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Hey I was on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning talking with Laurel Wamsley about an alternative to Facebook:

Would We Be Better Off If We Didn’t Rely On 1 Social Network?

This is a guest post by Allison Pacelli, a Professor of Mathematics at Williams College. She got her Ph.D. in Algebraic Number Theory at Brown University in 2003, and has been at Williams ever since.  Allison is an award-winning teacher, and author of numerous research papers in mathematics as well as the book Mathematics and Politics: Strategy, Voting, Power, and Proof with Alan Taylor of Union College. Allison is the founder and director of Williams College Math Camp (WCMC), a camp aimed at mathematically talented high school students. She is also the co-founder and director of PZ Math, an organization aimed at promoting mathematical literacy. She also does work in K-12 Math Education, working with elementary and high school teachers.

I met Cathy at UC Berkeley in the summer of 1996. I had just finished my junior year of college, and I was accepted into this 6-week summer program for women in math. Cathy was the TA for my course in elliptic curves, a branch of number theory, which I absolutely loved. I’m now an algebraic number theorist at Williams College. One of the things I remember most about Cathy was how honest and open she was about math being hard, and how other grad students she knew at Harvard pretended they knew what was going on when, in fact, they did not.

Math is hard. Very hard! No matter how intelligent someone is or how amazing their past accomplishments, math eventually becomes difficult for anyone. This should not be a surprise, but it is to most people I know. It’s perfectly acceptable for someone in society to say, “oh I’m not a math person.” Personally, I think, that with the right teacher or materials, everyone can enjoy and be successful with math.

What I most love about math is how useful it is. Yes, of course math is useful in engineering, building, accounting, etc. but that’s not what I mean. Math makes you smarter. It makes you a better problem solver. It makes you better at persevering and trying new ideas until you find a solution. It even makes you a better writer in your English or political science courses. Learning how to approach mathematical problems improves your logical and reasoning abilities. When one method doesn’t work, you try another. You start to build up an arsenal of methods for approaching a difficult situation, in any field. Mathematical thinking also requires that we be very precise and clear. This precision and clarity translates into better arguments in any paper or debate.

So why doesn’t everyone love math? Unfortunately, far too often, math is taught in schools as a bunch of formulas to memorize and rules to use. When I first took Calculus in high school, I did very well and got a 5 on the AP exam. But I didn’t truly understand it. I was just good at knowing which rules to use when, and I was good at algebraic manipulations. When I teach Calculus now, either at Williams or the PZ Math Calculus Prep Camp that I run, I spend a lot of time helping my students actually understand calculus.

What is a derivative? What does it mean? How do you find it? What is it good for?

In a one week camp, we can’t teach our students all of calculus of course. But we do give them all the big ideas and an understanding of what the subject is about, including the Fundamental Theorem. We also delve into the details of the first third of the course material, as well as strengthen students’ algebra and trig skills that are so critical for calculus success. The result is that students know what to expect when they begin their Calculus courses in the fall. The pace of the course doesn’t feel so rushed. They understand the ideas, and they have time to hone their skills with the calculations that do come their way. Most importantly, students feel more confident in their problem solving abilities and are ready to take on challenges, not just in their calculus courses, but with any obstacles that confront them.

My newest Bloomberg View article just came out:

Congress Is Missing the Point on Facebook

Americans need a data bill of rights.

See all my Bloomberg View pieces here.

I was interviewed by Tom Upchurch of Wired UK on a Hippocratic Oath for data science and ethics of AI (it’s long!):

To work for society, data scientists need a hippocratic oath with teeth

My newest Bloomberg View piece just came out:

Don’t Worry About the Ethics of Self-Driving Cars

Road deaths create an incentive to care that is woefully lacking elsewhere.

To read all of my Bloomberg View pieces, go here.

My newest Bloomberg View piece just came out:

How to Teach a Computer What ‘Fair’ Means

If we’re going to rely on algorithms, we’ll have to figure it out.

To read all of my Bloomberg View pieces, go here.

Hey all! I told you I’m boring now, so here’s proof. I ran my second 5K race this morning.

My first one was in early February, and I ran with my buddy Elizabeth (who you might remember as my yarn whisperer) and my husband Johan:

They gave us hot cocoa and bagels afterwards, which was nice because it was 17 degrees.

