Sorry about lack of posts

I have meant to continue blogging about epistemology and its relation to statistics and extremisan, but deadlines are fast approaching. Bear with me, and I'll soon begin posting again.

Green Washing?

I got this email today from HSBC:

Dear BRIAN ROWE,

Small changes can make a big impact. That's why HSBC has partnered with The Arbor Day Foundation to help the environment. Now, when you switch to environmentally-friendly eStatements, HSBC will plant a tree with The Arbor Day Foundation.

On the surface, that sounds really good, and it is. I will take them up on their offer. Yet, I'm annoyed.

If HSBC wanted to make an impact on environmental issues, they would just do it (sorry Nike). I expect that if a large enough number of their customers switch to eStatements, then HSBC will actually make money on this deal. Thus their tree-planting scheme is simply marketing. This is all just cynical assumption on my part, but just because it's cynical doesn't mean it's wrong.

HSBC, be a leader, and give The Arbor Day Foundation the windfall from this switch to eStatements.

PAINful threats and the Climate Crisis

I have a friend who is fairly eloquent in claiming that we should not worry too much about the Climate Crisis. I hope he sees this:

Shell History Meme

There's a meme going around in the Ubuntu community. It seems that listing one's shell history is currently all the rage:

brian@gandalf:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
172 java
105 git
58 cd
50 ls
18 ssh
18 ipod-touch-mount
15 sudo
11 ipod-touch-umount
7 exit
5 nspluginwrapper

Curse you, AI class requiring the use of Java!!


Oh, yeah and I just got myself a new iPod Touch...

So What Is Extremistan

Nassim Taleb's Extremistan is an interesting "place." It is a place dominated by power-laws, the "long tail" if you will. In these systems the vast majority of events are small and inconsequential, yet from time to, exceedingly rare, time, a massive event can occur which outweighs everything which occurred before. That is to say, this sort of system does not obey the Law of Large Numbers.

For example, consider human height verses human income. Human height is a system whose values (or events as I referred to them above) fall along the well known Gaussian distribution (or bell curve). This means that the average height of a random sample of humans is stable. If you measure the height of 10,000 people and then include the tallest person in the world the average will not change in any meaningful way.

We cannot repeat this experiment with incomes. Bill Gates' income utterly dwarfs the average person's income. The average income of the 10,000 people would not reflect the average income of the same set of people plus Bill Gates.

This has major consequences for prediction--induction, to be more precise. Inductive reasoning holds that if we observe an experiment return a certain result many times, then we are justified in expecting that it will continue to achieve that same result in the future. I will have more to say about induction, or Hume's Problem, in the future.

My next post will be a bit more technical. I'm going to drill into what I meant by: "the average will not change in any meaningful way." We'll see that there's circular reasoning going on at the heart of statistics, and that it is inescapable.

Al Gore's New Slideshow

All I can say is: "damn." Go here and discuss.

Jon Stewart Covers the Mississippi Primary

An Elegant Shuffle Redux

Gary King has posted his reaction to Leslie's shuffle algorithm. As always, his comments are very relevant.

I feel remiss for not posting a copy of Leslie's code here, so here it is:

(defun seqrnd (seq)
 "Randomize the elements of a sequence. Destructive on SEQ."
 (sort seq #'< :key (lambda (x) (random 1.0))))

How elegant!

An Elegant Shuffle

Leslie Polzer just posted a very elegant bit of code to shuffle a sequence. It made me as happy as an elegant proof can, so I felt like sharing it with you.

Science Journalism is Misleading at Best

So, I just read this article. It's a typically blurry piece of science journalism sadly.

Michael McGuigan thinks that computers will soon be able to pass the "Graphical Turing Test." The article makes him out as being of the opinion that real-time rendering is the main obstacle to passing the "Turing Test". In fairness to him, I doubt very much that that's what he thinks. Other scientists are quoted as saying things like this:

But others think that passing the Graphics Turing Test requires more than photorealistic graphics moving in real-time. Reality is not 'skin deep' says Paul Richmond at the University of Sheffield, UK. An artificial object can appear real, but unless it moves in a realistic way the eye won't be fooled. "The real challenge is providing a real-time simulation that includes realistic simulated behaviour," he says.

Which I'm sure no one doubts.

Imagine a virtual world where the user is playing a game of pool. This would be much easier to do realistically than a world where interacting with a virtual human (or indeed even a dog or cat, for example) was possible. In order for the user to not realize that she's in a virtual world, that character would have to behave naturally, of course. Thus, we're back to the "Turing Test."

So, I don't know if this author is conflating "Graphical Turing Test" with "Turing Test" or what's going on. The only thing of interest that this article says is this:

"You never know for sure until you can actually do it," he says. "But a back-of-the-envelope calculation would suggest it should be possible in the next few years, once supercomputers enter the petaflop range – that's 1000 teraflops."

That's McGuigan talking about being able to pass the "Graphical Turing Test." So, a nice VR is coming soon. Not a machine capable of passing the "Turing Test."

This is a sort of sensationalist journalism. It's just aimed at a geek audience. Sensationalist journalism is sensationalist at best, and dangerous at worst. Please read Manufacturing Consent if you haven't already.


Note: I was an intern at BNL during the summer of 2003. Michael McGuigan was my mentor while I was there.

My Favorite Firefox Bug

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=347226

Just to pique your interest, here's a quote from one of the bug comments:

Alex Polvi 2006-08-11 00:18:01 PDT

Something weird just happened... I fell asleep in Manhattan and woke up in the
Willamette Valley of Oregon. I can't explain it, but I think something is about
to happen. 

Enjoy! :-)