Inner conversation

How Many Are You?
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/how_many_are_you/

An interesting idea, that you could be more than one person inside your head. It might go a long way toward explaining multiple personality disorder and people who hear voices. I am used to having conversations in my head, though what I feel isn’t quite as distinct as what Scott is describing. I do talk to myself, not always in full sentences (I tend to digress quite a bit (as any of my regular readers will know) and often lose my point (why I prefer writing, I can look back and pick up my train of thought again)). Likely exclusively, when writing I am speaking the words in my head, which leads to my hands magically making the words appear on the screen (I don’t do paper/pen and paper much any more, my penmanship has degraded to the point I can barely make sense of what I have written). When I think about ideas (something I tend to do a lot, you all have only been exposed to a tiny fraction of my ideas (granted only a tiny fraction of the manifold ideas I think about are worth discussing)) I tend to have a wee bit of conversation where I present a part of an idea, then discuss it a bit, then attempt to refine it. I also repeat myself a lot, sometimes I think that repeating an idea creates ruts in my brain which allow me to follow the same path again in the future. I have many (many!) times had what seems like a brilliant thought (we can all be brilliant in our own minds; there is no competition!), but then immediately side tracked myself with a digression and been unable to recapture that ‘brilliance’. When I was young I was very resentful when that happened, but as I got older I realized that 99% of my ‘brilliant’ ideas are not very sparkly at all when given further consideration, so I gave up the thought that I was losing great ideas.

Scott updated his post to have a link to a Wiki page about the “bicameral mind“. Also very interesting reading, the point being that it seems humans were of two minds (literally) until relatively recently (3K years ago). I didn’t read the page in detail, but the concepts are interesting. Difficult or likely impossible to prove, though, and in the world of science, theories without evidences are just campfire stories. They might be really cool to listen to, but they shouldn’t change your life.

Doing my tiny part…

Iran sanctions now causing food insecurity, mass suffering
Yet again, the US and its allies spread mass human misery though a policy that is as morally indefensible as it is counter-productive
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/07/iran-santions-suffering

Since us Americans, as a species, tend to be totally unaware of what is going on outside of our country, I will do my small (tiny) part in attempting to expose my reader(s) to what is going on in our names. The whole article (as usual; I like Glenn and how he writes) is interesting and a good read, but since I know many of my reader(s) won’t take the time to look at it, I excerpted a few bits. This first is actually a quote within a quote:

“As documented by the report’s firsthand account on the ground, sanctions are not driving the working class to join Iran’s democracy movement, they are doing the opposite – decimating the Iranian middle class [btw, any of this sound a wee bit familiar?], that has been at the center of the democracy movement, by intensifying their economic struggles. The greatest impediment for Iran’s pro-democracy movement – as we saw at the height of the Green Movement protests in 2009 – has been that working class Iranians who are preoccupied with immediate financial struggles are unable to enlist in a struggle for political freedoms.”

This second bit is part of what prompted me to post in my blog…

What’s most extraordinary about all of this is that the extreme human suffering caused by US-led sanctions is barely acknowledged in mainstream American political discourse. One reason that Americans were so baffled after the 9/11 attack (why do they hate us?) is the same reason they continue to be so baffled by anti-American protests in the Muslim world (what are they so angry about?): namely, most Americans literally have no idea, because nobody ever told them, that their government’s imposition of sanctions in Iraq led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, and they similarly have no idea that the suffering of ordinary Iranians is becoming increasingly substantial.

People in the Muslim world (who are relentlessly depicted as propagandized) are well aware of the human devastation US sanctions have caused, while Americans (who think of themselves as the beneficiaries of a free and vibrant press) have largely had those facts kept from them. That dynamic in part, is what often explains the irreconcilable worldviews among people in those two parts of the world.

Can any student of history, particularly the history of the US, doubt that war with Iran is not only inevitable, but at most a few years away? Lessons learned from Iraq? Well, by the voting public, nada. By the people who lead the sheeple around by their nose, not much either except that they should invest an extra 10 minutes and invent more plausible lies as justification for war.

Does anyone think that if Iran were to immediately, publicly and verifiably disavow their nuclear ambitions that we wouldn’t go to war with them? The only ‘crime’ that Saddam Husein committed when he destroyed his WMDs was to expect that the US would make public the spy satellite images of him doing the destroying. By not making it public he gave the US (and Israeli) hawks all they needed to deny that the WMDs had been destroyed and create the whole massive propaganda in the run up to the war.

US govt == terrorist organization. Your tax dollars at work!

