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October 31, 2006
Gliding in Feshie in the Scottish Cairngorms
I had a fun weekend flying at Feshiebridge in the Cairngorms (Scottish Highlands).
Posted by dr at 10:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 26, 2006
Polish Edinburgh (the more, the merrier)
With the borders between the old Europe and the East (like Poland) slowly going away, we've come to see a lot more Polish people here in Scotland, and with them Polish clubs and delis. Some of my Scottish friends are glad that they can finally get good service here (because the Poles are taking low-paid jobs in the service industry, and they're quite dedicated), and even a joiner or a plumber or electrician who would actually turn up to do some work.
You won't be surprised that a bunch of people ressent the influx of a new culture. To mix, evolve and move ahead, you have to accept that you can't live the way you've gone about doing things for fifty years. However, a lot of people just don't get it. In a forum at Gumtree, I've read some of the most idiotic comments. "I do not think my intetions are either to Patriotic or install bad thoughts in others" (sic), says one local dubbed Albertking2000. And "corsebou" adds, "No, definitely, they should refrain polish people and other poor poeple, or force them to adopt local culture and rules... which is not possible I think (no one will accept to lose his culture)." (sic)
Mistakes are being made - mistakes that the Germans and the Dutch have made long before. Segregation instead of integration. A job for all parties involved. Then again - I'm not so sure if I want the Poles to become more British, or the Brits to become a bit more Polish. Dangerous69 writes: "I say the more Poles the merrier!!! The girls are beautiful, and the blokes are a good laugh!"
Posted by dr at 11:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 21, 2006
20 knots gusty and a sail too wide
20 knots (gusty) is a mouthful when you're learning to windsurf. And my sail was way too big. These are some of the things learned this week on a short "work trip" sponsored by my department. On the shore of Loch Tay in the Scottish Highlands, we've tried to find out more about the research that people across the 500-person school are doing, and we've tried to meet unusual challenges that had to do with water and mud. It was great fun and very motivating.
I observe that our brains seem to love the stimulation from learning new things - the Heureka experience when the sail catches wind and your board picks up speed.
Apart from the wind, I noted that a) scientists are in great danger of drifting off into geekery when they're supposed to explain their work to people from different (even bordering) fields, and b) that a 10-minute short presentation rule demands strict enforcement. Neither observation came as a surprise.
(More pictures in my BigTrip log.)
Posted by dr at 4:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 15, 2006
It changed the world
I was very lucky to grow up in a time when music really mattered. It wasn't just something in the background; it really mattered to a generation of kids growing up. It really changed the world. I think that music faded in importance for a while, and the iPod has helped to bring music back into people's lives in a really meaningful way. Music is so deep within all of us, but it's easy to go for a day or a week or a month or a year without really listening to music. And the iPod has changed that for tens of millions of people, and that makes me really happy, because I think music is good for the soul.
Note the marked difference between multi-billion-dollar top manager Steve Jobs in his approach to music to how music is seen by the music lobby and some software companies, who all try to squeeze money out of us, selling recycled, mass-produced be-happy nuggets instead of soul food. The quote is from a recent interview Jobs did with Newsweek.
Posted by dr at 10:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 12, 2006
John Peel Day: Teenage dreams, so hard to beat
It's John Peel Day today - John Peel was the legendary BBC DJ, loved by hundreds of thousands Brits, as he introduced them to the likes of The Doors, Pink Floyd or Bob Dylan in the late sixties on "Radio One". "I just want to hear something I haven't heard before", he said, and I very much relate to that. Especially since I've begun listening to BBC Radio One in the mornings recently, and I noticed that they play the same few songs every morning, making the same lame jokes (a format for dummies, or "format" gone wrong?). Peel, on the other hand, had an exceptional taste for a broad range of music and managed to make his selection heard. John Peel died two years ago at the age of 65.
Posted by dr at 11:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 9, 2006
Why the mind hates probabilities (and gets out-smarted by science marketers)
A saying among pilots states: You start with a bag full of luck and an empty bag of experience. The trick is to fill the bag of experience before you empty the bag of luck.
Well, too bad that's not how probability works. However, it seems to me that it characterises the general perception of what "probability" and "risk" mean pretty well. When you've played the lottery for twenty years, it is not finally time for your turn to win. History doesn't matter, and there is no bag of luck that is full or empty.
I conjecture that the human mind isn't made to deal with probabilities in a rational fashion. What?, you might ask. Us, with our brains that regularly beat every machine-learner at recognizing complex patterns? Let me give you an example: Do you know about the Baader-Meinhof effect? (Un-fittingly, they were a terrorist group in 60/70's Germany.) What the term refers to is that you'd often notice that your mom would call you on the phone, just when you were thinking about her. Things like that would happen a couple of times, and you begin to think that there must be something supernatural at play. Can your thoughts make your mom dial your number? Do your dreams cause hiccups a thousand miles away?
Or, Murphy's Law: the lane you're in always moves slower. Unfortunately, you forget to make a mental note every time your lane is faster!
It's simply our brain that simply pays special attention when these strange coincidences occur, while we do not take note when something usual happens. Some psychologists say that we mostly learn from the unexpected. So in a way, listening up when the unpredicted takes place is beneficial to learning from experience. But it clearly biases our conscious perception of the world around us towards the unusual.
And of course there's a second kind of skew in our judgment: we're biased to arrive at favorable conclusions. Take my grandma. She was an intelligent, political, opinionated, fun-to-have-around person. And a chain-smoker. She never contracted lung cancer like so many others, but she had a bad leg (clogged veins). When her doctor pointed out that this was likely caused by her smoking, she refused to believe. After all, her friend, a non-smoker, had a similar problem!
One of the problems with that reasoning is that you can't really say much from a sample of size one (her friend). From this limited evidence, you can't tell how much more likely cigarettes make it to run into problems when you're getting old. But you can tell that smoking is bad for you when you look at thousands of patients, and thousands of healthy people. And that's why we do studies rather than believing our instincts.
So, I may conclude that the equipment we work with is a little weak on the "objective statistics" side. Guesswork and calculated probability based on evidence can be pretty far off. It's unfortunate that people generally get little formal education in interpreting statistics. What does it mean when a study finds that some drug significantly enhances weight-loss?
Not much! "Significant" in the context of a clinical study only means that the tested drug most likely makes a difference overall. For example, it could be that this new slim-down substance allows you to lose 70 grams more over the course of a month! That's certainly not worth spending £100 on, is it?
Drugs companies happily abuse the statistic terminology in their favor. Science journalism happily copies the stats-speak. The reporters forget that among non-scientists, "significant" certainly means something else, namely "grave", "important", "notable". That's why I tend to use the term "reliable" in my papers when speaking of statistical significance.
In short: Don't always believe what your guts tell you, especially if you have a vested interest in believing one way or the other. And when you read about statistics, don't forget that "significant" only means something like "makes a difference". What matters is how big this difference is.
Posted by dr at 11:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack