Rebane's Ruminations

Scattershots – 6may19 (updated 9may19)

It is the ultimate fantasy that we can live our lives, or at any rate live them in peace and contentment with each other, without ever having to share a common reality. - James Bowman

George Rebane

An example of fake news.  Apple News is a very comprehensive news website for Mac, iPad, and iPhone users, one that allows you to customize with your interests, and then augments the format with your viewing history – in short, it snoops in your user sessions.  Recently it included a piece from the National Geographic reporting on the military marine mammal programs of Russia and US (here).  I was a bit astounded that almost everything they reported on the US program was either false or grossly misleading.  Full disclosure – I and my company spent years supporting the US Navy’s marine mammal (and other animal) R&D programs as their analytical support team doing the heavy lifting in the math, data analysis, and systems design work.

The 6may19 Union’s op-ed has two pieces from our favorite leftwing columnists, Dr Milan Vodicka (search RR) and, of course, Mr George Boardman.  Dr Vodicka delivered one of his trademark muddled sermons on the joys of socialism (not posted yet).  There he attempted to augment Bertand Russell’s three factors motivating human behavior with a fractured taxonomy that makes absolutely no sense to the careful reader, and then went on to celebrate the free nationalized healthcare systems found in EU countries.  In the latter, he drinks the kool-aid by the gallon, and evinces no understanding of the realities that obtain.  Mr Boardman presents a good critique of the Republican California Senate candidates Assemblymen Dahle and Kiley, and then blows a tire describing the Democrat Audrey Denny attempting unseat Congressman LaMalfa (here).  Without so much as a smidgen of qualification or sourcing, he tells the reader that the Green New Deal is “a sweeping national plan to zero-out emissions and provide clean energy and infrastructure jobs to millions.”  Apparently, our columnist continues to have trouble distinguishing between objectives and plans, and reports the GND as actually being a plan.  Regardless, objectives or plans, It has a snowball’s chance in hell of accomplishing anything touted.

[7may19 update]  Spying v. Surveillance.  I don’t know why this is so difficult for the media talking heads to resolve (those on FN, not the lamestream whose agenda is known).  A nation’s law enforcement agency does surveillance (on an individual, group, organization) when the target of such intelligence gathering involves a domestic issue/parties that does NOT involve the presumed culpability of a foreign government.  That same agency conducts a spying operation when it seeks to gather intelligence on a matter that does involve a foreign government.  To infiltrate a domestic gang, you send in an 'undercover agent'; to surveil or infiltrate foreign government operations, you employ/send in 'spies'. That is the way we have successfully defined spying v. surveillance for generations.  Since Obama’s FBI et al were convinced from the gitgo that Team Trump was in cahoots with Russia, their surreptitious intelligence gathering efforts were clearly spying.

[8may19 update]  Upcoming tariffs increase on Chinese goods this Friday (10may19) is supposed to be in retaliation for the Chinese reneging on parts of the two countries’ established trade agreements and/or the progress made in the current negotiations.  And there’s a big debate on whether President Trump is doing the right thing with this retaliation.  The debate would be moot if the administration just published the details of China’s renege.  I don’t know why the big secret in not putting it out for all to see and judge for themselves as to the relative magnitudes of the offense vs the response.  Everyone involved in such negotiations around the world already knows what has gone down; the only ones ignorant who will be affected by it all are the people of China and America.  I can understand the communists keeping their people in the dark (it’s their nature), but I can’t see why our government also keeps us in the dark.

AG Barr will be held in contempt of a Democrat House, and that is again denigrating the intelligence of their own constituents – why?  Simply because they can.  They know that in the aggregate, Democrat voters have little or no idea how our government works or what the laws are, and they overwhelmingly consume media outlets that cynically keep them in the dark.  The rest of us know that AG Barr is under no legal imperative to release any of the Mueller report to anyone, or to even reveal its main contents/conclusions – why?  Because the special prosecutor came up with nothing with which to prosecute anyone.  (He diddled away the people’s money on a self-serving sideshow nailing individuals on process crimes, people who had nothing to do with his commissioned charter, and then wrote the best anti-Trump political blueprint that he could.)  Now scumbag Nadler is going to up it a notch and hold Barr in contempt for not releasing information that is against the law for him to release - please reread this.  And none of it has anything to do with Congress’ oversight function for legislative purposes.  Moreover, the whole thing is a total bag of bullcrap that Democrats are dealing out to their know-nothings as part and parcel of the Big Lie – i.e. anything it will take to defeat Trump in 2020.

[9may19 update] Well boys and girls, your humble host has now visited a genuine, legal pot shop.  A good friend (known to you all) with whom I often take lunch, took me on a tour of the Elevation 2477 cannabis dispensary in Nevada City.  The experience was quite remarkable.  We entered into an immaculate reception area at the end of which sat a uniformed security officer behind (bulletproof?) glass.  The room contained a nice couch and an abstract painting presumably abstracting some visions customers may enjoy after imbibing of the establishment’s offerings.  We were invited to the window to place our driver’s licenses against the glass to be scanned, and I being a newbie, was instructed to fill in a store “membership application”, studying the store’s rules, and then putting my John Hancock declaring that I understood everything.  My friend was already a member, so my joining up allowed us both to be ushered into the inner sanctum housing the stash.

The store itself was immaculately laid out with neat glass-cased counters displaying all the desiderata in various forms and at various concentrations of THC and CBD.  For the cognoscenti, this was no doubt a very inviting display as evinced by the palaver carried on between other customers and clerks, all of whom were very knowledgeable of both their products and the applicable legalese.  After getting some answers to my questions, my friend made a very modest purchase of probably their most benign SKU, and we made our way to the exit.  Then I noticed that the store’s walls each had a magnificent abstract painting cum mural on it, replicating their foyer and no doubt reinforcing visually the promises made by the cleverly named substances and concoctions.  As we left the premises, it occurred to me that I am now marked for life.

The American AI Initiative & herding cats

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 13 February 2019.]

The entire field of artificial or machine intelligence (AI) seems to be more misunderstood by the day, and not only on Main Street, but also in the highest levels of government.  President Trump recently signed an executive order to launch the American AI Initiative.  The purpose of this whatever it is, is to “focus federal government resources to develop AI” in order to “increase our prosperity, enhance our national and economic security, and improve quality of life for the American people.”

Deciding with Minimally Known Processes

George Rebane

[Trigger warning - this post is primarily for our technically oriented readers.]

We encounter ongoing minimally known processes (MKPs) continually in our daily round, and we often need to make decisions based on the likelihood of their terminating during a specific future time interval, or surviving it.  Yet few are aware of this perspective of the daily round, and fewer yet know how to obtain quantitative information from such processes, information that is important for decisions in such fields as finance, medicine, environmental risk, and other areas of science and technology.

The ongoing MKPs considered here are 1) a process about which we know only its age, or when the process started (label these MKPA); and 2) a process about which we know only its lifetime, or the length of time before such a process terminates (label these MKPL).  Both kinds of such observed and observable processes are of interest in that we want to know the probability the process will end during or survive through a specified future time interval.  A simple example of a MKPA is, say, a spring which started flowing five years ago, and today we want to know how likely it is stop sometime during the next nine months (or its complement, how likely is it to continue through the next nine months).  An example of a MKPL query is, given that such an ongoing process is known to last ten days, what is the probability that it will end or continue through the next 90 minutes.

