The Third Wave Is Coming

A World Without Referees

2012-02-25T00:39:00.008-08:00

Larry Wasserman article, Carnegie Mellon University

Our current peer review is an authoritarian system resembling a priesthood or a guild. It made sense in the 1600’s when it was invented. Over 300 years later we are still using the same system [..] The peer review system that we use was invented by Henry Oldenburg, the first editor of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, in 1665 [..] we are using a refereeing system that is almost 350 years old. If we used the same printing methods as we did in 1665 it would be considered laughable. And yet few question our ancient refereeing process. [..] I argue that our current peer review process is bad and should be eliminated.

The refereeing process is very noisy, time consuming and arbitrary. We should be disseminating our research as widely as possible. Instead, we let two or three referees stand in between our work and the rest of our field. I think that most people are so used to our system, that they reflexively defend it when it is criticized. The purpose of doing research is to create new knowledge. This knowledge is useless unless it is disseminated. Refereeing is an impediment to dissemination.

Every experienced researcher that I know has many stories about having papers rejected because of unfair referee reports. Some of this can be written off as sour grapes, but not all of it. In the last 24 years I have been an author, referee, associate editor and editor. I have seen many cases where one referee rejected a paper and another equally qualified referee accepted it. I am quite sure that if I had sent the paper to two other referees, anything could have happened. Referee reports are strongly affected by the personality, mood and disposition of the referee. Is it fair that you work hard on something for two years only to have it casually dismissed by a couple of people who might happen to be in a bad mood or who feel they have to be critical for the sake of being critical?

Some will argue that refereeing provides quality control. This is an illusion. Plenty of bad papers get published and plenty of good papers get rejected. Many think that the stamp of approval by having a paper accepted by the refereeing process is crucial for maintaining the integrity of the field. This attitude treats a field as if it is a priesthood with a set of infallible, wise elders deciding what is good and what is bad. It is also like a guild, which protects itself by making it harder for outsiders to compete with insiders.

We should think about our field like a marketplace of ideas. Everyone should be free to put their ideas out there. There is no need for referees. Good ideas will get recognized, used and cited. Bad ideas will be ignored. This process will be imperfect. But is it really better to have two or three people decide the fate of your work?

Young statisticians (and some of us not so young ones) put our papers on the preprint server arXiv (www.arXiv.org). This is the best and easiest way to disseminate research. If you don’t check arXiv for new papers every day, then you are really missing out [..]

When I criticize the peer review process I find that people are quick to agree with me. But when I suggest getting rid of it, I usually find that people rush to defend it. Is it because the system is good or is it because we are so used to it that we just assume it has to be this way? In three years we will reach the 350th birthday of the peer review system. Let’s hope we can come up with better ideas before then.

Pathfinders

2012-02-24T01:57:00.003-08:00

Here is a great book on Islam and science. I perused through it, and boom: found a passage that talks about how Greeks were busy with science but Byzantium Empire wasnt. Frankly I am quite tired of being right on this issue: Romans, Byzantium and Ottomans represent a dark chapter in human history whose ill-effects persist even today.

Kevin Hart

2012-02-23T14:25:00.001-08:00

New find; Kevin Hart. I like the bit about his kids.

Giordano Bruno

2012-02-23T03:23:00.001-08:00

Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600), was a philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. His cosmological theories went beyond the Copernican model in proposing that the Sun was essentially a star, and moreover, that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited worlds populated by other intelligent beings. He was burned at the stake by civil authorities in 1600 after the Roman Inquisition.

Bruno was deeply influenced by the astronomical facts of the universe inherited from Arab astrology, Neoplatonism and Renaissance Hermeticism. He is said to have made a threatening gesture towards his judges and to have replied: "Maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam meaning "perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it."

Syria

2012-02-23T02:59:00.001-08:00

In Egypt the crux of the resistance was people filling the streets, the game was about mass demonstrations. In Libya it was a game of logistics -- landmass was vast population few, hence transportation, air cover became important.

In Syria the model increasingly starting to resemble Afgani mujaheddin resistance against Soviets. There is fighting in towns, except the capital where the enemy (Soviets, or now Baas) were / are holed up and felt "safe", for a while. Just like in Afganistan during 80s, resistance fighters have a safe haven nearby (Pakistan / Turkey). The importance of a such a neighbor cannot be overstated. Mujaheddin fighters used to send their families to Pakistan and once in a while they would themselves cross the "border" to Pakistan for vacation, visit their families, have some R & R, then come back and do some more Stinger slingin'. Turkey is now playing this role for Syrian resistance.

