Arbitrary Names

Language Log is a treasure trove. Every time I dive into its archives I find something old, but new to me, that is interesting.

In 2004, Geoffrey Pullum discussed his refusal to learn which business model for massage is called incall and which is called outcall, on the grounds that the names are utterly unhelpful and "if I can't see how it follows by some sort of linguistic principles, I will just forget it again." Later that same day, Christopher Potts pointed out that similar problems exist with ordering food "in" or "out", pushing an appointment "up" or "back", and (my favorite) identifying the root of a tree structure as maximal or minimal in the dominance relation. (Potts also says that "linguists draw their trees upside down, with the root at the top of the page" which of course is right-side up to computer scientists like me, as long as we're talking about trees as an abstract graph structure rather than about trees, the plants.)

I love reading this kind of LL post, because some of these are the kind of things about language, especially technical language, that drive me crazy.

Example: Statistics textbooks classify the ways a statistical test can go wrong as "type 1 errors" and "type 2 errors". (Or maybe they use Roman numerals. The point, namely that these names are stupid, is the same.) I have an old book (actually, a new copy of a Dover edition of an old text) that calls them "errors of the first kind" and "errors of the second kind". Now, one of these kinds of errors is when your test tells you two things are different when they're really the same, and the other is when the test tells you they are the same when they're really different. Like Pullum, I absolutely refuse to even try to remember which is which. And also like Pullum, I anticipate that many people reading this statement would respond to it by trying to tell me anyway: the fact that I don't know is not the point; the point is that the meanings of these technical terms are arbitrary, reflecting nothing about the events they describe but depending instead on what order some founding father of statistics happened to think of them in.

So what do I suggest? Well, in many contexts, like testing people for diseases or testing drugs for treatment effects or identifying spam or whatever, the terms "false positive" and "false negative" are transparent and work perfectly well. In other cases, where the designation of outcomes as "positive" and "negative" is not obvious, the statistics literature provides the terms "rejection error" and "acceptance error", referring to rejection or acceptance of the null hypothesis; which hypothesis is null is an unambiguous technical fact about the statistical method being used.

Interestingly, there are tons of these arbitrary namings in mathematics, and I don't object to all of them. I don't really care, for example, about the fact that one kind of function is called a homomorphism and another very different kind of function is called a homeomorphism, even though (as far as I can tell) there's no way to look at those words and determine from their structures which means what. But in this case, and many others, there's a good reason not to mind: a homomorphism is a function you study in algebra, and a homeomorphism is one you study in topology. So while if you're reading this paragraph as a nonmathematician and seeing these terms for the first time I could forgive you for being confused, the average mathematician probably learned the definitions of those two words in separate classes, probably separate semesters of undergraduate math. They're probably conceptually separate enough that no one who cares about either thing can possibly be confused.

Similarly, before I studied Euclidean geometry in ninth grade, I could never remember which kind of pair of angles was called complementary and which was called supplementary. (To be truthful, it's now been long enough that I will have to go look them up before I can finish this paragraph.) (Okay, looked it up. And guess what? I had it right.) There's an episode of the Cosby Show where Cockroach, complaining to Dr. Huxtable about having to study for a math test, says "I couldn't care less about complementary and supplementary angles." If he meant he didn't want to learn which word meant which thing, and Mrs. Westlake had organized her syllabus such that the two definitions were on the same pop quiz, then I can't say I blame him. But when I took geometry, the notion of a straight angle was introduced a whole week or two before that of a right angle. I'm not sure why that was, but it had the pleasant effect of letting us talk about supplementary angles for quite a while before we had to know about complementary angles. By the time we had to learn the second word, we were comfortable enough with the first word that they didn't interfere. (At least not for me. My classmates might not have agreed.) The difference between the classroom experience and the, well, call it the "dictionary experience" was impressive to me even then.

And don't get me started on confluence and the Church-Rosser property. Because I've spent so much time on these two examples that I'll have to save that one for later.

Paul Davies: Taking Science on Faith

Op-ed in the New York Times.

Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from “that’s not a scientific question” to “nobody knows.” The favorite reply is, “There is no reason they are what they are — they just are.” The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are. If one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality — the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes a mockery of science.

A very nice essay on the importance of faith to science. I have had many of the thoughts expressed here myself, but this is a much more eloquent presentation than I could have created. Read it.

