Tag Archives: conservatism

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  • BOOKTRYST: Amer­i­can Rare Book Trade Ads From 1902

    ‘Where to begin with Charles Car­ring­ton (b. 1867 — d. 1921 of syphilis), who deserves an entire book devoted to his col­or­ful char­ac­ter and career? Of Por­tuguese descent, Car­ring­ton,  born Paul Harry Fer­nandino, was, arguably, the most noto­ri­ous pub­lisher of his gen­er­a­tion. He began in Lon­don. Circa 1893–96 he skipped to Paris; deported from France in 1907, he fled to Brus­sels. In 1912, he returned to Paris, at times Ams­ter­dam. In short, he oper­ated one step ahead of the law. “His­tor­i­cal, Artis­tic, Med­ical, and Anthro­po­log­i­cal Works,” is cer­tainly one way to char­ac­ter­ize the books he pub­lished. Erot­ica, pornog­ra­phy, curiosa, and sex­ol­ogy are other appro­pri­ate descrip­tions. Often, the stated pub­li­ca­tion locale, pub­lisher, and date on his books were false. Many if not most of his books were “for pri­vate sub­scribers only.” He was active as a pub­lisher for twenty-​​six years and pub­lished approx­i­mately 300 books.’

    book­seller bib­lio­ma­nia nanohis­tory characters-​​we-​​have-​​been-​​like

  • The Ongo­ing Vigil of Soft­ware Security

    “Some of the rea­sons that we keep see­ing these types of exploits are that the “bad guys” are much smarter and more deter­mined than we give them credit for, we’re much lazier and more igno­rant than we take respon­si­bil­ity for, and secu­rity is dif­fi­cult to man­age prop­erly. As we become more and more reliant upon soft­ware, it is imper­a­tive that secu­rity be taken more seriously.”

    software-​​development secu­rity advice overview

  • Economist’s View: “The Soci­ol­ogy of Organizations”

    “It often sounds as though Per­row is fault­ing these orga­ni­za­tions for defects that are inher­ent in all large orga­ni­za­tions. But it seems more fair to say that his analy­sis does not iden­tify a gen­eral fea­ture of orga­ni­za­tions that leads to fail­ure in these cases, but rather a sit­u­a­tional fact hav­ing to do with the power of busi­ness to resist reg­u­la­tion and the sus­cep­ti­bil­ity of Con­gress and the Pres­i­dent to polit­i­cal pres­sures that ham­string effec­tive reg­u­la­tory orga­ni­za­tions. Per­row does refer to spe­cific orga­ni­za­tional haz­ards — bad exec­u­tive lead­er­ship, fal­ter­ing morale, inabil­ity to col­lab­o­rate across agen­cies, exces­sively hier­ar­chi­cal archi­tec­ture — but the heart of his argu­ment lies else­where. The key set of prob­lems spi­ral back to the inor­di­nate power that cor­po­ra­tions have in the United States, and the dis­tor­tions they cre­ate in Con­gress and the exec­u­tive branch. … It is specifics of the US polit­i­cal sys­tem rather than gen­eral defects of large orga­ni­za­tions per se that lead to the bad out­comes that Per­row iden­ti­fies. There are strong democ­ra­cies that do a much bet­ter job of reg­u­lat­ing risky indus­tries and plan­ning for dis­as­ters than we do — for exam­ple, France and Ger­many. …
    There isn’t much pub­lic con­cern about these risks, and leg­is­la­tors are there­fore free to ignore them as well. … So where will the polit­i­cal demand for strong reg­u­la­tion come from? Will we need to wait for the bad news we’ve man­aged by good for­tune to have avoided up to this point?”

    public-​​policy infra­struc­ture antebellum-​​America con­ser­vatism

  • Bach­mann, Gaffney, and the GOP’s Anti-​​Muslim Cul­ture of Con­spir­acy — The Daily Beast

    “Ear­lier this month, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-​​TX) appeared on the FOX Busi­ness show Money Rocks to make the case for depriv­ing the chil­dren of immi­grants of their 14th Amend­ment rights. Gohmert claimed that on a recent air­plane trip to the Mid­dle East, one of his trav­el­ing com­pan­ions had struck up a con­ver­sa­tion with a grand­mother who described her family’s involve­ment in a Hamas plot to send preg­nant women to the United States. Gohmert sum­ma­rized the les­son for view­ers this way: “We’re bring­ing them over here on tourist visas, some ille­gally, let­ting them be born here and say­ing, ‘This is an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen. So come back in 20, 25 years when you’re ready to blow us up.’””

