I have just finished reading
Super Sad True Love Story, and I found it quite good; one of the best, indeed, I've read lately. However, I understand that diehard sci-fi fans will find it quite unsatisfactory, mainly in the lack of detail of artifacts, like the aforementioned äppärät. This post is an attempt to clarify, or rather ask more questions, about
it.
At first glance, they're basically a glorified Blackberry, a personal communication device you use to chat, email, look up stuff, and also transmit information via streaming. Noah, one of the Media character, and his girlfriend Amy, have a
stream in which they transmit 24/7 their thoughts and what's happening in from of them. It's also a phone you can use to
verbal (talk via voice) with your friends, synchronously.
It's clear, then, what they do, but not so clear
how they do it; in one of the first chapters of the book, Lenny, the main character (although I think that the real main character is Eunice, his partner, but that's another story) receives a new one in the shape of a pendant. We don't know how big is that, but, well, it's hanging from the neck, so it shouldn't be too big. Hence the questions: what's used for input/output?
My first hunch is that it would be something similar to the
Sixth Sense created by the Fluid Interfaces group at MIT. That is, something
you wear, that uses any surface for projection, and gestures for input. However, that doesn't leave much privacy. Not that the characters in the novel care too much about privacy (except when they do), but nothing in it allows us to think that they are watching over what others are doing, or using a wall or a table for projecting.
What kind of network it uses is not clear either. It works everywhere, most of the time, and seems to be free; nobody is paying for the bandwidth, since at one particular moment refugees are given old äppärätti regardless of how much connection might cost. Roaming is not a concern, either: they work in Italy, in the USA, wherever. No problem.
So, no solution here, and the device remains as fuzzy as the author has wanted it to be. At the end of the day, an äppärät is just a plot device. You shouldn't delve too deep into it; if it's plausible, that's enough for the purposes of the plot. The name also serves that purpose: it sounds Finnish, that is, non-American, which showcases the technological dependence of America on the rest of the world which is one of the themes of the book.
Next week the deadline for the first (and hopefully not last)
edition of the International Workshop on Distributed Evolutionary Computation on Informal Environments will arrive, and maybe we need a bit of explanation on what we consider
informal or unconventional. And we will do it by way of a negative definition. What is
not informal?
Well, mostly everything published in journal or conferences. Most algorithms take place in static, single node environments using a conventional procedural language by performing a sequence of steps; even parallel evolutionary computation mostly follows a conventional master-slave or island model, with each island performing a conventional (as above) evolutionary algorithm and advancing in lockstep, with all nodes being of exactly the same capabilities.
That is all good and well, and allows everybody to focus on the improvement of the algorithm
such as it is, if you have got a good gamer computer or server and a cluster to perform the experiments. This is what would be called
conventional.
However, it all looks very sixties; programming has changed incredibly and new languages, and even language paradigms, are being created every single day. Even old tried and true techniques such as databases, threads, map-reduce, AJAX, many techniques that are used everyday in applications haven't trickled down to changing the paradigm of evolutionary computation; these techniques are, besides, in cases much more biologically inspired than the single-thread, single-node that is the mainstream.
And all this is interesting for several reasons. First one, the scientific one: there is science in creating an evolutionary algorithm that goes with the grain of the implementation (hardware, language, operating system, everything). An
evolutionary algorithm in Go (the language, not the game) is different in many subtle ways from other languages, the same as it might be in Erlang or in D.
And the second is performance; to take advantage of the full range of capabilities of a particular environment (language + OS + hardware) sometimes concessions must be made to these changes. Threads are needed to fully use modern CPUs; P2P networks are the most adequate for current dynamic networks, and
Javascript might be the best option for programming a distributed evolutionary algorithm that will run on browser.
If you do that kind of thing, please consider
sending a paper to IWDECIE. It will be a small workshop, single day, tightly scheduled, and we'll be able to discuss the issues related to this kind of thing. And in
New Orleans, together with the Congress on Evolutionary Computation.
I have just uploaded the latest version of
Algorithm::Evolutionary, a library I use all the time for doing stuff with evolutionary algorithms; latest one online being
this poster accepted at the
GECCO evolutionary computation conference.
However, it can be left alone for long stretches of time, which means that, when I come back to it, the language and upstream modules I use have drifted and it can be absolutely obsolete. This happens all the time: Perl and CPAN are living beings, and a module left to its own devices plainly stops working after some time, due to an API change or some borderline condition that is no longer accepted in current versions.