The what percent?

From the Straight Dope Classic that ran today:

According to David Orme-Johnson, a researcher at Maharishi International University, "Thirty-one sociological studies conducted throughout the world document that the quality of life in society significantly improves when as little as the square root of one percent of a population practices TM-Sidhi Yogic Flying together in one place."

The square root of one percent? Is that ten percent, as in 0.10*0.10=0.01? Or, just as implausibly, does it mean (size of population affected) = 100 * (number of meditators)^2?

Impunity

Hey, I learned something today!

From Al Jazeera English (emphasis added):

Farida Deif, researcher in the women's rights division of Human Rights Watch, said: "A courageous young woman faces lashing and prison for speaking out about her efforts to find justice.

"This verdict not only sends victims of sexual violence the message that they should not press charges, but in effect offers protection and impunity to the perpetrators."

This is the first time I can remember seeing the word impunity not preceded by with. It looked so strange that I thought it might be a typo for immunity, like the kind prosecutors sometimes give to witnesses who would otherwise be subject to prosecution themselves. Most of the time, when I hear or read that someone acts "with impunity", I take it to refer to the attitude of the person acting, the confidence that their crimes will go unpunished. This isn't something it makes sense to "offer" someone, even unintentionally and even only "in effect" -- you can offer someone the opportunity to act with impunity, but you can't offer the impunity itself.

But never mind all that, because I looked it up, and sure enough, impunity means precisely "exemption or freedom from punishment, harm, or loss". So not only does it refer to the fact of non-punishment rather than just to the expectation of non-punishment, but it can refer to "exemption" rather than mere "freedom" from punishment. So when a prosecutor grants a witness immunity, I suppose she is also granting him impunity. Then again, the dictionary's usage example was "laws were flouted with impunity", which lets me go on believing it's weird to use impunity without with.

In any case, it may be that Al Jazeera's command of the English language is better than mine.

I suppose I have to compare and contrast Al Jazeera's (English-language) coverage of this story with the U.S. media's. The second sentence of the Al Jazeera story is:

But the decision to give a woman who was gang raped a six months jail term and 200 lashes received only mild criticism from the US on Monday.

The headline on CNN.com (as of now) is "Clinton: Saudi rape verdict 'an outrage'", and the article says in part:

Labeling it "an outrage", Sen. Clinton urged the U.S. government to protest the decision.

"The Bush administration has refused to condemn the sentence and said it will not protest an internal Saudi decision," the Democratic presidential frontrunner said in a statement.

That's not so different, but I have to admit that I read the CNN piece first and sort of missed the fact that the Bush administration has not condemned something so obviously condemnable. The Al Jazeera version puts it much more bluntly. I guess Democrats, particularly those running for President, criticize the Bush administration so often that I no longer assume it means they've actually done something wrong.

Abbas And Peres Call For Peace

Al Jazeera English quotes Israeli President Shimon Peres, referring to an upcoming Israeli-Palestinian peace conference to be hosted by the U.S.:

"Annapolis will not just be a performance, it is a stage on an agreed path that could lead to a peace agreement in the right direction."

Is that setting the bar low enough? At least Peres seems to think the meeting will involve some kind of progress -- later in the article, he is contradicted by "one Israeli official" who is quoted as saying:

"It's not a conference, as Israel has explained many times, but a meeting where representatives will read declarations without entering into negotiations."

Sigh.

Clearly I've been reading too much Language Log, because here's what I notice. When I saw the word "stage" following the word "performance", I initially assigned it the wrong meaning. The fact that "Annapolis" refers primarily to a place (kind of like "all the world"), rather than an event, is also a factor. (Obviously I'm not claiming it's not legit to use a place name to refer to an event that occurred or is scheduled to occur there. Witness "Pearl Harbor", "Kitty Hawk", or "Abu Ghraib".) Believing I am too smart to be tripped up by nothing, I submit that this is a clumsy translation. (Though I don't know what language the original statement was made in -- for all I know it was English!) And has Israel explained many times that the Annapolis meeting is not a conference, or claimed many times that it is one? I don't remember the name of the semantic phenomenon that causes me to favor the former interpretation, but it's the thing where saying someone "explained that X" (as opposed to "said that X" or "asserted that X") entails agreeing that X is true (though I suppose not as strongly as "proved that X"). The official clearly believes that the truth is "It's not a conference," so that's what Israel must have explained. Thus I am led to a picture of the Israeli government attempting many times to reassure its own citizens that their leaders are not getting ready to give anything away. Is that just me?

