push and pull

2012-01-17T12:45:00.001-06:00

There's a fun story today about two men who kayaked around Ellesmere island in the Arctic north last summer.

The island is between Canada and Greenland. Here you can see a map of the north Arctic including Ellesmere island.

I like this quote from the story:

“We paddled out at 11 in the morning, got scared and came back,” Turk said. “We went out at 4 in the afternoon, got scared and came back. And then we went out at 9 and looked at each other. ‘O.K., we’re going for it.’ By 3 in the morning, we got clear around Cape Union.”

He added: “We each had a gut feeling that that was the right time. But is a gut feeling just a fancy name for blind luck? Or did we really know something? I don’t know. We made it.”

Glad Calvinball is at the bottom!

2012-01-13T08:18:00.000-06:00

Remember Watson, the computer that can play Jeopardy? Scientists love to create algorithms that can beat humans at games-- it's one of the most interesting, fun, and useful ways to address questions of artificial intelligence. You can now find an up-to-date categorization of games, with respect to how easily computers can beat humans, in xkcd. Thinking about the different games might give you some insight as to what computers are good at and what they are not!

Math in Business

2011-11-10T22:58:00.002-06:00

Jordan Ellenberg has recently introduced me to mathbabe, a great blog with interesting perspectives on all sorts of things related to math and data and life.

This post is about jobs that mathematicians could have after getting their PhD (or enjoying some advanced expertise) in mathematics. I think it's also really applicable to folks in EE and CS who work on data, like me!

Here's a quote I definitely agree with:

"in general [academia is] a place for people who have internal feedback mechanisms and don’t rely on external ones."

The Berlin Wall

2011-08-12T17:50:00.004-05:00

On August 13, 1961, the Berlin wall was raised overnight. Literally starting at midnight, the border between West Berlin and East Germany was entirely lined with barbed wire fence by morning. The wall itself was built then built up inside the fence.

This morning on NPR I heard a review of writer Hogler Teschke, who was born and raised in East Germany. When he was seven, he first saw the wall.

Renee Montagne asked him about divisions between the East and West:

Hogler Teschke: "I think the most important difference was that the people in the West grew up in a democratic and an open and liberal society, and we did not. And with freedom, and with democracy, there are also many many challenges, and you have to learn to face this. And you have to learn to think and act for yourself. ..."

RM: "You mean it wasn't just an immediate gratification of the basic human need to be free-- as I think the most idealistic people would think. That emerging from communism wasn't that simple."

HT: "A very good old friend of mine... once said, It is actually not very easy to learn to be a free person. That sounds very simple and banal, but it is not if you have not learned it from your childhood on."

They spoke also of two words created from this fractured history: Ostalgia, or nostalgia for the East. Teschke's son, who was 10 when the wall was open, calls himself an Ossie, like a Eastie. Teschke believes his son's generation still feels the divide, but he hopes with the next generation it will disappear.

Futurama clip

2011-08-03T09:05:00.001-05:00

just watch it. It's only seven seconds.

Thanks to Marco Duarte for that one (via google+).

Freya Stark

2011-05-07T12:56:00.004-05:00

Freya Stark was an explorer and writer, born in the late 1800s. She spent most of her time in the middle east. I've been reading about her in the New Yorker. I liked what I saw, and kept reading on the internet; here is a quote of hers that I like:

"One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings... I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism."

From the New Yorker article, which is a review of some of her books which are being re-released, I chuckled at this quote:

"The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is, and no one is surprised."

After laughing I realized that we have come a long way. Here I am, a woman studying to get a PhD in electrical engineering. This Monday is my preliminary defense, and as it turns out, pretending to be stupid will not get me very far.

Large deviations Take 2

2011-04-29T11:09:00.003-05:00

This week a tornado ripped through Tuscaloosa, Alabama, leaving 38 confirmed dead. That storm in all killed hundreds.

This article from the NY times discusses how predicting tornadoes is still very difficult. There are many factors, and it still isn't clear to meteorologists exactly when a tornado will form and come down to the earth.

I grew up with tornadoes, and when I moved to California I thought earthquakes were a lot scarier. It is true that earthquakes kill many more people around the world than do tornadoes. And earthquakes have had serious consequences even in places with amazing infrastructure, like we saw recently in Japan. At the same time, tornadoes that can hit at any time in any place-- as long as "conditions are right"-- make them a difficult problem for scientists to figure out.

As storms become more often and more severe in the world, I would like to see us put more resources toward understanding them-- both by collecting new and more measurements, and by analyzing old data about these storms. We won't be able to divert them, and we won't be able to stop their destruction; but if we can warn people ahead of time, we can save lives.

Beauty and Counting

2011-04-25T20:24:00.003-05:00

Sometimes enumeration is beautiful! But engineers don't like having to enumerate everything, because that takes a long time.

There are 892 ways to partition a 3x4 grid into unit rectangles. Thanks to angichau for the link.

Japan earthquake and large deviations

2011-03-14T12:07:00.003-05:00

The New York Times has an interesting article today about how Japan and North America came closer together after the devastating earthquake last week.

A very important area of study in modeling is that of large deviations theory. When we collect data in order to model something-- in order to predict earthquakes, for example-- we may not get very many data points for rare events, if any at all. Researchers in this area work on theory that allows for principled extrapolation to model and predict rare events.

From the article:

"What is perhaps most surprising about the Japan earthquake is how misleading history can be. In the past 300 years, no earthquake nearly that large — nothing larger than magnitude-eight — had struck in the Japan subduction zone. That, in turn, led to assumptions about how large a tsunami might strike the coast.

“It did them a giant disservice,” said Dr. Stein of the geological survey. That is not the first time that the earthquake potential of a fault has been underestimated. Most geophysicists did not think the Sumatra fault could generate a magnitude-9.1 earthquake, and a magnitude-7.3 earthquake in Landers, Calif., in 1992 also caught earthquake experts by surprise.

“Perhaps the message is we should re-evaluate the occurrence of superlarge earthquakes on any fault,” Dr. Stein said."

when you know why and shifting the paradigm

2010-12-14T14:19:00.001-06:00

A friend of mine visited me in Madison last spring. She is a community college biology professor near Detroit. The week after she visited, she was teaching her students about levers for anatomy class. So while I was working at school, she spent some time trying to understand these simple machines.

She and I talked about how we both have a hard time using information we have learned until we feel there are no gaps in our understanding. For me, if I wasn't careful at understanding why something is the way it is, I have to take giant leaps of faith in actually applying it. And being a skeptic, I'm not particularly good at leaps of faith! You can ask my sewing teacher-- I'm always questioning the instructions she gives me. But sometimes, all the inside-out seams and pattern matching suddenly make sense, and I realize she was right all along!

When some fundamental thing just clicks, it's not always obvious why things suddenly make sense. We all have a paradigm which we accept, and once something new fits into that paradigm, we feel it "click." But this is also a hindrance to shifting the paradigm itself.

I have been reading a very good book about incorporating Structured Controversy into the classroom, by Johnson Johnson & Smith 1996. Intellectual conflict is believed to be a central part of learning to have an open mind and to be a critical thinker. Piaget in 1950 proposed that cognitive dissonance-- or inconsistency among a student's understandings of the world and what they see and hear from others-- is what motivates transitions from one level of reasoning to higher level which is more broad and flexible, and which causes "a shift from egocentrism to accommodation of other people's
perspectives."

It should be the lifetime goal of the researcher to achieve a balance between on one hand having a paradigm that allows you to incorporate and use new knowledge efficiently and on the other hand being open to shifts in your paradigm in order to follow the really breakthrough ideas.

when a proof becomes a proof

2010-08-11T08:02:00.003-05:00

Just this week, a researcher at HP labs named Vinay Deolalikar has claimed to solve the P ≠ NP problem. It has been conjectured long ago that P ≠ NP, and probably every researcher in algorithms, signal processing, and computer science has some work that relies on the belief that P ≠ NP, so if he has proved it there will be world wide celebrating. It is also one of the Clay Math prize problems, so (again, if the proof is accepted) Deolalikar will win the million dollar prize.

What I find so exciting is now the process of accepting or rejecting the proof as a community of researchers. This blog post discusses possible issues in the proof that have been raised by various computer scientists and mathematicians. Hopefully this process will help the public understand something about the way that math and research really works-- as that blog quotes from mathematician Yuri Manin, "A proof only becomes a proof after the social act of accepting it as a proof." Engineering, science and even math are social endeavors in many ways, but the most important is that ideas only begin to impact the world when the whole community begins to understand and accept them. The point in time when the community embraces the ideas, and begins to voice the implications enthusiastically, is the point at which the idea really guarantees its spot in the library of scientific knowledge.

compressed sensing

2010-05-25T12:55:00.004-05:00

I created this audio illustration of compressed sensing as part of a demo for an NPR bit about compressed sensing, which Jordan Ellenberg was asked to participate in after the NPR folks saw his Wired article. Well yesterday the piece was on All Things Considered! You can listen here.

Authenticity

2010-04-05T11:37:00.006-05:00

I watched this talk by Jesse Schell, a professor at CMU. In it he talks to game developers about how games are moving forward into the future. He has some very interesting ideas about bringing gaming into our every day lives-- even to help us become better people. But what I found most interesting was his reference to a book called "Authenticity." Here is a transcript of this part.

