January 15th, 2010
G. William Domhoff at UCSC is interested in understanding dreams from a rather different perspective than the “meanings of dreams” model (including the Freudian scheme). Rather, he and his collaborators are interested in questions like@ “how often do animals appear in dreams? what about violence? how many strangers vs people you know?” and so on; with these numbers tallied against men vs women, or different cultures.
This is interesting stuff, and it is interesting to see the ways in which the dreams of men differ from those of women, likewise across cultures. One could certainly, if one wished, spin tales of the pre-occupations of different people. There is, however, a nagging worry in my mind that severe editing and translation occur in the mind in the transition from dream to recollection of the dream; and that it is perhaps this translation that is strongly culture dependent, not the dreams themselves. Obviously this insight doesn’t give us much to work with — how do you get at a dream before it goes through this translation? — nevertheless I do think it is worth bearing in mind; and thus that grand conclusions drawn from this sort of research should be taken with a grain of salt.
Posted in *Talks, Cognitive Science | Comments Off
January 15th, 2010
We are constantly barraged with claim about the pathologies of the US civil legal system, how terrible large awards are, how “ambulance-chasers” make it impossible for professionals to do their jobs, etc etc. It’s nice to have some perspective on the subject, which is what Stephen Yeazell provides in this talk from UCLA, entitled What’s Not Wrong with the Civil Legal System – And What Is@. As always, it’s not enough just to carp about the problems with a system; serious objections have to understand the problems that are being solved, and to suggest better solutions, and it’s not clear, for many (not all) of the complaints against the US system what a better solution would be.
Posted in *Talks, Law | Comments Off
January 15th, 2010
LED lighting is starting to become a subject of some discussion, and, as an outsider, it can be somewhat mystifying to try to reconcile the great things claimed for it by some parties with the reality that one simply cannot walk down to WalMart and buy an LED bulb to screw into one’s existing light sockets — how hard can it be to manufacture such a device?
From a UC conference in October 2009 we have
this@
very nice overview of the current state of LED lighting. It should come as no surprise that the most enthusiastic proponents of the technology play somewhat fast and loose with the fact and compare apples to oranges. Some of the problems include
- There are spectrum issues. The very high efficiency LEDs generate a very blue spectrum, which, while fine for flashlights or LCD backlighting, people apparently find distasteful for use in homes. Lighting for homes requires more yellow and red, and the existing LEDs produce those very inefficiently.
- Which gets us to — I assumed all along that these white LEDs were basically optimized red. green, and blue LEDs in some cunning way fashioned together on the same die. Apparently not. Few details were given, but as I understand it, the current model for cheap white LEDs is in essence the same as fluorescents — generate high frequency (blue, not UV) light, and downconvert some of it to yellow through a phosphor coating.
Obviously this means there is scope for improvement via dispensing with down-conversion and generating R, G, and B directly; on the other hand it also suggests that the technology for manufacturing multiple different frequency LEDs in the same device is immature and/or expensive.
A related issue is that right now LEDs prefer to generate a spiky spectrum rather than a smooth black-body-like spectrum. Again it seems people prefer a smooth spectrum, and forcing this results in some inefficiencies.
- There are packaging issue. A selling point of these devices is that they are very long-lived, but this is undermined if the packaging is poor. The optics cannot, for example, be made of cheap plastic because that yellows substantially before the LED dies. A similar example is the use of electrolytic capacitors in the packaging.
One wonders who will police these issues in the real world once these devices become common. Certainly my experience has been that while compact fluorescents last longer than incandenscents, they don’t last anything near as long as the lifetimes claimed.
- Apparently a substantial problem with heat dissipation in fitting these devices to existing sockets. You’d hope they are so efficient heat dissipation is not an issue, but sadly no; not yet anyway.
- It’s not all bad news. There are environments where LED lighting is already superior to the existing alternatives. One unsurprising example is lighting for the entertainment industry (movies and TV) where the robustness of LED lights (for mounting on cars and such) is a real boon, as is the longer lifetime and much lower heat generation. More surprising is cold environments, where fluorescents apparently do not work well, like in the refrigerators of supermarkets.