That's why you have to stop, every six months or so, to run tests all over again; or check
CPAN testers to see if something's gone wrong and fix it. Of course, sometimes there can be documentation errors, problems you hadn't covered by your tests, and so on. And the plain fact that after six months, all code written by you looks alien. So my advice is to go back to whatever you did from time to time, see how it's doing, and nurture it. It can't hurt to do a maintenance release, either.
It's been
all over the place, so you probably know already that the autonomous region of Catalonia has banished bullfighting (or rather bullring bullfighting, since
other forms of figthing, or teasing, bulls are still permitted, or even encouraged.
A lot has been made of this; in fact, in Spain we make a lot of noise and fighting and arguing on just about everything. In fact, a single bullring was active in Catalonia and mostly for tourists. Bullfights have not been shown for a long time on national TV (but they thrive on pay channels and some regional government-run stations), and in fact, just a few
fiestas took place every year, with a bunch of bulls killed (and some bullfighters maimed).
So, what's the big deal? A few thousands persons will not be able to take the underground and attend a celebration they like, and a few tourists will be pissed off because they weren't able to see, live, a bull killed. Because just a few people, and mostly of the older persuasion, like bullfigthing. Most young people would be seen in a bullring just for a concert or in any of the many pubs that have been built around them. Myself, I've never been in a corrida for years, and will never voluntarily go to one or watch one on TV. In fact, I'm horrorized by the gruesome pictures of gored bullfighters that show up, from time to time, on the first page of web dailies, where you can't help but watch them. I won't take anybody in my family to such a show, so the next generation is not going to change in their tastes.
And why is it so? First, a corrida is boring. It takes three long hours, it takes place in an uncomfortable stone bench (helped by little pillows), it is expensive unless you want to endure sun for three solid hours, and if you go just for the bulls, you're probably going to be disappointed. People go with friends and use it as a venue for staging a party, sometimes looking at the bullring when they are warned by the bugles or by the yells of people.
And then, it's a complicated art. Most people distinguish between standing and kneeling passes, and that's that. Those who know (less and less) are able to name every single motion, and of course understand styles and patterns and types of bulls. But since there's a generation gap between the previous generation and this one, the numbers of those are dwindling quite fast.
That all means that in a generation there will be only a few bullrings operating. It all boils down to economics, and if the managers can't obtain enough money they will just shut down and use bullrings as movie theaters or as historic museums. Outside the big cities, it's increasingly difficult to pay goot bullfighters, which are expensive. And the lack of a quality show will feed back on itself, making the few people who understand and like it abandon the plazas.
That said, it does not make any sense to forbid something that will probably die by itself, and not in the far future. If you
look at the big picture, it makes even less sense. But here you go, it is forbidden now, which will probably lead to a renaissance of the fiesta and an increase of interest due to the well known "green door" effect. Red doors, in this case.
Etiquetas: bullfighting, politics, spain, catalonia
If you are in the science business, you have probably received personalized unsolicied requests to publish some paper in a specially-designed book published by a no-name company. I'm not talking about big-name publishers like Springer, or well-known researchers on the area. An offer, out of nowhere, from some person acting as editor for some outfit in upstate New York or Burma or wherever.
If you have nothing better to do with a paper already rejected in two or three places, and it is not a lot of work, and they don't say you have to pay up front, maybe you take up the offer.
Be careful, however, because this guys are essentially pay-per-publish and they will charge you some place along the way. Nova Publishers, for instance, charges for "English editing". That means that once you've prepared the manuscript, they tell you that if the English is not OK (hint: it will not be) they will charge for editing or reject the paper. They might charge you for publishing color figures, or for sending it to your University library (with a rebate, of course). There will always be a reason for charging you, which you might do to not lose the (time) investment you have already done in the paper, or just because you need to publish.
So, be careful: as soon as you receive this kind of offer, help your bayesian filter by sending it to the spam bin, along with congress announcements from Naguib Callaos and WSEAS.
Etiquetas: hoaxes, scams, pay-per-publish
Tomorrow I'm leaving for Istanbul to present my paper on MasterMind in
EvoGames, a workshop within the EvoStar conference. The paper will be available shortly (and obviously under request), but here's the presentation
Since the conversion is less than perfect, it's probably better if you download it; credits for the CC images are included in the notes. The basic idea about this paper is that we (
Tom Runarsson and myself) try to get the best of exhaustive search, without keeping tabs on the whole search space; in this paper we manage to design an evolutionary algorithm that finds solutions almost as good as that, but with better scaling potential (and a rule of thumb to perform it). Besides, it is a plain vanilla evolutionary algorithm and an Estimation of Distribution Algorithm which manage the feat; this can be (and will be) very much improved in time (for the IEEE Computer Intelligence in Games, I expect).
