Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

There are days when I just don’t get xkcd (at least until I Google).

Today was one of them.

Urban Dictionary: rickroll
To post a misleading link with a subject that promises to be exciting or interesting, e.g. “World of Starcraft in-game footage!” or “Paris Hilton blows Busta Rhymes’ dick” but actually turns out to be the video for Rick Astley’s debut single, “Never Gonna Give You Up”. A variant on the duckroll. Allegedly hilarious.

Of course, it might help to have the slightest idea who Rick Astley is in the first place….

Transterrestrial Musings

Thoughts On Objectivity

In both science, and journalism.

The notion that journalists are, or should be, or can be “objective” is perhaps the profession’s most fatal conceit. As Virginia Postrel says, what’s important is to be fair, something that they often don’t even attempt, as demonstrated by CNN and its performance in the debates.

I’m dubious. Even granting that “objective” is something of a term of art among journalists that doesn’t quite correspond to what a philosopher or scientist might mean in terms of attempting to avoid prejudice, bias, or wishful thinking, I don’t see how you can aim at fairness without first being able to assess what parts of your reporting might be unfair. And to do that, it seems to me you have to try to be objective…unless you’re just going to reduce everything to a procedure, as in “he said; she said” journalism.

From my point of view, the problem isn’t that journalists try to be objective where they should be trying to be fair–it’s that they’re so damn bad at objectivity. And it doesn’t reassure me that fairness over objectivity would be an improvement when the biggest critics of objectivity as a journalistic goal (e.g. Chomsky) want to downplay it precisely so they can hide their biases and better achieve their agendas. “Fake but accurate” is exactly what that approach is trying to legitimize. It is unfair that the journalist can’t present what he knows to be true based on his expert judgment, just because there’s no actual “objective” evidence. But because journalistic standards still require objectivity, he supplies fake evidence (and maybe even believes it to be true because of his biases), and with luck gets caught out. I say that if you believe that the journalist is obligated to provide the actual documents for other people to examine, and not just assert that they exist, you believe in objectivity not fairness; you believe that there is a truth of the matter that can be gotten at through examination of the evidence*, and not just a requirement to announce your biases.

Rand Simberg’s post above is in reference to a Virginia Postrel post on Objectivity. I haven’t read the book, but to infer anything about the appropriateness of objectivity as an epistemic virtue from a discussion of its history is to commit the genetic fallacy. I’m not at all sure whether the Daston and Gallison, the authors of Objectivity, would agree with Postrel’s take-away that “Real objectivity would turn the journalist into a C-Span camera, simply recording data without any sort of selection or pattern-making,” but I am sure that it is a core epistemic virtue for journalists to start by simply recording the data without any sort of selection or pattern-making. As the folks at Language Log have demonstrated over and over and over again, if you want the truth you have first accurately record what really was said. That doesn’t mean that you end there, and the journalist’s job is just to faithfully transcribe and then print it–but it has to start there.

* if it can be gotten at at all…

Unlocked Wordhoard: Beowulf Review Round-Up, Part II: Wiglaf’s Revenge

Professor Richard Nokes, medievalist, has been all over the new Beowulf movie.  I’ve got to say, with each new project he undertakes my respect for Neil Gaiman’s talent drops further.

Grousing about losing my access to the online OED (and a sleepless night due to a head-cold) led me to give another go at installing the CD-ROM version, and this time I discovered some helpful information on the Oxford University Press site, namely that the symptom I was seeing (launching and immediately exiting with no error message) was caused by a Microsoft security patch. Figures. Fortunately, MS had developed a hot-fix for this, and the OUP had a link. I installed it, and wonder of wonders, it actually worked and I had my lovely OED CD-ROM working on my desktop again.

So that’s the w00t.

