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Tag: complexity
Digital History, Saturn's Rings, and the Battle of Trafalgar
History and astronomy are a lot alike. When people claim history couldn't possibly be scientific, because how can you do science without direct experimentation, astronomy should be used as an immediate counterexample.
Astronomers and historians both view their subjects from great distances; too far to send instruments for direct measurement and experimentation. Things have changed a bit in the last century for astronomy, of course, with the advent of machines sensitive enough to create earth-based astronomical experiments. We've also built ships to take us to the farthest reaches, for more direct observations.
Voyager 1 Spacecraft, on the cusp of interstellar space. [via]
It's unlikely we'll invent a time machine any time soon, though, so historians are still stuck looking at the past in the same way we looked at the stars for so many thousands of years: through a glass, darkly. Like astronomers, we face countless observational distortions, twisting the evidence that appears before us until we're left with an echo of a shadow of the past. We recreate the past through narratives, combining what we know of human nature with the evidence we've gathered, eventually (hopefully) painting ever-clearer pictures of a time we could never touch with our fingers.
Some take our lack of direct access as a good excuse to shake away all trappings of "scientific" methods. This seems ill-advised. Retaining what we've learned over the past 50 years about how we construct the world we see is important, but it's not the whole story, and it's got enough parallels with 17th century astronomy that we might learn some lessons from that example.
Saturn's Rings
In the summer 1610, Galileo observed Saturn through a telescope for the first time. He wrote with surprise that
Galileo's Saturn. [via]
the star of Saturn is not a single star, but is a composite of three, which almost touch each other, never change or move relative to each other, and are arranged in a row along the zodiac, the middle one being three times larger than the two lateral ones…
This curious observation would take half a century to resolve into what we today see as Saturn's rings. Galileo wrote that others, using inferior telescopes, would report seeing Saturn as oblong, rather than as three distinct spheres. Low and behold, within months, several observers reported an oblong Saturn.
Galileo's Saturn in 1616.
What shocked Galileo even more, however, was an observation two years later when the two smaller bodies disappeared entirely. They appeared consistently, with every observation, and then one day poof they're gone. And when they eventually did come back, they looked remarkably odd.
Saturn sometimes looked as though it had "handles", one connected to either side, but the nature of those handles were unknown to Galileo, as was the reason why sometimes it looked like Saturn had handles, sometimes moons, and sometimes nothing at all.
Saturn was just really damn weird. Take a look at these observations from Gassendi a few decades later:
Gassendi's Saturn [via]
What the heck was going on? Many unsatisfying theories were put forward, but there was no real consensus.
Enter Christiaan Huygens, who in the 1650s was fascinated by the Saturn problem. He believed a better telescope was needed to figure out what was going on, and eventually got some help from his brother to build one.
The idea was successful. Within short order, Huygens developed the hypothesis that Saturn was encircled by a ring. This explanation, along with the various angles we would be viewing Saturn and its ring from Earth, accounted for the multitude of appearances Saturn could take. The figure below explains this:
Huygens' Saturn [via]
The explanation, of course, was not universally accepted. An opposing explanation by an anti-Copernican Jesuit contested that Saturn had six moons, the configuration of which accounted for the many odd appearances of the planet. Huygens countered that the only way such a hypothesis could be sustained would be with inferior telescopes.
While the exact details of the dispute are irrelevant, the proposed solution was very clever, and speaks to contemporary methods in digital history. The Accademia del Cimento devised an experiment that would, in a way, test the opposing hypotheses. They built two physical models of Saturn, one with a ring, and one with six satellites configured just-so.
The Model of Huygens' Saturn [via]
In 1660, the experimenters at the academy put the model of a ringed Saturn at the end of a 75-meter / 250-foot hallway. Four torches illuminated the model but were obscured from observers, so they wouldn't be blinded by the torchlight. Then they had observers view the model through various quality telescopes from the other end of the hallway. The observers were essentially taken from the street, so they wouldn't have preconceived notions of what they were looking at.
Depending on the distance and quality of the telescope, observers reported seeing an oblong shape, three small spheres, and other observations that were consistent with what astronomers had seen. When seen through a glass, darkly, a ringed Saturn does indeed form the most unusual shapes.
In short, the Accademia del Cimento devised an experiment, not to test the physical world, but to test whether an underlying reality could appear completely different through the various distortions that come along with how we observe it. If Saturn had rings, would it look to us as though it had two small satellites? Yes.
This did not prove Huygens' theory, but it did prove it to be a viable candidate given the observational instruments at the time. Within a short time, the ring theory became generally accepted.
The Battle of Trafalgar
So what's Saturn's ring have to do with the price of tea in China? What about digital history?
The importance is in the experiment and the model. You do not need direct access to phenomena, whether they be historical or astronomical, to build models, conduct experiments, or generally apply scientific-style methods to test, elaborate, or explore a theory.
In October 1805, Lord Nelson led the British navy to a staggering victory against the French and Spanish during the Napoleonic Wars. The win is attributed to Nelson's unusual and clever battle tactics of dividing his forces in columns perpendicular to the single line of the enemy ships. Twenty-seven British ships defeated thirty-three Franco-Spanish ones. Nelson didn't lose a single British ship lost, while the Franco-Spanish fleet lost twenty-two.
Horatio Nelson [via]
But let's say the prevailing account is wrong. Let's say, instead, due to the direction of the wind and the superior weaponry of the British navy, victory was inevitable: no brilliant naval tactician required.
This isn't a question of counterfactual history, it's simply a question of competing theories. But how can we support this new theory without venturing into counterfactual thinking, speculation? Obviously Nelson did lead the fleet, and obviously he did use novel tactics, and obviously a resounding victory ensued. These are indisputable historical facts.
It turns out we can use a similar trick to what the Accademia del Cimento devised in 1660: pretend as though things are different (Saturn has a ring; Nelson's tactics did not win the battle), and see whether our observations would remain the same (Saturn looks like it is flanked by two smaller moons; the British still defeated the French and Spanish).
It turns out, further, that someone's already done this. In 2003, two Italian physicists built a simulation of the Battle of Trafalgar, taking into account details of the ships, various strategies, wind direction, speed, and so forth. The simulation is a bit like a video game that runs itself: every ship has its own agency, with the ability to make decisions based on its environment, to attack and defend, and so forth. It's from a class of simulations called agent-based models.
When the authors directed the British ships to follow Lord Nelson's strategy, of two columns, the fleet performed as expected: little loss of life on behalf of the British, major victory, and so forth. But when they ran the model without Nelson's strategy, a combination of wind direction and superior British firepower still secured a British victory, even though the fleet was outnumbered.
…[it's said] the English victory in Trafalgar is substantially due to the particular strategy adopted by Nelson, because a different plan would have led the outnumbered British fleet to lose for certain. On the contrary, our counterfactual simulations showed that English victory always occur unless the environmental variables (wind speed and direction) and the global strategies of the opposed factions are radically changed, which lead us to consider the British fleet victory substantially ineluctable.
Essentially, they tested assumptions of an alternative hypothesis, and found those assumptions would also lead to the observed results. A military historian might (and should) quibble with the details of their simplifying assumptions, but that's all part of the process of improving our knowledge of the world. Experts disagree, replace simplistic assumptions with more informed ones, and then improve the model to see if the results still hold.
The Parable of the Polygons
This agent-based approach to testing theories about how society works is exemplified by the Schelling segregation model. This week the model shot to popularity through Vi Hart and Nicky Case's Parable of the Polygons, a fabulous, interactive discussion of some potential causes of segregation. Go click on it, play through it, experience it. It's worth it. I'll wait.
Finished? Great! The model shows that, even if people only move homes if less than 1/3rd of their neighbors are the same color that they are, massive segregation will still occur. That doesn't seem like too absurd a notion: everyone being happy with 2/3rds of their neighbors as another color, and 1/3rd as their own, should lead to happy, well-integrated communities, right?
Wrong, apparently. It turns out that people wanting 33% of their neighbors to be the same color as they are is sufficient to cause segregated communities. Take a look at the community created in Parable of the Polygons under those conditions:
Parable of the Polygons
This shows that very light assumptions of racism can still easily lead to divided communities. It's not making claims about racism, or about society: what it's doing is showing that this particular model, where people want a third of their neighbors to be like them, is sufficient to produce what we see in society today. Much like Saturn having rings is sufficient to produce the observation of two small adjacent satellites.
More careful work is needed, then, to decide whether the model is an accurate representation of what's going on, but establishing that base, that the model is a plausible description of reality, is essential before moving forward.
Digital history is a ripe field for this sort of research. Like astronomers, we cannot (yet?) directly access what came before us, but we can still devise experiments to help support our research, in finding plausible narratives and explanations of the past. The NEH Office of Digital Humanities has already started funding workshops and projects along these lines, although they are most often geared toward philosophers and literary historians.
The person doing the most thoughtful theoretical work at the intersection of digital history and agent-based modeling is likely Marten Düring, who is definitely someone to keep an eye on if you're interested in this area. An early innovator and strong practitioner in this field is Shawn Graham, who actively blogs about related issues. This technique, however, is far from the only one available to historians for devising experiments with the past. There's a lot we can still learn from 17th century astronomers.
Author scott b. weingartPosted on December 15, 2014 Categories methodTags ABMs, complexity, history of science, methodologies, scientonomy2 Comments on Digital History, Saturn's Rings, and the Battle of Trafalgar
Bridging Token and Type
There's an oft-spoken and somewhat strawman tale of how the digital humanities is bridging C.P. Snow's "Two Culture" divide, between the sciences and the humanities. This story is sometimes true (it's fun putting together Ocean's Eleven-esque teams comprising every discipline needed to get the job done) and sometimes false (plenty of people on either side still view the other with skepticism), but as a historian of science, I don't find the divide all that interesting. As Snow's title suggests, this divide is first and foremost cultural. There's another overlapping divide, a bit more epistemological, methodological, and ontological, which I'll explore here. It's the nomothetic(type)/idiographic(token) divide, and I'll argue here that not only are its barriers falling, but also that the distinction itself is becoming less relevant.
Nomothetic (Greek for "establishing general laws"-ish) and Idiographic (Greek for "pertaining to the individual thing"-ish) approaches to knowledge have often split the sciences and the humanities. I'll offload the hard work onto Wikipedia:
Nomothetic is based on what Kant described as a tendency to generalize, and is typical for the natural sciences. It describes the effort to derive laws that explain objective phenomena in general.
Idiographic is based on what Kant described as a tendency to specify, and is typical for the humanities. It describes the effort to understand the meaning of contingent, unique, and often subjective phenomena.
These words are long and annoying to keep retyping, and so in the longstanding humanistic tradition of using new words for words which already exist, henceforth I shall refer to nomothetic as type and idiographic as token. 1 I use these because a lot of my digital humanities readers will be familiar with their use in text mining. If you counted the number of unique words in a text, you'd be be counting the number of types. If you counted the number of total words in a text, you'd be counting the number of tokens, because each token (word) is an individual instance of a type. You can think of a type as the platonic ideal of the word (notice the word typical?), floating out there in the ether, and every time it's actually used, it's one specific token of that general type.
The Token/Type Distinction
Usually the natural and social sciences look for general principles or causal laws, of which the phenomena they observe are specific instances. A social scientist might note that every time a student buys a $500 textbook, they actively seek a publisher to punch, but when they purchase $20 textbooks, no such punching occurs. This leads to the discovery of a new law linking student violence with textbook prices. It's worth noting that these laws can and often are nuanced and carefully crafted, with an awareness that they are neither wholly deterministic nor ironclad.
The humanities (or at least history, which I'm more familiar with) are more interested in what happened than in what tends to happen. Without a doubt there are general theories involved, just as in the social sciences there are specific instances, but the intent is most-often to flesh out details and create a particular internally consistent narrative. They look for tokens where the social scientists look for types. Another way to look at it is that the humanist wants to know what makes a thing unique, and the social scientist wants to know what makes a thing comparable.
It's been noted these are fundamentally different goals. Indeed, how can you in the same research articulate the subjective contingency of an event while simultaneously using it to formulate some general law, applicable in all such cases? Rather than answer that question, it's worth taking time to survey some recent research.
A recent digital humanities panel at MLA elicited responses by Ted Underwood and Haun Saussy, of which this post is in part itself a response. One of the papers at the panel, by Long and So, explored the extent to which haiku-esque poetry preceded what is commonly considered the beginning of haiku in America by about 20 years. They do this by teaching the computer the form of the haiku, and having it algorithmically explore earlier poetry looking for similarities. Saussy comments on this work:
[…] macroanalysis leads us to reconceive one of our founding distinctions, that between the individual work and the generality to which it belongs, the nation, context, period or movement. We differentiate ourselves from our social-science colleagues in that we are primarily interested in individual cases, not general trends. But given enough data, the individual appears as a correlation among multiple generalities.
One of the significant difficulties faced by digital humanists, and a driving force behind critics like Johanna Drucker, is the fundamental opposition between the traditional humanistic value of stressing subjectivity, uniqueness, and contingency, and the formal computational necessity of filling a database with hard decisions. A database, after all, requires you to make a series of binary choices in well-defined categories: is it or isn't it an example of haiku? Is the author a man or a woman? Is there an author or isn't there an author?
Underwood addresses this difficulty in his response:
Though we aspire to subtlety, in practice it's hard to move from individual instances to groups without constructing something like the sovereign in the frontispiece for Hobbes' Leviathan – a homogenous collection of instances composing a giant body with clear edges.
But he goes on to suggest that the initial constraint of the digital media may not be as difficult to overcome as it appears. Computers may even offer us a way to move beyond the categories we humanists use, like genre or period.
Aren't computers all about "binary logic"? If I tell my computer that this poem both is and is not a haiku, won't it probably start to sputter and emit smoke?
Well, maybe not. And actually I think this is a point that should be obvious but just happens to fall in a cultural blind spot right now. The whole point of quantification is to get beyond binary categories — to grapple with questions of degree that aren't well-represented as yes-or-no questions. Classification algorithms, for instance, are actually very good at shades of gray; they can express predictions as degrees of probability and assign the same text different degrees of membership in as many overlapping categories as you like.
Here we begin to see how the questions asked of digital humanists (on the one side; computational social scientists are tackling these same problems) are forcing us to reconsider the divide between the general and the specific, as well as the meanings of categories and typologies we have traditionally taken for granted. However, this does not yet cut across the token/type divide: this has gotten us to the macro scale, but it does not address general principles or laws that might govern specific instances. Historical laws are a murky subject, prone to inducing fits of anti-deterministic rage. Complex Systems Science and the lessons we learn from Agent-Based Modeling, I think, offer us a way past that dilemma, but more on that later.
For now, let's talk about influence. Or diffusion. Or intertextuality. 2 Matthew Jockers has been exploring these concepts, most recently in his book Macroanalysis. The undercurrent of his research (I think I've heard him call it his "dangerous idea") is a thread of almost-determinism. It is the simple idea that an author's environment influences her writing in profound and easy to measure ways. On its surface it seems fairly innocuous, but it's tied into a decades-long argument about the role of choice, subjectivity, creativity, contingency, and determinism. One word that people have used to get around the debate is affordances, and it's as good a word as any to invoke here. What Jockers has found is a set of environmental conditions which afford certain writing styles and subject matters to an author. It's not that authors are predetermined to write certain things at certain times, but that a series of factors combine to make the conditions ripe for certain writing styles, genres, etc., and not for others. The history of science analog would be the idea that, had Einstein never existed, relativity and quantum physics would still have come about; perhaps not as quickly, and perhaps not from the same person or in the same form, but they were ideas whose time had come. The environment was primed for their eventual existence. 3
An example of shape affording certain actions by constraining possibilities and influencing people. [via]
It is here we see the digital humanities battling with the token/type distinction, and finding that distinction less relevant to its self-identification. It is no longer a question of whether one can impose or generalize laws on specific instances, because the axes of interest have changed. More and more, especially under the influence of new macroanalytic methodologies, we find that the specific and the general contextualize and augment each other.
The computational social sciences are converging on a similar shift. Jon Kleinberg likes to compare some old work by Stanley Milgram 4, where he had people draw maps of cities from memory, with digital city reconstruction projects which attempt to bridge the subjective and objective experiences of cities. The result in both cases is an attempt at something new: not quite objective, not quite subjective, and not quite intersubjective. It is a representation of collective individual experiences which in its whole has meaning, but also can be used to contextualize the specific. That these types of observations can often lead to shockingly accurate predictive "laws" isn't really the point; they're accidental results of an attempt to understand unique and contingent experiences at a grand scale. 5
Manhattan. Dots represent where people have taken pictures; blue dots are by locals, red by tourists, and yellow are uncertain. [via Eric Fischer]
It is no surprise that the token/type divide is woven into the subjective/objective divide. However, as Daston and Galison have pointed out, objectivity is not an ahistorical category. 6 It has a history, is only positively defined in relation to subjectivity, and neither were particularly useful concepts before the 19th century.
I would argue, as well, that the nomothetic and idiographic divide is one which is outliving its historical usefulness. Work from both the digital humanities and the computational social sciences is converging to a point where the objective and the subjective can peaceably coexist, where contingent experiences can be placed alongside general predictive principles without any cognitive dissonance, under a framework that allows both deterministic and creative elements. It is not that purely nomothetic or purely idiographic research will no longer exist, but that they no longer represent a binary category which can usefully differentiate research agendas. We still have Snow's primary cultural distinctions, of course, and a bevy of disciplinary differences, but it will be interesting to see where this shift in axes takes us.
I am not the first to do this. Aviezer Tucker (2012) has a great chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science, "Sciences of Historical Tokens and Theoretical Types: History and the Social Sciences" which introduces and historicizes the vocabulary nicely. ↩
Underwood's post raises these points, as well. ↩
This has sometimes been referred to as environmental possibilism. ↩
Milgram, Stanley. 1976. "Pyschological Maps of Paris." In Environmental Psychology: People and Their Physical Settings, edited by Proshansky, Ittelson, and Rivlin, 104–124. New York.
———. 1982. "Cities as Social Representations." In Social Representations, edited by R. Farr and S. Moscovici, 289–309. ↩
If you're interested in more thoughts on this subject specifically, I wrote a bit about it in relation to single-authorship in the humanities here ↩
Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2007. Objectivity. New York, NY: Zone Books. ↩
