Taser International, “market leader in advanced electronic control devices”, have released their inevitable press release in response to the death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport.

Taser has been remarkably good at dodging lawsuits. As far as I know, they’ve never even been stuck with a civil suit for injury or death.

Their press release, helpfully reproduced in unedited form as a news article by CNN, scolds media outlets for rushing to blame Dziekanski’s death on his being tasered. They insist that

“We are taken aback by the number of media outlets that have irresponsibly published conclusive headlines blaming the TASER device and / or the law enforcement officers involved as the cause of death before completion of the investigation. These sensationalistic media reports completely ignore the earmark symptoms of excited delirium shown in the video.”

Yes, they’re shocked. Shocked. Furthermore,

“TASER International is transmitting over 60 legal demand letters requiring correction of these false and misleading headlines and will take other actions as appropriate.”

Which suggests an explanation for the lack of successful suits against them: they spend a lot of money on their justice.

So how come people die after getting tasered? It’s the tasered’s fault, not the taser or the taseree.

“This tragic incident appears to follow the pattern of many in-custody deaths or deaths following a confrontation with police. Historically, medical science and forensic analysis has shown that these deaths are attributable to other factors and not the low-energy electrical discharge of the TASER(r).”

Cause-and-effect is a slippery thing, sure enough. When is a thing a cause of another thing, and when are they just correlated in space in time? It’s a question that has vexed philosophers and ecologists and taserologists for centuries. The RCMP are very clear in their own philosophy, as noted previously.

After watching the video of the man dieing at the same time and place as he was being tasered by police I’ll tell you this: if that man hadn’t been tasered, he wouldn’t be dead now. Therefore the taser caused his death. I’ll tell you this too: the police also caused his death.

You know who should get a tasering? The philosophy department at TASER International of Scottsdale Arizona. What’s a low-energy electrical discharge among pure intellectuals?

Thing 1: In this episode of the CBC radio show Search Engine, they discuss the tens of thousands of “Chinese gold farmers” who “play” online video games to generate virtual gold to sell to western gamers for real cash. They are crammed dozens to an apartment, rotating between the computers and the sleeping mats in 12 hour shifts, playing the same game, killing the same respawning monsters, all day every day. Apparently it’s a thing that they don’t wear shirts. I’d rather do repetitive manual labour. What blew my mind was the researcher who claimed that in his interviews, some of the farmers claimed that they spend their off-hours… playing the same video games. I guess it’s the world they relate to.

There’s also a documentary in production about gold farmers, and a Cory Doctorow short story about a UK gamer who gets hired to raid online sweatshops to steal their gold and gets co-opted by an online labour organizer. And plenty of other exquisitely weird aspects.

Thing 2: Apparently V.S. Ramachandran was investigating the synesthesia phenomenon in which people experience certain colours in association with certain numbers, and had the smarty-pants idea to find a colour-blind number-synesthete. Colour-blind people’s experience of colour is limited by low-performing retinas, but there isn’t anything wrong with the colour-interpreting parts of their brains so, what happens when they see the number-induced colours? Turns out they see those colours (and only those colours!) as intensely as a normal person can perceive normal colour. The synesthete had the pet-term “martian colors” for them. Damn.

This is very cool, in a way I am far from qualified to articulate: a 20 year old undergraduate has proven that a 2,3 Turing machine is capable of universal computation. Every word I write after that will be one more inaccuracy, but nonetheless here goes: a 2,3 Turing machine is a mechanically very simple device, which can be theoretical or could actually be constructed, as Turing and associates did, and which follows a few simple rules. It’s current “state” depends on it’s state in the last time step: in the case of the 2/3, it has some “heads” which can be either up or down, and it prints on some “paper” in 3 colours. The state of each head and the colour it prints depends on the head positions and previous colours of the line above on the roll of printer paper. Or alternatively, any other 2 and 3 position machine you can imagine. If this sounds to you something like the game of life, that’s because you know more about this stuff than I do. By comparison, the computer you’re reading this on has many, many “states” in the logic gates of it’s CPU. Like millions.

Universal computation means it can accomplish any possible computational task, if you got the rules for up/down white/orange/red colour right. Obviously. Duh.

People have proven that relatively complicated (7 state(?)) machines are capable of universal computation. Which is pretty wild. People claim that 2/2 and simpler machines aren’t capable of it. So the question was: can 2,3 machines do it? Cause if they can, that probably makes them the simplest possible machines capable of universal computation.

Stephen Wolfram, boy genius and subsequent author of the scale-crushing A New Kind of Science was so intrigued by the topic that he offered up $25 000 to the first person to prove (in the mathematical Proof sense) the question either way.