"We talk about realism, and we know yeah realism can make your game better sometimes if it's the right kind of realism. But normally we're thinking about visual realism. There's a lot of other kinds of realism that can come into a game. ... Guitar hero you play on a real guitar, and webkins with a real stuffed animal, and even the X-Box achievements is outside the reality of the game-- there's a higher level scoring system.

"But it's not just us that were snuck up on by this reality thing, and it's not just happening to us. Go look at TV-- the people on TV, their heads are spinning--everything has turned into reality TV. Go to the grocery store-- it's not just groceries anymore, it's organic groceries-- more genuine, more real groceries. Go to McDonald's, well you could get a Big Mac, OR you could get a real burger, the Angus burger, made with real this and that and whatever. Everything is suddenly about reality.

"Now, what's going on? Is this just how it's always been? Well I found this really interesting book, called Authenticity, by the guys who wrote the Experience Economy. Gilmore and Pine put forth this interesting concept-- that the most valuable thing in products today is "Are they real, are they authentic"-- which is a bold hypothesis. Then they go further and they say, well, why is it? Why now? It didn't always used to be this way-- certainly that's not what sold stuff in the 80s. It wasn't reality and authenticity that sold stuff then.

"What is it now that people are demanding reality and demanding authenticity? They're arguing that all this virtual stuff that's been creeping up on us over the last 20 years has really cut us off from nature. We're cut off from nature, we're cut off from self-sufficiency. We couldn't be self-sufficient if we wanted to. We don't know how to do it. We live in a bubble of fake bullshit, and we have this hunger to get to anything that's real-- Even if the best we can do is a Starbucks mocha with real Swiss chocolate, we'll take it, Oh it's real! Look how real that seems to me relative to what I'm used to.

"So there's this idea that maybe there's this hunger for reality. You might believe it or not, but once I read this authenticity book, I started seeing it everywhere, everywhere I looked--every ad was about their product being the real one. And I go to see the movie Avatar, and you might say Oh Avatar, that was cool special effects and that was really a lot of fluff, but it's the movie that's made the most money of all time and it's got a good shot at best picture-- What's this movie about? This movie is about the question of: We know technology cuts us off from the real world, and the movie addresses the question of can we then use that technology in order to penetrate back into reality and back into something genuine. So it may be this movie is not just fluff, it may be this movie is resonating with something important for people."

Women in Physical Education: Title IX

2010-03-18T05:59:00.001-05:00

In 1974, Kathleen Saunders-Nordeen was appointed as the first Director of Women's Intercollegiate Athletics. In 1975 the Oral History Archive did an interview. Here are some excerpts.

Interviewer: "I do know that women have had a hard time at the University from way back-- the whole coeducational idea was vigorously fought at the turn of the century by the administration. Chadburn was for really considerable segregation of the sexes in terms of practically all activities."

KSN: "I think to a great extent, women perpetuated that."

Interviewer: "How do you mean?"

KSN: "Back in the late 20s or early 30s, we had some of the strongest leaders in the country here on our campus as far as Physical Education is concerned. And women's athletics have grown out of Physical Education, because that's where the leadership was, but they've also been slowed down a whole lot by Physical Education leaders and the feeling that it was wrong to put all your efforts and all your facilities and all your finances into making a small number of people really highly skilled and really concentrating all your efforts on a small number of people.

"The philosophy was that it was far better to have a thousand women who were really mediocre athletes, given the opportunity, and it was as if you couldn't possibly do both."

Interviewer: "Why not?"

KSN: "That's the point. Now maybe at that point resources were so limited that you couldn't, or maybe it was just real narrow kind of thinking. But this thinking, and I think Blanche Trilling who was here on our campus and does deserve a lot of credit in Physical Education, has been one of the leaders in the country who kept women's athletics from progressing.

"From then on, for 40 or 50 years, nothing happened in women's athletics. Before that, we had very strong women's teams in a lot of sports-- there were 250 women out for rowing in 1920. Of course they were largely intramural teams, but the interest was there, and the skill was there.

"But things just kind of died for about 40 or 50 years, and during that time the men's programs were still growing. And now when women are trying to get back into facilities and back into budgets, it's very difficult. We're trying to crack back into something that's been allowed to grow and we've been just dragging our feet."

==========

KSN: "The women's crew has done really very well, they've gotten themselves recognized nationally, which is very good in 3 or 4 years."

Interviewer: "That recently? Even though they've been rowing since the 20s?"

KSN: "Well, they rowed in the 20s, and then there was no rowing again until about three years ago when several women students from one of the lakeshore dorms decided it might be kind of fun to get out there in those shells. They came to me at Lathrop and we sent them to the men's crew coach who said, OK, We'll give it a try, see how many people you have interested. I don't know that he thought they'd make it through the first winter, because he really zapped it to them with the same kind of training that the guys have-- which meant running several miles in below zero weather, working in the tank rowing, and working on the odometers and lifting weights and doing all these things. Instead of that having that make them lose interest, it grew, because women really did want to push themselves and see how good they could become."

==========

KSN: "I'm sure the women's movement has helped a lot, because it's okay for women to be good at almost anything they want now. Physical activity just happens to be one of those things. It's kind of a new freedom or something."

==========

KSN: "Right now, it looks very much like the interpretation of Title IX is going to be that if there are scholarships given for men in any institution, then you've got to do it for women also. Right now the income producing sports are not exempted from the guidelines of Title IX; It looks to me that they probably will be exempted, if the guidelines come out at all.

"Now my understanding is that they're getting kicked around so much because of pressure groups like NCAA who don't want athletics included in it at all, that we may never get the guidelines out, which would be really a shame.

It was pointed out to me a couple weeks ago that even if the guidelines never come out, never get signed by the president, the impact that they've had and the threat that they've had to institutions has done an awful lot to programs for women getting started, just the idea that they were there. I think also some institutions, we have to give some credit, it's not just the threat behind Title IX but the concept that was pointed out so vividly by Title IX that women's athletic programs really have been short-changed and it really is discrimination."

Shattering Coefficient and VC Dimension

2010-03-04T16:44:00.002-06:00

Here is an excerpt from a book called "Reliable Reasoning, Induction and Statistical Learning Theory." I read this book about a year ago and really liked its description of VC dimension and shattering coefficient in statistical learning. These aren't easy concepts, so I wanted to put the description here for reference.

The setup is that you have a set of hypotheses or rules, C, that are used in order to classify data. For example, if we are trying to decide whether or not a patient is healthy, we may look at his resting pulse and systolic blood pressure. Then I could make a rule that says if his pulse is above 100 and his systolic blood pressure above 140, then he is not healthy. A rule like this helps us make a decision whether or not the patient is healthy. Now assume you do not have expert information (that high blood pressure is bad) but you have data points-- measurements of pulse and blood pressure-- and labels for each data point which say "healthy" or "not healthy". From here we would like to learn a rule that can classify other patients as healthy or not healthy, using the same measurements. From p23:

"How can we use data to choose a good rule from C? One obvious idea is to select a rule from C with the least error on the data. Then we use that rule in order to classify new data. This is basically the method of enumerative induction. Our question then, is: How good is this version of enumerative induction for choosing a rule from C?

"Clearly, it depends on what rules are in the set C from which the rule is to be chosen. If all possible rules are in that set, then there will be many rules with least error on the data, and these will give completely different advice about new cases. ...

"Of course, restricting the rules in C runs the risk of not including the best of all possible rules, the rule with the least expected error on new cases. ...

"There are other possible inductive methods for choosing rules-- methods that do not just choose the rule with the least error on the data. One such method balances data-coverage against something else, such as the simplicity of a given rule. ... but now let us concentrate on what is needed for the sort of enumerative induction that simply chooses the rule in C with the least error on the data.

"So now consider the question of how the rules in C might be restricted if enumerative induction in this sense is to be guaranteed to work, given enough evidence, no matter what the background statistical probability distribution.

"The answer to this question is one of the great discoveries of statistical learning theory-- the discovery of the importance of the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension, or VC dimension, of a set of rules. The VC dimension is a measure of the "richness" of the set of rules and it is inversely related to the degree of falsifiability of the set.

... from p45: "What has to be true of the set C in order to guarantee that, with probability approaching 1, given more and more data, the expected error for the rules that enumerative induction endorses at each stage will approach the minimum value of expected error for rules in C?

"You might wonder whether this sort of convergence isn't guaranteed by the statistical law of large numbers. That principle implies that with probability approaching 1, the empirical error of any particular rule will approach the expected error of that rule, given more and more data. But this is not the same as what is wanted. The trouble is that, given infinitely many rules, as more and more data are taken into account, the rules endorsed by enumerative induction can change infinitely often. Even if the empirical error for each rule approaches a limit, that does not imply anything about the limit of the empirical error of the varying rule endorsed by enumerative induction at each stage. ...

"What is needed then is not just that the empirical error of each rule should converge to its expected error but also that the empirical error of the varying rules endorsed by enumerative induction should approach the value of the expected error of that rule in the limit. If c_n is a rule endorsed by enumerative induction after n data points, then what is needed is that the empirical error of the rule c_n after n data points should approach the expected error of c_n in the limit. ...

"This will happen if (with probability approaching 1) the empirical error of the rules in C converge uniformly to their expected error. ...

"What has to be true of the set of rules C for such uniform convergence? Vapnik and Chervonenkis (1968) show (in effect) that this condition is met for classification rules if and only if the set of classification rules C is not too rich, where the richness of the set is measured by what has come to be called its "VC dimension." ...

