A Pittsburgher back from the Sandbox

Parenting Month 14: Evaluations and goals

2012-01-01T23:34:00.003-05:00

Hi daddy. Thanks for taking me to the museum, a photo by LugerLA on Flickr.

Some lighthearted observations. Then a serious one.

1. T is learning how to go down things. We've been trying to get him to get off of a mattress backwards (feet first). Not only has he started to do this consistently (instead of charging headfirst off them), he also figured out that this is how to go down stairs. The books state that this marks the end of the 'stairs are dangerous' period, and some of the more natural parenting types consider this as the goal instead of using baby gates. Mind you, we are keeping the baby gates, but we don't have them everywhere. And maybe we won't need to.

2. Loves bananas. He amuses everyone at grocery stores when we go pick up bananas and he is so happy to have them. Even better when he cries out 'nana, nana' for all to hear once we get within sight of the bananas.

3. He likes to feed mommy and daddy. Taking a spoon of yogurt and putting in our mouths. Cheese, crackers, bread, even a banana. We like to think that this is his way of showing love (after all, feeding him is what we do)

4. He is generally a very happy child. Except when it comes to sleeping. Then he is a very unhappy child. *sigh* *yawn*

5. He has continued to like it when we read to him. Our babysitter comments that she is surprised that he has the patience to make it through books. Of course, he has been doing this for months.

6. At day care they had evaluations. One funny one was 'does not show affection to stuffed animals.' He actually does not have stuffed animals at home, so the idea of forming attachments to things, not people, is probably not something that has occurred to him.

7. A more serious note, the evaluators also mention that he is slow on all marks regarding socialization and language. Of course, most of the behaviors they mark as deficient, he does show at home. The problem, of course, is that we are raising T bilingual. And our understanding is that children raised bilingual will be evaluated as slow until they are around 5-6. I have colleagues who are in the same situation.

We have promised ourselves that we would ignore things like milestones for the first few years. But this is where it is important to check that we do believe in this. Because we believe that the goal of raising children is not for good grades or evaluations, but to prepare them for the world. And while evaluations are important, if they do not further that goal, they are to be ignored. Learning to put aside these evaluations now, after considering what they mean, hopefully makes us better able to work with evaluations in the future. And take us further in our goal of raising a child.

Getting SageTeX to work on Ubuntu

2012-01-01T13:38:00.005-05:00

Since I'm using Sage more, I'm trying to get SageTeX working, so I can embed Sage into LaTeX documents (i.e. have a report on the methods integrated with the code that implements the methods and generates the results. Search for 'Literate Programming' or 'Sweave' for many references on this)

On Ubuntu, after I copied SageTeX files to my local LaTeX configuration directory (as per instructions in the Sage Installation Guide, I still got errors when trying to build the example documents

Traceback (most recent call last): File "st_example.py", line 7, in _st_.inline(_sage_const_0 , number_of_partitions(_sage_const_5 )) File "/home/lluang/Apps/sage-4.7.2/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/sagetex.py", line 86, in inline '}{{%\n' + s.rstrip() + '}{}{}{}{}}\n') File "element.pyx", line 331, in sage.structure.element.Element.__getattr__ (sage/structure/element.c:2868) File "parent.pyx", line 327, in sage.structure.parent.getattr_from_other_class (sage/structure/parent.c:3193) AttributeError: 'sage.rings.integer.Integer' object has no attribute 'rstrip' **** Running Sage on st_example.sage failed! Fix st_example.tex and try again.

So what happened? Apparently, one of the Ubuntu texlive packages (specifically texlive-latex-extra) includes an outdated version of the sagetex.sty file while what is needed is one tailored to the current version of Sage (and included in the Sage distribution). While I have the correct version in a local directory, there is a precedence issue when multiple LaTeX style files are present. Since I don't have the inclination to figure out the issue, I found the location of the wrong sagetex.sty file, and deleted the entire directory (/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/sagetex). Now, SageTeX works, and I can start writing papers using Sage/Python, just like I do using Sweave for R.

Ghost Story by Jim Butcher - What is the goal of training the young?

2011-12-29T00:23:00.002-05:00

Ghost Story by Jim Butcher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So, Harry is dead. But apparently not quite. He is now a ghost. And he knows nothing about how to survive as a ghost. Fortunately, he soon meets some guides to mentor him along the way.

Along with the rest of the story, Ghost Story is the story of the training of the young. While Dresden has been spending years training an apprentice. But throughout the series Dresden has had a problem with trusting others. He has made a practice of hiding the truth of dangers and the realities that he faces from those around him. Even after it repeatedly gets him and those around him in trouble. And now that he is dead, he is not able to help his friends when they inevitably get caught up in things bigger than they are So throughout the book he learns of what his friends have been doing to compensate for his absense.

The question at hand, was his way right? In his absense his apprentice has gone off on her own, and one of his old acquaintances has teken up the task of continuing her training. And his friend comments that she was training his former apprentice to survive in combat, in a world that was harsh and unforgiving. While he has been derelict in his duties in coddling his apprentice.

Was she right? I have a young son, who we are hoping to raise so that he will be able to handle the world. And I have been entrusted with the training and mentoring of graduate students to prepare them to face the world and to survive and thrive in it. My wife and I have promised that we would not coddle our son, that as he grows we will prepare him for the world that he will be a part of. That may not be forgiving. We do not promise success. But we promise that he will not into it blind. And we will have prepared him so that it is possible for him to thrive. But in the end, he will be the one who has to learn the lessons, develop the skills, and go into the world.

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Teaching Notes: Simulation Fall 2011 and using Simpy and Sage

2011-12-26T14:22:00.004-05:00

This was my first semester teaching a graduate level (research focus) simulation course. The department has not had this course in quite some time. There is a master's level graduate course taught by an adjunct professor that focuses on simulation modeling (i.e. building the models, with an explicit de-emphasis on analysis). This course, in stark contrast was to focus on the analytical side of simulation with a de-emphasis on model building (i.e. the models used would be considerably simpler then would be expected in the other course, including the project).

The other goal was to learn a new simulation library. I wanted to learn to use Simpy simulation library as it is used by researchers associated with a computational research center at my school. I was using this within Sage, a mathematical programming environment. Sage in its notebook mode was how I was going to present the material, as it allows for mixing formated text as well as showing the results of calculations, graphing of results, etc. I wanted to test live generating of graphs and output of random simulations, to demonstrate the effects of randomness throughout. I let each student choose a simulation platform. The standard here was Arena. The other options were simulation libraries targeted at various simulation languages such as Simpy (Python), SSJ (Java), Simlib (with the Law and Kelton books for C/Fortran) or Omnet++ (C++).

The students were a mix of engineering PhD/MS students and students in the MBA/MS-Industrial Engineering (IE) program. Note that there is some selection here, as everyone is fully aware that the other graduate simulation course would be offered in the spring. Actually, one of the MSIE students had previously taken that course. Most students used Arena. One used Simpy and one used Matlab (i.e. roll his own)

Some notes

Teaching MBA/MSIE students was fun. If this is what teaching MBA students is like, I'm all for it. These students were attentive, frequently asked very insightful questions, eager to learn the material and implement it, and were quite appreciative of the analytical focus of this course. A few of them mentioned that since they were interviewing for jobs, topics covered came up in their interviews (clearly, these were quantitatively oriented MBAs). One issue was during projects, as one of the PhD student projects was based on what he was exploring as a PhD thesis, I had to explicitly state that there were different standards for projects.
An analytically focused simulation course was the right idea. The MBA/MSIE students liked it and appreciated the difference, including the one who took the other simulation course previously. Focusing on the use of simulation instead of the building of simulation models put the emphasis on the use of simulations for decision making (which allowed the MBA students to bring in what they knew from other courses with them). And for the PhD students, implementing analytical methods gave them an understanding of the field. And a decent part of one PhD dissertation is going to come out of the course.
Simpy - I liked using Simpy. I found it fairly easy to pick up once I started putting some time into it. One issue was the general flexibility of programming language simulation libraries compared to commercial packages. My general pattern for solving a homework problem was to (i) take code from a similar problem, (ii) (re)write a class to incorporate the differences, (iii) write data collection code (iv) analyze results. But what happened to those who used Arena was they could not get modules to do what they wanted, and developing data recording procedures for an arbitrary performance measure and getting the per-replication output in Arena could be a daunting task. So what took me 20-30 minutes sometimes took the students hours.
Sage - The Sage notebook view was very useful since it allowed the mix of formatted text (like a Powerpoint slide would have), along with live calculations. I used this along with simulations to demonstrate the effects of random variables and to show how various formulas and algorithms are actually implemented. (the descriptions in books and articles skip implementation details) Having the description alongside implementation made sense. When asked, the students preferred this version over the alternative of me drawing on the board (which I also did on occasion) and definitely better then Slides (with the benefit that slides give of having distributable lecture notes). One other benefit was I had to make sure I understood everything, because I would implement every procedure discussed in code including charting before giving the lecture, since the implementation was part of the lecture. There was a similar downside of the students not being able to efficiently replicate the analysis, as they were mostly using Excel spreadsheets for analysis and it was sometimes time-consuming to do tasks that programming made quick.
Sage data analysis. Sage uses the Matplotlib library for data display and graphics. It is reasonable capable, and I have more flexibility than say R. But the tighter integration with the data analysis techniques already built into R make R a better platform when it comes down to it. Sage/Matplotlib has the advantage that modeling can be done in Sage/Python, allowing for all in one tool. (R can be accessible from within Sage, but it is not straightforward once you get past the R core functions)

Conclusions

An analytically focused course works, even with non-PhD students (who were admittedly self-selected)
The Sage notebook view is useful for teaching purposes. Formatted text, LaTeX for equations. Sage's ability for typesetting symbolic math and putting descriptions as well as implementation side by side was useful. Especially in stochastic settings where people do not have well developed intuition on the effects of stochasticity. I like this as a teaching environment. Unfortunately, this seems to be difficulty to teach people how to install it so I'm on my own here :-(
One issue is having people in the same class using commercial simulation packages and programming languages. It is very easy to create a problem that is unexpectedly difficult in a commercial simulation package (and I have no reason to believe that it is a particular failing of Arena). The lack of flexibility in modeling, data collection and analysis makes it easy to get a student in trouble. And I am convinced that this occurs in practice once you leave the core domain the packages were designed for. (I get direct personal contact with representatives from the companies behind a couple of the packages so I get to have this discussion directly with them.)

Book Review: Cool Tools in the Kitchen by Kevin Kelly

2011-12-25T22:04:00.005-05:00

Cool Tools in the Kitchen by Kevin Kelly

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cool Tools is a listing of kitchen gadgets that have received rave reviews on the Cool Tools website. While none of these are necessities (actually, for those who think that all you need is a chef's knife and paring knife, one of the reviews is for just that). But beyond gadget porn, it is good for all the explanations of how people use these Cool Tools, in many cases beyond its originally marketed purpose.

Cool Tools is NOT a listing of what are necessities for your kitchen and why. For that, I would go to Bittman's "How to Cook Everything." What it is are 81 gadgets that have been reviewed highly on the website "Cool Tools." Each has one or two reviews of just how the reviewer has used that gadget over time and why it has become a key addition to their kitchen. And they discuss practical aspects such as price and cost effectiveness.

Now, it is what it is. A fun little catalog of kitchen gadgets. But within the provided reviews, I actually learned a few things. And that was an unexpected bonus.

Disclosure: I received a free electronic copy of this book from O'Reilly Press as part of their O'Reilly Bloggers program. For more information, this book is available at the O'Reilly Press website

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The Art of Readable Code by Dustin Boswell

2011-12-19T20:41:00.005-05:00

The Art of Readable Code by Dustin Boswell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In engineering, it is often easy to forget that as much as we deal with things that are determined and immutable laws of nature, while the subject we study may be science, our practice of it is an art. And to be good at an art, one needs to master the use of the tools, not only in the sense of understanding its instructions, but as a craftman. When I was just learning computer programming while in high school, I used to openly wonder about my teacher’s concern about aesthetics. But now, with a few more years, I recognize that viewing programming as an art and learning it as a craftsman, leads to better outcomes in programming of our models and algorithms. And The Art of Readable Code is about what it means to look at the writing of code as a craft, one to be mastered and where the doing is as important as the final product.

The first part of the book are the details that go into every line of code. Naming variables and functions, aesthetics (using whitespace and line lengths to make the code easier to understand), using comments frugally, simplifying the logic. I had one person working with me that refused my comments in this area. I somewhat think that part of the reason his time there was unproductive was that he would not take suggestions along these lines, and his implementation of algorithms was both hard to follow and I think contained errors.

The second part was on reorganizing the code. This is something that has relevance as part of what I do is develop new methodologies. But this development very frequently is in many stages. The section on one task at a time was particularly enlightening. I have long known of the idea that it is beneficial to make every function return one output only. But I have felt that only applied when I reached a point where the current progress in the method had a single output. The chapter here discusses organizing steps within the function so each section of the function did one thing only. And reading it, I can think of how that would have made the last paper I submitted to a journal much less painful to develop and maintain.

It is easy to pass over books that look at the art and craft of programming in favor of those that teach new skills or pass on new language or library features or techniques. But a book like The Art of Readable Code is one that will help through over the course of the career, part by part as you mature as a programmer and coder.

I received a free electronic copy of this book as part of the O'Reilly press Blogger program. More information on The Art of Readable Code can be found at the O'Reilly website.

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Parenting 13 months: Holidays

2011-12-02T21:28:00.002-05:00

Red in Tamatebako, a photo by LugerLA on Flickr.

Our holiday activity this year was having little auntie visit us from Chicago for Thanksgiving. And she performed the duty of all little aunties and uncles everywhere. She taught T tricks. In this case how to stick his tongue out at people (ps he still did this for days after little auntie left).

S and I have never been much for holidays. S jokes that for her and her friends, the most notable thing about holidays was that it was much easier to get practice room time. And paid gigs. For me, it was mostly a slight pause that let me catch up on things and visits home to see friends.

We're told that as T grows up, this will change as he gets excited about holidays. We'll see.

A conference in Charlotte

2011-11-20T12:29:00.005-05:00

Another fall, and I again went to my professional society conference. As usual, the meeting of old friends, and making some new ones in the same circles. I'm slowly becoming more comfortable in the idea of academia, so my circle is growing beyond connections from graduate school. Although it is including my friends students over time.

1. The big news I could tell everyone was that my first PhD student is defending this month. My advisors are very happy with news of their impending grandchild. (and yes, they do refer to him in all seriousness as a 'grandchild'. Any professor who mentors PhD students understands the sentiment.)

2. Despite my being a very junior faculty person, I've been informed that I have been around enough so that I cannot avoid various community service opportunities by hiding in the corner much longer.

3. I had a number of 'what am I going to do when I grow up' conversations. Although, it is nice when some of those conversations include comments like 'you check a lot of boxes.'

4. I've continued my tradition of eating Saturday dinner with someone random I meet at registration. Although I really should start trying harder to actually schedule something.

5. I've also continued the practice giving a friend's PhD student feedback. Although this time I was not really expecting to do so since her advisor was at her talk. I figure it is good training for when I have my own students giving talks.

6. It is a good feeling to say 'My talk is for fun. My (student/post-docs) are giving the serious talks.'

Ten Photo Assignments (Rocky Nook) by Amanda Quintenz-Fiedler

2011-11-09T22:10:00.003-05:00

Ten Photo Assignments by Amanda Quintenz-Fiedler

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Before you attain mastery of a craft, you must first learn the fundamental skills. I know a world class violinist whose teacher spent months having him practice picking up and properly holding his violin. Pianists spending hours on hours starting with scales and octaves. Chefs in their first jobs develop knife skills by cutting food. This book is trying to be the tutor for knife skills for digital photography. It may start out slow, but the goal is to master the tools of the photographer's craft, then you can create what you see in your mind.

For all the sophistication of some modern cameras, there are only a limited number of things that can be adjusted on a camera. Traditionally, it was shutter speed and aperture, and film speed (sensor) to a limited extent. And in digital SLR you also include white balance (instead of using filters). All the fancy features in cameras exist to do this, or help the photographer decide how to make these settings. But for the photographer to make these decisions instead of letting the camera do so, the photographer needs to know the consequences of these decisions. And the way to do that is to experience the difference. And this exercise comprises the majority of the assignments in this book.

The assignments here are very different then most lists of photographic assignments. Usually, when I think of photographic assignments it deals with shooting a specific subject under certain conditions. Here it is the learning of how to use a particular aspect of the camera. So one assignment is a test of how your camera light meter measures exposure, so you can see what your camera considers to be proper exposure, over exposed and underexposed. And when you come across a scene, you can determine what you should set the exposure as (i.e. above or below what the camera reads). The second assignment deals with lenses, so you spend time shooting with each lens you own, so you learn its characteristics at different apertures and have a visceral sense of what each focal length looks like. And so on with the many white balance modes, and different combinations of shutter speed and aperture with equivalent exposures. Not until you get to assignment seven do you start two assignments on composition and two assignments on lighting.

Key to appreciating this book is recognizing it for what it is. The first six assignments of the ten are learning the tools of the photographer's craft. It makes you learn what your instrument can do and how it responds to your changes in controlled conditions, and asks questions so that you can reflect on the outcomes so that you develop an intuition on how the camera works, and you can make decisions when you get to the field. I don't think there is a readily available resource outside of a teacher that would lead you on this path. The last four are more pedestrian and generic. For learning composition and lighting there are many sources of exercises and photo assignments that can teach you more with more scenarios and challenges.

At its base level, photography is a craft and skill. And to learn it well you need to practice it deliberately until the fundamentals are sound and intuitive. This book will take you there. But its title is somewhat deceptive (and maybe there is no title that would work in a book like that) because it is not a standard set of assignments (and I dock a star just for that). Perhaps this book is the Études of digital photography, focusing on getting the technical aspects of photography right. But the artistry is something to be developed elsewhere.

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Note: I received a free electronic copy of this book as part of the O'Reilly Media Blogger program. More information on this book can be found at the 10 Photo Assignments web page

Parenting: One year

2011-11-03T22:38:00.004-04:00

Oh wow, how did we manage to pull that off? Before T was born, someone was commenting on the fact that parents to be never felt ready, so he was wondering how we felt. My response back then was I was pretty sure after we have had a child, we still won't say we are ready. But some thoughts on the first year.

1. Parenting is an experiment of one. We used to say we would ignore all developmental milestones before T turned 4, in recognition that babies are highly variable. I can't say we have achieved that, but I think that the more we strayed from that ideal, the more the stress, and I don't think there was any benefit.

2. Attachment Parenting. To the extent we followed any philosophy (other than Chinese mother/auntie advice), we ended up closer to the attachment parenting school. He is what the AP folks call a 'high-need' baby, so he wants contact. But when he get it, T thrives. He is highly responsive to contact whether being carried around, having someone in the room in sight when he sleeps. The result has been what was promised, a baby who is very responsive to people (well, at least people he knows). For all he likes various toys, we like to think that we are his favorite toys.

3. Sleeping. All the books and magazines talk about babies sleeping through the night and when that happens. T is in that set of babies that does not sleep through the night. And apparently he has considerable amounts of company. This counts as another source of stress that did not seem to do any good. But his sleep (or non-sleep) schedule now drives the rhythm of our lives.

4. Learning. We are somewhat surprised that we actually do care about how well he learns, even now. Although we are not so sure about his peers who are doing flash cards and such. It is not facts or things we want him to learn (although we expect him to learn numbers and letters in due time), we want him to learn how not to give up, that things that are hard are worth trying to do, and when you can accomplish them, they are fun. He actually is just getting some of the things we have been playing with him, and it is a lot of fun watching him pai-pai shou (clap hands) when he accomplishes something

5. Alert. Ever since he made it past his colic period, this is one of the most frequent comments we get. That he is alert and intently examining his surroundings (this is another one of the rewards advertised of attachement parenting). He wants to look at everything, we joke he inspects everything he can reach and tastes his food before he decides it is acceptable.

6. Sick. Standard baby is sick with the condition of the month. Always changing.

7. Priorities. Probably the most frustrating part of parenting is that you are always have two or three top priorities at any point in time.

8. Toys. Well, besides us, we have him enjoying reading (at least he turns the page when he is ready to go to the next page, which is usually when we finish reading). Then there are the screens. We are raising a child who thinks it is perfectly normal to have a video call on something that is portable. As well as watch a video or play a keyboard or draw. We're not too sure about that, although I am hoping we can steer him to things that involve him making something.

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Ethics and role playing games

2011-10-09T00:23:00.001-04:00

One of the few hobbies that I've kept is playing role-playing games. Alas, it has been a while since I've played with real people, so I tend to play over the internet, with people I don't actually know in real life. For those who only know of games such as Dungeons & Dragons by reputation or only know of electronic versions such as video games, the important thing about role-playing games done right is that they are shared storytelling. The story can be dark, flashy, primarily physical, primarily social, gritty, hopeful, serious, silly or anything else that the participants require. While the organizer sets the environment and milieu, it is the job of the other players to decide how the story goes within the setting.

There are plenty of motivations for doing this. People just enjoying each other's company, wit and humor; those who want to try out what the world looks like from another point of view; writers who want some practice (or who are still working on getting their 1 million words of bad prose out of the way). But one thing I get is the opportunity to think through how to deal with moral issues that do occur in real life.

My wife jokes that I have a habit of playing characters that are like myself. Or more precisely, I take one aspect of me, and make a character that is built on that. Like what beginning writers are told to do, write about something you know. It could be thought of as exploring what ifs. Of course, currently, I am trying to break this by playing a modern day Buddhist monk, Jesuit priest, and paramedic along with a technician in an early industrial setting. (well, I think my wife will call me out on one of these, but I was not trying too hard building that character). But the games I get into tend to be on the grittier side. And one of the effects is that they go into moral issues. Over the past couple years the games I have been in have dealt with racism, class divisions, prejudice, counter-insurgency, and the application of torture. To play well, it means you have to think about the motivations of your character, and the consequences of traits and decisions made along the way.

The groups respond in various ways. For some, it becomes repulsive and they want no part in it. Which is frankly how a large part of the real world is like, where moral guardians declare their righteousness and destroy the possibility of intelligent discussion. Others play things out, and let their characters respond to see how things lead (of course, there are often characters who are moral guardians in play, but this still means that things play out).

And that is probably one thing that I get in gaming that I don't get in real life anymore. I am no longer active in communities that have learned that a lack of transparency, honesty, and openness leads to failure and death. It has been a few years since the last time I was part of a conversation that included a discussion on how a decision would be made to accept the death of some of those present. In its place is a world where moral outrage is a practiced art form, and moral guardians reserve for themselves the right to have these discussions, and shout down others who may want a say.

Not knowing most of my playing companions in person, I have no way of knowing if these are questions they think deeply about, or if these are things that only come up in their lives in the context of games. But I do know that when we are talking about life and death, generally I find that the time to think about it is before you are faced with it for real. Then things tend to work out better. And this is one place to do it.

PSO Blog: Mommy and daddy need to go to a PSO concert

2011-10-05T07:23:00.000-04:00

[Originally posted at the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra blogs] We achieved one of those major milestones in parenting this weekend. Leaving baby with a caregiver not related to us. ( Yes, we did check in during the course of the afternoon). The occasion, a PSO concert of pieces by Beethoven featuring the Eroica Trio playing the Triple concerto, as we were reminded by a mailer a couple weeks before.

I have a recording of the Triple Concerto at home. And I've been asked why I would go to a concert when I have a recording of some of the greats. And there is something to be said about the fact that every performance is unique. But there is also the fact that there is more to a piece than the notes written by the composer. There is the interpretation of the work. And when you have a group like the Eroica Trio who have been playing together for decade you get the collective interpretation of the work.

With in the first minute of the first movement I was hearing aspects of the piece I have never heard before. A good part of this can be attributed to Honeck balancing out the orchestra so that the right part has focus at any point in time. But another part of it is probably due to the fact that the Eroica Trio has played together for so long. The recording I have is by three acclaimed musicians with another world class orchestra. But the three soloists are known as soloists, not as an ensemble. And there is a difference between musicians playing together and musicians who know each other playing a single piece. It shows in the way the Eroica Trio could play off each other, more a conversation of old friends rather then a few technicians working together. And it felt more that we were privileged to bear witness to it more than just being in an audience.

When I was in graduate school I had remarked to a pianist friend that I thought a duet she was performing probably could only be mastered by pianists who were family members, because there was so much potential in how the parts worked with each other that could not be expressed by performers who knew each other in passing. This weekend's performance is the reward of having artists playing together who not only know their craft, but each other.

Parenting Month 11: Let's play a game - feed mommy and daddy

2011-10-02T10:43:00.001-04:00

Mommy feed baby, baby feed mommy, a photo by LugerLA on Flickr.

This past week we have been having lots of fun playing feed mommy and daddy. Because T knows that he likes being fed and he wants to do the same for us (we think). We also play give mommy/daddy ___ alot now.

On the not so nice front, we are declaring defeat on the ear infection that has been with us since early August. So this month tubes will go in. It seems to be widespread in this region, and by all accounts the tubes seem to work (a four year old gave us a full description of what it was like to get them, but it seems he was sleeping for most of it. Obviously it was not too traumatic.), but he does seem young for this sort of thing. But he has been bothered by it, especially at night since he wants to relieve the discomfort, but he cannot reach inside his head to get at it. On the other hand, for a sick child, he is remarkably good natured and happy when awake. It fools all the doctors who think it cannot be too bad, But we're hoping it gets even better once the fluid drains from his ears.

And now for a gratuitous cute picture.

