Basic Stupidity

Over at a website called “GOOD”, they have a really bad chart on the effects of bike commuting on obesity. Here’s a static image of the chart:

What makes this chart bad? Well, in the first place, it took me a few minutes to even figure out what the various bits mean. The columns are countries; the green part is the proportion of trips made on a bike, the orange part proportion of trips made on foot. Now, already we have a problem: why the hell did they curve some of the bars? It makes it impossible to see exactly how long the bar really is—and I’m not sure how the chart designer decided how far the bars go after they turn. Did the designer take into account the length of the quarter-circle for the turn when drawing the long bars? Or do you just add the vertical and horizontal parts and ignore the curving part? We don’t know, and because of that, you can’t accurately compare the lengths of the bars. You have to look at the percentages—and if you’re making us look at the percentages to get information, why are you making a chart?

The second part involves the obesity percentages. It took me a while to find them, as it took me a bit to figure out that the decoration on the ends of the bars are incredibly rotund cyclists. Using the cyclists to represent obesity is really stupid, because it’s their width that represents the obesity rate, but because they are circular, a reader’s eye perceives area—and area increases with the square of width. Hence, when you look at the UK and Norway, you would think that the obesity rate in the UK is about four times that of Norway, but it’s only twice that of Norway.

The length/area thing is a key tool to use when trying to lie with statistics— the author of this chart, deliberately or not, is effectively lying to us.

Another big problem with the chart is that, since you need to compare lengths of the bars with their widths, it’s almost impossible to see the trend. You can easily compare countries whose bars are next to each other, but that doesn’t seem to say much—for example, Finland has lots of biking and walking, but their obesity rate is basically the same as that of Canada and Australia, where people walk and bike far, far less than in Finland. If the chart is trying to tell me that biking and walking to work helps you be thin and healthy, the actual data are not bearing that out.

In the end, each country has two numbers associated to it: walking/biking rate, and obesity rate. Why not just make a scatter plot? Then, if there’s a clear correlation, it will be visibly obvious, and outliers can be quickly identified.

In the end, I’m saving this chart, so if I ever teach a quantiative literacy class, I can use this as an example of how not to communicate quantitative data.

Here at KAIST, they have a strict “no snogging while you are making an experiment” policy:

danae

mle292

sent us invites to Google Wave. So far I don’t find Wave very useful, although that’s simply a network effect; I have some ideas for how to use it, but they would work much better if anyone could get an account. Also, for the people who are on it, it’s not a primary communication tool and many don’t seem to log in very often, so they don’t respond.

However, I somehow got added to a wave on beer in Korea and through that wave—including the handy map gadget—I now know where to get Yebisu in Korea. So Google Wave is good for something.

If anyone is interesting in, uh, waving me (or whatever the verb is) my username is dan.drake.

Next semester I’m teaching a lecture with 230 students.

When I was told I’m teaching MAS 101Z, I was immediately suspicious— they label sections with letters, and a “Z” is very suspect. I learned what the deal is yesterday.

Korea has long had “science high schools”, which are very desirable because graduating from one helps you get into good universities—and until this year, KAIST only accepted students from these high schools. In the last year, KAIST asked the principal of every regular high school in the country to nominate a student for admission to KAIST, and they accepted 150 of these students for the 2010 school year. (The school year in Korea starts in spring.)

Meanwhile, KAIST has been accepting foreign students for a while, and many of these students come from places with the “usual” school calendar, so they start in autumn.

They’ve found that the foreign students that start in fall don’t do as well in the basic calculus courses as the usual Korean students. They are expecting that the new non-science high school students will also have some problems, so the plan is to split the usual one-semester Calc 1 class into two semesters. They’re starting it this semester, which is fine for the foreign students on campus, but there’s the 150 Korean students around the country. So they are videotaping the class and doing something online for these students.

Next semester, the 150 Korean non-science high school students and the 80 foreign students come together in a single lecture with me. Yikes. One nice thing is that it’s my own lecture and I don’t need to stay synchronized with other classes; I just have a set of topics to cover. The class will be a challenge, though.

An appropriate article on the eve of the release of Ubuntu Karmic… a Korean person gets fed up with Korea’s utter dependence on Windows and ActiveX! (Via the Marmot.

Because the Chosun Ilbo seems to struggle with things such as “working links”, here’s the editorial by their columnist Kim Ki-cheon:

Korea is at the cutting edge in technology, the state of the art in
e-commerce, an early adopter of third-generation wired and wireless
communication, broadband and personal media. Yet 99.9 percent of
computer users are on Microsoft Windows. Mac users cannot bank or shop
online, nor do these users have access to government websites. The same
goes for users of Linux, the free user-generated OS, and those using
Mozilla Firefox or Opera to browse the web.

