The person in charge of matching MSc students with research projects is now seeking research projects for the next batch of students. I was invited to present some opportunities to students on almost no notice several hours before a conference paper was due, and so declined the opportunity.
I do have a couple of data gathering projects to which I could deploy students, but they are not yet written up. My PhD supervisor has mixed feelings about using in this way (she said she was too close to the projects on which previous students had worked). I have resolved to come up with two options during the break. One is a "fire and forget" project in which my expectations would be that the student(s) tell me something interesting about a broadly defined problem at one of my research sites. The other would be a detailed data collection exercise that would be useful any time in the next two years.
It has also been suggested that supervise a MSc student directly to do some of the above research.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Tales of Supervision: The conclusion
On Monday half an hour before our scheduled meeting, my co-supervisor e-mails indicating that a printed copy of her suggested grading was in my physical mail box. I took a brief look at it, spending most of my time Google Translating the criteria into English. I was also responsible for adding to the blurb that explained our grading choices. The opponent and all supervisors have to sign off on one grading/explanation.
On the way to retrieve printouts of my extended comments (for my co-supervisor and the opponent), I catch my co-supervisor in the hallway as she was leaving for lunch. Even though we had hastily set a meeting time on Friday, she had not written it down (understandable, since two of her other MSc students were defending after our common student.) After pointing out that the opponent would come to the university at 1 p.m. explicitly for the paperwork, my co-supervisor remembers the meeting.
We discussed that the student's goal was to get 3/5 points overall. We ended there, haggling over scores of 2-4 (I didn't think the thesis was that great, and tried to push the grades down in a couple categories). It turns out that the thesis was really well organized, and the literature review was really strong, but reusability was weak. At this point, I learned that my extended comments would be visible to the student, and attached to the credential. The opponent agreed with my blurb, but found the second paragraph harsh (limitations of time and company's externalities). We decided to remove it, leaving the first paragraph which was basically something that followed the sandwich rule (praise, bad stuff, praise) I learned when judging primary school science fairs.
One of the changes that the opponent and student had suggested was a change in the title of the thesis. (This is not a problem in the Finnish system, unlike in the Canadian system in which a title is locked in relatively early in the process.) We printed a set of paperwork with the old title, and then realized our mistake. We copied and pasted the title from the final copy the student had sent early Monday morning into our paperwork, (the paperwork/forms come out of a poorly secured internally developed web application) and then realized that it had a grammar error, and did the paperwork a third time.
And so the thesis was done. Had the student completed it after December, he would receive only 30 ECTS instead of 35. He still has coursework to finish at his leisure. I learned quite a bit about the "constructive research" methodology. And the co-supervisor learned some things about internationalization.
At our Friday department meeting and annual Christmas dinner, we learned that the department had produced 98 of the 100 desired Master's theses (not Master's degrees) affecting the upcoming three-year budget cycle. We also learned that the average number of MScs produced per teaching faculty member was around 0.3, which means that a small number of us are carrying most of the supervising load.
On the way to retrieve printouts of my extended comments (for my co-supervisor and the opponent), I catch my co-supervisor in the hallway as she was leaving for lunch. Even though we had hastily set a meeting time on Friday, she had not written it down (understandable, since two of her other MSc students were defending after our common student.) After pointing out that the opponent would come to the university at 1 p.m. explicitly for the paperwork, my co-supervisor remembers the meeting.
We discussed that the student's goal was to get 3/5 points overall. We ended there, haggling over scores of 2-4 (I didn't think the thesis was that great, and tried to push the grades down in a couple categories). It turns out that the thesis was really well organized, and the literature review was really strong, but reusability was weak. At this point, I learned that my extended comments would be visible to the student, and attached to the credential. The opponent agreed with my blurb, but found the second paragraph harsh (limitations of time and company's externalities). We decided to remove it, leaving the first paragraph which was basically something that followed the sandwich rule (praise, bad stuff, praise) I learned when judging primary school science fairs.
One of the changes that the opponent and student had suggested was a change in the title of the thesis. (This is not a problem in the Finnish system, unlike in the Canadian system in which a title is locked in relatively early in the process.) We printed a set of paperwork with the old title, and then realized our mistake. We copied and pasted the title from the final copy the student had sent early Monday morning into our paperwork, (the paperwork/forms come out of a poorly secured internally developed web application) and then realized that it had a grammar error, and did the paperwork a third time.
And so the thesis was done. Had the student completed it after December, he would receive only 30 ECTS instead of 35. He still has coursework to finish at his leisure. I learned quite a bit about the "constructive research" methodology. And the co-supervisor learned some things about internationalization.
At our Friday department meeting and annual Christmas dinner, we learned that the department had produced 98 of the 100 desired Master's theses (not Master's degrees) affecting the upcoming three-year budget cycle. We also learned that the average number of MScs produced per teaching faculty member was around 0.3, which means that a small number of us are carrying most of the supervising load.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Tales of Supervision: The defense
(Yes, I'm spelling defen(s|c)e inconsistently. Deal with it. This might also be conscious breathing awareness month.)
I arrived in town on Thursday morning to snow and ice covered streets. I decided I would bike it in since proceeding on the first 600m test scenic route to the main road was uneventful. I was surprised to see several locals walk their bikes along some stretches of pathway. Deciding to investigate, I tried to slow down. There was no slowing down. Somehow, I had made it more than 3 km without running into this problem, and then I noticed locals falling over and/or biking into snow banks or off the path to avoid worse things on the path.
I dismounted after riding into some soft snow, and walked the bike under the highway underpass. A local walking his dog warned me about the slippery surface in Finnish, and then gestured the same. A cautious 40 minutes later (walking past some interesting tread marks that recorded black ice under snow) I arrive at my office.
No new draft from the student, so I work on the text he sent to the opponent (It had obvious grammar issues in new text, but was otherwise OK). I hope he at least did a language check with someone for whatever new content might be added. Then I realize that I have no idea about protocol at the defense on Friday, and my co-supervisor was not in her office. But she did return an e-mail detailing the procedure (most of which I had observed before).
On Friday morning, I collect my co-supervisor from her office, and we head to the usual presentation room a few minutes before its scheduled start. The student was already there, with the PowerPoint loaded, waiting for us.
The presentation goes well. In addition to we the supervisors, there was the opponent, the moderator, and some other students/staff. A couple of attendees even walked in late, during the defense.
The opponent offers his criticisms in detail. He and the student debate for a few minutes. I agree with most/all of the criticisms, and even recall making some of them in previous drafts. The opponent states that the presentation was clearer than the text.
After time was up, we adjourned to a communal sitting/coffee area, at which the four of us discuss in detail the criticisms and next steps. My co-supervisor and the opponent both supply hardcopies of the thesis (my co-supervisor did not print a copy of the final version), I promised to send a copy of my marked-up PDF.
The student would have until Monday to amend his thesis because the department committee that has the final word on thesises meets on Tuesday. My co-supervisor suggests a meeting on Monday to do the formal grading paperwork (based on the expectation that the student will improve the text as suggested).
[I have extended hand-written notes about the defense, which may appear in this space at a later date in some form.]
I arrived in town on Thursday morning to snow and ice covered streets. I decided I would bike it in since proceeding on the first 600m test scenic route to the main road was uneventful. I was surprised to see several locals walk their bikes along some stretches of pathway. Deciding to investigate, I tried to slow down. There was no slowing down. Somehow, I had made it more than 3 km without running into this problem, and then I noticed locals falling over and/or biking into snow banks or off the path to avoid worse things on the path.
I dismounted after riding into some soft snow, and walked the bike under the highway underpass. A local walking his dog warned me about the slippery surface in Finnish, and then gestured the same. A cautious 40 minutes later (walking past some interesting tread marks that recorded black ice under snow) I arrive at my office.
No new draft from the student, so I work on the text he sent to the opponent (It had obvious grammar issues in new text, but was otherwise OK). I hope he at least did a language check with someone for whatever new content might be added. Then I realize that I have no idea about protocol at the defense on Friday, and my co-supervisor was not in her office. But she did return an e-mail detailing the procedure (most of which I had observed before).
On Friday morning, I collect my co-supervisor from her office, and we head to the usual presentation room a few minutes before its scheduled start. The student was already there, with the PowerPoint loaded, waiting for us.
The presentation goes well. In addition to we the supervisors, there was the opponent, the moderator, and some other students/staff. A couple of attendees even walked in late, during the defense.
The opponent offers his criticisms in detail. He and the student debate for a few minutes. I agree with most/all of the criticisms, and even recall making some of them in previous drafts. The opponent states that the presentation was clearer than the text.
After time was up, we adjourned to a communal sitting/coffee area, at which the four of us discuss in detail the criticisms and next steps. My co-supervisor and the opponent both supply hardcopies of the thesis (my co-supervisor did not print a copy of the final version), I promised to send a copy of my marked-up PDF.
The student would have until Monday to amend his thesis because the department committee that has the final word on thesises meets on Tuesday. My co-supervisor suggests a meeting on Monday to do the formal grading paperwork (based on the expectation that the student will improve the text as suggested).
[I have extended hand-written notes about the defense, which may appear in this space at a later date in some form.]
