Adventures in NI

Bath Is Brilliant: The Digital Economy vs. Physical Reality

2012-01-29T03:33:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, everyone was worried that our obsession with the online world and social media were "fractionating" our real communities. An example: in 2006, everyone in the USA thought that their candidate for president was going to win the election that year by a landslide, when in fact it was another tie (in terms of statistical significance). People were only talking to the people that agreed with them, and the Internet facilitated this. The debate was: did it matter? Should people know about their neighbors, or should they be able to talk to experts in the things they were really interested in? As of last week, I think that debate is a false dichotomy.

In early 2010, shortly after coming back to Bath from Vienna, I attended a meeting of Bath Camp, by invitation of a colleague from Computer Science, Guy McCusker. Bath Camp is held at 8 in the evening roughly once a month in a space owned by the University of Bath right by the Bath Spa train station. As I understand it, it is entirely organised by local entrepeneurs / .commers, for no money. It costs nothing to attend and apparently the university charges nothing for the space.

I was shocked, I'd never been to a meeting like this. It was entirely full of people who were clearly geeks, yet were also well-dressed, poised and successful, and about 40% female. It was like two different worlds–programmers & professionals–had collided and made something really shockingly cool. I felt a bit old, scruffy and jealous (why hadn't programming been like this in the 1980s when I was a programmer?) but mostly really happy. The world was changing in a positive way, young people like I had been could meet, date, be successful in life and have families as well as cool jobs.

To be fair, the topic of that meeting was Getting Things Done. There was a fairly famous speaker, and I've never seen Bath Camp quite so well-dressed and gender-balanced again. But still I wasn't too far from wrong. And Bath Camp is just the tip of the iceberg for Bath. There's BathSpark, (which is a bit older than that page says it is, I think they've just moved servers) and the new BathDigital with over 700 twitter followers, and a big ten-day BathDigital festival in March.

Who are these people? Locals who realise that they're lives are better if there are more people like them around building more cool stuff, sharing tips, employing more of their friends, building success. A bunch of them are dads – that's how Guy McCusker first met them. A bunch of them are recent graduates from our department that had their own companies set up before they graduated.

They use the Internet in a fundamentally different way than I do. First, they make money on it. I make money from academia and use the Internet to give my research output away. Secondly, they use sites like Twitter like they were IM. I have followers from around the world and a number of disciplines, people I want to know if I publish something cool. I'd lose them if I went blathering too much (maybe I do :-). So in my very first Bath Camp meeting I created another Twitter identity, @j2blather, just so I could keep up with the way the audience was all communicating.

As I said, I thought this was the way the world had gone. In fact, the twittering during talks was just like my niece Rebecca's favourite way to communicate. Once when I was visiting she took me into the family study, turned the music up loud, and got into IM with a few friends and I. That was the longest conversation she & I had that visit. She said real talking was slow & boring, and after just a few hours of her way of communicating I agreed, it was weirdly like shifting down a speed to go back out & talk to the rest of my family. So if you can find it in a 16 year old American Midwesterner and Bath I thought it was universal. I was wrong.

I'm now disappointed to go to conferences and not be able to chat with the other participants, but I've hardly ever found a group as engaged at the GTD Bath Camp that way. Is that just because academia has a high latency? After all, in some sense we are society's memory, we're bound to be older and slower. Well, apparently not. I was just at a meeting of two of the four EPSRC Digital Economy Networks (I'm in Community & Culture and Sustainability & Society, both because I think it would be useful to turn my simulations of how societies function into citizen science / philosophy for "co-creation" (new buzzword) of and engagement with our new social realities as change accelerates.) No one else knew of anything like what I'd seen, and everyone was jealous of Bath.

Why would Bath be different? At least four possibilities:

Something special about Bath. It's just the right size (a city, but a small one) so there's enough people for critical mass but not so many that people become anonymous, it has two universities that both turn out good technical people, it's beautiful but expensive so already pre-selects for people willing to pay a cost for aesthetics.
The guys who built Bath Camp etc. are unique, and we're fantastically lucky that they met each other and came up with this stuff.
It's not special, this is going on in every city, but academics don't come down into town enough to know.
Possibility's 1 & 2 are part right, but that just shows why Bath got here first. And in fact, the importance of geographical proximity, of kids playing together, shared parks, policing, digital infrastructure etc will work in combination with the increased communication of the digital age to help people find those who share not only interests but space. In other words, as we get better at communicating well on line, we'll get better at building and governing our local communities in the real world.

Obviously I hope 4 is the answer. And I think it is, it makes sense from what I know about how society and communication work. Which isn't to say we shouldn't work on facilitating this. As I said earlier, the world is changing, and change may accelerate a lot, depending on the rate for example of climate change. The sooner we can help communities get better at self-regulation, the more robust our society will be to all these challenges.

I have to say though that I think 3 is a bit true too. I probably wouldn't attend Bath Camp if my partner hadn't been away half the time and I hadn't been lonely – it's hard to find the time and energy for new communities. And there is an obvious disconnect between the academics and the rest of Bath Camp despite the number of alum that sort of bridge us. I had forgotten how even people in prestigious & geeky careers like high tech view academics as sort of weird aliens, maybe aggravated by the old power dynamics of school when there was an age difference too. And I forget how many academics have never held a job in business. I've been forgetting that since I went to MIT (my Edinburgh MSc was almost entirely people coming back from business, but the MIT postgraduates were almost entirely people that had never been out of school or made more than $14,000 in a year.)

But anyway, in the near term, it turns out I'm lucky to be in Bath. In case anyone missed it, the title of this post is a pun – Bath is brilliant in the UK sense because it's brilliant in the US sense because its bright minds are brought together physically via social media.

Is Open Access part of the War on Science? (the end of the monograph)

2012-01-21T01:31:00.000-08:00

One of the problems with the age of open access and wikileaks is the idea that everyone can get something for nothing. Stuff costs money. Some things seem free, like Google, but as has often been pointed out, if you aren't paying for it you aren't the customer, you are what's being sold. Google makes money by selling your interests to advertising. That's OK by me, it's an exchange of information I'm content with. But I'm not content when we start destroying important parts of our culture.

Academic publishing has provided an important role in moving progress forward in fields for several hundred years now via the mechanism of peer review. It costs money. It isn't perfect, peer review like any government can be corrupt to various degrees, but is generally better than anarchy. Like a lot of industry right now, academic publishing has problems due to too much consolidation and greed. But what's absolutely shocking to me is that academics themselves have been happily set like a pack of hounds to shred the majority of academic publishers who are relatively small, don't make very much money and are in this industry because they are interested in the content. In fact, they are mostly run by people just like us, other academics. The "hounds" metaphor breaks down here, we've somehow been set on ourselves; I don't think that's possible with dogs.

I can't believe that the Times Higher Education has published an article celebrating the end of the monograph. A monograph is a small academic book where you completely communicate important ideas with the help of a wise editor in a way that people can read for centuries. By the nature of academic discovery, not too many people will ever care about the exact state of your field when you moved it incrementally forward, so these books are expensive to produce. But if no one moves fields incrementally forward no progress is achieved. This is one of the many services academic publishers have provided – they have supported monographs by taking profits from their journals.

Claiming that incremental progress on thousands of fronts by dedicated specialists is elitist and deserves to die is complete madness. It shows no understanding of academia or scientific (or any other kind of cultural) progress. Here's a letter from the Ecological Society of America (in pdf) explaining how new US regulations concerning open access are going to bankrupt them. I only know about it because of academics on twitter posting that they "disagree" with it. You disagree with helping an academic society not go bankrupt? What is wrong with you? Oh yes, feeding frenzy, baying hounds – that's probably a clinical problem.

There's been all kinds of insanity in the open access lines of reasoning. How do we keep publishing? By paying people to publish our articles. People are happy to do this, (despite it being a moral hazard, as I've explained before.) Yet they expect to be paid to review articles, which is insanely easier than writing them in the first place. Listen, I'm always happy to be paid for my labour, but I work a lot harder when I write articles. I want to be paid for my articles, not to pay for them! And I certainly think people deserve even more to be paid for their monographs – those are significant services to our species and our culture. Pretending that it makes sense only to ask for money for reviews is part of the general madness of the pack.

Is this really a part of the war on science? I don't think it started out that way, I think it started out with the love of getting stuff for free, the hatred of having your articles rejected, the jealously of people at better academic institutions that can afford more journal subscriptions than the one you are at. But now it is getting propagated by the US Government, some of the same organisations that have told my friends that no research funding should go to academics because they just waste time writing articles instead of producing stuff you can use. A part of a government has decided it might be a great idea to kill the goose that produces golden eggs because that goose is moderately expensive to feed and doesn't only give the eggs to them. The flock of geese, and they concur! (Do geese bay?)

Academic progress happens through communication, review and critique. It happens because we are driven by competition to do a better job and write a better article. Part of what makes an article or monograph better is for it to be actually comprehensible, something a good editor and reviewers makes sure is possible. The problem with being on a bleeding intellectual edge is that you invent concepts too quickly to be comprehensible by anyone else. I just spent yesterday afternoon helping a brilliant PhD student figure out why he had done the work he'd done over the holidays and what it meant. When you are really making progress it's hard to remember even the concepts you started out with. Creating new academic content has to be a collaborative process, and the collaboration needs to include people who don't talk to you all the time, experts in communicating to larger audiences.

I know why I value academic publishers – because if you go through my many papers, the ones that are smartest (smarter then me really) are the ones that have had good editing and reviewing. As a computer scientist, that's only a fraction of my output, so I can compare those articles to the ones with just quick reviews and no edits. I'm glad to have a wide portfolio of publishing options, but I totally see where the value lies in the academic publishers, and I can see the loss our society will suffer if they are driven out of the system.

How new British PhD funding damages UK research and undergraduate education

2011-11-06T05:47:00.000-08:00

In the UK (like most places), science PhDs are mostly paid for off of government grants. Sometimes this is part of a normal research grant, or sometimes it is a direct allocation of funding for PhD studentships from a research council. However, recently at least two British research councils (the two I work with most) EPSRC and BBSRC, have decided

that you can no longer have PhD studentships on grants, and
to allocate PhD studentships based on the amount of income a university gets from them.

This latter unfortunately depends not only on the quality of the researchers there, but also on the size of the university (the number of people who can apply for grants). The upshot is that Bath, recently ranked the fifth best university in the UK, has trouble getting any funding to pay PhD students.

Small universities, or at least universities with small class sizes, are better for undergraduates more generally. As with all learning, having more attention from your teachers helps. But if small universities can't have PhD students, then we also can't have well-qualified teaching assistants to work in small groups with the undergraduates. Worse, no serious researcher in science or engineering would work somewhere where they can't have PhD students. PhD students are an essential part of university research. Since professors are both researchers and teachers, students at small universities are no longer going to have good teachers either. So the UK is seriously compromising both its research and its undergraduate education with this policy.

The excuse the councils give for this is concern that PhD students do better when they work in decent-sized cohorts and attend classes aimed at them together. Small universities can't have enough PhD students to really do either of these. Historically, this has been a serious problem when you compare postgraduate education in Europe and the USA, particularly for the UK. The problem for the UK is that they will sometimes accept students into their PhD programs directly after their undergraduate degree, so these students may only have had 3 years of taught courses. In most of Europe, students have always done 5 years – currently this is split into an undergraduate 3 years and a 2 year Masters program, but historically it was just called a 5-year diploma. Nevertheless, Europe has also come up with a brilliant solution to this problem: specialist taught postgraduate schools for two weeks which let students from across Europe and even around the world learn from the leaders of their field. Will teaches at one of these for quanitative social sciences in Ljubljana every year.

I attended a NATO-funded Advanced Studies Institute on Autonomous Agents in 1993 (organised by Luc Steels). Among my classmates were Sebastian Thrun, who is now directing the research for Google cars and teaching AI at Stanford, which is now being broadcast online to over 100,000 students. Another was Giulio Sandini, now the Director of Research at the Italian Institute of Technology. Needless to say I learned a lot – more than I learned in three of the courses I had to talke at MIT, and about the same as the two MIT courses I learned something useful I didn't already know in (theory of computation and principles of computing systems (which was mostly about concurrency). I got out of taking one course at MIT because they decided the 8 courses I took at Edinburgh were good for one MIT course; I only needed to take six to graduate.) But back to the NATO ASI, I made friends that I kept in contact with for years, they were all like classmates to me.

So do I worry that my PhD students at a small University don't get enough education? Well, I do worry, so I generally only accept students who have a good Masters degree (or European diploma), and then I make a point of sending them to specialist courses and conferences. Recently I've realised the most important thing is for them to work side-by-side with great researchers full time for a while, so I'm making more of an effort to hire postdocs and to send them to larger laboratories than my own for a while. But having taken these precautions, I'm confident they are getting awesome educations. Even though Bath is a small university.

The bottom line then is that this is bad policy. The UK is compromising their undergraduate teaching, their capacity for research, and their competitive standing in global academia by choosing research universities on the basis of size rather than exclusively by their quality. They get no real advantage out of this that would not be better won by just increasing the standard of educations required for their PhD degrees, which incidentally they are already doing. This is a shame.

IBM Watson and Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-01T08:41:00.000-07:00

Watson is the biggest AI celebrity of the 21st century. I came up with that line when I realised that the PhD students at Bath didn't know who it was, or that they should attend the talk that Dale Lane was going to give us on it this past Friday. Watson beat two extraordinary human players at Jeopardy (youtube link), live on television. If you are American, you know how big a deal that was, and if you aren't, then you can watch this video from the eighties in order to realise how much of a cultural event Jeopardy is in the USA.

Dale was nice enough to stay around after his talk, and at some point we started discussing the acceptance of AI by society.   Dale said that the videos of Watson that IBM upload to youtube always get very negative, almost hysterical comments concerning how AI will take over the world. A lot of this is driven by science fiction. I've had a web page for years about robot ethics and whether AI more generally is likely to damage society (I don't think so). But with Dale I started talking about Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano. Player Piano imagines a future right at the moment that the scientists and engineers that have been replacing other people's jobs are finally replacing themselves. It's a fairly dystopian world, and one of the subplots of the novel involves a guy who has already been "made redundant", as the British say – perhaps allowed to retire early would be the better phrase from the perspective of the authorities in Vonnegut's novel. Anyway, the character manages to mess up his life and others' by having an affair with his neighbour, and the reader gathers that quite a lot of the society in this dystopia are doing things like that, because they get bored of watching television all day.

Dale said in his talk that the driving vision of Watson had been the Star Trek computer, which you could always ask for help or information. "Computer" was listening but not interrupting, only responding when addressed. In the Star Trek universe there are still soldiers, scientists, colonists, artists, traders, bartenders and many other professions. While the original series talks about money ("credits"), later versions of Star Trek imply that culture has moved beyond money and materialism – anything you want can just be synthesised from pure energy (which is in limitless supply.) People get to make individual decisions about how to "self actualise", how to create meaning for their lives, but no one needs to work to live (or get medical care).

Growing up I always assumed we were moving towards the Star Trek future, which was after all only 300 years in the future of the late 1960s (so 250 years from now I suppose.) I was interested in the economic transition – would people retire earlier and earlier until they didn't work at all? That didn't seem like a good solution since many people enjoy their careers. What made more sense to me was that as we got better and better at being productive and as our economy kept growing, welfare would pay more and more to people who were unemployed, until finally everyone would find the standard of living on welfare acceptable and working would truly be optional.

This isn't as crazy as it sounds. It was before welfare reform, and I lived in Chicago. I knew that public housing could be dangerous, but I also knew that welfare families generally had VCRs, which not all working families had. Now I know that entertainment becomes a much higher priority when you are bored, but at the time I took that was a sign of at least moderate affluence. I also knew that suburban kids of white-collar workers would take jobs in the city that people on welfare would not. For example, jobs in art stores paid only $4/hour, whereas being on welfare was roughly the equivalent of making "almost" $5/hour. Of course, kids working in art stores wound up getting promoted or moving on to better jobs and those on welfare didn't – that's the welfare trap, but that's not the point of this posting.

The point of this posting is why thirty years later welfare hasn't substantially improved, even though technology and therefore individual productivity has. I'm not hugely sympathetic to socialist / economic-egalitarian arguments. I think a lot of people are badly misinformed about the nature of the world. The twentieth century saw a lot of experiments in communism. Basically it seems that when people got properly paid for the labour they've already been doing, things went very well for a generation or two. But by the third generation corruption sets in, and a sense of entitlement that lead to loss of productivity and therefore economic unsustainability. Money doesn't grown on trees, and if it just gets printed by the government it isn't worth anything. Someone has to be producing value, and humans have to be motivated to work. They are strongly motivated by differentials between each other. That's what the twentieth century showed.

But I read something in the aftermath of Steve Jobs' death that made me realise there really is a significant problem with employment right now.   Wealth really is increasing while the number of jobs decreases, and both trend are way more profound than I'd realised. Well, OK, that's what we expected, especially if you only call it a job if it's in a factory or something. The problem isn't this, but what is not happening – the wealth or income of people who are not working is not increasing.

Somehow neither Vonnegut nor the Star Trek writers anticipated what's happening now. And how could they? After all, we live in a democracy. How could the USA select a course that wouldn't ultimately benefit the majority of its people? I think the problem here is very fundamental, the most fundamental problem on the planet right now. Democracy is the best form of government we know, probably because the possibility of getting voted out is one way to limit corruption. But corruption can still happen. The main current problem is that we have gotten very, very good at getting people vote against their own interests. Manipulating people's beliefs and desires is a skill we've been developing for at least as long as we've had language. The challenge is continuous – whenever one solution is discovered soon a counter-strategy is as well.

The problem here may sound like tyranny of the majority, a well-known issue in democracy. Maybe just like non-smokers, when welfare recipients become more than half of the population everything will get nicer for them. But actually I think the Occupy Wall Street people are right – opinions on both smoking and taxes were driven from a small minority that were profiting, until the majority of people somehow believed them. Normally in a democracy minority interests should have influence since minorities matter in close votes. Something really has to be actively happening to get the majority to ignore the urgent needs of a substantial minority.

So, getting back to Watson, AI and industrial technology are not really the problem. The problem is political. Not that politics is bad – politics is just when there's more than one person in the room. But figuring out how to run a political system is a constant, ongoing puzzle. Jobs in themselves aren't really a problem either – in a world where everyone really wanted hand-crafted furniture or art as much as in this world they currently want low taxes, then there'd be work for everyone.

Speaking of robots, one thing I've learned from consulting for the European Commission is that Europe has built and sold most of the industrial robots in the world. However, they aren't in Europe, largely because of the strength of labour unions. European Labour thinks it is more important to keep jobs than to be efficient, and maybe they are right – I certainly enjoy most aspects of the European standard of living.   Certainly after the original industrial revolution people lost jobs, and probably some of them starved and died. But now, people in general really are way better off. We are healthier, we live longer on average, our babies are less likely to die. That's something political science has learned – one of the best indicators that a state may collapse (that people are so unhappy with their government they may get rid of it) is infant mortality.   Health is a very good indicator of happiness. So yes, I still think we could have another industrial revolution and eliminate a lot of tedium, and we could all generally be better off after it.

And I'm not saying this sitting from the side of the elite who won't be replaced. I've been watching the Stanford AI lectures on the Internet and wondering how much longer governments will think they need as many universities as they have now. And speaking as a cognitive scientist, it's my professional opinion that Watson's intelligence and knowledge discovery isn't that different from human intelligence, but with a much broader access to / memory for existing knowledge. So scientific discovery might also be automated in my life time.

So now that we all know we're in this together, let's get back to the challenge. Honestly, the challenge is not only political, but cultural and philosophical – biological and sociological. Can we find ways to be actualised – to experience a feeling of self worth – when we know our labour isn't needed? To be honest, millions of people face this question every day already, either because they are unemployed, retired, or banned from work for some other reason (like their gender.) What's changing is only that more people need to find answers.   At least, I hope we find answers and not just better and better distractions.

Wikileaks: Welcome to the Brave New World – of 1984

2010-12-04T02:49:00.000-08:00

Like most geekly liberals, I've been broadly in favour of wikileaks since I first heard of it. Whistleblowing seems like a good idea; corruption damages the common good; as long as everything is well documented and not forgeries, what could go wrong?

But now we've seen what can go wrong, or at least, we've been vaguely exposed to it. Most of my friends seem to still think wikileaks is great, and the people who aren't so sure are mostly talking about compromised information sources who could be killed, or the interests of one country over another. Those are serious problems, but not the one that's bothering me.

What's bothering me is that this is an enormous blow towards completely ending privacy. I am bothered by the idea that every thing I say must be made available to every person on the planet who can be bothered to do a Google search. Worse, I know enough about AI to know that they won't even have to do a google search themselves -- in a few years no doubt people will be able to buy or program web crawlers to find out everything ever said or written about themselves, or to construct complete personality profiles of any person they happen to get interested in.

The things in the cablegate wikileaks – at least, the things making the news – are the honest opinions of smart people doing their jobs trying to solve problems. I don't know about you, but my job (like theirs) quite often has to do with people. Right now a great deal of my time is being spent dealing with two person issues. One of the problems initially seemed to be red tape, and it's taken a large number of people some months to decide it is really a person issue. Another problem is clearly a person issue. For both of these, the best thing that could happen for the productivity of me and the people that work under me is that we can eventually pretend there had never been a problem, perhaps just a misunderstanding. But right now, the path to that solution is not clear, and it is requiring honest discussions and appraisals with a variety of informed sources to try to find ways forward.

The public face of the US State Department has been saying that countries will continue dealing with America because they need too, even if they no longer trust or like the people they talk to. But I know that while some of the people they have insulted already knew those were the things said about them, and maybe a few others will take advantage of new insight into their life & their place on the planet to become better people, a bunch of them are going to be angry forever and never coöperate again. Some problems may be unresolved for decades because of this – problems that will impede trade, development and reduce the quality of life, most likely in countries that are already small, poor and corrupt.

Unless, of course, all such people – all grudge-holders and bullies – will now be eliminated from governments. What if the power structures of the world were composed entirely of people chosen in advance to be collaborative by nature? I have no idea – maybe that would be awesome, but maybe the whole system would become enormous and ungovernable.

But what I worry about more (and I think it is more likely) is that the entire world will become like 1984, like Soviet Russia or East Germany. Where no one speaks their mind anymore to anyone, and a lot less innovation happens, and a lot less things get done, and there's a lot less intimacy in everyday life.

Weight

2010-09-25T06:16:00.000-07:00

Something pretty weird has been weighing on my mind since the loss of my mom. She told me on the phone "Oh Joy, you won't recognise me, I've lost so much weight, I'm down to 140lbs."

If you look at the picture in the previous post, you can see my mom was not particularly heavy by current standards -- in fact, not really at all. Yet I knew that I'd weighed 140 (+/- 5) from about 1984-1999 (when Will & I moved back to the USA), and I'm two inches taller than my mom, so how could 140 be thin? And sure enough, when I saw her, I did recognise her --- she looked more like the mother that raised me than anyone had for, well, probably a decade. But at the memorial service, her friends didn't recognise that woman -- they were shocked by the family photos.

I don't weigh 140 anymore, and though I don't think about it that much, I do wonder how it can be that it takes six months of severe and mysterious weight loss to make you back toward approaching what was normal not very long ago. And what is the economic & environmental cost of this shift in terms of fuel and food? I've read that even being as overweight as I am now could take 5-7 years off life expectancy, that's approaching 10% of a lifespan. I'm hardly the first one to notice the weight crisis, but for some reason my mother's illness really has brought this home to me. I do notice now that there does seem to be a reversal, there are a lot of thinner people again at least in my circles. But it is shocking that such a fundamental physical attribute can change so much in so short of time.

And for people who think that human cognition or culture has made us "immune" to biological evolution -- ha. I am sure this change is cultural, and I'm sure it's enormously shifting which genes look like winners right now.

Níche Deconstruction

2010-09-01T09:13:00.000-07:00

First of all, I wanted to put somewhere googleable that my mother, Donna Joan Swezey Bryson Hathaway died yesterday, 31 August 2010 at my sister's home where she had been in hospice for three days. She only knew that she had cancer for three weeks, and had control of her life for all but about the last 22 hours.

I'm not going to do a full obituary here now. When one is written, I will link to it in the comments. If you knew my mom and this is how you found out she died, I'm sorry. I have in my personal web space a memorial to some of my friends who died in 1994, and I still get email about that sometimes and I can see people often spend a lot of time on that site. So I know how Internet searches can sometimes lead to the discovery of tragedy.

More to the topic of this blog, Will & I have been staying in my mother's apartment since we arrived, and as I look through it I am reminded of two really interesting theories -- the more relevant one is actually called The Extended Mind -- the idea that our intelligence and behaviour are determined by a lot of things outside our body, and that one way we make ourselves really smart is by carefully constructing the environments we work in. Agre & Chapman pointed out how much this relates to reactive / dynamic intelligence back in the 1980s, while more recently the Getting Things Done people have emphasized this idea as well. I don't find it even slightly surprising that a good theory from the philosophy of mind can tell us how to improve both artificial and natural intelligence.

The other theory is called niche construction. This is a relatively new theory kicking around in biology. On the theory side, it can sometimes gets a kind of post-modern anti-selectionist spin: species don't inhabit existing niches, they create and define niches. It is certainly true that every species (and every individual) affects its environment and therefore every other individual, though to spatially and temporally diminishing extents. But it is still useful to think of a niche that more than one species has adapted to exploit, e.g. the ocean, predation on turtles, whatever.

But the other interesting thing about niche construction is that if your offspring live near where you do, then you are passing information to them by non-genetic means -- thus individually-constructed niches are a form of epigenetics (and also a bit of an oxymoron since definitionally you have inherited part of yours.) Note this isn't just "stuff", it extends to social networks, governing structures, nutritional / resource environments etc.

I've been thinking in recent years (perhaps a bit late) that I'm old enough that I should be taking more care in making my homes really presentable and useful for entertaining and living in. I mean, they've been OK every since I graduated from college, but never really as professional looking as I wanted -- the same for my wardrobe (Will might argue about whether that was even OK before he met me.) The last few days wandering around my mother's house I can see how she has reconstructed her niche / external mind around her current identity (which is a lot different from the identity she had when I lived with her.) And she has done a pretty good job of this. It is a shame to dismantle such a well-constructed artifact, but it is her niche and it will never exactly suit anyone else. My sister and I will keep some of the furniture, photos & knick knacks (sorry Will), and her friends will take some of her books and tapes and so forth I expect, but the vast majority of this will go to a sale or charity, and some will be thrown away. It feels like a waste of so much precise and artistic construction, but without the central biological body and mind behind it, there is really nothing to save.

I suppose the same is true of any body of work -- no offense to my students, but even the ones most excited by my ideas miss steps and reasons I think are carefully and well documented. In just the last year I have been growing to shift from thinking of science & the arts as the stuff documented in archival publications to thinking of them as a machine constructed of human recepeticles of knowledge and learning. The archived information is an incredibly valuable part of our extended minds, but the work we do by physically being in universities or attending meetings, teaching & learning from our students, arguing with our colleagues and our friends and strangers in pubs --- that's what really makes up the state of science or the arts today.

Will Learning Stats

2010-06-01T11:41:00.000-07:00

The son of Torsten & Constanze Kathan Selck. Actually, he only knows German (so far).

Is wood pulp obsolete?

2010-04-24T09:01:00.000-07:00

I've been worrying this year about whether the fact Will & I have a lot of books means we are really old. This started when my final-year dissertation students (undergraduates) were asking me about all the book in my office -- where did I get them, how much did it cost to have so many, did I actually read them -- I mean, reasonable questions, but in aggregate I realized they were alien objects that the students vaguely lusted after like the latest Apple gadget but weren't sure they were worth the trouble.

Will suggested at some point that we should think about collecting books as an investment. I thought it was a great idea. But I don't think he has, at least not deliberately.

Today I met Alastair Gill (who was in town for a talk, but had Will as a tutor when we were in Edinburgh) an Etienne Roesch for lunch. It was a fantastic day & we wound up having tea in the tea garden of the assembly rooms, which is normally impossible, because they never open the tea room. However, there was a book fair. I picked up a few books and was surprised to see how much the type of thing I used to pick up in Chicago all the time is now worth.

So I bought a couple over-priced books that I wanted to read. And now our books are not really books like they used to be, they are art we enjoy collecting. It's kind of cool, but kind of sad. Books as, you know, books -- as information you couldn't get any other way, that was a great idea for a very long time. That idea changed the world.

Speaking of, I got a copy in the post of the first book that Will & I both have book chapters in. The inside of the book is great & I think they could have sold a lot of copies. But the outside is utterly lame and clearly the publisher is not even going to try. But really, the chapters are not very academic, and the whole idea is very interesting -- what will it be like to have artificial companions? But the top of the book says that it is about natural language processing, even though hardly any of the chapters even mention language.

My chapter is called Robots Should Be Slaves.

And I guess it should be obvious, but this blog post & my new books are in honour of my being made a Reader.

