amount of money, what you do is more important to your happiness than what you make. Meaning is the north star of a happy existence and, as long as you keep that in mind, you will always find a way to be happy. Not that you have to do something at all times that makes you a junior Pharrell Williams. Sometimes you have to do things that aren't fun in the present but will have a chance to be awesome in the future. Which leads me to the next step.

Step 7-Sometimes you have to do something not fun in the present to get a chance at something better in the future

What I did was not necessarily unpleasant, but staying on part time at the University did take away from my free time. But the time was trivial when put in the perspective of what I wanted to do in the future. And this small bit of time each week led to my next step.

Step 8- Make yourself memorable

Always be sure people from your previous jobs remember you. And work towards making your memory last for the people in your current job when they move on. Sometimes checking in with old friends for lunch is all you need to do to connect with people again. However, the best way to do this is own your weirdness.

I understand that I am somewhat of a weird guy. I am also even odd for my profession because my background in social science makes me think about programming as anthropology, not computer science. But I own it. Yes, my name is spelled weird (don-E), that is not a mistake. I am OK being different. And sometimes people will not quite get the whole of your weirdness but that is OK. As long as you do your job and people know what to expect of you, you will be fine. This leads me to my next step.

Step 9- Always meet people's expectation but always try to exceed them

The reason I word it this way is that sometimes we have a tendency to go for the big awesome thing and fail and then deliver nothing. Don't put all your eggs in one basket but always try to do better than they expect. But it also says you are thinking about "what do they want?" and "how can I give something that they would think is better?" And with this ninth step, that leaves only one last step.

Step 10-Make them laugh

You should always have fun and try to find the humor in what you are doing. You will make mistakes, laugh them off. We will all take ourselves too seriously; point it out and make a joke. People can't help being happy when they are laughing, so making light of situation while still taking it serious is something that makes the days go quicker and the years roll into happy memories.
So my idea of a dream job was a job doing something I find meaningful with people that I like and respect. The job would let me live and support my family. It would give me a chance to create something unique and share it openly with the world. My new job at the University of Arizona does just that and that is why it is my dream job. All I had to do was follow these steps (which I made up as I went along). I believe if you follow these steps you, too, can get your dream job.

List of image credits used by this blog post below

The upside of hypocrisy

2011-11-06T22:00:00.001-08:00

Hypocrisy has gotten a bad rap. And I admit I am one who has played the hypocrisy card before to note the lack of consistency of people’s arguments. But not anymore, hypocrisy is a godsend and I fully condone the lack of inconsistency of people’s values, especially the religious ones. If people really believe the crap that they say they believe in, the world would be a pretty sad place. But luckily, people have stopped going to the logical conclusion of their confounding views. This is one of the amazing insights I learned from Steven Pinker’s latest book The Better Angels of Ourselves: Why Violence Has Declined.

Getting better, really???

The premise of the book is that we are living in a time with an unprecedented low level of violence. I just lost of few of you right there with mental retorts such as what about WWII? Vietnam? Insert violent tragedy here. He knows you won’t believe him, so he goes through the history of humans from prehistory to present and dissects his points one by one. He is a good scholar and is very detail oriented. I would normally say go ahead and read about the evidence, and you can. However, let me warn you that a non rose colored view of our past is very disturbing. I will never hear the term “drawn and quartered” in the same way again. As he noted and I agree I wouldn’t do some of the stuff that was a public spectacle for everyone to enjoy to the worst person I can imagine. As L.P. Hartley notes and Pinker reiterates “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. “

The sad fact is that the people of the middle ages were more consistent with their beliefs. As Pinker notes:

Institutionalized torture in Christendom was not just an unthinking habit; it had a moral rationale. If you really believe that failing to accept Jesus as one’s savior is a ticket to fiery damnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life: better a few hours now than an eternity later. And silencing a person before he can corrupt others, or making an example of him to deter the rest, is a responsible public health measure. Saint Augustine brought the point home with a pair of analogies: a good father prevents his son from picking up a venomous snake, and a good gardener cuts off a rotten branch to save the rest of the tree.35

Pinker, Steven (2011-10-04). The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Kindle Locations 656-661). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.

Luckily, people aren’t that consistent in their actions and beliefs. Again Pinker notes:

[The] people in the West today compartmentalize their religious ideology. When they affirm their faith in houses of worship, they profess beliefs that have barely changed in two thousand years. But when it comes to their actions, they respect modern norms of nonviolence and toleration, a benevolent hypocrisy for which we should all be grateful.

Pinker, Steven (2011-10-04). The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Kindle Locations 666-668). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.

So when people like Bill Maher complain that perfectly rational people somehow believe these illogical things, as he does in his movie about religion, you need to say that is ok. Let them spout their ideas but lets just make sure they don’t make these points some action items to be done by Thursday. Because if history is teacher (Ok, it really isn’t, just a figure of speech), the antics of the hypocrites are pretty mild.

The downside of utopia

But Maher goes too far and states that religion is dangerous. It is really a idea of a perfect world that is the danger. The big 3 killers in the 20th century were not religious but secular but they peddled a very tempting caret. If you want to kill someone, you need a good idea. The idea has to be about a perfect place because that makes the economics of the idea work. If someone complains, their needs versus the perfect place makes an easy decision. Kill them for the good of all.

Note that any utopia would do. And we can see now that throwing in some extra virgins is a nice touch for utopia conscious radicals today. Of course, this shows one of the problems with the old ways. In short, guys are assholes who believe in honor and will kill you if you don’t believe it. But before I get too sarcastic, let me break down Pinker’s argument in USA Today form.

The dance to peace

Pinker’s argument is complex and full of maybes, so if you are looking for easy answers from someone who is sure of things, don’t bother. In other words, this book won’t be on FOX news any time soon. But here is basically the argument in a nutshell.

Humans were very violent in prehistory just likes our bros the Pan family. Slowly Leviathan states emerged and started a slow reduction of violence by being the better bullies. Ideas like manners started to give us the idea that we could control ourselves. Reading comes along and allows us to actually be able to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. This leads to the ideas of the Enlightenment and rights. Nationalism comes along to mess things up for awhile but the liberal ideas of person hood prevail. In fact, the ideas expand and bring about the removal of slavery, women suffrage, race equality, animal rights, children’s rights and gay rights. We also pick the ability to reason more abstractly and unites some of the Leviathans and start to limit the power the Leviathans.

Pinker is no Pollyanna and knows that there are huge problems to our current world and it is no utopia. But he sheds insight on the facts of how we have it pretty good compared to the ancestors and that we should be grateful. But along the way he also shows us when it is not to be ok with hypocrisy.

A line in the sand with Elton John

Pinker shows that there is a line that can’t be passed by or it could lead us back to the bad old days. The line is a very American idea that we picked up in the Enlightenment and have slowly start to realize with radical leaders like ML King.

A person is a sovereign being and as long they don’t hurt anyone else, they should be left to be. That is why I can’t ever let the Christian gay bashing stand because they have tried to remove or limit the rights of people. Ok, you don’t have to believe in Evolution. The people who matter believe in it and save your stupid self. But you can’t reverse the rights of people or try to spin your tribal crap to limit their rights. Christian nation is a bad word. Heck, American nation is a bad word. We are not a nation, people of a tribe, we are a people. A flag or a commitment to God is not our claim to fame. We thought long and hard and put our best thoughts to paper in a Constitution. Because we did that we were able to eventually see the errors of our ways and are closer to people being equal in the eyes of the law than anyone could probably imagine. IN GOD WE TRUST. I don’t think so. In reason we trust. And you know what, we have gotten pretty good results from it.

A tale of two technocrats: Steve and Bill

2011-10-24T22:19:00.001-07:00

When I had graduated from college, I took up the task to make a list of people whom I admired due to a suggestion from a book by Dale Carnegie. Steve Jobs was on the top of the list. I didn’t own a Macintosh but I yearned for one. And in reality everything that Steve was selling I was buying. Steve Jobs sold dreams and it was a dream I wanted to own, to change the world.

Bill Gates never claimed he wanted to change the world. He wanted to build and sell software. Bill was an engineer. He was a nerd. I never really wanted to be Bill Gates. He was Darth Vader and Steve was Luke Skywalker.

It is so odd that now that Steve is dead and we take note of the changes that have happened due to these two visionaries, I have come to a surprising conclusion.

1984

The Best of Steve and the worst of Steve

Steve Jobs did change the world. Steve had a vision of the relationship between humans and technology that is unparalleled. Steve could take a complex idea and make it simple. Because of that, the list of items that he helped to create is truly mind blowing. Apple II, the Mouse, Object Oriented Programming, Graphical Interfaces, Desktop Publishing, Macintosh, Newton, Computer Animated Cartoons (Pixar), iPod, iPhone, and iPad is list unequaled by anyone. In fact, the computer company that he created after being kicked out of Apple, NeXT, was the type of computer that created the world wide web. This places him on every considerable important technological breakthrough of my life.

Everyone agrees that his methods pretty much made him an asshole. He was hard to work with and disrespectful of people. He had a problem with authority. However, the problem he always had was when he wasn’t the authority. When he was the authority, he was

OK with the idea. He marched to his own drumbeat but sometimes that meant he danced alone. But when we he worked his magic we all couldn’t help but watch and smile.

The worst of Bill and the best of Bill

Bill Gates was a programmer. He wrote code and had the vision to know that he should drop out of Harvard to start a company that could only be a success at that moment. He did the dirty work and created something that didn’t exist. He was a man of details. He sometimes did things that caused people to despise him. He was known to not play fair. Many thought he was trying to take over the software industry to rule with an iron fist from his Redmond office.

Bill Gates is now a philanthropist. He is a billionaire. He gives away large sums of money to help change real tangible problems. Bill is changing the world. However, his approach is not as sexy as Steve. He uses money to solve problems like health issues in the 3rd world. He puts his money where we never knew his mouth would be.

Change for whom?

So the conclusion is obvious that both of these men have changed the world. But the worlds they changed are quite different. Steve has changed the world for the middle class and Bill has changed the world for the voiceless. As Johnny Test says in every cartoon, “I didn’t see that coming…”

Steve changed the world for people who could pay his price. All of his products are overpriced, even today. I have an iPad and MacBook because my work gave them to me. I would never ever pay the price for this devices because they are not worth it. We want Steve’s products because he is cool and if we have them we are cool too. But coolness has its price…

Bill changed the world for the people who could pay no price. His charities are changing the world for people that none of us know about. Bill is once again about the details and keeping the vision to himself, though is slowly letting that be known.

His own worst enemy

Steve for all of his vision is really his own worst enemy. His characteristics that make him an amazing visionary make him an amazing jerk. Steve is the perfect mix of the hippy culture and Silicon Valley and has all the virtues and vices of both. He is a millionaire that doesn’t care about money. He let his own opinions override the doctor’s recommendations for surgery and it more than likely cost him his life.

