The Toilet Door

So I need to come up with a name for a phenomena I've observed.

Basically I tell my students at the start of the practical the same things. Check the marking scheme, don't forget to talk about errors, work quickly.

Inevitably they ignore me and forgot to talk about errors, so I started telling the students. Check the marking scheme, don't forget to talk about errors, work quickly. I tell all the other students this and they usually fail, so maybe you'll be different.

Inevitably they think I'm joking or something, and they do poorly. So I started telling the students. Check the marking scheme, don't forget to talk about errors, work quickly. I tell all the other students this and they usually fail, and I tell them what I've just told you now and they usually fail, so maybe you'll be different.

So we can really just state it's

Message Content. + self referencing warning

I need to print something like that out for my students and just show them what happens 🙂

So I just read a substantial paper that debunks the argument many people use to support legislation or technology that would infringe on privacy. "If you've got nothing to hide, what's there to worry about?"

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565&

Basically he states that privacy is a fairly ill defined term,  and it has a range of classifications. He goes on to define the problems that the term privacy can encompass. The two main ones are Orwellian surveillance and Kafkaesque problems. Kafkaesque being the kind of situation where another party has so much information about you that before you can take any actions, you're already limited in what you can do.

Anyway, it had me thinking about trying to break down privacy to what it really means. All I've come up with so far is that privacy is like a currency denominated by information. The majority of interactions we have in the world are essentially trades in information. With friends, we share secrets, which is an information trade to build up trust. Similarly, when we go for job interviews, or are looking for romantic partners, we have the ability to release and share information in a way that makes us more desirable.

Where privacy is important is that it allows us options in how we reveal information and when. If you remove privacy, it allows other parties you may want to interact with to assess you on either a) incomplete or incorrect information or b) correct information presented in an unfavorable order. For most cases it's probably a), which is why privacy is important.

I guess an appropriate analogy would be suggesting that life is a bit like a card game. You can spend some time trying to trade for better cards, you can play cards in a beneficial order, you can make intelligent guesses and inferences about other people based on what actions they take. The privacy component is that your hand is hidden information, there should be no desire to give up the advantages that privacy affords even if you're doing nothing wrong, because it can in no way help you in the future. What is happening with big data and data mining is that we're getting so much information from everyone about what they are discarding, what they play and what hands they have that we can start building fairly accurate models about what moves you'll make next.

They've already built a computer program that will consistently beat most humans at rock paper scissors based on big data http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/science/rock-paper-scissors.html?_r=0

It's an interesting thing to consider, but for the time being, fight to hold onto your privacy, otherwise you're giving up your social currency too easily and gaining nothing for it. As I'd say in most games, that's a bad trade.

So I haven't updated for a while. I think I was perhaps a bit ambitious to think I could make a meaningful entry every day. I either need to rapidly increase the speed at which I can produce an entry, or I need to make them less frequently. Part of the issue is unbalanced work weeks, but anyway. On with the content.

So one thing I find interesting in Game Theory. I'm talking about things like the Prisoner's Dilemma, Pascal's Wager. They can be applied to all sorts of situations wherein you are uncertain about the state of one particular function. For example, you could apply it to the weather raining or not raining. Then your choices are wear rain appropriate clothes, or not. Ideally you want to only wear rain appropriate clothes when it's raining, but it comes down to what will bother you more, wearing rain clothes when you don't need them, or getting soaked in your normal clothes.

The other situation where they are interesting is when you're relatively sure of one of the states, but not certain, but the payoff for being correct is small or insignifcant compared to being wrong. For example, funding some unlikely to work research but for a defense purpose. Funding the research and having it pay off is huge, Funding the research for no pay off is not ideal, but on the other side, not funding the research and not having it pay off achieves nothing, but not funding and having it succeed is disasterous. Other situations turn up in social contexts as well.

I'll expand on this more later when I can actually draw some in here, it's too awkward to talk about them without

We spend a good deal of time learning how to perform certain tasks, so our brain can pretty much complete them on autopilot, freeing up our brain to do other tasks. The problem is that in doing so, our brain stops forming memories of that task unless they are significant, eg a car crash. So we repeat tasks and form habits and routines, so our brain can be lazy.

The paradox is this. Do we spend our time in the same routines, and remembering on highlights of our existence, but live efficiently. Or do we force ourselves to not use the easy pathways formed in our brain, so we're constantly learning and relearning and remember more in detail, but live less efficiently.

It's a tough concept for me to resolve.

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/03/nielsen-family-is-dead/

So I read this article tonight and it covers a number of highly relevant points. I'm not going to cover everything, but I do want to talk about the first point they bring up, that is, how network executives measure the popularity of a show is shifting. Rather than surveying the habits of random households, some companies are now just sampling the available data on twitter. It means going from a sample size of 25,000 with a good deal of selection bias to an entire, worldwide demographic of millions of people, also with some selection bias.

It speaks to the complacency of companies when they aren't constantly trying to innovate and improve, only maintain share price that they didn't start doing this sooner. What is really interesting though, is whilst it's starting with TV shows, there's no reason the traffic on twitter can't be used measure a whole range of social phenomena. Journalists are already tweeting details of events, court cases live and generating interest and discussion. As more people become involved, the information that can be gleamed from twitter analysis will become more reliable cross sections of public opinion.