    para­noia Repub­li­cans con­ser­vatism conspiracy-​​theories political-​​discourse antebellum-​​America

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  • What if Inter­ac­tiv­ity is the New Pas­siv­ity? Jonathan Sterne /​ McGill Uni­ver­sity | Flow

    “What if all the bad things that media crit­ics have been said about pas­siv­ity for the past cen­tury or two are now equally applic­a­ble to all the demands to inter­act, to par­tic­i­pate? What if inter­ac­tiv­ity is now one of the cen­tral hinges through which power works? In many moments today, the most com­pli­ant ges­ture we can make is to con­sent to inter­act on the terms pre­sented to us by our soft­ware and machines. This pull is espe­cially strong in those com­mer­cial plat­forms that cel­e­brate their own dif­fer­ence from the so-​​called pas­sive media of pre­vi­ous decades, and in the process mon­e­tize their users’ par­tic­i­pa­tion either directly or indi­rectly. What if—from time to time—we chose not to iden­tify with the inter­ac­tive promise of new media plat­forms or for that mat­ter new media art? What if, when the new media savants lam­bast so-​​called old media audi­ences as denizens of pas­siv­ity and ide­ol­ogy, we say, “yes, that’s me”?”

    a-​​bit-​​too-​​theoryish cultural-​​norms ingroup-​​outgroup new-​​media

  • How Can Her­bert Spencer’s 1892 Revi­sions to his Social Sta­t­ics Help Us Under­stand Con­ser­v­a­tive Oppo­si­tion to the Indi­vid­ual Man­date? | Rortybomb

    “But I think it’s clear what his real objec­tion was: uni­ver­sal suf­frage has the poten­tial to advance social­is­tic causes, inter­fer­ing with his laissez-​​faire project. From his auto­bi­og­ra­phy: “Another exten­sion of the fran­chise since made…will inevitably be fol­lowed by a still more rapid growth of social­is­tic leg­is­la­tion.” When he real­ized women’s equal­ity could poten­tially inter­fere with laissez-​​faire eco­nom­ics, it was time for women’s equal­ity to get cut from his over­all the­ory of a bet­ter world. He would rather muti­late his intel­lec­tual project instead of allow­ing his ene­mies to con­tinue to build their gov­er­nance project.”

    Herbert-​​Spencer laissez-​​faire cor­po­ratism cap­i­tal­ism pol­i­tics con­ser­vatism via:cshalizi

  • BloJJ — About con­fer­ence poster design and defense:

    “My approach is dif­fer­ent. Poster pre­sen­ta­tion, like con­fer­ence pre­sen­ta­tion, belongs more to the area of dra­matic arts than to mar­ket­ing. It is information/​entertainment, and that is the main thing you have to bear in mind when prepar­ing for the ses­sion. Plus, while at a con­fer­ence you have the full atten­tion of your audi­ence (shared, of course, with email, Face­book, plus the 10% that are sim­ply speak­ing) in a poster ses­sion you have to first attract the atten­tion of the peo­ple wan­der­ing around a hall shared with other 20 to 100 posters, then keep them there for the dura­tion of the spiel and while you start a new one, and then, of course, con­vey the infor­ma­tion you want to share with your poster. ”

    advice academic-​​culture meet­ing poster-​​presentaitons skills

  • Economist’s View: The 999

    “Some Indi­vid­u­als of our Coun­try­men, by the Smiles of Prov­i­dence or some other Means, are enabled to roll in their four–wheel’d Car­riages, and can sup­port the Expence of good Houses, rich Fur­ni­ture, and Lux­u­ri­ous Liv­ing. But, is it equi­table that 99, or rather 999 should suf­fer for the Extrav­a­gance or Grandeur of one? Espe­cially when it is consider’d, that Men fre­quently owe their Wealth to the Impov­er­ish­ment of their Neighbours.”

