my trip to atlantic city

More like Rusty Chef

With the end of The Crazy Tree on the horizon Austin starts to think about other potential projects.

Maybe I could do a cooking show?
How hard cook it be.
I've helped out and the production staff prep everything. You just throw stuff together and grin. Second camera ready. I'll have three cameras and just edit it together. Close up Kitchen-cam all set.

I'll just do what Jake does, take some left over stuff and throw it together how hard can it be?

He sliced and diced.
And then flipped the stuff a little. I can do that.

Uh oh, I think this salad might have been sitting out too long.
Well maybe my sidedish will be ok.Oh that's not looking right.

Well there's still the chicken dish I used to make with Jake. It's a just a little smokey. We'll call it blackened chicken.
Oh oh oh oh smoke in the eyes. Smoke in the eyes.
Huh... maybe there's a reason Jake drinks more when I'm helping to cook.

John Locke & Bishop Berkeley animation

The empiricist philosopher John Locke worked out some of the details of an important distinction (originally formulated by Descartes) between primary and secondary qualities, and he was quite pleased with himself as this distinction allowed for the possibility of doing some serious science: you can't study secondary qualities objectively, since they are essentially subjective (and thus liable to change from person to person), but you can study primary qualities scientifically, since there is no difference in those cases between what you experience and what is.

As you can learn in the following hilarious little presentation, little did Locke imagine that soon after, a) Bishop Berkeley would take this distinction to its logical conclusion and show that there is no real difference between primary and secondary qualities, and that b) the physical world would disappear as a result...

Esse est percipi... Dang!

Channeling Seth Godin

I always read about people "hoping for the best and preparing for the worst." Lately it's the government shutdown that has folks worried, but next week will bring some new disaster to plan for. It got me thinking: how much time do we spend preparing for the best? If you're focused on planning for the worst case scenario, when does your best work happen?

July 4th: A Timeless Day Of Revolution

On July 4th, Americans will celebrate their nation's 235th birthday by visiting family, throwing frisbees around in parks, going to picnics, swimming and of course - watching fireworks after sunset. Flags will be prominently displayed, and the colors red, white and blue will decorate everything from cakes to T-shirts. Festivities will include parades, marching bands, concerts and a famous hot dog eating contest in New York City.
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If asked to explain the meaning of the Fourth of July, most Americans would rightly define the celebration as one of 'freedom' and 'liberty.' Yet, July 4, 1776 represents far more than an emphatic pronouncement of separation from Britain. Ultimately, it was an unprecedented, watershed event in world history.
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On his tombstone, Thomas Jefferson's (1743-1826) self-written epitaph reads "Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom and Father of the University of Virginia." His political career, which included being a successful two-term president of the young republic, is not mentioned. The reason? Jefferson understood his place in history - as the person responsible for ushering in a timeless day of revolution.
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When Congress unanimously accepted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, it was endorsing a truly radical document that not only called for throwing off the "tyrannical" rule of King George III but also established a modern definition of human dignity.
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As our days are filled with tasks, chores, errands, obligations, requirements, appointments and duties, it is all too easy to view July 4th as simply an American holiday or a three-day weekend. By reading or re-reading just a few lines of the Declaration, reproduced below, the significance of his document and that moment can fortunately be recaptured.
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"We hold these truths to be self-evident, That all men are created equal"
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If Jefferson had stopped here, these thirteen words would have already constituted one of the most controversial and radical statements in history. In these few words, Jefferson managed to level centuries of hierarchical order. Kings and rich nobles were no better than workers or poor peasants. They had simply acquired their status through power - self-appointed, unjust power used to subordinate others. From these thirteen words, Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) would justify ending slavery, and American women would campaign for female suffrage (finally granted in 1920). If "all men were created equal," why not black men - and why not women as well? The genius of Jefferson's phraseology is its elasticity. It allowed future generations to reinterpret the bounds of rights and liberty as society evolved from one of tradition - to one of enlightened reason.
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"That they (all men) are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"
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In his second self-evident truth, Jefferson gave "unalienable Rights" not to the state but to individuals. Hence, citizens were paramount in the order of society - not the rulers or the ruling class. The idea that governments were called into existence by people to promote their livelihoods rather than people being subjects and servants to government was indeed revolutionary. In short, it turned the eighteenth century order completely upside down.
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"That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it"
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Politics is an unending negotiation and renegotiation of rights, resources and rules. As such, government, which exists for the sole purpose of promoting 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' for its citizens, must be responsive and competently broker conflicting interests in a fair and equitable manner. In the event government fails to do so, the people can 'alter' (vote it out) or 'abolish' it and create a new government altogether. The sovereignty of the people is unequivocal.
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Jefferson's Legacy
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Five decades later, Jefferson, who had become an old man of eighty-three, picked up his quill on 24 June 1826 to write - what would be - his final letter. Many of his fellow revolutionaries were dead. Others had grown older and become conservative since the days of the American Revolution. Not Jefferson. In declining an invitation to speak in Washington, DC on July 4th, Jefferson graciously thanked the Mayor and expressed his hopes on the future of his document as an ideological force for change stating,
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"May it be to the world what I believe it to be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or are opening to the rights of man."
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If Jefferson were alive today and able to consult a textbook of modern world history, he would see his hand - his writing hand to be precise - all over the globe. From the European Revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848, to Simon Bolivar's (1783-1830) South American Revolutions in the nineteenth century, to the quest for decolonization and self-determination after World War I, to 1960 - the grand year of independence on the African continent, to Eastern Europe and China in the struggle to overthrow Communism in 1989 and to the Revolutions in Iran, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere still in progress, Jefferson's lines of revolutionary thought have inspired countless numbers of people to overthrow their tyrannical governments for democracy.
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Furthermore, the Declaration of Independence has served as the basis for the human rights revolution of the twentieth century - most notably in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) - one of the foundational texts of the United Nations.