Stop Trying To Make Money From Distribution

2012-02-22T06:25:00.019-08:00

As Tim O'Reily said, this link sums up Holywood's piracy problem perfectly.

Before Internet distributing content was inefficient, hence distributors could provide a service by making the delivery of content just a tad more efficient. The problem is publishers also hooked their payment-receiving mechanism into this delivery as it was logical at the time; A needs product X, B delivers it, A pays to B before delivery, who passes the earnings onto C.

Fast forward to 2day. Free distribution of content is highly efficient -- noone can beat it and provide a "service" by replacing this. Unfortunately, now content producers lose their "hook", the place where they inserted their payment receiving step.

This is why I've been saying, a new payment mechanism must assume distribution is now seperate from payment mechanism, for good. Since legal enforcement is out of question (Net distribution is, well.. distributed, but enforcement is concentrated, 3rd wave vs 2nd wave, latter loses) we need to make it very easy to indicate interest, "likes" in a product. If given the chance, I am sure people will indicate their likes, dislikes; in fact, there is nothing people like to do more in their leisure time.

Free market, capitalism worked because it was mostly based on what was natural. In this day and age sharing and distribution of content is natural. This is the new "constant" and any successful system needs to take that constant into account, rather than fighting it. You can try to fight it of course but the natural will kick your ass. Just ask the Soviets. However, with one simple change of viewpoint, free distribution of content can be seen as a major service, a benefit to all consumers and content creators alike.

I am not saying my proposal is the best, or the only method. I was simply trying to demonstrate an alternative that takes the new constant into account.

Who Need Access? You Need Access!

2012-02-21T02:25:00.001-08:00

Link

Our governments spend millions on funding research. Scientists do the work, write up their results as papers, format the manuscripts, prepare figures, and send them to publishers. Other scientists handle editing for the publishers (unpaid). Yet other scientists review the manuscripts for the editor (also unpaid). The result of all this is a honed and polished research paper. But all too often the publisher demands the copyright, and locks the research behind a paywall. (Needless to say, they don’t pay the author, either.)

The result is that the taxpayers who funded the research don’t have access to it.

“So what?”, you might ask. “I don’t want to read research papers.” [..] The reality is that there are many groups that want and need access to the research that they and you funded. Public access to scientific research makes all our lives better: it makes us healthier, better governed and better educated; it lets us live in a cleaner environment, a more civilised society and a healthier economy.

Thiel

2012-02-19T09:47:00.005-08:00

Link

I think the advanced economies of the world fundamentally grow through technological progress, and as their rate of progress slows, they will have less growth. This creates incredible pressures on our political systems. I think the political system at its core works when it crafts compromises in which most people benefit most of the time. When there’s no growth, politics becomes a zero-sum game in which there’s a loser for every winner. Most of the losers will come to suspect that the winners are involved in some kind of racket. So I think there’s a close link between technological deceleration and increasing cynicism and pessimism about politics and economics.

--

I respectfully disagree. Thiel's model is elegant, but wrong. There are technological advances, in fact lots of it. The problem is that our current political structure is built for an fossil-steel era and it is so out of touch with the new societal structure which races forward based on the new generation of technology that it cannot deal with the present realities anymore. Looking at 70s and 80s is a shortsighted view. You need to look at 1800s, 1900s, and at the critical juncture on 1956.

Oh by the way, here's a question: why the f-k did Paypal block payments to Wikileaks?

Liberterian my ass.

Nice Action (Indian Movie)

2012-02-12T10:39:00.001-08:00

It’s Evolution, Stupid

2012-02-11T11:43:00.000-08:00

Link

We all know how evolution works, except one industry that refuses to evolve: the entertainment industry. Instead of looking at evolution as something inevitable, the industry has made it their business to refuse and/or sue change, by any necessary means.

In the case of The Pirate Bay, it’s been particularly obvious. [..] My sentence was eight months [..]. Evidently, Warner Brothers felt that the investigation was taking too long. The studio contacted the police officer in charge of the investigation (one person that worked mostly by himself) and before I had even been questioned by him, he interviewed for a job with Warner Brothers. When we found out he’d been hired (by him changing his employer from “Polisen” to “Warner Bros” on Facebook) the reply we got was that it was proof that Swedish IT police are of such high caliber that even the big U.S. companies would hire them.

I got promoted from “witness” to “suspect” a week after the job was promised [..]

The internet is being controlled by a corrupt industry. We need to stop it.

Psychology & Computation Link

2012-02-10T23:53:00.000-08:00

There are interesting parallels between algorithms / computation and Jungian psychology.

Si is introverted sensing, it looks at the current events and "remembers" similar events, objects, sayings from the past. Then, Si is basically a nearest-neighbour approach that is used in Machine Learning. It has no model, the model is the data itself.

