GREG MANKIW is rich. [...]

I just find the effect of this column particularly interesting. In terms of the economics, I can't find much in it with which to disagree. And yet it seems like a woefully incomplete model of the actual decisions made by those setting tax rates and those responding to them. For better or worse, people care about fairness and they work for reasons other than money. And one of the biggest shortcomings of economics, I think, is the extent to which the field struggles to incorporate such realities into its models. It's amusing to me that in a piece laying out the maths behind his choice to write an additional piece on economics Mr Mankiw demonstrates how incomplete the picture painted by economists frequently is.

Read the whole thing. Mankiw's blinkers are gigantic.

Filled with anger, disappointment, depression and brilliant rants about cats, cars, celebrity, media (even NPR!) and much more, Freedom isn't a frolic. But it's a surprisingly moving and even hopeful epic in which Franzen's flawed but ultimately sympathetic characters try to figure out how to heed the engraved message that catches Patty's eye at her daughter's East Coast college: "USE WELL THY FREEDOM."

I was reading The Corrections when September 11 happened. I lost my taste for reading literature for a while then, as it felt more urgent to read up on history and other nonfiction to understand the dangerous world of humanity better. Now I am back to devoting a little time to fiction every day, and I may read this.

Freelancing advice blog Freelance Switch suggests it might be time to change up your morning routine. When you wake up in the morning, sometimes your best creative moments can come from just diving into work. Treating your work-at-home situation like you're in a real office may hurt more than help. You are working at home, and one of the perks is waking up a bit later and jumping straight into work from your bed. If you feel like your creativity is lacking first thing in the morning, try switching things up. Stay dirty and messy and just jump right into the day's activities.

Increasing Creativity and Productivity with Your Morning Routine [Freelance Switch]

Don't tempt me now...

Evom Is a Minimal, Drag-and-Drop Video Converter

Mac OS X: The Mac has a few good and free video converters, but nothing is quite so simple and elegant as Evom. Backed by ffmpeg, it'll easily convert your video to the format you need with very little effort.

While Evom does a great of the standard operations you can get with most apps of its kind, it has a few minor features that really set it apart. Aside from its great, minimal interface it lets you convert video to audio (MP3 format). This is great if you want to use Evom's ability to pull music videos from the web and save the audio directly to iTunes. While Evom focuses on the iPod/iTunes standards, it can also help you create files that are upload-friendly for video sharing sites.

Evom [via One Thing Well]

Send an email to Adam Dachis, the author of this post, at adachis@lifehacker.com.

Quick, out behind the bike shed, Professors Pendry and Leonhardt are having a fight over a completely hypothetical situation. If we hurry, we should catch the end of round three. Science: it is exactly like that all the time. It's just that, most of the time, the participants keep their disapproval of each other much more hidden.

So what am I talking about? The story takes place in an area of physics that has been long-neglected: friction. Everyone knows it exists, engineers have a bunch of empirical formulas to calculate it, but no one gave much thought to what actually causes friction. Physicists started to pay serious attention about 10 years ago and, since that time, a lot of heat seems to have been generated. There seems to be considerable disagreement between physicists at the moment, with each having their own pet theory, their own predictions, and absolutely nothing in the way of experimental data to back any of them up.

Our protagonists are two theoretical physicists, one at Imperial College London and the other at St. Andrews in Scotland. The heart of their disagreement boils down to trying to decide what happens in a seemingly simple situation. Imagine two perfectly smooth plates of material at a temperature of absolute zero, sitting in a perfect vacuum. The plates are separated from each other by a small distance and one is moving past the other at a constant rate. The big question: do these plates experience friction?

Imagine that: academics have fights. Who knew? Fascinating article, though.

I tweeted earlier that after having slept with her (Ms. iPad), I woke up with morning-after regrets. She’s sweet and pretty but shallow and vapid.

Cute line, appropriate for retweets. But as my hangover settles in, I realize that there’s something much more basic and profound that worries me about the iPad — and not just the iPad but the architecture upon which it is built. I see danger in moving from the web to apps.

