Language Games

September 21, 2014 Mark Davis6 Comments

On The Thinking Atheist, C.J. Werleman promotes the idea that atheists can’t be Republicans based on his new book. Why? Well, for C.J. it’s because the current Republican platform is not grounded in any kind of factual reality. Supply-side economics, Libertarianism, economic stimuli vs. inflation, Iraqi WMDs, Laffer curves, climate change denial—all are grease for the wheels of a fantastical alternative reality where macho small businessmen lift all boats with their steely gaze, the earth is forever resilient to our plunder, and simple truths trump obscurantist science. Watch out for the reality-based community!

Is politics essentially religion in that it depends on ideology not grounded in reality, spearheaded by ideologues who serve as priests for building policy frameworks?

Likely. But we don’t really seem to base our daily interactions on rationality either. 538 Science tells us that it has taken decades to arrive at the conclusion that vitamin supplements are probably of little use to those of us lucky enough to live in the developed world. Before that we latched onto indirect signaling about vitamin C, E, D, B12, and others to decide how to proceed. The thinking typically took on familiar patterns: someone heard or read that vitamin X is good for us/I’m skeptical/why not?/maybe there are negative side-effects/it’s expensive anyway/forget it. The language games are at all levels in promoting, doubting, processing, and reinforcing the microclaims for each option. We embrace signals about differences and nuances but it often takes many months and collections of those signals in order to make up our minds. And then we change them again.

Among the well educated, I’ve variously heard the wildest claims about the effectiveness of chiropractors, pseudoscientific remedies, the role of immunizations in autism (not due to preservatives in this instance; due to immune responses themselves), and how karma works in software development practice.… Read the rest

Profiled Against a Desert Ribbon

September 11, 2014September 11, 2014 Mark DavisLeave a comment

Catch a profile of me in this month’s IEEE Spectrum Magazine. Note Yggdrasil in the background! It’s been great working with IEEE’s Cloud Computing Initiative (CCI) these last two years. CCI will be ending soon, but it’s impact will live on in, for instance, the Intercloud Interoperability Standard and other ways. Importantly, I’ll be at the IEEE Big Data Initiative Workshop in Hoboken, NJ, at the end of the month working on the next initiative in support of advanced data analytics. Note that Hoboken and Jersey City have better views of Manhattan than Manhattan itself!

“Animal” was the name of the program and it built simple decision trees based on yes/no answers (does it have hair? does it have feathers?). If it didn’t guess your animal it added a layer to the tree with the correct answer. Incremental learning at its most elementary, but it left an odd impression on me: how do we overcome the specification of rules to create self-specifying (occasionally, maybe) intelligence? I spent days wandering the irrigation canals of the lower New Mexico Rio Grande trying to overcome this fatal flaw that I saw in such simplified ideas about intelligence. And I didn’t really go home for days, it seemed, given the freedom to drift through my pre-teen and then teen years in a way I can’t imagine today, creating myself among my friends and a penumbra of ideas, the green chile and cotton fields a thin ribbon surrounded by stark Chihuahuan desert.… Read the rest

Spurting into the Undiscovered Country

August 22, 2014August 23, 2014 Mark DavisLeave a comment

There was glop on the windows of the International Space Station. Outside. It was algae. How? Now that is unclear, but there is a recent tradition of arguing against abiogenesis here on Earth and arguing for ideas like panspermia where biological material keeps raining down on the planet, carried by comets and meteorites, trapped in crystal matrices. And there may be evidence that some of that may have happened, if only in the local system, between Mars and Earth.

Panspermia includes as a subset the idea of Directed Panspermia whereby some alien intelligence for some reason sends biological material out to deliberately seed worlds with living things. Why? Well, maybe it is a biological prerogative or an ethical stance. Maybe they feel compelled to do so because they are in some dystopian sci-fi narrative where their star is dying. One last gasping hope for alien kind!

Directed Panspermia as an explanation for life on Earth only sets back the problem of abiogenesis to other ancient suns and other times, and implicitly posits that some of the great known achievements of life on Earth like multicellular forms are less spectacularly improbable than the initial events of proto-life as we hypothesize it might have been. Still, great minds have spent great mental energy on the topic to the point that elaborate schemes involving solar sails have been proposed so that we may someday engage in Directed Panspermia as needed. I give you:

Mautner, M; Matloff, G. (1979). “Directed panspermia: A technical evaluation of seeding nearby solar systems”. J. British Interplanetary Soc. 32: 419.

So we take solar sails and bioengineered lifeforms in tiny capsules. The solar sails are large and thin. They carry the tiny capsules into stellar formations and slow down due to friction.… Read the rest

Marshlands

August 11, 2014August 14, 2014 Mark DavisLeave a comment

It is purely by chance that I discovered a remarkable note, penciled in a deliberate cursive, on page one hundred something of a secondhand copy of Borges’ Labyrinths. The Huns were clashing about and trampling books, but one survived—that sort of chance or magical thing—and an arrow crawled up from the text and declared “all great civilizations are built on marshes,” seemingly in praise for the despoiled monastery and its now collapsed civilization, or perhaps referring to the banks of the Danube or the arc of historiography that passed from Athens to Rome later in the page.