The answers to such and even more complex questions can be calculated quickly through the use of formulas whose development is based on an ingenious application of the Copernican Principle first demonstrated on an MKPA problem by physicist J Richard Gott in 1993.  For reasons unknown, his work was discussed briefly and then quietly laid to rest.  My own involvement began with its serendipitous discover while researching approaches to solving another problem.  Since then, I have reformulated Gott’s work to expand and obviate its applicability, and expanded it to the class of MKPLs.  An interesting use of MKPLs is in allocating resources in the observation of periodic processes about which we only know their periodicity.

I have found these results useful in my own analysis of securities’ performance, and in making of healthcare decisions.  A little thinking on what processes qualify with the Copernican approach to minimally known (understood) processes continues to yield new uses.  As an important footnote to the application of this theory is in Bayesian decision making that require a reasonable prior probability to kick off the calculations as new evidence comes in.

We looked at MKPAs in a previous RR post here.  To update the elements of this theory and its resultant formulas, I have written a short technical note which you can download here - Download TN1902-1_lifetimeMKP

Scoping Your Rifle

George Rebane

OK boys and girls, time to take a break from our usual work of solving the world’s socio-political problems.  Today we’re going to look at a new and, hopefully, better method for scoping your rifle.  I am a lifelong shooter and also a military and NRA trained range safety officer (RSO).  As a longtime member of our local Sportsmen shooting club (rifle, pistol, trap, archery), I do my required club work hours serving several times a year as the rifle/pistol RSO on Sunday afternoons when the club opens its outdoor range to the public.

You shooters can imagine the stories I have stored up over the years helping (the mostly inexperienced) shooters and keeping them from accidentally killing someone.  Well, one of the tasks I’m frequently asked to help with is scoping the rifle of a guest or member who is not quite clear on the concept.  To scope a rifle means to align the scope with the rifle’s barrel so that a shotgroup’s centroid is close to the center of the bullseye at a given range (say, 100 yds) when shot with the scope’s crosshairs, or point of aim (POA), centered on the bullseye.

Calling Global Warming a Hoax can be Confusing!

[Russ Steele is a regular contributor and commenter in these pages.  He hosts Sierra Foothills Commentary, a blog that focuses on the ongoing debate about the science behind the highly politicized ‘climate change’ issue.  RR invites submitted bylines from various viewpoints on a wide spectrum of issues.  gjr]

By Russ Steele

Let’s be clear, climate change is not a hoax, the climate on this planet has demonstrated a wide range of variability over millions of years and continues to vary year to year, as the oceans warm and cool, orbits around the sun change, and the sun’s output varies.  No hoax, it is real.

So why would President Trump call global warming a hoax?  Perhaps, because there was a hoax played on the American people by a group of climate scientists as to the cause of current climate variations, claiming it was human generated CO2.

Red Pill America has the hoax story, in Episode 7, a podcast by Patrick Courrielche who has done an excellent job of telling the story in a way that all can understand. Even global warmers can follow and understand the story, and the basis for the hoax label. That is if they listen.

Listen to the Podcast HERE.  The Transcript is HERE.

As a friend of Anthony Watts and close follower of Steve McIntyre, I was an observer to the events described in this podcast. It was Steve McIntyre who got me started learning the R programming language, as I studied his Hockey Stick analysis software. I later used some of his R code in my temperature plotting programs. I am now using Python.

Listen to the biggest science heist in history and you will understand the hoax.

Scattershots – 22nov18 (updated 26nov18)

George Rebane

Forcible female mutilation is again legal in America.  “A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that the U.S. law banning female genital mutilation was unconstitutional and dismissed charges against several doctors in Michigan who carried out the procedure on underage girls as part Muslim sect’s religious practice. … U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman ruled that Congress had no authority to enact a law that criminalizes female genital mutilation (FGM). “As despicable as [FGM] may be… [Congress] overstepped its bounds” by banning the procedure, the judge said.” (more here)

Two things – imagine, if let stand, the precedence this ruling sets for all kinds of primitive practices if they are claimed in the name of this or that religious practice (and focus on the ‘forcible’ part); also, did anyone notice that it was FN that broke this news, while it was totally eschewed by the likes of lamestream’s MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, … .  Begrudgingly, 24 hrs late, leftwing outlets such the NYT started reporting on it.  But the news doesn’t fit the Left’s pro-Muslim narrative even though they should all be enraged at the anti-woman implications of this barbarous practice.  It’s tough making such choices when you have a dysfunctional ideology that you must then promote with an incoherent narrative.

Women in world class chess are not very prominent.  Today the unequal and asymmetric roles of women are much in the news and an entire politically correct protocol has emerged about how we should think about women viz men, and how we should speak about such things.  The ongoing world chess championship match between reigning champion Magnus Carlsen and challenger Fabiano Caruana (here) is renewing interest in the questions of ‘where are the women, and why aren’t they represented in such matches?’  Well, there are all kinds of answers.  An interesting one is presented by Alisha Mathewson-Grand who argues (here) that women’s chess needs more coverage than current interest warrants, and that they are not as good as men because an insufficient number of them play the game to create enough right-tail outliers in the game’s skill distribution (admittedly tech talk).  My view is that instead of creating some artificial demand for women chess players, women should just play the men in normal tournaments and beat them to generate broader female interest in the game.  Overall, I think this gender stuff in chess is a non-issue, a nothing-burger if you will.  (I wonder how a transgender woman champion will be viewed by the politically correct population.)

Man vs Machine.  My real interest in human championship chess actually resides in a new class of interests for me.  How should we humans think of continuing to compete in activities in which our abilities are clearly outclassed by machines.  Ever since Kasparov was beaten by IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997, the best chess players on this planet are no longer humans.  Continuing matches like the current Carlsen/Carauna contest are strictly Junior Varsity.  No human chess master today would take the time and make the effort to be publicly humiliated by a better chess-playing machine.  The same dethronement happened recently in the even more complex game of Go.  It all reminds us again of the lore of John Henry, the steel-drivin’ man (here and here), that introduced America to the notion early in the industrial age that bit by piece man would be bettered by machines as time went on.  Is our (waning?) interest in human world chess championships a harbinger of how pre-Singularity humans will continue to compliment themselves in various endeavors in which they have been bettered?  And will they persist in these self-adulatory activities as the daily advance of technology outdoes them in skill after skill that require advanced cognition, sensing, dexterity, speed, and strength?  Can we also start augmenting our own bodies in these pre-Singularity years (jumping the gun in becoming trans-humans) with advanced embedded processing, memory, connectivity, prosthetics for sensing, mobility, and manipulanda, …?

Border security and judicial bias political?  That's what the media claims that President Trump brought up politics in his Thanksgiving calls to our troops.  First, I don't think so.  Border security is a non-partisan issue that the anti-American Left has made political in its opposition.  Judicial bias in the US is blatant and unabashed, and it has been so deemed by all sides in their turn.  Chief Justice Roberts spoke out of the wrong end when he created the latest batch of fake news by bloviating that America's judges, once empaneled, are hardworking, unbiased jurists.  Nothing could be further from the truth, else neither side would so readily sacrifice honesty and honor in opposing the other side's picks.  The president was on the mark and correct in pointing these out during his calls; and BTW, he's their CIC and gets to do that all day long if he wants to.  The last thing he should be guided by is the hate-Trump sentiments of his political enemies.

[26nov18 update]  Why Nevada County indeed?  Russ Steele, NC native and RR contributor, writes a letter to The Union in today’s edition that nails the particulars behind that question.  Here it is in its entirety –

Erika Kosina wrote in Digital disruption: Tech, entrepreneurial ecosystem paves way for growth, "All we need to do is connect the dots."

Yes, let's connect the dots, all the dots.