    it-​​was-​​ever-​​thus

  • Ris­ingTide­Har­bor: Matt Barcomb’s Blog on Lean Agile Busi­ness Soft­ware Devel­op­ment: Stop B*tching About Local Optimizations

    “In fact, one approach is to inten­tion­ally over opti­mize a local opti­miza­tion. This will often make appar­ent to man­age­ment (or even to you) where the true bot­tle neck in the sys­tem is. We shouldn’t worry so much about doing the wrong things righter, but we should be aware that that may be the case and always work to be doing the right things. In the end, show­ing improve­ment and build­ing momen­tum can lead to excit­ing changes. In fair­ness, it can also come crash­ing to the ground if the right kinds of changes aren’t made at some point, but this should not deter any­one who thinks some­thing can be made bet­ter from try­ing to do so and it cer­tainly should not be a rea­son to do nothing!”

    change cultural-​​engineering organizational-​​behavior local-​​optimization

  • Geof­frey Chaucer Hath a Blog: A Long Tyme Agoon in a Shire Far Away

    “…A WHINY YOUTHE cam nexte, barl­eye a man, With yelwe haire, tunique, and farmeres tan. But aqua­cul­ture litel did he love, He wolde been a pilot al above And bulls­eye oump-​​rattes yn a nim­ble craft.…”

    amus­ing

  • knitr: Ele­gant, flex­i­ble and fast dynamic report gen­er­a­tion with R | knitr

    “The knitr pack­age was designed to be a trans­par­ent engine for dynamic report gen­er­a­tion with R, solve some long-​​standing prob­lems in Sweave, and com­bine fea­tures in other add-​​on pack­ages into one pack­age (knitr ≈ Sweave + cacheSweave + pgf­Sweave + weaver + R2HTML::RweaveHTML + highlight::HighlightWeaveLatex + 0.2 * brew + 0.1 * SweaveListingUtils + more).”

    R-​​language LaTeX type­set­ting dynamic-​​documents writ­ing tools

  • Math Notes | Futil­ity Closet

    kata for GP

    nudge-​​targets mathematical-​​recreations

  • Cere­bral Mastication

    “There’s a charm­ing lit­tle brain teaser that’s going around the Inter­webs. It’s got var­i­ous forms, but they all look some­thing like this:…”

    nudge-​​targets mathematical-​​recreations

  • Tanya Khovanova’s Math Blog » Blog Archive » Inter­lock­ing Polyominoes

    “A set of poly­omi­noes is inter­locked if no sub­set can be moved far away from the rest. It was known that poly­omi­noes that are built from four or fewer squares do not inter­lock. The project of Dhawan and his men­tor was to inves­ti­gate the inter­locked­ness of larger poly­omi­noes. And they totally deliv­ered. They quickly proved that you can inter­lock poly­omi­noes with eight or more squares. Then they proved that pen­tomi­noes can’t inter­lock. This left them with a gray area: what hap­pens with poly­omi­noes with six or seven squares? After draw­ing many beau­ti­ful pic­tures, they finally found the struc­ture pre­sented in our accom­pa­ny­ing image. The sys­tem con­sists of 12 hex­omi­noes and 5 pen­tomi­noes, and it is rigid. You can­not move a thing. That means that hex­omi­noes can be inter­locked and thus the gray area was resolved.”

    poly­omi­noes mathematical-​​recreations nudge-​​targets

  • Pool based evo­lu­tion­ary algo­rithm pre­sented in EvoStar 2012 « GeNeura Team

    “This is the first inter­na­tion­ally pub­lished paper (it was pre­vi­ously pub­lished in a Span­ish con­fer­ence of a series that deals with a sys­tem, intended for vol­un­teer com­put­ing, that uses a pool for imple­ment­ing dis­trib­uted evo­lu­tion­ary algo­rithms. The basic idea is that the pop­u­la­tion resides in a pool (imple­mented using CouchDB), with clients pulling indi­vid­u­als from the pool, doing stuff on them, and putting them back in the pool. The algo­rithm uses, as much as pos­si­ble, CouchDB fea­tures (such as revi­sions and views) to achieve good per­for­mance. All the code (for this and, right now, for the next papers) is avail­able as open-​​source code.”

