First Paul, now John

Two years ago we lost Paul Hudak to cancer. Today I was saddened to learn that we have lost his close collaborator, John Peterson, to a climbing accident. Both will be missed.

Option A vs B: Decision Time

Tomorrow Edinburgh City Council will decide between Options A and B for the East-West Cycle route, after deferring a decision last September.  Some of the recent coverage:

• A visualisation of Roseburn Option A (above).
• A comparison of road layout, current against Option A (below).
• A letter in the Edinburgh Evening News from East-West nemesis Pete Gregson.
• A letter from Transport Committee head Leslie Hinds, rebutting the previous letter.
• A two-page spread in the Edinburgh Evening News.
• A blog post from Daisy Narayanan of Sustrans.

Daisy's post hit the mark:

We have seen narratives that create an ‘us’ and ‘them’ – pitting ‘motorists’ against ‘cyclists’ against ‘pedestrians’. With such projects, it is hugely disheartening to see what should have been a force for positive change become a focus for anger. It is equally disheartening to see strong evidence and the policies of the Scottish Government which support a more active, greener Scotland being undermined by such opposition.

In darker moments, I have been tempted to draw parallels to the post-fact world that we seem to inhabit at present.

Previously:
  Option A vs B: Kicked into the long grass

  Option A: Think about the children

  Roseburn to Leith Walk A vs B: time to act!
  Ride the Route in support of Option A

Do you have Q?

A study conducted at Northeastern analyses the factors that contribute to success in science. Age is not one of them.

The research team began by focusing on career physicists. It ransacked the literature going back to 1893, identifying 2,856 physicists with careers of 20 years or more who published at least one paper every five years — widely cited findings rated as “impact” papers — and the team analyzed when in a career those emerged. ...
[K]eeping productivity equal, the scientists were as likely to score a hit at age 50 as at age 25. The distribution was random; choosing the right project to pursue at the right time was a matter of luck.
Yet turning that fortuitous choice into an influential, widely recognized contribution depended on another element, one the researchers called Q.
Q could be translated loosely as “skill,” and most likely includes a broad variety of factors, such as I.Q., drive, motivation, openness to new ideas and an ability to work well with others. Or, simply, an ability to make the most of the work at hand: to find some relevance in a humdrum experiment, and to make an elegant idea glow.
“This Q factor is so interesting because it potentially includes abilities people have but may not recognize as central,” said Zach Hambrick, a professor of psychology at Michigan State University. “Clear writing, for instance. Take the field of mathematical psychology. You may publish an interesting finding, but if the paper is unreadable, as so many are, you can’t have wide impact because no one understands what you’re talking about.”

Benedict Carey, New York Times, When It Comes to Success, Age is Just a Number.

Anti-semitism, conjured and real

Accusations of anti-semitism in the Labour party have gone virtually unchallenged, which is unconscionable because almost all of what is referred to as 'anti-semitism' is simply legitimate protest against Israel's oppression of Palestinians. David Plank at Jews Sans Frontiers has just published a thorough debunking. 

I've been lucky to rarely face anti-semitism in my personal life. So its salutary to be reminded the extent to which it actually exists in the world. If nothing else, this is something that Donald Trump does well.

Trump's campaign is based on dog-whistle racism, including anti-semitism, as called out in An Open Letter to Jared Kushner from one of your Employees and, more humorously, by Jon Stewart in The Day I Woke Up To Find Out Somebody Was Tweeting Weird Shit About Me.

 

Of course, many others than Jews have faced the same racism, as noted in The Price I’ve Paid for Opposing Donald Trump.

The issues at stake have been eloquently stated, more forthrightly than in most media, by Adam Gopnik in A Point of View. I expect most folk reading this will not be supporters of Trump, but, if you are, please listen to it before you vote.

Papers We Love Remote Meetup: John Reynolds, Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order Languages

I will reprise my June presentation to Papers We Love London at Papers We Love Remote Meetup 2, today at 7pm UK time, with the subject John Reynolds, Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order Languages. Learn the origins of denotational semantics and continuations. Additional citations here. See you there!

Lambdaman (and Lambdawoman) supporting Bootstrap - Last Three Days!

You have just three more days to order your own Lambdaman or Lambdawoman t-shirt, as featured in the video of Propositions as Types. Now available in unisex, children's, and women's shirts. Profits go to Bootstrap, an organisation run by Shriram Krishnamurthi, Matthias Felleisen, and the PLT group that teaches functional programming to middle and high school students. Order will be printed on October 15. 

Lambdaman, supporting Bootstrap

After watching talks or videos of Propositions as Types, folk ask me how they can get their own Lambdaman t-shirt. In the past, I tried to make it available through various services, but they always rejected the design as a copyright violation. (It's not, it's fair use.) Thanks to a little help from my friends, CustomInk has agreed to print the design as a Booster. Sign up now, order will be printed on October 15. Any profits (there will be more if there is a bigger order) go to Bootstrap, an organisation run by Shriram Krishnamurthi, Matthias Felleisen, and the PLT group that teaches functional programming to middle and high school students. Order has already surpassed our goal of fifty shirts!

Option A vs B: Kicked into the long grass

I've been putting off posting about the final outcome of the West-East Cycle Route confrontation at Edinburgh City Council's Transport and Environment committee, in part because there was no final outcome.

I sat through four hours of Edinburgh Council's Transport and Environment Committee. The end result was a fudge. The Council heard adamant depositions from both sides, and decided not to decide. They will form a stakeholder group, with representatives from all involved, and attempt to come to a compromise that satisfies all sides. But it's hard to see how that can happen: if we don't get a straight route it will be a disaster, but if we do folk in Roseburn will fear an impact on their businesses (studies show cycle routes don't harm business, but they seem to be taking the Gove line: they are tired of hearing from experts).

