Wednesday, April 14, 2004
Twenty weeks of marginalia (mostly unattributed)
My parents arrived yesterday morning. They're here for six days before heading to Turkey. The immigration officer asked them what they were doing in London; they explained they were visiting their children, who are both studying here. After asking where Jason and I were studying, the immigration officer deadpanned, about the LSE, "a bit of an upstart institution. It seems it could develop a name for itself, given time."
Updates here are likely to be sparse until April 27. But my binders are all organised, and I'm suffering from writer's block on my many essays. In case anyone as geeky as I may glean some amusement herein, these are things said in my LSE courses that amused me or intrigued me or struck me as nicely phrased enough that I wrote them down in the margins of my notes.
On the importance of simulation: "The DOD and Department of Energy listed modelling & simulation as one of twenty-two CRITICAL technologies in the United States. It was the only technique-oriented [vs hardware] field listed."
On how we should think about one of our projects: "No, you're not getting paid. Suppose you're getting paid. You're not. Don't look so hopeful. In fact it's quite the reverse, isn't it?"
On a very high p value from a regression, after eliminating outliers: "Before, it was a disgrace; now it's even worse."
On the inevitability of perceiving order in the residuals: "Of course, if you keep staring at it for fifteen minutes, you will come up with a pattern, with probability 1. So don't do it. It's random."
On using data: "If you have no idea what is going on, you can let the data speak for itself. If you do have knowledge, use theory to support the selection of regressors."
On how fairness seems to be at work even in situations when there's no reciprocation: "Don Corleone doesn't immediately (and might never) ask for favours in return."
On why fairness is a dumb idea, from my stoner Belgian classmate: "Competitiveness is Darwin, man, we fight against each other."
On measurement: "We're going to have to get money involved."
On the inevitable conclusion one draws from multi-person prisoner's dilemma (MPD) graphs: "At some point, if you don't have a mobile phone with a camera in it, what's the point?"
Ibid: "If someone doesn't have email, you don't want to deal with them."
On the usefulness of word count limits: In Anthony Trollope's autobiography, he apparently talked about his process. He'd have a contract for 900 pages or a certain number of words, he'd write what he was contracted for, and then stop. "And, ah, the books are great. [...] It should be even easier, as an essayist: you don't need to worry about plot considerations."
On the ubiquity of pop-culture, or something: "Anyone heard of Monica Lewinsky? She's famous."
On taking credit for ideas: "If I say we, it's just an affectation."
On price-drop.tv: "It's well worth watching, for a couple hours, probably. [...] If you're with friends, and you're drinking, it might be worth more than an hour of your time. [...] Obviously, they're definitely ripping you off and the selling of the goods might be only a small part of their revenue."
On experimental design, particularly the Kitten Carousel: "Science is cruel. I blanch a little when I read about these experiments that were done in the early days of psychology."
On how the house money effect may make people overconfident in experimental situations: "You can't usually take money from people in experiments." (also early in the term, before I was recording these sorts of things, there was something funny about how generally you can't design experiments in which you cause the subjects pain, and this leads to gaps in information about risk aversion. Oh well, lost to the ages.)
On the sentence on the whiteboard at the beginning of class, namely, "The world is a vampire of its own devices.": "This is very profound, by the way. Did someone here write this? Very deep."
On suggesting changes to the discussion/essay requirements for the course: "So you get the benefit of whatever system we use this year, and you get to impose your will on next year's students."
On the reciprocation principle of influence: "If someone got the first round, you need to get the second round even if you don't want a second beer. I find that kind of problematic. I don't know what to do about it."
One of my clever Greek classmates, on reciprocation in context: "The only difference is consequences. In the case of the mafia you might end up dead."
On a departmental seminar: "And of course I'll take attendance... but don't feel any pressure."
On the overhead projector facing the wrong way: "Because I'm a cognitive psychologist by training I have a deep insight into optics that allows me to use this machine."
On the inherent fallibility of the anonymous marking process in a discussion-based course: "I've read other things you've written, I know what you're interested in... and of course I've been reading your emails every day. Oh, you shouldn't know that."
On people getting caught up in the transmission of memes: "I felt kind of bad reading the quote from the governor of Georgia... People have a rather biased attitude towards people from the southern USA, and boy, that's not helping any."
On the limits of what we can learn from our friends:
Tom: "All I know about the weather is why it always rains during the two weeks of the Wimbeldon tennis tournament, because my mate did it for his PhD."
[ omitted high level meterological overview that I now forget, and don't want to be responsible for some urban legend]
Me: "So why don't they change the date of the tournament?"
Tom: "Well, because. Bloody history!"