Ti is the ultimate modeler. It tries to summarize data, tries to set clear boundaries between definitions so that categorizations and predictions are more accurate. Ti in ML is anything that uses a graphical, analytical, structure based model such as Bayesian Nets, ID3, or already cooked up formula with some missing parameters. Si cannot predict, classify things that it did not see before. Ti can.

Te has logic, measurement, contingency planning. In compsci terms it is a combo of a recursive depth-first search, logic and sensor data processing. It has rudimentary modeling abilities. It is quick so it probably utilizes a cache (hah!).

Ne, Ni are the ultimate non-deterministic generator of possibilities. They are probably "multi-threaded", as they generate many possibilities, sometimes blindly, these many possibilities can be executed in parallel. Even then however, their job might take a long time to finish, which must be why Ni,Ne is known to keep working even when a person is asleep, busy with other things. A "discovery" popping into a scientist's head is simply Ni, Ne finishing its work. There's nothing mysterious about it. Note: Generating possible solutions and verifying them are seperate tasks of course (per our P ≠ NP? discussion), Ne,Ni generate, Ti,Te verify.

My kinda car

2012-02-10T12:36:00.001-08:00

Link

That's a wood-burning stove in there!

Point Spread

2012-02-10T04:06:00.000-08:00

A like-based system for artistic products (or even other things) can result in interesting side applications. Each creation in the registry can also carry a list of references, or sources that the creation used as its inspiration. Then, every "like" (or a portion of it) received by this creation can automatically be distributed people in the references list.

Corollary: In our general scheme, copying and stealing is encouraged, and no punishment of any kind is condoned. That said, potential disagreement in this scheme can (should) be around the issue of reference, that is being cited properly in a digital work, thus "missing out" on the likes received by that work. Therefore, it is conceivable one involving a legal mechanism of sorts in order to be included in a reference list. That is ok. But again, no punishment, and rabid stealing (copying) is encouraged and in fact the prime f...ing directive of this system.

I have a bad feeling about this

2012-02-08T22:53:00.000-08:00

Link

In hardware, minicomputers disrupted mainframes. Then microcomputers disrupted minicomputers. Now phones and tablets are disrupting microcomputers. With each wave, a hardy band of rebels fought against everything the industry threw up in their way. Waves of salespeople spreading FUD. Rigged government procurement deals. Lobbyists in the halls of power passing laws against them. The battle cry of the empire has always been that a victory by the rebels would cost the economy everything, that jobs would vanish and chaos would reign. But each victory by the rebels actually created more jobs, more wealth, and more freedom.

Now in the next century, what [do we] observe? That everything old is new again. The “intellectual property cartels” act like the hardware giants of old, buying politics by the pound and telling everyone who will listen that they need more protection for their patent portfolio, more protection for their cartoon characters, more protection for even the depiction of sporting events.

They tell us that only a “managed economy” for intellectual “property” will preserve jobs, and that if the serfs have more “freedom,” this will actually lead to slavery. The warn us that roving bands of pirates are living it up like drug barons on movie downloads. They explain how they need the senate to grant them special, temporary powers to download the contents of your phone or laptop when you cross the border, they explain why they need to send violent special forces police to arrest and extradite the owners of a file downloading business, they explain why they need to monitor the entire world’s tweets looking for jokes in poor taste.

And that’s just how they run politics. If you want to create the future, the possibility of successfully navigating a patent minefield is approximately 3,720 to 1. And I noticed earlier, the electoral motivator has been damaged [..].

Some of you will agree with me that surrender is a perfectly acceptable alternative in extreme circumstances. But others will [..] continue the fight, harassing and wounding the entrenched interests until the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own corruption. The future of our economy really does depend on the rebels succeeding. At every point in the last forty years, wealth, health, and happiness in our economy have been built on the freedom to disrupt the entrenched powers, not the preservation of their rent-seeking monopolies.

More jobs and businesses have been created by VCRs than destroyed by them. More jobs and businesses have been created by the breakup of AT&T than destroyed by it. More jobs and businesses have been created by the decline of IBM than lost in Armonk. More jobs and businesses have been created by the stagnation of Microsoft than lost in Redmond. And it will be the same with the RIAA, the MPAA, Intellectual Ventures, and everyone else scheming to enthral the people with digital “rights” management and criminal prosecution of “file sharing.” In the destruction of the monopolization of ideas, lie the seeds of a new revolution, one that will bring wealth, freedom, and jobs.