A computation-enabled biological perspective on cultural variation

2010-04-10T03:12:00.000-07:00

Tuesday-Friday I attended a conference on cultural variation. I went because I was invited & it sounded relevant to my new grant looking at cultural variation in a particular form of moral behaviour (anti-social punishment, which I will have to blog about later). In fact though it was more about how to facilitate cultural integration, obviously a significant topic in the world in general, and in the Netherlands one of considerable political interest. But the workshop was set up so that people could easily organise into sub-groups and discuss topics of interest. One of my main interests is how cultures relate to other forms of modular decomposition in learning systems, e.g. regions in vertebrate brains, species in ecosystems. By having concurrent modules specialising on particular approaches, you may facilitate whatever learning problem you are trying to optimise for --- presumably for cultures that problem is primarily the well-being and survival of people. I was able to organise a group of people to talk about this, so that was interesting.

Anyway, my talk was called A computation-enabled biological perspective on cultural variation. The slides are here. That's a large file -- 6M. Many of the papers I mention in the talk are linked from the bottom part of my primate learning research page, which concerns human-like culture. (I really need to rewrite my web pages, especially now that I'm doing so much work on culture.)

Software for simulations in the above articles is available from the AmonI software page.

The role of academics

2010-03-28T07:42:00.000-07:00

I got elected to the Senate of the University of Bath. I don't know whether this is a good thing or not -- it will no doubt take time. But I found the Faculty Board of Studies really interesting. It helps that I am interested in intelligent systems in general, as well as it being useful to know how your own institution works. But anyway, this time I was encouraged to run by the head of Academic Assembly, Steve Wharton, whom I really respect, so I ran.

Candidates got to make a 100 word statement -- here's mine.

One of the primary assets of a university is the knowledge of its academic staff. Academics serve as conduits, passing knowledge to our students and exploiting it in our research. Our expertise is also an asset of the communities that support us, whether national, international or local.

I am running to represent Academic Assembly in Senate because I want to ensure that our most immediate local community, the University, makes the best use possible of its academic staff. I am always interested in my colleagues' opinions of university issues. If elected, I will ensure their concerns and advice are heard.

As long as I'm being narcissistic, I found out recently that the five words I use most on twitter are "new", "time", "people", "talk" and "good", in that order. I guess those are all things I'm interested in :-)

motivation, action & faith

2010-03-18T02:00:00.000-07:00

I was just reading an article about 'Jihad Jane', Colleen LaRose. According to the article:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has questioned the religious devotion of alleged converts like LaRose, given her live-in boyfriend and apparent failure to ever pledge her faith at a mosque.
"Maybe it's not the Islamic faith that is making them do this; maybe it's just their personal demons," said Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director for CAIR.

This statement shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of religion in society. Yes, "personal demons" provide the motivation for action. Motivation for action almost defines what it means to be an agent --- an individual who acts in the world. But what religion and society more generally provide is a set of possible actions to choose from.

The search for the next action you might take could be an infinite task taking infinite time, given the number of combinations of muscle movements you could possibly make. But we don't choose from every possible action. Many, perhaps most of our ideas for actions come from social learning.

If you have faith in someone or something, you take that as an authority which should bias your selection of actions. Technically, religions (like other conduits of culture) provide a set of affordances that their followers might otherwise have never conceived of as possible actions, thus increasing the probability that these actions will occur. Of course, various religious speakers will also try to influence the probability of some actions over others by directing the motivational attention of their followers to one set of affordances or another.

Different people will deal with these affordances differently, depending on their individual motivations and the rest of their cultural and physical environment. But putting ideas into the mind in the first place is certainly part of the problem, particularly if those ideas are backed by revered figures. Anyone who tells people to put their faith in sacred and immutable texts, and tells them that the actors in those texts are holy, is likely to have trouble solving that problem.

privacy and publicy

2010-01-02T03:05:00.000-08:00

I'm reproducing a comment I wrote on a blog post about how society has shifted away from privacy.

Much more of our lives were public than we ever knew, but that information was functionally inaccessible due to anonymity. It is actually fortunate that social websites have alerted us to the collapse of unintentional anonymity that has resulted from search technology. Hopefully this will help people (including judges) understand the issues as we try to force intentional anonymity and encryption on our personal records held by the government and other institutions.

Update: A somewhat related post on anonymity & intimacy. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/st_thompson_obscurity/

I'm a world-leading biologist! Or else Open Access is a bad idea. (a short rant)

2009-11-26T09:10:00.000-08:00

I got invited to be the editor-in-chief of a journal due to my "reputation in biology". This is by a publishing company called Bentham.

Why does Bentham think I should be an editor? Because the more journals they make, the more money they make. How can that be? Surely it's hard to sell new journals? Ah, but no -- this is an Open Access journal, so the authors pay them. They couldn't care less if no one every reads the article, they get money for it.

And will authors pay to get published? Oh yes! Because some people think any journal article is good -- and academics get judged by the number of good articles they produce. Some people think Open Access is a good idea, as in the opposite of evil, rather than good as in good quality articles. This is because anyone can read the articles for free, since the authors already paid for them. Tax payers pay for research, shouldn't they be able to read about it? Well, yes, and they can, for nearly any article in any journal Google will find you a free copy. Don't like to steal? Then why not join the library of your local university? Bath charges £80 a year, and then you have access to literally thousands of journals that they buy electronically.

The first few Open Access journals had nice, idealistic socialists trying to change the world working for them. But taking money for articles this way is not just an insult to the authors (who already did all the work, and now get charged!) but also a moral hazard.

I have to go have dinner with Will, as it's Thanksgiving. Though we already celebrated, we want to go out, and it may be crowded as there are often Americans here. Saturday I said I was thankful Obama won the presidency. Today I am thankful for the people who still keep working to make the scientific publication system work. It's our main mechanism for validating research, the selective force that keeps science progressing. Like Natural Selection, it's not perfect, but it at least generally finds a gradient.

Random Whiny Update

2009-11-14T04:50:00.000-08:00

I had to come here because I've started getting spam comments, so I'm sorry but I have now made it obligatory to sign in if you want to make a comment.

The weather is very weird here -- warm & windy and bouts of serious rain. It is one of those stupid weekends where Will & I are in different countries. I have a ton of work to do -- I left for this weekend a task that would probably be done better over two weeks, I need to edit 1/3rd of a book of collected papers. I can hear people cheering from my living room: I guess that the Bath Rugby team must have a home game; I am not too far from their grounds.

I've been a bit frustrated at work. On the one hand, I actually am way happier to be back in Bath than I expected. It is nice to know a higher proportion of what is going on, and to have people know & respect you for your role in an institution. But the problem is that I am back at work in a Computer Science department so that is just naturally putting a lot more of my research emphasis (let alone my teaching) back on engineering. My sabbatical at the KLI was not exactly what I had expected -- I thought they did theoretical biology, but really they do philosophy of biology. So as a result I know way more about evolution than I even realized I needed to learn -- philosophers are incredibly knowledgeable and beyond up-to-date -- they look way over the leading edge into the questionable fringe, because some part of the questionable fringe will of course become the leading edge in a few years. But they didn't really help me get better at writing up semi-empirical (simulation-based) theoretical biology, which was one of my goals.

Of course, just reading does that. I've come back to a paper that got rejected 6 months ago & I can now see that it wasn't written in the right style. Further, I finally went to a really theory-level conference on the evolution of cooperation last month. I tend to go to more empirical meetings because I want more data. But from the meeting I attended I realized that my article is still competitive theoretically, and also I got some ideas about presenting the material so it is more comprehensible from some other researchers who are doing scarily good & complicated stuff. Particularly Ulf Dieckmann.

Well, we'll see how it goes. I think I could have an easier time if I concentrate on publishing closer to the areas I have degrees in, like the social sciences, which are increasingly also taking an evolutionary perspective. In the longer term I think I probably will, but in the next few years I think I need to get all the stuff I've already done published, even if it means working harder on getting each paper accepted.

But back to the frustration, I hate that doing a significant part of my Bath job (ramping back up my AI research program) detracts from making what is probably more globally-useful contributions in biology. Just to make things worse and at the same time better, a brilliant prospective postdoc is getting me to spend time on a third area of my research that I also hadn't spent too much time on lately (though some): individual learning, emotions & action selection in humans and other animals. This is really fun, but yet another thing going on. At least one of my two PhD students seems to be starting to write his own papers, so that's good. I don't mind people getting me to do interesting stuff if they do at least half the writing about it!

OK, that was random & whiny. In general things are fine & fun. Hope you all are doing well. I got my BT phone fixed so I can dial out of the country again -- I finally chose the "billing" rather than the "report faults" option on the telephone menu & got a foreign call centre, and they were smart enough to figure out the problem.

The Meaning of Life

2009-10-11T08:47:00.000-07:00

I wrote the below Thursday. The Internet was meant to be getting set up in our flat in Maastricht that same day, but now has been delayed a week. -- JB

I woke up sad today, which is particularly strange because I'll be seeing Will tonight. In fact, I'm writing this on the Eurostar; right now I'm in the chunnel. It was a beautiful morning and the sun was coming in the windows in our beautiful Georgian front rooms. I had a couple of hours before the train so I went to a coffee shop with free wireless (our Internet still hasn't arrived -- late in both countries.) And I found out that KC's wife had died of leukemia, leaving him with two nearly-grown sons.

KC & his sister Krissy used to live across the street when we were growing up in Carol Stream. He was very cool -- smart, funny, good toys, a pitcher in little league. And he let me play with him & his other (male) friends. He was the natural leader on our block from the age of 5-10, when his family moved away.

We didn't keep in touch. One summer when we were all in highschool Barb's & my parents decided to go visit his parents. KC looked totally different -- he'd taken up wind surfing. (Krissy looks the same today as she did when we were growing up.) But after a little while it was all the same as it had been five years earlier -- running around catching snakes & riding bikes. I think I finally got my favorite books back from Krissy she'd taken with her when she moved. But that was it. Life is pretty arbitrary when you are a kid, because you just get warped into contexts by your parents. Maybe it's different now with email & IM, but I kind of doubt it -- being a kid is very much about being where you are.

I think the most recent time I'd heard of KC was when I was about 25, and apparently the people who made my very favourite software product of all time (center line / saber C -- the best IDE I've ever used) put something I'd said on the box of their product. The company didn't tell me, but KC apparently saw it on the box & asked his mother if it was the same Joanna Bryson, and his mother asked mine. And then a few weeks ago we friended on facebook, but he hasn't been at all active there. Now I know why.

I suppose when you are over forty (& you spend too many nights alone) you are likely to think about not just what you want from life, but life in general. Will's grandmother has been hospitalised, and it was hard to write a letter to her, because as far as I know she mostly watches TV anyway, so I'm not sure how much things have changed, though I suppose she must not like having the strange people around. I've been hospitalised a couple times, but I never really minded very much. I guess it's part of my general neophilia -- it all involved lots of anesthetic and weird new things happening. Besides, I like fixing things or having them fixed, and so far it has always been positive outcomes. I hope Nan is entertained by my card; she seems generally to have a good sense of humour.

One of my friends recently was complaining about a committee he'd just been put on. The committee is very powerful -- well, over some people's careers, not really over fundamental decision making at his institution. My friend was appalled by the people on it seeming to just be revelling in the exercise of power. I have noticed that for some people just exercising power, or exerting dominance, seems to be one of their hobbies. Like lying to the face of a subordinate, when both sides knew they were lying & that the subordinate couldn't really do anything. I can see enjoying the power to do something useful, but in general I like fixing things (as I said) and I'm always happy if that turns out to be easy. I can't understand how just asserting the obvious ("I'm more senior than you", well duh, it says that on the website) can give anyone pleasure. And anyway, of the things that do give you pleasure, why waste time on the ones that don't really accomplish anything further? Personally, there are tons of things I enjoy, but I try to do the ones that are going to give me or someone else some utility at some point.

Noticing this thing about some people & power (and perhaps it's bizarre I only noticed this so late in life) has given me a slight edge in that it's helped me to be able to anticipate (if not truly understand) some people's behaviour. And how to make them happy -- by saying "oh yes, why look, you are very powerful indeed." It all reminds me a bit of Elizabeth Taylor's scenes at the end of "The Taming of the Shrew" -- you don't believe for a minute that she believes her own lines, yet what's clear is that she has learned how to get along.

This posting is only dancing around the topic of life, but in a way that's the only way such topics can be addressed. Once a Christian said to me "I don't know how you can be an atheist, because if I didn't know all these people were going to burn in hell I'd go nuts." More recently someone asked me to toast the defeat of mutual enemies. I told him about Kurt Vonnegut's line in the forward to one of his books (Slaughterhouse Five?) Vonnegut's father was dying, and so Vonnegut was visiting him, and his father asked "why are there no villains in any of your books?" And Vonnegut said "It's something I learned at University of Chicago, Dad. After the war." I went to University of Chicago too. I don't think there are enemies, just people you can trust more and less. Will has my favourite line in enemies though. I was referring to someone as a friend who had been one, but Will knew this guy had treated me badly (professionally). And I said "I'm not sure what to call him now." and Will said "I believe the technical term for a friend who stabs you in the back is `enemy'". I don't know though, the trust thing seems like a more useful distinction. But anyway, the point of this is that power gives you control over some things and not others. You can damage or assist other people's careers, but you can't entirely anticipate what the consequence will be for you or for them. You can affect but not eliminate aging and disease.

Since I got further into biology, I think about life all the time. I'm actually working with a biologist on natural selection for aging, or put another way, on what determines lifespans. Given that a particular environment can only support so many of any particular kind of species, does it make more sense for those individuals to be old or young? If it weren't for cognition, I think the answer would be "young", because the faster you reproduce, the faster you can evolve, and therefore the more able you are to adjust to the fact the world and your ecosystem are always changing.

However, cognition (and other kinds of individual plasticity) gives you an option. Essentially, before you reproduce, you can gather quite a lot of data, and that might be used to affect what kind of children you have. This way, although you reproduce less frequently, the change that happens in the next generation is more informed, and thus maybe you can evolve just as quickly. This is a controversial idea, though with some evidence -- it's called "maternal effects", and is also related to the Baldwin Effect. Of course, all this requires evolving the capacity to change your offspring in response to your environment, and that also takes generations and therefore time. Life had gotten more & more complex, and all kinds of things are happening with it now that wouldn't have when life was younger and simpler. Life could be more complicated still, and most likely will become so. But there will always be at tradeoff. Different species have different optimal life spans, because of their particular niche --- the set of tradeoffs their ancestors wound up falling in to. But so long as there is death there needs to be birth, and so long as there is birth there will generally be an advantage to having newer configurations of genes.

Possibly, if you happen to be in a species where you not only affect the gene expression of your offspring, but can actually alter their behaviour through teaching them, then you might really be on to a new thing. This is called culture, and some people think culture is a new form of evolution. Of those people, some of them (like me) think of the two evolving systems as mostly complimentary & interacting. But some people think culture is the new big deal, and that biological evolution will be left in the dust. Some subset of these people think that ideas & culture are more important than bodies & children, and that they would be happier to have their behaviour in machines that "live forever" than to stay animals. One of the terms for this is "AI Heaven" -- the idea you can offload your mind to a computer and become immortal. I honestly know people who think this.

Some people who don't believe in AI Heaven still do believe that we can pass our culture on to robots, making them as important as we are, and again making our society (if not themselves) immortal. We could build intelligent self-replicating space ships that would outlive the sun. I've been writing papers recently saying this is stupid. But I have to admit, I'm not certain. That's one of the things about being a scientist -- no, two of the things. First, you should never be certain of anything. Second, you should act anyway.

I have sympathy with the idea that culture matters more than an individual life -- that's why people fight in wars. But I'm not sure that culture matters without any life. At least, our culture is so dependent on our lives, on our being a particular kind of animal with aesthetics and needs rooted in our biology. What would it even mean to give that to robots? Let alone, what would be the utility of doing so.

When I try to decide what to do every day, I balance the things I should do in order to keep having the choice (things related to maintenance, like house work & keeping my job), the things I think I should do because they are useful or important, and the things I should do because the matter to me aesthetically. You can't easily separate these actually -- maintaining the aesthetic pleasure in life also keeps me working as well as a primate like I am can, so I can do the other things that I'm obliged to do. I take aesthetic pleasure in parts of my job like teaching & science as well as in art and "pleasures of the body".

I'm not sure if this is meaning, so much as a formula -- a formula for keeping things going. And the formula keeps changing the more I learn, and as my body changes -- the older I get. But anyway, some people think that's the definition (if not the meaning) of life -- a formula that keeps itself going.

Please don't hassle me

2009-09-27T05:07:00.000-07:00

I appreciate that you guys appreciated my blogging during my sabbatical, but I don't appreciate getting hassled about not having time for it now. I'm very behind on many things.

Here is a random assortment of tabs on this browser window which have been here for several weeks waiting for me to read or decide what to do with them.

A history of hacking our way to the moon. Forcing all marriage to be about reproduction in California (since the banned gay marriage.)

What it takes to graduate from college. I will say something about that. I always knew I wouldn't do well in college if I didn't go somewhere challenging. I thought I was just less disciplined than most people. But in fact lots of people who go where they will be the "smart kids" wind up dropping out. How obvious is it that education should be about learning, not about an easy ride?

I do really like that article because it says that it doesn't matter what highschool you go to, it only matters that you get decent grades (not necessarily straight As!) and that you go to a 4-year college that challenges you. Going to community colleges is not the way to start a successful degree for most people.

Who gets arrested at protests. It is totally weird that people could get arrested for wearing t-shirts under Bush & no one blinked, but now people would be literally up in arms if people carrying guns to protests got arrested.

a nature article we're writing an extension of ("we" is my student Marios Richards & two biologists from Bath).

a national geographic article about the real Harod I keep meaning to send Barb (I don't think she reads this...)

literary analysis comparing Spock & Obama -- that's also from Marios.

an article on the neuroscience of proper names I keep meaning to read so I can figure out why I can't remember them.

an Iraqi journalist the US has held without charge for a year now.

a science story about the origins of symbolic behaviour. an article about how Ted Kennedy saved the life of the guy whose office was next to mine at MIT, and his daughter. Boris was great, he was always friendly. He also was the first person to tell me about the butterfly ballets in 2000.

An article about changing the culture of kindergarten I keep wondering whether I buy it.

cool subway mapsI want to look at. Potentially cool music I'd like to dig up & listen to. But I need to get back to work!

What is twitter for?

2009-08-31T08:45:00.001-07:00

I just published a response to a blog query about twitter, and I'm happy enough about it I thought I'd post it here (just so I'm sure to get credit :-)

Twitter may not be for every business, or maybe not any, but it could still play a significant social and financial role. The non-friend entities I follow on twitter are mostly scientifically-oriented news organizations & politicians. Both sorts of individual pay for advertisement. I also have feeds from small local arts theatres. You don\’t have to be challenging M$ in order to have a viable business model. Twitter really could be one of the things just replacing newspapers.

I think twitter should charge anyone with over 500 followers a little. I think they’d pay. It’s like adsense, you *know* how many people are reading what you put out, so you know what it’s worth. And it’s only worth a little. But to many, many people.

Maastricht

2009-08-30T03:10:00.000-07:00

We left Vienna on Thursday. The movers came on Wednesday & we had a small going-away party in a nearby beer garden after that, then we spent Thursday doing annoying things like trying to track down the people I rented my flat from to give back they keys. I was seriously afraid they'd gone bankrupt, since no one had been able to get in touch with them to have them tell my Bath flat that we paid our rent every month. But in fact they just don't answer the phone, we watched them not answer it for about an hour while waiting to be attended to. Since they require three months deposit, I'm glad I'll be getting most of it back. It being Austria, they will take some out to repaint the house & resand the floors. I miss the US where ordinary wear & tear is expected, and the owners repaint on their own when it is needed.

Maastricht being the Netherlands, no one cleaned anything between residents. We paid to have the place painted, and we coerced the owner into having it carpeted. But in a tiny (< 3 meters squared) kitchen I went through three buckets of mopping water getting the floor cleanish! The bathrooms were in better shape. Actually, there is one bathroom with no toilet, & one tiny toilet with its own little sink. What we didn't notice before is that there is constant noise in the flat because some kind of extractor fan is on all the time for those rooms. But the space is cool. We will eventually get new phones with cameras & take pictures for you.

I'm only here until early Tuesday morning. Then I'll take the train to London, work on a grant, then get into Bath late. On the 2nd of September I'll be finishing all the human subject forms for my grant, and also have an enormous amount of post to deal with. Will is going to Toronto 1 September, and then the next weekend to Potsdam, so already we will be apart for 3 weeks when classes haven't even started yet. I wanted to go to Toronto with him, but I really need to spend some time in Bath. 3 September I will figure out what classes I am teaching this term -- I know the course, but it's shared & I don't know the classes yet.

We had to buy appliances on Friday -- we got a refrigerator on sale but now it isn't ready to be delivered so we have nothing in the house yet except the (electric) stove. There are no lights except the two little orange ones I had in Vienna, and some in the kitchen. What kind of people care so much about their house the strip out all the appliances & light fixtures, and so little that they let their kitchen floor get in that state? We are also mystified about how to get the hoses for the dishwasher from under the sink to the dishwasher nook. The store we bought it from will connect it, but won't carve holes in the cabinetwork. After being in Austria, we have had it with the weird UK propensity not to own dishwashers.

Anyway, nothing really interesting going on besides packing & unpacking. Maastricht is cool. We saw a wedding party going down the river on a boat, the bride & groom standing on the back of the boat & waving like they were on a cake. People waved from the bridges, and other boats honked their horns. I guess the river goes to the sea, because the boat horns sounded like fog horns. We also saw an antique auto parade this morning at about 9.30 am -- before any store or cafe was open -- they were driving under a balcony which was pouring down confetti & two photographers took pictures of each one. There were three generations up in the balcony having fun getting the confetti out, and most of the cars had grandpas driving with a kid riding, most of whom were having a blast. One had a very cool looking mom & kid. There is also a kind of "taste of Maastricht" thing going on, we haven't gone but may go tonight. So far we are mostly working on unpacking, or I am -- Will is also working on his course he's giving in Toronto. Will has one day in his Maastricht office Monday before going to Toronto.

Culture Changing

2009-08-23T00:50:00.000-07:00

I'm only forty-four, but then maybe that isn't so young actually. And given that culture changes with increasing speed, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I can see big changes in the time I've been alive. But I've been pondering three kinds of cultural changes that may all result in a substantial shifts in the way people think about problems.

People don't expect to have the same job for life, so don't identify with their jobs, so don't invest the same amount of themselves in doing their job. I've been pondering this in the context of the way PhD students now don't seem to spend as much time actually on their PhD as we did just a decade ago. That's not just my own observation, every time I get into a discussion about it in a room of academics everyone else hushes and attends -- they've all been trying to figure it out. I got the insight about the possible cause though from a taxi driver. He was talking about a friend who went from being a heavy drinker to entirely tea-total when he got a job as a professional driver shortly after getting married. The former drinker said "I'm a driver now, this is my life." This had been a couple decades back, and the taxi driver & I discussed that such things seemed to happen more then.
Way fewer kids sit through sermons every week & then hear the adults around them discussing them afterwards. I started thinking about this just yesterday, when I was at a wedding with a large number of kids who clearly saw nothing to indicate that the procedure was any different from a ride in a train or a boat. Until nearly the end, when the adults all recited the Lord's Prayer in unison. That was clearly weird & the kids all suddenly hushed & looked forward & tried to figure out what was going on. The first thing I thought was that the Church of England had it right to use more responsive readings in throughout their wedding services, since that clearly helps get people focused on being part of the process. But then I started thinking about the fact that even when I was a child, churches stopped expecting kids to sit all the way through the sermon & let them leave early to go to sunday school. I've been aware for a long time I was exceedingly lucky to get a good religious education living in the US, since you legally can't be taught about religion in school, and our church happened to have the liberal professors from a nearby religious university in it. But it hadn't occurred to me before how unusual it was to experience the very process of sitting in a mixed-age collective learning something debatable with people who cared about the content & would debate it openly for the next hour. I'm sure that both gave me intellectual skills and an attitude about learning and debate -- for example, it's probably why I still care more about what people do & say than what their current academic rank is. But just as importantly, maintaining the skill & discipline to listen to an argument that may be poorly or weirdly phrased with no power point or video animations, and still find the most interesting points (& moves) buried somewhere in the content, and getting reinforced for doing that by having interesting conversations afterwords.
And finally, this I know the least about, but the military draft. I keep getting in conversations with people about what an equalizer this is, at least for males in a society -- that they all wind up together with a common experience, and then get to go to higher education with a more mature perspective. This still exists in some countries in Europe, but not others.

I don't know what to think about any of the above, but when you see the way people are so easily taken apart from each other and radicalized around really stupid ideas, convinced to support things that hurt their own interests (like the working poor opposing a public option to US health care) by a few flashy, gimicky advertisements & arguments, you really wonder. I guess one thing I didn't list above is isolation & television, but I think I already blogged a couple years ago about meeting the widow of a famous UK politician, who said about how before there was television, the whole community would turn out to a local debate because it was the only thing happening in town, and there was much more coherent & community-wide discourse on politics. Now so many things are more engaging.

If you break down the USA by counties rather than states, the people who voted against Gore in 2000 largely lived in sparsely-populated areas, while the ones who voted for him were living near each other. I wondered at the time whether if you actually run into your neighbours and can see how public policies affect them, if you are less likely to be fooled by lies on television.

We have to pack now & go back to Vienna. In the month since my last posting we've been in Vienna, Oxford (talking about a grant), Nottingham (packing), Shrewsbury (for David's wedding), Maastricht (finding a home & Will signed his contract), Amsterdam (I gave a talk at Cognitive Science), then Will went to Washington DC but I went to Vienna, then we both went to Ljubljana (Will was teaching a course), then I went to Zurich (I gave a talk at the European Federation of Primatology), then we both went to Adelboden (1350 meters above sea level! I was dizzy the first day, but gave a talk at The Use of Vertebrate Model Systems to Study Social Evolution) then Oxford again (Will & I both gave talks & I helped lead a discussion at EXREL) then Zurich again (had dinner with Phil Kime & his new wife Nancy -- you remember him from our wedding?) and now Ansbach where one of Will's colleague from Nottingham just got married (the people we visited in Ankara). On Wednesday the movers will take our stuff from Vienna to Maastricht, we will follow them Thursday, then I am back in Bath on 1 September, though I am meeting some collaborators in London on the way there.

Moving

2009-07-11T04:01:00.000-07:00

So Will & I are trying to move. Both of us. I was in Bath for a week & a half -- my PhD student Hagen Lehmann had (and passed!) his viva, and I attended a meeting & worked on a couple grants, but somehow in there we also found an apartment to rent right in the centre of Bath -- I guess just as close to the train station as last time but the other side. We also put in a bid on a really excellent cottage -- we couldn't afford it so we bid very low, so we will see whether or not we can help the forces of deflation on the UK housing market. I think UK house prices are still way too high, you wouldn't believe some of the crappy places we saw that people were asking half a million dollars for that you couldn't pay me to live in -- no way to block the light from weird windows, noisy roads, sharing an old mansion with two other households who don't even fix broken windows or keep the garden. I'd say the housing bubble may have stopped growing, but it certainly hasn't burst, nor deflated very much. So probably we will keep renting. We certainly have a rented flat for 6 months anyway.

Will, meanwhile, has finally told his boss that he has an offer from Maastricht. This is about the same commute as Vienna / Nottingham, except it is by Eurostar instead of jet, so we'll be able to get a lot more work done. I'm glad we will still have one place in continental Europe, though of course unhappy we aren't living together again. We will probably spend holidays etc. in Maastricht for a while at least since we are such neophiles. Anyway, that job is supposedly taking care of ALL our moving -- Maastricht will get the furniture from Vienna as well as one bookshelf & a lot of books from Nottingham. But they haven't actually even offered him a contract yet. Apparently we have to get used to this, it is a Dutch thing. Supposedly he start 1 September, certainly my Vienna lease ends August 31. Anyway, at least it's motivating me to clean the apartment. Or it was. Now I am blogging :-) Guess I should stop that...

It was very funny. Nottingham had been promising to find him a permanent job for a while. So Will has this way of giving big news he's pleased with, where he just sits there & listens until someone asks if he has any news. It can take quite a while. So this time his boss talked about various things for like an hour, and then finally says "Oh, here's something I should run by you -- the head of department has found a permanent, part-time job for you in [a different school of the university that Will really doesn't like & has nothing to do with politics]. How does that strike you?" So Will was sitting there with an offer of a real, tenure-track job in his discipline in a cool city, and getting offered a part-time job in a backwater somewhere near the group he'd worked very hard to try to help set up in a place he otherwise had no interest in living in. So he gave up on waiting to be asked if he had any news & just told his boss.

Anyway, I'm very glad I'm going to be on Eurostar a lot -- I love it! (Well, so far... haven't got stuck in the chunnel yet.) I hope going once a month is enough they'll let me into the lounge soon.

I am resolved that our next two homes are going to be real -- kept clean, decent furniture, PROFESSORIAL. Will is afraid.

