Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone Interview
"I came into work one day and I got down to my desk and I saw that my e-mail inbox was completely flooded. My phone voice mail was filled up, and it was all the same question from major news organizations around the world, and all of them essentially asking me, 'What was your role in the Moldovan revolts?' Part of me was tempted to say, 'Well, I wasn't happy with that regime so I went over here to this button I have here on the wall" ... but the truth of the matter is, I had to actually look up what was going on in Moldova. So there are things happening all around the world at any given point in time, and we find it incredibly meaningful work to foster this open exchange of information and to watch as people around the world do their thing and make the world a better place."
-More Here
Full Bladder = Clear Mind (Self Control)
The surprising thing is that the people who drank more—the ones whose bladders were full—more often chose the delayed award. It’s a surprising finding because, as Tuk explains in the paper’s abstract, psychologists believe that “visceral states are known to have a (detrimental) impact on our ability to exert self-control.” Psychologists call this “ego depletion”: the mind labors to to restrain a bodily function, making it harder to exert self-control in other areas. So how did full bladders lead to better self-control?
Tuk’s study only established a correlation bladder control with other types of self-control, but she does have a working hypothesis about what’s actually happening in her subjects’ brains. The reason is that our feelings of inhibition all originate from the same area in the brain, she explained to me in an email, and so it’s not too hard to imagine that our self-control in one area can affect—or “spill over” (get it?)—into self-control in other areas. “Hence, people who [are experiencing] higher levels of bladder control, should be better able to control unrelated impulses,” she writes.
-More Here (I used to use this trick for night time long distance driving; that was self control on a completely "different" dimension.)
Quote of the Day
“I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out.”
-Roy Croft
-Roy Croft
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
What I've been Reading
Keynes: Return of the Master by Robert Skidelsky. Few years ago when I first read Hayek's Road to Serfdom, I was all pumped up (which to a certain extent explains the cognitive misers on cable news). I am so glad for not having read Keynes then. Reading him now after living through(in) a recession helps not only comprehend but also harmonize Keysian economics with reality. Being still a student, I am not qualified to "gauge" his economics. Here are few lessons...
I am sucker of anyone who changes their mind with experience (read "wisdom" not "dissonance").
"As he grew older and grew up, Keynes realized that he had been wrong. In 1938, looking back at his early beliefs, he admitted to having had a ignored the insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men, and the dependence of civilization on rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved. On another aspect of those early beliefs, the rejection of Benthamite calculus, he remained unrepentant. Benthamism was the worm which has been gnawing at the insides of modern civilization and is responsible for its present moral decay."
"As he grew older and grew up, Keynes realized that he had been wrong. In 1938, looking back at his early beliefs, he admitted to having had a ignored the insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men, and the dependence of civilization on rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved. On another aspect of those early beliefs, the rejection of Benthamite calculus, he remained unrepentant. Benthamism was the worm which has been gnawing at the insides of modern civilization and is responsible for its present moral decay."
One of the root cause of malaise in economics is the perpetuation of self-delusion after one get's lost in the mathematical "elegance".
"I have a view of people who devote so much effort working out the implications of assumption which almost no ordinary people would find other than nonsensical if they understood them. Freshwater economics uses difficult mathematical tools. Students in freshwater graduate programs have to learn a huge amount of math very fast. It is not possible to do so if one doesn't set aside all doubts as to the validity of the approach. Once the huge investment has been made it is psychologically difficult to decide that it was wasted. Hence the school gets new disciples by forcing students to follow extremely difficult courses... If my information is not out of date, innocents from abroad are the new blood of fresh water economics."
-Robert Waldman
"The study of those economic activities in which our views of the future are... reliable in all respects and the study of those in which our previous exceptions are liable to disappointment and expectations concerning the future affect what we do today."
Keynes on the difference between uncertainty and risk.
