Author Archives: jsylvest

"Social networks in fact and fiction"

The Endeavour :: John Cook :: Social networks in fact and fiction

In a nutshell, the authors hope to get some insight into whether a myth is based on fact by seeing whether the social network of characters in the myth looks more like a real social network or like the social network in a work of deliberate fiction. For instance, the social networks of the Iliad and Beowulf look more like actual social networks than does the social network of Harry Potter. Real social networks follow a power law distribution more closely than do social networks in works of fiction.

If you read one version of Beowulf and it's not Seamus Heaney's translation you better have a very good reason.
If you read one version of Beowulf and it's not Seamus Heaney's translation you better have a very good reason.
Cool.

I vaguely remember reading about some astronomer's using Homer's descriptions of constellations to pin down dates for various events in the Odyssey. Perhaps it was this PNAS paper by Baikouzis & Magnasco?

It seems however that an accurate historical account might have a suspicious social network, not because the events in it were made up but because they were filtered according to what the historian thought was important.

Indeed. Although I suspect this form of Narrative Bias would be less of a problem with Beowulf, the Illiad, etc., because the composers of those tales, and their audiences, had less exposure to the way fiction is "supposed" to be.

I would like to see someone do similar analysis for contemporary non-fiction. I prefer authors who tell a sprawling, tangled, less narratively driven story (Keay, Mann, Lewis, and Mukherjee come to mind) to one that fits a more conventional structure.  It's difficult for me to accept a story that takes place in a high causal density environment and yet somehow only a couple of people have any agency.

Nate Silver apparently feels the same way:

When we construct these stories, we can lose the ability to think about the evidence critically. Elections typically present compelling narratives. Whatever you thought about the politics of Barack Obama or Sarah Palin or John McCain or Hillary Clinton in 2008, they had persuassive life stories: reported books on the campaign, like Game Change, read like tightly bestselling novels.
— The Signal and the Noise, p. 59

Those are not the books I'm interested in.


NLP is very much not my area, but I can't help but wonder about automatically generating some sort of metric about this for a book. Count up how many proper names appear, and build a graph of them based on how closely together they are linked in the text. (That is, two names appearing often in the same sentence are more closely linked than two which appear in consecutive paragraph.) Perhaps simply looking at the histogram of name occurrence frequency might give you some preliminary ability to separate books into "realistic social structures" and "fiction-like social structures."

Posted in CS / Science / Tech / Coding | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Conway's Game Of Life in APL

APL is the sort of thing I imagine "Programmer-at-Arms" Pham Nuwen used in Vernor Vinge's "Zones of Thought" books. It seems both incomprehensibly magical while also impeccably rational, forming the shortest bridge between what the programmer is thinking and what the computer is calculating.

Of course it also seems like you'd be building a bridge no one else could walk over. Not even you-one-year-from-now. I have a hard enough time figuring out what I was thinking when I read Ruby I wrote a year ago.


For more, here's a written tutorial by the same fellow. It had this helpful poscript regarding "glider guns"

Artillery in a finite manifold is a dangerous business.

Hehe. Good advice, I suppose.

Aficionados of the 1979 arcade game "Asteroids", which took place on a torus, will recall that the manufacturers thoughtfully gave their canon a range just short of the screen's circumferences.

Found that out the hard way back in undergrad when we wrote a genetic algorithm which learned to play Asteroids.

Posted in CS / Science / Tech / Coding | Leave a comment

Reading List for 11 April 2013

StackOverflow :: Strangest language feature

JavaScript: I love you, but what the hell? Just... why?

A lot of the oddities listed here are aggressively, in-your-face strange or so quirky you'd never know they're there unless you seek them out. The JavaScript ones would make good examples if Hannah Arendt were to re-write Banality of Evil but make it about 21st century coding: strange enough to be dangerous, but normal enough to be insidious. (Via JamulBlog)

HBR Blog Network :: David Court :: The Case for Crafting a Big Data Plan

The Endeavor :: John D Cook :: How loud is the evidence?

New career goal — get a paper published in which I report my results in decibels.

Coyote Blog :: Warren Meyer :: Government Prioritization Fail: Adding Staff When It Is Least Essential

Marginal Revolution :: Alex Tabarrok :: A Brilliant New Method of Price Discrimination: Flip to Fly

Brilliant indeed. Sign me up.

