Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

dark matter killed the dinosaurs?

A new book proposes that dark matter changed the course of a comet, which killed the dinosaurs. This article is also interesting to me for its possibly over the top use of analogies to communicate scientific information.

Sixty-­six million years ago, according to her dark-matter disk model, a tiny twitch caused by an invisible force in the far reaches of the cosmos hurled a comet three times the width of Manhattan toward Earth at least 700 times the speed of a car on a freeway. The collision produced the most powerful earthquake of all time and released energy a billion times that of an atomic bomb, heating the atmosphere into an incandescent furnace that killed three-quarters of Earthlings. No creature heavier than 55 pounds, or about the size of a Dalmatian, survived. The death of the dinosaurs made possible the subsequent rise of mammalian dominance, without which you and I would not have evolved to ponder the perplexities of the cosmos.

how do you value data?

This article lists six ways a company or organization can try to value its data:

  1. Intrinsic value of information. The model quantifies data quality by breaking it into characteristics such as accuracy, accessibility and completeness.
  2. Business value of information. This model measures data characteristics in relation to one or more business processes. Accuracy and completeness, for example, are evaluated, as is timeliness…
  3. Performance value of information…measures the data’s impact on one or more key performance indicators (KPIs) over time
  4. Cost value of information. This model measures the cost of “acquiring or replacing lost information.”
  5. Economic value of information. This model measures how an information asset contributes to the revenue of an organization.
  6. Market value of information. This model measures revenue generated by“selling, renting or bartering” corporate data

Another article says that algorithms are becoming less valuable as data becomes more valuable.

Google is not risking much by putting its algorithms out there.

That’s because the real secret sauce that differentiates Google from everybody else in the world isn’t the algorithms—it’s the data, and in particular, the training data needed to get the algorithms performing at a high level.

“A company’s intellectual property and its competitive advantages are moving from their proprietary technology and algorithms to their proprietary data,” Biewald says. “As data becomes a more and more critical asset and algorithms less and less important, expect lots of companies to open source more and more of their algorithms.”

 

The internet is telling you what you want to hear

That’s right, the internet is telling you what you want to hear. In some cases, it really is government and corporate propaganda, known as “astroturfing“. This is the practice of creating a fake media buzz to give you the impression that there is grassroots support for something when there really isn’t:

Astroturfing is the attempt to create an impression of widespread grassroots support for a policy, individual, or product, where little such support exists. Multiple online identities and fake pressure groups are used to mislead the public into believing that the position of the astroturfer is the commonly held view.

Although usually associated with the internet, the practice has been widespread ever since newspaper editors first invented the letters page. Pick up any local paper around the time of an election and you will find multiple letters from “concerned residents of X” objecting to the disastrous policies of Y…

As reported by the Guardian, some big companies now use sophisticated “persona management software” to create armies of virtual astroturfers, complete with fake IP addresses, non-political interests and online histories. Authentic-looking profiles are generated automatically and developed for months or years before being brought into use for a political or corporate campaign. As the software improves, these astroturf armies will become increasingly difficult to spot, and the future of open debate online could become increasingly perilous.

The other thing going on is the “online filter bubble”, which is simply the idea that search and marketing algorithms are increasingly telling you what you want to hear. This makes sense in the logic of marketing, but is dangerous when you are trying to figure out what is going on in the world. From TED:

 

 

 

refugee cities

This post makes a case for establishing cities for refugees rather than “camps”.

Second, the world now has 60 million refugees. That is a number roughly the size of six Belgiums, Hungarys, or Swedens. If they were to create their own country, it would be the size of France. In the face of such staggering numbers, commitments to take thousands or even tens of thousands of people will do almost nothing to alleviate the misery of millions.

Rather than conflating the issues of refugees and terrorism, politicians and policymakers should be addressing each separately. On the question of refugees, Western countries should take in as many as their populations can assimilate, demonstrating a willingness to make good on the universal values they profess for both moral and political reasons.

But the world also needs far bolder solutions than twentieth-century approaches like limited asylum quotas and “temporary” refugee camps. In particular, it is time to embrace the prospect not of camps but of cities – places where up to a million refugees of any particular nationality can live safely and learn how to build a better future.