"Economics is a moral and not a natural science: that economist should be mathematician, historian, statesman and philosopher... in some degree, and that no part of man's nature or his institutions must be entirely outside his regard."
"I have a view of people who devote so much effort working out the implications of assumption which almost no ordinary people would find other than nonsensical if they understood them. Freshwater economics uses difficult mathematical tools. Students in freshwater graduate programs have to learn a huge amount of math very fast. It is not possible to do so if one doesn't set aside all doubts as to the validity of the approach. Once the huge investment has been made it is psychologically difficult to decide that it was wasted. Hence the school gets new disciples by forcing students to follow extremely difficult courses... If my information is not out of date, innocents from abroad are the new blood of fresh water economics."
-Robert Waldman
"The study of those economic activities in which our views of the future are... reliable in all respects and the study of those in which our previous exceptions are liable to disappointment and expectations concerning the future affect what we do today."
Keynes on the difference between uncertainty and risk.
"Economics is a moral and not a natural science: that economist should be mathematician, historian, statesman and philosopher... in some degree, and that no part of man's nature or his institutions must be entirely outside his regard."
Keynes was optimistic about the human nature and was expectingn immensely moral changes within a century. He was obviously wrong. May be, I am more pessimistic. Morality in economics is an oxymoron. To put it blandly, there is no "incentive" to be moral in economics leave alone human nature. I hope, I am wrong. But yet, civilization does progress only because of sacrifices, struggles and moral honing of very few people every generation. We should be indebted to them for everything we had, have and will have.
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood - James Gleick
Freeman Dyson reviews James Gelick's new book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood:
"The information flood has also brought enormous benefits to science. The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.
Even physics, the most exact and most firmly established branch of science, is still full of mysteries. We do not know how much of Shannon’s theory of information will remain valid when quantum devices replace classical electric circuits as the carriers of information. Quantum devices may be made of single atoms or microscopic magnetic circuits. All that we know for sure is that they can theoretically do certain jobs that are beyond the reach of classical devices. Quantum computing is still an unexplored mystery on the frontier of information theory. Science is the sum total of a great multitude of mysteries. It is an unending argument between a great multitude of voices. It resembles Wikipedia much more than it resembles the Encyclopaedia Britannica.The belief in a heat death was based on an idea that I call the cooking rule. The cooking rule says that a piece of steak gets warmer when we put it on a hot grill. More generally, the rule says that any object gets warmer when it gains energy, and gets cooler when it loses energy. Humans have been cooking steaks for thousands of years, and nobody ever saw a steak get colder while cooking on a fire. The cooking rule is true for objects small enough for us to handle. If the cooking rule is always true, then Lord Kelvin’s argument for the heat death is correct.
We now know that the cooking rule is not true for objects of astronomical size, for which gravitation is the dominant form of energy. The sun is a familiar example. As the sun loses energy by radiation, it becomes hotter and not cooler. Since the sun is made of compressible gas squeezed by its own gravitation, loss of energy causes it to become smaller and denser, and the compression causes it to become hotter. For almost all astronomical objects, gravitation dominates, and they have the same unexpected behavior. Gravitation reverses the usual relation between energy and temperature. In the domain of astronomy, when heat flows from hotter to cooler objects, the hot objects get hotter and the cool objects get cooler. As a result, temperature differences in the astronomical universe tend to increase rather than decrease as time goes on. There is no final state of uniform temperature, and there is no heat death. Gravitation gives us a universe hospitable to life. Information and order can continue to grow for billions of years in the future, as they have evidently grown in the past.
