I am … unhindered by talent

photo credit: hradcanska
As we were car-less in the UK last year, we would rent wheels at various times when we needed to move all three of us and lots of stuff over what passes for long distances on the small island. Our last rental, for our last week between Spain and our return back to the U.S., was from Enterprise. When we dropped the car off at the airport their desk was closed, so I just plopped the keys in their little return safe.

Today I got an e-mail with the receipt. As an attachment. In “.MDI” format. Whatever the hell that is.

I was pretty sure we were going to find out that this was a M$ format before I’d even bothered looking, as it’s almost always people that have been sucked irretrievably into the M$ vortex that blithely send out files in annoying proprietary formats without considering the possibility that not everyone has sunk loads o’ dosh and a major organ into M$ software. I was right. It turns out that it’s Microsoft Document Imaging format, which apparently scans physical documents and converts them into TIFFs. But instead of then using the open, nigh on universally supported TIFF, they wrap (I’m guessing) that in their own goofy MDI format so people like me can’t open the documents.

Charmed. I’m sure.

Nothing I tried (and I tried quite a lot of things) would open this MDI file up, so I (nicely) wrote back and asked if he could re-send the file in an open format, like plain text or PDF. A model of restraint, I was. Really.

They promptly sent a second message with a new attachment in “.doc”. Good on the promptly. Less winning on the “.doc”, since that’s clearly not an open format. Happily, however, NeoOffice was able to open it up, sparing me a second round of e-mails with this nice person.

And what, after all this fun, did this remarkable M$ Word document contain?

A single, small image.

The image looks like a scan of a small bit of a spreadsheet. A small bit. No names (theirs or ours), dates, or any other standard “invoice” information. Just 10 lines of text, four of which are labels, four of which are actual entries (the rental amount, VAT, etc.), with the rest being sub-totals and totals.

In other words, a ton of machinery to obfuscate a quite small bit of information.

I just hate it when that happens…

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Regular readers here will likely remember various past posts extolling the virtues of Dagstuhl, this really wonderful computing research facility in Germany. I’ve been lucky enough to attend several seminars on the Theory of Evolutionary Algorithms in the past, and have taken (and posted) quite a few photos from those trips.

A few months ago I had the (totally) unexpected pleasure of being contacted by Christian Lindig, a member of Dagstuhl’s scientific staff, and asked if I would be willing to return to Dagstuhl for the specific purpose of taking photographs for them. They’re apparently in the process of re-doing all their brochures and such, and liked what they’d seen on Flickr.

As a result I’ve spent a very pleasant few days back at Dagstuhl in some gorgeous spring weather (I’ve only every been here in the winter before), enjoying the company of a fine group studying the Design and Analysis of Randomized and Approximation Algorithms. (They’ve been very patient with an intruder who always seemed to be waving a camera about, and for this I am grateful.)

I’ve taken something over 1,000 photos, with a few more planned for tomorrow morning before I leave. Some of the participants have asked if the photos will be made available. I have uploaded everything I’ve taken this week to my “events” account on Flickr, all under a Creative Commons license, which means that participants are welcome to download and use any that they wish, as long as they provide attribution. (Note that I am not, and can not, provide any sort of permissions from individuals photographed - that’s their right and prerogative. If you want to use someone here in a beer ad, you need to get their permission first.)

Where are they all?

• Everything I’ve taken this week is on my “events” account.
• I also have a Dagstuhl set on my “real” Flickr account that has some of my favorites (with cleaning, cropping, etc.) from my various visits to Dagstuhl. At the moment this set is heavy on shots from previous trips, but I hope to add more from this visit as time allows.
• Earlier this year I posted everything (without cleaning or editing) from the Jan/Feb seminar on Evolutionary Algorithms to my “events” account.

It’s not yet clear what all Dagstuhl may do with these, but they will contact anyone who is recognizable in a photograph for permission before using your image in any of their materials. If anyone objects to being included in these vast oceans of photos, please let me know and I’d be happy to remove the photo in question.

Thanks again to Christian for inviting me out to Dagstuhl, and to the Randomized and Approximate Algorithms group for being patient “hosts”. Enjoy the photos!

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Sorry for the lack of activity here - an EPSRC grant with Riccardo came through, which is big happy news. The downside is that there’s a ton of research work to be done in a very short period of time. We were lucky enough to have Ellery Crane visiting for the last two weeks, and the two of us did some pretty massive hours while he was here. We got a bucket of really good work done was he here; we built several large new systems and got some early results that suggest probably at least a couple of papers.