Why is this important? Hell I don’t know. Folks claim that all life and possibly the entire universe is really just a form of information computation, and this impinges on that sort of thinking somehow. I don’t really understand what that means, although it’s somehow provocative to the old imagination.

It also gives us all a fresh excuse to read Cosma Shalizi’s review of A New Kind of Science, one of the most refreshingly acerbic excercises in sharp-blade big-brain academic critique I know.

A New Kind of Science
A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity
….
What, then, is the revelation Wolfram has been vouchsafed? What is this new kind of science? Briefly stated, it is the idea that we should give up trying on complicated, continuous models, using normal calculus or probability theory or the like, which try to represent the mechanisms by which interesting phenomena are produced, or at least to accurately reproduce the details of such phenomena. Instead we should look for simple, discrete models, like CAs (“simple programs”, as he calls them) which qualitatively reproduce certain striking features of those phenomena. In addition to this methodological advice, there is the belief that the universe must in some sense be such a simple program — as he has notoriously said, “four lines of Mathematica”. Most of the bulk of this monstrously bloated book is dedicated to examples of this approach, i.e., to CA rules which produce patterns looking like the growths of corals or trees, or explanations of how simple CAs can be used to produce reasonably high-quality pseudo-random numbers, or the like.
….
As the saying goes, there is much here that is new and true, but what is true is not new, and what is new is not true; and some of it is even old and false, or at least utterly unsupported. Let’s start with the true things that aren’t new.

A disclaimer of sorts: I am a giant fanboy of the idea that the bizarre swirly patterns of the world may be the encrusted aggregate product of a handful of granular basic mechanisms, not least because that would mean that it’s okay if I let down the people trying to teach me the “complicated, continuous models, using normal calculus or probability theory or the like, which try to represent the mechanisms by which interesting phenomena are produced, or at least to accurately reproduce the details of such phenomena”.

The S.O.S. Mathematics primer on matrix algebra leads off thusly:

Matrices and Determinants were discovered and developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Initially, their development dealt with transformation of geometric objects and solution of systems of linear equations. Historically, the early emphasis was on the determinant, not the matrix. In modern treatments of linear algebra, matrices are considered first. We will not speculate much on this issue.

Just listened to a fascinating talk by psychologist Philip Tetlock, who long ago initiated a multi-decadal programme to ask hundreds of experts to make hundreds of predictions each about future political events, and has ever since been measuring their observed success rates and analysing the implications. Among other things he finds that those who adhere tightly to a central philosophy or dogma and derive all their answers from that philosophy are likely to be more confident that the future can be predicted, more willing to attempt to predict it, and significantly less likely to successfully do so than those who don’t subscribe to any all-encompassing world view. Neoclassical economists and marxists alike bomb. He also makes the interesting point that the two camps may not be able to exist independently, but that they are in fact “mutually interdependent ecosystems” wherein the ideologues push big ideas as far as they can go (“or perhaps further”) and the non-ideologues are “scavengers” who pick up bits and pieces of the exploded big ideas and fruitfully reassemble them. He also points out that if it is the reconstituted frankensteins of larger ideas which is most successful in prediction, then there are implications for optimal diversity in team-building. Scott Page, paging Dr. Scott Page. He also also also makes the interesting observation that neither the ideologues nor the non-ideologues did much better in their predications than simple statistical null model predictors (‘nothing happens’, ‘change continues at the same speed and direction that it has been’).

All very interesting. Blog summary here, .mp3 recording here. As per usual, it’s a Long Now seminar.

If you’re interested in the tension between correlation and causation in ecology and don’t feel like standing up, it turns out that great chunks of R.H. Peters’ “A Critique For Ecology” is available online in Google Books. Apparently Cambridge press is experimenting with sticking big swaths of its books up on the internet. It makes a lot of sense to me: it doesn’t cost them anything, and there is no way I would actually sit and read through all of a book on a computer screen. Ouch. But on the other hand, I’m at least ten times as likely to buy or otherwise get a hold of a physical copy of the book if I read a bunch of it first. So there you go.

If it sounds like a boring topic to you (causation v. correlation etc) it may be, but if you’re interested in ecology it may not. Peters argues that ecology’s obsession with explaining the whys behind the way things are in nature has led to a vague and muddled science, given that it’s functionally impossible to prove why something happens. In his mind, ecology goes around identifying problems and never really solving them, so the longer it exists as a science the less we seem to know. He points out that if you want to contribute to solving problems you have to be able predict what will happen in the future given the current state or possible current states. And prediction is all about correlation, which is a separate issue from causation. He thinks we need to be worse natural historians and better statisticians.