I found this after being persuaded to try reading some Al Jazeera news coverage.

Love Soul Mate

Love Soul Mate - "Find out the name of your Love Soulmate"

This was the target of a banner ad I saw today. The banner said it would "Calculate the exact name of your perfect lover!" And even though I wouldn't want anyone to think I'm looking for a more perfect mate than I have, I clicked. To save you the trouble of trying this yourself, here's what happened:

Select your gender. I click on the guy.

Select your sign. I click on Aries.

Enter your name (this will be used in the calculation). I type "Joe".

Enter your cell number.

I click "Back".

This is such a blatant spamtrap that I didn't even bother reading the fine print. Enter my cell number. Ha! I probably shouldn't even encourage these people by linking to their site. But somehow I can't resist.

Shortening Ph.D. programs

Caution: bitter rant from a recent Ph.D. recipient approaching!

Here's an article in the NYT on how universities are trying to
shorten the process of writing Ph.D. dissertations.

For those who attempt it, the doctoral dissertation can loom on the horizon like Everest, gleaming invitingly as a challenge but often turning into a masochistic exercise once the ascent is begun.

Very cute.

Nevertheless, education researchers like Barbara E. Lovitts, who has written a new book urging professors to clarify what they expect in dissertations; for example, to point out that professors “view the dissertation as a training exercise” and that students should stop trying for “a degree of perfection that’s unnecessary and unobtainable.”

First of all, is that a sentence? The only way I can parse that as a sentence is if "like" is a verb, giving something similar to "Education researchers approve of Barbara E. Lovitts." I don't think that's what was meant.

I remember being told that I should stop worrying about whether my dissertation was going to be perfect and just write the damn thing. "The only good thesis is a finished thesis," I think someone said, although "The only bad thesis is an unfinished thesis" would have been more helpful. I remember at least one of my graduate student colleagues reworking and reworking one chapter of his dissertation for weeks while his advisors told him in very direct terms that it didn't matter and he should leave it the way it was. So when the time finally comes for a CS graduate student to write a dissertation, yes, professors are pretty clear that it doesn't have to be a masterpiece.

But I would be very surprised to learn that professors at my graduate institution really thought of the entire process as a mere "training exercise." If they do, then they need to read Barbara E. Lovitts' book about how to make that clear to their students.

Here's how it looks from a student's point of view. Everyone knows that a Ph.D. thesis involves original research. What's a little less known to outsiders is that Ph.D. thesis projects comprise a sizable portion of the total original research that gets done in a university setting -- particularly in computer science, where there are fewer postdocs than in, say, chemistry. (The article refers to A.B.D. graduate students as a "pitied species" -- postdoc, the next stage in the academic life cycle, is actually one of the Worst Jobs in Science!) So the papers graduate students publish about their thesis work in peer-reviewed conferences and journals account for a significant percentage of the published articles those students' advisors' names are on. So professors are counting on their graduate students -- and in particular, on the Ph.D. thesis projects of their students, though admittedly not the dissertations themselves -- for exposure, reputation, tenure and funding.

It is easy to imagine that some professors -- ones I'd call "bad advisors" right to their faces if I had a chance -- make no attempt whatsoever to insulate their students from the pressure inherent in this situation. Let me just state for the record right now that I have never worked with any such people in real life. My own Ph.D. advisor certainly isn't one. Bad advisors are undoubtedly more prevalent in some fields of study than others -- in some disciplines, the pace of innovation and the pressure on faculty may even make bad advising the norm! Such professors think of graduate students as their own employees -- though they usually aren't -- and what ought to be five years of "training exercises" turn instead into five years of thankless labor. Viewing things this way, de-emphasis of the dissertation (touted as progress in this article) might actually be harmful to students' morale: naturally, the research a student does is much more important to a bad advisor than the dissertation about that research he or she produces at the end; since the dissertation itself is not published, any time spent writing it is time the student is getting paid for "nothing", and the ruthlessly efficient bad advisor tries hard to deny the student the very useful (and cathartic) exercise of writing a coherent report of his or her accomplishments. (Sure, whatever, just staple your published articles together and we can all get back to the lab where we belong.) The Ph.D. diploma is no longer a certificate of significant accomplishment you frame and hang on the wall (as I have done with mine), but more like a terse letter of reference you get when your first entry-level job lays you off. (As an aside, when I was hired at Caltech the lady who verified my credentials never saw my diploma, just a letter from my graduate department administrator stating that I had qualified for one. I imagine it's like that for a lot of folks.)

