It was during this trip that my father expressed an interest in picking up a DSLR (Digital Single-Lens Reflex) camera to replace his aging point-and-shoot. My folks have been doing more travelling lately - partially because of my trans-American movement patterns - and my dad wanted to get a better camera for taking photos. After much reading and searching, we settled on the Nikon D3100 as it seems to be a good 'introductory' model. I got to play around with it a little bit, which was fun, before the trip was over and they returned home.

A short while later, I decided to go on a trip myself (see previous post) and my dad suggested that I get a DSLR so that I could take some nice photos. While mulling it over, a buddy helpfully opined that if I was going to 'take the plunge', I should do so several weeks before the trip because it would take me some time to figure out how to use the thing. He was right.

In the end, I found a good deal on a refurbished Nikon D5100. Meta.

I'm a complete amateur when it comes to this stuff. The little that I know about aperture, ISO, exposure time, focal length, etc. comes from listening to tech podcasts and reading Wikipedia. I had no concept of why you'd want to fuss around with such settings rather than shoot on 'auto'. That's why I had to do a lot of reading followed by some sessions of playing around with the knobs and buttons.

A general observation I have about getting into DSLR photography is that it's kind of tough - more so than I anticipated. Don't get me wrong here, I wasn't expecting to be able to take professional-quality crowd-wowing photos from the get go. However, I've found that it's actually pretty easy to accidentally take photos that look worse than those I take regularly with my far less expensive Cannon point-and-shoot.

The way I look at it is like this: a good point-and-shoot doesn't give you many options in terms of creativity, but with the exception of low-light conditions, you'll generally shoot photos that look good (if boring). A DSLR, in giving you complete control over its functions (as well as the option to switch lenses), allows you to shoot a much greater variety of photos. The trade-off is that you have to have some understanding of what it is you're doing, which, in turn, requires some modicum of research.

Actually, understanding isn't entirely sufficient, unfortunately. It also requires time, which is actually the bigger problem. It's all fine and good for me to take a walk around a local park or trail and take photos on manual to my heart's content. It's an entirely different story when I'm walking around with friends (or my gf), and they're getting annoyed while I'm fiddling around with settings. I have to admit that I've been in the 'annoyed' camp myself.

Rereading this, it feels a tad negative, which isn't my intent. I'm glad that I picked up the camera and I'm enjoying working through its many mysteries. My early photos were a bit garbage, but in the past couple of months, I've taken a few really nice shots. I'm still finding that that I have to adjust the color balance in LightRoom1 but I'm sure that I'll figure it out eventually.

On the bright side, photography gives me something else to blog about, so I'll post photos to here and Picasa as usual. I'm also sure that I'll have future posts to write about how my photography 'skillz' are... developing. 

1I'll write a blog post about Bryan Peterson's excellent Understanding Exposure, a must buy for new photographers. One detail, however, is that he recommends always shooting on 'cloudy' white-balance. I find that the default D5100 cloudy setting is far too harsh, and produces photos with oversaturated warm tones. I haven't found a setting that I consistently like.   

The 'Chimmz'1 holiday season is usually when I return to Eastern Canada to visit the family and put up with the blistering cold. However, this year was different; Instead I spent two-and-a-half weeks in Spain, meeting my gf's friends and family. I'd like to talk about the trip in a few posts, starting with a bit of background.

This was somewhat momentous for me as it was my first time travelling to Europe. That's probably strange to some folks, but while my family did make a lot of trips when I was young, they tended to be more of the 'camping/nature' rather than 'seeing world cities' variety. Furthermore, I'm not sure that I would've appreciated trips to the 'Old World' when I was young anyways - it's really only in my 20s that I began to value experience as much as hard 'goods'2. Oh well.

The region of Spain that I visited was The Basque Country (País Vasco in Spanish, Euskadi in Basque) pictured left in the Wikipedia article. It's a beautiful land of green mountainsides, towns in hidden valleys, excellent food, and rich history. It's also well-known for its fierce nationalism and the presence of the separatist terrorist group known as the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Freedom), or ETA. While the ETA has declared a complete cessation of all paramilitary activities since 2011, its regular bombings, kidnappings, and shootings in the past probably did a lot to prevent the beautiful countryside from becoming a hot tourist destination. It is not my intent to discuss 'politics' here - especially about a situation for which my knowledge is so limited, but it is worth pointing out that it's impossible to visit the Basque Country without seeing evidence of national politics everywhere in the form of signs, demonstrations, and discussion.

