Karaoke-triggered killings and fights remind us why the Ig Nobel peace prize was awarded to the inventor of karaoke. The New York Times reports:

The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”

In 2004 the Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Daisuke Inoue of Hyogo, Japan, for inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.

BONUS FACT: The Philippines have a deep involvement with the Ig Nobel Peace Prize. The 1993 Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Pepsi-Cola Company of the Philippines, suppliers of sugary hopes and dreams, for sponsoring a contest to create a millionaire, and then announcing the wrong winning number, thereby inciting and uniting 800,000 riotously expectant winners, and bringing many warring factions together for the first time in their nation’s history.

Our descendants will be different from us. In a competitive world, they’ll have to be; our design is hardly optimized for their world. But since they will evolve incrementally from us, they won’t be completely different.  For example, many features of the ways we talk between minds, and within minds, may lock in as interface standards.  Also, our descendants will prefer to reuse and modify complex workable modules rather than reinventing such things from scratch.

Which brings us to everyone’s favorite topic: sex. Our minds have been evolved in great detail to handle human sex. How might our descendants reuse and adapt those well-honed capabilities to deal with future mental challenges?

First, it is pretty obvious that within a century or two at most our descendants just won’t be creating descendants by randomly mixing the features of two parents, any more than firms today design new products via random mixes of old product features. No, our descendants will be more deliberately designed, with design components inspired by, if not directly taken from, a great many predecessors.  They just won’t make babies the bio-sex way.

Even so, our distant descendants will continue to form long-term alliances between minds whose qualities and loyalties are opaque. Even when one can directly peer inside, most complex minds simply have no clear place to look to see their overall abilities and loyalties. Such features are instead spread across such minds and best seen in actual behavior.  So to infer such features it can help to probe and test such minds in particular ways.  Our mental sexual toolkit is full of such ways to probe and test.

Also, when complex minds last longer than the multi-mind tasks they tackle, they must choose which minds combine to do which tasks.  And to create good incentives, minds must share some consequences of their joint performance, while committing in certain ways to outcomes they might not prefer after the fact.  Our sexual toolkit also has many useful ways to deal with these issues.

Our descendants will therefore likely recruit variations on our sexual toolkit to such tasks.   They will distinguish flings from “true love” while adapting human feelings of lust, romance, attachment, jealousy, and intimacy, and also variations on our mating dances of watching, displaying, flirting, wooing, testing, seducing, accusing, betraying, etc.

Our descendants may also distinguish male from female patterns of such behaviors. For example, some will pursue while others evaluate, some will take more risks while others play it safer, some will invest more vs. less in each relation, and some will protect against outside dangers while others nurture inside growth.

Our mental adaptations to sex are subtle and well-tuned for our mating task of slowly teasing out the abilities and intentions of others while becoming increasingly committed to and dependent on those others.  Our distant descendants will likely adapt such abilities for their many purposes.  Future sex may well change greatly to meet future needs, but it will still be recognizably sex all the same.  Long live sex!

Miscellaneous stories and links about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:

• Kathy Ceceri, who wrote the story about the book that ran in the Times Union, has posted the full article on the Home Physics blog. The link to the paper itself may very well disappear behind a paywall, but this post should remain accessible.
• There's an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that I can't read because I'm not a subscriber, and I don't remember the password needed to access it via the library subscription. If anybody has access and would like to tell me what it says, that would be cool. (UPDATE: I've got it now, thanks very much.)
• How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is used as an example in a German presentation about problem solving. Google translate is good enough to get the idea of the way it's being used, but is no help at all with the embedded presentation slide. I think it's a translation of part of the Introduction, but my German is nonexistent.

That's the best of this week's vanity searching. Again, I will be on KSOO radio Tuesday evening, 6:30 pm ET, if you'd like to hear what I sound like live. I'll also be at Boskone next weekend, reading book-related stuff on Sunday morning.

去南非过年

2010.02.07

又是过年时节。

前几日同学从南非Pretoria发email来说自己带儿子到在南非做世界官的同学家过年，美其名曰是去考察世界杯的组织工作。

我十几年前在纽约看过一场世界杯的半决赛，意大利对保加利亚，结果2:1，所以就坚决表示自己不用劳民伤财地去南非考察了。

做世界官的同学说：那么趁我这几年还没有回华盛顿，你找机会到Pretoria来开学术会议吧。

我说：算了吧，我宁愿带全家度假的时候去，南非很少有我非得去的学术会议。

同学去南非过年，是掏自己的钱，不是掏公款。他想掏公款也不行，因为他不是公家人。他是凭自己的能力赚钱和纳税的，而不是不凭自己的能力花纳税人钱的。

中国过去三十年的进步真大，现在不掏公款也可以到全世界去过年了。

十八年前我在纽约念书，这个同学已经在北京做高级白领。他当时在给我写的一封信里面说（大意）：

寒假了。

见转载的报道“目前在北京清华大学任教的台湾学者程曜，星期二到北京市公安局出入境管理处办理签证事宜时，被指称态度不好，而被拘限在公安局内一天，他被勒令一个月内离境”，报道还说，“台湾的著名科学家曾直言不讳的批评中国教育问题”。

