Don't just do something, stand there! Reflections on the counterintuitive behavior of complex systems, seen through the eyes of System Dynamics, Systems Thinking and simulation.
These robots synchronize their dance routine via coupled nonlinear oscillators. The approach results in eerily lifelike behavior. They don’t have to say, “I’m not like other boys.”
Steve Strogatz’ popular book Sync is a nice, accessible treatment of this kind of phenomenon.
We already have to fly in planes designed by lawyers (metaphorically speaking). Now House Republicans want to remove the windows and instruments from the cockpit. This is stupid. Really stupid. I’ve used ACS data on numerous public and private sector consulting engagements. I’m perfectly willing to pay for the data, but I seriously doubt that the private sector will supply a substitute. Anyway, some basic free data is needed so that all citizens can participate intelligently in democracy. Lacking that, we’ll have to fly blind. Say, what’s a mountain goat doing up here in a cloud bank?
An interesting tidbit from Science:
Dennis Normile
In Western cultures, the future lies ahead; the past is behind us. These notions are embedded in both gestures and spoken metaphors (looking forward to next year or back over the past year). A forward hand motion typically accompanies talk of the future; references to the past often bring a wave over the shoulder.
It is hard for most Westerners to conceive of other ways of conceptualizing time. But in 2006, Rafael Núñez, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, reported that for the Aymara, an ethnic group of about 2 million people living in the Andean highlands, in both spoken and gestural terms, the future is unseen and conceived as being behind the speaker; the past, since it has been witnessed, is in front. They point behind themselves when discussing the future. And when talking about the past, Aymara gesture farther in front of them the more distant the event ….
At the Tokyo Evolutionary Linguistics Forum, Núñez presented another example of unusual thinking—and gesturing—about time: The Yupno people, who inhabit a remote valley in Papua New Guinea, think of time topographically. No matter which way a speaker is facing, he or she will gesture uphill when discussing the future and point downhill when talking about the past. …
I like the Aymara approach, with the future unseen behind the speaker. I bet there aren’t any Aymara economic models assuming perfect foresight as a model of behavior.
Fast forward to 4:40 to hear the former Vice Chairman of GM wondering how CO2 can go up while temperature goes down.
http://youtu.be/kijVlez5R9w
Setting aside the fact that, smoothed over a reasonable period to suppress natural variability, temperatures haven’t gone down, Bob clearly needs to brush up on his bathtub dynamics.
This “icy finger of death” is an interesting dynamic system, but I’m just posting it because it’s cool:
http://youtu.be/LMhBuSBemRk
Background story here. h/t Stoat. Too bad we Americans won’t see the last episode of this series.
We used to rely on Groove for coordination of a lot of company projects. It was originally an “insanely great” product, with a lot of advantages over web-based alternatives like Central Desktop. Then Microsoft bought it. It’s been downhill since then. Here’s the MS evil plan for the destruction of Groove, as it has unfolded:
1. Make upgrades a hostile account takeover, with limited backwards compatibility.
2. Eliminate essential features, like export of message history to a discussion.
3. Make the product difficult to obtain, reducing its viral appeal, by eliminating trial accounts, hiding old versions, and providing bloated bundles.
4. License per PC rather than per user, to make use for sync uneconomic.
5. Change the name to maximize confusion with regular Sharepoint, which is fundamentally different (server-centric vs. P2P).
Update
6. Break folder sharing on 64bit OS flavors (it worked fine in Groove 3.1)
I have a hard time thinking of an objective function that makes this rational. My guess is that the existing Sharepoint group within MS felt threatened and had the political power to mess up Groove, but not quite enough to kill it outright. This reinforces my suspicion that companies are engines of capitalism on the outside, but inefficient centrally-planned economies on the inside, so we’d be better off if they weren’t so big.
Anyone know a good P2P alternative? Or at least a server-based tool that works well offline? All I really want is integrated file sharing, instant messaging, and discussion, with good security and easy drag-&-drop to the desktop.
I’m hanging out at the Systems Thinking in Action conference, which has been terrific so far.
The use of metaphors came up today. A good metaphor can be a powerful tool in group decision making. It can wrap a story about structure and behavior into a little icon that’s easy to share and relate to other concepts.
But with that power comes a bit of danger, because, like models, metaphors have limits, and those limits aren’t always explicit or shared. Even the humble bathtub can be misleading. We often use bathtubs as analogies for first-order exponential decay processes, but real bathtubs have a nonlinear outflow, so they actually decay linearly. (Update: that is, the water level as a function of time falls linearly, assuming the tub has straight sides, because the rate of outflow varies with the square root of the level.)
Apart from simple caution, I think the best solution to this problem when stakes are high is to formalize and simulate systems, because that process forces you to expose and challenge many assumptions that otherwise remain hidden.
Funny stuff from the Daily Show. It would be funnier if it weren’t a bit too real.
The 2011 Ig Nobel in Mathematics is for modeling … it goes to predictors of the end of the world:
Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.
Notice that the authors of Limits to Growth aren’t here, not because they were snubbed, but because Limits didn’t actually predict the end of the world. Update: perhaps the Onion should be added to the list though.
The Medicine prize goes to a pair of behavior & decision making studies:
Mirjam Tuk (of THE NETHERLANDS and the UK), Debra Trampe (of THE NETHERLANDS) and Luk Warlop (of BELGIUM). and jointly to Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder and Robert Feldman (of the USA), Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, and Paul Maruff (of AUSTRALIA) for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things — but worse decisions about other kinds of things‚ when they have a strong urge to urinate. REFERENCE: “Inhibitory Spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains,” Mirjam A. Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop, Psychological Science, vol. 22, no. 5, May 2011, pp. 627-633.
REFERENCE: “The Effect of Acute Increase in Urge to Void on Cognitive Function in Healthy Adults,” Matthew S. Lewis, Peter J. Snyder, Robert H. Pietrzak, David Darby, Robert A. Feldman, Paul T. Maruff, Neurology and Urodynamics, vol. 30, no. 1, January 2011, pp. 183-7.
ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Mirjam Tuk, Luk Warlop, Peter Snyder, Robert Feldman, David Darb
Perhaps we need more (or is it less?) restrooms in the financial sector and Washington DC these days.