Regardless of the minutiae of the referents, the statement remained in my head for days as I shuffled about through my ordinary occupation and preoccupations with information theory, intelligent machines, and some spectral analysis of the statistical distribution of gut bacteria/eukaryotes. Google was fragmentary in its responses to the phrase as a query and I quit before the end of the first page, anyway, distracted by other thoughts about why marshes would be so attractive for building a civilization. The fishing should be good, admittedly, as well as the availability of reeds for various structures, but the shifting nature of land and the threat of mosquito infestation struck me as negatives. And wouldn’t clean, fresh water be better served by a mountain stream? All great cultures should be at the base of a non-volcanic snowpacked mountain.

I returned to Borges later in the week and found myself fanning through the pages like a schoolboy watching a stickfigure animation until, seventy-five pages further, below the tail of an essay on Cervantes and the inversion of authors and characters and readers, there was another brief flash off a curlicue of lead embedded in the page.… Read the rest

The Deep Computing Lessons of Apollo

July 31, 2014July 31, 2014 Mark DavisLeave a comment

With the arrival of the Apollo 11 mission’s 45th anniversary, and occasional planning and dreaming about a manned mission to Mars, the role of information technology comes again into focus. The next great mission will include a phalanx of computing resources, sensors, radars, hyper spectral cameras, laser rangefinders, and information fusion visualization and analysis tools to knit together everything needed for the astronauts to succeed. Some of these capabilities will be autonomous, predictive, and knowledgable.

But it all began with the Apollo Guidance Computer or AGC, the rather sophisticated for-its-time computer that ran the trigonometric and vector calculations for the original moonshot. The AGC was startlingly simple in many ways, made up exclusively of NOR gates to implement Arithmetic Logic Unit-like functionality, shifts, and register opcodes combined with core memory (tiny ferromagnetic loops) in both RAM and ROM forms (the latter hand-woven by graduate students).

Using NOR gates to create the entire logic of the central processing unit is guided by a few simple principles. A NOR gate combines both NOT and OR functionality together and has the following logical functionality:

[table id=1 /]

The NOT-OR logic can be read as “if INPUT1 or INPUT2 is set to 1, then the OUTPUT should be 1, but then take the logical inversion (NOT) of that”. And, amazingly, circuits built from NORs can create any Boolean logic. NOT A is just NOR(A,A), which you can see from the following table:

[table id=2 /]

AND and OR can similarly be constructed by layering NORs together. For Apollo, the use of just a single type of integrated circuit that packaged NORs into chips improved reliability.

This level of simplicity has another important theoretical result that bears on the transition from simple guidance systems to potentially intelligent technologies for future Mars missions: a single layer of Boolean functions can only compute simple things.… Read the rest

Just So Disruptive

July 10, 2014 Mark DavisLeave a comment

The “just so” story is a pejorative for cultural or physical traits that drive an evolutionary explanation. Things are “just so” when the explanation is unfalsifiable and theoretically fitted to current observations. Less controversial and pejorative is the essential character of evolutionary process where there is no doubt that genetic alternatives will mostly fail. The ones that survive this crucible are disruptive to the status quo, sure, but these disruptions tend to be geographically or sexually isolated from the main population anyway, so they are more an expansion than a disruption; little competition is tooth-and-claw, mostly species survive versus the environment, not one another.

Jill Lapore of Harvard subjects business theory to a similar crucible in the New Yorker, questioning Clayton Christensen’s classic argument in The Innovator’s Dilemma that businesses are unwilling to adapt to changing markets because they are making rational business decisions to maximize profits. After analyzing core business cases from Christensen’s books, Lapore concludes that the argument holds little water and that its predictions are both poor and inapplicable to other areas like journalism and college education.

Central to her critique is her analysis of the “just so” nature of disruptive innovation:

Christensen has compared the theory of disruptive innovation to a theory of nature: the theory of evolution. But among the many differences between disruption and evolution is that the advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments. If an established company doesn’t disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be because it didn’t disrupt. When a startup fails, that’s a success, since epidemic failure is a hallmark of disruptive innovation. (“Stop being afraid of failure and start embracing it,” the organizers of FailCon, an annual conference, implore, suggesting that, in the era of disruption, innovators face unprecedented challenges.

