alQpr | what you see is what you get

Cave Man DidnT Have Classrooms

Posted on 2007-10-03 by alan

I got this post by Roger Schank via Stephen Downes and share Stephen’s concern with some of its polemical conclusions. The following counterpoint to Schank’s article may be a bit silly, but no more so than the original. Continue reading →

Posted in education, mathematics | Leave a comment

CRIA cries the blues on the problem they created

Posted on 2007-09-18 by alan

This is Downes’ take on Geist’s comments on CRIA’s break with the CPCC. When I finally reveal my solution to the conundrum of how to fairly and efficiently assign costs to users and compensation to producers, all who should be awed by my achievement will instead be dismissive and contemptuous of my naivete.

Posted in canada, copyright | Leave a comment

The Reality Club: MORAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION

Posted on 2007-09-18 by alan

In The Reality Club: MORAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION Jonathan Haidt seems close to getting the point. He hasn’t quite nailed it, but then neither have I, so I can’t quite say what needs to be added or changed but there definitely is something . . .

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Eggheads – The Boston Globe

Posted on 2007-09-18 by alan

Eggheads – The Boston Globe

Ravens and octopi both give me hope for the future of intelligence on this planet.

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60 Quality AJAX Resources and Tutorials – Software Developer

Posted on 2007-09-18 by alan

60 Quality AJAX Resources and Tutorials – Software Developer

This is just something for me to look at more closely when I get time

Posted in AJAX, web | Leave a comment

Probability of Occurring by Chance

Posted on 2007-08-14 by alan

In this post at squareCircleZ, Professor Bruce Armstrong from the Sydney Cancer Centre at the University of Sydney is quoted as saying “The probability the that increase is due simply to chance is about one in a million so we are looking at something that is almost certainly a real increase in risk”. But this is almost certainly a misstatement since the probability that something is due simply to chance is not computable and probably not even meaningful whereas the probability of its happening in a randomly chosen situation from a well defined population of cases is meaningful and often computable. Either concept could be expressed by the ambiguous title of this post but they are definitely NOT the same – as can be seen from the following example. If I win the lottery without cheating then the probability of it having happened by chance (in the sense of having only chance factors involved) is in fact 1 but the probability of it happening by chance (ie of it happening given that only chance factors were involved) was less than one in a million. Of course, if we don’t assume that I didn’t cheat, the probability that my win was due only to chance may be less, but in any event it is not the same as my chances of winning a fair game. For a more practically relevant example consider the case of an experiment which identifies an effect of some sort “at the 95% confidence level”. What this means is that the probability of the observation occurring if only random effects were present is no more than about 1 in 20. But then in a set of many trials it is likely that up to about 5% of them will actually appear to show the effect. Users of statistics need to be aware of this distinction since in an experiment which collects more than six variables (as many in the social sciences do) there are more than 21 pairs to consider and so in an average such experiment at least one such pair will seem to have a significant relationship even when no such relationship actually exists.

All this is actually relevant to the story about cancer clusters since, in a world with several million observed groups of a hundred or so people, if the chance of a cluster happening given only random factors is one in a million then we may expect to see several such clusters occurring just by chance.

Posted in mathematics, science, statistics | Leave a comment

Leaning Tower Illusion

Posted on 2007-08-12 by alan

My friend Gerry Pareja forwarded a link to this story from ‘Improbable Research’ about the first prize winner in the Neural Correlate Society’s 2007 Illusion of the Year contest.

The image certainly is pretty cool. But to test the explanation I tried covering each image in turn and the effect was still there! I wondered if there was a perceptual delay effect in that our memory of one picture affects our interpretation of the other but then I also noticed that the effect changes depending on where the picture is in our field of view. If I position myself facing the right hand edge of the monitor, then the right hand tower seems more vertical and the left one almost seems to lean left or backwards. So the illusion may be more (or at least partly) due to the fact that in the absense of other visual cues in the picture we tend to interpret as if viewed from the direction at which we are looking at the picture – ie we interpret the picture edge as a window frame.

Posted in arts and culture, photography, psychology | Leave a comment

Basskin Misrepresents Media Levy

Posted on 2007-08-10 by alan

David Basskin, Director of the CanadianPrivate Copying Collective, has written a letter to the Star in response to Michael Geist’s earlier comments about the media levy and its prospects of its being extended to mp3 players and perhaps even computer hard drives.

