This is a somewhat controversial topic, however, I think I should bring it up.
The N-acronym
…the N-acronym being NSA, obviously. It does not really surprise me that the United States government (or whoever feels responsible) seems to be unwilling to sign a so-called No-Spy-treaty. So, in the light of all the revealing leaks, what is the problem?
Lots of things. However, there is something that needs to be pointed out since most people concentrate on the “Big Brother” aspect. While this is something the availability heuristic helpfully suggests, it is not the only problem with being spied on by legal institutions (or, for that matter, any institution). The other problem is that institutions consist of people and while no institution has an incentive to look into YOUR files and tamper with YOUR data, malicious individuals for sure have. If you think this is something that may happen in good old movies like Enemy of the State or True Lies (which I nevertheless recommend), here is something that suggests that even the police consists not only of law-abiding policemen whose primary job is to serve and to protect (For those too lazy to follow the link: this is not your average leftist ACAB stuff, there is evidence that some police departments have been infiltrated by organized crime). And this is only something that is obviously grossly inappropriate, lots of other things, like stalking or spying on a random person, cannot be detected as easily as pretty much everyone can do it without being connected to organized crime. The Big Brother or any big company is an abstract concept that is far away. Your neighbor is far more concrete and may be more interested in the vast amounts of data their employer can offer. Perhaps their relative works for a company that is your competitor. Perhaps they just like reading your romantic correspondence. For someone, you might truly be a very interesting person, you might never know.
I hope you are now at least as paranoid as I am, and so, I would like to phrase the question as follows: Do you trust a random middle-class person enough to let them spy on you? Not the big, abstract NSA, but your neighbor? Does the possible damage seem less than the security you can gain?
I want to stress that security and privacy are not something sacred and there is an obvious tradeoff. However, it seems that the security gained by mass surveillance of phone call metadata (which can provide a great lot of information) does not really compare to the problems it creates. And the profits from targeted advertising… well, at least in this case you can make your Internet experience more or less private. Unless someone at the NSA sells your browsing patterns to advertisers. You never know!
The Qatar affair
I have been reading on the Qatar Word Cup affair for a while and, currently, I am laughing my head off. So, as it appears, some FIFA guys have taken loads of money from some climatically and otherwise challenged, but financially rather successful country. (NOTE: this is a plausible, but wild guess and there are probable more reasons to hold a World Cup in Qatar. However, there does not seem to be evidence in support of the latter claim, but on the other hand, there is some strong evidence that said country is actively intervening in the regional politics.) Now some people, also from FIFA, very SUDDENLY (this is an important point—nobody thinks about the implications before the decision is made) realize that sports in summer down there is a bad idea and fight a large medial campaign against this idea, and, probably, against the general decision of holding a World Cup in a very hot, both literally and figuratively, region. Holding the World Cup in winter seems also bad since it does not fit in the schedule of the leagues, so there seems to be no really good solution. On top of that sits the great master of balls Sepp B. and does not seem to support either side while promising that a decision will be made somewhere in the future.
In a perfect world, people would decide based on reason and logic. However, this world is not perfect, and things like these happen disturbingly often. If a decision has been made, it is hard to revoke, and very easy to rationalize. Even if it will turn out that the decision has been biased by money, the stakeholders will be likely to say “so what, the decision has been made, costs has been sunk, and now we have to deal with it”.
In any case, 2022 is far away, the Middle East might be subject to some landscape design, and until then we will have a lot of fun. So, if you are a professional football player and fear that your job makes you perform somewhere very hot, chances are, this won’t happen.
Living with Markov chains
It has been nearly two months since I started in grad school, and I have not told you what I am working on. (Well, some of you know, but I still have not announced it.) The project is called “Bounded-Parameter Markov Decision Processes” and it deals with decisions under certain uncertainty conditions. The broad context is optimization of technical systems under uncertainty, and this is one approach to the general problem.
So, what is it all about? It begins with Markov chains, which are a fairly old formalism that describes a system that has some states, like “lights on” and “lights off”. The formalism contains probabilities of the event that the system changes its state after one unit of time. With some linear algebra and probability theory, it is possible to compute the behavior of such system. Then, we go on and extend this formalism: now, in each state, we can make a decision and execute an action from some given action set; in our case these actions might be “flip switch” and “do nothing” (as you can see even in this simple model, inaction is also a decision and implies consequences). Each action has some costs attached to it (costs may be also negative, thus, being rewards) and alters the state in a different way: in our example, flipping the switch would mean a state transition and doing nothing would mean staying in the previous state. This leads to the obvious question of finding a strategy that minimizes costs. And for this case, too, one can employ Mighty Linear Algebra and find several algorithms that deliver optimal strategies.
Now, my problem is a little more complicated. In my case, the transition probabilities are not certain; one only knows lower and upper bounds, which in the most general case can mean arbitrary transition probabilities. In this case, it is far less trivial what the optimal strategy can be.
But the thing that bothers me most is that, actually, I’d like to get a joint Math/CS degree afterwards, since what I am doing is basically lots of (applied) math 🙂
Hatred
If I could give you an advice on living in Germany, that would be: never rent a flat with an address that has a letter, like Baker Street 221b. The shiny information systems that crave my Big Data seem to fail this not very seldom case.
In my case it happened that two databases could not understand that I, in fact, have a house number that is not a number.
