Zeitgeist and Ethos

Predictions, Risk Lag and Throughput Acceleration

2009-01-01T20:13:00.001-08:00

Looking back to 2001 A Space Odyssey was a common theme for me over the past few days as 2008 came to a close. I even received a text message that lamented the lack of a "manned mission to Jupiter" from an old friend. What is interesting about 2001 is just how unprophetic it really was in many ways.

The miniaturization and pervasiveness of communications technology had already appeared with Star Trek's individual communicators, yet the video communicators on the space station in 2001 are done in a small phone booth. Women have traditional roles as space flight attendants and dated clothing styles that are hard to imagine as futuristic. HAL is assisting with a manned mission to Jupiter but we already had robotic probes performing various tasks by 1968 with essentially no intelligence-but exploratory utility-reducing the massive resource requirements and risk that a manned mission incurs.

Here are a few inevitably incorrect predictions that I will put forward for the next decade or two:

(1) Continued miniaturization and convergence of information and communications technologies

(2) Increasingly effective voice recognition and control of technology that eliminates strong requirements for keyboard-based interfaces

(3) Nanomachines for medical treatment will virtually eliminate cancers and infectious disorders, and radically reduce the need for invasive surgery

(4) Increased integration of technology to enhance human capabilities, including implanted communications and processing modules

(5) Pervasive tele-observation through networked cameras building composite, real-time situation awareness

(6) Web integrated government with real-time feedback from constituents increases influence of citizens groups while reducing the effect of lobbying organizations

(7) Enhanced resolution of factual questions due to automated, intelligent cross-linking of factual sources to speculative information claims

(8) Massive bandwidth capacities reducing limits on video and image sharing, causing copyright crisis and resolved through an information tax applied to bandwidth usage estimates

Oddly, there are a few areas of technology in modern life that are changing very slowly. Aircraft are a prime example. Other than enhanced safety equipment and general efficiency updates, jet airplanes and helicopters are remarkably similar to models from the 60s and 70s. Technology change in a modern society is countered by safety requirements, where testing and verification cycles become the pacing mechanism. Thus we can expect the medical aspects to lag behind the others. I call this "risk lag." Information technologies, conversely, have no risk lag and instead get a "throughput acceleration" since information may not want to be free, but it at least can't be contained.

OLPC and IPhones

2008-12-28T00:45:00.001-08:00

My son was given a One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) laptop this holiday season. It came in a neat little box with icons on each side. The neatness continued as we unpacked it, revealing a sleek white and green plastic lozenge with a handle. A bit of effort was needed to figure out how to open the thing, but we were pleased that it fired up immediately, not requiring a 12 hour charging cycle.

For those not familiar with the OLPC project, the idea is to create $100 laptops that can be given to children worldwide to try to bridge the technology divide and empower young people to use technology. The purchase of our OLPC was actually paired with the gift of a second OLPC to a Third World nation.

My son already has a laptop, it turns out, but I was bound and determined to set-up and try the OLPC. My fun began with trying to get build 706 of the Linux OS to recognize our WiFi network. The problem is that I have a hidden SSID (non-broadcast) for security reasons (this is security through obscurity, which is not the best policy, but when paired with strong encryption reduces the threat of easy compromises). So I began the Linux hacks that I am far too familiar with having five Linux servers in my stable.

I could never get the OLPC machine to see the network for more than a moment, unfortunately, so I eventually relented and just exposed my WiFi node. Then I hunted down the upgrade procedure from within a command line shell and spent hours doing an upgrade. The upgrade radically re-arranged the UI's already cryptic iconic interface (I still can't figure out a few of the button functions!) but also brought some improvements to the WiFi connectivity UI.

Overall, though, my wife complained that I spent 6 hours hacking on a computer that was supposed to be useful to African tribesmen. I also have something like 15 years experience with Linux, even running early versions on laptops with experimental X windows servers by 1994 as an alternative to purchasing a Sun "luggable" at the time. I also have innumerable hours pouring over the Linux FAQs/wikis that are always out-of-date or pertain to earlier builds, trying to unravel the correct changes to make something work. I think OLPC has some more work to perfect.

I contrast OLPC with my IPhone 3G that cost only marginally more. If the claim holds true that WalMart may start offering $99 IPhones (8G), the cost would be comparable to the OLPC while providing substantially greater memory capacity. Some of the educational aspects of the OLPC are missing (built-in graphical Python programming, for instance), but everything else is easier and more stable.

Monophony and Complexity

2008-12-18T19:03:00.000-08:00

I like George Will because he is slightly less loopy than, say, Jonah Goldberg at the National Review. I like his inventive language and use of baseball metaphors. But he has recently become monophonic and uninventive. Perhaps that is the fate of political conservatives who have a quiver filled with dozens of the same arrow labeled "smaller government might be better government."

Here he is in the most recent Newsweek building a rickety historical scaffolding to re-explain how an originalist (political originalism to distinguish from legal originalism) interpretation of the Constitution takes a dim view of government involvement in almost anything, how government involvement in almost anything inevitably leads to a request for more government involvement in our affairs (repeating Hayek), and how regulation drives lobbying because regulation drives defensive politics by business entities.

The odd thing about Will's unending exposition of political and economic history is that it minimizes or ignores the complex problems that led to our modern state. Madison's America was a smaller, emptier and more racist place where notions like the tragedy of the commons were only intellectually interesting; the vastness of the wilderness was also a vastness of available resources for exploitation. It took a hundred more years for economic interactions to become complex enough that monopolistic inequities began to become obvious and regarded as unfair. It took longer still for environmental pollutants to be understood and pervasive enough that regulation and environmental law was shaped. It took almost as long for American law to begin to shed itself of racism and sexism and expand that originalist notion of equality to all people.

For American conservatism to move forward there must be something more than raw originalism crossed with Hayek's fears of serfdom. There are too many counterexamples of each in the modern world for those arguments to carry much weight. Instead of fixed ideology, what is needed is targeted creativity. As an example, while environmental regulation is a thorn for conservatives like Will, a targeted improvement might be to focus on streamlining and using technological means to speed the process of regulatory approval. Partisan efforts that broadly deny the value of such regulation can't possibly succeed.

The same is true of health care reform which Will mentions in passing. He rings the topic with Grover Cleveland's assertion concerning originalism but doesn't penetrate to exactly what might be wrong with the specific programs that Obama hinted at in his platform. It's enough for him to proclaim it might be bad because the Constitution failed to mention it in succinct language (unlike, say, the existence of the Navy).

Fair enough. We are warned. Now I want actual policy that goes beyond a single note.

Thanksgiving and Poodles

2008-12-03T21:26:00.001-08:00

So the Thanksgiving events wind down.

There was soggy architecture, rain-soaked and oversubscribed at the California Academy of Sciences. Two giant spheres sandwiched between a living roof and a subterranean aquarium, pushing the roof outward with a graceful femininity and seemingly mocking the functionally irrelevant twisted tower of the De Young Museum directly across from it.

There was a sunset dinner cruise on the Bay, with detailed discussions of the implications of new theories concerning IGF2, imprinting and the spectrum of mental disorders from autism through to schizophrenia as the swells poured in through the Golden Gate Bridge.

Then, finally, there was SFMOMA, Martin Puryear and participatory art projects. Katharina Fritsch's visually stunning Kind mit Pudeln (concentric circles of black poodles surrounding a baby) invoked the embrace of kitsch (yes, Fritsch invoked kitsch) by, say, Jeff Koons, while simultaneously reminding me that the singular requirement of art is discovery of the art by critics and museums. Advocacy is the requirement. It's not that Fritsch's piece is not interesting, but it has the postmodern conceit of denying conceptual depth with a gentle tongue-in-cheek amusement. As observers we spend time interpreting it, but the interpretation is at best a reference to Faust, at worst a reference to Koons.

The social aspect of art was reinforced while browsing a volume on the roots of cyberart in the 90s (and before). The examples and the narratives built around explorations in coastal metropolitan centers and major universities. The author spun a narrative history in a web of advocacy connecting together their friends and acquaintances from that era. There was not, nor could there have been, an appreciation of anything other than what passed through the author's sphere.

Could it be otherwise? Disintermediation and long-tails might hold a key with the internet supporting better access of artists to art markets and observers, but they also promote an unfiltered view of content without sieving by non-amateurs.

Guanocholia and Politics

2008-11-06T14:19:00.000-08:00

The most striking effect of the election of Barack Obama was how the extreme Right Wing legitimized outright insanity. I'll get back to that in a moment.

First, I want to speculate on the origins of the phrase "bat shit." There are many contenders as this discussion points out. The most likely case is that the creative spatial metaphor "bats in the belfry" (spatial insofar as the belfry is atop the building and that the bats are like random thoughts colliding about "in the head"--our mental metaphors do tend to be spatial) was co-opted through "ape shit" and "batty" to become "bat shit."

So "bat shit" is an excellent description of some of the memes floating around in Right Wing circles during the run-up to the presidential election. Recursivity chronicles a few of them, including the remarkable claim that Obama was hypnotizing his audiences using some weird variation of neural linguistic programming. To reduce the obviousness of the scatological quality of the phrase, however, I will coin guanocholia to describe a general susceptability and belief in bat shit ideas.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds demonstrates that guanocholia is far from a recent phenonema, but what concerns me is that the internet now makes it remarkably easy to transmit and sustain these delusions. What once took years of word of mouth to spread, now can spread in minutes from blogs like so much fertilizer mined from a cave.

Is there any inocculation for guanocholia? Likely not, but the American public seems to be tired of erratic temperments and most guanocholics are, by definition, bat-shit erratic.

Collapse and Flat Technology

2008-10-12T23:55:00.000-07:00

The backlash and analysis is beginning.

I should join in since the first of my September statements just arrived showing a 10% drop in a diverse basket of international growth, domestic plodders and domestic technology funds. I have a feeling that is just a pinprick compared with next month...

How could this have happened?

One line of toxic reasoning is that Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac were forced to take-on subprime mortgages by Congress desiring to spread homeownership. But that appears to have been only a small slice of the entire pie since FM/FM only held 40% of the subprime mortgages (and many of those bundles were acquired late in the game in an effort to shore up the broader market).

There is also the moral/economic analytic dimension based on moral hazard theory that the S&L bailouts of the late 80s combined with the hedge fund debacles of recent years gave a sense of cushion on the downside. But I don't tend to think that fund managers look much at worst case downside; upside is where the profit is and moral hazard reasoning is meaningless when golden parachutes will automatically deploy in contractual severance packages.

Instead, the best available analysis (thanks, Ted) divides across two arguments: (1) risk was hidden (information loss/information assymetry) due to the complexity of the security instruments, lack of regulation and restraint, and short-term profit objectives; (2) quants and algorithms screwed up resulting in (1).

The latter argument is summed up in the NY Times: "Beware of geeks bearing formulas" begins the article with a quote from Warren Buffet. This is the same bugbear that attacked in the 80s with automatic trading; deploying technology results in unexpected outcomes.

Perhaps. And perhaps the current election is unduly influenced by the flattening of information resources in the internet-driven world.

But there are inevitable corrections to extremes that result in people losing money or power, and the technology will continue to be pervasive while the users of the technology will get smarter about its impact. On the political front, factcheck.org demonstrates how there is already an evolution from pre-internet rumor-driven political feelings to partisan exploitation of technology channels, and then on to sensible corrections to those partisan swings.

Perhaps. I just hope my son's 529 plan recovers enough in the next 8 years to make it better than just a wash.

Startles and Moral Reasoning

2008-09-19T13:00:00.000-07:00

I was startled awake today by the work at University of Nebraska, Lincoln, that showed a potential link between political affiliation and startle response. Partisan Republicans exhibit greater startle response to threats than do partisan Democrats, seemingly supporting the penumbra of classic definitions of "liberal" like this fine Bertrand Russell offering:

The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment. This is the way opinions are held in science, as opposed to the way in which they are held in theology.

There are other results that seemingly bear this out, including Jonathan Haidt's findings that political conservatives simply value tradition and fairness at different levels from liberals. Preservation and stability trumps flexibility and risk.

Other recent interesting finds this week include Pyschiatric Times reporting that adult ADHD sufferers have lower educational and professional outcomes than non-ADHD individuals, even when IQ was held constant:

Adults with ADHD are not achieving the educational and occupational successes that they should be, noted researchers in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

In a case control study, Dr. Joseph Biederman and colleagues looked at 222 adults with and 146 adults without ADHD to determine if educational and occupational functioning in ADHD represented low attainment or underattainment relative to expectations based on intellectual abilities.

In the control group, educational levels were significantly predicted by IQ scores, and, in turn, employment attainment was significantly predicted by educational levels. However, in the ADHD group, patients did not achieve successes as expected based on IQ and educational levels. In fact, only 50% of patients with ADHD were college graduates, yet based on IQs, 84% should have been. Similarly, only 50% achieved semi-professional or major professional levels, although 80% were expected to achieve such based on their education. Most importantly, the researchers noted, ADHD was associated with significantly decreased educational obtainment independent of IQ.

“These findings stress the critical importance of early identification and aggressive treatment of subjects with ADHD,” the researchers concluded. “Appropriate intervention could be highly beneficial in reducing the disparity between ability and attainment for individuals with ADHD.”

The take-away to me continues to support the notion that an evolutionary effective brain that trades-off risk aversion with creativity (and the kinds of transcendant and even randomizing cogitation that is essential to creativity) is in a wide valley of contributory genetic and environmental inputs that are easy to get just slightly wrong, whether we are looking at dysfunctional and excessive behavior among artists, interference with educational success for ADHD sufferers, or enhanced mental capabilities among borderline autistic individuals. The continued maintenance of this diversity of types suggests that the diversity is or was more adaptively useful than the obverse.

Finally, Marc Hauser works the landscape of moral decision making in a recent Newsweek article, once again describing how remarkably uniform a "moral grammar" we seem to share, regardless of ethnic background or political affiliation. In discussions among friends and family on this topic, I always come away with a more complicated picture of the moral dilemmas. How can you guarantee that dropping the fat man onto the railroad tracks will stop the train? How can you be certain additional help will not arrive before cutting the woman out of the cave mouth? How can you be certain that the death row inmate really committed the crime?

In every case, the trade-off is not between what is morally permissible and obligatory, but between the individual's level of certitude and the killing of one or many. I can therefore almost always answer the dilemmas with a refusal to act until the situation is so dire that action is required. Flipping the switch to divert the trolley car is the exceptional case that demonstrates pure utilitarian moral reasoning, but almost all others require persmissibilty to be modified to something like "permissible only given a lose lose situation where there is the strongest signal that other lives may be lost."

That kind of reasoning requires a low startle response, of course.

Gray Laptops and Luminous Clouds

2008-09-04T14:40:00.001-07:00

Last Friday my new laptop arrived, throwing me into a dark, confused fog that is only beginning to lift. I know, I know, it should have been a joyous and exciting time for me, but the time commitment needed to make it functional has been somewhere between distracting and onerous.

The machine is impressive enough: a Sony VAIO FW (no, not the recalled model) with 4GB of RAM, 250GB of disk, and a Blu-ray device with HDMI output built-in. Although large, it was a concession to a round of deliberation about how I use computers. My old machine, a Gateway with a 13 inch screen and 1GB of RAM running XP, was simply too slow and lacked sufficient screen real estate for effective software development. With 10 Firefox windows open and a running Eclipse instance, things would start to drag and switching became ponderous. Part way through my deliberations over what to get, I seriously considered a Mac Air, which would have not met my requirements at all but was just so delicious I had to give it consideration. I thought briefly that the Air would work because I have five Linux servers hosted in a high-rise in San Jose, California and could use them remotely for my development needs. Almost--but not quite--due to networking speeds and the need to sometimes work offline. The larger Macs were also considered, although the price points to get serious bang were too steep. In the end, the VAIO was a good trade-off, with the Blu-ray add-on a concession I made to myself because I was not going for the high-end Mac.

And then the work began.

Luckily, I have cultivated a model of continuous holographic reflection of all work-related materials through the use of a source code control system called Subversion (SVN for short). In this model, every document, note, source file, image, etc. I create is checked-in to a repository hosted on one of my servers through an HTTPS connection and WebDAV. Change logs are maintained on the server, and periodic backups are created to other machines in the cluster as well as to a portable USB drive and, soon enough, to Blu-ray writeable media tossed in the trunk of a car.

So the first thing I did was install SVN on my new machine and check out everything to my local hard drive. Nice. But to get everything working took 4 days of software installations and configurations. I configured 10 different POP and IMAP accounts, PHP5, Apache HTTPD, MySQL, PHP5 plugins, Eclipse, Subclipse, ITunes, FabFORCE DB Designer, The GIMP, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Visual Studio 8, Adobe Flash CS3, Cygwin, Inkscape, Firefox, Propel, Xemacs, and many more. I updated everything to the latest versions and got automated and manual patches. I rebooted many times (wasn't that supposed to be fixed back when I worked on Windows 2000?)

All the complexities were smoothed out gradually and incrementally, of course, and I am fairly happy with the screen real estate and performance of the new machine after I disabled most of the security features of Vista. I even picked up the Blu-ray edition of Blade Runner, The Final Cut and ran HDMI to our LCD TV to confirm it all worked (note: no start-up lag unlike some BD console players; also, HDMI and LCD can't be running simultaneously due to HDMI-based DRM policies, which seems like ridiculous overkill).

But I wondered why I can't have a computing universe where the ease of the SVN management of my own resources was replicated in the software installation world? There is a hint of that capability in recent Linux installations that can download and install software packages and their dependencies with a single, short command. Still, configuration and customization remains daunting and can even be exacerbated because the installation process doesn't communicate all the details about where resources go (and the destinations change with some regularity).

Ideally we can imagine a computing cloud where apps are no longer installed locally, just web-based, and all of our configuration settings and password management is remote (and trustable) as well. Hints of that have been emerging with Java Web Start, Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight and, to a lesser degree, Google Chrome. Each is an attempt to move web-based applications away from the limitations of a browser-based model and support more sophisticated interaction models. One company I work with has shown the model can work for specialized enterprise computing needs, so I think there is hope, but the evolution is nevertheless slow and may even require re-imagining the computing platform itself.

I'm guessing I have several dozen more gray laptops, virtual tablet devices, holographic mental interfaces and whatnot to go before everything becomes as neat and easy as I'd like, disconnected from individual platforms and universally available on-demand from some luminous computing cloud where replicants slave away maintaining and upgrading software in those tilt-up buildings in Silicon Valley.

Ignorance and Efficiency

2008-08-25T01:10:00.000-07:00

I picked up John Rawls' A Theory of Justice last Friday and digested segments through the weekend. This evening I caught up with 3 Quarks Daily and was connected to a Libertarian critique of both Rawls and other Libertarian efforts to appropriate Rawls for their own devices.

Rawls' core principle is that given a "veil of ignorance" about the capacities, needs and external facts surrounding a decision-making event about resources, an individual will choose a fair distribution of resources since they can't be certain how the resources will ultimately be distributed. By being fair, the decision maker will maximize their own chance of a fair outcome.

This is a game theoretic resolution that parallels ideas like tit-for-tat and reciprocal altruism. It is also used to further justify a model of economic interventionism that assigns fair distribution of resources in a society. Hence the concern of Libertarians, though I see David Gordon's roll-up as an incremental and technical fight within the Libertarian community and about which I have little comment.

Instead, I find it interesting that if we acknowledge the implications of limited knowledge we arrive at inherently specialized models for decision making: in this case implications about the fairness of government policies concerning welfare or health care policy. This closely parallels the veil of ignorance expressed in Quine's notion of "gavagai" where we have to accept the limitations of strong notions of meaning and instead rely on decision procedures to achieve a tentative understanding of the immediate epistemological landscape.

One aspect that the purely philosophical treatment of this problem does not address, however, is how to handle the problem of procedural inefficiency. What do I mean by that? Well, we can take the standard critique of command economies as interfering with efficient allocation of goods and services. We can also take the apparent administrative inefficiencies of modern American health delivery. Both reflect differences in economic theories and have strong historical exemplars, but are polar opposites in delivery and informational mechanisms. If these are inefficient models compared to other examples, is there a principle of ignorance that can guide us in how to apportion resources in the face of these failures? For example, let's say that equality of health care is a good because if we could divide-up health care resources evenly and equitably it would result in that equality. Yet, if the mechanism of achieving equality also costs enough that it compromises other aspects of quality, what is the cost/benefit inflection point that recommends one approach versus another? We could seek to maximize some measure of person health outcomes/dollar using a basket of measures like those measured by the Commonwealth Fund's analyses of the United States' problematic health delivery system, but at what point do we agree that government is the best mechanism for delivery?

I tend to think that a principle of ignorance must remain in effect. Given uncertainty about efficiency in allocation, it is best to create a basket of solutions that try to achieve the same outcome. So, given the massive administrative costs of US health care delivery, we can create mandates for integrated billing and informatics for some domains while supporting tax incentives to improve delivery for other domains. There is then competition among outcomes in the basket of solutions and our ignorance is reduced through small, evolutionary outcomes.

Treasures and Syncretism

2008-08-17T22:57:00.000-07:00

Needless to say, late summer is a busy time for me. Between consulting gigs, investment pitches, collaboration planning, and reporting to my investors and government agencies, I rarely have time to give the blogosphere the attention that it needs.

Still, while wandering through the National Gallery while on a quick hop into DC, and just coming down from being mesmerized by the Afghanistan collection, I sought out the Rauschenberg at right. RIP, Robert. With hope, the vaults of the nuclear enterprise in your collage are now just cold warrior memories.

The National Museum of Kabul collection was amazing, though, showing how Alexander's conquest came quickly to be reflected in the artistry. A different era, perhaps, where resistance to foreign occupiers was tempered by an acknowledgment that power is more important than fairness or respect for self-determination.

But truly sad was the gigantic gap in the timeline view of Afghan art and culture from the 1200s up through the discovery of graves during the Soviet occupation. That the analysis and remains stayed in Kabul from the Soviet era contrasts sharply with the later destruction of the Buddhist statues at the hands of the Taliban.

Inspiration and The West

2008-07-20T12:32:00.000-07:00

Is the western United States uniquely inspirational for science and art? That old hypothesis of mine came back to me last week as I looked down over the Rio Grande river valley from 10,000 feet up on the Sandia Tramway.

The vast stillness of the valley, the faint X of airport runways, the thin green ribbon of the river and its fragile accompaniment of cottonwoods and salt cedar, the layering of atmosphere as the monsoonal cumulonimbus began to darken—all inspirational in the same way that they were when I was growing up in New Mexico.

But how does that translate into a crossover of science and art? My other data points were that Jaron Lanier grew up about a mile from me (I would later get to know his dad, Ellery, when Ellery was working on his doctorate in psychology), and that Alvy Ray Smith was also a southwesterner who, in turn, grew up just across the New Mexico/Texas border from Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics and Netscape fame. Then there is Robert R. Wilson who was a Manhattan Project physicist, sculptor and Fermilab architect. And recently, when visiting Southern New Mexico, I saw paintings by a bio-informatics professor and former member of The Institute for Genetic Research (J. Craig Ventner’s original effort) hanging in the lobby of a grocery store.

The tramway ride, it turned out, was part of a mini vacation within a vacation combined with work for DOD in the previous several days. It was my first time monitoring an experiment being conducted on live test subjects and it was fascinating, although somewhat tedious. Bookending the work phase with beautiful scenery, meals under evening thunderheads, historical markers along the Jornado del Muerto, and a quick flight back to the Bay Area, was invigorating and inspirational.