Would this be better or worse, for both consumers and airlines, if you could list <i>n</i> potential destinations instead of just two?

Turing's Invisible Hand :: Ariel Procaccia :: The economic Turing test

Over a recent lunch, Boris Bukh suggested the following variant of the Turing test: a human and a computer play a game (in the game-theoretic sense). A judge who is observing only their moves must decide with confidence who is the human and who is the computer. The premise is that the human would play irrationally (he’s just a random person off the street), and the computer’s goal is to also play irrationally to avoid detection.

A couple of years ago I worked on an IARPA-funded project which was trying to model cognitive biases of intelligence analysts. They were sinking a lot of money into what Procaccia cleverly calls "Artificial Stupidity."

The Economist: Babbage :: G.F. :: Stick a pin on it

Charlie Lloyd's Map of of Cape Morris Jesup
Charlie Lloyd's Map of of Cape Morris Jesup

When Charlie Loyd wanted a job at a mapping firm, he did not send out resumés or make calls. Instead, he posted a message on Twitter that linked to a side-by-side comparison of satellite imagery of Cape Morris Jesup, Greenland's northernmost tip. On the left was a lacklustre image with no real detail captured by a NASA satellite and widely used by Mr Loyd's prospective employers; on the right, his own version.

This is inspiring. Literally, it gives me inspiration for ways to up my chances of getting hired.

JamulBlog :: Fidelity.com Password Fail

Wow. That is amateurishly bad. I really hope Fidelity is better at managing money than they are at managing crypto.

I'm routinely surprised (is such a thing possible?) at how lax security is on banking websites. As an example, of the seven different financial institutions I log into weekly, BofA is the only one that bothers to authenticate itself to me. It's 2013. Is two-way auth really that much to ask?

writeLaTeX

How did I not know writeLaTeX existed? This is useful stuff.

(Sidenote: check out this foldable dodecahedron calendar someone created with just a few lines of TikZ.)

Posted in Reading Lists | Leave a comment

Manfred Mohr

I saw this post on Manfred Mohr's (very!) early digital art literally minutes after picking up a book about Mohr's work from the library yesterday. Total coincidence.

p231, Manfred Mohr
p231, Manfred Mohr

I like a lot of the pioneering digital artists' work. I think the restraints gave them a lot of focus. (Limits boost creativity.) You don't see many of those first generation guys still producing like Mohr does though. It's also refreshingly unusual that Mohr hasn't gotten bogged down in self-consciously retro, 8-bit, glitch kitsch.

(Dear [far too many digital artists]: I also remember that sprite animations were once a cutting-edge thing. Move on.)

Back when I was taking Computational Geometry I remember getting sidelined working out an algorithm based on the six dimensional rotations in Mohr's space.color.motion. At some point I need to dig my notes out for that and implement it.

If you like Mohr you may want to check out this interview as well. I like what he says at the beginning about taking a simple idea and running with it. Also the questions about an artist working like a scientist were good. This also stood out:

So I went higher and higher in dimension and it got more and more complicated. I could do different things, but I could not explain to people because it was so complicated. '6-D cube, what kind of crap are you talking about?'

I've had that experience. Here's a free tip for you: do not try to explain something to a room full of psychologists by beginning "So if you were to imagine yourself moving around on the surface of a 35-dimensional hypercube..."

This interview also displays the link between algorithmic art and political economy. Mohr sets up a system, and lets it do its thing. The artwork emerges from the software. Legislators and regulators and executives set up a system and it does its thing. The economy emerges from society. Mohr's work, like all good algorithmic art, reminds me of Hayek's description of spontaneous order: "of human intent but not of human design."


PS Prosthetic Knowledge points out that Mohr also maintains a very thorough YouTube channel. Would that all digital artists did similar.

Posted in Art, CS / Science / Tech / Coding | Leave a comment

Reading List for 2 Apr 2013

Alan Winfield's Web Log :: Extreme debugging — a tale of microcode and an oven

"Components on the CPU circuit board were melting, but still it didn't crash. So that's how I debugged code with an oven."

If that's not a closing line that gets you to click through, I don't know what is.