Dot #1: Lack of affordable housing for young families fleeing urban blight. According to Joel Kotkin, millennials with family are looking for single family homes with a safe yard for their children.

Dot #2: Young families with children are looking for communities with quality schools. Nevada County has the Ghidotti Early College High School with a small number of students, but the recent Common Core testing indicates many Nevada County Schools would not make the competitive cut.

Dot #3: The work-at-home population needs to have high-speed internet access, and broadband in Nevada County has some severe limitations.

Dot #4: The target populations are prolific smartphone users and expect robust cell phone coverage, which can be a challenge in Nevada County.

Given the lack of affordable single-family homes with a yard, a high-speed broadband connection, with robust cell phone service, all near top-rated schools, why would a young family choose to move to Nevada County, when there are more competitive options in other states?

Yellowstone Supervolcano about to blow?

George Rebane

[This little interlude will most likely interest very few RR readers, but it has provided me a respite from the political struggles through my continuing love-affair with pushing squigglies.  Truth be told, I do this kind of stuff quite often, and who knows, there's always the off-chance that some reader may show interest.]

As we sat last Saturday morning waiting for the history making Senate confirmation vote on Judge Kavanaugh, I meandered across yet another article on the supervolcano that rumbles under Yellowstone National Park.  Geologists tell us that the volcano has erupted every 600K – 800K years or so with a devastating effect that we in recent decades have come to call a ‘nuclear winter’.  The last one occurred about 640K years ago.  When that magma dome blows again it will put so much dust, dirt, and ash into the earth’s atmosphere as to change the earth’s climate for several years starting with a two- or three-year winter that will kill much of the planet’s vegetation and critters, make agriculture near impossible, and therefore cause the wholesale death of most of us who live here – at least that’s what NASA and a covey of paleo-geologists tell us.

It turns out that modern technology today can provide a very beneficial prophylactic to prevent such an event, and in the process generate a considerable amount of clean geothermal electricity.  Scientists at NASA tell us that it would be possible to cool the molten magma bubble by drilling laterally into its sides, pumping down cold water, and harvesting super-heated steam for electricity generating powerplants on the surface.

The cost of drilling such 10km deep holes comes to almost $3.5B, add another few billion dollars to the budget to put up a powerplant or two, and you could see doing the whole thing for about $10B while lowering or completely eliminating the risk of a big blow-up.  The cost of the electricity generated in this manner comes to about $0.10/kWh – cheap at twice the price.  So why aren’t utilities rushing in there to do just that? (more here and here)

Well, the best anyone can tell is the high business risk of such an undertaking in a national park that is surrounded by high walls of environmental regulations manned by legions of super-zealous, lawyer-ladened, eco-nazis with a paucity of critical thinking skills.  Now this is where government should step in and play the crucial role of paving the way to implement such a humanity-saving insurance policy with a clean energy solution to boot.  But so far no one on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue has made a peep about this.  It can’t be the cost, because the feds lose more than $10B a day with what they drop off their loading docks.  So, for an answer, let’s look at the risk side of this potential earth-shaking catastrophe.

To quantify the downside risk we techies first appeal to what is called probability rate theory that is a well-known tool in areas like search and detection using radars and sonars.  The best estimate of Yellowstone’s catastrophe rate is once every 700K years.  That’s about the average frequency at which the big magma bubble gets close enough to the surface for its outward pressure to blow its top.

The real question we have to answer today is something like ‘what is the probability that Yellowstone blows again in the next 100 years?’  Clearly, if that probability, let’s label it P100, is sufficiently high, we should get busy tout de suite on the drilling and powerplant project described by NASA.  I have no idea what is ‘sufficiently high’ for the congress critters to get something going.  Most certainly if P100 = 0.5, then things in Washington would start happening.  But if P100 = 0.01, then I think we would continue to sleep on it a bit more.  So what is the real value of P100?

Lucky for you dear reader, mom sent me to school to learn how to answer such questions.  So I’ll save you the trouble of reading my brilliant analysis before calculating the answer, and give it to you right off the bat – P100 = 0.000246.  That’s a pretty low number for the next supervolcano eruption to take place sometime in the coming 100 years, and it pretty much explains why people aren’t getting too excited about it in the government or in the energy industry.

Now that doesn’t mean we won’t have one of those smaller eruptions that occur every few 10K years, these will not be civilization enders, but they might screw up our agriculture on the Great Plains for a few years.  Maybe later, if there’s available data, I’ll do some noodling on the chance that a ‘minor’ eruption will happen in the next century.  So the question remains, why are the NASA people getting excited about Yellowstone’s civilization ending volcano?

fMRI in your pocket

George Rebane

A longtime friend, RR reader, and former colleague just made me aware of this latest reason to celebrate capitalism.  The name of the new start-up is Openwater that has invented and is now productizing a whole new medical imaging technology that uses light and sound.  Its introduction into the healthcare markets here and abroad promises to totally revolutionize the ability to deliver timely, continuous, and low-cost healthcare to literally billions around the world, especially those who have never been able to afford or get close to today’s massive imaging equipments such as fMRI and CT scanners.

The technology was invented by the active and successful entrepreneur Dr Mary Lou Jepsen and her team.  Here is the link to more information and to the TED talk on her technology that Dr Jepsen recently gave in Vancouver.  Wow!

Fair Division 101B

George Rebane

In ‘Fair Division 101’ I introduced readers to the field of fair division algorithms and presented a powerful and easy-to-use two-party algorithm derived from the literature which I named FD01.  At the conclusion of that dissertation I offered a method for extending FD01 for use by more than two parties.  The method works but is a bit clunky to apply.  Since then I have developed a slick multi-party version dubbed FD02 which retains the correctness, format, and all the simplicity of FD01.  FD02 is suitable for online implementation, and can be used in adjudicating wills, dissolving partnerships, mergers & acquisitions, and private occasions requiring the fair division of an identified set of assets.  You can download the short paper ( Download TN1808-1_FD02) describing it and the MS Excel™ spreadsheet ( Download FairDivisionAlgo_FD02) that is fun to play with, demonstrates its implementation, and can be modified or used as is in the realworld.  Enjoy.

Sapir-Whorf on the Art of Coding and the Communications Conundrum

George Rebane

In his ‘Code to Joy’ essay (featured in the Jun-Jul 2018 issue of 1843, the Economist’s bi-monthly features magazine), science writer and author Andrew Smith almost discovers Sapir-Whorf.  But not quite, and therein lies a tale.  The man had been writing about computer technology and its impact on our lives for most of his career before he realized that he really didn’t know exactly how software worked, and it was the software that enabled all those wonderful things that most of us now take for granted in our daily round.

So he asked, “Is learning to code in middle age a fool’s errand or a committed act of digital citizenship?”, and started his quest for a programming language which he could learn well enough to code up a simple task.  On his travels through the programming world he interviews important personages and finds a well-known mentor to help him as he inevitably hits the ‘dark night of the soul’ when all gleaned progress and understanding fades into a hopeless morass of imminent defeat.  But with a mini-epiphany here and there along the way, he perseveres and finally celebrates his finished and fully functional Python code snippet.

What Smith’s trail of tears illustrates is another confirmation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis cum dictum that a person’s language(s) bound their capacity for thought.  We have visited the ramifications of S-W in these pages before (e.g. here) in the context of languages such as English and mathematics.  The bottom line of it all is that every human being is not capable of thinking all human thoughts; they are limited by the languages they have mastered.  And Smith’s essay is a clear illustration of this, even though he is not able to connect it with S-W.  (He is not alone, almost none of our ‘educators’ have this understanding as they mangle our schools’ curricula and/or teach in our classrooms.)