The sort-of is because in the process I discovered that they’ve released two new point-releases of the CD-ROM since I bought it, which among other things allow it to download updates from their site, fixes the printing problems, and removes the stupid, stupid relicense-every-ninety-days restriction. Which would be great, except there doesn’t seem to be any upgrade path from the v3.0 2004 disks that I have to the the v3.1.1 2005 disks. So it appears that unless I want to buy it again, I’m stuck with the original retarded DRM. I’m going to dig around further, but at least in the meantime I can once again bask in the glory that is the OED.

update: It turns out there is an upgrade from 3.0 to 3.1.1 for $70, so I’ve ordered it.  Just never having to re-install the license is worth that to me, plus it appears that the 3.1.1 version is necessary to run reliably on Mac OS X under an emulator, which would be my ideal way to do it.  Pretty much the only thing I use my Windows machine for is to play City of Heroes and run a couple of other programs that only like Windows (until MS broke it, the OED CD-ROM was one of those).  Being able to carry the OED around on my Mac laptop would be a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Amazon.com: Kindle: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device

Initially I misread the announcement and thought that the Kindle came bundled with the OED as its built-in dictionary. I would happily have paid $399 for the complete contents of the OED in something that weighed less than a paperback book that happened to also be able to wirelessly download 80,000 other books and store up to 200 of them at once, particularly since the OED on CD-ROM goes for about $236 (and if my experience is any guide will just stop working round about the 3rd license update). Unfortunately a second read reveals that it’s the far less exciting New Oxford American Dictionary that ships with the Kindle. The NOAD is the dictionary that comes bundled with Mac OS X, which is fine and all, but without the quotations and the date chart, it just isn’t the same. sigh

Marginal Revolution: Why Most Published Research Findings are False

There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false. - John Ioannidis

The argument is from a paper by John Ionnidis, but Alex Tabarrok gives a much easier to read analysis of the fairly simply Bayesian reasoning behind it. Essentially, this is the classic problem of false positives vs. true positives when the condition being tested for is rare in the population (e.g. presence of AIDs in non-high-risk groups, or in this case the truth of a hypothesis).

It might be tempting to argue that the case of a hypothesis under test being true isn’t typically as bad as the general assumptions being made to drive the argument, since the researchers presumably have some thought or intuition that drives them to pick a particular hypothesis to test (they’re not just throwing darts at a board), but consider that works both ways. Despite the common complaint that this or that study is “just another case of science proving what everybody already knows (and so a waste of money)”, I suspect very few researchers deliberately pick hypotheses that are widely believed to be true, particularly if there’s a lot of evidence and research backing up that belief. That’s not, generally speaking, believed to be the way to advance the frontiers of scientific knowledge. But in that case, the sample is biased in the other direction–a random hypothesis to test would include already-known-to-be-true hypotheses in the same proportion that they occur in the population of all hypotheses, so the hypotheses actually attracting attention are less likely to be true than random chance would dictate. Whether the scientist’s intuition towards selecting true hypothesis is a bigger bias than the elimination of all the ones believed to be true is something you can’t really be sure of, so I’d be really cautious about asserting that P(hypothesis is true) must be a lot better than Ionaddis’ calculations allow for.

Of course, the tool this came from gives no indication whatsoever of what method it uses to determine readability, and sneakily inserts a link to an advertiser in the html they give you to copy, so caveat lector.

Update: After Googling around a little, my guess is that the tool uses the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level readability test, both because it delivers the results in categories that roughly correspond to grade level, and because it’s a test that’s simple enough to calculate with a tiny program.  The formula (from the Wikipedia article) is:

 

It’s my infatuation with sesquipedalian verbiage I tells ya.

Here’s the result of a poll I took on one of the boards I frequent (a board for a group of City of Heroes players). Comments on the poll were disallowed, to try to prevent people from influencing each other’s views, though many eagerly shared their opinions with me via private message. It’s interesting how well this matches up to the 146,000 vs. 49, 300 Google Hits observed on Language Log.

You’ve got another X coming
Which sounds right? >You’ve got another thing coming [ 37 ] [78.72%] >You’ve got another think coming [ 8 ] [17.02%] >Both sound right to me [ 2 ] [4.26%]
Total Votes: 47

Language Log: Another thing coming

Google has 146,000 hits for “another thing coming”, most of which are not the Judas Priest song, vs. 49,300 for “another think coming”, which I’m pretty sure is the original expression. (Arnold Zwicky observed thing’s internet victory back in June of 2004 — though the totals were much smaller then, 21,400 to 5,830.)

