Quote of the day

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From Paul Ellis‘s The Essential Guide to Effect Sizes:

THe post hoc analysis of nonsignificant results is sometime painted as controversial (e.g. Nakagawa and Foster 2004), but it really isn’t. It is just wrong. There are two small technical reasons and one gigantic reason why the post hoc analysis of observed power is an exercise in futility…

… and then some more stuff on p-values and the like. Somehow, reading applied statistics books make my brain glaze over, but at least you get a giggle now and then.

Library cataloging fail

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Last week I saw this in the library at UCSD:

Shot from UCSD Library

One of these things does not belong in QA279


What is that, you might ask? Why it’s The Design Inference, by noted Intelligent Design proponent William Dembski. I thought perhaps some enterprising soul had hidden it away in QA279, the Library of Congress call number for experimental design, to keep it away from the corruptible undergraduate youth. However, much to my surprise, it was correctly shelved. I suppose you could call it a book on experiments, but it’s a far cry from D.A. Freedman’s Statistical models : theory and practice. I wonder what the LC call number is for pseudomathematical quackery?

Rudolf Ahlswede (1938 – 2010)

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At the end of last week I learned, much to my sadness, that Rudolf Ahlswede passed away in December. There will be some sort of commemoration at the ITA workshop. His Wikipedia entry has been edited, but I couldn’t find an obituary. It does have a rather dashing photograph of him in earlier years. I think the sideburns suited him.

Rudi Ahlswede was one of the pillars of Information Theory and had many seminal works in that field using tools from combinatorics, probability, and graph theory. I came to know his work through my dissertation work on the arbitrarily varying channel (AVCs); he had written extensively on the AVC starting in the 1960s. Of particular note (to me) was his paper on the “elimination technique,” which is one of the first derandomization arguments I’ve seen in the literature. And of course he was part of the start of Network Coding. I met Ahlswede at the 2006 ISIT and then most recently in September at ITW in Dublin, where I was presenting a paper on AVCs in which the adversary has a noisy look at the transmitted codeword. He presented in the same session a paper on “channels with time structure,” about which I will make a separate post later. I just wanted to note with sadness the passing of such a giant.

Norbert Wiener was a man of constant sorrow

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He was hitting the haterade pretty hard:

The vacuum tube was first used to replace previously existing components of long-distance telephone circuits and wireless telegraphy. It was not long, however, before it became clear that the radio-telephone had achieved the stature of the radio-telegraph, and that broadcasting was possible. Let not the fact that this great triumph of invention has largely been given over to the soap-opera and the hillbilly singer blind one to the excellent work that was done in developing it, and to the great civilizing possibilities which have been perverted into a national medicine-show.

Eliza-san Sushi

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A friend posted an article from the New York Times on Kura, a sushi chain that uses sushi-making robots. This of course got me thinking about how I like to sit at the sushi bar and have a conversation with the sushi chef. How might that go with a robot? I fired up ELIZA (M-x doctor) and…

I am the sushi chef. Please, describe your problems.

Hello

Can you elaborate on that?

Good evening

Why do you say good evening?

I would like to have some sushi for dinner.

What makes you believe i might want to have this sushi dinner?

I was hoping you would make me a sushi dinner.

Earlier you said
i would like to have this sushi dinner?

Yes.

I would appreciate it if you would continue.

What would you recommend?

Maybe your life has something to do with this.

It’s true, I am often indecisive. I really love sushi!

Perhaps you could tell me about your relationship with sushi.

Well, it started when I was in high school.

Talk about your school.

I took four years of Japanese. Koukou de yon nen kurai benkyou
shimashita. Demo zen zen wasuremashita.

Is it because of your plans that you say demo zen zen wasuremashita?

Well, I have always wanted to learn again.

You mentioned that
i would like to have this sushi dinner?

Yes, I am very hungry. What fish is fresh today?

Perhaps the people you hang around with have something to do with this.

Maybe a mackerel temaki?

Are you sure that
maybe a mackerel temaki?

Is the mackerel good?

Do you really think you love sushi?

Yes…

Go on, don’t be afraid.

I really do.

Is it because of problems at school that you are going through all this?

I’m done with school, thank goodness.

Does it bother you that your grades could improve?

Too late for that now.

I need a little more detail please.

How about salmon skin?

Is it because of any hobbies you have that you say
how about salmon skin?

What, like Silence of the Lambs?

Earlier you said
i would like to have this sushi dinner?

Yes, I’ll have the omakase.

How do you reconcile hangups you have?

A new scam?

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I received a scam email recently asking me if I wanted to “take up a job” for a few months while someone is goes on leave. The salary is not huge but pretty decent ($3.5k/month + some sort of commission) and I’m instructed to contact someone in Taiwan to make the arrangements. I assume the next step is that I will give them my bank account etc (for direct deposit), which then will get cleared out.

This seems like a particularly pernicious type of internet fraud because it doesn’t involve egregious amounts of money (vs. Nigerian bank scams) and there is so much unemployment in the US right now that people would be happy to take that job for 3 months.

Is this a new kind of scam? It seems different from the “work from home and make $70k” things I’ve seen before.