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On July 4th, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and of the United States as a nation, ninety year-old John Adams (1735-1826), one of Jefferson's fellow revolutionaries and a former US President (second after George Washington and just prior to Thomas Jefferson - the third president), lay dying at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts near Boston. As his mind turned to the legacy of his generation for the betterment of mankind, he comforted himself with one final thought - which he expressed in his last words, "Thomas Jefferson still survives." His revolutionary brother, however, had died a few hours earlier at his stately home in Virginia on the same day - July 4th.

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In fact, John Adams' final words were correct and remain correct. Thomas Jefferson, through his transcendent Declaration, does indeed still survive. He survives wherever and whenever people assert their right to "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" over oppressive institutions and governments - a struggle that confronts much of the world today.
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To everyone in the United States and around the world who subscribes to Jefferson's ideals - the ideals of mankind - truth, liberty, justice, security and hope, you are wished a Happy Fourth of July.
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(Photo: Thomas Jefferson, portrait by Rembrandt Peale in 1800)
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(For additional pictures, including ones of Thomas Jefferson's architecturally brilliant home (Monticello) in Charlottesville, Virginia, please click onto kleostimes.tumblr.com to the right and view postings under 30 June)
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J Roquen

Summer Cover Designs

Here are a couple of book covers we've completed recently.


Above: The Pocket Wedding Planner. Using line drawings of flowers commonly seen in bouquets and fresh colours, the Pocket Wedding Planner will soon be published by How To Books.


Above: Eat Well, Spend Less. This book contains over 200 family recipes for busy cooks who want to save time and money, but also deliver wholesome food for their families. It is soon to be published by Spring Hill and will be in a shop near you!


(Detail)

Wet n Wild

Check out the promo for Jake on Man vs. Wild.


That's some kind of wild.



And how's this for some hair?
One question: How did Jake who's vision is poor, do this with contacts on, and in hard lenses no less?

Jake was a little more civilized yesterday spotted out in the wilds of WeHo at a fav, Urth Cafe.

And the Wild Turkey?

The script of the first episode was delivered to the cast Sunday/Monday, and everyone is heading to back to the big Tree now. Filming starts sometime next week.

Why null ain't necessarily dull

Photo by Flickr user BenFrantzDale

Something slightly unusual happened this week. In a paper in the journal Vision Research, Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues reported that they had found no statistically significant difference between the visual acuity of individuals with and without autism.

The study was a follow-up to a 2009 paper that claimed to show enhanced (or "eagle-eyed") visual acuity in autism. Following two particularly damning commentaries by experts in vision science, the Baron-Cohen group got together with the critics, fixed up the problems with the study, and tried to replicate their original findings. They failed.