This morning my husband watched me run the same route but without cocoa:

This morning it was a balmy 33 degrees at race time.

My goal is always simply to finish the race without stopping, which I’m happy to report I did both times. I run really slow, though, so it always becomes this thing where I’m near the very back, with people who run by me and then stop to walk, and then I slowly pass them, and then they run by me again. By the end of the race I’m kind of the last always-runner and ahead of most of the sometimes-walkers.

I’m happy to report that this second race was easier to complete (I never felt like I wouldn’t be able to, whereas in the first race there were definitely moments I was forcing myself to keep going) AND my time went down! From 39:00 to 38:55, so a full five seconds. For those interested, that’s 0.21% faster. Did I mention that I’m a slow runner? I’m also a very consistently slow runner.

I’ve signed up for a triathlon at Lake Welch in May. It’s a sprint triathlon, so the running part of it is a 5K, which is by far the hardest part for me. So I’m well on my way to training. For the next two months I’ll be doing lots of biking and running and trying to sometimes do two in a day, to build up stamina. The swimming is super easy so I barely need to practice that, but I will anyway because it’s nice sometimes to do something easy instead of forcing yourself to do something hard. Having said that, I’ve really been enjoying the running, it gets out a good portion of my urban aggression. Also I honestly enjoy being that slow runner whom everyone passes, because it makes them feel really fast, and I’m happy for them, and I don’t mind at all being slow. I’m just grateful to be healthy.

OK, sorry to bore everyone with all of this, but if you’re doing similar stuff, feel free to sign up for the same triathlon as I am and I’ll see you there!

My newest Bloomberg View piece just went up:

Big Data Alone Can’t Fix a Broken Bail System

Philadelphia should think twice about its risk-assessment algorithm.

For all of my Bloomberg View pieces, go here.

Did you hear that Palantir, the big data company founded by Peter Thiel, has been secretly building predictive policing algorithms for New Orleans?

Well, when my buddy Ernie Davis found out, he decided to write a poem. He’s generously allowed me to reproduce it here:

Six years ago, one of the world’s most secretive and powerful tech firms developed a contentious intelligence product in a city that has served as a neoliberal laboratory for everything from charter schools to radical housing reform since Hurricane Katrina. Because the program was never public, important questions about its basic functioning, risk for bias, and overall propriety were never answered.— Palantir has secretly been using New Orleans to test its predictive policing technology, Ali Winston, The Verge, Feb. 27, 2018.

In Eldamar, so long before
Our time, that none can tell the count in years,
The elven craftsman Féanor
Devised the seeing stones, the Palantirs.

The men of old, in seven towers,
Installed the stones that Féanor had wrought
And used their extrasensory powers
To see far off and to converse in thought.

But using a device whose might
Exceeds your wisdom risks a fearful fall.
The fates of Saruman the White
And Steward Denethor are known to all.

********************************************

The enterprising Peter Thiel
Built Paypal and became a billionaire.
A man of business nonpareil
But arrogant as Féanor the Fair.

He scorned the college education
That piles useless knowledge in your head,
And so established a foundation
So youths could start up businesses instead.

He scorned the privileged elite,
Self-righteous, over-educated, smug,
And thus endorsed the loathsome cheat
Who honors every autocratic thug.

Since folks online are always willing
To publish on the web all they can tell
Thiel saw that he could make a killing
By mining it for content he can sell.

His team of workers then designed
The mightiest program they could engineer
To sift the data to be mined.
He named the company “The Palantir”.

The palantirs of Féanor
Could show what was long past and far away.
Thiel’s Palantir sees vastly more:
It knows right now what men will do some day.

It studies billions of relations
‘Twixt men as they develop over time.
And finds the key configurations
That augur the committing of a crime.

********************************************

To prove, past reasonable doubt,
Who’s guilty of specific criminal acts
Requires reasoning about
An awful lot of pesky little facts.

Who was where and when and why?
What show the footprints, blood stains, DNA?
An inconvenient alibi
Can ruin any prosecutor’s day.

A human being is still needed
To comprehend these kinds of evidence
No AI program has succeeded
In mastering the basic common sense.

But building an AI detector
For criminal propensity’s no sweat.
You map a person to a vector
And classify it with a neural net.

