I was with Matt Casey all the way in his discussion of how ridiculous it is for people to be distraught over the death of people they have never met like Michael Jackson or Farrah Fawcett. Why should that matter more to you than when John Doe on the other side of the city has a heart attack? It is one thing to be disappointed that their work will not go on, but how can you have an emotional connection to them? And yet, here I am feeling sad about the death of Jim Johnson. I guess it just shows that we all have our own irrational interests in other people, and I should be less quick to judge the motivations of others. Although all I know of Johnson’s personality is what I have read about him and the interactions I’ve seen on the sidelines, I’ll be thinking of him with every all-out blitz this season.
July 28, 2009
July 25, 2009
Zoe Exiled
After she managed to destroy two laptop power cables without leaving a visible trace, I was quite excited to have a cat-free office when we moved to our new apartment. That lasted about a week, as the air conditioning does not reach the office so well and I do not enjoy being cut off from the rest of what is going on in the apartment. For more than two months she was mostly good while I worked, sitting in the window to watch the exciting sights outside or napping on the futon. All that ended last night, and with it, her reign over the office.
July 23, 2009
Three Unrelated News Stories With Commentary
First, Henry Louis Gates was visited by police because a passerby witnessed him breaking into his own home. This has become a Big Deal because Gates is black, and he was eventually arrested after not responding charitably to the investigating officer. Racial profiling is certainly a problem, but I am not sure that this is a good example of it. I would hope that police would be willing to investigate a report of someone breaking into a home regardless of the color of their skin. The officer should not have arrested Gates for disorderly conduct, but it sounds like he was indeed conducting himself in a disorderly fashion.
Second, PENN-DOT is spending $60,000 of money from the great stimulus package on signs to inform motorists that it is being used to pay for work. In the grand scheme of things this amount of money is basically meaningless, but this may still be one of the most irresponsible things I have ever read. How is this type of signage remotely valuable. If there are not roads in such dire need of repair as to require these funds, they should be returned to the taxpayer.
Third, Senator Spector and others are considering a law to set a price floor for milk. This surprised me because I already thought I had seen “lowest price allowed by law” signs on milk at grocery stores. In any case, can someone explain to me why we would do this? If the price of milk is too low for dairy producers to make a profit, perhaps that is an indication that far more milk is produced than is actually needed. I could swear it was only a year or so ago there were articles about pizzerias in danger of closing because the price of cheese was higher than ever. I know we have a long history of agricultural subsidies in this country, and I agree that maintaining enough farms to feed the population is important, but I cannot help but think things would work out much more smoothly if we stopped meddling in these affairs.
I suppose I’ve outed myself as an angry, white conservative for tonight.
July 21, 2009
Book Review: To The Lighthouse
I am sure that Virginia Woolf has some grand thing to say in To The Lighthouse, but to me it is inscrutable. The eponymous lighthouse and journey to it must be symbolic of some yearning of the human spirit. I can certainly find some themes in this work: the relation between art and life, the complexity of human relationships, the emotional dependence of men on the approbation of women. Wrapped in a complete lack of plot this produces a great novel to learned critics but an incredible bore to me. The only section I can recall enjoying was three or four pages in the second section describing nature retaking dominion over an abandoned house. Hopefully if I continue to read literature of this type I will eventually come to understand its deeper meanings through some sort of osmosis.
Musikfest Scheduling
As if trying to pick the best of up to 8 simultaneous sessions to attend at IJCAI was not bad enough, I now have to do essentially the same thing for concerts at Musikfest. Somehow, they manage to have days when there is not much I care about, and others when there are three simultaneous must-see acts. Crosby, Stills & Nash on the 9th is non-negotiable, but that will mean missing the The Arrogant Worms. I am planning to see George Thorogood & The Destroyers with Jonny Lang, but they had to schedule their great young bluesman and entertaining faux-blues musician at the same time as their premier free blue show: John Lee Hooker, Jr. My general heuristic of avoiding bands that I have seen before fails here.
