7pm, Holy Trinity Church, St Andrews.

Dr Hans Blix

“Time for a Revival of Disarmament?”

Best quotations:
A wise American friend of mine said: “I always trust those who seek the truth and mistrust those who claim to know it.”
During my work as a UN weapons inspector I was bugged by the US government, if only they’d paid attention to what I said(!)

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4.00pm Wednesday. Coffee from 3.45 pm, CREEM

Christian Ewald, Economics, University of St Andrews

“The conflict over parental care: A game theoretic analysis on aspects such as cooperation, benefit and welfare for the young”

In this talk we address various issues which arise in the classical parental care conflict, which have, should or could be modeled with game theoretic models. After a brief summary of fundamental concepts in game theory, aspects such as cooperation, benefit and welfare consequences for the young will be put into a game theoretic context and various models will be discussed. These models have been developed in joint work with John McNamara and Alasdair Houston.

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So, I’m writing this from the 0920 GNER from Leuchars to London Kings Cross. Fortunately due to the excellent Google Gears, I can read my RSS feeds and catch up with the 60ish unread items I currently have sitting in my Google Reader.

I’ve recently subscribed to two new feeds, both of which I find excellent. The first of these is 43Folders, which is written for GTD addicts (like Merlin Mann, the author of the blog) and wannabes (like me.) I’d been aware of 43folders for a while, but not really paid it any attention. However I recently watched a Google Tech Talk from Merlin Mann about “Inbox Zero” which is a GTD technique to minimize the amount of time one spends in their mail reader. Having had this problem for some time, I found his tips really useful, although his comparison of the Blackberry to a spontaneously combusting cat a little tenuous (watch it, you’ll understand.)

My other recent feed acquisition is Coding Horror, which has some neat tips and tricks for those doing webdev. I found it while looking for a good explanation of SQL JOINs (which I found.)

So, a few items in, I’ve stumbled across Dave Gorman’s latest entry. He offers an an excellent solution to both the current “phone in scandal” problem and the postal strikes.

From Kernel Trap an excellent initiative by the Linux kernel team to have a list of projects available for (CS) students. This is a great idea, no more lame “I’m going to build an online shopping system” or “the world really needs another CMS”-type projects. Students can feel like they are doing something useful and the kernel team get some of the work done for them.

Andrew Gelman received an e-mail about bad analysis, that didn’t really concern me, but the last two lines are absolutely true. He also has a nice article about the difference between an article and a web page in academic research. I like the idea of publishing your research as a web page and getting it out to as wide an audience as possible. This seems like what research should really be about. Not just getting your paper into JASA or Biomerika, but actually getting the guy on the street to understand what scientists do all day.This does of course mean more work for the authors, but why be a researcher if you are not trying to tell people something they didn’t know about the world.

Stephan Fry’s latst blog entry is on fame. It is, as usual, lengthy but ultimately satisfying. My favorite paragraph being:

Is it fun? Or, as student journalists always ask, what’s it like? ‘What’s it like working with Natalie Portman, what’s it like doing QI, what’s it like being famous?’ I don’t know what it is like. What is being English like? What is wearing a hat like? What’s eating Thai red curry like? I don’t believe that I can answer any question formulated that way. So, student journalists, tyro profilers and rooky reporters out there, seriously, quite seriously never ask a ‘what’s it like’ question, it instantly reveals your crapness. I used to try getting surreal when asked the question and say things like ‘being famous is like wearing blue pyjamas at the opera. It’s like kissing Neil Young, but only on Wednesdays. It’s like a silver disc gummed to the ear of a wolverine. It’s like licking crumbs from the belly of a waitress called Eileen. It’s like lemon polenta cake but slightly wider. It’s like moonrise on the planet Posker.’ I mean honestly. What’s it like?? Stop it at once.

Finally, a quick word about what else I’ve been up to. Mostly this week I’ve been attempting to do some work on my dissertation. This has been pretty tough, all in all. I really enjoy reading papers and trying to work out what’s going on, but sometimes it’s extremely frustrating when you reach an impasse and work stops for half a day until you figure out how you were being stupid this time.

