Random Musings Whilst Travelling...

The long time that I spent travelling to the 2012 Evolution Conference in Ottawa today was a perfect opportunity to put the finishing touches on my revisions to a manuscript that I'm soon planning to submit for publication. This is a good feeling for a couple of reasons:

1) Aside from a book chapter to be published soon in a volume from Oxford University Press (Rapidly Evolving Genes and Genetic Systems; RS Singh, JP Xu, and RJ Kulathinal eds.), I haven't published a manuscript that wasn't part of a large consortium since 2010.

2) I've been doing this for long enough that I now have a tradition by which a computer is not 'christened' until it has been used to write and successfully publish a manuscript (weird, I know).

I've somewhat convinced myself of the notion that publication of a new primary-author manuscript will be the first step in regaining my footing towards a career in science (see my previous post about my unintentional 2 years spend working unproductively). It's a small-ish step in that the work that I've written up is interesting, but not revolutionary. It's a side project upon which I've been tinkering away while I generate the necessary data for my primary project1. It's also had the benefit of opening up some more interesting research ideas that I'm aiming toward pursuing later this year.

If you're interested, here's a link to a PDF of the poster that I'll be presenting on this work at the conference this weekend. Unfortunately, I only found out that I'd be able to attend this conference quite late, and the registration for talks was already closed - so poster-only it is. I have to admit that this is a bit depressing as it'll be three years in a row that I don't give a talk about my own work at a conference (in 2009 I gave two separate talks at conference in a single week on two totally different projects - I haven't felt quite so productive since). However, things are looking up and in a few months I may have a lot of interesting work to talk about with colleagues and collaborators. 

I'm going to switch gears here and talk about a book that I tried to read and am embarrassed to say, failed to complete: Jonah Leher's How we Decide (2009; Houghton Mifflin Hartcourt). I think I picked the book up on a lark after seeing the author give an interesting TED talk and after a mildly interesting start have been forcing myself to trudge through the 29% that I've reached on my Kindle.

I came to the 'realization' that I could simply let it go while listening to an economics podcast wherein a co-host explained why he rarely finished books. I'm paraphrasing here, but he basically said that most books written with the intent to teach are way too long - they really only have one central concept that they want to convey and keep wrapping it up in an ever-expanding array of case-studies and examples. Once you get it, everything else is just fluff.

While I don't necessarily agree that even most books are like this, How we Decide fits this bill to a 'T'. It's yet another in a long string of neuroscience books based on fMRI data that give vague clues about the relationship between behaviors and certain areas of the brain. As an acquaintance of my gf is apparently fond of saying: "fMRI and voodoo are basically the same thing."

The major point is interesting: Contrary to classical Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, we need emotions to make decisions - our brain appears to require trained instinct to tip the scales in favor of one choice or another. fMRI studies show that the frontal cortex is involved in combining logic and emotions together and people who suffer different types of damage to their frontal lobes can either be unable to make decisions at all or be a complete slave to their passions (they typically become very hardcore addicts). This requirement that we need emotion and instinct to make basic decisions explains much of why humans are so prone to various forms of cognitive bias. We intrinsically feel 'more worse' about negative outcomes than we should, and choices can be influenced simply by rephrasing the decision in a positive or negative way (keeping the ultimate outcome identical).

It took me a paragraph to lay out about 100 pages of the book. Admittedly, one difference is that I didn't make untestable (though plausible) hypotheses about why we evolved this way, or claim that Neandertals didn't have this or that brain structure despite us having no actual perfectly preserved caveman brains to analyze (this statement in the book is unreferenced)2.

I'm sure that Lehrer's book will delight most - my dislike of it is probably strongly tied to my evolutionary biology engrained dislike of 'just-so stories'. The brain is very complex, and it's unlikely that we can atomize its various functions into specific areas so neatly. fMRI measures where blood is flowing in the brain, not where neuronal signals are travelling. Its resolution, while impressive, is fairly low for so complex a structure. Directionality of signals and importantly, causality, don't seem quite so obvious to me. Brain research is an exciting field, but scientific conservatism probably doesn't sell books.

The above only applies to some of the off-hand statements made in the course of the book - I think that the main theme of How we Decide (i.e., emotional involvement) is solid and entertaining, but could be conveyed in far fewer very speculative words3. Reading over some of the reviews at Amazon.com, I don't think that my opinons are too far out there...

