Bloomberg?!?

"Recently, I have been a great deal about two communities that have put forward idiosyncratic ideas about the world. Less Wrong claims to be “a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality.”  Eliezer Yudkowsky, a proponent of the singularity, began the blog in 2009 and used it as a space to broadcast his views on, well, just about everything but primarily artificial intelligence, epistemology, and ethics. Yudkowsky and the Less Wrong community often base their speculations on ‘rationality’ on research in cognitive science, behavioral economics, and related disciplines. I’ve also been interested for some time in chemtrail conspiracy theorists, a community that is more decentralized. Chemtrailers believe that contrails, or lines of condensed water left in an aircraft’s wake, are in fact, um, chemtrails, chemicals sprayed into the atmosphere by the government or some other malignant group. Chemtrail theorists have carried out their own experiments to verify their intuitions. And they have become the scourge of those proposing research on geoengineering (like these people haunting a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science [beginning @ 1:50]).

Thinking about these communities reminded me of Lovecraft’s earlier interactions. In some ways, amateur journalism and epistolary circles of Lovecraft’s day were not unlike the blogs and webpages that Less Wrong and the chemtrailers use. (Yes, I know the dangers of cross-temporal and cross-technological comparisons.) Still, I think there is much to explore about how such groups produce and distribute their knowledge against the background of an epistemic status quo. If scientists have their journals—as Alex Csiszar has been exploring—the laity have their amateur journalism and their blogs. And such spaces give historians of science and technology and STS scholars a chance to examine and probe the practices of epistemic subcultures.

"Sumerian is the first language for which we have written evidence and its literature the earliest known. The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), a project of the University of Oxford, comprises a selection of nearly 400 literary compositions recorded on sources which come from ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and date to the late third and early second millennia BCE.
"The corpus contains Sumerian texts in transliteration, English prose translations and bibliographical information for each composition. The transliterations and the translations can be searched, browsed and read online using the tools of the website."

(Re to_teach:data_mining tag: here are some bags of words for classification, principal components, topic models, maybe even manifold learning...)

"The ever-expanding capacities of computing offer new narrative possibilities for virtual worlds. Yet vast narratives—featuring an ongoing and intricately developed storyline, many characters, and multiple settings—did not originate with, and are not limited to, Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Marvel's Spiderman, and the complex stories of such television shows as Dr. Who, The Sopranos, and Lost all present vast fictional worlds.

Third Person explores strategies of vast narrative across a variety of media, including video games, television, literature, comic books, tabletop games, and digital art. The contributors—media and television scholars, novelists, comic creators, game designers, and others—investigate such issues as continuity, canonicity, interactivity, fan fiction, technological innovation, and cross-media phenomena.

Chapters examine a range of topics, including storytelling in a multiplayer environment; narrative techniques for a 3,000,000-page novel; continuity (or the impossibility of it) in Doctor Who; managing multiple intertwined narratives in superhero comics; the spatial experience of the Final Fantasy role-playing games; World of Warcraft adventure texts created by designers and fans; and the serial storytelling of The Wire."

"As Clawback opens, an assassin has begun shooting the country’s worst-performing financiers. A bottom-ranked investment manager; a hedge fund partner down ninety percent; a rotten banker. Someone’s slogan seems to be, “Don’t bail them out, take them out!”

"A coalition of banksters hires a fixer, the sort of contractor whose job description opens with “total deniability” and ends with “unlicensed machine guns.” As bodies fall and markets plunge, he ranges the Greenwich-Midtown axis with an equalizer and an attitude – only to realize he’s become a target himself."

An actually rather good interview in, of all places, Vice magazine. (Which I can now truthfully say I have read for an article.)

Less than convincing, both as socialist argument and as discussion of intellectual history.  (John von Neumann was not, repeat, not, part of the Vienna Circle.  On the other hand, actual full-blown socialist theorists like Otto Neurath _were_.)  No discussion of market socialist traditions, other than passing mentions of Lange et al.

I am a bit boggled that they write a whole paper about how to explain economic fluctuations in terms of input-output matrices without even mentioning the name of Leontief...

This confirms my sense from his books that Tufte is probably a complete pain in the ass to deal with, though genius must be excused much.  (Also, I will now take odds that he will succumb to the Brain Eater within 10 years, which will be much more of a tragedy than usual.)

Insidiously training us to act in a benevolent manner towards strangers.

Hear, hear, hear.

The immune system from the viewpoint of statistical decision theory.  Would be very interesting if it actually integrates the two; haven't read it so I won't presume to guess.

I really shouldn't complain, because writing something like this, for this audience, is working for righteousness.  But (1) talking to haphazardly selected businesspeople is no way to evaluate an economic system (at the very least you should be talking to randomly selected business people).  And (2) THIS IS CAPITALISM, in which the means of production are privately owned, controlled and exchangeable in the market, and production and distribution are driven by calculations of profit in the marketplace.  The whole point of the article is the many ways in which Norway encourages people to become capitalists.

Not that it's not great, but WTF is this doing in _Esquire_?

To be fair, without a similarly-constructed list for earlier times, this does make it hard to say whether the problem is actually getting _worse_.

ETA: if using pre-ground peppercorns, DO NOT keep at 1/2 tsp, even if you double the volume of beans.  Maybe 1/4 tsp?

Awww.

"Let the flowers be forgotten/ Sprinkle coal dust on my grave/ In remembrance of the UMWA"

Cleverly concealed RSS feed at http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/pn_wp/recent.rss

Aargh, aargh, aargh. Look, it's a cute story, and Fallon seems to be trying to do good, but the illogic! Take at face value that this "warrior gene" (barf) allele predisposes to violence, all else being equal. Do we know all the _other_ genes which contribute to this? No. For all we know he has the "big ol' teddy bear" gene (just look at him!), which is much stronger. Or again, if the function of such-and-such a region of the brain is suppressing violent impulses, _and_ this shows up as metabolic activity, _and_ that activity is absent, maybe it's because he doesn't have many impulses that need to be inhibited.

