Lambda Days

I am on the programme committee for Lambda Days, Krakow, 18-19 February 2016.

Paul Hudak Symposium: Putting the Funk in Functional Programming

Thank you to John Peterson, who is organising a symposium in memory of Paul Hudak. I was sorry to miss the session devoted to Paul at ICFP. Paul made huge contributions to FP, and though he was only a little older than me I was proud to have him as a mentor. I'm looking forward to the meeting. The symposium will take place Friday 29--Saturday 30 April 2016 at Yale.

Haskell gets Wired (but does Wired get Haskell?)

WIRED's business section has an article on Haskell, Facebook's New Spam-Killer Hints at the Future of Coding. 

LOUIS BRANDY PAUSES before answering, needing some extra time to choose his words. “I’m going to get in so much trouble,” he says. The question, you see, touches on an eternally controversial topic: the future of computer programming languages.
Brandy is a software engineer at Facebook, and alongside a team of other Facebookers, he spent the last two years rebuilding the system that removes spam—malicious, offensive, or otherwise unwanted messages—from the world’s largest social network. That’s no small task—Facebook juggles messages from more than 1.5 billion people worldwide—and to tackle the problem, Brandy and team made an unusual choice: they used a programming language called Haskell.
...
If you consider that companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon represent where the rest of the internet is going—as the internet grows, so many other online services will face the same problems it faces today—Facebook’s Haskell project can indeed point the way for the programming world as a whole. That doesn’t mean Haskell will be ubiquitous in the years to come. Because it’s so different from traditional programming languages, coders often have trouble learning to use it; undoubtedly, this will prevent widespread adoption. But Facebook’s work is a sign that other languages will move in Haskell’s general direction.
...
What about Haskell itself? In the long run, could it evolve to the point where it becomes the norm? Could coders evolve to the point where they embrace it large numbers? “I don’t know,” Brandy says. “But I don’t think it would be a bad thing.”

Spotted via Katie Miller (@codemiller) and Manuel Chakravarty (@TechnicalGrace).

The control group is out of control

From The control group is out of control, by Scott Alexander (Star Slate Codex):

Allan Crossman calls parapsychology the control group for science.
That is, in let’s say a drug testing experiment, you give some people the drug and they recover. That doesn’t tell you much until you give some other people who are taking a placebo drug you know doesn’t work – but which they themselves believe in – and see how many of them recover. That number tells you how many people will recover whether the drug works or not. Unless people on your real drug do significantly better than people on the placebo drug, you haven’t found anything.
On the meta-level, you’re studying some phenomenon and you get some positive findings. That doesn’t tell you much until you take some other researchers who are studying a phenomenon you know doesn’t exist – but which they themselves believe in – and see how many of them get positive findings. That number tells you how many studies will discover positive results whether the phenomenon is real or not. Unless studies of the real phenomenon do significantly better than studies of the placebo phenomenon, you haven’t found anything.
Trying to set up placebo science would be a logistical nightmare. You’d have to find a phenomenon that definitely doesn’t exist, somehow convince a whole community of scientists across the world that it does, and fund them to study it for a couple of decades without them figuring out the gig.
Luckily we have a natural experiment in terms of parapsychology – the study of psychic phenomena – which most reasonable people don’t believe exists but which a community of practicing scientists does and publishes papers on all the time.
The results are pretty dismal. Parapsychologists are able to produce experimental evidence for psychic phenomena about as easily as normal scientists are able to produce such evidence for normal, non-psychic phenomena. This suggests the existence of a very large “placebo effect” in science – ie with enough energy focused on a subject, you can always produce “experimental evidence” for it that meets the usual scientific standards.
...
Bem, Tressoldi, Rabeyron, and Duggan (2014) ... is parapsychology’s way of saying “thanks but no thanks” to the idea of a more rigorous scientific paradigm making them quietly wither away.
You might remember Bem as the prestigious establishment psychologist who decided to try his hand at parapsychology and to his and everyone else’s surprise got positive results. Everyone had a lot of criticisms, some of which were very very good, and the study failed replication several times. Case closed, right?
Earlier this month Bem came back with a meta-analysis of ninety replications from tens of thousands of participants in thirty three laboratories in fourteen countries confirming his original finding, p < 1.2 * -1010, Bayes factor 7.4 * 109, funnel plot beautifully symmetrical [see figure above], p-hacking curve nice and right-skewed, Orwin fail-safe n of 559, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. ... This is far better than the average meta-analysis. Bem has always been pretty careful and this is no exception.

