Relevant History

Hiking in Castle Rock State Park

Yesterday the family went on a hike in Castle Rock State Park.

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Castle Rock's about an hour south of our home, and is one of the many excellent parks on Skyline Ridge, the mountains that divide Silicon Valley from Santa Cruz, Half Moon Bay, and the Pacific coast.

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The kids have been getting into rock climbing recently (our local Y has a climbing wall equipped for top-roping), and I wanted them to have a chance to do a little outdoor climbing. Castle Rock is famous for having lots of very interesting sandstone formations that are weathered and great for climbing; they range from smaller rocks that are good for kids, to some very difficult technical climbs.

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There's one outcropping in particular, at Goat Rock, that the kids found hard but not impossible, and offered a terrific view of the mountains-- and a steep drop on the other side.

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One of the things I'm trying to teach the kids (particularly my self-described daredevil son) is that you need to respect the fact that while it's fun, climbing can kill you if you don't pay attention. Being smart about the risk is part of the challenge.

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There are two major trails in the park, Saratoga Gap and Ridge. Ridge leads to Goat Rock, and is a good steady climb from the parking lot. It has some beautiful sections, but I thought Saratoga Gap was even better: not only are the views spectacular, but the trail runs over a couple streams and rocks that the kids enjoyed scrambling over.

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Parts of the park look like something out of a Roger Dean album cover for Yes. I found that a little disorienting in a pleasant way.

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There's a waterfall that's supposed to be great during the rainy season; it was a bit anemic yesterday, but the observation deck beside it has a terrific view.

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[To the tune of Van Morrison, "And It Stoned Me," from the album Live at the Fillmore West (April 26 1970) (a 4-star song, imo).]

On resolutions

The Guardian has a timely article examining why New Year's resolutions fail:

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire... and his team had asked 700 people about their strategies for achieving new year resolutions. Their goals ranged from losing weight or giving up smoking to gaining a qualification or starting a better relationship.

Of the 78% who failed, many had focused on the downside of not achieving the goals; they had suppressed their cravings, fantasised about being successful, and adopted a role model or relied on willpower alone.... On the other hand, people who kept their resolutions tended to have broken their goal into smaller steps and rewarded themselves when they achieved one of these. They also told their friends about their goals, focused on the benefits of success and kept a diary of their progress.

People who planned a series of smaller goals had an average success rate of 35%, while those who followed all five of the above strategies had a 50% chance of success, the study found.

"Many of the most successful techniques involve making a plan and helping yourself stick to it," Wiseman said.... Other strategies that helped people to achieve their goals included making only one resolution at a time and treating occasional lapses in the plan as just temporary setbacks.

Since I'm about 20 pounds lighter than I was this time last year (but 15 pounds from where I really want to be), I read this with particular interest. There's plenty of research that indicates that regimens involving self-denial, and require immediate sacrifices for long-term gains, are hard for people to keep to: this is why retirement accounts that automatically deduct money from your paycheck are more reliable than your own intention to put away some money every month for retirement. I think Wiseman's findings are consistent with that work.

Like a lot of people who've fought with their weight, I have a pretty complicated relationship with food. Some of the foods I overdo most easily are really simple, like Ritz Crackers (go figure). It's also something of a narcotic: I find if I eat more than a modest lunch, I get dumb. But unlike smoking, it's not a relationship you can ever end: I'm stuck with eating.

For me, the first critical discovery about dieting was that the miracle key to weight loss is... eat less food. It's really that simple. Not exercise, not Atkins (which worked for a while, but then didn't, and feels pretty ecologically unusustainable anyway), not some other diet; just a lot less food. And making that work, in turn, required paying a lot of attention to little things. I figured out that the time of day I'm most likely to have trouble with food is before dinner (and to a lesser degree after). I've learned what diversions work: investors in gum companies had a very good 2009 thanks to me, and I drink vast quantities of water and tea, mainly for the satiety effect. I also realized that eating certain ways creates problems: eating breakfast while standing over the kitchen sink may have worked when I was a grad student and only had two eggs and a moldy lemon in the fridge, but these days, it's a recipe for disaster. I've learned that when I have a bad day, you have to not get too discouraged, and just start over again the next day. Or the next year.

[To the tune of Van Morrison, "School Of Hard Knocks," from the album Keep It Simple (a 1-star song, imo).]

Paper planes in space

I love this idea: paper planes in space. Last year, Japanese paper plane maker Takeo Toda

and fellow enthusiast Shinji Suzuki, an aeronautical engineer and professor at Tokyo University, announced plans to have about 100 of their paper planes launched by a Japanese astronaut on board the international space station, 250 miles above Earth.