On teenage mothers: "The dominant feeling is it's a big problem."
On the theory of value: "Why are diamonds so much more expensive than water, when water is valuable to humans and diamonds are not? Lots of things to worry about in life... I'm not sure that's one of them."
On the value of human life and economics: "Whenever I hear somebody talk about safety standards, I know I'm in the presence of someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. But worse, in my view, is if someone's talking about cost effectiveness, I know it's nearly certain to be nonsense."
On the content of a lecture: "My message for you today is many and varied." (I just liked that as an introduction. This professor, justifiably in my view, regards himself as "a master of exposition.")
On hypocrisy, and how caring about one's children is not the same thing as altruism: "The most left wing friends I have -- regard me as Attila the hun -- devoted communists... they had a child. They're fairly well off, these communists. They were worried that when they died, they wouldn't be able to give all their money to their child."
On herd-serving behaviour in antelopes: "Is it altruism? There's a deep philosophical question I'm not too concerned about.. well, I am concerned about it, but time presses on."
On the six week introduction period of the BBC, during which they broadcase lectures of Richard Feynman's: "and never since have they put on anything as good."
On why writing more in an exam doesn't necessarily lead to better results: "There's obviously some shambolic answers that sprawl forever and are tremendously annoying."
On the ability to reduce complexity: "People who say this do grave injustice to reality."
On icons used in rich pictures: "Love is obvious. Well, love is never obvious, but the icon for love is obvious."
On power commodities in organisations: "The power to control the minutes of a meeting should not be dismissed as a source of power."
A text from Grash, when she, John and I were working on issue-based and task-based root definitions of the Metropolitan Police: "Ah the Met... a force for good to protect the most vulnerable in society or a nasty bunch of racists that go around hitting black kids."
On pedagogical techniques: "I'm just paraphrasing what I've said before, but generally it's a good idea to say things several times."
On measurement, again: "We live in a cash society -- or a credit society at least -- and there is a temptation to reduce everything to a cash measure."
On the language of the prisoner's dilemma: "But if you, buddy, you confess (this is in America)..."
On the strike, which only cancelled one day of class for me: "I'm afraid it's a rather sympathetic kind of strike action we're doing."
On why pragmatism is problematic: "Theory is important as a way of illuminating insights and codifying good practice."
On asking questions in lectures: "I may not look pleased but I will be pleased if you interrupt and say, 'But what about...?'."
On modernist film: "Very brooding deep films of Scandinavian gloom."
On Don McLean's American Pie: "Everything getting better and better, peace and love and all that stuff coming to an end. As an old-school Marxist, I see that as caused by the end of the post-war boom."
On broad social goals and planning theory: "The problem, as with motherhood and apple pie, is how to promote them."
On a diagram about comprehensivity (the C in Rational Comprehensive Planning): "This is my bit of graphic work I'm most proud of, so I hope you enjoy it."
On a tinkering socialist friend, and age: "One of my closest friends, when I was at university a hundred years ago..."
On gentrification, and age: "More profit can be made selling lofts to yuppies, than printing greeting cards. I happen to live in this building. I no longer count as a yuppie."
On Cardinal Newman's "Lead Kindly, Light", and incrementalists: "For Incrementalists, the light leading them is not God, it's the Market."
On Policies Z, A and B: "A and B are rather like Z. They're at the other end of the alphabet, but don't worry about that."
On a recalcitrant missing slide: "Somewhere, in a few months' time, someone will find my missing OHP slide. Oh, no, here it is."
On the possibly mythical good old days: "A pint of beer cost thruppence, and it tasted good as well."
On the jungle survival analogy of Mixed Scanning: "In fact this is a really good analogy, so good I claim I invented it, and so do several others."
On the cost of doing Mixed Scanning: "It takes time and it takes money. We're talking about in the organisation now, not in the jungle."
On working on one part of the plan at a time: "As Blair said, the key word is Fragmentation, Fragmentation, Fragmentation. He actually said education, but never mind."
On how NIMBY concerns aren't dealt with by John Friedmann's 1973 planning system, described in "Retracking America": "a world of peace and love, and everyone will probably smoke a joint, and it will all be very nice."
On the public health crisis in the 19th century: "In Paris there were the same sort of slums... or probably different, with a French flavour."
On why Paris was redesigned to be healthier with wide boulevards down which you could aim cannons: "The French mob was in the habit of spilling out of their ghettos and trying to seize power. The slums were too close to things you'd want to seize."
On the density of Habermas's writing: "I read one of his books a long time ago and since then I've relied on second and third hand accounts."
On the vision for public sector policies: "One of the reasons we have public services is equity. Efficiency remains a problem."