1After several months of technique-optimization, failed-starts, and headaches, I just sent of some samples for analysis yesterday. If these turn out to be acceptable, I'll be able to shift my focus 100% toward my main project in a few weeks. Fingers are very crossed!

2I asked my gf, who is a neuroscientist, about this, and she scoffed at the idea that we could claim that Neandertals lacked any particular brain structure as the brain-case isn't a great proxy for actual sub-organ morphology. If anyone has any evidence to the contrary, I'm all ears.

3Lehrer's writing reminds me a lot of Malcolm Gladwell, who I understand is very, very popular. It's a style that revolves around using extremely detailed and fleshed-out case-studies to repeatedly reinforce a central concept.

Musical Renaissance...

Renaissance: French for 'rebirth'; the revival of learning and culture.

I think that I've always had this oddly 'dead' part of my soul: I've never had much of an emotional attachment to music. Well, that's not precisely true - when I was a pre-teen, I did become somewhat attached to the kind of music that my folks listened to: Elton John, Steppenwolf, The Eagles, Huey Lewis and The News, Billy Joel™1, etc. I remember that when my friends were walking into high-school listening to Daft Punk and that godawful garbage, Prozzäk, I'd have the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack spinning in my enormous portable CD player. What can I say? I was cool.

Classics aside, I've never really generated that mental playlist that so many of my friends associate with their teenage years - you know, like the guys who spend hundreds of dollars on limited edition boxed sets of horrible audio quality Nirvana B-sides? I actually remember other kids making fun of me because I didn't know the names of the people in the hip bands of the 90s, or own any of their albums (but did you know that Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon remained on the Billboard sales charts for FIFTEEN YEARS!?!?!? What do you mean, 'What is a Pink Floyd'???).

I think that part of this ties back to a previous discussion that I had on the blog about piracy: around the age that most people would've started developing their die-hard musical preferences, I was exposed to MP3s on the internet (while Napster came around when I was ~18, I've had DSL internet since I was 13). And, as economics and common sense teach us, you generally don't value something that you can get for free as much as you do when you pay for it with your hard-earned dinero. Having endless numbers of songs to shuffle through isn't conducive to making you care about any particular band, I guess.

All of this being said, MP3s are now causing me to 'rediscover' music - in particular the types of bands that I heard during my teenage and college years, but also some new groups that I've heard on the radio here and there. I'm particularly impressed by Amazon.com's MP3 store, which regularly has great deals on albums ($2-5) and provides DRM-free tracks (i.e., bare MP3s that can be played on anything).

Though musicians probably disagree, I think that these low prices are necessary in the era of digital sales. There's no doubt that MP3s are changing the way that we listen to music: what's the meaning of an 'album' when we can pick and choose our own mixes? In reality, most albums have 2-3 catchy songs and a bunch of 'filler' - very few bands can write 15 solid gold hits in a row. If an album is $10-15, I'll just buy the songs that I like a la carte, thank you very much.

However, buying only the singles will cause you to miss some of the great tracks that are out there - and it's these that I'm discovering now. (This is also why I'm typically not satisfied by Pandora or Spotify, which focus on singles and have me constantly skipping tracks that I don't like). While vocal tracks distract me too much from writing and/or doing computational work, they're certainly conducive to lab work, jogging, biking, and also doing house work as well - can you believe that I've only recently clued into the idea that it's nice to have music in the background? I know, it's strange isn't it?

Next time that I decide to dust my appartment, which, incidentally, is probably going to be very soon, I'll do it to the tune of Katy Perry... Umm, I mean, Florence and the Machine. Yeah, that's right.

1While it is not uncommon for bands and performers to trademark their name for the purposes of countering fake/bootleg merchandise (though they're not required to do so), I find it somewhat laughable that Billy Joel™ actually puts the tradmark logo next to his name on some materials (rather than in the legal text below).

Rationalizing Piracy (or not)...

I had a short conversation with a friend on Facebook where I noted that, for the past several years, I've adopted a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to 'piracy'. I've never been the kind of person who downloads music, movies, or games for free, but I certainly shared tunes during the Napster craze in college. I'd also delved pretty deeply into classic system 'emulation' before my 20s. I have mixed and somewhat complex feelings about the causes and effects of piracy in modern media, but by not partaking in it myself I can put my money where my mouth is and support those creators whose stuff I feel is is worth keeping afloat.

