I gave a talk last month arguing why online communities are strategic for social science. Thank you to Michael Bernstein and all the members of the Human-Computer Interaction Group.
Video: Online communities as model systems for commons governance
Category: audio/visual
My talk at the AI Objectives Institute: “The Commons Approach to Online Self-Governance”
Community building as one of your basic skills
A healthy democracy requires a citizenry full of people who have built communities, held office, and started initiatives. You can’t expertly serve and intentionally organized group if you haven’t built and nearly broken several. That is why my strategy for serving democracy is to focus on online communities, which provide this opportunity to more people than ever before. Of course, as strategy it isn’t very strategic: it boils down to “change everybody.” But it’s necessary, so you have to proceed as if it’s possible. I’m still struggling with it. But there are patterns that have pulled it off. Organizations like the Scouts (Boys and Girls Clubs of America, officially the largest paramilitary organizations in the US) happen to require all of these things, and they built a system that lets people learn in flexible mentor-driven ways. Making this poster helped me get these ideas down clearly.
AI in the classroom
At Davis I teach a course that introduces programming by starting with motivation before principles. That means it’s a course about doing fun stuff. And I just added an assignment for playing with the OpenAI API.
It’s an online course with its own security requirements, and so I regularly have the students submitting video in which they flash their IDs. To play with that habit, I ask them to modify code for OpenAI’s Vision API to give me a
A {style} {animal} holding its ID up to a webcam.
Here are their submissions. I don’t have all the prompts that students filled in with, but some are in the filenames. With some, I do wonder if all of these submissions are real AI-made images as opposed to mere human-made submissions, but I have no way to confirm, so I can only enjoy the irony of suddenly being concerned that my students are manually doing their homework instead of using AI.
If it looks fun, here are the OpenAI demos, #1 (text) and #2 (images and audio) for you to play with.
Understanding Taylor Swift with Python
Here are the complete lyrics of Taylor Swift’s “Shake it off”, in the form of a Python string
shakeItOffComplete = """ I stay out too late Got nothing in my brain That's what people say, mm, mm That's what people say, mm, mm I go on too many dates But I can't make them stay At least that's what people say, mm, mm That's what people say, mm, mm But I keep cruisin' Can't stop, won't stop movin'/groovin' It's like I got this music in my mind Saying it's gonna be alright 'Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play, And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, I shake it off, I shake it off Heartbreakers gonna break, break, break, break, break, And the fakers gonna fake, fake, fake, fake, fake, Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, I shake it off, I shake it off I never miss a beat I'm lightning on my feet And that's what they don’t see, mm, mm That's what they don’t see, mm, mm I'm dancing on my own (dancing on my own) I make the moves up as I go (moves up as I go) And that's what they don't know, mm, mm That’s what they don’t know, mm, mm But I keep cruisin' Can't stop, won't stop movin'/groovin' It's like I got this music in my mind Saying it's gonna be alright 'Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play, And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, I shake it off, I shake it off Heartbreakers gonna break, break, break, break, break, And the fakers gonna fake, fake, fake, fake, fake, Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, I shake it off, I shake it off Shake it off, I shake it off I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off Hey, hey, hey Just think while you've been getting down and out about the liars And the dirty, dirty cheats of the world You could've been getting down To this sick beat My ex-man brought his new girlfriend She's like, “Oh my God,” but I'm just gonna shake And to the fella over there with the hella good hair Won't you come on over, baby? We can shake, shake, shake Yeah, oh, oh, oh 'Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play, And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, I shake it off, I shake it off Heartbreakers gonna break, break, break, break, break, And the fakers gonna fake, fake, fake, fake, fake, Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, I shake it off, I shake it off Shake it off, I shake it off I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off Shake it off, I shake it off I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off Shake it off, I shake it off I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off """
print( type(shakeItOffComplete))
By representing it in Python we can learn about the formulae underlying pop music. Let’s break it up into parts to see how it is structured.
verse1 = """ I stay out too late Got nothing in my brain That's what people say, mm, mm That's what people say, mm, mm I go on too many dates But I can't make them stay At least that's what people say, mm, mm That's what people say, mm, mm """ prechorus = """ But I keep cruisin' Can't stop, won't stop movin'/groovin' It's like I got this music in my mind Saying it's gonna be alright """ chorus = """ 'Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play, And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, I shake it off, I shake it off Heartbreakers gonna break, break, break, break, break, And the fakers gonna fake, fake, fake, fake, fake, Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, I shake it off, I shake it off """ verse2 = """ I never miss a beat I'm lightning on my feet And that's what they don’t see, mm, mm That's what they don’t see, mm, mm I'm dancing on my own (dancing on my own) I make the moves up as I go (moves up as I go) And that's what they don't know, mm, mm That’s what they don’t know, mm, mm """ postchorus = """ Shake it off, I shake it off I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off """ interlude = """ Hey, hey, hey Just think while you've been getting down and out about the liars And the dirty, dirty cheats of the world You could've been getting down To this sick beat """ bridge = """ My ex-man brought his new girlfriend She's like, “Oh my God,” but I'm just gonna shake And to the fella over there with the hella good hair Won't you come on over, baby? We can shake, shake, shake Yeah, oh, oh, oh """
With those parts, the variables verse1, verse2, prechorus, chorus, postchorus, interlude, and bridge we can see how “Shake it off” is structured (and also represent it with a lot less typing).