While it's slightly concerning that the original study ever made it to publication, it's heartening that the authors took the criticism seriously, the concerns were addressed, and the scientific record was set straight fairly quickly. This is how science is supposed to work. But it's something that happens all too rarely.

In a brilliant piece in last weekend's New York Times, Carl Zimmer highlighted the difficulty science has in correcting itself. Wrong hypotheses are, in principle, there to be disproven but it's not always that straightforward in reality. In particular, as Zimmer points out, scientists are under various pressures to investigate new hypotheses and report novel findings rather than revisit their own or other people's old studies and replicate (or not) their results. And many journals have a policy of not publishing replication studies, even if the outcomes should lead to a complete reassessment of the original study's conclusions. 

There is, however, a deeper problem that Zimmer doesn’t really go into.

Most of the time, at least in the fields of science I'm familiar with, we’re in the business of null hypothesis testing. We're looking for an effect - a difference between two conditions of an experiment or two populations of people, or a correlation between two variables. But we test this effect statistically by seeing how likely it is that we would have made the observations we did if our hypothesis was wrong and there wasn’t an effect at all. If the tests suggest that it’s unlikely that this null hypothesis can account for the data, we conclude that there was an effect.

The criteria are deliberately strict. By convention, there has to be less than a 5% chance that the null hypothesis can explain your data before you can confidently conclude that an effect exists. This is supposed to minimize the occurrence of people making grand claims based on small effects that could easily have come about purely by chance. But the problem is that it doesn’t work in reverse. If you don’t find a statistically significant effect, you can’t be confident that there isn’t one. Reviewers know this. Editors know this. Researchers know that reviewers and editors know this. Rather than being conservative, null hypothesis testing actually biases the whole scientific process towards spurious effects entering the literature and biases against publication of follow-up studies that don't show such an effect. Failure to reject the null hypothesis is seen as just that - a failure.

This is something with which I'm well acquainted. My PhD was essentially a series of failures to replicate.  To cut a very long story very short, a bunch of studies in the mid 90s had apparently shown that, during memory tasks, people with Williams syndrome rely less on the meanings of words and more on their sounds. I identified a number of alternative explanations for these results and, like a good little scientist, designed some experiments to rule them out. Lo and behold, all the group differences disappeared.

Perhaps not surprisingly, publishing these studies turned out to be a major challenge. One paper was rejected four times before being finally accepted. By this time, I'd finished my PhD, completed a post-doc on similar issues in Down syndrome, and published two papers arising from that study. In some ways, they were much less interesting than the Williams syndrome studies because they really just confirmed what we already knew about Down syndrome. But they contained significant group differences and were both accepted first time.

So the big question. How do you get a null result published?

One helpful suggestion comes from Chris Aberson in the brilliantly titled Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis. He points out that you can never really say that an effect doesn’t exist. What you can do, however, is report confidence intervals on the effect size. In other words, you can say that, if an effect exists, it’s almost certainly going to be very small.

Another possibility is to go Bayesian. Rather than simply telling you that there is not enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis, Bayesian statistics provides information on how likely it is that the null hypothesis versus the experimental hypothesis is correct given the observed data. I haven't attempted this yet myself so I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has.

The strategy I've found really helpful is to look at factors that contribute to the size of the effect you're interested in. For example, in one study on context effects in language comprehension in autism, we were concerned that group differences in previous studies were really down to confounding group differences in language skills. Sure enough, when we selected our control group to have similar language skills to our autism group, we found no difference between the two groups. But more importantly, within each group, we were able to show that an individual's language level predicted the size of their context effect. This gave us a significant result to report and in itself is quite an interesting finding.

This brings me neatly to my final point. At least in research on disorders such as autism or Williams syndrome, a significant group difference is considered to be the holy grail. In terms of getting the study published, it certainly makes life easier. But there is another way of looking at it. If you find a group difference, you’ve failed to control for whatever it is that has caused the group difference in the first place. A significant effect should really only be the beginning of the story.