I still have a lot of science to finish up before I leave Vienna too. Though I finally got a simulation running I'd been working on for ages while I was in Bath. But it's mostly the writing that's the problem. I really, really need to get some money & hire some postdocs who actually write. Though hopefully both of my current PhD students will have articles out this year. But there are a number of my own things that need revision, not to mention new things that need submission. It's ironic that you can only do science if you don't do any science but spend all your time working to get money to do science. But at the same time, honestly, I think some good scientific theory building and innovation happens when you are trying to get a grant written.

Anyway, back to cleaning... Will should be here in 3 hours :-) Then we have dinner plans tonight with a couple from the university. The weather is great here, at least today.

Institutions & Science

2009-06-27T04:38:00.000-07:00

Busy as usual with talks, models, papers & grants. Less papers recently, actually -- except reviewing other people's. But anyway, the thing that stands out that I've been meaning to blog about for a while was a KLI talk by Sabina Leonelli. She is even more interdisciplinary than I am -- a philosopher of science, a historian and a sociologist. She is studying how the use of shared computer databases is affecting science.

A lot of huge results now, like the human (and other animal) genomes are available as resources to anyone over the internet. This allows a lot of work to be done by AI -- machine discovery of possible new drugs and so forth, where you just need to do giant pattern matching, which only takes time & data. In order to facilitate both human and machine exploration of all this data, there are large projects devoted to labeling all the important data in a uniform way. The part of the web that is marked up this way is called the semantic web, and the collections of labels that are agreed on for doing that are called ontologies.

I worked on the semantic web myself briefly for about four months with Lynn Andrea Stein right after my PhD in 2001. She said I had to write a paper about it, so I tried to find something to hack on, but as far as I could tell at least at that time there was no part of the semantic web that actually worked. It was just a bunch of protocols & languages people talked about. I wrote an article anyway about how services should be integrated over the semantic web. I sent it to the editors of a special issue on the topic, and they asked me for both a shorter version of the paper for their journal and a longer version for a book they were producing. (For some reason I can't get Google Scholar to show both versions on the same page.) Anyway, taken together those papers have been cited 58 times, which makes it like the fifth most academically-popular thing I've done, even though there's no code in it. Or experiments. I think this mostly just shows how many people are working on the semantic web. But what people do like about the article is the image of web services as extensions to the intelligence of agents that work for people, rather than being either just passive data or themselves active agencies. Though there is one other useful contribution of the paper which is trying to get the logicians who were designing the semantic web languages to think about representing and integrating components that are unreliable real-time systems.

Well, back to the topic, apparently the semantic web is actually getting usable these days, and Sabina Leonelli is studying the impact of this on science. When there is a single agree-on ontology, does that become perceived as the truth? The nature of science and knowledge is that we are always improving on it. That's why the articles about how many articles in leading journals are "wrong" are so ridiculous -- if articles get corrected then they are in the scientific process. The ones that are not corrected or extended are dead.

The concern that ontologies bias science is to me an example of two concerns that I run into a lot. First, that once you introduce technology a problem changes qualitatively. This is a lot like the hopes & fears for AI stuff I've written about before. There is almost always a dominant thread of scientific opinion, but there is hardly ever only a single thread. In Sabina's talk I mentioned the official lists of psychological disorders, which at one point included homosexuality and now do not. What's in the list doesn't determine where science goes, but it does determine a lot of stuff about public spending, what insurance will pay for, and so on. So the introduction of ontologies just gives us an occasion to think about the nature of science, the influence of money and so on again. But so far I don't think it actually creates new problems.

The other concern is one that has come up over & over in scientific discussions at the KLI in the last two years. The question is, is it right that science should ever be biased. Should we believe the mainstream? Won't good ideas get lost?

There's something very attractive about the idea that being objective means being without bias, but anyone who works on computational models of planning or learning knows that bias is actually a necessary and useful mechanism. Do we really want to think that it's as easy to light a fire with water as with a match? If we were without bias we'd be without knowledge and our actions would be random.

In this sense, science & evolution both work a lot the same. They select the theories / genomes most likely to do well, but they also need to have enough variation around so that in science, ideas & knowledge can keep moving forward, and in evolution, so that changes in the environment can be dealt with and better solutions to living and reproducing found. Sticking with science, one way to think about it is that as a community we should allocate our time exploring a particular idea in proportion to its probability of being right. In practice, this usually means that there are a bunch of people who believe different things, and they & their labs study these different ideas and try to convince other scientists they are right.

The kind of bias that is bad is when people are blocked from researching ideas that they think are probably true, or forced to spend lots of time researching ideas they think are probably wrong. That throws off the system, and means useful & important ideas might get neglected. But that most current scientists study things at least mostly compatible with the mainstream view just shows that we respect and (more importantly) use the knowledge discovered by the previous generations of scientific culture.

Anyway, I loved Sabina's talk. Fortunately, she has a job in Exeter now, and her husband is a smart & fun mathematician, so we hope we will be able to get together and talk about science a lot when I get back to Bath.

I've given versions of my own talk on evolution, culture & cognition in Brighton (Sussex), Budapest (CEU), Grünau (Vienna people), & Oxford in the last month. I'm getting a lot of help and enthusiasm from people at the talks -- hopefully eventually I'll get that translated into some more publications and grants! Robin Dunbar, who inspired my entire approach to action selection with some of his talks in Edinburgh in the 1990s, has moved his lab to Oxford & has very smart postdocs. Again, that's quite close to Bath so hopefully I can visit more once I go back.

Sorry for the fuzziness of the Oxford picture, it's from the laptop, taken out the window of the room I stayed overnight in at Magdalen College. I really need to get a phone with a good camera in it again. I will probably do so quite soon now. The second picture is from Patricia, who managed to convince both sons & partners to go to Ludlow for lunch.

Institutions & Web 2.0

2009-06-04T14:48:00.000-07:00

Er... sorry for taking so long to post again! I'd forgotten both that it had been so long & that the previous post was rather depressed. A couple weeks ago I had to hand in notice on my apartment in Vienna because they require 3 months notice in Austria. It is hard to believe another two years have come and almost gone! It has been an amazing time in Vienna and I can't believe how much I have learned.

When I first came here, my PhD student Hagen & I went to the European Federation of Primatology meeting in Prague, and people kept coming up to me and saying "This isn't even what you really do, is it?" That was because I asked a lot of questions, but apparently they were the right ones. Anyway, two weeks ago when I was at the meeting in Budapest, it was a much better question: "Wait, aren't you a biologist?" I was joking with some Czechs (coincidentally) at a meeting today that I'd become fluent in spoken biology, but my writing skills still aren't as strong as I'd hoped. Well, I have three more months to work on writing. I have three journal articles submitted and several others I should write -- I will probably write at least two of them and at least one more grant, maybe two. Getting the three articles into final form is a challenge too though. I keep forgetting how long articles take.

While I am thinking of it, the talk to the Budapest social scientists (well, really a bunch of them turned out to be philosophers!) went really well. And I did put a lot more pictures into the talk :-) One of the people there asked if I had a video of that talk. I think the last video I saw of myself was taken by Dave Gunkel in 1987.

A few weeks ago I gave a talk in the Austria institute for AI research. That went really well too, and the room was packed -- there were even people sitting in a hall where they couldn't see me, just listening! Afterwards, it turned out that one of the people -- a physicist -- just came because the abstract was interesting & hadn't heard an AI talk before. She asked me to post notices if I give more talks! I told her I was talking in Budapest, but that was too far for her.

Anyway, she asked me to post it on my twitter page. If you don't know what twitter is, go look it up on Wikipedia, I'll wait.

This was very weird, because it was the first time someone asked me for my twitter page in the real world. Or at all, really. I've had twitter for years. One of my prize-winningly brilliant undergraduates invited me so she could keep in touch after she graduated, Meri Williams. Anyway, for a long time I thought of it as a fairly private thing, although in fact it is totally public, it is also pretty anonymous. There was a small group of my friends I worked with at Marble that we all just read & commented on each other's posts, really, my geekiest friends. So I could just be my geeky self there. But one day not long ago, after twitter hit the headlines, I noticed that if you googled my name it came up on the first page. Oh great! Now all the stuff I thought only 5 people were seeing, anyone who wondered who I was might see.

I thought about changing my name on it -- a lot of people I know don't have their real name associated with their twitter account. Also, some people "lock" their posts, so you can't see them without asking. But to me, the real fun of twitter is wandering around seeing new people, and another thing was I liked when friends got in touch with me which they wouldn't do if I'd changed my name. So instead ultimately I went through and deleted a bunch of old posts. Maybe 6%, and not all the way back to the beginning --- I got bored. Mostly just whiny stuff that sounded unprofessional. It's weird, I really dislike deleting anything from the past, but at the same time, it seemed the least worst option. It feels like a shame, but in a way, how can it be shameful to be more professional? Still, it was fun when it really was a secret geeky hidey hole.

Change happens and as someone who researches evolution & AI, I am the last person who can complain about it or think it shouldn't. Life is like swimming in a surf --- it only makes sense if you enjoy playing with the waves.

Austria has set up a new Institute for Science & Technology. It is meant to be a flagship "elite institution". Normally, Europeans setting up such institutions say the are modeling these things on MIT. Actually, I think that's a bad model -- MIT got to be MIT in open competition with other universities & technical institutes, and it keeps being MIT by fighting hard to be better than Caltech, Georgia Tech, IIT and everyone else. No one appointed MIT the best technical place in America, it's a title it won. In fact, for a long time in the early days MIT was worrying about staying independent of Harvard.

But anyway, at the meeting of the funders -- all Austrian industrialists -- they mostly mentioned Harvard and Stanford -- no one mentioned MIT. That is not surprising, since Austrians tend to care a lot about the arts. In fact, they kind of treat the sciences as arts, which to be fair arts & sciences have some commonalities. Also, the campus is insanely far out in the middle of nowhere -- it takes a minimum of 90 minutes to get there from my door, and I live in the perfect place for being central and well connected to transport north of the city. So, I think Stanford is a good model -- a recently endowed major university out in a huge parkland. IST are going to need tobe a stand-alone university, because I really think good research requires students at all stages, since they all contribute different things. And the IST is too far from town for them to borrow other university's students!

I wouldn't be so confident in my assessment, except that the IST did the coolest thing for their inauguration. Mostly it was full of great science talks, and then the evening programme looked boring, but I stayed to see how it was. First, in the late afternoon they had advice from other people who ran leading research institutions, and these people were AMAZING. I couldn't have heard better advice about running a science organization anywhere on the planet. The main thing which is new & different than if you were really running a university, is that you recruit people purely for their ability, not to fill in gaps in a discipline, and then you leave them alone. If you bring in good people, other good people that are complimentary will follow, so you will get coherence and direction for free. You just try to make sure they are somewhere beautiful and tranquil so they concentrate on their work.

There was debate about some things, like whether you should have any permanent staff / tenure. A lot of people said no. One person said that if you make people permanent, you had to make them compete for funding, because something has to keep people from slowing down. But most of the directors recommended have rotating people (like the KLI does, incidentally). Then obviously people produce as much as they can because they want to get the best possible next job, or if they are on sabbatical they want to get ahead on their research while they can. A couple places had a practice more than a policy of very rarely retaining a very few top talents who were really helping run and identify the place.

The new president of the new institute did a really good job of pumping these guys for information. It was so cool he shared it with us, though I think having an audience also helped him by keeping everyone talking, since they were on the spot! One of the hardest things (to me) that they told him was that the places that succeeded, they did so because they had amazing directors who were great scientists & knew everybody & could recruit everyone, but the heads themselves had to pretty much abandon every other aspect of their careers to totally devote themselves to making their institute great. This guy is young and has produced tons of amazing science already, I can't imagine how he is going to give that up. But I guess he has decided that producing an institution that produces science is even more interesting than producing it yourself. Or maybe he only expects to be full time for a limited number of years (like 10) & he will go back to his own lab once this institute is running well -- and he'll know he can fund himself an excellent lab.

Did I tell you Rod Brooks quit as the head of the AI lab after 10 years & then went on sabbatical? Then at the end of his sabbatical he quit MIT & academia altogether. He is apparently starting a new robot company to do more intelligent manufacturing. I haven't heard anything for a few months, but I guess with such things we won't likely hear for another 10 years. He is 10 years older than me, so he might have time to make another company really go before he retires.

Well, anyway, there was all kinds of advice about funding streams, recruiting top talent, etc. Then the late evening was an event honoring the funders where they described their vision, and they were great. Very funny and successful men & one woman. One guy said he was not a scientist but that he thought basic research was a lot like hunting -- you have to wait and wait & hope you are ready to shoot and eventually maybe nothing will come down the path to even shoot at. They talked about their time to market in their different industries. One guy was in steel and said his product life cycle was so far 1000 years. A lot of it was in German, but they provided simultaneous translation -- the first time I've ever used that. It was slightly weird because of the lag, but very cool. In fact, I had a headset with my name on it! I didn't remember saying I didn't know German, but maybe it was on the registration form. Anyway, I was not bored by any of the meeting, it was all an insight into a world that I've benefited from but never seen -- top academic and industrial leadership. I hope one decade I'll be using some of the things I've learned.

Still, personally, I am having trouble giving up doing the science myself. Besides loving it, it just seems to go so much faster that way. But this may be a mistake. At some point, I'll need to really shift gears. Already I am thinking about how to remanage my time -- changing policy / strategies on email, reviews etc. I'm not sure whether I'll keep this blog up when I'm back to lecturing, though I know you guys love it. But do feel free to start following my twitter stream -- I tend to post there once a day, though it probably isn't often that coherent for you. It's still really aimed at my geek friends.

Fun in the Midlands (pictures from Vienna.)

2009-05-09T10:09:00.000-07:00

I can't remember if I've told you that Will has got his contract extended a year at Nottingham. This is good because it means they have basically made him permanent (by the same wacky rules that are why Harvard couldn't find money for him after 36 months & then suddenly did again 6 months after that...) He is going to be able to teach political science and that apparently will really make him a political scientist. Somehow having done 7 years of postdocs with leaders in the discipline couldn't compensate for the fact his PhD was in cognitive science, at least not to Europeans. Americans seem more inclined to hire him, but we don't want to move...

Well, anyway it would be good news except I was hoping he would lose his job & come live with me again. But of course, even though he could write all the same papers he writes now & do the same research & that is the favorite part of his job, somehow he wouldn't feel the same about it if he weren't getting paid! And neither would any of his reviewers, since they really care about affiliations. Academia & psychology are both annoying sometimes.

The British Midlands is not thrilling, although there is one nice thing in it: Will. I've spent the last week here with him, more or less. I did go to Brighton and give a talk at the University of Sussex. The talk went well, I think I am really getting good at communicating my newest work & putting the big picture together. I have some challenges coming up though because I'm going to be speaking to social scientists in Budapest so I am thinking I will leave a lot more of the computational detail out & give more big picture. I guess I am getting old enough to pull this off :-) The students in Brighton said (when I told them) "hmmm... more pictures then" which I have to agree.

Giving talks is great. It makes you really think about what you are doing from more perspectives, and it lets you get immediate feedback on how you communicate it. Communicating is at least as big a part of science as actually discovering new information, so that's important.

There are a couple new papers on my publications page I'm quite excited about. I have other papers due & have been working a lot still on grants, and also on reviewing PhD student applicants for Bath.

I'll attach a few pictures from the KLI. There's a weird problem with the building at KLI, so we are working at home & from University of Vienna for a while. Though next week I will mostly be working in Budapest because I'm getting my travel paid to go attend a meeting on comparative cognition -- I'm giving a talk there too, but it will be short. The main problem is my laptop is broken & I'm having a lot of trouble getting it repaired, so I'm worried about how much work I can get done while I'm traveling. Hopefully tomorrow I can switch everything to one of my older laptops for the next week or so. I have been wasting a LOT of time trying to get this one fixed. My laptop is in one of the KLI pictures above, so this is not a completely crazy paragraph.

Lots of things are broken, actually. My laptop, the process that is supposed to fix it. Will's and my mobile phones don't reliably deliver messages even when we are both in the UK (they are both British phones.) The trains are not going to work tomorrow so I have to take a taxi to the airport -- two hours! I think that with the credit crisis a lot of companies may just be quietly firing people & then working less well than they used to. But who knows?

We went out last night with some of Will's Law coworkers, and tonight will be going out with some of his Politics ones. That reminds me, I don't think he bought enough food to give them! Guess I should get on that...

Oh, I have a third picture to upload which is not the KLI, but I think you'll all know what it is!

David Gunkel

2009-04-25T13:58:00.001-07:00

I forgot I was going to tell you, I heard news from David Gunkle (my flatmate from The Grandeur on Granville). Click his picture for the article, then scroll down until you see the picture again.

Istanbul (was Constantinople)

2009-04-25T01:31:00.000-07:00

Hi -- Sorry for the long delay in posting. Really I shouldn't even be writing now, I have a ton of deadlines to deal with this weekend, including two today! Also, sorry the pictures aren't great -- it was cold every day we were there until the last one, so we didn't spend much time on the roof terrace of our hotel. We took these just minutes before we left & we were looking into the sunshine so it was hard to see what was going on!

So quickly -- the four ways Istanbul is even better than Vienna:

ambient music in restaurants, parks etc. is local, not old US/UK English stuff.
much less smoking, even though it seems to be legal.
honey is much yummier than chocolate, and in Turkey it is the main part of any dessert.
The cuisine includes vegetables at all times of the year (not just asparagus & pumpkin seasons).

I don't know if you all realize that there is a huge controversy about whether Turkey should be in the EU. They are already in NATO. Will and I were really struck on the one hand that it seemed more safe, modern & organized than several existing EU countries. On the other hand, there were a couple things that made it obvious even in the Western cities that this was not Europe, e.g.

YouTube was blocked. Apparently because the Turks didn't like the allegations against Atatürk that the Greeks were putting on YouTube. Atatürk is kind of like Washington & Jefferson combined, but he worked at the beginning of the twentieth century, at the end of the Ottoman Empire. As a general, he drove the Greeks further West, keeping Istanbul in Turkey (the Greeks had hoped to return it to Christendom as Constantinople. Apparently the city was known by both names until Atatürk ordered the post offices not to deliver mail addressed to Constantinople.) Then as a leader he more or less secularized it. Actually, some of the sultans had already started this process 50 years earlier (for example, by banning turbans), but he banned fezes & head scarfs, moved the weekend to be the same as Europe's instead of the rest of the Muslim world's, and changed the alphabet from Arabic to Latin (imagine if we had that change in reverse overnight one weekend!) So he is a really big deal, but so why are they threatened by some vidoes? And what about the pro Atatürk videos and every other useful thing on there?
While we were there, they were arresting people who opposed the government, including professors. Imagine if Bush had thrown professors in jail who supported the Democrats and said publicly that it was wrong to torture or suspend aspects of the constitution. Or if Obama threw Stephen Colbert (from about about one minute in until about three minutes in) or Tedd Rall in jail for pointing out that as a professor of constitutional law, Obama shouldn't be supporting the suspension of habeas corpus in Bagram.

This doesn't even mention that there are religions & languages which are being repressed, which we didn't see anything about since as usual we just walked around some major cities & didn't drive around the countryside & villages. But the villages & relics do sound spectacular. There have been civilizations there a LONG time.

The best stuff we saw (in my opinion anyway) were:

I guess while I'm at it I'll mention that the two most disappointing things we saw were also the two most expensive, the Sultan's palace & the Hagia Sophia, which to be fair was also having its dome renovated so there was scaffolding. The Hagia Sophia was built as a church in 700 & when the Muslims took Istanbul they just plastered over the mosaics there, so they wound up preserving some cool Byzantine art. Now it is a museum -- again, the wisdom of Atatürk that all the contested buildings are just museums, not churches or mosques. So the mosaics are cool, but we had heard the space was generally even more amazing than the Blue Mosque's, but in fact it just didn't have the same feel. Will's friend Constanze was right about this -- she said it was just depressing because you can see how brutally people have treated each other's culture there. She had warned us but we went anyway.

We went to the Blue Mosque during the early evening prayer one day. In general, I really liked the calls to prayer, Istanbul has done a decent job of getting the volume & speaker quality to such a state that you could imagine it is not much more intrusive than the acoustic calls were before all the traffic & modern city noise. I mean, it's meant to be intrusive, but not ugly. Anyway, in the mosque we sat towards the back of the vast space under the dome with the other tourists, and admired the great space & listened to the prayers. The prayers reminded me also of the Russian Orthodox ceremony I'd been to, but with less silly running around behind screens by the officients. The imam is right in the front -- and all the men are kneeling right around him. At some point I wondered where the woman were and started looking around for their area, but I didn't see them until we left -- they were stuck behind even the guests! Most seemed to just be tolerantly sitting there waiting for their husbands, but one young woman was really praying and petitioning and even crying and reaching her arms out towards the imam, and I got really angry at how ludicrous it was that she was stuck in the back like that. Not that as an atheist I think she'd be any closer to God in the front of the mosque, but at least she'd be closer to people with the power to help her.

On the other hand, it was really striking how clean, friendly and safe the city was, even in the poorer areas. Will & I walked about 5 kilometers across the Golden Horn -- through the bazaar, through the most conservative quarter (which was also having a huge market), through some poor areas where there are still a couple Greek Orthodox churches and even some synagogues. When the Christians were driving Jews out of Europe during the Inquisition, the Sultans invited them to Istanbul. But that was a long time ago, and like Vienna everything went wrong for them in the 20th century, and very few are left now. I really worry about all the communities that have been abandoned for Israel, since I really worry about Israel. I don't think theocracy is a good idea. They can't keep pulling back their borders to try to keep their own religion running their country "democratically" forever. Though of course Israel has more religious tolerance than any other state in that region. Turkey is officially secular now, but apparently they repress all versions of Islam except for Sunni. There is actually this cool version of Islam called Alevi in the East of Turkey, which incorporates some of the older animism. The mainstream criticizes them heavily for having men and women worship together so "anything could happen." I wish I could be a student forever. I was so amazed by some of the artifacts in the Civilization museum, I would love to try to understand the older animist world view.

But anyway, I have no doubt that all this is part of the reason the cities are so friendly. It must also be said that the city is unbelievably beautiful in its natural setting. We went fairly up north along the Bosphorus to visit Metin Sezgin, one of my friends from MIT, who just took a position at Koç a few months ago. He chose a really beautiful harbour to meet up in, and we saw much more of the town in the taxi ride on the way there. Koç is one of the two leading private universities in Turkey, the other being Bilkent in Ankara, which we visited (see below). They are both campus universities set pretty far out from the cities fairly recently. One of the interesting things about Istanbul is that the landscape is all gentle rolling hills around the water, and on every hill there is a gigantic Turkish flag. Huge flags ripple in this very cool and surreally slow-motionish way. Maybe you just don't realize how really big they are so it makes the ripples look like they are going too slow. I've only seen flags like that before in the USA.

We took the night train to & from Ankara to visit some German friends of Will's from Nottingham -- thus saving a lot of money on two nights in hotels, even though we went "first class" :-) The night train was fun but the beds weren't quite wide enough to both sleep on one bunk. Also, since there are no smoking cars anymore, people sneak smoking in the "non smoking" cars, so that's a bit annoying. But overall it was fun & we slept well. And it was great to see Ankara & Will's friends & we saw the most awesome museum there.

We also saw Atatürk's tomb. It is amazing. These people know there have been three empires in Turkey that have each lasted about a thousand years. They are taking the very long view. I wish the rest of us built with the next millennium in mind.

We've been back since Monday night -- well, Will left Tuesday so I've been in Vienna on my own, trying to catch up. I've got a ton of things on as usual. I am very aware that my sabbatical is coming to an end so am trying to both get a bunch of grants and research lined up so I can keep doing great science, and get the stuff I've already done published, and finish up exciting & timely projects I don't want to wait until I have funding / postdocs to finish.

this is not an update

2009-04-11T12:06:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I've had no time. I keep having really urgent things, like proof-reading my students' dissertations, giving talks at conferences, rewriting grants that people WANT to give me the money for. It's hard to know if you get all the priorities right. Will and I are in Vienna now briefly -- we thought we'd be on holiday by now but we are still working. The weather is great here, as it was in Scotland. Only Nottingham is never lovely. Anyway, we've only been together for two days so I will get back to work or him.

Less interestingly

2009-03-23T20:52:00.000-07:00

I missed a great concert Sunday night & in fact wound up working until after midnight, then was up again at 7:30 this morning & spent the morning at the university sorting out stuff for a conference I'm going to in two weeks. Before that I have to proof-read two dissertations for students & I still have reviewing, grants & resubmissions to do. It's annoying that I have so much stupid stuff to do all at once, but I scheduled it like that to just get it over with. I wish every month could just be science, but if you don't do reviewing, grant writing, publishing etc. then science can't happen. I did go to a great concert Wednesday night though, after a great talk about different parenting styles by different beetles in the same species. The guy who gave the talk is from Exeter which is near Bath so probably I will see him again.

Ada Lovelace day

2009-03-23T06:47:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is Lady Ada day. Ada Lovelace was allegedly the first programmer, since she came up with a program for Charles Babbage's machine, but I don't honestly know much about her, maybe I'll learn tomorrow. Anyway, I'm meant to blog about women in technology I admire. That's easy. The coolest woman in technology I know of is Grace Hopper. She was a full professor, an admiral and she raised four children. How do you do that? I guess after that is Aunt Dorothy; it's pretty cool she programmed for GE in the 1950s -- or was it the 60s? Then there's my friend Helen Grenier, who ran a robot company for about a decade. She's doing something else now. I worked with a cool woman, Margo Seltzer, the summer I spent at Marble after the plane crash. She is a prof. at Harvard & also started a database company called SleepyCat which got bought by Oracle. Apparently the technology is great, but I have trouble getting excited about even cool database technology. Actually, I know a lot of women that are robotics professors. Interestingly, it seems like more women go into that than straight computer science.

AIG & Bonuses

2009-03-19T11:48:00.000-07:00

I was having a conversation with my dad, and he said "I can't believe the same guys who lost all that money are getting bonuses." I told him maybe it wasn't.

In 1987, I was working for a trading unit run by Lawrence Schulman, which had until recently been its own company but it had lost money, almost gone bankrupt, and then been bought by First Options, which in turn was bought by Continental Bank, which had recently been bailed out by the US Government after the Savings & Loan crisis. In the crash of 1987, First Options effectively went bankrupt, mostly because two foreign trader had been allowed to put three large trades on as speculation, which between them lost $90M. The customers couldn't pay that money, so First Options was liable for it. Some internal regulators didn't do their jobs in that they let these customers put on those two trades, but everyone else had been doing their job fine. These numbers sound small compared to today's numbers, but it was 1987 and this could have put several hundred people out of work and had a big impact on options and futures trading.

As it happened, I had been rather bored in the months running up the crash because the traders had been too busy trading to give me work, so I'd written a new program on my own initiative that combined all the positions my unit had into one chart so I could see our risk all in one place instead of just per trader. I showed my program to Larry about a week before the crash. He liked it and asked the clerks to run it every day.

Larry, it has to be said, was an incredibly talented trader and a very smart guy. He was trying to make a bigger organization by training other people to trade for him. But on the day of the crash, he pulled all of his traders out of the pits, took the output of my new program and went into the pit and traded for the whole unit. He made $18M in one day. At the end of the day, he and the traders sat up all night splitting his trades back into their various accounts.

The next day we found out about the $90M loss. Actually, here' how I found out. I walked into the office and my boss's boss's boss, Jennet Lingle, was sitting in our office and they said "Joanna, do you know any rich people?" All the richest people I knew were sitting there in the room. It was bizarre. I mean realize that the crash was bizarre too from the inside. It was like as if gravity suddenly turned off. It had been a very weird few weeks. Anyway, the problem was our group had this $18M position, but the company was bankrupt, so they wanted to sell it to someone. If the bank just took it over and liquidated it, it would be worth a lot less.

In the end, Continental Bank chose to bail out First Options, but it was a very close call. They took days to decide, during which of course everyone was in a panic. I don't think they would have done it if it weren't for the $18M Larry had just made -- that made it look like the company was only $70M in the red. By the end of the year, our unit had made about $20M over the whole year. The position that looked like it was worth $18M settled closer to $14M, but we had had a very good year already before the crash.

Now, back to bonuses. At the time, I was making $23K. Even then, that was very low for a programmer. But I had been told I'd also get 1% of whatever the unit made. One other person who was not a trader was promised that -- the head clerk. Also, some of the traders were promised fractions of a percent because they stayed late and helped train the new traders. The traders, meanwhile, were promised 50% of what they made as a bonus. Actually, most of them were promised 40%, but Larry got 10% of what everyone else made, and so 50% of his own. Back to my salary, before the crash we had been doing very well and made $4M and Larry was very pleased with himself, and asked me if I wanted my bonus in cash or a BMW. I already didn't believe in owning private transportation, so it was a weird question. But the point is that he'd probably expected my "salary" to be 1/2-1/3 of what I really got paid.

So, when bonuses came out after the crash, Larry got more than $5M. We knew, because the pay checks only could have six figures on them and so he got six pay checks. I should have gotten $180K, almost eight times my salary. But the company made a decision -- no executive bonuses. Apparently, because I wasn't a trader, I was an executive.

