Archive for November, 2006
I guess I don’t have to mention what I think of the Dutch governments idea to propose a law to make using burkas illegal in the Netherlands. They found yet another way to emphasize that only one culture is acceptable in the Netherlands and that we’ll protect our culture by law!
Some Dutch political decisions are really, really cool, though. This article in Der Spiegel discusses how various towns in Europe are abolishing most traffic rules, including signs, lights, and even pedestrian walks. The result: far fewer accidents! Makes total sense to me and I just hope this is going to become a widely adopted trend. Assume some responsibility, and people act more responsible …
November 20th, 2006
Wasting my day a bit, I stumbled on some videos I did not want to leave out of this blog:
On a totally different note - Cantr got a review today in a large Polish online gaming journal, Gram. It looks so cool to see my familiar screen shots among the other games … and Cantr is described as ‘genius’. Makes my day!
November 12th, 2006
“Islamic teacher must shake hands” - according to the Volkskrant, all parties in the Netherlands, except GreenLeft, agree that a ruling by the ‘Committee for Equal Treatment’* is a step too far. The Committee decided that a Muslim female teacher should not be forced to shake hands with male parents. All political parties agree that shaking hands is a normal part of the Dutch culture and that such a teacher should thus be forced to accept this.
How is not respecting even the minor details of the Muslim culture going to ever help integration? There is not even the slightest attempt to try to understand the culture of immigrants and even in minute details we force them to accept our culture and our behavioral patterns, and then we are surprised that some of them radicalize and turn into terrorists. I am so shocked by this news. To hear the minister of integration, mrs. Verdonk, say something like this would not surprise me anymore. She also wanted to make speaking Dutch in the Dutch streets mandatory (very welcoming to foreign tourists!) and made a strong personal effort to throw a member of parliament out of the country without proper investigation into her citizenship status - in other words, she’s doing the opposite of ‘integration’ and usually making the most stupid remarks ever, so it’s no surprise. But now even the leader of my own party, Wouter Bos, whose book made me join the party again, supports this consensus. What happened to the Netherlands?!
Perhaps I really should vote GreenLeft - even though I consider myself a liberal and thus rather far away from this socialist party. But immigration / integration is the most salient issue for me in Dutch politics at the moment and the GreenLeft is the only party left that makes some sense in this regard. Integration is definitely something I wish the Dutch would learn a bit more from the Americans. Even after 9/11, I think Muslims here are much more respected than in Europe.
Lets make an attempt to get to know other cultures in the Netherlands and live together and respect each other, instead of this recurring nonsense about ‘Dutch culture’ and ‘Dutch values’. Current policies are definitely not reflecting Dutch values of tolerance and liberalism …
* Sorry, bit of an ugly translation - committee which is concerned with equal treatment of different group in society; an anti-discrimination council.
November 10th, 2006
I finally managed to update the paper written for the ECPR conference in Nicosia last April far enough to have it read by some experts for comments. In case you are interested in what I am working on professionally, here is the paper: An agent-based model of democratic diffusion. It was a good lesson in how I have to be even more careful in being organized with my code. So many snippets doing parts of my research that it is very difficult to keep track of what part of the data is in what stage of development exactly. I really should be using Subversion more extensively for my work, just like I do for Cantr-related stuff. Especially the idea that you can tag a particular version of your code, for example when you publish a paper, should be quite handy.
November 9th, 2006
Yesterday I went on a hike found through the Boston hiking Yahoo group with just six people to the highest peak in Massachussetts, Mt Greylock. I uploaded a set of photos taken by Matt, the hiking group leader, to my photo gallery. Unfortunately, I have not been able yet to properly integrate gallery2 with my WordPress site, so the photos button above and to the right still don’t really work. This should be changed soon. Another member of this little hiking group uploaded pictures here, with especially really nice close-ups of berries and grass in the snow.
November 5th, 2006
Despite my previous post claiming that my thoughts are now with research rather than computers, my attention today was briefly distracted by some posts on an interesting blog I am subscribed to. Mark Russinovich has is transferring his old blog to a new blog on Microsoft’s servers now that he has been hired by that company. He is one of the founders of Sysinternals, an interesting company that produces tools to help manage a computer with Windows installed. I often use their software when I’m on a Windows computer, for example to figure out which programs are run on boot time. His blog is very interesting to read, often containing detective stories on Windows systems. It’s also nice to read a geek-style blog by a fan of Windows systems, as a counter balance to all the anti-Microsoft stuff I read for example on Slashdot. After all, despite the fact that Microsoft’s marketing and market penetration strategies are disgusting, their software is actually quite good and of course ubiquitous. An interesting thing I read today on his blog is about personal computer security. Most people run as ‘administrator’ on their system, because it makes installing software so much easier. It also means, however, that if you get spyware or virusses via email or web surfing, that software also runs as administrator, and can thus do much more damage to your system. His blog entry describes how you can run particularly risky software, like Internet Explorer or Outlook, as a limited user, while still running other applications as administrator. Seems like a smart thing to do!