********************************************

New Orleans, fair but troubled Queen
Has not in full recovered from the blow
Dealt by Hurricane Katrine
In storm and flood, a dozen years ago.

Gangs that trafficked in the sale
Of heroin and methampetamines
Fought turf wars, and they left a trail
Of murder on the streets of New Orleans

James Carville, famed politico,
Lived in New Orleans and held it dear
And Carville also chanced to know
About the products built at Palantir.

Carville convinced the company
(He was a paid advisor at the time)
To share their software, all for free
To help N.O.P.D. to combat crime.

An altogether secret deal:
Only N.O.P.D. and the mayor,
The folks at Palantir and Thiel
Were any time informed or made aware.

“Fool!” Thus Saruman was named
For secret hid from Council long ago.
And should not those be likewise shamed
Who thought the city council need not know?

Policing with predictive code
The guardians of security delights,
But leads us on a risky road
Toward bias and ignoring civil rights.

Matalin, James Carville’s wife
Assures us all that we will be OK
As long as, in the course of life,
No cousin or acquaintance goes astray.

So Palantir in place remains
And now that we have heard of it, we must
Conclude that those who hold the reins
Of power have betrayed the public trust.

This is part of the collection Verses for the Information Age by Ernest Davis

I wrote a Bloomberg View piece about something Facebook could probably do to determine if the Russian ads made a difference in the 2016 election:

Facebook Could Do a Lot More on Trump-Russia

The company could probably measure the effect of election-meddling if it wanted to.

For my complete list of Bloomberg View pieces, go here.

I’m off of Twitter and Facebook, so my blog is starting to become my go-to rant spot once again.

This morning it’s Jane Brody that’s got me ranty, with her unbelievably incoherent take on exercise and diets:

More Fitness, Less Fatness

Let me give you my snarky summary of this piece:

1. Diets don’t work.
2. People are beginning to understand this.
3. They’re starting to accept their bodies as they are and go on with their lives.
4. This makes Jane Brody feel bad for them, because they really should feel bad for themselves.
5. Turns out people should exercise instead of diet to be healthier.
6. But Jane Brody suggests they should diet too, even though it doesn’t work.
7. Jane Brody concludes by entitling the piece to imply exercise makes people lose weight even though there’s plenty of evidence that it doesn’t.

My newest Bloomberg View piece is out:

Are You Poor? Here’s Your Virtual Hamster Cage

Technology could erase the limits of inequality.

See more of my Bloomberg View pieces here.

Who cares if the stock market tanks? No, really. I’m wondering who actually has a stake in the levels of the stock market.

The average person doesn’t have much savings, including retirement savings which is the standard way to have a direct stake in the market. In fact a majority of Americans, and more than that if you consider minorities, have less than $1000 put away for retirement. They might care about the few hundred dollars they have, but it’s really not much directly at stake, and it’s a long term abstract investment if it even exists.

For that matter, truly rich people have investment advisors that diversify their positions by using bonds, hedge funds, and so on to make their bet more market neutral. Plus, they have plenty of assets, so to the extent that the market goes down by a bit won’t overly concern them.

That leaves the well off but not rich people who are adequately long the market to care what it does, and still their stake is mostly via retirement savings. I’m not sure how much they represent as a percentage of the population, but it’s fair to say the average member of the population don’t really care about a market fall.

It’s been a long time since the market has been a good proxy for the economy as a whole. Thinking used to be that if corporations made more money, at least if it came from higher productivity, then some portion of that would be distributed to workers. But it was long ago that productivity decoupled from the median wage.

In fact, it’s become just the opposite: good news for workers means bad news for the market. That became clear recently when a substantial rise in wages led to a drop in the market. The argument went something along the lines of higher wages will cause inflation and then interest rates yadda yadda, but the bottom line is that shareholders have gotten used to keeping all the corporate profits.

Actually, this anti-correlation between the market and worker interests has actually been true for quite a while. The tax bill, which heavily privileges stockholders over wage earners, was slowly baked into the stock market as it became increasingly clear it would pass. In other words, good news for the market has meant bad news for workers for the past year and a half. It’s also why Davos loved Trump: he gave out goodies to rich people with the abstract promise that this will end up in the pockets of workers.