As a tourist, the area was a bit overwhelming - primarily because most of the signage outside of the major cities like Bilbo (Bilbao in Spanish) and Donostia (San Sebastian) is in Basque. Basque, or Euskara as the Basques themselves refer to it, has fascinated academic linguists for some time as it is not part of the Indo-European family: with the exception of some Latin-derived neologisms (e.g., Ospitalea) there's absolutely no context through which to interpret what you're reading using other languages. This is a pretty big deal - for instance, my Spanish is rudimentary at best (though I've signed up for classes!), but I can make out a lot of street signs, directions, and menus by interpreting cognates from English and French. I had no such luck with Basque, however, the words and grammar are totally alien. If you're interested, take a look at this list, where you can see how few borrowed words there are. Thankfully, everyone speaks Castillian Spanish if you need to ask for directions, but I don't think I would've seen much of the countryside without a guide.

Incidentally (and fascinatingly), the best supported evidence for the origin of modern Basque is that it stems from the ancestral language spoken by what eventually became the Roman province of Gallia Aquitania in the 1st century BCE. Roman Aquitanian inscriptions have been found containing words that are very similar if not identical to modern Basque, such as 'bihotza' (heart). Several pre-Roman Iberian languages are known to have existed from ancient writings and archeological excavations, but all others appear to have died off in favor of Roman spread Latin and its eventual derivatives. The somewhat isolated nature of the Basque Country and its people is likely responsible for the language's survival, though banning of its teaching during the period of Francoist Spain went a long way towards ending that. While there are ~2.3 million Basque people, fewer than a million actively speak the language fluently (at least according to Wikipedia).

North Americans such as myself probably have a naive tendency to view other countries as relatively homogenous. For instance, the cultural differences between the US 'North' and 'South' are pretty minor when you consider that many countries have sub-populations that speak different languages and follow completely different traditions. Canada experiences some of this between the French and English parts, but Spain has several major languages/dialects in an area that would easily fit into most individual Canadian provinces. With no offense intended, if you asked me a few years ago to name things about Spain off of the top of my head, I probably would have said things like: Matadors, flamenco, Don Quixote, sangria, siestas, tapas, and soccer (the last works to describe every European country, I'm told). With the exception of siestas and a particular type of tapas, most of what I saw didn't fit my 'Spanish eStereotypes', and I'll start with that in the next post. 

1Chimmz is my non-denominational, non-religious, end-of-year holiday. I like it more than 'festivus' or whatever because it rolls off of the tongue: "Merry Chimmz, yo."

2This is something that I now regret. I spent a lot of money (relatively) in my younger years buying stuff that I don't care about anymore at all. I kind of collected everything - movies, books, games, junk... Some of the things that I collected, I still appreciate and cart-around with me, but a lot of it just seems like so much wasted effort.

It's somewhat unfortunate that Thomas Khun has become the patron saint of quackery - at least that's the way that I feel given how often he's brought up by purveyors of non-science. I've read Khun's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and found it to be quite interesting, if a tad simplistic. Its classic contribution to the philosophy of science is its argument that science doesn't progress only by the accumulation of facts that build upon existing theories, but rather more importantly, by the accumulation of facts that cannot be squared with current theories. Eventually, the weight of these unresolvable observations 'breaks' the discipline requiring a qualitatively different approach to explaining the data: a completely different set of theories, a.k.a. a new 'paradigm'.

This model works rather well in explicating the context and subsequent effects of landmark historical discoveries (relativity, evolution by natural selection, etc.1), however, it has been criticized in its ability to explain the sorts of 'revolutions' happening in modern science. The argument goes like this: Modern science is a much more well-funded and institutionalized pursuit than it was during these classical revolutions. New 'discoveries' are being made rather frequently and so, when it comes to most sciences, hypotheses are being tested, refuted, and reassessed on much smaller scales than previously. Furthermore, the number of independent observations supporting many fundamental hypotheses is much, much larger than in the past. All of this suggests that we're unlikely to see many 'paradigm shifts' on the level of the classical Khunian examples any time soon, at least for most sciences2.

Unfortunately for the quacks, a new hypothesis - the efficacy of homeopathy, for instance - must incorporate existing observations. And yet so many do not. I think that this is why many of us get frustrated when non-scientists, especially science writers, call for some form of 'middle ground' between practitioners of woo and mainstream science. 'But this or that anecdotal evidence suggests that there might be something to this,' they say. It's a Kuhnian revolution in the making... ungh.

