Archive for January, 2009

On Phoenix

Saturday, January 31st, 2009

Hello again, patient reader; I apologise for my long absence, I have had a pretty busy couple of weeks, what with the Amsterdam trip being added to my otherwise hectic life. If you have been pinning for information on how it all went, I can finally reveal that it went very well, thanks for asking. In addition, I went to Artis (Amsterdam Zoo) as part of my continued quest to visit all the science museums in Europe (the zoo contains their equivalent of a Natural History Museum); perhaps in the future I will write something about this. I will have to synthesise everything I remember about all the museums into a Coherent Whole though, so you will have to be patient.

Anyway, today I went on what you could describe as a Journey into the Past, if you were feeling grandiose. It started when I had a free hour due to one of my students being taken ill, so I decided to look up a question that I have been meaning to find the answer to for a long time. I must warn, this post gets a little sentimental, and if you find such things irritating, I apologise.
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On Michele Hanson and Game Theory

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

I read the Guardian newspaper on a semi-regular basis, and I find their coverage to range from Pretty Good to Good Lord No, with a peak around Not Bad (the quality is somewhat moot, since the ever-delightful Ben Goldacre, among other loved columnists, guarantee that I will always return).

However, there is the occasional distressing piece from an individual notably unaware of the complexity, and often the substance, of what they are talking about. One source that provides such tidbits with unfortunate frequency is in the G2 columnist Michele Hanson. Now, her column usually just offers Humorous Anecdotes and Gripes, which is fine for a supplement, but she also spends plenty of time commenting on science subjects from a platform of ignorance and, more worrying, derisive scorn. From yesterday’s column:

A bumper crop of bad science plopped out of our universities and hospitals this week. Three lots at once, and all about relationships. The first gang, from UCL, LSE and Warwick Medical School, have “developed a mathematical model of the mating game to help explain why courtship is often protracted”. Or as every girl’s mother has probably told her, “Don’t do it on the first date. If he can’t wait, he’s not worth it.” [...]

I would like to tear my hair out. I ought to be used to professors churning out this sort of old-hat, inapplicable drek, time after time, but for me the shock never fades. How do they get away with it? Has Professor Robert Seymour, of UCL, been shut away in the groves of academe since birth, and does he really think that we don’t know that “longer courtship is a way for the female to acquire information about the male”. Has he ever met a female person? Or a male from the outside world? Did he not know already that we know that you can’t get to know someone all that well in the course of a quick bang?

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On Blogs

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

Reader, if I feel I must comply with convention. No doubt you have experience the birth pangs of new blogs many a time before, and at some point early on in their creation they spawn a page that attempts to justify their existence. I have so far put this off, instead seeding my blog with secrets and lies, but I have put it off long enough.

This post will not be about my delusions of importance, my swollen ego or my desperate clawing at the twin doors of love and affection. I shall take these as read, and proceed to the proximate causes.
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On Life Finding A Way

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

You may be know, for my Day Job I am a Ph.D. student at the Sanger Institute just outside Cambridge, doing lots of exciting things with genomes and the like. However, as you may not know (but, to be honest, are just as likely to as not), as my Thing On The Side I study evolutionary algorithms with my previous supervisor Yogi Jaeger. In my first Fancy Perk of being a full-time researcher, I will be going to Amsterdam later this month to give a talk at the University of Amsterdam on a comparison between two algorithms.

Now I think the details of the comparison are actually pretty interesting to a lay-person, especially because they lead to some idle speculation about the nature of evolutionary forces. Now, Yogi generally doesn’t like me speculating about such things, since he thinks it isn’t rigorous, and he points out that lots of people far smarter than me spend their time doing advanced theoretical studies about the constraints and capacities of the evolutionary process. However, I know that you, my most kind blogventurer, will not raise such objections. And thus, once again I will subject you to my idle musing.
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On Wine and Wikis

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

If you are interested (or, perhaps, bored, though I wouldn’t like to imply an exciting blogventurer such as yourself reads my posts out of nothing more than sheer boredom) my server has recently manifested a wiki, which is dedicated to Wine. Which is not as pretentious as it sounds.

The concept sprung up from discussions between a number of my friends, and specifically from two observations. Observation 1) was that we have drunk, in our long time in Cambridge (rapidly approaching five years, for my part!) a relatively large quantity of wine. Observation B) was that whenever we go to buy wine, we are always faced with a large choice, and no idea which wines will be good or bad. Clearly, in an optimal world (e.g. a world full of fairies and classical economics*) these two observations would be contradictory, as a good proportion of the wines in the shop we have purchased, drunk and either enjoyed or loathed before. However, world of becoming, fall from grace and all that, so 90% of the time we end up grabbing wines because their label looks cute (“it has a kangaroo! Score.”).

The proposed solution was to peel off the wine labels and write down our opinions on them. This failed, due to the difficulty of removing the label without exposing it to unacceptable risk of damage (and from a chronic case of Not Being Bothered). So, the next solution is take pictures of all the wines and post them in a wiki, where anyone can comment on them. We can then access the wiki, either from our smart phones (in my case) or from a copy printed on parchment (in the case of my less advanced friends), and use it to make informed choices. The Wiki is called WineInference, and consists of two pages, the contents of which I am sure you can guess.

Feel free to use the information contained within for good, or, if you so can conceive of a way of doing so, for evil.

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* I know that you would not be so crass as to point out that in the world of classical economics all buyers would know exactly how good any given wine was a priori, and thus this entire conversation, and perhaps much of the joy of wine, would be moot.

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On Bayes and Me

Monday, January 5th, 2009

This post carries on from my previous excursion into Bayesian statistics.

Bayesian Science

A mathematician friend once told me that Bayesian inference is the type of inference that fits in most readily with the scientific method (that being the method I am most prepared to use in the majority of situations). It is true that a Bayesian inference, if done properly, represents a mathematical version of an idealised scientific inference - we have some explicitly stated prior beliefs, based on previous evidence, and we look for data, in the form of experiments or observations, which are combined to form an inference. Lovely.
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