80% Now or 100% Later

Given a choice, should you take the 80% solution you can do now or the 100% solution you have to wait for?

The bottom line here is, clearly, available time and effort. Assuming you have the resources to make either happen, it comes down to which one can you get done prior to any relevant deadlines and whether or not the difference in time and effort will impact negatively other projects (recall the 80/20 Rule).

The awful truth is we don't always get to do the best thing every time nor can we always put out our best effort on what we do. A simple example is this: you have two projects to get done, A and B. Project A is due in a week, Project B is due in 10 days (calendar days and weeks, not business days and weeks). Project A needs a week's worth to do really well, but three days to be a satisfactory result. Project B has the same setup. Late is very bad (like you don't get paid, lose a contract, or fail a class). What do you do?

I'd plan for eight days days of work (four days in on each) and have an extra "emergency" day for each and live with a better than minimal but less than optimal result on both. Should I get more done than I thought, that's great (but not likely). On the other hand, I have two days to help get all the requirements met to at least a satisfactory level.

How does this relate? 80% now versus 100% later is all about priorities and bottom lines. In the above case the point is get the job done, not get it done perfectly. It says, in short, take what you can get and move on to the next priority item. It is, in short, slash and burn project planning.

Sometimes its more important to get the job done than getting it done well.

Congrats to the Turing WInners

Major congrats to all the Turing Award winners.

It's people like this who do really cool stuff (and the thousands more who never get recognized properly for it) who make this world as awesome and amazing as it is for those of us who are one step away from trying to go cyborg to get more connectivity and technology in our lives.

Resistance is Futile.

Seriously though, congratulations.

Exponential Distributions and Tag Clouds

I just noticed this and I have to wonder if it's a common thing or not: When looking at the number of posts with a given tag on my tag list, it has a vaguely exponential distribution. Discrete, of course, but it has that same downward slope and everything when the tags are ordered by number of posts. I wonder if the histogram of number of tags with a given post count is Poisson?

I may just take the current counts of this page, run them through R, and post the results. It would be really cool if lots of other people did this and posted the results below or emailed theirs to me for inclusion.

I wonder if it says anything about human behavior? Do we tend to clump most things into the same few bins and have lots of smaller ones?

Research as an Undergrad: Why I'm Thankful For It

One of the things I've been very thankful for has been the opportunity to do research in mathematics and economics as an undergrad. It's been an experience I'll always look back on fondly. People talk about taking learning beyond the classroom, but in reality it's been my experience the learning which results from research can completely overshadow any related work done in the classroom. This isn't simply technical material (and there's plenty of that to learn before real research can begin), but an entire philosophy about work in general.

One of the biggest ways in which learning from research overshadows classroom learning is that in the classroom it is usual for all presented problems to have been previously solved or to fit into a given mold. In research neither of these things are true. The point of doing research is (usually) to do something which hasn't been done before in a given way and the first question may well be "does this resemble anything else I already know/is anything I already know applicable here?"

The second major way in which research overshadows classroom learning is it requires a far greater level of self-motivation, maturity, creativity, and determination. There isn't some manual that tells you how to solve the problem and most of the competition is against yourself. Nor is it designed to make a given point in a "reasonable" amount of time after "reasonable" effort. It's on the individual researcher to find it within themselves to keep going and working and thinking until they find the insight to make more progress until the next plateau. It goes in lurches: you lurch forward, then stall only to at some unknown point lurch forward again.

At the end of the day, I can't really express how much I value the experience research has given me. All I can do is try to keep working and learning.

Digital Copyright Protection

I've been reading a very fascinating debate at the New York Times site about the topic between--go figure--two lawyers. You can infer the joke about how the first commentators on an economic/business question are the ones with arguably the least direct training and experience therein.

First, let's start the debate over again. Why do people create content in any form? Two reasons. First, because they want to. Second, for some form of renumeration. In the case of corporations, this means monetary payment. In the case of open source coders (such as GNU contributors) I would say this is in the form of more usable software that does what they want it to do.

Then there's the US Constitution's granting of copyrights (I use this as an example only because I live in the States). Let's all remember they lived in an analog age where to infringe on a copyrighted work you had to either (a) hand copy it over and over again or (b) pay someone with a printing press to print copies. Either way you had to put in some serious time and money in hopes of making enough on sales to offset the costs. Let's face it, barriers to successful mass infringement were huge when those words were written and have been dropping steadily ever since. Computers and the Internet might be as low as barriers will go, but only time will tell.

What does this say about the debate of copyright protection on digital media? Very simply, it says that the only time such protection makes sense from an economic point of view is when it generates more revenue than it costs to implement. Does it? I don't know, but I know no protection system which allows the media to be played is going to ever stay unbroken forever. Moreover, it's likely that as time goes on it's going to get harder, not easier, to protect content.

I think any casual visit to doom9 or recalling the publication to the Internet of the key to hundreds of DVD titles a few months ago (not to mention the ongoing success of dvdlibcss2, which lets DVD's be played on Linux boxes or my history example above) will convince most reasonable people that in the arms race between "hackers" and "protectors", given time the hackers will win every time. It's not just software either. At some point the material has to be played, and a clever person with a Linux box could physically hack the monitor to record the imagery--unencrypted--as it gets displayed. This is not hyperbole, merely a more sophisticated version of sneaking a camcorder into a movie theater.

So what does this make copy protection schemes? I'd say "futile" sums it up nicely. Any system, not matter how strong, which enables playback will eventually get cracked. Period.

Then there's the argument that if we can't protect media we can keep it from being transfered. I refer back to my previous point about any system being able to be worked around. Maybe with enough draconian restrictions such a system could stop more transfers than it misses, but are we really willing to (a) pay the money or (b) the cost in civil liberties?