"Suppose that some set of N points in the feature space is shattered by rules in C in the sense that, for any possible labeling of those points, some rule in C perfectly fits the points so labeled. Then the VC dimension of the set of rules C is at least N. More specifically, the VC dimension of a set of rules C is the largest number N such that some set of N points in feature space is shattered by rules in C. ...

"Notice that the definition of VC dimension refers to some set of N points being shattered, not to all sets of N points being shattered. Consider the set of all linear classifications of points in the plane where YESes and NOs are separated by a straight line. The VC dimension of this set of classification rules is 3, because some sets of three points in the plane can be shattered by this class of rules and no set of four points can be shattered. Three collinear points (i.e., three points on the same straight line) cannot be shattered by this class of rules, because there is no such rule that can classify the middle point as a YES and the outer points as NOs. But three points that are not collinear can be shattered... And no four points can be shattered by this class of rules, so the VC dimension of these linear rules is exactly 3. ...

"Some other examples: The VC dimension of the set of all linear separations in D-dimensional space is D+1. The VC dimension of the set of all inner rectangles in the plane is 4. The VC dimension of the set of all unions of rectangles in the plane is infinite.

"So, that is what VC dimension comes to. Vapnik and Chervonenkis (1968) show roughly that enumerative induction is guaranteed to work no matter what the background probability distribution if and only if the classification rules in C have a finite VC dimension."

orthogonal

2010-01-16T09:38:00.001-06:00

My friend Todd posted this on facebook:

' I get the same reaction when I use the word "orthogonal". '

A fable to describe the process of writing a proof.

2010-01-15T12:44:00.002-06:00

Which way should we turn?

Very very busy

2009-11-16T13:19:00.002-06:00

This has happened to me more than once: I'm busy thinking!

persistence

2009-11-09T12:11:00.003-06:00

Last Thursday I did an interview with some women in a qualitative research methods course. They were looking to identify things that help or hurt a woman's self-efficacy in a graduate program in engineering. We had about an hour to talk and I tried to help identify what helped me and what didn't. It's difficult to pinpoint really, and I certainly don't feel like anything that helped me was specific for helping women.

One of the interviewers asked me a very good question though. Almost an hour had passed and we had been talking about various classes, research experiences, and mentor interactions I had over the past 5 years. So then she asked, It seems you have persisted through some ups and downs. Why? What has helped you persist?

This is such a good question. Why do some of us stick around for so many years and others of us do not? First and foremost, I have had amazing support. My advisors and mentors at both schools (and all places in between) have been incredibly generous and inspirational. With full conviction and without exaggeration I can say that I would not be here without them. But that's another question-- I was asked, "Why did you stay?" not "Why didn't you leave?"

All I could say is that I love to learn. I'm doing it for me now, to learn new things every day. I just want to know. I want to see how it all works out. I remembered the times I spent banging my head against my discrete stochastic processes book or fighting (literally) through a proof with my peers until we got it right. Or way back at Rice when I worked daily with Violeta and Steve as the design and implementation of our algorithm continually informed one another. Or that moment in the first spring when I arrived at UW, when how to do the proof of the math extra credit question just popped into my head three weeks after it was due, and I spent until midnight nailing down all the details.

Now I should get back to work and see if I still persist after the next two weeks-- I'm working toward a paper deadline!

Cross-Post: My experience volunteering at the Oral History archive

2009-10-05T12:32:00.002-05:00

Over the past year I have been volunteering at the Oral History archive at the UW-Madison. I wrote a posting for their blog and it was posted today.

Women at UW in Science and Engineering: An Insider’s View of an Oral History Project

We are all "statisticians"

2009-08-07T18:05:00.001-05:00

This NYTimes article basically describes what I do, and what I find to be the most important area of technology today. I don't like the name "statistician" because of the very specific ideas that this conjurs up in people's minds. As the article says, the "new breed" of statisticians are actually computer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians... but "new breed" are really the operative words. That is definitely what we are.

Quoting:

"The new breed of statisticians tackle that problem. They use powerful computers and sophisticated mathematical models to hunt for meaningful patterns and insights in vast troves of data. The applications are as diverse as improving Internet search and online advertising, culling gene sequencing information for cancer research and analyzing sensor and location data to optimize the handling of food shipments.

"Even the recently ended Netflix contest, which offered $1 million to anyone who could significantly improve the company’s movie recommendation system, was a battle waged with the weapons of modern statistics.

"Though at the fore, statisticians are only a small part of an army of experts using modern statistical techniques for data analysis. Computing and numerical skills, experts say, matter far more than degrees. So the new data sleuths come from backgrounds like economics, computer science and mathematics."

Denial of Service

2009-08-07T17:45:00.000-05:00

"Denial of Service." This is a term we should all become familiar with. It sounds like a pretty harmless thing, but it's the term technologists use to describe very serious attacks on internet infrastructure that have potential to seriously disrupt commerce, government, and crisis communication infrastructure.

A denial of service attack is what silenced twitter on Thursday, August 6. The attack on Estonia in April of 2007 was also a denial of service attack.

The WSJ had a good opinion piece about the state of these online attacks. Quoting: "As the attacks against Estonia show, the task cannot be delayed -- the increasing sophistication and accessibility of malware means these problems will only become worse. The future of the Web is at stake."

I'm sure of it!

2009-08-07T14:03:00.000-05:00

My advisor's favorite passtime

moving average

2009-07-28T12:01:00.000-05:00

The author of the windows file copy dialogue visits some friends.

Stochasticity

2009-07-09T17:17:00.000-05:00

On my long trip to Yellowstone last weekend, I took some time to catch up on Radiolab podcasts. This one about Stochasticity starts with a story of two ten-year-old girls with the same exact name who just happened to be on either end of an experiment-- one Laura Buxton released a balloon with her name and address, and the other Laura Buxton, 150 miles away and in the country side, was on the receiving end of that balloon.

The girls even looked the same, they both dressed in pink jumpers and jeans the first time they met, and they both had labradors, rabbits and guinea pigs!!!

What are the chances???

Well I wish I could tell you... but you should listen to the podcast to find out.

e to the i 2 pi

2009-04-19T18:35:00.000-05:00

This xkcd reminds me of an old story. Kyle and I were at Sequoia Natl park, hiking through the trees and discussing science, math, and other sundries. At some point I said something which ended with the justification, "because e to the i 2 pi is one," and he almost laughed at me. Come on!

But when you use euler's formula, well, it's right there. So easy.

I love that.

So I justified it to Kyle on a little scrap of paper in my pocket... and for the rest of the afternoon we would shout it every once in awhile to the skies-- e to the i 2 pi is ONE!!!

Yep.

Project 2061

2009-04-09T19:42:00.000-05:00

Today while my simulations were running, I skimmed through a book called "Science for All Americans." I have had it checked out for a few months, but finally I wasn't allowed to renew it anymore :) So this book is a report from a government group called Project 2061, tasked to improve the science, math, and technology curriculum.

I think the report made some very good points that (1) (quoting the text) "The present science textbooks and methods of instruction, far from helping, often actually impede progress toward scientific literacy. They emphasize the learning of answers more than the exploration of questions, memory at the expense of critical thought, bits and pieces of information instead of understandings in context, recitation over argument, reading in lieu of doing. They fail to encourage students to work together, to share ideas and information freely with each other, or to use modern instruments to extend their intellectual capacities."; (2) We try to cram too many things in our K-12 science and math curriculum, instead of teaching the very important things thoroughly; and so (3) We should really refocus from tabula rasa and try to design a math and science curriculum that emphasizes the very most important concepts while instilling skills and attitudes of scientists into the students.

Some of the concepts they said should be emphasized in "The Nature of Science" were good:

The world is understandable.
Scientific knowledge is durable.
Science demands evidence.
Science explains and predicts.
Scientists try to identify and avoid bias.
Science is not authoritarian.

Interestingly, in the chapter on mathematical skills which should be emphasized, four out of seven were concepts I use every day:

- Uncertainty
- Summarizing data
- Sampling
- Reasoning

computer programmers

2009-03-16T17:28:00.000-05:00

"There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users.'" -Edward Tufte

math for logic's sake

2009-02-20T15:42:00.000-06:00

Rob just told me--

There's something about going through the math classes that gives you a sense of when there are holes in someone's argument. You may not know exactly where the holes are, but you know that you're not totally convinced.

The classes themselves may not give me the most pertinent knowledge-- some of the math I'm doing right now, I will never use. But he's right-- I am learning when to say "Wait a minute, something's fishy." And that's what's fundamental to scientific reasoning and discussion.

It's somewhat astonishing how my ability to find these holes has improved over the past few years. Just ask my study buddies-- I have a bad reputation for destroying their ideas that they were done with the homework...

innumeracy

2008-09-04T19:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I saw Janet Hyde speak about her article in science magazine about gender similarities in math performance. Her meta-analyses of other people's studies on gender and math performance show that performance is about the same except in advanced problem solving skills for advanced students, where men have performed better.

The most interesting discussion of performance, though, was that if white men are better than white women by a couple of points, Asian men and women wallop whites by tens of points. When an audience member asked Professor Hyde to comment on this, she gave her opinion that we have a dangerous cultural problem with mathematics: Firstly, she suggested that with the advent of IQ scores and the like, white cultures tended to give accolades for ability more than for hard work. This is not true in other cultures, and a subject like mathematics does require perseverance in order to develop a good intuition and understanding. Secondly, she made a very good point that it is somehow acceptable for even very educated adults to say something like "Oh I am SO bad at math!" She asked what would you think if a medical professional said "Oh I just cannot read!" And what's the difference? I heard the same thing mentioned in an introduction for a Mathematics and Biology symposium that I attended yesterday as well. This speaker recommended the book Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences. It's now on my to-read list.

