Not that Sane

Country first?

2012-01-22T18:52:00.001Z

I'm trying to stay off politics -- too depressing! But a few points:

(1) Gingrich has won the SC primary in the most ugly way possible. I thought Bush beating McCain by claiming he had a black baby was the pits. But that was done in secret, in anonymous phone calls. Now, it is all out in the open. Gingrich essentially took it out on a uppity black man (Juan Williams: saying that work was an abstract concept to him), called Obama a food stamp president and someone who could be outsmarted in a debate ("I want to see his college transcripts", as if it was unbelievable that a black man could do well at Harvard). Gingrich decided not to dog whistle his racist trope: he catcalled his way to victory.

(2) I see that Romney has said he is going to release his 2010 returns. Theories on why he was so reluctant center on two possibilities: he pays less as a fraction of income than Buffet's secretary and that he may have moved his money offshore to the Caymans. I suspect that there is a third, more damaging revelation lurking. George Romney used to pay "only 37%" as tax, and the reason it was so low was his substantial contribution to the Mormon church. I think Mitt is screwed in the Republican primary regardless of whether he paid very little to the church (Mormons won't forgive him) or whether he tithes so honestly that this contribution (to what evangelicals consider a cult) dwarfs his taxes.

(3) Democrats are gleeful that Gingrich has won. Have they thought about the country we'll live in if Gingrich wins the nomination and the economy continues to tread water? Obama will lose (personal approval and awfulness of the opposition not withstanding), the Democrats will lose the Senate, the Tea Partiers will feel empowered and the country will lose another 8 years to right-wing incompetence.

The country needs a capable government. And that, unfortunately, means that you (regardless of your partisan politics) should be hoping for a moderate Republican nominee.

Now this is the way to advertise a class ...

2012-01-19T16:31:00.002Z

You are teaching a college course for the first time and the enrollment numbers are not what you hoped for. What do you do? Last Spring, I was in that situation and being the uncreative soul that I am, I took my lumps. What else can you do beyond sending an email?

My friend, Matt, on the other hand ... he's essentially run a front-page ad in the student newspaper. This story takes up a half-page in the print version and the message could not be clearer:

...Five students are currently enrolled in the course, but there are 15 seats remaining....“The career options for students interested in unmanned aerial systems appear limitless,” Esker said.

ISBN assigned

2012-01-17T20:23:00.000Z

My book now has an ISBN number and everything. This by itself wouldn't mean anything, except that the ISBN number being available means a couple of things:

(1) Springer has a blurb about my upcoming book on their website. Please don't get a sticker shock. I'm quite sure it will be less expensive when it comes out. Besides, the e-book version should be considerably cheaper.

(2) You can sign up on Amazon to be notified when the book becomes available. Click the button below:

There is no echo chamber

2012-01-17T16:56:00.003Z

A recently completed PhD dissertation, based on looking at how 75 million links were shared among 243 million Facebook users found that:

Although we’re more likely to share information from our close friends, we still share stuff from our weak ties—and the links from those weak ties are the most novel links on the network. Those links from our weak ties, that is, are most likely to point to information that you would not have shared if you hadn’t seen it on Facebook.

Of course, the former graduate student now works for Facebook, so you may want to take the finding with a spoon of salt.

A poorly conceived graph

2012-01-16T16:09:00.000Z

Tufte, where are you?

A graph by Alan Kreuger, a top economist, who should know better than to draw misleading charts:

I have no quarrel with the data on the graph, of course. What I'm pointing out is how poorly conveyed the information content of the graph is. The graph is so poorly conceived that it is misleading.

Looking at the graph, and without looking at the captions, do think the United States is improving or not? Our natural reaction on any numerical chart is that the top-right is where we want to be. That is, however, not what the chart is saying.

The x-axis variable is inequality. The more left you are better, the more cohesive the society is. So, for one thing, the x-axis should probably have been (1-inequality) or the axis should have gone from 0.40 on the left to the 0.15 on the right i.e. the x-axis ought to have been flipped.