Sadly for the overly brash, science necessitates conservatism. Working within a theoretical framework that may be incomplete, but is solid and works for most circumstances (such as Newtonian gravity), is certainly preferable to overindulging in research under frameworks that have little to no support to begin with. As with many things, ideas are important, but relatively cheap in comparison to being able to come up with methods through which to test them (the challenge of experimental design). Conservatism, as a reviewer of a manuscript once pointed out, also means that novel hypotheses that explain existing observations as well as existing hypotheses are insufficient. They must do better than existing hypotheses - that is to say that they must explain facts that are not explained by those hypotheses in current vogue.

There's a time commitment to science, and testing every random idea out there isn't necessarily an efficient way to make progress... unless you're the NCCAM? 

1The 'Copernican Revolution' is often cited among these, but I don't understand its relevance. As is discussed in detail in Owen Gingerich's The Book That Nobody Read, Ptolemaic epicycles and Copernical heliocentrism were equivalent models for explaining the available data and both made testable predictions about the position of planets (see here). In the absence of other theories that would have cinched the debate (e.g., gravity), the only real difference between the two theories was that Copernicus' made some of the calculations easier, which is why a preface was added to his book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, which contained the following:

...it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions through careful and expert study. Then he must conceive and devise the causes of these motions or hypotheses about them. Since he cannot in any way attain to the true causes, he will adopt whatever suppositions enable the motions to be computed correctly ... The present author has performed both these duties excellently. For these hypotheses need not be true nor even probable. On the contrary, if they provide a calculus consistent with the observations, that alone is enough ... For this art, it is quite clear, is completely and absolutely ignorant of the causes of the apparent [movement of the heavens]. And if any causes are devised by the imagination, as indeed very many are, they are not put forward to convince anyone that they are true, but merely to provide a reliable basis for computation. 

2That's not to say that I don't think that there are any 'big shifts' on the horizon. Some 'common knowledge', ostensibly derived from science, doesn't have nearly as much evidence as we'd like to believe - especially in disciplines where controlled experimentation isn't always easy. One example that's being challenged in books and research is the idea that fat intake is a major cause of heart disease, something promoted extensively by the American Heart Association. There seems to be growing evidence that refined sugars are a much stronger culprit - and in particular intake of certain sugars in doses not typically found in nature (e.g., high-fructose corn syrup). None of this is my expertise though. While his views seem a bit extreme, I would like to read Gary Taubes' Why We Get Fat, which discusses the issue.

ACftP begins with Zingales offering an opinion as to what has traditionally made American enterprise so successful: relatively free and open markets. He has an interesting perspective on the matter in that he was born and raised in Italy and worked briefly for the Italian central bank before becoming a professor at the University of Chicago. In Italy, Zingales observes, cronyism is the norm. Power lies in the hands of a relatively small number of elites who distort the normal functioning of the market in the favor of their (and their friend's) own fortunes.

In an anecdote, the author explains that when he first moved to Chicago, the city was hit with a Tornado warning. The mayor appeared on TV and asked everyone to tape up their windows. Somewhat surprised, Zingales realized that many of his neighbors were following the mayor's advice. In Italy, he explains, if the mayor asks you to tape up your windows, you immediately assume that his brother sells tape.

I also happened to listen to an audiobook last week that tackles many of the same themes: Arianna Huffington's Third World America (2010; Tantor Audio). The 'third world' referred to by the author is the idea that America is becoming a country of 'haves' and 'have nots', where an ever greater amount of wealth is concentrated in the hand of an influential few.

Both books argue that people's confidence in markets exists only so long as they continue to perceive society as a meritocracy. When the common conception is that luck and/or familial wealth have the greatest impact on your ability to succeed, market confidence will erode leading to populist calls for greater 'redistribution'. 

The confusion of the ideas of 'market' and 'business' doesn't help because businesses have large short-term incentives to distort the proper functioning of markets in order to generate monopolies and oligarchies. Zingales in particular argues that many of the high-tech industries that are becoming an ever greater part of American economic growth are in winner-take-all economies: being the dominant operating system, or the number one app, drives disproportionate revenue your way. This leads to ever greater incentives to limit competition once you're at the top.

