Showing posts with label mathematics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mathematics. Show all posts

Saturday, June 20, 2015

20/6/15: WLASze: Weekend Links of Arts, Sciences & zero economics


Couple of non-economics related, but hugely important links worth looking into... or an infrequent entry into my old series of WLASze: Weekend Links of Arts, Sciences and zero economics...

Firstly, via Stanford, we have a warning about the dire state of naturehttp://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/june/mass-extinction-ehrlich-061915.html. A quote: "There is no longer any doubt: We are entering a mass extinction that threatens humanity's existence." if we think we can't even handle a man-made crisis of debt overhang in the likes of Greece, what hope do we have in handling the existential threat?

Am I overhyping things? May be. Or may be not. As population ages, our ability to sustain ourselves is increasingly dependent on better food, nutrition, quality of environment etc. Not solely because we want to eat/breath/live better, but also because of brutal arithmetic: economic activity that sustains our lives depends on productivity. And productivity declines precipitously with ageing population.

So even if you think the extinction event is a rhetorical exaggeration by a bunch of scientists, brutal (and even linear - forget complex) systems of our socio-economic models imply serious and growing inter-connection between our man-made shocks and natural systems capacity to withstand them.


Secondly, via the Slate, we have a nagging suspicion that not everything technologically smart is... err... smart: "Meet the Bots: Artificial stupidity can be just as dangerous as artificial intelligence
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/04/artificial_stupidity_can_be_just_as_dangerous_as_artificial_intelligence.html.

"Bots, like rats, have colonized an astounding range of environments. …perhaps the most fascinating element here is that [AI sceptics] warnings focus on hypothetical malicious automatons while ignoring real ones."

The article goes on to list examples of harmful bots currently populating the web. But it evades the key question asked in the heading: what if AI is not intelligent at all, but is superficially capable of faking intelligence to a degree? Imagine the world where we co-share space with bots that can replicate emotional, social, behavioural and mental intelligence up to a high degree, but fail beyond certain bound. What then? Will the average / median denominator of human interactions converge to that bound as well? Will we gradually witness disappearance of human capacity of by-pass complex, but measurable or mappable systems of logic, thus reducing the richness and complexity of our own world? If so, how soon will humanity become a slightly improved model of today's Twitter?


Thirdly, "What happens when we can’t test scientific theories?" via the Prospect Mag: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/what-happens-when-we-cant-test-scientific-theories
"Scientific knowledge is supposed to be empirical: to be accepted as scientific, a theory must be falsifiable… This argument …is generally accepted by most scientists today as determining what is and is not a scientific theory. In recent years, however, many physicists have developed theories of great mathematical elegance, but which are beyond the reach of empirical falsification, even in principle. The uncomfortable question that arises is whether they can still be regarded as science."

The reason why this is important to us is that the question of falsifiability of modern theories is non-trivial to the way we structure our inquiry into the reality: the distinction between art, science and philosophy becomes blurred when one set of knowledge relies exclusively on the tools used in the other. So much so, that even the notion of knowledge, popularly associated with inquiry delivered via science, is usually not extendable to art and philosophy. Example in a quote: “Mathematical tools enable us to
investigate reality, but the mathematical concepts themselves do not necessarily imply physical reality”.

Now, personally, I don't give a damn if something implies physical reality or not, as long as that something is not designed to support such an implication. Mathematics, therefore, is a form of knowledge and we don't care if there are physical reality implications of it or not. But physical sciences purport to hold a specific, more qualitatively important corner of knowledge: that of being physically grounded in 'reality'. In other words, the very alleged supremacy of physical sciences arises not from their superiority as fields of inquiry (quality of insight is much higher in art, mathematics and philosophy than in, say, biosciences and experimental physics), but in their superiority in application (gravity has more tangible applications to our physical world than, say, topology).

So we have a crisis of sorts for physical sciences: their superiority is now run out of the road and has to yield to the superiority of abstract fields of knowledge. Bad news for humanity: deterministic nature of experimental knowledge is getting exhausted. With it, determinism surrounding our concept of knowledge diminishes too. Good news for humanity: this does not change much. Whether or not the string theory is provable is irrelevant to us. As soon as it becomes relevant, it will be, by Popperian definition, falsifiable. Until then, marvel of the infinite world of abstract.

