In Which I Dabble in Photography...

Unfortunately, many things came to pass during the second half of last year that were more important than updating the blog. One of them was a two week visit from my family, during which we toured San Francisco, went up to Sausalito and Point Reyes, and generally enjoyed the Bay Area.

It was during this trip that my father expressed an interest in picking up a DSLR (Digital Single-Lens Reflex) camera to replace his aging point-and-shoot. My folks have been doing more travelling lately - partially because of my trans-American movement patterns - and my dad wanted to get a better camera for taking photos. After much reading and searching, we settled on the Nikon D3100 as it seems to be a good 'introductory' model. I got to play around with it a little bit, which was fun, before the trip was over and they returned home.

A short while later, I decided to go on a trip myself (see previous post) and my dad suggested that I get a DSLR so that I could take some nice photos. While mulling it over, a buddy helpfully opined that if I was going to 'take the plunge', I should do so several weeks before the trip because it would take me some time to figure out how to use the thing. He was right.

In the end, I found a good deal on a refurbished Nikon D5100. Meta.

I'm a complete amateur when it comes to this stuff. The little that I know about aperture, ISO, exposure time, focal length, etc. comes from listening to tech podcasts and reading Wikipedia. I had no concept of why you'd want to fuss around with such settings rather than shoot on 'auto'. That's why I had to do a lot of reading followed by some sessions of playing around with the knobs and buttons.

A general observation I have about getting into DSLR photography is that it's kind of tough - more so than I anticipated. Don't get me wrong here, I wasn't expecting to be able to take professional-quality crowd-wowing photos from the get go. However, I've found that it's actually pretty easy to accidentally take photos that look worse than those I take regularly with my far less expensive Cannon point-and-shoot.

The way I look at it is like this: a good point-and-shoot doesn't give you many options in terms of creativity, but with the exception of low-light conditions, you'll generally shoot photos that look good (if boring). A DSLR, in giving you complete control over its functions (as well as the option to switch lenses), allows you to shoot a much greater variety of photos. The trade-off is that you have to have some understanding of what it is you're doing, which, in turn, requires some modicum of research.

Actually, understanding isn't entirely sufficient, unfortunately. It also requires time, which is actually the bigger problem. It's all fine and good for me to take a walk around a local park or trail and take photos on manual to my heart's content. It's an entirely different story when I'm walking around with friends (or my gf), and they're getting annoyed while I'm fiddling around with settings. I have to admit that I've been in the 'annoyed' camp myself.

Rereading this, it feels a tad negative, which isn't my intent. I'm glad that I picked up the camera and I'm enjoying working through its many mysteries. My early photos were a bit garbage, but in the past couple of months, I've taken a few really nice shots. I'm still finding that that I have to adjust the color balance in LightRoom1 but I'm sure that I'll figure it out eventually.

On the bright side, photography gives me something else to blog about, so I'll post photos to here and Picasa as usual. I'm also sure that I'll have future posts to write about how my photography 'skillz' are... developing. 

1I'll write a blog post about Bryan Peterson's excellent Understanding Exposure, a must buy for new photographers. One detail, however, is that he recommends always shooting on 'cloudy' white-balance. I find that the default D5100 cloudy setting is far too harsh, and produces photos with oversaturated warm tones. I haven't found a setting that I consistently like.   

A Trip to the Basque Country (Part 1)...

Been pretty quiet around here for a while. It's a new year and I'd like to change that, if possible. We'll see if work and life permit.

The 'Chimmz'1 holiday season is usually when I return to Eastern Canada to visit the family and put up with the blistering cold. However, this year was different; Instead I spent two-and-a-half weeks in Spain, meeting my gf's friends and family. I'd like to talk about the trip in a few posts, starting with a bit of background.

This was somewhat momentous for me as it was my first time travelling to Europe. That's probably strange to some folks, but while my family did make a lot of trips when I was young, they tended to be more of the 'camping/nature' rather than 'seeing world cities' variety. Furthermore, I'm not sure that I would've appreciated trips to the 'Old World' when I was young anyways - it's really only in my 20s that I began to value experience as much as hard 'goods'2. Oh well.

