Flu Seasonally Adjusted

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Permutations points out an elegant paper from Christakis and Fowler (gloriously open access). They exploit a clever result from social network theory called the friends paradox. This is the phenomenon that your friends have more friends than you do – because social networks typically have a few very connected spoke nodes. They use this to track flu within a university student population. By separately tracking the friend cohort they were able to note the evolution of a flu epidemic several weeks before its full arrival in the general population as represented by the random cohort.

Current surveillance methods for the flu, such as those implemented by the CDC that require collection of data from subjects seeking outpatient care or having lab tests, are typically lagging indicators about the timing of the epidemic (information is typically one to two weeks behind the actual course of the epidemic). […] [W]hile potentially instantaneous, the Google Trends and prediction market methods would only, at best, give contemporaneous information about rates of infection. In contrast, we show that the sensor method described here can detect an outbreak of flu two weeks in advance. That is, the sensor network method provides early detection rather than just rapid warning.

Wiring up a distributed computer of neighbourhood gossips to see into the future is presumably a trick with wider applications. For instance, economic data is not only notoriously bad, but notoriously slow. It’s a field where price data from three month old lagging indicators are siezed on with delight at their timeliness, and GDP figures have to be seasonally adjusted a year after the period they apply to. Economic actors also behave as a network for the flow of information and beer.

So, you should be able to systematically exploit this effect in economic surveys to get both more timely results, and information on the velocity of effects throughout an economy. Eg, if you are surveying businesses, get those businesses to also nominate their suppliers and customers, and track that group as well. It’s possible this technique is already used, and I’d be interested to hear about it. I suspect that its main use is though data collection folk wisdom rather than systematically. So it’s well known that health workers are vulnerable, highly connected nodes for disease spread / containment, and that banks and large retailers are hubs of economic activity, but that knowledge is not generalisable in the same way as the friend cohort in the paper. Perhaps you could even use techniques like this to build a network model of critical financial institutions, from the perspective of vulnerability to systemic failure under a catastrophic crisis.

The Napkin Scrawls of Dining Philosophers

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Technologists are, by their vocational commitment to new things, manufacturers and early adopters of language. Our commitment to language is however generally one of casual incompetence. The artifact being built, or fixed, is the focus of our attention, and the language referring to it is an after thought for the tormenting of poets, grammarians and the marketing department. Perhaps that’s as it should be, but it’s still a pleasure to read a book like Java Concurrency In Practice, which has a mastery of both language and its topic.

JCIP has already been well reviewed on its technical merits. [NB: These notes are also from 2006 and written about the first edition.] In summary, it’s a great reference. As the jacket copy points out, concurrency in software is both difficult to deal with and of renewed importance. Problems like these put stress not only on software artifacts being developed, but the context in which that artifact is built and used, like collaboration in its construction, or human and computer interfaces, or eventual maintenance. Java Concurrency In Practice also has some insights into this, but it’s not foregrounded, and seems worth exploring.

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Scribed On Demand

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Two opposite poles of art creation in Paul Clark’s acclaimed art history of the Cultural Revolution, the slightly misleadingly titled The Cultural Revolution: A History, illustrate his thesis marvellously. Clark argues, with voluminous examples, that the Cultural Revolution was an artistically productive time, even if it was also a politically terrifying one. He takes aim particularly at the received wisdom in a common joke; 800 million people watching 8 performances (八亿人看八个系).

方海珍（李丽芳饰）是《海港》里的女主角； Fang Haizhen (played by Li Lifang) from The Harbour

The first pole of art creation is the model operas (样板戏). These were highly professional productions closely supervised by the cultural leadership including Jiang Qing (江青). These have a reputation as clumsy kitsch. Clark points out, with their production values, long lead time, and close executive supervision they are actually the very pinnacle of high kitsch. They made a number of technical innovations that moved Chinese opera smack in the middle of the twentieth century. Their focus on clearly delineated roles, modern settings, post-war language and ideological agenda – arias about revolutionaries and Mao Zedong are commonplace – make them distinctively modernist projects. Also, far from cultural troupes being entirely disbanded, certain parts of the culture industry were kept very busy on large productions of this kind. The striking film still above is from one of these model operas, 《海港》 (The Harbour).

To me, the Antarctic counter-pole to the model operas are the hand-published books. Amongst metropolitan youth sent into the countryside when schools and universities closed, there developed a subculture of letters, poems and entire novels written by hand, copied by transcript or mimeograph, and distributed by being passed from person to person. 《第二次握手》(The Second Handshake) was the most successful of these, eventually landing its author in jail for two years, followed by being published and filmed in the eighties. Works written in this fashion were enhanced and edited by their readers and transcribers, in a　cultural movement part schoolroom note, part monastic rescribe and part wikipedia collective publication.