shakeItOffReconstructed = (verse1 + # (it's ok to stretch expressions over several lines. It can help readabiilty)
prechorus +
chorus +
verse2 +
prechorus +
chorus +
postchorus +
interlude +
bridge +
chorus +
postchorus * 3 ) # repeats three times
#print( shakeItOffReconstructed )
Is it really that simple? Let’s test and see if these strings are the same.
shakeItOffComplete == shakeItOffReconstructed
Verse-level representation
That’s some nice compression, but we can do better. There is a lot of repetition all over the song that we can capture in variables and chunk down. For example, the “mm, mm”s and “That’s what people say”‘s in the verses could be chunked down. But the most redundancy in any pop song is going to be the in the chorus and, in this song, especially the post-chorus. Let’s see if we can rewrite them into a more compact form.
### Original
chorus = """
'Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play,
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate,
Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake,
I shake it off, I shake it off
Heartbreakers gonna break, break, break, break, break,
And the fakers gonna fake, fake, fake, fake, fake,
Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake,
I shake it off, I shake it off
"""
### Refrain
shk = 'I shake it off' # this gets used a lot, so it gets a variable
### Replacement
chorusReconstructed = """
'Cause the players gonna {}
And the haters gonna {}
Baby, I'm just gonna {}
{}, {}
Heartbreakers gonna {}
And the fakers gonna {}
Baby, I'm just gonna {}
{}, {}
""".format('play, ' * 5,
'hate, ' * 5,
'shake, ' * 5,
shk, shk,
'break, ' * 5,
'fake, ' * 5,
'shake, ' * 5,
shk, shk)
#print( chorusReconstructed)
### Test for success
chorus == chorusReconstructed
The new chorus is identical content, typed in about half as many characters. That means that, in some sense, about half the chorus of “Shake it off” is redundant.
How about the post-chorus? We’ve already defined placeholder variable shk, which it looks like we’ll keep using.
### Original
postchorus = """
Shake it off, I shake it off
I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off
I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off
I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off
"""
### Replacement
postchorusReconstructed = """
Shake it off, {}
I, I, {}, {}
I, I, {}, {}
I, I, {}, {}
""".format( shk, shk, shk, shk, shk, shk, shk )
### Better replacement
### (observe above that most shk's are repeated twice.
### We can use that to get a bit more compression)
shk2 = shk + ', ' + shk
postchorusReconstructed2 = """
Shake it off, {}
I, I, {}
I, I, {}
I, I, {}
""".format( shk, shk2, shk2, shk2 )
### Even better replacement
### (observe above that most shk's are preceded by a comma and a space.
### We can use that too)
cshk = ', ' + shk
shk2 = cshk + cshk
postchorusReconstructed3 = """
Shake it off{}
I, I{}
I, I{}
I, I{}
""".format( cshk, shk2, shk2, shk2 )
### Too far?
i = 'I, I'
shk2 = i + cshk + cshk
postchorusReconstructed3 = """
Shake it off{}
{}
{}
{}
""".format( cshk, shk2, shk2, shk2 )
### Test for success
postchorus == postchorusReconstructed3
We’ve reduced postchorus to almost a third of the size. Add to that that the final post-chorus of the song repeats postchorus three times, and that’s a total reduction of about nine times. In other words, from an informational standpoint, the last 20% of the song is 90% redundant.
### The last 20% (40 seconds) of "Shake it off" in one line
### "\n" is the character representation of the line break/return key
print( ( ('Shake it off' + cshk + ('\n' + shk2) * 3 ) + '\n' ) * 3 )
Of course, it’s really not fair to evaluate music from an informational standpoint. There are other standpoints that make sense for music. Nevertheless this exercise does do something useful for us. Breaking a thing down into parts—”ana-lysis”—teaches us about a thing by showing us its natural faultlines, and revealing the formula behind it. And it’s just that kind of breaking-things-down that programming makes you good at.
If you end up analyzing another song this way, let me know!
FYI, this is an excerpt from a lesson out of my Python course at UC Davis and on Coursera.
Your face’s facets
In this project a collection of kaleidoscopic passport photos helps us reveal the subtle asymmetries in anyone’s face. The dual portraits are made from symmetrizing the left and ride halves of each face. Here are about 150 portraits from 100 people. In every photo, the leftmost portrait is the left side of the original photo (and therefore the right side of your face looking out from your own perspective).
And as you browse, consider: do you believe the conventional wisdom that the more symmetric faces are the more beautiful (whether conventionally or unconventionally)?
Pictures are below but the link to a better gallery is
https://0w.uk/facefacets.