This came up the other day in the car, when we were listening to the Judas Priest song, and it turns out that neither my fiancée nor my old college friend recall having ever even heard it as “you’ve got another think coming.” Moreover both were convinced, at least initially, that “another thing” just made more sense than “another think.”

SAGE: Open Source Mathematics Software

General and Advanced Pure and Applied Mathematics
Use SAGE for studying a huge range of mathematics, including algebra, calculus, elementary to very advanced number theory, cryptography, numerical computation, commutative algebra, group theory, combinatorics, graph theory, and exact linear algebra.

Recently I’ve found myself having to do real mathematics for the first time in many years. Surprisingly, despite being a programmer of actuarial math calculations, there’s not a lot of call for solving equations; the algorithms seldom change. This year, though, we’ve been rushing to implement changes for the Pension Protection Act which have made things very much more complicated and changed the way we calculate benefits in a big way. And what I’ve found is that I’d forgotten a lot of what I once knew.

So I decided to refresh my memory of a lot of the math I once studied as an undergrad, and, being a nerd one of the first things I did (after buying a couple of books) is to go fishing around for some software to play with. I was particularly interested in stuff that would let me model and graph equations, to try to regain some intuitive sense of their behavior, and I wanted something fairly easy to program. While it’s possible to write spreadsheets to validate the actuarial calculations I’ve been working on (and I have), it’s a bitch-and-a-half to read them again later or debug them. And if possible I wanted it to be open-source.

SAGE is what I found, and to my delight it’s yet another application that makes heavy use of Python. And, no, I didn’t go looking on a Python site to find these. Straight Google searches turned up both SAGE and the NLTK. It’s no coincidence that applications looking for a way to provide straight-forward but powerful programming tend to be built on or with Python, but it wasn’t one of my search criteria.

Again I installed it on both my Windows and Mac boxen, and again the Windows installation was a bit more straightforward, though this time not by much. In the case of Windows, you have to first install a VMWare player (free, but not open source) so that SAGE can run in its own virtual machine, and then you have to configure your firewall (I use ZoneAlarm) so that you can hit the web-server that SAGE runs (if you’re going to use the graphical interface, which is built as a web application). In the case of Mac, stuffit repeatedly had problems opening the .tar.gz file and I ended up just downloading and unzipping and untarring it from the command-line; after that running the setup.py script was straightforward.

Once you have it set up, it’s a breeze to use. You can run it from a command prompt (in fact, you have to start it that way), but the most convenient way to use it is to run a “notebook” sub-application that sets up a web server; surf to that server on your localhost and you get a graphical interface (web-page) that lets you create and manage “notebook” pages–basically persistable interactive sessions. You can even upload these sessions to public instances of SAGE running on the internet (for instance at the University of Washington math department); in fact a great way to explore SAGE is to surf there, create an account and start playing around.

Like most really powerful pieces of software, there is a learning curve to using SAGE, and it’s a steeper curve if you don’t know any Python, but a lot of the most basic stuff (assigning variables, solving simple equations) is pretty much exactly what you expect. Tip: Enter what you evaluate into the box on the screen (the boxes are for code). Shift+Enter to cause SAGE to evaluate what you’ve entered in the box and create a new empty box below, use your mouse to put the cursor in a box you’ve evaluated to edit it, and hover your mouse above the top border of a box until you see a bluish-purple line across the page then click to insert a new empty box prior to an existing box.

I’d also recommend starting with the SAGE Programming for Newbies link from the SAGE Documentation, even though it’s incomplete, rather than the SAGE Tutorial. The Tutorial jumps right into operator precedence, “rings” and other such minutiae without even stopping to explain what’s facing you at the prompt once you’ve completed the install. The SAGE Programming for Newbies is a much gentler introduction (and you can skip the parts that are too gentle, like “what is a computer”).

SAGE is also built to interface with other standard mathematics software packages, like Maple, Mathematica, MATLAB, and so forth, if that floats your boat. I don’t have access to them, but I can see how that would be useful.

What can I say? I find this kind of thing really, really cool.