Clark was a student in Beijing at the end of the seventies, so he’s able to add personal anecdote to careful scholarly description in a tone reminiscent of antiquarian journal Arts of Asia. Though a fair number of pictures are included, it’s best annotated by Google to get a fuller impression of the many works he mentions.

Finally a minor quibble – why do academic books on China, written in English, use (non diacritical) pinyin rather than Chinese character translations? I doubt much of the audience is able to use the pinyin that is not able to use the characters themselves, which are also far less ambiguous. Is it a printing cost limitation? It seems archaic in a time of Unicode and print on demand PDFs.

Portal

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But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
Laser guided, a gun turret aimeth. — Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2

Portal is as much a poem as a game. The creators take the vernacular elements of the first person shooter and make a discliplined selection from them. For instance, the only weapon you equip doesn’t actually hurt anything, because that option is simply not available, and doesn’t make in game sense. Falling damage has been removed. They then add one new one element – the famous portals. In the words of Jeep Barnett, one of the developers,

We try to understand our limitations and work within those and in some ways embrace them.

And embrace them they did. Once the game’s chosen elements and their relationships are established, it recombines them with wit and grace. And it tries to kill you a few times too, but what is art without struggle?

Though analogies from one form of art to another are not perfect, and I doubt the team set out to write a poem, the description as poetry is apt because the formal constraints of Portal make it possible to describe it in a kind of ludic meter. The remainder may spoil. (I also owe a debt to work from the Rocketboom Institute of Internet Studies on image macro haikus).

Like Goethe’s Faust, Portal is divided into two distinct parts, which differ in structure and content. Part 1 has a whimsical tone, but a formal structure reminiscent of a sonnet. Each level can be treated as a stanza. The structure of each stanza is then

G (O B|B O|S)* G

G is dialogue from the AI Glados, half sexy librarian, half HAL from 2001. Each level starts and ends with AI dialogue, in a great performance from Ellen McLain. The repetition is not as strict as a villanelle, but is similar in linking the beginning and end of a stanza. The AI returns to themes throughout the game (eg, cake).

B and O are the blue and orange portals respectively. These form rhyming couplets. It is the chain of portal couplets that progress you through a stanza. When you go in one portal and out another, you move one or both portals and repeat the process. In terms of rhyme scheme, going in the orange portal, and coming out the blue is O B. Then, for example, moving the orange portal and returning into the blue portal is O B B O. A Shakespearean sonnet has the form (A B A B)^3 C C, that is, three sets of A B rhymes followed by a C C rhyming couplet to finish.

The structure of each line is not restricted by time meter as it would be in the iambic pentameter of an English sonnet. However, the deliberately limited vocabulary of Part I, using floor buttons, boxes, doors, lifts, energy balls and switches, and not much else, still gives a sense of formal restraint.

S is a substanza. As Portal proceeds, the levels get more complex, and the AI will bookend sections of a particular level with more dialogue.

What distinguishes this game from a conventional puzzler is the retention of a sense of flow. This seems to have come from Valve’s process of rigourous playtesting (mentioned in the interview above). This in turn fed back to the reduced vocabulary and minimalist setting, which reinforced the formal structure. It means you don’t get stuck on an impossible or frankly tedious puzzle. This also shows the limitations of playing a game in poetic mode. It’s as if you couldn’t go past page three of Paradise Lost unless you read out the fifth line exactly right.

At the beginning of Part II, the AI famously and hilariously asks you to assume the party acceptance position. When you, as the protagonist, reject this and scoot off into the factory innards of the laboratory, the game itself leaves its formal structure for something more anarchic. It’s actually a more conventional FPS setting, with more jumping onto lifts and such according to timing, though you still don’t shoot anything except walls. The climax, though, despite Eric Wolpaw’s hatred of plays, really does have a wonderful setpiece, a coup de theatre.

Valve, this is a triumph. I’m making a note here: Huge Success.

Confucius Gordon In The Twenty First Century!

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Jiang Qing (蒋庆) is a mainland Chinese scholar who proposes reviving Confucius as part of the Chinese political settlement. There is a good overview of his work from Daniel Bell in NPQ. He notes the revival of Confucius’s fortunes amongst Communist Party cadres, as well as critiques Jiang Qing makes of the current Chinese and Western systems.

