cat /proc/claus

One idea that I really like, is that our brain works a lot like a muscle.

What I used to mean by this is that, just like a muscle, our brain needs exercise to develop itself. Just like to be able to run 5 kilometers you need to practice running 2 km, then 3km, then 4km every day, in order to be able to make logic arguments and understand them, you need to work on logic problems and questions, and keep your brain active.

And just like by making regular exercise you make your body stronger and generally healthier (and happier), by making regular mental exercises you also make your mind sharper, and yourself a more interesting person.

To sum it up, people use to think that intelligence and wits are something that either you have, or you don’t, and if you don’t you should just not think about it (ha!), while my argument is that we can and should practice our brains and critical thinking, and as we do it, the world will naturally become clearer and make more sense for us.

That said, recently I started to build a little bit more on the above analogy. I started to think about mental sugar.

We have evolved to find very highly caloric foods tasty, and crave for them. This is probably because in our hunter-gatherer times, food was scarce. It was beneficial to gorge yourself in highly caloric foods in order to compensate for the times when you couldn’t find any. However, nowadays due to technological and economical progress, sugar/fat/etc is really easily accessed by a large number of people. And thus we consume too much of it, with negative effects on our bodies and health.

Just in the same way, the excess of pre-digested information easily available works like sugar for our brain. Because in ancient times we needed to be alert to survive, our brains were rigged to give a lot of attention to things that are new and unusual. However today we have very easy access to a LARGE volume of bit-sized, easily digested news, one after another. So much that in fact we can eat the next piece of new information before we have had the time to fully digest the previous one. So much that not only news are available, but a variety of comments of all kinds to even the most banal kinds of news.

I don’t say this because I hate information and the internet age. Actually, I love it. But I started to notice that in recent months my thought process had grown fat and sluggish. I was absorving so much new info, in so little time, that I was losing the ability to generate new info myself. The sugar and fat where going straight through my saturated mental digestive system, much of it was being lost, and very little of it was becoming “muscle”.

Of course, bite sized pieces of curious media and discussions are tasty, and they are good and have their value. But just like with our non-brainy part of the body, they need to be consumed with moderation, balanced with “healthy” information (varied nutrients, need work and effort to be digested), and lots of mental exercise if you want to keep your brain in a good shape.

Easier said than done, obviously, but at least now I gave this problem a name and a shape.

In a recent interview, the interviewer asked me to briefly explain my PhD work. While showing him what I did, he intersected “that’s just like Genetic Algorithms, right?” - “Yes, I am actually working on Genetic Algorithms” - “But your curriculum said you worked on “Evolutionary Computation”

…

I can’t really blame him. The field of evolutionary computation (and bioinspired heuristics in general), is plagued by too many “cute/cool” names, such as “Ant Colony Optimization”, “Ant Clustering”, “Memetic Algorithms”, “Queen bee optimization”, “Cat Swarm Optimization”, that often say very little about the technique under them, and less about what other techniques are related.

These names are often the result of well intentioned researchers who want to relate their findings with their inspiration, or who think that a new cool name can bring in more attention, more people and more ideas to the field. But I feel that these names more hinder than help, by making it difficult for people not in the field to have a grasp of what is connected with what, and for people in the field to make sure that what they are doing was not already done by someone else with a different cool name.

I was talking to a friend who was couchsurfing in my place these days. She said she doesn’t like Skype, because since it is mostly free for the caller/callee, there is this semi-obligation to talk to the other party, all the time, for a long time. According to her, phone calls and letters cost money and effort, and so the communication becomes less forced, and more important. She has similar dislikes for e-mail.

I don’t think I fully agree with her regarding Skype and E-mail, but for some points I see where she is coming from. Myself, I have been noticing something similar in the social network Facebook. I started my account on facebook a few months ago, and my inicial idea was to have it as an outlet to messages to my day to day flesh friends here in Japan. While at first I resisted a little bit, eventually though, many people whom I have only a passing acquitance to made it to my contact list. While there are positive points of having a wide variety of people in your social network, it does change the way I see the network, and how I interact with it.

Mixi has adressed this issue a bit - you can set “levels” of friends, and set up certain information to only show up to certain levels of people in your network. But thanks to social engineering, I wonder how effective this would actually be. All you need is one “friend”, who is closer to someone you don’t really want hearing your rants than she is to you, for her to quickly spill the beans to your “friend”, and hell break loose again.

I know, there is no expectation of privacy in the internet, but that does not prevent me from lamenting it.

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On another, and lighter note, today I saw “Whisper from the heart” “Mimi wo sumaseba” again. That is a small and simple movie that always strike a deep chord into me. Every time I see it, I find out new things, like a good old book, and I also feel myself reflecting about what I want in my life, and how can I get to it. This seems an appropriate moment to do so.

Recently I have read a news article at ACM’s website about the ICPC, which reminded me why I usually hate the media. How facts are casually distorted in order to make the truth “sexier”, sometimes even when it is not needed to.

