Inscitia » Aside

iPhone, meet WordPress

Michael Griffiths — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:58:03 +0000

So some bright spark over at Automaticc wrote a WordPress app for the iPhone. It’s rather awkward, writing on this keyboard, but it seems to work well.

I think a better use is publishing pre-written drafts, and checking comments.

What We Should Teach in High School

Michael Griffiths — Thu, 07 May 2009 14:27:26 +0000

“I think that we shall have to get accustomed to the idea that we must not look upon science as a ‘body of knowledge’, but rather as a system of hypotheses; that is to say, as a system of guesses or anticipations which in principle cannot be justified, but with which we work as long as they stand up to tests, and of which we are never justified in saying that we know that they are ‘true’ or ‘more or less certain’ or even ‘probable’”

- Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 2nd Edition, Harper Torchbook: 1968

Torture and Republican Values

Michael Griffiths — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:34:39 +0000

I find myself increasingly astonished that the Republican Party has embraced torture whole-heartedly, and is rapidly defending it. I would not have expected it; indeed, the conservative movement with its push for “family values” should, surely, reject torture out of hand – because it goes against those very values. So why has the Republican Party embraced a post-modern argument which denies the validity of values? For comparison purposes, compare what the Republicans would be saying if the Democrats had tortured people. I imagine it would be something along the lines of: “Look at that! Just like the Democrats to sacrifice the few in a wrong-headed attempt to ‘protect’ and ‘help’ the majority. We stand against torture, because we – unlike the Democrats – have our values. Torture has never been an American value, and it never will be – the point of values is that they don’t change simply to make your life more convenient.”

The Coase Theorem

Michael Griffiths — Fri, 01 May 2009 02:51:58 +0000

I’ve been coming across a few references to the Coase Theorem, some of which dismiss it out of hand as unrealistic. Perhaps they’ve never read The Problem of Social Cost, but complaining that the environment depicted is unrealistic is not, in itself, a criticism of the theory. Indeed, that is largely Coase’s point – that, in an environment with zero transaction costs, you will always end up with an ideal outcome; but the fact of the matter is that there are never zero transaction costs. Indeed, at the start of section VI, Coase states “The argument has proceeded up to this point on the assumption (explicit in Sections III and IV and tacit in Section V) that there were no costs involved in carrying out market transactions. This is, of course, a very unrealistic assumption.” Coase then goes onto outline how transaction costs – that, those things which exist in the real world – prevent social welfare from being maximized. Indeed, the Coase Theorem is more about stating that transaction costs lower social welfare than it is saying that an optimal outcome will come about via negotiations between two parties.

Newspapers Cannot Afford to Reduce Supply

Michael Griffiths — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 02:45:26 +0000

I touched over this in a previous post, but Nick Carr’s argument that newspapers should reduce supply is absurd. His argument seems to stem from the fact that multiple newspapers cover the same story – often using the same content. Unfortunately, he doesn’t consider the consequences of deliberately “reducing supply” when the barriers to entry are near-nonexistent. Bloggers will step in to fill the gap, providing news and commentary as newspapers reduce supply. If this wasn’t immediately obvious – because it’s been happening – consider that in order to reduce supply newspapers will necessarily have to cut staff. Where will that staff go? Most will enter other industries; but enough – and probably the best – who love journalism and think they can make money will self-publish. That is, they will start a blog. And they will bring domain expertise, writing experience, and so on to their blogs – which Google, as an unbiased middleman will treat the same as newspapers. Quality content will rise to the top – whether it comes from newspapers or not. Frankly, I think that newspaper companies as firms are on their way out – with the internet, inter-market transactions are cheap enough that you don’t need the economies of scale from having a firm. So, until someone figures out how to obtain economies of scale out of blogs, we’ll see a proliferation of small content-creators: journalists, analysts, etc as bloggers. But supply will never decrease. If anything, it will increase, junk and all, only to be aggregated and filtered by the middleman, Google. Trying to reduce supply will only cede the market to the bloggers.