Where the two books differ, as expected, is in how they suggest the problem of cronyism be addressed. Whereas Huffington supports tighter regulation and both advocate transparency, Zingales is a bit more practical. We must recognize, he explains, that government itself is part of the problem, and therefore cannot be the solution on its own. Massive incentives exist to capture regulators and grease palms. Unfortunately the balance will never favor the diffuse individual over the concentrated incentives of the company.

What ACftP advocates is an overall simplification of regulation. Zingales says that he's realized that economists spend too much time focusing on what is efficient, rather than what works. Repeal of the Glass-Stegal Act didn't cause the recent economic calamity, but its existence did have an effect of limiting bank consolidation and thus may have been stabilizing. Whether inefficient or not, it was ~30 pages long, which meant that it was easy to monitor and enforce unlike the unwieldy ~2,300 page Dodd-Frank Act, which will likely keep an entire army of attorneys employed to interpret it (and find loopholes for corporations). Furthermore, Zingales also advocates a massive simplification of the tax code, an end to incentive perverting (read ALL) subsidies, a restoration of the ability of individuals to pursue class action lawsuits under all circumstances, and laws that would massively reward 'whistleblowers', which are a much cheaper and far more effective source of regulation.

While Huffington and Zingales bascially agree the vast majority of the time, I think that Zingales has the right of it in that hoping that we'll somehow be able to demand 'different sort of politician' ignores the realities that will likely change the incentives of anyone who takes office. His suggestions on how to reform corporate governance and regulation may not be perfect, but they're more transparent. Ultimately, constant vigilance against abuse and scandal is the only way to minimize cronyism.

P.S. Based solely on his comments on various podcasts and writings, I was a bit surprised to discover that Zingales does not consider himself a libertarian. He's certainly pro-market, but as he writes in the book (p. 232):

Many free-market economists think that well-functioning markets arise naturally in a laissez-faire economy. Unfortunately, this is not the case. A free market’s infrastructure and liquidity—the presence of many buyers and sellers at the same time—are the ultimate public good: everybody benefits with no cost. Yet individual market participants, especially powerful ones, can benefit from trying to restrict competition and hollow out liquidity. Here lies a fundamental challenge for libertarians. Unrestricted freedom of contract can lock in potential traders in a way that dries up liquidity and prevents market development. If companies could lock in workers at a young age, for instance, the labor market for managerial talent would be constricted. The more comprehensive contracts can be, the shallower the market. This is one of the reasons for prohibiting indentured servitude (in which a person sells his future labor services). The same applies to securities markets. As powerful banks try to exchange securities over the counter, markets become less liquid. For this reason, separating investment and commercial banking, as required by the Glass-Steagall Act, was essential to jump-starting the development of a liquid securities market in the United States.

Then two years passed during which I wrote little of my own design, but rather focused on contributing analysis to larger efforts. I did draft at least one manuscript, but it fizzled because key co-authors had different opinions about where the emphasis should lay. It's not easy to write a good manuscript when you disagree on which results are the most significant and interesting1.

Unfortunately, I feel that I've become 'rusty'. Blogging helps with grammar and syntax (which is part of the reason that I've worked to keep it up), but it doesn't necessarily help with good 'science writing'. Actually, I've found that there are so many opinions regarding what 'good science writing' is, that I'm beginning to think that it's one of those 'you'll know it when you see it' things.

In the midst of working on flexing my typing fingers again, a colleague pointed me to an excellent journal article that both highlights some of the common mistakes that scientists make when trying to convey complex information to their peers, and suggests many alternatives. Some were even revelatory to me, at least in terms of focusing my own though process; while all the while being rather simple to implement. I wanted to share the article, which can be accessed by anyone here:

Gopen GD, Swan JA. 1990. The Science of Scientific Writing. Am Sci 78: 550–558.

I think that a few key insights from the paper are worth discussing. After pointing out some of the common pitfalls of scientific writing2, the authors suggest that there's a reason for why manuscripts aren't always written with a major focus on clarity: scientist are much more concerned with making sure that all of the information that must be conveyed is there rather than making sure that the 'flow' is adequate.

However, as the authors point out, improving flow requires only a few rules of thumb (you can go read them for yourself). The most significant suggestions that have changed the way I've been looking over my drafts are summarized in the following three points:

Place in the stress position the "new information" you want the reader to emphasize. 

Place the person or thing whose "story" a sentence is telling at the beginning of the sentence, in the topic position.