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Tales of Supervision: In a hotel room, after visiting the local analogue of the Lincoln Memorial (or Layton Memorial...)
I had received my student's latest text by 8 a.m., but couldn't do much with it since I was packing. The hotel I was transiting through didn't have an overnight room ready, and no business center to speak of. (I had mistaken their security room for a business center. It had a computer workstation built into a wall and was not occupied or guarded. The actual public computer was an old HP junker in the lobby.) It also didn't have much of a lobby (three chairs). So I could either cram myself into a subway or visit the local analogue of the Lincoln Memorial to find a place to sit down and work. (The amazing thing about this city is that it provides very few public sitting places in an effort to discourage vagrancy.) I left my luggage and computer at the front desk (which was also the unoccupied security desk and headed out to the memorial. It provided no public seating (except under the drizzle).
Two hours later: The hotel room has exactly one accessible power outlet, to which the entire entertainment system is connected. To access it requires forcing my way behind the 30" flat-screen TV... My sitting place (there was no desk in the otherwise immaculately appointed room) was one of two non-reclining easy chairs by a ground-floor window facing the local alley-side coffee and snack shop. 2.5 hours later, I sent my comments on the "final" copy of the thesis, along with a PDF of the comment summary. This should give him plenty of time to edit things before sending it to the opponent.
Late that evening (for the student), he sends a copy of his thesis to myself, my co-supervisor, and my opponent. It has some minor text issues.
I'm scheduled to arrive in time for the usual Thursday afternoon meeting time, but the student does not think he needs a meeting.
Two hours later: The hotel room has exactly one accessible power outlet, to which the entire entertainment system is connected. To access it requires forcing my way behind the 30" flat-screen TV... My sitting place (there was no desk in the otherwise immaculately appointed room) was one of two non-reclining easy chairs by a ground-floor window facing the local alley-side coffee and snack shop. 2.5 hours later, I sent my comments on the "final" copy of the thesis, along with a PDF of the comment summary. This should give him plenty of time to edit things before sending it to the opponent.
Late that evening (for the student), he sends a copy of his thesis to myself, my co-supervisor, and my opponent. It has some minor text issues.
I'm scheduled to arrive in time for the usual Thursday afternoon meeting time, but the student does not think he needs a meeting.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Tales of Supervision: North American style
Monday's meeting went as usual.
On Thursday, I was nearly late. I had decided to go shopping at one of the not-so-local night markets, and returned to a flakey Internet connection at the residence. Skyping my co-supervisors desktop computer was flakey, so I Skyped my student instead. (He had his laptop at the co-supervisor's office.)
The student had not had time to address all the suggested text revisions. He was instead focused on presentation slides. My co-supervisor found a minor issue with the timeline slide, which anticipated completion in Spring 2012 (a formality to satisfy the bean counter in the room).
I had asked a few questions of both my co-supervisor and student about linking back to the literature. I had suggested that a stronger link be made in the analysis, but my co-supervisor objected, stating that that section should be used exclusively to describe the student's own original work. I had no objections to that, as long as the findings linked back to the literature in some fashion. It seems that there are some style differences still to be worked out. We emerged the idea that the discussion and conclusion should deal with this in a cohesive way. (We found out later that the student had decided to start the final section as "Discussion and Conclusion"... Not exactly what we had expected, but it was clear that the student was working on something. We trust him enough to figure it out.)
My co-supervisor then over-interpreted my style question to mean that active/passive voice question that I thought we had settled. So far, I had only been editing for local grammar, without altering the student's choice of voice in his writing. My co-supervisor had been paying more attention to voice as a style matter and suggested that the student not refer to his own work in the "passive voice", by which she meant past tense.
After two long weeks in the field, I thought better of arguing about that detail at 11:30 p.m. the night before the student was scheduled to present. I'm also glad that my co-supervisor is more on the ball this week since I was/am dead tired. I asked for more text for Monday, which would be our last meeting before the defense. I asked if there was further opportunity after the defense to modify the text, to which the answer was thankfully "yes, we must deal with the opponent's comments".
About the presentation: I attended via Skype, while skipping out on a part of a local workshop relating to my own research. (The co-supervisor was late, she ditched out of giving a lecture to attend this.) I saw the presentation via the student's laptop, with which he was also presenting..., but I couldn't hear or respond to any questions from the audience due to exceedingly poor audio pickup. I'm glad that my co-supervisor was there (even though a bit late) to address live questions. (Even though the presentation and teardown lasted 30 minutes, the workshop had not significantly proceeded in the schedule, and I picked up almost where we had left off.)
In an exchange of e-mails later, there is still some hesitation about formally booking the defence for next week, but we run with it for now. My co-supervisor emphasizes that the goal now should be to get the thesis to look like it has the correct parts and order of a good Finnish thesis, whatever that is.
On Thursday, I was nearly late. I had decided to go shopping at one of the not-so-local night markets, and returned to a flakey Internet connection at the residence. Skyping my co-supervisors desktop computer was flakey, so I Skyped my student instead. (He had his laptop at the co-supervisor's office.)
The student had not had time to address all the suggested text revisions. He was instead focused on presentation slides. My co-supervisor found a minor issue with the timeline slide, which anticipated completion in Spring 2012 (a formality to satisfy the bean counter in the room).
I had asked a few questions of both my co-supervisor and student about linking back to the literature. I had suggested that a stronger link be made in the analysis, but my co-supervisor objected, stating that that section should be used exclusively to describe the student's own original work. I had no objections to that, as long as the findings linked back to the literature in some fashion. It seems that there are some style differences still to be worked out. We emerged the idea that the discussion and conclusion should deal with this in a cohesive way. (We found out later that the student had decided to start the final section as "Discussion and Conclusion"... Not exactly what we had expected, but it was clear that the student was working on something. We trust him enough to figure it out.)
My co-supervisor then over-interpreted my style question to mean that active/passive voice question that I thought we had settled. So far, I had only been editing for local grammar, without altering the student's choice of voice in his writing. My co-supervisor had been paying more attention to voice as a style matter and suggested that the student not refer to his own work in the "passive voice", by which she meant past tense.
After two long weeks in the field, I thought better of arguing about that detail at 11:30 p.m. the night before the student was scheduled to present. I'm also glad that my co-supervisor is more on the ball this week since I was/am dead tired. I asked for more text for Monday, which would be our last meeting before the defense. I asked if there was further opportunity after the defense to modify the text, to which the answer was thankfully "yes, we must deal with the opponent's comments".
About the presentation: I attended via Skype, while skipping out on a part of a local workshop relating to my own research. (The co-supervisor was late, she ditched out of giving a lecture to attend this.) I saw the presentation via the student's laptop, with which he was also presenting..., but I couldn't hear or respond to any questions from the audience due to exceedingly poor audio pickup. I'm glad that my co-supervisor was there (even though a bit late) to address live questions. (Even though the presentation and teardown lasted 30 minutes, the workshop had not significantly proceeded in the schedule, and I picked up almost where we had left off.)
In an exchange of e-mails later, there is still some hesitation about formally booking the defence for next week, but we run with it for now. My co-supervisor emphasizes that the goal now should be to get the thesis to look like it has the correct parts and order of a good Finnish thesis, whatever that is.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Tales of Supervision: Supervising at 10:30 p.m.
Reliable Internet connection + thesis draft from my student + six hour time difference = supervising at 10:30 p.m. by Skype.
It turns out that my supervisor only glanced at the student's latest draft, which I received in the morning (or around midnight for my student). Good progress was made with text and diagrams. During the day, I highlighted a number of ambiguities remaining in the text, and did my usual Acrobat 9 text edit suggestions. (Acrobat X is flakier than Acrobat 9 and the UI was garbaged. Avoid if possible.) Apparently, they don't completely show up in whatever PDF viewer the student uses (probably Preview since he's on a Mac), so I provided a screenshot of what they should look like.
We agree to do this again on Monday since we're two weeks from the deadline. Also, because he was sick the last time he was supposed to present his "research proposal", it will be held next Friday. (The research proposal presentation is basically a 10-minute talk about the student's proposed/ongoing research [problem, methods, literature], given at a seminar that runs every Friday morning. At it, critics and colleagues are allowed to ask questions about the research. It is open to all interested. The same booking is also used for MSc defenses, that typically last 40 minutes with a 15 minute presentation, 10 minutes of comments and dialogue from the opponent, and 15 minutes for general discussion including the supervisors.)
We scout out possible English-speaking opponents (apparently s/he only needs the text by the Tuesday before the Friday defense).
I will try to attend the research proposal presentation via Skype on his laptop, even though the usual facility for presentations is a PolyCom-equipped teleconference venue.
It turns out that my supervisor only glanced at the student's latest draft, which I received in the morning (or around midnight for my student). Good progress was made with text and diagrams. During the day, I highlighted a number of ambiguities remaining in the text, and did my usual Acrobat 9 text edit suggestions. (Acrobat X is flakier than Acrobat 9 and the UI was garbaged. Avoid if possible.) Apparently, they don't completely show up in whatever PDF viewer the student uses (probably Preview since he's on a Mac), so I provided a screenshot of what they should look like.