Book Review: The Perfect Photo by Rantakrans and Hagberg

2011-09-29T22:26:00.002-04:00

The Perfect Photo: 71 Tips from the Top by Elin Rantakrans
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Obviously, The Perfect Photo is mis-named. At a mere 128 pages, this is a pocket book and it is not attempting to be the modern day counterpart of Ansel Adams series on photography or Photography by London and Upton. But what is it? It purports to be a set of simple tips for any photographer, regardless of equipment. However, while the tips are indeed the classic ones that every photographer needs to learn, this book is harder to use for the beginner than it needed to be. It tries to be all things to all people, but it is not enough for a knowledgable photographer, and it skips information that a novice would need to be able to use the good advice effectively. So it fails to deliver to anyone.

The format of The Perfect Photo is similar to what other photographers who are also columnist have used, a set of short articles each on a single subject organized topically. The problem is that while the book is probably best for novices who have not learned these methods, the articles are aimed at photographers with a particular type of equipment, Full Framed system cameras, which are the high end of photography equipment. For example, many of the chapters discuss the use of features that would not exist on point and shoots or compact cameras such as white balancing or the manual controls for aperature and shutter speed. And it does not discuss the work arounds that those who have gotten good at working with these types of cameras have developed to compensate.

More egregarious are the issues with sensor size. While everything they discuss is in terms of Full Frame sensors (24 x 35 mm), they acknowledge something called a half-frame camera. But there is nothing marketed as 'half-frame camera'. There are the digital cameras with APS-C sensors (ranging from 13.8 x 20.7 mm to 19.1 x 28.8 mm depending on manufacturer), there is the four-thirds system, (17.3 x 13 mm) and a few other proprietary formats that are used by a single manufacturer. But none of those is 17.5 x 24 mm , which is presumably what half-frame would be. And while it does mention a few equivalent focal lengths (e.g. that a 50 mm lens will cover the same area on a 'half-frame sensor' as a 75 mm lens on a full-frame camera), they don't go the obvious next step of saying that you can multiply by a factor of approximately 1.5. Even this discussion is not until Tip 22. So in multiple discussions of lens focal length, the novice would not have noticed that there was an issue and they needed to mentally adjust the discussions of what wide-angle, normal or tele-photo are.

And this is my complaint about this. Each tip is oriented towards the novice photographer who is just getting serious and needs to start somewhere. But the individual essays almost require a base of knowledge of photography and the workings of the equipment to understand it fill in the missing details. And worse, the novice would not have realized there was a problem until she tried to use the tip.

Rocky Nook (publisher) offerings seem to be finding replacements for the teaching of photography technique that are useful for the digital age. And this book seems like it was to meant to be the slim fieldbook for the novice who is just starting the road to being serious. But while each tip is good in itself, it needed an editor's hand to pick its audience and focus on it to properly fill this niche.

Disclaimer: I received a free electronic copy of The Perfect Photo as part of the O'Reilly Bloggers program.

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Book Review: Think Stats by Allen Downey

2011-09-20T16:58:00.001-04:00

Think Stats by Allen B. Downey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Statistics gets a little respect in Operations research, in part because it gets taught as a bunch of formulas and computer procedures. And the problem with the way that it is taught is that the formulas don't mean anything, and the student may know her way around menus, but that does not mean that she knows under what circumstances to use what method. And everything is learned in isolation, often without practice in getting her hands dirty. Think Stats gives students the chance to get their hands dirty.

Because it uses a programming language (Python) it covers data analysis from beginning to end: viewing data, calculating descriptive statistics, identifying outliers, describing data using the distributions (and explaining what the distributions really mean!). Going through this small book, the goal is understanding and using statistics, not just learning statistics. I have a number of college undergraduate students working on projects. I have started giving them this to work on when they first start with me, both for the programming in Python and to learn statistics and data analysis so they can be useful.

I received a free electronic copy of Think Stats from the O'Reilly Blogger review program.

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Remembering 9/11 in music

2011-09-14T06:51:00.000-04:00

[Originally posted at the Pittsburgh Symphony Blog site]I was listening to the Pittsburgh Symphony concert from September 11, 2011 in Berlin on YouTube. As the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City, Washington DC and Shanksville PA, this was billed as a dedicated to the victims of the attacks. But I started to wonder, what does it mean to have a concert dedicated to an event? In particular, there was nothing different about this concert then any other concert on the tour, so it is not in the program. And it is not likely that anyone present was directly related to the attacks. So what does it mean to use music as a means of remembrance, particularly if the music was written with no specific meaning?

At the Chatham University concert commemorating the 10th anniversary of the attacks, Pauline Rovkah commented that the reason we have these concerts is that we have no other way to express what we feel. It is not just that the opportunities do not present themselves, but what we feel is beyond our ability to express them in words.

And the music is not just how we express how we feel, but also how remember later what we feel now. When I was listening to Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach Cello Suite No. 1 - Sarabande in New York for the ceremony at the 9/11 WTC memorial, I remember listening him playing another piece. On July 1, 2007, I was deployed in Afghanistan. That day, the news told us that Tuzla Air Base, Bosnia, had been turned over by the American military to the Bosnia-Croatians. Many people in my unit had deployed to serve in the Balkans during those years, and the turnover of Tuzla Air Base represented the success of that effort. And that day I listened to a recording of Yo-Yo Ma playing The Cellist of Sarejevo by David Wilde. Which was in remembrance of darker days of that conflict, of a cellist who remembered his friends by playing his cello during the Siege of Sarejevo. Music as a reminder of sorrow in the past, and the joy of the day that signified that sorrow was past.

We don't always have words to express how we feel. And the reality is that we sometimes forget what we were feeling in the past as time goes by. But when we want to remember, we can remember the music we used. Yo-Yo Ma playing the Sarabande from Bach Cello Suite #1 in 2011, or Cello Suite #5 from 2002 for the World Trade Center attacks. The Cellist of Sarejevo for those who remember the Balkan war of the 1990s. Or even the trumpet or horn solos from Mahler #5.

Parenting Month 10: Socializing

2011-08-31T19:58:00.001-04:00

Baby party, a photo by LugerLA on Flickr.

After last month's Thailand trip, our hope for this month is that all that contact with other people would make things easier at daycare and such. And it has. T no longer cries the entire time he is at day care or with other caregivers. He even interacts with the other kids there. We were confident enough to host a little party of babies at our house and he did well.

And he even learned to share. Unfortunately, his friends taught him to share whatever they got sick with while we were gone, so he would not miss out. And he came back and shared with mommy and daddy. So our house has been a house of coughing and sneezing for much of the past month. And it has morphed over time so what we all have now is probably different than one we had at the beginning of this mess.

Now that school is starting for both of us, we finally are into the full swing of life with a baby. Two adults with full time jobs and baby at full time day care with no grandparents around. So far, he is handling it well, except that he does not sleep much while at day care. Hopefully that will also improve.

Alternatives to the scientific method

2011-08-12T22:14:00.002-04:00

I've been taking some time over the past two weeks having lunch with some students who were working with me for the summer. As part of this, I ask them what they thought about the experience of working with researchers and their own roles. I also discuss the project and where what they did fit into the overall goals.

One thing that surprised them all was that there was an alternative to decision-making through the use of models and analysis. And that using models and rigorous analysis was not always accepted or desired as a way of understanding our world and making decisions. Even important and complex ones.

1. Analysis by argument/logic - There is a reason that study of the natural world (what is now science) used to be called natural philosophy. This is analysis through reasoning and providing explanations for observed phenomena.

2. Perception as truth - The belief that what is perceived is what is true. This was argued by a number of friends of mine in graduate school who were members of a faith based group. It also is the justification of truth being arbitrated by those with societal power.

The contrast is the scientific method, which involves

i. Propose a hypothesis
ii. Identify a consequence from the hypothesis
iii. Develop and conduct an experiment that can test the consequence and potentially disprove the hypothesis
iv. Revise the hypothesis

Why would someone use (1) or (2) in making decisions instead of the scientific method?

a. Easier. (1) or (2) can be done much faster.
b. Lack of capability. Utilizing the scientific method required personel who are trained in developing hypothesis, identifying consequences, and designing experiments to test the hypothesis in the domain in question.
c. Power. (1) and (2) can be used by those who have built up power in a domain. Related to (a)
d. Disbelief. A large segment of society does not believe in the scientific method and prefers other sources for establishing truth.

(a) and (b) tend to be the basis of outreach by analytical groups within companies and academics. They often run into (c), which is subverted when top leadership has experience with having analytical groups assist decision makers in the past (one common example is if an executive served in the U.S. military) (d) tends to be the target of groups such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) or more politically oriented groups such as the Ben Franklin's List (see New York Times, August 8, 2011, Groups Call for Scientists to Engage the Body Politic)

In large part those of us who are trained and teach and use the scientific method forget that there are alternatives, and people choose to follow those alternatives for reasons. I think that working with the high school students who don't worry about sounding ignorant (after all, they are going to go on with their lives, and there is never any shame for a high school student to tell a college professor in private that they don't understand something)

Lessons learned: working with high school students

2011-08-07T20:12:00.002-04:00

In the New York Times Education section there was an article on how high school students are looking for experiences over their summers beyond the usual summer job (For a Standout College Essay, Applicants Fill Their Summers). This summer I had three high school students working for me on various projects. They had come through my department chair, who was aware that I had more project ideas then money and suggested them to me.

Over the course of the summer I had them working on a mix of grunt tasks and substantive ones. I think a lot of times high school interns end up doing data entry or manual labor tasks. And I had them doing such things.

Entering data from forms written by teams that were in the field (i.e. on foot when they collected the data)

Entering data into a spreadsheet model from multiple sources (census, address lists, etc.)

Developing process maps from a process description

Running a simulation and performing sensitivity analysis

Debugging and running linear programming models and analysis

Some thoughts

Clearly the high school students (juniors and seniors) I am seeing are taken from the top. I was impressed by their desire to carry out the tasks. I had to gently remind one of them that I wanted to know about difficulties as well as progress, because I actually did want the tasks done. (or there were alternatives if something was impossible. The difference between a school assignment and a research project is that research projects do not come with guarantees that they will succeed.) I have a hard time with graduate students who give up too easily.

I could have pushed harder. While high school students typically do grunt work, I had them running models. Talking to them at the end of the summer, each of them said they may have been able to do more technical work. One of them had started learning R in the middle of the summer (for someone else). I think that if I started teaching them programming Python or R at the beginning of the summer, we would have found reason to use it at some point, and do it better then trying to learn programming when a specific task came up.

They were very eager and inquisitive. Lots of good questions. Which came in useful since I wanted to have better documentation of the models and they would ask about what they did not know (because it was not in the current documentation)

This was a good experience. I don't have much experience working with kids (to me, everyone before college), so this was a good one. From talking with each of them over lunch, it was for them too.

Parenting Month 9 - We're going to Thailand and we're so happy we just want to sing

2011-07-30T18:51:00.003-04:00

The big event of the month. The family trip to Thailand so that T could meet his grandfather and his great-grandmother for the first time. It was deft scheduled to thread the narrow window between the end of colic (because there is no point bringing a baby who is screaming around the clock anywhere) and when T starts crawling. Some notes:

T was a good flyer. He did not fuss beyond what is normal for going to bed at night. Actually, he spent a lot of the flights smiling at our neighbors and the flight attendants. One of the flight attendants wanted to hold him while we were on the ORD-NRT leg of the trip. (no, we did not let her try)

We loved Narita Airport (Tokyo). They have great family bathrooms with very large changing tables and a seat for a baby in the bathrooms. They also have these fun play areas everywhere.

Every day I took T to the market to get breakfast. Sometimes with someone, sometimes not. By the end of the trip, lots of people on the street in the morning were used to seeing him. Many regularly said hello. I think that one of the biggest things from this trip was exposing T to a new environment, new people, new sights, new sounds, new smells.

One comment we got everywhere we went was how big his eyes were. Because everywhere I took him, he would be looking around at things and looking at people. Highly attentive.

I carried him everywhere in a baby carrier, specifically a Maya Wrap Ring Sling. I could not imagine using a stroller on Thai streets with the pollution and various bugs and animals on the ground. We also noticed that in the sling, T could look at what he choose, which could mean looking ahead or behind. And he could choose to look at people (or not). Those he rewarded with his attention were obvious because of their happy smiles (and his too). It made it real easy to just talk to people who T spotted first.

Of course, the other major reason was so he could see great-grandma. And we were not the only ones. There was another cousin coming in from Chicago whose daughter had never been to Thailand either. And another family from Singapore with two more children. A big family reunion.

Oh yeah, lots of cousins to play with. This is actually pretty important because T does not get much exposure to playing with other kids. So this was a good way of doing it.

One of the big questions about traveling with a baby is if it is worth it compared to the difficulty. Some thoughts:

Traveling with children is easier in Asia than in the U.S., because the U.S. culturally makes it unnecessarily difficult. One writer describes it as "not socially acceptible to be human." There are a number of practices in the U.S. that are a based on a desire NOT to make it easier on parents (because the attitude is that conveniences and services must be paid for) that have the effect of making things worse for everyone. In Asia, babies and small children are pretty much welcomed everywhere we went. Granted, I also never saw out of control children in Asia, but part of that is because there is space for them that is not as controlled as in the U.S.

While the purpose was for the benefit of the grandparents/great-grandparents, I think that T benefited from the trip (even if he does not remember it). He was exposed to many new people, new sights, new sounds, and new experiences. Before he had significant stranger anxiety and was easily scared. So being exposed to so many new things while in the safety of us (parents) holding him may help in this respect.

T does not get many opportunities for playing with other kids. So being in repeated contact with his cousins in Thailand was a growing experience.

T really likes being with mom and dad. Dr. Sears describes this as a characteristic of high-need babies (see www.askdrsears.com for what this means). This trip means he had pretty much 24/7 contact with us for the two weeks. So he was a very happy baby pretty much all the time. And development is supposedly faster when a baby is not wasting effort fussing.

We are very glad we did this trip. In the few days we have been back, T has started crawling in earnest (he started while in Thailand). Everyone tells us that traveling becomes much harder from now until he learns how to read, so it may be a while before we do something this involved again.

Things guaranteed to make my son laugh

2011-07-19T21:47:00.004-04:00

1. Playing peek a boo with mommy, while daddy is holding him
2. Singing Bad Romance by Lady Gaga (we're trying to figure this one out. Of course, if anything describes him, Little Monster is pretty good).
3. Mommy and daddy kissing
4. Rum-tum-riddle-rum-tum-tum (from Winnie-the-Pooh)

A back of the envelope modeling of daycare operations

2011-07-17T17:36:00.005-04:00

We have what Dr. Sears refers to as a high-needs child. They define high-need as a contrast to fussy or colicky in that fussy babies quickly outgrow their fussiness and colicky babies tend to be incolable and in pain. Dr. Sears describes high-needs children as "supersensitive, intense, craving physical contact, have difficulty self-soothing . . . however, generally happy when their needs, as they see them, are met" Which is a good description of our son. Dr. Sears also describes this as something that continues for a while. While there are future benefits, such as good attachment to responsive parents, there are some problems. One of which is difficulty with alternate care-givers, such as day care. In our case, we have started T with half day at day care, and he pretty much cries the entire time, only taking a break to eat. So we have to consider the possibility of a mis-match of child and day care center.

We investigated an alternative of a family day care, meaning a day care that is run within a home. So it is smaller, as there are limits to the number of unrelated children that can be in a daycare (ratio of 1:4 staff to infants, 1:6 for older children).

The one thing that does seem to work is for the day care worker to spend individual time with T, such as when eating, but also one-on-one play time. Dr. Sears also consols that high-need babies are carried for some length of time per day. So, as we do not think by observation that the skills of care givers in either the current day care or the family day care are much different (although we think that the senior staff at the current day care have a broader breadth of experience in terms of how different the kids are), we decided to work out the numbers. Our day care center reports seem to indicate that they spend time with him either carrying him or taking him for a walk in a stroller. While there is no statement to that effect, that seems to mean that he gets regular individual time. So our question is if this can possibly be true.

Current large day care center summer months is a little slow, so let's say two care givers and 8 infants over a day (justified as they seem to have a number of part-timers on call that allow them to flex staff based on daily demands. If > 8, they bring in more staff. For < 8, the numbers only get better, especially since they have some staff dedicated to lunch/feeding). For an 8 hour day, that gives 16 staff hours split across 8 infants. Figure 2 hours per staff for feeding time (1/2 hour per child), that leaves 12 hours of care time. So do we believe that they can use these 12 hours to provide one-on-one time for each child (with the other staff worker essentially keeping an eye on all the others) If you count feeding time, you can state that the limit is 8 hours of one-on-one time to avoid having both staff engaged in one-on-one time simultaneously, so that allows for each child to get 1/2 hour feeding time and 1/2 hour of individual play time. Note that I did not allow for staggered child schedules, which actually would lead to increased potential individual time.

Then we thought about the family day care center we looked at. There is one worker for 6 children (some are older, so she is working under that ratio.) While older kids can somewhat entertain themselves, we realized that she cannot afford to provide individualized attention, because that would leave the other children with no supervision.

Conclusion: we think that we are doing the best we could given that we have a high-need baby and we are staying with the current daycaree center (there are other reasons then presented here)

Review: Sage: Beginner's Guide by Craig Finch

2011-07-03T20:12:00.006-04:00

Sage Beginner's Guide by Craig Finch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I like to use Python for modeling and data analysis, and I tell my students that I consider Matlab, R and Python moral equivalents, made in kind by their wrapping of various numerical Fortran libraries, data structures for matrices and vectors, and numerous specialized libraries. But while there are Matlab books for every combination of field and level, and R books for every branch of statistics under the sun, Python books for data analysis are rare. Most introduction books are aimed at computer administrators or web programmers. Material on the web for scientists tended to be reference material that explained the functions available. The few in depth books seemed to assume that you were already a competent scientific programmer who was adding a new language to the toolkit. Sage: Beginner's Guide is meant for the person who is learning scientific programming, and doing so using Sage. As such it is highly useful for those who are being introduced to scientific computing in Python world.

While I use Sage and Python in technical programming myself, I have not been able to successfully teach someone else to do the same. What Finch does is to introduce someone not only to tools available for Python programmers, but instructions on setting up the environment, the practice of technical programming, but also the idea that each of these steps sets up something else.

Sage is a large and highly capable program, so any book has to focus somewhere. So the chapters can be thought of as covering the following (Note: this is NOT a chapter listing):

Introduction and installation of Sage

Use of Sage as an interactive environment

Python programming: Introductory and advanced programming

Numerical methods: Linear algebra, solving equations, numeric integration, ODE

Symbolic math: algebra and calculus

Plotting: 2D and 3D

In each substantive chapter, topics are covered in a standard pattern. A brief narrative description, a short sample program that uses the concept, a description of what program does and why the output looks like it does, then sometimes there are exercises that you can use to confirm you understand the concept or build your intuitive understanding.

What is missing? These are probably additional topics for "Where do we go from here" chapter. First, they do not take advantage of the Python ecosystem. Because of the basics of Numpy, Scipy and Matplotlib, numerous other scientific libraries exist that are not in Sage. I would include some notes on installing packages for use in Sage (which requires some modifications to the standard procedures). Also, an explicit mention of Scipy, since it is the basis for a number of other scientific packages in Python.

Sage: Beginner's Guide is a great addition to the library. It fills the role of the introduction to technical programming in Python that for Matlab is filled by professors who teach computational science/engineering courses. I envision that my copy of the book will be loaned out to one student after another for some time to come.

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Note: I received a free copy of Sage Beginner's Guide for review from Packt Publishing.

Parenting Month 8 - Attachment

2011-06-30T21:57:00.003-04:00

Baby at Exercise Hurricane Earl, a photo by LugerLA on Flickr.

At the end of the eighth month we can clearly state that we have been successful at one of the major goals of infant parenting - attachment. T is clearly very happy with either of us. And he is babbling, expressive, alert, curious and generally happy in all settings.

But that is only as long as one of us is present. The other major happening of the past month is we have started sending T to day care. And he definitely does not like it. We suspect that the majority of his time there is spent crying. We also have noticed this at the local YMCA (which has child care) and at a church nursery. While the Y and the day care don't think this is bad enough to merit calling us, we notice that after leaving him with others for a while he is sobbing for a while. One web site describes stranger anxiety at this age to be a sign that we are successful in developing attachments with the parents. By this measure, we must be wildly successful.

The other fun thing that we did was have him take part in his first Red Cross exercise. It was a shelter exercise and his job was to take the role of a baby staying at the shelter without his mom. A role that he played admirably according to all concerned.

June 28, 2008: Three years

2011-06-28T21:19:00.002-04:00

Every now and then in some parenting/marriage forums the discussion topic "which is easier/harder, marriage or parenting." And well before we had our first son, we were convinced that the answer would be parenting, if nothing else because we found the transition into marriage to be a very pleasant one and could not imagine the transition to parenting to be as good. And while there are not major dramas involved, I think that I would still consider being a new parent is harder than a new marriage was.

Neither of us had ever been much for the propaganda that surrounds both marriage and parenting. Neither the comments about how wonderful both would be, or the assumptions that either are signs of maturity or social skills. For both of us, it was a part of life, and it happens that it is a part of life that most people took part in, but no more.

What makes parenting difficult? Not to talk about the day to day issues (that is for my monthly updates), but more of what is intrinsically different about a family of two adults compared to having a third person who is completely dependent. For all talk about two becoming one, for us, marriage was still two people who were living life alongside each other, but we were still growing and had room to explore life while alongside each other. Each of us was making personal decisions that was separate from our marriage. While marriage provided the color and background scent of our lives, both of us had more. We can make decisions that affect the other, but both of us had resilience, and could disagree and influence the other.

With a baby it is different. We can make decisions, and the baby is dependent on our judgment. And that has changed the dynamic of decisions. Because we cannot get good feedback from a baby, we are reduced to guesses and feelings about what the root problem is, or even what constitutes a problem. And this is heavily influenced by what babies we have been exposed to, how intensely, the tendencies of parents to trumpet good things widely, but hide problems, books we read, and who we happen to talk to. And for most of us, the number of babies we actually have is small (certainly not enough to form a valid sample).

So we have the things that have gone well (baby is thriving, he is generally very happy, well attached to both parents, teething was fairly painless) and not so well (was colicky for many months, doesn't sleep well or self-sooth, does not take alternate care-givers well, does not socialize with others well, not really as active as we would like). And with the realization that all of our parenting desires are not all achievable (especially the sleeping part), the question is turning to what are we willing to sacrifice to achieve the desires we have not met. Because in the past it was enough to talk about things and know that our opinion is part of the eventual decision making. Now both of us are fully engaged in this thing called parenting, and we are interpreting the same information differently we do not make the same decisions with the same goals. And that is what the electrical people call impedance mismatch. ('friction' does not quite get the sense right)

One of the things that is nice about the fact that we are both on academic calendars is that our slower pace makes working through this easier then it will be when we are on our full job responsibilities. But still not easy. But we have years to work this out.

Review: The Manga Guide to the Universe by Kenji Ishikawa

2011-06-26T21:56:00.002-04:00

The Manga Guide to the Universe by Kenji Ishikawa

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Manga Guide to the Universe is another offering in The Manga Guide to . . ., this time focusing on modern astronomy. And this is not astronomy as in star watching, this is astronomy as in modern physics. It tries to get across the fact that science is about answering questions through reason and data. But with cosmology as the subject, the plot is more obviously contrived than others in this series, and in this case may be too distracting to achieve its purpose.

Reading The Manga Guide reminded me of an astronomy course I took back in college. Like the others in the series, it presents the material in the context of an anime storyline set in a japanese high school, with a plot that involves some schoolgirls in a situation that requires some knowledge about astronomy to solve. In this case, they need to put on a play, and they require expert assistance in updating a traditional story for a play for modern audiences. But because too much of traditional folklore is not believable due to scientific advances, they re-write it so that the principle characters are from other places, consulting with a local university astronomy student and an astrophysics professor to join them along the way.

The plot takes us to the moon, solar system, the Milky way and beyond. Each step has the characters identify a logical flaw in the current understanding, and then they reason through a solution, with the professor giving expositions as needed to fill in the facts or to demonstrate why the reasoned out solution is in fact correct (or not). While it can be fun, the writers clearly had more trouble on this one than in others, as the exposition often has to go on for pages, unlike other Manga Guide to the ... which usually only gives exposition to present a more concise and complete explanation of the principle that was just illustrated in the story. Because of this, while it is mostly entertaining, I think that The Manga Guide to the Universe may have been a stretch too far covering too much ground for the format.

Note: I received a free electronic copy of The Manga Guide to the Universe from O'Reilly Press from their blogger program.

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How I use a Kindle (e-book reader)

2011-06-03T20:35:00.007-04:00

I got the Kindle in September 2010. The timing was based on the fact that I had a baby on the way (more on that later). Because one of my hobbies is reading, and I realized that I was going to soon have considerable amount of time that I would be stationary, with only one hand available.

I already had a fairly large collection of e-books, mostly Adobe Acrobat files that are the daily nourishment of an academic. But I was also exposed to ebooks on my mobile phone and my long dead Palm Pilot. So I was used to the concept.

So what have I found? Like other data devices, the Kindle is an adjunct to my computer, not a replacement. Where it shines is in it's ability to sync with my computer, in particular I probably use the Kindle to read news as much as to read books (through pulling in news feeds in Calibre).

For books, I like the fact that there are lots of inexpensive books. One of the first books I bought for the Kindle was Sears' The Baby Book, which was a $5 special right around the time my son was born. I regularly check Amazon's discount section for similar gems. But the shining jewels are the free book depositories. Project Gutenberg with it's vast collection of older works, with the better offering conveniently arranged into topical bookshelves and the Baen Books Free Library and their many CDs of books available.