On the benefit of teaching: "I always learn. Whatever happens to you, I get a huge amount out of this course."
On supplier-induced demand for healthcare: "This has all characteristics of being a complete economic nightmare... which is what I find most interesting. Lots of potential for work."
On colours and the development of star ratings by the NHS: "There was a magnificently intense meeting in the NHS where someone actually said 'traffic lights aren't a black and white issue.'"
On the NHS star rating system for hospitals: "It gets something happening. But in terms of a sound conceptual basis, it's singularly lacking. [...] The thing is, it worked."
On looking at the ambulance key target data, showing that more ambulance services are coming close to meeting them since instituting the star rating system: "Looking at this data, the obvious thing, and what the Daily Mail, one of my favourite newspapers, would say, is of course the government has failed."
On the shift in responsibility for assessing the clinical and organisational performance of the NHS: "This is what the Secretary of State said when he changed my job description, which wasn't exactly a wanted present. [...] This question of being independent was somewhat less than it seemed at the start."
On the NHS's new Payment by Results plan: "The thing about nirvana... not only do I have questions about nirvana being around the corner, but I have concerns..."
On the worst graph I've ever seen, in which scales did not match up with numbers, and everything was very wrong: "Now the mystery to me is not that they were so amazingly stupid. This is why we don't have MBA students at the LSE."
On the importance of preparing for presentations: "Gore Vidal said President Eisenhower would read his speeches with a surprised aura of discovery, or something like that."
Future Thinktanker, on packing new shoes into her bag in the airport (okay, this wasn't actually in class, I had some reading with me on our comedy-of-errors trip to Barcelona): "It's so like having children or something -- PUSH."
On the nature of food when one has overconsumed alcohol recently, at 4:47 a.m.:
Future Thinktanker: "I really want a nasty English breakfast."
Me: "I'm really not hungry."
One of my classmates, on some other classmates being annoying: "I wouldn't mistreat them at the most basic level... but at levels above that, it's open season."
My non-stoner Belgian classmate, on who might be indifferent to having an airport built near them: "Deaf people."
On who might be in favour of it:
Someone: "renters."
Someone else: "renters who don't mind noise."
Seth: "deaf renters."
Someone else: "plane spotters."
On economics and urban dynamics: "It's no coincidence that the housing immediately around Heathrow are occupied by relatively poor people, whereas the rich people who benefit from the airport drive there from their nice Buckinghamshire villages."
On the importance of asking questions of one of the guest speakers for OR in Practice: "Believe me, I can bore for England when required to do so."
On why clients' expectations need to be managed: "This will never work, well, I suppose it might, and you mean we can ... ? Why doesn't it fry the bread?"
On marketing: "That is another rule for your life: marketing people are not nice. Any sale's a good sale, so they break the rules."
On a late arrival to class, because there was a fire on the Piccadilly line: "Well... I'm glad you survived."
On the classroom seating arrangements: "Are you happy? It's okay to be not happy."
On the revised seating arrangements' impact on one of my classmates: "It's quite a transformation! You should smile more."
On an overhead projector that needed fixing:
Lecturer: "Prepare to be shocked. Does anyone have a screw driver? ... I am so disappointed. This wouldn't happen at Imperial College, I can tell you."
Grash, aside: "Sorry we're a bunch of pansy social scientists."
On a diagram of an iceberg, discussing that events are only the 10% you see above water, and they're caused by patterns of behaviour which, in turn, are caused by system structure: "That's wrong, isn't it? It needs to be bigger... ha HA! James Cameron macho."
On the customer satisfaction feedback forms: "Why are they interested? Because they're going to do something about it. Well, not in the case of Great Britain's railways..."
On the importance of asking WHY you're collecting information: "If you're not going to use it, you're the worst sort of accountant."
On feedback loops in driving: "Fairly clear. If you get it wrong, you die, which is a fairly good reward policy. If you get it right you reach your destination."
On a 1 to 5 Likert's scale of stress: "1. You are at one with the universe, things are calm and chill. 5. You are very stressed and about to kill someone, possibly yourself."
On the need for an 11 minutes' break in the middle of the lecture: "Let's not make it 9 minutes past three, that's absurd."
On rabbits on an island: "It's about eating and sex at the beginning, apparently."
On limits to growth: "Initially your rabbits should just fornicate. Only later do they need to build tractors, conquer new territories, invent agriculture."
On the people who didn't do the homework: "For those of you who've never filled a glass of water and apparently found the learning curve too intimidating..."
On those people again: "Let's imagine, in another world, where you're motivated..."
On math: "We don't often solve linear equations in this class, that was quite exciting, wasn't it?"
