December 2006 Archives

I turned on Fox News today and saw graphic images of Saddam, pre- and post-execution. Somebody - I think it was Heather's mom - alerted me to the fact that CNN Headline News wasn't showing as much footage. Nobody, to the best of my knowledge, showed the actual execution. But Fox showed dead Saddam in a body bag. I guess Fox - or somebody affiliated with the network? - interviewed the cameraman filming the execution. He described Saddam as afraid... showing fear. Fox News pointedly observed some celebration in Dearborn, Michigan - the second largest Muslim community in the U.S., according to a network pundit.

It's difficult for me to put myself in the perspective where it's OK to celebrate Saddam's execution. I mean, I know he did terrible things, and that he's a bad guy and all of that. But I kind of feel sorry for the guy. Then again, I didn't experience those terrible things at the visceral level that his victims did. It kind of disgusts me to see celebration over his execution, but I wonder if I might behave similarly were I in their shoes.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to FoxNews' Saddam Death-stravaganza. They even made a special, animated graphic for it - of course. They also cancelled four of their regularly-scheduled programs.

Happy Holidays.

Whew! Heather and I have been pretty busy during the holidays. First we went to Ohio, then back in Ann Arbor, then tomorrow it's to Pennsylvania, and then we'll be spending New Year's with some friends in NYC. Then, the day after we get back to Ann Arbor, it's back to school for me.

I'm supposed to have read a 1000-page textbook before we get back to school for this one class, but I'm only about a fifth of the way into it. Oh well.

So, I finished my blog author feature discriminator project. Basically, I pared the project down so that it looked at a bunch of blogs, clustered based on the sex of the author, and then tried to make predictions on other blogs based on the clusters. It was about 80% correct. I promised that I would post the paper online when I was done with the project, so, as promised:

Blog Author Feature Determination with Clustering

I'd be very interested in hearing what people have to say about it.

Not much else going on. I'll write a bit more later.

I got done with my first semester at Michigan

Apple computer people are like a cult. I know of people on campus (University of Michigan) who [illegally] affix Apple Computer stickers on poles, sidewalks, sides of buildings. I also knew some irrational Apple-heads at undergrad - a couple were very good friends! People proudly wear Apple Computer shirts - advertisements for which they pay top dollar. Microsoft... not so much. I don't think I've seen anyone strolling about, on campus or otherwise, proudly wearing a Microsoft t-shirt. Unless I'm at a .NET conference.

It's because Apple has managed to cultivate a culture of cool, in stark contrast to Microsoft's capitalist, technical nerdiness. It's actually hip to buy and be seen with iPods - I think this is unprecedented for a computer company. Hell, a kid was murdered by another for his iPod - a terrible tragedy, to be sure, but one wonders if behind closed doors Apple were doing giddy backflips at this incontrovertible evidence of their emerging geek chic.

But Apple shouldn't forget their nerd heritage, and I think their latest advertising foray is a terrible evolution - one that will bite them back - damaging the already fragile relationship between people who think they're cool and people who know they're nerds.

Here's an ad that's getting a lot of airtime on many of the networks:

OK, I get it. The pasty overweight guy on the left is a kind of Bill Gates avatar - uncool guy par excellence. The stylish, much better looking (sorry Bill - no offense) play-it-cool Apple dude looks to me like a permutation of a young Steve Jobs. I've heard that Jobs is remarkably ego-centric; I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that he had input on the campaign and forcibly projected himself into it...

So it's uncool to do C++ programming??? Since when??? I am sorely disappointed.

There are other examples of this ad campaign that are illuminating. I'll post one without further comment.

I don't mean to pick on Apple in particular... I mean, they're doing what any other company would do. Any smart company, at least. Not that I endorse their particular tactics - I think they need to think it through a little bit better. And I'm no fan of Microsoft.

I think it's only fair that I disclose here that I own an iPod - a 1 GB shuffle that I bought for about $100 in Japan - and I love it, despite the fact that I think $100 is a bit too much for what's basically a fashion accessory. A remarkably buggy one at that. But that's Apple.

Of course, as usual, your comments are always welcome.

Another important idea emphasized in that Knowledge Based Systems class was the notion of bootstrapping - although the professor didn't refer to it as such.

