Month: May 2012

Flame on

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Understanding arduously complex topics is a joy in itself. I’ve been, by professional necessity, recently working on 3D visualization technologies. Matrix rotations, vector mathematics, and linear algebra are old topics that I’ve encountered now and again, but to be pushing towards a deadline and peeling the onion layers back in support of a specific goal makes each improvement as triumphant as those early summer mornings at the tender age of fourteen when “Hello World” in machine code first ran on my Commodore 64.

Understanding is a joy.

The “Flame” malware infecting computers in the Middle East is another example. This collection of tools and technologies embeds itself in Microsoft Windows (XP and up) and monitors various actions by the users. From what is currently understood it is therefore spyware, but there may be additional functionality hidden in this huge collection of software.

There is some remarkable research already on Flame, like this 64-page report from an academic laboratory in Budapest, Hungary that shows the detailed machinations working in a modern spyware system. At heart are exploits of the Windows OS, of course, but the cleverness is magnified by some of the approaches that are applied: decrypting code resources and overlaying other running programs, multiple compression and encryption algorithms, spyware databases, kernel patching to hide running processes, and even an embedded scripting language for providing versatility in the face of new challenges.

This is l33t stuff, but it is still dependent on legacy features of the Windows OS. And don’t take that as suggesting that Linux or Mac OS X are somehow immune. They aren’t. The exploits were just targeting the OSes relevant to the task. Could OS creators fix the problem?… Read the rest

On the Soul-Eyes of Polar Bears

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I sometimes reference a computational linguistics factoid that appears to be now lost in the mists of early DoD Tipster program research: Chinese linguists only agree on the segmentation of texts into words about 80% of the time. We can find some qualitative agreement on the problematic nature of the task, but the 80% is widely smeared out among the references that I can now find. It should be no real surprise, though, because even English with white-space tokenization resists easy characterization of words versus phrases: “New York” and “New York City” are almost words in themselves, though just given white-space tokenization are also phrases. Phrases lift out with common and distinct usage, however, and become more than the sum of their parts; it would be ridiculously noisy to match a search for “York” against “New York” because no one in the modern world attaches semantic significance to the “York” part of the phrase. It exists as a whole and the nature of the parts has dissolved against this wholism.

John Searle’s Chinese Room argument came up again today. My son was waxing, as he does, in a discussion about mathematics and order, and suggested a poverty of our considerations of the world as being purely and completely natural. He meant in the sense of “materialism” and “naturalism” meaning that there are no mystical or magical elements to the world in a metaphysical sense. I argued that there may nonetheless be something that is different and indescribable by simple naturalistic calculi: there may be qualia. It led, in turn, to a qualification of what is unique about the human experience and hence on to Searle’s Chinese Room.

And what happens in the Chinese Room?… Read the rest

The Comets of Literary Cohesion

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Every few years, with the hyperbolic regularity of Kahoutek’s orbit, I return to B.R. Myers’ 2001 Atlantic essay, A Reader’s Manifesto, where he plays the enfant terrible against the titans of serious literature. With savagery Myers tears out the elliptical heart of Annie Proulx and then beats regular holes in Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo in a conscious mockery of the strained repetitiveness of their sentences.

I return to Myers because I currently have four novels in process. I return because I hope to be saved from the delirium of the postmodern novel that wants to be written merely because there is nothing really left to write about, at least not without a self-conscious wink:

But today’s Serious Writers fail even on their own postmodern terms. They urge us to move beyond our old-fashioned preoccupation with content and plot, to focus on form instead—and then they subject us to the least-expressive form, the least-expressive sentences, in the history of the American novel. Time wasted on these books is time that could be spent reading something fun.

Myers’ essay hints at what he sees as good writing, quoting Nabakov, referencing T.S. Eliot, and analyzing the controlled lyricism of Saul Bellow. Evaporating the boundaries between the various “brows” and accepting that action, plot, and invention are acceptable literary conceits also marks Myers’ approach to literary analysis.

It is largely an atheoretic analysis but there is a hint at something more beneath the surface when Myers describes the disdain of European peasants for the transition away from the inscrutable Latin masses and benedictions and into the language of the common man: “Our parson…is a plain honest man… But…he is no Latiner.” Myers counts the fascination with arabesque prose, with labeling it as great even when it lacks content, as derived from the same fascination that gripped the peasants: majesty is inherent in obscurity.… Read the rest

The Unreasonable Success of Reason

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Math and natural philosophy were discovered several times in human history: Classical Greece, Medieval Islam, Renaissance Europe. Arguably, the latter two were strongly influenced by the former, but even so they built additional explanatory frameworks. Moreover, the explosion that arose from Europe became the Enlightenment and the modern edifice of science and technology

So, on the eve of an eclipse that sufficiently darkened the skies of Northern California, it is worth noting the unreasonable success of reason. The gods are not angry. The spirits are not threatening us over a failure to properly propitiate their symbolic requirements. Instead, the mathematics worked predictively and perfectly to explain a wholly natural phenomenon.