    distributed-​​processing evolutionary-​​algorithms CouchDB nudge

  • What Amazon’s ebook strat­egy means — Charlie’s Diary

    “If the major pub­lish­ers switch to sell­ing ebooks with­out DRM, then they can enable cus­tomers to buy books from a vari­ety of out­lets and move away from the walled gar­den of the Kin­dle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less imme­di­ate threat than a gigan­tic multi­na­tional with rev­enue of $48 Bil­lion in 2011 (more than the entire global pub­lish­ing indus­try) that has expressed its inten­tion to “dis­rupt” them, and whose chief exec­u­tive said recently “even well-​​meaning gate­keep­ers slow inno­va­tion” (where “inno­va­tion” is code-​​speak for “oppor­tu­ni­ties for me to turn a profit”). And so they will deep-​​six their exist­ing com­mit­ment to DRM and use the terms of the DoJ-​​imposed set­tle­ment to wig­gle out of the most-​​favoured-​​nation terms imposed by Ama­zon, in order to sell their wares as widely as pos­si­ble. If they don’t, they’re doomed. And all of us who like to read (or write) fic­tion get to live in the Ama­zon com­pany town.”

    monopoly-​​and-​​monpsony-​​sittin-​​in-​​a-​​tree Ama­zon eBooks disintermediation-​​in-​​action cor­po­ratism redis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion

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  • Pin­board: Book­mark Detail


    you-​​are-​​supposed-​​to-​​have-​​read-​​that-​​young-​​man

  • Cyber­net­ick Inkwell · On a def­i­n­i­tion of “open humanities”

    “The dig­i­tal human­i­ties are a part of the open human­i­ties to the extent that those same val­ues are held, though of course the purely dig­i­tal ele­ments (the code, the markup, the hard­ware) are unique to the dig­i­tal human­i­ties and live largely out­side of OH. That being said, much of DH—the com­mit­ment to open source, the col­lab­o­ra­tive nature of the field, the interdisciplinarity—is open.”

    open­ness digital-​​humanities the-​​inevitability-​​of-​​enclosures cultural-​​dynamics theory-​​as-​​code

  • Don’t Hold Your Breath | Paul Shep­heard | Archi­tect and writer | Words

    “…Nar­ra­tives are bet­ter than thumps, is the mes­sage; and in the field of human rela­tions this might well be so, but here’s the rub. Nature’s not a per­son. Nature’s not a mother. We are not fight­ing it but liv­ing it. The indus­trial land­scapes pur­sued with such ter­rific thor­ough­ness, the agri­cul­tural deserts as well as the sub­urbs, the mine­fields as well as the wind farms, the cities them­selves, are the out­comes not of rage but of sto­ries, nar­ra­tives in the dream of the human dom­i­na­tion of the world. That’s why I hug the boy’s head. It’s good that he sees him­self as a par­ti­cle of nature, a being rather than a human being, and his life as fun­da­men­tally con­sump­tive. He knows if he holds his breath he will die. He knows he must live in the present. So now I must try and teach him this: the bolt-​​ons and band-​​aids of the sus­tain­abil­ity move­ment that try to man­age our fear of the future are but another chap­ter in that book of dom­i­na­tion. It will not, in the face of the red giant, ulti­mately sus­tain. And nature as we know it now, in this snap­shot of human time, will not stay as it is, how­ever we try to pre­serve it.”

    paul-​​shepheard sus­tain­abil­ity crit­i­cism how-​​to-​​rite-​​gud

  • Grounds For Dis­per­sal | Paul Shep­heard | Archi­tect and writer | Words

    “Anonymity does not mean with­out deep con­tact, it means that the con­tact has no pre­empt­ing cer­e­mony. Col­lab­o­ra­tion, like­wise, is the proof of itself. It exists nei­ther before or after the moment it takes place, except in how it inflects your char­ac­ter. Inclu­sive­ness and par­tial­ity are sym­bi­otic, too. If par­tial is a move taken to out­flank hege­mony, the inclu­sive works to recom­bine dif­fer­ences. The para­doxes implicit in such terms are part of what makes them inter­est­ing. I’m try­ing to elu­ci­date a think­ing that is not dialec­tic, no longer depen­dent on oppo­si­tions, not look­ing for the right way. As one of the direc­tors of The­mepark, a Lon­don based fashion-​​architecture-​​photography-​​landscape com­bine said to me: “we are inter­ested in show­ing con­tent in its pure form.” At first I thought it was a joke, more of that London-​​Thing irony, but then I thought, what else is the mate­r­ial world but con­tent in its pure form? Today’s pho­tog­ra­phers, who mis­trust the Mag­num generation’s point-​​and-​​shoot real­i­ties, who set up every shot elab­o­rately, who treat land­scape, por­trait, action and spec­ta­cle as the same thing, are not being min­i­mal­ist. They are posit­ing the veloc­ity of the image.”

