Rebane's Ruminations

Courtroom Evidence – the Z/M case (updated 28apr12)

George Rebane

Reason and logic have always had a low survival rate in courtrooms, especially where poorly understood evidence of a technical nature is presented by self-serving lawyers to innumerate juries.  In recent memory, the OJ Simpson murder trial may serve as a nationally prominent Exhibit A for this proposition.

Today we have the much examined and touted (for various agendas) Zimmerman/Martin shooting case that will soon be going to trial.   Much effort and focus is put on a piece of recorded audio that appears to have become the evidence by which Zimmerman’s claim of justifiable homicide will stand or fall.  This audio clip is now undergoing forensic analysis by state agencies and private parties having court-acknowledged expertise in matters pertaining to analyzing speech.  Some of these experts have apparently weighed in with some “preliminary findings” which now serve as grist for the media mill and a large gaggle of very opinionated bloggers, commenters, and self-appointed jurists in the blogosphere.

RR has chosen not to join this cohort opining on Zimmerman’s guilt or innocence, instead we wish to use the case to examine the larger questions of ‘stand your ground’ victims’ rights, and in this  piece how to properly look at reported evidence in such cases.  In the following we take a look at a report on the blog of “legal scholar” Professor Jonathan Turley by guest poster Mark Esposito.

I have no idea of Mr Esposito’s qualifications, but simply post his opening paragraph that also happens to be his summa.

The  chair emeritus for the American Board of Recorded Evidence, Tom Owen, and Ed Primeau, a Michigan-based audio engineer and forensics expert, have independently concluded that the furtive pleas for help clearly heard on the 911 tapes are not George Zimmerman’s. Both acknowledged experts used voice enhancing software, but different techniques, to rate the probability of the voice being Zimmerman’s at no more than 48%.  A 90% match is considered scientifically reliable.

So there you have it, the case is seemingly closed.  But not quite.

Making Medical Decisions

George Rebane

[This introduction to modern medical decision making is intended as the first of a series of such essays on RR.  Subsequent pieces will cover simplifying nomograms (to avoid the arithmetic), personal utility (always subjective), and planning sequential diagnostics and treatments.  The aim here is to prepare the intelligent healthcare customer to communicate effectively with the healthcare industry and make prudent decisions for his own benefit.  A related background tutorial by the author for this piece is 'Hello Bayes Theorem!']

The healthcare industry woefully lags in many areas, but helping patients make correct decisions about their individual healthcare is where healthcare providers, led by attending physicians, are pathetically behind the times.  Let me explain.

Judea Pearl wins 2011 Turing Award

George Rebane

The Association for Computing Machinery announced today that it has named Dr Judea Pearl of the University of California, Los Angeles as the recipient of the A.M. Turing Award for 2011.  The announcement itself begins –

NEW YORK, March 15, 2012—ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Judea Pearl of the University of California, Los Angeles the winner of the 2011 ACM A.M. Turing Award for innovations that enabled remarkable advances in the partnership between humans and machines that is the foundation of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Pearl pioneered developments in probabilistic and causal reasoning and their application to a broad range of problems and challenges. He created a computational foundation for processing information under uncertainty, a core problem faced by intelligent systems. He also developed graphical methods and symbolic calculus that enable machines to reason about actions and observations, and to assess cause-effect relationships from empirical findings. His work serves as the standard method for handling uncertainty in computer systems, with applications ranging from medical diagnosis, homeland security and genetic counseling to natural language understanding and mapping gene expression data. His influence extends beyond artificial intelligence and even computer science, to human reasoning and the philosophy of science.

The Turing Award, widely considered the "Nobel Prize in Computing," carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc. It is named for the British mathematician Alan M. Turing, whose 100th anniversary will be celebrated in June at the ACM 2012 Turing Centenary Celebration that includes 34 past Turing Award winners along with Pearl.

"Like Alan Turing himself, Pearl turned his thinking to constructing procedures that might be harnessed to perform tasks traditionally associated with human intelligence," said Vint Cerf, chair of the ACM 2012 Turing Centenary Celebration, and a former ACM Turing Award recipient. "His accomplishments over the last 30 years have provided the theoretical basis for progress in artificial intelligence and led to extraordinary achievements in machine learning, and they have redefined the term 'thinking machine.'" Cerf pointed to Pearl’s innovation as a quantum leap from Turing’s "test" dating to the 1950s, when Turing set out to discover if machines could think. "Pearl's work on reasoning with uncertainty as well as his game˗changing contributions to machine reasoning about causality have had a pervasive influence not only on machine learning but on natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, computational biology, econometrics, cognitive science, and statistics," Cerf said.

The rest of the announcement may be read here.

Judea Pearl and I first became acquainted as colleagues on various defense research projects during the 1970s when he consulted for the small ‘black studies’ company that I headed during that period.  Subsequently our families became friends and over the years we spent many evenings in exciting discussions and song (Judea on guitar and me on the keyboard - Judea is an excellent musician in voice, choral, and several instruments.).  It was Judea who convinced me to complete my doctorate and join his small troupe of students at UCLA working on the various research tasks that served as the halo around the magnificent tour de force that Judea Pearl presented to the world when he showed how Bayesian networks could be constructed and correctly computed.

