The Hanover Collaboration

President Obama wants to give a speech to the nations school students next Tuesday at noon. The country is so polarized that, apearantly, this is a big controversy. Georgetown, (MA), for instance will not be showing it.

Suppose that the President were Republican and the angry parents were Democrats, how do you think this would play out?

1) It wouldn’t. Democrats would suck it up as “civic duty.”
2) It wouldn’t. Democrats don’t have a good enough network (mainly radio shows) to rally enough angry phone calls to schools.
3) They’d do the same, but then get hung out to dry for a “lack of respect.”
4) It would play out just the same.

I’m thinking (1), because I really, truly, hated Bush, but if he were going to give the kids a pep-talk on the first day of school, I’d think that was fine, good in fact. The president is important; they might listen.

Everybody who is hand-wringing about how “political” the speech might be is not thinking about it very hard. When Obama speaks, he is nothing if not cautious. If he said anything even remotely political, even remotely assailable, he would (deservedly?) suffer for it. Those kids are guaranteed some of the A-grade flowery bullshit. But maybe it will inspire a kid or two to work harder, stay in school or become better citizens. Whether or not it’s worth the time is another argument, but I think it probably is.

Regarding the other complaint regarding “indoctrination”, let’s be honest, it’s there and it’s pervasive, but it’s not coming from Obama.

The United States men’s soccer team upset Spain yesterday and unsurprisingly it has caused quite a stir. They played pretty well and certainly deserved the win. However, it is my nature to be both contrary and pessimistic, I thought I’d offer some thoughts on the game.

I haven’t actually watched Spain play all that much so my observations on their performance are largely speculative. But to me, they seemed rather disorganized in back, at least early on. I’m not sure if that was a result of their back four not communicating well, or if it was some defensive midfielders not doing their job.

The US played pretty well for about 35 minutes. There were about 4-5 players who ran around like freakin maniacs in midfield pressuring the ball, scooping up errant passes etc. They were (to my eyes): Bradley, Dempsey, Clark, Davies and Spector. Davies and Spector are actually a forward and defender, but they were dropping back and pushing forward (respectively) quite a bit. During these early minutes, the US did what it does best: run around like crazy and be physical.

Spain started pretty flat and continued to be out hustled by the US for much of the first half. Altidore’s goal was legit, though he had a significant piece of help from the Spanish defender marking him who decided to try to climb over Altidore’s back rather than simply trying to keep him from turning.

For me, the second half was essentially a complete disaster for the US, despite Dempsey’s goal. I’m really curious why the US retreated into their defensive third for the rest of the game. Did Coach Bradley tell them to do that? Or was 35 minutes all they could muster physically at that intensity level?

Either way, hunkering down behind a 1-0 lead for 55 minutes against a team like Spain is, generally, not a recipe for success. Every now and then it’ll work, but it takes luck and your opponent has to have a bit of an off day.

I would have preferred to see the US at least try to maintain the intensity level they started with in the second half. It might have been riskier, and might even have cost them the game. But it would have been a good opportunity to see just how long they could keep it up.

As for individual performances, I was most impressed with Bradley and Spector. Mostly that’s based solely on the effort and intensity they put in during the first half. Bradley should be sent to bed without supper by his Dad for the red card. Unthinkably stupid foul. Which, sadly, has become a trend with this US team.

Altidore continues to fail to impress me. He does only a few things, and not particularly well. He sits up front and waits for the ball to be served through the defense. He gives chase and either is unmarked (rare) and shoots (meh) or he automatically falls to draw a foul. I was much happier with Davies, who at least displayed a wider toolkit, coming back to help develop plays in midfield.

Howard did well, as usual. Dempsey I can live with, if he is used properly. He should really just be a defensive midfielder and not push forward much.

Donovan? Meh. He’s been billed as the Savior of American Soccer for so long now, I always am disappointed when I watch him. He’s no Claudio Reyna, that’s for sure.

It was nice not to see Beasely out there and Jay DeMerit needs to go. Maybe Heyduk will be back soon.