Royalty and Pronouns

2008-06-26T13:50:00.001-07:00

SCOTUS released the groundbreaking 2nd Amendment decision today in DC v. Heller and, as I parse through early analysis of the linguistics and historical semantics of the majority decision, the use of a sub-form of the so-called "royal we" in the discussion of court decisions strikes me:

In United States v. Miller, 307 U. S. 174, 179 (1939), we explained that...

Now this is interesting in that it paints a picture of unity in the way a court operates. A reasonable alternative might have been:

...the majority decision concluded that...

Instead, Scalia is both time traveling and invoking a certain personification of SCOTUS wherein its often bicameral nature is subordinated to the body as a whole. Unity out of many, indeed.

Pathological Science and Odd Birds

2008-06-25T23:48:00.000-07:00

Over at Recursivity there was a discussion of a psychic advisor to a school teaching assistant who told her that one of her charges was being abused. The school then undertook an investigation about alleged abuse claims based on the psychic’s suggestion. The child has autistic spectrum disorder and so often exhibits behavior unlike non-autistic children, as well, complicating the whole issue. Communication is limited, also.

So how should we treat fringe science and pseudoscience as a social phenomena? For instance, there is a fairly long history of investigations of supposed psychic phenomena dating back to the late 1800s, but with institutional investigation in the US beginning in the 1920s or so. Since that time, there have been many university laboratories created to try to study anomalous experimental findings. Projects at SRI in the 60s expanded the use of our tax dollars on this topic in pursuit of Cold War weapons.

As per the basic revulsion I felt at the treatment of the poor mother in the Canadian case, there certainly is not any evidence that suggests social policy should be influenced by psychic “discoveries” but there are enough findings that further research may be warranted (though funding that research should be a private—not public—matter). I say this with some trepidation, but I would say the same thing about cold fusion or other anomalous hints at findings.

But then what makes these two cases different from so-called “intelligent design” (ID)? For cold fusion, there is a proposed physical mechanism, for one, so that theory and experiment can progress together. For psi, there are some experimental results that look sufficiently interesting that additional experiments could and have been done. A mechanism is still wanting, however, though some ideas have been proposed based on virtual particle interactions that date to the beginning of the quantum science era.

Both of these are examples of what Irving Langmuir called “pathological science” and both were subject to enormous scrutiny and brought with them substantiated examples of dishonesty on the part of some (but not all) of the participants.

But ID is an odd pathological bird. It doesn’t really propose a physical mechanism but instead claims that there is insufficient evidence for a physical mechanism of evolution (though apparently only at the level of speciation). It also lacks experimental evidence (even in a historical sense) but uses a principle of insufficient information as the core of its methodology. It does share with cold fusion and psi powers the unenviable status of being practiced by at least some dishonest charlatans. In the case of ID, they have been actively trying to insert creationism into school curricula. Interestingly, there has never been a concerted effort by psi or cold fusion advocates to try to insert their ideas into the schools.

The odyssey from pathological to mainstream is not unknown (plate tectonics, for instance) but is only survived by relatively few. My guess is that ID will never make it through that filter and be welcomed to the lands of rationality.

Olympia and Father's Day

2008-06-15T20:21:00.001-07:00

It took enormous feats of dadness to get up on Father's Day and make it to the member's early admission to the Frida Kahlo exhibit at SFMOMA today. But we made it and watched the narrative unwind of Latin American socialism, personal tragedy, illness, dysfunctional relationships and catharsis through painting.

Yet slightly more intriguing to me was the use of language and titles in many of the more contemporary works at SFMOMA. Check out Robert Bechtle's irreverent Watsonville Olympia from 1977:

And anyone with a painting or art history degree (or, in my case, a wife with one) will recognize the inside joke (at Manet's expense). Here's Manet's Olympia:

What mountains an artist must climb. Happy Father's Day!

Internets and Guantanamo

2008-06-13T22:55:00.000-07:00

It’s no surprise I guess that the US Supreme Court would inevitably embrace the internet as a research tool. In the most recent decision on Guantanamo Bay detentions:

See Halliday & White, The Suspension Clause: English Text, Imperial Contexts, and American Implications, 94 Va. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2008) (hereinafter Halliday & White) (manuscript, at 11, online at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3 /papers.cfm?abstract_id=1008252 (all Internet materials as visited June 9, 2008, and available in Clerk of Court’s case file) (noting that “conceptually the writ arose from a theory of power rather than a theory of liberty”)).

And:

See History of Guantanamo Bay online at https://www.cnic.navy.mil/Guantanamo/AboutGTMO/gtmohistorygeneral/ gtmohistgeneral.

Times change, even at SCOTUS.

Economy and Narrative

2008-05-31T21:02:00.000-07:00

Hot on the heels of Susan Jacoby’s paean (“The Age of American Unreason”) to some lost world where ideas were sacrosanct—or at least the uneducated had a more genteel respect for eggheadedness—comes Mark Bauerlein’s “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future...” Like Jacoby, the problem is technology’s withering effect on deep processing of complex ideas.

There is nothing terrifically new here, though. Neil Postman decried television’s numbing and dumbing effect in “Amusing Ourselves to Death” in the 80s. If only kids had the time and inclination to read deeply they would be able to recall more facts about culturally importance events. If only they set down the cell phone and remote they would be able to recall the major players in World War II. If only they stopped text messaging they might grasp the compact beauty of poetry. If only…

I’m reminded of my first encounter with Goethe or Bellow or Pynchon, where the notion that writing could be more than just the transparent conveyance of a storyline first started to fixate in my youthful mind. I certainly hope that young people get to encounter the art of writing that is skillfully great, whether in prose, poetry or even information design.

I should also wave my hand over my copies of Claude Levi-Strauss, Jane Jacobs, Jung, Heinz Pagels, Chomsky, Jacob Bronowsky, Hillary Putnam, David Chalmers, Doug Hofstadter, Pinker, Dennett, and a myriad other popularizers and integrators of complex social and scientific ideas. There is equal artfulness in integrating disparate facts and ideas into a cohesive view that lends itself to the successive narration of chapter upon chapter.

But I would like to suggest that far too many of the latter are quaintly wrong or irrelevant today as science has unfolded further. They were derived from abduction over limited new facts to cover murky unknowns and were therefore largely doomed to factual attack as the murk was clarified by new experiments, observations and theory. Even their very narrative structure is subject to examination in that it forces the alignment of multiple research paradigms into a single narrative thread that always serves to reinforce the central thesis, regardless of how many other implications arise that fall outside the narrative flow.

In some ways it is the scientific research paper that serves as perhaps the best example of how ideas can be expressed with the maximum respect for the limitations of understanding because they force an exceptional economy on the narrative to avoid speculation, or at least to provide speculation without substituting narration for fully supported propositional constructs.

So there is nothing inherently dumbing about a diminished role for the long-form narrative (except perhaps in conveying the art of narrative itself). Whether a similar effect will save the text-messaging generation remains to be seen.

Assault and Ambiguity

2008-05-23T10:59:00.000-07:00

It began with a chance encounter. I was walking through a room with a TV on and a news caption was running during a commercial break. The newscaster intoned with provocative seriousness how a woman had followed a man who had sexually assaulted her weeks earlier to his home and he had been arrested. The location was my town and it rang a bell.

Three weeks back my wife and I went to a doctor’s appointment in Lafayette and, as we returned and entered our neighborhood, we were surprised to see a half-dozen police cars in our otherwise perfectly tame patchwork of planned homes and parks. During a walk two hours later there was still a squad car on one side street. A scan of the police blotter turned up the cause: a woman walking with her toddler had been assaulted and groped by a man who ran away when struck in the groin with a sippy cup.

Weeks passed until I overheard the news of the arrest. Good for her! The next phase of datamining impressed me with the thoroughness of the picture. I was able to use the television station archives combined with Google to find the mug shots, the original sketch of the suspect done by police sketch artists, the suspect’s arrest status in the county courts system, the location of the alleged perpetrator’s house, the suspect’s father’s name and place of business, the suspect’s mother’s name and place of business, a previous citation of the suspect for a moving violation (infraction) in a neighboring city, the county records concerning the amount and type of mortgage held on the suspect’s home, and a satellite view of the home as well.

Amusingly, also, was that the reporter in the news piece actually drove by our house and coincidently filmed our various vehicles. I could likely have read the license plates if I wanted from the footage.

Overall, I had managed to scour out all the corners of ambiguity concerning when, where, who and how, leaving only the strange question of why left in fuzziness. Why was this 24-year-old still living at home, jogging at midday and preying on middle-aged women? Why was he living in this neighborhood where even a Megan’s Law offender is fairly hard to find?

But strangely, it was the suspect’s last name that was the key to developing the search picture because the last name was so unusual. Had he been “Jim Smith” or “Joe Sanchez” or “Mike White” it would have been virtually impossible to make as much headway in extinguishing ambiguity. George Miller is quoted something like “There is only one problem in Artificial Intelligence: words have more than one meaning.” (And I can’t resolve the ambiguity of the source of that quote because George Miller is too ambiguous). This problem is amplified for searching across identities of places and people, or when special identifiers are introduced as placeholders in a single document (this happens quite often in technical literature where an acronym is used locally as a technical shorthand but is ambiguous outside that document or domain). Moving to the level of folksonomies for, say, labeling pictures on the web, we see the problem exasperated by the natural telegraphic shorthand that any labeling scheme suggests to the user purely by dint of the size of the entry fields.

Clever approaches to trying to apply context to help address these limitations start with statistical co-occurrence-based disambiguation and linkage analysis, and then run all the way through to using complex ontologies to try to infer the best relabeling of the ambiguous entity or concept as a canonical identifier. None of these methods can hope to achieve any level of perfection but a basket of them can enhance the process of information discovery and disambiguation.

Race and Empathy

2008-05-08T08:44:00.000-07:00

But back to ethics. If there is any validity to the idea that modern values have been shaped by increased exposure to images and video of other people, thus removing the barrier of unfamiliarity that allows us to treat others instrumentally, then we should see the vestiges of that unfamiliarity quotient in various social problem areas. Indeed, we do:

American Journal Psychiatry 165: 560-561, May 2008

Recognizing Each Other and the Effects of Racial Differences
Carl C. Bell, M.D.

In this issue of the Journal, Pinkham et al. report findingson own-race and other-race effects in their research on facialrecognition in schizophrenia. They highlight the troublingfinding in previous studies that African Americans with schizophreniahad greater impairment in recognizing and remembering emotionsin faces, compared with Caucasian schizophrenia patients. Theauthors point out that these previous studies showed only Caucasianfaces as test stimuli—a major procedural flaw that noone had anticipated. Pinkham et al. designed a better studyin which test subjects—both Caucasians and African Americanswith schizophrenia as well as comparison subjects of both races—wereshown both Caucasian and African American faces as test stimuli.The authors found that the capacity to recognize and rememberemotions in faces is no different between Caucasians and AfricanAmericans, whether they have schizophrenia or not. But memoryfor the faces and discrimination of emotions in them are higherwhen the study subject is of the same race as the person expressingthe facial emotion.

Some interesting follow-on questions for investigation: Would exposure to multi-ethnic faces early enough reduce the emotion discrimination deficit? Is there a learning window? Are there differences between subgroups (more integrated communities show lower deficits)? What is the impact on eyewitness subject identification across racial lines?

Ofamind and Twine

2008-04-26T21:15:00.000-07:00

I was flattered to learn about twine.com the other day. Twine is the long-simmering product of Radar Networks and is remarkably similar to Ofamind in many ways. A bit of digging shows that they used Wikipedia as a basis for their tagging engine. Some reviews have been positive while others less so.

Still, I consider it a vindication of sorts, though I think they will have a hard road business-wise if they believe twine.com has a massive audience appeal. I will just mention that I interviewed with a startup called Backflip in 2000 that went nowhere as well. The business proposition for these kinds of technologies is when they provide real business value to specific knowledge worker communities--when they serve vertical domains to address specific problems.

A minor footnote: I chatted with Radar Network's Nova Spivak several times about collaboration several years back and suspect that there was a bit of, ehhhh, influence of Ofamind on Twine's development (based also on watching my weblogs). I'm just amused that I beat them to the plate with one consultant and three other ongoing engagements simultaneously. Are there diminishing returns beyond a few agile minds in what Bessemer VCs refer to as our new capital efficient web marketplace?

Folksontamasticons and Ambiguity

2008-04-24T11:02:00.000-07:00

Folks might not be all bad, though. For instance, in my Ofamind technology, this blog and social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, the tags that are attached to documents serve to help people find and retrieve information. Tagging is a counterpoint to the idea of structured ontologies and metadata because it builds from the ground up rather than from the top down. The term coined for these tagging schemes is “folksonomy.”

But are folksonomies useful and consistent? Some studies suggest they are useful under some circumstances. For instance, querying across the titles and descriptions using tag keywords on del.icio.us bookmarks results in a precision-recall of only 50%. In other words, the tags are not also in the texts around 50% of the time, and so provide an additional channel of information for retrieval. People appear to think differently about tags than they do about titles and descriptions.

In terms of consistency, however, a very large number of tags are used only once or are used in differing and inconsistent ways that indicate ambiguity over multiple user subcommunities. Examples might be “architecture” used to refer to computer architecture and building design, or “camp” referring to drama or outdoor recreation.

A couple of interesting questions emerge about how to refine the power of folksonomies.

For instance, can the title and description (or full blog content) be used to automatically suggest tags that are based on other tagging schemes? The Ofamind system partially does this by automatically categorizing web content among your “views” or collections as you surf. It does a fair job, too, for a great deal of content. This can be seen as a personalized metadata tagging filter, since the view association to content is essentially a categorical tag.

Similarly, business taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, full ontologies and other mechanisms could be used at authoring time to try to suggest or overlay more consistent tags onto web content, enhancing searchability and even supporting reasoning about content. For Ofamind, a subproblem that we are currently working on is how to disambiguate extracted people, places and organizations in order to produce high-quality metadata using a combination of human tagging and automatic methods.

Then the folksonomy becomes more of a folksontamasticon, combining folksonomy, ontology and onamasticon in a rare new tag.

Folk and Psychology

2008-04-03T16:38:00.000-07:00

Is the reach of reason limited by our nature? That question came to me during a rather disagreeable conversation recently. The woman I was conversing with spoke almost entirely in vignettes built around folk sociology and psychology.

“Girls always grow up to marry someone like their father.” “You just don’t understand what it’s like to grow up as a redhead.” “My father hates me because I had medical problems as a child.”

Now, I try to be sympathetic of even bad self-analysis insofar as I only have to encounter it in small doses. What good can come from challenging people under those circumstances? But I increasingly wondered as the conversation continued whether there are limits to our natural capacity to overcome the patterns of folk psychology we use to attach meaning and explanation to our lives. I tried lightly challenging one of the statements and suggested that there was little or no evidence to support a given claim. Her response was that she just gave me evidence—a single example. There was some hemming and hawing about how she acknowledged that that wasn’t scientific evidence, but it was enough for her.

Isabel Allende was recently interviewed and she confessed that her entire writing method and inspiration emerged from trying to construct narratives and folk psychologies to explain her characters. Everything had an explanation and there was little difference for her between magical, religious and everyday occurrences—they all had elaborate explanatory narratives that involved mystical forces, and frameworks for punishment, reward and retribution. Magical Realist at core, but also reflecting the need for fiction to tie together into a structural form that is without the weak sense of doubt that pervades our everyday lives; people are complex and do things for complex and sometimes unexplainable reasons best regarded as tendencies.

But is there any sense in which people can change their cognitive styles? Somewhat, I think, but there are also other factors like dopamine and it’s relationship to magical thinking that are likely more resistant to active attempts at change. Still, the goal of liberal education has always had at its core the notion of refining the mind to enhance our ability to think and process information. It’s the best tool we have.

Flaws and Adams

2008-03-25T00:01:00.000-07:00

Drawn-in as I am by HBO's John Adams miniseries, and by the portrayal of Adams as a flawed but principled man, I was equally impressed by the quotes that put him in context as a man of his times conflicted with the biases of his era (at The New Republic):

In his summary defense in the Boston Massacre trial, he claimed that the British soldiers had every reason to be afraid of the crowd, "a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues [pigs], and outlandish Jack Tars."

And here:

In fact, one of the causes of the revolution was the Quebec Act, which gave religious protections to Catholics in Canada. This infuriated the colonists. "Does not your blood run cold to think that an English Parliament should pass an Act for the establishment of arbitrary power and Popery in such an extensive country?" wrote Alexander Hamilton. "Your loves, your property, your religion are all at stake." Sam Adams told a group of Mohawk Indians that the law would mean that "some of your children may be induced instead of worshipping the only true God, to pay his dues to images made with their own hands." Fortunately, George Washington realized that it would undermine the colonists' efforts to win support from Canada and France if they were perceived as being anti-Catholic, so he banned the "monstrous" practice of burning effigies of the pope on "Pope Day."

Social Cohesion and Freedom

2008-03-06T10:12:00.000-08:00

Inchoate is perhaps the best word to describe my sustained interest in the notion that somehow we can characterize the complexity of interactions using a standardized grammar or toolkit. Sometimes small pebbles of coherence emerge from this interest, like work on characterizing the complexity of grammars for generating neural networks or interesting music production systems (after great effort, moderate diversity and connectedness is not surprisingly a requirement for both of them!)

Still, I remain a student of the general theme and so am intrigued when people like David Sloan Wilson characterize the role of religion in social cohesion as providing unique evolutionary advantage at the group level (Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society). While arguing about group dynamics in evolutionary circles is somewhat heretical, Wilson paints a picture that once again uses language like diversity, prediction, connectivity and social support.

From some cross-over of libertarian and paleo-conservative thinking, comes another intriguing data point from The American Conservative. Yes, that’s Pat Buchanan’s magazine. Pat regularly brings up the notion of “balkanization” both in reference to the Balkans as an example of a geopolitical mess, and as a broader metaphor for the problem of diversity in modern societies, so it is not surprising to see his magazine latching onto Robert Putnam’s discourse on changing American civic involvement (Bowling Alone) and related research on the potential drivers for civic strife.

The TAC article by Steve Sailer is somewhat fragmented, jumping around through some sloppy generalizations about ethnic identities (Hispanics and Italians don’t build large organizations because they only trust extended families, for instance), and dipping into wag-the-dog-style political fervors driven by a common enemy. It ends with some minor discussion of how both religion and mandates can improve cooperation between people, with the latter example being the Army limiting career advancement among officers who discriminate.

Now I suspect Sailer and Buchanan consider this grist for a policy mill that aims to reduce immigration to the US (or perhaps be simply more selective about it), but in some ways it works against their more cherished cause of small government and limited government because, given an uncooperative, pluralistic and diverse population, one remaining channel to achieve grander visions is through government action. Government and law become the conduits for coordination by transforming distrust in others into (perhaps grudging) acceptance of institutions. Even Sailer admits as much in noting that:

In America, you don’t need to belong to a family-based mafia for protection because the state will enforce your contracts with some degree of equality before the law.

So I suspect that we have achieved a stalemate of sorts, with the benefits of diversity (I’ll just start with my restaurant options today and leave it at that…) balanced against less social cohesion, but perhaps propped up by institutions that are trusted enough that we are not always suspicious of corrupt abuses of power. That seems like a gentle enough substitution for a civil religion to me, with a more subtle organizing physics that preserves the freedom to think outside the confines of any monolithic pattern of ideation.

Reason and Social Darwinism

2008-02-24T18:18:00.001-08:00

Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason is my weekend reading. After an initial burst of polemic that was perhaps too careless about the roles of new information technologies and games in modern idea formation, she settles into a detailed analysis of the history of reason, science, pseudoscience and anti-intellectualism in American life. Almost as soon as Huxley hit the lecture circuit with a discussion of Darwinian evolution, social and economic theorists began an expansive integration of the core algorithm into their theories, justifying racism, colonialism, laissez-faire capitalism and, later, eugenics from a loosely critical reading of Darwin.

It was the triumphalist laissez-faire notions that celebrated industrialists under the banner of Social Darwinism that I found the most interesting, since there remains a core of this in contemporary Republican/Conservative reasoning. Indeed, paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan routinely revive a weakened form of these notions when opposing social programs like affirmative action and justifying positions where individual and racial differences are not correctable by public policy.

And therein is the irony, I suppose, that Social Darwinism informs some of the most anti-Darwinist modern thinkers. Competition is good for you. Still, the most telling development to emerge from the same era is that ideas have a certain prolific vitality, mutating outward from basic scientific observations into new formulations that reengineer the scientific core into a series of quasi-scientific speculations. Then, over time, the speculations are whittled down and even completely discarded as the pseudoscience is ejected and only the core remains.

Craziness and Poop

2008-02-12T16:56:00.000-08:00

My subscription to Psychiatric Times always has something interesting associated with it. Bottom line: the stereotype of the crazy, isolated cat lady may be dead-on true.

Environmental Factors in Schizophrenia Three epidemiological studies bolster the evidence for infectiousand social influences on the development of schizophrenia. Swedishnational registers show an association between psychotic illnessand childhood viral, but not bacterial, infections of the centralnervous system (CNS). Dalman et al. (p. 59) analyzed hospitalizationsfor CNS infections before age 13 and psychotic illnesses fromage 14 onward in children born during 1973–1985. Psychosisrisk was almost tripled by childhood mumps exposure and wasover 16 times as high after cytomegalovirus exposure. Usingblood samples collected routinely by the U.S. military, Niebuhret al. (p. 99) confirmed a relationship between schizophreniaand toxoplasmosis. IgG antibodies to Toxoplasma gondii werecompared in service members medically discharged with schizophreniabetween 1992 and 2001 and matched healthy subjects. The antibodylevel was nearly 25% higher for the subjects with schizophreniain the 6 months preceding the diagnosis or after it. Dr. AlanBrown examines these two studies in an editorial on p. 7. Velinget al. (p. 66) identified social isolation as a risk factorfor psychotic disorders among immigrants in The Hague. Cityrecords provided the ethnic backgrounds and locations of residentswho received a first diagnosis of psychotic disorder over 7years. Immigrants in neighborhoods with high densities of immigrantsfrom the same country had a rate of psychotic illness similarto that of native Dutch residents, but those in neighborhoodswith low densities of the same ethnic group had a rate morethan double that for the Dutch.

Flat Worlds and Clouds

2008-02-11T16:35:00.000-08:00

I’ve commented previously on the notion that web technologies are radically reducing the level of ambiguity that we once had to live with. Google, Wikipedia, IMDB and news archives have all replaced vague recollection with fast fact discovery. Only the efficient linking of knowledge technologies into our lives remains a problem for standards and standardization.

Another area that has rapidly advanced and structurally changed the way of doing business is the growth of cheap computing power and even cheaper software to tackle web and enterprise software challenges. Open source software in the form of MySQL and Linux effectively demolished the barriers to building web-grade technology stacks. Ten years ago, expensive Sun server farms and Oracle licenses were a prerequisite to doing business on the web, but now we can do it comparatively cheaply.

Still, there remained until recently one final barrier for large-scale web businesses: scaling from thousands to millions of users with huge bandwidth and content needs. That is changing too, though, with cloud computing efforts like Amazon’s EC2 and related projects. I’ve just embarked on a brand new effort that has the potential to reach huge audiences and am seriously looking at the Amazon model because it means that I no longer have to deal with racks of hardware and complex and expensive colocation plans.

