I am … unhindered by talent

Great minds (which clearly leaves mine out of the running) continue to be annoyed by the same cultural artifacts here and there.

Yesterday at lunch one of the locals asked whether I found it awkward being away from the U.S. election coverage during all this primary action. As was the case when we were here in the UK during the 2000 election, we generally find the coverage here to be better than what we’d get back home. It tends to be more focussed on issues and have more depth (less oriented towards sound bites), so no tears shed here. And, with most news outlets on-line now, you can really choose to read/watch/listen to pretty much whatever news sources you want to, regardless of your physical location.

During the 2000 election several well-meaning people independently offered to send us U.S. newspapers so we could keep up with things. Given that it’s damn difficult to get good international news in the States, it’s not entirely surprising that people assume that it’s hard to get U.S. news when abroad. Given that the U.S. election was front page news over here, however, we declined :-).

Thanks to James Good for the cool image.

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A tale of mismanagement, overly enthusiastic love of buzz words and the Next Big Thing, and hiring good people and making them do stupid things.

The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack.

Thanks to MJ for the pointer. As he said “makes one weep for our kind”.

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Registration for both the Algorithm and Marathon competitions in this year’s TopCoder Open close in the last week of January, so start sharpening your … uh … programming … thingies …

I was participating in TopCoder events a fair bit when we first got to Colchester. I stopped, though, once the research really got up to speed, and I haven’t participated in TopCoder in several months. I’m not entirely sure I’ll be able to participate in this year’s open (there may be an unavoidable scheduling conflict), but it would be nice to try to add another t-shirt to my collection.

For those about to code, we salute you!

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While I realize that this is little more than incoherent link propagation (unlike my normally focussed prose-o-wonderment), hopefully pulling some of this fluff from the mighty tubes that connect us all will help clarify our various connections and communications.

A couple that our amazing progeny sent my way:

• How I failed the Turing test: How would you convince a random new IM contact that you were a person and not a bot? (Of course might wonder why you’d bother, but we’ll ignore that for now.)
• RIAA Declares Using Brain to Remember Songs is Criminal Copyright Infringement (satire): Fairly amusing piece on the “Music industry moguls remain willfully clueless” thread. I love how the authors felt the need to include “satire” in the title. Are we really that dim?

I’m not sure where I got this pointer from, but Bruce Schneier is exhorting people to “Steal This Wi-Fi” over on Wired. In a world where people expend tons of energy securing their wireless networks (and ISPs often require it of their customers), one of our major security experts chooses to keep his home wireless open. “To me, it’s basic politeness. Providing internet access to guests is kind of like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea.”

And in a vaguely related piece on security, a post from John Naughton on the dangers of publishing your bank details. Jeremy Clarkson, arch-conservative, petrol head, and (much to my dismay) highly amusing Top Gear presenter decided that the woo-haa was way overblown regarding the recent loss by British government officials of financial details of millions of people. So he published his bank details in his Sun column. According to the BBC, however, “Clarkson admitted he was ‘wrong’ after he discovered a reader had used the details to create a £500 direct debit to the charity Diabetes UK.” Oops.

Well, my tubes are definitely clearer. Thanks for the Q-tip.

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As many of my students can attest, I’ve always loved emergent behavior where you have a whole bunch of “stupid” agents working with simple rules, but the end result is amazingly complex and wondrous. There are termites, for example, that by following simple rules (and with no “leader” in charge) manage to build large mounds with extraordinarily precise climate control in certain chambers where they farm special fungi. If you held a gun to my head and told me to use dirt, sticks, and other bits lying around to build a chamber that would be nearly constant temperature day and night, winter and summer, I’d have to tell you to pull the trigger. Yet these insects, with no blueprint or foreman, pull it off over and over again across thousands of years. (Doesn’t evolution just rock!)

No surprise, then, that I was smitten with this recent TED video (of a talk from four years ago) where Deborah Gordon talks about her research into how ants figure out how to allocate tasks (i.e., who does what when).

If you want to play with this sort of thing, I recommend both NetLogo and Breve, as well as this cool Breve-based screensaver, which evolves walking creatures while you’re momentarily distracted from your random web surfing. Both NetLogo and Breve can happily suck up way too much of your life (there are literally days to be spent playing with all the canned models in NetLogo), but it’s great fun, and working with tools like this can really help build your intuition for how complex systems of agents can work.

Below the fold I list some of my favorite NetLogo simulations that I often use in demos.