I am a particular fan of Project Gutenberg Children's Picture Books which have provided a fine introduction to the tales of Peter Rabbit and many friends.

The place I really appreciate the Kindle is when I'm holding my son, when he is sleeping Because my son likes to be held when sleeping. And reading is a good way to use the time. The Kindle is light enough and small enough to hold in one hand, or prop it up on my son without waking him up. And I can work its controls while doing so.

The other way to get something on the Kindle is email. Every Kindle has a name@free.kindle.com email address and you can send a file to yourself (after setting up your account so that it will accept the email). I do this to send notes (e.g. shopping lists) or documents to myself so I can look at them online.

Some issues:

PDF is awful. Because PDF is a fixed size, and the Kindle has no easy way of moving around the page or zooming arbitrarily.

Wifi works, but it is slow. Use sites that are optimized for mobile use is available. When the page is loaded, use the Kindle menu to switch to 'Article mode', which strips it down to the article itself (i.e. takes out all the navigation and advertising columns)

Final verdict: Very handy. I would recommend it to any parent who reads, because this will help keep you sane when you are trying to do anything else when with a baby. Also very handy for carrying around documents without carrying lots of paper.

Resources for Kindle

Calibre - Library manager for your ebooks. Manage all your ebooks that you do not buy from Amazon here , it has a RSS feeds and it will automatically load to the Kindle when you sync. That means you can automatically download stories from news sites, blogs about any topic of interest.

Send to Kindle - Chrome plugin that automatically takes any web page and emails it to your Kindle (assuming you have set it up with your email address)

ReKindleit - Plugin for Firefox. Same idea, when you are looking at a web page, email it directly to the Kindle.

Parenting: Month 7 - Whole body smiles

2011-05-31T20:24:00.002-04:00

Grandma and Grandpa left at the beginning of the month, so now there are the three of us, just like a normal family life. Mom is done with school for the academic year, so she is playing the role of stay-at-home mom. (Dad is at a research university, where noone follows calendars anyway.) The effect of having mom home all the time. A very happy baby. Everytime dad takes T out he gets comments on what a happy and content baby T is. Every day we have several instances of the full body smile. In fact, T is even happy when he is sick (which leads pediatricians and nurses to not take this very seriously.)

Besides being generally happy, T's dominant characteristic is alertness. He looks around at everything. Hears everything (and wakes up if not already). Tastes his food before deciding if he likes it or not. And it means he does not sleep.

The not sleeping part is exhausting, especially for mom. So we have a generally very happy baby, which is a lot of fun, but no sleep so we're tired.

Baring serious issues (other then lack of sleep and the endless string of mysterious ailments to figure out), the next task is to come up with a sustainable rhythm to this
thing called parenting. Because the next major thing on the way is mobility. That will be fun.

Book Review: Capture - Digital Photography Essentials by Glenn Rand et. al.

2011-05-21T22:39:00.001-04:00

Capture: Digital Photography Essentials by Glenn Rand

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Capture

When I started to get serious about photography, I turned to London and Upton’s ‘Photography’ as a place to go to understand the fundamentals of photography on the theory that you can get better at something if you understand how it works. Capture by Glenn Rand fills that same role for digital photography as London and Upton did. It peels back the layers of mystery of how things work.

What is the point of this? I learned photography with a manual camera and film. And I still shoot with fixed lenses and priority exposure, eschewing program modes and retaining creative control. Can we add to this and proper composition and general reading of the scene?

And the answer is yes. Digital was more then just replacing an silver based physical light sensor with a digital sensor. There were effects to having a smaller range compared to the old films. But because of the ability to process the image, this is countered by the ability to work with the image after the fact. Reading this taught me how to use HDR, what can be done with RAW or DNG files, compensating for the narrow dynamic range of digital, and the general physical of digital imaging.

Unlike London and Upton (but perhaps like some of Ansel Adams works in the same vein), Capture does not go into composition at all. The purpose of Capture is for the skilled craftsman who wants to learn the intricacies of his craft, and has learned the creative side elsewhere. And for that, I value it.

I received a free electronic copy of this book as part of the O’Reilly Bloggers Program. This book can be found on the O’Reilly website here.

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Book Review: iPad 2 - The Missing Manual by J.D. Biersdorfer

2011-05-10T16:29:00.001-04:00

iPad 2: The Missing Manual by J.D. Biersdorfer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

iPad2: The Missing Manual by J.D. Biersdorfer

Thinking about a "Missing Manual" for the iPad2, the obvious first question is "Why?" The marketing is all about ease of use, and there are YouTube videos out there with toddlers adeptly maneuvering around the interface. And if you think of tablet computers as only a media consumption device or an Internet appliance, there probably is not need for a a manual. But if the iPad is a computer platform in it's own right, and you can actually be productive, there is a place for a Missing Manual. But I don't know if this is that book.

The iPad interface is largely intuitive, so the role of a manual is to provide trouble shooting and some insight into no-obvious functions. A second role would be to demonstrate enough
uses to expand on an owner's understanding of what is possible with the iPad.

The Missing Manual does well when discussing the included iPod type applications such as the Photo viewer or the iPod (music) application. And the chapters covering the many features of iTunes and how it integrates with the iPad are highly informative, especially if you are not familiar with the many features of iPods.

But past the built in applications, it is thin. It provides a tour some other prominent applications, mostly those sold by Apple. For each application it introduces it, installs it on the iPad or home computer as appropriate and guides you through basic use. But it does not go much past that. Some of the applications, such as the parts of the iWork suites or Adobe Photoshop Express, are barely more then an advertising brochure that let's you know that an application exists.

What it is useful for is how to use the iPad out of the box, especially for getting the most out of iTunes media (music, books, video, apps) management. But for using the iPad to be productive, the search is ongoing.

I received a free electronic copy of this book as part of the O'Reilly Press blogger program. This book can be found at the O'Reilly Web Site

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Parenting: Month 6 - Getting ready for this to be real

2011-05-01T21:09:00.002-04:00

Is this his first fever? How exciting!
- Urgent care clinic doctor

With colic mostly out of the way month 6 was a taste of normal life. Two dates not including T for mom and dad. A social lunch outing. Dad continuing taking T out for a few hours every weekend for some father-son time.

And of course, a first real illness. Including a 103 fever. Calls to the on-call nurse. Multiple doctor and urgent care clinics. Oh, the joys of working with the uncertainty called a sick baby as the diagnosis changes day by day. And the reality, while the baby is sick and not feeling particularly happy, by far and away the parents are considerably more messed up then the baby by the time everything is over.

As both parents are working through the flurry of activity called the end of the year and graduation duties at their respective institutions, upcoming is the dreaded day we have known would come. The coming departure of the grandparents, whose presence and help has been greatly valued and will be soon missed.

Book Review: R Cookbook by Paul Teetor

2011-04-22T23:04:00.000-04:00

R Cookbook by Paul Teetor

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A part of the cookbook series is expected to provide a multitude of examples of useful tasks. The R Cookbook does this, but also more. This provides more, teaching about R beyond what reference books and most tutorials.

One weakness of R compared to other data analysis environments and programming languages is it's lack of coherence that comes from a central design. Instead it seems like a set of constructs, each designed differently. As an example, the multiple packages for graphic. Every user of R soon picks up idioms from tutorials or trial and error. Book authors use their favorites. But the effect is that it is hard to know what you do not know. And one does not realize the realm of the possible.

The R Cookbook does this. In having multiple related recipes together what it provides are a number of closely related tasks, done in different ways. And using different idioms. And I have taken advantage of it, learning more ways of working with various data structures, the apply family of functions and other data transforms. This makes the R Cookbook even more valuable then the typical member of the O'Reilly Cookbook series. Well recommended.

I receive a free electronic of this book as part of the O'Reilly Blogger program.

More information on the book can be found at O'Reilly Press

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PSO: A Sunday afternoon out in New Castle

2011-04-10T21:25:00.004-04:00

[This post is originally published at Pittsburgh Symphony Blogs]

On a sunny Sunday in April, my wife and I went up to New Castle to see the Pittsburgh Symphony perform at the Scottish Rite Cathedral. And this ends a drought. We have not attended a concert live since the end of September. And that is one of the things that the adventure known as an introduction of parenting can do.

So Sunday was a carefully planned day. Sunday morning was spent on an outing with the three of us, to ensure that our son got hours of interaction time with us before the afternoon (and hopefully ready for a nap). Baby was fed and changed. Grandma and Grandpa took baby as he tired out to fall asleep. And we went.

We have been told that when we had our first child our lives will change forever. Of course, that same phrase is used at marriage and many other of life's milestones. And both of us for as long as we have known each other (and likely before that) have always been changing and growing (and we hope this will be true for the rest of our days). So we expect that in the course of events our priorities, our various relationships and how we use our time will change over time, and new interest come in and old ones fade away. But one thing (among others) that our friends have no expectation of fading away is our love and enjoyment of music. And so we have looked forward to this Sunday's concert, not for an expectation of brilliance, stunning performances, enchanting interpretations, or even the expectation to meet old friends (although all of this was present), but as a touchstone, that a part of our life has not faded away.

This post has been sponsored by the services of Grandma and Grandpa Babysitting ;-)

Parenting: Month 5 - Time to be playful

2011-04-02T20:26:00.005-04:00

Very happy baby, a photo by LugerLA on Flickr.

The major development for the past month? No, no sleeping through the night (Q: how many times does he wake up each night? A: We don't count because it would be too depressing) But he is responding much more to people.

In particular, he likes to smile. And (being the unbiased father I am) I think he has a very good smile (note: only when he tries). This started a month ago when we took our little vacation. And walking around with him at the resort my comment was he was starting to have a smile that looks like someone was drawing a cartoon of a smiling baby. (i.e. draws a round face with a sideways 'D' for a mouth). Every day, we have a lot of fun getting him to make that smile again, starting when he first wakes up (meaning the first time he wakes up after sunrise). Sometimes, it works so well that he forgets that he was fussing at the time (only sometimes, not all the time)

Grandpa also notices that T is more responsive. In particular, T is getting much more fun to play with. And grandpa is much better at playing with baby than anything else, so he feels much more confident (he was always worried that T did not like him much).

Now that it is warmer, we are trying to take him out more. Daddy takes him out of the house every weekend without anyone else to for a walk (usually it is at a mall, it is not that warm yet). And we are trying to walk around the neighborhood more. He is still very scared of strangers and crowds. We need to expose him to more people and go on more outings in public (or have more friends come and visit *hint* )

Major event for next month. Grandma and grandpa are leaving soon, after 6 wonderful months here. So we get to find out what real parenting life is like.

Book Review: What to Expect the First Year by Merkoff et. al.

2011-03-31T20:13:00.001-04:00

What to Expect the First Year by Heidi Murkoff

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A book on baby parenting is trying to supplement two other sources. For your average baby, it supplements the advice that one used to get from a myriad of aunties and grandmas who were close at hand to benefit from the experience of raising children. For the not-so average event, it supplements the pediatrician, who benefits from the experience of working with hundreds or thousands of children. And so the 'What to Expect' book provides exactly what the title says. 'What to Expect'. But the moment that an individual infant deviates from the average, it begins to fail.

What to expect is organized strictly on a month by month basis. Within each month there is a discussion of standard developmental milestones, and discussion of issues that are expected to arise in each month. The problem is, babies are highly variable. Like good baby books, What to expect acknowledges this basic fact. But because of its organization, you can't find information unless you are examining the 'correct' month. And at this point the usefulness of the book quickly drops.

Runner's have a saying, we are experiments of one. While it makes sense to talk of developmental milestones (especially since we can't ask babies about themselves and get useful answers so milestones, and appetite, are all we have to work with), there are a number of ways of deviating from the norm. Substantially. What to Expect explains the norm. Which is useful before the baby arrives. But when you have an actual baby, even by the first month there are ways babies vary from the majority. Basically, any condition that is described as "n% of babies are ____" will represent deviations from the norm. Two very common examples are colicky babies (~20%) and preemies (~12%) (we have a colicky baby). The book quickly has notes that such babies are different, and can even discuss it in a relavent section. The problem is that now everything else is off. But if you are going through the book month by month, this is not obvious. And month by month, every developmental milestone discussed is off when compared to the real, living, eating, crying, squirming example of a baby that is with you.

There are other ways of doing this. Sears' The Baby Book has a section that is month by month milestones, organized in three sections per month based on probability (probably is able, may be able, sometimes can). But other topics are approached separately from the timeline, encouraging readers to think of them outside the timeline. This approach is much better then the What to Expect approach that organizes everything on the timeline.

In summary, 'What to Expect' is useful, if you have the average baby. It can be useful before birth (which is the definition of 'expect'). But if your baby falls into any special category (even mundane specials like colic or premature), regular reading of 'What to Expect' will lead to madness.

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Book Review: Data Sources Handbook by Pete Warden

2011-03-18T23:00:00.001-04:00

Data Source Handbook by Pete Warden

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

While this bills itself as covering 'the most useful sources of public data available today" and that "You’ll find useful information on APIs" what this really is a sampling of a small number (57) sources and an example of its use. The information given is terse, and you will find yourself having to Google the documentation to get good use of the source, and probably use Google to find more sources.

I was interested in the Data Source Handbook because many of my models require a range of setting specific data as well as data that is available publicly, if I can get it an put it into a useable form. And looking at it, it provides many examples of available data sources. But these are all fairly specific as presented, so I'd probably end up having to search to find out if what I want is actually available.

The limitations of the presentation are more apparent if I look at one source I have actually used before, the Google Maps API. Warden shows an example of submitting an address and getting a result, and also mentions that you can do reverse geocoding, but he does not describe what information is in the geocoding results (only displays a small portion of them), or the fact that there are many other result sets (such as directions, distances, elevation) that can be returned using the Maps API.

The other way that someone can have a problem with this is that it makes an assumption about the reader without stating it, specifically that the reader is a proficient at programming for the web (i.e. someone whose is primarily a computer programmer as opposed to someone who programs because they need to get something else done.) It comes up because it assumes that you recognize a JSON result set as well as some internet utilities (e.g. curl) which are presented without explanation. It could have been greatly improved by having a one page 'how to use this book' section in the introduction that gives pointers on what is assumed you know before presenting the material.

In the end, if you don't know what you are doing with programming for the web, this book is only useful as a guide so you have an idea of what can be found. Even if you had this book, you probably are going to end up using Google to understand the capabilities of the sites that it does cover, and it cannot be that comprehensive because it is so small.

More information on this book can be found at the book website at Data Source Handbook at Oreilly.com

I received this as a free ebook as part of the Oreilly Press Blogger Review Program

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Pittsburgh St. Patrick's Day Parade March 12, 2011

2011-03-12T22:02:00.002-05:00

Today was the Pittsburgh 2011 St. Patrick's Day Parade. And I reprised my role as a ham radio shadow for one of the parade marshals, a member of the Ancient Order of Hiberians. We were at the front of the parade and his day job was with the county, so there was much hobnobbing going around among the politicians and also with the various police and fire pipe and drum groups up at the front. But like other ethnic events, this was about the next generation.

In addition to the various parade business going around, what is notable are the kids. Obvious babies and toddlers get attention. But what I noticed this time (usually I'm way in the back) were a bunch of older boys shadowing their dads as their dads meet and greet as well as work on organizing the parade. Dads introducing sons to friends also working or marching in the parade, exposing them to those who are in the public eye to recognize them as people and generally teaching them how the world works. And this is how it should be.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Parenting: Month 4

2011-03-05T00:38:00.002-05:00

Working with an abacus a photo by LugerLA on Flickr.

This month saw the 100 day milestone come and go. And T is still colicy The Dr. Sears books mention that colic is a description and not a diagnosis, meaning that it is a description of a case where they cry for hours a day, with no consistent explanation of why (if there was an explanation, you would provide that as a diagnosis instead of colic). The current pediatrician statement is he is gassy (as opposed to reflux, and certainly not allergies, as he is continuing to grow) It also means that he still wakes up several times a night, and we look jealously on our friends who boast that their babies sleep through the night.

The other side of it is he is a babbler. I get a couple good conversations a day. We get a few laughing episodes a day. But his fussiness makes us reluctant to bring him anywhere.

Some thoughts:

1. Parenting an infant is a contact sport. A baby can only communicate by crying and touch. So the only way to communicate is listen to the baby's crying, or holding the baby, feeling his movements and noticing variations. My wife, who spends an order of magnitude more time than I doing this, especially at night, is regularly days ahead of me in noticing changes.

2. He definitely likes being held upright. The pediatrician says it is because he is gassy, and this makes it that much easier to get the air out. The problem is that he is a big boy, and we're running out of people in the household who can hold him for any length of time.

3. Waiting for the day when he sleeps through the night. But we hope that it is not much longer.

4. He is colicky. By definition it means that the issue/cause of crying changes frequently, so what worked yesterday may not work today. (ref. 1 the fact that daddy is a few days behind is actually a significant issue) So parenting is not only a contact sport, it is association football where the clock does not stop, not American football where you get timeouts.

5. My wife and I tend to treat parenting as an opposed contest. Us against baby as we figure things out along the way (with the reward at any given point in time being a happy, playful, laughing, thriving baby). (See Ayelet Waldman's Modern Love essay) Also reminds me of T.E. Lawrence 27 Articles (I may write a post based on that someday. Counter-insurgency seems like a very good metaphor for having a newborn in the house.)

Book Review: The Baby Book by William Sears et. al.

2011-02-25T22:28:00.000-05:00

The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know About Your Baby from Birth to Age Two by William Sears

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like some other first time parents, we got ourselves a small bookshelf of pregnancy and parenting books when we found we were expecting. And these stayed readily available at our bedside, referenced almost every night during pregnancy, and during the middle of the night during the first several months (since we were up anyway). Pregnancy was more straightforward (we joked that our son was taking the checklist approach, pretty much everything that the books said would happen did to some degree). Parenting is harder, because every child is different, and wildly so. What makes the Dr. Sears book the one we (or at least I) still open up and read is that it recognizes that fact with every page.

Every parenting book is reviewed at the extremes. And that is probably just the nature of thought about parenting. There is probably nothing that people take so personally as discussion about their parenting skills. Even if they are like us and state up front that we know nothing and we are learning as we go along. (and my inlaws who are staying with us say the same thing, which makes our dynamic better then what may be feared.) So, any parenting book that has any opinions whatsoever will have lots of reviewers complaining about how it is unyielding. But the book does what I think it should do. It lays out an issue, states an opinion, then works with various levels of departures from their opinion. So the chapter on breastfeeding is followed by a chapter on bottlefeeding and formula. The parts on attachement parenting are alongside chapters on issues faced by working mothers.

But what keeps me coming back to this book is the chapter on fussy baby. We have one. And that means I get to hear many potential solutions. Probably more then there are days where this will last. When the pediatrician declared 'colic' I regarded this as a disaster declaration, with months of exhaustion to look forward to. What this book gives is a framework that puts it in perspective. So based on the classifications and descriptions we don't have a true member of the colic club, we have a high-needs baby. As the well-meaning advice comes in (usually from people who have never experienced a fussy/colicky baby), I can take it in stride, recognizing that we're not missing the non-existant magic bullet, but adding to our battery of tricks, each of which may or may not work on any given day. And that is OK. And while there may not be an end to it (only changes in form), there may be things we can look forward to with our sensitive, interactive, communicative son that we will be glad to see someday.

I'd highly recommend the book. It is not just a set of paragraphs of facts (there are some sections that are, but all parenting books have those), but also good discussions on how to approach this turn-your-life-inside-out thing called parenthood.

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NYTimes: Parents Seeking Danger by Lisa Belkin

2011-02-23T21:36:00.003-05:00

Lisa Belkin, Parents Seeking Danger - The Motherlode, New York Times, February 18, 2011

"""
After the “60 Minutes” correspondent Lara Logan was brutally attacked in Cairo, one Web site asked today whether she was a bad mother for being on the scene in the first place.

Hollywoodlife.com, which more usually spends its bandwidth on stories about whether Jennifer is sneaking around with Brad behind Angelina’s back, yesterday all but said that Ms. Logan was partly to blame: “Her bio says she is the mother of two small children. So, do you think she’s really brave, or completely irresponsible for putting herself in such a dangerous situation when she has two little kids waiting for her to come home?”
"""

In last weeks entry in The Motherlode (the New York Times blog on parenting), Belkin highlights the response to the sexual assault of journalist Lara Logan in Cairo during the uprising in Egypt. (While Belkin highlights Katie Dunn, writing for Hollywoodlife.com, Media Matters has a long list of those who decided to play 'blame the victim') Ms. Dunn's words immediately brought to mind several people I served with in Afghanistan and many firefighters and police I know, all with young children. And I thought "Are these people completely irresponsible for putting themselves in dangerous situations when they have little children waiting for them at home?" And my answer is NO!

But this is an attitude that has been spreading. I remember being told that there is no place for heroes (I had made the mistake of going looking for and finding someone who got lost and was calling for help during a backpacking trip). And many of my activities are dispised by others around me, who think there is no place for people who prepare themselves to go towards scenes of danger. Kipling's Tommy could look around and nod in recognition.

Of course, I am in regular contact with people who deserve the title of hero. And our son will grow up doing so as well. While my wife and I may have some differences in our hopes and what we consider desirable for our son, one thing we agree on is we will not hide him from the realities of the world. As he grows and gets older, he will identify the ugliness of the world. The dangers and hazards. What needs to be done to be safe in dangerous environments (natural and manmade). How to recognize danger or safety (and what is only the appearance of danger or safety) That not everyone is kind and helpful and there are those who will despise him with all the wisdom their God has to give. That things that are worth doing are hard, and the path can very well include failures, with consequences. But even with all that, there are things that are worth it. The confidence of knowing you can survive and thrive in adversity. That in the heat of the moment, you can act and live. Of being called 'brother' by those who would hold that term for those who have earned it. And this is worth the disapprobation of lesser men.

Is this a guarantee? No, he will grow up around those who disagree. But he will know both sides. And we hope he chooses ours.

"""
Feelings of journalists change when they have children. So do feelings of police officers, and soldiers, and firefighters, and coal miners, and airline pilots. And that leaves all of the above with two choices. To limit your personal risk, which is one way to protect your children, and one that I would never criticize. Or to increase your commitment, which is another way to protect your children. And one that I would never dream of questioning.

Come home safe, everyone.
- Lisa Belkin
"""

PSO: Technique or Freedom

2011-02-10T22:07:00.002-05:00

[Originally posted at Pittsburgh Symphony Blogs] As part of the Tchaikovsky Festival, some members of the PSO played in a recital on the University of Pittsburgh campus at Bellefield Hall. And, instead of playing pieces by Tchaikovsky, they played pieces by his contemporaries, starting with Anton Arensky. One thing that makes Arencky Piano Trio in D minor special is that there is an 1894 recording of a performance of the trio, with Anton Arensky playing his own piece on the piano. With him are violinist Jan Hřímalý (known by violin students for his Scale Studies) and Anoatoly Branukov.

Copeland in his book "What to Listen for in Music" states that in any piece of art, there are three actors. The composer, the interpreter (performer) and the listener. All three must do their part for a complete expression of a work. But it is fascinating to know that we have an depiction of how the composer interprets his own work. And preserved in a fashion that is not distorted by the twists of time and fashion which always occur over that period of time. At the recital, they played the recording from the Block cylinders (1894) after Ms. Orchard, Mr. Istomin and Mr. Vatchnadze performed the piece, giving us the opportunity to compare them both. And the style of play was notable in how different it was. While Hřímalý is known for his studies used to hone violinists technique, this performance is highly improvisational, taking great liberties with the rhythm, tempo, and even the written score. Almost surprising given how we view these greats.

What is different? The recordings by the original composer and his friends almost sounded like a jazz interpretation of his piece. The parts coming across as freeform expressions of personality instead of technical mastery and artistry. And if some student played like this in a recital or audition, they would surely have been snubbed.

I wonder if over the decades we have fallen completely victim to a tyranny of technique. It is very easy to hear a fast tempo performance and because the performer was even capable of hitting all the notes, in time and express the dynamics of the piece and declare it to be a great performance. And because it is easy to judge it on these quantifiable criteria, we value the mastery of techniques. Comparatively, it is considerably more difficult for us to judge artistry and expression which is not so easily quantifiable, we do not instinctively accept it as readily. And there are other fields where this is also true. The teaching of math has in many ways become the memorization of formulas and theorems. The teaching of history has become a memorization of facts, names and dates. The students subjected to this education rightly declare it useless, and the mathematicians and historians who see these students in college dispair that these students know nothing and are unable to think or reason. Despite being filled with useless facts and good test scores. And I question if this has made us better, whether it is understanding math, history or music.

Sitting around the radio

2011-02-05T11:07:00.005-05:00

[Originally posted at the Pittsburgh Symphony Blogs]

Our son is three months old now. It is Friday night and he is fussing, tired but not sleeping. We're in the family room, with the radio turned on to WQED, where the Pittsburgh Symphony is being broadcast live in concert. The Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto is one we know. So we hum along starting with the opening horns. And our son joins us in delight. But by the end of the first movement, he is asleep. Good night.

Parenting: Month 3

2011-01-30T20:53:00.003-05:00

This month has been a battle with colic in its various forms. And we have been working through reflux, thrush, eczema, allergies, and the myriad other causes and cures that multiple cultures have come up with for colic. And more to come, recognizing every culture on earth probably has more candidate cures then the standard length of colic. So we have about another month of this to go. While my wife and I are both marathoners who have proven endurance and ability to endure pain and suffering, the in-laws who are with us and take care of T when we are working are not. And my wife and I are considerably better at calming T down when he is wailing away then they are. A case where the skills are mismatched to the need.

