Go read Kevin Kelly’s important essay “Speculations on the Future of Science”. In particular, read the sections on “Combinatorial Sweep Exploration”, “Evolutionary Search”, “Multiple Hypothesis Matrix”, “Pattern Augmentation”, “Adaptive Real Time Experiments”, &c.
Now think not merely about science, but engineering as well. Think about what makes one different from the other. Historically, that is.
(Via 3quarksdaily)
The last is a line from what bids fair to be one of the management books of the year. Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense (Harvard Business School Press), by Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, is a compelling tour of management conventional wisdom and why it so often turns out to be unwise, untrue and a stranger to fact - bollocks, in fact. Every potential manager should be made to read it before they are allowed to be in charge of anything, even a whelk stall.
The way it’s done is changing:
WHAT makes a scientific revolution? Thomas Kuhn famously described it as a %u201Cparadigm shift%u201D%u2014the change that takes place when one idea is overtaken by another, usually through the replacement over time of the generation of scientists who adhered to an old idea with another that cleaves to a new one. These revolutions can be triggered by technological breakthroughs, such as the construction of the first telescope (which overthrew the Aristotelian idea that heavenly bodies are perfect and unchanging) and by conceptual breakthroughs such as the invention of calculus (which allowed the laws of motion to be formulated). This week, a group of computer scientists claimed that developments in their subject will trigger a scientific revolution of similar proportions in the next 15 years.
Will the century-old academic scientific culture adapt, or snap? What do those two outcomes mean, exactly?
As seen at Barbara’s Odd Ends:
Ballade of the Book-Hunter
In torrid heats of late July,
In March, beneath the bitter bise,
He book-hunts while the loungers fly—
He book-hunts, though December freeze;
In breeches baggy at the knees,
And heedless of the public jeers,
For these, for these, he hoards his fees—
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs!No dismal stall escapes his eye,
He turns o’er tomes of low degrees,
There soiled romanticists may lie,
Or Restoration comedies;
Each tract that flutters in the breeze
For him is charged with hopes and fears,
In mouldy novels fancy sees
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs.With restless eyes that peer and spy,
Sad eyes that heed not skies nor trees,
In dismal nooks he loves to pry,
Whose motto ever more is Spes!
But ah! the fabled treaure flees;
Grown rarer with the fleeting years,
In rich men’s shelves they take their ease,—
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs!ENVOY
Prince, all the things that tease and please,—
Fame, hope, wealth, kisses, cheers, and tears,
What are they but such toys as these—
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs?— Andrew Lang, in Ballades and Verses Vain.
Visit the R Graph Gallery for ideas on R graphic techniques.
(Via Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.)
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science: Visualization of large datasets:
smoothScatter from geneplotter R package can help a lot in producing more informative and eye candy graphs.
See also the excellent cited paper from Gentleman et al.
This is a step towards an ongoing effort to Clean My Desk. And also to cut back on the frivolous increase in the world’s heat I generate by indiscriminately picking books up at the library and hauling them back here (only to be told they’re overdue without being read). I’m not reviewing; rather, noting interesting articles in the books.
I’ve already had some words, months back, about the ridiculous prices charged by certain Northern European Publishing Clans, and I don’t want you to consider buying these books for an instant. The links to the left are offered more in the spirit of a public shame through literal fact, not an approbation. You could go to Amazon and buy some other crap—some useful crap, if you want. I wouldn’t mind that. Because Amazon would pay me, so I would be less minding that, for the paying. I am not at all about minding paying.
But in general these are books that are for the bibliographic padding of the contributors, not to be read, not even to be referenced physically, but merely to be socked away on some shelf in a basement High Density Storage, and to see the light of day only when some idiot (like me) gets a dose of undirected curiosity.
So: Expensive academic press vanity doorstops = dumb. But: Authors in said books = sometimes very interesting. To kill π birds with one stone, I’ll call out some of the articles and chapters and equations that catch my eye, and briefly discuss them. And offer links to free preprints online, as available.
I’m starting with the fattest. Clear that space off quick.
[I'll add the telegraphic notices as I have time today. These books are due, after all.]
AI 2004: Advances in Artificial Intelligence is one of those catch-all proceedings volumes that is full of this and that. As local Specialist in This and That, I like it. Not all. Here are some contributions that at least caught my eye:
The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of pre singularity mythology: They’re a dim-witted collective of huddling crustaceans. Before their discarnation, before they were uploaded one neuron at a time and injected into cyberspace, they swallowed their food whole, then chewed it in a chitin-lined stomach. This is lousy preparation for dealing with a world full of future-shocked talking anthropoids, a world where you are perpetually assailed by self-modifying spamlets that infiltrate past your firewall and emit a blizzard of cat-food animations starring various alluringly edible small animals. It’s confusing enough to the cats the ads are aimed at, never mind a crusty that’s unclear on the idea of dry land. (Although the concept of a can opener is intuitively obvious to an uploaded Panulirus.)