Once his 1988 Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference was published, Bayes nets became and have remained the state-of-the-art in machine intelligence.  Bayesian inference now is the standard in all applications that required correct probabilistic reasoning, decisions under uncertainty, and management of risk - in short in all human endeavors.  Every field that has not embraced what Pearl started with Bayes is now scrambling to catch up.

I have long had the honor of calling Judea Pearl my teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend.  Those of us who had the good fortune to recognize early his genius and accomplishments were amply rewarded by what he taught us, and how he guided our individual contributions (my own humble efforts were in machine learning and causality).  It is most appropriate that Judea now joins the pantheon of the recognized greats in computer science. 

From Lysenko Loonies to Climate Change Clowns

George Rebane

The 27jan12 WSJ publishes a major piece ‘No Need to Panic About Global Warming’ signed by sixteen science and technology heavyweights.  From my perspective as a systems scientist, I long ago joined the once lonely voices that pointed out that the climate change alarmists (especially of the anthropogenic global warming stripe) were intellectually naked shills with a pernicious political agenda.

Led by internationally recognized serious science commentators (links on right) like Anthony Watts, and locally by Russ Steele, the voices of reason and scientific accuracy have been growing and becoming more prominent over the last years.  But the political steamroller has yet to show significant slowing.  AGW is now a recognized and much applied tool of the political Left which uses it at every turn to remove individual liberties and shackle economies.

The authors of the cited piece point out the eerie similarities of how politicized science today recalls the days of church proscribed scientific enquiry and communist mandated politically correct sciences of (Lysenko, et.al.) of the USSR during the first half of the 20th century.  We are there again with claimed “incontrovertible evidence” that AGW exists.  Science contains no incontrovertible evidence, and once ‘evidence’ is so ascribed, it exits the halls of reasonable enquiry and science and enters the temples of religion.

The piece concludes –

A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.

If elected officials feel compelled to "do something" about climate, we recommend supporting the excellent scientists who are increasing our understanding of climate with well-designed instruments on satellites, in the oceans and on land, and in the analysis of observational data. The better we understand climate, the better we can cope with its ever-changing nature, which has complicated human life throughout history. However, much of the huge private and government investment in climate is badly in need of critical review.

Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of "incontrovertible" evidence.

The Value of Stereotyping

George Rebane

Stereotyping is the use of a template of characteristics that are thought to belong to members of a particular class more frequently than members of the general population of which the class is a subset.  The template of characteristics is also known as the stereotypical characteristics like, say, a plastic pocket protector full of writing instruments more often seen in the shirt pockets of male engineers than in the pockets of other men.

Stereotyping has gotten a bad rap in our society, and its use is roundly criticized in the public forum.  However, stereotyping, so as to assign or exclude someone from membership in a given class, is built in to almost every critter that lives on this planet.  Why?  Simply because it is a low cost survival technique that has evolved in all species to simplify quick decisions about the famous ‘Three F’ functions – feed, fight, or mount - important to everyone.

But if you understand the underpinnings of stereotyping, it can be a valuable tool in making all kinds of decisions, and also serve as a mirror for better understanding yourself.  I was motivated to write this piece when recently reading Daniel Kahneman’s monumental Thinking, Fast and Slow which dances around the subject without getting into the nitty-gritty of it because of the little math involved.  Kahneman, recent Nobelist and co-father of behavioral economics with the late Amos Tversky, is also a giant in the field of psychology.  In that field stereotyping comes up under the forbidding label of representativeness (q.v. – which is short for quod vide or ‘which see’, and I’ve concluded that its modern version is simply ‘google it’.)

Now consider seeing a good looking woman, finely coiffed, beautifully dressed, and dripping with expensive jewelry, getting out of a chauffeured limousine in front of a fancy restaurant.  You wonder if she’s a member of the currently notorious ‘1%’.  More particularly, what are the chances (friendly word for ‘probability’) that she is a member of that exclusive class, given she has some of the stereotypical characteristics of that class that you just observed?  If you had been facing the other way and your friend told you that a woman just got out a car behind you; then without seeing her, what would you answer if he mused whether the woman belonged to the '1%'?

Science still says, ‘Creation occurred.’

George Rebane

The best brains in cosmology ranging from Stephen Hawking of Cambridge to Alan Guth of MIT have been trying to munge the equations and the data to come up with some/any kind of support for the proposition that the universe did not have a beginning.

NewScientist.com reports in ‘Why physicists can’t avoid a creation event’ -

YOU could call them the worst birthday presents ever. At the meeting of minds convened last week to honour Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday - loftily titled "State of the Universe" - two bold proposals posed serious threats to our existing understanding of the cosmos.

One shows that a problematic object called a naked singularity is a lot more likely to exist than previously assumed (see "Naked black-hole hearts live in the fifth dimension"). The other suggests that the universe is not eternal, resurrecting the thorny question of how to kick-start the cosmos without the hand of a supernatural creator.