Author scott b. weingartPosted on January 18, 2014 Categories theoryTags big data, complexity, data analysis, diffusion, digital humanities, disciplinarity, history, history of science, interdisciplinarity, literary history, macroanalysis, methodologies, scientonomy, social science, theory, two culturesLeave a comment on Bridging Token and Type
Breaking the Ph.D. model using pretty pictures
Earlier today, Heather Froehlich shared what's at this point become a canonical illustration among Ph.D. students: "The Illustrated guide to a Ph.D." The illustrator, Matt Might, describes the sum of human knowledge as a circle. As a child, you sit at the center of the circle, looking out in all directions.
Eventually, he describes, you get various layers of education, until by the end of your bachelor's degree you've begun focusing on a specialty, focusing knowledge in one direction.
A master's degree further deepens your focus, extending you toward an edge, and the process of pursuing a Ph.D., with all the requisite reading, brings you to a tiny portion of the boundary of human knowledge.
You push and push at the boundary until one day you finally poke through, pushing that tiny portion of the circle of knowledge just a wee bit further than it was. That act of pushing through is a Ph.D.
It's an uplifting way of looking at the Ph.D. process, inspiring that dual feeling of insignificance and importance that staring at the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field tends to bring about. It also exemplifies, in my mind, one of the broken aspects of the modern Ph.D. But while we're on the subject of the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, let me digress momentarily about stars.
Quite a while before you or I were born, Great Thinkers with Big Beards (I hear even the Great Women had them back then) also suggested we sat at the center of a giant circle, looking outwards. The entire universe, or in those days, the cosmos (Greek: κόσμος, "order"), was a series of perfect layered spheres, with us in the middle, and the stars embedded in the very top. The stars were either gems fixed to the last sphere, or they were little holes poked through it that let the light from heaven shine through.
As I see it, if we connect the celestial spheres theory to "The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D.", we'd arrive at the inescapable conclusion that every star in the sky is another dissertation, another hole poked letting the light of heaven shine through. And yeah, it takes a very prescriptive view of the knowledge and the universe that either you or I can argue with, but for this post we can let it slide because it's beautiful, isn't it? If you're a Ph.D. student, don't you want to be able to do this?
The problem is I don't actually want to do this, and I imagine a lot of other people don't want to do this, because there are already so many goddamn stars. Stars are nice. They're pretty, how they twinkle up there in space, trillions of miles away from one another. That's how being a Ph.D. student feels sometimes, too: there's your research, my research, and a gap between us that can reach from Alpha Centauri and back again. Really, just astronomically far away.
It shouldn't have to be this way. Right now a Ph.D. is about finding or doing something that's new, in a really deep and narrow way. It's about pricking the fabric of the spheres to make a new star. In the end, you'll know more about less than anyone else in the world. But there's something deeply unsettling about students being trained to ignore the forest for the trees. In an increasingly connected world, the universe of knowledge about it seems to be ever-fracturing. Very few are being trained to stand back a bit and try to find patterns in the stars. To draw constellations.
I should know. I've been trying to write a dissertation on something huge, and the advice I've gotten from almost every professor I've encountered is that I've got to scale it down. Focus more. I can't come up with something new about everything, so I've got to do it about one thing, and do it well. And that's good advice, I know! If a lot of people weren't doing that a lot of the time, we'd all just be running around in circles and not doing cool things like going to the moon or watching animated pictures of cats on the internet.
But we also need to stand back and take stock, to connect things, and right now there are institutional barriers in place making that really difficult. My advisor, who stands back and connects things for a living (like the map of science below), gives me the same prudent advice as everyone else: focus more. It's practical advice. For all that universities celebrate interdisciplinarity, in the end you still need to get hired by a department, and if you don't fit neatly into their disciplinary niche, you're not likely to make it.
My request is simple. If you're responsible for hiring researchers, or promoting them, or in charge of a department or (!) a university, make it easier to be interdisciplinary. Continue hiring people who make new stars, but also welcome the sort of people who want to connect them. There certainly are a lot of stars out there, and it's getting harder and harder to see what they have in common, and to connect them to what we do every day. New things are great, but connecting old things in new ways is also great. Sometimes we need to think wider, not deeper.
Author scott b. weingartPosted on September 3, 2013 Categories miscellaneaTags academia, complexity, disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, scientonomy7 Comments on Breaking the Ph.D. model using pretty pictures
Predicting victors in an attention and feedback economy
This post is about computer models and how they relate to historical research, even though it might not seem like it at first. Or at second. Or third. But I encourage anyone who likes history and models to stick with it, because it gets to a distinction of model use that isn't made frequently enough.
Music in a vacuum
Imagine yourself uninfluenced by the tastes of others: your friends, their friends, and everyone else. It's an effort in absurdity, but try it, if only to pin down how their interests affect yours. Start with something simple, like music. If you want to find music you liked, you might devise a program that downloads random songs from the internet and plays them back without revealing their genre or other relevant metadata, so you can select from that group to get an unbiased sample of songs you like. It's a good first step, given that you generally find music by word-of-mouth, seeing your friends' last.fm playlists, listening to what your local radio host thinks is good, and so forth. The music that hits your radar is determined by your social and technological environment, so the best way to break free from this stifling musical determinism is complete randomization.
So you listen to the songs for a while and rank them as best you can by quality, the best songs (Stairway to Heaven, Shine On You Crazy Diamond, I Need A Dollar) at the very top and the worst (Ice Ice Baby, Can't Touch This, that Korean song that's been all over the internet recently) down at the bottom of the list. You realize that your list may not be a necessarily objective measurement of quality, but it definitely represents a hierarchy of quality to you, which is real enough, and you're sure if your best friends from primary school tried the same exercise they'd come up with a fairly comparable order.
Friends don't let friends share music. via.
Of course, the fact that your best friends would come up with a similar list (but school buddies today or a hundred years ago wouldn't) reveals another social aspect of musical tastes; there is no ground truth of objectively good or bad music. Musical tastes are (largely) socially constructed 1, which isn't to say that there isn't any real difference between good and bad music, it's just that the evaluative criteria (what aspects of the music are important and definitions of 'good' and 'bad') are continuously being defined and redefined by your social environment. Alice Bell wrote the best short explanation I've read in a while on how something can be both real and socially constructed.
There you have it: other people influence what songs we listen to out of the set of good music that's been recorded, and other people influence our criteria for defining good and bad music to begin with. This little thought experiment goes a surprisingly long way in explaining why computational models are pretty bad at predicting Nobel laureates, best-selling authors, box office winners, pop stars, and so forth. Each category is ostensibly a mark of quality, but is really more like a game of musical chairs masquerading as a meritocracy. 2
Sure, you (usually) need to pass a certain threshold of quality to enter the game, but once you're there, whether or not you win is anybody's guess. Winning is a game of chance with your generally equally-qualified peers competing for the same limited resource: membership in the elite. Merton (1968) compared this phenomenon to the French Academy's "Forty-First Chair," because while the Academy was limited to only forty members ('chairs'), there were many more who were also worthy of a seat but didn't get one when the music stopped: Descartes, Diderot, Pascal, Proust, and others. It was almost literally a game of musical chairs between great thinkers, much in the same way it is today in so many other elite groups.
Musical Chair. via.
Merton's same 1968 paper described the mechanism that tends to pick the winners and losers, which he called the 'Matthew Effect,' but is also known as 'Preferential Attachment,' 'Rich-Get-Richer,' and all sorts of other names besides. The idea is that you need money to make money, and the more you've got the more you'll get. In the music world, this manifests when a garage band gets a lucky break on some local radio station, which leads to their being heard by a big record label company who releases the band nationally, where they're heard by even more people who tell their friends, who in turn tell their friends, and so on and so on until the record company gets rich, the band hits the top 40 charts, and the musicians find themselves desperate for a fix and asking for only blue skittles in their show riders. Okay, maybe they don't all turn out that way, but if it sounds like a slippery slope it's because it is one. In complex systems science, this is an example of a positive feedback loop, where what happens in the future is reliant upon and tends to compound what happens just before it. If you get a little fame, you're more likely to get more, and with that you're more likely to get even more, and so on until Lady Gaga and Mick Jagger.
Rishidev Chaudhuri does a great job explaining this with bunnies, showing that if 10% of rabbits reproduce a year, starting with a hundred, in a year there'd be 110, in two there'd be 121, in twenty-five there'd be a thousand, and in a hundred years there'd be over a million rabbits. Feedback systems (so-named because the past results feed back on themselves to the future) multiply rather than add, with effects increasing exponentially quickly. When books or articles are read, each new citation increases its chances of being read and cited again, until a few scholarly publications end up with thousands or hundreds of thousands of citations when most have only a handful.
This effect holds true in Nobel prize-winning science, box office hits, music stars, and many other areas where it is hard to discern between popularity and quality, and the former tends to compound while exponentially increasing the perception of the latter. It's why a group of musicians who are every bit as skilled as Pink Floyd wind up never selling outside their own city if they don't get a lucky break, and why two equally impressive books might have such disproportionate citations. Add to that the limited quantity of 'elite seats' (Merton's 40 chairs) and you get a situation where only a fraction of the deserving get the rewards, and sometimes the most deserving go unnoticed entirely.
Different musical worlds
But I promised to talk about computational models, contingency, and sensitivity to initial conditions, and I've covered none of that so far. And before I get to it, I'd like to talk about music a bit more, this time somewhat more empirically. Salganik, Dodds, and Watts (2006; 10.1126/science.1121066) recently performed a study on about 15,000 individuals that mapped pretty closely to the social aspects of musical taste I described above. They bring up some literature suggesting popularity doesn't directly and deterministically map on to musical proficiency; instead, while quality does play a role, much of the deciding force behind who gets fame is a stochastic (random) process driven by social interactivity. Unfortunately, because history only happened once, there's no reliable way to replay time to see if the same musicians would reach fame the second time around.
Remember Napster? via.
Luckily Salganik, Dodds, and Watts are pretty clever, so they figured out how to make history happen a few times. They designed a music streaming site for teens which, unbeknownst to the teens but knownst to us, was not actually the same website for everyone who visited. The site asked users to listen to previously unknown songs and rate them, and then gave them an option to download the music. Some users who went to the site were only given these options, and the music was presented to them in no particular order; this was the control group. Other users, however, were presented with a different view. Besides the control group, there were eight other versions of the site that were each identical at the outset, but could change depending on the actions of its members. Users were randomly assigned to reside in one of these eight 'worlds,' which they would come back to every time they logged in, and each of these worlds presented a list of most downloaded songs within that world. That is, Betty listened to a song in world 3, rated it five stars, and downloaded it. Everyone in world 3 would now see that the song had been downloaded once, and if other users downloaded it within that world, the download count would iterate up as expected.
The ratings assigned to each song in the control world, where download counts were not visible, were taken to be the independent measure of quality of each song. As expected, in the eight social influence worlds the most popular songs were downloaded a lot more than the most popular songs in the control world, because of the positive feedback effect of people seeing highly downloaded songs and then listening to and downloading them as well, which in turn increased their popularity even more. It should also come as no surprise that the 'best' songs, according to their rating in the independent world, rarely did badly in their download/rating counts in the social worlds, and the 'worst' songs under the same criteria rarely did well in the social worlds, but the top songs differed from one social world to the next, with the hugely popular hits with orders of magnitude more downloads being completely different in each social world. Their study concludes
We conjecture, therefore, that experts fail to predict success not because they are incompetent judges or misinformed about the preferences of others, but because when individual decisions are subject to social influence, markets do not simply aggregate pre-existing individual preferences. In such a world, there are inherent limits on the predictability of outcomes, irrespective of how much skill or information one has.
Contingency and sensitivity to initial conditions
In the complex systems terminology, the above is an example of a system that is highly sensitive to initial conditions and contingent (chance) events. It's similar to that popular chaos theory claim that a butterfly flapping its wings in China can cause a hurricane years later over Florida. It's not that one inevitably leads to the other; rather, positive feedback loops make it so that very small changes can quickly become huge causal factors in the system as their effects exponentially increase. The nearly-arbitrary decision for a famous author to cite one paper on computational linguistics over another equally qualified might be the impetus the first paper needs to shoot into its own stardom. The first songs randomly picked and downloaded in each social world of the above music sharing site greatly influenced the eventual winners of the popularity contest disguised as a quality rank.
Some systems are fairly inevitable in their outcomes. If you drop a two-ton stone from five hundred feet, it's pretty easy to predict where it'll fall, regardless of butterflies flapping their wings in China or birds or branches or really anything else that might get in the way. The weight and density of the stone are overriding causal forces that pretty much cancel out the little jitters that push it one direction or another. Not so with a leaf; dropped from the same height, we can probably predict it won't float into space, or fall somewhere a few thousand miles away, but barring that prediction is really hard because the system is so sensitive to contingent events and initial conditions.
There does exist, however, a set of systems right at the sweet spot between those two extremes; stochastic enough that predicting exactly how it will turn out is impossible, but ordered enough that useful predictions and explanations can still be made. Thankfully for us, a lot of human activity falls in this class.
Tracking Hurricane Ike with models. Notice how short-term predictions are pretty accurate. (Click image watch this model animated). via.
Nate Silver, the expert behind the political prediction blog fivethirtyeight, published a book a few weeks ago called The Signal and the Noise: why so many predictions fail – but some don't. Silver has an excellent track record of accurately predicting what large groups of people will do, although I bring him up here to discuss what his new book has to say about the weather. Weather predictions, according to Silver, are "highly vulnerable to inaccuracies in our data." We understand physics and meteorology well enough that, if we had a powerful enough computer and precise data on environmental conditions all over the world, we could predict the weather with astounding precision. And indeed we do; the National Hurricane Center has become 350% more accurate in the last 25 years alone, giving people two or three day warnings for fairly exact locations with regard to storms. However, our data aren't perfect, and slightly inaccurate or imprecise measurements abound. These small imprecisions can have huge repercussions in weather prediction models, with a few false measurements sometimes being enough to predict a storm tens or hundreds of miles off course.
To account for this, meteorologists introduce stochasticity into the models themselves. They run the same models tens, hundreds, or thousands of times, but each time they change the data slightly, accounting for where their measurements might be wrong. Run the model once pretending the wind was measured at one particular speed in one particular direction; run the model again with the wind at a slightly different speed and direction. Do this enough times, and you wind up with a multitude of predictions guessing the storm will go in different directions. "These small changes, introduced intentionally in order to represent the inherent uncertainty in the quality of the observational data, turn the deterministic forecast into a probabilistic one." The most extreme predictions show the furthest a hurricane is likely to travel, but if most runs of the model have the hurricane staying within some small path, it's a good bet that this is the path the storm will travel.
Silver uses a similar technique when predicting American elections. Various polls show different results from different places, so his models take this into account by running many times and then revealing the spread of possible outcomes; those outcomes which reveal themselves most often might be considered the most likely, but Silver also is careful to use the rest of the outcomes to show the uncertainty in his models and the spread of other plausible occurrences.
Going back to the music sharing site, while the sensitivity of the system would prevent us from exactly predicting the most-popular hits, the musical evaluations of the control world still give us a powerful predictive capacity. We can use those rankings to predict the set of most likely candidates to become hits in each of the worlds, and if we're careful, all or most of the most-downloaded songs will have appeared in our list of possible candidates.
The payoff: simulating history
Simulating the plague in 19th century Canada. via.
So what do hurricanes, elections, and musical hits have to do with computer models and the humanities, specifically history? The fact of the matter is that a lot of models are abject failures when it comes to their intended use: predicting winners and losers. The best we can do in moderately sensitive systems that have difficult-to-predict positive feedback loops and limited winner space (the French Academy, Nobel laureates, etc.) is to find a large set of possible winners. We might be able to reduce that set so it has fairly accurate recall and moderate precision (out of a thousand candidates to win 10 awards, we can pick 50, and 9 out of the 10 actual winners was in our list of 50). This might not be great betting odds, but it opens the door for a type of history research that's generally been consigned to the distant and somewhat distasteful realm of speculation. It is closely related to the (too-often scorned) realm of counterfactual history (What if the Battle of Gettysburg had been won by the other side? What if Hitler had never been born?), and is in fact driven by the ability to ask counterfactual questions.
The type of historiography of which I speak is the question of evolution vs. revolution; is history driven by individual, world-changing events and Great People, or is the steady flow of history predetermined, marching inevitably in some direction with the players just replaceable cogs in the machine? The dichotomy is certainly a false one, but it's one that has bubbled underneath a great many historiographic debates for some time now. The beauty of historical stochastic models 3 is exactly their propensity to yield likely and unlikely paths, like the examples above. A well-modeled historical simulation 4 can be run many times; if only one or a few runs of the model reveal what we take as the historical past, then it's likely that set of events was more akin to the 'revolutionary' take on historical changes. If the simulation takes the same course every time, regardless of the little jitters in preconditions, contingent occurrences, and exogenous events, then that bit of historical narrative is likely much closer to what we take as 'inevitable.'
Models have many uses, and though many human systems might not be terribly amenable to predictive modeling, it doesn't mean there aren't many other useful questions a model can help us answer. The balance between inevitability and contingency, evolution and revolution, is just one facet of history that computational models might help us explore.
Music has a biological aspect as well. Most cultures with music tend towards discrete pitches, discernible (discrete) rhythm, 'octave'-type systems with relatively few notes looping back around, and so forth. This suggests we're hard-wired to appreciate music within a certain set of constraints, much in the same way we're hard-wired to see only certain wavelengths of light or to like the taste of certain foods over others (Peretz 2006; doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.11.004). These tendencies can certainly be overcome, but to suggest the pre-defined structure of our wet thought-machine plays no role in our musical preferences is about as far-fetched as suggesting it plays the only role. ↩
I must thank Miriam Posner for this wonderful turn of phrase. ↩
presuming the historical data and model specifications are even accurate, which is a whole different can of worms to be opened in a later post ↩
Seriously, see the last note, this is really hard to do. Maybe impossible. But this argument is just assuming it isn't, for now. ↩
Author scott b. weingartPosted on October 10, 2012 Categories personal researchTags complexity, computational models, history, human dynamics, scientonomy, social scienceLeave a comment on Predicting victors in an attention and feedback economy