The y-axis is similarly poorly conceived. The higher you are in the y-axis, the less the social mobility in the country, i.e. people born poor remain poor. Again, the y-axis ought to have been (1-elasticity) or its range flipped to go from 0.6 at the bottom to 0.1 on top.

Once you flip the two axes, then the take-away of the graph becomes extremely clear. The United States is unequal and getting more so.

Chart-drawing software (Mr. Kreuger probably used Excel here) has made it so easy to draw graphs that people forget to stop a bit and think about whether the chart actually conveys (visually: that's the point of a chart after all) what they want it to convey.

Richard Dowling, in the boondocks

2012-01-15T07:19:00.002Z

The kids and I went to see Richard Dowling perform at a local church today (Saturday). He's in town to play in the inaugural concert of the Norman Philharmonic and decided to squeeze in a small performance before that.

I noticed that he was playing without the benefit of any sheet music and pointed this out to S1. The ten-year-old who is going on thirty was not impressed. "It is a very simple pattern," he told me and pointed out the pattern, "so it's very easy to play from memory."

It wasn't until Dowling moved on some orchestral Chopin pieces rearranged for the piano (so that the original orchestral pieces needed to played by the pianist) that S1's eyes widened and his mouth fell open. He ended up being completely enthralled.

I'm tone-deaf, so you shouldn't take musical suggestions from me, but Richard Dowling is very good. It's not just that he played a 2 hour concert from memory. It was also the sheer exuberance of the concert. It's when we get world-class people passing through that I miss the energy and opportunities of a big city.

YouTube has a few videos of him. Here he is playing a ragtime classic:

and here he is playing a more traditionally classical piece:

Both these songs were part of the concert today, and as with any live performance, the recordings do not do them justice

He said he was going to be playing a Gershwin piece Sunday at the Nancy O'Brien auditorium. S1 will be part of the choir in that program, singing a composition by Libby Larsen.

A newspaper or a stenograph?

2012-01-13T02:51:00.001Z

No, really. This is the question the New York Times' public editor poses to his readers:

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

"Do you want us to simply print the press release?," he essentially asks, "or do you want us to check the assertions in them".

I had to make sure it was the Opinion Page this was in, and not the Onion.

Google+ vs. Facebook

2012-01-05T02:00:00.004Z

If you want total privacy, use Google+. No one will see your posts.

With my book done, I gingerly moved back to Facebook and the first post was my previous blog post about the completion of the draft. In 15 minutes, the Facebook post had 8 likes and 7 comments.

Meanwhile, the Google+ post, with a 7 hour head-start, might as well not exist.

A couple of days later, the Facebook post has something like 30 comments and "likes". The Google+ post has two.

I still have the concerns about the overwhelming stream of information that led me to leave FB, but I was missing the connections that Facebook made possible. Google Plus is a better design, but even the obvious problems are not getting fixed. Meanwhile, Facebook has improved: in particular, they allow you to subscribe only to "Life Events" from some people, for example.

Stick a fork in me ...

2012-01-04T21:19:00.003Z

Stick a fork in me 'cos I'm done. What's done? The draft of my book (working title: "Automating the Analysis of Spatial Grids: A Practitioner's Guide to Data Mining Geospatial Images") is off to the publisher (Springer Verlag). It will be a couple of months before the book gets a ISBN number and can be preordered.

I started writing the book the last week of August and now the draft is 320 pages consisting of 80,000 words and 400 illustrations. As you can see from the graph, writing was difficult at the start. Once I got going though, I managed four months of rather steady progress:

Thanks to everyone's patience with me as I was burrowed deep into the woodwork. You will see me out more often now, blinking in the sunshine.

Strange time zones

2012-01-01T15:35:00.001Z

Gazing at the time zone map of the world, it strikes me that there are all kinds of strange things going on.

The strangest though must be the +8 zone that starts with Western Australia and continues northward to include Beijing and Shanghai. But notice that all of China is in the same time zone! I didn't realize that the Chinese do not believe in time zones. Not only should everyone speak Mandarin, they should live and work on Beijing time. Even stranger is that Russian time zones in Siberia are offset. Thus, the +8 time zone includes the territory that should normally be +7. Maybe it is because of the cold and low-light i.e. Siberia works on a permanent daylight savings time!