The 30cm planes, made from heat-resistant paper treated with silicon, survived temperatures of 250C and wind speeds of mach 7 ‑ seven times the speed of sound ‑ during testing. But the attempt was postponed after the pair acknowledged it would be all but impossible to track them during their week-long journey to Earth, assuming any of them survived the searing descent.

And no, I'm not sure how a paper plane will behave in either microgravity or the exosphere. Is there enough atmosphere to get any kind of lift and stability? Whatever.

[To the tune of Van Morrison, "Kingdom Hall," from the album Live at the Bottom Line, New York City (November 1 1978) (a 2-star song, imo).]

On belay!

Climbing at the Y.

F6: Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying spacecraft

Having been doing a lot on cubesats recently, I was struck by a Space News report that DARPA is funding a $75 million project "to develop the final design for a radically new space architecture in which traditional, large spacecraft are replaced by clusters of wirelessly connected orbiting modules"-- i.e., networked cubesats.

Dubbed System F6, short for Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying spacecraft, Orbital’s design was selected among four competing study contracts issued in 2008 and 2009, according to a Dec. 18 company news release. The new contract is valued at $74.6 million over a one-year period.

Gregg Burgess, Orbital’s vice president for national security systems in the company’s Advanced Programs Group, said the new space architecture has the potential to transform space systems in much the same way that the Internet changed many aspects of daily life.

“System F6 is not just an incremental improvement in technology, but rather a fundamental transformation of the entire space community,” Burgess stated in the news release. “Fractionated and networked architectures could be the answer to recurring problems that debilitate the space sector, including significant cost increases, late deliveries, launch mishaps and on-orbit failures.”

Burgess said each of the System F6 modules is designed to work with the others in a cluster to perform tasks once reserved for large, traditional spacecraft while providing the same overall mission capability.

For those who aren't that familiar with conventional satellites, what makes this idea revolutionary is that normally spacecraft are expensive; take a long time to design, test and launch; and are all-or-nothing propositions-- if they crash or fail to deploy properly the costs are catastrophic. Theoretically, you could replace some big satellites with constellations of cubesats, which could be upgraded incrementally, reconfigured for different missions, and would be more robust against accidents or attack. Very different.

[To the tune of The Futureheads, "Burnt," from the album News & Tributes (a 1-star song).]

Wait 'Till

The De-Phazz remix of Ella Fitzgerald's "Wait 'Till You See Him" (on Verve Remixed) is one of the most fabulous things I've ever heard. Wow.

[To the tune of Ella Fitzgerald, "Wait 'Till You See Him (De-Phazz Remix)," from the album Verve Remixed (It's a 4-star song).]

Academic job market sucks for thirtieth year; Ph.D.s remain unaware of other job markets

This piece of complete non-news in the New York Times caught my eye this morning:

With colleges and universities cutting back because of the recession, the job outlook for graduate students in language and literature is bleaker than ever before.

According to the Modern Language Association’s forecast of job listings, released Thursday, faculty positions will decline 37 percent, the biggest drop since the group began tracking its job listings 35 years ago.

The projection, based on a comparison between the number of jobs listed in October 2008 and October 2009, follows a 26 percent drop the previous year.

I read this, and wondered what bothered me about it. Obviously the news itself is bad, but not surprising: the academic job market has been a disaster area for a generation now, it's not going to get better, and anyone who thinks it will is delusional. When I was in grad school in the late 1980s, the conventional wisdom was that we were hitting the job market at exactly the right time: the generation that was hired during the Great Expansion in the 1950s and 1960s would retire, and we'd cruise into those positions.

Needless to say, that didn't happen, and the fact that many of those jobs were converted into short-term positions should have been a clear signal that The Market Had Changed.

But this is old news. What gets me about this piece, I realized, is how it's framed. It equates "the job outlook for graduate students in language and literature" with "the academic job market:" there's no sense that Ph.D.s might be capable of doing SOMETHING ELSE with all that knowledge. Demonstrably wrong, guys.

[To the tune of British Sea Power, "Something Wicked," from the album The Decline Of British Sea Power (It's a 1-star song, imo).]

You kids get off my lawn so I can retire

Sometimes a "what people are commenting on" list (like this one from CBS' Market Watch web site) looks like a direct, unmediated view of the id:

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Gee, I wonder what Baby Boomers are worried about?

It also makes me wonder how well the "biggest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history" is going.

[To the tune of Audioslave, "Bring 'em Back Alive," from the album Audioslave (I give it 4 stars).]

I wrote on Victorian solar eclipse expeditions, when I could have doing this....