If you’re in the collection and wish your picture taken down, let me know. The code for automating much of this is
https://github.com/enfascination/faceFacets
By
Seth Frey (enfascination.com) and Gyorgy Feher (g.feher.0@gmail.com)
What’s the thing in your life that you’ve looked at more than anything else?
What’s the thing in your life that you’ve looked at more than anything else? Your walls? Your mom? Your hands? Not counting the backs of your eyelids, the right answer is your nose and brow. They’ve always been there, right in front of you, taking up a steady twentieth or so of your vision every waking moment.
That’s important because to have access to wonder, the joy of knowing you don’t know, you need to realize there are things that are right there that you can’t notice. If you’re wired to miss the obvious, then how can you be confident of anything?
There are answers, of course, but the question has always haunted me, and still does.
Good ol’ Popper
My CV in a gif.
In case there’s doubt that Charles Bukowski’s Post Office is about himself
Bukowski was dissipated, a postal worker, and a dissipated postal worker.
Here are letters to “Mr. Henry C. Bukowski Jr.” from the USPS informing him of his right to participate in the various stages of disciplinary review for actions including drunken arrests and skipping work. These letters make it look like you really have to try to get fired from a government job, so we should be impressed at his commitment and hard work.
These come from the amazing collection of Indiana University’s Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana, one of the few special collections library’s that is open to random wanderers off the street.
Why Carl Sagan wasn’t an astronaut
Astronomer Carl Sagan probably loved space more than most people who get to go there. So why did it never occur to me that he maybe wanted to go himself? We don’t really think of astronomers as wanting to be astronauts. But once you think about it, how could they not? I was in the archives of Indiana University’s Lilly Library, looking through the papers of Herman Joseph Muller, the biologist whose Nobel Prize was for being the first to do biology by irradiating fruit flies. He was advisor to a precocious young high-school-aged Sagan, and they had a long correspondence. Flipping through it, you get to watch Sagan evolve from calling his advisor “Prof. Muller” to “Joe” over the years. You see him bashfully asking for letters of recommendation. And you get to see him explain why he was never an astronaut.
The letter
HARVARD COLLEGE OBSERVATORY
Cambridge 38, MassachusettsNovember 7, 1966
Professor H. J. Muller
Department of Zoology
Jordan Hall 222
University of Indiana
Bloomington, IndianaDear Joe,
Many thanks for the kind thoughts about the scientist-astronaut program. I am not too old, but I am too tall. There is an upper limit of six feet! So I guess I’ll just stay here on the ground and try to understand what’s up in the sky. But a manned Mars expedition — I’d try and get shrunk a little for that.
With best wishes,
Cordially,
Carl Sagan
A little note on using special collections
A library’s Special Collections can be intimidating and opaque. But they have amazing stuff once you’re started. The easiest way to get started is to show and up and just ask to be shown something cool. It’s the librarian’s job to find things, and they’ll find something. But that only shows you things people know about. How do you find things that no one even knew was in there? The strategy I’m converging on is to start by going through a library’s “finding aids”, skip to the correspondence, skip to the alphabetized correspondence, Google the people who have been pulled out, and pull the folder of the first person who looks interesting. The great thing about this strategy is that even if your Library only has the papers of boring people, those papers will include letters from that boring person’s interesting friends.
Instagram Demo: Your friends are more popular than you
I’m teaching a class that uses code to discover unintuitive things about social systems (UC Davis’ CMN 151). One great one shows how hard it is to think about social networks, and it’s easy to state: “On average, your friends are more popular than you” (Feld 1991).
It’s one thing to explain, but something more to show it. I had a demo coded up on Facebook, but it was super fragile, and more of my students use Instagram anyway, so I coded it up again.
To run the demo you
- Consider not to participating (because, for a student, the demo involves logging into your Instagram account on a public computer and running code written by someone with power over you).
- Log in to your Instagram account
- Click to show your Followers, and scroll down that list all the way until they are all showing. This could take a while for people with many followers.
- Open up View -> Developer -> JavaScript Console (in Chrome. “Web Console” in Firefox. Slightly different for other browsers. In Safari you need to find developer mode first and turn it on)
- Ask them to paste the code below, which will be accessible to them via Canvas, into their browser’s JavaScript Console. If Followers aren’t showing, it won’t work. This could also take a while if you have many followers. Keep pasting the last part until the numbers are stable. You computer is working in the background growing the list of your followers’ numbers of followers.
- Open this Google Sheet.
- Paste your values into the sheet.
- Calculate the average number of followers, and the average number of followers of followers. Compare them. With enough participants, the second will be bigger, even if you exclude giant robot accounts.
This post isn’t an explainer, so I won’t get into how and why it’s true. But the way you set it up beforehand in class is by reasoning that there shouldn’t be a systematic difference between your and your friends’ popularities. The numbers should be the same. You wrap the lesson up after the data is in by hopping onto the spreadsheet live and coding up the averages of their followers, and of their friends followers, to show that their friends’ average is higher on averages. After explaining about fat tails, you drive it home on the board by drawing a star-shaped network and showing that the central node is the only one that is more popular than her friends, and all others are less popular.