We agree to do this again on Monday since we're two weeks from the deadline. Also, because he was sick the last time he was supposed to present his "research proposal", it will be held next Friday. (The research proposal presentation is basically a 10-minute talk about the student's proposed/ongoing research [problem, methods, literature], given at a seminar that runs every Friday morning. At it, critics and colleagues are allowed to ask questions about the research. It is open to all interested. The same booking is also used for MSc defenses, that typically last 40 minutes with a 15 minute presentation, 10 minutes of comments and dialogue from the opponent, and 15 minutes for general discussion including the supervisors.)
We scout out possible English-speaking opponents (apparently s/he only needs the text by the Tuesday before the Friday defense).
I will try to attend the research proposal presentation via Skype on his laptop, even though the usual facility for presentations is a PolyCom-equipped teleconference venue.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Dessert chicken
A colleague demonstrates the proper way to grip the chicken piece for eating:
It's between a flattened split breast cut and a half chicken cut, with wings and legs removed. Measures ~10 inches long, 3-4 inches wide, 0.5 inches deep. I initially thought that it was entirely one chicken breast, and asked about the size of the chicken that bore a breast of this size.
Deep-fried for ~5 minutes in a crispy light sweet batter, then lightly salted and spiced on the outside. The rib structures provide a secondary grip. Grease is entirely retained in the batter and doesn't penetrate the paper bag.
(pictured at a 30 degree angle.)
It goes great with beer, and would be a killer app in American spectator sports.
~1000 kcal, ~1 lb (12 oz. chicken, 4 oz. batter and oil). Cost: NT$40 (US$1.33), and a heart attack a decade later.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Dessert cake
Container: Two shells of structurally sound non-fluffy pancake material prepared on this special grill. Shells are glued together with a thin layer of the same pancake material after filling.
Contents: "milk butter" (like condensed milk), red bean, tarot, or green bean. All sweetened.
~200-400 kcal, NT$10 each.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Beef noodle soup
Beef slices in a spicy broth, white flour noodles, green onions, pickled vegetables, kelp.
NT$75, ~500 kcal.
Friday, November 25, 2011
Tales of Supervision: Supervising with Skype
I thought I had missed our weekly Thursday meeting due to lack of Skype in the field, but it turns out that my co-supervisor and student decided not to meet this week. That's unfortunate since we really need to have some progress with the defense in less than a month.
I have confidence that my student is busy working on that business stuff that his company likes to do. I hope he keeps notes well in that notebook we provided, instead of just using it as a vacation planning tool.
I'm still new to this design science thing, so I'm glad that my co-supervisor knows how to be more of a hard-ass about it than I.
I have confidence that my student is busy working on that business stuff that his company likes to do. I hope he keeps notes well in that notebook we provided, instead of just using it as a vacation planning tool.
I'm still new to this design science thing, so I'm glad that my co-supervisor knows how to be more of a hard-ass about it than I.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Prizmo/DocScanner review followup
By request of mlgoodson, the following brief comparison of OCR in DocScanner and Prizmo is provided for your reading pleasure. I also include Acrobat Pro and Acrobat X Pro simply because they are already commonly available. This is a follow-up to my previous review of DocScanner. While Primo has been updated since May 2011, DocScanner has not.
The PDF (11 MB) is available here:
Please judge the data for yourselves.
Notes: I use Acrobat Pro 9 and Prizmo. I have received no consideration for this review.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
About the present state. Part the second.
More upsetting ideas for the linear economists and Enlightenment democratists.
9) The wealth gap does not exist as such.
Criticising the income distribution implies that quality of life, happiness or whatever personal satisfaction can be generally improved through the improved distribution of money. i.e., we can spend our way to better lives. Optimising for the *potential* to spend does not necessarily affect the ability to obtain desired goods and services.
Recall that money may have originated a proxy for relationships, and that it is now a measure and entity with its own dynamics. Note also that the available quantity of, say, surgeon time available, rare earth metals for green energy devices, and truffles are constrained by factors vaguely, if at all, by personal incomes. Fixing the measure of inadequate social relations will fix neither the inadequate social relations, nor the probabilistic processes that generate products and services of unequal quality.
The gap to address is the opportunity gap. What new norms of social relations can we conceive, test (and mostly reject) that will scale well to meet our current and future needs? Meritocracies have succeeded quite well in the open source world, but concentrate decision-making, decision-taking, and decision-enacting in an even smaller portion of the population than do democracies.
10) The wealthy and powerful are not always purposefully evil.
Almost every system fails to consider some stakeholder existing outside the system logic. Godel might claim that it's impossible to know about such missing stakeholders.
Whatever the likelihood that wealthy and powerful individuals are born disposed to deliberately keep others down, every decision-maker is subject to incomplete information. One cannot know everything there is to know about a decision before making it, otherwise it would not be a choice as such.
Most humans include and exclude individuals in their groups based on similar sets of social, cultural, vocational, political and various intrinsic and extrinsic factors of identity. They often surround themselves with people of like attitudes, with whom social capital bonds become strong. Hipsters do this with trends, vying for exclusivity to being the first to adopt. Similarly, foodies with rare culinary experiences, science fiction and fantasy fans with knowledge of various cannons, heroin addicts with safe suppliers and injection sites, boating people with... boating stuff, and strange academics in high towers with access to pre-press papers. Everyone includes and excludes, and only some of the time are criteria connected to money or governmental power.
11) Long-term sustainability is depends on short-term sustainability.
In the long run, we're all dead, but presumably we want to make the best of the temporary islands of stability we have and see now. It also means we need always to be ready to jump at the same time to several other islands. Biology deals with this pragmatically: Produce offspring who can themselves produce offspring, and call it a day.
For humans, this implies: acknowledging and fulfilling a hierarchy of needs, not counting on martyrdom, and doing all the boring day to day things (don't get shot at) so that we or our descendants are at least around to do the next big thing.
12) Jobs, policies, corporations, people, etc. are not the source of capability.
There are two possible sources of net inputs into the global economy: The Sun, and time. The sun provides energy (mostly via plants), while time provides opportunities for processes to use that energy to arrange local environments in more advantageous ways.
A process--say, a human--can generate advantage (or "value") through directed or thoughtful rearrangements of their environments. They can eat and/or cook dinner, manufacture widgets, arrange other humans, devise new ways to do things, etc. whether in a "job" or not.
Directed and thoughtful means that use of time and energy provides a net gain of either or both *in the immediate local environment* (that is, they are fit), and provide opportunities to draw support from nearby environments. (This is Kauffman's fitness peaks and valleys.) The directed and thoughtful actor must not only have the capability to take risks through accrued resources and advantages, but *must* take risks to explore nearby environments in order to be part of a sustainable system.
13) The system of everything is not (yet) useful.
a) The Westphalian statehood model explicitly implements a economic model of social organisation, via exclusivity to land areas containing material resources, people who harvest time, and the ability to harvest energy from the sun through plants.
But The sun and time do not respect arbitrary political or economic borders. They may respect physical geographic borders (and perhaps social borders). Yet our measures and policies of finance and economy assume that systems are bound by lines on paper. Clearly, such faulty models will diverge from reality in interesting and unpredictable ways.
The problem is complicated because of the long lag time and many unconsidered factors between our adjustments and feedback from the system. Economic policies and interventions like job creation, infrastructure investment, or tax changes takes months to years to come into effect and report. And our knowledge of how to instrument the systems we seek to influence, or to know about other systems our systems touch, is limited at best. Abstract measures about total composition or growth or "rates" do not tell us much about the dynamics of a system, yet we expect to be able to optimise for such measures.
b) Exports is the wrong way to think about macro growth (not "macroeconomic" growth).
Against what do individual states push to assert their advantages? other states. Individuals push other individuals. Regions push other regions. Firms push other firms. The world pushes or compares against what? There's an import/export assumption in there, that exports are necessary for economic and social growth. To whom does the "global economy" export? Since the globe as a whole cannot export across space to another globe, at the end of the day we must export across time.
Our measures of growth are therefore conceptually temporal (year over year growth) yet with such measures we want to inform policies regulating competition predominantly across space (individual, firm, and political entities).
c) We focus on measuring individual local phenomena in hopes of informing policy about system phenomena. We do not have the science to deal with a system of everything. Of consequence, we know that adding or subtracting 30,000 jobs will most likely *affect* a local region, and that effect may even be sustainable locally. But we cannot expect to make informed decisions with respect to how the system is thereby affected in the short or long term.
At best, we can and should consider how actions within our own system (howsoever defined) do not negatively affect the fitness of *systems* that provide inputs or take outputs at the same level. It's entirely acceptable to make another system more sustainable by destabilising its inefficient subsystems. Pareto says that the human stakeholders will get by in a better way on average.
14) The credit crunch is the system is correcting itself.
Excessive borrowing to run unsustainable programs appears to be a significant factor leading to the current situation. If one believes in a mostly linear economic model, why is it necessarily a problem to not dump more goods onto congested markets while we wait for markets to coordinate and clear? Returning to the lifestyles of 1999 for a period would be such a hassle, what with rampaging hordes, Scarlett fever, sabre-tooth cats and all.
