Relevant History

LOLCats meets OCLC

...on the blog NCBI ROFL. NCBI is the National Center for Biotechnology Information, and its Web site has a number of scientific journal databases.

Some of these public articles on such cutting-edge subjects as "Disco clothing, female sexual motivation, and relationship status," which concluded that

females are aware of the social signal function of their clothing and that they in some cases alter their clothing style to match their courtship motivation. In particular, sheer clothing -although rare in the study- positively correlated with the motivation for sex.

It may be just me, but the only reason I can imagine this article being written is to help nerdy guys get laid.

The case study on accidental condom inhalation, the article on the dangers of beards in microbiology labs, and the study of canned cat food evaluation techniques are also must-reads.

However, I think the article title "Inappropriate use of a titanium penile ring: An interdisciplinary challenge for urologists, jewelers, and locksmiths" (umm, LOCKSMITHS???) may be the best thing ever written.

Thanks, Anthony!

Ah the future

From GraphJam:

The limits of data

[D]ata sets themselves do not really convey any specific meaning. Meaning can be inferred from how the data compare to expectations or previously published data, but numbers in enterprise applications or spreadsheets cannot explain the strategies Intel and its customers are employing or the uncertainties they are facing. Decentralized organizations must find a means of transmitting business context; in other words, instead of transmitting mere data sets, they must transmit information and intelligence from employees who have it to employees who need it to make decisions and plans. (Jay Hopman, "Using Forecasting Markets to Manage Demand Risk," Intel Technology Journal 11:2 (May 2007), emphasis added.)

Tutoring

My son has started tutoring in reading. He's not as strong a reader as we'd like, or as strong as he'd like. So twice a week we take him to a reading expert. She's a former Peninsula teacher, and is actually someone my wife had as a child.

His enthusiasm is striking, because when I was a kid, getting tutored was a Bad Thing. Certainly you didn't look forward to it, or expect it to be fun. I don't know if this is a general change in kids' attitudes, or something specific to this area, or an extension of their general Peninsula-bred love of school. My kids look forward to Monday coming around so they can go back to school, and my daughter and her friends always complain about the end of the school, so those attitudes probably influence their attitudes toward turoring. And my son has known Marion (her tutor) for ages, and that made him more excited to be working with her.

And while I haven't done any surveys, my sense is that a lot more of my kids' friends are doing that in an earlier age might have been seen as remedial, and not talked much about. At least two or three of my son's friends have worked with Marion, which goes a long way to normalizing it. And for kids who already are taking music lessons, are in swimming clubs or little league, or doing lots of other scheduled things, tutoring or speech therapy probably doesn't seem like anything out of the ordinary.

So he'd better be reading Tolstoy by September, or I'm going ask for my money back.

Ah Ryanair, will you never cease pushing the boundaries of customer service?

My nemesis, Ryanair (which I flew several times last year), has announced a brave new era in customer service:

RyanAir this week announced that they will soon eliminate all airport check-in counters and require passengers to carry-on their luggage. Starting early next year, passengers will need to schlep their bags through airport security and drop them at the steps of the plane for checking into plane's cargo hold. Once aboard though, there will be gambling!

Not exactly going to have Virgin Air quaking in its boots.

My favorite comment: "It's like Ryanair has ceased to become an air carrier and has become a Brecktean improv group."

[h/t to Nancy]

Fort Funston

Today we took the kids to Fort Funston, an old fort and beach in San Francisco. It's very popular with hang-gliders, so while playing in the freezing cold waves was the main attraction, the kids also enjoyed watching hang-gliding up close.

via flickr

I'd never been this close to them either, and was impressed at how long they could stay in the air.

via flickr

The beach is at the bottom of a fairly steep trail, and it's too dangerous to actually swim in the water; but that's hardly unusual for beaches in this area. Unlike southern California, our beaches are mainly for walking along.

via flickr

Taleb the Improbable

"I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event. I just don't know what that event will be." (Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan, p. 154)

The kids will want one of these

The next generation Macbooks. Top this, Windows!

On opportunity

"Opportunities to rise, which can, of their very nature, be seized only by the few... [cannot] substitute for a general diffusion of the means of civilization, which are needed by all men whether they rise of not." (R. H. Tawney)

John Oliver on information technology

John Oliver, in the latest issue of The Bugle (the funniest thing in the world), talking about the use of information technology in Iranian protests:

John Oliver: The reinforcements of modern technology stepped to the front line: the twin soldiers of YouTube and Twitter answered their planet's calling. People in protests used their cellphones to shoot footage, and then put it on the Internet. All it took was a potential Iranian revolution to find a practical use for Internet video.