Larry could have personally given all the traders and me and the other woman our promised share of the unit bonus and still had $4M, but he didn't. So I quit. Weirdly, no one else did.

Anyway, so what do I think when I hear about people getting million-dollar bonuses? Well, I think they did whatever their job was, not that they are the same ones who lost the money, because probably the guys who lost money wouldn't get anything. Though I don't know, maybe AIG is more screwed up than First Options was. Really, no trader should ever get 40% of what they make for their company, because what happens in years where they lose? I think one or two years after I left a lot of the traders lost money, and then they all just quit rather than stay and work off the deficit and get no bonuses. But I also think as I thought of Larry that the people who got a lot of money should obviously be thinking about how that makes them & the company look. But probably, like Larry, at least some of them don't care. They will in the worst case quit their jobs, take a few years off, and then there will always be someone willing to hire guys with experience. Even experienced losers are viewed as more valuable than people who don't have any experience.

I didn't quite tell all this much to my dad, but I did tell him that only two guys lost all the money for First Options. Dad said "if that's why these guys are getting paid, why don't they just tell us so we don't get so angry?" I don't know the answer to that either.

How the credit crisis works

2009-03-14T10:26:00.001-07:00

The content here is pretty accurate, despite some visual stereotyping.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Who knew what when

2009-03-14T08:45:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to do another post about the financial crisis for a few weeks now. I started thinking because of a series of strips in one of my favorite comics, Sylvia, where the characters are finding out why they hadn't got the message that they were supposed to sell their stocks, when it seemed like all their friends had.

Certainly Will & I decided the housing bubble was too stupid to keep playing with about five years ago. We sold about two or three years before the peak, so we lost a few thousand pounds I guess. How did we know? The difference between prices in Bath vs. Evanston, and the difference between mortgages vs. renting. With respect to that last, owning should always been cheaper than renting, because it's harder to own, since you need capital. If renting is cheaper, something is seriously wrong.

But what about the banks? What I kept thinking about after I read the Sylvia strips was that my friend Hilary explained to me and Chris that all the banks were bankrupt the last time I was in Chicago, last Spring. She said she was totally freaked out about it, but that a lot of people were saying all the banks had also been bankrupt during the Savings & Loan crisis under the previous President Bush (when one of his other sons went to jail -- remember Silverado? When I was campaigning in Ohio in 2000 for Al Gore someone asked me why no one was mentioning Silverado.) Apparently at that point they just kept doing what they do and eventually worked off the debt, and people thought the same thing would happen again. But then she started explaining that the government knew that something needed to be done this time, so they were going to make special institutions to buy the most risky debt, so the banks would be in less trouble. Chris said "That's why the head hunters have been phoning me constantly this last week!" The new institutions would need new heads of IT.

So by now we've all heard of these institutions, they are called toxic banks. But we don't hear that the Bush administration already knew something needed to be done and that the banks were bankrupt in March 2008.

Right now I am finally getting around to posting this because I am watching Jon Stewart's interview of one of the guys on CNBC. He says something at minute 14:00 "I can't tell you how angry that makes me, because what it says to me is that you all know. You all know." Well, he's right. I know, and I haven't been employed in finance since 1991.

Sometime when I was first working in trading industry, some of the traders that worked for Larry Schulman were telling me that everyone in the pits knew there were good companies and bad companies there -- people who ripped off their customers, and people who didn't.
I got really angry after watching the Enron movie, The Smartest Guys in the Room. There's a scene in that movie where Enron is pitching a blatantly illegal product to a room of select people representing various financial companies, and they all pause and then say "yeah, sure." Someone was filming it secretly, so it's fuzzy. But the narration says who the people are, and it's all the same names who were evil in the 1980s being evil in the 1990s. Like Merrill Lynch and Citicorp.

I was thinking about this post, and I remember I started talking to a guy I was sitting next to on the London Underground when we were walking through the Docklands together. He was a researcher from Luxembourg. He was doing research on ethics and its impact on business. And I told him I was sadly dubious about any impact, and about the Enron movie thing I just told you. And he said "Well, the bad institutions are getting into trouble now." And looked knowingly at me, as if he expected I was on the inside of some knowledge he had. And I suspected he meant the impending financial crisis, and I was skeptical then that that was only going to hurt the bad institutions.

That wasn't after Hilary told me about it. I remember it distinctly, because I was on the way to viva a PhD at Goldsmiths, which I've only done once. That was the evening of 21 November 2007. Luxembourg (presumably therefore, the EU) already knew. And I already had at least some guess so I could figure out what this guy was referring to. Yet loads of politicians now claim they couldn't have seen it coming, just like the Bush administration couldn't have seen Katrina or September 11 coming, despite all the memorandums about those dangers. Why can't people say "I knew something was up, but I guessed wrong how important it was"? I guess they'd lose their elections.

None of us knew exactly what was going to happen, and I suppose we all hoped & maybe some really believed that someone or something else was actually going to fix it. You can know about a whole lot of contradictory theories, and you can only guess which if any of them are right. But I think Jon Stewart is right to think that a lot of people knew that illegal, unethical and even dangerous things were going on, and they let them slide, or even thought they were funny, or worse, exploited them. Others didn't -- some people wrote letters to the SEC complaining that Madoff couldn't possibly be making money legitimately. People like Hilary went around and said "something is very wrong, shouldn't we be fixing it?" Not all financial people are bad. I don't have any sympathy for institutional or professional investors who lost money to Madoff, because it's their job to understand how money is made, and to notice when something smells fishy.

I guess that's what it comes down to. If everyone realizes it's their job to help enforce norms, laws and ethics, then we do OK. If people can break the laws and get away with it, then everyone starts playing games. A political organizer I met when I was volunteering for Sen. Paul Simon's presidential campaign in 1988 told me there was a theory that the Savings & Loan crisis wouldn't have happened if Nixon hadn't been pardoned rather than facing charges. Kissinger has apparently documented in one of his books that Ford was chosen for VP because he was the only candidate who would promise the pardon. I remember after Iran Contragate that the judge said the Republican administration had treated the law like a puzzle to work around rather than something you were meant to respect the spirit of.

One of the great mysteries is why anyone is convinced that Republicans are the party of ethics. I suppose it's because they are the party of fundamentalism, and people mistakenly believe that there's a correlation between intensity of religion and intensity of ethics. I mean, mistakenly believe there's a positive correlation.

Lots of reviewing and such

2009-03-08T03:45:00.000-07:00

Hi --- sorry I haven't had much time to post. I totally overcommitted on some reviewing and proposal writing. Then I got one of my journal articles and one of my proposals back needing revising. Also, I gave a talk in Bern (which is quite beautiful) and learned about some new research that makes one of the grants I'd been trying to put together a lot simpler. So I dropped everything for a couple days & checked that out.

Will is here and it is very nice. We are not seeing each other much again; I was alone two weeks and will be again I think maybe for three, unless one of us breaks down & cancels some of the stuff we are meant to be doing this month. I think it should be Will since he gets more work done here than in Nottingham anyway, and so do I, but it is my turn to go there.

The talk in Bern went very well. It was an evolutionary biology department, so it seems I have learned how to address the weird questions on variation I was getting for a while. Bern also have a great system where they coerce their Masters students into asking questions by making their seminar series a mandatory unit which is only marked by each student handing in one page where they say what three questions they asked that term and explained & discussed the answers they got. But there were also professors there and I was able to answer all their questions too.

I can't remember if I blogged about the weird question I'd got at my first two biology invited talks before. I was demonstrating a model of how easy it is to evolve altruism, and I got this question "why is there any selfishness then." This is kind of like showing how useful walking is and then being asked why anything swims. This time I started out the talk (maybe the third slide) talking about fitness landscapes and how evolution is full of tradeoffs between conflicting pressures, and that these tradeoffs can produce ridges in the fitness landscape & you can expect to see various species at any location along that ridge. I am surprised by how many biologists are surprised by this. I think it is kind of basic, but it took me months to figure out that was the image they were lacking when they asked me the selfishness question.

I told you I have a great new collaborator in Bath that I'm looking forward to going back to work with, Nick Priest. I think we are going to be working a bunch on variation. Everyone is so obsessed with evolution being about selection, but they forget about the fact evolution also needs to maintain a population of options to select between. This can even be a kind of long-term species-level memory, so species can switch between phenotypes easily, though of course also there is innovation of new forms.

It is very fun to think about intelligence (or at least, intelligent behaviour) being learned across generations and species as well as within societies and within individuals.

Here is the other cool EuroTourist thing I saw this week (Will was there this time) -- we went to a Darwin Lecture in the main hall of the Rathaus (town hall.) There was a 3-day meeting for educating the public about evolution and celebrating Darwin. We only went to the opening talk which was about how much of the genome humans and Neanderthals share. Since the series was for ordinary people it was all in German, which is why I only went to one talk. Some of the people at the KLI were really mad because the organizers let the Cardinal of Vienna speak who is a creationist. It is hard because if you don't let him talk he says you are afraid, but you hate to validate him by letting him say he participates in scientific meetings. It's not really participating to say "I learned a lot here but I know due to faith you are just wrong." Given that two consecutive popes have said that Evolution is scientific fact and the pope is the ultimate authority in Catholicism I should think he should just be excommunicated. But obviously no religion -- or other organization -- would survive if they kicked out everyone who even partially dissented. It's a real sign of weakness to be afraid of subordinates who disagree with you.

Will and I are going to have tea with someone who used to do something concerning human rights for the UN and is now the director of the fundamental rights agency for the EU. Will met him in Nottingham through his colleagues in the human rights centre & it turns out he lives literally around the corner from us here, in the same block!

The Reader

2009-02-23T02:53:00.000-08:00

I went and saw the Austrian premier of The Reader last night. I had to go see it because Will's old boss emailed me that he & his wife were both struck by the similarities between Will and the main character. The movie was very good, but it sounds like the book is much better, so I will try to read that.

I'm very disturbed though by all the people complaining about the movie / book / Kate Winslet making a Nazi into a sympathetic character. The complaint is that our culture is watering down the history of the Holocaust by making it more and more palatable. But it strikes me that anyone who says Nazis can't be sympathetic is missing the very most important lesson of the entire episode. Which is that just because you or someone you like sometimes do(es) good things, it doesn't mean you or they aren't possibly doing fundamentally evil things as well. Maybe without even realizing the extent of how bad your own actions are.

When I was in highschool a book about Nazi doctors came out and it got a lot of criticism for making them sound like real people, not monsters. And it was actually a Sunday School teacher (sorry, I can't remember which though I can visualize what room we were in!) that pointed out to me that this was the most important lesson we had to learn, how ordinary doctors became Nazi doctors, and how to make sure it doesn't happen to us.

When Will and I first got to Vienna we were in a Croatian restaurant and the waiter said he didn't speak English so we began speaking German to him & he looked surprised. Later he came and talked to us (in English) and said that the truth was he hated Americans because we were all guilty for what was happening in Iraq and should be held accountable for it, just as all German-speaking people were held accountable by the world for the Nazis. I didn't argue with that.

Last week was just busy -- I'd over-committed on reviewing as well as having an aggressive schedule of writing proposals (mostly funding but one teaching) and then got an article and a grant back I have to revise. Also, Will was in New York so I hardly heard from him until Saturday we were able to talk. This week I have a talk in Bern, but otherwise I have much the same to do as last week.

weirdly unexciting week

2009-02-15T08:07:00.000-08:00

Well, I spent this week doing things I'd been planning and looking forward to for some time, but somehow it wasn't all that exciting. I think this is partly because I'm just in a big chunk of time where I just have to write grants and won't get much feedback on that for 6 months -- it's just work. I'm doing a lot of the work on trains & planes which I enjoy, but still. I spent Tuesday talking about a grant with smart people in Oxford. Monday night I saw an enlightening talk on the new Creation museum in Kentucky. What offended the people most was that the museum had smallpox as one of the consequences of The Fall / "human reason", when in fact curing smallpox is one of the great triumphs of science. But of course the whole point is to undermine science. But I find it weird they are embracing a lot of localized evolution while claiming to embrace Biblical Literalism -- they don't think having all the species created in one day means they are immutable for some reason.

I tried to work in Nottingham on Wednesday but the internet there is even worse than at the KLI so I have been finish a bunch of the stuff I had scheduled for that day today. Thursday afternoon I spent going around Shrewsbury with Patricia attending various things about Darwin's growing up in that town, and then we had a happy birthday dinner for him, Will & I (though Will & I were two weeks off in either direction). Will's brother David & his fiance Nancy also came.

Saturday at 6am Will had a flight to New York where he's been asked to talk at a conference. I was going to go to a meeting in Bristol Friday morning but I got so little done Wednesday we stayed at Patricia's home & caught up (Patricia also has better internet than KLI or Nottingham, as do we at both our homes & as do most cafes!) Then we went to Birmingham & saw a concert & then stayed overnight in an airport hotel. I had wanted to come back to Vienna afer he left but it was much cheaper to fly back Monday due to the holiday. But then KLM lost my reservation! So by then it was cheaper to fly ON Valentine's day so I got back after all, but for 150 euro more.

I think it's hard to get excited about things right now because we are all getting email about how much our universities are cutting back etc. so we have no idea what will happen in the future, presumably our jobs will get worse. At least I have a permanent one. Honestly, if Will's job is not renewed it will be worth it if we can be together every night. But the problem then would be how he will keep his career going & be happy with himself. I am also unhappy because I had a paper rejected so that is more work resubmitting it somewhere else.

Ha, someone has just got a birthay cake in our cafe! I can't imagine the British letting you light 20 candles in a cafe. They had the fire brigade standing by when they lit the candles for Darwin's cake outside! I guess I'll close with a picture of that.

How the time goes

2009-02-07T04:03:00.000-08:00

My original idea when I started this was that I'd blog every morning when I got in to let you guys know what was going. And that worked --- while I was living at the KLI (that is, for about 3 weeks). Now I take the train in and I am nearly always working on the train, so when I get to work I don't shift back to non-work stuff. I think the 50 minutes a day I spend on the train account for a disproportionately large amount of what I get done, not least because they also help me get into my work in the morning without the distraction of email etc.

So an interesting thing I learned about science since I've been here is that there are really two very different steps to it 1) figuring out how things work and 2) convincing other people. Originally you think 1) is all that matters, but I had already realized there must be a second step with communication, or you were achieving nothing. Science is about societal progress in understanding. Individual enlightenment is not an end goal, just a part of the overall mechanism. Sometimes when I am feeling AI / futurist or memeticist I wonder whether individual enlightenment really matters at all -- so long as we are improving our predictions maybe we are doing science, even if we are doing that improvement through local improvements of theory without anyone really globally understanding what's going on, because a theory is too big for any one person's head.

Well, anyway, just sticking your idea on the web sort of communicates it, but you need to be more convincing than that to actually do good science. So a lot of what you spend your time

running unnecessary-for-discovery, over-the-top experiments to make your findings really, really obvious even to naysayers
producing attractive-looking and very clear figures
getting your work "certified" by publishing it in the best journal you can.

With respect to the figures, I am unashamed to say that I am getting a huge amount of help from Will, who has of course made data & methods his field of expertise. Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time over the last few months running new large data sets of simulations and hacking on the statistical code Will wrote for me (in R) to make the figures look even better & clearer. I finally finished this about two weeks ago, so I spent a couple of days on the week of the 26h completely rewriting a paper that had previously been rejected from a top journal to make it clearer, to use the new figures, and to update it with the research of other people that had been published in the last few months (this area is very hot!) Then I sent the paper to a few of my colleagues. One was Nick Priest, who was sure I should get it published & promised to look over the paper. This is the paper on the evolution of culture.

Then I switched to working on another paper. This one is just for a conference, though eventually it should become a journal article, and also (sooner) it will become a funding proposal. The conference deadline was Sunday night and I started working on it Wednesday, but fortunately I found I'd done some more work on it than I remembered, probably when I was on the plane sometime and should have been working on something else. Having laptops is great, you can always be writing down ideas. As it happened, I changed all my old text, but having even the sketch of ideas there did really accelerate the writing. This paper is about looking at the impact of aging on task learning, and what that tells us about how we learn and think. It's an extension of some work I originally did over Christmas in about 2000 when I was working on my MIT PhD and just wanted a problem to write an AI program around to test some of my new AI code. I wound up doing a lot of the "individual enlightenment" part of of that while I was in Harvard, understanding my own results and how they fit into the rest of the field but it didn't get into a good journal until 2007, partly because the first years of a new teaching job are always terrible & take loads of time, but also because I was still learning about communicating & convincing. Well, that paper is out and the work is done, and the new paper moves on to a new but neighbouring problem.

Now, there's a group at Prague (Charles University, one of the oldest in the world) founded by Cyril Brom that does more work on my PhD research (the AI action selection stuff) than any other group in the world does (that I know about!), including mine. So a week ago Friday they organized a whole day of talks about action selection & its applications, two of which were by me. So last Thursday I spent the morning working on email and the aging/learning paper, then Thursday afternoon I spent the 5-hour train ride to Prague writing the two talks I was going to give. This is despite the fact they were just modifications of talks I'd given before. Writing a talk is again another way of really thinking a problem through and how to communicate it better, and in this case I was bringing a few short talks together and trying to make a better and clearer overall talk than I had. This is part of why I love teaching (well, at least in my own area), because it makes you really understand things more deeply, and can help you move your own understanding along. And if you are at the front of your field, then moving your own understanding helps move the field too. That's one reason why it's so important that research and teaching both happen in universities, and researchers aren't isolated in laboratories. I am excited about one of the talks I gave them, the one I worked on most, called "Time for AI" -- it is about not only how to build better AI but why natural intelligence is the way it is, because computation takes time. I have already written a sort of a magazine article about that which has been submitted, but I think this may again turn into a grant and a bunch more articles.

The second talk I gave them was about the evolution of culture. I've been giving that talk for a while now & it has gotten fairly good, so that is why I was able to write the new version of my paper in two days. All these things feed off each other. Anyway, so I didn't have to rewrite that much.

Friday the students showed me their new work, which is great. Some of the students have a bit of a problem which is that they are leading the world at something -- providing educational tools for programming students based on building AI game characters -- but even though a bunch of smart people have been working on their project for years, and even though they are from the best university in their country, they can't believe they are actually the best in the world at something, so if they are they figure it must not be worth doing. This is something people at MIT never had a problem with, more the opposite --- they often assumed they were leading the world & didn't need to read other things. It's very frustrating in Prague, some very good people aren't sure they want to stay on in academia, which is fine but not if it's for the wrong reasons. But on the other hand, there are other people who are very enthusiastic and not at all worried, so I suppose those will be the people who will make the difference and carry the project forward. When I was talking at that AI & games meeting last month in Bradford I mentioned their work & several people went on at length saying that it was great work & they were excited about it, so I told the group that. And my talks went well, so hopefully that will help keep all the students excited. After my second talk just a couple people stayed and showed me some of their new more biological research they were doing, so that was cool too.

Saturday on the 5-hour train back of course I spent the whole time on the paper due Sunday. Will was in Vienna so we actually didn't do that much work that evening, but Sunday we met my PhD student & his partner for brunch, then went into the KLI and got a ton done the paper, then went to dinner with friends in the 9th district, then I was up until 1am finishing & submitting the paper. The last hour was just dealing with the submission software. Again, I had help proof-reading the paper, this time from my friend from Harvard now in Oxford, Mark Baxter. I didn't really have time to fix everything I should have, but since this is a draft conference paper I will have time still to get it right in the future. I actually had to do some of the analysis at the last minute and Will helped me again with the coding because I'd forgotten a language it had been so long since I used it. Science is a social process and it goes so much faster now, and you can collaborate with the best people you know who are interested, wherever they live. We must be building culture faster, much much faster, since we have the internet. Again, it's amazing to think about this.

Monday I still hadn't heard from Nick but I talked at length with my two other students, both by instant message. And finally Tuesday or so I heard I could go ahead with my paper. So then came a day, I think it was Wednesday, where I spent the entire day submitting the paper! (Well, except for some time on email as always.) Again, this must be such an improvement that allows the journals to go through so many more papers than they used to, but I had to spend a ton of time researching their own editorial board to suggest people they might want to use to edit the paper, and I had to get all my files into the right formats and figure out how to fill in all the forms. I think I worked about 6 solid hours just on the submission process (not counting lunch, other email, etc.)

So now I'm finally working on what I expected to work on all month (so I'm not too many days behind, I started Thursday) which is writing grants so I can have lots of students and postdocs when I go back to Bath. I want a large group, because even though I do OK with support from all over the world, students are much more affected by the people they see every day, and I think mine so far have been too isolated from people doing similar things. So if I get some postdocs in they will help set the tone & give advice etc. The reason I haven't before is because writing the grants took so long (esp. when so few can get funded) and all that time was time you weren't really doing research. But now I think I have got the hang of it better and also I have a better probability of success with the publications I've had recently and the fellowship too. But it is hard to stay focussed on writing the grants when there are so many exciting models to write and papers too. But hopefully I will be back to doing that by April.

I'm just hitting on the highlights and hinting at the fact there is other stuff you have to do to. It's an endless amount of email and requests. I have to review other people's papers (I am committed to 14 conference papers and two journal articles in the next couple months...) even just agreeing or rejecting these offers takes time, let alone doing them. And you have your direct infrastructure. One of my coworkers has had a lot of problems that I've seen other coworkers have before and so I have wound up spending time trying to help out, as are other people at the institute. And I have been given a course I have been asking to teach for years by Bath, so I will finally actually teach something I'm an expert in, but I have to write the full "unit proposal" and things like that.

The next couple months are going to be bad again in that Will & I won't see each other much at all. But in mid April we are going to take a proper "no laptops" week off for our 10th anniversary and go to Turkey. Although we've both been asked to give talks while we are there and probably will. But we'll email the talks! We are still trying hard to figure out how we can live together, but it isn't easy to arrange.

Really nice explanation of evolution

2009-02-06T03:23:00.000-08:00

From the economist, for Darwin's 200th birthday. There's some stuff at the end that is very populist & I don't agree with, but the review of where the theory came from & what controversies are still active (e.g. the Gould stuff) is really nicely written. Also, a discussion about how the other radical new scientific ideas of the 19th century have penetrated public acceptance, while evolution has not (in some countries.)

Evolution: Unfinished Business

Joanna loves science

2009-01-25T04:24:00.000-08:00

I've had an amazing few weeks, because I've just been learning the coolest stuff. I don't know how much of it I can communicate to you quickly, and I do need to get going as I'm still not (never!) getting enough done.

I can't remember how much you know about the work that got me this fellowship, but it had to do with the evolution of culture, which is (among other things) an altruistic distribution of behavior. There are a lot of people who are skeptical that altruism can evolve, mostly because they haven't read past the cover of Richard Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene". The entire book is about why you get multi-gene organisms despite each gene being in the business of replicating itself.

So with respect to altruism, some people have focused on something called "reciprocation" whereby you are nice to someone who's been nice to you, but that's pretty complicated to keep track of & even bacteria show altruistic behavior (behavior that costs them but benefits others). The stuff I've done rests on something called "inclusive fitness" which basically means that since you are more likely to live near someone you are related to than not, you can just be nice to everyone around you.

So the first talk I saw that was amazing work on generalized reciprocity, which is kind of in between these two ideas. You are nicer when others have recently been nice to you. This is great, because it's obviously a more adaptive form of the basic inclusive fitness result -- how likely you are to be around other people who are altruistic (like you) can be measured by how nice people tend to be towards you. The work was done by Michael Taborsky & his colleagues in Bern. I got to talk to him afterwards and now I've been invited to speak in Bern in February! I'm very excited about going.

I was very impressed with how his lab works. He started getting this new idea so the first thing they did was model the idea in simulation to see if it really made sense. Then once they'd succeeded, they started looking for the behaviour, and found it right away (in wild rats! not monkeys or anything.) Now that they have real data, they are improving their model which is also their theory, just better specified. I think this is exactly how modelling should fit into science. I think every leading laboratory will be like this, not just in biology, but in the social sciences as well, including public policy. I've known a few other labs that incorporated modelling well, but not so completely. I'm very excited therefore both about the biology and about the methodology.

The next exciting thing was that I went to Bath to talk to two other lecturers [UK -- assistant professors US] in biology about writing a grant for my new PhD student, Marios Richards. It turns out that the newer of the two lecturers, Nick Priest, is doing a whole lot of stuff on understanding variation. OK, so back to the science again. If altruism is so easy to evolve, why isn't every action altruistic? This is kind of like asking why every animal isn't the same "optimal" species. A lot of people have treated variation in nature as "noise" -- accidents in reproduction, but there's a lot more to variation than that. Some variation is actually a set of solutions stored in the genome with different behavior expressed depending on the environment the individual develops in. Some variation may even be stored in ways that makes some kinds of changes easier or harder to evolve, reflecting what's worked well for species in the past.

Incidentally, Nick Priest is using fruit flies to study how mothers control variation in their offspring. (Obviously not intentionally!) What factors (environmental, life history) lead them to increase or decrease levels of recombination. This is amazing, and from an information perspective exactly like the question of how much information gets passed on as culture, so we have tons of questions in common, and complimentary sets of answers we've been working on, including about understanding aging. So we are very excited.

Incidentally, the most stupid thing Sarah Palin ever said was that it was a waste of money to have foreign graduate students working on fruit flies. Of course, she doesn't want to understand how life really works, she wants to make rules about how it should. That's the nature of all autocracies, they always attack science because it doesn't follow orders. But the countries that come to understandings about the real world have rather a big led in health, business and other kinds of well being. Incidentally, both of the scientists I was meeting with are Americans. One came to the UK several years ago to work on stem cells, Nick came this year because the good biology was going on here. That's what happens.

Not that I think migration is bad. For science, the worst thing is when people stay at the same universities their whole lives. They neither learn as much or disseminate as much as they would if they moved around. That's why sabbaticals are integral to research universities.

Well, as if that wasn't enough, I have also been to a meeting on social evolution at the Royal Society in London where I learned tons of amazing things. I learned that all the eusocial insects (the ones with huge hives / nests built by workers that never reproduce) descended from some of the few perfectly monogamous species there are. Though now their societies are so structured they can enforce altruistic behaviour even when they aren't perfectly monogamous but have multiple fathers or even queens kicking around. I learned about mammals that act this way too -- meercats. I got invited to go get involved with modelling by two very different and incredibly famous people I really admire. And I hope to, but I need to finish writing the grants I've already started with some other people.

Then I came back and this week I heard the most amazing talk about the evolution of the central nervous system. This is getting down to when the different cell types evolved, and how they came from wild single-cell organisms. I don't think I will ever be able to work on that stuff, it is too far away from what I do, but it was so cool to find out how things work! That talk was by a guy named Detlev Arendt, and the whole talk is basically in an article from last year in Nature Reviews Genetics, if you are curious you should go look in a library for it (page 868-882, issue number 11).

I hesitate to say this, but in the meantime I also gave talk to an AI Games meeting that was national (UK) and a Bath robotics meeting which was also very good -- there are some good roboticists in Bath, mostly in Mechanical Engineering. But what I'm hesitating to say was how much less exciting that was. But I'm good at it and trained in it, so I feel obliged to do it. I've submitted two articles so far this month, both to AI journals, although both on naturalistic intelligence. (Hopefully I'll get a biology article out this week...) I know I try to do too many things, and it's tempting to leave behind the stuff that's less thrilling. But I can't bring myself to do that, nor completely convince myself I should.

One thing about the science though is just that they have a higher standard of publication, they know better when they've likely made a contribution. I keep seeing AI chasing its own tail. And philosophy too. We had two philosophy talks at the KLI and they just seemed so much more pointless, though again in the absence of all the exciting other things I would have been more interested in them. I do enjoy philosophy; I submitted proofs on one article that was essentially philosophy just this last week --- philosophy & cognitive science. I think part of the problem was that for some reason KLI didn't get speakers in that were of the same international caliber as the University had gotten in for their Darwin lectures, which is ironic since the biology guys were from much closer by! But they were much better published. I'm not clear on why we didn't make the same effort to get well-established speakers in, but maybe I'm missing something.

OK, I need to get back to work. I'm trying to resubmit a biology article and write a new cognitive science article by the end of the week. I've also got a concert to attend tonight! Will is sadly not here this weekend -- we were together two weeks in a row this month so now we are apart two weeks, and then next month will be the same. I'm going to Prague Thursday to talk about AI as well. Hmmmm...

New from US Immigration (another kind of unnatural intelligence)

2009-01-15T08:02:00.000-08:00

In case you haven't heard, there is a new thing that people who want to fly to the US have to do before they go, they have to login to a site run by the ESTA and ask permission first. This goes for any country, even the UK.

I wasn't clear on whether this applied to US citizens or not, so I tried to go to their web page. If you look at their website, you get an in-frame pop-up with a message that includes this:

You are about to access a Department of Homeland Security computer system... There is no expectation of privacy when you use this computer system. The use of a password or any other security measure does not establish an expectation of privacy. By using this system, you consent to the terms set forth in this notice...