Chicago Guide to your Academic Career

2008-08-20T09:34:00.004-05:00

I've started reading this book which discusses the choice of getting a PhD and going into an academic career. So far it's reasonably interesting, though I am wary that it may not be applicable for the engineering career because the authors are all in social sciences and humanities. Still, they have some interesting ideas about the required personality traits of an academic.

One of the authors suggests some things to think about and questions to ask yourself before and throughout your graduate career:

"Original research requires much self-reliance, perseverance, and intelligence as well as creativity. You also need self-discipline to complete the monotonous tasks that inevitably accompany even the most exciting research project. Do you have enough of these qualities to succeed?

"Self-questioning is, of course, an important quality to nurture in yourself, but it certainly requires practice to be effective. One cannot develop such critical skills overnight. Do you know yourself well enough? ... Are you able to judge yourself without making excuses? Do you rationalize your mistakes, so you cannot learn from them? You can improve your forecasts about yourself by consciously updating your information... How have you erred in the past, and what can you learn from these errors about your true abilities and about your expectations? Are the goals you are about to set for yourself reasonable in light of your past performance? Are you getting closer to formulating a reasonable strategy for solving problems?"

Here is a quote from the female professor about the particular issues she faces with family care:

"A generation ago, ...some relief on at least the domestic side was possible-- if you were male. Most professors were male (if female, they were generally single and/or childless), and they were mostly married, with wives who did not work outside the home when the children were young. These wives made possible the devotion of their husbands to their work, as they handled all the shopping, cooking, child care, doctor's appointments, and entertainment of colleagues and students. I know there must be a few cases out there today where the roles are flipped and the husband is 'Mr. Mom,' but they are few and far between. Even in the households where tasks are divided up 50-50 (as they have been in mine and in some others I know), there is an extra layer of responsibility that somehow gravitates to the female in the household. She's the one who seems to be responsible for keeping the system running, for knowing what nonroutine things have to be done when, for initiating the conversation about dividing up tasks, for anticipating when the schedule will need to change, and for locating the backup help when the system flounders ... From time to time it surfaces that underneath it all, my husband still fantasizes occasionally about a life where I would do all this stuff, just as his upbringing prepared him for. Good thing we can laugh about it."

A quote on the mentor relationship:

"The best students coming into graduate school are not only intelligent-- they are also independent-minded, and that independence has been encouraged for years, inside school and out. Of these, the very best will very likely think that they know what they want out of school. Many of them may think (often rightly) that they are smarter, or at least quicker, than any of their teachers in college.

"When they come to the point of having to submit themselves... to both a specific discipline and a particular mentor, many students find themselves unable to do so. ... It may come out as a dissatisfaction on the student's part or an inability to work comfortably with any of the faculty members in the department. But graduate education requires... a submission of the ego to that of the mentor... This student-mentor relationship is fundamental to becoming a successful researcher.

"Central to the relationship is your common and joint research. In general, what is shared is the research interests of the professor; in a more unusual circumstance, the student may bring a special research interest and involve the professor in it... The student gets to see, for the first time, what it means for knowledge to arise out of confusion and ignorance. That, after all, is the meaning of research; it is the patient struggle to achieve comprehension where there was none before."

An interesting point about your faculty recommendation writers:

"[The] mentor's responsibilities are, to some extent, split, involving responsibility to the student who may be looking for a first job and responsibility to the field (that is, to colleagues at another university who need hoenst and frank letters of appraisal). To balance these commitments is not always an easy task."

On choosing a dissertation topic:

"Some professors are reluctant to suggest thesis topics, either out of a philosophical conviction that that is the student's job or out of a concern about the commitment and responsibility that go with such advice... There are those who argue for a sink-or-swim approach on the assumption that the student will learn these skills by being forced to choose a dissertation topic. This point of view is surely reasonable, but my own experience leads me to urge you to err on the side of caution if you have the opportunity unless you have reason to think that you have already mastered such skills: the risk of sinking is too great at this stage."

On working through peripheral issues:

"One of the most difficult challenges you will face is the temptation to work on ancillary issues during the course of your research. ... Any original research will bring to the surface dozens of peripheral issues that have not been explored in the past. You will have to consciously avoid being attracted by them. Just tell yourself that you will come back to those questions later, and, of course, these are potential dissertation topics that you can suggest to your future students. Avoid at any cost falling into the trap of thinking that answering these questions is a precondition to completing the dissertation. ...you need to develop skills that will enable you to avoid boxing yourself in on particular issues. Argue by analogy, argue by order of magnitude, or suggest that your conclusions are tentative and are subject to revision with further research. There is nothing to be ashamed of in admitting the limitations of your work. On the contrary, it is wise to do so, since it is hardly your fault that insufficient research has been done in your field."

From Krulwich's Caltech Commencement address

2008-08-14T23:55:00.001-05:00

Robert Krulwich, correspondent for NPR science desk, was invited to Caltech to give the commencement address this year. The speech was put on the Radiolab podcast a few weeks ago and I finally got a chance to listen.

The topic he discussed was the duty of scientists to explain their work and tell their stories in a way that a non-scientists will understand. The speech was outstanding. Here are some of my favorite quotes.

4:05
So here's my question, when you are asked "What are you working on?" should you think: There's no way I can talk about my science with this guy, because I don't have the talent, I don't have the words, I don't have the patience to do it. It's too hard. And anyway what's the point?

Which is, by the way, not an unusual position. No less than Isaac Newton, I mean Sir Isaac Newton, when asked, Why did you make the Principia Mathematica, your earthshaking book about gravity and laws of motion, so impossibly hard to read, he said well I considered writing a popular version that people might understand, but, and I am quoting Newton here, "to avoid being baited by little smatterers in mathematics" he intentionally wrote a book in dense scholarly latin with lots of math so that only scholars could follow. In other words, Isaac Newton didn't care to be understood by average folks.

But here's the argument I want to make to you guys this morning. You aren't going to hear this advice often; I suggest you may never hear it again.

When asked about your work, do not do what Isaac Newton did. When a cousin, or an uncle, or a buddy comes up and asks, "So what are you working on?" even if it's hard to explain, even if you know they don't really want to hear it, not really, I urge you to give it a try; Because, talking about science, telling stories to regular folks is not a trivial thing. Scientists need to tell stories to non-scientists, because science stories-- and you know this-- have to compete with other stories about how the universe works and how the universe came to be.

8:47
Your teachers [at Caltech] ... were giving you values. A deep respect for curiosity, for doubt, for open-mindedness. For going wherever the data lead no matter how uncomfortable. For honesty, for discipline. And most of all, the belief that anybody no matter where they're from, no matter what their language, no matter what their religion, no matter what their politics, no matter what their age or their temperament -- I mean this place has seen monstrous egos, and bongo players, and people who dress in viking hats-- but if you can learn how to sit down in a laboratory and think in an orderly way, and if you have the patience to stare and stare and stare, looking for a pattern in nature, you are welcome here. It may be boring, it may be sometimes very exhausting, but there's a freedom, there's a freedom in this way of looking that is precious in the world, and that freedom can be attacked or defended with stories.

11:00
Unlike Newton, Galileo wanted to tell people what was on his mind. Unlike Newton, he thought that people could understand him-- that's why he got in so much trouble. ... He wrote [The Dialogues] in Italian for a mass audience. ... So, because Galileo's book was so easy to read, and such a page turner, it so threatened the established order that Galileo, as you know, was put under house arrest. And it wasn't just the science that was alarming, I think it was the power of his storytelling.

17:55
But the job that we face is to put more stories out there about nature that are true and complex-- not dumbed down-- but still have the power to enthrall, to excite, to remind people that there's a deep beauty, a many-leveled beauty in the world. And what scientists say is not their offhand opinion, it's hard-won information, it's carefully hewn from the world. It's not a bunch of ideas from a tribe of privileged intellectuals who look down on everybody. It's my sense that if more scientists wanted to, they could learn how to tell their stories with words and pictures and metaphor, and people will hear and remember those stories, and not be as willing to accept the other folks stories-- or at least there will be a tug of war.

24:46
You are part of and you are celebrating something very rare and very precious and very fragile in our world. This place celebrates freedom. And because you are now free men and women, you have to protect what you've been given, by helping others who haven't been here, who are never coming here to understand the value of what you do, and what your teachers do, and what their predecessors have done.

causality

2008-08-14T15:55:00.000-05:00

"Causal inference is one of the most important, most subtle, and most neglected of all the problems of Statistics." -- Philip Dawid, 1979

Mirrors

2008-07-24T14:02:00.000-05:00

Here is an interesting science article from the New York Times. I've been reading a lot lately about how mirrors can help psychological disorders that no medications can help-- like getting rid of phantom limbs or phantom pains in amputees.

The main point of the article is to explain the fact that, when you look in a mirror, no matter how far you are from the mirror, your image on the mirror's surface will remain the same size. This is due to the fact that the mirror is always half-way between you and your reflected image.

There are other interesting things in the article: there is research that people are more self-aware when mirrors are around. If you are in a room with a mirror, you are less likely to cheat or judge people and more likely to help others.