This reminds me a little of Paul Romer’s “charter cities”. The idea was to create entirely new city states focused on economic growth that people from anywhere in the world could opt into, provided they agreed to certain norms of behavior. I find the idea compelling, although Romer’s attempts to realize it on the ground in Honduras ended up on the rocks. You can argue that Singapore developed somewhat along these lines, although it was not founded based on this ideology (in fact, it was not even founded voluntarily, but just sort of cast adrift.)

car dealers sabotaging electric cars

The New York Times says car dealers are actively subverting peoples’ attempts to buy electric cars, even when they really want them. One reason they cite is that electric cars need less service like oil changes, and dealerships actually make a lot more money from service than from sales. This may be a rational explanation. But part of the explanation may also be that people can get sucked into longstanding institutional cultures even when they are highly irrational. I face this quite often in my work, and I have faced it around the world – groups of people can be incredibly motivated to defend the status quo, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence that there are better ways, and even when the people in question are young, intellgient, well-educated and well-intentioned. Sometimes the facts just do not matter. I don’t have the answer to this, if you do please let me know.

Low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem

I have heard from know-it-alls that the problem with renewable energy is that it is intermittent and hard to store. I have always thought there are many ways to deal with that – charge a battery, pump water uphill, heat something, wind a spring, compress air, electrolyze water into hydrogen and charge a fuel cell. Those are my thoughts with absolutely no expertise at all, but luckily the experts are thinking about this too:

Mark Z. Jacobson, Mark A. Delucchi, Mary A. Cameron, and Bethany A. Frew. A low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem with 100% penetration of intermittent wind, water, and solar for all purposes. PNAS 2015; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1510028112, 2015

This study addresses the greatest concern facing the large-scale integration of wind, water, and solar (WWS) into a power grid: the high cost of avoiding load loss caused by WWS variability and uncertainty. It uses a new grid integration model and finds low-cost, no-load-loss, nonunique solutions to this problem on electrification of all US energy sectors (electricity, transportation, heating/cooling, and industry) while accounting for wind and solar time series data from a 3D global weather model that simulates extreme events and competition among wind turbines for available kinetic energy. Solutions are obtained by prioritizing storage for heat (in soil and water); cold (in ice and water); and electricity (in phase-change materials, pumped hydro, hydropower, and hydrogen), and using demand response. No natural gas, biofuels, nuclear power, or stationary batteries are needed. The resulting 2050–2055 US electricity social cost for a full system is much less than for fossil fuels. These results hold for many conditions, suggesting that low-cost, reliable 100% WWS systems should work many places worldwide.

Peter Checkland

Peter Checkland is another system thinker that I have just discovered. Apparently he is well-known, but I find that systems thinkers are buried in a variety of disciplines, in this case management, and I wasn’t looking there.

This is from a 2000 journal article, Soft Systems Methodology: A Thirty Year Retrospective:

Although the history of thought reveals a number of holistic thinkers — Aristotle, Marx, Husserl among them — it was only in the 1950s that any version of holistic thinking became institutionalized. The kind of holistic thinking which then came to the fore, and was the concern of a newly created organization, was that which makes explicit use of the concept of ‘system’, and today it is ‘systems thinking’ in its various forms which would be taken to be the very paradigm of thinking holistically. In 1954, as recounted in Chapter 3 of Systems Thinking, Systems Practice, only one kind of systems thinking was on the table: the development of a mathematically expressed general theory of systems. It was supposed that this would provide a meta-level language and theory in which the problems of many different disciplines could be expressed and solved; and it was hoped that doing this would help to promote the unity of science.

These were the aspirations of the pioneers, but looking back from 1999 we can see that the project has not succeeded. The literature contains very little of the kind of outcomes anticipated by the founders of the Society for General Systems Research; and scholars in the many subject areas to which a holistic approach is relevant have been understandably reluctant to see their pet subject as simply one more example of some broader ‘general system’!

But the fact that general systems theory (GST) has failed in its application does not mean that systems thinking itself has failed. It has in fact flourished in several different ways which were not anticipated in 1954. There has been development of systems ideas as such, development of the use of systems ideas in particular subject areas, and combinations of the two. The development in the 1970s by Maturana and Varela (1980) of the concept of a system whose elements generate the system itself provided a way of capturing the essence of an autonomous living system without resorting to use of an observer’s notions of ‘purpose’, ‘goal’, ‘information processing’ or ‘function’. (This contrasts with the theory in Miller’s Living Systems (1978), which provides a general model of a living entity expressed in the language of an observer, so that what makes the entity autonomous is not central to the theory.) This provides a good example of the further development of systems ideas as such. The rethinking, by Chorley and Kennedy (1971), of physical geography as the study of the dynamics of systems of four kinds, is an example of the use of systems thinking to illuminate a particular subject area.