(Via The author.)
…which I have at one time or another undertaken, or which have otherwise been afflicted upon me by certain forces.
Introduction
For most of the last dozen days—and many of their nights—I have been engaged in untangling the skeins and feeding out the strands of a number of long-postponed assignments. All are admittedly of little innate importance, except for the increasingly shrill insistence of certain patrons who pointedly remind me of their completion at every chance, and whose notion of tardiness—by mutual assent—trumps my notion of importance.
As is often felt in times of such a rigorous attention, whether it is built by choice or need, that part of my mind responsible for the structure of the job has been driven into that state called “flow”. In the middle of a night (like this one, for I write these words at the darkest hour, in the quietest part of the house), it is as if I have spent two weeks driven by the pilot of some river craft, who handles the tiller with a subtle engaged surety while treacherous rapids are traversed. In hindsight, it is no surprise that the crew and passengers—at least those who do not find themselves retching over the sides—should feel relief at once again reaching smooth water. But they should have rested all the length of those rapids (barring retching), on the the minimal surety that the pilot had in his hand during every moment of the trip a way to grant them a controlled and exhilarating doom. If that had been necessary. Which it was not.
It is no matter. Here we are.
As a consequence—or perhaps a symptom—of this greatly increased attention being paid over these last weeks by “the pilot” in the “rapids” of my recent necessary tasks, certain memories have been shaken loose, and brought to light, and held up in comparison to more recent events. These memories are the particulars of some travels I undertook many years ago, motivated by a combination of adventurousness and necessity.
There were several trips. I am on one now, as it happens, and I shall come to that as well. In each case I left for distant strange lands armed with a motley mix of a tourist’s sensibility, a missionary’s zeal, a folklorist’s misapprehensions and an unwarranted trust in others’ tales. As is often the case when one spends long times away from home, the exotic sensibilities of the natives of those lands in all cases began to chafe, and sure as dawn I eventually regretted my surroundings, and pined to depart them.
Thus does lengthy travel end for every traveler, whether tourist or emigré, mendicant or missionary. (That this characteristic disenchantment might affects the visitors to the traveler’s own home, is of vanishing consequence, and never need be considered.)
But as I say, my late immersion in diligence has brought back certain memories of those times past and far away. A concomitant illumination has struck their facets, and ignited in me a sort of thoughtful wonder—much like one feels when the sudden reconsideration of long-ago conversations with an ancient and intimate friend, which after years pass can be re-staged, shows that one was being made an ass of, though at the time one felt the fondest sort of camaraderie.
One scarcely ever reads the abstract of one’s life from within the work itself. Rather it is like the well-known girl with the bears, had she only realized the triune pattern of her adventures when telling the tale to her own grandchildren, and until then simply been focused on the temperature of various foodstuffs, and the condition of her rump upon sitting.
I have made copious notes through the years, and today having consulted many of my old notebooks and diaries I see that my old travel experiences and concerns—the temperature of various foodstuffs, and the condition of my rump—have all along fallen down in a well-partitioned pattern as succinct as that girl’s persistent trinity. Moreover, I have not traveled alone, and even today as I write these words am part-way down a new long road, passenger among young folk of many sorts. When I hear snips and cuts of their tales, I see the same lines there as well.
Yet few of the tourists I have met—nor surely any of the natives of the lands I’ve visited—ever had a notion of what they had conspired to set themselves against, or for: with few exceptions they know only roughly where they are, by virtue of their own unquestioned presence, but never by distinction with what elsewhere may be different. Said “elsewhere” being hard enough to see, having been there; pity the ignorant and untraveled.
I know I must take care. As with any unconfirmable traveler’s tale, my own webs of interpretation are just my own, and any move to pass them on must make them sound like pedantry, or the worst meanderings of a fantasist. I will eschew all pedagoguery and pedantry, and set down the simplest facts and memories uninterpreted.
My memories of travels in those distant lands will be thus a guide, like a pilot’s log, and perhaps will help point out some shoals and reefs along the way.
As my notes are set in order, I will furnish accounts of the following voyages, which have been made (by combination of choice and accident) in my last three decades:
As ever, my goal is to be brief, clear, and factual in all things.
Bill Napoli has to tell you what to do. Don’t ask me just because of this little thing between my legs—ask him. I would much rather defer to his judgement.
(via Brutal Women
Pontification without all the gritty gravitas
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