FractaLog

Model-Predict-Understand...A non-linear space for students of Chaos and Fractals

Well , it's finally here, and not a moment too soon. I haven't posted in months. I'll blame some of the procrastination on today's election. Like many former able-bodied workers, I have spent countless hours watching the web wires for the latest info on the moose hunter of all elections.

One place where I've probably spent 538 hours or so is at fivethirtyeight.com - a meta-meta-polling site that claims to present "electoral politics done right."

Named for the total number of possible electoral votes, FiveThirtyEight.com is the creation of Nate Silver and Sean Quinn, who have developed a unique methodology for polling analysis:

1. Many polls are used to produce a weighted average. The weights are based on a reliability index determined by that pollster's historical track record, the poll's sample size, and the recentness of the poll.
2. A regression estimate based on the demographics in each state is used to account for outlier polls
3. An inferential process allows states that have not been polled recently to have their results modified , effectively makeing them "currrent"
4. The election is simulated 10,000 times "in order to provide a probabilistic assessment of electoral outcomes based on a historical analysis of polling data since 1952. The simulation further accounts for the fact that similar states are likely to move together, e.g. future polling movement in states like Michigan and Ohio, or North and South Carolina, is likely to be in the same direction."

See the site for a much more thorough description of their methodology.

And especially visit it to see the display of results, particularly of the simulated elections.

Which is why I'm posting now, at 1:20 AM EST on November 4th. The latest simulations has Obama winning in 98.1% of the model elections, which ultimately leads to a prediction of Obama getting 52% of the vote to McCain's 46.1%. The electoral breakdown is predicted to be 346.5 to 191.5 for Obama (I could not find where the 0.5 electoral vote comes from)

Naturally I am as interested in the accuracy of these predictions as I am interested in the outcome. I will post an update to this piece as soon as the final numbers are tallied, to check the reliability of FiveThirtyEight.

This past march, Michal Heller was awarded the 2008 Templeton Prize, an honor that groups him with other prize winners as "entrepreneurs of the spirit"— defined by John Templeton as  outstanding individuals who have devoted their talents to those aspects of human experience that, even in an age of astonishing scientific advance, remain beyond the reach of scientific explanation. (more)

I have written before about past winners, and of research sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. Yet I have not found explicit writing that attempts to join together the separate strands of science and the divine through the prism of chaos until I read some of Heller's works. This may be because of his very obvious dual hats: Heller is both a cosmologist and Catholic priest, who managed to thrive in communist Poland.

Heller is really interested in the ultimate beginnings of everything. His work and speculation must necessarily include theology because his target is the start of everything before there was a Start to Everything:

Various processes in the universe can be displayed as a succession of states in such a way that the preceding state is a cause of the succeeding one… (and) there is always a dynamical law prescribing how one state should generate another state. But dynamical laws are expressed in the form of mathematical equations, and if we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about a cause of mathematical laws. By doing so we are back in the Great Blueprint of God's thinking the universe, the question on ultimate causality…: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" When asking this question, we are not asking about a cause like all other causes. We are asking about the root of all possible causes.

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The Problem with Wikipedia. (Click to  enlarge)In what may be a self-organized example of Occam's Razor, consider the case of reliability of Wikipedia articles.

Recently, Joshua E. Blumenstock of UC Berkeley performed a statistical analysis of 1000's of wikipedia pages, looking for predictors of quality articles. (Where "quality articles" was taken to be featured articles. These articles are given this rating by Wikipedia editors, using specific criteria.   As of this posting, there are approximately 2000 featured articles out of over 2.4 million wikipedia articles.)

In his paper Automatically Assessing the Quality of Wikipedia Articles Blumenstock describes the search for correlation between "featuredness" and a a wikiload of possible variables. The variables included surface features (e.g. # of characters, words, one-syllable words), structural features (e.g. links , images, tables), a variety of readability metrics (e.g. Gunning Fog, Coleman-Liau Index), and part of speech tags (e.g. nouns, past participles, perterites).