India has no timezone either, but in a smarter, more inclusive way. Because the country is mostly north-south, they divided up the difference and so the whole country is +5 1/2 instead of being +5 and +6 (this explains why India is shown hashed). A little weird in that time corrections are not whole numbers, but once you are in the country, it's a highly workable system. Venezuela seems to have had the same idea.

But ... where else is it hashed? Australia! Why on earth are the central provinces in Australia in different time zones? And why are they offset a non-integer number of hours?

What's with Spain and Germany? Spain ought be +0 and Germany ought to be +2, but they picked the same timezone as France.

Putting one over dad

2011-12-31T23:18:00.001Z

One of the neighborhood kids rang the doorbell asking if S2 could come out to play. The weather has been unseasonably warm the past couple of days and was in the 70s today.

S2, who would have preferred to play in her room with dolls, was persuaded to come out.

"Can I and A- go play in the park?" she asked.

"Okay," I said, "but come back in an hour because you have a New Year's eve party to go to."

She went out to get her watch (more to show the watch off to A- than to actually use it), looked at the time and asked whether she could come back at 6 o'clock (it was 4.50pm).

"Okay," I told her.

And then she whispered hoarsely to her friend, "let's go! let's go before my dad changes his mind! We can get to play for 70 minutes!"

Travails of English as a second language

2011-12-20T19:45:00.000Z

For the most part, I can forget that I learned English relatively late, but sometimes it strikes me that I view the language differently from most native speakers.

My son, for a school assignment, wrote that "the tractor had no breaks". "Do tractors have fuses?", I asked him, before I realized that he meant "brakes". Because I learned to read and write English before I could speak it, words like "break" and "brake" have no relationship to me. They are completely and totally different. This has advantages -- there is no way I could mix up "their" and "there" in a sentence. Or even "it's" or "its" because I don't tie an English word with its sound. They are just a sequence of letters. In fact, there are thousands of words that I've never pronounced and the first few years in America, I learned to listen somewhat carefully to figure out the general scheme of pronouncing words and place names. (Incidentally, this listening thing is something that many immigrants never seem to latch on to. I spoke to someone who'd lived in Tulsa for over 15 years who pronounced the name of the town he lived in: "Toolsa". I didn't have the heart to correct him.). But it has the disadvantage in that misspellings can throw me for a complete loop.

Thus, when a colleague writes, in a blog about a missed forecast of freezing rain, that:

the freezing drizzle didn't have the dramatic appearance of huge amounts of ice forming that most drivers look for as queues to take action to slow down.

it takes me a long while to realize that he is taking about "cues". My first thought was that the drivers would slow down only if there was a queue of hitchhikers in an ice storm and only when that mental image didn't make sense did I finally puzzle out the intended meaning. Meanwhile, you probably read through the sentence and had to go re-read it to see that he'd used "queues" instead of "cues".

Crediting the money men, not the technology people

2011-12-15T17:05:00.000Z

One of the places we always take visitors is the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History. It's a world-class museum, full of world's-largest this and the world's largest that. One of the cool things they now have is a baby apatosaurus:

Of course, an exhibit like this doesn't just happen. A few bones are found and they are combined (painstakingly) into the structure on display. The skeleton is never completely intact, so missing pieces have to be created.

I happen to know the person in whose lab the bones were pieced together and where the missing pieces were manufactured. Hundreds of thousands of man-hours and sophisticated technology solutions went into creating the skeleton.

But is that work even mentioned in the credits (see below)? No, only the money men are mentioned. And people wonder why young people do not go into STEM fields. Well, duh. Ambitious people want respect, but in America, it's a catch-22. Science doesn't pay well, and scientific contributions are not publicly appreciated to the level that monetary contributions are.

Invented Languages

2011-12-12T20:30:00.002Z

Languages are not my thing -- in spite of growing up hearing multiple languages, I can barely speak two. (I grew up on the border of a French-speaking country, amid people who spoke about 15 different West African dialects and went to college in an Indian city, where at least three languages were commonly spoken). Now, I can speak just two languages fluently.