A list of unpopular potential actions that change some major constants alone or in combination.
a) fix the interest rate globally and durably (perhaps at 0% as some middle friends had suggested) so that loans revert to being based on trust;
b) severely restrict the ability to divine new currency (again, perhaps limiting it to zero as the bitcoin folk have tried) so that sustainability problems cannot be hidden;
c) start re-implementing local informal (currency and non-currency) systems of coordinated effort to see how they can collaborate and emerge new kinds of higher order phenomena, given our current information-sharing capabilities.
d) identify, evaluate, and quite possibly and tear out assumptions made when most humans lived to the age of 30 in one village. Modify some other assumptions to suit our current time in which humans live to 100 as global citizens.
These actions (conveniently) require unpinning many of the laws we've developed since the Enlightenment or earlier and selecting laws that people understand and respect. It might inconvenience some to return democracy from the rule of law to the rule of people.
Monday, November 14, 2011
Charts
Counts for "income equity" in Canadian Newsstand and Library PressDisplay.
Monthly
| Date | Canadian Newsstand |
| 2005 | 37 |
| 2006 | 67 |
| 2007 | 158 |
| 2008 | 88 |
| 2009 | 80 |
| 2010 | 84 |
| 09/2/2010-10/1/2010 | 10 |
| 10/2/2010-11/1/2010 | 13 |
| 11/2/2010-12/1-2010 | 6 |
| 12/2/2010-12/31-2010 | 15 |
| 1/1-2/1 | 32 |
| 2/2-3/1 | 20 |
| 3/2-4/1 | 6 |
| 4/2-5/1 | 13 |
| 5/2-6/1 | 9 |
| 6/2-7/1 | 12 |
| 7/2-8/1 | 41 |
| 8/2-9/1 | 9 |
| 9/2-10/1 | 46 |
| 10/2-11/1 | 74 |
| 11/2-11/15 | 17 |
| 2011 YTD | 279 |
(Our PressDisplay subscription only goes back three months.)
More recently weekly
| Date | Press Display | Canadian Newsstand | CN*5 for visual scaling |
| 8/17-8/23 | 36 | 1 | 5 |
| 8/24-8/30 | 56 | 2 | 10 |
| 8/31-9/6 | 25 | 2 | 10 |
| 9/7-9/13 | 40 | 4 | 20 |
| 9/14-9/20 | 120 | 27 | 135 |
| 9/21-9/27 | 44 | 8 | 40 |
| 9/28-10/4 | 10 | 10 | 50 |
| 10/5-10/11 | 69 | 2 | 10 |
| 10/12-10/18 | 167 | 21 | 105 |
| 10/19-10/25 | 128 | 27 | 135 |
| 10/26-11/01 | 149 | 20 | 100 |
| 11/02-11/08 | 135 | 11 | 55 |
| 11/09-11/15 | 120 | 6 | 30 |
| total | 1099 | 141 | 705 |
The two databases generally agree on the monthly data. There are clearly baselines to which previous bumps have returned previously. Will the PressDisplay line return this time?
More F. More U.
In this latest finally editable edition of the salad, onions are finely diced, slightly pickled, and mixed in the inverse proportion with seedless citrus cubes that echo the original recipe. Unsalted sunflower seeds (confusingly similar in appearance to potential citrus seeds) add texture. Served with beet root and a delightful cream of pork and potato stew.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Dear Facebook:
There's no need to be clingy just because I don't sign in for 24 hours and prefer to hang out with other networks on the weekend.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Translate server ???
I sincerely hope that there will be no more application hoops at this university. Via Google Translate:
Thank you for registering at the University of Oulu Graduate School. Your PhD thesis really seem to be okay in terms of graduate school.Hei,
A nice winter in anticipation of the joy of work in research and doctoral studies involved.Sincerely,[graduate school coordinator]
Thursday, November 10, 2011
About the present state. Part the first.
The following propositions each invert a common axiom or assumption concerning the economic model.
1) Economics is a model by which we attempt to regulate social relations.
- Our entire system of codified laws supports a formal mechanism to govern how individuals interact with each other. Such laws may compliment or oppose much older social laws. (In liberal democracies, we have often demanded that codified law not to restrain social or moral norms.) It has been assumed that following the economic model yields socially desirable outcomes, and that such value generated is sustainable in general. Yet limited satisfaction appears only achieved at a meso scale.
2) Economics is not a model about resource management.
- The economic model is neither necessary, nor sufficient, to concentrate or distribute resources. Great spiritual works demonstrate non-necessity, while the many extra-legal exchange systems demonstrate demonstrate non-sufficiency. They work on social laws, such as trust and reciprocity.
- It may appear to be a resource management model since it has been implemented using physically scarce tokens, but the current implementation merely manipulates one of gazillions of electronic or magnetic bits in some computer. The condition of such bits only have meaning through the abstraction of external human ideas. The economic model is even less about knowledge management than about resource management, except at its non-linear and non-deterministic edges (STS, innovation, information systems, human behaviour).
3) "The economy" is not broken. Our model, dubbed "economy" is broken.
- Our economic model no longer faithfully represents key features of the empiric world. But the world clearly continues to function.
- Millions of individuals do not participate in the economy as the model would predict. Although they do not add monetary value to the economy, and sometimes behave contrary to the model, somehow such individual receive social and material support to exist as mostly healthy human beings. By contrast neither the invisible hand, nor the most intricately planned economic system, have resulted in any socially just arrangement of relations on a global or even macro-regional basis.
- We have exerted Ptolemaic efforts to add epicycles and exceptions, but the model misunderstands some underlying first principles. The increasingly elaborate model is increasingly costly in resources to maintain, while providing decreasingly less explanatory or predictive value.
4) "(Un)employment" is not a consistent concept.
- Individuals may or may not feel fulfilled through the /exchange/ of their labours for tokens. But they must be fulfilled by contributing to themselves and to society, minimally to meet basic physical and social needs. Humans and other sentients were happy or miserable long before economics necessitated the concept of employment.
- It's not clear that (un)employment has a consistent role or meaning in the economic model. Do unemployed individuals show a poorly functioning economy as value sinks, or do they show that an economy is functioning so well that it can sustain an excess of non-value-contributing labourers? Why does the model require us to become employed by 16 and unemployed by age 65, when individuals of all ages are capable of contributing value?
- Similarly, how many other apparently social concepts are based in the economy? Poverty. Empowerment. Some (or perhaps all) discriminatory -isms.
5) There is no "tragedy of the commons."
- Systems such as over-grazed plots of grass self-correct just fine in the long term. Our individual short-term needs conflict with our collective long-term needs.
6) Currency is an inadequate abstract representation of value.
- a) Economics makes the assumption that there is some logical pattern by which humans assign value to goods and services. It also assumes that all humans who want to engage in social relationships share the same pattern or at least that the patterns yield mutually intelligible outcomes. And that humans employ common ways to think about present and future value of things in linear or causal terms. Interest, risk, inflation, and many other economic concepts depend on the assumption that all of human social relations can be reduced to some currency unit that retains value when traded.
- Yet we have demonstrated that humans are more averse to risk of loss than risk of gain, that humans do not plan well for the future in terms of currency units, and that value is highly context sensitive and borderline irrational. Few, if any, of the theories offered by economics to package such unwieldy variables into a currency unit are intuitive.
- (Imagine explaining the following: "Hey, aliens, this pint of this ale poured at this location now is the same as the act of no longer owning 100 shares in Flooz seven years ago, but not the same as that pint of this ale poured 10 metres from here tomorrow night." The aliens would be right to ask to speak to the cognitively mature adults of the house.)
- b) Environmental economics, triple bottom lines, corporate social responsibility, and other in vogue concepts all tell us to look outside the economic model to consider how to act sustainably. They all highlight that the nearly infinite array of products, services, and other valuable instantiations cannot be reduced to one kind of information.
- While nature frequently transacts in common units (sugars, amino acids, gases, etc.), such units are either highly context dependent, or highly context independent. It doesn't matter where a molecule of water comes from, as long as it's a molecule of water. One cannot drink a 10 cent piece.
7) The abstract economic model should enable us to live more sustainably, we should not live to enable or sustain the economic model.
- Our social laws and relations have become subservient to fulfilling the needs of the economic model. It is of clear social benefit that some individuals undertake undesirable operational tasks. It is of *no* benefit to limit such individuals to performing only such tasks. The current economic implementation of society does not tell us how to justly allocate such tasks.
8) The economic model is a poor model for time.
- As with all models, pushing the economic model at its edges, such as through perpetual trusts (http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/trust-issues.php?page=all), reveals the model's internal contradictions and inadequacies.
- A temporal dimension to the model, as currently kludged by amortisation, interest, "net present value", is empirically evident in that humans do set aside resources for times of scarcity, and the values of social relationships do change through time. However, temporal abstractions in the economic model do not take many non-linear factors into account.
- The economic model assumes that time can be treated in a linear, constantly ticking manner with all slices being of the same quality. (The value of an asset may change non-linearly through time, but the starting conditions to determine how that change occurs nonetheless require that time behave consistently.) People experience time as non-linear, and not all slices have the same quality or value.