He needn't have looked so deeply. It turns out that word count alone is an incredibly potent predictor. Amazingly, Blumenstock found that whether an article had greater or less than 1830 words was all that was needed to predict whether an article was featured with 97% accuracy!

Now why is this?

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Fractal tumor on Wild Cabbage LeafI have always considered fractals in time to be related to self-similar music (such as a nested fugue), or just a plain-old self-similar time-series, such as stock market fluctuations, or the corn price fluctuations at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, whose fractal nature was first noted by Mandelbrot.

Now there's a different way to consider time-fractals - proposed by Carlos Escudero and colleagues of the Institute for Mathematics and Fundamental Physics in Madrid, in their Dynamic Scaling of Non-Euclidean Interfaces

Escudero "performs calculations of the dynamic scaling (how a surface changes in space and over time at several different scales) of growing structures, such as the kind of semiconductor films used in the microchip industry where, even under the most carefully controlled of conditions, rough (non-Euclidean) geometries can exist. He found that the moment-by-moment behavior of the surfaces are strongly effected by the fractal geometry."

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Complex SutureSteve LaMonte, a student in my Fall 2007 version of Chaos and Fractals, has noted the fractal-like shapes that are formed by suture lines in ancient cephalopods. He points out the correlation between fractal structure and the ability of the cephalopod to withstand extremes of water pressure. He writes:

One often pictures fractals as consisting of pretty pictures generated by computer programs, but they are quite prevalent in nature. A notable example can be found in the fossils of ancient cephalopods, specifically nautiloids and ammonoids. Nautoloids and ammonoids are the ancient ancestors of modern squids, octopi, and the nautilus. The ancient organisms looked like modern squids and octopi with shells, some elongated and some coiled like a snail. These shells had internal chambers that the organism filled with gas for buoyancy. Each chamber is separated by a wall, or septa. The contact line between the septa and the inner shell wall is called a suture line. The structure of the suture line determines how well the organism can resist water pressure and adjust its buoyancy. The evolution of suture lines follows an increasingly fractal-like pattern from straight sutures to highly undulated sutures. In complex sutures, the dips and folds in the undulations are called lobes and saddles, respectively.

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Or rather, what in the world goes on when a writer for almost any type of publication - whether mainstream or not - writes about anything that remotely touches on science?

Often times what comes out instead is "science," a stream of misapplied, poorly understood concepts. Maybe it's writing for deadlines, or maybe it's just the overall scientific illiteracy that grips many, but there is no doubt that the world needs more reporters that know the very basic scientific ideas. Otherwise we are all faced with an every growing body of articles and blog posts that will only reinforce the already shaky scientific foundation that many apparently have. (I have already noted recent media errors in articles on friction and gravity.)

My latest gripe? The May 12, 2008 issue of Newsweek contains a very positive article about students at MIT trying to lower energy costs wherever "energy hogs" exist, with a major hog - your typical vending machine - one of the main targets of their energy-waster-busters attention. Unfortunately, the amount of energy consumed by an average vending machine is incorrectly stated. According to Newsweek "The average soda dispenser consumes 3,500 kilowatts a year." As anyone who actually pays utilities should know, a kilowatt is a rate of energy use (it's 1000's of joules/sec). The actual unit of energy used is then found by multiplying the Rate of energy use x running time, i.e. the kilowatt-hour (kW-hr). One kW-hr is the amount of energy used by a device running at a rate of 1 kW for 1 hour. This energy amount is typically how your electric bill is determined by the electric company that services your home. The price per kw-hr will vary depending on the area of the country, the source of the electric company's energy, and time of year. Current rates for my area are approximately 17cents/kw-hr.

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Klaatu barada niktoOne of the great lines in all of 20th century science was uttered over lunch by Enrico Fermi. In a discussion of the possible likelihood of many advanced civilizations in our galaxy, Fermi said something to the effect of "well, where the hell are they."