Tony Perrottet found something pretty interesting:

A couple of years ago, while researching a treatise on salacious European history, I discovered the phantasmagoric wonderland of sex that was Georgian Britain, the era from 1714 to 1837. Long before the heyday of Austin Powers, debauchery proliferated up and down the rain-soaked land, fueled by riotous boozing and self-indulgence. "There was a gusto about 18th century vice unmatched before or since," writes historian Fergus Linnane with tangible nostalgia, in London: The Wicked City. A flood of wealth from the budding empire allowed the leisured classes to fulfill their carnal fantasies without restraint. And perhaps the most striking feature of the age was the explosion of British sex clubs.

[To the tune of Nine Inch Nails, "The Greater Good," from the album Year Zero (I give it 2 stars).]

Peninsula Craft Fair

Today was the Craft Fair. Each year Peninsula has a fair in early December that's part fund-raiser, part school marketing, and part social event; it's one of my favorite events for the same reasons I like things like biking and travel. This year, as usual, we were over there during early set-up: my daughter had a table this year, and was selling handmade jewelry. (She did pretty well, too, and we had some interesting conversations around pricing: in particular, whether you should charge people more for pieces that actually take you longer to make when you're just learning, or whether you give people a discount because your early work isn't necessarily as good as your later work.)

setting up the front porch, via flickr

After helping my daughter get settled with her stuff-- which basically involved making sure she had the boxes that she needed, and that he'd connected with her fellow Girl Scouts-- I walked around and took pictures. I always like the school right before these events open: it's like being backstage before a show.

turning the play space into a cafe, via flickr

Of course, since its a progressive school, Peninsula has always had a pretty active arts and crafts program, though the specific offerings have varied depending on the interests of the teachers, tradition, etc.. (Though by varied, I mean decade by decade: my wife's weaving teacher arrived at the school during the Roosevelt administration, and left sometime in the Reagan years.) For a long time, I regarded it as an interesting part of the school culture, but more recently I've come to form a theory that it serves an important role balancing the other parts of the school curriculum.

our renovated auditorium, via flickr

It's a bit of a stereotype about the school that Peninsula kids spend a lot of time learning interpersonal stuff, getting in touch with their feelings, etc.-- typical flaky California educational stuff. Like some stereotypes, there's a grain of truth to that, at least in the lower grades: certainly the nursery kids are explicitly taught how to behave, how to deal with disagreements and bad feelings, etc.. I think for the older kids it's more implicit, in part because most of them have been through years of training already, but also because they all kind of realize that they need to be civil because they're all going to be living with each other for the next several years.

There's nothing wrong with this, but even for someone who writes, teaches, and designs events for a living, it seems a bit... insubstantial. But after reading Matthew Crawford and Richard Sennett, and especially the way craft standards support the rough, blunt communication about success and failure, I started to see the crafts at Peninsula in a new light.

karyssa miller's weavings, via flickr

For while it's important to get along with other people, and to be creative, it's also important to know that some things absolutely have to be done in certain ways, and that beyond a very basic level, expression can't happen without mastery of your medium and cultivation of talent. The kids start off on very simple looms, and progress over time to more sophisticated ones: it's a big thing to move to the floor looms, or to graduate from rope pots to the potter's wheel. Further, the loom doesn't give a damn whether you're imaginative, or you get along with your friends: it needs to be handled a certain way, and it requires you to have a feel for your materials. The utter impersonality of craftwork forces you to learn things that you don't in more egalitarian and human contexts, and the fact that the school provides both is a good thing.

soup heroes, via flickr

Craft Fair setup

Vendors are setting up for the 11 opening. So far it isn't raining. Let's hope that holds!

Peter Drucker on forecasting too early

This is striking:

[When] Warren Bennis praised him publicly for his foresight, [Peter] Drucker had this surprising reaction: "It was meant as a compliment, but I winced because, bluntly, I was 10 years premature with every one of my forecasts. And that’s not a compliment. That is saying that one has had no impact."

[To the tune of Tori Amos, "Mr. Zebra," from the album Boys For Pele (I give it 1 star).]

Ineffective ad of the day

This ad on Weather.com doesn't really inspire me to refinance my mortgage.

Am I supposed to identify with this guy? Because when I think "homeowner," I think "shirtless ex-Skynrd roadie who looks like he's got the lead role in this year's San Quentin performance of a Passion play."

Okay, back to work.

[To the tune of Tori Amos, "That Guy," from the album Abnormally Attracted To Sin (I give it 4 stars).]

Brain science's last tribute to H. M.