While it's premature to discard the economic model completely, we should seriously examine whether model's assumptions--some several thousands years old--accord with present reality and future needs. In particular, the economic model assumes a mechanical time which sharply disagrees with manifestly ambiguous social time. It may or may not be patchable to function for a short while longer, but now would be a great time to ask /why/ there appear to be cycles and stratifications and interesting distributions and circular flows, so that each instance does not have to be an exception.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
In response to the negativity
It would be a mistake for us to to dismiss the movements' views for the only reason that they appear to disagree with our own. The movements seek what most mentally sound people seek: to improve the community in which we live, whether that community is the country club or the homeless shelter. For that they do not deserve our hatred or scorn.
Genuinely new ideas lack common terms and concepts to be expressible in ways that are initially widely understood. Inclusive communities have the patience to not immediately dismiss or give up on ideas or their proposers. Inclusive communities also criticize unsound ideas without de-valuing those who propose the ideas, and recognise when hard work accomplishes something good. This is the model of every main stream or big tent organization. It is also expected that a good number of attempts at new ideas and change will fail, as Egypt appears to show, before others succeed with the same ideas.
Whether or not we agree with the movements or participate in them personally, they have happened, and they have shaped the way we think and discuss our society. Just as Woodstock was not simply a music gathering, but instead a touchstone for an entire generation's cultural values and stories (including in the dismissive sense), what we see now will become a reference point to the problems and attidudes of this era. It took almost a generation for the new combinations of ideas and people and relationships from Woodstock to manifest via individual and collective achievements (you are using one right now). It will no doubt take some time to identify, let alone understand, the significances of this year's events.
Genuinely new ideas lack common terms and concepts to be expressible in ways that are initially widely understood. Inclusive communities have the patience to not immediately dismiss or give up on ideas or their proposers. Inclusive communities also criticize unsound ideas without de-valuing those who propose the ideas, and recognise when hard work accomplishes something good. This is the model of every main stream or big tent organization. It is also expected that a good number of attempts at new ideas and change will fail, as Egypt appears to show, before others succeed with the same ideas.
Whether or not we agree with the movements or participate in them personally, they have happened, and they have shaped the way we think and discuss our society. Just as Woodstock was not simply a music gathering, but instead a touchstone for an entire generation's cultural values and stories (including in the dismissive sense), what we see now will become a reference point to the problems and attidudes of this era. It took almost a generation for the new combinations of ideas and people and relationships from Woodstock to manifest via individual and collective achievements (you are using one right now). It will no doubt take some time to identify, let alone understand, the significances of this year's events.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
In re: 'Plutonomy' and the reign of the super-rich
In re: Kris Kotarski column, in the Times New Colonist: 'Plutonomy' and the reign of the super-rich
B: Most laws do not apply to most people. (Otherwise, every intended action would have to be checked against every law, which would be grindingly inefficient.) It is about as surprising that the rich have carved a set of laws for themselves as it is that the butter producers have created a set for themselves. Similarly with the Canadian content, cannabis, chiropractic, organised crime, labour, and every other lobby that seeks legitimacy and higher entry costs for competitors.
B: Most laws do not apply to most people. (Otherwise, every intended action would have to be checked against every law, which would be grindingly inefficient.) It is about as surprising that the rich have carved a set of laws for themselves as it is that the butter producers have created a set for themselves. Similarly with the Canadian content, cannabis, chiropractic, organised crime, labour, and every other lobby that seeks legitimacy and higher entry costs for competitors.
That those working hardest to find discrepancies between laws and enforcement appear to gain the most advantage is not at all unexpected. Nor is it a surprise that the magnitude and distribution of such profits [follow] a power law.
RKB @B - while I think your point is one that is often missed - that realistically all groups will seek advantages within the system of laws that apply to them - are you making it under the suggestion that the level of circumvention of the law by the mega-rich is expected, and therefore acceptable?
That those working in the butter industry are as likely to take advantage of laws as mega-rich types is perhaps expected. But consider the abilities of each, and the consequences of each, in doing so. A butter firm "cheating" the butter industry has effects that don't reach far beyond the industry. A mega-financial firm does the same, and the nature of the operations means the effects are felt across a much wider radius.
What's more, would you not agree that the size of a company and the money it wields affects its ability to influence and shape rules of law, or find ways to skirt them when desired? Hence, given the ability of mega-rich entities to evade laws and the consequences to the surrounding people/industries when they do so, is that not reason enough to demand a more stringent enforcement of the laws that apply specifically to them?
B: "Acceptable" depends on the value systems of individuals or societies. From my perspective, I note that most living organisms bound by emerged laws (available physical resources, competition, etc) make their livings accumulating from the environment, and that most social creatures exercise power over others through accumulation, and make social laws to govern themselves. Large sea mammals are prime examples of social jerks who conspire to develop and exploit their advantages over each other and their environments.
So my question would be: given the system of features of humanity that we assume differentiate humans from everything else, whether a particular law we contemplate would be consistent with that system.
A major difference between found and socially emerged laws of non-humans is that non-humans tend to only accumulate laws that remain advantageous in the long term for the whole of the community, whereas humans accumulate laws by default, whether or not they are desired by the community, or provide any advantage. Of consequence, human laws accumulate contradictions and thus any proposition can become "acceptable" to that system of logic.
(It is fair to compare the value system held by the global West to its system of laws because its citizens and societies have tended to appeal to law makers, law interpreters, and law enforcers as last-resort arbiters of competing ideals and interpretations of right. More broadly, most of the West's citizens conduct their daily lives based on laws encoded in computer systems that determine how much money they may spend, how we may spend it, and with whom they may spend it.)
Enforcement of laws within particular industries as a specialisation can only be effective if the enforcers have an understanding of the industry. Violations of laws about acceptable of margarine colour are far easier to detect than violations of laws about more abstract concerns such as electrical infrastructure design, or long-term child mental health. Laws concerning finance, which operations are almost all purely abstract math and logic, could be understandably more difficult to enforce than laws about tangibles. Our formal legislation tends to concern tangibles, but it's usually trivial to express any particular exploitative financial operation in terms of different unregulated tangibles while retaining the same mathematical relationships as the original. As I've written elsewhere, the cost to try a new way to evade current legislation is far less than the cost to prevent that evasion.
On scale, a key part of the democratic assumption is that representatives are individually and collectively capable of making informed and effective decisions about entire societies. I am, as yet, unconvinced that we have discovered any mechanism to reliably identify individuals having such required cognitive abilities.
(Butter producers, like most other industries and interests, have created laws to exploit gaps and contradictions in the system of laws, affecting most Canadians. Their common motive is to externalise to the public the costs of defending against competitors. See http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2008/07/09/f-margarine.html)
Sunday, October 30, 2011
In re: Kris Kotarski: This is completely fucked up. Rubber bullets... gas... rifles pointed at photo reporters...
The US looks like a third world banana republic right now...
Occupy Denver protesters face off with police – Saturday, October 29, 2011 Photos – Photos and Video |
B: If there is a clear and obvious design flaw in public assembly laws of western liberal democracies in general, we should acknowledge that problem and work to resolve it through usual legislative or novel means. If the usual legislative mechanisms are untrustworthy, they would require more than tents to fix.
However, if the preference is to complain about the predictable onslaught of projectiles, rather than to prevent or mitigate them, then the motives and reasoning need to be better explained.
tl;dr: How many supporters have tried to enact positive change, rather than simply complaining?
Kris Kotarski B I'm not sure that the main problem here is the "obvious design flaw in public assembly laws of western liberal democracies in general", although this too is a problem. The main problem is the creeping intolerance for mass dissent, and the almost-complete militarization of police forces in the name of "fighting terrorism" or other some such...
CH: B, let me see if I can distill your post a little shorter: None of these people have done done something famous I've heard about, and they are therefore negative, nattering nobodies of negativity, which I can downplay when they are shot at. How predictable it is to be shot at.
One wonders, have you been? Have you talked to the people there? Maybe you just missed the actions that are being taken on the ground to create change. Now, we can argue about their likely effectiveness, but to cast OWS as nothing but a bunch of layabouts is deeply cynical.
CH: And yes, of course the normal miscreants are there. The Black Block largely caused the big ruckus here in Denver yesterday, but they are, as always, a small minority, used as an excuse by the police to stomp everyone else. I've been shot at and tear gassed because of these assholes before, and have no love for them. But they are never core - just angry people who don't see healthy outlets for frustration.
One wonders, have you been? Have you talked to the people there? Maybe you just missed the actions that are being taken on the ground to create change. Now, we can argue about their likely effectiveness, but to cast OWS as nothing but a bunch of layabouts is deeply cynical.
CH: And yes, of course the normal miscreants are there. The Black Block largely caused the big ruckus here in Denver yesterday, but they are, as always, a small minority, used as an excuse by the police to stomp everyone else. I've been shot at and tear gassed because of these assholes before, and have no love for them. But they are never core - just angry people who don't see healthy outlets for frustration.