I’ll try to post at least sporadically in the upcoming weeks, but I suspect things are likely to be light here well into the summer.

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Much chops to Bad Science for pointing out Phun, a simulation environment/game/construction engine thingie that (judging from the videos) is just super fun (ho, ho, ho) to fiddle with. It seems a wonderfully open-ended platform for making stuff, which is of course the great strength of a pad and paper, or a bucket of Legos. This demo video gives a sense of the range of possibilities:

There’s a YouTube group devoted to this thing, and the number and variety of little clips there also speaks well to the Phun’s flexibility. We even have one person building a binary adder, and another a working pinball machine. Very, very cool.

The sad, sniffle, miserable bit is that Phun doesn’t run on Macs at the moment. It supports for Linux and Windows, though, and there are people working on a Mac port, so my fingers are crossed. It just seems like it would be too damn much fun to play with.

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Just finished my GECCO reviewing, and I must say that is seriously sucks when people don’t attend to even the most basic of issues. Two things almost guaranteed to majorly annoy a reviewer:

• Weird random floating fragments of text that are obviously the disemboweled remnants of some cut and paste action.
• Only 8 entries in the bibliography on a subject that has been heavily researched for over a decade.

And just guess the average publication date of 8 fine references.

1985.

Yeah, over 20 years ago.

3 entries were books (two of which were over 10 years old), and the only 2 journal articles were from 1938 and 1964 respectively.

Strangely enough, I didn’t encourage acceptance of that paper.

The really depressing thing is that most of our (undergraduate) students at UMM would do better than this.

No, maybe that’s the uplifting thing.

Maybe the really depressing thing is that I see papers with this kind of bibliography fairly often. I’d almost recommend some sort of automatic rejection system for obviously stupid bibliographies, but then people would just start padding their bibliographies with random citations to get past that blockade.

Sigh.

photo credit: markopoulos

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The Economist has an interesting piece on why government web services tend to suck, especially when compared with the best corporate services. Their take is that a significant part of it is that isn’t any kind of competition, so there isn’t much fall out if government web tools are wretched:

When Britain’s Inland Revenue website crashed on January 31st—the busiest day of its year—the authorities grudgingly gave taxpayers one day’s grace before imposing penalties. They did not offer the chance to pay tax in Sweden instead.

I suspect there’s significant truth in this, but I’m not convinced it’s the whole story. It’s amazing, for example, how many university web sites/tools are pretty wretched, including those in the computer science departments. You’d think that would drive away prospective students in ways that, in this very competitive environment, would have the kind of direct consequences that purportedly drive Amazon and Google. I certainly know that the U of M’s growing adoption/creation of on-line tools has hardly been without its trials and travails; many of their web tools are really nice, while others totally make me want to cry. Sometimes the problems are lack of infrastructure supporting the development and maintenance of the tools (a problem that’s clearly plagued many business making the transition from bricks and morter to on-line). Sometimes the problem is infighting and bureaucratic silliness that would be cut off at the knees in a well managed company (but isn’t always - not all companies are well managed).

I think, however, that one of the chronic problems (for the U of M, for governments, and for many companies) stems from the fact that the key decision makers just don’t use the internet much, so they’re not well positioned to judge the success and failure of their organization’s efforts. They often don’t use their own tools, so they don’t know how painfully awful they are, and when they do use them they don’t have the rich frame of reference needed to see what could be instead of just what is. And thus we get embarrassingly precambrian web tools. Compare this to Google, for example, where it’s clear that (a) their people are using their tools at all levels and (b) they’re very aware of what other people are doing on the web (and not just in the area of search tools).

Tip of the cap to Naughton once again for the pointer.

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Chris posted some cool questions on my earlier post about decentralized behavior in social insects:

so what kinds of things do computer scientists do w/this idea? is sort of what evolutionary computing is about? i picked up the evolution of cooperation recently (tit for tat wins prisoner’s dilemma) you must be familiar w/this, yes?”

There’s really three different (but related) ideas in this question:

• Decentralized and emergent behavior
• Evolutionary computation
• Game theory and cooperation

I’ll take them one at a time, with more on the first of the three, at least for now.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Almost had an alliteration in the title, but then lost it at the end. Sigh.

I’ve finishing dumping all my Dagstuhl photos (uncleaned and unedited) to my event account on Flickr, so those with more time than sense can rush over and gaze upon them all. Over the next week or two I’ll work on cleaning some of my favorites and posting them to my “real” Flickr account, but who knows how long that will take.

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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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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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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