Week 28

"Three years ago Mr Erdogan promised to address Kurdish demands but has done little other than lift some restrictions on the use of the Kurdish language. These gestures have been outweighed by the arrest of several thousand Kurdish activists, politicians and academics, often for the flimsiest of links to the PKK. The arrests mean that the rebels retain strong support and a steady flow of recruits from the country's 15 million Kurds. Many observers fear hopes for a political settlement are fading. The younger generation of Kurds, embittered by growing up in the midst of a 28-year-old conflict, are more radical than their elders"

Diving ass-first into pool / sea and splashing the maximum amount of water towards the by-standers, or just up in the air apparently has a name in Germany -- Arschbombe (ass bomb). :) We used to do this when in our youth (well ok, I still do this sometimes) and I thought my technique was perfect. Someone at Universitat Beyreuth did some research, and the best Arschbombe form, optimizing for the most amount of splash is seen to the left. Awesome.

While learning a new skill, a new profession, there is almost no substitute to watching another expert while he works. PhD process tries to foster this by having teacher / student work side by side. Student sees how teacher approaches problems, how they think. Perhaps most importantly -and the teacher does not have to say many words for this kind of transmission- student sees how much time teacher spends on what, what kind of tools is used, and his overall attitude. Does teacher scribble something on paper, ponder, than go to some tool, look at results, ponder some more (or not), and say "F@#$k! ?? He was expecting certain approach to work? Why did he pick that approach first? He cursed, was he frustrated? Why? Tool's shortcoming, or the teacher's? On and on..

These are all micro messages that student can absorb like a sponge, if he is standing next to the teacher and watching. This is a very important part of learning, and teaching.

But obviously, since one has to be there physically, this approach cannot scale, or we want it to scale better. Maybe a new tool can be created to have people transmit their work habits; a combination of self video recording, desktop and keyboard capture, etc. I saw recently a venture capitalist (whose background is in tech) enabled his editor so all his previous drafts for his writings can be seen, along with all mistakes, trials, do-overs. This is nice. It gives people access to his thinking process.

Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

Data journalism has been around as long as there's been data - certainly at least since Florence Nightingale's famous graphics and report into the conditions faced by British soldiers of 1858. The first ever edition of the Guardian's news coverage was dominated by a large (leaked) table listing every school in Manchester, its costs and pupil numbers.

The big difference? Data was published in books, very expensive books where graphics are referred to as 'figures'. Now we have spreadsheets and files formatted for computers. Which means we can make the computers ask the questions.

But now statistics have become democratised, no longer the preserve of the few but of everyone who has a spreadsheet package on their laptop, desktop or even their mobile and tablet. Anyone can take on a fearsome set of data now and wrangle it into shape.

People in Colorado went to see the new installment of Batman, Dark Night Rises, waiting to watch violence, mayhem, shootings, and that is exactly what they got, physically, in their own movie theather, LIVE. It is hard to miss the irony here -- the perp who senselessly killed so many people was dressed up in tactical suit, wore tactical gloves, planned the whole thing down to smoke canisters, was armed for combat exactly like.. Batman (or Joker).

As we wrote in Covering the Distance, aggressive behaviour is a communication mechanism in America. People's way of acting is a function of distance that are in between indiiduals who had to populate a vast landscape. Why are Americans so loud? Because there is a lot of distance to cover. Why throw keys, other things from to one person to another? It's not only done in movies because it looks cool. Behaviour is a function of distance.There's also the "prohibition / letting go" cultural fault line of course. Perp wanted to "let go", and be cool.

But there is more.

Nowadays, everyone wants to be a knight. And for better or worse, they now have the tools to do it. Gun laws, outlawing this or that is not the issue. 21st century technology favors the individuals, in America you may get shootings because of bullshit culture codes, in other places, you might get hackers, or other forms of outbursts. But it is all different sides of the same coin.

We need a different form of art, different way of societal structures, different forms of community. This is just crazy shit. It cant be wished away, overlooked, ignored. Even the mass media picked up on the fact that Batman shooting took place 20 miles away from Columbine High School. Come on! Where is the penetrating analysis that can explain both events in one swoop? Where are the thinkers?

Uncertainty, Clockwork, Science

Some people, of previous Marxist persuasion, having been burned badly by their previous choice and long since moved to other pastures, try to explain their misfortune by saying Marx's reliance on science was wrong. "It was also a time when science thought it knew everything, it saw a linear world" etc, etc.. These people sadly cant still tell their head from their ass - which is entirely too bad.

Science, especially the kind that started in Renaissance, had uncertainty baked in from day one. Most people know about the Descartes' quote that goes "I think therefore I am". Most do not know the rest of that sentence however. The full quote goes like this: "I think therefore I am, of nothing else I can be certain".

Mechanical view of things around us, the clockwork universe outlook crept into the system (and persisted) due to the mechanization of society, and that is due to second wave effects. Today, we play with non-linear models, use probability theory, and when we linearize for faster computation or simplification, always knowing what that choice entails, the trade-offs, while always watching for knowing what we do not know. This science has achieved tremendous amounts. You are enjoying the fuits of it everytime you do a Google search.

And this outlook of science is no different from Descartes' or Newton's. History is relative, future uncertain, seek knowledge, create (like mad). Creation / confirmation cycle.. this is at the core of science.

CNET: "Data isn't always the answer.. "Big Data" promises to turn terabytes, petabytes, and exabytes (with, presumably, zettabytes and yottabytes to come) of what's often ambient digital detritus into useful results. That promise often seems to come with an implicit assumption; with enough data and the tools to crunch it, useful insights will follow. Insights that can be used to make businesses more efficient, tailor everything from medicine to advertising for individuals, and employ instrumentation and automation on larger and more complex physical systems than ever before [..]

[A]as Big Data hype accelerates, it's also useful to maintain an appropriate level of skepticism. While data can indeed lead to better results, this won't always be the case. The numbers don't always speak for themselves and sometimes the underlying science to apply data, however plentiful, in a useful way just doesn't exist [..]

There is not now, nor is there anything on the horizon, that is a scalable, automated means of exploiting people-generated data to extract actionable marketing information and sales knowledge. A well-known dirty little secret in the advertising world is that, even after millennia of advertising efforts, not a single copywriter can tell you with any confidence beyond a coin flip whether any given advertisement is going to succeed. The entire "industry" is based on wild-assed guesses and the media equivalent of tossing noodles against the kitchen wall to see what might stick, if anything.

Peter Fader, co-director of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, talks of a "data fetish" that is leading to predictions of vast profits from mining data associated with online activity. However, he goes on to note that more data and data from mobile devices doesn't always lead to better results. One reason is that "there is very little real science in what we call 'data science,' and that's a big problem."

We'll only see more stories about great results being achieved by applying data to some problem in a novel way. Especially when there's solid underlying science, algorithms, and models limited only by the quality or quantity of the inputs, more and different types of data can indeed lead to impressive results and outcomes.

But this doesn't mean that bigger data will always hold the key. Sometimes data is just data -- noise, really. Not information. It doesn't matter how much you store or how hard you process it"