Then I had a brief exchange with a man working at a used record store last weekend during which he brought up an interesting philosophical point: What about media that is no longer in print, but isn't old enough to have fallen into the public domain? Is it ok to download PDF versions of such books, or ripped copies of such movies or video games?

The law is fairly clear on this: So long as someone holds the copyright on a work, you're not allowed to reproduce it, even if it's out of print. The only real recourse that you have to obtain it for yourself is to attempt to find it used1. I only said 'fairly clear' because actually finding out whether someone holds the copyright to a work can be pretty tricky. Apparently, when a company goes out of business without finding a buyer for its assets, it's fairly popular for them to 'write off' intelectual property as a loss for tax and bankruptcy purposes. While there's no clear legal standing to such material - apparently 'scholars' are unclear on whether such material automatically becomes 'public domain' - it has spawned the software concept of 'abandonware', or software whose copyright holders have relinquised their legal hold on the material. If someone still owns this stuff, they're not complaining. See Abandonia or XTCAbandonware for examples of sites that openly distribute such software.

But let's put Abandonware aside. Rather, consider only media whose publishers are still in business, but who no longer actually publish or support said work. I have to admit that I can't morally justify its piracy to myself: There's always the possibility that the publisher will re-release the work at a future time. I've already experienced this with a recent book: it had been out of print for almost a decade, but was re-released last year as a Kindle e-book. 

Despite my inability to justify such piracy to myself, even I can admit that there are some titles that are highly unlikely to see re-release. For instance, some games were programmed during in an era when it wasn't common to create extensive backups or were designed for systems with architecture so unique that it's almost impossible to 'port' them to modern computers in any form2. Similarly, certain TV shows and movies incorporated licensed music or themes whose contracts have expired, and any attempt at re-releasing them would require extensive renegotiation of royalties.

The one somewhat legitimate argument (and I use legitimate here in the literal sense of 'justifiable') that was made by the gentleman in the store is that of 'cultural preservation'. We would balk at the idea that Shakespeare's or Jane Austen's work could be lost to the ether of time because of legal disputes over who owns the rights. We're lucky that because they're written down on fairly durable material, which survived the expiration of its copyright, it's unlikely that every single copy of Hamlet or Sense and Sensibility could be somehow lost. However, because it's impossible to buy legal copies of the Star Wars Holiday Special, were it not for all the nerds uploading it to sharing sites, it could become a tragedy of time3. Disks and magnetic tape don't last for ever, unfortunately.

I'm pretty cynical, and I'm willing to bet that 95% of people who claim that they're involved in 'preservation' of media are actually just rationalizing what amounts to theft. There are organizations dedicated to keeping a record of the history of classic works - Project Guttenberg for books, or The Lost Levels for unreleased videogames - and you can usually tell if they're legit by whether or not they have 'skin in the game' (are they investing time, effort, and cash in 'preservation' or just hosting pirated works on an anonymous, free service?). But then again, if someone is honest with themselves and admits that the only recourse they have if they want to experience a particular piece of media is to pirate it, it's difficult to condemn them... Which, I suppose, is just one more argument for why making one's catalog available digitally at a market-reasonable price is a great start to curbing piracy. 

1This is creating a massive headache for people looking towards the future of media. If you read the End User License Agreements of digital goods (and who does?), you'll often find that there are provisions indicating that the provider has no obligation to provide access to the good indefinitely. Some services, such as Amazon's Kindle e-book reader or MP3 store basically give you a copy of the files, so you can be responsible and back them up yourself. Other services - especially as relates to movies and software - require authorization keys locking the media to a particular piece of hardware, and/or access to internet servers to authenticate the product everytime it's used. When those servers go down, what happens? 

2For anyone interested, it's really fascinating to look up the details of the failed videogame console known as the Sega Saturn. The Saturn was such a unique and custom piece of hardware that software designed on it was almost impossible to run on other systems. Just for starters, it was a 3D system that rendered quadrilateral polygons rather than the triangular polygons used by every other system up to present, meaning that it was incompatible with the design software used by everyone else. To this day, it remains one of the most difficult if not nigh impossible systems to emulate, and almost no big originally Saturn-specific titles have ever been released on retro-gaming services, legal or otherwise.

3Yes, I did intentionally, implicitly compare the Star Wars Holiday Special to Hamlet.  

