I am … unhindered by talent

photo credit: Unhindered by Talent

When I edit, I tend to scribble a lot, even when it’s my own stuff (or the writing of people I really like). Last January, for example, I took a set of photos after scribbling all over a paper that Riccardo and I were working on for GECCO. This paper went on to win the Best Paper award in the genetic programming track at GECCO last month, so I’d like to think that all this editing had some value :-).

I posted the full set over in my events account, and I plan on using some of them to show my students that I’m not just being mean to them — I’m mean to everyone, myself included!

This showed up here now because a publisher contacted me about using it in a college writing textbook. I figured I’d clean it up and post the full size version.

Related posts

• You know, basic editing and lit review = teh good (3)
• Wrapping one’s head around the data (0)

Just stumbled across Wordle, a neat tag cloud/text visualization tool, and am having way too much fun.

Some of my most common Flickr tags (click on the cloud to see it bigger on Wordle’s site):

The contents of the front page of my blog as of 3 July 2008:

I like how the latter captures our time in Spain quite nicely, and I really like how Wordle can intermingle the ascenders and descenders. Wordle can grind pretty hard on your CPU, but there are lots of neat options to play with and some very fun results to be had. w00t!

Thanks to banned photography inc for the tip.

Related posts

• We can all make history come alive (0)
• The strange mysteries of popular opinion (4)

It’s pretty cool when you update your repository and see

At revision 400

We just hit that on the genetic programming book that Riccardo and Bill and I are working on; we’re currently averaging close to 10 commits a day here in the final stages. We hope to wrap it up in the next 1.5 weeks and then off to the printers for fun (and no profit in the traditional sense)!

P.S. Anyone want to proof read a few pages? Get in touch and we can work something out.

Related posts

• UMM students are just so cool! (4)
• Nothing like a little shameless self-promotion (0)

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

Related posts

• Wrapping one’s head around the data (0)
• N-grams and the evolution of programs (6)

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 :-).

Related posts

• Show me what they really want (and don’t assume it’s the money) (2)
• UMM students are just so cool! (4)

I can’t really imagine that anyone’s going to want one of these, but just in case…

As a Xmas present for our various family members we used Blurb.com to create a photo book of some of our images from 2007. But hey, you can join the family by purchasing one as well :-). It’s 127 photos on 38 pages, and they have a PDF preview so you can see what you’re getting into before you put your money down.

This was our first use of Blurb, and their software was pretty decent. Amazing, really, how easy it is these days to publish books that no one really cares about. It used to be hard to publish books no one cared about; they regularly gave people degrees for it.

Related posts

• Happy Thanksgiving to our American friends! (2)
• We have arrived in Spain! (2)

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.

Related posts

• Making an unexpected difference (1)
• Wordle makes tag clouds all pretty (0)

The death of the book has been oft prophesied, and so far the old dear keeps hanging in there. Here Bill Janssen is quoted by Peter Brantley, suggesting that what the casualties may be are forms of content rather than forms of publishing.

Will the novel become a marginal form like opera?

In the hype around the Kindle, I haven’t noticed a mention of Monday’s NEA report, To Read or Not To Read. Seems much more interesting.

I’ve been saying for a few years that we are entering an age where textual fiction is becoming less and less significant, particularly for the canonical long text, the novel. The novel is a relatively recent innovation in entertainment, and the popular novel is a product of cheap production and distribution, thanks to the industrial revolution.

The delivery channels have multiplied, and the economics have changed. Television killed off the pulp magazine (and crippled the market for short stories). What would replace the novel? Something which would produce a ludic experience for hours at a time — a movie. But movies have not succeeded in killing off the novel. They’re too expensive and too complicated, and major players control the distribution channels. The best they could do was to absorb years of talents like Chandler and Faulkner.