The big controversy in parenting around now is Amy Chua's book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" that just came out. Chua writes as an advocate for "chinese parenting", meaning being strict with the children, letting them you know you believe they can achieve, and not letting them settle for less then their potential. There is a lot of commentary on the book, from those who are agast at it and those who defend the way described as the way to do it.

My wife and I are listening to the book on CD. And we agree with Chua's daughter's comment in the New York Post. The book is retrospectively funny. There is not a chapter where Amy Chua is in fact taking herself seriously. And everything is laughing at the fact that she was so strident at the time.

That said, there are things that we want. We want our son to know that we believe him to be capable of being great. We want him to realize that this is not because of giftedness or being a prodigy, but because of hard work and grit. That we expect him to be capable of things that are hard, and thing that are hard are worth the effort needed to accomplish them. And that it is worth respecting and emulating competence and wisdom where it can be found. These are not widespread beliefs. And it is hardly guaranteed that he will

Book Review: Microsoft Excel 2010: Data Analysis and Business Modeling by Wayne L. Winston

2011-01-29T22:30:00.004-05:00

Microsoft Excel 2010: Data Analysis and Business Modeling by Wayne L. Winston Ph.D.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When Microsoft Excel ® 2010 came out, I noted that it claimed to finally correct long standing errors in its statistical functions (1). While I wait for McCoullough et al (2) to do their usual reviews, I was encouraged to see that it now passes some basic statistics tests where previous versions consistently failed. For all its faults, spreadsheets are the principle vehicle of communicating quantitative information in business. And to support that, Microsoft Excel has built in many tools for modeling and data analysis. But discussion for many of these techniques in MS Excel books is limited to describing the dialog boxes that are needed to use the functionality. Winston in Microsoft Excel 2010 Data Analysis and Business Modeling provides a needed in depth look at Excel as a data analysis platform in addition to a spreadsheet.

Winston wrote this book as a result of teaching MBA and consulting clients spreadsheet modeling classes. It is broken up into 84 short chapters, each comes with examples (using downloadable spreadsheets and data) and example problems. Each chapter is used to demonstrate a defined concept. For example, financial issues are covered in three chapters, demonstrating net present value, internal rate of return, and the standard bond/loan finance calculations.

The many short chapters allows topics to be covered in some depth. Seven short chapters cover random numbers, followed by five chapters on simulation and some uses of simulation. While the first chapter on a topic may cover the steps to use the tool, the followon chapters all present uses. For example, the Solver is introduced in Chapter 28 with an example that steps through the menu and dialog boxes. Then each of the following seven chapters describe the use of the solver for a standard math programming problem: optimal product mix, scheduling, distribution, capital budgeting, financial planning, facility location, and rating sports teams (ok, this last one is not a standard math programming problem). This focus on providing non-trivial examples for substantial tools is the strength of the book.

Are there things that are missing? Two areas that I find myself teaching students in using spreadsheets is using the tabs to organize data and general spreadsheet management. While there are chapters on pulling in data from text files and the internet as well as a chapter on using auditing tools, there is no chapter on the art of using spreadsheets. The book falls into a common software focused book on working through the functions, even if it does this very well. Therefore, it would not serve as as a book to be used by specialists in data analysis, who need to know the art and purpose of data analysis in addition to applying techniques. But it is good for generalists who have to do analysis as part of their jobs as well as those who need to package analysis to a business audience. And for this purpose, Winston’s book does a good job.

Disclaimer: I received a free electronic copy of Microsoft Excel 2010 Data Analysis and Business Modeling 3rd ed. by Wayne L. Winston through the O’Reilly Press Blogger review program.

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(1) Openheimer, 2009, Function Improvements in Excel 2010, http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/archive/2009/09/10/function-improvements-in-excel-2010.aspx

(2) McCoullough and Heiser, 2008, On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2007, Computational Statistics & Data Analysis Vol 52 (10), pp 4570-4578.

Thoughts on 4 Jan 2007: From Father to Son, Last Words to Live By

2011-01-29T12:09:00.004-05:00

One of the reasons for keeping a blog is to see what you were thinking years ago, and compare it to now. This piece was written in January 2007. S and I had started dating, but marriage was not even a thought (and needless to say, neither were children). A potential deployment to Afghanistan was a topic of discussion, but far from being actualized.

This was a commentary on a piece in the New York Times. Of the fiance of one of the Times editors, who was a First Sergeant in the Army, and a father. Who wrote about what he wanted his son to learn as he grew up.

==========
Original post on Xanga

New York Times article

Dana Canedy is an editor for the New York Times. Her fiance, Charles Monroe King, was a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago and a gifted artist. He was also a soldier. As a First Sergeant, he would have been responsible for the training of 18 and 19 year olds for war. And when he went to Iraq he left a yet to be born son behind. During his tour of duty, Charles wrote a journal for his son to read as he was growing up.

Dear son, Charles wrote on the last page of the journal, “I hope this book is somewhat helpful to you. Please forgive me for the poor handwriting and grammar. I tried to finish this book before I was deployed to Iraq. It has to be something special to you. I’ve been writing it in the states, Kuwait and Iraq.

There are many things that we learn from newspapers. There are matters of fact, the 'first draft of history,' scores, events, editorials. But in the better papers, you learn something of what it means to live life. The First Sergeants of the U.S. Army and their counter parts also had the role of teaching their young charges about life as many of them left their familiar homes for a larger world. Of balancing checkbooks, of dealing with the pressures of making their own decisions and of the realities of romance.

Never be ashamed to cry. No man is too good to get on his knee and humble himself to God. Follow your heart and look for the strength of a woman.

One month before his tour of duty would have ended, First Sergeant King died in an IED attack near Baghdad, and this journal became the one means where he could teach his son of what it means to be a man.

Remember who taught you to speak, to walk and to be a gentleman, he wrote to Jordan in his journal. These are your first teachers, my little prince. Protect them, embrace them and always treat them like a queen.

I get the chance to have conversations with people about the training of young men and women, of raising sons and daughters. And the question is what values do I wish to impart should I become a father. And as of right now, what I can work on now is the way I account for the days of my youth.

The 18th was a long, solemn night, he wrote in Jordan’s journal. We had a memorial for two soldiers who were killed by an improvised explosive device. None of my soldiers went to the memorial. Their excuse was that they didn’t want to go because it was depressing. I told them it was selfish of them not to pay their respects to two men who were selfless in giving their lives for their country.

Things may not always be easy or pleasant for you, that’s life, but always pay your respects for the way people lived and what they stood for. It’s the honorable thing to do.

When I was in college, one woman in a bible study declared her goal of being the comfortable suburban mom. And many talk about being comfortable, of the large house, nice car, the trappings of modern american life. But those are not the stories I want to tell. On the top shelf of my bookshelf next to me are the trophies and medals of many races and awards. I've joked with friends that it will be a long time before my kids match that. And it may be something they will respect. But I will also tell the stories of calls in the middle of the night. Of having shots going in my direction. Of going towards and into fires. Of comforting the tired and scared. And I hope that these things are something they will consider valuable. It is not a natural thing. I know many who find it incomprehensible to risk a sacrifice without expected gain. And I have known many who find it outright repulsive. And I do not want to emulate them.

So what of young Jordan, who will grow up without a father? Will he be surrounded by those who tell him that the goal is to be comfortable and that his father was a fool to wear the uniform and lead young men and women that he trained into harms way? Or will he read his father's journal and respond to his father's words by considering his father a man of honor, and believe that being a man of honor is something to aspire to.

God blessed me above all I could imagine, Charles wrote in the journal. I have no regrets, serving your country is great.

Right now, being a father is still an abstract thing. And somehow, after all these years, I have not quite lost the dream of the young, that the world is changed by myself and those I have the privilige of being alongside. Right now, as I read Dana's words, Summon the Hero's by John Williams is playing in the background. Should I have sons and daughters, I hope that they get to hear stories of those who dared to be great, and to see the living embodiment of greatness around them.

Book review: Winter Fire by William Trotter - Meeting Sibelius in Finland:

2011-01-22T14:16:00.003-05:00

[Originally posted at the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra Blog]

Every month in the music department of the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland, a group of music lovers gathers to discuss a book as part of the Pittsburgh Symphony Book Club. And this month, Jim Cunningham (WQED) along with Paul Silver (PSO: viola) led the discussion on Winter Fire by William Trotter.

Winter Fire follows a WWII German officer named Erich Ziegler as he serves the German Army in Norway and the Eastern Front. He is an infantry officer, who in his civilian life is a conductor. In particular, he had written an article on Jean Sibelius, the Finnish composer who was the pride of Finland. And after a period of exemplary service, he was tapped by German Army Intelligence to serve as what in the U.S. Army is known as a Foreign Area Officer, based on his expertise and special knowledge of Finnish culture. His stated mission: To ingratiate himself into Finnish society and take the pulse of Finnish leadership and military on their commitment to being allies of Nazi Germany in WWII.

In the course of his duties he is attached to a Finnish unit near the front. And he finds the wartime refuge of Sibelius. Over the course of the book, he is welcomed into the Sibelius household, falls in love, and develops deep relationships with the Finns he serves with. As the tide of war turns against Germany, he is buffeted by political forces including Nazi party members, officials more interested in promoting their careers and image then in accurate representation of the war to Hitler, and in the end, Sibelius and his Finnish hosts offer Ziegler refuge against the fall as Nazi Germany collapses, despite the Finns pledge to their new Soviet and Western Allies to expel the Germans in the last stages of World War II.

The book is of music and war, two topics that do not seem to go together. What we do see is how in both professions, Erich has to experience it intensely. When he in the combat front, every lapse of concentration has consequence, and in particularly intense areas this intensity can be debilitating. The intensity also opens him to moments where he becomes one with his environment, and his Finn comrades note that he becomes much like the Finns.

Similarly in his artistic experiences are intense. Being a conductor working with a new score, absorbing it and imagining what it can become. And with a new orchestra, turning that image into a reality. And the highs and lows of doing this, and being buffeted by his political environment of a depraved Nazi Germany where, just as has been documented in many other forms, the closer you get to Hitler the more craven officials become.

But a person can only maintain levels of intensity for so long. In this book Erich goes between the intensity of the combat front and instead of the breaks his comrades in arms would get when their units were rotated away from the front, he dives into the intensity of his art and political conflict.

In the end, a dream that Erich has been hoping for over a large part of the book is being denied. But another dream is being offered in its place. The Finns who have been alongside Erich through triumph and disappointment through the course of the war offer Erich refuge and hope for the future. And one after another, they present their dreams of a future for Erich. But it is not Erich's dream, and he has to decide if he can come to terms of a dream denied.

Book Review: Programming Python 4e by Mark Lutz

2011-01-16T19:34:00.001-05:00

Programming Python by Mark Lutz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been using Python since I was a graduate student. While I have known of earlier versions of this tome it had never occurred to me to go through this. Because my focus in computer programming is not in the systems administration or IT related skills like most of O'Reilly Press customers seem to be. My interest is in scientific programming and data analysis. Now that I have had some time and occasion to use this, I find that the content is indeed weighted at an audience whose function is computer programming (as opposed to using computers for something else), but what this book really provides is an education on how to accomplish tasks in idiomatic Python, not just a programming how-to book.

Programming Python (PP4E) goal is NOT to teach programming in the Python language (that task was for another book by Lutz, Learning Python). The stated goal was to teach practical use of Python, and that necessarily means using the standard libraries. But even at 1600+ pages you can't do everything. So this book focuses on (IT) systems administration, GUI development and web programming using Python 3.x (not covering Python 2.x). None of these are what I do. But, there are some tasks that are covered that can be very useful, so in reviewing this book I focused on Graphic User Interface (GUI) and text processing.

What I found as I worked through these sections was that PP4E was not a reference as it lacks systematic coverage of topics. And it is not just a tutorial, although it definitely follows a crawl, walk, run sequence as it covers the topics. What it does do well is cover how to think and how to make design decisions. So for the GUI section it focuses on tkinter, and it does cover various widgets, window managers, etc., where it shows its colors is when it discusses how the parts work and how you make choices between alternatives (e.g. window managers). There are some warts with its focus on Python 3. There are several chapters in the GUI section that require the Python Imaging Library (PIL). But based on the PIL web page, PIL is not ported to Python 3.x. So it probably means that Lutz used a pre-release port without telling us.

Similarly, regular expressions is something I've never quite gotten. And I would not be able to master use of the re module here, since it lacks a usual lists of functions with examples that a reference or a tutorial would have. But what it does do is to cover how regular expressions fit along with other string operations, when and why to use match, search, find, findall, compile. When to compile and how to think through building a regular expression sequence. You would not learn how to use regular expressions here (I would never be able to develop the examples from what is in the book), but you will learn how to think through them, and bring that when you go back to a real reference or instructional book.

One aspect that is very annoying is the examples quickly become more complex than the material that leads up to it. So instead of crawl, walk, run; it takes on the feel of crawl - sprint, with a basic introduction then quickly moving into a complex and mature code. Some of this is a result of a goal of trying to be deep in everything. So be warned.

I received a free electronic copy of Programming Python from O'Reilly Press as part of their blogger review program.

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Review: Maya Wrap Ring Sling

2011-01-15T23:07:00.003-05:00

First outing
Originally uploaded by LugerLA

I got the Maya Wrap soon after my son was born. While we had a Baby Bjorn, I was looking for something not so bulky, and something with some more flexibility in how it is used.

The Maya Wrap is an example of a Ring Sling, which is an example of a fabric carrier. Essentially, it is a long piece of cloth threaded through 2 rings similar to D-rings used with webbing for camping equipment. The baby sits in the pouch, and the cloth is adjusted by sliding it through the D-ring. By adjusting the parts of the cloth (either end or the middle) you can set the tension across the baby's entire body. The Maya Wrap is made up of a breathable cotton and is rated for newborn through 35 lbs. There are ring slings marketed that are made of patterned fabrics, or in silk (for special occasions) In principle, a baby can be held in a cradle hold (pictured) upright tummy-to-tummy, kangaroo hold (facing forward) or hip straddle. Initially I used cradle holds, but I've switched to upright (more on why later).

Given that it is missing the precisely located straps and buckles, one question is how do you know it is being used correctly. There are a few guidelines that are true for all baby carriers (and some carriers fail these)

1. Baby is seated in the carrier. If you think about how you hold a baby for extended periods of time, most carries involve support across the baby's bum and across the back. So a carrier should do the same. The main way many carriers fail is to hold the baby in between the legs at the crotch vice across the entire bum. In particular, the fabric should be supporting part of the thigh and the knees should be higher then the butt.

2. Baby's back is supported. A baby's back is naturally bent into a C, but the carrier should not exaggerate the C. A class of carrier called bag slings were notable for this (think of a pouch, and the baby sitting in the bottom of the pouch). And Bag slings were recently banned by the Consumer Products Safety Commission. The test for this is to look at the baby's chin. The baby's head does not follow the C of the spine, so the chin should not be against the baby's chest. (and if you can't see it, you probably have the baby positioned too low)

Things I like about the Maya wrap.
1. Once we got past the initial learning curve (first three time trying it) it was easy to drop T into the sling.
2. It is very compact. It does not take up much room in a bag.
3. Few moving parts. It was easy to set up and have it ready. Now straps or buckles all over the place.
4. My son has been diagnosed as colicy. And putting him in the sling upright has been a sure way of calming him down. (or even letting him sleep in there.)
5. My two month old son is also easily scared. Between the sling pouch and the tail, we can basically hide him, and cut down on the sensory overload that is the world around him.
6. Wearing the sling, I can eat while holding him. Basically, my hands are relatively free (although I usually have a hand on his back or bottom when I have the sling on)
7. For that matter, I can do some other things wearing the sling that need my hands. Listening to music on my ipod. Reading books or my ereader. Packing/unpacking

Things not so nice.
1. There is a learning curve. My wife and both of our parents don't want to use it because they don't like how it works. And things have to be adjusted reasonably well to sit on your shoulder and have the baby in a comfortable position. Once you get the hang of it, it is not hard, but you need to put some work in to get there.
2. It is a pouch, so there is not much ventilation inside the baby compartment. The cotton fabric is breathable, but the baby will be warm because it is essentially another layer of clothing (in addition to the body heat)

Over all, I love it and I'm glad I got it. T does not like the Bjorn so much and because he is colicy, having the ring sling makes it conceivable to go out even though we have to hold him constantly.

Maya wrap is available direct from Maya Wrap. There are also a number of sellers listed on Amazon.com. Retail availability seems limited, but apparently there are a number of home-based businesses that cater to baby and children needs that also sell babywearing products, including ring slings.

Why I write reviews

2011-01-08T19:12:00.002-05:00

Near the beginning of the year, the New York Times Sunday Book Review had several literary critics right about the purpose of serious book reviews. And the explicit background is the web, with many blogs where anyone with an interest can write reviews (e.g. yours truly), sites which invite reviews (such as Amazon.com). And in a world where anyone can say anything, what is the value of serious reviews (or what makes a review 'serious')?

What is not available in the crowdsourced review? Renee Fleming when she was in Pittsburgh last fall made the comment that the popular review had one flaw, that it tended to be gladitorial style, thumbs up or thumbs down. And as criticism goes, it was shallow and useless.

And there is the place for good criticism. The purpose of criticism is not to state a like or dislike, it it to describe and evaluate. There are a few things that you should be able to know after a well done review or criticism.

1. Where the work fits in its environment
2. What the work was trying to do
3. How well the work expresses its intent
4. The intended audience of the work
5. Who is not the intended audience of the work

And presumably, the reader of the review can identify if he is in 4 or 5, and if this is something he would want to read/attend/eat.

Why should I do such a thing? One, because this way I remember what I've done before. But also because every one of us is different. And these differences should result in differences in how we view a work. So when I have reviewed books, concerts, camping gear, movies, etc., the reader should be reading them with an eye for what makes us similar or different, and how would those similarities and differences change the way we would view the subject. And how does the object of the review fit into a larger whole (whether it be a set of experiences, gear taken on a backpacking trip, or a as part of a library.)

Do I do this every time? Probably not. Like many things, this is an ideal, to be followed when I am in the mood to do this, and the work is worthy of the attention. But having this ideal is a guard against a shallowness that contributes more noise than substance.

2010 in review

2011-01-02T20:42:00.002-05:00

Someone was commenting that I've neglected a usual recap. And reality is, neither of us can carve out time to write a letter (and school for both of us starts soon, so there goes any other free time. But here goes for something that I'm sure is substandard. I think for things like this, it is an advantage to have been blogging here and maintaining a photo site at Flickr. Because those areas become the record of a life in thoughts and what was important at the time, like the journals and notebooks of old.

Professional life

Both of us are fully in the academic life. S spent the past year working on her tenure portfolio. In addition she has been traveling and performing recitals in Chicago and at her college in Beaver Falls and private students as well as her college students.

L is continuing his career experiment in academia. At Pitt he is now non-tenured faculty with a certain amount of fairly stable outside funding. So far, the experiment is being viewed by all concerned as progressing. He has many projects with the local VA hospital (clearly, Louis did not go too far professionally), a fun quick consulting gig with an architectural firm (Note to self: finish the paper on this). The big change is work with students. He has been shepherding along two PhD students, one at Pitt and a statistics PhD student who was visiting for a year. Both have been very productive. The Pitt student has very good results beyond anyone's expectations from when L started with him and looks to graduate soon. The other student returns to Turkey with good progress on a paper, and her home department is expecting several seminars on topics that they are not strong in. L's own PhD advisor is looking forward to his first academic grandchild, since L is his first student to graduate his own PhD student.

Social and community service

We have continued many things, such as going to PSO concerts where Louis continues to get comp tickets blogging for them on their blog page. However, they have been scaling back some things. L has finally finished his long tenure on the board of the National Association of Asian American Professionals (NAAAP) Pittsburgh. And, to make sure that they can still wear their fancy clothes on occasion, they still plan on enjoying events such as the PSO gala, Silk Screen gala and Red Cross Ball as part of their ongoing associations throughout the year.

L is continuing volunteering with the Southwestern PA Red Cross. In addition to the ongoing on-call for fires etc. he has had leadership roles in being the disaster assessment lead during heavy snowstorms and taking part in a volunteer review board looking at emergency services operations.

Travels

Both of us have had trips for work. In addition S and L went to New Orleans, LA; Somerset, PA and Saugatuck, MI visiting friends, relatives, and spending time just together enjoying precious times.

Physical

L continues to serve as radio communicator for various races as part of Amateur Radio Emergency Communications (ARES) in Allegheny County. And this summer, he finally completed the Rachel Carson Challenge on time. Of course, this is probably his last challenge as a participant (for the foreseeable future). In the future he may take part as a volunteer, and go back to something less challenging, like running marathons.

Family

The big event of the year was, of course, the birth of our son T on October 30 at McGee Women's Hospital. At 8lb 11 oz T was a surprisingly big boy. We're not sure how he got so big. The pediatrician assures us he will regress to a body type like his parents within two years.

While runners have a saying that we are all experiments of one, and this applies to life in general, relationships and marriage, it seems to us that raising a child is especially a good application of this principle. Even though a few billion of these have come around, everyone is a bit different. And we've noted a lot of advice forgets this (sometimes because of poor memory, or someone who thinks all people are the same).

L's mom was here to provide much welcome help the first month. S's parents are here now and for when S goes back to work. We have had easy times, and some hard ones. And not being sentimental people by nature, it is neither as easy or as hard as sometimes we have feared or hoped. And that is probably as it should be. There are many plans and expectations that people have, but we'll let T find his path, with us looking ahead to be with him on the many expected rocky parts to come.

Parenting: Month 2

2010-12-30T22:20:00.001-05:00

Tomie's Three Bears
Originally uploaded by LugerLA

All the baby books say month 1 is the time of upheaval and month 2 is a settling in period. Month 1 seemed fairly straight forward in retrospect. Of course, he was just a blob and his job was eat, sleep, pee and poop. And he was very well mannered for the first month. Month 2 we have a real baby that fusses and cries. The in-laws arrived for the grandparent shift change, the night we went to the emergency room for the first time. They are probably wondering if we were lying about the easy going baby we had.

Some notes along the way

- Doctor gave the dreaded diagnosis - colic. (AKA pediatrician does not know why baby is crying, but the parents better steel themselves for three months of this) Actually, if this is colic, we'll take it and run, because this is easier then what we thought colic was.

- We still have a big blob. He started out as a big boy, and he is staying big. Problem is, most babies his size are older and have learned to crawl. But in his case, we have to do all the exercising for him. Lot's of bicycling time. But that does not come close to what a self-mobile baby does. Good thing he is sick so he does not eat so much. (of course, he is still gaining weight, so no doctor is going to worry too much about him being sick)

- Colic and constipation = complexity. It's getting harder to keep track of everything that we're working on

- He is a bit of a chicken. Lots of things scare him. One of the problems is that it is so cold, so we have not been bringing him out of the house where he can be exposed to other things which is what is supposed to take care of this. (Hint: we need visitors. Call us and come by.)

- Baby gear. We love the Medela line of breast feeding products. We hope that whoever coordinates/manages/develops that line great prosperity for lifetimes to come. That makes life so much easier.

- Baby gear 2 - I like my ring sling. I have a Maya sling that is great because I can carry him and do something else while he is wailing away (or threatening to wail away) or when I'm just holding him asleep (i.e. he would not be sleeping if I was not holding him). This usually means playing music on a CD, iPod or reading on the Kindle. And I can keep this up for a few hours (i.e. the time between feedings). Of course, I am the only one who can use it. We have a Baby Bjorn that mom and grandpa can use, but he needs to be in a very good mood to get in that.

- Holidays - We are very unsentimental about holidays, birthdays, other special events. We're told it might change as he grows up. But not yet.

- Gadgets - non-baby. I'm getting a lot of reading done with the Kindle. What makes it work is that it is light, so I can hold it for extended periods of time with a couple fingers while I'm holding him. If it was closer to a pound, it would get problematic after the first hour or so.

- Carrying - I enjoy holding him. Awake, asleep, happy (even crying). Standing still, sitting down, laying down, dancing (waltz). I'd probably hold him even more if I didn't have to work.

At two months, he clearly dominates our lives. Although we are fighting to see that the world does not completely revolve around him. Mom and grandma are discussing what classes he will be taking (after all, he going on three months). Competitions to enter. And of course, noting that no child of two endurance athletes has a chance of being a sloth. But for now, we enjoy being parents. So far.

Book Review: Data Analysis with Open Source Tools by Philipp Janert

2010-12-27T21:46:00.003-05:00

Data Analysis with Open Source Tools by Philipp K Janert

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a book that is how to think about data analysis, not only how to perform data analysis. Like a good data analysis, Janert's book is about insight and comprehension, not computation. And because of this it should be a part of any analysts bookshelf, set apart from all the books that merely teach tools and techniques.

The practice of data analysis can get a bad rap, especially by those who think that data analysis is only statistics. Most books on data analysis don’t help because they focus on using the features of a particular tool, leading to the view that data analysis is following a recipe from a cookbook. This book subverts this by being principally of how to think about data analysis, and providing examples using different tools (primarily R and Python, but he uses other examples as well)

Among other topics, Janert covers graphing, single and multi-variable analysis, probability, data modeling, statistics, simulation, component analysis, reporting, financial modeling and predictive analytics. In each section he starts by explaining the concepts, what it is for, and (just as important) what each topic is not. Working through it you get a sense of not just what and how of the various tools and methods discussed, but why they are used as well as some ways these techniques are misapplied.