Read the rest of this entry »

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I highly recommend “Science, delayed” over on Science- Progress.org. It’s a short, clear case by Chris Mooney for how seriously messed up the U.S. Congress is when it comes to science, and how important it is for us all to speak up.

The short version is the the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), created in 1972 to provide non-partisan “user-friendly scientific advice to members of Congress”. After several successful decades (and providing a model for numerous other countries), it died a partisan death in 1995 at the hands of Gingrich The Newt and crowd. Mooney and others had hoped that the OTA would be reconstituted when the Dems regained control of Congress in 2006, but an attempt to include it in the legislative appropriations bill over the summer failed.

The problem? Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), a physicist and supporter of the return of the OTA found that many of his colleagues just didn’t see the point.

Many members of Congress don’t even see the scientific component to many policy issues. “I use voting as an example,” Holt explains. “Not a single one of my colleagues really understood the problem that was presented by unverifiable voting machines. Scientists or engineers would get that immediately. But Congress didn’t.”

I’ll understand if you need leave the computer for a bit to go rock back and forth in a dark corner and moan. Go ahead - I’ll be here waiting for you when you’re done.

I certainly wouldn’t expect any politician to understand all the complexities of the technical and scientific component of every issue that comes before them. That would be an insanely superhuman task, which is why politicians (should) have (good) advisors. From a statement Holt made before the House Science Committee:

None of us in Congress have time to analyze scientific and technological advances and make reasoned, logical determinations of their direction and impact on industry, nations, and education, but we vote on decisions about topics on a regular basis that include technical or scientific components. The connections to science and technology are not always obvious, especially to Members who avoid science and technology, which are most Members. We cannot do this alone.

Unfortunately, it appears that most Congress Critters don’t have “official” science advisors (if they have them on their staffs, it’s bloody difficult to find that info on-line), which is exactly the gap the OTA was intended to fill.

Given that almost every issue of substance these days has a non-trivial science/technology component, this is particularly disconcerting. From Mooney’s piece (his emphasis):

But in truth, science pops up again and again across a wide diversity of political issues, including many unexpected ones, which is why the entire Congress needs the service of an agency specially suited to analyze issues with that in mind, as well as to look forward to future science-related quandaries on the horizon.

Where do your legislators stand on the restoration of OTA funds? We’ve got to ask these questions if we want them to take the issues seriously.

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Courtesty of Status-Q, I’ve just run across this amazing and wonderful little project: WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier.

Bill Lamin is posting the letters his grandfather (Harry Lamin) wrote home from the front of WWI as a blog. Each letter is posted 90 years after (to the day) Harry wrote it, so following the blog is somewhat like being his family, waiting for news, hoping it’s good.

What a brilliantly simple idea, absolutely full of potential and possibility. Our family is fortunate enough to have a number of excellent diaries, letter collections, and such, and I’ve often thought of “doing something” with them. My thoughts had always been fairly traditional; this opens all sorts of doors.

Wow.

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I ran across this great dismantling on Whatever of Sony BMG’s truly ludicrous new semi-kinda-sorta-DRM free music system last night and just about wet myself giggling.

Kid #2: So to recap, what you’ve got here is a system that makes people leave their house in order to download music at their house, and makes them go to a store to get music that they could get at the store, somewhere else.

Sony BMG dude: Er.

Come on - you know you don’t really have anything important to do. Go treat yourself (to the post, not one of their stupid cards).

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The last seven years of mismanagement, deception, and chest thumping give one at least slight pause before owning up to being from the U.S. out here in the wide world beyond Kansas. Obama’s win in Iowa, however, is something we can all be proud of regardless of the final result in November. To quote the NY Times:

Mr. Obama’s victory in this overwhelmingly white state stood as a powerful answer to the question of whether America was prepared to vote for a black person for president.

The caucus result does have a very scary side in Huckabee’s success:

Polls of Republicans entering the caucus sites found that nearly 60 percent described themselves as evangelical Christians, and by overwhelming numbers they said they intended to vote for Mr. Huckabee.

This is exactly the crowd that semi-elected Our Fearless Leader, and we’re all in trouble if they lead us down another garden path.

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We watched the New Year’s fireworks from London on the telly last night, and that was one remarkable display of blowing stuff up. At the time it kept reminding me of the blitz in creepy ways, and later I kept thinking about places like Kenya and Pakistan where people are burning things out of anger rather than for fun.

Here’s hoping that more explosions can be “in fun” than “in anger” in 2008.

The photo is another from the 4th of July display in Monticello, Wisconsin.

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