Place appropriate "old information" (material already stated in the discourse) in the topic position for linkage backward and contextualization forward.

Once you figure out the 'stress' and 'topic' positions, it seems simple. Despite this, I think that it says a lot: Scientific writing is all about clarity and communication. While basic rules about sentence construction still apply (avoid redundancy, etc.), the overall construction of sentences, paragraphs, and sections works best when they follow a defined flow linking each section explicitly into the next. Again, this may seem intuitively obvious, but when you begin looking at the examples given in the text, I think you'll notice that many of the times you've had to read over a section multiple times, were because the expected flow of information was interrupted3. 

Regardless, the article helped me reorganize some troublesome sections and lay out areas of the text more efficiently. I hope that others will find it useful as well.

1I've found that this is surprisingly easy, particularly when your data is being interpreted by people with widely different interests or backgrounds. An observation that is fascinating to you can be completely (and disappointingly) uninteresting to someone outside of your field.

2For instance, scientific papers often, in order to convey more information, separate subjects from verbs via overly long clauses, which leads to a difficulty in parsing due to playing against expectations. Mmmm... bittersweet.

3This occurs more often than not because information is referenced externally, or knowledge is assumed of the reader due to space constraints. 

Unfortunately, I've found that I have to keep changing up my 'mix', sometimes because shows eventually stop (bye, bye, 1Up Network), or more frustrating, because most podcasts eventually 'go bad'. I've discussed this at some length with a buddy, and I have an opinion as to why.

I think that all good podcasts begin with a clear plan: topic(s), segment layout, approximate length in minutes, etc. After some growing pains as the participants to get used to the flow of speaking on the mic, the show gains popularity in the form of a healthy number of subscribers. Simple enough, except that it inevitably appears to go to the host's heads.

In the world of radio, people love personalities - some folks make for particularly entertaining shows and segments. However, I feel like a lot of podcasters, once they've established a fan base, seem to think that people are tuning in to listen to them and not what they're actually saying.

An example, the Tested.com podcast (This is Only a Test) is ostensibly about technology news and reviews (though they've started throwing in some very light 'science'). Their shows used to be ~1 hr and followed the format of discussing tech-related news, talking about the pros and cons of new products, then answering listener questions. As of late though, their podcasts have become more and more bloated with irrelevant junk, like lengthy discussions about the best way to cook hamburgers, boring 'inside baseball' personal anecdotes (you've moved into a new office? Good for you), and long drawn out segments about things that aren't really related to technology except in the most tortuously roundabout ways (I don't care about how nice the hotel was at Comic Con). Oh, and the shows are now > 2 hrs. I've found myself only listening to a few minutes before deleting them and it's likely that I'll unsubscribe soon.

I've singled out Tested as an example, but this phenomenon seems rather common. I'm sure that there are a decent number of people who just want to hear their favorite radio personalities talk and, to be fair, some of the best moments in podcasts come from funny non-sequiturs and tangents. Nevertheless, my criticism here is editorial rather than proscriptive: Just like word counts force you to write clearly and concisely, sticking to a podcasting plan and time-frame keeps said tangents to only the most interesting and at least somewhat relevant.

New podcasts compete for the ears of subscribers and tend to go to much greater pains to stay on track, keep quality high, and edit out uninteresting, extraneous material. Once they hit the 'big-time', at least as far as subscriber counts go, a lot of this tends to go by the wayside in what I assume is the failure to appreciate the qualities of the show that made in popular in the first place. In podcasting, like so many things, I'm beginning to think that it may be better to burn out rather than fade away.

In my experience, the most consistently high-quality podcasts are those that stick to a plan/format and edit judiciously in order to maintain high-quality. I may have a lot of opportunity to listen to shows, but there are always new podcasts competing for my time.

P.S. Another couple of podcast gripes: 1) Audio quality. The best podcasts are generally recorded in studios, though I've heard some excellent Skype-based ones as well. Regardless, even the best 'cast can be ruined by a single participant with awful call quality. If someone keeps dropping from the call, it's better to axe them altogether rather than force your listeners to put up with incomprehensible gibberish. 2) Bad hosts/guests. Not everyone is a good public speaker and there's nothing wrong with admitting that. The official podcast of a particular magazine, for example, doesn't have to have every staff member on the show out of some perverse sense of 'completeness'. Someone who stutters, interrupts the flow of the show, or doesn't have anything interesting to say drags everything down. 