The iPad is retrograde. It tries to turn us back into an audience again. That is why media companies and advertisers are embracing it so fervently, because they think it returns us all to their good old days when we just consumed, we didn’t create, when they controlled our media experience and business models and we came to them. The most absurd, extreme illustration is Time Magazine’s app, which is essentially a PDF of the magazine (with the odd video snippet). It’s worse than the web: we can’t comment; we can’t remix; we can’t click out; we can’t link in, and they think this is worth $4.99 a week. But the pictures are pretty.

That’s what we keep hearing about the iPad as the justification for all its purposeful limitations: it’s meant for consumption, we’re told, not creation. We also hear, as in David Pogue’s review, that this is our grandma’s computer. That cant is inherently snobbish and insulting. It assumes grandma has nothing to say. But after 15 years of the web, we know she does. I’ve long said that the remote control, cable box, and VCR gave us control of the consumption of media; the internet gave us control of its creation. Pew says that a third of us create web content. But all of us comment on content, whether through email or across a Denny’s table. At one level or another, we all spread, react, remix, or create. Just not on the iPad.

The iPad’s architecture supports these limitations in a few ways:

First, in its hardware design, it does not include a camera — the easiest and in some ways most democratic means of creation (you don’t have to write well) — even though its smaller cousin, the iPhone, has one. Equally important, it does not include a simple (fucking) USB port, which means that I can’t bring in and take out content easily. If I want to edit a document in Apple’s Pages, I have to go through many hoops of moving and snycing and emailing or using Apple’s own services. Cloud? I see no cloud, just Apple’s blue skies. Why no USB? Well, I can only imagine that Apple doesn’t want us to think what Walt Mossberg did in his review — the polar opposite of Pogue’s — that this pad could replace its more expensive laptops. The iPad is purposely handicapped, but it doesn’t need to be. See the German WePad, which comes with USB port(s!), a camera, multitasking, and the more open Android operating system and marketplace.

Second, the iPad is built on apps. So are phones, Apple’s and others’. Apps can be wonderful things because they are built to a purpose. I’m not anti-app, let’s be clear. But I also want to stop and examine the impact of shifting from a page- and site-based internet to one built on apps. I’ve been arguing that we are, indeed, moving past a page-, site-, and search-based web to one also built on streams and flows, to a distributed web where you can’t expect people to come to you but you must go to them; you must get yourself into their streams. This shift to apps is a move in precisely the opposite direction. Apps are more closed, contained, controlling. That, again, is why media companies like them. But they don’t interoperate — they don’t play well — with other apps and with the web itself; they are hostile to links and search. What we do in apps is less open to the world. I just want to consider the consequences.

So I see the iPad as a Bizarro Trojan Horse. Instead of importing soldiers into the kingdom to break down its walls, in this horse, we, the people, are stuffed inside and wheeled into the old walls; the gate is shut and we’re welcomed back into the kingdom of controlling media that we left almost a generation ago.

There are alternatives. I now see the battle between Apple and Google Android in clearer focus. At Davos, Eric Schmidt said that phones (and he saw the iPad as just a big phone… which it is, just without the phone and a few other things) will be defined by their apps. The mobile (that is to say, constantly connected) war will be won on apps. Google is competing with openness, Apple with control; Google will have countless manufacturers and brands spreading its OS, Apple will have media and fanboys (including me) do the work for it.

But Google has a long way to go if it hopes to win this war. I’m using my Nexus One phone (which I also had morning-after doubts about) and generally liking it but I still find it awkward. Google has lost its way, its devotion to profound simplicity. Google Wave and Buzz are confusing and generally unusable messes; Android needed to be thought through more (I shouldn’t have to think about what a button does in this use case before using it); Google Docs could be more elegant; YouTube’s redesign is halfway to clean. Still, Google and Apple’s competition presents us with choices.

I find it interesting that though many commercial brands — from Amazon to Bank of America to Fandango — have written for both Apple and Android, many media brands — most notable The New York Times and my Guardian — have written only for Apple and they now are devoting much resource to recreating apps for the iPad. The audience on Android is bigger than the audience on iPad but the sexiness and control Apple offers is alluring. This, I think, is why Salon CEO Richard Gingras calls the iPad a fatal distraction for publishers. They are deluding themselves into thinking that the future lies in their past.