As for the internets, it seems that my ISP and the backbone provider cannot decide who is responsible for my connection since my house seems to be connected through the neighbors, which means that I will have to talk to the landlord and ask him strange questions. This obviously had to happen two weeks after I ordered the phone and internet package, which is a little annoying. (Not to say: if I could, I would make them all get only 8 KB/s bandwidth for a month just to feel some empathy)
How to be an Internet prophet
Do you have a feeling that you have better things to do than just working on your job because in fact, some very sophisticated thoughts that no one in your real life environment understands cross your mind? Do you feel offended by the words “armchair reasoning”? Fear no more, since I will give you precise instructions how to feel respected and very influential.
In my experiences on the Internet I have come across several instances of “influential people” whose influence was mostly correlated with the number of bytes produced. Bonus points for influence can be gained if the ideas are labeled as those that will help solve the current world’s problems. Note the word “labeled”: it does not actually matter whether the solutions that are being proposed will work or are at all feasible to implement. It is only sufficient to identify as a morally right, problem-solving person to feel morally superior, and nobody has the right to question your identity.
Then, to make an idea really popular, a unique source of current world’s problems has to be identified. This is a very, very common part, because the concept “get rid of \(X\)” is far simpler to memorize than “\(X\) causes \(A\), absence of \(X\) causes \(B\), both \(A\) and \(B\) are undesirable”. Often \(X\) is defined in a not entirely clear way; this gives some spaces for an argumentative retreat and still makes a vague intuitive interpretation possible.
Make no mistake: You are the Light. It is not your job to educate anyone why exactly you believe what you’re doing is morally right; it should be obvious to anyone (using derogatory words as “sheeple” is discouraged, they are tainted and not usable anymore) sane. And since you are the Light, dissent cannot and should not be tolerated. This is completely independent from your political platform; even if you state that you are in favor of a calm discussion, you might say that calm discussions are an ancient tradition of (insert your political affiliation here) and leftist pigs just inherently cannot discuss anything calmly, so they might just go screw themselves. It is doublethink, but it’s a little price for being an Internet guru.
As I mentioned prices, there is something you must understand: This style of self-presentation will alienate people. Take it like a sane person: Troll them, accuse them of derailing, associate them with not-so-nice people (think Hitler, Stalin, Paris Hilton, ALF), and they might go away.
Enjoy your sect.
A magical transformation
On the night from Sep 30 to Oct 1, a magical transformation happened. I ceased to be a student of Computer Science and became a research associate at the Computer Science department at my university. Why magical? Because, some months ago, I almost expected to move somewhere else for a PhD position. Dresden, Vienna, even Bozen/Bolzano were probable; I was absolutely surprised as I was made aware of a PhD position with an interesting topic at my home university. I also found a nice flat not too far away from the famous Westfalenstadion (also known as Signal Iduna Park), and incidentally, also rather close to the university.
The first days of work were mostly organizing work and reading research papers; for now I am very excited to get into the research context and (hopefully) be able to produce some interesting thoughts.
As usual, I will now torture you with some pictures of Dortmund.
DSA
For the last two weeks, I have been giving a course on SAT solving at the DSA, which expands to „Deutsche SchülerAkademie“. This is a system of summer camps in Germany that provide courses on various scientific topics (mostly: mathematics, science, politics, philosophy, and art) and are intended for high-schooler one or two years before they finish school.
Having participated at such an event myself, I connect lots of warm memories with my DSA, and my intention was to help gain the same experience for those who were participating in it now. I think I managed to do that.
I have met lots of motivated young people, experienced a very different perspective on teaching, and I hope I got some new insights about people in general. I am happy that I could do it, and I would like to give a course again.
After-thesis traveling
So yeah, four weeks into some-kind-of-vacations and I already have visited three cities. It feels somewhat strange, not having obligations of any kind besides my student job that I still have. Other than that, it is a very beautiful feeling of freedom — though it might be whited out by other feelings.
Since the whole Prism affair I had several thoughts on matters of information security. Besides, I also wanted to have an independent web presence, so here you go. This blog is as of now available at http://blog.s13h.eu , hope you will like it here.
On the correct usage of pronouns
There is one pronoun I dislike. It is “we”. For reasons, consider the following text snippet.
“We live in an era of technocrats. The more we know, the less we understand. Cold numbers replaced emotions, we struggle to keep what defines us as human in our hearts, for the future seems to optimize the humanity and our core values away.”
This text sounds Very Deep, and might have come from the quill of a famous philosopher, except that I have just written it down, being inspired by some more or less anonymous thinkers. So, what is wrong with this text?
The text is talking about “us”, which makes the author sound like he has Awakened from his fairy tale dream he has been sharing with everyone else, so, the “we” he is talking about seems to include just about everyone. This sounds and looks great, except for the fact that it is almost surely wrong. The usage of “us” presented here is actually an accusation, and, if the author was honest, he would replace it with a “you”. Because he is the Enlightened One. He has managed to understand the great self-deception (insert concrete instance of self-deception here) the society has lured itself into and he wants everyone else to withdraw the veil of ignorance. In the end, the text boils down to this: You are dumb. I was dumb too, but I am no more dumb. So, believe me, for I am Enlightened. But since social interaction does not work this way, the core message has to be covered under tons of fake self-humiliation.
The other problem with the text is that it is based on the false assumption that all people in a given society think sufficiently similar to buy into the stated premise. While this may be true for some very basic opinions (like, that being healthy is better than otherwise), the society allows for all kinds of thoughts running in the heads of its members, and generalizations over the contents of people’s heads are rather dangerous. They are even more dangerous if the target audience is non-homogenous by design, and someone might actually have the presence of mind to say “Well, that might apply to you, but not to me, I know more and am less confused than anytime before” and end this rhetoric insult.