And so I would like to hereby issue a public apology to the piano-playing cat; to the teenage boy receiving a nut-shot from a whiffle bat; and to the fat lady falling off a table. All of your clumsy attempts at entertainment were in fact vital experiments in the development of this communications tool.

Andy Zaltzman: They were very much the John the Baptists to the Jesus of Iranian video.

Kitten on a Roomba

Yes, I'm working on a bunch of different things, but... who can resist video of a kitten on a Roomba?

Building a labyrinth

We spent this afternoon at the house of some good friends, helping them expand their labyrinth and having a Solstice Day cookout.

First the kids (and a few of the parents) cleared the ground.

Then we laid down rocks in a spiral.

The kids then filled the labyrinth with sand.

It was a very interesting time, and the kids really enjoyed working on it.

Afternoon activity: building a labyrinth

At a friend's house, under some redwoods.

Bloomington

I've been in Bloomington, Indiana for a conference on visualization and the history and philosophy of science. It's one of those events that brings together my old life as an historian, and my new life as a futurist: on one hand we're mainly talking about how visualizations of scientific communities and social dynamics can be used by historians and philosophers; on the other I suspect that there are cool things I could do with these maps to forecast the future of science.

the official conference picture, via flickr

There's one other think-tank person here, which saves me from being the one non-academic Ph.D. in the room, the scholarly equivalent of Stephen Colbert's one black friend.

There have been some efforts to use scinometric (or "science of science") maps in the history of science, but so far as I know, most of this work has followed fairly conventional historiographic paths: for example, mapping the Darwin or Mersenne correspondence, or asking questions about the growth of scholarly networks. We've not yet used them to something radically new, like using geographical coding to calculate the speed of the transmission of ideas or instruments, or constructing agent-based models of scientific communities and seeing how they evolve over time. But that's why we're here-- to think about how we could create such things, and what benefit they might bring.

I quite like Bloomington, or the few blocks of Bloomington that I've seen.

via flickr

The place is enormous. It has roughly the same number of students as Berkeley, but physically it's much larger. It also takes collegiate Gothic (a somewhat stripped-down, modernized version) to a scale I don't think I've never seen before. If you took Princeton or Bryn Mawr, put it on a balloon, then blew up the balloon to five times its previous size, you'd get the IU campus. Yale and University of Chicago bear some family resemblance to Oxford or Cambridge, thanks to their small scale; IU takes Gothic where it's never gone before.

via flickr

It's also pretty heavily wooded. There are a couple streams that flow through the campus, and they're surrounded by forest and crisscrossed with little footbridges.

campus tuesday night, via flickr

the same location, wednesday afternoon, via flickr

The town has a lot of restaurants, and a lot of foreign food, for a place its size. Tuesday night I had dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant, and last night it was Thai at Siam House. (Both are a serious challenge to dieting!) One local attributed this to the long presence of foreign students at IU, some of whom brought spouses or other relatives who went into the restaurant business. I have no way of knowing if this is true, but for whatever reason, there's good food here.

siam house, via flickr

There's a bit of a restaurant row, small places in old houses. That's cool, as it gives the restaurants a more informal character.

restaurant row, via flickr

There are also rabbits that come out in the evening, which adds one more little (furry and bouncy) note of whimsy to the place.

insouciant bunny, via flickr

Ethiopian dinner in Bloomington!

Delays and altruism on the road

I'm in the shuttle from Indianapolis to Bloomington. I got here six hours late, as I gave up my seat on last night's redeye in exchange for an early morning flight. I'm not sure it was a good trade. On one hand, I did get $350 (though it's not cash, I need to use it in the next year, and I'm sure US Airways hopes that I'll lose it rather than use it), and I won't miss any of the critical conference stuff-- I'll still get there in time for this evening's dinner. On the other, I gave up the chance to spend a day exploring Bloomington (though whether the town would really provide entertainment worth $60/hour is unknowable) and do a little early networking. And I accepted the airline's offer to stay in a hotel, though that turned out to be a wash: yes it was free, but it took longer to get the shuttle than I expected, which ate into ime I would have spent sleeping.