I think I’ll be attending the following:
- July 31: George Hrab & the Geologic Orchestra, Craig Thatcher Band. (would also like to see Sarah Ayers Band)
- August 1: Bronze Radio Return, Lili Anel, The Headers, The Dan May Band, Webb Wilder & The Beatniks, Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue. (would also like to see Jump City Jazz, Eric Steckel & Friends)
- August 2: The Young Werewolves, The Coffin Daggers, Eric Steckel & Friends, Larry Holmes & Marmalade, Rosie Flores. (would also like to see Yes, Nancy Coletti, Magnum, Trombosis, Los Straightjackets)
- August 3: Peripheral Vision, Frog Holler, Davy Knowles & Back Door Slam. (would also like to see Dr. Dog, Los Straightjackets)
- August 4: Talking Heads Tribute: Start Making Sense, Ronnie Baker Brooks. (would also like to see Deb Callahan Band, B C & Company, Fusion Jazz Trio, The Limits, Sensational Soul Cruisers, Mingo Fishtrap)
- August 5: The Slicked Up 9′s, City Rhythm Orchestra. (would also like to see Steve Brosky & His Big Lil’ Band, Mingo Fishtrap)
- August 6: Friar’s Point, Todd Wolfe, Craig Kastelnik & Friends. (no others)
- August 7: The Doughboys, Marcia Ball. (no others)
- August 8: Jonny Lang, George Thorogood & The Destroyers (would also like to see Mike Dugan & The Blues Mission, Grayson Capps & The Stumpknockers, John Lee Hooker Jr., John Nemeth)
- August 9: Crosby Still & Nash (would also like to see Philadelphia Funk Authority, Lucy Bonilla, The Arrogant Worms)
Of course, I can’t really complain. Not too many people are lucky enough to have all of this music, most of it free, in a city where many people will lend them a couch and to have a job where they can be mostly unproductive for 10 days.
PA Budget Crisis
I am generally a firm believer that government in the United States does all sorts of unnecessary things and wraps even those essential services in layers of expensive and generally useless bureaucracy. If the size of the state budget has grown far in excess of the inflation rate over the last 8 years (it has), then it should be easy to roll back some of those increases or at the very least hold the line on new spending without compromising the important and long-recognized functions of state government. Why, then, do I keep reading that the budget proposals by the Republican caucuses that decrease overall spending by very modest amounts will result in the closings of hospitals and state parks?
If these statements were gross mischaracterizations of the bills, I presume I would have heard something about it. The editorial department of my local newspaper is as rabidly right-wing as Fox News, but I have not read a single column refuting these sort of claims. Thus, I assume that they are at least somewhat accurate.
Is it impossible to cut spending from the general treasury otherwise? I think not. I have taken a look through the Governor’s most recent proposal (http://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/document/447242/09-06-26_2009-10_revised_budget_pdf) and there are definitely some remaining programs that could be cut:
- The Governor’s office is budgeted $7.104 million. If I am correct in thinking that this is purely for the operations of the office and not any programs funded through the office, that is ridiculous. Let’s choose a number arbitrarily and cut $2 million off of this.
- The Office of the Budget gets $29.801 million. How can it possibly take more than two dozen staff members to disburse funds and oversee this process. Cut another arbitrary $20 million.
- The Weed and Seed Program may be a nice idea, but certainly not a necessary one. Drop all of its $2.506 million.
- Drug Law Enforcement gets $25.694 million, and Local Drug Task Forces another $10.501 million. Let’s take a total of $15 million between them and encourage the remaining money to be used against violent dealers instead of ferreting out users.
- Tobacco Law Enforcement gets $0.769. Making sure it is a little more difficult for kids to get cigarettes is not important enough for its own line item, so take it all.
- The State Farm Show gets $3.419 million. Chop, chop!
- Marketing to Attract Tourists is listed for $9.509 and Marketing to Attract Business another $1.790 million. We’ll take all that back, thanks.
- The similar Tourist Promotion Assistance can lose its $9.500 million as well.
- There are all sorts of line items that sound like they are involved in the process of taking money from some businesses and giving it to others in the form of grants or tax credits. It is hard to say exactly what is here, so let’s just pull the $18.268 million from the Opportunity Grant Program.
- Senate Legislative Print and Expenses is listed at $15.216 million, with another $16.423 million for the House. Some hard copies of bills will be necessary, but with appropriate use of technology and conservation-minded, I am confident we could take $10 million from each and be fine.
- Employees of the two legislative bodies (not actual representatives, but their staff) are allocated more than $39 million. With the recent scandal in which House Democratic staffers were either doing no work or mostly campaign work, I think we can cut $20 million here without the actual work of the legislature being threatened.
- The House has additional Legislative Management Committees and Special Leadership Accounts for both of the major parties totaling $56 million. I am not sure what that means, but it sounds unnecessary. Take $40 million from it.