B: +Kris Kotarski Intolerance for many things have been addressed (but not necessarily overcome) through explicit legislation protecting diversity, including diversity of political opinion. If there is a recognition, design, compliance, or enforcement problem with non-violent solutions, why consistently prefer the violent alternative?
+CH: My comments neither imply nor require all that elaboration.
If our goal is to live in a rules-based lawful society, the right to assemble, the right to dissent, and the right to contribute to the legislative process should be available to everyone. The vast majority of comments on social media, mailing lists, at meetings etc. are complaints about law enforcement actions and improvised responses to such actions, rather than ways to change the laws being enforced.
Municipal ordinances regulating by-law enforcement are surprisingly effective low-hanging fruit, in that a couple dozen people can get an ordinance to and through a municipal committee within a calendar year at most. An ordinance enabling peaceful assembly to override zoning, land use, and perhaps traffic by-laws would, shockingly, lower the risk of participation for everybody, not just for those experts in protesting.
The lack of attempts to protect local protest can only be attributed to an extremely unlikely cognitive gap (protestors and their supporters not knowing how laws can be changed), or a preference for the status quo of receiving violence at taxpayer expense.
Based on protest organisers' consistent and repeated calls made over years for onsite medics to respond to police actions, and distribution of literature about resisting crowd control tactics, I have to ask if and why legislative means to protect dissent have failed. And if they have failed, why are not the protests about such a far more crucial problem?
Could it be the case that if one's only tool is victimhood, every problem looks like suppression?
CH: B, my experience on municipal ordinances is a little different, although I certainly respect those who try to change the basic rules via the normal democratic route. But the ordinances I've seen pass, at least here in Colorado, are the ones that limit the use of space, not expand it. Anti-homeless ordinances are a local favorite, which are inevitably used against sign holders of all types. I was once threatened with arrest for holding an sign near a street corner, as a measure had been passed targeting pan-handlers, banning all sign holding and loitering near intersections.
More to the point, cops quite often disregard or ignore ordinances as they see fit. You can pass ordinances till you're blue in the face, but if police feel free to ignore them, they don't do the least bit of good. Sadly, most elected officials feel they can't be critical of such actions (or don't care), and many departments operate free from much interference from city hall.
Anyway, I still disagree with your main contention that the people at protests aren't the same ones agitating for changes in the law. Personal experience says this just isn't true, although the level of other activities varies with the target of the protest. During the Iraq war protests, no one (including myself) had much of an idea what else could be done without breaking the law. Some of my friends took that step, and blocked base entrances. Yet pro-marijuana legalization protests are full of people actively working on petitions and amendments (and being quite successful at it).
That street protest is suppressed in this country whenever possible does not mean that people should stop doing it until legal remedies have been brought to bear. That's not how one creates change. Your charge of victim-hood, to me, just shows you've not really been involved in rallies. Yes, there is a sense of victim-hood after being shot at and pepper sprayed - as there should be, as you've likely just been victimized. But except for the fringes, this is not what it brining people out. People come for community, and a hope that change is possible. Without those two things, protest fails. Indeed, the creation of victims via police violence can halt a movement in its tracks. Those who believe police violence makes a protest movement stronger (via media coverage, resentment, etc.) are full of shit, and that's something I think both you and I can agree on.
B: +CH:
I appreciate that you have experience in this area. I'm not sure where it is that you think we disagree.
I also disagree with the "main contention that the people at protests aren't the same ones agitating for changes in the law" since that was never my main contention. See: "vast majority of comments on social media, mailing lists, at meetings etc. are complaints about law enforcement", "extremely unlikely cognitive gap", "preference to complain... rather than to prevent or mitigate ... need to be better explained", and "legislative mechanisms are untrustworthy... require more than tents to fix."
I also do not see many pro-marijuana, pro-same-sex union, pro-disabled, and other successful movements being subject to the same kinds of crowd control as practiced in 2011. Time will tell if this generation's remake of sit-ins will succeed or flop.
You'll find my experiences and opinions of rallies on the public record. To summarise, I did not find the typical Western style of group protest (hours of yelling and counter-yelling without listening, multiplied by hundreds of people) to be a productive use of my time in terms of communication or policy development.
Having more recently worked on the other side of policy, community organisers who are the most effective with respect to securing policy or programming are also the most effective at simultaneously spinning both media and supportive crowds. Note that this does not necessarily imply that the crowds' policy demands are being met or even considered. We've seen this gap with some of those elected on social media and "grassroots" hope campaigns in the last four years.
That much existing ordinance is of the restrictive variety should not in itself prevent permissive ordinances from being contemplated or enacted. If there are quality management problems in enforcement, those should be highlighted and addressed using the standard or novel approaches as appropriate.
CH: I think this conversation would have gone much faster in person, as you're quite right, we are more or less in agreement, with a difference in emphasis.
My largest experience was in the build-up to the Iraq war, which was largely organized at a high level, with many attempts to mitigate police action, attempts that I saw fail multiple times when small numbers of people who did not wish to cooperate gave the police the excuse they wanted to fuck everyone over.
Movements with more main-stream positions are subjected to less repression, but their history shows this wasn't always so. The history of homosexual activism is a good example of where the perceived position of the protesters in society largely dictated police action, not the action of the protesters themselves. It's also a good example of where protest and social activism marched hand-in-hand.
But you're quite right, yelling endlessly is a useless exercise beyond awareness, and it has limits there too. Sometimes protest is just cathartic, and that's okay in my book. On a day-to-day basis, OWS isn't operating this way. Yes, there are marches, and that's mostly what gets covered in the media, and there is a segment who wants to fight the police as both symbolic and physical manifestations of authority, but good deal of the time people are sitting around, talking, discussing, and building. Like you, I'm having a hard time thinking it will directly lead to much, but there is little question it has opened up space for other activists to make change. The issues members of OWS commonly mention have gotten far more air time in the U.S. then I've ever in my lifetime, and public opinion seems to be swinging in favor of many of the policies that are natural reactions to the issues. I'll keep offering support to OWS as long as it seems to be creating that space.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Tales of Supervision: Tales of research and writing
In brief:
Met with my student on Thursday afternoon as scheduled. Co-supervisor was away at a conference. We picked a different setting to meet (internal cafe).
After our meeting last week in which we had him tell us the story of his work, the student had written quite a bit about the local context of his empirical research. He reports using the notebook we provided not for his research work, but to plan an upcoming trip in November. I pointed out that he would forget even more after that trip if he didn't develop some good notes now. He said that he is more comfortable doing notes directly into the computer. The diagrams and explanatory text that he composed were good enough that I had scribbled "source?" next to them assuming he had neglected to cite them.
I'm OK with skipping the paper notebook step as long as he does it consistently. We'll find out at the next meeting if my co-supervisor has the same objection.
I expanded on the story-telling approach by asking him about what he had accomplished this week in the practical work, what were the circumstances, and what he thought about the project's progress. Having done similar IT work, I successfully spotted the dodges and poked him on those. He didn't seem to mind, and said that the questioning was helpful. I also had him think about what I or my co-supervisor would ask about at the next meeting since we still only have superficial knowledge about the details. He then thought of a few things that would be helpful to write down in the thesis, estimated the amount of space required to do so, and left the meeting excited to put in some more hours.
I found no major language issues other than some inconsistencies in terminology among different sections. One term appears repeatedly in the introduction but does not show up again. I had reservations about a couple of other terms, but he understood the implications when I asked about them.
Return of the course
Recap: In September I took a "scientific writing" course offered to graduate students. A few times during the course, I had remarked that this or that piece of writing could not have been written by a native English speaker, and was asked to explain why. I said that although technically and semantically correct (it would pass Word's grammar checker), we simply wouldn't express such ideas using such and such a form, but would use this other form instead. But it was difficult to articulate a rule for why that was the case. That was a problem for everyone who had learned to do English through strict adherence to rules.
The take-home assignment for the course was to write a four-page literature review. I submitted that assignment earlier in October. The instructor returned a copy with comments this week. Most comments were directives to apply such and such a rule strictly and always, even though they would violate prevailing scholarly and editorial practice. For example, section titles must follow the Introduction-Literature Review-Methods-Data... pattern and labels, even though editors encourage and readers appreciate more interesting signposts. And apostrophes were only to be used to indicate possessives, not as single quotes. Quotation marks should never appear except when quoting passages directly from text, never mixing the one kind of quotation marks with the other (smart quotes and straight quotes, although the instructor did not use that terminology). And series of quoted terms should be rendered in italics, rather than in quotes, despite the visual subtlety of the italicized comma. Fairly trivial changes that would take 10 minutes based on the local custom of writing English in the strict but not particularly engaging way that the locals are taught in school... OK, it was supposed to be a learning experience and I could dispose of the course forever.
And then I realized why technically correct English composed by Finns and Swedes stands out. They lack intuition about rhythm in English.
English, being a hairy language, has enough technical rules to follow without having to consider aesthetics. I do not sense that they are taught the idea that one could use punctuation to set pace beyond its immediate sentence. Or that rigidly structuring paragraphs can make them as uninteresting as rigidly de-structuring them. Or that thoughtful exceptions to rules can direct attention toward or away from particular measures.