The whole reason I’m suddenly reading all this is that he decided to move old blog entries to his new blog, which creates events in his RSS feed which I get in my email. Recently I’ve been subscribing myself to a whole series of blogs through RSS and I’m quite happy with this. RSS feeds are systems to keep you up-to-date on new posts, and for myself I installed it in such a way that the RSS feeds go directly to my email. So I do not have to check out numerous sites - just checking my email keeps me informed of blogs related to Linux, Sysinternals, and social science statistics. In fact, you can also subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog and easily stay informed of my posts. If you have problems doing so, ask me, and I’ll help.
November 5th, 2006
Today a new issue of the Journal of Artifical Societies and Social Simulation was published. I am not a huge fan of the journal as it is too much part of the group of social science that is totally converted to using social simulation as method of social research. In particular circumstances computer simulations can be very illuminating for particular issues and it is definitely a very cool tool to use, but it is not the revolution of social science as some presume and it is often far less useful than empirical methods. For this reason, I usually appreciate papers that use similar techniques that are presented at major political science conferences or get published in major political science journal more than those that are really aimed at the relatively small group of researchers already totally into this area. But, nonetheless, usually when there is a new issue of this journal there are a few articles I do want to read, and this issue is no exception. This log entry is mostly for me to remember which ones I wanted to read:
- Luis R. Izquierdo and J. Gary Polhill, Is Your Model Susceptible to Floating-Point Errors? - this is nicely in line with some things I have been reading recently in this book.
- Michael Barber, Philippe Blanchard, Eva Buchinger, Bruno Cessac and Ludwig Streit, Expectation-Driven Interaction: a Model Based on Luhmann’s Contingency Approach - not sure what this is about but it sounds kind of a little bit interesting. Interesting number of authors, by the way. In most natural sciences it is very common to have large numbers of authors but in political science not at all. I think this is a big mistake - working in larger group you can be much more innovative and self-critical than when working by yourself. I, at least, would much prefer such a working team and miss the team-based work I did in various research projects in Leiden.
- Paul Guyot and Shinichi Honiden, Agent-Based Participatory Simulations: Merging Multi-Agent Systems and Role-Playing Games - interesting probably for both it’s relation to my dissertation research (which implements an agent-based model) and my involvement in Cantr, a roleplaying game I have often wondered couldn’t be used for some academic research especially on diffusion of attitudes over social networks (in Cantr I have access to the entire network and everything that is communicated between characters).
- The Spatial Dimension and Social Simulations: A Review of Three Books - interesting since my simulations are very spatial in nature and also some of the econometrics work I am interested in is focused on spatial dimensions.
Contrary to most previous posts, lately I have been thinking very little about computer and programming, but rather about my research. Especially a potential paper I might be writing with a friend on spatial econometrics, building on the work by Jude Hays and Rob Franzese, has drawn my attention lately and got me very excited. No idea yet whether our basic idea will work out well enough to create a publishable paper, though, but I think that should be clear fairly soon.
This post is the first one I write directly into WordPress instead of pmWiki, and I must say, it’s a very irritating process. Links I copy from other sites are copied with format included, thus what is a big font title on the other site is immediately assumed to be a big font title in the middle of my post. Very irritating! Links are added through a dialog screen instead of just a simple syntax like in pmWiki and are all assumed to be ‘open in same window’ unless you select otherwise. Why is the default to drive people away from your site? And it’s difficult to write after a link without extending it - it assumes it’s all part of the link heading. It’s totally like working in MS Word or something - there is a reason I avoid Microsoft software at times!
I’m quite happy with my renewed discovery of last FM - see the list of music here on the right. To have it included on my site is kind of cool. Mostly I’ve been listening to the radio created by the singer-songwriter tag, which has a lot of cool music.
In the area of gadgets, two cool items I just stumbled on are the dancing robot for your iPod and the headphones with glasses with video screens - nice alternative for my reading while walking to work, isn’t it?
November 5th, 2006