Fast Broadband in the USA: Population Density Matters

Michael Griffiths — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:04:19 +0000

The New York Times Bits blog has a post about how a Japanese company can upgrade their broadband service to 160 megabit/second broadband for $20 a home. Saul Hensell contrasts this with Verizon, who is spending $817 per home. Sadly, Mr. Hensell’s attempt to explain this difference falls short of believability. Instead of “less competition”, “no demand”, and “fear of losing TV revenue” a better explanation is “population density”. Mr. Hensell explains that the super-fast modem in Japan costs $60, up from $30; which leaves us wondering where the $20-upgrade fee comes from. One explanation is that it’s the average price per home – in Tokyo, where J:COM is based. But the population density in Tokyo is 14,410 people per sq mile; compared to 2,181 in New York City, and 409 in New York State. The infrastructure costs per home will therefore be considerably less in Japan.

Hume and Critical Realism

Michael Griffiths — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 01:49:35 +0000

It is astonishing how much freedom I feel after a rejection of Hume-an Constant Conjunctions; the twin ideas that the limitations in perception in turn limit the knowledge one can acquire to that of observing “constant conjunctions”, and that the weaknesses of induction prevent one from locating real “laws”. Hence the absence of “laws” in science, in favor of “laws which haven’t been disproved yet”. Critical Realism allows a rejection of Hume-an Constant Conjunctions on an ontological basis. Such a rejection re-defines science, from the task of locating constant conjunctions to the task of locating reality’s ontology and subsequently creating theories to explain how they operate. While the result is that I approach science in largely the same way I did beforehand, I know have a considerably firmer philosophical base from which to operate – and one which serves to explain how science both does and should operate. Hume, and his legacy of Positivism, does no such thing.

Tools for Research

Michael Griffiths — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:19:02 +0000

It seems that there is a large opportunity to apply modern technologies to academic articles. Take a data sources such as arXiv.org, and apply text analytics and quantitative algorithms to relate and rank articles. In academia, word choice tends to be more precise than ordinary speech, so entity extraction should have a higher success rate. Furthermore, format is mandated, which both makes entity extraction easier and allows interesting statistics to emerge. For instance, in-text citations allows one to find out how many times an article is referenced (superior to simple the bibliography), what text the article is cited to support, and so on. One could use that to create a document map of the article; who is cited where? Given the demarcation into sections in journal articles, simply knowing who’s most often cited in introductions for a particular field is useful. Furthermore, the time-based nature of academic progress provides a number of interesting analyses for research. In short, the avenues for interesting research are almost endless – you have vast quantities of data, in a more than unstructured format, with the potential upside of both making research dramatically easier and potentially building a machine knowledgebase. Pity there’s not enough money in it.

Asking Knowledgeable Questions

Michael Griffiths — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 03:13:09 +0000

From the Stuff I’m Thinking About category: what’s the relationship between asking questions and having knowledge? Is one more important than the other? While I would say that the skill of asking questions is more difficult to build, and more useful, than simply having domain knowledge, it also seems to be true that it is impossible to ask good questions without sufficient domain knowledge. Consequently, that seems to imply some dialectical process between asking questions and answering those questions – whereby answering questions builds domain knowledge, and enables one to ask new (and better) questions.

Education seems to emphasize the latter – domain knowledge – while actually supressing the former – asking questions. The universal questions tend to be “Will this be on the test?” as opposed to “What questions do knowing this allow us to ask?”

Shoddy Journalism

Michael Griffiths — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 23:45:13 +0000

My God, more shoddy journalism in the tech industry. Randall Kennedy writes that Microsoft may drop Internet Explorer – after IE8 – in favor of a new rendering engine like WebKit (which Safari and Chrome use) or Gecko (Firefox). This sounds reasonable – or at least not outright absurd – unless you either know anything about Internet Explorer or are capable of using Google; in which case, a simple search (for “ie8 new rendering engine”) will lead one to a post on the IEBlog (which itself references a post on A List Apart). Both posts make it very clear that Microsoft embarked on writing a new rendering engine for IE8. In other words, Microsoft already has its “new rendering engine” and has no need to adopt something like Gecko or Webkit – not to mention the support nightmare that would inspire. Given how easy it is to dismiss the premise for Mr. Kennedy’s article, it’s difficult to take it seriously – or see it as anything more than mere shoddy journalism.