But why should the mathematics work so exceptionally well? It could be otherwise, as Eugene Wigner’s marvelous 1960 paper, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, points out:

All the laws of nature are conditional statements which permit a prediction of some future events on the basis of the knowledge of the present, except that some aspects of the present state of the world, in practice the overwhelming majority of the determinants of the present state of the world, are irrelevant from the point of view of the prediction.

…

A possible explanation of the physicist’s use of mathematics to formulate his laws of nature is that he is a somewhat irresponsible person. As a result, when he finds a connection between two quantities which resembles a connection well-known from mathematics, he will jump at the conclusion that the connection is that discussed in mathematics simply because he does not know of any other similar connection.

Galileo’s rocks fall at the same rates but only provided that they are not unduly flat and light.… Read the rest

From Smith to Darwin

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The notion that all the contingencies of human history can be rendered down into law-like principles is the greatest reflection of the human desire for order and understanding. Adam Smith appears in that mirrored pool alongside Karl Marx and, in his original form, even Charles Darwin. That’s only the beginning: Freud, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Hegel, and a host of others are reflected there in varying, and transitory clarity.

Adam Smith is a iconic case, as I discovered reading Adam Smith’s View of History: Consistent or Paradoxical? by James Alvey. The paradoxical component arises from a merger of a belief in the inevitability of commercial society and, at various points in Smith’s intellectual development, a cynicism about the probability of forward progress towards that goal. Ever behind the curtain, however, was the invisible hand represented by a kind of teleological divine presence moving history and economics forward.

The paper uncovers some of the idiosyncrasies of Smith’s economic history:

[T]he burghers felt secure enough to import ‘improved manufactures and expensive luxuries’. The lords now had something beside hospitality for which they could exchange the whole of their agricultural surplus. Previously they had to share, but ‘frivolous and useless’ things, such as ‘a pair of diamond [shoe] buckles’, and ‘trinkets and baubles’, could be consumed by the lords alone. The lords were fascinated with such finely crafted items and wanted to own and vainly display them. As the lords ‘eagerly purchased’ these luxury items they were forced to reduce the number of their dependents and eventually dismiss them entirely.

The lords ultimately have to trade off economic freedom of the artisans in exchange for more diamond shoe buckles. Odd, but perhaps reflective of the excesses of the wealthy in Smith’s era–something that needed explanation.… Read the rest

Teleology, Chapter 5

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Harry spent most of that summer involved in the Santa Fe Sangre de Cristo Church, first with the church summer camp, then with the youth group. He seemed happy and spent the evenings text messaging with his new friends. I was jealous in a way, but refused to let it show too much. Thursdays he was picked up by the church van and went to watch movies in a recreation center somewhere. I looked out one afternoon as the van arrived and could see Sarah’s bright hair shining through the high back window of the van.

Mom explained that they seemed to be evangelical, meaning that they liked to bring as many new worshippers into the religion as possible through outreach and activities. Harry didn’t talk much about his experiences. He was too much in the thick of things to be concerned with my opinions, I think, and snide comments were brushed aside with a beaming smile and a wave. “You just don’t understand,” Harry would dismissively tell me.

I was reading so much that Mom would often demand that I get out of the house on weekend evenings after she had encountered me splayed on the couch straight through lunch and into the shifting evening sunlight passing through the high windows of our thick-walled adobe. I would walk then, often for hours, snaking up the arroyos towards the mountains, then wend my way back down, traipsing through the thick sand until it was past dinner time.

It was during this time period that I read cyberpunk authors and became intrigued with the idea that someday, one day, perhaps computing machines would “wake up” and start to think on their own.… Read the rest

The Sooner We Are All Mongrels, the Better

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E.O. Wilson charges across the is-ought barrier with a zeal undiminished by his advancing years and promotes genetic diversity as a moral good in The Social Conquest of Earth:

Perhaps it is time…to adopt a new ethic of racial and hereditary variation, one that places value on the whole of diversity rather than on the differences composing the diversity. It would give proper measure to our species’ genetic variation as an asset, prized for the adaptability it provides all of us during an increasingly uncertain future. Humanity is strengthened by a broad portfolio of genes that can generate new talents, additional resistance to diseases, and perhaps even new ways of seeing reality. For scientific as well as moral reasons, we should learn to promote human biological diversity for its own sake instead of using it to justify prejudice and conflict.

