A beautiful article in the NYTimes contrasts abstract mathematics with the chilling reality of the Mexican drug cartel wars:
I was born in Mexico City, in a world that seems less and less familiar to me. I live now in the opposite corner of the continent. I am training to be a political scientist at Harvard. My passion has remained the afflictions of my homeland, but at Harvard I have found new ways to address them, to use mathematical models — matrices, vectors, equations, regressions — to understand the Mexican drug crisis.
The cartel wars are extremely violent, and the gangs are responsible for reprehensible kidnappings and deaths. They rank among the most deadly periods of organized crime in human history. The author’s goal isn’t to explain how she can analyze the wars from up in an ivory tower; it’s to describe how her mindset and toolkit inform her understanding of the world in any situation.
The article captured me because it never mentions what the author actually models. Instead, it presents her frightened thoughts and her efforts to calm herself by looking at the world through a mathematical lens. But it’s not what you think; there are no emotionally-distant mathematicians here. The author communicates her fascination with tying reality to abstract models, expecting and preempting the protest that reality is too complex and math too simple:
In this violent world, with the man in the blue Chevy whispering at me behind the window, math is my shield. Speaking up about drugs is in these parts a dangerous game. But not if you speak in the language of sigma and conditional expectations. Math protects me from the immediacy of the violence, and it protects me from them.
The beauty of my method lies in its simplicity. With mathematics I’m able to codify and simplify reality to make it manageable and, more important, malleable. I represent each possible individual as an equation in which each term symbolizes tastes, goals, profession and abilities. All people get portrayed: Policemen, politicians, citizens and drug cartels start living in this mathematical world as planes and hyperplanes and, as in real life, they interact and affect one another, sometimes colluding, sometimes colliding, sometimes neither.
I then use optimization to predict the form of interaction that will be the most probable to emerge and remain over time. Math starts speaking. It tells me, for example, under what conditions the outcome would be a drug war; when would the government prefer to cooperate with cartels; or when cruel intra-cartel purges will become the norm.
There is a part of every modeler’s mind which is constantly teasing out variables from constants. The statisticians among us may take a frequentist view, and wonder what would happen if a scene played itself out a million times; the programmers will deduce the underlying algorithms from the fuzzy result; the pure mathematicians will see manifolds everywhere:
In this abstract microcosmos, reality can be frozen or just slightly changed. I move and look at my hyperplanes from different angles. Let’s change the penalty code. No, let’s increase patrolling. Or reduce wages. Allow less contact between policemen and dealers. Assume the police force is corrupt. Assume it is not. I solve the equations and there it is. My answers come as Greek letters and probabilities.
But we all admit:
I know, I know, this is weird.
Ultimately, “free will” becomes the clarion of the independent. At least, it’s the best response to this explanation:
It may seem strange to examine this shadowy world with equations. But mathematics is transforming the social sciences. In the same way that physicists can predict the movement of atoms in space, we can use mathematics to model how individuals and groups will make decisions and interact in a society.
But free will has a (somewhat tentative) analogue in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and with that philosophy and math (or theology and physics) are combined — but there’s been plenty of pop-sci written on that topic.
I found this brief article remarkable in how it was able to demonstrate the overlay mathematical thought on an extremely “human” subject without ever needing to explain either one.
(Via Drew Conway)
Microsoft has announced the system requirements for Office 2010.
That’s news in and of itself. Once upon a time, system requirements (at least, ones that anyone paid attention to) were strictly for high-end professional software, cutting-edge games and the like: software that actually needed powerful hardware. But the real news here is that Office 2010 requires a DirectX-compatible graphics card.
Now, I don’t think Word is going to be offloading word counts to a GPU anytime soon. But Microsoft’s announcement is making waves nontheless — and I think it’s actually great. It means we’ve reached a point where our computing history is so mature that even our mass-market word processors have achieved a level of sophistication that we need to make sure of their compatibility. That’s exciting!
Certainly, Excel is an obvious candidate for hardware acceleration, which, besides accelerating simple tasks like opening large files and parallel tasks like running many equations, could finally bring true vector operations to the versatile software.
But there is bad news. I’ll let Microsoft break it to you:
If your computer has a GPU, it lets us perform graphics rendering tasks (like drawing charts in Excel, or transitions in PowerPoint) in the GPU instead of in the CPU, which parallelizes work and speeds up performance. This is particularly relevant for users of PowerPoint 2010, which will introduce some awesome new graphics and video integration features (more info at the PowerPoint team blog).
Yes, the true motivation behind the graphics upgrade is supercharging those awful 3D pie charts we know and despise.
(If you click the PowerPoint link, you’ll notice that Powerpoint 2010 looks a lot like Keynote. Just sayin’.)
Very amusing… and true:
I especially love “The HDR Hole.” Presumably the y-axis is measured in percent of personal potential… there must be all sorts of Bayesian self-reflection stuff going on there.
(Via DataViz)
Via The Big Picture comes news of a rather substantial revision of numbers from last November:
You may recall that consensus for November’s Durable Goods had been +0.5%. The reported data was lighter than expected at +0.2%. Looking at the revisions the Census Bureau has now incorporated into the data, we see that November actually printed at -0.7%.
The critical point is that this would represent two consecutive months of negative growth – a feat not accomplished since last January. For the record, the swing of more than 1% was officially attributed to a “processing error.”
With the recent announcements that YouTube and Vimeo are both releasing HTML5-based video players, one has to wonder about the impact of those moves on Adobe. Adobe’s Flash had been (and is) THE standard for delivering multimedia content over the web, capturing something like 99% of internet users. HTML5 allows many Flash-like animations/videos/experiences without the need for a seperate plugin or buffering (that’s right – skip to a different point in that YouTube video without waiting for it to load!).