On a separate note, the article says that when people are presented with photos of themselves which are airbrushed to look better, worse, or left the same, people identify the best photograph as the one untouched. But they only did that with their own photos-- for other people's photos they could identify the unairbrushed image.

a science journalist answers some questions

2008-07-08T13:00:00.000-05:00

From Dennis Overbye of the NY times:

There really isn't any such thing as a silly question in science, where the best people often are those who are free enough to think up a really outlandish question. Einstein said his success was due to the fact that he kept asking a child's questions when he was an adult. I am reminded of what Niels Bohr once said, "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."

Nancy Drew

2008-06-23T07:59:00.001-05:00

Morning edition's "In Character" series covered Nancy Drew today. I never read her books, but I appreciate the commentary.

Crime writer Laura Lippman said, "One of the nice things about Nancy Drew books is that it validates curiosity as a virtue, which was not always the message in a lot of things that little girls where told."

Engineers and scientists need to be curious to pursue research. My curiosity always came in the form of wanting to know and solve riddles and puzzles. I had Games magazine for a long time when I was a kid, and there was one riddle book at the Oak Park library that I would check out almost perpetually.

Still today, though, I have to remind myself to foster that curiosity. There are so many opinions and ideas of what research to work on, that I can easily get derailed on the high-level commentary and understanding. At some point I have to dig in, and it's my curiosity that will facilitate the transition.

pressure and emptiness

2008-06-22T15:54:00.000-05:00

One evening over dinner at the workshop last week we talked about differences between industry and academia.

At a one-day workshop held last fall for Martin Vetterli at EPFL, there was a very good panel of people who had been both in academics and in industry. I remember clearly that Stéphane Mallat gave his perspective on the issue: The two have different main challenges in their jobs. In industry, there are deadlines where there is great pressure to deliver and a lot (millions of dollars, future of a start-up) on the line. In academia, there is a kind of emptiness one gets from working on a problem for several years without seeing any fruit from your work.

When I brought that up, folks had some interesting thoughts to add-- that most people in big companies never feel that kind of pressure in industry, and that in fact the pressure of teaching in front of 300 students for the first time could be more stressful than any work deadline. I wish more people felt that way. Maybe profs would be more prepared for their courses!

Joint Workshop on Fusion, Mining and Security for Networks

2008-06-22T15:04:00.000-05:00

I had a great time at this workshop last week. It was held at McGill University in Montréal, and there was an interesting mix of systems folks and theory folks. In a panel on the last day, there was a discussion about what is more important in the study of computer and complex networks today-- theory or practice?

The answer (from Matt Roughan) was that clearly both are important, but that the research that can be applied to practical problems will win. In a way this is a universal truth-- Newton, Gauss, Einstein, Daubechies all won because their theory was applicable. (Though I would like to refer you to my earlier post on Stigler's law.) On the other hand, the work of abstract mathematicians, a few of whom I know and love, won't be useful for at least another century... and without them we would be hosed (to use what I understand is a Canadian phrase).

It brought to mind a discussion I had heard some time ago about how in every discipline, either applications are leading theory or theory is leading applications. The speaker at that time said that he believed disciplines go through phases where either one or the other is ahead. I thought that was very interesting. His point was that in the study of sensor networks right now, the applications are leading the theory.

the set game

2008-06-01T00:33:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine just introduced me to the Set Game! It's cool. Check the "how to play" link which takes you to a flash tutorial...

I'm playing the daily puzzle every day :)

Multiples in Innovation

2008-05-12T15:15:00.001-05:00

Recently I read this great article in the New Yorker about how most innovations were innovated by multiple people at the same time. The most famous example in my mind is the development of calculus-- which both Leibniz and Newton did at the same time, hundreds of miles apart.

The article thus calls into question what it really means to be a "genius." Perhaps genius is distributed more flatly across the population than we think. Also, the article talks about companies which do group brainstorming and patenting. In my own work, I have always felt that I am smarter when I have the right people around me.

Here is a snippet from the article:

"It can be found that Laplace employed Fourier Transforms in print before Fourier published on the topic, that Lagrange presented Laplace Transforms before Laplace began his scientific career, that Poisson published the Cauchy distribution in 1824, twenty-nine years before Cauchy touched on it in an incidental manner, and that Bienayme stated and proved the Chebychev Inequality a decade before and in greater generality than Chebychev's first work on the topic.

"For that matter, the Pythagorean theorem was known before Pythagoras; Gaussian distributions were not discovered by Gauss. The examples were so legion that Stigler declared the existence of Stigler's Law: 'No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.'

"There are just too many people with an equal shot at those ideas floating out there in the ether. We think we are pinning medals on heroes. In fact, we are pinning tails on donkeys.

"Stigler's Law was true, Stigler gleefully pointed out, even of Stigler's Law itself. The idea that credit does not align with discovery, he reveals at the very end of his essay, was in fact first put forth by Merton."

NPR or whatever else

2008-03-04T14:21:00.000-06:00

Every time you tune your radio, thank imaginary numbers!

sudo

2008-03-02T19:51:00.001-06:00

sudo is a unix command that you can use to force the computer to do something you want, even when your user account doesn't have the permissions to do that.

I've started reading a new web comic... xkcd!

While I was in Switzerland and Finland, I had a lot to comment on regarding math, society, education, etc. Now I forgot all of it. I'll let you know if I remember.

the devil wears birkenstocks

2007-10-17T10:23:00.000-05:00

Here is my transcription of story by David Dickerson. He read it on the radio as part of the This American Life episode called "The Devil in Me."

When I was 23 years old and wrestling for my faith, the last big battle for my soul came when I had to face down an actual demon who was a guest in one of my university classes. Or that's how I thought at the time.

But the battle had started long before when I was a kid. I had been raised a fundamentalist Christian. Adam and Eve, the flood, David and Goliath-- All of that really happened. Jesus walked on water and was born of a virgin and said everything that the four gospels told us.

But after years of religious studies classes at the University of Arizona, I found myself swerving toward a moderate Catholicism, and wasn't quite sure about many of the things I had been raised to believe. The history of the Bible wasn't as pure as I was taught. I was questioning inconsistencies, like how simple textual analysis pretty much proves Paul didn't write the book of hebrews. Basic facts about the nature of jesus, of god, of our duties on this earth, seemed to be less like eternal truths and more like things I happened to believe.

But I was still sure about two things: There was a spiritual world behind what we could see, and it contained both good and evil spirits. Angels, that is, and Demons.

I believed this for a couple reasons. First of all, the Bible said so. Time and again in the gospel, a demon possessed person will cross Jesus' path, and then the demon inside the person snarls and curses. Jesus rebukes the demon, casts them out, and the person is healed. But beyond just the bible, my sister and father had both seen demons. They'd always kind of been closet charismatics and for a while our family was going to both kinds of services.

Charismatic Christians are the ones who speak in tongues and lay hands on sick people. At that church, we got regular reports from visiting missionaries who would tell hair-raising stories about how they'd faced down local witch doctors who would suddenly yell at the missionaries in a strange voice and in perfect english, or cause spears to levitate over them menacingly.

I'd never actually seen a demon myself, but all of us Christian kids traded demon tales the way other kids swap ghost stories. And for the same reason-- because it's scary, but exciting. But scary. But exciting.

So even though years went by, and I still never saw a demon, a little sliver of that fear stayed with me and kept me on my guard just in case. If I ever did meet one, I wouldn't make the mistake of treating it like a metaphor.

So anyway, at the time of this story I was a college senior. And to fill out my last semester of electives, I decided to take a class called Paranormal Anthropology. This was about strange phenomena-- dousing, UFOs, ESP, Past life aggression-- all that stuff you find on the X-Files. And the professor was really interesting, because although our textbook was a skeptical look at all these things, he would bring in guest lecturers who were actual believers, so we could get both sides of the story.

We were lectured one week by three UFO abductees, and then the next week we had a douser try and trace the water mains on the university green. The douser failed, and the abductees were weird, and on the whole, it looked like science was winning.

But then one day, the professor announced that our guest next time would be a medium. A woman who channeled spirits. And she was going to let herself get possessed, right there, in the classroom. Two days from now.

As soon as he said it, I was terrified. For all my book-learning, in some raw anxious way I was still 10 years old and overwhelmed. There was going to be a demon in this classroom-- an actual agent of spiritual evil, who was counting on people not believing in him. People would ask this demon questions, and this demon would answer, speaking with the voice of Satan. And everyone would nod and no one would know the real agenda of this creature.

I was the only conservative christian I knew of in that class, which meant that I was the only one who could save us from-- well, from being corrupted by evil in some direct, horrible way. I wasn't at all sure what the demon would do or say. All I knew was that what had been a simple academic pursuit had suddenly turned into the most serious spiritual test of my life.

Only I was *really* not up to the task. My faith had wandered-- I had gone to Catholic mass! I had several gay friends! I had said skeptical things about the authorship of Hebrews! Now it was as if the god of my old christianity, the real god, the straightforward god... the god who the bible plainly states is there, but whom I had become too high-falutin to simply accept, was calling me back to the battlefield-- and I had two days to get into spiritual shape.

I started fasting immediately, and holed up in my room for hours. I prayed, "Lord Jesus, please protect me in this coming battle. Build a wall of protection around the classroom, and protect all my fellow students. Give me the wisdom to know what to say, the courage to face this evil in your name, and please please please please protect me."

I repeated this over and over for the next two days. I didn't watch TV, I didn't use my computer... I couldn't let anything distract me, because I knew that if I failed... well, you probably saw the exorcist-- same idea. This was a magic monster. One who could probably smell the holy spirit dwelling inside me, and who would find some way to attack.