In the cloud computing universe, you buy as much as you need and can buy more as your demand levels rise without having long hardware deployment and software imaging cycles. And thanks to the massive server farms, the capacity comes with certain guarantees concerning reliability. A remarkable feature of cloud computing is the ability to snapshot a given virtual computing instance and create new copies as needed to expand capacity.

The end result, though, is that the combination of cloud computing and open source software has flattened the world of technology to the point where creating world-class web technologies is purely a matter of brainpower and business models.

Nannies and Moloch

2008-01-31T22:37:00.000-08:00

I caught Diane Rehm on Sirius coming home today and was surprised to hear the gentle southernisms of one Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) talking about his new book on morality, religion and values. Of course I was drawn in and managed to suppress the vague feeling of creepiness that kept coming and going in waves enough to be able to make it to the end of the show.

Senator DeMint was described as the most conservative member of Congress and delivered on that description in his interview. After a short intro on his endorsement of Mitt Romney and a discussion of the currently pending economic stimulus package, DeMint sketched his thesis: anyone who expresses religious values is oppressed by the government; that the reduction in religiosity in America since the 60s has been accompanied by the erosion of the greatness of our society; that the government promotes immorality through various policies; and that the “Democrat Party” was in opposition to good values (he sort of apologized when someone pointed out that “Democrat Party” was a slur and that the party is the “Democratic Party,” though he said that we are a democratic nation and he didn’t associate that with Democrats, thus compounding his slur while claiming he would try to do better)

Now, I can safely say that Jim DeMint has some serious problems with facts, categories and logical argumentation. But that’s to be expected. For instance, he floats the case about a parent in Massachusetts who was incensed that same-sex relationships were mentioned in his child’s school. He then claimed that the parent was arrested for speaking out about this “immoral” education, when in reality (as Diane Rehm’s stand-in from the BBC noted) the parent was arrested for refusing to leave the school premises. DeMint continued on a strange quest to conflate the notion that free speech was being thwarted when people were unable to change policy, as opposed to the commonsense notion of free speech having to do with speech acts, written or verbal.

Many callers questioned his statistical claims concerning a range of issues, as well. When pressed on why he claimed abstinence education was being blocked by evil secular government forces, for instance, rather than the recent discovery that they didn’t much work, he claimed that the Heritage Foundation had statistics that showed that if you combined abstinence education with a commitment on the part of parents to furthering the abstinence cause, that then you might get a 75% reduction in out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Fair enough, but he is completely redefining the problem. I could achieve the same results with secular humanist education: if you get pregnant before you are ready, it will have negative consequences to you, your partner, your parents and society. Don’t do it. Given good basic values of respect for oneself and others, care for others, and belief that harming others is wrong, you get precisely the same result.

DeMint is easily criticized and I didn’t come away with a deep respect for his intellect or his willingness to stretch intellectually to fathom the complex issues. Indeed, he was so wedded to his theses that I felt queasy. But there was one topic that he mentioned that was somewhat interesting to me: does government, though its policies, serve to direct, encourage or sanction moral behavior? DeMint suggested that our values have changed regarding smoking based on government action. A similar argument applies to seatbelts or talking on cell phones while driving.

The odd thing to me is how an arch-conservative seems to have adopted a nanny-state attitude that also reveals a divide between liberals and conservatives. Jonathan Haidt’s research shows that liberals and conservatives differ on a couple of measures, with conservatives valuing “reverence” more than liberals, and liberals value “fairness” more than conservatives. Now an easy application of this principle shows the divide: DeMint castigates homosexuality as immoral while liberals don’t care what others do with their lives and think they should be treated fairly. But for DeMint, government has been shaping those attitudes by failing to criticize the gay community for (in his analysis) the cost to society from AIDS, STDs and other alleged problems. Gay marriage, oddly, remains a problem for DeMint despite the claim that it might lead to longer-term relationships and reduce exactly the issues that he is concerned over. So DeMint wants a nanny state for personal morality, but also wants a small government that is less nanniful about business regulation, guns and the environment.

A strange collection of virtues and values that shows how the 1800s live-on in the backwaters of America.

Wine and Irrationality

2008-01-22T08:37:00.000-08:00

Over a rather spectacular kick-off dinner with two of my consultants in Las Vegas last week, I had the pleasure of basking in the meal/wine pairing choices of chefs and sommeliers, deliciously devoid of any need for my decision making as to how to eat, much less how to pair wines with food. At the beginning of the meal I was handed a tablet computer that we could use to try to pick our wine, but by choosing the tasting menu we avoided having to do anything more than play around with the user interface.

What amuses me about this is that just how to do that pairing, or how to evaluate wine quality, is not just a mystery, but is a profound black hole of irrationality and subtle psychology. If determining wine quality was rational, we would expect consistency among experts. We would expect predictability in the Wine Spectator scorings. There isn’t. We would not expect to find that people buy wines with animals on the bottle more than other wines, or that you can label the same wine at $40/bottle and at $3/bottle and get remarkably different reviews from tasters (the $40 version is remarkably better!)

In the end, though, no one really knows anything beyond some simple rules about how to combine wine and food flavors together. Sweeter wines with spicier foods. More robust meats with richer and darker reds. A sommelier and a tasting menu makes much better sense than any of us wine spectators.

Sitting at that table, one of my consultants managed to dig out an 1899 Rothchild Pauillac from the tablet computer. Price tag would have been $8999.00. I nixed the idea. I promised him that someday, maybe, we might get it in a fit of irrationality.

Codes and Fervor

2008-01-13T19:12:00.000-08:00

I stumbled onto the continuing saga of the so-called “bible code” the other day and was amused to see that the issue continues to percolate along fourteen years after the original effort appeared in Statistical Science as a “puzzle.” My own involvement was briefly in the early years when I developed some code for performing searches in documents that matched the original effort. I handed the code off to Dave Thomas of New Mexicans for Science and Reason, though I believe he was already using the results from Brendon McKay from Australian National University for his work.

A brief description may help.

Some Israeli researchers following a Kabbalah-like speculation about hidden codes in the Hebrew OT looked for words and word relationships hidden in the characters. The way they thought the words were hidden was as what they called equidistant letter sequences (ELSs). An ELS is where each letter of a word is separated in the text by a certain number of other characters. When they found an ELS, they then looked in the immediate area of the text around the words for other ELS sequences that said something interesting about the original word. They paired these together as questions and answers.

Needless to say, it is pretty easy to take any text, find interesting short words as ELSs and then find interesting words as ELSs around them. With my original code, I used the system to decide what to have for lunch. I would find the word “lunch” as an ELS, then look around and get words like “taco,” “steak” and “fish.” As one can imagine, shorter words tend to have greater representation!

Here's some examples borrowed from Brendan McKay showing ELS patterns predicting the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the text of Moby Dick:

More are here.

The whole episode demonstrates a surprising vitality to craziness impregnated by religious fervor, considering the start in 1994, the analyses and counter-analyses from various fronts, the publication of a best-selling book, and the availability of commercial systems that help you now do your own bible code analyses.

A slightly less crazy speculation comes from Clifford Pickover (although it's not clear what the original source is) that given a (countably) infinite digit sequence for PI, Shakespeare must be inevitability coded with those numbers given a suitable representation scheme. While that might be, ELSs in PI would be rarer than in human language texts, I think, because the digit probabilities are very uniform for PI after a few thousand digits, unlike most languages that tend to have a more skew distribution of letters. So ELS words would be way down deep in the code, though not quite as far along as The Bard.

Santa and Universal Morality

2008-01-01T20:06:00.000-08:00

Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds has been among my reading materials over the holiday period. In Moral Minds, Hauser postulates a universal grammar underlying all human moral decision making.

The moral dimension of decision making ended up pervading my holidays, with a perhaps only nominally healthy degree of worrying over the whys of many otherwise pedestrian considerations. I upset my nine-year-old as we drove by the Shaklee building in Pleasanton, California by asking whether he thought that the bombing of the building by animal rights extremists was at all justified given that some animals might have been harmed in the testing of health products. I was very surprised at how emotional the topic became for him—to the point that he was teary-eyed—and how quickly we had to discontinue discussion. For him, the idea of a moral tradeoff between harming animals and saving people was just so affective that he couldn’t go on with the discussion, demonstrating Hauser’s thesis that the universal moral grammar operates at a level that is not rational at its core.

A related concern arose in a commentary I made to the local paper: should we lie to children? Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins argue absolutely no, and for the most part my wife and I have done very well with our own variation on this position. We dropped the ball a few years back, though, because of suburban parental expectations and the fear that our son would be castigated by his friends (as much if not more than he already has been by those who assert Hell is in his future!). What we did was to vaguely allow the Santa Claus myth to continue. The results two years back were perhaps predictable and, to this day, he reminds us that we cruelly deceived him and made him look like a fool. Never again.

So, when the inevitable “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” reprint came to the local paper, I made a disguised contribution:

Dear Virginia,

There are many things that The New York Sun is wrong about. We print retractions with some regularity because we are flawed but dedicated to trying to get things right as best we can. It is therefore with a heavy heart that I must point out that our previous letter to you from 1897 neglected some very important facts. And, because we consider it immoral to lie to children, we want to be as clear as we can in this retraction.

Virginia, we want you to understand that Santa Claus is a great idea and that a long time ago there really was someone named St. Nicholas and other people named Kris Kringle. In recent years, in our country, many celebrate Christmas and think of Santa Claus as a bringer of toys and good cheer to all of us. He represents a beautiful idea in his magical sleigh giving gifts to children and adults alike.

But, Virginia, we would be wrong to tell you Santa Claus really exists and lives at the North Pole while little elves build toys. We can’t tell you that because it isn’t true. Santa Claus is no more real than Odin, God, Yahweh, Allah, Zeus, Kali, Quetzalcoatl, ghosts, demons, devils, imps, djinns, leprechauns, or any of the many supernatural creatures that people have thought up down through the ages. There is simply no evidence for any of them.

Virginia, we want you to believe that we have your best interests at heart, and therefore we can’t lie to you about these things. Opinions differ about many of these ideas. Some people think that if we deceive you it helps you have a more interesting childhood. Some people think there are many gods swirling around in space. Some believe that forests are filled with wood spirits inhabiting the trees. But all evidence points to quite the opposite of all of these ideas.

Still, giving gifts of cheer, celebrating our lives together, and being kind to one another are all beautiful and very human ideas. We won’t lie to you, Virginia, but we do want you to be kind and enjoy the holidays. Be of good cheer, and the spirit of Santa Claus will always be with you.

Sincerely,

The New Editorial Staff
New York Sun

But this is an example of a basic moral revulsion (do not lie to children) interfering with social and rational ideas. In any case, my son at least approves.

Valleys and Zombies

2007-12-17T23:26:00.000-08:00

The Uncanny Valley.

It's not the name of somewhere near Monterey, California, with Steinbeck wincing in the distance. No, it is a notion closely related to Dennett's intentional stance. The uncanny valley was proposed by Japanese robotics theorist Masahiro Mori in the early 70s. It is not a psychologically-motivated theory, per se, but rather a raw speculation that as the level of humanlike behavior improves in animatronics of various forms, there is a point at which we will become creeped-out by the similarity to real people.

For moving robotic simulacra, the weirdness is that they seem like zombies. Or, with a simulated arm, it looks too much like some Frankensteinian body part animated by lightning and stinking of embalming fluid. The reaction is revulsion.

Recent Robert Zemeckis films like Polar Express and Beowulf have caused similar reactions among some reviewers who felt that seeing Angelina Jolie or Tom Hanks as some lifelike muppet versions of themselves, moving around unnaturally, invoked a creep factor replete with skin-crawling sensations. The lesser-known simulated actors and actresses did not invoke the same reaction, however, because there was no uncanny resemblance at work in the viewer’s mind.

I suspect that our very productive human recognition circuits are at work here. I note a symmetrical oddity from my own childhood. Watching PBS and owning the Time-Life science book series, I saw many medical programs that showed open-chest or open-limb surgeries, and was intrigued by the anatomy of it all. But one evening Nova was about wide-awake brain surgery. For some reason, the exposure of the brain and, very critically, the notion that the brain is somehow connected to our sense of self, personality and thoughts, struck me as extremely disturbing. I certainly knew that the brain is responsible for thought and emotion. I even knew the basic physiology and had a small understanding of modularization. But observing the connection between volitional self and brain in real time just creeped me out to the extent that I remember that show to this day.

I see that experience of revulsion as projecting backwards over the uncanny valley, in a way, showing the mechanical aspects of the intentional aspects of human identity. We are not just creative, volitional tours-de-force riding an existential wave of thought, but are just across a gentle dip filled with zombies and robots, from nothing at all.

Davies and Materialism

2007-12-10T00:49:00.000-08:00

Paul Davies took a solid beating and responded in turn at The Edge.

Part of his response was to the effect that he didn’t mean all of science in his original discussion, but only meant instead the area of cosmology and theoretical physics which is his bailiwick. He exempts evolutionary biologists with that stroke. His opinions on cognitive science or neuropsychology would likely be similar (I bring this up since I see a few “grand problems” for science beyond the origin of the universe and some final theory of physics; the problem of mind and abiogenesis as similarly important).

But part of his discussion continued to hammer at the notion that uniformity and understandability of natural law was somehow intrinsically related to monotheism. It’s a rarefied argument that kind of bootstraps itself on the fact that Newton, Kepler and Galileo saw the hand of God in the correspondence of their mathematical abstractions to physical observations. There is an odd hint about his proclivities, though, in Davies’ mention of Lee Smolin’s evolutionary selection of universes, where other metaphorical narratives have informed the physical theory; a similar parallel exists in the use of computer metaphors in cognitive science, of course, or in ecological theories of perception. There are only a few basic algorithms available to try to explain unexplained phenomena: stochastic selection with replication (evolution), deterministic interaction (Newtonian dynamics), quantized interactive behaviors (quantum mechanics), thermodynamic uniformization, cybernetic control and feedback, computation and, yes, pure irrationality or theology.

I did some digging on some of the Davies’ arguments, passing back through the Wigner paper and the follow-on by Hamming, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics,” which builds-out the notion that there are essentially irrational drivers (aesthetics, play, mysticism) that push forward mathematics and that the results in turn drive scientific theory. All of this effort in some ways parallels or rediscovers the ongoing work during the same time period concerning aspects of irrationality in the philosophy of science (Kuhn, Feyeraband, etc.). The scientific method is not an acidic, scalding, and sacred pursuit devoid of irrational influences, nor are individual scientists devoid of personal faiths about their capabilities or the possibilities of their theories, but proclaiming the entire enterprise as strongly influenced by a monotheistic worldview is a strange preoccupation. Indeed, the only constant across the varied scientific pursuits is that any metaphysics is material in nature because no other explanations have provided any hint of validation or added to the task at hand (thus any metaphysics is tentative, itself), and that mathematics is a useful tool because it is simply a way of expressing relationships between objects that are not irrational but that vary according to sometimes complex but non-arbitrary ways.

Dimensional Folding and Coherence

2007-12-07T14:19:00.000-08:00

I was reading Terence Yao's blog on mathematics earlier today, enjoying some measure of understanding since his recent posts and lectures focus on combinatorics. In addition to the subject matter, though, I was interested in the way he is using his blog to communicate complex ideas. The method is rather unique in that is less formal than a book presentation, less holographic than a journal article for professional publication, more technical than an article in a popular science magazine, and yet not as sketchy as just throwing up a series of PowerPoint slides. And of course there is interaction with readers, as well.

There is some rather interesting work in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics on the relationship between writing styles and reader uptake. Specifically, the construction-integration model by Walter Kintsch and others tries to tease out how information learning is modulated by the learner's pre-existing cognitive model. There is a bit of parallelism with "constructivism" in educational circles that postulates that learning is a process of building, tearing down and re-engineering cognitive frameworks over time, requiring each student to be uniquely understood as bringing pre-existing knowledge systems to the classroom.

In construction-integration theory, an odd fact has been observed: if a text has lots of linking words bridging concepts from paragraph to paragraph, those with limited understanding of a field can get up to speed with greater fluidity than if the text is high-level and not written with that expectation in mind. In turn, those who are advanced in the subject matter actually learn faster when the text is more sparse and the learner bridges the gaps with their pre-existing mental model.

We can even measure this notion of textual coherence or cohesion using some pretty mathematics. If we count all the shared terms from one paragraph to the next in a text and then try to eliminate the noisy outliers, we can get a good estimate of the relative cohesion between paragraphs. These outliers arise due to lexical ambiguity or because many terms are less semantically significant than they are syntactically valuable.

A singular value decomposition (SVD) is one way to do the de-noising. In essence, the SVD is an operation that changes a large matrix of counts into a product of three matrixes, one of which contains "singular values" along the matrix diagonal. We can then order those values by magnitude and eliminate the small ones, then re-constitute a version of the original matrix. By doing this, we are in effect asking which of the original counts contribute little or nothing to the original matrix and eliminating those less influential terms.

There are some other useful applications of this same principle (broadly called "Latent Semantic Analysis" or LSA). For instance, we can automatically discover terms that are related to one another even though they may not co-occur in texts. The reduction and reconstitution approach, when applied to the contexts in which the terms occur, will tend to "fold" together contexts that are similar, exposing the contextual similarity of terms. This has applications in information retrieval, automatic essay grading and even machine translation. For the latter, if we take "parallel" texts (texts that are translations of one another by human translators), we can fold them all into the same reduced subspace and get semantically-similar terms usefully joined together.

Terence Yao's presentation is clearly aimed at grad students, advanced undergrads and other mathematics professionals, so his language tends to be fairly non-cohering (not, I note, do I think he incoherent!), and much of the background is left out or is connected via Wikipedia links. The links are a nice addition that is helpful to those of us not active in the field, and a technique that provides a little more textual cohesion without unduly bothering the expert.

Multiverses and Regress

2007-11-24T16:17:00.000-08:00

Paul Davies and Dinesh D’Souza have much in common. Both have summoned Newton’s faithfulness that supported his belief in an ordered universe as a means for explaining how modern science is dependent on faith. D’Souza goes much further than Davies, however, in denying that any other culture other than Christian Europe could have developed science and reason as a central cultural pillar upon which liberalism and America ultimately emerged.

D’Souza’s flaw is primarily in his historical dismissal of the achievements of other cultures, like Islam, in the development of math and science. In his presentations and articles he tends to quote a single Islamic philosopher who believed that Allah could be as irrational as he wanted to be, as if that led all Islamic thinkers to dismiss as impossible any understanding of the universe beyond the ideas of the Koran. Of course we know that was not the case, and hence we get algebra through Aldebaron.

Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Democritus and Epicurus would be similarly shocked by D'Souza's claims.

Davies’ error is in his assumption that science must be a closed intellectual system, thus submitting the entire explanatory framework to an argument of infinite regress. If we see symmetry in forces, there must be an explanation for that symmetry. Then we need an explanation beyond that symmetry. If we assume that the existing laws are effective explanations, he declares that we have invoked faith that has the same essential character as the faith of the religious.

This, of course, dismisses the entire project of inference and abduction—the contingency of liberal rationalism—using a logical positivist conception of theory. We do not, as Davies declares, claim scientifically that there may be no explanation for the ordered nature of physical law. We simply hold that there is no clear theoretical construct and supporting evidence to provide such an explanation. We keep looking and constantly ask ourselves: are there any exceptions to relativistic conceptions of gravitation? We look for anomalous disconfirmation because it leads to conceptual revision. We tentatively hold forth multiple universes and ask whether there is any way to confirm or refute the idea, or whether the idea has consequences.

That, to my mind, is nothing like religious faith, and is only loosely allied with the grand ordered Deism of Newton.

Math, Science and Popular Culture

2007-11-23T10:50:00.000-08:00

A digital video recorder (DVR) destroyed my evenings. I write that, though, with some guilty pleasure. I really was not much of a television viewer until I upgraded our technology stack, including an HD receiver with DVR pumping glorious time-shifted detail through an LCD television with a surround-sound system.

That was just over a year ago and my evening productivity has suffered. I spent probably six months just exploring features, programming a universal remote and capturing programming. Then I settled in to watch some specific programs in addition to movies and documentaries.

There are four network programs that I want to mention because of their unexpected cultural importance: the CSI franchise, House, Numb3rs and Criminal Minds. In each case, science or mathematics plays an essential role. In each case, the background material is actually well-researched, although the outcomes are almost always ridiculously neat in order to fit the format.

Numb3rs is the show closest to my background in terms of using algorithms and mathematics to solve problems. In a recent show, in fact, one mathematician used a classification and regression tree (CART) algorithm to do something. I’ve used CART before. Some of the other topics in social network analysis and covering algorithms also ring vaguely true, though they are distorted through a lens of excited elaboration that gets tiresome over time.

Northeastern University keeps track of some of the Numb3rs mathematics, here.

But more important, I think, is the cultural message that intelligent people with highly developed skill sets are heroes. Even Gregory House is a hero of sorts in his coldly analytical pursuit of truth, his anti-theism and dedication to correct diagnoses. I contrast this kind of programming with 90210, Dallas or other cultural phenomena that seemed to cater to baser ideas of wealth, power and privilege. Is the brain on the rise?

I have to admit that I am getting some kind of network television fatigue here after a year with the DVR and shows are stacking up on the hard drive. I may have to go back to a stricter media diet, but hope the science and math keeps a place on the television menu.

Folksonomics and Conceptual Metadata

2007-11-14T15:05:00.000-08:00

I necessarily think about information design as a part of my professional duties. I also try to keep frosty on novel ways that information might be presented. So I naturally have been revisiting these notions in some avocational research I have been delving into concerning health care reform.

Health care reform is, of course, a deeply political topic that breaks down along several ideological and interest dimensions. In supporting the claims for all sides, basic research is mined and often cherry-picked to build a case. And my point in this entry is not to make an ideological or political claim but to describe in a way how that information is discovered, used and reused.

Now I was quite a novice on the topic of health care economics and reform ideas when I began researching the topic. I certainly had personal negative and positive experiences over the years. I also had heard the reviews and blowback over Michael Moore’s Sicko (though have not yet seen the film). But, beyond that, I had no real understanding of who the players were, what the research suggested, or what the counterclaims were.

My understanding built from a range of sources, most of which were simply not accessible even a decade ago to casual researchers like me. Instead, you had to be a Beltway insider who subscribed to think tank newsletters and research publications. But now I can download and read Commonwealth Fund reports, CATO news briefs, and a host of other resources and become a moderately well-informed amateur researcher. I can access huge swaths of blogs and commentary, reflecting different perspectives. I can even organize the information by collecting it together and then labeling it for easy recovery based on a recollection.

What I can’t easily do yet is to be able to answer specific questions that have not already been answered in some publication, but that emerge out of the collected information. For example, after I read how the German medical system did not have the kinds of rationing and waits for access that we associate with certain aspects of the British and Canadian systems in a Commonwealth Fund report, I wanted to know the details of the German system. Was it a single-payer or nationalized health service? Perhaps a hybrid? What was the role of doctors and information technology? It took quite a lot of searching to finally be able to answer those questions, ultimately using a Siemens Medical Technology précis and market analysis of the German system.

Could approaches like structured metadata via Semantic Web technologies assist me in these tasks? Perhaps, but it seems to require that propositional information above the level of named entity extraction could be accurately indexed. For the first question, I would need documents labeled with “Structure of the German Medical System” or the equivalent rather than the many nuanced and varied ways that we write. Moreover, the proposition needs to express the timeliness of the resource, a problem I frequently encounter when trying to fix problems with my Linux computers. How timely is a given piece of information?