The Downtown Disney District in Anaheim is scheduled for some major changes soon and one is the closing of some of it's staple eateries. Part of that plan includes removing ESPN Zone to make way for a new hotel and unfortunately we will be losing one the coolest Easter eggs on the Disneyland Resort. Many already know about the hidden basketball court in the Matterhorn but did you know that there's a hidden baseball diamond on the roof of the ESPN Zone? Check out the image below!
The baseball diamond and "field" are painted on the canopies that protect the cooling units on the building from the elements. Although it's not a field you can actually play on, we still think that was a clever and fun hidden gem on the resort.
In this episode we mentioned Disney For 2's vlog where they tried some of the food and the churros being offered during Pixar Fest. Check it out below!
This last week we put up a video of the projections for 'Together Forever – A Pixar Nighttime Spectacular'. if you haven't had a chance to check it out, you can watch it below!
Special thanks to our friends Brittany and Liam from the Cloud City Cast podcast for joining us this episode! Check them out using one or more of the links below!


Our experienced experts have seen it all and will serve as your resource and advocate from start to finish. Ultimately, their mission is to shepherd the project on your behalf, giving you a space that glorifies God, and allows you to focus on making an impact with your ministries.
With a little bit of southern charm and an infectious smile, Carson's passion lies in creating great places that make a difference in his community. His architectural designs are inspired by history, nature, technology and human behavior. This Georgia native believes architecture and design is all about invention and innovation - inspiring built environment is all a part of human expression. He is also inspired by his lasting relationships with his clients; and you can definitely find him in his element when he is connecting with people of all walks of life.
Outside the office you can find Carson watching college sports, playing basketball, traveling, and finding a little happiness in just about every situation in life. But what really sparks that smile are his "two girls" – wife, Nicole, and daughter, Greer. They always make him laugh.
Anita has a passion for sustainability and her goal is to someday design a structure from locally sourced materials all contained within a 500 mile radius of the project. She enjoys lighting design and how it affects ones experience of the built environment. Anita is a member of the BIM Group, Religious Facility Group, and the Sustainability Group.
Away from the office Anita loves spending time with her husband and two year old daughter. They enjoy the outdoors and often take nature walks or get away as a family on camping trips. An avid crafter, Anita loves to paint, crochet, knit, quilt, and sew.
We shared our concerns with a variety of architects, and the people who listened best and grasped our concerns most clearly were BLDD Architects.