Posted in *Talks, Oil/Resources, Physics/Math, Technology | Comments Off
December 17th, 2009
Game Theory is a subject I’ve long felt I ought to know something about, but the two previous courses I tried on the subject were, to put it bluntly, just awful. Not so with Polak’s course@, given at Yale. (I would recommend that, unlike most courses, this is worth viewing as video, not just listening to as audio. I watched about half a lecture at a time over lunch.)
The first impressive aspect of the course is just how carefully Polak has chosen his examples. he constantly switches from a theoretical game, described on the blackboard, to a “real-world” game, described to the students, after which they are asked to make decisions. At each step, as we alternate, there is the obvious addition of some new idea along with repetition of a previous idea in a way that is quite glorious.
The second impressive aspect of the course is seeing the games play out in a real world situation. It is one thing to read about one of these games and try to imagine how a variety of different people might react; it is something else to actually see the variety of responses before your eyes.
The third impressive aspect of the course is the extent to which the students participate, and the extent to which the students are, generally, bright and articulate people. The course is not as interactive as I understand an HBS or Harvard Law class to be — mostly Polak speaks, with the occasional live-action game, followed by asking people why they did what they did — but there are plenty of questions directed at the class (which is also being recorded). For every muddled or outright silly response from the students, there is another powerfully smart response, phrased more elegantly than I could probably have managed given the circumstances.
Posted in *Talks, Economics/Finance, Physics/Math, Social Science | Comments Off
December 17th, 2009
Evolution seems to generate a whole lot more patently stupid statements, from supposedly intelligent people, than most science. Yes, you get idiot statements about physics, or global warming, or whatever, but from people that are confirmed twits. It is evolution that gives us frog-mouse battles with such inane starting points as “Intelligence: nature or nurture?“, or “Group selection: myth or fantasy?“
David Sloan Wilson, a much more patient man than myself, here gives a marvelous talk on just what group selection really means, and how it plays out in the real world.
To be sure, that’s not his aim. His first few minutes discuss the basics of natural selection, and how sad it is that Americans are so stupid about it — all stuff you’ve heard before. Then we get a few minutes on how the social sciences are locked in their own little bubble of refusing to believe that evolution has anything to teach them; again mostly familiar stuff. But with these preliminaries out the way, we get to the good stuff:
How would evolution play out if we put one good and one evil person on an island?
OK, now we put a community of good people on an island, and a separate community of evil people on a different island. What happens?
And it’s not just speculation; we then get a discussion of some real-world consequences of this sort of thinking with respect to the breeding of farm animals.
And so it goes. Fascinating.
If you liked that talk, you’ll probably also like this one@.
The first half covers the same material as the previous lecture, but the second half goes on to discuss these ideas (how appropriate responses are shaped by the surrounding environment, and the consequences for the evolution of altruism) in the context of a large, on-going study of teenagers and how they react to the social world around them.
Posted in *Talks, Biology, Social Science | Comments Off
December 17th, 2009
A few months ago I had a discussion with my brother on how greed in western society, and even in economics, had changed so much, even just in my lifetime.
Dominant thinking with respect to greed used to be that it is an unpleasant human trait, and it is a remarkable fact about economics that, for certain very specific situations, individuals acting in a greedy fashion can make everyone better off.
We have seen this change to the bizarre idea that everyone, always acting as greedily as possible, in all situation, will improve everyone’s lives.
Of course, if you look more closely, you will see that there is an asterisk attached to this claim. In fact it is the rich, and corporations, acting greedily, that will lead us to the New Jerusalem. The poor acting greedily is not part of this deal. Thus we have moron Megan McCardle telling us that it is unconscionable that the poor behave as HBS teaches economically rational actors to behave, by simply refusing to pay off their mortgages, because a mortgage is not just an economic contract, it represents your very soul, or something. Unhappy with the reception her poorly thought-out rant received, she tried again with this
where we are told (seriously) that people who refuse to honor economic contracts (poor people, that is) are communists.