Etiquetas: mastermind, games, puzzles, volare, uououo
How do you compute the real
H? One of the ways is the most straighforward, the one I use when I
post about it and what
programs like Publish or Perish return. But there are several problems here: first one is that Google overshoots a bit the number of publications by including published Master Thesis, technical reports and even the popular press. No big deal, because a reference is a reference, but the second is a bit harder: excluding self-cites.
Citeseer does it, as does
Scopus, but Google does not.
The problem is that it's quite laborious to exclude self-cites, since the paper title is unique, but the author might not (A. Pérez, anyone?). In any case, if I try to exclude these self-cites, what would my real H be? I would have to painstakingly go reference by reference, and exclude a few. And while I'm at it, there are a few papers called "Indexed bibliography of this and that" which are also included and would have to be taken off. And all that is not worth the while any more. But
I should try and modify this, to take that into account... gone to the TO DO list. Any other suggestion, you're welcome.
Etiquetas: musing, todo, PoP, academic world
Right now the
tally of blogs supporting the "Spanish science needs no cuts" goes up to the thousands, and it's basically a slap in the face of the government, that has released all its mediatic power to try and convince somebody that it's the other way round, that we live in the best of all possible worlds.
In fact, the money devoted to fund basic research and competitive grants has gone down sharply, and that's on the top of an even sharper drop the previous year, and an not-so-well-publicized drop the year before. It's already three years in a row with even prestigious groups known internationally having trouble to make ends meet, so we have finally said enough is enough and jumped to our blogs to make our voices heard.
It's going to be useless, probably, but don't underestimate the power of under/post/and ultra grads with an open Internet connection.
Etiquetas: science, budget cuts, crisis, what crisis?
In my latest step to achieve an
H-number in the triple digits, and after almost a year of writing and revision, our paper on
the Algorithm::Evolutionary Perl module and its applications has finally
been published (online first) in the
Soft Computing. Those that follow this blog will remember
these posts I usually write about it, but here's the abstract anyways:
This paper describes Algorithm::Evolutionary (A::E), a Perl module released under an open source license and designed for the exploration and exploitation of evolutionary algorithms. We describe the design decisions taken to enhance flexibility, how performance was improved by using several implementation tweaks, and what kind of design patterns were applied for its development. This work also tries to dispel the myth of low performance of scripting languages by comparing it with a state-of-the-art library (ECJ) written in Java. Besides, we are interested in assessing its efficiency in several possible evolutionary settings, finding out what kind of behavior we can expect, and what can be done to improve it. Applications already written using A::E are also described, along with how it can be used to create new operators. Finally, some conclusions are drawn from the design experience.
The baseline is that
Perl is a language as good as any to do Evolutionary Computation, and probably better than many others. And it's fast enough to be able to
solver Mastermind in a little while.
Etiquetas: papers, publish and/or perish, just in time for the full professorship tribunal
With respect to the
incident referred to as the goth daughters photo-op, the debate around it seems to miss a few points, mainly related to the understanding our president has of world affairs.
First one is protocol. Of all the
the 135 pictures taken in the same session, there's a
single one with somebody else than the mandatary with spouse (curiously enough, with Kosovo's president, wife and
translator). You simply don't do those photo-ops with daughters; just the position will cause a problem. Up to this year, Zapatero didn't travel too much, and it's obviously its first photo with a president of the USA, which might explain it.
Second one, sadly enough, is English. Our president does not speak English, and if his daughters are a typical product of the Spanish educational system, they won't speak more than a few words. If he wasn't accompanied by a translator in this event, probably somebody explained to him the whole stuff (up to and including the fact that the pictures were going to be published, not filed and/or emailed to him), but he just said OK, not understanding a word. If he had been fluent, he would have realised before standing for the picture what was going to be done to them, and would have told his daughters to stay apart just for this time.
Third one, even more sadly, is the Internet (or maybe the world at large). Showing something for a little while in a website is bound to have been seen several, or even thousands of times. If the Kosovo first family picture shown above is any guidance, it's gathered several thousands views. And once it's on the Internet, it's impossible to stop its spreading from one website to the next, and from that one to a photoshop-toting person with some time in his hands. So even if you ask the State Department to delete it from Flickr, and the state press agency to not release another picture, it's bound to show up again and again. Anybody with a bit of understanding of how the Internet works would probably have embraced the oportunity to out his whole family, instead of clumsily trying to stop a picture from being shown.
Etiquetas: politics, photo-ops, reflections over a picture