The ramifications of S-W necessarily extend beyond thought to communications and understanding.  What you cannot think, you cannot communicate, and what is beyond your lexicon, you cannot understand what someone else is trying to tell you.  Cultures with such language deficits have a difficult time making progress since it is hard for them to come together to solve problems and make more complex plans for productive cooperative enterprises.  It has been the expansion of language that has always provided the bases for the advancement of cultures in the sense of securing more resources, insuring their survival, and increasing their quality of life.

Think of what your life would be if you had no concept of nor ability to communicate ‘before/after’,  'future/past', ‘more/less’, ‘harder/easier’, ‘if/then’, numbering/counting things in your environment, expressing the subjunctive, considering counterfactuals (“A counterfactual thought occurs when a person modifies a factual prior event and then assesses the consequences of that change.”), quantifying risk (the notions of likelihood/probability), … .

In the same manner, Smith and others not familiar with the art of coding have no concept of the kinds of primitives that are both necessary and possible in various programming languages.  And therefore, given a problem to solve that involves the manipulation of specific types of data or implementing a user task, they simply have no place to start thinking about how to approach and structure a solution (i.e. to algorize).  Smith runs into this problem without appreciating it when he initially considers which one of the current 1,700+ programming languages he should first learn.  His mentor takes him through such considerations, but without connecting to the larger linguistic landscape of thought and communications taught by Sapir-Whorf.

Today much (almost all?) of our discussion of social issues is also hampered by the various boundaries that exist in the (partially) shared language people use domestically, which, of course, is immensely amplified when translation is required between languages with widely different roots and current capacities for understanding and expressing thought.  The comment streams of blogs (e.g. RR’s) along with countless letters-to-the-editor attest to the so far insurmountable difficulties Americans have in communicating with each other, no matter how sincere are their efforts.

Ruminations – 22may18

George Rebane

America’s students are still struggling as they compete for leadership in the high tech job markets of today and tomorrow with other students arount the world.  A correspondent from the east coast emailed me the following – “The 2015 Program for International Student Assessment tests 15-year old students around the world.. It's administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.  The United States placed 24th out of 71 countries in science. It did worse in math, ranking 38th.  The U.S. scored at 470 in math, below the OECD average of 490. That's well below the scores of the top five, all of which are Asian: Singapore at 565, Hong Kong at 548, Macao at 544, Taiwan at 542, and Japan at 532.  China was not included, since only four provinces participated.  In science, the United States scored at 496, above the OECD average of 493. The top five highest scoring countries were Singapore at 556, Japan at 538, Estonia at 534, Taiwan at 532, and Finland at 531.”

Fellow blogger and RR reader Russ Steele has a new blog – Rural Economy and Technology - that focuses on the introduction of technologies into rural economies.  It’s worth reading, especially as it treats the slow introduction of broadband to communities like Nevada County.  (more here)

Still on travel.  Apologies for sparse postings and responses to comments.

Criminal Uses of Drones & AI

George Rebane

It didn’t take long for criminals and terrorists to start using affordable, commercially available drones for surveillance and even weaponized munitions delivery platforms on the battlefield.  Terrorists routinely launch their own eyes in the sky when being attacked by the militaries of countries seeking to destroy them.  In the US drones have already been used by prepared criminals to actively harass the FBI during a hostage situation.  And there’s more to come.

With affordable face recognition AI, authorities are anxious about the launch of assassination drones in built-up areas to search out and then kill a designated human target either with a firearm or explosive.  Drug smugglers are using ever more sophisticated drone platforms to monitor and catalog border security procedures and process so as to pick the proper times and places to bring in the drug payloads.  Smaller deliveries of high value narcotics are already handled by drones from Mexico.

Our military and law enforcement are playing catch up with counter-systems and delays caused first by the usual calcified bureaucratic assessments of ‘oh, they’ll never be able to do that’ to R&D and procurement red tape that doesn’t allow the good guys to invent and test as fast as can the terrorists and criminals.  Of course, all that government can field against the bad guys is the same stuff that they can field against law abiding citizens to keep the rest of us on our mandated straight and ever-narrowing paths.  As someone once said, ‘There is no free lunch.’  And that goes double for advanced technology.  Stand by for ram.  (more here and here)

 

‘Quants’, Kelly, and the RK formula

George Rebane – 19 May 2010 (V5apr18)

[I originally posted this little blurb on some work I had done on the Kelly formula prior to 2010.  Well, after some more noodling and squiggly pushing I found that there was a conflict in the way odds and expected gain/loss were defined which required me to revise what is now the RK formula.  As a result, I took down the 19may10 version and am now replacing it, appropriately edited and modified where required, with the current corrected version which still reflects its original publishing date.]

Contrary to the rumors you’ve been hearing for the last year plus, GeorgeW didn’t cause the Great Recession.  This fiasco had three main progenitors - government idiots, corporate greedies, and some very clever, but not clever enough, Wall Street traders practicing the arcane art and some of the more dubious science of financial engineering.

Scott Patterson has been reporting on things financial for the WSJ, and recently wrote The Quants – How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It (2010) which immediately shot up to the top of the charts and is still there.  I finished Quants before going on travel and was just going to add it to my collection of finance and economic history books.  But then I thought that there might be some little gems of broader interest there.

Patterson goes back to the beginnings of financial engineering in the 1960s, and takes us right up to the fall of 2009, the Great Recession and all.  In fact, the whole purpose of the book is to explicate the role of the quants in fostering the recession.  What’s a quant?  A quant is a person trained in many of the mathematical ideas and toolsets of the system sciences.  A bunch of them came from research universities like MIT, Caltech, UC, … .  They are generally at the PhD level, so they have a demonstrated ability to think out of the box and extend human knowledge.

Now these young graduates were snapped up by various ‘Wall Street investment houses’ and hedge funds.  Their job was to examine the price behavior of all kinds of securities around the world, and then apply their math wizardry to develop automated trading programs to lickety-split execute profitable arbitrage transactions that their algorithms discovered in the massive daily dataflows of the finance and securities industry.  Since I have some knowledge of these high-jinks (actually, I also claim to be a financial engineer), this kind of historical background fascinates me.  And doubly so since the political reverberations of this recession will be with us for a long time to come.

Financial engineering actually began with Modern Portfolio Theory credited mainly to Harry Markowitz and William Sharpe.  They both became Nobelists for their work.  MPT is used to allocate funds among a short list of competing investments like stocks.  Sharpe’s contribution was the Capital Asset Pricing Model or CAPM which introduced the notorious alpha and beta numbers to a stock.  Brilliant and elegant modeling of an investment world that turned out not to exist – well, not to exist quite like their equations required.

Today MPT and CAPM are used primarily by professionals for CYA purposes to manage other people’s money.  If the client’s portfolio blows up, you can always point to the Nobel prizes and claim you did the prudent thing.  And thereby hangs a tale, or should I say ‘tail’?.

Most of the applied financial phrenology is still based on the view that security prices move up and down sort of like a drunkard’s (or random) walk.  If you assume this, you can fit nifty bell curves to the magnitude of price movements, and off you go into the land of stochastics.  Stochastics is a fancy word for random processes that depend on other random processes.  The problem with the random walk model is that it doesn’t predict big catastrophic price swings very well – practically not at all.

(To continue reading, please Download Quants2_2018)

And then what shall we do?

The company that pits its labor against another’s use of technology loses.  The worker who pits his labor against technology loses. – The John Henry Law & Corollary

George Rebane

[This is the linked transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 31 January 2018.]