All in all, it’s nice to see the US get a good result like this. But it doesn’t erase from my memory the travesty that was the Costa Rica game, or their uninspired win against Honduras, or their lopsided losses to Italy and Brazil.

Somebody at work asked about the chicken scratchings I used in the snack room and in response to my solution said something fawning about how neat it was that I could just change my number representation however it suited me.

As Jon would guess, that led to a conversation about balanced tertiary, and the following problem arose.

You have a balance with two pans and an object with integer mass, N, that you would like to determine. You have the following known masses:
let k be an odd, positive integer. You have (_k_ – 1)/2 of each mass of weight kⁿ for n in the non-negative integers. With this set of masses, each integer will have a unique representation.

You would like to determine N in a minimum number of weighings. Any time you add or remove a single mass from the scale counts as a weighing.

For instance let k=3, and I wanted to put 128g (=243-81-27-9+3-1) on the scale when 256g (=243+9+3+1) was on their previously. To do so counts as 6 weighings.

I’m looking for the big-Oh (in terms of N,k) of your strategy. From the above example I think it would be easy to argue that binary search is O(log ² (N)). Can anyone do better?

At work we’ve got a snack room and there is a tab on the wall. Attached to it is a pen rather than a pencil as you would expect in a perfect world… Anyway, I’m struck by how inefficiently most people use the space in it, forcing it to be pages and pages long.

All the prices are divisible by five and go from 5c up to $1 with 45, 55, 65, and 95cents all absent. Come up with a scheme for keeping track of the cumulative sum of transactions that doesn’t use a lot of space.

Benchmark: You’ve got enough room for about 80 characters, so you should be able to get at least 160 items before starting another page.

Hard version: You maintain a fixed number strings of {0,1}*. After each transaction (containing potentially multiple items) you may add as many characters to whatever strings you’d like. From these strings you need to be able to construct the sum of the transactions.

You can assume each transaction comes from a finite set with a known probability distribution. Come up with a scheme that minimizes the expected bits per transaction. You’re welcome to make limiting case arguments, but winners are going to be picked at 640 bits.

Generally, I think “talking tough” is bad foreign policy. Keep in mind that in every country you’ll find people who agree with you and people who don’t. Our “tough talk” tends to buttress the people who disagree with you. Apropos of Iranian elections, John Dickerson basically agrees.

Fred Kaplan makes the argument that now is a moment when talking tough to the Iranian government wouldn’t be construed as talking tough to the Iranian people. As a result, it wouldn’t necessarily be counterproductive.

If you were the President, what would you say?

I’m getting the impression that the standard for educational TV show has really dropped since we were young. I regularly watch National Geographic specials, but they are dominated by “dramatic re-enactments” with really minimal and meaningless narration. I was thinking that the difference is that I’m pickier now—that Nova wasn’t that much better. On the other hand, I’ve always been suspicious that Nova couldn’t have done that kind of thing, even if it wanted to.

I’m in the middle of watching Scientific American Frontiers after watching Nova, and I can assure you, they are much better than anything else on the TV currently.

What I don’t understand is why isn’t (e.g.) the National Geographic Channel comparable? It isn’t like Nova is very expensive to produce. Is it that it is impossible to sell commercials during shows this?

This ad really resonates with me—it makes me want to work for intel. I’m not sure why. Probably because it is a spot-on potrayal about what geeky really means. Maybe its because the usual portrayal of geeky is so grating (e.g. hire geeks to set up your DVR!).

If Bertsimas walked into my lab, I swear to God, it would be just like that. I bet I could make money selling the t-shirt.

Here’s an applet that lets you play rock/paper/scissors against the computer. Some of you might find the following two experiments interesting. You should do the experiments before reading how the algorithms work.

1. Play with the window scaled such that you can’t see the results. In other words, do your best to create a random sequence. Check in every 25 clicks or so.
2. Watch the computer and see how well you can “fake it out.”

A 17yr old eagle scout was lost for three days in the Presidentials. I’d assumed that he was dead a day before they reported that he had been found okay.