He actually never did the detail work on any of his products, he was actually a rotten engineer, yet was always accusing other of stealing his ideas. He is even doing it now from his grave claiming Google stole his ideas from the iPhone.

It’s just Steve being Steve.

Steve would speak so eloquently that he would always lift my spirit and make me remember what is so great about being alive. For example:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works.

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

I'm an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

But there is one quote that I find terribly disturbing that I heard him say on 60 minutes.

You are born alone and you die alone.

This is both empirically and spiritually wrong. You are never born alone, there is always at least one person helping you come into this world and has helped grow to a point of departure. And if you are lucky, as Steve was, there will people with you when you die. And as the cliché goes no one ever thinks on their death bed that I should have spent more time at work. It bothers me that Steve didn’t seem to think that. He was at Apple trying to change things for strangers until the very end. The latest iPad is not that important in the long run.

How can someone be so visionary and so blinded to his own journey?

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Steve always had trust in his vision and in the end, he went down with the ship. When I connect the dots, I am a little disappointed in my hero. His arrogance has robbed us of what he would do next and in the end I am not sure he understood the beautiful poetry that fell from his lips like manna from heaven. But in the end the love he gave to the world is more than he took and I am thankful for his vision. So I guess I just want to thank him for inspiration and the lessons he taught me, good and bad. He gave us great times and we are the worst for his departure. R.I.P. Steve Jobs.

The Skittles-PP Equilibrium or Why Economics is hard to predict

2011-07-05T20:51:00.001-07:00

Steven Leavitt had a problem. His young daughter was refusing to become potty trained and his wife was at his wit’s end. Leavitt intervened with an economic solution because he is an economist. Economics is about incentives, he just needed to find the proper motivation and he found Skittles to be his daughter’s favorite. So he made the bribe, every time you go to the potty in the proper fashion, you get Skittles. Quickly, his daughter towed the line and Leavitt gloated of his brilliance. Then something went astray. His daughter who did not have the bladder control a week ago could now squirt out what was once one session into multiple sessions to get more Skittles. Leavitt, the author of the Freakonomics books and an economist at the University of Chicago, tells of this story as an example of why economics is a tricky science.

There’s Easy and There’s Easy

The truth is always hard to discern and part of it is just the mere dynamics of systems. For example, the weather cycle is a simple system but because of the relationships of the variables to each other a minor change can cause a qualitative change,.i.e. the Butterfly effect. The science of complexity was born from a model simulation of the weather when the scientist took a shortcut and left a minor digit off a fraction

. (See http://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0140092501/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1309919214&sr=1-2 for more details on this concept.)

So simple systems usually don’t stay simple in their results. And due this fact an odd truth emerges. The truth of simple systems is they give complex results and thus the truth is complicated. And that’s a good general rule of thumb, if the hypothesis is simple and clean, it has a high probability of being incorrect or incomplete. If it has a tons of conditions, the probability of truth is higher.

(For a detailed explanation of this concept, please see http://www.amazon.com/Wrong-us---Scientists-relationship-consultants/dp/0316023787/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1309919046&sr=8-1 or http://www.amazon.com/Being-Wrong-Adventures-Margin-Error/dp/0061176052/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1309919046&sr=8-3 )

Economics is one of these simple systems with complex end results. The problem is people want easy answers. Similar to Bart Simpson who claimed his opponent “thinks there are no easy answers. I think he isn’t looking hard enough!”, all types of politicians and pundits claim an easy fix. The economic system is an easy to understand system:

People who create items of worth for people who have something to exchange for items of worth creates wealth.

Of course, you can see this quickly recurses upon itself and becomes a infinite loop of possibilities. Because this is a very hard to predict and more importantly control, and so this has been simplified to a couple of often used shortcuts.

John Maynard Keynes is dead

John Maynard Keynes proposed a simple solution. When inflation heats up, raise the cost of money, and when employment becomes a problem. lower the cost of money. His critics pointed out that in the long run, inflation would be a problem. His response was in the long run we are all dead. Now it is true, that JMK is dead, we aren’t and live with the consequences. As Nixon claimed “We are all Keynesians now.” And the fact that inflation has distorted the world economy and created “lumpy” money is just what his critiques predicted. Oddly enough the idea of “Stagflation (inflation and unemployment)” quickly emerged due to the OPEC crisis in the 70s yet no one seemed to notice this obvious sign that Keynes was using a simplification that was in fact false.

Ayn Rand is dead too

Ayn Rand is famous for a simple idea “Pure Capitalism is the key to a just society.” In her defense she said that that capitalism couldn’t exist without a rational populace, but she wasn’t a real stickler for details either. When I hear people campaign that (Pick either Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, or any other word ending with ism) is the answer or the problem to (insert problem), I have one reaction. The person is a ideologue who isn’t interested in any empirical science. The first obvious retort to any of these is that not one of these ‘isms” have ever existed in a pure form. So sentences like “when America was Capitalist we were better off” or “Since (insert Scandinavian country) is Socialist they are better off”, I can only roll my eyes. Once again the true answer is easy and complicated. Every economy on Earth is a mixed economy, the differences are only in degree. To say any different is to take a strong stand against the empirical evidence. And saying X country is better/worse off is an aggregate that you pick your facts to prove your point. So this is crap thinking pure and true. So what is the proper thinking? Well, let’s go dancing with the stars.

Samba Economics

Brazil wasn’t touched by the financial crisis of 2008 which is an odd fact that illustrates the dynamics of an economic system. As Silva stated on 60 minutes, it took a socialist to bring capitalism to Brazil. Brazil figured out a great answer to the question that had great political and economic consequences. There were lots of poor people in the country, they gave them a stipend. This poor didn’t have basic durable goods, think washers, dryers and other capital consumer items, and Brazil had people who could create these needed items from the resources that existed. People who have something to sell meet people who have money and voila you have economic happiness. Note without the government pushing money to the poor, this doesn’t happen. And note that if they didn’t have the knowhow to build these goods, this doesn’t happen either. The answer isn’t pushing money to people if they don’t really have a need to buy what people are selling. So though I appreciated the money earlier in the decade I wasn’t surprised it didn’t do much for the economy.

So what is the answer to our problems

In reality, I don’t have the answer. But I do have suggestions and warnings against some obvious things that won’t work. Let’s start at home.

A regressive tax (retail tax) is never an answer in a bad economy. The fact that AZ gives back retail tax at the end of the year via the long AZ140 form makes it even more stupid and more regressive. Taken more money from those with less money won’t fix anyone’s problem. The proof in the pudding of course, the schools still need money-we need to look somewhere else.

Pushing more money into the economy without making anything else just causes inflation. Got to have a plan to push that money into an industry that capitalize some resources we aren’t using (like those who are still unemployed or those who are overeducated for their current employment). I like some of the Prez’s idea but I don’t think there is a glut of individuals with green technology skills to save us so that won’t do the trick. Time for some crazy ideas like a census of talents of those who are unemployed and some targeted industrial incentives, not just mo’ money. But then again there are too sides to the equation, the question to answer is what do people want that we have the ability to create but aren’t and how do we get them making it. I admit, I don’t know what that is. But let’s start to ask the right question and stop doing stuff that hasn’t worked before.

The Story Amplification Consequence or Why A Good Story Leads Us Astray

2011-05-28T15:26:00.001-07:00

Chris Mullin sat in the ESPN studio after hearing Nick Fridell’s arguments on why Derrick Rose was not the MVP of the NBA. The fact that he didn’t have the most statistically dominate year and that his team actually had a better plus-minus ratio (net points) when he was NOT playing. Mullin, an all time great, listened and then summed it up in a very common way.

“I don’t know about all of that but I know what my eyes see and Rose is the best.”

Mullin’s statements were in the majority and Rose was awarded the MVP. Fridell claimed that the reason Rose was considered the MVP was that he had the best story line. The reasons for Mullin’s eyeball estimates are very common and a natural consequence of normal human thinking that we all engage in. They are highly irrational but as Dan Ariely notes they are predictably irrational. Mullin’s thinking could summed up in this way. Chicago was mediocre last year, this year they had the best record in the NBA, Derrick Rose has improved this year and is the best player on the team. Derrick Rose is the cause of the Chicago Bulls having the best record in the NBA and thus the most valuable player this year. There a few things wrong with this argument but first let’s start an experiment to demonstrate the issue.

Let’s start an experiment

Ok, this experiment is easy. I will give you some sets of three numbers and you need to figure out the pattern. After I give you a set of numbers write down what you think the pattern is and a couple of other examples that might be in future sets and how confident you are of your hypothesis. I am warning you ahead of time, the pattern is the easiest answer.

{2,4,6}{4,6,8},{6,8,10}

Ok, write down your thoughts. Remember don’t overthink it. Pattern, future examples and confidence level.

Back to our story

One of our biggest weakness in understanding phenomenon is that we are always looking for a cause of the phenomenon. We are very blind to the products of randomness. Sports is really a beautiful illusion and we see causes where randomness would better explain things. The illusion of a “hot” shooter is one of the best. The idea of a hot shooter is an illusion and was proven experimentally to not exist (Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky). But anyone who has played and watched basketball knows that it really seems like a person is just hot. I can recently remember thinking that Kevin Durant just can’t miss in a recent playoff game. The reason is partly a bias in the way that we look at things, we are skewed to look for a pattern.

We always look for examples to prove our point and ignore examples that don’t support our point. Show me a baseball player that has a hit in 5 of his last 6 at bats in August and I will show you a batter who has hit in 5 of his last 7 at bats. Show me a hitter in August that is 1 in his last 10 at bats and I will probably show you a hitter that is 2 of his last 11 at bats. You see 5 of 6 is a better story than 5 of 7 and 1 of 10 is better than 2 of 11. That natural instinct to make meaning in sets of data is a natural instinct and is ground into us from evolution’s mortal consequences.

Let’s look at some more numbers

Back to the experiment… add the following sets to your data;three,five,seven and five,seven,nine. Ok once again, write down what you see as the pattern, some future examples and your confidence in your answer. And back to the story…

It is just a lion, don’t run

Making rash judgments of casual effect has an evolutionary advantage but is not as helpful in our modern world. Seeing a lion and quickly running away because you saw a person get eaten by a lion once is not a logical conclusion. However, it is a good bet and more than likely the best choice. The expected value is easy to calculate and it has a certain appeal. So logically if you have only seen one lion in your life and it maimed the person who didn’t run, you can’t conclude that all lions will maim you if given the chance. However, the probability that the lion will maim you times the consequences (your health) versus the probability that the lion will not maim you and the benefits(you see a lion up close) make this an easy decision. The expected value tells you that you should run and that is what your ancestors would have done given the hypothetical. But here is the funny part of the story, if you (person who lives in the United States) see a lion up close it is very unlikely that the lion will NOT kill you. And this odd fact is an example of how our modern world differs from the ones our ancestors lived through.

First, lions are not indigenous to North America and thus it is very unlikely that you will meet one walking down the street. Most likely you will see lions in a zoo or an animal park. In a zoo you will not need to run because the lion will be secured away such that they are not any threat. In an animal park like the wildlife park we visited last summer, the lions are actually tame and used to human contact. The lions would actually play games with their human wardens. If you were given access to go in the cage with the other trainers, the probability of your safety is actually rather high (mainly because the company would have to be awful sure because if got killed it will kill their business). So in the possible reality space of your life, if you see a lion up close you shouldn’t run. And in reality you have probably have seen a lion fairly close and didn’t run. But that first story about your distant ancestor seems reasonable. It’s a good story for sure and easy to imagine and there lies the problem. Our love of story and inability to imagine patterns of randomness is in fact why sports is so popular.

The beautiful illusion

I know that my position on the couch during Maryland’s national championship had nothing to do with their victory. But I also know I wouldn’t change my position once MD was in the lead. I know that most of the drama of sports that I perceive is nothing but a playing out of random processes. I also know I have nothing to do with the game as a fan watching it live or semi-live via TiVo but my human side feels that is true. I know my mother-in-law has nothing to do with Maryland losing a 10 point lead in the last minute against Duke. However, the story is pretty good and makes have a certain odd “truth.” Here is the story: We went up to Show Low to watch my mother in law get baptized. Later that night we watched the MD and Duke game and Maryland dominates the game for the first 39 minutes. The announcer says “It will take a miracle for Duke to pull this out!” My newly baptized kin then said “Ask and ye shall receive.” Jay Williams steals the ball and leads Duke to an overtime victory. Did my mother-in-law cause MD to blow the game? Obviously the two have no relation in real life but they are hard to separate in my mind. The story is so much better if God intervened on my mother-in-laws behalf to lead the Blue Devils to victory. And story is hard to beat.’

The random occurrences in time during a game become a drama that I want to see how it turns out. Every fan knows that a blowout of 20 points is not as enjoyable as a last minute victory. As TNT notes, it is the drama. I like it for the same reason I like Law and Order, it unfolds in a way that keeps me guessing. And that guessing leads to another fun and irrational activity, prediction.

It’s the end of the world and I feel fine

Humans love to predict the future. A character in a play that I wrote noted why he liked gambling, “I am the prophet for the profit.” We love to predict things and feel great when they come true. Whether it is the rapture or the next election or which grocery line to stand in, we get an odd pleasure in predicting the future. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that someone (again) predicted the end of the world but I don’t think enough about WHY we are so in love with prediction. Take for example the Monty Hall problem.

You are on Let's Make A Deal and you have your pick of 3 curtains with a big prize behind only 1 of the curtains.
Let's say you pick Curtain A (you can pick anyone but I will use A to help with the demonstration). Monty opens up Curtain C and the grand prize is not behind the curtain. Do you stay with your pick or change it?

This created a big controversy when Marilyn from the Parade magazine told people that the odds were better to change their pick. Curtain A still has 33% chance and therefore Curtain B must be the 66% to even it to one. If you don't believe this, try this Monte Carlo simulation that I created to prove the point right here. There are a few odd things about this problem. One, people who were professional math people couldn’t figure it out. Two, when people get the wrong answer, 50%, they feel that they want to stay and don’t want to change. This is odd because given this 50% scenario it shouldn’t matter if you change. But we like to stay with the horse that we rode in. I think our love of story, especially the one where we defied the odds and picked the correct answer, is part of this bias.

Now back to the experiment

So let’s get back to the experiment. I have told you that it is the easiest solution and I willing to bet you think you have the pattern figured out. So let’s end the experiment with you applying your pattern to determine if you are correct. Which of the following sets are incorrect: {six,four,two } or {one,seventy, seventy three}

I am willing to bet that most of you saw the pattern in the first set and feel that I am tricking you. And your prediction is probably right, I am tricking you. The answer is (drumroll) the pattern is three ascending numbers. Therefore the second set of numbers is the correct one. I told you it was the easiest answer and you can’t get more simpler than three ascending numbers. The problem is our minds want to find patterns and once they have found a pattern they stop looking for things that will prove them wrong. We want to find a cause but the world is full of randomness that masquerades as a pattern. Part of it is how we ask the question, so let’s do one more experiment with facebook account.

Today’s your birthday

What do you think the chance is that one of your facebook friends has the same birthday as you? Actually not great. What are the chances that some of your facebook friends have the same birthday? Almost a sure bet. These questions look the same to the untrained eye but are very different and turn on “How” you ask the question. Check it out for yourself now in your facebook accounts, if you have more than 100 friends there is high probability that 3 of your friends have the same birthday.

As you look through your facebook friends birthdays be aware that your pattern seeking brain will try to find hidden meaning but you shouldn’t give in to this fantasy. Looking at a dataset to find patterns and then claiming to see a cause for certain items is one of the most common mistakes in the scientific community. The proper way to look at any pattern in any large dataset is what is the chance that (insert number of occurrences) would happen randomly to any characteristic of the group. Let me demonstrate this from an example in my last job.

At Sun, an email would be sent out each month to tell everyone who had a birthday that month. In September, 4 of the 6 people in our department were on the list. Someone noted in a meeting that this was interesting and wondered why it was so. Were people with a programming mindset more likely born at a certain time of year, maybe environmental factors in youth or starting school led people to a mindset towards logic. Another employee noted that this showed that there is a slight boost in birthdays in this month due to the holiday seasons. Both of these are wrong because they are not asking the right question. The correct question is what is the likely that a greater than half of a small group in about 20 groups would have the same birthday month. It is actually fairly likely. The second statement is wrong because the person said “the holidays were the cause of the increased birth rate”. The question is what is the likely hood that a certain month will have more births than all of the rest, pretty high. It is true that September is the highest birth month on most years. However, not every culture has the same holidays so it shouldn’t hold for non-Western cultures and it doesn’t. This is the confusion caused by seeing cause when there is correlation.

So the story goes…

Be aware that your brain wants there to be a cause. Your brain wants a story to explain what is happening. A good story is memorable and we are biased to think that the things we can remember easiest are the most common. So we have a story bias and that distorts our understanding of the world around us. Remember, random happens.

Of Rabbits And Men Or My Thoughts On Obama’s Visit

2011-01-12T22:30:00.001-08:00

Rabbits have eyes on the sides of their heads to give them full vision of the everything around them. It is an adaptation for prey to prepare for the approach of predators. Long ago our ancestors eyes moved slowly to the middle of our heads to give us depth perception to navigate their arboreal home. This adaptation came at a price, we no longer were able to view things from behind and individually were at risk. Our ancestors came up with the great adaptation-- to live in groups, let the many protect the weakness of the individual. We are a social animal. We need each other. It is lies in deep and ancient places of our being nurtured for millions of years. It is how we came to be where we are today. It is an ancient echo in each of our souls and today Tucson throbs in tune with this truth.

It is true, like the plowboy poet claims, that the best laid plans of Mice and Men often go awry. Steinbeck used this as a metaphor for his famous novella Of Mice And Men. The story has a cynic, George Milton, and a innocent men passionate about bunnies, Lenny Small. They are desperate people on the edge of a society who were cast out over a misunderstanding. But they still had dreams. They kept trying but were once again taken advantage of by bitter people. In the end, the innocent dies by the hand of the cynic. But George kills Lenny because it hurts him to see George’s innocent dreams destroyed by the harsh realities of life. It pains us all cynics and optimists to see innocence destroyed.

I doubt the shooter had George’s well intentioned motives at hand last Saturday. I also doubt that he saw the people as innocent. But the rest of us see the innocent and it brings the nation together in a hopeful pace of grief. The President recognized that and paid a visit to the U of Arizona campus to share with us his thoughts. I make no bones, I am a fan of Barrack Obama. He did not disappoint me tonight. He kept his thoughts to the positive and reasonable. He didn’t let it become about politics.

Obama reminded us of why we grieve. We recognize our loved ones in the fallen and their heroes. The loved matriarch, the protector of the law, the public servant, the brother, the son, the husband protecting his wife, and yes, probably the hardest hit of all, the optimistic daughter. We grieve because we hate to see innocent destroyed and recognize it in ourselves. As Robert Burns states in the poem:

You saw the fields laid bare and wasted,
And weary winter coming fast,
And cozy here, beneath the blast,
You thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel plough passed
Out through your cell.

My cell was crashed by a cruel plough indeed. I never imagined these things would happen in Tucson. I saw the signs of “weary winter coming fast” in the inflamed rhetoric that spewed out in the weeks before this tragedy but I never expected this. Burns continues later in the poem:

But little Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!

Still you are blest, compared with me!
The present only touches you:
But oh! I backward cast my eye,
On prospects dreary!
And forward, though I cannot see,
I guess and fear!

But here Burns is incorrect. I do see pain in the past but I don’t see fear in the future. I still see the dream and recognized the time to celebrate his life slowly approaching on the calendar.

The shooter talked nonsense about people not being able to dream but that is far from the fact. Martin Luther King’s dream is still very much alive and we shall celebrate it this coming weekend. MLK is another example of the fact that you cannot kill hope. Obama is living proof of that fact. We grieve because we love and our love plants seeds of hope that grow on the weariest of fields.

Used to be we would play a song that I wrote about MLK on this weekend but that isn’t going to happen this year and probably never again. Though I won’t sing it again it still rings true to my ears and so I will put it down for the last time right now. This was what I heard Barrack ask us tonight and I can only answer yes.

Can You See The Dream (Dedicated to MLK, Jr.)

I had a dream
Of what could be
But I had to leave
Before I saw it here

So now its time
For you to make
That vision I had
The real world today

Can you see the dream?
Can you see the world to be?
Will you work with me
To make it that way?

The dream survives
Without me here
If you do your part
We’ll bring justice here

Let justice ring
For all to hear
And we will be
Free at last again

Can you see the dream?
Can you see the world to be?
Will you work with me
To make it that way?

Self-Evident
To all with eyes
That all of us
Are created equal here

The dream survives
With your help here
A better place
Because you were here

Can you see the dream?
Can you see the world to be?
Will you work with me
To make it that way?

Surviving The Waves Of Hate

2011-01-08T23:01:00.001-08:00

I don’t usually go to Oracle Road. But today Thomas, my youngest son who is eight, and I were headed out to Lowes on Oracle Road. We were going to make a play box as part of a promotion from the lumber company at 10AM. We quickly assembled the project and headed home going east on I-10. On the way back, I saw the lights go on for a police car and race westward in a big hurry. Within a minute, 2 others sheriff’s vehicles followed suit. I thought “Wonder what the heck is that about?”

