April 2006

Fun story in the “Chronicle”:http://chronicle.com/free/2006/04/2006040701t.htm this week, about the perennial academic pastime of trying to figure out the identity of the anonymous referee who dinged your article. Word documents preserve a lot of metadata, including, very often, the author’s name – so that if you submit your review via a Word email attachment (as many journals ask you to these days), and the journal forwards the review unchanged to the article’s author, he or she can figure out who you are without having to play the usual guessing game. I’ve been aware of this for a couple of years (I carefully strip all data before sending reviews out, just in case) – but I suspect that many academics aren’t (some of them may not even realize that Word collates this data automatically).

I think this is my best spam email ever. It’s part Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and part Russian sci-fi:

“Why is it,” Jonathan puzzled, “that the hardest thing in the world is profoundly serious work, since every bent line illuminates a straight one. They were all just watching and grunting words of welcome, but not one was swift wind. Yet he felt guiltless, breaking the promises he had made.”

Bullshit stock hype, if you wondered. And I can hardly blame my mail; perhaps the coming AI kernel is building in the relentlessly negative spam-filter hive mind. Each time a nonsense phrase is chancily uplifted to poetic virtue the filter “stumbles” and allows it through.

The website “Sign and Sight”:http://www.signandsight.com/ (an English-language version of “Perlentaucher”:http://www.perlentaucher.de/ ) is a year old, and I’ve only just noticed it. There’s lots of excellent stuff there, including “a piece by Friedrich Christian Delius on the state of Italy”:http://www.signandsight.com/features/697.html , which tells us, inter alia, that the World Bank ranked the Italian legal system 135th/136 (just ahead of Guatemala!) for effectiveness:

bq. The main reason is that the limitation period for crimes continues to run after a trial has opened, and even after a verdict has been passed, right up until the final day of the final instance. Consequently lawyers try to prolong legal proceedings as long as possible. In 2004 alone 210,000 cases fell under the statute of limitations. The perfect scenario for well-off defendants to get away scot-free. Berlusconi himself has profited this way several times.

bq. A well-governed state might have an interest in changing this state of affairs, for example by introducing the usual procedure of suspending the statute of limitations when a trial begins. The governing majority has indeed gathered the energy to make changes, but in an unexpectedly creative way. The limitation periods have now been considerably shortened, from fifteen to seven and a half years, specifically for economic crimes and corruption. There will be no more sentences for the top ten thousand criminals, Mafiosi, corrupt politicians.

There’s much much more.

Over the next hour or so, I’ll be in a debate with Jerome Armstrong, Dan Drezner and Stefan Sharkansky on Puget Sound “public radio”:http://www.kuow.org/weekday.asp – Seattle area readers should feel free to chime in.

David Clark in the Guardian is pointing out that people are thoroughly bored with the Tony Blair versus Gordon Brown show. So I thought I’d settle the matter once and for all by setting a date for Tony’s departure, based on quantitative economics rather than all this nebulous political stuff. I am taking my modelling strategy from David Clark’s observations that what really matters here is 1) the non-Blairites perception of whether Tony is staying or going and 2) how vindictive a victorious Gordon is planning to be to the Blairites. So let’s make a model.
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A year or so ago, I was surprised to find out that a fair bit of the news on US TV is actually advertising produced by corporations and fed into news broadcasts with spurious “reporters”. The NYT has an update, with a report by the Center for Media and Democracy on the extent of the practice.

“Tiktaalik, Dr. Shubin said, is ‘both fish and tetrapod, which we sometimes call a fishapod.'” (NY Times link)

It seems to me there is a missed opportunity in not calling them ichthyopods. Because then you could riff on Daniel Dennett – the whole ‘no skyhooks’ thing. You could pen an attack on ID: ‘ichthyopod crane and the headless horseman of natural selection.’ Something like that. (I suppose an ichthyopod would really be an organism with fish for feet. But, then again, so would a fishapod. Come to think of it, suppose we find an organism with the number four attached to the ends of its legs. What are we going to call it? Not a tetrapod, surely. A problem. Speaking of four, google only gives us four hits for ‘ichthyopod’, as of today. If you are feeling lucky, you see this.)

Following up Kieran’s post quoting Douglas Adams’ line that “You may think it’s a long way down the street to the Chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space” I thought I’d try to work out the scale of comparison that is, in some sense directly available to us and compare it to the scale of the universe. (I’m bound to make a mistake here, but what are comments threads for if not to fix these things).

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Sean Carroll is “moving to Caltech”:http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/04/06/going-to-california/ as a Senior Research Associate. Congratulations to him. I was out at Caltech a couple of years ago. I gave a talk on weak first order deconfinement transitions in (2+1)-dimensional SU(5) Yang-Mills theory. No of course I didn’t. I was in Pasadena because my significantly smarter other was at a conference, and I wandered over there. Looking to get oriented, I found a map of the campus. The buildings were numbered and there were two keys: an alphabetical index and a functional index. Obviously the engineers are in charge here, I thought.

