World affairs

Short-attention spans; does anyone still THINK?

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I spoke yesterday at The Economist conference, Information: Making Sense of the Deluge. Very interesting speakers, I was excited to go. The stated and sincere intent was to get a  discussion going, including the audience. But the format was like watching TV news (and I don’t mean PBS): toss someone on stage, let them roll a 6 minute video, answer a few questions, and on to the next. This format was good for Twitter-bytes, but not for thinking or reflecting or building ideas.

One of the topics was Nick Carr on how “pseudo-multitasking” is hurting our brains. The conference itself seemed to follow the same format. This morning, for example, the schedule for the first 50 minutes has 7 different people on stage, in four sessions:

Act II:   Bottom up: Information for people
8.35 am
Flash of genius: How to translate the internet
Luis von Ahn, A. Nico Habermann, Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
8.45 am
Flash of genius: Turning information into knowledge
Amit Singhal, Engineer, Google
8.55 am
Data exhaust
The intersection of search and big data
Luc Barthelet, Executive Director, Wolfram Alpha
Arkady Borkovsky, Chief Technology Officer, Yandex Labs
Moderator: Kenneth Cukier, Business Correspondent, The Economist
9.15 am
Flash of genius: The information entrepreneur
Scott Yara,Vice-president, Products and Co-founder, Greenplum
The audience is finding plenty to Twitter about. But 10 minutes is only time for a sales pitch; it is not enough time to discuss the weaknesses as well as the strengths of an idea.
On the plus side, this means there’s still a need for academics who can sit in an empty room and work on one thing for an hour. Of course to accomplish that I have to discipline myself not to check email…..
A  friend who was there told me he “never follows Twitter.” It turns out that  he means  he keeps a Twitter feed in the corner of his screen 100% of the time; he just does not explicitly devote time to reading it! Talk about distractions…

Research faculty are retiring too slowly!

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Late retirement is a paradoxical problem. In most of the economy, we want people to delay retirement, if only to keep a reasonable ratio of workers to retirees (which is needed for Social Security and for retirement financing in general). But at research universities, “new blood” is especially critical, and 70-year old faculty tie up slots for new hires.

Many workers yearn for retirement — the goodbye parties, the golf course, maybe even a gold watch. But Stanford University has the opposite problem: Nobody wants to leave.Hoping to create more space for young scholars, Stanford has revamped its generous “Retirement Incentive Program” — for the second time in a decade — to nudge more old-timers toward the door.”Our senior faculty are wonderful. I love them all,” Provost John Etchemendy said at a recent meeting of the Academic Senate, publicizing the plan. “But we’re getting fewer people into the faculty, and that’s because people are staying longer,” he said. “The faculty is aging.”

via Stanford University confronts the graying of academia – SiliconValley.com.

Perhaps a solution is in the article’s observation that foreign universities are hiring like mad, hence have very young faculties. Better for US would be to bring those students here; but if we can’t do that, I know some of my colleagues who are “retiring” abroad.

The worst graph in a decade?

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The back page of IEEE Spectrum this month has, hands down, the worst graph I can remember ever. It takes information on media spending in different countries, and transforms it into a totally confusing picture.

Worst graph in a decade?

Worst graph in a decade?

  • The horizontal axis should be country, while color should be different media. They have it exactly backwards. As it is now, the stacking renders comparisons impossible. Continue reading →

Can we really adjust to a 5m sea level rise?

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I’ve always assumed that a 5 meter sea level rise would be catastrophic – is that too simple?

I have no patience with the “It isn’t happening” view of climate change, which to me is part of the anti-rationalist view of the world. (The battle over the relative merits of Faith and Reason was supposedly settled, at least in Europe, by the Enlightenment, and the supporters of Reason won.)  Pumping large amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere must increase temperatures, and the burden of proof is on those who claim that it hasn’t and won’t. But everything (else) is susceptible to analysis, with no presumption that any particular conclusion is valid.

One of the surprises I have run into is the seemingly small estimates of damages in, say, the next 50 years.  Continue reading →

Toyota learns the tyranny of software complexity

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A good column about Toyota’s acceleration mess. The author is a former electrical engineer at Ford, and discusses the complexity of the software that runs modern cars. He compares this problem with previous major recalls by other vendors. The comments to the post are good, too. Here’s an excerpt:

The system level error that Toyota made is not letting a brake signal override a throttle signal. I designed speed control systems at Ford, and everything was dependent on having a tap on the brake cancel any speed control function. A throttle-by-wire car like Toyota makes is almost free to add speed control, you just have to have a button to tell the ECU (engine control module) to hold speed and a brake signal,

Continue reading →