Week 44

If due to increased efficiencies in the economy people are out of work, the solution cannot be "reduced work hours" -- this would be a modernist, industrial (therefore backward) solution to the problem; reduced work hours are another standard, another potential restriction for business. Instead, government giving out 1K, 2K $ per month to everyone is better; this gives people the freedom to do whatever they want with that money, so supply / demand signals still work. The extraordinary wealth that is created due to high-tech production -- which inherently favors the few -- is shared by everyone.

I repeat: the originator of this idea is not Karl Marx, but Milton Friedman. Marx, the idealist moron that he was, went to a completely different (read: wrong) direction.

Another reason why such a distribution mechanism is important: in a 3rd Wave economy is that the outcome of projects become less and less predictable. It is not a coincidence most recent management advice in business is the so-called "Trystorming" approach which advocates failing fast, quick while trying many solutions. But "trystorming" requires trying and failing many times, and such risk taking will work best in society with a wide social net.

It is interesting to note that one of the giants of computer science and programming, Donald Knuth is also the creator of the typesetting system TeX which forms the backbone of scientific publishing (I personally use a variant called LaTeX that lets me quickly prepare a document, using special codes for different types of structures). If the printing press gave the spark of renaissance, reformation, then one of the pioneers of what I consider a digital renaissance also enjoys a similar figure, this time being a creator of a digital publishing system. We have a digital Gutenberg and Galilei embodied in Knuth.

The benefits of this digital publishing system cannot be overstated. For my work I have all kinds of shortcuts, templates that let me write a scientific document almost as fast as I can think it. When I am done, with another script the whole thing goes to the Net, one piece is added to a tracking system, generated PDF file is appended to another master file. The whole thing grows, becomes searchable, can be watched, downloaded by others as soon as I make put this material "out there".

If this is not revolutionary, I don't know what is.

"A comment posted to London’s Guardian newspaper said it best: “Censorship, like everything else in the West, has been privatized.” The writer [was ..] referring to news that Wikileaks — the online whistleblower that has been embarrassing governments and corporations worldwide by disclosing their secrets — was suspending operations.

Why? Had its leader, the mercurial Julian Assange, been indicted? Had the black choppers swooped in and taken him out? No, nothing that cinematic. It was the bankers. A handful of big money handlers decided they wouldn’t process donations to Wikileaks, it had exhausted its reserves, and it was going broke.

The fund cutoff started in December 2010. That’s when Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union, Amazon and Bank of America discovered their patriotic duty"

"Jeremy Rifkin, Der Spiegel, 2005

No one is dealing with the real employment problem in Europe. They're afraid to have the real conversation. These jobs are never coming back.[..] Outsourcing counts for about 5 percent or less of the jobs that are disappearing. [..] The fact is that we're ending mass wage labor. This is what's going on with all the companies I've been working with.

The last great structural shift in labor occurred at the beginning of the industrial revolution. We ended slave labor and that was a great structural shift. For 10,000 years people held each other as slaves. From an economic point of view, it became cheaper to feed coal to the steam engine than to feed the mouth of a slave. The new high- tech revolutions of the 21st century end mass wage labor -- meaning the cheapest worker in the world is more expensive than the intelligent technology coming online to replace them."

Continuous Rules

Longnow.org: "One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. His reaction was unequivocal, "That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard." For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company [..]

The technical side of the project was definitely stretching our capacities. We had decided to simplify things by starting with only 64,000 processors, but even then the amount of work to do was overwhelming [..]

Feynman's insistence on looking at the details helped us discover the potential of the machine for numerical computing and physical simulation. We had convinced ourselves at the time that the Connection Machine would not be efficient at "number-crunching," because the first prototype had no special hardware for vectors or floating point arithmetic. Both of these were "known" to be requirements for number-crunching. Feynman decided to test this assumption on a problem that he was familiar with in detail: quantum chromodynamics [..] According to Feynman's calculations, the Connection Machine, even without any special hardware for floating point arithmetic, would outperform a machine that CalTech was building for doing QCD calculations.By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he presented his answer in the form of a set of partial differential equations. To a physicist this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is a bit strange. Feynman's router equations were in terms of variables representing continuous quantities such as "the average number of 1 bits in a message address." I was much more accustomed to seeing analysis in terms of inductive proof and case analysis than taking the derivative of "the number of 1's" with respect to time. Our discrete analysis said we needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman's equations suggested that we only needed five. We decided to play it safe and ignore Feynman.

The decision to ignore Feynman's analysis was made in September, but by next spring we were up against a wall. The chips that we had designed were slightly too big to manufacture and the only way to solve the problem was to cut the number of buffers per chip back to five. Since Feynman's equations claimed we could do this safely, his unconventional methods of analysis started looking better and better to us. We decided to go ahead and make the chips with the smaller number of buffers.

Fortunately, he was right. When we put together the chips the machine worked"

There is a new breed of software developer / analyst who call themselves "data scientists" who are mostly bunch of ex-IT programmers with shoddy mathematics skills that managed to learn some statistics, but all they really do is throwing some tools at an analysis problem.

Kaggle.com is a place where the these "scientists" meet. For those who dont know, clients go to Kaggle with analysis problems and they typically attach an award to the best analysis. Kaggle "crowdsources" these problems to anyone who is interested, records, tracks submissions, and selects a winner.