We can’t, however, expect individuals to be able to code that metadata in any consistent way, though I believe there is a folksonomic method that can lend a hand: a community of users can gradually improve the metadata structure and content in much the same way that Wikipedia is gradually improved. The Wikipedia model has also shown that quality can be maintained—with fits and starts—by a community of users and some policies in place.

Leftward and Magical Thinking

2007-11-02T00:47:00.000-07:00

What if all of the beauty of the arts could be boiled down to a tendency to turn left? I’m not kidding, and I’m not making a political statement. I’m talking about the real thing: physical orientation.

So where to start?

There is a remarkable literature on the relationship between magical thinking and schizophrenic behavior. Not surprisingly, schizotypic ideation (delusional psychotic thoughts) correlates with magical thinking indexes. So, if you believe in mystical connections throughout the universe, you might also believe that forces are communicating with you.

But the connections are more interesting, still. If you ask people to grade the relationship between different words on a 1-5 scale, with 1 indicating the words are unrelated and 5 meaning they are nearly identical, people who rate highly on magical thinking indexes also tend to rate unrelated words more related than those with low index ratings.

The theory is as follows: semantic memory is tied to right-brain functioning and dopamine activity is abnormally high in both schizotypic and magical thinking people in the right hemisphere. Specifically, spreading activation is enhanced by dopamine. We slur ideas together when we have high levels of dopamine. We believe things are mystically connected and, at the extreme, we even get semantic relationships gated into perceptual memory and turned into hallucinations. But at lower levels of activation, we get the insanity of artistry.

And it is the right hemisphere action that results in the tendency to turn left because the right hemisphere controls left motor functions. So those with schizophrenia, those who damage their brains with amphetamines, and those with magical thinking tendencies will veer a bit left when asked to mark the center of a piece of paper. At the extreme, Parkinson’s patients with extreme dopamine issues will wander in leftward arcs. So will rats.

Leftward, always leftward. The artists all lingered to the left while finding patterns where the rest of us found only randomness. It is the source of gurus and mystics, artists and poets, and, perhaps, NASCAR drivers.

Mind and Connectivity

2007-10-28T20:50:00.000-07:00

David Brooks in New York Times proclaims the outsourcing of his mind into GPS devices, Wikipedia and cell phones. Technology is changing the way we think and remember things. It is making us both mentally lazier and, as I’ve suggested before, more accurate.

I lamented this recently when my Casio atomic solar watch died due to the gumming up of the backlight button from too much swimming, riding and sweating over the giant, clunky, but remarkably functional watch. I had to start remembering the date and the day of the week. I had to stop using my preset alarms to remind me of the differences between Monday early-release days and other days for my son’s school. I had to expect to be inaccurate with my analog backup watch.

And then there was another day in September when I was out-of-town and having lunch with friends. The topic of tapioca pudding came up and none of us could recall what the origin of tapioca was. Out came the IPhone and we quickly resolved the question, fixing my partially inaccurate recollection from my Peace Corps time in Fiji that tapioca was related to dalo (taro). In fact, tapioca is from another root crop called cassava.

So these technologies may sometimes be reducing our cognitive commitments to certain information (the day and date), but they are also allowing us to reduce ambiguity in answering questions of a factual nature, and in a manner that exceeds what our natural mental capacities allow.

But what is missing for me is information convergence, where the knowledge contained in your DVR or GPS path memory is instantly accessible, exportable, importable, and available for all your needs. My car links via Bluetooth to my phone, but has separate voice memory for dialing. I can download new tunes through ITunes but my car can’t automatically grab Car Talk off NPR through the satellite radio and store it for later listening. Nor can I export my DVR content easily to my laptop for watching while at the park.

But the right technologies are available for the next step forward. The Semantic Web provides a beginning to achieve this step by providing a standard for self-describing information. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is the basis for Semantic Web. XML is an information representation language that is similar to HTML but is not merely designed for web page representation. The problem is that a representation language is useless unless every technology agrees on how to represent different information resources. Semantic Web standards provide a meta-description for XML data that makes it possible to code information in meaningful ways, where “meaningful” is defined by the capacity to share information between systems, converting information into knowledge in some sense.

Someday soon, my Ofamind.com approximation of Vannevar Bush’s Memory Extender may be able to talk to my DVR and help me find quotes from PBS’s The War, and my GPS will help me retrace the path of the California gold rush, as exported by Wikipedia. Someday soon.

Funding and Alternatives

2007-10-22T18:04:00.000-07:00

My weekend ended with marvelous news: a new funding round for my startup effort! The final terms are still under negotiation, but it should serve as an excellent next step for critical phases of R&D towards a large-scale, online knowledge management technology.

Meanwhile, my 9-year-old has been spending a remarkable amount of time on YouTube...

Mere Reason and Education

2007-10-19T20:49:00.000-07:00

I commented recently on the problematic issue of education and indoctrination of the young in religious matters on Recursivity. My position has always been that extremism in religious viewpoints (and note the emphasis) must be primarily related to early religious indoctrination that essentially forbids nuance and careful evaluation of facts, opinions and ideas. I can just barely imagine that an adult exposed to a rich panoply of ideas and perspectives can come to hold extremist views, and this relates to my concern over issues like school voucher programs that contribute to religious schools. In fact, when confronted with an extremist, my folk psychology would immediately ask how it is that a person raised in a nurturing and unbiased environment could possibly have transitioned to a perspective of extremism. In effect, I would want to know who harmed them or what crystallizing moment of injustice caused their change.

I’ve argued previously that it is precisely the exposure to the humanity of others via television that has occurred post-WWII that has changed the way we regard war, aggression and the universality of human rights. Racism, cruelty and mass civilian deaths in wartime are no longer acceptable because we now see others as human, instantaneously, via satellite, and with full translations. Why not accord them the dignity of humanity, spare them collective punishment, and avoid torture when we would want the same for ourselves? Our morals and ethics have improved because of secular education and reason combined with extrinsic factors like technology and social dialog, not through some new form of faith that took hold during that period.

The standard response and challenge to me is to apply a standard of intellectual arbitrariness to the topic and claim that any perspective is still a perspective, and therefore I am as guilty as the religious. There is a curious symmetry with the postmodernist critique of science and reason, here, in the claim that there is no standard for judging the merits of ideas except through a subjective narrative. And my narrative is no better than anyone else's.

But, by this standard, I see faith and reason being leveled to the same standards as intellectual mechanisms, and that I think robs the faithful of their most powerful way of regarding faith: that they have special knowledge that is transcendental to mere reason. Then evolutionary arguments are interesting but irrelevant because they are “mere reason” and the schools are no threats whatsoever in the matter of ideas.

This will make little difference to people like Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind series, who writes in The Atlantic this month:

“Until we break the secular educational monopoly that currently expels God, Judeo-Christian moral values and personal accountability from the halls of learning, we will continue to see academic performance decline and the costs of education increase, to the great detriment of millions of young lives.”

His article comes directly after Sam Harris’ musings titled “God Drunk Society” in a collection of short subjects on “The American Idea” by many august writers. LaHaye even slurs together some dubious claims about socialism in early America to justify his claims. Actually, California schools teach a complex set of values that seem to transcend and encompass LaHaye’s desires quite nicely:

"Each teacher shall endeavor to impress upon the minds of the pupils the principles of morality, truth, justice, patriotism, and a true comprehension of the rights, duties, and dignity of American citizenship, and the meaning of equality and human dignity, including the promotion of harmonious relations, kindness toward domestic pets and the humane treatment of living creatures, to teach them to avoid idleness, profanity, and falsehood, and to instruct them in manners and morals and the principles of a free government. (b) Each teacher is also encouraged to create and foster an environment that encourages pupils to realize their full potential and that is free from discriminatory attitudes, practices, events, or activities, in order to prevent acts of hate violence, as defined in subdivision (e) of Section 233."

And this is merely the result of very modern reason.

Discovery and Multiple Explanations

2007-10-15T13:51:00.000-07:00

My startup, Ofamind, has both a “classification engine” and a “discovery engine” as part of the core technology. A discovery engine is an algorithmic system that tries to show you new content based on what you have been looking at in the past. For Ofamind, the discoveries are currently over scientific newsfeeds, scientific papers and patents. The role of the classification engine is to make it easier to add content to your interest collections (“views” in Ofamind) as you browse the web by automatically suggesting how to add the new web content (via a Firefox extension).

Both are based on a combination of content and linkages between documents. For content, the system goes a step further than current methods by using extracted people, places and organizations to improve the quality of the matches, as well as leverage aspects of document structure. Ongoing work (prior to the full public release of the system) is trying to improve even further the disambiguation of “named entities” to make it possible to answer useful research questions about topics and the researchers who are involved in those topics.

I was therefore intrigued when I learned about the Netflix Prize from 3QuarksDaily. The Netflix Prize is offering a US$1M purse to any group that can do a better job of predicting Netflix film rankings by people than their current system, Cinematch. The prize term runs through 2011 and I am seriously considering giving it a run.

Reading through the work by the leading group (at around 8% improvement over Cinematch so far), the approaches seem rather ho hum at first glance: look at the rankings of people who have seen movies similar to my viewing choices, then use their other rankings to suggest new movies to me. Then we get into the fine details, and start to see two main themes develop. First, there is the problem of high levels of variability for some interest areas versus others. In other words, the landscape of choices is not very smooth. Different movie genres, director’s outputs and actor choices may all influence small pools of choices made by individuals that otherwise share my interests. So smoothing methods are introduced that try to capture latent variables or trends in the data that can reduce the distortions of outliers and improve the overall system performance.

But the other methodology that several groups have started looking at is based on combining decision making between several different approaches. Indeed, one blogger from Columbia University noted that this was similar to Epicurus’ Principle of Multiple Explanations. It also is widely used in classification algorithms like AdaBoost in hoping to overcome the problem of overfitting to training data, which means creating a decision process that is too finely tuned to any special oddities lurking in the training data.

One area that is not currently exploited, though, is the direct use of movie metadata (directors, actors, release date, genre) in the models. It can be argued that some (if not most) of that metadata and its influence is encapsulated in the choices made by people, thus producing an expert analysis in their ranking strategy. But I think there may be some significant value in a hybrid approach that looks at when the metadata connections make better predictions than the crowds. And that kind of hybrid approach is precisely what I am working on with Ofamind.

Swearing and Power

2007-10-09T10:03:00.000-07:00

Steven Pinker lassos up a whole rodeo of bad words and swearing at The New Republic. His arguments largely concern the connotative nature of swear words for creating an affective reaction in the reader or hearer and are a pairing-down of the broad treatment in The Stuff of Thought.

There is an oddity, though, in his treatment of the word "fuck" from an evolutionary psychology perspective. The problem of parasitism has been put forward as a driver for the evolution of sex because sexual recombination is a good diversity pump for immunological competence in the face of a rapidly changing threat environment. So it is natural that Pinker would invoke this theory of sex to try to get a handle on why sexual terms might carry taboo weight down through history. But the argument falls somewhat flat in the most common way "fuck" is used: "fuck you." He rightly points out that there is a symmetry with "damn you" but with the unmodern religious nature of "damning" replaced by the up-to-date invocation of taboo sexual terminology. "Eat shit" has about the same level of nastiness as "fuck you" but is more clearly tied to the problem of parasitism.

Yet, the idea that our connotations are tied to the icky and emotionally fraught aspects of sex (he even invokes parental investment theory at one point) strikes me as less likely than seeing the word as exactly the kind of power word that the 70s feminists saw in "cunt." "Fuck you" is a power phrase that is tied to non-voluntary sex and rape. Rape (and the protection of females from rape) must have had a profound role in the environmentally adaptive environment that backgrounds our psychological makeup. The fact that "fuck you" was most often used between men until recently (I suspect) bears this out. It is ungrammatically asserting that the receiver of the phrase is somehow going to receive the profane act in a passive role. It demeans them with a conveniently short and phonologically plosive imprecation.

True, the term "fuck" has common currency these days but still resonates with a more animalistic reference to sex when used in that fashion: "What have those two been up to? They were fucking" as compared with "They were having sex" (clinical) or "They were making love" (euphemistic and 70s-ish).

So do we linguistically sort and invent terms over time to find optimal curses that carry the right level of phonological, semantic and pragmatic properties? Absofuckinglutely.

Strong assumptions and Instinct

2007-10-08T01:18:00.000-07:00

I am a strong AI proponent, meaning that I believe that, given sufficient time, we will succeed in building a thinking machine that thinks in a non-trivial way beyond the capabilities it was programmed with.

And I have pretty much always been a strong AI proponent. I remember very well wandering irrigation canals in Southern New Mexico on my way home from high school and thinking about this topic. My foster dad and mom had an HP3000 minicomputer in our house that they were using for applications development after a try at timesharing was displaced by the rise of the personal computer. It sat right next to the Altair that was used for burning EPROMS back then. Among the first applications of that HP was the game of animal guessing, where a twenty-questions-style interrogation is performed of the user to guess the animal they are thinking about. Does it have hair? Does it have claws? Etc. If your animal is not in the program’s database, it gets added to the decision tree, growing the learned response set as time progresses.

So I am walking home and thinking about Animal and convinced that programmed intelligent response and learning was not what we mean by the notion of artificial intelligence. We mean something more, something that demonstrates behavioral plasticity, that specifically overcomes the limitations inherent in the programmed capabilities imbued in the system, something that shows us novel behavior.

I came up with the idea of the “instinct” kernel while walking along that day, based on the assumption that understanding the natural phenomena of intelligence would, inevitably, lead to the natural-like capabilities that I was certain were essential for intelligence. This instinct kernel somehow encompassed that natural history that girds intelligence but also served as an essentially unknowable core that expressed the metaphorical notion that intelligence is difficult and unprogrammable.

So here we are 25 years later and we have made remarkable progress in automatic speech recognition, machine translation, Roomba vacuums, and search. Yet, the level of autonomous action akin to that ultimate goal still seems out of reach, despite the achievements in chess or in efficient stock picking. What are we to make of this outcome? Does 25 years of effort mean that the goal is unachievable? Of course not. The goal remains because the goal is tied directly to a fundamental philosophical assumption that there is either something metaphysically unique about mind that can’t be simulated or that strong AI will ultimately be untangled in much the same way that thermodynamics was untangled from demons gating atoms from vessel to vessel.

Anything less robs us of our humanity by declaring there are limitation that are unachievable. I can’t believe that, and there is no evidence that says we should believe that.

Wireless and Metaphors

2007-10-04T23:01:00.000-07:00

I fixed two wireless problems today, both of which were obscure metaphorical problems in a way, since I could only visualize and not directly observe the radio waves pulsing through the non-ether. I mention the issue of metaphor because I picked up Steven Pinker's new book, The Stuff of Thought, which deals some with the topic of metaphor. Well, since I am only in the introductory section of the book, that is the initial takeaway at any rate.

So my problems with wireless were odd enough, even without the rhetorical wind-up of the problem of metaphor. First, my key fobs were recalled by my car manufacturer because they could be reprogrammed by close proximity to cell phones. There is a certain irony to this in that the car also bridges through Bluetooth to provide voice-recognition dialing and general operations. So I could start the car remotely and use the phone, but if I brought the phone and starter device together too closely, the result would be that I could neither start the car nor use the phone.

Finally, though, the manufacturer fixed the problem and it only took about an hour at a local dealership while my wife and I got Indian down the street.

The second problem was weirder, though. My 802.11g router started to fail randomly and oddly. And it started around the same time as when I added an HP wireless printer to the zoo of technology. The symptoms were bizarre and manifested themselves randomly with packet dropping from my wireless camera, different laptops and the aforementioned printer. Since one laptop was initially affected more than others, I started with trying to solve the problem with an external USB wireless adapter. No luck. So, after backtracking to an old 802.11b router and seeing some improvements across the board (and after 10 hours work reconfiguring everything), I replaced the router with a new Linksys model today.

There were moments in there where I speculated my neighbor's old 2.4Ghz wireless phones were interfering with the system, but couldn't shuffle channels enough to make any difference. There were moments when I thought the printer had to be to blame since the problems first started around the same time that I got the printer. But no, it was irrational and ultimately the packet failures didn't match any conceivable model for digital system failures where any chip failure results in total non-functionality. Cosmic rays?

If only I could have seen (maybe with false coloration of UV/IR/2.4Ghz rays) what was happening? If only I could have had diagnostics beyond traceroute and ping that would tell me not just that packets were dropped, but who dropped them? If only I had something more than a metaphor (wireless networking is like networking but slightly different) to work from?

Even tonight, following resolution of the recall, I diligently separated my phone from my key fob. The metaphor of fearful interactions was still lingering.

Neoepicureanism and Joplin

2007-10-01T13:57:00.000-07:00

Sometime in late high school, sometime after I had been ejected from the partier crowd for being just not too cool, and sometime after I decided that my role-playing gaming and interests in ideas were good things despite their incompatibility with even the stable and geeky cliques, I proclaimed the philosophy of "neoepicureanism" and held that, "we never do anything we don't want to do." It served as a Socratic seed for discussions (sometimes under the influence) with friends concerning parents, tribulations, the role of fear in human action, and my own libertarian leanings.

No one does anything except by choice, even if that choice is under duress. A youthfully simplistic principle, but one that could defuse anger and hostility and transform discussions into positive appreciations of ambitions, goals, and baser pleasures, as well.

So here I have Veronica Gventsadze's "Atomism and Gassendi's Conception of the Human Soul" in front of me describing the Epicurean atomic swerve that was used in opposition to the purely deterministic atomism of Democritus. It's a long way out from high school and my interests in philosophy took on a terrifically sober and analytic form through college and then largely folded into scientific practice with the arrival at evolutionary epistemology and algorithmic information theory. Still, revisiting Epicureanism strikes me as remarkable in its monism, in the conception of the gods as prime movers detached from interaction with the corporeal world, and in the atomistic justification for free will and an ethics derived from reciprocity.

Gassendi was a 17th Century thinker who expanded on Epicureanism, reintroducing it to the West on the cusp of the Scientific Revolution. He resurrected the core ideas while enhancing the psychological descriptions, suggesting how we create mental simulacra and the influence of those simulacra in creating new ideas.

I wonder, though, since I had not read any Epicurus back in high school, and certainly hadn't read any Gassendi, whether the real source of my theory was "freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose?"

Halo and Intentionality

2007-09-23T17:03:00.000-07:00

Halo 3 is just around the corner and I bit the bullet and upgraded the Xbox to an Xbox360. I also preordered the game and my son and I started going back through Halo and Halo 2 to refresh our memory about the storyline (I know, I know, I'm technically a bad dad in that those games are recommended for mature audiences only...)

That aside, though, my son has been more interested in the backstory of those games than in almost anything else (and he reads extensively). Partly, I attribute that interest to the vagueness of the story exposition in the games, leaving much to imaginatively fill-in. But, also, his interest arises because of the dual embedded themes of the Covenant and Flood in the game. He sees parallels between the religious war of the Covenant and current events, but his interest in the Flood keeps popping up with an odd intensity.

For those who are not Halo fans, the Flood is a parasitic organism that constructs Frankensteinian golems out of body parts. The relation to the alien Covenant is that the Halo (ringworlds) devices were created by an ancient civilization to periodically destroy all life in the universe and cleanse the universe of the Flood, but the Covenant believes that they will send them on The Long Journey if they activate them, paralleling the nihilism of extreme jihadists, in a way.

The Flood, as a parasite, caused my son initial consternation but has also brought about some amazing discussions, including one today during lunch. My wife and I were explaining how viruses were not intelligent but were creatures that simply survive and do not really have a purposeful origin. They are not really malevolent, either, and perhaps the Flood are similar. Malevolence is an attribute that we ascribe to intentionality and parasites are not intentional.

We emphasized a spectrum of lifeforms and described how, for instance, ants have individual nervous systems and also use chemical messages to communicate threats and food sources, and also how, unlike viruses, ants are unique in that only the queen reproduces and so the workers do not derive their individual purpose from reproduction alone, but from supporting the queen in reproducing.

Finding the language to explain this to a nine-year-old was surprisingly difficult, I found. The very idea of non-intentionality combined with intrinsic purpose is remarkably outside our language and intuitive framework of explanation. Children think stuff happens either because it is a mindless, natural phenomena or because it is a result of intentional action. Cats and dogs are intentional. Sunlight and waves are not. Getting into the middle world of what Ernst Mayr called teleonomic (appearing purposeful due to an adaptive algorithm) is surprisingly non-conforming to everyday ideas.

Still, my son was intrigued by the idea that children think so oddly about the world. During our discussion, a sea plane taxied by on the water outside and disrupted the conversation with sheer coolness. We wandered the docks outside the restaurant afterwards and got to peer in the cockpit. Strapped to the pilot's yoke was an aftermarket GPS unit, helping him fly with precise intentionality.

Words gone wild

2007-09-19T15:06:00.000-07:00

A friend recently sent me along a quirky little poem that took some time to understand:

A fabulous verb is "to pronk"
The antelopes jump when you honk.
Its synonym, "stot"
Was made up by some Scot.
I think that he must have been dronk.

And its arrival was close behind Word of the Day's minority definition of tattoo:

Tattoo is an alteration of earlier taptoo, from Dutch taptoe, "a tap(house)-shut," from tap, "faucet" + toe, "shut" -- meaning, essentially, that the tavern is about to shut.

Now, here I found a treasure for etymologically-disposed searchers searching for strikes in the literary loam:

OED Appeals List

Could it really be that "poo" only became feces in 1981? And "wife-beater (T-shirt)" only 1993?

Affect and The Natural History of Morality

2007-09-13T08:31:00.000-07:00

A must read from Edge on affect, morality, charity and the New Atheism.

Strangeness and Bias

2007-09-12T08:47:00.001-07:00

I always come back to the problem of how and why people believe strange things. I am certain that I have believed strange things before, and likely will again, but feel that I have also developed a certain level of critical detachment that helps me to hold ideas contingently. I like to think that I am always "on guard" for the support structure of an argument. So it both worries and interests me when I read the political blogs and my local paper, when I keep hearing the framing efforts of the President to portray the situation in Iraq as entwined with terrorism, and when I hear kids educated in our public schools talking about almost anything.

But really I believe very many strange things, as you will see.

Norbert Schwarz and compatriots at Michigan work extensively on the issue of how our minds process ideas. I first encountered a discussion of Schwarz' work over the weekend as we were driving to lunch and On the Media was on Sirius NPR Talk. I tracked down one of the papers:

Metacognitive Experiences and the Intricacies of Setting People Straight: Implications for Debiasing and Public Information Campaigns

Now, "metacognitive experiences" initially struck me as strange and New Agey. In the paper and broader literature, however, the phrase refers to mental experiences that accompany or affect cognitive processing. Calling it an "experience" seems at odds with most cognitive psychology, but I think the term was chosen because it the mental facilities are still being identified and detangled. Much of this work builds on the kinds of bias studies like Kahnemann and Tversky and others during the heyday of cognitive psychology, but carries it forward to link it to social psychology.

Anyway, the gist of the paper is that "rational" information processing is altered and biased by these metacognitive experiences. One example is an experiment with a facts versus myths flyer created by CDC to combat common myths about flu vaccines. It turns out that over time the myths get incorporated as facts with an alarming rate, essentially reinforcing the myths rather than debunking them. It only takes a few minutes for this to happen! We are prone to regard recall preferentially as factual, it seems.