The observation comes from an early 2007 entry on a Japanese blog,
written shortly after the blogger's disappointing visit to Korea. It is
not an unfair assessment nor is it borne of jealousy. Korea's Internet
monoculture has been a subject of concern here for some time and remains
an issue. In a recently published book, Kim Ki-chang, a professor at
Koryo University, says that Korea's Internet environment is so unsound
that nothing like it can be found in any other country in the world.

What is the problem? For one thing, accessing many Korean websites
requires jumping through hoops not found anywhere else in the world.
This may mean installing unfamiliar software programs, one to ensure
secure access, another to protect against keystroke tracking, another
for personal firewall protection, and on top of that, an antivirus
program, all to be able to do some banking online. Nowhere else are
websites so complicated and inconvenient.

It is also a uniquely Korean peculiarity that the programs needed for
access to secure websites are compatible only with Microsoft Internet
Explorer. Many are based on the ActiveX framework from Microsoft. And
while there exist other technologies that perform the same function,
none are in use in Korea. As a result, web browsers such as Firefox used
by over 20 percent of users worldwide have no presence here.

The average computer user may not care whether it is ActiveX or
something else that allows convenient and secure access. But that is
misguided. In the event of worldwide Internet chaos, as was the case in
January 2003 or during the DDoS attacks in July, Korea gets hit the
hardest. Its online environment has become one where users habitually
hit "yes" for every dialog box that pops up and install programs without
a second thought.

Koreans are the easiest prey in the world for hackers intent on
spreading computer viruses and using zombies.

Whenever Microsoft releases a new operating system, such as Windows
Vista, or a new version of Explorer, only in Korea is there a fuss about
previous versions not working. The country's closed and outdated
computing environment is overly dependent on ActiveX.

The following is from a post earlier this month on a blog maintained by
British freelance IT experts: "Korea's excellent Internet infrastructure
may be useless as long as its software programs are adopting outdated
technologies." Korea is like an oxcart going along a highway.

A few experts and industry players cannot change the situation. A
determined effort on a national scale is needed.

I’d be glad to help with their “determined” effort by handing out some Linux CDs, although no real change will happen until the laws governing secure websites are changed.

I came across this article today in First Monday, which bills itself as the premier peer-reviewed journal about the internet, on the internet. They apparently are still learning the basics of using the internet, though…click through and look at the graphics. Their own logo looks muddy and distorted. They put the title and author of the article inside another muddy, distorted image. The title of the page only has the author’s family name. The page uses frames—frames!—for layout. The journal started in 1996 and their site design does not seem to have changed since then. Ugh.

Okay, so I voted for Obama and generally like what he’s doing, but…the Nobel Peace Prize? Is there really no one else more deserving? Or is this some sort of way for Europe to say “okay America, we like you again”?

Hangeul, the Korean writing system, is really cool. Google Korea has a cool doodle for Hangeul Day. Check it out if it’s still October 9, or I’m guessing it will show up here. I like last year’s Hangeul Day doodle: the “글” in “한글” is pronounced the same as the “gle” at the end of “Google”.

Last year, I was teaching a differential equations class where we studied Fourier analysis. Fourier analysis is used with functions that are periodic—they repeat themselves exactly, over and over again.

I’m teaching that course again this semester, and I’m preparing next Thursday’s lecture. It’ll be a special lecture on Fourier analysis and tides. I pulled out my notes from last year and noticed that I’ll be doing this special lecture…exactly one year from the first time I did it. Periodic functions indeed.

mood: hungry

Here in Korea, we foreigners often talk about where to get foreign foods —“there’s a place in Seoul where you can get canned refried beans” and so on. The other day I realized that when we return to the US, that will get turned around, and we will have to scramble to find good Korean food. Well, Granny Choe’s Kimchi Co will be helpful when we do. I like this description:

In the olden days, awesome kimchi was hard to come by unless you: A) Lived in the motherland or B) Had easy access to a Korean grandmother.

Surprisingly, we do live in the motherland and it’s hard to find good kimchi here. Lots of the cheap stuff is imported from China.

This morning before my class started, I got a call from a student. He asked if class was being held today, because there was a message on the board saying class was canceled. I certainly didn’t cancel class, so I told him yes, class will be held as usual. I noted that I still had plenty of time before class.

A little while later, I get a call from the same student. He asks if class really is going to be held today. I think to myself, “of course it is, I told you just 15 minutes ago”. I tell him yes, and he (not in as many words) replies “okay, but class starts at 9:00, and it’s now 9:15”.