Let’s take a break from the political goings on in Washington and Sacramento, and consider something that will really change our lives in the not too distant future.  In previous commentaries we have visited the approaching Singularity, when machines, the so-called AIs, surpass human intelligence. (more here, here, and here)  Many people already are aware that we live in the pre-Singularity years as we hear daily reports of smart machines and robots displacing humans in another area of expertise or somewhere new in the workplace.

It wasn’t that long ago when even well-read people still used the ‘never’ word – ‘machines will never be able to do this, or they’ll never best humans doing that.’  Well, today we are already on a slippery slope, and witness machines beating the best humans in the most sophisticated games, outperforming the most knowledgeable humans in more and more areas of medicine (such as diagnostics, prescribing treatments, and even in delicate surgical procedures); machines are already world-class masters in finance and manufacturing.  And autonomous vehicles are taking to the highways, our airspace, and distant battlefields.

The old shibboleth that new technologies will always create more jobs than they destroy has given us hope since John Henry the Steel Driving Man of the 19^th century (here and here), but sadly that no longer holds true.  Today human employment has become more selective than ever, and our current high employment rate is maintained almost entirely by low participation in the workforce, and an expanding economy which itself is driven by increased uses of advanced technologies.

What work humans will do in the next decade or two is anyone’s guess, but you can bet the farm that we all will be competing with tireless, strong, extremely agile, very smart, and much less expensive workers with silicon brains.  And talk about income inequality – you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

As an example, let’s turn to a pursuit that almost all of us still think will forever be reserved for humans - making music.  Specifically, composing, producing, and performing it.  Before you write off silicon artists, both unembodied and humanoid, consider how second-best performances already fare in the entertainment and sports markets.  Why do women’s athletics have such a hard time competing with the men for media audiences?  Who today would be interested in following a man vs machine match in which the machine is the guaranteed winner?  And who would even watch a human vs human contest where it is known that they are second rate competitors – an intelligent machine has and would again beat either of them.  In short, consider that we might soon attend human-only competitions with the compassion that today motivates us to watch the Special Olympics or foot races for amputees.

Now imagine watching a perfectly fashioned, fully conversant, pre-sentient android virtuoso violinist or pianist play a difficult classical concerto or some newly composed music that no human could master.  How would we accept such artistry with the knowledge that even the best human virtuoso is not up to the art of the possible?  And beyond that beckon conceivable musics in new audio formats that can only be synthesized by machines, conceived by other machines which have learned to compose aural presentations that are siren-like to the human auditory system, and therefore overwhelmingly pleasing above the consumption of all other previously offered recreational sounds.

In such a fast approaching world, what then will we humans do to challenge, amuse, and entertain ourselves - in short, what shall we do to maintain a purposeful existence?  Today we already see some answers to what people will do when they see themselves as without hope and irrelevant to the established social order.  For the rest of us, our best defense and greatest comfort against such far out notions come from simply ignoring the possibilities, or holding fast to the belief that it will never happen.  But wait a minute, there’s that ‘never’ word again.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

US Students’ PISA Ratings

George Rebane

The latest (2015) release of PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) scores are out, and the all important ratings for 15-year-olds in now a matter of record.  We have long mourned the performance deficits in our educational system and the resulting standing our students have on the international stage where America must compete more and more in the high tech areas of AI, genomics, and nanotechnology – the main sectors that will determine who will win and lose both economically and strategically in the coming pre-Singularity decade(s).  As the chart below shows, America will not be among the winners.

Our deplorable ratings have been covered here for years.  During that same interval progressivist pundits have been white-washing the bad news to our gullibles as nothing to worry about, that we’re doing OK in our super expensive, union-dominated public schools.  The latest spin comes from a team of researchers from the University of Chicago and University of California, San Diego.  These academic worthies have conducted some psych experiments with students and concluded that US kids are just as smart as anyone, but that they’re simply not trying hard enough (also note the inappropriate use of "about average" with the above data).  They ran a test with American and Chinese (first place) math students to see how performance could be improved with cash money prizes. (more here)

Well, guess what?  It turns out that the Chinese were not much affected since they were already on top, but US kids’ performance improved enough, that according to the pencil pushers, they would have placed 19^th instead of the (fasten seatbelts) dismal 36^th among the 65 nations taking the PISA tests.  So the conclusion is that our kids just don’t give a crap about doing well on such tests, and they would do much better if motivated by some kind of valuable prize.  (Recall, they’ve all grown up in world where everyone gets a trophy for just showing up and fogging a mirror.)  Now, 19^th in the world in math is still horrible for our country’s future, but that claimed improved score is specious on its face.  It assumed that the rest of the world’s scores were static; no other country’s kids were enticed with prizes.  A more rigorous test would have been to offer such rewards to all the test takers, and then see how much our students’ ranking would have improved.

So that no one misunderstands, American students’ gray matter is just as good as that between the ears of the rest of the world’s students – i.e. we are not genetically disadvantaged.  Where we have a huge deficit is in our carefully inculcated culture of learning – three generations of politically correct schooling and parenting – and a school system designed to keep the bottom quartile of college graduates gainfully employed and fully pensioned (with unfunded pension portfolios).

The cited study heralds that if we just motivate our students better, their performance can be improved from putrid to piss poor, and we can all stop worrying about our schools.  Well, that’s not the case in any of the three tested areas – science, reading, math – as the above data plot shows. 

In parting, we should remember two notables.  In Silicon Valley, where STEM jobs/skills dominate, more than half the workers are foreign born and educated.  And to show how good California’s schools and economy are in supplying and attracting born-in-state workers, only 18% of such students qualify for and/or accept jobs in the highly-touted high-tech mecca from which Sacramento draws the lion’s share of its tax revenues. (more here)

The second notable is the absolute bullpucky in PISA’s testing in the ‘science’ category.  They make it out as if science and math are somehow two separate and disjoint areas of learning, and therefore produce two separable skill sets.  This myth is designed to successfully fool those holding education degrees, and the general public which doesn’t have a clue.  The simple truth of the matter is that for at least the last half century there has been no science without math, and today ALL science is done with and within the language of mathematics.  (emphasis mine)

An Innumerate SCOTUS, oh my!

A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.  Thomas Jefferson

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 8 November 2017.]

Numeracy is the name given to a set of math oriented skills that an educated lay person is supposed to have in order to hold a job, function as a householder, and understand the day’s news and issues.  Such skills include the ability to do arithmetic, understand graphs and charts, be able think logically, comprehend the basics of chance and risk, and so on.  For a numerate person, the mastery of these basic skills need not be at the level of a technician, but sufficient to comprehend today’s work-a-day world that will be ever more complex tomorrow.

The Singularity is Nearer

George Rebane

Have you noticed over the years when we have met in these pages to talk about the Singularity, that today finally everyone is talking about it in one fashion or another.  It’s as if suddenly everyone who reads is being introduced to the newest developments in AI and the possible futures it portends for humanity.  To be sure, not everyone in this conversation is still aboard with the inevitable advent of AGI (artificial general intelligence), the level of machine cognition that has become the specific definition of the Singularity.  (see more in Singularity Signposts)

Let’s first dispense with troglodytes like the Dr Miguel Nicolelis, Distinguished Professor in the Duke School of Medicine, Professor of Neuro-science and Co-Director of Duke’s Center for Neuroengineering.  He writes about ‘The Perils of Putting a Chip In Your Brain’ and tries to make the case that striving for transhumanism is fraught with unacceptable risks which in the end will still be futile in humanity’s competition with the machine, which he believes will never even equal us where it counts – creativity.  He concludes the display of his ignorance of what already has transpired with –

The human brain should be revered as something exquisite and unique. We need to rethink the role of digital systems in education and ensure that humans—not machines, or humans joined to them— control the creation and decision-making process for art, science, politics and all the things that define us. Digital technology will never surpass what our brains can do—but it can shape them, and that is the biggest danger.