Spotted by Conrad Hughes. Cheers, Conrad!

Don Syme awarded Silver Medal by Royal Academy of Engineering

 

 Congratulations, Don!

For over two decades, the Academy’s Silver Medals have recognised exceptional personal contributions from early- to mid-career engineers who have advanced the cause of engineering in the UK.

Three of the UK’s most talented engineers are to receive the Royal Academy of Engineering’s coveted Silver Medal for remarkable technical  achievements in their fields, coupled with commercial success.

They are the inventor of 3D printed surgical instruments, an

indoor location-tracking technology pioneer, and the creator of the F#
computer programming language.

 Full RAE Announcement. Spotted by Kevin Hammond.

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

Sydney Padua explores an alternate universe wherein Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage complete the Analytical Engine and use it to (at the order of Queen Victoria) fight crime. I've blogged before about the web comic, but the book is even better.

Padua's tome reconciles hilarity with accuracy. I am not normally a fan of footnotes: if it is worth saying, say it inline; don't force your poor reader to break the flow of thought and eye, and leap to the bottom of the page. But here is the glorious exception, where the footnotes supplement, argue with, and occasionally threaten to overflow the comic. Even the footnotes have footnotes: endnotes cite sources for the dialogue, present pocket biographies of Ada and Charles' contemporaries Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Charles Dodgson, and George Boole, quote at length from original sources, and explain the workings of the Analytic Engine. In the midst of an illustrated fantasia riff on Alice in Wonderland, the footnotes pursue an academic war as to whether or not Babbage truly considered Lovelace to be the Empress of Number. Padua makes pursuit of Victorian arcana a thrilling adventure of its own. Highly recommended!

A brief bibliography on parametricity

Henry Story asked HoTT Cafe about parametricity, prompting creation of a handy, short bibliography including Hermida, Reddy, and Robinson; Ahmed; Dreyer; Milewski (artist of the elegant diagram above); and Shulman.

How badly will Audible misuse my contact list?

In today's world, where our books, music, and photos belong to the Cloud rather than to ourselves, one problem we face is commercial concerns insisting on increased access to personal data.

I received the following note from Audible:

It looks like you may have an older version of Audible app installed on your device which needs to be updated before 6/30/15 to ensure that you enjoy uninterrupted access to your library.

Option 1: Continue to use the older version of the app.

If you receive an error message when you attempt to sign in, look in your emails for a password that you will need for sign in.

OR

Option 2 (Recommended): Upgrade to the latest version.

...

Warmest Regards,
The Audible Team

What the note doesn't mention is that updating the app requires giving Audible access to my contacts list.

Does anyone know how Audible is using the contact list? Worst case scenario is they email advertisements to my friends in my name, telling them what I am currently reading.

Do customers have any legal redress? Changing the terms of service to require access to the customer's contact list is the sort of thing the law should protect against.

Haskell in Production: Bdellium

At Medium, Fredrik (@ique) describes using Haskell in anger.

At the start of the products’ life we mostly analyzed small retirement plans with 100 to 500 plan participants. As time went on we started seeing plans with 2,000 participants and even 10,000 participants. At these numbers the execution time for the processing started going outside of acceptable bounds. Luckily, every participant could be analyzed in isolation from the others and so the problem was embarrassingly parallel.

I changed one line of code from

map outputParticipant parts

to

map outputParticipant parts `using` parListChunk 10 rdeepseq

and execution times were now about 3.7x faster on our 4-core server. That was enough to entirely fix the issue for another 6 months, during which time we could focus on further enhancing the product instead of worrying about performance. Later, we did do extensive profiling and optimization of the code to further reduce execution times significantly, but we didn’t want to prematurely optimize anything.

Spotted via Manual Chakravarty @TacticalGrace.

Stylish Academic Writing

Surprised to discover myself the subject of a "Spotlight on Style" in Stylish Academic Writing by Helen Sword. Thanks to @ctford for the heads up. The segment is about titles (no surprise there) and also quotes Robby Findler, Simon Peyton-Jones, Ralf Laemmel, Sam Lindley, Simon Marlow, Martin Odersky, Enno Runne, and Jeremy Yallop.