The vision of the future as an infinite playground, with an unending sequence of mysteries to be understood by an unending sequence of players exploring an unending supply of information, is a glorious vision for scientists. Scientists find the vision attractive, since it gives them a purpose for their existence and an unending supply of jobs. The vision is less attractive to artists and writers and ordinary people. Ordinary people are more interested in friends and family than in science. Ordinary people may not welcome a future spent swimming in an unending flood of information. A darker view of the information-dominated universe was described in a famous story, “The Library of Babel,” by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941.3 Borges imagined his library, with an infinite array of books and shelves and mirrors, as a metaphor for the universe.Gleick’s book has an epilogue entitled “The Return of Meaning,” expressing the concerns of people who feel alienated from the prevailing scientific culture. The enormous success of information theory came from Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning. His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness. Information in such quantities reminds us of Borges’s library extending infinitely in all directions. It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information. Gleick ends his book with Borges’s image of the human condition:
We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.
"The information flood has also brought enormous benefits to science. The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.
Even physics, the most exact and most firmly established branch of science, is still full of mysteries. We do not know how much of Shannon’s theory of information will remain valid when quantum devices replace classical electric circuits as the carriers of information. Quantum devices may be made of single atoms or microscopic magnetic circuits. All that we know for sure is that they can theoretically do certain jobs that are beyond the reach of classical devices. Quantum computing is still an unexplored mystery on the frontier of information theory. Science is the sum total of a great multitude of mysteries. It is an unending argument between a great multitude of voices. It resembles Wikipedia much more than it resembles the Encyclopaedia Britannica.The belief in a heat death was based on an idea that I call the cooking rule. The cooking rule says that a piece of steak gets warmer when we put it on a hot grill. More generally, the rule says that any object gets warmer when it gains energy, and gets cooler when it loses energy. Humans have been cooking steaks for thousands of years, and nobody ever saw a steak get colder while cooking on a fire. The cooking rule is true for objects small enough for us to handle. If the cooking rule is always true, then Lord Kelvin’s argument for the heat death is correct.
We now know that the cooking rule is not true for objects of astronomical size, for which gravitation is the dominant form of energy. The sun is a familiar example. As the sun loses energy by radiation, it becomes hotter and not cooler. Since the sun is made of compressible gas squeezed by its own gravitation, loss of energy causes it to become smaller and denser, and the compression causes it to become hotter. For almost all astronomical objects, gravitation dominates, and they have the same unexpected behavior. Gravitation reverses the usual relation between energy and temperature. In the domain of astronomy, when heat flows from hotter to cooler objects, the hot objects get hotter and the cool objects get cooler. As a result, temperature differences in the astronomical universe tend to increase rather than decrease as time goes on. There is no final state of uniform temperature, and there is no heat death. Gravitation gives us a universe hospitable to life. Information and order can continue to grow for billions of years in the future, as they have evidently grown in the past.
The vision of the future as an infinite playground, with an unending sequence of mysteries to be understood by an unending sequence of players exploring an unending supply of information, is a glorious vision for scientists. Scientists find the vision attractive, since it gives them a purpose for their existence and an unending supply of jobs. The vision is less attractive to artists and writers and ordinary people. Ordinary people are more interested in friends and family than in science. Ordinary people may not welcome a future spent swimming in an unending flood of information. A darker view of the information-dominated universe was described in a famous story, “The Library of Babel,” by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941.3 Borges imagined his library, with an infinite array of books and shelves and mirrors, as a metaphor for the universe.Gleick’s book has an epilogue entitled “The Return of Meaning,” expressing the concerns of people who feel alienated from the prevailing scientific culture. The enormous success of information theory came from Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning. His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness. Information in such quantities reminds us of Borges’s library extending infinitely in all directions. It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information. Gleick ends his book with Borges’s image of the human condition:
We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.
Economics of Trees
Yeah, Trees are now being "quantified" to justify their raison d'etre - here:
"In 2006, McPherson and his colleagues were adding Queens as a reference city when the New York Parks Department asked them to value all of New York City’s 592,000 street trees. With the advances made over the preceding dozen years, McPherson could deliver a far more sophisticated report than he had for Chicago. Energy savings: New York City’s trees annually saved roughly $28 million, or $47.63 per tree. Air pollution: Each street tree removed an average of 1.73 pounds of air pollutants per year (a benefit of $9.02 per tree), for a total of more than $5 million. The report also calculated that street trees reduced stormwater runoff by nearly 900 million gallons each year, saving the city $35.6 million it would have had to spend to improve its stormwater systems. The average street tree intercepted 1,432 gallons, a service worth $61, a figure large enough to impress cost-conscious city managers.
