Author: Kyle

Five-Minute Posts: Five March Madness Thoughts

Kyle

Editorial note: First off, I realized today that my titles for the first three of these short posts contained a common error. I wasn’t planning on writing five minute posts, but rather posts that took me five minutes to write (by the way, it’s usually been more like ten, but I haven’t done too bad so far). Please accept my apology for the absent hyphen.

On to the list:

(1) I’m terrified of the Badgers’ draw. Who am I rooting for in the K-State/USC game? Well, O.J. Mayo is 6’5”, and Michael Beasley is 6’10”. Michael Flowers is 6’3”. I’m rooting for USC. That’s who I picked as well, even though LRMC gives the edge to K-State.

(2) For me, Tyler Hansbrough is the new Tom Brady. The annual UNC love fest is driving me crazy. I’ve got them losing to Kansas in the Final Four, but I’d gladly sacrifice the points for an early Tar Heels loss.

(3) A statistical quibble: Just because it seldom happens that all four one-seeds make it to the Final Four doesn’t mean that configuration is a bad bracket pick, even though it’s not a daring one. Unless you’re playing in a huge pool that will have most of the likely Final Four combinations represented, your best chance to win is to get as many of them as possible (well, depending on how your pool assigns points, I suppose). If you think the top teams have been seeded correctly, then of course it’s a good idea to pick those four teams. I usually don’t take all the one-seeds, but I usually get burned for that choice and only get one or two teams in the Final Four. You’ve gotta decide if you want to win or if you want to have bragging rights if something extremely improbable happens. I think either choice is legitimate, of course, but just like in writing (and design), it’s important to be aware of the choices you’re making. They may not be the ones you think.

(4) I love the way the tournament takes over our lives for four days (two of them workdays). Don’t we all need to be reminded that there are more important things than work? I’m not saying college basketball is necessarily one of them, but I’ll take any reminder. Plus, there’s another issue, although I suspect this is more true in academia than in at least some other fields: productivity rarely scales linearly with time spent at your desk not reading joke emails, checking out hilarious videos, or watching basketball. Some days I’m totally focused with my nose to the grindstone for ten hours and accomplish next to nothing. Other days I’m in and out of meetings and totally distracted and yet get a ton done in the four hours I’m actually at it.

(5) OK, I’m way over time on this post, so I’m gonna have to call it quits here. Check out this Badger love from Seth Davis.

Go big red!

Five Minute Posts: The Hacker Within

Kyle 1 Comment

Today’s topic: compiling in Emacs

Dude! Why didn’t I learn to do this a long time ago? I can’t believe how much it’s helped my productivity. I thought it would be all kinds of work, but that’s not so.

“M-x compile” will open a shell (in your present working directory) and let you edit the default compile command, which is “make -k”. (That’s an intentional outside-the-quotation-marks period, by the way. We’re talking syntax, after all.) Just edit that compile command (something to your compiler if you don’t have a Makefile) and press enter. Your code will be compiled in a special window called “compilation”. Now the super-exciting part. You can use the next-error and previous-error functions to move between the different compiler errors (and warnings). Your cursor jumps automatically to the place in your source code where the compiler’s reporting the error is located. As usual in these situations, I shudder to think about the cumulative time I’ve lost over the last year or so jumping between source code files manually in all the programming setups I’ve tried.

Here’s a screenshot and a link to my new .emacs file. I’ve bound the compile, next-error, and previous-error commands to Ctrl-o, Ctrl-p, and Ctrl-Shift-p, respectively.

(Click to enlarge.)

Five Minute Posts: Shananananana knees, knees

Kyle

My run this morning was a good deal more pleasant than it usually is when I’m visiting back home. My parents live in Pewaukee now, so there of course aren’t any sidewalks in our neighborhood. However, it’s a lot more pleasant to run in the road when there’s a veritable beach of sand piled up at its edge. My knees certainly appreciated it.

That’s the only lemonade I’ve been able to make from the frigid lemons winter has handed us this year. Anyone else got ideas?

Five Minute Posts: Thriller

Kyle

My “spring break resolution” is to try to get my posting times down. So I’m going to try to do a five-minute post each morning during spring break.