Some Difficulties with Historical Narratives...

I've finally managed to choke my way through David Sheff's Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World (1999; Random House Digital), which is a fairly dense history of Nintendo, focusing primarily on how they took over the North American market after the 'great videogame crash of 1983'. Unfortunately, I say 'choke through' because I didn't think that the book was particularly good, partially because it doesn't seem to be quite sure of what kind of story it wants to tell (it's got some long, rather uninteresting tangents and unreferenced, 'editorialized' claims). It also stumbles into a few other issues that I've regularly encountered in the odd historical narrative I've read. So, rather than discuss the book itself - which I'm sure won't interest most people - I'd rather use it as a springboard for a larger discussion.

I'm certain that writing a complex history, be it about a single individual, a company, or even a country, is a difficult and daunting task. Books (unless they're written by Terry Pratchett) are organized into sections, and each section is typically centered around a theme or idea. As most of us know, history isn't so neat. One problem is simply historical demarcation: You may date the beginning of the Renaissance to some specific period of the 14th century, but you'd be hard pressed to have noticed a big change if you were living in Florence at the time. Another issue is that multiple major events may be occurring concurrently. If you divide them into separate chapters, you often unintentionally give them the appearance of being much more unrelated than they actually were.

A good author may be able to overcome such issues, but the big killer for me is that of context. The actual state of what was going on around any narrative is absolutely necessary to any interpretation of the past. Without it decisions can seem inexplicable, and events can seem completely random, etc. If you're jumping back and forth in time so that you can parcel your story into neat little concepts, it's easy to lose sight of what the external circumstances were during any given period. This can be brutal, especially in a book about such a fast moving field as technology.

Another issue that specifically applies to narratives about the near-past is solipsism. It's quite common for individuals to narrate the broader themes of history from their own particular experiences. But such a perspective is a disservice to the reader, especially in an ostensibly 'researched' book. For instance, if I were to write a book about computers right now, based only on what I saw while working in the San Francisco Bay Area among academics, I'd probably argue the Apple was the world's dominant PC manufacturer and that 40% of America's population were hipsters. Global markets need to be put into a global context.

Finally, I'd like to bring up a pet peeve of mine that probably has a lot to do with my training as a scientist. It's not really part of the 'historical narrative' per se, but it does tend to show up in the conclusions of a lot of these books about companies or individuals. Let me set it up as a question: Has any piece of hype or prediction from a corporate exec in a tech company ever really come close to becoming reality? I mean like, become realized within say 10 years of when it was predicted to occur? Seriously, I've read countless stories in which executives talk about the 'world of the future', where your fridge communicates with your watch and 'multimedia' becomes the new reality, blah, blah, blah. While the wheels of progress grind ahead inexorably, in the short term, new technology is pretty much the same as old technology, only slightly prettier and a bit faster.

Here's the rub: I'm not criticizing execs for trying to peddle their wares, but rather I'm dumbfounded by how people fall for the hype every single time. I long ago decided that 90% of everything a corporate suit says is BS, and I've taken a wait-and-see approach to every new claim about how 'thing X will be nothing short of a revolution!' And yet, so many technology writers parrot the same junk to their followers. If you're going to end your book with a prediction, how about you stick to the old standbys that pretty much explain everything - price and market. It's tough to predict the future, of course, but I didn't need the title of 'market analyst' to tell you that no one wanted to pay huge sums of money so that their families could sit on the on the couch wearing stupid-looking glasses and watch 3D TVs, for example. I also don't need a book to tell me what the suits are screaming to the press.     

The Net is a Dangerous Place...

I've been a bit troubled by the recent trend among several world governments who've attempted to pass sweeping legislation with the intent of 'regulating' the internet. Some of these bills, such as this one in Canada, basically allow warrantless 'wiretapping' of internet traffic in the name of protecting 'children' from vague threats1. Others, such as the US SOPA or CISPA bills, are ostensibly about preventing online piracy or protecting national security, but the muddied wording and over-reaching nature of the legislation makes any specific intention debatable.

The specifics of the actual laws vary, of course. Some indemnify corporations against litigation should they provide personal information to the government that violates specific privacy laws, while others allow require internet service providers (ISPs) to keep copious records. Another popular form of bill allows companies to hold web hosting services liable for the content that their users upload. Cutting through the noise, all of these 'initiatives' pretty much have the same thing in common: They all try to argue that things done on the internet are somehow markedly different from things done in other 'mediums', and therefore require that someone be given more power in regulating it.