I may have taken some liberty in the way Fermi expressed himself, but there's no doubt that Fermi's questions is one of the more provocative off-the-cuff statements ever made because of the response that it generated, including immortalization as a named dilemma: The Fermi Paradox

In 1961, approximate 10 years after Fermi's lunch-time query, Frank Drake developed an equation that he used to predict the number of advanced civilizations in our galaxy. Upon reading about the Drake Equation many years ago, I was struck by its simplicity and its audacity. Here it is in its full glory.  (Read all about the parameters here ) 

The equation consists of a chain of probabilities, all multiplied together in the fashion of the probability of a string of independent events. Depending on the values of the individual probabilities, estimates of the average number of advanced civilizations/galaxy range from several thousand to less than one.

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CO₂-collision/absorbtionBelief in global warming, and especially the causes of GW (if one believes the data) depend crucially on modeling. The physics of atmospheric gases-solar radiation interactions, especially those involving carbon-dioxide molecules, is of major importance because the increase of CO₂ is often quoted as a correlate to warming. The story is basically that CO₂ absorbs some of the infrared radiation (IR) streaming to the earth from the sun, and reflects the rest back.

Just how much is absorbed? The answer to this question is a crucial one. Until recently, the basic physics of light absorption by gas molecules, though pretty well understood, doesn't get the amounts of IR absorption correct for atmospheric CO₂. Is this a failure of physics, or the model used?

Get serious. Of course it's not the physics. To paraphrase, it's the model , stupid. Physicists decide what goes into a model, and then the physics (in the form of fundamental laws) takes over, yielding the model prediction.

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The Boston Molasses DisasterIt seems tautological that it's impossible to get ready for Chaos. Yet a recent patent application by researchers at IBM claims to do just that. In their System and method for optimizing the selection, verification, and deployment of expert resources in a time of chaos Robert Friedlander, Richard Hennessy, Anwer Mujahid Khan and James Kraemer describe:

A computer implemented method, apparatus, and computer usable program code for finding skills and resources for a chaotic event. Skills data for the chaotic event are organized. A determination is made whether the skills and the resources are available in response to a receiving an identification of the skills and the resources that are required to manage the chaotic event. The skills and the resources are optimized based on requirements and constraints, potential skills, and enabling resources to determine optimized skills and optimized resources. The availability of the optimized skills and the optimized resources are verified. The optimized skills and the optimized resources are reoptimized in response to a determination that the optimized skills and the optimized resources are unavailable.

Pardon my skepticism here - while what is described here certainly seems laudable, it doesn't sound like much more than a nice robust system that links resources with those who need them. The word "chaos" is being (mis)appropriated to add some juice to the patent claim. There ain't no chaos here, at least not in the sense of CHAOS Theory. The word chaos then doesn't convey anything more than a hook for readers and , presumably, patent examiners.

Maybe the authors do better in actually describing a chaotic event. See what you think:

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Uugh.. who would want to look at anything remotely representative of two of the most hideously ugly realities of online life?

Alex Dragalescu, that's who. Dragalescu, a Romanian visual artist, often uses analyses of spam and other annoyances to drive visualization schemes, producing highly-organic-looking computer-generated images. (And, in this case, a nice example of meta-imagery: CGI's of nasty things that see their birth, and are spread, via computers.)

For example, Alex uses "the ASCII values found in the text of spam messages determine the attributes and qualities of the Spam Plants."

The graphic in this post is from Spam plants.

His latest series is entitled Malwarez, which is

a series of visualization of worms, viruses, trojans and spyware code. For each piece of disassembled code, API calls, memory addresses and subroutines are tracked and analyzed. Their frequency, density and grouping are mapped to the inputs of an algorithm that grows a virtual 3D entity. Therefore the patterns and rhythms found in the data drive the configuration of the artificial organism.

This is all fascinating, fractal stuff, and is in the spirit of other visualization projects posted on fractalog.