Today’s topic is the twenty-fifth anniversary of Thriller. I’m pumped about dancing Superbowl lizards and spontaneous dancing Chinatowners (thanks NYT). One thing I’m not really pumped about? All the remixed on the reissue. Carl and I listened on the way back to Milwaukee the other day, and I gotta admit, I’m not impressed. Anybody heard it?

Still, do yourself and favor and listen to Thriller today. Most of why the reissue is such a disappointment is that the original is such a masterpiece.

Special Combined Sunday Judgment/Hacker Within: March Madness

Kyle

Today’s subject: the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

First, a couple of confessions.

(1) It’s a bit of a stretch to throw the Hacker Within label on this post, but I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to integrate my two regular features in one post.

(2) Since I have picks to make, and also fair number of goals for genuine productivity during this week (which is spring break at UW-Madison), I’m totally half-assing this post with respect to both the commitment-to-quality-science-writing and commitment-to-meaningful-integration-of-technical-
and-non-technical-material ambitions of this blog. Thus, the whole integration thing in (1) is also a stretch.

So here we go. First, Sunday Judgment. If you’ve been watching Sports Center or listening to any sports talk radio this week, you know that the trendiest game in NCAA basketball journalism is coming up with clever synonyms for bubble team. (See especially this week’s Mike Tirico Show.) Not surprisingly, this trend makes for good radio and plenty of fun armchair etymology (or maybe reverse-etymology?).

However, this seemingly harmless game reminded me of a serious problem that mars a lot of college writing. Call it synonymic hyper-proliferation. Or restless diction. Or mythesaurus rex.

Actually, please call it only one of those things.

I can’t tell you how many student writers feel pressured to substitute synonyms when repeatedly referring to an important theoretical construct or technical term. Of course, variety is an important attribute of all good writing, and it’s often a bad idea to use the same word twice in one sentence, in the same position in subsequent sentences, etc. But, more often than not, if you’re writing a paper about, say, disciplinary matrices, it’s a mistake to give in to the urge to come up with a million different ways of saying disciplinary matrix. These precise terms come about for a reason; don’t feel pressured to over-substitute.

OK, onto some quasi-Hacker Within material. For reasons of, well, basically realizing it was a huge waste of time, I’ve abandoned draft.gms, my probably futile attempt to turn my fantasy baseball draft into a huge assignment-problem-like GAMS model. Naturally, I’ve re-channeled my silly interest in applying mathematical programming to, say, sporting events and dice games in bars, and so I wanted to point you in the direction of resources for using the power of science to make better March Madness picks.

You may have heard last year about some professors at Georgia Tech who published a paper in Naval Research Logistics called “A logistic regression/Markov chain model for NCAA basketball.” If memory serves, the UW-Madison libraries don’t carry this one, but it looks like Kvam and Sokol have posted a manuscript of the paper here. There’s also a kinda funny “powerpoint style equivalent” to the non-mathematical summary they wrote, presumably for all the media (I heard about it via some ESPN article last year that also included an “insider look” at how the oddsmakers go about their business). I haven’t read the whole thing, but even checking out the first few pages gives you an appreciation for their methodology. If you need some help with Markov chains (I certainly did), this AMS primer is pretty comprehensible.

Not interested in Markov chains? No problem. Profs. Kvam and Sokol make the output of their model, applied to this year’s game results, available here. You can choose between three versions of the model that take one of the types of input data, margin of victory (MOV), into account in various ways. Not surprisingly, the “pure” strategy (which doesn’t cap the contribution of MOV) is best. Nevertheless, the selection committee, which at least last year had access to the LRMC, won’t use tools that consider MOV (for sportsmanship reasons, presumably). Anyway, if you’re interested in trying this, just choose a model and use the rankings to pick each match-up. And remember: the pure LRMC is the most successful systematic ranking system available.