The definitive book on luscious, decadent cheesecake by a master chef and baker.
Almost everyone relishes the creamy delight of a well-crafted cheesecake. But isn't a really good one available only in a bakery or restaurant? George Geary proves that home-made can be better than bakery-made, with 200 delectable cheesecakes that can easily be made in the home kitchen.
This decadent and delicious collection of prime cheesecake recipes written by baker extraordinaire Geary provides baking inspiration, from plain cheesecakes to others that are intensely rich.
This delightfully creamy dessert is actually easier to make than other traditional cakes, and it is incredibly impressive for family or guests. These recipes provide everything needed for a perfect cheesecake every time. And the wonderful array of flavors from classic vanilla to chocolate, citrus and nutty will delight all.
Savory Cheesecakes Mini Blue Cheesecakes, Creamy Crab Seafood Cheesecake, Triple-Pepper Cheesecake.
The Cheesecake Bible is the perfect book for anyone who loves cheesecake. The cookbook starts out with the tools and equipment needed to make a perfect cheesecake. It then goes into detail about the various types of cheese used to make cheesecake. Then the book talks about other ingredients added to cheeses. The final part of the introduction is a section on basic techniques of making cheesecake.
Then the cookbook gets into the good stuff. There are many different sections of cheesecakes in this book. It starts off with cheesecakes from around the world and then moves into chocolate cheesecakes. From there it takes us to fresh fruit cheesecakes and citrus cheesecakes. Next up are no bake cheesecakes and nut cheesecakes. The book finishes off with savory cheesecake. I've never had a savory cheesecake but they sound wonderful!
Included in the book are over 25 color photographs of different cheesecakes. Each recipe includes a description, serving size, and tips. If you've ever wanted to make a cheesecake this is the cookbook for you.
The first cheesecake I made from this book was the Butterscotch Peach Cheesecake. I made it for a luncheon at work and it was amazing. I had so many compliments on it. The cheesecake is made with caramel sauce and fresh peaches on a graham cracker crust.
It is so creamy and thick. There is the flavor of peaches and a subtle butterscotch note. It's perfect for sharing with friends and helped start off a great summer at work!
A thick, rich cheesecake studded with fresh peaches and ribbons of caramel sauce.
Grease a 9 inch springform pan with 3 inch sides.
In a bowl combine graham cracker crumbs and butter. Press into bottom of cheesecake pan and freeze.
In a mixer bowl fitted with paddle attachment, beat cream cheese, sour cream, and brown sugar on medium-high speed until very smooth, for 3 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition. Stir in flour until blended. Fold in peaches, ½ cup of caramel sauce and vanilla by hand.
Drizzle cake with remaining caramel sauce in a bulls-eye pattern.