Forbes :: Tomio Geron :: Quantopian Brings Algorithmic Trading To The Masses

Why didn't this exist five years ago? I would have had *so* much fun. But no, it can't get invented until I'm up to my ears in dissertation and have already adopted half a dozen new hobbies in the last two years. (Via the Lab49 Blog)

Marginal Revolution :: Alex Tabarrok :: Cognitive Democracy: Condorcet with Competence

More generally, if the voter competences levels are \{p_1, p_2, p_3\} then the cognitively most efficient voting scheme gives each voter a weight of \log \left(p_i/(1-p_i)\right) the result is remarkable for a being such a simple formula of the voter’s own competence level.

There are a ton of links between voting, structured finance, and machine learning ensembles. For example, the logit equation Tabarrok gives is also used to weight members of Bayesian Model Combination ensembles, and is closely related to the weighting scheme used in AdaBoost.

I have every intention of writing about the overlaps between these topics one day, but until that day...

Thomas C. Leonard's review of Nudge [pdf]

Leonard's critique is brilliant in its simplicity. RTWT.

Very briefly: if it is in fact so simple to "nudge" people between sets of preferences, how can you even claim they have real preferences? If people's preferences for apples or cookies is all an artifact of which comes first in the cafeteria line then central planners aren't allowing people to act on their low discount rate preferences instead of their high discount rate preferences, they're creating those preferences. David Henderson has a more in depth summary, but do read the original.

chrmoe :: LED Cube 8x8x8 running on an Arduino

Now that I've got a Raspberry Pi up and running I need to dive into Arduino.

I'm going to build one of these to cut my teeth, then before you know it I'll be giving Leo Villareal a run for his money 😉

Posted in Reading Lists, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Crowdfunding vs angels vs VCs

ESR has some good analysis of how crowdfunding will interact with the existing angel-investor/VC process.

Armed & Dangerous :: Eric S Raymond :: What does crowdfunding replace or displace?

I think he's on the right track, but I wonder how willing will people be to contribute to crowdfunded projects by established firms? It seems like people are more willing to contribute to the (imagined?) plucky tinkerer in his garage than to an existing small-medium firm who is just looking for lower cost of capital.

In my view Kickstarter is just busking, especially now that they've moved to discourage people from using it as a platform for prepayment. Are you really going to be willing to keep chipping in money to fund projects from existing companies with a track record of product releases?

Maybe there are simply too many Scots in my ancestry for me to get so loose with the purse strings, or maybe I've just been living on a grad student's budget for too long, but crowdfunding doesn't have much appeal to me either way. (Unless it's just a pre-order system.) I'm glad it exists, and I'm glad other people are getting utility from it, but it's not for me. Not until I can get some equity out of the deal.


PS Sort of related — The Economist: Babbage :: After the Crowd Leaves

Posted in Business / Economics | 2 Comments

Ripple

Moneyness :: JP Koning :: Ripple, or Bills of Exchange 2.0

Here's some interesting news. Ripple is finally being implemented.

What is Ripple? Ripple is an open source P2P credit system dreamt up by Ryan Fugger in 2004. Its mission is to provide a non-banking payments alternative by decentralizing the process of creating and circulating highly liquid IOUs. Put differently, Ripple offers an environment in which individuals can be their own credit-issuing and credit-accepting banks. Ripple has always remained conceptual. But now a team of developers lead by Jed McCaleb, founder of MtGox, the world's largest bitcoin exchange, are implementing a living breathing Ripple network.

Ripple might seem to be unprecedented, but the decentralized credit system it envisions existed centuries ago in the form of the historical bills of exchange system. ...

This is a fascinating system. Koning's post has a good intro to Ripple and some good background on Renaissance-era banking.

I'm a little concerned about one thing with Ripple though: who am I supposed to endorse? The people I trust the most are very close friends and family members, so they'd be the obvious choice. But there's a reason it's a bad idea to go into business with friends and family: any monetary disputes have an extra layer of difficulty.

It makes most sense for me to endorse a Ripple of a close friend, but in a way those are the people for whom it is hardest to collect on an IOU from. This may sound cynical, but in every clique of friends I've ever seen there is a set of perpetually out-standing small debts. You know you can be delinquent in returning that drill, or suitcase, or $40 from from the time you forgot to hit the ATM before dinner and Dave spotted you your share, because there's a whole history of positive associations to balance out the other side of the ledger. Dave is not going to scuttle your entire relationship because you still haven't paid your share of the gas from the road trip you too took back in 2010. In limited quantities perhaps this perpetually-outstanding debt thing is actually a strength of a system like Ripple, but I'm not putting money into a system unless I have some high confidence I'll actually be able to settle up my accounts at some point of my choosing.