The region of Spain that I visited was The Basque Country (País Vasco in Spanish, Euskadi in Basque) pictured left in the Wikipedia article. It's a beautiful land of green mountainsides, towns in hidden valleys, excellent food, and rich history. It's also well-known for its fierce nationalism and the presence of the separatist terrorist group known as the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Freedom), or ETA. While the ETA has declared a complete cessation of all paramilitary activities since 2011, its regular bombings, kidnappings, and shootings in the past probably did a lot to prevent the beautiful countryside from becoming a hot tourist destination. It is not my intent to discuss 'politics' here - especially about a situation for which my knowledge is so limited, but it is worth pointing out that it's impossible to visit the Basque Country without seeing evidence of national politics everywhere in the form of signs, demonstrations, and discussion.

As a tourist, the area was a bit overwhelming - primarily because most of the signage outside of the major cities like Bilbo (Bilbao in Spanish) and Donostia (San Sebastian) is in Basque. Basque, or Euskara as the Basques themselves refer to it, has fascinated academic linguists for some time as it is not part of the Indo-European family: with the exception of some Latin-derived neologisms (e.g., Ospitalea) there's absolutely no context through which to interpret what you're reading using other languages. This is a pretty big deal - for instance, my Spanish is rudimentary at best (though I've signed up for classes!), but I can make out a lot of street signs, directions, and menus by interpreting cognates from English and French. I had no such luck with Basque, however, the words and grammar are totally alien. If you're interested, take a look at this list, where you can see how few borrowed words there are. Thankfully, everyone speaks Castillian Spanish if you need to ask for directions, but I don't think I would've seen much of the countryside without a guide.

Incidentally (and fascinatingly), the best supported evidence for the origin of modern Basque is that it stems from the ancestral language spoken by what eventually became the Roman province of Gallia Aquitania in the 1st century BCE. Roman Aquitanian inscriptions have been found containing words that are very similar if not identical to modern Basque, such as 'bihotza' (heart). Several pre-Roman Iberian languages are known to have existed from ancient writings and archeological excavations, but all others appear to have died off in favor of Roman spread Latin and its eventual derivatives. The somewhat isolated nature of the Basque Country and its people is likely responsible for the language's survival, though banning of its teaching during the period of Francoist Spain went a long way towards ending that. While there are ~2.3 million Basque people, fewer than a million actively speak the language fluently (at least according to Wikipedia).

North Americans such as myself probably have a naive tendency to view other countries as relatively homogenous. For instance, the cultural differences between the US 'North' and 'South' are pretty minor when you consider that many countries have sub-populations that speak different languages and follow completely different traditions. Canada experiences some of this between the French and English parts, but Spain has several major languages/dialects in an area that would easily fit into most individual Canadian provinces. With no offense intended, if you asked me a few years ago to name things about Spain off of the top of my head, I probably would have said things like: Matadors, flamenco, Don Quixote, sangria, siestas, tapas, and soccer (the last works to describe every European country, I'm told). With the exception of siestas and a particular type of tapas, most of what I saw didn't fit my 'Spanish eStereotypes', and I'll start with that in the next post. 

1Chimmz is my non-denominational, non-religious, end-of-year holiday. I like it more than 'festivus' or whatever because it rolls off of the tongue: "Merry Chimmz, yo."

2This is something that I now regret. I spent a lot of money (relatively) in my younger years buying stuff that I don't care about anymore at all. I kind of collected everything - movies, books, games, junk... Some of the things that I collected, I still appreciate and cart-around with me, but a lot of it just seems like so much wasted effort.

These Paradigms Won't Shift Themselves...

A.S. I've been 'reading' a book that I'm planning to write up a book club about, but I felt that I first needed to rant about a more general aspect of science writing as a preamble to discussing the book itself.