I was quite pleasantly surprised by the quality and contents of the series - they're like interesting university lectures if your prof took more time to prepare and had all rambling edited out. 

Prof. Madden begins the series with a discussion about what we mean by the 'fall' of Rome. The Roman Republic itself fell during the 1st century BC and became an empire, primarily because total concentration of power into the hands of one clear dictator ended decades of civil war among various Roman generals out to seize said power for themselves. This is only a preamble, as the lectures are more concerned with the decline of the Empire, traditionally dated to have lasted from 27 BC to 476 AD, when the final Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, Romulus Augustulus, abdicated the title. The Eastern Roman Empire, referred to as the 'Byzantine Empire', continued for another thousand years until the fall of Constantinople in 1,453 AD.

One aspect of Roman history that the lectures attempt to emphasize is that there wasn't a single 'ultimate cause' that precipitated the fall of Rome. Rather there were a series of issues, each playing varyingly important roles that served to strengthen or weaken Rome's influence in the known world.

One major problem that Prof. Madden identifies is that Rome tended (though not always) to do better when Emperors were chosen from capable military leaders - such as when a seated Emperor would define a clear successor who was popular with the citizenry. Far more problems seemed to be created during periods of dynasty, or when spoiled sons succeeded their fathers and ran the Empire like their own personal playgrounds (check out Elagabalus as an example of a particularly weak, somewhat insane Emperor who was put into power by his grandmother).

When Emperors died without heirs, or were assassinated after weak rule, power vacuums would lead to massive civil wars. In fact the third century AD saw one such war after another. As civil wars and political assassinations became more frequent, leaders realized that the key to holding power was maintaining a very loyal military. Over a period of many consecutive short-lived reigns, Emperors raised taxes in order to increase the pay of their troops and buy their loyalty. The problem was that the military quickly realized that the more often their leaders changed, the faster their pay rose, leading to a period of extreme taxation and terrible political unrest.

In the 'end' (no actual Roman at the time thought that the Empire 'fell' in 476, though the sacking of Rome in 410 AD by the Visigoths did change perceptions considerably) Rome was laid low by the culmination of very poor leadership, population pressures pushing Germanic tribes into Imperial lands, the arrival of the Huns from the far East, and Persian incursion into the Eastern Empire preventing them from aiding the struggling West.

It's almost impossible to overstate the significance of the Roman state on Western thought and culture. Almost every subsequent 'Empire' has billed itself as reclaiming the 'glory of Rome'. The US Congress doesn't have a 'Senate' for nothing, and the relationship between religious power and the state among Christian nations was largely established during the waning years of the Empire.

I've said it before in previous posts, but I feel the need to reemphasize the sophistication with which classical figures acted and wrote. We have a tendency to view people in the past as 'inferior', but they were only so in terms of their understanding of the world, not in their interpretation. Some Roman figure-heads made brilliant decisions and hatched impressive plans given the lack of rapid transportation or communication. Furthermore, Roman law (and even more so subsequent Byzantine law) was surprisingly effective and progressive compared to many contemporary and subsequent tyrannies.

There's always value in revisiting the past in order to understand what we can learn from it in its own context and not in order to interpret it through the lens of current events. As Prof Madden bookends the entire lecture series: Rome is not a metaphor for modern day America, even though some of its successes and failures can help to inform modern politics. 

1Incidentally, I've found myself pretty much only wanting to watch documentaries when it comes to films.

Mah Fravorit Berk.

One reason that I wanted to attend the meeting was that Oxford University Press was premiering the book Rapidly Evolving Genes and Genetic Systems (RS Singh, JP Xu, and RJ Kulathinal eds.), of which I contributed a chapter2. It was a nice opportunity to meet some of the other chapter authors as well as some of the editorial staff at OUP. Apparently I'm going to have the right to host a PDF version of the chapter on my website as long as the PDF contains the full book's table of contents, so I'll make it available as soon as I can.

While I saw a lot of great talks that were relevant to my own interests (I downloaded quite a few papers that I'll now have to make my way through), the sheer number of speakers was somewhat overwhelming. During the vast majority of the conference, there were 15 or 16 concurrent sessions going on, with only relatively loose cohesion of topics - so numerous were the talks that there were no published abstracts. You had to skip from session to session based on title alone, and more than once I ended up at a session that wasn't what I'd expected.

'Twas quite 'teh buseh'.

