Wikipedia: Nomothetic And Idiographic
I can no longer remember where I saw a remark on these two words. One of the non-fiction books I’ve been reading, no doubt: It was definitely a remark about academic modes in History vs. Economics. But as you can see from a quick search, these words can also be used to refer to personality types(!)
From the Wiki: “In sociology, the nomothetic model tries to find independent variables that account for the variations in a given phenomenon… The idiographic model focuses on a complete, in-depth understanding of a single case.”
I’m not sure what all the fuss is: This feels merely like a difference between general and specific; the tendency to generalize and the tendency specify.
Posted in economics | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:44:00 GMT
I’m wearing my new glasses. Of course, it feels strange. My prescription didn’t change much in all the years since my last exam, but moving to a new prescription always causes a little field distortion. I feel like I’m in a slightly different universe with an even less Euclidian geometry. I had to walk around a bit downtown for a bit before I could really say that I was happy with them.
Before picking up the glasses I went to CVS for some divider tabs to put in a binder. I wound up with a cheap battery powered LED book-light. I have often wanted a book-light, and I think getting light from LEDs is a brilliant idea - since they’re not just red and green the way I always remember them. You can even get replacement light bulbs that contain an array of LEDs and use even less power than a flourescent bulb. In addition, I’ve been wanting a small notebook to keep with the espresso machine for recording ephemera regarding how much coffee I’m using, how much money I’m spending on it, and anecdotal evidence about the quality of the output.
After the glasses, I went around the corner to print some photos at Penn Camera. It wasn’t a spur of the moment decision - I mentioned it earlier today - but, all of the sudden, it seemed like a really good way to road test my glasses, looking at detail on a computer screen, then looking at the same details on a print. The prints came out fast - only 15 minutes - but I still needed to kill some time, so I took a walk around the neighborhood, meandering through the 2-block radius of the store: L St, K St, 19th, Pennsylvania Ave; H to 18th, Eye to Farragut Square, then back around to the photo shop. Along the way, I realized that the real test is to see if I could read while walking. I do that all the time - it’s important that I don’t get a headache or start vomiting while I dart my glance back and forth from the book to my surroundings.
I didn’t fall down, or vomit, or anything, but still… everything on the periphery is a bit wobbly - this makes some sense when you consider that they have to looking straight ahead during the exam. There is obviously going to be some uncertainty about the effects of a prescription away from the line of sight. I know from studying optics that they don’t bother to grind the exact shape because they couldn’t do it cheaply enough. Paraboloid lens grinding is for billion dollar space telescopes. And they mess those up too.
I was daydreaming about some way they could use a temporary lens material to simulate your glasses - something just to verify the prescription before making the real lenses. Can real lens be melted down or something? Probably not, because that would allow them to recycle your old pair.
Posted in DC-roaming, photography | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 10 Nov 2008 23:42:00 GMT
It never fails: Every time I resolve to blog more I actually wind up blogging less. Maybe I should promise to blog less to begin with. Somehow, I don’t think that would work too well. This pitiful little entry will have to do for now, while I think up more interesting things to say…
My new glasses are ready at HourEyes. Nobody called. Today, I called, and there they were, waiting for me. Bad timing, though: my friend Sam was going to take me out to lunch the next time I was down around K Street, but she’s not working on K Street today.
One of the other things I can do in that neighborhood is go to Penn camera, so I loaded up a USB drive with a few good photos that should be printed. They are also photos with a lot of black that I wouldn’t have printed on an ink-jet printer - they need to be done on real photo paper instead. Maybe I won’t print them all, but it would be nice to return home with a couple prints to help me calibrate my eyes to the screen… That is, be sure I’m not going to get something wildly different on the paper from what I see when I’m editing them at home.