The ideas presented in this booklet have been trialled with a large number of groups ranging from Years 6 and 7 in primary school through to students at tertiary level. In all cases they have generated considerable interest and enthusiasm and are presented in this booklet in a form which could be easily adapted to suit the needs of most year levels.
The worksheets in this booklet are based on Modulo Arithmetic or generated Latin Squares. The worksheets outline the theory of Modulo Arithmetic as a basis to construct standard, converging segment, kaleidoscopic patterns and circular residue designs. After completing the material students should be capable of producing large and intricate patterns from mathematical relationships both demonstrating and enhancing an appreciation of mathematical order. Your classroom, too, will look much more interesting.
This PowerPoint file looks at how shapes are made up of other shapes.The slides are designed to be printed off and used as hands-on activity.
This old book from 1986 contains ideas for teaching geometry in primary mathematics classrooms. It presents a wide range of activities for teaching geometry in a stimulating and active way.


Outdoor activities in Clemson are a mix of adventure sports and some laid-back vibes amidst scenic beauty. Clemson comes with an ideal terrain and atmosphere to spend active holidays and make plenty of unforgettable memories. So, explore the wilderness of Clemson and spend some time in the lap of nature with these exciting outdoor activities Clemson has to offer. From the most adventurous experiences to the most popular ones, the following list combines it all to make sure you do not miss these unique experiences while planning a trip to Clemson.
For walking it is a good place. But if you to seat enjoy there are better place.
Very pleasant, nice to be able st stroll around the lake or sit and watch nature.
One of the finest bars in Clemson!
Great place to meet up for basketball, only thing that would make it better is if they fixed the water fountain.


Toho beads are designed to have a larger hole that allows for even more pass through for threads. The larger hole also creates lighter beads which give you more beads by weight. The cut holes of inside colored or silver lined beads give an exquisite shine.