Bill of Exchange, 1779
Bill of Exchange, 1779

Here's my other concern: how public will it be who you've endorsed? Specifically, if a deadbeat cousin or flaky co-worker endorses your Ripples, will you face social opprobrium for not reciprocating? Because that's the dynamic most social networks have evolved to. Will someone with the upper hand in a combined business/social setting, like your boss or landlord, be able to turn that to their advantage in terms of pressuring people into Ripple endorsements?

Maybe I'm thinking about this on too personal of a basis. Does this kind of system make more sense if you're using it like the original bills of exchange, i.e. endorsing the debts of your clients, suppliers, business partners, etc? Koning's recent post on Bitcoin has at least convinced me that Ripple makes a lot more sense than Bitcoin does.

Posted in Business / Economics | Leave a comment

An Untold Stories Tax?

Carnivale - Season 2HBO canceled Carnivàle, a serial show with deep mythology, after two of a planned six seasons. The remainder of Creator Daniel Knauf's story was never told.

The AV Club :: Daniel Knauf tells us his plan for the end of Carnivàle

AVC: Have you ever considered trying to do it as a novel or a comic book [of the remaining story line]?

DK: Constantly. Yeah. Marvel, we had it all set up. At one point, they wanted to go forward and do a series of graphic novels, and they just couldn’t turn the corner with HBO. Since then, yeah, I’ve considered it. But one of the things that makes me a little crazy about Hollywood is, they’re idiots when it comes to their contractual stuff. If I write a novel, it’s like Random House publishes the novel, copyrights it, but when you do business in Hollywood, they say, “Everything in this thing, in all forms, in all potential forms invented and uninvented…” The language is draconian! “…throughout the universe. We own everything in your head. We own everything.” And it’s like, “If you own everything, at least exploit those rights, please. Could you please exploit the rights? And if you’re not going to exploit the rights, can I at least have them back, so I can exploit them?” It’s just a silly way of doing business. [...]

It didn’t make sense to spend $3.5 million an episode. So let’s do a graphic novel. Let’s tell the story!” But they’re on to other toys now. It’s like doing business with that kid down the street whose parents give him really bitchin’ toys, and he’d just leave them broken in the backyard. It makes me crazy, Hollywood.

I think you could make an analogy to Georgist taxation here, or perhaps more generally Gobry's argument in favor of the French wealth tax.

If property ultimately derives from mixing your labor with things, it's not unreasonable to suggest that people have an ongoing responsibility to continue doing so. If you hold some property, most especially land, you may have a responsibility to society to put it to productive use. (We're talking about theory here, not practice. The arbitration of what counts as responsible, productive use is nearly impossible in practice and so even if you had such a responsibility in theory it is likely best if that responsibility is never legislated into reality.) Gobry's argument is, briefly, that capital gains taxes discourage people to put their resources to use, while wealth taxes do the opposite. In essence, capital gains taxes makes it more expensive to put your resources to work, so people do less of that. OTOH if you're going to loose %1 of your accumulated resources anyway to a wealth tax that gives you reason to put your resources out in the world to try to get them to grow more than the amount you'll lose.

If a studio owns the rights to further adaptations in other media, do they have a responsibility to society to actually use those rights? Land may be a special case of property, because people aren't making any more of it. Or so I gather the Georgists, the Diggers, etc. would say. But people aren't making any more Carnivàle either. That idea can only be invented once, only to be owned by one person, just like a particular acre of land. Does that put an extra responsibility on HBO to do something with it? If an owner of arable land has a onus to see it cultivated, does the owner of fecund IP have a similar onus to see it reified?

I have absolutely no idea how you would actually structure this as a policy. Doing so in a way that wouldn't put the actual tax burden on the creators rather than studios would be harder yet. Even so, I think it's an interesting way to look at the ethical responsibility of content owners, if not a way to structure their legal responsibility.

Posted in Business / Economics | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Reader

Google is shutting down the Google Reader service, as you may have heard.