I need to learn more from my student about how English is taught here.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
In re: Why Self-Organized Networks Will Destroy Hierarchies
In re: Why Self-Organized Networks Will Destroy Hierarchies http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/why-self-organized-networks-will-destroy-hierarchies/2011/10/27?
?: This strikes me as mostly right, but the second-to-last paragraph seems hopelessly clueless about capital investment. Thoughts?
B: The second to last paragraph is the only one in which he attempts any insight. "the cultural pathologies of hierarchy" is a hypothesis that the broader tendency to coalesce and disband ordered systems may be moderated by human intervention. It's a bold claim to test, but the evidence so far is not favourable.
The trick with big investments and infrastructures (thinking beyond just monetary "capital") is that they take a long time to accumulate, and also a long time to disperse. The energy required to order atoms and other organisms around a tree or former Soviet city or missile fleet or taken for granted infrastructures can take as long to dissipate as to build in the first place. And such investments do not cease to provide value at the moment of their cessation as the ideal system.
Returning to our good friend the Coase theorem, when a hierarchy ceases to be, it can no longer enforce (the same) rules it imposed on the exchange of value it stored. Artifacts storing such stored value, even and especially if randomly redistributed, will tend to end up in the specific other systems in which they would provide the most value by reinforcing the other systems' orders and rules.
The P2P foundation piece misses this point that hierarchies depend on the ragged edges as much as the ragged edges depend on hierarchies. Although it does not explicitly specify how hierarchies come to exist, there are three possibilities. (I equate hierarchy to order for simplicity. I've not thought through a universe in which hierarchies do not imply at least order.)
a) Hierarchies (and order) simply spontaneously come to exist as fully formed systems.
b) Super-hierarchies decompose into into the hierarchies we observe. This cannot be independent of a) or c).
c) Hierarchies are composed of less ordered pieces, and by induction, of self-organized networks and whatever they are made of.
Decomposition with recomposition is the only explanation compatible with the piece's argument that progress (putting new order around things) depends on breaking hierarchies. Otherwise, new order would just form and overlay on the old order and everyone would be happy.
?: "I've not thought through a universe in which hierarchies do not imply at least order."
That's interesting. What's "order" in this case? Would a series of (relatively) rapidly shifting equilibria that still follows some larger pattern apply?
B: Hierarchy minimally requires arrangement of things into above/same/below categories. In this case, I think we're most interested in the kinds and instances of relatively stable and reliable relationships among the things ordered in a hierarchy. To maintain such arrangements requires an energy expenditure (and implied input), whether or not such arrangements generate exploitable efficiencies elsewhere in the system (I think that this was one of the points that the P2P piece tried to make).
The second part of your question concerns how to the spatial and temporal magnification on observations. How long has life on this planet depended on photosynthesis? Which species have provided photosynthetic services over the last 4 billion years and where? Does the series of ever-changing players in the common microbe/plant->animal->animal energy flow make a difference to the pattern, and what would notice?
And most importantly: Given the current network of lock-ins and dependencies, how much freedom does any component of the network have with respect to breaking those dependencies, and at what scale? All life on this planet also happens to be locked into sugars, fats, proteins, etc of the same chirality to be food-compatible with each other. Within Earth organisms, I can easily substitute fish for chicken for legumes for MREs as food, but I cannot easily substitute photosynthesis for eating as an energy intake if all editable (to me because millions of years of evolution have resulted selected for a relatively standard set of robust interfaces) food sources disappear.
(While we're here, this is substantially the reason that I find the anti-finance protests to be mostly pointless. Finance can easily substitute every particular source of inputs [almost exclusively interest and commissions] taken away by legislation. But, as has been pointed out, most of the value generated by finance stays within that system, and little value would be lost by most from its cessation. Humanity had gathered around great works long before there was a modern finance system.
As a highly optimised system, finance operates on a faster beat than the outside world, i.e. in milliseconds instead of hours, so even small decrease in inputs is noticeably multiplied throughout the system. Since the only external source of input into that system is from the masses, simply not feeding any more input into the finance system will be sufficient for it to burn out on its own. There's no need to expend the effort to actively destroy anything as suggested by the P2P article. Large trees and animals fall over and die all the time without being dragged.)
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Translate server... win
It's interesting that this is written in English instead of Finnish.
Lights are on but nobody is home.
It's interesting that this is written in English instead of Finnish.
In re: Premier waffles on judicial inquiry into Alberta health-care allegations
RG: It didn't take her long to completely about-face with respect to this critical campaign promise. You can add her to the list of provincial Tories who are nearing zero credibility.
Premier waffles on judicial inquiry into Alberta health-care allegationsB: Competing unstated assumptions: Those closer to the badness have more knowledge to ask better questions of their peers, but are less trusted by outsiders. Those independent of the badness would have to learn quite a bit from their suspects to engage in the same depth of inquiry, but would be more trusted by outsiders.
No one is asking: How would we fund a multi-year independent inquiry at 7-8 figures per year (to do it correctly)?
RG: @B: I agree with the assumptions, but I'm not sure of their relevance. The problem with a health quality council review is that it has no teeth and would be seen as (and perhaps be in actuality) a half-hearted and insincere attempt to get to the bottom of things. A judicial inquiry would be independent and separate from any partisan politics (which is good, because some of the people suspected of inappropriate behaviour are in the PC party and likely to be whitewashed in any government proceeding).
As to the cost issue (which I have heard raised before), I understand your point. How, during times of fiscal belt-tightening, do we justify the cost of this inquiry when there's no guarantee it will have any "tangible" results (i.e., findings of wrongdoing, recommendations to prevent same in the future)? I guess my position is that it would be worth the money to know that people have been behaving in a responsible, accountable manner (or, conversely, that they haven't). If the money isn't felt to be "worth it", then why investigate any allegations of unethical/illegal activity--ever--be it at a government level or individual? Should we all be exempt from investigation and prosecution because of the cost to the legal system? As to the money itself, it's fascinating how the government can justify spending taxpayer money on astronomical oil company subsidies ($1 billion in 2008), redundant levels of bureaucracy, pay raises for MLAs...but when it comes to ponying up some meager lucre to ensure the people in power are behaving properly, there's no cash to be had.
At any rate, my initial premise was that Redford made a key campaign promise that many people (myself included) bought into (or at least WANTED to believe), on which she is now reneging. Either have a judicial inquiry, or don't; compelling reasons exist on both sides, and I can live with the decision (which is for people much smarter than me to determine). But when you promise something, make it a large electoral issue, then completely change your mind and sweep it under the carpet, I get frustrated and annoyed.
B: +RG: One could determine what to investigate through the usual cost/benefit analysis.
Assume an independent inquiry. Also assume that it finds that all of the allegations of misconduct are true. What would be the benefits and costs to society to systematically address some or all modes of misconduct found?
Now assume the opposite, that the independent inquiry finds no misconduct and makes the commendation about better documentation and communication of policies. Do you honestly believe that critics will back off, and not simply allege that the independent inquiry was tainted, that witnesses refused to cooperate on government orders, or that it was not sufficiently independent? What would be the costs to society of this outcome?
No inquiry would come to either of those extreme conclusions. Given that we are talking about error prone processes performed by humans, we can expect some variance from the ideal some of the time. In manufacturing, a human might acceptably perform a standard task incorrectly one time out of 500. In data entry, that error might be as high as one time out of 10 (acceptable at the phone company, not acceptable at cheque clearing). In some tasks or professions requiring a high degree of judgement on incomplete information, humans acceptably make mistakes half or two-thirds of the time. Think baseball hitters. While there are policies that could reduce such errors (at varying costs), no procedural or physical policy can eliminate all errors.
Given that AHS conducts at least millions of standard and judgemental transactions a year, many involving ambiguous information, I would personally not be surprised at a finding of mis-queing (intentional or otherwise) in up to one-quarter of all cases. A quality or process expert would be able to more closely determine the expected error in the system as is.
If we want to do this through the quality council, or an independent inquiry, all parties should first agree to some well-defined basic things *before* it begins: a) the tests to be used to evaluate whatever they're examining; b) the thresholds for concluding that the system performed appropriately, inappropriately, needs improvement, etc. Otherwise, either process could cherry-pick or ignore the naturally occurring errors and conclude whatever the charismatic committee member wants to conclude.
I don't see parties on either side eager to do the kind of work needed to head toward an objective finding here.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
M was correct
Up side: Halloween isn't a consumer event here, so the stores did not become filled with black and orange cruft for the six weeks before the end of October.
Down side: The red and green Christmas shopping season starts in mid-October.
Undecided: It's "Christmas" here, not the uncommitted "Winter Season's Neither Holy nor non-Holy Zero or More Days of Optional Consumer Excess but it's OK if you don't Celebrate Because We don't Want to Offend" marked in Canada.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Tales of supervision: References and defenses
MSC student
I met with my student for the first time in a month. (My three conferences/meetings in North America broke our last scheduled meeting. Also, he did not present his research plan as scheduled three weeks ago, and has rescheduled for November.) He emailed the latest draft of his first three chapters. I marked perhaps ten sentence mechanics issues (a few less frequent cases of definite and indefinite articles), and another ten style concerns throughout. (I suggested that shifting tense within a paragraph was not the best idea, and that some sentence constructions.) I am really impressed with his progress. I had emailed both him and my co-supervisor that his draft made more sense than the papers I had reviewed recently for an international journal. (Then I found out that another student supervised by my co-supervisor, who works at the same firm as our student and started his thesis at the same time and was further along in the thesis, has hit a wall.) I am also pleased to challenge him to nail down his interpretations, ideas, and concepts.