Duke should be looking for a new a new co-director.

Nicolelis is not alone in his dim and uninformed view of machine intelligence evolution.  There are also international notables like Nick Bostrom and Stephen Hawking (whom we have reviewed), who still believe that humans will write the code for the first AGI, when even now such efforts have pretty much been abandoned by that dwindling rear guard of ‘programming AI’.  As argued in these pages for years, AGI will be achieved ONLY through machines that develop their smarts through learning.  The most that humans can do and are doing today is developing algorithms and paradigms that make such learning machines more facile.  None of these bleeding-edge workers know exactly what these machines will wind up learning and what they will be able to do after they have been allowed to chomp through vast amounts of realworld data, measurements, and/or observations.  Trained neural nets don’t yet fully reveal their inner workings as they fashion the immensely complex discriminants that allow the amazing feats they today demonstrate in game playing, medical diagnoses, financial decisions, speech understanding, facial recognition, and the dynamic control of some very complex systems.

In tune with what’s really happening and what will be required in the very near future are people like Dr Christof Koch, chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute of Brain Science, who understands and promotes transhumanism.  He argues that ‘We’ll Need Bigger Brains’ in order “to avoid a dystopian future fueled by the rise of artificial intelligence, (and) we must move quickly to create technologies that enhance the human brain.”  The whole goal is to “keep up with machines” and become a thriving part of the post-Singularity future.  The alternative is to become a kept species that will ultimately die out or just be disposed of by the then dominant intelligence as described by several authors, most recently by Max Tegmark in his Life 3.0 (2017).  Koch and other transhumanists point to computationally augmented humans with microchips in their bodies that can compute, communicate, and store data that is all accessible and controllable through new brain-machine interfaces being now developed by a “burgeoning neuro-tech industry”.  And ominously, Dr Koch makes it clear that it is the heavy hand of government that can act as the anchor to these critically needed advances.

The most significant ‘hardware’ developments to support all areas of modern societies are in quantum computing.  All nations have major programs akin to our fabled WW2 Manhattan Project to develop the first practical (i.e. 50 qubit) quantum computer.  And the big fear is that them that gets there firstest with the mostest will wind up ruling the roost on this planet.  A good tutorial on quantum computers, ‘Welcome to the Quantum Age’ by Jack Nicas, appeared this weekend in the Nov/Dec issue of WSJ’s magazine The Future of Everything.  Globally, China has placed the largest bets on getting there first with new quantum computing institute under construction.  In America the leading contender in the race is Google.  Our federal government, as usual, is a day late and more than a buck short.  It’s hard to tell how many times we can pull a hat trick by coming up with some critical needed technology in the nick of time.  We’ve done it in the past, but the lead times to do it again are getting exponentially shorter.  As usual, it appears that the only hope for salvation here is from a minimally fettered private sector.  (more here)

Introducing Politically Correct Mathematics

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 25 October 2017.  A slightly edited version of this appeared as an op-ed in the 4nov17 Union (here). gjr]

In these commentaries we have chronicled the long decline of America’s K-12 education, a decline that has now been joined by our very politicized higher education system.  The race toward the bottom continues, and is very apparent from the aggregate performance of our local public schools.  Today we have major news outlets confirming that “Internationally, US Students are Failing”, prominent technocrats like Bill Gates tell all that “schools are failing America’s kids”, and the government’s own National Center for Educational Statistics states flatly that “everything is just going down.”

Where America is most in trouble is in the critical science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, subjects which provide students the necessary expertise to ultimately enter the workforce into careers ranging from researcher, through electrician and carpenter, to assembler in our new roboticized factories.  The underlying rot in the system exists at several levels, but today I want to highlight some new and unbelievable insanity from our universities that recently came to my attention.  But first, let’s review some background that provides context and perspective for what you are about to hear.

When all is said and done, America has been the world’s leading high-tech nation, providing our citizens an enviable quality of life through our ability to develop, consume, and export products, all of which depend on a constant stream of advances in STEM.  In recent years other developed nations have been catching up and even surpassing us in certain fields, while our schools have “stagnated” and are now “just going down”.  Internationally, American students are “outperformed by their counterparts in 36 countries in math; 18 countries in science, and 14 countries in reading.”  In all categories we rank below developed country averages.  Some startling statistics include 30% of military applicants failing their entrance exams because of poor STEM preparation, and that 2/3 of our 8^th graders already perform below grade level in math.

The language basic to all fields of science, technology, and engineering is mathematics.  And while education at all levels has come under attack by ideologues with agendas that have successfully already politicized almost every subject taught in schools, in recent years these have come to include classes in engineering and the sciences.  Mathematics has remained the last redoubt - untainted, until now.  Today math instruction is also under assault by academics from university schools of education seeking to de-emphasize and dumb down the subject in order to provide social justice for some minorities and students in general who, for a variety of reasons, have difficulty with math.  To put a face on it, let’s take a look at an academic who is a prominent leader of this destructive assault.

Ruminations – 11oct17 (updated)

George Rebane

MIT’s Max Tegmark just released Life 3.0 – Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, which I bought immediately and dove right in last night.  In his prelude Tegmark takes us through a scenario of a developing AI super-intelligence and its human ‘handlers’ that includes treatment of rampantly systemic unemployment addressed through an institutional approach very similar to the Non-profit Service Corporations which I have proposed in these pages (here).  The book promises an education of how the current pre-Singularity years will unfold – check it out, Tegmark writes good stuff.

The Boy Scouts of America have decided to start admitting real girls, and I guess that means going beyond just boys who wake up feeling like they have been issued the wrong plumbing.  The move seems to be motivated by more than political correctness in these gender-confused times.  According to the Girl Scouts of America it really has to do with the BSA needing more funds, and thereby raiding the GSA membership is a reasonable plan forward.  The resulting dust-up will continue between what were two of America’s iconic institutions, as the times they are a’changin’.  (more here)

I have always viewed Kaspersky’s popular antivirus software with a gimlet eye.  I guess that I just don’t trust Russian companies, given the kleptocratic regime under which they all operate, and therefore are all instruments of the state in one way or another.  So why would I want to install Kaspersky on my company’s in-house computer systems, especially if I develop high tech stuff or have other valuable intellectual property that keeps me in business?  Well, now it turns out that ‘Russia Has Turned Kaspersky Software Into Tool for Spying’ – whouda thought?

[update]  Implicit Bias, another flat-earth pseudo-science lapped up by the liberal legions turns out to be bullshit.  Few academic ideas have been as eagerly absorbed into public discourse lately as “implicit bias.” Embraced by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and most of the press, implicit bias has spawned a multimillion-dollar consulting industry, along with a movement to remove the concept of individual agency from the law. Yet its scientific basis is crumbling.  (the hilarity of it all continues here)

Wanna see another liberal shibboleth bite the dust?  Take a look at ‘A Flawed Study Depicts Drug Companies as Profiteers’.  And then corroborate that with the share price histories of the big pharmas.