Janert also illustrates the methods using some data analysis environments. Principally R and Python (with Numpy, Scipy and Matplotlib), but also other tools such as Gnuplot and the Gnu Scientific Library. What is helpful here is the focus is on what techniques and capabilities are needed in the tool, not the tool itself. Instead of being a cheerleader for a particular tool, Janert discusses in his appendix the qualities that make environments such as Matlab, R and Python good data analysis environments. However, this focus means that he does not teach any particular tool. If you want to learn how to use a particular tool for data analysis, you are better off getting a book on R or Python (or Matlab, Excel, etc.)

The book page at O'Reilly.com is here: Data Analysis with Open Source Tools

View all my reviews

Lessons Observed: Learning Bayesian Methods

2010-12-19T21:07:00.003-05:00

I've been working with one of my students in a project that involves identifying a proper probability distribution and parameters for a fairly complex and diverse data set. As we did our literature review, one thing that was very unsatisfying was the fact that many published papers either used data that was unavailable at the time needed, or employed magic numbers as part of their method (magic numbers are arbitrarily chosen constants). As she did her literature review, we discovered the applications of Bayesian methods. But neither of us had any experience in using this. At the same time, my PhD student had a problem that we uncovered during his proposal presentation. He needed another course. Solution. We'll have an independent study on Bayesian methods with three of us.

We used as a basic text Carlin and Louis, Bayesian Methods for Data Analysis and Alberts, Bayesian Computation with R as a supplementary text. The alternative to Carlin and Louis would be Gelman et. al., Bayesian Data Analysis. We chose the Carlin and Louis text because it seemed to be more technical while Gelman et. al. was aimed at social scientists (as opposed to the mathematical disciplines we came from). (Note: all of these do require some level of programming using R)

While doing this we were also looking at various Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) toolkits. The best programmer was working with MCMCPack. The least experienced used WinBUGS and I used JAGS.

Lessons learned:

1. For independent study, I should be more forceful on making them do the exercises. By the time we were done, I had implemented many of the models, but I don't think my students did.

2. Carlin was good to work with. I had gotten the instructors solutions guide direct from him (although I did not use it). I also identified a problem in one of the data files for one of the case studies.

3. Of the three of us, JAGS was the only one we got to work well. We had a hard time formulating models in MCMCPack. WinBUGS would work, but it was only good for interactive use (if you called it from R, it would open its own window to do its work, which is a lot of overhead) and we needed something that could be used as a callable library because we needed to apply this to 1000's of cases.

4. There was a benefit to involving my students in learning this field. Because I knew nothing about it, I could model the process of learning a new field of knowledge to my students.

Outcomes

1. The project is turning out to be successful. We're doing comparative performance evaluation now and it does considerably better then the other methods in the literature. The fact that Bayesian methods blend expert knowledge and historical data in a systematic way gives it considerable face validity.

2. The student that I was working with is going back to her home university with an expectation that she will introduce Bayesian methods to faculty and other grad students in her statistics department (at a university outside the U.S.)

All in all, I think this experience was successful. Not that I am an expert in Bayesian methods, but this has led to very good results that I expect to see implemented on live data in the near future. And some insights on situations that allow Bayesian methods to be more useful then most applications of it.

Book Review: Head First HTML With CSS & XHTML by Elizabeth Freeman and Eric Freeman

2010-12-12T19:05:00.004-05:00

Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML by Elisabeth Freeman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This member of the Head First series teaches in an engaging way with every lesson providing the context and the why, not only what and how, of using HTML and CSS.

I have written web pages before, and even worked through some on-line tutorials. But having some colleagues gently remind me that my web page needed to be updated and filled out provides an opportunity to learn how to do this right.

Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML does a better job then others. The style of teaching lends itself very well. Three case studies (even if contrived) weave their way throughout the book. And having three case studies allow every new concept to be introduced in a usable context. Each chapter had several different kinds of exercises. For all of us who learn in different ways.

I appreciated many sections where they take a break from teaching to explain why certain features of XHTML and CSS were the way they were. So you are not only learning a lot of syntax, but you are also learning why HTML and CSS are the way they are, and how to use them as tools as a coherent whole. Making it easier to remember and retain what they are teaching (almost like learning from first principles in addition to the tutorial they are giving).

Book page at O'Reilly

View all my reviews

Book Review: Baghdad at Sunrise by Peter Mansoor

2010-12-07T13:36:00.000-05:00

Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq by Peter R. Mansoor

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the memoir of a field-grade officer's tour in Iraq as a Armored brigade commander in 2006. It covers a period where U.S. military doctrine was being debated and changed from active denial that the U.S. was facing an insurgency to fully engaged in counter-insurgency. In particular, as a brigade commander Mansoor was exposed to both decisions from higher up as well as the reality on the ground.

Mansoor demonstrates the capabilities of those in the military. As some recognize (esp. Col Gian Gentile USA), as a practical matter, many in the U.S. military were very aware of tenets of low-intensity warfare from experience in the Balkans, Africa, northern Iraq and around SW Asia and SE Asia. And regardless of what their political masters may say, many have learned that these have to be dealt with, and the U.S. has experience and doctrine to do so, if it is followed.

So the book becomes a memoir of what he faced, how he dealt with the Iraqi people he was there to protect as well as the insurgency he was fighting. And how he handled both as well as the political and military senior leadership of the time (who did not have on-the-ground experience in these same areas). I found it to be candid, and worth reading the thoughts of those who attempted to carry out their countries missions in the unknown of war.

View all my reviews

Fatherhood: One month in

2010-11-29T21:57:00.001-05:00

Father and Son
Originally uploaded by LugerLA

One month. One thing we are agreed upon that a baby's state at the one month mark is not the fault of the parents (of course, assuming survival), which is why the one month point is traditionally the time you publicly celebrate. That being said, there are certain nice-to-have's at the one month point.

1. Baby is healthy (In a newborn there is only one measure. Gaining weight)
2. Baby crying is bounded.
3. Parents are doing better than walking zombies.

At this point, baby is doing a good job gaining weight, as we look at the strains in anything labeled 3 months. The official pronouncement from the pediatrician is "thriving"

He has quickly determined that there are other ways of getting attention other then crying. Although there are days that he tries that method quicker then others.

He is feeding on a three hour cycle. Most days. And some days it gets freaky (meaning you can set your clock on it). Of course there are some days (growth spurts. Too much energy) where he does not get anywhere close.

Some initial thoughts.

1. The runner's reminder, we are experiments of one, seems to apply here. I have a healthy disrespect for any expert who proclaims the One True Way to ____.

2. I've noticed that on Amazon.com, every baby book has readers who complain that the book is too belief in one true way. The majority of the books I have read are considerably more nuanced then their detractors (or most enthusiastic supporters) give credit for. Mind you, there is one book I consider an exception to this.

3. Baby feeds and eats and goes back to sleep a lot better when we get to him before he starts crying. It helps that he usually gives us other cues. But I don't easily take the advice that we should let the baby cry. At least not a newborn. (I don't think that newborns are deceptive. But I am aware that that time will come.)

4. We are given the understanding that a baby's personality changes over time, regardless of what the parents do. We'll take what we have as long as it lasts.

Conference notes: INFORMS 2010

2010-11-17T20:36:00.004-05:00

I was in Austin, TX for the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) annual conference. I had gone to this conference through grad school, and a few times since. This time was a little different.

There are many reasons to go to conferences. To keep up with your field. To follow recent developments. It is an efficient way of learning new developments (compared to only reading a paper). To present your work. But it is also a way to keep in touch with old friends (and if you are in a profession for any length of time, there should be friends at conferences). And in my case, the obvious conversation topics were:
"How old is he? Why are you here?" and "Pictures!"

As far as the professional side went, I had my talk. It went well. And a good chunk of the audience left right after my talk (I was the first talk of the session, so this meant that people were in the room for my talk, then they went to where they really wanted to be for the rest of the session time slot).

But what made the conference different was my talk was not important (ok, so maybe that has not changed). I was part of two talks at the conference, and this was the boring one. The interesting one was my student's. And that went well. Good audience reaction and commentary. And definite interest. Which bodes well when he does this again next year, with visions of graduating dancing in our heads. The goal for this conference was not about me, but all about him. Having him give a talk. And meet all the researchers who wrote the papers that he has been reading, poring over, and extending. To talk about what they have done and what he is doing now. Developing confidence that what he is working on is indeed something reasonably new, a contribution to the body of work, and something that can be of interest when it is done. It was a good feeling, watching my student interact with people I know (and many I did not). While talking to my own advisor, another, more senior researcher was commenting that it would be my advisors first 'grandchild'. I have to agree, talking about my student is a lot like what being proud of your own child is supposed to be like. So, in a sense, I have two thriving children, and one getting ready to take flight.

Why I am Asian-American

2010-10-17T18:13:00.004-04:00

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. - Amendment XIV, Section 1, United States Constitution

This is another badly worded post. I am asian as both parents are of asian descent. And I am American based on the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution as my parents were under the jurisdiction of the laws of the United States at the time of my birth. But it is also important to remember that nothing in the U.S. Constitution has to be the way it is. And like many aspects, this is one that has been challenged in the past, present, and will be in the future (Heritage Foundation brief about the granting of citizenship to those born while parents where in the U.S. under legal visas). And certainly, few countries follow this rule. Most countries define citizenship to follow from the parents. And few countries will allow the children of immigrants to be full citizens, with the rights to vote, hold office, and serve in its defense. In the United States at various point in time many groups were viewed with suspicion, and much resistance to viewing them as worthy of citizenship (obvious historical examples are Catholics, Irish, Italians, Germans, Chinese, Japanese, as well as Blacks, which prompted the amendment in the first place. A list of current examples is not much shorter.)

Where is my place in this? For several years, I have been on the board of a local asian american professional organization. (this causes amusement on people who knew me before I moved to Pittsburgh, as I am not the type who usually does such things.) As such, this is something other then asian (other groups are comprised of mostly asian immigrants), and not completely just another professional group (the Pittsburgh region distinctly lacks diversity compared to other urban areas of the United States.)

Other countries view the idea that the children of immigrants can be full citizens just as those who have been in the U.S. for several generations to be impossible. I suspect that most countries do not have provision for someone to desire full citizenship who did not have local ancestry by blood. The alternative is the view that purity of blood is paramount. An example was the view in the early days of the U.S. that one drop of blood was enough to make someone viewed as black, regardless of how much of his ancestry was white. In Germany, Chanceler Merkel has declared that multiculturalism has 'utterly failed'. France is in the process for making it easier to strip people of their citizenship.

Why should the U.S. not follow the path of Germany, France, or Japan? Why should the U.S. continue too put itself up as a place where those who have ambition and goals and drive can go and work to succede? Why should the U.S. be a place where the children of immigrants who work with their hands can gain the education to succede and thrive?

The U.S. has a myth of American Exceptionalism. But if the myth is true, then it must be because there is a characteristic of the U.S. that is exceptional. It is not the racial stock of its people, because that racial stock is found in the lands of its origin. It is not the ties to the land. Others in other places have just as strong ties to the same types of land that we have. It is not a natural industriousness of its people, many lands claim industriousness and even education better then the U.S. But none have told the world that there is a place for those who have ambition, drive and desire to create in the way the U.S. has over the decades. And none have been therefore attractive for those without social status, where the children of parents with no special status of title, social class or privilege can begin working on the street, in garages, with their hands and rise to become captains of industry or even a President. And because all these things are true, I believe in the myth of American Exceptionalism.

Does it have to be this way? No, it does not. There are many calls that say that those who 'do not look like us' should not have the privileges of a citizen. That it is not possible for people to change from the citizenship or religion of their parents. That people should not be able to rise in the world through effort, drive and education. That people who are different should not be allowed to serve in this countries defense or in public service.

Are there places like this? Yes. And they are dying, stagnant, fully aware that their best days are past and will not return. Realizing that they are in a spiral of destruction, feeding off the assets built in the past, and not renewing the future. And should America turn its back on the things that make it exceptional, I will mourn the end of America's greatness.

PSO: Showing off talent

2010-09-26T20:22:00.009-04:00

[This post was originally posted at Pittsburgh Symphony Blogs]

Before last week's opening Gala, Ann Pratchett and Renee Fleming hosted a interactive talk about their books. One question came up about the internet and Ann Pratchett criticized how commentators on websites have a tendency to give their reviews 'gladiator style', meaning thumbs up or thumbs down. What results are reviews that either excoriate the work reviewed as a pile of worthless garbage or the most incredible experience this side of heaven. But generally with no explanation or justification. And the result is only the form of interacting with the author and the creation without substance. It is a criticism that can be leveled at American society in general, valuing quick, snappy decisions based on instant impressions as sincere and authentic while being suspicious of anything that results from deep thought and study.

But these impressions turn out to be merely shallow and incomplete. I was talking over lunch this past week with a regional manager of a major shipping company who was lamenting the difficulty in identifying job applications with a particular ability. Things like grades are too one-dimensional, and the interview does not allow for depth. The only way she can evaluate the applicant, was to have them work for a year.

And so it is with the creative arts. It is a mistake to evaluate a work on one aspect, or an artist for a single work, or even work in a single environment. An evaluation needs to be across a range. And that is what made last weekend's concert rather enjoyable, it showcased a range across style in a single concert.

Michael Gandolfi's Garden of Cosmic Speculation opened up the concert. Prior to the piece, the composer spoke about it. The complete piece is actually 11 movements. But for performances the composer expects only a selection of the movements to be played, and any subset is appropriate. It becomes very much like going to a large garden or an art museum, there is no time to see the whole thing if you do it right, to experience it deeply you must go and select what parts of the museum to see, and leave the rest for another day. Musically, the four movements feel very different, almost like each was a separate work. And this provides an example of showing his range as a composer in a single work.

Having Yuja Wang play Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini was a great choice. It is very easy to have Ms. Wang play pieces to show off technical brilliance. Certainly most publicity for her revolves around her ability to perform fast, technically demanding pieces. And many soloists use such pieces to showcase their skills. But Ms. Wang is capable of more. And in Rhapsody she was able to show this. There are the expected fast, loud and technical sections that demonstrates her command of the keyboard. But there are also flowing melodies, intricate delicate sections and textured nuance that show off not just mastery of a piece, but an understanding it to let it shine. And by not trying to dominate the piece, I am more impressed by this interpretation of it, and by Ms. Wang's artistry in addition to talent and skill.

Installing pyspatialite

2010-09-24T16:04:00.003-04:00

Goal: To use spatial databases to perform operations such as centroid, nearest point, and distances to generate a table of distances along a road network from area to area, using the nearest node to the centroid of an area to represent the area.

Backup plan: Create a list of nearest node to centroid of areas. Use some code I have previously written in R to implement Dijkstra's algorithm.

Preferred method: Programmatically access Spatialite and perform all functions in spatialite.

Barrier: Most distributions of SQLite (including the sqlite3 library included in Python) do not enable loading of extentions.

Solution: Install Python module pyspatialite.

Installing pyspatialite is done through easy_install: sudo python setup.py install

The documentation mentions that you need geos and proj libraries installed. What it does not tell you is that you need the development versions (which include header files) of these libraries, as well as the Python headers. After installing the developmental files, then you can install pyspatialite.

Installing JAGS/rjags/R2jags

2010-09-24T10:06:00.002-04:00

I got a new computer via a project. It is a Windows machine which is heavily administered, but they let me put Virtualbox on it, and naturally I have Ubuntu running on it so I can actually build the tools that let me do work. Times like this I am very glad I've been putting my installation notes for various packages on the blog since it saves me time searching all over the place (e.g. some gotchas on Eclipse and StatET (R-project))

For JAGS (Just Another Gibbs Sampler), there is an Ubuntu package of 1.0.2, but JAGS is at 2.0+. And the CRAN packages of rjags and R2jags are similarly behind. So I downloaded the source and installed them.

JAGS was simple. The usual combination of:

./configure
make
sudo make install
make installcheck

works as expected.

For rjags and R2jags I had to try a number of different configurations. I ended up with

sudo R --with-jags-modules=/usr/local/lib/JAGS/modules-2.1.0 CMD INSTALL rjags_2.1.0-10.tar.gz

sudo R --with-jags-modules=/usr/local/lib/JAGS/modules-2.1.0 CMD INSTALL R2jags_0.02-09.tar.gz

While I'm not entirely sure that sudo was necessary, prior to this I was getting in trouble with

Error in dyn.load(file, DLLpath = DLLpath, ...) : unable to load shared library '/home/louis/R/i486-pc-linux-gnu-library/2.10/rjags/libs/rjags.so': libjags.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

So this did work. Source is Installing jags on 64-bit Debian by Roger Levy

Why I am a Red Cross Volunteer

2010-09-22T21:22:00.008-04:00

ERVs in Louisiana

At my University there has been a Red Cross Club for a few years. And our local American Red Cross chapter finally discovered them. So I was there today at their second meeting of the year to talk about the Red Cross and the VA and volunteering off campus. I spoke about the things we do as emergency services volunteers, responding to fires, floods, hurricanes, storms, and so forth. Of Health & Safety, teaching classes. Of Service to the Armed Forces, of having others in my unit who were deployed who got the calls that they should come home while there was time. I suppose that this audience probably were more interested in this talk then my students in class are.

I started volunteering for the Red Cross when I was in college. I was a volunteer EMT, and since I was learning CPR, I also became an instructor. Our EMS organization taught classes on campus to university staff and to students (it was how the organization raised funds). And I taught classes in the community as an instructor for the Red Cross chapter.

I left that behind when I graduated and started work. Work and grad school just squeezed that out of my life for a while. Then when I went back to grad school for a PhD I started volunteering again, this time in emergency services. My degree was in modeling operations. The Red Cross gave me the opportunity to take part in operations.

It is not just that the Red Cross conducts operations. It conducts them under some of the most difficult constraints for operations. In disaster response, we do not choose the time, place or scale, and we do not get to choose who responds. Those who plan and run the operation work with the resources and personnel available at the time and place. The current classical situation is a hurricane. And to work in that setting competently, with the chaos of an unknown and uncertain situation where the pressure of people whose lives are at stake is a stress and challenge only matched by combat against a willful and capable opponent.

What to tell these college undergraduates that perhaps volunteering with the Red Cross or with Veterans Affairs is worthy of their time? I had three areas for them.

1. This was good and meaningful tasks. Granted, there were other opportunities for good and meaningful things that they will be provided on a college campus. With the Red Cross and VA staff and volunteers where people who have done things. At both, everyone there has had the experience of being in high stress situations and having to act and make decisions. Whether it is a Red Cross volunteer who is the team lead at a house fire where the family has no where to go, no food and only the clothes on their back, or the nurse who has had a patient crash, they would be with people who have experienced life and can get things done.

2. The Red Cross and the VA trains their volunteers. For those who volunteer over years, they will be trained to do their tasks, but also about dealing with people and dealing with life in all its aspects, both the good and bad. To recognize what is important and what is not.

3. I also told them that I was a professor. And that this semester, there is a group in my department whose senior design project is with the local Red Cross Chapter. Because the Red Cross and the VA are not just another charity or hospital, but they are organizations that reach out into their communities and interact with them in complex ways. And because of this someone with a little curiosity will quickly see there are many questions to be asked, ways of handling difficult issues to develop, and resource limitations that need to be dealt with. So I told them that I would like to see members of this club who volunteer with the Red Cross and the VA over the course of their college years to be doing senior projects, senior thesis and class papers based what they observed and did with the Red Cross and VA. So they can take what they are learning and put it in context with real problems effecting real people.

This fall, the first Pitt students have started volunteering at the VA under the Red Cross Veterans Affairs Voluntary Services partnership, after going through orientations in spring. This year, they are being introduced to the Red Cross and VA at the beginning of the year before they have settled into their routines. And these students will see a part of life greater then what they would get if they did not leave their campus.

Renee Fleming: The Inner Voice

2010-09-20T09:10:00.002-04:00

Renee Fleming: The Inner Voice
Originally uploaded by LugerLA

This post was originally posted at the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra Blogs

The day before the opening Gala, Renee Fleming and Ann Pratchett had a book discussion at the O’Reilly Theater. It was an enjoyable conversation with two artists. They spoke of limits, of family, of talent. But what stood out, was they spoke that creating art is work.

Fleming commented that one thing that she dislikes is the belief that music is a gift, that one day someone opens her mouth and sings, then she is discovered, and then she goes to the Met. (Metropolitan Opera). Ann also has instances where people ask if she works. Because they are faced with the belief that talent is innate, it only needs to be found. But for both of them, this is not true. And it is not true in general.

Peter Orszag recently wrote two pieces in the New York Times about talent and effort. His observation that is shared by many others who have examined this (Michael Syed “Bounce”, Carol Dwed “mindset”, and others is that innate talent only gets so far, that to reach world class levels in a complex field takes practice. 10,000 hours of practice. It holds in music, mathematics, many sports, and chess. It shows in the dedication of young men and women in their teens who get up with the rising sun to practice, whether it is on the athletic field the weight room or in the studio. The students working their way through problems and proofs. My friends in martial arts working on their kata. Soldiers and FBI agents working through battle drills in the desert.

Fleming said at one point that when learning a part, it is not enough to know the words and the music, then you need to learn the meaning. And then, when you know what it means and you know it well, you are able to do more then follow the score and you are able to interpret or try new techniques to make it your own. The same is in other fields. Through practice the athlete learns the limits of her body and strength. The chess or go player can recognize patterns on the board and see the progression of the game. The soldier knows his role on his team and the overall intent of his commander even when he is unable to communicate with them. The mathematician or scientist or engineer can look at a problem and recognize what the form of the solutions or results will be even before she begins the work. Authors and writers can see how a turn of phrase can change the tone of a work. All this comes not from some gift of birth, but time and effort in practice and study, purposeful and directed effort.

The thing is, somehow one has to be convinced this is worth the effort. If you are good, you will be around people who are even better. And you will be working on things beyond your ability. And here you have a choice. You can decide you are good enough and stop. You can give up because it is too hard. Or you can look ahead and decide that it is worth the effort and pain of work to master your art. And the rewards? While Renee Fleming stated that her goal when growing up was to be good at something and it did not have to be music, I am glad that it was.

Why I enjoy classical/concert music

2010-09-19T20:10:00.003-04:00

This is, obviously, a badly titled post. Because 'enjoy' is not the proper word. Not that there is anything wrong with merely enjoying something. I believe that there is a place in life for things that can be enjoyed as they are. But I don't think that 'enjoy' or 'appreciate' conveys how I experience concert music. There is a cliche that those with mathematical backgrounds should enjoy classical music because music, like math, deals with patterns. But that does not get you very far. By the end of chapter 2 of his Critical and Historical Essays (lectures on music at Columbia University), Edward MacDowell shows examples of what happens when you take mathematics as the means of analysis of music, and each historical case of cultures that try it leads to dead ends.

When I was in high school, the smart kids, the ones in the honors program, took Art Appreciation. I was not one of those kids. To this day, I say I know almost nothing about art/music history or theory. My experience with music was playing in the high school marching and symphonic bands. While I was good enough to be first chair my senior year, and being part of the Chicago All-Catholic Band, our ambitions were suitably limited (the bandmaster considered part of his job to be dissuading students from the profession.) The goal there was an appreciation of music, and perhaps a life-long hobby (e.g. community ensembles or playing in private). This is where I was when I lived around Washington DC, where I took advantage of a wealth of performances in public spaces (museums, parks, public buildings, university) and the occasional concert. And I continued my practice from when I was an undergraduate of going to performances of friends who were in music programs at the local universities.

In graduate school this began to transform. I had friends in the music program, but now I was at a school with a decent music program, where students there had aspirations of professional careers in classical music. I was going to recitals, concerts, and programs where my friends were performing on a regular basis. And, since I was taking my time in a Ph.D. program, I could follow them throughout their time in school, and I could watch how they developed both in performances and sitting in on practice time. (I had one friend comment that having me in the room while she was practicing was like a studio session. My wife thanks everyone for the training as she is the current beneficiary of all of those sessions.) Over time I stopped merely hearing the music to listening for the interpretation. Instead of appreciating the music being played, I could observe how an ensemble interact with each other and it became a conversation between people, not only the genius of the composer putting notes on a page.

What do I gain? Like all of the other fine arts, classical music is an abstract way of asking what it means to experience being human. At times composers use it to respond to a historical context. Most composers chose to create a tension by using a format to constrain themselves as they desired to emote or to present a story. (I tend to not get many of the more free form moderns). And I take it as a privilege to observe the result.

I am looking forward to another season of blogging for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. I have always maintained that my blog is not a concert review. The Post-Gazette has someone who does that as well as people associated with the schools of music and conservatories. Many with backgrounds in the humanities can discuss what a piece means. And I know little about the mechanics or history or philosophy of music. What I can do is pay attention to the concert and react to it. At a book discussion prior to last weeks opening gala, Renee Fleming stated that her performances where a collaboration between the creator (composer) and the performer. But she is missing an actor. Aaron Copeland stated that art is a collaboration between the composer, the interpreter, and the listener. Copeland tells the listener his job is to be aware of the personalities and functions of the composer and interpreter, to distinguish between them. And it is not sufficient (or maybe not even necessary) to be educated and trained, but the listener must love music. And not just particular styles or forms or schools of music, but across a wide range. And then react to it. Otherwise the efforts of composer and interpreter do not have meaning. I do my part.