This follows an analysis of the relative genetic differences between various racial groups of humans, concluding that subsaharan Africa contains the highest genetic diversity among human groups. Yet almost everything in our social and biological history suggests that we have formed social structures specifically to prevent out-breeding and limit the expansion of our genetic pool. This has always been a thorny subject for selfish genetics: why risk pairing your alleles with unknowns guessed at through proximal sexual clues like body symmetry or the quality of giant peacock tails? The risk of outbreeding is apparently lower than the risk of diverse infectious agents according to a common current theory, but we also see culture as overriding even the strongest outbreeding motivation by imposing mating rules based on familial and tribal power struggles. At the worst, we even see inbreeding depression in populations that consolidate power through close marriages (look at the sex-linked defect lineages in European royal families) or through long religious prohibitions on marrying outside of relatively small populations of the faithful.… Read the rest

John Gray on Jonathan Haidt

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Excellent discussion (and review) of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by John Gray in The New Republic. Gray is skeptical of intellectual history but even more skeptical of scientism, or the attempt to apply scientific reasoning to the complexities of human politics. Summing up concerning evolutionary psychology:

Haidt’s attempt to apply evolutionary psychology is yet one more example of the failures of scientism. There is no line of evolutionary development that connects our hominid ancestors with the emergence of the Tea Party. Human beings are not amoebae that have somehow managed to turn themselves into clever primates. They are animals with a history, part of which consists of creating cultures that are widely divergent. Using evolutionary psychology to explain current political conflicts represents local and ephemeral differences as perennial divisions in the human mind. It is hard to think of a more stultifying exercise in intellectual parochialism.

E.O. Wilson, Sam Harris, and David Sloan Wilson undoubtedly also included. The trouble arises in trying to connect the dots in too simple a contour. Haidt’s observations about flavors of moral feelings among liberals and conservatives is interesting and perhaps useful. But, as Gray suggests, it is where this naturalism ignores the cascading complexities of history that trouble arises. And when it tries to crawl onto the shores of policy and normative ethics, Gray takes even greater exception; the is-ought barrier is unassailable.

There are some assumptions by Gray that could use some critiquing. He quotes Haidt’s favorable perspective on utilitarianism and contrasts it with Berlin’s values pluralism. Gray is skeptical that culture war topics like abortion or gay rights can be cast into a utilitarian form and are better entertained through a recognition that a divergent moral landscape is the inevitable product of the complexities that culture hath wrought.… Read the rest

Lies, Damn Lies, and the Statistics of Mortality

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I spent a few minutes calculating my expected date of death today since I just turned 45. It turns out that I am beyond the half-way point in this journey.  I’ve created a spreadsheet that you can use to calculate your own demise and produce charts like the one above. The current spreadsheet uses the US Male/Female mortality numbers from the World Bank dataset and then a linear regression for future gains in life expectancy. Other country sets can be easily incorporated.

Enter your year of birth in the yellow box and it will create a plot of how long you can expect to live, as well as the transition point from green to red in your, eh, lifecycle.  Don’t forget to get your trusts, wills, organ donations, and directives in order.

Of course, there are no more compelling lies than statistical ones, and yet there are no other ways to guess the future than to extrapolate from the past.… Read the rest

On the Non-Simulation of Human Intelligence

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There is a curious dilemma that pervades much machine learning research. The solutions that we are trying to devise are supposed to minimize behavioral error by formulating the best possible model (or collection of competing models). This is also the assumption of evolutionary optimization, whether natural or artificial: optimality is the key to efficiently outcompeting alternative structures, alternative alleles, and alternative conceptual models. The dilemma is whether such optimality is applicable to the notoriously error prone, conceptual flexible, and inefficient reasoning of people. In other words, is machine learning at all like human learning?

I came across a paper called “Multi-Armed Bandit Bayesian Decision Making” while trying to understand what Ted Dunning is planning to talk about at the Big Data Science Meetup at SGI in Fremont, CA a week from Saturday (I’ll be talking, as well) that has a remarkable admission concerning this point:

Human behaviour is after all heavily influenced by emotions, values, culture and genetics; as agents operating in a decentralised system humans are notoriously bad at coordination. It is this fact that motivates us to develop systems that do coordinate well and that operate outside the realms of emotional biasing. We use Bayesian Probability Theory to build these systems specifically because we regard it as common sense expressed mathematically, or rather `the right thing to do’.

The authors continue on to suggest that therefore such systems should instead be seen as corrective assistants for the limitations of human cognitive processes! Machines can put the rational back into reasoned decision-making. But that is really not what machine learning is used for today. Instead, machine learning is used where human decision-making processes are unavailable due to the physical limitations of including humans “in the loop,” or the scale of the data involved, or the tediousness of the tasks at hand.… Read the rest