The ‘Casting Couch’ has been a Hollywood staple for over 80 years.  And since most of show biz folks have been historical proto-communists, the Left has left the sexual abuses of young sweet things under the rug where they have always had a home.  Now ol’ sleazebag Harvey Weinstein finally gets exposed, and our lamestream is making it out as if they have found the only bad apple in their barrel.  Another demonstration that they don’t give a crap about women save what political advantage they can wring out of our fair sex.  I’d love to see a clean sweep of the overwhelmingly leftwing entertainment industry to expose what aspiring women have really had to put out or up with to succeed.  It didn’t all happen in corporate offices of other industries that have a tilt to the right.

Why Not 24/7 Air Attack? (updated 11oct17)

George Rebane

Dropping fire suppressants from fixed and rotary wing aircraft is an extremely effective way to fight wildfires.  Living in the southern California mountains we annually witnessed how air attack kept little fires from becoming big, and big fires from going into populated areas.  In the 1993 Malibu fire, it was five or six heavy lift helicopters with big buckets that saved the community of Topanga with 8,000 housing units.  The demonstrated airmanship was awesome to behold as an orbit was established with the heavy lifters dropping sea water on the ridge where we lived that separated Topanga Canyon from Tuna Canyon as the four-day-old fire returned to consume the last few houses on the Tuna Cyn side as it tried to breach the ridge.  The heavy lifters soaked our ridge, climbing up Los Flores Cyn, dropping their loads (our cars got sea water rinses) with pinpoint accuracy, and then diving down through the narrow Tuna Cyn gorge with rock walls within a hundred feet of their rotors to the ocean to fill up and repeat the cycle.  With their skill and courage, those airmen saved an entire town (our ridge-top house included) in the Santa Monica Mtns.

Witnessing year after year how effective were the aircraft, many of us wondered why the operations had to shut down after sunset, and sometimes even when the smoke got too thick.  The answer given was always flight crew safety, it was not possible to fly when you couldn’t see the terrain.  But by the 1990s a lot of technology had already been developed that might mitigate that concern, and today that definitely appears to be the case.

So, I raised the question about 24/7 flight ops again to my professional aviator friends.  And to make sure that I don’t get anyone’s undies in a knot, I am not impugning the skill and courage of the flight crews, nor do I want them to take any more risks than they are already taking.  (For the techies, I don’t want them to undertake missions in which their probability of accident is any greater than it is today.)  But I am questioning the policies under which our wildfire air attack operations are designed, prepared, and executed.  And I am perfectly willing to be educated and accept any reasonable answer.

Tax Policy Noodlings

George Rebane

The newly proposed GOP tax cut has everyone talking.  A couple of its main features are supposed to include switching from sequential taxing to concurrent taxing of earnings.  Also discussed is the removal of certain deductions like mortgage interest paid from taxable earnings.  I was interested in the impact of these two policy changes so I pushed a few squigglies, and I’ll share with you here some of the results without taking you through the weeds – BTW, nothing higher than your high school algebra is required to derive these formulas.

In sequential taxing, the taxing jurisdictions calculate the taxes due in sequence, the later jurisdictions applying their tax rate to the remaining earnings after you’ve paid the earlier jurisdictions.  As an example, say, jurisdiction J1 (e.g. California) taxes at rate r₁, and J2 (e.g. the feds) then tax the remainder at rate r₂.  The overall tax rate r_S  you pay on earnings E is given in formula (1) in the panel below.

In concurrent taxing, the jurisdictions all compute their tax take on your taxable earnings E.  The overall tax rate r_C you pay is then given in formula (2) above.  This rate is always higher than the overall rate for sequential taxing, and the switch from sequential to concurrent is an effective tax increase R_SC given by formula (3).

Say, that r₁ = 0.1 (10%) and r₂ = 0.2.  Then from formula (1) r_S  = 1 – (1 – 0.1)(1 – 0.2) = 0.28 = 28%.  And similarly, from formula (2) r_C  = 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.3 = 30%.  From (3) we calculate the increase in effective tax rate as 0.1*0.2/(0.1 + 0.2 - 0.1*0.2) = 0.0714 = 7.14%.

For calculating the effective tax rate for deductions, assume that to compute your taxable earnings you can deduct a fraction f of your earnings E before applying the relevant tax rate r.  Then your effective tax rate r_f  is given by formula (4).  Now suppose that a deduction, say Δf, is no longer allowed.  This reduces the fractional amount of E you can deduct to (f – Δf).  Your effective tax rate is now given by formula (5).  Finally, the percentage of your tax increase R_fΔf through the denial of such a deduction is given by formula (6).

As an example, let f = 0.35 = 35% and Δf = 0.25, then R_fΔf  = 0.25/(1 – 0.35) = 0.385 = 38.5%.

You may want to enter the formulas into a spread sheet and play with the numbers to understand the real damage that such tax policy changes will deliver.

Max Tegmark, welcome aboard!

George Rebane

The Singularity must really be near when we have MIT physicist Max Tegmark climb aboard with the spate of science and industry luminaries who have recently discovered that intelligent machines will someday surpass humans, will systemically displace human labor, and (in a TBD form) will become the dominant lifeform on Earth.  Dr Tegmark has just published his epiphany in Life 3.0, and joins Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, … in spreading the news of the incipient Singularity to the general public.  Of course, none of them dare call it Singularity; for if they did, then it would instantly identify them as Johnny-come-latelies.

For those of us in the field, as recorded herein, the possibility of Singularity has been known for at least thirty years (and more decades in science fiction).  And science savvy entrepreneurs like Ray Kurzweil (now at Google) and Jeff Hawkins (founder of Numenta the developer of hierarchical temporal memory) have long staked out businesses that are pioneering the only branch of computer science that promises to deliver the Singularity – systems that are capable of learning from vast amounts of data present in their ‘environments’.  Here I don’t want to revisit the ‘learn vs program’ debate on the path to super-intelligence other than to say that the ‘program school’ of computer science has woefully been the dragged anchor, diverting resources from the ‘learn school’ which now finally dominates the field of AI.  All of the above people and technologies have been introduced and discussed here over the years (see RR’s Singularity Signposts section).

Deep learning is the label given to the latest generation of massive artificial neural networks (ANNs) that have learned to do amazing feats requiring intelligence and cognitive processing.  Most of these feats already far surpass humans’ ability to do the same tasks.  And what is happening today in the field of deep learning will literally blow your mind, in the sense of blowing it away as redundant, in the event that you decide to compete with it in the workplace – this brings to mind the story of John Henry, the steel drivin’ man (here).

Companies large – e.g. Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Baidu, Alibaba, … - and small are racing to integrate deep learned AI into their operations and products at breakneck speed.  The heads-up companies are launching in-house education and training programs to introduce deep learning to their technical and management staffs.  As an example, I can modestly cite my computer scientist son-in-law Roland Fernandez at Microsoft Research who has co-developed and operates that company’s online course in deep learning (q.v.).

What the sclerotic (‘programming school’) side of computer science did not realize for some decades, with some still in their benighted darkness, is the message Dr Kurzweil has been telling (preaching?) to people for years – that technology is advancing exponentially.  The programmers could not conceive that very soon there would emerge computers and databases that are large and fast enough to implement ANNs with thousands of layers that learn to ‘instantly’ manipulate millions of parameters in tasks like voice understanding, image recognition, medical diagnosis, concurrent large cohort control, and on and on.  And that’s just today.

For more on Professor Tegmark’s new book, I bid you read the excellent review ‘When Machines Run Amok’ by Frank Rose.