The wily ways of life

Chemical bond shields extreme microbes from poison
Molecular structure explains how ‘arsenic life’ bacteria rely on phosphate instead
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/345502/title/Chemical_bond_shields_extreme_microbes_from_poison

I mention this research before here, if you are interested in a tiny bit of background. The interesting thing to me (as someone who once intended to make a career out of designing enzymes and proteins) is the minor change in structure that lead to a 4,500 fold increase in preference of phosphate over arsenate. Ask the people who make ultra-pure silicon how difficult it is to make something completely free of contamination before ever considering that the original researchers were capable of totally eliminating any possible source of phosphate (a rather ubiquitous compound that pretty much falls off our body in microscopic bits in an endless rain). As such, with enzymes capable of such incredible differentiation, it now becomes quite feasible to expect the results as initially reported.

Anyway, to me the take-home message is that life, once it has ‘infected’ a planet, is pretty damn difficult to eliminate. If we give Panspermia any credence at all, our solar system, at a minimum, has to be pretty well infected with life in every corner that is capable of sustaining it. Indeed, it becomes rather trivial to expect that our galaxy and universe entire are infected with life, albeit of the microbial variety.

Too bad we can’t seem to muster up the interest to explore for life in our solar system. While I have a lot of complaints about how NASA does business, their budget represents less than 2% of the DoD annual expenses ($17 billion vs at least a trillion dollars) and, other than supporting the massive military industrial complex, we as a society get nothing to show for our DoD expenses. If we supported NASA better we might get something useful out of all those ‘stimulus’ dollars.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

Misconduct prompts most retractions
Two-thirds of scientific papers pulled from journals are for fraud, suspected fraud and plagiarism
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/345465/title/Misconduct_prompts_most_retractions

I like this analogy:

The culture of science may be to blame for a recent increase in fraud cases: Journal publications are widely used to gauge a scientist’s potential and success [publish or perish]. “Misconduct is a phenomenon similar to doping in sport: It is essentially about gaining an unfair advantage over competitors,” says Daniele Fanelli of the University of Edinburgh. But a rise in retractions doesn’t mean that fraud is also increasing. “The fact that we went from zero retractions to 0.01 percent in a few decades is just an encouraging symptom of growing awareness of the problem.”

This demonstrates yet another form of bias, this one related to looking vs not looking. If you aren’t looking for something, it is remarkably unlikely to discover it. Sort of like buying a new car, prior to that expensive decision all cars on the road seemed different, but suddenly, once you have made your decision, it seems like every third car on the road is a carbon copy of yours! So, looking for fraud in publications actually reveals fraud (indeed, with so many people having so much riding on publications I would be quite skeptical if no fraud was ever detected!). Reducing it, though, just like doping in sports, could prove highly problematic as, in excellent parallel with sports, many of those who commit fraud in science feel they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. I am not aware, though, that the standard for fraud has intersected with the rather idiotic way that the antidoping agencies have made so many innocuous things into career ending violations, but who knows? Perhaps in a few decades that will start to happen. At least in science, there is a tradition of using science to evaluate things (as opposed to antidoping where there isn’t much in the way of evidence, let alone proof, that these so-called performance enhancing drugs are indeed performance enhancing).

As for is discretion the better part of valor, this is a nice quote:

Although Fang and Casadevall say they worry that their study could be misused to erode public trust in science, sweeping misconduct under the rug would be even more harmful.

Recent high-profile cases of fraud show that “when people make up stuff, it’s usually important,” Casadevall says. He cites the case of Andrew Wakefield, who published a study in 1998 in the Lancet linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism and intestinal disorders. That study was repeatedly discredited and found to be fraudulent, but nevertheless, that paper sparked an ongoing backlash against vaccination.

Belief perseverance

Can we stop lies from becoming “facts”?
Using strategies like “de-biasing,” scientists are working on concrete methods to prevent the spread of false info
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/04/can_we_stop_lies_from_becoming_facts/

An interesting article showing how damn cussed we are at changing our opinions. It seems the stronger held the opinion the more resistant is is to change. A parallel with an earlier post.

…Even simple traits such as language can affect acceptance: Studies have found that the way a statement is printed or voiced (or even the accent) can make those statements more believable. Misinformation is a human problem, not a liberal or conservative one…

It is interesting that they use global warming as their example, particularly given my rather extensive history regarding the topic. As I have mentioned a number of times in the past (regarding global warming), my concern is the knee jerk reaction against anyone suggesting that anything besides the elimination of the use of fossil fuels can possibly address the situation. I am not yet convinced that CO2 is actually at the root of the changes we have been observing and my concern is the quadrillion dollar hit to our global economy in an effort to minimize CO2 emissions isn’t going to do a damn thing except result in the death of hundreds of millions of people and a trip back to the stone age for the rest.