Of course, there are pieces of news that would be bad for both the workers and for the market, like a recession, and there are potential turns of events that would be good for everyone, like exciting new industries that hire lots of people. But for the foreseeable future, I’m thinking that workers should be cheering a tanking market.

This is a guest post by Eugene Stern, originally posted on his blog sensemadehere.

My friend Cathy O’Neil just sent me an article she wrote for the NY Times reviewing two books by technologists about virtual reality (VR). Part of her take was that neither book talked enough about ways that VR could be abused, and she speculated that worrying about VR was still mostly the provenance of science fiction writers (think Star Trek) rather than technologists.

I’m pretty comfortable around both sci-fi and technology, but you really don’t need to be an expert in either to worry about how VR could upend our lives and civilization. Just some sense of recent history is enough. If you think that massive computational power, the internet, and smartphones might have turned out to be a bit more than we bargained for, maybe it’s time to consider how amazingly well-positioned VR is to amplify some of the most troublesome aspects of the technology revolution:

Personalization. We’ve learned over the last quarter century that we don’t mind being monitored (cookies, GPS, Fitbits), just as long as some benefits (recommendations, special offers, traffic advice, a tailored Facebook feed, the ability to broadcast our 5.4 mile running route to all our friends) come from crunching the resulting data. Never mind who might be storing all that data or what they might be doing with it.

Now think about VR, which massively scales up both the amount of data and the ability to collect it. On one hand, VR is an immersive experience, generated by high dimensional data sets (indeed, one of the uses of VR is as a tool to allow us to navigate data sets that are otherwise too complex to make sense of; see here or here or here). On the other, VR is delivered through a device, which can be used to track eye movements, and VR technology to monitor other biometrics like heart rate, pulse, and  electrical activity in the brain is already on the way (see here or here). You’ve probably heard of Google’s A/B tests, which enable web designers to vary individual aspects of a web page and track how people respond. Now imagine such tests in VR space, targeted at each individual user, and able both to vary all kinds of stimuli affecting all the senses, and to measure all kinds of response. In a contest between your family, friends, and VR set over who knows you better, it’s hard to see the humans having a chance.

Addictiveness. By now it’s sort of a cliche to hear a technologist speak thoughtfully about how they won’t let their children near smartphones or Instagram until they’re in high school, or to read articles about internet use sprinkled with multiple mentions of dopamine. Won’t this all seem quaint in a few years, when internet porn gives way to (personalized!) VR sex, and your social network can deliver a full VR simulation of your crush’s reaction to the cute photo you just posted, not just a stylized thumbs-up or heart. Um, yeah, VR is going to make the virtual world way more addictive. “Why go into the outside world at all, it’s such a fright,” as Black Flag sang, to their televisions, and that was at least two whole generations of technology ago!

Marketing. I was born in the Soviet Union, which had no ads, and it always felt strange to me that our entire media landscape (or, today, our entire information landscape) was driven by companies inserting little messages meant to sell you things. For one thing, I was always a bit skeptical that advertising was actually worth it. Well, with VR, there’ll be no question, because we’ll be able to track the outcomes of ads so precisely: eyeballs widen, heart rate rises just a bit, electrical activity heightens in the buying center of the brain (which by this time we will have effectively mapped, using — what else — VR technology). Advertisers will know exactly which ads worked (so the economy will make sense!), and, with predictive analytics and the heavy volumes of data attached to VR, they’ll also know which ads will work, for any given person. And lots of them will, because VR’s ability to virtually sample any product you might imagine might make it the most effective advertising medium ever. If today we think about ads as delivering eyeballs and clicks, in the age of VR, they might be delivering (virtual) wallets directly.

Will users object? One more thing we’ve learned in the internet age is that people don’t seem to mind being targeted with ads across their entire virtual experience. Ad-based media still dominate, while raising revenues via direct subscription works for a few niche publications at best. The internet is funded by advertising. Why wouldn’t VR be?

Though VR seems expensive today — the domain of rich NFL teams needing to train quarterbacks to have split second reactions to thousands of different stimuli, as Cathy writes in her book review — from another point of view, it might actually be quite cheap. In the non-virtual world, you have to be rich to sit in the front row at midfield at the Super Bowl, or swim with tortoises in the Galapagos Islands, or climb Mount Everest. But, mass adoption of VR could be a great leveler in a way, making virtual versions of all of these accessible to the masses. Being marketed to may seem like a small price to pay to have these experiences, especially if the income gap between rich and poor grows as technology makes more and more segments of the economy winner-take-all. Sure, VR might enable advertisers to fully exploit you economically, to optimize and control all of your purchasing power — but so what, we haven’t been troubled yet whenever our technology asks us to give up control to gain comfort.