The code
Open your Instagram Followers (so that the URL in the location bar reads https://www.instagram.com/yourusername/followers/) and paste this into your JavaScript console.
// from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/951021/what-is-the-javascript-version-of-sleep
function sleep(ms) {
return new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, ms));
}
function instaFollowerCount(page) {
return parseInt(page.querySelector("a[href$='/followers/']").firstElementChild.textContent.replace(/,/g, ""))
}
function instaFollowerCount2(page) {
return parseInt(page.querySelector("head meta[name='description']").attributes['content'].value.match(/([\d,]+)\sFollowers/)[1].replace(/,/g, "") )
}
function instaFollowerList(page) {
return Array.prototype.slice.call(page.querySelector("div[role='presentation'] div[role='dialog']").querySelector("ul").querySelectorAll("a[title]")).map(x => x.href)
}
// https://stackoverflow.com/questions/247483/http-get-request-in-javascript#4033310
function httpGet(theUrl)
{
var xmlHttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xmlHttp.responseType = 'document';
xmlHttp.open( "GET", theUrl, false ); // false for synchronous request
xmlHttp.send( null );
return xmlHttp.response;
}
function httpGetAsync(theUrl, callback)
{
var xmlHttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xmlHttp.responseType = 'document';
xmlHttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
if (xmlHttp.readyState == 4 && xmlHttp.status == 200)
callback(xmlHttp.response);
}
xmlHttp.open("GET", theUrl, true); // true for asynchronous
xmlHttp.send(null);
}
var iFollowers = instaFollowerCount(document);
var aFollowers = instaFollowerList(document);
var docs = [];
for (f in aFollowers) {
httpGetAsync(aFollowers[f] + "followers/", function(response) {
docs.push(instaFollowerCount2(response));
});
if(f % 100 == 0 & f > 0) {
await sleep( 1000 * 60 * 30 + 10000); // in ms, so 1000 = 1 second.
// instagram limits you to 200 queries per hour, so this institutes a 30 minute (plus wiggle) wait every 100 queries
// If you're fine running the demo with just a sample of 200 of your followers, that should be fine, and it's also way faster: this demo can run in seconds instead of taking all night. To have it that way, delete the above 'await sleep' line.
}
}
And then, after waiting until docs.length is close enough to iFollowers, run
console.log(`You have ${iFollowers} followers`);
console.log(`(You've heard from ${docs.length} of them)`);
console.log("");
console.log(`On average, they have ${docs.reduce((total, val, i, arr) => total + val) / docs.length} followers`);
console.log(`Your most popular follower has ${docs.reduce((incumbent, challenger, i, arr) => incumbent > challenger ? incumbent : challenger)} followers`);
console.log(`Your least popular follower has ${docs.reduce((incumbent, challenger, i, arr) => incumbent < challenger ? incumbent : challenger)} followers`);
The result isn't meaningful for just one person, but with enough people, it's a strong lively demo. See how things are coming along for others on this Sheet.
Technical details
Instagram crippled their API, so it isn't possible to run this demo above board, not even with the /self functionality, which should be enough since all participants are logged in to their own accounts. This code works by getting the list of usernames of all followers and posting a GET request for that users page. But Instagram can tell you are scraping so it cripples the response. That's why instaFollowerCount differs from instaFollowerCount2. In the main user's page, the followers are prominent and relatively easy to scrape, but the requested page of the friend can't be reached through a console request. Fortunately, Instagram's "meta" summary description of a user's page in the lists their number of followers, so a simple regex yields it. Of course, even scraping the follower count and IDs from the main page is tricky because Instagram has some scheme to scramble all class names for every page load or account or something. Fortunately it's still a semantic layout, so selector queries for semantic attributes like "content", "description", and "presentation" work just fine to dig up the right elements. Of course, this could all change tomorrow: I have no idea how robust this code is, but it works on Oct 24, 2018. Let me know if your mileage varies.
Change your baby’s astrological sign with physics!
My summer project this year was a little non-academic web app project.
The premise of the site is that the mechanism of astrology is gravitational influence, and that since small nearby things have influence comparable to large things far away, it should be possible to tune your child’s astrological sign by giving birth around specifically arranged person-made objects. As a pop science site, you’ll see that it is a pretty soft sell: not telling anyone that astrology is wrong, instead trying to channel the interest in astrology into relevant subjects of physics.
I haven’t even released the site yet, but as a summer project it’s already a big success. I developed my frontend skills a bunch, and learned how to use astrological ephemeris databases. I also learned that astrology has a big open source community. I learned that there is a .baby and .amazon top-level domain for web addresses. I also learned a bit more about how to teach web programming students, hopefully showing the bones of the Internet a bit and making code a bit less intimidating.