The earliest electronic computers were built by designing circuits and hard-wiring them. Later, the advent of machine language gave humans the ability to install programs into computers - that is, computation became [more] universal. In other words, you didn't necessarily have to specify the needs of the computer up front, at manufacture time; instead, you could comparatively easily tailor the behavior of the computer to suit your needs whenever you wanted.

Well, machine language was - and still is - cumbersome, so after a while some bright people came up with Assembly Language, which was essentially a set of mnemonics that mapped directly onto the machine language instruction codes. This made programming somewhat easier. Shortly after came more dramatic advances in the form of higher-level procedural languages such as C and Pascal. These languages translated higher-level specifications into assembly (or, more likely, directly into machine language). The benefit of these languages was that you could specify a procedure into more abstract, more "english" terms. There were also some error checks implemented in case the programmer specified the program incorrectly, at least in terms of grammaticality; semantically, it's a much different story. These higher-level languages were still literal - there were no pragmatics in programming languages, for example - but it made programming a great deal easier.

A bit later came object-oriented systems. C++ is an example of a language - though not the first - that is largely object-oriented. The basic idea is that you treat a larger class of programmatic constructs as objects. The flow of the program is more like a network of objects passing other objects to different places. Moreover, there's kind of an inheritance hierarchy; this allows you to share code for objects of the same fundamental class. A big win!

The first proto-C++ was actually called C with Classes, and it compiled C++ code into C code, which was in turn compiled into machine code. Nowadays, modern compilers translate directly into machine code, but you can still see the bootstrapping process in place.

The focus of Knowledge Based Systems is that we're programming at the knowledge level, as far as possible. That is to say, people have written programs in which you can specify a problem and a goal more declaratively rather than procedurally - though not entirely (yet). Prolog, Lisp, and JESS are in many regards examples of languages/rule systems that operate at more the knowledge level. Interestingly, these programs were programmed in Java, C++, Pascal, or some other medium/high-level language - more bootstrapping.

Of course, I'm simplifying a bit. It's not quite as linear as I made it out to be; developments seem to ramify (and converge) at every moment. In any case, evidence of bootstrapping is everywhere in Computer Science. We haven't exhausted the possibilities with what we can do with procedural or functional programming languages, and we certainly have a lot to explore with rule-based and agent-based systems. But I have to wonder - what kind of layer will be built atop the knowledge layer? Or will we ramify further into a different dominant paradigm? I wonder when we'll get there?

Bootstrapping, of course, is not just a phenomenon of Computer Science. As John Holland pointed out in his talk a few weeks ago, all organisms - from an elephant to a carrot - have the same basic eight enzymes needed to carry out the Krebs Cycle. Now, as far as I know - and I'm no biologist - mammals, for example, don't normally carry out this process - it's too inefficient. But it's there as a default behavior (looking suspiciously like a rule in a rule-based system - with low recency and thus saliency); a kind of vestigal, junk-DNA expression (although probably it has nothing to do with real junk DNA). If our normal, more advanced, more efficient metabolic processes were to fail, Krebs would kick in. For other type of biological bootstrapping, maybe the scaffolding has already fallen away... perhaps the cost to maintain that scaffolding was too high, and/or the potential benefit for retaining it was too low. Cost-benefit analysis in biology.

This bootstrapping, I think, is extremely profound; and I think that, if we look carefully, we can identify it in everything and everyone that we encounter.

John Holland understands this well. In his talk, he talked about metaphor, and its critical importance in understanding. We can't, he asserts, really understand anything other than through our prior experience. We must form, receive, and convey ideas through metaphors that intersect with our understanding of the universe. In other words, metaphor - and Holland didn't frame it as such, but still - is a bootstrapping process.

When I was young, I was taught, for example, that one apple and one apple make two apples. After time, I was able to generalize this up a level. This abstraction allowed me to discard the once-useful metaphor of apple counting - like so much junk DNA (which is not discarded, incidentally; just not phenotypically expressed). Later I learned to visualize multiplication as carving out areas from two perpendicular line segments, as we all do. I haven't discarded this area metaphor, interestingly... it seems to be too useful to me to get rid of.

