What I Learned Today

I have read and re-read and savored Anneli Rufus’s wonderful book, “Party of One: The Loner’s Manifesto.” The author defines a loner as one who actually enjoys time spent alone — as distinct from those who are lonely (which is the state of being alone and wishing you weren’t). Being a loner doesn’t mean that you hate other people (misanthropes claim that distinction), but that you just don’t need them around all the time, and you rather hope they can understand this and not take it poorly. My full review of the book goes more into its scope and ideas, but here I wanted to record some of my favorite quotes:

• “We are at our best, as Orsino says in Twelfth Night, when least in company.”
• “Anything done alone is discredited, demeaned, devalued, or at best, simply undiscussed. People talk about other people, and of the things they do with other people.”
• On phone calls: ”Being home alone, they presume, could not possibly also mean being busy. Or contented exactly as you are. Unwilling to be interrupted.”
• “Loners have nothing against love, but are more careful about it.”
• “But loners, no matter our taste, eat many meals, if not most, alone. At home, this affords the essence of choice and spontaneity […] Jell-O eaten from a toy pail with a toy spade while taking a bath? A beef-tongue omelet? Why the hell not?”
• “Unmoved by the mass hysteria, immune to the contagion by which nonloners spend fortunes just proving they like a certain song or style, we do not give the entertainment industry what it seeks.”
• “Time spent alone has a way of winnowing the inventory of what we need.”
• “For some loners, a paucity of friends is a matter of time. There is simply too much to do alone, no time to spare. Shared time, while not entirely wasted if the sharer is a true friend, must be parceled out with care, like rationed flour. And time shared, even with true friends, often requires loners to put in extra time alone, overtime, to recharge.”
• Quoting Sasha Cagen: “For the quirkyalone, there is no patience for dating just for the sake of not being alone. On a fine but by no means transcendent date we dream of going home to watch television. We would prefer to be alone with our own thoughts than with a less than perfect fit. We are almost constitutionally incapable of casual relationships.”
• “The solo expedition, traveling beyond reach, is a big thing still and will always be. To the loner, such an adventure promises epiphanies, wonders never to be forgotten, elemental challenges, confrontations with the ultimate and the self.”

If that’s not motivating, I don’t know what is.

As a homeowner, I’m used to getting all sorts of shady offers in the mail for new mortgages with astoundingly bad terms. But now that home values are declining, the free market has spawned a new kind of scam, at least in California. In our fair state, home values are reassessed only when they are sold (hoo boy, Prop 13!). In the meantime, the County Assessor assumes that your home value increases by about 2% each year and increases your property taxes accordingly. Historically, this has been a win for homeowners, whose property value was outpacing 2% by leaps and bounds, and a increasingly problematic loss for any local tax-supported services (such as school funding).

Anyway, these new offers take the form of a letter warning you that your home is probably worth less than the county thinks it is, and giving you the opportunity to pay a third party company to file a “tax reassessment” form to have the property properly revalued (and get a lower property tax bill). What makes this such a miserable scam is that anyone can file this form themselves, for free. Here are online instructions, with the online form. Not only that, but the County Assessor is pre-emptively re-assessing 500,000 homes this year (sold between 2003 and 2008) to see if they should be adjusted — you don’t even have to file the form! The County Assessor’s office is clearly exasperated with this scam, too, and has posted a scam warning on the subject.

Recently, I received one of these offers that really took the cake. Not only did the letter from “Property Tax Adjustment Services” try to entice me to pay for a free service, but it actually came formatted as a bill — complete with a “due date” and a “late charge” if payment was not received by the deadline! As I stared at the “bill”, it seemed strangely familiar… so familiar that I went and dug up my actual property tax bill. They are formatted virtually identically. See image at right (click to enlarge). The “reassessment bill” is on top, and my property tax bill is on the bottom (actual numbers removed). Obviously they’re hoping that I as a busy homeowner might glance at this and think it comes from the County Assessor’s office and is a required payment.