All this was scary, but I have to admit, it was exciting too... which is basically what the conservative Christian's whole life is like. There's temptation on every side, you have to constantly immerse yourself in prayer, in the bible, in the community of faith. But with that fear comes the thrill of getting to be an instrument of goodness in an evil world. And for me now, with this impending demon, here it suddenly was, years after I had given up expecting it.

I had been groomed for this battle since I was a little kid. This was my chance to be a hero for the faith, just like my namesake, King David. I'd read the bible stories about him hundreds of times.

I walked into class that Thursday wearing a cross necklace I had lately been setting aside, and I slapped down my new International version study bible right there in front of me on the table. I just stared at it, and prayed, and didn't talk to anyone.

I was trembling-- partly from fear and tension, and partly of course from hunger.

And then the medium came in. An overweight woman of about 55. Faded jeans, faded t-shirt, tacky bead necklaces and long greying hair. She had a friend with her who acted as her assistant, and this friend, also frumpy, said that the medium often had several different spirits come through her in a session, so we might notice her voice changing.

They dimmed the lights slightly, the medium went into her trance, and then her assistant said: "She has just reached her spirit guide who is an Indian chief from the Hopi tribe who died in the 1800s. Does anyone have any questions?"

An old sort of hippie-ish woman. An Indian spirit guide. This started seeming less sinister and more like something out of community theatre.

But of course I told myself, that's exactly what satan would want me to think. Because if the devil doesn't want us to believe in him, this was a really perfect disguise. But then again, how would I know the difference?

And just then, the medium moaned and rolled her head, and her friend announced, "She is now channeling the spirit of King David."

King David? Hell, I was a Bible scholar! This was my turf. I flipped to the Psalms, the book that David is supposed to have written, and found a question I had always been curious about. When the teacher asked, "Does anyone have a question for King David?" my hand shot up. The professor called on me, and I rose to my feet.

Still staring intently into my open bible, with a voice that was actually quivering, I said:

"Yes, Um, King David? I notice here that some of your psalms are called maskills and some are called miktams. And according to my footnotes, these are musical terms, but scholars don't actually know what they mean. Could you please explain the difference?"

There was a brief pause. I was too scared to look at her face.

Finally the medium said, "Yes..{cough} yes I could explain. But the answer would be very technical, and I don't think it would interest anybody." And her friend said, "Next question."

It all happened so quickly that I wasn't sure how to understand it. I decided that the demon, who would clearly have known the answer, just didn't blurt it out because he wanted to avoid a fight with a real christian. The second the bell rang, the women left the classroom without a word. I thanked God for the victory and went to grab some pizza.

While I was sitting at a booth waiting for my slice to arrive, I mentally replayed exactly what had happened, and I realized that God hadn't technically won.

A win for god would have been the demon calling me out in a creepy voice, and me brandishing the cross and saying "In the name of jesus I command you!" and maybe papers flying everywhere. Instead, what had happened was that a liar had come into our classroom, and I had beaten her with scholarship. What's more, it hadn't even been close. Book learning had been easier, swifter, and more powerful than prayer and fasting combined.

Right then, for the first time, I saw myself from the outside. And what I saw was that my belief in demons was actually kind of silly. My next immediate thought was, well if demons don't exist, except in stories I hear from other people-- What about angels? For that matter what about the virgin birth?

Oh My GoD!

And before I knew it, I felt like I was falling, helplessly... Because it turns out you can't actually make yourself believe something if the doubts seem more likely.

When I think about it now, that one rational question put to the demon-- that shipwrecked my faith. I had kicked open one door too many, and I could no longer stay inside where I felt safe.

For a few years I kept going to church, I kept trying to believe... but after awhile I let go all together. If you ask my family, they'd claim that when I fought that non-existent demon, satan actually won. That he couldn't have chosen a better answer to make the whole idea of demons seem ridiculous-- and kill my faith forever.

sensor information mismatch

2007-08-24T00:33:00.000-05:00

The New York Times did an article a few days ago on the magic shows at the Conference on Consciousness that was held in Vegas this year. Magicians discussed with the scientists that if you create an assumption of a behavior pattern, then your audience will assume something is fact when in truth it doesn't have to be. Today they have an article about how out-of-body experiences can be induced by creating a mismatch between the different sensory streams that our brain uses.

What this means is that even our brains-- though they are very complex and have learned from a lot of experiences as our lives go on-- sometimes still cannot detect scenarios that have the same sensory input as another more common scenario but are actually different. I like the example of the rubber hand. Subjects with their hand under the table and a rubber hand on the table had both hands stroked by a stick. Visually, you would see that the stick is stroking the rubber hand, and since you feel your own hand being stroked, you would assume the rubber hand is your own. The people even shrieked when the rubber hand was hit by a hammer!

(note: NYtimes links are only free for a couple days)

"the moon" incident

2007-08-23T00:35:00.001-05:00

I just read about this in the Wittenberg Door.

During a science lecture by Bill Nye in Waco, a woman stormed out when the Science Guy informed his audience-- after quoting from Genesis that God made two lights in the sky along with the stars-- that the moon was not in fact a light but simply a reflector.

In this response, they express their opinion that the woman left upset because the Science Guy had purposefully brought up the bible and said that it was wrong, as if to attack the bible.

Maybe it's true-- maybe if our dear Bill had not brought up Genesis, everyone in Waco would have been happy to know that the moon is a reflector. sigh.

But anyway, how else do we scientists get christians to start considering figurative interpretations of the bible? Perhaps by donating to the unicorn museum billboard to be installed near the creation museum in Kentucky. Unicorn museum motto-- "Unicorns are real. The bible says so."

Also, the Waco Tribune *did* take down the story from their website. I can't judge whether that was out of embarrassment. They have at least 30 days of history on there, but no such original story from a few days ago.

Anything you can do, I can do Meta

2007-08-21T09:59:00.000-05:00

MIT Technology Review has a good article about Charles Simonyi in the Jan/Feb 2007 issue. Simonyi created microsoft word, and now he hopes to fix the way programmers do their job. He asks, "Why is it so hard to create good software?" here are some quotes.

"Everywhere you look, software is over budget, behind schedule, insecure, unreliable, and hard to use. Anytime an organization attempts to introduce a new system, or upgrade an old one, it takes a colossal risk."

"The US Government has found it nearly impossible to introduce or upgrade large-scale software systems: Decade long efforts at the FAA and FBI have collapsed in chaos. Businesses have fared no better. To give a single example, McDonald's executives dreamed of a (new software system)...By the time they gave up and canceled the project, they had to write off $170 million of its estimated $1 billion cost."

"But even as Moore's Law has made each year's new computers faster and cheaper, the flexibility and utility of our computer systems have been limited by the slower, uneven evolution of software. One formulation of this problem is known as Wirth's Law, after programming expert Niklaus Wirth: 'Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.'"

"...in Simonyi's quest to alleviate the chronic woes of the software field. 'It's not enough to be a great programmer,' Simonyi once told Hichael Hiltzik, author of a history of PARC. 'You have to find a great problem." [Simonyi's company] Intentional Software may not deliver on its grand promises. But no one can charge Simonyi with choosing too modest a problem."

One funny thing-- Simonyi doesn't know how to turn off Clippy. Ha.

Just to put in my two cents, I contend that it's so hard to create good software because programmers have typically been the type of person who wants to tinker and hack. A stereotypical coder enjoys tweaking things until they work, whether or not he knows exactly why it started working. (I used the male pronoun on purpose here! haha)

give them more time

2007-08-21T01:39:00.000-05:00

This new york times article talks about how highschool students who are far behind can finish-- if you just give them more time.

I believe strongly in eliminating expectations on time. Why should you get a HS diploma at 18, college diploma at 22, married at 23, promoted at 25....etc?

This precludes all interesting paths, like traveling the world for a year, earning money needed for family emergencies, spending time doing real community service, or playing in a rock band before you get your PhD in your late 30s (I know someone who did this).

Forget the timeline, people.

ok go vids

2007-05-25T21:49:00.000-05:00

I am a little old for all these new internet fads, but I just have to say that the Ok Go videos are the reason why YouTube should exist.

Junior year in college, one of my friends told me I would like Ok Go, and after that I used to listen to them. So when I saw this video on Mtv-U I was totally psyched, and of course I loved it.

a million ways to be cruel

And now that the treadmill video is out...can anyone ever beat it? Can they even make anything better themselves?? Note: as I post this right now, there have been over 17,600,000 views of this video on youtube.

here it goes again

When I saw them play at the This American Life tour a couple of months ago, one guy said it's his sister who choreographs the videos! She rocks.

artificial intelligence

2007-05-20T22:49:00.000-05:00

Tons of technologies around us use some form of artificial intelligence. Science fiction media usually gives us the impression that AI is just a robot that can walk and talk like a human, but really AI is the practice of getting a machine to do something humans currently do, like make decisions or classify objects and rank their relevance. Mathematics, computer science, statistics and signal processing all play roles in the field of artificial intelligence-- we give it many names like statistical learning, machine learning, estimation, classification....etc.

Let me give you some examples... Spam filters try to classify email as spam. Netflix or Amazon (and others) try to suggest new products based on what you and others like. Alarm systems decide when a home has been broken into and notify the police. GPS boxes for your car give you directions and then adjust to your own choices or mistakes and give you a new route to follow. Google tries to find the best website match for your search terms. Translators try to find the best match from a set of words in one language to a set of words in another.

