I was reading the most recent issue of Technology Review and two things popped out at me. The first, was the difference in energy density (measured in MJ/kg) between gasoline, ethanol and batteries:
This, in a nutshell, highlights the reason why you don’t see very many electric cars on the road today. They either weigh the same as gasoline cars (and are therefore underpowered) or are full of batteries galore (and therefore cost a lot more). It’s going to be very interesting to watch this statistic change over time.
The other was about what Japanese researchers have been doing with Marmosets:
This spring, news of a biological breakthrough arrived in the form of baby marmosets whose feet glowed green under ultraviolet light. Researchers at the Central Institute for Experimental Animals in Kawasaki, Japan, had genetically engineered the monkeys to incorporate a gene, derived from jellyfish, that produces green fluorescent protein. It was the first time scientists had added a gene to a primate in such a way that a new trait could be passed to a second generation.
This is unreal news. If this turns out to be scalable and applicable to humans (both very big ‘ifs’), we could be looking at a future where it will be possible to speed up evolution. You could now pick and choose the best traits from anywhere and attempt to graft them into a human genome and see the results enter the global human gene pool immediately. (I’m not recommending any of this, rather it’s important to realize how fast this technology is evolving and what it’s implications are)
There are big ideas and then there are big ideas. Reading this blog entry on Ford’s electric vehicles is mind expanding. Imagine an America with lots of electric cars. Now imagine a smart electric grid with variable pricing. Your car charges at night (when power cheap and interestingly most winds are strong enough). During the day, if it’s plugged in, it’s putting energy back into the grid – and you’re pocketing the difference. That’s a huge idea.
I love reading about behavioural economics and how human nature limits our ability to make rational decisions. I love it even more when I find myself behaving irrationally despite being aware of it (this is all very meta).
Here are two recent examples:
1) On Sunday I went for a run. In the crazy heat. With my iPhone in my pocket. After two and a half hours in my sweaty pocket, it wouldn’t work.
I had turned my $0 run into a $450 run and mentally readied myself to go buy a new phone on Monday.
But then something great happened-the damn thing came back to life (I’m writing this blog post on it right now). I started to feel elated about the $450 I had ’saved’ when, in reality, absolutely nothing about my financial situation had changed.
2) I sold a bunch of stocks the other day at a modest return. However, I kept tracking this portfolio just to see how it does. Unfortunately for me, it’s been doing great-or at least one stock has. This pains me-even though it’s just a shadow portfolio.
Moreover, when the market fell on Monday, I going myself checking to see how much I would have lost, even though I would still theoretically be up. Needless to say, this was getting so unhealthy that I just deleted the portfolio.
I’m quickly realizing that though it’s easy to read about this stuff it’s going to take a lifetime to master.
There have been two fascinating articles published in the past few days talking about how we perform under pressure. Both are fascinating reading.
In the first, The Guardian examines why athletes choke. The short answer: you think too much. When you’re a master athlete, you have muscle memory and your actions are literally built into your body. If you think too hard about what you’re doing your brain, rather than your muscles, takes over and you fail.
There’s a chemical element at play in the Times article too: Navy Seals under pressure release the same amount of cortisol as normal soldiers, but they are able to recover to a normal level much faster.
I’ve no idea how to interpret all of this, but there are some interesting themes. Training makes it easier for you to recover to normal faster, meaning that you can use your muscle memory rather than having to think? A well-developed mental model makes it easier for you to find patterns and deviations from that pattern, meaning that you can then respond more quickly without thinking? Anyone want to speculate?
This weekend I walked into a gallery on 21st street and saw this sculpture:
This photo captures the components of the system, but not the dynamics of it. Basically, you’re looking at two fans facing each other and connected by four pieces of fishing line. Around the fishing line are wrapped two circular streamers of magnetic tape.
This is fundamentally a simple system – the fans provide continuous input – but the outcome is unbelievably complex. The two streamers bounce back and forth between the two fans. At time they appear to stand still and then wildly gyrate in a new direction. At no time can you predict where they are going to go next, nor do they ever take the same path twice.