OH SHIT.

My afternoon class starts at 2:30, and I had been thinking my morning class started at 9:30 when it really starts at 9:00. I look around for my notes that I had prepared on Friday. My notes. That I prepared on Friday. I did that, right? Oh shit, I didn’t.

I have several seconds of pure, unadulterated, utter panic and then see my folder with last semester’s notes. I see my lecture from about this time a year ago…it’s not precisely what I wanted to do today, but it’s good enough. OMG! Saved. I snag the notes, read them over as I walk to class, and deliver a mediocre lecture—much better than no lecture at all, or the result of me doing something completely cold.

Dear god. Can’t let that happen again.

No, I haven’t lost my current job, but rather, I’ve decided to actively look for tenure-track jobs for fall 2010. Searching for a new job is basically the most awful thing ever, but it does beat unemployment.

On the one hand, there’s the anxiety attached to the thought that no one is interested. I’ve found some positions that I like, and I’m going to go to a national math conference in San Francisco in January for interviews, but…what if I fly to SF and don’t get any interviews? What if I don’t get any on-campus interviews? Of course, I can stay here at KAIST, but I do eventually want to return to the US, and striking out during one job search doesn’t make the next one any easier. The economy is terrible right now and most math positions get hundreds and hundreds of applicants.

There’s also a problem if I do get some serious consideration. I’m looking at some positions at small liberal arts colleges, and while they seem great, I don’t know if I really want to do tons of teaching and very little research. I can stay here at KAIST, have a decent teaching load, save tons of money, and enjoy living in Asia…or take a job that I might like a bit less than my current one? Ack!

Then there’s the actual materials the ads request. “Demonstrate substantial research accomplishment and dedication to teaching” is a typical phrase. Well, I have two publications, one submitted, and another couple in the works…I don’t know who would really call that “substantial”, but I’m still going to apply. (And perhaps get ignored, see above.) I like teaching and want to do it as best I can without it taking over my life, but is my dedication “substantial”? What kind of hyperbolic rhetoric do I need to (ahem) employ to distinguish myself from the other applicants—most of which are probably just as qualified as I am?

Then there’s simply finding the positions to apply for. The mathematics community does have one enormous asset in this area, namely mathjobs.org but not everyone uses it, so there’s a lot of just searching around. Today I was talking on IRC to some Sage developers and jokingly asked someone if they had any positions—and he replied by emailing me saying that there’s a slim chance they might, and to keep my eye on a certain webpage. Now, that’s awesome that I got the email, but…do I really need to check the “positions available” pages at every single university I might want to work at?

This whole thing is one huge emotional roller coaster. One minute I’m terrified, the next I feel fine. And all the time I’m spending on this is time I’m not spending making my research record more substantial or demonstrating my dedication to teaching. Ugh. I hate the job search.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDN7Nx5J6No is a surprisingly accurate 3-minute description of what it’s like to live here. They should have had something about taxi drivers that go 60+ mph on city streets, though.

Elsevier—publisher of fake journals and journals by and for math cranks —nevertheless has some publications that are quite good. Advances in Applied Mathematics is one of them, but on their author instructions page, they have a link to “the mathematics preprint server”. Now, for most math people I know, that phrase means arxiv.org/archive/math. Elsevier instead links to this spam page. Fake journals and spam!

I have a couple papers on the arXiv, because that’s what you do with papers in mathematics. Now, when you upload your (La)TeX file, the arXiv submit bot automatically runs TeX on it and tries to typeset it. Since this is done automatically, and since their TeX installation is their own special setup, often this fails, reports the error to you, and you have to resubmit several times before the submit bot is happy and serves up some PDF and Postscript.

Today I uploaded a new paper (available from http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.1655 )…and it was accepted on the first try! Victory!

(Man, this is seriously one of the nerdiest things ever to brag about…“wooo, I can write a math paper and use LaTeX well enough to get the arXiv to accept it on the first try…”)

UPDATE...whoa, the arXiv has trackback autodiscovery! On the abstract page I linked to above, it has a link back to this article. Which in this case is slightly embarrassing, but it's cool that LJ and arXiv automatically cooperate this way.

Man, “parallelogram” and “parallelepiped” are really, really hard for native Korean speakers to say.

We are doing really well in the board games department right now. We came back to Korea with two new games: Pandemic and Alhambra, both of which we really like, and a couple old ones (San Juan, Gloom). We also brought back Bang! The Bullet which is a game that comes in a giant bullet. The game’s packaging is a giant bullet! How can you not like that?