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

3/12/2013: Some top level results from PISA 2012: Part 2

In previous post I covered the PISA results (top-level overview) for Ireland (http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2013/12/3122013-some-top-level-results-from.html). Here's a summary table showing 2012 data and changes on previous survey:





  • As you can see, Ireland is ranked in a respectable 20th Mathematics place based on the mean score. 
  • We rank 29th in terms of top performers in mathematics and 17th in terms of share of bottom performers in mathematics. This suggests that our system is performing better in raising students from the bottom than promoting students to the top. The first is a good thing, the latter is a bad thing.
  • Another bad thing is that we are losing scores, down 0.6 points annually on previous survey.
  • Ireland's maths score is statistically indistinguishable from the scores for Viet Nam, Austria, Australia, Slovenia, Denmark, New Zealand, Czech Republic, France, United Kingdom
  • And we are statistically above the OECD average along with 22 other countries.

Relationship between annualised change in performance and average PISA 2003 mathematics scores:

  • In reading, our mean score of 523 ranks us between 7th and 9th in the world - highly respectable achievement. However, the score is down 0.9 points year on year.
  • We are comfortably ahead of OECD average here
  • Our score on reading is statistically indistinguishable from Finland, Chinese Taipei, Canada, Poland, Liechtenstein.
Relationship between annualised change in performance and average PISA 2000 reading scores

  • In science we have a score of 522 which ranks us 14th to 15th which is good. Even better: the score has increased by 2.2 points year on year.
  • We are statistically above the OECD average and our science score is indistinguishable from that of Viet Nam, Poland, Canada, Liechtenstein, Germany, Chinese Taipei, Netherlands, Australia, Macao-China, New Zealand, Switzerland, United Kingdom.
Relationship between annualised change in science performance and average PISA 2006 science scores

3/12/2013: Some top level results from PISA 2012: Irish Education Performance

PISA results are out today. Here's the link: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results.htm

And some snapshots of Ireland's performance:



And comparatives to Hong Kong, Korea and Shanghai (just because we think we have the best educated workforce in the world):
Note: Ireland = Blue
Hong Kong:
 Shanghai:
Korea:

And to some European peers:
Finland:

Germany:

Sweden:

And so on. Not take these too seriously as standardised testing is hardly indicative of many important aspects and traits relating to education, but... we are reasonably good in reading skills, mediocre in mathematics and sciences... Improving in sciences, flat in maths, slightly down in reading... oh, and our top students are not really at the races, while our bottom students are. So who do we compete against? The brightest or the lowest performers? Makes you wonder, right?

Saturday, November 30, 2013

30/11/2013: WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences & zero economics


ƒThis is WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics. Enjoy…


Let's start with couple of links about mathematics… popularising and reductionist, but nonetheless brightly descriptive and engaging:

"The Math Trick Behind MP3s, JPEGs, and Homer Simpson’s Face" is a post on Nautilus covering the nature and role of Fourier Transforms in our everyday life. And the comments are really good, too… http://nautil.us/blog/the-math-trick-behind-mp3s-jpegs-and-homer-simpsons-face

A non-Simpsonite visualisation of music using Fourier Transforms via http://leaflondon.net/partners/


And a fast Fourier Transform music video: http://vimeo.com/5334539


From the science of imagining to the science of digging out: a fully intact skeleton of a baby dinosaur:
http://www.livescience.com/41486-smallest-intact-baby-ceratopsid-found.html
If you really are geeky, try computing the prior likelihood of this discovery…


And from prehistoric dinosaurs to human ancestry: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38008/title/Dating-the-Origin-of-Us/
Dating the origin of us has to be out there with the other 'ultimate' questions such as dating the origin of everything. Which, of course, only opens up an even bigger question of dating the origin of everything that precluded the origin of everything we know as reality… Fourier Transforms won't be enough here, but Homer Simpson's world referencing might just work… "This is indeed a disturbing universe"…