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text:
John Godsey
John Godsey has served as North America chief creative officer since January 2017.
He joined legacy VML a decade ago and helped win the agency's first Cannes Lion in 2012. Since then, he has helped bring home nearly 60 more Lions — including VMLY&R's first Grand Prix for Wendy's "Keeping Fortnite Fresh."
Recognized as an industry expert in branded entertainment, Godsey has created three full-length branded films — with his most recent film, "It All Begins with a Song," being honored at multiple film festivals, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The film also won three Cannes Lions, which helped VML become Cannes Entertainment Agency of the Year in 2018 — for the second year in a row.
Godsey's 25 years of brand-building expertise includes stints at Team Detroit — where he helped create a branded content discipline for Ford — and at FCB. While at FCB, his work was parodied by "Saturday Night Live," "Scary Movie 3," and ESPN — and demonized by Rush Limbaugh (a personal career highlight).
Godsey is based in VMLY&R's principal office of Kansas City.
Chief Creative Officer, North America
john.godsey@vmlyr.com
https://www.facebook.com/john.godsey.9
@jgodsey2003
https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-godsey-0876217/
A member of WPP / Copyright © 2020 VMLY&R

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Why did you pick you pick this picture?
I picked this picture, because I adored the meaning behind this word—"sonder" is one's realization that everyone has a life as vivid and complex as one's own—the word really depicts how none of us are alone in this world, and how we should acknowledge that everyone goes through similar hardships, struggles, and barriers in life to progress and survive.
Other than the theme, I really liked how I used one of Vivienne Westwood's (she is my idol) fashion models as an element of the illustration. The complicated and vivid patterns, the jewellery, the bag, cup, and pink hair—they represent the superficial masks that people put on every day to hide their struggles to seem "normal" to others. The way the model turns around, as if startled by something, with her hair whipping in front of her face and her right arm stretched out, shows "sonder".
Why does this picture mean so my how you?
This artwork means a lot to me because it reminds me that the people around me are struggling as well, which then in turn encourages me to not judge others by their appearance or demeanor, as they are living a life that is just as complex as mine. It is also empowering in a way that it reminds me that I'm not alone in this world.
I am 16 years old, and I became interested in art when I was very young. As a child I thought art was only about perfection and realism—having the ability to copy an object directly onto paper. But as I grew up I began to think that art is a form of expression, and that there is really no wrong answer to art, which attracted me towards abstract art as well.
I don't really have an art style, because I love trying new things and testing out different styles. I love all forms of art. My styles range from cute doodles to realistic graphite sketches—if I were to pick a favorite medium, I'd have to go with watercolor!


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text:
SOLD OUT: Grace Petrie, Rainy
Acoustic singer-songwriter and activist on UK tour
SJE Arts at the church of S. John the Evangelist, 109 Iffley Road, Oxford OX4 1EH, Sat 5 October 2019
SJE Arts at the church of S. John the Evangelist
109 Iffley Road Oxford OX4 1EH
Alice Nuttall October 7, 2019
Snowflakes and socialists
SJE Arts was the fifth stop on Grace Petrie's month-long tour of the UK, one of several sold-out venues on a trip that will take the folk artist and protest singer all around the country to sing the joyful, angry, politically-charged songs that have won her a broad spectrum of fans. The queue outside SJE Arts as I arrived on the night stretched around the building, across the church's peaceful gardens and out into the road, made up of people of all ages, with a few unlucky chancers hovering around and asking people if they had any spare tickets to sell. No-one did, however. The church's aisles were packed, and SJE Arts is a decidedly roomy space.
The crowd was bubbling both inside and outside the church, helped on a little by the well-stocked bar that had been set up on one side of the nave. I hadn't been to a performance at SJE Arts before, but was surprised to note how clearly active a church it is – the stage was set up in front of an ornate rood screen with a large cross perched on top, and oil paintings of the Stations of the Cross adorn the walls on either side. It seemed quite an incongruous setting for an extremely secular singer, something commented on both by Petrie herself and by her promoter, who noted "I don't do God, but he does have some rather nice buildings" – and indeed, the acoustics were impressive, and the grandeur and solemnity of the building made for an interesting contrast to Petrie's raw, uncompromising and humorous look at the world's inequalities.
The gig was opened by another acoustic guitarist, Rainy, who played several bluesy-folk songs. The first few didn't seem quite big enough for the location, getting a little lost in the large space, but he hit his stride a couple of songs in, with a song called 'Nothing But Change' that had one man near me dancing in his seat.
There was a short break after Rainy's set, and then Grace Petrie came on, to applause that almost shook the windows. Petrie bantered with the crowd, introducing herself as "a socialist feminist lesbian left-wing protest singer, and that is a full-time job". She talked about how she'd been angry since May 2010, and had been trying to use her music to effect political change and stop people voting Tory ever since, joking "if anything, I'm making things worse!" Having introduced who she was and what she was about for the newbies in the audience, she launched into 'Farewell to Welfare', probably her best-known song and a furious critique of austerity and political hypocrisy.
Petrie performs with an air of passion and anger that overlays a strong sense of hopefulness, and a belief in the power of society to take care of all its members, and to do better. She's also self-deprecating, never taking herself too seriously, something encapsulated in her performance of another one of her well-known songs, 'Nobody Knows I'm a Fraud', and in her fluffing the very first line of her "one happy song" about the birth of her niece Ivy.
In bleak and wearying political times, Grace Petrie is exactly the kind of protest singer we need – one who combines anger with humour, and is just as quick to boost the heroes of the time up as she is to tear the villains down. While introducing her song 'You Build a Wall', Petrie discussed the term 'snowflake', and how it's used to describe young people who point out injustices in the world, commenting "if the worst thing you can say about young people is they're too compassionate, I think we're going to be okay". Hopefully, we will be – and Petrie is making sure that we have a great soundtrack for the fight.
© Daily Information 2020. Printed from https://www.dailyinfo.co.uk/feature/15697/sold-out-grace-petrie-rainy


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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


HomeAskChoosing between two masters offers. How?
I am looking for a career in Safety Engineering and have completed bachelors in Chemical Engineering.
I have offers from the University of Sheffield in 'Msc in Process Safety and Loss Prevention' and the University of Aberdeen in 'Msc in Safety and Reliability Engineering in oil and gas'. Advice me which university to go for, keeping under consideration better job prospects and learning.
We cannot make a choice for you. A visit would probably settle this, because meeting people face to face and seeing the facilities helps you to place yourself in the context.
If a visit isn't possible, check the staff lists, the curriculum and decide which course is most suitable for your needs, based on the information on university websites. Don't hesitate to ask penetrating questions about the courses to the admissions tutors. Ask them for their statistics on graduate employment, these will be accessible.


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Three Actions You Can Take to Improve Others' Wellbeing at Work
We've all seen the headlines that the pandemic is pushing down health and wellbeing. One result is that skills related to mental and emotional wellbeing, like empathy and compassion, are forecast to be the most critical leadership skills in 2021 and for years to come. This should come as no surprise as 80% of respondents to one survey say they would quit their job over mental health, and 62% of employees who participated in another survey consider mental-health issues to be a top challenge during the COVID-19 crisis.
So, what can leaders and concerned colleagues do? A lot, actually.
There's a broad spectrum of changes we can make, from making small adjustments to how we interact with our team members to integrating the principles of wellbeing into corporate culture and systems. In this article, I will highlight an example from the "small adjustments" end of the spectrum. I will write about the other end of the spectrum in a future article.
Imagine this: you are a mid-level leader. And Shinji is a high-performing, front-line manager on your team. Despite two challenging quarters this year, he has managed to keep the same positive disposition that you have come to expect from him.
During your weekly 1-on-1 meeting with Shinji, he asks if he can take an extended three-week vacation since he, like many others at his company, have a large surplus of vacation days, many of which rolled over from last year.
"Sure," you say enthusiastically, trying to convey your support for Shinji and his self-care. "And please don't worry about work while you're away. The team and I will gladly cover for you. Enjoy your time off."
Good conversation, right? Well, not exactly.
This is a summary of an actual conversation. Shortly after it ended, Shinji (not his real name) left for his vacation feeling more disconnected and unmotivated than before he asked for the time off. So, what happened?
Shinji's wellbeing needs were not met during this conversation.
When I talked to him after his vacation, he told me he had gone into the meeting with two desires. First, he wanted his manager to show a genuine interest in his wellbeing. And second, he wanted to talk about his feeling that he is languishing at work. But he hesitated because he felt a degree of toxic positivity (e.g., rejecting or denying non-positive mindsets and emotions) during recent department meetings, so he wasn't sure it was safe to share negative feelings with his manager.
Suggestion: Show a Genuine Interest
In this conversation, what Shinji said he wanted from his manager was for her to ask him why he felt he wanted an extended vacation now. He wanted to talk about how he feels like he is languishing, stressed and maybe even a little burned out. And research results from Google's Project Oxygen find that "showing concern for success and well-being" is one of ten behaviors that make managers great. Weaving statements or questions like…
"You've worked especially hard through two tough quarters. I appreciate your effort and commitment. I also have some concern about you. How are you doing" or
"You've worked especially hard through two tough quarters. What's been tough for you over the past two quarters? What are you struggling with?"
Suggestion: Normalize and encourage expressions of emotions
…into the conversation could have helped Shinji talk about what was most important to him at the time: coping with feeling unmotivated and empty, and figuring out how to regain a higher sense of wellbeing at work.
Shinji went into the meeting looking for a signal that it would be safe to talk about his emotional and mental state. Yes, it would be ideal if Shinji were part of a team where expressing feelings, even difficult ones, were already the norm. Afterall, expressing our feelings is beneficial even at work – as outlined in the best-selling book No Hard Feelings.
One action we could take here is to try to pick up on what Shinji is feeling and then communicate to him that his feelings are natural. Assuming that we had shown a genuine interest in Shinji, and that he opened up about what's going on, we could try normalizing (a cognitive behavioral therapy term sometimes called validation) his feelings by making statements like:
"It sounds like you're feeling worn out / unmotivated," or
"Feeling worn out / unmotivated is understandable given the constant pressure you've been working through since last year"
But we can't always count on the other person to share their feelings first. Whether or not we recognize it, as leaders, our own actions often set the tone as to what behaviors are and are not appropriate. So, when appropriate, making ourselves vulnerable through personal self-disclosure can send a clear signal to others that it's okay to follow suit. For example, revealing (if true) that…
"I've felt my own energy levels and enthusiasm for work dip at times over the past few months," or
"I have days where I feel I'm not my usual self, and that's tough for me to deal with"
…can make it feel safe enough for others to share their own feelings. It also strengthens our social connections. And there's plenty of evidence we need to do this, and employers can help.
Suggestion: Match the support you offer to what's needed
Positive psychologist Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener writes that "for support to be received well, it needs to match what is desired." As we know, this doesn't always happen. Here is one common and funny example of mismatched support and need.
While offering heartfelt encouragement to take time off might seem like the supportive thing to do, researchers have found that people who are grappling with difficult feelings really need compassion and acceptance. Similarly, when the issue is wrestling with a practical problem, like regaining a sense of wellbeing, the underlying need is for tools, advice and assistance.
So, how do we figure out whether the true need is time off or something deeper?
What's necessary is what Mark Goulston and John Ullmen call connective listening skills. And, in fact, it's the skill that is common to all three suggestions above. Connective listening is "listening of the highest order, and it's the human listening that all of us crave. It's listening into other people to discover what's going on inside them. It's listening on their terms, not yours. It's understanding where people are coming from to establish genuine rapport."
And with rapport, comes the opportunity to influence. In Shinji's case, and others like it, the opportunity is to positively influence others' wellbeing. Doing this should matter to us as leaders because well-being is strongly correlated to better work performance and firm value, and as leaders, we influence all three.
Thanks for reading this article. You can find a list of my other posts by clicking here. I invite you to join people from 30 other countries around the world to the latest episodes of Humans At Work, my podcast that gives you fresh perspectives and actionable ideas for making working with other humans better for everyone.