Also, our friend Mark is back and instead of living on the islands outside of Yeosu (quite far away from us), he’s now living on an island outside of Incheon, which is rather closer. Mark is a gamer and brought back Power Grid, which we played last night and which is awesome. He also has the Korea/China expansion which seems super cool.

Furthermore, our friend Hobbes will be back in Korea this week. He is a game demo person for Steve Jackson games, and I think he might bring Nanuk with him. Here’s the description:

In Nanuk, each player bids for how long he can stay on the trail and how much he will bring home. Each boast must be greater than the one before, until one hunter refuses to raise the bid, saying “You’re doomed!” Then the hunt begins. Will the hunt leader make good on his boast, or will the doomers be right? Every player decides secretly to help…or to let it fail.

Beware Nanuk, the great polar bear, who can end any hunt in failure. If you find an inuksuk, it will protect you –- once. If the hunt is successful, the hunters share the animals collected. But if the hunt fails, the doomers score instead.

I’m excited about any game in which you shout “You’re doomed!” and in which you can get eaten by a giant polar bear.

It’s good to have new games and old friends to play them with.

Right now I run the KAIST Sage servers on my office computer, which generally works fine, but I’ve convinced the head of our department to drink the Sage Kool-aid and he’s springing for a dedicated Sage server. I’ll help administer the machine, so I get a new toy to play with. It’s nothing super special, but it’s got two quad-core Xeon processors at 2 GHz and 8 gigs of memory, some kind of fancy hot-swap hard drive bay, and the place we’re buying it from will install Ubuntu on it. And during the summer, I don’t need to worry about running the AC in my office to keep it from overheating—and if I move offices again, I won’t have to wait three days for the IT people to get the IP address and DNS sorted out.

So, a new toy to play with.

The H1N1 flu has spread to Korea, but there’s something here which is spreading even faster: a not-entirely-rational fear of H1N1. You might even say that Korea has…swine flu fever!

There’s a bunch of stuff they’re doing which seems more or less reasonable: at the airport, everyone gets their temperature taken (they have health officials with these cool laser thermometers), and there are a couple universities in town (includingdanae’s) that are delaying the start of classes because some students have H1N1.

But, in typical Korean fashion, reasonable and effective responses to the problem are quickly, uh, mutating into things that are epidemiologically ridiculous. Apparently Chungnam National University (danae’s former employer) is having all foreign students that are moving into the dorms going through “quarantine”. This “quarantine”, I hear, just means that you can’t move into the dorms for a while. So what are these foreign students going to do? Well, obviously they’re going to go stay with some friends, or get a hotel somewhere, which will clearly do a lot to help prevent the spread of H1N1.

They are terribly concerned about H1N1 flu here, but I can’t shake the feeling that everything they are doing is totally stupid from a disease control standpoint. For example, take the airport checkpoints. Let’s posit that they can reliably detect passengers with the flu. A plane lands and you find that someone has H1N1. If you’re trying to prevent the disease from spreading, it seems like you have to quarantine everyone on that plane, since they’ve all been cooped up together for at least a couple hours. But the stations at the airport are just a checkpoint, so if the last person off the plane is totally sick, you already have several hundred passengers wandering the airport.

My guess is that this (the stupid responses) will only get worse. I’m also guessing that at some point, a “kimchi kills H1N1” rumor will surface. Sigh.

We are in Amherst, my hometown, for a couple days. The older I get—or maybe just the longer I spend away from here—the more I regret growing up in rural Wisconsin. Here, high culture means you’ve got absurdly tall shocks on your pickup truck and, for extra credit, an enormous eagle decal across your back window. I remember when I was young, I’d read things in Time magazine that would refer to some bit of culture that, according to the author, was absolutely ubiquitous across the country—and it would be something I’d never heard of. Now I’m on the other side of that equation and I’m just glad that the wonders of wireless networking have come here.

Things just don’t change quickly here. I’m sitting in the coffee shop at the main intersection of town looking across the street. There’s a bubbler on the corner there (and you bet it’s a bubbler, and not a drinking fountain or anything like that) that just runs constantly. The button that you press to get it to…well, bubble…is welded down, and it just continuously runs. This bubbler has done this every summer, all summer long, for as long as I can remember—probably at least 25 years. That this might be a waste of water, and that perhaps someone should repair it, has evidently never occurred to anyone in the last two and a half decades.

Things change slowly here. This town isn’t quite dying, but the main street has pretty much the same set of nearly-abandoned buildings as it did in the mid–80’s, and Amherst struggles to keep up with the rest of the world. These days I almost feel more at home in central Seoul than I do here.