I should stress that I have done almost no research and looked only at a very high-level apportionment. I am sure some things that I have cut are actually quite important, and that I have ignored other gross excesses. I have tried here to make simple a process that is in fact quite complex, and that I have only a superficial understanding of. Still, I found $145 million that seemingly could be cut without touching education, health, or the other services that people claim will suffer if we remove anything from the budget. Much greater savings could be found by making worthy programs make do with fewer administrators or other costs that have little to do with providing services.
July 19, 2009
Pasadena, Day 8-9
On Thursday I skipped the morning talks to get a little extra sleep and rehearse my presentation again. I had lunch with my advisor and collaborators from HKUST to discuss the feedback we received on our paper presented the previous day and possible next steps. We went to the Brazilian Churrascaria again and, predictably, I ate far more than I should have. As a result, I could barely stay awake through the Planning: Search Techniques session that I attended afterwards. After the first two talks I set my alarm and laid down on a bench to try to recover.
The first talk in the session where I would be presenting (Contingent And Nondeterministic Planning) was canceled, so we had to wait 22.5 minutes to keep the remaining talks on schedule. I was a bit apprehensive about being part of this session because I have very little expertise on nondeterministic planning and almost none on contingent planning. The work I was presenting combined my experience with learning HTN models with that of one of my co-authors in nondeterministic planning. As expected, I could understand very little of the other two presentations in the session.
My talk came in a few minutes fast, but I felt fairly calm throughout it and thought I explained things well. I had some difficult questions to answer, but fortunately they were mostly on the side of the topic that I understand well. I always feel like my work is trivial compared to that of others and am almost embarrassed to present it, but was once again pleasantly surprised that other researchers seem genuinely intrigued by it.
After the afternoon sessions was the Research Excellence lecture given by Victor Lesser about multi-agent reasoning and organization. Following that was a student reception, which I attended only long enough to determine that no one I knew was there and that the provided refreshments were not terribly exciting.
Friday morning I packed up my things and had to lug my luggage around with me for the rest of the day. In the first session I attended an invited talk by Qiang Yang of HKU (the faculty member of the team we have been working with there), and it helped me to understand the work we have done together more as part of a holistic vision of activity recognition applications. Afterwards I was quite excited to attend a talk by Stephen Wolfram on The Science Of Wolfram|Alpha (an online question answering system unveiled to great fanfare a few months ago).
As it turned out, Wolfram did not actually show up to the conference, instead presenting through video conferencing software. I have no idea how he got permission for this, but I suppose star power has its benefits. This was to be a half hour talk, and at least the first five minutes were taken up trying to debug the technology so that we could mirror his computer screen. He then proceeded to demo the product for 25 minutes, giving the software an endless stream of queries and briefly displaying and describing the results. When the presentation was supposed to be completed he finally took another ten minutes or so to describe the technology at a superficial level. (Again, no one else would be allowed to continue beyond their assigned time slot.) I was surprised to find that the data used by the system is curated by experts rather than crawled free-form from sources, making it a much more knowledge-intensive system than the document search engines to which it is presented as a competitor. The results, at least on the queries used in the demo, are quite impressive, finding and presenting not simple figures but also trend data and sophisticated analysis. I do not necessarily recall this being the case when I spent a few minutes toying with the system at its release.
Because the talk ran long, I missed another that I had been planning to see in a session on Games And Monte Carlo Search. Many people I knew had already left Pasadena by this time, but I managed to find a few friendly faces to eat lunch with. Afterwards I was planning to attend only the first talk of a hybrid session on Musical Expression (the part I was interested in) and Vision & Robotics III. At ten minutes after the session was supposed to start the first presenter had not arrived, so I decided reading the paper would have to be sufficient. Most of that session and another time slot remained, but there was one thing I still wanted to do while on the West Coast.
I wanted to at least see and touch the Pacific Ocean while I was in the area, so I took trains and buses to the Santa Monica Pier and public beach. I was hoping to find a place where I could store my suitcase in a locker for an hour or two, but could not. So rather than a typical day at the beach, I just took off my shoes and carried them, my suitcase, and my backpack down to the shoreline and set them down where I could keep a close eye on them while I waded up to my knees in the surf. Then I tried sitting on my suitcase on the beach for a while (not having a blanket or towel, and not having bothered to change into my swimsuit), but found this to be uncomfortable. The beach is definitely beautiful in a way I’ve never seen on the Atlantic. I probably only stayed in Santa Monica for an hour, but since I had little else to do I suppose it was worth the two hour trip each way.