So we stop off after lunch at REI to get some replacement socks for hiking and general winter applications. As I wander around, though, I notice something intriguingly strange about my own biases. North Face and Marmot brands are superior to Columbia or Mountain Hard Wear in my thinking it seems. But not because of any rational or experiential facts, really, but purely because of a combination of the exclusivity of the brands (Columbia is more of a commodity brand) and because of a name bias that Mountain Hard Wear is just a dumb name. No advertising polluted my thinking, really, because I don't read outdoor magazines. And while I have seen other people with North Face jackets, I can't recall seeing anyone with a Marmot jacket so my bias is not based on associating the products with exemplars per se.

I just believe strange things.

Compression and Focus

2007-09-06T09:42:00.000-07:00

I just happened on Greg Chaitin's 2006 Scientific American paper, The Limits of Reason, which the author was kind enough to publish to his website. I first encountered Chaitin in another SciAm article while in graduate school in the early 90s and I found the nascent topic of algorithmic probability so beautiful and profound that I dragged my boss to see Chaitin talk several hundred miles away at University of New Mexico. He kept dramatically grabbing his bald pate during the talk and gradually coated his head with colors from the whiteboard markers he was using. It was immensely distracting but I still got the gist of his arguments.

The odd thing is that I somewhat discovered the same idea of algorithmic complexity as an undergrad, but only in a very limited and intuitive form. I was in a Philosophy of Language class and was worrying over parsing and halting problems, partly informed by all the Frege and Wittgenstein we had been discussing, and partly driven by Godel, Escher, Bach..., the popular text on AI at the time. For my final report, I speculated that an evolutionary algorithm might be able to partially solve the halting problem by guessing when to halt from the productions of the machine and past experiences with other machines. There would be a probability of success at halting, at the very least, I speculated, and the evolutionary algorithm was a general solution.

Anyway, I ended up having to drop by my prof's office to discuss the paper and I recall descending into a discussion about the teleological language we use to discuss evolutionary processes. His face twisted up when I mentioned GEB and we ended with me querying him over whether he didn't like the book because it was popular. I got an A despite myself, I think.

Then, years later, I encounter Chaitin-Kolmogorov complexity and am blown away by the ideas. I trace back into the application to inference and machine learning and discover Ray Solomonoff's work on the topic, published in a series of technical reports at a small research firm called Zator.

Continuing this journey, I encounter Eliot Sober's philosophical treatments that include discussion of Occam's Razor, AIC, BIC and other ways of negotiating inferencing, which leads me to Minimum Description Length by Jorma Rissanen. Soon thereafter I publish a paper on applications of MDL to semantic analysis, showing how compact coding of data streams into trees has similar properties to methods like Latent Semantic Analysis and provides a general way to explain human grammar learning. My boss at the time coins "compression is truth" paralleling Chaitin's "compression in comprehension."

And here, now, Chaitin again adding new spices to this melange as he continues on with his life's work. I envy his focus.

Effective Procedures and Transcendentalism

2007-09-03T15:10:00.001-07:00

Newsweek has two articles that are joined together by the thesis that we are reaching a point where computational intelligence built on statistical methods outperforms human decision making and intuition. Effective medicine is the shared topic between the two articles and, in effective medicine circles, the term "algorithm" is used to describe treatment cycles. This takes us back to the classic expert system for blood disease diagnosis, Mycin, that was a glorified decision tree of sorts for searching through the differential diagnosis space based on patient symptoms.

I got a chance to read E.O. Wilson's Consilience on my trip this week and the Newsweek articles resonated deeply with the core of Wilson's strongest claim: that empirical materialism is the only effective way forward to tackle problems in the remaining gaps in the sciences, in ethics, in the humanities, and even the arts. Because if optimal decision making can be automated by what cognitive scientists call an effective procedure and achieve 95% success (for example) in a given application, that level of success is more than likely better than the agreement level between practitioners relying on their own intuitions and experience.

The claim that intuition is somehow unintelligible is essentially a transcendental claim and transcendental claims arise because of ambiguity or skepticism about the validity of other knowledge procedures. I personally attacked this problem in a 1998 paper in which I used evolutionary algorithms to create automatic art forms that were partly random. The randomness was constrained by an abstract complexity metric based on an analysis of the connectedness in the space of production grammars that the evolutionary algorithm searched through. I was essentially creating an effective procedure that mimicked evolutionary epistemology and had randomness and creativity of a certain sort mixed in (though admittedly without the experiential aspect of human art).

In addition to reducing errors, one of the outcomes of effective medicine is that the ability of doctors to be swayed by pharmaceutical incentives is gradually being whittled down because the algorithms constrain treatment options to certain formularies and procedures. Similar efforts have been used to predict the quality of wines based on environmental monitoring and the predictions outperform oenophiles.

So we begin to see the rolling back of transcendental justifications and claims, first in intuitions and then, as Wilson suggests, moving into the realm of the humanities freshly scoured by the scathing wit of the postmodernists.

Free Will and Neuropeptides

2007-08-29T09:29:00.001-07:00

I'm stuck in a mental vortex because I have to fly out-of-town today. My running joke is that I have to be careful in the airport restrooms to avoid getting bothered by creepy Republican senators.

I can't start any serious work, nor can I do nothing at all. So, am I a victim of circumstances concerning my state of mind? I wish I could absolve responsibility and somehow push the issue back to the set of externals and maybe my genes, but that would be a bit rash.

I ask that rhetorically, however, because it is an issue that arises in an article in The Psychiatric Times called Hume's Fork and Psychiatry's Explanations: Determinism and the Dimensions of Freedom. In the article, the author posits the discovery of a neuropeptide called "assaultin" that is coded by the gene, BAD2U. When assaultin is injected into the cerebrospinal fluid of human subjects, 65% become dangerous and attack others. Now the 35% don't become assaultive because they use some kind of impulse control mantra that can also be taught to the others.

The author uses this framework to build a contingency-based theory of free will and promises to develop a legal framework in subsequent articles. Overall, he suggests a continuum of responsibility that needs to be reflected in the relative strength of punishments and treatments that should be applied to people.

Totalism and Liberalism

2007-08-21T08:04:00.000-07:00

Mark Lilla's exceptional piece, The Politics of God, in New York Times paints an historical analysis that has Hobbes front and center in refashioning the Will of God as a political force into a belief that fear is the driver of men's wills and that alleviating fear can bring about peace. Lilla carries forward through Locke and coins "Great Separation" to describe the forceps that pried apart theocratic impulses and political philosophy, echoing Jefferson's Wall of Separation that would come to America.

Strangely, he says of the American experiment that "It's a miracle" that our institutions have held fast against tides of cultural opposition that have desired to refashion liberal, secular democracy with messianic drivers. But I don't think so. There were several unique starting conditions that were essential to American success. There was the lack of existing institutions in the New World combined with the diverse religious character of the early immigrants themselves. This washed over into a unique opportunity to create governance completely anew and in a way that trusted no one and no higher authority. And the preservation of the system during the initial 90 years was derived from a shared belief in the value of institutions, themselves, arising from Northern European sensibilities about order, only crashing mightily during the Civil War but surviving and thriving by dint of Lincoln's victory.

Overlooked, too, is the impact of geography, with America just too far from our allies and enemies for any state to have too great an impact on America's development of an independent strain of morality that verbally holds fast to religious principles but in action subjugates them to secular law.

It's interesting that Lilla begins with a discussion of the letter to Bush by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wherein he claims that liberalism and democracy have failed, and the failure is that they apparently do not provide the kind of totalism that the Iranian president thinks is essential to human existence, with a unification of God's will with that of man. To me, there is no effective answer to that except in Bertrand Russell's notion that contingency is the essential aspect of the liberal mind and the reflexive desire to build ever stronger walls between the liberal and the illiberal.

Moore and Semantic Skepticism

2007-08-15T21:40:00.000-07:00

Strange, I found the Paglia essay interpenetrating all of my thoughts over the past few days, dredging up language swarms from old Derrida and Feyeraband essays, and dipping over into my work on disambiguation and ontology. See, linguistics-wise, I was once an empiricist with an almost palpable antagonism to the value of knowledge resources like ontologies in solving specific problems. I would reach first for a statistical model that was trained on the contexts of word occurrences, expecting that words can only be known by the company that they keep.

Even the notion that the Semantic Web can achieve any level of crispness in assigning metadata to online content was doubtful in that it was inherently impossible for content authors to assign metadata consistently. The position is postmodern relativism, if you will, derived from the same kind of semantic and pragmatic arguments that have been used to deconstruct machine learning: do I translate this as "terrorist" or "freedom fighter"? Well, what is your frame of reference? What is your meta-narrative?

A radical position is the folksonomy view that folks are themselves are the best determiners of how to tag metadata. In this view, they use whatever tags seem appropriate based on their own intuitions about the content. But does this get us around the Bono issue, below? Unlikely. It seems more appropriate to purely abstract and controversial concepts like "terrorist" or "justice".

So I think we need a gradation of semantic forms that range from relatively simple propositions about identity up through propositions about meaning and intent. The latter are purely Wittgensteinian word games, with agreement and disagreement strewn across the symbol space, but the former have lower average rates of disagreement over referential attachment.

This parallels the notion of post-postmodernism in a way, by accepting fluidity and chaotic symbol/signifier interactions but still anticipating a useful and uncontroversial basis for facts. G.E. Moore would raise his hand in salute.

Paglia and Reconstructionism

2007-08-07T21:39:00.000-07:00

A few things I've read lately:

Camille Paglia's Religion and the Arts in America from Arion (cross-pollinated from 3QuarksDaily)

Pioch et. al.'s A Link and Group Analysis Toolkit (LGAT) for Intelligence Analysis (scary, huh?)

Malcolm Gladwell's The Moral Hazard Myth from The New Yorker

Wikipedia on the Casimir Effect

Paglia's speech at Colorado College was especially interesting. Her central thesis is that the role of religion in the arts in America has been sidelined into pure identity and narrow partisan politics which only reinforce antagonism from the Conservative Right. The end result has been the strangling of arts funding from government sources though she points out that no one in the avant-garde should accept government funding anyway. In some ways she echoes an Allan Bloom in decrying "sterile and now fading poststructuralism and postmodernism." Like Bloom, she sees a vacuum created in deconstructing traditional notions of values and aesthetic criteria. Like Bloom, she longs for something more powerful, more lively.

But her answer is, in part, to reinvigorate the arts through a re-examination of the spiritual roots that underlay so much traditional art, from spiritual hymns to rock to rap. In that, I think she misses one of the crowning achievements of our civilization even while she points out how technology is the most current creation of "American genius." Is it the failure of the arts and humanities to embrace materialism, science and technology as a central facet of modern life that leaves us in this condition of limitations and craven ennui?

Even while I read about the Casimir effect and try to imagine some of the most abstract and beautiful ideas ever conceived of--that vacuum itself is pervaded by energetic influences and zero point energy--Paglia thinks polyphonic differences between Calvinist and Lutheran hymns are a source of inspiration. Even while I imagine the subtle mathematics of group dynamic evolution using sophisticated achievements in graph theory, Paglia ponders the political implications of Madonna images festooned with elephant crap.

Why isn't rationality and all that it has achieved the greatest source for artistic inspiration in modernity? These are not sterile thoughts at all, but stunning achievements that have changed human existence more than all the stained glass in all of history.

Swarms and Social Cybernetics

2007-08-06T10:42:00.000-07:00

David Sloan Wilson, in his spectacular Darwin's Cathedral, does an in-depth analysis of Korean-American Christian Churches in the Houston area. Newly arriving immigrants, some with only a few hundred dollars in their pockets, use the church as a transitional community asset that supports them through jobs, business development, loans and other benefits. Many second generation children complain that their parents have only the church and other church members as their community, even after twenty or thirty years.

Wilson's analysis also points to some of the relatively simple mechanisms that are used to try to keep church members actively involved. Every Sunday, for instance, there is a flier placed in mail boxes assigned to each member. After the service, the church staff contacts any parishioners who failed to pick-up their flier, giving them a clear attendance record.

Wilson never uses the term "cybernetic" to describe the pushes and pulls that are needed to keep a community actively engaged, especially communities that expect tithes and human capital, but that was the term that kept popping up as I read through his slim manifesto. I visualized a swarm of points in space orbiting each other in close formation. Occasionally a point would break away and start to orbit into another group, only to be pulled back to the original center of gravity by attractive forces (incentives) combined with shame forces (disincentives). The steam governor at work in sociology. The tighter knit or more extreme the ideas, the stronger those attractive forces.

A New York Times article shared similar thoughts. In it, a Harvard Law prof went through a Conservative Jewish Yeshiva and went on to a do great things. When he went back to a wedding of an old friend from school, the subsequent wedding photos did not show him. He had been literally erased from the photos. The reason: he had been accompanied by an Asian American girlfriend. The motivation was to remove the record of his failure to abide the expected rules, thereby both shaming him and eliminating any temptation for other young men who might see the photo and start thinking outside the Hassidic box, so to speak. Defeating free thinking and Hellenism prevented assimilation once. Defeating Asian chicks is a comparatively minor self-correction.

But could such qualitative social forces as shame and sense of belonging be given a quantitative reality that helps describe the rate of change of social and religious groups over time? We might be able to use group membership counts and look at correlations between the subjective opinions of group members as to the attitudes of other group members as a proxy for the cohesion mechanisms or memes in the group. Wilson does a bit of this when he reviews a survey of the orthodoxy of different religious groups as gauged by a random sample of religious scholars.

Semantics and Sonny Bono

2007-07-29T15:48:00.000-07:00

"Bono and the tree became one"

That sentence has been an object of scrutiny for me over the past several weeks. It is short enough and the meaning seems fairly easy to digest: Sonny Bono died in a skiing accident. It might have shown up in a blog back when the event transpired, or in casual conversation around the same time.

So what is so fascinating about it? It is the range of semantic tools that are needed to resolve Bono to Sonny Bono and not to U2's Bono or any of the thousands of other Bonos that likely exist. First, we need background knowledge that Sonny Bono died in a skiing accident. Next we need either the specific knowledge that a tree was involved or the inference that skiing accidents sometimes involve trees. Finally, we need a choice preference that rates notable people as more likely to be the object of the discussion than everyday folk.

We could still be wrong, of course. The statement might be about Frank Bono, a guy from down the street who likes to commune with nature. It might be, but for a statement in isolation the notability preference serves a de facto role as a disambiguator.

How, then, can we design technology to correctly assign the correct referent to occurrences like Bono in the text above? We have several choices and the choices overlap to varying degrees. We could, for instance, collect together all of the contexts that contain the term Bono (with or without Sonny), label them as to their referent, and try to infer statistical models that use the term context to partition our choices. This could be as simple as using a feature vector of counts of terms that co-occur with Bono and then looking at the vector distance between a new context vector (formed from the sentence above) with the existing assignments.

We could also try to create a model that recreates our selection preferences and the skiing <-> tree relationship and does some matching combined with some inferencing to try to identify
the correct referent. That is fairly tricky to do over the vast sea of possible names, but is easy enough for a single one, like Bono.

It turns out all of these approaches have been tried, as well as interesting hybridizations of them. For instance, express the notability preference as a probability weighting based on web search mentions, while adding-in the distance between different concepts in a tree-based ontology, trying to exploit human-created semantic knowledge to assist in the process. It turns out that fairly simple statistics do pretty well over large sets of names (just choose the most likely assignment all the time), but don't really capture the kinds of semantic processing that we believe we undertake in our own "folk psychologies" as described above.

Still, I see the limited success of knowledge resources as an opportunity rather than a source of discouragement. We definitely have not exhausted the well.

Fiber Optics and Amateur Access

2007-07-21T16:14:00.000-07:00

An elderly woman in Sweden got a 40Gb/s fiber optic pipe installed to her home, recently. She hardly uses the web but can now download a feature length film in 2 seconds. I was lamenting the death of satellite and cable TV when we all have fiber to the house with those kinds of bandwidths over lunch today. It came up because my neighbor dropped by for a drink the other night and ended up staying until 1 AM, sucking down my gin and complaining about the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. He called home at some point and apparently interrupted his wife's enjoyment of The Closer while also missing dinner.

It was the fact that she missed her TV show that struck me. I don't have that problem. I didn't watch much TV beyond the news, Frontline or some random late-night sitcom until recently when we upgraded everything. Now I have a DVR and actually watch some programs (including The Closer) but only because I can comfortably time-shift and pause TV as I see fit, and all in HD where available.

But what happens with full on-demand TV? The satellites will not be de-orbited for some time as they will continue to serve remote areas, but eventually they will go away. Even the notion of networks and channels would dry up over time. Channels are a delivery mechanism for content that are only useful as branding labels in an on-demand universe. Studios can equally well disintermediate their content and swing deals directly with advertising clearinghouses. This is already happening somewhat in the online video space, but the bandwidth and quality issues remain a stumbling block until that fiber optic pipe arrives.

Now, suddenly, without the channels to filter content choices down to a few hundred options (sheepishly, I have a few hundred channels; George Chadwick's Aphrodite is playing via SIRIUS Symphony Hall through Dish Network right now, blurring the lines between mediums) we will instead start using other mechanisms to make content choices. There will be individual critic lists, popularity recommendation engines and, most importantly, content cross-advertising to try to attract eyeballs. The amateur will mix with the pro as technological and artistic means for producing amazing content becomes increasingly inexpensive.

Framing and Dissonance

2007-07-13T22:55:00.000-07:00

Finally, and with little fanfare, I closed on my final report for my most recent grant this evening. The champagne rests in the fridge for the moment. The last two weeks have been, well, consuming. Now I rush headlong toward a second phase.

While writing and experimenting, I was occasionally drawn into blog and editorial discussions, some of which were mildly amusing. I even learned some new things, though not directly from the blogs, I'm afraid. Specifically, the topic of semantic "framing" came up during a cross-Wikipedia excursion in pursuit of a recollection about Newspeak driven by Christopher Hitchens' discussion of cognitive tyranny in a variety of forums. As a biographer of Jefferson and Orwell, Hitchens is uniquely qualified to address the problem of tyranny and fascism.

Semantic framing is the use of distinctive metaphorical terminology that is designed to provide a clarifying distinction with alternatives. It is the opposite of nuance in a way, and relies on positioning issues as risky (when opposed) versus beneficial (when in agreement). Interestingly, framing effects on economic decision making appear to be less effective on some people than others, with the distinguishing mental characteristic related to emotionalism (exposed as increased amygdala activity during fMRIs).

But the question that arose to me was whether we have an innate property that resists framing (and that, when we have it, drives us towards more analytical tasks and higher education levels; yes, based on my own supposition that higher education levels correspond to greater cognitive moderation) or whether it is itself a learned response to moderate one's emotional reaction to arguments and information that corresponds to the "liberal" aspects of higher education?

Innateness, Excellence and Rats

2007-06-29T20:09:00.001-07:00

I played hooky this afternoon and took the family to see Ratatouille. We got to the theater after the start time but before the main feature began. It was packed, though, and we ended up in the second row surrounded by chattering two-year-olds and crying babies. It is to the filmmaker's credit that despite all this I was suitably entertained--much more so than any of the recent blockbusters that we have seen.

But there is something slightly disturbing about the film that sloshes over from The Incredibles: the disturbingly Ayn Randian notions concerning excellence and mediocrity. In both films, the main characters possess innate abilities that transcend the abilities of their peers and that make them unique and exceptional. In The Incredibles it is the, well, incredible talents of the superheroes. In Ratatouille, the main character has a heightened sense of taste and smell that sets him apart from others.

Now, some of the critics drew direct parallels with Rand in terms of the opposition to the Incredibles by the masses and by their arch-enemy who resorted to technical feats to achieve his own power. But I don't think that is quite right because while Rand's characters strive against backlash from critics and opposition (well Roark does, at least), they do not achieve their talents and powers from some innate source. They are "constructively" brilliant or the source of their capacity is an emergent property of their life experience.

Instead, I interpret both films as more religious in tone because they specify talents that arise through unknown agency, much like the celebration of Mozart in Amadeus, rather than as exemplifying extraordinary devotion to craft. Of course, if excellence is purely innate, that leaves the rest of us out of luck with regard to spectacular achievement. And that is a bit disturbing to me as a message for young people.

Still, the films are wonderfully crafted achievements in their own right, maintaining Pixar's fine reputation for devotion to the craft of film making. There is even a lovely homage to Citizen Kane in Ratatouille when the grumpy critic eats a nouveau ratatouille (of course) that causes a flashback to his simple childhood. His pen drops from his hand and we watch it fall from below, just like the snow globe dropping from the hand that once piloted Rosebud. Sadly, the semantic associations flowed to Orson Welles hawking wine later in all his obese excellence as the critic sipped his wine in reverence over the rat's gustatory achievements: we will sell no wine before its time. The final fate of the truly extraordinary?

Prior Restraint and Hostile Speech

2007-06-24T16:43:00.001-07:00

George Will came out swinging at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals today, claiming they are magisterially undermining free speech while catering to a carefully orchestrated Left Wing agenda bent on the destruction of all our rights. Some research on this issue turned up a remarkable group of culture warriors all taking on this issue, but from a range of different perspectives.

First, the facts. A group of Christian, African-American public employees in Oakland were offended by the posting of a "Coming Out Day" message on the City forum bulletin boards, as well as via email. So a few months later they created the Good News Employee Association (GNEA) and created a flier that promoted discussing "the natural family, marriage and family values." (paraphrasing roundly) They were told to remove the flier after a lesbian employee complained that the message was homophobic. The administrator decided to do so based on her interpretation of Administrative Instruction 71 (AI-71) which bars "discrimination and/or harassment based on sexual orientation." They were apparently told that they could change the flier to make it inoffensive but they decided to file suit instead. The 9th Circuit, in Memorandum 05-15467, decided their appeal was without merit.

From the Right comes George Will asserting this represents "prior restraint" of free speech about something as innocuous as some disagreement about religious ideas about morality. This guy takes another route, suggesting that the United Nations is behind all of this, working quietly to undermine free speech.

In reality, though, the courts have rightly found that governments have a legitimate interest in preventing hostile speech in workplaces, with the only real question being whether or not certain acts cross the line from merely bad taste to truly offensive. A raving racist can be fired after being warned to stop it or, perhaps, even without warning. This isn't viewpoint discrimination, just restrictions that are designed to get the business or agency aligned with the goals of getting work done.

So we can ask several questions, here.

First, was the GNEA flier symmetrical with the Coming Out Day flier vis-a-vis hostile speech? I think not. The GNEA flier was implying that homosexuality is unnatural while the Coming Out Day flier was not implying anything about Christians, Jews, Republicans, mice, lampposts or aviators--at least not according to 05-15467 and all of the other resources I can find.

Next, could the GNEA employees legitimately complain that the Coming Out Day flier was singling them out for discrimination under AI-71? It doesn't appear so. By promoting homosexuality, the authors of the flier were not denigrating GNEA employees. Thus, they have no specific claim against the Coming Out Day flier.

Finally, did the act of implying that homosexuality is unnatural cross the line of hostility? Just barely to my mind. Implication is not the same as direct hostility. There was a complaint against it, however, and an attempt to get GNEA to modify the flier. The fact of a complaint means that the administrator needed to evaluate his or her obligations under AI-71.

What might have happened if the Oakland government had chosen to side with GNEA and told the lesbian employee that they consider such a flier only modestly and indirectly offensive? Under those circumstances, they might have faced a lawsuit that the civil rights of the lesbian employee were violated by a hostile workplace. Suddenly the free speech issues get transferred to a question of whether the administrators allowed a hostile workplace and what remedy is appropriate if they did? So we would get a substitution of "post hoc litigation" for Will's "prior restraint." That's largely the way that sexual harassment is handled these days, creating an industry of trial attorneys who specialize in the topic.