Creating spatial data files

2010-09-14T21:27:00.007-04:00

At my school, there is a class on Geographic Information Systems (GIS). When you complete the class, you now know how to analyze data using ArcGIS. But you do not know how to create the data files you used. And you do not know how to do anything that ESRI did not include in ArcGIS. As a researcher, I find that unacceptable. This year, there is a senior project team including someone who has taken this class doing a project with the local chapter of the Red Cross that will involve using spatial data. But since they cannot create a spatial file, I will create the data sets that they will use to populate their models. If I am going to do something, I may as well learn something along the way. Those somethings are Spatialite and Google Maps API for geocoding.

Step 1. Given a list of addresses, find their latitude and longitude. The official way to do this is to get the TIGER line files of street maps. These encode each block by name and the end points of addresses for each block along with their geospatial coordinates. Then you can interpolate. The more pragmatic way of doing this is to find someone who has already processed the TIGER line files and created an API or other interface to work with them. There are many that will then create Keyhole Markup Language (KML) files as output, and I have used one before.

The way I will do it is to use the Google Maps API. There is a Python package called googlemaps that will find lat/long given a properly formulated address. (note: long is a keyword in Python, so we use lng for longitude)

from googlemaps import GoogleMaps

def getlatlong(gmaps, streetaddress, city, state, zipcode):

address = streetaddress + " "+ city + ", "+ state +" "+ zipcode

lat, lng = gmaps.address_to_latlng(address)

return lat, lng

# get api_key from http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html

api_key = "APIKEY"

gmaps = GoogleMaps(api_key)

. . .

lat, lng = getlatlong(gmaps, streetaddress, city, state, zipcode)

Step 2. Create an Spatialite database. Spatialite is the SQLite database with extensions for Simple Features for SQL, i.e. a relational database that allows for queries on geometric objects. The other options are Oracle Spatial, DB2 Spatial, PostGIS and MS Server with spatial extensions. There are also spatial extensions to MySQL, but they do not meet the SFSQL standard, and they are simplistically implemented (which would lead to many errors if you actually needed correct answers instead of approximations.) Of these, Spatialite does not require an administrator and contains its data in a single file, both of which simplify their use. To use Spatialite, the PROJ and GEOS libraries should already be on your machine. (see Spatialite installation instructions)

To create a database, use spatialite the same way as you would have used sqlite. But after creating the database, load init_spatialite.sql This SQL file loads some required tables. Sometimes, Spatialite will create the tables on its own, but sometimes not (especially if the database was originally an SQLite database).

Next, load the data (using any of a variety of different methods for SQLite databases.) Given address data, determine lat/long and enter each of them into their own fields. (you probably have to create these fields after importing the address data.

Step 3. Create the geometric representation of the data. What makes data spatial is the connection of a geometric representation of the data and the information about the spatial object. Before you do this, it would help to look at other datasets you are using. Spatial data is usually distributed as ESRI Shapefiles. Each Shapefile is actually a collection of files that include the polygons of the geographic objects, the data associated with those polygons, and a projection that describes how to make a representation of a surface of a sphere into the two dimensions of the computer screen (or piece of paper). The projection of a shapefile is usually found in a *.prj file in the same directory as the *.shp file. Most GIS viewers allow you to look at the shapefile properties from within the GIS viewer. The value needed is an SRID, usually a 4-digit number (sometimes 5). From here, a set of spatial queries are run from within Spatialite to add the geometry to the database. See prior post on loading lat/long data in Spatialite. When these spatial functions/queries are run, Spatialite will perform a series of operations that use the information in tables loaded by the init_spatialite.sql to generate the geometry representation or convert representations between projections. At this point, the data is now spatially enabled.

Step 4. View/Export. At this point, only a few GIS viewers can use Spatialite databased directly. One is QGIS. So after performing any wanted spatial queries or other operations you should export the data to another format, such as Shapefiles. The OGR/GDAL tools of the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library are able to do this. Within Spatialite you can use the .dumpshp function to create a shapefile.

The format of .dumpshp is

.dumpshp table Geometry sitelocations CP1252 POINT

table is the TABLE to be exported. I think this could have been a VIEW as well. Geometry is the name of the field within the table that has the geometric representation. Note that Spatialite stores this as a BLOB object. sitelocations is the name of the shapefile to be created. CP1252 is the name of a character set. Presumably there are others, but I have been using CP1252 for now. POINT is the spatial data type. Other types include LINESTRING, POLYGON, and MULTIPOINT.

What would be very useful right now is if I could automate steps 3 and 4 so I could run them from within Python instead of doing them inside Spatialite. However, this only works if SQLite was compiled with the ability to load extensions. Most distributers do not do so. One workaround is to install the pysqlite2 extension and compile it so that it can load extensions (as opposed to using the sqlite3 extension that is included in Python).

Why I run

2010-09-12T20:30:00.003-04:00

(and hike and camp and . . .)

"Short cut this way" - spectator sign at 2004 Chicago Marathon

"No short cuts" - 2004 Chicago Marathoners cry on seeing the sign

There are lots of reasons to promote running. Fitness. Competition. Glory. Euphoria. Myself, after 20 years of running I'm not going to turn heads by my fitness. The only races where I've gotten prizes are races where noone serious shows up (don't laugh, it has happened. The funny thing, I was teasing the eventual winner about it before the race). And I don't get euphoria from just running any more (ok, maybe if there is a real good hill. Note: my idea of a real good hill is one that a car cannot drive up.)

But what I do get is connect to reality. My profession is one of abstraction. How to make an abstraction of our world so we can understand it better. But, as I had to explain to one of my students, when you are faced with an actual instance, there is no need for abstraction. In running, hiking, camping the road, trail, hill, stream, field is present with you, and you have to deal with it as it is. Heat, water, cold, ice, rain, snow, hazards, obstacles, are things you face. The constraints of fuel, food, water and the limits of your body, skill, knowledge and training have to be considered before you start, and their effects have to be dealt with. Preparation matters, and you pay a price if you skimp. There are real hazards. I've written journal entries for the purpose of informing whoever discovered them. I've given reports that a trail was hazardous and should have been closed.

I think we live in a society that likes to ignore reality, preferring to view perception as more important. And they can use power derived from fait, moral righteousness or power to enforce their views. But that does not count when it is you, your fitness, skill, training and nature. And I like having one part of my life where that is unambiguously true.

Loading Lat/Long data into Spatialite

2010-09-06T16:52:00.004-04:00

The task: Load spreadsheets with Longitude and Latitude data into a spatial format. Preferably in a way that can be done by people who are not good programmers but can follow directions to use command line tools.

Initial data: Spreadsheets with addresses and Longitude and Latitude. Note: this can be created using the Google Maps API accessed through various programming interfaces.

Tools: Spatialite and SQLite Manager (Firefox plug-in)

Steps:

Save spreadsheet as a comma separated format
Import into SQLite using SQLite Manager plug in
Open Spatialite using command line interface.
Add the geometry to the table using: SELECT AddGeometryColumn('addresstable', 'the_geom', 4326, 'POINT', 2);
Note that 'addresstable' is the table within the database that contains the long/lat data. 'the_geom' will be the new field that contains the spatial data. 4326 represents the SRID for the projection to be used (in this case WGS 84). 'POINT' is the spatial data type. 2 indicates this is in a 2-D space.
Calculate and insert the spatial data using: UPDATE 'addresstable' SET the_geom = GeomFromText('POINT('||Longitude||' '||Latitude||')', 4326);
Longitude and Latitude are the field names containing the longitude and latitude data in the table. The names do not matter. But they order does. And they are separated by a single space.
Method is taken from PostGIS in Action by Obe and Hsu. Spatialite function names are similar to PostGIS function names. In many (but not all) cases, the 'ST_' is removed from the beginning of the function name. Note that for the exceptions, the Spatialite documentation references two function names, one without 'ST_' and one with.

Why I am a photographer

2010-09-05T19:56:00.003-04:00

I have had a wide range of hobbies, as does most people over the course of their lives. And like most, many have gone by the wayside. I think one aspect of maturity in a hobby or an activity is that you are no longer merely an actor performing techniques, but you either guide others (through teaching or through organizing a community) or you are pushing yourself in the practice of the art. In photography, this observation comes through in the form of commentary on digital cameras, especially digital SLRs. One big criticism is that the advertising around cameras fosters a view that being a good photographer was only a matter of a big (and expensive) camera and big (and expensive) lenses, completely neglecting the elements of skill and practice and understanding of light.

I started photography with a manual SLR. Center-weighted meter, manual focus, manual aperture, manual shutter speed. After that was a point and shoot. An Olympus Epic known for its good 35mm f/2.8 lens and being a hockey puck (indestructible). It was a few years before I even bought my first auto focus/auto exposure camera. Continuing my ways, my favorite camera was a manual focus, manual exposure rangefinder (i.e. what cameras were like before SLR was invented). This was characterized by fast (wide aperture) prime (non-zoom) lenses and frequent use of black & white film. Also known as "this is how Cartier-Breeson and Capa did it"

Part of being good is taking time to learn the fundamentals. Learning the ways of light and shadow. The limits of the sensor (film or digital). How to see relationships in a scene. How to see a relationship unfold so you can be ready at the decisive moment.

My investment in equipment pales in comparison to the investment in study and practice, and I like to think that it shows.

For my involvement in the arts, photography is my only practice of it. So to improve means to find ways of improving your skill. And one of the classical ways of developing creativity is to put in place boundaries that force creativity in other ways. Thus my preference for using prime lenses and black & white. It becomes the frame in which I develop. And the expectation is that when I do use color and zoom lenses, the skills and ability to see that is developed carry over.

Like many things, I have adapted as the technology behind photography has changed. My rangefinder is now rarely used, since the chromonegative film I had always used is no longer available. I now have a digital SLR and a set of zooms. But the manual focus primes are still what I take most of the time and that goes well with one of the smallest APS digital SLRs on the market. Most of my photography is not intended to push my abilities, but to record the events of life.

Why I read

2010-09-02T17:31:00.002-04:00

Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

View all my reviews

I recently went to my first meeting of a book club. The last one I was with slowly faded away, as such enterprises do. For the new one, this was its second meeting of its existence. Which is a milestone. If nothing else it means that one group of strangers did not repulse each other away and they thought it was worth meeting again. It does seem odd that less than two months before a baby arrives I am meeting new people. But I was not alone, as one guy there is a new father as well. The book we read this month was fairly unremarkable. But its subject is the place reading has played in the life of the author. Most of the book focuses on the author as a young girl. And for an author to examine the place of reading in her life is a bit of navel gazing.

So, why read? There are many arguments not to. I know many people who state that they do not read fiction, only non-fiction, viewing all fiction as fantasy and a waste of time. Various books get branded as out of bounds or satanic. Of course, many of these same people invest time in video games, shopping, and other arguably non-productive hobbies and pursuits which I do not. I also can say, as my wife would put it, I have actually done a lot of these things in real life, so living vicariously through reading is not strictly necessary.

What reading provides is a way of making my world larger. I joke that the reason I listen to people telling stories and lessons learned is that I want to hear others talk about how things went wrong. Because I am a very creative person and I want to make mistakes that are unique. Mark Twain in "Taming the bicycle" discusses learning through one's experiences only as misleading, since you don't know if what aspect of your experience provided the right lesson.

Fiction does the same. What good fiction should do (and I hold movies to the same standard) is develop a world, and provide situations for its characters to engage in the three major conflicts: man against nature, man against man and man against self. Given the setting (I always give authors and writers great leeway in how they make their setting, since real life is pretty varied as well), do the choices and consequences of the characters make sense. (again, realizing the wide range of responses people in the real world use, there is a certain amount of range available here too.) Every (good) book adds to my world, and provides a base that I take with me in engaging my world, in all of its messiness and occasional perversity. And ways of describing my experiences to others (I write a lot of after action reports and meeting notes)

Is it worth reading and talking about it with other people? Like many things, reading is a skill. There is a benefit to testing your ability to observe and synthesize with other people who also had the same experience (reading the same book). It is a given that everyone will take away different things from a book (which is not to say that the takeaway needs to be anything profound or deep), but you should at least recognize each others observations of action, character, and motivations.

But the main reason I read is that it makes my world larger. And richer. And we look forward to our son doing the same.

Why I am a researcher

2010-08-30T20:51:00.003-04:00

I was asked yesterday about the value of a Ph.D. It is a fair question. When I was in graduate school, occasionally a first year student would say something to the effect that he was in grad school because he wanted to make money. We all informed him that he assuredly had the skills to do very well, with an MBA (equivalent) from the excellent business school down the block at our university. And that he would make more money for considerably effort then the road that he was starting on. I did not start my professional life as an academic, so this is a question that in a sense has an answer.

After I finished college I went to D.C. to a policy school for a professional master's degree and to work. (because all Master's in policy students usually work while in school). Over the next four years I worked for a legislature, a non-profit, a government agency and at a government contractor. I did this as a quantitative analyst and as a logistician. And it was fun. I worked on environmental studies and projects that were at the cutting edge of applied economics and modeling. There is work I did that I could see in the news over a decade later as they came to fruition or the issues they addressed began to be considered by commercial enterprises. I had few projects that were routine. There was always the sense that you were developing something new, and while there may be ways to do that, what you would find along the way was not always obvious in foresight.

But I also realized that the only reason I was working on these projects was because of my boss(es) along the way. And this is not what work would always be like. Looking ahead, I realize that there were really two ways to have a career doing new things like this. One was to work for twenty years and establish yourself at the top of your field (like my last boss). The other was to get a Ph.D.

And this was the value of the Ph.D. Not the knowledge gained along the way, but the opportunities to work on things that were new and hard. At one meeting with non-researchers I've explained I do not want to be working on problems unless someone else has examined it and failed to find a resolution. And at this time, I can say I have this. Will this continue? As a non-tenure track academic I have a good place working on difficult applied problems, where there are both technical and social issues that need to be solved (as I've commented to one doctor, if the social issue is what is preventing the situation from being resolved, it is an issue that needs to be solved.) Is there a place long term for this? One of the criticism of academia is that it focuses on problems that are theoretically hard rather then hard in practice, even when the reason it is hard in practice is because of the lack of development in theory. In Operations Research, there is pride in working on hard problems, but the definition of hard is based on the technical difficulty of the math, while I tend to use the definition that smart and talented people have tried and failed as my benchmark. Whether there is a place for that remains to be seen.

Why I ____

2010-08-23T17:20:00.004-04:00

I remember an article and conversations some time ago asking the question which is harder: Marriage or Motherhood? Replacing 'Motherhood' with 'Parenting', I think both of us have the conclusion that given how easy Marriage has been, we are going to come on the 'Parenting is harder' side of the argument. Even though we are not among those people who knew each other for many years, joining lives was not a big adjustment, partly because our lives were (and are) in the midst of ongoing changes so it was more of merging of two moving highways then big changes. And we both have well exercised sharp elbows. At least neither of us ever picked up the habit of hiding sharp elbows until the worst possible time. (or hiding them at all)

People who rhapsodize over marriage or parenting have tended to make both sound very unattractive. Both criticize those who have not yet joined them as selfish (I sometimes wonder if my friends who criticize their unmarried peers as selfish but do not have kids hear the criticism that those who are married without kids are being selfish.) Both describe the life post-marriage/parenthood as a dying of self and life and the parts of life that are interesting. And the wonderful alternative presented is often something unappetizing. A life without flavor. We've been glad that this has not come to pass in marriage, but parenting looks a little more problematic. To use vocabulary one mother used, working with the things that come in marriage involved skills and attitudes that were already part of our operating systems. We're not sure that Parenting is. One person who was ready to provide wisdom asked us the question "Are you ready? Most people are not sure they know how to raise a child before their first" Our answer was "Of course not! We're pretty sure that after our first child we still won't know how to raise a child."

The other problematic side is the reality that some aspects of our lives will fall away or change markedly. We are fortunate that we have many examples of people who did not disappear off the face of the earth when they had children, and so we think there is hope.

But, as I tell my graduate students and the post-docs I work with, the reason I write such detailed messages is because I have no memory. And while I still have a nice record of photographs, I do not live life through a viewfinder (and I never will). So to remember, I have to write it down. And so I won't loose it, I am putting my faith in Google (and maybe a printout) as a place of record. So begins a series of notes on the various aspects of my life now. And in a few years, I may look back on it fondly (or not) as we bring a child into this world and all that is before us.

WinBUGS and JAGS differences

2010-08-20T09:43:00.004-04:00

One of my graduate students and I have been working on input modeling in a setting where the amount of historical data can range from a lot to almost no (i.e. 0, 1, 2) occurrences. So both of us have been learning Bayesian methods and developing means to work with our setting. Part of this involves working with the standard tools and building blocks for Bayesian methods, in particular Monte Carlo Markov Chains (MCMC). To implement these methods, you can program your own, or use some standard modeling frameworks. Some of these frameworks are essentially programming libraries. But the primary ones are Bayesian inference Using Gibbs Sampling (BUGS) derivatives. There are two families: WinBUGS/OpenBUGS and JAGS.

WinBUGS is the direct successor to BUGS, with OpenBUGS being the open source next generation. BUGS is both a software package as well as a model specification language for MCMC models. One issue with WinBUGS/OpenBUGS is that it is written in Component Pascal. WinBUGS depended on the BlackBox component builder, which is only available in MS Windows (as does OpenBUGS, but OpenBUGS is essentially the open source next generation of WinBUGS once it is done). JAGS is an opensource implementation of the BUGS model specification and command language and is written in C++ on top of some open source libraries. JAGS exists specifically because of the inability to port WinBUGS. A review of the literature shows that WinBUGS/JAGS/various other libraries, all have areas of strength and weakness. Research groups working extensively with Bayesian methods use all of the them at various times.

But, this is our first project. So one thing we did was to examine three frameworks while we were learning Bayesian methods. I primarily used JAGS, one graduate student worked with WinBUGS, a third graduate student (the strongest programmer) used MCMCpack (an R package).

Our intent was to use either WinBUGS or JAGS when we actually implemented our methods on real data, so the question was which to use. Some obvious differences that came up.

When running using R, the RWinBUGS interface opens the WinBUGS application to run BUGS model. We anticipate having to run this on ~50 separate data sets a day as part of our methodologies. This time of interface is unstable (both theoretically, and practically as my student's computer ends up hanging a lot)
WinBUGS is a lot more particular about the BUGS model specification. Or, since the WinBUGS people are the ones who developed the BUGS model specification, it is probably better to say that JAGS is much more forgiving. Some gotchas that came up included:

When specifying distributions, parameters in WinBUGS could not be expressions. Only single variables. I.e. something like (num1*num2) is not allowed. So we have to perform all computations, then specify the distribution separately. JAGS allows passing an expression as a parameter.
WinBUGS does not have an exponent operator (either '^' or '**') JAGS does. Since one parameter that is important and common is 1/variance, this is very useful when the data is expressed in terms of standard deviation. We have to use expressions like (num1*num1) all over the place.
JAGS from R is seamless (R2jags, rjags). You call JAGS, and it returns without opening any IDEs. You can see the JAGS output in the terminal, but JAGS runs in command line, then is done. No IDE left to close. (R2jags was designed to work the same way as RWinBUGS, but I think it is much more elegant)
The JAGS documentation includes some more differences, but we have not hit those yet.

So, for this project, given that we have a certain amount of risk based on the fact that we are figuring out Bayesian methods and MCMC along the way, we're going to go with JAGS as our engine. Someday we'll get better at using WinBUGS/OpenBUGS and MCMCpack, but not today.

Book review: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte

2010-08-05T20:51:00.002-04:00

by Edward R. Tufte

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The book goes through many examples of displaying information visually. And it does so through a historical context, reminding us that the issues that are faced and the many ways to (mis)-represent them have been around for centuries.

What I'm reminded of is that statistics and data analysis is not just about methods, but they are means of communication. And like all methods of communication, they can be made less clear whenever you have something other than clear communication as the goal.

Many of the techniques discussed in the creation of various plots and charts are artifacts of when printing graphics was done by ink and pen, and difficult to reproduce. But the book's focus is not on the techniques of making these visual displays, but on the principles in designing efficient displays.

I use a number of data analysis packages and packages, Excel, R, Python, etc. After reading this it makes me look at these other packages and their options differently, wanting to evaluate the choices there designers made. It also makes me look at charts and graphs on internet sites, newspapers and magazines differently. I imagine the author would consider that to be a success.

View all my reviews >>

Five factors that make a job dangerous

2010-07-30T14:53:00.003-04:00

From a recent presentation by K. Emmerling to Southwest PA (Pittsburgh) Red Cross Disaster Volunteers on dealing with difficult people

You work with the public
You work after midnight
You handle money
You work alone (or are the ranking person present)
There are weapons present

The presenter then worked through a quick narrative that explained that in the course of regular duties as Red Cross Disaster Volunteers, all five are present. Those present had numerous examples of social situations that occurred on duty that had potential to escalate.

Stay safe everyone.

Looking at source code version control: Comments wanted

2010-07-22T21:07:00.003-04:00

I've been investigating version control systems for use by a team. Is there anyone who uses these who can have some comments? I'm leaning towards Mercurial, but I am open to change (our best programmer likes Git). What follows are my notes on some version control systems. Note: While I personally like/use Linux, as a team we are being provided with Windows machines for this project. Based on my review, I'm only looking at Subversion, Mercurial and Git. Comments and experience would be helpful.

=====

Version control systems (VCS) are used to track historical changes to source code (text) files as well as a means to enable collaboration between team members working on a single project. Note that this can be for any text based project, both programming or LaTeX writing. There are 2 major advantages:

Rollback: It is possible to retrieve the version of a file at any point in time. This is especially useful when one is exploring a new idea that ends up not working (or has introduced a bug or error into a program/file) (Note: Apple Computing advertises this feature in recent versions of Mac OS X as the "Time Machine", which is essentially version control built into an operating system).
Collaboration: In the case of multiple people working on a different parts of a single project, changes that are made by one person can be committed to a shared repository, then distributed to all other team members. This results in a definitive version of a system, even as multiple team members are involved in ongoing work on their own parts of the system. Is it does so, version control can keep track of the changes, so that if a change is determined to cause problems and needs to be removed, it can be removed for everyone (or only on an individual's local version as needed)

There are two major categories of modern version control system: Centralized and Distributed

Centralized version control requires the use of a server, and all team members can update or branch using the centralized repository. For distributedversion control, all team members have a local version of source code repository, that can be synchronized to a definitive repository as needed. Distributedversion control is a relatively recent development (

Native availability under MS Windows (availability under UNIX/LINUX is true for almost all Version Control systems). Preferably without use of Cygwin or MSYS.
Can be used through GUI - through the operating system file explorer or a stand alone GUI (all open source VCS enable command line use)
Integration with IDE - Visual Studio, Eclipse etc (EMACS/VIM integration can be assumed for open source VCS)
Documentation - Tutorials available for those learning the system with the expectation of infrequent use
Existing support within ___

Available for MS Windows, Linux, Mac
Standard plugins for Visual Studio (http://www.visualsvn.com/visualsvn/) and Eclipse (http://subclipse.tigris.org/).
TortoiseSVN (http://tortoisesvn.net/) is a standard gui that integrates into Windows Explorer (MS Windows) as a context sensitive menu (usually right-click on a file to see options)
Requires server
The O'Reilly Press Subversion book is available as a freely available ebook (http://svnbook.red-bean.com/)
Many tutorials available

Built on UNIX shell and Perl. For Windows, this seems to require that CYGWIN or MSYS be installed to provide UNIX shell services on Windows.

Available for MS Windows, Linux, Mac
Multiple plugins for Visual Studio (http://visualhg.codeplex.com/) and Eclipse (http://javaforge.com/project/HGE).
TortoiseHg (http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/TortoiseHg) is a standard gui that integrates into Windows Explorer (MS Windows) or Nautilus (Linux file explorer) as a context sensitive menu (usually right-click on a file to see options)
The O'Reilly Press Mercurial book is available as a freely available ebook
Some tutorials available. http://hginit.com has an introduction to version control tutorial.
Also http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/UnderstandingMercurial and a tutorial (http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/Tutorial) and a Quick Start guide (http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/QuickStart)

How can you bring a life into this world?

2010-07-05T13:08:00.003-04:00

I remember conversations about this when I was in Grad school (note: not with other grad students). While some of this may be just usual 20 something angst, at the time the local pastor was also proclaiming that our entire social circle were a group of social freaks. When God declares this view of you, a certain allowance of cynicism towards life and the world could be understandable.

Are there things to be depressed about? The candidate list is fairly long. Among the list of actions that I have engaged in that have been described as evil and/or warranting eternal damnation at one time or another include working in academics, deploying and working in a combat zone, work with the Red Cross, catching a falling hiker, organizing social activities (both with undesirables as well as including people I should not), associating with doctors, lawyers, police, diplomats, responding to calls for help, (list goes on. Note that no one person would hold the entire list against me, just their own selected parts as their moral authority deems fit.)

My wife and I have the fortune of knowing and counting as friends people with a wide range of history, interest and backgrounds. We know both the wealthy as well as those who have chosen to be simple. Those who are world class in their chosen pursuits, and others who may or may not have a college education. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, tradesmen and craftsmen who take pride in the attributes and high callings of their professions. Christian, Buddhist, Jew, agnostic and atheists. And for each of these, those who view those as moral inferiors.

As we have gotten older, we recognize that our group of friends, relations and acquaintances has been narrowing over the years. And we've been told that would be the case. But we have also hoped that we would maintain a range of friends. Because someday, we would be starting a family.

We get asked sometimes if we hope that our son will be just like us. Both of us say absolutely not. Because as much as we enjoy life, neither of us think you can ask someone to take the paths we've taken. While it is entirely possible that he may choose to take life in a similar direction, that may not happen. And we want people we know and trust to be companions along the way.