    paul-​​shepheard crit­i­cism style how-​​to-​​rite-​​gud

  • Mario Carpo: Post-​​Authorial Cre­ation | berfrois

    “This is where the design pro­fes­sions are increas­ingly feel­ing some dis­com­fort.  Design­ers like to design.  They like to be in charge of all aspects of what they cre­ate.  Many design­ers are noto­ri­ously con­trol freaks.  And rightly so: being in con­trol is their rai­son d’être.  Tra­di­tion­ally, design­ers “authored” objects and “autho­rized” their pro­duc­tion, repro­duc­tion, or mod­i­fi­ca­tion.  Their sig­na­ture had (it still has, by the way) bind­ing, legal value–implying autho­r­ial priv­i­leges pro­tected by law, and all the lia­bil­i­ties result­ing from that.  But once again, dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies do not work that way.  When so many peo­ple can work together, who is in charge?  Who reaps the hon­ors?  Who pays the damages?”

    design con­trol planning-​​as-​​a-​​symptom mass-​​customization control-​​of-​​the-​​means-​​of-​​thought

  • Repub­li­can con­ser­vatism (com­plete rewrite) — Crooked Timber

    “The polit­i­cal impli­ca­tion, which has drawn some flak in the com­ments, but which I think is cor­rect is that there is no point in polit­i­cal engage­ment with author­i­tar­ian con­ser­v­a­tives. In a polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment where they are con­cen­trated in one party,politics is going to be a mat­ter the only strat­egy open to lib­er­als is to out­num­ber and out­vote them by peel­ing off as many periph­eral groups (for exam­ple, those who devi­ate from the approved cul­tural iden­tity in some way) as pos­si­ble. Obvi­ously, that’s an unpalat­able con­clu­sion in all sorts of ways, but I think it’s a valid one.”

    con­ser­vatism Repub­li­cans pol­i­tics nature-​​and-​​nurture-​​sittin-​​in-​​a-​​tree

  • Bot­tle the Infla­tion Mon­ster! — Crooked Timber

    ‘Fur­ther­more this seems to me to play once again into the view that ‘eco­nom­ics’ is tech­ni­cal and has right answers, while ‘pol­i­tics’ is emo­tive and con­tested, so stu­dents of the EU don’t have to talk about it.’

    eco­nom­ics infla­tion ped­a­gogy for-​​the-​​little-​​chilluns

Items of some interest…

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  • [1112.6209] Build­ing high-​​level fea­tures using large scale unsu­per­vised learning

    We con­sider the prob­lem of build­ing detec­tors for high-​​level con­cepts using only unsu­per­vised fea­ture learn­ing. For exam­ple, we would like to under­stand if it is pos­si­ble to learn a face detec­tor using only unla­beled images down­loaded from the inter­net. To answer this ques­tion, we trained a sim­ple fea­ture learn­ing algo­rithm on a large dataset of images (10 mil­lion images, each image is 200×200). The sim­u­la­tion is per­formed on a clus­ter of 1000 machines with fast net­work hard­ware for one week. Exten­sive exper­i­men­tal results reveal sur­pris­ing evi­dence that such high-​​level con­cepts can indeed be learned using only unla­beled data and a sim­ple learn­ing algorithm.

    image-​​analysis image-​​segmentation unsupervised-​​learning learning-​​by-​​doing feature-​​extraction nudge-​​targets

  • [1105.0158] Detect­ing emer­gent processes in cel­lu­lar automata with excess information