I got to be careful where I say this, though; could get burned at the stake as a heretic!

Wall Street and education

Four ways banks have ruined higher education
Colleges and universities are padding their bottom lines — and the American public is footing the bill
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/04/four_ways_banks_have_ruined_colleges_and_universities/

Except for a very few degrees, the cost of education has reached the point where, in my estimation, there is no longer any economic payback. When I was doing research on graduate school years ago, at _that_ time (this would be the early part of the ’90s) the _only_ graduate degree that was purported to have an economic payback (meaning that additional lifetime earnings were such that you could expect a return on your investment (tuition, room/board and, most importantly, opportunity costs (most prominent being lost wages))) was the MBA. In my personal experience, the MBA has been cheapened to the point where it can no longer provide that value. I bet that even at Harvard and other top MBA programs that if the student had simply remained in their current job, continuing to climb the ladder, that they wouldn’t get back the costs of getting a full-time MBA. The alternative, for MBAs, is the ‘executive’ MBA, or as I like to call it, the weekend MBA. I went to school full-time for two years (including summers); I am confused how going on weekends for a year is supposed to be equivalent, but hey, such is life.

Anyway, based on my economic analysis, most degrees weren’t worth their cost more than two decades ago and since then I am quite sure that the real (inflation adjusted) cost of education has at least doubled, likely tripled, I am more convinced than ever that the vast majority of people getting degrees (forget the _half_ that fail to complete!) are wasting their time and money. Associates (two year) and vocational (job-focused with little of the artsy fartsy crap you get in university) degrees can provide, based on my research and experience, a much more likely economic value. So, before we even get to Wall Street, I believe higher education is already a big lie. Now we come to the point of the article, the educational-industrial complex. Wall Street (‘banks’ in this article) is working _very_ hard to get as much profit from students as possible. They (and their parents) are in a rather vulnerable spot as they have been inculcated by culture that higher education is an absolute must else the poor little dears will be living as trolls under a bridge somewhere. Very much in analog to the absolute requirement today to get a diamond for your fiance (expect to spend _at least_ three months wages!), anything less and you are a chump not worth the ground she walks on. Diamonds, like education, are not intrinsically valuable outside of a few science experiments, yet a huge premium has been placed on them through marketing and market manipulation. Any of that sound even a wee bit familiar when it comes to education?

OK, I will address each of the author’s points a bit…

1. Privatizing Student Life

To me the most pernicious part of this is the multi-tier aspect. Now, I never was an on-campus student; I transferred from community college and Va Tech, at that time, only allowed freshmen to be on-campus and everyone else had to take part in a lottery system (besides, I had no interest in living in a shared dorm). However, for the most part, except for the age of each dorm they were pretty much the same basic experience. Now, it seems, there is a suite of dorms for the lower class and a separate one for the upper class. That way, we can be sure to keep any mingling to a minimum. How much longer before the students get separate classes? Oh wait, that has already happened: the elite have their own schools!

Of course, to a substantial extent, poorer students already had to make do with less, so simply being a freshman (as opposed to a transfer student (my community college was a personal decision, I wasn’t convinced I was ready for college (indeed, my first trip to Tech was a disaster and I left after a couple of quarters to lick my wounds for a couple of years))) already makes you a member of the (relative) elite. The poor live off-campus, eat a lot of Ramen Noodles (amazingly, I still like the things) and make do with rather minimal living conditions (I didn’t have to deal with that, my middle class background enabled me to live in a townhouse at first and later buy my own house (though I did need roommates from time to time)). So, really, this trend the author is discussing had already been in vogue for at least the last 30 years. The main difference I see, though, is that before it was all internal to the University, now it has been outsourced and a for-profit entity is driving decisions.

2. The Consumer Body

Wall Street wants to produce nice, compliant consumers willing to go deeply into debt to buy whatever widget is in vogue. No sooner had credit cards been effectively banned from the campus when in swoops the big financial institutions with yet another way to make a buck off these credulous students. Even better, the banks now have guaranteed income since simply having the students forced into using their products the students now have to pay a fee. Sounding eerily similar with that great socialist experiment Obamacare at all? The population being _forced_ to purchase a product that is profitable to the corporations supplying it? Anyway, if I had any outrage left in me I would be outraged that this has happened, but now am numb to it.

