I am … unhindered by talent

Which of the following was written by (a) me, (b) William Shakespeare, and (c) Charles Darwin?

“I would have sent to Rome that’s worthy death?”

“The naturalist looking at species as he might succeed from a fork low down in the separation of the species of any species in a more or less from their sap this is unimportant for the instincts already possessed by certain plants so that natural selection of mere piles of superimposed strata and watch the sea separating an island even if we believe that pure water can effect little or no offspring.”

“The troubling aspects of a building block semantics in a given tree in the context and false.”

The answer and (much) more is below the fold.

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All good things must come to an end, and our week at Dagstuhl ends tomorrow after lunch. Above is yesterday’s group picture (I’m in yellow near the front) just before the traditional Wednesday hike (below), which was wet and misty but still an enjoyable few hours out in the world.

I gave a talk this morning which (I think) went well, especially since I didn’t know I was going to be giving a talk until Tuesday afternoon! There was certainly a lot of good discussion and people came up with tons of suggestions and ideas, which is what I really love about presenting at Dagstuhl. I started with something quite fun, which I’ll post here later. Most of the talks have used computer slides (PowerPoint or some more sensible alternative like LaTeX/Beamer), but Jon Rowe did a great blackboard talk on Tuesday (pictured below).

I was greatly inspired and did almost all of mine on the boards as well. I had four slides at the beginning that really needed to be slides, and then I did the bulk on the boards, and came back to a fifth slide at the end.

Tomorrow there are talks before lunch, including a talk/discussion thing that Riccardo is doing that I’m sure I’ll be roped into in some mysterious way. Then we eat, and it’s a taxi out to the Frankfurt Hahn airport for our flight back to the UK!

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This is from the morning break here on our first full day at Dagstuhl. I love the look on his face.

Dagstuhl isn’t all heavy thinking and hard work, though. I had a beer with dinner (pictured below); unfortunately it made me very sleepy for a while. I’m such a lightweight…

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We all arrive at Dagstuhl on Sunday night for the week’s workshop. After a long day of traveling we enjoy some of Dagstuhl’s exceptional food, meet with folks, and catch up.

Above is the conversation during dinner tonight. It’s not the sharpest photo I’ve ever taken, but I think it captures the spirit of the room quite nicely.

And then we (at least quite a few of us) get to work. The photo below was taken at 9:30pm (probably 2.5 hours after the previous one), and there were quite a few people in this lab at the time. And there’s another lab elsewhere in the facility, and the library, and people’s rooms. I’m sure that lots of folks were also hanging out in the coffee room or playing pool, but there were a lot of people working on a Sunday night as well.

It helps if you enjoy your work, and most of these folks are extraordinarily interested in what they’re studying.

While I’m at Dagstuhl this year I’m going to try (amidst all the “real” work) to capture something of what the workshop is like and, more generally, what it is to do (computer) science. This is hard because it’s not flashy high-action bull-riding kind of work, but it’s important, significant work and deserves to be documented. I’m just going to have work harder at it.

I’m also probably going to take more people pictures than I would be naturally inclined to. If anyone finds them self in a photo here and objects, let me know and I’d be happy to remove it.

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It’s late and I’m way tired, but I think the packing is under control (more or less) (sorta kinda) (as well as can be expected) for tomorrow’s grand journey to Dagstuhl. Not sure how much posting will happen from there; depends a lot on how good the wireless is in my room this year.

In the meantime I leave you with this travel (and research) related shot from my excellent visit to Dublin last month: a group of vehicles driving onto O’Connell Bridge. It looks like it’s the middle of the night, but it was actually only a bit after 6pm as everyone was hurrying home from work. Short days in Dublin in December.

Ciao!

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As mentioned before, I’ve been pretty insanely busy, trying to get four different co-authored research papers ready in time for the submission deadline next week for one of the major conferences in my field. Part of the reason I’m busy is that I procrastinate, but part of it is that I’m damnedly slow. And an important part of that is that I spend roughly forever making and fiddling with graphs.

See, I just love a good graph. One of my great goals in life is to give a standard length (20-30 minute) conference talk where my entire collection of slides is just one gorgeous, illuminating, data rich graph. The graph would need to have all the information I want to convey and enough to support 20 minutes of me talking about it. So far I’ve not come anywhere close. I’ve occasionally had single graphs that could support more than five minutes of presentation, but I’m not sure I’ve ever hit 10. But I’m working on it.

In the meantime, I tend to collect vast whale bellies full of data (my research generates data with wild abandon), and then make plot after plot after plot, trying to figure out both what the data says, and how I can best share that with my potential audience. Hours and hours constructing different views on the mystery. And, of course, I don’t then leave them alone. No, I fiddle and twist, spindle and mutilate, trying to get it “right”.

Technical papers come with page limits, however, so many of these graphs wander around for a while through the land of drafts, only to have their ultimate fate be the rubbish bin of ruthless editing. Some I really like, but they lose out to the necessities of the day. Others were probably never destined for greatness, but served some purpose, like an intellectual scaffolding that helped me build my understanding and argument, but was always going to come down when the construction was finished.

This image combines three of those pieces of scaffolding, freed of their labels and tickmarks, but together as team. I knew all along that these weren’t gonna make the big time, but I needed to plot them to make sure that my intuition about them was (mostly) correct. It was, they served their purpose, and now they’re off to oblivion. Except that I just liked the way these looked, so I joined them all up like little Legos to preserve here on Flickr.

You can think of it as a curvy Mondrian, without being nearly as good :-).

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JOCP! It’s been almost five days since I’ve posted anything here, and I have so much backed up in the queue…

There’s a major conference deadline (GECCO 2008) in a few days, and I’m struggling to finish up four different (and only loosely related) papers for submission. On top of that I leave Sunday morning for an excellent week in Germany at a research seminar at the wondrous Schloss Dagstuhl. (Feel free to visit some of my photos from my last visit to Dagstuhl.)

So sleep is short and fun on the blog is shorter still. In two weeks, though, I should be able to get back in the game a bit.

The top photo is of a student (Tyler - now graduated) during a talk he was giving with another student (Andy) at a regional computer science conference (MICS) last April. On the next day the two of them received the best student paper award for this work :-).

I’ve spent numerous hours this week drawing and redrawing graphs and tables, so this is all too reminiscent of my life at the moment.

The photo below is from a beautiful snowfall we had during the Dagstuhl workshop two years ago.

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Ninety-six printmakers of all experience levels, have joined together to produce 118 prints in any medium; woodcut, linocut, monotype, etching, lithograph, silkscreen, or any combination. The end result is a periodic table of elements intended to promote both science and the arts.

Some way cool stuff - definitely worth the visit. Thanks to mitten for the pointer.

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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.

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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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