But now we have kids who don’t read, the Web, game engines, and the writers’ strike. Game engines and machinima make it possible for writers to produce and direct their own work without actors or sets, for a relatively modest capitalization (a game machine). The Web provides free distribution. Kids provide a hungry audience. But the wild card here is the WGA strike. Suddenly all the folks who normally spend their days creating teleplays are looking for other outlets for their creative energies. Maybe write that novel they’ve been talking about? Maybe not. People like Rob Long (Cheers) are suddenly blogging. Maybe someone will tell them about machinima. We may be entering a twilight for the popular novel, perhaps relegating it to a niche more like opera.

Related posts

• Squeak book available under Creative Commons license (0)
• JOCP! At revision 400! (2)

There’s been much written and said about Radiohead’s decision to let punters name their price when downloading their new In rainbows album. While some of this heat and noise as been quite sensible, much has been predictable tripe about how stupid and naive the band has been. There is some evidence, however, that the band wasn’t so daft, and that their monetary take may have indeed been not to far from what they (as the band) would have seen through traditional marketing channels.

More importantly, though, I think most of this blather totally fails to grasp the more central question: Most bands (artists, writers, open source programmers, etc., etc.) aren’t in it for the money. If you take out the handful that make a fortune (can we please take out the reformed Spice Girls? please?), most people who do this sort of thing aren’t looking to get rich, and many don’t even expect to pay the bills (hence the term “day job”). For them, the value is often much more in being heard (or read or whatever).

As a concrete example, Bill Langdon, Riccardo Poli, and I are considering expanding a chapter we’ve (in fairness, mostly they’ve) written on genetic programming into a full on book. The traditional model would be to find a (science) publisher (which we could easily do), and then have them produce and market the thing. It would sell a few copies, and we’d make a few bucks along the way. That kind of book is never gonna sell 10M copies, however, and we know going in that we’ll never make very much monetarily. But that’s not why most academics write papers and books; if it was we’d be the daftest lot on the planet. (No, don’t go there…)

What we’re after is, in a crude sense, references. Since we’re not going to get rich, we’ll settle for famous (at least in our circles). So we want as many people to read, use, and reference our book as possible, for that’s really the currency of the realm where we live. (And, in truth, that currency converts back to hard cash in complex and indirect ways, through pay raises, increased odds on grant applications, invitations to give talks and tutorials, etc., etc.)

So our intention is to follow a model not so far removed from Radiohead’s (although we’ll probably not get nearly as much press). Our tentative plan is to self-publish using one of the many print-on-demand sites, so there will be a printed, bound copy people can buy; we’ll keep the price low, because we’re more interested in volume than immediate profit. We’ll also give the book away, probably in HTML and PDF formats, to encourage people to check it out, use it, and refer to it, regardless of whether they ever actually buy a copy. We might have a PayPal donation button, sort of like Radiohead’s download for free and pay us what you think makes sense. Or we might not; that’s a bridge we’ll cross when we get there. We’ll do most of the marketing, taking copies to conferences, getting it mentioned on the relevant web sites and discussion groups, and hopefully picking up a fair bit of word of mouth along the way.

I don’t expect we’ll ever see much money on this deal, but I’m quite optimistic that the three of us can put together a book that’ll get used, and that’s the point for us. Similarly, Radiohead’s made enough money on their music that I doubt they’re deeply concerned about a few dollars here or there. They want to be heard and talked about, and they are. Hopefully we can have a somewhat similar experience.

I should also be clear that just because people like Radiohead (or struggling new bands) choose to give away their music, we shouldn’t just write them off as fools and rip them off at every opportunity. We all benefit from their passion, and it’s in our collective interest to support that when we can. That’s part of why I do my darndest to avoid giving money to bands that are already making a ton - they don’t need my support. I prefer instead to spend my money on the zillions of cool, but virtually anonymous, acts that can really benefit from a few bucks.

Related posts

• Rainbow curves (Lost imagery) (0)
• They’re only…what…20 years late? (1)

In general I’m a pretty crap citizen of the websphere. I produce in my spastic little way, but I don’t read or discuss or contribute much to the community of the thing. Or if I do, it’s really scattered and unfocussed. This is especially true in the blogsphere, if less so in Flickr space.