On my East Coast trip, I did something similar. I got into JFK around 2 in the morning, in that dead time when the airport has effectively shut down. After about half an hour I got the Supershuttle, and immediately settled in and dozed off. A few minutes later, the driver woke me up Two couples needed to go to Long Island, and if he didn't take them, they'd be stranded and have to spend the night in the airport. Could he take them, and drop them off at their homes first?

I was too groggy to ask why they couldn't drop me off first and then take the other passengers, and I wasn't really obliged to say yes. But my flight was already several hours late, and so I kind of felt like, what's a couple hours more? Plus, I know how much it can suck to be stuck in an airport: for all the appearance of luxury, they're really places designed to move people in and out as efficiently as possible, and are sullenly hostile to people who find themselves stuck. And, in some way, having had such a great time the precious few days at the conference and reconnecting with friends, I suspected that karma would catch up with me if I said no. It was time to rebalance.

So I said yes. We picked up the other passengers, who were pretty damn grateful to be going home. We then barreled out of JFK, promptly got lost, and spent the next half hour trying to figure out how to get to Stony East Oyster Point, or wherever. By the time we rolled up to the Paramount, it was about 5:30 in the morning.

Maybe I've done enough of this kind of thing for the year. But what matters is that I'm here now.

And the flight here was fine. I changed planes in Phoenix, which was a bit more direct a route than my original itinerary, which had me connecting through Charlotte, North Carolina (sigh). And I brought along a copy of Richard Sennett's The Craftsman, which is a wonderfully stimulating book, and which I realize I can blend into three different things I'm working on (that I've got three different-- and more to the point, unfinished-- pieces going simultaneously is a fact we shall not linger over).

Cass Sunstein on deliberation and extremism

It's conventional wisdom that groups generate ideas and plans more moderate than those of individuals. Groups and discussion encourage compromise, smooth out extremes, and guarantee moderation. It is also one of the unspoken assumptions of facilitation and group-oriented scenario work. Facilitation and scenario-building, the thinking goes, builds a sense of collective spirit by helping groups develop a shared vision of the future.

But Cass Sunstein's new book, Going to Extremes, challenges these assumptions. As Slate's Christopher Caldwell explains in a review,

Going to Extremes... finds that sitting people down to deliberate does not necessarily lead them to compromise or to converge on their mean opinion. They tend to radicalize in the direction of whatever bias they had to begin with. Teams of doctors, deciding collectively, are more likely to support the "extreme" strategy of heroic efforts to save terminally ill patents than the average individual doctor among them. Juries tend to vote, after discussion, for much more "extreme" monetary awards than the average individual juror among them would. Talking things over isn't necessarily wrong. But it doesn't lead reliably to moderation, either....

Much of Sunstein's evidence about how people drift to extremes comes from his studies of groups that already have a bias to begin with. Individual Democrats and Republicans on three-judge panels cast more "extreme" votes when they are in the majority than when they are not. A group of conservative Republicans in Colorado Springs will move sharply rightward when they discuss global warming among themselves, and a group of liberal Democrats from Boulder will move sharply leftward.

These homogeneous groups are not the special cases they would appear. They tell us something about what happens in more heterogeneous groups, too. If you bring the two clashing sides together, they don't find middle ground any more than like-minded people do. Each side digs in. If you give "a set of balanced, substantive readings" to a group that is at loggerheads over abortion or affirmative action, Sunstein shows, each side simply mines the readings for support of its own position. Ideology, it turns out, is not just a matter of opinions or positions—it is a predisposition to receive some kinds of evidence and not others. Compounding the problem, certain kinds of extremist arguments have an "automatic rhetorical advantage" in deliberation. Me, too, but less is harder to rally behind than In for a penny, in for a pound.

The question this raises is whether the facilitation methods that futurists use tend to encourage moderation, or exacerbate this problem. Do scenarios tend to force people to think together, and recognize that complex issues can't be solved through simple means? Or does the intellectual and imaginative freedom that thinking about the future provides encourage groups to project their own extremes?

Add this to the list of insights from psychology-- along with the work of Daniel Gilbert, Daniel Kahnemann, Philip Tetlock, et al-- that futurists need to consider when thinking about how to improve their work.

Sunday in the park, Silicon Valley style

Birthday party with bouncy house.... Couples out for a stroll... IIT
alumni cricket match....

Steam train at Vasona Park

A favorite with the kids!

Live music at Cafe Zoë

Guitarist DeBraun Thomas. He's good.