Adobe doesn’t derive much revenue from Flash – so this isn’t going to crimp their cashflow necessarily – but it is a major part of their broader brand recognition. (For the curious, Flash and other platforms generate about 6% of Adobe’s revenue, but half of that comes from Mobile solutions that likely don’t include Flash. Creative software is the bulk of the revenue stream, forming about 60% of the total.). I’m curious what indirect impact it could have on the rest of the company.
For that matter, Microsoft’s Silverlight — the Flash alternative that powers the excellent Bing Maps — doesn’t have nearly the market share of its competitor. Where does this leave it?
Flash, Silverlight and other proprietary delivery systems are essentially browser replacements. They deliver web experiences which browsers on their own can not. To the extent we can move away from plugin multimedia and incorporate it directly into the web standard, that’s a good thing in my mind. Unfortunately, browser support for HTML5 is minimal – just the latest version of Safari and the nightly Webkit builds (including non-production versions of Chrome). Plugins, by contrast, are widely supported and bring content to potentially any browser. It’s hard for me to imagine why people wouldn’t want the latest, fastest, and most secure web technology available… but then again, I’m constantly surprised by the number of TGR visitors using IE6!
And a special message for those visitors: please click here to download Google Chrome.
Here’s an interesting case study in internet behavior dynamics: when Engadget publishes a story — any story — about 3D TVs, the comments are filled with fans and excited (potential) consumers. When the NYT publishes a story called “Do Consumers Really Want 3-D TV’s?” the comments overflow with doubters and pessimists.
Thanks to the magic of social comments, each sub-population reinforces its own beliefs. The result is that viewing either story in isolation would convince you that it represents the majority opinion. If the NYT story were a little more critical, crossing some invisible line in the virtual sand, then the fanboys would come running to defend their turf. But it isn’t. Engadget’s stories, on the other hand, have a broad enough audience that they do attract a few nay-sayers — but their opinions are quickly drowned out.
For me, the clincher is that the NYT author seems to be worried that he will be forced to watch old shows in 3D:
And what happens when I want to watch shows like “Seinfeld,” or “Everyone Loves Raymond”? Will I really want to experience these in 3-D too?
3D screens do not automatically make everything into 3D. The spatial processing that would require has not been developed on a supercomputing scale, much less a consumer entertainment device. Moreover, they can display 2D content without any problem – in fact, the “3D” content is nothing more than a specially (and spectrally) oriented 2D image which, when viewed through the polarized or shuttered glasses, is rendered differently by your two eyes. The result is the perception of 3D from 2D – and the key point is that there’s nothing preventing the good old 2D images we know and love.
I have seen a 3D TV – there’s one at the Sony store in midtown Manhattan. It is extremely impressive and yes, you’ll own one one day (though they’re going to be expensive at first). Depending on the intersection of technology and regulation, you actually may have to (a la digital and de facto HDTV).
I completely agree that the glasses are impractical and a little annoying. But I’ll limit my critique to that accessory rather than the entire industry. The NYT article actually notes that glasses-free viewing may be “two to three years away” (personally, I’m less optimistic about that timeframe). Indeed, auto stereo TV’s exist (I saw one in Bloomingdales, of all places!) and certainly will be the norm. Will consumers be ready then?
The NYT article concludes:
Maybe the consortiums and manufacturers are right, we’ll see these images popping out of our TVs in our homes and never look back to a 2-D world. But I’m about as geeky as they come, so are most of my friends. We all wait in line for the latest iPhones or video games and we spend an exorbitant amount of time sharing links about the latest digital cameras, video game consoles and the Apple rumors. But I can’t recall a single geeky friend saying anything, with any excitement, about 3-D televisions.
I have to wonder if those “geeky” friends have ever read Engadget.
Clay Shirky sees the internet poised between Invisible High School and Invisible College, the latter of which sounds a lot like an open source society:
What did the Invisible College have that the alchemists didn’t?
They had a culture of sharing. The problem with the alchemists had wasn’t that they failed to turn lead into gold; the problem was that they failed uninformatively. Alchemists were obscurantists, recording their work by hand and rarely showing it to anyone but disciples. In contrast, members of the Invisible College shared their work, describing and disputing their methods and conclusions so that they all might benefit from both successes and failures, and build on each other’s work.
And my favorite point from the essay:
…in the 20th century, the mere fact of owning the apparatus to make something public, whether a printing press or a TV tower, made you a person of considerable importance. Today, though, publishing, in its sense of making things public, is becoming similarly de-professionalized; YouTube is now in the position of having tostop 8 year olds from becoming global publishers of video. The mere fact of being able to publish to a global audience is the new literacy, formerly valuable, now so widely available that you can’t make any money with the basic capability any more.
There’s a lot of speculation out there regarding the form of Apple’s tablet OS: will it be the iPhone OS in an expanded resolution? Will it be a stripped down version of Snow Leopard? Will it be something new entirely?
If you’re using a Mac right now, hit F12. That’s my bet at what the forthcoming tablet will look like: Snow Leopard’s dashboard.
Dashboard is an environment which runs multiple widgets of various sizes and functionalities. Widgets must be written as small web apps, using html, CSS and java, but there’s not a good reason that full featured and self-contained applications couldn’t run on the dashboard as well.
In other words, I could run a bunch of iPhone apps at once on my dashboard. In fact, since many apps scale to match the iPhone’s orientation, they could presumably scale to an arbitrary footprint as well.
Just my two cents.
