Archive for November 5th, 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