James Drogan

From Dave Pollard comes this wonderful piece regarding the power of the story.

There is good advice here for those of you who learn, or teach, or sell, or entertain, or otherwise try to covince people to appreciate another point of view.  Read it, think about it, take it to heart. 

There has been, from time to time, a lament for the decline of in the rolls of the farmers.  This, by way of Greg Mankiw's blog, should help build the farm population.

I wish I were taken care of in this fashion.  I must write my congressmen. 

I came across the subject line in a e-mail a few days ago and it caused me to wonder about the relationship between thinking and politics.

It seems to that this relationship is extremely strong; unbreakable, in fact.

Thinking, to me, is of little value unless it results in conclusions.  Conclusions would therefore seem to represent a set of views on issues which can be labeled as politics.

Hence, how could thinking be admired, but the conclusion of that thinking (i.e., the politics) not be admired?

Well, perhaps the originator was referring to the process of thinking, not the thinking itself.  For example, he might conclude that his subject was following acceptable rules of critical thinking, but was biased in the selection of issues, data, and analysis.  That would explain the apparent dichotomy.

Or perhaps the originator was thinking that the politics of the subject did not result from the thinking, but rather, perhaps, amounted to the subject avoiding his responsibilities and hewing to a party line.

And what is politics anyway?  Unfortunately, one's politics is often assigned a simple label (e.g., let, right, left of center) that is really a convenience and not the result of real understanding.  Hence, we find ourselves in the partisan politics of the Dims versus the Rips where the objective function is to win in such a way that the other side loses.  Whether the outcome is best for the constituency is a minor point as is understanding.

Hhhhhmmmmm. 

From Wired Top Stories this morning comes April 7, 1964: IBM Bets Big on System/360.  I was taken back to my early years as a systems engineer for IBM in St. Louis.  Carrying around the famous "green card," writing S/360 Assembler Language on coding sheets, doing the desk checks, punching the cards, getting up and leaving the family for 2AM test shots in downtown St. Louis. 

 
We emptied bit buckets and hexadecimal become our second language.  Writing two-card self-loading programs that would actually do something useful.  Changing the program status words and patching memory locations from the console  in order to make the program do something a bit different or to correct an errant instruction without going back through punching a a correct card and recompiling.

Heady times. 

This morning, by way of Slashdot comes a pointer to UW team researches a future filled with RFID chips from The Seattle Times.  The opening paragraph is:

"Some University of Washington students, faculty and staff are being tracked as they move about the computer-science building, with details of where they've been, and with whom, stored in a database."

This connects to two items.  First, in A Small View of a Possible World I raise the question whether being always on, always connected, always transacting  is a good thing.   I tend to think, in some cases, this is not a good thing.  Even the ubiquity of the cellphone is perhaps not a good thing.

My wife and I noted emerging developments in cellphone technology would allow either of us to know all the time where the other was.  We concluded (I think) that if we did that it would say something troubling about our  relationship.

This also relates to the thinking of Sherry Turkle at MIT.  See Turkle + Technology = Something to Think About.

The second strong connection to The Seattle Times article is to a recent post in cac.ophony, the blog of The Bernard L. Schwartz Communcation Institute at Baruch College.   In How and when do we begin learning about plagiarism? Why don’t we always learn?, Olga brings up interesting questions that prompt me to ask if there is a link between the demise of privacy and the rise of plagiarism?

If ethics are the norms of behavior in a society, then perhaps technology is fundamentally changing our ethics in ways the succeeding generations are find increasingly acceptable, and preceding generations are finding increasingly unacceptable.  This presents a dilemma to those of us who believe we have a responsibility to instill ethical behavior in those following us.

My, but this is a rich morning on the blogs.  By way of MetaFilter comes How to Disagree.  I was sensitive to this post for two reasons.

First of all, earlier this morning I posted an item on How to Get Your Comments Deleted and Yourself Banned.   Secondly, all students in my courses are subjected to a discussion on how to deliver constructive criticism, something I suspect is not covered well in tertiary education.

How to Disagree relates to both reasons and is suggested reading for all.

In Reflections on Cloud Computing Wladawsky-Berger provides is with valuable points of view on this development.

However, the usefulness of cloud computing is dependent upon the nature of connectivity to the cloud, a matter we should not, in my experience, take for granted.  The characteristics of this connectivity are that it is everwhere, available all of the time, and has sufficient capacity.

Experiences with RIM, my own personal experiences at my instituion and my cable network, the enormous gulps of capacity being taken from present networks by the rise of video, suggest to me that there is substantial ground to be covered before cloud computing rises as a real preference.

And there is more.  In A Small View of a Possible World I raise the question whether being always on, always connected, always transacting  is a good thing.

I don't mean to be a naysayer to Wladawsky-Berger's comments, but rather to say that we should exercise some caution when it comes to the seduction of technology (see Kurzweil, Ray. The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. Penguin Books, 2000, 0-140-28202-5 for a point of view that ought to stimulate thinking).

This article, from the Washington Post by way of del.icio.us,  is a sobering, and I believe true, commentary on the demise of curiosity and learning in America.

This aligned with my reading over the weekend of "Out of Print" by Eric Alterman in the March 31, 2008 edition of The New Yorker.   I was particular struck by the section bginning on p 53 discussing the view of Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, and this had to say about the responsibilities of a citizen in a democratic society.

One of the major issues we face as a society is reigniting the fires of interest and responsibility in the citizenry.  How can this be done?  It's not enough to  have such behavior chiefly reside in those who have achieved positions of authority and responsibility (although one might argue that this behavior may not reside there to the extent it ought).

There may well be a new day for America, but it will not come without a revival of the focus by the polity on the issues of importance. 

Another on my blogroll is The Big Picture, ably manned by Barry Ritholtz.  Today be brings me How to Get Your Comments Deleted and Yourself Banned, a brief synopsis on blogging behavior of considerable merit.

Those of you who follow Greg Mankiw and wondered why he turned off comments, here may be part of the answer.

The message?  Behave yourselves. 

ps.  Scroll down and review the comments on the Ritholtz post.  Oy vey!

Dave sent me a link a recent article in The Economist, "Let's talk about figures," which caused me to, in turn, wonder about the morality of mathematics in the context of current world economic developments.

As a layman, I tend to lay much of the responsibility for the current economic messiness at the feet of well-paid "quants" developing elaborate economic models that, to my way of thinking, focus on minimizing risk and maximizing return, which is good, but at the expense of failing to understand the associated moral hazards, which is bad.

This then leads me to wonder whether we explore the notion of morality in mathematics in our education programs.  Now my formal mathematical education in 1965 and my memory may be failing me, but I don't recall any such discussions in my courses.  Nor do I recall an recent press on this matter.  Certainly I didn't see any treatment of the matter in The Economist article. 

Googling "The Morality of Mathematics" produces some 455,000 hits in some 29.7 billion pages (WWW FAQs: How Many websites are there?) on the visible web suggesting to me that "The Morality of Mathematcs" may not be receiving much attention.  Yes, I understand that I am employing a from-the-hip search strategy.  Still, one wonders about the importance of and interest in the subject.