The News

If I was permitted any favor by the divine I would use my favor to dissolve the news. When people tell me that they keep up on the news to be a more informed person, I don’t know whether to laugh, cry or smack them across the face. The news is a perfect hack of the humans reasoning mechanism. News is the unusual. It is news that “Human bites dog”, not vice versa. But humans reason that the most common thing in their memories is the most common thing. So listening to the news actually makes you less aware of the true balance of the world. Steven Levitt in his books about Freakanomics shows how the shark attacks of a couple of years back were anything but newsworthy. But today I would grant the news a pass. Today is different.

Arizona has been quite newsworthy of late. One crazy law after another has earned the state the title of “Crack lab of democracy” by John Stewart. But as embarrassing it is to have my friends back east think the crazy news in Arizona was representative of my state, it was always easy to says “that’s those idiots in Phoenix.” Tucson is different. Today Tucson is different.

Today a Tucson man took a gun and shot 18 people at a grocery store off of Oracle Road. Six of those people lie died tonight; one a judge and another a nine year old girl. A congresswomen from Tucson who represents Tucson lays in critical condition with a bullet hole in her head. Today a tsunami of hate erupted and the waves are washing over the people of my beloved city. Today people gathered online, in prayer and in buildings to try to keep each other afloat. We gathered together so we could pull each other out of the weight of vengeance and to not go under and drown in the anger.

The Waves

An explosion in the middle of the ocean doesn’t register as much in the middle of the ocean. I remember a friend of mine who had been stationed in the middle of the Pacific thought it odd that the tidal wave was a mere little wave in the vast open sea. It is when it hits the stable ground of the shore that the monster is revealed. But it doesn’t matter how the wave started once it hits the shore, all that really matters is how are you going to deal with the 40 foot wave of water coming at you.

Was the tea party or Sarah Palin responsible? Is it responsible to talk about how guns are important and then put gun sites on the American map? I feel that anger and agree that we should figure out what was responsible for this and try to prevent it in the future but today is the time to swim and help others stay afloat. Today is about the waves.

I didn’t hear about the news until past noon. Thomas and I were making up games with his favorite toys, Go Gos. I got a call from my wife at Costco who asked if I heard the news. I said I hadn’t and turned on the TV right away. I sat with open jaw disbelief with Thomas perched beside me. I thought how the heck do I explain this to my kids. Dumbfounded I just muttered “Thomas I can’t believe the world today.” Not very profound but the Gods honest truth. This was the first wave that hit me and I was stunned.

Later upon learning a nine year old girl was one of the slain, it hit me how the other waves were playing on the other side of town. Tonight, parents are trying to explain to their kids why Christina is not going to be around anymore. Somewhere a principal is trying to figure out how he is going to react. A teacher is wondering how to deal with the fact that one of the students in their class is not coming in on Monday and everyone is going to notice. Everyone can feel the depth of pain of the parents and tries to not imagine it themselves. But their grave pain is just one of the many waves of despair that will fall onto the valley tonight. And the adults we will try to catch ourselves, stay afloat and pull up the others as best we can.

Watching for the next wave

I learned in the grief counseling after my father’s death that every new tragedy will invoke the feelings from previous similar tragedies. How ironic that the little girl was born on 9/11/2001, probably the most unbelievable tragedy in my lifetime. The paper had done a story about this little girl that was a ray of hope in our darkest hour. Today I again felt the same as that rainy day back in 2001. That day hate revealed itself on an American landmark but today hate found an American servant.

I have many friends who worked with or campaigned for Gabby Giffords. I saw friends exchanging information and trying to give support on the pages as facebook, hoping that she survives this vile crime. I voted for her on every ballot I saw her name. I see her name a lot on emails from her office and from the Psychology List View at the University of Arizona but I don’t know her personally. I really only know of her and what she represents.She represents what every true American believes about America, hope and opportunity.

Giffords was a first in many things in her life. Given the opportunity, she put in the hard work and won a seat to serve. She was holding an open meeting because she was a open person who trusted that openness was the light from above that would lead our country along our way. The attack on her was an attack on that very ideal. Let us not forget those co-workers that gave their lives today and other who were witness to the horror. Let’s not forget the people who trusted in such an open policy for a politician. Let’s help pull them out from the waves of despair that strike down on them on this day. Openness is not dead, the ideals will live to fight another day. 6 Americans lay dead, 18 more physical injured and countless others traumatized by a terrifying moment of life. The waves turned their power against many people today. And the senseless violence effects the witnesses and every one the witnesses knew. It then spreads in horrible pools to each new friend, over and over again, crashing into the same people countless times.

So while it is easy to get sucked into the why of what happened today, I say let’s put that on hold. Today is a day to swim. Today is the day to grab the others who are getting pushed over by the tide of hate. Today is the day to let hope float above and let hate dive down into the depths of which it came. The truth is will we forgive them in time. Not because they deserve it but because we deserve it. Hate bowls you over and keeps you down, to hold onto it is to hold on to an anchor of pain. We will swim on towards the light and we will bring others with us. The wave of hate will bring back a wall of hope and our spirits will be stronger for the swim.

Bless all and swim on.

The Nope Hypothesis Or The Joy Of Being Wrong

2011-01-04T21:20:00.001-08:00

In the movie Doubt, Meryl Steep’s character is trying to get Phillip Seymour Hoffman to admit that he has done something inappropriate with a young boy in the school. She devises a scheme where he will have to admit it; she will ask him whether he has something for which he needs to be forgiven. If he did something inappropriate, he will have to admit it and this will prove her claim. Hoffman explains to her that he like everyone else has done things they need to be forgiven. Streep concludes Hoffman is guilty of the crime she suspects.

Amy Adams also wants to know if Hoffman did something inappropriate also. Her strategy is to ask him to explain the situation. He gives a plausible explanation and that convinces Adams of his innocence.

Many people believe that Streep thinks that Hoffman abused the boy. There is actually nothing in the film mentioning this fact. The fact that is was shown in the theatres while priests were being revealed for abusing boys sexually would seem to be the logic to this conclusion.

I’m a Pisces

Myers and Briggs were students of Carl Jung who devised a test to help determine the personality types of people. It never used any scientific methods in its creation, and actually the binominal nature of the types defy the obvious bell curve phenomenon, yet it is used by people and businesses all over the world. It works it magic in the same way as a horoscope. Brian Dunning explains:

One obvious trait that the MBTI has in common with horoscopes is its tendency to describe each personality type using only positive words. Horoscopes are so popular, in part, because they virtually always tell people just what they want to hear, using phrases that most people generally like to believe are true, like “You have a lot of unused potential.” They’re also popular because they are presented as being personalized based on the person’s sign. This has been called the Forer Effect, after psychologist Bertram Forer who, in 1948, gave a personality test to his students and then gave each one a supposedly personalized analysis. The impressed students gave the analyses an average accuracy rating of 85%, and only then did Forer reveal that each had received an identical, generic report. Belief that a report is customized for us tends to improve our perception of the report’s accuracy.

All of the above people are guilty of a normal human logic problem, the framing problem. People frame questions to be consistent with their beliefs. And then they look for evidence to prove their theory. People like proving themselves right.

The Truth seems to have expired

Jonathan Schooler published a clever experiment to demonstrate a phenomenon called “verbal overshadowing” (a person will remember items better that they don’t have to describe) in 1990 and his work was duplicated by lots of colleagues. His work has over 400 references in academic journals. In the 1990s, he started trying to duplicate his experiments and noticed something odd. His results were not the same. The more he tested them, the less the effect occurred until it is practically not existent. He is very disturbed by this and wonders if the ideas of statistics used to prove his experiment “valid” are actually invalid themselves. But lots of psychologists still quote his work.

What’s so great about being right? Briggs and Myers were both scientists (kinda), so it not reserved to the religious as some skeptics insist. David Freedman notes in his book Wrong that over 90% of studies that are published in medical journals prove the effect the experimenters expected. Of the ones that are retested later over 50% aren’t NOT duplicated. Very few journals publish studies proving “no effect.” Why is Schooler different than the other people in this article? I suspect that he knows that being wrong is usually more informative.

First, let me make sure everyone understands why the above people in Doubt are not correct. The number of things that Hoffman can be ashamed of it greater than the one item that Streep is thinking, his being ashamed is not proof of Streep’s intuition. Hoffman’s assertion explaining the facts doesn’t mean that this fact is true for Adams. The idea of sexual abuse is not even on the table so it can’t be proven in any way. It doesn’t mean they are wrong either. That is the problem at the end of movie, Streep has doubt; she says is not sure of Hoffman’s guilt. Doubt sucks, being wrong is much better.

The Terror of a Perfect Experiment

The Merson clan loves us some Mythbusters and if affords fun conversations. My favorite is “Does the experiment prove what they think?” What we are looking for is a perfect experiment. A perfect experiment is a narrative of tasks that will lead the next experimenter to get the same results. To be perfect you need to document everything you do in detail. You need to try your experiment multiple times if possible. You need to implement measures of statistics and randomness to make sure the experiment is not fooling you. Schooler has some good ideas and suggests we should make researchers state what would be proof or disproof of their experiment before they run the tests. The maxim of science is a willing to doubt is a willingness to know. Take a couple of examples.

If Terrorism is a response to lack of education what would we expect to the data to show?

Well the people who are terrorists would have less education on average than those from the same areas who are not terrorists. Does this hold true? Sadly no, it is not that simple, the data shows the opposite. But the important part is that we ask the question before we look at the data. That way we don’t explain away the data which is a favorite hobby of economists of the left and right. Be bold and try to prove yourself wrong.

So the next question to ask is what other factors could be the cause of terrorism? Is it more than one phenomenon, are there certain types of education that lead to the phenomenon? We could look at the data and see what items stick out. The next important idea, which is rarely done, is after we analyze the data we make a hypothesis and not a conclusion. We need to ask a question again and get new data to try to prove our conclusions wrong. Analyzing data never proves anything and you can prove this for yourself.

Take a group of 23 or so people and start talking to each other about likes and dislikes. Pretty soon you will find something odd, that a certain “unnatural” amount of people do something or have something in common that seems beyond chance. There is actually an over 50% chance that two of those people will have the same birthday. If your group grows to 57, the chance grows to 99%. You might even start to think hey maybe people who are drawn to this group seem to have this in common so maybe that is why they are drawn to this group. I remember at a company I worked out all the managers could juggle which lead the director to wonder if he had found a trick to finding new managers. That is your human logic trying to proof something is true. Put your fingers in your ears and go “La, la,la,la,la”. It is an illusion based on the odd counter intuitive laws of probability.

Let’s make a deal that you will doubt

In 1990 the Ask Marilyn column in the Parade magazine put out this puzzle.

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice? (From Wiki)

The answer is switch, you a 2 to 1 dog is you stay. The scary part is that there were professors of statistics who wrote in explaining her supposed error claiming it was a 50% chance. It is the most counter intuitive puzzle I know. If you don’t believe it, I have just the thing for you. Computers allow me to run a simulation of this test and show you the results. Click here to prove it to yourself. I made this page to prove the point when I got annoyed that enough people didn’t believe me. I can’t believe a person who does math for a living wouldn’t have done this first before “correcting” someone in a national newspaper. They didn’t think to try to prove themselves wrong. I had the courage to do that. And that makes all the difference. Now where is my car? What, a goat? That just proves I am so unlucky.

The Chuck Lorre Identity Or How TiVo Changed My Mind

2011-01-03T21:58:00.001-08:00

My wife and I play a game most Monday evenings after the kids go to bed. No not that game… I use the TiVo remote to scroll through the list of shows and if I find a new Two And A Half Men I click it once to view the title and description of the show. We then play the game. The game is based on the title of the episode. Every Two And A Half Men episode is named after a line in the show. TiVo when it tapes the show has the title and summary information at hand to determine whether to tape it or not. We look at the title of the show and guess what the name of the character will be who has the line that the show is named after. Kim tends to read the description of the episode before guessing, I tend not to and try to guess it it cold. There are great lines in the titles of most Men episodes such as “Keith Moon is vomiting in his grave” and “Three Girls and a guy named Bud.” We have learned that when in doubt guess Charlie Sheen. It is a fun distraction and adds an extra bit of suspense to the episode. So we have slowly noticed that each show has a title, something I never really knew was public knowledge before Direct TV. The title shtick is part of the fun of shows now as different shows have different methods. In Seinfeld, it is always “The” something, in My Name Is Earl is it the bad deed he is trying to make up for but my favorite is the other Chuck Lorre vehicle The Big Bang Theory. The titles are actually the inspiration for my blogs. For example, the last couple of episodes “The Bus Pants Utilization” and “The Justice League Recombination” are great example. Just take what the item is about and imagine how you would say it scientifically. I add the “Or” part to give a hint to help explain what the blog will cover. It is all good fun for me. It is more than fun though as it is part of my TiVo mind.

This afternoon I was watching 2 games (3 really-Go Colts!), reading on my kindle, talking with son Thomas, writing this blog, explaining an experiment with my son Sam, and checking email in the hours from 2 to 5. TiVo allows me to pause live TV, switch the screen to another game(and keep either game paused), fast forward at a speed I can still watch the game, slow down to check out subtle parts, have both games on pause so I can wait until the commercials are over and can do something else (read my Kindle) at the same time. TiVo is one of the many devices that allow me to control information flow. It is not just that it is a DVR, we have a DVR downstairs because our other TiVo died. It is not the same thing. It does most of the same things but requires me to put thought into it. The DVR is put together like a German Synthesizer manual. Diz button does this, dis button does dat, it has no flow it only has functions. The TiVo remote is like a part of my hand, it has all the features in the most logical place. It even had special combinations that I could accidently discover which I now use all the time.

I have been reading the pros and cons of the internet in the book Shallows:What The Internet Is Doing to our minds along with other various articles about research into how the internet is changing the way we think. The studies tend not to get it, they cite the formats of a book work better and people retain more info, blah, blah,blah. And I have seen this argument before in the 1920s when psychologists noted the poor showing of immigrants on intelligence tests. The reason for the immigrants poor showing was, of course, they didn’t all know English and that tends to lead to doing poorly on a test. It seems so obvious now but this was real research and one of the reasons that psychologists claim that intelligence tests are much better now. (Quick diversion--- Intelligence Tests are B.S but that for another blog) The same flawed methodology is being used in tests of whether it is better to read a book in print or in the web.

The methodology has the users read a work of fiction in either print or web format and then test them on their comprehension. Surprisingly, not, the printed book is better for comprehension. Seems a book is a better learning device from that evidence, right? How about we change the venue. Let’s give one group a manual on how to change the oil in a car and the other group a video of how to change the oil. Anyone want to make any bets on who does better with this? Heck, give one person a car manual and the other just the internet to run the test and I don’t think you need to be Houdini to figure it out who is going to be looking up how to dispose of oil first. Web is not just text, it is images, it is video, it is links. Yes, these are distractions but unless you are doing a book report on Tolstoy, these are not so bad because that is how real life is arranged. Plus, the web lets me manipulate things into mashups of what I want or need in a given situation and my TiVo really started me down the road.

Tonight-Monday now as I am writing this-Kim and I played the Charlie Sheen game (“Skunk, Dog Crap and Ketchup” which was spoke by Alan so she won) and then watched another of our favorites-How I Met Your Mother. The show has the best writers in the business and always have TiVo rewindable material in the show. Sometimes it is a homage to another movie, like a monolog modeled after Salieri’s speech in Amadeus, sometimes it is an interesting detail that would escape first sight. Tonight, it was a very clever sight gag.

Kim, who can’t help but read license plates, noticed it first. Numbers were appearing in descending order placed into the scene. There were numbers throughout the episode to throw you off (or maybe for some other reason) but as the show progressed the numbers 50-1 appeared in descending order naturally in the scenes. The writers even cleverly used the 9 to become the 6 in the show (as I predicted when I saw the 9). Of course, with TiVo, we were able to stop and rewind when we realized we missed a number (hint-if you play 15 is partially hidden behind the CBS logo branding). What it counted down towards was, as the title explained, bad news but not the bad news you expect as the show unfolds. The show also has a clever visual trick as there are two “Barneys” and the producers try to trick you with this fact (Kim saw it before it was revealed). Without TiVo, none of this is possible.

Was the story linear-yep, but in a scatter plot kind of way. It has no analog in book form. You could try fun tricks like not use “e” in a novel and that is kind of like it but not really. See it requires you to pay attention but in a different way. Not pay attention to in the normal way-being lead by the author on a string- but to be able to be open to experience while not doing something else. It requires you to pay attention in the same way you drive. You are following the road relaxed in expectation, listening to the radio but need to notice that car 5 cars up lights just turned red. Your non-conscious mind must be able to take over the cycles and come to the forefront. That is what is needed on the web really, a new way to pay attention. And that is why I am thankful for my TiVo mind.

The New Years Resolution Alternative or What I Expect Will Change In Years To Come

2011-01-02T11:54:00.001-08:00

What happens if Marshall McLuhan had a love child with George Lakoff? You would probably get me and my spin on the world.

So instead of vowing to do something everyone knows I ain’t gunna do, let me take a different approach. I am going to think about how I believe things are going to go down and what I hope to do to so I don’t work on Maggie’s farm no more.

spell check

I can’t spell to save my life. My 10 year son Sam, a multiyear spelling bee champ, has probably been a better speller than me for a year or more. But I am not worried, my world doesn’t need spelling so much. The red lines lead me into possible answers-did you mean x,y or z? If my first attempt at a word is not found in the correction list I quickly alt-tab into one of my open browsers, click new tab and type “spell wordIdunno” in the address bar. Google will usually give a definition or say “Did you mean this? If this doesn’t work I can clear the Google search box and start trying to the word and Google will in real time try to give me suggestions which I can then use to find the conventional spelling of the word.

But the fact that a word is a valid word doesn’t mean that the word is the correct spelling of the word; sometimes that is two much for a spellchecker. But grammar checkers have been created to catch these things also. The information of how a word is spelled is easily queryable but whether it is appropriate in the place you want to use it must be learned. That, to me, this is a metaphor of the modern world to me. Knowledge is no longer facts but understanding.

Sam may be able to spell off of the top of his way better than I ever could but I have an understanding of technology and linguistics which makes it possible for me to get answers he still doesn’t know. I understand that English is a highly evolved language with a checkered history which shows up in its orthography and people’s opinions on correctness. I also have a better idea of whether I know when to say it, how to find out how to pronounce it (though I still stink at this) and a better feel when I don’t know how to spell these things. And I still do have the experience advantage. That is why given a the same amount of time, I can use a larger vocabulary and negate his spelling advantage in any essay form. In this case, the speed and the knowledge can compensate for natural spelling talent differences. But there is something that only a human can do and that is why editors are important in the new world.

The editor with a thousand keyboards

I have friend (names withheld to protect the innocent) who always gets upset that “young people” don’t print out and read through their resumes. People do sometimes do this and submit a resume that an objective reading would find problems (but so do old people and people without computers). That is why she concludes that you will always need editors. I agree that statement but in a different way than she means. She would say “I need an editor to look over my resume.” I would say “I need editors to look over my resume.” The internet’s growing wiki culture has been a bold experiment in collective wisdom and it is beginning to show its muscle.

Wikipedia has changed our ideas on what an expert is and whether you know something. Expert is always a tricky idea because of what I call the expert paradox. You claim a person an expert when they know more about a given subject than you. However, you can’t really validate they know more than you because you don’t know enough about the subject to judge their expertise by definition. But throw a mob into the mix and this starts to erode. Wiki allows anyone to be an expert but their expertise can only live on if the mob agrees. So the first thought is that conventional platitudes will overpower unconventional wisdom. However, wiki has a answer for that also,the view history link. You can see how stable a subject is by looking at the revision history and actually see dissenting opinions. Plus there are editors scanning articles for style concerns noting “this needs a references” and other stylistic concerns. Sentences like “Some experts think it was Clapton’s best album” can’t stand because they are weasel words. (The opposite of the sentence is also true even if the sentence is true-Some experts didn’t think it was Clapton’s best album, hence it doesn’t convey the truer statement- Experts are mixed on whether it was Clapton’s best album)

So I have instant access to information on pretty much any subject in the world. The skills I need for the new world are:

Can I determine if said fact is true and how sure am I?
Do I understand the factors that make said fact true?
Can I expand on factors that exist because of said fact?

The speed at which I can arrive at these statements is improving daily but in multiple ways. So instead of being able to find quick answers, sometimes one can be overloaded with information. So I believe “information retrieval optimization” is the new knowledge that will have the most power in the next decade. What you know is determined by how fast you can get an accurate answer.

The internet massage

Marshall McLuhan concluded that the “Medium is the message” in his now famous book Understanding Media. The statement means that the type of the media influences our minds more than the content of the media. The fact that the West exploded with theories to break ideas into smaller more manageable ideas coincides with the Guttenberg Revolution which broke words into various ink blocks that can be rearranged to create any idea. The idea was later developed into the media is the “massage” meaning that media changed our perceptions and then our perceptions change the media. Simply stated-technology changes our understanding, our understanding changes so we change our technology and so on and so on.

Lots of people dislike the lowered status of content from this idea. Content is not unimportant in McLuhan's mind but is less important than the package it arrives in. The counter argument is that technology is good or bad depending on how you use it. And that is actually a completely false statement and why McLuhan is right in my opinion. Technology is always good AND bad, it is never just advantages or disadvantages, it is both. What technology I have influences how I see the world and how I understand the world.