Even in SeaMonkey (FireFox on steroids) there was no way to navigate away from this, there was only an OK button. I couldn't kill the tab without saying OK, and the "kill window" button had disappeared off the browser window. I had to kill the entire browser to not click the OK button. I couldn't do this from my dock, I had to pull up "Force Quit Applications" from my Apple menu. I wonder what you would do under Windows.

For the record, giving up privacy is not OK by me, especially on a government site concerning travel. Nor is being forced to enter into a contract just by navigating to a web page.

I actually do have a lot of both AI & NI news, I'll try to post it this weekend.

Busy as usual

2009-01-10T12:58:00.000-08:00

Hello -- well, everyone is back from their holidays now, so of course we are getting less work done, there are talks and so forth. But I did have a pretty productive break. I got that article in Monday night (well, 2am Tuesday) and I hope it will get accepted -- if so, it will come out in July! But even if not, it was good to write it and get all my thoughts on that topic down -- I'm sure it will get into somewhere eventually.

I spent the rest of this week attending talks for the KLI and doing reviewing and redoing a bunch of diagrams for a paper I'm trying desperately to get submitted. But I have to stop working on that now because I have a talk at an AI & Games conference in England on Monday (in Bradford, where I've never been before.) Then Tuesday I will go to Bath and Wednesday meet with some people I'm working on grants with, then Thur-Sunday with Will in Nottingham, then Monday & Tuesday I will attend an awesome workshop on Social Evolution that the Royal Society are organizing in London. I have finished one other article on action selection I just need to submit, and I have one and need to do more reviewing. Actually, both Will and I have totally got ourselves packed up with plans the next three months. But then the best plan is mid April we are really going to take a week vacation to celebrate our tenth anniversary. We are thinking of going to Turkey.

In case you are wondering about the gas thing, it is not affecting Austria (we have reserves good through March) but it is horrible in a lot of the former empire / neighbouring regions, particularly Bulgaria. There is a lot of anti-Russian graffiti around, on the trains and so forth (where I suppose cold people go to ride!) I think it is probably people fleeing to Austria from the cold countries. We went to see this great exhibit that Klimt originally designed in 1908, they are having a centenary of it at the Belvedere. On the way we past the Russian's monument to themselves that the Austrians are obliged to maintain, and it was all draped like it was being cleaned, which at first I thought was odd since it always looks like new. But then I realized probably there was graffiti there too.

We saw some really great talks this week, one is a new fellow who will be coming here who does experimental psychology, so that's excellent news. More scientists! He talked about (& demonstrated experimentally) how people expect to find more patterns than actually exist. Earlier this week I thought about writing the blog entry on that, but I'm too tired to be sciency now. The other was someone that after the talk I was embarrassed not to have known the literature of already, Michael Taborsky, who has some great, great data on what varies levels of altruism expressed by rats.

Also, one of the fellows at the KLI, Zsófia Virányi, always has a dog with her, Todor. Well, Zsófia and her coauthors (whom I also know) got the cover article of PNAS this week, and there is a picture of Todor and the first author's dog (Guinness) on the cover, as well as Zsófia's hand.

We are flying to England tomorrow. It's a shame Will can't work here full time too, so we wouldn't have to leave so much.

teaching and other human behavior

2008-12-31T03:47:00.000-08:00

I'm going through old emails a bit during the break -- though we are also working a lot, more on that later -- but given that we commute less we have more time and anyway it's the time of year to do it. Well, anyway, I ran into an email from my highschool English teacher Sally Berg. I'm quite sure I never would have gotten into Chicago without her since my grades weren't that great, though maybe the National Merit thing would have carried me anyway. But the point is, she taught me how to actually write essays, at least she taught me more than any one other teacher.

Glenbard North had a system whereby everyone took the basic English course in the first term, then if they got an A in that they were permitted to register for the honors courses. I guess it was a way to deal with the variety of feeder middle schools GN got, but it was nice because it was a way to prove yourself rather than just feeling "tracked" since middle school. My first-term teacher actually came up to me and said, "Joanna, I'm giving you an A, so you can take honors courses if you want to, and you probably should. But I want you to know that if you do you will never get another A in English because your spelling is so bad." As didn't matter to me and interesting courses did so I took honors and I always got Bs, until third year. Then Mrs. Berg gave a lot of us Cs our first quarter because our writing style was so bad. We were all shocked, but at least we had a gradient to follow and I think I got As the remaining two or three of the remaining quarters with her, and I learned to write. I still couldn't spell, but neither could she. It turns out she'd trained as a math teacher, but got bored of it so retrained to teach English.

I was really lucky to have someone who cared about writing. It was a big school so other people got other teachers for honors. My year also had a bunch of totally type-A parents (maybe how they all are now) who complained about their kids getting a C even for one quarter as it damaged their chances at a good college, so she wasn't given honors again so she retired early. I wonder how that affected the number of kids that got into good universities after I left?

The idea of "good universities" is considered classist and "anti-meritocratic" by a lot of Europeans -- you should have the same chance whatever university you happened to go to. I find this bizarre because you don't "happen" to go to a university, you choose one. Your education depends on your university and the courses and teachers you take within it, so you better choose carefully and get into the best place you can. Forcing universities to all be the same is forcing students to all be the same, which is forcing them all to be average, which for half of them is beyond their abilities and the other is a waste of their talents and inclinations.

Well, anyway, today I have a deadline for talks for the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association Conference. Two of my students are submitting talks and I will probably too. They are on:

Fission / fusion social organization (which humans share with chimpanzees) -- we have help from Julia Lehmann on this one which is great, she's fantastic and I'm learning a lot (hopefully the student is too! He's a brilliant undergraduate.)
The Baldwin Effect -- how learning impacts evolution. This is by my new PhD student Marios.
Social dominance, selection and variation -- this one is just me. The idea is that male dominance ranks (in monkeys) signal fitness, but most of that signal is ignored except at the highest ranks. Females also seem to like to have a mix of offspring, some from the very fittest, but some from, well, anyone. There's some cool new data from fruit flies (sorry Sarah Palin) showing information on the proportion of risk vs. sure thing you should get from your offspring, so I'm trying to apply that into understanding primate mating patterns. Hmmm...

After that is done I am trying to get a journal article in by Monday to a special issue on Humanoid AI.

Happy New Year! I will probably try to phone Rebecca for her birthday tonight or tomorrow.

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-25T09:05:00.001-08:00

Being or Nothingness (more weirdness about being an academic)

2008-12-23T04:02:00.001-08:00

One thing about being a professor is people send you books all the time. Usually text books (mostly bad ones! but some good) they want you to use for your courses so they can sell them to your students. But over the summer I got a far weirder book in the post that was clearly a work of individual art. I googled some of the key phrases in it, decided who I thought he author was, then basically forgot about it until last month when another guy I know brought up having received the same thing.

Here is a web page about the book by another person who received it. The original posting is not in English, but there are photos & a lot of comments which are in English. My comments explain who I thought the author were & why I thought it had been sent to me.

Primate Learning

2008-12-22T13:10:00.001-08:00

I updated one of my web pages that was getting lots of hits from google but nobody was staying to read it. Does it sound interesting now? I am painfully aware that it should be updated and really broken into about four pages. Normally I write new web pages over Christmas, but I have too many papers, abstracts and models to write in the next 5 weeks to do that. Maybe this summer towards the end of my sabbatical...

citing authors for AISB

2008-12-14T08:04:00.000-08:00

This is for my colleagues, not my family. I'd put it on my website but Bath's network is still down. Hopefully google will pick this up quickly!

If you want to cite references as nouns e.g. "As Bryson [3] shows..." you can't do it with the currently distributed AISB package. I have managed to hack it with natbib. Here's what you do:

In the preamble, add the line
\usepackage[numbers,sort&compress]{natbib}

Replace \bibliographystyle{AISB2008} with \bibliographystyle{unsrtnat}

You are almost there, except that the references will be too large & misaligned. Fix this by inserting the command \small right before you include your bibliography. E.g. for my two bibliography files biblio.bib & jjb.bib:

\small
\bibliography{biblio,jjb}

\end{document}

Now you should be able to use \citet{Bryson06} to get the format shown above, or use \citep for ordinary references. Or any of the other normal natbib citations (see the natbib manual.)

Typical KLI Dinner

2008-12-13T07:37:00.000-08:00

I just ran into the KLI photostream at flickr. Who knew? Anyway, here I'm in the foreground sitting between Will & Marc Kirschner. If you click the picture you get the whole photostream. Currently there's just pictures from the meeting on evolution last July.

PS that's not actually a typical dinner!

Becoming a Primatologist (or Biological Anthropologist or Theoretical Biologist or...)

2008-12-12T03:51:00.001-08:00

This post is about professional identity. I've never worried that much about creating an identity, though I do worry about honestly signaling the identity I have. That's why I've always taken care to keep web pages up-to-date, things like that. There's no point to doing work no one reads or learns about. Neither is there a point to becoming a repository of expertise that nobody accesses. You need to make sure people who might need to know what you know can find you.

Well, maybe part of that process is about creating an accessible professional identity. Consider the last four public talks I've given and how I was introduced. The fourth most recent was at a symposium on Modelling Cognitive Behaviour (in machines, organisms, organisations). Given that that is exactly what I do, it's not surprising I guess that my introduction was just matter-of-fact. But then I gave two talks in biology groups: the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Ethology (which is different from the KLI I work for!) and the Behavioural Biology group at Utrecht. At both, the people who introduced me (who are friends as well as colleagues of mine) made a large point that I came to their discipline by an unusual route. I guess it is unusual, but also their institutes are closer to my undergraduate degree and some of my research than many computer science departments would be (sadly including Bath!) Then the really weird thing is that someone I've attended conferences with for years (and given two talks before in his laboratory) Rolf Pfeifer of the Zurich AI Lab, introduced me to his group as someone who did biomimetic robotics. I do do biomimetic AI, and I guess I do robotics in that I am very involved with a number of robotics projects in Europe, but mostly in the capacity as an external expert hired but the European Commission. But it was strange after my other friends told their students I don't do what they do, when I do, to have him tell his students I do what they do, when I don't very often.

So my concern is, if no one is sure what I'm generally doing, is that a problem? I should think they would only care about the thing I am doing that impacts them --- particular papers and so forth. But maybe science is more social than that, and people really do need some kind of a larger handle to grasp.

Anyway, this hasn't hampered me from having an excellent week. I got to see all the robotics and AI stuff happening in Zurich -- I was especially impressed by some of the self-assembly work that was going on. One other funny thing -- there was a postdoc there who thanked me for helping her pass 6.001, the MIT programming course. I was her tutor in 1995! We had a fun time talking about careers and Europe. She already has an EU grant, so she is well on her way. She is originally from Asia, so has now lived in more continents than me -- lucky her!

But I also talked to a bunch of faculty -- a full professor of political science who like me uses agent-based modelling some of the time, and four primatologists / anthropologists. Two full professors, one who came I think from physics, the other from human anthropology though his work looks more like a biologist than any of the others, a reader / associate prof who comes from a medical background and a lecturer / assistant prof who comes from cognitive neuroscience. I had a fantastic time and learned a lot and have three offers to work on grants with well-established researchers now. Hopefully I will get all of them written before the end of my sabbatical -- in fact, hopefully two of them will be done quite soon since I need to have grants in place by next October so I can still be doing research -- even more research -- when the sabbatical is over.

Anyway, about identity, I am thinking about writing a book and see if that helps. But I'm not sure when I'll get it done...

Speaking of identity, I attended Mark Wood's graduation (my first PhD supervisee that I was the first supervisor for -- I was Manu Tanguy's second supervisor.) Another student from my AI group also graduated, Andrew Carnell -- I was also his internal examiner so I read his thesis too. I also saw two of my current students in Bath who are also doing cool work, and managed to talk to a few members of staff about what I might be teaching next year... it looks like Bath students may be getting a little AI in their coursework now, so hurrah for all the work we did on the new curriculum. Mark's mother took the picture.

Mumbai

2008-11-27T07:42:00.000-08:00

I just checked Facebook & Twitter which I normally never do from work, and *no one* I know is talking about this (though if you go to http://search.twitter.com you can see constant live updates from people who are talking about it, many from people who are there.) Or at least you could when I wrote this, of course once it's not really happening that link will be less interesting.

I don't understand how people can be not upset. In my mind this is a bigger military change in strategy than September 11th. It is more organized, the people who are being killed (both Indian & UK/US) are much more specifically targeted, and they did it when they knew all America would be home watching TV. This is a much more targeted attack.

You could even argue it is a more ethical than a conventional air raid, since they know who they are killing and why. This could be a whole new paradigm for sectarian warfare, which might appeal to organized religious people. The people doing this don't have to be much braver or more intelligent than ordinary soldiers. It's only unusual because it's happening outside of what is conventionally considered a context of war. But I'm sure the fighters are convinced this is a part of a larger war. I am afraid there will be more attacks like this. I hope I'm wrong and this is as fixable as airport security.

I keep waiting to see an intelligent analysis of who might be doing this and why. I assume it has something to do with the "redrawn map of Pakistan" which is some sort of internet rumor allegedly started by an American conservative think tank trying to figure out how to stabilize the Middle East. Obama has said he will take troops out of Iraq & put them in Afghanistan, and allegedly some people are afraid Pakistan would be threatened by being between two states that are relatively organized and friendly with America, although of course most countries in the world do not live next to failed states. For years, India wasn't friendly with America because they sided with Russia because they were afraid of China, but that silliness ended in the last decade.

I'm glad the US is now friends with the world's largest democracy, but unfortunately a lot of people in the world believe every game is zero sum, so for example India can't gain anything without Pakistan losing. Zero-summness is provably wrong -- look at how all the economies in the world grew together for so long, and are now shrinking together. But it's hard to convince some people with reason & evidence -- like for example, American creationists.

This isn't at all to say it must be Pakistan who did it. Perceived threats to Pakistan could be seen as a bad thing to many smaller communities too. India is huge; there could well be domestic groups who are worried. I suppose no one wants to publish an analysis prematurely in fear of making things worse.

I was not going to celebrate Thanksgiving today anyway. I have to go out with the KLI. Will & I had a nice lunch together Monday before I left Dublin & tried to be thankful then.

Will and I famous together

2008-11-10T13:41:00.001-08:00

I've had about 15 hours of sleep since Thursday, but I just spotted this as I was going to bed. Be sure to click the picture & see the review of our favourite cafe! (And be sure to look carefully at all the people & laptops on the couch :-)

I was in Washington DC for 3 days for some symposia -- I had three papers there, two with coauthors who also managed to come. Avri Bilovich, who had a paper from his undergraduate dissertation, and Philipp Rohlfshagen, who had a paper from his very short postdoc with me. They both did totally brilliantly. The meeting was frustrating because I really wanted to attend two of the symposia a lot, but I could only be in one place. There was a great one on culture (which was also therefore on a lot of humanoid AI), but I spent a lot of time in another one on Naturally Inspired AI, because it was a lot of my old friends from MIT (and some rather powerful other people) talking about a topic I really cared about. Since big decisions sometimes get made at these things, sometimes you have to actually sit through a meeting on a topic you already know about.

It was really great to see a bunch of my friends from MIT -- one even came through DC by coincidence (fortunately, a coincidence picked up by our social networking sites) and spent late Saturday evening with us. I also saw my friend Cyril Brom who does more with my thesis work than I did, and he has invited me to Prague again in January, so that will be great, and a bunch of friends from Edinburgh. Still, I wish I could have sat in longer on the culture meeting and met even more people -- I'm always curious.

I don't mean to complain too much though. Avri and I had a lot of fun arguing with the MIT guys about whether statistical models of natural language (like Will does) are actually anything like what human minds do. Avri hadn't realized the full significance of his project until he heard all the arguments, so now he is very excited so will hopefully do the extra work we need to make this into a journal article. That was actually a great talk to have for your first talk. He was really very poised. Philipp is a brilliant researcher and has spoken many times before, so he also did fine. It was his first time in the US and Avri's first time in DC so they came a day early and toured around.

Sunday afternoon (after the meeting which ended at noon but before our flights at 6pm) I went into town with Philipp and my friend Jeremy Wyatt and we had a nice lunch and walked around the White House. The taxi driver asked if we wanted to say hello to President Bush, and I said "no, we'll wait on that one" so then he asked if we wanted to say Good-bye" -- Philipp and Jeremy did! It was an unbelievably pretty and warm Fall day so great for walking around.

Anyway, I never really got over my jetlag and kept waking up at 4am and then just working or reading about Barack Obama and his future plans. I haven't been this excited about someone/something since I got into the Beatles in highschool. Everything has just been done so well and so elegantly so far. Of course, we are all crossing our fingers (and even offering our help) hoping it will continue going well now that the really hard work has started.

We had a party at our apartment Wednesday morning, but the election was already all over by the start of the party at 8am. A surprising number of my friends came over and we watched the concession speech and then the victory speech off the internet. We shared a bottle of champagne and fresh orange juice and ate amazing Viennese pastries. Then Will left to go to Nottingham and I went to the KLI to work and to attend a talk. The talk was pretty interesting, it was about which species get funded for study in government labs and how we really need more. Then I went to a meeting at the Austrian Academy of Sciences that Richard Gregory had told me about in Bristol last month, he said we should meet up. I only saw half a talk, but I took Richard and his friend out for a drink while they waited for dinner, and then I got invited by the Austrians to come along to dinner as well. So that was Wednesday, and then Thursday I flew to DC, and I flew back this morning. So I guess I should really go to bed now.

slogging

2008-11-02T02:36:00.000-08:00

Hi -- very short entry this week. I spent most of the last 10 days rewriting an article I thought it would take 3 days to rewrite, then I had one day to catch up on a lot of admin and then I had to go to Genoa for three days to review the RobotCub project. It is really great to think about cognitive robots again --- I've done a couple of talks about robots lately. I think it's good to get away and look at a problem another way. Also, it's just good to see old friends. This is the fourth year I've reviewed this project, next year will be the last, but anyway several people on the project I already knew before as well.

Anyway, I am back with Will in Vienna on a couch in our favorite cafe trying to work because we are both behind but fairly tired. Next week is going to be crazy too, but hopefully I will resubmit a paper early before I go to another weekend trip, this one I will have to do talks as well, and will be travelling with former students. Will and I haven't seen much of each other lately so he has agreed to stay until the election results are announced -- assuming it gets sorted out the by midnight 4 November California time! Maybe we will have an election party on Wednesday morning.

Civic Courage

2008-10-25T06:45:00.001-07:00

I had the most amazing conversation this morning, with my friend Vera Schweder, who invited me to breakfast at her flat. Among other things (some of them pastries) she introduced me to the concept of civic courage. She wasn't sure that was the right terms in English, but I have found it several other places, mostly in translations from Russian or other East European languages. This is what it takes to tell someone in authority over you something they might not want to hear. She said it takes this even to tell a waiter that he has brought you the wrong food.

I absolutely love the term, and it also just opened up a whole way of thinking about democracy and the cultural differences that I've experienced. In America, it is actually next to nothing to complain politely about food in a restaurant, while in England there are low-ranking academics who would stand up and protest in a department meeting but never dream of sending food back. So this means that while the courage aspect is no doubt a personality trait, the extent to which it is expressed is culturally variable. One of the reasons America is so different from Europe is that the political systems and most organisations are designed to facilitate communication. This is part of why America has a more mobile society, and part of the reason it has more innovation --- good ideas can come from anywhere.

But it also means an American can seem more threatening and courageous than they really are if they come to Europe. Will has told me that Europeans think Americans share particularly with each other because they are nationalist, but I've always known that really we would share with anyone, but it's just easier to share with each other because both sides expect it. Sharing is of course a two-way street -- if you talk to someone but they never tell you anything then you stop.

Once I visited one of my English friends in his flat during my MSc in Edinburgh and we had a nice conversation over tea and he said afterwards how wonderful it was to talk because he knew you could tell Americans anything. And I reflected but couldn't thin of a single thing he'd said that was even slightly exhibitionist. I knew that one of my other English friends definitely felt voyeuristic when she talked to me, you could see her look kind of excited and guilty when she said what she really thought about things (again, nothing an American would hesitate to talk about in a public coffee shop!) But with this guy, I really never figured out what he'd been referencing. I think this aspect of the English culture has changed a lot since 1992, though of course so have I having lived in Europe so long. But there is still a big difference. And I will say also, although I've never known enough people from South America, from the ones I've known I'm often reminded that we are American together, this is something they share even on a different continent. It is something New World. Maybe it's something from our ancestors, about people who would go settle a different continent. But all of us are experimenting with governments, no one brought royalty from Europe. And, of course, I suppose all of us have been influenced by the Native Americans, but I don't know much about how.

But I do think the fact as an American I never even had the notion you need the term "civil courage" means something about how our societies are organised. In fact, I think if we called it anything we'd call it a part of our civic duty. It's nothing to be proud of if you tell authorities what they need to know. It's the norm, and it's something to be ashamed of if you don't.

After breakfast I went and saw a movie in the Viennale called L' Homme qui marche. I just wanted to see something arty and intellectual while I waited for Will to get here, and I picked it out of a German-language programme (fortunately I know the little key to look for: meU - mit english Undertitles) It was about someone who was so brilliant but crazy that he lived as an artist for decades but then died of starvation in Paris. It was ironic since he'd escaped the USSR where of course artists were paid. Unless they were killed. The movie must have been hard for the Parisians to watch, since they think they love and support the arts, but I think one of the points is that sometimes genius comes with so many crazy ideas it is impossible to support, it isn't viable. The old theme of genius being hand in hand with madness.

The English description of the film in the on-line Viennale catelogue is totally wrong, don't read it. It's not that they got the English wrong, they got the plot & the themes wrong -- what kind of a cinema buff wrote that? But fortunately (?) it was based on a real story, so you can read about the actual artist and his life on wikipedia: Vladimir Slepian The movie didn't show him at all in his painting part of his life, but showed him from when he was becoming a writer until the end of his life. He is in an artistic scene in Paris and there are fantastic scenes of French political discussions from the various ages he witnesses but says nothing during. And a chain of interesting friendships and cafes. The trailer also doesn't do it justice, but it's hard to put French film pacing into two minute summaries. It really was an engaging film!

I promised some weeks ago to tell you another great concept I learned, this one from Dennett, about "shmesh". The conversation was about philosophy, and its relation to science. I was talking about how it seemed like some philosophers only saw philosophy as a collection of techniques and didn't really care what they proved. This was what turned me off it at Chicago -- I was interested in the topics, but I couldn't stand the students I knew who were studying it, at least I couldn't stand arguing with them. Dan replied that he had recently written this paper about shmesh. Shmesh is the game of chess, only with one difference --- the king can move two squares, not one. He said that there were thousands of papers written proving this and that about chess, but it would be ludicrous to write the thousands of identical papers you could write about shmesh. But unfortunately, this was what some philosophers were doing. They'd publish papers pointing out errors in each other's previously published papers, yet none of these papers was actually about anything anyone really thought or cared about.

As an aside, Dan, Will and our mutual friend Phil Kime that introduced us were the first "useful" philosophers I ever knew. I used to think the attitude that you should apply philosophy to something actually interesting was rare. But at the KLI we've had a parade of really interesting people doing real work advancing biology coming through who are called philosophers, and I can see that they do use some of the philosopher's tools to help check their reasoning is right. It's been a fantastic year so far intellectually (and aesthetically, but you knew that if you've been here!)

Anyway, I was talking about the concept underlying shmesh with Vera. We were talking about people who spend huge amounts of time watching TV or playing computer games instead of doing something (possibly, instead of worrying). I spoke about some of the people I'd known at MIT. Marvin Minsky used to complain about the "trillions of processors" that were wasted for hours ever Sunday afternoon. Rod Brooks once told me before an exam that he felt guilty for making 700 undergraduates that were that smart think for two hours about stuff that was so meaningless. Vera and I talked about the ambition to both examine (or at least teach) undergraduates and accomplish something useful at the same time. If you could give them problems that were both suitable for practice and learning but might also lead to new discoveries, wouldn't that be better? I do this a bit with my dissertation students, but I've never had the chance to teach anything I knew or cared enough about to really do this in a course. But maybe I will get a chance in the coming years.

money, England

2008-10-13T13:14:00.000-07:00

George Soros is very smart and I think honest. Bill Moyers reminds me a bit of Dad. Here they are talking about what's going on. It's the evaluation that makes the most sense of any I've run into, from what I know.

Last week I was in England. First, while we were still in Vienna, Will and I went to the long night of the museums again this year, accidentally staying out til midnight, then had to get up at 4:30 for a 6:45 flight. We had a bit less than one day in Nottingham, then went to Bath where I met with my new students -- one undergraduate, one PhD, both of whom I'm mostly supervising by email & chat. We also had dinner with a bunch of our friends. Then I had to go to Birmingham for a talk, and Will back to Nottingham, then I went to Bristol for a symposium I was one of the speakers at. A lot of the other speakers were pretty famous, so I was pleased to be asked. There was a botanist, Anthony Trewavas, who talked about plant behaviour which was really startlingly interesting. Three of us, Susan Blackmore, Owen Holland and I, talked about consciousness one way or another. I reused my talk from two weeks ago (plus some other material since this time I had 40 minutes, not 10!) One of the other speakers, Richard Gregory, was one of the people who founded the AI department at Edinburgh --- in fact, the last of the three people living, and the only one I hadn't previously met. I tried to talk to him at the beginning but couldn't think of anything intelligent to say and he wasn't very interested. But fortunately he liked my talk so we had a long conversation before dinner while the others were out enjoying the view from a patio over the Avon Gorge. He was very encouraging. Since this was the first time I spoke about consciousness publicly other than last week (the first time when I didn't have to!) I was glad it went OK. I'm not sure whether it's a good direction to take my career, but maybe it is.

Prof. Gregory said that he always sort of regretted leaving Cambridge, so I asked why he did, and he said it was out of frustration not to be able to study the whole brain. I asked whether Edinburgh had let him do that, whether he'd really learned anything from working with AI, and he said no. It was surprising, so I asked him twice. He seems still very interested and engaged in the ideas of machine intelligence -- in fact, his talk was a review of the talks at the original AI meeting 51 years ago, which he attended (he also reread the proceedings.) But he left Edinburgh after a decade and came back to doing biology in Bristol, where they gave him a whole department. He really is very amazing.

The night before I was explaining to a couple of the professors who also came the night before (I won't say which!) about how deflation works. They were asking how there could be no demand when people all need things, and I was explaining that if people can't afford to buy things it doesn't matter how much they want them from an economic perspective --- they can't buy them, so there's an oversupply, so stores have to lower prices. It is amazing to me people don't get taught that stuff here in highschool like we did. Though I guess I don't know how many Americans would remember they got taught it. I remember Barb didn't remember all the things I know we both got taught in jr high! So maybe they got taught about the depression and don't remember it too. Will says he just got taught endlessly about WWII.

Anyway, Saturday I went back to Nottingham and read five days of email & got to see Will for a few hours, then flew back to Vienna yesterday. I hope you guys can make due with following links rather than pretty pictures --- I've got quite a lot of deadlines in the next 10 days.

Science, Philosophy & Culture

2008-10-03T00:20:00.000-07:00

I agreed months ago to talk at the Vienna Consciousness meeting which happened here yesterday (Friday). The format they do is to fly in a few big names, let them talk 30 minutes, then have local people talk for 10 minutes each afterwards. So it didn't seem like too big a deal to do the 10-minute talk. Especially since they were flying in Dan Dennett, so I already knew his work. But when John (the guy in charge) reminded me of my commitment two weeks ago I'd totally forgotten I needed to write an article as well. I panicked briefly & then decided I shouldn't write a critique of Dennett but rather play to my own strength & just talk about the consequences of his current views for robot consciousness, since I would probably know more about robots than anyone else who would turn up. I wrote something quite quickly which actually turned into a slightly longer & more complicated thing than I'd intended. It fleshed out some thinking I'd been doing about a functional role for conscious attention & how it correlated to known cognitive processes in animals. All the papers I'm talking about here are available from the link if you click on the picture, just click the link that says "program" in the upper left corner.

So John also asked me to come out to the airport with him when he went to pick up Dan Thursday. On the way there we talked about my paper which he broadly liked but then he said that the problem with Dan (& me) was that we want to take the soul out of consciousness. For myself, I totally agree -- I think "consciousness" and "soul" are two perfectly nice words with rich meanings and histories and there's no reason to confound them. In fact, it was the fact people confuse the two so often that makes me not normally want to have anything to do with writing consciousness papers. But I was perturbed to have a leading biologist act like this was a bad thing and asked him what he meant by "soul". He said essentially (as I understood it) an individual's values and moral obligation. Since I think that consciousness is involved in action selection I obviously think values would be linked to that. So I said "John, that's fine, I can see how that is related to consciousness, but 95% of the people on the planet mean by `soul' their personal chunk of the supernatural stuff that makes life meaningful. Why do you want to confuse that with a sensible idea about values and morality?" I didn't really understand his answer. I realize that people of course usually think that supernatural stuff is also where morality comes from, but it's also easy to evolve morality and he didn't really say anything to me that indicated he didn't think that could happen.

