Jerry's Map

World building as open-ended semi-random fine art project. Jerry Gretzinger also has a blog about his project.

Update (2014.10.26): Wired now has a piece about Jerry's map with extensive pictures.

Links

1. A plan to build a real-life Starship Enterprise.

2. Neuroscience and stage magic. (Hat tip to the Browser.)

3. A flowchart for changing habits.

The Future of TV = Broadcast + Broadband?

According to Tech Crunch, "Cord cutters"--households without cable TV--represent only 5% of TV households, but their number has grown over 22.8% the past year. I am a cord cutter myself; a big part of the reason is that cable companies do not allow consumers to purchase individual shows, but instead require that they purchase a large bundle of channels, even if consumers aren't interested in most of the programs that are in the bundle. At the Atlantic, UCLA sociologist Gabriel Rossman explains the economics behind cable companies' resistance to a la carte programming. He also links to an amusing cartoon from the Oatmeal which portrays internet piracy of cable TV shows as a response to cable companies' lack of flexibility in delivering content.

Robot Wars

Who would win: a 5-axis milling robot or a 3D printer that works in metal? According to this article, the future lies with 3D printers, but for the time being the safe money is on the milling robot.

The Nine Hells

1. Slavery in Mauritania.

2. Born and raised in a North Korean prison camp.

3. With U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

4. The madness of Philip K. Dick.

5. Mississippi hate crime.

6. Staff Sergeant Robert Bales.

7. Inside America's Ivy League fraternities.

8. The harassment of women in modern India.

9. Seeking justice for Haiti's rape victims.

Links

1. New York Times review of "Marley", the new Bob Marley bio-pic.
2. Wired profile of Joss Whedon.
3. Jennifer Tilly, poker player.
4. Chairs are dangerous.

The Quants Rule, OK

Atlanta, Montreal, Oslo, Paris. What do these cities have in common?

Recent social network research reveals the answer: Montreal leads North Americans' raido listening habits when it comes to indie music, while Atlanta leads for North American hip-hop. In Europe, Oslo is the leader for general music listening habits, and Paris leads for indie music. This means that what people are listening to on the radio now in Montreal (for example) will soon be what people are listening to across North America.

A related story: a school for quants doing research in network science at University College London. These are the job skills of the future. Adapt now, or forever hold your peace. Amen.

Links

1. Modern slave owner in Mauritania becomes an abolitionist.

2. China's 30 million cave dwellers.

3. E-books may make it harder to remember what you read. (Hat-tip to Marginal Revolution.)

Links

1. Ten lessons to learn from Jeremy Lin.

2. Tiny lizards in Madagascar.

3. Spartan vs. Athenian models of education. (Hat tip to The Browser.)

'Undue Weight' on Wikipedia

Timothy Messer-Kruse is a professor in the department of ethnic studies at Bowling Green State University. The Chronicle Review recently published a piece of his, in which he recounts his many failed attempts to edit the Wikipedia page related to his area of expertise, the Haymarket Riot of 1886. The main problem: while Messer-Kruse's claims are backed up testimony from the trial available from the Library of Congress and by his own peer-reviewed articles, they conflict with the account given by the majority of published sources, which, according to Messer-Kruse, have been simply repeating the same errors for decades. The problem stems from Wikipedia's 'undue weight' policy, which requires that the content of Wikipedia articles reflect the majority of published works on a given subject (even if the majority happen to be in error):

[A] Wiki-cop scolded me, "I hope you will familiarize yourself with some of Wikipedia's policies, such as verifiability and undue weight. If all historians save one say that the sky was green in 1888, our policies require that we write 'Most historians write that the sky was green, but one says the sky was blue.' ... As individual editors, we're not in the business of weighing claims, just reporting what reliable sources write."

Given Messer-Kruse's experience, it would seem difficult or impossible for a new discovery by a researcher to make its way quickly into Wikipedia; as he puts it:

I guess this gives me a glimmer of hope that someday, perhaps before another century goes by, enough of my fellow scholars will adopt my views that I can change that Wikipedia entry. Until then I will have to continue to shout that the sky was blue.

Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

I have recently been reading Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, a set of techniques for resolving disputes in a way that is nonviolent (as the name implies) but does that meets everyone's needs without compromise. NVC was developed by a clinical psychologist named Marshall Rosenberg; Rosenberg, a student of Carl Rogers, first used NVC to mediate disputes in schools that were desegregating in the 1960s, and more recently he has traveled to hot spots such as Bosnia, Rwanda, Israel-Palestine, and northern Nigeria to try to mediate disputes between people who have literally been killing each other. More prosaically, Rosenberg also leads workshops on NVC in the U.S. and other countries.