This, pardon the phrase, is kind of mind-blowing . The Brain Observatory, a UCSD lab, is slicing the brain of amesiac patient H.M., one of the most-studied people in the whole history of science, into 2500 sections-- and the process is being broadcast live.

We are slicing the brain of the amnesic patient H.M. into giant histological sections. The whole brain specimen has been successfully frozen to -40C and will be sectioned during one continuous session that we expect will last approximately 30 hours (+ some breaks and some sleep in between). The procedure was designed for the safe collection of all tissue slices of the brain and for the acquisition of blockface images throughout the entire block.

It's really worth checking out, first as a kind of morbid wonder ("oh my god, that's really a brain!"), then as a technically fascinating event ("it's sort of like one of those meat cutters at the deli-- and is that a sumi-e brush they're using to take each slice?"). Where you go from there is up to you. Me, I find it kind of an amazing tribute to someone who contributed a lot to our understanding of the neurological foundations of memory.

The man was named Henry Molaison, though before he died last year he was only publicly known at H.M. According to the Times, he "lost the ability to form new memories after a brain operation in 1953, and over the next half century he became the most studied patient in brain science."

Before H.M., scientists thought that memory was widely distributed throughout the brain, not dependent on any one area. But by testing Mr. Molaison, researchers in Montreal and Hartford soon established that the areas that were removed — in the medial temporal lobe, about an inch deep in the brain level with the ear — are critical to forming new memories. One organ, the hippocampus, is especially crucial and is now the object of intense study.

In a series of studies, Mr. Molaison soon altered forever the understanding of learning by demonstrating that a part of his memory was fully intact. A 1962 paper by Dr. Brenda Milner of the Montreal Neurological Institute described a landmark study in which she had Mr. Molaison try to trace a line between two five-point stars, one inside the other.

Each time he tried the experiment, it seemed to him an entirely new experience. Yet he gradually became more proficient — showing that there are at least two systems in the brain for memory, one for events and facts and another for implicit or motor learning, for things like playing a guitar or riding a bicycle.

I keep coming back to the Web site, and looking at the computer-driven slicer taking off another section in one window; the control panel of the microtome in another; and some grad students or techs in a third window. Computers and people, workplace and wonder, and the brain-- at once intensely human, and seen this way very alien.

[To the tune of Stereolab, "The Man With 100 Cells," from the album Margerine Eclipse (I give it 1 stars).]

Conversation in the car this afternoon

I was driving the kids home from school when the Troggs' "Wild Thing" came on.

Wild Thing, I think I love you
But I wanna know for sure...

I said, "Hey like, wow, man, that's like, cool," in a dazed hippie voice.

My son, who's nearly eight, said, "Is that old-fashioned talking?"

You damn kids. Get off my lawn.

"listening, understanding and neutralizing"

From a reader of Andrew Sullivan:

Obama is after bin Laden. No other single action would pay such huge dividends. In this, Obama proves himself again to be, not just the politician as chess master, but the politician as martial artist, always seeking for the fulcrum, the pivot point where four ounces of effort will yield a thousand pounds of result.

It is a very high level skill, far higher and more effective than the brute force men like Cheney, Bush, or Rumsfeld rely on, and it's difficult to attain, because it depends on three subsidiary skills that lesser men simply never recognize, much less master: listening, understanding and neutralizing.... What appears to some to be hesitation or lack of engagement on his part early on in any effort is really just preparation.

[To the tune of Audioslave, "Jewel Of The Summertime," from the album Revelations (I give it 3 stars).]

The Framinghman Heart Study is the gift that keeps on giving

The Framingham Heart Study really is an amazing source of data:

Dr John Cacioppo, head researcher from the department of psychology at Chicago University, said: "We detected an extraordinary pattern of contagion that leads people to be moved to the edge of the social network when they become lonely.

"On the periphery people have fewer friends, yet their loneliness leads them to losing the few ties they have left.

"These reinforcing effects mean that our social fabric can fray at the edges, like a yarn that comes loose at the end of a crocheted sweater.

"Because loneliness is associated with a variety of mental and physical diseases that can shorten life it is important for people to recognize loneliness and help those people connect with their social group before the lonely individuals move to the edges."

For the study the team examined records of about 5,000 people who lived in the Farmingham [sic] area of Massachusetts.

[To the tune of Hank Williams, "Long Gone Lonesome Blues," from the album 40 Greatest Hits (Disc 1) (I give it 3 stars). And yes, I was inspired to listen to it by the article.]

Accounting for the future

Some of the most interesting things I've read in the last year are books like Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness and Eliezer Yudkowsky's work on cognitive biases and risks [pdf], which take a close look at the psychological limitations of thinking about the future. Of course, the claim that futurists-- or OR people, accountants, etc.-- make is that the tools they use can correct for these biases.