This scam letter actually does mention the fact that you can file the form yourself (but not that it’s free to do so). It also warns that “Property Tax Adjustment Services” is an expert business who will ensure that it gets done right. Yeah. The form requires all of three pieces of information: your home’s address and the addresses of two comparable recent sales. This information is available easily from the County Assessor’s website, which even has a browsable map interface so you can see all recent sales near your home.

Disgusting, is what it is. Or simple capitalism in action? Caveat emptor!

Yesterday was Ada Lovelace Day, accompanied by a large-scale blogging exercise in which people around the world blogged about women in technology they admire. Yesterday was also a rather busy day for me, so I’m writing my entry a day late. I’m sure Ada would understand.

There are volumes to say (and that have been written) about Ada herself. She was gifted in mathematics and reasoning, and developed the first computer programs — before any computers actually existed. (She was developing hypothetical programs for Babbage’s Analytical Engine, which didn’t exist either.) Today it is challenging enough to learn languages already developed for machines that anyone can use; imagine starting from less than scratch to accomplish computational magic!

I’d like to draw your attention to two women who’ve made more recent contributions to the field of computers and technology. The first is Donna Shirley, a key player in the JPL Pathfinder mission to Mars in 1997. She led the team that built the Sojourner rover, as chronicled in her enjoyable Managing Martians autobiography. She was a trailblazer for women in high-profile (and high-stress) mission positions, but also remarkable for her accomplishments regardless of gender. She flew airplanes, became an aeronautical engineer, worked on the Mariner 10 mission to Venus and Mercury, raised a daughter, and more. I recommend this fascinating interview with her from 1998. I had the opportunity to meet her years later, when I was interviewing for jobs with my shiny new Ph.D. in 2002. At the time, she was the Associate Dean of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma, and I had a wonderful lunch with her. I didn’t end up taking that job, and she moved on a year later to start her own speaking and consulting business to encourage innovation and creativity in tech fields. There’s so much more to say about her delightful personality and her passion about space and innovation. I encourage you to take a look at her book.

Another fascinating woman in technology is Sherry Turkle. Her background is in psychology, which she’s applied to good effect in analyzing the world of technology. She wrote a book called Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet about how people interact with computers (and the Internet), and the effect that interaction has on us in return. What’s even more remarkable is that this book was published in 1995, when the Internet was still something of a foreign country that only a fraction of the population had visited. She has some very interesting things to say about identity in a virtual environment and the challenge involved in drawing a clear separating line between events in the “real” world and events that happen online. She’s put forth a host of other interesting ideas, including:

• Authenticity in the Age of Digital Companions, or how children growing up with digital “companions” may result in adults who place less value on “authentic” emotions or aliveness (2007)
• How Computers Change the Way We Think, in terms of metaphors, cognition, communication, identity, and more (2004)

I love new ideas and thought-provoking inventions, regardless of the gender of their source. Ada Lovelace Day is a chance to put the spotlight on female contributors, with one goal being to combat the perception that tech advances are produced solely by men. So far, they’ve collected a phenomenal 1,112 posts by bloggers (men and women) about these ground-breaking possessors of double-X chromosomes. Go ahead and browse, as a list or a world map. So many of these were new to me!

I recently came across an article on the use of a neural network to predict which death row inmates would be executed and which would not. The authors of “An Artificial Intelligence System Suggests Arbitrariness of Death Penalty” argued that because they were able to train a neural network to successfully predict execution decisions using only irrelevant variables, then the (human) decisions being made must be arbitrary. Confused yet? Although their neural network achieved 93% accuracy, they argue that because information about DNA testing and the quality of each defendant’s legal representation was omitted, this performance is concerning. In their words,

“What we have demonstrated here is that ANN technology can predict death penalty outcomes at better than 90%. From a practical point of view this is impressive. However, given that the variables employed in the study have no direct bearing on the judicial process raises series questions concerning the fairness of the justice system.”

