Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

This is a long, interesting, carefully written article by Alex Kotlowitz about a program to change community behaviors in service of decreasing violence. It is nice to see a discussion of how to reduce polarization. There is so much entertainment value in polarization that the media revel in it. It is further to the article’s credit that it doesn’t play the card of Chicago’s most recent violent troubles into the text.
If I was to be critical of the article it would only be how it leaves the impression that the means being used here were entirely gin’d up by the folks involved. I certainly hope that many of these were imported from other violence reduction efforts, and most of the methods outlined I’ve read about in other venues; particularly the negotiation handbooks.

Given my interest in group dynamics I was interested by the story about a kid who wanted to resign from a gang. Much negotiation through various possible outcomes, “no”, “well, maybe, after a beating,” until they settled with the kid paying a fee. Not unlike getting out of your cell phone contract, eh? Joining a group often involves a hazing, and I suspect leaving often involves a beating - or at least a standing debt.  You can’t make the books never balance inside a club good community.

That groups are a sources of violence is clear. You get discipline inside, and polarization between, but I hadn’t noticed before that movements of members across the group member boundaries can also generate violence.

One other thing that caught my interest, because it’s analogous to atomization effect we see in other systems these days. “Many of the interrupters seem bewildered by what they see as a wilder group of youngsters now running the streets and by a gang structure that is no longer top-down but is instead made up of many small groups — which they refer to as cliques — whose members are answerable to a handful of peers.” When the middle scale systems die off you left with nothing but long-tail, and elites in their walled-gardens.

The skills these “interrupters” have are skills that we all should have. Skills the media should model. A culture rich in these skills can tolerate a lot more diversity. That there is honor in turning the other check. It is man’s work to intervene in a fight. The article is here.

Facinating article about a mast year in bamboo. Rat’s thrive and the following year people starve.

… Mizoram and Manipur … rats … army … teach … eradicate … flowering … bamboo … increase fertility rates … population explosion … crops … severe famines … the mautam in 1958-59 … triggered an insurgency … redrawing of boundaries…. Bamboo Flowering and Famine Control Schemes … rat tail … bounty … 200,000 rat tails… registering more tails… hunger currently prevail … grain production falling by 87% …collapse of the administrative machinery … refugee flows … worst is still to come….

Tip of the hat to Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah.

Search in a space requires poking around. In fact random search is the canonical strong method. Presuming you have time, can cover the search space, and recognize a solution it can solve any problem. Of course, drunken random walks are well known to result in repeatedly bumping into the same parking meter. So it is with some pleasure that I stumble upon a different kind of random walk. Better yet these walk’s principle feature is that their moves are power law distributed.

Levy walks are observed in nature. Searching animals have only a limited awareness of where food might be found. Outside that awareness they are reduced to random search. But they don’t move randomly in the sense of Browning motion, nor do they randomly select some destination and then move to it. Rather they appear to draw a random number from a highly skewed distribution and then make that move. If you browse the literature on Levy walks you can see that monkeys, humans, and many marine animals all use Levy walks to organize their search. Here’s a picture showing an example of those three kinds of walks.

I find this fascinating. As an engineer I’m surprised that I don’t think I’ve ever saw seen a search algorithm using this method. Looking down from above, this means you could observe the trajectory of any object and this simple statistic would tell you if it was alive. Looking out from within, since this is presumably a largely scale free phenomenon it’s quite suggestive about the trajectory of one’s life.

Another good posting on inequality.

Oh, yummy. Some data on the distribution of torrent traffic. Not what I expected. Curious!

That’s at Guillaume Besset’s blog, he’s also a collector of highly skewed distributions: More…

He’s also working on a p2p jabber based wiki, Bouillon.  I found this provocative: “… Everything you see in Bouillon is recommended by your friends … “  Of course given the way marketing people use the term relationship, Google, the Library, Wikipedia, and the Newspaper are my friends, aren’t they?