The Return of Featherbedding (updated 5aug17)

George Rebane

When George Westinghouse patented his railway ‘fail-safe’ airbrakes in 1869, that new technology inaugurated a century of what came to be called featherbedding for the railroad industry as unions successfully fought the railroads to continue employing unneeded workers.  Prior to airbrakes on each railroad car, the speed of trains on down grades were controlled by brakemen manually setting each car’s brakes and then releasing them.  This was demonstrably the most dangerous job on a train since it required the brakemen to run up and down the length of the moving train equipped with narrow wooden gangways on the roofs of freight cars, jumping from car to car night and day in all kinds of weather.  Thousands of brakemen died during the 1800s until all trains were equipped with the Westinghouse brakes.  Today we still have railroad ‘brakemen’ doing other things, but that’s another story.   (more here) 

The important notion to understand here is that after remotely operated airbrakes were installed, railroads were still forced to hire brakemen whose new make-work tasks allowed them to also while away their work hours ‘featherbedding’ in the obligatory caboose (crew’s sleeping quarters) at the end of each train.  Due to successful lobbying of the federal and various state legislatures by the unions, laws were passed to enforce specified crew sizes and compositions, and, of course, union memberships.  This continues to this day.

Ruminations – 11jul17 (updated 13jul17)

For people whose work is the written word, reporters can be stunningly indifferent to what words actually mean. onthecommons.org

George Rebane

California is now a one-party state, as recognized by everyone in the land (more here).  The Democrats have sealed their decades-long control with an uncontestable supermajority in the legislature, and dominate all state elective offices.  Now they can really get to work on vacuuming up other people’s money to insure their autocracy.  The student of history knows that tyranny is the most stable form of governance – it just renews itself with a series of new cliques of elites that displace the old.

The latest attempt to derail the Trump administration has now fastened on Trump Jr’s meeting with a Russian lawyer last summer.  Since there’s no there there, the media has been reduced to reporting what other media are reporting about the inconsequential meeting.  But then, posit that the lawyer could have given Trump Jr some actual (not alleged) dirt on Hillary.  Would it not have been only proper, but also long-established protocol, for an opposition party to use that in a political campaign?  Our country has meddled in exactly the same way in other countries’ elections – it’s all a popular and classic game of thrones.  Aren’t we all glad that we found out about Hillary’s servers making classified information criminally available to the world, and the DNC emails conspiring to screw Bernie?  If Trump did something criminal, we would all want to know; but continuing an expanding number of investigations that will be halted only when all allegations have been proven is more than a bit beyond silly.

Compassionate secession by our Left is the constructive advice of America’s liberals as highlighted under ‘Healthcare from Hell’.  Since we can’t see ourselves letting illegal aliens die in the streets, and we won’t seal our borders, their only counsel is for America to slowly succumb to the onslaught of unassimilating mass migrations across our open borders.  Achieving Agenda21’s post-American globalism with no fuss or muss.

[12jul17 update]  The lamestream and Dems have tacitly admitted that the ongoing Russia investigations have so far been pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp.  The enthusiasm and excitement with which they have fastened on to the blatantly inconsequential TrumpJr meeting, while completely ignoring their formerly ‘substantial allegations’, lends credence to the fact that so far they had nothing, and that this latest revelation is all that’s left with which to bring down the Trump administration.  One of our left-leaning readers has diagnosed that only “God knows what dirt the Russians have on Trump.”  If he is correct, perhaps continuing the investigations from a house of worship will be more conducive to their speedier conclusion through divine revelation.

[13jul17 update]  Reading about all the political attacks and politically correct proscriptions happening across the country, added on to what thoughts and speech are already prohibited as being at least 'micro aggressions', does anyone else have the feeling that we are starting to reprise the age (1478 - 1834) of the Spanish Inquisition??

Speaking of inquisitions, now we can generate totally fake videos of people saying things in their own voice that they never actually said.  All that using new technology developed at the University of Washington (more here).  Talk about producing some real convincing fake news that will convince millions that a targeted person is culpable of something totally fabricated.

Scattershots – 12jun17 (updated 13jun17)

George Rebane

Investigations will cease only after all allegations have been proven – Dictum from The Swamp

The ‘Robot-Human Alliance’ is a hopeful promotion by Dr Kenneth Goldberg, a UC Berkeley engineering professor (here).  He sees little to worry about human job markets with the advance of ever more intelligent machines, and bases his sanguinity on discovering that humans and AI machines can still do useful work together, and that AI tools allow some people of more modest skills to get gainful employment.  He feels that this is such a significant discovery that it deserves a most inappropriate name with an extremely lame definition – “Multiplicity: diverse groups of people and machines working together to solve problems.”  It turns out that early 19^th century threshing machines also supported multiplicity.  Professor Goldberg’s problem seems to be one of a limited horizon.  Yes, humans and smart machines will be able to work together; and yes, AI based machines can act as a workplace prosthetic for the inadequately skilled, but all this describes is a temporary palliative for the pre-Singularity years in which we find ourselves.  With each passing month AIs are able to permanently displace more and more workers, and this replacement pace is increasing.  Only government’s regulatory intercession can slow it down using the fiat of the gun.  The important problem to solve today is how we will manage a guaranteed national income for the systemically (read terminally) unemployed.  The ongoing impact of AI on the workforce is longstanding theme in these pages - see Singularity Signposts.

The Beveridge Curve is the anointed name of a plot of unemployment rate vs job openings rate (see nearby graphic from the 12jun17 WSJ).  The curve abets the previous reflection on Goldberg’s multiplicity. This presents a “dissonant reading (that) points to an increasing mismatch between workers’ skills and the roles employers are seeking to fill.”  Increasing mismatch indeed, and we ain’t seen nothing yet.  (more here)  A more detailed discussion of this mismatch problem was presented in these pages here.

George Boardman’s column in today’s (12jun17) Union gives a person pause.  In his ‘It’s time to start affirmative action program for campus conservatives’ the man does a solid recounting of liberal bias and suppression of free speech in today’s academe, and goes on to recommend positive measures to correct the situation and expose the resident snowflakes to some heat from opposing ideas (here).  Mr Boardman’s contribution does much to regain the tilt of his perch as that of a mid-roader IMHO – in recent months it had gone a bit wopperjob toward port.  Given his words today, I am more interested than ever in learning what are the tenets of his assuredly complex credo.  As readers are aware, no one left of the conservetarians here have deigned to reveal any of their core beliefs in a clear list of tenets that define their ideological ontology.  (Mine is found in the upper right panel.)

[13jun17 update]  The Union’s columnist and mistress of trivia, Ms Hilary Hodge, makes a mighty attempt to elucidate ‘Housing in Nevada County’ in today’s (13jun17) paper.  But her attempt goes awry immediately after she once more establishes the nature of her sexuality for the chance new reader.  In lieu of serious editorial content, that seems to be the lady’s never-ending message.  (Full reciprocal disclosure, I am a lifelong heterosexual.)  Her column’s preamble forewarns us that this is but “the first part in a three-part series looking at housing in Nevada County.”  Unfortunately, after sliding in the now obligatory “my friend and eventual wife”, the sequel rambles off into the underbrush of her arcane anecdotal archives to retrieve some memories of their moving to Nevada County, snippets (or perhaps the entire opus?) of her vitae, and the subsequently understandable travails of finding employment here.  The patient reader departs with the hope that she still has two more chances to at least get a base hit on housing.  Nevertheless, given the other more appropriate sections of the newspaper, the question still ignored by The Union’s management - ‘Is our op-ed page really that desperate for content?’ 

As a relevant afterthought, for substance compare a Hilary Hodge column to The Union's other prominent women columnists Mses Lynn Wenzel and Terry McLaughlin.