On This Week in Google last night, I went too far slathering over the iPad and some of its very neat apps (ABC’s is great; I watched the Modern Family about the iPad on the iPad and smugly loved being so meta). I am a toy boy at heart and didn’t stop to cast a critical eye, as TWiG’s iPadless Gina Trapani did. This morning on Twitter, I went too far the other way kvetching about the inconveniences of the iPad’s limitations (just a fucking USB, please!) in compensation. That’s the problem with Twitter, at least for my readers: it’s thinking out loud.

I’ll sleep with the iPad a few more nights. I might well rebox and return it; I don’t have $500 to throw away. But considering what I do for a living, I perhaps should hold onto it so I can understand its implications. And that’s the real point of this post: there are implications.

: MORE: Of course, I must link to Cory Doctorow’s eloquent examination of the infantilization of technology. I’m not quite as principled, I guess, as Cory is on the topic; I’m not telling people they should not buy the iPad; I don’t much like that verb in any context. But on the merits and demerits, we agree.

And Dave Winer: “Today it’s something to play with, not something to use. That’s the kind way to say it. The direct way: It’s a toy.”

: By the way, back in the day, about a decade ago, I worked with Intel (through my employer, Advance) on a web pad that was meant to be used to consume in the home (we knew then that the on-screen keyboard sucked; it was meant to be a couch satellite to the desk’s PC). Intel lost nerve and didn’t launch it. Besides, the technology was early (they built the wireless on Intel Anypoint, not wi-fi or even bluetooth). Here’s the pad in the flesh. I have it in my basement museum of dead technlogy, next to my CueCat.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 4th, 2010 at 11:25 am and was tagged Apple, apps, beta, google, ipad, newarchitecture.

One more voice against the backward movement represented by the iPad.

Quotation Details

Quotation #1233 from Michael Moncur's (Cynical) Quotations:

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

Laurence J. Peter
US educator & writer (1919 - 1988)

Like I say all too often, economists cannot predict. Beware of those economists that say they can. They have a bridge to sell you, a beautiful bridge in Brooklyn. Economics needs several more centuries of research before it can develop decent predictive capabilities, and I wouldn't bet it will even then. (Once in a while I am really glad I follow "quotes of the day".)

Like I say all too often, economists cannot predict. Beware of those economists that say they can. They have a bridge to sell you, a beautiful bridge in Brooklyn. Economics needs several more centuries of research before it can develop decent predictive capabilities, and I wouldn't bet it will even then.

(Once in a while I am really glad I follow "quotes of the day".)

Ever wanted to have a robot to do your research for you? If you are a scientist, you have almost certainly had this dream. Now it’s a real option: Eureqa, a program that distills scientific laws from raw data, is freely available to researchers.

The program was unveiled in April, when it used readouts of a double-pendulum to infer Newton’s second law of motion and the law of conservation of momentum. It could be an invaluable tool for revealing other, more complicated laws that have eluded humans. And scientists have been clamoring to get their hands on it.

“We tend to think of science as finding equations, like E=MC2, that are simple and elegant. But maybe some theories are complicated, and we can only find the simple ones,” said Hod Lipson of Cornell University’s Computational Synthesis Lab. “Those are unreachable right now. But the algorithms we’ve developed could let us reach them.”

Eureqa is descended from Lipson’s work on self-contemplating robots that figure out how to repair themselves. The same algorithms that guide the robots’ solution-finding computations have been customized for analyzing any type of data.

The program starts by searching within a dataset for numbers that seem connected to each other, then proposing a series of simple equations to describe the links. Those initial equations invariably fail, but some are slightly less wrong than others. The best are selected, tweaked, and again tested against the data. Eureqa repeats the cycle over and over, until it finds equations that work.

What took Newton years to calculate, Eureqa returned in a few hours on a decent desktop computer. Lipson and other researchers hope Eureqa can perform the same wizardry with data that now defies scientists, especially those working at the frontiers of biology, where genomes, proteins and cell signals have proven fantastically difficult to analyze. Their interactions appear to follow rules that traditional analytical methods can’t easily reveal.

“There’s a famous quote by Emerson Pugh: ‘If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.’ I think that applies to all of biology,” said John Wikswo, a Vanderbilt University biophysicist who’s using the Eureqa engine in his own lab. “Biology is complicated beyond belief, too complicated for people to comprehend the solutions to its complexity. And the solution to this problem is the Eureqa project.”