McPherson and his colleagues were also able to tally various benefits associated with aesthetics, increased property values and economic activity, reduced human stress, and improved public health, which were estimated at $52.5 million, or $90 a tree. These drew on straight-up economic studies of real estate prices as well as social science research, which showed, for example, that hospital patients who could see a tree out the window of their room were discharged a day earlier than those without such a view. Other studies showed that shopping destinations with trees had more customers than those that didn’t, and leafy public-housing projects experienced less violence than barren ones.
All these data led to the finding that each year New York City’s street trees delivered $122 million in benefits, or about $209 a tree. As New York City’s parks and forestry officials well knew, they received $8 million a year to plant and tend street trees, and spent another $6.3 million to pay personnel. The netbenefit they were getting for all these trees was an impressive $100 million.
For the first time, urban forestry science had a dramatic effect on public policy: In 2008, Mayor Michael Bloomberg quadrupled the city’s forestry budget, from $8 million to $31 million (down last year to $27 million), when he launched Million Trees NYC, a partnership with entertainer Bette Midler’s nonprofit New York Restoration Project. McPherson was thrilled to see science elevate urban forestry above the level of “a kumbaya idea.” The million trees (350,000 are in the ground so far) planted by 2018 will transform the Big Apple, and those lush, tree-lined streets and shaded parks may well become Bloomberg’s most visible legacy."
"In 2006, McPherson and his colleagues were adding Queens as a reference city when the New York Parks Department asked them to value all of New York City’s 592,000 street trees. With the advances made over the preceding dozen years, McPherson could deliver a far more sophisticated report than he had for Chicago. Energy savings: New York City’s trees annually saved roughly $28 million, or $47.63 per tree. Air pollution: Each street tree removed an average of 1.73 pounds of air pollutants per year (a benefit of $9.02 per tree), for a total of more than $5 million. The report also calculated that street trees reduced stormwater runoff by nearly 900 million gallons each year, saving the city $35.6 million it would have had to spend to improve its stormwater systems. The average street tree intercepted 1,432 gallons, a service worth $61, a figure large enough to impress cost-conscious city managers.
McPherson and his colleagues were also able to tally various benefits associated with aesthetics, increased property values and economic activity, reduced human stress, and improved public health, which were estimated at $52.5 million, or $90 a tree. These drew on straight-up economic studies of real estate prices as well as social science research, which showed, for example, that hospital patients who could see a tree out the window of their room were discharged a day earlier than those without such a view. Other studies showed that shopping destinations with trees had more customers than those that didn’t, and leafy public-housing projects experienced less violence than barren ones.
All these data led to the finding that each year New York City’s street trees delivered $122 million in benefits, or about $209 a tree. As New York City’s parks and forestry officials well knew, they received $8 million a year to plant and tend street trees, and spent another $6.3 million to pay personnel. The netbenefit they were getting for all these trees was an impressive $100 million.
For the first time, urban forestry science had a dramatic effect on public policy: In 2008, Mayor Michael Bloomberg quadrupled the city’s forestry budget, from $8 million to $31 million (down last year to $27 million), when he launched Million Trees NYC, a partnership with entertainer Bette Midler’s nonprofit New York Restoration Project. McPherson was thrilled to see science elevate urban forestry above the level of “a kumbaya idea.” The million trees (350,000 are in the ground so far) planted by 2018 will transform the Big Apple, and those lush, tree-lined streets and shaded parks may well become Bloomberg’s most visible legacy."
Quote of the Day
"Start doing the things you think should be done, and start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in free speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely."
- Adam Michnik
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