But a Wharton accounting professor's recent studies suggest that even the apparently most rigorous quantitative tools can contribute to our holding faulty views of the future:

Accounting techniques like budgeting, sales projections and financial reporting are supposed to help prevent business failures by giving managers realistic plans to guide their actions and feedback on their progress. In other words, they are supposed to leaven entrepreneurial optimism with green-eye-shaded realism.

At least that's the theory. But when Gavin Cassar, a Wharton accounting professor, tested this idea, he found something troubling: Some accounting tools not only fail to help businesspeople, but may actually lead them astray. In one of his recent studies, forthcoming in Contemporary Accounting Research, Cassar showed that budgeting didn't help a group of Australian firms accurately forecast their revenues. In a second paper,he found that the preparation of financial projections added to aspiring entrepreneurs' optimism, leading them to overestimate their subsequent levels of sales and employment.

"It's been shown in many studies that people are overly optimistic," Cassar says. "What's interesting here is that, when you use the accounting tools, the optimism is even more extreme. This suggests that using the tools, which a lot of academics and government agencies say is good practice, can lead to even bigger mistakes."

The second of the two studies is more interesting here, because it asks whether doing things like writing business plans and creating sales projections make entrepreneurs more realistic or less realistic in their views of the future. He draws on the work of behavioral economists, who

have documented a number of mental shortcuts and biases that can lead people to depart from the logic that traditional economic orthodoxy would suggest. One of the concepts, for example, introduced by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and co-author Dan Lovallo, is that "an inside view" can distort decision making. A person who adopts an inside view becomes so focused on formulating his particular plan that he neglects to consider critical outside information, like other people's experiences in pursuing the same goal.

"Individuals form an inside view forecast by focusing on the specifics of the case, the details of the plan that exists and obstacles to its completion, and by constructing scenarios of future progress," Cassar summarizes. "In contrast, an outside view is statistical and comparative in nature and does not involve any attempt to divine the future at any level of detail."

Doing financial projections for an entrepreneurial venture, Cassar realized, entails the creation of an inside view. The entrepreneur builds a storyline of success in her head and then plays it out in her spreadsheet, showing rising sales year after year. "Humans are good at storytelling and building causal links," Cassar notes. "They think, 'I'll go to college, I'll write a business plan, I'll raise some capital and then I'll go public or sell out to a big competitor.' There's a probability attached to each of these steps, but they don't think about that. They put all the links together and evaluate the likelihood of success at a much higher probability than is realistic."...

People who did financial projections were the most likely to overestimate the future sales of their ventures. In other words, "the same management activities that entrepreneurs rely on to cope with uncertainty appear to be causing individuals to hold optimistic expectations," he writes. Interestingly, writing a business plan also led to optimism about the likelihood of success, but it didn't lead to overly optimistic expectations because it's also "positively associated with the likelihood that the nascent activity will become an operating venture," he adds. Put another way, people who write plans are more likely to start companies, thereby justifying their optimism.

The details are worth looking at, but the basic moral is clear: what seem like rigorous tools can lead people astray, through a combination of their apparent rigor, and the ways their use generates inside views. The interaction of users and tools co-produces what looks like objective data, and a particular way of looking at that data that's likely to exaggerate the odds of success and downplay the odds of failure.

Now for entrepreneurs you can argue that this is a good thing, and that entrepreneurs aren't successful if they dwell too much on the risks of failure. Starting your own company is an exercise is controlled, disciplined self-delusion. But how much do these kinds of biases-- ones generated by a combination of apparently good information and processes that generate inside views-- affect the work of futurists? I wonder.

[To the tune of Radiohead, "All I Need," from the album In Rainbows (I give it 5 stars).]

This is a really good idea!

From Bloomberg, via Balloon Juice:

[S]enior Goldman {Sachs] people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank....

[The combination of] Goldman and guns plays right into the way Wall- Streeters like to think of themselves. Even those who were bailed out believe they are tough, macho Clint Eastwoods of the financial frontier, protecting the fistful of dollars in one hand with the Glock in the other. The last thing they want is to be so reasonably paid that the peasants have no interest in lynching them.

Update: As Indecision Forever says,

If Goldman's buying guns they're probably about to rig a spectacular collapse of the worldwide gun market by packaging sub-prime pistols into securities, manipulating the quality ratings of those pistols and then re-selling them to everyone else.

[To the tune of Pet Shop Boys, "What Have I Done To Deserve This?," from the album Discography: The Complete Singles Collection (I give it 1 star).]