Rather than subordinating Confucian values and institutions to democracy as an a priori dictum, they contain a division of labor, with democracy having priority in some areas and meritocracy in others. If it’s about land disputes in rural China, farmers should have a greater say. If it’s about pay and safety disputes, workers should have a greater say. In practice, it means more freedom of speech and association and more representation for workers and farmers in some sort of democratic house.

Jiang, who incidentally shares an English transliteration with Mao’s notorious wife 江青, and is therefore hard to Google for without using Chinese characters, has certainly been on a remarkable intellectual and biographical journey. Xujun Eberlein has provided a good biographical sketch, including his search through intellectual and spiritual traditions from Marxism, Christianity and Buddhism, and detail on his magnum opus, Political Confucianism (《政治儒学》). She also has also posted some a more detailed overview by Wang Rui-Chang and notes on philosophical attitudes to women. Bell also has a good interview with Jiang in Dissent.

I haven’t read Political Confucianism, not just out of native laziness and because I only heard about it last week, but also because it’s patchily available even in Chinese: no English language translation exists. You could call Jiang and his followers Neo-Confucians, except that term is already in use for a group of Song and Ming dynasty thinkers. It was the Neo-Confucians that laid out the obedience-centric doctrine – to government, to parents, to husband – that defined Confucianism until today. This also goes for the New Confucians, the term applied to Neo-Confucian twentieth century thinkers outside the mainland in places like Korea and Taiwan. (Such are the pitfalls of prefixed nomenclature. It has a touch of irony given Confucius declared in Analects XIII, 3 his first priority would be the rectification of names. I have visions of the great teacher giving Modernism, Post-modernism, Neo-classical economics, retro-futurism and Neo-Confucianism several weeks of detention.)

As the Wang Rui-Chang paper points out, Jiang attempts to revive an older, humanistic and individually moral strand of Confucian thought alongside the rather more pessimistic tradition of the Neo-Confucians. Arguably the realpolitik school goes back to the arch-pessimist Xun Zi 荀子, who believed people were inherently evil and needed it taught out of them.

to be fully legitimate, a political power or regime must simultaneously meet three conditions: 1), it must be at one with, or sanctioned by, the holy, transcendental Tao as expressed or implied in the Confucian Scriptures, and as interpreted by the prestigious Confucian Scholars; 2), it must not deviate from the mainstream of the national cultural heritage and break the historical continuity of the nationality; 3), it must comply with the will or endorsement of the common people.

He goes on to quote Edmund Burke; a conservative, moralist figure with a lot in common with Confucius considering they lived 1900 years apart and on opposite sides of the globe.

Skimming over Jiang’s proposal to re-establish Confucianism as a state religion, the key constitutional proposal is of a tricameral legislature, only one of which is directly elected:

The House of Profound Confucians (Tong Ru Yuan) represents the legitimacy of the sacred Way, the House of National Continuity (Guo Ti Yuan) represents the legitimacy of cultural heritage and tradition, and the House of Plebeians (Shu Min Yuan) represents the legitimacy of the common people’s will and desire.

Combining an elected house with two Houses of Lords is obviously not going to light a flame in any democrat’s heart. The obvious parallel here is with the American Tripartite Commission. The existing examples of this sort of thing – in Hong Kong and Iran – are not really encouraging. The emphasis on ethnic or cultural representation rather than geographic and democratic representation also seems both very imperial Chinese and inviting the nastiness of partisan splits on ethnic and cultural lines. Absent having seen the specific arguments Jiang has, and as fun as kicking an absent strawman while he’s down is, let’s just note my general support for the miracle of democracy for now.

What is more striking is the parallel to the golden age of the Westminster system. In 1855 the Northcote-Trevelyan report recommended adoption of a civil service entrance examination as one means of professionalising an inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy. This was inspired in turn by the long history of Chinese imperial examinations for the civil service. Combined with the great Reform bills, by the end of the 19th century the United Kingdom had a democratically elected House of Commons (庶民院) and an aristocratic House of Lords including a number of bishops (国体院). And they relied on a career civil service to advise on, draft and execute policy, which exerted its own conservative cultural influence on the government (统儒院). This constitutional settlement started to change at the end of the 1990s with changes to the Lords and the relationship between the cabinet and civil service, (and in Australia due to the breakdown of ministerial responsibility) but it had a good hundred year run and is by no means finished with. Given it has both historical precedent and cultural suitability, I can’t help but wonder why Jiang didn’t think of it. Perhaps with all that visiting of monasteries, studying of Marxist texts and surviving the Cultural Revolution, he didn’t get much time for repeats of Yes, Minister. If someone has his postal address, I’m happy to send him a copy.