What do we hope that he learns? We hope that he learns that people are interesting and have stories that are worth getting to know. Deeply.

We hope that he learns that there is value in learning and understanding something deeply. To learn to recognize what good looks like in any field of endeavor, and that it is worth striving to meet that standard.

We hope that he learns to value the creative, the ones who find ways to do the difficult tasks that have never been done. We hope that he decides that difficult things are worth doing. And, if he is good enough, that difficult things are the things that are worth his time, energy and creativity.

Is this guaranteed? No. As much as we hold certain values, we are fully aware that we are around people who scorn those values. And our son will be exposed to them. And along the way he will choose. But we can ensure he knows the choice he makes.

In the end, the goal of life is not the avoidance of things that are bad, but the striving for the things that are good. Our child may not achieve all of his dreams and will experience pain, suffering and hurt along the way. But he can also make choices, that we hope are those that lead to things beautiful and useful. And the stories he will create along the way, and the stories we build with him are something worth looking forward to.

Flag raising July 4, 2007

2010-07-02T23:35:00.001-04:00

Flag raising July 4, 2007
Originally uploaded by LugerLA

So I reject the notion that the American moment has passed. I dismiss the cynics who say that this new century cannot be another when, in the words of President Franklin Roosevelt, we lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good.

I still believe that America is the last, best hope of Earth. We just have to show the world why this is so.

- Barack Obama, September 2007

June 28, 2008

2010-06-28T21:42:00.003-04:00

From Wedding Dancing

I think that if we thought about it in a purely abstract way, neither my wife nor I would be inclined toward marriage. Most of what we have heard about marriage from those who claim it as wonderful did not have all that much appeal. Well meaning friends assured us that it would be the end of all the things that made life interesting. My wife was assured that I would settle down and become normal. And the idea that marriage would make either of us complete or whole or mean settling down was frankly horrifying. Because neither of us was done growing or exploring our world or changing.

But marriage, and relationships, is not something that is meant to be discussed in the abstract. I have held that discussions on relationships are only interesting when there are names involved. And when asked about how I knew that this is the person I want to marry, my response has been that it was not about who I was getting married to, it was what we would become and how we would get there. And that is what I was getting.

Married life has been surprisingly easy. One other person who had commented on married life being easy likened married life to moving furniture around in the house. There are changes in life, but they are minor compared to the steadiness of the foundation. In our case, it was like moving furniture around, but each of us would have been moving the furniture around anyway, and had considerable flexibility on different furniture arrangements. Marriage did not mean we had to stop growing, changing, or even reinventing ourselves along the way. Neither of us is the same person as when we started dating, or even when we go married. And we have not gotten bored.

Will it stay that way? The same person who described marriage as like moving furniture also described being a parent as tearing down and rebuilding a house while living inside it. Of course, I've done that before :-)

Strange how you know inside me
I measure the time and I stand amazed
Strange how I know inside you
My hand is outstretched toward the damp of the haze

And of course I forgive
I've seen how you live
Like a phoenix you rise from the ashes
You pick up the pieces
And the ghosts in the attic
They never quite leave
And of course I forgive
You've seen how I live
I've got darkness and fears to appease
My voices and analogies
Ambitions like ribbons
Worn bright on my sleeve

Strange how we know each other

Strange how I fit into you
There's a distance erased with the greatest of ease
Strange how you fit into me
A gentle warmth filling the deepest of needs

And with each passing day
The stories we say
Draw us tighter into our addiction
Confirm our conviction
That some kind of miracle
Passed on our heads
And how I am sure
Like never before
Of my reasons for defying reason
Embracing the seasons
We dance through the colors
Both followed and led

Strange how we fit each other

Strange how certain the journey
Time unfolds the petals
For our eyes to see
Strange how this journey's hurting
In ways we accept as part of fate's decree

So we just hold on fast
Acknowledge the past
As lessons exquisitely crafted
Painstakingly drafted
To carve us as instruments
That play the music of life
For we don't realize
Our faith in the prize
Unless it's been somehow elusive
How swiftly we choose it
The sacred simplicity
Of you at my side

- Eric's Song, Vienna Teng

Rachel Carson Challenge 2010

2010-06-20T22:13:00.006-04:00

Saturday was the 2010 Rachel Carson Challenge (notes from previous Rachel Carson Challenges are here). My partner in crime this time was SS, who decided this past winter when things were rather boring that she needed a hobby, and this need of a hobby led her to the Rachel Carson challenge. As usual, we did the series of training hikes (Hi Donna! Hi Bob!) that included wet days and hot days. (I missed the really hot sunny day, figures)

The challenge began with waking up at ~3 AM in the morning so we could catch the bus to Harrison Hills Park. And we did with time to spare before sunrise.

We raced through the first section, keenly aware that we wanted to cover miles before it got sunny. By the first checkpoint, everything was still sunny and good.

By the second checkpoint I was running into trouble. I had run out of water along the way, and the second checkpoint had run out of gatorade. (and forgotten my extra bottles of water in the kitchen on the way out the door) So by checkpoint 3 I was starting to dehydrate. Checkpoint 3 was a definite rehydration stop. I filled up my camelbak with gatorade with the goal of finishing it before I left while I was essentially eating lunch. In addition to the usual PB&J sandwiches, oranges, bananas, pretzels and chips there were salted potatoes. But I realized that I was not going to speed up anytime soon so SS found a group and went on ahead. I started from Checkpoint 3 and things got better for me as electrolytes were absorbed into my body.

The Rachel Carson Trail is a connector trail. It connects a number of county and municipal parks in Allegheny County, starting in Harrison Hills Park and going through Agan Park, Emmerling Park, Hampton Community Park, and ending in North Park. (MapMyHike link). Allegheny County is an urban county (includes Pittsburgh, PA) so to connect all these parks means that there is substantial private property and hiking along roads along the way. There are numerous hills (i.e. too steep for building roads or houses) and streams without bridges on the trail.

By checkpoint four, I was feeling pretty good. And I had four hours to go the last 8.2 miles. No problem. But the clouds were rolling in. And about an hour after I left checkpoint four it started raining. And heavily. And thunder. I found a group that was working through Hampton Community Park together and we made it across Route 8 together. Then the trail started to follow Pine Creek. And by follow I mean we had to cross it. Five times.

The creek in the areas we had to cross it ranged from 20 to 30 feet across. While normally it is a shallow gravel stream bed with water about an inch above the gravel, that day after the thunderstorm it was a raging stream thigh deep. I hooked up with J and J from our little group and we crossed the streams together, holding arms to keep each other from being knocked down and dragged by the current.

After this major adventure, we reached North Park. There were four relatively easy stream crossing (much higher than normal, but by this point they were easy), and then the trail went up and into the park proper. A couple miles here and on to one last stream crossing and to the finish at Beaver Shelter.

Why do something like this? Like a t-shirt says, it is called the Rachel Carson Challenge, not the Rachel Carson Walk. It is a challenge. And like anything worthy of the name, it is hard. I tend not to be a competitive person by nature, but I am drawn to things that are hard.

There is also the inherent honesty and reality to such things. You are dealing with nature in a raw and unforgiving form. Heat, sun, dehydration, nutrition, physical limits, water, streams, hills are real. There is no recourse to decisions made by authority that is granted by God or Man. There are people who believe that perception is reality. And on a trail such as this, even in the urban area of Pittsburgh, that is wrong. Perception is not reality and believing otherwise can get you killed. Reality is reality, and there are enough people who believe otherwise that a challenge like this with people who recognize this is a wonderful experience.

Many thanks to SS, for being a wonderful training and hiking companion. Donna, Bob, Mark and many other volunteers for your work (including washing everything today [Sunday]) J, J, E and KB3OGS for being companions along the way. And looking forward to the next challenge. As a volunteer.

Memorial Day, 2007, Bagram Afghanistan

2010-05-28T12:55:00.001-04:00

Raising the flag on Memorial Day
Originally uploaded by LugerLA

Why is the Silk Screen Asian Film Festival valuable?

2010-05-12T21:54:00.003-04:00

At last Friday's Silk Screen Film Festival Gala, I was one of many who were interviewed by a local TV crew. One of the questions asked was what makes Silk Screen valuable to Pittsburgh. Now, I hardly claim to represent Pittsburgh, but I can think about what makes Silk Screen, and film festivals in general, valuable to me.

Now, for sheer variety of selection, we have things like Netflix that have an overwhelming selection of films. And what makes Netflix special is not that it mails these movies to my home, but that it has a selection of everything under the sun, including the most obscure (my wife and I imagine that the Netflix computers that analyze movie selections must have a real fun time working with us) and foreign films. But while Netflix computers can recommend movies similar to what you have seen before, what it would not do is expose you to something completely different.

Those who watch media have noted that over the last few years it has become increasingly fragmented. It is very easy now to see only what reinforces your current beliefs, views, opinions and way of life.

But, for me, life has not yet become a routine of the same. And given my age, I'm starting to wonder (and hope!) that it does not (since I think for most people have settled into a set routine by now). There is not a week that goes by that I don't have to deal with something that, if not completely new, is something I do not expect to deal with often. While it makes for an interesting life, I only get one of these, so do not have the benefit of experience (to be fair, I'm often in situations where noone involved has this benefit.) What film (and works of fiction in general) do is provide a window into different ways of seeing a situation, working out alternatives, and providing a mirror that asks what is it that you value. While it cannot be expected that the movie or book describe any real situation exactly (after all, it becomes a sample of 1), it can teach you to see things from several viewpoints. And if not teach you what to do, at least show you what you do not want to happen.

And Silk Screen. The festival takes on the role of an editor or reviewer. Of the myriad of choices out there, where to find the gems. And Silk Screen identifies films worthy of my time and attention, and brings them here to Pittsburgh. Showing me the world through a set of eyes I may not have found on my own here. And for that I am thankful.

See you at the movies of the Silk Screen Asian Film Festival in Pittsburgh.

PSO: Thinking about talent

2010-05-10T22:35:00.002-04:00

[Originally posted at Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra: PSO Blogs]

Listening to Hilary Hahn starting off Sibelius Concerto I had to think about what constitutes talent. I have to recognize the reality that most of the performers (and just about all of our wonderful guest) are at a technical proficiency well beyond my ability to judge. The sheer volume of performers that come out of the world’s music schools and conservancy’s will ensure that only those that are the most skilled make their way into our notice. But there is more to talent than skill. And you realize this when listening to Ms. Hahn, who commands your attention without flash.

In my profession, computers are the instrument of use. Because for all the work we do, at some point our work interacts with the world through data, and through a computer program that takes our understanding and uses it to interpret the data. The risk is to forget that the value of the work lies in the understanding that went into the program and the interpretation of the results, not in the program itself. But this is easy to forget, especially if only viewing it from the outside. From a surface understanding, one can only see a computer and an operator. And in the shallowness of the moment, believe that the talent is the talent of the operator. But this is a trap. The point where you need to make the investment and have the best people is with the person who designs the analysis and interprets the results. Not the person to implements it and operates the computer. To implement the procedures and run a program is (comparatively) easy. Understanding is hard.

Similarly in arts, at the level under consideration, the technical capability of the performers is not a consideration. Everyone who graces the stage at Heinz Hall has demonstrated mastery of the instrument throughout its range. But we can ask for considerably more. We can ask from our interpreters (conductor and musicians) for not just the ability to recreate the written record of composers past, but to imagine what if some things were different, to use the creativity of the composer as a point of departure and develop an interpretation that includes the aspects that cannot be expressed in ink on paper. Then present that interpretation.

After that, Aaron Copeland said that art (music) is a collaboration between composer, interpreter and audience. Once the composer and interpreter have done their part, it is our turn to do ours.

Allegheny County Public Service Net - 9:00 PM 5 May 2010

2010-05-05T21:32:00.004-04:00

This is KB3OGQ representing the American Red Cross as net control station for the Allegheny County Public Service Net. This Net meets every Wednesday night at 9:00 PM local time on the North Hills Amateur Radio Club Repeater, the W3EXW repeater on 147.09 MHz. The back up repeater is the Gateway FM Association repeater, the WA3PBD repeater on 146.73 MHz. In the event this repeater should fail, wait 2 minutes. If this repeater does not return to operation, switch to the back up. Is there any emergency or priority traffic - if so call KB3OGQ.
(pause)
Hearing None. This is a directed net, alerted for the purpose of a training drill. When I call the roll please give your call and state if you have any comments for the net.
(roll call)
I will now take additional check ins. You do not have to be a member of ARES or RACES, or be from Allegheny County to check in. Please give your call, name and location.
(take check ins)
Are there any additional check ins.
(pause)
I would like to thank the North Hills Amateur Radio Club for use of the repeater. I will now close the net and return the repeater to general amateur radio use.

And so went my first experience as net control. Thanks to everyone for being nice :-)

A Taste of Art: the student run restaurant at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh

2010-05-05T19:02:00.005-04:00

A Taste of Art
420 Boulevard of the Allies
Pittsburgh, PA 15219-1301
412-291-6532
http://www.artinstitutes.edu/pittsburgh/StudentLife/resturaunt.aspx
(Note: check website and make reservations as menu and times change over the course of the year)

A Taste of Art is a student operated restaurant at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. It is operated by the A la Carte class in the Culinary Arts program. They are supervised by their instructor, who informed us that the students spend the first two weeks of the semester developing a menu, costing it, and deciding on dishes from those created by them that fit the theme chosen by the instructors (this semester is Mexican). By week three, the restaurant opens and students rotate through the positions both in the kitchen and hospitality staff. (the instructor told us that when they first open, the students in hospitality are terrified at dealing with actual customers).

We enjoyed talking with the instructor, who was modeling the practice of hospitality like good owners do.

For the food, we had appetizer, main dishes and dessert. The appetizer was interesting, the dessert wonderful in creativity and flavor (we had Blueberry Bird's nest and Banana cheesecake and something else I don't remember).

However, the main dishes left something to be desired. We had steak salad and beer braised turkey tacos. Both of them were lacking in flavor. Disappointing. We wish the students would be more aggressive in trying something creative.

A fun place for a different lunch in downtown Pittsburgh. Definitely go for an inexpensive meal (entrees $6.50 - $8)

Lessons Observed: Teaching Design of Experiments

2010-05-04T21:51:00.002-04:00

This past semester I taught Design of Experiments. The primary reason I was teaching this was that this is the point of departure from one of my research areas. In particular my PhD student's thesis builds on this field, and he had never taken design of experiments. The course had not been taught in this department for years, so I offered to teach it. I ended up getting my students, and a MBA who was working at a local manufacturing company.

1. Textbook - I used Dean and Voss Design and Analysis of Experiments. This is a very comprehensive text. For this purpose, it was overkill. It covers methods in depth. So much so that it went into areas that showed the weakness in the use of software packages. So the SAS code they have to give for examples is quite sophisticated. Minitab, as far as we could tell, was completely outclassed by the end of the course. I was doing everything in R. But I believe what my students decided that I was a better programmer then they were. For statistics majors, this is probably the right book. And I picked it because it gave perfect lead ins into some topics I wanted to learn. But it was too ambitious (and I was not even trying to cover the whole book. I was using a slightly modified version of their sample curricula) But the next time I teach this I would use Box and Hunter. Which has the advantage of having an associated R package for examples. One real good aspect of Dean and Voss are the datasets. They made a point of having real data sets in the examples and in the homework sets. So we were forced to deal with messy data.

2. Material - I was actually learning some of the material myself along the way, since I had not taken a true DoE course (only one focused on applications in simulation). So some of the lectures took me a long time to prepare. On the other hand, I found that I was developing a deeper understanding of statistical methods. In particular, I now think if multiple comparisons is an issue whenever using statistical inferences. When Tom Siegfried wrote his Science News editorial Odds Are, It's Wrong: Science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics, I was able to identify just what the misuse of statistics was for all of his points (except for the Bayesian, because I have not had much exposure to Bayesian methods.) So I learned alot about the underlying assumptions of a many statistical methods. And one of my students is actually a statistics Ph.D. student, so someone was around to keep me honest.

3. Software. The book uses SAS. I used R. My own graduate students started in Minitab and switched to R as the material in the book reached the limits of what Minitab could be made to do. The MBA stuck with Minitab and we had to live with its limits. I ended up getting much better at R and Sweave (because I forced myself to use it for everything, even when no package was found for a method). Even redoing Dean and Voss examples. I am now a big fan of list comprehensions and I think I can almost program in a functional style (as opposed to procedural and object style). I won't say I like R better then Python, but I am almost as fluent now.

4. Summary. This course took a lot of time. Partly because I was learning much of it as I went along. And I was also learning the tools as well (R and Sweave). It is gratifying to know that I actually taught something useful. The MBA student has started using the material at work (and can now go toe-to-toe with the Six Sigma Black Belts in his company when talking statistics). My PhD student incorporated some of the material into his proposal. He also keeps saying that he wish he took this class years ago (he said this after the last class I taught, which was basically created for him). And my statistics student seems to have learned a lot about working with real data. (Dean and Voss have a lot of real, and messy, data sets.) But in the future, I think I'm going to find textbooks where I can also get some solved problems, because this was a lot of work for a single class.

PSO: What makes a classic?

2010-04-21T12:20:00.003-04:00

[Originally posted at Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra: Outside Perspectives]

Two pieces. One was first performed even before it was fully written, with the composer partly filling in the parts as he played. The other solid in style, but had the misfortune of opening alongside a piece that incited great and vigorous argument, and therefore went into obscurity. Clearly the outcomes are not related to the work and effort that went into them, but somewhere there is something else.

I have two students who are presenting their plans for their ongoing efforts this week. Both are engaged in a creative work, building on what has been done before, moving in directions that are unknown. Along the way they will be questioned, their beliefs and assumptions challenged, their thinking sharpened. And both do so with hopes that they are building something of enduring value (in addition to completing a project!)

But realistically, not everything is of such value. Looking at concert music, it is almost unfair comparing pieces from centuries past to music from the past century. But it is not because of the composer, but the mere fact that pieces are still played means they survived and were found worthy of remaining a part of the repertoire, while younger pieces have not finished this winnowing process. And with my students (and myself for that matter), it is not just the effort that goes into the work, but the many decisions and choices of those who come next, when they consider what is worth commenting on, and worth building upon, that will ultimately determine any enduring value in what we create.

But does that mean that the work is only of value because it is known or because others build upon it? In a sense, because what we are doing is a creative work, its value will be in part how it effects conversation in our field (measured by people choosing to react to it and build up on it or take it in new directions.) But there is more. Henri Poincare wrote about what scientists study. It is not just that the study of our world is useful (although it is), but what we study is beautiful, and in that captures our attention, and rewards us for efforts beyond the remuneration we receive. And I'm looking forward to the years to come, that they may be devoted to efforts that I can say that I delight in them, and uncover both the beautiful and useful, whether enduring or obscure.

PSO: Avalanches and pebbles

2010-04-11T14:46:00.001-04:00

[Originally posted at the Pittsburgh Symphony: Outside Perspectives]

Listening to Prokofiev Symphony No. 5 made me think of the tides of history. The movements started with transparent motifs that made one think of someone exploring life and his world. But each movement soon descended into a deep foreboding mass of power and force, making the initial moments of carefree joy meaningless.

When I was younger, it was easy to think that the world moved on its own, and there was nothing you could do to influence events, or even your own fate. It was easy to think that everything was chance. In the TV show "Babylon 5", a significant quote is "The avalanche has started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote."

And now? Between me and my wife's family we have direct experience in three wars. Our stories sound like history books and newspaper stories. We have no illusions about personal impact on the course of history, but neither are we merely swept along with the tides. We see and notice how people are swayed, pulled by their fears, or resigned to insignificance by those who would scream the loudest. And for Prokofiev in Stalin's Soviet Union, where work done with the approval of one set of leaders would suddenly be denounced in another time, it would seem that way, a powerless man swept by the tides of history, subject to its whims and caprices.

But, as statistician/political scientist/artist Edward Tufte remarked just yesterday here in Pittsburgh, we do not live in that kind of place or that kind of time. We live in a place and time that allows us to make choices, take risks and adapt to our changing world instead of only following the herd. And as we do so we can bear the cost, reap the rewards. And live other then as sheep who follow where those play on our fears would lead us. For all its cost, we recognise there is no other place like that on this earth, and we rejoice in it.

Edward Tufte: An Academic and Otherwise Life An n=1

2010-04-08T21:51:00.003-04:00

The Carnegie Mellon University has a lecture series "Journeys" where the speaker (usually a CMU professor) talks about what is important in life. A famous example of this was Randy Pausch's talk that was played in various forms (and also presented on Oprah) as well as turned into a book. Edward Tufte is best known for work on presenting data. He gave a talk yesterday about data presentation. Today's talk was on life. n=1 is an acknowledgement that these are observations based on a sample of 1, himself. With the statistician's view of how well you can generalize from that (not at all.)

His story is one of a polymath. His was an academic track. But while his degree is in statistics, his first academic job was political economy, and he has had positions in Political Science, statistics and computer science. And he is a "B-rate" artist (meaning he can get his work shown in B-rate galleries.) But this talk is advertised about being about academics.

One of his learning moments was the encouragement to do work of lasting value. He started out as a political economy, working on things very up to date, like results of the last (or next) election. Just like untold multitude's of junior political science professors. And the parallel in any field is to look for 'hot' topics. Which change like the wind. He says the reason he was able to jump from field to field was his ability to look at a field and identify what the key issues of the field were, and spend his time working on those. His point is that much of the academic world becomes focused on itself, on its own controversies and issues of the profession. So that he was always able to enter a field and distinguish himself by ignoring that and focusing on the knowledge of the subject itself.

There is a researcher working with us that I've been trying to give some advice. And one was telling him that one of the primary skills that should have been developed when he was getting his Ph.D. was the ability to identify what was important and what was trivial detail. Does this work? My grad students and the post-docs I work with have noticed that when I turn my attention to something, I learn and pick out the important details of papers and texts (in new areas) faster then they can. And I am reasonably good about telling them a few weeks in advance what they will need to know and be able to do down the line in our projects.

I think Tufte touches one of the reasons I was not that interested in academia. I was more interested in actual problems and issues, not so much in what an academic profession thought of as an issue. And in my exploration of academia, that is one thing that I bring to my host department, I probably deal with the messiness of the real data better then anyone else there. Tufte made the comment that it is instructive to observe how the data that you are using is collected, because they give you insight. In my case, some of the data sets I use have my name in the recorder block. Because I was the one writing the report at 2:00 in the morning. And I have to agree, that is useful knowledge. I hope that it is an advantage that I can make useful.

Eclipse setup notes: R (StatEt) and Python (Sage)

2010-03-28T14:49:00.005-04:00

My standard Eclipse setup consists of the following extensions:

Texclipse
StatEt (for R and Sweave)
Pydev
Data Tools
BIRT

And I also have these loaded, even if I don't use them as much

CDT (C/C++ Developers tools)
Java (since it comes with)
Subversion

For a while I've been using StatEt using the R console, because I had not gotten the RJava console to work. While it works, it has two problems (1) it does not open a graphics display, so you could not see the plots you were making (But plots are still generated and included into Sweave documents) and (2) it would drop out if there were any errors in the R code, causing you to have to start over.

The trick with getting RJava to work is set the configuration in the JRE tab in eclipse. In the VM Arguments, there should be an option included that points to rJava (which you have installed and run

sudo R CMD javareconf

to enable)

-Drjava.path=/path.to/rJava

(where the /path.to/ is your path to the location you installed your rJava library in the R directory. On my system it is /home/my_account/R/i486-pc-linux-gnu-library/2.9/ )

This provides a stable interactive R console and allows Sweave.

For Python, in addition to the standard interpreters (python, jython, ipy), you can run Sage. This would be through using the Python interpreter that is in the Sage package.

So add another Python interprester pointing to /sage-4.x.x/bin/python
With $SAGE_ROOT = /path/to/sage-4.x.x
and LD_LIBRARY_PATH = $SAGE_ROOT/local/lib

Next steps, figure out how to add R libraries to the R included in Sage, so R packages can be called from within Sage (note that R can be called using the rpy2 package, but this is only the currently installed packages.)

PSO: A conversation with strings that are different

2010-03-24T16:34:00.002-04:00

[Originally posted at the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra: Outside Perspectives]

Having a viola as soloist was a change from the usual piano or violin guest artist. I was laughing reading the program notes saying that Berlioz Harold in Italy was written for Paganini, who complained that it did not allow him to play enough. Because Berlioz wrote a different kind of piece.

While it may not have satisfied a violin virtuoso, what Berlioz gave us was a conversation. Instead of the violin soaring exuberantly, we were treated to viola, harp, and flutes passing their lines to one another. Each different, yet fitting together like old friends engaged in conversation.

My wife and I have not been married long, but we sometimes get to enjoy the moments where we can talk about subjects ending with the wonder "you think about that too!?", the times when we can finish each other's thoughts (which is real useful when one has trouble coming up with the next word), and "magic" around the house. But, in our unsentimental times, we have some understanding of how the "magic" happens, it is the paying attention to each other and around us, and it almost seems natural. So it is with the first movements of Harold. The principals are not the type to overwhelm with brilliance, instead we hear them play with each other, bow, pluck and wind. Appreciative both of the differences and their ability to be together. And hoping life will be like that as well.

Is it [being married] all that you expected?

2010-03-07T09:14:00.001-05:00

Somehow, we (the married for ~20 months couple) got asked if "being married was all we expected?" We did not really answer the question. And I'm not sure we had expectations all things considered. Marriage was more something we got into thinking we could make work more then something we had dreams and aspirations for. Of course, a relationship seemed the same, it was something that could work, more then something of dreams.

