Publish and be damned

Two news stories recently have highlighted another aspect of the tragedy of the commons. One on Copyright (artists petitioning government to extend UK copyright beyond 50 years): the other on a proposed EU community directive to require open access publishing of scientific results.

In both cases, there is lots of research to indicate that the greatest good comes from open access. In copyright terms, the issue is not the few famous things: it is the huge mass of copyrighted material which cannot be reproduced because the copyright holder cannot be found. This reduces knowledge transmission and empoverishes us all. In scientific research, the effect is acute: the massively beneficial effects of the theoretical physics archiv service are obvious to anyone working in the area, whereas those subjects without an open access publications server have a looser culture, slower dissemination of results, and are less open to paradigm shifts. Take a look at the archiv server front end to get some idea of what's available. So yes, limited copyright and open dissemination of research might be bad for a few copyright holders, but that is greatly outweighed by the massively positive effects for the commonwealth.

The Nature of Scientific Theories

Two controversies are bubbling along at the moment which made me think about what science claims. The Evolution vs. Intelligent Design debate seems to be hotting up again, and there is controversy about climate change. Now I should immediately state that I think that Evolution is the best guess we have about how organisms developed, and that man-made factors are responsible for significant climate change that could, eventually, prove to be catastrophic. Those beliefs are supported by evidence, but that evidence is not incontrovertible.

It may be, for instance, that the Theory of Evolution will be modified and improved again. Certainly since Darwin we have seen some intriguing new ideas, such as
punctuated equilibria. So we claim too much if we say Evolution is correct. The best theory we have at the moment consistent with the evidence is more like it.

Things are even more troubling in the area of climate change. There we have rather little experimental evidence (building new planets to test climate change theories being somewhat impractical). So we just have direct measurements of the Earth's climate, and (almost certainly correct) inferences based on things like differential oxygen isotope measurements. In addition, there are computer models of the climate, but these suffer from potential model error: they are build to calibrate correctly to known physics and known measurements, but there is enough uncertainty that their predictions about future climate may not hold, and moreover that uncertainty is difficult to quantify. That said, the overwhelming evidence both paleoclimatological and more recent is that there will be significant further global warming with catastrophic effects on mankind. But it is not certain in the same way that a prediction of Newtonian mechanics is.

In this mix, of course, we need to add significant vested interests, such as the deeply irresponsible Exxon-sponsored climate change denial, and the influence of the religious right on the abortion debate. But the best counter to this is not to overstate the claims of science. Politicians may not wish to hear carefully stated, potentially uncertain results but scientists do them, and us, a disservice if they claim a higher epistemological status than they deserve.

Finally, although scientists may wish to believe that their practice is objective, we cannot dismiss cultural factors. Kuhn's changes of paradigm are usually accompanied by significant resistance from the scientific establishment because the figures in power have cultural capital invested in the old view. The lone scientific hero who defies the establishment to champion a correct theory is a horny old stereotype, but we should also not forget that there are many such figures who happened to be wrong. It is only eventually that we figure out who had the better guess.

Irritating and almost certainly wrong though the proponents of intelligent design and the climate change deniers are, therefore, we cannot say their ideas are absolutely incorrect. Non-scientific, politically and/or religious motivated, and unlikely to be true, certainly. Not the best guess given the evidence, undoubtedly. But not certainly wrong.

CP Snow as a power source...

...because he's turning in his grave. I think the two cultures thing is getting worse. Certainly mainstream arts people not only are unembarrassed by their ignorance of science, they even flaunt it (scroll down to 'Opacity Quotient'). Clearly this problem has been with us for a long time. Perhaps it is time to set a few equivalences, just so the arty types understand the thresholds of ignorance, as it were. Something like

Ignorance of Newton to a scientist = Ignorance of Shakespeare to an arts person

through

Ignorance of Electromagnetism to a scientist = Ignorance of Dickens to an arts person

to

Ignorance of String Theory to a scientist = Ignorance of Structuralism to an arts person

It's quite amusing trying to construct the parallels if you have a few moments
to spare.
Gödel = Joyce?
Transfinite set theory = Gabriel Garcia Marquez?
Dark Matter = Derrida?

You know best Tony

There is an article in today's paper saying that despite advice to the contrary, Tony Blair is going to give the go-ahead to new nuclear powerstations*. I find this deeply depressing for a couple of reasons. Firstly what on earth is the point of having experts examine an issue and prepare a thoroughly researched report if the prime minister is going to overrule them because he thinks he knows best? Then there are the usually distasteful overtones created by the inordinate weight the nuclear industry has compared with other forms of power that do not create a 700 million year headache (the half life of U-235). And of course this is all in the context of trying to decide what the best form of power generation is without any idea of the real decommissioning and clean-up costs of fission reactors. The sooner we figure out fusion power, the better...

* Trying to write a sentence where all the words are short enough so that they fit beside the picture (Didcot power station, taken from the train), is an interesting constraint. Perhaps an Oulipolian novel with no word longer than, 4?, 5?? characters might be interesting?