So of course I told Dennett about this conversation in advance of his talk. And at the end of my own talk, when someone asked a question about whether I was saying that everything was conscious (I'd already given an example of a conscious robot and a robot that wasn't conscious on its own), I said (among other things) "No, but it does mean a few robots and most animals would be at least a little bit conscious. And I think it's time we separate our ideas about ethics from consciousness so we can get clearer about both." Some people in the audience were quite unhappy about that, because they thought as soon as you said animals were conscious it "proved" you owed them ethical obligation. Which maybe it does, but as I said, we need to talk about why and whether and how much.

Audiences make more noise in Austria than in the UK. My talk went very well, and it was the first time I've ever had someone go "no!" when I got my warning I would need to finish talking in a few minutes from the moderator. :-)

Anyway, the previous night (Thursday, when all the speakers had flown in) we'd been at dinner, and a few of us including Dennett had been standing around talking about people's obsessions with consciousness, and I said I was starting to think that maybe the pope was sort of right, that reason did lead to nihilism. I told them about the economic idea of staples -- the things that you spend money on even when you are in an economic crisis, and how economists used to be surprised that people treated coffee as a staple, but that in the 2001 recession people had treated computer games as a staple too. I said we seemed to work very hard to find things we could immerse ourselves in so we wouldn't think too hard about the wrong things.

Well, Dennett got a second chance to talk on Friday afternoon, and this time instead of talking about basics of consciousness (his multiple drafts / fame in the brain theories he'd presented and I & others had discussed in the morning) he presented the kind of stuff I think I would have expected to hear from a philosopher when I was in highschool --- he did talk about the soul. He said humans are not only conscious but also have souls because we have language and we know responsibility and can reason about our moral obligations. It was great. One thing I'd never understood when we worked together in the 1990s was why he thought language was essential for consciousness, but his new paper says language is just a greater form of "publication" than episodic memory, so when you communicate what you are aware of you essentially have a larger conscious system. And with this point, maybe it is one he made before, but since I've been learning a lot about language and cultural evolution and stuff for the last decade, maybe I just finally understood, or maybe he's saying it better now, I don't know. But I totally buy that conscious experience is different for humans because we can label things, think about more things at once (a theory I'm working on called "cognitive compression", but Liz Spelke calls it "the boring theory of language" :-) And it was a totally beautiful move to use it to link in ethics and give the audience at least some information about a subject they really cared about.

I have to say, one of the other speakers they flew in, Giulio Tononi, had the most basic view of consciousness I've ever heard -- just when you have parts of the brain (or any information system) where together they have higher mutual information than apart, that's it. I think. I might have believed that was a model of the thalamus, but I couldn't see how that was, in itself, a model of consciousness, and I think a lot of people were also saying "but what's it for? What does it do?" And he had a lot of guts, he's like "that's all it is, it doesn't do anything, that's just consciousness." And at some point I suddenly realized that the way I felt trying to understand that must be how other people felt trying to understand my talk where I was leaving out all the stuff about souls and ethics from my simple "clean" notion of consciousness.

Sorry I haven't posted much. We had symposia at the KLI two weekends in a row, and then this Consciousness thing last weekend (it's Friday again now) and one of those weeks I was also in the UK and I am just horribly behind. Next week I will have to go to the UK also and I am talking in two towns and vivaing someone for their PhD at Bath & seeing my students there -- I have a new PhD student, Marios Richards. I don't have any new funding, but he decided to come anyway for a year. I am also trying to finish proofreading the dissertation of my student Hagen Lehmann & also Marios' MSc, and then of course I am still trying to get my own work done and papers published etc.

Will is here this week -- he wanted to see Dennett but had to go to Oslo for this huge Human Rights / International Criminal Court meeting where he met among others the US ambassador at large for war crimes issues (whom he sat next to at dinner!) So he only got to have breakfast with Dan on Sunday morning --- and had to try to explain what he was doing. Hearing him describe it to Dan was great, because suddenly it all became about how individual identity leads to language and interacts with national identity and political constructions --- very cool.

Anyway, I have to go, we are late for dinner now. I will try to remember to tell you about "shmesh" which was another important thing I learned from Dennett, but maybe next time.

Measuring Biology

2008-09-14T04:38:00.000-07:00

Hi -- I just got a few minutes because a meeting I had scheduled for the hour between the most recent KLI symposium, Measuring Biology, and the associated boat trip got canceled.

The paper I submitted that I mentioned last time has got rejected, but I will just submit it somewhere else. I'm annoyed I haven't done this yet, but I didn't in Cambridge have access to the notes I had about journals to submit it to, and then since I've been here I've had to revise three other papers that got into AAAI symposia & write a new paper on consciousness from scratch. It is just a commentary about Dennett's model of consciousness which he is talking about here later this month. In keeping with what I learned as an MIT student I decided to make it interesting by being bold, so I basically hashed out a functionalist model that was in keeping with what he was saying, supported it with some examples from the behavioural neuroscience literature, and then claimed there are robots that already do this. I'm surprisingly pleased with the paper so will probably submit it somewhere -- after the resubmission of this & also one of the three conference papers is perfectly ready for a journal.

It's just about finding time -- I can't believe you can have papers lying there & not get them submitted. But I am massively behind on commenting on my student Hagen's PhD dissertation which he gave me a draft of & on a journal article review and on contacting an author for a book I'm editing. But the last three days I have been doing my KLI fellow duty & attending a workshop here. This time it was about Measuring Biology. Some of it was interesting, but basically it was kind of preaching to the choir. I guess I have been learning a lot about measurement this year. Also, two of the participants here were at U of Chicago right before I was (only as deans / professors, not students) so unsurprisingly I've already got the right model about what you are actually trying to communicate when you give a scientific result. It's not just "this is significant, True or False", it's about communicating the magnitude of the effect and the likelihood that your theory is a better account of it.

But they talked a lot about the role of a scientist in communicating -- not just discovering -- their work, and that gave me the idea of doing some totally unnecessary figures for the paper that got rejected, because I know people don't all follow the way I argue (or for that matter have time to really read a paper) so it would be better to just have a big picture showing lots of replications & statistical testing. So I'm leaving yet another run of the model running on my desktop this week so that I can get some simpler data for those figures.

There are a bunch of new fellows at the KLI and they are doing a much better job of demanding the institute be like a proper scientific institute should be -- a place to have conversations & give talks to other fellows & get feedback on your work. Before I think it was too hierarchical. So that's very exciting, although of course again time consuming!

No pictures this week -- I went from being thinner than usual at the end of July to barely fitting in my clothes now. This month is going to be hard too -- there is another workshop next weekend & then the consciousness thing the week after that, which as a speaker I'm invited to a lot of meals for.

Submission

2008-08-25T09:11:00.000-07:00

I finally submitted an article I've been meaning to all year. It's just that I kept realizing I didn't know enough. It was originally an article proving something was possible that most people don't think is (evolving altruism) but in fact that is already known -- at least by a few mathematicians. So I've finally rewritten it with a brief review of the fact it's well known and now concentrating on what that can tell those of us interested in the evolution of human behavior.

I was trying to submit it before flying on Wednesday, but I wound up spending three hours listening to and talking with a really cool philosopher who is interested in the role of modelling in science and of mechanism in scientific explanation. Bill Bechtel. It still wasn't really enough time because I wanted to find out whether it was fair to call things like genetic drift "mechanisms" (a point of dispute at the KLI) but we had a previous dinner engagement and then the next morning both they and us were flying from Vienna.

Now we're in Cambridge and I was too jetlagged to be very useful for a couple days, at least on hard stuff like writing articles, but I got it finished Sunday. But submitting is a total struggle, it's not just the content, it's the formatting and jumping through the right hoops, filling in web forms etc. All this and I sent it to a journal where 90% of papers get rejected. But I figured out last week where to submit the paper next & have commented into my text the stuff I'll change for that. But I stupidly forgot to bring the file where I wrote down the journals I've decided on at the KLI so if it does get rejected in less than a week I still won't resubmit it 'til I get back to Vienna.

I have so many cool ideas to do next but first I have to review a bunch of papers and a grant which I've been putting off and also some PhD dissertations. Hagen has finally submitted a draft to me, and I am the internal for another student at Bath. But I'm optimistic I will get through this quickly. We are getting up very early and getting tons of work done now. So hopefully I'll get some more of my own work done before I go home too.

PS cold-blooded cognition shot

2008-08-15T06:01:00.001-07:00

I forgot to add, I took a picture for the cold-blooded cognition page they are making for the Vienna Cognitive Biology group. Dinosaurs may not have been cold-blooded, but I'm sure that robot dinosaurs are!

Transit

2008-08-14T07:08:00.000-07:00

Sorry for not getting around to blogging earlier this week. The time in Edinburgh was crazy. We did go to our favorite modern art galleries (out along the waters of leith) on the first day, but then we just sat in the cafe and worked a few hours, then had lunch, then went to see the exhibits. Will was incredibly depressed to be back in the UK, not helped by the fact it was raining, but despite how awesome that walk is. But he cheered up when he got to work and then the art was great. Ironically one of the shows was this amazing early photography exhibition from Austria, Hungary, Czech and Poland. They were really playing with the technology to see what could be done with it, expressed, not just taking pictures. The sun came out while we were in the first gallery (as it always seems to there - I don't think I've seen their lawn when it wasn't sunny!) and we walked back into town the short way and made it in in time to see the new Informatics building -- AI, Cog Sci & Computer Science have all been moved in to a huge new building right next to the one I used to be in when I was in McGonigle's lab (with the monkeys.) It isn't that great looking from the outside but the inside was amazing. It seems to me like it has combined and done better the job that they were trying to do at MIT with the Media Lab and the new CSAIL building. I hope they get a huge burst of productivity. There were certainly a lot of PhD students working at 6:30 on a Friday evening which was good to see, as well as professors, and even though there was a going-away party going on for a retiring secretary. She was quite drunk & thought we'd come just to see her go, though of course we hadn't known about the party! We saw Will's PhD supervisor Richard Shillcock and also some other old friends, and then we went out for a beer with Mark Steedman.

Saturday we just worked, though in good cafes (and with a nice lunch!) Will was working on his lectures (he got that paper submitted) and I was working on my talk for the conference, including extending some of the models & reading up on things.

Sunday the conference started -- not till evening, but I spent the afternoon at a workshop about long-tailed macaques and how they are interacting with humans. There are places macaques have lived with people for centuries but suddenly there seems to be less tolerance on both sides, and of course the macaques lose. Also a ton are being sold to China for research. You aren't supposed to buy wild-caught monkeys anymore, but China has all these breeding colonies right on the borders with Cambodia and such places -- sometimes even in them -- and given the huge black market it is never clear if the monkeys were really bred or whether they were smuggled in & then sold out. I was mostly there because I was interested in the shifts in macaque behavior, but you can't help caring about the conservation and social issues (which are inseparable.)

The conference was amazing and I won't try to go into it all here. But it was a lot of work. My colleague that I wrote about in the last posting (but one) was there running around aggressively promoting her theories. I mean, I ask a lot of questions at talks, but I can't quite imagine harranging people after their talks, but she is very successful, so maybe it's a good strategy. Anyway, there was a lot of modelling this time --- two of the biggest groups in primatology have smart people doing models now which they presented. I was most impressed with the one from the Max Plank for Evolutionary Anthropology (unsurprisingly! it is full of smart people.) They had this great ecological model done entirely in terms of social networks rather than a spatial model like I mostly do. (I've had one student do a social-space model, on terrorism, extremism, the media & opinion formation). The work the MPI presented was great, but they talked to me at my poster & so I know they later hit a bit of a ceiling for not having really modelled more of the ecosystem, but I expect they can hack together a solution within their current framework. The other group presenting a modelling talk was from the German Primate Center at Goettinger (where I went to that amazing conference last December). They had a nice cognitively-minimalist spatial model of baboon troop formation. But they said in their talk they have hit the ceiling with that and will have to start putting some more intelligence in to get some of the troop formations they see, though they did get some of the basic dynamics from their minimalist model.

I was also talking to two other women I already knew had modelling projects on but weren't giving talks about them -- their work isn't so far along yet. One of them, Julia Lehmann and I, talked about setting up a network for biological anthropology agent-based modelling, especially to share code. On the one hand it's scary to share your code because you are giving away some of your competitive advantage, but on the other hand it's thrilling because it's kind of like working in a giant group, where anyone might help make the improvements and solve the problems & discover the new knowledge & understanding you want. It's hard to get all the tradeoffs right, but the idea of open software is that you are most valuable for your expertise, so you can afford to be generous with your products. I hope that is true of scientific modelling to! I expect so. Certainly no one has a monopoly on how to run rats through mazes, so I don't see why modellers should be any less open in publishing their methods than ordinary psychologists and biologists. We should actually be able to make the most and fastest progress if we can keep a good culture together, because we can communicate our theories so efficiently and completely.

Anyway, the meeting ended late Friday with a dinner which Will came to. I got to sit next to this (other, besides Will) complete genius I've read some papers by but never met, he was pretty interesting. Saturday we got up and went to hear a quartet play at Queen's Hall like we used to, and then we had lunch & went around some of the contemporary galleries in town, and then had dinner. Then Will had do leave on a 7am flight on Sunday, so I had a day to do something he doesn't really like to do -- go see the theatre at the festival fringe! Except I went back to sleep & didn't wake up until 9:30am, so I really only had about 12 hours to see hundreds of shows in the end -- and to figure out what to see. The festival has in some sense been a complete fiasco this year due to a computer failure -- neither the computers on site nor the internet stuff is working. Also, the British are in terror over the economy so it was unbelievably uncrowded for a Sunday -- sort of like back in 1992 the first time I was there. I could certainly live in Edinburgh another five years, maybe forever. It's even better when you have a salary than when you are a student.

So Monday I had the 7am flight. I got to Vienna around noon and home around 1:30 and spent the rest of the day catching up on email and doing laundry and cleaning the apartment. I'm still trying to sort out my US taxes this year (I've got an extension until October). I have no filing cabinets or shelving in my flat in Vienna and most of our records are in Nottingham so it's been challenging finding things.

The last three days I've been catching up on obligations like reviews and also doing something I meant to do for years, which is straightening out my computer file systems with my papers in them. It was a mess every since I got my laptop at Bath, because there were copies that started out the same then diverged. But now I just use my laptop as a portable hard disk, so I network to that disk from whatever desktop I can work on. So now that things are finally cleared up (and I found the stuff I was looking for for the paper I need to write) I need to think about getting it into a serious revision control system. But anyway, at least my files are all in one place and backed up. I'm also trying to get this paper submitted before our next trip next week.

Tomorrow is a holiday in Austria -- Mariä Himmelfahrt, I think based on that well-known Biblical event where Mary ascends to heaven. Last year no one told me so I was wondering where everyone was. This year I told all the new fellows about it, and now anyway I just flew to Ljubljana and am waiting in a restaurant for Will and his students to get here. He is very popular here at the restaurant because he's booked a table for 14. Anyway, it's not a holiday in Slovenia tomorrow (at least not at the European Summer School) so he will be teaching and I can work on my paper, so that's great. But Saturday we will come back into town & do the tourist thing. Apparently it is quite pretty. I'm just in a square now & can't see anything, but at the airport there were really impressive and pretty clumps of mountains here and there surrounded by plains filled with grain --- mostly field corn! I haven't seen any of that in Austria, I guess they just let their animals graze there, though there is some sweet corn around Altenberg. Anyway, it's hard to believe there was such a terrible war here not long ago.

Speaking of wars, the whole flight (only 50 minutes!) I was reading about Georgia in a small edition of the WSJ that they had on the plane. Except for one other article about how China is cracking down on Tibet during the Olympics --- summary executions, torture to death, disappearances. But as terrible as that is, the idea that Russia is going to get to bully the world by monopolizing all the oil and gas from Europe & Central Asia (and have Iran do the same for the middleast) is so unacceptable. Ironic to think about in the airplane, but I though I would way rather give up all the gas and oil (or 3/4ths of it anyway and pay a lot more for what's left) than let people have power to do this kind of crap. Commodities are so passe. Communication, computation & creativity are enough, who needs to drive hunks of metal around the place. I have to admit it is much easier to think this if I get to stay in Vienna than if I have to live somewhere like Nottingham. But even so, it's better than having bombs dropped on civilian buildings and a brilliant new democracy and economy destroyed.

Hope of deliverance from the darkness that surrounds us -- that's a line from a weird late Paul McCartney song, which the Slovenian radio has chosen to play just now.

ceilidh spider monkeys

2008-08-03T02:26:00.000-07:00

Just ran into this on the IPS site while checking whether Will could come to the opening ceremony.

In Edinburgh

2008-08-02T03:19:00.000-07:00

We're in Edinburgh for the primate meeting I blogged about before. It is great as always here, though of course Will prefers Vienna. We went to the modern art galleries along the waters of Leith yesterday, and we lucked into a reception in the new Informatics building, which is truly amazing. It has a part you can go out on the roof and see all the views. Will found his PhD supervisor Richard Shillcock, and I saw a lot of the faculty and sysadmins I knew. Will is I think going to be working there a lot next week. We only found out about the reception (and that the building was open) because we ran into Gert Westermann on the street outside --- he was here for another meeting.

One of my colleagues put out a paper rebutting one of mine (which to be fair, critiqued several of hers), but the problem is that she didn't even cite our paper at the same time she was complaining generally about people who thought the way I do, and the way I critisized her for not. She's very well aware of our work, she's talked to us about it at length. I think it's very unprofessional of her, but as it happens she published her paper on exactly the topic I'm giving a talk on at this meeting, so I've just changed my talk a little to a) make sure any future reviewers of her articles know she needs to cite us and address all our criticisms, and b) to adjust to that and some other papers that have come out in the months since we submitted our talk proposals.

If I hadn't been going to give the talk next week I would have been really angry, but as it is I'm just annoyed. Science is a debate, and it isn't a debate when you ignore the other side's good points.

The picture is from Austria, it was taken after the evolution meeting I blogged about by Bill Lorenz, working for the KLI.

Interview about Robots

2008-07-26T03:23:00.001-07:00

I did an interview for a project which is studying whether robots would be accepted by the British public, for example in their homes. They've just put a first cut of the video on the web. Click people, then researchers, then my name & then "video". I think the video is OK (though the cutaways are weird) but the picture is a bit deer-in-the-headlights.

I managed to spend the first three days of this week getting my grant fully submitted, what a pain! But I've learned a ton about human cultural evolution and did a bunch more designing of my modelling strategy. Really moving into anthropology will be exciting. I spent the next day catching up on email, I've got 150 less in my spools now. Friday I actually contributed a few paragraphs to someone else's grant proposal, but mostly read papers and worked on one of my own. Except Will forgot to bring the power adapter to the cafe we went to Friday night, so we were forced to just sit there and talk to each other rather than work. It was terrible.

Now we are in another cafe, The Blau Stern, ordering lunch, and after lunch we will each try to finish the papers we are currently working on. Will's is really quite a big deal and he has been spread out in the KLI's library for days doing the rewrite. He made a huge contribution in the draft of the paper, but it was very hard to read, so now he's totally rewritten it, and typical of him he also figured out a ton more theory. This is why he never publishes! But the paper will be his first big thing in Political Science that he's the sole author, and he has the follow up already half written too.

I'm resubmitting a paper that was in a "web conference" last year, because I'm not sure how to cite web conferences. I thought it would just take a day, but in fact I've learned and figured out so much since I've been at the KLI that I'm rewriting it quite a bit. I have a more important paper to submit next week, but I wanted to be able to reference this one in it.

I also have to review a book proposal and four book chapters and write a talk and a poster, all by Thursday when Will and I go to Edinburgh for the international primate conference, where I have a talk and a poster. Normally I would be very much looking forward to that, and in fact I am, but it's a shame to leave Vienna after such a nice month here together.

A Rainy Day in Alsergrund (entry 100)

2008-07-20T06:38:00.000-07:00

Vienna has the best weather of anywhere I've lived. It's a shame we didn't have more snow in Winter, apparently that is down to global warming as there was a lot of snow a couple decades ago. But still, there was more than we got in the UK, but it's not so insanely hot or humid as it was in Boston or Chicago.

I worked really hard trying to get the grant out last week but we didn't make it. There are like 10 little stupid forms to fill in for US funding, everything is just worse than doing UK grants. But the material we are writing and I am reading about is very interesting and I have no doubt I will reuse a lot of the text in real publications one day. Also, I am excited about thinking about human cultures, and to have found a problem that seems accessible to my techniques but also very useful and important both scientifically and for diplomacy. Still, it is just frustrating to spend so much time on something that may come to nothing if it is not funded. Papers you always know will eventually come out in some form somewhere once you have learned enough to make them useful. But funding can just never happen. But trying to raise funds is a big part of what you have to do if you are an academic. At least in biology or computer science -- my officemates are philosophers and have never had to do this, and Dan Dennett told Will he'd never written a grant back in 2000 (I don't know if that's still true!)

It was hard to work long the last couple days, working all the way through the weekend makes it harder even if the work is fun. Anyway, Saturday we did very little except wander around a little more of the town, including finding a great new place to eat lunch. I should say also, that Wednesday night we went to the contemporary art gallery, the ESSL. It is both free and open late Wednesdays. It took us forever to find it and find the door, but it was worth it once we got up to the third floor and found the art.

Today I am doing a little more on the grant applications / form filling front, but also will hopefuly finally straighten out all the papers in my flat. I need filing cabinets here, but don't have anything like that. It's hard to spend money on furniture when you don't know whether you will ever move it back with you. Although I hear moving is cheaper out here.

I've started flustering a bit about the month ending -- not only because I have a lot to do in terms of papers and presentations first, but also because Will and I are just really back to being settled in happily together, and now we are already planning what to do the last Wednesday he's here and such like. Next month we will be together most of the month (but not one week), but only a few days of our time together will be in Vienna. Then September I suppose he will have to go back to Nottingham, although I hope he just stays here another month. Courses in the UK (and Europe generally) don't really start until October.

Friday night we saw the movie Control about an 80s band called Joy Division. Actually, they played mostly in the 70s, but since they were British and I was in the Midwest I didn't hear them until 1982 when I went to university. The movie totally reminded me of when I used to be a guitarist and I have had lots of dreams about Chicago since then. The movie was shown outdoors in a park across the river from where we live. They show movies every night for two months, it is a shame we don't go more often (this was our first.) It's just hard to fit everything in.

What I learned about evolution

2008-07-16T22:26:00.000-07:00

I've posted before about the fact that my current fellowship is in the area of EvoDevo, and that sometimes people (like Fodor) come up with flaky definitions or claims about that. The workshop this past weekend was great, and really clarified for me a bunch of the issues, both what the exciting new ideas are, but also on the more historical / philosophy of science level why some people take the strange directions.

To make sure my posting makes sense, I want to start with the obvious, which is basic natural selection (NS). To get evolution, you need:

More young individuals born in each generation than winds up breeding in the next generation.
Some variation between those individuals, which has to be heritable (that is, something that affects these individuals' children)
A process of selection that makes it more likely that individuals with some kinds of variations wind up producing the next generation. This is the famous "survival of the fittest", but note that "fittest" only really means "most likely to reproduce".

Towards the middle of the last century, biologist kind of agreed on a model of evolution as being the one to be taught, called the Modern Synthesis (MS). What I knew was that some people now thought that selection wasn't as important as people used to think in the MS, but I didn't really understand why. Now I think I do. But what I say below is my own understanding, some of it may be controversial.

The reason is because of something called evolvability. The idea is that as selection keeps happening for billions of years and through enormous environmental variation, it doesn't just select for things like longer legs or shorter noses, but also for traits that make it easier to change quickly if the environment does. So an example Marc Kirschner brought up was a recent paper on Darwin's finches. It turns out all the variation in beak size is controlled by just two genes -- one for how long it is and one for how thick it is. When you look at these birds heads, their heads are totally different so that the beaks can fit on. But that didn't require separate mutations / evolution. Rather, because development has become such a powerful, complicated process that changing one gene results in all the necessary extra things happening. In fact, these changes will happen even if there is no genetic change, just if say the mother is in a strange environmental situation, maybe she is hungry. The embryo will do the best it can with the resources it has to make a complete, functioning organism.

This is what the EvoDevo people (like the director of my institute, Gerd Müller) are studying, all the developmental mechanisms that make evolution more powerful and go faster. We learned about all kinds of things like that, including epigenetics. We also learned about multi-level selection. There was a paleontologist from the University of Chicago, David Jablonski gave this amazing talk that really showed it didn't matter very much what cool body plans you evolved if your entire clade gets wiped out just for being at the wrong latitude when a major environmental transition happens.

So I'm not sure, but I think this is why some people think selection isn't that big a deal. It's because they see more and more things accounted for by other mechanisms, basically more impressive mechanisms for generating variation, so they think (logically) that selection accounts for less and less. In some ways that's true -- for example, that there are now a lot more mechanisms we could teach kids in biology to help explain how life on earth got so complicated in "only" four billion years. But from my perspective, as an engineer, in a way evolvability just makes selection more powerful. It just means that in relatively few generations of variation & selection you can get much bigger changes.

In fact, I realized at some point while talking to Marc Kirschner that the ideas he was trying to put forward in his book about biology were incredibly similar to the ideas I was trying to put forward in my PhD. He was saying that evolution could go faster because of these mechanisms, I was saying you needed to build mechanisms / modules to make developing AI go faster. In evolution, some people really want to believe this means selection can go away, because they don't like selection's implications (it's not at all egalitarian.) In AI, some people really want to believe that various mechanisms or algorithms mean the problem of building / developing AI will go away and it will build itself, because AI development is done by people and is a hard task people can get wrong. All those people are wrong. AI development and evolutionary selection will never go away, but they will get what they do done faster and faster with better mechanisms.

I by no means mentioned all the interesting talks! But I thought it was worth blogging quickly about what I learned. On Monday I also learned some very cool stuff about monogamy after having gone to the KLI for Ethology again and talking to Richard Wagner. (Will got to meet the keas too.) Mostly I've been working on a grant with Benedikt Herrmann this week, hopefully that will end & I can submit a couple journal articles & get back to doing my new models -- hopefully before I have to prepare my talk and poster for the next scientific meeting I am going to, 1 August.

in Science again

2008-07-12T04:51:00.000-07:00

Not me this time, but the KLI & also the meeting I'm in this weekend.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/321/5886/196

extending the synthesis

2008-07-10T07:57:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to do another long post this weekend, because we are working all weekend. In fact, this week has already been quite hectic trying to get stuff done in advance of a symposium this weekend. I'm working on grants and papers generally, they all take longer than you expect, and then you keep learning more interesting things and knowing you should read more, but then also knowing you have to stop reading and write at some points.

So the symposium is on evolution. Apparently sometime around WWII people got together and created "the new synthesis", which was kind of a simplification and reduction of all the theories of evolution that were kicking around at the time. As I've blogged before, people here are interested in a lot of the other mechanisms affecting evolution that got left out of this "standard story", some of which are more newly discovered, others of which just got overlooked. I'm not sure how complicated a story you can tell and have people keep up with it -- even the other scientists -- again as I've said before it's one of the things that kind of bothers me about science. But on the other hand, as a culture we keep getting our heads around ideas that are more and more complex, so maybe that is why we can keep moving the threshold up on more complex theories and understandings. Like when I was in college, I was taught that no one knew how to program a parallel computer, although some people had built them. Then when I did my MSc at Edinburgh 10 years later, I got to take a whole course on different programming techniques for handling concurrency. Thinking about concurrency (lots of things happening in parallel) is still pretty hard for us, but I think we are getting better at it. I hope one day that school children will build and run agent-based social simulations so they can get more of an understanding and an intuition about how some kinds of small changes in everyone's behaviour can have big consequences, while other changes just cancel each other out or have little effect.

So, anyway, this meeting runs from tonight through Monday, and then it looks like Monday is the last day I can go talk to one of the Cichlid researchers over at the KLI-Ethology for the summer. Real biologists (or at least field biologists) have this tendency to go out to study whatever they study for months at a time, so it's hard to work with them between teaching and the research trips. The same is true of some social scientists. I think I travel enough just to attend meetings!

The people here are a little nervous, because although they run symposia all the time, because this one is on a particular topic of evolution they have been getting all these phone calls and people are planning on coming who weren't invited. Hopefully the message has got out they won't be let in. We have been joking about hiring bouncers. Anyway, I am lucky to be here. I wish one of the people who has got accepted as a fellow but isn't here yet was here -- Adrianna Wozniak. It is exactly in her research topic & she'd be interesting to talk to afterwards. I missed a symposium right in my topic area by a month too -- if they had told me I would have flown out just for it! But I didn't even know about these things until after it was over.

Anyway, back to work now.

Natural Intelligence

2008-07-06T05:45:00.000-07:00

I noticed the other day that "Joanna Bryson" is no longer the most popular search term for finding my main web pages at Bath. There are twice as many people who go there looking for "Natural Intelligence". It turns out that my page "Understanding Natural Intelligence" is the top hit on Google for that term, which is strange given I'm hardly the first person to use it. I guess the page has a nice summary.

I had always hoped (well, originally expected) to teach a course by that name at Bath, but our former HoD wouldn't let my proposal go before the teaching committee. The idea is, to quote Josh Epstein, is you don't understand something if you can't build it. So the course would mostly be about modelling intelligent systems in nature, but would also be a good introduction to cognition, distributed intelligence, learning, evolution, etc. And to science writing --- I'd like to model the coursework structure on Gary King's Replication Replication.