Though neither the mathematics, nor Homer were the fans of Soviet automotive industry, there is a certain quaint relation between the images below and the dinosaurs: http://rbth.co.uk/multimedia/pictures/2013/11/12/heroes_of_their_time_top_russian_car_makers_automotive_ma_31657.html
Purely aesthetic… of course…



Courtesy of Saatchi Gallery, brilliant brief interview with American artist, Maurice Sapiro:
http://magazine.saatchionline.com/articles/artnews/saatchi-online-news/from-the-studio-of-saatchi-online-news/maurice-sapiro?wmc=E-Mail.collectors.20131126&utm_source=collectors&utm_campaign=cb7f901342-Collectors_Tuesday_November_26_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c7e0716c03-cb7f901342-342475861


Space, colour, intensity, air…



A cool story from my old home town of Baltimore, where "Architects Turned This Former Set From "The Wire" Into A Training Ground For Tomorrow's Designers" http://www.fastcodesign.com/3021481/how-architects-transformed-this-former-set-from-the-wire-into-a-training-ground-for-tomorrow
I am impressed. Really impressed. The ambition, the scale of execution, the range of thinking that went into this are substantial and substantive... all for under USD27 million?! Beats burning cash on a minor super-yacht...


Visionary and iconic at the same time, "Rigati e tessuti" glass pieces designed by Carlo Scarpa for Venini, ca. 1938–1940 are on display at the Met in a retrospective of Scarpa's works.
http://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/press-room/exhibitions/2013/venetian-glass-by-carlo-scarpa


Per Metropolismad: "Every single piece of glass on display is breathtaking. The exhibition is organized by manufacturing technique, a strategy that works well because it is how Scarpa himself worked, pushing the master craftsmen at Venini’s furnaces to reinvent old methods, year after year."

Scarpa's work ranges from deeply structured basalt-like pieces of melted glass in organic geometry of singular bodies, to intricately woven lattices to paper-thin bowls of incredible lightness and grace, to geometric perfection of cubism. Instead of evolution toward higher complexity, Scarpa's work is a constant narrative of search and invention.


If anything, the fact that a work of a once-an-apprentice with little formal education can reach the Met is (among many other things) a testament to the long-lost pathway to exceptionalism and excellence - the good-old-fashioned learning-by-doing… You really can't teach this in an MBA class…


Saturday, October 19, 2013

19/10/2013: WLASze Part 1: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics


This is the first post of my WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences, and zero economics for this week.

Enjoy.


Today is the birthday of one of my favourite Italian futurists: Umberto Boccioni, born this day in 1882. Here's his brilliant painting from the States of Mind series: The Farewells, 1911


Boccioni's page on ArtStack: http://theartstack.com/artists/umberto-boccioni


Great slideshow giving an insight into the world of trespassers' photography:
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/10/adventures-of-a-serial-trespasser/100604/


This is not quite art, but there is some sense of raw force driving us, as people, to pushing the limits of 'normality'. And that force is well-represented in these photographs… almost voyeuristic, half creative and half inquisitive - the borderline of learning self and expressing self...


Via http://www.saatchionline.com/koenlybaert works of a Belgian painter Koen Lybaert:


Evocative of (if not outright 'borrowing from) Gerhard Richter's works.
http://www.gerhard-richter.com/art/
http://theartstack.com/artists/gerhard-richter


An interesting report about the research into behavioural, emotional and mental activity of dogs, suggesting that the caudate region activity in dogs' brains is proximate to human and indicates that dogs: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/opinion/sunday/dogs-are-people-too.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Some select quotes: "Although we are just beginning to answer basic questions about the canine brain, we cannot ignore the striking similarity between dogs and humans in both the structure and function of a key brain region: the caudate nucleus."

"Do these findings prove that dogs love us? Not quite. But many of the same things that activate the human caudate, which are associated with positive emotions, also activate the dog caudate. Neuroscientists call this a functional homology, and it may be an indication of canine emotions. The ability to experience positive emotions, like love and attachment, would mean that dogs have a level of sentience comparable to that of a human child. And this ability suggests a rethinking of how we treat dogs."