Halftime in America

2012-02-08T04:11:00.001-08:00

Know-How and Why

2012-02-08T00:47:00.000-08:00

Science education needs to focus on the process, on mathematical modeling, on how to obtain results, instead of simply results themselves. There is some improvement in this regard, but the old approach and culture still persists. Even the greats of teaching were not immune to this problem; The Feynman Lectures on Physics is mostly about results rather than the process used to obtain those results. The real gold is in the process, the results can change. In Genius we read at a young age Feynman reached a point when he could model pretty much anything he wanted, he'd run around asking people for problems to model, and finally found one;

No one had ever analyzed the behavior of light passing through a parade of mostly transparent films thinner than a single wavelength [..] A few days later Feynman returned with the solution: a formula summing an infinite series of reflections back and forth from the inner surfaces of the coatings. He showed how the combinations of refraction and reflection would affect the phase of the light, changing its color. Using Feynman’s theory and many hours on the Marchant calculator, Cutler also found a way to make the color filters his professors wanted. Developing a theory for reflection by multiple-layer thin films was not so different for Feynman from math team in the now distant past of Far Rockaway [his childhood home]. He could see, or feel, the intertwined infinities of the problem, the beam of light resonating back and forth between the pair of surfaces, and then the next pair, and so on, and he had a giant mental kit bag of formulas to try out.

Representing functions are sums of infinite series is a deeply theoretical subject whose research was inspired by physics, beautiful mathematics. Tranmission of such "mental kit of formulas [or equalities, inequalities, theories, representations, etc]" should be the goal of education, not simply dropping a finished product / formula F = ma in a kid's lap, and have him / her solve mechanical problems one after another.

Big Brother Zynga

2012-02-05T22:59:00.000-08:00

Reddit

I worked at Zynga for 8 months, I can tell you all about the Good Stuff (yes, there is good stuff going on in there!), and the nasty-douchey stuff (yes, there is extremely CREEPY stuff going on in there!) [..].

Spying on players. Getting intimate gaming data, their habits, their networks, and how to effectively monetize given X [..].

Another issue was skewing gameplay for the sake of profit, example; I actually resorted to BAD MATH, to make the case for making a feature more fun. At the end of one sprint, a QA dude was complaining about the drop rate of a specific item being absurdly insane, and therefore UnFun. I looked at the code, and tweaked some values, gave it back to QA guy, and fun was restored. Product Manager overrides this, goes for unfun, yet more profitable version [..].

Internal metrics researchers often give studio wide talks on what trends are going on. They've basically tracked down very popular players and also players who've spent an excess of 10k into the game [..].

We often tweak our features to match and maximize for a particular gaming habit. We do this for massive populations of players. Players are not aware of this. To me, that's a big brother like issue, someone is measuring and monitoring your behavior intimately, and you don't know how that data is going to be used.

--

Yucky. Ppl spend 10K on Zynga games? Who are these fools?

BOHICA

2012-02-05T13:17:00.001-08:00

There are some great passages in Roubini's Crises Economics. I will share them as I read the book, but the state of the world system can be simply summarized as ... Bohica. This is past Snafu, past Tarfu, and waaay past Fubar. It's BOHICA, which stands for Bend Over Here I Come Again.

P ≠ NP?

2012-02-04T23:45:00.000-08:00

In theoretical computer science a distinction is made between branch-and-bound problems, and stuff that is computed in linear time. Solutions for NP problems try all possibilities, but for every found potential solution, its correctness can be checked in linear time. Shortest route from Boston to New York? Try'em all! If you have the final solution will be blatantly obvious; is New York in the list? If yes, you are done. P problems are anything efficiently solveable. Almost all of the applied mathematics is in P.

I argue that fussing over P ≠ NP is pointless and waste of energy. Feynman once said [paraphrasing] "some problems are just harder to compute [numerically]". So he was like "so what?". NP problems are foreign to physicist because their math is designed to keep them in P. If they come across intractable computation, they will throw simulation, other numerical tricks at the problem, but this either a) never happens, or b) won't be pursued until it is absolutely necessary. Algebraic derivation continues for a long time, twists and turns, sometimes in order to avoid intractability, sometimes for other reasons; and when finally there is a formula, usually it is already in P.

Some argue that the data generated by the Internet, images, video, sound, result in problems that are inherently in NP. I disagree. PDE based methods are applied to image processing successfully, and noone knows how much in P we can remain and still succeed solving these problems, because we haven't tried them yet. To me, pattern equals tractable math and that equals P.