The scariest thing about VR might be that it could be more of the same, but on steroids. If we’ve shown no societal ability so far to confront technology addiction, data collection and surveillance, or media manipulation, what happens when VR technology renders all of these ten times more powerful? Be afraid, be very afraid.

I just wrote my first book review for the New York Times. I reviewed two books about Virtual Reality, one by Jeremy Bailensen and the other by Jaron Lanier:

Enter the Holodeck

My newest Bloomberg View column just came out:

No, I Don’t Want to Insure My Pizza

Insurance can be useful, but too many schemes are distorting the concept.

For older Bloomberg View columns, please go here.

My newest Bloomberg View article just came out:

Personality Tests Are Failing American Workers

All too often, they filter people out for the wrong reasons.

Read all of my Bloomberg View pieces here.

Since my last update I’ve been diagnosed with Graves’ Disease. You can look this up on Wikipedia, but the short version is it makes my thyroid hyperactive, which in turn makes me anxious and hyperactive, which in turn makes me exercise a lot, which in turn makes me very boring.

It’s an autoimmune disease, and it’s treatable, so please don’t worry. Also, it probably has nothing to do with my recent bariatric surgery. In fact before my bariatric sleeve surgery, I was diagnosed with another autoimmune disorder, which is even less worrisome, called autoimmune gastritis. That basically means my stomach slowly produces less stomach acids. It’s good for acid reflux, since there’s nothing to reflux, but it’s bad for absorbing iron and B12. Luckily after gastric surgeries they’re constantly checking your vitamin and mineral levels so no need to worry. But long story short, once you’ve gotten one autoimmune disease you’re more likely to get another. They cluster. So chances are I would’ve gotten Graves’ Disease even if I hadn’t gotten the sleeve surgery.

I’m on a medication called Methimazole to calm down my thyroid, and I’m due for a blood test tomorrow to see how well it’s working. I can’t really tell if it’s working but that’s not a real surprise because I couldn’t really tell I had a problem in the first place. Also, if we can’t adjust the Methimazole levels to make it work, then the standard approach is to burn out my thyroid with radioactive iodine – which sounds worse than it is – and take supplementary medication to replace what my thyroid should have been doing in the first place.

Finding out I have Graves’ Disease is actually kind of good. It explains the deep anxiety I was feeling and the trouble I was having sleeping. And I know there are plenty of reasons to feel anxiety but it was getting slightly out of hand, and now it seems a bit better but again I’m not sure if that’s because the meds are working or because I’m just acclimating to Trump. Or it might just be because I quit Twitter, which was bringing me down consistently. Having no social media habits is good for anxiety problems!

Also my eyesight was changing rapidly, which is a common symptom of Graves’ Disease (although my eyes never bugged out as far as I could tell). That seems to be calming down a bit as well, but again I might just have acclimated. Right now contact lenses work much better than glasses.

So, you remember last update when I mentioned that I started exercising a lot? Well that’s still true. In fact at this point I’ve signed myself up for a 5K race in Riverside Park on February 3rd (which involved free hot cocoa at the end of the race so please join me) as well as a Sprint Triathlon at Lake Welch in Harriman State Park on May 20th (no free hot cocoa but please join me there and I’ll buy you cocoa).

I’ve always said that people who get really into exercise are the most boring people in the world because all they ever want to talk about is exercise. So excuse me for being incredibly boring from now on, or until my thyroid gets under control. It really is a wonderful escape and I admit I’m indulging. For example, in preparation I ran 5K on Saturday morning and I haven’t stopped gloating about it. I’ve really become insufferable. Please tell me to shut up when you next hear me drone on.

Also, and I promise this *isn’t* boring, my band, the TomTown Ramblers, is playing this weekend downtown! Details are below.

Date: Saturday, January 20th.
Time: Our music starts promptly at 9pm.
Place: Caffe Vivaldi, located at 32 Jones Street, between Bleecker and West 4th.

No cover charge! Cash Bar! See you there!