That is, the neural network must have identified a useful predictive pattern in the data, but in a sense it was “not supposed to,” so a pattern may exist where one should not be.

There are several problem with the arguments in and conclusion of this paper.

First, I don’t think the authors interpreted their result correctly. “Arbitrariness” was not at all demonstrated (despite the paper title). The neural network identified some sort of pattern in the data set that allowed it to successfully predict the outcome for 93% of previously unseen inmates. If they were executed “arbitrarily” (i.e., a random decision was made for each inmate), then the neural network would not have been able to learn a successful predictor. Instead, if the features really are irrelevant to the judicial process (they include sex, race, etc.), then high performance of the neural network instead shows bias in the system. There is some sort of predictive signal even in features that shouldn’t directly affect execution decisions.

Second, I’m not convinced that the features really are irrelevant. While sex, race, month of sentencing, etc., should (presumably) not be deciding factors in who gets executed, “type of capital offense” sounds quite relevant to me. If the neural network placed a heavy weight on that feature, I would be much less concerned than if it placed a high weight on “sex”. What was the neural network’s performance if the capital offense features were omitted? In fact, it would be interesting to use a machine learning feature selection method to pick out the “most useful” features from the 17 used in this study, to help identify any bias present.

Finally, the evaluation was quite limited, so our confidence in the conclusions should also be limited. The authors trained a single neural network on a single training set and evaluated it on a single test set. More typical methodology would be to use cross-validation, splitting the data set into, say, 10 test sets and, for each one, training a network on the remaining 9. This yields a much better estimate of generalization performance. Also, what about other machine learning methods? Is 93% achieved only by a neural network? What about a support vector machine? (SVMs have been shown to out-perform neural networks on a variety of problems.) What about a decision tree, which would yield direct insight into the decisions being made by the learned model? For that matter, what about neural networks with other network structures? Why was a network with a single hidden layer of five nodes used? Was that the only one that worked?

Naturally, my critique comes from a machine learning perspective. I have no legal training. I would be very interested in any insights or opinions on this work from those who do have a legal background. What is the value of this kind of study to the field? Is this an important subject to investigate? How could the results be used to positive benefit? What other questions were left unanswered by the authors of this paper?

On Saturday, I attended a Proposition 8 evening protest in Los Angeles. Our protest was part of several across the state, coming to more than 20,000 people protesting the passage of this discriminatory amendment to the state Constitution. There were over 12,000 people in the Los Angeles protest alone.

I had never attended a political rally or protest before. It was a wonderful thing, to march along in this sea of people unwilling to permit the loss of the civil right to marry. The vast majority of them were peaceful, passionate, loving, and even positive: they emphasized the value of marriage and what participating in it means to them. Some of the signs were funny (such as the ones noting wryly that chickens command more public support than gays do–a reference to Proposition 2, which requires more humane treatment of chickens and pigs on farms and passed with 63% of the public vote. Some protesters wore beaks and tailfeathers and carried signs expressing a wish that they could be as lucky as the chickens.) and some were heartbreaking (“Married 6/7/08; Segregated 11/4/08” and “How do you ‘protect’ marriage by banning it?”). Some expressed the inevitable anger: “Keep your Jesus to yourself!” and “I didn’t vote against your marriage!”, or sarcasm: “Protect marriage — ban divorce!”.

The LDS church in particular drew a lot of negative attention due to its massive support for the proposition and encouraging its members to donate in support of it. Signs like “Tax the church!” and chants of “Keep your hate in Salt Lake!” were depressing, both for what they indicate about the church’s activities and for the sentiment they indicate in the protesters.

But overall, there were so many, many people involved, such a large and … oddly … almost happy crowd. Not happy with Prop 8, obviously, but happy to be out in public, sharing views and camaraderie (and drumming and dancing and cheering). I was proud to see them all, proud to march with them and join in the chanting:

What do we want?
EQUAL RIGHTS!
When do we want them?
NOW!

Because even if this proposition does not personally target me, damn it, I still believe in equal marriage rights for all.