Anyway, sorry I haven't blogged in two weeks. I've been busy. Let's see -- I'm moderately surprised I didn't mention in my last blog that that Sunday in Grünau I went to mass and then lunch at a trout farm with a retired school teacher from Germany. She had been coming to that hotel for a couple weeks a year for decades, and in fact her mother's favourite room was also Konrad Lorenz's. Like a lot of school teachers I tend to meet she was very into botany and showing me plants along the trails. Mass was a great way to practice my German -- there's only so many things people tend to talk about in church, and when you are singing hymns you can tell if you are pronouncing things wrong by listening to the people around you. I found out a week later that I can also start to understand football (soccer) telecasts in German. Anyway, after dinner I did indeed go walking up into the hills -- there are elaborate well-kept footpaths like in Korea. I walked into some vocal argument between some deer. The woods looked just like a Klimt landscape. Except the roads being built everywhere as people build new houses.

I got back to the KLI and got to work three days more on grants and papers (well, I was doing that on the train & in the hotel too). I got to see Pamelia Kurstin again. She was playing with three other people, one a famous blind accordion player Otto Lechner, one a violin player, one an electric violin player. Again it was melodic free jazz -- just amazing. About half the time it was like the most exciting parts of a Shostakovitch quartet. There were only about 30 people there in this little incredibly hot jazz bar -- they closed the windows when they were playing. There were thousands of people in Vienna for the soccer then, it was weird that so few people were there for something so wonderful and unique. She has said I can get a CD of the performance from her, so hopefully I will.

Wednesday afternoon I went to the KLI-Ethology again to hear a talk about EvoDevo -- selection for life histories in predatory birds. I met the director there again Dustin Penn and told him my new ideas about the Baldwin Effect leading sympatric speciation, and he was very enthusiastic about it and showed me a ton of zebra fish we could use to study it. I wasn't really looking for zebra fish, but maybe now I have another grant to write --- two big grants would I think be enough to have a good-sized group when I get back to teaching, but you can't count on them coming through.

Thursday morning Will was meant to arrive on an overnight train from Saarbrücken, but he got stuck in I think Mannheim for three hours midnight-3am as his connection was late. It was the night after the last German win in EuroCup, but the Germans didn't know that yet and were really happy. So anyway, he only got to Vienna an hour before I had to go to Munich, so we only had lunch together. In Munich I met up with my postdoc Veronica Sundstedt and we went to dinner in the city, then came back to the airport hotel and met up with my other postdoc Dylan Evans at about 11:30pm and stayed up arguing about robots and ethics until 1am. Then the next day there was a meeting of euCognition, which was pretty interesting. Veronica and Dylan are doing a great job building up a website doing "outreach" for Cognitive Systems, which we finally got live for the meeting. We're also trying to find publishers for a book on the topic, I spent some time on that this past Friday.

Anyway, back to last Friday, after the meeting we took the train from Munich to Zürich, which took about four hours. It was fortunate it was so close to midsummer, as it was light the whole way there and very beautiful. We spent the time discussing and planning the project -- it was the longest we'd been together actually in the same room talking -- the second longest was when we interviewed Veronica! Mostly I am supervising by IM session.

In Zürich we attended a workshop on teaching with robots, since encouraging students to take courses leading to qualification in careers in cognitive systems is one of the main goals of the grant. It was a small workshop but with totally amazing people from Zürich, Tufts and CMU. The workshop ended early afternoon so I went to another workshop on learning robots where my friend Aude Billard was speaking. It was quite shocking because counting me we had at least four female roboticists all in the same room. In fact, I think there were a lot more, but anyway I wound up going out that evening with two who are know assistant professors at Georgia Tech. There were also a number of people from Google Zürich, who took us to a really nice "club" outdoors on docks over a river. I have to say Zürich handled the EuroCup a lot better than Vienna -- there were no walls or inaccessible tram routes.

Sunday Veronica & Dylan left but I stayed one more night to go talk to Carel van Schaik about my current modelling work (and one of my students'), and talk about modelling and validation, and also the anti-social punishment grant. He had a few meetings during the day too so I got a new extension on one of our models written --- added sexual reproduction into a model of selection for dominance. It was an idea Hagen & I had come up with but Hagen had never gotten coded. Anyway, I finally got home late Monday evening and Will was out drinking with Hagen! I got really unreasonably frustrated about that, but I really had thought he might be waiting at home to see me. I'd lost my phone on the plane so couldn't call him, but he knew that and I thought knew not to expect me to.

Well, the rest of the week was more normal -- I have been working on writing papers, though Friday we had dinner with Dustin Penn and his wife -- it turns out they live right near us -- and talked more about the Baldwin Effect. Dustin's wife Sarah is also working with the zebra fish concerning social learning, but is about to go on two year's maternity leave. Then Saturday my neuroscientists friend from Harvard / Oxford Mark Baxter came. Fortunately he also was behind on work so we are again sitting in my favorite cafe, but I think he has gotten a lot more work done than I have, I feel silly sitting here this long just writing a blog! He types even faster than I do -- I wonder what the correlation between typing speed and number of publications is? We've been talking about academia and learning in animals. He left Harvard to take up a fellowship at Oxford so doesn't have to teach, but the fellowship is up next year and he has to decide what to do next.

Well, I will go back to working on overdue reviews or grant proposals now! We are meeting Will for dinner in a couple hours and then going to see a silent film being shown in a park. We also found the most amazing tapas restaurant last night, and a beautiful cafe set in a platz under a church up in the 8th district. Vienna is amazing.

Greetings from Grünau im Alten

2008-06-22T08:16:00.000-07:00

I'm in the Waldpension Göschlseben The picture is of the very couch I'm sitting on. You can click the link and go to the Fotogalerie to see more pictures.

Well, like every bit of Austria I've been to so far it is unbelievably pretty here. The weather has been perfect until today, now it is too hot to hike which is a little too bad. The workshop was pretty good -- there were two other guest speakers -- who were really invited guest speakers who came from further away! I just came because I wanted to keep up with Ludwig Huber's group (I've hardly been able to attend any of their talks this term) and find out what was happening in the Grünau KLF, so my only invitation was from being on the mailing list for Ludwig's group.

The other speakers were Amanda Seed and Valérie Dufour -- (who now has a web page so I've updated this!) I had met Valérie a couple times before, the more recent of which I remember, in Bernard Therrie's group in Strasbourg where she was working with the capuchins. One big difference about cognitive biology / psychology from AI is that most of the researchers are women --- though sadly so far not many of the people in top positions are women. Some of us sat around one night and named all the successful female scientists with children we could think of and there weren't many. But anyway, there were many interesting talks and it was good to see the wolf center and also the KLF -- actually, especially the KLF! It was great to see the ravens and geese. They have creeks running right through their enclosures, as did many of the animals in the wildlife park the wolves are part of. Kurt Kortschal, the director of the institute, said they expected to have two packs of 20 wolves each in three years --- that's hard to believe given how much trouble the four "wolf whelps" they have now are!

The cubs were very cute --- they are still tripping over their paws. It's nice to see their new natural space, but also they came into the talks a couple times so they could get habituated to the space and to more people. But they got kicked out fairly shortly the first time they came in when a couple of them decided to start howling!

Honestly, if you include the train ride, I've spent as much time working on the grant application as at the meeting here --- which means a lot of time! It was supposed to be due 1 July but I phoned up the programme officer to talk about a couple things and found out there was another call for the same money with an open ending date. Because it is the same money though we will have to put in the proposal very soon since otherwise all the money will be gone due to the deadlined call!

I've realised on looking more at the data that most of the countries that had both more anti-social punishment and lower levels of cooperation had one thing going in their favour as well. Those countries had stable if somewhat conservative levels of cooperation even when there was no way to punish people who "defected" and didn't collaborate. The countries that used altruistic punishment effectively and achieved very high levels of collaboration when they didn't have stable cooperation before they were given punishment as a tool. They tended to start out at high levels of collaboration, but then it reduced as people felt they were being taken advantage of. So this is really interesting...

Anyway, I should get back to work on that. I was going to go hiking, but it was too hot, and now it is almost dinner time. I will go back to Vienna tomorrow morning and should be back at the KLI during lunch. The train ride is five hours, and my battery lasts five hours, so I'll no doubt get a lot done tomorrow too. I had a ton of ideas about modelling at the conference --- mostly about cultural evolution and speciation. So maybe I will be able to finish the grant and then do some programming to celebrate.

Sorry about the picture. I took it with my laptop again while waiting to get picked up for the second day of the conference Saturday morning. Hopefully I'll have a new camera you can't lose cables for after 11 July.

quick culture & the other KLIs

2008-06-18T22:54:00.000-07:00

Very quick update -- since being back in the country I'm trying to work on the grant, but I was already committed to talk to Daniel Haun, who looked me up since he was visiting Vienna. I've always enjoyed talking to him because he is smart, but I was surprised this time to find out he is shifting his research much closer to what I am doing here at the KLI. We had some very interesting conversations. He has a new group that is supposed to bridge two MPIs in Germany to study the origins of human cultural variation. So it will be interesting to see what they do in the next five years.

For some reason while I was talking to Daniel I had a huge insight into the presentations I have been doing & am trying to write up, concerning the difference between culture & cultural evolution. I will write about this when I have more time.

Yesterday I also went to the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Ethology, to hear a talk about cichlids & to try to talk to one of their senior research scientists about studying sympatric speciation the Baldwin Effect, which is something we're modelling. The scientist was on vacation but I talked to some students & met another scientist, Richard Wagner, and wound up having dinner with the speaker.

Today I will be at my own KLI briefly, then finally go see a KLI I haven't seen yet, where Lorenz actually did a bunch of his goose studies & the wolf & raven projects I've talked about are now. This is really not a KLI but the Konrad Lorenz Research Station -- it is up in some other mountains the other side of Salzburg from where Mom & her friends went. They need to update their banner with a wolf! Anyway, there is a meeting on cognitive science sponsored by the Cognitive Biology group at the University of Vienna, and I will speak there, but more importantly hear what everyone else is doing. I'm just giving my talk "Consciousness is easy but learning is hard" which I first gave in Korea & most recently as part of my Science Cafe in Bath -- it's mostly explaining what is computationally difficult in cognition. Theory of computation results apply to all intelligent systems, not just computers. I will probably update the talk to include a few slides from my most recent work on cultural evolution.

On a less interesting note, I can't figure out why the news is saying Obama has a narrow lead over McCain when the polls currently indicate them at 317 vs 221 of the electoral college votes. I know numbers like that probably won't hold, but how is that lead narrow? I sometimes think the reason elections have been so close lately in America is because close races sell newspapers / commercials.

ideas, grants & communities

2008-06-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

Today is the last day I'm with Will for a couple weeks. But we'll be together (in Vienna) all July, and most of August. We were going to be together all August too, but he got asked to help a friend teach a political science methodology course for the EU in Slovenia, so we'll be apart a few days. I need to be in Vienna then, but will join him on the weekend.

I've given my Modularity & Cultural Evolution talk four times now -- KLI, then Manchester (center for policy modelling), Nottingham & Birmingham (computer science departments.) I thought the first & third time went well, but the second & fourth time that there wasn't enough structure --- too many new ideas and not enough proof. However, I got good feedback from at least some of the audience all four times, so I can't tell for sure if it went differently or I just felt differently about it. I feel like there are a lot of good ideas in the talk, but that it is better to give a clear, simple talk where you have proven something you know was controversial and you can see you've communicated that clarity to the audience. This talk seemed to inspire a bunch of people, but ultimately it may have helped me more than my audience, since the process of trying to be clear about something makes you clear.

This is why I have been so angry about Bath never letting me teach any courses anywhere near my own subject matter. Even if you are teaching just introductory courses, talking to new, bright students makes you question your assumptions and clarify your reasoning. It's such a waste to apply that process mostly to subjects that I don't research, where clarity doesn't help me or anyone else beyond the students. Helping the students is important, but it would be better to help them and some research communities at the same time. Especially since "research communities" can extend into businesses and the general public.

I need to get to work -- I am meeting with a collaborator working on that grant proposal. It is the first time I've written even a proposal about modelling people rather than non-human primates. Also, it may have direct application into public policy. But it's a lot of work and we have already hit some weird road blocks. Still, this is about the time of my career (maybe a little early) that I'd hoped to get into thinking about people & public policy. I know it can be very important, but I also wish I had time to work on some of the modelling I've got ideas for now that I've given my talks.

I've spent a lot of time this week worrying about my two almost-done PhD students and my one possible-new one. My existing students have made me decide I have to give more direction to my PhD students -- though I already do give a lot more than I ever got. But the UK forces them through too quickly (three years of funding, four years max.) and I'm not sure how typical I was as a PhD student. Actually, I was very typical for Edinburgh, and a lot at MIT were similar, but some worked more like postdocs / assistants even at MIT.

I had a bunch of colleagues at Birmingham I knew and we went out after my talk, but it was clearly unusual for them to do this. Some of them I knew from Edinburgh, and we were reflecting that Edinburgh seemed to have the best attitude about research of anywhere I've been, which is I guess surprising. But people really cared about what they were doing and understood what each other were doing, and everyone expected to go out with a speaker afterwards and really get to talk about the material all evening. I wonder if Edinburgh is still like that? Manchester I had never visited before but knew two people already (one of whom we had dinner with) and I met Scott Moss for the first time, who is the head of their modelling group.

Sincerely quick this time

2008-06-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

Just so you know my talk went well, which is fortunate since I'm giving it three times this coming week. But first I need to do my US taxes -- for some reason they are due two months later abroad than in the USA. More importantly perhaps I got some excellent feedback on one of the papers I wrote in May from one of the KLI fellows, Christophe. Getting his perspective really helped me clear up some of the things that were bothering me about the paper. I figured out on the plane how to rewrite it and also another paper to do out of some insights I had writing the talk & a little discussion afterwards that came from the talk about speciation. This weekend I've heard that both another of the papers I wrote last month and the funding pre-proposal got accepted -- the funding pre-proposal is a problem because now the full proposal is due 1 July! But if I get the grant it would mean I'd be able to not only do some cool and useful research, but also pay for the PhD of an MSc student who's been doing simulations with me the last few months. But anyway, it means I'll be busier than usual this month.

factors limiting cultural evolution

2008-06-03T05:45:00.000-07:00

Hi --

Will & I took the moms to St. Johann am Pongau. We had dinner with them & then walked around the older part of the town in the rain looking at the views. The clouds were quite high and it was twilight so you could see a light band around the horizon with the alps surrounding us, while darkness was directly overhead.

What was particularly cool was going to a graveyard. I knew one of my Austrian friends told me she visited her grandmother's grave every single week, but I hadn't really realized the consequences of that kind of devotion. Every grave looked fresh although many were decades old, and all were planted with flowers, and most of them had candles lit on them! It was about 10pm, so they must stay lit a long time. I thought it was amazing that most graves had been visited that very day, presumably right after church. There was a vending machine for candles, and almost all the graves have red glass candleholders to shelter them from wind & rain.

Oddly, one of these carefully-kept graves had a statue of an angel on it, but the angel was entirely covered with ivy except for one hand and its wings! It was kind of cool looking. I guess the family didn't really care for the statue.

Monday we went to Salzburg. I had heard so much about it being amazingly beautiful that it was a little bit disappointing -- it wasn't necessarily prettier than Bath or Vienna. But it was very cool & the old town really reminded me of every movie you've ever seen about Mozart. I think it would be a great place to live or to raise kids. "We" was Will & I & Patricia. There is a huge white fort overlooking the town on a hill you can see from the train, and I thought we'd never go that far, but in fact the old town is well beyond the station & at the foot of this hill, so in the end we did go up to it. Wikipedia says it is one of the best-preserved castles in Europe. It was from around 1000AD, a lot of the work is from 1400 though. It belonged to arch-bishops but they were also really princes then & quite involved in trying to be both politically & religiously somewhat independent.

Anyway, the main thing I am working on this week is a talk. Normally when I give talks I revise & extend existing ones, since work tends to build on previous work. But in this case I am really writing it from scratch, because it is focussed on all new things I have done & learned since I have been here. So I expect it will take 12-18 hours to write.

Dad asked for a summary -- well, I have already written an abstract, so I will put that here as the summary:

Dear friend of the KLI,

We kindly invite you to participate in our next Brown Bag Discussion ("bring your own lunch, sit back, enjoy the talk, and join us in the discussion"):

Thursday 5 June, 1.15 p.m.

JOANNA BRYSON
(KLI and University of Bath)

"What limits the biological evolution of cultural evolution? Modularity in evolution and learning"

Abstract

Since Darwin first presented the theory of natural selection, scientific (and other) debate has focussed around whether this simple process can explain the level of diversity we witness in nature. Recently, EvoDevo has focussed research on the way modularity is used to develop complexity. The primary research questions here are both proximate: how modules differentiate themselves from homogeneous initial conditions, and ultimate: why is this a useful strategy? These questions can equally be applied to the interacting systems that provide intelligent behavior: biological evolution, cultural evolution and individual learning.

My initial interest in cultural evolution arose from an intuitive dislike of one strand of research on language origins, which suggested that language was "extra-Darwinian" because it requires the evolution of altruism. In previous work (Cace and Bryson 2007) I have shown that altruistic communication is easily evolved. Since coming to the KLI I have come to better understand the mechanisms behind this. My talk includes a brief review this work.

What then limits the extent to which species utilise culture for rapidly evolving intelligent behavior? I believe there are a number of mechanisms:
Speed vs Reliability trade-offs: These tradeoffs are fairly well understood when applied to modular learning systems in individuals --- particularly short term and long term learning and memory. I believe similar concerns apply here.
The Baldwin effect: The mechanisms which shape evolution (including the speed of change in the environment) determine what will in the long term be encoded genetically and what left to individual learning. I believe this statement can be extended to include the third process of cultural evolution.
Niche size and competition with other species: I believe the advantage of the cognitive strategy given its costs and benefits are more limited than we tend to realize.
Representational issues: Just as biological complexity has been dependent on the evolution of genetic representations for modular and hierarchical instructions, so cultural complexity is limited by the capacity to transmit not only quantity but structure. I hypothesize about representational advantages humans have over other species for the evolution of languages (c.f. Bryson 2007; 2008).

In my talk I present these factors and my evidence for them to date. I welcome feedback and additional references as this is very much work in progress.

References:

Ivana Cace and Joanna J. Bryson, ``Agent Based Modelling of Communication Costs: Why Information can be Free'', in Emergence and Evolution of Linguistic Communication C. Lyon, C. L Nehaniv and A. Cangelosi, eds., pp. 305-322, Springer 2007.
Joanna J. Bryson, ``Representational Requirements for Evolving Cultural Evolution'', invited and reviewed target article (and responses) in interdisciplines' Web conference, Adaptation and Representation 28 May 2007.
Joanna J. Bryson ``Embodiment versus Memetics'', Mind & Society, 7(1):77-94, June 2008.

Biographical note

Joanna Bryson is a member of faculty at the University of Bath in the department of Computer Science. She holds degrees in Artificial Intelligence from MIT (PhD) and Edinburgh (MSc), and Psychology from Edinburgh (MPhil) and Chicago (BA). She is currently on sabbatical at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, studying factors limiting the biological evolution of cultural evolution. She is also a visiting research fellow at the University of Nottingham Methods and Data Institute.

We look forward to seeing you at the KLI!

------------
Eva Karner (secretary)
Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research
Adolf Lorenz Gasse 2
A-3422 Altenberg, Austria
Phone: +43-2242-32390 Fax: +43-2242-323904
http://kli.ac.at

Phaedra (2007) & Shima

2008-05-31T13:14:00.001-07:00

Will and I finally saw our first opera in Vienna, with our mothers and my mom's friend. The music and staging were fantastic, but we had no idea what was going on. It was made more surreal by the lead being sick so her part was sung (AMAZINGLY) by an understudy, but acted by another woman who didn't sing. I got a programme, but it's in German.

I think the description on the Phaedra website isn't very enlightening -- it doesn't even explain what one of the main characters (Aphrodite) was doing... fortunately, Google turns up more.

By the way, I did get to spend some time observing one of the wolf cubs --- Shima. She seriously does not look like a dog. It was amazing watching her gamble, and fun petting her and playing with her. But it is such a lot of work for Zsofia and the other caregivers!

quick update

2008-05-31T08:22:00.001-07:00

Well I finally got that paper finished, but I'm kind of unsure about it. Some of my papers take years to totally come together though, but getting it out to review at a conference is a good first step. Some of the other fellows at the KLI have said they will give me comments on it, so I look forward to that.

Around the time I broke my finger I also broke my new little laptop. It took a couple weeks to get it to the shop, collect it, and just now I'm trying to reinstall my accounts on it but it keeps dying --- I don't think it's properly fixed :-(

Mom emailed that she didn't see that the epicenter of the quake was anywhere near Tibet. I'm not sure she looked at the picture I had put up of where Tibet was historically. But anyway, I have found the epicenter and it does look further East in current Sichuan than historic Tibet was. Nevertheless, certainly ethnic Tibetans lived in the capital which was strongly affected, so I still think it's a bit weird no one is mentioning them.

On the other other hand, it is also true that Tibet was pretty feudal before China got there, and in many ways is better off now. It seems like all over the world people would be better off if their languages and culture weren't actively repressed, they'd be less rather than more likely to start wars. But recently China was no longer repressing the religion at least, just moving a lot of their own people in. This article points out thats a lot like the US treated the natives in North America. Will says the Dalai Lama actually was also saying how great China had been for Tibet too and didn't want independence, he just wanted the agreement about Tibet's autonomy within China to be fully implemented, e.g. using their language in schools. There were only about 20 other people in the room with Will when he was there --- two were professors from China so there was a lot of discussion.

I gotta go -- we're taking the moms to an opera. I was waiting for my laptop to install an OS upgrade but it's just dead :-(.

no free finger

2008-05-26T03:47:00.000-07:00

Well, I went to the hospital today again. The first time they told me 4 weeks + 2 weeks therapy, the second 2 weeks + therapy. This time they said 3 weeks & not to come back, just to take it off (except for at night.)

I am glad I have some more protection on it since it is still tender. But I'm a little worried about whether or not I actually will need therapy. But probably I'll figure it out.

I'm nearly done with the big paper I'm writing! Of course I have a ton of work stacked up after that. Will comes late tonight.

tibet, china & the international press

2008-05-24T05:03:00.000-07:00

I forgot to say -- the other thing Hagen & I talked about was how weird it is that no one is saying that the earthquake actually happened in Tibet, not China. The epicenter happened in a place that was part of Tibet before China invaded, and obviously a lot of Tibet people still live there. When China invaded it divided up the country into three provinces, two of which were stuck onto historically Chinese provinces. One of these two was Sichuan, where the earthquake happened.

Why is nobody saying the earthquake is happened in Tibet? And why are European leaders not talking to the Dalai Lama now? How can all the international press be swept up in something so blatantly political?

Hopefully Will found something out about this this morning. But I won't see him until Monday -- the Sunday flights were too expensive.

modelling and science

2008-05-24T04:51:00.000-07:00

I met up with my PhD student Hagen this morning for the first time in 3 weeks. He has finally got really systematic about studying all his models and now we have a much clearer understanding of how they work. So now the question is, is it science? I am having the same problem today with the paper I am writing.

Basically, whether it is a contribution comes down to whether you now understand something other people do not. I used to think the criteria was that no one else understood, but now I realise there are always huge numbers of people with all kinds of theories so it is quite likely some of them already think what you have discovered is true. But it is also a contribution if you can convince more people that the hypothesis you are now backing is right.

In this case, the nature of a contribution amounts not only to your own work, but everyone else's --- are there other people currently getting published with work based on theories or hypotheses that you have shown not to be true? Then, if so, you have made a contribution, because your work can help focus the debate.

I don't know why it is so hard to get over the idea that you should be able to look at your own work and see if it's science --- I guess arguably that's true about art. But science isn't art, though both are very creative (& very tedious by turns.)

Anyway, this really makes me wonder if it is sensible to have modelling groups in maths or computing departments. But maybe it is best to be on neutral turf, and just make sure you attend the professional meetings and department seminars of the organizations you are currently working in. Isolating theoreticians from empirical people though is certainly stupid.

Wolf pup pictures

2008-05-22T06:33:00.001-07:00

Wolf pup pictures are on the amazing new Wolf Science Center Web Page.

I'm an author!

2008-05-22T06:26:00.000-07:00

At least according to Amazon UK.

writing without wolves

2008-05-21T10:50:00.000-07:00

Well, I am just writing a lot -- not the blog so much, obviously! Sadly I couldn't get the speech rec. software. It turns out the Nottingham apple store KRCS is very fly-by-night -- they tried to get me to buy the discontinued version of the software. So I've ordered it on line, but it will get here after my splint comes off. But anyway, I have been thinking I type too much so I can at least use it with all the writing this summer.

I got the other workshop paper and book chapter done, but I have not finished the final paper due Friday and I have that review to do on Friday in Vienna so I can't spend all of the next two days on it, so I don't know how the paper will be. But it is only for a workshop. The other papers I was polishing for journal articles, and this one will ultimately go to a journal too, but since this is the first time I am writing on the topic I'm sure I'll have lots to learn from the reviewers.

I can't believe it --- I missed playing with wolf cubs at the KLI on Monday!! Zsofia brought them in to the KLI. They are part of an experiment to see how much dogs have changed genetically in terms of their ability for social reasoning since they've been a part of our culture for thousands of years. If you raise wolves the same way, we know they aren't great pets, but can they reason about intentions and such as well as dogs? Dogs do better than chimpanzees on many social intentionality tasks.

I will ask Zsofia if she minds if I post the cub pictures... I can't wait til I see the real animals! At least I am back in Vienna. Will is not coming here until Monday because he has to meet the Dali Lama this weekend (rough life.) He will stay a whole week though so I think I will get to have him at least one night without moms!

good news, bad news

2008-05-14T04:59:00.000-07:00

The good new is I went to the hospital again today and they think I need only one more week in the splint. Much more sensible in my mind. It pays to be a good patient!

The bad news is from China and Burma. When the last tsunami hit, I remember being in a pub with a collection jar. I got change from a ten pound note, and started to put the small change in, and then thought a second and put it all in. The pub's owner looked surprised, but then looked in then looked in the jar and saw it was full of pound coins and notes. I think no one could imagine losing everything, even your city, with no insurance, no development.

The two new tragedies are equally incomprehensible -- as is Iraq, which has lost far more civilians and buildings than any of those three events. But various barriers make it unlikely they will get the same assistance --- China's perceived wealth (which isn't really that great), Burma's government, and the fact we're the ones doing the damage in Iraq, not nature.

When I was young I might have felt sorry for myself over the finger thing, but now I'm just annoyed, and even there not very. If anything it just reminds you how good you have it, and also of how much of your future is likely to involve hospitals.

I submitted a paper and a white paper / funding draft today. I have another paper I'll try to get done today on the plane & a chapter draft due Wed and a final quick paper due Friday. The three papers are for a symposia series but I'll hopefully make them all into journal articles by July (plus a few other things!) It's hard to give up programming, but writing can be fun too.

anti-atheist bias in America

2008-05-12T05:06:00.000-07:00

Love to see the full stats on this -- e.g. how many people won't vote for religons, races & sexes... but anyway "More Americans (48 percent) would be unwilling to vote for an otherwise qualified atheist than any other group."

very, very pretty

2008-05-12T04:41:00.001-07:00

It's amazingly nice here. It is also Pentecost, which I should probably be spending learning German, but I was trying to get four papers out before I go to Nottingham this week. One is basically done, it is just a proposal anyway & I've asked my coauthors to just accept it given the finger thing, so hopefully it is all set. Two others need only minor corrections I'm trying to finish today. The last is the most interesting, I'll see if I'm up to typing enough to get it out tomorrow & Wednesday.

Anyway, I spent the morning at home installing software on my laptop since KLI has this bandwidth constraint, then went to the restaurant I went to with Dad & Will & Patricia last week & had the same thing (minus the beer!) It was still great, but not nearly as much fun, but I got some work done on my laptop which was good. Though less than you'd expect! They were very attentive I guess because I was by myself) This week the place was totally packed by 12:30 already. Everyone is very happy.

It is amazing that the one vegetable-main dish in Austria can be so unhealthy! :-)

Google and the Environment / Global Social Change

2008-05-11T02:56:00.000-07:00

Two months ago I posted about getting Google to model possible futures. I should have realized they'd already be on this. Still, would be cooler with agent-based simulations that let kids pick the decisions made.

Broken finger!

2008-05-10T06:46:00.000-07:00

I slipped on some steps outside the KLI trying to catch a train Thursday night. Fortunately I already planned to spend this month writing papers, not code, so I thought I'd only lose a few hours going to the hospital & then going to buy some new dictation software (the last time I dictated was 2001 for my PhD.) But it turns out you can't get the only well-rated mac program in Vienna (or by download) so I have to wait until I'm in Nottingham. I guess speech recognition still sucks if you have even a slight accent -- I remember being shocked in 1998 that IBM's didn't work for the Danes at LEGO but worked for me -- they spoke flawless & very American English.

Otherwise it was quite a good week as I'm getting very into writing my papers & reading & thinking. I founds some *great* articles on cultural evolution & altruism -- one great thing about the KLI is their Library -- these were in a collection. Normally I only read journal articles & conference proceedings, but books tend to have better summaries & more risky / edgy thinking since they are less properly reviewed.

We also had a great talk by Tetsu Sato about the cichlids in Africa. They have explosive speciation the way humans have explosive culture. I'm not sure if it's for some similar e.g. representational reason, or if large new niches often get that kind of thing going on then eventually the species get strong enough to out-compete their predators & start competing with each other so that it settles down to fewer types & a more normal ecosystem. Ha, "I'm not sure" -- I'm sure lots of people aren't sure & would love to know!

I had dinner with my officemate for the first time yesterday & met his family. He asked what I would do not being able to type & then pointed out I can probably still type faster than him. Yeah, but it might not be good for me! As I said, from next week I can dictate, but this week I guess I'll read a lot & maybe spend more time than usual trying to learn German! Today though I stopped by the Leopold museum -- if Les comes back he should really go there -- Life & Death is way cooler in person than The Kiss. In fact, I just love the Leopold; it is with the Modern Art Gallery of Scotland my favorite art gallery.

The doctors say I have to wear a splint for 4 weeks then 2 weeks of physiotherapy! They gave me lots of drugs but it doesn't hurt so I will save them for the next accident. Of course, to keep it not hurting I was walking around town with my hand elevated, which made me feel like Schiele (who was always painting himself holding his hands funny), thus the Leopold...

PS He died when he was 28!!! Good thing I didn't or I'd have nothing to show for myself except 30 copies of a cassette tape with 4 songs on it & some trading software.

More realtime-ish

2008-05-06T09:33:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd do a really quick blog to get back in the habit.

Last week was actually a bit odd, because 1 May is actually a holiday here. In the UK they take all the real European holidays & turn them into Mondays & call them "Bank Holidays". So I have now learned that "early May bank holiday" is really the international worker's day, and "late May bank holiday" is really pentecost. It seems an affront to history & culture to remove the names like that. I thought the "floating Monday" thing was bad enough in the US, but at least they still actually call them "Memorial Day" & "Labor Day" or whatever. Anyway, we spent it mostly cleaning my apartment, though we did go out & get some programming done in the evening, before meeting Patricia and having dinner with my biologist acquaintance & two more of his brothers (& one of their wives.) They took us also to a former anti-aircraft tower that has been turned into an aquarium & climbing wall. It is quite surreal. There are apparently six such towers, though I've only run into one before (& didn't know what it was!)

Friday - Sunday I spent with Dad, Marty, Brian, Les, Les' sister Catherine & Patricia & sometimes Will (he also got some work done, since he see's his mom more than I see dad!) The Mullaneys are into the professional site-seeing thing, which was kind of interesting, but at some point Dad & Patricia & I basically bailed & went to see all the nice things in walking distance, + the KLI where I work. We all had a lot of nice meals.

The most interesting thing intellectually for me was that we visited a Benedictine (in fact, Cistercian) abbey & the guide said about how important it had been to bring the Benedictines to Vienna, since they brought literacy & lots of agricultural knowledge with them. I thought a lot about what the order was doing back then -- men kept sleep- & largely language-deprived, told not even to think about anything except god, with the exception of the time they spent reading & writing, mostly old texts. The one thing they could talk about was business, so it is no wonder they developed amazing agriculture and such. As a kid, I always wanted that kind of life, actually! But of course we weren't Catholic... anyway, now I was thinking about it as a way to transmit, retain, and even accumulate knowledge for a culture. Really very interesting --- really, when you get down to it, amazing --- Kind of an early, slow version of Wikipedia.

The abbey was founded by Otto of Freising, who went to Paris for his education & picked up on the Benedictine way. It helped that his father was the ruler of the closest thing to Austria that existed at the time, so they were able to see the advantage of bringing all that knowledge home and had the resources to do so.

Speaking of knowledge and evolution, I forgot in my last post to mention the talk I most enjoyed last month, by Arianna Wozniak. She had this really interesting analogy between physics & biology, and showed how the fact selection affects its own landscape (which includes variation) is somewhat like relativity (where mass affects space). I'm not doing the talk justice here, but she was a really interesting thinker who brought together a lot of recent evolutionary theory for me & really helped me conceptualize and consolidate some things I'd long been suspecting about the silliness of some concepts of speciation. I mean, she addressed something I remember not believing when I was told it at college. Then I thought I was missing something, but now that I'm a lot older I can see that sadly it was probably my professor who was missing something, though I think he & is field knew something was wrong. I knew her "virtually" already, she edited a paper of mine in sort of an on-line journal last year, but it was really just amazing to hear her talk. I wish she had stayed longer, I think I could have talked to her for days.

The best talk so far I've heard this month was actually my first experience of on-line webcast conferences. I'd been invited to some before, but this is the first time I found myself with time at the right moment & logged in. It was being held at MIT's Brain & Cognitive Science department, which was my favorite place for talks the last few years we lived in Cambridge. The topic was Brains, Circuits & Genes. The second talk (by David J. Anderson) was unbelievable -- they showed that the same genes were linked to the expression of genetically inherited and socially acquired tendencies to be aggressive (or not) in fruit flies. Efficient, but unbelievable! It's just not how I think about genetics, though I had heard about phenotypic plasticity & changes in gene expression as a consequence of social outcomes before, from Hans Hoffmann. But to know that the mechanism was so related to biological inheritance that it reuses (at least in this case) the same gene is amazing.

The webcast thing was fantastic. There was this great video of fruit-fly aggression (who knew? They actually picked each other up & threw each other around! He also showed how different their posture is when they are courting, & said this showed commonality with Darwin's observations in opposing emotions...) But on the other hand, it really made me miss being at MIT. Not only because of the great talk, but because I was worried the whole time about whether I was going to blow the download cap for the KLI -- not a problem I've ever had anywhere else, not even at home! In the end I went home, since it was a coffee break at the meeting & I needed to buy laundry tokens anyway (you can only buy those Tuesday early evening in my building -- Obviously I buy 20 at a time, but you still run out!) and I was meant to be meeting my PhD student Hagen. But then when I got home they had pulled the conference off the web -- I guess MIT had problems with it too. Also, it looks like someone in the afternoon didn't want their results released out of the room. Which probably means they were under embargo from some journal -- Nature or Science.

Speaking of, I need to finish a draft grant proposal & a review tonight so I can work on papers the rest of the week. I'm stuck here this weekend without Will because of a meeting next Tuesday, so hopefully I'll get a ton done. At least I'm hardly travelling this month -- I do have one one-day EU obligation, but thankfully it's in Vienna!

Another month older...

2008-04-29T12:21:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't updated lately. Honestly, it's hard to find time to write when I'm also with Will, and also I spent two weeks in the US with no datahands (and lots of jet lag / sleep deprivation) so my arms were not in good shape for just writing. In fact, now, I've just spent a week in Nottingham and I'm writing on a train, so I will try to be short here too.

Four weeks ago I was in California for a AAAI spring symposium on emotions, personality and social behaviour. I generally am radically preferring to spend my time in primatology meetings, but it is remarkably easier to hang out in the discipline where you are actually educated. I mean, I can use the first metaphors (and jokes) that come to my mind, rather than having to translate them into another scientific dialect. It's kind of like the difference between German and English, except that mysteriously I seem to be much more competent in primatology than German, even though I had three terms of German at University of Chicago, but none in primatology.

I got three quite nice collaboration / funding offers in California. One is probably a dead end but was interesting in itself -- I got to visit Willow Garage. It was a bit of a misunderstanding --- someone I met thought Willow would like to hear me talk, whereas Willow thought I was there to ask for funding or a robot. But it was interesting. They have their own money and are trying to facilitate the development of domestic robots. Their two rules are no military funding and all open-source software. Of course, I have open-source software for robots on my web page, but I got some useful advice on how to license it. Also, of course, I haven't used it on robots for years, and never on a dextrous robot. I have to admit it is quite tempting to apply for one of their semi-subsidised robots when I get back to Bath and address that.

The most promising of the three opportunities in some sense was to use my software to assist a big EU project I'd already wished were using it, but they had to use one of their partners' planning systems, but now they want to use mine, which is great. I hope it happens, but it's not going to take much of my time either way. But the weirdest thing was that I was approached twice by a guy who turned out to be an Air Force programme manager who wanted to give me money to help him model social behaviour. He was particularly interested in understanding why sometimes religions morph into fundamentalist extremism.

I'm of two minds about this. I know that the military is both useful and necessary, but I also know that the dynamics of the military / industrial complex are such that they can encourage military actions that are not necessary, since so many people's livelihoods depend on continued military spending. Part of the reason I'm not in the US was to avoid the necessity of taking US military funding, which is pretty unavoidable when doing AI research on any significant scale in the US. But this question is quite close to my real scientific research, and clearly is aimed at avoiding the need for violent interventions.

Anyway, one of the things the air force want is that the models should be grounded in real "anthropology" (that is, tested or validated against real human data, to see if they are actually useful.) Most of the anthropologists I know work on apes, but I wrote one anyway and one of his suggestions reminded I'd read this great article in Science about how people in some cultures will spend money punishing other people who are being "too good", even though the good guys are benefiting the people doing the punishing with their good acts. This may sound rather depressing, but to me it was amazingly cool research, because it seems to demonstrate that costly punishment isn't necessarily a rational action, but is rather just an example of a culturally evolved behaviour for maintaining norms. In this sense, it's quite related to the work I'm doing at the KLI, as well as in the evolution of social structure work I've been doing with Hagen, my PhD student.

As it happened, the authors of this article are at Nottingham! So I emailed the first author suggesting we meet there. But I am getting ahead of myself...

Three weeks ago, after California, I went to Chicago and saw Barb, Kevin, Rebecca and Mom. I should say, in California over the weekend (after the
conference) I saw my coauthor from Harvard Jonathan Leong, who is now doing an MD PhD at Stanford, stayed the weekend with my old housemate Pearl Tsai Renaker and her family (two girls and Steve her husband), saw both of the only other two people my PhD supervisor supervised the PhDs of (Ian Horswill, who ran the workshop I attended & supervised me for 8 months at MIT; and Ellen Spertus who was head of department at Mills but has been at Google for rather a long sabbatial), and two of my friends from LEGO, Chris and Laura --- all of whom are doing very well. Pearl has resigned from Google but didn't want to set a bad example for her daughters by not working so is doing an Architecture degree. Meanwhile Steve has taken up building & tuning harpsichords! (They need a lot of tuning... as will said "that's why there are pianos.") So anyway, in Chicago I took two days off with my family, and then went to Chicago with Will. Thursday I gave a talk at Northwestern about action selection in agent-based modelling, and we discussed how it would be quite easy to get my action selection working in my favourite tool (which they make), NetLogo. The only problem is I need a programmer, and while I'm on sabbatical I don't really have anywhere to put one, even if I dug up the money for one. Friday I just worked and then Saturday -- brace yourself -- I went shopping for clothes! I actually found Chicago a little freaky from a shopping perspective. They did a great job of investing all the affluence of the last twenty years in the infrastructure of the city, but now Macy's / Marshall Field's was empty, and no one was using the new Apple Mac laptops anywhere. I don't think the economy has really started shutting down on people yet, but I think they must be very scared, too scared to spend money, and that will kill the economy if it isn't already dead. Anyway, I got nice clothes which is useful since I'm getting old & semi-respectable, and I did it on a weak currency.

I have to say by the way, I don't entirely support the bonkers idea that Macy's has to bring back Marshall Field's. In fact, it is awesome that they have brought the building back to its glory, and also the best service I've ever had there. That's a better tribute to the memory of that store than the version I knew in the 70s and 80s, regardless of the name.

So the week I got back to Vienna there had been rather a bizarre political event at the KLI that I won't go into here. Anyway I had a ton of work to do since I'd been travelling e.g. wrapping up final reports on the grant that funded Hagen and my first PhD / postdoc, Emmanuel. Here's the web page I wrote about that grant. So anyway, I was working quite late and keeping distracted from the general uproar, but I also did a bunch of reading up on organisational behaviour which helped me understand better not only my current situation and a couple previous ones, but also the research topic that air force guy suggested (remember him?) I also spent a lot of time talking to other fellows at the KLI --- I wish we talked about science that much! Hopefully we will from now on.

But now is when I get back to talking about that interesting paper those guys from Nottingham wrote. I emailed the first author, Benedikt Herrmann, from Vienna and asked to meet with him when I was in Nottingham the next week (now the week before last) and he wrote back "why don't we meet on Saturday in Vienna -- I'm staying with two cool people I think you'd like." It turned out he was visiting the University and staying with some people he barely knew, but judging just from my email thought we'd all get along. As it happens, he was totally right. His host, Christoff Koch, is a biologist at University of Vienna, and his friend Thomas, turned out to be expert in all kinds of interesting thing while working mostly in business (including helping restore Persepolis in Iran). I had absolutely the best time visiting them, as we all talked about
fascinating academic and political things.

In fact, I had such a good time that it made me really reflect on my life. I think I used to have fun like that a lot more in Edinburgh and in Chicago, but never so much in Bath and Boston. There just haven't been enough people in my life really enthusiastic about knowledge and what they do. I think in Bath part of that is just that too many of my peers have kids and live in villages rather than really doing the urban lifestyle thing. And in Boston, well, I'm not sure. I always found it weird there, both Harvard and MIT. Actually, when I first worked for Marble there, there was more flat-out intellectual fun. And when I lived with Pearl and Elizabeth, they were fun, and the AI Lab was more fun sometimes (too rarely!) in the earlier days. But in Chicago, I used to wind up at these parties with people working in all kinds of businesses and we had the most fascinating conversations. I suppose part of it could be I've just learned more so less things surprise me! But the world is full of complexity, so that seems pretty unlikely.

Anyway, the next week I was meant to go to Nottingham on Wednesday, but my PhD student Mark Wood turned out to be defending his thesis in Bath on the Monday, so I had to go to Bath Sunday night. I'd managed to leave my wallet in Chicago, so Will had to come to Luton airport and meet me so I could get train tickets. (In Vienna, my bank just gave me money, but I forgot to get enough to change into pounds.) We spent a couple of nights with our friends the Lewises. Mark passed with minor corrections! (Although quite a few of them which has been a matter of ongoing discussion...) I have had one other PhD student graduate before, but I was only his second supervisor, so this was (and still is) a big deal. And obviously, for Mark, it's a huge accomplishment. Though he won't really be happy til his corrections are all through and he has graduated.

Monday afternoon and evening I took out Mark's external examiner, whom some of you might have met in Edinburgh when I was in Brendan's lab, Mark Humphrys, so then Tuesday we went to Nottingham -- although we stopped in London on the way (since we were going via Luton anyway) and celebrated our anniversary that day with a nice lunch. Of course then we worked until midnight when we got to Nottingham! Wednesday I went to Computer Science and then to Economics. I was amazed at the latter attending a CeDEx weekly meeting, which is this research group that does experimental economics. I've been a lot of good universities, but I've never seen one where so many faculty turn up to essentially student talks and give really useful feedback and discussion of research and methods. Maybe the Stanford AI group was that good when I visited in 2001. But hardly anywhere do the faculty seem to make time to know what all the graduate students are doing.

The rest of that that week Will taught a clinic on regression that was really interesting and I really need to use what I learned already on my results from the models I had last month, but haven't gotten to it yet. Hopefully today...

Normally I would leave on the weekend, but as I said my original tickets were Wednesday to Wednesday, and I only changed the first one. So we spent the weekend unpacking --- 9 months after Will moved! We finally finished unpacking the kitchen and dining room, and then we had some friends over for dinner Sunday night. By coincidence they were all German and we talked about working in academia in Europe & the UK.

Monday I mostly caught up on the previous 3 weeks of email, but that evening we met and had dinner with two of the authors (from Economics) of that anti-social punishment paper. This is Will and I, Benedikt and his postdoctoral supervisor Simon Gächter. Simon is almost exactly my age, but he stayed in academia the whole time and has been a full professor now for about five years. I would like to have a chair in the next two years like him! (Since he is seven years ahead.) He was amazing too, though he saw the data totally differently, and was quite unhappy about it, whereas the data matched Benedikt's experience so surprised him less. Simon is in fact also Austrian so we discussed Vienna a bit too. Anyway, besides being scientifically interesting, this all my have quite a practical upshot, as we may write a grant to study what their data tells us about cultural evolution and variation.

Then Tuesday I was invited go to to a reception at the UK Parliament in London. I went down early and had lunch with Frank Binns, a Bath undergraduate who is working on his placement year there. Together we finally debugged some last stupid piece of code on the games AI thing my group has written, so I was able to upgrade all that code (a bit late for all the traffic from the AI games site!)

I had never been to the British Parliament building before. The front part of it is quite old, like 1100AD-ish, a huge hall for the time. It wasn't originally for democracy, but for festivals. On the way to the toilets (which were stunningly nice) there were two TV screens showing current debates in the two houses. Only the Commons had sound, they were talking about road safety. I didn't have time to wait in line and get into the visitor's galleries, even though the invitation had gotten me through security etc. quite quickly.

The actual reception of course had a very large number of people I knew, plus the older important people. I think mostly people from the house of lords bother to come to these things, but there was also a lot of media. There were several real robots there, and a couple of them were actually working -- it seems ridiculous that in the 21st century anyone was trying to get funding for robots that didn't work! But I can't talk since I have no robots at all so no demo --- I was there because the organisers knew I was good at talking to people and know a lot about robots, and I have done that kind of role for British research councils before. But this time I felt less significant -- I think the only "clients" / decision makers I really got to attempt to educate were some people from the Royal Society, who were otherwise being unimpressed, but I convinced them (I think) that real progress was being made (even if slowly) and this was going to have social impact. So maybe it was worth it from that standpoint -- the Royal Society has a lot of impact on British science policy.

On the personal networking front it was more successful. I saw a number of big people in the field who said hi or at least smiled (Kevin Warwick! It's surprising he smiles at me... actually met Ben Goldacre in a pub in London less than a year later (we have a mutual friend), and he said it was the first time ever he was forced to print a retraction.) I went out afterwards with Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at the best technical university in the UK, Imperial. We found a nice pub across the street, and eventually Owen Holland (who works on Conscious Robots) and an entourage from his robot company, Noel Sharkey (who publicises robotics and is doing really good work right now on the ethics of robot use), and Alan Winfield and his entourage from "Walking with Robots" (which largely organised the event), including the wonderful Claire Rocks, who I met at my Science Café last January.

The point of the event was trying to keep the UK competitive in the domestic (and surgical and space) robotics market, which is also a big priority generally in the EU, though for some reason no one mentioned that. Actually, for some reason this was the first time I really noticed British academics being defensive about Europe, not really feeling a part of it. Maybe it's because I was living in Austria, or because the pound is following the dollar rather than the euro right now. Anyway, it's ludicrous -- the British have a huge impact on the personality of the EU and the EC, it's very weird that they don't always see how important they are.

The rest of the week I was in Vienna desperately trying to finish some obligations such as reviewing and assisting with grant proposals, which meant I wasn't catching up on email (or blogging -- well, half of this I wrote Wednesday on the train to the airport.) Sunday I had expected to be working, but the weather was amazing so we went up the Alp closest to Vienna, Schneeberg (snow mountain). We took a cog-wheel train part way up, then walked as far up as the beginning of the snow. We bought a cake and some water in a little hut, then walked the whole way down through a valley, having dinner in another town, Schneebergdorfl. We had a camera with us, but not a download cable, but anyway we didn't even try to take a shot like that, Will thought it was impossible to get that light, but it looked just like that picture.

This week so far I have been getting back to some science -- as usual, helped by students. My new MSc student (who wants to do a PhD) has done a ton of good work and we were able to discuss modelling the Baldwin Effect and to learn a bit more about its history and understand better the precise details of some of the controversies. The Baldwin Effect is a phenomena in evolution whereby individual learning can accelerate evolution, even when what you learn can't be passed directly on to your children. The very fact that some individuals can learn better than others shows that they may be genetically nearer to a good solution. This was all established theoretically in the 1800s, but not really proved until the 1980s (by Geoff Hinton and a student with a computer model. Geoff Hinton is the guy who gave the ScD lecture at Will's graduation that Patricia took pictures of). I took it for granted that everyone knew about it, but it turns out not to be a part of general biological education, and the extent of its utility is not yet well established. Now that people are thinking about EvoDevo, it is of course a bigger deal (though it is sometimes referred to as just "phenotypic plasticity" and treated as a great mystery rather than a known or at least hypothesised effect.)

And of course my own research now is about the case where you can pass information to your children and peers. Cultural and biological evolution will also interplay. But the case where the information born in intelligence and learning is only transmitted indirectly in reproductive success is more basic, so we should start there.

As of today I've finally caught up on my unread email for the first time since I left for Chicago! So you can see my priorities --- it is more important to be sure there isn't something important to be read than to write blogs. But it is even more important to spend at least a few hours every day really doing research.

Programming & Science

2008-03-25T01:54:00.000-07:00

Hi -- very short entry, I'm on my way to San Francisco now. I'm in the Vienna Airport, which has free wireless (like any airport should!) This really is the best place to fly from. Except there are still some smoking zones, so maybe in that respect Schiphol is now leading...

Anyway, I got more results this week on the culture model and it is all very exciting, but now I have to transition from the exciting pilot studies to the meticulous data gathering. For the last three years the main expert on doing real science / experiments in my group has been my PhD student Hagen Lehmann who has a recent degree in psychology in Germany and is very good with statistics. But still, he is not a programmer so hasn't really created a system for doing analysis. One of the goals for this sabbatical for me is to really get a system of taking results out of NetLogo and BOD/MASON and crank them relatively quickly through statistics in R & get pretty graphs. Will is helping massively with this. Next month I will take the most important course of his I need to take, on doing regression. He says if I really understand the whole course back to front then there won't be much more I'll need. But he also helps me make pretty graphs too.

You would think this stuff would all be fixed, but it isn't. Will is complaining about this with respect to his paper he's writing now too. The science of doing science keeps moving, as does the mathematics of statistics. We spend time on methodology as well as basic research for practically every paper. Hopefully I can get things more nailed down in the next few months. I also need to get a faster computer so I can run statistically significant sets of experiments in reasonable amounts of time. The KLI have said they will buy one.

Speaking of things taking forever to "get to market", I had more traffic than usual on the AI part of my web page, so I tracked it down and it turns out someone wrote a nice article about my PhD research on an AI & Games website.

http://aigamedev.com/theory/behavior-oriented-design-modular-agent

Gotta go board now...

Stability and its lack

2008-03-16T03:03:00.000-07:00

I mentioned last week that I saw Dan Sperber at the KLI & thought his talk was brilliant. However, there was one thing that bothered me in it. Just a recent theory he's been working on / publishing for a few years -- I won't go into the details here, but it has to do with how modularity (the theory that intelligence is composed of a large number of relatively simple parts, which was the basis of most of my PhD work) might explain how culture is preserved by providing bias towards correct solutions. The reason you need something to do this preservation is because, as we all know, communication is very hard and people hardly ever The problem with this idea is that in statistics / information theory we know that the best way to recover a signal from noisy transmission is to not have any bias on the noisy part at least, and just recognize the consistent part is the signal.

I built a model of my theory this week (a new one from scratch in about 6 hours -- shows how good NetLogo is). I think in fact this regularity is one way that modern humans can share so many modules, we acquire them from culture, not the other way around. However, it is of course true that the less possibilities there are, the easier it is to learn which one is true, so there may be some feedback in the system. Anyway, I've submitted an abstract about it to HBES, which is in Japan. One of my colleagues told me it is a great meeting I should go to, and having looked at their journal I think I should probably be joining their society. I am interested in too many things. I also need to get to writing the full paper around that model. I have a ton of papers to put out, but I've been mostly working on programming lately, which to be fair was one of the reasons I needed to go on sabbatical. I hadn't had time to keep up with my students' code or to keep my skills up. It is nice to be getting back in the groove. But I do need to publish...

Thursday and Friday the KLI hosted a symposium on Interpreting Climate Change. I and a few other people were worried that this sounded more like post-modernism than theoretical biology, but the speakers were excellent. Surprisingly few people came, so on Friday we all just sat around the fireplace in the Lorenz mansion and talked about how to save the world. ("we all" == the speakers & the staff & fellows of the KLI). One of the big points of the symposium was that governments & such people are all putting all their money into trying to stop climate change. Even if we stopped all carbon emissions tomorrow (which no one is talking about; they are lamely talking about going back to 1990 levels as if that were any good), the climate is still going to change at this point. So a lot more attention should be being spent on moving people out of harms way and preparing for mass migration. This will require major, major shifts in infrastructure and governance. And we want it to happen peacefully, as peacefully as possible. In Europe, war isn't something that happens far away and you lose the boys & wealth you send to it. It destroys your cities and your libraries and kills your civilians and changes where you live and what language you speak and sometimes even your religion.

Over Christmas I heard an example of a peaceful transition coming in an area I had been worrying about for a few years. I hope you all remember the dustbowl, the agricultural disaster in the midwest and southwest of America in the late 1900s. It is very, very likley that will happen again as the climate gets warmer. And meanwhile, Canada is going to be getting better agricultural conditions. So how will the US respond to Canada having all the farms? Well, maybe hopefully peacefully just buying food, but I was worried about this. But over Christmas we heard a rumour that NAFTA is going to turn into stronger and stronger economic union, so that eventually North America will be like the EU with a single currency. People like I used to work for in Chicago are already trading an instrument based on this idea, just like we used to trade "eurodollars" in the 1980s before the euro had been introduced. I had friend who traded eurodollars. So that is good news, it means that at least the US and Canada and hopefully Mexico are dealing with the coming situation in advance and so there should be well-ordered economic means to deal with the shift in where farming happens.

Back at the KLI, a lot of the speakers we had were people who were lobbying at the highest levels of government, but were frustrated because no politician could say "we need to prepare for the change." This is partly because of the way people trust Nature and it is wrapped up in their faiths. I mean, it used to be Republicans actually said we shouldn't worry about the environment because god would. But when you come down to it, dealing with the huge, long but regular and predictable shifts in life that the seasons bring is one of the things you need culture and religion to do. To get you to store for winter, to give you faith that Spring is coming so you don't do things you regret while you are hungry. So anyway, people want very badly to keep the climate like they remember it, so if you say "we can't do that, we have to start preparing for the change" it sounds like you are losing, you have lost, and losers don't get reelected.

I was arguing that although ultimately you want the governments to fix these things, it sounds like right now the lobbying there has gone as far as it can. Also, the general public is pretty well primed, knowing something is up. So what really needs to change is that we need more companies offering alternatives, being prepared for the changes, and then they would provide both services so that the population could start preparing, and they would offer additional lobbying voices to the government. Will said (yesterday) that I think like an American, and that in America in general innovation is often seen as coming from industry (which is just the general public when you come down to it, esp. now that so much industry is start ups etc.) But historically in Europe people think of it as the government's job to come up with the ideas as well as to fund them. I think this is very weird, but then I do work on intelligent control all the time. You want the control system to maintain order, you want other specialized modules (remember them?) to worry about actually doing the learning and acting.

Another thing I was confused by though was that everyone was talking as if working in the US system was the only way to address climate change. Two of the four speakers were American (and I am), but only one of all of us lived in the US now. I said "isn't the EU a bigger economic force now?" and everyone just looked at me. With the expansion of the EU it now has like 100 million more people than the US, so even if on average they are poorer and the EU control structure is more diffuse, surely overall Europe has more influence? Also, I just think the EC has some great ideas about how to spread science and innovation right now, whereas I've heard nothing good about how research funding is going in the US lately. (We also talked a lot about the problems of dealing with problems that fall between disciplines, who researches them, how are students trained to deal with them, who hires them after they have been.)

Anyway, this morning I just read that the euro zone alone (not the whole EU, the part that has he euro currency, so for example not the UK and not the Czechs) now has the world's largest economy, because the dollar has plunged so much relative to the euro taking all the assets denominated in that currency with it. So I was right, people just weren't used to thinking that way. Not that America doesn't matter, every country matters and America matters more than most. But it is not a stupid pipe dream that Europe might sort out its own problems locally and still have impact globally.

I was lying in bed this morning thinking about whether I should spend time trying to get models of the way the world will change out where people can play with them. I've argued for years that if people had experience of modelling they'd be better at thinking about this stuff. I'm currently working on trying to make it accessible to graduate students and advanced undergraduates, and hoped before I retired we'd have it for highschool. But now I'm thinking 20 years is too long and maybe I should be thinking about facebook applications or Google widgets. Or maybe I should be writing my papers. It's hard to know in times like these.

I'm going to be in Palo Alto though in a week and a half, and I've already met the head of Google research on previous trips. So I should really make up my mind about whether to write to him, and if so what, and see if he wants to meet up. I might see him anyway since Pearl Tsai is throwing a birthday party for herself while I'm visiting her.