先说报道的后半截，好像暗示他的被驱逐也和批评中国教育有关。我想这是报道的不实。如果批评中国的教育或者科技会被驱逐，很多人要被驱逐。我相信这是报道的夸大。至于程曜在清华是好老师还是坏老师，有不同意见。应该是清华决定是否开除或者解聘他，不在我们不知情者的讨论范围。

这里主要讨论报道的前半截，因为它引起一个很大疑问：如果程曜是台湾学者，是台湾居民，那么，按照中华人民共和国法律，台湾是中国的一部分，无论他犯何罪，好像不能“勒令离境”。比如四川人在北京出问题，北京市公安局可以判他刑，但是不能把他“勒令离境”。因为他是中国人，北京和四川之间没有边境、北京 和台湾之间也没有边境。

Meena Kadri looks at the psychology of tile placement:

Disrupting Urination Norms
In Mumbai someone kindly explained to me the custom of putting wall tiles of gods from different religions along street facades. They’re positioned at pissing height – and act as a perfect deterrent in a reverent nation.

The study of reciprocity between mobile phone users reveals surprising insights about the flow of information in society.

What do your mobile phone habits say about you? Probably more than you might imagine.

At least, that's the suggestion from Lauri Kovanen and pals at the Aalto University School of Science and Technology, Finland. These guys have studied the 350 million calls made by 5.3 million customers over an unnamed mobile phone network during a period of 18 weeks. The primary question they ask is whether mobile phone calls are mutually reciprocated: in other words, does somebody who calls another individual receive in return as many calls as he or she makes, a phenomenon known as reciprocity.

Mobile phone calls are a particularly good way to study reciprocity because they are directed in a way that sms messages and email are not. In a mobile phone call, the caller initiates the conversation and then both parties invest a certain amount of time in the event. But afterwards there is usually no immediate reason for the recipient to call back. So it's clear who initiated the event.

But SMS messages or e-mails are entirely different: here a conversation usually means sending a sequence of reciprocated messages and this makes it much more difficult to study reciprocity by simply counting the number of messages.

This has allowed Kovanen and company to unearth a number of interesting phenomena. For a start, the calling patterns of prepaid users is very different from those with a contract who pay later. Postpaid users tend to be more prolific, having on average 5.41 people they call.

Prepaid users, by contrast, have only 3.41 contacts on average (although the notion of "average" is a little strange here since there is a very long tail on these distributions).

Not only that but postpaid users make 10 times as many calls as prepaid users. "We can also see that prepaid users receive more calls than they make, while the most active postpaid users make more calls than they receive," says Kovanen and company.

Prepaid users are also have more skewed relationships. Among prepaid users, the relationships where one participant makes more than 80 percent of all calls make up over 25 percent of the total.

The figures for postpaid users are far less skewed but they are greater than you'd expect from an ordinary probabilistic distribution in which each party in a relationship was just as likely to call the other.

So what's the difference between prepaid and postpaid callers? One of the most important is probably that prepaid users are much more likely to be young people. And sociologists already know that relationships between young people tend not to be equally reciprocated.

A few years ago, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health asked US students to name up to five of their best friends. Between them, the students named 7,000 individuals but only 35 percent of the nominations were reciprocated. So perhaps it's not suprising that a similar picture emerges from the study of mobile phone calls.

More puzzling is the skew in reciprocity in postpaid users which may not be as significant as for prepaid users but is still worthy of note.

What Kovanen and co are uncovering may be some fundamental property of human relationships; only more study will reveal that.

But the work is important for another reason: the skewed reciprocity between mobile phone users may influence other things such as the spread of ideas and information in society or, just as likely, the spread of viruses.

And that could have important implications for the way antivirus efforts are organised and directed.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1002.0763: Reciprocity of Mobile Phone Calls

The study of reciprocity between mobile phone users reveals surprising insights about the flow of information in society.

What do your mobile phone habits say about you? Probably more than you might imagine.