George is my friend

George Lakoff is a cognitive scientist who developed the idea that humans use metaphor in their language and thought process in many unconscious ways. Do you get that idea? (Metaphor-Ideas are Objects that can be acquired) Lackoff, though now known for his political opinions which are based on his cognitive research, is a revolutionary thinker and a figure still controversial in Linguistics circles.

I doubt that Lakoff would agree with McLuhan but Lakoff’s work lays out the framework in an interesting way. Lackoff would state that objective reality is unknowable because the way we understand the world is limited by our conceptual system. Lakoff, in his work Philosophy In The Flesh, shows why our conceptual system is not reconcilable with an objectivist epistemology. Simply put-there is an objective world but we can’t know that world because of our human senses. He points out that in fact humans reason with physical metaphor, mostly unconscious, due to our physical experiences and that there is never a single metaphor that is true. While I know this is a shocking position that would need more explanation because it goes up against two thousand years of Western Philosophy that is ingrained in everyone’s brain but just suspend belief with me until another blog. We can reconcile Lakoff and McLuhan because they both believe that human thought is molded by the experiences of their life and technology is a large part of that experience. In fact, we do have many people talk about the internet as a type of brain and give it brain like attributes.

Consummating the marriage

So I think that people who “get” technology intuitively understand this argument. But it has odd consequences that I not sure others without my screwy vision will notice just yet. One thing is that there will be cultural misunderstandings due to someone not understanding how the medium works, viewing it as an electronic letter, and will tend to be viewed as rude as time goes on. I have a friend (doesn’t every internet story start this way) who doesn’t realize that emails are not letters. The slowly structured logic of a letter doesn’t work in an email. She gets upset that people don’t read her emails where she “said that.” So my friend has so much experience in the wonderful world of books that she can’t help to use her more familiar metaphors from publishing in understanding the new technology. People in turn get upset that she is so verbose in a non-verbose medium. Most people don’t read email in the same way that they read books. People, as Nobel Peace Prize recipient Herbert Simon notes, satisfice. They look for the first thing that looks like it is what they want and go from there. Good web page design is based on this idea. As more and more websites are designed this way, people’s expectations will skew every more to this reality. So I think the writing is on the wall for books.

The idea of a books is based on having to convey every bit of information and logic in one package because that is what the end user needs to get your argument. You have to write a book with an audience in mind. A web page doesn’t quite have to follow these rules. A web page can state an argument and link to the details or proof and not require every reader to plot the same path to the truth. Of course, there is danger here too. Conventional facts can be unexamined because they will be glossed over. Things that “everyone knows” will have a new weight that didn’t exist in such an extreme state in earlier times.

Also if a picture is worth a thousand words than a video is worth frame rate times a thousand. (I had to include at least one geek joke) Video does not work in the same way on our brains that reading works. In video our minds are easily hacked. The director uses our attention span and type of consciousness to get us to believe certain facts about the meaning of the images. The easy example is we see a person start off towards a cliff and then we see that person is wet in the river next to a cliff. The conclusion is the person jumped off the cliff. I am reading a great book, Sleight of Mind, about how magicians and painters are really hackers of the mind. I find it interesting and scary. The human brain has lots of holes that are easily hacked and it is not the things we don’t know that will kill us, it is the things we know that just aren’t true.

Video is powerful because we expect to be true. We think we see it with our own eyes but really we see it with our brain. Your brain has built a bunch of logic circuits but some of them are like Newtonian Physics; they seem to work but are really not the whole story. Of course video is easily manipulated in digital form so it is the tool of choice for influence makers in the next decade. Though this is a scary phenomenon, I think people can see the basic problem with this and have a healthy distrust of it. The scariest part of the new world is the price of it and the cost it extracts.

Free is not such a good price

Lots of free stuff is not so good. The problem is our mind is not so good remembering that the cost of anything always has a time component. Things with lots of options also have a good “time suck” factor. An item with lots of choices also brings about a need for seeing all its possibility. My Line6 guitar has kept me up multiple times to the wee hours of the morning trying to determine the “best” sound for a particular song. Lesser technology and I would have been in bed dreaming of better technology. The price of doing something is the cost of not doing something else. As the book Predictably Irrational explains free is a whole other experience and one that humans are drawn to like a moth to a flame. So we have to be aware that “free”, whether it be more options for no more cost or no cost whatsoever, is something our brains don’t understand so well. And because we interpret it as zero so our normal formulas don’t really know how to calculate it.

The problem is that the internet brings so much free into our life that we become numb to the free problems. Every technology has good AND bad things. It is great that I have access to any subject but it is also bad because my brain has not evolved yet to understand the consequences. So what I am going to try to do in the next year…beware of how free things change my judgment. I can’t resolve to escape the stranglehold on free that the internet brings. I cannot be free of free. So I am going to keep trying to ask in the next year, how much is this free thing costing me?

The Dog Probability Factor Or Will facebook Keep Your Identity Secure

2011-01-01T18:36:00.001-08:00

With more than 500 million active users counting on them, facebook has a power that might just be unknown in history. Users expect facebook to be there like the morning sun in the sky. And it seems some people’s lives revolve around facebook like the earth revolves around the sun. So when facebook makes a change, a big portion of the world notices.

When facebook made changes to their privacy standards without user’s notice a little while ago, it stirred up a hornets nest of anger among its users. Mark Zuckerberg really shook up the user base when he claimed that “privacy is an evolving standard.” But he is correct it is evolving and facebook is really a major influence on how it evolves.

Let’s call Jack McCoy

They say “on the internet no one knows you are a dog” but lots of people have put many man hours into letting web pages recognize you so you don’t constantly have to identify yourself. So this of course sets up a scale that must be balanced of how much you can get done and how much you must divulge. No web application can do any work without recognizing you on some level and of course this leads to concerns of privacy.

Privacy is one of those invisible cultural artifacts that lives in our brain unnoticed until a situation pricks them to life. It is codified into our English common noun and the court is not allowed to violate the “expectation of privacy.” The problem is what do people expect to be private? And is it uniform within a culture or variable to the individuals.

I would say there isn’t any uniform standard and that technology is morphing it constantly. Take a gander at the couple of examples below to see how you feel about the scenarios if someone had a recording of the following actions. Would you feel violated if someone had a recording and/or if someone would ask for the recording and/or if the recording would be prorogated?

You singing in your car
You picking your nose in your car
You making bodily noises in your car
You talking on your phone
The texts coming to you in the car
The texts you send in the car
The talks with family members in the car
The talks with friends in the car
The talk you had with the sales rep who sold you the car
You asking for direction from your car
You eating in the car
You when you were a hormonal teenage in the car (You know what I mean)

Now think about this… Most of your actions in your car are public and it would be easy to someone to have these recordings accidentally. Imagine the couple from Alabama videoing themselves near the Hoover Dam as you get into the car next to where they are lined up smiling next to the modern marvel. You burp loudly and scratch your nose (no nostril penetration), take a bite of your Carl’s Jr., wipe your face, turn on the radio and sing loudly out of tune to Wham. Have they violated your privacy by recording your public acts?

Evolutions Power Engage!

I think the answer is it depends on what they intended to record and/or what they do with the recording. If you are David Hasselhoff and they intent to show you on TMZ, I think the answer is an easy yes. If they are just folks who only use the tape to show their kin when they get home, I think the easy answer is no. In between these two forms, the answer is tricky. If they post this video up on facebook for just their friends is this a violation? If they post it to everyone on facebook has that crossed the line? If they put it up on YouTube have they crossed the line? What happens if burping, no singing, sloppy eating tourist becomes the next viral video? What if it becomes a feature clip on NBC nightly news? Or becomes one of the clips of the year? What if these sequences happen because of actions that the original poster never intended? These crazy possibilities are why privacy is an evolving standard and will continue to be mutated as technology gets ever more powerful. I am willing to bet if I ask 10 people I would get at least 5 different perceptions on where the line was crossed in the above scenario. And I am willing to bet that no one would be certain of their answers. Technology changes the ideas of privacy like in the example of cell phones.

Cell-U-Itis

Prophet of the future

It really annoys me that people talk on their phones in public, even more so when they are using a blue tooth device. I hate the scenario of being in the mall walking towards someone and all of sudden they start talking. Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me? Cause I don’t see anyone else here.

Even more annoying is the teen who is talking on the phone in the middle of a pack of their friends. I even wrote a song about this once. “She’s a phone ear, always talking to all her friends, unless they’re with her”

So does she have an expectation of privacy talking in a pack of friends? So if she is planning the text cyber bullying campaign that leads to a murder can the Orange Julius manager who overhead her master plan testify against her? Can the posting of a embarrassing photo that leads to a suicide be blamed as they put the suicide into motion? Does the privacy settings she used on her facebook post matter? Does it not matter if she is or isn’t aware of the privacy options in facebook?

What Jay Leno Doesn’t Understand

Jay Leno likes to tease people who text and email from their phones. “If only there was a way I could talk to them right now.” Leno doesn’t get that text messages, phone calls, IMs, email, facebook posts, tweets, etc. all have different innate privacy abilities and different amounts of attention that are required by the other user. Teens were quick to get the stealth nature of texting because it allows them to communicate to their friends without the annoying hungry ears of their parents to intercept the message.

A text is a private item that requires the user to view it only when they feel it is convenient. A phone call requires the user to answer in real time, go through formalities (Hey whatsup dude?) and not being able to communicate with the people around them while talking on the phone. The phone call also puts a burden on people in room with the person. It is hard to tune out sound and someone talking on the phone will naturally draw your attention. When there were only phones and phones were tied to a place, the rudeness and privacy expectation were different. And people evolve an understanding of what they believe is private and/or rude as technology changes.

So it comes back to facebook again, the visibilities of the privacy features will determine the future of privacy and the social norms around a good portion of technology. If your mom posted a picture of you as a baby in your nature suit with butt shining from powder and makes it available to everyone, what do you do and/or think? Do you phone her, email her, IM her, drive to her house or report her as putting up inappropriate material? Do you blame her or facebook for your young butt exposure? What do you when she tells that she “took facebook off of her computer?” (This scenario comes a real life relative) These wacky seemingly trivial actions are why facebook will continue to help evolve our global ideas of privacy. Woof woof woof woof. Sorry, dog collar fell off.

The Mark Twain Experience Differential or How Experience Changes Our Experience

2011-01-01T13:00:00.001-08:00

In Two Ways To See A River, Mark Twain talks about how he used to cherish the beauty of the Mississippi but as he became more experienced as steamboat pilot he started to fail to see the beauty. Twain states:

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!

I know of this phenomenon in my personal life especially in the realm of music. I no longer just hear a song; I hear the progression and the instrumentation and the form, etc. I no longer hear just the song in that magical way that I did before I studied music. Thursday night while listening to Roger Clyne and The Peacemakers play a show at the Rialto downtown, I realized that this was more true than I had previously imagined.