Wow, were we poor.

Yes, yes, and again yes!

When the IMF (the IMF!) calls for a tax specifically targeted at the financial sector, you know it's too big.

Nice, but not profound, interview with Ostrom.

That's an embedded EEG recording apparatus apparently.

"Only human beings have a rich conceptual repertoire with concepts like tort, entropy, Abelian group, mannerism, icon and deconstruction. How have humans constructed these concepts? And once they have been constructed by adults, how do children acquire them? ... the innate starting point ... systems of core cognition. Representations of core cognition are the output of dedicated input analyzers ... but ... differ from perceptual representations in [being] more abstract and richer functional[ly]. ...key to understanding cognitive development [is] conceptual discontinuities in which new representational systems emerge that have more expressive power than core cognition and are ... incommensurate with ... earlier representational systems. ... fleshes out Quinian bootstrapping [as] sketched in the literature on the history and philosophy of science. ... major mechanism in the construction of new representational resources over the course of childrens cognitive development."

"We explore the possibility that the US political system [is effectively] oligarchic. Using a material-based definition drawn from Aristotle, we argue that oligarchy is not inconsistent with democracy; that oligarchs need not occupy formal office or conspire together or even engage extensively in politics in order to prevail; that great wealth can provide both the resources and the motivation to exert potent political influence. Data on the US distributions of income and wealth are used to construct several Material Power Indices, which suggest that the wealthiest Americans may exert vastly greater political influence than average citizens and that a very small group of the wealthiest (perhaps the top tenth of 1 percent) may have sufficient power to dominate policy in certain key areas. A brief review of the literature suggests possible mechanisms by which such influence could occur, through lobbying, the electoral process, opinion shaping, and the US Constitution itself."

WTF???!? I knew we hadn't caught whoever did it, but I had no idea it was this much of a clusterfuck.

Page on individual-sequence prediction.

I especially look forward to reading the bits about Larry Summers.

Of conservatives: "The specifics of the reform they oppose have been in constant flux for a century--from child-labor laws to integration to health care reform. The tone of apocalyptic hysteria at the prospect of reform remains constant."

"Contrarianism generally lines up with the "perversity" column in Albert Hirschman's typology "The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy". ... Experts come up with solutions to the problems the societies face. Those solutions often entail discomfiting established interest groups [and] ... almost always entail some degree of perverse counterreaction .... It can be very interesting to focus on those counterreactions.... But [overwhelmingly], the counterreactions aren't as big as the first-order effects of the solutions. The minimum wage may price a few people out of the labour market, but it mostly raises low-income people's wages. Raising marginal income taxes does slightly lower rich people's incentives to generate income, but it mostly raises government revenue.... And as journalism has come increasingly to focus on contrarianism, it has become less and less adept at actually describing the world." This from the Economist!!!

My reaction to the first half is "preach it, brothers and sisters!" Perhaps inevitably, the constructive proposals of the 2nd half are less compelling.

Largely ripped off from Hoopes's _False Prophets_ --- but that's not so bad, because it's a good book (But it is bad, because he doesn't give a shout-out.)

Errr, surely the big glaring hole in this is that he never addresses why _manned_ space-flight would better serve the (laudable) goal of saving the planet than robots. (Extra negative bonus points for space-based solar power, which isn't inconceivable but presents vast, vast technical obstacles.)

Institutionalizing BMI, despite its ineffectiveness and the existence of superior alternatives. (Which, errr, make it even more obvious that I'm way over-weight, so this isn't rationalization on my part.) Lots of issues here for a data-mining class.

Good profile of Steven Chu in, of all places, Rolling Stone.

LeGuin on Venice is particularly good.

They seem to miss what is the most obvious incentive to focus on research: publications are valuable in the academic _job-market_; they create prestige and reputation; they are verifiable and observable to potential employers at another school (or even to tenure committees at the same school) in ways that teaching quality is not; and of course there is an arms race.

Edited to add: Also, a Ph.D. is a near-requirement for a faculty job, and getting one is a long, underpaid apprenticeship in _producing research_. Those who complete a doctorate have, whether by selection or by treatment or both, a really remarkably great commitment to research.

"I packed a backpack and took off for the romantic frontier-land of New Zealand with nothing but $500 and a working visa in my pocket. The six months I spent there were a far cry from what I thought the adventure would be, but it was educational. Culminating in my job at the cardboard factory--where I was surrounded by people who hated their jobs but had no other viable option.

In a flash, I grasped the true value of a college degree. It didn't matter what I majored in. It didn't even matter all that much what my grades were. What mattered was that I got that rectangular piece of paper that said, "Lane Wallace never has to work in a corrugated cardboard factory again.""

"It would be nice to think that Elsevier will listen to scientist [sic], but I suspect that this will not happen until scientists start getting a little more strident. If you are scientist, publish your work in society journals rather than Elsevier journals. Try to avoid citing work published in Elsevier journals. Elsevier lives by a combination of pricing and impact factor, and scientists have direct control over only one of these—impact factor. Librarian could start looking at Elsevier journal usage patterns; perhaps they can follow Cornell's example, and subscribe to just a few Elsevier journals."

I forget how I wound up here, but it's well worth reading --- especially when you get to the flogging-of-dubious-products bit.

Brian Stableford doing far-future dying earth SF!

Joy!

This is deeply shameful.

2004 profile of Rashid Khalidi.