Appearance on two podcasts with Steaming Piles of Science
Steaming piles of science is a very fun science podcast based out in New Hampshire. They recorded a “Science pub” I did with colleagues on the science and practice of community building, and we followed that up with a wider ranging sit-down.
Here they are:
https://steamingpilesofscience.com/upcoming-episodes/page/2/
Tom Lehrer song ripping on quantitative social science
Tom Lehrer was is a cold war era lefty musical satirist, best known for Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, and his jingles about math, science, and nuclear holocaust. In addition to being a musician, he also taught math and stats at MIT and Santa Cruz. His courseload at MIT through the 1960’s included the Political Science department’s quantitative modeling course, an experience that seems to have made him very mocking about the sciences of society. The song below is addressed to sociology but, as he admits, it’s really about all quantitative approaches to social science.
Some choice bits:
They can take one small matrix,
and really do great tricks,
all in the name of socioloigy.…
They can snow all their clients,
by calling it a science,
although it’s only sociology.
Elsewhere in the same clip are very nerdy mathematical songs, and a good satire about professors thinking we’re brilliant, and a School House Rock type kids song. Before stumbling on this, I discovered and rediscovered a bunch of other wonderful songs, such as the Vatican Rag, “I got it from Agnes”, and Oedipus Rex. I was especially into Selling Out.
1920’s infoviz, when “Flapperism” was the culmination of Western civilization
This image offers a schematic of Western history with a two-axis timeline that brings attention more effectively to long periods. It was published in the journal Social Forces in 1927.
Its author Arthur Dahlberg was a science popularizer and Technocrat active through the 20’s and 30’s. His books, which presented economic systems as closed plumbing systems and other visual metaphors, brought technocratic ideas to many important thinkers in the first half of the 20th century, making him the route by which Technocratic ideas influenced the science of complex systems. Technocracy was a social movement and economic theory that can best be glossed as capitalism under a planned economy. It was popular among farmers and other rural Americans, but was ridiculed otherwise. Nevertheless, its popularity brought it to the attention of people like Herbert Simon, who made fundamental contributions to organization theory, cognitive science, and economics, and Donella Meadows, whose own stocks-and-flows theories of economic system successfully forecasted today’s population growth and global climate change in the 1970s. His influence on original thinkers in the second half of the last century is what piqued my interest in him, and led me to this fun illustration of the state of the art of information visualization in the 1920’s. I love how it all leads to “Flapperism”, which we’ll guess he takes to mean some kind of societal fizzling over.
Two GIFs about peer review, and an embarrassing story …
1)
2)
It is common to have your papers rejected from journals. I forwarded a recent rejection to my advisor along with the first GIF. Shortly after, I got the second GIF from the journal editor, with a smiley. It turns out that I’d hit Reply instead of Forward.
At least he had a sense of humor.
Stop, look, and listen: A tour of the world’s red crosswalks
My favorite thing about traveling is the little things. And with Google’s Maps, you can celebrate those without going anywhere. Here are “stop walking” signs from cities around the world.
Europe
As expected, Europe has a lot of diversity, particularly Switzerland:
Geneva, Switzerland has this skinny person
Lucerne, Switzerland has a lanky Giacometti type
Zurich, Switzerland also goes lanky, but a little more of the Age of Aquarius, Platonic ideal, smooth edges, hard ideas style that you get in that city.
More of Europe:
Berlin, Germany is v. different.
Vienna, Austria, which put these up during a recent Eurovision contest, gets the prize.
Moscow
Oslo, Norway means business!
Stopping and going, Brussels, Belgium has style
North America
The huge US is depressingly homogeneous, especially in comparison to the much smaller Switzerland. Maybe there’s a monopoly in the US traffic-light market?
NYC
LA
Chicago
Atlanta
St. Louis
Zooming out to the rest of North America doesn’t seems improve things, though I admit I could have looked harder.
Montreal, the least Anglophone Canadian city, deviates from the US mold by only a bit, by hollowing out the hand. It’s “walk” guy is better though — I’ve got a picture of one below.
I pathetically couldn’t find any lights in Mexico City and haven’t checked other major Mexican cities, though I’m guess that border towns at least will look American.
Africa
In Africa, I tried Addis Ababa, Lagos, Accra, Nairobi, and even Cairo, but Google hasn’t shot any of them. I only found Streetview in South Africa. Here is Pretoria
East Asia
There is also very little Streetview in China. I tried Beijing, Shanghai, and a few other Chinese cities. All I found was Hong Kong. I guess that by the time we come to envy China for not having been scanned, Google will have them scanned too. China has over 200 cities of population over 1,000,000. There are only 9 in the US that big. Other parts of east Asia, like Japan and South Korea, are much better.
Hong Kong is realistic enough to automatically have its identity fizzed out by Google’s algorithms.
Tokyo, Japan. Looks like a worker. I was told that, in Japanese, the word for jaywalking translates to “red light, don’t care.”