I got to LAX by 8:30 and had only a manageable time to wait before my 10:45 flight boarded. By this time I was quite tired and looking forward to sleeping on the flight, but it did not work out very well. Every seat on the airplane was filled, so there was no opportunity to move from the rigid upright seat. I think I got about three hours of sleep overall. By the time we were taxiing into Philadelphia International it felt ridiculously good to stand up or bend my knees to anything other than the angle to which they had been locked for the past five hours.
By happenstance I ran into an old friend, Ryan Neff, in the airport as I was arriving and he was escorting his young nephew to the gate. I was supposed to contact less-old friends and frequent commenter Michaluk and wife to go out for breakfast during my layover, but apparently I had managed to jostle my phone to on and drained the battery searching for nonexistent network signals during the flight. You would think that you could begin charging the handset and immediately operate it from wall power (this was true of my previous, much less high-tech telephone), but apparently the BlackBerry requires around 15-20 minutes of charging before it has enough power to operate the radio antenna. Perhaps the AC adapter is connected to the battery only? It seems like a poor design choice.
Although we were thus delayed, we were able to find a nearby restaurant and get some good breakfast. I wanted to make sure I was back to the airport by 9:30 for my 10:45 flight in case there were long lines at the TSA checkpoints. We were a few minutes late, but I was still sitting at the gate by 9:45. The flight to Williamsport was much more sparsely filled, so I actually slept quite well for that 38 minutes.
It was a great trip, but I am very glad to be home now. Many of my colleagues are going on from Pasadena to another week at ICCBR or SIGIR or elsewhere, and I have no envy for them whatsoever. I took quite a few pictures on my trip, but I think you will have to find them on Facebook. I hate to not do things myself, but they have made it so much more convenient than what I have used here in the past.
July 16, 2009
Pasadena, Day 6-7
Tuesday morning I attended the keynote address by Hal Varian of UC Berkeley and Google (interesting, but strangely not at all relevant to AI), a session on Depth And Breadth First Search (very interesting and useful to me), and a session on Search In Games (very interesting and useful to me). After lunch I went to a session on Transfer Learning (way over my head). There were then two Computers And Thought Award lectures. The first, by Carlos Guestrin, was very interesting but not quite clear on the mathematics. I had difficulty caring about the second, but this may have been because it came at the end of a long day. Following these was the AI Video Competition awards, a very campy event modeled on the Oscars and designed to further the education of students and the general public about AI. There were many good submissions and, while I have only seen the short trailers that they showed at the ceremony thusfar, I agreed with most of their selections. I walked back to the hotel with a friend I had not seen since ICAPS-07, then split a usage of the hotel’s laundry facilities with her. Hopefully all of her garments got back to her so I won’t have any explaining to do.
Thursday morning I went to sessions on Recommender Systems and Search And Learning. Both are of interest to me, but I lacked the necessary technical background to really understand several of the presentations. The first afternoon session was on HTN Planning, and finally something that I could really grok at a deep level. A colleague of mine from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology presented a paper that we wrote together, and we got some really excellent feedback through the question-and-answer time and after the talk from several interested researchers. The other three papers in the session were quite good as well. I went to Clustering during the last session block of the day, but left after the second paper when it was clear that I would understand nothing of it. The official IJCAI banquet was scheduled for that night, but since I was quite unwilling to pay the $75 entrance fee I had another cheesesteak from Luigi Ortega’s and spent the evening fine-tuning my presentation.
Oh, and while I was on the bus back to my hotel from the conference center I was holding a cup as I frequently am. A sheriff boarded the bus, saw me and another person in the same situation, and told us, “You can’t drink that on the bus. If you go throw it in the trash I won’t ticket you.” I was too stunned by this to respond that I had no intention of drinking from it while on the bus and, not having an extra $250 to pay for civil disobedience, dumbfoundedly followed orders. Then he immediately exited the bus. I generally have great respect for law enforcement officers, but to enjoy this as much as he seemed to you would need to have serious psychological issues.
July 15, 2009
Book Review: The Underground History Of American Education
John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History Of American Education is freely available online, although not in the most convenient form imaginable. It is not particularly well written and the text seems to meander somewhat randomly through a variety of topics, but the ideas within are worth considering.