Not only an amazing set of studies, but also a promise of serious ethical and even legal implications, were the findings to continue expanding our insight into the emotional, cognitive and psychological existence of our extended family members…


A brief note: http://classic.slashdot.org/story/13/10/07/2352217 with huge implications. This marks the first time that a fusion reactor was able to generate more energy than it consumed. Full report here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24429621


An absolutely stunning breakthrough in mapping out the future of mathematical theory:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/10/01/voevodskys-mathematical-revolution/
The implications of this thinking are so far reaching out only to the issue of how we write proofs (the topic of the article), but far beyond that, the removal of the heavy burden of proof formulation and verification will enable mathematics to move onto the core purpose of the field of any inquiry - derivation of questions and formulation of propositions. Here's a direct link to Voyevodsky's work on Univaliant Foundations: http://www.math.ias.edu/~vladimir/Site3/Univalent_Foundations.html and his lecture introducing the topic: http://video.ias.edu/univalent
Marvellously put…


For those of you who took my course in Investment Theory this week at Trinity College, I referenced this work in the last lecture, talking about the advancements in computing and data analytics / strategy formation nexus.


And from the future of mathematics to the past of the power that drives all inquiry: humanity. The origins of our beginnings must be rethought now... thanks to the latest fossil discovery...
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/17/skull-homo-erectus-human-evolution?CMP=twt_gu


Enjoy and stay tuned for more WLASze...

Friday, June 7, 2013

7/6/2013: Weekend Reading Links Part 1



The weekly links page for weekend reading materials is now becoming a regular feature of this blog. Why? Because in my daily life I am privileged to come across a number of fascinating things - science and arts related - and these are simply worth sharing. Also because art and science are more important in value to humanity than economics (the bit of economics that is beyond science-art overlap, or, as I call it, applied economics). And finally, because it is often fun to tease out bits of my own thinking on the matters of art (and less so on the matters of science).

So here's this week's list in no particular order.


Since my days at IBM I came to appreciate the complex nature of data visualisation. Prior to my days at IBM I came to appreciate the value of visualisation in shaping our understanding of the world when information about the world is transmitted to us by means of data. Now, here's an article that added to my understanding of visualisation as a tool for shaping the long-term future of the world: http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/07/sparkon-releases-future-visualization-engine-to-help-kids-choose-a-career/ . Why is it important to me? Ok:

  1. It contains direct links to human capital (sorry, err… I know, no economics)
  2. If visualisation is about narrating the world, making it more comprehensible, then visualisation is also capable of altering the world around us by altering our understanding of it. That is second-order loop of causality: world causes data, which causes (via visualisation) our understanding which in turn causes us to interact with the world and thus cause data… If we take the visualisation as a tool for directly shaping human choice of careers, fields of study, inquiry etc, then the visualisation over time becomes the first order shaper of the world, right? Scary… You bet:
  3. The entire idea of shaping (via any specifically designated tool) one's future, as in "Let’s say your strongest “career personality type” is artistic follows by enterprising, you are extroverted, and you are passionate about art and video games. Sparkon suggests a range of jobs that bring all these together, like video game designer or art director, and suggests majors and skill sets that are useful for these areas. The engine then suggests specific videos, like “careers in the video game industry,” computer programming, or graphic design. There are also more general videos about college and SAT preparation, communication and leadership etc… Students can create a Netflix-style queue with recommended videos, and parents can also get involved by monitoring their kids’ progress to see what they are exploring." Missing something? Oh, yes, Sparkon won't really suggest you become an artist, cause you know… "there's no money in that". Now, imagine the world where humans are discouraged from making any errors by constantly being steered / selected into a stream of activities and information determined by a machine?.. Here comes Sparkon generation of drones?


Next, back to Venice Biennale:
"When I got out I felt I had escaped from the suffocating embrace of a revenant worthy of De Chirico. But this remake is perfectly in tune with the market of today now that the fairs have given up on the fuchsia and chrome-yellows of Murakami and Koons and have taken to showing off the pauperish neutrals of the Seventies. It is a much more radical product than the efforts of the young neo-conceptualists, but highly fashionable at a time when collecting is wearing the hair-shirt of the most hypocritical of penitents."