    Many nat­ural processes occur over char­ac­ter­is­tic spa­tial and tem­po­ral scales. This paper presents tools for (i) flex­i­bly and scal­ably coarse-​​graining cel­lu­lar automata and (ii) iden­ti­fy­ing which coarse-​​grainings express an automaton’s dynam­ics well, and which express its dynam­ics badly. We apply the tools to inves­ti­gate a range of exam­ples in Conway’s Game of Life and Hop­field net­works and demon­strate that they cap­ture some basic intu­itions about emer­gent processes. Finally, we for­mal­ize the notion that a process is emer­gent if it is bet­ter expressed at a coarser granularity.

    emer­gence com­plex­ol­ogy cellular-​​automata signal-​​processing nudge-​​targets

  • [1008.0901] Con­ver­gence to global con­sen­sus in opin­ion dynam­ics under a non­lin­ear voter model

    We pro­pose a non­lin­ear voter model to study the emer­gence of global con­sen­sus in opin­ion dynam­ics. In our model, agent $i$ agrees with one of binary opin­ions with the prob­a­bil­ity that is a power func­tion of the num­ber of agents hold­ing this opin­ion among agent $i$ and its near­est neigh­bors, where an adjustable para­me­ter $alpha$ con­trols the effect of herd behav­ior on con­sen­sus. We find that there exists an opti­mal value of $alpha$ lead­ing to the fastest con­sen­sus for lat­tices, ran­dom graphs, small-​​world net­works and scale-​​free net­works. Qual­i­ta­tive insights are obtained by exam­in­ing the spa­tiotem­po­ral evo­lu­tion of the opin­ion clusters.

    agent-​​based social-​​dynamics network-​​theory com­plex­ol­ogy nudge-​​targets

  • [1110.4876] REBOUND: An open-​​source multi-​​purpose N-​​body code for col­li­sional dynamics

    REBOUND is a new multi-​​purpose N-​​body code which is freely avail­able under an open-​​source license. It was designed for col­li­sional dynam­ics such as plan­e­tary rings but can also solve the clas­si­cal N-​​body prob­lem. It is highly mod­u­lar and can be cus­tomized eas­ily to work on a wide vari­ety of dif­fer­ent prob­lems in astro­physics and beyond.

    sim­u­la­tion computational-​​science astro­physics numerical-​​methods sim­u­la­tor library open-​​source nudge-​​targets

  • [1112.5908] Query Answer­ing under Match­ing Depen­den­cies for Data Clean­ing: Com­plex­ity and Algorithms

    Match­ing depen­den­cies (MDs) have been recently intro­duced as declar­a­tive rules for entity res­o­lu­tion (ER), i.e. for iden­ti­fy­ing and resolv­ing dupli­cates in rela­tional instance $D$. A set of MDs can be used as the basis for a pos­si­bly non-​​deterministic mech­a­nism that com­putes a duplicate-​​free instance from $D$. The pos­si­ble results of this process are the clean, “min­i­mally resolved instances” (MRIs). There might be sev­eral MRIs for $D$, and the “resolved answers” to a query are those that are shared by all the MRIs. We inves­ti­gate the prob­lem of com­put­ing resolved answers. We look at var­i­ous sets of MDs, devel­op­ing syn­tac­tic cri­te­ria for deter­min­ing (in)tractability of the resolved answer prob­lem, includ­ing a dichotomy result. For some tractable classes of MDs and con­junc­tive queries, we present a query rewrit­ing method­ol­ogy that can be used to retrieve the resolved answers. We also inves­ti­gate con­nec­tions with “con­sis­tent query answer­ing”, deriv­ing fur­ther tractabil­ity results for MD-​​based ER.

    data­bases graph-​​theory algo­rithms nudge-​​targets

  • The Wash­room Game by Jan Heufer :: SSRN

    This arti­cle analy­ses a game where play­ers sequen­tially choose either to become insid­ers and pick one of finitely many loca­tions or to remain out­siders. They will only become insid­ers if a min­i­mum dis­tance to the next player can be assured; their sec­ondary objec­tive is to max­i­mize the min­i­mal dis­tance to other play­ers. This is illus­trated by con­sid­er­ing the strate­gic behav­ior of men choos­ing from a set of uri­nals in a pub­lic lava­tory. How­ever, besides very sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tions (e.g. set­tling of res­i­dents in a newly devel­oped area, the selec­tion of food patches by for­ag­ing ani­mals, choos­ing seats in wait­ing rooms or lines in a swim­ming pool), the game might also rel­e­vant to the prob­lem of plac­ing bill­boards attempt­ing to catch the atten­tion of passers-​​by or sim­i­lar eco­nomic sit­u­a­tions. In the non-​​cooperative equi­lib­rium, all insid­ers behave as if they coop­er­ated with each other and min­i­mized the total num­ber of insid­ers. It is shown that strate­gic behav­ior leads to an equi­lib­rium with sub­stan­tial under uti­liza­tion of avail­able loca­tions. Increas­ing the num­ber of loca­tions tends to decrease uti­liza­tion. The removal of some loca­tions which leads to gaps can not only increase rel­a­tive uti­liza­tion but even absolute max­i­mum capacity.