It's somewhat unfortunate that Thomas Khun has become the patron saint of quackery - at least that's the way that I feel given how often he's brought up by purveyors of non-science. I've read Khun's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and found it to be quite interesting, if a tad simplistic. Its classic contribution to the philosophy of science is its argument that science doesn't progress only by the accumulation of facts that build upon existing theories, but rather more importantly, by the accumulation of facts that cannot be squared with current theories. Eventually, the weight of these unresolvable observations 'breaks' the discipline requiring a qualitatively different approach to explaining the data: a completely different set of theories, a.k.a. a new 'paradigm'.

This model works rather well in explicating the context and subsequent effects of landmark historical discoveries (relativity, evolution by natural selection, etc.1), however, it has been criticized in its ability to explain the sorts of 'revolutions' happening in modern science. The argument goes like this: Modern science is a much more well-funded and institutionalized pursuit than it was during these classical revolutions. New 'discoveries' are being made rather frequently and so, when it comes to most sciences, hypotheses are being tested, refuted, and reassessed on much smaller scales than previously. Furthermore, the number of independent observations supporting many fundamental hypotheses is much, much larger than in the past. All of this suggests that we're unlikely to see many 'paradigm shifts' on the level of the classical Khunian examples any time soon, at least for most sciences2.

Unfortunately for the quacks, a new hypothesis - the efficacy of homeopathy, for instance - must incorporate existing observations. And yet so many do not. I think that this is why many of us get frustrated when non-scientists, especially science writers, call for some form of 'middle ground' between practitioners of woo and mainstream science. 'But this or that anecdotal evidence suggests that there might be something to this,' they say. It's a Kuhnian revolution in the making... ungh.

Sadly for the overly brash, science necessitates conservatism. Working within a theoretical framework that may be incomplete, but is solid and works for most circumstances (such as Newtonian gravity), is certainly preferable to overindulging in research under frameworks that have little to no support to begin with. As with many things, ideas are important, but relatively cheap in comparison to being able to come up with methods through which to test them (the challenge of experimental design). Conservatism, as a reviewer of a manuscript once pointed out, also means that novel hypotheses that explain existing observations as well as existing hypotheses are insufficient. They must do better than existing hypotheses - that is to say that they must explain facts that are not explained by those hypotheses in current vogue.

There's a time commitment to science, and testing every random idea out there isn't necessarily an efficient way to make progress... unless you're the NCCAM? 

1The 'Copernican Revolution' is often cited among these, but I don't understand its relevance. As is discussed in detail in Owen Gingerich's The Book That Nobody Read, Ptolemaic epicycles and Copernical heliocentrism were equivalent models for explaining the available data and both made testable predictions about the position of planets (see here). In the absence of other theories that would have cinched the debate (e.g., gravity), the only real difference between the two theories was that Copernicus' made some of the calculations easier, which is why a preface was added to his book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, which contained the following:

...it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions through careful and expert study. Then he must conceive and devise the causes of these motions or hypotheses about them. Since he cannot in any way attain to the true causes, he will adopt whatever suppositions enable the motions to be computed correctly ... The present author has performed both these duties excellently. For these hypotheses need not be true nor even probable. On the contrary, if they provide a calculus consistent with the observations, that alone is enough ... For this art, it is quite clear, is completely and absolutely ignorant of the causes of the apparent [movement of the heavens]. And if any causes are devised by the imagination, as indeed very many are, they are not put forward to convince anyone that they are true, but merely to provide a reliable basis for computation. 

2That's not to say that I don't think that there are any 'big shifts' on the horizon. Some 'common knowledge', ostensibly derived from science, doesn't have nearly as much evidence as we'd like to believe - especially in disciplines where controlled experimentation isn't always easy. One example that's being challenged in books and research is the idea that fat intake is a major cause of heart disease, something promoted extensively by the American Heart Association. There seems to be growing evidence that refined sugars are a much stronger culprit - and in particular intake of certain sugars in doses not typically found in nature (e.g., high-fructose corn syrup). None of this is my expertise though. While his views seem a bit extreme, I would like to read Gary Taubes' Why We Get Fat, which discusses the issue.