There is definitely self selection bias though, the demographic of older people or those without reliable access to the internet are unable to make full use of the power of social media. It shouldn't be solely relied upon just yet, but for now it's large enough that institutions can no longer ignore it. I'd like to think that in 30 years time, when the older generation has passed away, that the entirety of the population could be reliably sampled through the internet, there'd be no need to rely on phone polls, face to face polls. Polling companies themselves would have shifted to big data analysis on trends from twitter or facebook. Public opinion on legislation could be reliably sampled by simple search query, or a tweet asking for opinions from a popular politician or celebrity.

I'm excited about the efficiency of the future, I can't wait for it to get here.

As part of writing, and being a social creature in general I'm often thinking about communication and how it actually works. There's a number of categories and ways to categorise communication. Do we split it up between verbal and nonverbal? Or do we sort it by the number and roles of the participants, one to one, one to many, many to many, many to one. Or can we sort it by the time delay between the sending and receiving of messages, from symmetric real time to asymmetric with a long delay. We can even split it up by ephemeral or non-ephemeral

I'll start with the one to one communications as they are the type that most people have, and can comfortably understand already. Within this classification, we can have several sub classifcations

• In person - verbal and non verbal
• Verbal only (phone or skype)
• Written only (texting, chatting)

We can also add the non realtime symmetric communications

• Verbal only (voice mail)
• Written only (email, letters)
• Video messages (contains verbal and nonverbal information)

Lastly, we have the non realtime, asymmetric communications

• Written only (Books, blog posts, documents)
• Verbal only (audio instructions, audio books)
• Video only (movies, tv shows, instructional videos)

Now I'm a bit skeptical of including movies and tv shows, as they wouldn't solely fall under a definition of a one to one conversation. They also can be one to many. It's hard to call them a conversation, but it can be classed as a one to one communication, except one party is delivering information, and the other party is receiving it. Anyway, there's far too many to cover in one post, but I'll focus on the first one, in person communication.

One to one conversations in person are probably the most important thing to get right, but the way we are taught in schools to communicate represents an idealised way we should communicate compared with the way we actually communicate. Typically, we spend a good deal of time learning about nouns, verbs, adjectives, sentence structure. The purpose of this is to develop mastery of the language. Now I can only write about Australian English, but I imagine most of what I'm about to discuss is relevant as well. We are taught to communicate using our words, since if everyone can agree on their definitions, then all ambiguity should be removed.

For the most part, this is correct, communication with words is what we should aim for, but where things get complicated is in all the non lexical communication. The tone, the pacing, the emphasis on certain syllables all delivers additional information. Additionally, the body language communicates information about the state people are in, opening up, making yourself appear larger communicates confidence, where as crossing arms, crouching, or making yourself smaller communicates insecurity and fear. The distance placed between people, the angle between them, the amount of eye contact all communicate information about how the two people perceive each other.

Now all this information is a lot to consciously consider, for the vast majority of people, it's mostly subconscious. If you had to actively manage your body language, your tone, your posture as well as choosing the correct words to say to effectively communicate your message, your brain would be fairly overloaded. This is where the ambiguity comes into one to one conversations in person. The words someone is saying might be what you want to hear, but the rest of what they communicate adds significant weight about whether or not you can trust those words. It is especially difficult when the words and the body language are communicating different messages, which one are you to believe? Is the person actively controlling their body language or is a result of their subconscious.

Over the years I've been doing a lot of reading about communication, body language, posture, non verbal cues and various other topics. One of the things I try to do now, is to simply make conscious observations during conversations about these things. What is my posture, what is theirs? Am I fidgeting or am I engaged with what they are saying? I view it as trying to peak into my subconscious to see what it is I like or dislike about someone. I also view as a challenge to peak into their subconscious/conscious to see how they feel about me and what I'm saying.

I'll definitely come back to this topic at some point, but that's all for now.

Well 2 days in a row followed by a long break isn't too bad. At least I remembered enough to feel guilty about not doing it.

Can't think of anything great to discuss at the moment. I'm finishing off my next paper to be published. It's a different kind of writing, significantly more restricted and a whole lot of editing to ensure the correct meaning comes across. I guess it's the same as any writing and communication though, you may have the ideas in your head, but unless you can communicate them clearly, efficiently they are worth nothing. Scientific writing requires one to be explicitly precise and at the same time, concise. This limitation poses significant challenges. Typically one could do the following for example.

The machine was left on overnight and there was a spill. It was fixed by turning it off in the morning.

With a sense of context, it is obvious the spill was not turned off. It, is referring to the machine. We could make this sentence more ambiguous by removing a part

The machine was left on overnight and there was a spill. It was fixed in the morning.

Here, we are left unsure if the machine being left on is the problem, or the spill is the problem, or both. Obviously avoiding ambiguity is what good writing should always aim to achieve. However, it can quickly become very verbose, especially when describing unnamed objects.