The Museum of London Archaeology built heritage team has recorded a possible-Medieval, secular wall painting during refurbishment works at Valence House, Barking and Dagenham. The timber-framed building, partially surrounded by a moat, is the only surviving example of the five manor houses of Dagenham. It is now home to Barking and Dagenham's local history museum and art gallery, which is undergoing a major redevelopment.
The painting was uncovered on the northern wall of a cupboard, as well as on a ceiling timber in the same cupboard. The discovery was made in an area of the building thought to date to the 15th century, and there is no initial reason to think the decoration is of significantly later date.
The painted decoration was sealed behind lath and plaster which, on the northern wall of the cupboard, had been attached to inserted timber studs with what appeared to be hand-wrought nails, suggesting that the painted decoration was covered over no later than the 19th century.
The painted surfaces could be seen to extend beyond the hole both to the top and bottom. It is possible that the painted decoration extends from floor to ceiling behind the present surface of the wall.
Museum of London Archaeology is consulting with English Heritage and the local conservation authority about the significance of the painting before works continue.


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GREAT BEND TRIBUNE
e-Tribune
Babies of 2020
Local News On the Record Business Life Trending Topics News Tips Community Covid-19
Hoisington announces emergency electrical service interuption
USD 428 notebook: Potential dropouts should know the value of a diploma
On the Record - Jan. 14, 2021
COVID-19 vaccinations continue
Local Sports Collegiate Sports Professional Sports
Great Bend surprises Hutchinson girls
Great Bend Middle School 7th grade basketball
Great Bend Middle School wrestlers
Panthers bowlers roll past Dodge City
Adrian Servando Vasquez	1996 - 2020
Alma F. (Zimmerman) Suppes, 1932 - 2021
Larry W. Meeks 1947 - 2021
Doris Ann White, 1938 - 2021
Sarah Christine Ryser-Brown	1978- 2021
Submit a Letter to the Editors
Mike Pence feels very aggrieved. Where's my violin?
New Year's retribution
Where do your directions lead to?
Why revisit the mask mandate?
Barton County Source Pawnee County Source Women's Expo Inspire Health Magazine Prime Life Magazine Health and Wellness 2020 Progress Editions Tis the Season 2019
Home for the Holidays 2020 Inspired Living Magazine
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Contact the Great Bend Tribune
Antonov to perform in Sterling on concert tour
Acclaimed concert pianist Avguste Antonov will perform at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 4, at the Sterling United Presbyterian Church The concert, sponsored by Sterling College, is free and open to the public. Photo courtesy of www.avgusteantonov.com.
Acclaimed concert pianist Avguste Antonov will perform at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 4, at the Sterling United Presbyterian Church. Antonov is artist in residence at The Master's Touch School of Music & Performing Arts, LLC., and has an active concert schedule throughout the U.S. The concert, sponsored by Sterling College, is free and open to the public.
"Antonov is a champion of contemporary classical composers. His program will include works by Robert Rollin, Gregory Hutter, Carter Pann and Matthew Saunders. It will be a delightful evening of contemporary works that many are unfamiliar with, but interested in hearing for the first time," said Brad Nix, chair of Sterling College's Department of Music.
Antonov was born in Bulgaria, and studied music at the prestigious Ecole Normale de Paris and the Conservatoire Nationale de Region de Bordeaux. In 1999, he moved to the United States to attend the University of Missouri – Kansas City. He moved to the University of Kansas in 2000 and graduated in 2005 with a B.M. in Piano Performance. He earned his M.M. in Piano Performance from Texas Christian University.
He has performed as a soloist with the Alton Symphony Orchestra, the Tulsa Camerata, the San Jose Wind Symphony, the Trevecca Symphony Orchestra, the Hardin-Simmons University Orchestra, the Kansas City Medical Arts Symphony, the University of Kansas Symphony and the University of Kansas Wind Ensemble. His 2013-2014 concert season includes Texas, Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Colorado, Kansas, California and Washington.


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Home Football Fernando Torres: Former Liverpool, Chelsea & Spain striker to retire
Written by: AC Posted on: 21/06/2019
Fernando Torres: Former Liverpool, Chelsea & Spain striker to retire
Category:	Football
Torres scores winning goal in Euro 2008 final
Spanish World Cup-winning striker Fernando Torres has announced he is to retire from football.
Torres, 35, played at Atletico Madrid, Liverpool and Chelsea in his 18-year career and is currently at Sagan Tosu in Japan's J1 League.
In 110 games for Spain, he scored the winner in Euro 2008 and was on target in their Euro 2012 final win.
"After 18 exciting years, the time has come to put an end to my football career," he said on social media.
Torres said he will hold a news conference in Tokyo on Sunday to "explain all the details".
His career started with Atletico, before a £20m move to Liverpool in 2007, where he scored 81 goals in 142 games.
In 2011, he was signed by Chelsea for a then British record transfer fee of £50m.
Torres scores 'cracker' for Spain at 2006 World Cup
Although he failed to replicate his goalscoring form at Stamford Bridge, he was part of the Blues' Champions League-winning team in 2012.
He also won the FA Cup and scored in their 2-1 win against Benfica in the Europa League final in 2013.
After 45 goals in 172 games at Chelsea and a brief four-month loan spell at AC Milan, he returned to Atletico in late 2014.
He finished on the losing side as Atletico lost the 2016 Champions League final to Real Madrid, but won a second Europa League in 2018 – his final appearance before moving to Japan.
Torres, who is Spain's third highest goalscorer with 38, played in six major tournaments including their 2010 World Cup triumph.
El Nino's career in pictures
Fernando Torres won two European Championships and the World Cup with Spain
Torres made his senior debut for Atletico in 2001 when they were playing in Spain's second division
At age 19 he was made captain
In 2007 he joined Liverpool for £20m under manager Rafael Benitez
He scored 33 goals in his debut season – only Mohamed Salah (44 in 2017-18) has ever scored more in his debut season for the Reds
At Euro 2008 he scored the winner in the final to give Spain a 1-0 victory over Germany
Torres endeared himself to Liverpool fans with his performances against Manchester United
Torres won the World Cup in 2010 in South Africa, coming on as a substitute in extra time in the final
His move to Chelsea in 2011 for £50m was a then British transfer record and the fourth biggest in the world at that point
His greatest moment in a Chelsea shirt was his injury-time winner against Barcelona at the Nou Camp which sent Chelsea through to the Champions League final where they beat Bayern Munich on penalties
He scored the third goal in the Euro 2012 final as Spain beat Italy 4-0 – he is the only player to score in two European Championship finals
He joined AC Milan on a two-year loan in August 2014, but left for Atletico four months later
In his two spells at Atletico he scored 121 goals in 350 games
His final game for the club was as a 90th-minute substitute in the 2018 Europa League final defeat of Marseille
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Daniel James scouting report: Man Utd winger makes debut in win over Perth
TOTTENHAM VS CHELSEA [FA Cup #CARABAO] 1-0 Highlights & All Goals 08.01.2019
Behind-the-scenes at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium's NFL makeover | BBC Sport
Daily Acca Tips – Tuesday 16 July
PM hopeful Jeremy Hunt seeks to ease tensions with Iran