Playing with traffic

The game that is UK traffic law is broken. It's broken because the rules don't always matter. Take the emotive issue of speeding. Speeding is illegal. Yet, unlike theft, say, it is not more-or-less universally disapproved of. Many ordinary people who think of themselves as law-abiding speed. Some of them, the militant Jeremy Clarkson tendency, even dispute whether it is a crime and, in deference to their sensibilities, the government appears equivocal about installing more speed cameras, instructing the police to prosecute speeders, and so on. And in turn this brings the law into disrepute.

This situation is unhelpful for everyone. If there is a law, it should be enforced. If the law is viewed as out-of-date, or not always appropriate, then it should be changed. But we cannot have mostly kinda almost enforced laws. That just encourages drivers to view the entirety of traffic law as somehow optional - have you noticed how much more often drivers cross traffic lights on red these days? Once the rules of the game do not always constrain you, things go bad rather quickly.

When an example is not exemplary

There is a blog I sometimes read, The Tao of digital photography. Recently it has featured 10 pictures which were important to the author's development of an aesthetics of photography, or Ten Epiphanous Photographs as he calls them.

What's interesting about this selection (apart from the photographs themselves) is how badly they come off from the blog format. André Kertész in real life is impressively sharp, well composed, atmospheric. Reduced to 200x160 pixels, it looks trivial, throw away, even whimsical. And if the author had chosen fine art photography in the tradition of the Bechers (like Gursky, or Struth, or Ruff, or possibly worst of all for easy reproducibility, Elger Esser), things would work even less well. This lead me to ponder how far the digital medium has to go in resolution terms. A good print at 3 feet by 2 has at least 300 pixels per inch, or roughly 10,000 by 7200. That's 72M pixels or over 2000 times more than the blog picture. For the Gurskys and such, they might easily be three times bigger in linear dimension, so the problem is ten times worse. Processing power might have increased by many orders of magnitude since the sixties, but display technology has not got more than a thousand times better. There's a way to go yet.

When the technology is more artistic than you are

Look what happens when my mobile phone's camera gets over- loaded by being pointed straight at the sun - I particularly like the purple halo around the black sun. This kind of objet trouvé has a long and glorious history, of course, going back at least to Duchamp, but it is still nice when it happens.

What makes a virtual world engaging?

Brian Eno was on the Culture Show tonight (is `culture television' an oxymoron?). He said that he thought that a new art form would emerge utilising DVDs, a true integration of music and image (rather than image-with-music as in a music video, or music-with-image, as in film music).

That might be right, but I beg to differ. I think the real challenge is exploiting interactivity in an engaging way. Mostly, let's face it, interactive DVDs have created virtual worlds that are less than compulsive. I like games as much as the next chap, but amusing though shooting aliens is, or driving around, or whatever, the Games Industry feels very much in its infancy. A lot of people might play massively multiplayer games, but much of their appeal relies on fantasy, not suspension of disbelief.

The Fine Art community has been more engaged in the problem of creating genuinely convincing worlds, especially folks like Blast Theory. They have, I think, succeeded in creating compulsive alternative realities such as Desert Rain, but only at the cost of specially built sets - integration of the game/ installation/ whatever into the world, in other words.

Another thread here is the alternative reality games (see ARGN if you haven't come across this before), where the game intervenes, sometimes quite delicately, in ordinary life. Such games tend to be episodic, allowing the game world more chances to leak into the real one.

Whether these related ideas will come together to create a new kind of game/art work/theatre is unclear, but I hope they do. The prospect of a much richer interactivity than we have at the moment would genuinely qualify as a new art form (or, given the context I suppose I should say Art Form).

Market theory dynamics

Here's an idea for a complexity theory thesis based on my The Game of Monetary Policy post (and by genetic algorithms).

Assumptions

1. Markets are created by willing buyers and willing sellers. The price of an asset is the price they are willing to trade at. The only cause of price dynamics is trading.

2. There are always irrational (at least the sense of in-model wealth maximisation) buyers and sellers.

3. There are always theory-driven buyers and sellers: they have an idea, and they trade based on that idea.

4. Successful ideas eventually become well known.

5. Unsuccessful ideas are eventually discarded by some (but possibly not all) market participants.

Thesis Plan

1. Literature search, all the usual guff

2. Select implementation technology: swarm perhaps?

3. Implement a model based on a 2 level simulation which I'll call simulation and meta-simulation. There is a population of buyers and sellers. Some are trade randomly (see 2.). Others trade with a rule-based theory. We start off with some distribution of assets among the traders, and trading is permitted for some number of rounds, say 75 (rough no. of business days in a quarter).

4. At the end of the simulation, the meta-simulation takes over. All traders publish their rules. All traders assess their rules based on their personal performance. Agents that have done well are less likely to change; ones that have done worse are more likely to change. Everyone who changes can select a published rule, with weighting driven by how successful that rule has been for others.

5. Repeat 3 and 4, ad lib, or at least through 100 meta simulations. See what the asset price dynamics looks like as a function of the simulation parameters. Can we recover the kind of fat tails and positive auto-correlation we see in the dynamics of real financial assets?

6. Review results, present conclusions.

There, the actual execution is entirely routine from here...