Recently there was a traffic flow analysis problem on this site. There's been decades of research on traffic flow analysis, the area in general is very similar to fluid flow -- you could easily view traffic as a function u(x,y,t) at time t and position x,y, and build from there. But no "scientist" has knowledge about partial differential equations, so they go nuts using bunch of black box methods that somehow identifies "patterns". The winner? Two dudes who report a success rate "within 1 minute of real travel time" (and get this, it is the best part) %73 percent of the time.

How would you feel if the plane you fly in obeyed the laws of physics %73 of the time? Or your pressure cooker was only built to contain its food %73 of the time? OK, these are high-risk, high-annoyance situations, but still, there is something missing here. This data science crap is middle-class scientism at its worst. Do we call Isaac Newton an "apple scientist"? Wasn't he also analyzing data? So the label sucks.

It seems we are failing to teach in schools, in literature what it means to mathematically model things. Schools give students lots of rote for solving neat problems that are all cooked up, but noone shows how wave equation can be derived starting from few key assumptions.

There can be noise in the data. That's not a problem. What we try in modeling is coming up with the best model so that the noise is "normal" or Gaussian. Once you have that model, there are many fitting tools that can fit the data, but there are no shortcuts while defining that model.

These models are very challenging, smart, we should be teaching how they are created, but instead, we give rise to monkeys that try to circumvent "the noise" but are ironically slapped down by the same statistics that they supposedly respect. We shared a post earlier about funding way more physicists than necessary. Many of these physicists research particle physics and any of them could enter that competition at Kaggle and it would be a slapfest. But they dont. Why? Because they are trying to uncover the mysteries of particles, while data monkeys are busy looking for magic wands. Supply is not meeting the demand here.

Watch for buzzwords in this space. People go nuts on stochastic blah, or Monte Carlo methods. Well, Monte Carlo methods are great for calculating intractable integrals, but for that, you have to know what an integral is. Right Mr. G? Oh, and this method was invented during the Manhattan project by physicists, and is deeply mathematical itself. There are no shortcuts.

"People have come to see copyright as a tool of punishment, Europe's technology chief has said in her strongest-yet attack on the current copyright system.

Digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes said on Saturday that the creative industries had to embrace rather than resist new technological ways of distributing artistic works [..] "Citizens increasingly hear the word copyright and hate what is behind it. Sadly, many see the current system as a tool to punish and withhold, not a tool to recognise and reward" [Kroes said].

The commissioner said online distribution and cloud computing offered a "totally new way of purchasing, delivering and consuming cultural works", and suggested that the existing legal framework around copyright was not flexible enough to take advantage of this evolution"

A freely accessible index of 5 billion web pages, their page rank, their link graphs and other metadata, hosted on Amazon EC2, was announced today by the Common Crawl Foundation. "It is crucial [in] our information-based society that Web crawl data be open and accessible to anyone who desires to utilize it," writes Foundation director Lisa Green on the organization's blog.

The US culture code for technology is FUEL. People eat not to taste, but to "fuel up". The drive-in restaurant / concept is directly related to this, these places look like fuel stations, and for all intents and purposes, they are. You drive in, get fuel, just like you drive in the gas station to buy gas for your car.

BTW -- we mentioned the US code for the car which is IDENTITY. Thus, the comic book, movie Transformers is on code, because there are walking, talking cars who have identities. German code for car ENGINEERING, the guy who coded up those Google cars is interestingly from Germany.

AB: "Americans seem to be eating constantly: in the car, at the movie theater, at work, while watching TV."

The US culture code for technology is IT WORKS. People dont seem to want perfection (the code for which, is DEAD). As long as something works, it is fine.

Axel Boldt: "I am constantly amazed by the poor quality and backwardedness of many technologies routinely employed in the US."

Agree 100%. For me 3D now is a negative that needs to be weighed against potential positives of a movie. If a movie has a good director, one great, two average actors, I might just see it. If this movie is in 3D however, then the negatives outweigh the positivies, and I'll pass.

"[..] 3-D for "Avatar" was absolutely stunning. Using 3-D technology not to have things fly out at us from the screen, but instead to create a realistic depth to what we were watching, was how 3-D was always meant to be.

The interesting part was that the studios didn't pay attention to why those buying tickets to "Avatar" were willing to spend more for 3-D. They were only paying attention to the fact that people were spending more to watch a movie in 3-D.

Instead of Cameron leading a new evolution of filmmaking, we instead got movies -- especially those already heavy in special effects -- to get 3-D converted. Not filmed in 3-D ... converted in 3-D.

It was head-slapping. Hollywood had a hold of some excellent technology, modernized by the genius of Cameron as a filmmaker, and somehow smashed it into the ground. Audiences at first didn't know the difference. They felt that the 3-D had to be as good as "Avatar," so they would snatch up 3-D tickets, paying a premium for the privilege.

However, they would walk out disappointed. The 3-D experience in a film like "Clash of the Titans" was not the same as what they saw in "Avatar." And slowly but surely, people at the ticket counter decided to stick with 2-D, and opt out of 3-D.

Yet, Hollywood sees that only as a negative blip on the overall radar, and feel 3-D is going to come back"