So, I didn't expect to get much out of a book by a linguist about invented languages. Before you can invent a language, you've got to have the ability to quickly learn a new one, and I can not see myself being able to do that. But every once in a while, I try to read something I don't expect to like much. And a book about invented languages -- Esperanto, Klingon, etc. -- seemed to be just the thing.

"In the Land of Invented Languages" turned out to be an engrossing read. First of all, did you know that there are so many of them? She lists 500 invented languages, and makes it clear that the list is totally incomplete!
The book starts out with Wilkins, a contemporary of Hookes and Newton, who decided to create a language and started out by cataloging everything in existence. His work essentially led to the Thesauraus. And oh, Esperanto which came about as a pan-European, simple language? It's now started to pick up slang and historical accidents of spelling. The way the English word "light" is spelled the way it is, because that's how it was pronounced or that the past tense of "eat" is "ate" because in Old English all past tenses involved changing the vowel sound. Some time later, the rule changed to "add -ed", but no one could change very common words such as "eat" and "know". Another neat aside that I remember, because I had the same misconception. It's not that Koreans can read Chinese in their own language. The characters are very stylized, so it's not the case that the characters represent real-world things. Instead, Koreans make sense of Chinese similar to how a Spaniard makes sense of English -- because many of the Latin-derived words look familiar.

The coolest part about the book, though, is when the author turns to natural languages and points out how is the "flaws" in the language that make them suitable for thinking out loud, for collaboration and for communication. An awesome book. Really. You'll love it even if you don't care a whit about languages.

p.s. There were lots of neat tit-bits throughout ... I loved the book so much that I knew I wanted to write about it. So, I started highlighting various cool passages using my Nook. And then when I went to retrieve the highlighted passages, I learned that there is no way to list all the highlights! So, I'm writing these mainly from memory. Forget the Nook -- it sucks. If you are in the market for an e-reader buy a Kindle.

The Nook Touch is worse than the Original Nook

2011-12-11T00:05:00.001Z

At a time when we take technological progress for granted, it's terrible when new versions of a good product are not as good as the old ones. What were the designers thinking?

I love my Nook e-reader (the "Original Nook"). I can borrow books from the public library, regardless of where in the world I am. It's no strain on the eyes (I have read 14 hours straight on planes). The Nook has an expandable micro-USB slot, so I can put my music library on it and listen to music as I read. It's a self-contained travel companion.

But it's been a couple of years since I bought the Nook and the battery life is not what it used to me. Now, I get only 7 to 8 hours (in airplane mode: I have not used the WiFi much). So, I started musing about getting a new one.

The new Nook Touch is better in some ways. It has a white background (the Original Nook had the color of parchment), so that letters stand out more. It does away with the ugly, useless LCD screen and makes the entire surface touch-enabled.

But ... there is no audio jack. What? No music when I read? Why on earth would they get rid of a really useful feature like that? When the battery runs out, I'll take it to Interstate Batteries and ask them if they carry replacement batteries. That, or, buy the Amazon Touch. It does sport an audio jack, and it now supports public library books.

No New Nook for me.

Patent madness to affect a doctor's office near you

2011-12-09T17:30:00.001Z

The madness of software process patents (e.g: Amazon's "1-click" patent or Microsoft's "loading images before text" patent) is all set to affect medicine.

The next time a doctor decides that he is going to increase your dosage, of say, statins when you break your leg, he's going to get sued for violating the patent of the researcher who showed the linkage between statins and a period of inactivity.

Instead of fixing the problem with software patents, the Supreme Court is all set to unleash the craziness on yet another field. How can the court system be this oblivious?

A breezy read

2011-12-06T02:20:00.001Z

Breezy novels are hard to come by. Especially breezy novels that are not piffle. So, I heartily recommend Rebecca Makkai's The Borrower for the next time you need something to occupy a few hours of your time.

