Seth’s blog

The Cleveland painter Michelle Muldrow was a musician for ten years before becoming a painter — although she got a BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) before that. From an unusual background, an unusual creative process:

Interviewer: Describe your working process when creating a new work.

MM: Usually I begin reading about environmental issues, urban development, really anything touching on the subjects of land use, as well American history and fiction. I guess I sort of consider myself a sponge at the beginning stages of work, then usually some travel helps and I take tons of source photos. From there I organize my photos into different obsessions, be it the artificial horticulture and landscaping in the modern developments, or the death of inner ring suburbs, subdivisions, etc, at that point I look for what I am most interested in painting. It’s sort of like all my intellectual obsessions still must go through a filter of how I feel, and that is an important element to my work- nostalgia. I suppose I attribute that to the rootlessness of my childhood, I am always trying to make sense of my landscape and home. Then I begin the body of my work. I tend to approach my work as a series or body rather than as individual images. I always prep, underpaint and paint at least 4-5 paintings all at once, never one at a time. I freehand draw, then do a monochromatic underpainting, and from there, I paint.

Painting, in other words, resembles blogging: You can blog about anything, you can paint anything — so long as you care about it.

One of her favorite writers is Jane Jacobs. She used to live in San Francisco, where there seemed to be no upper limit on the value of property. In Cleveland, with boarded-up homes everywhere, there seems to be no lower limit.

The journal Experimental Mathematics, started in 1992, publishes “formal results inspired by experimentation, conjectures suggested by experiments, descriptions of algorithms and software for mathematical exploration, [and] surveys of areas of mathematics from the experimental point of view.” The founder wanted to make clearer and give more credit to an important way that mathematicians come up with new ideas. As the journal’s statement of philosophy puts it, “Experiment has always been, and increasingly is, an important method of mathematical discovery. (Gauss declared that his way of arriving at mathematical truths was “through systematic experimentation.”) Yet this tends to be concealed by the tradition of presenting only elegant, well-rounded, and rigorous results.”

When John Tukey wrote Exploratory Data Analysis (1977), he was doing something similar: shedding light on how to come up with new scientific ideas plausible enough to be worth testing. Tukey obviously believed this was a neglected area of statistics research. I was told that the publisher of EDA was uninterested in it; they only published it because it was part of a two-book deal. The other book, with Frederick Mosteller, was more conventional.

My paper titled “Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas” made the same point as Tukey about an earlier step in the scientific process: data collection. How to collect data to generate new ideas worth testing was a neglected area of scientific method. Self-experimentation, derided as a way of testing ideas, might be an excellent way of generating ideas worth testing.

I think of it as crawling back into the water. In the beginning, all math was conjecture and experimentation. In the beginning, all data analysis was exploratory. In the beginning, all science was tiny and devoted to coming up with new ideas. From these came methods of proof, confirmatory data analysis, and methods of carefully testing ideas. Human nature being what it is, users and teachers of the new methods came to greatly disparage the earlier methods. Gary Taubes told me that he spoke to several obesity researchers who thought that the field essentially began with the discovery of leptin. Nothing before that mattered, they believed.

Thanks to Dev Rana.

Yesterday I heard Mitch “Lotus 1-2-3″ Kapor give the third of three talks at the UC Berkeley I-School on “Disruptive Innovations I have Known and Loved” (podcast). This talk was about Second Life; the first two were about the PC and the Internet. It was a very nice talk I would have enjoyed more if I hadn’t had a cold. Even with a cold I was pleased by two things:

1. A graph of on-line Second Life activity. It was increasing at roughly the same rate as SLD-forums activity.

2. A comment that the short-term effect of similar technologies is less than expected; the long-term effect is far greater than expected. One long-term effect Kapor predicted is virtual meetings. I knew someone who was head of design for a very large powerful company — supposedly a dream job. But he had to travel all over the world to meet with his subordinates. Incredibly exhausting. So it wasn’t a dream job, and he gave it up.

I knew about the “disruptive technologies” idea from my work on variation in rat bar-pressing, which led me to read Clayton Christensen’s excellent The Innovator’s Dilemma. Disruptive technologies can be as simple as hydraulic power, which caused several steam-shovel companies to fold.