I am concerned that this will set me up with unreasonably high expectations for future students. I will also have less material to discuss with my colleagues in North America who have helped me on this supervisory adventure.
My co-supervisor was pleased that the student had included 17 of the required 50 references. The student's development of ideas and themes so far doesn't ring any alarm bells, but I'll take a more detailed look at the references this week anyway since it's important to both of them.
We're now in the middle of the effort and since our original meeting schedule had run out. We decided to fix meetings on a weekly basis until the thesis is complete. I also demanded thesis drafts on Wednesdays from now on, so that I could comment in time for the student and co-supervisor to digest on Thursday before our meetings.
The student had not found himself a dedicated paper notebook for the academic part of this project, so I stepped out of the meeting to raid the supply closet.
He is using a design research methodology (mostly at my co-supervisor's insistence), which requires analysing various factors and conditions that occur during a design process. My co-supervisor and I repeatedly emphasised the importance of keeping track of the unique circumstances in which the student works, and the importance of having a memory aid at hand for figuring out the important theoretical and applied analyses later. The three of us agreed that the student would write or sketch at least half a page per day (my co-supervisor is into diagrams and figures).
I asked him to tell us the story of the project so far from the firm perspective. (Insert standard IT consulting project story here.) This helped all three of us think about how best to approach the big picture. My co-supervisor had independently concluded that the link from theory to empirical research could be stronger. She left it as an open question in our pre-meeting discussion; I had sketched some thoughts (to help me summarise with the student's work so far) on the hardcopy of the latest thesis draft. I don't know if that will be helpful for the student.
My co-supervisor also emphasised the importance of getting the thesis done in this calendar year, even if course credits are incomplete. Theses completed next year will be worth fewer course credits than in this year. For the next three year budget cycle, which comes up in the spring, the university will use the number of MSCs completed as a metric. 2007 was a good year in that regard, but will not be counted, so we apparently need to complete as many MSCs as possible in the next two months. (I also learned that it's not unusual to complete the thesis before completing coursework requirements.) In an internal department e-mail on Friday, my co-supervisor reminded everyone of the rewards of supervising an MSC to completion: 50 paid work hours (at 32.5 hours per week) to do whatever, and funding to attend a discretionary conference. (I'm externally funded, so the 50 hours do not affect me; I'll take the conference funding though.)
I ended with the usual open-ended "what questions do you have for us?", which again didn't elicit any questions from the student. (My co-supervisor had not thought to ask this.) I'm considering a different approach since he has not asked any questions in this context so far.
An unusual PhD defense
Scheduled start: 12:15. Actual start 12:30. This has apparently never happened before.
The fifteen of us in the audience stood as the candidate, his supervisor, and the external opponent, entered in that order. The candidate and the supervisor both wore identical tail-suits. The supervisor carried a doctoral hat (600e), wore white gloves, and a white bow tie. The candidate assumed the podium at right without a bow tie. The opponent wore a business suit under his academic regalia. I'm told that it's usually business casual for defenses.
After a scripted exchange of pleasantries and introductions, the candidate, a native English speaker, read an abbreviated version of his introductory chapter for the first 20 minutes. It was a compilation dissertation. Candidates normally present something more substantial, I'm told. The opponent (from a featured US IS school) asked some softball questions, including "which part of your research do you think was the best?" ("the best part was the part I enjoyed the most"), some technical minutia about where and how some details appeared in the printed document ("copy and paste error in the diagram, it's correct in the matrix"), "on which of the chapters are you the lead author?" ("the first three"), and "what was your strategy to choose journals to submit to?". The opponent also gave the audience some practical publication tips!
The supervisor (who looked a little too much like Mr. Bean for my comfort) took notes and fidgeted for the 90 minute exchange without speaking a word to the audience. He closed the ceremony with more script. The examiner was apparently supposed to hold forth for an extended period about the strengths and weaknesses of the dissertation, but closed with a recommendation that the faculty accept the dissertation. When asked if anyone knew of any reason why these two should not be wed the dissertation should not be accepted, one audience member asked "why did you choose exactly four studies?", to which the acceptable response was "my supervisor said so". My guess is that the opponent was jet-lagged if he had flown in from the US. Several times he attributed to old age some problems he had navigating his own notes.
My co-supervisor (from the above story) and I discussed the defense on the way out to coffee and cake. The first thing she said was: "I have never seen a dissertation or defense like this before." Four unpublished co-authored chapters seemed weak to both of us. At coffee, I asked about the tail-suits. No one knew, and we dared not ask either of the dapper gentlemen. I was asked if I knew why the opponent was wearing a strange costume. I explained North American convocation ceremony customs regarding academic dress, but I made it clear that I had no idea why it was deployed at the defense.
Bonus: Lessons from my former supervisor
While in North America, I took the opportunity to ask my former Master's supervisor about supervising. He told several stories about his experiences as a post-doc in the UK being supervised, as well as about supervising some of my predecessors and myself. We had always had a good working relationship as research collaborators, and a good personal relationship through good food, travel, and drink, but we had never discussed supervising in any detail. (He told me that this was the first time he had ever been asked to externalise his knowledge about supervising and teaching.) We had a good talk about the importance of communicating regularly and substantially (both the supervisor's and the student's responsibility to keep the relationship healthy; credit where credit is due); using different learning and teaching styles for different students (if possible adapt to the student, rather than expect the student to adapt); encouraging students to find and exploit their own areas of excellence; and the importance of learning how to supervise by supervising.
He confirmed that he did not know of any formal resources to help novice supervisors learn to supervise.
(I would like to collaborate with any knowledgable or interested reader to patch this gap in practice and in the literature.)
Most corporations are small businesses owned by the middle class. Discuss.
| Being able to successfully conduct almost all of the work of living using a minority of the total resources is desirable according to standard environmental movements and economic models. But in this case, we're not even discussing resources, but rather proxies for resources, all stored in abstract computer systems. At a high level, does the friction come from imbalanced wealth and asset distribution, or with the inversion of the relationship between social and economic models embedded into our management systems. The total resources available more than meet the total needs of potential users. The top-level people in the system do not spend their days actively looking for ways to deprive individuals of access to the necessities of life. At the end of the day, they are all human and have enough of the generic kinds of graces and decencies that they maintain some semblance of generic human social function. The most heated arguments appear to be about how best to reconfigure the rules at the edges in order to conform to (evidently different) perceptions about the core ruleset. (The core ruleset is an implementation of a social model first developed a long time ago and incrementally refined ever since the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the Information Age, or other convenient shorthand epoch. It necessarily embeds stated and unstated assumptions, some of which have become irrelevant today.. Rather than arguing how we should conform to the ruleset or model, we might ask if we need this particular ruleset or model to perform our desired social functions. Or failing that, we might consider how to revise the model in order to regain control over the rules we impose upon ourselves.) I don't see any individual in the top tier enjoying more than one set of clothing, one meal, one party, or one habitation at one time. For anyone but the extreme bottom tier, the question concerns degree, rather than having or not having. As we know from centuries of manufacturing, formal rules are very good at restricting variation until something catastrophic happens. If an explicit rules-based society is what we want (in keeping with the mechanistic Enlightenment paradigm), the rules to determine which corporations do or do not operate in a socially acceptable manner must operate repeatably. That is, the standards we apply to one corporation must be uniform across all other corporations of the same kind. In the past, we've designed rules around qualitative differences among corporations (monopoly, public, not-for-profit, charitable, professional, etc.). But under current classifications, it's not evident how Google (which knowingly sells bundles of ads that will mostly not be clicked) is different *in kind* from a firm that knowingly sells bundles of loans that will mostly not be repaid. Closer to accountability, all but the smallest of organisations exhibit some specialisation and distribution of tasks because few individuals have the knowledge, skills, or time to do everything. Hence, each layer of functional or organisational abstraction costs some information and transparency, and hence, accountability. The problem of information and communication gaps is ubiquitous (and possibly scale-free). This, I think, exposes one of the fatal assumptions we've been making: that wealth and assets as denominated or proxied in terms of money are conceptually or practically related to any social dimension. (This is not to say that there is no social dimension to wealth, but that the same social dynamics apply irrespective of particular wealth or lack thereof.) Investment firms, politicians, or profiteers are not socially destructive because they have different bits in some database next to their names; they would be considered socially destructive because they exploit trust and incomplete information in their social relations with other humans. This wealth manifestation is a symptom or outcome, not a cause, of some deeper dynamic that begins with exploiting individuals. tl;dr: If we believe the mechanistic relationship between input reactants (exploitation) and output products (wealth), removing product from the system would tend to drive the reaction forward (more exploitation). In contrast, if we want something other than a rules-based society, we would need to do something different in kind than adding or removing rules at the edges. |
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