Reading through the PISA results for this post, I noticed that they demonstrate a cross-culture difference in the way that boys and girls understand science.

Standardized Testing in General and No-Child-Left-Behind in Particular are Destroying our Schools

You are doubtlessly aware that there has been some controversy regarding the effects of the historic “No Child Left Behind” law, created in 2002. In fact, the “controversy” is the political kind. Amongst teachers there is a robust consensus: It’s hamstringing them.

Between the inexorable improvements in Netflix and my mounting dread over my thesis proposal, I have been giving myself a much deeper understanding of the science fiction genre historically. From this, I would like to make the following observations so that the creators of future science fiction can make more lasting and historically significant contributions.

First up, Styles. This one is easy, the crazier the better. If anybody looks even remotely “hip” or “cool” or anything stylistically recognizable in your era, it will look painfully dated in the future. As I said, the crazier the better.

Second, tech. This is where the smart kids like to make predictions. Getting stuff right makes the work look sagely, getting it wrong makes you look stupid. Unless you’ve got someone like Kim Stanley Robinson on staff, you’re mostly going to want to keep this stuff as dialed back as necessary for the story line. But if you do have some predictions, I won’t fault you for going out on that limb.

Third, interfaces, controls. To the untrained, this might seem like “tech” and people with vision might be able to do something. While that’s somewhat true, this is dramatically harder than tech. Even if you do have Kim Stanley Robinson writing for you, best way to handle this is by minimization. While The Matrix Trilogy, or Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within, or even James Bond and his Quantum of Solace, make somewhat inspired attempts, despite how sweet they look now, I feel pretty confident saying that most of those things are going to end up looking stupid in the future. I think the right way to do it is more like Doctor Who’s “sonic screwdriver” or Star Trek’s “tricorder” where it’s operation is left to the imagination.

Which brings up the overarching principle: If something can be left to the imagination, leave it to the imagination. For example, using somebody’s console with a “code red” pop-up as a cut device is only going to make your movie look stupid, regardless of how much you spend on graphic design. How much harder is it to tell the actor to “give me a ‘code red’ expression” and shoot it from an angle where you can’t see the controls?

Can any of the anti-regulation economists who come here respond to this quote from vanity fair ?

One of the hidden causes of the current global financial crisis is that the people who saw it coming had more to gain from it by taking short positions than they did by trying to publicize the problem.

BTW: I found that article from here

Before I start talking about myself, let’s lay down the interesting material. I’ve been testing and profiling my web application (Digiyou) and to do that, I use a number of different browsers. I’ve tested Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Safari 3 and 4, and Google Chrome. I tested what ran in Windows and Mac.

As one who is nearing the end of their graduate studies (the defense is being scheduled, the dissertation is basically written, etc.) I find myself spending a lot of time ruminating on just what a horrible experience it has been. (Don’t pity me; I am solely to blame.)

One aspect of this regular cogitation is focused on the fact that PhD suffering, (which comes in many forms and can be experienced differently by different people, so YMMV) is very difficult to relate to others.

Some well known attempts can be found at PhDComics. Indeed, some of their most popular comics are attempts at capturing the desperate ennui of grad school: see here, here, here, here and here. These are pretty good, although I usually regard PhDComics as a fairly bland and predictable form of humor. They usually evoke not much more than a grunt of familiarity from me.

However, the brilliant musings of Scott Eric Kaufman at Acephalous are pure genius. If you are not already reading his blog, go there now. He’s a humanities guy (literary theory and rhetoric in visual media I think) so I frequently don’t follow the academic stuff. But the guy is the only person I know who could give Cosmo a run for his money as the Toughest Writer Alive. The guy can write.

And he has written depictions of life as a PhD student that, while topically distinct from my own experiences (statistics), honestly feel like he has been secretly videotaping my life. And what a sad, depressing life it has been for the last few years. Don’t believe me? Read these four posts in order. Now read this.

Done? Good. Now do you see? Do you? The horror! The horror!