    game-​​theory agent-​​based com­plex­ol­ogy eco­nom­ics nudge-​​targets

  • [1109.0777] Effi­cient and Cor­rect Sten­cil Com­pu­ta­tion via Pat­tern Match­ing and Sta­tic Typing

    Sten­cil com­pu­ta­tions, involv­ing oper­a­tions over the ele­ments of an array, are a com­mon pro­gram­ming pat­tern in sci­en­tific com­put­ing, games, and image pro­cess­ing. As a pro­gram­ming pat­tern, sten­cil com­pu­ta­tions are highly reg­u­lar and amenable to opti­mi­sa­tion and par­al­leli­sa­tion. How­ever, general-​​purpose lan­guages obscure this reg­u­lar pat­tern from the com­piler, and even the pro­gram­mer, pre­vent­ing opti­mi­sa­tion and obfus­cat­ing (in)correctness. This paper fur­thers our work on the Ypnos domain-​​specific lan­guage for sten­cil com­pu­ta­tions embed­ded in Haskell. Ypnos allows declar­a­tive, abstract spec­i­fi­ca­tion of sten­cil com­pu­ta­tions, expos­ing the struc­ture of a prob­lem to the com­piler and to the pro­gram­mer via spe­cialised syn­tax. In this paper we show the decid­able safety guar­an­tee that well-​​formed, well-​​typed Ypnos pro­grams can­not index out­side of array bound­aries. Thus index­ing in Ypnos is safe and run-​​time bounds check­ing can be elim­i­nated. Pro­gram infor­ma­tion is encoded as types, using the advanced type-​​system fea­tures of the Glas­gow Haskell Com­piler, with the safe-​​indexing invari­ant enforced at com­pile time via type checking.

    domain-​​specific-​​language algo­rithms grid-​​computing nudge-​​targets

  • What’s Chal­leng­ing About Paul? : Lawyers, Guns & Money

    It’s wrong to think of Ron Paul’s racism and his lib­er­tar­i­an­ism as two dis­tinct parts of his polit­i­cal per­sona, when in fact they are deeply tied together. White suprema­cists under­stand what Glenn, appar­ently, does not; the absence of Fed­eral author­ity makes it eas­ier for pri­vate actors and local gov­ern­ments to repress the civil and polit­i­cal rights of minori­ties. Paul’s lib­er­tar­i­an­ism emerged in a regional and cul­tural con­text that was deeply hos­tile to Fed­eral efforts at inte­gra­tion. The newslet­ters give strong indi­ca­tion that none of this is lost on Ron Paul. A notional Pres­i­dent Paul is just as likely to use the pow­ers of the office to gut Fed­eral enforce­ment of a wide range of civil lib­er­ties pro­tec­tions as he is to do any of the things that Glenn would like him to do.

    pol­i­tics lib­er­tar­i­an­ism racism con­ser­vatism pop­ulism

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  • The Econ­o­mist on the Repub­li­cans « The Reality-​​Based Community

    The Econ­o­mist – despite its unerr­ing judg­ment about  books on crime con­trol and drug pol­icy – can­not be justly described a Demo­c­ra­tic or lib­eral pub­li­ca­tion; it iden­ti­fies itself as “pro-​​business, right-​​of-​​centre.” But, unlike the friends of plu­toc­racy on this side of the Atlantic, the folks at The Econ­o­mist believe in prin­ci­ples other than dereg­u­la­tion of enter­prise and low taxes on the rich. More­over, they remain largely reality-​​based, eschew­ing wingnut postmodernism.

    con­ser­vatism pol­i­tics jour­nal­ism