Basskin says “The private copying levy is an important source of revenue for music-rights holders and is an issue of fairness”, and goes on to claim that “The levy is often misunderstood. It is not a tax or subsidy, but payment to individual rights holders for use of music by Canadians in the privacy of their homes. Compensation for use – that’s fair”.

But of course the levy is NOT fair because it extracts funds from people who purchase data storage media for purposes having nothing to do with the products of Basskins’ clients and so in fact it IS a tax and subsidy.

What is particularly frustrating about this is the fact that there is a perfect opportunity for the sellers of music recordings to obtain compensation for whatever pattern of reproduction they expect from their customers, and that is at the point of sale. Extracting that compensation later from others who may have no interest in the product just amounts to artificially lowering the price. This may be good for sales and it may even be in the public interest to subsidize artistic products in some way, but this particular approach to gaining that subsidy is fundamentally dishonest and the legislators who were persuaded to go along with it have been conned and bamboozled.

One other aspect of this situation that is worth mentioning is that many who object to the levy might still be willing to entertain a more honestly defined subsidy – paid from honestly defined taxes. But taxes should be collected by the government not by private organizations.

Posted in arts and culture, canada, copyright | Leave a comment

Media Company Thieves Coming Back For More

Posted on 2007-08-02 by alan

In TheStar.com – entertainment – Tax on MP3 players may return, David Basskin, director of the Canadian Private Copying Collective, is quoted as saying:

“When you have bought a CD, you don’t own the music – you own the copy of the music that you’ve purchased,” he says. “You’re not buying the rights to make copies.”

“People are going to do private copying, and the levy legitimizes it and provides compensation to the people who created the music. It’s pretty hard to say why that’s not fair,”

No its bloody well not hard to see at all!!!

{Warning:obscenities coming} Continue reading →

Posted in arts and culture, canada, copyright | Leave a comment

squareCircleZ » Zipf Distributions, log-log graphs and Site Statistics

Posted on 2007-07-29 by alan

squareCircleZ » Zipf Distributions, log-log graphs and Site Statistics

Posted in mathematics | Leave a comment

Bonobo Swingers?

Posted on 2007-07-27 by alan

Arts&Letters Daily pointed to this fine essay by Ian Parker in The New Yorker. It really is an interesting and entertaining blend of anecdote, history, and good science reporting.

Posted in biology | Leave a comment

Even the New Yorker Gets it Wrong

Posted on 2007-07-27 by alan

ok, This may be a picayune comment in the context of a serious issue, but in David Remnick’s Letter from Jerusalem: The Apostate: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker he refers to Avram Burg’s “flouting of the fact that he holds a French passport”. Of course the common ignorami more often go the other way and have angry demonstrators “flaunting authority” so at least favouring the more hi-toned word is consistent with the New Yorker’s self-perceived station in the world. But perhaps this flaunting of editorial incompetence may encourage others to flaut the magazine’s presumed authority.

Posted in arts and culture, language | Leave a comment

Revisiting the Potential of Free Content ~ Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes

Posted on 2007-07-26 by alan

Revisiting the Potential of Free Content ~ Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes

Posted in copyright | Leave a comment

Privileged Peer Review – Whose Opinion Counts? ~ Stephens Web ~ by Stephen Downes

Posted on 2007-07-26 by alan

Privileged Peer Review – Whose Opinion Counts? ~ Stephens Web ~ by Stephen Downes

Posted in validation | Leave a comment

AlterNet: Environment: What to Say to Those Who Think Nuclear Power Will Save Us

Posted on 2007-07-25 by alan

AlterNet: has reprinted an article from ‘Orion’ magazine by someone called Rebecca Solnit who claims to be giving advice on: What to Say to Those Who Think Nuclear Power Will Save Us though what she is really arguing is not just that nuclear power is not a panacaea, but that it must be excluded at all costs – and the tone of her argument (as with many on the climate bandwagon) makes it plain that she is more interested in using the threat of global warming to justify the imposition of behavioural constraints than she is on actually doing everything possible to reduce our emissions of CO2. Unfortunately she has nothing new to add to the debate, but some of the exchanges in the comments are more interesting. Much of the discussion on both sides is sufficiently vacuous and polemical as to strain one’s faith in democracy, but at least some of it is decent and it is up to the reader to assess which of the commenters appear to have the more credible arguments. Personally, I come down pretty firmly on the side of those who see a substantial increase in nuclear power generation as an essential component of any strategy for the mitigation of our environmental impact. But even with it, and with everything else we can possibly do, we’re headed to where snowballs have no chance unless the other big unmentionable, population control, is also pushed hard and fast.

Posted in sustainability | Leave a comment