Lipson made Eureqa available for download early in November, after being overwhelmed by requests from scientists who wanted him to analyze their data. In the meantime, he and Michael Schmidt, a Cornell University computational biologist responsible for much of Eureqa’s programming, continue to develop it.

An ongoing challenge is the tendency of Eureqa to return equations that fit data, but refer to variables that are not yet understood. Lipson likened this to what would happen if time-traveling scientists presented the laws of energy conservation to medieval mathematicians.

“Algebra was known. You could plug in the variable, and it would work. But the concept of energy wasn’t there. They didn’t have the vocabulary to understand it,” he said. “We’ve seen this in the lab. Eureqa finds a new relationship. It’s predictive, it’s elegant, it has to be true. But we have no idea what it means.”

Lipson and Schmidt are now devising “algorithms to explain what our algorithm is finding,” perhaps by relating unknown concepts to simpler, more familiar terms. “How do you explain something complicated to a child? That’s what it involves,” said Lipson. “It’s machine teaching, rather than machine learning.”

One set of incomprehensibly meaningful discoveries comes from Eureqa’s analysis of cellular readouts gathered by Gurol Suel, a University of Texas Southwestern molecular microbiologist who studies how cells divide and grow. But even if Eureqa can’t yet explain what it found, it’s still useful, said Suel.

“You can use this as a starting point for further investigations. It lets you think about new ideas of what’s going on in the cell, and generate new hypotheses about the properties of biological systems,” said Suel.

Sometimes Eureqa will require more data than it’s given before finding answers. In those cases, the program may be able to identify information gaps, and recommend experiments to fill them.

That functionality is included in the latest build of the program, and is being taken even further in a new Lipson-Wikswo project. They’re hooking a version of Eureqa directly to Wikswo’s experimental gadgetry.

“The program is going to adjust the valves, feeding different nutrients and toxins to the cells,” and it does this faster than any researcher, said Wikswo. “It comes up with the equations, plus the experiments needed to come up with the equations. It’s Eureqa on steroids.”

According to Wikswo, who studies the effects of cocaine on white blood cells, Eureqa can propose experiments that researchers would have difficulty imagining.

“In most of science, you try to keep everything constant except for one variable. You turn one knob at a time, and see how the system responds. That’s wonderful for linear systems,” he said. “But most biology is complex and non-linear. Emergent behaviors are very hard to understand unless you turn many knobs at a time, and we can’t figure out which knobs to turn. So we’re going to let Eureqa pick them.”

The Cornell team hasn’t counted downloads of their program, but it’s likely being used by researchers outside biology. As long as data fits on a spreadsheet, Eureqa can analyze it.

“In the past year, people have contacted us with some wild application ideas,” said Schmidt. “Everything from predicting the stock market to modeling the herding of cows.”

Images: 1) Hod Lipson running Eureqa in his office. 2) Diagrams of information flow through one of Lipson’s self-repairing robots (left) and Eureqa (right).

Eureqa downloads and tutorials.

See Also:

• Computer Program Self-Discovers Laws of Physics
• Open-Source Biomodels: Molecules First, Then the World
• There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Simple’ Organism
• Humans No Match for Go Bot Overlords

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecosystem and planetary tipping points.

Well. How about we just give up on science as a human enterprise?

The more serious issue is that this predetermined-conclusions thing happens all the time. (Or, as they say on the Internet, All. The. Time.) I've worked on many projects, often for pay, with organizations where I have a pretty clear sense ahead to time of what they're looking for. I always give the straight story of what I've found, but these organizations are free to select and use just the findings of mine that they like.

Once I started reading the Applied Statistics blog, for my previous post, I just had to read one more item and guess what: I found this one, which is motivated by an article by the economist blogger Mark Thoma. thoma points out an ad by the Chamber of Commerce that blatantly says they are looking an economist to write a "study" to support what the Chamber wants to appear to be true. Reading the full post is highly recommended (click on "scienceblogs.com" above, after "via").

