Category: Geek stuff

If it involves physics, math, computer science, electronics or has general geek cachet, this is the place for it.

Fixing the apostrophe with two marks for two purposes

Both for people who are new to English and for life-long speakers, one of the most consistently confusing aspects of the language is the apostrophe.

There†s a pretty straightforward reason for this, I think, and it†s one that could be addressed fairly easily if people are willing to consider a minor linguistic change. There are two main uses for the apostrophe:

  • Indicating possession, as in: “The cat’s bed is beside the dog’s bed, on the floor between Carol’s bed and Peter’s bed” and
  • Indicating a contraction, as in: “I’ve noticed there’s not a lot of time ’til Christmas”

This dual use is most problematic insofar as it causes it’s/its errors. People are naturally used to seeing the apostrophe as a marker for possession, so “The dog is vexed by it’s fleas” seems intuitive.

A simple solution would be to use two different marks for the two different purposes. Since possession seems to be the use that is most intuitive for people, I would suggest using the new mark for contractions. A superscript dagger wouldn†t change the look of printed text too much. Furthermore, the character is already included in nearly all typefaces, and isn†t widely used for any purpose that isn†t equally well served by a numbered footnote. People who chose to make the change wouldn†t confuse people excessively, and English’s reputation as an incoherent hodgepodge of a language might be somewhat mitigated.

The problems with apostrophes also connect to the awkward issues involved in indicating plurality and possession for words the always end in ‘s’, over which there is no agreement even among pedantic language experts. Using two punctuation marks wouldn†t settle that, but it may help reduce the odds of error.

Memory games

My new hobby (in the shower, while walking, while waiting for anything) – mentally listing public policy scholars and their best-known contributions:

  • Haas – epistemic communities
  • Kingdon – policy windows
  • Skogstad – economic globalization v. political internationalization
  • Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith – the advocacy coalition framework
  • Downs, Olson, Arrow – rational choice
  • Green and Shapiro – critics of rational choice
  • Howlett, Ramesh, Perl – summarizers of everything
  • Harden and Ostrum – analysts of tragedies of the commons
  • Jones – bounded rationality
  • Lindblom – muddling through
  • Tversky and Kahneman – framing
  • Tsebelis – nested games, veto points
  • Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos – philosophy of science
  • Pierson – policy feedbacks
  • Hall – policy paradigms

Etc, etc

These facts will not be on the exam

I was wrong a while ago when I said the QI podcast isn’t available through the iTunes Store. It simply doesn’t have a name that makes it obvious that it is the QI podcast: No Such Thing As A Fish.

One nice fact is that Lawrence Burst Sperry, the man who invented the aircraft autopilot, went flying in November 1916 with Mrs. Waldo Polk, whose husband was off driving an ambulance in France. They counted on the autopilot to keep them aloft, but ended up crashing naked into a bay and being found by duck hunters.

Also, if you get a zebrafish drunk and put it among sober companions, the sober ones will follow the drunk one:

Maybe something about the drunk fish’s one-on-one interactions with the other fish made the group as a whole move in the same direction. Or maybe the sober fish looked at their non-sober tankmate and saw a leader. “It is likely,” Porfiri says, that the drunk fish’s uninhibited behavior “is perceived as a boldness trait, thus imparting a high social status.” As they followed the drunk fish, the sober ones also sped up to keep pace, swimming roughly a third faster than they would have otherwise.

The very drunkest zebrafish, though, lost their leader status. Fish that had been exposed to the highest alcohol concentration began to lag behind the rest of the group, following instead of steering. Since higher alcohol doses have “sedative effects,” Porfiri says, the drunkest fish slow down and start to display “sluggishness in response to the rest of the group.”

I listed some fun facts from QI in a previous post.

Method-driven versus problem-driven

It is our impression, however, that much rational choice theory is method driven rather than problem driven, and that this is partly responsible for its defects. Empirical science is problem driven when the elaboration of theories is designed to explain phenomena that arise in the world. Method-driven research occurs when a theory is elaborated without reference to what phenomena are to be explained, and the theorist subsequently searches for phenomena to which the theory in question can be applied.

Green, Doland and Ian Shapiro. Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science. 1994. p. 194 (hardcover)

Science and replicability

The basic claim made in published science is that something about the nature of the universe has been uncovered. That makes it distressing when other researchers attempting to isolate the same phenomenon are unable to do so:

For social ‘scientists’ with aspirations of matching the rigour of their peers in the ‘pure’ or ‘natural’ sciences. If different groups of scientists using true double-blind controlled experiments can’t reach compatible conclusions about the world, what hope is there for people trying to deduce causality from historical data?

Living with a fifth limb

Both to feel a little less surveilled and to be subjected to fewer deviations from whatever stream of thought is ongoing, I often choose to leave my cell phone at home when going out.

The choice does serve those purposes but, whether my phone-side pocket is empty or stocked with some less intrusive object, I nonetheless feel periodic spontaneous sensations which can be interpreted as the buzz of text messages or email. It’s somewhat akin, perhaps, to the phantom limb syndrome experienced by those who have lost arms, legs, or digits. Once the brain has come to expect sensations from a particular part of the peripheral nervous system, it will sometimes introduce them by its own invention whether the genuine form is present or not.

Open thread: energy storage

One challenge with energy sources like solar and wind is that their output varies with local environmental conditions, and not necessarily in ways that correspond to energy demand.

Hence, having energy storage capacity makes them easier to integrate into the grid. There are many options: pumped hydroelectric storage, tidal storage, batteries, compressed air, molten salt, and potentially hydrogen.

It is also possible to balance output from different kinds of renewable stations, using biomass, solar, wind, tidal, and other forms of energy to cover one another’s fallow periods.

CPSA 2014, day 2

I am glad Peter Russell encouraged me to attend this morning’s “Roundtable: Constitutional Conventions, Minority Parliaments and Government Formation“. It has certainly been the most interesting session I have attended at the conference so far. I need to add Peter Aucoin, Mark Jarvis, and Lori Turnbull’s Democratizing the Constitution: Reforming Responsible Government to my reading list.

Next, I have a session on “Voting Determinants“.

Later, I am going to Catherine Dauvergne’s talk on “The end of settler societies and the new politics of immigration“.

Today’s last academic event will be the CPSA presidential address: “What is it a Case Of? Studying Your Own Country“.