OK. I guess end-of-ramble. Comments welcome as usual!

This past Thursday was our last real lecture for our Knowledge Based Systems class. One of the interesting bits of the class - and probably the bit that I thought the most about - is the notion of symbols, and the physical symbol system hypothesis. It was arguably a minor part of the course, but a lot of the work afterwards flowed from these two notions. These postulates.

The professor, early in the semester, defined a symbol as a marking that can be made in some sort of environment. I think that that's a deceptively profound statement, but I'm not going to go into why I think so here.

The course was largely predicated on the physical symbol system hypothesis. It states that symbol manipulation is a necessary and sufficient condition for general intelligence. That argument has come under a lot of criticism in the modern AI era, as, for example, more statistical methods have been enveloped into the fold. Regardless, even though we supposedly knew better, we accepted this hypothesis as a given for this class.

I don't think that there's anything wrong with the hypothesis. I think that, in fact, there's something wrong with our notion of general intelligence - not to mention an overly constricted notion of "symbols." How are we going to determine whether or not an entity is generally intelligent? I mean, an entity that can pass the Turing Test will be able to fool most people into believing that it is human rather than machine. But how useful - or even relevant - is that, really? We already know how to make humans pretty well. I'm wondering if designing a computer that can fool human beings will only prove how easily fooled we can be, and a lot of the effort towards passing the Turing Test will result in a kind of parlor trick.

To be fair, modern researchers in AI don't generally even try to inch toward the passage of the Turing Test. But it seems that we need some sort of unifying theme for this work. I guess it comes down to asking ourselves, what's the final goal, if any, of AI? Is it to improve our standard of living - all in the name of progress? Or is it more of a science than an engineering discipline? Or am I missing it completely?

I think that the dirty little secret for AI is that - and this is just my opinion, of course - it's a kind of catch-all discipline - and everyone knows it. Catch-all may be a bit of an overstatement - there are some limits. I was having a conversation with one of the AI faculty members at Michigan - a person for whom I have a lot of respect. I'm trying to attain equivalency for this one Michigan course, and I showed him all the AI-related courses that I took as an undergraduate. One of the courses, Computational Neuroscience, dealt with biologically-inspired computer models of the neurodynamics of certain animals. I think was the final project was a simple recurrent network of a sea slug. Four neurons, if I remember - please correct me if I'm wrong. The thing is, this prof told me, "Well, that isn't really Artificial Intelligence, is it?"

Now, I bristled at that initially. Who the hell did he think he was, categorizing disciplines this way and that way? Of course, his credentials far outstrip my own, but still... at a fundamental level I was righteously indignant. At the time.

Shortly thereafter, I started going through Norvig and Russell's book. In the first chapter, they spend a lot of time looking at various definitions of AI. They examine AI definitions in ten or eleven introductory textbooks. It's an exhaustive chapter, and well worth a read. The conclusion that the authors come to, however, is that perhaps Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer. Perhaps, instead, the term should be Computational Rationality. The most important end goal of AI, I think they're implying by ascribing this definition, is to create artifacts that more intelligently serve our needs. I think.

Given this view, our stated goal is to create a subservient race of slaves to do the tasks that we're too busy, lazy, or simple unable to do. But nobody ever says that. The ethics of AI is not given more than one or two lectures - at most - at the end of a survey AI course. Moreover, the ethics center debate centers more around heading off Matrix-style crises, and less around I, Robot slavery and civil-liberty scenarios. I don't think we think enough about these types of issues. They may seem to be far off in the future, but we should be thinking about them now. Nobody else is going to think it through thoroughly.

In the end, I don't really blame my prof for trying to narrow the scope of the discipline. I mean, it already cuts a pretty wide swath... getting wider every day. And his opinion certainly seems to be aligned with that of Norvig and Russell - and, apparently, the vast majority of the rest of the AI faculty at Michigan - that's how they select 'em. For my single semester here at Michigan, I definitely have picked up on the notion that the school is an engineering school - a school of problem solvers (with a few notable exceptions). But that doesn't mean that I've come to agree with their assessment. I think it's a shame that the examination of other disciplines - like psychology, cognitive science, zoology, and the humanities - is not promoted more. Maybe I haven't been properly socialized into the Michigan culture yet. Maybe after a couple more semesters I'll have changed my tune completely.