« Deciding the conclusion ahead of time | Main

Why most discovered true associations are inflated: Type M errors are all over the place

Posted on: November 21, 2009 3:22 PM, by Andrew Gelman

Jimmy points me to this article, "Why most discovered true associations are inflated," by J. P. Ioannidis. As Jimmy pointed out, this is exactly what we call type M (for magnitude) errors. I completely agree with Ioannidis's point, which he seems to be making more systematically than David Weakliem and I did in our recent article on the topic.

My only suggestion beyond what Ioannidis wrote has to do with potential solutions to the problem. His ideas include: "being cautious about newly discovered effect sizes, considering some rational down-adjustment, using analytical methods that correct for the anticipated inflation, ignoring the magnitude of the effect (if not necessary), conducting large studies in the discovery phase, using strict protocols for analyses, pursuing complete and transparent reporting of all results, placing emphasis on replication, and being fair with interpretation of results."

These are all good ideas. Here are two more suggestions:

1. Retrospective power calculations. See page 312 of our article for the classical version or page 313 for the Bayesian version. I think these can be considered as implementations of Iaonnides's ideas of caution, adjustment, and correction.

2. Hierarchical modeling, which partially pools estimated effects and reduces Type M errors as well as handling many multiple comparisons issues. Fuller discussion here (or see here for the soon-to-go-viral video version).

If you have studied statistics, you may remember Type I and Type II errors. This blog post by Andrew Gelman, from Scienceblogs > Applied Statistics, brings to my attention (probably shamefully late) the prevalence of Type M errors. I am very intrigued and have printed out the article found under "our recent article" in the above quotation. When I manage to wrap my head around this idea a little more, i will post a follow-up. (I am posting on my "general interest" blog as this should interest everyone, not just scientists. Sorry I don't have a plain language explanation ready yet...)

Professor Chris Berry of the University of Glasgow gives a concise talk about Adam Smith.

In his first study, each year, for four years, Mr. Hodgson served actual panels of California State Fair Wine Competition judges—some 70 judges each year—about 100 wines over a two-day period. He employed the same blind tasting process as the actual competition. In Mr. Hodgson’s study, however, every wine was presented to each judge three different times, each time drawn from the same bottle.

The results astonished Mr. Hodgson. The judges’ wine ratings typically varied by ±4 points on a standard ratings scale running from 80 to 100. A wine rated 91 on one tasting would often be rated an 87 or 95 on the next. Some of the judges did much worse, and only about one in 10 regularly rated the same wine within a range of ±2 points.

The article was published in the January issue of the Journal of Wine Economics.  The Wall Street Journal has a fun writeup.  The same researcher showed that the distribution of medal winners in a sample of wine competitions matched what you would get if the medal was awarded by a fair lottery.

via cheeptalk.wordpress.com

Ha! I love that (1) this blog post is written by a game theorist who does mechanism design (Jeff Ely at Northwestern), (ii) it is about wine, and (iii) there is such a thing as the Journal of Wine Economics!

I agree with Tim that “If you don’t want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don’t wait till it’s too late.”  I think he’d also agree that we need to think beyond code and copyright.  That’s like going to war with trucks but no tanks.  For the open, distributed, heterogeneous web to thrive, we need to incorporate thinking from a host of other fields, such as contract law, design, psychology, consumer behavior, brand marketing, and more.  Figuring out how to engage thinkers and leaders in those fields is likely one of the critical, still missing steps.

I can't resist pointing to this nice follow-up to the Tim O'Reilly post I talked about earlier this evening. I suggest following the link to David Ascher's post to read all of it.

One of the points I've made repeatedly about Web 2.0 is that it is the design of systems that get better the more people use them, and that over time, such systems have a natural tendency towards monopoly.

And so we've grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we've been readying ourselves for one dominant social network.

But what happens when a company with one of these natural monopolies uses it to gain dominance in other, adjacent areas? I've been watching with a mixture of admiration and alarm as Google has taken their dominance in search and used it to take control of other, adjacent data-driven applications. I noted this first with speech recognition, but it's had the biggest business impact so far in location-based service

Tim O'Reilly offers a good analysis of the coming wars for control of the Web. Scary but unavoidable, I fear. I echo his call, at the end of his blog post, for every one to support open standards on the Web before it's too late.