What?! Ah, yes, yes… that's about current reconstruction of the 1969 exhibition http://www.veniceconnected.com/node/29046. The review of it - the source of the quote - is here: http://www.theartnewspaper.com/reviews/The-Prada-Biennale-show-Creative-Energy-turned-into-Dead-Fetishism/29836 . Comes August, I am looking forward to being as suffocated by the embrace of the exhibition as I was suffocated by the embrace of the review, just as I am certain to be suffocated by the Venice stuffed by the 30+ degrees sun heated bodies of tourists, who usually leave Biennale the last on the list of amusements worth attending…


The art of displaying dead art (point above) is different from the art of feeding dead art to a dead dictator… and the latter doesn't quite offer the promise of the excitement of the former. Except when the dead dictator is Kim Jong-Wong-Bi-Din-Dong-Il of North Korea. Fascinating and fantastic account of Kim's favourite sushi chef depicted in a lengthy interview in http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201306/kim-jong-il-sushi-chef-kenji-fujimoto-adam-johnson-2013?currentPage=1

My favourite rhetorical bit: "And guesthouse is code for a series of palaces decorated with cold marble, silver-braided bedspreads, ice purple paintings of kimilsungia blossoms, and ceilings airbrushed with the cran-apple mist of sunset, as if Liberace's jet had crashed into Lenin's tomb." My favourite human bit: Fujimoto's two abandoned families. It has to be a rare twist of fate in which one abandons his two daughters and a spouse to serve the dictator in exchange for having a family that he subsequently condemns to labour camps by escaping the dictator… and so on… do read!


Science or fiction? http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/06/06/take-that-nsa-scientists-hide-communications-using-a-hole-in-time/ So basic idea is there are holes in time (not only the ones that follow copious consumption of alcohol) and you can hide stuff in them (well, for now, no white elephants - ease off, politicians with any plans). My favourite quote: "In practice, this system isn’t perfect." No sh*t, Sherlocks…


New stuff on 'how planets are formed' http://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/item/32967-astronomers-discover-comet/ Predictably, nothing new on why planets are formed… but that is a different topic.


On the way we know stuff, plus the way we communicate, a very interesting paper from Cornell University "Social Media and Information Overload: Survey Results" (http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0813) looks at information flows via user-generated media, "such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter' based on smallish sample of 587 participants in a UK survey. "Participants who experience information overload are those who engage less frequently with the media, rather than those who have fewer posts to read." Kind of obvious: less you engage, bigger is build up of unanswered communications. "Microbloggers complain of information overload to the greatest extent. Two thirds of Twitter-users have felt that they receive too many posts, and over half of Twitter-users have felt the need for a tool to filter out the irrelevant posts." I have no idea how I would have answered their survey… maybe because I feel that I am more surveys-overloaded than twitter-overloaded?


Much is written by humanity on the topic of happiness. So much so that even the Guardian (a miserably Lefty paper) has gotten to the topic, let alone the economists (the latter also more often than not read the Guardian, which is clearly correlated with both being unhappy on average more than non-economist and so on…) Read: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/31/secret-happiness-complicated-research?INTCMP=SRCH - it is somewhat 'all over the place' and not too deep, but is interesting nonetheless. And when you finished, read



And thereafter, come back to this page…


Last week, I posted links to several articles on the proof of the theorem that postulates that gaps between prime numbers are bounded (see: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2013/05/2552013-saturday-reading-links.html). Here's a human story behind the proof author:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/05/twin-primes/ - worth a read.


In contrast, here's the design for much-awaited Lego House design: http://aboutus.lego.com/en-gb/news-room/2013/june/the-right-look-for-a-lego-house/ and, argue with me on this, but I think it is banal. Made even more banal by monochromatic white, which is so 'not Lego' and thus expected in the world of reverse psychology of asymmetric innovation - aka the world of on-line aesthetics.


Stay tuned for more reading links once the kids are put into their beds...



Saturday, October 6, 2012

6/10/2012: Art, Mathematics and Science


And to finish off the night of charts galore, here's something charts-graphs related of a softer variety: on art and maths . Enjoy!