The brown machine was left on overnight and there was a spill that affected the black machine. The black machine was fixed, the brown machine was turned off and the spill was cleaned up in the morning.

In scientific writing however, items don't have simple or small names such as the brown machine or the black machine, they often have long, awkward names. This is partly due to the nomenclature used to describe molecules. It is insufficient to simply write glucose, there are two isomers, so we write D-glucose, but even then, there are two forms, so we write α-D-glucose. In regular writing, it would be sufficient to simply introduce it as α-D-glucose and then refer to it as glucose from that point on, only adding clarification if you later introduced a different form. As science papers are rarely read by scientists in order, it is a necessity to ensure that if a reader picks up the paper and starts reading from a given figure, that it remains unambiguous.

It is taking me a while to get used to writing in a style where each sentence I write must be able to stand on its own, such that a reader with some scientific knowledge can make sense of it without being confused by attempts to reduce the number of words on a page. Basically, nomenclature is really important. I'm definitely looking forward to being able to write freely

So one of the first things I've been thinking about with this blog is the simple question. Who is my audience going to be?

It's entirely possible that some of my close friends or family will wind up reading it. It's possible, but unlikely that in the future my children, or children of the next generation will discover it. It's possible that at some point, some strangers over the internet will start reading it because of some content I post about something draws their continued interest. All I really know for sure is that I'm going to read it at some point in the future.

Since a future version of myself is the target audience and anyone else is a bonus, there's a few things I know I need to do to tailor the content so I'll want to read it again, I'll start with some basic assumptions or hopes about what a future version of me will be like.

1) I'll have less time in the future, due to increased responsibility and aging in general.

2) I'll presumably be wiser and have a broader range of knowledge.

3) I'll respect any content that required some intelligence and effort to create.

Taking those three things into account, it gives me a guide as to how I should think about and structure the content I create. From that I can give myself a couple of simple guidelines about what an ideal blog post should contain if I'm going to be interested in reading in the future.

- Concise and to the point

- Thoughts and ideas should contain some preliminary research and effort.

- Should cover a range of topics I'm likely to be unfamiliar with

So to ensure this post complies with my newly defined guidelines, I'm going to expand on the point and try and estimate some probability of people in the future reading my blog.

To work out the probability of someone reading my blog, we have to consider the rate of content creation, as well as the current amount of content available. We'll assume the rate of content consumption is fixed.

In 2012, there was 745 movies released [1], with an average length of 90 minutes, that's 46 days.

For TV shows it's a bit trickier something like Star Trek: The Next Generation has 178 episodes of 42 minutes each, which is 124.6 hours of viewing. Or 30 rock  has 138 episodes of 23 minutes each which is about 53 hours of viewing. If we say the average length and duration of a comedy series is about 60 hours after it's finished and the average drama show is about 100 hours of viewing, then we just need to put a number on how many of those shows are finishing each year. At a guess, I'd say there's at least 3 comedies and 3 dramas finishing each year on average. So that gives us a minimum of about 19 days.

From TV and Movies alone, there's about 62 days a year. Of course that's not including all TV content, I'm excluding things like reality TV, sports, news. It might be better to look at the number of TV channels and competing shows they have in primetime. But I'll leave that for another day. So at 62 days a year of only new video content, there's some time to catch up on the backlog. By what year is the backlog of TV and Movies going to be so great it can't be overcome in a lifetime? I'll leave that for another day as well.

The point I'm trying to get to, is that there already exists more content than anyone could possibly hope consume in their lifetime, and the rate at which it's being produced will grow as the population increases as well. The result of this is that individual blogs are unlikely to be read by anyone in the future, unless at some point, the rate at which humans can consume content is greatly increased by technology.

So. Anyone that's come across this blog before has probably seen how infrequently I update it. Part of that is due to Facebook serving as an adequate outlet for microblogging. So basically what happens is I have some random thought or something interesting worth sharing. I share it on Facebook, get a handful of comments and 'likes' and then I never consider it again. In rare cases some discussion is had.

Part of my unending quest towards self improvement is to force myself to develop new habits. With some help from some software on my phone aptly named Hab-it! One of those habits is obviously blogging & journalling my thoughts and life. I see three immediate benefits to this.

1) I can clear my mind by writing stuff down, rather than bouncing around an idea in my head indefinitely until I get a chance to discuss it with someone or work it on more.
2) I'll get more practice writing and putting my thoughts and ideas into structured essays. Which should aid with my aspirations of writing a book one day.
3) I'll get a chance to document some of my life. I watched a TED talk recently about a guy, Cesar, who made a 1 second video every day for the past year of his life. He was doing it so he'd never forget a day.

So expanding on #3, a 1 second video doesn't mean much to an outside observer, but to him it serves as an anchor point for his memories of that day. It winds up being an ordered system of remembering things. One of the benefits he mentioned was that he was making his days more valuable, so he'd try and do something worth remembering each day. Now I'm unlikely to be able to make a 1 second video each day just yet. I'd certainly try it if there was a convenient application to remind me to take one my phone each day. At least writing something each day is a start.

I've got plenty of ideas for things to write about for the next couple of weeks. So we'll see how this goes.