I had a programming idea while I was in the shower. Class inheritance and operator overloading is so easy in Ruby that I though I should be able to add an operation to floating point numbers to calculate the value of two electronic components wired in parallel. Then, as with some fancy circuit analyzer package, I could do my own charts of electronic circuit responses, like monte-carlo variations or frequency response in linear circuits. I didn’t think it all the way through, though: Getting software objects to combine with an arithmetic-like syntax is easy enough, but passing in a frequency parameter to such an expression is not so easy. I’ll need to be able to pass in the expression using internalized symbols along with a value substitution or frequency parameter. It’s got something to do with blocks, maybe, but then I’m going to need a circuit object to read in the expression and “simulate the interconnection” of the components… I lathered up with soap standing in the tub, and then the water cut off.
Probably be back in a few seconds, right?
No. They’re back at it, screwing aroung with the plumbing on the second floor. I waited until after my roommate left for work, which is how it happened that I was taking a shower at 10am, and not 7am. I heard the tell-tale hammering on pipes. I screamed at the top of my lungs and banged first on the wall, then on the tub, apparently no one heard - or they just ignored it. I’m pretty sure they don’t speak English, anyway.
But they did this yesterday afternoon - a Sunday - and when I looked, it was just one little sink in for the whole floor. Clearly, they must have a bathroom, with a sink and a toilet, and the corresponding need to shut off my water, but why couldn’t they install all the valves they needed in one session, then never turn the mains off ever again? I said it out loud: “Some day they’re going to shut that thing off while I’ve got soap in my eyes!”.
The prophesy has been fulfilled.
Posted in ontology, programming | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:25:00 GMT
Check out this article “Intentional action and Asperger Syndrome” in Psychology Today. I spotted it in BoingBoing.
I’m disappointed at the lack of analysis in the article. Would you like to hear MY theory?
Think of side-effects: Results of an action are sometimes inseparable. We seek a desired result, and in the process we get some inseparable side-effect. So far, so good? Sometimes we require that separation and won’t settle for a particular side-effect. But, that is not usually what is on offer, so we have to keep searching. That extra time spent searching is experienced as a cost, too. We will sometimes take the lesser of two evils - supposing we actually do that cost-benefit analysis.
In the article, the two related examples differ in the side-effect: In one example, the goal of getting the biggest smoothie means also getting a commemorative cup you didn’t want. In the other example getting the biggest smoothie means paying an extra dollar. The researchers asked: Do you experience these side-effects as an intentional choice?
In a sense, when you make a choice, you are signing on to all the side-effects - even ones you don’t know about. So I understand the point of view that any side-effect you are aware of immediately becomes a part of your intent.
The article contends, assuming I still remember it accurately, that a person with Asperger’s syndrome does not experience those side-effects as intentional at all, whereas a normal person (control group?) makes distinctions: the unwanted commemorative cup vs. spending the extra dollar.
I think I agree to a lot of side-effects that I regret - and I can’t stand to admit that I agreed to them, so claiming them as my “intent” seems wrong. It manifests as a feeling that I didn’t get enough choices to really get what I intended. I can live with the poor choices I am forced to make to ‘satisfice’, but that doesn’t mean I have to accept them as my intention.
Not the cup or the dollar.
Posted in ontology | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 06 Nov 2008 03:31:00 GMT
I was reading the chapter on Haussmann’s transformation of Paris in the 19th century in “Cities In Civilization” when I came across some untranslated French. It is common for an author to provide translations for such quotes.
An observer in 1882 described the traffic situation in Paris as “le dernier mot de l’obstructionnisme”.
And that was one of the shortest examples. So it was over to Google Translate for some answers.
That was when I remembered that I wanted to road test the machine with some Japanese. Well, it didn’t take long to find a stinker.
Japanese is not like English. Maybe that’s why I found it so durned interesting.
As you can see, I’ve taken the liberty of color coding the sentence. This will allow you to see how different the grammar is, and I hope it helps understand what went wrong with it over at Google.