The core of NVC involves four main steps: (1) observing actions, (2) identifying and stating feelings, (3) identifying and stating the needs which cause these feelings (when they are either met or not met), and (4) clearly articulating requests for actions. These four steps can be performed both on oneself and the person one is communicating with. Though easy to understand, it's actually quite hard to put these techniques into practice, due to the power of our habitual ways of interacting with people. My attempts to use NVC in the classroom and in my personal life have been difficult, but still effective--even if the only effect is to get greater awareness of what I am feeling and needing when someone does something (which makes it less likely that I will react with anger, resentment, or a passive-aggressive behavior).

One of Rosenberg's claims is that while people's preferred strategies for meeting their needs often conflict, the needs themselves could all be fulfilled if only they were willing to use different strategies to meet those needs. Now, like much of the theory behind NVC, I don't believe this 100%; there are surely some cases in which genuine needs conflict, such as lifeboat scenarios where there is only enough food or water for one person to survive. But like the other defects in the theory of NVC, this point does little to undermine the effectiveness of the techniques of NVC, which are quite practical. In the vast majority of human conflicts, even those involving physical violence, everyone's needs could be met without violence (even if not everyone's preferred strategies could be met without violence--such as if one side seeks to satisfy its need for security by killing off every member of the opposing side).

Another defect in the theory behind NVC is Rosenberg's claim that humans are not inherently violent; violence, he maintains, is something against human nature which we learn through our culture or society. To the contrary, since violence has been a part of every human culture, and since rates of death by violence were higher in stone age hunter-gatherer societies than they are in today's society, it is arguable that human nature includes the propensity for physical violence, and that if anything culture is gradually shifting our behaviors to less physically violent forms. But this theoretical quibble seems to have no bearing on the effectiveness of the techniques of NVC. These are grounded in careful observation of people's behaviors, coupled with acts of interpretation which seek to clarify feelings and needs, and finally with the formulation of clear action requests that can move dialogue forward more effectively than vague or judgmental criticism and demands.

My friend Lynn Ackerson first told me about NVC several years ago, but it took me a while before I actually looked into it further. I was turned off in part by the corny terms and techniques used by Rosenberg to communicate his ideas. As shown in the picture above, Rosenberg frequently uses tattered hand puppets to convey his points about NVC. This technique would be utterly laughable except that Rosenberg does seem to be in on the joke. It's a way of getting attention and of clearly summarizing points; when the "jackal" puppet says something, we know he is giving an example of violent communication, even when it doesn't sound like it--such as when someone snivels and says "I'm sad because you hurt me". Rosenberg also occasionally sings God-awful songs on his guitar (many of which he wrote himself!).

All of this, together with the problematic theory behind NVC, should be overlooked when one is considering the effectiveness of the techniques themselves. They are the real deal, and have been field-tested by Rosenberg in the worst conditions imaginable--when talking to groups of Christians and Muslims in northern Nigeria, some of who had killed relatives of those on the other side; when talking to convicted murderers and rapists in prison; when dealing with one's own road rage while driving behind the slowest car in the world! Likewise, Rosenberg's original inspiration for NVC was his own brutal experience as a child in Detroit in the 1940s, where he witnessed terrible race riots immediately upon moving to the city (in which many people were killed right in his own neighborhood), to being repeatedly beaten at his school starting on the first day because of the fact that he was Jewish. Rosenberg may occasionally indulge in cheesy or hokey antics, and his theoretical speculation seems off the mark, but NVC itself is no joke and should be practiced by more people.

Jonah Lehrer on the Incredible Shrinking Effect Size

Jonah Lehrer recently wrote an article in The New Yorker (and another in Wired) about decreasing effect sizes in the sciences. An excerpt from the former:

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.

Possible explanations for the problem include publication bias (journals like to publish interesting results), selective reporting of data by scientists, and data mining (scouring already collected data for interesting results, as opposed to collecting data to test an already determined hypothesis). One of the scientists interviewed by Lehrer proposes as a solution an open-source database, in which researchers are required to outline their plans for research and to document all of their results. Lehrer's Wired article is titled "Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us," but science rather seems to be revealing the problem with some of its own methods; the problem is real but potentially self-correcting. Lehrer also makes a philosophical mis-step when he invokes David Hume's skepticism about causation:

Hume realized that, although people talk about causes as if they are real facts—tangible things that can be discovered—they’re actually not at all factual. Instead, Hume said, every cause is just a slippery story, a catchy conjecture, a “lively conception produced by habit.” When an apple falls from a tree, the cause is obvious: gravity. Hume’s skeptical insight was that we don’t see gravity—we see only an object tugged toward the earth. We look at X and then at Y, and invent a story about what happened in between. We can measure facts, but a cause is not a fact—it’s a fiction that helps us make sense of facts.

Hume was skeptical about the view that a cause is a necessary connection between cause and effect, not about whether a cause is a fact. Hume's point is that causal reasoning can be overturned by subsequent experience, unlike reasoning about relations of ideas (such as logical or mathematical truths), which is immune to empirical rebuff. Philosophical quibbles aside, Lehrer's articles are a useful layperson's introduction to this important issue.