I do not agree with Gatto’s version of American exceptionalism, nor his belief (endemic among Libertarians, of which I am one) that highly successful people like Ben Franklin and George Washington were not an exception, but the rule among people free of government interference. Gatto also seems to talk out of both sides of his mouth on several issues, such as remarking on the way strict authoritarianism stifles the spirit while bemoaning the legal inability of contemporary teachers to discipline their students. He makes strong statements without providing justification, uses anecdotes as evidence, and harangues the reader with his own political philosophy.
I find some of the idea of a vast philosophy of statism and corporatism designing schools to produce dumb, compliant workers and consumers a bit too much to swallow. But not all of it. Too many of my own experiences match up too perfectly with what he is saying, and that is in spite of the fact that I think I attended quite a good public school and was part of what Gatto would call the Gifted caste destined to become great social managers. School does indeed consist of a great many arbitrary rules and punishments, and any illusions that students have the power to influence policy or seek redress are just that. I will not presume to know intentions, but I have no doubt that this does have the effect of ingraining Pavlovian obedience in some (and near-total disregard for authority in others). The rights of citizens, visitors, and even illegal aliens to the United States are generally not extended to students while on school property or during school hours, and school systems have been given or have taken authority far beyond their walls. (Should I really need a permit from my principal to work on weekends? In Pennsylvania, at least, I do.) Much of schoolwork is meaningless, and it nearly has convinced someone like myself that quite fascinating things are really tedious.
I mostly agree with the heart of the broader societal implications as well. Children and young adults are definitely more capable (physically, intellectually, emotionally, etc) than society generally gives them credit for. I do recall that as a child some of the best fun was being allowed to do “grown-up” stuff. People do seem to be consumers first and citizens second. I’ve never before heard the idea that part of the reason for the growth of management as a profession is that there is just not enough actual work left to be done. That sounds absurd with hungry people and crumbling infrastructure, but I can see it making some twisted sense to a macroeconomist. (The possibility that the continued profitability of food production depends on people starving is a topic for another day.)
If you can make it through the blustering, this is definitely a thought-provoking read. If you are interested in examining unorthodox perspectives on one of the pillars of modern society, this would be an excellent place to start.
July 14, 2009
Pasadena, Day 4-5
On Sunday morning I was volunteering at a workshop I would be attending, and needed to be there at 7:30. Buses run somewhat infrequently on Sunday mornings, so this meant leaving my hotel room at 6:15, not a pleasant experience. This was quite a nice volunteer shift to draw otherwise, since I was going to be there anyway. Bothering people about tickets was annoying, but most were understanding that I was just doing my job.
The workshop (StrucK-09) was quite good. There were a few papers on topics far outside my sphere of knowledge, but also several directly related to topics of interest to me. One in particular tied science related to my own research (learning teleoreactive logic programs with ICARUS) with a domain about which I am passionate (analyzing video of college football games to extract offensive strategies). My own talk about some very preliminary work went reasonably well. There were several questions from the audience for which I had no good answer, but they were precisely the same sorts of questions that we have been asking ourselves for the past few months.
After the workshop I had dinner at a Brazilian steak house with my advisor and a collaborator of ours from Hong Kong. It was not as good as I remembered Rios in the Lehigh Valley area as being, but I still ate enough to put me right to sleep when I got back to my hotel.
Monday morning I again needed to be at the convention center at 7:30 to start my shift, but because there were more buses on the route I could sleep in an extra half hour. I spent the morning giving out information and materials to people who had registered for the conference in advance (most attendees). Because most people had either arrived the day before to attend a workshop or were waiting until the day after for the beginning of the main conference, it was rather slow. I managed to map out what sessions I would attend during the conference and read a few papers from the workshop notes.
When my shift ended at 12:30 I was determined to find an In-N-Out Burger, which was the only food I had read that I needed to try while in California. They have one location in Pasadena, and it turned out to be in walking distance from my hotel. I got a double-double (no spread) combo, and found that the burger was fine but nothing special. The french fries were unpleasantly chewy, so I am not sure what the attraction is. After walking back to my hotel in the hot sun I took a three hour nap.
My last volunteer shift was directing people to the chartered buses that would take them from the Opening Ceremony (which I was thus unable to attend) and the Opening Reception at the CalTech Athenaeum. The Athenaeum is apparently an exclusive, private club for faculty members at CalTech and a few other academic organizations in the area. While I am morally opposed to such things, I will say that it was quite a nice place to have a light dinner and socialize.