Couple of thoughts:

(1) Check out the top eight teams for each of the three rating schemes–
Pure: Kansas, Memphis, UCLA, Duke, North Carolina, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Clemson
Capped MOV: Kansas, Memphis, Duke, UCLA, Tennessee, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Stanford
No MOV: North Carolina, UCLA, Memphis, Duke, Tennessee, Kansas, Texas, Wisconsin

This is kinda neat. You can see the effects of all those close games North Carolina won reflected in their placement under each model. Are they actually overrated? I dunno, but I like the sound of it.

(2) See, Wisconsin, shoulda been a two seed, no matter how you look at it (or, rather, no matter how these two industrial engineers looked at it).

(3) Pull a Joe Morgan if you like, either by criticizing the very idea of using stats to predict this stuff or by gloating when the inevitabilities of statistical randomness play out and the models break down from time to time. But please don’t say that this kind of analysis sucks the life out of playing or watching these games. That mentality totally missed the point. Of course we shouldn’t reduce sports to mechanical calculations. Of course what’s really exciting is watching people overcome their mathematical destiny and do something special. Of course these methods overlook all kinds of intangibles.

But the point of doing brackets is to get the most picks right, right? There are all kinds of arguments against using the LRMC method to make your picks, but wanting to give yourself the best chance to win isn’t one of them.

Kvam and Sokol humorously observe, “With so much money on the line, a model that predicts outcomes more effectively than standard ranking and rating systems can be useful.” I myself am risking a total of two beers, so I’m going to let pride cloud my scientific judgment and tweak the pure LRMC rankings a bit. To my detriment, no doubt.

Dawkins v. Heller, and Other Things I’ve Read, Heard, or Thought About This Week

Kyle

Priest-Cosmologist Wins $1.6 Million Templeton Prize — Richard Dawkins was in Madison Tuesday promoting The God Delusion. Suffice it to say, reading about Fr. Heller this morning was a significant change of pace from Wednesday’s news. I’m grateful for the juxtaposition though, because in investigating it this evening I found a totally fascinating, though aging, Heart of the Matter called “God Under the Microscope” (1 2 3 4). Dawkins and Heller are both on the panel.

Three thing are certain:

(1) Dawkins has definitely gotten more combative since this special was produced almost twelve years ago. More specifically, he’s taken aim at non-fundamentalists, seemingly abandoning his earlier comment that “It may be true that among sophisticated modern theologians, there is no conflict [between religious and scientific ideology].” As that last link (the Onion AV Club review of The God Delusion) suggests, what’s most obnoxious to people in mainstream denominations (or at least to me) is that while he claims to be preaching to us now, he nevertheless can’t lay off the occasional “‘You’re either with us or you’re with the abortion-clinic bombers’ dualism.” It’s as if he fought the fundamentalists for so long that he keeps forgetting he’s moved on to other targets.

(2) I love the BBC. I shudder to think what a special like this would turn into on, say, CNN, especial twelve years later.

(3) I miss the old Richard Dawkins. The one for whom teaching people about evolution was the primary goal and arguing against religion still at least seemed like a secondary, though admittedly titular (or maybe sub-titular?), goal. Seriously, he’s one of my favorite science writers. I just wish he’d get back to it.

—-

For an Aspiring Singer, a Harsher Spotlight — In continuing New York Times coverage of the Elliot Spitzer story, two staff writers for arguably the world’s best newspaper spend half an article basically just reading us Dupré’s MySpace page. Hey, everybody standing at the Engineering Hall e-mail kiosk: get your résumés together.

—-

What’s Behind the Gender Gap in Education? — My friend Ryan’s back in action on the Freakonomics blog. He got an interesting discussion started today, though I’d perhaps skip the comments if you can’t afford periodic blood pressure spikes.

—-

Episcopal Church Votes to Oust Bishop Who Seceded — I’ll confess to not understanding all the political and religious subtleties involved here (not to mention the legal ones), but what exactly was the point of this decision? It just feels like sort of a “screw you” to a guy who’s already gone anyway. Don’t get me wrong: a part of me I’m not exactly proud of definitely doesn’t want him back, but wouldn’t just leaving well enough alone have been a better option for the House of Bishops?