Surely being able to solve NP problems, using paralellism, quantum computers, multicore architecture is necessary, a different research track on its own, what I am saying is there is a wealth of mathematics, modeling that is essentially P material. Mathematics, applied or not, is mostly about exploiting properties of numbers so they give us computable solutions in linear time. I am using the word exploitation here, with good reason. Some tricks are akin to dressing up a monkey and making it dance. Monkey dont know it, but it is dancin, and doing something for its viewers, conciously or not. That takes genius, creativity, understanding the problem domain and a good amount of mad skillz.

Peculiar

2012-02-02T07:48:00.000-08:00

Genius, James Gleick

When Paul A. M. Dirac, the British quantum theorist, visited the University of Wisconsin in 1929, the Wisconsin State Journal [publised an article on him]. An American scientist the reporter said, would be busy and active, “but Dirac is different. He seems to have all the time there is in the world and his heaviest work is looking out the window.” Dirac’s end of the dialogue was suitably monosyllabic. (The Journal’s readers must have assumed he was an ancient eminence; actually he was just twenty-seven years old.) [..]

The genius was otherworldly and remote. More than the practical Americans whose science meant gizmos and machines, Europeans such as Einstein and Dirac also incarnated the culture’s standard oddball view of the scientist.

“Is he the tall, backward boy ... ?” Barbara Stanwyck’s character asked in The Lady Eve about Henry Fonda’s, an ophiologist roughly Feynman’s age.

—He isn’t backward, he’s a scientist.—Oh, is that what it is. I knew he was peculiar.

“Peculiar” meant harmless. It meant that brilliant men paid for their gifts with compensating, humanizing flaws. There was an element of self-defense in the popular view [..].

Ninja Loan

2012-02-01T13:23:00.000-08:00

Crises Economics, Roubini

As securitization became increasingly commonplace in the 1990s and 2000s, mortgage brokers, mortgage appraisers, ordinary banks, investment banks, and even quasi-public institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac no longer subjected would-be borrowers to careful scrutiny. So-called liar loans became increasingly common, as borrowers fibbed about their income and failed to provide written confirmation of their salary. Most infamous of all were the “NINJA loans,” in which the borrower had No Income, No Job, (and no) Assets.

--

Hillarious shit.

Buying into the Boom

2012-01-30T11:46:00.000-08:00

Crises Economics, Roubini

As it became apparent that the crisis was real, many commentators tried to make sense of the disaster. Plenty of people invoked Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of the “black swan” to explain it. Taleb, whose book of that title came out on the eve of the crisis, defined a “black swan event” as a game-changing occurrence that is both extraordinarily rare and well-nigh impossible to predict. By that definition, the financial crisis was a freak event, albeit an incredibly important and transformational one. No one could possibly have seen it coming.

In a perverse way, that idea is comforting. If financial crises are black swans, comparable to plane crashes—horrific but highly improbable and impossible to predict—there’s no point in worrying about them. But the recent disaster was no freak event. It was probable. It was even predictable, because financial crises generally follow the same script over and over again. Familiar economic and financial vulnerabilities build up and eventually reach a tipping point. For all the chaos they create, crises are creatures of habit. Most crises begin with a bubble, in which the price of a particular asset rises far above its underlying fundamental value. This kind of bubble often goes hand in hand with an excessive accumulation of debt, as investors borrow money to buy into the boom.

--

What is described above is a big problem, because money = debt, and debt is "hoped" to represent new enterprises being formed in which people create value to pay back their debt. If, instead, a pyramid of debt is created that has no basis in terms of creating value, then after the music stops the whole system is in danger of going bust.

Yep

2012-01-28T08:45:00.001-08:00

Asian Population

2012-01-28T03:11:00.001-08:00

We calculated in next 60 years 2 billion people in the world will sadly lose their lives. Since Asia is a continent with a high population density, it is likely that most of the projected death count will come from this continent. Densest countries are the most vulnerable, i.e. in terms of population India has three times more people than US living on a third of her landmass. China is a bit luckier, but overall Asia might witness some hard times.

Under Obama, the Freedom of Information Act is Still in Shackles

2012-01-27T23:18:00.000-08:00

Link

Three years ago this past weekend, on his first full day in office, President Barack Obama issued his now infamous memo on transparency and open government, which was supposed to fulfill his campaign promise to lead the “most transparent administration in history.” Instead, his administration has been just as secretive—if not more so—than his predecessors, and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has become the prime example of his administration’s lack of progress [..]

[S]ecrecy won out in the Obama administration almost immediately. In the early months of his presidency, a court ruled that the administration would have to turn over photos related to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in response to a FOIA request. Knowing they’d likely lose the appeal, Obama supported a new law that could keep information secret even when FOIA would otherwise require disclosure. The bill’s only intention was to create a way to shield photographs of detainee abuse from public disclosure.