You’ll note that nowhere in Megan’s paean to the wonders of contract law does she ever discuss such issues as corporations reneging on their deals to their workers, or insurance companies denying coverage…
Anyway, I was going to write a post on this thought, when I discovered that I’d been anticipated by this@
which states pretty much exactly my thoughts on the place of greed in the thought of modern policy manufacturers.
Posted in *Papers/Essays, Economics/Finance | Comments Off
December 17th, 2009
Vastly more interesting than the pissing match over the current health payment bill (a health CARE bill would focus on, you know, health — what is going through congress is all about who pays and who gets paid, nothing to do with healthcare) is the question of just why US healthcare costs so much more than the rest of the world.
R. Adams Dudley is one of the few (maybe there’s a partial answer right there in that adjective) impartial academics investigating this issue. In
this talk@ given at UCSF in October 2009, he discusses a variety of ways in which the US health care system not only wastes money, but has very little interest in changing its ways, not simply to be cheaper, but not even to provide better care.
Immensely depressing — and yet, having seen what’s happened in Congress over the past few months, it can hardly surprise a viewer. Hypocratic oath, my ass.
Posted in *Talks, Medical | Comments Off
November 27th, 2009
I finally have a workaround for the PHP bug that gave us broken dates starting about three months ago.
There is a discussion of this bug here.
I adopted the solution posted by ollivdl to workaround the problem and life seems to be good, or at least acceptable, again.
I do think it is pretty shameful that Apple appears unwilling to deal with this. Sure this appears to be an issue with 10.5 PPC machines, but, honestly, would it be so hard to just recompile the latest PHP and bundle it into the next 10.5.x or security update?
The one remaining problem is the two broken month links at the bottom of the Archives column of the right hand side of the page. Anyone have an idea how I can get rid of those?
Posted in !Ephemeral | Comments Off
September 7th, 2009
Baba Shiv is one of the new breed of neuroscience/cognitive science types, specifically interested in how we make decisions. In this talk@, given at Stanford on July 11, 2009, he discusses the role of emotion in decision making, both where it works well and where it works poorly.
His primary claim is that the use of emotion in making decisions is that they act to speed up decision making — rather than obsessing over every detail, especially when making trivial decisions, emotions (whatever they may be) perform an end-run around the rational brain and simply dictate a choice. In many (perhaps most) life situations this is actually a good thing — in many situations it is more important that some decision get made and get made right away, and that everyone then get on with the consequences, than that the decision be, in some sense, perfect. So one can view this as another viewpoint on Gladwell’s Blink territory.
One place I imagine some listeners will be less than pleased is that Shiv has strong opinions that men and women vary in the extent to which they use emotion in their decision making, with women being more emotional. He regards this as a plus in many situations, for example business, where he sees too many male executives essentially paralyzed and unable to decide until an issue overwhelms the company; however he claims that it also lets women down when it comes to choosing life partners, because it leads them to reject good potential partners too soon on vague and foolish grounds, the sort of grounds that would not exist if they considered logically the entire package being offered by the partner, and the likelihood of finding someone better. He also has interesting things to say on why he believes that, at least for some people, arranged marriages are superior to leaving people to try to find their own mates.
Posted in *Talks, Cognitive Science, Emotions/Happiness | Comments Off
September 7th, 2009
Political Islam, oh god. Every hack in the US has given speeches on the subject, most at the level of a Max Boot rant on how we need to nuke the brownskins before they come and impregnate our womenfolk or something.
But amongst all this garbage there is the occasional thoughtful talk, or even two.
First we have Bernard Haykel talking about Islam in Saudi Arabia’s Politics@ at the Carnegie Council, on Feb 21, 2008. The title makes the subject plain — what are the practical consequences for how Saudi Arabia is run of the fact that it is supposedly run on Islamic principles.
Second we have Noah Feldman discussing The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State@ at the Carnegie Council, on May 7, 2008. Feldman’s interest is in what the idea of an Islamic state means in practice. We have two (rather different) extreme examples claiming to be such, Saudi Arabia and Iran, along with various others states claiming the same sort of thing, eg Pakistan or Indonesia; so what does the moniker mean in practice? And why is it the case that so many polities, when given the chance to vote, vote for Islamic parties?
Posted in *Talks, Politics | Comments Off