… Read the rest

Trees of Lives

June 23, 2014 Mark DavisLeave a comment

With a brief respite between vacationing in the canyons of Colorado and leaving tomorrow for Australia, I’ve open-sourced an eight-year-old computer program for converting one’s DNA sequences into an artistic rendering. The input to the program are the allelic patterns from standard DNA analysis services that use the Short Tandem Repeat Polymorphisms from forensic analysis, as well as poetry reflecting one’s ethnic heritage. The output is generative art: a tree that overlays the sequences with the poetry and a background rendered from the sequences.

Generative art is perhaps one of the greatest aesthetic achievements of the late 20th Century. Generative art is, fundamentally, a recognition that the core of our humanity can be understood and converted into meaningful aesthetic products–it is the parallel of effective procedures in cognitive science, and developed in lock-step with the constructive efforts to reproduce and simulate human cognition.

To use Tree of Lives, install Java 1.8, unzip the package, and edit the supplied markconfig.txt to enter in your STRs and the allele variant numbers in sequence per line 15 of the configuration file. Lines 16+ are for lines of poetry that will be rendered on the limbs of the tree. Other configuration parameters can be discerned by examining com.treeoflives.CTreeConfig.java, and involve colors, paths, etc. Execute the program with:

java -cp treeoflives.jar:iText-4.2.0-com.itextpdf.jar com.treeoflives.CAlleleRenderer markconfig.txt

… Read the rest

Action on Hadoop

June 2, 2014 Mark DavisLeave a comment

The back rooms of everyone from Pandora to the NSA are filled with machines working in parallel to enrich and analyze data. And mostly at the core is Doug Cutting’s Hadoop that provides an open source implementation of the Google BigTable MapReduce framework combined with a distributed file system for replication and failover. With Hadoop Summit arriving this week (the 6th I’ve been to and the 7th ever), the importance and impact of these technologies continues to grow.

I hope to see you there and I’ll take this opportunity to announce that I am co-authoring Hadoop in Action, 2nd Edition with the original author, Chuck Lam. The new version will provide updates to this best-selling book and introduce all of the newest animals in the Hadoop zoo.… Read the rest

Vin versus the Vampires, Chapter 2: Dealing with the Creditors

May 30, 2014May 30, 2014 Mark DavisLeave a comment

Unpublished novel chapter about vampires taking over Hollywood, from the perspective of Vin Diesel. Vin arrives in London to work on a new film about vampires but is attacked by a strange creature while jogging in Hyde Park.

The doctor is a woman, brown, Indian or Pakistani, and, as usual when I first arrive in Britain, I am surprised that the accent can accompany any serious discussion at all. Yes, I had a tetanus shot three years ago. Actually, yes, I had the typhus series, too. No, it was definitely not a dog but admittedly, yes, I am not sure exactly what it was. I’m grinning at her as she projects standardized health system concern through the lilts and dips of pure Londoner. She keeps glancing at my grin, either not recognizing me or just concerned that I am drunk or high. It’s just the accent, I think about blurting out; I can’t take it seriously, sorry, an American oddity exaggerated by the pain in my knee and the early morning hours without much sleep. But I clam up and answer her questions only getting a bit peeved at the third round of, “Had you been drinking”

“No, I was jogging. I was jetlagged. I was jogging. Really.”

There were no stitches, just a bandage and a shot of broad-spectrum antibiotics. As I finished up and signed off, I thought about sneaking a peak at the chart to see if she had annotated “likely alcoholic” or something on the page, but it was almost 9 AM British Summer Time and I needed a nap before my meeting in the afternoon, so I scribbled where I needed to scribble and grabbed a cab back to the hotel, hobbling in past the front desk with my tattered sweats sweeping the marble of the lobby.… Read the rest

Inching Towards Shannon’s Oblivion

May 11, 2014May 12, 2014 Mark Davis3 Comments

Following Bill Joy’s concerns over the future world of nanotechnology, biological engineering, and robotics in 2000’s Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us, it has become fashionable to worry over “existential threats” to humanity. Nuclear power and weapons used to be dreadful enough, and clearly remain in the top five, but these rapidly developing technologies, asteroids, and global climate change have joined Oppenheimer’s misquoted “destroyer of all things” in portending our doom. Here’s Max Tegmark, Stephen Hawking, and others in Huffington Post warning again about artificial intelligence:

One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.

I almost always begin my public talks on Big Data and intelligent systems with a presentation on industrial revolutions that progresses through Robert Gordon’s phases and then highlights Paul Krugman’s argument that Big Data and the intelligent systems improvements we are seeing potentially represent a next industrial revolution. I am usually less enthusiastic about the timeline than nonspecialists, but after giving a talk at PASS Business Analytics Friday in San Jose, I stuck around to listen in on a highly technical talk concerning statistical regularization and deep learning and I found myself enthused about the topic once again. Deep learning is using artificial neural networks to classify information, but is distinct from traditional ANNs in that the systems are pre-trained using auto-encoders to have a general knowledge about the data domain. To be clear, though, most of the problems that have been tackled are “subsymbolic” for image recognition and speech problems.… Read the rest