Here we have a transitive verb “To Eat”, and ostensibliy we have a subject and an object… Then it gets weird. In Japanese, there are postpositional particles (which often function like English prepositions) that mark the role of a phrase within a sentence. With no spaces between words, you have to rely on other strategies. “Wa” marks the end of a “Topic” which replaces another marker - obscuring the role of that phrase. “Sae” adds the idea of “even”, thereby replacing another marker - which is also now missing, obscuring the role of that phrase, too. What we do know is that “tabenai” is the negative version of a transitive verb requiring an object to make sense. We’ve definitely got a subject and and object here in this sentence (sometimes we don’t have them - they could be implied because they showed up in previous sentences…), but which one is which? Cat or Fish?
Google (#1) thought Fish was the subject, and Cat was the object. How naive. They were probably relying on phrase order to figure it out. Phrase order is not that important in Japanese. In the English version, you know immediately from context that this is wrong - but that doesn’t prove anything: Nonsense can still be grammatically correct. It’s a theory. Isn’t that exciting? Every little sentence needs a theory. I love that. “The fish” is wrong, anyway: it’s quite clearly ”this fish”, and “Even this fish do not eat my cats” forces the verb into “would not eat”. So that’s two problems already. “Uchi” and “neko” are neither singular nor plural, so it could be “my cat”, “my cats”, “our cat”, or “our cats”. I see why they picked “cats”: Doesn’t “eat” suggest an ongoing or habitual activity where the object is likely to be plural? I’ve become more sensitive to the way some English nouns like “fish” can be a substance - an indistinct quantity. One or many fishes can still be described as “fish”.
The textbook I took the example from (William McClure’s “Using Japanese: A Guide to Contemporary Usage”) supplied (#2). This represents the theory that Cat is the subject and Fish is the object. I agree. They editorialize thusly: “Sae places extreme emphasis on the noun in question, and is often followed by a negative”. There is another thing the Topic-wa construction can do: Provide a contrast. I only mention it because it’s a perfect way to pull an object to the front of the sentence. Here in this sentence, the contrast is this fish versus all other fish (the “not this fish”).
I moved the “not” for #3. It’s subtle, I know, but I like it. I just had to have the last word.
As I think about it, the textbook is less concerned with giving a natural-sounding English version than you or I would be. In fact, most of the Japanese textbooks I have seen do the same thing: English translations that make the subtleties of the Japanese examples more explicit, at the cost of sounding ridiculous.
I like to pull “not” to the beginning of the English version, even though there is nothing wrong with #2 here. The distinction may not be completely neutral, but having both versions available is nice when you have to fuss with the rhythm, timing, cadence, or alliteration of the larger utterance this sentence would appear in. On the face of it, though, as a stand-alone sentence, I get inspired by the distribution of the “Noun-sae, Verb-nai” construction in the Japanese version to produce another distributed construction in English. I just feel a little uncomfortable leaving the “not” with the verb when that “even” is there: Better perhaps to have them together. And I wonder if #2 is not simply trying to leave as much of the original as unmolested as possible.
The only thing left now is the “yo”. I was looking for some reason “yo” would inform the emphasis in the English version, and I didn’t find any. In Japanese, in addition to “phrase particles” (“wa” and “sae” in this example), there are sentence particles. The sentence particles typically indicate the speaker’s understanding of who knows what. That can be powerful in a language of subtlety: If I don’t want you to think I’m claiming to know more than you do, I might turn a statement into a question, or an imperative into an invitation. That’s part of the famous “can’t say no” reputation of Japanese, having the option to shift to the less confrontational version in every circumstance. “Yo” is the strongest member of the group: It means that I don’t think you know about the content of the preceding statement. It’s not so imposing when it refers to personal facts - in this case literally the inner workings of my house, and the dietary habits of its feline member - which won’t cause much embarrassment when I imply that you don’t know. So with the English translation, it might be nice if we could capture that revelatory tone. But the emphasis provided by “sae/even” seems to do the trick.
Posted in computer-interface, books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:52:00 GMT
Elections are one of the times I really feel my irritation with mainstream media. They get so excited about announcing the results as early as possible (their job) that they run the risk of screwing it up (not their job). “Dewey Defeats Truman!”
