The Onion Wins Again: Roger Ailes Edition

The Onion wins yet again! This one is really funny.

Deadpan Reaction to Unhinged Presidency

In it's article about the outlandish statements by the White House's Press Secretary about the size of the Inauguration crowd, CNN.com has unleashed some beautiful deadpan: "This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period," Spicer said, contradicting all available data."

The article title is also great: White House press secretary attacks media for accurately reporting inauguration crowds.

(When I see a story about such ridiculous, flagrant lies (which anybody can see from all available data, including videos, transportation data, and more) posted on Facebook, I need Facebook to add a nuanced 'reaction' that modifies their laughter icon into the type of hysterical laughter that occurs as one is losing one's mind. Their reactions aren't nuanced enough for this. Sure, I'm angry, but I want a 'hysterical laughter' reaction.)

Update (1/24/17): And Spicer's feud against Dippin' Dots ice cream is simply bizarre (and free advertising).

Green Jelly Beans Linked to Acne!

You better be careful, because scientists have found that green jelly beans are linked to acne (at least according to xkcd).

This particularly xckd sure hits the nail on the head, doesn't it?

The 26-year Losing Streak is Over!

The Caltech men's basketball team has won its first conference game in 26 years, breaking a 310-game losing streak!

Of course, the world has changed quite a lot since our last victory.

(Tip of the cap to Vincent Kong and Greg Fricke for this article, and a tip of the cap to numerous Techers and one non-Techer for the news itself. I linked to a story that Greg Fricke posted.)

Update (2/25/11): Here is an article posted on Caltech's website about the victory. And the Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times wrote an absolutely brilliant comment in his article: "The partying continued long into the night, with players failing to return to their homework after a weeknight game for the first time in many years."

Cows are apparently sexier than tensors.

As you know, I am the coauthor on a new paper on community structure in multislice networks, which has just appeared in Science and which I genuinely believe makes a very big advance.

I am also the coauthor of a recently submitted paper entitled A Mathematical Model for the Dynamics and Synchronization of Cows that has been posted on the arXiv, as is normal procedure in mathematics and physics (and, increasingly, other fields). Nevertheless, this paper has not yet been peer-reviewed, and I can't stress this enough.

Guess which paper is getting more attention?

I will readily admit that I have some fun when I get media attention, and that it's pretty damned cool to be see articles in places like Technology Review, Boing Boing, and Marginal Revolution about my work. I'm flattered, and some of what is written is entertaining (and some of the accompanying pictures are entertaining). This has been a fun project with some interesting scientific results (on which I believe we can build with a lot of additional hard work), and we included a couple of jokes in the paper because frankly it makes it nicer to read. Also, I am happy to see a lighthearted tone in some of the places that have discussed our work, but I am a bit disturbed by a couple of things:

(1) Some of the venues that have discussed our work used figures without asking for our permission. That's just not cool. I would gladly give permission, but you really ought to ask.

(2) I'm not surprised by the media attention on something that hasn't been peer-reviewed and indeed have experienced this before, but can we please make a distinction between something that is published and something that is on a preprint server and has not yet undergone peer review? Some (but not all) of the articles that I have seen are ignoring this crucial distinction, and it's a bit annoying to see increasingly inaccurate statements from people who are playing a sort of "whispering game" and making incorrect approximations of what other people wrote (and writing unsubstantiated things as if they were facts). I know that's the nature of things, but it's frustrating, and when I see a post that is not lighthearted but instead tries to use our work to advocate some cause that has absolutely nothing to do with what we studied (which is a biologically-inspired mathematical model, and I feel a very interesting one), I feel just a little bit worse about the world than I did before.


If you are reading this and are a journalist, please note that my coauthors and I wish to wait until after the peer review process runs its course (and the paper is accepted to a scientific journal---ideally the one to which we have already submitted it) before we grant any interviews. We are very excited about our work, but please let's not be premature about things! Now if you want to talk to me about multislice networks, then I would be extremely pleased to talk to you now.

Thank you.

"Project 'Gaydar'": Oy Vey

You'll notice that I have quotes in part of the title for this blog entry, and that's because this study about using network information to infer unknown demographics has been given a rather unfortunate and irresponsible name.

The link I have provided is a Boston Globe article about some research coming (mostly) out of MIT about using Facebook data to infer demographic information that people have not openly acknowledged---in this case, sexual orientation. Now, of course it is true that such data can be used for that, and indeed many of the tools to do so come from network science. And it is essential for people to be far more aware than they seem to be that that is the case. Of course the media is going to butcher the actual research, so as a scientist it is crucial when talking them to make sure approximations are reasonable and---when it comes to sensitive studies like this one---non-damaging. ("First, do no harm.") I'll come back to some of this in a minute, but first I want to tell a story (and then beyond my research interests, it will really become clear why I am blogging about this incident).