It’s sad to me to see his contention that general systems theory has failed.  It should be a central, foundational body of knowledge that people are trained in before they apply their focus to narrower fields. I have said many times, this would give a wider variety of intelligent people a shared body of knowledge, vocabulary, and respect for each other’s pursuits, and might accelerate the pace of innovation.

Holmes

Some people say your first Sherlock Holmes book should be The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. But I am really enjoying A Study in Scarlet, the very first novel where the characters are introduced. Watson is convalescing after a war injury in Afghanistan and decides to take on a roommate to save money. And that roommate turns out to be Sherlock Holmes. The descriptions of Watson discovering his personality are really fascinating. At this point he doesn’t know that Holmes is a detective, and is too polite to ask. I pulled this from Project Gutenberg, where you can download a public domain HTML or e-reader version:

He was not studying medicine. He had himself, in reply to a question, confirmed Stamford’s opinion upon that point. Neither did he appear to have pursued any course of reading which might fit him for a degree in science or any other recognized portal which would give him an entrance into the learned world. Yet his zeal for certain studies was remarkable, and within eccentric limits his knowledge was so extraordinarily ample and minute that his observations have fairly astounded me. Surely no man would work so hard or attain such precise information unless he had some definite end in view. Desultory readers are seldom remarkable for the exactness of their learning. No man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reason for doing so.

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”

“To forget it!”

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

“But the Solar System!” I protested.

“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

I was on the point of asking him what that work might be, but something in his manner showed me that the question would be an unwelcome one. I pondered over our short conversation, however, and endeavoured to draw my deductions from it. He said that he would acquire no knowledge which did not bear upon his object. Therefore all the knowledge which he possessed was such as would be useful to him. I enumerated in my own mind all the various points upon which he had shown me that he was exceptionally well-informed. I even took a pencil and jotted them down. I could not help smiling at the document when I had completed it. It ran in this way—

SHERLOCK HOLMES—his limits.

  1. Knowledge of Literature.—Nil.
  2.              Philosophy.—Nil.
  3.              Astronomy.—Nil.
  4.              Politics.—Feeble.
  5.              Botany.—Variable.  Well up in belladonna,
                              opium, and poisons generally.
                              Knows nothing of practical gardening.
  6.              Geology.—Practical, but limited.
                               Tells at a glance different soils
                               from each other.  After walks has
                               shown me splashes upon his trousers,
                               and told me by their colour and
                               consistence in what part of London
                               he had received them.
  7.              Chemistry.—Profound.
  8.              Anatomy.—Accurate, but unsystematic.
  9.              Sensational Literature.—Immense.  He appears
                              to know every detail of every horror
                              perpetrated in the century.
  10. Plays the violin well.
  11. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.
  12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law.

When I had got so far in my list I threw it into the fire in despair. “If I can only find what the fellow is driving at by reconciling all these accomplishments, and discovering a calling which needs them all,” I said to myself, “I may as well give up the attempt at once.”

I see that I have alluded above to his powers upon the violin. These were very remarkable, but as eccentric as all his other accomplishments. That he could play pieces, and difficult pieces, I knew well, because at my request he has played me some of Mendelssohn’s Lieder, and other favourites. When left to himself, however, he would seldom produce any music or attempt any recognized air. Leaning back in his arm-chair of an evening, he would close his eyes and scrape carelessly at the fiddle which was thrown across his knee. Sometimes the chords were sonorous and melancholy. Occasionally they were fantastic and cheerful. Clearly they reflected the thoughts which possessed him, but whether the music aided those thoughts, or whether the playing was simply the result of a whim or fancy was more than I could determine. I might have rebelled against these exasperating solos had it not been that he usually terminated them by playing in quick succession a whole series of my favourite airs as a slight compensation for the trial upon my patience.

Fascinating, but not a model for the aspiring modern polymath I don’t think. Many smart, well-educated people assume that only certain pieces of knowledge are useful to them in their occupation and daily interests, then block out all the rest. The problem is, you don’t know up front what the useful knowledge is going to be, so you miss out on a lot of potentially useful information and all the rich connections between pieces of information that could inform your daily life. Holmes actually cast a very wide net for information, although he excluded certain subjects, and could call upon a rich library of interconnections and associations that others could not see, within seconds. He seemed to further curate this connection in his brain with music, drugs, and seemed to be somewhat manic. I find it fascinating how Watson describes him as being accomplished on the violin, but not always playing actual pieces of music but just kind of noodling around while thinking.