Reference:

Tavassoli T, Latham K, Bach M, Dakin SC, & Baron-Cohen S (2011). Psychophysical measures of visual acuity in autism spectrum conditions. Vision research PMID: 21704058

Further reading:

• Neuroskeptic: Eagle-Eyed Autism? No.
• Carl Zimmer: It's Science, But Not Necessarily Right
• BPS Research Digest: Statistical significance explained in plain English
• Cosmos and Culture: Working within the error bars
• Andrew Gelman: So-called Bayesian hypothesis testing is just as bad as regular hypothesis testing
• John Cook: Five criticisms of significance testinghttp://www.flickr.com/photos/benfrantzdale/395972743/

Julian Baggini - What Does It Mean to Be "You"?

The metaphysical question of personal identity is, to my mind, one of the most interesting and important there are in the philosophical literature. An obvious part of its importance has to do with the fact that many other philosophical, psychological, social and ethical issues depend on the answer to the question of whether the self exists and what it is.

Consider a thought experiment formulated by Leibniz: suppose you have the option to choose to have all the riches, talents, fame, good looks and lovers you desire, but on one condition: that you forget absolutely everything about yourself up to that point. Would you do it? If you answer is no, that implies that you think that whatever you are, your conscious experience and memories seem to be a necessary part of being you. So, no memories = no you. The new rich, talented, beautiful person would effectively be someone else. Imagine then a case of assault in which the victim loses all memory. Should this now count as murder?

In the following presentation, Julian Baggini explores the question of the self, whether it exists, whether it's an illusion, and whether we should understand an illusion as something that's not there, or as something that's simply not quite what we normally take it to be, but which is there nevertheless.

And if you want to listen to the whole thing, including an interesting Q&A, you can listen to it here:

For more on this issue, check out the Brainspotting series.

Like Two Pieces of a Puzzle

Let's break down the latest from People

Jake ..."was cracking up and laughing with pals during a lively night at West Hollywood's Chateau Marmont – but the actor gave special attention to one woman: Olivia Wilde. The two were very flirty, an onlooker says, acting "touchy-feely." Says the onlooker: "At one point, he had his hand on hers." Still, the two weren't overly affectionate with each other. "Olivia was very cool," the onlooker says, "and wasn't fawning over Jake but seemed to like the attention he was giving her." Alas, at the end of the evening the two went their separate ways.

was cracking up and laughing with pals during a lively night

What pals? Peter? Adam? RDJ? They all gets mentions in People not mystery man status. (pictures with Jake) Who are these mystery people who are seen with Jake who never get named in People?

And it couldn't be a gal pal or that would have made it out of Celebrity Sightings and at least a thousand words with 4 exclusive pictures.

Let's see who does that leave?

And who was getting ready to leave ? (to go back start shooting a new season?)

And who goes out before they have to being apart for a while?

But, but, but, but ....Wilde?

The two were very flirty, an onlooker says, acting "touchy-feely." Says the onlooker: "At one point, he had his hand on hers." Still, the two weren't overly affectionate with each other. "

Now how can you be flirty and "touch feely" but not overly affectionate?

They've been floating Wilde several times with Jake in the rags. But she has been on a cross country mission of her own to be seen with handsome "single" men of the moment leading to speculation about the nature of her dating status (ie those coveted inches of copy and countless tweets-that'spublicity, people)

Justin, Jake, Ryan Gosling and wasn't it confirmed that she is a new couple with Bradley?

"Cozy" "Flirty" "hands" on hands, back of chairs, .. oh my!

"and wasn't fawning over Jake but seemed to like the attention he was giving her." Alas, at the end of the evening the two went their separate ways.

This sound really familiar. Kind of like this from the Golden Globes:

"According to reports, Jake and Mila were chatting away and getting grabby at the CAA afterparty at the Sunset Tower. An inside snitch at the party said, “They ended up talking in a corner practically the entire party. They were laughing and smiling a lot. It was really flirty and they both looked like they were having a lot of fun.” Even though they were touchy-feely, the two of them went home separately. A friend of Jake’s said, “They are just really good friends...."

Who was the other person both Justin and Jake were mentioned with that weekend Justin hosted SNL (and left with Olivia) - Mila Kunis -- funny that.

And you know who's gotten a long weekend break from shooting for the Golden Globes before?

It is a bit of a puzzle....or is it just too obvious to be one.

If you want a real puzzle
check out this one and see how you do.

Here at OMG, the missing to piece to the puzzle that's Jake