—-

Researchers Show Off Laser-Guided Robot — Best line of the day. So, what does this fancy-pants robot do? “It simply grabs stuff you point at with a laser.” Wow, a robot that can grab stuff and detect what a laser is pointing at?! (I don’t mean to make light of this story, though, since this robot stands to help a lot of people. I just thought the prose was funny.)

Editorial note: I managed to resist publishing a drafted four sentence rant that was basically a dangling modifier joke disguised as an editorial quibble involving the word that–or rather the absence of it–in the quoted sentence. As you can see, though, I was unable to resist at least pointing out that there’s a dangling modifier joke to be made. I swear, Aaron Sorkin has turned me into frickin’ Roger Rabbit when it comes to dangling modifiers. Gotta be strong. [Deep breath.]

Will wavering…aggh…powerless to resist…

But how can the robot grab stuff with a laser??!!

Proof That Programmers Write the Coolest Master’s Theses

Kyle

You’ve got to check out Phun, a wickedly cool piece of software written by Emil Ernerfeldt at the VRlab. Phun was his Master’s project in computing science, and it’s a terrific 2-D multi-physics simulation.

It’s no coincidence, though, that Phun is more commonly described as “the greatest computer toy in the history of the universe” or, by Ernerfeldt himself, as “a playground where people can be creative.” Steven Hawking jokes in A Brief History of Time about his publisher’s admonition that, for each equation he used, he’d lose half his audience (I’ll let you guess which one he went with). I wonder how much of your audience you lose by using the phrase “2-D multi-physics simulation” (or, come to think of it, “Coolest Master’s Theses”…).

(Hat tip: ASEE’s Engineering &…)

Off Today

Kyle

I’m gonna take a break from the Sunday Judgment column, and posting in general, today. If you really need a language fix, Safire‘s got the etymology of waterboarding. An added bonus is that it’s a vicious, though typically subtle, indictment of this horrifying practice.

Also, congrats to Wauwatosa East, my alma mater, for winning the WIAA boys basketball tournament last night (seriously, I’m not that into basketball, it’s just that time of year). They beat Madison Memorial in overtime. I wish I’d have gone down the street to watch it, although we watched American Astronaut (trailer) instead, and it’s hard to regret that decision. Seriously, this movie is bizarre and brilliant. Here’s a taste:

Music To My Ears, and Eyes

Kyle

I’m telling you, Julie Rehmeyer is fast becoming one of my favorite science writers. Her Science News Math Trek piece this week follows up on a paper by music theorist Dmitri Tymoczko that represents musical chords in hyperdimensional geometries. Even cooler than Rehmeyer’s very accessible written description of the work, though, are the accompanying videos (1 2). It turns out that Tymoczko’s techniques explain some of what goes on harmonically in Chopin’s E-minor prelude, and the videos capture the effect beautifully.

Still, I was initially skeptical about Tymoczko’s ideas in the last graph:

What’s particularly amazing, Tymoczko says, is that the mathematics needed to describe these spaces wasn’t even developed in Chopin’s time. Nevertheless, he says, “it is unquestionable that he had some cognitive representation of the space. So there was this period of history where the only way Chopin could express this abstract knowledge was through music. His knowledge of four-dimensional geometry was most efficiently expressed through piano pieces.”

I’m not sure I share Tymoczko’s certainty that Chopin knew anything about what we would call four-dimensional geometry, abstractly or otherwise. But the more I watch these videos, the less I doubt that he “had some cognitive representation” of some idea that Tymoczko’s merely learning another way of exploring. I doubt he’ll be able to fully grasp whatever that idea is any more meaningfully than Chopin could, but it’s hard to fault either for trying, and in the meantime we all get to bask in the beauty.

Sorry to get all heavy on you. I think today’s Daily Office reading sort of puts you in the mindset to want to ponder these things: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

—

I’ve been warned by a psychologist friend about the strength of the science in some of these fMRI studies, but I nonetheless thought this piece was also interesting. Douglas Adams would be pumped about the music & math/science vibes in this week’s Science News coverage.

—

Congrats to the Badgers for clinching sole possession of the Big Ten Championship today at Northwestern. Speaking of Northwestern, I stumbled across this post from a Northwestern student giving online dating a go. Good writer, interesting stuff.