So the TV networks break in with special coverage of… what exactly? They don’t have the answers yet. The polls close on the west coast at 11pm EST - if you can assume you know who won in what states the moment that happens - and, California counts for quite a lot of Electoral College votes.
The excitement is real enough, but that’s not an excuse for wasting an entire evening of newscast blabbering on about what little you know so far. It’s a pleasant surprise to wake up in the morning and know for certain who won.
My Concession Speech:
As our Time Zone approaches the 9 o’clock hour, I am feeling gravity’s pull. The people have spoken, and… I don’t know what they said. Surely the Reef will have it on the big-screen TV, along with some fine domestic micro-brewed beverages. About seven beers changed on Friday and it’s going to take me a while to taste them all at the rate I’m going.
Also, I got an important-looking piece of mail for my old roommate. One of her doctors still had her listed at my address. For all I know, it’s just a packet of junk, but to be on the safe side, I can look for her at the bar - the only place I ever see her anymore - and possibly hand it off to one of our mutual bartender friends for safekeeping. They are sure to have her phone number.
An Interesting Fact:
Today is the second time I voted for the guy that won… In the presidential election. I was just a little too young to vote in 1988, and it bugged me. In 1992, I walked into my local junior high school and voted for Bill Clinton. Sixteen years ago. Sometimes I voted for somebody I knew would not win. There was a transcendental meditation party fielding a candidate in ‘96; Nader got my vote in 2000 because I wanted a good showing for his party and I didn’t have to worry that Gore wouldn’t win DC. If I remember correctly, I voted for Kerry - I really like brie cheese, by the way.
Today I am back in alignment with the will of 51% of the people.
Tonight I dream of presidents who do not grin like an idiot; Presidents who take ideas seriously; Presidents who display genuine concern; Presidents who speak to me.
I watched the election results at the bar, and I didn’t expect there to be an answer until tomorrow. There were dozens of fanatical supporters - people waking up from a nightmare. Now the streets of DC are a party, like the day they tore the Berlin Wall down. People in this town believe tomorrow is going to be a better day. I hope they’re right.
It appears to be done.
Posted in politics, bar-scene | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 05 Nov 2008 01:04:00 GMT
As of 9am, I haven’t voted yet. The polls open at 7, and I meant to show up early, but I did not wake up in time to line up that early… I got there precisely at 7 to find the line snaked around the block.
As I half-suspected, first thing in the morning is no longer the appropriate time for me to vote. Since I don’t have a specific place I need to be, I shouldn’t delay anyone who does. My hope is that, line the crowd on the 42 bus - favored by Dupont and K Street office workers living in fancy Mr. Pleasant townhouses - everyone will be gone by 10. At the very least the line will be back down to manageable size. I brought a granola bar something to read while I waited, but once I had the issue framed in terms of inconveniencing people that wouldn’t be back home in time to vote tonight, waiting to take advantage of the lull was a no-brainer. And my polls are just a block away - I can check back often to sample the progress of the line.
After the first overcrowding disappointment, I doubled back to the little coffee shop to sit and write. I miss the morning staff, especially one woman who would banter with me in half-English, half-Spanish. But there was no banter today, because it was all she could to to tend to the line. These construction workers in front of me were incredibly indecisive - or maybe I thought they were done ordering when they hadn’t even started yet. Between the inane radio-DJ chatter over the speakers and the conversations of the other patrons, it was not an environment conducive to writing. But I filled a page with one or two quick ideas, then went for another survey of the voting queue.
It was the same length an hour after opening! Who knew I had so many neighbors? - the voting precinct is about a four-block radius, and some of the other voting locations seem like a very short walk from my place. How come I never meet all these people in daily life? I was looking for the precise end of the line when I bumped into someone I actually did know. My new ping-pong partner Leah. She had me fooled for a second. “I didn’t know you voted here!” She never changed her address after splitting with her husband, so based on that address, she was in the right place. Does this strike anybody else as a weakness in our system? All that nomadic mobility? The state-by-state demographics are always in flux. A system based on fierce state loyalty is probably cheating us out of fair representation.