Book Club: Two Takes on Cronyism...

I picked up A Capitalism for the People (ACftP; 2012; Basic Books) after hearing its author, Luigi Zingales, on the EconTalk podcast. I found some of his comments interesting and provocative, most especially his lamenting that many politically powerful people in America have confused the concept of 'pro-market' and 'pro-business'.

ACftP begins with Zingales offering an opinion as to what has traditionally made American enterprise so successful: relatively free and open markets. He has an interesting perspective on the matter in that he was born and raised in Italy and worked briefly for the Italian central bank before becoming a professor at the University of Chicago. In Italy, Zingales observes, cronyism is the norm. Power lies in the hands of a relatively small number of elites who distort the normal functioning of the market in the favor of their (and their friend's) own fortunes.

In an anecdote, the author explains that when he first moved to Chicago, the city was hit with a Tornado warning. The mayor appeared on TV and asked everyone to tape up their windows. Somewhat surprised, Zingales realized that many of his neighbors were following the mayor's advice. In Italy, he explains, if the mayor asks you to tape up your windows, you immediately assume that his brother sells tape.

I also happened to listen to an audiobook last week that tackles many of the same themes: Arianna Huffington's Third World America (2010; Tantor Audio). The 'third world' referred to by the author is the idea that America is becoming a country of 'haves' and 'have nots', where an ever greater amount of wealth is concentrated in the hand of an influential few.

Both books argue that people's confidence in markets exists only so long as they continue to perceive society as a meritocracy. When the common conception is that luck and/or familial wealth have the greatest impact on your ability to succeed, market confidence will erode leading to populist calls for greater 'redistribution'. 

The confusion of the ideas of 'market' and 'business' doesn't help because businesses have large short-term incentives to distort the proper functioning of markets in order to generate monopolies and oligarchies. Zingales in particular argues that many of the high-tech industries that are becoming an ever greater part of American economic growth are in winner-take-all economies: being the dominant operating system, or the number one app, drives disproportionate revenue your way. This leads to ever greater incentives to limit competition once you're at the top.

Where the two books differ, as expected, is in how they suggest the problem of cronyism be addressed. Whereas Huffington supports tighter regulation and both advocate transparency, Zingales is a bit more practical. We must recognize, he explains, that government itself is part of the problem, and therefore cannot be the solution on its own. Massive incentives exist to capture regulators and grease palms. Unfortunately the balance will never favor the diffuse individual over the concentrated incentives of the company.

What ACftP advocates is an overall simplification of regulation. Zingales says that he's realized that economists spend too much time focusing on what is efficient, rather than what works. Repeal of the Glass-Stegal Act didn't cause the recent economic calamity, but its existence did have an effect of limiting bank consolidation and thus may have been stabilizing. Whether inefficient or not, it was ~30 pages long, which meant that it was easy to monitor and enforce unlike the unwieldy ~2,300 page Dodd-Frank Act, which will likely keep an entire army of attorneys employed to interpret it (and find loopholes for corporations). Furthermore, Zingales also advocates a massive simplification of the tax code, an end to incentive perverting (read ALL) subsidies, a restoration of the ability of individuals to pursue class action lawsuits under all circumstances, and laws that would massively reward 'whistleblowers', which are a much cheaper and far more effective source of regulation.

While Huffington and Zingales bascially agree the vast majority of the time, I think that Zingales has the right of it in that hoping that we'll somehow be able to demand 'different sort of politician' ignores the realities that will likely change the incentives of anyone who takes office. His suggestions on how to reform corporate governance and regulation may not be perfect, but they're more transparent. Ultimately, constant vigilance against abuse and scandal is the only way to minimize cronyism.