So I blog, but erratically and without any real focus. You’d hardly guess that I’m a computer scientist by profession, or that I’m deeply interested in evolution and evolutionary computing. I keep fantasizing that I’ll write all these cool reviews (esp. music, but books as well), but that rarely happens in practice. I post photographs at random intervals, but not with any focus or arc.

Worse, I’m a truly terrible reader of other blogs. And there are dozens, nay hundreds out there that I know I would find useful, interesting, enlightening, fun… But reading is slow and I’m busy and scattered, so it doesn’t happen.

Every now and then I worry about it, but rarely for long. I occassionally fantasize about being some significant figure in the blog universe like my friend down the hall. Then I think about how much of his life he has to put into building and maintaining that status, and I know it will never happen.

And I’m usually OK with that.

Sometimes I think I need (not necessarily want, but need) to write a book or record an album (or seven). How else can I really make a difference? Leave my mark?

But that’s mostly illusory as well. Even books that top the best sellers list are usually forgotten in a few years, and a few decades wipe out nearly every semblence of significance for all but the tiniest fraction of authors, painters, musicians, etc. And lord knows, I’m not Plato or Da Vinci or Godel.

While a rare few get to place some rocks, or even boulders, on the beach of human experience, most of us get a few grains of sand if we’re lucky. And it really has to be that way; if everyone got a rock, then rocks would just become the new grains of sand. (But we can never understimate the power and importance of lots of people pooling their sand; 59 million U.S. voters dropped their sand in George W. Bush’s bucket in 2004, and look where that got us!)

So I muddle through, trying to balance my family, and my teaching, and my music and photography and writing and gardening and whatever, knowing that I need it all to be me, but that I’ll never “Be all that I can be” at any of them because I’m so distracted by the constant buzz of the world. But still trying to put my grains of sand in places that do some good, if in small ways.

Now and then, though, fate drops a penny in my bucket to remind me that sand counts. Sometimes it’s a former student writing back to say how valuable something I did turned out to be for them. (And I promise that every teacher worth sending something like that to treasures every such note they receive.) Sometimes it’s an unexpected thank you for something you didn’t even think was terribly significant at the time, but which meant a lot to that person.

And sometimes you find out you helped a near stranger break an addiction.

I posted the following about two months ago, both here and on Flickr:

This was mostly just part of my response to Dad’s illness, and something I knew would make Mom cry (in a good way). But it was also my small attempt to bring some attention to this issue, and how the decisions we make can have consequences, not just for us but for those around us.

I was very honored by the very supportive responses I received both here and on Flickr, and shared many of those with my family. We were all very grateful for the support and help, both from long-time friends and from people I only sorta-kinda knew from the on-line world.

And I figured that would be the end of it.

Three days ago, however, just as I was scrambling to get course stuff together and drive the 14 hours south to spend a few more days helping my folks out before having to come back for classes, I got a most unexpected comment on this photo on Flickr. csharp_gal has a wonderful eye for gorgeous landscape photography, and was also apparently addicted to nicotine. After describing her addiction first to cigarettes, and then to nicotine gum, she went on to share:

Then, one day I saw this photo and I read about what’s happening with your Dad. I left a comment and started thinking about it. That day, I went off the gum. It’s almost two months and no gum.

…

Just wanted to let you know that this posted picture helped me to end my almost relationship with nicotine in any form. It’s very important to me, former nicotine junky. I will always think about your Dad while being nicotine free.

I just about cried. It was so unexpected, and so positive, and just so cool! Huge thanks to csharp_gal for sharing her story, and best wishes in her fight against that nasty beast.

I know I’ll never be some giant of the blogsphere, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to writing a book or making an album or whatever. Regardless, I’ll have surprises like this, and my amazing family, to remind me that some of my sand ended up in a good place. And that’s pretty damn cool.

Related posts

• We can all make history come alive (0)
• Wordle makes tag clouds all pretty (0)