Seoul, South Korea
South Asia
I didn’t have any luck finding lit crosswalks in south Asia, but that could be my problem.
Southeast Asia
In southeast Asia, I only looked in Manila, which only recently went up on Streetview in the past year I think, but they mostly only have crosswalks in their upscale neighborhoods, and, in-line with the USA-philia over there, those few look very much like the American ones
Middle East
In the Middle East (and outside of Israel), I only found usable intersections in Dubai, whose lights look like the Swiss ones above. Only connection I can think of is that that’s where they keep all their money
Israel has more. Here is Tel Aviv. Pretty manly, right? Wait till you see Sao Paolo.
South America and Latin America
South America is also very diverse. I only looked a bit, and many cities are unscanned, but it seems that there is a lot more interesting variety there than in other parts of the world. In fact, you can find different lights in the same intersection! In Santiago you’ll see a silhouette of the “walk” light — sprightly fella — and a more generic “walk” light guy walking in the other direction. These two really are from the same intersection.
Santiago, same intersection, walking guy walking the other way
Bogota, Colombia
It looks like Sao Paolo, Brazil has a burly burly strong man. I can’t figure out if the crookedness adds to or subtracts from his apparent virility.
“Walk” lights
“Walk” lights are harder to catch in Streetview than “stop”s. That said, I got a not-bad collection of those too. The lessons above stick: the US is homogenous; variety happens elsewhere. And, outside the US, the walker tends to be green and walk to the left instead of the right.
NYC
Atlanta
Manila
Montreal
London, UK
Moscow, Russia
Tokyo, Japan
Seoul, South Korea
Bogota
If there is some important cross-walk of the world you think I really missed out on, I’m happy to add more.
Extra info about my appearance on BBC Radio 4
I was on a BBC radio documentary by Jolyon Jenkins, “Rock Paper Scissors.” The goal of the documentary was to show that this seemingly trivial game is secretly fascinating, because of what we humans make of it. My own academic contribution to that fun claim has been published here and in much more detail here.
Jolyon was a gracious host, but the documentary was released without any word or warning to me, and with rough spots. I’ve got to clarify a few things.
The most important is an error. The show ended with my describing a game in which people “irrationally” herd together and make lots of money. The results of this game were reported faithfully in the show, but the game itself got defined wrong, and in a way that makes the results impossible. Here’s the full game: All of you pick an integer 1 through X. Each person gets a buck for picking a number exactly one more than what someone else picked. ADDITIONALLY, the number 1 is defined to be exactly one more than number X, making the choices into a big circle of numbers. The documentary left that last bit out, and it’s really important. Without anything to beat X, I’m guessing that everyone will converge pretty quickly on X without much of this flocking behavior. It’s only when the game is like Rock Paper Scissors, with no single choice that can’t be beat by another, that you start to see the strange behavior I describe in the show.
Three more things. All of the work was done with my coauthor and advisor Rob Goldstone at IU, who wasn’t mentioned. Second, it’s not accurate, and pretty important, the way that Jolyon implicitly linked my past work to my current employer. The work presented on the show was performed before I started with Disney Research, and has nothing to do with my work for Disney Research. Last, a lot of what I said on the show was informed by the work of Colin Camerer, specifically things like this.
Cat ladders of Zürich’s District 6
My talk at Computational Social Science 2015 (IC2S22015 in Helsinki)
This was for a more general audience, so it should be fairly understandable.
Gondry video in reverse
Love Gondry’s music videos but hate riding trains facing backward? This is for you:
Enfascination 2013
“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” Thus spoke Martin Luther King Jr. in a great endorsement for humility, curiosity, and discovery.
On Thinko de Mayo, from 1PM, you will have five minutes to help us see how dangerous we are. You may share anything at all during your five minutes, as long as you personally think it’s fascinating. Your goal is to transmit your sense of fascination to others. FB page: https://www.facebook.com/events/498466006869981/
If the constraints of themes help you brainstorm, try “Science towards nescience.” But generally, you should trust yourself. If you manage nothing more than five minutes of wobbling, inarticulate, ecstatic blubbering then Well Done: You have successfully expressed the unfathomable depth of your subject.
This is the ten-year anniversary of these lectures –– ten years since I attempted the world’s nerdiest 21st birthday kegger. This will be the fifth and probably last in Bloomington. Ask me for help if you’ll have slides or a demo.