George Will suggests that the Supremes will take and overrule the 9th Circuit because they are so terrifically out of touch with reality. I don't think so. Instead, I think the Supremes will affirm the decision and stay out of the fray, supporting the notion that judgment was used by the administrator, and that judgment was not out-of-line with existing jurisprudence or common sense.

Alternative History and Blue Moons

2007-06-16T16:02:00.000-07:00

Sipping deeply into a Blue Moon draft with a slice of orange tilted over the lip at lunch today, I found myself wondering over alternative histories. The restaurant overlooks a small harbor and, as we ate, small boats and wet bikes cruised in and out, the crews waving to the shore as a band tested the drums at a yacht club across the inlet, tuning up for a ball tonight under the stars.

What if the Twin Towers had not collapsed from the plane hits of 9/11? What if only a few hundred people had been killed? A hundred per plane and the occupants of a few floors in each building.

The doctrine of proportionate response might have taken precedence over the urge for a massive military response. Moreover, the political momentum established by Afghanistan may not have been enough to sustain the invasion of Iraq. The Clinton administration's use of cruise missiles in Afghanistan and Africa following terrorist attacks under his watch was certainly one model that was available, but was deemed insufficient after 9/11. The use of the Northern Alliance as a proxy force supported by US air power and special forces was the chosen path forward, relieving us from the logistical difficulties of access to the land-locked Afghanistan for a full-scale invasion.

Still, a lighter-yet force presence might have been the primary option given 300 deaths at 9/11, and given continued intransigence by the Taliban leadership, but I think the outcome would still have been about the same. But given a lower international and domestic political will for the Iraq invasion, might UBL have been captured in Afghanistan? Perhaps, but only if he made a mistake of hubris or was betrayed. The option of hiding in Pakistan was too easy given the largely un-patrolable border and supportive political sentiment.

By not invading Iraq, however, we would have maintained the moral sympathy of the European nations, and would have increasingly been well-regarded in the Muslim world if sufficient NATO assets could have stabilized and rebuilt (well, built at any rate, considering the state of Afghanistan's infrastructure and institutions) the country.

Meanwhile, back in Baghdad, Saddam would have kept up his tyrannical but impotent realm. The strongest argument I have heard about the impact of the US invasion of Iraq, however, is that it was the decisive factor in causing Saudi Arabia to begin its own hard fight internally against support for terrorists, perhaps because they realized that failure to do so transformed them into a vulnerable terrorist-supporting regime. The same might be said for Libya, though it is no more plausible to argue that sufficient pressure could not have been applied to them based on the Afghanistan outcome than it is to believe that breaking the back of the Hussein regime in a week was the turning point in their attitude towards terrorist support.

The Blue Moon was light perfection, though, with just that hint of sweet orange to counteract the spices in my chicken salad.

Implausibility and Semantic Possibility

2007-06-13T10:40:00.000-07:00

Academics can be so amusing. I'm reading a paper on machine learning late last night called "Hierarchical Topic Models and the Nested Chinese Restaurant Process" and I stop dead at the following sentence:

Suppose that there are an infinite number of infinite-table Chinese restaurants in a city.

Yes, and further suppose:

...that the Dim Sum cart could move at light speed...
...that the Szechuan sauce was infinitely hot...
...that Mr. Ying could only sit to the left of any member of the Yuan family...
...that you could get take-away delivered after 10PM...

It all goes to show the remarkable creativity of language. Quoting Pynchon: A screaming comes across the sky.

Anti-theism and Chaucerian Frauds

2007-06-10T21:45:00.000-07:00

I've been debating with myself on the potential merits of a book that would serve as a kind of anti-theist manifesto for a new generation. The book I'm envisioning would be Chris Hitchen's god is not Great combined with elements of Dennett and Dawkins, but refracted through a fictional prism that places the arguments into the context of a dialog between a young man and a fading old televangelist.

The televangelist reflects on his life and his manipulation of his flocks while leading the youth in an intellectual journey through his most cherished beliefs, ultimately arriving at a conclusion of unbelief, and how he is now a scholar of scientific and rational ideas. As the ideas unfold, the young man challenges many of the elder's presumptions based on his own belief, but his skepticism begins to grow as the discussion grows.

I was particularly struck by Hitchens describing Jerry Falwell as a "Chaucerian fraud" during an interview shortly after Falwell's death, and that there is a poverty of fiction that presents fairly basic ideas about skepticism and faith for consumption by young people. Yet there is no shortage of religious tracts that present ideas of faith in simple, easily consumed tidbits, including the infamous Jack Chick tracts.

Many questions remain, though, including whether cartoons and/or verse are the best approaches, much less whether I have the chops to make it happen.

I always read this sort of thing with a smile that even in the 14th century wits were far quicker than it often seems today:

For smalle tithes, and small offering,
He made the people piteously to sing;
For ere the bishop caught them with his crook,
They weren in the archedeacon's book;
Then had he, through his jurisdiction,
Power to do on them correction.

Gender, Morality and Legal Divergence

2007-06-01T18:57:00.000-07:00

This amounts to an exploration of the complexity of my moral failures.

A 35-year-old woman some miles to the south of here, the wife of a cop and mother herself, got wild and crazy one night, plied several boys with alcohol and had sex with two of them. Not much would have happened if the boys hadn't rolled their vehicle in a drunken stupor later that night.

Now she faces 300 days in jail and is very apologetic after pleading guilty. Her husband divorced her 4 days after her arrest, as well.

But the interesting fact is that some blogger said what most males who ever went through puberty were thinking, somewhere in the back of their minds: "I know when I was 16 I would have done a 35-year-old hot mom." And I would have, too, though I might have freaked out a bit and ran away, too.

But wouldn't we be less sympathetic with a 35-year-old male "molesting" a 15-year-old girl?

In other words, there is a certain asymmetry to sexual desire that emerges at puberty, and that doesn't quite accord with California or US law. Should the fact of the desire and potential lack thereof has an innate asymmetry influence the formulation of law? I don't think so, and do believe that she should be punished for her lousy choices. But did she do less harm to those horny teen boys than we would accord to a female victim in the same sensational position? Or how about a male perpetrator of a male victim?

I would guess so because I would guess that the boys got what they wanted at some level. I would also guess that few would assign the same motivations to a 15 or 16-year-old girl in the mirror version of the same scenario. But is that accurate in terms of formulating a moral position outside of the legal formulation?

As it stands, the law makes distinctions based on what might be termed the "least discriminatory factor." In effect, since the age of each victim is in question as a proxy for their rational decision making, the legal protection should be built on the age factor while avoiding the discriminatory consequences of presuming a difference in outlook for a girl, boy, woman or man, and the relative relationship between each.

It is not ideal, but is simple enough to provide sufficient guidance. Still, I can't escape the general feeling that those boys were harmed more by the consequences of alcohol and driving than her molestation. Is it a flaw of being too familiar with the robustness of my own psyche in my teen years? Maybe, but I doubt I could be convinced I would have been harmed in any particular way by similar circumstances at that tender age, yet would not ascribe the same robustness to girls.

Memorials and Democracy

2007-05-28T16:00:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day seems to have turned into the kind of sickening mix of emotional pabulum and commercialism that has infected the entire spectrum of American holidays. And this tendency colludes with the divisive red-blue rhetoric to enhance the polarization of opinion on the ongoing war effort.

Here's what I mean.

Nowhere do we see the troops and the fallen being honored for their role as part of the system of American democracy. Nowhere do authors write that what they died for was the ideal of democratic, civilian and political control of the military. Rarely do authors state first and foremost that it is precisely the political indecision of Washington over unpopular and arguably unjust wars that is the first value for which they fight.

The worst system of governance...except for all the others, indeed.

Instead, we get a kind of deadening of the central questions of why public service matters by a continuous stream of emotionally leaden appeals to support the troops. At least they could put Samuel Barber's Adagio in the background now and again to really get the tears rolling. The individual sacrifice stories are important, don't get me wrong, but they need to be tempered by more than an occasional drumbeat that the role of military might is to protect us and our way of life, especially when there are so few clear examples of whether that role could be said to have fulfilled the claim.

The US military is a projection of democratic will, imperfect and occasionally driven more by triumphalist idealizations than clarity of forethought. And it is that political element of civics machinery that needs to be remembered around those graves on days like this. Otherwise, we are just praising a military ethos that is only important because it is ours. I prefer to find deeper moral justification for their sacrifice and loss.

Arguments and Video Games

2007-05-24T09:16:00.001-07:00

James Fallows, in this month's Atlantic Monthly, mentioned a new company out of Australia that interests me. The company, AusThink, has a product called Reason!Able that is designed to assist in graphically managing arguments. It is based on the company principal's background in philosophy and cognitive science, and has been under development at University of Melbourne for several years.

The technology is remarkably simple, providing a graphical tree view of premises, objections to those premises and supporting reasoning for the premises. While it really does little more than you could achieve with paper and pencil, it has been empirically tested in a university setting. The results show that students who take a critical thinking class using the technology achieve an improvement of 0.8 standard deviations on the California Critical Thinking Skills Test after only one semester. This compares favorably to an improvement of 0.5 SD for students over three years of college without the course!

So they get smarter faster.

I was thinking about this in light of my engagements in the local paper's online forum. The level of coherence in argumentation is astoundingly bad for the most part. The modus operandi is to directly insult those politically opposed to you and use straw man arguments to justify your claims. Another common tactic is generalization of the author's feelings to those of others, even when there is clear variation in opinions on the topic at hand. Among these kinds of authors, I believe the levels of education are not very high and the amount of coherent argument that they have had to engage in with anyone except their educational peers is relatively low.

Yet, I also think many of them have improved over the last several years and have started writing more coherently as they have watched their discussions get publicly skewered. It takes time, though, and I like to think that getting a critical thinking program down to the level of high schools would help improve the overall dialog.

Brainstorming: Could a video game do this kind of thing? How about a video game wherein you argue with people about complex issues like what the mission and goals are of the invading alien species? I will slightly sheepishly admit that I let my son play Halo/Halo2 and that he spent quite a long time trying to understand the motives, goals and underlying theology of the Covenant and Flood, so I think there is a kernel in sophisticated new games. But perhaps the needed unmet component involves puzzles that require verbal analytic capacity (discovery of a written document) to reach a conclusion about next steps?

Startup and Dissemination

2007-05-20T09:48:00.000-07:00

I've been running full-bore these last two weeks, writing commercialization plans and dispatching them to consultants for review, getting servers up and running in skyscrapers in San Jose, and pushing the whole system out for early public consumption. On top of that, I was drawn into the local paper's wonderful world of fora, sparing with those who use "seditious liberal" as a form of punctuation. Name calling is such a great debate tactic. Oh, and I did "Career Day" at my son's school, spending the morning repeating myself. Such is the fate of teachers, as I recall. I had my patter down by the third and final session and, of course, will go back again.

The forum engagements began as a follow-on to my original editorial, now followed up twice in print. The second follow-up calmly attacked the previous one for their anti-evolution stance. I post little notes on these topics, focusing on issues in epistemology and noting that I don't much care what others believe as long as policy provides for freedom of conscience. My unflappability results in the name calling, I suppose. Oh, I was also told to repent. That was expected.

But, more interesting, is the continued sense of support for my main business effort, which I will now reveal to my very limited readership! ofamind.com is an elaboration of my earlier glitta.com platform and is designed as an online prosumer web clippings/tagging/social networking engine for online knowledge workers. I liken it to MySpace crossed with Salesforce for serious researchers. The system integrates with patent search and with citeseer (more sources to come) as well as with other user's content to provide discoveries related to your interests. From a business standpoint, the technology is a channel for personalization and advertising for a select audience (with high earnings) built around science, technology, legal and business research professionals. The early-stage funding came from consulting gigs, but I won a National Science Foundation grant to continue to expand the system and have been team building in an effort to try get a second wave of funding.

Meanwhile, I am hard at work on another government funding opportunity that builds on one component of the Ofamind system: indexable briefings and presentations. Specifically, a subcontractor has a tool for compiling voice together with PowerPoint slideshows, then uploading them for search and dissemination to Ofamind. The new funding opportunity builds off of that capability and expands on the idea that cross-citation of supporting documents and ideas via tagging, content and reference can provide a powerful new way of working on the web and distributing briefings and presentations to a wider audience.

Pools and Editorials

2007-05-13T16:42:00.000-07:00

Well, this last week saw my letter to the editor appear in print. My focus was on the incompatibility of various religious traditions and how strange it seems that people are willing to harm others over those incompatibilities. I addressed it as a letter to the children, suggesting that they should be skeptical of the claims of their parents about a great number of things, but that they should be especially careful about claims about the meaning of poetry.

There were several motivators in positioning it as a letter to children. First, I was able to simplify and operationalize the language in a way that points at the difficulties of treating religious texts as fact. Second, I was following Dennett's lead on the notion that young people need to be made aware that there are those who quite happily (and productively) live without religious belief and are smart, moral and interesting.

The responses in the online forum were very mixed, with the obvious "don't believe this guy" to heartfelt worries that popular culture is so negative an influence that only religion is capable of countering the impact on our children. I responded mellowly to all of the non-accusatory points and seemed to achieve the desired effect of being calm and learned at some level.

Saturday's paper contained the first in-print rebuttal, which focused on the author's own re-integration with organized theism following years of "freethinking". Yes, I avoided the A word in favor of a less-culturally charged term that is more inclusive of agnosticism, vagueness, humanism and rationalism. He was slightly antagonistic, suggesting that freethinking is the realm of liberals and people who believe we came "from pond scum." Sadly, it does reinforce the tendency for highly religious people to use debate tactics that are drawn from the shallower side of the gene pool. But I responded mostly positively in the online forum, describing the difference between "public knowledge" (observation, empiricism, experimentation) and "private knowledge" (revelation, subjective experience, prayer), and managed to avoid my own antagonism by not using the loaded phrase "magical thinking."

In fact, though, as we were heading towards Pyramid for Mother's Day lunch, I started processing the whole experience and we chewed a bit on how to escape the desconstructionist argument that there is nothing particularly favorable about private versus public, rational versus irrational, looking at the history of science. Freud, phrenology, alchemy. They all had their day in the sun as matters for learned discourse. Yet, can we still conclude that progressivism in science, history and culture is bankrupt due to classy arguments about a few failed social sciences? Thermodynamics is not nearly so porous.

I was reading Condi Rice's interview in Atlantic the other day and found myself agreeing with her on this notion of progressive, positive historical change, if not on any of the details or outcomes of our sloppy Iraq invasion and follow-up. The essential details, though, are tied to systems of governance that interfere with the urge to power on the part of individuals. Instead of a "Great Man" theory of history, I see a progressive unfolding of the assertion of individual rights and responsibilities through law that is gradually perfecting the inalienable rights of man. It is easy to be negative about this and decry income inequality or social justice, but the most effective players in government are those who find a creative dialog that is essentially positive in outlook, and who maintain a calm way forward that improves on the respect levels for the other players on the field.

I think I did that in my editorial engagement and follow-up, but time will tell.

Hitchens and Simpatico

2007-05-06T22:12:00.000-07:00

It's odd. I decided to proceed with a defense of rationalism to my local paper. The timing was right based on some other editorial content that has recently found its way into that august publication. I got a call Saturday asking for a backgrounder to supplement the piece and shot off an email containing the requested information.

The day after I sent the letter in, though, I encountered both the Lou Dobbs interview with Chris Hitchens and Chris' spectacular talk at Sewanee University, The Moral Necessity of Atheism:

What's odd is how simpatico this talk is with the core thrust of my editorial. The only real difference is his depiction of religion as a form of mental totalitarianism, but I was amused by his juxtaposition of Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand, much as I recently did.

I was jazzed all weekend by the whole affair, but nevertheless forgot to pick up a copy of his new book.

Debate and Outcomes

2007-04-28T12:00:00.000-07:00

As I wander through Jon Meacham's American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, I found myself wondering (sometimes out loud, my wife reports) what the potential upshot is of the current public dialog involving atheist thinkers like Dawkins, Sam Harris, and (soon enough) Christopher Hitchens. Dawkins has as one of his objectives to actually help people leave religion by showing them that reason and non-religion are better--that non-belief is morally superior to belief. Sam Harris has a kind of spiritual commitment to community and the world as a replacement for supernatural beliefs. Hitchens? I'll have to wait but am certain that it will be a rollicking and lyrical ride.

Now, Dan Dennett began his foray into the lion's den with his discussion with exceptional high schoolers and coining the term "Bright" as a replacement for the vast sea of terms that we use like agnostic, atheist, humanist, rationalist, freethinker and so forth. I consider the term unfortunate because it does cast aspersions on the religious by antonymy: they are "dulls". Dennett has tried to talk around that comparison, but the semantics are now stuck and I doubt the term will gain positive traction as far as his original goal.

Still, I do think there is merit to Dennett's core goal of outreach to young people to build awareness that there is a community of freethinkers. Far too often I suspect that young people turn their vague feelings that there is something just not quite right about the religious folks around them into equally vague religious professions simply to get along with others. Knowing that there is a public dialog and serious discussion gives them the option of thinking freely, of overcoming the stigma associated with public non-belief. That is probably the lasting effect of the public discussion, but it does need to be both sustained and managed at the local level.

It is the local level--grassroots activism--that needs effort to help overcome the tendencies for vague consumerism to be overlain with vague religiosity. Maybe the calls for studying religion in schools would be enough to demystify some of the core issues that drive this trend by showing the historical and modern facts. An even-handed approach would certainly call into question specific supernatural and moral claims by juxtaposing all of the competing ideas in the world. And then kids would start asking deeper questions.

Alpha and Kings

2007-04-23T09:36:00.000-07:00

Brilliant quote of the week made by friend and business adviser, at Pier 39 in San Francisco, while watching the young male sea lions practice king-of-the-float while the alpha male looked skyward in disdain:

me: And isn't that what adults do is compete?

friend: Well, I don't compete anymore. I get others to compete for me.

Ambiguity and Ignorance

2007-04-18T10:29:00.000-07:00

I keep thinking that we may be reaching a point where we declare the end of ambiguity.

When I see a face in a movie that looks familiar but I can't quite place, I go to imdb.com and find the actor in question, then trace back his or her career and typically read their bio as well. This happened recently when watching The Departed with my wife. The slightly implausible, too good-looking state counselor with an MD and a PhD turned out to have been...the archer in the short-lived Roar series. So I keep joking about how she is going to loose a quiver of arrows on her enemies throughout the remainder of the film. I got laughs initially and then had to shut up because I just couldn't let go.

And getting lost in Wikipedia still happens, cross-linking through historical treatises on the lives of scientists or the historical build-up to the Napoleonic Wars. Man, music theory on Wikipedia is amazingly dense; the maintainers of those pages are to be commended. Then there is LinkedIn for monitoring the status of friends and colleagues in the technology business. On the less savory side, I recently discovered a neighbor had a lien put on his house for failure to pay child support in 1993 while looking around the public records section of Santa Clara County. It fits. I never did like him. It seems I only really use Google for coding examples and occasional driving directions any more.

"The end of ambiguity" has a nice ring to it as we move forward into the 21st Century. Looking back, we were amazed at how little we knew or could confirm prior to the internet. We lived behind a veil of ignorance, safe in our cocoons of uncertainty. Conflicts emerged over factual matters that could easily be resolved had the right resources been accessible in a timely manner. Lessons learned were far too often not transmitted to the next generation of business, social and technology leadership, resulting in a massive waste of societal effort and brain power. It was not surprising that the impact of information technology on efficiency was either hard to measure or showed negative returns because technology had yet to provide the kinds of information access scales that lead to reduced ambiguity. Computers were just big calculators and filing cabinets before the internet.

Vannevar Bush's notion of Memex comes to mind. Even in 1945, Vannevar felt researchers were faced with an explosion of information and needed a "memory extender" that would use circuits and microfilm to connect together research papers and ongoing experiments in a given field. Vannevar wanted information discovery and linking, two things that the internet helps with. My own effort builds on the notion of enhanced discovery to support better personalization of information access. By improving personalization, we increase the rate of discovery, decrease ambiguity and, well, better target advertising to individual needs and interests.

Integration is key, though. Why can't I have gotten the bio and filmography of Vera Famiga from the directory on my DVR? Why can't I read about the history and conflicts of Northern California water policy as I browse through my local paper's discussion of watershed levels? Why can't I request a Wikipedia backgrounder from my car as I pause Sirius satellite radio during an NPR news article on the habitats of the Seychelles Islands? And why can't I rediscover those items later from a central collection with a bird's eye view of my own history?

The end of all ambiguity is likely impossible, but we are still doing an impressive job of lifting the veil of ignorance.

Spring and Construction

2007-04-16T09:13:00.000-07:00

Ahh, spring break is over. The little one is back to school and the new DARPA proposal calls are out. And I am at a crossroads as to whether I should bother, but am itching to attack one of the topics because I am certain I could win. One of my new business advisers understands this quite well: do you take the government money and the obligations that it entails to follow-through on the research agenda (commercialization is never directly covered in these grants) or do you focus on the main line of business and the growth model that you have projected?

The DARPA topic is particularly interesting to me because my approach to solving the problem would invoke a psychological model known as "construction-integration" (CI). In CI, when someone is learning something, they are integrating prior knowledge with situational knowledge as they read or study the topic. This is closely allied with the educational model known as constructivism, but has some specific and measurable aspects when applied to textbook learning that takes it out of the softer realm of educational theory.

Specifically, CI has been used to explain some odd results in text comprehension where those who are well-versed in a topic area learn better when given relatively incoherent texts about a related topic. Now I don't mean that the texts are simply gibberish but merely that they are not measurably as "coherent" as other texts. That is, there are fewer linking ideas between paragraphs, more pronominal references are used and there is more of a burden put on the reader to fill in the gaps. Not surprisingly, for those with little understanding of a topic area highly coherent texts improve their ability to learn those new ideas. Machine-based methods can even score coherence fairly well, which is part of the technology used for automatic essay grading methods.

My application of CI and coherence would be applied to a novel domain, however, to fulfill the DARPA needs. The call looks for a realizable system in 3-5 years, which is an astounding timeframe to my mind in this age of internet acceleration and souped-up disintermediation. And if I took it on, I would have to think about it in that kind of timeframe, something that carries with it a bit of cynicism in that you don't want to move too terribly fast lest you make yourself ineligible for future funding by actually bringing a product to market.

Push, pull. Either way, it is better to have an embarrassment of riches than none at all, I suppose.

Kurt and The Asterisk

2007-04-12T09:29:00.000-07:00

Goodbye Kurt Vonnegut. His gentle, amiable writing style stunned me at age 12 and I continued to read everything he wrote up through Bluebeard, I think. He was the soul of humanism and devoted a whole chapter to people he had known in Palm Sunday, cherishing those linkages to the humble and great as justifying his own life. And in Bluebeard, again, the final painting of the protagonist is a visual record of everyone he had in his life, because it is our part in other lives that makes a story.

I thought back a bit having heard of his passing this morning and realized that my first great memory from Vonnegut is from Breakfast of Champions and is suitably juvenile: a crude drawing of an anus as an asterisk (accompanying image stolen). I have no idea what the context was but remember laughing about it for days, secretly snickering at the implausibility of that little drawing appearing in the middle of a "serious" work of fiction. He was laughing, too, when he drew it.

My second memory is a quote that goes something like: I will not participate in massacres, nor will I let my children participate in massacres. It's a good start to a humanist manifesto.

Goodbye, Kurt.