While I’ve been working, I’ve been listening to a few new albums I’ve acquired over the past week or so. My dad sent me Amy Winehouse’s album, “Back to Black” which I realise I should probably slate but I have to say it’s great. A really good pop record, not much more than that, but really great at what it does. He also sent me a Freestylers double CD, “Different Story, Vol. 1″ which is a whole lot of drum’n'bass. It’s great to code to. Finally, I also downloaded the new Radiohead album. A lot has been said online about it and about how it is going to change the business model for online music. I’m not going to echo all of these comments here, I’ll just say it’s an excellent record. Maybe not as good as Thom Yorke’s “Eraser” from last year, but still excellent.

At this point the train pulls into Edinburgh Waverley, the train fills with the smell of brewery and I think I should probably do some real work.

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It’s been a tiring few days. I arrived in London on Friday, whereupon I was catapulted into a party of one of Elle’s friends. To cut a long story short, this resulted in me waking up on a bus somewhere in the vicinity of Holborn/Aldwych at 5 am on Saturday morning, unable to ascertain how long I had been on the bus. So, the rest of the weekend has been spent packing up Elle’s room in hall, which involved driving around South London in a massive mini bus for quite a portion of Saturday and Sunday.

On the subject of me not posting enough, the Oddhead Blog has an interesting article (see particularly footnote 1.)

In linkage: Greenpeace trying to get Apple to have “greener” products, Dr Strangeblix a game where you play Hans Blix (thanks to Lucy), Al Gore’s cool but messy office setup, a nice science vs faith diagram and Tyler Cowen has some advice for those like me who forget people’s names.

Finally, a really cool map of the states of the US labeled with countries of equivalent GDP.

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What have I been up to recently? Well, a lot of practicals for wildlife population assessment, and an essay for Adv. Bayesian Inference for a start. The former was not very fun but the second was pretty interesting although I’m not sure if I have any writing skills whatsoever (as those who read this blog will be able to confirm.)

On Wednesday it was “Pi Day” (3.14) I was not involved in the silliness of drinking wine in the physics common room before mid-day, my opinion is better summed up with the power of Dinosaur Comics.

In other linkage: MR on fairtrade, Steven Levitt gets annoyed with airlines (Freakonomics blog) and Ben Goldacre get angry about the global warming “documentary” which was on Channel 4 last week.

Finally, lightbluetouchpaper has a good article on how to write an abstract.

I think that’s all for now…

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It’s Monday, it’s early and I’m back in Symbolic Computation.

There is an interesting post on Marginal Revolution about textbook prices and it seems that by avoiding buying new books (by buying them second hand) we are raising the price overall (since there are less sold and authors (evil publishing companies?) get less revenue.)

MR also mentions the book All My Life for Sale by John Freyer. In the book Freyer sells all of his possessions on ebay and then goes and visits all of the items with their new owners, which is a neat idea and kind of appealing (not that I would do it!)

Intermission, at which point Tuesday happens

So, last night I went to an Apple recrcuitment event. It was pretty interesting. I think it made me realise that I really don’t want to work for them. Although the guys who were talking were nice, funny and smart they really were selling the Apple brand (in a broad sense.) There were two employess who came along and gave a 2 hour presentation/question session. Once was a recruiter (who had previously worked at Sun) and the other was a software engineer (from their OS group.) I was surprised when thy sadi that their engineering groups were so small (the people working on the new wikis feature in Leopard numbers only 6 ish) and that they hire so many interns (around 200-300.) I think overall it galvanised my opinion about working for big business (or small business) is that there doesn’t really seem to be very much exciting science, it’s all about product.

Via Andrew Gelman’s blog I found RSeek which allows you to search through a lot of R documentation and website all at once, with added tasty AJAX.

Another exciting installment from the Microlab on Friday!

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Well, I am back to having lectures in the microlab (as was the case in first year) so it would appear I’m spending a little more time with my friend Google Reader…

In that vein, I found (via the Freakonomics blog) an interesting article about a coffee shop that doesn’t have any prices on their menu. This forces people to decide for themselves how much their food and drinks were worth and also feel the pressure from their fellow patrons. It’s an interesting idea and, unsurprisingly, thought up by a Google employee.

interlude, at which point Thursday happens

Math fangirls are very funny. I just overheard a conversation in the microlab along the lines of “I was in the Whey Pat last night and Dr Reinaud and Mr McCabe were there! And then Prof Dritschel came in too! We were like the only ones in the pub!” This reminds me a little of the article a read some time back about “slide-rule celebrities” about the number of popular economics blogs.

I’ve mentioned Swivel before and thanks to Statistical Modelling I have also discovered Data360 and Many Eyes from IBM.

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