Past topics have included:
Slide Rules, Counting the Permutations of Digit Strings, Conceptions of Time in History, Chili Peppers, How to cross a glacier, The Singularity, Indiana Jones, Rural desert water distribution systems, Hexaflexagons, Small precious things, Wilderness Camps as Commodity, DIY Cooking, Roman Emperor Deaths , Joy of Science, Salt , Three Great Banquets in Italian History, How to Sharpen a Chisel, Some Properties of Numbers in Base Ten, The Physiological Limits to Human Perception of Time, Geophagy, Pond Ecology, Superstition: For Fun and Profit, Counterintuitive Results in Hydrodynamics, The Wolof Conception of Time, Arctic String Figures, The Seven Axioms of Mathematics, Dr Seuss and his Impact on Contemporary Children’s Literature, Twee, Motorcycle Life and Culture, Cultural Differences Between Japan and the US, Brief history of the Jim Henson Company, Female Orgasm, Insider Trading: For Fun and Profit, Film of Peter Greenaway, A Typographical Incident with Implications for the Structure of Thought, Cooperative Birth Control, Tones in Mandarin, Unschooling and Deschooling, Q&A: Fine Beer, DIY Backpacking, Chinese Nationalism in Tibet, Biofuels, The Yeti, The Health Benefits of Squatting, The Big Bang, How to Pick Stocks Like a Pro, Food Preservation Technique, or Managing Rot, Infant Visual Perception, Demonstrations in Number Theory, Rangolis, Kolum, The Hollow Earth, Edible Mushrooms: For Fun and Profit, Human Asexuality, A History of the California Central Valley Watershed, An Account of the Maidu Creation, The Paleoclimatology of the Levant, Rural India, German Compound Words, Manipulating Children, Physics of Time, Animal Training on Humans, Constructed Languages, This Week’s Weather, The XYZs of Body Language, Light Filtration Through Orchards, Our Limits in Visualizing High Dimensional Spaces,Twin Studies.
Last year’s audio:
http://enfascination.com/weblog/archives/301
And video/notes from before that:
http://enfascination.com/wiki/index.php?title=Enfascination_2011#Enfascinations_Past
pow!
seth.
UPDATE post-party
Here is what happened:
- The Tiger Café by Ronak
- Jr. High School Poetry Slam by Lauren
- The “Border” language by Destin
- Perception/Objectivity by Paul Patton
- Readings from James Agee by Jillian
- “A signal detection theory of morality” or “The morality manatee” by Seth
- Dreams and the four candies by Danny
- Pick Two by Adam
- Trust and Trust Experiments by Jonathan
Ouroboros and the failures of complex systems
This is a little intense, it should be enough to just watch enough of the initial seconds to satisfy yourself that Ouroboros exists. I’d post a photo, but the photo I saw seemed photoshopped. That’s how I found the video.
A complex system has failed to integrate the proper information into its decision. I’d guess that the cause is a badly designed environment (what looks like a zoo enclosure) presenting an otherwise well-designed snake with exactly the wrong pattern of information. That said, the mere fact of the Ouroboros myth makes it conceivable that this can happen in the wild.
Was this a failure of information diffusion in a distributed local-information system? Or was it a failure of a properly informed top-down system suppressing the right information and amplifying the wrong information? We don’t know, we don’t really have the language to articulate that question in a manner that it can be answered. In that respect this is not just a failure of a complex system, but a failure of complex systems, the field.
The “Ant well” is less ambiguously a failure of a decentralized system. It happens in the wild, when the head of a column of army ants short circuits. Millions of ants start marching in circles until too many have died to close the circuit. And here is a magically functional decentralized system. What does decentralized mean here? Does it mean the same thing in all three examples? How is it different from bottom-up, feedback, distributed, local, networked, hierarchical, modular, or any other concept? We’re still working on that. At least there’s more video than vocabulary out there.
Undrugs: Sugar pill may work even when you know it’s sugar pill
You’re sick? Here’s a sugar pill. We know that it can’t work. Take it anyway. You’ll feel better.
Introduced starting at 9:54. I think the interview is boring before then; he rambles.
My crush on the placebo effect started at Berkeley in Prof. Presti’s molecular neurobiology course. He introduced us to a very carefully controlled study showing that naloxone, a drug that can stop opiate overdoses, can also neutralize placebo pain. That’s a big deal. It can take pain that you started to feel only because you thought you were feeling it, and make that pain go away. The placebo effect is not just psychological, it’s chemical, and it can be influenced by chemistry. That means we can harness it.
I was so addicted to the placebo effect that I started collecting “the last week” of pills from all of my friends on birth control. I quickly amassed hundreds of sugar pills, an impressive drug collection even by Berkeley standards, even more impressive for its mystical power over the psyche. If I thought I was getting sick, I would take one so I could think I was getting better. And it really did always make me feel great, at least while telling that joke.
We don’t understand the mind, the brain, or the relationship between them. That’s true even though we have the perfect tool, drugs. Understanding consciousness will mean being able to describe mental states in chemical terms. Drugs change chemistry and cause predictable changes in mental states. They are they reason we know anything at all about the biological basis of consciousness. Of course, what we know is very little, and that it’s very complicated. The placebo effect is my favorite example: I described the effect of drugs as one-directional “drug -> brain chemistry -> mental states.” But the placebo effect seems to turn that chain on end: “sugar pill -> mental states -> chemistry.”
Rock-Paper-Scissors ms. on Smithsonian, NBC, and Science Daily blogs.
This is my first (inter)national press, I’m a little embarrassed to feel excited about it. Its also a pleasant surprise, I wouldn’t have expected it to have general appeal.