P.S. Based solely on his comments on various podcasts and writings, I was a bit surprised to discover that Zingales does not consider himself a libertarian. He's certainly pro-market, but as he writes in the book (p. 232):

Many free-market economists think that well-functioning markets arise naturally in a laissez-faire economy. Unfortunately, this is not the case. A free market’s infrastructure and liquidity—the presence of many buyers and sellers at the same time—are the ultimate public good: everybody benefits with no cost. Yet individual market participants, especially powerful ones, can benefit from trying to restrict competition and hollow out liquidity. Here lies a fundamental challenge for libertarians. Unrestricted freedom of contract can lock in potential traders in a way that dries up liquidity and prevents market development. If companies could lock in workers at a young age, for instance, the labor market for managerial talent would be constricted. The more comprehensive contracts can be, the shallower the market. This is one of the reasons for prohibiting indentured servitude (in which a person sells his future labor services). The same applies to securities markets. As powerful banks try to exchange securities over the counter, markets become less liquid. For this reason, separating investment and commercial banking, as required by the Glass-Steagall Act, was essential to jump-starting the development of a liquid securities market in the United States.

Figuring out How to Write Again...

There was a point just as I transitioned between my Ph.D. and first postdoc where I felt like I was being crazy productive. I had just written a thesis and was working on three separate manuscripts (all of which were actually published). All of this material came out of projects that I'd had a large part in designing, and so I didn't feel as though I had much difficulty charting out drafts for publication.

Then two years passed during which I wrote little of my own design, but rather focused on contributing analysis to larger efforts. I did draft at least one manuscript, but it fizzled because key co-authors had different opinions about where the emphasis should lay. It's not easy to write a good manuscript when you disagree on which results are the most significant and interesting1.

Unfortunately, I feel that I've become 'rusty'. Blogging helps with grammar and syntax (which is part of the reason that I've worked to keep it up), but it doesn't necessarily help with good 'science writing'. Actually, I've found that there are so many opinions regarding what 'good science writing' is, that I'm beginning to think that it's one of those 'you'll know it when you see it' things.

In the midst of working on flexing my typing fingers again, a colleague pointed me to an excellent journal article that both highlights some of the common mistakes that scientists make when trying to convey complex information to their peers, and suggests many alternatives. Some were even revelatory to me, at least in terms of focusing my own though process; while all the while being rather simple to implement. I wanted to share the article, which can be accessed by anyone here:

Gopen GD, Swan JA. 1990. The Science of Scientific Writing. Am Sci 78: 550–558.

I think that a few key insights from the paper are worth discussing. After pointing out some of the common pitfalls of scientific writing2, the authors suggest that there's a reason for why manuscripts aren't always written with a major focus on clarity: scientist are much more concerned with making sure that all of the information that must be conveyed is there rather than making sure that the 'flow' is adequate.

However, as the authors point out, improving flow requires only a few rules of thumb (you can go read them for yourself). The most significant suggestions that have changed the way I've been looking over my drafts are summarized in the following three points:

Place in the stress position the "new information" you want the reader to emphasize. 

Place the person or thing whose "story" a sentence is telling at the beginning of the sentence, in the topic position.

Place appropriate "old information" (material already stated in the discourse) in the topic position for linkage backward and contextualization forward.

Once you figure out the 'stress' and 'topic' positions, it seems simple. Despite this, I think that it says a lot: Scientific writing is all about clarity and communication. While basic rules about sentence construction still apply (avoid redundancy, etc.), the overall construction of sentences, paragraphs, and sections works best when they follow a defined flow linking each section explicitly into the next. Again, this may seem intuitively obvious, but when you begin looking at the examples given in the text, I think you'll notice that many of the times you've had to read over a section multiple times, were because the expected flow of information was interrupted3. 

Regardless, the article helped me reorganize some troublesome sections and lay out areas of the text more efficiently. I hope that others will find it useful as well.

1I've found that this is surprisingly easy, particularly when your data is being interpreted by people with widely different interests or backgrounds. An observation that is fascinating to you can be completely (and disappointingly) uninteresting to someone outside of your field.

2For instance, scientific papers often, in order to convey more information, separate subjects from verbs via overly long clauses, which leads to a difficulty in parsing due to playing against expectations. Mmmm... bittersweet.

3This occurs more often than not because information is referenced externally, or knowledge is assumed of the reader due to space constraints.