For a long time, certain learning algorithms have focused on improving algorithm performance with a limited amount of "training data"-- data you have ahead of time that you already know how it should get classified, for example. So if Netflix has some data where you told them what movies you were actually interested in, then this is training data. You can use that information to teach your algorithm your preferences. Or, you can use the training data as "testing data", to see if the algorithm predicts a movie that you actually do like.

Now, however, google is showing us that the real way to go is not to improve the algorithm carefully--but instead to give the algorithm a ridiculous amount of training data. As you increase the amount of training data, all of the algorithms can just do vastly better-- way better than any new-and-improved AI algorithm does on a small set of training data. So for example, google is working on a translation service, and they are looking for every multilingual journalistic publication out there. Wherever they can find the same stories in two languages, google algorithms can try to learn how to translate between those two languages by learning. You might wonder, what if some of the translations are wrong? Well if there are enough data, then those incorrect translations will get lost in the heap, and the algorithm will still do well.

In my field of sensor networks, we are collecting data and hope to create technologies that can make all kinds of decisions for us-- hopefully, better decisions than we could even make ourselves, because they incorporate both human knowledge and a vast resource of collected data. For example, in the santa monica mountains nature preserve, rangers are collecting a lot of data using sensors. Because of it, they are better able to decide on properties to buy and add to the reserve for the best plant and animal preservation, building codes for developing property nearby, and developer requests.

(I don't know where I am going with this. But here you go.)

Generation M

2007-05-10T11:14:00.000-05:00

I just read part of this good article on how to parent "the media generation." I feel really lucky that I used email and IM starting when I was 16 and that I was right on the bandwagon and thick into technology when friendster and google happened.

There are two main thoughts I had to supplement the article.

First of all, media technology may be the way of the future, and kids are learning early online social skills, research skills, and creative skills--ie, they are "playing in information" as the article says. However, from being in the workplace after college I saw a problematic form of performance metric in our jobs-- hours with your butt in the chair. 15 years ago, when you sat down in your office job, the only thing you could do to distract yourself is pick up the landline phone. Otherwise you had to just sit at your desk and either daydream or just get your work done. No one can daydream all day, and anyway if you stare out the window all day people get suspicious. So it was easier for people to get work done because there was nothing else to distract them.

I think that now it is possible for people to sit at their desk--and in fact look quite busy-- all while using internet and networking media technology. And this practice is not only bad for the company, but it's horrible for the person practicing it-- work becomes a constant struggle to learn how to focus.

I believe virtual worlds and multitasking are not better, only alternatives to real worlds and focus. In the end I think both will be needed. And for someone to teach their media kid how to focus, I think one of the best ways would be to find something cool and exciting on the web-- and print it out and take it to a quiet place where there are no distractions. For example, your kid could learn how to design sound canceling headphones or practice drawing.

Secondly, the article refers to "cell phone etiquette" as if this is something which has been defined by my parents' generation. The truth is, kids often don't care if their friends answer their cell phone on the first ring, interrupting the conversation (even at the dinner table!). Etiquette is not something set in stone, but instead something that involves being sensitive to how the people around you feel about your actions. I think old fogies (I unfortunately have to include myself here) will just have to accept the fact that what makes them uncomfortable may not make other people uncomfortable, and to teach their kids to have some sensitivities to all the different types of reactions. For example I think (hope) it's still safe to say that you shouldn't answer your phone at Thanksgiving dinner or at dinner with grandma, but otherwise you might just teach them to extend a courteous, "Do you mind if I answer this?" the first time it happens in uncertain circumstances.

Try the Cenozoic

2007-05-08T11:58:00.000-05:00

Get away from my time machine, future man!

matlab for men

2007-05-08T11:26:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine wrote to the creator of the site "Matlab for Men" and asked him why he chose this name. She told him she feels the name discourages cooperation among engineers of all genders and reflects poorly on the international image of Sharif University.

A student of the creator (who my friend cc'd) replied in earnest trying to defend the name's creativity, and she forwarded that response asking us what we thought. Here are my responses.

Date: Sat, 5 May 2007 11:08:21 -0700 (PDT)
If it were an American writing this email to you, I would feel comfortable assuming that "Matlab for Men" means "matlab only to be used by real men" in the fully chauvinistic sense. I would spam them everyday and get my friends to do it until they could come up with something actually creative (bc I don't think it is creative, if this is the true original meaning).

However, I really don't know how this translates. Perhaps they really did mean "Matlab for Humans" when they wrote it-- implying that they are giving useful working advice to real people for how to use matlab.

He seems genuine in wanting to make you feel like it's not offensive, but I find it amusing bc in English there are gender neutral/incuding terms for a few of the examples he's offering, like cowgirls, businesswomen or businesspeople. From my experience you would never call a cowgirl a cowboy, for example. Not because it's offensive but because it's inaccurate. (And besides, the Dallas Cowboys are all men.) This is opposed to words like mankind and human which have the word "man" inside but have always been defined to mean all people. Again-- all of this is solely from the English language perspective. I think you could suggest to him that he changes the name to "Matlab for Mankind"--which sounds great and is actually creative.

I have always understood how people think that some women are being picky when they ask for a change of vocabulary in order to be technically more equal, when in reality the word is mostly used equally for both genders anyway. This guy's example of "freshman" is a good one-- if we all started getting riled up and saying you have to start saying "freshpeople", it would be silly.

However, I do think that if all people were somehow magically able to let go of the issues attached, then clearly the best choice would be a gender neutral or gender including vocabulary. Then men who run the front podium at a restaurant would not be called "hostess" or men who help you on the airplane would not be "stewardess"...the "ess" ending implying female.

There is nothing wrong with wanting it to stay the old way that everyone is used to, but there is also nothing wrong with wanting the neutral case. And once something is changed, it soon becomes "the old way that everyone is used to" anyway.

Date: Tue, 8 May 2007 09:38:48 -0700 (PDT)
I just wanted to let you know that I had one further thought this morning about this email. It irritates me to no end that he said twice that you should not "segregate yourself" and not use the website because of the name. This is one of the most detrimental things that someone in a position of power can do-- preemptively blame the victim for the disadvantages they will face.

In fact, for every one woman who says they refuse to use the website because of the name, there are ten women who feel discouraged and ashamed to use that website. The segregation is happening because of HIS choice, not because of yours.

LA USD science fair

2007-04-04T17:56:00.000-05:00

Last week I judged the middle school engineering projects at the LAUSD science fair! It was really great. The projects were so interesting. I felt a little bad because all the best projects came from the same middle school. Bonus for those kids because it seems they had a great science teacher! But I wish there were more great science teachers for all the kids across the school district...

The kids brought their projects on Monday night and we judged them on Tuesday. Then we called back the top students for interviews on Wednesday so as to facilitate prize assignments. Well, Tuesday night some more students set up their posters! So the organizers asked us if we could judge those additional posters on Wednesday, even though they wouldn't qualify for the prizes.

I finished my interviews and went to join two men who were judging the extra posters. One was an ex-highschool science teacher, the other was a science prof at cal poly, both in their 60s. They had gone through some of the late project posters, and I suggested I should start at the other end. "wait"--they said--"First go back and do that one...we didn't have the heart to do that one." hmm...what do they mean? Poor kid... I decided I will help a kid out...

well do you know what that poster was about?? It was a girl who studied the effect of different shampoos on shininess of hair. Now, it wasn't very good and she didn't have a good measure for shininess-- but those guys skipped it just because of the topic! I asked and they admitted it! I told them--"You should be ashamed of yourselves!" They didn't seem to care much...

Tell me ladies, if some highschool girl who loved science came up with a good, measurable way to know if shampoo makes your hair shiny-- would you or would you not invest heavily in her methods???? I was so pissed at those guys. If I hadn't been there, she would have gotten discouraged! Now I know that this girl may not care about the science fair-- but maybe she does! and imagine that her poster was the only one without a grade...

Not only that but when we all were finishing up, those guys left as I was grading a final poster, and when I was cleaning up I realized they had left two more off in the corner ungraded-- another one on shampoos and one on gel vs. mousse. No wonder science is boring to some girls, the topics that they are interested in don't get any respect...

things haven't changed

2007-01-22T12:58:00.000-06:00

Kiri Davis is a young filmmaker whose high school documentary has left audiences at film festivals across the country stunned -- and has re-ignited a powerful debate over race.

windy

2007-01-05T21:16:00.001-06:00

It's windy tonight in los angeles. I haven't updated this for awhile so I thought I would-- but I don't have anything to say. Just listening to the branches swoosh in the wind, listening to a creaky metal something outside go back and forth.

If you are a scientist, engineer or computer scientist, I would like you all to look at this and think about how it will fit into your life. Right now I have my plate full with school and research, and I should focus these months if I want to get on the path to graduation. But I am thinking about how and when I will be a civic scientist. I think it's really important for all of us.

Additionally, in the past year I read this by syndicated columnist Richard Cohen and this by English Professor Eggenschwiler at USC. Here are my responses.

Hi Mr. Cohen,

I read your column on highschool algebra a while back, and I am hoping you will take some time to read my comments.

I am an electrical engineering PhD student who was bored by world history in highschool. I am wondering why algebra or other math courses should be only optional when biology, history, etc should be required. I know many people who don't ever need what they learned in history class, nor do they ever wish they remembered it.

I think, though, that you and I both would prefer that history be taught in highschool. Even if the student is not interested and never thinks of past wars again, at least he or she had the chance to find an interest in it, if that interest was there.