Not wanting to treat these sorts of issues with the same black-and-white mentality that I've seen used by many pundits, there are obviously aspects to the modern internet that allow rapid, mostly anonymous dissemination of copyrighted and/or even illegal material. In addition, I'm sure that modern criminals are able to use this anonymity to their advantage.

However, I'm sure that the advent of cellular phones was a boon to crime syndicates everywhere, and yet we didn't start widespread warrantless monitoring of the public's cell phone use (before the PATRIOT act anyways, to the best of my knowledge). I think it's pretty safe to say that a criminal element will spring up in any medium where an incentive exists for people to participate in such a thing. To paraphrase Balzac (or G. Gordon Liddy): If crime didn't pay, there would be far fewer criminals. I'm sure that governments would love to trample all over our constitutional rights to privacy, but I'm willing to bet that these 'protection' bills are heavily sponsored by the same folks who want all of the 'anti-piracy' bills to go through (see below).

The problem with 'piracy' is a bit more complicated - I don't think that it's the internet that's the problem, but rather that people place little-to-no value on 'digital' goods. I've had conversations with perfectly reasonable, intelligent people who proudly showed me their collection of ~$25,000 worth of pirated software without batting an eye; but would never think of shoplifting a chocolate bar. It's also clear that the cultures of some entire countries simply don't encourage paying for any media.

All this being said, I'm not exactly sure how fighting this theft is materially any different from fighting any other theft. I mean, every other business is plagued by opportunistic 'free rides'. When I was a kid, people routinely copied tapes and movies, shared books, etc. I never heard lamentations from studio execs and publishers that every time I loaned a CD to someone, it was a lost sale. But all of a sudden, Hollywood accountants come in to tell us that piracy is costing them more by the day than they make in a year and that everyone needs to be monitored to make sure that we're all playing by the 'rules'2.

Call me cynical, but I think that there's more than a little 'rent-seeking' going on here. Giant, powerful corporations are springing out of the technology revolution and seem to be doing just fine, whereas all of these archaic giants are clinging to outdated business models and crying foul. Perhaps a younger generation doesn't 'value' a film at $20, or a hardcover book at $30, or an album at $15, etc. What's the artist's cut on those figures anyways? Methinks that these young turks - the Netflixes, Amazons, Googles, and Facebooks - have found a much more efficient and cost effective content distribution model that leaves all of the good old boys in the dust.

As always some radicals are going to use the internet to organize and cause mischief. Some jerks are going to rip off the occasional Lady Gaga album (though it's questionable if they would have bought it were it not available through pirated means), and many, many fools are going to be too slow to figure out how to keep monetizing what people no longer value as highly as they once did. But in all of this I'm sitting in front of what is undoubtedly the greatest tool in human history in terms of disseminating and democratizing information, fostering cross-cultural interaction, and generally lifting the veil of opaqueness that's settled over that question of 'what's going on over there' for thousands and thousands of years. It's a marketplace of ideas that will compete for mental real estate with a much smaller barrier to entry than traditional mediums - that is, so long as it's kept free of what largely amounts to special-interest sponsored tampering.

The net is a dangerous place, at least in the traditional sense of the word, meaning 'threatening'. The question is 'threatening to whom'?   

1I have this constant, nagging problem with pretty much everything I hear about children (in the broad sense) these days. See, I did all kinds of stuff that I'm now being told is psychologically devastating to children, but I turned out just fine. I played insanely violent video games (there were no ratings back then), watched M-rated movies, read 'adult' fiction, and went to some of the most disturbing sites on the net regularly. In fact, we all did and most of us turned out ok. I'm hard pressed to think of anyone I know who didn't turn out so well that can't be explained by a terrible family situation or a series of 'real life' problems. I certainly can't think of any kid who say, glanced at pornography, only to have his or her life go spiraling out of control despite the best efforts of their family and friends. I think we're yet again completely misplacing our fears in the direction of things that old people can't understand, like rock-and-roll, or comics. Oh, and if you're concerned about the 'legions' of pedophiles lurking on the internet, then don't let your kid use it. Or maybe you could educated them or whatever before you buy them that iPhone.

2Have you ever tried to read one of these 'End-User License Agreements' that comes with software? They're ridiculous.