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We now return to our regularly scheduled social/computer-sciency blogging.

Probabilistic computing?

Hat tip SMCISS.

For over 60 years, computers have been based on digital computing principles. Data is represented as bits (0s and 1s). Boolean logic gates perform operations on these bits. A processor steps through many of these operations serially in order to perform a function. However, today’s most interesting problems are not at all suited to this approach.

Here at Lyric Semiconductor, we are redesigning information processing circuits from the ground up to natively process probabilities: from the gate circuits to the processor architecture to the programming language. As a result, many applications that today require a thousand conventional processors will soon run in just one Lyric processor, providing 1,000x efficiencies in cost, power, and size.

Hat tip SMCISS.

Psychologists say that power corrupts, via WSJ

Psychologists say that power corrupts, via WSJ. I know that this thesis is pretty widely accepted, but I want to snipe at it. I think we may be mistaking correlation for causation. The general arc of my argument is that thuggishness may (sometimes) lead to power, instead of the other way around.

First, all the cited psych studies showing "nice guys finish first" are from areas with dense social networks (dorms, sororities, chimp clans) and repeated person-to-person interactions. Not surprisingly, likability translates to popularity here. But I don't see any particular reason why that conclusion should translate to accumulation of power through job interviews or elections. I'm going out on a limb here, but perhaps the qualities that make frat boys popular are not the same qualities that put CEOs in power.

Second, at risk of alienating a lot of my friends in political psychology, I'm not a big fan of gimmicky priming studies. For instance: tell me about a time when you felt powerful, then write the letter E on your head. You wrote it backwards? See -- power corrupts.

Err... run that by me again? At what point does this experiment measure "power," and "corruption," and where does it demonstrate a casual relationship between the two? Sure, the researchers who did this study can do a song and dance about it, but at the end of the day, there are a lot of leaps in the logic. The study is gimmicky. Interesting maybe, but nowhere close to conclusive.

I completely accept the notion that our minds move between different mental states and that primed manipulations can nudge us from one state to another. But I'm not persuaded that we've mapped the set of states and priming cues in enough detail to draw general conclusions -- particularly when treatments and responses are measured in ways that never occur in normal human experience.

Third, the idea that transparency might fix things is nice, but lacking evidence. This is a place where careful study of incentives and strategy could add a lot of leverage. Go game theory!

Parting shot: I'm not anti-niceness or pro-corruption, but I think we often demonize authority and authority figures. There are an awful lot of social problems that best resolved through the benevolent use of authority, and I know plenty of people who live up to that charge. To the extent that power has a corrupting tendency, we should be looking for, promoting, and celebrating those who are proof against it.

Wacom tablet: post-purchase rationalization

So I bought a Wacom Bamboo tablet last week. It's a nice digital pen tablet, with a drawing area about the size of a postcard -- a good size for sketching & gesture-based interfaces. It plugs into a USB port and (after some fiddling with the drivers) works very nicely with Windows, Firefox, Inkscape, etc.

That said, I'm not really sure why I bought the thing. I do a lot of writing and programming, which leads to a lot of typing, but not much clicking and dragging. Sure, the touchpad on my notebook is small, but it's not really $60 small. I blame postpartum sleep deprivation. It might also have something to do with watching this TED talk.

Anyway, in an effort to assuage my post-purchase cognitive dissonance, I've been telling myself that if I can improve the speed and accuracy of my clicks by just a fraction, this tablet thing will easily pay itself off in productivity in the long run. Right?

To bring some proof to that claim, I dug up this flash-based target practice game. Little targets fly around the screen and you try to click on them: score points for every target you hit; bonus points for consecutive bulls-eyes; miss too many times and the game is over. Great sound effects. This is high brainpower stuff.

I played three rounds in time trial mode, using the touchpad. Mean score 438. Then I played thrice with the tablet. Mean score 685!

To make sure this wasn't just an improvement in my reflexes and strategy (shoot the spring targets at the apex; don't waste a shot on a yo-yo target that might be yanked), I employed an interrupted time series design and played six more rounds. Mean score with the touchpad: 407. Mean score with the tablet: 977!

With that kind of performance improvement, the tablet was clearly worth it. Minority report, here I come.

TED talk on origami

James Lang, physicist and origami master, speaks at TED. He talks about a fascinating intersection of art and math: origami.

This is a great, visual talk that links ideas you would never expect to come together: water bombs, ibex, and spiders turn into satellites, heart valves, and airbags, using the math of trees and circle packing. A really great example of the unexpected practical value of mathematics.

Hat tip to my brother Matthew for putting me onto Lang's work.