There's one last point that seems to get missed: some people pirate on principle, most because it's cheaper than getting an official copy (in terms of total expense of time, money, and effort). One key question is therefore this: of the people any copyright protection system prevents from pirating/having access to pirated materials, how many would buy a legal copy to have access?

I'll be honest, there are lots of songs and movies that if they were free to download I'd download and keep but that I would never buy nor rent. My favorite example is the annual James Bond marathons on cable TV. Yes, I like James Bond, but I'd not rent them, much less buy them. So if someone suddenly said to me "Goldeneye will never again be played on cable TV" this isn't a big loss and I'm not going to turn around and buy a new copy at prevailing store prices (even the Amazon ones I link to), but I might buy one used for half as much or better yet, for $1 to download. Radiohead's experiment in name your own prices would make for an interesting case study. One question I have is how many downloaded the album because they had never heard much of Radiohead's music and thought they'd try it out. Even more interesting, how many of those people then paid for a second download of the album? How many of those then recommended the album to others who then did the same thing? How many sales have happened since the cited articles? There are many interesting questions here that would inform the debate with hard evidence which, as far as I have seen, no one has bothered talking about to the public.

Whether we (or anyone else) likes it or not, Internet file sharing and downloading are here to stay. Is it legal? Not in most places. Is it ethical? I don't happen to think so and I think everyone who paid for Radiohead's album agrees. On the other hand, business is about the bottom line: profits. Is it profitable to fight the copy protection arms race? With several of the biggest music labels dropping DRM, I'd say the answer is probably "no", but the question is still open.

Never forget: in any market it's not the law that matters, but the bottom line. The world's lawyers need to sit up and take notice.

Thoughts on the AMS/MAA Joint Meeting Part One: Hostelling

First, my most sincere compliments to the AMS, MAA, the San Diego Convention Center Staff, and everyone else who made the 2008 AMS/MAA Joint Meeting happen. It was, in short, completely awesome. Most of the talks I saw were very well done, especially the AMS Special Sessions and the more focused AMS topics sessions.

Next, as for accommodations: I stayed in the listed hostel four blocks or so from the convention center. As a hint to those on a budget and considering doing the same, this is probably a big toss-up experience wise, but I had a blast.
Pluses:

1. Much more contact in informal/social settings with other conference goers (I was in a 10 bed room and all of us were attending).
2. Great networking and "insider's view" of graduate school as most of those staying there were grad students looking for jobs.
3. Very collegiate/dorm atmosphere.
4. Very budget conscious. I spent $100 for four nights. Best price at a convention hotel was around $150/night after taxes, etc.
5. Fully stocked kitchen.
6. In the heart of the Gaslamp district.
   

Downsides:

1. Little private/personal space. See 10-person room comment above. If you booked far enough in advance, however, private rooms were available.
2. Minimal storage space, but the space was lockable. Basically, there was plenty of room to lock up valuables like laptops, wallets, etc, but not enough to store things like suits. No real space to hang anything.
3. You are NOT the normal customer.

Overall, I'd say the hostel experience was great for me (as a fourth-year undergraduate), but is probably not something I'd recommend to everyone.

Off to Conference Land

I'll be at the AMS-MAA Joint Meeting in San Diego. I'm flying in tomorrow afternoon and out Wednesday afternoon. I have a 10 minute contributed paper, which is completely awesome even though it takes no work to get one.

Should be fun. While I have to front everything, my university is going to pay me back for basic living expenses. I completely expect to look at them and say "Look, I don't expect you to pay all of this, so pay what you consider reasonable". Dangerous, but I know who will be putting this thing together and they don't want to screw me any more than they want to get screwed. It should be okay.

Not sure if I'll go to the beach. Never have been a fan of that place.

Coding Irony

I went through the part of the code which was most suspect vis-a-vis the errors I was getting and found the flaw: a typo. The irony of this situation is not to be underestimated. Insofar as I can tell, all the algorithmic stuff is right, and in fact everything else is right, but this little tiny thing in wrong.

I'm just hoping it doesn't unveil some larger flaw lurking in the shadows, obscured by the heinous nature of what I found.

My Little Coding Nightmare Revisited

It's even worse than I thought initially. It turns out that the error is systematic and not sporadic (as I should have immediately guessed from its repeatability). It turns out that there is always a sort of inflation of the values of the sum of squared differences coming from somewhere.

This means that while the script looks like it is working great and doing what it should, it is completely bunk and will need to somehow be fixed to avoid this issue. I am thinking about trying to put a series of commands in to reset the values of different variables to zero in hopes of clearing out whatever error is compounding on me.

The next option if that fails it to post the relevant files to the R mailing list and hope someone is kind enough to tell me where I went wrong . . . which I somehow doubt.

Coding Nightmares

My coding nightmare tonight has been discovering an error in the way a piece of code executes I can't duplicate outside it's native environment, but I can repeat natively.

Here I am, working on an R script to do some (rather elementary) computational geometry and I want it to compute $(a-c)^2 + (b-d)^2$ (to use the TeX notation) where $a,b,c,d \in \[-2,2\]$. A little examination shows that the sum should always be less than or equal to 16. I was getting 16.8. Not good.

The problem is that while I can duplicate this kind of MAJOR error when computing this number as part of the script, I can't get it by starting R up cleanly and manually imputing one example. Then it works fine. I have to wonder what in the world is going on.

The worst part is most likely the solution is simple and would be obvious to a professional programmer but to me, an amateur, is far from it.

Grrrr . . .