I saw a link to this study this morning when I was going through the daily digest from SOCnet listserv. Among the included e-mails was one from sociologist Barry Wellman that included a link to this newspaper article and some of his commentary. More commentary from others came in subsequent e-mails. Obviously, I have a great deal of interest in this topic based on my research, and instead of saving the article for later (as I often might, but in this case I was especially interested in the article), I opened it up immediately. Scanning through the text, I noticed a very familiar name: Fuck! One of the students on this project is one of my former research students from Georgia Tech!. He worked with me on an abstract problem in dynamical systems---nothing to do with networks---but I am one of his educators, and my memories of him are of his being just a fundamentally nice kid (not a generic nice kid, but somehow nicer in some deeper sense). Also, educators have nightmares about seeing their students' names in situations like this. When he applies for jobs in a few years, people will google him, and this thing is what they're going to see, and he's probably going to have to explain himself.

For this kind of research, there are obviously very serious issues---especially when such personal information is involved---and any study of this nature necessarily has a lot of hurdles to pass to even be allowed to happen, and that includes ensuring that the data is anonymized. The article in the Boston Globe indicates one of the ethical hurdle but not one that would be sufficient. (Based on an e-mail exchange with my former student, there were several beyond this, though I can't say if they are sufficient.) Also, the "validation" that was mentioned in the article is just frightening. My former student assures me that there is more in there, but things are exacerbated by the fact that the paper is not available publicly in any form. It is currently under review and isn't even around as a preprint. So the experts reading the Boston Globe article can't even look it up to see what the researchers really did. Also, it seems like huge mistakes were made in the discussions with the media---I wonder if the people on the project actually used the term 'gaydar' in those discussions, and that is just stupid. How could one think that something like that wouldn't blow up in one's face? (And not that it's a particularly nice term in the first place.)

Anyway, conveying science to the media is a very difficult endeavor, but it needs to be done in way that doesn't result in articles like this. Obviously, the researchers didn't want this kind of article, and something like this could have been prevented---even with a sensitive subject (which is when you want to be especially careful). Work with your interviewers, prepare for your interviews by establishing both talking points and things not to say, try not to say asinine things, and insist very stubbornly to look at drafts of what might get published. Some of the science will necessarily get approximated; grin and bear it if the approximation is reasonable and kindly offer corrections if it isn't. And, especially, as it is with doctors: "First, do no harm."

If you want to see an excellent capsule of the scientist-journalist relationship, take a look at the short sequence of PHD Comics that starts with this one. "Robots", indeed.

Taking Over the Blogosphere (well, not really, but it's a dream)

The baseball networks story has been picked up by the Freakonomics Blog.


It's also been picked up by a few baseball/sabermetrics blogs, including a couple of them that are hosted by prominent people in the business. Ones that have followed up on the Wired story include 27pitches.com, The
Book--Playing The Percentages In Baseball, Baseball Musings, and Baseball Think Factory.

I wonder if my dreams of being made fun of on SportsCenter (or at least by Bill James) will come true? ;)


The story has also been picked up by USA Today online and reached #4 on digg.com in the category of sports for a 24-hour period. As usual, the comments in the various venues have included a mixture of intelligent ones and not-so-intelligent ones. (The ones on the sabermetrics blogs have been almost uniformly great. Some of those folks have looked at our actual paper and not just the Wired article and have given some very nice academic-style food for thought regarding some things we might want to consider rephrasing in the paper when it is back on our desks. That is much appreciated!) I especially "love" the ones that expressed extreme moral indignation about some combination of (1) not incorporating PED information into our rankings, (2) not using data to which we just don't have access, or (3) not coming up with results that match their preconceptions. (Um, science isn't automatically wrong if it doesn't give the answer for which you were hoping and/or expecting!)

Oh, and I haven't gotten as much work done during the last couple of days as I was hoping... I really need to work on my scholarpedia article about solitons.

Internet Traffic and Michael Jackson

When I wrote my blog entry yesterday, I found myself unable to access Michael Jackson's wikipedia entry. Here is an interesting CNN.com article on internet traffic that resulted from first rumors and then reports of Jackson's death. Part of me is still weirded out by the whole thing---it's hard to think of him as gone---though the more analytical part of me is seeing yesterday and today as something that reflects the modern era more than most days.

As interesting as the article is, it's also somewhat self-serving with respect to what it says about modern versus traditional news sources: "The need of the professional media to be first with the news -- many did for a short time report the Goldblum rumor as fact -- adds further veracity. And, of course, the whole process is speeded up by the Web." Yeah, and all bloggers live with their mothers and write their material from their room in the basement.

Update: Mariano Beguerisse Díaz sent me the following article about google searches related to Jackson's death. As he reminds me, from a technical standpoint, such dynamics result from what is known as an "exogenous shock" (as opposed to endogenous dynamics that would refer, e.g., to normal search traffic patterns).

Random walker rankings back in the news

The random walker U.S. college football rankings I helped develop are back in the news. (Actually, the author of the piece, Ivars Peterson, has written about our ranking system before, as you can see by scrolling down the page and looking at the references.)