I won't spoil the story by telling you what it's about, except to say that it's not about events that spin tragically out of control (she tells you the ending on the first page, so I'm not spoiling anything by telling you this). Instead, it's about the power of books, and of family -- the typical coming-of-age-novel, except from a unique viewpoint.

Read it!

How to debunk a myth: Skeptical Science doesn't follow their own advice

2011-11-30T18:49:00.001Z

An excellent article on how to debunk myths (by Skeptical Science):

Lead off with the facts. You need to state the facts, not the myth. Otherwise, the myth gets reinforced.
If you have to explain the myth, precede it with a warning. State the myth. Then, provide an alternate explanation.
Three facts are better than twelve.
Use simple, clear language. The power of myths is that they are usually simplistic. Your facts need to be able to replace the myth. Shoot for an explanation simple enough that they can repeat it.
Focus on the undecided; there will always be an unswayable minority especially if it runs contrary to their core beliefs.
Use graphics.

Here's an example of myth-busting done right:

But here's the thing. Right now, on the Skeptical Science website is this graphic:

If that doesn't reinforce the myths, I don't know what does!

Lose 1000 euros every time or 7000 euros one time?

2011-11-29T17:09:00.001Z

Apparently, if Germany bails out the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain), it will cost Germany about 1,000 euros per capita. Germans naturally balk at having to send a thousand euros down to the lazy bums (incidentally, the national stereotypes are wrong: Italians work longer hours than Germans, but it's similar to how a poor Vietnamese farmer works longer hours than an American farmer -- the American has more machines and more land and is therefore more productive).

On the other hand, if these countries default and have to leave the euro for their second-tier currencies, then German banks will lose enough that every German will in effect lose 7,000 euros per head the first year and incur smaller losses in future years. That's because the loans that the banks have on their books are worth far less.

So, is it rational to just bail the countries out? I'm not sure. Because you can be sure that it's not going to stop with this one-time. There will be another bailout a few years now, and as these things go, that bailout is going to be more expensive than this one. Therefore, it's probably time to stop throwing good money after bad. I don't think Germany's reluctance to carry out a bailout is irrational.

Penn State vs. UC Davis

2011-11-21T22:20:00.001Z

Penn State students rioted because their football coach was fired for not doing enough to stop the abuse of children.

UC Davis students lodged a silent protest against police abuse. The video is powerful if you have not seen it:

The two campuses seem to have completely different moral compasses.

China battling for scientists' minds

2011-11-21T15:39:00.001Z

Coincident with a NY Times opinion about how China can defeat America:

China’s quest to enhance its world leadership status and America’s effort to maintain its present position is a zero-sum game. It is the battle for people’s hearts and minds that will determine who eventually prevails.

is an email I got from a Chinese scientific conference. They offer to pay me an honorarium to participate in the conference if I would organize a session consisting of scientists from outside China:

The first author of each paper in an invited session must not be affiliated with an organization in China’s mainland. "(Invited Paper)" may be added below the title of each paper in the invited sessions. Invited session organizers will solicit submissions, conduct reviews and recommend accept/reject decisions on the submitted papers.

Is this "buying affection" or is it something much more strategic? Invited papers at scientific conferences are quite prestigious, so they are giving me the ability to distribute favors and offering to partially pay my way. At a time when science budgets in America are disappearing, the Chinese are actively building up their scientific expertise and gaining international exposure.

Google needs to think of G+ as a network, not as a destination

2011-11-21T14:58:00.001Z

Google just doesn't get it. They had a good social thing going with Google Reader, but they had to mess it up. Here's an email that someone sent to my wife:

Please forward this link to Lakshman ... Previously, we used to share good articles via Google Reader. That service has been disabled now ...
Sent to you via Google Reader
Karachi to Bombay to Calcutta | History of Flight | Air & Space Magazine

I used to follow him on Google Reader. Anything he shared was sure to be good and here's the clincher: I would see it when I was in the mood to read longish articles. Google killed the share/follow feature on Google Reader, killing the one social thing they actually did well.