There are lots of examples of things to be afraid of. We both know people whose lives lost much in richness, became uninteresting, and definition when they became involved in romantic relationships, and replaced what we knew with a life completely defined only by their relationship, viewing the world only through the lens of romantic relationships, and viewing those who did not share this with disdain. I know of others who viewed their romantic relationships as prizes and possesions, that they would rather have the partner dead then with others, with all the righteousness of their God to justify them. And we have known people who were the possession or prize.

Did this happen with us? Some old interests faded away. Although living it, it feels like this is the natural progressions of interests, in the course of events our interests change, some fade away, others are added, and hopefully some get deeper. But having someone else there changes the direction. It is not that we share all the same interests (or that is ever going to happen, as anyone who knows us will no doubt affirm), but others are shared, and sharpened. Because there is little that sharpens more then someone else who can challenge, affirm, question, and support in ones endeavours and goals.

But this was not something that would lead to marriage. In the end the question was about living life. To take in the joys and the challenges, life's uncertainties and the rewards that may or may not be there. To recognise there are no guarantees in life, not even what is in life right now.

When we were dating, someone told me that the time we were apart when I was deployed overseas did not count when considering the time in relationship. I disagree. One of the results is that our relationship was stressed. It would not be the first such stress. My wife has joked that she thinks she found herself in a movie plot. And no doubt there will be more stresses and changes to come. And we will both change along the way as these stresses come, so it was good to learn how this happens. And probably even more important to learn how we undergo change then what the changes actually were. Neither of us is the same as the person we were when we met, when we got engaged, or when we got married. And it is better that way.

PSO: A world of water

2010-02-21T17:16:00.002-05:00

[Note: Originally posted at Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra: Outside Perspectives]

We've had a long couple of weeks here in southwestern Pennsylvania. With a historic snowstorm wrecking havoc on our region everything has been been affected, including the symphony. After a week of snow storms, it was good to return to the symphony.

Tonight was a night of new music. And the composer Mason Bates was here to introduce his piece. He spoke of the various movements of the piece, and described that transitions of the states of water. He reminded us that "glaciers ultimately melt." Then followed by hurricanes and floods, reminiscent of the trials experienced by the city of New Orleans.

In the audience were a number of staff and volunteers of the Red Cross. Over the past two weeks they and their community partners have been hard at work, providing shelter, warmth, comfort and food to many who have been effected by these storms and the power outages that have caused so much trouble to so many.

Earlier today we had been cleaning and repacking our supplies, so many of which were used over the past two weeks. And we also remember that glaciers ultimately melt. As does snow and ice. And as in Liquid Interface following the glaciers melting comes the hurricanes and floods, we are worried about what comes when the snow covering our region melts. But we will be ready.

Book Review: Turn Coat (Book 11 of the Dresden Files) by Jim Butcher (2009)

2010-02-14T00:17:00.002-05:00

Turn Coat by Jim Butcher

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
One of the things I like about this series is how the principle character, Harry Dresden, matures. By now, it is not just that he is maturing, he is mentoring others, and this book is about them maturing. We have an old antagonist whose presence provides stress for them, and old friends, who are stressed in the conflicts of the story and we wonder just who they are.

Some themes

1. The training of students. Harry is involved in the training of an apprentice and some others who are learning from him. Earlier in the series Harry had a tendency to hide things from people he cared about. This repeatedly had the effect that the people he cared about stumbled into situations which they did not recognize their peril. By now, his apprentices and students are demanding they be told about the dangers they face in the world, so they can make decisions on if they face the hazard or not. Another model is provided by one of Harry's colleagues who likes to bait Harry's students and lead them into a trap. (Which is something that actually seems like something I occasionally witness.)

2. On proof of guilt and innocence. Another theme that runs through the books is on the nature of guilt, and the difference between perception and fact. For many of the characters, the belief that someone is guilty of an offense is enough to warrent punishment, even to the death. Because even perception threatens the purity of their cause. At one point in the book, Harry, who is known for getting walking where angels fear to tread (if there were angels) walks in on a four way standoff and says "Have you people ever considered talking when you've got a problem?" A statement that can be answered in the negative by many groups, churches, political organizations . . .

3. Will vs. fate. In the Dresden Files series is based on the premise that there is a supernatural work coexisting with our own. But the defining characteristic of humans is that humans have free will, and that makes up for the many abilities that supernatural creatures have. But it is something incomprehensible, because most beings in this world do not have free will. So stereotyping and prejudging abound, where people are judged as having a characteristic based on one event, and nothing, no weight of evidence, or evidence to the contrary can possibly make it different. Again, something that is a common view in the real world.

4. Meaning of love (after all this is Valentine's Day). There are a few levels of this. There is that more chaste type between a person and his/her friends/relations/dependents/companions. There is also the contrast between love and lust (magnified because one class of supernatural beings is a type that feeds on lust. And one member of this class now experiences actual love, which is actually painful to them). And Harry, who is identified in the book as someone who is often viewed as 'weird' (or as a former pastor of mine would say, a freak) as opposed to one of his companions who gets compared to a Greek god, has found love. Which is taken away in a manner cruel. (there is foreshadowing that goes on, but you have to be paying close attention since the object of Harry's affection is not present during the moments of foreshadowing)

These books have been getting better as they go. The relationships are richer, all the characters, main and supporting, grow. And the themes of will, justice, learning and love are explored in complex and deep ways. (even if it is in the context of what is effectively a supernatural gang war)

View all my reviews >>

Movie Review: The Hurt Locker (2009)

2010-01-31T22:28:00.002-05:00

The Hurt Locker is set soon after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and follows a 3-man Explosives Ordinance Disposal (EOD) team: Sergeant James, Sergeant Sanborn and Specialist Eldridge. Sergeant James joins the team near the end of a one-year tour of duty, following the death of Sergeant Thompson. As the senior in rank, James is the team leader. He is also the EOD Tech (i.e. the one who handles the explosive device). Sanborn is Ranger qualified and acts as a mentor to Eldridge. Eldridge is the young one, fighting his fear of dying in combat.

James has two things against him as a leader. First, he is a replacement team leader close to the end of a tour of duty. i.e. these are short timers counting the days until the end of the tour. Second, he is very aggressive, choosing to tackle difficult problems directly instead of conservatively. And this is the defining conflict of the movie.

A lot of things about the setting are very well done. The overall competence of American forces, especially American NCOs, was on full display. The difficulties in working in insurgent environments where it was hard to tell who was on which side. The desire to help the Iraqi's against the desire to take the safe way out. The tension of going into an environment where nothing is secure and everything is fluid and can easily turn deadly without warning. They even showed the tension within the Army between those who viewed their role as security and combat versus those who viewed victory as something that would only be gained by connecting with the population (in the early days, the political leadership was decidedly on the security/combat only view.)

But in the interest of setting up the story, there are many things that are unreasonable. An EOD team was a highly valuable asset, and would not have been risked travelling without an escort. They would not have been employed as light infantry (something alluded to at one point). A Colonel, (especially one that is not combat arms) would not have been allowed to be outside secure areas without escort (but at least they had the sense to tease him in film about his acknowledged incompetence in potential combat roles). And an EOD tech whose job it was to concentrate intently on a single narrow thing (the explosive device) would not be a team leader with the responsibility for an entire team. The parts taken from disarmed explosives would have been taken for investigation and study, not allowed to be hiding underneath some soldier's bed.

But all is forgiven with how well the conflict between James and Sanborn is done. Every scene becomes a way to address this tension in another way. James aggressiveness versus Sanborn's conservationism (of the "I am a soldier who intends to use my experience to complete my mission and live" variety, not the political variety). James single focus on the technical task and challenge of disarming explosives versus Sanborn's view of situations as a whole. And with all that, the fact that James is in fact the team leader, even if Sanborn is tactically more competent (note that Sanborn is Ranger qualified, something that is made explicit when he fills the role of sniper in one scene.)

One thing that the director and writer find hard to get is motivation. The feel of the environment seems pretty good, showing the confusion and lack of clarity in what can be seen. The characters seem reasonable (the writer spent time with a team, and claims the characters are composites. Even if he put character qualities that should not be in a single person together). But we don't quite get the motivations of the characters. Leaders do not get the luxury of focusing on one technical detail while they ignore their men (the Specialist track is for this group). People who are highly trained in very technical skills e.g. EOD techs) do not tend to turn into cowboys. And a Specialist (which usually implies a few years of experience) near the end of a year long combat tour does not get congratulated for not becoming frozen in a combat situation.

Even so, with what they did get right, it is probably one of the better movies on the current wars (see my other reviews). And the depiction of conflict between James and Sanborn makes it a good film.

Installing rSymPy on Ubuntu. JDK problem (and soln)

2010-01-27T22:29:00.004-05:00

I've started using rSymPy, because I find myself having to being able to take derivatives and integrals again. And maybe a Computer Algebra System is something worth learning. I'm learning both Sage as well as Sympy.

Sympy has the advantage of running in pure Python. And with the recent version of Jython 2.5, it means Sympy can run on the Java Virtual Machine. And someone figured out that meant that you could call Sympy from R, using the rJava interface, using the rSymPy package

The problem is configuring R to use rJava. This can be tricky, because R has to be configured to use the Java Development Kit. Under Ubuntu, I have two machines that I had to put this on. It turns out this was easy for one machine, but difficult for the other.

The instructions are to configure R by running the following as root (or sudo)

R CMD javareconf

But then when installing rJava, I got the following error:

configure: error: One or more Java configuration variables are not set.
Make sure R is configured with full Java support (including JDK).

The problem was the JDK. When running javareconf I see:

Java home path : /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre

Hmm, I thought I was using the Sun Java JDK. So I uninstall openjdk and reinstall the Sun provided JDK. After this, I run javareconf and get what I expect:

Java home path : /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.15/jre

Now, when I use install.packages() to install rSymPy, it works.

Three Primes: Latodami Nature Center, North Park, PA 1/1/2010

2010-01-01T13:57:00.003-05:00

[Photos at bottom]

I recently made the jump to a digital SLR after many happy years of using 35mm film SLRs and rangefinders. What really did it: when the local Ritz camera started paring down its film offerings, in particular I no longer have a ready supply of the Kodak 400CN (chromo-negative, meaning it comes out as black and white). Ok, my auto-focus SLR was also getting long in the tooth with the pop-up flash not working, and I've long since given up on using the meters built into my manual SLR and rangefinder (so I'm one of the few photographers my age who use an analog lightmeter.)

I got a Pentax K-x. Main features: it is compact (one of the smallest SLRs with the APS sized sensor) and my Pentax lens collection still works. Like most consumer digital SLRs, it comes with a 18-55mm zoom lens. But like most kit lenses, you get what you pay for. Ok for tourist shots in nice, well lit places where you want simple snapshots, but to get low-light or depth of field effects, you need something else. Options are to spend $1000+ on good zoom lenses, or use primes. (non-zoom lenses). Primes are smaller. They are cheaper. And I already own a few good ones.

It has been a while since I've gone for a decent shoot, so today I decide to take it through its paces. Like any proper project, I need a goal. Today's goal: Three primes. The task, go on a shoot with three prime lenses. In 35mm, you choose the primes so that they are separated by a set ratio, either 1:2 or 1:1.5. So I used to use 24mm:50mm:100mm or 35mm:50mm:75mm. I'm not sure how this works in digital, but I suffer because of the 1:1.5 magnification factor caused by using the APS sensor found in most digital SLRs as opposed to 35mm film. So I go out with the following lenses:
SMC Pentax 2.8 24mm (36mm equivalent)
SMC Pentax-A 2.8 28mm (42mm equivalent)
SMC Pentax-F 1.7 50mm (75mm equivalent)

Some other complications. The 50mm is the only one of these lenses with Auto-Focus. The 24mm does not even have autoexposure. So three lenses, each of them require different operating practices. The 50mm is the easy one. Everything works. The 28mm is not terribly hard either. All exposure and TTL functions work with the -A series lenses as long as the Aperature ring is set to the 'A' position. So I have a functioning non-AF 'Normal' lens. But not with 24mm lens. No 'A' position, so the camera cannot talk to the lens. In my film AF camera, this could not be used, because the built in exposure meter would not work. In the Pentax K-x, it is possible to program one of the buttons (the 'green' button) so that even though the exposure meter did not display, the camera can set the shutter speed for what it thought was correct exposure given the aperture set on the ring when the camera is in manual exposure mode. Then it is your job to set any compensation. The other issue is when putting one of the non-AF lenses on the camera. Because the camera cannot communicate with the lens, you have to tell the camera what the focal length is via the control wheel and a button.

There are a few tasks to undertake today. First is to get used to operating the camera. In particular, a camera that has buttons while wearing gloves because of the snow. The second task is to get used to the effects of magnification on focal length. For digital SLRs, the conversion of focal length for the APS sized sensor is ~ 1:1.5 (only a few upper end DSLRs have full-frame 35mm sensors). Part of being a good photographer is to know the effects of focal length, and compare it to the effects of changing your own position in composition (how it compresses the scene, depth of field, relative sizes and locations of objects in frame, etc.) And the only way to get this is practice. Which digital cameras are supposed to be good for.

Some notes:
- The 24mm is manageable, which is better then I feared. Again what makes it work is the ability of the camera to quickly set a baseline metered position, then you use your old manual exposure skills to make tradeoffs between stops of over or under exposure, as well as the tradeoff between shutter speed and aperture for DoF effects.
- The 28mm pretty much works just like any other lens. I prefer to use manual focusing anyway since I'm as fast as the camera for anything reasonably close.
- The K-x has rubber grip for the right hand which makes the whole hold on when wearing gloves thing not too bad.
- There are only a few buttons on the back. The hardest one is the four-way button set with center button that a lot of cameras have. And the Pentax has the usual 1/2 chiclet sized buttons here. But at least it does not get any smaller, because I think this is as small as I can get while wearing winter gloves, and it is a hassle.

All in all, not a bad shoot. I need more practice working with exposure, and learning how to compensate with the snow (the fact that it was overcast probably saved me today). And I see drooling over camera catalogs in my future)

Book Review: Final Exam - A surgeon's Reflections on Mortality by Pauline Chen

2009-12-27T23:28:00.002-05:00

Not long ago, I was at a Pittsburgh Symphony Concert which had pieces that reflected on death and mortality Pittsburgh Symphony: reflections on death. This is another view of the topic, in this case the final exam is for doctor's, who have to face the fact that their patient is facing death and how dealing with this should be part of the doctor's profession. Pauline Chen, a transplant surgeon, makes the case that (1) providing care in death is not part of a regular doctor's training, (2) it really should be (3) there are experiences that can be used to provide this type of training (in the same manner that other parts of the doctor's training are provided through experiences)

When I was an EMT I was told a joke by a nurse. Q: What does 'MD' stand for? A: Made Divine. It was a reference to the fact that doctors had a tendency to believe they were as gods, with the power over life and death. But the problem is that this was not true. At some point, death wins. The reality is that most people are not able to face this honestly. In the case of doctors, because (for many specialties) they see death frequently in their training, one could expect they learn how to work with death. Pauline Chen's point is what they learn is coping mechanisms that allow them to avoid dealing with death. What they do not learn is how to continue care as the patient is known to be approaching death, which is something very different.

In the U.S., this is a controversial subject. There is a large portion of the U.S. population that believes doctors should have no part in discussion with clients how they want to die. (most obviously expressed during this past summer's controversy over what anti-doctor people called "death panels") And on the doctor's side, many of my friends have commented on how the care they were providing to patients who were beyond any reasonable expectation of recovery seemed to be tantamount to torture and mutilation. Forced by families that refused to let their loved ones die with dignity and wanted to fight, despite the costs in pain and suffering of the dying.

What Pauline does is to go through the stages of training of a surgeon, from medical school to residency to fellowship and show how doctors are trained, and then how their training involves the use of experience to teach them how what they learned in school relates to the realities of patients with actual conditions and histories. As she does this, she also talks about how death is dealt with as part of the training. How death is addresses, how the subject of death is ignored through denial or withdrawal, and how the practice of teaching and thinking about death is changing within the medical profession.

Pauline's book is not just the usual 'what is wrong about . . .' As she goes through the training program, she describes experiences that occurred that could have been used as teachable moments, along the same lines that medicine is taught in the modern day. In some cases they came and went without notice. In other cases, she observed mentors dealing with death in what she viewed as highly insightful and humane ways, but without an explicit teaching moment, leading her (as a trainee) to observe (or not) the example without comment. And she discusses some of her own cases. Some cases that she reflects on that she could have handled differently. And some cases where she did not know what to do, but from feedback later (after the patient is deceased) from the family she learns that there was genuine healing for both the patient and family from how she handled the case.

There are a number of lessons here, not just how the medical profession handles death (or avoids it) and how the medical profession could handle/train for dealing with death, but on how one trains others in a profession. I am teaching, not only in the classroom but also with students working on projects. And as part of these projects, we are aware that we are teaching values and an art form to the students working with us, not just the technical skills of our profession. It shows in the how we address the project, how we talk to those outside of our profession, the questions we ask, the questions we choose not to ask, and the directions we choose not to go in. And this book questions those values.

Movie Review: Ride with the Devil by Ang Lee (1999)

2009-12-25T20:30:00.001-05:00

Ride with the Devil is set in Missouri and Kansas during the Civil War, when pro-Southern elements waged guerrilla warfare against the Union occupation of Missouri. It is from the point of view of the Southern "bushwackers" as they raid and harass Union forces and sympathizers.

This has an incredible depiction of guerrilla or irregular warfare, known nowadays as insurgency. You see both sides attack civilians who sympathize or support the other side, or even are suspected of supporting the other side. It is shown in raids against isolated settlements, and massacres of entire villages. The use of language in shaping perceptions of one's own actions as well as the opposition. The fighters going to ground blending into the population and depending on the support of civilian supporters. All of these very familiar to anyone with familiarity of Iraq or Afghanistan in recent history, or Algeria, Vietnam or many such places.

The other theme here is the motivations of the Southern sympathizers. The focus on wanting to live their own way without interference, contrasts to the Union, who would impose their rejection of slavery on the Southerners. The portrait of the Southerners is sympathetic. And the view it shows of insurgency and its brutality, especially on civilians who are caught attacked by both sides with no security, is especially hard hitting. Well done movie by Ang Lee.

Lessons Learned: Notes on teaching Fall 2009

2009-12-18T21:35:00.004-05:00

The past semester was spent teaching two classes,the introduction to operations research that is typically taught to juniors as their introduction to the more mathematical side of industrial engineering/operations research. It is a required class, so it gets the entire year at once. The other course was a new course in Homeland Security modeling which was a concept course for graduate students. We are working on a emergency response certificate program, and one of the requirements will be a quantitative modeling course.

I had the advantage of the syllabi from the last two people who have taught the course. The main issue is retention of material over time after the course. With that in mind, the course coordinator (a faculty who was given 'ownership' of the class over the long term) and I made the choice to focus on modeling as opposed to algorithms, with the goal of the students learning modeling which can be applied, even if the actual methods are forgotten.

As a preface, I think the reality is that the top students would do well pretty much regardless of how (in)competent the professor is. For them the best I can do is make the claim that something is worth spending time on. But as much as we may be proud of our top students, and we probably can't do much about the bottom, the middle is where we as professors show our worth. And I try to resist the temptation of only thinking about the top of the class in these notes.

1. Focus on modeling and sensitivity. The overt choice was made to focus the course on modeling and sensitivity as opposed to methods. Given that these are engineering students, it is accepted truth that methods are easier to teach then modeling. The issue is that these students have been taking courses that teach them how to follow procedures for 12+ years in their math and science classes, so modeling is something different. And there are lots of people who work in the field who never really learned how to do this.

One result is that the class was more fun to teach. Because the focus was on the modeling, the concepts could be introduced with examples and the models can be built up from understanding the physical example. For some of the models, after going through the example I could discuss the historical situation that led to the model. For one quiz, I used a paragraph from a New York Times article to provide the problem the students had to model.

Response seemed reasonably positive. In particular, there was gradual recognition of what they were learning as various students started clicking as the semester went on ("I've started to think in sets!"). Others were somewhat resistant, as they were much more comfortable following algorithms. (e.g. simplex, Dijkstra's, MST) There was a general resistance to visualizing the problem through the use of diagrams. In the end, the real test is if they have developed modeling skills by next year when they do senior projects. (while they have LP, queuing, simulation, etc. senior projects tend to be process improvement projects.)

2. Software. In my preclass survey of goals, more then half of the students mentioned something about using software. The textbook uses LINDO (matrix generator) and Excel Solver. I had them learn Excel solver and GLPK. I don't think GLPK was any harder the LINDO. In particular, I think software was less important then I expected. Other then the middle portion of the course that focused on sensitivity and duality, there was not much use of the software to actually solve LPs. There was considerably more time spent on interpretation of output. I don't know if the students actually got skilled at using the software. We went through a few rounds of giving instruction, in class examples, live demonstrations of translating a formulation into a model, a YouTube video (by a business school professor demonstrating the Excel Solver) and a grad student presentation on GLPK.

We also found two bugs. Excel had a tendency of giving solutions that violated a constraint. The issue is that there was a default setting for the tolerance that was positive (>0) and was less then the rounding in the standard display. So the Excel solver violated constraints, even on small problems (where finding a feasible solution should not have been too much work). GLPK had a problem with bounds analysis in the Windows version of the software. It turned out that a fix to this problem was recently found and the patch developed by a senior in the Pittsburgh IE department (i.e. someone who took this class a year ago).

3. Class management. It was a 58 person class, so very large. A large portion of the course was taught semi-socratic, mostly the overview of different types of models. While this was fun as an instructor, the issue with socratic method is you go at the speed of the fastest students. Which I soon realized meant that I was loosing a big chunk of the class, even though there is a lot of repetition involved.

4. Team teaching. For the Homeland security course, this was team taught by myself and the head of a Center that was developing the certificate. There was a problem with communication. While the topics were agreed upon, we seem to have somewhat different ideas on what the use and purpose of models are. This was made worse by a lack of a communication plan between us, so when questions came up, they were not resolved. In addition, he had his students in the class do their project that was of very different character then the rest of the class (or the stated purpose of the course), which made grading and advising problematic. Before doing something like this again, I would have to have a more formal discussion on goals and purpose, as well as plan for ongoing adjustments.

Modern Love: A Joint Account that Underwrites our Marriage (New York Times)

2009-12-15T21:01:00.003-05:00

Modern Love: A Joint Account that Underwrites our Marriage

By David Sarasohn, New York Times, December 11, 2009

Back when we became engaged, our news was also greeted with baffled curiosity. It was the ’70s, after all, when the freedom to be able to hop from one relationship to the next was as essential as anything in the Bill of Rights. Our friends were profoundly perplexed; nobody, they thought, could want a fondue set that badly. We had already been together three years at that point, pretty much ever since I turned around at the orientation meeting for new history graduate students and saw her in her granny dress. (As I say, it was a long time ago.) Our feelings about marriage may have been shaped by our pursuit of such a traditional area of study. Perhaps our attitudes would have been different had either of us been in gender studies.

Of course, back then no one had heard of gender studies.

The surprise that now greets us at the fact that we’ve managed to stay married so long — as opposed to having shaken hands at some point and decided who kept the ice cream maker — is even more extreme. Friends you haven’t seen for a long time often inquire delicately about the spouse you had when they last saw you.

In this piece, David Sarasohn discusses his experience of marriage, through the years that have seen many of his friends divorce or separated, through the loss of friends as a side effect, through the struggle with infertility (and listening to may supposedly pro-marriage people proclaim that the primary purpose of marriage is to bear children).

When I was 19 I was first told I was entering into an activity that was associated with a high risk for divorce. And of course, of this group of 19-20 year olds, not one blinked at the thought. Now, while this was being said by some kind nurses who were warning us of what we were getting ourselves into, so maybe we could do something about it. And some of us filed that away for when that became an issue. And I've been told many other reasons why relationships would be problematic since them by people without the same level of caring, including my choices of friends, acquaintances, and relations.

There have also been others like that nurse who were more interested in my well being, and if I do get married, that it be done well. First, that this is done with eyes open. We know who we are and how we got this way. And not everyone is ready for a life with such as us. We all knew of stories of people who got into relationships where their partners first priority was to try to get them to stop going on the calls (i.e. the very things that developed the character that made them so appealing, at least to us)

David talks about his marriage and the hard times. What he says:

Being single is all about the future, about the person you’re going to meet at Starbucks or after answering the next scientific compatibility questionnaire. Being married, after a certain point, is about the past, about a steadily growing history of moments that provide a confidence of comfort, an asset that compounds over time. What you share is what you’ve shared, and measuring your communal property in decades puts you in a freakishly high bracket.

So this is what we are looking forward to. Our albums include pictures and letters from war zones, disaster areas, question and thoughts on dealing with risk. Questions about our careers. Engaged and sharing in the toil of our chosen paths. Learning to endure/appreciate/experience each others patterns, reactions and language (spoken and not).

And somehow we take each other. With both of us having edges adapted for environments with little tolerances, somehow we manage.

I am somewhat better with words than my wife is; she is infinitely better with people. In different ways, we translate each other to the rest of the world, and admire each other’s contrasting language skills. Being married to someone you respect for being somehow better than you keeps affection alive. That this impressive person chooses you year after year makes you more pleased with yourself, fueling the kind of mutual self-esteem that can get you through decades.

The other part, about how those decades change over time from obstacles into assets, is something my wife’s student will have to figure out for herself. It could take awhile.

Like, forever.