3. Diluting the Classroom

Really, how is it that any University is OK with the idea of charging full price for a recorded lecture watched at home? When I first heard about this years ago I thought that it would trigger a cratering of the cost of education, what happens instead? Continued increases in the spiraling cost! I keep thinking that at some point all this will come crashing down, but our culture currently looks down on self-taught people and assigns absolutely no value to on-line learning. I believe there really is a vast conspiracy to keep self teaching from being recognized formally, it would put a massive (likely fatal) dent into the profitability of our Great Educational System, so the system acts against it. Some day, I fervently hope, there will be a mechanism whereby you can take a series of exams or whatnot and prove your skills and education totally independent of any ‘institute of higher learning’.

4. The Student Voice on Mute

This is not terribly surprising to me and I see this sort of censorship moving around in waves. If our Great Government will actively pursue and punish (including extra-judicial incarceration and even assassination) of people expressing their Constitutionally protected opinions, why should anyone expect Universities to be any different. Heck, that great bastion of liberals and socialists at Berkeley were pepper sprayed and carted off to jail for their effrontery. This, to me, is just the logical extension of our oligarchy, nothing new, nothing to see, move along…

The more you know the less you think…

Blue Truth, Red Truth
Both candidates say White House hopefuls should talk straight with voters. Here’s why neither man is ready to take his own advice
http://swampland.time.com/2012/10/03/blue-truth-red-truth/?hpt=hp_t2

The ‘truth’ is, in fact, mutable, though it is clear that not everything could be interpreted as ‘true’ no matter how one spins things. Historically, though, it seemed to me that the more someone knew about a subject the _less_ certain he or she became about ‘truth’, but based on this article, the exact opposite is true now. The more educated people on a topic (at least when it comes to politics, the subject of the article) the less likely they will consider any information that is contrary to their biases, no matter how much independent proof is provided.

Even in the world of science there is very little ‘truth’ that is immutable. Experimental results are always subject to interpretation and, while quite rare, even if almost everyone agrees with a given interpretation that ‘truth’ can still be totally wrong. If we have such problems in an area where there is at least the formal effort to remain unbiased and only consider verifiable facts, imagine how difficult it could be to bore through the barriers to unwanted information in politics.

Yes, it is a long article, but I think it is worth reading, hence my blogging on it. Common you slackers! Invest a little!

Our educational “meritocracy”

College graduates are in for a rude awakening
Grade inflation has spawned a generation of graduates convinced they’re exceptional. They’re not
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/03/college_graduates_are_in_for_a_rude_awakening/

None of the articles I read yesterday or today grabbed me, but this one did. I really like this:

Social scientists have established that the last non-gifted white child in America was born in Reseda, California, in 1962.

Damn I am special! So is my wife (hell, she married me, that makes her one in 7 billion!). My boy is so much smarter than any other kid who is dumber than he is! America the exceptional! The only nation where 90% of the population is in the top 10%!

It is just a game

As a kid I was big into Dungeons and Dragons, whiling away many, many weekends on adventures. I actually wound up being Dungeon Master quite a bit of that time, either because no one else would touch it or my peers actually thought I could develop more interesting adventures. Well, there is a crap load of bookkeeping in DnD and it actually gets quite tedious. Everyone I know altered the rules somewhat to suite their type of playing style just to keep the game flowing as much as possible. As such, for me and my peers anyway, niceties such as having the appropriate materials to cast spell, for instance, were totally ignored. Combat was truncated and I had to get into the habit of randomly rolling my dice just to keep them from being convinced that ‘something just happened’ and getting all paranoid or immediately stopping and doing an exhaustive search for a secrete door that wasn’t there. I longed for having a better way to keep track of the minutia that wouldn’t also strangle the life out of our play, but never came up with anything.

Also as a youth I was introduced to the game ADVENT, or the Colossal Cave Adventure, a command-line game that was all in your head (meaning no graphics of any sort). We spent waaaayyyy too many hours playing the game (generally as a group with one person working the keyboard) and never really solved it (though I believe I still have my maps of the “Maze of twisty little passages” somewhere). Anyway, a number of years ago I and a friend started to talk about educational games and how to ‘lure’ the kids into learning, but without the astronomical budgets spent on conventional gaming. I thought about the old ADVENT game and was able to find a machine translated C version of the original FORTRAN program (I know C really well) and set to work trying to understand how it works. Partly, I am sure, because it was machine translated, but also because it was written in a period where bits and bytes mattered (back when RAM was measured in kilobytes instead of gigabytes), the code is very dense and difficult to follow. It is also ate up with goto statements further adding to the complexity. I was never able to totally grok the program, but I did develop a good enough understanding to recreate the same sort of functionality in a totally different way. I wrote a version that uses a database to store game information (instead of having it embedded in the code) as well as the state in such a way that any number of players could be playing (independently) at the same time. Sadly, like so many other ideas, we didn’t get any financial backing and I would up putting the thing on the back burner incomplete.