But I doubt it. I'm stubborn like that.

So, there was an error with the blog. I couldn't post any new entries, and nobody could leave comments. The good people over at OpenSourceHost promptly fixed the problem. Although, weirdly, Moveable Type is not allowing me to post [some] links. Anyway, maybe I can figure it out. Thanks, guys!

Other than that, not much to report - except that I read a good article on 43folders about email management. Check it out. EOM

This morning, I was a little bit late getting out. The final assignment for my Natural Language Processing class last night was the culprit. As usual, I took the bus. Not as usual, it was the 8:47 rather than the 8:17. I knew I could usually make it in time even on the later bus. Maybe only a minute late. Unfortunately, I neglected to factor in all the new snow outside.

So, the bus wasn't there the usual time. I don't wear a watch, and my cell phone is still screwed up, so as usual I had little idea what time it was. I was starting to wonder whether, in fact, I had missed it, and if I would have to wait another half hour - in the freezing cold. Another dude climbed up the hill to the bus stop. So, either I hadn't yet missed the bus, or he was a dumbass too, and I just got some company for the next half-hour. Naturally, we didn't talk to each other or even smile at each other; no small-town friendliness here, in Ann Arbor, with the constant turnover of students every year. With an enrollment of over 44,000 people alone just for one school. I was still glad he was there. It's strange the things that comfort us.

Finally, the bus came. About fifteen minutes late, by reckoning; that is, by my mindclock. The other dude got on first.

We were greeted this morning by two well-dressed, attractive yuppie-women handing out goodies bags containing God knows what. The women were PR types by the look of it. Certainly not the kind of person that rides the AATA (that's veteran rider lingo for the Ann Arbor Transit Authority not to be confused with at least two other busing systems in Ann Arbor alone). No, I envisioned these women drove their way to work in their Lexusus, or maybe their BMWs. Their clothing - and their apparent socioeconomic status - contrased sharply with that of the rest of the riders (which, by the way, are mostly comprised of university students, high school students, senior citizens on their way to the VA hospital, drug dealers, and ex-cons).

I scowled inwardly at this brazen ploy for customer goodwill, but I took the bag anyway. Actually. I waited in line - remember there was a guy in front of me. I guess my principles can take a back seat to swag acquisition on occasion.

I expected the bag to contain a bunch of useless shit. It turns out it was full of a bunch of random, unuseless weird shit. There was a piece of chocolate in there... fair enough. But also, there was an AATA change purse, an AATA miniature tape measure with an attachment for your pants' belt loop, and, weirdest of all, a blinking, battery-powered reflective red safety light. It says: The Ride: BE SAFE, BE SEEN. Talk about white and nerdy!

Yesterday Heather and I got together with a friend who works at a defense contractor nearby. It was interesting to hear this person's take on the defense industry. I hadn't known this, but I guess that the defense department only deals with companies based in the United States - which seems good in many ways, but the way my friend describes it, it kind of fosters industrial inefficiency and shady backroom deals. You have to know someone to get the good contracts, I guess. Another thing that bummed my friend out is ever-present DOD-contractor politicking. I guess this one firm had manufactured a set of devices that were far and away the best protection for their intended domain, but because of bad feelings between the contractor and the DOD contact, those devices were never earmarked for actual production. The real losers in the end are the soldiers in the field, who are not granted the best protection - within reason - that current technology could grant to them. "The Defense Industry:" my friend summarized, "where corruption meets incompetence. And the taxpayers foot the bill."

The conversation turned to the potential mideastern petroleum crisis, and our so-called addiction to foreign oil. Of course, large portions of the economies of several middle eastern states are based on the petroleum industry; Kuwait, for example. A friend of mine had the pleasure of visiting Kuwait recently. This friend was thoroughly disappointed in Kuwaiti culture. They have no culture, this person asserted. The was no real Kuwaiti cuisine, for example; most Kuwaitis ate Lebanese or Egyptian food, prepared by their resident alien servants imported from elsewhere in the middle east. My friend asserted that Kuwait just sprang up in the desert overnight in order to cultivate the oil fields there.