Instead, Google has replaced it with two buttons: a +1 button and a G+ share button. The problem with these is that there is no way to subscribe to someone's +1s on G+ -- there is no RSS feed for it. And the G+ share is simply too invasive. While I do want to hear status updates from all my friends, I don't really care to read all the articles that all my friends post. I know which ones have reading tastes similar to mine.

Instead of thinking of G+ as a destination, Google would be better served to think of it as a network. With different clients and different services. And Google Reader would be the client of G+ when it comes to reading longish articles. Such an architecture would be a lot better than what they have now.

Patent madness

2011-11-15T19:28:00.001Z

Microsoft is suing Barnes & Noble over their Android-based e-reader (the Nook). Microsoft is now squeezing more money off Android manufacturers than they can make selling Windows Mobile. Apparently, the patents they are suing B&N over are:

1. placing a loading status icon in the browser.
Really? This is novel? Here's somebody demonstrating a framework for doing this for Ajax-web applications:

2. browser that recognizes background images and loads them after text.
Images loading after text has been a feature of pretty much every browser since the original Netscape.

3. Tab controls for use by all applications instead of application-by-application.
This has been a feature of Macs since forever.

4. Using handles to change text size.
This is standard functionality in any text reader. I think even emacs used to have it.

5. storing and annotating text that is not modifiable
Again, pretty standard functionality in most readers. Even Ghostscript used to have this.

Software should never be patentable. All we'll end up with are these types of bogus patents.

p.s. A commenter on Slashdot uses irony to make the same point:

People have known for decades that it's sometime useful to give users feedback about something that takes a long time, by displaying a progress meter or at least "Please wait" or "loading" or "initializing the galaxy." When GUIs got popular, displaying it as an icon was natural. When small screens started to get more popular, it became somewhat common to eschew fixed-position widgets in favor of using the entire screen as a "content area" because there was so little to spare for scrollbars, status displays, or whatever.

Yet despite this situation, no one could figure out how to display a loading status icon in a content area. Or at least no one easily could. But then Microsoft Research applied themselves to the problem, and with a lot of insight, experiments, trial and error, hard work, and just plain luck, they figured out how to do it. I've never seen a Microsoft handheld computer, but presumably they used the novel solution in a product. But nobody wanted it, so it died. And Microsoft, too, may some day die.

The secret for how to display a status icon in a content area, could become lost when Microsoft dies. But no. Not willing to let their efforts be buried by the sands of time as a lost trade secret, they took advantage of patent law, which gave them a brief monopoly (a mere 20 years within themillennia that people have been doing mathematics) for which We The Public received public disclosure for how their invention works.

And what did Google and Barnes & Noble do? They renegged on the disclosure-for-monopoly deal!! Instead of having to figure out on their own, how to display a status icon in a content area, they dishonorably read through all of Microsoft patents, learned all the secrets ("aha! That's how to display a status icon, where the icon is in the content area! Ingenious!") and defied the monopoly.

And here you all are, blaming the victim, Microsoft. Yet without Microsoft, would you know how to display an icon inside a content area instead of outside it? Or would you be pounding your keyboards in frustration? "It doesn't compile!" or "It doesn't run right! There's my icon, but it's outside of the content area! How did they do it!" or "There's my icon inside the content area, but WTF, it doesn't say 'Loading'! How is the user supposed to know it's loading something, if I can't figure out how to make the icon say 'Loading'?!" Please, people, think of the inventors and their technical solutions. Without the monopoly, they might not have had any incentive at all, to solve the long-standing mystery.

What's a photograph worth?

2011-11-14T20:00:00.001Z

Nice photo, this ... right? How much do you think it is worth?

It recently sold for $4.3 million dollars.

The next time you are by a rural riverside, see if you can take a picture like the one above. Don't be surprised if you don't find anyone willing to pay you the $4.30 it'll cost to print it out.

Seriously ... who pays $4.3 million for an easily reproducible photograph?

Can radar see earthquakes?

2011-11-07T19:16:00.000Z

Enough people have now asked me if we can use radar to predict tsunamis that I've now started treating it as a serious question that deserves a serious answer.

But ... maybe all those people were just ahead of the curve ...?

Images courtesy National Weather Service Forecast Office, Norman.