Perhaps you believe that history is useful because everyone should understand at least a little bit about the world and how we got where we are. I agree with you. But I also believe that everyone should understand at least a little bit about the global warming statistics, google search engines, computers and cell phones etc that they see and use every day. And to understand a little bit about these things, we need to understand math.

Why is it okay to be completely clueless about these things? They are now an integral part of our everyday lives. They provide us with information so that we can navigate the current world. Why is it okay to just accept what the devices and search engines give us without knowing how they work?

I read some comments to a new york times article about mathematics and science education in highschool, and one comment really stood out to me. The writer said something like-- I don't see the problem with math in this country. Here in the US we have Microsoft, Intel, several of the strongest tech companies in the world.-- Well, I would like to ask that writer just what percentage of engineering employees of those companies does he think were educated in the US? I don't know how to find out, but my guess would be under 50%.

I believe that the problem with math in highschool is twofold: We don't know how to teach it well, and we keep saying it's difficult and useless so why learn it?

Today I talked to an old friend who is applying to get her PhD in social welfare; she will have to take statistics in order to pass the course requirements. She was never good in math in highschool, but today she told me she thinks it's because she never had a good teacher. She said she would ask questions, and the answers would only serve to make her more confused. I believe that, instead of cutting math from the highschool curriculum, we should only encourage more innovative teaching of the subject and set even higher expectations.

Thank you for your time.

Yours Sincerely,
Laura Balzano

Hi Professor Eggenschwiler,

I just wanted to write and say Thank You for speaking up for algebra in the LA times. I feel that as math gets a bad rap for highschoolers so does critical thinking, and you have hit on them both in one column. I agree that math has taught me to be able to think abstractly and systematically, and I think it helps me interact with different cultures, find compromises during disagreements, and work toward developing my own moral compass.

I would also add that math is important in itself. Many would say, for example, that history classes in highschool are useful because everyone should understand at least a little bit about the world and how we got where we are. I would agree, and then I would say that everyone should understand at least a little bit about the global warming statistics, google search engines, computers and cell phones etc that they see and use every day. And to understand a little bit about these things, we need to understand math. It is not clear to me how it became okay to be completely clueless about these things. They are now an integral part of our everyday lives. They provide us with information so that we can navigate the current world. Why is it okay to just accept what the devices and search engines give us without knowing how they work?

Clearly I am more motivated to learn these things that most people-- I am getting my PhD in electrical engineering :) But anyway, those are my two cents. I am certainly a proponent of better math education in K-12, and I hope voices like yours can help guide our policy makers and educators toward such goals.

Thanks again.
Sincerely,
Laura Balzano

what's your vote

2006-03-12T13:52:00.000-06:00

When I first moved from kansas to california it was a big debate: Earthquakes or Tornadoes, what is worse? Of course all the wussy californians thought tornadoes are worse. But I think earthquakes. With tornadoes you get advanced warning. Contrary to popular belief, the actual tornado lasts about as long as an earthquake. And way, way fewer people around the world die in tornadoes than die in earthquakes. I mean, do I really need to make the argument after the Sumatra quake last year? Even without tsunamis, earthquakes cause mudslides and entire landmasses shifting, moving, and burying things.

Anyway this morning when I called home, there was a tornado warning and my parents were in the basement. Mom said it was super dark outside. I remember once in highschool we were eating at macaroni grill, and when we went outside it smelled like tornado. The sky was a blanket, slightly green, and the sun was setting, peeking in underneath. Very eerie, but much more beautiful than any earthquake ever was.

a quote

2006-03-05T16:51:00.000-06:00

"Dreams are real, while they last. Can we say more of life?"

--Havelock Ellis

state of the union

2006-01-31T23:39:00.000-06:00

"Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction."

- John F. Kennedy

peace corps

2006-01-02T10:47:00.000-06:00

I was reading the article in the ny times today on the Lincoln group which was hired by the military to spread pro-US propaganda in Iraq. Earlier, they were printing articles in the newspaper without attributing the authors (who were US soldiers). Now they're maybe paying sunni clerics and US muslim scholars to help with the program.

Now I believe it is very important that we work to promote our image in the middle east. But I believe we shouldn't do it using propaganda, but instead by actually changing the way we project ourselves. We have a military to handle war, why not have a peace corps-- a real peace corps who goes to build infrastructure, schools, hospitals so that the people in a wartorn area like Iraq can begin to live normal daily lives. They would be trained to know about the culture, the language, the needs of the people-- and also about how to remain safe, of course-- but not about how to bust into a room and kill the person they're looking for.

The only image most of the middle east people have of us is military men at checkpoints, with large guns and gruff voices, speaking english to them as though they should understand. Additionally they see President Bush proclaiming victory, "mission accomplished" on television, they see celebrities with dresses whose price could feed them for years.

In my grandfather's time it was respectable to go and risk your life to serve your country. I believe it still would be, if the service was in peace.

Harajuku Closeups

2005-12-30T18:55:00.000-06:00

"Things you can see while viewing closeups of this photo I took last summer" by zach gibson

forgiveness beyond

2005-08-24T01:30:00.000-05:00

the guy who did the atlanta olympic park bombing in 96 was sentenced to life yesterday. And the daughter of a woman who died in that bomb said some awesome things in the media, forgiving him and the like. "I've cried enough for her, I've cried enough for me, and now I will cry for him."

emptying email inbox

2005-07-12T18:34:00.000-05:00

hot hong kong

keren ann's KCRW show

and here's something from the salon.com murakami interview:

I wake up at 6 in the morning and go to bed at 10, jogging every
day and swimming, eating healthy food. I'm very realistic. But when I
write, I write weird. That's very strange.

quote day

2005-06-07T11:50:00.000-05:00

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." -Nietzsche

"I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." -Stephen F. Roberts

indie pete and dinosaurs

2005-06-01T15:21:00.000-05:00

today's a dot-comics day.

it's been a long time since I exercised my 1337 skillz... indie pete gets em every time.

also, some programming advice from dinosaurs.

self-reliance

2005-05-25T23:28:00.000-05:00

from the nytimes:

"[Justice Priscilla R. Owen] represents a part of the Texas culture that is basically a frontier mentality," said Linda S. Eads, a law professor at Southern Methodist University and a former deputy attorney general of Texas who supports Ms. Owen's nomination.

"You don't cry about your hardships, you just keep moving forward," Professor Eads said. "In some ways, it's a very empowering philosophy, and in some ways it can be seen as cold. I guess it depends on which side of the outcome you are."

and from sheilabeela:

They always say time changes things,
but you actually have to change them yourself.
-Andy Warhol

kansans have stopped evolving

2005-05-21T14:22:00.000-05:00

So I'm from kansas, and this is the second time i've gone through the whole "Why doesn't my state believe in evolution" crisis. But I think over time I've realized it's not just a problem with the crazies who want to put creation in the curriculum. It's actually more a problem with the way we view science.

I would like to remind people that the philosophy and purpose of science is not to prove anything. It's to observe something about nature and then try to come up with an explanation.

So, you can come up with an explanation, and other scientists may agree or disagree with your methods and conclusions. As long as they agree and adopt your theories into their own work, you're good to go. If they don't agree and you still want them to take you seriously, you have to work harder to make your experiments sound and show that your conclusions are applicable, realistic, useful.

The neat part is, if some people do agree and accept your theories, but some other people disagree, the burden is not yours anymore. Why not, well, that's because nothing in science can be proven true, it can only be proven false or withstand the test of many attempts to prove it false. The burden is on those who dissent, and it's their job to prove you wrong.

Hey Kansas, please go ahead and teach that evolution is a theory. But make sure you teach that so is gravity. Kids are smart enough, they'll get the point.

annals of science

2005-05-07T20:49:00.000-05:00

From the 9 May 2005 new yorker, Climate of Man-III, by Elizabeth Kolbert

I asked Socolow whether he thought that stabilizing emissions was a politically feasible goal. He frowned.

"I'm always being asked, 'What can you say about the practicability of various targets?" he told me. "I really think that's the wrong question. These things can all be done.

"What kind of issue is like this that we faced in the past?" he continued. "I think it's the kind of issue where something looked extremely difficult, and not worth it, and then people changed their minds. Take child labor. We decided we would not have child labor and goods would become more expensive. It's a changed preference system. Slavery also had some of those characteristics a hundred and fifty years ago. Some people thought it was wrong, and they made their arguments, and they didn't carry the day. And then something happened all of a sudden it was wrong and we didn't do it anymore. And there were social costs to that. I suppose cotton was more expensive. ... It's clear from the record that [the climate] does things that we don't fully understand. And we're not going to understand them in the time period we have to make these decisions. ... If it's a problem like that, then asking whether it's practical or not is really not going to help very much. Whether it's practical depends on how much we give a damn."

missing pieces

2005-05-06T00:47:00.000-05:00

5 May 2005 ambiguity, an eye for an eye, and disparity
4 May 2005 you never know
14 April 2005 love and dogs with diabetes.
12 April 2005 one of our possible futures
9 April 2005 rock replacements, robots, and none of the diplomas.
27 Feb 2005 How I feel when I have too much work
14 Feb 2005 Assassination of Lebanon's Former Prime Minister
4 Feb 2005 Murakami interview
3 Feb 2005 Ousting of Nepali Government
26 Jan 2005 zero padding does not buy spectral resolution
3 Jan 2005 Alternative names for moveon.org
10 Dec 2004 Nepal's continued heartache