While many of us may be OK with the idea of the big bang simply starting everything, physicists, including Hawking, tend to shy away from cosmic genesis. "A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God," Hawking told the meeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech.

After looking under every theoretical rock available today, and then some, the bottom line is that “all these theories still demand a beginning.”

As a proponent of Intelligent Design (not to be confused with Creationism), I continue to celebrate such corroborative reports as satisfying Occam’s razor to the max.

'The Next Grand Minimum' Launches

George Rebane

Russ Steele, Nevada County blogger extraordinaire, closed down his long running NC Media Watch blog.  He has moved his blogging enterprise to a new blog - 'The Next Grand Minimum' - that was launched today.  In this research and publishing effort he will focus on real climate change backed by science that is yet to be tainted by politics.  Specifically, he will present ongoing scientific evidence - imported and generated - that will validate or falsify the advent of the next grand minimum (NGM) in earth's ever changing climate.

Grand minima in precipitation and temperature have occurred cyclically throughout the millenia, and the next one appears due in the lifetime of those of us here now.  Russ will collect, develop, and present evidence that is relative to the advent of this civilization impacting event.

I and most RR readers wish Russ the best in his new and important endeavor.  RR has installed a permanent link to the blog in the 'Our Links' section in the right panel.  We expect many points to the published work on that site.

Break a leg Russ!

How Social Engineering (almost always) Fails

George Rebane

Big government’s (centrally controlled) social programs have a daunting history of failures that more often than not spill over to spread their hurt into other unintended areas.  An excellent example of this – 'The State Against Blacks' - is given by economist Walter Williams in the 22jan11 WSJ.  Today we have entered the epoch of large government programs that range from long-entrenched farm subsidies through various targeted welfare and ‘stimulus’ programs to nationalized healthcare.  In this piece I would like to give a scientist’s view of how to look at and think about such programs with the goal of understanding their large-scale operational characteristics.  And further, how eventual failure is built into the very structural make-up of every such program.

From the gitgo I have to declare that this will not be an easy read, and damn near impossible for the innumerate (see numeracy).  My apologies are tempered by the reality that EVERY significant social issue comes down to understanding ‘the numbers’ involved in its framing and implementation.  Here ‘the numbers’ actually refer to a broader toolset from the system sciences.  So let’s dive in.

Singularity Signposts - Consciousness and Coprocessors and …

George Rebane

In 1976 Julian Jaynes, the late Princeton psychologist, developed in three volumes his groundbreaking theory of consciousness.  Combined between one set of covers in 1990, it was called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.  In this mouthful Dr Jaynes presented a definition of consciousness from which people comprised of renown philosophers to computer scientists have found hard to escape.

In the The Origin he takes us through a fascinating journey of the early history of western civilization, theory of language in guiding/constraining thought (google Sapir-Whorf), to the operational definition of the bicameral mind.  Jaynes argues that the bicameral mind is all anyone had up to the beginning of the Dorian invasions around 1,200 BC.  These invasions originating from the Middle East (Persia et al) caused a fundamental change in the agrarian societies of the greater Near East that includes Greece, the Levantine, and Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq to the Mediterranean and up north through Turkey and Greece).  The book is a page turner, and its successful reading should conclude with the award of at least sixteen upper division unit credits at a first rate university.

Scientists and philosophers have muddled for centuries about what consciousness really is.  Jaynes develops a meticulous case that consciousness is a sometime thing, a mental state in which a human actually practices the introspection of planning and simulating the real world in which the ‘I’ and ‘me’ are actors and objects of contemplation.  As such, it is quickly realized that during most of our day we are going through routines of behavior and dealing with the external world in a semi-autopilot mode which is really not conscious behavior.  Lower critters, and today machines, can be taught to replicate such interactions with their surroundings.

God Gets to Stay

George Rebane

This week I finished reading The Grand Design by Drs Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.  I posted earlier on a review of their new book at ‘Evicting God – The Latest Attempt’ which generated an interesting comment thread.

 

Hawking and Mlodinow have a best seller on their hands (it’s already number one in hardcover non-fiction), and fortunately the writing style is vintage Hawking – compact, simple, and to the point - that includes his occasional humorous injections.  The book is a first class, high quality production with generous use of lavish illustrations and the occasional cartoon that prevents us from getting too serious about the subject.  Actually, the subject is serious since H&M have nothing less in mind than explaining the ultimate nature of reality to us.

At the start our intrepid authors state that their objective is to answer these questions –

Why is there something rather than nothing?
Why do we exist?
Why this particular set of laws and not some other?

And they give it a mighty try, arriving in the end at a point that is close enough for government work.  But along the way we learn so many things from such a short essay (the entire book is under 200 pages).  We are given a surprisingly thorough overview of the history of human thought about existence and the universe.  And even before that we are assured that “philosophy is dead”, and then have some pretty heavy duty philosophy poured over our heads for the remainder of the book.