I had not thought of SLD as a technology; but I realized that’s what it is: A weight-loss technology. Disruptive, who knows, although Aaron Swartz was optimistic quite early. And today in the SLD forums I read this:

I’ve lost 85 lbs. and I have 25 lbs. to go and I just. Can’t. Quite. Process that idea. . . I’m at a new job where no one knows that I used to be incredibly heavy and there’s even a really cute fellow faculty member who seems to like me. He smiles at me. A lot. It’s nice. Everything is so . . . fantastic. I’m so happy I’m practically beside myself. . . . Almost every morning . . . I catch sight of myself in the full-length mirror out of the corner of my eye and the first thought is still “Is that me?”. And I have to stop. And look. And wrap my arms around my tummy - my much, much smaller tummy - and think “Oh that’s right. That IS me.” It always makes me laugh.

Podcasts of his earlier talks here (PC) and here (Internet).

At the Berkeley Whole Foods a few days ago, a friendly man named Hunter Austin was demoing Alvarado Street Bakery Sprouted Wheat bread. “Baked locally, sold [frozen] nationally,” he said. He was giving out little grilled cheese sandwiches. It turned out he had his own demo company — food companies hire him to demo their products. He had started the company four years ago. Before that he had owned and run a restaurant. He made lots of money but he was working seven days a week. The pay worked out to $15/hour.

Why did you choose this as your escape route? I asked. “You want to know the truth?” he said. “Because it looked really easy.” He did demos for someone else for a few months then decided to strike out on his own. He made a brochure advertising his services. Then he went up and down the aisles at a supermarket writing down the names and addresses of companies whose products he liked. He sent them his brochure. What happened? I asked. “I got business,” he said.

That’s how his business began. It turned out to be harder than it looked. “The first ten demos are fun,” he said, “the next twenty are sobering, and after that it’s a job.” Now he mostly hires people to do the actual work. This was the rare demo he did himself. His company is called Demo Demon.

The Flynn Effect is the steady improvement in IQ scores over the last 50 years or so in many places. It was documented by James Flynn, a professor of moral and political philosophy at the University of Otago. Flynn gave a talk at Berkeley recently. I asked him how the Flynn Effect came to be.

Flynn finished college at the University of Chicago in one year (lots of advanced placement) and went on to get a Ph.D. at the same school. His first job was at Eastern Kentucky University. It was during the Korean War; better schools were afraid he’d be drafted. He lost that job because of his CORE (Congress for Racial Equality) membership. He got another assistant-professor job at Lake Forest. He lost that job because of his socialist views, although “sins” such as assigning readings beyond the set test were also given. He and his wife decided to go to New Zealand, where his politics would be more acceptable. He got a job at the University of Otago, where he has been ever since.

In the 1980s, he started to write a book defending humane ideals. One > question he wanted to answer was how to combat racism. He came across Arthur Jensen’s work. Jensen’s work was not easily dismissed. It was based on data. To properly answer Jensen, he believed, you needed data — a radical view for a philosophy professor. This was outside his area of training. He asked a professor of psychology for advice. The psychology professor was dismissive; his attitude was “what could you possibly contribute?” But Flynn did not see that psychology professors were substantially smarter than everyone else; the necessary skills should be within his reach, he thought.

He studied the math behind IQ tests for two years. He started looking at data. He looked at IQ test manuals and discovered that the raw scores kept increasing over time. He found six examples. He wrote a paper based on these examples and sent it to the Harvard Educational Review. The editors (who, unknown to Flynn, were graduate students) rejected it. Everyone knows intelligence is going down, one reviewer wrote. This made him mad. He went out and found 14 more examples. With 20 examples, he wrote a paper that was accepted by Psychological Bulletin. The reviewers were stunned, he said, but couldn’t find any holes in his case. It appeared in 1984.

Arthur Jensen pointed out that the tests concerned were heavily influenced by education and predicted that a test like Raven’s would show no gains. Flynn collected data from around the world (14 nations) and found that the largest gains were on Raven’s. The resulting article appeared in Psychological Bulletin in 1987.

Flynn said that only now (in his new book What is Intelligence?) can he give a coherent explanation of the gains.