There. I feel better. Now I have to back off and clarify that I have no proof that advisors this bad actually exist. Most professors I know are Good Advisors who take their roles as mentors seriously. They encourage students to do the best work they can, helping them along and not confronting them with cold analysis of their contributions to the lab's bottom line. They see the beneficial symbiosis of the student-advisor relationship: the student is there to learn, and does so by doing brilliant work that reflects the advisor's brilliant leadership. Everybody wins. That's the way it should be.

Who Needs Hackers? - New York Times

Who Needs Hackers?

The New York Times on the observation that complex systems can fail with spectacular results even in the absence of malicious attackers.

Eleven lessons learned from 9/11 - Travel News - MSNBC.com

Seen on MSNBC.com:

For the airline industry, 9/11 will always be a watershed moment, the horror between "before 9/11" and after "9/11."

Is this just lousy editing, or am I missing a fiendishly clever syntactic joke?

The Effects of Petraeus' Testimony

Iraq 'surge' working, Petraeus tells Congress - CNN.com: "A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll taken last month found about two-thirds of Americans -- 64 percent -- oppose the Iraq war, and 72 percent say even if Petraeus reports progress, that won't change their opinion."


Um, what? Does that say that more Americans say they won't change their opinion if Petraeus reports progress than say they oppose the war in the first place? I guess we're supposed to think that means that 72% of the 64% who oppose the war will still oppose it even if Petraeus reports progress, that is, that 46% of Americans both oppose the war and will continue to do so even if Petraeus reports progress, but that's really not what it says.

What it does say implies that 28% of Americans might change their opinion if Petraeus reports progress. Now, I suppose there might be people who don't oppose the war but would start opposing it if Petraeus reports progress, but that's a strange position; common sense says that most of the Americans who might change their opinions if Petraeus reports progress are among those for whom a change of opinion would entail ceasing to oppose the war. So somewhere between zero and 28% of Americans (but almost certainly closer to the latter) oppose the war now but might change their opinion if Petraeus reports progress. In other words, it's possible that up to 44% of those Americans who oppose the war now might change their opinion if Petraeus reports progress. That's pretty different from the 34% implied by the analysis in my first paragraph.

I decline to state which of these groups I am in. But I think the more interesting question is whether those who do not support the war and would not change their opinions even if Petraeus reports progress -- however many of them there actually are -- hold that view because they think any recent progress is irrelevant or because they think Petraeus is an unreliable source of information on the matter.

By the way, as the linked article title indicates, Petraeus has reported progress. What percentage of Americans are surprised?

Quote of the Day

Just saw this while researching a contribution to Wikipedia's type theory article:

Moreover we shall adopt the customary, self-explanatory, usage, according to which symbols belonging to the formal language serve in the syntax language (English) as names for themselves, and juxtaposition serves to denote juxtaposition.

Whoah.

Reference:

Alonzo Church. A formulation of the simple theory of types. The Journal of Symbolic Logic 5(2):56-68, Jun. 1940.

NYT on Ending Wars Soon Enough

How a Revolution Saved an Empire - New York Times

Wow. And I thought people were joking when they compared George and George. A very well written piece IMHO.

Dobbs: Don't let our leaders divide us - CNN.com

Lou Dobbs says we should not let our leaders divide us. Good idea, but:

President George W. Bush, seeking support for his so-called "comprehensive immigration reform" proposal, declared that "America should not fear diversity." Those are neither the words of a leader, nor a uniter.

Never mind whose words those are, Lou -- only those who fear diversity think it's the same thing as division. Sadly, it's self-fulfilling: fear of heterogeneity leads to segregation, segregation facilitates division. If we had no fear we'd all be better off.

Black and White

Lighting Candles
Originally uploaded by C Joe V.