In November 2017, Planned Parenthood Association of Zambia (PPAZ) received the news that they must cease all USAID funded programmes. The stop order was a result of the 'Global Gag Rule' (GGR), also referred to as the Mexico City Policy. The reinstatement of the policy has resulted in Planned Parenthood Association of Zambia losing 46% of its funding. You can learn more about the Global Gag Rule here.
"My name is Joyce. I live in Sopoloyi with my grandmother. I tested positive for HIV, around November, but was doubtful about starting treatment. I stayed away for three months and came back in January, to retest, when they asked if I wanted to start treatment right away, I refused, because I wasn't ready.
I told my sister what happened and explained that I had tested positive for HIV, so she advised me to go back and start treatment as soon as possible, because the longer I waited the more I was wasting away.
I returned to the clinic and I was given medication for two weeks. I was changed and put on another course for a month. I would go back every two weeks to get medication, then gradually I was given a course for two months. From the time I commenced treatment till now, there's a clear difference, my body is slowly coming back to normal. I felt very safe, I was happy that they protected me, if I hadn't come at that time to get help I would have been seriously ill, the medication wouldn't have helped me at all, but now I have been on medication I feel much better and my body is also getting better.


spleen is the personal blog of stephen judd -- All posts tagged "bicycles"
A while back we returned to Wellington. I brought my big heavy Pilen Lyx with me.
Christchurch is mostly flat, Wellington is mostly not flat, and in fact we moved to Wilton, most of the way up Te Ahumairangi, so our house is about 200m of elevation above Willis St where I work. I tried riding the Pilen home from town. I made it but then I had to lie on the sofa for half an hour. Rather than give up the Pilen, I got Bicycle Junction to convert it to an e-bike with a Lekkie conversion kit. I've been riding the converted bike for over a year now, and I've had lots of conversations with curious people. Here's what I tell them.
If you haven't ridden an e-bike before, it's just like having your own personal tail wind. You still have to pedal, and your pedalling still does the work it always did, but you get assistance. By changing the amount of assistance from the motor, you get more or less of a tail wind. The Lekkie kit has 5 levels of assistance. I have it on level 1 when I ride to work, which is mostly downhill, and level 3 when I ride home. This enables me to get up Wadestown Road and the rest of the hill without actually getting sweaty, just warm, so I can wear my work clothes the whole trip. I have never felt the need to use level 4 or 5. If I'm riding somewhere really flat and I want to go as slow as possible, eg the waterfront, I turn it off and ride unassisted altogether.
There is a little boost button that gives you extra assistance while you press it. It's handy for takeoff when you're in the wrong gear by mistake, or to get over a brief increase in incline.
The motor cuts out appropriately when you're braking, coasting or changing gear. No special techniques required, just pedal and brake and change gear as normal.
It's about 5km each way, aso a return trip of 10km or so, almost all downhill one way and uphill the other. I charge the battery every 3 days or so, whenever it gets down to 2 bars (out of 5). It seems to take 3-4 hours to get back to fully charged so I just put it on the charger overnight.
Niggles: it isn't hooked up to the bike lights, which doesn't bother me so much, but it might bother you if you were expecting it. I also had a weird problem with the motor not quite engaging a few months back, and the unit had to be sent back to the manufacturer for some mysterious work.
Overall I'm very happy, and it has enabled me to remain a bicycle commuter riding my favourite big blue beast. If I didn't already have the Pilen, I might well have gone for a purpose-built e-bike, but this is still pretty good.


John Halikias is Professor of Quantitative Analysis at the Department of Marketing and Communication of the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB).He has been educated at Athens University of Economics, London School of Economics and Warwick University, where he received a B.Sc. in Economics, a M.Sc. in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Applied Econometrics, respectively. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Surrey (Surrey European Management School) and the University of Strathclyde (Strathclyde Graduate Business School).
His main research interests are in the areas of Quantitative Analysis and its use in Export Modelling and Export Performance of Greek Firms. His work has appeared in journals such as International Review of Economics and Business, Journal of Global Marketing, Journal of Applied Business Research, Journal of European Industrial Training, Management Decision, European Business Review, Gender in Management, The Journal of Product & Brand Management, in International Conference Proceedings and others.
He has an extensive consulting experience. He has acted as Project Management Consultant in two Regional Operational Programs of Greece (Central Macedonia, 1992 –1995 and Rest of Central Greece, 1995 – 2001), Chairman of MODA CHROMA SA, Synthetic Leather Manufacturer (1995 – 2004), Consultant for issues concerning the compilation of real estate price indices and property valuation surveys for PROPINDEX SA (2002 – 2004), Vice Chairman at State Deposits and Loans Fund (2007 - 2009), Member of the Management Board at Hellenic Post Bank (2008 – 2009) and recently as Vice Rector of Economic Affairs at AUEB (2007 – 2011).
He has also conducted many consulting projects for government and private industry (Ministry of Agricultural Development & Foods, Ministry of Economics, National Centre for Public Administration and Local Government, Embassy of Pakistan, Association of Advertising Companies, Hellenic Post, The Athens Water Supply & Sewerage Company, etc).
Currently, Professor Halikias is Senior Research Officer at the Export Research Centre of the Pan-Hellenic Exporters Association, Vice Chairman at the Company for Management and Development of AUEB Property SA and Member of the Good Practice Advisory Committee for the Hellenic Statistical System.


If you are only joining this series now, you may want to go to our pharma business resource centre and read the first four articles in our series of steps to winning leads online. Pharma IQ speaks to hundreds of industry leaders every year at the 50-100 conferences we hold annually and so are best placed to help you and your business succeed in the online space. Our editor, Andrea Charles, has nearly a decade of experience in the pharma industry, and so is excellently placed to not only give out this advice, but also to tailor our approach to your specific needs.
We can help you reach our 50,000 newsletter subscribers, the 11,600+ members of our LinkedIn Group and 6,600+ Twitter followers.
For more information on how we could help you meet your target audience online, please visit Pharma IQ or download our Business Development Information Pack.
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Step 10 - Contact the IQ Team to do this Again!
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Jean Christophe Schwaab (* 23. August 1979 in Lausanne, heimatberechtigt in La Chaux-de-Fonds und Lausanne) ist ein Schweizer Politiker (SP). Schwaab ist Jurist und erwarb 2003 ein Lizentiat in Recht an der Universität Bern, wo er 2009 in Wirtschaftsrecht promovierte. Schwaab ist verheiratet und hat einen Sohn und eine Tochter.

Schwaab war von 2011 bis 2017 Mitglied des Nationalrats und war dort in der Kommission für Rechtsfragen RK und der Begnadigungskommission BeK. Vorher war er seit März 2007 im Grossen Rat des Kantons Waadt. Weiter war er von 1999 bis 2008 im Einwohnerrat von Riex und von 2011 bis 2016 im Einwohnerrat von Bourg-en-Lavaux, der Fusionsgemeinde, in welcher Riex aufging. Ab Juli 2016 ist Schwaab Mitglied des Gemeinderates von Bourg-en-Lavaux.

Am 24. Oktober 2013 forderte Schwaab den Bundesrat in einem Postulat auf, einen Bericht über Bitcoin vorzulegen.
Schwaab erwähnt nebst der zweifelhaften Rolle von Bitcoin für Kriminelle auch die Gefahr, dass es sich um ein Schneeball- oder Pyramidensystem handeln könnte.

Im Herbst 2017 trat Schwaab aus dem Nationalrat zurück, um sich mehr um seine Familie kümmern zu können; er verbleibt jedoch Gemeinderatsmitglied von Bourg-en-Lavaux und kündigte an, sich weiterhin mit der Kantons- und Bundespolitik zu beschäftigen.

Werke
 Wettbewerbsbeschränkende Know-how-Lizenzverträge. Stämpfli Verlag, Bern; 2009. ISBN 978-3-7272-0025-0.

Weblinks

 Website von Jean Christophe Schwaab

Einzelnachweise

Nationalrat (Waadt)
Grossrat (Waadt)
Kommunalpolitiker (Kanton Waadt)
Person (Lausanne)
SP-Mitglied (Schweiz)
Politiker (21. Jahrhundert)
Schweizer
Geboren 1979
Mann

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Students from secundary 1st level have made a mural to commemorate the peace day with a peace pigeon where they put theis hands to pray for the peace in the world.
Also they wrote: "it isn´t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn´t enough to believe in it. One must work at it".
Our five- year-olds class have learned vocabulary words about the project that we have worked, "Castle".
You can watch some videos about these games.