I teasingly announced in my class on political policy and education reform that next week I shall be defending NCLB; “Brighouse defends Bush” was what I promised them. I told my family the same at the dinner table, and confronted the following rebuke by my 9 year old: “But dad, you’re not supposed to use your teaching to persuade your students about politics. That’s bias”. This was, I thought, a bit rich from someone who slavishly adopts her teacher’s views, and criticizes me every time I use the word “Indian” for what she regards as “using stereotypes”. But I agree with her basic point. So why is it ok for me to defend NCLB in class?

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“Teresa Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007399.html#119570 in comments on _Making Light_

Won’t change their minds [creationists] . They’ll say it’s a fake.

So maybe that means they won’t have to deal with it; but they’re just begging to have their kids suffer a catastrophic loss of faith when they discover that it’s demonstrably not a fake. You can only go so far in inculcating denial. Beyond that, the person has to want to deny the evidence.

bq. Or that it was put there by God to test our Faith.

God Almighty is infinite truth and light, but the God we deal with here on earth is lying to us? Doesn’t that make them some unpleasant variety of Gnostic?

Also, could they please explain what other apparently solid data is eligible to be dismissed in that fashion? Yes? And how they can tell the difference? One step past that point in any direction, they’ll fall into _”some parts of creation are More Real than others”_ : a muddy, fetid philosophical swamp that breeds errors by the swarm.

_”What do we know, and how do we know that we know it?”_ : There’s a reason it’s a classic.

bq. Or worse, it was put there by the Foul Deceiver to undermine said Faith.

Ooooookay, so Satan is a creative force, and had a hand in the creation of the world? That can’t be anything but Manichaeanism: a recurrent Christian heresy, explicitly rejected as doctrine by all the major denominations.

There’s your real problem with Creationism: it’s incompatible with Christianity.

Update: as Teresa points out in comments, I should make it clear that she’s responding to an earlier comment by “Serge”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007399.html#119561.

I’ve been doing some research trying to find out the sizes of schools in different countries (I want to know the average size and the median size of schools — anyone know this for the US, UK, and a couple of other randomly chosen countries? Tell me below). Anyway, in the course of this I have found this document at the DFES site. Unless I am reading it wrong (which I must be, surely) it says that in 2004-5 there were sixty 5 year old children attending secondary schools in England and Wales, fifty 6 year olds, and 110 seven year olds (see table 2b on p. 9). “Secondary” includes schools “deemed middle” so the numbers of 8 year olds and above are less startling, but it is very odd, no? Can anyone explain this? Or am I going to be reduced to asking my dad?

Jon Mandle points to one anticipation of Thomas Kuhn. Here’s another – this one about the romance of paradigm shift vs. the pedestrian dullness of ‘normal’ science:

In a philosophical view, consistency is a certain level at all times, maintained in all the thoughts of one’s mind. But, since nature is nearly all hill and dale, how can one keep naturally advancing in knowledge without submitting to the natural inequalities in the progress? Advance into knowledge is just like advance upon the grand Erie canal, where, from the character of the country, change of level is inevitable; you are locked up and locked down with perpetual inconsistencies, and yet all the time you get on; while the dullest part of the whole route is what the boatmen call the ‘long level’ – a consistently-flat surface of sixty miles through stagnant swamps.”

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For some reason someone thought this clip from _Rachel’s Holiday_ by Marian Keyes was something Henry and I should read. I can’t imagine why.

And although we didn’t want to … we traipsed over behind him. Where we had to do the Irish person meets other Irish person abroad thing. Which involved first of all pretending that we hadn’t realized the other was Irish. Then we had to discover that we had been brought up two minutes’ walk from each other, or that we’d gone to the same school, or that we’d met on our summer holidays in Tramore when we were eleven, or that our mothers were each other’s bridesmaids, or that his older brother had gone our with my older sister, or that when our dog got lost his family found it and brought it back.

I’m sorry to say this sort of thing happens all the time. For some reason — possibly due to the combination of a small base population, large extended families, general nosiness, and the propensity to talk the leg off a donkey — Irish people are appallingly good at uncovering the normally invisible web of latent network connections that surround us. Out at Langley, teams of NSA analysts are using the most sophisticated computing technology to dredge through terabytes of data using fast homomorphic reductions, Markov graph regressions and Galois lattices in an effort to do what your typical Irish Mammy accomplishes by asking you two or three questions, taking a sip of tea and saying something like “Oh are you related to [your Aunt or Uncle’s name here] then?”