Graphs and Relationships

2007-04-11T09:09:00.000-07:00

Mathematically speaking, graphs are collections of edges and vertexes (nodes). They can be undirected (no arrows) or directed (arrows). Graphs are useful for understanding ideas like connectivity in telecommunications systems, combinatoric relationships in algorithms, and large relationship networks. At IBM Research in the mid-90s, graph connectivity was used to characterize the World Wide Web by noting that there are "hubs" and "authorities" based on linkage patterns. An authority is a page that everyone points to, while a hub is a page that points to many other pages. The Google Pagerank system borrowed the same idea but simplified it a bit to not consider the linkage graph to be a directed graph. While the role of Pagerank in improving Google over their competition is vastly overrated and misunderstood, the approach did have an impact on their success for at least a subset of the queries that they service.

I've been more recently working on another kind of graph called co-citation matrixes in my startup effort. The idea borrows on the analysis of academic research papers that looks at papers that cite or reference other papers. A direct citation is obvious: I put a reference to your paper in my paper. Co-citation analysis looks at the papers that are linked together by both citing another paper. Now, sometimes those co-citations are fairly spurious or backgrounders to fundamental or related ideas. Sometimes though they are directly related to the topic of the paper. The interesting question is how to find the best set of relationships out of the huge relationship matrix.

More to my particular problem, how do you look at a graph built out of combinations of direct references and named entity relationships (people, places, organizations) and simplify it to find significant relationships and linkages? There are some very cool algorithms to do that based on looking at multipath linkages and checking whether the sum of their weights or normalized occurrence counts is greater than the more direct pathways. There are also some similar methods in matrix mathematics that try to fit a "reduced dimensionality graph" onto the existing graph. In other words, if I have 100,000 nodes and their linkages (up to 10^10!) can I create a new matrix that is most similar to the original one but is only based on 200 nodes? The "most similar" requirement constrains the choice of new matrix to somehow maximally represent the data distribution in the original matrix, exposing the most significant patterns of interaction, effectively bottlenecking or distilling the representation down to just the most essential aspects of the observed patterns. Related approaches are rampant in our nervous systems, helping to identify edges in noisy visual fields and isolate novelty in memory.

Another aspect of graph theory that emerges (excuse the preparatory pun) in large relationship graphs has to do with adaptive theory in a way. If you have a group of nodes (say, people) and you create a graph of their business relationships to one another over time, the time evolution of those relationships has some interesting properties. Specifically, small cliques emerge and then tentacles reach out and start joining the cliques together. As the graph grows, there is a point at which a "giant connected component" typically arises. That is, all the nodes become suddenly connected together. What is interesting is that the probability of that component emerging is not linear in the number of edges and nodes, but emerges quite suddenly when the edge/node ratio reaches a certain point.

I like that as a broad example of a transition in self-organization that is not predictable by the parts alone, yet results in a new class of relationships. My work is a bit more prosaic, of course, and involves algorithmic efficiency considerations combined with usability considerations for the relationships I am trying to distill down into their bare essentials, but the depth of the subject still resonates in the background.

Organisms and Startups

2007-04-04T11:59:00.000-07:00

Team building exercises. Remember team building exercises? Trust, subordination of individual egos to the collective, division of effort, coordination. Corporations are like organisms in a way, with the organization thriving through specialization of the parts to execute, execute, execute. Or die. David Sloan Wilson draws sharp parallels between corporations and organisms in Darwin's Cathedral, and notes that in a free market there is real competition for resources, mating and spawning of new companies as people leave to start fresh and subdivisions are created.

I'm 3 months into my seed grant for my startup and it is time to start building my team up from just our three current technologists. It has been surprisingly easy so far, which keeps me from suffering too much under the weight of ambiguity. I snagged an ex-Xerox PARC researcher now a prof at Berkeley who is a perfect fit. I have a Chief Scientist at a video sharing startup who has been informally advising me for several years. He's too busy to be really active, but still stays in touch. In-house counsel at an old employer connected me to an ex-CEO who I am tapping for the business side. He may not be a good fit for the consumer web space, but he knows everyone in Sili Valley from his aerie in Saratoga and will undoubtedly be a tremendous asset. I also got set-up for referrals for the critical attorneys when needed. And soon I will be hitting up old contacts on Sand Hill Road. But not until the timing is right.

Optimism is almost palpable here on the Left Coast, as liquid as the fog banks that push in over the coastal range. But the optimism requires teams, specialization, growth, dynamism. Learning to sublimate the research engineer's heads down inward focus and reach out to build a team is one of the hardest and most rewardingly optimistic things I have ever had to do.

The organism is starting to grow.

Adaptation and Control

2007-04-01T17:39:00.000-07:00

I've been very impressed with David Sloan Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society that I was reading on my D.C. trip. It helped me especially when I missed my flight in Dallas and had to spend the night sleeping in a chair in the C wing of DFW.

D.S. Wilson is noteworthy for his work on group selection theories of religion and morality, and for his combined efforts with Eliot Sober on the topics of altruism and society. Now, group selection is a highly controversial idea in evolutionary theory that claims that groups are subject to natural selection rather than only genes as selected through their individual carriers (organisms). The problem with group selection is that it often requires sacrificial behavior on the part of one individual that exposes that individual to greater risk, and mathematically that results in suicide for a germline because the genes disappear over time. There are some famous solutions to this dilemma like "kin selection" that is used to explain why bees and ants have castes of non-reproducing organisms who are essentially sacrificial. In kin selection, the sacrifice of the workers supports the continuation of their genes through their kin. Similar arguments have been applied to some mammals like naked mole rats, where individuals serve as lookouts for the rest of the group, helping their kin survive.

Wilson's argument, it should be noted, is theoretically opposed by a number of other researchers. Richard Dawkins, for instance, argues that religion is a side-effect of mechanisms that help with learning. Faith and belief arise from what Dan Dennett refers to as an "intentional stance" or the association of intentionality with observed events; dualism and animism are inherently part of our brain, evolved to help us avoid threats, and ultimately take on symbolic status as religious beliefs about the continuity of souls.

Despite the controversy, I have to agree with Wilson's basic critique that there does appear to be adaptive significance for religious beliefs in terms of in-group and out-group relations, significance that is hard to ignore when looking at the flow of history. Religion and related behaviors like nationalistic fervor contain an irrational and emotional series of conceptual patterns that ultimately result in greater benefits for the religious group while countering and combating foreign ideas. Explaining this using memes a la Dawkins doesn't answer the "ultimate" question of the adaptive significance of religious thought.

Most interesting to me is that Wilson's theory supports a cybernetic conceptualization of social control. This has long been my own personal approach to the question of why and religion. Religion provides predictability for the behaviors of others within the group while suppressing transgressions against those expectations. Wilson describes Calvinism's hold on Geneva, Judaism's proscriptions on outbreeding and internal usury, and early Christianity's countering of pagan reactions to plagues as examples of how predicting and helping the in group leads to greater success of the religious tradition compared with the out group. Likewise, the Old Testament call to the extermination of one's (male) enemies and enslavement of their women and children shows how out groups are treated insofar as they do not comport with the will of the in group.

The group is adaptive, whether that adaption arises from group selection mechanism or individual selection mechanism that percolate to the level of the group while preserving traditional genetic arguments operating at the level of ideation about society. And the book is a gem.

Districts and Dali

2007-03-28T17:30:00.000-07:00

So I'm in Washington DC for the entire week, drinking in motherhood and apple pie on topics in valuation, product positioning and the supreme importance of executive teams. I played hooky today, though, and bailed on the afternoon session of the MIT Enterprise Forum.

A quick Metro ride to the Smithsonian exit and I can safely admit to having museum fatigue and seriously painful feet.

Still, the cherry blossoms are in bloom and the weather is just spectacular, so how can I argue with my fate? I've also had some excellent meals: one-eyed tuna steak on Monday, hand-made pizza with jalapenos and anchovies last night, and Thai duck rolls for lunch.

Tomorrow is a long day of meetings, again, however, lasting into the late evening, followed by a quick exit out of Reagan National on Friday.

I should be just over my jetlag as I head back to California.

I love it when business crosses path with science. It always seems so hopeful to me.

Sturm und Strauss

2007-03-22T14:45:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about Jon Mendelson's post on the use of simple, divisive political messaging and the lack of nuance among some of the TV news providers. FOX News and Rush Limbaugh are the most obvious and odious, but I've seen equally stark polemics from the far left of the spectrum where the primary currency seems to be paranoid conspiracy theories and vacuous relativism. The why and how of that messaging is a fascinating topic to me, especially since the tone of those broadcasts and writings either reflects contemporary thinking or drives it.

Stephen Colbert does a brilliant job lampooning this kind of ham-fisted Manichaeanism when he asks questions like: "George W. Bush: great president or the greatest president?" Humor is a powerful force to expose the lunacy of self-fulfilling categories but mostly appeals to the politically cynical. If one only sees politics as laughably mad, then one never embraces politics and just mocks from the sidelines. Still, it adds warmth and color to the Sturm und Drang of modern American politics.

But the numbers suggest that denaturing the influence of newsertainment (just made that up) will not be easy. I constantly chat with well-meaning and nice folks who have whole quivers of talking points derived from FOX: "liberals hate America", "there is no separation of church and state", "the homosexual agenda", "culture of life", etc. Newsertainment thrives because it is mostly entertainment by eloquent and engaging personalities who package ideas as starkly as possible to make it all fun and easy to swallow.

At the same time, there may be a slightly more devilish consequence that fulfills the neoconservative Straussian notion that sometimes the body politic needs to be told noble lies for its own good. Most neocons actually deny that such elitist and Platonic notions color their agendas, but do assert a kind of triumphalism associated with freedom and democracy that is so simplistic as to effectively be an untruth. I would have loved American foreign policy to have found a way to oppose communism while not supporting dictatorial regimes back in the day, but we have the history we created and must live with it and the dark background it provides to all modern foreign policy. Wrapping foreign adventurism in triumphal declarations doesn't change the realities on the ground.

It's odd, Plato and Strauss just reminded me of Ayn Rand in their belief that categorical definitions should be shaped by hopes--celebratory--rather than mired in naturalism. Did she call it Romantic Realism? All three have a tendency towards elitism, as well, although Objectivists may quibble over that in Randian apologetics. But Rand at least would have been opposed to lies and simple dichotomies, I think, and much more inclined to challenge the common man and woman to do better at understanding the depth of issues in formulating his or her opinion. Anything else would have stunk of mental slavery.

But even if the impact of 24/7 newsertainment turns nice folks into partial zombies, it is also pervasive and invasive enough that it spreads moral empathy more rapidly than at any point in history. Abu Ghraib, murders and rapes by soldiers, torture debates, civilian casualties, the fates of dogs in Iraq are all seen, projected and packaged to appeal to our moral outrage. When we see horror, we agree that our men and women should not be doing it. We have a need to see ourselves as civilized and fair in the face of horror and voices like Ann Coulter become increasingly marginalized as they struggle to convince us otherwise. And that aspect of newsertainment doesn't bother me so much, though I still prefer McNeil-Lehrer.

Sudoku and Universal Selection

2007-03-19T09:14:00.000-07:00

Anticipating the future and managing risk is an essential aspect of human endeavors and is a core activity for biological organisms. Internally, the same dilemma arises with immune systems trying to manage the constant flux of parasitic organisms that strive to use our energy for personal gain. Because the threats are constant and changing, an organism needs a universal toolkit for solving problems in both the external and internal environments.

I had never done a Sudoku puzzle before about two years back, and only recently tried them in earnest. They are an interesting mental exercise that combines well with other activities like watching TV (an activity I also recently succumbed to after getting an HD DVR). My Sudoku strategies that I have developed involve several levels of activities. First, an almost gestalt-like visual scanning for same number distributions in vertical and horizontal patterns. Next, each of these is checked with greater attention to look for possible fill-ins of missing information. Vertical and horizontal fill-ins are a next step, along with block fill-ins. But then something interesting happens with hard or very hard Sudoku: they become unsolvable without guessing. Guessing is not actually needed, really, since one could just go through every possible combination, looking for inconsistencies down the search tree of available patterns, but only computers have the ability to do that effectively. Instead, I look for possitions that might yield progress and have only two disputed positions (three sometimes for mega hard puzzles), and guess. Then I try to carry through the implications of that guess and check for failures. I write the guesses in the upper right-hand corner of the boxes and circle the initial guess. I then carry forward the implied results, also writing them in the upper right of the boxes. Sometimes this goes two-deep, with the need for a second round of guessing, which I write in the upper left corner. If an inconsistency emerges, I can erase the set of guesses back to the initial two and rearrange and try again. This is essentially depth first search but using a semi-random initial selection. The actually fill-ins are truly random, but the choice of location to try is based on vague ideas of coverage (how many rows, columns or blocks can I complete or progress on by trying these values?)

Now, the ability to complete Sudoku doesn't seem to have any particular survival value relative to primitive human survival. It doesn't help throw rocks at game or understand the lay of the land. So it must be a side-effect of a generalized ability to solve problems that utilizes search, elimination and selectionist principles. The ability to think about the implications of any move only goes about two configurations deep for me without the extended notation of writing them down. I'm sure others can do better, but that doesn't change the basic mental activities of randomness combined with search.

A variation on this theme struck me years back when reading Gary Cziko's excellent Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution. I actually used a similar type of word problem to argue that universal selection ideas added very little to the explanation of the problem solution because the random component could be replaced with brute force search without any change in the efficiency of the search strategy (other than the gestalt initial choice). I think that misses the point, however, in that I really do make a choice randomly about the assignment, whereas a computer search algorithm would make that choice according to whatever programming it had been given (assign the numbers to the squares lowest to highest; assign the numbers randomly; assign the numbers according to a reading of the I Ching). My programming, if you will, has me choose randomness as the preferred strategy because I see the other strategies as irrelevant to solving the problem and therefore use the easiest method of guessing. When uncertain, guess the answer! I seem to remember this strategy in differential equations: look at the form of the problem, guess the answer, work out the constant.

Parker and Principles

2007-03-14T10:52:00.000-07:00

My local paper recommended a reading of Parker v. District of Columbia to get an understanding of this controversial decision that will likely head to the Supreme Court. Of course, I took their advice.

I have argued previously in an extended editorial to the same paper that American morality is not derived from religious sources but is driven by the interplay of largely secular notions of principles and laws. The former are partly indescribable and governed by changing semantics over time: freedom, liberty, fairness. All of these are mostly unrelated to religious convictions except in very strained cherry picking of religious texts. The Abrahamic religions are notorious in their historically xenophobic tribalism, for instance, though Confucianism provides a more direct effort to provide a philosophical construction of government and governance. So exegisis, omission and liberal readings become the critical analytical tools to forming justifications for morality when using ancient religious texts as a basis.

But language is imperfect and something seemingly as simple as determining the meaning of Article II of the US Bill of Rights takes on some of the same character, though with a remarkably analytical focus. Parker v. DC is one of those cases. Here's the text of Article II:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

In Parker v. DC, the meaning of Militia, State, and Arms are all debated, invoking common parlance and historical context. DC even claims (and is supported by the dissent) that DC is not a "State" under the terms of the Constitution and that the rights and liberties guaranteed therein don't really apply to territories or special federal districts. Another aspect of the analysis of both positions is whether the prefatory clause "A well regulated Militia" constrains the remaining language. I'm amused by both sides on this, most especially because I once argued (derived from Justice Stevens, I think), that in the 1st Amendment, the establishment clause takes precedence over the free exercise clause because it arrives earlier in the sentence.

Minutiae is minutiae no matter which side you come down on, but it is sad that the Bill of Rights is hostage to the embalmed critical analysis of highly ambiguous language in short pithy statements. I tend to support readings of the Constitution that provide for the freedom principle first and foremost, but that then supports the fairness principle in that there are no additional rights extended by implication. So I agree with the majority opinion that the individual's right to own firearms was intended (or ought to have been intended in any case) by the Framers. But that right can be regulated under some circumstances, with the decision criteria built on a fairness principle (does the regulation provide for the fair access to said firearms for the historically-motivated purposes of self-defense, hunting and providing a militia?) This is identical to my position on 1st Amendment religion tests: freedom of exercise is not encroached by legislation that fairly (was not formulated to restrict a religious group from their practice) serves a criminal legal function (protecting the right of Laotians to club dogs to death for good luck does not override our right to legislate against animal cruelty). This latter position actually flies in the face of recent 1st Supreme Court decisions, but they were, in that case, operating not just on the issue of the 1st, but on additional legislation that modified the interpretation of the 1st to, in my opinion, distort the fairness principle.

But the broader question for me is whether it is possible to reduce the interpretive conundrums that have resulted in these snarled roots? Certainly it would have better served our present purposes to have had the 2nd written like:

"An individual has the right to keep and use light firearms like rifles and pistols, for hunting and to protect themselves, their homes and property from violation and tyranny. Congress and the States shall have the power to create and regulate militias, to regulate hunting, and shall have the power to limit access to, possession of and use of other dangerous weapons and devices that constitute a threat to the common good."

We can't anticipate how a reading of this will change in another 200 years, but we could be better suited by it for the next bit--say, 50 years. Anyone up for an Amendment?

Categories and Biases

2007-03-12T09:55:00.000-07:00

Hot on the heels of the "Darwin's God" extended article (hrmmph, only available via Times Select now), New York Times scores again with a great article on neuroimaging, ethics, law and punishment (here).

I was struck by the discussion of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) being used to try to tease out how racism operates psychologically, especially when combined with startle response tests. The findings show that whites shown unfamiliar black faces have higher flight-or-flight if they also show evidence of bias on the IAT. The bias disappears for familiar black faces (MLK Jr., etc.), however. These biases work the other way, too, with African Americans showing bias towards white faces. The focus of the article is on whether that racial bias may be used in the future to change the way juries are selected, but I think it points more towards an understanding of how our brains are pre-wired to form generalizations and stereotypes as placeholders in our mental models. For white kids from the suburbs who have or have had limited contact with African Americans, for instance, there is a default xenophobia and nervous response to black faces.

An anecdote from the summer of 1998 when I was in Hiroshima, Japan: I was there for almost a month working with a professor at a local university on a machine translation project. Almost every morning at dawn, I would go running through the calm streets, down along the canals, then back to the city center to my hotel. I found very quickly that in the canal area, elders would gather for Tai Chi as the sun came up and, when a 6'2" Anglo man came running around a corner, would panic, stop in their tracks and sometimes emit little shrieks of fear. I learned to stick to the main drags and avoid those exercise zones.

Faces are very significant again, because face detection and recognition plays such a critical role, but the article does show that there is plasticity in the xenophobia--the categories aren't fixed nor is the level of response to them. If Denzel Washington doesn't elicit a strong response, it means that the category formation apparatus is biological, but the categories are learned through exposure or lack of exposure. If we are hard-wired to identify and fear groups of "others", it is also possible to displace or override that categorization mechanism by not finding any groups to assign to those categories.

The acquisition of irregular verbs during language learning has some similar properties. Irregular verbs are like run, running, ran. The past tense is not formed by the common suffix rule "add -ed" in this case, making it irregular. For children, irregular verb learning has a startling "U" shaped curve. On first exposure to an irregular verb, they just rote memorize the past tense and then use it correctly for a while. Then, over time, their performance tends to degrade as they "discover" rules like "-ed" and start to overapply them. Finally, they learn the limits of productive morphological rules and become very capable in the combination of irregular forms and regular rules. Thus, a "U" shaped curve when measuring the correct use of verbs, with initial high quality, followed by a period of incorrect usages, then finally correct use once again.

If category formation for group psychology, biases and xenophobia is largely similar to the example of verb acquisition, we should see a reduction in those biases over time with exposure to positive or non-threatening exemplars. This may be the lasting legacy of school integration and busing--more so than overcoming deficits in the capabilities of minority schools--in reducing the immediate and fearful association of skin color with otherness. Similar effects apply to the social acceptance of woman's roles and homosexuality, both of which have become gradually more accepted over time as exemplars have become increasingly common due to television.

Selective Memory and Chunking

2007-03-08T09:50:00.000-08:00

A problem that I have worked on for around 15 years involves trying to tease apart how to create optimal mental models. Now, when I say optimal I mean models that are in some sense the best at predicting the class of a signal given a learned history of signals. The best in some sense may not, however, be perfect because there may not have been enough information to formulate a perfect model that is infallible, especially when some of signals may have been underrepresented in the learned history.

My interest in this topic arises from my interest in evolutionary optimization. The generalized intelligence of human beings is both an incremental improvement over other animals and a remarkably new phenomenon, especially when combined with language and cultural transmission of lessons learned. I assume our model-making capabilities are highly optimized to use information effectively, although there are clear biases that influence the default modes that our mental models grow and change. Examples of these biases arise all the time, like in our highly productive attempts to find human faces and forms in shadows. This illustrates a strong bias that likely had evolutionary significance in helping us escape threats; it's better to run away or be prepared for a fight than to rule out a few false positives on the threat radar. The worst you experience is mild embarrassment compared with death.

The problem of optimal learning of models is nevertheless interesting because it points a way towards understanding how information can be used for prediction even if biases are mixed in due to extrinsic factors like threats, and the topic I have studied involves language learning. Here's the interesting tidbit that led me to investigate this topic: if you create a sequence of letters that look like a cryptoquip but are created by a simple set of probabilistic equations, people can study them and then tell whether other, similar sequences came from the same equations or not. In other words, we can learn arbitrary patterns of symbols that are essentially meaningless. How is this interesting? Well, sound sequences for young children have only a bit more context than that, a bit of pointing and smiling and frowning and what not. So it is safe to assume that a general capability for learning patterns is likely related to the same machinery that children use during language acquisition. Moreover, it seems likely that it is related to general pattern learning processes.

In the original experiment, the question that arose was whether the people were learning based only on repetitious pairs of symbols or whether larger "chunks" of symbols figured into their reasoning. The experiment was repeated with a careful balancing of "pairwise frequencies" to demonstrate that larger chunks must be involved in the learning process. So we appear to create a mental model that involves inferring that some chunks are useful but others are not, and then comparing those chunks to new sequences to see whether the new sequence is a good match or not. But which chunks do we choose? And is there an optimal way to acquire chunks such that we predict well?

For the second question, we can see the bounds of the problem if we acquired every chunk of every length and held them in our mind to compare with the new sequence. We could then count the number of chunk matches and called them a match if we had enough. But what is that threshold to make a judgment? And, besides, we don't have enough short term memory to keep all those chunks in mind, since these are arbitrary symbol sequences like XVMTMVXQT... So maybe we look for large chunks that have similar patterns in different positions, or symmetries, and hold only those chunks in our mind? That seems more likely, but we know that it can't be merely due to pairwise symbol frequencies, since people still can perform the task when those frequencies are balanced.

My solution, which was partially derivative of another model used for phrase acquisition, is to create a "lexicon" of symbol pairs initially, then create a new level by combining pairs together (or pairs with singletons), but then throwing away combinations that do not increase the predictive capability of the system as a whole. This criteria, known variously as Minimum Description Length or Minimum Message Length, considers the expense of adding elements to the lexicon as trading off with the predictive value of the element. A combined element may be slightly useful, but it also may cost too much to continue to represent it in the lexicon, and therefore should be thrown away. Using this approach, some notion of optimal prediction can be achieved given a finite set of learning examples.

But here is the rub. Using a bottom-up combination approach means that it is possible that you won't ever find the best combination of chunks because the chunks repeat with a certain distance between them, and the symbols in that separating area vary. Combination doesn't suffice under those terms, so you need the ability to semi-randomly and experimentally vary elements of the lexicon and check whether those mini-experiments improve the model. This is where we can propose a selectionist description for optimization that builds on the basic combination approach by adding a generate-and-test style approach to thinking! The end result is a greater likelihood that the resulting model will outperform other models, while requiring limited additional commitment of working memory.