Last week I was talking with my new cube mate and the subject of ADVENT came up for some reason and I talked about my experience and a different cube neighbor came over to note that not only were these old games still being played, but people were still writing them! Not making millions of dollars, of course, but I am told (I am not a gamer myself) that the modern games with the beautiful graphics tend to be very short on any sort of plot or intellectual problem solving, so there is still a market for the old-style story/logic games of yore. That got me thinking that maybe I could take my love of DnD and my experience with ADVENT adaption to educational games and produce games with simple interfaces that people might enjoy playing because of the story-telling aspect and the intellectual problem solving. If I got really lucky, perhaps a small fee to save character information so it can be shared would be tolerable and I might eventually be able to focus on this sort of activity.

Naturally, as soon as I decide to do something like this I start to have problems with my computer at home. We had the power go off the other day when it was asleep and after that it wouldn’t boot any more. I managed to revive an earlier version long enough to download the latest version off the ‘net (Ubuntu 12) and installed that yesterday, but now when it goes to sleep and is revived, I got no monitor, mouse or keyboard function! I decided I could live with having it on all day and installed VNC so I could use it remotely and all the sudden the screen locked up and that was the last straw and I turned the damn thing off. I will probably try to work a bit on it this afternoon and see if I can at least get it to work (I think I will leave VNC off), but isn’t that always the way things work?

Hopefully I will be able to quickly adapt what I have into a working system and can start to refine it. Initially I plan on recreating the old ADVENT game, then plan on extending it (I already have written out what I want to do: produce an outdoor section where you can interact with some locals) and finally enhancing it by starting to weave in thoughts and ideas from my DnD era. I am planning on some minimal graphics instead of only text (since I plan on running it over the web, simple graphics are ‘free’) but hope to preserve the very simple concept of using your imagination to ‘see’ the world. I am quite sure that when we were playing as youths that each of us had a very distinct vision of the dragon, troll, etc., I want to preserve that aspect as much as possible but somewhat simplify the visualization of the environment (we often had no idea where we were, even when we weren’t lost in a maze). My fantasy is that in 5 or 6 years I can get enough paying players that I can focus on it full-time, but I think I would be just as happy if a thousand (or even a hundred) people played it regularly. I intend to make it available as a stand-alone version that can run as an app on a smart phone (and desktop/tablet) to try to hook users into wanting to play multi-user and be willing to pony up a couple of bucks a month to do so.

Hopefully there are a couple of my reader(s) who would be interested enough to act as alpha testers; I will post more when I finally get something minimally useful.

Poll nonsense

Nate Silver: The polls aren’t wrong
Bias? The stats guru who nailed the 2008 election tells Salon it’s very hard for this many surveys to all be off
http://www.salon.com/2012/09/29/nate_silver_the_polls_arent_wrong/

The most interesting revelation to me in this article is that in the battleground states Romney has never led and indeed has trailed in nearly all the polls ever taken. Rather convenient that the media ignored that tiny thing and trumpeted the statistical heat at the national level (one has to wonder if Romney won the popular vote, but lost the electoral vote, as Gore did, would the GOP now complain about the electoral system?), but I have read reports that make plausible arguments that the media deliberately keeps the story on how close the race is in order to promote viewership.

Of course, as the subject of the interview points out, favoring Obama by 80% means that one out of five times the opponent (Romney, in this case) is _expected_ to win.

Also interesting was the comment that more than a certain number of polls starts to diminish the aggregate value as it appears pollsters don’t want to stand out and will use statistical methods to bring their results into agreement with the mainstream. It appears that due to the statistical nature of polls one should expect the results to _diverge_ rather than converge as is often seen.

Of course, like any other area of inquiry that depends on a deep understanding of math and statistics, I am quite sure that the majority of pollsters are hacks just trying to squeeze a few bucks out of credulous partisans. It appears clear to me that any deep understanding of polls immediately takes one out of any partisan world, something clearly incompatible with politics.