Monkey See Monkey Feel

Humans have an odd condition that is sometimes called “Theory of Mind” in the psychology research circles. We come to understand that other people don’t see things the same way we do. This is actually something quite remarkable. The classic experiment is having an two adults and child in room with a toy. Then one adult leaves and the other adult helps hide the toy in a concealed location. If you ask the child if she expects the other adult to know where the toy, the child expects the absent adult to know where the toy is because the child knows where it is. Eventually, we catch on to the fact that our experiences are not other’s experiences. Our brains take this even further.

fMRIs required subjects to be still in a magnetic chamber and any movement will bankrupt the experiment. So how can we study behavior when a subject can’t move? Because when the subject sees an action, their brain imagines what is it like to do that thing. When you see someone pick up a book your brain fires the circuits that your previous book picking up experience activated. This is an unconscious action just part of the many wacky things our brains afford us. We have actual neurons that mirror the action.

Feeling the music

So since I have been playing guitar for about 30 years now, my brain has lots of data about playing music. So as

I see the lead guitarists bend the note on the second string on the 15th fret, my brain is activating the neurons that have done this in the past. As I hear the volume swells, my brain activates the feeling of letting up on the volume pedal. I am literally feeling the music.

In fact, one of the oddest sensations I experienced in my life was when I started playing acoustic patches on my line 6 Variax guitar. My experience of playing acoustic guitar for years had taught my body that the difference between playing electric vs. acoustic guitar was you could feel the vibrations on your chest. The line 6 emulation didn’t do this. It is a perfect emulation; in fact I remember posting a song with an acoustic patch online once and someone commenting that is was “some good acoustic work.” It took a while to realize why my brain was feeling out of sorts while I played but I eventually figured it out. Now after 5 years of playing my Variax, I don’t notice it. My experience of playing the Variax has changed my experience of playing the Variax.

Hey Soul Sister

As I was holding my wife’s hand listening to the music Thursday night, my fingers start to curl. My wife thinks of this as “jamming” on her hand. Just one of the many annoying things I do when primed with music. In my mind I think I am trying to communicate my inner experience though I logically know that can’t. But as I was talking with Kim about this phenomenon in the car yesterday, I realized it went the other way also, there are internal experiences for songs that her experience brings to the table.

We were listening to the Gloria Estefan hit Conga on the radio. I feel the feeling of pressing on the keys of the keyboard in that Latin clave rhythm or banging on the bongos. So I asked Kim what she felt. It reminded her of a Jazzercise routine and she could feel the dance steps in her mind.

Dance Dance Revolution

Probably my favorite dance routine on the show

I wonder if that is part of the wonder of the show So You Think You Dance. Our brains are trying to imagine the experience of leaping through the air with supreme grace as the dancers sway for our pleasure. The freedom of their movements help free us in some way.

But the theory of mind changes us in ways untold also. We can imagine what it is like to be other people. I have a video burned in my brain of the dancer Brain Gaynor who has scoliosis and his dance routine to the song Fireflies. (see the video here if it doesn’t appear in this post) The beautiful opening lilting melodies of the tune Fireflies can’t be processed in my mind in the way that guitar music can. So the music itself just dances weightless in the air for me like a butterfly while the dancer thin, limber and frail moves robotically in place. As the drums and rest of the band erupt into focus, the frail dancer moves in perfect harmony to the sounds in perfect syncopation and this creates an emotion I don’t know how to place in words. The song moves along with beautiful precision and as the words “the planet earth turns slowly” ring out, his hands move and twist an imaginary planet earth in a gentle turning motion. The judges are crying and are moved by living song in front of them and I can no longer hold back the tears either. The dancer dwindles his motion down to the floor in loving reverence as the final words “I fall asleep” drop from the air.

Is it that I can’t imagine the fear to wake up everyday not knowing whether I could do something I could treasure that moves me so deeply? Is it that I can’t imagine the mechanical motions necessary to create the shifting sounds falling in the air?

I think that I can try to imagine what these experiences are like and they are novel and tickle my soul in ways I have yet to experience. This is the beautiful caress that is what all of Art is about. So while Twain is right, experience does change the experience. The more subtle truth is that imagined experience can mold us even more.

The Baggy Pants Evolution Or Its Literally The End Of The World

2010-12-31T22:15:00.001-08:00

I had the pleasure of taking a class from Andy Wedel this year and it was always entertaining. Andy is a dual PhD, Biology and Linguistics and one of the brightest people I have met. With over 250 college credits under my belt and 18 years in the software biz, I have met a lot of bright people but Andy rates pretty high. Andy’s class on Phonology was like having a human web page. He had a carefully devised topic but the class could press links to more details on a topic with a thoughtful question. He told us up front that he liked “uppity students who asked a lot of questions” and we did.

However, I also created an experiment for him last semester so I had a special pipeline and got lots of time of him talking about what he was passionate about. He actually even invited me to listen to him lecture in a graduate class on evolution put together by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini who co-wrote the book What Darwin Got Wrong. Though my ideas on evolution are different than the mainstream but I do disagree with the basic premise of the book-that natural selection is overrated. And Andy also disagrees with the premise of the book. (I personally believe that natural selection might be the greatest idea anyone has ever realized, I only disagree with minor details of how it works.)

The class was filled with bright minds and Andy mesmerized them all with his presentation. My favorite Andy hyperlink was one of how the baggy pants style came about. It started because prisoners were not allowed to wear belts while incarcerated and thus their pants fell off their butt. Upon leaving prison, they kept the style to prove their street cred as a homage to having done time. Kids, yet to see inside prison walls, seeing the style and relating it to being tough started to take up the style. More people, who had no idea the reason for the style but admiring the people who wore it, started emulating it, not knowing it’s roots in prison culture. The link had disappeared and looked like the style had evolved out of nowhere. But it actually had a logical but not obvious origin.

Lots of press still seems to come about from people who still somehow don’t want to come to the reality wagon of evolution always try to bring up the concept of missing links. The missing links are not so missing now as Neil Shubin details in his book Your Inner Fish. But the idea I want to emphasis is that lots of odd things pop into existence seemingly out of nowhere where there was a logical unnoticed evolution. Language is one of those items that people think is a static thing when it is actually a constantly moving target.

The End Of The Language As We Know It

I always find it funny that Bookman’s puts authors that talk about “proper English” in the Linguistics section. Linguists hate these guys. People who believe in a prescriptive version of English are not going to have the same opinions as people who take a descriptive view of English. They are really like the Jets and the Sharks.

This reminds me of another Andy story. To quickly demonstrate that people didn’t learn English from their 4th Grade teacher he brings up the wonderful world of English infixes. It is an un-freackin’-believable topic to some people but it is un-freakin’-forgettable lesson. I am a Linguistics student so I was already one of the converted but if you ever doubt that you learned English grammar in school just think about the inner curse word trick, we all know- even Ned Flanders has got it down.

So when I finished reading Txtng:The Gr8 Db8 today I was amused to see the various talking heads exposed doing the same thing they always do-tell us it is the end of the beloved language. People are really upset about abbreviations, e.g., gr8, lol, etc., i.e., abbreviations created before they were born. David Crystal tells the tale and lifts the cover on the ways that words have and always will evolve. The difference with txtng is really the people who are causing the evolution, teenage girls.

Words evolve whether we want them to or not. People remove middles of 3 syllable words and drop endings. Kids grow up hearing these items and create mental models that the parents didn’t intend. Kids grow into adults and a little by little things change. Ya know itz proly going keep hapnin’. It is “literally” a steamroller of evolution.

Not so literate

Literally is a great example of the process. People have evolved the meaning into “I am being serious.” The conventional meaning is that the physical process is actually happening; the phrase is not a metaphor. However, think about how people actually learn the word. They hear the word in a context, not read it from a dictionary. So imagine being a naïve user and hearing the following story.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. People were literally jumping out of the World Trade Center.

The point here for the speaker is that the unbelievable was happening, the speaker wants the hearer to know it is not a metaphor. But it is easy to see in the concept that “literally” could be interpreted just as a modifier meaning “This is true.” Hear this a few times in similar contexts and the meaning gets stuck. Unless the person who knows the “literal” meaning, it gets cementing into minds as the definition; though it is not the conventional one. Evolution is literally a moving target of change.

Every generation has those own language snobs who crown themselves official English ambassadors of proper language from Jonathan Swift to William Safire. They are always missing the missing links and don’t see the pea in the peas.

Don’t Peas Me Off

Pea is a non-word that eventually was granted word status. It is a backformation and was created by user’s viewing peas as being a plural word. I doubt any monarch of the English language would deny “pea” real word status. People view pea as something that just happened, like baggy pants stylishness, and are unaware of the missing link of peas. But the concept of a word as a static thing is a illusion. Pea may be stuck and not subject to further evolution at this point, a species of a word. But “literally”(the word) is a species in the midst of change evolving before our eyes.

So peaz dnt peaz me off and tell me you think language is a static thng. u c idz tru. da times day r changin.

So let’s have a little cell phone to take us out…

The I Am A Dork Confirmation or Why I Jumped Into A Pool of 44 Degree Water

2010-12-31T11:19:00.001-08:00

In case you haven’t seen it from my wife’s posting, I did in fact-as the video shows- jump into a pool of 44 degree water for a 50 bucks of Amazon credit. However, I would like to show that while I am a dork for doing this, it actually wasn’t that bad, and want to show what I actually got for my troubles. To see the evidence go to http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1658840524844

First, my kindle has ruined me on newspaper and books. I don’t like reading books, they don’t allow to adjust to a font for maximum reading speed and they are bulky and unyielding in your hands. I thought that maybe I was mistaken and checked out a few books from the library two days ago. But the experiment proved to me, I don’t like the paper versions of books anymore.

I actually bought a book with my winnings to explore this idea called The Shallows:What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brain. Kindle Cost: $9:43. I know the internet effects my brain and makes my view of the world and I would love to see this guys spin. I read the sample (advantage to Kindle Books) and thought, hey, I need more.

The Kindle is also probably responsible for lack of satisfaction with newspapers. I try to read parts of the paper everyday but I always leave with a feeling of it should be better than this. Mainly because I have already found something better. Instapaper is an awesome service and the correct price: Cost : Free. Articles like “The Moral Life of Babies”, “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains”, “Does Language Influences Culture.” now these are interesting to me. And I can use the Instapaper bookmark to send any article on the web to my kindle. And with my wireless kindle, they just appear on my machine.

Being someone who is interesting in Linguistics and Internet Culture of course I had to buy Txting: TheGr8 Db8. Cost : 7:16.