Teleonomy and the Why of the Y

2007-03-05T10:45:00.000-08:00

I was reading Dan Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon this weekend and came across his use of the phrase free-floating rationale to describe the automatic discovery of solutions to fitness problems using evolutionary search. I think Norbert Wiener coined the term "teleonomy" to describe the same phenomenon. Dennett is very much up on the topic, so I'm surprised that he didn't cross-reference Wiener's rather nice term?

In related matters, Dennett references the notion that parasitism may be the driver for sex, originating with John Maynard Smith in "parental investment theory." The problem is that mixing one's genes together with another's needs explanation: why is sexual recombination apparently better than asexual? After all, in the latter the genes are faithfully copied without the threat of being coupled with some broken alleles that could lead to the end of the genetic lineage. The genetic mixing might be most important for immune response in (part of) Smith's reasoning, and the variability of immune response may be adequate to offset the costs of mixing.

Interesting, but there is another oddity. In mammalian males, our 23rd chromosome doesn't have backups for broken alleles (the "Y" chromosome). It turns out that my foster father asked the "why" question in the early 90s concerning Y chromosomes. The Why of the Y? Without a backup, genetic defects will build-up faster in males than in females. These "sex linked defects" reduce the robustness of males in comparison to females and, when combined with agressiveness and the physiological consequences of the hormones that drive aggressiveness, result in short, angry lives. So my foster father reasoned that the Y is a mechanism for increasing the exposure of defects under competition, driving deleterious mutations out of the population at a faster rate than if males did not have a Y. This is somewhat controversial, to say the least, because it suggests a meta-evolutionary or group selection-like mechanism, but it does provide a Why for the Y where few have asked the question before.

Mercy and Email

2007-02-25T10:41:00.000-08:00

Cruelty has a human heart

And jealousy a human face,

Terror the human form divine,

And secrecy the human dress.
William Blake, A Divine Image

George Will's column today is celebratory of Clint Eastwood's "Letters from Iwo Jima" making it to The Academy Awards because it serves as an example of how much our perspective has changed about enemies in wartime. He contrasts the portrayal to the historical backdrop of anti-Japanese sentiment during World War II, quoting Admiral Bull Halsey's billboard at a base that excoriated troops to "Kill Japs, Kill Japs, Kill More Japs."

The topic of moral drift in America, Europe, Australia and many other countries is fascinating to me because there does seem to be a movement towards increasing sensitivity to human suffering, increasing belief in the universality of human rights, and an impressive improvement in the very language we use to talk about other people. Even among the poorly educated with whom I occasionally have contact, outright racism or homophobia is hedged very carefully into neutered statements about "they don't respect life like we do" or "I just can't stand the thought of two men kissing." I haven't heard the "N word" used in 20 years.

I mentioned previously that increased education and communications likely play a part in this effect, but I would like to refine that suggestion a bit based on research about how email flame wars erupt. Flame wars often arise, it seems, due to the lack of verbal and facial cues that we use in phone and face-to-face conversations. The rate of misinterpretation for email is as high as 50% according to some research. Not surprising, since communication via textual symbols is a side-effect of general communications capabilities that we assume helped with face-to-face information exchange and social interaction.

I think a similar phenomena is at work in terms of the general moral Zeitgeist. Even if evolution has tuned us to believe out-group should be less worthy of rights and opportunities than in-group, I think the rise of mass communications and visual presentations of other cultures that show our common humanity essentially converts xenophobia into acceptance by providing direct facial evidence of the out-group's similarity to us. In 1945, when incendiary bombing of Tokyo began, the amount of knowledge and understanding of Japanese culture in America was virtually nil. The Middle East and Islam had the same quality prior to the first Gulf War. But, as our understanding grows about the common humanity, we find it harder and harder to dehumanize. And faces may be the key.

Here's the parallel verse from Blake:

For Mercy has a human heart,

Pity a human face,

And Love, the human form divine,

And Peace, the human dress.
William Blake, The Divine Image

Chimps and Spears

2007-02-23T13:34:00.000-08:00

From Washington Post via SF Chron:

Chimps make wood spears, kill smaller animals for food

Females described as problem-solvers in primate culture

Rick Weiss, Washington Post

Friday, February 23, 2007

Chimpanzees living in the West African savannah have been observed fashioning spears from sticks and using the handcrafted tools to hunt small mammals -- the first routine production of deadly weapons ever seen in nonhuman animals.

The multistep spearmaking practice, documented by researchers in Senegal who spent years gaining the chimpanzees' trust, adds credence to the idea that human forebears fashioned similar tools millions of years ago.

The landmark observation also supports the long-debated proposition that females -- the main makers and users of spears among the Senegalese chimps -- tend to be the innovators and creative problem-solvers in primate culture.

Using their hands and teeth, the chimpanzees were repeatedly seen tearing the side branches off long, straight sticks, peeling back the bark and sharpening one end, the researchers report in Thursday's online issue of the journal Current Biology. Then, grasping the weapon in a "power grip," they jabbed into tree-branch hollows where bush babies -- small monkeylike mammals -- sleep during the day.

After stabbing their prey repeatedly, they removed the injured or dead animal and ate it.

"It was really alarming how forceful it was," said lead researcher Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University.

The observations are "stunning," said Craig Stanford, a primatologist and USC anthropology professor. "Really fashioning a weapon to get food -- I'd say that's a first for any nonhuman animal."

Scientists have documented tool use among chimpanzees for several decades, but the tools have been simple and used to extract food rather than to kill for it.

Some chimpanzees slide thin sticks or leaf blades into termite mounds, for example, to fish for the tasty, crawling morsels. Others crumple leaves and use them like sponges to sop drinking water from tree hollows.

But while a few chimpanzees have been observed throwing rocks -- perhaps with the goal of knocking prey unconscious, but perhaps simply as expressions of excitement -- and a few others have been known to swing simple clubs, only people have been known to craft tools expressly to hunt prey.

Pruetz and co-worker Paco Bertolani of the University of Cambridge made the observations near Kedougou in southeastern Senegal. Unlike other chimpanzee sites under study, which are forested, this site is mostly open savannah. That environment is very much like the one in which early humans evolved and is different enough from other sites to expect differences in chimpanzee behaviors.

Pruetz recalled the first time she saw a member of the 35-member troop trimming leaves and side-branches off a branch it had broken off a tree.

"I just knew right away that she was making a tool," Pruetz said, adding that she suspected what it was for, as well.

But in that instance, Pruetz was not able to follow the chimpanzee to see what she did with it.

Eventually, she and Bertolani documented 22 instances of spearmaking and use, two-thirds of them involving females.

In a typical sequence, the animal would discover a deep hollow suitable for bush babies, which are nocturnal and weigh about half a pound. Then the chimp would break off a nearby branch -- on average about 2 feet long, but up to twice that length -- trim it, sharpen it with its teeth, and poke it repeatedly into the hollow at a rate of about one or two jabs per second.

After every few jabs, the chimpanzee would sniff or lick the tip, as though testing to see if it had "caught" anything.

In only one of 22 observations did a chimp get a bush baby. But that is reasonably efficient, Pruetz said, compared to standard chimpanzee hunting practice, which involves chasing a monkey or other prey, grabbing it by the tail and then slamming its head against the ground.

Chimpanzee behavior is widely believed to offer a window on early human behavior, and many researchers have hoped that the animals -- which are humans' closest genetic cousins -- might reveal something about the earliest use of wooden tools.

Many suspect that wooden tools far predate the use of stone tools -- remnants of which have been found going back 21/2 million years. But because wood does not preserve well, the oldest wooden spears ever found are only about 400,000 years old, leaving open the question of when they first came into use.

The discovery that some chimps make wooden weapons today supports the idea that early humans did, too -- perhaps as early as 5 million years ago, Stanford said.

Adrienne Zihlman, a UC Santa Cruz anthropologist, said the work supports other evidence that female chimps are more likely to use tools than males, are more proficient tool users, and are crucial to passing that cultural knowledge to others.

"Females are the teachers," Zihlman said, noting that juvenile chimps in Senegal were repeatedly seen watching their mothers make and hunt with spears.

"They are efficient and innovative, they are problem-solvers, they are curious," Zihlman said of females.

And that makes sense, she said.

"They are pregnant or lactating or carrying a kid for most of their life," she said. "And they're supposed to be running around in the trees chasing prey?"

ABCs and Magical Thinking

2007-02-21T09:55:00.000-08:00

The most effective form of psychotherapy is based on assessing and eliminating irrational thoughts and beliefs. That's right. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy--originally called Rational Therapy or Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy--is effective against depression, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety disorders and bipolar disorder. In some cases, like for OCD, the effectiveness can be stunning with 80% of patients reporting an improvement via cognitive methods.

So how does it work? There is a handy acronym, ABC, that stands for Activating Event, Beliefs, and Consequence, and lays out the basics. At core is the idea that a patient's cognitive model is irrational. Their irrational beliefs lead them to interpret an Activating Event in an irrational manner, leading in turn to negative consequences like cycles of depression or obsessive thoughts. We have all experienced these sorts of problems in our lives. Ever obsess over a boy or girl? But for major depression or OCD or anxiety disorders, the irrational beliefs are fixed and persistent in leading to negative consequences. Cognitive Behavioral methods focus on getting a new map in place by undermining the irrational beliefs to convert the A into a positive outcome for C. Simple as that. No need to discuss your relationship to your parents or anything so elaborately Freudian (unless there are specific beliefs related to them: "I feel like Mother is constantly looking over my shoulder").

Now, what I want to get at here is that the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral methods in undermining irrational beliefs also highlights the general issue of magical thinking--non-scientific attributions of causality.

During grad school I would quite often come up against New Agers because I circulated in an arts community and New Age beliefs are very common in arts communities. Occasionally I would challenge some of the claims, but always in a very gentle and (I thought) kind manner. I remember one example where a friend suggested I should buy these mushrooms that you soak in water. You then drink the gray water they soak in on a daily basis and you get fantastic health, vigor and vim. I had never heard of this mushroom and had no idea whatsoever whether her claims were true or not. I asked her how the mushroom worked and she described a very complicated metaphorical landscape in which the immune system is a fortress and the mushroom helps to build moats around the fort, or something very similar. I mentioned that I tended to think of the immune system as a more fluid battlefield where the enemy is constantly being identified, surrounded and killed. That was all I said, but the reaction was angry, attacking and spiteful. In fact, I think she hung up on me. This happened a few more times during those years, and in each case the person in question was a college-educated artist or humanities major. Most were in grad programs or were in late undergraduate.

I have to add, here, that these kinds of reactions have been paralleled only by the angry responses I have received occasionally from Christians to my self-professed atheism. Some of those Christians have been people very close to me and their vehemence and anger was hurtful. Just like the mushroom incident, however, the responses caught me by surprise. I have rarely challenged anyone's beliefs unless asked directly for my opinion (well, except in newspaper editorials of which I've written some fairly nasty ones on the intelligent design debate and church-state separation) and the topic of religion hardly ever comes up in daily conversation. I certainly never said anyone was stupid or did anything that should provoke an ad hominem attack, yet even gentle philosophizing does seem to have that effect on some.

My 8-year-old son encounters similar problems in school. We cultivate tolerance and understanding in him and he is a remarkably nice kid. We also tell him that he has lots of time to figure out what he wants to believe about religion and try to answer his questions as best we can. He lives in a time of wars and unrest partly partly caused by religious hatred and intolerance, though, and he has a generally negative opinion at the moment. Maybe I shouldn't let him watch the news? But most disturbing is that he is routinely told that he is going to go to hell by kids at school. Now I don't recall that sort of thing coming up when I was in grade school. I just don't think we talked about the topic of religion or that religion was considered more of a private matter. I was always an atheist (well, some New Age thinking in late high school and college crept in) but the topic never came up until much later in life; no one bothered me about it and I didn't bother anyone else. But now it is a regular and hurtful affront to the sensibilities of a charming young mind (I'm biased, I know, but all evidence points to us doing a pretty good job as parents).

So the question that I pose here is where are the separating hyperplanes between magical thinking and dangerous irrationality? Neither really meets clinical psychological criterion unless they result in self-destruction, unlawful behavior, or the holder of those beliefs asks for help. Moreover, much of the time religious belief results in positives for the individual, including strengthened community ties and improved sense of self-worth. It may even boost the immune system. But the barrier is more porous for die hard believers for whom literalism irrationally empowers unlawful or simply mean behavior. Is there a cognitive behavioral therapy that can be applied on a larger scale to help draw down the negative impacts?

Richard Dawkins has recently been proclaiming that teaching children religion from a young age is effectively child abuse because it essentially robs them of their human right to make an informed decision about faith, reason and belief. The perspective is extreme, but it points to the question of how to reduce the negative consequences of extreme irrationality in our societies. One idea that I see applied at my son's elementary school is values and character education that is aimed at reducing bullying and promoting tolerance. There are a series of ideas that are articulated through posters published in the multi-purpose room (nee cafeteria) and library that promote a kind of ABC-like process for assessing the consequences of one's acts on others. It is largely an empathy modeling system, but does have a component of self-assessment to determine why the student thought it was alright to terrorize other students or treat others with disrespect. The approach is not applied to the religion issue, however, and instead the policy appears to be to inform the students that they are in school to learn and have fun, and that religion should be discussed elsewhere. I say "appears to be" because I have only heard it from my own kid's mouth and think he is doing just fine in not responding in kind to the comments of his classmates.

Are these methods enough to inoculate the kids against extremism? Likely not, but developing empathy models early on will likely serve us all in the future.

Speech and The Semi-Sentient Insult

2007-02-17T12:34:00.000-08:00

I picked up a new Windows Vista machine for testing purposes related to my startup recently and found myself trying-out the automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine. Under my the terms of my seed funding, a subcontractor of mine is investigating using ASR to transcribe scientific talks. The transcriptions would then be indexed to make the content searchable in a knowledge management service. I thought I would contribute a bit to their work by getting some qualitative and quantitative understanding of the quality of ASR today. I've also been encountering ASR in more and more places: my car integrates with my Blue Tooth phone and supports voice dialing; my son has an R2D2 toy that has crude ASR.

The quality of the Vista ASR for dictation started off very poor, but I was pleasantly surprised after a small amount of training that I could dictate at around 95% accuracy if I use a very careful "anchorman"-style enunciating patter. That 95% figure was over some challenging technical terminology, too, like "algorithmic information theory" and "computational linguistics". Not bad, but at a normal pace with "ums" and asides thrown in, the accuracy dropped to around 40%, which is essentially unusable. Even worse, my subcontractor reports that trying speaker-independent untrained systems from Dragon/Nuance goes to around 10% accuracy and that the out-of-the-box claims just border on outright lies for Naturally Speaking.

Still, 95% is an impressive technological achievement and the methods used to achieve these results are important enough that I want to mention them and describe a bit how I believe they relate to the topic of this blog.

A language model is a statistical distribution of how phonemes, words, characters, phrases, parts of speech, or any other feature of language occurs in a corpus of text or speech. ASR uses several interacting language models to try to predict what you are saying at any given time. A speaker independent engine has a large, generic language model that is supposed to be flexible enough to accommodate the vagaries of accents and intonation, prosody and pace. A trained system has a generic model with some of the probabilities adjusted by hearing you read some material (hopefully not too much material). When recognition takes place, the system has to take the sound bit after some filtering and try to match it against the most likely word in the language model based not just on the word itself but also on the other words that came before it. So the language model is not just a library of word probabilities, but also of the contexts of word probabilities. And here is where the systems fail: the context analysis is currently too shallow and lacks higher-order corrections from semantic and syntactic sources. Well, that is a bit too egregious of me, since there are some higher-order corrections implicit in the sequences of the temporal language models. It's just that language is so sparse that there is not enough context to encode all of the complex interacting variables that go into a perfect model. It works that way for us, too, since we can easily be made confused by very rare verbal utterances ("furious the fever fled forth from me..."; "what, say again?").

The point here is that with increased computing power and enhanced training there is no reason that ASR can't get to 98% or even 99.9% speaker-independent. I would guess that we need another 10 years to close that gap, but there are no theoretical challenges for most mainstream speaking transcription tasks. And when that happens, there will be a shift in the way that we regard computing machines. Children will grow up expecting voice control over toys, tvs, dolls, video games. They will expect conversational capabilities in their entertainment, and will develop a two-tiered mental model for how to interact with people versus the merely verbally reactive. I am guessing it will become a common way to insult someone by conversing with them like they are among the semi-sentient.

Ancestry and Art

2007-02-16T13:48:00.000-08:00

Does artistry recapitulate phylogeny?

My wife and I got DNA ancestry analysis done for our holiday presents late in 2006. We used dnatribes.com based on some reviews we found combined with price considerations. The reports we got back confirmed a couple of speculations we harbored about our pasts and also revealed some unexpected outcomes.

The method of analysis is based on Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) to amplify specific sequences that are used for forensic DNA analysis. That's right, the 13 specific loci are also used by the FBI and CSI units as a genetic fingerprint for solving crimes. At each loci there are different possible patterns of base pairs, with each pattern that occurs in the wild called an allele. The alleles have numeric codes in the literature and population studies have been done to establish the distributions of allele patterns across different ethnic groups. In fact, you can even download a huge Excel spreadsheet application that contains many of the distributions of allele patterns based on FBI studies and other sources in the forensic DNA literature.

For me, the analysis confirmed a Black Irish model with Tunisian, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian arriving through my Scots-Irish lineage (established through my family tree), and Russian, Norwegian, Flemish and Austrian presumably through my Dutch/Scandinavian side. Note that the comparisons are with "deep ancestry" in the sense that the distribution tables reflect populations that are known to have been somewhat genetically stable, so if your ancestors landed for a generation or two in Copenhagen (like mine) before moving on, you don't get to see the Dutch.

My wife had some more interesting results, with Sub-Saharan African (Equatorial Guinea) coming remarkably high on the list, just under her Polish and Russian. OK, very interesting, and it might be due her long line of Southern slave owners on one side visiting the slave quarters now and again, and then bringing the children up as their own. Or maybe it is just a false positive. Omnipop (the NIST Excel application) also confirmed that her allele pattern looked much like diaspora African American populations, but her mother had her analysis done and showed no signs of the African origin. Since her father is second generation Polish-Lithuanian, it is hard to imagine how African made it into his bloodline, so we are curious about the possibility of a false positive on the African link. Bummer, if so, but it made for some great fun over the holidays.

The picture above is a detail from an artwork I put together back in January. The artwork is an example of generative art relying on the actual short tandem repeating DNA sequences taken from my forensic profile to render the form and structure of a tree-like representation. In addition to the "language of life," I superimposed poetry over the sequence branches derived from Spain and Norway (specifically a poem about Yggdrasil, the World Tree, for the latter).

As I write this, I am awaiting the arrival of the final, framed version. At 60" by 60", the printing and framing process has run to around 4 weeks, now, much longer than the time needed to develop the software, tune it, and finalize the color and poetry contributions. On the negative, I just missed being able to enter it into a juried show, but I will find a venue soon enough.

The Clitoris and Civilization

2007-02-15T13:39:00.000-08:00

The clitoris may be responsible for civilization.

Now hear me out, because I am semi-serious. The clitoris is a very odd aspect of female anatomy because it receives limited stimulation during intercourse, the critical act of procreation and proximal cause for all things evolutionary. In fact, 70% of women never have orgasms during intercourse.

Yet, there it is, capable of arousal and even capable of multiple orgasms. Moreover, there is some evidence that the chances of conception increase when an orgasm does accompany intercourse. There is even a video that shows the cervix moving down into a pool of semen during female orgasm, as if to better help get the semen to the destination.

One theory is that the clitoris is just vestigial. Doubtful, as we can see our cousins the Bonobos using them for all kinds of kinky bonding rituals. Instead, a more compelling idea to me is that the haphazard positioning of the clitoris and the time and effort needed to make intercourse and female orgasms compatible are related to female mate choice making. A male who is likely to listen to the woman's desires--and fulfill them--is also a male who will be more of a partner in terms of the long-term childrearing requirements of these big-brained babies.

If this is the case, then we should have seen evolutionary pressures towards greater degrees of compatibility and lower rates of male aggressiveness over time, and increased mid- to long-term partnering.

All because of the clitoris!

Popes and Reason

2007-02-15T13:01:00.000-08:00

I recently reviewed the Wikipedia article on Pope Benedict's controversial statements on Islam. The Pope's topic was on the relationship between faith and reason, and was apparently mostly targeting the secularity (I use the less-loaded term instead of "secularism") of some societies. It is worth noting, however, that Pope Benedict appears to consider elements of Islam to consider reason as subordinate to the will of God, and that such a consideration is a metaphysical crisis point in terms of any urge to violence that arises out of extremist subpopulations of Islamic societies.

What makes this noteworthy to me is that The Pope seems to support the idea that Christianity and reason are fully compatible, or at least that they are more compatible than Islam and reason. Now I don't want to grab the easy fruit of historical criticism of this perspective, but instead am trying to envision how the Vatican builds compatibility between "reason" and some of their social perspectives like antagonism to contraception. Is it a reasonable position? Or is it one that emerges from a policy choice that is historically and, perhaps, liturgically consistent, but that is at odds with reasoning on public health and safety?

The compatibility of reason and faith must, at some level, involve cherry picking elements of each. The Pope accepts The Big Bang because it offers some metaphorical consistency with Biblical descriptions, but considers principles over public health on procreation-related matters. In these matters, I believe we are seeing the kinds of pragmatism that has made Christianity survive into modernity: syncretize traditional religious elements (from Black Madonnas to Pagan Holidays), become a partner with secular government, focus on social charity, become compatible with reason as necessary.

We can only hope that Pope Benedict is proved wrong by moderate Muslims.

An initial foray...

2007-02-15T11:17:00.000-08:00

I saw a clip of Richard Dawkins on YouTube recently discussing how the Zeitgeist has shifted towards greater and greater respect for human rights in at least the Western World, if not the world as a whole. He led off with some remarkably racist quotes from Abraham Lincoln that reflected the prevailing views of the era, then moved on to describe how carefully the fate of civilians has been managed in the US invasion of Iraq when compared with mass civilian bombings of World War II in London, Dresden and Tokyo.

Things have changed. We have changed.

His point is that that shift happened due to a complex dialog within our societies that gradually has beaten down our prejudices to the point where it would take an extraordinary set of circumstances for us to collectively and unquestioningly engage in acts of appalling cruelty that were accepted even 50 years ago.

Part of the change is due to technology, I think. Global communications systems support the publication and awareness of the actions of governments, corporations and people. Part of the change is also due to the enhanced effectiveness of the press in Open Societies as they publicize events and humanize transgressions. Part of the change is due to increasing education levels and the ability of more people to understand concepts like rights and responsibilities, and to feel empowered by a sense of ownership of their own governments.

I liken this drift to an evolutionary process, but one that has a definite resistance to an overtly selfish genetic analysis because it does seem to be optimizing towards virtuous goals rather than simply supporting the selfish interests of individuals. Or does it?

This blog will be exploring some of the cultural, social, biological, philosophical, theological and personal issues that surround ethics, morals and virtue. I will point out up front that I am a materialist with a poetic side and am not above cheering for ideas that seem interesting but have minimal support in the broader literature. I will also point out that I am an engineer and scientist by training with a special interest in the evolution and simulation of intelligence, which will tend to color my discussion.