This is actually nothing compared to past instances of media sluttage. The football ranking system alone has been picked up by such glorious venues like Nature Science Update, The Washington Post, CNN Headline News, and (most important) ESPN: The Magazine. You can find links to many of those articles using the link I provided.

In other media news, the AMS Mathematical Moment based on one of my expository articles has now been translated into Polish. It was already available in English, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

More Legends III coverage

Here is a small blurb that appeared on 6/24 in a tiny venue called the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin.

I'll let you know when the scheduled LA Magazine, Popular Science, and San Jose Mercury News things come out.

And I still don't understand why my hometown paper (Beverly Hills Weekly, which often publishes trivial things about alums) and especially the Pasadena papers haven't picked up the story.

Did I mention that I'm a media slut?

More media coverage of Legends III

I'm such a media slut.

There will be coverage of Legends III in Engineering & Science (a Caltech publication, so duh) and Los Angeles Magazine. (The latter one should give the book some good exposure, especially considering that the Caltech bookstore sells something like 250 each of the first two books each year.)

I already linked to the LA Times blurb in an earlier post. There was supposedly something in San Gabriel (though I can't find it online) and there is going to be a book review of Legends III in the San Jose Mercury News. (I think the latter one is kind of using the Autumn as a local person spin, which makes sense. Also, there are a ton of Techers in the Bay Area.) The book is slated to be mentioned (and hopefully discussed at some reasonable length, but I don't really know how much) in an upcoming article on tech-savvy pranks in Popular Science.

At some point, I am supposed to meet with Tom Mannion and some guy who is producing a some sort of documentary on Caltech pranks. (The meeting hasn't been scheduled.) This is the guy who I'll be talking to about movie possibilities -- my hope is to try to inspire a sort of modern version of Real Genius.

You know what city's publications are missing from the above discussion? Pasadena! Go figure. (Actually, it would also make sense for Beverly Hils Weekly to cover this because I'm an alum, and maybe they'll do that after they see the stuff in the LA Times and LA Magazine. Hell, I know the editor of that paper and I'm pretty sure I told him about the book.)

I don't expect to go beyond California publications (and Caltech's stuff), but we'll see. There were blurbs about my college football ranking stuff all over the world (including by Nature), and it's sometimes surprising who cares about what.

(Recent) Movies, Plays, and Musicals

OK, so this isn't exactly lawyers, guns, and money; but I'll take what I can get.


Let's start with 300, which is an extremely good movie. Here's Lemming's review. I don't think I liked it quite as much as he did, but I enjoyed it quite a bit and recommend it wholeheartedly. Lemming's review sums things up nicely, but let me add explicitly that the line "I don't see why we can't be civil about this." is (1) the best line in the film and (2) much better than the second best line. The delivery on that line was fantastic and both Lemming and I laughed hysterically when it was uttered. The rest of the dialog was hit-or-miss, but the storytelling and ambiance were the highlights here.

The other movie I saw recently in the theatre was Ghost Rider, which was exactly what was advertised. The movie was both good and fun (though I suspect others might call it "fun" but perhaps not good) but not excellent. The whole thing about pointing at someone and going "You -- guilty!" or "You -- innocent!" reminded me of recent discussions with colleagues about interviewing students and seeing clearly who was a scientist at heart and who was an engineer (despite the fact that --for the most part -- the students in question didn't really know). For what it's worth, "engineer" = "guilty" in terms of my recruitment of SURF students. (Note that an engineering major can be a scientist. I'm referring to the research mentality of the student.) Also, I was looking through some pictures recently and I found a really cool one from DragonCon that shows someone dressed up as Ghost Rider next to someone else dressed up as Beaker. Awesome!

There was also a recent string of movies that we saw on DVD. Crank got the wtf award. Who needs a plot when you can just have fun? (The movie was fun to watch but it wasn't exactly deep stuff.) Idiocracy was decent but not great. Watching it, however, did remind me that a pimp always goes after his hos. No exceptions. The Departed was awesome and Mark Wahlberg played a badass, which is probably the biggest compliment that one guy can give to another. (Technically, saying that someone is a badass is said biggest compliment.)

The play I saw recently was David Mamet's Oleanna. (There's a film version with William H. Macy that I have never seen.) I have enjoyed some of David Mamet's other work immensely (especially the film State and Main) and this one was decent, but it wasn't great. This one was basically pure drama; none of Mamet's hallmark witty dialog was present. While there was good stuff, the ending was extremely abrupt, and I left feeling that the play ended before the action did. By the way, I saw this play at the Hollywood Fight Club, whose stage has occasionally been graced by the wondrous presence of one Joshua Hime.

The musical I recently saw was My Fair Lady. I read Pygmalian in 10th grade but had never actually seen My Fair Lady before. A couple of the songs were familiar, and naturally I had seen a version of the story before. One of the CPA people with whom I went is from Great Britain and she claimed the accents were done well, so that's a good sign. And cockney is just fucking awesome as a general principle!

That's about it for recent media (aside from video games). I'm seeing another play on Friday and I'm playing lots of Zelda.