I am not happy about this, but I'm also not throwing fits about it. I spent more time in my Reader tab than any other by a huge margin. I'm sure there's some other service out there that will fill the void. Google is also being pretty considerate about this: they're giving users several months warning and they've made tools available to export your subscription data.

RWCG has had a couple of posts taking the wind out the sails of all the people who are tearing out their hair and rending their garments and casting the evil eye towards Mountain View. Overall I think he's on the right track, but this post doesn't quite line up for me:

RWCG | Crimson Reach | Google Reader: The end of the ‘free’ era

How dare Google shut down a service I made heavy use of for years and years and paid nothing whatsoever for! [...] I wonder if this event marks the end of the ‘free’ era. You know the free era, it’s the era where this was the prevailing business philosophy:

1. Drive competing services out of business with a free service (subsidized by a profitable product).
2. Cancel free service.
3. ???

Actually no, that’s still snarky. It’s more like this:

1. Company gives away something for free.
2. People like it and use it.
3. This makes people think the company is cool. Their friend.
4. When it goes public, they buy its stock, cuz it’s so cool, and everyone they know uses and likes it. Surely that’s gotta mean something, stock-wise.
5. People continue to use the free thing and come to not only rely on it but expect it as their birthright.
6. ...
7. Profit?

According to this philosophy, giving away cool stuff for free was the wave of the future. It’s what all smart, cool companies did. Only backward knuckle-dragging idiots couldn’t figure out how this added up to a business model. Economic realities were no longer reality.

I think he's short-changing the business potential of a product ("product"?) like Google Reader. There's no direct line between "make Reader & give it away free" and "profit," but this approach still has some uses.

1. Yes, it makes people think you're cool and friendly and not-evil. Many firms do things for that reason alone. They spend billions on things way outside their core competencies just so people think they're cool and friendly. Isn't that the entire point of the "Corporate Social Responsibility" fad?

Google paying its employees to create Reader is in it's wheelhouse; it makes sense. Far more sense than, for example, Chrysler paying its employees to lay bathroom tile in poor neighborhoods.

2. Providing services like Reader makes Google look cool to people generally, but more importantly it makes them look cool to geeks. It's a punchline that a firm's number one asset is it's people, but that's pretty true about Google. They can do what they do because they get the pick of the litter of hackers.

I went to career fair my CS department sponsored a month or so ago. The line for the Google table was literally out the door. Most people in my graduate program are angling for academic jobs. Google is one of maybe four private companies that people will be impressed you're interviewing with.

3. Projects like Reader not only motivate applicants, they motivate employees.

Talent and productivity are extremely unevenly distributed in coders. The best are many orders of magnitude better than the median; the bottom decile (conservatively) have negative productivity. You usually don't get the best by offering them orders of magnitude more money, you get them by giving them cool problems to work on.

If you're excited about spending some time developing X, there's a good chance Google will let you do that. (At least in comparison to if you were working at Initech.) What's more, there's a chance Google will roll out X to millions of people, like they did with Reader. I can't stress enough how big of a motivator that can be.

4. Google's strategy for a while has been that anything they do to make people want to use the internet more is good for them, because they capture a dominant slice of the ad revenue online. More people spending more time online is better for Google, period. Reader fits into that. That's not a strategy that will work forever, or for many (any?) other companies. It can also be used to justify a lot of wasted "investments." But it's also true.

5. Google lives and dies off of data. Reader could have been generating that for them. I have no idea how much they actually learned from people's reading habits, if anything, but it had the potential to be a goldmine.

If you can predict people's age, race, religion, political party and drug use only using publicly available "likes" on Facebook, what could you do with my online reading habits? (Answer: sooooo much.)


I have no idea if it was a good idea or a bad one for Google to shut off Reader. I'm skeptical, but I realize I have none of the facts. I can't imagine it would cost that much to keep it running as is, especially compared to their other projects. I'm not sure what better use they have for the resources they're redeploying. I'm curious that they didn't even try to make it ad supported. Hell, I would have even paid directly to keep using it, and I pay for approximately zero online subscriptions.

Again, I don't know what they know. But I do know that "there's no revenue from this free product; let's shut it down" should not be the beginning and end of this decision making.

Posted in Business / Economics, CS / Science / Tech / Coding | Tagged , | Leave a comment