This art installation is a fantastic visual example of what is talked about in a recent paper, The (Unfortunate) Complexity of the Economy, by Jean-Phillipe Bouchaud. Bouchaud shreds the notion that our economy can be explained simply by supply and demand. Instead, he outlines how many of the behaviours we see in our economy (bubbles, markets that never settle on an equilibrium, etc.) can be explained by different physical analogues. For example, the fans above are an example of a system that is incredibly sensible to the slightest perturbation in its environment, meaning that is constantly and dramatically changing state (sound like the stock market of late ‘08/early ‘09?). What’s more, the system above is also governed by few simple actions (fans blow a tape wrapped around strings) yet incredibly complex action resuls (think about many people buying/selling a stock, yet prices gyrate madly).
If you read one academic paper this year, make it this one.
I’ve noticed a lot of musings about behavioural economics over the past few months (to the point that Wendy’s currently taking a class on it at Columbia). A lot of it has been related Richard Thaler’s recent book Nudge, plus the fact that he frequently consults Austin Goolbee, one of Obama’s top economic advisers.
One of the other big players in this space is Daniel Ariely, who also has a book – Predictably Irrational. Both have recently-ish done book tour at Google. Here’s the video from Daniel’s visit; it’s a great intro to the topic (plus he’s an entertaining speaker):
If you only watch 3 minutes of this, skip ahead to 27:50 and watch as he recounts an offer The Economist had online (he took a screenshot). They offered the following subscription options:
Online-only access: $59
Print-only: $125
Print plus online access: $125
You’re probably thinking: “these people are idiots – why would anyone pay $125 for just print when they could get online for free?” And you’re right – Ariely asked 100 MIT students which offer they’d take and the split was 16/84 online vs. print + online. No one took the print-only offer.
Nothing exciting there, so he re-ran the experiment without the print-only option. Now it was a whole new world: 68 students wanted online-only access whereas only 32 wanted print plus online.
Now The Economist doesn’t look so stupid anymore. As Ariely describes it: “the middle option was useless in the sense that nobody wanted it, but it wasn’t useless in the sense that it helped people figure out what they wanted.”
Check out the video and read up on the topic. This is a nascent field tackling a lot of tough questions and it’ll be interesting to see if someone can come up with a comprehensive theory over the next few years.
Today I read the most recent entry in Strange Maps, talking about humans tend to see things where they don’t really exist (read their blog entry for some great photos). There’s a technical word for this – apophenia.
The best part of reading this article is that it anchored me to start seeing patterns where none existed. I didn’t have to wait too long until it finally happened. I was listening to a recent Resident Advisor podcast and it contained the following album art:
I immediately thought that it looked exactly like part of the path from Bow Lake up to the Wapta Icefield:
Now, Resident Advisor is based in Sydney and the podcast is from a British group, so I’m pretty sure that nobody involved with it has ever been to Wapta. Must be that apophenia kicking in…
A little over a week ago I attended Edward Tufte’s day-long course on how to visualize information. What follows is a chronological summary of what he presented; the course consists of a series of infographics along with running commentary.
The first infographic was actually an animation: the Music Animation Machine’s rendering of Chopin’s Berceuse, opus 57 (a lullaby). You can’t see that video online, but here’s a rendering of Chopin’s Etude, opus 10 #7:
There are two powerful elements to these visualizations. The first is that you cannot delete anything from the graphic without removing information. The second is that you can literally choose to hear a note by looking at it.
The next graphic was the following one from Nature (apparently the best source to see people pushing the limits on infographics) showing the epidemiology of SARS:
What makes this graphic so useful is that it includes labels on the linking lines so that it subtly adds additional information. The use of directional arrows also clearly indicates the nature of relationships. It’s not perfect though – it could add incident and mortality rates in different countries and not overwhelm the rest of the graphic.