Everyone Was Gone At 10…
Well, not… everyone. But, the line to sign in was entirely inside the lobby of the building when I arrived at 9:45. I was back home before 10.
Posted in politics, urban-studies | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 04 Nov 2008 13:56:00 GMT
Over at Seed’s Science Blogs there is an interesting little piece by Jonah Lehrer (author of “Proust Was A Neuroscientist”) where he compares the current financial market crisis with the overfishing of Atlantic cod…
“People love models, especially when they’re big, complex and quantitative. Models make us feel safe. They take the uncertainty of the future and break it down into neat, bite-sized equations. But here’s the problem with models, which is really a problem with the human mind. We become so focused on the predictions of the model - be it the cod population, or the risk of mortgage derivatives - that we stop questioning the basic assumptions of the model. (Instead, the confirmation bias seeps in and we devote way too much mental energy to proving the model true.) It’s not just about black swans or random outliers. After all, there was no black swan event that triggered this most recent financial mess. There was simply an exquisite model, churning out extremely profitable predictions, that happened to be based on a false premise. Hopefully, the markets will recover quicker than the Atlantic cod.”
Posted in economics | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 01 Nov 2008 16:27:00 GMT
Thanks again to Jason Kottke for pointing out an interesting thing I might have missed: Obama has apparently read Michael Pollan and taken him seriously (…full Time interview with Obama here. A book excerpt and Pollan interview here ).
My dear sweet mother has been telling me all my life that “they’re messing with the food”. As a kid I already knew her theory that chemical additives and cheap substitutions were causing the rise in childhood allergies. I took it seriously, even when I was skeptical (in fact maybe I owe my skepticism to her).
It’s the same old story of Prometheus that we get into with every new technology, isn’t it? Ham-fisted attempts to take the benefit of a new idea ignore the dark side of tinkering with nature and suddenly you’ve got high rates of cancer in your neighborhood, or soft cadmium leaching into your bones - and you don’t know why.
But that’s okay - they assure us - it will all be fixed in version 2.0… I’ve got as much enthusiasm for new technology as the next guy, but it does seem to be a youthful obsession - I could be losing my grip on it. And, technology is mute on the problem of risk management and quality assurance - those things are up to us. Which takes me right back to externalities and the temptation to cheat for higher profits. And the need for us to all make these decisions together. One of the effects of profit is to abstract away all those externalities, making them seem not to be anyone’s fault in particular.
The Pollan article is right up my alley: It’s another angle on the Peak-Oil Problem. I just wrote a big thing on inflation last night, then spent part of this morning editing it, and it just occurred to me that cheap energy will naturally worm its way into everything we do. I see an analogy with money bidding up derivatives in lieu of raising consumer prices: Supply and demand operating on ingenuity. But, the ingenuity is only in plentiful supply because the raw inputs are so cheap. Pull that pin out of the machine, and the whole thing could fall apart. If cheap energy boosts the process at every stage, then prepare to see the process decidedly unboosted.
This is all to remind us that economics is not just about money. Much of the theory of economics has developed in recent centuries, long after money hit the scene. To live life obsessed with money is to ignore the processes by which wealth is actually created; It results in all manner of streetcorner hustle - no matter if you’ve got a three piece suit and a downtown office suite.
It also emerges that people will play some dangerous games with nature when they’ve got their eyes on the dollar. Well intentioned folk come up with reasonable standards for the mass market, then ingenuity strikes: Every loophole is exploited, studies are commissioned to find the minuscule benefit in an additive. From Pollan’s book “In Defense Of Food”:
Yet as a general rule it’s a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound “whole-grain goodness” to the rafters. Watch out for those health claims.
Posted in politics, economics, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:23:00 GMT