I am a person who is on the net everyday for large portions of my day but I also have a luddite streak in me like one of my favorite authors, former Wired Editor and technologist and luddite, Kevin Kelly. After reading his sample of What Technology Wants where he talks about the evolution of technology (you have me at evolution) reaching back to the language revolution of 50 000 years ago. I had to buy this too. Cost: $14:98.

I also found a cheap book that talked about a Calculus for three bucks!

So I have 15 bucks of amazon credit left and I am pondering what to finish off with. The logical choice would be a book on Speed Reading because it would make my life so much better. It kills me that there is so many things I don’t know that are just a book away. There is also books on Music Psychology, an always fun topic for me. There is a book on an Amazonian language that doesn’t have recursion (for Linguists this is a really big deal). There are also the obligatory cutting edge books on evolution such as Life Ascending: The Ten Great Innovations of Evolution. And of course the obligatory books on cognition and vision such as The Vision Revolution and Fixing My Gaze.

But I went with Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions. Cost:12:99. This book talks about human perception from a cognitive science spin and how Magicians “hack” your mind. Hacking people minds has now become my favorite phrase and favorite idle mental rambling. Here a video from my favorite site TED which talks about the concept.

So I figure I have a few bucks left and I have 50 bucks of Barnes And Noble gift cards which I figure I can trade for a discount to someone for cash (My kindle doesn’t read B&N books only Amazon version). I will glad to take any offers ;>,

But really the best part of this story is that Kim said she would have given me 50 bucks for Amazon anyway.

Jumping into a pool of 44 degree water for no use other than your wife’s amusement. Priceless.

The Mike Ditka Coaching Theorem or Seeing Beyond The Invisible Aggregate

2010-12-30T13:18:00.001-08:00

The guys at ESPN’s NFL pregame show were talking about whether the New York Giants’ coach Tom Coughlin had a personality that was compatible for his job. Was he too abrupt with his players? Did that type of communicative make it impossible to be a successful coach? Ditka responded by saying different styles work and it didn’t matter. “Lombardi and Landry were both great coaches.” The point being Lombardi was a in your face coach and Landry a distant mentor. I thought wow this is quite an interesting observation. How could this be true because communication in pretty much a large proportion of what a coach does. No amount of brains matters if you can’t communicate the message to your players. So how could this empirical fact stand? Is communication not that important in coaching?

My buddy Boomer then went around the table to former NFL greats and asked what they thought about coaching style and which they preferred. The formers players did not have a consensus; some preferred a coach who “told them like it is” and said they preferred someone who didn’t yell at them.

I SEE DEAD LOGIC

Do you see the answer? This is kind of like that scene in The Sixth Sense when the boy whispers to Bruce Willis that he “sees dead people.” I was blown away at that point in the movie and had to whisper to my wife that Bruce Willis is dead. Other people didn’t realize that the reason the boy is telling Bruce this fact because Bruce is dead and doesn’t know it.

If a coach needs to communicate to his players to be successful then how can two totally different polar opposites work. If A –>B and C—>B where A <> C are mutually polar opposites would be the best symbolic formulation I think. If you are perplexed by this then you creating an invisible aggregate. Players is(are) not a uniform thing.

The results of a coaching style are determined by the fit of the players. Some players work better with different methods. A perfect coach would be hard on the players that needed it and be supportive of those who needed it. Though this might not work so great because the players might not be aware of the why of the treatment and only see the how. Thus players being treating harshly would believe the coach was playing favorites. So what’s the best answer?

Bill Parcels came to the conclusion that if you want me to cook the soup you need to let him pick the ingredients. It is an obvious solution, you need players who thrive with the coaches playing style. Bill needed people who could take direction and criticism.

I turned out ok

People model their parenting style based on how “they turned out.” The reasoning being if I turned out ok then what my parents did must of worked. If their parents toughness was a primary factor and they consider themselves successful, then they conclude that the parenting must have been the reasoning. Or if they feel that they are a failure, they adopt a different more nurturing philosophy. People fail to see that events can transpire because of conditions or in spite of conditions. And some conditions actually don’t matter at all. And more importantly as Amos Tversky pointed out people will gravitate to view facts that prove their initial mental theory. Our minds create abstractions and begin to believe their abstractions are real. That is why there are things like the Gambler’s fallacy.

I will put all my money on black

People often confuse probabilities with distributions. Probabilities are what the chances are that it could happen to you, distributions are the aggregate sum of happenings. They are related but not the same thing and most definitely not interchangeable. So given n spins of the roulette wheel, 1/2 of them will be on black. That doesn’t mean if there are three blacks in a row that the next one is more likely to be red. It is still 50% chance of red and black. Casinos make millions of dollars because people don’t get this concept. My favorite joke is from a comedian who I can’t remember his name but still chuckle at the joke. “1/3 of people of are stupid (distribution). So look to your left and then look to your right, if they aren’t stupid then it is you.(probability)” I sometimes wonder if people are laughing because it defies their logic or that the logic is false. It is part of normal reasoning though.

Humans reason by taking in data and making abstractions. They then apply these abstractions to reason about the world. Sometimes we don’t realize that these abstractions are not real things but distributions. This is what I call the invisible aggregate. People sometimes can only see the forest and can’t see that it is made of trees. The trees become invisible in the forest (aggregate). Thus when we expect trees to exhibit “forest behavior.”

What does this all mean? Don’t forget to listen to Ditka, he’s da man. Ok, if God was playing Dit-ka, who would win?

The Omar Little Alternative or How Evolution Really Works

2010-12-29T23:53:00.001-08:00

I have grown to love the HBO series The Wire and probably count it as one of the five best TV Dramas ever. I love it because it is gritty, real, subtle, intelligent and enlightening. I think the thing I like best about the show is the character of Omar Little.

David Simon, the show’s main writer and a former Baltimore crime reporter, tells us that Omar is based on a compilation of various real characters. Omar is a openly gay black man who robs drug dealers for a living. He is smart and cunning. He is earnest and moral (in a real odd kind of way). He is a niche predator in the bizarre world of street crime in Baltimore, MD. He is a part of the ecology of modern day Ballmere. Below he is testifying (falsely) on Bird, the man who he knows killed and mutilated his gay lover/partner. He understands the “game.”

Omar in Court

I got the Shotgun, you got the briefcase. S'all in the game tho right?

What a great line, might be the best of all time. Drug dealers create a market for drug dealer robbers and lawyers to get the drug dealers out of trouble. Watching the show you will note that Simon (seems) to be implying the lack of industrial economy creates the market for drug dealers in an odd trickle down economics.

This to me shows a great ecological evolution of the inner city culture. To not confuse my opinions with those of conventional versions of evolution, I am going to label my version of evolution donEvolution. donEvolution is based on a few premises. The first of which is, quoting the book What Darwin Got Wrong (p152):

History (natural history included) is about what actually happened;it’s not what had to happen;or even about what would happen if Mother Nature were to try again.

To quote another great Philosopher Homer Simpson “There is no moral, it is just stuff that happened.” So basically just because something is, doesn’t mean it had to be that way. There are multiple ways of life possible in any ecology. This rules out a lot of speculation in Evolutionary Biology about why something is. That is the wrong question, the real question is why are certain things, given an ecology, not present anymore.

South America had a ton of large creatures 10 000 years ago. How come they aren’t there any more. Well, humans came to the continent. Humans are good are killing big slow creatures for food, probably a little too good for the likes of giant penguins and giant sloth.

This rids us of stupid question like why did species X develop trait Y in environment Z. The reason is trait Y is not a lethal trait in environment Z. This also rids of the really dumb ideas of a spandrel, which is a trait that developed in spite of having no evolutionary advantage. So Steven Pinker’s claim of music as “auditory cheesecake” goes out the window as not a real good question. Spandrel assume an intelligent designer which is bad theology and bad science put together in one shiny crappy idea.

The next important concept in donEvolution is that every living organism is equally evolved. There is no more evolved creatures;each living creature comes from a certain base creature which could or could not still exist, though it is doubtful. If anything, E Coli and other single cell organisms could be considered more evolved as they have been through many more generations to get to their current design. Animals like humans with single births and long initial periods before fertility haven’t had the number of rounds that our single cell cousins have weathered.

So this rids of us of goofy ideas like we are evolving towards more complex beings which is in vogue now with the digerati. Lots more single cell creatures than multicellular ones, lots more beetles than mammals. And due to fecundity differences this is probably become a wider gap every day.

Point four is there are different species because of genetic and epigenetic change. The corollary of that is that there isn’t any essence to a creature, any given creature is the result of past genetic calculus. All mammals have a same ancestor that had 4 limbs and each limb is designed with one big bone, 2 smaller bones and lots of little bones at the end. Bats and humans both have this configuration but also have a difference in size and other odd features. So suppose you are this ancestor (probably Tiktaalik) who will have children that through genetic change turn into bats and humans, are your distant grand children still kinds of lungfish? Hopefully, you will agree that bats and humans are not lungfish. Now do the same mind trick a million years into the future, will your future grand children be human? Probably not—odd thought, no?

Point five is that there are genetic change dead ends and those are called species but these dead ends have unforeseen outs. A species by definition is two biological units that can reproduce a new creature that can procreate. If two things can create new biological units they will have a tendency to create more of the same. But through odd circumstances there are mutations and after time these mutations are so different that they can’t mate with the base species only with the mutated species. That is how you get new species, you can actually do this in a lab with creatures with short generations and high fecundity.

Point six is that certain aggregates of creatures create an ecological base and certain creatures will thrive in this environment while others won’t. Sometimes your random genetic mutations like for instance the color of your fur matches the color of the sandy beach on which you live will allow you to thrive. Sometimes your random genetic mutations like the color of your fur being different than the beach you live on is not so good and you don’t survive to make new little ones of you.

There are certain laws that appear over and over again. Being too good of a predator can have bad future consequences. Only eating one type of food also not a good strategy. But the point of donEvolution is that it depends on the circumstances of the environment whether it happens, there is no predictable paths of evolution—just tendencies. Panda Bears are built for extinction in so many ways, one food source that needs to be constantly be eaten. However, they live near humans who love their beautiful symmetry.

So to come full circle back to Omar, he has a great survival strategy. But it doesn’t follow that every drug gang situation will breed an Omar. Omar is moral but this isn’t a must be trait for a drug dealer robber. Omar is smart and that is definitely a trait that ensures his survival. You could argue that Omar couldn’t survive in this situation without being more cunning than those he robs. We see that pattern in nature, predators tend to be more intelligent. Why? Well the unintelligent ones probably don’t get dinner because they are being outfoxed by rabbits and other dinner dates. Omar needs lots of targets just like predators need lots of prey. This is another pattern we see in nature. In computer speak, predators don’t scale. Prey that survive also tend to have a high fecundity. Lots of street level corner drug troops are being created more quickly to not allow the drug dealers to predict Omar’s next move.

So Omar is the shining example of a predator in an environment but is oh so unique. He is a great example of donEvolution.