Though perhaps we were lucky to get a fudge. Had it gone to a straight vote, following the whip Greens and Labour would have voted for Option A (7 votes) while the SDP, Conservatives, and Liberal Democrats would have voted for Option B (8 votes). As it was, the Greens gave a rousing defense of Option A, with fantastic speeches from Nigel Bagshaw and Chas Booth. Everyone else supported the 'compromise', and took the opportunity to excoriate the Greens for taking a principled stand. Even those who would have voted for Option B expressed support for cycling, and perhaps that is something we can build on.

Dave duFeu of Spokes posted an excellent summary, including links to the webcast of the meeting and a list of the steps you can take to support the West-East Cycle Route.

The Edinburgh Evening News offered coverage in the two days before: Cyclists take to street to support £6m cycle “superhighway” and D-Day for cycleway in Edinburgh amidst anger and division. The first of these features a couple of photos of me arguing with opponents of the cycle route in Roseburn. I don't look calm and collected. Oddly, I can't find any coverage the Evening News gave to the outcome of the Transport and Environment committee meeting. Was there any?

Not only are Roseburn residents up in arms. A similar cycleway in Bearsden, near Glasgow, is attracting comparable ire from its locals. What is our best way forward to fight bicycle bigots?

Previously: 

  Option A: Think about the children

  Roseburn to Leith Walk A vs B: time to act!
  Ride the Route in support of Option A

What is it like to understand advanced mathematics?

A correspondent on Quora explains the insider's view to an outsider. Some selections:

• You can answer many seemingly difficult questions quickly. But you are not very impressed by what can look like magic, because you know the trick. The trick is that your brain can quickly decide if a question is answerable by one of a few powerful general purpose "machines"  (e.g., continuity arguments, the correspondences between geometric and algebraic objects, linear algebra, ways to reduce the infinite to the finite through various forms of compactness) combined with specific facts you have learned about your area. The number of fundamental ideas and techniques that people use to solve problems is, perhaps surprisingly, pretty small -- seehttp://www.tricki.org/tricki/map for a partial list, maintained by Timothy Gowers.
• You go up in abstraction, "higher and higher". The main object of study yesterday becomes just an example or a tiny part of what you are considering today. For example, in calculus classes you think about functions or curves. In functional analysis or algebraic geometry, you think of spaces whose pointsare functions or curves -- that is, you "zoom out" so that every function is just a point in a space, surrounded by many other "nearby" functions. Using this kind of zooming out technique, you can say very complex things in short sentences -- things that, if unpacked and said at the zoomed-in level, would take up pages. Abstracting and compressing in this way makes it possible to consider extremely complicated issues with one's limited memory and processing power.
• You are easily annoyed by imprecision in talking about the quantitative or logical. This is mostly because you are trained to quickly think about counterexamples that make an imprecise claim seem obviously false.

ISDS enables corruption

I've long known that ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) is one of the worst aspects of TTIP, TTP, and CETA. But I've thought the main problem with ISDS was first, that it enabled businessmen to sue governments over laws enacted to save their citizenry (as in the cartoon below), and, second, its secrecy. What I did not understand was how it enables corruption. Kudos to Buzzfeed for their detailed investigation.

Say a nation tries to prosecute a corrupt CEO or ban dangerous pollution. Imagine that a company could turn to this super court and sue the whole country for daring to interfere with its profits, demanding hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars as retribution.

Imagine that this court is so powerful that nations often must heed its rulings as if they came from their own supreme courts, with no meaningful way to appeal. That it operates unconstrained by precedent or any significant public oversight, often keeping its proceedings and sometimes even its decisions secret. That the people who decide its cases are largely elite Western corporate attorneys who have a vested interest in expanding the court’s authority because they profit from it directly, arguing cases one day and then sitting in judgment another. That some of them half-jokingly refer to themselves as “The Club” or “The Mafia.”

And imagine that the penalties this court has imposed have been so crushing — and its decisions so unpredictable — that some nations dare not risk a trial, responding to the mere threat of a lawsuit by offering vast concessions, such as rolling back their own laws or even wiping away the punishments of convicted criminals. This system is already in place, operating behind closed doors in office buildings and conference rooms in cities around the world. Known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, it is written into a vast network of treaties that govern international trade and investment, including NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Congress must soon decide whether to ratify.

These trade pacts have become a flashpoint in the US presidential campaign. But an 18-month BuzzFeed News investigation, spanning three continents and involving more than 200 interviews and tens of thousands of documents, many of them previously confidential, has exposed an obscure but immensely consequential feature of these trade treaties, the secret operations of these tribunals, and the ways that business has co-opted them to bring sovereign nations to heel.

The series starts today with perhaps the least known and most jarring revelation: Companies and executives accused or even convicted of crimes have escaped punishment by turning to this special forum. Based on exclusive reporting from the Middle East, Central America, and Asia, BuzzFeed News has found the following:

• A Dubai real estate mogul and former business partner of Donald Trump was sentenced to prison for collaborating on a deal that would swindle the Egyptian people out of millions of dollars — but then he turned to ISDS and got his prison sentence wiped away.
• In El Salvador, a court found that a factory had poisoned a village — including dozens of children — with lead, failing for years to take government-ordered steps to prevent the toxic metal from seeping out. But the factory owners’ lawyers used ISDS to help the company dodge a criminal conviction and the responsibility for cleaning up the area and providing needed medical care.
• Two financiers convicted of embezzling more than $300 million from an Indonesian bank used an ISDS finding to fend off Interpol, shield their assets, and effectively nullify their punishment.