Inspiration and The West

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.