All of that being said, one of the major aspects to attending these things is meeting colleagues face-to-face and talking science. On this count I think that things went quite well: I got some great ideas for some side projects to tackle as soon as I get the current manuscript that I'm working on out, as well as some interest in future collaborations and career possibilities. All great stuff for getting me pumped about getting back to the grindstone.

I was pretty busy with the conference and evening meetings so I had very little opportunity to do much touristy stuff. Thankfully the Ottawa Convention Center is within walking distance of Parliament, the seat of the Canadian Federal Government, so I did get to take a few nice photos of its environs. As usual, I've made a Picasa Web Album for anyone who's interested in seeing these pics.

Here is one nice panorama that I took of The Parliament and surrounding buildings.

1Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.

2Apparently, one of the 'perks' of publishing in an OUP book is a lifetime 25% discount on the OUP catalog. I'm still not sure whether that will make it cheaper than just buying off of Amazon.com, but it sounds nice. (I also get a 40% discount on additional copies of the book itself).

1) Aside from a book chapter to be published soon in a volume from Oxford University Press (Rapidly Evolving Genes and Genetic Systems; RS Singh, JP Xu, and RJ Kulathinal eds.), I haven't published a manuscript that wasn't part of a large consortium since 2010.

2) I've been doing this for long enough that I now have a tradition by which a computer is not 'christened' until it has been used to write and successfully publish a manuscript (weird, I know).

I've somewhat convinced myself of the notion that publication of a new primary-author manuscript will be the first step in regaining my footing towards a career in science (see my previous post about my unintentional 2 years spend working unproductively). It's a small-ish step in that the work that I've written up is interesting, but not revolutionary. It's a side project upon which I've been tinkering away while I generate the necessary data for my primary project1. It's also had the benefit of opening up some more interesting research ideas that I'm aiming toward pursuing later this year.

If you're interested, here's a link to a PDF of the poster that I'll be presenting on this work at the conference this weekend. Unfortunately, I only found out that I'd be able to attend this conference quite late, and the registration for talks was already closed - so poster-only it is. I have to admit that this is a bit depressing as it'll be three years in a row that I don't give a talk about my own work at a conference (in 2009 I gave two separate talks at conference in a single week on two totally different projects - I haven't felt quite so productive since). However, things are looking up and in a few months I may have a lot of interesting work to talk about with colleagues and collaborators. 

I'm going to switch gears here and talk about a book that I tried to read and am embarrassed to say, failed to complete: Jonah Leher's How we Decide (2009; Houghton Mifflin Hartcourt). I think I picked the book up on a lark after seeing the author give an interesting TED talk and after a mildly interesting start have been forcing myself to trudge through the 29% that I've reached on my Kindle.

I came to the 'realization' that I could simply let it go while listening to an economics podcast wherein a co-host explained why he rarely finished books. I'm paraphrasing here, but he basically said that most books written with the intent to teach are way too long - they really only have one central concept that they want to convey and keep wrapping it up in an ever-expanding array of case-studies and examples. Once you get it, everything else is just fluff.

While I don't necessarily agree that even most books are like this, How we Decide fits this bill to a 'T'. It's yet another in a long string of neuroscience books based on fMRI data that give vague clues about the relationship between behaviors and certain areas of the brain. As an acquaintance of my gf is apparently fond of saying: "fMRI and voodoo are basically the same thing."

The major point is interesting: Contrary to classical Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, we need emotions to make decisions - our brain appears to require trained instinct to tip the scales in favor of one choice or another. fMRI studies show that the frontal cortex is involved in combining logic and emotions together and people who suffer different types of damage to their frontal lobes can either be unable to make decisions at all or be a complete slave to their passions (they typically become very hardcore addicts). This requirement that we need emotion and instinct to make basic decisions explains much of why humans are so prone to various forms of cognitive bias. We intrinsically feel 'more worse' about negative outcomes than we should, and choices can be influenced simply by rephrasing the decision in a positive or negative way (keeping the ultimate outcome identical).

It took me a paragraph to lay out about 100 pages of the book. Admittedly, one difference is that I didn't make untestable (though plausible) hypotheses about why we evolved this way, or claim that Neandertals didn't have this or that brain structure despite us having no actual perfectly preserved caveman brains to analyze (this statement in the book is unreferenced)2.