On how if everyone moves to the sides of the room, the latecomers get the best seats: "Then you get the lesson that life is just unfair. And if you didn't get that lesson from the Hutton report, then you weren't paying attention."
On the overfull nature of the classroom: "Somebody brought me a course change form changing away from [this course], which was fantastic. I mean, obviously incomprehensible, but fantastic."
On waiting for people to answer his questions: "55 seconds of silence in a lecture theatre feels like death."
On finding a Nash equilibrium: "Here is the implicit logic of applying to university: you want it to be really really hard for everyone to get in, except you."
On admission policies and judging educational quality through how much it costs: "Fees... you think this is irrational? This is the Blair government arguement."
On using a Doonesbury cartoon to demonstrate this: "The real world is a messy, complicated place and data arises in many forms"
On impact of entrance requirements on quality of graduates: "I like to think that quality of teaching has something to... never mind, I like to think a lot of things."
On learning the correct pronunciation of Tiananmen: "LSE: it's an education across the board."
On viewing a system from the perspective of a revolutionary: "Imagine yourself being rather romantic."
On viewing it from a different angle: "Take off the black beret. Cease to be a revolutionary, look at it from the other side."
On taking a break: "Have one minute contemplating the inhumanity of man to man."
On how operational research and decision science ought to be engaged activities, seeing as they have the first words "operational" and "decision": "Risk analysis has the first word risk. That doesn't work at all."
On categories of knowledge:
Him: "Another minute off. Stretch, talk, have a laugh at the Hutton report. ... If I asked you who Jordan was and you told me, would I regret having asked?"
Someone in class: "Yes."
Him: "Dr. Johnson said you could categorise knowledge as things you know, and thinks you know you can look up in books. I think there's a third category, things you know you don't want to know. ... But enough of this badinage."
On a less packed classroom: "We seem to be thinner in number. What was it, assignment 1? Did it work its magic again?"
On the difficulty of trying to figure out revenue on a Friday afternoon: "In social systems, all phenomena are overdetermined."
Laura, on where she'd been since Monday: "Well, I've been an attendance all-star."
On a model running as predicted: "It's happy. Well, it's not happy, it's a computer."
On someone committing firmly to a prediction for how a model will behave: "He's got nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, we're about to find out if he's right or he's wrong and that's good. That's science."
On the pervasive sniffling noises in class: "My goodness, we all have colds, haven't we. Vitamin C... and/or cheap whisky."
On Pranav's deadpan reaction to a graph and how he should fill in his data on assignments to overcome the anonymous marking system: "Forget your candidate number. Put in Bald Guy Who Said 'Oo' and the distinction is yours."
On fixing the projector, another way to get distinction on assignments: "Helpful Greek Guy, on the form..."
On pollution models: "Are we exceeding the dissipitative capacity of the planet? I don't know. I don't think anyone knows."
On the implications of a model of rat population: "Dead rats. Dead baby rats. Deadbeat mother rats."
On revisiting earlier points: "Some parts of the course are a surprise. Some parts are a review. One can only hope that all parts of the course are a delight."
On double-checking units: "Which means the dimensions are consistent, which is always fun."
On a doctor who said you couldn't determine how long a nurse typically spends with a patiend in ER admissions: "I was alright. He didn't seem to be. So we drank coffee and moved away from each other."
On determining the weekly usage of heroin per addict: "I don't know much about this because, like you, I get off on system dynamics."
On whether drug dealers know the usage rate of drugs: "Suddenly I'm seeing images from Al Pacino movies and smoky pool halls. I probably shouldn't spend so much time watching these movies."
On how one of the objectives of sensitivity analysis is to indicate further work: "This is a euphemism if there ever was one."
On having questions in class: "Next time, ask... see, I didn't bite your head off... that was rather good, because the nonverbal I got back was 'This time, no.'"
On a population model that kept growing after wiping out all the women: "You're thinking of genetic technology now because you're rather clever, but that wasn't in the model."
On the assumption most easily ignored by applied mathematicians, that computer models and the real world have some interaction: "It is quite extraordinary. Philosophically it's quite deep, which is not what we're going to get into now."
On a malfunctioning computer: "There are times when Bill Gates annoys you, and times when Bill Gates really annoys you."
On strategy at a buffet: "When there's a lot, take a lot. When there's a little, take it all."
On pushing the chair in his office back a metre during cold season to reduce the possibility of transmission: "Now you will either find that an inspirational story or deeply weird. Or possibly both."
On The Economist in the late 80s advocating exporting toxic waste to the third world because utility is lower there: "That's what you get if you read a free market fundamentalist magazine."
On classroom response: "Happy? No, you look content. I want happy."