The ICPC is a programming contest hosted by ACM. In it, students from all over the world get together to try and solve a large number of very hard programming problems in 5 hours. Each team has 3 students and one computer, so the contest involves not just the ability to read a problem, figure out which algorithm will solve it, and implement that algorithm correctly in a short time, but also how to best manage the single computer among the three students (you have to figure out and write down most of your code in paper before sitting down to program to save time). The participants are the best teams of their respective local competitions, young people with a great knack for maths and programming. The contest itself and the associated events were really fun.

However, obviously this was not enough for whoever wrote the article. They had to say things like that “the participants did the work of a traffic controller”, or that “the contest challenges participants to solve real world problems”. Really? Maybe the contest has changed a lot in the last 5 years, but the problems where all mathematical problems (longest path, geometric problems, search, constraint satisfaction, etc) with some “stories” thrown into the mix to test the players reading comprehension. *Sigh*

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On the other news, this week will be dedicated to writing my second journal paper, to complete the publication requirements for my PhD at the university of Tokyo. Allegedly I managed to get enough data for the publication with last week’s experiments, now comes the inglorious tasks of transforming all of that in an interesting and engaging document which won’t be criticized too heavily by the all mighty anonymous reviewers. I only have one week until the deadline of 31st, and I have a lot of other stuff to do in the same period, so I’m getting a bit worried that I won’t be able to make it. But if I don’t make it in time, I can still submit it for another, non-Special Issue Journal, a few weeks later - with the negative side that the lack of a fixed, externally imposed deadline would reduce my motivation.

(why am I posting in my blog instead of working? I’m trying to amp myself into writing mode by sitting down and writing here instead of reading a dozen different news and getting anxious - like the news I just blogged about above :-P).

Today is the election day in Japan. This particular election is actually a pretty big deal, because for the first time in many years, the opposition party actually has a chance to take the Liberal Democratic Party out of the Japanese Government - the LDP has been in power for almost 55 years now, since the end of American occupation of Japan post World War II.

I am by no means a political analyst, I’m much less informed about Japanese politics and economy than I wish I would be, so I will only mention a few loose facts and observations that have been bugging me.

Hereditary Seats

One of the big problems I hear about japanese politics is that of “Hereditary Seats”. There are a bunch of reasons for the hereditary seats, from very strong support networks that get passed down from one generation of politics to the next, to restrictions to election publicity that makes it difficult for new/budding politicians to get their name out. The results is that some families have been in power for up to three generations now, forming literally a “ruling class” in japanese politics. Fortunately, this seems to be coming around, as some of those “feuds” are suffering defeats around the country.

Young indiference

Another big problem I see in Japanese politics is that a terribly large part of the young population was alienated to it. In a TV program a few years ago, I heard interviews with college-aged Japanese saying that “I’m abstaining from this election because I feel I’m still too young, politics is better left for adults” - as a result, the elderly in Japan (who already compose a pretty high part of Japan’s population) held an even greater weight in the elections, which meant that topics like unemployment and work reform would take second stage in politician discourse over pension reform. (OTOH, one of the reasons that the ruling party is taking such flak is that they screwed up pension reform hard a few years ago). Fortunately, this seems to be beginning to change - this year I have seen a number of advertisements in the trains calling young people to vote.

No Criticism

Somewhat related to the previous point, in Japan, comedians never, ever, make jokes about current political events, or political figures. They may have have done the most bizarre/astounding thing ever (like the defense minister saying that Japan was prepared for an alien invasion, the Finance minister drunken antics, or the Prime minister saying that poor people shouldn’t marry), you’ll never see a comedian on TV harping on these gold mines. I was talking about this with a japanese friend the other day, and she told me this is because comedians fear the negative repercussion to their careers if they make jokes about “powerful people”.

As silly as it may be, I think this is a pretty serious problem actually. It is the politicians that should be afraid of the people and the ability of the media to show the skeletons in their closet and make them public, and not the other way around. This “fear of offending/showing ridicule”, may contribute, in my opinion, on the fact that Japanese Youth is so distant from politics - like the comment I quoted above, they feel politics to be “too serious” for them. Another example, a few years ago I participated in a talk show in Japanese TV, which got together a bunch of Japanese and Foreign 20-somethings to talk about society problems. They told us that the show with the theme “participation of young people in politics” would be canceled because there would be elections 3 months later - do you want any BETTER time to talk about participation in politics on TV?

Treatment of foreigners

Finally, I’m really looking forward for a DPJ led government. The LDP has a very poor record on its relationship with foreigners, with the government refusing to see immigration as necessary or
even beneficial to Japanese society, and taking cheap shots at foreigners every now and then to get some points with the population. The DPJ has a much more interesting position in this - They usually add text about foreign plans and rights in their fliers - which would be weird for a campaign promise, since foreigners have no votes, so I can only imagine that they actually mean it.

Looking forward to the results tomorrow.