A quick commentary: if you want to create illegible boxes, give them a big, heavy border and use all caps sans serif fonts – that what cigarette companies do on their warnings:
After that we looked at a graphical history of rock & roll:
There’s a massive amount of information on this chart – more than any one person can possibly explain. What makes the chart work is that every reader has a chance to look at it and explore it using their own cognitive style. Each user will tease out their own story; if they can’t find one then you can tell them one.
Another related point: clutter is not a property of information; it’s a property of design. If you’ve a cluttered diagram you don’t understand your information.
The next graphic was a hospital bill overlaid with commentary as to what each element actually meant (alas, no image online). The bill was a two column itemized list; the commentary was provided in boxes next to the components of the list.
Tufte emphasized that the connections between the boxes were via gray – not black lines; this rendered them more visible. The point here was that a grey line was the smallest “visual move” you could make to connect to the graphic and not distract from it.
From there we moved on to a graphic showing cancer survival rates (here’s a sample):
Note that the graphic goes from least to most lethal and visually depicts how a person can expect to survive over time. While this may seem trivial, you won’t find a chart like this on any major health-related website. And, in fact, Tufte mentioned that he used to show up as the number 3 result in Google queries for “cancer surival rates” – well above any health-related sites.
And here’s Tufte’s favourite graphic of all time. Charles Minard’s description of Napoleon’s disastrous advance on Moscow:
What makes this graphic so impressive is that it has six variables on it: location (x&y), time, the size of Napoleon’s army, temperature and direction. Without a word, the horror of Napoleon’s failed march is immediately obvious. Note that there’s no flourish on this map: it’s just data.
From there, Tufte lectured on a variety of topics. Here are some random comments:
We do our best analytical thinking when we are 24-30 inches away from the page. That should help you decide how big a graphic should be
For serious work, you need data that is adjacent in space (think of a wallchart), not stacked (like a typical Powerpoint presentation)
Whenever possible, get a ‘relevant object’ in the room when you’re giving a presentation: we are human and love both tactile objects and metaphor
Sidenotes are “where god wants footnotes”
When designing a user interface, always focus on what percentage of total screen real estate is data/information (vs. marketing speak)
Genius of the iPhone is that it reduces the need for stacked paths. Most phones had the same functionality but made it impossibly difficult to get to. One of the reasons why Apple was able to do this is that the screen has 2.5x the resolution of a computer screen (hence the screen is effectively 2.5X larger than a similar-sized phone)
If possible, don’t present rather give people a report ideally containing a “supergraphic” like the Rock & Roll history map. They can read faster than you can speak and will ask questions if they find anything interesting in the supergraphic
See how long you can go in your presentation without saying “I”. Will make you appear more informed and professional
Use the “PGP” rule: say something particular, explain the general principle and then say something particular. This is how teachers educate young kids and it works well
The course also featured a number of great quotes. Here are two:
John Von Neumann: There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about.
T.S. Eliot: Talent imitates, genius steals. Apparently Eliot stole this from Oscar Wilde: Good writers borrow. Great writers steal.
And now for some not-so-serious info. Check out this little message that was left in one of my books over lunch:
I live in New York City, where you can’t go more than about 150 feet without hitting a road. I’m from Canada where you can go up to the North and there are no roads for at least a hundred kilometers (see my earlier post on the ice fields in Auyuittuq park). So what about the U.S.? How far can you go before you hit a road?
Turns out, not that far. According to this article, the farthest you can go in landlocked America is 20 miles, and it’s in the southeastern corner of Yellowstone:
Apparently in Louisiana there are some swamps that preclude road building and it’s the part of the country where technically you can get the furthest from a road:
RSS
I immediately thought that it looked exactly like part of the path from Bow Lake up to the
Now, Resident Advisor is based in Sydney and the podcast is from a British group, so I’m pretty sure that nobody involved with it has ever been to Wapta. Must be that apophenia kicking in…
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