Links:
- The paper, Cyclic dynamics driven by iterated reasoning
- An NBCnews.com blog
- A Smithsonian Magazine blog
- ScienceDaily
- The Daily Globe and Mail
- a bunch of IU outlets
- The Red Orbit science blog
- and somehow, farnews.ir, the mouthpiece of the Iranian State
Enfascination 2012 audio
Some things take time, but it only takes an instant to realize that you have no idea what’s going on. This epiphany-every time it happens-is punctuated by the sound of 500 stars around the universe literally exploding, dissolving their planets and neighbors in flaming atoms, in silence. It happens every instant, forever. As right as you were, its impossible for you to know how right.
The 2012 program from May 5, 2012, featuring:
- “Hoosier Talkin’,” Sarah on the southern Indiana dialect
- “A brief history of Western art” by Eran
- “Introduction to conducting” by Greg
- “Infant perception” by Lisa
- Poems read by Jillian
- “The paleoclimatology of the Levant” by Seth
- “Tweepop” by Robert
- “Direct perception” by Paul Patton
- “Slide rules” by Ben
“Seth Frey the Sandwich Guy”
In high school I would bring very large sandwiches constructed with many pounds of meat and bread. They were famous enough that I would sell them. I bought some in exchange for people’s souls. Jonathan Lazarus wouldn’t sell his, but he offered to make me a song instead, and I couldn’t have hoped for more.
link
This is 1998 or 1999. He died two weeks ago, hit by a train. His brother Ben made this video to remember Jon. RIP Jonathan Lazarus. RIP also Sean Emdy who was in the same high school class, and was killed the same way in 2003 or 2004. Thanks also to Ben.
My Awe Talk: Inventors who were killed by their own inventions
Awe Talks are a 5-minute fun lecture series started by my pal Kyle. He asked me to record one, here: http://vimeo.com/59541529
Fun 3-minute video of my research
Enfascination 2012
Some things take time, but it only takes an instant to realize that you have no idea what’s going on. This epiphany—every time it happens—is punctuated by the sound of 500 stars around the universe literally exploding, dissolving their planets and neighbors in flaming atoms, in silence. It happens every instant, forever. As right as you were, it’s impossible for you to know how right.
Enfascination is a very tiny event that celebrates the act of being caught. You have five minutes to share something that you think is fascinating—that’s the only rule. You will find that the people you are sharing with are fascinated too, and you will be caught by things you’ve never thought to catch.
The 2012 Enfascination Lectures
Why: I would love for you to share.
When: Saturday, May 5th, or “Thinko de Mayo,” starting at, say, 5PM.
Where: Probably in the basement of Woodburn Hall, on the IU campus
Really?: Probably, maybe not. I just made this all up now so times and places can change. Check this webpage for updates.
This year’s occasion is my 30th birthday, but this is the ninth year that I’ve been hosting this birthday lecture series. Past topics have included Counting the Permutations of Digit Strings, Conceptions of Time in History, Chili Peppers, How to cross a glacier, The Singularity, Indiana Jones, Rural desert water distribution systems, Hexaflexagons, Small precious things, Wilderness Camps as Commodity, DIY Cooking, Roman Emperor Deaths , Joy of Science, Salt , Three Great Banquets in Italian History, How to Sharpen a Chisel, Some Properties of Numbers in Base Ten, The Physiological Limits to Human Perception of Time, Geophagy, Pond Ecology, Superstition: For Fun and Profit, Counterintuitive Results in Hydrodynamics, The Wolof Conception of Time, Arctic String Figures, The Seven Axioms of Mathematics, Dr Seuss and his Impact on Contemporary Children’s Literature, Motorcycle Life and Culture, Cultural Differences Between Japan and the US, Brief history of the Jim Henson Company, Female Orgasm, Insider Trading: For Fun and Profit, Film of Peter Greenaway, A Typographical Incident with Implications for the Structure of Thought, Cooperative Birth Control, Tones in Mandarin, Unschooling and Deschooling, Q&A: Fine Beer, DIY Backpacking, Chinese Nationalism in Tibet, Biofuels, The Yeti, The Health Benefits of Squatting, The Big Bang, How to Pick Stocks Like a Pro, Food Preservation Technique, or Managing Rot, Demonstrations in Number Theory, Rangolis, Kolum, The Hollow Earth, Edible Mushrooms: For Fun and Profit, Human Asexuality, A History of the California Central Valley Watershed, An Account of the Maidu Creation, Rural India, German Compound Words, Manipulating Children, Physics of Time, Animal Training on Humans, Constructed Languages, This Week’s Weather, The XYZs of Body Language, Light Filtration Through Orchards, Our Limits in Visualizing High Dimensional Spaces,Twin Studies. There is video for some of it, notes for others, collected here.
see you there,
seth.
Vulnerability of decentralized systems
Myopia in decentralized systems: The Ant Well
explained here
And here is the opposite: unexpected success.