According to the Wikipedia entry, there appears to be some truth to this, although I think my friend probably overstated it: some kind of Kuwaiti cultural identity seems to have been extant since the sixteenth century. But it can't be disputed that Kuwait's economy is in very large part dependent on the oil industry: almost half of its $53.31 billion GDP comes from oil. Oil accounts for 95% of export revenues. Kuwait contains an estimated ten percent of the world's proven oil fields. Wow. Other countries, like Saudi Arabia, also enjoy healthy economies in large part to healthy proven oil fields.

So, the question was raised: why are the Western powers importing so much oil from the mideast, when we have proven oil fields in, for example, Alaska? We had our theories, but as a matter of fact, the data seems not to bear it out. According to the Wikipedia article about Alaska, the petroleum industry accounts for 80% of the Gross State Product of $39.9 billion. We're obviously putting those reserves to good use. But an interesting question remains: why are we extracting from both sources? Is it just a matter of comparative advantage, or is there something potentially more realpolitik going on?

Our hypothesis - and I don't want to be called conspiracy theorists or anything - is that maybe Western powers are intentionally consuming petroleum from mideast fields first, as a matter of policy, so as to exhaust them and secure greater future geopolitical leverage. If one has lots of energy and one's potential enemies don't have any, it's better in terms of national - and possibly cultural - security, adherents might assert. I thought it was an interesting idea.

Back to the Kuwaiti article. I've long been interested in understading the motivations of Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, and the Wikipedia article provided some new interesting facts. I had already known that certain power-centers in Iraq - and perhaps there is some cultural history to back this up - had long considered Kuwait a kind of renegade province, a la Taiwan and mainland China. A new wrinkle provided by Wikipedia is that Iraq asserted Kuwait was slant-drilling into Iraqi territory. That's pretty interesting; I wonder if it's true.

It got pretty busy after Thanksgiving. A few projects due, several classes to teach. My load is a bit lighter now, but there's still a lot of work on the horizon. Fortunately - or perhaps not so - the semester is going to be done in a couple of weeks. Then finals.

Thanksgiving itself was a lot of fun. It had been a long time since I had seen everyone together for a pretty long time - certainly over a year. It was great to see everyone. Heather and I placed bets on how long it would be until I got some ribbing about the voting thing. As soon as my dad saw me, he exclaimed, "Oh no! It's a non-voter!" That didn't take long! :)

Heather and I asked what to bring. My sister told me that just a bottle of wine would suffice, but we thought that we should bring something in addition; something special. Coincidentally, Heather had just gotten an ice cream maker from her parents - on loan - so we decided that our special addition would be homemade ice cream -- but not just any flavor. We wanted something a little unusual.

"Let's make pumpkin-flavored ice cream!" Heather enthused.

I replied, "Hmmm, nawww, let's make something a bit more unusual. How about avocado-flavored ice cream?"

At first she thought it was a bad idea. She thought that my family would think it was weird and that it would not taste good. SHE was worried, too, that it would taste bad. I eventually won her over, though. Here's how I did it:

"Heather, think of the interesting, unusual flavor we'll be adding to the Thanksgiving dessert pallete. It might not be the most delicious thing - in fact, it might be the least - but it will taste unusual, if nothing else. Also, we already know that there will be pumpkin pie there. Think of the interesting contrast of the colors of the green avocado ice cream against the orange pumpkin pie. It will be Christmas-y!"

So we made it. The night before Thanksgiving, we did a little taste test. I thought it was, well, fairly good. I don't want to say pretty good, but it was better than I was expecting. Heather thought it tasted pretty weird - but she liked it well enough.

It wasn't a big hit Thanksgiving day. My family did think that it was pretty weird, and I think that most people didn't have any. Several of the kids had some and most thought it was gross - although I think that they were, in part, primed for the grossness by my sisters.... LOL. At least one of the kids, though, actually enjoyed it - and had several bowls - so in the end, it was worth it. I bet my family can't wait to see what we bring for Christmas!

After we decided to make the ice cream, we learned from the web that it is a common dessert in Brazil for the holidays. That was interesting. It made us feel better, anyway.