It’s an interesting argument, but childish and silly of course. Which is obvious if you read the book. Which, hey presto, you sort of can!

A Critique for Ecology By Robert H. Peters

I have a group project writing an agent-based program to simulate the foraging behaviour of ants. The NetLogo implementation of this idea makes it look easy. Turns it out it’s not. Which has lead to lots of interesting questions about ants.

Incidentally, the project is being written using the RePast agent based modeling libraries for java. Now, I haven’t looked at the code of the NetLogo sample implementation since I started writing this thing, because we’re not supposed to. But I did look at it last semester, and I seem to remember you could fit the code on a tshirt, using a fairly hefty font, if you were so inclined. You could not fit the equivalent java code on a tshirt. You could not fit it on a muumuu. If nothing else, this project is convincing me that as soon as we’re let loose, I’ll be switching to NetLogo. RePast may not be as clumsy or random as a blaster, but NetLogo is just like way faster. Bring on the clumsy and random.

In an effort to answer some of my questions about how real ants have solved their RePast programming issues, I got a copy of Ants at Work by Deborah Gordon out of the library. I was shocked and mildy irritated to see that no one has checked out this copy — the only one in the UMich system — before me. WTF? I first read AaW when I was contemplating a project for my final year field course in undergrad, and it sticks in my memory as one of the most interesting books I have read. Dr. Gordon studies how it is that individual ants, obeying no rules outside of their own tiny heads, somehow come together to form the persistent yet adaptable superorganism that is an ant colony. She uses methods ranging from painting individual ants to digging up colonies with backhoes. It was my first introduction to the idea of emergence, before I (or apparently Dr. Gordon) had ever heard the word.

I can’t believe nobody else has read it around here. What’s wrong with these people? It’s so much more portable than The Ants, and costs 1/20th as much, even if you don’t include the cost of the hand cart.

Also, there is a raccoon sleeping in the garbage bin to the east of the Shapiro library doors.

The media is bit by bit beginning to accept that the scientific consensus really is that serious human-induced global warming is a go. It has taken years for us to get to this point, and we’re not fully here yet anyway. One of my most grumpy moments this summer was on a day off in town, standing in a line up in a king sized grocery store, staring at a 3″ National Post headline claiming that global warming skeptics have been unfairly ignored.

Strangely enough, it hasn’t been very difficult to figure out what the scientific community has actually been thinking on this issue. Not for years. There is a single credible and comprehensive international body which coordinates global warming research and goes to great lengths to assemble and summarize findings on the topic. I can’t offhand think of any other major science-related issue that has been made as transparently easy to research.

But I guess that wasn’t enough for the press. They could hardly be expected to, you know, read the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change’s reports. They had stories to write and deadlines to meet. Poor buggers. It must be a real existential challenge, keeping a sense of reality when you are charged to make it up without reference to it on a daily basis.

I’m not complaining here about the editorial position of journalists or journalism outfits. People are free to dismiss the findings of the scientific enterprise if they have doubts about its integrity or value. The thing is, the media haven’t been casting doubt on the value of the science, they’ve just been routinely misstating that science, for years. For the most part it’s been to play up the uncertainty angle. Maybe it made for more exciting reading. You would think certain impending social and environmental disaster would be more interesting than uncertain impending social and environmental disaster. Guess not.

So the poor folks at the IPCC who have been writing these reports every few years have, I imagine, been getting more and more desperate each year at the lack of impact of their crucially important publications. The last one came out in 2001. The next one is due out in 2007.

Looks like the scientificos are trying some tactics this time round. In particular, individual scientists are giving interviews talking up the report as being wildly important and containing amazing information. Which it is and does, no doubt, it’s just not like an esteemed international scientific body to pimp it’s pubs with teasers and interviews.

There are, for example, some great lines in this newspaper article from CanWest:

”I can tell you for sure that the statements in that report will be far stronger than what existed in 2001. It will be flabbergastingly stronger.”

Holy crap, that’s a lot stronger. Let’s hope the brave new edition of the report will be enough to do it. And let’s hope that if it is action-jam-packed with unequivocal statements of flabbergasting strength, that they will be interpreted for what they are: the highly unusual result of the highly unusual situation in which the level of doubt around a scientific question has drained almost completely away; and not for what they aren’t: evidence that the scientists have lost objectivity and are making personally motivated overclaims.

I guess we’ll see. If anybody pays attention.

From Tim, a hell of a good link…

Pictures (and a movie!) of the northern lights from space.

There are no words to describe how cool some things are.