I'm sure that Lehrer's book will delight most - my dislike of it is probably strongly tied to my evolutionary biology engrained dislike of 'just-so stories'. The brain is very complex, and it's unlikely that we can atomize its various functions into specific areas so neatly. fMRI measures where blood is flowing in the brain, not where neuronal signals are travelling. Its resolution, while impressive, is fairly low for so complex a structure. Directionality of signals and importantly, causality, don't seem quite so obvious to me. Brain research is an exciting field, but scientific conservatism probably doesn't sell books.

The above only applies to some of the off-hand statements made in the course of the book - I think that the main theme of How we Decide (i.e., emotional involvement) is solid and entertaining, but could be conveyed in far fewer very speculative words3. Reading over some of the reviews at Amazon.com, I don't think that my opinons are too far out there...

1After several months of technique-optimization, failed-starts, and headaches, I just sent of some samples for analysis yesterday. If these turn out to be acceptable, I'll be able to shift my focus 100% toward my main project in a few weeks. Fingers are very crossed!

2I asked my gf, who is a neuroscientist, about this, and she scoffed at the idea that we could claim that Neandertals lacked any particular brain structure as the brain-case isn't a great proxy for actual sub-organ morphology. If anyone has any evidence to the contrary, I'm all ears.

3Lehrer's writing reminds me a lot of Malcolm Gladwell, who I understand is very, very popular. It's a style that revolves around using extremely detailed and fleshed-out case-studies to repeatedly reinforce a central concept.

I think that I've always had this oddly 'dead' part of my soul: I've never had much of an emotional attachment to music. Well, that's not precisely true - when I was a pre-teen, I did become somewhat attached to the kind of music that my folks listened to: Elton John, Steppenwolf, The Eagles, Huey Lewis and The News, Billy Joel™1, etc. I remember that when my friends were walking into high-school listening to Daft Punk and that godawful garbage, Prozzäk, I'd have the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack spinning in my enormous portable CD player. What can I say? I was cool.

Classics aside, I've never really generated that mental playlist that so many of my friends associate with their teenage years - you know, like the guys who spend hundreds of dollars on limited edition boxed sets of horrible audio quality Nirvana B-sides? I actually remember other kids making fun of me because I didn't know the names of the people in the hip bands of the 90s, or own any of their albums (but did you know that Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon remained on the Billboard sales charts for FIFTEEN YEARS!?!?!? What do you mean, 'What is a Pink Floyd'???).

I think that part of this ties back to a previous discussion that I had on the blog about piracy: around the age that most people would've started developing their die-hard musical preferences, I was exposed to MP3s on the internet (while Napster came around when I was ~18, I've had DSL internet since I was 13). And, as economics and common sense teach us, you generally don't value something that you can get for free as much as you do when you pay for it with your hard-earned dinero. Having endless numbers of songs to shuffle through isn't conducive to making you care about any particular band, I guess.

All of this being said, MP3s are now causing me to 'rediscover' music - in particular the types of bands that I heard during my teenage and college years, but also some new groups that I've heard on the radio here and there. I'm particularly impressed by Amazon.com's MP3 store, which regularly has great deals on albums ($2-5) and provides DRM-free tracks (i.e., bare MP3s that can be played on anything).

Though musicians probably disagree, I think that these low prices are necessary in the era of digital sales. There's no doubt that MP3s are changing the way that we listen to music: what's the meaning of an 'album' when we can pick and choose our own mixes? In reality, most albums have 2-3 catchy songs and a bunch of 'filler' - very few bands can write 15 solid gold hits in a row. If an album is $10-15, I'll just buy the songs that I like a la carte, thank you very much.

However, buying only the singles will cause you to miss some of the great tracks that are out there - and it's these that I'm discovering now. (This is also why I'm typically not satisfied by Pandora or Spotify, which focus on singles and have me constantly skipping tracks that I don't like). While vocal tracks distract me too much from writing and/or doing computational work, they're certainly conducive to lab work, jogging, biking, and also doing house work as well - can you believe that I've only recently clued into the idea that it's nice to have music in the background? I know, it's strange isn't it?

Next time that I decide to dust my appartment, which, incidentally, is probably going to be very soon, I'll do it to the tune of Katy Perry... Umm, I mean, Florence and the Machine. Yeah, that's right.

1While it is not uncommon for bands and performers to trademark their name for the purposes of countering fake/bootleg merchandise (though they're not required to do so), I find it somewhat laughable that Billy Joel™ actually puts the tradmark logo next to his name on some materials (rather than in the legal text below).