The best shot from my first roll of black and white film: Timi lighting the candles for a Passover seder. Kodak BW400CN film; Pentax-F 35-70mm zoom lens; Pentax SF1n, probably shutter priority at 1/60 sec. Scanned at home from a 4x6 print, sharpened (too much?) in Photoshop.

Computer Science Takes Steps to Bring Women to the Fold - New York Times

Computer Science Takes Steps to Bring Women to the Fold - New York Times

There has been backlash, [Dr. Lenore Blum of Carnegie Mellon] said, including “calls from outraged parents saying, ‘My son has three patents, how come he did not get into Carnegie Mellon?’ ”

Boy, no two ways about it, college admissions is tough these days.

"Earth's Black Hole"

Boy, am I disappointed with the History Channel. In this wonderful piece I saw some parts of last night, they seriously suggest that there is a black hole in the Bermuda Triangle. I am smart enough to notice that they start every other sentence with "some people believe," but I also remember what it was like to be a young person, interested in science and old enough to watch the History Channel but too young to pick up on weasel phrases like this. I can just imagine how many kids are in school today saying "I heard there's a black hole in the Bermuda Triangle."

I mean, they sent a camera crew out on a boat with a guy who had invented a magnetic anomaly measurement device that he seriously called a "BTD" (Bermuda Triangle Detector). It some flashing lights and a buzzer that went off now and then but no other readout of any kind. I changed the channel before I could hear this guy's conclusions.

Those crazy turtles

Apparently the situation depicted by the photo in my last post is not atypical. Walking past the same pond today I noticed no fewer than five turtles all trying to sun themselves on the same rock. They were climbing up on top of each other, knocking each other into the water... it seemed pretty frustrating for them.

As Forrest Gump said, I guess sometimes there just aren't enough rocks.

How did I get here?

Seen on campus today. Not sure what is going on, but it doesn't look too comfortable.

Blogging an Image!

Waterlily 2
Originally uploaded by C Joe V.

This is a test of the "Blog this" button on flickr.

Did I mention I have a flickr page?

The Boycott

So yesterday was the Great American Boycott of 2006, when a vaguely specified group of workers skipped work and a vaguely specified group of consumers stopped patronizing a vaguely specified group of businesses in support of the vaguely specified rights of a vaguely specified group of people. Demonstrators clogged the streets of US cities waving flags (some of them Mexican) and chanting (often in Spanish) to show that they are Americans too.

Was it about immigrants? Was it about illegal immigrants? Was it about Hispanic illegal immigrants? And what did they want? I'm not sure I know.

What I do know is that some of the things people said bother me. First of all, there seems to be a sense that illegal immigration is not illegal, or shouldn't be -- that people from other countries have some kind of inherent right to come to the U.S. in search of a better life, even if they do so by circumventing the immigration laws and procedures. "We're not criminals." Or "We didn't come here to break the law, we came here to work." That doesn't change the fact that you broke the law by coming here, and that anyone who hires you to work for them is breaking the law too.

Here's a more subtle annoying thing. At a rally I walked past yesterday, the man at the microphone was saying that contrary to popular arguments, the presence of immigrants has little or no impact on wages. Furthermore, he went on to say, immigrants do jobs that would go undone in their absence because Americans do not want to do them. Now wait a minute. Why don't Americans want those jobs? Because they don't pay well enough. Why don't they pay well? Because there are people who are willing to do them for very little. But some of those jobs are necessary: someone has to do them, so if the people who do them now weren't here, their employers would have to offer better pay. Now, I know that the availability of cheap labor creates jobs that would not otherwise exist (gardeners, maids...) but not all low-paying jobs that immigrants have now would disappear without them, and as for those that did not, well, either (1) Americans would do them just as they are, or (2) they would pay more. So the guy at the rally must have gotten something wrong.

My bottom line opinion is that the U.S., like any other country, has a right to control who gets to enter and who gets to stay. It's a security issue. The fact that there are so many undocumented persons in the country now shows that our immigration laws and border controls are a joke -- and that should not be. We need to improve our border security by a lot, regardless of what we do about the people who are here now. As for them, we must not create a system where all you have to do to live and work in the U.S. indefinitely is go undetected for a certain amount of time until a blanket amnesty is passed or some time limit expires -- that would only create incentives for people to help each other hide. That's a security issue, too -- the marchers and chanters yesterday may not have been terrorists, but if good people can cross our borders and live for years in the shadows, so can bad.